Inner Life 7: Sleep

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“Do we even know what the artefact does?” Goldie asked.

“The arte – ”

“Sentry ship pulling out of its patrol route,” Lav reported.

“Shit!”

“Accelerating,” Lav said. “Emergency space jump in four seconds.”

Goldie’s eyes widened. “They can shoot us if – ”

Then something hit the ship.

Then space disappeared.

“ – we’re that far from the station,” Goldie finished with a sigh. “Fuck.”

“Huh,” my body said. “They actually shot us.”

“And hit something important, because we’re not in normal space yet,” said Spanner Ann. “Lav, move over; let me run diagnostics.”

“You have your own computers in the engineering bay,” Lav grumbled, but moved.

I had ancestral memories of a lot of space jump tech. Some species stayed in subspace for long stretches of time; some emerged almost instantly. The human tech was the second kind, as evidenced by everyone’s concerned glances at the cameras showing nothing but the endless faint magenta of subspace.

“What’s wrong?” Ricky Danger asked.

“Everything,” Ann said, “but that’s not new. New damage is… oh, great. Part of our diagnistics monitoring system is gone now. It can’t tell me what’s wrong.”

“So we don’t know why we’re stuck in subspace?” June asked, and I heard panic in its voice for the first time.

“Not stuck,” Lav assured it. “Just moving slowly. If there are no further surprises, we’ll be out in ninety minutes.”

“Based on the external sensory equipment we lost,” Ann said, “my guess is that part of the subspace shielding array has been knocked out of alignment. System says it’s still there and technically functioning, but can’t read alignment without those sensors. So we’re poorly shielded and the ship’s slowed down to compensate so that moving at speed through this place doesn’t tear us apart.”

“Can you fix it?” Ricky Danger asked.

“Yes, but only by climbing out there and bolting it back into place. So, no; not until we’re in real space again.”

“Great. Slow journey it is.”

We all sat in silence for several long seconds.

“Most of our externals aren’t rated for long-term subspace exposure,” Annie said. “We’re going to have even more broken stuff after we come out of this.”

“Expect sluggishness and light chills,” Earthman added. “The nature of subspace has a similar effect on the nervous system as being cold.”

“We’re going to get cold?” Shadow asked.

“No. If it was real cold, insulations and heaters would deal with it. We’re going to feel cold. It won’t be fatal.”

“Even with all of that,” my body said, “we’re really lucky that they shot at us, and didn’t kill us.”

“Would’ve been luckier if they hadn’t shot at us,” Goldie muttered.

My eyebrow rose. “You think? Would it have been luckier if they’d managed to radio a demand for us to return to port? Would you prefer for us to be officially fleeing authorities right now? Some idiot hotshot guard didn’t want to to radio us and watch us flee and have to radio in an arrest claim to someone else; they wanted to play the big enforcer and disable us in space and swan onto our bridge and arrest us. So instead of being fugitives waiting to get arrested at the next port right now, we have the very clear defense that someone broke formation and fired at us without any kind of halt or stand down demand and we obviously assumed it was pirates rather than the actual authorities, who would’ve radioed. That knocked out shielding has bought us the ability to dock safely at the next port.”

“Then we’ve just gotta offload that artefact to Roach before anyone has a chance to find it on us,” Shadow nodded.

“What is the artefact?” Goldie asked. “What did we even steal?”

There was another pause.

“We’re not sure,” June said.

“We’re not sure? We stole a mysterious weapon from one of the Anderian Kingdom’s elite battleships because a criminal boss wants it, and we don’t even know what we stole? It could be the galaxy’s biggest bomb, or – ”

“I don’t think it’s a weapon,” Shadow said quietly.

June nodded. “I’m sure that the Penetrators have all kinds of fun surprises, but they wouldn’t have any weaponry that the Roach would both want, and couldn’t get in an easier fashion. What use would he have for the biggest bomb in the galaxy? He has easier and more direct ways to get the kinds of explosives that he could possibly have a use for.”

“Oh,” Goldie said sarcastically. “Well, that’s very sound logic.”

I was starting to feel the sluggishness that Earthman had warned us about. Everyone was. They were speaking slower, sinking into seats, slumping against walls.

“It’s fine,” Shadow said, sounding distant.

“Every Penetrator class ship carries an artefact in its heart,” said Spanner Ann. “No transmitters or trackers; we scanned it thoroughly. No way to see what’s inside without risking damaging it, if it’s electronic in there, but it’s completely faradayed and shielded and there’s no way to get a detonation signal in there even if it might be a bomb. The going theory, which I subscribe to, is that it contains military intelligence.”

“The Penetrators are also acting as kingdom couriers?” Earthman asked.

Ann shook its head, then closed its eyes briefly as if the motion had made it dizzy. “More like, ‘here is what to do in the worst case scenario’ kind of intelligence. Top secret instructions for desperate situations. Break In Case Of Kingdom Falling type information – instructions on where to go, what to protect, who to answer to. A coordinated emergency response that nobody who would enact it knows about unless the worst happens and they have to do it.”

“And the Roach wants to know what the Anderian Kingdom’s worst case scenario plan is,” Ricky Danger said slowly. “That can’t mean anything great.”

“Mmm,” June said, eyes almost closed.

