Departing through the cabin door, we were forced to pass through a gritty black dust cloud swirling silently in the corridor. Festina said the cloud was a swarm of fierce microscopic machines, cousins to the Analysis Nano back in sick bay but designed to keep watch on Nimbus. If any speck of the mist man tried to sneak away from his body, tiny robots in the black cloud would swoop in, grab hold of the speck, and carry it off. The robots had been programmed not to damage Nimbus’s component bits, for he was a sentient creature and therefore not to be killed…but apparently, the League of Peoples would not raise a fuss if all of Nimbus’s individual particles were dissipated like fine dust throughout the ship, thereby preventing them from working together and doing harm.
Festina told me additional sentinel robots lurked in the ventilation ducts of Nimbus’s cabin, and even in the plumbing and electrical outlets. This proved the cloud man was a closely watched prisoner, much less trusted than I…for I only had a single mook chaperoning me whereas Nimbus had billions. Hah!
My Mook
My mook was the sergeant, and he showed excellent taste—he left his two lesser mooks in the infirmary to watch Uclod and Lajoolie, but he went with me himself. That must be the chief reason to become sergeant: so you can assign yourself to monitor the most beautiful security risk.
The sergeant’s name was Aarhus. When he finally took off his helmet, he proved to be a bearded man with hair the color of stone…by which I mean the yellow type of stone, not the gray, white, red, or brown types of stone which are also quite common, so perhaps I should have said he had hair like a goldfinch, except it was not that color at all. It was exactly the color of a pebble my sister once found on the beach, and close to the color of certain leaves in autumn, but not the sort of leaves that turn scarlet. So this tells all you need to know about Aarhus, except that he was tall, and he occasionally said odd things which might have been jokes but one never knew for sure.
The sergeant accompanied Festina and me as we proceeded toward the room where we would record our broadcast; and although he was not discourteous, his presence was still a Burden. This was my first time alone with Festina since we had been reunited, and there were many personal subjects we might speak of…but not with a stranger dogging our steps. In addition, I could not reveal my conversation with the Pollisand: bargaining with aliens is just the sort of thing a keen-edged Security person might take amiss, believing me to have become a Tool Of Hostile Powers.
Festina clearly felt the same inhibitions as I, stifled under the sergeant’s gaze. Instead of relating how she had grieved while believing me to be dead, or describing the joy she felt to have me back, she seemed at a loss for words; after an awkward silence, she simply began to name the rooms we were passing. “Main Engine Room. Secondary Engine Room. Hydroponics. Gravity generators…”
The lack of conversation might have been more tolerable if I had been allowed to look into any of the rooms as we passed. After all, the engines of a starship must be quite a sight: great fiery furnaces tended by muscular persons with sweat glistening over their rippling torsos. But every door we passed remained shut and unwelcoming…until finally one hissed open just ahead of us.
Festina and Aarhus halted—they must have assumed someone was coming out into the corridor. When no one did, they simply shrugged and started forward again; but I remained frozen where I was, for I had heard a familiar voice.
The voice was distressingly nasal, coming through the open doorway. When the door began to hiss shut again, I dashed forward and grabbed the edge of the sliding panel. The door fought against me for a moment; then it grudgingly slid back into the wall.
“Hey,” Aarhus said, “that’s the main computer room. Off-limits to civilians.”
I ignored him. Striding into the room, I searched for the source of the voice. It was coming from behind an array of computers so tall and wide I could not see past them. I could, however, hear the voice’s words quite plainly: “What did you think you were doing? Why didn’t you test the code first? Did you really think an undebugged program would work perfectly the first time?”
Festina grabbed my arm. “Oar, where are you going? What’s wrong?”
“That is the Pollisand!” I whispered.
My friend’s eyes grew wide. “Oh fuck!”
Then she and the sergeant sprinted forward.
15
WHEREIN I TAKE CHARGE OF OPENING DOORS
Logic Scum
We rounded the bank of computers at a run…then stopped in the face of chaos.
First, there was the Pollisand: exactly as I had seen him in the lava garden. Indeed, I could still detect reddish stains on his feet, obtained when he peevishly stomped the scarlet flowers. This was definitely the same creature I had met hours earlier…or else such a perfect copy I could not tell the difference.
The Pollisand was not the only one with crimson stains on his skin. In front of him stood a human dressed in dark brown attire: a woman whose flesh was dark brown too, except for the fingers of both hands. Those fingers were smeared a vivid red—not blood, but a scarlet dust that sifted off flakes whenever she moved. Speckles of that dust lay scattered across the floor at her feet…and red chalky fingerprints glowed on the access panels of the computer in front of her.
Though those panels were shut, something bubbly leaked out around their edges: a charcoal gray foam, forcing itself through the seams of the computer’s casing, trickling down the machine’s exterior, and pattering onto the floor tiles. The glup had a musty smell, like human feet enclosed too long in stockings. When a clot of the stuff slopped down near the brown woman’s boots, she jumped back fearfully as if the foam could hurt her.
