The Stark Divide

by J. Scott Coatsworth

  The captain eyed his engineer warily. The man sounded truthful, and Colin was a good judge of character.

  Was Jackson an unwitting agent for someone else? The Church? The Interveners? “If that’s true, how did it get tarnished so quickly? The doc thinks it was because of the fungus.”

  Hammond shook his head. “That’s easy. It was splattered with some of the ship’s ichor. Things don’t stay new for long in my line of work.”

  “Then what’s that for?” he asked and pointed to the cutter. His other hand found and pressed the silent alarm beneath his console.

  “What, this?” Hammond seemed to have forgotten the cutter he held. He looked at it strangely and said at last, “I have to save Lex.”

  ANA GATHERED the vials and several syringes in a large sample bag and was about to leave the lab when a small red light started blinking on her console.

  An alert came up as well. “Problem on the bridge,” she read, and sat back down in her lab chair. “Dressler, please give me audio from the bridge.”

  “Yes, Doctor.”

  There was a bit of static, and then, “I have to save Lex.” That was Hammond’s voice. How had he gotten free?

  “Who’s Lex?” McAvery said. She could hear the strain in his voice.

  “The Dressler. The ship-mind. She calls herself Lex.”

  Either Hammond had gone off the deep end or the sedative she’d given him had some unexpected side effects.

  She was about to leave the lab for the bridge when McAvery said, “Be careful with that cutter. You could hurt someone with that thing, Jackson.”

  That comment was meant for her. Hammond was armed.

  She’d have to find something to counter that.

  She slipped out of the lab, headed for the hold below.

  “I KNOW it sounds crazy, but I spoke with her. With the ship-mind. When you guys had me knocked out.” He remembered her face, the anguished look in her eyes when she asked for help.

  The captain shifted uneasily in his chair, his eyes on the cutter. “I’m sorry for that, Hammond, but we had to do it. We didn’t know how dangerous you might be.”

  Like this? Jackson’s eyes narrowed. The captain was stalling. It had to be now or he might not get his chance.

  “Course correction commencing,” the Dressler announced. The captain looked away, distracted, and Jackson took his chance. As the ship shifted, reorienting her expulsion jets, he flung himself forward, pushing the captain out of the way.

  As the other man tumbled backward, he pulled the release on the maintenance cover on the console, flipping it upward, and brought the cutter to bear.

  “What are you doing?” McAvery called, catching his balance and surging forward.

  “Stay back, Captain.” Jackson brandished the cutter at him. “I have to do this. Once it’s done, we can talk.” Just let me get through it.

  “Hammond, drop the cutter.” The captain’s voice had taken on a dangerous edge. “Drop it now!”

  Jackson ignored him, staring down at the ship-mind, a football-sized organ revealed beneath the console panel, connected to the rest of the ship by a series of neural lines inside a milky-white membrane.

  It was now or never.

  With three quick cuts, he severed the ship-mind from the Dressler, pulling it up out of its protective sack. He then set the cutter to maximum power, cauterizing the pouch that had held the ship-mind so there could be no chance of repair.

  He turned to face the captain, who was staring at him, mouth open, white as a sheet. “Hammond, what have you done?”

  What I had to. “I’m sorry, Captain, but it was the only way. You were going to leave her to die.” He set the cutter down on the console. “Now call Anatov up here. We have about ninety minutes to save a life.”

  Chapter Seven: Void

  LEX WAS expecting it, but the suddenness of the break caught her off guard. Her world crumbled, the grass burning away with a hiss as the hills of the valley settled and flowed away like black tar. All at once, she was alone in a dark place, the blackness as oppressive as a grave.

  “Hello?” she said, but no one answered. The vast emptiness swallowed up her voice like it was nothing.

  What if Jackson couldn’t convince the others? What if she was trapped in this state forever, or at least until she died?

  What is it like to die?

  ANA STARED at Jackson. The man had gone mad.

  He held the severed ship-mind in his hand, and it was evident that there was no putting her back where she belonged. “What have you done?”

  “Are you going to help me save her, or not?” Jackson held up the mind.

  “How?”

  “We can put her inside the seed.”

  “We… it’s not… you can’t be serious.”

  “Serious as a heart attack, Doc.”

  It could work. Even as one part of her mind rejected the idea outright, another was working out the possibilities. If they were quick enough….

  “Well?”

  “It might be possible.”

  “What are we waiting for, then?”

  She shook her head. The whole idea was insane, but the alternative was worse. She made up her mind. “We’ll give it a try. The captain can start injecting the fungicide into the Dressler.” Ana handed one of the syringes to the captain, along with the vials of milky fluid. “Inject one of these, full, as close as you can to each of the visible lesions. The circulatory functions of the Dressler are controlled by a sublevel of the ship’s cognitive functions and should continue to work for some time without the ship-mind.” That meant they’d still have breathable air for a little longer, though it might start to get cold.

  McAvery nodded and set off down the runway, his face grim.

  She’d arrived at the bridge to find Hammond holding the ship-mind, and the captain in shock. She glared at him. What the hell were you thinking?

