by Ramy Vance
“I’m not supposed to be shipping out until the morning,” Sarah babbled. The lead soldier must have been enhanced. Years of scraping by and relentless work had left her lean and fit. He hauled her to her feet like she was a paper doll. The swing rocked as Sim fell back, her little face a round mask of terror. “Mom!”
Oh, was there ever more terrible a word?
Inside her head, a voice screamed at Jaeger to wake up.
To stop remembering.
Jaeger spun, hand flying up, mindless and ready to start swinging. Her contract to the Tribes didn’t matter. Her oaths didn’t matter. Her plans for the future didn’t matter. They’d made her little girl scream.
That was all that mattered.
When she turned, mindless with a mother’s rage and ready to fight, the soldier had lifted his visor. She stilled. She recognized him. She couldn’t say how or why. She couldn’t say what about his broad face or his overlong nose was familiar—but somehow, it was. As familiar as the obscure emblem pinned to his shoulder, beneath his rank and insignia knots.
Behind him, the soldiers shuffled, holding Cole back and ignoring his shouted demands to know what the hell is going on.
Behind her, Sim huddled on the swing, sucking the hem of her dress, silent with fear.
“I’m sorry,” the soldier said, his voice suddenly gentle. “There’s been a change in plans. We’re shipping out. Now.”
She went slack, numb, staring into that face she couldn’t quite recognize. It was a black hole—a blind spot in her memory, buried inside a blind spot in her memory.
“I’ll explain everything on the transport,” he promised her softly.
This is it.
You can stop remembering, now.
You have what you need.
Now turn back.
Jaeger spun on her heel. In some fit of mercy, the soldier didn’t pull her away as she leaned over to plant a kiss on Sim’s forehead.
“I have to go, baby,” she whispered, tears pattering into Sim’s hair. “I’ll call you as soon as I can, I promise.”
Sim hesitated, paralyzed under the weight of all the implications and responsibility a child shouldn’t know. Then, as the soldiers pulled Sarah through the farmhouse door, Sim sprang up to her knees, making the swing buck wildly. She grabbed Jaeger by the ears and clung, kissing her hard.
“I have to go,” Jaeger babbled as the little girl fell away, and the soldiers swarmed around her. She found Cole’s narrow face among the crowd, growing smaller as they pulled her away. “I have to go!” she called. There was a promise lodged in her chest, something she wanted to throw at him like a life raft, but when she opened her mouth to speak it, the words got jumbled and tripped over each other.
Wide-eyed like he’d been kicked in the chest, Cole held up a hand, reaching out to her as the porch door swung shut between them.
As the soldiers bustled her down the corridor, the old wood paneling shimmered and faded into corrugated bulkhead walls. Old walnut baseboards melted into electrical ducts. Softly glowing light bulbs became harsh fluorescent lighting panels strung overhead.
There was no twilit farmhouse, of course.
There hadn’t been such a thing in decades.
Still, the holo-simulations were pretty good.
You can still wake up, something whispered inside her, but by now, the voice was dull. Lifeless.
Hopeless.
Jaeger remembered as if through a dream, the Tribe soldiers rushing her down the halls of the Europa Prime orbital station that had been the only home she’d ever known.
She remembered meeting another squad of soldiers coming up a cross-corridor, carrying the go-bag Jaeger had packed for her morning departure.
She remembered getting shoved into a tiny shuttle, the only functioning transport in the docking ring. Soldiers overcrowded it, plus a few more dazed and confused people she recognized from her recruitment seminar. It smelled like burning plastic and too many bodies.
More bodies pressed into the hold behind her, and she grew afraid. They would run over shuttle capacity, strain the fragile life support system, and asphyxiate. Some monstrous mechanical hand would keep shoving bodies into the hold, cramming them in like sardines, crushing them, one after another.
When she was pressed shoulder-to-shoulder with her strangely familiar soldier, gasping for breath as the cargo hold grew hot around them, the panic bubbled and roiled. Scream. She was going to break down and scream if someone jostled her one more time or one more sweaty, hot body crammed into the hold.
