by Tim Pratt
“You’re Callie Machedo. You always do things. And I know you’ve been bored.”
She grinned. “It’s my funeral, Shall. It would be pretty rude of me to miss it, don’t you think?”
Chapter 2
Elena Oh floated in the medical bay, one hand on the rail of her friend Sebastien’s hospital bed. (Was he still her friend? True, he’d tried to take over the galaxy with a fleet of alien ships full of mind-control technology, and had almost hijacked her own brain with an implant, but he’d been under the influence of alien technology himself at the time. She was willing to forgive, if he could recover from brain-spider induced megalomania and psychopathy.)
Stephen, the executive officer of the White Raven and their resident doctor, floated in the corner, prodding a tablet with his fingertip and looking pessimistic, which was basically his default expression. Uzoma, the closest thing they had to an expert on the implants, was on the other side of Sebastien’s bed, looking at him with no visible emotion, which Elena knew was no indication of their inner thoughts: Uzoma kept everything close.
Stephen and Uzoma had removed the alien implants from Sebastien’s skull and brain, and the grafted skin around his temples and on the back of his head was pale and tender-looking. The rest of his flesh was unmarked, and less pale – his coloring was naturally Mediterranean, resistant even to the pallor of long cryo-sleep – and he was altogether lovely, like a statue of a young god in repose, dressed only in a pair of thin shorts.
Uzoma detached various bits of diagnostic equipment from his body, peeling off round metal sensors and unsnapping gleaming black bracelets, and unhooked the intravenous line that was keeping him fed and hydrated. They left the tube running sedatives into Sebastien’s wrist in place, but otherwise, he was fully detached from the medical system.
“How is he?” Elena said.
Uzoma didn’t have to consult any readouts. “His vital signs are good. His brain waves seem ordinary. But…”
But it’s impossible to tell whether his mind is still full of writhing electric murder snakes, Elena thought.
“But his state of mind is still a mystery,” Uzoma settled on saying.
They were going to try waking Sebastien up in a moment, and dread and hope warred within Elena. She still held out hope that the man she’d trained with, shared her dreams and hopes with, and undertaken an impossible mission to the stars with would return to her… but she knew he might never be the same. Or maybe he was the same, and she’d just never truly known him. The Axiom space station had tried to control Sebastien’s mind and make him a slave, but it had failed, unable to cope with his unfamiliar human physiology: as a result, he’d retained his sense of self, but had lost all traces of empathy, and had embraced Axiom technology for his own galaxy-conquering ends. Maybe he’d always had the makings of a tyrant – certainly he thought he knew better than everyone else about almost everything, a confidence she’d once found attractive – and had just lacked a plausible path to conquest until he discovered the alien fleet.
But the alien implants had changed him. Whether they’d transformed Sebastien into a different person, or merely heightened his worst qualities and eliminated his good ones, was an open question. Stephen said the parts of Sebastien’s brain that involved empathy and impulse control were those most badly damaged by the alien interventions. The pirate asteroid Glauketas, their home for the past few months, had an excellent medical facility, and Stephen and Uzoma had done what they could to repair the damage. The only way to tell if it had worked was to wake Sebastien up and see.
“Are you ready?” Uzoma quirked one eyebrow – a remarkable show of expression by their standards. Uzoma had been attacked by the Axiom mind-control devices too, but the implant hadn’t taken as successfully as it did in Sebastien, and Uzoma’s psychological recovery was complete. Uzoma still had visible lines from the skin grafts on their scalp, but those would be hidden completely once their fine fuzz of hair grew in a bit more. It was possible to come through an encounter with Axiom brain-spiders and emerge whole on the other side. It was.
Elena nodded, gazing down at Sebastien’s face, so still and blank.
Uzoma swiped at the tablet in their hand. “He should wake up in a moment.”
Sebastien’s breathing sped up, his eyelids twitched, and then his dark eyes sprang open. His gaze rolled back and forth, passing across Elena without stopping, then returned to her. He inhaled sharply through his nose and sat up, so quickly that Elena pushed off the bed in surprise, the motion sending her spinning away in the null gravity.
Being startled backward probably saved her life.
