Men and Machines I

by Charlie Nash

“We don’t think so. Not a useful guy like you. They’ll send you back. Do a partial wipe, maybe. They’ll tell you it’s just one more, then again, one more. Do you know how many times you’ve been here already?”

  The statement makes the air heavy. My lungs struggle and my throat closes. A new headache hammers around my lumbering thoughts. I pull the trigger, but nothing happens. My body won’t respond. Because somehow I know they are right.

  The quiet passes for ten standard secs. Then Comms says, “You won’t shoot because you like us. We worked hard on that. So you won’t do it. We know you blame yourself. You don’t want to do it again.”

  Some part of me is broken and unresponsive. I let Mouth push the StrafeMaster aside. My ass finds the dirt and the polarizer slips over my eye. I watch the wraith tendrils floating beyond the pod. I stare at the StrafeMaster barrel, resting on my thigh.

  My thoughts remuster around a single idea. “I need a mem wipe.”

  Comms and Morale Boy exchange a look. “Cap, you’ve had the mems a long time. They might not go. Might be worse than now. But there’s people we could go to,” she adds.

  I believe her for the time it takes them to go to work on the pod. Then I remember the doubt in her voice.

  I watch them. They think they’re right. Their activity is purposeful; a well-laid plan deep in execution. But I’m only useful if I remember my training, if I remember everything. So, they’re never going to get me a wipe. They believe what that Stelline psych said.

  They’re all wrong.

  I am not a man, not anymore. And I didn’t tell them all of it; the one thing I never told the psych.

  A memory reloads. My gun against Comms’ hair. A red spray. Another face, eyes shot with blood, then shot, more blood. They are all dead now, all except me. But I’ve seen my eyes in the latrine mirror; I’m compromised like the rest. I rest my gun on my teeth, but I can’t do it. And it doesn’t matter how much I tell myself I’m a coward; how much I know I should protect others from my infected form … I can’t do it.

  Then finally, rotorbeats of rescue. A stolen treatment. But I’m compromised beyond the alienoid; I have no honor. I have survived, but I am no longer a man.

  This is what I have to forget: the knowing I couldn’t end myself after ending my own men. The knowing I thought I was strong enough, right until the last moment, when I wasn’t.

  Just like now.

  The re-living loses time. When I come back, it’s to the EMP burst and the pod in motion. Comms, Morale Boy and Mouth are busy with the controls. They’re clever; they think they know me.

  So I’m looking for another way out. Wipe that memory, so I can be whole again. Maybe I can do it.

  Once more.

  Deep Deck 9

  Login □ Sci-Bin004

  Psswd □ *********

  Awaiting Command□ set_secure:ultra

  Security set to ultra

  Awaiting Command□ recompile 06801A-Moon Ranger

  Poseidon Sci-Bin004, DistComp subrtneJJ64

  Sample extraction file retrieved

  06801A

  Begin recompile

  *******************

  They say space is a silent place to die, but I never worked out why. Sounds like something a planet-sider would say. Someone never been to space, never heard the sounds it makes.

  Poseidon’s curve is coming up big in the window, far too big for safety. But that’s the general idea. It’s a red and orange thumb-print, with its hazy gas-rock ring arching overhead. Civilization scars pock the surface; I used to live there, but it’s never been home. And there’s no time for nostalgia; the alarms will start soon enough. Smashed out a few but some I can’t turn off; I already know we’re going down. We’re skipping into atmo too steep, moments from being a burning stone. And the ship thinks I need to know about things like that.

  While the planet looms red and vast, my head is down in the floor, screwdriver rolling around on the GravDeck. I’ve barred the door, and I’m trying not to think about what’s behind it. This is too important. They’ll send the planet-side investigators for the crash-hardened black box after we’ve burned a long match-strike across Poseidon’s crust. So I’m digging down in the Ranger’s belly, going for the heart that holds those damn coordinates. The Junta can’t find it.

  They can’t know where I’ve been.

  ***Stitching non-concordant thought stream***

  Lou gave us the mission: a trunk call salvage twenty parsecs out. It was us then. Three tars and the Moon Ranger, just a standard fast shuttle with a DistComp: distributed computer inner skin. Just capable of the distance, and certainly capable of the desperate need to go. We owed Lou a favor, and no one usually survives owing Lou. I guess he keeps his rep.

