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AMA STUDIED THE SPACE. “So this is the secret room?”
“A control room,” Tyce corrected her. He reached for the streaks of color that controlled the camera, but Ama caught his wrist.
“Explain this to me.”
Tyce opened his mouth, but he couldn’t find the words. All he had were vague feelings and a gut-level distress that didn’t make sense—not even to himself. “I can’t.”
“Then explain why you didn’t tell me that you had alien probes in your brain,” she said. Tyce felt the metaphorical ground shift under his feet. It’d been years since a hot need to defend himself had burned his gut, but he felt it now. The desperate need to justify his actions before she assumed the worst gnawed at him.
“Their doctor said it wasn’t affecting anything beyond the tactile hallucinations.” That sounded like a poor excuse, even to Tyce. But he didn’t have any other. Maybe he’d wanted to repress everything about his time as a Command prisoner. After all, when he’d been in a room with Command people before, he’d killed them. Their faces, and the faces of their victims, still haunted his nightmares.
Ama pulled Tyce’s hand away from the controls. “Their doctors are as ineffective as their moralists and priests. I don’t understand why you would believe them.” At least her tone made it clear that he was still on the right side of the us-them divide.
“They did a scan. I had every reason to believe them.”
“And yet, you now say the ship led you here.” Ama’s gaze challenged him to explain that .
Tyce took a step back to prove he wasn’t going to challenge her. If she said not to touch the controls, then he wouldn’t. However, the growing sense of panic grew more intense, and Tyce wasn’t sure if that was the result of her disappointment or whatever was going on with the ship. “I don’t know. I don’t know what the ship is telling me.”
“But it’s telling you something?”
“It’s telling me to look.” Tyce gestured toward the controls. When Ama gave him a concerned expression, Tyce had to stomp on his temper. “I’m not imagining this. I certainly didn’t imagine this control room into existence.”
Ama took a deep breath. “I believe you. This ship is a being, but every living creature has hopes and fears. This ship wouldn’t be different. Believing that ze is talking to you and trusting zir are very different, and I am only willing to commit to the first.” She still had the same expression, as if she was concerned that Tyce had lost his mind.
Maybe he had, because she was being logical. He had no reason to trust a being that was whispering in his ear. None. But his gut screamed at him that he could. He ignored that instinct and focused on cold logic. Numbers. Facts. Tactical strategy. “The ship wants the cameras turned on—not environmentals or weapons. If she was trying to get us to turn on a self-destruct mode or drive us out, those would be the two systems she would use.” Instead she screamed for them to turn on cameras—so much so that Tyce’s stomach cramped at the horror of standing in the ship, camera blind and helpless.
“Don’t assume a female gender.” Ama was probably going to break out another sermon about respecting the life choices of others, but this time Tyce wasn’t being thoughtless. He felt the ship. He knew her in a way Ama didn’t, even if her voice could only tease the edge of his awareness.
“The Command crew opened fire on a shuttle door. They did huge amounts of damage, and the ship retaliated by destroying most of the shuttles.”
“You said that already,” Yoss’s voice was edging toward frustration. However, he continued to lean against the open door, his gaze sweeping the room and corridor outside. He might not be jumping in to defend Tyce, but he was taking the warning seriously.
“I know I did. But the ship up there... it stinks. It’s dry—they haven’t found water or protein sources. The ship is trying to starve them out.”
Yoss offered a curt, “Good.”
Ama’s expression didn’t change much. “If the ship is aggravated with Command that does not mean ze likes us.”
“She likes us more than them.” Tyce assumed as much anyway. However, he found it almost impossible to maintain his absolute faith in these ghost impressions under Ama’s scrutiny. Maybe the ship was manipulating him. Yoss certainly implied as much when he changed Tyce’s name to ship-Tyce as if Tyce no longer had an existence of his own. “We need to turn the cameras on. Ama, if you believe that the ship has a right to choose her path, then I’m telling you to turn cameras on because that is the path she’s choosing.”
