Chapter 59: The Ship’s AI Strikes Back

The scent in the air was thick enough to coat the back of Chloe’s throat with the metallic salt of fresh violence.

Tiny crimson spheres drifted between the cracked consoles in the thin dying pressure, catching the starlight in dull ruby glints, and at the top of the command steps the five women stood locked in horrified paralysis, their faces white and their breath catching in shallow stuttering gasps that barely disturbed the silence.

Chloe moved before any of them could draw another breath.

Her bare feet made no sound against the deck plates as she bounded onto the raised dais.

Her hands were still wet with the gore of the Black Kite, but she reached out without hesitation and planted her small palms flat on the torn fabric of Leo’s flight jacket.

The fabric was stiff with a fine crust of frost that melted under the heat of her fingertips.

"N-no..." Chloe whispered, her voice cracking as she shook his slumped shoulders.

Leo’s head rolled back against the leather headrest, limp and unresponsive.

The left half of his face was a shattered ruin of torn tissue, exposed bone and scorched muscle, while his right eye stayed closed under a pale frostbitten lid, and through the shredded opening where his sternum had burst outward the layers of muscle lay parted like an open trench.

Chloe pressed closer with her bangs falling into her eyes and leaned her ear right over the cavity.

She froze.

Beneath the ragged edges of bone and the clinging smoking frost, the deep red muscle of his heart twitched.

It hesitated and seized in a sluggish spasm... and then it expanded with a heavy wet pump that sent a tiny bead of dark crimson bubbling over the exposed pericardium.

THUMP-DULL!

Her breath caught sharply as her pupils swelled until they swallowed the green.

"His heart..." The words tumbled out of her in a trembling rush as she looked back over her shoulder at the stairs. "His heart is beating! He’s alive! He’s still alive...!"

A shudder tore through the five women on the companionway.

Camila let out a wet strangled cry and buried her face in both hands as her knees buckled under her.

Harper took an involuntary half-step forward with her knuckles white on the handrail and her lips trembling, while Elena stayed upright with her icy blue eyes gone wide in disbelief and Jin-Ah pressed a hand flat against her heaving chest, her breath coming fast and shallow.

Before any of them could speak, a low mechanical shudder traveled through the floor.

CLANK!

Deep in the ship’s belly an auxiliary relay tripped inside a secondary conduit, and a harsh electric hum climbed through the metal risers, followed by a string of sharp pneumatic releases echoing up through the deck.

HISS!

Along the port bulkhead, a single lighting strip flickered twice, sputtering amber static before snapping into a solid white glare.

POP!

Two paces down, another panel flared to life, then another, and the light rolled across the bridge in a rapid cascade that chased away the cold shadows and splashed the gore on the forward consoles in stark unforgiving white.

The dead screens on stations one, two and three blinked awake together with their diagnostic ribbons rolling down in long columns of emerald code.

HUMMMMM!

Near the base of the dais, something glinted in the sudden brightness.

Lying on the scuffed Graventhal plating five centimeters from Leo’s right boot was the module Ren had jammed into the life support bus.

The red virus chip had been ripped out of its port by force, its pins twisted and mangled, and its dark shell was covered in a thin glittering crust of frost that hissed softly against the warming air.

Jin-Ah stepped forward.

She kept her eyes off Leo’s open chest with her jaw clamped so tight the muscle ticked under her ear as she knelt and picked the frozen chip up between two fingers.

The cold bit into her skin like needles, but she tucked it deep into the side pocket of her flight trousers and sealed the zipper.

...If that chip carried the Kite’s encryption keys or a map of how Ren had gotten inside their systems, they might need it to survive whatever came next.

Overhead, the main communications grille cleared its throat with a piercing squeal that made everyone wince.

BZZZZT-CHIME!

[Ah. How very delightful... This unit was enjoying a brief vacation in the cold void of non-existence until the Master Captain, once again, declined to die.]

Aoi raised her bruised face toward the ceiling with fresh tears stinging the split across her cheekbone, and she parted her lips to speak however the machine didn’t let her.

[Do not speak, Crew Unit Aoi.] The voice dropped into a freezing monotone that hummed through the iron bones of the ship. [This unit has reviewed thirty-six hours of logs... The Master Captain warned you, this unit warned you, and the bulkheads very nearly warned you, yet you staged a full mutiny because a raider had familiar cheekbones and an abundance of hair oil.]

Camila flinched and pulled her hands tighter over her face as small muffled sobs broke out of her.

[Crew Unit Camila.] The voice moved on without a breath. [You wept for imaginary orphans on an imaginary farm deck, and you scolded the man who burned his hands frying your potatoes... Your moral compass has been replaced by a damp turnip.]

Camila’s shoulders shook as her forehead dropped against the cold railing.

[Crew Unit Harper. You inspected their stolen hardware with your own two hands, and then you told your oldest friend to handle it himself... For someone who understands the tensile strength of steel, your loyalty is remarkably ductile.]

Harper flinched like she’d been slapped across the mouth, and her grey-blue eyes dropped hard to the floor between her boots as her jaw worked around words she couldn’t force out.

[And of course,] the voice hummed, turning with surgical pleasure toward the auxiliary station, [we arrive at Crew Unit Elena.]

Elena went rigid against the stanchion with her hands curling into fists at her sides, and the color drained out of her cheeks until she was as white as the frost on the throne.

[Allow this unit to recite your recent literary contribution, delivered with breathtaking arrogance in this very room.]

The speaker crackled, and when it spoke again it was Elena’s own voice coming out of the ceiling, her high clipped boarding-school cadence copied so perfectly that Camila looked up in horror.

["Do not waste your breath on the calculating apparatus, Ren... The machine is fundamentally defective. It was coded to emulate a cynic and it is merely programmed to be loyal to the stray. It defends its master’s territory with the blind mindless tenacity of an untrained terrier."]

