There was a clatter from backstage. Startled, Saga looked toward the curtain. She heard a tapping sound, getting louder. “Wei?” she said. “Michel?” No response. She couldn’t help imagining Gregor’s shuffling corpse, burnt to a cinder.
Tap tap tap. With a click the curtains opened, revealing a lone figure at the center of the stage. Saga’s heart hammered in her chest. The figure bowed low, a cascade of brown hair tumbling down as she did.
Saga let out her breath. It was the woman who’d been with Gregor. The synth dancer. She was wearing black high heels, stockings, and a red dress that artfully revealed slightly more than it concealed. She had very long legs. She lifted her head and looked Saga in the eyes.
“May I dance for you?” she said, her voice like honey.
Saga had experience with humanoid synthetics before; they were useful in dangerous environments and did much of the unpleasant work in the belt. But they were designed to be clearly artificial. Form following function. Until now, she’d never met one so eerily lifelike.
“Perhaps I could sing for you instead?” the synth said.
Saga shook her head. “No. No thank you.”
The synth nodded and relaxed her pose. She walked to the front of the stage and stepped down. She came smiling toward Saga, who found herself backing away until she bumped into the wall of shelving behind her.
“May I get you a refreshment?” The synth now spoke with the voice of the ship. “Something to eat?”
“Sure,” Saga said, wanting to get away from this uncanny machine. “Go get me something to eat.”
“Would you care to see the menu?”
“No. Just . . . anything. A steak sandwich. Fetch me one of those.”
The synth nodded. “Of course, madam. Anything else?”
For a moment Saga imagined her returning with an actual steak sandwich, conjured up from some secret store of luxuries. They could travel back to Earth in comfort, like on a real cruise. But that was ridiculous.
The synth stood, waiting. Her hair gleamed in the room lights. Her chest rose and fell as she breathed. Dark, liquid eyes flickered in tiny movements. Saccades: that was the word. An imitation of life.
“Do you have a name?” Saga asked.
The synth smiled. “Krasivaya. It is Russian for ‘beautiful.’”
“Did Gregor give you that name?”
The synth tilted her head slightly. “I don’t understand the question.”
“You can go now, Krasivaya,” Saga said. “I’d like to be alone.”
“Of course, madam.”
The synth turned and walked back across the room and onto the stage, vanishing behind the curtain.
Saga left the casino and took corridors at random until she found herself heading back toward the presidential suite. Her and Michel’s home while they worked out how to get to their real home.
She stopped. There was no guarantee they would return, was there? They were going to have to start thinking seriously about survival: all their food had been on the Sigurd. She tried to remember the data she’d requested when she was searching for a way back to Earth. The Sigurd had generated a list of the various ships traveling in the region of space they occupied. There hadn’t been many, and the nearest was many millions of kilometers away and moving in the opposite direction.
Every so often she was reminded of the sheer vastness of the solar system. How the maps and schedules they relied on focused on the tiny islands of light people had created out there. In reality, it was almost entirely empty space. Blackness in all directions.
“Ship,” she said. “Are you there?”
“How may I help you?” the ship’s voice replied.
“Gregor’s room. Which one was it?”
“I’m sorry,” the ship said. “I don’t have a passenger manifest for this voyage.”
She thought for a second. “There were two rooms occupied recently. One of them was the presidential suite. Could you tell me which one the other guest stayed in?”
“Of course,” the ship said. “Just follow the yellow line on the wall.”
A warm glow lit the corridor.
* * *
Entering Gregor’s room, Saga felt a wave of memory overtake her. It was the smell more than anything, stale sweat and alcohol. She could have been back in her family’s house again. She put her hand on the door frame and closed her eyes. She couldn’t go in.
She’d spent the last half of her teenage years in Germany with a loose coalition of urban explorers, living on Guaranteed Income and taking trains around Europe to break into various abandoned factories and government facilities left over from the second industrial revolution. It had been a good life, while it lasted. Then one day she’d received a message from her aunt: her mother had been hospitalized.