Ama shoved her gray hair behind one ear. “And you can’t tell me why?”
Shaking his head, Tyce said sadly, “I wish I could. I only know something terrifying is coming or maybe it’s already here.” A shiver ran down Tyce’s spine.
For several seconds, she studied him. Then she sighed. “If you do anything to endanger the crew, I will shoot you in the head and search for your soul on Ribelo so I can apologize later.”
Another cold shiver ran down his spine. “If you believe in people choosing their own destinies, I would point out that I don’t want to get shot. So, before you fire your weapon, think about that. You know how you disapprove of interfering with people’s life choices.”
“I also know you put yourself in the middle of far too many conflicts for a soul who has chosen a peaceful death.” Ama backed away from the controls, choosing to stand on the opposite side of the open door as Yoss. They were bookends, two people ready to shoot Tyce if something went wrong. Ama probably would risk arrest to search for his soul on Ribelo in ten or fifteen years. That would be an Amali sort of thing to do.
Tyce moved to the controls. “Yeah, well I don’t want to get shot by a friend.”
“Again, you’ve made odd choices if that is truly your goal this life,” Ama said.
Tyce shot her an unhappy look before he reached for the controls. His heart slowed and the panic faded. He still had the idea something bad was about to happen, but now he had the feeling he did before the ship would go into battle. He might die, but at least he knew what was coming at him.
Or he would as soon as he could find the right camera. He ran his fingers over the colors, not understanding the controls but following his instincts.
“Wait!” Ama stepped forward as the camera panned past a person. Tyce was already reversing his gestures, moving the camera back to the corridor he’d passed. A soldier in a Command uniform lay sprawled across the floor. Tyce pivoted the camera—or whatever the ship used that doubled as a camera—to show the soldier from the opposite angle. The woman seemed familiar, but Tyce couldn’t connect any of the soldiers he’d seen to the body with her face contorted in horror and her guts split open.
“Fuck,” Yoss whispered.
Ama rested a hand on Tyce back. “Scatter?” she asked softly. It was the most serious of all the security codes. It would send children and elderly to the most secure positions and scatter all the fighters. The uncoordinated attacks would, hopefully, be enough to warn invaders away. Ama had used it against Command boarders to confound their attempts to counter her strategy, but this... this was something so alien that Tyce didn’t know if it was the right call. His fingers danced across the controls, the camera skittering wildly out of control until he found what he wanted on the watery, distorted screen.
A bug lurched down the corridors, its legs braced against the walls and its head thrust low to the ground .
“What is it?” Tyce asked. Some primitive part of his brain screamed in terror. This was a creature of nightmare and horror vids. It wasn’t an alien as much as the personification of every human fear. Maybe he was still strapped to a Command bed while they experimented on him. That might explain the monster in front of him. The corridors were obscenely wide, so the bug had to be monstrous.
Yoss spoke up. “Why the hell would we recognize that thing?”
“I have no idea, but the Dragon was running around parts of space that Command couldn’t find if you stuck it on their ass and handed them a map.”
Ama cleared her throat. “No part of space I know is inhabited by hairy bugs. What is it doing?”
The camera angle showed the creature from the back, so it was hard to see, but it swung its head back and forth. Tyce had a hypothesis, but no evidence. “Smelling?” he guessed.
“What? You think that's an attack dog?” Yoss demanded. Tyce figured he had been living with Ribelians far too long because he had a gut-level reaction to the idea of a sentient creature taking advantage of animals that way.
“We can’t assume anything,” Ama said.
Tyce studied the watery display. When he reached out as if to touch the creature, the view zoomed in until Tyce could see the undulating green hair. Damn. The Rownt were epitomes of beauty compared to this monster. Its front legs came down on the floor hard enough that the creature’s green hair trembled. Nothing in its movements suggested sentience, so Yoss was probably right about the thing being an attack dog. That meant that the alien handlers were also wandering about. Great.
