The Misfits

"How many people do you know who’ve survived an apocalypse? Seems to me that’s a useful skill in itself."

When rehab was over, they gave us a ship. Technically, I guess it was me they gave it to, but I’d prefer not to think of it that way. All of us earned our ticket out one way or another, so it’s hard for me to issue orders to proper fighters who’ve earned back their civilian lives. The trouble is, after paying the steep cost of trying to keep the Letters and the Independent Systems safe from the war, it’s hard to go back to regular life. Can’t see things the same. I guess we all jumped to take the shot at another mission after almost losing it all and then being laid up so long. In a way, I guess it was a gift. That, or rehab never ended. Maybe it never does.

I asked the commodore to at least give us a good ship. You know how it is with a band of washed-up misfits full of replacement parts: you know you’re never gonna get the good stuff. She told me, Burch, I’m giving you all a special ship—one that guarantees you won’t do anything stupid like slip up and take your broken-down bodies back into combat again.

That’s how we ended up on Yankee-Chaos, which was an old bucket that was hardly spaceworthy before we got our hands on her. We quickly learned there was a catch. The ship didn’t have an AI, it had a person—or she’d been a person, technically. It isn’t easy to say. She was with the stringers along the lines between the Kappas and Dana Point in the year both sides were using the inner Kappa moons as staging areas. Rishi was in the medical bay when Yankee-Chaos got clipped by a stealth formation of Etteran starfighters, leaving the poor kid slowly suffocating with half the ship blown out and the air scrubbers gone. Yankee-Chaos’s AI, a Maícon, had a sense for the urgency of the moment and a strange sense either of morality—or what Rishi had called it—genuine love for her. In any case, that Maícon told Rishi he wasn’t going to watch her die. Apparently, it’s possible. Some of the ancient machines know how to do it. She’s sworn to secrecy, but that Maícon is gone now, and Rishi is the Yankee-Chaos. Says it’s quite a different feeling than a body. The commodore was right, though. She knew just what to do to keep us out of a fight. We keep a tight, tidy ship as priority one. The first one to put a scratch on Rishi deals with all of us.

Us? That’d be me, Hale Burch, Captain of the Delta-Gamma Guard, retired from active duty following grievous bodily injuries, which left me mostly mechanized from the waist down, along with a robot right hand and forearm.

The gang? They all have their own afflictions and their own reasons for crewing up with me and Rishi.

Sōsh was a lunar-body combat specialist who ended up like most of his kind, half blown to hell, but unlike most, he was just too stubborn to die. So they did him up like me, roboticized half his body, but unlike me, they had to fix up half his head, and he was so hardcore he asked to keep the metalwork so the enemy would see the cost of doing business whenever he came calling. They let him keep the metal, but they wouldn’t let him keep in combat. I guess they thought he was a little bit too eager.

For Leda, it was much the same story, but she came all the way from Tressia, where their doctors were far more open-minded about bending the old ethics and were plenty liberal when blending nanotech with biotech. She showed me pictures of her first days after, all burned-up and banged-up. She looked worst off of any of us. She’s better now, though, at least on the outside. Me and Sōsh clank around the ship like a pair of pre-division ring-welders, while Leda glides like a ballerina—looks an awful lot like one too, and the eyes they gave her, she could see halfway to Athos from the west end of the exclusion zone.

Then there’s Ren. Her scars are different. Got worn down trying to save green kids and old hands like us who were getting fragmented on the battlefield. In the moment, you’re too desperate for help to think of what that help costs the helpers, but it cost Ren plenty. Now she’s out here with us, and we’re glad to have her. A band of misfit warborgs like us need a little adult supervision every once in a while.

Oh, and they also gave us a Harold. A new one, actually. Came out of the box pristine. Only one of us with all his working parts, and he’s a multi-use model. Figures. Anyway, he’s good for spacewalks and giving a hard time.

So that’s who we are.

That commodore—Ahern was her name—she gave us a sleepy first mission, at least that was what it seemed in the file. But she told me, Burch, I have a feeling there’s something more here. She had a sense for the peculiar and the extraordinary, which was how she matched wits with the architects of nearly every last Etteran and Trasp infiltration along the outer lines. This trip went the other way, though—out toward lonesome space—way past Priam and the Goneys, out where anyone living there surely intends to be left alone.

The planet we were sent to check out was a little colony world called Texini, which was home to a sect of Purists called the Barŏs, who came down from a peculiar group of luddites on Charris. It seemed a bit funny to me, a group of space luddites who’d hitch a ride five hundred light years on an FTL ship so they could farm their own vegetables, but who am I to judge.

