Eclipse

by K. A. Bedford

  I should delete that last bit. Self-pity and all. But I’m trying to tell the truth here, while I can. Or such truth as can be found in the eyewitness testimony of a single person’s account. I imagine Rudyard or Ferguson would remember those final days rather differently.

  I wonder if Ferguson would crow about attacking me? For some strange reason I feel bad about how he and I parted company. Which is nuts, isn’t it? Considering.

  I wonder if Rudyard still hears the voices of the aliens talking to him, denying him his final sleep, wherever he is now.

  I’ve thought a lot about Sorcha. No, scratch that. I’ve thought endlessly about Sorcha. I’ve relived that fleeting kiss in the hallway so often I think the memory is wearing out from overuse. I know it’s hard now to recall exactly the entire experience. The memory succumbs to noise in the system, gets harder to pick up. Or my brain is just crapping out on me the way this boat is slowly crapping out on me, too. Ah, Sorcha. It’s astonishing to think about how so much of what’s happened is because of her. Conventional wisdom these days holds that human space is too vast, that there are too many people for the actions of one person to make a difference to the way people live their lives. She proved them all wrong, I suppose. One very angry woman with infosphere access can do a lot. I’m glad, in a perverse way, that I’ve left all that behind. Out here in the dark, there are other, more pressing, things to worry about.

  Day 131

  The boat’s little fab unit broke down earlier. I’m sitting here, surrounded by the machine’s components, wondering what the hell to do now. There’s no backup — looks like it got ripped out a couple of refits ago. Matter conduit throughput isn’t what it could be, either; so as power ­conversion rates fall, so does the matter pump pressure.

  So I’m investigating the prefabbed stuff and counting the canisters of water.

  Which brings me to a grim calculus: what standard of living do I want as I plunge out into unknown space? I can have a relatively decent supply of food and water — for a short while. Or I can hang on for a lot longer, especially if I can bring myself to drink my own piss while I see the sights.

  Day 133

  The boat’s sensors just picked up some kind of low-powered transient communication burst. I found a sheet of cheap Active Paper in the emergency supplies locker, and I’m using its signal analysis system to probe the burst’s structure. So far it contains no origin identifiers corresponding to any state or organization in human space. I’ve also screened out pulsar signatures, gamma-bursts; in fact, all known repeating-signal astrophysical phenomena. I’ve ruled them all out.

  I have no idea what I’ve got here, but it’s almost certainly an artificially generated signal designed to make sense to someone.

  I already know the Gardeners are out here. The signal analyzer in my Paper hasn’t been updated to recognize the Gardeners — which isn’t surprising.

  The Gardeners again. I thought I was done with those bastards.

  Shit.

  Day 136

  Lifeboat environment management system has been feeding status reports straight into my Paper. Power conversion rates are trending way down. Heat is hard to make, air is hard to scrub. I tinker as best I can, but what I really need is an engineer. Or a systems guy, like Dad.

  Which is a thought I don’t need right now.

  I’m having nightmares about Dad, the way he died with all those other people. It’s hard to write. Hard to make the words for how I feel. How can Dad be dead? Hard to hit the Paper’s keyboard tabs. I’m making all kinds of mistakes. Shivering. I’m going to have to put a survival suit on.

  Already so cold. Can see my breath. The blankets help, but aren’t enough. The universe is sucking heat out of this boat fast.

  Day 138

  Environment systems are pretty well screwed. I can hear the coils failing. Yesterday there was a fire in the oxygen processor subsystem.

  I’m eating my rations too fast.

  Day 143

  Hard to keep recording now. Voice failing. I’m shivering so much. But I had to make an entry.

  Something appeared, a few minutes ago. Bloody huge object. I’m falling towards it. Sensors say it’s about ten days away, at boat’s current velocity. I have no way to brake.

  Tried sending basic greeting. No response.

  It just flashed into being, right in front me.

  The way the Gardeners appeared, that day. I’m thinking whatever or whoever this thing is, it might be the Gardeners, though it doesn’t quite look the same as the thing I saw before. This thing changes shape as you look at it. And that ­horrible light looks familiar.

  They are waiting for me. Feels that way. They let me go before, and now they’ve come to get me after all.