“Bloody hell!” Festina said. Shoving the brown woman aside, my friend drove a kick into the junction between two of the computer’s access panels. The kick must have snapped whatever locking mechanism held the panels in place; both doors swung open, propelled by great gouts of foam that had built up inside. Gray bubbles spilled and gushed to the floor, releasing such a wash of musty odor I nearly gagged.
“What is that?” I asked, feeling choked.
“Logic scum,” Festina said. “Chunks of the ship’s data get encoded in organic molecules: DNA, long chain polymers, stuff like that—then all those chemicals are packaged into a single living cell. A data bacterium. The only problem is that bacteria can be killed.”
She nodded toward the red powder on the floor. “That’s a chemical called Modig—a bio-poison that rips data bacteria to shit. This foam is the result: a slurry of bacterial corpses. All that’s left of the logic circuits.”
Festina booted another kick into the left access door, cracking it off its bottom hinge. The impact splashed back a flurry of foam that spattered onto the leg of her trousers. She retreated a quick step and shook her foot, endeavoring to throw off every speck of foam clinging to her pants. As she did so, she said, “Oar, break that panel off. Try to stay clear of the scum.”
“Yes, Festina.” I pulled down the sleeve of my jacket so it completely covered my hand, then slammed my forearm against the remaining hinge of the access door. The hinge was flimsy indeed—it broke with a
“Is logic scum poison too?” I whispered to Festina.
“Not the scum itself,” my friend said. “But mixed in with the dead bacteria are traces of the Modig that killed them; and Modig is an utter bitch.”
She glanced toward the woman in brown…particularly at the red dust on the woman’s hands. The woman was looking at the dust too: lifting her hands in front of her eyes, staring at her crimson fingers. Bits of gray foam had begun to bubble from beneath the woman’s fingernails—the same type of foam that was flooding from the computer, only this came from the woman herself.
Festina opened her mouth as if to tell the woman something; then she shook her head. Turning away sharply, she headed in the opposite direction, toward a console at the far end of the computer bank.
The Pollisand Follows His Trade
“The circuits are shot,” Aarhus said, still scooping foam out of the computer. “Electronics as well as biologicals. Must have been a feedback surge.” He glanced at a label on top of the machine. “Unit 4A51,” he told Festina. “What is it? Navigation? Engine control?”
Festina had reached the console. She bent over it, tapping buttons. “4A51 is the primary security module. Damn…the readout says it’s in master mode.”
Aarhus growled. “How the hell could she put it in master? Only the captain and the XO know the privileged access codes.”
“Not true,” Festina told him. “Admirals on the High Council know the codes too…or backdoors to get around the usual security. Obviously, some admiral ordered this woman to sabotage us, and gave her the codes to do it.”
“But why did she follow such an order?” said a nasal voice. “And why so incompetently?”
We had forgotten about the Pollisand. He stood exactly where we had first seen him…but by some disquieting coincidence, that position was conveniently out of the way of everything we had been doing. He had not been in the flight path of the panel I knocked across the room, nor Aarhus’s rush to grab the panel, nor Festina’s route to the control console. When the woman in brown stumbled back from the foam, the white headless creature had been just a bit to one side of her retreat.
As I looked around, I could not see a single other spot he could have settled himself without getting in the way of at least one of us. Yet he had put himself in that special location before we entered the room.
Deep in the creature’s neck, one of his glowing eyes vanished for a moment—a Pollisandish wink. It was almost as if he were acknowledging the thought which had silently gone through my head…but I did not want to believe that, so I put it out of my mind.
Meanwhile, the Pollisand’s words had drawn Festina’s attention. She whirled on him, shouting, “What are you doing here? What do you want?”
“I want answers to my questions,” he said, “but do I get them? Not bloody likely. Nobody ever has time to talk: it’s always Crisis this and Emergency that, with everyone far too busy for civilized discourse. Bet it would be different if I had a goddamned head—but no, you’re all so superior, constantly wearing hats and flaunting your peripheral vision, never mind how it eats me up inside, condemned forever to be cranially disadvantaged…”
He lifted his large foot and pointed toward the woman in brown, whose hands were now covered in foam that bubbled from her own skin. “Speaking of being eaten up inside,” the Pollisand said, “this woman has thirty grams of Modig ripping her apart. You might want to deal with that before she dies of shock.”
“Damn!” Festina said. Raising her voice, she called, “Ship-soul, attend. Tell Dr. Havel we have a severe case of Modig poisoning in the main computer room.”
“Aye-aye, Admiral,” a metallic voice answered from the ceiling.
“Hurray,” Aarhus muttered, “the computer is still online.”
“Don’t celebrate too soon,” the Pollisand told him.
The sergeant winced. “Why?”
“You’ll see in seventy-two seconds.”
“God damn it,” Festina said, “quit being a know-it-all, and tell us something useful. What did this woman do, and how can we stop it?”
“You can’t stop it,” the Pollisand replied. “And what this woman did—by the way, her name is Zuni, if you care, which you don’t, or you wouldn’t need a complete stranger to introduce you to someone who’s been under your command since the day you inherited this ship—but no, let’s not waste time on civilities which are only the bedrock of society, what this woman, Zuni, that’s still her name, even if you don’t care about it, did…” The Pollisand took a breath. “What Zuni did was write a program she believed would let her override the captain’s commands.”