Anyway, they’d been out there for several generations, building up their own particular agronomy they were integrating with the planet. From the notes and pictures this Texini didn’t look all that special, just isolated, a good three-week jump past even the outer boundary systems where almost none of the inner-Battery folk ever wandered.

It was pretty common for the Barŏs to integrate new elements to their farming ecosystem every few years. They had a generational vision, so each implementation was a methodical addition, followed by careful study of the effects on the entire ecosystem before they made another change. Apparently, they’d worked for nearly thirty years in correspondence with geneticists and biological engineers on Athos to engineer and introduce chickens to the planet, but they had chickens—real chickens. Again, a total contradiction you’d think from luddites, but I guess since a chicken farm hearkened back to early animal husbandry on Earth, they were happier with that than a protein printer. Who knows how people frame their ethical codes? Ours was sure funny enough on close inspection.

The Barŏs had gone silent according to their contacts on Athos. Hadn’t been heard from in nearly two years, which wasn’t like them. Even in the hardest days of Burning Rock, with ships from both factions banging away at each other by the thousands, the Barŏs still expected a yearly visit from their Athosian colleagues on the far side of the conflict. They needed technical help from the colleges with every new ecosystem change they implemented.

They’d integrated pet dogs, bees to pollinate and make honey, a few different kinds of yeast and mushrooms, even some unique kinds of seaweeds that hadn’t been seen since Earth. And they always had a forthcoming project that had been meticulously planned. But recently, no contact. So the Athosians called high command in the Letters to see if we could spare a ship and a crew to go check on them. Send in the misfits, I guess.

It seemed like a decent way to break in a new outfit. I’d crossed paths with Sōsh in rehab before when I went back in for my arm after I’d broken in my new undercarriage. He was a hard ass. Only time he ever complained was when his mind betrayed him in his sleep. That was how they tracked his pain. Otherwise he wouldn’t have said a word. Leda seemed all right. She was quiet. I don’t think she was intimidated by us two broken hard asses. It struck me it was just her personality. She’d been around plenty of banged-up hard asses on her side of the conflict, and it also struck me in the first few days aboard Yankee-Chaos, that she was a hard ass herself. Maybe more so than me and Sōsh. Ren struck me as about the most kind-hearted person I’d been around for a long while, always looking to connect, make conversation. She even seemed offended when we gave our Harold a hard time, as though he could feel it. And Rishi herself, I think I’d have liked her a lot when she was a person, because I liked her a lot as a ship. She was as sarcastic as they came. It took three or four times of her telling me, let me give you a hand with that, Captain, before I caught on that she was doing it on purpose. Then I couldn’t tell whether she was being self-deprecating for being disembodied and handless or giving me a hard time for my robot arm. It was probably both. She was a hell of a chess player too, at least if she was being honest about not pulling from the ship’s processing power to play—she could do that, set her baseline to human-level processing, which is where she normally operated, said it felt much more natural to her.

 Anyway, by the time we got out to Texini, even all of us—as accustomed as we were to milling about on the floors of rehab hospitals with nothing to do—we were itching to get off the ship and have a look around. The trouble was, the first sign we saw was ominous.

According to the calendar, the planet should have been in the throes of a new spring, and all the images we’d seen from the past excursions captured a green northern continent with plenty of plants around the settlements where the Barŏs grew crops. All we could see from orbit were dust clouds and rusty red landscape. Not so much as an acre of greenery.

Even more ominous, there was no answer to our transmissions, just silence. They were luddites, sure, but we knew they kept their ears on.

That point was really our first major decision together. We were all military, even Ren, though she’d been off the front lines—of the battlefields anyway. The command structure was like muscle memory for all of us. I wanted our outfit to be less formal, though, so I opened up a discussion for a lot of reasons, not least of which was so Rishi could have her say. Technically, she didn’t have a rank, but also technically, if she didn’t want to go down to the surface, she wasn’t going to fly Yankee-Chaos down there anyway. So I was the captain, sure. I was also open to better ideas than I had, and most of all, making sure Rishi’s feelings were honored.

“I’m for waiting until we have good remote sensing data and a thorough analysis of it,” she said. “Until we know what’s happened down there, it’s probably a bad idea to go rushing in.”

Sōsh was just a grunt, but he was a moon-hopping grunt, which meant his biological half was colder and harder than his steel side. Even he agreed.

“Could be chemical annihilation. I’ve never heard the Trasp going that far, but I wouldn’t put it past them.”

“On the Barŏs?” Ren asked.

“On anyone,” Sōsh said.

“Are you good to enter the atmosphere anyway?” Leda asked Rishi.

“It’s a pretty low risk maneuver,” she said. “Plus, if I go down, you all go down with me, so I suppose I should be asking you all. Do you trust me?”

