Ascending

by James Alan Gardner

  “Ooo,” said Festina. “Showy.”

  We all nodded silently.

  Knock-Knock

  Our contemplative silence was interrupted by a crashing noise from the other side of the computer bank. In the blink of an eye, Festina dived to the ground, rolled along the tiles, and ended on her feet again. Her hands came up clenched into fists. Somewhere during her dive, she had dropped the glow-wand; it lay a short distance from her feet, casting strong upward shadows across her features.

  The sound came again: a smash that echoed through the quiet computer room. Festina grabbed up the light and disappeared around the bank of dead machines. The sergeant and I ran after her; we were just turning the corner when we heard a third kaboom. It was someone battering against the closed door to the hallway, an unknown person trying to bash through. Already the door had a conspicuous bend in it, though it was made of metal and appeared to be moderately thick.

  One more whump and the top of the door snapped out of its frame. It sagged slightly inward, but not far enough to reveal who was hammering on the other side. I quickly assumed an aggressive stance in case the intruders should prove to be enemies—perhaps the Shaddill had invaded the ship now that we had no defenses. Festina, however, had put down her fists, and Aarhus was making no effort to prepare for attack. They simply stood warily, clear of the doorway, waiting for whoever came through.

  Something struck the door with a fierce thud. The mangled metal could not withstand this final impact—it collapsed completely, propelled by a muscular body that fell forward with the door onto the floor tiles.

  Lajoolie looked up, blinking in the beam of Festina’s light. Behind her, Uclod and Dr. Havel peeked around the edge of the door frame; the watery-eyed physician held a shining wand exactly like Festina’s. Smiling down at Lajoolie, Havel said, “Nothing like a Tye-Tye, ha-ha, when you have to make a house call. Someone reported a poisoning?”

  Medical Matters

  The doctor hurried off to examine the woman in brown…or perhaps I should call her Zuni, though I do not know if she deserves to be dignified with a name. This Zuni was a spy and saboteur; I did not quite understand what she had tried to do or what she accomplished instead, but the end result was readily apparent. There was no light in the hallway, and no machinery sounds either. “It appears,” said I, “this vessel has slain itself.”

  “Yes,” Havel called from the other side of the computer bank, “the Hemlock has taken hemlock, ha-ha.”

  If that was a joke, no one laughed. I asked, “Do all star-ships have suicidal tendencies? Because I have only ridden in two such vessels, and both have killed themselves within hours of my coming on board. This constitutes a Disturbing Pattern…and I should like to point out I am not to blame.”

  “Don’t get defensive,” Festina said, patting my shoulder. “If anyone here is a trouble magnet, it’s me.”

  She turned to check on the others. Uclod was helping Lajoolie stand up after bashing the door. He did not provide much practical assistance—since his head only came to her wallabies, he could not actually pull her up to her full height—but she held on to his hand anyway and tried not to look too encumbered by him as she got to her feet.

  “Are you okay, sweetie?” Uclod asked. His voice had a ragged edge to it and his eyes were ringed with red, but it seemed he had finished weeping over his grandmother…at least for the moment. Lajoolie did not answer the little man’s question, but she pressed his hand softly to her stomach.

  “All right,” Festina said, “let’s get to the bridge and see what the captain can do about this mess. Havel,” she called, “do you need any help?”

  “No, Admiral, not right now,” came a reply from the other side of the computer bank. “Eventually we’ll have to carry the patient to sick bay…”

  “I’ll send you some stretcher bearers,” Festina said, “but I don’t know if sick bay is any better than here. Captain’s Last Act will have killed all your medical equipment.”

  “Oh dear, yes,” Havel said. “Then maybe, ha-ha, it’s best if we stay away from the infirmary. The place is swarming with Analysis Nano, and without the ship-soul controlling them…well, the eager little devils may get out of hand. There was a case on Morrikeen where a clinic’s power went down and every last nanite decided to give the attending physician a blood test. Sucked the poor fellow dry, ha-ha.”

