Рич Ларсон - Tomorrow Factory - Collected Fiction

“Cracking the first one now.”

Silas heard a grunt, then the gurgle of sluicing fluids and the hiss of a pod coming open. Silence.

“This one’s empty.” Io’s voice crackled. “Find the cryo record, Silas.”

Silas readied himself. This was not a healthy freethinker. That much was glaring. He plugged in with his dampers on full, and found himself in a mist of code. Systems were running slant-wise. Protocols were blinkered red, falling apart. Through it all, a spiky vein of mutation, coiling through core files and throttling monitor programs. He searched for the cryobank.

“A bioship can’t grow without feed,” Yorick’s voice came, accompanied by the gurgle and hiss of another pod. “All this fresh mass… These empty pods…”

Silas heard it dimly; he was immersed. The freethinker’s personality module was bloated. Immense. He reached for it.

“Oh, shit.” Io’s voice, taut. “Oh, shit. Silas, please tell me they launched a fucking lifeboat.”

But Silas was prodding the personality module, running his virtual feelers over it, even as his subconscious processed the conversation and cold clawed up his spine.

“It ate them,” Yorick said, and in the same instant the module unfurled under Silas’s touch like a star going supernova.

Electric current sizzled through his radsuit with a cooking fat hiss. Even insulated, Silas’s teeth knocked together and he spasmed, flopping away from the interface, blinking through reams of corrupt code. Then he was spread vitruvian on the deck, staring upward as the firefly lights of the star map flickered to life.

“Welcome aboard, crew members.” The voice speared his eardrums. “Thank you for volunteering for reassignment. Dronyk Orbital appreciates your service.”

Hologram bloomed in the dark like a nocturnal garden, sweeping through the air, painting displays. Silas saw their ship docked up from an outside angle, a remora latched to a leviathan. The bioship was extending its grapplers, sluggishly stretching.

“Your prior service vessel has been demarcated as salvage,” the freethinker blared. “We are eager to acclimate you to your new home.”

Silas felt someone haul him to his feet. “Full-on decay,” he choked. “The freethinker. It’s fucked up beyond belief. Maybe some kind of virus.”

“Can you fucking, I don’t know, wipe and reboot?” Io demanded.

Silas looked at the crackling interface. “Not when it’s spitting volts.”

Tendrils were descending from every part of the bioship’s flesh, pushing slick and glistening from every crevice, some wriggling crude suckers and others tipped with wicked-looking barbs.

“Cooperation is key,” the freethinker trilled. “If crew members fail to cooperate, they may be…” The voice looped backward. “Demarcated as salvage.”

“Override it!” Io was sweeping back and forth with the howler, trying to pick a target. “Can’t you override it?”

Silas knew it was far past verbal override, but he tried. “Dronyk Orbital service vessel 405204, you are undergoing a malfunction,” he said. “Allow emergency access to outside diagnostics. Your crew is endangered.”

“Internal diagnostics report no malfunction,” the freethinker cooed. “You are mistaken.”

“Where the fuck is your crew?” Io blurted.

“You are my crew.” The tendrils wriggled closer. “Your prior contract has been dissolved. Your prior ship will be dissolved.”

Silas opened his mouth to try speaking in code, but as he did the display showed the grapplers wrapping around their docked ship. Around Haley’s cold body. Haley’s neural imprint slow-dancing in the freethinker. Haley’s ghost.

Dissolved.

“Sorry,” Silas said, then he put his foot into the back of Io’s knee, wrenched the howler away, and ran like hell.

It wasn’t his imagination anymore; the corridors were constricting around him like a gullet and the bioship was very much awake. Silas put his head down and bulled through the first wave of tendrils, feeling them slap across his shoulders and coil for his ankles, then he found the wide-spray on the howler and cut loose. The subsonic pulse shivered his teeth and shattered the spines of the tendrils, snapping them limp.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Io blared in his ear.

“Haley’s imprint,” Silas grunted.

“It’s going to eat the ship with you on it, you stupid, fucking—”

Silas cut the radio. He fired from his hip, no time to aim, clearing his way through a flesh-and-blood thicket, until suddenly the corridor opened up and he was facing the sealed sphincter airlock. He narrowed his weapon’s cone as tight as it would go, draining the battery to dregs, and slammed the trigger.

The air in front of him rippled and blurred, then the sound wave punched through in an eruption of shredded meat. Silas staggered through the hole with tendrils wrapping his ankles. The gleaming white metal of the airlock was a comforting pressure on his eyeballs. No meat. No pulse. He stomped off the last of the tendrils and crossed over to the door, cranking the manual release.

As soon as he was in the ship main, Silas was bombarded with red panic lights strobing the corridor and proximity warnings chattering to his radsuit. As he hurtled around the corner, he pulled up an exterior view in the corner of his faceplate, watching the bioship’s embrace tighten. The walls shuddered and he could hear groaning metal. The bioship was drawing them towards its maw, firing up white-hot smelters and gnashing diamond-edged crushers. Aft would go first. He could make it.

Silas hurtled around the corner, slamming his shoulder on the cryohold door when it didn’t open quickly enough. His faceplate was splashed with warning holograms; he could see punctures and pressure drops all over the place, contained for now but not for long. He dove to the interface and plugged in.

Their freethinker’s personality module was nowhere near the size and complexity of the bioship’s, but it could feel crude distress, like a cat or a dog, and it was feeling it now. Silas felt a shallow pang of guilt as he barreled through the freethinker’s directive requests, and a deeper one as he remembered Yorick and Io might be fighting for their lives. Both fell away when he found Haley’s imprint.

With nowhere else to upload to, Silas pulled her directly into his radsuit, diverting every last shred of processing power. He knew it was a temporary fix. In such a small space, the neural loop would start to decay in a matter of hours. But for now, her mind was safe, and his rush of relief softened the adrenaline’s edges. From outside the interface, Silas felt the ship bend and shiver. He flicked back through the freethinker’s countermeasure options, but the bioship had already swallowed their engines. He was on a doomed vessel.

Silas was staring at Haley’s frozen face when the alloy roof of the bridge peeled up and away like so much soft tissue, exposing the howling black vacuum.

Only a loop of cable throttling the crook of his arm kept him from being plucked up in the stream of desperate gases seeking equilibrium. His viola case went spinning past and he managed to grab it with his free hand, nearly wrenching his shoulder from its socket. His options were few. Even if he managed to crawl back to the airlock, handhold by handhold, there might not be an airlock by the time he arrived.

If he was going to get back to the bioship, it would be from the outside. So, as the cable stretched to breaking point, Silas tucked the viola case under his arm and readied himself.

“ Your hand caught in mine like a breath / I will have to release ,” he said, though Haley’s ghost had no way of hearing him. “What do you think? It’s for a dirge.”