082: ALIENS

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It’s movie night.

And for once, it’s fairly sparsely populated. Seven of us gather in Network and Engineering Ring 1 to play Sunset’s favourite computer game about twelve hours after my talk with Captain Sands, and it’s not the people I would’ve expected to see. One of the Friends (the doctor one) is missing, still holed up the medbay and drugged to the eyeballs on painkillers for its unexplained muscle cramping problem, and Lina’s probably tending to it and making sure it doesn’t have yet another mysterious mad science problem that’s going to hit us all over the head in a month, and Renn went to Network and Engineering Ring 2 to work more on translating Captain Kinoshita’s notes, and of course Tinera can’t leave Habitation Ring 2, but Denish, Adin and Tal are all missing, too. I never would have thought Tal would pass up an opportunity to beat everyone at a computer game.

It’s not until I notice that the convicts still haven’t moved into Habitation Ring 1 that I realise what’s going on. There’s no way they’ll be able to believably draw out the moving process for another day, so they’re probably keeping Tinera company. One last night together.

“It’s probably a good thing that they’re dawdling,” Captain Sands admits as we settle down at neighbouring terminals. “I think I overreacted on Tinera’s little outburst. I’ve already unlocked the doors for her, and I’ll tell her she’s out of confinement tomorrow.”

“Really?” I ask. “She did break Heli’s teeth.”

“I’m well aware of that. But everyone was under a lot of stress, and I honestly don’t think it will happen again. You’re right; I’ve been too suspicious and cautious with the old crew, and that’s not fostering a good crew relationship. If we want a harmonious crew that we can trust, I need to trust them. Locking her up indefinitely will only cause further tensions; I think we can move past this on the understanding that if there is further violence between anyone on the crew, there will be more serious consequences.”

Huh. He’s made even more of a turnaround than I could have hoped for. Hopefully this new attitude sticks.

“May the seeds we tend grow to shelter us,” I say.

“What does that mean?”

“Oh. It’s an old Arborean saying. It means, um, may the work we put into the world, and the kindness and consideration we show others, be reflected back to us.”

“Huh. I like it.”

It had been Shia’s favourite saying. “So,” I ask, “have you ever played Alien Space Pirate Rumble Four Thousand?”

“Oh, yeah. I used to play this all the time in engineering college. I am very bad at it.”

“In college? You’ve been an engineer for…” I glance at the game’s release date… “less than eight years?” His profile had said he was thirty nine years old when he went into chronostasis.

“Seven years before we left Earth, yes.”

“What did you do before then?”

“I was a sex worker.”

I bark a laugh. “A sex worker?!”

“What?” He self-consciously smooths his hair back. “You don’t think I have the skills for sex work?”

“Oh, no, you’re definitely charismatic enough. I just… what kind of a career path is that? Since when does a sex worker wake up one morning and go, ‘oh, I think I’ll start designing ship engines’?”

“Since they have a regular client who’s an engineer and very passionate about it,” he sighs. “Honestly, I think Cynthia looked forward to talking about her work more than the sex, and the feeling was mutual. It’s impossible to be around that woman one night a fortnight and not be forcibly converted to the frame of mind that the most interesting thing in the world is engineering. And she was right, it is.”

“It’s good work if you can get it,” Celi says, settling in on the other side of me.

“What, engineering?” Captain Sands asks. “It sure is.”

“No, sex work. Put me through about six months of my medical training before a bunch of Tarandrans moved into the area and just took over the entire market overnight.” Ke shoots a mock glare at the captain. “Stupid Tarandrans with your genetically beautiful bodies. Unfair advantage.”

“Don’t hate the player, hate the game,” Captain Sands says, raising his hands in a mock pacifying gesture. “Speaking of games, I am about to annihilate you both.”

“You just admitted that you’re bad at this game,” I point out.

“Oh, trust me. It is not possible to be good at this game.”

