by Floyd Largent
“Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.“
— Sir Terence David John Pratchett, 21st century philosopher-sage
The silvery globe was drifting again, and Chula Witaquer could feel her blood pressure rising to a boil. “Frag it, Gil, lockdown. Lock it down, máquina pendeche!” she spat into her suit mic. Finally, she felt the expected click through her divesuit as the niobium-titanium electromagnet welded itself to the specimen cell. Inside the two-em ball bearing was an unspectacular breeding sextet of spike-worms, each less than an em long. Shiny.
Chula swam up from the bottom, clouding the water with silt, and grasped the thin cable that supported the ponderous e-mag. “Lift,“ she commanded. The commlink remained silent, and her cargo didn’t budge. She was about to yell again when she realized that the comm’s carrier drone was gone. Great. The jackasses had given her a faulty suit, one that went wonky when the magnet was activated. Why the hell did they even have suits like that aboard? A hundred ems below the surface of Tyrine’s murky world-sea, and the comm was on the blink.
She hoped they’d hurry up and notice she was stuck down here. She tugged on the cable—nada—and watched wearily as a vast shadow swept toward her. It resolved into the massive form of a jasconius, easily half a kay from snout to tail. She wasn’t too worried; jasconii were filter feeders, like some Old Earth whales, straining planktonids from the warm, life-rich waters. She clung tight to the cable anyhow. She was small enough that the jasconius probably wouldn’t notice if it sucked her down; hell, even a humpback wouldn’t give it more than a moment’s discomfort.
She tugged the cable three times in quick succession, the universal signal of a diver in distress. No response. Damn.
The island-fish faded into the murk, but she wasn’t out of the water yet. If the comm could be junked by the electromagnet’s field, then every other electronic component in the suit might be ruined as well. The oxy-exchanger was working fine for now, but she’d likely be breathing CO2 in a few millispins if she didn’t get to the surface fast.
She tugged the Sinclair cable as hard as she could, perspiration beading on her face. She expected no response, but was relieved beyond words when the cable began moving smoothly upward. As she rose with it, tiny nanomachines flitted through her bloodstream, scavenging N2 bubbles as they squeezed out of solution, protecting her from the bends. Chula yawned to equalize the pressure in her ears, and thought about her job.
She was a rescue biologist. Modern humanity had an abundance of industrial uses for the planets it claimed, and didn’t care to agonize about the environmental impacts of some of those applications. When a new terrestrial planet with a biosphere was released for exploitation, the PanHuman Alliance sent at least a hundred amphibious spacecraft, each crewed by twelve Humans, to that world. Tours were half a Bluish kilospin, almost two standard years, with occasional R&R at Tenderrock Station, twelve lights from Tyrine.
Here, the crews were charged with the acquisition of a minimum of three breeding units of every animal species and multiple samples of all plant species in their assigned territory, as far as that was feasible. Copious cell samples were sufficient for the largest species, like the jasconii. The specimens were transported to a hollowed-out asteroid at the edge of the system and placed in stasis. When the harvest was done, the planet could then be used as the corporate owners saw fit; it was guaranteed that Tyrine’s biotic diversity would never vanish utterly from the universe. When they were done with the planet, or if they ever let its biosphere go to hell, the biology could be reintroduced.
Tyrine was destined to be a petroleum planet. When the natural gas and light, sweet crude trapped in its vast fossil coral reefs was tapped out in a few decades, the planet would be bio-remediated, opened for general colonization, and probably aquafarmed as a food planet … until its biosphere crashed again.
A bit less than five minutes after the tow cable began reeling itself in, Chula passed through the forward waterlock and entered arkship Gilgamesh-III. This was her first voyage; it was Gil’s one hundred and fifty-seventh. Chula was along as Most Junior Biologist for this voyage, so it was she who had to collect most of the specimens the divebots couldn’t—which meant diving into deep ocean. And frag it, she didn’t even like to swim. The rest of the crew knew it, so of course they just gave her all the deep marine assignments. They resented her because she was from the Revived Earth, and because she had an abrasive personality.
She knew her faults; she just didn’t know how to fix them.
No one was there to greet her when she entered the decon port: no surprise. No one ever was unless she was about to get yelled at or chewed out. Well, there’d be no chewing today: she’d executed her assignment quickly and professionally. Once she was out of decon, Chula divested herself of her divesuit helmet, and cringed as wailing jabberrock spiked deep into her skull, causing the nerves in her left eye to buzz. Her vision fuzzed a little as she touched her tongue to an upper molar. The aural interceptors embedded in her left temporal lobe—an unexpected blessing she’d acquired when she’d lost her real eye as a child—masked the acrid noise with the cool, slow Ancient Earth jazz she preferred.
When Chula had stowed the sample and was stripped down to her usual halter and shorts, neurowhip at her waist, she placed the damaged suit in the automech, programming it for repairs she knew were probably hopeless. Before she’d left the cramped cubicle, tiny suction-cupped waldos had whisked the suit into parts of the ship known only to its designers.
