Inner Life 3: Crew

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After the presentation, we were each taken into a small room by the dissector one by one and given a thorough inspection. From the way it rubbed at my flesh, checking for hard shapes beneath, and inspected me for tiny unexpected holes, it was obvious that it was looking for ovipositors. That… wasn’t great. But it was interesting.

The crew knew about us, and was clearly interested in finding us and, if the void roach corpses and the one I’d shot were any indication, killing us. But they clearly didn’t know all that much about us. The act that they’d discovered the ovipositor by dissection and were looking exclusively for that when inspecting us meant that this might be their first encounter with people. They might have no other way to detect us, and I could use that.

There were ways to detect us, of course, and the more we matured, the easier it was. Young as I was, I was practically invisible – there was no way that a species that had just discovered our ovipositors would be able to detect my by scan or by chemical test. My cells would just be mistaken for nerve tissue, and the chemical effects I have on the circulatory system would be undetectable, or at least dismissed as random noise, in any chemical test.

As I grew, I might become more obvious. If I wasn’t careful about how to arrange myself, then when I got larger my sheer mass might be suspicious on scans, looking like far too much oddly placed nerve tissue. At some point, I would grow the specialised organs that people used to detect each other; a scent gland and an olfactory system to detect the scents of others, both of which needed to be placed somewhere on the surface of my body where an observant crew might detect them. And then, of course, I would eventually develop an ovipositor, the most obvious sign of our presence, which they already knew about. I had a fair bit of control over the speed of my development, so I could slow things down and hide for as long as possible, but that might not be the best idea – the longer I waited, the more time the crew had to learn about us and refine their detection techniques.

I needed to secure this ship before they learned enough to find me.

How was I going to do that? Maturing as quickly as possible and rushing to implant the first crewmate I could get alone was a very bad plan, judging by how many times I’d shot my cousin who had clearly attempted that. (The fact that it had matured enough to implant others before I was even conscious suggested that its family line was on the opposite end of the spectrum to mine, in terms of care and caution. We’re slow developers, but that’s definitely not true of all people. In many situations, recklessly growing and spreading as quickly as possible is the best strategy – but not, clearly, in this situation.) I could be more cautious, but what about other people? If I had more cousins among the crew, then any of them might panic and get caught, giving the crew more information about us. Or, they might be sensible and incredibly helpful in securing the ship.

Either way, I needed to find them as quickly as possible. The question was how to detect them, or allow them to detect me, without revealing myself to the crew. I couldn’t afford to wait around until I’d developed my scent; I needed to both work fast, and stay hidden. I was going to need to find them in some other way.

I spent some time getting to know the crew, via passive observation. I couldn’t interpret my body’s language processing systems yet, but through listening directly, I had been able to manually learn a few words. Most notably, the names of the crew.

There were ten of us, not counting the dead. My name was Big Marge, and I was the largest of the crew. (All round, that is. Two were very slightly taller than me, but also thinner. Those broader than me were significantly shorter.) I wasn’t entirely certain what my job was, but one other crew member, a smaller person with thin hair and dark eyes named Shadow, worked for me. My body told Shadow what to do a lot, and Shadow did it.

The other relationships were a bit harder to figure out. There were several crew members who could tell me what to do, and a couple who neither gave nor took orders from me. There was a chain of command and I seemed pretty low on it, which was a pity so far as taking over the ship went. But I could make it work.

Spanner Ann, the one whom my body had saved from my cousin, was one of the ones who neither gave nor received orders from me. It seemed sad and stressed a lot of the time, even more so than the rest of the crew (and, if I was interpreting mood correctly, everyone was a bit sad and stressed.) The other two who had the same sort of command relationship with me were The Gun, and incredibly neat and reserved crewmate who talked very seriously all the time, and Lav the Nav, who hunched over a lot and spent a lot of time in the cockpit. I had no idea what The Gun or Spanner Ann did, but Lav the Nav, I was pretty sure, was the navigator, or maybe some sort of space analyst. It spent a lot of time looking at star charts, anyway.

The dissector gave orders, but only in its own little suite of sterile rooms full of tools and benches, and I quickly figured out that it was the ship’s doctor. Its name was Earthman. So probably not directly above me in the chain of command, but everyone had to obey it when it came to their health.

Pots and Goldie were probably above me though, because they gave me work that my body did without question. Every three days, I spent about a quarter of the day in the kitchen where Pots, who had a wide smile and three missing fingers, made me cook food and clean things. On a different quarter day every three days, thin and quiet Goldie looked at the floor and mumbled and gestured vaguely, and my body cleaned and tidied parts of the ship under its direction.

