Jade Star (Tanager Book 1)

by Cedar Sanderson

  I ate, I drank. I didn’t taste anything. I felt only a sense of frustration at knowing that I had something in the ship with me. Something I couldn’t escape. I lay awake nights wondering if they had brainjacked me. Would I know, if I weren’t me any longer? What if I really was dead already and this was all I would ever know, an existence they let me have, thinkin’ I was autonomous but operating like a puppet on a string.

  I deleted the program I’d written. Wiped it off everything. Held my hands over the keyboard, ready to delete the systems that ran the ship. I’d figure out fast if I were dead.

  If I were dead.

  I could be dead, if I wanted to be. The little people weren’t here, to rescue me. And I could find out if there was a stowaway, because I was the ticket to their spread. They might not know they were truly alone. Depended on how much they understood of the rock herding I’d been doing. I’d been out of system when the rocks tore into the atmosphere, punched through metal, and ground the station into bits while the planet heaved and screamed with the tectonic plates shifting on the molten core. I hadn’t been there. Didn’t mean I didn’t have the imagination for it, or the dreams that kept me from sleep’s soothing touch.

  The answer lay in Death, all folded up like a paper crane. I’d taught the littles origami. It was good practice for the nimble fingers you need with waldoes, to keep from overcompensating and crushing what you only want to scoop up gentle-like. Right now I was unfolding the answer in my mind. If the ship were dead, and me with it, then they would die, too. If they were dead, then I could warn Earth of what was comin’ at them.

  I had no illusions that I’d committed genocide back there, in the system at the edge of the known universe. I’d just crushed an advance feeler. Did what had sent it know? I thought not. I might be wrong ‘o course. I’ve been wrong lots. But a virus is a thing that isn’t alive, or dead. A machine is a dead thing with a semblance of life that can be seen to dance – like a puppet, guided by a mind that is elsewhere. The thing, the someone, that had taken Termine’s choices was a bit of both, machine and virus and something alien. I could accept alien. My little friends were such.

  I tapped the keys, scheduling my plan. I got up and spun lightly on one toe, throwing my arms out wide. I wanted to feel alive, to move, to make my muscles obey my slightest thought. I didn’t want to sit there and keep thinking my body didn’t belong to me. I wanted to feel human again. I wanted to have his arms around me. I wanted to see the stars behind my eyelids, so like the stars that glittered outside, behind his head, while we became one under a dome of alumiglass. I danced to silent music until my legs quivered and my muscles were awash in pain. And then I walked into the tiny bay where the autodoc was, and with shaking fingers, programmed that, too.

  I got in, lying on the deep gel and feeling it ooze over my skin. I closed my eyes, and waited for death. I had no illusions, not anymore. If he were there, we’d kiss and press into one another, no bodies in the way. We’d been one, but that had been a choice, and we’d come apart after the joining. We’d been one, but two. The element of surprise, that had been what made it so good. Not knowing where he’d touch, press…

  The gel flowed over my face and I choked on it, thrashing. But the lid was closed and the machine had its orders. I died. It hurt, a lot.

  Chapter 8: A New Beginning

  Coming back to life wasn’t nearly as nice without Blackearspetting me. For one thing, I was still hurting, and wet, and breathing was something I had to think about, rather than let happen on its own. For another thing, I wasn’t sure I’d been successful and really wasn’t sure I could make myself pull that stunt again.

  I lay there in the autodoc, concentrating on breathing. In, and then out. After a hundred breaths, give or take, I realized I could do it without the internal commands. I decided I’d try sitting up. That took a little longer, because I had to stop and rest some more, and make sure breathing was still a thing. Reassured, I gave it another go. This time, I made sure to undog the lid and give it a bit of a push. The system was completely dead, but my adrenaline kicked in and I lifted it out of my way. I’d felt horribly trapped for a moment in the dead autodoc.