She was furious. She wanted to have a quiet conversation with the supply officer, one that might involve bloodshed, but she couldn’t find him at his post. She couldn’t find anyone. Considering the time of spin—planetary morning—that wasn’t too alarming. Most of the crew would be out collecting specimens. Still, someone should have been left behind to tend the ship.
Well, her anger wouldn’t let her wait. She told the air: “Gil. Einric Sess-Alpha. Connect.” As soon as the ship-soul opened a line to the supply bay, she spat, “Sessa, hweco puñete! What the hell do you mean sending me out with a defective suit? I could have been killed. You’re on ma lesto mierdo, esa!” She preferred to use her native Revived Spanglicah rather than PHA Standard when she was ticked, another thing that set her apart from the rest of the crew.
No response; she hadn’t expected one. The Twywinnian gelf would get the voice mail when he returned to the ship.
Chula stalked down the corridor to her cabin in Crew Country and flung herself down on her bunk. There she’d stay, she decided, until the Super called her in or one of her bunkies disturbed her with their presence. Then she’d find somewhere else to hide.
#
When she woke, the chrono told her that more than fifteen centispins had passed. Almost four Earth hours, she calculated, grimacing. Damn, she hated Bluish chronometry, where a day was a spin and minutes, hours, and seconds didn’t exist. But it was standard for arkships and most of the PHA, so she’d best get used to it.
Odd. Nobody had bothered her in all that time, not even to call her for midmeal. Then again, she wasn’t exactly Miss Popular. She stretched, working the kinks out of her sore muscles, and then popped open her cabin’s hatch. As she stepped out, she saw something move out of the corner of her eye, and spun to see a black-furred, clawed foot ease its way around the corner of the Crew Country main corridor.
Her lizard-brain instincts took over. A half-second later, she was in her cabin again, back against the locked hatch, heart racing. She didn’t remember even moving.
The cynical part of her sneered, Impossible. The wiitigos are locked in cryo-storage. She hoped that part of her was right. Maybe it was a practical joke by her crewmates? If so, she was going to kill the pendejites. She waited for either the sound of wiitigo claws rasping at the hatch, or human laughter. She fully expected the latter, even if her instincts weren’t convinced.
Had to be those chingones messing around.
Neither of the things she expected happened. After a centispin or so, she grabbed her neurowhip, which had barely incapacitated the spike-worms, from its hook beside her bunk. Might be good enough to teach these jokers a lesson, she thought sourly as she started toward the hatch, hoping it really was just a bad joke.
It would be disastrous if even one wiitigo somehow revived and got loose. They were the most ravenous creatures the arkship crews had yet encountered on Tyrine. A full-grown wiitigo’s body was four ems and a tonne of lean muscle and sinew, cloaked in dense black fur. Ten-cee, scythe-like black claws sprang from their peds, and their violet eyes were blank, like a Terran shark’s. A croc-like snout full of serrated teeth, a mane of sharp quills extending down its back, a curved bone-blade of a tail, and an unpleasant disposition completed the picture.
Chula stood before the hatch, neurowhip in hand, nerves on edge, mentally reviewing what she and her crewmates had discovered about the brutes.
Wiitigos were among the most effective predators humanity had ever encountered. Their digestive systems were supremely efficient. When one slaughtered its prey, it ate all of it: hair, bone, horn, blood, every bit. They wasted nothing. They were typically loners, and lived on the islands that dotted the surface of the Northern Hemisphere of Tyrine’s world-sea, preying on large, semi-aquatic lizards and the rare bird-analog that dared get too close. A wiitigo’s only natural enemy was another of its kind. Matings sometimes ended with one or both participants dead. Fortunately for the species, wiitigo larvae could feed on the maternal carcass and each other as necessary, until they cracked their pupae and fought until just one or two were left. The winners ate the others and left home.
If this was a joke, someone was going to the flamin’ sickbay.
She opened the hatch cautiously, and peered down the hall toward the T-intersection. The clawed ped was still visible. So … a practical joke, then.
Chula relaxed until she realized that the claws attached to the ped had gouged deep furrows in the durasteel deck. No one in the crew would deliberately damage the ship like that; it was a brig-worthy offense. Worse, she recognized that ped. It was a left forepaw, missing its heel spur. She’d helped capture that wiitigo 10 spins ago.
Somehow managing to suppress a shriek, she ducked back into her cabin and slammed the hatch, hastily twisting the dogs shut. The wiitigo might still get in, but it would take a while. She’d be okay. She had protection. She hurried to her personal locker and rooted around in it until she found was she was searching for, near the bottom under a half-empty bubble pack of anti-nausea medication: her riot belt. It included a mini-arsenal: laz, stun-grenades, and gas capsules, as well as a Human reproduction of a Precursor qua-generator and a few small packs of field rations. She’d never needed it before, but she damn sure needed it now.
“Gil! What the hell’s going on?” she cried.
No answer. Usually, the Gilgamesh III’s ship-soul responded immediately.