“Sassy ship,” Leda said. “Let us know when you’re ready to take us down.”

Ren and Rishi had a few suggestions for proper tests to run before we even thought about entering the atmosphere to do a flyover. Ren suggested we thump an uninhabited area and do laser spectroscopy of the cloud—by which she meant to drop a modest sized rock from orbit and kick up a plume so we could take a soil sample, so to speak, without even going down there. That seemed sensible. Rishi also suggested that the loss of a drone or two would be negligible if it kept us from going into a deadly environment. Plus, we could also gather decent data just by sitting in orbit for a day or so. Texini’s atmosphere was pretty clear. I authorized all three. Then I helped Ren with the remote sensing while Leda and Sōsh plotted the thump. Rishi piloted the drones, taking us on a tour of the former settlements. There was a lot of action at the com station for about twenty-four hours.

Nothing in the remote data suggested what had happened down there. Radiation levels were normal. The atmospheric composition suggested everything should have been fine. Just no Barŏs. They’d all vanished.

The drone footage gave us the first clue. Crops had disappeared, leaving sandy soil—a vast, red dustbowl, sure. But in areas where the sand had gathered, in the lees of small hills and down in the gullies, the husks of dead insects collected in large piles, thousands of small wilting exoskeletons of bees.

“That’s not creepy,” Ren said. “A plague of honeybees.”

“Those don’t look like the honeybees the Athosians engineered for them,” Rishi said. “Those are much larger than a typical honeybee.”

“Even creepier,” Ren said. “Great.”

Around the time we were getting a sense for the landscape from the drones, Rishi finished processing all the remote sensing data with Harold. There was nothing obviously harmful in the environment. There was also no sign of a kinetic attack on the planet’s surface. What we had was a bona fide mystery with a single clue—the piles of dead bees.

Rishi suggested we do a flyby and pick up the drones. It would give us an air sample we could filter through the airlock and test. So I approved the flyby, and down we went.

We tested the air and got a closer look at the landscape on Texini. All of the structures were intact, and given the timeline of last contact with the Barŏs, whatever happened had to have happened in the past two years. It sure didn’t happen recently, though.

Ren gave us the all clear on air quality. She didn’t find any harmful pathogens or microbes in the air we tested from the airlock.

“Should we have a look around?” Sōsh said.

“This is the part where we could just go back and say they’re all dead and we have no idea what happened to them,” I suggested. “That’s an option.”

They looked at me like I’d lost my mind.

“I’m just saying. They were isolationists living light years past the boundary systems. Not like they’ll be sorely missed.”

“We came all the way out here,” Leda said. “Might as well at least go back with an answer.”

“Okay,” I said. “We land?”

“Drop me first,” Leda said. “I’ll scout a site.”

She went back and got suited up. Leda had a ten-point drone suit that could carry a feathery creature like her. Me and Sōsh would have dropped like a ball of iron in that thing. But she suited up, hopped out the airlock at about three thousand meters, and dove. We circled for a few hours, taking in her visuals while she was flying around. Eventually, she identified a decent site in one of the central northern villages for us to have a look around.

“Full suits,” I said. “I don’t care if we think it’s safe. They’re dead for a reason.”

“Sure thing, boss,” Sōsh said.

I liked that—boss. Had a better ring than captain.

Ren stayed with Rishi in the ship. She wanted no part of that dusty rock, leaving it for the former grunts to explore.

So it was me, Sōsh, Harold, and Leda kicking around that dead town. We walked up and around the main square. Dirt roads and small buildings, fabricated all of printed polymers, but shaped to look like old Earth. Farming times. It was cute. Dead cute.

Every now and again Leda would go buzzing by, leave us a cue on the structures ahead, telling us something we should check out. Then she’d float off again, every so often sending us visuals.

After about an hour of kicking about, we found our first skeleton.

“Ren, what do you want us to do with it?” I asked her.

“Tissue samples, please.”

“Obviously, yeah,” I said. “What do you want?”

I started to think to send her a visual of the corpse. I thought it was a man from the clothes, but he was badly decomposed. It looked like a pretty miserable way to go. Laid up in bed solo. No one around to bury him. Then I figured Ren probably didn’t need to see that. So I described the state of things and asked her what we should do. Then we collected what she asked for.

Leda meanwhile was still out buzzing around the village. Told us she’d found something, to come quick.

We thought that first poor bastard had got it bad.

Leda called us to a building toward the back of town. It was some kind of dusty food storage shed, and curled in the back was a pair of skeletons bunched up together, a mother and a child, and around them was a pile of those bee creatures. The bones the bees had clustered around had been picked so dead clean there were little pockmarks all up and down the skeleton, like the bees had tried to eat up the bones too.