He’s right. Alien Space Pirate Rumble Four Thousand is frustratingly chaotic and bafflingly complex, although half the problem (like with a lot of the games we play) is that it clearly wasn’t designed with computer terminals with physical keyboards in mind. In a holodrome or with a lightwand for an input device, it would be much easier to keep track of both the constant enemies and the twenty nine different constantly changing player stats, but of course the Courageous has no such modern hardware – they’re too delicate, and too hard to fix when they break. So we’re stuck using devices that haven’t changed all that much from those used before my home country was even created.

Sunset, zeelite that she is, apparently learned the game on this ancient style of computer terminals and has a lot of practice at playing it this way. So she kicks all of our arses easily. It’s like playing computer games with Tal all over again.

“We should get Tal and Sunset to play each other at this and start a betting pool,” I whisper to Celi as my last alien pirate succumbs to fatal decompression.

“None of us have any money,” Celi whispers back.

“We can bet other stuff. Loser lets Tal pick their outfits for a week.”

“Why are you trying to make life on this ship even more chaotic?”

As the Public Universal Friend’s spaceship (not the doctor one, that one’s still in the medbay) explodes in a shower of pixels that probably look far more impressive as a hologram, it stands up. “This friend will see if Renn needs any assistance,” it says, and leaves.

“Dibs on the scrap metal from its ship,” Sam says.

“Not if I beat you there,” Heli shoots back.

We play three or four games, which takes about ninety minutes, and the Friend doesn’t come back, which gives me an excuse to go and see if it and Renn need even more help. (Not that commanding a ship of alien space pirates isn’t exciting, but I can only take so much.) I take my time ambling down to Network and Engineering Ring 2, not exactly eager to play Translate The Koreazone Shorthand either.

Captain Sands had said that he had been chosen for the program specifically to respond to any potential sabotage of the terraforming and colonisation project, as interference was expected from Antarctica. Had anyone accounted for such interference from the crew? Had anyone anticipated Captain Kinoshita and her allies?

Maybe that’s what killed off the crew up the front. Some kind of conflict between the two remaining conspirators and the rest of the crew. No, that… the faces painted on the doors suggested that not everyone had died at once. But maybe a conflict had kicked it off?

It doesn’t matter. This isn’t useful. I should do what Captain Sands has committed to; focus on things that will help us get these colonists safely to Hylara. The historians can figure all the rest of this out.

I walk through my own chronostasis ring (still creepy) and the storage ring beyond it. I find myself pausing at the next airlock, keenly aware of something I hadn’t really given much thought to before – this was where Laboratory Ring 1 used to be. This was where Claire Rynn-Hatson had died, where Mohammed Aziz and Ash Dornae had been exposed to whatever nasty chemical they’d been cooking up and died a few weeks later. Leaving Kinoshita Keiko all alone. How different would this point in the journey be, if that lab accident hadn’t happened?

Well, the current crew would probably all be asleep. The AI would’ve informed Captain Kinoshita of its inability to turn on the fore engine, and she would’ve sent someone, either externally or by ejecting CR1. (Probably by going externally; she’d probably be pretty keen to keep the CR1 brains for the AI.) The crew up front would all be dead at that point, same as they were when I got there, and they’d turn the engine on and… keep experimenting with the AI, I guess.

And we’d get another five years of peaceful chronostasis, and wake up at Hylara.

But, that’s not the universe we live in. The accident did happen, and they’re dead, and we’ve got an important responsibility and not nearly enough answers, but I’m not supposed to be focusing on that, I’m supposed to focus on what’s actionable and practical for our mission. Let Renn keep translating; if he finds answers, he’ll tell us.

