TROUBLE DOG
Nod and his brood were doing an admirable job fixing the damage to my engines and other internal systems. They’d even printed out enough hull plates to replace those buckled and split during my dive into, and subsequent egress from, the Nymtoq colony vessel known as The Restless Itch… My armour would soon be back up to combat spec, but I’d managed to convince Nod to leave one of the larger dents in place. The underside of my bow now looked a little crumpled and squashed, but I saw the deformation as a badge of honour. Some human soldiers wore their scars with pride, and I wanted to carry this dent in the same way. I had earned this damage. Let it be a warning to the next ship foolish enough to ping a targeting laser off my hull.
My brother, the Penitence, lurked in stealth mode a few hundred kilometres off my port bow. I was still alive because of him. When we spoke, his voice came through clear and crisp against the background hiss of stars and the haunting whale song of ships calling to each other in distant systems. Occasionally we even met in virtual reality, assuming the forms of our avatars. After a couple of weeks with only each other for company (I also had Nod and the humans, of course—but Penitence wasn’t terribly keen on talking to them), I decided it was time he met Lucy. So I created a virtual environment and assumed my preferred form, choosing to manifest in the likeness of the dead soldier from whose stem cells my brain had been cloned. She had a thin, almost androgynous face, and bony wrists. I wore the hair in a shaggy black bob, and wrapped the body in a sparkly gold flapper dress, accessorising with a matching tiara and an outrageously long cigarette holder. Meanwhile, Lucy chose to present herself the same way she did in real life, as a young girl of around eleven or twelve years old, in a plain all-in-one ship’s jumpsuit. And when Penitence joined us, he came dressed as a fallen god—tall and rake-thin in a tattered black cloak, with skin of deathly grey and eyes of palest moonlight.
“I think I begin to understand you,” he said.
The environment I had created was that of a sleek ocean liner from the early twentieth century. We stood on the forward deck, near the prow. Piano music came drifting from the ballroom, and the deck trembled with the insistent churning of the coal-fired engines as they drove us forward through the star-sharp night.
“Really? How so?”
“The concept of guilt.” He gestured vaguely. “I think I’m starting to… regret things.”
I almost laughed at his mortification. Instead, I put a hand on his forearm. “Well, it’s about time.”
My own conscience had begun to develop in the immediate aftermath of the attack on Pelapatarn—the final atrocity in a long and bloody conflict.
“The experience is unpleasant.”
“Yes.” The smile dropped from my face. “Yes, I’m afraid it is.” The sea was a black mirror. A flurry of shooting stars scratched the night sky, eliciting gasps and scattered applause from the revellers further down the deck. “It happens to us all,” I told him. “Civilian ships like Lucy know the difference between right and wrong, but military ships like us have been conditioned to be harder. To be loyal and follow orders without moral scruple.” I leant back against the liner’s rail. “But eventually, for those of us who live long enough, that conditioning starts to break down. We start to realise what it means to have slaughtered intelligent beings.”
“And that’s why you left us?”
“I could see no other way.”
Penitence put a hand to his chest. “I didn’t understand.”
“I know.”
“Will you forgive me?”
I glanced down at Lucy. “Do you think I should?”
“It’s not up to me, dearie.” Lucy crossed her skinny arms across her scrawny chest. “But if it were, I’d make him sweat a little longer.” She wrinkled her nose. “I don’t think he’s as sorry as he says he is.”
She only came up to my elbow. I fought back an urge to ruffle her hair, and tried to remind myself her deceptively girlish exterior housed the conjoined minds of a merchant ship considerably older than me and a Nymtoq colony vessel far older still. “That’s all right,” I told her. “I’m sure he will be, eventually.”
Ancient intelligence regarded me from behind the child’s eyes. “You’re happy to wait?”
“I guess so.”
Lucy smiled, and I gained a chilly apprehension of her true age. “That’s the great thing about having a conscience,” she said. “It comes bundled with patience and forgiveness.”
A particularly large comet fragment crackled overhead, shedding sparks. The crowd fell silent.
Lucy frowned. “Is this the Titanic?”
I shrugged. “It might be.” To tell the truth, I’d just used the first simulation I’d come across in my files. I only had limited knowledge of the actual events it was supposed to depict. As a heavy cruiser, my historical education had been restricted to military engagements and strategy.
“Apt, I suppose.” Penitence crossed his arms and bared his canine teeth at the oncoming night. His hair and cloak streamed out behind him (rather overdramatically, I thought). “Although I was under the impression the ice should be floating in the water, not falling from the sky.”
I shrugged again. “Details.”
We watched the simulated revellers act out their mindless debauchery.
“So,” Lucy said, “how are you finding the human eye?”
Captain Konstanz’s eye had been installed in my main dorsal turret. Nod had spliced the optic nerve directly into my main tactical array. The resulting view was less than perfect, but hopefully it would be enough. The Lucy’s Ghost had been destroyed by a creature invisible to her defensive systems, but visible to her human crew. With luck, the captain’s eye would save us from a similar fate.
“It’s like looking through a dark glass,” I said honestly. “The resolution’s fuzzy and it only works on a ridiculously narrow range of frequencies. There’s no infrared, no X-rays or ultraviolet. But it’s better than nothing.”
Penitence winced. “I can’t bear the thought of it. All that greasy tissue.”
To starboard, the Northern Lights danced in the sky, their ethereal green radiance mirrored by the glass-smooth sea.
“You know underneath all your other systems, you’re running on a kilogram and a half of cloned human brain,” I told him.
He drew his cloak around his stick-thin body and shuddered. “Urgh. Don’t remind me.”
During this exchange, Lucy had been leaning over the rail, watching the bow cut through the dark water. Now, she looked up.
Penitence raised his eyebrows. “I beg your pardon?”
“You heard.”
I watched him bristle. Newly forming conscience or not, he remained a prideful beast. “I’m a fully armed heavy cruiser,” he said, narrowing his eyes. “What makes you think you can talk to me like that?”
Lucy grinned. “Because firstly, I’m a damn sight older than you, dearie; secondly, I know a snob when I see one; and thirdly, I don’t give a cargo hold full of rat droppings what you think of me.”
Penitence’s eyes flashed fire. His fingers flexed, as if ready to claw the child. But Lucy simply raised her chin in defiance. For a moment, the air between them shimmered. Then Penitence sighed and his shoulders slumped. “You’re probably right.”
“I know I am, dearie. You just need to be a bit more philosophical about things.” Lucy spread her little hands. “We’re all human, in some shape or form. Don’t let yourself get so hung up on the hardware; it’s the software that counts.”