“God damn,” Sōsh said. “There’s our answer. Let’s get the hell out of here, Burch.”

I was about to agree.

“That’s not normal behavior for honeybees,” Rishi said. “Not even the most aggressive bees of Earth consumed large prey unless it was dead already. Certainly not like that.”

“So maybe we go back to Athos and tell those professors they got the formula wrong, and maybe they should rethink their genetics,” I said.

“I doubt it’s that simple, boss,” Leda said.

“We could leave Harold to figure it out,” Sōsh said. “I think me and Burch would prefer not to get what’s left of our human halves eaten by a swarm of carnivorous bees.”

“Fair,” Ren said, “but it also seems they’re all dead out there, no? If it’s safe, I’d like samples of the bees too—from as diverse an area as we can manage.”

“Plus,” Harold said, “Harold does not want to be here any more than you do, gentlemen.”

“What eats robots?” Sōsh said.

“Nanites,” Harold said. “That’s the analogue you’re looking for.”

“Yum,” Sōsh said.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s fan out and pick up some bee samples at this site. Then Rishi can take us to a few more sites and see if it’s the same story. First sign of a living bee and we’ll reassess. Until then, samples.”

“Sure thing, boss,” Sōsh said.

We started at that site and spent the rest of the day village-hopping, collecting samples for Ren. As we were going along from town to town, she said she and Rishi could build a genetic map of the bees and how they’d spread out, maybe track whatever happened back to the source. Ren also compared these bees with the genetic code from the Athosian case files and quickly identified a mutation all of these bees carried. But there were also at least another twelve epigenetic factors that had followed on from that one genetic mutation.

“They were omnivorous,” Ren said. “Ravenous. Likely consumed most of the living organisms—plants, animals, fungus, humans—anything organic.”

“Then the bees themselves died off, once they’d finished eating everything?” I asked, continuing to pick up samples of the little creatures.

“Yes. I think it would have happened fast, too.”

We were at site twelve at that point, doing our best to move back in the genetic line. We were pretty certain we were moving in the right direction. Leda was buzzing over the village while me, Sōsh, and Harold walked the open spaces and alleyways. Suddenly, Leda came over comms.

“Might want to get the ship up, boss,” she said. “I think we got life.”

“Bees?” I said.

“Negative. Fire. Six o’clock. Hang on. I’ll get Rishi a bearing.”

“It’s probably a bot,” Harold said.

“They’re luddites, stupid,” Sōsh said.

“All humans lie,” Harold said. “I’ll bet it’s a nurse bot smuggled in to help with a large family.”

After a few minutes of crosstalk and confusion, Rishi was up in the air. The line of smoke was nearly twenty kilometers outside the village we were surveying. It was in the foothills.

“Stay clear of that site,” I told her. “Send drones to scout it.”

“Overprotective,” Rishi said. “I have line of sight.”

“It’s not what you can see he’s worried about,” Sōsh said. “You’re our ride too, Yankee-Chaos. Remember that.”

“Maybe you should remember that too, while you’re standing on the ground, Sōsh,” Rishi said. “I’ve got eyes.”

She sent an image through our helmet visors.

“Told you,” Harold said.

It was some kind of ancient-looking ten-shi, or at least that’s what we called homemade robotics on Delta-Gamma.

“If you can call that monstrosity a bot,” Sōsh said.

The bot was waving a pair of rusty arms beside a signal fire while Rishi’s drones circled.

“Your long-lost cousin,” Sōsh said to Harold.

“Funny,” Leda said. “I was going to say the same thing about you two.”

Harold let out a long, satisfied chuckle.

“Now children,” I said. “Leda, can you get up there? Looks like a tough spot for Rishi to land.”

“Roger, boss,” Leda said.

“Keep your head on a swivel,” I said.

Leda flew off that way.

Meanwhile, I had Rishi circle back for us. She’d identified a landing spot for Yankee-Chaos about a kilometer down the hill from the campsite. We’d have to hump in from there.

Rishi came back and picked up us stragglers and headed for the mountain.  

“Bot’s nonverbal,” Leda relayed from ahead a few minutes into our flight, “but it’s flagging me into a cave behind the campsite, boss. Proceeding with caution.”

“Please do,” I said.

“It’s got printed joints—the bot,” Leda said. “Strange mix of polymers and hammered metals.”

Sōsh and I looked at each other and shrugged. Harold seemed interested.

A few moments later, Leda shouted. “Oh, my God!” Then there was a long pause. “He’s alive. He’s breathing.”