Sebastien had spent a few months in a coma, but they’d kept his muscles pharmaceutically and electrically stimulated – therapies they all went through occasionally anyway, since weightless environments were terrible for maintaining muscle tone. He swiped at Elena with one long arm, but his fingers missed her as she floated backward. He snarled, teeth bared, and pivoted to lunge at Uzoma, on the other side of the bed, but the straps on his lower body, holding him down in the lack of gravity, prevented him from reaching them.
“Sebastien!” Elena shouted, steadying herself against a wall panel. “It’s OK, you’re not in danger!” She looked to Stephen. “Is this supposed to happen?”
“We expected some disorientation–” Stephen began, and then gasped.
Elena turned back to Sebastien. He’d wriggled out of his straps somehow, and as Elena watched, he braced his feet on the bed and launched himself at Uzoma, hands extended to grab their throat. Uzoma stabbed at the tablet with their finger, doubtless trying to dose him with sedatives, but Sebastien’s violent escape had torn the needle out of his vein – the tube floated over the bed, drooling medication from its tip.
Uzoma raised their arms to fend him off, but Sebastien twisted in the air, graceful as an eel, and grabbed Uzoma around the waist instead, his momentum sending them both spinning against the wall. Uzoma battered at him, but Sebastien kept moving, coiling around Uzoma’s body like a constricting serpent, climbing up their back and wrapping his arms and legs around them, pinning Uzoma’s arms to their sides. Sebastien grinned at Elena from over Uzoma’s shoulder, then lowered his head and bit into Uzoma’s neck with the relish of someone tearing into the first ripe peach of summer.
Uzoma screamed as Sebastien jerked his head back, tearing out a hunk of meat and sending a spray of blood into the air, creating a constellation of crimson droplets that spun and floated in microgravity. Sebastien opened up his arms, planted his feet against Uzoma’s back, and kicked hard. The force of the blow sent the glassy-eyed Uzoma flying forward and down, cracking their forehead hard against the rail of Sebastien’s recently vacated bed. Uzoma bounced and then drifted, motionless, except for red streamers and bubbles spilling from their wounds.
The kick sent Sebastien up and backward, toward the place where the gentle curve of the wall met the ceiling. He twisted in the air, like he’d practiced zero-gravity combat a thousand times, and curled up his body, aiming his head downward and bracing his feet toward the ceiling.
“We need to sedate him!” Elena cried, and Stephen said, “Yes, I know.” He was the XO in part because he was almost supernaturally calm in a crisis, famed throughout Trans-Neptunian space for his stoicism and implacability. He released his tablet, letting it float in the air beside him, and lifted the syringe of paralytic fluid he’d filled in case Sebastien became agitated or disoriented.
Sebastien didn’t seem disoriented, or even particularly agitated. He seemed to be enjoying himself, smiling down on them with bloody teeth. He pressed his feet against the ceiling and pushed off hard, aiming himself like a missile at Stephen. The doctor watched the approach for a moment, made some mental calculation, didn’t like his chances, and tossed the syringe spinning toward Elena.
She snatched it out of the air and watched as Sebastien crashed into the XO, bulling him into the corner. Stephen was a big man, taller and heavier than his homicidal patient, and certainly stronger
, but his height was no help in such a cramped environment, his weight was no help in a weightless one, and he didn’t have the opportunity to use his strength. Sebastien slashed at the doctor’s eyes with fingernails, and Stephen squeezed his eyes shut and flung his head back in an instinctive defensive motion. Sebastien took advantage of the moment to grab the handheld tablet Stephen had released out of the air, and swung it hard at Stephen’s face. The metal, plastic, and smartglass smashed his nose in and cracked partly on impact, sending blood and gleaming shards in all directions.
Stephen howled. The force of the blow he’d struck sent Sebastien spinning, and he pulled in his limbs to conserve angular momentum, twirling fast – then lashed out with the tablet again when he came around, breaking the tablet in half against the doctor’s face. Stephen slumped and floated, face obscured by a floating mist of blood.