My own eyes were closing. I slumped back. My body fell asleep.

Something was wrong.

I’d been warned about sluggishness, and chills. Not unconsciousness. The fact that everyone seemed to be falling unconscious, and Earthman hadn’t warned us about that, couldn’t mean anything good. I checked the brain – yep, unconscious. But alive. I checked the blood.

The blood was extremely low on oxygen.

Pumping normal, carbon dioxide normal. Breathing normal. Plenty of red blood cells. The problem wasn’t circulatory; it was atmospheric. Either too little oxygen, or something else in the air preventing the uptake of oxygen in some way that I couldn’t detect.

Something was wrong with the life support systems.

No. I wasn’t going to get this far and die to a faulty life support system.

I had ways to attempt to temporarily invigorate the nervous system and wake up my brain, that may or may not work on humans. I didn’t bother with them. The brain was asleep to conserve oxygen and demanding it use more energy wouldn’t help. I used my own connections to the spinal cord to pull myself to my feet and, careful not to agitate unnecessary parts of the brain into higher activity and waste oxygen, used the brain to pull my eyelids open.

My control was very bad. Part of that was the sluggishness from subspace; part was the sluggishness from lack of oxygen. Most of it was my complete lack of practice. But I managed to keep my balance in the room of unconscious crewmates. And I wasn’t the only one.

Pots was up, too. We stared at each other. The hesitation and caution on both of our faces told each other everything; this was not how a normal crew member would behave in this situation.

“Cousin,” I said, relieved. The word was slurred and clumsy – I’d never spoken before. But understandable.

“Cousin,” Pots said, with a smile. “I’d been worried that I was alone.”

“Me, too.” I glanced at the sleeping bodies around us. “I guess it’s just us, though.”

“Or somebody else isn’t big enough to move on their own yet. But given how long it’s been, I agree. It’s probably just us two.”

“Well,” I said, “we need the rest of them to navigate this world, so we should get them some oxygen.”

We left the room together, step by clumsy steps. Pots was better at walking than me. Perhaps they’d had practice, moving about while their body slept at night – I should start practicing, myself. It’s been afraid to raise suspicion, but I was paying for that now. I knew where the nearest emergency oxygen tanks were; I’d cleaned the ship with Goldie often enough to know where all important publicly accessible equipment was.

“We need some of them to navigate this world,” Pots said as we walked.

“What?”

“Many of them,” they said, “are more dangerous than useful to us.”

I stumbled a moment. “What are you saying?”

“The captain, the engineer, the pilot – those, we need. But the doctor? It’s going to find us before we can mature enough to take it. They outnumber us by far too much – this is the perfect opportunity to deal with that.”

“We’d get caught,” I pointed out, though I already knew that we wouldn’t. I already knew what Pots was proposing.

“No, we wouldn’t. Everybody is deprived of oxygen right now. If some people died of oxygen deprivation, that would be tragic, but not suspicious. This ship has tanks of nitrogen as well.”

A form of suffocation that would be indistinguishable from being simply unlucky. We could do it, if we hid the evidence before waking the others.

“Earthman is too dangerous, you say,” I said. “Who else?”

“The other guard,” Pots replied instantly. “I am overjoyed to find that you are my cousin. You are the strongest on this ship and I know that you will keep us safe. But Shadow is clever, and likely to be a problem for you. We should eliminate that problem, too.”

My adrenaline spiked of its own accord, and I had to manually tamp it down; I couldn’t afford that in low oxygen. Shadow? No. Absolutely not.

That reaction in me was concerning; the brain that was so attached to Shadow should be unconscious. If it was observing this, then that would complicate things a lot. I double-checked. I triple-checked. Unconscious. Completely unaware. Maybe I just didn’t understand my body’s nervous system as well as I thought; maybe there were other means to cause such a reaction.

“I need Shadow,” I said.

“It’s a risk.”

“A necessary one.”

My cousin shrugged in concession. Not agreement, but it was obvious that I knew Shadow best and they didn’t want to fight me about it. “Then the risk would need to be mitigated elsewhere. This is our one chance to get rid of problems without causing any suspicion; if you must have our most combat-capable target alive, then we’ll need to work harder to minimise how far we’re outnumbered. We need the captain or the first mate, not both. We don’t need the logistics officer, or the janitor.”

Pots wanted to kill Goldie, Earthman, The Gun, and either June or Ricky Danger, my choice. That would leave us with either June or Ricky, the both of us, Lav the Nav, Spanner Ann, and at my insistence, Shadow – cutting our crew down from ten to six. Cutting our list of potential enemies from eight to four.

It was a good plan. Four was a lot safer, a lot more manageable.

“Do we have enough nitrogen for that?” I asked.

“Yes, plenty.”

“I haven’t seen any nitrogen tanks.”

“Most of the nitrogen is in the medical bay or the engineer’s stores. I will get them. You focus on the oxygen. But don’t wake anyone up until we’ve done the nitrogen.”

I nodded. “Obviously.”

We were at the nearest emergency oxygen stash. I pulled the cabinet open and started fussing with the tanks. Pots kept walking.

When they were well out of arm’s reach and facing away from me, I drew my gun and put a bullet through their head, and a second in their chest.

Most of the crew being unconscious did, indeed, make this a good time to deal with inconvenient dangers.

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