We Have Always Been Here

by Lena Nguyen

  Sagara was giving Boone his classic knife-eyed look, a chilly anger radiating from him in waves. “I thought I told you to leave Park alone,” he said. “Are you willing to disobey a direct order?”

  “Don’t let the power get to your head, Sagara,” Boone bit back. To Park it had the childish cant of you’re not the boss of me. “Let’s put our differences aside, huh? Something bigger than the both of us is going down on this ship.”

  “The longer we stand around, the more time this stowaway has to wreak havoc on the crew,” Park butted in. Sagara turned to spear her with his gaze next.

  “There is no stowaway,” he told her, his voice flat and steely. “I know you believe that, Park, but you’re seeing things. You’ve become infected with whatever got to Holt and Ma and Hunter.”

  Park’s shoulders jumped. How dare you, she almost said, but she opted for something more rational-sounding. “You have no proof of that.”

  Sagara was shaking his head. “I’ve monitored this ship since Corvus,” he told her. “I would know if there was a stranger on board. There isn’t. This man you think you’ve seen is not wandering the halls. It’s just not possible.”

  “Then how do you explain Wick’s death?” Park demanded. Saying it out loud gave her a kind of pang, as if someone had pricked her in the heart with a needle.

  Sagara glowered. “The same way I explain the downed communications and the power-out,” he answered. Park noticed that he had shifted his stance a little, as if he was expecting them both to lunge at him and attack. “Those things weren’t done by a stranger. They were done by people on this ship.”

  Boone snorted. “He thinks it’s all a big conspiracy,” he said to Park. “He thinks everybody on the ship is out to get him.”

  “I know,” Park tried to say; it was clear now that Sagara had gone a little power-mad, a little unbalanced. And who could blame him, considering what he’d said about his dead wife? His grief was still raw, it had to be; the incident on Halla could not have been more than two years ago. It was clouding his judgment. Keeping him from seeing the truth.

  But Sagara saw what she was thinking, and headed her off before she could expose him. “I have my reasons,” he grated. “Whether or not those reasons will make any sense to you is a different matter.”

  “Try us,” Boone said, folding his arms.

  “No,” Sagara answered. “Everyone on this ship is a suspect. Any one of them—or you—could have done this. That’s why I have to act this way.”

  Boone barked out a laugh. “Everyone is a suspect—except you. That’s convenient.”

  “I know that I didn’t kill Wick, yes.”

  “Wait, what about me?” Park demanded. “I was unconscious during all of this. Can’t you confirm that?”

  “But you were the one who turned off the lights,” Sagara said. She saw now that his fingers were just touching the hilt of his blade.

  “That’s insane,” Park cried—wondering frantically what she was going to do if he decided to draw that thing. “I had nothing to do with the lights! Or Wick!”

  Sagara was shaking his head. “You could be working with the murderer,” he said. “You could have been providing darkness—and a distraction—to get me away from Wick and everyone else. I don’t know.”

  Unstable, Park thought. Paranoiac. We have to get him under control.

  Sagara looked away, towards Boone, who stiffened defensively, and Park felt her palms itch. How to grab his weapons from him without hurting him—or herself? “What I do know is that this ship needs to go on lockdown,” the security officer continued. “All of us in separate rooms until I can sort it out. Not scattered throughout the ship, with METIS and the inlays down.” He glared. “You can see how that’s a logical course of action, can’t you?”

  She could, Park thought—if she hadn’t seen the stranger with her own eyes. If Boone hadn’t seen him, too.

  But she could follow Sagara’s line of thinking. Out loud she said, “If you really believe the culprit is one of us, it can’t be that difficult to eliminate the innocent, can it? There’s a limited pool of suspects. The number of people who had the motive, means, and opportunity can’t be that large. All it takes is some deductive reasoning.”

  “You make murder sound so simple,” Sagara snapped. “And you forget that the ship’s systems are down. We don’t know who was where, doing what. We don’t even know what time Wick was killed.”

  She’d forgotten about the systems’ failure, the chaos it could be causing, and was briefly shamed into silence. Boone said, “There’s, what, seven of us left? You’re going to interrogate us all, figure out who’s guilty from discrepancies, lies? That’ll take forever—and all the while the real killer will be running around, doing God knows what to the ship. At least let someone you trust help you.”

  Sagara gave him a look that made it clear: he didn’t trust anyone. “I’m putting you in separate rooms,” he said again. Then, looking at Park, he added, “Even if you aren’t guilty of anything, it’s for your own safety.”

  Boone’s sculpted face was white and sullen. “If you separate us all, you make us easy targets for the killer.”

  “I’ll be the only one walking around,” Sagara retorted. “And I am not a killer.”

  “I’ve heard otherwise,” Boone said, casting a significant glance at the security officer’s tense hand on his weapon. At this, Sagara made a strange face: it was almost a grimace, almost something like a vicious smile.

  “Not unless I have to be,” he amended. And he curled his fingers around the hilt of his blade and unsheathed it a little.