Elena was not as cool in a crisis as Stephen, but she had a keen sense of responsibility, and this was her fault: she’d wanted to try this, she’d wanted to wake up Sebastien and get a sense of their progress despite Stephen’s concerns that their patient’s brain was still too damaged. While Sebastien attacked Stephen, Elena pushed herself forward, syringe in her hand. She’d intended to glide silently through the air and stab him in the neck while his back was turned, but Sebastien’s second blow spun him around to face her. His face was spotted with blood, and he smiled at her as she flew at him. There was no wall or furniture within reach to arrest her motion, and he spread his arms, as if to welcome her into an embrace.
She reached out with the syringe, but he batted her hand aside, sending the needle flying. The blow sent him spinning away from her, and she thought she might sail safely past him – until he grabbed her ponytail in passing and jerked her toward him. They slammed together, and he got his arms around her, spinning her body around until she faced him, then crushing her close to his chest. She wriggled, trying to escape, but his arms were bands of iron, his breath hot in her face. His mouth stank of blood and flesh.
Sebastien had kissed her, on the Axiom station, when the brain-spiders were still gleaming on his scalp, their legs punched through his skull, his eyes glowing red from the implants and nanomachines within. She’d taken advantage of his distraction, then – of his twisted affection – to punch him in the back of the head, but he’d learned his lesson, and she didn’t have a fist free to repeat the effort.
Sebastien didn’t try to kiss her now – just held her close. She looked into his eyes. “Sebastien. Calm down. You’re safe. I know you’re – confused. You were injured. But I’m here to help you–”
“Elena.” His voice was low, a soft, insinuating whisper. “Missed you. Missed you. Missed you.” He squeezed her harder, moved his face close, and took her lower lip in his sharp teeth.
“Failure!” she shouted as her flesh began to tear.
Chapter 3
Elena opened her eyes and removed the Hypnos diadem from her brow, setting it aside. She shuddered, wiping the back of her hand across her mouth – her lower lip didn’t hurt, and she couldn’t taste blood, but it seemed like she should.
Sebastien was still stretched out on the table in the medical bay, his own diadem resting on his sweaty brow. He had a faint smile on his face. That expression hadn’t been there before. She shuddered. Was he floating above their bleeding bodies now? Gloating?
Uzoma walked over, removing their own diadem. “That could have gone better,” they said. “I am surprised you did not stop the simulation as soon as he killed me.”
Elena shook her head. “There was a possibility his violence was just a response to disorientation, mindless lashing out – Stephen said he might be confused and frightened. If that’s all it was, we could have put restraints on him before waking him up for real. I wanted to give him a chance to calm down, to see if the real Sebastien emerged.” She sighed. “But I guess he was calm all along.”
Stephen, normally an unflappable figure of superhuman calm, floated in the farthest corner away from their patient, eyes narrowed. “I had my pain receptors turned off, and even so…” He shook his head. “I expected Sebastien to exhibit diminished function, because the implants we removed altered his brain in fundamental ways, but I wasn’t anticipating quite that level of bloodlust.”
“It’s not his fault.” Elena hated the wheedling, defensive note in her own voice. “The Axiom did this to him.”
“On Earth in our time, dogs sometimes contracted rabies, and became aggressive and dangerous,” Uzoma said. “It was not the fault of the animals that they became infected, but nonetheless, they had to be put down.”
Elena stared at her. “Are you suggesting we kill Sebastien?”
Uzoma shook their head. “I am suggesting we continue searching for a cure for his rabies.” They paused. “Space rabies.”
The White Raven’s crew had a running inside joke about “space madness.” “Did you just make a joke?” Elena said.
“I am very funny,” Uzoma said.
“Right. Good. So. What’s the next step, Stephen?” Elena said.
Stephen looked up from his tablet. His dark eyes were sad, but weren’t they always? “The Axiom implants have been entirely removed, as far as we can tell, and there seem to be no lurking nanomachines – again, not as far as we can detect. We’ve done all we can with the resources we have here, I’m afraid.”
“That’s it, then? We just… give up?”
Stephen shook his head. “Not necessarily. I’ve been reading and researching, and there are experimental drug therapies that could repair the damaged portions of his brain. Combined with some other pharmaceuticals and some trans-cranial magnetic procedures, I suspect they could restore his higher functions, his ability to speak and reason – all the functions that were hijacked by the implants, and lost when we removed them. I don’t know whether we can restore his empathy, or diminish the megalomania he exhibited on the Axiom station. There have been promising results on, ah, certain patient populations.”
