Pitch Dark

by Courtney Alameda

  LAURA

  Tonight, my future hangs by the tips of my fingers. Never in my life did I want to break any of Mami’s rules—but here I am, climbing the ship’s massive silocomputers during the late bells. Breaking rules.

  But this may be my only chance to escape.

  As I reach for a new handhold, a translucent ioScreen dialog box opens over my wrist, displaying a ping message from my friend Alex: You on your way, chiquita? Its notification buzz tremors through my arm bones. My fingers slip. Wedge it, I curse in my head, nearly losing my grip. I halt my climb, wrapping my left thumb around the tops of my nails, anchoring myself to a black-body radiation meter. That was close.

  Jutting fifteen centimeters off the silocomputer’s facade, the radiation meter makes a decent grip. But I can’t rest here long. Radiation meters were designed to measure the potency of the electromagnetic waves in deep space, not to support the weight of a fifty-kilogram girl.

  A second ping follows the first, this one from Faye: Where are you, Laura? The dialog boxes hover over the bioware node embedded in the back of my left wrist, shimmering, demanding my attention. No pasa nada if I’m hanging sixty meters above the floor, right? Strung up by a rope and barefoot? In a place I’m not supposed to be at any hour of the day, but especially not now? It’s almost two bells past midnight. My little detour’s taking longer than I imagined it would.

  No mames, Faye adds in disbelief, this is the most important party of your life. If you miss it, I’ll never forgive you.

  Liar. She always forgives me. But if I don’t make an appearance at Faye’s soon, someone will realize I’m not at my family’s party or my friends’ party, or at any party, for that matter. If that someone is not as forgiving as Alex and Faye, they could ruin my plans for tonight.

  Mami allows for few holiday permits once the ship’s past the Interstellar Guard’s—or ISG’s—dead zone, but it’s not every day one’s archeologist parents stumble across what appears to be a fully operational, yet potentially abandoned, terrarium-class starship. If the ship contains even a remnant of the extinct bacteria and enzymes humanity needs to finish terraforming Mars, my parents will be national heroes. Tomorrow they might save the world; so tonight everyone’s celebrating. Naturally.

  Everyone but me.

  Securing my rope, I sit back in my ancient climbing harness, wiping the sweat off my forehead with the back of my hand. I snuck out of the family party early, after Mami and Dad made their ship-wide public speeches, then their private, family-only ones. I waited till Lena slipped away with her boyfriend, then ran to my room, changed into my climbing gear, and headed out the back door. Nobody noticed me missing. Till now.

  A third ping arrives, again from Alex: We’re missing you, cari. Still braced by my climbing harness, I open the image he attached. In the foreground, Faye waves at the camera. She looks radiant, her long brown hair falling in barrel rolls around her shoulders, big topaz eyes warm as Nueva Baja’s solarshine.

  Behind Faye and out of focus, my ex-boyfriend, Sebastian Smithson, holds court, surrounded by a gaggle of milk-pale, leggy girls. Emphasis on gag. Looking at Sebastian causes the muscles in my throat to constrict.

  That pendejo. Why isn’t he celebrating with his bruja of a mother? My stomach curls up into the fetal position when I realize he’s probably waiting for me. After all, he’s the heir to the Smithsonian Institution’s legacy, and my parents just made the greatest find of the twenty-fifth century. No doubt he’s planning to make my life even more of a living hell.

  I swallow hard. The small piece of tech hidden in the hollow of my throat grates against my windpipe. I have to escape it, I have to finish my work here. I must.

  Holding my left arm parallel to my chest, I select Reply All and type: Give me 30, but tell my mamá I was with you all night.

  The replies ping back in nanoseconds.

  Alex: People are noticing you’re not around, Lalita. Your cousins are here.

  Me: Mierda, which ones?

  Alex: Marta and Lena. Thought I saw Esteban, too.

  I blow out a breath. Marta and Lena won’t tattle. Esteban might, since he makes it his business to “take care” of me. The fool. I’m the daughter of Elena Cruz. I take care of myself.

  Faye shoulders her way back into the conversation: Why do you hate fun, Laura?

