Chris Moriarty: Spin Control

Arkady eyed Moshe, taking in the clever resolute face, the thin yet strong body. “Did you fight in the War for Independence?”

“If you’re going to talk about it to humans, you might want to consider calling it something else. But no, I didn’t. Earthers aren’t required to make troop contributions for off-world Peacekeeping missions.” Moshe sat down again and leaned forward to stare at Arkady. “But I saw the war on the evening spins. You fought like ants. You died and died and died until the Peacekeepers had nervous breakdowns from having to shoot so many of you. What do your officers threaten you with to make you fight like that?”

“We have no officers.”

“Then what are you afraid of? People only fight like that when they’re faced with something that scares them worse than dying.”

Later Arkady would see this moment as a turning point. Before it, he had managed, just barely, to keep Moshe guessing. After it, Moshe and Osnat both knew in their guts what he really was…even if it took their brains a while to catch up with the knowledge.

“Some things are stronger than fear,” he whispered.

“Name one.”

He hesitated, acutely aware of Osnat’s gaze boring into his back. There were plenty of safe words he could have chosen. Duty. Honor. Gene loyalty. Genetic gifting. If he’d latched on to any of those abstract concepts he could have kept up the lie. He could have remained the empty vessel that Korchow wanted him to be: a vessel into which Moshe could pour his own beliefs and desires without ever touching on the real truth of what had happened on Novalis.

Instead, Arkady uttered what seemed to be the only word left inside his rattlingly empty skull:

“Love.”

ARkady woke to the smell of curry.

No solid food for twelve hours before the coffin: that was the rule for all cold shipping on the Syndicate’s creaking fleet of Bussard-drive-powered interstellar ships. It was rumored that this precaution had been rendered obsolete by the newest generation of UN-built jumpships. But that kind of wishful rumor, fueled by privation, envy, and cryophobia, was always winging its way through the vacuum between the various Syndicate orbital stations. And given the fact that Arkady felt as if he’d fasted through every day of the long months of slow drift from Gilead to Novalis, the extra twelve hours hardly seemed significant.

He sat up, rubbing at skin raw with freezer burn and fighting his way out of the bruised haze of jump hangover. There was a thrumming, flickering whisper in the air, below and beyond the normal shipboard noises, as if quick fingers were tap tap tapping along the ship’s hull out there in the starless dark.

A dust field? Please let it only be a dust field.

They were running ahead of the charts now, flying half-blind on spectrometry that was years out of date before it ever reached them, with only the skill of their superbly spliced and trained pilots standing between them and hull breach. In its wake the ship shed a maelstrom of astronomical and navigational data that would guide later ships on the same journey. But up ahead there was only the razor-thin spin-stream from the unmanned probes. And though space was empty, it wasn’t so empty that you could jump off the edge of the map and be sure you weren’t going to hit something.

Arkady’s clothes lay in the hold-all beside his coffin, neatly folded in an airtight insectproof flatpack: orbsilk shirt and trousers that hung loose on his dehydrated body and still smelled faintly of the sweet clean air of KnowlesSyndicate; soft stationside shoes whose soles and uppers blended into each other with a seamlessness that went a long way toward explaining why hand-thrown orbsilk had become the Syndicate’s number one cash crop since the Trade Compact with the UN worlds; the little rucksack, neither indecently large nor puritanically small, that contained all the moveable property he held separately from RostovSyndicate’s communal stores.

Someone had left a sweater beside the rucksack: a thick rollneck with the soft hand and deep rippling color that only the most carefully spliced and cosseted worms could produce. It was a “think of me” if Arkady had ever seen one: the kind of beautiful luxury object that might be passed to a crèchemate setting off for a distant assignment with the ritual words: “think of me when you use it.” And it was just the thing for a body still in the shivering grip of cold sleep.

He stood up and felt the sharp tug of the ship’s .4 gs on muscles raised in microgravity. The retrofitted lab and ark modules of the ship would be in the old zero-g cargo bays—places that the human designers had never meant to be shirtsleeve working environments but that were the closest thing to home the retrofitted UN ship could provide for its new passengers. In contrast, the cryobay, bridge, and crew quarters had all been designed to provide humans with the rotational gravity their skeletons and immune systems required. The Syndicate crew, who needed fake gravity not at all, would just have to live with the sore muscles and broken equipment.

Arkady had to squeeze past the tacticals’ still-active coffins to reach the corridor. He slid past with a shudder, trying not to look too closely at what slumbered beneath the backlit viruflex. He hadn’t seen a tactical since the UN invasion…and he hoped never to see another.

The corridor hugged the outer hull of the ship, and sure enough the rustling whisper was louder there. He peered through the nearest viewport. White hull plunging away into blackness. And out on the edge of darkness something so strange that it took him several stunned moments to identify it.

They were flying through a forest.

Leaves pattered on the hull like raindrops. Twigs and branches rasped down its length like fingernails scrabbling for purchase. A mulberry leaf tumbled past, and the shipboard running lights flashed on the bright tracery of veins that had exploded into ice crystals when they hit hard vac. The leaf was followed by an orbsilk cocoon, its priceless golden worm dead inside it. Then a woman’s hairbrush, turning lazily end over end, its momentum so close to the ship’s own that it seemed to slide sternward at little more than strolling speed.

This was the ship they’d been sent to overtake, hurtling along their same trajectory, its hull open to the void, its silk gardens shredded by decompression, its little ark of living treasures cast upon the deep. Arkady tore his eyes away from the viewport. He had known, they had all known, that another ship had tried to reach Novalis before them and failed. But it was one thing to know it. It was another thing to hear the lost lives picking at the hull like hungry ghosts.

There are so very few of us, he whispered to the gods of the void, if there were any. I can stand dying. But not for nothing. Let Novalis be the home we need so badly. Who knows how many more chances we’ll have?

Arkady had spent only four hours on the ship before going into cryo, so the smell of the curry led him more surely than his vague memories of the hab module’s configuration. The ship seemed smaller and harder-used than he remembered it. A trick of perception; in point of fact, it had barely been used at all during the two years they’d spent in cold sleep. And it was just the right size for the ten members of the survey team, most of whom were already in the dayroom, nursing their cryo hangovers and watching Novalis slowly stealing real estate from the black void on the wall monitor.