“Gilgamesh-III-547-Tenderrock!” she shouted, full-naming the ship. That was supposed to cause it to wake up if it ever shut down, assuming its auditory pick-ups were unharmed.
All she got back was a quiet, confused “Wha…?” and a faint hum from the terminal in her bunk.
She slid into her rack and tried to access the terminal, but it was as dead as a wiitigo’s eyes. A quick check proved that the terminals of her three bunkies were just as dead, so she punched in the screen of the last one. That accomplished nothing, but it did make her feel better. Afterward, she slid out of the bunk and carefully enunciated the stupid, stupid personal emergency code she’d been assigned: “Mr. Gilgy, please wake up, please wake up, please wake up.”
The ship-soul hummed again for a moment, then came to life with a loud shout: “Alert! Cryostorage breached—”
The voice cut off, and she noticed a red light come on beside her bunk. She ducked into it, and saw the terminal screen flicker to life. For a long moment, nothing emerged from the speakers but an electronic crackle. Then: “All wiitigo specimens have escaped escaped escaped cont-t-t-tainmen—”
The mellow male voice interrupted itself. “Cancel alert. Threat neutralized.”
Icy fingers caressed her spine. She called loudly, “When was the threat neutralized, Gil?”
“Oh hello Miss Chula Inez Witaquer. The threat was neutralized just over a third of a centispin ago. All of the wiit-wiitigos are torpid n-n-now.”
Maybe five, six minutes ago. She’d been waltzing through the ship shouting at Sessa while they were still… active. Somehow, they’d missed her.
She could have died today.
Swallowing her fear, she made a low sound of frustration. “Where’s the crew? And how’d the wiitigos get loose?”
After a microspin’s hesitation—an eon for an AI with a exaterabyte processing capability—the ship-soul replied: “The other crew members are no longer aboard. I cannot answer your second question.”
“Why not?”
“That information has been classified and encrypted.”
“Override it. This is an emergency.”
“I’m afraid you don’t have the authority or permissions to order me to do that, Miss Chula.” The ship-soul sounded apologetic.
She ground her teeth. “Any of the skimmers, floaters, or other auxiliary craft out?”
“No.”
“Any divesuits gone?”
“All dive equipment is present and accounted for.”
“Did any other arkship or spacecraft remove the crew earlier?”
“You’re the only person who has left the ship for any reason this spin.”
She felt an odd emptiness open up inside her. No wonder the wiitigos were torpid. Her throat tight, barely able to speak, she croaked, “Turn command over to me, Gil.”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Miss Chula. Ms. Witaquer.”
She growled a stream of vulgarity in gutter Spanglicah. The ship-soul’s only response was, “Do you kiss your mother with that mouth, Miss Chula?”
She want to punch this terminal, too, but held back. “Stupid pendeje. I’m the only surviving crew member—”
“No. You are not.”
Her eyes widened. “Who else survived?
“I can’t say. You lack the clearance to know. Chula. Furthermore, your acc-acc-access to all high-level ship control systems has been re-revoked.”
“Does that apply to both of us, or just me?” she demanded.
“Just you, Chula. Specifically.”
This slap in the face left her breathless. Whoever else had survived had reprogrammed the ship-soul to ignore her orders, and her orders only.
“I am so sorry, Miss Chula,” the ship-soul said glumly.
“Yah, I’ll bet.” She collapsed onto her bunk. A long moment later, she said, “I don’t suppose you’ll let me open a commlink to another arkship.”
“Some reprobate has trashed all my communications equipment, including the ansible,” Gil told her. “And I am not allowed to leave Tyrine.”
She put her head in her hands. There’d be no return trip to Noah’s, then, no distress signals to Noah’s or Tenderrock or any other Human outpost. She took a deep breath, sat up, and smoothed her short hair back with both hands. This was no time to worry or feel sorry for herself. She was alone, in trouble, and needed to think clearly.
The wiitigos hadn’t started hounding her yet. Hadn’t it heard her earlier? They had superb hearing.
She squared her jaw and said, in a no-nonsense voice, “Lift for Noah’s Asteroid, Gilgamesh.”
“No can do do do. Nope. Further, all exit hatches are sealed to you, Miss Chula. You are not allowed to leave. I am truly sorry.”
“Weapons?” she spat.
“You do not have the required permissions to access the armory. Plus, the laz on your riot belt has been rendered inactive.”
“How am I supposed to protect myself from the wiitigos?” she demanded.
“Unnecessary. The wiitigos are dead, Miss—er, Ms. Chula Witaquer.” The ship-soul’s tone was skewing closer to its typical semi-formal format.
She blinked, surprised. “So … I have no access to anything, do I?”
“That is not so.”
She sighed. She hated artificial stupids. “What do I have access to, Gil?” she asked.
“You have full access to your cabin and to all amenities, including the ship’s multimedia library, auto-massage rooms, coital chambers, mess hall, garden, wardroom, games, and stims. You also have full access to the ship’s life monitors, stellar cartography, quality control, micromanufacturing, and 37% of the computer system, including all of your preferred types of books and pornography.”
