Kira handed over the headphones. “Not good. He’s…” She struggled to find a way to describe Gregorovich’s behavior. “He’s really off. Something’s wrong, Hwa-jung. Really, really wrong. He can’t stop talking, and a lot of the time, he can’t seem to string together a coherent sentence.”
Now the machine boss was frowning as well. “Aish,” she muttered. “I wish Vishal were still awake. Machines are what I work with, not squishy brains.”
“Could it be something mechanical?” Kira asked. “Could something have happened to Gregorovich when we were on Orsted? Or when you disconnected him from the mainframe?”
Hwa-jung glowered at her. “That was a circuit breaker. It would not have caused any problems.” But she continued to scowl as she tucked the headphones into a pocket. “Stay here,” she said abruptly. “There is something I will check.”
The machine boss turned and kicked herself down the hall and around the corridor.
Kira waited as patiently as she could. She couldn’t stop thinking about her conversation with Gregorovich. She shivered and hugged herself, although she wasn’t cold. If Gregorovich was as bad as he seemed … keeping him in cryo really might be their only choice. An unbalanced ship mind was a thing of nightmares.
There were, she thought, many different types of nightmares in the galaxy. Some small, some large, but the worst of all were the ones you lived with.
Kira wanted to tell Falconi about Gregorovich, but she forced herself to wait on Hwa-jung.
Nearly half an hour passed before the machine boss reappeared. She had grease on her hands, new scorch marks on her rumpled sleeves, and a troubled expression that did nothing to ease Kira’s worries.
“Did you find something?” Kira asked.
Hwa-jung held up a small black object: a rectangular box the size of two fingers side by side. “This,” she said with a tone of disgust. “Bah! It was clamped to the circuits leading into Gregorovich’s sarcophagus.” She shook her head. “Stupid. I knew something was off when the lights glitched like that in Control when I pulled the breaker.”
“What is it?” Kira asked, moving closer.
“Impedance block,” said Hwa-jung. “It stops signals from traveling through a line. The UMC must have installed it to help keep Gregorovich from escaping. None of my checks showed it when we came back on the Wallfish.” She shook her head again. “When I pulled the breaker, it caused a surge in the box, and the surge ran into Gregorovich.”
Kira swallowed. “What does that mean?”
Hwa-jung sighed and looked away for a moment. “The surge, it burned the little wires going into Gregorovich. The leads are not connecting properly to his neurons, and the ones that are, aish! They are firing wrong.”
“Is he in pain?”
A shrug from the machine boss. “I don’t know. But the computer says many of the broken leads are in his visual cortex and the area of language processing, so Gregorovich, he may be seeing and hearing things that are not there. Ahhh.” She shook the small box. “Vishal will have to help with this. I can’t fix Gregorovich.”
A sense of helplessness unmoored Kira. “So we have to wait.” It wasn’t a question.
Hwa-jung nodded. “The best thing we can do is put Gregorovich into cryo. Vishal will look at him when we arrive, but I do not think he can fix him either.”
“Do you want me to tell Falconi? I’m going to see him.”
“Yes, tell him. I want to get Gregorovich frozen. Sooner is better. I will go into cryo after.”
“Okay, will do.” Then Kira put a hand on Hwa-jung’s shoulder. “And thank you. At least now we know.”
The machine boss grunted. “What help is knowing, though? Ah, what a mess. What a mess.”
They parted, the machine boss pulling herself into the ship mind’s holding room while Kira returned to Control. Falconi wasn’t there, nor was he in the ship’s now-defunct hydroponics bay.
Slightly puzzled, Kira sought out the captain’s cabin. It didn’t seem like him to be in his room at a time like this, but …
“Come in,” he said when she knocked on the door.
The pressure door creaked as Kira pushed her way in. Falconi was sitting at the desk, strapped into his chair to keep from floating away. In one hand, he held a drinking pouch that he was sipping from.
Then she noticed the bonsaied olive tree pushed to the back of the desk. The leaves were tattered, most of the branches broken, the trunk tilted against the side of the pot, and the dirt around the roots looked as if it had been overturned: small clumps floated loose under the lid of clear plastic that covered the top of the pot and surrounded the trunk.
