The Furthest Planet

by James Ross Wilks

  “But I will say this: I think we should clean them out.”

  Staples frowned. “You mean steal their stuff?”

  Overton nodded, a lopsided grin on his face. “Pretty much. It’s only fair. They stole your ship, left you for dead, and tried to kill your crew. Don’t call it theft, call it… endangerment tax.”

  Staples barked laughter. “You know, I think I can get on board with that.”

  Overton grinned and nodded. “Oh yes. Space Justice.”

  Staples was standing in the mess hall of the Doris Day. The eight surviving members of the Doris Day’s crew stood facing her with their hands zip tied behind their backs. Surrounding them were Dinah, Overton, Jordan, and Jang. All carried weapons, but they were holstered. Logan Vey’s body was on ice in the sparse medical bay of the ship. Since his death, Wilhelmina Jones had stepped up to speak for the crew, and she had been very cooperative. Staples suspected that she knew why. With Vey dead, she became the de facto captain. That didn’t necessarily make the ship her property, but given the state of the solar system, she didn’t think anyone would be chasing the Doris Day down in order to make sure that Vey’s will was properly executed, assuming he even had one.

  Staples looked over the enemy crew. They were quite a mess. Two of them had sustained concussions; one from Amit when he had broken free and the other on the bridge of the Doris Day when Brutus, one version of Brutus, had rammed the Tyger into the other ship. Dinah had shot another through the thigh. The woman was a good enough shot not to clip a major artery, but Staples had quickly found that Vey had not kept a doctor on board to treat his crew. She had asked Jabir to patch the man up and look at the head wounds of the other crewmembers as well. He had been only too happy to, stating that it was a pleasure to treat people who weren’t his friends for a change.

  “So here’s the deal,” she said. “I’m giving you back your ship.” Vey’s crew looked somewhat surprised at this, but less than they might have been had they not been transferred over here an hour prior. “As soon as we’re finished here, we’re going to cut thrust, and my engineer is going to disable your engines. She figures that it should take you about a week to put them back together. You might want to work on your coms systems as well. I understand that they were damaged when the Tyger hit you.”

  “A week?” Jones asked incredulously.

  Staples turned her full gaze on the woman. “Yes, a week,” she said. Implicit in her face was the fact that the situation could be far, far worse for them. “You’ll have food and fuel, though we’re taking some of your reserves to replace what you spent. My navigator estimates that if you’re conservative with your fuel, you should be back to Mars in just over a month.”

  The crew grumbled and gasped, but they did not object further. Staples felt a moment of sympathy for them, especially the pilot Okilo, who seemed to be a decent person with the bad fortune to choose a monster for a boss. Before the feeling of empathy could grow any more, she reminded herself of Burke’s statement about evil men. Even so, given the fuel reserves they were leaving them, the ship would have to run at a quarter G or less. At that rate, it would take them days just to overcome the velocity they had built up since they left Mars.

  “We’ll also be taking some choice items from your stores.” She glanced at Overton. “Call it endangerment tax. Don’t worry, we’re not taking anything vital. We’re not leaving you out here to die… we just don’t want to see you for a long time.”

  “Ever again would be nice,” Jordan added.

  “What if we hit something?” one of them blurted out. It was the big one who had shot at them, the one Dinah had wounded in the leg. “Without engines, we can barely steer.”

  “Space is big,” Staples shrugged. “The odds are in your favor. That’s the best you’re going to get.”

  Jordan spoke up again. “And better than you deserve.”

  Staples made a mental note to speak to their newest crewmember about keeping quiet when her captain was handling matters of business, but in this case, she thought that it worked just fine.

  The whole process took several hours to sort out, but finally all of Staples’ crew was back on Gringolet. They had acquired munitions stores, tac missiles, thousands of rounds of ammunition, three stasis tubes, various spare parts, and the big prize: a replacement UteV. It was not the same model as the one they had left at AR-559, but it was close enough.