  I’ll try to record what this thing looks like. Big job. It’s made of light and acute angles; its shape is not fixed. It has a surrounding cloud of other lights. Sensors can see it most of the time, but they can’t agree on its composition; even its exact location is hard to determine.

  I keep thinking I’ll end up inside it and find a dead cat and a broken bottle of poison: Schrödinger’s monster alien artifact.

  If it were the size of my hand, it would look beautiful hanging on a Christmas tree. But out there, at that size, possibly alive, it scares me shitless just like the way it did before.

  Suicide looks better all the time.

  Nineteen

  I don’t know how, but I wound up in the Infirmary after Ferguson had finished with me. Dr. Critchlow told me, when I woke up after the surgery, that I’d been lucky to survive, and that I’d lost a great deal of blood. The physical damage was fixed, Critchlow said; there’d be no scarring, though for a few days I had to stay on fluids only.

  Critchlow asked, “It was Ferguson, wasn’t it?”

  I was curled up, on my side, facing away from him. I said nothing. I stared at the wall. I couldn’t imagine speaking or having anything to say ever again.

  “If you testified,” the doctor went on, “we could make a fair case against him.”

  When I didn’t respond, Critchlow gave me a talking to about my responsibilities. Then he left. His footsteps on the tiles made a lot of noise.

  Later that day Lily Riordan showed up. She was all ­business. “Spacecraft Services Officer Level 1 Dunne, J.”

  I understood this tone. But I didn’t care. It was like she was a long way away from anything that mattered.

  She took my lack of response for agreement. “Mr. Dunne: SCO Level 6 Ferguson, R., executive officer of this vessel, HMS Eclipse, has presented me with evidence of your col­lusion with Admiral Caroline Greaves, a known ­conspirator against the Service and the Home System Community. Mr. Ferguson has also shown me evidence that you maliciously attempted to access his headware self-destruct controls with the aim of committing murder. I must, therefore, according to the Standard Code of Military Justice, advise you that I am placing you, Mr. Dunne, under arrest, pending full court-martial to be conducted upon our return to Service Headquarters at Ganymede.”

  I said nothing, and kept looking at the wall.

  “Mr. Dunne,” Riordan said, her tone softer, “you are of course entitled to counsel, public or private, and I should also point out that the nature of the situation Mr. Ferguson described to me is such that my office believes you might be in a unique position to make a statement regarding the circumstances surrounding your alleged attack against Mr. Ferguson, and your involvement in the admiral’s plot against the Service. Your cooperation now will be taken into consideration during the court-martial proceedings.”

  It was like listening to someone speaking a long way off, on the other side of a rushing river.

  She went on, “We’ll be back at Ganymede in about three weeks. If we’re going to get Ferguson, we have to move soon. Only your testimony agains
t him will overcome the captain’s protection. You have to make a complaint. If you cooperate, it will go easier on you with the treason charges. It means maybe twenty years in prison instead of execution, for Christ’s sake! It means we could get a full inquiry into the Service, and without Admiral Greaves’ cloak-and-dagger methods. Don’t you even care?”

  Riordan obviously wasn’t paying attention. I didn’t care. The place I was in was calm and quiet. I thought I could see a small pond with a wooden bridge over it. There was a breeze, and the tinkle of wind chimes.

  “Damn you, Dunne!” Riordan shook my shoulder, trying to get my attention. “I know you’re not asleep. Your eyes are open and whether you like it or not, you will respond to your senior officers with due respect!”

  I was sitting on wild grass, with bright yellow ­daisies springing up everywhere, their blooms tilted like tiny radio telescopes towards the sun and sky, even if the Martian atmosphere did give it a kind of pink tint. Hard to think about what it must have been like, back on Earth, with that enormous blue sky. Not that I had seen it, even in vids from those days; vid companies these days colored the skies pink in those old Earth movies. Only the old people, the really old ones, over a hundred and fifty or so, gave a damn.

  Some lazy bees pottered quietly among the daisies. There were a few kids in the distance, near some trees, kicking a soccer ball around; I heard them yell and laugh.

