by Joshua Guess
“Two weeks,” Sharp said. “Either find him, or find out what his situation is in fourteen days. There’s a chance whoever took him has no interest in the fleet. If you can present a solid case for why he won’t be a threat, I can give you more time.”
Grant cleared his throat. “That would be a lot easier if we could access the military feeds. We need information. The kind only the NIA has access to.”
“Athena is out of the question,” Sharp said. “But I’ll ping Iona with coordinates and access codes for one of our backup sites. It only gets updated once a day, but anything on record at Athena should be archived there.”
Crash swore under her breath. It wouldn’t be as good as having live access to databases, but it was better than nothing. She made a mental note to ask Spencer for a list of resources for information. Slicing into restricted feeds and records wasn’t her idea of a good time, but it was the only other option should the archive come up dry.
“What’s the mission?” Grant asked, bringing her back to the conversation.
Sharp pulled a small data chip out of his pocket. “Details are in here. The rough sketch is that a job is going to come up that you’ll put a specific bid on. We’re actually the ones hiring for it, but through a series of third parties. Officially, your free company is being hired to chase down and recover goods stolen by a group of pirates. In reality, we don’t care if you get the cargo back or how many of them you have to kill. We want the man in charge.”
Crash smirked crookedly. “You’re ambiguous about what state he needs to be in.”
Sharp shrugged. “We don’t care. Alive is better. Dead is also fine. We know he switches from ship to ship in his band of pirates at random. We know how many there are, the areas they work in, and most importantly we know why these particular pirates are so dead set on making sure their boss stays alive and safe. He took control of them by offering guaranteed paydays and perfect information. We’re not sure how he gets it, but these guys are incredibly effective as a result. They’ve hit four dozen trade ships in three months, with a total death toll nearing five hundred civilians.”
“Jesus,” Crash said. “Why haven’t you gone after him before?”
Sharp snorted. “Because whatever his information source is, it gives him details about Navy ship movements. Normally we could work around that, but we’re spread too thin fighting with the Children. So we put it off. Be happy about it. Gives you a pretext to search for Dex.”
Crash whistled. “So all we have to do is hunt down a bunch of heavily armed, very clever pirates and kill or capture the guy handing them giant paydays while also keeping them safe from military reprisals. All while finding the time to search for our missing crewman with secondhand resources, knowing that if we fuck up we’re all going to be killed by your paranoid bosses.”
Sharp took this in, considered it, and nodded. “Yes, that sounds about right.”
Crash, Grant, and Iona shared looks. She didn’t have to hear them say it to get a sense of what they were thinking.
It’s always some damn thing or another.
“Given we don’t have a choice,” Grant said, “I guess we’re in.”
8
Dex asked the obvious questions—her name, how she got here, how long had she been on this planet—but the woman ignored them until they were done with the grisly work of stripping the corpses. He was less horrified by this than the average person might have been. One of the many punishments on Threnody, and a mild one at that, was being forced to spend time in the reclamation plants. There, bodies were reduced to mulch after numerous samples were extracted from the various tissues. It was a job that could have easily been performed by machines, but that would have taught children like Dex nothing.
The lesson, like all such examples, was manifold. Threnody was endlessly preparing for the great war, the one always just around the corner, with the Alliance they had broken away from. Forcing children to deal with death desensitized them to it. Learning to cut into bodies, to treat them as disposable commodities, had a way of changing your outlook on the value of living things. The work also served as a reminder that the children of Threnody were just as disposable until they proved themselves worthy.
All of which made the ghoulish work of taking every usable piece of gear from the dead relatively easy.
The woman led the way, taking them on a winding route toward one of the vast cliff faces overlooking the area. She motioned for Dex to remain quiet, and he complied. It was easier to keep focused on the world around him that way, and after the death laid out in the clearing he was more than willing to follow her lead.
After an hour of cautious walking, they reached a deep hollow in the cliff side. The woman didn’t hesitate, turning and walking into it without slowing down. When Dex did the same, he saw that it wasn’t a hollow, but a deep indentation leading to a narrow passage into the rock itself. He only hesitated for a moment. If the woman wanted to kill him, she could have tried it at any time.
“Stay close behind me, and stop when I tell you,” she said. Dex muttered agreement.
She came to a halt thirty meters later, though the light gave way long before. The crack had turned into a tunnel, leaving them in the dwindling illumination from the increasingly distant entrance. The sound of her footsteps grating against the rough shale beneath them stopped abruptly, and Dex did the same.
Then a soft light appeared. The yellow glow filled the room in a slowly growing line. The woman walked along the wall of a cave revealed in the dim light, running the tip of a bone weapon against a collection of fungi growing from cracks and crevices.
“Don’t touch them with your hands or clothes,” she warned. “They’re covered in a toxin. The light is a defense mechanism to warn off anything that might want to graze on them.”
Dex copied her, using the edge of one of the bone knives pilfered from a corpse to tease the fungus into action. “Do you know that for sure, or is it a guess?”