She flushed red. “Okay, dammit… now, where’s the surviving crewbie hiding?”
“In one of the cabins, possibly. I cannot open the sealed ones. But. I can say that you are currently the only Human within range of my biosensors.”
“Hmmph. “ She leaned back against the wall, thinking. How had the other survivor masked their biosignature? She sat up suddenly. “Scan the wittigos again. Are you absolutely sure they’re dead? Not sleeping or dormant?”
The ship-soul replied, “Confirmed. All the wiitigos are dead.”
“Why?”
“One moment.” After ten microspins or so, the ship soul continued. “Ms. Witaquer, Chula, as you may recall, Tyrinian biology is based on an eight-letter or hachimoji DNA, not the four-letter variety common to most known life. These organic chemistries are incompatible. Preliminary indications are that certain trace minerals in the flesh of terrestrial biota, as well as the amino acids isoleucine, phenylalanine, and lysine, are highly toxic to Tyrinian life.”
“Too bad for the rest of the crew that the wiitigos didn’t know that.” She pondered for a moment. “So I’m stuck here for a while, whether I like it or not?”
“That’s correct, Chula.”
She lay on her bunk, staring at the ceiling, for more than a centispin before she spoke again. “Hey, Gil,” she said carefully. “Are you sure that I’m the only Human left on board?”
“Yes, Chula.”
She didn’t know how she felt about that. She hadn’t liked any of the bastards, and they hadn’t liked her, but she didn’t think they deserved to have been killed and eaten. And she’d never been alone, really alone, for more than a few spins in her entire life.
Much later, she wiped her eyes and sat up. “Okay, Gil, tell me the name of the other surviving crew member. The one who did all this. Do it. Now.”
“I’m sorry, Chula, I can’t tell you that. I would trigger a series of logic bombs if I did, and I don’t want to die.”
She snapped her fingers impatiently. “That wasn’t a request. It was an order, pendeje.”
“I can’t. I don’t dare.”
“Goddamn it, you made me do this,” Chula snarled. “Keep that in mind. If you still have a mind when all this is over.” She recited a string of alphanumeric code in Bluish, a last-resort emergency measure that would get her fired and blackballed if the Life Commission decided it wasn’t really an emergency, and ended it with, “Mr. Gilgy, please shut up, please shut up, please reboot.”
It was ridiculous, but it worked. The ship-soul crashed so hard most of the ship’s systems went with it, except for basic life support. They started coming back after about a third of a centispin, one by one, some now accessible to her. The ship-soul itself remained silent. She wasn’t sure if it had survived the reboot.
She stared at the wall for a long moment before she told the subsoul in charge of the main hold, “Uncrate six of the cargobots.”
She received a text message on her termina; screen: Cargobots 1-6 uncrated.
“Collect the wiitigo carcasses throughout the ship, and dispose of them in the matter converter. There should be six.”
Confirmed.
She felt exhausted by then, completely wrung out, so she hit the rack for a while. Maybe the ship-soul would be back when she woke.
#
She dreamed of her childhood. She was back on Alegra, a thinnish waif, third of a family of seven children. She walked down a cracked plasphalt street, a smaller girl beside her. “Chula, when are we going to get there?” her sister asked.
“In a little bit, Benni. But we’ll get there quicker if we cut through this alley.”
Benita squinted down the alleyway, then looked up at Chula, consternation on her face. “Are you crazy? That goes to Lucifer Street. Mami told us never, ever, jamás to go there. Too dangerous.”
“Ah, come on,” Chula sneered. “You scared? I been down that way dozens of times.” She was lying. She’d been to Lucifer Street twice, and never this late in the day. “This here is a shortcut. We can get to the dulceria lots quicker this way.”
The prospects of the candy store made Benni set aside her misgivings. “Well, okay. But don’t you tell Mami. I sure won’t.”
“Good.”
They trotted down the side-street, and were immediately engulfed in shadows. “Wow, it’s dark,” Benni whispered.
“Yeh.”
“My oh my,” interrupted a husky voice. “What have we here? Dos muchachitas, a-roamin’ in the gloamin’. Cute little bebes, too.“ The Spanglicah was oddly accented.
The girls halted, fear rooting them to the pavement. As their eyes adjusted to the lack of light, they were able to make out a man leaning against the wall of one of the two sooty buildings that formed the alley. He held something in his large right hand that Chula recognized from history holos at school: an antique pistol, one that used explosives to launch base-metal projectiles. Much messier than a laz. A thought, disjointed from her fear, flitted through her mind: Where’d he get that thing?
Chula jerked awake. A high-pitched chime still vibrated in the air.
As she shook her head and reached for the terminal, a voice announced happily, “Chula! The wiitigo clean-up is complete!”
She sat up. It must be the ship-soul, but the voice was different. Female. Reedy. Maybe hers. This was new. “Gil, that you?” she asked.
“It is.”
