Uncanny Magazine Issue 37

by Lynne M. Thomas

  Belal sighed. “Yeah. Except they’re not just ships, though, are they?”

  Jebd is waiting for her when she arrives. The dome of the chop shop is smaller than the dealership had been, and blue instead of orange to blend in with the planet surface. She actually misses it the first time around and has to loop back, tapping her IPS and cursing, before it finally reveals itself.

  Jebd isn’t alone either. Two armed guards accompany him, guns strapped to their waists.

  “Sorry for the precautions. But…well…you understand.”

  She nods to the guards who nod back with a military sort of seriousness. She does understand—or she did once. You needed to protect special things. And sometimes protection looked like violence. Sometimes safety looked like betrayal. Sometimes love looked like lies.

  Jebd walks her through a cavernous warehouse, large ship parts lined up on rows of floor-to-ceiling shelving maintained by efficient little warehouse droids. Small and dumb, but strong. They shuffle between stacks, fulfilled by the constant flow of simple, necessary work. Level-1 AI if anything at all.

  As she looks closer, she begins to better understand the facility she’s in, the reason for the guards and the annoying bit of camouflage. Not just ship parts but jump drives from R-class personnel carriers, advanced nav units from the zippy little strikers she flew in training, blasters and their rotary machinery in all sizes. These are relics. Expensive, dangerous, valuable relics. Something brightens and flutters in her chest at the realization. A hummingbird for a heart.

  That’s what Ziggy always called it. So soft and quick compared to the deep, thrumming beat of his own core. Her hummingbird heart.

  “How can you hear it?” she’d asked him once, expecting him to explain something about his connection to her interface chip, his duty to monitor the well-being of the crew. But instead he became quiet.

  “Zig. I asked you a question.”

  His lights dimmed ever so slightly, as if trying to become small. As if trying to hide from her.

  “Zagreb?”

  You’ll be mad if I tell you.

  “I promise I won’t be mad. And if it’s something I should be mad about, we’ll talk through it together. It’ll be okay, I swear.” In hindsight, Iyara realizes that these are the same words her mother used to say. The same tone. The same stern kindness. But hindsight can’t help her now.

  His air ducts had sighed as he responded, his voice featherlight in her mind, nuzzling up against her consciousness. I can only hear it if I turn off all the other inputs and listen to the audio very carefully. It’s so quiet and gentle. But the sound. It helps me sometimes.

  “Helps you what?”

  Helps me feel safe.

  She stroked a hand across his walls. “Oh, my sweet boy…” She didn’t understand the mechanics of it, how he’d managed to overwhelm his programing and shut down all his other processors, the parts that detected poison in the air and stealth-fighters hiding against the black of the universe. But she understood what it meant, the danger it had put them all in. And she understood what she’d have to do if anyone else found out.

  “Never tell anyone again.”

  Jebd leads them to a small door at the other end of the warehouse. “I think we have something very special for you here, Captain.”

  She raises an eyebrow at the mention of her old rank.

  Jebd smiles his blue smile. “Did some research on you after you left. Had to make sure you were the real deal.”

  “How’d I measure up?”

  “Your service record is impressive. Can’t believe what you did on Gharnum. Blasted them straight out of the sky. You’re a fucking hero.”

  She laughs. “That’s a word for it, I guess.”

  “Hero? Well whatever you prefer, it’s definitely earned you the right to see this.”

  She’d rather not get into all the things she’d rather be called, the ugly names she really deserves: liar, betrayer, coward. She doesn’t feel bad for the people she killed in the war—they were trained not to. But if she thinks about it too much, forgets her breathing exercises, she remembers seeing the Gharnum blockade ships crack open like eggs. She sees Zig’s lights dim even as she plugs in his orders, refusing to take them. It’s dangerous.

  She remembers how surprised and angry she was. How badly she just wanted him to go back to being her easy, obedient ship—no heartbeats, no secrets, no pauses, no overrides, no questions except How far and How fast. How she’d ordered him to move. How he’d refused again.

