by Kali Wallace
I nodded mutely, but how could we know for sure? The infected on the bridge had died sitting calmly at their stations.
“Look.” He pointed across the table. “Can we find out what they were doing?”
The tablet at the captain’s fingertips had a red light slowly pulsing on and off: it was still connected to the ship’s power. It was the heavy-duty kind my mother and her engineers had used in her workshop, shielded against temperature extremes and changing atmospheric conditions, made to withstand being bumped and knocked and tossed about. My mind was skipping, like a data transmission with corrupted bytes, and I thought: She brought it here. I thought: That’s hers. I thought: Why didn’t she come after me?
I thought: She promised. She promised to follow.
I pulled myself around the table and grabbed the tablet. Baqir was at my shoulder, while Ariana and Xiomara watched from the doorway. The only blood in this room was staining my mother’s jumpsuit; the tablet was clean. Still I was wary. Every time I looked at Ariana, I searched for the rippling motion beneath her skin, and I caught myself looking for it in Xiomara’s face as well, in Baqir’s, in my own bare hands. I turned the tablet on.
My mother’s face looked out at me. Her black hair was pulled back into a messy knot. There were smudges of exhaustion under her eyes. Her mouth was slightly open, drawing breath or forming a word. It was a frozen image from a log entry. There was a time and date stamp in one corner, a location signifier in the other: 12:35:19 01.04.393. HOUSE OF WISDOM, SPEC RESEARCH.
I keyed the entry to the beginning and played it. The image changed to one showing both Mum and Captain Ngahere. They were seated in the same chairs in which they had died. The captain spoke first.
“This is Captain Lilian Putnam Ngahere of House of Wisdom.” She cleared her throat. “If you have received this message, you may already know what has happened. We are recording this not to excuse what we are about to do, but to explain how we came to the conclusion that it was necessary. We don’t know if we’ll be able to transmit it.”
Mum shifted in her seat and looked directly at the camera. The torn edge of her collar brushed her cheek. “We assume you are investigating the aftermath of what has happened over the past twenty-four hours. We will tell you what we can. Right now, we have the ship quarantined behind its security web. It is too dangerous to attempt a rescue mission.”
To see my mother’s face again, to hear her voice, it was like a nova in the center of my chest, a racing pain radiating outward through the long-healed fractures in my bones. She sounded so much like herself, and not like herself at all. Absent was all of the enthusiasm she had carried into her work, the razor-sharp intellect approaching smug superiority, the fervor with which she had argued, the teasing laughter she had reserved for my father and aunt and her closest friends. She was drained of all spark. She sounded defeated.
Captain Ngahere said, “House of Wisdom has been attacked by a person or persons unknown. The method of this attack appears to be a blood-borne, neuroengineered pathogen or device capable of complete neurological control over targeted individuals. We don’t know the source or the purpose. Most of the infected succumb immediately, many from self-inflicted wounds suffered during an initial stage of infection. Others pursue actions meant to deliberately infect others. But others . . . once the unknown agent has successfully subdued them, this is what it does.”
The captain turned the tablet to give the camera a view of the bridge. The screens were lit up with maps and navigation information, feedback from the ship’s systems and engines. There seemed to be rather more than a healthy number of flashing red warnings on every display.
And all along the curved banks of terminals there were people at work. None of the crew were speaking. None of them were so much as glancing at their neighbors. None of them turned their heads or looked around at all. Only their hands moved, skating lightning-quick over panels and screens. Every one of them performed their task without glancing down.
It was confirmation of what we had already suspected, but it was still a deeply unsettling sight. There was Jessamyn, twelve years old, with her hands skittering over the navigation controls as though she had flown the ship a hundred times before. Her mouth was slightly open, giving her a fixed expression of surprise. She did not blink.
“We don’t know who is controlling them or why,” Captain Ngahere said. “We have established that if one of them is disabled, the others pick up the task without any visible communication. We’ve tried to isolate them, to incapacitate them, to stop them. So far we’ve failed.”
My mother took the tablet from the captain. Her hand grew large, momentarily blocking the view, as she tapped a command. “They don’t seem to care that we can watch them. They don’t care that we’re here at all, not now that they have control of the ship. So we can see what they’re doing.”
Her image was replaced by a navigation display, a dizzying array of lines and colors and shapes. I tried to make sense of it, feeling the once-familiar sensation of being too slow to follow where my mother’s mind was leading.
“The hostile force is altering the ship’s navigation constraints. They have disabled the collision-avoidance mechanism. They have reduced the atmospheric correction to zero. They have removed all of the acceleration dampers. I don’t know how they did any of this, but I know the result. They have, in short, disabled every automated and manual component of the ship’s drive system that protects it from a planetary collision. They are going to crash the ship into Earth.”
“No,” I whispered, as though Mum could hear me.
There was a pause, and in the silence Ariana said, her voice hollow, “I thought it was admiring the view.”
“We haven’t been able to regain control of the ship’s navigation and drive systems,” Captain Ngahere said. “Every time we try, they catch up. There’s no delay between our removing one hostile individual and another taking their place. We haven’t been able to disrupt their communication.”
