Ends, Means, Laws and an Angry Ship

by Lyn Gala

  The doctor frowned, probably wondering how the ranking Command officer planned to deal with this information. John shrugged. “Officer training school did not cover this. In fact, if we found ourselves on an old AI ship, we were supposed to rip the computer out before it could do something illogical. That doesn’t apply here,” he quickly added.

  “I know you wouldn’t do that to her,” Tyce said.

  “I wouldn’t, but if she refuses to go to Earth...” He frowned, and the doctor took a step backward.

  “We’ll figure it out,” Tyce said. “She can’t have a problem with every Earth-held territory, so we’ll figure it out.” It was the best he could offer. The doctor didn’t look happy, and no doubt some of the Command crew would be equally displeased, but Tyce was not Wolf’s pilot. He didn’t control her. He could only suggest and ask, and right now she was making it clear that Earth was not an option.

  EPILOGUE

  “Where are we going?” John asked.

  Tyce followed the mental map Wolf had given him. When she was offering concrete information, it was so much easier to interpret. For example, he could easily see that she was taking them deeper into empty space as she slowly woke and all her systems started coming online. She had to heal multiple breaches, and until she felt whole and healthy, she didn’t want to risk the crew. The fragility of human children in particular terrified her. The crew found it sweet and comical the way Wolf had detoured light years to avoid the radioactive afterglow of a super-luminous supernova. Her skin was impervious to cosmic radiation, but she didn’t want the children in the same part of space with the dangerous particles.

  “Tyce?”

  “Down this hall,” Tyce said. “Wolf wants us to see something.”

  “If this is another set of stinky bathrooms, you’re on your own. Your ship reeks, Robinson.” John shivered in horror.

  “Asshole. Maybe there is some smell,” Tyce admitted in the universe’s biggest understatement, “but that’s the price you pay to have luxury bathrooms and soaking pools.”

  “Ah, the ends justify the means.” John nodded. “The last refuge of every unethical bastard.”

  “I can tell Wolf that you’d rather use the chemical recyclers we brought,” Tyce warned.

  John narrowed his eyes in mock fury. “You wouldn’t dare.”

  With almost three hundred of them on board, he wouldn’t dare, but he didn’t mind winding John up. “You can’t go around insulting a woman’s smell and expect her to forgive you.”

  After a long pause, John looked at the ceiling. “Wolf, I apologize that your bathrooms stink.” He raised an eyebrow in challenge. Tyce laughed. Luckily, Wolf didn’t take offense easily. John’s expression turned more serious. “What do you think Wolf’s ends are?”

  “Big question.” Tyce blew out a breath. “She doesn’t want to go to Earth, and sometimes I get the feeling she wants to find her sisters, and other times I get this resignation when she thinks about them, like she’s given up on them.”

  “Why the anti-Earth sentiment? You said there were humans she cared about, grieved for.”

  “If I’d enslaved half the universe, I’d avoid my former slaves, too,” Tyce said as he stepped over a rib growing into the corridor. He got a sense of... embarrassment? Wolf didn’t like that her form had slipped, and he felt her strain as she tried to correct it. But she grew slowly and it would take time for her to move the bone.

  “Yeah, but Imshee do trade with Cy, or at least that’s the impression I got from the Rownt briefing materials. And the Rownt sometimes trade with Cy. Maybe.” John sighed. “I wish we could have saved a copy of the official databank because I would like to review the information. Why did she shoot our ships to pieces?”

  When John had asked that question before, Tyce hadn’t known. Now he did. “It was an automated defense system,” Tyce said. Wolf sent a new flurry of thoughts through him, and the force of the images made Tyce stumble and nearly fall. John grabbed his outstretched hand and steadied him with a second hand on his shoulder. The brain flurries ended and Tyce closed his eyes and enjoyed the feeling of John so close. They hadn’t done much more than touch so far, but at least they were moving forward.

  “What did she say?” John asked.