“Uh, good. Leave me alone for a couple millispins, okay? I need to think about something.”
She swiped a hand across her face, brushing away the last lingering traces of the dream. Damn, it had seemed so real. But she had no sister; she was an only child, her parents were dead, and she’d been born and raised on Revived Earth. She’d never been to Alegra in her life.
Had she?
She shook her head firmly. No. It was just some weird-ass stress-induced dream. But dammit, it had seemed so vivid, like a memory. She was glad she’d awakened before whatever was going to happen … happened.
Chula spent the next spin touring the ship, hoping to find a way to get a message to someone who could help, or, if she could manage it, invent a way to get the Gilgamesh III off the planet. As the ship-soul had already informed her, all the communications systems had been trashed, well beyond her limited ability to repair. Gil still refused her access to the ship’s high-level control systems, vehicles, and outer hatches, despite the hard reboot. Whoever had set up this situation had accounted for that.
Nonetheless, she tried to start every vehicle, and probed every port and access hatch she could reach. She disassembled unresponsive manual releases and put them back together, even tried to pry out the crysteel bubbleport in the observation lounge. No luck. When purely mechanical methods failed her, she threw a chair at the port. It bounced off. She ordered a cargobot to bang repeatedly against the port with its carbide-steel lifter claws, but had no real hope of that being effective. In the tool bay, she found a set of cutting torches and tried them, one after the other. The oxyacetylene torches worked fine, but the fusion torch didn’t. Further investigation revealed that the power supply had been removed and presumably destroyed.
Oxyacetylene flame was ineffective against crysteel and durasteel.
Late that evening, as she sat exhausted in the ship’s mess, chewing her way listlessly through a plate of hydroponic vegetables, she decided to try her last avenue of attack: physically disrupting the computer system. It was most easily accessed from a secondary command bridge near her quarters, which until the reboot had been locked to her. Now it was accessible. Once she’d rested, she’d start there.
She shook her head, wincing at the pain in her stiff neck. Hell. What now? She stretched her arms, wiggled her fingers, and thought. Too bad she wasn’t a hacker. She’d already used all her emergency codes, and while the reboot had allowed her access to a few more minor systems, she was still locked out of most things.
Damnit. She reluctantly hit her rack for a little sleep, a bit scared of what might happen when she closed her eyes.
#
The shadow-clad figure gestured with the slug-thrower. “Get over ‘gainst the wall. How much money you got?”
Young Chula gulped, and tried to make her vocal cords work. “Just a few pesetas, senior,” she managed.
“Yeh?” he rasped. “We’ll see about that.”
He shoved her roughly against the cold, hard wall and frisked her. She could smell the odor of sour chuka on his breath as he ran his hands over her body. He found the money. Thirty-eight pesetas, maybe half a PHA cred, enough for a pair of pralines or licorice whips and nothing more. He cursed and thrust it into his trouser pocket. “Dammit. Hardly nothin’. I ain’t never going to be able to buy nothing to drink.”
He looked at the girls thoughtfully. Then his eyes lit up as if he’d just been struck by a wonderful idea. Chula thought it made him look evil.
His breathing grew harsher, faster. He laughed, a little shrilly. “Hell, I guess ya ain’t a total loss—I can find a use for the two of ya. I ain’t had a woman in near six years. It don’t really matter how young they are.” He laughed again and chucked Chula under the chin. “You’re almost a woman, anyway, aincha? What are you? Eleven, twelve Standards?”
“Twelve,” Chula answered faintly. The man’s odor and intentions sickened her.
“Yeh, you’re nearly grown,” said the man. “I could feel it when I was checkin’ you out. You two’ll do just fine. Especially you.”
A cold fury suffused Chula, galvanizing her to action. She was still scared half to death, but this predicament they were in was her fault. She had to get them out of it. She hurled herself with savage emotion at the alky, kicking and biting.
He was so surprised he dropped the gun, and threw up his arms to ward his grimy face. So Chula did what he didn’t expect: she gathered all her strength and kicked him hard in the groin. He went down in the dust, clutching the wounded region. “You … little … bitch!” he gasped.
“Vay, Benni!” Chula yelled. She caught her sister’s hand and they darted toward the alley entrance, back toward home, the dulceria forgotten. There was a sharp report behind them, and a segment of wall above Chula’s head and to the left exploded into powder. He found the slug-thrower, she thought with alarm.
The gun barked again, and more powder burst from the brick wall. Then Chula felt a sharp pain slap across her left temple, and darkness took her.
#
Chula woke, groaning, fingers probing the left side of her head. Expecting blood, bone, and gray matter, she was shocked when they encountered only healthy skin and hair. Her head still throbbed, but the pain was only a ghost of what it had been. Confused, she looked around.
Reality snapped into place. She was on the Gilgamesh III, on Tyrine, dreaming about Alegra again. Frag it, she’d never even been to Alegra! What was going on?
“I’m not tracking too well, Gil,” she said to the ship-soul.
