by Lena Nguyen
Keller thought that she was personally worried about the robots, Park realized. That this wasn’t a matter of survival for her, but one of personal attachment. She supposed it was true in some sense; it was easier for her to talk to the androids, and she dreaded imagining life on the ship without them. There was none of that exhausting analysis with them; no undercurrents for her to guess at and navigate, nothing for them to hide. What you saw was what you got—and Park found that refreshing. She didn’t have to parse through a dozen micro-expressions and facial nuances per minute. She didn’t have to wonder if they were ever lying to her, or concealing hidden barbs in their looks and words. Or putting poison in her food. There was that sense of relief with them, even comfort and familiarity. With androids, everything was simple, open. Pure.
But her concerns were so much larger than that. Why weren’t more people worried about the loss of Reimi? Why was no one panicking, running through the corridors screaming? Reimi was the ship’s only engineer, roboticist, and mechanic; she had the tri-fold job of attending to the Deucalion’s positronic brain, its mechanical heart, and the robotic crew that serviced it. Park felt a hard stone of fear, way down in her gut, when she thought of what could happen to the crew with Reimi out of commission. What if the ship suffered a catastrophic engine failure, a malfunction somewhere in its entrails, and they had no one on board who knew what to do?
The androids knew what to do, she thought then. That was what they were there for—to ensure that the Deucalion, their mothership, didn’t die, and every human passenger along with it. But they still didn’t come with the protocols to maintain themselves. That was what Reimi was for. And she was gone. And now Park was just thinking in circles, nauseating herself.
Suddenly Keller broke into her thoughts. “Lunchtime,” she said, standing decisively and blinking off her inlays, which she’d been using to compose the draft of some message to someone. “Come. Some food will do you good. Clear your mind.”
Somehow Park doubted that—she would not touch the ship’s bland, gluey food in front of others again, if she could help it—but she rose obediently and followed her mentor. She was still brooding when they entered the mess hall together: a strangely warm, salt-and-bleach-smelling room with a dispensary lining one wall and several round tables filling the center. They picked up their trays of rehydrated meatloaf and flash-thawed potatoes from the service android, Megex, then sat, as always, at a table by themselves.
Lunch was usually the time they observed mealtime behaviors together. Animals at the watering hole, Keller often whispered, in a British documentarian’s accent. Eating was a vulnerable activity; people tended to relax their guard. It was why Stalin had invited Churchill to so many dinners. You could tell a lot about personalities and group dynamics at lunch: who was in control, who was deferential. Who occupied the choicest spots and who slunk in alone.
Park was initially too preoccupied to give much thought to who was on display today, but Keller had apparently dismissed the topic of Reimi from her mind and was intent on carrying out her daily observations. She nudged Park with her elbow and said, softly, “Sagara’s sitting alone again.”
Park looked. Keller was right: there he was, sitting alone, a tense and silent presence in his black uniform. He had been the last one to join the crew—the ship had picked him up out of Corvus—and as a result, he had entered the community with its various cliques and groups already formed. Most of the other crewmembers steered well clear of him. Keller sympathized, but Park privately thought that it was Sagara’s severe—almost lethal—personality to blame.
She continued to scan the mess hall as she picked listlessly at the disintegrating meatloaf. Their main concerns were usually the loners, like Sagara. There was always the danger of isolation in space, anxiety and depression breeding in the dark corners of a lonely mind. Sagara himself seemed self-sufficient enough, but it was others, like the exobiologist Wan Xu, who always sat in Park’s crosshairs. Those were the ones who sat by themselves or in silent pairs, bending over their wrist consoles while they ate. Recording expensive video messages to send back home. There was technically no one on the receiving end of their calls, either: messages back to Earth or even Mars took months. The loners were choosing one-sided conversations with blank screens over socializing with their fellow crewmates. That was something to monitor.