  I’m not going to bore you with the details of getting out of the machine. My chest felt like I’d been kicked with steel-toed boots, sat on, and then maybe kicked some more. I guessed it was from the restarting my heart. On vids, when you saw them do that, the body twitched and jerked all over the place. It was a little weird to picture myself doing that. Or maybe it hadn’t happened. Vids are for drama, not for reality.

  I made it out, and on my feet, standing there swaying, one arm still hooked over the lid for support. The gel had receded, mostly. I was dripping wet and naked. But alone. I didn’t feel like I was being watched. Did that mean I wasn’t?

  I still didn’t know, and it was going to drive me crazy. Crazier. I figured I was already well around the bend, anyway. Too much quiet, too little information, loose ends I couldn’t answer. Not ever. Can the human mind take living with no answers? I wasn’t sure about that. We make up stories for ourselves, to get the endings we so badly need. Beliefs, faith, and an assurance that it all means something.

  I staggered away from the machine and toward the bridge. If the air felt stale, motionless, right then, I didn’t notice. I couldn’t have told – I was moving enough nothing felt still. It wasn’t until I collapsed into the captain’s chair that I realized something was wrong.

  The control boards were dead. The autodoc is independent of the ship, which is why I’d trusted it to bring me back. I’d gambled on that, being insufficient power to attract my stowaway while it was panicked. But while I’d been successfully restarted, the ship had not. The first thing I did, was go get a suit. I’d programmed the system to reboot, and do an air flush and recycle when it did. I was supposed to have been safely dead in the autodoc while that was going on. There was air, some, the circulation fans and life support were off. But the recycle would be unpleasant in my bare skin.

  Skinsuit on, I sat back at the board. The manual, which I’d near committed to memory, was only accessible when the system was online. Because the only time any sane human would take it offline was in a repair dock. Like the one I’d first seen it in, on Termine. I hadn’t anticipated having to troubleshoot it. I had looked at the directions on how, though. I did try to plan for trouble.

  Pressing buttons didn’t work. There was no power to the board. Mindful of the air tank pressed between my shoulderblades, I crawled under the captain’s desk. I knew there was power, or it would have been dark. Ergo, the board was a limited outage. I wouldn’t know a blown cable if it bit me… but I did know that a cable shouldn’t sound crunchy when I touched it gingerly.

  I backed out and sat on the floor, thinking. I’d found where the stowaway had been. Wrapped around the powerline, no doubt. Possibly in the reactor itself. No. Then the whole ship would be dead. Might as well be dead, if I couldn’t power the computer systems back up. Man cannot fly a ship manually anymore. Space just isn’t as easy as the sea or atmosphere, and I had been told they weren’t easy to conquer back when we were trapped on the mudball.

  So. Spare cabling, to replace the stuff that was fried. I needed a computer. No way around that. I knew there was an equipment closet – found that exploring, when I was trying to figure out how to kill off my stowaway. I’d done that, it seemed.

  The cabling was in a neat coil. Heavy, but not unmanageable. I checked my suit air. The ship’s air was starting to taste stale, and I wasn’t sure if that was in my head, or not. The suit, obligingly, because it didn’t care if my helmet was sealed, gave me a readout. Okay, the stale was in my head, but I didn’t have a lot of time to do this.

  I cracked the panel to the reactor. I didn’t have the tools to access it. No point in putting those in the toolkit, even for emergencies. If you cracked that, you’d be all the way dead. I was reserving that for the last resort. Some kind soul had labeled the cables for me, at some point in the
past, with Galstandard and iconic representations. Blessing them, although they were no doubt as dead as the rest on Termine, I switched the dead one out for the one I had on the spool, and headed slowly back toward the bridge, playing it out in the narrow corridor. I’d tidy it up later. Right now, I wasn’t going to trip on it, unless I got so punchy from lack of oxy I couldn’t help it.

