The Farthest City

by Daniel P Swenson

  Enzo Acciaio. She hadn’t worked with him directly, but she knew of him. No one liked him much. His lips flapped when he talked. Hair sprouted from his ears and nose, complementing the unshaven face and bleary eyes. She tried not to laugh.

  Her gaze went to the equipment scattered on the floor. Tools. Parts of an EVA pack. Memories of her recent EVAs flooded her mind’s eye. She missed the serenity of floating in space.

  Enzo scowled at her, his eyes full of menace undercut by the absurdity of his appearance.

  “What do you want?” he asked, standing to his full stature, but failing to gain any height on her. They stood eye to eye.

  “Nothing,” she said. “I’m working for Doctor Na. Bringing up chine tech.”

  “Ah? You are, eh?” His face broke into a leer. “You come work for me sometime.”

  His hand twitched. Had he meant to touch her? What would happen if she struck this guy? Watch yourself, she thought. She didn’t need any more trouble.

  “I’m Enzo. Technician. And you are Sheemi.”

  Her heart sank. Did everyone on the ship know about her? “That’s right.”

  “I keep this ship running,” Enzo said. “I work the main engines.”

  “Just you, all by yourself, Enzo?” someone at her elbow said.

  A skinny tech leaned toward her, his caterpillar-like eyebrows and large forehead giving him the over-exaggerated look of a cartoon. He proffered a hand for her to shake. “Jimmy Chang.”

  “Enzo’s just a glorified mechanic,” Jimmy said with a vicious grin. “I’m the one who keeps Command running. Without me, those engines wouldn’t take us anywhere.”

  Enzo’s scowl returned.

  She didn’t know if she should laugh or be afraid these people were responsible for keeping Dauntless running.

  “You think too much of yourself, Jimmy,” Enzo said. “You can’t code your way out of a systems malfunction.”

  “Cram it up your ass, Enzo.”

  A third man walked in and looked at them with unhappy eyes. He rubbed his moustache.

  “This is Sheemi,” Jimmy said.

  “From A shift,” Enzo said, leer back in place.

  Jimmy grinned.

  “Good to meet you. I’m Don Euell, senior tech.” The man clenched his tool belt with both hands as if to anchor himself. “Another solo, Enzo?”

  “Yes. So what?” Enzo shot back.

  “It’s against the rules.”

  “Rules, rules,” Enzo said. “This ship, this experimental ship, she doesn’t run on rules. I’ve got to maintain things before they fail. I just ran a report. Two rotary joints are bleeding voltage back to their power supplies. Who will fix them?”

  Don launched into a lecture on EVA safety.

  As Sheemi resumed her search for the artifact, Enzo’s leering face stuck in her mind. He knew what she’d done. They all did. How long would it take to climb out of the hole she’d dug?

  #

  Captain Ciib called Sheemi into the office he shared with Rollins and Mertik. Rollins wasn’t there, but she passed Mertik on the way in. He watched her pass, his face revealing nothing. She assumed he didn’t like her. He probably wished she’d never set foot on Dauntless.

  The captain’s office was identical to Colonel Go’s. Her hackles rose as she stepped through the door. She’d never forget that last meeting.

  Ciib asked her about her training back in King City, about her family. She told him about Brin and her father. She told him about the nightmares. She told him about Connor and the others. She ended up telling far more than she’d planned, more than she ever should have told an officer. But she wasn’t a soldier now, not really. She had no weapon in her hands. And what use would a weapon be to her now?

  She expected Ciib to be angry or dismissive, but he listened patiently as if he didn’t have work to do.

  “Doctor Na tells me you’re an asset to his staff,” he said. “Efficient and hard-working.”

  “I’m trying to be helpful, sir. But I don’t understand most of what they’re doing.”

  “I’m glad you’re doing well.”

  He was kind, but she was relieved to escape when he dismissed her. She blinked the time. What had felt like hours had been one.

  The nightmares receded. She wasn’t sure what had made the difference. New people? Her determination to change, or the baby growing inside her? Perhaps good fortune had found her at last.