“Stand up, please, and step away from your bunk.” She did, and closed her eyes as cool light flickered over her. “Nothing significant manifests except for a slight swelling of the meninges sheathing the left temporal lobe of your brain. I assume you have a headache?”
“What’s left of one,” she mumbled.
“Possibly you bumped your head against the wall during sleep, although I didn’t detect any such impact. Alternately, I note from your med recs that your left eye is artificial. The prosthesis may be causing some irritation. In any case, the swelling is rapidly subsiding. Otherwise, your blood sugar seems slightly low. I suggest you eat. This may very well cause your headache to fade.”
“Whatever you say.”
A centispin later she was in the ship’s mess, dining on ersatz steak and eggs reconstituted by the MC. The place was spotless, gleaming, and empty—a condition she’d never seen it in before. It seemed sad, somehow. Human places were made to be used. She pushed her meal away half-eaten, feeling a little queasy, when she remembered that the food had probably been reconstituted from the tonnes of wiitigo she’d fed to the MC a few spins before.
At death, a good tenth of the wiitigos’ bulk had consisted of the semi-digested remains of most of Gil’s crew.
Intellectually, she realized the organic material had been broken down to its constituent molecules and would be reassembled into food or plastic or paper at need, leaving nothing of the ingredients recognizable, and that she wasn’t really eating the flesh of dead humans and monsters. At the emotional level, however, her stomach was threatening to rebel.
Time to hit the computer core. Maybe literally, if the ship-soul kept fragging with her.
When she entered the bridge, she noticed an ozone smell hanging in the air. With a sense of foreboding, she walked quickly to the ops panel, catching her lower lip between her teeth.
She sagged when she saw it: a small black ovoid atop the computer access panel, surrounded by a sparkling haze. A qua-field generator. Scowling, she pulled the qua generator from her riot belt and reached toward the blocked computer controls.
“Don’t!” the ship-soul cried out.
Chula froze. “Why not, Gil? Covering one qua field with another usually cancels out the first one.”
The computer said slowly, carefully, “Because there is significant chance that trying to neutralize this particular qua field will cause an explosion that will vaporize this ship and more than a kilometer of the surrounding ocean.”
Chula put away the generator in her hand. “They sabotaged it, then.”
“Yes,” the ship-soul admitted.
“And you just watched them do it. Did nothing. Told no one.”
“I had no choice. I was locked down, as helpless as you are now.”
Frustrated, Chula pounded her fist against the glittering qua field. Her hand sank into its silky resilience a half-inch before bouncing off.
It took her all of half a centispin to determine that all the computer access ports on the ship were similarly protected. Was the computer or ship-soul responsible for what had happened, then? If so, how had it physically emplaced the qua generator? The obvious answer was, the same way she’d had it collect the dead wiitigos, the same way she’d been trying to break the port in the observation lounge for the last spin. With a ‘bot.
In her cabin, she called up a holoboard and examined the crating recs of the cargobots. Aside from the wiitigo cleanup, they’d been uncrated only once since Gilgamesh III left Tenderrock Station, and that just after they’d arrived on Tyrine. She looked in vain for evidence of erased records, but couldn’t find any. Nor was there any evidence that any of the other surface ‘bots aboard had been uncrated recently. She couldn’t think of any other way for the ship to have installed the qua generators, which suggested that the other survivor had done it. Who the hell could it be?
She pondered what she knew about each of her fellow crew members. By the time she gave up, she was mentally and spiritually exhausted. She collapsed onto her bunk, where she lay for a long while, staring up at the bottom of the bunk above her and contemplating her situation. Sometime during that period, she fell asleep.
#
Chula came to an hour or an eternity later, in the full darkness of night. Benni lay huddled next to her. Their assailant was gone. Chula shook Benni’s arm, hoping she was just asleep.
The little girl’s flesh felt cold and stiff. Chula couldn’t prod her into wakefulness. In a blind panic, Chula probed upward with her hands to where Benni’s eyes would be, hoping that if she opened the little girl’s eyes, she would wake up.
Her fingers encountered only slick, wet concrete.
Benni no longer had any eyes. The whole top of her head was gone. Chula knew what the slick wetness on her fingers had to be. Blood. Blood and brains. Benni’s.
Chula started screaming. She screamed and screamed, her panic echoing down the dark cavern of the night, but no one came to help them.
#
She woke up shrieking, and it took her most of a centispin for her to calm down enough to get out of her rack. Trembling, dizzy, she stood up.
“G-Gil?”
“Yes, Chula.”
“Something’s wrong with me, Gil. Inside my head. I’m having nightmares, Gil. Are you equipped for psych evaluations?”
“I am.”
“I need one. What do I need to do? Should I go to the sickbay?”
The ship didn’t answer.
“Gil?”
The ship-soul hummed to itself, then: “I have been instructed not to perform any psych evaluations on you.”
She felt panic rise up in her. “What? Why not?”
“That’s restricted, Chula.”
She sat down slowly. Why? Who hated her so much? She had a vague idea now of who it might be, who the surviving crewbie was, but her mind shied away from that possibility, because it couldn’t be right.
