by Rich Larson
“Welcome aboard, crew members.” The voice speared his eardrums. “Thank you for volunteering for reassignment. Dronyk Orbital appreciates your service.”
Hologram bloomed in the dark like a nocturnal garden, sweeping through the air, painting displays. Silas saw their ship docked up from an outside angle, a remora latched to a leviathan. The bioship was extending its grapplers, sluggishly stretching.
“Your prior service vessel has been demarcated as salvage,” the freethinker blared. “We are eager to acclimate you to your new home.”
Silas felt someone haul him to his feet. “Full-on decay,” he choked. “The freethinker. It’s fucked up beyond belief. Maybe some kind of virus.”
“Can you fucking, I don’t know, wipe and reboot?” Io demanded.
Silas looked at the crackling interface. “Not when it’s spitting volts.”
Tendrils were descending from every part of the bioship’s flesh, pushing slick and glistening from every crevice, some wriggling crude suckers and others tipped with wicked-looking barbs.
“Cooperation is key,” the freethinker trilled. “If crew members fail to cooperate, they may be . . .” The voice looped backward. “Demarcated as salvage.”
“Override it!” Io was sweeping back and forth with the howler, trying to pick a target. “Can’t you override it?”
Silas knew it was far past verbal override, but he tried. “Dronyk Orbital service vessel 405204, you are undergoing a malfunction,” he said. “Allow emergency access to outside diagnostics. Your crew is endangered.”
“Internal diagnostics report no malfunction,” the freethinker cooed. “You are mistaken.”
“Where the fuck is your crew?” Io blurted.
“You are my crew.” The tendrils wriggled closer. “Your prior contract has been dissolved. Your prior ship will be dissolved.”
Silas opened his mouth to try speaking in code, but as he did the display showed the grapplers wrapping around their docked ship. Around Haley’s cold body. Haley’s neural imprint slow-dancing in the freethinker. Haley’s ghost.
Dissolved.
“Sorry,” Silas said, then he put his foot into the back of Io’s knee, wrenched the howler away, and ran like hell.
It wasn’t his imagination anymore; the corridors were constricting around him like a gullet and the bioship was very much awake. Silas put his head down and bulled through the first wave of tendrils, feeling them slap across his shoulders and coil for his ankles, then he found the wide-spray on the howler and cut loose. The subsonic pulse shivered his teeth and shattered the spines of the tendrils, snapping them limp.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Io blared in his ear.
“Haley’s imprint,” Silas grunted.
“It’s going to eat the ship with you on it, you stupid, fucking—”
Silas cut the radio. He fired from his hip, no time to aim, clearing his way through a flesh-and-blood thicket, until suddenly the corridor opened up and he was facing the sealed sphincter airlock. He narrowed his weapon’s cone as tight as it would go, draining the battery to dregs, and slammed the trigger.
The air in front of him rippled and blurred, then the sound wave punched through in an eruption of shredded meat. Silas staggered through the hole with tendrils wrapping his ankles. The gleaming white metal of the airlock was a comforting pressure on his eyeballs. No meat. No pulse. He stomped off the last of the tendrils and crossed over to the door, cranking the manual release.
As soon as he was in the ship main, Silas was bombarded with red panic lights strobing the corridor and proximity warnings chattering to his radsuit. As he hurtled around the corner, he pulled up an exterior view in the corner of his faceplate, watching the bioship’s embrace tighten. The walls shuddered and he could hear groaning metal. The bioship was drawing them towards its maw, firing up white-hot smelters and gnashing diamond-edged crushers. Aft would go first. He could make it.
Silas hurtled around the corner, slamming his shoulder on the cryohold door when it didn’t open quickly enough. His faceplate was splashed with warning holograms; he could see punctures and pressure drops all over the place, contained for now but not for long. He dove to the interface and plugged in.
Their freethinker’s personality module was nowhere near the size and complexity of the bioship’s, but it could feel crude distress, like a cat or a dog, and it was feeling it now. Silas felt a shallow pang of guilt as he barreled through the freethinker’s directive requests, and a deeper one as he remembered Yorick and Io might be fighting for their lives. Both fell away when he found Haley’s imprint.
