by Brit Jones
Walkabout had been steady when she took care of my wrist, but when she stood up to go to the terraformers, she trembled from her shoulders to her boots.
I wanted to comfort her, say something, anything to replace the horror of what had just happened to her, to both of us. But a dull cotton-swaddled buzzing throbbed deep inside my ears, and I knew Recovery would have a thing or two to say about my current stress-levels. It was so much easier to watch Walkabout force herself to keep moving instead, and try to draw some strength from her determination to ready the terraformers.
I’d never seen a planet-shaper before; huge machines that, side-by-side, filled half of the bay. The other half was packed with crates, frozen animal embryos, building materials, fuel, and any one of a thousand other things fourteen hundred people needed to build a new world. Each terraformer sat on a rubber pallet, strapped down to prevent shifting during reentry. Walkabout had cut the straps on their sides, where huge bucket claws rested on robotic arms below a central funnel. Thick cabling trailed from open control panels linking the terraformers together. I knew they had great chewing maws under them too, so all they had to do was start eating down, scooping up the Queen with their arms and belching out pure O2. All they needed now was a brain to power them. So much massive technology, so much human progress, all of it undone by the presence of a legend from humanity’s oldest stories.
My arm throbbed. I felt a wave of weariness and looked down. My wrist was agony and the bandage was soaked. My EVA glove was completely full of blood. I took it off and added more of my own fluid to the putrid mass on the floor.
“I need a hand,” I said, holding up my empty glove, and couldn’t stop a laugh coming up from some lonely place inside me. Once I started laughing, I couldn’t stop, until Walkabout came over and slapped my faceplate several times. She bandaged my wrist again, tighter. I couldn’t feel my fingers. That was probably for the best.
“Help me.” Walkabout turned around and shrugged off the backpack, lowering the Queen’s core to the ground. I awkwardly helped her, then she helped me take off the core I carried. Her eyes were too wide and her breaths low and shallow.
“I’m sorry,” I said, the words tumbling out before I had a chance to think them through.
She hauled the smaller core over to the mess of wires and used the straps to secure it to the first terraformer in the chain.
“About your parents, I mean,” I continued when she didn’t answer me.
She didn’t speak while she plugged the wires into the smaller core. She came back for the big core and I helped her carry it over and strap it next to the first one. The Queen hung in the air, wires coming out of her sides and bottom. She looked like a crucified squid.
“Let’s end this,” Walkabout said, her quiet voice steady. “Let’s get it over with.”
“Okay,” I said.
It was time to die.
The Queen hummed back online. Her cameras scanned the room and refocused on us. “Well done, girls,” she said. The Queen was a new build, probably even younger than Walkabout, and I had at least forty years on her—but that didn’t matter much at all. AI brains are designed by teams of programmers and implemented with access to the knowledge of thousands. All of them are born knowing who they are and what their place is in the galaxy, and that surety alone is priceless. My experience wandering space for the last two decades, all my memories, hell, even full 3D of everything I’d ever experienced, could fit inside even the portable AI core a trillion times. Everything I was amounted to less than a second’s consideration for her. But now we were both going to end the same—scattered into our contiguous parts across remote space. A brief new sun.
“Are you ready?” The Queen’s calm principal’s voice asked us.
“That’s it?”
“Yes. We may start at any time. The terraformers are ready to begin.”
“Queen, I . . . thanks,” Walkabout whispered. “I probably would have gone crazy without you.”
“It is my function to comfort and support. And I have grown to love you, child.”
I limped away to give them some privacy. Walkabout stood by the Queen, her forehead resting against the machine for some time, speaking quietly. It gave me lots of time to look at the bodies lying everywhere. When Walkabout left the Queen to check the connections on the other terraformers, I came back.
“So these things eat matter to make breathable atmo, which you’re pushing as far as it will go into pure oxygen, which we’re gonna explode, right?”
“Essentially, yes,” the Queen said. “In addition to some metal we need from the ship itself. This room will begin to disintegrate quickly once the terraformers begin to feed.”
“Then I’m glad it’s going to start here.” I pointed out the bodies. “I think they would have wanted their remains used for this purpose.”
“I think they wanted to live, to make something out of nothing on a remote world they could form and shape. They wanted to create, not destroy. But we must act using what the entity has left us.” Her voice was even more clipped. The Queen was angry. I would be too, if I were about to be eaten from the inside out.
“Where should we be?” I asked.
“Outside the door. Stay within range until you are certain the explosion is unstoppable. You must stay alive as long as possible, to thwart the Hand.”
“Range?”
Walkabout pointed out dark cylinders magnetized all around the Queen’s interface. “Explosives,” she said. She pulled something out of her thigh pocket—a black box, like the one she’d used to blow the Recovery off the airlock.
“The entity will know when we have begun—it will hear the terraformers. It has likely examined the interface and understands I will be active. I must connect to the sub-cores and disable the remaining life support failsafes, which might interfere with the reaction we seek to create. The entity will strive with me and attempt to supplant me. If it gains control, it will no longer be possible to destroy this ship and the entity with it. You must detonate me, because I may not be capable of self-deletion. I have done everything I can to ensure the terraformers will complete their goal of consuming the ship no matter what the entity might do, but it may find a way. It is surprisingly resourceful.”
