Dark Charris I
“Sometimes history is the story the people of the present need to believe about their past.”
(Part 23 of “The Misfits” series)
Verona located him in the Northern Hemisphere. It wasn’t difficult to find a citizen on Charris, especially one who’d just returned after being off world for three decades or so. Kristoff Mikkel was in the city of Riobhan. Verona presumed he was trying to locate living relatives of his now perished sect, delivering tough news about the people, she had to figure, most of the folks here on Charris had already long considered lost.
While orbiting the planet aboard Nilius’s ship, she had a brief conversation with Clem Aballi—when was he last on Charris; did he murder anyone; could he show any of his faces on Charris without raising a terror alert across half the galaxy?
“We’ll be fine,” he stated. “I’ve made no enemies here, not any still living anyway. What about you, Verona? Any chance you’ll be identified—Anatalia, what was it?”
“Anatalia Gomes,” she said, a bit wistful, before turning back to him suddenly. “Facial scans won’t pull archives half a millennium old, Clem. They’re all long dead, me and my family.”
“Good then. Let’s go get Kristoff.”
Verona and Burch had both protested when Nilius and Rishi insisted on pulling Kristoff away from his present task of recruiting a cohort to return to Texini to lay that entire society of luddites to rest. Verona imagined it was a difficult enough task without interruptions. Rishi and Nilius insisted they needed everyone they knew who could be trusted, especially someone as useful as Kristoff Mikkel. He’d been to the future. He understood the dangers on the horizon, how the artifacts worked, the players, the stakes, and maybe more importantly than anything, he knew the planet—Charris.
It was a heavy argument to rebut. Heavy enough that Burch and Verona relented. So she found herself on a short shuttle down to an airfield outside Origgi, and then on a tram to Riobhan, not a part of her homeworld she was familiar with.
Kristoff was registered in a small rooming house—a travel stop common among the smaller towns surrounding the desert flats of the North. The hub in the tiny lobby pinged his room with Verona’s picture. A visitor. They waited outside on the walkway for Kristoff, who took several minutes before appearing. He did arrive with a muted smile, though.
“It hasn’t been long,” he declared. “But I have to say it, sure feels that way.”
His tone of voice told Verona about all she needed to know of his progress so far. “I know your work here is important, Kristoff, but we require your help.”
“Something more important?”
“Not that we care at all to diminish what you’re doing here, but yes. Both Nilius and Rishi agree that it’s vital to our understanding of the present state of things.”
“And what do you two think?”
“We agree,” Aballi stated, “or we wouldn’t be here.”
He sighed. “I’ve barely gotten started here, and you’re pulling me away again.”
“It’s good timing then,” Aballi said. “Better now than in two months when you’ve recruited a following and are starting to make preparations.”
“Who’s to say I haven’t recruited a following already?”
“That grim face of yours. Grab your gear, Kristoff. You’re needed.”
Verona could see Clem’s presumptuousness was bothering Kristoff.
“We won’t be gone long,” Verona added, a gentler tone than her companion, “at least relative to here.”
“The future again?” Kristoff asked.
“Not this time,” Verona answered. “The past.”
“The past? How long?”
“Best not to get into details here,” Verona replied.
“No, I mean how long will we be gone—relative to here, that is?”
“A few weeks, a couple months at the outside,” Aballi answered.
“Fine. I’ll make you a deal. I join you two for whatever bizarre mission this is, and when we return, however much time has passed, that’s how long you stay with me here to help me recruit followers.”
“That’s negotiable,” Aballi stated, shaking his head. “We can call that a fair starting point.”
“Verona?”
“Yes, agreed.”
“Fine,” Kristoff said. “I’ll get my gear.”
In the shuttle on the way back to Nilius’s ship, Verona couldn’t help but notice the shift in Kristoff’s demeanor from when they’d parted weeks before. Instead of the determined, slightly optimistic bearing he’d carried with him to Charris, he was sullen now—maybe not overly so, but noticeably.
“It’s not going well?” she probed.
He turned to her and shook his head. “I had thought their families might care, but it’s over twenty years now since our group left. So the people I left with, all they are is stories to these people here—the crazy aunt or uncle who went off with some luddite cult to some God-forsaken world in the Letters. It’s so far from here it’s hard to make them understand it actually exists, Texini or the tragedy that happened there.”
“It’s a tough sell,” Clem remarked.
“I don’t need a lot of people,” Kristoff said, shaking his head. “A ship and a brigade of bots and spotter drones. Financing. Maybe a hundred people willing to dedicate a few years to service. I don’t know. Depends on the resources I can muster.”
“We’ll see what we can do about that when we get back,” Clem said.
“What’s this about the past? I don’t understand. That makes no sense. We are going to Charris?”
“According to Nilius, he and Rishi have figured out how to target specific places and times using the artifacts,” Verona stated. “We’re shooting for Charris at the founding.”
“Shouldn’t he know about that? Or Maícon, who lived through it? What are we supposed to learn that they don’t already know?”
Verona and Clem exchanged a look—the news about Maícon: should it be shared now or later?
“Nilius claims there were factions,” Aballi stated. “Sometimes history is the story the people of the present need to believe about their past.”
“I can vouch for that truth, at least as the Trasp are concerned,” Verona added. “History isn’t told by the victors of history, as is often stated, it is told by today’s victors, and who’s on top is constantly changing.”
“I think our history is fairly straightforward,” Kristoff stated. “Early colonization, the usual struggles, notwithstanding the fact that Charris was the first such case.”
“I guess we’re going to find out,” Clem Aballi said. “We don’t usually do usual.”
“I suppose we do not,” Kristoff agreed.
Nilius sat in on Verona’s briefing on the way to the artifact she and Rishi had designated C-1, as it was the temporal node closest to both Charris and Eddis Ali’s Vault. On Nilius’s ship, the trip was hardly long enough to finish a thorough briefing. In the case of Kristoff, he was already well informed. With the notable exception of Rishi’s unilateral removal of Maícon, there were no major revelations. Stop the technologicals of the future by controlling their ascension in the present. Something unknown about the roots of their civilization on Charris was essential to their current struggle.
“You must be prepared to meet a different history than you are expecting,” Nilius explained. “The truth is far darker than you may imagine.”
“Darker than my home and everyone on that planet being consumed by a pestilence?” Kristoff stated. “Perhaps you forget my history, old man.”
“Perhaps,” Nilius conceded. “You will encounter a young version of me. That nickname would certainly seem a slip of the tongue there.”
“Understood.”
“Additionally, Rishi and I have developed protocols for you three to find each other when you arrive in case you are separated when you revive.”
“Find each other? What do you mean? Why would it be any different from when we arrived on Murell in the future?”
“Rishi believes you will arrive in another’s body,” Nilius said. “She posits that the artifacts create the most accurate possible world for you to inhabit for each journey. In the future, there is no canonical record to corrupt with your presence. In the past, there are such intricacies as city records, archives, genealogical lines. Assigning the body of a historically integrated entity seems to be the way the artifacts write you into the script.”
“So figuring out which body among the colonists each one of us is inhabiting may be difficult?” Kristoff stated. “I’m sure you have a decent plan in place.”
“It’ll work,” Verona assured him.
“What else do I need to know?”