“And here comes Boone,” Keller muttered. This time, Park didn’t bother looking; she’d already heard Boone’s entrance to the mess hall without having to turn her head. He always made sure to stomp his heavy combat boots against the tile to announce his presence. Even now, he was scanning the room and letting out an overly loud sigh, as if to inform everyone that he was hungry—as if every person in the room ought to know how he was feeling. He even patted his stomach dramatically, like a gorilla beating its chest. Me want food. Get out me way. Keller had muttered it more than once.
Park had concerns there, too. Boone was a wild card in the power balance on the ship, and he had an ego problem to boot. Why there were so many soldiers on the ship at all—three “security” personnel out of thirteen, nearly a fourth of the crew—Park didn’t know. ISF military was usually colony-based, putting down the odd uprising or terrorist attack, but she hadn’t ever heard of them accompanying an expedition to a new planet. And she privately disliked Boone, with his swaggering, his sneery remarks, the hard dismissive flick of his eyes whenever a woman he considered unattractive spoke up. As with Sagara, none of her strategies so far had worked on him.
Boone automatically moved toward the table with most of the expedition’s leaders, both official and de facto. Daryl Wick was there, the kind, sensible astronaut who was commander of the entire mission. Natalya Severov, the beautiful Russian surveyor, was there too. The only one who seemed missing from that group was . . . Kel Fulbreech.
Park jolted. “He’s waiting for me,” she said, without meaning to speak out loud.
Keller was grinning at her. “Go,” she said. “I’m sure it will be pleasant. Don’t let fear hold you back.”
It wasn’t fear, Park thought as she dumped her tray into the mouth of the waste compressor and hurried up the ladder to Deck B, the navigation level. But if Keller had pressed her on what exactly the feeling was, she wouldn’t have been able to say.
Fulbreech was waiting for her with his hands in his pockets, leaning his rangy body against the wall of another side-tunnel. His face brightened when he saw Park approaching; he said, grinning, “Good. I didn’t think you would come.”
I didn’t think I would, either, Park thought, but instead she looked at his pockets and said, “Where is it?”
Fulbreech looked surprised. “Where is what?”
“The—you know. Whatever it is you have in store.”
“Ah,” he said. He winked. “So you’re excited. Look at you. You’re like a kid on Solstice Morning.”
“I’ll leave,” she warned.
Fulbreech laughed. “Relax. It’s through here.”
He indicated the large hatch behind him, and Park, finally realizing where they were, blanched. They were standing in front of the Deucalion’s escape pod, a little shuttle attached to the underside of the ship. It was the crewmembers’ favorite spot to conduct clandestine sexual liaisons.
“I suppose that makes sense,” Keller had said when Park first told her about it—having heard all about it from Jimex, when she asked him where that particular door led. “It’s the only place where you’re guaranteed not to get walked in on—because what business would someone have in the escape pod, other than that? And it’s the only other place that has a bed, besides the bunks.” She’d grinned at Park. “Too bad you’ll never see the inside of it. Conflicts of interest and all that.”
“Park?” Fulbreech waved a hand in front of her face.
She balked a little from him. “I don’t understand.”
Fulbreech seemed oblivious to her dis
comfort. “This place doesn’t have a camera on it,” he said, as if that explained anything.
Park shook her head; she could not believe his audacity. “And that’s your . . . surprise? The thing that you said would make me feel better?”
“Well, not all of it,” Fulbreech said. He looked a little sly, a little pleased with himself. She looked up into his open, friendly face and remembered with sudden, painful clarity that he was handsome—suspiciously handsome, she sometimes thought—but also too upright to pull a stunt like this. He was one of those all-American astronauts, blunt-jawed, square-nosed, with a sweet, sheepish, boyish look. Golden hair falling into his eyes. Right now he looked not like a man overcome by lust, but more like a kid on Solstice Morning himself. Full of radiant glee, excitement—maybe even pride.
“All right,” Park said reluctantly, deciding to trust him. But behind her back she was balling her fist: ISF had given her piecemeal self-defense training before departure. “Let me see it.”