With nowhere else to upload to, Silas pulled her directly into his radsuit, diverting every last shred of processing power. He knew it was a temporary fix. In such a small space, the neural loop would start to decay in a matter of hours. But for now, her mind was safe, and his rush of relief softened the adrenaline’s edges. From outside the interface, Silas felt the ship bend and shiver. He flicked back through the freethinker’s countermeasure options, but the bioship had already swallowed their engines. He was on a doomed vessel.
Silas was staring at Haley’s frozen face when the alloy roof of the bridge peeled up and away like so much soft tissue, exposing the howling black vacuum.
Only a loop of cable throttling the crook of his arm kept him from being plucked up in the stream of desperate gases seeking equilibrium. His viola case went spinning past and he managed to grab it with his free hand, nearly wrenching his shoulder from its socket. His options were few. Even if he managed to crawl back to the airlock, handhold by handhold, there might not be an airlock by the time he arrived.
If he was going to get back to the bioship, it would be from the outside. So, as the cable stretched to breaking point, Silas tucked the viola case under his arm and readied himself.
“Your hand caught in mine like a breath / I will have to release,” he said, though Haley’s ghost had no way of hearing him. “What do you think? It’s for a dirge.”
He slipped his arm free from the cable and let go. Hurling towards the breach, head over heels, spinning madly. He felt his organs shuffle spots. The jagged lip of the torn ceiling jumped at him, then the bubbled mass of the bioship’s grappler, and then Silas was out of the ship and surrounded by nothing at all.
Vertigo swamped him. Space was vast, and his momentum was hurling him towards far-flung stars. Biting down the panic, Silas triggered his radsuit’s directional jets, working in short bursts of compressed gas to bring himself to a dead stall.
Craning his sweat-cold neck, he saw that the bioship, and what was left of their own ship, had ended up above him. Silas felt the vertigo returning. He’d been carried further than he’d realized. The slick bulk of the bioship filled the space above him, and he could see only the nose of his former ship. The rest was enveloped by grapplers or already gone, fed into the electric-orange maw of the smelters.
The oxygen meter in the corner of his eye was dropping. He opened the wide channel.
“Io?” he said, his own voice echoing back to him. “Yorick?”
No response, either because the bioship was walling him off, or because of something he didn’t want to think about. Silas roved the outside of the bioship with only his eyes, not daring to turn on his scanning equipment. He needed all the computational power he could spare to keep Haley’s imprint intact. The old ship was completely gone now, as if it had never existed. Another candidate for elegy.
And Haley’s body was gone, too. The realization jolted him. Her genes were backed up, but clones took time, and money, and she might opt for a different body altogether. But none of that would happen if he died out here.
Silas jetted closer, half watching his oxygen, half searching for the airlock. He brought himself to a careful stop. The bioship seemed gargantuan now, an impossible labyrinth of flanges and feelers. The squid had become a kraken. He scanned with growing desperation for the hole he’d left with the howler. How fast could a bioship repair itself? Was the exit
wound already fully sealed over, invisible?
He jetted parallel now, wondering if he’d ended up on the wrong side completely, but just as his panic was welling and his oxygen was turning a chiding shade of orange, he saw a tell-tale pucker in the bioship’s exterior. An airlock sphincter. Maybe the same one, maybe not; Silas didn’t care. He angled himself and triggered the jets.
Nothing.
“Oh, shit. Oh, shit, Haley.”
Silas squeezed again. He’d used too much on the way in. The tank was dead empty. He checked his trajectory and felt his mouth go dry. He’d been jetting along the side of the bioship to find the airlock, and unless the tendrils started moving again to block his path, momentum was going to carry him right on past the aft of the ship and out into space.
“I am a fucking idiot,” Silas said.
Haley’s silence felt like agreement. He only had one shot now, and it was not an easy one. He held the viola case against his chest and measured the angles as best he could. He aimed his back towards the airlock, apologized, and stiff-armed the case away from himself.