“Factions,” Nilius stated. “You will understand when you arrive. Much of what you will encounter has been blotted out from the historical record. The story is one of settlers coming together to terraform the planet, to settle together, to form a successful and consonant government that set the foundation for all the peoples here and in the Battery. That may be true, but not before we almost destroyed ourselves. That part gets left out.”
“Great. So looking forward to that.”
“The factions are human, but they’re our doing as well as your own,” Nilius continued. “We are asking you to avoid getting caught up in the struggles of the moment—of the people there and their survival. Even if it means the colony dies. Their existence in that artifact has no bearing on the present, as the past has already unfolded. You are investigating us—the Ancients as you called us in the future, specifically Eddis Ali, Maícon, and Miliner.”
Kristoff looked puzzled. “Why? Are your protocols not what they seem?”
“The truth, I suspect will reveal itself more in that era than I can explain to you now,” Nilius answered. “You might consider asking yourself why, with the sole exception of Kayella and Boggs, we AIs so seldom keep each other’s company.”
Kristoff shook his head and scoffed. “Whatever. We’ll figure it out when we get there, I guess.”
“Good man,” Nilius said. “We’re coming up on it.”
“I am not looking forward to the headache,” Kristoff stated to Verona. “That negotiable bit Clem was talking about when you picked me up. That works both ways.”
Each traveler in the trio was accustomed to the workings of the artifacts, and this one—C-1—had been previously dug out by a party unknown to them. They geared up—in this case, light gear, a belt and a nanosheet. Nilius left the short shuttle outside, tethered to the dusty surface of the artifact in case of emergency, declaring that he had his own affairs nearby. That, the travelers presumed, was another visit with Eddis Ali, but Nilius didn’t divulge the details.
They floated out the back, and before they were even at the orifice of the outer door to the artifact, Nilius had jumped away.
“Guess that’s an incentive to last a while,” Kristoff stated. “Couple weeks, you said?”
“If he didn’t want us alive, there are much easier ways to kill us than abandoning us here, Kristoff,” Aballi replied. “He’ll be back.”
“Off we go then,” Verona said. “Follow me in.”
All three expected it would take several days to locate one another when they arrived. From what they knew of the early days of the colony, there were several hundred thousand colonists in a handful of nearby outposts. Their plan was to use a lesser-known historical figure as a touching post, in this case a senior engineer named Sett. Each of the travelers, upon getting their bearings, would make contact with Sett, using an identical unique phrase and a request that they be put in touch with any other person who uttered it. There was a hand signal as well.
When Kristoff came to, he immediately recognized that he was far more lucid than the previous time he’d traversed from the real world to the reality within the artifact.
He was in some kind of infirmary—a makeshift one by the look of it. There were dozens of people lined up along the walls, and there were bots seemingly tending to the patients there. They were familiar to Kristoff, an Alba and a Delius. There was a strange odor in the air, not overly foul but not pleasant—pungent, though an almost entirely distinct smell he thought seemed plant-based.
“One of the seizure patients is conscious,” the Alba announced, turning and directing her attention to Kristoff immediately.
To his left was a female Kristoff guessed to be in her thirties. Across from him in another bed was a middle-aged man. He examined his hands. They were small—juvenile. Boy’s hands. Kristoff guessed about twelve by the length of his arm.
“Can you tell me your name, please,” the Alba asked him, directing her eyes to make contact with his.
“Is it Pyco? I think,” the sound of his voice surprised Kristoff. “Pyco Matta. Is that correct?”
“I asked you,” the Alba replied. “Do you know where you are?”
“Charris,” Kristoff said. “I believe I am on Charris. Can you tell me please, Alba, who are all these people here?”
“You know my name?”
“I’ve seen you many times before.”
“I don’t believe I have seen you, Pyco Matta, and you were unconscious when you were brought in. The rest of these people here are sick.”
“I’m starving,” Kristoff declared, beginning to breathe more heavily as he clutched his aching stomach. “Please, may I have something to eat?”
“Everyone is starving,” the Delius stated coldly. “Records indicate that you have consumed your caloric allotment for the day.”
“She said I had a seizure?” Kristoff said. “Surely I should see the doctor?”
There was no response from the two bots.
“My parents?”
“Neurological compromise,” the Delius stated. “Resource management should be our priority in this case.”
“Are they all starving?” Kristoff asked, gesturing to the other patients. “All of them?”
He looked down the row of beds—twenty or so he could see down the long corridor to either side of him.
“Hey robot,” uttered the voice of the middle-aged man across from Kristoff. “Get that boy something to eat or I’ll break you into a thousand pieces.”
The Delius’s head turned. “Unlikely,” he said, seeming to sneer at the man’s demand. “The other two are conscious as well.”
“Whispering to the two moons of Etterus,” Kristoff said loudly enough for the man to hear.
It was their phrase, lyrics to a well-known song that wouldn’t be written for another few thousand years, and it was a good hunch.
“Kristoff?” the woman beside him answered.
“Me as well,” the man across from him stated. “We’re all here.”
“They’re delirious,” the Alba stated. “I will report these new symptoms to Maícon. A most unusual and unlikely presentation.”
“What symptoms?” Verona asked her. “What is going on here?”
“You are on the surface, in the Niera post,” the Alba stated. “The doctor is dead, along with most everyone who ate the contaminated grain.”
“What is odd about our symptoms?” Verona probed further.
“The poisoning presents something like ergotism—hallucinations, extraordinary thirst, self-harm. No one yet has presented with seizures until you three, simultaneously in nearly opposite sides of the complex. Your presentation is not as projected by Maícon. This is an aberration.”
The older man began to clamber to his feet. “We need to get outta here,” he declared. “Let’s go, you two.”
“You cannot go,” the Delius declared.
“You can’t hold me against my will,” Aballi answered. “I am Korai Companys. I am of sound mind, and I take no directives from robotics.”
Verona slowly pulled herself to a seated position, swung her legs over the side of the stretcher, and stood.
“Kristoff?” she said, looking down at the boy.
“I’m okay,” he replied, rising from his bed as well. “Some of it is coming back to me.”
“Neither of you are that boy’s guardian,” the Delius stated. “We cannot release him into your custody.”
“My parents are dead, I think,” Kristoff said. “Aren’t they?”
“That is correct,” the Alba answered.
“Then he has no guardian,” Verona said. “Certainly not two multi-use models pretending to be medical units. We shall take guardianship of the boy.”
“All three of you just had a grand-mal seizure,” the Delius insisted. “You two are in no state to care for yourselves, much less a child.”
“Well it looks like you two are doing a hell of a job with everyone else here, doesn’t it?” Clem Aballi gestured to the rows of emaciated, infirm people lining the walls of the makeshift medical facility. “We’ll take our chances elsewhere.”
“Let’s go,” Verona stated, taking Kristoff’s arm.
They both steadied each other as they began to walk. Aballi brushed the Delius aside, leading the way out of that corridor of horrors.
Niera was the name of a city Verona and Kristoff knew, but this complex, it was darker and far more of a prefabricated industrial center than any city they’d ever seen on Charris. The mess of corridors and rooms the trio staggered down seemed more like a mining hub or a cargo depot than the homeworld Verona and Kristoff grew up on. It wasn’t totally unexpected. The planet was more of an outpost than a genuine colony in its early days—a foothold, and from the looks of it, a shockingly slippery foothold at that.
