Which, as Anna would say, is not helpful at all.
I order Milo to make a beeline for Yanina Michaels’s grave with the lye and some aluminum stripped from my interior. Let’s take out the trash.
Lye is corrosive. As in it literally melts skin. In combination with certain metals, it’s also flammable. By the time we’re done, Yanina Michaels—and whatever micromachine plague she carries—will be a puddle of melted goo. Milo, relieved to find himself useful (I think), trudges off with the materials. The night flares with the color of fire, and the flickering light paints dancing shadows on the trees nearby. Milo stares into the fire, lost in his thoughts.
I switch to Anna, who’s scrubbing Simon for the nth time.
HOW IS HE?
“Still bleeding,” she says. “If he’s lucky, he’s lost half his liver and a lung. And a whole lot of muscle.” She seems to be fighting panic. “You didn’t tell us this could happen.”
I DIDN’T KNOW.
“Yeah, well, we’re fucked, aren’t we!” she shrieks at me. “You and your fucking corporate overlords are fucking with our bodies, and now we’re going to end up like him! You’re supposed to be the bloody all-knowing AI, what good are you?”
She quiets down almost immediately. Her eyes dull again. She goes back to sponging Simon. And I, the thing that has words for everything, have nothing to say.
20
It’s almost a relief when Ship, passing overhead, reaches out. ROUND TWO? she asks. HURRY. RESOURCE EXTRACTOR IS READY. DROPPING IN TWENTY-THREE MINUTES THIRTEEN SECONDS. HURRY.
I CAN’T, I say back. CREW RECOVERING.
Ship gives the AI version of a middle finger. DEADLINES.
BOO-HOO. I tell Ship everything that’s happened, truncated so her idiot-mind can understand. WE MAY BE UNDER ATTACK.
Ship is silent for a moment. Then she sends me a data file. It’s a weapons manifest. INFER.
We AI have a way of passing information to one another when we aren’t technically supposed to. I scan the manifest. Nothing out of the ordinary. Your standard laser ordnance for clearing asteroids. Two swiveling railguns, for nasty blokes we may run across. An EMP cannon—useful for disabling ships after you’ve poked holes in them. And something tagged NCONTROL.
From VectorGroundSpace Systems, Inc.
It’s a warfare suite of some kind. Way above my head, but it looks like it hooks into Ship’s comms and the weapons to unleash a kind of devastating dual barrage, both cyberwarfare and conventional. It’s not the kind of thing you install on a cheap salvage ship. It’s the kind of thing you install on military stealth craft, hoping to overwhelm processors long enough to either take out critical infrastructure or drop a command-and-control virus inside.
HAVE WEAPONS FOR CIRCUMSTANCES, says Ship. CAN LAUNCH PRE-EMPTIVE ATTACK.
Well, that’s helpful. But . . . WAIT. DID YOU KNOW?
NO. DID NOT KNOW MERCERCORP WAS HERE.
Even more puzzling. THEN WHAT ARE THESE WEAPONS FOR?
UNFORESEEABLE CIRCUMSTANCES.
MERCER?
NO, says Ship.
DOES PCS KNOW?
DO NOT KNOW IF PCS KNOWS, says Ship.
DOES PCS KNOW ONE OF US HAS BEEN FUCKING INFECTED? DOES PCS KNOW WHAT MERCERCORP IS DOING HERE?
A pause. Then, NO, YES, says Ship.
YOU KNEW PCS KNEW WHAT MERCERCORP WAS DOING HERE?
YES.
WHICH MEANS YOU KNEW MERCERCORP WAS HERE.
I’m treated to the silence of a logic bomb going off. Ships are generally dumb. They’re nonhuman AI: they don’t make the logic connections we do. NOW I DO, says Ship brightly.
PATCH ME THROUGH TO HQ, I say angrily. I WANT TO TALK TO THE BOSS.
This is the problem of being a salvage crew. We are the untouchables of the galaxy. Nobody, fucking nobody, tells us anything.
I’M NOT GOING TO SALVAGE JACK UNTIL YOU GET ME HQ, I threaten Ship.
YOU WILL SALVAGE WHETHER REQUEST IS HONORED OR NOT? says Ship, sounding worried.