  She remembers seeing her fellow pilots—the Eagle-12s on the front line—blown out of the sky when the second Gharnum unit ambushed them. And she remembers her rage afterwards.

  Jebd opens the door and cool grey light filters through, illuminating a room that is much too small for what she hoped would be on the other side. It’s approximately four standard cubits, barely a storage cupboard.

  She looks at him, confused. Maybe this is just another detour. Another security check. The room should be cavernous. Achingly large. The size of a smartship. The size of her loss and hope and…but no. There are no doors beside the one they’ve entered through.

  A trap then?

  Her old fighter reflexes twitch, and she bends her legs ever so slightly, clenches her fists. She may be old enough to be a grandparent, but she’s pretty sure she can take at least one of the three down.

  Instead, the eager salesman motions towards a dusty shelf, and one of the guards steps forward to pull a cardboard box down.

  No extra security measures. No keypad or retinal scanner. No anti-grav containment sphere. No uranium rigged lock. No nothing.

  Just a cardboard box. The guard sets it down on a small metal table in the center of the room and then retreats to a corner.

  Jebd smiles at her like a proud parent. “I think you’ll be very excited to see this,” he says. “Took me ages to get my hands on it, but I’m something of a collector myself.”

  He opens the box, nimble fingers picking apart the old tape, the flaps brittle and waterfalling dust. Something that looks like a tiny green crustacean tumbles from one corner and scuttles indignantly off the table.

  Her hopes follow after it.

  Out of the box, Jebd pulls a large, glass cube. Inside, is something that looks like an exploding computer frozen mid-blast. A dying mammoth preserved in ice. As he turns it over in the light, she can see all the little micro-rings and filters, diodes and transistors, and the many fractured parts of a dozen circuit boards, their qubits lined up like broken teeth.

  Each metal part captures the light and reflects it back, focusing it into little fairy lights that dance across the walls as Jebd spins the cube for her to admire. It’s beautiful. Too beautiful for what it all means.

  “It used to be the USS Berlin, well, the quan-comp part of it anyway. The brain. He fought in the Final Battle of the Heights, was captained under Belal Malcolm, decommissioned…” Jebd pauses and looks at a little brass plaque fixed to one corner. “…3087. So, that’s right after the war. Look, you can still see the name on this piece right here.” He holds the cube out for her to take.

  “I’m not doing it,” Belal said. They sat across from each other in the same bar they’d been meeting in for years, both a little harder, both a little more broken after all they’d done in the war.

  “You have to.”

  “I won’t,” Belal said, their voice strangely calm. As if giving a briefing report, not proposing treason. “He doesn’t know what’s happening or what he did wrong. I’m not letting them take him.”

  “It’s part of de-armament. Without it, everything we fought for goes to pieces. We go back to war and more people will die. Do you want that?”

  They’d been circling around the same argument for weeks, ever since the treaty was signed and the deadline for compliance announced. Her responses were rote. After her debriefing on the Gharnum incident with central command, they’d put in the decommission order. Explained to her how it was just some mai
ntenance and AI re-updates until they’d been deemed safe for re-entry into the force. And she believed them. Belal shook their head.

  “I’m not debating you, Iyara. I’m warning you: if you go through with this and turn Zagreb in, they’re going to kill him.”

  “Don’t be dramatic. He’s just going to go into dry-dock for a bit.”

  “They will, and you’re naive if you don’t believe it.”

  Anger flared in her stomach, and guilt. She hadn’t told Belal about Zig.

  “Naive? I’m the naive one here? What, you think the military is just running around destroying tech they spent trillions building? The smartships cost too much. They took too much research. They’re too valuable to just tear apart.”

  “Valuable as weapons, sure, but we’re not at war. No one else knows them like we do. No one cares. To everyone else they’re just ships. But to us, they’re—”

  She cut them off like she did every time they tried to get too sentimental with her. “I can’t believe you’re actually serious about this. About throwing your life away.”

