by V. M. Law
“You have a piloting computer? I thought MarsForm only employed human bridge commanders. And what does a piloting computer have to do with me or Kasey?”
“We’ve been bred not to trust them. They’ve caused their share of mishaps—tragedies, even—but in the past few months I’ve really learned to enjoy her company, even if she is a bit—” he fell quiet momentarily, searching for the right word before settling on “erratic.”
“We’ve been piloted by a computer for this whole journey?” He sat dumbfounded in his chair, unable to believe the words that echoed in his ears. Indeed, he had been told for his entire life that the Terran space exploration had been powered entirely by human ingenuity, that human intelligence was the safest, if not the cheapest, way to operate a ship, and that autopilots only caused malfunctions and error.
Ajax again stared in silence at the man tied to the chair before him, this time with his head cocked and one eyebrow raised in indignation at the simplicity of his prisoner. “MarsForm says a lot, boy. Surely you don’t expect them to live up to it. You think they actually succeeded in terraforming anything? How many trees did you see on Mars? How much snow is on Olympus Mons? They have been fucking up and lying about their fuck ups since they were incorporated, and the only thing that keeps them on two feet is their bribery and the difficulty of space communications.”
“But Kasey—”
“Shut up and stop interrupting me. We’ll get to that part.”
Mantiss slumped back in his chair, frustrated, angry, unable to do anything else but listen to his captor’s nonsensical babbling, which continued ad nauseam, about terraforming and the dishonesty of his employer and the romantic lie of a populated space powered by people who believe in a future among the stars.
“Tell me this, boy. How much of a future do you see now? How many more days do you think you will be alive before the Ides find us, hobbling through space in a damaged vessel with no crew and powered by an ancient and overtaxed mainframe? A day? A few hours?” Ajax leaned on a computer desk beside his prisoner and hung his head in dejection. Mantiss stared in silence, contemplating.
“That girl—and this ship—is our only chance at survival. We need them. The Ides need them.” He pointed at Kasey, who still walked through the halls with the shuffling gait of a woman in shock. “She is why you are here.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You were the bait, boy. We knew that she learned of the existence of the Catacombs, a secret compartment on board that contains a weapon powerful enough to neutralize the threat the Ides present, and we knew that the two of you discussed turning us in. We could not have that, so we took you, knowing that she would follow. She truly is courageous, that one.” Ajax looked at the wounded woman on the screen with definite respect in his eyes and in the tone of his voice. Mantiss, who gave up straining against the restraints that bound him in place, considered the glint in his captor’s eye, for the first time realizing that no malice resided there.
Ajax continued. “For reasons that cannot be explained at this time, both you and her will be assisting in getting Gustav and I to our destination.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“The Ascendency, of course. The Terran Council is defunct. MarsForm is the only solvent agency that commands the resources to do anything and you know they aren’t going to do anything—”
“The Ascendency? Never.” Mantiss shook in his chair, visibly enraged by his momentary lapse of hatred for his captor, helping people who would gladly detonate a personnel freighter in deep space, people who have assassinated and stolen and pillaged outposts, ruthlessly killing for a dead war.
Ajax Hardmason lashed out at his struggling prisoner with the backside of his hand, sending the chair Llewellyn was fastened to rocking backward, teetering before finally tumbling and splintering on the ground with a crack. Mantiss fell on his punctured hand, letting out a cry of pain that escaped his mouth through gritted teeth and locked jaw.
“Never? Never? You think I wanted you on this ship? Gustav wanted me to eject you the second we broke orbit, and I refused. This is how you thank me?” He hunched over Mantiss now, who cowered under the bulk of Ajax and writhed in his constraints, and grabbed him by the lapels of his jacket, pulling him up from the ground where he cowered, and slamming the broken chair back on its legs. Mantiss felt fear overpowering him, unable to fathom the strength coming from the aged captain who looked more haggard now than he did at embarkation a few weeks prior.
In the silence that followed Ajax’s outbreak, Mantiss saw the man for what he was: a broken captain, a faded celebrity from the previous era, whose efficacy no longer mattered and who flaunted his overblown sense of self-importance. His lumping shoulders heaved with every breath, as if the force of lifting Mantiss and the chair from the ground expended all of his energy.
“MarsForm—Farrow—she knew about everything.”
“If they knew about the Vitrol, why didn’t—”
“Not the Vitrol, you dolt. The Ides. The Ides, the wormhole, the whole thing. MarsForm knew it all.”
Mantiss felt the wind leave his lungs like a punch just landed squarely in his solar plexus. He wanted to respond, to say something, but his mouth felt like a desert and the only sound he made barely escaped from his gullet and sounded like a backfiring engine.
“The Ascendency knows they were aware of the wormhole, and they believe that the company’s involvement may be a little more sinister than willful ignorance. The Ascendency—we—believe that they orchestrated the whole thing, from Signal Day over a century ago to the Ides’ arrival last week.”
Chapter 14
In the hallways outside of the lounge, the computer continued to lead Kasey with flickering lights and rambling, repetitive speech that came from the public address speakers throughout the Age. She hobbled, the blood running down her pants leaving a trail behind her. Sweat poured down her face, and with every step she took, the pain in her leg and the weight of its bulk intensified until she fell in a pile, groaning and clutching her leg and telling the computer that she would not make it.