“What populations?”
Stephen sighed. “I believe back in your time they would have called them ‘the criminally insane.’ Incarcerated people with severe personality disorders and antisocial tendencies, with histories of violence.”
Elena nodded. “That does sound like Sebastien.”
Stephen said, “The studies are still ongoing, and it’s difficult work to quantify because much of the research depends on the subjective self-reporting of people who lie and manipulate as easily as they breathe, but there’s evidence of substantially increased empathy and decreased violence among the subjects. The therapies aren’t commercially available, but… I know people. I’ll need to visit the Jovian Imperative to acquire the necessary drugs and software. Fortunately, we can afford them.”
They’d been broke for a while: the crew was afraid to access their personal accounts while the truth-tellers might still be monitoring the Tangle. None of them wanted to alert the members of a deadly alien conspiracy to the fact that they weren’t as dead as everyone assumed. The time refugees from the Anjou didn’t have any money either – they’d shipped out on a one-way journey to a prospective colony planet five hundred years ago, and hadn’t left bank accounts behind accruing interest, more’s the pity. For a while, the combined crews had subsisted on the supplies on Glauketas, which leaned heavily on a shipment of canned beets the villains had hijacked from some supply ship. Ashok’s many borscht variations had lost their novelty quickly. The pirates had money, though, hidden in the darkest parts of the Tangle, and Shall had spent six weeks attempting to crack the password that would allow them to access the pirates’ stash of cryptocurrency, without success. Then Callie found the password scribbled on a piece of metal with grease pencil, hidden behind a secret panel in the old pirate queen’s bedroom, which Callie had taken as her own. Since then they’d had a decent bit of operating capital again, though it wasn’t a vast fortune. Pirates, it seemed, were rather profligate with their funds. Callie didn’t feel right spendi
ng blood money anyway, and said once they had a decent income again, they’d repay what they took from the pirate coffers and donate the lot to charity.
They’d have to find some kind of paying work soon, which meant they had to either take up the mantle of their old lives again (if Lantern declared it safe), or blow the rest of their money on false identities and relocate to a new system where murderous truth-tellers would be less likely to recognize them. They were all hoping for the former. People were attached to their identities, and Callie was especially cranky at the prospect of having to rename her ship.
The door to the medical bay opened, and Ashok floated in, spinning around with his arms extended. “It’s Gravity Day!” he crowed. Then he seemed to take note of the mood in the room, gazing down at Sebastien stretched on the table. “Ah. It’s also ‘wake up Sebastien in the simulation day,’ isn’t it. How did it go?”
“He murdered Stephen and Uzoma right away,” Elena said. “Then he got his hands on me, and… well. We called the simulation off before he could kill me too.”
Ashok kept gazing at the sleeping patient. “Huh. I mean, he couldn’t do that, not really – Shall would have deployed drones to stop him when he got violent. At most he could have murdered maybe one of you.”
“That’s very reassuring,” Stephen said. “We wanted to give Sebastien more options in the simulation than he’d get in reality, to see what he’d do if left totally unfettered.”
“Maybe you could find him a good therapy module?” Ashok said. “Or put him in some kind of mental hospital sim?”
“His brain was altered by alien implants,” Stephen said. “A psychiatric expert system wouldn’t be much help at this point. Maybe someday. Right now, it would be like trying to put a fresh coat of paint on a house that’s currently on fire. You have to put out the flames and then rebuild the walls first.”
Ashok nodded, his cheerfulness undeterred. “Well, at least soon you’ll get to be disappointed in gravity! We’re going with maybe half a G to start, and if everyone clamors for more, we’ll make it stronger. The artificial gravity system is adjustable to… honestly, a pretty terrifying degree. I could squish us all into mush.” He waited for a moment, then sighed. “No applause? Really? OK. Gravity will hit in about fifteen minutes. Try not to be sleeping up near the ceiling when I turn it on. I’m going to go tell Robin and Ibn. Maybe they’ll appreciate my genius, and also my wit.” He spun out of the room.