by Brit Jones
He looks at the poster on the wall, a blown-up photograph of Sweetie sitting on the outstretched palm of a previous customer.
‘That kid is about six years old,’ he says. ‘Are you saying six-year-olds can handle it and I can’t?’
One of his friends slaps the back of a hand against his upper arm. ‘Fuck it, Chris, let’s go.’
‘No,’ he says, and points at me. His fingers are square and chunky, yellowish staining on the underside. I would have blamed nicotine, once, but I suspect it’s more likely a tanning solution. ‘I want the spider. It’s the only reason we came in here in the first place. You said people can hold it, so I’m going to.’
I compose my expression into reluctance and take a typed disclaimer out of a plastic tray on the side. He slaps it out of my hand and it drifts to the floor. Perhaps that’s just as well; it’s a prop, like the fake bamboo in the cases, and makes no sense whatsoever. Although I’m not sure he would realise that even if he read every word.
‘I won’t sue you,’ Chris says, the words barely getting out through clenched teeth. ‘I might nut you one if you don’t stop fucking me about, but I won’t sue you. All right?’
‘Fuck’s sake,’ says the other young man. He looks jittery, pulling on the collar of his shirt. There are sweat stains spreading out from under the arms. ‘Can’t we just leave it?’
Maybe it’s chemical, this edginess—maybe he just wants to rush off towards the next fix of his regular poison. But there’s something in his eyes that reminds me of those sensible children who knew when to be scared. Maybe this one really does understand something of the world, after all.
The rest ignore him. I get the impression Chris usually puts on a good show, and they don’t want to miss anything. Good for them.
Sweetie currently lives in a five-gallon aquarium, the bottom layered with a few inches of soil and peat. She has a shallow water dish and a cave in the form of a small clay flowerpot. I remove the lid and lift her out.
The men fall into a semicircle and lean in closer. There’s a very small noise, little more than a vibration, but it almost sounds like an ‘ooh.’ A warm rush of nostalgia sweeps through me.
‘What do you feed it?’ a member of the chorus asks.
‘Crickets,’ I lie.
Sweetie sits on my palm, unmoving. You could imagine she was just a model, a toy—maybe a corpse. She plays dead extremely well.
‘Hold out your hand,’ I tell Chris.
For a heartbeat or two he hesitates—vestigial survival instinct, perhaps. But if so, it’s easily overridden. He won’t back out now, not after so much fuss. In this modern world, social embarrassment is a far greater fear.
He pushes back the sleeve of his shirt and offers me his hand. I bring mine next to it until our fingers brush. His flesh is cold, but he still jumps, minutely. Perhaps mine is colder.
I tilt my hand and Sweetie tumbles fluidly from my palm to his. He stiffens, the muscles in his arms and his jaw visibly rigid. Another whisper of sound; the complementing ‘aah.’
We all wait.
She moves a foreleg, taps it gently on his skin. ‘She’s reading your palm,’ I say. ‘Telling your future.’
They all smile, as if I’ve said something funny. Chris breathes out for the first time in at least thirty seconds, and then frowns.
‘Is it supposed to do that?’ he says, because Sweetie’s changing her colouration. Amber bands are appearing on her legs, reminiscent of the Mexican Red-Knee—probably because that’s the classic image so often used in illustrations and films. Say ‘tarantula’ to most people and that’s what they’ll think of.
‘She likes you,’ I tell him.
I don’t always lie.
He raises his hand and brings her up to eye level. ‘You’re not so scary,’ he says.
The blond boy in the stained shirt winces and closes his eyes, and I know that he’s seeing Sweetie jump, legs extended and fangs bared—fangs that make no sense for a creature that size. He’ll be seeing these things in his dreams for a long, long time.
But at least he’ll wake up, afterwards. He has that advantage over his friend.
Sweetie and Chris are still eye-to-eye. The others are getting restless; it doesn’t look like there’s much more fun to be had here.
‘Are we going?’ one of them says.
‘Yeah,’ Chris says, but he doesn’t move.
‘Catch us up, then, yeah?’