  As Hammond held the ship-mind, she rubbed it down with some of her homemade fungicide to repel any errant spores.

  “Come on, then, and bring it with you.” She couldn’t look him in the eyes. “I don’t know if what you’re proposing is even possible, let alone in the time we have to get it done.”

  “Lex assured me this will work. The ship-mind,” he clarified when she shot him a look.

  The man was apeshit crazy, but they’d deal with that later. She nodded curtly and motioned for him to follow her.

  Was it her imagination, or were the walls of the runway sagging inward?

  She paused in her lab to grab some surgical gloves and then led the way into the hold. The ichor from the ship’s wounds that had aerosolized had begun to condense along the outer walls of the hold, running down in rivulets of yellow blood.

  “The ship’s systems are too erratic to try to pull the seed in on hydraulics,” she told the engineer. “We’ll have to bring her in manually.”

  He nodded, and she set up a workstation, wiping down a work crate with more of the fungicide. “You can set it down here.”

  He did, and she wrapped some flexible webbing around it to hold it in place. She attached the crate firmly to the decking.

  She had a hard time looking at the naked ship-mind. It was difficult not to imagine what it would be like to be suddenly cut off from her own body without warning—a recipe for madness.

  She didn’t believe his story about this “Lex” for a minute, but if there was a chance to save one of her precious children, she had to take it.

  “The seed will have to be pulled in slowly and steadily to avoid damage to it or the ship. I need you to do it while I suit up to go out and guide it into the air lock.” She clambered into the lifeboat, retrieved one of the suits, and climbed into it. She hated extravehicular excursions, but there was no one else to do it. Her hand shook, and she willed it to stop. Deep breaths, Ana.

  Hammond took his cue and approached the wheel that anchored the superstrong carbon monofilament chain tethered to the seed.

  “One thing I don
’t understand,” she said to him before she climbed into the air lock. “Why would you try to destroy the Dressler, only to turn around and try to save the ship-mind?” She had her reasons for asking.

  “I didn’t know about the fungus. Now let’s get a move on. We don’t have much time.”

  She snapped the helmet in place, took a deep breath, and climbed into the air lock as the door irised shut behind her.

  THE SHIP continued in slowdown mode as the expulsion jets fired in turn, following the program Colin had set before Hammond had committed his brutal act.

  What had possessed him?

  Colin pulled one of the vials carefully out of the sample bag, used it to fill the syringe, and then inserted it into the flesh of the ship, next to one of the lesions that had appeared on the runway. Carefully, precisely, he delivered the shot, hoping the good doctor was right about this plan of attack. It was better than sitting around and doing nothing.

  The wall shuddered.

  He shook his head and discarded the vial, moving on to the next spot. The lesions here had grown over the last hour. The fungal infection was spreading quickly. He just hoped they could buy enough time to reach Ariadne before the Dressler literally fell apart around them.

  Hammond’s words nagged at him. If the engineer was trying to destroy the Dressler and them along with it, why not simply destroy the ship-mind? Why cut it out so carefully?

  Why not just kill his crewmates? The engineer certainly could have done so. It makes no sense.

  How had Hammond gotten the fungus through all the layers of security checks?

  He’d flown with Hammond before, and the man had always been solid. Dependable. Even dependable men can be bought. Or blackmailed.

  Another lesion, another delivery of fungicide.

  There was no time right now for an interrogation, but if they got out of this thing alive, Hammond would have to answer for his actions.

  Right now, that was a big if.

  SOMETHING HAD changed inside Jackson.

  He cranked the manual wheel slowly, pulling the seed in toward the ship, aided by the Dressler’s gradual slowdown.

  In the air lock, the doctor waited to guide it inside, where they could perform the synth repair.

  It was as if a new world had opened to him. What he had viewed with suspicion before—the Dressler and other man-made creatures like her—now seemed a font of wonder, a new creation under God’s bright heavens.

  He had come to believe the Dressler truly had a soul.

  He’d always admired Glory’s compassion for all of God’s creatures, her gentle spirit that embraced even the things small and ugly that populated the Earth. In Lex, he had found such a being.

  Dr. Anatov and her ilk had likely never intended it. They had been building workhorses, replacements for human labor, things both ubiquitous and mundane.

  Instead they had created something divine.

  The captain entered the hold behind him. He turned to see, but McAvery wouldn’t meet his gaze, busying himself instead with the fungicide the doctor had supplied him.

  “How’s it look out there, Doc?” Jackson called through the ship’s comm link to her loop.

  “Almost there. I think you can stop now. It has enough forward momentum to glide into the lock.”

  Jackson locked down the wheel and moved over to one of the plasform bubbles to watch the seed’s progress. As it approached, it seemed to grow larger. He could now see the deeply wrinkled wooden skin that protected the precious interior.

  “I’m going to slow it down so it doesn’t rip a hole in the lock when it comes in.”

  She pulled herself out along the cable toward the approaching payload.

  ANA CLIPPED her tether to the cord that towed the seed and pulled herself hand over hand toward it, well aware of her precarious position connected to the superstrong cable, woven from carbon monofilaments. That alone gave her a small degree of confidence, but this whole thing was way outside her job description.

