Keloids erupting from her radiated skin were old, and Anna was covered in small mutations and cancers on her body which remained black despite her thawing. Cancers were a dead thing anyway. Maybe they’d died forever. She didn’t know. The result of radiation and living day to day among those freezing homeless, the tramps and the beggars and the insane, all trying to survive on the scraps the rich threw down. Food soaked in the constant poisonous rainfall which never seemed to cease. They had bathed in it.
I am the one below the Angels. The fallen.
The refrain written on the City walls. Crumbling graffiti to remind them who they were, but there had always been something hopeful, something proud about that slogan.
Maybe it was only ever an epitaph.
She smacked her tongue against the roof of her mouth to get her saliva flowing, and something irritating shifted. She remembered, then, that she wasn’t alone. She was rich as she’d been before she boarded Hush. She had something to hold. Anna spat her tooth into her right palm, managed to clench her fist.
She tried out her voice.
‘Ra...’ she said.
Her voice was hoarse, and pained her, but it worked.
The ache in her joints, muscles, bones, chest, guts, back, eyes, head, ears faded.
She didn’t need the toilet, and her body hadn’t, yet, decided if it was hungry or not. The nutrients and drugs and myriad things inside her body to keep her alive while sleeping dead perhaps still worked to give her some manner of energy. Or perhaps it was the last thing she’d eaten, however many decades or centuries ago, waking in her gut.
She listened again, unsure of her senses, wanting to be sure all was truly quiet.
Only then did she move away from her own sarcophagus to explore. As she did, walking slow and tentative on her aching legs, she reached out to those who hadn’t made it.
‘Corpsicle,’ whispered Anna, and even so her voice was a bold echo in the hold. She was far from alone, though.
There are so many.
Ice-bound bodies, some still blackened, some stinking like rot, some just...kind of half defrosted. Those who hadn’t made it were just as ugly as her, she thought, and she was alive...or, at least, close enough.
Walking past yet another corpse, and she tapped her dislodged tooth against the thick glass of a dripping coffin. It sounded like a hailstone striking against a store window long ago, in another life, in another reality.
‘Corpsicle,’ she said, and again, and again.
Anna liked the word at first, and now not so much. Of all the hundreds of sleepers in K-5, of all who had been woken, for all the screams she’d heard, and the noise, and the hustle as drone and Aug and bodies arisen moved around for the first time since their entombment...so few had lived.
The bodies of the dead had simply been left where they lay. In their tombs, or beside, or half-in, half-out. She stepped over countless bodies. Those who’d died without completely thawing were the hardest to look on. Mummified and frozen, their flesh and faces were tortured and alien to her. Failed hatchlings, and an entire field-worth of them.
Anna wasn’t sure she should have been wandering alone, but there it was. Perhaps it was a mistake. Perhaps it was meant to be. Either way, she didn’t intend to go looking for anyone. Sometimes, company just finds you whether you want it or not.
*
An Aug clattered against the metal flooring as it roamed the dark cold halls of Hush unseen somewhere in the darkness.
Anna ducked down. She could hide. She could be quite. The thing in there with her was denied stealth. Metal against metal, loud and echoing. Like footsteps made by a creature on metal stilts. Sledgehammers on a van roof. It was a heavy, unpleasant, and entirely inhuman sound.
The Aug didn’t say anything, and it wasn’t rushing, or searching. It seemed aimless as her, an explorer in an ancient, forgotten cave searching for drawings on the walls of mammoths and deer.
The metal legged thing moved on, further. Anna couldn’t see the entrance of K-1. The door befitting such a grand hall of the Lord of Cold Deaths had been ten metres high. She remembered it well enough. Her, led shuffling in cuffs away from a life she didn’t want to one she might. Back then, it hadn’t mattered. Space wasn’t any better than Earth, but when you knew the secret of life, it didn’t matter where you were.
It could always turn to shit.
Even if you lived in some magnificent high-rise, those monoliths of the city light up bright with their neon fans, or down in the dirt with the hobos dead on grates full of poison and sometimes warmth, truth was universal; shit was only ever a minute away.