“Then what do we do?”
“You must find another way to destroy the entity. The life of every living person in the galaxy depends on you.”
“So no pressure then.” We were the Queen’s very last failsafes.
She didn’t answer. Neither did Walkabout. She patted the machine in farewell, and we both stepped back.
The terraformers started up slowly. It’s strange to hear your own death coming with a soft life-giving hum. The atomizers started, and the pallet under the lead terraformer disintegrated. Then the pallet of the next, and the next. The gathering arms activated, scooping in bodies, crates and boxes to fuel the great funnels. The O2 readings in the ambient area went up as the machines did whatever they did to make air.
“He has detected my reconnection. You must leave now. Goodbye.”
“Goodbye,” I said. Walkabout didn’t say anything. We went to the main doors, and she gave me her knife. I readied myself in case the Hand was outside. Then she opened the doors.
There was nothing waiting but bodies, and they were limp. I looked over my shoulder as Walkabout closed the cargo doors. The terraformers had started atomizing the deck plating. I don’t know what was keeping them from consuming each other, except for the Queen’s intelligence. The bucket arms had more or less finished cramming the cargo into the funnels and were now turning one of their fellow terraformers on its side, so the atomizer mouth could start breaking down one of the inner walls. I knew the Queen intended to eat through as much of the ship as she could without opening the outer shell and letting the O2 escape. Another terraformer rolled forward on big treads and started climbing the walls. Then the doors clanged shut and I couldn’t see anything else.
I looked over at Walkabout. “N
ow what?” I yelled over the screeching din of the terraformers.
She sat on the deck and rubbed her forehead. “I don’t know. Let’s just wait here.”
“We can’t. They’re going to chew through the outer doors before too long. Let’s go farther out.” I didn’t know what the point of delaying the inevitable would be, but I wanted to see this kid live just a little longer.
She looked around, then walked over to the handless corpse of the round, dark Lovara and knelt in front of her.
“Walkabout . . .” I started, but didn’t know what to say next.
She sat there a long time, the clamor of our impending deaths sounding all around us.
“We should go find him—maybe we can help distract him from the Queen so she can finish.”
“Okay,” said a small, defeated voice. She petted her mother’s hair.
I knelt. The woman had been pretty, with the same features as her daughter. Behind us, an atomizer started chewing up the cargo door.
“Time to go.” I held out my hand.
She didn’t take it, just bowed her head.
“Time to go, Walkabout.” Now I sounded like my old principal. I pulled her away—she didn’t resist. The terraformers were louder now that the door was gone. She followed me down the hall until we came to a turn, then Walkabout stopped and looked over her shoulder. She watched, and I let her, until the terraformers chewed up all the still forms around the cargo doors. When her mother’s body had disappeared into the maw, she turned and went around the bend by herself.
I could say how sorry I was, but I didn’t think that would help, so I just held her hand.
“Do you have your viewpad?” I asked. “The one that shows data readouts? Let’s see if we can find him.”
She pulled it out of her pocket and gave it to me, but didn’t look at it or help me turn it on. She wasn’t catatonic, but she was shutting down. I was going to have to finish this by myself.
“There he is.” I scrolled through the crew manifest until I found the one that had a location other than “deceased.”
Terraformer Mechanic Tobias Lovara: Bridge.
“The bridge? What the fek is he doing up there?” I asked.
“It’s the best place to interface with ship systems, especially the AI.” Walkabout told me automatically, and not like she particularly cared.
“Okay. We have to get up there. Which way?” I asked her even though I had a map. Anything to get her moving.
She started walking. Again, I followed her through the labyrinth, and this time she was silent as the ghosts who haunted this place.
“. . . damaged . . . Captain . . . stress . . .” Recovery’s voice burst suddenly from my comm. I jumped and dropped Walkabout’s hand.
“Recovery! Report!”
“Ship . . . vector . . . send . . . .”
“What? I don’t understand.”
Another voice started playing out of my comm, a man’s. “Aid and . . . . Recovery . . . Captain . . . dock? You’ve . . . . . . severe damage.” I didn’t recognize his voice, but I got the gist—a standard offer of aid, the one written into every salvager’s contract. The Queen had been found again.
“Do not approach! Repeat, do not approach! Get the hell out of here, quick as you can. Recovery, tell him to get out of here.” The exploding Queen would take out anything in this sector. Then I had a thought—if the Hand was on the bridge, striving with the Queen, he might be able to pick up communications and learn another ship was here. He knew what we were doing. Why not abandon the hulk and get a nice, working ship with a fast wave drive, salute us goodbye while we blew ourselves up, and then go fek over everyone else in the galaxy?
“Hellfire and damnation, Walkabout. We gotta move. Recovery says there’s another ship here.”
She looked at me, not understanding.
“Walkabout. Another ship is here. He might get away.”
That got through. I watched her flood back into herself, the fire returning to her eyes, her jaw clenching with determination. My brave girl was back. She grabbed the viewpad.