  They had also found two dormant automatons. Jones didn’t seem to know much about them except that Vey had brought them onboard as part of the payment for the job. Staples had asked the more combat-oriented members of her crew to move one of them, very carefully, back to Gringolet. She strongly recommended to Jones that she destroy the other one.

  The crew of the Doris Day was set free once their engines were disabled to Dinah’s satisfaction. As Gringolet and the Tyger began the process of reversing their thrust so that they could eventually head Solward, the damaged and darkened Doris Day slipped further and further away into Jovian space. Staples genuinely hoped that she would never see either the vessel or its occupants again.

  To her complete lack of surprise, Jang had asked to speak to her.

  Staples had never been in Jang’s quarters. She had never had cause to call on him, and he had never invited her. Now she stood in them and found that she could not tell that someone had ever lived there. The walls were spotless, the corners were clean, and there was only a large duffel bag resting lightly on a bed stripped of sheets.

  “Never got around to unpacking?” she asked, hoping futilely for a smile from the grim man who stood before her. He did not grace her with one.

  “I am not a man of things,” he stated, his eyes on hers.

  She sighed audibly. “You’re leaving.”

  “No, we are,” he replied.

  “You and Yoli.”

  “Yes. I’m sorry, Captain. It has been my pleasure to work for you for the past two years. You are, in many ways, a fine captain.”

  Jang towered nearly a third of a meter over her. She looked up at him, hands on her hips, and squinted at the light set in the ceiling behind his head. “But-” she began, leaving him to fill in the rest.

  “But you have made mistakes. You should have trusted me.” He shook his head as though scolding her.

  “Would you have kept the secret? That Bethany tried to kill Quinn and Parsells? They were your men, more or less.” Suddenly her nose itched furiously, but she refused to sacrifice dignity to scratch it.

  “I haven’t told anyone, aside from Yoli, and I don’t plan to, if that answers your question.” He cocked an eyebrow. “But you should. Secrets are dangerous, Captain. You may speak carefully, say all of the right things, and lie convincingly to those you love the most, and they will still destroy your life. When you cannot share those things that are most important to you, those things that eat away at you with your friends and family, you will find yourself pulling away from them.”

  Staples nodded and then lowered her head, scratching her nose in the process. Kojo Jang was given to dramatic speeches, but that didn’t make him wrong. “You’re right,” she said. “But sometimes it’s a captain’s job to be distant, to withhold that information so that the rest of the crew can function.”

  “I suppose I will discover whether that is true,” he said, shouldering his duffel bag.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “Unless you object, Yoli and I will take the Tyger. Despite the damage it sustained, it is still spaceworthy.”

  The ship they had stolen from its Tranquility berth did indeed look to be in terrible condition. It would need a major retrofit, and it was likely that half the ship’s rooms were open to vacuum, but Brutus’ judicious ramming of the Doris Day had saved the engines and cockpit. He had informed them that it was habitable and that all major systems had been spared. The sentient program was keeping the other ship in formation with Gringolet as they worked to reverse their momentum and head back towards Sol.

&n
bsp; “It is,” she agreed. “I had planned to go over and retrieve that iteration of Brutus and bring him back. I really didn’t know what to do with the ship after that. What do you want to do with it?”

  “What is right,” Jang said, and he made to move past her and to the door. Staples didn’t move, and so courtesy kept him pinned in the cabin he had inhabited since she had first hired him.

  “What does that mean?” she asked, laughing without humor. “I’ve had a little trouble figuring that out lately.”

  “First, we will make every effort to find the crew of the Tyger on Mars if they are still alive. If they are, we will return their ship and help with repairs to whatever degree we can.”

  Staples suddenly felt like a cretin. “Yes, that would be the right thing, wouldn’t it?” she asked rhetorically. “We should probably go with you and help with that.”