  A trunk call: that’s what they call it when you’re going beyond the comms limit, where a small problem overnights into a Poseidon-sized cluster-fuck. And this job was twenty parsecs past the asteroid shell, a celestial graveyard given up by Zeus’ tidal pull. All the planets in this system are called by the old gods. The Junta thought that was a good idea; inspiring, nostalgic. Seems fitting to send the ship to die smashing into one of them.

  Took two weeks to haul the Ranger out to the asteroid shell. There were stories about the shell. Find any old, red-wrinkled tar who’s toasted too many mallows around old-school reactors and they’ll tell you. The shell’s a place for renegades, anarchists and secrets: for people wanting out of the reach of the planets. After the first decades of just hermits and the two-parts crazy, corporations took their out-of-regs research decks out into the shell. Must have been hard out there; lonely. Endless drone of recycled air; endless waiting between service drops, and endless deep, Cold Space. The real frontier. Men went crazy and topped themselves, and sometimes took the platform with them. But back within the comms, within the Junta’s grip, there was no official word, only the stories.

  So we never heard about Deep Deck 9.

  At least, not until Lou did.

  ***Stitching non-concordant thought stream***

  There’s a shudder, and a red strobe blinks over my shoulder. That means the auxiliary life support’s gone. The Ranger’s DistComp is keeping track of all this, and soon she’ll warn me of last-chance-to-correct. Until then, she’ll keep quiet. That’s the good thing about the DistComp, and the difficult thing too. On the way back, after the others were gone, I thought about a quiet death. Blew the scrubber lines to pump monoxide back into the bridge, make the Ranger my last locker. But the DistComp is pretty clever, and odds are she’d get down on her own, even with me screwing the inputs. Can’t let that happen.

  Poseidon’s tower is trying to raise me. Guess they’re worrying I haven’t noticed the trajectory. But I’ll bet someone in the tower’s got the Ranger’s signature off the transponder. They know it’s me; I’m the best there is at course plotting, and sometimes I cut it fine for show. I won an award once, way back. I can bring any ship half-way across the system within a length of where you wanted.

  That’s why Lou gave me the job.

  ***Stitching non-concordant thought stream***

  Everyone knew about the corporations in the asteroid shell, but Lou heard a whisper about Deep Deck 9 and did the kind of digging only he could do. Angelo Deep, entrepreneur, richest man in the systems. A man who’d started in the Junta but gotten exiled and made good elsewhere. A real pioneer, a visionary was what they called him. At least they did, three hundred years ago when he was last alive. The Deep Deck was launched from the shell, set in a long elliptical orbit and charged with a covert mission: new tech development, far from artful competitors. The Deck would spin out on its three hundred year orbit, and return with science built by a long-expired crew; on the vision of a man who wouldn’t live to see it. Because a deck in Cold Space has no resupply; even with the best recyclers, you lose water and carbon until there’s not enough left to run systems, until there’s nothing to eat but polymer and chrome. Sending men out into that was real vision. No wonder Lou was
impressed.

  Of course, memory fades fast in this system. Too much happens in these tech-driven worlds and the Junta help some people forget. But Lou found it out: about the mission, and that the orbit was coming back close.

  The window was tight. Twenty parsecs meant we had to cart extra. Extra scrubbers, extra cyclers. We stripped the Ranger bare and had the extras crammed in every corner, and we still weren’t sure we’d make it back. Fuel’s not the problem once you’re out on your delta-V. It’s the air and water that’ll bring you unstuck. The Moon Ranger doesn’t have farms and processing of an interstellar freighter. So we had to stick it. Calculate the orbit on a bunch of guesses and hope. The plan gave us thirty minutes. Five to dock on and off, twenty on board. Twenty minutes to rip the spoils from the Deep Deck and bring them back for Lou. Twenty minutes on a four-week-plus turnaround was a drop in the starfield, and we all knew it. But we went.