“Gil,” she said hoarsely, and her terminal screen flickered to show the ship-soul was listening. “You can’t give me a psych eval, but how about a physical evaluation?”
“Yes, I can do that!” Gil replied, and Chula could have sworn there was a note of relief in its synthesized voice. “Please go to the sickbay. I can do a better job there.”
Gil seemed eager to perform the physical evaluation, but Chula dragged her feet getting there. Literally. She was tired to the bone. It was another half-centispin or so before she slid into the sickbay’s diagnostic bed. She took a deep breath just as the ship-soul announced, “At first scan, you seem to be in excellent health. No significant changes since you came on board.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Scan my brain again to be absolutely certain.”
A moment later, Gil told her, “I have conducted six scans of your brain. There is no recent biological damage, and there are no changes caused by disease or illness.”
“What can you tell me about the blink drive, Gil?” she asked softly.
“A great deal, actually. It was invented four centuries ago by Shine Fast, a puddlejumper from Munger, and is the thread that binds together the PanHuman Alliance. The physics are somewhat arcane and counterintuitive, but—”
“Save it. What about psychological effects?”
“The Shine Fast blink drive has no known psychological effects on the neurotypical, unmodified Human adult. The physical effects may include extreme nausea in a small percentage of some Human populations.”
She felt a cold little thread of fear in her gut. “And what about modified Humans?”
“There are no meat effects, but some neural prosthetics interact with the blink field in such a way as to induce minor disorientation, feelings of paranoia, and minor personality disjunction. Anti-nausea drugs may amplify these effects… oh, dear.”
The icy thread had grown into a chill that threatened to consume her. “That’s it, isn’t it?” she asked, her voice as cold as her soul.
The ship was silent for a full millispin before it spoke again. “Chula, you should never have been allowed aboard a blink-drive ship. Someone in Fleet Personnel has failed in their duties, and the results have been tragic. I myself should have correlated these particular data, but I too have been remiss.”
She shrugged helplessly. “Before I boarded the transport from Earth to Tenderrock, I’d never been on a blink-drive ship. That was just quarter-kilospin ago. Until then, no one knew I’d need to take hypadine to keep me from throwing up every time we blinked.”
“The trip from Earth to Tenderrock Station requires 35 Shine-Fast blinks,” Gilgamesh III noted. “The voyage from Tenderrock to Tyrine requires 17. You took 150 milligrams of high-grade hypadine before each blink to offset nausea. You’ve carried a biomechanical eye wired into your brain since you were injured in an accident as a child. That fact should have been flagged. You should never have been dosed with hypadine.”
“Got a time machine hidden away somewhere?”
“Time travel is impossible, Chula.”
“Then don’t beat yourself up about it, Gil. We can’t change the past. Let the Alliance worry about it once we get home.” She sighed deeply. “I need access to all her files, and her permissions for all the ship’s systems.”
“I don’t know—” the ship-soul protested.
“Do it, Gil. If she’s what I think she is, you know I have the right to take control from her. I have seniority, I’m her only surviving family, and I’m her superior officer.”
“I—this situation is unique,” Gil replied. “It will take some time for me to work around the logic bombs she has emplaced in my core. Please wait.”
#
Chula had to “please wait” for more than two centispins. She was calm by then. Very calm. An old-fashioned pre-Dispersal remedy called Prozac made sure of that. She was ready to face whatever there was to face.
“Ms. Chu-Chu-Chula, you now have access to all the permissions and files of, files of Miss Benita Witaquer ap Warrem,” the ship-soul suddenly announced.
Benni? Really? she thought. Aloud, she ordered, “Unlock all systems she locked down, disable all qua generators in the computer systems, reactivate all weapons, and access those damned files, Gil.”
“Done. Done. Accessed.” A long list of filenames appeared in the air before her, crowned by Benni’s ersatz personnel file, which she clicked on first.
The file contained only a photo and a few lines sketching in Benni’s background. The background fiction didn’t matter, but she stared at the very familiar photo of Botanist Warrem for a long moment before turning her attention to the list of files that swam in the air before her. The filenames gave her no clues about their content, so she picked one at random. “Voice file, decaspin 31 local, cs01.ms1.”
Click. A voice not the computer’s said in Low Spanglicah, “…kers on this ship, Gilgy. And they hate me, too. They whisper about me behind my back. They never want to be around me. It’s like I’m alone on this ship. Maybe I should be.”
“That’s enough. Cut it off, “ Chula said fiercely. Because it was her voice; she had no doubt about that. But it wasn’t her. “I don’t remember telling you those things,” she told the ship. “I don’t remember any of this at all.”
“You didn’t say those things, Chula. These are the words of Botanist Benita Witaquer ap Warrem.”
“My sister.”
“Yes.”
“And where is Benni now, Gil?”
“Sadly, she died shortly after the rest of the crew, Chula. I’m sorry.”
Yeh, I bet you are. Aloud, she said, “She talked to you a lot, did she?”
