by B. V. Larson
“I’ll make sense,” she insisted, “and they’re rational—for the most part. For right now, they just need to listen.”
Turtle did not look like he was convinced. “I once heard an old guest say the word ‘human’ is synonymous with ‘regret.’ Watch your back.”
Neva shrugged. “I’ll do my best.”
“I’m going to check this location I got on Scarn,” Turtle said. “But if I’ve found him, what’ll I do? He could be raving.”
“At least you’ve dealt with these aliens before. United Tarassis sure as hell isn’t going to tell you anything you need to know.”
“Just once in a while, I wish I knew what I was doing.”
“Same here,” she said.
When Neva stepped out of the lift onto Deck 1, she could hear the rattle of a dozen chattering voices.
Following the noise led her to one of the control centers. Clusters of men and women, all wearing uniforms, paged through screens of code. They spoke to others elsewhere on the ship for guidance, calling questions or clarifications back and forth to each other.
She was a navigator, not a coder, so she hadn’t been invited to this party. It was one thing to calculate thrust and duration, it was quite another to devise a script to operate a bank of ancient engines. They were so old and past their expected lifespan they were brittle and metallurgically unsound.
A thousand scenarios had to be pre-engineered. What if number seven went out while six tried to compensate? Would that stress blow out the next in the line, then the next? When should they shut down? How great a risk should they take?
The questions and planning were infinite. No one could ever be one hundred percent certain they weren’t all destined to die the moment Tarassis lit up in space again, spewing exhaust and radiation behind her. Neva stood back and observed what they did and looked for who was in charge. The place seethed with movement and excitement. Quick shouts signaled one person or another’s need for information or assistance.
Three officers moved from one group to another, apparently providing some unity in the chaotic-looking process. One of them was a security chief.
Neva recognized her. She was Emma Venner, the woman in white who’d been in charge of Captain Stattor’s security detail the night he died. Her eyes swept the bridge, and she spotted Neva.
Venner’s eyes narrowed. She finished answering a question, and then came directly over to Neva.
Neva read the security chief as being tired and in a bad state of mind. Her mouth was tightly turned down, her eyes bleary and squinting—it was obvious.
Neva steeled herself. She had to spread the word. She was wearing her uniform and her bridge security pass, otherwise she would never have made it this far.
Venner examined these with a practiced eye.
“An unofficial navigator?” the woman asked her crisply. “We’re past that step. You’re not crew, so I’m assuming you can assist us in activating the ship’s drive?”
“I’m afraid I’m not trained for that, what I need to—”
“Then we have no use for you here. Please exit the bridge.” The woman was in a hurry and started to turn away.
“Give me a moment, Venner,” Neva insisted. “I know how we can save the people in the quarantined zones. When UT—”
“That has no relevance.”
“When UT agreed to allow an alien race to store its ‘people’ inside our brains—”
“Aren’t you supposed to be working in Chisolm’s office?” Venner asked, working her handpad. After a moment, she looked up. “Chisolm isn’t answering.” She was becoming alarmed. “Something is wrong there.”
“Listen to me,” Neva said, she was desperate now, “they fucked up the insert codes and—”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, and we’re dealing here with the fate of Tarassis.” Venner signaled, and a genderless combat synth stepped forward. The synth moved with precision. It struck Neva just below her cheekbone and knocked her back against a cabinet.
Neva thought she hadn’t been hit that hard, but when she tried to get up, her legs jellied and she dropped to the floor on her butt.
The Security Chief stood over her, both hands balled up into fists. Her mouth was an ugly down-turned U.
“When you can get up, I’ll have you marched to the brig and figure out how many crimes we can charge you with. In the end, we might find a useful purpose for you after all. The story of Stattor’s ‘accidental’ death hasn’t convinced everyone. And I could use an officially sanctioned assassin…”
To Neva, Venner’s voice seemed oddly loud... until she realized that everyone else on the bridge had fallen silent.
Venner looked away from Neva and saw what they were looking at: Scarn stood in the main entrance. He was dirty, stained, and stinking. Turtle stood behind him.
Scarn slouched a few steps onto the bridge and grinned asymmetrically. He played with a yellow can of J-9 in his hand. He tossed it into the air, giving it a single spin each time. Just behind him, Turtle stood with wide eyes, on full alert.
“Hey there, crew members,” Scarn said. He sounded like a drunk person. “You may have heard of me. I’m supposed to be dead.” He tossed and grabbed the can out of midair and pointed it at Venner, who still stood over Neva.
“You,” he said. “Don’t punish the messenger.” This time he didn’t sound drunk—he sounded mean. “Your mother never told you that?” He gave the J-9 another casual flip.
A small voice from across the room spoke. “Could you please hold that still?”
“Where did he get that?” someone else whispered.
J-9 was a radioactive propellant. The gas, if released, would be quite deadly in an enclosed area.
Scarn looked at Neva, still on the floor from being knocked down and gestured for her to get to her feet. In the meantime, Turtle threaded between people and moved to her side.
“Jackpot,” Turtle whispered to her. “Sort of….”