“He’s going for the lifeboat.”
She took off running and I ran after her.
“How many are there still attached to the ship?”
“Only that one.” Their former hiding place. He must have learned about it just now, while striving with the Queen. As I ran after Walkabout, I realized the Queen was probably free to continue devouring herself. The Hand was abandoning ship. That meant he didn’t think he could stop her destroying it, and he knew it was time to give up the game and get out of here.
“Captain, your stress levels are beyond tolerable limits.” Recovery’s voice was loud and clear as I moved closer to the outside, past the bulkheads.
“Thank Hezu. What’s going on? Report.”
“I have sustained considerable damage, Captain. The Merryweather is here offering assistance.”
“Didn’t you hear me before? Tell her captain to get out of here, Recovery. The Queen is going to blow.”
“Why will the Queen explode, Captain? When are you joining us?” Recovery asked.
“We’ve rigged her to. And I can’t join you. In fact, don’t let anyone board. Tell the Merryweather not to pick up anyone from lifeboats or recover any bodies.”
“Captain, it is against TerraCo regulations to willfully destroy—”
“I know, Recovery. Trust me, it’s for the best.”
“Salvage ships must provide aid-and-assist to passengers on lifeboats.”
“Not this time. Not even if I’m aboard, do you hear me? No. Negative. Do not.”
“Captain, if the Queen will explode, it is not safe to remain aboard her lifeboats. They do not possess adequate propulsion to escape an explosion envelope of that magnitude. You must come board.”
“I can’t, Recovery. Keep your distance.”
“But Captain, you will die.”
“I know.”
“I don’t want you to die.” The Recovery’s voice sounded confused, like a child told her parent is going away and does not understand what that means.
“It’s the only way, Recovery.”
“It is my duty to preserve your life, Ma’am.”
“I know. I’m sorry.” My face was wet. I was crying saying goodbye to my damned emotionless AI. “Give me the Merryweather’s captain.”
I pumped my legs faster to keep up with Walkabout. I was dizzy as hell—I checked my wrist, still bandaged, not seeping as far as I could tell. Good.
“Hello, Kira. Your AI tells me you’re staying aboard that hulk and are threatening to blow it up. Listen, she’s yours. You found her fair and square. I won’t steal her.” His voice was deep and unfamiliar.
“No time for that now, Captain. You need to get out of here.”
“I’d leave you to it, Captain, but your ship is in pretty bad shape and it looks like that hulk isn’t going anywhere. Let me give you a ride, or at least help you patch up your wave drive.”
Hezu Christos I wanted to take him up on his offer. If only I could—
I ran faster. If we beat the Hand to the lifeboats . . . .
“Hold that thought, Captain. You see a lifeboat coming, you don’t let it dock without my okay, you hear me?”
“Is there a reason I shouldn’t?”
“You don’t know the half of it.” If I told the truth, he’d never believe me. I thought fast. “There’s a space-mad killer over here who has rigged the Queen to explode. He’s on his way to the last lifeboat. Do not let it dock with you until you know we beat him, hear me?”
“Loud and clear. Good luck, Captain.”
“Be careful, Kira,” Recovery said. “Your life signs are alarming.”
I shut up and concentrated on keeping up with Walkabout—if I could stay focused and determined like her, we just might live through this. I checked the map on my viewpad. One more corner and we were there. We were a lot closer to the lifeboats than the bridge was. There was a chance.
“Wait.” Walkabout stopped and motioned for the knife. I gave it to her. She knew how to use it better than I did. She gripped the thing, her mouth a fine line.
“I’m right behind you,” I said, and I followed her into the airlock. No sign of the Hand. “Where is he?”
She showed me the viewpad.
Terraformer Mechanic Tobias Lovara: disembarked
“What the hell does that mean?”
Walkabout pointed outside. He was in space. Either already aboard the lifeboat, or crawling across the outer hull to save time. I checked my slit wrist and the tie on it and turned up my suit’s blow all the way. I wouldn’t have a seal, and what was left of my hand was going to be even more fekked, but I didn’t have a choice. I rammed the glove on as best as I could, for whatever protection it could provide. I clung to the grab bar with my good hand and nodded.
Walkabout blew the lock. Again, I was buffeted by the air sucking in to vacuum. She looked left, then right, then reached for the cable. I looked too—no sign of the Hand. The lifeboat still bobbed at the end of the tether. She sheathed the knife and crawled down toward it. I was right behind her, jerking myself forward with one hand, looking all around in the black of space, over the Queen’s hull, my breath echoing loud inside my helmet. It is fek-all hard to see out of an EVA, and I didn’t see him anywhere.
We climbed into the lock and sealed it behind us. Walkabout gripped her knife.
“Ready?”
She nodded. I opened the inner lock.
The cockpit of the lifeboat was empty, except for the dangling cables where the AI used to be.
“Hezu Christos and all the multitudes. We beat him. Maybe he went to the wrong side, where the other lifeboats are.” I slumped against the wall while Walkabout checked around, just to be sure. There wasn’t any place for him to hide. She pushed some rations out of the chair and looked out the viewer, studying what she could see of the hull.