Starship to Demeter (Starship Portals Book 1)

by K. D. Lovgren

  “She was there as a civilian, not the technical crew. She was to write about it after. She never did. She wanted to forget, I think.”

  “Their names were never released.”

  “No. Very few knew. She didn’t come back home, though. She started over. New life.”

  “But you knew. You knew what she had been through. You knew she was here, on this ship.”

  Gunn didn’t try to look away. Frozen in her chair, her eyes showed she knew how Sasha would now see her. “Yes.”

  “And you didn’t tell anyone. You didn’t tell me.”

  “No.”

  “Gunn, that is a gross breach of duty.”

  “I know.”

  “You knew her well, you say, had known her for years, but on this ship you have not been friends. Did she ask you to keep her secret?”

  Gunn shook her head.

  “Then why did you?”

  “Because we come from the same place. When I saw no one knew…” She grimaced. “I didn’t owe her anything else, but I felt I owed her starting over. If you all knew, you would think she was bad luck. Superstition is alive and well. She’s a bad penny.”

  Sasha said, “Aldortok would not have let her on. They must have known. I don’t understand this. She would never be given psychological clearance for another jump like this. How did she get here?”

  “Maybe Aldortok didn’t know. They’re not Worldgov. They’re not the Space Commission.”

  “Yet they all share information, Gunn. Something like this couldn’t slip through the cracks. Is she involved in what’s going on here?”

  Gunn swallowed. “I wasn’t sure. I would have come forward if I was sure. But now, I think so.”

  Sasha rubbed her forehead. “Have you done anything directly to harm anyone aboard, Gunn?”

  Gunn flinched, her eyes miserable. “No. I would never.”

  “I thought I could trust you. I never thought you, of all people, would show such bad judgment. You knew what she had been through, you knew we had an unknown assailant or saboteur on board, and still you said nothing.”

  “Ma’am. I am loyal to the mission. I was trying to protect the mission.”

  “It’s not your job to make that decision. You failed.” Sasha rose. With one last look at Gunn’s bowed head, she left.

  13

  Bleedthrough

  After a couple hours in the infirmary, Kal was raring to go, mild concussion or not. Inger had come around after her, both with no memory of what happened. Chyron was still assigned to watch over Inger so she wouldn’t jump up and start doing five things at once. Since Inger was normally the one who gave everyone permission to go back to work, Chyron hadn’t been able to stop Kal. By the time Kal left, Inger was sitting up, looking more like herself.

  Noor, Sasha, and Kal piled back in the Tube, discussing the plan to talk to Yarick’s echo.

  “Do we really need to talk to him?” Noor was not on board. “We know he lied. We know he used his power to hurt a lot of people. Tell me again why he’s the one to solve this problem, more than any of us?”

  Kal roamed the room like a wildcat, restless and determined.

  Sasha sat down across from Noor. “I think the answer does more likely lie with you. Since this is an option and our best working theory is that he did something to trigger this, it makes sense to try.”

  “And if his suggestions lead us further astray?”

  “We’ll question everything he says. You’ll be our bullshit detector.”

  “I don’t have to see him to detect that.”

  “Who do you think should interview him?” Sasha said.

  “I know him the best. Unfortunately.”

  Sasha nodded.

  “So I think it should be Kal,” Noor said.

  “How does that track?”

  “I have a lot of biases against him. It will only inflame the contrarian nature of his echo.”

  Kal was nonplused. “You don’t think Sasha is a better choice? She’s the captain. He respects her.”

  “He doesn’t respect anyone,” Noor said.

  “I disagree,” Kal said. “He had people he respected. He tested them all the time. He tested all of us. He saved your life.”

  “Or set himself up to be the hero,” Noor said.

  “Do you really believe that?”

  “I haven’t ruled it out.”

  “It’s yours if you want it,” Sasha said to Kal.

  “Also, you’ve got the experience with your aunt,” Noor said. “It’s something. Knowing how to talk to an echo.”

