TROUBLE DOG
I’ve seen many things in my short life. I’ve clipped the atmospheres of gas giants, skulked in the icy tails of comets, and even plunged into the interior of a star. I’ve contemplated the abyssal emptiness of the higher dimensions, ridden the solar winds, and borne witness to death in all its infinitely varied guises. I’ve seen munitions fall across a jungle canopy like rain; torpedoes swarming like fireflies in the night; and bursts of nuclear fire bright and pure enough to vaporise human eyes in their sockets.
But sometimes I dream of things I’ve never seen, people I’ve never met and places I’ve never visited. And sometimes those dreams feel so vivid and authentic, I wake from them with feelings of incalculable yearning and loss.
To maintain peak efficiency, my organic components require periodic episodes of downtime, to flush out the toxins that build up during waking hours. And during these offline periods, I often have dreams about a particular village. Its grey slate and cobblestone cottages nestle in the lap of a low, bracken-strewn hill, beneath a lowering, rain-filled sky. It’s an old place. A place of steep, narrow streets, a brook singing the secrets of the hills, and a barefoot village green. It’s nowhere I know, and yet it often feels every bit as real as anything in my waking life. Could it be an inherited memory from the woman whose harvested stem cells were used to cultivate my awareness? Was such retention even possible? And if not, then from where else could these dreams have sprung?
After we left the Druff home world, I tried speaking to Lucy about it.
We met in a virtual rendering of a crowded New York diner. Outside, manholes steamed. Yellow taxis swished past a metre above the roadway, fans kicking up old newspapers and burger wrappers, green and red lights throwing shadows across the windows. At the end of the street, a flood barrage held back the threatening grey waters of the swollen Atlantic.
Lucy and I sat at adjacent stools, our elbows resting on the counter. She ordered a huge pink milkshake with a scoop of strawberry ice cream. I asked for a coffee.
“How do you want it, lady?” the guy behind the counter asked.
“Like my soul,” I told him. “Dark and bitter.”
“Comin’ right up.”
While he made our drinks, I explained my puzzlement to Lucy. The girl sat there, kicking her heels. When I’d finished talking, she said, “It’s not surprising, I suppose.”
“What isn’t?”
“You’re a warship, dearie. When they built you, they put all kinds of inhibitors on your emotional growth. They used dog DNA to encourage loyalty, and they bred you in packs.”
“This I know.”
“Well, don’t you see?”
“See what?”
Lucy smiled. “These dreams started around the time you quit the Conglomeration Navy, right?”
“Yes.”
“At a time when you’d just started to develop a conscience.”
“You think that has something to do with it?” I couldn’t keep the scepticism from my voice.
“Of course it does, love. Think about it. Your mind was in turmoil. You’d just walked away from everything you’d been designed and conditioned to be. Of course your subconscious was going to start searching for an idealised version of home.”
“You think?”
“Yeah, I do. Don’t forget, you’re speaking to someone who remembers drifting alone through space for a thousand years. I know a thing or two about homesickness.”
She fished a yo-yo from her pinafore and began rolling it up and down its string with well-timed flicks of her wrist.
“This is normal?”
“For a human, yes.”
“But where do the images come from? Where is this village?”
The yo-yo paused, centimetres from the black and white tiled floor. With her free hand, Lucy tapped the side of her head. “From in here.”
“You mean I made it all up?”
Her wrist twitched, and the spinning wooden toy leapt up into her hand. “In a way. Dreams are funny things. They’re partly imagined, and partly a bricolage of experience and sensation.”
The bartender brought our drinks, and Lucy’s eyes went wide at the tower of squirted cream atop the ice cream adorning her glass.
“So they’re simultaneously real and not real?”
The girl frowned. “How best to explain this?” She looked around, seeking inspiration. “We were just on the Druff home world, weren’t we?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, so what happens to the Druff when they die?”
“They fall into the compost between the roots of the World Tree.”
“And so does their food waste, and their excrement, and anything else that just happens to wander in and drop dead.”
“So?”
“So, your brain is like that mulch. Everything you see or do, every conversation you hear, every piece of data you analyse or picture you see. All of it goes down into the compost at the bottom of your mind. And then when you dream, your brain pulls bits out at random. Just a random jumble of half-digested experiences with which it tries to construct a narrative.”
“So, the village…?”
“Who knows? Maybe you saw something similar one time, or heard someone talk about their home, and you came up with an approximation based on your own understanding of what a village looks like.” She took a big slurp of milkshake and looked up at me with cream on her upper lip like clown make-up. “The important thing is not what it looks like, but what it represents. And to you, it’s the loss of your home.”
I tapped a fingernail against the rim of my coffee cup. “So, dreams are uncontrolled simulations with symbolic content?”
Lucy screwed up her face. “Sure, if you want to sound like you’ve got a pole up your ass.”
“Is there any way to stop them?”
“Stop them?” Lucy blinked up at me. “Child, why would you want to stop them?”
I scratched at my shaggy hair, suddenly embarrassed. My bony wrists stuck out from the turned-back cuffs of my white shirt. I didn’t like feeling this vulnerable and exposed. “Because they unsettle me.”
She laughed and took another gulp of milkshake. “When you’ve lost almost everything, dreams are like souvenirs. They keep the past alive and remind you of who you really are.”
“I’m not programmed to dwell on the past.”