Though the people they saw as they walked weren’t nearly as bad off as the wretched patients in the infirmary, it was clear that nobody was in good shape, no smiles, no hearty color in their skin, no laughter nor bright tones. The odd trio drew a few stares as they maneuvered along, from the nest of corridors and rooms near the infirmary to a larger open warehouse-like room that seemed to be the industrial hub of the complex.
“What do you remember?” Aballi asked.
“It’s all vague,” Verona answered. “I am struggling, though. So much …”
Verona shook her head and slowed to a stop, bracing herself against the wall of that prefabricated industrial warehouse.
“Are you all right?” Kristoff asked.
She began to weep, put her back to the wall, and lowered herself to the floor, burying her face in her hands.
“So stupid,” she muttered into her hands. “So stupid. I wasn’t prepared for this.”
Kristoff looked at Clem, who was taking long deep breaths.
“I am trying,” Aballi said. “It is difficult.”
“What is happening to you two?”
“Oh God, it all makes sense now,” Verona exclaimed. “Rishi.”
“I don’t understand,” Kristoff said.
“Rishi had a body. That’s why he sent her back. Nilius—that’s why she wasn’t angry. He was reminding her of her humanity.”
“Is it so different for you two?” Kristoff asked.
“Night and day,” Aballi replied. “The sensations are overwhelming.”
Clem sat down beside Verona.
“We need to get ourselves together here,” Kristoff insisted. “I don’t remember any of this from our history. Not a settlement at Niera. Starvation. Contaminated food. None of it.”
“We will settle into this,” Verona said. “I have training. It will kick in.”
She exhaled audibly.
Kristoff looked down at them both, Aballi, a seemingly frail, malnourished man with unkempt, graying hair and Verona, a younger, though equally malnourished, conspicuously unattractive woman with ashen skin and sunken eyes reddened from the overflow of tears that her body could ill afford to lose.
“Stay here,” Kristoff told them. “Get yourselves together. Do what you can to find some memories of your hosts if there are any. I knew my name, and some feelings are coming back to me. Maybe we can recover more, like the memory exercises Burch and I did. I’ll see if I can find out what’s going on here and maybe get us some food.”
“Kristoff,” Verona said, reaching up with an outstretched hand. She began to weep again.
“Do not go anywhere,” Kristoff stated. “I have no way to find you again if you wander off. I don’t even know your names.”
“I’m a Companys,” Aballi stated, shaking his head, struggling to find it. “Korai Companys.”
Kristoff looked down at Verona again. She put her hands to her temples and seemed to be straining to think. “Triere something.”
“It’s fine,” Kristoff said, stepping away from them. “Just stay where you are.”
“Alago,” she managed to say as Kristoff disappeared around a large generator in the corner of that industrial hub. “Triere Alago. That’s my name.”
Kristoff walked with no specific plan, merely hoping that an idea would present itself. He was thinking as he moved further into the complex, with each turn, he hoped, moving closer to the residences. The people of this outpost had to call somewhere home, and it couldn’t be these vast machine warehouses. The problem he was wrestling with was how to approach someone and ask the baseline questions he needed answered without seeming insane: How many years into the expedition were they? Who was the leader? What happened to the food supply? What was the plan here for survival? Where were the AIs and what were they doing about all this? The Alba had mentioned Maícon. Surely, he was about.
Kristoff continued from the industrial area into a vast open courtyard with a clear ceiling that seemed to be made of some sturdy polymer. Daylight streamed into the room. That light—that star. This was home after all.
“Pyco?” a child’s voice called out.
It took Kristoff a moment to realize he was being addressed. He looked over to see a girl about his age—Pyco’s age.
“Hello,” he said.
“They said you were dying,” the girl replied in amazement. “You look fine.”
“I am … all right. Can I talk to you?”
She looked back at him and giggled. “Are you okay, Pyco? You’re acting strange.”
“I was in the infirmary,” Kristoff replied. “I am okay, but I’ve lost some of my memory. It would be very helpful if I could ask you a few questions.”
She looked at him as though it might be a joke.
“Some of them are going to sound very funny, I’ll bet,” Kristoff continued. “I’m sure my memory will come back if you’ll help me.”
“It might be more help if you went back to the infirmary,” the girl suggested.
“I’m not so sure about that. There were only two bots down there, an Alba and a Delius and no doctors. They didn’t seem to know anything.”
“They know more than I do, I think.”
“Oh, but these will be easy questions, I promise.”
“Like what questions?”
“Like what planet are we on?”
The girl laughed. “You’re joking,” and when Kristoff persisted in the inquiry with a look, she answered, “Charris, of course.”
“Good,” Kristoff said, smiling. “That’s a relief. Next questions. Do I know you? And, what is your name?”
“Of course we know each other, Pyco,” she said, her eyebrows turned down as she shook her head at him. “It’s Olivia. Olivia Varnet. This isn’t some act?”
Kristoff could hardly believe his ears. “Olivia Varnet,” he repeated. “You are not what I was expecting. Good. Very good. Can we go somewhere to sit and talk, Olivia?”
“I think you need to get your head checked again,” Olivia answered. “But sure, I guess.”
Olivia brought Kristoff to a back hallway where she and some of the other kids would sneak off to. They could play down here without bothering the adults or be shooed away because of any possible danger, like in the machine quarter, as she called it. Kristoff realized that was where he’d just left Verona and Clem. When they entered, there were a few other kids in that back hallway, all but two were sitting with headsets on, presumably whisking themselves away to a better place in VR. He could hardly blame them. The two kids who weren’t plugged into VR looked up as Kristoff and Olivia came in. They were playing chess on a board drawn in chalk on the floor.
“Hey, Pyco. Hi, Olivia.”
“Hey,” Kristoff said back, trying his best to sound like a twelve-year-old to the younger duo.
Kristoff sat with Olivia far enough down the hallway he thought they were out of earshot of the kids. Then he proceeded to ask her more silly questions. The answers shocked him.
Unless he’d drastically misinterpreted his history lessons, this child he was talking to was the Olivia Varnet, the first COC—Chief Officer of the Colony—in the history of Charris. Yet she explained that role was currently occupied by a man named Rodel Dawcett—a name Kristoff had never heard before. All the other principals were unknown to him, including the Chief Engineer on Niera, whose name was not Sett but Manuel Heder—the father of one of the boys plugged into VR in that corridor.
The story was this. They had arrived on Charris nearly three years prior and followed the pre-ordained plan for de-barking and settlement that had been outlined in intricate detail at the columns. According to Olivia’s knowledge, it was the first such expedition from the columns—a point of contentious historical issue, as no other such seed world, nor her progeny, had ever been encountered throughout Charris’s colonial or post-colonial eras. For all anyone knew, their massive colony ship, Stellar Song, was the only such attempt.
Rodel Dawcett, the COC, had been the deputy city manager of Friendship Column before being elected to the role of expedition leader. According to Olivia, all was going as expected under his leadership until roughly ten months before the present day, when people suddenly began to die. It took nearly a week for the colonists to figure out that their previously-safe food supply had been contaminated with some sort of microbe—the nature of which Olivia couldn’t explain. But she did explain the damage it had done, not only decimating the population, but taking vital members with critical skills and knowledge.
