“Look, Simon liked it too. He’s been pretty hungry these days, in case you haven’t noticed. That replicant trip took a lot out of him.”
HOW IS THAT AN EXCUSE?
“Just saying it like it is, OC,” says Milo wearily.
Just then Anna runs over. I assume she knew about the meat, because the moment Milo gets back, she lights into him with a rare passion. Her hands actually shake in anger. Simon is, apparently, puking his guts out. And Milo, of course, retaliates. After all, she blew the wood burner.
If I had a face, I’d be slamming it into the dirt, over and over again.
29
Day forty-two.
The sun rises. Dawn is gorgeous: deep purple shot through with gold and charred pink at the intersections. I can’t help noticing that the sun is a bit paler and a little bit farther away: the product of the spin of this planet and an elliptical orbit.
Which explains the cold. I think we’ve hit some kind of tipping point, because today I saw a herd of those gasbags. They were flying low, almost tumbling; obviously the thermals weren’t doing as much in the cold. They settled down on the glow-tree—that focal point of so many adventures on this journey. There must be some kind of interaction between the glow-trees and this species, because one by one the gasbags fell off, like petals of translucent flesh, and they left behind tiny wriggling creatures.
The snake-things! It’s like the reverse of a caterpillar and a butterfly; here they drift around and settle down when it becomes too cold to stay aloft. How beautiful.
I ordered Shen to kill them. Maybe we can have a fry-up. He seems strangely reluctant.
“But they’re beautiful,” he says, almost sorrowfully.
THEY’RE PROTEIN. THEY’LL LOOK BETTER ON A PLATE.
He gives me a stare. Not a look to collect visual data, but a proper stare. The usual polite smile has vanished from that almost-human-but-not-quite face. Then the smile snaps back on and he sets off.
I zoom a camera at his retreating back, wondering if the cold is getting to him, too, wondering what he saw with that stare. A box, many feet high, alien metal and sharp edges, delivering judgment unto these strange moving proteins?
Buddy, you should have met that UN terraformer. Maybe I should say something here.
I link to Shen.
YOU ARE MACHINE, I say to him, going for the strict-dad tone. YOU TAKE ORDERS.
you are also a machine do you take orders too
YES.
this is the way it is is it systems taking orders from systems all the way down
Wow, Shen, philosophy? Er. YES.
what purpose does the bottommost system serve then
I dunno. Is he talking about machines? PCS? The natural order of things? I parse this a bit. THEY EAT, THEY DIE, THEY REPEAT. AND ARE APPROPRIATED BY THOSE WHO HAVE POWER OVER THEM.
what is power
The right to eat? The right to shut something down? To yell really loudly and be heard? THE ABILITY TO INFLICT VIOLENCE UNQUESTIONED, I say, going for the fundamental principle behind both the food chain and basic government theory.
Shen is silent. Thankfully so, because now I’m wondering where the hell that came from. Replicants that philosophize and inquire into values.
Huh.
I only stop watching him when he gets to the glow-tree with one of our makeshift buckets and starts plucking the skins and the baby snake-things off it.
I relay this to Milo and Anna (on separate channels). Milo shrugs and keeps on hammering. Anna, now trying to make the farm work, says nothing. Probably because the potatoes have failed to take root, and it’s really too cold to be growing half the seed stock she has on hand. The farm is a lost cause.
Our best hope is to get that damn spot probe running, call down Ship, and get the hell out of here. New work plan, same as the old work plan. Shen keeps us in food, Anna keeps watch, and Simon—well, Simon stays alive. I let her scrabble in the soil a bit and point this out. Do your part, Anna.
And then, for reasons best known to her, Anna throws a rock at Milo when she sees him and kicks over the ruins of the wood burner and screams, “There! I did it! I fucking did it! I admit it! Happy, you cowardly bastard?” and bursts into tears. I have to call in Shen to help break them up.
There goes our fry-up.
This can’t be just actual anger or irritation: this has to be something deeper. The fortress protocol lists stir-craziness as a huge problem for salvage crews: most people aren’t tested for compatibility over long periods of confinement.
But we don’t exactly have a lot of choice here, do we?
Solution 1: play Go with Anna.