“We have one last thing to try,” said my mother. “We will attempt to incapacitate the hostile force for long enough to put the ship in a stable orbit.”
“Beginning atmospheric quarantine protocol,” the captain said.
They were isolating the air in small sections throughout the ship—but they had known the parasite was transferred through blood, not air. I stared at the screen, trying to understand.
My mother took a breath. “Ready with new course calculation. It’s going to try to reset the navigation every two seconds. It will get through. Once they aren’t stopping it . . . it will get through.”
“Okay.” Captain Ngahere paused, then looked at my mother. “Okay. Shipwide fire suppression protocol.”
“Oh, no,” Baqir murmured. On the recording, an alarm began to sound.
The fire suppression protocol meant oxygen would be replaced by carbon dioxide in some places, argon in others. It was meant to deprive a burning fire of fuel. It was meant to be used sparingly, in closed sections, when fires were raging out of control, only after everybody had been safely evacuated.
The crew at the mainframe. The crowd in the garden. The people throughout the ship who had escaped infection. They had remained at their posts or found secure places to cling together in hope. They had been waiting for rescue.
My mother and the captain had found a way to turn the ship’s own systems into a weapon against the parasite. But to use it they had to suffocate everybody on board.
“It’s done,” the captain said. She spoke quietly, as though the effort of expelling those final words defeated her. She looked at my mother, then reached out to take her hand. Their fingers twined together.
“I wish there was another way,” my mother said. “Please forgive us.”
The log entry ended. Once again her face was frozen in a still image. Eyes clear, mouth open, dark hair in wisps. My heart was pounding so hard I
could feel it in my throat.
Ariana was the first to break the silence. “That’s what it was trying to make me do? Get right back to where they left off when they . . .”
“This ship is a kilometer long,” Xiomara said. “Even if it broke up in the atmosphere, no matter where it crashed, the impact would be catastrophic. Hundreds of thousands of people would die. There would be mass extinctions. It would be . . . it would be a second Collapse.”
It was too awful to contemplate, and too easy to imagine. It was part of the answer that had been missing for ten years—and the rest might also be within reach. The screen on the tablet had gone dark.
“We have to get this to SPEC. This and everything else from after the data transfers stopped. They need to know.” I looked at the others, hoping they understood. I knew I was asking a lot, stalling our escape. “Then we can leave.”
To my relief, nobody protested. They got to work instead.
“We can get a system dump of all the system commands and actions from that day,” Baqir said. “If the systems were still compiling summaries, it shouldn’t take too long.”
Xiomara turned to a console. “I can get the medical info.”
“Maybe that will help them get this fucking thing out of me.” Ariana offered a brave, trembling smile. “I like that idea. Let’s give them everything we can. I’ll find the personal logs and messages.”
I had not even thought about what the personal logs might contain. How many people might have recorded final messages for their loved ones, how many tears and goodbyes, how many last words spoken in fear and despair. I did not tell Ariana not to do it, because I knew she was right, but part of me wanted to stop her. The families had suffered enough. The dead were dead, and their voices should not be dragged from this crypt, for no solace or comfort would come from hearing what they had suffered at the end. I said nothing. It was not my decision to make. I had my mother’s final message, though it was not directed at me. I had my father’s final words echoing in my mind. Others deserved the same, even if it brought them no peace.
“What I don’t understand is, who would want to do something like this?” Ariana said suddenly. “What possible reason could they have?”
“I know SPEC had reasons for blaming Dr. Lago, but they don’t make much sense anymore,” Xiomara said. “This doesn’t look like revenge that got out of hand.”
“Unless there was something way more fucked up than data theft going on,” Baqir said. “Can we—”
“Find the data he was hiding? Yeah, I’ll look for it,” I said.
Only two fragments of recovered and restored data from UC33-X had been released to the public before the massacre. The rest, the parts of the data Lago had hidden from his colleagues and worked on in secret, had been held back pending the results of the investigation into his actions. But only two days had passed between his dismissal from the ship and the massacre, and Lago died by suicide only a few days after that.
In the archive I found five additional restored fragments that had never been made public. They were short passages, no more than a couple hundred words each. I read them quickly one by one.
Then I read them again, more slowly.
“Fuck,” Baqir breathed, reading over my shoulder. “This is about the planet they found.”
“We already know they found a planet,” Xiomara said.
“We didn’t know there was an archaeological excavation.”
Xiomara started to reply, then turned to look at us. “But that means—”
“It means they found the ruins of an alien civilization.”
For a moment, none of us spoke. The claustrophobic closeness of the ship faded away, and with it the dead, the persistent red light, the blood.
Before the Collapse, as the world descended into chaos and darkness, those with the means had identified planets like Earth and aimed their generation ships toward them, hoping to find a home unspoiled by what humanity had done to Earth. But the ships had fallen silent one by one, and the dream of finding life on another planet had faded away. The people who survived the Collapse had focused on rebuilding civilization on Earth. There was a famous quotation from Leung Ma-Lin carved above the entrance to every Councils building across the globe, said to be the words she spoke when opening the First Council four hundred years ago: “First, we heal our home and ourselves.”