The state of the tree caught her by surprise. She knew how much he cared for the plant.
“So? How’d it go?” Falconi asked.
Kira braced herself against the wall before delving into her report.
As she talked, Falconi’s expression grew darker and darker. “Goddammit,” he said. “Fucking UMC. They had to go and make things worse. Every fucking time…” He drew a hand across his face and stared at an imaginary point somewhere beyond the hull of the ship. She couldn’t recall ever seeing him so angry or tired. “Should have trusted my gut earlier. He really is broken.”
“He’s not broken,”said Kira. “There’s nothing wrong with Gregorovich per se. It’s the equipment he’s hooked up to.”
Falconi snorted. “Semantics. He’s not working. That makes him broken. And I can’t do anything about it either. That’s the worst part. The one time Greg actually needs help and…” He shook his head.
“He means a lot to you, doesn’t he?”
A crinkle of foil as Falconi took a sip from his drinking pouch. He avoided her gaze. “If you asked the rest of the crew, I think you’d find that Gregorovich spent a lot of time talking with each of us. He didn’t always say much in groups, but whenever we needed him, he was there. And he’s gotten us out of some real tight spots.”
Kira planted her feet on the deck and allowed the Soft Blade to anchor her there. “Hwa-jung said Vishal might not be able to heal him.”
“Yeah,” said Falconi, letting out his breath. “Working on ship-mind implants is tricky stuff. And our medibot isn’t rated for it either.… Thule. Greg wasn’t even this bad when we found him.”
“What will you do if we get into a fight with the Jellies?”
“Run like hell if it’s at all an option,” said Falconi. “The Wallfish isn’t a warship.” He pointed a finger at her. “And none of this changes what Gregorovich did. It wasn’t some impedance block that caused him to mutiny.”
“… No. I suppose not.”
Falconi shook his head. “Damn fool of a ship mind. He was so scared of losing us, he went and jumped off a cliff, and now look where he’s at … where we’re at.”
“I guess it goes to show that you can still make mistakes, even with a brain as big as his.”
“Mmh. That’s assuming Gregorovich is wrong. He could be right, you know.”
Kira cocked her head. “If you really believe that, why are we going to warn the Knot of Minds?”
“Because I think it’s worth the risk.”
She thought it best to change the subject then. Motioning toward the olive tree, she said, “What happened?”
Falconi’s lip curled with a snarl. “Again, the UMC, that’s what. They ripped it out of its stasis box looking for—for whatever. Took me this long to clean the place up.”
“Will the tree recover?” It wasn’t a variety of plant Kira had experience with.
“Doubt it.” Falconi stroked a branch, but only for a moment, as if afraid to cause further damage. “The poor thing was out of the dirt for most of a day, temperature was down, no water, stripped leaves…” He held out the pouch. “Want a drink?”
She took the pouch and put her lips to the straw. The harsh burn of some sort of rotgut hit her mouth, and she nearly coughed.
“Good stuff, eh?” Falconi said, seeing her reaction.
&nbs
p; “Yeah,” said Kira, and coughed. She took another slug and then handed the pouch back.
He tapped the silvered plastic. “Probably not the best idea before cryo, but what the hell, eh?”
“What the hell indeed.”
Falconi took a sip of his own and then let out a long sigh and let his head drift back so he was looking at what would be the ceiling when under thrust. “Crazy times, Kira. Crazy times. Shit, of all the ships we had to pick up, we had to pick up yours.”
“Sorry. It’s not what I wanted either.”
He pushed the pouch across to her. She watched it drift through the air and then snared it. Another mouthful of rotgut and another burning streak pouring down her throat. “It’s not your fault,” he said.
“Actually, I kinda think it is,” she said, quiet.
“No.” He caught the pouch as she lobbed it over. “We still would have ended up having to deal with this war, even if we didn’t rescue you.”