“Which explains why she put the system in master mode,” Aarhus said. “If her program worked, she could set our course straight back to New Earth…and prevent anyone from changing it.”
“But the program didn’t work,” the Pollisand told him. “Zuni didn’t test it first: she just wrote it and ran it. Which clearly shows that possessing a head isn’t the same as using it. (Not that I’m bitter.) What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality she thinks she’ll get complex software right the first time? Especially when she’s hacking the ship’s most important security settings—”
“Look,” Festina interrupted, “we’ll discuss Zuni another time. Just tell us what the program did.”
“It went out of control,” the Pollisand said. “Romped off on its own, overwriting basic system code. She tried to rein it in from the console, but it had already stomped part of its own control settings; that’s when she popped open a tube of Modig powder.”
“Why was she carrying a vile red poison?” I asked. “Was she a secret assassin?”
“No,” Festina answered, “it’s navy policy to have some Modig available—precisely for situations where you’ve got a runaway computer and can’t shut it down.”
“It is better to turn off the power switch,” I told her, “or to adjust the machine’s mechanisms with an ax.”
“Zuni didn’t have an ax,” the Pollisand said, “and the way to turn off a power switch on this ship is to ask the computer to do it—which doesn’t work if the computer is already fucked up the snout. Anyway, Modig is standard issue for last-ditch emergencies, and Zuni had been immunized against tiny exposures…but she should have known better than to scoop it up with her hands and smear it into the circuits. No immunization can protect a human from that much contact. Why would my poor Zuni do such a thing?”
“We’ll ask her at the court-martial,” Festina said. “Right now we have to figure out what’s been damaged, what the runaway program did…”
The Pollisand’s eyes flared brightly. “I can tell you that. It overrode the safeguards on Captain’s Last Act.”
“Oh shit!” Festina and Aarhus said in unison.
“What is Captain’s Last Act?” I asked.
Festina’s face looked pained. “If a crew is forced to abandon ship, it’s the final command a captain gives…to make it impossible for outsiders to learn military secrets if they capture our equipment. Captain’s Last Act means—”
The room lights suddenly went out.
“Doing some drastic Science thing that breaks all the ship’s machines?” I asked.
“Good guess,” Festina said.
Shutdown
The room had not been noisy—the computers operated with quiet hums rather than ventilatory hiss. But when the lights went out, the sound level dropped to complete silence, as soft whirs and purrs faded to nothingness. The gentle breeze caused by the ship’s air circulation system grew still. A moment later, within the cores of all the machines, trickles of fluid began to drip, drip, drip, as if the circuits were bleeding.
“Look on the bright side,” Aarhus said in the blackness. “At one time, the Admiralty wanted Captain’s Last Act to cause a total self-destruct. Fortunately, the League wouldn’t let navy ships sail around with their bellies full of explosive.”
“So,” Festina said, “instead of blowing ourselves up, we get to freeze in the dark. Goody.”
A light clicked on from the direction of her voice. My friend held a thin wand that gave off a bright silver shine; the beam reflected off my hands, so that when I moved my arms, little patches of silver flashed across the floors and ceiling.
“I see you came prepared, Admiral,” Aarhus said.
“In rank, I’m an admiral,” Festina told him, “but at heart, I’m an Explorer. I don’t go anywhere without a chemically powered light, a first-aid kit, and twenty meters of rope.”
“Same things I carry on a first date.” Aarhus dropped
his gaze to the floor and asked, “Why do we still have gravity? The Higgs generators are surely off-line.”
“They’re more than off-line,” Festina said. “The whole grav system is now a steaming pile of slag. Why do we have gravity?”
“Oh for heaven’s sake,” the Pollisand grumped. “Don’t you know anything about your own ship?”
“Not really,” Festina replied. “The navy likes to keep Explorers uninformed about ship operations—otherwise, we might realize how incompetent the regular crew members are.”
“Same with Security,” Aarhus said. “We only guard the ship, we don’t push the buttons.”
“And you wonder why your species hasn’t evolved farther.” The Pollisand raised his eyes heavenward in exasperation. The eyes cast dancing red glows across the dark ceiling. “Listen,” he said, turning back to us, “just because your gravity generators go poof doesn’t mean your gravity field does too. The field dissipates gradually—like heat when you turn off a furnace. Ten hours from now, you and your gear will be floating off the floor, but it doesn’t happen all at once.”
“Thank God for small mercies,” Festina muttered. “And speaking of mercy,” she said to the Pollisand, “I don’t suppose a technically brilliant entity like yourself would help resurrect some of Hemlock’s basic ops?”
“Never!” said the Pollisand in shocked tones. “How will you lesser creatures learn to take care of yourselves if you don’t face the consequences of your actions? Hardship builds character…and I’m sure you’ll build a lot in the next few hours. Ta-ta, y’all.”
He lifted a front paw high and flipped off a salute from where his forehead would have been if he possessed one. A moment later, his body exploded into a million pinpricks of light; they scattered in all directions, making zings and whistles as they disappeared through the walls. Then the room fell quiet again, with a conspicuous absence of Pollisand where he had just been standing.
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