The other two members of the crew were Ricky Danger and June, and I had no idea what their jobs were except that everyone else obeyed them. One of them must be the captain, or chief or matriarch or whatever this species had, but I wasn’t sure which one. Ricky Danger had bright blue eyes and yellow hair on its head and face, and rushed around grinning and making speeches. June was thin and dark-haired, and moved and spoke more quietly and precisely. They did a lot of a strange sort of play aggression, where they would argue but in gentle voices, smiling and rolling their eyes.

Any of them could be an ally in hiding. Any of them could be an enemy who would notice me and kill me.

Fortunately, there are more subtle ways to operate a complex body than to grabbing motor control at the first opportunity, clumsily trying to attack a crewmate, and getting shot to death. A lot of the physiological effects that created my body’s moods originated in the central nervous bundle that I was attached to.

I started by creating an aversion to going to the doctor. It was relatively simple to drop the body’s mood and increase its heart rate whenever it went for a medical inspection (not during the inspection, of course; the last thing I wanted to do was look nervous in front of Earthman.) I tried to keep it subtle, so that the body wouldn’t notice and panic. I didn’t need to hate the doctor; I just needed to be reluctant to seek medical attention unless I was sure that I needed it.

My nervous system was going to notice something strange about my body or behaviour eventually, and I didn’t want it reporting every vague suspicion to Earthman. Better to convince it to keep things to itself unless it was sure that something was wrong.

Then I started making my body happy and relaxed around Shadow. Shadow was my one direct subordinate, and was therefore the safest crewmate to be around. So long as it wasn’t suspicious, it would do what I said. And if it had one of my cousins in it, I wanted to know about it.

That probably wasn’t as necessary as the doctor thing, because Shadow and I seemed to spend a lot of time together anyway. We talked a lot and pored over maps and charts that I didn’t have the context to understand, and did a fair bit of combat training in the ship’s small gymnasium. Sometimes we fought each other, sometimes we ran or lifted weights, sometimes we trained with guns. Shadow and I were the only ones on the ship who carried guns; other crewmates would sometimes come down to train, but mostly in close combat, taking direction from me and Shadow. If they did want to train with guns, we took the guns out of a locked room for them and returned them when they left.

This wasn’t hard to put together. Shadow and I were soldiers. We were responsible for the security of the ship, and protecting the crew against hostiles.

The fact that I was on board meant that my body had already catastrophically failed at that duty at least once.

That did make my shifts with Pots in the kitchen and cleaning the ship with Yellow a bit confusing, until I realised that all the crew took these shifts, even Ricky Danger and June. Pots and Yellow didn’t take shifts working for each other, but it seemed like everyone else had to help a little bit with both cooking and cleaning. That made sense in my case, because most days there wasn’t a whole lot for a security force to do.

In addition to the ten living crew, we had three dead crewmates. I knew this because their bodies were in the medical wing, where my body would go and look at them and talk sadly to them until my mood alterations made it start avoiding the medical wing as much as possible. The one I’d killed was named Trigger, and my body spoke to that one the most; whether we were close, or whether it was guilt over killing it, I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t all that good at determining which emotion was which yet; I had to extrapolate from behaviour, and I didn’t know enough about this species’ behaviour to tell guilt from grief.

The other two bodies were called Scalpel and Sinner. Earthman hadn’t pulled ovipositors out of either of their bodies, so they hadn’t died in the same way as Trigger. They had, however, died violently, with large slash wounds and broken bones. My inherited memories told me that the wounds were consistent with the natural weapons of a void roach, which wasn’t surprising. It didn’t take a whole lot of intelligence to figure out what had happened; my progenitor, with Trigger’s progenitor and possibly with some other people, had been void roaches. They’d had a conflict with this species I had no inherited memories of; possibly a new species. Scalpel and Sinner had died in the conflict, as had our progenitors, but not before they’d managed to implant me and Trigger, and hopefully others, in their attackers. (Or in their prey? I had no idea who had attacked who, or why. Most likely this crew had attacked, though, because I’d been implanted in a hurry; if my progenitor had been planning to attack, they would have taken the time to add memories of the situation to give me some context. Being born with little more than a collection of standard ancestral memories for my family line suggested that the implanting had been rushed and desperate.)

And if they were taken by surprise, then it was very possible that my and Trigger’s progenitors were the only ones who’d managed to implant any children in the scuffle. It was very, very possible that I was alone.

I’d have to do something about that.

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