Men and Machines I

by Charlie Nash

  Dellinger

  Adventures of Coryn Astridottir #2

  Shortlisted for the Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Story

  This is the way things run on a long haul. In a grotty galley, somewhere in the ass-end of the transport boat, someone starts telling stories. You can pick the moment it happens like a mathematical function, time zero being the day we boarded at the exchange station. From that moment, people in this part of the boat circle that mess table in decaying orbits, crossing the zones from strangers to familiars. On day three, someone sits down, probably with a deck of cards. On day four, it’s two.

  Day five, today, everyone’s there, eating, drinking, smoking the pretend cigarettes contrabanders ship out here.

  Everyone but me. I never started on the orbit.

  I’ve staked a spot by the exit door, hard against a bulkhead that conceals the ship’s command lines from aft to the bridge, which is far down the bulk of this liner. And that’s the way I want it. No involvement. No questions on where I’m bound, or who with. But the hum of those lines speaks through my skin; she’s not a neural-grafted core, this boat, but I can still take her pulse. Second nature for what I am. So I press my body against these walls, and rest my gaze on the table, like a planet with its moons.

  Riley has joined them now, this ragged group of Earth-bound desperates, busy introducing themselves. My reticence has failed to hold him back, even with the promise of bed. And so now, evening of the fifth day, all is primed: audience captive. And one opens her mouth to tell a story.

  “So I was on this salvage, out near Poseidon. Junta job, down planet-side. It was me, and a couple of guys out of the force ...”

  Salvage story, so original. She keeps talking, each other body around the table pretending to listen, but secretly straining forward for their own chance to talk. Riley’s the only one leaning back in his chair. He’s ex-Special Ops, the genuine real-deal, the only one who understands anything about me, and knows better than to blab to strangers.

  Another guy runs his tongue now, a story of a ship he used to command, if you believe him, out in an asteroid belt, before the drinking and bad luck caught up with him. I’m done listening. It’s been ten hours already. I need a fix only Riley can provide, and I will his eye to catch mine across the table, not wanting to speak into his mind. But he’s focused his bead on another card player, an old, broken guy, who’s spinning a Jack by its diagonal corners, and whose cheeks now work his voice like a rasp.

  “You guys ever hear about the Dellinger?”

  My attention snaps with the rest of them. A shocked second passes silent. Then laughter comes, the nervous kind. The first guy speaks up. “Nice try, cap. Try it on the wet-ears next time.”

  The old guy’s drooping cheeks raise spots of blood. “I saw it.”

  A peculiar sensation takes root in my gut, as though each organ is jostling for room. I look down and see the gooseflesh running from wrists to elbows. Dellinger. There’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time. A sharp tang scents my next breath: blood. But I know that’s only a memory.

  “Well, if you saw it, you wouldn’t be here, would you?”

  The old guy wrinkles his nose, like maybe, if he was younger and not so radiation-soaked, he’d sink his fist into the doubter just for impertinence. Instead, he scrapes his chair back and shuffles to the port-hole, where the speckled black eternity lurks behind the glow of the transport engines. “Maybe I’m not here at all,” he says, quietly, and I’m not sure anyone hears it but me.

  It’s an hour later in the tiny hold bunk. Riley is naked under the sheets, but I’m pulling on my boots.

  Where are you going? Riley’s voice comes in my head, over that neural connection I didn’t use earlier. I thought I’d got used to it since the Freya, but now I’m annoyed and I shut him out.

  “Where are you going?” His voice this time, which he hasn’t used in our bunk, not since this transport left port, not since we agreed to head to Earth together.

  “Out,” I growl.

  “This about the Dellinger?”

  I pause at the door, betraying my intent. This trip is supposed to mark a new start, to leave the dark wells of our pasts in our wake. That tiny part of me that’s allowed him into my life wants to disclose what I know, but most of my brain is cold and practiced in secrets.

  “Stay here.” It’s all I can say.