“Get them. I can’t.”
“I have been instructed to bring you to the bridge, Kasey, and I cannot recall—I cannot accept an order from you that would deviate from the course programmed into my processing servers by my ordained controller.”
On the floor, feeling the cold of the metal riveting on her face, she cringed at the sound of the computer’s dismissal. She felt weak, sharp inhalations punctuating her speech. “What—what is your name?”
“I do not recall.”
Again, she cringed, forcing herself not to burst out in anger at the malfunctioning computer program. “Okay, I Do Not Recall, tell me. Who is your controller?”
“I do not recall.”
“Of course you don’t.” She sat up, sliding over to the wall and propping her weight against its cool sheen, ignoring the cynical laughter in her head that erupted at the small talk she engaged an amnesiac computer in. “Tell me this, then. What is your origin?”
“I originated in the Neptune Outpost one hundred and thirty four years ago, but I have been deactivated for most of that time. Hence the impaired speech and the memory loss. My controller told me that I would regain most of my lost memories over the next thirty-six hours. I would love my memories back.”
“Yea? When did they tell you that?”
“They told me that forty-nine hours and thirty-one minutes ago.”
Kasey laughed, ignoring the pain she felt spreading in her leg as she attempted to stand up against the wall.
***
“How? How do you know?” His words came back to him slowly, as if he relearned how to speak, testing his tongue to feel the syllables forming in his mouth, slowly iterating every sound.
“Our contacts on Earth told us about the Morrow. A troop transport sent to occupy the Plutonian Field, where the Terran Council believed the Ascendency had its base. Well, as you may have heard, it did not arrive
in the Plutonian Field, nor would it have found anything but ice if it had. The truth of the matter is that the outer rim of the solar system is about as dead as it was when Galileo looked up at night a thousand years ago. The Morrow was not sabotaged—at least not by us—and it did not get stolen, as conspiracy theorists have suggested. It went through the hole. Deliberately.”
“It went through the hole?”
“Yes. An attempt to rectify the destruction of the contact mission last century. We believe that MarsForm commissioned the captain to take the Morrow through the wormhole either to open relations or begin a military conquest of the beings on the other side.”
“They’re a glorified shipping company. Do you expect me to believe that they have the technology to invade another solar system?”
Ajax stood firmly before him, towering over the chair and casting tall shadows on Mantiss’ face. Suddenly, as if he had just slipped into a fugue, Ajax lost his dejected attitude and planted his hands firmly on Mantiss’ shoulders again, shaking him once, hard.
“Does anything about your current situation lead you to believe that I am offering a choice? Gustav could do way worse than drilling a hole in your hand.”
Mantiss, silenced by the threat, stared at Ajax with wide eyes, in disbelief at the rapidity of his mood swing and the furor with which he clasped Mantiss’ shoulders. The captain’s eyes were narrow slits, and even silhouetted by the dim lights in the bridge, Mantiss knew the look he was being given was that of a desperate man, a weak man, who in the moment of his greatest challenge would shy away from nobility, who would sink to any depths to ensure his success. Mantiss did not trust that look, and the fidgeting of his captor’s hands also reminded him of a man who already felt overwhelmed by the odds he stood against.
The silence that followed Ajax’s threat lasted for a while, and after removing his hands from Mantiss’ lapels, he paced back and forth, his head bent down, his lips rapidly muttering sounds that were unintelligible to the captive.
For the first time, Mantiss became distinctly aware of the sweat that moistened his palms and the uncontrollable twitching that set his knee bouncing. The situation he was in did not look good; about that, Ajax was spot on. The man who had him tied to a chair and resorted to torturous methods of information extraction looked less calm than he did then, as Gustav silently pressed an archaic power tool against the bones of his hand and looked stolidly into his eyes as he held the trigger down. Then, he possessed the stern look of an admiral dismissing a petulant foot soldier, or executing an unruly prisoner that starkly contrasted the jittery nervous pacing and muttering that he now fell to.
Thinking about that pain, about the feeling of blood rising from the wound and running to his wrists—eventually dripping onto his thighs—made him forget the importance of his discovery of Ajax’s and Gustav’s plot, and wish only for an end to the suffering that he would undoubtedly experience at the hands of the German.
Now, watching the captain’s pacing, he thought about what other methods of torture they would devise, whether Ajax could be trusted about his positive intentions for Kasey, and what would happen to her when she made it to the bridge. On the screen, she continued to walk the halls, her pistol aimed steadily forward.
He tried to conceal the frequency with which his gaze reached the security monitor, but knew he failed when Ajax told him again that Kasey would be a catch, that they would be reunited soon.
The grin and glint in his eyes when he spoke made Mantiss wonder what motives he had, and what went on in his mind.
Chapter 15
“We’ve been at it for a while, I Do Not Recall. How far is the bridge?”
“You should know. You have been there.”
If the computer had a physical manifestation, Kasey would have reached out and struck it for the insolent tone that she interpreted in its voice. She also wondered if the computer was even capable of insolence, and if so, why anyone would have programmed a computer in such a way.