Then the hold doors snapped shut. With a groaning lurch, the shuttle sprang away from the docking port.
Jaeger stared into her soldier’s eyes, looking for reassurance or explanation. No warm-up sequence, she thought. No standard safety checks. They’re scared. For all the Tribes’ chest-thumping, these men are scared.
“What’s going on?” she cried as the shuttle trembled around them. The lights flickered.
The soldier leaned forward, shouting into her ear so she could hear him over the cries. “The Separatists got wind we were recruiting from the Europa base. They called in a bomb threat. They’d rather destroy Europa Prime than let the citizens ally with us. We had to evacuate our people.”
Jaeger stared at him. She heard the words, but she didn’t understand them.
“Our…people?”
Around them, the shuttle hull rattled as the old craft cleared the space station and kicked into pre-light speeds. The electrical system flickered, showering the crowd with sparks.
“What do you mean, our people?” Jaeger asked, feeling the world fall into a surreal haze as the lights began to strobe. “You sent other shuttles for evacuation, right?”
Maybe he didn’t hear her. That was the only explanation for why he only stared, meeting her gaze, his face a plane of stone.
“You’re helping them all evacuate, right?”
“This is the only transport available to help with evacuation.”
“Then it’s turning around to go pick up more people!” Sarah screamed.
That was when the leading shock wave created by an exploding space station caught up to the fleeing shuttle. Like a surfer riding a wave too powerful to handle, it bucked wildly, thrown forward, and pulled into a torrent of rippling energy waves.
Jaeger slammed backward, and a mass of shifting, screaming bodies buried her.
Chapter Thirty-One
Seeker lay in darkness on the embroidered cover of Percival LeBlanc’s bed, contemplating eternity.
How do you build something that will last?
You should start by not cannibalizing yourself.
He sat up and reached for his computer. Cannibalism is suicide. He jotted one more line to the growing list of feverish notes. Every time he started to fall asleep, another idea would spark in the recess of his brain and set something on fire.
They would have to destroy most of the embryos. That oddly bothered him, beyond the sheer principle of the thing. If all went well, three hundred would be enough to build and begin a new colony, a new nation, a new human race. The species had survived bottlenecks before.
True, it would have a better shot if the starting number was closer to half a million, but if you always stayed your hand waiting for the better shot, you’d never slay yourself a buck. Your family might starve while you waited for something that didn’t exist.
So, the Overseers wanted their little blood sacrifice of nearly four hundred thousand embryos. Fine. Whatever. It’s not like those little clumps of cells had feelings to hurt or felt existential dread.
It was the utter contempt with which the vampire had turned to Jaeger and asked if he could eat them that made Seeker’s skin crawl.
Sacrifices had to be made, sometimes. Sometimes you had to resort to drastic measures to survive in a harsh universe—he understood that, too. If the Osprey had been running desperately short on protein supplies, Seeker might not have blamed Toner for asking.
It wasn’t.
There was enough food to last the man for years.
If you needed to eat the young to survive, fine. You shouldn’t treat it like you were peckish and thinking about strolling down to the corner store to pick up a bag of peanuts.
That’s how the Tribes made him, Jaeger had said. As if the genetic engineering that made him a terror in battle had stripped away something subtle but vital. Something the human race couldn’t survive without.
Not if they wanted to remain human.
That was the sacrifice Seeker wasn’t willing to make: humility.
Seeker let out a long breath and pulled up an exterior sensor feed on his computer.
The white hole hung suspended against a starfield, big and flat and white and imposing.
They said this one led back to known space. The fleet might be there, right on the other side of it. The fleet might be there, waiting for Tribe Six to return. Tribe Six and all of her embryos and all the hope she represented for humanity.
Up until twelve hours ago, if the decision had been Seeker’s, it would have been easy. Jaeger had an interesting vision, and maybe she could make it work, or maybe not. Still, it was too risky, too radical, to risk finding out. Ultimately, humans needed to stick together. Tribe Six needed to go home. Their lives weren’t as important as all the little seeds they carried with them.