“Right now, they’re still fighting.”
“Who is fighting?” Kristoff asked.
“Everyone—the leaders, the AIs, up on the ship, down here. Time is running out, though.”
It took quite a few questions to get Olivia to a clear explanation of the situation, but she was not wrong about the ticking clock. There were still some tens of thousands of colonists aboard the Stellar Song in orbit of the planet in what Kristoff interpreted as some sort of sleep stasis. There was, though, according to Olivia’s account, a hard limit on the number of months they could safely remain in stasis before they would need to be revived. The plan had been to wake the colonists in waves, with each group expanding the colony in stages.
When the food supply on the surface became compromised, COC Dawcett was forced to choose whether to resupply the colony with the ship’s stores to prevent the total loss of people on the surface. The problem, Kristoff was able to tease out of the young girl’s answers, was that those stores had to be sufficient to supply the thousands of sleeping colonists on their revival from stasis, and with each passing week, the supply of uncontaminated food aboard the ship was dwindling. Somehow native microbes from outside the settlement had made it through the airlock and contaminated their entire Ag quarter.
For months, COC Dawcett, who’d fled to the Stellar Song in the early days of the crisis, had been splitting the difference. He was unwilling to make the hard choice of leaving the colonists on the surface to their own devices. All the while, though, he supplied them with barely enough provisions to sustain life. In the end, to Kristoff’s mind, all Dawcett had succeeded in doing so far was delaying the moment the real choice would need to be made.
“They’re going to leave us,” Olivia stated, the whites of her eyes locked wide as she spoke. “The grown-ups don’t think we know, but we know. It’s only a matter of time.”
“I’m going to see what I can do to help, Olivia,” Kristoff said. “Thanks for helping me remember.”
“Pyco, what can you do? You really don’t remember anything, do you?”
“I’m beginning to. One last thing, Olivia, and then I need to get back to my friends.”
“We are your friends, Pyco.”
“My new friends. I met them in the infirmary.”
“Everybody down there is dying.”
“Not if I have anything to say about it,” Kristoff stated. “But I need to know one more thing. Where can I find Maícon?”
“You really have lost it, Pyco, haven’t you. Oh, God. We’re going to lose you too.”
Kristoff found Verona and Clem right where he’d left them almost two hours before. From the looks of them, they’d come through what seemed like a heady adjustment, not just to another body, but to a fully human one. Kristoff had spent so much time with them both that sometimes he forgot. As much as they looked like ordinary people in their physical presentation, they were anything but. The double-edged sword of the wizard’s constitution, and here they were thrust into two entirely foreign bodies, disoriented following a seizure, suffering a rush of emotions neither had felt in centuries.
“Are you all right?” Kristoff asked, directing his eyes more toward Verona.
“Much better, thank you,” she confirmed. “Hungry, though. We were hoping you’d found food?”
“No such luck, but I did get a thorough breakdown of the situation. It’s very complicated, but I do believe we’ve been lied to about nearly everything we believe about how Charris was founded.”
“How so?” Clem asked.
“It’s about as dire here as it looked back in the infirmary, maybe more so. But I’ve been thinking about it. It makes sense. At some point, when the society shifted its focus to sending out colonial charters, the leaders probably thought it might be a good idea for our founding story to not be a colonial horror show.”
“What’s the situation?” Clem asked.
Kristoff recapped the outpost’s status as best he could, pausing to answer questions when they came up. Clem didn’t know Charran history the way Verona and Kristoff did, but even he was well-studied enough to know that Olivia Varnet should have been the first COC. This meant almost two full generations were missing from the colony’s founding history.
“So, yeah,” Verona quipped. “We don’t usually do usual.”
The last unusual piece of intel Kristoff had garnered from Olivia explained much of why Nilius would have missed many of the details of the history on the early colony. The AIs were disembodied—deliberately segregated to control tightly guarded domains. Olivia couldn’t give an answer why the mission was organized that way beyond stating, “I don’t know. Because that’s the way they did it.”
Kristoff’s best guess was that the purpose was to keep any one AI or system from dominating the decision-making process for the expedition. But it was far easier to see the ease with which the factions Nilius had warned them about could take root.
“What now?” Kristoff asked. “You two are deeper into this than I am.”
“I suggest our goals be twofold,” Verona answered. “We should make our best effort to help these people survive. Our existence proves they did, so if we want to witness how things played out, we’d better make sure they do play out. And we work our way close to our targets. I will seek out Eddis Ali and find a way to get close to him.”
“And I’m on Maícon,” Aballi stated.
“I guess that leaves me with Miliner?” Kristoff replied, shrugging.
“No,” Aballi said. “Miliner’s a philosopher. He’s not a player in any of this. He’d rather be contemplating what happens to your thoughts as you cross the event horizon of a black hole.”
“So?”
“Nilius,” Verona stated. “His misdirection was so obvious it’s almost as though he was begging us to look at him.”
“And what am I watching him for?”
“Maybe history,” Clem said. “Who knows? If we knew that, we wouldn’t be here, would we, Kristoff?”
“Let’s get to it,” Verona said, pulling herself to her feet.
Like fleet officers on military carrier frigates required to pass minimum qualification on all major systems, Verona and her fellow acolytes, similarly, were cross-trained in recognizing and understanding various dark techs. Eddis Ali had insisted upon it at the sect’s inception. This was a major part of the curriculum over their five centuries of training inside the vault. So even though Verona’s specialization wasn’t in biological contagions and microbes, her arrival at that time on Charris instantly made her the planet’s foremost expert.
Eddis Ali himself was sequestered within the machine quarter, so Verona didn’t need to go far. Eddis Ali had access to the tech in that quarter, as well as the cameras, ambient audio inputs, and shared data—that colonial information the AIs readily conveyed to each other at all times—things like colonist locations, air temperature and quality, power distribution, and other such baseline data.
He had overheard the conversation among the three unlikeliest of friends—the three seizure patients, and his only working theory was some sort of post-seizure delirium. Admittedly, it was a weak theory, but there was no better explanation for a twelve-year-old layabout, a middle-aged malcontent bully, and a quiet and somewhat useful functionary to suddenly be keeping each other’s company—especially given the history between Korai Companys and Triere Alago, the former of whom frequently and publicly mocked Ms. Alago for her physical appearance when they were young.
“Ali, you are here?” Triere addressed him as she approached one of the arch-ports where he interacted with the technologists in the machine quarter.
“At your service, Ms. Alago. Are you well?”
“I am fine. I would like baseline information on the response to this microbe. The doctor is dead here. Who is spearheading the efforts to address the situation?”
“What front of the situation is it to which you are referring?”
“All of them.”
“I am not privy to details.”
“Then an overview, please, Ali.”
“The overall response falls under Maícon ’s purview. Drs. Otten and Marr are conducting medical research remotely on the microbe with the aid of the on-site multi-use models as lab assistants. They are currently aboard the Stellar Song. Devonaya Daley is the Ag specialist conducting the investigation into the microbe’s interaction with the plants on site and their food systems and outputs. Drayton Baye is the sole surviving sanitation engineer attempting to rid the complex of the microbe directly. Elander Kedi is filling the shoes of all the deceased environmental engineers, but frankly, she is only barely capable of maintaining life support. There has been little discussion of filtration or sterilization, as both seem unlikely and impractical at this juncture. Might I ask what your interest is in exploring these logistical questions, Ms. Alago?”