They’re drifting towards the door now, listening to a different siren song. The blond is the first one out, his face ashen and his chest heaving as he gulps polluted street air as if it tastes fresher than inside the shop. The others laugh, thump him on the back and call him names.
‘Yeah,’ Chris says again, but they’ve all gone.
We have to go too, now. They’ll come back for him eventually. Or they’ll remember that he was here, at least—that this was the last place they saw him.
I pack everything up quickly and neatly, leaving nothing but dust and whispers. I still miss the romance of the covered wagon, but it has to be said that the van is a far more efficient method of transport.
I slam the back doors on Sweetie and her new friend. I think Chris would be screaming if he was still capable, but he’ll settle soon enough. We’ll head out to Eastern Europe for a while, I think, somewhere that hasn’t entirely sacrificed awe and wonder for regulations and small print. He should be ready, by then, to take his place as the star attraction of my little travelling show. Sweetie doesn’t mind sharing the limelight, sometimes. She’s good like that.
Failsafe
Karen Bovenmyer
I don’t like ships with corpses.
I don’t mind a salvager’s life—the time alone, the long hours searching—but ships with bodies, those bother me. Shake me up for weeks after, sometimes, almost aren’t worth the nightmares. Some of my fellow salvagers climb aboard wrecks and work over the dead for anything valuable because TerraCo lists unfound personal effects as lost or destroyed. Not me. I can’t rifle corpses and stay sane. When I find a ship, all I want is my fee. Someone else does cleanup. I don’t need anything held by the dead, and I like my ship’s cozy little bridge just fine. My next move after finding is always to submit the coordinates and head toward the core worlds to collect my big TerraCo payoff. But this time I waited, fighting a lingering feeling like there was something I was supposed to do. I tried to ignore it, but I couldn’t shake it off. The colony ship revolved in the dark like a ruptured beehive, circled by a nimbus of empty lifeboats. Thirty-foot letters—The Eden Queen—marched unbroken across her bulbous midsection, but the lower half of the hulk was breached by a crescent grin. My searchlights picked up a glint of twisted metal shining back from the scar—whatever violence had rendered the Queen lifeless had been explosive and quick.
“Everyone’s dead—” A voice from nowhere spoke. I jumped, my twitch jerking the camera focus into empty space. Nothing but black—not many visible stars this far out on the rim.
“Hezu, Recovery. You fekken scared me,” I said.
The nowhere voice replayed in the air like someone singing in another room. Everyone’s dead—Everyone’s dead—Everyone’s dead—
I cracked my knuckles to hide a sudden case of nerves that made my hands shake—the AI monitored my health constantly and got preachy when she thought her captain was straining herself. Dry-mouth scared probably counted.
“I’m sorry, Kira,” my ship said. “You told me to play transmissions coming from the Queen. This is the only one.”
“Everyone’s dead—”
The words cycled again, clipping off each time as though the speaker were interrupted.
“Analysis—adolescent female between the ages of nine and thirteen. High levels of stress,” Recovery said.
“No shit,” I said. The message had been little more than a terrified whisper. I’ve never been a mother—that ship left port years ago—but even I could hear the trauma in that kid’s words. “Play the rest o
f it.”
“There isn’t any more, Captain. The transmission repeats.” Recovery’s reasonable, clinical voice switched to the kid’s in a heartbeat.
“Everyone’s dead—” she repeated. Recovery let it cycle for a minute and the small voice floated from the speakers, alone and afraid.
“Shut it down. You’re making me jumpy.”
The AI complied, leaving me in silence, which was almost as bad. Over fourteen hundred colonists had been aboard the Queen, heading out to a new rock on the rim with a belly full of terraformers. Now only this one voice sounded in the dark—surely the person who belonged to it was long dead. That little lost voice reminded me death waited for us all, and the departed made me nervous. I’ve seen enough deep space to know there are things beyond our understanding—we salvagers talk to each other, and there’s a drunk in every port yarning about haunted ships sailing themselves, proceeding on to some unknown place for purposes of their own. Whatever you may think about those washed up spacers, I know as sure as vacuum that there are things in the black, waiting, that collect all the souls we leave out here. An odd belief for someone who combs the stars for salvage, but there are things even I don’t like to mess with. The dead are one of them.
