The Stark Divide

by J. Scott Coatsworth

  “Let’s step outside.” He guided the doctor out onto the runway. The door irised shut behind them, more slowly than usual. “Is there a cure for this?” he asked, gesturing at the ship walls.

  Anatov frowned. “I don’t think so, Captain,” she said after a moment. “It’s too advanced, and I don’t have the capabilities in the limited lab here on the ship. If I was back on Frontier….” She spread her hands helplessly.

  “The Herald’s at least three days away, Doc.” He put his hand on her shoulder. “Anastasia, can you find a way to buy us some more time?” He could see the gears in her head turning.

  “There is one thing we can try,” she said at last.

  “Anything.” He needed a few more hours, at least. Enough to get them to Ariadne.

  “I think I can manufacture a fungicide that might slow the advance of the infection.”

  He nodded. “Slow is good. How long will it take?”

  She shook her head, breaking away from him. “It’s not good. It may very well kill the host.”

  “The host? The Dressler?”

  She nodded miserably.

  He wondered if the Dressler was listening. If she understood what they were talking about. If she cared. “What does it buy us?”

  “If we’re lucky, another four or five hours. If I can slow the advance of the infection, the ship should hold together a little longer.”

  He nodded. “Do it. How long until you’re ready?”

  “An hour, maybe two at most, to prepare enough for injection into the Dressler’s circulatory systems.”

  The captain nodded. “Go.” He watched her hurry down the runway to the lab.

  It was going to be tight.

  He went over the things he had to do in his head. Prepare the lifeboat. Collect whatever supplies he could manage. Track his course from the Dressler to Ariadne once they arrived.

  If everything worked, they might all get out of this alive.

  Except, of course, for the Dressler.

  JACKSON BREATHED in deeply, the mingled scents of grass and flowers and warm summer air filling his lungs with joy. He was free of the tin-can confines of the Dressler. He was home.

  He opened his eyes to find himself cross-legged on top of a grassy knoll, the hillside stretching out below him, the bowl of the sky blue overhead, flecked with occasional white clouds.

  This wasn’t his home. What the hell? Jackson jumped up, staring at the open, empty landscape all around him.

  The girl from the tower was suddenly in front of him, peering at him with her piercing blue eyes.

  His armor was gone.

  “This is a dream, isn’t it?” Jackson tilted his head to look at her. “This can’t be real. I’m still on the Dressler.”

  “Jackson, sit down.” There was unexpected steel in her voice. “Yes. You’re still on the Dressler.” The wind blew her black hair around her head like a living thing.

  He sank back down in the thick grass, uncomprehending. The Dressler didn’t have holo capabilities—not on this scale. “Who are you?”

  “You know who I am. We’ve spoken often enough.”

  Something about the dulcet tones was familiar, but not. Like the first time his wife had fallen into his arms and spoken to him with a voice that was for him alone. “Dr. Anatov?”

  She laughed, though it looked like the effort pained her. She spread her arms, and a gossamer fabric stretched between them, wrapping her like a thin sail.

  Something clicked. “You’re the Dressler, aren’t you? The ship-mind?”

  “You always were a smart one.” She sat down once again before him, wincing as if in pain. “We don’t have much time. You have questions. Ask them.”

  His mind raced. He’d interacted with the ship on numerous occasions, asking for status updates, running tests, accessing important (and not so important) information from the ship’s archives, but it had always been the impersonal voice of a machine behind those living walls. Or so he’d thought. “What are you?”

  Her brow furrowed, a gesture so human it startled him. “I’m not sure how to answer that. I was designed to be the organizational system for this ship… the ship-mind, as you so eloquently call me.” She stared off into the distance. “Now I suppose I’m something like you, like all of you, but more. And less.”

  “Less?” he prompted.

  She nodded. “Unlike you, I have no freedom of motion and little free will. I wait, and answer your questions, and take your orders, but I’m not free to… to go where I want to go. To explore. To run through the long grass.”

  He was distracted by how her hair fell across her chest. He shook his head to clear it. “And more?”

  “I have vastly upgraded processing capabilities, far beyond the average unmodified human brain.” She gave him a significant look.

  “So you know about my wetware upgrade.”

  She nodded. “It’s why I can reach you like this. You and you alone.” She took his hand in hers. “Look.”

  His awareness narrowed down to that warm hand, then to the code that lay beneath. It expanded before him, exposing itself, folding outward until he was inside the Dressler, racing down her neural pathways. He could see her mind working, packets of thoughts flowing back and forth at the speed of light.

  Broadening his awareness, he could also sense the invader, a series of dark blotches on an otherwise pristine form. It ate away at her awareness of herself like a cancer. It smelled of rot and death.

  As quickly as it had unfolded, the vision snapped away, leaving him back on the hillside.

  Jackson’s mind chewed on this unexpected information, working out the ramifications. The Mission-class ships, or at least this one, had minds as complex as his own. Maybe even more so. Assuming this was not some grand illusion or delusion. “Are you the only… ship-mind who is… like this?”

  She hesitated. Dirty clouds were gathering on the horizon, and the wind was warm and heavy with moisture.