  Tyce held John’s hand and started down the hall again. John closed the distance between them so their shoulders brushed. “It was a test,” Tyce said. “She left her unconscious mind those directions so she could find a Purpose who was brave enough to take the only logical solution that offered itself. That, by the way, would be me.” Tyce wiggled his eyebrows. “I am the logical and brave individual she was searching for.”

  John rolled his eyes before his expression turned more serious. “And how many people did she kill without ever waking up?” John asked.

  That took most of the shine off Tyce’s pride. Earth’s early exploratory ships that had come in this general direction had vanished, which had pushed space exploration toward the Anla. “The ends justify the means?” he said softly, but he couldn’t defend her choices on this.

  There was a good chance she had killed astronauts who had been brave enough to fly into space in ships that were little more than tinfoil and spit. Humans had developed engines far faster than they’d developed the materials for the hull of the ships. However, as Ama often pointed out to the Command people in the crew, Wolf had her own logic. Ama had even suggested that the ship had chosen the image of a wolf to remind the crew of her untamed nature.

  “Hey,” John said softly and he squeezed Tyce’s hand. “That’s not your responsibility. She must have been pretty frustrated that you took the lower decks and we ended up near her Purpose console.”

  “You have no idea,” Tyce agreed. “I’m glad she was still half asleep or she might have dealt with you the way she did those Imshee who were trying to get to the shuttles.” Tyce’s skin ached with an echo of the pain she’d felt as she’d blown out the hull. Unlike the faceless humans who had died because of her automated weaponry, Wirki’s death in those voided levels did inspire guilt. As Ama would say, Wolf’s enlightenment was limited.

  “I’ll avoid making the ship angry.” John had said as much to the members of his crew who had wanted to force the ship to turn around and head for Earth.

  “Here it is,” Tyce said. The corridor dead-ended in a huge spiral design embossed onto the wall. Tyce stood staring at it, waiting....

  “This is it?” John demanded indignantly. “You made me climb six sets of stairs to look at a wall?”

  Tyce laughed. “You are so easy to wind up.”

  John narrowed his eyes. “You’ll pay for that.”

  “Doubt it.” Tyce rested his hand on the center of the swirl, and he felt old muscles tremble and strain. The doors in the lower and mid-levels were thinner, but this skin was designed to protect. It was the core of her being. It was the home of her Purpose. If she held anything sacred, it would be this room. If the rest of the ship were destroyed, she could regrow. Engines, corridors, consoles—they were pieces that could be ripped out and replaced. They were often ripped out and moved to other places. But this room was her.

  “There’s only one access corridor. We could take the rooms on this level and have this area for the children.” When Wolf broadcast surprise, Tyce got his first indication that she couldn’t read his mind. No matter how much Tyce had considered the tactical advantages of putting the children in a more controlled area, she hadn’t heard him. He would have to speak to her, even if she did sink probes into his brain.

  Images flashed—the Imshee she’d liked stretching out in his pool-sized bathtub, his long arms slowly scratching his back and then human children running through the space. Over half the children had the face of that little red-haired girl from her memories, which was Tyce’s first indication that Wolf was imaging a possible future. Then she added Wirki’s little boy with his thumb in his mouth and Ter’s little brother and two of Ama’s grandchildren. As she warmed to the idea, she imagined
more and more of the children in her room—Iowee climbing the structures under the viewscreen and Lele building block towers.

  “Viewscreen?” She showed him the huge nose of the ship and the fibers that ran from the hull, through skin and bone and muscle down to the room, each carrying a spot of light. And those fibers created the illusion of one huge window looking out at space.

  John pressed close. “Are you okay?”

  “If Wolf is telling the truth, you’re in for one hell of a surprise,” Tyce said. A sliver of light showed in the middle of the design. “These are the private quarters for the Purpose, but I think they’re a little large for just the two of us.” Tyce glanced over to see how John would react to the assumption they would live together.

  His smile was incandescent. “We’ll have to choose something smaller then,” he said.