  Each day cycle blended into the next. She spent mealtimes with Bravo Team. Other than Durskie, they were a good bunch. She would have been proud to fight with any of them.

  Working with the artifacts became routine. Back and forth to cargo, hauling the odd-shaped objects to the lab. At first, she had been in awe, touching objects the chines had left behind. But then it occurred to her she had grown up in a city built by chines. These things were just older, abandoned before the New Cities had even been raised.

  “Hello,” Gavin said, coming into the lab. He was usually the first scientist to arrive each day. He sat at the table and called up data onto the wall. “How’s the scanning coming along?”

  “Fine. I’m through most of the smaller pieces. The big ones are taking longer, but there aren’t too many of those. I should be finished in another few days.”

  Still looking at his data, Gavin rubbed his face and sucked in a breath through his fingers. “We have some even larger artifacts stored in pod three. I’ll have Enzo and Don transfer them.”

  Pod three was one of the unpressurized storage spheres attached to the axle between the ring and the drogue.

  “I could go in a vac suit,” she said, “take a portable scanner to the pod. It would be a lot faster.”

  Gavin looked up at her, brows raised.

  “I’m EVA-certified,” she said. “So I’m used to working in vac. And I wouldn’t even be going EVA—just inside the ship.”

  A feeling of shame welled over her. It was a stupid idea.

  “I’ll mention it to Colonel Go,” he said, turning to greet the other scientists.

  Sheemi fought the urge to take back her request. Go would never let her leave the ring. Probably wouldn’t ever trust her with anything again. For the first time, it really hurt, what she’d done, the change it had wrought in her and those around her. She’d always been a go-to person, someone others depended on. Now she wasn’t even sure she could depend on herself.

  “I have a question I’d like to pose to you,” Gavin said, startling her out of her brooding.

  “Yes?”

  “Why do you think the chines left Earth?”

  What’s this about? He’d never talked science with her after their first meeting. “Because they wanted to leave Earth to us?” For the humans. That was what she’d learned in history class.

  “Yes, that’s what’s taught,” he said. “The high-level intelligences at the time did their best to change our path, but we pulled the trigger anyway. After the rads fell and the viruses died, the long winter began to give way. The chines restarted everything. In a near-dead world, over three thousand years, they carefully preserved and nurtured what was left, coaxed seeds to grow, fetuses to develop from the deep freeze. They brought us back from our own extinction. By that time, we had much of our knowledge back. Our data had been better preserved than we ourselves. The chines built new technologies for teaching, and we learned while we slept. And when we knew enough to truly appreciate our folly, they left us with no explanation. Humanity went through a period of extended grieving, a natural response to the loss of a parent. We kept to our homes in the New Cities. Exploration sputtered, died. We stagnated. We still mourned over two hundred years later when the Hexi arrived.

  “That is recorded history, but I often wonder how the chines decided to leave. Was it so simple? A unanimous decision? We still know so little about them. Were the chines made of just a few intelligences? Many? Or only one? We don’t know for sure.”

  He stood up and swept all the data off the wall.

  “Th
ese are important questions,” he said. “Because we need to convince them to help us now. That’s my real job, if it ever comes to that.”

  Why does he seem so worried about it? Of course the chines would help if they found them. No one doubted it—except Gavin. But that was why the scientists were aboard, to think about things the rest of them couldn’t understand.

  Gavin left for Command, and Sheemi got to work until someone tapped her shoulder.

  “Miss Tanamal.” Short and fat, the man exuded an air of showmanship. Maybe it was his stance, as if he were trying to stand taller than he was, or the flowery gestures he made. The symbols on his collar glinted gold, an embryo in a hexagon.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m Doctor Ferenc Meszaros.” He bowed. “I represent the Church of the Fathers. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  She’d seen him around, but Gavin hadn’t had a chance to introduce them. Meszaros would appear in the lab occasionally to discuss something with one of the scientists, or examine the artifacts, but had never seemed to do any actual work. Now here he was, at her elbow.

  She was surprised someone from a chine cult had been included among the scientists. She’d always thought of the cults as religious freaks, believing the chines were gods. She tried not to stare at the symbol of the chine cult.