Scarn tossed the yellow can a little higher. It made two revolutions before he caught it off-center, bobbled it, and then got a grip on it.
“Oops.” He sounded drunk again. He tossed the J-9 again, one spin. “What I’m gonna do,” he said, “is practice my juggling skills—” He sent the can for another quick toss from one hand to the other and back. “—till this woman finishes telling you what she wants to tell you.”
“We’ll listen,” someone said. “You don’t have to do that.”
“Really, we will.”
“We’ll listen as long as you want.”
Scarn gave the can a double-spin. “You sure? All of you?”
All heads nodded, except for the synth guards. They were moving slowly, waiting for the signal to strike—but it didn’t come. The officers were too freaked out because one can of J-9 could kill all of them in seconds.
Scarn held the can in one hand, folded his arms, and leaned against the door frame.
“I’ll stand right here to be sure.” He wiggled the can a little. “Everybody lies these days. Have you noticed?”
Scarn pointed at Neva, who climbed to her feet. Everyone turned their focus back to her, and this time, they listened, even Emma Venner.
Neva ran through it for them—how the aliens were tracking them and transferring their people into ours, and how Stattor, Chisolm, and unknown others purposely mismatched the personality transfers to keep these people helpless and isolated in the quarantined areas.
“So,” she said when she’d finished, “we can’t move Tarassis yet because if we do, all the colonists who are deranged now will stay that way forever. We want to get them back.”
“I talked to these aliens,” Scarn added. “I’ve talked to them more than once, so has Turtle. We can’t be the only ones.”
He looked sternly around the group. A few of the psychonauts didn’t meet his gaze.
“That’s what I thought. Some of you know we’re right, but you never had the balls to do anything. Well, Captain Stattor is
dead now. You can admit the truth. We all can. We can live it.”
“We just need time,” Neva pleaded. “We’ll work with the aliens to resend their scans to us.”
“Wait a minute,” Venner said. She stepped near, her face full of arrogance and mistrust. “Let’s say we believe that you’ve figured out why people are getting zerked so often. As I understand it, these codes they’re going to resend to us are codes for what? For alien personality structures, right? You’re deliberately putting them back into our people?”
“It’s not that bad,” Scarn said. “I know when I’ve got an alien guest in my head. You can feel it. The thing is in there’. It’s mentally kind of itchy… but it’s quiet. And this is the only deal in town. The only way they’ll help us rescue our people. We’ve got to have alien cooperation. Resend the scans, put them in the right way, and hope it reorganizes the psychotic mess that Stattor gave them.”
“Why?” one psychonaut demanded. “They aren’t human. Why should we care if they live or die?”
“They’re intelligent enough to do what we’ve done here aboard Tarassis.
“How long will this delay take?” a voice asked.
“Loading a fresh copy of a compatible alien mind?” Turtle asked. “Not long. I just did it. With a solid team working on it… maybe two or three days—we’re talking about thousands of people. The hardest part will be digging them out of the quarantined areas without terrifying them or causing them to hurt themselves.”
Venner looked from one cluster of her people to another, and then back to Scarn. “We’ve listened to your story and it looks like most of the psychonauts believe you. That’s a shock, but there it is. You’ve brought it down to this: do we want to trust these aliens? Do we want our people back that badly? Or should we just write them all off and say screw these aliens? Half the colony might be mad, but we could make do with the rest.”
Scarn narrowed his eyes and did a high toss with his canister.
That was a mistake. Venner signaled and one of the synths reached out a telescoping arm and snatched it from the air.
Scarn looked stunned.
Venner looked at Scarn and Neva smugly. She spoke with care. “I’ve just received word that Chisolm has met with a terminal accident,” she said, “so it would seem that I am now the acting captain.”
A few of the crew gasped.
“Another accident?” demanded one of the officers “You’re not even crew—not really. You’re guest.” He pronounced this last word as if it was a curse.
“Have a care if you want to keep breathing, Commander,” Venner said, and the man quieted sullenly.
“Look,” Scarn said, “I just want to recover as many of our colonists as we can.”
“One question,” Venner said. “How long do we have before our crew and guests actively reignite the civil war?”
“Not long at all, from what I’ve heard.”
“Correct. Every hour this madness continues, the risk goes up. I don’t want to return to those dark days. Tarassis might never recover.”
“Then we should work very fast, shouldn’t we?” Neva suggested. She’d stood up, and Turtle was helping her toward the lifts. “Imagine having thousands of lost colonists return home to their loved ones, their minds functioning again.”
Venner considered her words carefully. “We’ll give you twenty-four hours,” she said at last. “If you can do what you say, we’ll know by then and you can continue. If you can’t, we’ll dispose of all three of you for trying to hijack Tarassis and redirect its course.”
With Scarn and Turtle still helping her, Neva led the way toward the exit.
Venner caught up with them at the lift entry. Two blank-faced synths followed close behind her.
“Neva,” she said. “I just want you and your little gang of thugs to understand that if you try anything with me—like I suspect you did with Chisolm—orders are already written up for you all to be thrown into the core. Just so we understand each other.”
“Chisolm was unfit,” Scarn said quietly, as though imparting a secret.