  The cable ran out before the corridor did. I stood there in arm’s reach of the bridge hatch, and stared stupidly at the dead board, the plug in my hand. Cables don’t stretch. I was done. I was…

  I checked my readings and put my helmet on. I sat on the deck, still clutching the cable like it was going to whip out of my grasp and vanish. After a minute of breathing clean air, my brain came back online. If I couldn’t get the cable to the board, I’d bring the board to the cable.

  That took some time. I was beginning to wonder if I could manage it on the suit’s air, which was reading into the orange on the handy head’s up display, when I got the board loose of the mounts, but not the cables, and stretched it out carefully. Like most install jobs, there were spirals and coils of cables back up and under it. It would, just, reach the power cable. I needed the screens to be online, too. I had to detach one, it just didn’t have the play in the line to get to a point where it would connect. I pushed, twisted, and felt rather than heard the cable click into place.

  The red standby light flickered on. I was sitting on the floor, my back to the bulkhead and the board balanced sort of on my lap. But it had power. I pressed the restart button. The red LED blinked twice, and then went out. I had to think about breathing, again. I’d almost forgotten the physical discomfort in my race to get the ship back up and running. The light flashed green, and the board lit up with a diagnostic inquiry.

  It wasn’t until a bit later, when I felt I could take off my helmet and test the air, since the board said life support was optimal and scrubbing, that I realized there were alarms screaming all over the ship. The suit had shut all the sound out. I started to laugh, and it took me a while to stop again. I was still giggling from time to time as I maneuvered the board off my legs and went to find them and switch them off.

  We’d – no, I’d – been down to emergency power. It wouldn’t do to think of the ship as sentient. I wasn’t that crazy. I was the one pulling the ship’s strings. Even if it did seem to be really unhappy with me for turning it off. Took a while to find and reset all the alarms.

  The ship – who really needed a name, I’d decided at some point while cursing it out finding the last alarm panels – drifted in space. I was once again lost in the vast black of deep nothingness. There weren’t any portals of alumiglass on this ship. I’d have liked one. The screens weren’t satisfactory for looking at the stars.

  Not that I was trying to navigate by dead reckoning. Too far off the surveyed track to pull that off. But I did have an idea of where the buoy was that I’d planned to squirt the message to, and I could backtrack from there.

  Once I was certain I was alone, that was. Just because I’d been dead, and the ship was dead, and something weird had happened to the power cable, didn’t mean I’d succeeded in killing the stowaway. I went back to the board and awkwardly crouched over it, programming it to go back three stops. I’d take on fuel, and decide what my story was going to be.

  Chapter 9: The Cat Walks Alone

  By the time I came back into human space again, I was desperate. It had been months since the reboot of the ship, and me. I’d stayed away as long as I could, but I was lonely. It gnawed at me like a living thing, and I finally decided that I could make contact with humans again, or lose every bit of my own humanity. I’d embraced life, and I wasn’t sure what I’d do with it yet, but lurking in space living on my own recycled excreta wasn’t living.

  I’d had time to come up with a story, and it was the reboot that meant I could probably carry it off if they didn’t scratch at it too hard. Their computers would ping my computers… and find something scrambled and incomprehensible there. Maybe the same could be said of my mind, but I had no intention of telling the whole story to anyone.

  Like my little friends, I chose an outlying planet with very little population. Two colonies, one on each continent. This was a wet world, wetter than Earth. Vast seas roiled with storms below me as I picked a signal and followed it in toward the colony. Even the automated voice reading off weather reports and landing coordinates sounded good to me. Humans. If I could trust what I’d been told at Termine, there had to be a physical inoculation for the infection to spread. If I saw a human and lost control over my own body, I’d know then, and could take steps. Had taken steps.

  The ship spiraled slowly under power deep into the atmosphere. I couldn’t see much on visuals, the screens reported towering clouds from a storm that was sweeping toward the colony and would pass over it shortly after my arrival. I sat on the floor with the board, craning my neck to see the screens.

  When we broke out of the clouds, we were very low to the ground, which whipped past in a gray-green blur. I could just see the ceramsteel of a dome ahead, when the automated landing signal squawked and shut off. I sat up straight, alarmed.