  The trip out to the shell was lots of nothingness. We watched re-runs, soaked the solar cells; Drake wrote his novel. Charlie paced and pretended to smoke. We passed through the shell, ports black like everywhere else with only the readouts to tell us we’d come within clicks of a hundred other unseen ships and stations. Then we were out into Cold Space, already beyond comms, beyond the Ranger’s rated limits. Drake and Charlie exchanged a look. They wouldn’t have come but for me.

  Now, they’re gone anyway.

  The morning we came up on the rendezvous, the DistComp began pinging after 0400. A lot of people don’t believe in Old Earth time anymore. There was almost another coup about it on Poseidon, but the Junta put it down. They do things like that. I’ve got reason to remember; there’s a chip in my head from fifteen years back. But I think we need things to hang onto in space. Time seems a small thing to keep.

  After the alarms went off, we were up and quiet. I sat with my hand on the stick, but only out of habit. No one flies by wire on a course that long. If we were wrong, we were wrong two weeks ago, nothing to be done for it. Charlie drummed his fingers and stared out the bridge port. Not that there was anything to see. Drake didn’t bother: the Deep Deck should have run out of critical gear within a hundred years without resupply, and the space bugs eaten out the solar cells. She should be dead black against black; we wouldn’t see until she was right on us. Then I see it came croaking from Charlie’s throat. Drake snorted; he thought Charlie’d lost it. Funny thing was: Charlie did see it. The Deep Deck came dead-on in the window, burning bright like a star in the field, like no station I’ve ever seen. Drake digested the apparition with a slow chewing motion, then slapped me on the back, credit for the navigation. But we exchanged the uneasy look that was due, the one that silently asked how a three hundred year old deck was still running hot, whether it would have air that was poison, or what kind of madness would be on board. Every Old Earth classic space movie feels real in Cold Space, so I was trying hard not to think of face huggers and sentient ships, and knew Drake and Charlie were doing the same. Not that anyone had ever found other life in the systems; that fact was enough to prop up some dying Poseidon churches, folded some others. But it didn’t mean squat. Everything was real in Cold Space.

  We locked on by 0408, started the timers, tested the comms and shouldered our salvage kits. We had twenty minutes to scramble before the Deep Deck dragged us out on her orbit, and it was three hundred years before someone else found our withered corpses stuck to her side. If we’d known then what would happen after, I wouldn’t have cracked the airlock. I’d have broken away and pulsed the Moon Ranger straight back to Poseidon, and to hell with Lou. We should have trusted that deep pain in our guts. A ship shouldn’t be running all bright and hot after three hundred years in Cold Space.

  But we scented credit, and so we went.

  We’d worried that the Deck would be a Tardis: ungovernable and unsearchable, needing Ariadne to make it back to the Ranger. But she wasn’t. She was an antique with lots of molded plastic panels in her long, ordered tunnels, built before the verse went ceramic and silicon. The air was thick, but breathable, so we had our masks off in seconds. The Deck was pre-GravDeck: her magnetic drive tugged hard at the shoulder suits we’d brought.

  And she was silent as a corpse.

  We headed for the bridge. If the Deck was still running there was fair chance all the data was fresh. If it wasn’t, we’d take only the solid-state memory and be done with it.

  We passed endless windows showing lab space, all the glass frosty and glowing, benches bright white. Drake ran his fingers over surfaces and left no mark, which wasn’t right. Even the Moon Ranger raises dust a few weeks from port, fine stuff that gets into everything. But the Deck was brushed bright, like it was new from Angelo’s fab plant yesterday, not three hundred years in Cold Space. That was when we began to think there might be crew still here, or worse: another salvage ship with bigger thrusters docked round the back.

  We reached the bridge in two minutes, empty beneath a yawning black sky port. Drake went for a console, found the keys fused, and plugged in another. It was the first sign the Deck was old, that this was real and not some Junta mind-spy trick.

  There wasn’t time to go hunting for physical spoils; information was the digital gold of the Deck, and we found it fast. Charlie pulled the solid-state data banks for system files, and the GhostDrive for the data. Twenty banks of solid-state meant nearly five-thou gig of data. The GhostDrive would hold five times more. In Angelo’s time, GhostDrive was new tech; now, it was hideously obsolete, but we had it in under a minute. Thirty-thousand gig stolen in a few seconds. Enough to pay our debt to Lou.