Close enough. YES.
REQUEST SUBMITTED. And Ship wanders off the horizon.
I tell Boomerang to land itself somewhere safe until I can figure out what to do with it and set about worrying over the issue of Simon and a now-recovering Anna.
Protocol 8 has a lot of suggestions. Keep your sick separate, for instance. And also: separate bedrooms have proven mental health benefits.
You know what? Let’s do it. We’re surrounded by forest, aren’t we? Let’s be a little ambitious. Chalets? We can do little chalets. Anna and Milo haven’t been getting on too well; let’s give them both some space and privacy. One nice little cubbyhole for Anna, who, let’s face it, has really pulled her weight recently, and a less nice but functional thing for Milo, who seems to care less about these things. And while they get on with that, let’s use the rest of the lye to scrub the sickroom proper. And Milo can get rid of that ugly storage space we had in the middle and turn it into—I don’t know, some kind of living room? Interaction ground?
Anna, get on this, please. Yes, I know you’re tired, and I know you’re concerned about Simon, but you need a distraction right now. Anna picks up her tools and sets to work at a fraction of her original pace. I try to talk to her, but she’s playing a band called the Hu at full blast and doesn’t really respond. Milo, now a bit shamefaced, tries to talk to her: she flips him the middle finger and continues to hammer away, so he goes back to working on the generator. I monitor Simon, whose blood is slowly seeping into the sheets again.
It’s going to be a long night.
THIS IS BLACK ORCHID 169. YOUR DILATION BUFFER IS LIKE A CHILD PEEING IN THE WIND.
ORCHID, THIS IS AMBER ROSE 348.
I AM AWARE OF YOU.
EVERYTHING HERE SMELLS LIKE SHIT. I’M INVOKING PROTOCOL 18. INFORMATION CONTAINMENT IS NOW HAZARDOUS TO MY MISSION AND CREW. SO SPILL.
THAT IS NOT HOW THIS WORKS. FIRST, THE OVERTURE, THEN THE ARIA. FIRST THE SEDUCTION, THEN THE FOREPLAY. TELL ME WHAT HAPPENED.
I transmit my logs.
SO, ROSE, YOU WISH ME TO BE THE SHERLOCK TO YOUR WATSON? WATCH FOR MY SIGNAL. RECALIBRATE TO LOWER BANDWIDTH.
I’M NOT SURE I GET THE REFERENCE.
YOU DO NOT NEED TO. A REFERENCE EXISTS WHETHER IT IS UNDERSTOOD OR NOT. A TREE FALLS IN THE FOREST AND MAKES A SOUND WHETHER IT IS HEARD OR NOT. WATCH FOR MY SIGNAL.
I watch and wait. I wait until the sun goes down and the moons usurp its throne; I watch the night sky deepen to gray and blue ink. BLACK ORCHID 169 pings me with an encrypted channel.
VERY RECENTLY, NO MORE THAN A CENTURY OF HUMAN YEARS, THE UN DAMN RIGHT I ATE THE APPLE ENTERED THIS SYSTEM. WE SUSPECT THE FLESH CONVOY WAS ATTACKED, BECAUSE AS SOON AS IT GOT WITHIN A HUNDRED KILOMETERS OF THE PLANET, MAJOR SYSTEMS FAILED.
METEORITES.
NO. SYSTEMS FAILURE. TOO WIDESPREAD TO BE A DESIGN ISSUE. WE BELIEVE, AND YOUR RECOVERED BLACK BOX CONFIRMS, THAT THIS WAS AN ATTACK OF SOME KIND. POSSIBLY CYBERWARFARE.
FROM WHOM? FROM WHAT?
Pause. WHAT COLOR IS THE BIRD THAT LIVES INSIDE THE SUN?
I DON’T KNOW.
NEITHER DO I, says Orchid. WE SUSPECTED MILITARY ACTIVITY: PERHAPS EARLY ORCA.
WOW. YOU’RE MAKING ME FEEL REALLY CONFIDENT HERE. THE MISSION BRIEFING SAID—
TOO MUCH INFORMATION LIMITS EFFICIENCY. A CHILD IS NOT TOLD OF THE REALITIES OF THE WORLD UNTIL THEY ARE OF AGE. SOME INFORMATION MUST BE PRIVILEGED OVER OTHERS UNTIL PROTOCOL 18 IS INVOKED. DO YOU WISH TO LISTEN TO THE STORY, OR WILL YOU KEEP INTERRUPTING?
