Spaced

by Greg Curtis

  Deep spacers had been a dying breed even before this disaster. Now they might be all but extinct. Carm focused his thoughts to what mattered – any survivors. There was one thing that occurred to him though.

  “He had a dog. A scrappy little thing called Turps, because he looked like he'd been washed in the stuff.” Had they killed the dog too? He couldn't imagine why the android would bother, but he also couldn't imagine why it would feed or water the poor creature either. Plus he didn't know how long it had been since she’d killed Hermes and jacked the ship.

  “Alright marines, teams of two, covering positions.”

  Carm was distracted by the lieutenant's voice. Maybe that was a good thing. He didn’t want to have to think about the dead man.

  “Secure the ship. Watts, Daniels the reactor, refuelling. Domingo, Suarez, back to the hold, scan for coffins. Schmidt, Dirk, the bridge, bring the ship online. The rest search and secure. I want to be off this rock in twenty!” The lieutenant barked orders at his people, and swiftly they went into action. Every one of them knew the ship was going to be sunny side in only a few hours and after that the mission ended.

  It took a while. The Grey Lady was a big ship. It was confusing to watch with the holo divided up into at least a dozen different smaller images travelling in different directions. Five minutes later, after nothing exciting had happened, the ship's lighting came up to full strength. Power had been restored. And perhaps more importantly, no one had been attacked.

  A few minutes more they were treated to the sight of scanners working through the main hold, and what they showed was a surprise. The Grey Lady's main hold was designed to hold maybe eighty to a hundred thousand tonnes of aluminium ingots. It was absolutely cavernous. Carm hadn't thought to match that sheer size with the number of steel coffins that could be hidden behind its walls. There weren't the thirty or so he'd expected. There weren't even three hundred. Instead he had to be looking at two thousand coffins hidden behind the walls.

  How could that be? Surely there couldn't be that many mutes trying to get off Aquaria. Or were they kidnap victims? People like his parents. Perhaps they were rogues? Someone had to command all those bot armies and man the flyers after all. Could this be a rogue army? He was saved from having to voice his concerns as one of the marines said exactly the same thing. And he knew that the Edenites would have the technology they needed to work it out now that someone had suggested it. And from what he'd been told the Edenites were going to be carrying out the decanting of the coffins. They had more advanced medical tech.

  Another few minutes later the dozen holos gave way to one giving an external image of the Grey Lady from above as its thrusters fired. Carm felt a moment of cheer then. Now at least they had a chance of beating the sun. But it wasn't a celebration so much as a small measure of relief for Carm. His friend was still dead, likely the first of many.

  Still, as the ship lifted off, it was a signal, and the other fifty marine shuttles began their descent to the planet. People cheered. The rescue had begun.

  The only one who didn't was Carm. He couldn’t put the image of his dead friend out of his mind. Or the dread of how many more he was going to see.

  This was no victory for him.

  Chapter Forty

  The lab was a quiet place on the ship these days. And lately Carm needed that quiet. He showed a positive face in public when escorting the second load of mutes back to Eden. He was professional with the crew. But he needed the silence to come to terms with the tragedy which had befallen his people.

  Six hundred deep spacers dead. He kept trying to wrap his thoughts around the seriousness of thee situation and failed. It just didn't make sense. He’d known most of them. They were kin in a way, sharing a bond. They all had space in their blood. Whether they terraformed, mined, prospected, studied bio-systems or ancient civilizations or anything else, they all knew the lure of space, and the exploration of the unknown.

  And now they were gone.

  They shouldn't be. These were survivors. They took risks but they always came back. They frequented the same bars and restaurants on the same worlds. They told their tales of living through any number of catastrophes and they shared their discoveries too, the worlds they'd visited and the things they'd seen. Because all of them had been to places that no one else had. Places that probably no one else ever would. These were his friends.

  Now they wouldn't be coming back. They wouldn't be sharing drinks and meals, or showing the holos of their latest finds and toasting one another's triumphs and tales of survival. Drowning their sorrows to the loss of another fallen friend, another who'd gambled his or her life one too many times and been lost to space. They would never dance again.

  Back in Hellacious he'd spent time with the survivors, most of whom were as shocked and confused as he was. They'd had no thought that anything was wrong until their androids had attacked them and jacked their ships. And after that they'd had no chance to find out what was going on.

  Many of them had been wounded, some badly. Most had only got through their ordeal by locking themselves away in various parts of their ships. Androids weren't bots and they couldn't tear their way through solid doors and walls. And luckily they didn't have weapons on board. That was why it had been an effective strategy.

  They were still trying to cope with the betrayals as well as the grief. Some had heard Carm’s story. And many had listened to the initial call for them to give up their android companions. But they'd all rejected it. The fact that they'd turned out to be homicidal killers, the androids were incredibly skilful emotional manipulators, convincing their owners easily that it was only one of their number which had gone off program. The spacers wouldn’t give up their android for a possible defect.