When she returned to Iceland she found a house gone to seed, an eerie mirror of the run-down places she’d been exploring. The house mind was unresponsive. The cleaning systems had malfunctioned months before and had never been fixed. There were balls of fluff under the beds. Fragments of food littered the kitchen floor and countertops.
Her anxiety lived in her stomach those days. A corrosive drip of worry, anger, and guilt. She walked around the familiar rooms while she tried to imagine how it had been. After all her mother’s threats and failed attempts to leave, it was her father who had finally been the one to go. Her mother had withdrawn from the world afterward, sunk into a depression. After months of solitude she’d had an aneurysm. She’d been undiscovered for days. Certainly her daughter had nothing to do with finding her: Saga hadn’t called her for months.
Saga stayed in the house for six weeks, scrubbing it clean centimeter by centimeter between trips to the hospital. She blamed herself. She blamed her father. She permanently locked him out of every personal and social system she had control of, but he still showed up one day on the doorstep, wanting to talk. He told her he’d gone to rehab. He was a new man and he wanted to see his daughter.
She’d hidden inside, shaking. Not with fear, but with anger, and the realization that if she opened the door she might try to kill him.
A month later, after it became clear her mother wasn’t going to get better, Saga fled Earth to seek her fortune in the belt and to start trying to pay back what she owed.
Now here she was, the woman who left. The woman who’d caused her mother’s death. Stuck in a doorway by the smell of stale booze.
She opened her eyes and forced herself forward. On the floor was a tangle of clothing, Gregor’s pressure suit crammed under the bed. She nudged aside an empty bottle with her foot.
There was also food. Gregor had taken more than his share from the rations Wei had left for them after she’d locked them out of the Sigurd. She could bring that back, at least. They were going to need it. The full bottles of liquor—and there were still several of those lined up on the dresser—she left untouched. They may have contained calories, but nobody needed the pain they held.
On the desk sat a partially eaten loaf of bread. It looked the same as the one Wei had been examining on the Sigurd. Saga touched it gingerly, then picked it up. The flour-dusted loaf looked like it had come from a wood-fired oven, and it felt like bread, more or less. Hard crust, like the real thing. She sniffed it, but it had no scent.
“Would you like to eat here, madam?”
Saga dropped the bread and spun around, her arms held out to ward off whoever had spoken. Just outside the doorway was a man in a crisp uniform. He wore a white apron and held a dish with a silver cover, a white linen towel draped over his arm. He stood there, neat as a pin, waiting for her response.
He had to be another synth, she realized. The voice he’d spoken with was that of the ship.
“Fokking helvíti,” Saga swore. “Don’t sneak up on people like that.”
“I apologize. I did announce myself.”
“Well, I didn’t hear you.” She took a breath and looked at the dish. “What’s that?”
The synth remove
d the cover. Under it was a steak sandwich and what looked like a mound of mashed potatoes. “Your food,” the synth said. “I can clear a space for you at the desk.”
“No,” Saga said after a stunned moment. “Not in here. This room needs a good cleaning. We’ll go next door.”
The room was immaculate and empty, the bed bare of coverings and the closet doors wide open. The synth placed the dish on the desk, then laid out a napkin and a knife and fork, producing salt and pepper shakers from a pocket in his uniform. He arranged everything carefully, then stepped back. “May I get you anything else?”
Saga shook her head. She watched as he turned and left without a sound, then leaned forward and sniffed cautiously at the meal. The sandwich smelled like nothing, like Gregor’s loaf of bread. She reached out and touched it, then held it up to her eyes. From a distance it looked entirely convincing—there were even grill marks on the bread—but up close the illusion broke down and the lie of it was revealed.
* * *
Michel was fascinated by the sandwich. He sniffed it, as Saga had done. Hefted it. “You didn’t take a bite?”