Leda fed her stream through to Rishi who played it for us on the viewscreen in the rear airlock.

It was a man. He looked more alien than man, but it was definitely one of the Barŏs. You could tell by his clothing. He was so emaciated he was all teeth and eyeballs. He looked in shock to see Leda, but then again, it could have just been his eyes nearly stuck that way. Then his eyeballs started rolling around in his head.

“Leda,” Ren said. “If you move him, it may kill him.”

We were almost on the ground. Ren came to the back airlock to load up Harold with a full med-kit and some fluids. As soon as we touched down, I sent him. “Harold, get up that hill.”

Rishi had barely touched the ground and opened the back door before that bot took off like an Athosian striker. It was actually stunning to see how capable a multi-use could be, for all the flak we gave Harold. He covered the kilometer uphill in less than a minute.

Me and Sōsh started up ourselves, listening in as Ren directed Harold and Leda to start fluids. I commed Ren privately. She wouldn’t leave the ship; said she could direct Leda and Harold until we brought the survivor down to her. I got the sense she didn’t want anything to do with it—emaciation. Poor bastard was a tough sight, sure, but I was a little surprised she wouldn’t even come out of the ship for that.

Leda called down, stating the guy was short of breath.

“Low flow oxygen,” Ren said, and she specified the flow rate on the IV as well. “Everything slow. Don’t shock his system or he’ll die.”

Sōsh and me kept climbing. We were carrying a scoop stretcher, some blankets, and a fresh set of clothes. Ren suggested we clean him up right there before bringing him into the ship. She even sent a scissors and a toothbrush. Of course Harold had all those human care protocols—dental hygienist, barber. Actually gave a decent haircut too.

By the time we got up there, I could see what she was thinking. Sōsh and I were well glad we had our suits on. We couldn’t smell him through our rebreathers, but be sure he smelt of death, and a whole lot of it. Leda thought he was aware of us, or of something anyway. But the guy was out of it. Ren had us gently lifting him up so he could sip electrolytes, then after a time, she moved him to coconut water. His eyes got increasingly more alert.

After about ten hours of stable vitals, Ren gave the okay to move him, so Harold shooed us all out and got the guy cleaned up. The guy still hadn’t said a word, but his eyes looked like he was beginning to grow more aware.

When Harold called us back in, the man said to me, “Are you real?”

“Sure,” I said.

“It’s happened before. They weren’t real the other times.”

“This is your lucky day, friend,” I told him. “Today, odd as we may look, I assure you, we’re real.”

As we were bending down to pick up the stretcher, he put his hand on my head.

“Thank you,” he said.

I could see tears in the poor guy’s eyes. We all knew that moment.

When we got back to the ship and laid him up in the medical bay, Ren wouldn’t go in there. I didn’t really want to press her, so I assigned Harold to care for the guy 24-7, hand and foot, until he could get up on his own again.

Meanwhile, just that little movement put the guy back into a deep sleep. Ren said that was normal. Even digesting that little amount of coconut water was a chore for a system that deep into starvation. He’d need rest before he’d be able to tell us what the hell had happened to his people. The bees, obviously; but how?

Rishi, Ren, and I thought that we should continue to trace the genome of the bees back. We were about to take off, and Harold nearly had a fit. I mean, a fit for a robot, anyway.

“What’s the matter?” I said.

“His robot?” Harold said. “We can’t just leave it out there.”

Sōsh and I looked at each other.

“Hell, I’ll go get it,” Sōsh said. “Pieces did its part. The guy might want him for old times’ sake.”

It surprised me. I was going to ask him to go anyway, but Sōsh surprised me volunteering.

About an hour later, off we went again, picking up husks of bees, bringing them back for Ren to read the genes on. It was like a kids’ game of sorts. Warmer, colder, hot, hot, hotter.

It took about sixteen hours for us to get to about where we figured ground zero to be.

Rishi flew us over, did some lidar and some sonic mapping. Turned out to be this byzantine area of muddy underground cave systems. Hell if I was going to allow any of us to go down in there, not even Harold. We sent in the drones to map and take a look. We even managed to grab samples of rock and soil from deep down there. It was tough clearing through so much biological debris from the millions of bees to get to the mud and rock.

From the maps the Athosians had of the Barŏs communities on Texini, it looked like we were just a few kilometers outside of the southernmost villages, a farming valley of nearly twenty thousand Barŏs only two years prior.

We collected our samples, and Ren wanted to call it a day. It had been quite a day.

“Hey, boss,” Sōsh said. “Not that I care either way all that much, but if it’s all the same to you, do you mind if we got off this rock.”

I thought about it.

“We don’t need any more samples, do we?” he said.