  I find the old guy still at the port in the galley, still watching the speckled star field. I pause in the doorway, my hand on the transport’s lifelines. She’s quiet, now, running on auto towards the way-gate station, the portal to Earth. I lift my hand away so I can focus on this man instead. He’s a big-framed sort, must have been an enforcer in his youth. And now, he’s got a sway about him, as if he really was off an old-time ocean-going ship, and not the vacuum-sailing kind.

  He looks around with a crooked smile. “I was wondering when you was coming back,” he says. “Young-looking thing like you almost fooled me, trying to look shy and reluctant back there. But I saw you listening to those comms lines. I know what you are.”

  “And what’s that?” A challenge in my voice.

  “Ship’s Doctor. Neural-grafted for diagnosing them big blue-class station hybrid systems. Very rare.”

  I stalk across and stand beside him, peering at his face, wondering where he came into such information. “Where did you get on?”

  “Last stop.” A bead of moisture gathers under his nostril, and he sniffs. “Came out of the Yoshida Icosa. You know what that is?”

  “Of course I know.” The words snap from my lips, leaving a sting on my tongue. The Yoshida is a no-go zone, a place of space-wrecks, where salvagers like to hang at the edges, hoping for a lost craft to come sailing out of forbidden space. “You a salvager?”

  He wrinkles his nose, sniffs deep. His toe is tapping on the floor now. He leans into the port. “How fast’s this boat go? How long to the way-gate?”

  I could put my hand on the wall and pull the information from the central system, but his tone stops me. He’s not asking for conversation. “What do you care?” I ask.

  “Be a good idea to get there,” he says, his fingers taking up his toe’s rhythm on the port. “Get there fast.”

  He leans his head, but we both feel the invisible string pull of deceleration, and through the port, I see the transport’s engine glow shifting red-wards.

  The guy laughs, and shakes his head. Then his face pulls straight, as if a marionette tugged his skin downwards. “Shit. And I thought I’d make it.”

  My hand seeks the wall like a fast-trap magnet. We’ve altered course. But all systems online. So, something deliberate. I back away, slowly. Don’t get involved. Just stay on the damn ship. Make the way-gate. Make it back to Earth. Forget all the stuff that came before. Start again, like you agreed with Riley. Even if you don’t know how.

  Then I turn and find Riley and another shadow in the doorway. Riley’s in his fleece pants and no shirt, has been given no time to dress. The shadow shows itself: an officer, in full uniform, a second-captain’s pips on his shoulder, Kirk on his chest. Seriously. Kirk.

  “Doctor,” he says. “Would you come with me please?”

  I give Riley a look of pure mutiny, and he avoids my eyes as I follow the uniform out of the galley.

  “You want to tell me what this is about?”

  I jog to keep up with the second-captain, striding down the long corridors of pressed ceramic, and through three speed tubes before we enter the bridge level. Up here, the decor is distinctly civil forces; sleek surfaces and sharp letters in dark relief. Chart room, Nav Comms, Defense Control. Typical of a transport liner. Then, we stop outside a door marked Isolation Bay.

  “Captain?” I insist this time, refusing to go further until he gives me his attention.

  “We are transferring a patient, picked up from a distress call. He’s being brought here and we require your assistance.”

  I back away. “I’m not that kind of docto
r.”

  “We know,” says Kirk. “You’re a Ship’s Doctor with a five-star rating, lately of the Freya quarantine. Bound for the Earth way-gate.”

  I narrow my eyes. “I’m registered as a civilian passenger.”

  “That may be true, but you’ve been reading the transport’s comms since you first came on board. We have detectors for that these days. The ship’s system reported you.”

  I curse under my breath. This is new. Usually only the neural-grafted cores on the big space stations have identifying software. “Captain,” I say, with all the patience I can muster, “so, I tapped in. It’s a reflex. But your transport isn’t neural-grafted. I’m just reading vibrations. I’m not who you need.”

  “We need you for the distress call.”

  “Which is for a passenger.”

  “Yes.” He stares at me, as if he can will me to understand.

  I feel the shivers run from the insubstance of my soul, right through to the meat of my heart. “You’re not serious? A neural incursion? That’s what this is about?”

