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“I’M RAISING OXYGEN levels. Warn the teams that fire might be more volatile,” Tyce warned. The ship had told him that Imshee feared oxygen, so he planned to use that to his advantage, although the battle had already turned their direction. The Imshee were in full retreat. Unfortunately, he wasn’t part of it. The battle was at the edge of his camera range, and he hadn’t figured out how to tap into the Command cameras. Soft regret jangled across his nerves. The ship felt guilty, but she didn’t know the technology.
“Oxygen rising, check,” John said, his voice terse. He was handling the field well. Considering that Command had poisoned these soldiers against John, they were following orders without hesitation. In a battle situation, that spoke of trust. Tyce wasn’t surprised. John always had an ability to connect with people.
“Do we pursue or let them retreat?” Ama asked on the radio. The line the three of them shared was silent for long seconds. John must have muted his end because Tyce couldn’t even hear the distinctive whooshing of the improvised flame throwers. “Tyce?”
“I’m not in the field,” Tyce said, but then he realized that if the Imshee retreated, they would tell the others that humans had a Cy ship. They were the mysterious boogie-men of the universe. Even the Rownt mentioned them only as a species they avoided, and Cy technology frightened the Imshee.
And the ships were a huge part of their power.
“If they escape, they’ll warn other Imshee to stay away from us,” Tyce said.
“You assume,” John said. “We don’t have enough evidence to know what they might do.”
Tyce winced. When John found out the truth, he might kill Tyce. He might even hack through the ship to get to him. But his connection to the ship meant Tyce did know. The Imshee were motivated by fear. They were fragile creatures, so easily broken, and with each individual lost, the whole had to adjust. Lose enough individual hairs, and the whole conglomerate had to renegotiate a personality. In some older Imshee, different clumps of hair would even form subpersonalities, and in those, the fear was even more intense. If one group slipped, the others would grow more aggressive about pushing their objectives. Tyce knew a lot about the Imshee, and very little was positive. The best that could be said of them was that they made horrible slaves, which had saved them from a dark fate as a species.
Tyce had a harder time understanding the ship’s impression of humans. Whenever he focused on the thought, she would send a weird flurry of images he couldn’t interpret.
“Tyce is captain. He says we allow them to retreat, so we do,” Ama said firmly.
John muttered something, but oddly he didn’t argue. Ama’s personality did create a gravity well that was difficult to escape. “Hold!” John yelled. “Everyone hold. Let the Imshee retreat. Follow at weapons distance to make sure they get their mangy asses off our ship.”
A frisson of joy shot up Tyce’s spine. John had claimed the ship. Tyce groaned as he realized she had no intention of letting John leave now. He claimed her. She was his. She wouldn’t be silent anymore. Horror. Silence. Grief. She wouldn’t have Cy. Never Cy. Never again. He heard cries from down-ship. Ghost cries. What the fuck had gone on in the damn ship?
The question sent Tyce spinning off into a new camera view, one closer to the narrower and simpler passages where the Dragon had docked. Anla scuttled through the corridors, but these were smaller than the ones Tyce remembered seeing on the vids Earth put out. It took him a second to realize he was seeing the past—a recorded memory from the ship. This was from a time before humans had first discovered Anla in space. Before the excitement of the first alliance turned into the horror of the human-Anla war. Tyce was seeing a much younger version of the species.
Anla darted around humans dressed in the same featureless clothing. A human child stood in the middle of the corridor crying. A woman stepped out of a passage, and Tyce expected her to pick the girl up, but she walked past, her eyes dead.
What the hell? The image vanished and a sense of guilt and confusion and anger rolled through Tyce’s nerves. Being so intimately attached to the ship tore through the walls Tyce had put up around his feelings. How could they not when the ship was hardwired into his nervous system?
“Tyce!” John’s voice broke through his self-pity.
“What?”
“I’ve called your name three times,” he said, his voice rich with frustration. He knew something was wrong. “It looks like the Imshee are retreating to their ship.”
“Excellent.” Tyce felt like he could breathe for the first time since the Cy ship had appeared on the radar. Not Cy. Her Purpose was not Cy. Not her current Purpose or her old one. That Purpose had left her. The ship flooded him with information, but it didn’t make sense. It was like hearing a three-year-old—an excitable and angry one—tell a story.
“I’m opening my channel to full,” Ama said softly, no doubt warning him that he would now be audible to anyone wearing a radio. “Signal me if you need me. I need to concentrate somewhere else.”
“Got it,” Tyce said. Then dozens of voices came across the radio. Instead of struggling to pick out a few voices, a few interesting details as team leads reported in, Tyce skated through the words, rewinding where he missed something interesting and planting mental flags that lit up conversations in colors. He felt something shift, and then he could hear all the team bands as soldiers chatted with each other, crass jokes glossing over their fears.
Soldiers spread out through the corridors, checking for Imshee and finding only bodies—human and alien. Teams called for medics when they located wounded. Someone called for help, and in the background, Tyce heard Yoss cursing at them. Yoss wanted to walk in, and from what Tyce could hear, he had a gaping wound in his calf. That was Yoss. Tyce smiled, but the relief faded as teams called in the names of the dead.
Some of them Tyce didn’t know: Johnson, Gomez, Franklin, Svoboda, Sampson. Belton, Apodaca. Too many were men and women he knew too well. Ralie, so damn young. Too fucking young. Ight and Ishat and Ter. Fuck. Ter. Tyce had surrendered to Command soldiers to save him and then the idiot had to get himself killed. Tyce’s grief physically hurt. The ship sang softly, adding her grief to his. She was older, so much older. And she had carried so much sadness that Tyce was swallowed by it. Loss was constant. Creatures died. Even ships died.