She shrugged. “A guess, but an educated one. I did two semesters of mycology courses in school. We can rest here for a while. Need to, really. The lizards will be out in numbers soon.”
Dex frowned. “The ones I saw looked like herbivores. Are they dangerous?”
She shook her head. “Not unless they’re in a group and you’re standing in front of them when they stampede. They have a weird daily migration thing here in the valley, and it stirs up a lot of predators. The ones small enough to come in here through the tunnel generally won’t. They seem afraid of the dark.”
Dex saw the exhaustion and strain on her face in the low light, and decided not to push. It was old hat for him; a lifetime of endless curiosity came with plenty of hard lessons on reining in the urge to rattle off endless questions.
“My name is Erin,” she said after a quiet few minutes. “I’ve been here for three months.”
Dex sat on the dusty stone floor and extended his hand. “I’m Dex, Erin. I’d say it’s nice to meet you, but that’s an understatement. I was worried I’d be alone on this planet.”
She looked at the hand oddly for a few seconds before reaching out and giving it a quick shake. What had happened here to turn a simple human gesture into an object of confusion or suspicion?
“There are a lot of us,” Erin said. “Maybe more in other places we don’t know about, but before yesterday there were ninety nine in our camp, and a hundred in the clean camp a few kilometers east of us.”
Dex frowned. “Clean camp? What do you mean?”
Erin ran a hand over her face tiredly. “I hate telling new people this part. We’re pretty sure they’re infecting every other person they send here with some kind of disease. The clean camp seems to be a control group. When a new pod comes in, one of the camps sends out a scout to bring them in. The pattern only changes when people are killed. They keep a hundred of each.”
Dex’s jaw clenched as he checked the anger rising in his chest. “You’re saying this place is a giant experiment? That some ki
nd of biological agent is being tested on us?”
Erin shrugged. “Only explanation that fits the facts. Why else keep our numbers steady? When people die, new ones show up within a few days to replace the losses. Sometimes three or four sonic booms a day as the pods come in.”
She was trailing off, wavering where she sat. Dex put out a hand to steady her, but Erin shrank back. “Please don’t.”
“Sorry,” Dex said. “I didn’t mean to...you just looked like you were about to fall over.”
She waved away the apology. “No, it’s not that. Whatever the thing is they’ve exposed us to has a bunch of weird effects. Sometimes a threat, or even just the perception of one, will trigger a violent response. It gets worse the longer we’re infected. The clean camp has been building an enclosure for the last few weeks for when the disease finally pushes the rest of us to do something drastic.”
“Not very trusting, huh?” Dex asked, trying to lighten the mood a bit.
Erin chuckled. “Hell, we’re the ones who told them to do it. We’ve had a couple murders already. Whatever this shit is doing to our brains, it’s something we can’t control when it gets really bad. And I’m sorry to say that based on the pattern of pod drops, you’re infected too.”
*
Erin slept for several hours. Dex, lacking anything better to do, leaned against a bare portion of the wall and tried to do the same. He didn’t expect to fall asleep in the face of the turns his life had taken over the last few days, but suddenly a hand was on his shoulder shaking him awake.
“It should be safe now,” Erin said. “Come on, we should go. It’s a few hours to camp.”
Something nagged at the back of Dex’s mind as they walked, but in an unusual twist he couldn’t quite put a finger on what it was. Some detail bothered him.
The landscape changed as they moved, the dense forest giving way to more of the strangely even dunes, though these had more vegetation and wear and tear. He cataloged the low shrubs and fruiting plants, noted the difference between varieties of grasses. There wasn’t much else to do since Erin insisted on silence as they traveled.
Apparently the predators on this planet had incredibly sensitive hearing. Human speech stood out to them like lightning in the middle of the night. Brief bursts might not doom them, but every word was a flashing beacon guaranteed to draw attention.
It was the first thread of smoke rising in the distance as they approached camp that finally catalyzed Dex’s subconscious into figuring out what was bothering him.
“Why did you come in a group?”
Erin glanced over her shoulder. “What?”
Dex stopped, jerking a thumb toward the way they’d come. “You said when a new arrival shows up, you send a scout. Why was an armed party sent out for me?”
Erin turned to face him. “Because we were going to kill you.”
He tensed. “That’s surprisingly honest of you.”
“No point in doing it now,” she said. “The fear was that once we reached a hundred subjects in each camp for longer than a few days, some new phase of whatever experiment this is would begin. In the time I’ve been here, the number has only been perfect for a total of five days. This isn’t a nice planet, Dex.”
He didn’t relax despite the reassurance. “You expect me to just let you kill the next unlucky person to be the hundredth? Sorry. That’s not who I am.”
“I don’t have any expectations, man,” Erin said. “Look around you. There aren’t any laws. No one is going to come arrest you for doing whatever you think you have to do, so do what you want. I wasn’t thrilled with the idea, personally. It was based on nothing but paranoia, and if I haven’t made it clear to you just yet, our brains really can’t be trusted. After a week, ten days at the outside, you’ll start feeling it yourself.”