  “We suspect so. Through here please.”

  I follow Kirk through a double-sealed door into a screened medical bay, where a regular doc, a human kind, is pacing, already gloved. He looks up as I come in. “Are you her?” he asks.

  I don’t know what he means by ‘her’ exactly. Does he mean the ship’s doc? Or does he mean ‘her’, the one who found the infection on the Freya, who broke her mind connection to stop a coup, and who is trying (unsuccessfully it seems) to fly under the galaxy radar. I keep staring, hoping it’s the first one. He can’t possibly know the rest.

  “Are you trained for this?” he asks, impatiently.

  “A neural incursion,” I say, eyeing the gloves he’s wearing, and quoting from the Program handbook. “A systematic and deliberate contamination of neural pathways, used to incapacitate or control an opponent. Illegal in all jurisdictions, and technology for perpetrating embargoed under strict military penalties.”

  “You forgot to mention contagious.”

  The guy is pretty worked up, and I control my contempt. “No, it’s not contagious, not unless the carrier has broadcast ability. Does the patient have an implant or a neural-graft?”

  We hear bootsteps in the hallway. “Let’s hope the fuck not,” he says.

  The guy they bring in looks pitiful, and my first thought is I wonder why they worried so much. Looks less like a neural incursion than a stroke-out, eyes glazed and looping in small circles the iris axis canted to the top-left of vision. Sidewards tic head movement. A low whine of air through a nostril with each breath, and the strong stench of a bowel no longer controlled. I register it all with a sinking sense of déjà vu. Haven’t seen this in decades. And that was still too soon ago.

  “Christ,” mutters the doc, jotting vitals and scanning for heart rhythm, which the machinery projects up on the wall. Electrical disturbances, everywhere. The diagnostics run, virus warnings tripping.

  “Shit, shit, shit!” The doc slaps his remote, silencing alarms. Kirk watches us through the barrier. Those chills are back on my skin.

  “Can’t be,” I mutter, watching the patterns, the space of years between my earliest days in the Program, and now, collapsing like time and space inside a way-gate. Because this isn’t just a neural incursion, no black market scramble. This is a pattern I recognize. Something I didn’t think I’d ever see again. A dirty little secret from the early years of the neural-grafted Program, evaporated into legend and now resurrected before my eyes.

  “Wait, where are you going?” asks the doc as I push through the barrier towards Captain Kirk.

  “Freeze him,” I say over my shoulder, knowing the patient is gone, his neural circuits used to extinction. I stop in front of Kirk, “I need to see the ship he came off.”

  “The dock’s locked down.”

  “Open it. I’ll be back in a half-hour.”

  And I speed towards the transport tube, hoping the old guy is still at the port-hole.

  “Where did you see the Dellinger?” I ask him, when I find him sinking cheap moonshine, made from some distant ’roid-grown tuber that stinks like an old sock.

  “Oh, she believes me now,” he slurs, taking another slug. “Not a phantom ship anymore, izzit?”

  “Where?”

  Riley’s hand is on my arm before I can shake the old guy. I try to shrug him off, but his Special-Ops grip is unyielding.

  “What are you talking about?” he demands. “The Dellinger’s an invention. A fairy story about a ship that takes your mind. Something to scare kids at night. Hell, they used to scare us with it at the Academy.”

  “It’s really not,” I hiss. “I’m older than you, remember? There’s things I know.”

  Riley raises his eyebrows. “There’s been missions. Explorations looking for it. Never a sighting. Never anything, except good boats lost. It was written off as a hoax. They found the information trail dead-ending in an old forum. Someone made it up. It’s nothing. If it was real, it would have left some evidence.”

  “There’s a hell of a lot of evidence up in the isolation bay right now,” I shoot back, not mentioning that the Dellinger is smart enough to leave a false trail, and those who lost her don’t want anyone to know where she came from. “A guy with a neural incursion, picked up off a drifting ship. So, either let go, or I’m going to drag you with me.”

  I see the doubt flash in his eyes then. Riley has a weakness for my history, it’s embedded in his training, a quiet awe that probably makes our … arrangement unethical. But I’m far beyond caring for that now.