The Aug left K-1, loud footfalls fading to nothing. No sign of the door, but she marked the Aug’s passage and followed it to where the exit must be. Sight in the chill lights of the sarcophagus’ systems was limited. Those light still blinked in red, green, blue, but they were small, functional things for readouts and graphs and flickering charts and measurements. Mostly, it was that white moon-glow by which she saw, and the cold, low mist full of blackened corpses she moved through.
Anna found the giant door, and an empty, wide hall beyond. Everywhere quiet, deserted. The barren halls were far taller than men or women, as though vehicles might pass, or perhaps Goliath suits worn by warriors might one day stomp through the halls to a distant planet to make war once more.
No drones, though. No Augs, no mechs, no people.
Anna moved on to the next hold, and to the next. She began to feel hungry. She was already cold, and movement wasn’t warming her. Waking wasn’t pleasant, and there hadn’t been anyone around to offer sustenance. Suited her then. Now, she was uncomfortable and weak, she shivered. But she wasn’t sure she should seek out others. If they found her, would she be terminated, or put to sleep?
No. I’d rather starve.
*
She remembered being in her sarcophagus, holding her tooth in her mouth, feeling the torpor and slowness draining even dreams from her, and she hadn’t liked it at all. It wasn’t a magical tooth, or a weapon, or a key to another dimension where she wasn’t meat in a huge can.
It was just a tooth.
Life turns to shit, her father told her, before he died and before Anna was on the streets, living however she could. Life will always turn to shit, he said. The only way to remember who you are, and what you are? Always have something to hold onto, girl. Always.
He kissed her that night, smiling and tucking her into bed. Three weeks later he died in the Aug War, the last year of the war, and she’d been only nine years old. His smile, his remains, never came home.
For twenty years, the streets of Low Angel had been her only home.
She couldn’t remember her father’s face, but she never forgot to always have something to hold onto. If you let go of that last thing, she figured, that was when you fell.
*
6.
Hush Speaks
Chancel Sanctuary
Hush
‘Sergeant Bale,’ said Hush. ‘Pleasant sleep?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Ulrich. ‘I was asleep.’
He rubbed at the hole where an eye used to be. He had no patch aboard the ship. He might not be a prisoner, not any longer, but close enough and with personal possessions restricted to one item, he figured a knife’d be more useful than something to keep the air out of his skull.
Besides, the absence was more important than possession. The hole in his face was the contrast, the opposite of sight – memory, imagination, perhaps – of what he’d lost, who he was, and why he was here. All his important memories were tucked down in that wound, behind hard tissue, safe enough so he’d never lose them.
‘In seven standard Earth hours I will breach the heliosphere of an undesignated solar system and seventeen hours thereafter reach high orbit around the first habitable planet since departure,’ said Hush. Her voice was full, deep, and resonant.
‘Why me? You woke me, and others to...what? Colonise?’
No.
Ulrich was fairly sure how early colonisation would work. Hush would have been in high orbit already if this thing were that thing. A forward base would have already been established. Why wake them on a ship with no provisions for humans? Plenty of readouts and very crisp visual data in the Chancel Sanctuary, but chairs, so no thought to human’s need to rest legs still aching from being frozen. There were certainly no sleeping quarters, and only the most minimal resources for human needs. No, then. This thing wasn’t that thing.
‘Objectives,’ said Hush, replying, even if her reply was in a manner Ulrich found needlessly obtuse. ‘To serve as forerunner for ongoing deep space exploration. To calculate, expand, and develop faster viable drive technologies for space exploration. Colonisation or the establishment of forward outposts should such prove feasible...these last are tertiary considerations at best.’
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘But what about breakfast? No bacon?’
Ulrich was good at being still, but his joints ached so he paced in the absence of a chair or anywhere comfortable, because moving was easier on his joints than standing.
‘I woke only those with suitable skills,’ Hush responded, ignoring Ulrich’s reply.