  “Ha-ha indeed,” Festina said. “And here I thought our only alternatives were freezing to death or starvation. I love it when new options thrust themselves forward.” She made a face. “Come on—let’s find the captain.”

  Forging Forward

  It turns out a starship has many many doors…which Sergeant Aarhus claimed were not doors at all but hatches. Festina said I could still call them doors; she reveled in the use of antinautical terms, because it vexed the ship’s normal crew. (She called regular crew members Vac-heads, which may or may not have been because they spent their lives sailing through vacuum.)

  Many of the hatch-doors were closed, and most were exceedingly stronger than the one Lajoolie had broken. The biggest doors were designed to remain secure despite vast extremes of air pressure; so thick, even I had no chance of smashing through. Fortunately, such violence was not required—though the doors no longer opened automatically, they contained Cunningly Concealed Mechanisms that allowed manual operation via wheels and cranks. Once Festina showed me how these devices worked, I got to turn all the wheels…which I did most prettily, ensuring our party’s speedy progress toward the bridge.

  We were not the only persons desirous of making contact with the captain. As we moved forward through the ship, numerous crew members peeked out of doorways, saw who we were, and joined our company. The newcomers did not speak; I do not know if they were intimidated by my beauty, Festina’s rank, or Uclod’s orangeness, but they seemed as shy as woodland creatures, keeping their distance yet mutely following.

  This muteness struck me as foolish. If I had not already known this darkness was the result of a complicated computer tragedy, I should have been asking, “What happened? What happened?” But then, I was not such a one as greatly revered machines. Perhaps these humans were so cowed by the demise of their ship, they had plunged into grief-stricken mourning.

  Or perhaps they were not so much wallowing in sorrow as silently giddy with excitement. It is Eerily Thrilling to walk through soundless corridors when your only illumination is a tiny wand of silver, and the blackness stretches for light-years in all directions. You feel that anything could happen…and even if there is danger afoot, it will be vastly preferable to lying on the floor with a Tired Brain.

  Having a perilous adventure is always better than comatose safety. Always, always, always, always, always.

  In The Halls

  I did not know how many hatches stood between us and the bridge…but I could tell when I opened the last. As I pushed back the great thick door, I saw light on the other side and heard voices talking in subdued tones. Five crew members had gathered in the corridor to listen to a sixth person: a dark-skinned man in a powder blue suit.

  He stood slightly apart from the others as he spoke to them, and he held a glow-wand just like Festina’s. At the moment I opened the hatch, he was gesturing with the wand, pointing in our direction. The waving light made shadows leap along the corridor walls in a manner delightfully creepy. However, the man stopped waving as soon as he saw our party.

  “Admiral!” he said—in a voice not loud but fervent. “I don’t suppose you know what happened?”

  “A saboteur,” Festina told him. “Hacked the ship-soul into committing Captain’s Last Act. I’m afraid the ship is…”

  “EMP’d to rat-shit from bow to stern,” the blue-suited man finished her sentence. “That’s what Captain’s Last Act means.” He gave Festina a rueful smile. “At my court-martial, you’ll testify I didn’t do it, right, Admiral?”

  “Of course, Captain…if any of us lives that long.”

  I looked at the man
again. This must be Captain Kapoor, who spoke to us earlier on the intercom. He did not impress me much as a Figure Of Authority: he was shorter than I, with thinning black hair and a poorly shaped mustache. I am not well-informed on the subject of mustaches—my own people do not grow true hair, we merely have the suggestion of hair as part of our solid glass skulls—but if I were to possess a mustache, I would endeavor to carve it with bilateral symmetry instead of letting it become an unkempt blob of fur that appears to be sliding off the left edge of one’s lips.

  Still, this Kapoor man did not seem totally foolish. He had happy crinkles around the edges of his eyes as if he must laugh a lot…and for all the tension that filled the air, he did not seem snappish or stressed. Indeed, one could argue he was altogether too blasé about the situation, considering that his ship had been disastrously incapacitated in the depths of Unforgiving Space.