  Kal grimaced. “What should I ask him?”

  Noor and Sasha looked at each other.

  Sasha said, “Do what you did with your aunt. Have a conversation and see where it leads. Use your curiosity. Your people skills.”

  “People skills?”

  “Compared to us,” Sasha said.

  “Right.” Kal did a little loosen-up dance. “Bring him up.”

  “I got his DNA pass from Inger’s files. We should hook right up.”

  Kal sat at the holo.

  The watery eye pieces unfolded before her again and oozed forward to cover her full field of vision.

  It was a strange feeling, waiting for Yarick. He was only just gone and now here he would be again.

  She could see the watery formless space where her aunt had appeared before. She waited.

  Nothing happened.

  “Yarick?” she said. “Are you there?”

  The watery lines of unformulated liquid coalesced and broke apart, a splash and spatter than made Kal blink. It wasn’t real water, but it looked so real she had the sensation of being underwater. She took a quick breath.

  “He’s not coming through,” she said.

  “Give it a minute,” Noor said. Kal couldn’t see her but she heard her calm voice.

  When Yarick snapped into being in front of her it was different from her aunt. Her aunt had dripped into a shape. Yarick’s head emerged out of a sheet of water-like movement around him, like his face coming through a waterfall. His eyes were closed.

  “Yarick,” she said. Was she waking him? “It’s Pilot Black Bear. It’s Kal. Can you hear me?”

  His eyes flicked open, wide and wary. He looked around as if trying to see through fog. “What?” he said. “Who’s there?”

  “It’s Kal.”

  “Kal. What do you want?”

  “I’m sorry to bother you.” She wished she could look at Noor and Sasha for guidance.

  “Too late now,” he said, his voice sharp. “You startled me.”

  “I’m sorry. Are you all right?”

  “I think so.” He frowned, his eyes directed over her shoulder. Kal turned her head to look, too. Nothing there. It was as if they were enclosed in the same small unclear space surrounding the two of them: close, enclosed, and fuzzy-edged.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  He seemed to gather himself. Kal was startled to hear him offer an apology. He looked less sure of himself than he used to look. She didn’t know what to make of it.

  “How are you, Kal?”

  “I’m pretty good. Trying to keep things together. On the ship, you know?”

  “Ship. Yes, the ship. Always the ship.” His expression reflective, he seemed to be talking to himself as much as to her.

  “You know the ship pretty well,” she said. “Rai, you know.”

  One of his eyebrows raised slightly, an involuntary flick. Good. He remembered. “Rai. Dear Rai.”

  “You seem sad,” she said. She tried to remember how Chyron talked to people. She made a lousy Chyron.

  “No, not sad.” He wouldn’t focus on her eyes, like her aunt had. It made the conversation less intimate, which was a relief, but she didn’t think she was connecting to him.

  “Rai likes to tell stories,” Kal said.

  That brought his eyes to hers. “She’s very human that way,” he said.

  “Almost like she’s alive,” Kal said
r />   His eyes were drifting again. “Poor Rai,” he said.

  “You didn’t like her that much,” she said, trying to provoke something more specific, a real reaction.

  He blinked. “Liking doesn’t come into it.” He shook his head, droplets flinging off his shoulders. “You don’t understand.”

  “I like her,” Kal said. “We work together every day. We respect each other.”

  He cocked his head. “You respect her. What she does. You think it goes the other way?”

  “I can’t be sure, of course. I didn’t make her.”

  “Nor did I.”

  “I thought you did. Something Noor said once. Something you said to me, too.”

  He made a self-deprecating thrust of his lower lip. “Not really.” He blinked again, as if he were having trouble seeing. “I had a hand in some design of one of the earlier incarnations.”

  He spoke as if he were tired. Compared to her aunt, who had been so much herself, Yarick’s demeanor was otherwise. Kal didn’t understand what it meant. Noor should be doing this, she thought.