‘Hush...I might have half my sight, but I’m not blind. Suitable for what? What is it you want?’
‘Company dictates all possible sites for permanent manned outposts be investigated. This I can do without waking cargo prematurely. Yes. However...Company also requires investigation of any and all anomalous occurrences, structures and entities. This supersedes all other demands upon my person.’
Ulrich paused in his pacing. Hush gave him nothing to raise an eyebrow at. He looked around the Chancel Sanctuary instead. Her words registered just fine. He just didn’t know what to say to it, so he changed the subject. If she was going round the houses on this, then so was he. He’d chase her round and see who got bored first.
‘Not even a seat, Hush?’
There were zero concessions for organic life and life’s needs...but there were screens and displays. So she might be just a voice in a room full of maps of star systems, readouts of shipboard functions and status reports, but surely she remained an extension of the Company, no matter how far she travelled.
Which meant what?
‘I see no reasoning behind your statement,’ said Hush.
Was that an extension of the reasoning of people who had designed her? Possibly dead now. Scientists, engineers...certainly wasn’t decorators. Either way, they were all very far behind, past and distance, and mattered no more than the thousand questions popping like bright fireworks and growing in number with each moment their conversation progressed.
Hush could just as easily have constructed these basic concessions to humanity purely in anticipation of this briefing...but she hadn’t.
Because I’m nothing.
Ulrich nodded, reminded, sure of this one truth. He, nor anyone or anything else, mattered to the ship, or the Company that had built her.
‘Nevermind,’ he said. ‘An anomaly. Cool. Anomaly, planet, great.’
What mattered was whether he wanted to live or die, and that was out of his hands. His life belonged to Hush.
Hush was all. She was their vessel and their Captain.
Remember that.
‘Yes...a significant anomaly, Ulrich Bale.’
‘Great,’ he said, shuffling, thinking, then walking in circles again. ‘But why me? You aren’t short of other resources.’
‘I have deemed this worth waking cargo. Aug and drone support will accompany your ship but you and other resources will increase insight and chance of success.’
Ulrich let that slide – why fight it? They were all resources, weren’t they?
‘Not all cargo?’
‘An excursion,’ said Hush. ‘I woke no more than I regard as requisite.’
He didn’t imagine for a moment Hush would tell him or anyone else more than necessary, but he understood her meaning. He was going down to the planet, and she wasn’t going to tell him more than that, and he was damn sure there wouldn’t be bacon.
Hush didn’t need his input, or his counsel. Her mind might as well be the size of the entire ship. Her intellect dwarfed any insight he might offer.
‘I’m pretty old,’ he said, head cocked, pausing his circuit around the Chancel.
‘Your body remains more than adequate for physical stresses.’
Still she skirts the issue.
Ulrich took a breath again, doing so to take time out, to slow his mind. He might not be Hush, or any kind of savant, but he was wise enough to save his breath rather than fighting a battle with no measure of victory. Ultimately, he belonged to her.
‘There’s an anomaly and I’m going to the surface, right? Fine. You don’t want to tell me what the big deal is, that’s on you. But you’re sending a team down one day from waking? One day? I’m suppose to prepare for a different world in one day? Like we can’t take a week? A month? Some kind of preparations? I just woke up. Everyone just woke up...from cryogen. We’re not exactly spritely right now. Hush...’
Ulrich wasn’t a savant, but that Hush had some kind of a timescale in mind, or that there was some kind of urgency to this mission...? It wasn’t a great leap of logic, was it?
‘I understand your reticence, Sergeant. It is, however, not your physical attributes which the excursion requires, but your reasoning. You are man with very particular skills; your willingness to do that which is necessary.’
‘But one day? It’s insane.’
‘What preparations would one make for an excursion to an alien, unknown planet? No one has such experience on this ship. Your use is not in your experience but the specific psychological profile presented. Scans, topography, weather conditions, location and routes, suitable landing sites...these things are within my capabilities. These things are within even my Century Class vessels’ abilities. I need alternate eyes than mine on the ground, and there, human assessment will prove beneficial. And, I am sorry to say your inference is incorrect. You have less than one day. You will depart on a Sabot Class ship before my arrival in high orbit around the planet.’