“The data is incorrect.” Recovery interrupted my thoughts. She was always doing that—she was programmed to keep me company and didn’t like long silences.
“What are you talking about?”
“Everyone is not dead.”
“Obviously the kid had to be alive to record the message. That doesn’t mean she’s alive now,” I said. Damned literal AIs.
“But someone is alive aboard the Queen now, Captain.”
“Show me,” I said. The colonizer had been lost with no contact for the last sixty-seven days. I’d only been looking for her for forty. Spending a few weeks in a pilot’s chair was pretty natural for someone like me, with quadrants to search and places to be. It was something different trapped aboard a failing ship among hundreds of decomposing bodies, not knowing if the next breath would be your last.
“The Queen’s AI is not answering my hails, but I have accessed rudimentary data. One of her redundant cores is active.” Recovery took over the viewer, which re-centered on the Queen. Sensor data graphed across the image of the stilled ship, reporting her energy stats and the soundness of her hull. Despite the rip in her shell, the Queen had functioning oxygen, heat, and even gravity. Recovery scrolled the crew manifest:
Captain Daniele Marachisio: deceased
Operations Manager Wilhelmina Lymari: deceased
TerraCo Engineer Giacomo Quinquilleros: deceased
Crew Coordinator Yergi Serchenko: deceased
“Okay, you can skip to the interesting part any time now, Recovery.”
The names floated up, all listed by their command tree aboard the big TerraCo colonizer. I told her to speed up the scroll until they were little more than a blur. Then she stopped.
“Juvenile Elizabet Lovara, cargo deck A, section C,” she read aloud.
“The transmission—is that voice hers? Adolescent female?”
“It could be, Captain. At that age, voice print identification is not one hundred percent viable.”
“Give me your best guess then.”
“Yes, Captain. The match is likely.”
Sixty-seven days with no contact. Sweet baby Hezu. “When was the transmission sent?”
“Thirty-two days ago.”
I cracked my neck to suppress the feeling of cold fingers along my spine. Still alive a month after sending that terrified message—weeks of living with rotting corpses on a partially functional ship, breathing air fouled by the dead, saving up whatever hope remained to get through the next few minutes, hours, days—a child alone.
“I have prepped for boarding, Captain.”
“Hellfire and damnation.” I really, really did not want to go aboard the Queen. I wasn’t equipped for this situation, but Recovery was right to prep. Aid-and-assist was in my contract; I was bound by law to confirm any survivors and help them. I watched the Queen revolve across the view-screen and wondered if saving Ms. Elizabet Lovara from her situation was possible. Even if I brought her back to TerraCo’s team of skilled psychs and medtechs she’d have to live with those sixty-seven days forever. Maybe she’d never escape the Queen no matter where her physical body was. But Recovery played the ghostly, lost little voice again, and I climbed out of my pilot’s seat and put on my EVA suit.
EVAs always make me sweat like hell, and I itched as I waited in Recovery’s claustrophobic airlock. The Queen didn’t make it easy on me either—the explosion that had ripped a smile in the ship’s plating had warped her pressure hull so most of her airlocks were fekked. Recovery couldn’t get a seal on the first three, and I felt as much as heard the pressure from the next two seals lock tight, but neither would open. By the time we finally pressurized into our sixth, my hands were slipping around in my gloves and my faceplate was fogged. The CO2 scrubbers did what they could to regulate moisture, but couldn’t keep up. At last, the gray metal of the Queen’s outer lock slid away, and I looked through the tiny window down the throat of a long, dark hallway. There were no blue-lipped dead staring sightlessly back.
“Calm down, Captain.” Recovery said. “Your heart rate is accelerating beyond the recommended coherence zone.”