Saga shook her head. “Does it look edible to you?”
“Sure, more or less.”
“But it’s obviously not actual food. It’s like the ship knows what food looks like, but it doesn’t know anything else about it.”
Michel put the sandwich down on the console beside him. When Saga had returned, she’d found her husband deep in data. He hadn’t even realized that Wei had left the bridge. He gestured at an image of the ship’s mind. The tracery of foreign code they’d found earlier glowed, brighter than before. “I wonder if it’s connected to that code. Maybe the food printers have been reprogrammed by it.”
“I searched the galleys,” Saga said. “There’s nothing there. All the food printer tanks were empty. The algal plant was offline. The cupboards are bare.”
He picked up the sandwich again. “Yet here it is. I did the calculations. You already found out there were no ships nearby, and it’s going to take us a long time to get anywhere. Weeks and weeks at the minimum. It would be nice if this was edible.” He frowned. “Food is just molecules: amino acids, proteins. The ship should know about calories and nutrition. Maybe it created this from the maintenance printer feedstock. We could eat it, even if it doesn’t have any flavor. You said Gregor was eating the bread, right?”
He lifted the sandwich to his mouth. Saga suddenly felt afraid. “Michel, don’t.”
One moment Wei was a flicker coming up the stairs, the next she’d knocked the sandwich from Michel’s hand and planted herself between them.
“Putain!” Michel swore. He rubbed his right hand.
“Did you eat any of it?” Wei said.
Michel scowled at her. “What?”
“Did you eat any?” she yelled. “Any of the ship’s food?” She turned around to face Saga, her eyes wild. “Did you?”
“No,” Saga said. She held both hands up defensively. “Neither of us did! What the hell is going on?”
Wei held out an open package. Saga looked at it. It was full of emergency rations. Inside were a dozen or so tan bricks—nutritional bars, each with a day’s worth of calories, protein, and fat. Shelf-stable for decades. Every ship had a few containers stuffed in a locker somewhere.
“None of the food is edible.” Wei shook the package at her. “Not even these.”
Saga took out a bar, turned it over, and found the expiration date. “It says it’s still good for another ten years.”
Michel took another bar. “Same here.”
“Look closer,” Wei said.
The bars were all the same basic ingredients, varying only by flavor: curry, hot and sour, Cajun spice. The best Saga could say about them was that they were palatable. She’d eaten a few before and regretted it. But this one had no odor.
Michel dug a finger into his. “It’s like rubber . . .”
Wei snatched Saga’s bar and squeezed it with her powered glove. It popped, splitting open to reveal a hollow interior. She let it fall to the floor.
Saga stared at her. “You’re not surprised, are you.”
Wei stared back, defiant. “I thought it might be in the air as well, but you two seem unaffected.”
Michel sniffed cautiously. “What was in the air?”
“Whatever took over this ship,” Wei said.
“We did that,” Michel said. “It’s been mothballed for twenty years. We were the first people here.”
Wei shook her head. “Something came here before us. This ship has been compromised. It’s being hollowed out like these emergency rations, piece by piece.”
“All the diagnostics were fine when we boarded,” Michel said. “The Queen has a working mind and an active reactor. We stayed in the presidential suite. Everything’s normal.”
Wei spread her arms. “This all looks normal. That’s the point. But the Martian Queen is as false as that sandwich.”
Michel tossed his ration bar from hand to hand. “I’m not buying it, Wei. You know how much work it would be to strip everything out and replace it? Who would even bother?”
“I don’t know,” Wei said. “I thought it was a nanotech experiment gone wrong. I tried to pin down the problem with the equipment on the Sigurd, but I failed. What I do know is that it’s dangerous, and it’s in the food.”
“How?” Saga said. “How do you know that?”
“Look what happened to Gregor.”
Poor Gregor. They’d failed him. “He wasn’t dead; maybe he was in a coma.” But as Saga said it she knew how unlikely it sounded.