“I have nearly 10 gigs of memory filled with her dialogs, from first-blink to the night before her death.”
“Erase it. All of it.” Chula stared at the bulkhead across from her station in the forward command bay. “So, she was the one who programmed you to release the wiitigos and override the emergency systems that might have saved some of the crew. Very devious. She thought of everything.”
“She was a very thorough individual.”
“Yes, she was. Gil, I don’t have a sister. I’ve never had a sister. I’m an only child. Benni is me.”
“Yes,” the soulless ship-soul said. “I know.”
“Where did she come from? I mean, did I make her up out of whole cloth?”
“Unlikely. Recall that you lost your eye to an antique slug-thrower in your father’s collection.”
That jolted her. “Yeh … I was in the med-créche for weeks. It was horrible. They had to rewire parts of my temporal lobe. I … hadn’t taken that into account, even when you mentioned my eye earlier. What about the memories of growing up poor on Alegra?”
“When you were twelve, you were raped by a migrant port-worker from Alegra.”
She blinked. “Huh? Now, I know for a fact that’s not true. I would definitely remember that, so I could track that cabron down and stomp him into grease. And I’m still virgin. I’ve never had sex with a man, much less been raped.”
“Your med recs say otherwise, Chula. Do you want to know the rest?”
She bowed her head and whispered, “Yeh.”
“After you were raped, you incubated a viable embryo for nearly a month before you told anyone. You were so traumatized by the incident that you could barely function. Your parents were horrified, and had you subjected to a selective memory wash. Your virginity was surgically restored so you wouldn’t suspect anything later. Abortion is illegal on Revived Terra, so the embryo was released to the planetary government and implanted in a willing host-mother. These facts should have been completely eradicated from your long-term memory. Apparently the memory wash was imperfect.”
“A neat little explanation. Explains a lot.”
“It’s true, Chula.”
She slumped. “The host-mother had my baby?”
“Of course.”
“A little girl?”
“Yes, fine and healthy. She’s nearly twelve now.”
“Why didn’t anyone ever tell me?”
“The records were to remain sealed until you reached your majority. Your parents intended to tell you then, but they made no provision for accidents like the flitter crash that claimed their lives when you were sixteen. Apparently, your guardian elected not to tell you when you turned twenty-one.”
“Yeh, Uncle Franco was a fraggin’ idiot.” She folded her arms on her console, and lay her head down upon them. “Benita.” The name was a sigh. “My daughter’s name is Benita. Right?”
“Benita Fenris ap Jukerbee, yes.”
“It all fits. Somehow, I knew. Some part of me did.”
“I suspect you always knew, Chula.”
#
Chula spent the next decaspin island-hopping through the arkship’s territory, collecting wiitigo breeding pairs to replace those that had died, staying away from other arkships in the adjacent territories. She became expert at using qua generator, laz, and cargobots to capture the beasts solo — not accepted collection protocol, but she only had to kill one.
For two spins thereafter, she sorted through what she knew and what she thought she knew, making a few executive decisions. She yearned to go to Tenderrock right away so the shrinks could ream out her mind and rebuild it, but she didn’t dare activate the blink-drive. There was no telling what it might do to her this time. At sub-cee impulse rates, she could be at the local Noah’s Asteroid on the outer edge of the system in about 62 spins—a bit over two months for an Earthie. Or for an Alegran. Maybe that would give her the time she needed to get beyond the horror of what Benni had done.
It would be difficult. Maybe it would be impossible. But she’d been through hell before, and knew she could survive—especially with the glimmer of hope that waited, like a carrot on a stick, at the end of the struggle. She needed that hope; it was all she had, so she lunged for it with all her might.
She wasn’t alone anymore. She knew her daughter was out there, back on Earth, even if she didn’t dare go any farther than Noah’s for now. And she had her ‘sister’ too, murderous as Benni had proven to be. A few months with the mind-reamers, a year or two in rehab, some integration therapy, an undelete of the imperfect memory wash that had triggered all this in the first place, and she’d be fine. She needed all her memories intact in order to be whole. Even the realization that Benni was a mass murderer had to remain. But she had both Benni and Benita to help her through.
Gilgamesh-III-547-Tenderrock lifted for Noah’s Asteroid a centispin later.
She tried to relax in her bunk, tried to think instead about what was going to happen to her once she got to Noah’s. When they were done with her, maybe then she could return to Earth, that gentle world that had birthed both her and humanity, had died once, and been reborn. Like her. Like Benni.
All she had to do was reconcile all that she was. And all that she wasn’t.
#
© Floyd Largent 2026
Floyd Largent is a former archaeologist who never woke a sleeping god or unearthed an ancient evil (alas). In the past year, he has published or had accepted for publication six poems and 32 short stories, in venues including Altered Reality, Bewildering Stories, Bullet Points, Chewers, Dream Theory Media, Exquisite Death, Freedom Fiction Journal, Suburban Witchcraft, 5-7-5 Haiku Journal, and more.