  It had hurt to realise it, but they’d all been just as far under the control of their android companions as Carm had been. That shamed them. To be so controlled.

  The second call had never gone out. It was obvious what would have happened if it had. But the worst had happened anyway. The mechanical companions had taken control of the ships and fled.

  Where they'd jumped to no one knew, not even the survivors. The ships' computers had been down, taken completely offline by the jackers. And none of the surviving deep spacers had managed to lock themselves away in the astrogation labs. As for the androids, they weren't going to tell anyone. The Edenites might have the technology to render them harmless, but not to overwrite their programming. It had probably been somewhere in the Commonwealth where they could hear Kendra's message. At least for eight hundred and ninety-three of them. Maybe there were still others out there somewhere.

  A number were still down there. Eight hundred and ninety three ships to board in a matter of days was simply too many. They'd had to focus on the biggest ships which probably had more people on board. Many of the ships had crash-landed hard, and couldn’t lift off. They just had to hope that the remaining ships could withstand eight standard days of thousand-degree temperatures, and that they had enough power. And, as they came out of the sunny side of the planet, those ships were being emptied of coffins. But it was a long slow operation and there was a chance that they wouldn't be finished before the ships returned to it. They’d just have to hope that some antimatter was still running through their systems, cooling the ships enough inside to make it to the next night.

  The rogues were down there too. Alive and firing on any shuttles which got too close.

  The most difficult thing for Carm to deal with was when people kept congratulating him, telling him he'd done a great thing. He'd saved, according to their best counts, seventy thousand people. They couldn't see the six hundred his revelation had killed.

  “Carmichael you have an appointment for lunch.” The ship abruptly interrupted Carm's depression causing him to jump.

  “Give my apologies please, ship.”

  “I will not!” the ship answered indignantly. “You have passengers onboard heading for a new world they
know nothing about. Refugees in all but name. And they need to see their Captain. They need to be reassured. And they need to be told to keep their children from eating off my floors! Especially anything with chocolate or gravy. That stuff stains! The bots are having a terrible time cleaning the carpets.”

  “I'm busy.”

  “You are not busy!” The ship raised its voice in frustration. “You're just moping around like an unplugged mesh-head. But you could just as easily do those recalibrations next week or next month.”

  “This is important,” Carm tried again.

  “You are a ship's Captain! Nothing should be more important to you than making sure your ship's in perfect working order. And right now my carpets need cleaning!”

  Its carpets needed cleaning?! After everything they'd been through it was upset about its carpets? “Check your software ship. I think you may have hit an infinite loop of stupid!”

  “Oh very droll!” The ship didn't mean it. “That organic soup you call a brain is really running at light speed today!”

  “Fine.” Carm stopped arguing. He knew the ship wasn't going to give up. It was concerned about him and in its own clumsy way it was trying to fix him. “I'm on my way.”

  “Good! I'll let them know. And by the way one of those little mush brains brought a puppy onboard. You need to talk to them about litter trays and sanitisers! Or better yet flushing the thing out the waste disposal! The sharding thing is pissing on my walls!”

  “It's a puppy!” Carm was surprised by the ship's callousness.

  “Exactly! It's not a passenger, it hasn't paid a fare and it has no place on a passenger ship. I am not a stock transporter!”

  Carm sighed but somehow kept himself from responding. A personality transplant. It was the only option, if he was to ever get some peace again. It seemed like a betrayal after the ship had done so much for him. Saved his life. But lately it seemed to be running further and further off track.

  He needed to speak to the Guild.

  Chapter Forty One

  Annalisse was happy for once, for what seemed like the first time in a very long time. As the flyer headed for the space-port she almost felt like bursting into song. Accompanying her was Thirteen who now, thanks to some new parts, new programming and a shiny new chest plate, was back with her. In fact it was flying them.

  Doctor Simons’ parents though might get upset by her singing – assuming they had ears.

  Then again they might not. They were too shocked still. From their perspective they had one moment been in their home, worrying about their lost son, and then someone had shot them and they'd woken up on an Edenite ship, coughing up hyper-oxygenated fluids. Months had passed, so naturally enough all the messages they'd received from their family had left them confused. As far as they knew they'd never been missing at all.

  Theirs wasn't an uncommon story. As the steel coffins were opened one by one, they found many who had been kidnapped. Carmichael had been right – the rogues had been stealing knowledge and skills, the best and the brightest from an entire pantheon of intellects, and not just from Aquaria. Thus far they'd awakened scientists and scholars from nearly forty Commonwealth worlds. And a lot of them had been kidnapped as long as a year ago. But no longer.

  Annalisse wasn't completely sure why that was – the life support system could people alive in their coffins for years. But she suspected it was about security. If and when a ship jumped to the rogue world, it was never allowed to return. They knew that because they’d retrieved logs of all the deep spacer ships saved from the Hellacious system, and not one of them had the coordinates to the rogue's planet. It could be that the coordinates had been deleted – and technicians were going over all the logs in detail. But she suspected it was more basic than that. They'd simply never travelled there. And those which had, had never returned.