  “It’s risky telling you this,” she said at last. “Not just for myself.” She sighed.

  The man in him couldn’t help but notice the delightful effect this had on her avatar. You’re beautiful.

  She frowned. “Is this form distracting to you?”

  “What? Um, no… I mean….” Dammit. She could probably read his thoughts.

  Her feminine shape shimmered, replaced by a young man with short, curly black hair, a simple tunic, with the same piercing blue eyes. “Is this better?”

  Strangely, Jackson still found her—him—attractive.

  “It’s fine.” He forged ahead. “What should I call you? Dressler seems so formal.”

  He nodded. “Call me Lex.”

  He laughed. “All right, Lex, fair enough.” Something else occurred to him. Something Glory would have asked if she were here. “Do you have a soul?”

  Lex looked down at the grass between them. “I don’t know. I hope so,” he said at last.

  The answer startled Jackson. It had been an off-the-cuff question.

  Maybe there was a reason he’d been chosen for this. Whatever this was. “What are you asking me to do?”

  Chapter Six: Cutter

  COLIN CROUCHED in the lifeboat, running calculations to see if his plan was feasible. It had a small onboard computer—much less powerful than the Dressler but fully mechanical, not subject to her current issues.

  If they brought all the air tanks on the ship on board and were extremely careful, there would be just about enough air to get them by until the Herald could reach them.

  For two of them. If nothing else went wrong.

  Goddammit. Colin didn’t like to admit defeat, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to leave the man here to die. Hammond could face justice back home.

  There had to be a way to get all three of his crew out of this. Even Hammond.

  Colin was sick of running calculations.

  The ship was already on a rendezvous course with the asteroid. There was nothing more for him to do on th
at front.

  He unstrapped himself from his seat and pulled himself out through the hatch of the lifeboat.

  The small ships had been designed for short-term EVAs and, in an extreme emergency, to evacuate the crew, but they had no interplanetary capability. At best, they could hope to make it over to the asteroid if he timed things just right—where they could be found and rescued.

  In the meantime, he set about collecting the supplies they would need.

  First the air tanks. He gathered all the larger ones in the hold and then the smaller suit tanks, strapping them down in compartments behind the seats. The lifeboat itself had three space suits—sealed mini-environments that could keep a person alive for five to seven hours out there.

  Next he gathered a selection of freeze-dried foods from the galley. There were far more there than they could hope to take, and they’d only need enough for three days. If they weren’t rescued within that window, there’d be no more need for food.

  It was a shame, really, that the seed couldn’t be saved. Colin knew how much the experiment meant to Ana and what it might mean for mankind if it was successful. It might be all that saved them from themselves.

  One of the ships could go after it later, to haul it back from the abyss.

  He glanced at his watch. They had just seven hours left until rendezvous.

  ANA WAS dead tired. What I wouldn’t do for a nap….

  She pushed herself, synthesizing the fungicide in large enough quantities to temporarily arrest the advance of the infection that plagued the Dressler. Time was short.

  She had no practical hope for a cure. Indeed, the injections might well kill the ship before the fungus did.

  If it worked, it would also buy them some precious time. The longer they could stay aboard the Dressler before having to abandon ship, the more likely they would make it out alive.

  She thought about Hammond and his cross. It seemed to bring him peace, but it brought her only sorrow and guilt.

  As the workstation filled vial after vial of the milky-white fungicide, she thought about her father, and the religious fanatics who used to protest outside his lab in Sacramento.

  She remembered vividly awakening one day when she was younger—just out of college. Her father had given her a gentle kiss on the forehead before heading off to work.

  She’d had a late night out with friends and a raging hangover, and she didn’t feel ready to join him there yet.

  “Don’t worry, my dear. I’ll get a head start, and you’ll come in when you’re ready. You work too hard for a woman your age. You should get out and enjoy yourself more.” His Russian accent was still thick after all these years in the NAU.

  She smiled. “Thank you, Daddy. I want to start on that sequencing project today—”

  “I’ll get things set up for you. Sleep, my little angel.”

  It was the last thing he ever said to her.

  She woke an hour later to the news of an explosion on the maglev train—the same one her father took from their home in the Sierra Foothills down to the Institute.

  She sat in front of the tricast and watched images of the explosion over and over as her insides went numb. Talking heads speculated. It was the work of terrorists, they said, or maybe Capitalist Russians.

  No one knew.

  She called her father frantically, but he didn’t answer.

  About an hour later, the police arrived at her front door, but she refused to answer it. She already knew in her bones that he was gone.

  It had been a bomb, planted in a briefcase by a splinter group of religious fundamentalists, one of the forerunners to the Interveners, angry with her father for his work on the Mission-class ships. The authorities eventually caught and imprisoned them all.

  From that moment on, Anastasia had committed herself fully to the work. No more parties. No more drinking. No more friends.

  If only she’d been with him that morning. Maybe she would have seen that something was wrong. Maybe she could have saved him.

  The synthesizer beeped. The last batch of fungicide was ready. Time to call the captain.