  “I heard what Doctor Na told you earlier. About the Old War, when the chines rebuilt humanity.”

  She couldn’t recall seeing him in the lab during her conversation with Gavin. He must have come in without her noticing him. “What about it?”

  “They believe the chines removed key data on artificial intelligence, and so humans have not been able to replicate fully sentient AI,” he said pronouncing they with contempt. “But we of the Church know the chines never removed any data—it was never there to remove in the first place.”

  He peered up at her, his eyes searching hers.

  “All history before the New Cities is fabricated,” he said. “Chines didn’t rebuild us. They created the original humans, not the other way around. They are our Makers, and they will return.”

  Sheemi had heard these theories before, espoused by the Church of the Fathers. Everyone had. They were often debated in the media, a mix of journalism and entertainment. She kept a straight face, although she suspected he could sense her skepticism. Why was he here?

  “Excuse me, sir,” she said and made to leave.

  “You used to be a soldier,” he said, his voice low.

  Used to be. She said nothing.

  “Have you killed the Hexi?”

  “Why are you asking me these questions?”

  “Do you hate them?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Everyone does.”

  “We seek our chine fathers for their help,” he said. “But the real question is, are we worthy of receiving it?”

  #

  They drifted the following day. Sheemi crawled out of her bunk and was on her way to eat when she heard Enzo’s voice emanating from the lock ahead. She slowed as she passed and glanced inside. Don and Enzo were removing their vac suits, Enzo trying to drown out Don’s admonishments with his own protests. Something about maintenance logs and inventories. Don looked more unhappy than usual. Enzo’s arrogance was palpable.

  She shrugged and kept walking to the mess. She was hungry and longed for company. Now that she spent most of her days with scientists, she missed talking with soldiers: plain talk, short on riddles and unanswerable questions, good-natured ribbing.

  Ash nodded to her when she entered. “Sheemi.”

  “Hey, Ash,” she said, sitting down.

  “How’s the civ life?” asked Neecie.

  “Plum,” she said.

  Ash indicated a massive soldier she hadn’t met. “This is Fu.”

  Fu inclined his head toward her. She thought she saw his expression change, but she couldn’t be sure. Not a talker.

  Neecie pointed at Ciib eating a few tables over. “Captain’s got a nice look to him. Mmm-hmm.”

  Sheemi choked, and Ash told Neecie to be quiet.

  “What?” Neecie said.

  Everyone else scanned the room.

  “You’re lucky Mertik wasn’t around,” Ash said.

  Sheemi hadn’t thought it until then, but she had to admit Ciib did look good, one of those men who snuck up on you, lookswise.

  “I like Enzo, myself,” Jerrold said, causing snorts and laughter.

  “He and Don don’t get along too well,” Sheemi said mid-chew. “Saw them fighting on my way here.”

  “They’re always fighting,” Neecie said, spinning her knife. “Jimmy, too. They’re a bunch of greasy gear-heads.”

  “As long as they keep Dauntless running, that’s all I care about,” Ash said.

  “Right as rain.” Jerrold stuffed a heaping spoonful of rehydrated stew into his mouth.

  #

  Sheemi hadn’t expected anything to come of it, but a few days later, Gavin pulled her aside and told her Colonel Go had approved her going to pod three. Surprise gave way to a surge of relief. Her past didn’t have a choke hold on her after all. It was the first thing she’d been happy about in a while.

  Sheemi hadn’t seen the artifacts in pod three, but from the list, she thought she could scan everything in less than a week. She wasted no time in lining up a buddy to accompany her. Neecie agreed to go. While it wasn’t as good as an EVA, any break from training exercises and equipment overhauls was welcome.

  She and Neecie suited up. The lock spiraled open to admit them, and the normal sounds aboard Dauntless faded as the lock finished venting its air. They proceeded down-spoke, gravity weakening as they went. They had to go through at the hub, the enormous motor that turned the ring.

  As Sheemi passed into the hub, her hand on the hatch was pulled along. The sudden shift in acceleration sent her twirling about. Reaching out, she righted herself, pulled the scanner behind her, and followed Neecie through a second hatch into the axle.

