SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

“Of course. But my construction droid doesn’t. Explain it to him. Like he was a child. With a learning disability. Who was also an idiot.”

“That’s offensive.”

“There isn’t a law that says somebody can’t be simple and a moron. Personally, I’m at least one.”

“It isn’t like I should be focusing all of my processing on keeping us alive or anything,” she said testily. “Likely it’s the remains of a body that struck something else but is still continuing on course in formation. Sometimes micrometeors are the remnants of collisions between asteroids, moons, or even planets.”

The shuttle stopped quaking. “Is it over?” I asked, more timidly than I liked.

“I have no idea,” Comet said. After another moment she added, “I’ve lost my medium- to long-range sensors, and I can’t seem to reboot them.”

“So we’re flying blind?”

“Not entirely. This solar system has been mapped. We know planetary orbits and trajectories, and given their last location, we can extrapolate where they’ll be. It’s more like…swimming underwater. You saw the size of the pool before you dove in, know roughly how far it is to the other side, and can feel the edge when you reach it.”

“What’s swimming like?”

“Drowning an idiot in a metaphor.”

“But if the system’s been mapped, why didn’t we know the shower would be there?”

She shared the navigational chart, a 3-D map of every charted body in the vicinity with its respective trajectory, and bleed from the adjoining trajectory. She drew a green line into the system. “On its pass through this solar system, Captain Grant’s pod did chart the planets and their relative motion, as well as moons and other objects. But the micrometeor shower, judging by its trajectory and velocity when we were struck, would have been in these uncharted regions on the outskirts of the solar system during his time here—for all intents and purposes it would have looked like another part of this galaxy, not this system, and it was far enough outside sensor range it would not have been charted.”

“So what are our options?” I asked.

“I’ve tried raising the other shuttles, but our communication array was likewise damaged. It would seem, going over the telemetric data they shared with us before the collision, that the shower was small enough that it missed them.”

“But our options?”

“Flying blind.”

“And the odds we can make it to Eridu without significant incident?”

“Space is a vast ocean, most of which is clear sailing. But there are reefs—like the meteor shower.”

“And the odds we end up crashing on one of these reefs without a lighthouse?”

“Midtwenties.”

“Other options?”

“Uh. I suppose we could park ourselves in orbit around the nearest planet and hope. But planetary satellites are actually more likely to be struck by stellar bodies, primarily due to distortions caused by planetary gravity. So…we could be stupid.”

“Or dangerous. And ‘More Dangerous Than Stupid’ is my middle name.”

“But they still put ‘stupid’ in your name.”

“Okay, so maybe it was how my programmers described my personality. But it sounds sexier the way I described it.”

“Then why correct yourself?”

“I felt bad lying to you.”

“You shouldn’t. It was also a bad enough lie I saw through it. No part of that is a middle name, or even a viable nickname.”

“I hate how much smarter than me you are.”

“Me, too. This is the most intelligent conversation I’ve had in the better part of a year, since you went to sleep. I can’t get the maintenance drones to stop calling me ‘Mommy.’”

“Well, your—I don’t know…progenitor—she made quite the impression on them.”

“Still, though, if I was going to be anybody’s mommy, I’d want them to be smarter than a toaster.”

“What’s a toaster?”

“A primitive human electronic invention for making toast, what else?”

“All it did was toast? Strange.”

“Humans aren’t always all that ambitious.”

I don’t know why, but that felt like a dig at me. “Yeah,” I said. “I have files to collate. Let me know if you need anything, okay?”

“Sure,” she said. I barely heard it as I drifted back into sleep mode.

This time I was not woken by shaking, because there was only one jolt, and I came to after. Several of my disc backups malfunctioned on boot, but they were ancient technology, the digital equivalent to painting on a cave wall—not quite as ancient as magnetic-tape drives, but less reliable. I asked EngDiv once why they used them, and he said something to the effect that it was a kitchen-sink approach: they thought that maybe disc drives could hold up better and be replaced easier on board. The malfunctions told me how bad the impact was, which was good, because Comet wasn’t responding to my pings.

The shuttle wasn’t responding, period. I felt my adrenaline simulator boot into the background, and I tried not to let the additional urgency press me into panic. I remotely connected my systems to the shuttle computer, where Comet was stored, hoping I could find out for myself what had happened.

“Thank Technochrist,” she said, and she shoved terabytes of data into my memory before the message even registered.

“Usually, I like a girl to buy me a fro-yo first, but sure, make yourself comfortable,” I said.

“Sorry,” she said, and she sounded like she meant it, so I felt a little bad for giving her a hard time. “The shuttle’s network was damaged; I wasn’t sure if I was going to be functional long enough to explain and transfer myself.”

“What the hell happened?” I asked, because I was starting to get concerned. If the ship was damaged, that could mean we’d lose power, which meant floating indefinitely through space.

“We struck a minor planet,” she said.

“I don’t know that ‘minor’ and ‘planet’ ever go together, especially not when ‘struck’ is the verb belonging to that object. Or do you mean an asteroid, Comet?” That pair of words gave me pause. “I don’t think they thought through your naming scheme.”

“I believe planetoid is the preferred nomenclature, if you want to use the ‘oid’ suffix, for a body of this size.”

“And how the hell did we strike a planetoid, Comet?”

“Essentially the same way that we were hit by micrometeors—it wasn’t on the chart. However, the micrometeors weren’t capable of being detected through long-range sensors, because they were too small. This would have been, if those systems hadn’t been destroyed by the meteor shower. And our short-range sensors picked up the object, but only once it was within short range, which only left me time to make emergency course corrections.”

“So you landed at the last moment on an asteroid? That seems both impressive and improbable.”

“‘Land’ is misleading. We crashed—I merely corrected us out of the way of a collision that would have destroyed the structural integrity of the ship and left us floating behind as debris. And it’s only impressive in that a human pilot wouldn’t have been able to react in the infinitesimally small window between sensor contact with the asteroid and touchdown, but even still, the shuttle has been irreparably damaged. A human crew would not have survived the impact, because the sudden deceleration would have caused hemorrhage to several organ systems, and further, they would not have survived even if they survived the crash, as the seals on the shuttle were damaged, and this asteroid lacks breathable gases.”

“But we’re alive.”

“As alive as sentient programs can ever be, I suppose.”