Cease and Deceased
by Jerry Oltion
Illustration by Janet Aulisio
It wasn’t the most beautiful starship ever conceived, not with a budget of only half a billion dollars. It was mostly just an open framework atop an Orion class fusion rocket, but the Spook had one big advantage over anything else that had ever been built for interstellar traveclass="underline" it could carry passengers.
Of course they had to be dead first, but that was no problem for Tilbey and me. We had plenty of experience at it by the time the ship was ready to fly. Liam, on the other hand, still hadn’t made the transition, and it was coming right down to the wire.
“So when are you going to snuff it?” Tilbey asked him one afternoon while we were working on the magnetic trap that would hold us in place while the ship was under thrust.
All three of us were outside, hovering around the payload section and getting in each other’s way while we replaced a blown coil in the magnetic restraint system. Liam was all thumbs in his pressure suit, but Tilbey and I were little better. We didn’t need suits anymore since we didn’t need air, but in our incorporeal state we still had a hard time holding onto anything. And when we slipped through normal matter, the magnetic fields that made up our “bodies” played hell with electrical circuits.
Tilbey had already blown a couple of expensive superconducting coils, which Liam had to replace since he was the only one of us substantial enough to twist a wrench, so Liam wasn’t exactly in the best of moods when Tilbey asked his question. Liam looked over at him, a man-shaped patch of thick fog—or maybe whipped cream—wearing a neck collar and a computer that interpreted his throat, tongue, and lip movements into a synthesized radio voice so he could speak even in vacuum, and said, “I’ll snuff it when I’m sure we don’t need a live hand to fix your mistakes anymore.”
Liam had joined our team not long after we’d started, after an unfortunate incident in which Tilbey had nearly scared him to death. After we’d revived him and told him we were trying to build an interstellar starship he had been eager to come along, but now that he knew more about the downside to being a ghost he wasn’t so hot to make the transition.
“Don’t go blaming me for your cowardice,” Tilbey said.
Liam might have been ninety years old and fragile as a butterfly, but he was still an ex-marine and didn’t take much sass. “Here, hold this,” he said, and he parked his counter-torque nut driver in Tilbey’s chest before Tilbey could reach for it with his hands.
Tilbey said, “Hey, watch it,” and pulled the nut driver free. His hand slipped through it just as it came out of his chest, though, and the nut driver tumbled off into space. It flashed bright silver as it caught the sunlight coming from off to our left, just above Freeport, the UN orbital space station we called home until we finished our ship.
I kicked off after it and caught up within a couple of seconds, but then I had to tuck it into my belt and flap my way to a stop. I still felt silly doing that, but it was the only way for a ghost to maneuver in space. Tethers wouldn’t hold me, and a reaction pistol would have blown right out of my hand, so we had to rely on interactions between the Earth’s magnetic field and our own. And since magnetic fields interact best when there’s movement, that meant flapping my arms.
I flew/swam back to the ship and handed Liam his nut driver. By the time I got back, he had removed the burned-out coil and replaced it with a new one, so he took the driver from me and tightened the clamps holding it into place. There,” he said, “Good as new. Now keep clear of it this time.”
“Yes, Mom,” Tilbey said, all hangdog. He had programmed his voice synthesizer for that nuance after the first month of working with Liam.
We couldn’t keep too clear of the coils; under the fifty gs of acceleration the ship was capable of we were going to have to tuck ourselves right in next to them in order for them to get enough of a hold on us to keep us from falling right through the deck. We had built three body-sized slots to stand in, and static tests had been promising, but we wouldn’t really know how well they would work under thrust until we tried it.
At least we didn’t have to worry about the propulsion system. The Spook was really just a modified Centauri probe without the instrument package, and the UN had already sent out five of the original article without a hitch. Two of them had gone toward Alpha and Beta Centauri, one to Epsilon Eridani, one to Barnard’s star, and one to Tau Ceti. Of course they would take decades to get to their targets because they didn’t have Tilbey’s mass eliminator to reduce the payload weight, and thus their top acceleration had been less than a g, but the engine design and navigational system had been proven in action so we weren’t worried about that. We just needed to make sure that our modifications would actually let us ride along.
“So when are you going to take it for a test flight?” Liam asked.
“Not ‘we’?” Tilbey asked him right back.
Liam slammed the meteor shield closed over the circuitry. “Don’t push me,” he said. “You prove it’s worth doing, then we’ll talk suicide.”
“Don’t think of it that way,” Tilbey told him. “Think of it as a transition. You trade your meat body for a magnetic one that will let you do a lot more.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Liam said, waving his arms in dismissal. “I’ve heard the pep talk before. But I’ve grown kind of fond of this old bag of bones, and frail as they are these days, I’m not quite ready to trade ’em in yet.”
“Look, we did—”
“Stow it, Tilbey,” I said. “We both bought it in accidents. That’s not the same thing as ending your life deliberately.”
“Exactly,” said Liam.
As I helped gather up the rest of our tools, I said, “We can test the system, just the two of us. Take it out to Pluto or somewhere and back. That’ll give Liam time to tie up all his loose ends and get his affairs in order, and it’ll give us a chance to figure out what we’ve forgotten before we take off on the big trip.”
Tilbey nodded. “All right, but 1 don’t want to wait around forever.”
Liam laughed. “You sound like my nephew. He can’t wait until I kick off and he inherits my condo in the hub. He’s still healthy as a horse, but he’s seventy-two so he thinks he needs a zero-g habitat.” He shook his head. “Kids.”
Tilbey didn’t respond to that, being almost sixty years younger than Liam. And I was younger than Tilbey by a few years myself. Young enough, in fact, to wonder if Liam might not know a few things I didn’t about life. Like maybe how to let the kids take all the risk while he kicked back and waited to see how it would turn out.
But I was already committed to the project, so it didn’t really matter even if that was the case.
So a few days later it was just Tilbey and me who slipped into the body cages and turned on the magnets. We had adjusted the standing wave generator that kept us alive so that we were nearly insubstantial, which meant we had practically no mass but at the same time we had very little natural interaction with matter. Without the magnets we would have slipped through the ship like light waves through glass the moment we lit the drive, but as it was 1 felt myself held in place so tightly I couldn’t even scratch an imaginary itch. Nor could I operate any of the manual controls built into the open framework just before me, which meant we were reduced to vocal control.
“Command, engage control voice,” I said. My speech synthesizer switched from my own digitized voice to a completely artificial “pure” voice that theoretically provided a cleaner signal for the off-the-shelf control circuitry we had robbed from a UN suborbital scramjet. “Command, visual display on,” I said, and through my mastoid speaker implants 1 heard what sounded to me like a Norwegian who’d spent time in the Middle East speak the words aloud. We were in vacuum so the synthesizer played straight into the computer’s microphone port, but 1 heard the echo in my ears and it sounded like speech.