Violent Wonder Page 6

  Not that that mattered really. The life expectancy of an SEU was extremely low, its high casualty rate owing more to botched drops than actually being killed by combatants, and the PUC didn’t care very much about the comfort and long-term health of its assets.

  “How are you?” Nadia asked, unfastening the clasps on her armor. She stepped out of it, putting it into stasis mode, and lifted it up onto the maintenance rack alongside the wall. Kneeling down, she then grabbed one of her blankets and wrapped it around her knees.

  Kit was staring up at the ceiling, his chest rising and falling in a steady rhythm. “Those were the first actual living people I’ve killed since leaving the PUC.”

  “I didn’t think you actually fired your weapon,” Nadia said.

  He shook his head slowly. “I didn’t but that’s not the point.”

  “Bullshit it’s not the point,” Nadia said. “There’s a difference between shooting someone to death and just being in the room when they’re killed. After all, you can bet there were plenty of people on those corvettes we blew out of the sky before we jumped.”

  Kit and Nadia had gone AWOL one day after an operation in which they were sent to a remote planet on the outer rim to take care of a small family-owned lumber-treatment business who had recently developed a way to sterilize vegetables on a number of worlds that specialized in growing food. Some of the atmospheres on those planets had rain that made it extremely prosperous for growing bountiful harvests of food. Unfortunately, the very biotic compounds that made this possible also boosted consumers’ likelihood of contracting fungal infections almost ten-fold; more if you were living in a humid climate.

  Apparently, the lumber-treatment business had a problem where their wood would start to rot on certain planets, which was eating up all of their return budget. So when they looked at the data of all the planets this was happening on, they noticed that they all happened to be the big agricultural planets. From there, they had looked to see if there were any big agricultural planets that their product wasn’t affected on and found only one, which was also known for having an ore-processing facility which had been unknowingly pumping toxins into the air for years before it was discovered and shut down.

  After some tinkering, they were finally able to discern that the fungus that was affecting their wood and causing it to rot was the same fungus that was killing people after eating vegetables from certain planets. The fungus could be killed however by bathing it in a powdered version of the iron ore from the planet where their wood wasn’t rotting. The powder itself was far more lethal than the fungal spores, but it could be washed right off with soap and water.

  The problem was that the state-funded scientists that had been put on the problem four years earlier had pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into a boatload of research that had resulted in absolutely nothing. Their problem had been that they had taken a top-down approach of trying to solve the problem by retroactively tracing all of the fungal-carrying vegetables back to their origins, discerning their specific properties, and then trying to figure out what exactly could kill the spores by exposing it to a number of known pesticides.

  Nothing had worked. They had tried everything from fire to boiling water to a whole array of synthesized compounds. The spores were simply too tough and adaptive to kill. The lumber-treatment business, on the other hand, had stumbled upon the answer nearly by accident.

  That was all well and good, but the government official who had funded the program had been elected on his campaign to eliminate the virus and reinvigorate the agricultural industry on the affected planets. So, when some backwoods entrepreneurs stumbled upon an answer that his best scientists couldn’t come up with, it was—well, frankly—embarrassing. It was embarrassing for the elected official and the government he was a part of.

  So SEU Squad: 1492 had been sent in to intimidate them and acquire the formula to the mineral powder. PUC scientists had tried to replicate it once they figured out what was happening, but everything they made was either too weak or too strong. The dense atmosphere on the world it had been discovered on was enough to take care of the fungus when it grew on wood, but vegetables were a different matter entirely. It was something that their scientists could reverse engineer but by that point, they didn’t have the time.

  Nadia remembered the operation well, though she didn’t think that she would have if it hadn’t been for Kit. They had gone in with orders to intimidate, not kill, so that’s what they did. They showed up in full armor, neural rifles slung over their shoulders, and simply asked the family for the formula.

  It was enough.

  Frightened half-to-death, they handed it over in less than thirty seconds.

  “That was when it hit me,” Kit had said afterward. “Right up until I had the formula uploaded into my neural drive, I had been ready to kill them for it. And when I didn’t? I was relieved. That was the first time I realized I didn’t want to kill anyone. I’ve never wanted to kill anyone. It was just that, whenever I got back from an operation where I had to kill—which were almost all of them—I would then justify why it had to be done. It wasn’t until I didn’t have to pull the trigger that I realized I had never wanted to in the first place. Not for patriotism or for the greater good. Not for anything.”

  And Nadia got that. She herself had never had a problem with killing people—call it a difference in temperament, she guessed—but she knew what Kit was saying about the justification part. In the programming facility, they weren’t conditioned by having to kill puppies or their best friends or something; instead, the PUC used a different tactic. They used social conditioning.

  It seemed silly now, but it had been effective then. Raised in an isolated society where everyone focused on the greater good and what needed to be done to protect it, there was no question about the right thing to do. Nadia had bought into the idea. In some ways, she still bought into it.

  Kit had always been there though, and when it came down to the mission or him, she chose him, the sentiment that made her such an effective killing machine for the PUC being the very same sentiment that made her abandon it. She did it for her tribe.

