We Have Always Been Here

by Lena Nguyen

  Then she heard a sound like a gunshot, going off behind her.

  Park stopped dead in her tracks, against every self-preservation instinct she had. Then she listened closely. Where the hell had Natalya gotten a gun? And why hadn’t she used it on Park?

  And which of the androids had she shot?

  God, please, she thought, thinking of Dianex’s long black hair; Megex’s gentle smile, even Philex’s twitchy, nervous look. Jimex. Please, none of them.

  After the shot there was no sound—nothing but the sounds of the ship, coughing and stirring to life. Park felt her inlays flickering back on. Had Sagara finally gotten the ship running at full capacity again? Does that mean he wants to take off?

  No, Sagara was adamant about completing the mission at all costs—and somehow, deep in the foundation of her bones, down in her mandible and in her hips, Park felt that they would not leave Eos. Not like this.

  Fear eventually pressed her onward. Either Jimex and the others were fine, or they weren’t. There was nothing she could do about it now. Chances were they had swarmed Natalya, and she had simply fired into the air to frighten them away.

  But androids didn’t know that kind of fear, she remembered then. They didn’t have that instinct to self-preserve. If Natalya put a bullet in one of their heads, the others wouldn’t react. Like how Jimex hadn’t flinched when Boone pointed a gun at his face.

  She began to cry, weakly, even as she panted for breath. Finally she made it to the doors that sealed the bridge and palmed them open; she staggered through the threshold with blood and tears commingling on her face.

  Sagara stared at her. He was flipping through some sort of digital manual as it hovered in the air before him like a sheet of pale flame. At the sight of her he automatically put a hand to his weapon.

  “There’s a robot down in the utility rooms,” Park gasped, before he could beat her to the punch. “It isn’t data they’re keeping down there—it’s a robot. A HARE. They’ve been studying him, and the man I saw, he’s down there, too, dead—”

  “I know,” Sagara said, his face shuttered. He moved over to Park and handed her a tissue, as if her face was the most pressing of his concerns.

  She waved him off. “You knew?” Then: “Never mind. Natalya found me down there—attacked me. She’s coming after me now, she wants to kill me—and she has a gun—”

  There were sudden steps behind her. The two of them turned sharply, Sagara pushing Park behind him—but it was Boone who came puffing up, his own electrolaser gun drawn. His eyes boggled when he took in the sight of her, but he said to Sagara, “What’s going on? I heard gunshots.”

  “That would be Natalya,” Sagara answered, motioning for him to get out of the way.

  Boone frowned. “She doesn’t have a gun.”

  “Apparently she does.” Sagara scowled at both of them. “How did you get out of your rooms?”

  “That doesn’t matter,” Boone said. He looked at Park. “And where the hell did you go? I turned around and you were just . . . gone.”

  “Boone,” she said through gritted teeth. “Get the fuck out of the way!”

  His brow was still furrowed in confusion, but the military specialist obeyed, stalking over to stand on Sagara’s other side and lifting up his gun. It wasn’t long before Natalya staggered up to the doorway, fierce red spots high on her cheeks and her eyes blazing with hatred. She was empty-handed, Park saw—she must have gotten rid of her weapon before Sagara or Boone could confiscate it—but Park stayed a little behind Sagara, anyway. If the surveyor came at her again, Park would take her eyes out.

  “What did you do to the androids?” she asked her. Her voice again sounded strange to her, tight, as if her throat had shrunk.

  Natalya ignored her. “Don’t listen to her,” she said to Boone and Sagara. “She’s gone the way of Holt and Ma. I found her sleepwalking in the utility lab—”

  “No,” Park butted in fiercely. “I’m not insane; look what she did to my head. And Holt and Ma and the others were never sleepwalking. They were experiencing something called the unity rain—”

  Boone turned to her. “The unity what?”

  “It’s an effect of the Fold,” Park said, trying not to gabble. “It’s like a storm that rages across the planet intermittently—and like in the Fold, it collapses together space, and even—even—”

  She faltered for a moment. How to explain it without sounding as mad as Taban? How could she even know if any of it was true?

