Playing God

by Sarah Zettel

  His palms sweated as he worked keys and icons. Each tractor had a bottle of neon gas hooked up to it. A simple electrical current run through the bottle would change the gas into plasma. Upon command, the bottle would open and vent the plasma into the gravity doughnut and start it burning.

  What he had to get through first was dozens of questions for each grid section. It all amounted to the same dung. The ship is in full operation, why would you want to do something this stupid? Then there was the fact that none of the shields were down and the ship wanted to know why and King had to tell it to mind its own business.

  He heard noise behind him. Hands and feet on ladder rungs. He kept typing. The noises got closer.

  “Stop!”

  He identified six grid sections to shut down.

  “We are not supposed to shoot unless it is an emergency. This is an emergency.”

  He saw the request for final authorization appear. King's fingers moved to enter his code.

  Thunder boomed, his body jerked, and his right knee gave. His fingertips brushed the edge of the keyboard as he fell, but couldn't reach the EXECUTE key. Gloved hands grabbed his arms. He saw a flood of red under his right knee.

  Then he saw that there was nothing left below his knee.

  He stared up at the Dedelphi, as if expecting an explanation. One of them reached into the socket beside his head and pulled out the command word.

  She said a word in her own language, and then she switched over to English. “Make sure his wound is stanched and bandaged and take him to the airlock.”

  It was then the pain hit.

  David shut the laboratory door behind him. He'd heard the cut-and-run order and had joined the river of bodies flooding the corridor to try to get to the main hangar before anything happened. As if something hadn't already happened. As the crowd shoved him along, he'd thought, If this is going on up here, what's going on down on All-Cradle? Nobody even knew where Lynn was. She might not be alive anymore.

  Sorrow and rage tore through him, along with a sick, angry thought.

  Now he stood alone in the middle of the lab. The only noises were his breathing, the hum of the analysis systems, and the faint sounds of the confusion outside.

  The Dedelphi had broken out. They were filling the secondary domes and taking over the ship.

  And I can stop it. He looked at the virus fridge.

  All he had to do was open the fridge and get out two or three of the WKV samples and break them open. Ideally, he should get down to the air recyclers and break a sealed dish open inside the vents to the city domes, but even if he released the WKV here in the Human sections while the Dedelphi roamed in pressure suits, there was still a good chance that one virus would be able to take advantage of one mistake, and there would be nothing they could do.

  If he moved fast, he could infect the entire ship very effectively. He might even find somebody to help him. If the plague found just two or three hosts, the entire three thousand could be sick and dying within a week.

  If the Getesaph succeeded in taking over the ship, God only knew what they'd do with it. And God only knew what the t'Therians would do when they found out what had happened up here. And God knew what the Getesaph had done, were doing, to Lynn.

  David crossed to the fridge. He laid his hand on the palm scanner. The door cycled open. He took out the first rack of flat-bottomed, glass culture eggs and set it on the table.

  Their labels said these eggs held one of the strains of WKV influenza. If he infected the population of the ship, they'd develop wet coughs and a fever. Then there'd be the muscle spasms and dry coughing, and they'd know. As their cell pores opened and did not close, and poisons and confused signals overloaded their systems, the spasms would harden into paralysis and their breathing would become more and more labored, and they'd die.

  He'd seen it often enough. He'd seen rows of patients in isolation beds, paralyzed, breathing on respirators, dignity gone, hope gone, eyes wide-open and staring, and mouths pulled open in eerie, unchanging grimaces.

  The noise had faded outside. Silence pressed heavily against his ears. David subvocalized to his implant for directions down to the recyclers. There was a hatch not too far away. He could crack one egg into the water and one into the air vents, and keep hold of the last one to open when they came to get him.

  The healthy would isolate the sick, if they didn't push them out the airlock. They'd look for the seat of contagion, and they wouldn't find it because by then it would be all around them, just like down below on All-Cradle.

  He heard running footsteps outside the lab. His head jerked around. The footsteps ran past, and the door didn't open.