  “What are we looking for?” He gives in, a peace offer I miss.

  “Evidence,” I say grimly, casting a look at the old guy, steadily drinking himself coma-wards. Something about him bothers me, and it’s not just that he’s seen a ghost ship and ended up here without a scratch. “And bring him too.”

  The ship in dock is pitiful, small even by salvager standards. Its outer panels are pockmarked, portholes barricaded. The only neat line is where the transport’s crew cut the hatch open with a laser. Kirk trails behind, casting disapproving glances at Riley and the old guy, but he’s spooked by the man in the isolation bay, by the stories he’s heard of neural incursion. Men controlled to turn on their own. To bring down ships on planet-side targets. To work as galley slaves. Kirk stays outside the hatch.

  Run a diagnostic, I order Riley through our link. I want the log and the system status.

  How about please? he responds. This is an annoying development, one I have no time for.

  Do it now. And I shut the link against response. Riley turns his back to face the comms panel, and a small part of me wonders if he bears a hurt expression, if he can remember how to do one after his years in Ops.

  The old guy is pacing down the hall, poking at the hatches, his feet sure even as he sways; not as drunk as he’s making out. I’m still staring at him a minute later, when Riley uses his voice.

  “System’s junk. Missing key components, or at least that’s what the command software thinks.”

  When we pull the panels, we see the empty component bays. Some of the pieces are still there, removed and cast aside, as if a space-rat’s been in here digging towards the bottom of the hole. The old guy leans over our shoulder. I can smell the moonshine wafting into the air, prodding the nausea in my gut.

  “Salvagers hit them hard,” says Riley from behind. “Stripped out the parts, especially the ones with rare earths. Critical stuff. That’s low.”

  The old guy laughs, mocking. He knows as well as I do: this wasn’t done by rogue salvagers. My stomach is hollow.

  Riley goes on, “But crew didn’t put up much resistance. Looks like they were trying to run.”

  I snap around, look Riley in the face for the first time, my fear finding release in my sharp tongue. “What does that mean, Tech? I want data, not assumptions.”

  His cheeks flush, the way they do when we’re in bunk. “Before components were
removed, they accessed charts to the way-gate.”

  My fears condense as a stone in my stomach, then it falls through my body. “Before or after they noted hostile contact?”

  Riley frowns. “They never noted hostile contact. But there was a crew of five. You said only one was brought in. Maybe the others escaped.”

  The old guy laughs again. “I’ll tell you where they are, and it ain’t doing the bloated space dance. They’re with Dellinger now.”

  Much as I would want it to be untrue, I think he’s right. But there’s a much bigger problem here, and no one on this transport besides Riley has skills to comprehend. So, it’s time to make peace. I reach out with the link. We need to talk.

  In the bunk, the sheets have been set straight, Riley’s training unable to leave them scrunched after rising. I sit on the crisp edge and try to see a way through this mess. His weight comes down beside me, and I look up into those eyes, seeing the spectrum shift in his irises. I don’t know how to begin.

  Tell me what you’re not saying, he says.

  We’re in trouble.

  Because of one neural incursion and a boat pilfered by a bunch of rogue salvagers?

  “That was not done by salvagers,” I say, his doubt reactivating my voice. “That boat was pulled apart by her own crew, and not of their own free will. Do you see? They were controlled.”

  Riley is quiet for a three long heartbeats. “Then this is about the Dellinger. You said you knew about it. You said it was real.”

  “It was before my time,” I say quickly. But not much before. And what I’m about to disclose is a secret people have died for. Something I learned in the Program and buried. That I would never speak of if I thought we’d get out of this alive. My voice is a harsh whisper.

  “In the early days of station building, they were looking for a way to keep the central systems current. They were so huge, took so long to build, that hard-wire computers were obsolete. And the programming missed things. Wiring missed things. So they needed something more flexible. The DNA graft allowed evolution. It grew with the station, optimized the system as it went. And then they created us to deal with everything that could go wrong in that neural–machine interface.”