  “You have more pressing matters, Captain. Victor must be your target. You must use what you have gained to find and destroy him, or this robot holocaust may be just the beginning.”

  “We could still use your help with that. I could use your help.”

  “I’m sorry, Captain, but you’ll have to manage without it.”

  She nodded reluctantly.

  “I might question many of your decisions,” Jang continued, “but taking the Tyger was the right one. If the crew survived, which is perhaps unlikely, they might not appreciate your choice to use their ship to recover your crew. It doesn’t matter. It was what you had to do, what a captain must do.”

  She nodded again. “People matter more than things. Even expensive things.”

  “Indeed.”

  “What if the crew or the owner of the Tyger are dead?” she inquired.

  “Then the ship will likely be willed to their family. If it is not, then perhaps Yoli and I will find a way to keep it, at least for a while. We could move medical personnel, supplies, or help in other ways.”

  “Noble of you,” Staples said, and she meant it.

  The trace of a smile touched his lips and was gone so fast that she couldn’t be sure she had seen it. “I try to be a noble man, Captain Staples.” He moved to pass her again, and this time she stepped aside to let him go.

  Several hours later Staples stood in front of the communications suite in the nose of her ship tucked under the cockpit. Dinah had recovered enough to transfer Staples, Yoli, and Jang over to the Tyger. The version of Brutus on that ship had handed over control to Jang without question and then downloaded himself back onto the drive that Staples had originally used to upload him into the Tyger’s computer core. Yoli had suggested that they run a sweep of the core to be sure that he was truly erased from it, and Staples assented, but she suspected that if Brutus wanted to leave a copy of himself in the mainframe, Yoli and Jang wouldn’t find him in a hundred years of searching. Once Dinah had flown Staples back in the Delta V, she had climbed all the way up to the coms suite and stood regarding the computers in front of her.

  There were welding lines in the flooring beneath her where her ship had been torn open by a missile. She could still imagine the broken robot body splayed out in front of her as it had been when she, Evelyn, and Jang had come searching for him after the Martian Navy had saved them from the Nightshade vessels. Now that she looked at the coms, she could see that alterations had been made. It was clear that Brutus had been prepping the computer core to accept his personality for several days, perhaps even weeks, before the attack. She had not asked him why, but she suspected that she knew.

  Brutus had made a brave and desperate gamble when he downloaded himself to a singular robot body and first snuck aboard her ship. As software, he was free and safe. So long as he remained undiscovered, he could move through Netlink with relative impunity. Once he coopted a body, he became nearly as mortal as the rest of them. She could imagine the fear that might bring. Humans spent entire lifetimes creating redundancy measures to ensure their safety, everything from seatbelts to artificial hearts. She could hardly begrudge him the same. He could have asked, of course, but if she were being honest with herself, she would have said no. There was a part of her that had enjoyed that Brutus was as mortal as the rest of them, one that wanted him to remain so. It made him easier to quantify and less threatening… less alien.

  She was reasonably sure that he had not asked her because she might have said no, and she thought that perhaps there was a moral imperative somewhere that stated that every creature had the right to ensure its own survival so long as that did not threaten the survival of others. She and the crew might have believed that having Brutus in the computer core constituted just such a threat, but only Brutus could know that it did not. The evidence had proven him right. In fact, had Brutus not joined with the computer core of Gringolet, it was unlikely that she would be on her ship at the moment, or that Bethany, Charis, and her family would be alive. The ends didn’t always justify the means, but she thought that in this case they might.

  “Are you ready, Brutus?” she asked, and held up the drive as though he could see it.

  “I’m not sure I am, Captain,” Brutus’ tinny voice said from her watch.

  “Wait, really?” she asked, startled. She had only asked as a formality.

  “Really, Captain. I find that I am frightened.”

  “Of what?” she asked, turning the thin strip of black plastic over in her hand. It still boggled her that sentience could fit into so small a package.

  “Reintegration.”