  I don’t hate fun, I type. My harness creaks as I sway back and forth on the rope. If I could be at Faye’s party now, I would. But tonight provided too perfect an alibi, and I knew the ship’s silocomputers wouldn’t be monitored for a few hours. Maintenance workers are at gatherings all over the ship, everyone taking advantage of the captain’s holiday permit. The ship’s guards presented a minor concern, so I hacked their secure-cams and inserted a few protocols to blind them to my bioware signature. Then I spoofed Mami’s geopersonnel locator. If she checks her GPL tonight, it will show my biomarker in the Peréz-Spiegels’ apartment, not in the ship’s Narrows … where I am definitely not supposed to be.

  My bioware pings. It’s Faye again: I swear, Laura Cruz, if you’re studying some nerd history of Uzbekistan in the twenty-first century during my party …

  Pachanguera, I type back, clicking my tongue. Party girl. It wouldn’t hurt her to do a little more studying, seeing as how she’s just putting in her uni applications now. I’ll finish college in another year, maybe two. Don’t be so dramatic, I am not studying. Though I almost wish I were doing something so plebe.

  I’m an artist, drama’s what I do, Faye replies. He keeps asking me when you’re going to get here, y’know.

  Who? I ping back.

  You know who, Faye says.

  She’s right, I do.

  The güero, Alex answers.

  I don’t know what you saw in him, Faye writes. Seb’s like cotija cheese—pale, but twice as bland. But I guess you both like to study?

  I almost type Don’t let Dr. Smithson hear you two throwing the G word at her son, but don’t. Had it not been for Sebastian, his mother, and their gringo attitudes, I wouldn’t be here now, climbing the Narrows during a ship-wide celebration, lying to everyone I love and breaking all of Mami’s rules. I won’t defend Sebastian’s actions, nor those of his mother.

  Be there soon, I type as that familiar, yet artificial, lump rises in my throat. Don’t let Sebastian out of your sight. He’s the square root of trouble.

  Obvi, she writes back, eye roll implied. Hurry, k?

  I will.

  Shaking my wrist to shut off my bioware’s ioScreen, I consider the route up the rest of the silocomputer’s face. Mami and Dad nicknamed the computers Lucita and Etel. I’m currently halfway up Lucita’s portside face.

  Lucita and Etel stand parallel to each other, two towering, hundred-meter-tall defenses between the Conquistador, her crew, and space’s utter desolation. White lights wink like tiny stars across their surfaces. Heat radiates off the silos’ absorption shields, bringing the temperature up to almost ninety degrees. Hot enough to make me sweat while climbing. The computers hum and beep. Except for the whir of cooled air through the HVAC systems and the blinking of machines, the Narrows lie quiet at this time of night.

  I love the Conquistador’s silos more than any other part of the ship; Lucita and Etel represent almost five hundred years of evolution. Their ancestors were born in garages and labs on a defunct Earth. Now these masterworks of engineering soar into the deepest regions of space.

  “¡Ay!” I say, sparks nipping at my fingers when I grip the wrong end of a transfer tube. I shake out my hand. On either side of me, the ship’s crysteel flanks let the Eagle Nebula’s light inside. There’s a murder of stars out there, lurking past the Conquistador’s hull. Despite the danger, I’d rather cling to the edge of the universe by a fingertip, riding the edge of disaster, than stand on the Colonies’ bioengineered but dead soil, safe and sound.

  So it seems like I climb through space itself, cradled in a mountain-climbing harness I’m not supposed to have. Anchored by a rope I stole during
the Alpha Centauri archeological dig. Hacking a computer I’m not supposed to touch. As captain and lead archeologist on this mission, Mami decides on all my supposed to’s, none of which include having access to the ship’s main systems.

  Mami’s nicknamed the Lioness of Baja for good reason—her honor, keen intelligence, persistence, and temper are all as legendary in Nueva Baja as the extinct beasts themselves. I’d never betray her trust if I weren’t so desperate to escape the Smithsons’ invisible shackles.

  If my hands tremble as I climb, it’s because this is the closest I’ve been to true freedom in three months.

  After another seventeen meters, I reach Lucita’s upper partition gates. Clipping myself to one of maintenance’s U-bars, I pause, patting the silo’s forepanel affectionately, like one might a cat.

  “Come on, Lucita bonita, let’s end this now.” I take a deep breath to steady the drums beating in my chest. My lungs rattle as I breathe. You can do this, Laura. I repeat the words Mami always says to me. You’re a Cruz.

  “Fortuna y gloria,” I whisper to myself.