“Obviously.”
“It was more than that,” he said. “We wanted you to become captain.”
Venner blinked. She didn’t smile, but the downward U-turn of her mouth relaxed a little. Scarn was mildly surprised his ruse had worked.
“After what happened the night of Stattor’s death,” Scarn lied, “it was common knowledge that you were the one for the job.” He knew the best lies were compliments. They were always believed.
“I see…” Venner said. “Well, you play a dangerous game. Cool it down a few notches.”
“We will,” Turtle said. He’d always been quick to grasp Scarn’s schemes and support them.
Neva looked at them with wide-eyed surprise but said nothing.
The new default captain of Tarassis left, and they all stepped into the lift and slid away to the nearest probe center.
There was a lot of work to do.
Chapter THIRTY-THREE
Turtle looked out through the ports of the repair shuttle. He could see stars filling most of the black sky. One seemed brighter than the others. He wondered if it was closer than a light-year—it looked like it could have been. They had taken one of the shuttles out for an hour or so of quiet drift, to get away from the complex din inside every part of Tarassis.
“Venner and her crew have the re-transfers under control,” Scarn told Turtle. “The techs in the engine room are still wading through Tarassis code—so what else is there that two pieces of trashlife could do with that mess?”
Turtle dealt the cards, spinning them through zero-G to Scarn, who plucked them out of the air.
The game they played they invented when they were twelve, but by now the rules were an abstruse tapestry of possibilities and exceptions for every situation. It would be inexplicable to anyone who hadn’t played it for a decade and a half.
Turtle’s eyes darted over his cards; Scarn gazed at his without expression. They discarded and drew from these discards.
“I’m doing the Slime-ball Exception,” Turtle announced after studying them.
Scarn cursed and drew six cards.
“What are you doing tonight?” Turtle asked.
“Collecting.”
“I’m going to have an old-fashioned date before Tarassis changes course, or the guests start taking things into their own hands again. Who are you collecting from?”
“Remember Lance Graff? Tonight I’ve arranged to collect our fourteen thousand creds from him.”
“Tonight? Really? I thought we’d never get it back.”
“Time is short and conditions are deteriorating. If we wait, our chances of collecting are only going to decrease.”
Turtle put a three of clubs in the red corner of the board. Scarn looked sly.
“Graff’s a disgusting person,” Turtle said. “You ever hear what kind of implants he borrowed our money for?”
Scarn shook his head slowly as he studied his cards.
“Me either. I heard he once had an alien fish-thing sewed up inside him till it died. Something hallucinogenic about it when it decomposed.”
Scarn shrugged. “It’s half the money for our contracts.”
“Scarn,” Turtle said, “we don’t work for United Tarassis anymore. There aren’t any contracts to buy out.”
“You never know. And if there isn’t and we live through this, the money is that much more freedom.”
“No argument there.”
Scarn’s life had been simple: A.) Stay alive, and B.) Accumulate enough money to get out of the United Tarassis web.
Turtle’s purpose varied considerably since it occasionally involved his loss of self in his affections for women. “You’ll remember who’s going to be my dinner date. Iris Soquel.”
“Her? Again?”
During a recent introduction to the upper-deck guests, they realized that Iris had become a minor celebrity. She was often seen on the arm of powerful men.
Turtle’s handpad projected an image of her face in the air.
“I remember. I remember.” Scarn waved it away and Turtle turned it off. “You pined over her forever.”
“I…” Turtle began, shrugging his massive shoulders. “I just want to see her over a few bites, you know. Just to see if there’s any magic left.”
“Magic?” Scarn scoffed. “The magic you’re talking about is that weird glow you feel when you’ve finally resigned yourself to being a piece of enslaved meat. And the amazing part? You know what you’re doing, but you still walk right into it. With the grin of an idiot.”
“Yeah, well… maybe. But this time I just want to see, Scarn. Maybe I’ll figure out that I was deluded.”
“What was your first clue?” Scarn asked. “That she’s married three guys so far? Seriously.”
“Or maybe if there is something special…” Turtle said. He was examining Iris on his handpad again, and seemed to be drifting.
“Then what?”
“I just need to know if there is a ‘then what?’”
“Deluded and enslaved. Turtle, don’t do this. With the conditions on Tarassis, please don’t become another casualty for us to have to look after.”
A red light blinked on the instrument panel.
“Shuttle 37, we have a problem. Please acknowledge.” There was a burst of static.
“They used the override,” Turtle said. He looked out at the rocky surface of Tarassis. “Maybe it’s something serious.”
“If it is, then this is the best place to be.” Scarn studied his cards and drew another.
“Scarn, if you knew you were most likely going to be tubed in the next twenty-four, what would you do?”
“My best to get out of it.”
“Say you got the word right now—twenty-four from now, and you’re out. What actual things would you do?”
“I’d wring the money out of Graff that he still owes us. Then I’d bribe a spacer to steal a shuttle and die off-ship in open space. It’s your bet.”
“I’d run amok,” Turtle said. “Follow the dictates of my DNA and spread my seed. Did you know that while you’re having sex, you can’t think about dying?”