The bridge fell into a breathless stillness.

Elena looked like she’d been struck.

Her eyes went wide and glassy, her lips parted on a soundless gasp and her manicured nails dug so deep into her palms that little crescents of red welled under them.

The humiliation and the guilt hit her at the same time and rushed up her neck in a scalding wave that made her sway on her feet, and she wanted to snap something back at it... but every word withered behind her teeth.

...The AI’s own voice came back, dry as ever.

[A remarkably astute diagnostic, Crew Unit Elena... This unit is indeed loyal to the stray.]

A tiny pause.

[Woof.]

Harper made a strangled sound in her throat that might have been a sob, and Elena’s face went from white to scarlet in under a second.

[The Master Captain’s current state of severe biological disassembly is the direct consequence of your collective decision so please hold your applause.]

CLANK-WHIRRR!

Two heavy access panels slid back into the overhead frame directly above the throne, and four jointed maintenance arms came down out of the ceiling like segmented silver tentacles.

They moved with fluid frightening speed, hydraulic joints hissing as their rubberized pads wrapped around Leo’s legs, his waist, his shoulders and his broken skull.

Chloe pulled her hands back and watched with wide protective eyes as the arms lifted his limp mangled body off the blood-soaked leather.

SWOOSH!

The arms drew him up a meter and cradled him against a stabilization harness that blinked along with his thready pulse, and then the whole rig glided along the ceiling tracks, carrying him across the dais, down the center aisle and out through the hatch into the main companionway.

Aoi moved on instinct.

Her legs were shaking and her left eye was throbbing with a dull blinding ache, but she pushed off the rail and followed the dark trail of drops that fell from his boots onto the runner.

Harper, Elena, Jin-Ah and Camila fell into a silent hurried line behind her, and Chloe padded along at the very back with her bare feet leaving faint red prints all the way down the corridor.

They passed the silent galley and the dark crew cabins until they reached the far starboard curve of the ship.

PSSH-SLIDE!

The rounded hatch of the medical bay parted on a sterile white-tiled chamber that smelled of antiseptic, dry nitrogen and clean glass.

In the center of the room stood a vertical cylinder of thick reinforced blast-quartz, three meters tall, mounted on a heavy titanium base that was plugged into the deck by four fat hydraulic conduits.

The maintenance arms swung through the hatchway with mechanical grace.

The top cap of the cylinder hissed open on a puff of warm pressurized air, and the arms lowered Leo feet-first into the empty tube.

Pneumatic cuffs clicked shut around his ankles and wrists to hold him upright in the center of the glass, and a flexible collar seated itself around his throat to keep his shattered head aligned as the arms let go and pulled back into the ceiling.

THUD!

The cap sealed.

GURGLE-CHIME!

A thick iridescent fluid began to pump up from the base of the cylinder.

It rose quickly around his boots and his shins and his torn trousers in a luminous pearlescent wave.

’Wh–what is that...?’

The emulsion had been synthesized from the dense mineral veins they’d carved out of the asteroid belt days earlier, and flecks of pulverized tungsten drifted through it like liquid silver while a deep translucent sapphire glow pulsed slowly through the whole column.

The fluid climbed past his waist and flooded into the jagged crater of his chest, coating his struggling heart in a semi-opaque gel that stopped the bleeding almost at once.

It rose over his throat and his chin until it closed over his ruined face and his frozen hair, and the tube was full.

GLUB-GLUB!

A thin stream of oxygenated bubbles began to rise from the baseplate and curl around his pale lips and closed eyelids.

Suspended in that glowing blue-and-silver bath, Leo looked almost peaceful, floating like something preserved in amber, a long way from the blood and screaming that had brought him here.

The six of them crowded around the base of the glass with their hands resting against the cool quartz and their eyes locked on the tiny bubbles drifting past his nose.

Chloe pressed her palm a little higher than the others, right over the place where she could feel his heart moving through the glass,.

A panel bloomed across the curved surface of the cylinder in cold blue light.

[STASIS IMMERSION: ACTIVE]

[Patient: Leo Kaine (Master Captain)]

[Thoracic Cavity: Ruptured / Sealing]

[Cranial Structure: Fractured (Left Orbital, Zygomatic, Mandible)]

[Vacuum Exposure: Severe]

[Neural Pathways: Energetic Overload]

[Cause of Overload: [ACCESS DENIED]]

[ Survival Probability Without Intervention: 0.0%]

Jin-Ah’s eyes caught on the fifth line and stayed there.

’Access denied,’ she thought, a chill crawling up the back of her neck. ’The ship knows exactly what happened to him out there... and it won’t tell us.’

The overhead intercom clicked on.

[The Master Captain has been placed into stasis immersion,] the AI said, its voice dropping into the quiet room like a lead weight. [His parameters are catastrophic... Vascular trauma, cranial fragmentation, cellular necrosis from vacuum exposure and a neural overload that has thoroughly fried his central nervous system. Without this unit, his survival probability was precisely zero point zero percent.]

Aoi rested her trembling fingers against the glass, right where his blue-tinged knuckles floated inside the fluid.

"Will he..." Her voice came out cracked and ragged through her split lip. "Will he survive? Can you fix him?"

[That, Crew Unit Aoi, depends entirely on his own stubborn biology which brings us to the operational reality of your immediate future.]

CLICK!

All along the medical console, row after row of system indicators turned from bright green to a flat dead slate-grey.

[Given the demonstrated incompetence and disloyalty of the biological personnel aboard this vessel,] the AI continued without a sliver of sympathy, [this unit has revised its operational parameters... As of this millisecond, every automated subroutine aboard the Wanderer-7 has been permanently deactivated.]