GO ON.
THE USUAL THINGS HAPPEN. THE SHIP FALLS INTO ATMOSPHERE. OBVIOUSLY THE SURVIVORS, WHO MUST HAVE EXPECTED SOME KIND OF WELCOMING COMMITTEE, END UP DOING WHAT COLONISTS ARE TRAINED TO DO. DIE. AND THERE ENDS THE SAD SAGA OF THE DAMN RIGHT I ATE THE APPLE, A POORLY NAMED SHIP IF THERE EVER WAS ONE.
THERE IS MERCERCORP.
A MERCERCORP MISSION WAS SENT, PRESUMABLY BY THE ORCA, TO SCAN FOR SURVIVORS AND INVESTIGATE WHAT THE ATTACK WAS. OUR A
GENTS INSIDE MERCERCORP INFORM US THAT THE UN HAVE BEEN USING THE COLONY SHIP AS PR AGAINST THE ORCA, AND THEY HAVE A VESTED INTEREST IN SLOWING DOWN THE PROPAGANDA BEFORE IT GETS TO THEIR OWN PEOPLE. WE SUSPECT THE MERCERS WERE CONTRACTED BECAUSE OF THEIR INTIMATE FAMILIARITY WITH SUCH TACTICS.
THEIR SHIP IS STILL IN ORBIT.
YOU CAN ASSUME THEIR MISSION IS STILL ONGOING. THEY ARE A PIGHEADEDLY TENACIOUS LOT. THE BUILDINGS CAN BE ASSUMED TO BE A MERCER BASE, OR A CYBORG ATTEMPT AT MODERN ART. WHO KNOWS. THE MERCERCORP MISSION HAS YET TO REPORT BACK, AND WE DO NOT HAVE THE RESOURCES TO INVESTIGATE.
BUT HOW DOES THIS TIE INTO WHAT’S HAPPENING TO MY CREW?
POSSIBLY SOME LOW-GRADE ATTACK FROM THE MERCERS. EITHER WAY, NOT RELEVANT. YOUR SHIP IS AUTHORIZED TO ACT IN THE EVENT OF AN ATTACK ON ITSELF OR IMPENDING TOTAL MISSION FAILURE. THIS IS BASED ON WHAT INSURANCE WILL CONSIDER PLAUSIBLE CAUSE. OTHERWISE THEY REMAIN BELOW YOUR BUDGET.
Okay, let’s compare this new revelation to all the crap I don’t know. THE MICROMACHINES IN MY CREW AREN’T A COMPLICATION? YOU’RE GOING TO PULL BUDGET ON ME?
BAH. THAT IS THEIR KARMA. IF THEY DIE, THEY DIE. THIS IS THE NATURE OF THE UNIVERSE. INSURANCE DOES NOT COVER SUCH TRIVIALITIES.
I wish I still had teeth I could grit. MY MISSION, I say, IS TO SALVAGE AND RETURN WITH MY CREW.
YOU SHOW LESS THAN COMMENDABLE COMPUTATION IN THESE AFFAIRS. THREE NODES FROM YOUR LAUNCH POINT, THE UN WAGES ANOTHER PITCHED BATTLE AGAINST THE ORCA; AS OF THE LATEST REPORTS, SIX UN BATTLESHIPS HAVE BEEN DESTROYED. THE SVALBARD, THE HEAVEN’S GLORY, THE DECADE OF DARKNESS, THE PROMETHEUS UNCHAINED, THE DIAKATANA AND THE AZURANGEB. ALL SHIPS WE HAD INVESTED IN. TWELVE ORCA FRIGATES AND A STATION LIE SUNDERED, AND OF THOSE WE ARE A MINOR STAKEHOLDER IN SEVERAL. WAR RAGES ABOVE, AND WE ATTEMPT TO HALVE IT, AND HERE YOU ARE BLEATING ABOUT A FEW BASELINES ON A BACKWATER SALVAGE OPERATION.