  He looked at the eggs again. Freed from the cold, the WKV influenza was coming to life in there. It was a wonderfully compact and adaptable little organism. It was hardy and could bide its time. It could jump from host to host in the air or in the water. As a WKV strain, it could kill in a few days, if nothing was done.

  His hands shook at his sides. They took Lynn, he reminded himself. They took Lynn, and nobody knows where she is, or if she is still alive.

  In his mind's eye, he saw the rows and rows of dying patients in their isolation beds, unable to touch their sisters and their daughters, who hovered outside their beds, pressing hands and faces against the polymer sheds that trapped their dying mothers or sisters or daughters.

  But they had Lynn. They had the ship.

  He heard the door open. He heard a gasp.

  “Don't move!” shouted someone in Getesaph. She switched to tortured English. “Don't move, or you will be shot!”

  David kept his hands at his sides.

  “Thank you,” he whispered.

  Captain Elisabeth Esmaraude sat at her station, amazed at how calm she felt. She was not a military commander. Dealing with organized attacks was not in her job description. There hadn't been any real pirates in centuries. As Humans made contact with various alien species, it turned out they were interested in trading goods, not violence. The few aliens they hadn't managed to establish communications with had just left them alone, which was fine with everybody.

  In short, this was not supposed to be happening. Maybe that was what kept her calm. Part of her was treating it as a weird sim exercise.

  An info-dump had gone out to Keale. He was probably about halfway to the Ur from Base by now. He and his people would do whatever they could.

  She'd sent the officers down to the hangars with their orders. Get everybody into the shuttles and off the ship. They had a thousand people on this ship, and none of them had signed up for this kind of hazard duty. They had to be gotten out of the way.

  She'd hooked her spectacles into the ship's video and saw engineering stand around too long, staring at the Dedelphi and their makeshift tunnel.

  She'd looked down into the hangars and seen that engineering wasn't the only bunch who had been too slow. Who could blame them? This wasn't real. This shouldn't be happening. The Dedelphi had the hangars and all the people in there. People were being sealed into rescue balls and left in heaps on the decks.

  There was a short running battle through the maintenance decks between the invaders and Keale's security people, but they were too heavily outnumbered, and it didn't last. Rudu had made a good try down on the gravity deck, but now… She didn't want to think about what she'd seen.

  People had slammed bulkheads shut, cut the power, waded into battle with all kinds of improvised weapons. They pulled off the Dedelphi's helmets and left them choking and coughing on the deck. They blinded invaders with fire extinguishers, tripped them with wires, shocked, scalded, and beat them to death.

  In response, the Dedelphi had cried out, “Medical emergency!” and the overrides had opened the bulkheads to gain free passage. They had found maintenance jobbers in the corridors and ordered them to repair the wiring and cut apart the booby traps. Keale had sealed off most of the voice commands to everyone but the crew, but jobbers answered anyone. That was the point of jobbe
rs.

  The Dedelphi had lain in wait for their attackers, lurking in side tunnels, clinging to bracing. They had tangled them in nets, tripped them, clubbed them with the guns, tied them up with tape and fishing line, stuffed them into rescue balls, and piled them up.

  Dedelphi had died. Lots of them. But each death made the rest tighter, more alert.

  They were coming to the bridge now. She could see them. They were down in the maintenance deck heading carefully toward her.

  So, time to get moving. She was slow, she was stupid and unprepared, and she'd only half listened to Kaye, but she was all this ship had as a captain. Some orders the ship would not accept from anybody else.

  Like the one to shut the engines down stone cold, now. And the one to close down power to the food plants and the water purifiers. Nothing she could do about the air, really, but she could shut down the scrubbers and the heating vents, and dump the regulator data. She tied every crucial database she could think of up tight.

  Then there was the command Keale had created, in case worse came to worse. “Ozone?”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  “Mind wipe.”

  “Completing request.”

  Those were the last words the AI would ever say. Right now it was in there eating out its own brain. If the pogos wanted to do anything with this ship, they would have to enter in each and every command sequence themselves, without any help.