  “Unknown ship, this is Pythias.” A female voice crackled from my speaker – I’d probably damaged it in moving the board. I relaxed back against the bulkhead and toggled my comm on.

  “Pythias, this is the scout ship 7815, coming in under emergency conditions.” I was pleased to hear my voice was steady and even. It wouldn’t have done to sound mad.

  “7815, please state the nature of your emergency.” I might have been imagining it, but the voice sounded a bit nervous. I didn’t blame her at all, after what I’d been through.

  “Pythias, this ship has had a catastrophic computer failure. Refitting is needed, and air.” I hesitated, wondering if I needed to explain further. But I guessed that was enough, as they answered me promptly.

  “We have limited facilities, Scout 7815, but plenty of air. Let’s get you safe under cover before the storm runs you over.”

  The storm I’d just flown through. I wondered about their scanners, that they hadn’t seen that. I also wondered what I was going to wear. I’d been wearing the skinsuit, or my skin, long enough that even the suit’s self-cleaning abilities were taxed. I went for a rummage in the cabin I’d been sleeping in. I knew that the ship had been stocked when it was given to me. And it wasn’t like I couldn’t buy whatever I wanted – although I’d have to be very careful about letting anyone know I had that many Almeida stones. And there was also the possibility that the tiny colony had nothing for sale. I didn’t have much time, so I pulled on the first things I found, and got my butt back to the board.

  So when I’d gotten the ship safely in a massive hangar and watched the shield flicker into place between me and the storm, I was wearing a pair of brown suede pants that had probably fit the man who’d bought them loosely, but on me they clung almost indecently in places, which was only partly concealed by the loose white shirt I’d buttoned over them and up to my throat.

  I stood in the hatch, waiting for an invitation to leave the ship, and watched the tiny screen as someone walked across the empty bay toward me. Shiny ceramsteel on the floor told me that this was a little-used landing point. It’s tough material, but will scar if it has ships landing and taxiing very often. I couldn’t make much out on the screen, besides ‘humanoid’ until they walked up the ramp and pressed the comm button.

  “Pythias ground control to Scout 7815, you have permission to disembark.” The young man spoke gravely, as though he weren’t wearing greasy coveralls and sporting a wide streak of dark grease across his forehead, like he’d pushed back his shaggy dark hair. I could feel my cheek muscles aching as my heart leaped. He looked and sounded like a real person, and I had not realized until that moment how much I missed human company. I needed this, needed it with a hunger that frightened me.

  “Thank you, Pythias.” I answered him, activating the hatch.

  He was wa
iting, a polite couple of steps down the ramp, when I came out of my ship. I extended a hand to him.

  “Hello, my name is Jade.” I had made an effort to rid myself of the accent. It would make me distinctive, and I was planning on becoming a new person. I’d died. I was alive, and I was working from a clean slate.

  He hastily wiped his hands on the gray coveralls, leaving behind more grease stains. “I’m Marsh. Welcome to Pythias.”

  “I was very happy to land.” I told him, with a wide smile. He smiled back cheerfully.

  “We don’t get many visitors. Well, ok, we don’t really get any. Just the company ship twice a year, whether we need them or not.” He bounced from foot to foot. “Would you like to, um, meet the family?”

  He assumed I would follow and turned to go down the ramp, talking over his shoulder. “Mam wouldn’t forgive me if I didn’t invite you.”

  “Is it just your family here?” I asked curiously, keeping pace with him as he headed for big loading doors. They were closed, but he led me to a small hatch that was open, but obviously could be sealed if the bay were depressurized – which was odd to see on a planet.

  I didn’t have time to think very much about it, as my new friend kept chattering at me. They really didn’t get many ships, or he was just very friendly. “Well, it’s a big family. Mam and Da, Uncles, aunts, and a whole bunch of cousins. And my sibs. There’s room for more, but at this stage the company didn’t want to add more population. Not until the terraform is closer to complete.”