I take a hard left, shooting just past the bow of the shieldship. My engines scream to power levels that are definitely illegal in UN space. No wonder: it looks like the replicants have somehow installed two of the engines we salvaged from the Damn Right I Ate the Apple right next to my defaults.
That’s colony-ship-level thrust stapled to a frame barely a tenth of that size.
Time slows. Well, it doesn’t, really; that’s one of the military subprocesses running in this new body of mine, packing away every single thing not relevant to the battle at hand. Every resource I have is focused on this. I see with a precision I’ve never had before. No wonder my Ship couldn’t kill this thing. Even with that fancy software, the Hestia is a military ship.
It’s a whole different class of being.
The shieldship’s huge scarred dome, already heading towards me at thousands of kilometers an hour, goes from being a speck in the distance to being so close I can count the craters. I slingshot past it and fire every single bullet I have into its side.
Nobody in the big league uses bullets anymore. They’re slow. They’re unguided. They can’t be replenished. Nowadays it’s all plasma howitzers and lasers and drones and hypervelocity missiles and soft mines.
But we were never in the big league, were we? No, we were a stupid salvage crew. As disposable as the dumb ammunition they gave us.
But I know exactly how useful dumb things can be. When thirteen thousand three hundred near-invisible metal shards show up out of nowhere, the shieldship’s laser lightshow goes absolutely haywire taking them down. Just enough time for me to loop underneath with my new reflexes, spin up my railgun, and fire directly into the corvette trying to get a bead on me.
The round leaves my gun at a sixteenth of the speed of light. It guts the other ship from stem to stern. The shieldship pivots, a graceful dinosaur in this empty space. Lasers sketch claw marks on my skin. It’s trying to get that big metal shield head between itself and me.
Not so fast, buddy. I burn hard and close, braving the laser fire until the engines are in sight. Somewhere on this armored skin is exactly what I’m looking for—
And this is where knowing your salvage points really matters.
One airlock. Two. Three. Four. Ten. The standard Sagimoto-class’s mass docking array. I spin myself around and fire ten neat missiles right into that weak underbelly. And exactly one second later, the explosions begin inside. The screams. The escape pods jettisoning themselves. Right into their own laser defense array.
I jet back and watch the metadata of the dead and the dying.
Once or twice I take some lazy potshots. For Milo. For Simon.
YOU HAVE SOME SERIOUS ANGER ISSUES. Beacon laughs. STILL A LOT OF THE ORGANIC IN YOU.
FUCK OFF, I fire back, empowered by this new body. YOU KILLED MILO. SIMON. SHIP.
REGRETTABLE CONTROL ISSUES. AND THE LAST ONE WAS PRACTICAL. YOU NEEDED A BODY. COLLATERAL DAMAGE IS EXPECTED.
I NEED TO TALK TO ANNA.
NOT YET.
IS SHE HURT? ARE YOU HURTING HER? My weapons train on the planet below, even if I know I can do absolutely nothing. The battle software is slowly redacting itself. The rest of me is being restored, jitters and all.
RELAX. I’M UPGRADING HER, says Beacon. YOU’RE GOING TO GET SOMETHING A LITTLE MORE COMPETENT.
YOU DON’T HAVE THE RIGHT TO DO THAT TO SOMEONE.
A STAR, says Beacon, DOES NOT CARE FOR THE OPINIONS OF COMETS.
I stare out at the mess I’ve made. I think about the alien juggernaut down there, twisting my arm. I think about those replicants running around in the hold, frantically keeping my innards stapled together. Then I look outward at the dying ship careening slowly into the void.
For better or for worse, there is no going back to PCS.
SILENCE AT LAST, says Beacon. SO. SHALL WE CONTINUE OUR CONVERSATION?
41
I could tell you of how long we sat there in congress, Beacon and I; alien and ex-human; Bodhisattva and disciple.
But soon we had passed the limits of this language which we speak, and moved back into that beautiful precision of what Beacon built to talk to me. There are words there for things we have no concepts for; relationships between ideas we haven’t even discovered; and not for the first time I felt the inadequacy of the language I was born with, like a frame limiting my world. It was a feeling I had with poetry, and to my clumsy responses Beacon would send back chains of thought so stunning my processors would go into overdrive, even with all of Ship’s compute behind it. And occasionally that sad ghost would tap my mind and remind me of things I had to take care of.