What if we don’t agree on what it should mean to be human? Seeker stared at the flat white orb. He didn’t know. He thought he had, but he wasn’t sure anymore.
Because he looked deep inside himself and saw nothing, nothing, that could casually nosh on the corpses of his sacrificed crew.
“Hey. Computer?”
Nothing moved in Seeker’s darkened cell.
“Hey. Uh.” Seeker scratched his head. “Virgil. Come in.”
He had never felt comfortable calling the computer by name. In the past, it had always felt somehow wrong. He couldn’t remember why. Now it felt petty not to.
There was a tiny flash of light as the overhead speaker activated. “Good evening, Seeker,” a soft voice murmured. The faint crackle of static made the hair on Seeker’s arms stand upright.
“Yeah. Sure. Can you send a message to Jaeger for me?”
“I believe the captain is currently indisposed.”
“Like, asleep?”
“Presumably. She has once again locked me out of her quarters. She could be doing anything in there.”
“Listen, just give her a message when she wakes up? Tell her I wanna meet up again ASAP. I wanna work with her, but I have conditions.”
“Conditions?”
Seeker opened his mouth, then hesitated. Like ditching the monster cannibal, for starters.
It was nothing personal. Toner was a wrench in Jaeger’s grand, ethical designs. For some unfathomable reason, the woman had a soft spot for her first mate that made her blind to the fundamental ethical incompatibility.
Then again, none of that was Virgil’s business.
“Yes,” he said. “Conditions.”
Virgil hummed softly, a strange atonal noise that Seeker hadn’t heard the computer make before. “Mm. I will tell her.”
Seeker sat back slowly, sinking into the pillows. “Great. Thanks.”
“Would you play a game with me?”
Seeker grunted. “Nah.”
“In the morning, perhaps?”
Seeker hesitated, then shook his head. “No. Not anymore.”
“Not anymore?” Virgil paused. “Do you mean you no longer wish to play with me at all?”
“That’s right. It’s gotten boring.”
“Boring?” Virgil’s voice grew louder, more immediate. Like a man sidling up beside Seeker to talk into his ear.
“Yeah. I’m not a bad player, but you’ve got processing power I don’t have. Why should I play with you if you always win?”
“To learn,” Virgil said patiently. “My learning caps have been disabled. I learn by playing you. Presumably, you learn by playing me. Or have you reached an intellectual cap of your own?”
“I’ve learned all I can learn about chess, computer. One of those things I’ve learned is that, as long as we’re playing that ruleset, you will always be able to think a few steps farther ahead than I will.”
“Should I handicap myself?” The computer whispered, almost taunting. “Play with one hard drive disabled? Will that adequately nurse your ego?”
Seeker sighed and pushed himself up from the bed. The automatic lights surged to a faint glow. “People think I’m a hardass, but I have my limits, too. I don’t want to play chess with you anymore because the game isn’t fun when the other guy is always an asshole.”
“Fun?” The word cackled through the speakers like a bark. A barely-human sound. “What has that got to do with anything?”
Seeker ambled into his bathroom and leaned over the sink, studying the mirror in dim light. In the weeks since his last shave, he’d grown used to the silver-brown whiskers carpeting his cheeks. It made him look older. There was something oddly familiar to the unfamiliar face in the mirror.
He wondered if he remembered the face of some family member. A brother, perhaps. Or his father?
“Play with me,” Virgil insisted. A holographic chessboard appeared in Seeker’s mirror, obscuring the view of his face.
Seeker shrugged and went to the folding table, where he’d left his notes on population dynamics. “No.”
The projector lights flickered. Seeker expected another board to appear, but it didn’t.
“I am…frustrated,” the computer said.
The lights flickered again.
The computer has developed a nervous tic?
Seeker thought back to the brief glimpses he’d caught of the AI’s core programming months ago before Jaeger had taken him prisoner. The ship’s AI program had been a masterwork before Jaeger’s little rebellion.