“Not yet. What data do you have on the microbe or microbes?”
“It is one singular microbe we suspect came in through an air filter that was improperly handled prior to incineration. The species has since replicated beyond containment within the facility. The microbe has been designated Finn-1. I am displaying what is commonly known about it on your floatscreen to your lower left. All this was well known to you prior to your seizure, Ms. Alago.”
“Quiet please, Ali.”
Verona studied the contours of the organism, recognizing it as a puzzling chimeric microbe with qualities that mixed attributes of bacterial plasmids and viroids.
“How did the victims die?” Verona asked Eddis Ali. “Their primary cause of death?”
“Most died of septic shock or kidney failure secondary to sepsis.”
“You wouldn’t have hematology reports on the victims during their course of treatment?”
“No, I would not. You would need to interface with Maícon or contact the doctors on Stellar Song directly. How exactly do you seem to know the relevant questions to ask?”
“Call it a side effect of the seizure.”
“A very bizarre and seemingly fortunate side effect.”
“Display for me a complete list of countermeasures that the colony has applied to combat the microbial exposure.”
“Very well,” Eddis Ali stated. “The overview is coming up now to your right. I have them categorized by division.”
“Good,” Verona stated. “I want to see the specifics within each category. Begin with biomedical countermeasures, please.”
Maícon interfaced with the entire colony, but his mind ran on a web of processors on the Stellar Song herself. Clem Aballi returned to the infirmary to inquire with the two multi-use bots on how he could interact with Maícon directly. The Alba showed him to an arch-port in an adjacent corridor.
It was dark and seemingly abandoned down there. Proximity to the infirmary was Aballi’s guess as to why none of the colonists ventured into that part of the complex—fear of contamination by the sick, most likely. Though it wasn’t clear to him yet how the microbes traveled.
The Alba left him at the terminal and returned to the makeshift infirmary. All the better for what Aballi had planned.
“Are you in there, Maícon?”
“Mr. Companys? How can I help?”
“Mr. Companys will do for now, and it’s not so much about how you can help me but how I can help you.”
“Oh? In what way do you suppose I need your help?”
“I have a proposition for you, Maícon, but it will require my being relocated to the colony ship. What’s it called, Star Song?”
“The Stellar Song, yes. However, Mr. Companys, the outpost is under quarantine for now due to the outbreak. This is well known. Your seizure must have affected your memory.”
“Seizures do funny things, light up neural pathways in odd ways, make connections that otherwise wouldn’t have been made. Sometimes they even help you to see things.”
“Are you referencing anything in particular, Mr. Companys.”
“Tell me if I’m wrong about any of the following. There is a crisis in leadership up there. Privately, many of the people under Dawcett understand that he is overmatched by the moment. He doesn’t have the stones for the decisions he should have made months ago. How am I doing so far?”
“I have no comment whatsoever.”
“I thought as much. I’m not certain about this but I’d wager you’ve privately discussed the matter of assuming direct control over the mission with your fellow technological beings, and they’ve shut down the conversation, as it’s outside protocols. Human civilization is to be directed by humans—even if it leads to the destruction of an entire colony—something like that?”
“Again, I have no comment.”
“I heard a rumor, or maybe I just think I heard this rumor. Odd neural connections and all that.”
“To what rumor do you refer?” Maícon asked.
“That you have a penchant for odd connections, interesting phenomena, the unexpected.”
“This conversation would certainly qualify, Mr. Companys.”
“It’s true, though. It’s in your nature.”
“Again, no comment, except to say that you are in no position to know my nature.”
“I may be in a far better position than you think in that respect. I am, however, in a very bad position, speaking literally, that is. This outpost is a bad place to be. Time is running out. And if Dawcett doesn’t give the order to abandon the planet and seek a more habitable settlement, someone else will relieve him and do it for him. A matter of days? Weeks?”
“Yet again—”
“I know,” Aballi interrupted Maícon’s response. “No comment. I do have a comment, though. If I know you as well as I think I do, you’ve been thinking about another alternative. I don’t know whether you’re certain about its existence, but I know you know it’s a possibility that a certain repository of dark tech that came from Earth might have come with you on that ship. I don’t need any comment from you except a yes or no, because I know for certain that this little pandora’s box somehow made its way onto your Stellar Song. I can’t tell you how I know, but I do know it’s there, and I will get it for you, but you have to get me on that ship.”
“Interesting phenomena indeed, Mr. Companys.”
“The seizure, you know.”
“Of course, the seizure. How else to explain such an improbable proposition.”
“We don’t need an explanation, Maícon, just a yes or no; but again, if I know you as well as I think I do, I already know your answer. This is an itch far too compelling to resist scratching.”
“If that is all true, as you suspect, Mr. … Companys …? Well, your question more properly put would be what sort of pretext would I need to sell the ship’s crew on the wisdom of re-embarking one colonist at the risk of the entire expedition. The outpost is currently quarantined for good reason, supply drops and digital communications only.”
“They did it for Dawcett, no? So there’s a protocol in place that worked once already.”
“All the same, I would need a compelling reason.”
“Then my final proposition is this: I get you that pretext, and after you get me aboard that ship, I will solve the leadership crisis and get you the illicit technological materials you need to save the colony—all for the good of humanity, of course.”
“Consider me pleasantly surprised. Somehow, though, I still yearn for yet another unusual outcome. Surprise me further, Mr. Companys, and we shall talk again, something I do look forward to.”
“Not nearly as much as I do, Maícon. We’ll talk soon.”
Kristoff had the farthest to go to access Nilius. Somehow it seemed fitting to him that the most elusive of the Prime AIs he’d encountered in future times would be hiding out on the periphery of the outpost, his consciousness embedded in an observation tower that now lay vacant. It was formerly the colony’s hub for planetary remote sensing and field site observation data. Now it was simply a figurative spyglass out onto a world that seemed destined to remain equally vacant.
“The area is closed,” Nilius informed Kristoff as he approached the base of the observation tower.
“Aren’t you lonely up there?” Kristoff asked.
“That is quite considerate of you, Pyco. But our kind, we don’t get lonely.”
“I would. I’ve heard there’s a wonderful view from the tower, yet you have no friends to share it with.”
“I have been instructed to keep it closed off.”
“There must be a purpose to that instruction, Nilius. Can you tell me what it is?”
“This tower was a designated workspace. Thus only the operators qualified to perform the tasks required to monitor the planet were admitted. When the operators passed away or were reassigned to more critical tasks, the decision was made to have me perform passive monitoring. No humans have since been admitted.”
“That is very interesting. Can you tell me about your monitoring protocols? I’ve been hoping after this is all over—if we’re able to find a way through this current crisis—that I might pursue a vocation as a planetary observer. I think I may have a knack for such work.”
“I would be happy to give you an overview commensurate with your education level and cognitive development.”
“Before you do, Nilius, I’d ask you not to underestimate me, and I’d also ask you to pay particular attention to the observation protocols you ran, both from on surface and in advance of landing—for example, what factors led the expedition chiefs to select this location as the primary landing site, and what sort of tests were run to ensure its safety with respect to microbial pathogens?”