“Yes, but—”
“But nothing. You think the Jellies were going to leave us alone forever? You finding the suit on Adrasteia was just an excuse for them to invade.”
Kira considered that for a moment. “Maybe. What about the nightmares, though?”
“Yeah, well…” Falconi shook his head. He already seemed to be feeling the drink. “That’s just the sort of bullshit that always happens. You can prepare and prepare, but it’s the stuff you don’t anticipate that always throws you for a loop. And it always happens. You’re going about your day, and bam! An asteroid comes out of the blue, ruins your life. How are you supposed to live in a universe like that?”
It was a rhetorical question, but Kira answered anyway: “By taking reasonable precautions and not letting the possibility drive you crazy.”
“Like Gregorovich.”
“Like Gregorovich,” she agreed. “We all have to play the odds, Salvo. It’s the nature of life. The only alternative is to cash out early, and that’s just giving up.”
“Mmm.” He peered at her from under his brows, as he so often did, his ice-blue eyes hooded and ghostly pale in the dim light of ship-night. “It looked like the Soft Blade was getting away from you back on Orsted.”
Kira shifted, uncomfortable. “Maybe a bit.”
“Anything I should be worried about?”
For an uncomfortably long time, she didn’t answer. Then: “Maybe.” Contracting her hamstrings, she pulled herself down to the deck and secured herself in a sitting position. “The more I let go of the xeno, the more it wants to eat and eat and eat.”
Falconi’s gaze sharpened. “To what end?”
“I don’t know. None of its memories have shown it reproducing, but—”
“But maybe it’s keeping that hidden from you.”
She tipped a finger in his direction. He offered her the pouch again, and she accepted. “Letting me drink this is kind of a waste of good alcohol. No way for me to get drunk, not with the Soft Blade interfering.”
“Don’t worry about it.… You think the xeno is some sort of doomsday nanoweapon?”
“It has the capability, but I don’t think that’s necessarily what it was made for either.” Kira struggled to find the right words. “The suit doesn’t feel malevolent. Does that make sense? It doesn’t feel angry or sadistic.”
Falconi raised an eyebrow. “A machine wouldn’t.”
“No, but it does feel some things. It’s hard to explain, but I don’t think it’s entirely a machine either.” She tried to think of another way to explain. “When I was holding the shield around the maglev, there were all these tiny little tendrils going out into the walls. I could feel them, and it didn’t seem like the Soft Blade wanted to destroy. It felt like it wanted to build.”
“But build what?” Falconi said in a soft voice.
“… Anything or everything. Your guess is as good as mine.” A somber silence stilled the conversation. “Ah, I forgot to tell you, Hwa-jung said she was going into cryo as soon as she put Gregorovich under.”
“Just you and me, then,” Falconi said, and raised the pouch as if in a toast.
Kira smiled slightly. “Yes. And Morven.”
“Pshaw. She doesn’t count.”
As if to punctuate his words, the FTL alert interrupted, and then—with a distant whine—the Wallfish activated its Markov Drive and departed from normal space.
“And there we go,” said Falconi. He shook his head as if he were having trouble accepting it.
Kira found herself looking at the ruined bonsai again. “How old is the tree?” she asked.
“Would you believe, almost three hundred years?”
“No!”
“For real. It’s from Earth, back before the turn of the millennium. Got it off a guy as part of payment for a transport job. He didn’t realize how valuable it was.”
“Three hundred years…” The number was hard to comprehend. The tree was older than the entire history of humans living in space. It predated the Mars and Venus colonies, predated every hab-ring and manned research station outside low-Earth orbit.
“Yeah.” A brooding expression settled on Falconi’s face. “Those jackbooted thugs had to tear it up. Couldn’t just scan the place.”
“Mmm.” Kira was still thinking about how the Soft Blade had felt on Orsted—that and whatever purpose it had been built or born for. She couldn’t forget the sensation of the countless threadlike tendrils insinuating themselves through the fascia of the station, touching, tearing, building, understanding.