Fulbreech palmed open the hatch to the escape pod and, looking around, quickly shut it behind them. Park had to give herself a sweaty moment to let her eyes adjust to the gloom inside—the pod, of course, was inactive—but soon she was able to make out another shape, lying there in front of her in the dark. A body, Park realized. She nearly screamed.
“It’s exo-armor,” Fulbreech whispered conspiratorially, right in her ear. “I snuck it in here a few hours ago. It’s Natalya’s, but she won’t miss it until the expedition team goes out again tomorrow.”
Park couldn’t make sense of it. She stared at the bench with the stiff exo-armor lying on it like a corpse, inert. “What would we need it for?”
Fulbreech bent to pick up the gold-visored helmet that came with the suit. “Well,” he said slowly, “I was thinking. You’re officially barred from going outside—from even seeing Eos, since you’re not part of the expedition crew. But I hardly think that’s fair. If it were me, it’d drive me crazy to land on a virgin planet, but never get to see it. To never touch it—smell it, walk on it . . .” He stared at her. “Don’t you think it’s a little silly of ISF to expect you to be fine with all that?”
There was suddenly a kind of tightness in her throat. “So you’re saying . . .”
“There’s a hatch down in the floor,” Fulbreech explained. “This pod’s terminal is—let’s say tangentially connected to the ship’s system. If I play my cards right, I think I could get it to open the hatch without alerting the Deucalion.” At her stare he gave a kind of grin and a shrug. “I’m good with computers. I have to be, working with METIS to chart everything.”
METIS was the ship’s governing AI, a heuristic brain tasked with managing the Deucalion’s massive nexus of systems, from its navigation to communications to surveillance. It was what their neural inlays were plugged into. “I thought only Reimi had the authorization to manipulate METIS’s protocols,” Park said. She didn’t add: She’s also the only one with the know-how to make sure all of our brains aren’t fried.
Fulbreech shrugged again. “It would be kind of stupid to have only one tech-savvy crewmember on board,” he said lightly. “I have a degree, if you want to look at my credentials. A minor one, mind, way at the bottom of the list—but my point is, I generally know what I’m doing.”
Park had to stand there in the dark and process what was going on; things were moving at a much faster pace than she was used to. She looked at the crumpled suit he’d brought for her and felt her fingertips chill. Eos was out there. Just one hatch away. But did Fulbreech know what he was offering? The implications of such an action? Stealing an exo-armor suit was bad enough, but to exit the ship without permission, to take her out there to explore an alien planet on their own, no supervision, no authority . . .
Her scalp tightened. She turned to him and said, barely hearing herself: “Why would you do such a thing for me?”
Fulbreech turned to look at her, despite the gloom. The look on his face was entirely serious. He said quietly, “You don’t know?”
Park’s pulse quickened; it felt as if someone had plucked her heart like a string. But before she could answer, there was a clanking and whirring from the door of the escape shuttle. Park felt her vision narrow as panic thundered in. Someone was accessing the lock.
In one swift movement, Fulbreech crossed the distance between them and kissed her.
Park jerked back from him as if he’d burned her. But the picture was complete, and when the door opened, whoever stood in the doorway got a good eyeful of Park and Fulbreech standing there, hastily breaking away from each other in the dark.
“Ah,” a voice said. Park could hardly stand to look at the speaker, but she turned when Fulbreech did. Vincent Sagara, their security officer, stood outlined in the threshold of the doorway. His face was entirely in shadow, so that Park couldn’t read his expression.
Fulbreech, on his end, recovered admirably. “Captain Sagara,” he said, clearing his throat a little. “What—ah—what brings you here?”
“I suppose I don’t have to ask you the same question, Fulbreech,” Sagara answered. His voice was perfectly neutral, devoid of embarrassment or ridicule. He clicked on a little utility light and swept the inside of the escape pod with it. Imperceptibly, Fulbreech shifted to block the exo-armor from view.