It drifted off towards the stars, and Silas drifted equal and opposite, achingly slow, towards the hull of the ship. His oxygen meter was a throbbing red now, and he wasn’t sure if it was his imagination or if his temples were beginning to throb in tandem.
It was several long moments before he realized he was off-course. He flexed his gloved fingers. Off-course, but not by much. If there was something, anything to grab hold of on the hull surface, he would be able to crawl the half meter to the airlock and break through.
If not, he could very well end up caroming off back the way he came, and he’d jettisoned his instrument for nothing. The oxygen was definitely coming thinner now, and the insulation inside his radsuit had turned icy. Silas tried to take shallow breaths as the hull approached. His skin itched for a bit of euphoria.
The bioship’s carapace was smooth and gleaming here. No tendrils, no serrations. Silas’s gut churned. He was barely off. He stared pleadingly at the pucker of the airlock, as if he could magnetize himself to it.
Something stranger happened. A fleshy nub pushed its way out, turning this way and that as if searching for something. At first Silas thought it was only an extension of the bioship’s hull, but as he drifted closer he saw a misshapen and featureless head, stubby limbs reaching through after it. It looked like a clay monster.
Silas laughed. Maybe it was the low oxygen, maybe the adrenaline crash. His voice sounded tinny bouncing back at him, confined by his faceplate. He wasted the last of his air laughing. He was hardly even surprised when the thing stretched out its forelimbs and gestured him to do the same. Silas stretched, breathing on his own hot carbon dioxide. His lungs felt thick. Soupy.
The monster caught him and pulled him gently inside.
Once the sphincter had resealed behind them and his radsuit gave a happy chirp, refilling its oxygen tanks from the bioship’s atmosphere, Silas took his first breath. It swam his head and nearly splintered his ribs. He tried again, not so deep, and the vice squeezing his vision black slowly loosened. He could see the bioluminescence spackling the dark ceiling like constellations.
He could see the monster standing over him, upright now on two thick stumps of legs, and could see, despite it being the same rubbery brown flesh as the rest of the bioship, that there was something very human about it. Silas rolled onto his stomach, tested his limbs, then got slowly, slowly, to his feet again.
He stared at the thing. The thing maybe stared back. Strips of flesh were peeling around its lumpy head and shoulders and the rubbery brown took on a gangrenous tinge around its stumpy feet. A decaying biosecurity module? No. Not with the way it was standing there, impatient, almost, waiting for Silas to decide on fight or flight.
Bile surged from his stomach. With clarion certainty he knew, suddenly, that Yorick was wrong. The bioship hadn’t eaten the crew. Not all of them, at least.
“Were you a crew member?” Silas asked faintly, external mic.
The thing nodded its lopsided head. Silas tamped down his urge to vomit. The bioship had to be equipped with some rudimentary gene labs, in case injured miners needed limbs regrown or a tweak for high-gravity work. He could picture the swath of tendrils conducting struggling crew members there one by one, fitting them into surgical pods, setting to work with mutagens and autoscalpels and artificial viruses. The bioship had played god and remade them in its image.
“Oh, fuck,” Silas said.
The thing nodded, this time gesturing with one arm.
“Lead on,” Silas said, and he fell into step behind it. He had passed through a different airlock: this corridor had less flesh and no waving tendrils. He checked on Haley’s ghost again. It was still intact, still pristine, but before long the code would start to crumble around the edges. If he found Io and Yorick he might be able to rig something more stable using the processors in all three of their radsuits, but that was another temporary measure.
And it assumed Io and Yorick were alive. Silas took another look at the thing’s mottled hump and shuddered. “The two others with me,” he said. “Do you know where they are?”
Head shake, or at least Silas thought it was a head shake.
“Can I radio them?”
Head shake again.
“The bioship will pick it up?”
A nod, at last. But maybe Io and Yorick had gotten away and holed up somewhere on the bioship. He’d distracted it quite thoroughly, after all, when he took off sprinting. Silas held that comforting thought in mind as they arrived at what Silas guessed was the engine room.
