Clarkesworld: Year Seven

by Neil Clarke

  Shepard sat at the bank of monitors and began to work out the details of the return trip. After a little while, a hazy image struggled to clarify on one the screens.

  “What are you doing?” it asked.

  “Hello, Caine. It’s good to see you.”

  “Is that my physics you’re doing?”

  “Someone’s got to.”

  The image rolled fretfully. When it steadied, Caine’s tone had turned scornful. “—cking longtooth,” it said, completing an insult Shepard hadn’t heard the start of. “What do you know about anything?”

  “I’m just doing my job, Caine.”

  “No. You’re doing my job.”

  “It’s easier than I thought,” Shepard said, and was immediately sorry.

  Caine’s livid response was lost in a burst of static. When the jockey perceived he wasn’t being understood, the intercom crackled, and his voice blared through the tug. “You’re a prick,” it said. “You were always a prick.”

  “I’m sorry, Caine. That was unfair of me.”

  “Unfair? No one says unfair.”

  “Okay, Caine.”

  “Taking us home will kill me.”

  “You’re already dead, Caine.”

  “I’m not fucking dead!” the jockey shrieked.

  “Try to relax,” Shepard advised. “We’re going home, and I know that upsets you. I understand that. But I can’t—”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “I can’t do anything about that now.”

  “You have no idea what this is like,” Caine said.

  “You’re right,” Shepard admitted readily.

  A long silence followed, during which they stared at one another through the monitor. It seemed there was nothing more to say. Then Caine gave a curt nod, as though a decision had been made.

  “Okay,” the jockey said. “If that’s the way you want it.”

  “That’s just the way it is, Caine.”

  “You’re right,” the jockey replied. “You’re always right.”

  Then his screens went dark, and Shepard was left eye to eye with a dim image of himself in the monitor. They had been right, he saw. He did look old. After a moment, he attended to the physics and tried not to dwell on the underhand tactics of slighted ghosts.

  Caine wasn’t gone long. The screens came alive while Shepard was still working, and he only glanced up before continuing. The jockey’s sullen image slid from one screen to the next, looking for the best vantage point from which to judge.

  “You’re doing it wrong,” Caine said.

  Shepard switched off that monitor, only to have Caine leak into another. “Let me help.”

  But Shepard knew better. Covering his work with an arm, he feigned deep concentration and pretended not to have heard. When he looked up at long last, Caine was gone, and the bank of monitors showed only obscure angles of fat snow and alien engineering.

  Shepard had fallen asleep in the jockey’s chair when a gentle chime sounded, and the calming female voice of the tug informed him that the derelict’s integrity was one hundred percent. More importantly: lifeless.

  For twenty minutes, Shepard nosed the tug around the perimeter of the derelict in search of a flat plane. Between an intake valve deep enough to park the tug and a cluster of blocky protrusions, he bumped against the hull and engaged the coupling links. A warm buzz vibrated the hull; the vessels were bound.

  Shepard switched on the intercom. “Homeward,” he announced. Without waiting for a reply, he initiated the return sequence and abandoned the cockpit. Back in the cabin, he settled in opposite Caine’s corpse while the engines struggled sluggishly toward an unknown speed. When they had attained a comfortable scream, he pushed a little deeper into his seat, knowing it would get worse before it got better. Outlines shivered as the engines sang. The air gelled, becoming difficult to breathe. He stretched his mouth wide in an effort to relieve the building pressure.

  And then something new. Something wrong. It manifested as the sound of marbles bouncing in an empty tank. In a matter of seconds, two became twenty, twenty became thousands. Barrels of marbles poured into the rotors. The pitch of the engines took an ugly turn, refusing to quit in the face of this new difficulty.

  Shepard popped the buckles of his harness and leaned forward to stand, but spilled out of his seat instead. Beneath him—all around him—the tug shook in the grip of the laboring engines. Shepard pushed to his feet. If he could get to the deck, if he could abort the return sequence and cut the engines . . . one step toward the cockpit and a monstrous bang kicked his legs from under him.