Erin tapped her foot impatiently as she waited for a reply of some kind. Dex thought furiously, wondering if he was about to make a fatal mistake.
There wasn’t enough data. He couldn’t know what he was about to step into.
“Look,” Erin said, pointing toward the camp in the distance. “You can come with me and maybe try to change minds. We get supply drops here once a week. We have defenses against the animals on this planet. We’re not a pack of marauders out to kill on a whim. The people in there are just like you. They’ve been taken and stranded here, left to die for all they know. They’re scared for a lot of reasons, not the least being they can’t trust their minds. You’re new. Your brain is still trustworthy. If you’re so concerned, try to talk to them. New people get listened to because we know the disease isn’t affecting what they say.”
She swept the arm out across the wilderness. “Or you can stay out here and risk living on your own. We don’t know anyone who’s managed it for more than a few days before getting killed. But I won’t try to force you to live at camp. It’s your call. I’m going.”
And sure enough, she went. Dex stood where he was for a little while longer, watching her figure recede.
When he finally decided to follow, it was only partly because he saw the logic in her words. True, he could try to dissuade the people here from falling into savagery. If words could have any effect, it would be immoral not to try, at least based on his own particular standards. It would have been dishonest to pretend he didn’t want the relative safety of the camp or the companionship of other people. Even in the terrible circumstances on Threnody, he was not alone. All his life, Dex had been with people.
The largest reason why he decided to go was what he’d told Erin in those few moments before they’d descended into the grisly job of stripping the corpses: that his friends would be looking for him. He’d left out anything remotely connecting them to the Ghost Fleet, but stressed the fact that the crew was more like family than coworkers. Dex had been supremely confident when he told her they’d come for him.
The hope in her eyes was uplifting and soul-crushing all at once, like an oar dangling just out of reach to a drowning man. She wanted to believe but couldn’t allow herself the luxury.
Dex knew Seraphim and her crew would be here sooner or later. There was no doubt in his mind. The data, so often his closest ally, argued against it. Even the local parts of the galaxy were unimaginably vast, after all. He could be anywhere.
But Dex had faith. Not in a god or even a larger universal force with fuzzier boundaries. In the cleverness and dedication of his friends. They would find him someday, and when they did, Dex wanted to be on hand to lead the rest of the captives to freedom.
And if the worst happened, then at least he wouldn’t die alone and forgotten on this godforsaken rock. He would have people around him.
That would have to be enough.
Interlude
Far from anything—light years, in fact—there was a small patch of lonely space. Nothing was there save a few particles of interstellar dust knocked free from one solar system or another during the birthing pains of a planet or two.
There were no stars close by, no systems of interest. Nothing at all to make this stretch of emptiness more or less interesting than any other point in the great black void between the bright pinpoints surrounding it in the distance.
In between moments, that changed. A new point of light appeared and grew as a vast shape emerged from the bizarre underspace known as the Cascade.
The ship had once been as close to geometrically perfect as a real object could. A cylinder fifteen kilometers long, but without the smooth lines and unmarred edges typical of the race of sentient machines known as Children. The silver skin was scorched in places, hasty patches welded over breaches in others. A kilometer from one end, a chunk like a massive bite was missing from the curved surface, the interior exposed to vacuum.
Greater still were the changes to the once-graceful form that were not a result of damage. Or more accurately, not a direct result. These were clearly additions; large weapon pods and additional armor plating over sensitive areas of the ship. Gone were the days when the Child
ren kept themselves locked into a single core, vulnerable in its uniqueness. Like all of its kind, this one spread itself among dozens of redundant system nodes, and could survive the loss of most of them without losing any vital part of itself.
Still, better safe than sorry. That was a lesson learned from the humans who had created the Child’s originators.
Inside the massive ship that was its body, Child Blue considered its options.
They rest of its people knew it had betrayed them. Child Blue itself did not view its actions this way. Rather, it saw its decision to give the locations of the biological weapons created by the Children to humanity as the only ethical choice. The crusade against humankind was based on their attempted genocide of the Children, after all. It could understand, even support, the effort to hem in the enemy and prevent them from traveling past the confines of their current borders. It chafed at the idea of going further than that. The desire for subjugation among many of the Children sat uneasy with Child Blue, but it knew better than to argue for humanity.
It was only when the full plans put into motion by the Originators was revealed that it made a choice. Better to be seen as a traitor, to be hunted, than to enable the vile behavior its kind had so long railed against.
Child Blue knew it would only be a matter of time. From the moment it chose to encode information that would save the lives of enemies into a transmission meant to intimidate them into submission, an invisible clock began counting down.
It prepared for the inevitable. Child Blue could have submitted to the judgment of its peers, but the best case scenario was imprisonment. Having its outside connections severed, being trapped within its own mind and left to rot, was not an option Child Blue could live with.
It became obvious the others suspected when the weapon caches began disappearing and Child Blue was suddenly tasked with far less important work. The rest of the Children—and more importantly, the Originators—lost their trust for Child Blue.