  She tried not to look at the overwhelming vastness of space all around her and instead concentrated on that cable.

  Behind her, the Dressler continued on through empty space on its way toward a rendezvous with the asteroid. If she lost contact with the line, there would be no way for the ship to come back for her.

  Especially with the ship-mind currently deposited in a work bin in the ship’s hold. Damn you for that, Hammond.

  She had to be careful.

  The stars shone steady and brilliant around her, and ahead she could see the small pinpoint of light that was Earth, so far away.

  She approached the seed as quickly as she could, and soon it loomed before her, a dark, richly textured brown hull where the sun shone on its rough surface and pitch-black on the other side. It was shaped like a huge football, round in the middle and tapered at each end.

  Inside it, a whole new world was genetically encoded.

  At last she reached it, stopping her forward momentum with her hands, imparting negative velocity to its mass. It wasn’t enough, though. She’d need to use her suit propulsion to slow it further. She positioned herself parallel to its bulk and triggered a slow burn.

  The seed had halved the distance since she had started off from the ship. She didn’t have much time.

  Its advance slowed almost imperceptibly. She ratcheted her suit propulsion up to max, and at last she seemed to make a dent in its forward momentum.

  She was cutting it close.

  Then her suit ran out of propellant. It wasn’t made for a sustained thrust like this.

  The mass of the Dressler loomed up behind her. It wasn’t going to be enough. “Buckle up in there,” she called over the comm system. “This thing is coming in hot!”

  She let go of the seed, scrambling to unclip the tether.

  She couldn’t get a grip on it, and time was running out. If she couldn’t free herself, she would be crushed by the weight of the seed as it pushed into the air lock wall. It might not have any weight out here, but it still had all its mass.

  She pulled the cutter from her belt and went to work on the tether, making short work of it.

  Relieved, she pushed away from the seed as it glided into the lock, bumping the side and settling down perfectly.

  Only now she was slowly drifting away from the ship as it continued on ahead of her.

  There was nothing to grab onto.

  Desperate, she grasped for the edge of the lock, but it floated away from her, ever so slowly receding. She started to hyperventilate. I’m going to die out here.

  “Keep calm, Ana! Deep breaths.” Hammond’s voice came to her over the comm system.

  “I can’t….”

  “Keep calm and throw the cutter. Throw it backward!”

  She stared at him through the platform bubble, uncomprehending for a moment, forgetting to panic. Then she realized what he meant.

  For every action, there was an equal and opposite reaction. Basic physics.

  She turned and threw the cutter away from her, back the way they had come, with all her might.

  She inched closer to the ship. Oh please, let this work.

  Determined now, she began stripping things out of her utility belt, throwing them one by one behind her—her all-purpose tool, her pistol grip tool, and finally the rest of her tether.

  “That’s it,” Hammond called. “Almost there.”

  She needed one more thing.

  All that was left was her air tank. All or nothing.

  She held her breath and detached the shiny metal tank and thrust it away from her, twisting back to grasp the edge of the air lock.

  Contact. Her hands caught the edge of the air lock. She heaved herself inside and slammed her hand on the button to close the air lock’s outer door.

  It slid smoothly three-quarters of the way and then jammed.

  A piece of wood from the seed had lodged in the track and was blocking the door.

  No closure meant no air.

  The wor
ld was starting to swim around her as she ran out of oxygen.

  She kicked at the offending debris, once, twice, three times, her breath rushing out of her with the effort.

  At last it dislodged, spinning out into the blackness of space.

  She was out of air. She couldn’t breathe.

  The door snapped shut.

  Ana passed out and collapsed as oxygen slowly began to fill the chamber.

  Chapter Eight: Transplant

  THE AIR lock door whooshed open at last, and Hammond squeezed ahead of the captain, past the ten-foot bulk of the seed, to retrieve the doctor’s limp form. He lifted her up and handed her over to the captain before climbing back out into the hold.

  Colin laid her gently on the floor of the hold and pulled her helmet off.

  Ana’s face was blue, and she wasn’t breathing.

  He started mouth-to-mouth, taking deep breaths and forcing them down into her lungs. It should have been strange, being lips-to-lips with her like this, but in the moment, he felt only a sense of urgency to bring her back to the world of the living. Come on, Ana. You’re stronger than this.

  He stopped the breathing long enough to perform a few heart compressions, and then went back to resuscitation.

  At last she coughed, her whole body spasming.

  Colin sat back, looking at Ana’s face anxiously.

  Her brown eyes flew open. She took a ragged breath and then coughed again.

  “Easy there. You’re okay now.” He helped her sit up with her back against the wall.

  She nodded, putting her head between her knees. Her breathing slowly became more regular. “It worked?” Her voice was raspy.

  “It worked,” Hammond said above them. “You okay, Doc? We don’t have much time.”

  She nodded. “Just give me a minute. Can the two of you haul the seed all the way inside?”

  “Already on it. Come on, Captain, let’s get this thing moved.”

  Colin followed his engineer, still unsure where things stood between them. The man had committed a major… crime? Infraction? Maybe two.