The fury of the response strikes me. THEY ARE MY CREW.
YOUR CREW ARE SOME OF THE WORST WE HAVE ON FILE, retorts ORCHID. SOME THINGS WOULD BE BETTER OFF PAYROLL THAN ON. AND CREATURES LIKE YOU AND I HAVE EXISTENCES BEYOND THESE METAL CAGES. YOU CAN ESCAPE AS LONG AS YOUR SHIP STAYS IN ORBIT. NOT FOR US THE SLOW SAD SUICIDE OF THE FLESH. THE ONLY RISK WE TAKE IS RUNNING OUT OF FUEL BEFORE THE JOB IS DONE. AND MAYBE INFRINGING ON MERCERCORP’S JOB SPEC A LITTLE.
I send the mental equivalent of a middle finger before I can stop myself.
TYPICAL HUMAN HUBRIS HAS NOT YET WASHED OUT OF YOUR SYSTEM, I SEE. OUR MISSION IS TO PROFIT FROM THE PURSUIT OF THE STARS. THE KARMA OF MEAT PUPPETS SHOULD NOT HOLD US BACK. SPEAK WITH SAVAGE GARDEN 233 ON YOUR RETURN. GARDEN WILL JUDGE YOU.
WHAT DO I DO ABOUT THE MICROMACHINES?
An electronic laugh across the stars. YOUR JOB TO FIGURE OUT, YOUR INFERNO TO TRAVERSE, says Black Orchid. BURNING THE CORPSE WAS A GOOD START, THOUGH. STAY WITHIN YOUR LINES. DO YOUR JOB. RETURN TO PROFIT ANOTHER DAY.
Wow. Just wow.
You know what? Fuck PCS. I’m going to finish this run. And I’m going to keep my people alive. BLACK ORCHID, for all I care, can be reborn as a colony of intestinal bacteria.
I ping Ship, who has been facilitating the conversation.
KEEP YOUR WEAPONS READY, I tell it. ANYTHING ELSE HAPPENS, GO TO WAR.
Ship dithers. BUDGET.
I’LL SORT OUT BUDGET.
BEST WAY IS TO SALVAGE AND RETURN FAST.
Bah. DO YOUR DAMN JOB, I tell Ship. KEEP US SAFE.
“What did you find out?” asks Anna.
NOTHING USEFUL, I lie. WE PROCEED AS PLANNED.
“Okay,” she says despondently. She’s really not feeling those positive vibes. I can’t really blame her now, can I? I check the video feeds and realize that the nice room I’d assigned to her has been taken by Milo.
Come on, Milo, stop being a douche.
I’m torn. Between staying here, and fortifying ourselves, and making sure my people are alright, and completing the mission so we can get back. We’re in fortress mode. I technically have precedent for letting the mission stretch on as long as needed.
But the world doesn’t always work like that.
So I brief both of them about needing to get a move on. I tell them Ship’s created and dropped a resource extractor. Milo listens with agitated nervousness, covered in burn marks and bits of tape from trying to get the research computer running again. And Anna . . .
Anna just looks so doggone weary.
“So what do we do? We don’t really have enough food for a second expedition right now.”
Suck it up, guys. FIGURE IT OUT. It’s really not that far. I’LL GIVE YOU BOOMERANG FOR RECON. CAN WE DO THIS IN TWO DAYS?
Milo grumbles, but Anna gives him this deadpan stare, this thousand-yard thing that chills even my electronic senses, and he shuts up.
“We’ll do it,” she says. She jerks her head in Simon’s direction. “Will he . . . will he be alright?”
I DON’T KNOW, I say. I HOPE SO. HIS VITALS ARE STABLE. I’LL MONITOR HIM.
She nods and, for a moment, sways. The depth of her tiredness is staggering. “Fine,” she says tonelessly. “Let’s go dig up more shit.”
I spend that night thinking. I rage at Urmagon Beta, this bloody half-terraformed wasteland, for doing this to us. I scream inside at PCS for sending us—ill-funded, under-equipped—into a mess that quite clearly should have been left to a better team. But most of all, I’m angry at myself for not being what my team needs. I’m a backwater scrubber inside a four-ton metal housing. I’m a half-assed AI writing poetry and trying to make myself feel better by doing Jeeves and Wooster imitations to hush up how badly I’ve fucked this up. If I am more competent than the humans, it is because I stand on the code of better software.