  “I suppose you’ll be wanting a status report,” he said to Festina. “Well, Admiral…the status is that everything’s Gone Oh Shit.”

  Many of the crew members looked confused at his words. I, however, knew that “Going Oh Shit” was an Explorer expression meaning dead, dead, dead. It derived from the fact that many Explorers blurt out, “Oh shit,” just before some terrible calamity befalls them. I suppose Kapoor used the phrase to show Festina he was familiar with Explorer vernacular…which means the captain was sucking up to the admiral, but I thought he did it most charmingly.

  “Everything’s gone?” Festina asked. “What about communications?”

  “Especially communications,” Kapoor answered. “Those systems have all kinds of top-secret crypto built into them: not just for encoding transmissions, but for switching bands a few hundred times a second, so we’re never broadcasting in one place very long. And then there’s the—” He stopped and threw a reproachful look at those of us who were not navy persons. “Ahem. I’m sure you know, Admiral, Hemlock has all kinds of gadgetry for keeping our messages secure, and one hundred percent of it is classified. Captain’s Last Act makes certain no such equipment can be salvaged. Nothing but melted plastic and defunct biomass.”

  “But that can’t be your only broadcasting stuff,” Uclod said. “At the very least, you must have a Mayday signal, right? Something that runs off batteries and doesn’t get vaporized when everything else goes pfft. Civilian vessels have to carry at least three Mayday boxes in case of emergency. So a navy ship must surely…” He stopped; his eyes narrowed, glaring at Kapoor. “You don’t have a working Mayday?”

  “Of course we do,” the captain replied defensively. “Just not a good one. The Outward Fleet doesn’t like distress calls that can be heard by absolutely anybody—it’s bad publicity to advertise how often navy ships break down. Even worse, the laws of salvage say the first person to find us gets to claim the whole cruiser. The Admiralty doesn’t want a civilian vessel, or even worse an alien, tracking us by our distress signal, taking our ship in tow, and dragging Royal Hemlock home to use as a lawn ornament. So…our Mayday only broadcasts to other navy ships.”

  “Ouch,” Uclod said.

  “Very ouch,” Festina agreed. “The last thing we want is to tell the Admiralty we’re stuck adrift. They’ll send one of their dirty-trick ships to pick us up, and that’s the last anyone will see of us.”

  Uclod made a disgusted sound. “So you don’t have a single useful signaling device?”

  Kapoor shrugged. “The ship’s escape modules are perfectly fine. They all have homing beacons…but they’re old-fashioned radio. From here, it would take five years for transmissions to reach the closest inhabited planet. As for using the escape modules for travel—they don’t have FTL capability. They can put you into stasis so you won’t feel time passing, but it’ll be almost a century before you get back to civilization.”

  “Fat chance of that,” Uclod said. “With the Shaddill still in the neighborhood, we won’t get back to civilization at all…especially not in rinky-dink emergency capsules with their beacons blaring, Here I am!” He leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes. “We are right royally fucked.”

  Festina stared at him a moment, then turned her gaze to the captain. Kapoor only shrugged. “We can check all the systems to see if anything survived, but Captain’s Last Act is intended to be one hundred percent thorough. It even hits the storerooms that contain our spare parts. We can’t repair a thing.”

  “So,” Festina said, “how long can we last without life support?”

  “I don’t know,” the captain said. He turned to the crew members around him. “Anyone here ever calculated how long the oxygen in a heavy cruiser lasts with a half-crew breathing it?”

  Nobody answered.

  “Well, Admiral,” Kapoor turned back to Festina, “if this were a VR adventure, the captain would put on a somber face and say we’ve got twenty-four hours before the oxygen runs out. Damned if I know if that’s anywhere close—could be two hours, could be two hundred—but let’s go with dramatic tradition till our lungs tell us otherwise.”