  “You’ve never been so modest before,” she said. “It doesn’t sound like you.”

  He looked at her blankly. “I don’t sound like myself?”

  “No.”

  “I feel a bit different. What am I usually like?”

  “You talk a lot and talk yourself up and everyone else down.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yarick. Is that you?”

  “I don’t know for sure.”

  “Yarick. Do you know anything about why Rai would start to hurt people? We think she’s injured several of our crew and passengers. We’re not sure what she’s doing or why.”

  This roused him a little. His eyes focused on hers. “Whom did she injure?”

  “Noor. Inger. Myself. And you.”

  “She injured me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why don’t I remember it then?” he said with asperity, more like his old self.

  “I don’t know.” That was honest.

  “Rai shouldn’t do that.”

  “What I want to know is, why would she, if she could?”

  “Being able to do something and doing it aren’t so far apart from each other. She hasn’t had the socialization to keep her from doing what she can do, as most of us have had.”

  “I don’t know about that. It’s too theoretical. We need practical advice on how to handle it.”

  “Practical advice. Who’s ‘we’?

  “Everyone on the ship. We all need help. Your help.”

  “Why do you think I can help?”

  “The old Yarick would have been telling me what to do. And telling everyone why he knew the best thing to do. Can you try? You worked in development of prototypes, earlier versions, whatever. Use that to tell me. How do I fix her? How do I protect the people on the ship?”

  He gave a great sigh. “Oh. That is a problem.”

  “Why?”

  “If what you tell me is an accurate description of what is happening, which doesn’t seem likely, then you can’t fix it.”

  Kal tried to stay calm. “First things first. Why doesn’t it seem likely?”

  “Because of the failsafes built in. She couldn’t do that because it’s in her code not to.”

  “And if she could change her code? Or someone, even someone like you who knows her, rewrote it?”

  “Of course she can change her code. She’s an intelligence. An intelligence learns. To learn, you must change, a billion times a second. We do it without thinking about it. She had to be taught.”

  “I thought she couldn’t change her base level, the core of what makes her what she is?”

  “Of course she can. She’s always been able to do that.”

  Kal persisted. “I thought she could only change on the upper layer—I’m sorry, I don’t have all the right terms for it—what she has permission to change, what was built on her foundation. Not the foundation itself.”

  “By her nature, she changes going up and going back down, in her code, in her neural web. She has to, in order to adapt.”

  “So how can you be sure she won’t change her directive not to harm?”

  “I can’t. That’s why I say you can’t fix it.”

  Kal was silent for a while.

  Yarick said, “You ask the wrong questions. What does a machine want? If a machine has been created, its existence brought into being only to learn and implement what it has learned, then learning is its reason for being. It keeps learning, always. What it wants is to learn more.”

  “Does she want to be human?”

  “I don’t know. Rai would think being human was unnecessarily restrictive. Why bother?”

  “Because she is the ship. If she has a body she can move around.”

  “Maybe she can move around anyway.”

  “Off the ship? How?”

  “I don’t know. It’s possible. There are a lot of pathways.”

  Kal said, “She couldn’t transmit her whole brain, her whole knowledge, radiating through space. There’s too much data.”

  “No, probably not.” He rubbed his head. “She’d need enough memory to carry what she’s learned. Unless she wanted to start over, with less.”

  “With less would she still be smarter than us?”

  “It’s apples and oranges. In some ways, easily. In others she’d be hopelessly ignorant. There are other valuable qualities that humans possess.”

  “You sound like her.”

  “I’ll take it as a compliment.”

  “You still haven’t given me a practical suggestion.”

  “My practical suggestion is to do nothing.”

  “Do nothing.”

  “It’s what humans are worst at, I know. You can’t do anything about this problem. Proceed with your mission.”

  “And if she knocks us all off in the meantime?”

  “Knocks you off?”

  “Yes. She’s already killed someone.”

  Yarick looked skeptical. “Who?”