  Tyce couldn’t contain his own grin. “Deal.”

  Wolf finally found the right muscle and the door retracted into the wall, revealing a cavernous space. But that was not what captured Tyce’s attention. The far side of the room looked into space. Stars twinkled and the deep red stain of a hydrogen field spread like a distant, wispy cloud to the left. Blue stars, red and orange stars, violet auras around distant points—they all lit up the screen. Enhanced telescopes sometimes showed space like this, but those were still images. Here, space moved sluggishly past with the red cloud vanishing behind the edge of the window as if they were driving by at three or four miles an hour.

  But that was an illusion. Wolf was tearing through space at about half-light speed. If she didn’t either fold space or go into a hyperspace dimension soon, relativity would become a major problem as time on the ship slowed relative to Earth. “Holy shit,” Tyce said. “She can fold space.”

  “What?” John yelped. “That’s the fucking holy grail of space travel.”

  Amusement. Confidence. Wolf not only knew how to fold space, but she could do it as easily as breathing. “How do you fold space?” Tyce asked, expecting to get flooded with technical information. He grabbed for the wall, and John took his arm in preparation for the mental storm. But it never came. Instead she showed him an image of a person sneezing.

  “Well?” John asked.

  Tyce waited to see if she would add anything to that message, but she was silent. “Either she initiates the process by sneezing or she’s telling me that it’s an instinct thing that she has always known how to do.”

  “Like a sneeze,” John finished. He sighed. “At least we know she can get us home, assuming she wants to.”

  Tyce didn’t like to talk about Earth. He got such a cacophony of feelings rushing through him that it gave him a headache. “Let’s focus on tactical positioning now. With Acosta and his idiots running around, we need to protect our people first. Second, we play for time while Wolf heals, and hopefully we can slow her down so we don’t have to deal with extreme relativity.” As Tyce said that, the decking shivered and the view out the window slowed until it appeared static until Tyce looked at the edge of the screen.

  “Third, we need to find a way to get people home. Not everyone likes the idea of living on this ship for the rest of their lives,” John said firmly. He still felt the weight of leadership and the need to put his people’s needs first. He was a good commander, better than Tyce had been back when he’d been given his first unit.

  The fact John hadn’t put himself in the category of those who wanted to go to Earth gave Tyce hope that after all these years, maybe they could finally find more than friendship and more than sharing a bed short-term. In all the years since Tyce had left the academy, he had never envisioned himself with a life partner. Now he had trouble imagining himself without John.

  “Yeah,” Tyce said, “but that requires her to finish integrating the shuttles before disengaging. She’s too big to land, although I keep getting images of her crashing into the snow.”

  “Huh.” John walked the perimeter of the room. The bed was in an alcove large enough to qualify as another room and everywhere were pipe-like structures that rose higher than a standard chair. The Imshee would straddle them. They might’ve looked front-heavy and awkward, but they had been tree dwellers, and they still preferred heights and chairs that mimicked tree branches. “Maybe she didn’t raid Earth for slaves. Maybe she crashed on it,” John suggested.

  Tyce wished that was the case, but he had also seen humans huddled, crying in locked rooms as Anla came and dragged them out. The humans hadn’t served on Wolf, but they had been imprisoned. Tyce felt like that was her secret to keep, though. He had already told the others too much about her past and her culpability in enslaving the Anla.

  “Whatever happened, it was a damn long time ago,” Tyce said. “So, what do you think about this as the playroom? It would give the kids a chance to run around.” They had been through a lot during the war. Most had lost family members, and all had lived in constant fear. They would need time to heal from the psychological wounds. “We could set up medical and operations offices in the closest rooms, they’re big enough, then living quarters and logistics, plenty of places to hook up food synthesizers. Finally we could put the fighters nearest the staircase and corridor leading in here.”

  John studied him. “That would mean giving up the control room,” he said slowly.