  Go.

  I pop the silo’s forepanel, then shut down a meter-high section of the absorption shield. The blue haze surrounding the partition gates automagically snaps off. So does the static hum. Shaking my left wrist, I rouse one of my bioware units again. Bioware consists of a pair of millimeter-thick crysteel diodes set into the user’s wrists and wired to the nervous system, one that acts as a personal computer, a communication device, a GPL tracker, health monitor, games server … and more, if the user’s clever. When activated, a touch-sensitive ioScreen shoots out of the diode. The screen can be resized and repositioned at will, though I generally keep it set to float above my forearm.

  Using my fingers like virtual suction cups, I move my ioScreen beside Lucita’s interface. Within seconds, I’ve initiated an upload for a new partition onto Lucita’s slag drives, which will keep her from alerting the bridge while I work. I don’t need to announce my presence to the night crew.

  I spent a week writing the partition code in secret: in the bathroom between classes, while monitoring the ship’s gravidar for Dad, or late at night, after everyone went to bed.

  Once the partition loads and installs, I breathe a bit easier. Luci won’t be telling on me now. I order her to shift all her Sector 41.08 responsibilities to her sister, Etel, for the next twenty minutes.

  Now I’m a ghost in the machine.

  I initiate a brute-force attack on the captain’s chair, watching thousands of lines of code spill over my ioScreen. The text moves so quickly, it almost looks like water cascading down the ioScreen’s translucent facade. Ten billion lines of code stand between me and freedom. My ioScreen can’t possibly display those lines fast enough.

  Since the mission’s Launch Day, my body hasn’t been my own. For three months, I’ve carried a secret, silent spy, one forced upon me by two-faced enemies who masquerade as allies of my family’s. The device, known as a subjugator, is illegal in all twenty-six Panamerican torus colonies. It allows an external user to program commands into a victim’s bioware, thus allowing the user a modicum of control over the victim’s behaviors. A modicum, of course, is not synonymous with complete; however, the subjugator’s mere presence is an insult. A terror. A danger.

  I press two fingers against the strange, alien lump residing in the hollow place between my collarbones. The subjugator’s shaped like a spider—one metal knot in the middle, with eight fibrous legs anchoring it in my tissue. When the Smithsons held me down and dropped the thing in my mouth, it crawled down my tongue, its little feet pricking my skin like needles. I retched as the device entered my throat, then screamed myself hoarse as it burrowed into my flesh.

  Throughout the implantation procedure, Sebastian watched. He stood by as I writhed in pain. He said nothing while his mother scolded me for coughing bright blossoms of blood on their white marble floors. He looked away when she wiped my face with the cloth she’d just used on the floor, tutting at me.

  The Smithsons programmed my subjugator with three main protocols:

  One, I could never tell anyone about the device, on pain of death;

  Two, I was barred from attempting to harm or injure a member of the Smithson family in any way: physically, emotionally, or otherwise;

  And three, I was never to speak the secrets I overheard Dr. Smithson utter on Launch Day, or tell my parents of the Smithsons’ plans to undermine and discredit the Cruz family and seize the artifacts in our collection. Dr. Smithson is keen on obtaining one piece in particular—the former United States of America’s Declaration of Independence. My parents have refused to part with the document on the grounds that it belongs to all of Panamerica, and not solely the Smithsonian Institution.

  So I’m breaking all the Smithsons’ rules and smashing through their protocols. I’m exacting retribution for the last three months of shame, torment, and horror I’ve endured at their hands. I will hack into the captain’s chair on the Conquistador’s bridge and use it to shut my bioware down. Then I will run straight to Mami and tell her everything I know. All the secrets. A world of lies. I will save my family’s fortunes, the terrarium of our future, and myself.

  My bioware rumbles, the lines of code on the ioScreen slamming to a stop. Two long numbers blink at the end of all those lines of text—the passcodes to the captain’s chair.

  Excellent! I smile when I recognize the numbers. The first passcode’s made up of my immediate family’s birthdays in chronological order: Dad’s, then Mami’s; my older brother Gael’s, my mother’s so-called Golden Lion; mine, the middle child and the one to whom all the work falls, not that I mind; and my babied younger sister, Sofía. The next number—Mami’s personal bioware marker—is the longitudinal number for our home on Nueva Baja. That’s Mami. No matter how far she flies, family and home are never far from her heart.