  The scanner was bulky and odd-shaped. Neecie helped her keep it on course to prevent its careening into a bulkhead. They drifted along the axle, just the sound of their breathing across the comm. Sheemi reached out for an occasional rung to adjust her trajectory.

  The axle was at least fifteen meters in diameter. Eight hundred meters from hub to drogue. It seemed to go on forever before they reached pod three. Not far beyond, the axle would terminate at the wall of the drogue, and beyond that another axle and finally the fusion plant with the main engines attached. She could picture it clearly from the many EVAs she’d done.

  Their helmet lights flashed in the dark, revealing the bay doors separating pod three from the axle. Sheemi entered a code, and the doors ground open. They pushed off from the axle wall and into the pod. Apart from EVA, it was the biggest space Sheemi had seen since leaving the moon. It had to be at least thirty meters across.

  Neecie helped her set up, then went off on her own, inspecting the cargo. Restless, Sheemi thought, not for the first time. Neecie never seemed to sit still. What would she be like on patrol where they’d have to lie unmoving for hours, waiting for an ambush or manning an observation post?

  The artifacts had been lashed to scaffolding within the pod. It was easy enough to untie them one at a time and get them in position. Sheemi strapped them to the scanner. Unfolded, it resembled a table with a funny-shaped gun on one end and a folding metal sheet on the other. Calibration took longer than she expected in zero-g. The guides kept slipping off the artifacts. Despite her difficulties, Sheemi managed to scan four objects.

  She was about to go for another when Neecie returned to give her a hand. They unpacked the object, a piece of a sphere, like half of an orange peel, covered in metallic, braided fibers with tubes crisscrossing underneath. Gingerly, so as not to damage the delicate fibers, they maneuvered the object across the pod and onto the scanner. Sheemi showed Neecie how to set the guide arms and run the scanning procedure.

  Neecie listened quietly and ran the scan without a
hitch. Despite the knife tricks and the bravado, she’s a professional, Sheemi thought. Maybe she’d be good on patrol after all.

  Neecie ran a few more scans at different angles and looked up. “How’s the E-1?” Everyone in Bravo referred to Sheemi’s unborn baby by rank now.

  “Growing,” Sheemi said, laughing. “I’m hungry all the time now.”

  “I miss ’em.”

  “Who?”

  “My sisters and cousins.”

  “Where do they live?”

  “Aubagne.”

  “But that’s…” The Hexi had destroyed Aubagne shortly after their arrival. Aubagne and Chimoio. A hundred thousand souls burned down between the two.

  “My unit was in the field when it happened. We lived in the brush for three weeks before getting evac’d. Makinen kept us alive—some of us, anyway. If it weren’t for him, no one would have made it. Of course, he’s dead now, too.”

  Neecie rotated the object and started another scan.

  “They killed my brother,” Sheemi said. “Brin.”

  Neecie nodded.

  Everyone had their dead.

  They finished scanning the sphere fragment and folded up the scanner. The way back seemed much longer now. Midway down the axle, as their headlamp beams bounced along ahead of them, Neecie laughed.

  “PJ, my little sister, she’d make funny looks, you know. Funny faces. She’d do a little dance. We’d copy her and laugh.”

  Sheemi imagined what that would have been like. She had few memories of her earliest years. As the youngest, she’d always been looking up to her parents, to her brother, racing to catch up. She’d never imagined she would someday leave them behind. She shook her head to get the tears out of her eyes and looked over at Neecie, who pretended not to notice.

  After getting through the lock, Sheemi wanted nothing more than to take off her suit. She and Neecie were stowing their gear when Enzo and Don arrived, each weighed down by equipment.

  Enzo gave Sheemi his standard leer. “You, eh? You like working in the vac?”

  She gave him a simpering smile. “Yeah. I love it.”

  Neecie snorted with laughter, and Enzo looked momentarily put out. Don finished suiting up and pulled tethers and gas packs out of an equipment locker. They were going EVA. She wished she could be out there, but that wasn’t going to happen.