  And yet, what else would explain the nightmares?

  “—causes people to see things,” she said finally. “Makes them behave strangely.”

  Sagara kept his gun trained on Natalya, but he glanced at Park. “How do you know all of that?”

  “The robot down there told me,” Park said. “Taban. The robot you’ve all been keeping a prisoner.”

  Natalya made a sharp gesture. Other than the few sweaty scraps of hair falling out of her bun, she looked just as composed as ever; but her eyes glittered with a special kind of malice. “I’m telling you, she dreamed the whole thing up,” she said. “She’s suffering from paranoid delusions, just like the others. She can’t tell the difference between fantasy and reality anymore. If she ever really could.”

  “Where did the blood on her face come from?” Sagara asked. His face was flat and unreadable.

  Natalya gestured again. “She attacked me. Like I said, she was in a trance. She’s unstable—”

  “Liar!” Park cried. “You’re the one who snuck up on me. You hit me. Taban can confirm that. You’re hiding something!”

  The surveyor looked appealingly to Boone and Sagara. “Paranoid delusions,” she said again, confidently—as if she really believed it. Park stared at her, aghast. How could someone be so comfortable with lying? With killing? Was she some kind of sociopath—one who had flown under Park’s radar this entire time?

  Boone was looking at Park and frowning. “Maybe we should hear her out,” he said, though Park didn’t know whom he meant.

  “I’m actually inclined to side with Park,” Sagara said then, still pointing his gun at Natalya. Park looked at him and felt a kind of swooping sensation in her chest. He motioned with his head to the panel of controls he had been working with and said, “I’ve been trying to get METIS up and running again. After the blackout—after Wick was killed—command of the ship defaulted to me. But now I check again, and it’s changed to someone else; and METIS tells me the blackout was caused by someone attempting to hack it the first time, and failing. You know who was causing a commotion while the mystery hacker tried to do their work?” His hand tightened a little on his gun. “You, Natalya. You let Hunter out and started a fight with her to create a distraction. Whoever you were working with took advantage and tried to hack into the ship’s protocols, reroute control to them. They failed the first time, but they’ve managed to do it now. Haven’t they?” His gun made a little clicking sound: Park did not know if that meant it was primed or if Sagara was just bluffing. “So. Who are you working with?”

  The man! Park thought then, with a little jolt of horror. The stranger! But then her brain swiveled—no, he was already dead, it was hard to remember that somehow—though maybe in some form he was still alive in Taban, or was Taban—?

  But then, just like that, it was Boone who turned and pointed his gun at Sagara’s head.

  Everyone in the room went still. Park looked wildly at Sagara to see what he would do, if he would turn and disarm Boone like a cobra striking. But he did nothing, and when she looked back, she saw that Natalya had drawn a weapon from somewhere, too—and she was pointing it right at Park.

  Traitors! The word formed in Park’s mind as a scream, but somehow she found that she couldn’t move: in fact, she could barely breathe.

  “So it was you,” Sagara said to Boone, very softly, without turning his head. Chilly anger
seemed to roll off of him in waves. “Who else?”

  “Don’t move,” Boone answered, reaching over roughly and pulling Sagara’s gun out of his hands. Then he pulled the security officer’s other weapons from his belt: the energy-blade, another holster. “If you even think about trying anything, not only will I put fifty megajoules of kinetic fuck-you through your head, but Natalya will put a bolt in Park’s neck. You wouldn’t want that, would you?”

  Sagara said nothing, so Park said: “Why are you doing this?”

  She stared into Natalya’s eyes as she said it. She saw nothing in them except flat indifference—a look that implied violence without emotion, action without thought. Boone glanced over at the surveyor and said, “You got her?”

  “Yes,” Natalya answered quietly, stepping over so that she was within arm’s reach of Park. “She will not get away from me again.”