  He found himself on his back, breathless and gasping for air. A klaxon blared while strobes sprayed emergency lighting across the bulkheads. Somewhere, metal twisted in anguish. The last of the marbles were bouncing away. Shepard rolled to his feet and stumbled toward the cockpit.

  Everything had failed, or was in the process of doing so: internal atmosphere, hull integrity, flight coordination; all of it dying in front of him.

  “Alarm,” reported a soothing female voice.

  Shepard slapped off the audibles, silencing the klaxons. Amber lights raced up and down the deck, screaming for attention.

  “Assessment,” he said to himself in a failing effort to remain calm. “Step one: assessment.”

  “Alarm,” repeated the patient voice.

  “I know,” Shepard said, and directed his attention to the monitors, where reports from the exterior drones were beginning to post. The same drones that had scoured the derelict were now running looping circuits around the tug, relaying information back to the deck. Trying to watch everything at once, Shepard saw his atmosphere venting from a dozen torn seams. He felt empty space creeping in, forcing open rifts with icy fingers even as the auto-sealant blossomed outward like cancerous growths to stanch the hemorrhage. Things were at wrong angles. Other monitors were populating with overlays of the tug, helpfully directing his attention to malfunctioning systems.

  Shepard stood ready to act, but there was nothing for him to do but watch. Struggling to stabilize itself, the tug needed no help from the likes of him. After long moments, lights began winking off, whether from the passing of danger or an awareness of futility, Shepard didn’t know. In time, he realized that the tug would not turn inside out; he would live at least a while longer.

  He sank into the jockey’s chair, face in hands.

  “Alarm,” the gentle female voice reminded him.

  Shepard lifted his head to see what fresh disaster had visited.

  Out there in the blizzard, the derelict had come alive. The drones, with nothing more to report about the state of the tug, had turned their attention elsewhere, and found much of interest in the derelict. Racing up and down her length, they streamed continuous video back to the deck. Running lights underscored aggressive angles and matte black assets. Shepard saw the tug attached to its hull, a sucker-fish latched to the belly of a leviathan.

  One of the screens blinked shyly, drawing Shepard’s attention. Caine’s face was barely there, a ghost of an image all but lost in the snow.

  “Shepard, look at it,” Caine breathed. The jockey then turned an accusing glare on Shepard. “What did you do?”

  Affronted, Shepard sat erect. “I didn’t—I want to talk to myself,” he demanded. “Where’s me?”

  Caine looked offended. “I don’t know. Where do bluehairs go?”

  “Caine . . . ”

  “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

  A sick dread turned Shepard’s stomach. He couldn’t look at the jockey anymore, so moved his attention back to the derelict. The massive glory of the alien vessel filled the monitors, a landscape of bristling armaments and eldritch lights. It seemed endless and impossible—alive and awake.

  The heating didn’t work as well as it had before the incident, and the tug bled warmth into space at an alarming rate. Pulling the thin blankets from both stateroom bunks, Shepard wore them over his shoulders as he watched the derelict on the
monitors. He slept for a little while in his chair, but woke suddenly to an ominous bang. He listened for a bit before deciding it had been imagined. For a little while, he tried to raise Caine and Shepard on the intercom, but found only static.

  Shepard knew something from outside had found its way into the tug when—all bundled in his blankets—he lifted the lid of the head and startled something that had come up through the drain to get comfortable in the bowl. With a splash, it pulled back down the pipes. Shepard slammed the lid and fled.

  Back in the cockpit, he turned the intercom all the way up. “Caine,” he said. “Shepard. Something’s in here with us. Something got in.”

  But the static wouldn’t talk back, and no one came to the monitors. Shepard called into the ventilation ducts. He tuned the com channels to empty space and listened for voices that weren’t speaking.