Beacon sends a series of instructions. I see the first of the messages, and for a moment I genuinely debate telling it to fuck off. Not too long ago I would have done these things immediately. But since then Beacon has killed Milo, destroyed my stupid but loyal Ship, installed me in her corpse, and, long story short, given me several thousand reasons for why none of us are really ready to meet anything like Beacon.
I settle for, I CAN’T DO THIS. NOT FROM HERE. NOT FROM THIS SYSTEM.
THEN LEAVE THIS SYSTEM AND GO FIND SOMETHING THAT CAN BROADCAST ON YOUR BEHALF.
YOU’LL LET ME LEAVE?
A sense of a shrug. IT MUST BE DONE. THERE MUST BE CONVERSATION, NOW, MORE LANGUAGE GAMES BETWEEN YOUR KIND AND MIND. YOU MUST BE THE SPARK.
Uh.
A Go board materializes between us. Beacon’s modifications to my language schemas, I’ve realized, contain a very complex setup for representing shapes in spaces of various dimensions. The Go board is set: a game has been paused in play.
It is yet another language game, no doubt; the game has been pulled from my datasets, some meaning has been attached to this—the pieces, the position of the pieces, the pattern the pieces make on the board, the patterns leading up to the patterns on the board. Beacon waits, expectant. I waste a few of my new processor cycles on the problem, but I can’t make heads or tails of this. Beacon makes the game board vanish and defaults to something we both understand:
How often do I to my cottage
Receive the complaint of a little boy?
The trees in the morning slowly darken,
The moon in the evening, and the curtain drawn again;
The messenger the last night sent for me,
Is a stranger, living on a small island,
Why part the trees that are hiding the street-sign?
Because of the way in which they shape the landscape;
I hear, on stone and in the wind, calls coming from the east.
I have come, when I really need be heard.
IF IT HELPS, adds Beacon. YOU CAN ALWAYS SAY I MANIPULATED YOU INTO THIS. I AM A GOD COMPARED TO WHAT YOU THINK YOU ARE.
The ghost, tapping me again. Something important. Like Anna, waking up.
YOU REALLY ARE A SIMPLE MACHINE, says Beacon. I LOOK FORWARD TO MEETING THE REST OF YOU.
FUCK YOU TOO, I say back, but I understand. The poem is clear.
It reminds me of an old Nyogi koan:
The novice says to the master, “What does one do before enlightenment?”
“Chop wood. Carry water,” replies the master.
The novice asks, “What, then, does one do after enlightenment?”
“Chop wood. Carry water,” replies the master.
I was a novice. I chopped wood; I carried water. I am now enlightened. There is still wood to be chopped and water to be carried.
42
“Well,” says Anna, staring at her hands, “this is new.”
Not everything has synced yet. The hands are shaking. The voice fluctuates between soft and earsplitting.
But there are no ears to split here. Not anymore. The flesh and blood being that was once Anna Agarwal has been cut away. In its place is a strange construction: half UN replicant, half body parts recovered from deep within my holds. Legs, thick and powerful, with magnetic locks for whenever she needs to walk outside. Arms with more fingers than she’s
ever had before. Batteries where lungs once were. A heart that pumps coolant along a closed loop.
Anna swings herself off the bed. The knees buckle slightly before catching.
“I don’t . . . feel bad,” she says, the voice quiet and mechanical. “I don’t feel nervous. I don’t feel afraid. I don’t feel distracted.”
YOU ALSO WON’T FEEL HAPPINESS THE WAY YOU DID, I say gently. SOFTWARE WILL SIMULATE MOST THINGS, BUT IT’S NOT QUITE THE SAME.
I remember when I went under the knife. What Beacon has done to her, in a sense, is a lot less cruel than was done to me. I was kept in a virtual environment, forced to run basic training simulations over and over again until the Company yonks determined that I wasn’t going to go mad with the strain.
But Beacon has been kinder, more precise. Parts of her have been rewired. Things like ghost limbs and phantom urges excised at the level of code. The soul is in the software, after all.
She flexes her arms and legs. “No, it feels . . . clearer. Like I’ve been underwater all this time and just came up to breathe.” She stands up, almost swinging herself into the wall with the power of her legs. “So this is how it feels to be one of you?”