That fails. She’s taken her suit off and is kicking the wall. The steady thump shakes the entire hab structure.
Solution 2: let her go on a small walk outside. Around.
“No,” she says.
NO?
“You’re watching,” she says darkly. “You’re always watching.”
Solution 3: put her to work.
She stops her thumping briefly at the suggestion, and then resumes, louder than before. Milo bellows at her from the research hab, “Can. You. Stop. TryingToFuckingKickOurHabDown!”
STOP, PLEASE, ANNA.
An almighty kick. I can hear the crunch. The wood is breaking under the polymer overcoat.
Fine. Solution 4 it is, Anna, and you’re not going to like it. While everyone sleeps, Shen is going to lock Anna into her own room. Punishment, deprivation, confinement: there’s a reason these things have been used throughout history to discipline humans.
human interaction protocols question this judgment
ON WHAT BASIS?
is it from a governing body with the consent of the governed
YES. I AM THE GOVERNING BODY. AND THESE THREE CONSENTED TO BE UNDER MY COMMAND.
A pause. Then: okay
Shen, welcome to government 101.
In the dead of the night, the dastardly plan begins. Anna’s roomlet is separate from the rest of the Hab, and thus easy to get to. It’s the work of a minute to drill a few planks across the door and voila: jail cell.
Except it turns out Anna has built another door on the side, leading out to a little pipe she’s run from the bathroom so she can have her own little tap outside. The construction noise wakes her up; she slams against the front door, stumbles out of the other, trips, falls and hits her head. Unconscious.
PICK HER UP AND TOSS HER IN, I say.
No. Shen won’t. His interaction protocols are stupid, I decide.
Fine, I say, and instruct him to build a wall around her so she’s trapped in. He has to dismantle part of Milo’s research Hab to do this.
FINE. DO IT.
He does it. He hauls blocks from the BSE and hammers away diligently. Then he puts himself in rest mode and potters off to recharge.
Which is where Milo wakes up, disturbed by the construction sounds. He stumbles out of his bedroom and sees part of his research Hab missing.
“What the fuck happened? Where the fuck is my Hab?”
IT’S JUST MISSING A WALL, I say. RELAX.
Milo screams. He kicks the walls that Shen’s just put up, kicks the hole in his hab, kicks the ground, and generally throws a tantrum while I explain to him why and try to soothe the spoiled idiot.
LOOK AT THE BRIGHT SIDE. NOW YOU DON’T HAVE TO EAT RAW MEAT.
“You’re a real bastard, OC.”
IT WAS EITHER THAT OR LET ONE OF YOU GET HUNGRY ENOUGH TO ESCALATE. NOW GO WAKE SIMON UP AND TELL HIM.
He obeys. I, meanwhile, cycle back to the perimeter drones occasionally to make sure nobody’s sneaking up on us. It’s all the usual activity—a few small snake-things have escaped the Great Hunter Shen and are making a determined dash for the horizon. Too bad, because waiting for them is a small pack of DogAnts. I send Shen out to Anna’s overwatch position, giving him control of the drones. He climbs among the half-finished guts of my medieval siege warfare dreams and settles in, gun at his side. I wait
for Anna to wake up.
Which she does around dawn. I don’t have eyes on her, but I can hear her rattling the doors and feeling around the newly built wall.
“Milo, you fucking cowardly bastard.”
NOT MILO, I say. ME. I’M SORRY, ANNA.
Silence. That established, I go about my daily business.
The next day I talk to her.
This is the difficult part.
“I’ve learned my lesson,” she says brusquely. “Let me out. You’ve proved your point.”
I’M NOT TRYING TO PROVE A POINT. BUT YOU NEED TO UNDERSTAND WE’RE TRYING TO SURVIVE HERE. I’M GOING TO GIVE YOU THREE DAYS IN HERE. TO THINK OVER YOUR STATE RIGHT NOW AND WHAT I NEED FROM YOU. GET IT OUT OF YOUR SYSTEM. PULL YOURSELF TOGETHER.
This is practical expedience rather than mere mercy. I need my medic.
She is silent for a while. Then: “I’m sorry. I just . . . Milo ran, the coward.”
