by C. Gockel
Martham moved toward him. “Flaming Core. You look awful.”
“I’ll survive. Beck won’t though, if you don’t find her soon. She’s been out there over half her suit time now. If she hasn’t given up yet, she’s thinking about it.”
“It’s on,” said Liu, emerging from beneath his console. He clicked his feed on. “Emery, are you there?”
“Yes, Liu, is that you? I can’t tell you how good it is to hear your voice.” Emery’s voice broke slightly and Liu exchanged a pained look with Blick.
“Stars, Beck, I’m glad you’re there. We made a terrible mistake. Hold on, we’re coming out to get you—”
“No! No, wait,” said Emery, “Something is wrong with Alice. You’re all in danger. You need to—”
“We know. We have her now.”
“She didn’t hurt anyone, did she? I’m not too late am I?”
Liu closed his eyes and Martham turned away. “It was for the greater good,” shouted Alice. She subsided, hissing with pain.
“Just let us come get you, Beck. Is the— is Issk’ath still with you?”
“Issk’ath is here. It’s staying with me, Liu. It isn’t the threat you think—”
“I know. We were wrong. Blick tried to tell us, but we thought— I just wanted to protect us.”
“I understand,” said Issk’ath. “I am strange. Unknown. With motivations that might have been opposed to yours. I am not an acceptable risk. Not a friend.”
Liu was silent a moment. Emery saved him from awkwardness. “You don’t have to rescue us,” she said. “We’re in the infirmary. I’m just waiting for the door to cycle.”
“How?”
“It’s a long story. It’s such a relief to hear your voice, Liu.”
“I’m going to come down there, just in case something goes wrong with the door. We’ll get you out.”
“Okay. I’m just— don’t turn off the feed again, all right? I just want to hear voices. I need to know someone’s out there.”
“I’ll talk to you the whole time. I promise,” said Liu. “Just let me find the toolkit and I’ll be down.”
“I’ll play you out,” said Blick, his fingers slowly flicking through the feed. A moment later Airlock Lovers crooned over the feed. Emery laughed. “It’s good to hear you laughing, Beck. You had me worried a few hours there,” he said, closing his eyes.
“Shouldn’t be you,” said Martham as Liu opened the door. “You need to stay and fly.”
“The Wolfinger is on course. We won’t be in range for several hours. I don’t need to be here until then.”
“It’s safer here. Let me go.”
“Safer? What have I got to worry about? Oxwell’s here. You have her tied up pretty tight. And with that wound— I don’t think we’ll need to worry about her.”
“What about the robot?” asked Martham. “It could still be behind all this. Something made Oxwell snap—”
“It wasn’t the robot. Look, back in the equipment lock I was wrong. It has never shown any animosity toward us.”
“It’s a machine . It never showed anything toward us.”
“That’s not true. It seems to care a great deal about Emery. And us. It put out a potentially disastrous fire. It could have let us die. Or pushed Emery out into space these past few hours.” Liu paused for a second. “Besides, do you know anything about bypassing environmental controls?”
“No,” admitted Martham.
“Then I’m the only one who can get that door open if it’s stuck. So it has to be me. Nothing’s going to happen. Issk’ath had several chances to kill me, in particular, in the past several days, but I’m still here. Look after Blick. And maybe— do something about Oxwell’s eye. I know neither of us wants to, but she is a human being, Martham. Nothing should suffer like that.”
Chapter Forty-Eight
Liu had gone and Blick’s music had moved on to an old Cosmix dance hit. She could hear Emery humming softly through the feed. Alice twisted in her seat, trying to break free and groaning in pain. “You should take it out, Beatrice,” Blick muttered. “Liu’s right. I’ll try and do it myself, if you won’t.”
“She slaughtered most of our colleagues. You didn’t see Chione. It wasn’t a painless death. She doesn’t deserve an ounce of mercy.”
“She’s mad,” he whispered, as if it mattered. “She doesn’t know what she’s doing.”
Martham shook her head. “She does. She knows. She thinks she’s protecting the planet from the terrible humans. Or the humans from the terrible planet. I’m not sure. That part wasn’t really clear. But she knows she’s killing us.”