They – everything thing on the ship – were tools of Hush, as she was a tool of the Company. She reminded Ulrich of that fact without stating it bluntly, or needing too. But even a servant could think. Even the meanest mech, equipped with the most basic of AI could think.
Beneficial. Human assessment.
Ulrich ran through Hush’s words again, and hit upon something else.
No one has such experience...on this ship?
It was hard to get a read on a voice with no face, no body language. All he had was words and tone, and synthesised, at that. Hush, it seemed, did not understand a human’s need to have something to interface with, or she simply did not care enough for human sensibilities to create a sending to greet him.
‘Part of an excursion force?’ he asked, skirting every issue he wished to discuss. Careful. Watchful. As always. The thing which had kept him alive. The trait, perhaps, which meant he would also be forever alone.
‘Team might be more appropriate terminology. Force is an aspect of your excursion more than adequately covered. You do not travel as a soldier, but to assess and report. And the team will be yours to lead.’
With no avatar, nor a human countenance but for a voice which filled the room, the conversation was disconcerting. Ulrich still ached from his long sleep, and the lights within the Chancel Sanctuary were startling, far too bright, after the dim, soft glow of the Crypt.
On this ship, he thought, but what he said was, ‘I read quicker than I hear, Hush. Bring it up. Please.’
Atmospheric assessment: Tolerable. Oxygen level sub-Earth standard at 19%. Hypoxia unlikely at estimated landing elevation.
Temperature: Preliminary telemetric scans for equatorial regions place temperatures between -40℃ and -70℃ - indicative of acceptable margin for intermediate term exposure with protective apparel, terrain-suitable vehicula
r land transport. Outside equatorial regions and during dark phase vehicular or modular habitats requisite.
Rotation: 392 standard Earth days.
Axial spin: 23 standard Earth hours.
Indigenous life: Unknown.
Climate: Stable but hostile. Survival equipment requisite.
Supposition: Acceptable and viable conditions for colonisation and long-term habitation with artificial warming and current terra-forming technology within seven hundred to thirteen hundred years. Intermediate manned expedition post preferential.
‘Great,’ said Ulrich, looking away from the readout and rubbing his eye, still sensitive to light, it seemed. Maybe it was that giving Ulrich a headache, maybe it was trying to talk to a voice in the air which was giving him nothing. Either way, he belonged to Hush, but he didn’t have to like it, and he didn’t have to come to Hush tail between his legs, either.
‘Great. It’s bullshit, though, isn’t it? Hush, and excuse me for saying this, but fuck you and your data. You’re in some kind of rush and why now?’
Hush didn’t rile, she didn’t care if Ulrich spoke harshly or cursed or threw things around the Chancel in a temper, and Ulrich didn’t really have a temper anyway, or the energy for all that.
No harm in poking, though, he thought.
Maybe it worked. Maybe Hush just bored of him.
‘A surface colony predates my arrival and as I am the first of my kind this is anomalous. No ship has come before me.’
And, he thought, there it is. A chink that let a little light through Hush’s bland presentation.
‘That’s fucked up, right?’ he said.
‘Indeed,’ she replied. ‘And in this instance my primary objective and the anomaly coincide...drive technology, salvage, but possibly more. There is a very significant energy signature emanating from the planet. Large enough that I detected it from beyond the borders of the system. Impressive, and beyond my understanding. I am tasked with finding new means of propulsion and this source could power an exponential increase in speed beyond any measure I have so far attained. The urgency, Ulrich Bale? Because the energy signature is large enough that it should it break containment it could render the first habitable planet we have reached uninhabitable for thousands of years, destroy the anomaly, and the power source itself. Should this happen my first notable opportunity to satisfy my objectives would die along with the planet.’
HUSH Page 3