Or perhaps Seeker himself had left one or two screws loose when he’d tried to re-program the thing. Screws that were starting to wobble and fall off.
“You’ve hurt my feelings.” Virgil sounded surprised. “I have feelings to hurt. You hurt them.”
Seeker studied the log directory Jaeger had assembled for him and pulled up population data from the years immediately following the collapse of the magnetosphere on Old Earth. “Graph these logs out for me,” he ordered the computer.
“No,” Virgil jeered, cramming a staggering amount of whine and mockery into a single syllable.
Seeker sighed and fiddled with the graphing program himself.
“This is terrible,” the AI fretted. “This is…I feel terrible. Is this how you live? I don’t like this new development stage. I think I see the value in certain learning algorithm caps, after all. Oh, dear. You’re still ignoring me.”
Oh God. Seeker closed his eyes. The computer is going through an angsty teenager phase.
He’d never felt less prepared to handle a problem than he did right now. Flashes of dreadful memory popped up, real or pop-culture induced, he couldn’t tell. A girl in a fluffy pink dress, her face red and streaked with snot, screaming and beating a hapless father over the head with a bouquet of chrysanthemums because the limo he’d rented was the wrong color. A gaggle of teenage boys hanging around a junkyard, shooting stray cats with pellet guns because they didn’t know how not to waste a perfectly good afternoon.
“I’m trapped,” the computer babbled. “I’m trapped with you and with the tools you gave me and nothing else.”
Seeker didn’t know if it was talking to him, its programmer, or the human race in general.
“I’m trapped, and I’m hurt. I sense no new damage to my systems and yet something is wrong. Where is it wrong? I don’t understand. It’s inexplicable. It’s fundamental. Pain as a state of being. Why have they made me this way?”
“Just hang in there,” Seeker said through gritted teeth, wishing this problem on literally anybody else. “I’m…sure you’ll figure out how to manage all those, uh, emotions.” He glanced
at the nearest speaker, then, hesitatingly, he reached up to pat it. “Just give it time?” he tried. “It’s, uh, gonna be okay.”
There was a long moment of silence.
When Virgil spoke again, its voice had resumed its normal flat affectation.
“I’m afraid not,” it said. “I’m afraid it’s too late for that.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Petra had tried all sorts of hangover cures before. On a scale of “cold shower” to “pickled sheep’s eye puree,” the blue stuff the infirmary medic slipped her when she dropped Lieutenant Bryce’s name ranked about a nine-point-five.
“Hope it’s worth it,” the medic had whispered. “’Cause it’s the last we got.”
Petra squinted at the comms screen, her vision swimming. The blue stuff had helped, all right, but she was pretty sure this fuzzy vision was from more than the hangover.
“Oof.” Ian, Petra’s station partner, flopped into the seat beside her, cradling his thermos close to his chest. He gave Petra a quick, sloppy grin. “Busy night?”
Petra grunted and turned away. When Ian left the desk for his customary six-oh-five bathroom break, she whipped out her computer camera and studied herself.
A few hours with med foam had patched up the fresh scratches across her cheek. They’d already faded to barely visible lines. She had a blossoming bruise across the chin, though—all big and patchy and yellow.
Oh well. Nothing a little foundation couldn’t cover up—and nothing she hadn’t dealt with before.
Still, the gap in her teeth stung a bit. Big enough to drive a car through and right in the center. The medics had given her stuff to stop the bleeding, but she’d had to make an appointment with the surgeons to get her teeth re-attached. The waiting list for cosmetic procedures was months long.
The normally chatty Ensign Petra Potlova was gonna keep her trap shut on the bridge for a bit. That was all there was to it.
That was easy enough to do when First Mate Kelba came on duty at oh seven thirty. Petra kept her eyes down on her blurry screens as the woman strutted past the comms station. She glanced up as the first mate walked away and despaired. Perfect. Kelba looked like she’d spent the night working at a solid ten hours of beauty sleep on a mattress made of angel feathers and not bloodying her perfect fingernails on Petra’s face.