  The implicit threat was clear: Sagara was now speaking in a language that he knew Boone would understand, the language of power and violence. She knew then that he wouldn’t hesitate to cut their throats if they put up a fight. All in the name of serving the ISF, she thought. All to carry out his duty, his mission. His blind loyalty was going to doom them all.

  But what could she say? Already she could feel the heat of the energy-blade fizzing and sparking through the air, and the thing had only been uncovered by an inch. She couldn’t imagine the damage it could do when slashed at someone, with its edge that could cut through tungsten and the cores of asteroids. Even Boone was flinching back. So she closed her mouth against her protests, her own accusations. Silently she let Sagara march them back to their bunks like an executioner taking his condemned to the gallows.

  * * *

  —

  Later, locked into the room she had once shared with Elly, Hunter, and Natalya, Park sat down on her cot to organize her thoughts.

  It all started with the nightmares, she thought. Those had started the day they landed on Eos. First it had been Holt; then later that night, Elly Ma. Then at some point (supposedly), Keller. None of them had gone outside, so that ruled out direct exposure to Eos as a factor. It seemed unlikely that there was contamination from something brought inside: there were the decontamination protocols, the sterilizing procedures. The ship’s state-of-the-art filtration and monitoring systems. And Fulbreech had said they hadn’t taken any samples into the ship.

  And none of them had encountered—to the best of her knowledge—the stranger.

  Then Holt had sleepwalked, tried to get to the door guarding the research on the Fold. She supposed that could be explained by his latent curiosity, or his anxiety and guilt over keeping such a secret.

  And then Hunter had sleepwalked—or something—perhaps even interfered with the ship’s controls; but perhaps that could be explained by her fear, witnessing everything that was happening to Holt and Ma and Keller. She had always expressed a dire aversion to the idea of being frozen. The growing panic that was seeding in the ship could have affected her, manifested as an unconscious behavior. Perhaps she’d simply wanted to escape.

  But what did any of it have to do with the stranger? He couldn’t have i
nduced the nightmares, surely—but he could have had something to do with Reimi’s mysterious, unexplained illness. Could he have poisoned her? Gotten rid of her, and then Wick?

  But why?

  At least Reimi was obvious, Park thought. She was responsible for maintaining the ship’s android crew, its governing computer. She was the only one who could have fixed the communication systems after they went down from the storm—something a murderer wouldn’t want, of course, since the crew could have called home for help. They would have gotten backup when the murders started—maybe even before then. No, a killer—or a saboteur, or a spy, or whatever kind of enemy this was—would have wanted to cut them off, leave them isolated and vulnerable to whatever he was planning.

  Maybe the stranger had even been the one to take out the communications in the first place, Park thought with a chill. Then taken down Reimi so no one would be the wiser. And then the lights, and the inlays. Left them all blind and deaf.

  But why kill Wick? And incapacitate the others, if the stranger was somehow responsible for those incidents too? What could he be after?

  What if he was after them all?

  She rose and tested the door for the umpteenth time. Sagara had somehow gotten the Deucalion’s ailing computer to give him the only security pass that could override the ship’s locks—probably in the same way he had gotten the lights working again. In a way she ought to feel safer: no one could open the door but him, and if he wasn’t currently intent on murdering her, that probably meant she was safe.

  But Sagara was only one man. What if the stranger ambushed him, killed him while he was unawares? Then he could pick off the rest of them at his leisure, one by one . . .

  Park shook herself. But why kill them at all? If he’d managed to stow away on the ship for all this time, undetected, would he really choose now to go on a destructive rampage and murder everybody? Or had he only been after Wick specifically? If so, why? How could the stranger benefit from taking out the commander of their mission? Was it something to do with Eos? Or was it something personal—a grudge borne a year and a handful of parsecs into the next galaxy?

  Her thoughts were awhirl. There were too many unknowns, too many variables in the equation that were still unaccounted for. What did any of this have to do with the nightmares, if anything? How were the ISF or the Fold involved?

  She suddenly remembered something Wick had said. She had asked him why Hunter and Boone were necessary, if this was a planet with no inhabitants. At the time Wick had only shrugged and said, You never know.

  But what if ISF had known? What if they had anticipated some enemy, some outside threat, and simply hadn’t told her?

  What if the man had come from outside?

  A part of her shook her head at herself. How could he have gotten in without anyone knowing? It was always such a process, opening any one of the ship’s doors . . . and surely METIS would have alerted them . . .

  But was it any less likely than the idea that a full-grown man had somehow survived on the ship for nearly a year without being noticed, stealing food and sleeping somewhere the humans and androids couldn’t have found him? And METIS had been malfunctioning. As had the androids—oh, God, had they gotten rid of Reimi so it’d be easier for him to board the ship undetected? Didn’t that mean someone had to be on the inside, helping him?

  And Sagara had always suspected someone of plotting some sort of conspiracy on the ship. That the danger was internal: it was why he had activated ARGUS, why he was so suspicious of everyone, including her. He thought one of the crewmembers, or more, had the means and motive to sabotage the mission. At first he’d directed his scrutiny at the non-conscripted—Park—but then he changed his tune, eyeing instead those who were acting more suspiciously. Chanur. Chanur?