“Thanks. I’ll get right on that.” I took a few deep, shaky breaths and checked my vitals again. “Just open the door.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
The door whooshed open, and the low-pressure inside the Queen sucked the air from the Recovery’s lock and pulled me forward a few steps, off-balance in my clunky EVA boots. The humidity change filled the small space with swirling fog.
“Oh, that’s not eerie at all.”
“What do you mean, Captain?”
“Never mind.”
“Check in periodically, if you are able. Communications disruption is likely.”
“Great,” I said. I hadn’t walked anywhere in an EVA in years. Hell, I’d barely bothered changing out of my pajamas for the last month, much less kept up with security drills like I should.
Recovery kept the lock open behind me, lights as bright as she could make them, and I took a few echoing steps into the Queen’s labyrinthine bowels. “Can you do anything with the AI? Turn on the emergency lighting?”
“I’m trying, Captain. Something is wrong with my counterpart. She has been deactivated. My probes are encountering holes—vital components have been destroyed or removed. I can access some data from abandoned sub-cores, but I do not have system control.”
“Destroyed? Is that even possible?” AIs, by rule, had multiple failsafes—the redundant systems had redundant systems and their cores were spread throughout every operational routine. A big colonizer like this would need one hell of an AI, and if she were gone—the damage must have been worse than it looked.
Then I realized the kid didn’t even have an AI to keep her company. Hezu, she was going to be in bad shape. I adjusted the strap on my toolkit and wondered what I would do if she were genuinely space mad. It happened sometimes; too much time alone and a survivor forgot how to be human, how to talk, or even that they had once been a person. The crew being rescued sometimes attacked salvagers, and I suddenly wished I hadn’t left my gun under the pilot’s seat on Recovery’s bridge. Stupid, but going back for it would mean going through decontamination and taking off my EVA. Maybe this would be easy; maybe I’d just get the kid and come back and we’d be on our way. And maybe I should buy an asteroid diamond mine from a guy who won’t show me his face in the next port.
“Is Lovara still in Cargo A?”
“Yes.”
“Any idea what she’s doing?”
“I’m sorry, Kira. I cannot access system control. There are no camera feeds.”
“Fine.” I took a deep breath and started walking, my boots echoing down the long hall and my shoulder lights bouncing ahead of me like distant stars that never
got any closer.
It’d been a long time since I’d walked a ship this big, corridors branching every which way. I called up the schematics on my viewpad and traced the layout of corridors between me and the big cargo holds in the Queen’s belly. The inside of my gloves were so slick I almost dropped the viewer. I double-checked the Queen’s atmospheric readings—tolerable oxygen and temp—so, when I stopped to rest at a junction, I opened my faceplate.
“Captain, I recommend keeping your atmospheric seals intact. My analysis estimates some compartments are depressurized.”
“Thanks, Recovery,” I said, and ignored her advice. “You’ll warn me when I get to those.” The air was cold on my moist face and neck, and the Queen smelled like burnt matches and old skin. I unsealed my gloves. It was a relief to be able to feel things with my fingers, even if I left wet prints on the view-pad. The light of the Recovery grew fainter behind me and my breathing echoed in the corridor—it curved ahead out of sight. I turned around for a last look at home and comfort and was reminded how limited my range of motion is in an EVA suit. Recovery waited, but I walked down the corridor anyway.
The shoulder lights of my pack showed black licks of carbon on the ceiling, walls, and closed doorways as I passed. There had been a fire aboard. Standard procedure would be to close bulkheads and vent the air in the affected compartments—I guessed that was why the Queen had damned near sucked me out of the Recovery when I opened the lock—the result of cold air and low pressure in the compartments that were still sealed.
The first double-thick bulkhead door was closed. Colonizers had several atmospheric pressure bulkheads, because they were made to enter a planet’s envelope and terraform up close and personal. Scorch-marks rimmed the door, and the control panel had been pried off, so I put my EVA gloves back on to poke around in the jumbled tangle of hanging wires. It still had juice, but someone had bypassed the AI so power fed directly to the opening mechanism. A clumsy job—I suspected the kid, even though the knowhow should have been beyond an adolescent, even a career spacer like a colonial.