Sagara’s light landed square on Park’s face. “Park,” he said—and now he did sound a little surprised. Park felt heat swamp her face and croaked, “Captain. We were just leaving.”
He paused, then lowered the light when Park squinted. “So was I,” he said, perfectly brusque. “I was conducting some electrical inspections, after hearing about Kisaragi. But I can return later. Carry on.”
The door shut behind him before either of them could say another word. After a moment Fulbreech turned back to Park and said, his voice low and incredulous: “Do you believe him?”
Park could hardly speak through her humiliation. She said faintly, “What?”
“That he’s looking at—the electronics? Sagara doesn’t know the first thing about the ship’s computers. Or its systems. Does he?”
“I don’t know,” Park said. Then she shook her head and said, “Aren’t you more concerned about what he saw?”
“What, about the kiss? Sagara’s not the type to gossip—”
“The suit,” Park said in a hard, flat voice. “He must have seen it—nothing escapes his notice. You don’t think he won’t wonder why we had it just lying around?”
Fulbreech didn’t say anything for a moment. Finally he said: “The shuttle has exo-armor suits of its own—in case its inhabitants need to go out to make repairs to the exterior. None of them would fit you, but he doesn’t need to know that. He’d think the one on the bench was one of those.”
“He wouldn’t wonder what we were doing with a suit in the first place, whether it came from the pod or not?”
Another pause. Then: “He didn’t see.”
Suddenly the little pod felt too dark, too small, like a cave she had gone into and couldn’t find her way out of. Park felt as if the air had turned hot and close, leaving her short of breath. She said abruptly, “I have to go.”
She spun around and left before Fulbreech could stop her.
* * *
—
Keller was not in their shared office when Park returned, but Jimex was. He had formed a special attachment to her, as androids were wont to do when it came to Park, so he was always finding some excuse or another to be around her. When Park came into the room, the android was busily wiping down the couch that she had been intent on flinging herself down on—so she gritted her teeth and moved to the chair at her workstation instead. When she put her head down on her desk, Jimex looked up and said, “You are experiencing gastric distress?”
“God,” Park said, muffled. “No.”
Her thoughts were whirring. As she had suspected, disaster had
struck; this was what happened when you planned surprises. She didn’t know what was worse: that Sagara had caught them illicitly hovering over stolen contraband, plotting to leave the ship, or that he now thought that she—one of the ship’s psychologists—was engaged in some torrid romantic affair. He’d be reporting it back to ISF Corvus, surely, just as she was tasked with reporting the same things back about other people. And Fulbreech, fool that he was, had—
Had—
“I’ve spoken to the other synthetics,” Jimex said. “Megex was not told by any party to put medicine in your food. But you may have left it unattended when you sanitized your hands.”
“Yes,” Park said. She had already thought of this.
Jimex paused for a moment. “Ellenex will prepare medication for you. She says it will nullify the effects of emesis tabs if they are administered without your consent.” At Park’s look, he added, “She will be discreet.”
Park tried not to groan. She was grateful to him—and Ellenex—for doing such a thing, but she did not trust the androids’ abilities to keep a secret. Especially not Jimex; telling him to investigate for her had half been a political maneuver, to let her opponent know she was hunting for them. But to secretly take medication was another thing entirely.
Jimex gave her a rare look of insight. “This upsets you. It was the incorrect action.”
“No,” Park said in a muted way. Then she closed her eyes and said, almost involuntarily, “Kel Fulbreech just kissed me.”
Jimex paused, just for a moment, in his wiping. “Oh,” he said, his voice milk-bland and mild. “I don’t believe Ellenex has medication for that.”
Park felt a laugh bubble up in her chest, but stifled it sharply. How like an android to think of such a thing as needing a prescription—a cure. Maybe he was right. Maybe there ought to be some tonic out there, some injection that would let her forget everything. Something to soothe the sudden turmoil. There was the MAD, but she didn’t dare use it in front of him. Otherwise Jimex would go around telling everyone who asked about that, too.