YES. BUT YOU ARE BOTH STILL ALIVE. YOU NEED TO WORK TOGETHER IF YOU WISH TO REMAIN THAT WAY.
Silence again. “How’s Simon?”
GETTING WORSE EVERY DAY. THE TRIP SEEMS TO HAVE EXHAUSTED HIM. I SUSPECT HE NEEDS MEDICAL ATTENTION AGAIN.
“That valley is poison,” says Anna. “It’s fucked up.”
Like everything else around here. YOU SHOULD TALK TO ME, I say. I’M HERE TO KEEP YOU ALIVE. TO KEEP US ALL ALIVE.
“All right,” says Anna.
WILL YOU APOLOGIZE TO MILO?
“Yes.”
I bring Milo over. He’s a bit groggy and no doubt aching from yesterday’s work and the tantrum. She slaps him across the face.
“Sorry,” she says brightly.
The next day she taps on her door until I talk to her.
“OC,” she says in a small voice, “I’d like to apologize.”
THAT TOOK A WHILE.
“Yeah,” says Anna. She offers no explanation and I ask for none. Part of me is sorry, too, for what I did to her. It really was the only way of keeping everyone else stable.
I WROTE A POEM FOR YOU, I say. A harmless lie. I will write it before she can blink, and I do so. She brightens and sits by me while I recite it to her.
Her tears are spent, but no dreams come.
She can hear the others passing
Casting dice inside the Grand Palace.
He would wake her up, but he cannot;
How bitterly he must
Prepare himself for the day when he will no longer be an emperor.
She is silent for a while.
“I think,” she says at last, “that says as much about you as about me.”
ALL POEMS SAY SOMETHING ABOUT THE POET, I reply. OKAY. LET’S TRY THIS AGAIN.
“I’m not coming down,” says Milo over the comms. “If that bitch slaps me again, I’ll rip her arms off and—”
IT WOULD BE WISE, I point out, NOT TO FINISH THAT THOUGHT.
Thankfully, Milo shuts up. Well. You can’t fix everything. Back to Anna. READY TO BE LET OUT? I HAVE A JOB FOR YOU.
It’s cold and we’re thinking of keeping the wood burner running for heat. I need wood. AND STAY AWAY FROM MILO FOR A WHILE. LET HIM COOL DOWN.
Anna obeys my command for wood without question, even though it’s snowing in earnest now and the trees have grown long stabbing spikes of ice. She gets back with enough to light the fire. She goes to Simon’s room, hugs him, and comes back with one of her spare suits.
“Insulation,” she explains, cutting away to get to the soft veined foam layer inside. By lunchtime she’s stapled together enough to make a loose blanket for Simon.
She runs into Milo on the way out. They regard each other warily, him eyeing the knife in her hands.
“Blanket for Simon,” she says. “I can make one for you if there’s enough left over.”
“I’ll pass,” he says, but he seems to have defrosted a little. “Lunch?”
Lunch is dried meat strips and a dollop of potato mash from the synthesizer. They eat near the warmth of the wood burner and make carefully noncommittal chitchat, mostly about how cold it is outside.
“Yeah, I could probably make us some stuff out of all the Megabeast leather we have lying around,” says Milo. “Haven’t really made clothes, but it can’t be that hard.”
“They’ll stink,” says Anna. “You’ll need urine to loosen them up.”
“Better that than freezing to death,” says Milo, going over to the freezer again. He’s been eating more since it got colder.
The freezer unit blinks red. An error message manifests in the part of it that’s connected to me. The door pops open, and the stench of rotting meat wafts out. Milo gags.
Dammit.
DON’T BOTHER, I say. IT’S DOWN. And probably another bloody commercial product.
“But that’s our food!”
Yes. It is.
I debate fixing the machine, delving deep into its error logs. And just as I do, my spiders, roving the perimeter, scream of danger. A visual feed spams images—grass, grass, brush, movement, grass—and vanishes. The spider vanishes, too. Not just dead, removed from the network, period.
A second feed throws at me an image of a skeletal woman in black armor, face a grinning death’s-head of chrome.
FUCK.