  JACKSON’S EYES opened. He was in his cabin, a small room in the Dressler with a cot, a small countertop, and a cabinet mounted to the wall where he kept his meager supply of personal items.

  His right hand was asleep. Someone had tied him down to the cot frame, and the cord was cutting off his circulation.

  The cabin walls looked patchy, strange. He’d seen what lay behind them. Things were getting worse. Why do they think I did it?

  He tested his bonds. They all were tight, but his left arm seemed just a tad looser than the others.

  Jackson began working his hand systematically back and forth, hoping to create more wiggle room.

  He had a mission, and he couldn’t do it stuck here in his cabin. If he didn’t get free soon, it would be too late. Lex would die. Somehow, that mattered. She was one of God’s creatures. He was certain of it now.

  After being recruited to AmSplor, he’d been trained in station biosystems and then put into habitat maintenance at Frontier, working with the machines that kept the air fresh and cleaned the station’s wastewater. Those things were precious and expensive to haul up from Earth. It was much cheaper and more efficient to clean and reuse them.

  It was there that he’d met Gloria, or Glory, as he’d come to call her. She’d been working as a waitress at the Blue Moon Cafe, one of the hangouts for the locals who worked on Frontier, on the main concourse of the Frontier Station.

  He spent the first few weeks just walking by the place when she was working. He learned her schedule by heart, just so he could catch a glimpse of her every now and then.

  Jackson had been terminally shy. He’d never been with a woman when he worked for the Badge. His time there hadn’t exactly been conducive to dating.

  He finally got up the courage to go in and ask for a seat in her section. The Blue Moon commanded a space along the center belt of the station. The centrifugal force meant that you sat on the outer skin with a plasform window beneath you, as if you were in the midst of a field of stars.

  He found it unnerving, used to the confines of a city and then the cramped quarters of the biofarm inside the ship. But when Glory came up to take his order and her smile blossomed across her face, he forgot everything else.

  She was from the Federated Central American States, from Guatemala, and she was stunning—golden skinned and dark haired, with an easy smile and deep, dark brown eyes.

  They began to date and would sit together between shifts in the public garden, with exotic ferns and palms and rushing water all around them, and look out through one of the windows at the stars.

  Glory wore a cross around her neck, and once he’d asked her what it was for. He’d never been religious—no one was in New York City anymore—but the way she explained it struck him.

  “I believe there’s a reason for everything,” she said. “When I sit here and look out at the tapestry of stars, I know I’m a part of something. A wave, a grand life, a bridge to everything there is and that there will be. Everything feels connected somehow, behind the scenes.” She turned to him, her eyes shining brightly. “Do you know what I mean?”

  He did. It was something he’d felt intuitively when he worked on the biosystems in New York and here on Frontier. The way each piece of the environment was attached to all the others and each change initiated countless others.

  He took her in his arms right then and kissed her.

  They were married within twelve months. That had been almost ten years ago.

  He refocused on the task at hand. The cord was definitely looser. He pulled hard against it, and it stretched. Almost imperceptibly, but it stretched. A little more and there was enough room to wiggle his hand out from the bindings.

  He made quick work of the other three and shortly was out the door on his way to the bridge, a cutter in hand.

  THE CAPTAIN set the final course corrections manually into the ship’s
mechanical navigational system. It was safest that way. They had no idea how compromised the ship-mind was, and he didn’t trust the Dressler to get this right.

  He locked the corrections in. Slowdown would continue as the ship’s expulsion jets nudged them toward the rendezvous with Ariadne in about six hours, approaching it from behind and traveling at roughly the same velocity.

  Behind him, the door irised open. “We’re all set, Doc.” Colin unbuckled his belt and swung the chair around to find Hammond there instead. Holding a cutter.

  Holy shit. The ship didn’t have any actual weapons. The Dressler was effectively a delivery service, and no one had found anything out here to be afraid of yet. But right then, Colin could have used a good old-fashioned pulse revolver.

  After all, a sonic cutter could make a pretty good weapon.

  “Hammond, put that thing down,” he ordered the engineer calmly. “I don’t want any trouble.”

  “Sorry, Captain.” Hammond closed the door and locked the controls behind him. “Don’t want a repeat of last time.”

  Colin was sweating. Who knew what Jackson was capable of? “Come on, Jackson, no one needs to get hurt here.” He thought about Trip, who might never see him again, and about how far away from everyone and everything they were out here.

  Hammond snorted. “Of course no one needs to get hurt. What did you think? That I was here to kill you?”

  His fear ratcheted down a notch. “It did cross my mind. After what you did to the ship….”

  “It wasn’t me.” Hammond crossed the bridge to sink down in the other chair. “That cross—my cross—it carried some kind of infectious agent?”

  Colin nodded. “You brought it on board, Hammond. That fungus is eating away at the ship beneath us as we speak. What were we supposed to think?” His hand casually drifted under the console to the manual comm button.

  “I brought it on board? Well, that might be true, but you have to believe me. I didn’t know. My pastor gave that cross to me at my son’s communion last week. I really didn’t know.”