“Look, if you won’t do it for her, at least have pity on me. I can’t stand listening to her in pain. It’s not right.”
“Okay,” she said. “For your sake, then.” She looked around for the surviving medkit.
“Thank you,” sighed Blick. Martham watched as he reached a hand up to his wound to probe it.
“I should change your bandages.”
“No, take care of Oxwell first. I can change them.”
“You aren’t looking well,” said Martham.
“Yeah well, been kicking around the galaxy for sixty years now. I guess I’ll make it through another day or two. Probably just an allergic reaction to that rodent’s quills. If it were going to, it would have killed me by now.”
“Unless it’s an infection.”
Blick closed his eyes and nodded. “Well, we still have Oxwell. Maybe she’ll find an effective antibiotic.”
“There’s no antibiotic,” groaned Alice. “The planet doesn’t want us. It’s fighting us off.”
“The planet didn’t murder Al Jahi or Leroux or the others,” snapped Martham even as she disinfected her hands, “You did that all on your own. Slaughtered good people for no reason.”
Emery’s voice was anguished over the feed. “She did it then? I was too late. Why, Alice? Why do you think this is the only way?”
“It’s my job to find a cure for organisms so bent on breeding and consuming that they destroy their host. Other lifeforms find their limits. They stay at sustainable levels. Not us. We kill our host planet, wring it dry and then move on. We’re that organism. I’m the cure. Ask your friend. It knows. It did the same thing for its people.”
“I did not, Oxwell. My people are not destroyed. Their data is not dispersed. They continue within me.”
“Yes, well we don’t have that luxury. If you hadn’t existed when your people swarmed, what would have happened?”
Martham shook her head and selected some tools from the med kit. “They would have overcome or they would have died,” she said. “Look up from your microscope once in a while. This is one thing Emery and I can agree on. We overcame. We adapted. Did you ever stop to ask yourself why other animals stop breeding once they reach carrying capacity?”
“Because they have no alternative,” said Blick, “Once they go over that level, they starve or communicate diseases and die off until they reach sustainable levels again.”
“We didn’t,” snarled Alice, “we just kept going.”
“Because we could ,” said Martham. “A cow can’t grow its fodder. It can’t increase yield by purposely breeding hardier grain. It can’t irrigate its land. It can’t cut forest to make more farms or develop pesticides to protect its crop. It doesn’t create vaccines and antibiotics to cure cow plagues.”
“It also doesn’t drown in its own filth or slaughter other cows to protect its fields or—”
“You’re missing the point. As usual. We beat our limitations. We increased our carrying capacity. It isn’t a failure. We’ve just adapted supremely well to our niche. We learned how to grow resources in the most inhospitable environments. We learned how to survive not just one or two deadly diseases, but thousands. We made technology that allowed us to exist where our biological bodies would fail. Space being one of those places. And we spread out. We overcame again. You think that we’ll repeat the mistakes of Earth. That w
e’ll overrun this planet and move on again. I don’t know the future. Maybe we will. Several centuries from now. But we’ve lived in a habitat the size of a minuscule fraction of our home planet for sixteen hundred years. We didn’t destroy it. We aren’t packed in without room to move. We aren’t starving. We’ve solved our waste problem. We know better . And if we forget— the system is self-balancing. There is no morality in nature. We are not evil for settling the planet. We are not good for drifting through space for another twelve centuries. There is only live or die. If we fail to overcome our consumption problems, we will die. Or leave again. It’s that simple.” She hung her tools beside Alice and put the bandages into her chest pocket.
“And the other life on the planet that we destroy in the meantime— it’s what? Worth less than ours?” spat Alice.
“You’re mixing morality into it again. It’s not a question of worthiness, it’s a question of adaptability. They either adapt to our presence or they die. As we must adapt to theirs or we die. You and Emery have been pointing out that everything on the planet could possibly kill us. And will. Refugees, remember? Not conquerors.”