The Soft Blade was more than just a weapon. Of that she was sure. And from that certainty came an idea that gave Kira pause. She didn’t know if it would work, but she wanted it to so she could feel less bad about herself and the xeno. So she would have a solid reason for viewing the Soft Blade as something other than an instrument of destruction.
“Do you mind if I try something?” she asked, extending a hand toward the ruined tree.
“What?” Falconi asked, wary.
“I’m not sure, but … let me try. Please.”
He fiddled with the edge of the packet as he considered. “Alright. Fine. But nothing too crazy. The Wallfish has enough holes in her hull already.”
“Give me some credit at least.”
Kira released herself from the floor and crawled across the wall to the desk. There, she pulled the pot close and laid her hands on the trunk. The bark was rough against her palms, and it smelled fresh and green, sea air wafting over cut grass.
Falconi said, “Are you just going to hang there, or—”
“Shh.”
Concentrating, Kira sent the Soft Blade burrowing into the tree, with but one thought, one directive guiding it: heal. Bark creaked and split, and tiny black threads swarmed across the surface of the tree. Kira felt the plant’s internal structures, the layers of bark (inner and outer), the rings, the hard core of heartwood, every narrow branch, and the sprouting base of every fragile, silver-backed leaf.
“Hey,” said Falconi, getting to his feet.
“Wait,” said Kira, hoping the suit could do what she was asking of it.
Across the olive tree, broken branches returned to their rightful place, lifting and straightening until standing to proud effect. The cut-grass smell intensified as sap wept from along the trunk. Crumpled leaves flattened and the holes in them closed up and, where missing, new blades budded and burst forth—silver daggers bright with new life.
At last the changes slowed and stopped, and Kira felt satisfied the damage to the tree was repaired. The Soft Blade could have continued—it wanted to continue—but then the directive would have shifted from heal to grow, and that seemed to her greedy, foolish. An unwise tempting of fate.
So she recalled the suit.
“There,” she said, and lifted her hands. The tree stood whole and healthy, as before. An aura of energy seemed to emanate from it: life newly born and burnished to a high sheen.
Kira felt overcome with a sense of wonder at what the xeno was capable o
f. At what she was capable of. She’d managed to heal a living thing—to reshape flesh (of a sort) and to give comfort instead of pain, to create instead of destroy. Unbidden, a laugh escaped her. A weight seemed to lift from her shoulders, as if the thrust had dropped to half a g or less.
This was a gift: a precious ability pregnant with potential. With it she could have done so much on Weyland, in the gardens of the colony. With it she could have helped her father with his Midnight Constellations, or on Adrasteia, she could have helped the spread of green across the moon’s rocky crust.
Life, and all that meant. Triumph and gratitude filled her eyes with tears, and she smiled through them, happy.
A similar wonder gentled Falconi’s expression. “How did you learn to do that?” He touched a leaf with the tip of a finger, as if unable to believe.
“I stopped being so afraid.”
“Thank you,” he said, and never had Kira heard him sound so earnest.
“You’re … you’re welcome.”
Then Falconi leaned forward, put his hands on either side of her face, and—before Kira quite knew what was happening—kissed her.
He tasted different than Alan. Saltier, and she could feel the sharp tips of his stubble scraping against the skin around her lips.
Shocked, Kira froze, uncertain of how to react. The Soft Blade formed rows of dull spikes across her arms and chest, but like her, they remained held in position, neither advancing nor retracting.
Falconi broke the kiss, and Kira struggled to regain herself. Her heart was racing, and the temperature in the cabin seemed to have shot up. “What was that?” she said. Her voice rasped more than she liked.
“Sorry,” said Falconi, seeming somewhat abashed. It was an attitude she wasn’t used to seeing from him. “Guess I got carried away.”
“Uh-huh.” She licked her lips without meaning to and then berated herself for it. Dammit.
A sly grin crossed his face. “I don’t normally make a habit of hitting on crew or passengers. Unprofessional. Bad for business.”
Kira’s heart was pounding even harder. “That so.”
“Yes it is.…” He drained the last of the rotgut from the pouch. “Still friends?”
To Sleep in a Sea of Stars Page 71