  I wondered if Sorcha would show up. It was a lovely day for a picnic. But I remembered there was something about her being on Ganymede. She’d been there since… I touched the side of my head, which ached a little. I had hurt my head a while back, and Sorcha, she … Oh well. Memories fluttered just out of reach, like the white cabbage moths I saw. Smiling to see them, I wondered what it was like to see through the eyes of a cabbage moth, the way their bodies bounce about through the air. What must their brains be like, to sort through information that chaotic? Insects were a lot more amazing than some people thought, I reckoned.

  Sometimes I hung out with Colin. He looked great with the sun on his brown hair, red highlights glinting, and that cocky swagger he had, that you could even see in his green eyes, when he looked down at me. He and I would talk about stuff, and argue about starships, and he’d just about always win the arguments because he knew more than I did, but that was only because I was just a little kid and I didn’t know shit. And he’d say I was nuts to go into the Service, because what the hell did I know or care about the stars or the ships that traveled among them? And I’d say I knew a lot and cared a lot, too, just like he did. And he’d just laugh and laugh, and say that was just because of him, and ‘cause of the way Dad treated Colin. Which made me laugh, too, because that was a big fat lie, and what did he know? I was every damn bit as good as he was, absolutely, even though I kind of didn’t really believe that, but I had to make Colin think I did. He’d still laugh, a horrible gasping, rasping laugh, and his tongue was all swollen and black and his voice sounded strange ‘cause he had this optical cabling looped tight around his neck, and his face was all purple and his eyes were popping out and he was saying, “I ­always told you, Runt, you gotta find your own thing!”

  And he shuddered, hanging there, twitching.

  Lily Riordan was shaking me hard, trying to get me to stop screaming. “James, James, it’s all right! James? It’s all right. Whatever it is, it’s fine, nothing can hurt you here.”

  I stared at the ceiling, still shivery and tense and unhinged. I didn’t have the heart to tell her how wrong she was.

  We crossed back into known space. As usual, the ship got a burst of waiting mail and news and other info, catching us up with events back home. I got a letter from Sorcha, concerning her adventures back at HQ. She had no idea why she had been so suddenly rotated out of Eclipse for a desk job, but had her suspicions. She also reported that Grantleigh and Blackmore had been pulled off the ship just before we left Ganymede, and they’d be seconded to Service Scientific Branch, reporting directly to the Admiralty. That looked suspicious, but she also wrote something more disturbing:

  ‘… I’ve also been sniffing around trying to find out about this mission you’re on out there. Just smelled kinda fishy, that so much of it was ­supposedly confidential, and that I got transferred down here on a temporary training rotation. Not that I mind — I could use a bit more education on the finer points of tube grapple engineering. Couldn’t everybody? Anyway, in my spare time, I started sniffing around. Something about the whole business struck me the wrong way. And in the course of my sniffing around, I heard this rumor that Eclipse had been sent to take care of “those buggy bastards!” Which turned out to be a rumor being spread by this guy in the Admiralty, some senior officer with a grudge against his boss over some promotion wrangle. You know how it goes. So I tracked down this guy, and got talking over a few (okay, lots of) drinks. You wouldn’t believe this clown, James! He couldn’t hold his booze at all. Even when he got his liver biostats burning blood alcohol at triple-nominal!

  Most charming of all, though, was the way, once he had a drink in him, was the way he thought he could climb all over me. It was “hilarious”.

  Well, after I told him I was already kinda involved with a very cool guy (hope you don’t mind me talking about you like that), demonstrated how easy it would be for me to break his arm in nine places, and told him I was recording his uninvited groping, which would stand up pretty well in a sexual harassment case, he… Well, let’s just say that he went straight from “Hey, look what a big hairy stud I am, baby!” to “I want my mommy…” and “Oh God,” he said, in mortal distress, “what do you want to shut up about any of this?”

  I said, “I beg your pardon?”

  “My parents mustn’t hear about this. They’ll cut me off!”

  I just stared at him, this pathetic weepy git who’d just gone dead pale. “Your parents? What the hell do your parents—”

  “Really. You’ve not heard of Lord and Lady Flemington?”

  Even I had heard of Lord Flemington, now largely retired at the ripe age of 132, one of the pioneers of hypertube transportation, and now safely crumbling away in the House of Lords back on Ganymede.