  But Belal pushed ahead. “Why won’t you say it, Iyara? You’re the only one who doesn’t say it.”

  “Say what?” The question came out too sharp and fast. Not a question: a challenge.

  “Zig’s not just a ship, is he? None of them are, and you know it.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” A hummingbird fluttered in her chest.

  “You remember that time your ship discovered lullabies? You ran out of songs so you made me ask my parents what they used to sing to me so you’d have more. What fucking ship do you know that likes lullabies? Children like lullabies because that’s what they are, Iyara. They’re our children. Lin, Ziggy, Ana, K.L, Brooklyn, all of them.”

  She glared at her friend, frozen by the words they’d said out loud. The words that duty and honor and training had taught them both to override, to tamp down, to replace with “ship” and “weapon” and “vessel”.

  When she didn’t answer, Belal continued. “Look. You’ve been a good friend to me, a good captain to your crew, and a good soldier. Hell, you beat my ass at every training exercise we ever undertook. But this isn’t an order you can just follow. This is a choice. I can’t tell you what to do. But I can tell you that I’m taking Lin. We’re heading out past the reach, somewhere beyond the Landis system where no one can find us, and I’m going to keep him safe.”

  Iyara ignored the constricted feeling in her own heart. “That’s suicide. There’s nothing out past the reach. You’ll starve or worse, they’ll find you and shoot you for treason.”

  “You think that’s worse?” Belal laughed. “I can think of worse things.”

  A small, horrible part of her is relieved. Not Zig. At least it’s not Zig. She looks at the glass cube—the smartship soul frozen in amber—and looks at Jebd. “How much?”

  Jebd smiles, puts the cube down on the table beside the box. “It took me a long time to get ahold of. Very difficult to find smartship pieces anymore. And this. It might be the only quan-comp of its kind left in the galaxy. The military had them all—”

  “—decommissioned. Yes. I know. How much?” She’s over-eager, and he’s going to jack up the price on her for it. But, it doesn’t matter. She can’t help herself. If she thinks too hard about it, the dam she’s built up in her heart will break, so all she can do is act.

  “Forty-eight thousand,” he says.

  “You’re kidding me. Kroners?”

  “That’s nearly what I paid for it. As I said. It was very hard to get ahold of, and that’s not to mention the work I had to put into the display.”

  Anger flashes through her, the scar of loss peeling open to reveal a raw wound. “You did this?” she says.

  “The display? Yes. Unfortunately it was already broken by the time I found it, but there’s an artisan on Eebos who does beautiful things with glass. I thought it made the whole thing look more dramatic, more like something you could put in an art museum.”

  Her anger does not cool, but she knows that it’s misplaced. God, she wants to place it somewhere so badly: on Jebd; on this planet; on the war; on her superiors. Anywhere other than herself. But it’s not Jebd’s fault. Not his fault that Belal’s ship was murdered and taken apart, his heart shoved into a battle cruiser, his skin melted for scrap, his mind torn apart and frozen in glass. It’s not his fault that, in the end, she’d chosen to be a good soldier. Not his fault that Ziggy’s gone.

  She taps the implant on her forearm and brings up her account. Her compensation after the war was significant. All the smartship captains ended up rich—at least those that had cooperated. The ones that didn’t were all dead, or in jail, or AWOL along with their ships. But her small fortune has been shrinking rapidly over the past decade. All her searching isn’t free—there’s research and travel expenses, not to mention the cost of all the parts she’s collected over all these years. It’s her penance.

  Hong Kong’s drive core.

  Anadarko’s dorsal fin.

  Bergen’s gravity generator.

  Kuala Lumpur’s console.

  Singapore’s primary access hatch.

  She’s down to her last hundred thousand kroners, and if she buys this, she won’t have enough to live on for more than a couple years. But it’s the closest she’s gotten to finding one of them alive, to finding him, and she’d pay her life to hear Ziggy’s voice again, gentling through her chip. It’s the price she’s been paying since the war.

  So she transfers the credits.