“It’s wrong , even if you deny it—”
“It’s not worth arguing,” interrupted Blick. “She’s mad, Beatrice. And in pain. Take out that thing and put her out. I can’t take twenty-odd more hours of this.”
Martham nodded. “Okay. Going to shut off my feed then. You too, Blick. We can hear you Emery, but this is not going to be pleasant.”
“I understand. I’m better now. I can hear Issk’ath, and Liu is just outside the door.”
Martham clicked it off. She unplugged Alice’s filament from the port at her neck. “Are you ready?” she asked.
“Yes,” sighed Alice.
Martham picked up an extractor and braced herself on the back of Alice’s chair.
“Be gentle,” warned Blick.
“I don’t want to be gentle,” growled Martham. “She’s doled out enough cruelty to warrant this. I’m only doing this for your sake.”
“She’s a person , Beatrice. Morality might not exist in nature, but it does between us. A little kindness won’t hurt anyone.”
Martham clenched her teeth together and carefully fitted the extractor around the stick in Alice’s eye. Alice shrieked at the tiny movement the stick made despite Martham’s honest effort to keep it still. “Please,” she moaned, “please let me do it myself.”
“There’s no way I’m freeing your hands. You’ll just try to kill the rest of us,” said Martham.
“You have a weapon,” whined Alice. “I’m unarmed and wounded.”
“Al Jahi had a weapon too, but you managed to dupe her somehow.”
“Even if I somehow managed to get free, I wouldn’t bother trying again.”
“Why? Having second thoughts?” Martham sneered.
“No. I needed you all dead and the robot gone. It’s no good if some of you are left, even if you promised to hide the planet, I could never believe you. And even if I managed to get one of you, the rest of you would kill me before I could finish it.”
“Flaming core,” breathed Blick.
“You see?” asked Martham, “This is the creature you begged me to be kind to.”
“No,” said Blick slowly, “I wanted you to be kind for your own sake. So you could remember this without the extra weight of shame. It will be hard enough without that.”
Martham was silent for a long moment. Then she began untying Alice’s hands. “One hand. Five minutes. That’s all.”
“Thank you,” cried Alice. Martham backed away and pulled her weapon from her belt.
“I know you can’t see out of one eye, but I have the jolt gun on you. Don’t do anything except pull the stick out.”
Alice raised her free hand carefully, gingerly touching the extractor’s handle. Blick turned his face away and shut his eyes. She blew a long stream of air out and gripped the extractor. Martham flinched but didn’t look away. Another long breath in and then a breathy groan and she dragged the wood slowly from her eye. Alice’s arm shook with the effort, the suction of the stick fighting her. The end popped free at last, followed by a bubble of pink fluid that sat on Alice’s eye. Her hand dropped into her lap. After a moment, she said, “May I have a bandage?”
Martham realized she was grinding her teeth. “Uh, yeah, of course.” She fumbled with the bandages in her pocket. Alice screamed and Martham’s head shot up just as Alice plunged the stick into her own thigh, still gripping the handles of the extractor.
“Dose her, Martham,” shouted Blick, “She’s going to kill herself.” He unstrapped from the chair and careened over to the medkit, pulling out the last dose of Rem. Martham struggled with Alice, wrenching the extractor away from her. It went spinning off to a corner of the room as she wrestled Alice’s arm back into the restraint. Blick slammed the Rem syringe into Alice’s port and plunged. After a few gasping moments, she stopped struggling. Her head lolled back and her arm went slack between Martham’s hands.
“Stars,” Blick managed between heavy gusts of breath, “another hour like that and you might be right, I may not last the other twenty.”
Martham looked up as the door slid open. Liu slid through. “I expected the first scream when you turned off the feed, but the second— I thought there might be trouble.”
“Only the trouble she’s caused to herself. Help Blick while I finish with her.” She finally fished the bandage out of her pocket.
“Where’s Emery?” asked Blick.
“Safe,” said Liu. “She’s just taking off the thermal suit.”