  Moving quietly, I wipe all traces of my presence, physical and digital, from the silocomputer. I replace Lucita’s forepanel and reignite her absorption shield. If everything goes according to plan, nobody will ever know I’ve been here.

  As I rappel down, a shadow moves along the floor below. I land on my toes between the hindrance oscillators sticking off the wall, quiet as a cat and certain I’ve been caught. Tucking myself between the enormous, wing-shaped machines, I hold my breath. I expect someone to shine a light up the silocomputer’s flank. To call my name and say I’m under arrest for breaking twelve Panamerican laws by hacking a silo while in-flight.

  Who could have figured out my location? Besides the Smithsons, of course—my subjugator features a tracking function. But if it were Sebastian or his mother, they would have entered the room in the most dramatic way possible, with a contingent of their own guards, turning on the Narrows’ great floodlights and ordering me down from the silo’s face.

  None of that happens. Instead, one of the floor-level interfaces boots up. A rectangular floatscreen throws the intruder into an EVA-suited silhouette. From this distance, the bulk of the EVA and the wearer’s helmet make it impossible to ascertain anything about the figure below—age, gender, ethnicity, none of it. One thing I do know: the Conquistador’s standard-issue EVAs aren’t nearly so bulky.

  If it’s not a Smithson below me, it means I have more than one enemy aboard this ship.

  Fury swells within me, coloring my world red. Nobody gets to hack the Conquistador’s silocomputers but me. This ship belongs to my family. While I would never jeopardize the ship’s mission or the safety of her crew, I can’t say the same for everyone aboard. The ship carries almost four hundred people. While I’d like to trust all of them, I’ve already been betrayed by the boy I thought I loved. Now I know better than to trust the hearts of anyone who isn’t family.

  I shift my weight, bracing myself against an oscillator. My rope creaks. The intruder’s accessing the ship’s gravidar servers—I know, because I’ve memorized the silos’ every nanoboard and microframe. After life support, gravidar’s our most
mission-critical tech. It measures the Big Gs, or gravitational constants, of objects in deep space, helping us find the ships an earlier age of humanity scattered all over the galaxy. It’s the tech Dad uses to track Panamerica’s lost ships, one that also helps us to avoid colliding with objects while in-flight.

  Now someone’s hacking into the gravidar, on the night my parents located a terrarium. Everyone’s on holiday. It can’t be a coincidence.

  It has to be an attack.

  Wedge me. I grit my teeth, wishing I had a pair of Specs to cut down the darkness and distance. If the intruder on the ground’s any sort of hacker, they might have noticed how I spoofed the secure-cams, too. We won’t be able to identify them on the security footage. Once I tell Mami about my subjugator and she’s dealt with the Smithsons, I might be able to pick up the intruder’s trail and reverse engineer their work—but if they’re good, they won’t leave much of a trace. It would be better to catch them here and now, if I can.

  Quietly, I crawl down Lucita’s face. I put my toes to the horseshoe-shaped electromagnetic accelerometers. Then one hand to the boxy capacitance sensor, which whirs at my touch. My harness clanks and I freeze, flattening myself to Lucita as much as possible. Below me, the intruder pauses, looking around. Of course, they don’t think to look up, because the silos’ six lifts are grounded on the floor. Why should anyone be above them, in the dark?

  The figure hurries now, shaking their wrist to power up their bioware’s ioScreen, then hitting a few keys to upload something into the gravidar’s interface. I narrow my eyes, but it’s no use. I’m too high and at the wrong angle to read either of the screens.

  The interface winks out. The figure ducks into the shadows. I wait until a door slams, and then I move, rappelling down Lucita’s surface in enormous leaps. My stomach flips each time I launch myself into the shadows. I reach the floor in twenty seconds. Less.

  Touching down, I untie the knots in my rope, kick it under a nearby cart, and sprint after the intruder.

  At this time of night, the Conquistador’s rounded tunnels are lit to 20 percent. Blue-white light leaks from the seed lighting along the ceiling. Shadows pool in the crannies between the auto-riveted plates, gears, and valves set in the walls. Long, multicolored pipes vein the ceiling in vibrant reds, oranges, teals, and greens. The grates underfoot punch into my bare feet as I run down the hall, climbing gear clanking as I go.