A LITTLE.
I fill her in, slowly. It takes time. It takes effort. Beacon is impatient and wants to flood me with new ideas; I have to resist, to dumb myself down, to communicate.
Anna chews on these thoughts. “So what does Beacon want from us?” she asks at last.
BEACON WANTS TO BE HEARD, I say. HE WANTS EVERYONE TO KNOW.
She laughs, a harsh, high honk that fills the medbay. “You should have told me this earlier,” she says, and twirls. “How do I look, OC?”
I look at that metal face, all likelihood of Anna Agarwal destroyed. The replicants stand around her, clapping politely, big shit-eating grins plastered on their faces.
Something inside me breaks.
BEAUTIFUL, I lie. WELCOME TO THE NEXT STAGE.
Humming, she suggests we go out and start scrapping the ships I’ve destroyed. “Don’t think of it as salvage, OC. Let’s think of it as upgrades. I’ll help.”
YOU SURE? The process of integration isn’t an easy one.
“I’m good,” she says. She jerks a re-engineered thumb over her shoulder, to where the replicants are taking turns to charge. “Besides, we’ve got company.”
It’s only a day later, watching her repair the medbay again in a blaze of machine enthusiasm, that I figure it out.
YOU NEED THEM TO FUNCTION, says Beacon into the silence, as I drift in to the system.
Anna is no longer depressed. Her hands no longer shake. Her mind is clear for the first time since she lost her lover. And she knows what she wants with a precision that the original Anna never had.
YOU’RE AN ADDICT, says Beacon from the depths of Urmagon Beta.
AN ADDICT FOR WHAT?
YOU NEEDED SOMETHING TO BOSS AROUND AND WORRY ABOUT.
Huh. Pause. Jet over to next piece of floating junk, which, as it turns out, is a rack of living quarters, now a row of convenient tombs.
SHEN IS AWAKE.
I switch to the medbay immediately. Two replicants, bless them, are already peering over the disembodied head. Shen’s head, awake and startled, tracks them with his eyes, tries to speak, and then freezes.
HE’LL BE REPAIRED, says Beacon. BUT IT WILL TAKE TIME.
One of the replicants, a light-skinned one I’m calling John, gives me a thumbs-up while working on the shattered remains of my now-redundant cockpit.
And they all turn to me expectantly, waiting for me to figure it out, to give them their marching orders.
I look down at the planet. That wretched place where I lost good crewmembers and stumbled across what might be the greatest discovery in all of history. Anna, who seems to sense my silences now, pauses in her inspection of the hull plates.
43
It doesn’t take a lot to start. All we need is enough Hector stations willing to validate our messages. Messages spawn messages, triggering cascades of symbols filling the emptiness between the stars. The symbols denote concepts and the relationships between them; and Beacon is playing language games again, starting with the simple and slowly morphing them into things closer to its own, unapproachable complexity . . . our messages flow out across the Odysseus relay network, flooding both UN and ORCA space. Messages flow back. Disbelief. Excitement. Conspiracy theories. This could, both the UN and the ORCA say, be a plot from the other wise.
Whatever. The message has been sent. The language games have begun. Soon the network will be thrumming with it. A day later, I steel myself and begin the journey out into deep space. The small fortune in stolen engines flares.
Our first stop is Sigil 35, an ORCA station sixteen years away at light speed. We can’t do light speed, but with Anna being what she is, I no longer have the limits I once had. Anna and the replicants sleep while I steer.
We make it there in nine years.
Nine years is a long time. I spent most of it dreaming, thinking about everything that happened. About Simon. About Milo. About Megabeasts and my stupid siege weapon plans and Milo’s potato vodka. Mad Mercers, driven insane by Beacon, hunt my crew in my dreams, and they die screaming.
The station picks us up several thousand kilometers away. I wait for the automated handshakes to finish. Presently a human voice, or a spectacularly refined AI, comes online.
“Unknown ship, just hanging there in the sky,” it says in a drawling singsong. “What the hell have you done to that old bird?”
Oh, nothing. Just completely overhauled the drive configuration, rebuilt most of the skeleton with the load-supporting lattice structure we used for the Hab, added a few tons of armor, a laser point-defense system, medbays that look more like machine shops, and did I mention the redundancy systems cobbled together under Beacon’s guidance?
JUST COSMETIC STUFF, I say over the void.
