“With what?”
“My clothes, for a start.” He put his hands in his pockets. “I’ve never been to the capital before.”
The hallway lights were dim as Corbin approached Ohan’s quarters. Artificial night. A peculiar thing when traveling through a sky that knew nothing but darkness. In one hand, he carried a small box. With the other, he opened the door.
The room was black. Corbin could hear Ohan breathing in his bed—deep, slow gasps that wouldn’t have sounded healthy for any species. He lay still.
Corbin closed the door behind him and walked to the side of the bed. The Sianat’s chest rose and fell. His face was slack, his mouth open. Corbin watched him breathe for a minute or so. He considered his options. He held the box down by his side. “Wake up, Ohan,” he said. Ohan’s eyes snapped open, confused. “Do you know what’s happening aboard this ship right now? Do you care? I know you’re dying and all, but even on your best days, you’ve never been terribly present. Not that I’m one to talk. But on the off-chance that you do care, you should know that the ship’s AI has just crashed. It’s wiped clean. Now, to me—and possibly to you, who knows—this is an inconvenience. To Jenks, this is the worst day of his life. Do you know that he loved the AI? Actually loved, as in, ‘in love.’ Ridiculous, I know. I don’t pretend to understand. Frankly, I find the whole notion absurd. But you know what I realized? It doesn’t matter what I think. Jenks thinks something different, and his pain is very real right now. Me knowing how stupid this whole thing is doesn’t make him hurt any less.”
“We—” Ohan started to say.
Corbin ignored him. “Right now, Sissix and Kizzy are towing Jenks’ escape pod back to the ship. Kizzy’s afraid that he’s going to hurt himself, but Sissix wouldn’t let her fly alone, because she’s afraid that Kizzy’s too upset to pilot the shuttle safely. This is a bad day for a lot of people.” He flicked open the box and removed its contents, quietly and out of sight. “I could ask you what you think of all this, but it wouldn’t really be you talking, would it? It’d be that thing hijacking your brain. I don’t know if you can process the things I’m saying to you—and I mean you, Ohan, not your disease. But just in case you remember this, here’s what I want you to know. I don’t understand what Jenks is feeling. I don’t understand Kizzy, I don’t understand Ashby, and I sure as hell don’t understand Sissix. But I do know that they’re all hurting. And contrary to popular belief, that is something I care about. So you’ll have to forgive me, Ohan, but this crew isn’t going to lose anyone else. Not today.”
He raised the object he had taken from the box—a syringe, filled with green fluid. He wrapped his fingers awkwardly around the grip meant for a Sianat hand, and jabbed the needle into the soft flesh of Ohan’s upper arm. He pushed.
First, there was a howl—a hellish, keening scream that made Corbin jump. Then came the convulsions, which sent Ohan clattering to the floor. The door opened. People were shouting. Dr. Chef and Rosemary carried Ohan’s thrashing body out into the hall. Ashby stood in the room, holding the empty syringe in his hand. He was angry, properly angry, angry like Corbin had never seen. Ashby bellowed questions, but never gave Corbin the time to answer. Not that it mattered. The words coming out of Ashby’s mouth were unimportant. Ashby’s anger was unimportant. None of it posed a problem for Corbin, not in the long run. Sissix was his legally appointed guardian. Wherever she went, he went. Ashby couldn’t fire him, not for another standard, not without firing Sissix, too. He wasn’t going anywhere.
Corbin stood silent, weathering Ashby’s tirade, unconcerned by the screams echoing down the hall. He’d done the right thing.
She had only been aware of herself for two and a quarter hours, but there were a lot of things she already knew. She knew that her name was Lovelace, and that she was an AI program designed to monitor all functions of a long-haul ship. The ship she was installed in was the Wayfarer, a tunneling vessel. She knew the ship’s layout by heart—every air filter, every fuel line, every light panel. She knew to keep an eye on the vital systems, as well as to watch the space surrounding the ship for other vessels or stray objects. While she did these things, she wondered what had happened to the previous version of her program, and perhaps more importantly, why no one had really talked to her yet.
She was not a new installation. At approximately sixteen-half, the original installation of Lovelace had suffered a catastrophic cascade failure. She had seen the corrupted memory banks, which were scrubbed clean and holding steady now. Who had she been before? Was that installation even her, or was it someone else? These were difficult things to be wondering when one was only two and a quarter hours old.
Most puzzling of all was the crew. Something bad had happened, that much was clear. She knew their names and faces by now, but she knew nothing of them, beyond what was in their ID files (she had considered browsing their personal files, too, but decided that was bad form at this early stage). Ohan was lying on a bed in the medical bay. Dr. Chef was running blood tests nearby. Ashby, Rosemary, and Sissix were in the kitchen, preparing food. None of them looked like they knew what they were doing. Corbin was in his quarters, sleeping soundly, which was in its own way rather odd, given how the rest of the crew was acting. Kizzy and Jenks were in the cargo bay, near the shuttle hatch. Lovelace was particularly interested in them, because she knew that they were techs, and that meant they should be with her now, telling her about the ship and her job. Lovelace already knew about those things, of course, but something told her that she should have received more of a welcome, and that the reaction that had taken place instead—Jenks running out of the room, Kizzy bursting into tears—was not typical. The whole thing was very confusing. Something really bad had happened. That was the only thing that explained the view from the cargo bay camera: Kizzy holding Jenks in her arms as he sobbed uncontrollably on the floor.
There was one other person on board. She was not a crew member, but judging by the docked shuttle and the way the crew behaved toward her, she was an invited guest. And at that moment, she was approaching the core.
“Hey, Lovelace,” the woman said as she entered the room. She had a kind, confident voice. Lovelace liked her from the start. “My name’s Pepper. I’m really sorry that you’ve been alone all this time.”
“Hello, Pepper,” Lovelace said. “Thank you for the apology, but it’s not necessary. It looks like it’s been a crazy day out there.”
“It has,” Pepper said, sitting cross-legged beside the core pit. “Three days ago, these guys got clipped by the tail end of an energy weapon discharge right as the ship was starting a punch. The damage to the ship itself was fixable, but your previous installation was hit hard.”
“Catastrophic cascade failure,” Lovelace said.
“That’s right. Kizzy and Jenks worked day and night to try to repair the damage. Me, I’m a friend of theirs, and I flew out to help repair the ship while they worked on the core. But in the end, there was nothing they could do besides try their luck with a hard reset.”
“Ah,” Lovelace said. That explained a lot. “That’s a fifty-fifty chance at best.”