I keep walking; pod launch ring, another chronostasis ring, the intact laboratory ring… our paths through the ship are pretty repetitive. The rings are pretty big, and each has four airlocks on either side, but most of us default to using the same airlocks; there’s a direct path between the airlocks nearest to the computer terminals in the network rings, nearest to the bedrooms in the habitation rings, and nearest to the medbay and the picnic tables in the recreation rings. Even on this small ship, quite a bit of it goes mostly unwalked. I make it to the airlock leading to Network and Engineering Ring 2 – the airlock we always use, because it’s closes to the computer terminals and we are boring, boring people – and walk through.

Stepping into NAER 2, I stop short and grab at the airlock doorway to stop myself from falling forward into the pool of blood.

A Public Universal Friend lies face-down, barely a metre from the airlock. Not the doctor one; that one is presumably still in the medbay. The other one, the one that came to help Renn. It isn’t moving, and there’s… quite a lot of blood around it. Originating, presumably, from its back, where the handle of a knife sticks out, the entire blade buried between its ribs. The blade’s a little longer than my hand, and judging from the angle.. well, I’m no doctor. But it looks like the Friend was stabbed right through the heart.

How do I know how long the blade is, if it’s completely buried in the Friend’s body? Easy – I recognise the knife.

It’s Adin’s favourite kitchen knife.

I feel cold as I bend down, trying to avoid as much of the blood as I can, to check the Friend’s heartbeat and breathing. The cold intensifies as I get the results I expect – nothing. It’s not a physical cold, it’s a chill in my heart, in my mind, rendering my thoughts perfectly flat and clear. It’s a terribly familiar feeling. I felt it when they told me that Acacia had been killed in a car accident. I felt it when Denish had gotten trapped trying to rescue the Chronostasis Ring 1 colonists, and I’d made the decision to save him, a decision to sacrifice hundreds of lives for one, a decision that I knew was wrong on every logical level, a decision that I had made anyway.

And I feel it here, staring down at this body, confronted with one clear, undeniable fact: one of my old crew did this.

The new crew, the people Sands woke, are all accounted for. We’ve been playing computer games together since the last time this Public Universal Friend was seen alive. Well, all except for Renn, obviously, but I already know what I expect to see as I edge around the pool of blood and peek around the terminal partitions and, yep, there he is; there’s Renn, motionless, collapsed against a computer desk with the broken glass of the computer all around him, throat slashed wide open. I don’t even bother checking his vitals; nobody lying motionless with a throat wound that severe has any chance of being alive. Especially after losing this much blood.

One of my old crew did this. They broke in, probably to kill Renn, and… and they were probably interrupted by the Friend, and had to kill it, too. That’s my guess, anyway. They murdered two crewmates while we played fucking computer games eight rings away. The captain had been right; they are dangerous. Or at least, one of them is.

What is Captain Sands going to do when he finds out? He’s not going to trust the convicts, obviously; any progress made on that front is a nonstarter. But what’s he going to do to the killer?

Captain Sands is a Tarandran. Tarandra has the death penalty. It’s not remotely controversial there.

I back away from the scene a bit, find an angle where I can see both Renn and the Friend. And then I turn away from them. I look up, for cameras.

The Courageous has about as many cameras as the AI needs to operate and not a single camera more. So far as I know, so far as I can see, there aren’t any cameras in this ring at all. I wonder, idly, how much we’re recorded going on our daily routes, on the well-worn path between the airlocks that we all use. Could one make it from Habitation Ring 2, the convict’s habitation ring, into this ring without being recorded at all? Maybe. Even if one was recorded, the AI was notoriously reticent to give anyone access to old information. So it might not matter.

One of my friends did this. One of my crew did this. One of my crew is a violent killer, not just in the past, but here and now, a danger to this ship.

One of my crew is probably going to be killed for this.

I look at Renn. I look at the Friend. The cold wells inside me, and I make another bad, incorrect, unethical decision.

Trying to avoid the blood as much as I can, I wrap the hem of my robe around my hand and grab the handle of the knife. I give it a good rub to thoroughly remove any fingerprints that might still be on it.

And then I run to tell the captain about the bodies.

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