  Drake brought up the camera views, pocked and frosty. One by one they showed the ship, inside and out, up and down, and empty. And there was still sixteen minutes, time enough to look for more.

  Drake and Charlie went. I stayed at the bridge and looked for the Deck’s log, which since the beginning of the verse has been stored with HoloGen black box, somewhere on the bridge. Lou wouldn’t want it; it wouldn’t sell. I watched Charlie and Drake stride the long hallways, turning over trays in the labs. They stuck close, avoiding the quarters, recyclers, and plant rooms I saw from the frosty cameras. But they weren’t finding much – the Deck was empty. No evidence of crew. Maybe there’d been one generation, maybe two or three. Lou said there’d been a hundred launched with the Deep Deck, enough for a few rounds of science kids who’d never seen planet-side before the supplies ran out. Kids didn’t grow well off-planet. Didn’t grow proper anywhere but Old Earth according to Lou. But what did Lou know.

  Drake’s voice came down the comms after five minutes.

  “Creeps and crawls, boss,” he muttered. “Can’t hear the plant running.”

  “Power’s on,” I argued, thinking as much was damn obvious.

  “’S’not running,” he repeated.

  “She’s running on batteries then.”

  In the tiny camera view, Drake scratched his balls. You’d never know he wrote romances. “This old? Shouldn’t be holding a charge at all.”

  “Yeah.”

  We all got the shivers. And with still ten minutes on our clocks we were heading back to the lock, feeling like we’d missed something. Charlie took the solid-state wafers in both hands and pockets, rubbing at his eyes with his shoulder. Drake had the GhostDrive, and I had the HoloGen black box under my arm. The data was Lou’s, but any man had the right to take something he thought might sell from a salvage. Or a trophy he wanted to keep. If Drake and Charlie took anything, I didn’t see it.

  We were dusted by 0430. I watched the Deep Deck’s bulk pull away into Cold Space, still glowing bright like festival lights.

  And there, as Drake and Charlie turned away, I was sure I saw them.

  Faces, hundreds, pressed against the sub-deck windows. Staring with blank white eyes; slack-jawed leers and slashed skin. Looks I’d seen in a Zeus dope house. One moved, jerking. I froze, squinting as the pulse drive engaged. But as we streaked away I couldn’t be sure. I was damn glad for every pa
rsec fraction between us, and glad it would be another three centuries before anyone would get close.

  Except that wasn’t the end.

  I had to knuckle-to for an hour: check the course plot for the two-plus week haul back to Poseidon while a correction was still possible.

  Then, we got into the data.

  Drake couldn’t resist a peak, no salvager can, really, even when the goods don’t belong to you. For the measly hours or days the stuff is in your possession, you want to know what you bought for the other guy with your sweat and adrenaline. Pays to know what he owes you, or in this case, to be sure we were even again.

  So we cracked out the solid-state, asked the Deep Deck for her secrets.

  She was a research platform. Drake snorted as Charlie made the proclamation. Anyone could see that. Charlie blushed. Multidisciplinary, which surprised us at first. On Poseidon, the regs restrict corporations to one industry, been like that for as long as anyone can remember. In the early days, it stopped the massive enterprises with lots of capital being the only ones who could afford a foot out into the space systems and gave the Junta more control. But no one really thought it out, ’cause it just meant the deals went below ground. Business as usual. And it helped men like Lou become big. They’re the dealmakers, setting up arrangements between the biotechs and the med-scis; genetics researcher needing neuroscience? They’d fix you up. Nothing traceable because they did nothing themselves; webmasters for information and contacts. But the Deep Deck was before all that, and there weren’t any regs in Cold Space.

  The Deck’s specs were all laid out in the solid-state. She’d had bio-labs, cryos, cyberface and astro-geo fabricators, soft condensed matter, nanoetchers and hi-funk computer power.

  But we couldn’t find the mission plan, and no logs for research objectives. I’d done a couple of hits on research labs over the years, and that was a first. Charlie frowned, furrows etching deeper as he skimmed the docs. Eventually, Drake got bored and went back to his novel. I sat under the star panel, and the soft whiz of Charlie scanning through kept me company into sleep.