  One day they were set to drop onto a planet for an operation, and before climbing into their drop pods, they had each altered the drop coordinates for a lake over twenty miles south of their area of operation. When the man-on-the-ground painted the target and hit the POP, their preset coordinates overrode the laser designation and they were sent somewhere else. Both survived the impact but were listed MIA when their bodies weren’t found. Officially speaking, they hadn’t been seen since.

  “I just feel like I’m responsible for what happened in there,” Kit said, still looking at the ceiling. “It was our job to clear the synths. We knew that there could be more, but I didn’t check that corner. That was my corner and I should have checked it. I was just too focused on getting to the shuttle before the others showed up. Plus, my attention was trained on all those people. I wanted to make sure what happened didn’t happen, so I ended up missing a crucial detail.”

  Nadia reached out and placed a hand on his shoulder. She knew that this wasn’t something she was going to be able to talk him out of with pure logic, so instead she just listened.

  “I just,” he began. “I just don’t know if I can take any more of this. I don’t know if I can watch any more people die. By my hands or otherwise.”

  She didn’t want to bring it up—couldn’t bring it up, not while he was in the middle of this—but if Kit left she wouldn’t know what to do. She was here because of him. If he hadn’t have gone AWOL then she would still be crushing operations without a second thought. She had grown used to the crew on board the Leopold but she could ditch them and not care any less. She had no stake in this fight—nothing except for her friend. Her teammate.

  “We’re not in the Pillon System,” she said. He turned to look at her. “Something got messed up when we jumped. We’re in uncharted space without a gate in sight.”

&nbs
p; “Hm,” he sniffed. “So, what now?”

  “Now?” She leaned back and laid down on the ground, head next to his feet. “Captain isn’t sure if we should stay put and figure out went wrong or start moseying to see if we can’t find a planet with people on it. We’re supposed to vote in a couple hours on what we think we should do.”

  The room ticked as they both stared upwards, each thinking their own thoughts.

  “Remember when we had a captain who would just do things?” Kit said. “Where we didn’t have to vote on stuff?”

  “Yeah,” Nadia said. “I think those are called dictators. And I think you and I both have snuffed out more of those than we could count on shitty little backwater planets.”

  “Do you think they could have been good people?” Kit asked. “Given different circumstances?”

  Nadia thought about it, running her fingers through her hair. “No, I’m pretty sure they were all assholes. If assholes were ever born, it was them.”

  “Okay,” Kit replied, still not looking convinced.

  They laid there and talked for the next few hours about nothing in particular and by the time 18:00 hours rolled around they hadn’t come any closer to deciding on what they should do. Instead, they both got up—their internal clocks telling them it was time—and they went up to the bridge where they voted on the same thing.

  The whole crew wrote down their answers and put them in a tin jar and Ritz pulled them out and counted them. The vote was six-to-one. They were gonna take their chances in open space.

  6

  The Signal

  They had been flying for three days now and the view in front of them hadn’t changed almost at all. The big red star loomed huge and bloody, its edges pulsing. The planets appeared somewhat closer but not much and from what they could tell, the nearest one was a gas giant that they couldn’t even try to land on without being crushed by its gravity.

  “This is some bullshit,” Byzzie said, casually. “What a stupid fucking death.”

  “Better than getting hung on live television,” Hector said through a mouthful of canned peaches. He was eating them with a wooden spoon.

  “Is it?” she said. “At least that’s exciting. It might be horrifying but at least it’s not boring. This just feels dumb and pointless.” She looked over at him. “You know you can get sick doing that?”

  “Doing what?”

  “Eating straight from the tin can. Most of those canning facilities ignore regulations.” She looked down at her screen. She had been running the calculations anyway. It would be unfortunate if they came across an answer once they had run out of food, but she figured it couldn’t hurt at least.

  “Why doesn’t someone enforce them?” Hector said, his rate of eating never slowing. “It’s against the law, right?”

  “There’s too many facilities and not enough people to enforce the regulations. It happens so infrequently that the broader public doesn’t know about it and even if they did, they wouldn’t do anything. ‘Clean tin cans’ isn’t exactly a sexy platform to try and raise funding for.”

  “Huh,” he looked down at the peaches, thinking to himself. He continued eating.

  “I take it you figure the odds were in your favor?” Byzzie said.

  “Nope,” he let the spoon clatter into the can, brought it to his mouth, and then tipped it back to drink the juice. “I was just thinking about what you were saying about dying this way,” he said after he had swallowed. “Maybe dying of tin-can-disease or whatever would be a little more interesting.”

  “So,” Byzzie said, changing the subject. “Who do you think voted to stay and do the calculations?”

  Hector scratched his chin. “I think it was you.”

  “Me?” She said incredulously.

  “Yup. I think it makes you feel like you’re in control.”

  “Whoa Hector, I’m a little insulted. What do you think of me?”

  “I get it,” he said. “It’s not really a bad thing per-say. It’s just, we’re in a tense situation and sometimes it makes us feel better to be doing something, even if it’s not exactly helpful. And to you, that might be running calculations.”