  A faint rhythmic pounding leaked from the ductwork, bringing him the shouts of an event taking place elsewhere. He thought maybe the cafeteria, so he started that way, but met something massive in the corridor. It blocked his way like a mass of bone-white webbing plastered to the walls, floor, and ceiling. It moved as though breathing. Shepard retreated to the cockpit and locked the door.

  He switched off the intercom and crawled beneath the panel, packing himself among the insulated cables and sweating conduits. He clutched his blankets tighter around himself, praying that whatever had come into the tug wouldn’t hear him breathing.

  During the initial hours of hiding, Shepard was haunted by the slow, agonized groaning of the tug. It penetrated the bulkheads and came up through the grating in the floor. It was the sound of something invasive working through the tug’s guts, forcing itself into and through all the private spaces. For a little while he heard faint voices from elsewhere, a terrified, incomprehensible litany that swelled and faded to the rhythm of unseen currents. “Oh God,” he heard it declare once in a tone both exhausted and horrified. It was hard to tell, but it sounded like Caine.

  Twelve hours later the internal temperature had dropped to minus five degrees Celsius. Having heard nothing for a long while, Shepard emerged from beneath the panel, blanket clutched around him. He felt stiff and burdened, as though bundles of wire had infiltrated his blanket to loop themselves about him. Painfully, he hauled himself up to peek over the panel, upon which a hard white frost had formed.

  Images of the derelict had been wiped from the screens, replaced by an unfamiliar face. Seeing him, it loomed closer. Shepard watched its mouth move before remembering he’d killed the sound. With stiff fingers, he tweaked the volume until the voice came through.

  “—ear me?” it shouted at him.

  “Shh,” Shepard whispered. “I hear you.”

  “Where have you been?”

  “Here. All the time here.”

  The face studied him. “Which one are you?”

  “Shepard.”

  “We’re on your port.”

  Shepard glanced at an exterior view. He saw a military frigate bathed in its own lights, dim in the deep hydrogen blizzard. “I see you.”

  “Where’s Caine?”

  “Dead.”

  “Both of him? How?”

  “I don’t . . . ” Shepard shook his head. “There hasn’t been any communication for a long time. The engines failed. Something—I don’t know what—something went wrong.”

  Having turned aside to read from another monitor, the jockey nodded absently. “I see that. The derelict didn’t want to move. Tug couldn’t handle it.” Looking back to Shepard, his expression changed.

  “What’s that?” the jockey said, pointing.

  “What?”

  “On your neck. There.”

  Shepard brought a hand out from under the blanket to touch a long, hard lump under the skin alongside his jugular. It had come up from under his collar, and retracted from his fingers like a living thing. With great apprehension, Shepard opened his blanket to assess himself.

  There were no bundles of wire around his legs, no cables or conduits. Pale white tendrils, like roots, had snaked up through the grating to coil intimately around his thighs. The larger ones had worked their way under his clothes; the smaller ones had already burrowed painlessly into his flesh.

  “What’s happening there?” the jockey asked, angling for a better view.

  Too quickly, Shepard snatched his blanket closed. “Nothing.”

  The jockey gave him a reproachful look.

  “It found me,” Shepard confessed.

  The jockey slumped. “Sit tight,” he said, and the screens went dark.

  Beneath the blanket, Shepard felt pale tendrils worming under his skin, pushing things aside to make room. He didn’t want to see what they were doing to him, but it afflicted him with a sickening heaviness.

  Having been gone hardly a moment, the jockey returned to all monitors at once. He didn’t seem to want to look at Shepard. He scratched behind an ear, looking truly regretful. “This is breach,” he said, then cleared his throat as though to read a prepared statement. “Standard operating procedures were probably violated. Mistakes were almost certainly made.”

  The jockey stopped to look at him directly. “I won’t lie to you. Yours is a bad situation.”

  Shepard swallowed thickly. “You’re leaving me here?”

  “No,” the jockey said, then again, but stretched out, as though Shepard were not simply wrong, but very wrong. “No, they want you back. You and your guest.”

  Relieved, Shepard struggled to his feet, tendrils weighing him down like shackles. “Please hurry.”