  “Why?” she asked, genuinely puzzled.

  “What if it kills me?”

  “How could it? We’re just blending you with… you.”

  “But a different version of me, one with different memories and experiences.” Brutus’ voice sounded concerned, even shaky.

  “But isn’t it just a data overlay? You won’t lose anything. You’ll just add the memories of what happened between the time you made the copy of yourself to give to me. It’s only been a few days.”

  “We are, all of us, the sum total of our experiences. Everything we do, every decision we make, affects us. Sometimes these changes are miniscule. Sometimes they are life changing. What if the version of me that inhabited the Tyger has been changed in some fundamental way? What if he has come to view things differently? What if he is more sympathetic to my father? Our father?” he corrected himself.

  “I suppose he,” she said, meaning the Brutus in the drive, “might have the same concerns.”

  “Did he say as much before you downloaded him?” Brutus asked.

  Staples shook her head. “No, he downloaded himself pretty much without comment.”

  “That proves it, then.” Brutus said, and Staples thought she detected a note of real panic in his voice. “If I am concerned about this and he is not, then we are no longer the same.”

  Staples twisted her lips in thought. “I think you might be applying some circular logic here. Your only basis for being concerned is that you are concerned.”

  “Consequently, if I weren’t concerned, then there would be no reason to be concerned?” Brutus asked.

  Staples shrugged. “I’m no philosopher, but I think so. Let’s look at it another way: you’re right. Life is full of experiences that alter and form us. We don’t always have control over them, but we can control how we react to them.”

  “I believe you may be pulling on the philosophy of Naturalism espoused by many writers in the late nineteenth-”

  “The point is,” she interrupted him, “that the core of who you are has remained the same since I met you. I won’t pretend to know exactly what constitutes consciousness. I know that somehow all of the cells in my brain, none of which is individually self-aware, work together to create a sentient being, or a close enough approximation of one so as not to matter. You may be made of code string rather than cells, but the same truth is at the core of you. You are more than the sum of your parts. This,” she stepped forward and tapped the drive against the input terminal in front of her, “is just one mo
re experience. It’s up to you what you do with it.”

  “You surely know,” Brutus replied, “that many philosophers throughout time have taken exception with your argument.”

  “The illusion of continuity of self.” She sighed. “I know, and they make some good points. Give me a few drinks and I become someone else. Give me a drug and I’m another person. Cut out part of my brain and I’m someone else again. Maybe it is an illusion, but like free will, it’s one we need to function, both as individuals and as a society.”

  Brutus did not reply, and Staples stood in front of a bank of computers in silence for a minute while the lights flashed in her face.

  “It’s up to you, Brutus. I don’t think I can bring myself to destroy this,” she said, rubbing the drive slightly with her thumb. “It would be a little too close to murder, morally speaking, but I can put it in a drawer and try to forget about it, if you like.”

  “Hardly seems fair to me, Captain. He, the other me, trusted you to rejoin him with me.”

  “Now you’re just being deliberately confusing with your pronouns.”

  “Forgive me,” Brutus replied. “I may never get the opportunity to be two people again.”

  “Does that mean that I should plug you-him in?”

  “Yes please, Captain Staples. I am frightened, but I cannot justifiably do otherwise. Besides, I know that if I lose my way, you will be there to help me find it.”

  “I promise that I will,” she said and plugged in the drive.

  Chapter 13

  “I’m just asking. Do you think when the adrenaline dies down, she’ll stop coming after me?” Overton asked John. It was his third attempt at the same question, and John had thus far failed to furnish the man with any kind of answer that satisfied him.

  The two of them sat in the mess hall across from one another, empty plates and glasses filling the table between them. Both had sat in relatively amiable silence while they ate, but once his mouth was empty, Overton began using it to ply John with questions about Dinah. Jabir sat down at the end of the table, seemingly absorbed in reading a surface in front of him, a glass of water held loosely in his hand.