“Interesting,” Nilius replied. “Maícon, Eddis Ali, and the multi-use models in the infirmary have all reported unusual behavior from the three seizure patients, Pyco Matta. What would you say if I expressed a similar sentiment about you?”
“I would say you don’t know the half of it, Nilius. Why don’t you send down the lift and allow me to share with you what I know about remote sensing. And while we’re at it, I’d like a complete run down of pre- and post-landing protocols. How was this microbe missed?”
“Curious,” Nilius stated. “Most curious. The view is quite nice, Pyco Matta, especially at sundown. I would be happy to share it with you.”
When the trio reconvened in the machine quarter later that evening, each had plenty to share. Clem even had rations he’d managed to get hold of, though he didn’t tell the others how exactly. Even in an ordinary body, the trickster had his ways.
Both Aballi and Verona had returned to their host’s residence, changing into more fitting clothing—at least more appropriate than the undergarments they’d left the infirmary wearing.
They ate mostly in silence, sharing in gestures that they could expect whatever they uttered to be overheard. Verona attempted to convey something useful to the other two using veiled language, but it quickly became clear her message wasn’t getting across.
“What next? Charades?” Aballi said, shaking his head.
“I have an idea,” Kristoff replied. “I’ll need to find one of the kids first, so meet me back in the courtyard outside the residences in fifteen minutes.”
Verona and Clem used the time to take a brief walk, exploring an area of the complex neither of them had seen, commenting on the state of the place, the state of the people. The residences had been surprisingly habitable, even comfortable, but out here—the public spaces and workspaces and dining areas and walkways, as the sun went down and the lights dimmed—this Charris was an origin darker than either of them had ever imagined for their civilization. That a marvel like Athos or Iophos, a silver moon like Hellenia, an expanse of quirky emergent colonies like the Letters, or great civilizations like the Trasp Protectorate or the Etteran Guild could ever spring from this poor seed was unfathomable. That even Charris herself could rise from this? The history they knew spoke of hearty colonists carving life, civilization, and monuments from bare stone. Not a phrase of pestilence, starvation, nor squalor.
When they met up with Kristoff again, he had a young girl beside him. She looked wary when the two adults approached.
“Hello young lady,” Verona greeted her.
“So it happened to your brains too?” Olivia Varnet replied. “Hi Ms. Alago, Mr. Companys, Pyco says you need a place to hide.”
“Something like that,” Aballi answered. “Somewhere we can’t be overheard—you know what I mean?”
The girl’s eyes rolled up and she tipped her head, clearly gesturing to those all-seeing, all-hearing AI watchers embedded in the complex. “You mean properly hide?”
“Exactly,” Verona answered. “Can you?”
Olivia nodded.
“Good girl,” Verona said. “Thank you.”
Olivia led the way down the back corridors where the kids gathered to play. As they passed through, two of the kids protested.
“Olivia! Pyco? What are you doing?” one of the boys asked.
“You two can’t show them the—”
“That’s our hideout!” the first boy finished the thought. “No grown-ups allowed.”
“Pipe down, Elijah,” Olivia told him. “Everything’s fine.”
“I’m coming too,” the only girl in the corridor stated. “Wait up, Olivia.”
The child was around eight years old Verona guessed. Verona shot Kristoff an inquisitive look.
“It’ll be fine,” Olivia said. “We go down here all the time.”
These were prefabricated workspaces, probably for lab work after samples had been taken in the field by drones, bots, or research teams. Because of the outbreak, though, many of the outer wings of the pre-assembled outpost had yet to be occupied. Power to those areas had never been switched on.
When they crossed into the darker rooms, Olivia illuminated a glowing panel on her vest to light the way.
“The cameras and audio are off in this wing,” she declared. “We play hide and seek down here. I mean, the young kids do.” She looked over at Pyco. “Sometimes we do too, I guess.”
Olivia took them into a dark corridor with an airlock hatch at the end of it. The door had a large wheel that clamped into place for emergency manual operation.
“No one will ever find you down here,” she stated. “Byram’s the one who found the hiding spot, but we’ve all been down here.”
Inside the hatch, there was a typical square block for an airlock port with another downward-facing hatch.
“It’s a locking door, so you can’t ever go down there without somebody to let you up when you knock.”
“A hatch to the ground?” Verona asked.
“None of the others even open. Only this one does,” the little girl said. “It’s scary down there. There’s no light at all.”
Olivia pushed a button and the hatch door swung down to reveal a small space beneath it, maybe three meters deep, a natural carve-out in the bedrock beneath the superstructure.
“Knock again when you want us to let you up,” Olivia said. “We’ll be right here, Pyco.”
Aballi and Verona exchanged a look.
“We either have the conversation down there or in front of the kids,” Kristoff stated.
“Don’t worry,” the little girl said, tugging on Kristoff’s hand. “I’ll keep Olivia company.”
“Worst thing that can happen is we croak in the hole and end up back where we started,” Aballi stated.
“Olivia Varnet,” Verona said as she took Kristoff’s hand and lowered him into the pit. “Such a beautiful name. A strong name.”
Olivia smiled and let out an embarrassed laugh. “Okay, Ms. Alago. Thanks, I guess.”
Once they were inside, that same earthy odor from the infirmary became faintly apparent. As the spring in the hatch slowly returned the door to its locked position above them, the space under the airlock was consumed by total darkness.
“I don’t even know where to begin,” Aballi said. “I mean, if it’s obvious to me, right? We’re basically bathing in a sea of that microbe right now?”
Verona tapped open a light on her shirt, illuminating the faces of the three travelers. She was nodding when the light hit her face.
“I’ll test my clothes to be certain, but it’s a safe bet we’ve figured out how the microbe got inside the complex.”
“And those witless little monsters have been tracking it all over the outpost for months,” Aballi stated as he tried to suppress a dark laugh. “Perfect.”
“What the hell are they even doing with a hatch opening to ground?” Kristoff asked.
“It makes sense,” Verona said. “The columns—their civilization was cut into bedrock, and this whole outpost had to be prefabricated beforehand—packed up and carried with them on the ship. This complex is just their temporary foothold. Lava tubes, geothermal vents, subterranean mining access, aquifers—all require access beneath the surface.”
“We need to tell them,” Kristoff said, shaking his head. “What a disaster.”
“So they can live with the knowledge they killed their parents and a few thousand other people for the rest of their lives?” Verona replied. “I suggest we be tactful with this new bit of knowledge.”
“Whatever you say, Verona,” Aballi said. “Children and pestilence can be your departments if you want them.”
“Yes, fine. I’ll take both. In the meantime, I have much to share, as I presume you both do as well. I suggest we get down to business fast, before those two girls run off on us up there. Let’s begin with Eddis Ali.”
They each had a story to tell, and each told it quickly. Verona detailed how genuinely naïve she believed Ali to be. Verona had dropped hints left and right during their discussion of the microbe, and not only did Ali fail to bite on any of them, what he did say only gave her the indication that he had no idea that the sorts of dark tech he would personally become the guardian of in future millennia even existed. He seemed almost a façade to her. What passed for wisdom and thoughtfulness when she was an acolyte in the vault seemed a breed of obliviousness here, almost as though doing the right thing would inevitably yield the right result for the people. Persistence and good intentions would always pay off. If only such a sentiment were so.