  Byzzie looked down at the calculations she had started, running anyway without telling anyone and shrugged.

  “Remember King tripping the security alarm?” Hector continued. “He did that because he wanted to be in control. He knew how important the mission was and his gut told him to take responsibility for it.”

  “Okay, I am not King,” Byzzie said raising a hand.

  “We’ve all got a little King in us, I think.”

  The screen in front of them suddenly burped and a red light started flashing on the counsel.

  “Is that a message?” Hector said incredulously.

  “Yeah…” Byzzie leaned over and hit the play button. The message wasn’t live, but rather, something they had received when they had gotten close enough. It played on a twenty-second loop.

  “That sounded like music,” Hector said after a second.

  It had sounded like music. It wasn’t like any music Byzzie had ever heard, but it still followed a steady rhythm. The instruments sounded organic though, almost like a throat gulping. To tell the truth, it could have easily been mistaken for that if it hadn’t been for the very faint but definite melody that could be heard in the background.

  Byzzie had played drums when she was younger, so she was more of a rhythm girl than lead, but she knew enough to recognize a melody when she heard one. It wasn’t particularly good in the traditional sense—the notes just kind of climbed up randomly and didn’t resolve—but the repetition and variation betrayed a sort of intentionality that was present in even the worst musicians.

  “Where did it come from?” she asked. “Can you trace its origins?”

  “Yeah, hold on.” Hector reached up and adjusted his baseball cap and bent the rim; it was a tick that Byzzie had noticed him do before take-off and other tense situations. “Looks like it’s coming from…” He lifted a hand and it began to drift toward the right-hand side on the viewport. “There.”

  He pointed but Byzzie couldn’t see anything. She toggled her headset and spoke into it. “Captain?”

  “Yeah?” A groggy voice came through the line and she figured he must have been asleep. He had been sleeping a lot ever since his injury, but she figured that if he was going to now was the perfect time. Not like they had anything better to do.

  “We found something. It’s not a planet but it’s—well, you better just get in here.”

  Thirty-seconds later, Captain Ritz walked through the hatch and onto the bridge wearing a stained white t-shirt and a pair of loose-fitting cargo pants. “What is it?” he asked, all business.

  “Just…here.” She played the message.

  They listened to it. Then they listened to it again four more times, each time the song seeming to grow stranger and stranger.

  “It sounds almost sad, ya know?” Hector said.

  “I don’t know,” Byzzie said. “It gives me anxiety.”

  “You were able to trace it?” Ritz asked.

  “Yup. Judging by the strength of the signal I’d say it’d take about eight hours to reach.”

  “Really?” the captain said. “It doesn’t look like there are any planets in that direction. At least, not that I can immediately see.”

  “There’s not. My guess is it’s a probe or satellite or something. Maybe a ship.”

  The captain’s eyebrows shot up. “A ship? What would a ship be doing way out here?”

  “And what would it be doing broadcasting that?” Byzzie added.

  “I don’t know,” Ritz said. He shook his head. “You got anything better to do?”

  “Nope,” Hector said, and as he did he began to punch in the new set of coordinates.

  “Good.” Ritz slapped his shoulder. “Let me know when we’re within range. Until then, I’ll be in my quarters.”

  “What is it?” Raquel asked. The whole crew was c
lustered on the bridge looking out the viewport. In front of them was a long, grey metallic tube with a bulky backend and a vast array of antennas and satellites jutting off of its body.

  “It’s a ship,” Hector said.

  “Doesn’t look like any ship I’ve ever seen,” Byzzie said.

  “That’s because it’s old,” he responded. “Way, way, before our time. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was powered by a Tesla Arc. Looks like an old freighter. Maybe even a first model.”

  “Really? And you think it’s still broadcasting after all this time?”

  He pointed at it. “Hey, don’t ask me. See for yourself.”

  “Did you hail it?” Kit asked. Both him and Nadia had donned their Arc Suits.

  “Yeah, no response. The thing looks dead in the water but if it is then I can’t tell how it’s broadcasting.”

  “Do you think there’s anyone onboard?”

  “I doubt it,” Hector said, flipping a switch. “But I’ll scan it anyway.”

  They waited while the numbers rolled across the screen, then an image of the ship sprung up above the viewport. It was blue and green with inconsistent patches of red and yellow.

  “Uhh, there’s something on board. Hard to say if it’s living or not.”

  “What else could it be?” Ritz asked.

  “Pfffff, any number of things. It could be residual radiation. Vegetation if the atmospheric processor is still cycling. Hell, they could have a degraded Tesla Arc; that whole floor could be live with pooling energy.”

  “Okay,” Ritz said. “So we should be suited up when we board.”

  “Excuse me, what?” Raquel cut in, feeling fear and apprehension shoot through her. No way she was getting on some ghost ship out in the middle of nowhere. “I don’t remember talking about boarding it.”

  “Of course we’re going to board it. There could be people on there. If not, then there might at least be food.”

  “Didn’t Hector say that thing could be from back when they still used Tesla Arcs? Didn’t they use those in ships like…two hundred years ago? If there’s any food onboard then I’d be more concerned with it eating me?”