  “So you’re the one who’s controlling the ship now,” Sagara said to Boone. He sounded very calm, as if he had sharply suppressed his anger and his shock: it was a defensive response, Park thought. A coping mechanism he’d developed for times of crisis. “Natalya distracted us with the fight so you could try the first time, but that didn’t work—the ship locked you out. Caused the blackout, shut down to protect itself from your attempts. I assume you tried to force Wick to give command over to you next? And he refused, so you killed him?” He glanced at Park, as if to say, And concocted that cockamamie story about the man to cover his tracks.

  The man was real, she wanted to tell him, or at least the echo of him through spacetime was—but Boone was saying, almost carelessly, “Yeah, that’s about right.”

  “We thought command of the ship would default to him, in the event of the commander’s death,” Natalya drawled, lynx-eyed. “It turns out we were wrong.”

  Sagara almost smiled, thinly. “Yes. It defaulted to me. Wick and I agreed to that from the start.”

  “But why?” Boone asked angrily. “You’re not conscripted. I am. ISF should have trusted me more.”

  “They were right not to,” Sagara answered, casting a glance at Boone’s gun. Boone’s shoulders tensed a little, but Park wanted to shout, Don’t provoke him, for God’s sake!

  To distract everyone she said, “Why are you doing this? Why would you want to kill Wick, take control of the ship?”

  “And who helped you override METIS the second time?” Sagara added.

  Natalya turned to Boone. “We don’t need both of them,” she said. “Get rid of Park. She asks too many questions—and ISF doesn’t give a shit about her.”

  Park did not allow herself to flinch: she thought of that cold unfeeling courage all androids had and tried to steel herself with it, as if she were donning their armor. Boone thoughtfully put his thumb on the primer of his gun, as if he was considering it. Park told herself not to close her eyes.

  Before anyone could move or speak, though, the doors to the bridge opened again—and someone else walked in. Park felt the adrenaline thudding through her in electric waves. There was the blond hair, the confident step—Fulbreech!

  “Watch out!” she shouted at him, before Natalya lunged at her and shoved her back against a panel, clamping a hand over her mouth.

  “I am tired of you talking,” she said softly. “Talking, always talking.” Park thought about biting the woman’s fingers off, but the gun just pressed harder into the soft area between her chin and throat.

  Fulbreech stopped and stared at the scene before him. “What the fuck?”

  Park was doing rapid calculations: Fulbreech made it three against two. But how to get the weapons away from Boone and Natalya without anyone getting hurt? Fulbreech didn’t stand a chance against combat-trained Boone. But if he lunged at Natalya . . .

  “Fulbreech!” she shouted against Natalya’s palm. “Don’t just stand there! Help!”

  He just looked at her, his face white and confused—but his eyes were those of a stranger’s. He did not seem to recognize her. It was as if she had called out to someone on the street, having mistaken their identity. As if she’d flagged down someone who had no connection to her, and never had.

  In front of Park, Natalya was laughing. “I don’t know why you’re asking him for help,” she said cruelly. “Who do you think bypassed the ship’s controls for us the second time? Who let us out? Who was the one who lied to you about the communications being down in the first place?”

  21.

  Frozen silence. Park’s mind was a vast, thundering blankness.

  Sagara said, “Communications are down.”

  “But not because of a solar storm,” Natalya said, suddenly sickly sweet. She smiled in a catlike way and looked at Park. “A man smiles at you and you’ll believe anything he says.”

  Boone grunted at Fulbreech, motioning with the gun he still had pointed to Sagara’s head. “Get your gun out, Kel.”

  Fulbreech shook his head, carefully avoiding eye contact with everyone in the room. “I told you I wasn’t going to use that,” he said indistinctly.

  Boone snorted. “Give it to me, then. I’ll use it.”

  Fulbreech shook his head again, still looking at the floor. “There’s no need for that. No one has to get hurt.”

  Natalya curled her lip. “Grow up, Fulbreech,” she said, still with her hand clamped over Park’s mouth. “And grow some balls.”

  “Shut up, Natalya.”