  The inner hatch opened and a half dozen Dedelphi spilled into the room. Esmaraude swung her chair around and pulled out the command word as she did it. The Dedelphi looked bewildered, she thought, to see no one left but her.

  “You will not be hurt,” said the leader in tilting English. “We want the ship.”

  “It's yours.” She held aloft the command word for them to see, and before any of them could move, brought it crashing down against the console.

  Lareet nudged the fragments of the shattered command word with her toes. The captain had let herself be led quietly away down to where the rest of her people were being held. Now, only clean-suited sisters filled the command center. Umat stood next to the captain's station, listening to Dayisen Wital give the rest of her report.

  “We captured two of the three command words,” said Dayisen Wital. “The head count of prisoners matches the duty roster for the ship. There have been three Human casualties, one very serious, but so far no deaths.” Her ears lowered involuntarily to her scalp. “We lost six hundred sisters.”

  Lareet squeezed Umat's shoulder and lifted her ears to the dayisen around them. “We will mourn our sisters. This ship is the payment of their life debt. They, we, have done well. Very well.”

  The dayisen swelled with pride.

  “Do we have any idea what Keale's doing?” asked Umat.

  One of the Ovrth Ondt bustled over. “We have a call from engineering; they estimate about twelve cutter-style ships on their way.”

  Umat nodded. “Dayisen Wital, start tossing out the prisoners. That will keep them busy for a while.”

  “What do you think they will do, Sister?” asked Lareet softly.

  Umat shrugged. “At this point, I have no idea. I am hoping they don't either.”

  The shuttle Theodore Graves accelerated hard and pushed Keale back into the swaddling couch. The Graves was too small to have a gravity deck, so they had been under acceleration gee all the way out. He had rotated the couch so he was sitting upright and able to reach the worktable his portable had been slotted into. Around him, two dozen of his people had done the same. They conferred with their machines, their implants, or one another, in quiet, confident tones. All of them avoided looking at him.

  Keale had threaded into the shuttle's exterior cameras, and his portable screen showed him the approach of the white blur that would eventually resolve itself into the Ur. From this distance, it was unlikely that they'd see anything useful, even an escaping shuttle, but he wanted to look anyway. Esmo's info-dump had reached him two hours ago. He'd quick-scanned it, looking for something that could be done, something that could be exploited to bring this disaster to a quick close. There wasn't much.

  What he ready wanted to do was shout at the Dedelphi overrunning the ship. “What do you idiots think you're doing?” he wanted to say. “Do you know what we'll do to you? To your sisters on the ground? Do you have any idea what we can do to all of you? Obviously not, because if you'd stopped to think about it, you wouldn't have pulled this suicidal stunt!”

  Instead, he turned to his staff. “Ashe, how're the spy ’lites coming?”

  Ashe, a big-boned, serious, golden-haired woman, murmured something to her implant. “The guys in the Tamulevich say they'll have them up and flying by the time we get there.”

  Good enough. “Whalen, anything on the long-range?”

  The sand brown man bent over his own portable and shook his head. “All quiet. Whatever's going on in there, it's staying in there.”

  “Anything on the computer lines?”

  “Not since the cut-and-run order came.” Whalen touched a few keys. “We're not picking up anything, not even maintenance calls between the AI and the jobbers. Whatever they're doing, they're not talking about it anywhere we can listen in.”

  Probably using paper, or their hardwired speakers. Primitive, but completely secure from Human spying.

  For the moment, he told himself. For the moment only.

  He felt old. Old and tired and worried. There were Humans in there, and he was responsible for them. Esmo was with them. If the Dedelphi were not willing to talk … Alternatives would be found. He would get the people out.

  Movement on the camera display caught his eye. His heart froze. Something white and about the size of a grain of sand drifted away from the Ur, heading at a forty-five-degree angle up from its disk. Another flew in almost a straight line from the plane. Another dropped off at a ninety-degree angle.