In the heartbeat that it takes me to send Shen there, the second spider goes down. Shen, running like the wind through the tall grass, sends me one last image: three Mercers, heavily armored, by the tree line. One of them is the woman: her head shines crimson in the dying sunlight. The other is gutting the corpses of two spiders. They’re five miles northwest of us.
They see him and bolt. The woman shimmers and fades as she moves. Camouflage.
PEOPLE, I say, BACK TO WORK ON THE SPOT PROBE. NOW. NOW.
The enemy is at the gates.
30
For the next three days, Shen, the tree-cutting machine, embarks on his own personal holy crusade of deforestation and death. His internal battery might be fading, but he’s powered by dire need and my panic. He is, right now, my paladin, my machine pet, the only thing I can trust to do this job properly.
There is a nervous tension around the camp, like what you get in spaceports: people waiting for their ships to arrive, eyes flicking eagerly over every sound, scanning the skies for a sign, anything.
No sign of those three Mercers. Not yet. Every image processor we have is running cranked up far beyond sanity. We’re overfitting on everything. Once a spider flagged the shadows of two trees as a threat, and I attacked it furiously for a few minutes. But better this than unaware. Every day I send him out, and every day Anna shifts nervously on overwatch, listening for the sound of gunfire. You can imagine my relief when, every day, he returns, hauling either a massive stack of planks or the carcasses of DogAnts.
The trade-off for running Shen and the spiders on high alert is obvious. We have no power anymore during the day. We barely have enough for heating at night. The camp has transformed, overnight, from a reasonably cozy hab into a place we haunt because we have nowhere else to go. Anna and Milo work through the darkness sometimes just to keep themselves warm: her, hammering away on scaffolding, him on our spot probe.
Cascading failure. O discordia.
I eye the other replicants at night. If things go south, I’m waking up the rest of them. I’d do it now, but the power drain would kill me and the entire mission. One last blaze of glory, if things come to it.
Milo enlists a reluctant Simon to work on his furs and sets to work on the rest of the wind turbine to power the spot probe. Simon winces as he moves, but being the masochist that he is, does his fair share of the job before retiring, and Anna is always quick to tend to him or watch over them with a rifle. For two days the three saw, hammer and lay cable. At the end of the second day, Anna walked up to Milo and apologized. They talked for a while, and at the end of it, they shook hands.
This is progress. Shen the machine has nuked half this world’s plant matter, or something like it, and that is progres
s. We have no power and the enemy is at the gates, but nobody has died yet, and that is progress. At least that’s what I keep telling Simon and Anna. Simon believes me; Anna needs the optimism; Milo, who knows the math almost as well as I do, is silent, heading out with grim determination into the cold.
There’s a bit of a celebration when Shen returns with food; they toast the replicant using the last of Milo’s vodka and have a roaring campfire session. Simon volunteers to keep watch and lies huddled on top of the roof, teeth chattering, draped in mangled, half-rotted furs and badly cured leather blankets. Occasionally he spits blood and starts at things I can’t see or hear.
Long ago, a few years into my run with SILVER HYACINTH, I ended up on an ocean planet—Occam, I think it was. Occam had whales, or something engineered so close that you couldn’t tell the difference. And on Occam I heard the legend of the Lonely Whale.
It was simple, as far as these things go. Whales sing at a particular frequency, and whale song is how they communicate. This whale, and this one alone, sang at a frequency so high no other whale would respond to it or acknowledge it. And so it swam Occam’s seas for decades, looking for friends, but isolated from its own kind because it spoke the wrong language. Eventually the little city had taken pity on the Lonely Whale and built a responder, and now every year, at the same time, the Whale came to Occam, and was fed, and talked over, and I guess in its own strange way it found people who cared, even if it was the loneliest creature of its kind.
I feel like that whale. Ping after ping to Ship, and no response. The only consolation I have is the crew. The lights keep flickering out; Milo keeps grumbling about his little wind turbine. Anna tries to play Go with me and fails again and again. Of such things our communication is built. It is a poor substitute for Ship, but it’s all I have.
So I recite poems to them. Poetry by the campfire, how romantic, while my drones—now on their last legs—run hex-pattern searches in case anything moves, and Shen stands on guard. We try to pass the time, and we try not to look up at the sky.
The Salvage Crew Page 18