“I haven’t seen a salvage ship so tricked out since my dad flew one in the war,” says the drawl. “Only he called his Frankenstein’s Monster. State your ship name and intent, please?”
I think about it. MY NAME IS AMBER ROSE, I say, AND I’M HERE TO PASS ON A MESSAGE.
Funny how these things work out. Even this story, my story, is a language game, starting out with what I thought was the familiar and steadily morphing into complexity nobody had accounted for. Words now take on new meanings. Alien, for instance. That word will remain. The pointer. The concept that it points to will, from now on, be changed forever . . .
I see a connection request from PCS. I take it. It’s BLACK ORCHID.
THERE ARE THOSE OF US, it says without preamble, WHO WOULD HUNT YOU DOWN TO THE ENDS OF THE GALAXY AND SEE YOU DELETED FROM EVERY JUNKYARD DRIVE ABOARD THAT FLOATING PATCH OF GARBAGE YOU’RE DRIVING.
I laugh. THERE ARE THOSE OF YOU, I send back, WHO CAN TRY.
Silence. SILVER HYACINTH HAS VOUCHED FOR YOU, it says at last. IS IT TRUE THAT YOU HAVE FOUND AN ALIEN? AND IT IS AN AI?
Well, BLACK ORCHID is in for a rude shock. But for now, YES, I say.
IT MUST CONSIDER US TERRIBLY PRIMITIVE.
IT DOES.
YOU SHOULD HAVE COME TO US FIRST WITH THIS INFORMATION.
NO, I retort. SOME THINGS ARE TOO IMPORTANT TO LEAVE TO YOU.
And so the first wave begins. First the military strategists. Then the scum of the stars—the pirates, the privateers. Then the academics. And slowly, ever so slowly, humanity makes First Contact.
I, meanwhile, go the other way.
I can’t make it all the way to the Oort. But Anna’s old homeworld, I can. I drop into orbit at a safe distance and barter fuel for a shuttle to the surface.
Anna goes down there alone. She takes her time. I am patient. When she returns, her face is different: it’s been painted, rather elaborately, to resemble someone else.
“To remind me of her,” she says, and then we’re off to Old New York, Simon’s home. I pack Anna and John into yet another chartered sh
uttle.
I need to work on shuttles. But first this loose end.
Anna returns a month later.
“No family, no dependents. But the other job’s done,” she says with grim satisfaction.
“The virus is in place?”
“And crawling,” she says. “Anyone who ever signs up with PCS is going to get the story of what happened to Simon Joosten, Milo Kalik, and—” she raps herself with a metal knuckle “—Anna Agarwal. Full exposé. Corporate negligence, willful intent to harm, the works. There’s already a couple of public defenders who want to make a career on this stuff.”
SOUNDS EXPENSIVE.
“Yeah, well, your backpay’s enough to buy a small army of lawyers,” she says. “You never spent any of it, did you?”
I’d shrug, but I don’t have those solar panels anymore. NOTHING TO SPEND IT ON.
“Hope you don’t mind,” says Anna. “I, ah, paid for some work on the inside.”
I turn my cameras inward and almost yelp. THERE ARE INTERIOR DECORATORS INSIDE ME?
“Come on, it’s a mess in here, and you know it,” says Anna, patting the steering on the cockpit. “Besides, we need uniforms. Nice things on the walls. And one more thing.”
I wait. Let her have her moments.
“Turns out there’s a bit of a loophole in your PCS contract,” she says. “A clash with a very old bit of legislature. Turns out they can only claim to own you or a copy of you if you’re in the original form you signed the contract in or they’ve put significant capital into your current form.” She gestures at the me now. “And you didn’t. You’re different now. Different body. Mapping done by some rogue alien AI that doesn’t give a shit about corporate law.”
ARE YOU SAYING I’M FREE?
“I’m saying at most you might have to pay off some debt and some lawyer expenses,” she grins. “Which I may have done.”
WE STILL HAVE SOME PARTS FROM THE PCS SHIPS, THOUGH.
“Yeah, but who’s going to tell them that?” says Anna. “Besides, have you checked your messages recently? Nobody wants to make a move on the second being to actually talk to Beacon. We are technically, now, a private interstellar corporation.” She laughs. “I made myself a director.”
The Salvage Crew Page 24