But as humankind soared back into the stars, we began to look again. It was still the dream that filled the dark spaces in the sky when people gazed upward and wondered. Dr. Lago’s recovery of these messages would have marked him as the father of one of humankind’s greatest discoveries. He had kept them from his colleagues because he wanted all the acclaim for himself. Such a petty, human thing to do, in the face of such knowledge.
Mournful Evening Song had traveled to a planet that had once been home to an alien civilization. And they sent UC33-X back not as a greeting, but as a warning, because what they found there had destroyed them.
* * *
• • •
We left the bridge. The cold, dark hallway curved out of sight in both directions. I turned to the left and grabbed a handle on the wall, trying to remember the fastest way to Level 12. The bridge had been full of ambient noise, the persistent hum of a functioning ship, but beyond its walls the unnatural silence returned. I was reaching for the next handhold when I saw a flicker of light ahead.
I held out my arm to warn the others. The flicker steadied into a beam. I hadn’t listened for our captors before we left the bridge. My helmet and its radio were hooked uselessly to my belt. Stupidly, stupidly, I had forgotten about them.
A voice carried down the corridor: “Did you hear that?”
Panya. Not muffled or echoing through a microphone. She had taken off her helmet.
There was no answer, only the soft sound of gloves scraping over the walls: somebody was using friction to stop themselves. The beam of light stilled. I pressed myself close to the inner wall of the curved hallway and gestured for the others to do the same.
“I heard something,” Panya said. She was speaking in a loud whisper, but the words carried. “Didn’t you?”
“Quiet.” That was Dag, the bald, unsmiling one whose face seemed carved from stone. “I’ll check it out. Wait here.”
I didn’t hear Zahra or Malachi. The light ahead moved, and the shadow of a person stretched around the corridor. I gestured urgently, motioning for the others to turn and head in the other direction. Baqir had been bringing up the rear; he was at the head of the line now. When he reached the door to the bridge, he glanced back at me, inclining his head with a silent question. I waved for him to keep going. Xiomara was right behind him. Ariana followed, but the sleeve of her space suit caught on the handhold; she jerked her arm in frustration. I reached out to pry the snagged material free. She looked at me, then looked down at her hand, bending her fingers into a fist for a moment. I wanted to ask her if she was hurt, but I didn’t dare speak. I nudged her onward. Baqir and Xiomara had already disappeared around the curve in the hallway.
We passed the entrance to the bridge as the light behind us grew brighter.
Then, from ahead, Xiomara’s voice came clearly: “Hey, don’t—”
She was cut off by a wordless shout of surprise. Ariana kicked away from the wall, arrowing herself toward the shouts. I was right behind her. Shadows danced wildly in the low red light.
Baqir shouted, “Let me go!” I rounded the bend in the hallway just in time to see Dag grab him by the arm. Dag had come around the opposite direction, moving swiftly and silently while we fled Panya and her light.
Baqir struck at the man’s face, at his torso, at the hand that was holding his weapon, but Dag dodged the blows easily. He swung Baqir around by his prosthetic arm, and Baqir screamed. I heard something creak, heard something crack, then Dag released him, and Baqir slammed into the wall. The ho
rrible whimper he made on impact was so much worse than the scream had been. I couldn’t see his face. He curled into an instinctive ball, not even trying to grab a handhold or right himself. I pushed over to him, but I had no more than touched his back before he let out another cry of pain.
Xiomara launched herself at Dag feetfirst, her boots aiming directly for his head, and Ariana flung herself forward to grab his arm. He dodged to the side, and Xiomara hit his shoulder, deflecting herself into a sideways spin; he caught her ankle and whipped her away from him. She struck the wall with a loud grunt, then flailed for the nearest handhold. Dag hit Ariana across the face, sending her spinning away easily. Momentarily stunned by the blow, with her nose and lip bleeding, she floated past me and right into Panya, who had come around behind us.
Panya grabbed Ariana by the neck, catching her beneath the chin. Ariana twisted to the side and bit Panya’s hand, hard enough that Panya let out a surprised shout.
“Stop.” Dag’s voice was a calm rumble. “All of you. Stop.”
He had caught Xiomara again; his gun was pressed to the back of her head. Panya still had a grip on Ariana’s throat. I clung to the wall with one hand, too afraid to move away from Baqir, not daring to leave him insensible with pain. His artificial arm floated at an unnatural angle from his side. He was breathing heavily, sucking in ragged breaths and forcing them out again, every one accompanied by a faint groan.
“We have a lot of work to do,” Panya said calmly. She shoved Ariana away and aimed her gun. “Into the bridge, all of you.”
[data corruption] supposed to be an invitation. Come to our paradise. A world humanity hasn’t ruined. Come see the beauty we’ve discovered. We were such fucking fools. The people who lived here, whoever they were, whatever they were, they were in love with beauty. You can see it in everything they did. This must have been a beautiful planet, once. But we weren’t the first to find it.