  “Just bloody wonderful,” Uclod said. “If twenty-four hours is anywhere close to correct, we’d better whip off a Mayday now. Even at that, we’ll be lucky to find a navy vessel close enough to reach us in time.”

  “But,” I said, “there are many navy ships back at Melaquin, and that is not so far away.”

  “Missy,” Uclod told me, “that is a whole heap too far away. When my dear baby Starbiter left Melaquin, she was traveling ten times faster than anything the human navy can do…and she held that speed for something like six hours, not to mention however far Hemlock has gone since picking us up. Those ships back at Melaquin can’t get to us in less than two and a half days; and I doubt if the Outward Fleet has any ships nearer. We’re a long way past the Technocracy’s usual stomping grounds—it’ll be a pure fluke if anyone gets to us in time.”

  “It’s not quite that bad,” Festina said. “The escape pods can put us into stasis and keep us alive indefinitely. When we run out of air here in the main ship, we’ll turn on our Mayday, ditch into the evac modules, and wait for someone to pick us up. But once we’re in stasis, we’re really sitting ducks…so let’s hold off on that while we try to solve our problem.”

  “Festina,” I said as softly as I could, “what is our problem exactly? What is our Goal?”

  She gazed at me a moment…and I wondered if she was mentally phrasing her answer in comprehensible words, or if she was debating why she should bother explaining the situation to such a grossly ignorant person. In many cases, Science-Oriented People respond dismissively toward those not of the Science faith—especially when the Science-Oriented People have decided that only extra special Science can save them.

  But Festina was not cruel. After a few seconds, she answered, “We need a way to call for help. But all our equipment is either broken or it calls the wrong people.” She smiled. “I don’t suppose you have a trans-light communicator in your back pocket, do you?”

  I patted the pockets of the Explorer jacket. They all felt empty. “It seems I do not have such a device; but I know where to get one.”

  “New Earth,” Uclod said gloomily.

  “There is one much closer than that,” I told him. “In Nimbus’s cabin.”

  “In…” Festina stopped as she realized what I meant.

  “Zaretts,” I said, “have the ability to make long-distance broadcasts. And we have an infant Zarett.”

  Without waiting for an answer, I headed off. I had been official communications officer on Starbiter Senior; I intended to assume the same role with Starbiter Junior.

  16

  WHEREIN I ACQUIRE NEW FAMILY

  Black Goo

  Outside Nimbus’s room, there was no sign of the black clouds that had been guarding him. However, the floor was smeared with a black goo that looked exceedingly yucky; I did not want to step in it, for fear it would stick to my feet.

  Festina stared down at the gunk on the floor and whistled softly. “Looks like Captain’
s Last Act cooks defense nano.”

  “Good thing too,” Captain Kapoor said. “The defense clouds are controlled by the ship-soul; with the computers off-line, you’d have billions of hunter-killer nano-bots flying around without supervision. Thank heavens we don’t have to worry about that.”

  “Don’t speak too soon,” Festina said. “We haven’t told you about sick bay. Now stand back if you please, Captain, and let an Explorer put her foot in it.”

  She stepped carefully onto the awful black deposit, tapping it a few times with her toe before setting down her full weight. “Not sticky,” she said. Experimentally, she pushed her foot a short distance across the black surface. “Not slippery either.” She glanced back at the rest of us. “Considering my usual luck, this is where the cloud suddenly rises from the floor and chews the meat from my bones.”

  But no such horror occurred. Instead, Festina moved to the door of the cabin and smashed the heel of her palm against a little plastic patch in the very middle. I had been told that one touched such patches in order to request admittance; I had not been told one could bash in the cover plate and manipulate the exposed mechanisms so as to open the door manually. It made me wonder if Lajoolie had been wasting her strength when she broke down the door of the computer room…but then, Lajoolie was not a navy person and therefore did not know the intricacies of the Hemlock’s hatches.

  Anyway, I am sure she found it far more satisfying to bludgeon a door out of its frame than to twiddle tiny gears until something went click. There is far too little bludgeoning in the human navy.