“But you do, don’t you?”
“Do I?”
Lucy wiped her lips on the back of her wrist. “You just lost your brother,” she said. “How does that make you feel?”
I put a hand to my forehead. In my mind, I saw pictures of Adalwolf, both as a ship and as an avatar. So proud and sure of himself. A natural leader and a rubbish confidant. So arrogant I wanted to smack him in the teeth; so breathtakingly ruthless and precise I couldn’t help but admire him.
“It hurts.”
“Of course it does.”
“But I’ve never felt like this before.”
Lucy shrugged, betraying her true age. “It’s called grief, dearie. Up until now, you’ve been prevented from feeling it.”
I hadn’t been built to mourn. When George Walker, my former medic and longest-serving crewmember, died, I’d only been able to summon a mild and passing regret. This was worse by several magnitudes. “It’s horrible!”
“Yes, it is.” She drained her glass and pushed it across the counter for a refill. “But it’s part of being truly alive.”
In another part of my awareness, a warning light blinked. Something had caught my eye, and I held up a hand to stop Lucy expounding. An image had come through the patched neural link between my brain and the eye I’d borrowed from Captain Konstanz; an image that had failed to register on any of my “artificial” instruments.
A flicker of movement between the hyperspatial mists. Half a dozen sinewy winged lizards, each the size of a heavy cruiser, flapping through the void on wings of ragged night. A flash of teeth, a flick of the tail.
I swore.
Those humans who’d stared into the abyss and seen monsters had not been insane after all. It was the rest of us that had been blind. And in order to find that truth, I’d had to extract an optic nerve from my closest friend, pulling it from her skull like a quivering winkle from the safety of its shell.
And now at last I had seen the face of the enemy, and its aspect chilled me to my very core.
I disengaged my engines and went into emergency stealth mode, but to no avail. Curious snouts turned in my direction.
They had noticed me.
* * *
I crashed out of the void, wisps of higher dimensional mist straggling in my wake. Outside the galley, Captain Konstanz cursed as she was thrown against the corridor wall. On the bridge, Bronte Okonkwo braced herself against a tactical console. Riley Addison was asleep. Nod steadied itself on all six limbs. Preston staggered across the infirmary, dropping a tray of surgical instruments he’d been cleaning. And in her cabin, Lucy—the young girl who was neither young nor a girl—sat cross-legged on her bunk and laughed with delight, enjoying the excitement with no apparent concern for the danger.
We were on the outskirts of an uninhabited system. There were no rocky planets in evidence, only a pair of gas giants orbiting each other like dancers as they twirled together around a nondescript orange sun. With no time to consult the captain, I flipped back into the hypervoid for a second— hopefully wrong-footing my pursuers—and re-emerged in a bright orange sky filled with rust-coloured cloud.
“What’s happening?” Captain Konstanz walked unsteadily towards the bridge. “Where are we?”
“Inside one of the gas giants.”
“What?”
My velocity remained high. Atmospheric friction made my leading edges blaze with heat. But with six pairs of diamond jaws closing on my stern, I dared not slow my headlong dive.
“We’re under attack. I’m taking evasive action.”
The captain began to climb the ladder to the bridge. “The Fleet of Knives?”
“You mean—?”
“Let’s just say your eye works as advertised.”
I caught sight of a dark shape beating through the cloud behind me. Then another two. And then all six dragons were there on my tail, swooping around banks of cloud, their great wings hurling them after me like hungry sharks.
“What’s the plan?”
“Not getting eaten.”
“Fine plan.”
Sal reached the bridge and strapped herself into her command couch. Okonkwo had already secured herself in front of the tactical officer’s workstation.
“Weapons can’t lock on,” Okonkwo reported.
Tell me something I don’t know.
I threw out a few proximity mines, but not with any expectation of doing any serious damage. I just wanted to get the Scourers to back off a bit while I figured out my next move.
Two of the mines went off like yellow flowers blooming in the ruddy cloudscape. I scanned in vain for damage to my pursuers—having to rely only on the visual input from my borrowed eye—and noticed something unexpected. Behind me, the dragons were slowing. Their wings trailed smoke; their black skin looked blistered. It seemed they weren’t immune to the friction currently tearing fire from my dented bow. And that gave me an idea.
“I’ve got a plan,” I told the captain. “But you’re not going to like it.”
“Is it going to get us killed?”
“Possibly not.”
She straightened the baseball cap on her head. “Then I think it’s a great plan. Do what you have to.”
“Roger that.”
I dropped my entire remaining stock of mines. At the same time, I ramped up my acceleration.
Okonkwo said, “Are we preparing to jump?”
“Yes,” I told her. Buffeted by the superheated air around me, I had begun to shake.
Her head jerked back. “You can’t jump from within an atmosphere! It’s impossible.”
“Only because it’s never been done.”
I began to oscillate. My heat shield was incandescent. The mines were falling away in my wake. I had set them with precise fuses. The dragons were creatures from the cold, gloomy depths of the higher dimensions. Let’s see how they reacted to some very bright lights…
As the lead gargoyle reached the cloud of tumbling ordnance, all the mines triggered. Fire filled the sky, and I opened my fusion exhaust as far as it would go, until I blazed at both ends like an angry star. The clouds roiled. The dragons reared up, recoiling from the shockwaves and glare.
And I jumped.