  The bridge crew must have noticed it, too, because the camera suddenly zoomed in on the first of the grains. First, Keale saw it was round. Then, he saw it was clear with a dark center.

  Then he saw it was a rescue ball. With an occupant.

  He touched the intercom key. “This is Keale. Pull the shot out again.”

  “Acknowledged,” came the voice of Holger Redding, the Graves's copilot.

  The camera's view pulled back. More white grains had joined the first, each heading on a separate trajectory from the others, spreading out at every possible angle. Some of them got caught in the ship's gravity field and bounced hard against the dome, eventually settling into orbit around the big ship like tiny moons.

  Keale had an abrupt vision of a cluster of Dedelphi in the number five airlock grasping the Humans in their rescue balls and heaving them out into the vacuum.

  Deliberately scattering them to keep us at a rescue for as long as possible. Keale felt his mouth harden. And it's going to work, too.

  His attention was still glued to the screen, but his hands flew across his portable's keys, slaving the Graves's intercom to the rest of the fleet.

  “Attention, all personnel. This is now a rescue mission. Top priority. We have to assume there's going to be the full thousand of them.” And we are going to get them all.

  “Anderson?” He hailed the Graves's pilot. “Head us in, top speed. Shuttle group, fan out, make sure we cover all sides of the Ur. Aubrey, Maturin, Hough, you take the far side. Tamulevich, Deku, Brian, take the downside. Everson and Sampson will take the near side. Hale, hang back and circle us, pick up anybody who slides through.”

  Affirmative replies flooded back to him, and he felt marginally better. A lot was going to depend on the pilots. Much of the success of this rescue boiled down to a physics problem: velocity, trajectory, and force.

  And speed.

  “Suits, people.” Keale planted his magnetic slippers on the deck and undid his couch straps.

  All security personnel on the Bioverse rolls were trained in as many kinds of space-based search and rescue as the system
guard could think up. They could do this. They would do this.

  Down in the hold, Keale shut himself into one of the suit lockers. He stripped out of his clothes and put on a skintight, white singlet that covered him from toe to neck. In a stall that was the size of a small shower, careful waldos covered him with organic insulation and a bright yellow layer of pressure webbing. Over it, he strapped the backpack harness with the helmet collar attached. He pulled a patch cord out of the collar and hooked it up to his temple implant. He locked on the helmet, slid on the gloves, knee and elbow braces, and boots.

  Out in the common area, he helped his people on with their batteries and air tanks, and was helped on with his. Nobody spoke beyond the ritual fit-and-function checks. Everyone was too distracted by what they'd seen outside.

  The Ur‘s actual crew members were experienced spacers. They'd be all right. The rest of the personnel, though, a lot of them would just be sim trained. Right now, they would be tumbling around, frightened, confused, and probably a mess, with their own vomit bouncing around the bad with them. Most of them would be completely unable to see that help was on its way.

  Keale and his people made their way down into the cargo bay. The shuttle had not been designed as a rescue vehicle. Instead of one huge hatch like ambulance ships, it had three small airlocks on either side of its single, cavernous bay. The Graves was empty of cargo, but not for long.

  “I want six to a lock, two outside to grab, two to run the hatches, and two to get those people out of the rescue balls and make sure they're all right. Rotate positions every two hours.” Keale rattled off assignments, finishing with, “Ashe, Deale, Chung, Skelly, and Vera, you're with me at number four.”

  Ashe and Vera followed Keale into the number four lock. Skelly shut the inner door. The world hummed and whirred and whooshed as the small chamber depressurized. Each of them instinctively grabbed one of the handholds.

  The outer door cycled open and let in all the light-flecked darkness of the universe. Keale felt the brief dizziness that came from having nothing between himself and infinite vacuum.

  Purpose and training took over. Ashe pulled a tether out of its rack. She jacked one end into the socket to the right of the airlock and hooked the other end to Keale's belt. She turned around, and Keale connected her to the left side of the lock. They held on and waited for their chance.