  Park shut her eyes; the pain in her head was throbbing wildly, distracting her—pulling her away from the moment, from the scene she was part of right now in the bridge. She couldn’t follow what was going on.

  Sagara, at least, seemed to know. “So it was you,” he said with a note of disgust. “I suspected someone had tampered with communications on the ship—but I never imagined you’d have the gall, Fulbreech.” He shook his head, despite the gun pointed at it. “And I gave you access to METIS when the blackout happened. I suppose that was when you reprogrammed it to take orders from Boone.”

  He wouldn’t, Park thought, opening her eyes again and looking at Fulbreech’s hunched shoulders—like he was a boy being scolded. He didn’t.

  But then she could only think about how Fulbreech had come into her office that night, after Holt had gone missing, and told her that radiation storms had fried the communication systems. How effortlessly he’d gotten her into the escape pod for his grand gesture, having stolen a suit without anyone noticing. How he’d come to free her in her bunk, overriding Sagara’s orders and giving himself Reimi’s clearance to access the locks. “I’m good with computers,” he’d said with a smile. “I have to be.”

  He’d had the ability all along, she realized. Why wouldn’t it be him?

  Because it’s Fulbreech, she told herself, just as Fulbreech looked helplessly at Sagara and said, “You’re not conscripted. You don’t have family in the frontier—”

  “Save it,” Natalya said then, in a cold, clipped voice. The hand holding the gun to Park’s neck tightened until the knuckles showed white. “It’s no use trying to explain to people like them. They won’t understand.”

  Park finally wrenched her mouth away from Natalya’s other hand, heedless of the danger. “What’s your endgame here?” she demanded. She couldn’t look at Fulbreech at the moment—or perhaps ever again—so she directed her gaze to Boone, who looked back at her without emotion. “What do you plan to do with control of a ship that’s barely working and a crew that’s either frozen or incapacitated?”

  “It’s a mutiny,” Sagara answered her, his voice acidic with contempt. “They think they’re being creative, revolutionary. It’s all happened before. They mean to hold us as hostages—the robot, probably, too—until the ISF gives them a ransom.”

  “Ransom?” Natalya answered fiercely, taking the bait despite her own instructions not to. “You mean our families? Our freedom?”

  Sagara laughed; it was a mocking,
bitter sound that made Park shiver. “And where will you go with that freedom?” he asked her. “Back to Earth? It’s not as if they won’t find you there—and ISF owns the rest of inhabited space.”

  “Then we’ll go to uninhabited space,” Boone said, with just a little less conviction than Natalya, and Park thought, We can make them doubt themselves. She and Sagara could sow enough conflict and confusion to make them see reason—or make the mutineers unsure enough that they could be thrown off guard.

  “You killed Wick,” she said aloud. “You’ve orchestrated a mass conspiracy: mutiny, hacking, the freezing of at least half a dozen people. You don’t think ISF will agree to all of your demands, pretend to release your relatives, and then simply renege once you hand us over? Or board the ship by force as soon as we’re in sight of Corvus? They’ll throw you in Pandora for your crimes—or execute you, if you’re lucky.”

  “They’d be too afraid that I’d kill their little specimen,” Natalya answered, her eyes shining now—not with tears, but a kind of fanatic determination. “Which I will, if I have to.”

  “It won’t come to that,” Boone snapped over her. He looked at Park. “We’ll demand provisions. The transfer of our families. Then we’ll jettison the freak into the farthest sector past Cambien and take off like bats out of hell. The ISF will be too busy chasing it to worry about following us.”

  “And after?” Park demanded. “How long do you think you’ll last in the darkest reaches of space?”

  “It’s a big universe,” Boone said. His eyes flicked over her, then back to Sagara, as if he was nervous—and Park realized that he was not nervous about them trying something, but afraid that they would not understand his line of thinking. It seemed important to him that he justified himself—to convey to them that he was still the good guy. The hero of the story. “ISF doesn’t own it all,” he continued. “We’ll find a planet of our own. Secede. We already have a few places in mind. Anyone tries to land on it, we’ll blast ’em.”