  Tyce laughed. “It’s not a control room. It’s a... a transition room. Now that she has a Purpose, she’ll seal it off until I die. Candidates go in the room for her to evaluate them. It would be a pretty shitty deal if she had to partner with anyone who wandered into the ship.”

  “So the Imshee...”

  “Were terrified of humans getting control of a Cy ship, and they knew the function of that room. They were desperate to get us away from it.”

  John sat on a pipe chair and rubbed his face. “Christ. If we had understood that, we could have caught a ride with them back to Earth.”

  Tyce thought about how the Imshee had been pulled apart, one hair at a time while the Cy experimented on the neural networking. “Doubt it. I don’t understand how they can even trade with the Cy because the hate is strong.”

  “You assume that based off memories that might be centuries old,” John said. “Okay, enough with the depressing shit.” John held a hand out, and Tyce crossed the room to take it. “If you want to move in together, I assume that means you’ve made a choice.”

  “A reasonable deduction.”

  John shook his head. “You’re not any better with this now than you were back in the academy.”

  “I’m not,” Tyce admitted. He rested his hands on John’s shoulders and leaned closer. Maybe he didn’t know how to talk about his feelings, but he was getting better about showing them. John tilted his head back, and their lips met.

  Tyce leaned against the chair and John’s arms wrapped around him, pulling him closer. The years vanished, and Tyce sank into the memory of a friendship so deep that he trusted John with his soul. Despite the treason, the abandonment, and the damn war, he still felt that way. John’s kiss was soft at first, a whisper against Tyce’s lips before he retreated to kiss the side of Tyce’s jaw. But then John pressed his lips against Tyce’s again. His arms tightened, and Tyce knotted his hand around John’s uniform shirt as the kiss grew more intense, more demanding.

  The world faded and all that mattered was them, this moment. Their tongues met, John threaded his fingers through Tyce’s hair, Tyce jerked John off the chair so their bodies pressed together. Tyce was giddy, hard, and stupidly happy. His heart beat almost painfully fast. Then John turned his head, breaking the electric connection between them.

  “A few things have changed.” John sounded breathless and his body trembled.

  “A few,” Tyce agreed. “And I will try to talk more.”

  John rested his head against Tyce’s shoulder. “Then something tells me that the rest of this will all work out.”

  When John said it aloud like that, Tyce believed him. Maybe they had some significant bumps in the road ahead o
f them, but as long as they were together, it would all work out. He turned toward the field of stars. So many colors twinkled and shone—so much of this part of space was a mystery. When Tyce had been a child, he’d looked up at the stars and wanted to explore. Then the Anla had appeared and the war and the universe had grown so much smaller. It was one more arena of war to train for, to learn tactics and perfect ways to kill others.

  But this. This was his heart. John and the ship and all the quiet of space waiting for him to explore. This was the perfection that Ama always told him to find. They stood locked in each other’s arms for long minutes before John finally spoke.

  “Do you want to go find Ama and run this past her?”

  “Yep,” Tyce said without moving. “And Tuch. He’ll be a bastard about leaving that control room. If he doesn’t have wiring to tinker in, he’s a real monster.”

  John huffed. Or maybe he sighed. His breath danced across Tyce’s neck and made all the hairs stand on end. “Let Ama deal with him. That woman could talk a Rownt out of a profit.”

  “Nope, she’d stare at him until he felt guilty about wanting profit,” Tyce corrected him. Then he straightened up and slowly reclaimed all his limbs. “Okay, let’s get this crew sorted.” He held his hand out, and John took it before Tyce activated his radio.

  “Ama, do you have time to come and look at some potential new quarters?”

  Lyn Gala

  LYN GALA STARTED WRITING in the back of her science notebook in third grade and hasn't stopped since. Westerns starring men with shady pasts gave way to science fiction with questionable protagonists, which eventually became any story with a morally ambiguous character. Even the purest heroes have pain and loss and darkness in their hearts, and that’s where she likes to find her stories. Her characters seek to better themselves and find the happy (or happier) ending.