“By the time we put him in cold storage, rigor mortis had set in,” Wei said. “No coma does that. It’s biologically impossible.”
“Then what—the ship zombified him? That’s less impossible?”
Wei just looked at her.
“Oh God.” Saga turned to Michel. “Please give me a rational explanation. There must be one.”
Michel regarded Wei like a dangerous animal. He dropped the bar. “Someone opened the locker and put his body onto the Sigurd. We know there are active synths on board. What if they moved him? Maybe Wei got them to do it, if she didn’t do it herself.”
Wei’s laugh had a ragged edge to it. “You saw the video from the bridge, just like I did. Gregor was moving around by himself. There was no synth pulling his strings. And why would I destroy the Sigurd?”
“Okay, Wei,” Saga said. “You know so much, you tell us. What happened to him? What exactly did the food do?”
“It turned him into something else. Something . . . alien.”
“How the hell do you know that?”
Wei reached up and slowly unlatched her helmet. It came off with a slight hiss of escaping air. She blinked, took a cautious breath. It was the first time they’d seen her bare face in days. She looked at both of them. “I have a story to tell you.”
* * *
It wasn’t Wei’s first visit to the Queen.
Three years earlier she’d been there with her partner, Ayanti. The two of them were running unauthorized salvage trips, traveling dark, plundering what they could from wrecks and abandoned facilities. Even, she admitted, sometimes stealing from automated mining stations and habitats under construction.
He was the hacker, she the salvage expert, identifying valuable technology, artifacts, minerals, anything worth the fuel and time to take back to the black marketers.
They used the same intrusion package she’d brought on this trip to break through the Queen’s defenses. Inside they found a treasure trove. They cut out carvings, took plates and silverware, piled up fittings and furniture. Their cargo nets were crammed full.
“Near the end we got into the alcohol,” she said. Wei paused and Saga could see regret and pain in her eyes. “That’s when it all began.”
They partied in the presidential suite, celebrating their good fortune and impending wealth. Drank more than they should have. The last thing she remembered was Ayan
ti ordering room service, laughing. When she woke, hungover, late the next day, Ayanti wasn’t there. She discovered the room-service meal had been delivered, after all, and Ayanti had eaten it. She went to their ship, looking for him, and found their cargo nets and pressurized containers empty.
On the Queen, every single thing they’d taken had been returned to its proper place.
Throughout the liner there was an oppressive silence. Until she reached the doors to the dining room. “I got there,” she said. “And I heard it. The sounds of a dinner party. Clinking forks, conversation, laughter. God, I even heard that string quartet—” She broke off, her eyes closed.
She hammered on the doors, but they wouldn’t open. When she finally broke in, the diners vanished. “All except for Ayanti,” she said. “He was sitting at a table, dressed in a tuxedo, eating a steak. When I touched him he looked at me . . .” Wei wiped her nose on the back of her glove. “But he didn’t really see me.”
He talked to her as if they were guests on the ship, as if the Queen were full of passengers sailing to Mars. He told her about the people he’d eaten with, shared their gossip.
She put it down to stress and exhaustion, assuming he’d returned everything in a fit of guilt. Somehow he’d fixed the damage they’d done, or triggered the ship’s self-repair protocols.
Hoping sleep would help, she brought him back to their suite and sedated him, locking him in. She spent a day reassembling their haul, refilling the cargo nets and containers with things she could take by herself. When she returned to the suite he was gone.
She searched the Queen, but he wasn’t on board.
“I found him outside,” Wei said. “Without his pressure suit. He was in vacuum—in his fucking tuxedo, ripping apart the cargo nets with his bare hands.”
Wei was quiet for a long moment. “I suited up and grabbed him. I don’t know what I thought—he was in a manic state, he’d installed decompression enhancements without telling me. Something to explain how he wasn’t dead. Then I saw his face . . .
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