  She went on…

  So the young SCO6 Leslie Flemington, second son of a living (and filthy rich) legend, was petrified of getting the parents off-side. It was something to see. People at nearby tables glanced our way. “I’m sorry, I’m awfully sorry, Miss Riley. Please don’t report me! My career…” He dabbed at his eyes and snorted back a noseful of snot. Very gentlemanly, James.

  Anyway, he babbled on like this for ages. In the end, no matter how much I told him I wasn’t going to report his clumsy unwanted advances, no matter how much I told him I quite understood about how alcohol can really loosen you up in ways you can’t quite control, etc etc, he finally said, eyes wide and anxious, “What can I do for you to make all this go away?”

  “Okay. Right. Hmm.” I thought about this a bit. “You’ve been spreading a few rumors about the explorer ship Eclipse, though, haven’t you?”

  He looked all anxious again. “Keep your voice down!”

  “Ah,” I said, “telling Admiralty secrets wouldn’t go down well with your folks, either, eh?”

  He looked like he was going to get up and stagger off. Sweat was pouring off him. He reeked and looked like a sick dog’s breakfast. It was pretty bad. In the end he looked back at me. “You want to know about Eclipse, is that it?”

  “Isn’t it why we’re here having this lovely chat in the first place, sir?”

  Anyway: upshot: he gave me temporary ­access to his headware security codes — can you believe it? An Admiralty officer for God’s sake! — which I used to get into Admiralty mission ­databases, and thus found out what Eclipse was doing all the way out there.

  Service Deep Space Watch Corps spotted that ship at least a year ago, James. A yea
r ago! It wasn’t an accident that we found it. The whole damn thing was a setup! Worse, having found the ship, they backtracked its course and found the star system where those aliens came from. Turns out the Admiralty has a lot of info on that world and the whole damn system. We were just sent out there to find out who or what might be aboard, and what kind of threat they might be. Can you believe it!?

  They bloody knew about these guys before we met them, James! They knew!

  Good news for them: the world is rich in ­resources, has a biosphere that can be readily adapted for human colonists, and is in all respects a pretty good find, as worlds go. Bad news: those alien guys have all these underground water-­cities, sort of like immense watery ant nests, but the size of huge cities, powered by geothermal plants. Planet’s teeming with these things, and all kinds of other life.

  So using data Eclipse scientists provided, the Service R&D biological weapons division came up with a nasty nanophage weapon. Delivered from a ship standing a long way off, these bombs come with ablative aeroshells to get them through the atmosphere, and the warheads themselves land in the seas. The bombs go off with a mild explosive, releasing the nanophages into the water. They swim around, get caught up in ­currents and evaporated into the rain cycle, and not long after that wind up in the tunnel-cities. The nanophages are keyed to the DNA of these creatures and are programmed to make more ­phages from the broken-down tissues of the ­creatures.

  Estimated time to total species annihilation: a few months. Maybe a year, tops. A follow-up drone mission is scheduled for three months to see what’s happened out there. First-wave ­human colonists are set to leave the Home System in about five months.

  So, James, are you feeling sick yet? Are you feeling as ANGRY as I am? I never thought when I joined this outfit that I’d be a party to genocide. Imagine it. You’re on a ship sent to eliminate an entire sentient race! Although the documents are careful at all times to qualify all judgments ­regarding the creatures’ sentience. They say “possible” sentience. Even “the remote likelihood that these creatures are sentient…” There is talk of the need to “pacify” and “sanitize the biosphere.” To make it safe for us humans to come and mine and farm and live on and extend the boundaries of human space further into the dark and I am so angry, I’VE NEVER BEEN THIS BLOODY ANGRY! I thought I was angry when Rudyard got his stupid pissy medal, but this is … I can’t think straight. I don’t know how to convey to you what I’m feeling now. Just saying I’m angry doesn’t cut it, you know? It doesn’t express how FUCKING FURIOUS I am. Right now I’m thinking of resigning my commission. For starters. Beyond that … I don’t know. I need to talk to you, James. I like that we can talk about things. I’ve really missed you these past days and nights.