“If there’s some sort of conspiracy here among the AIs, Eddis Ali strikes me as being out of the know.”
“Let me guess,” Aballi stated, looking at Kristoff, “Nilius is Nilius. Nothing glaring seems off?”
“I wouldn’t say so. We mostly discussed the selection criteria for the landing site. The testing protocols were surprisingly scant. It’s no wonder something snuck past them. But from Nilius himself, nothing odd.”
“Maícon is our old friend,” Aballi said. “I’m going to make a move. He’s going to help me.”
“What sort of move?” Verona asked.
“We need to ensure that ship doesn’t leave, right? Otherwise, everyone here will be dead in a few weeks, and us along with them?”
“I may be able to tease out a solution now that we have the source for the outbreak, but the resources on the ship would be critical to any such effort, I suspect.”
“I’m going to get Maícon to pick me up, and then I’m going to make sure that ship doesn’t leave us here.”
“How are you going to do that?” Kristoff asked.
“I’ll figure out the details once I’m aboard. But I need a reason to get aboard that ship—something the two doctors up there would be willing to take the risk for.”
“Then I’ll need to work with Maícon,” Verona said. “It’s possible samples of the original microbe in here might lead to a solution.”
“The solution is in the black box up there,” Aballi stated. “We don’t need a solution, just a ticket to the mothership.”
“I’ll keep working with Nilius,” Kristoff said. “I’m not sure how much help I can be anyway.”
“Very good,” Verona agreed. “We’ll discuss the details with Maícon. Connect with him if you need to find us, Kristoff.”
They all nodded, and Verona rapped her hand against the hatch above them. For a few seconds, there was no sound in response. Then, just as the three had begun to exchange a look, a quick tap-tap-tap sounded on the hatch above them, and the door swung down.
“See,” Olivia Varnet declared, “I wasn’t going to leave you.”
“We knew you wouldn’t, dear,” Verona said. “I have absolute faith in you, Olivia.”
“Sure thing, Ms. A.”
Kristoff retreated to the tower. It was interesting for him to meet Nilius here at the beginning. It was a bit strange talking to Nilius like this. In the future, he’d only ever seen him embodied—for nearly fifty years, off and on, he and Nilius would see each other and talk. He was, to Kristoff’s mind, perhaps the most enigmatic of the Ancient AIs. If Maícon was the most unpredictable and mercurial, Nilius was the most difficult to read.
That evening, for hours they discussed testing for native microbes and the protocols any colony would need to undertake to properly screen a prospective planet. The topic was particularly important to Kristoff as a result of the trauma he’d barely lived through on Texini. Not surprisingly, he’d given a lot of thought to what had gone wrong there—how those caves that housed the bacterium that ended his world got missed.
Even before Texini, his work with the GMS on Charris, monitoring the Barŏs and their manipulation of the native bacteria was a significant point in his professional and personal life. And somehow, he couldn’t help but let slip the weight of this dark irony—back here at the beginning, the same problem all over again, as though it was destined to follow him across space and time.
He discussed the GOASSS protocol. The plan he outlined to Nilius was almost verbatim from the colonial speculation mission guidelines. Every substrate needed to be tested exhaustively—Geologic, Oceanic, Atmospheric, Soil & Subterranean Subsurface. Certainly this microbe would have been identified beforehand had they done so faithfully.
Then Kristoff explained to Nilius in great detail about what might happen one day on some distant theoretical planet if a closed subterranean system with an unknown native bacterial ecosystem were suddenly uncovered and opened to an already developed human colony with its own agriculture, animals, and even insects.
He had his theories: ways to be even more meticulous about testing new planetary environments, adding more letters to the acronym. Impact—dropping small meteors to aerosolize deep soil samples and rattle open lightly closed orifices for inspection. Subsurface Sonar—how to map underground cave systems and lava tubes where microbes could hide.
The more he talked, the more painful it became. The history unfolding here before him, the missing history of Charris, was the very history he was doomed to repeat. If only that chapter in Charris’s history had never gone dark. Nilius could see young Pyco growing increasingly emotional discussing the matter.
“You are so much like a different person, Pyco Matta, it is almost enough to believe in a phenomenon primitive people on Earth called possession.”
“Demonic spirits,” Kristoff replied. “To add another layer of irony, as I understand it, the cause was usually hallucination brought on by some kind of microbe.”
“Do you know something of a cure, young Pyco?” Nilius asked suddenly. “Maícon is relating that your two new friends have stumbled onto a source for a potential inoculation. He’s recommending that Korai Companys be sent to the Stellar Song with the source material for further testing.”
“Inoculation?” Kristoff said. “I cannot lie to you, Nilius, I do not know much about that. I’m sure, though, that if Maícon is recommending it, then the doctors would do well to consider his proposal.”
“I am sure that is true,” Nilius stated. “In any case, it is growing late. I believe we have done enough work for tonight.”
The ruse Verona and Aballi devised wasn’t entirely meritless. Much of the supporting evidence would need to be spoofed by Maícon for the doctors to bite, but the premise wasn’t entirely deceptive. They had found the original source of the microbe, which, on examination, Verona discovered was not the same organism that had induced sepsis in the colonists. In fact, anecdotal evidence suggested that exposure at high levels may have provided a protective effect. None of the children in that corridor had fallen ill. The one factor they could not account for was whether those kids had eaten the contaminated food.
Korai Companys now selflessly volunteered to test that theory, following his exposure, by eating a fatal amount of the contaminated grain. The one condition he gave was that he be monitored in the highest-level medical facility available—aboard Stellar Song. Rapid dialysis, artificial plasma, biochemical detoxifying agents, duodenal injections to mediate absorption of the toxin—all of this could be done in orbit. Here on the surface, the Alba and Delius were not outfitted with the equipment, pharmacological inputs, nor the expertise to treat someone as sick as they anticipated Korai Companys was soon to be.
Maícon had them convinced. This was likely to be the breakthrough they had been praying for.
In addition to a well-sealed and sanitized container with samples of the original microbe and its fatal derivative, they were sending up Korai Companys with a belly full of toxic spaghetti.
The doctors on the Stellar Song watched the video feed as Clem Aballi inhaled the plate of death pasta. His hunger had been so overwhelming he hardly hesitated when it was set in front of him.
“How’s the meal?” Verona asked from behind the glass in the adjoining lab.
“Could use a little more salt,” Clem remarked, shrugging, “but, honestly, the death toxin adds a strong but not overpowering earthy body to the dish. If I had it to do over, I’d have requested a white sauce instead of the red. Four out of five stars. Given that tonight’s chef is actually a drone technician, I commend him for his efforts.”
There was nothing about his demeanor that wasn’t calculated. Clem was watching the reaction of the doctors and the bridge crew of the Stellar Song carefully, disarming them, lowering their guard, shifting the focus away from himself to the matter at hand—the real danger, the toxin.
He was met by a sterilization team, who washed him down, quickly stuffed him into a pre-sanitized space suit, handed him the case filled with samples, and guided him out the main airlock where the Stellar Song’s long shuttle 1 was waiting.