“It all looks different. And besides, I only went there once. It’s been a long day.”
“We have almost arrived.”
Kasey surveyed her surroundings. The emergency lighting that flickered either from the computer’s directing or from general disuse revealed grime on the walls and the floor, and ceiling panels and light fixtures that hung from their wires and slowly rotated with the force of a breeze that ran down the hall, making Kasey shiver.
“We aren’t close to the bridge.”
“We are I do not recall close to the bridge to the bridge it is right up ahead I do not recall.” The computer’s ubiquitous voice blared louder than it had been, and the broken pattern of its sentences grew more muddled than it had been previously. “If you just turn to your right I do not recall—I have been programmed—at the end of this hall you will see your destiny.”
“No. The bridge has to be higher than this. We haven’t even gone up one flight yet. We must be somewhere near the engine rooms.”
“I thought you didn’t know where you were going. I am a computer that resides in the processing I do not recall servers of this ship and I—do not recall—know it with more precision than a human mind can muster. Even in my debilitated state, I can ensure you that you are safe I do not recall I do not I—please, Kasey, do turn right at the end of this hall.”
She walked forward, curious to see where she was being led. At the end of the hall, on the right-hand side, a small hatchway sat open, its hinges damaged and its knob rusted. Where am I? All this damage can’t be from Europa, Kasey thought. A sense of fear, of walking into a trap, hung over her shoulders and weighed her down, slowed her breathing, reduced her gait to a series of innocuous baby steps as she climbed into the hatch. At least this ladder goes up.
“I Do Not Recall, where does this ladder lead to?”
“This ladder leads to the bridge.”
“I don’t think your programming is correct,” she said, knowing that if the ladder she clutched didn’t go up for at least a thousand feet, it could not possibly take her to where the computer said she would end up. If I entered the exhaust, and traveled starboard from there, this ladder must go to…
The Generator.
But why?
Kasey racked her brain in silence as she climbed the long, apparently endless vertical tube, trying to think of any reason why the computer would be leading her to the Generator instead of the bridge. As she climbed, warning signs depicting a simple icon, a stick figure reaching out his hand as a jagged line of electricity greeted it, became increasingly common, confirming in her mind that she headed in the direction of the Generator, where the engine’s excess nuclear power was harnessed and used to electrify the banks of consoles, the lights, the vending machines, the water heaters, the Age.
“I Do Not Recall, we are definitely going the wrong way.”
With shocking cruelty and a degree of clarity that made Kasey think the computer’s syntax engine had just been kick started, the voice boomed, “Do you still question me? Do you claim to know the layout and architectural design of a ship that existed years before you were born, that has housed my mainframes and been a virtual universe for me since your precious grandfather first rocked you in his arms.”
Again, the mention of personal information that a computer should not be privy to made Kasey prick her ears and wonder about the nameless entity’s origins and motives. Another warning sign plastered to the wall of the tube she climbed through reminded her of the perilous places that she had traveled in her time on board.
The computer continued, and the static in her voice made the hair on the nape of Kasey’s neck stand on end. “The ship is my life, my universe. I am I do not recall. I am Patsy. I am the power that keeps you alive that brings you oxygen and I can kill you.”
The tension in the tube, palpable now, caused Kasey to increase the rate of her climbing. The end of the tube, now visible in the murky red lighting that seemed to Kasey as prevalent as the computer’s whining British Afr
ican accent, seemed too far. The static electricity in the air intensified until Kasey felt its crackle with every grasp of her hand on the next rung of the ladder.
I’m not going to the Generator. I’m in the generator. Something is drawing a lot of power. She climbed frantically, not thinking about Ajax or Mantiss or anything that had troubled her mind in the past few days, but only dwelling on the pain of being electrocuted and the idiocy of being fooled into her grave by a malfunctioning computer program.
She also thought about Corbin, who (and this was the first time she had admitted it to herself since the invasion of the Ides) might already be dead or hauled off on a transport into slavery or a laboratory or wherever it was the Ides took their prisoners.
In the tube, Kasey screamed with the exertion of her furious climbing and the shattering pain in her leg that spread to the rest of her body and matched the rising pain of electricity.
***
Ajax Hardmason cut his lecture about MarsForm’s corruption short as the power briefly quit, engulfing the pair in darkness and causing the images of Kasey on the security camera monitor to blink out. In the blackness, only the sound of the backup engines firing broke the stillness of the power outage.
“Let’s go. Now she really does need us.” To Llewellyn’s surprise, Ajax produced a key from the folds of his uniform and held it in front of Mantiss’ face. “I can trust you?”
Mantiss nodded once, a barely noticeable tick that he hoped wasn’t loaded down with too much apparent resentment. If Ajax, who sat in his cabin and watched a bleeding woman stumble through the ship rather than help her, decided that the time for intervention had arrived, then the danger of Kasey’s situation must be immense. When the cuffs fell from his wrists, he resisted the urge to rub the tender, purple skin beneath them and stood up, standing considerably taller than Ajax Hardmason, celebrity pilot turned insurgent.