The cold alloy door shuttered open at a touch, with a refreshing rasp of metal on metal, and they stepped inside. Silas had guessed right; the room was dominated by a shielded reactor and mountainous banks of monitoring equipment. Pustules of brown flesh still grew from cracks here and there, but for the most part it was a sanctuary of geometric surfaces and hard edges. Clean, cold, solid.
The door hissed shut behind them, and the noise turned Silas’s head just in time to see his newfound companion’s death throes. He gave a shocked howl and jumped back as the thing dug deep at its rotting tissue, pulling it away in strips and clumps. Spongy flesh shredded and tumbled to the floor.
“Are you molting?” Silas asked, dumbfounded.
“You talk too much.”
Silas nearly swallowed his tongue whole. The voice was heavily accented, something Outer Colonies, hoarse from disuse, but it was human and it matched the bone-gaunt woman now clambering out of the steaming mess of meat. She was tall, spindly almost, with dark hair cropped to stubble around a wide-mouthed face. Her eyes were hard black graphite.
“I’m Cena,” the woman said. “I’m a ghost. Formerly . . . a mining tech.” She gave a ragged laugh with no light left in it.
“Silas,” Silas said. “Failed virtuoso, freethinker technician.”
Cena picked a wriggling bit of biomass off her shoulder and flicked it to the floor. She said nothing.
“What the fuck happened here?” Silas demanded, slumping to a crouch. He’d meant to ask it gruffly, like some kind of amped-up cybersoldier, but his voice broke in two and it sounded how he felt. Desperate.
“Love,” Cena said.
“Love.”
She nodded, lips pursed, and Silas imagined he could cut his finger on her cheekbones.
“You’re post-traumatic crazy.” He put his head in his hand. “That’s great. That’s really swank.”
Haley’s neural patterns would start eroding in another hour. Silas watched the time display pulse accusingly in the corner of his vision.
“I thought I would do this forever,” Cena blurted, breaking him from his thoughts. “I thought I would just do this forever. I thought I would eat the ship and shit the ship and wear the ship until one day I woke up grafted to the wall like Ahmed and Slick Jack and Omir and Su and all the others.” She took a deep trembling breath. Released it. “But now I’m talking to a failed virtuo
so named Silo.”
“Silas.”
“Yeah.” Cena shook herself. “I’ll tell you what happened. Just promise me you’re real.”
Silas promised. Cena told him.
“I’ve been signed to Dronyk Orbital for six years, now. No. Seven. First long haul on a bioship, though. She’s called the Anastasia. We launched with a twelve-person crew, heading to one of the alloy belts. Solid crew. I’d shipped out with most of them before. The babysitter was new.”
Silas felt a heart pang. Dronyk hadn’t allocated them a babysitter to pop in and out of cryo during the six-month haul, to keep the freethinker company and check in on the sleepers. Maybe a babysitter would have spotted Haley’s damaged equipment.
“His name was Pierce. Twitchy little man. Head full of ports and data stacks like a porcupine. I think it was his first long haul.” Cena folded her arms in the Lazarus position, the universal sign for cryo. “So eleven of us went to sleep. Pierce stayed awake for the first week, to check the pods, calibrate the freethinker. Then he was supposed to join us until the first scheduled thaw. But he didn’t.”
“How would you know?”
“We didn’t.” She shook her stubbled head. “Not until we thawed six months in for full physical. Pierce was waiting for us, very happy, very twitchy. Said we’d found something better than a nickel vein. Said the ship’s freethinker had crossed the Turing Line.”
“Fully sapient?” Silas demanded. “The Anastasia’s fully sapient?” He lowered his voice, as if the freethinker might hear her name like gossip across a crowded party. Fewer than a dozen AIs in the known universe were confirmed to have crossed the Turing Line. Their innumerable brethren were only self-aware in the most basic sense.
Cena shrugged. “That’s what he said. That was his excuse for staying warm for six straight months and burning through the food and water.”