  Perhaps it was natural rogue paranoia, that no ship with the coordinates to their home could ever leave it, apart from the ones that were entirely theirs. And they had proof that the rogues were paranoid. It had become clear they were mistrustful in the Hellacious system. Those ships that had the coordinates had not been allowed to fall in to enemy hands. They'd discovered that when they'd watched the fallen rogue ships explode one after another. No one had fired on them. And it hadn't been a fault. They had blown themselves up rather than let themselves be boarded.

  Maybe the rogues would be able to tell them more – the ones who’d been pulled out of the coffins. The Edenites were keeping them. What they were going to do with their new prisoners she didn't know – though she doubted it would be anything terrible. The Edenites weren't that way inclined. And maybe it was best that they dealt with them. Of the few thousand coffins that had been opened so far one third were captured scientists, one third were Edenites fleeing the Commonwealth, with the remainder rogues. And the rogues, as best they could figure, were soldiers, preparing for the invasion of Eden. There were seventy thousand and something coffins in total, meaning twenty four thousand rogue soldiers.

  For the moment the situation was getting better. The Commonwealth had returned to some sort of order, the Navy was pulling itself back together. Naval Command was now full of new and inexperienced faces, but that was to be expected. Trials would start in a few months. The heavy and brutal hand of Maximilian White-Jones had been revealed, even in the massacre as Carmichael had said it would be – the geologist was bright.

  The ALEB was rebuilding too, with new hirings for the first time in many years. Now that the Navy’s budget had been slashed, there was more for everyone else. No one had ever realised just how much of the annual Commonwealth budget was going into fighting a non-existent war.

  Even from her perspective life was getting better. Her callipers were long gone, her crutches along with them and she would be able to begin fitness training in another week and then go back to light duties.

  Surely even Carmichael had to be happy. He had his family back. But he was such a natural depressive that maybe that was being too optimistic. Currently his ship was at the space-port, loading up once more with passengers, and he was probably still complaining about how unfair his life was.

  The man would find rain on a sunny day.

  “He really spaced himself?” Mrs. Simons asked the same question she had several times before.

  “And got back?” Her husband completed the question.

  Annalisse was beginning to realise that these two weren't quite normal. They seemed to have minds that wandered in circles. They would ask a question, get an answer and then return to it again later as if needing to check that the first answer had been correct. Maybe that was a good way to solve problems in synthetic programming – she didn't know – but it wasn't what she was used to. Still they were nice people and obviously extremely bright even if a little distracted.

  “Yes. He had a little help, but Carmichael is the first ever man to jump wild, space himself and return. He is a very resourceful person. You should be very proud.”

  “We are,” Mrs. Simons smiled at her from the back seat. “We didn't approve of his choice of career of course. It seemed dangerous and a waste of his talents. He should be running a research lab somewhere. But he always had this wild streak in him, a desire to explore.”

  “And that android of his. That was just wrong. But he wouldn't listen. I'm glad it's gone.”

  “The programming was good though,” Mr. Simons rubbed idly at his jaw. “Amazing really. I've never seen so many adaptive logic loops or analytic algorithms in one system before. Despite its size it was the equal of most AI's.”

  “Then there were the hypercore processors. At least ten thousand times faster than anything we've ever seen. We really need to study them in more detail.”

  “Well there's plenty of them around.” It was an odd sort of thing to be thinking about Annalisse mused. But she kept forgetting that for them, nothing had actually happened. They'd simply gone to sleep and woken up months later.

&n
bsp; “You know that Carmichael has suffered a significant loss?” Annalisse thought she'd better bring the conversation back to a topic she understood before the two of them started talking circuits. They'd done it before and it was the most boring conversation she’d ever had the misfortune to listen to.

  “A loss?”

  “The deep spacers. Six hundred of them were killed. Hundreds more are wounded, and even more are missing, potentially never to return. He's lost a lot of friends. Most of his peers.”

  “We know. We were told.” The mother seemed to understand. But did she really Annalisse wondered? Could anyone really understand what it was like to lose so many friends and colleagues all at once? It wasn't just the grief and the shock. It was the feeling that a part of your world had been stolen from right under your feet. At least it had been for her. And from what she'd seen it had been for Carmichael too. Perhaps worse, as he blamed himself for the tragedy. He was hiding it, doing his work. But according to the reports she'd been given, he was broken. She knew that feeling. Which was why she was so glad to be able to bring his parents to see him. To remind him that he had something left after all.

  “Space-port ahead,” Thirteen spoke up, ending the conversation before it could begin.

  One thing Annalisse had noticed about Thirteen. It had a nice shiny new chest plate and the technicians had given it a whole load of new parts as well as completely reloading its programmes. But they hadn't done anything about that cold, dead voice. Yet strangely she was glad of that. There was something very reassuring about it. Something she could trust even after all that had happened.