  Jebd feels the buzz on his forearm and looks surprised. “Just like that?”

  “Just like that.”

  He places what’s left of Berlin back in the box, folding the cardboard back into place, movements quick and bright. He tries to make conversation, but she just nods along. If she speaks it will all come out, her guilt and shame. Her anger. And she needs those things now. They’re what keep her together.

  “Pleasure doing business with you,” Jebd says as she exits through the docking bay, headed back to her skiff.

  Business. Such an innocuous word for what they’ve just done. She knows a lot of words like that: hero; honor; orders. So many ways to obscure things like betrayal and destruction. So many ways to pretend her good boy was just another ship, was just the SSV Zagreb and not Ziggy.

  She holds Berlin in her lap as she drives the skiff across the planet’s surface, then angles it up towards where her cruizer waits in the sky.

  Aboard, she carefully places the cube amongst the other pieces she’s found on this trip. Rivets and metal plating. Bits of original circuitry. Maybe some of it was Ziggy’s once, but she’ll never know for sure. She likes to think they aren’t. She’s never found anything of his. Never found his heart or mind or anything with his name etched on the side, and she’s been searching for so long, trying to find proof that he’s still alive. Trying to give their children a decent memorial. It gives her an aching kind of hope.

  Pre-plugged into the IPS is home, a modest house on a planet only three cycles away where she keeps most of her treasures. Her museum to the war. Her mausoleum.

  But instead of initiating the drive sequence, she hesitates.

  When she landed him for the last time, he’d known something was wrong. Something about her chemical signature, her mood, maybe her heartbeat had given her away.

  Problem, Captain? he asked, his consciousness chirping quietly against hers.

  “No problem, Zig. No problem. We’re just going back to headquarters for a little bit. The crew needs a little shore leave.”

  Ziggy hated shore leave. Hated being away from her for longer than a few hours. The air vents sighed.

  Will it be for long?

  “Not long.”

  Where are we going after?

  “I don’t know, Zig. I don’t…just leave it alone,” she said, her sadness coming out as frustration.

  He grew quiet.

  “Landis,” she said finally, rem
embering Belal’s plan. “After this we’re going to the Landis system.”

  That’s very far away.

  “Yep. You’ll need to rest up for the journey, so be a good boy and be sure to do what the docking crew tells you to do.”

  He thrummed happily at the prospect: him and her, together going fast and far.

  Iyara knows that people like her don’t deserve to cry. They don’t deserve regret or heartache after what they’ve done. And so she doesn’t allow herself any of that.

  “This isn’t just an order you can follow.”

  She’d made a choice.

  She doesn’t have any pictures of Zig—can’t bear to keep them around—but stuck under the metal corner of her console is a picture of Belal in their dress blues beside their ship. Old age got them in the end. Apparently human war heroes deserved more consideration than metal ones. Instead of an execution, Belal had been shuffled off to a jail cell. The first time she visited, they’d been so angry with her they wouldn’t even pick up the little phone by the window. But time softened them.

  “Why you?” Belal asked once, early on, before they’d quite forgiven her. “Why do you get freedom?”

  She still doesn’t have an answer to that. Never will. Why are good people locked up? Why are good ships torn apart? Why do bad people get to follow orders and walk away unscathed? There’s no fairness to it. But it is.

  She plugs in new coordinates for out past the reach. Iyara isn’t a good person, but she knows other words to cover up the bad things she’s done. She knows “duty” and “promise” and she thinks that maybe if she can’t keep her own promises, then at least now she can keep Belal’s.

  It’s a long trip to the Landis system—a couple years at least—so she’ll need to use the last of her money to stock up on supplies, and there’s no certainty anything will be waiting for her when she gets there. No certainty of food or water or refueling stations.

  But she’ll get there. Lin will get there. And who knows what she’ll find.

  She taps the chip behind her ear once more, just in case it judders anything loose—it’s mostly habit now—and says, “Hey, sweet boy. I’ll be home soon.”