He nodded and sank back into the seat as Liu helped him. Martham finished cleaning Alice’s eye as well as she was able and sealed the bandage over her socket. She pulled herself down the chair to get a look at the wound in Alice’s thigh, but found none. Only a hole in her thigh pocket. No blood seeped out. She opened the pocket, looking for another hole in the interior of the pants, but found instead a lumpen green thing. She reached in to pull it out so she could see.
She held it in one hand and poked around with the other. “Well, the thigh stab was a bluff anyway. Or a mistake. She didn’t even make it through the pant leg,” she muttered.
Blick opened his eyes. He leaned forward looking at the green thing in her hand. “Martham, what is that?”
She looked over at him. “Hmm? Oh, I’m not sure. It was in her pocket. Stress ball maybe? Light’s not great in here.”
“Sorry,” said Liu tapping the console. The lights brightened. “Captain Stratton used to get headaches. We’ve— I’ve gotten used to running with the dimmers.”
Martham stared at it, rolling it unevenly across her palm. “It feels like fabric or leather. She got it good with the stick though, some kind of dust leaking from it.”
Blick squinted and she brought it closer. He stared at it for a second and then jerked back. “Masks!” he shouted, “Get the filtration masks!” He grabbed Martham’s hand. “Stay perfectly still, Beatrice. And turn your face away. Liu, get the biowaste bag from the med kit and hand it to me.”
Liu shot across the bridge and ripped the kit from the wall. He snapped it open and pulled a bag from its pouch. “Good,” said Blick as he took it. “Now tell Emery to put her suit back on. And tell her to get the masks from the lab.” He held open the mouth of the thick bag and slid it over Martham’s hand to her wrist. He twisted it closed around her arm and it suctioned to her skin.
“Ow. I don’t think it was meant for that,” she said.
“Just hang on. We’ll get your hand out of there. We just need to ask Issk’ath how. It said the neurotoxin won’t pass through skin. You don’t have any cuts?”
She shook her head.
“Good,” sighed Blick. “Maybe we’re o—” he froze as Alice began convulsing against the restraint straps.
Chapter Forty-Nine
“I’m sorry, Issk’ath,” said Rebecca. She scrubbed at the soot on its chassis with the towel. “What Alice di
d— was nothing like what you did.”
“Why do you iterate? You did not perform Alice’s actions. You did not agree with her conclusions.”
“But I am friends with her.”
“Friendship should never be a matter for iteration. And I disagree. What I did was akin to what she has done. We had different motivations. I did it to save my people. She is doing it to save something other than her people. But the end result is similar. The casings are broken.”
Rebecca pulled gently on its wings and they clicked open for her. She rubbed the towel over the shimmering net of lights. “But your people’s minds are intact. You’ve kept them. Alice did not. My colleagues are gone.”
Issk’ath’s body whirred and the wings slid closed as it compressed. It stared at her and it chirped. “Is that why you mourn, Emery? Because you believe when the data disperses it is gone?”
“Isn’t that why you keep them? So that it doesn’t— evaporate?”
“Evaporate. That is a fitting statement. Yes, the data evaporates. It transmutes into another form. It is not uncreated. When the casing dies, it is like bursting an earthen water jug. The water runs away, sinks, evaporates. This is what happens with the data. But it is not gone. It’s just no longer gathered the way that it was. The data, like the water, will someday return. In another jug, with other droplets. It will be rediscovered in the future. I keep my people because it is more efficient than chasing after those droplets of data. It is better than waiting for the rain. Like them, this metal is only another jug. Just a bigger one. And someday, this casing too, will shatter and the other Guardians as well, and all our data will evaporate. But I will still be Issk’ath. Just as you will still be Emery. And your colleagues are still themselves. Maybe, when next we are gathered, it will be in the same casing. And I would find that optimal.”
Rebecca shook her head. “But what she did was wrong —”
“I am still not confident in my understanding of how you judge right and wrong, but what she did was wasteful. She believes it necessary, but your colleague, Martham, has proved it is not. To me, if not to your friend. It has caused suffering but yielded no result. It is not optimal. Perhaps she will iterate. But that is her task. It is not yours. Your actions have been entirely different. It is clear that your colleagues have distrusted me. They have not enjoyed my presence. You must have known this.”