A dark slash on the floor caught Tyce’s attention. “Look.” When he pointed, the display zoomed in.
“At what?” Ama asked.
“The floor. The claws are damaging the floor.” Deep gashes showed in the soft surface of the floor. And since the ship was organic, that meant the surface would now need to do some version of healing.
“So?”
“Whoever built the ship, they didn't design it to have a creature like that running around inside. We thought the ship was calling for the original ship builders, but that thing does not belong to whoever built this ship.”
Ama inched closer to the display. “Are you sure?”
Tyce trusted not only his logic but a gut instinct that the ship hated this invader. “If the monster walked across the floor a dozen times, it would shred it. This can’t belong to the ship builders.”
“So we have two unknown aliens. Great.” Ama touched her radio. “Scatter. Authorization Zeta Fu. Scatter.”
The code sent a shot of adrenaline through Tyce. He imagined parents shoving children toward the shuttles before grabbing weapons. Some crew would partner up, but most of them would hunt for the enemy on their own, without anyone to watch their backs. Tactically, it felt a bit like a slow version of mass suicide, but Ama was captain now. She had the right to make the call.
He expected Yoss to take off, hopefully to target the aliens and not Command soldiers. However, he still stood at the door, his gaze sweeping the corridor. He spoke, his voice little more than a whisper. “Maybe it belongs to the people who built the ship, but they normally leave their pets at home.
Ama looked at Tyce with such optimism, but logically that didn’t work. “Anyone who built a ship like this is probably going to build all their ships using biological coverings. Those claws are not compatible with this construction.”
“Humans produced artificial intelligence driven ships and then quickly figured out that was a dumb ass idea,” Yoss said. “Maybe this is an obsolete design.”
“True, but if you're inside an AI ship, you can't tell the difference between it and a standard ship that uses computer controls and human pilots. In fact, you're never going to notice the difference until the AI goes stark raving insane and tries to dump you into space.”
“He’s right,” Ama said. “Flooring is so basic that I'm not sure anyone ever thinks about it. So if the shipbuilders liked organic floors, they would have used them in all their ships.”
“Assuming they think like humans,” Yoss said.
“No, I'm assuming they think like aliens,” Ama said. “Humans think that having organic flooring is so stupid that I’m surprised Command hasn’t come up with the idea. Do you think the ship can feel pain when ze gets cut like that?”
Tyce cringed. Human AI ships grew unstable because they lacked the interaction a human mind required. He couldn’t imagine how unstable a ship might become if it felt actual pain. Without the shuttles or access to populated space, though, they had no way to leave.
“Find the Command crew,” Ama said.
Yoss abandoned the corridor and stopped right in front of Ama. “Why?”
Tyce wanted to ask the same thing. He feared she might use Command soldiers as cannon fodder, but he also worried that he was being unfair by assuming as much. It was as if having John back in his life had left him feeling out of balance. He wasn’t Earther enough to predict what Command personnel might do, but suddenly he didn’t feel Ribelian enough to predict the Dragon crew’s actions, either. Even Yoss—silent, predictable, angry Yoss—felt suddenly foreign.
Almost against his will, his hands worked the controls. He couldn’t get the cameras to move into areas where he knew John had his crew. His attempts to call up images sent a buzzing discomfort through his brain. Changing his tactics, Tyce focused on finding any humans up-ship. The camera view zoomed through corridors until it focused on a group of humans huddled behind a heavy door.
Ama ignored Yoss. “Can we get there?” she asked.
He was on the verge of telling her that he had no more knowledge of the ship’s layout than she did, only then he did know. He knew exactly where they were, and the room they’d chosen was near a major artery for dangerous chemicals the ship used to recycle materials. Tyce’s head throbbed as he considered the many ways they could all die before the day was over.
“Let’s go,” Ama said without waiting for him to answer. Tyce traded concerned looks with Yoss before Tyce took point.