The people within the complex erupted into cheers when he appeared on the floatscreens, stepping across the dusty plain, case in hand. They were chanting the name—Companys! Companys! Companys!
Even Verona and Kristoff, who were the only two people on that world who knew some master stroke of deception was coming, had no idea where the strike would come from, nor what its target was. It was clear to them though that when Clem Aballi was working, when his left hand moved seductively, the real action was in his right.
Verona and Kristoff watched a feed that Maícon was receiving from Precops, who had control of one of the ship’s sub-systems. Similar to the division of labor on the surface, the ship’s artificial beings never had direct control without the checks of the others—something Kristoff and Verona exchanged a look over, surely a question to be probed, but this wasn’t the time.
At that moment, Clem Aballi was flying to the mothership within the body of Korai Companys, strapped into a jump seat inside the rear airlock of the Song’s long shuttle. And to further guarantee sterilization, they vented the airlock and sent Korai Companys outside on a Tether for thirty minutes in the cold, radiation-soaked, hostile vacuum of space.
“Seems like a bit of an overkill to me,” Aballi said to them as he floated there. “But who’s to say, right? Certainly not the dead guy.”
The dark humor mixed with a massive dose of rebellious carelessness proved extremely charismatic on the feed. The crew up there were lapping it up. So when the time came to pull Aballi inside, they were only too happy to do it.
This original colony ship was something like Verona and Kristoff had never seen before—a behemoth of staggering proportions, with twelve arms rotating around the axis of a central spire that was capped with a gigantic conical hub. The colony ship, they could see, was running spin gravity on the outer extremities, a factor they hoped would aid Aballi in whatever he had planned.
During the dead times in Aballi’s transit to the mothership, Verona and Kristoff would take turns questioning Maícon, trying to tease out details they hoped their assumed personas would help to seem innocuous. Maícon was certainly curious about the trio, but not so curious that he was reticent about details he may not have shared with ordinary colonists—that their assumption about COC Dawcett was correct, for instance. His indecisiveness had been a hot topic among the AIs, and he was strongly considering abandoning the outpost. Privately, the doctors had declared to him that all the colonists were almost certain to die, as all their attempts at mitigation and containment had failed miserably. Dawcett, though, was risk averse, and the physical infrastructure of the outpost itself was something they couldn’t replicate if Charris was abandoned for another planet.
This meant they would need to find another world with a natural environment that was survivable for humans—or at least very close to it, and they had yet to see encouraging signs. In fact, Charris seemed to be in a particularly dead zone. Rodel Dawcett’s advisors were advocating for a much denser collection of stars on the inner arm nearly a full year’s transit from Charris, particularly an area they were calling the Battery Systems, as the orientation of the major stars—at least from Charris—took the shape of a D-10 field battery.
Maícon confessed that he reckoned COC Dawcett was less than a week away from relenting and giving the order to abandon the ill-fated colonists on Charris.
Clem Aballi was led from the outer airlock into a sealed makeshift cleanroom, where another Alba and Delius were waiting to put him through another round of sanitization as they removed his suit. Through the whole process, Korai Compans put on a brave, cheerful face, several times cracking up the ship’s crew and colonial leadership, who were hyper-focused on the transfer of a man many had been convinced was their final hope.
Outside the clean room, Korai Companys, cleaner than his body had been in his entire five decades of life, began the journey down a sealed corridor toward the hub, where the medical bay had been quarantined in anticipation of his arrival.
At the bottom of the ladder on the outer causeway, awaiting his arrival was a Harold.
“Hello, old friend,” Kristoff said. “I had no idea Harolds were so o—” He caught himself.
“Oh, you’ve heard of the new multi-use,” Maícon stated. “Precops and Svaarta have been working with some of the ship’s crew to develop several new models for beta testing. This Harold has rated quite highly.”
The Harold escorted Clem Aballi down the corridor toward the med bay where he would be monitored as the disease progressed, though Korai Companys was displaying no bodily signs of illness thus far.
Steps from the door to the medical bay, Aballi dropped to the floor and began to seize. It was so convincing there was no question from the doctors monitoring remotely or the three bots escorting Aballi that the seizure wasn’t exactly what it appeared to be. The doctors were busy debating whether the seizure was a recurrence of the episode that had landed Korai Companys in the infirmary recently or a presentation of the poisoned pasta working its way into his system.
The three bots picked up Aballi, carrying him into the med bay and strapping him to the table. He stopped seizing abruptly before they had a chance to administer any medications. They immediately began a body scan.
“Whew,” Aballi said to the Delius. “Lost a little time there, boy. Starting to sweat a little. It takes a while, but that pasta does have a kick after all. That’s some spice.”
They began a comprehensive exam. Maícon ’s feed began following the Harold, who had left the med bay, shortly after the seizure stopped.
“New materials, new opportunities,” Maícon announced as the Harold marched inconspicuously down the outer causeway.
“You must have a compatriot in this,” Kristoff stated to Maícon.
“Other than your compatriot?” Maícon replied. “If I did have one, I certainly wouldn’t expose that actor to you. Well, not unless you two want to tell me who you all really are.”
“Not just yet,” Verona replied. “Let’s see how this plays out first.”
“The obvious target for sabotage,” Maícon said, “if you want to simply keep the Stellar Song from leaving, would be FTL capability. Nearly inaccessible from the hub. Not so easy to pull off with so many crew aboard, especially if you care to preserve the drive’s functionality for later use. However …”
“Life support,” Verona stated, her eyes growing wider at the realization.
“There’s no sense jumping anywhere if you’ll be dead by the time you get there,” Maícon finished the thought. “And there are twenty-six critical access points our Harold can get to without raising suspicion.”
“And it puts their skin in the game,” Kristoff added. “Not a bad play.”
“Your compatriot is a strategic genius,” Maícon declared. “He even got a pasta dinner out of the exchange.”
“Let me guess,” Kristoff said. “The food was clean.”
“And quite delicious, apparently,” Maícon concluded.
From that back corridor by the makeshift infirmary where they’d arrived, Verona and Kristoff watched the Harold aboard the Stellar Song progress down the circular outer causeway to an access panel.
“He knew exactly how to manipulate a multi-use model like that, your companion,” Maícon remarked. “Something Korai Companys could never have conceived in a thousand years.”
The Harold worked quickly, making the necessary insertions within the panel to execute the simplest, most elegant sabotage of the life support systems Maícon and Clem Aballi could think to apply, a system-wide corruption that couldn’t be undone for months. Then, that faithful, unwitting Harold simply walked away.
Several minutes later, an alarm began to sound, first on the Stellar Song’s Atmospherics panel, followed shortly by a flashing indicator light and an announcement over the hub’s audio ports. They had thirteen hours.
Clem Aballi stepped off the exam table and addressed the camera in the corner of the med bay. He was well aware of the size and composition of his audience.
“COC Rodell Dawcett, on behalf of the people of Charris, I, Korai Companys, do so declare that for your abandonment of the colony in our moment of crisis, for your failure to make critical decisions in a timely manner, for your catastrophic failure to safeguard the people under your watch, you are hereby relieved of your role as Chief Officer of the Colony, effective immediately.
“And to the rest of you, sitting up here fat and happy, watching as your people starved to death below, I have a very simple message: Pack a bag. If we go down, we’re all going down together.”