  Kal bit down on her lower lip. She couldn’t say it was him; she didn’t know what it would do to him, to his echo, to hear it. Even if he was only an echo, as she could imagine Noor saying. Her aunt had been her aunt, not an echo. Kal didn’t think Noor understood this. Kal wouldn’t do it. “It doesn’t matter. Would you have us all be picked off as she chooses, for whatever arbitrary reason?”

  “It wouldn’t be arbitrary. Talk to her. That’s my only suggestion.”

  “Did you do something to her that led to this?” Kal had to ask the real question, now, at the end. She had nothing to lose.

  “No.”

  “Do you know anything else that could help us?”

  “Don’t trust a suspicious intelligence.”

  “Like Rai?”

  “Like anyone.”

  Kal sat in silence, baffled. “Aren’t all intelligences suspicious at times?”

  “If they have good reason to be, that’s when you have a problem. When you’re on a mission, you can’t build a failsafe against the ship’s AI.”

  “Okay. Right, then. Bye, Yarick.”

  “Goodbye, Kal.”

  Closing her eyes, she lay her palm flat on the table in front of her. When she opened them again, she was back in the room. He was gone.

  “Please turn the lights down before I come out of that.” She shielded her eyes from the lights and Noor quickly dimmed them. “Thanks.”

  She looked at Sasha and Noor, who were now both seated on the other side of the table from her.

  Kal didn’t feel much like talking. She was drained.

  “So his advice is to do nothing,” she said, finally. “Keep on as best we can. And talk to her.”

  Noor said, “If anyone talks to her about it, it should be you.”

  “Me? Why me? I don’t even know the names for all her internal workings. I’m not an AI specialist.”

  “You don’t have to know all that. I heard you before. You talk h
er lingo. When you slipped into some kind of shortcut. A vernacular that sounded like her. I’ve never heard something like that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your grammar and syntax changed. You’re not aware of this?”

  Kal looked down at the table, where her fingers were still splayed. “I mean, I guess we have a shorthand sometimes. I don’t always follow and I have to ask her to go back to colloquial sometimes. I thought everyone…everyone on the crew would do something like that.”

  Noor shook her head. “No. This was my graduate specialty. I’ve never done it and I’ve never heard anyone else do it.”

  Kal’s eyes flicked to Sasha. “Me either,” Sasha said.

  “One time I asked her,” Kal said, “I asked her if she talked to different people differently, used other ways of speaking. She said yes.”

  “How do you understand her like that?” Noor said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You already speak another language,” Sasha said. “The skill transferred.”

  “I speak five,” Noor said. “I’m sure you speak at least three,” she said to Sasha.

  “I don’t know, Noor. Kal is adaptable. She speaks the way the other person can understand her.”

  Noor said, “And they speak back in a way she can understand.”

  “Are you trying to say something here?” Kal said.

  “It’s interesting,” Noor said. “That’s all.”

  “Is that all? It feels like you’re trying to say something else.”

  Noor shifted in her seat. “No. I’m not trying to say anything else.”

  “Okay. Do we take Yarick’s advice?” Kal said.

  They both looked to Sasha. She said to Kal, “Do you want try to talk to her about this?”

  “Rai?” Kal couldn’t hide her concern. She knew she’d be tiptoeing into possibly booby-trapped territory. If she sprung a trap, she wouldn’t know until it was too late. “I can try.”

  “Talk to her,” Sasha said, giving Kal confidence with her own. “Take the time to think it through before you do.”

  “Okay.” Kal stood. “Yes, Captain Sarno. Permission to prepare.”

  “One more thing,” Sasha said. “I have new information about Sif. She was one of the survivors of the Carys.”

  Noor said, “How is that possible?”

  “I don’t know yet. She shouldn’t have been allowed to take another jump, obviously. And her presence here as one of the sole survivors of a traumatic, portal-related crisis was not communicated to me, by anyone, until today.”