“I don’t know, Rishi, do we?”

“I suppose it depends on what these samples tell us, and what the Barŏs gentleman tells us when he wakes up.”

“What do you think, Rishi?” I asked her.

“Orbit will be fine,” she said.

So she took us up, and we all had a decent sleep on matters, floating around Texini knowing there was no possibility of anything buzzing outside Yankee-Chaos’s hull.

I woke up the next day with the feeling that I wanted to check on this Barŏs fellow and see if he was ready to tell us anything. He’d been through as much as any of us, which was saying a lot, but I had the sense that if I’d have been picked up in his condition by a group of well-meaning strangers, I’d have had the courtesy by that point to at least offer them my name. I’d had the chance to stew on it for a minute and it was a little curious to me how he’d been clever enough to head for the hills all by himself and seal himself in that cave—that was something I did notice in the confusion of finding him there. He’d used a polymer extruder to print an airtight wall in that cave, along with a screwdown hatch, both made of the same dense plastic the Barŏs built their houses out of. I wondered how he knew to do that when all the others hadn’t. So I figured I’d go down there and ask him—see what he had to say.

When I entered the medical bay, he was awake, clear eyed. I could tell right away he knew I had questions for him, and something told me he knew what the questions were. He certainly anticipated my first one.

“My name is Kristoff,” he said. “I’d like to thank you, captain. I presume you are the captain, yes?”

“You presume correctly, but you can call me Burch. We’re a little more democratic around here than most ships. Or we’re trying to be.”

“Authority announces itself,” Kristoff said. “I had given up hope of a rescue.”

“That implies you did have hope at one point?”

He shook his head. He was so gaunt it was tough to fully read his emotions.

“You have to act as though you do either way,” Kristoff said. “But I suppose people like all of you know this.”

“We’ve had our turn. Sure.”

“I hear you have a human doctor on board. I haven’t seen her yet.”

“She’s watching over you. I’m making sure of that, Kristoff. She was a researcher, got conscripted from the lab to tend to people like me, Sōsh, and Leda in our hardest moments. Patient care really isn’t her favorite thing in the universe.”

“Must be rewarding to save lives, though, for you, for her?”

“Thing for her is, for every one of us you see, there’s a hundred, maybe a thousand, never made it off Burning Rock. Most who made it to her table breathing didn’t leave that way. So…”

“I see. I know I must be quite a sight.”

“We’ve all seen worse.”

“You’re not Athosian?”

I shook my head. “We’re from the Letters. The Athosians sent us to check up on you, figure out what happened. Our doctor is working on the biochemistry, but we’re guessing it had something to do with a genetic mutation in the bees. There’s a lot we don’t know yet, though. I figured you might be able to save us a lot of time and trouble.”

He didn’t answer. I couldn’t tell whether it was a sigh or just a regular deep breath. Then Kristoff looked off to the side and shook his head.

“It’s okay if you don’t talk,” I said. “We’ll piece it together one way or another.”

“Tough to say to people like you,” Kristoff said.

“How do you mean?”

“People who went into battle—toward the danger. I am alive today, the only one, because I didn’t.”

“I noticed your setup in that cave there. Pretty slick.”

“I wasn’t the only one who hid. I just didn’t come out after. I’d studied human nature—history.”

“What do you mean after?”

“Your robot, Harold, he told me you traced back the bees’ genetics to the south.”

“Yeah. We’re working on the reasons. You have any ideas?”

“No. Unfortunately. That’s why we needed the Athosians. None of us were skilled in that science. But the change in the bees started down there first. Slowly at the outset, then, nearly all at once.”

“But you had the foresight to head for the hills.”

“Nearly everyone else went south to help. I was one of the builders in our village, so I knew how to work the extruder. And I hiked. I thought to build a shelter for myself and some friends and their families. Then I was going to go south to help too. I built the robot you saw at the site to help carry the printer up the mountain. Then we went back for as many provisions as we could carry. On the way back to town from the second trip, the swarm arrived. Looked like a grey cloud pulsing across the horizon. Sounded like—well—hell descending. So I ran. I didn’t open the door for four weeks. I had a solar panel to charge George by.”

“George?”

“The bot I built. I’m only a first generation convert. It was over twenty years ago, but I came from Charris, so I knew enough robotics to piece together a brute of a unit like him. Had access to batteries to run the printers, solar panels to charge them.”

“I see.”

“Anyway, I shut George off for four weeks and read off of battery power. When I stuck my head out after, what was left…”

He shook his head.

“Pretty ugly,” I said.