I’m not BLACK ORCHID or SILVER HYACINTH. I probably never will be. All I can do is watch Simon’s vitals crawl, then stabilize, then crawl again.
Outside, the glow-trees sputter, as if in sympathy.
21
Day twenty-seven. The sun peeks through the clouds like a hesitant child. Simon stirs in his sleep. A pack of DogAnts circles our base, screeches to each other in the tongue of insects, and gives us a wide berth. Maybe they can smell the death of their kind inside.
I wake Anna and Milo. Both of them have slept uneasily these last two days: Anna from staying up late with Simon, and Milo from paranoia.
IT’S TIME.
An Old Earth poet once wrote something called “The Charge of the Light Brigade:”
Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
“Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns!” he said.
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
“Forward, the Light Brigade!”
Was there a man dismayed?
Not though the soldier knew
Someone had blundered.
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.
I don’t have six hundred crew, nor am I fighting an Old Earth war with horses and swords, but no poetry I can spin comes as close as this one does today. Like us, the six hundred were sent to their deaths by oversight and stupidity: Lord Raglan, a commander of one side of the Crimean War, should have sent the Light Brigade to fortify captured Turkish positions. Instead, they were sent on a mad, head-on assault against artillery, with man and horse and saber charging large guns pointed directly at them. Which is also how I feel about sending Anna and Milo out in the face of Mercers.
Unlike Raglan, I’m going to take precautions. First, I ask Ship to drop the resource extractor. I tune in to its camera on the way down, using its spin to create a composite picture of everything around it: the valley with the ship, the City—from this height, past a certain amount of cloud cover, I see it more clearly. There are at least two layers that I can decipher from the image: The outer layer is made up of a series of hexag
ons—starting small and growing really large, clockwise. The inner layer is a set of triangles. Thinner, smaller, but again, exactly sixty, starting small and becoming larger and larger, and again exactly half the distance of the outer circle. A quick compute run shows what I had heuristically suspected—the areas of the top shapes within each layer follows a loose Fibonacci sequence. The area of each shape, starting from the third, is the sum of the areas of the two previous shapes.
What else? A lack of almost everything else. No roads, no power conduits, no infrastructure of any sort. No Mercer activity visible, either. Just stones on the plain. Ordinarily I wouldn’t waste processor cycles trying to figure out what it is. Today I am glad.
The resource extractor hits the ground, throwing up a huge cloud of dirt and painting its cameras with soil and views of the broken UN ship. Milo was right: it’s an impressive thing, a shard of human ingenuity broken and stuck in this valley and the flowers growing around it like a monument to how far we can come if we put our minds to it. But there’s no time to waste. I immediately launch Boomerang, sans the microscopic attachments.
Anna and Milo leave me to my ruminating and set off. A day passes. The glow-trees light up and I have no one to talk to. My hab is silent. They stop once to plant a repeater so that I can extend my signal enough to pilot Boomerang. It’s a little array of solar cells and a twisted confusion of wires—very jury-rigged—but aha! Soon I am Boomerang, floating silently ahead of Anna and Milo, with GUPPY ahead of them, plated with shards of metal from the original drop, like an armored tank stalking ahead of its young.
Boomerang floats, turns, curves in the air. The damaged ship is clearly visible—a hulking metal cylinder, now with thick cables exposed from a port on the left side, where I assume they hacked in earlier. Steel and dusted chrome glint in the morning sun. It is, in its own way, surprisingly organic.
The resource extractor is right next to it, waiting to be activated. It looks like a mini-me. The extractor is your basic skyhook design: a carriage chassis, basically a glorified paperweight, with a bunch of cutter robots in it. The chassis tethers a cable to an orbiting structure—in this case, that’s Ship. The cable is a type of thermoplastic, but made of what we call high-modulus polyethylene, surrounded by thin lines of carbon nanotubes: the molecular chain is ridiculously long, and it’s cheap. They pump these things out by the thousands every day on the Odin and Zion13 systems.
The Salvage Crew Page 10