  She began to pace. No, it was still too difficult to piece things together. She was just guessing wildly, flinging things at the wall to see what would stick. They were all acting with different puzzle pieces, different gaps in knowledge. They would never be able to assemble a bigger picture unless they came together. But now they were stuck, separated into cells and locked up with their own paranoia and unvoiced fears. Blind, deaf, and dumb, just where the stranger wanted them.

  Even as she thought it, she heard someone tapping on the door. For a moment Park thought it was her own hand, absently still trying the lock—but the sound was coming from the hallway outside. She stiffened, but then told herself that a killer would never give her forewarning of his entrance. Not unless he was really deranged. Then she heard a familiar voice, very soft and muffled through the metal door: “Park?”

  “Fulbreech!” How had he gotten out of his room?

  At her answer the door slid open, and outlined in the light beyond was Fulbreech, broad-shouldered and warmly familiar. He saw her gaping at him and smiled. “You’re all right,” he said. He sounded breathless, as if he’d sprinted to get to her. Or maybe he was simply relieved.

  She wanted to leap at him, but held herself back. “Where’s Sagara?”

  Fulbreech glanced behind him, as if expecting to find the security officer lurking in the shadows with a dagger poised over his back. “In the bridge. He’s trying to get METIS up and running again.”

  “How are you out of your room?”

  He grinned, a little proud of himself. “I was the one who got the lights working,” he said, almost preening. “When they’d just brought you to the medical bay. This was before we found out about Wick. While I was tinkering around, trying to figure out what was wrong with METIS, I sort of—gave myself clearance to use the system freely. I did the same thing when we were in the escape pod, when we were going to go outside. Remember?”

  She shook her head; that felt like an eternity ago. “You gave yourself full clearance?”

  “It was sort of an accident,” Fulbreech admitted. “I ended up using Reimi’s credentials to make the system work with me.”

  She blinked. One could do that? He’d had that ability this whole time?

  Fulbreech rushed on. “Anyway, once Sagara put us on lockdown, I was going to stay in my room, but—Boone told me what happened with Wick. And the—killer. And I figured we ought to find him instead of just staying caged up.”

  She felt a rush of relief. “So you believe us.”

  “I do. And I’m sorry that I didn’t act on what you said before.” He grimaced. “It could have saved Wick.”

  Park did touch him, then, and felt the warm, solid strength of his flesh and bone. “Maybe,” she said. “Or maybe it would have gotten you killed, too.”

  Morbid thought, she thought immediately. Why did she say it, instead of some other, more comforting platitude? But Fulbreech, against all odds, smiled at her. Then he glanced down the hall and said, “We’ll have to hurry. Once Sagara starts interrogating everyone, he’ll figure out fast enough that we’re missing.”

  “What happens then?” Park asked, with a little chill in her heart.

  Fulbreech shook his head. “We’ll just have to catch the guy before he finds out we’re gone. Then he’ll know none of us killed Wick, and that you were right all along.” A brief spasm of unhappiness crossed his face. “You do think the guy killed him, don’t you?”

  “Of course I do.” She wanted to lean against him, offer some gesture of comfort or camaraderie, or take it from him—for a moment the desire was so strong that she experienced a kind of vertigo. But then she heard footsteps from down the hall, and tensed.

  Fulbreech looked. “It’s just Boone and Natalya,” he said. “I let them out, too.”

  Park’s gut reaction was to recoil. Why Natalya? she wanted to ask, fighting down a surge of dislike. But then she did a quick mental tally in her head. Thirteen crewmembers aboard the Deucalion. Reimi, Holt, Ma, Keller, and Hunter frozen. Wick dead. That left Boone, Fulbreech, Sagara, Natalya, Chanur, Wan Xu, and Park ready and able to fend off a killer. Only h
alf the crew. And half of that didn’t even believe the killer really existed. She couldn’t afford to be picky.

  The other two appeared from around the corner; Natalya flashed Park a caustic look of loathing, but said nothing. Park saw that Boone now had his own gun at his hip.

  “Good,” he said in a low voice, drawing up. “You got her. Sagara’s on Deck A, fucking around with the computer. That means you and Severov can take Deck C. Park and I will take Deck B.”

  I want to go with Fulbreech, Park tried to say—but she told herself that this wasn’t summer camp, or a recreational gridball team. It didn’t matter who went with whom. Natalya hissed at Boone: “You’re the only one with a weapon. What happens if we run into the killer? Or Sagara, for that matter?”

  “It’s two against one,” Boone said, his gray eyes flat and callous. “Improvise.”

  Fulbreech shot Park a loaded look as Natalya turned away with impatience. Park didn’t understand his expression. He looked afraid, or as if he was in pain. It wasn’t a face that she was used to seeing on him: his presence was always so uplifting, so assured. Seeing him like that gave her another pang. “Wait,” Park said as they turned to go.

  Fulbreech looked back, as if hopeful. “Yes?”

  “Are you—all right?”

  Fulbreech stared at her. Natalya and Boone arched their brows at each other, like two people in on some sneery little joke. Fulbreech said, carefully it seemed: “I’ll feel better when we catch the crazed maniac running around. What about you?”