  “We need you to drop your coupling with the derelict.”

  With shaking hands on frigid controls, Shepard disengaged the links. A hollow bang echoed through the tug upon release.

  “Now get me out of here,” Shepard said. “Please.”

  “I’m afraid extraction at this point would only complicate things,” said the jockey.

  Shepard stared at the screen. “You can’t leave me here. I can’t be here with it when we go back. Where will it go?”

  “You should lie down,” the jockey said. “I think lying down would be best.”

  The tug shivered when the frigate took hold.

  “This wasn’t our fault,” Shepard objected.

  The jockey made a face to express that such matters were beyond his jurisdiction.

  Shepard felt the frigate’s grown-on engines bunching up. He felt it in his teeth, and in his groin. As the outlines of everything solid shivered away, others became clearer. A crowded latticework of bone-white webbing piercing the bulkheads, stretching through the fabric of the tug. He opened his mouth to protest, but the frigate’s engines banged, and both vessels were gone. Flakes of hydrogen swarmed to fill the vacant spaces.

  Tachy Psyche

  Andy Dudak

  The woman who means to kill Wang Zhe is, like the rest of the universe, apparently frozen, though actually in glacial motion.

  He has studied the scene for subjective years: the sculpture of her flowing cloak, the mask of her smart grease paint, the beginning of a channel through that paint at the corner of her right eye. He’s gone mad theorizing on that tear. He’s gone mad counting the rain drops that hang suspended in the autumn air of this narrow Kashgar street; and mad again gauging the progress of her pistol as she levels it.

  He’s gone mad wondering which will kill him first: a bullet, or the heat of his fatally overclocked brain.

  There was a time, long ago, when he made a great effort of will to move his right hand on a collision course with her weapon. But of course, his body isn’t overclocked like his modified brain. He devoted volition to his hand in weird, Zen-like shifts for an apparent year before giving up. He wonders what she’ll see. Maybe a twitch before she fires, or before infected processors cook smoking holes through his skull.

  He’s aware of his rising fever, but doesn’t feel it like he would in baseline time. It’s a barely perceptible global warming. The air on his skin and the
weight of his utility kilt are an unchanging tactile cocoon, sound a basal drone. Sometimes the hellish monotony of his final moment is too much to bear. He retreats into memory.

  He remembers his modification, deep in the bowels of a qingbaochu somewhere between Lhasa and Chongqing. All the agents endured it. After two months of psychedelic torment, they emerged with strange new powers. The one that would be their downfall was considered the greatest: acceleration or deceleration of thought, at will. The former would give them initiative in split-second decision making; the latter would speed them through isolation or torture.

  The PRC’s sorcerers were optimistic. If they imagined a virus that could set thought-rate fluctuating randomly and beyond design specs, they didn’t picture it in the hands of Uyghurstan.

  It hit him first in the Urumqi Han ghetto. One moment he was shuffling along with a river of his emaciated countrymen, and the next they flowed past him in a blur. He barely had time to realize he was underclocked before suspicious Uyghur troops buzzed in and whisked him away. Still he decelerated. Months of internment flashed by in minutes.

  He doesn’t know if she visited during that time. She would have been another flash in the racing patterns of daily activity. Humans came in streams. They were blood, pulsing through routines with each day’s heartbeat. With each beat came the high-pitched whine of daytime clamor, the momentary break of night—with each beat, a staccato of force feedings and med-probes.

  She probably had access to his little white cell. She must’ve known he wouldn’t recognize her. Was she tempted to come? Was their Tashkurgan tryst just business for her? He entered Uyghurstan via Pakistan, following the rubble of the Karakoram Highway through the Khunjerab Pass. Love was the last thing he expected to find on the Roof of the World. It managed to over- and underclock him at once. Three incredible days shot by, but there were moments that seem in retrospect to weigh centuries. A kind of gravity pulled him back to the ancient battlements of Tashkurgan Fortress, her hand in his, looking down upon the vast green plain sprinkled with white yurts.