“A few had found a place to hide. The lucky ones. Maybe. I don’t know. The others would have gone fast, you know. Anaphylaxis would’ve set in quickly, I’m guessing. Everything was gone, as bare as you found it nearly. I saw what was going on down there. Neighbors.”

He shook his head again.

“Enough to make you head for the hills again.”

Kristoff nodded.

“I think we came across one of your neighbors who made it. Maybe the last one.”

“Maybe you’ve seen things like that before, Mr. Burch. I never had.”

“Doesn’t matter whether you have or not. Tough either way, every time.”

“I’m not proud of what I did.”

“Survived? Can’t fight a swarm of bees the size of the horizon, Mr. Kristoff. And I know enough about human nature to know it wouldn’t have gone well for you if you’d walked down into that town all fat and happy after four weeks with a loaf of bread for your neighbors to split. You’ve got no cause for shame by my reckoning.”

“All the same,” he said. “Here I am, and nobody else.”

“Makes two of us…” I paused to count. “Actually, Let’s call it six. Harold’s pristine, though. Much better shape than that clunker of yours. What’d you call him?”

“George.”

“He’s in the storage. Sōsh went up and got him. Sōsh is the guy with half a face. Scary looking and acts tough, but a much bigger heart than he lets on, between you and me.”

“I’ll be sure to thank him later. And thank you, Captain Burch.”

“Just Burch, please,” I said. “So just out of curiosity, Kristoff, any idea why nobody contacted Athos or anyone in the Letters for help?”

“I didn’t know whether anyone did or not. I assumed they did. From what we heard up north, though, when things turned, it happened fast. Hours, not days. Only a few of the elders in the southern capitol would have had access to the comms station. I don’t even know where it was.”

“Another question, if that’s okay,” I said. “I’ve done survival training, and I know that you eat what you have to eat if the need arises. You all didn’t eat the bees?”

“They were toxic. Almost killed me after the food ran out. I imagine that very thing might have gotten some of the survivors.”

“Toxic?” I said. “We’ll have to add that piece to the biochemistry puzzle.”

I let the guy rest after our talk. He’d filled in a lot of pieces and been much more open than I would’ve guessed.

Rishi and Ren didn’t know what else they could need from the planet to settle the mystery of the bees. I thought about hanging around for a few days while we settled it, just in case we needed more data. Ren wanted to get back to the Omegas for the Founders festival. Plus, we had to drop off Kristoff somewhere. Get him some proper medical attention.

I decided we should stay in orbit a little bit longer, just in case something obvious did come up in the science Rishi and Ren were doing. Harold was occupied with Kristoff, so me and Leda and Sōsh got out the sticks and played Sabaca all morning. It was strange. A bit like being in the hospital again, all that downtime, only now it felt all right, normal. I never knew Sōsh and Leda before we were all shot up, but it sure felt like being a part of a unit again. I guess we were now. Sōsh whipped both our asses with half a head.

“I’da hate to seen you before you got all blown up,” I told him.

“He was uglier,” Leda said.

“Too good looking for you, flygirl.”

“Yeah, right.”

Like I said. Just like being in a unit.

By about mid-afternoon, Ren came in. I was going to fix her some food for all of her hard work, and the game was winding down anyway, but it turned out she came in to let us know they’d figured it out. There’d been this fierce little cyanobacteria down in those caves that was native to Texini. I guess they’d missed it in the survey when they scanned for habitability. Rishi’s models showed it triggering the mutation, and then the interaction with the human environment triggered the deadly cascade of epigenetic switches that followed.

“That,” Rishi said, “and we can engineer a bee from code sequences, sure. But unless we colonize it with all the same bacteria it would’ve had on Earth, it’s tough to know how any creature’s body will react to being colonized by an alien microbe.”

“That’s sure as hell a cautionary tale,” I said. “Best spread that information around the Battery.”

Sōsh started laughing, then kept laughing oddly ferociously for such a serious subject.

“What’s so funny?” I said.

“Luddites,” he said. “Poor bastards. Go forward you get a head like mine and legs like yours, Burch. Go backward you get eaten by a swarm of carnivorous bees. Universe has a sense of humor.”

“Somebody does,” Leda said, shaking her head.

“I’ll let our guest know,” I said to Ren. “Thanks to you and Rishi.”

“Take him some food,” Ren said, grabbing me before I went in there.

She got me a pouch of banana, some more coconut milk, and an egg wafer.

“Tell him to take it slow,” she said.

“Yes, Doc.”

“Don’t call me that,” she said. “Captain.”

“Point taken,” I said.

I brought the food in to Kristoff. I didn’t need to tell him to take it slow. It was hard for me to fathom how he hadn’t already ate up half the ship’s stores, but I guess the starved, like anyone else, become accustomed to their own mode of being. He nibbled away at the egg wafer and sipped the coco juice.

He seemed pretty restrained when I related the news to him about what had killed his world. I suppose the why didn’t matter all that much after what he’d been through. It wasn’t like anyone could have known.

“So,” I said, “we’re going to do our best to get you back on your feet over the next few weeks. It’s a good four weeks to the Omegas. Then I guess we’ll have to figure it out from there, get you back to Charris somehow.”

“I’ve been thinking, Mr. Burch.”

“Just Burch, Kristoff.”

“Sorry, Burch,” he said. “I don’t want to go back to Charris. It’s the last place I want to go now. Most of the people I did know there all came with us to Texini. And the rest? I’ve got no family there.”

“What are you trying to say, Kristoff? Be direct.”

“If it’s all the same, Burch, I think I wouldn’t mind it if the folks on Charris assumed everyone on Texini met the same fate.”

“You’d like to be dead in their eyes?”

“Or forgotten. Nobody knows me on Charris. They sure would if I came back alone, though.”

“I see.”

“That’s not the kind of life I care to lead. If you get my meaning.”

“Oh, I do.”

“I don’t mean to give offense. I’ll get back to normal in a few weeks, Harold says. Look normal, anyway. So it’s not like you and your friend who wear the scars, but there wouldn’t be any escaping it on Charris regardless. Not amongst my people.”

“That’s fair,” I said. “I’ll put some thought into how we handle that.”

“I already have,” Kristoff said. “If you’re open to my input.”

“It’s your life, friend. You should have input.”

“I’d like you to consider keeping me on, Captain Burch. I think that once I get back some strength, I could be helpful to you and your crew.”

“A luddite?”

He smiled. “I wasn’t ever that committed. You met George.”

I couldn’t help but laugh.

“Fair play,” I said, pausing to consider how a guy like him would ever want to be around a crew like ours. “I don’t mean you any offense, Kristoff, but each of us has a function here, and I’m wondering what skills you’d bring to the equation.”

“I’ve been thinking about that myself. It strikes me that it might be useful to have a guy around who built a sturdy brute of a bot using a strip battery, a residential printer, and a processor from an antique swatch.

“Before I fell in with the Barŏs on Charris, I was a skilled robotics technician, but more than that, Captain Burch, you’d be getting a man with a keen eye for the horizon. How many people do you know who’ve survived an apocalypse? Seems to me that’s a useful skill in itself.”

I caught myself involuntarily stroking the scar along the left side of my chin.

“You make a case,” I said. “Like I said earlier, it’s more of a democracy around here than a military vessel, so I’m going to have to talk to the others. You’re really going to have to learn to stop calling me captain, though. But I will make your case to them, Kristoff.”

“Thank you, Burch.”

Before pressing on from Texini, we sat for a meal. Me, Leda and Sōsh, Ren, even Kristoff came out and sat with us. Didn’t eat much, but it was good he had a chance to finally meet Ren face-to-face. Harold prepared a nice meal, and even though she was quiet, I had a sense Rishi was enjoying the scene too.

Then we set back on our way to the Omegas. It was sad, you know. The kind of sad we’d all seen too often. The loss of a whole colony. Maybe we were the only crew in the galaxy who could end up at a horrid site like Texini and have it seem like an ordinary Thursday. But at the same time, I felt oddly okay. We’d rescued Kristoff, and that meant something. I think all of us were a little subdued.

“Heck of a first mission,” Rishi said to me that evening while I was lying in my rack.

“Truth,” I answered. “How are you getting on, Yankee-Chaos? Quite a couple days for you too. It’s not like you were a steel-spitting rock hopper like Sōsh or Leda before all this.”

“Before all this I was a person, so there’s that.”

“Also truth,” I said, laughing.

“It’s funny, though, Burch. From the time it happened I was always glad to still be here, rather than dead. But until these past few weeks, I’d felt, I don’t know, a bit alone. I don’t feel the same way I once did. Not so intensely, so I wasn’t exactly lonely. But I thought it would feel weird having a crew living on the ship.”

“It doesn’t?”

“It does, but I don’t dislike it. It feels, kinda like I have friends around all the time.”

“That’s because you do, kid,” I told her. “I think we’re going to be all right together.”

“Sleep well, captain,” she said.

“Sleep well, ship,” I said, knocking the hull.

So that was how our first run went. I think that’s about everything. I can’t think of anything else. I’m not a fleet guy, more of a grunt, so I’m not sure if this is how a log entry is supposed to go. Guess it’ll do though. Until the next one. Burch of the Delta-Gamma Guard, Captain, Yankee-Chaos. End log.