But these people—they had survived the war with Earth only to die fighting animated hair. It was obscene. Rage washed through him, and Tyce felt weapons power up. The problem was that if they blasted this Imshee ship out of space, the next one would board with the same goal—to prevent humans from ever getting access to Cy technology.
Tyce forced his heart to slow. “Ama, could you go private?” Tyce asked.
The voices quieted before she said, “What do you need?”
“Someone to walk me through those stupid meditation exercises of yours.”
She sighed. “Do I need to give you my lecture on not calling the beliefs of others stupid?”
“Nope. I have that one memorized. However, our shiny new ship is angry about how much damage the Imshee did, and she’s thinking about blasting their ship out of space.”
“Would that be the best tactical decision?”
“No, but it would feel good,” Tyce admitted. “It would feel damn good.” Tyce remembered the dark satisfaction of revenge. He’d shot his own team, the one the officers had lauded while they’d warned him in hushed tones that his career would suffer if he didn’t learn to work with others.
“You would wallow in guilt for the next decade and I don’t need to endure that sort of punishment,” Ama said. “Not now Leishi.” She snapped. Then... “Shit.”
“Shit?” Tyce asked. His heart rate immediately shot right back up. “What happened?”
“Nothing. But it’s time to be honest with John.”
“Shit.” Tyce breathed the word. John was on his way to the engineer’s room. It was the only explanation.
“Talk to him,” Ama said earnestly. “Now.”
Tyce would’ve procrastinated forever if he could have, but he didn’t want John throwing a fit in front of the crew. He focused on the radio channel and felt the shift in his mind that meant it was open. “John?”
“How badly wounded are you?” John asked without preamble. He was out of breath, so either he had just bounded up a set of oversized stairs or he was running for the control room.
“What?” Tyce had practiced how to break the news, but John’s question had derailed his plan.
“You don't sound wounded, but I know you. If you could be, you would be at the front line fighting. So something's keeping you in engineering. How bad is the injury?”
“That's up for debate right now,” Tyce answered wryly. He had forgotten how good John was at putting pieces together. Of course this time he had gotten the picture wrong, but John’s assumption was logical.
“Debate? I’m on my way to engineering right now.”
“Wait,” Tyce said. “Find a private room, and let’s talk on the radio first.”
There was silence for a time, and then a soft, “Fuck.” Silence again until John said, “Give me a minute.”
Tyce had nothing but time. His nose itched, and he strained against the need to scratch. Damaged forward sensors. He was feeling the damn sensors. As superpowers went, Tyce was unimpressed with this one. He’d trade it in for the ability to scratch his nose.
“Okay,” John said. “I found a room that has a minimum of stench.”
“Bathrooms.”
“What?” John sounded confused.
“The rooms that stink... the bathrooms are coming online. There are a dozen on the upper levels, and the living walls need to shed the old skin and digest it before they’re ready for use.” Tyce realized he had turned them on. In the infirmary, he’d wanted a bath, so the ship had reactivated biological processors and had chosen an appropriate number of bathing rooms for the current population.
“Um, okay. Do you have a head injury?” John sounded worried.
“We need to provide a united front, agreed?”
“Why? Do you have access to sensors? Are there Command ships coming? Is that why you’re trying to keep me away from engineering?”
“Seriously?” Tyce demanded. He was then distracted by an awareness of the sensor systems reporting in. The Imshee were retreating. They had an asteroid field on the sensors and recommended navigating away due to the unstable elements in some of the rocks. No Earth ships. “Do you think I’m staging a coup here?”
“No, but I think you might want to protect my position and the positions of those on the ship by claiming you controlled the ship, and we were prisoners rather than allies.”
Okay, that was the sort of plan Tyce might have suggested in other circumstances. “There are no Command ships on the sensors, although some micro-meteor damage has left blind spots. However, we still have your mutinous crew members somewhere on this ship and eventually we will have to talk to Earth. So we need to stay united.”
“What the hell is going on?” John demanded.
“I went into the alcove,” Tyce blurted. “I joined the ship.”
Silence answered.
“I needed to access more information than I could with only a few probes in my head.”
“So you...” Again, the radio signal was stuffed full of silence.
“It was our best hope,” Tyce rushed to explain. “The minute the Imshee started a mass attack on our position, we had no hope of winning, not without the ship.” With the ship, the Imshee would stay far, far away. She was huge—the size of a dozen Earth battleships, larger than Imshee or Rownt ships, because she grew and changed. If she encountered a ship bigger than her, she would grow new structures. She would not be beaten in a battle. She wouldn’t. But she had no Purpose. Even Tyce could feel the capital letter on that concept. A Purpose. Without one, she wandered through space aimlessly. Lonely.
“I’m going to kill you.” John sounded weary.
“The engineers know I’m in here, and I assume Ama has them under control. I’m not sure. But right now we need to focus on the battlefield. Acosta and his crew are virulently anti-Ribelian and we have shuttles full of Ribelian children and techs down-ship. Your people took the brunt of this fight, and we have to set up better medical facilities. We need to think about patrols and food production and water purification. The ship has water and food stores, but they’re thousands of years old and she was not built for humans.”
The image of the dead-eyed woman passing the child replayed in his mind, but then he had another image—a man in a historic military costume leaning against a wall. He had a crooked smile and fondness filled the ship’s awareness. And loss.
“So we’re still neck-deep in shit,” John summarized.
“Chest deep,” Tyce said. “The ship has seen humans before and she believes she can support us, so starvation or dehydration are probably off the table. But we have to get to the rest of the Dragon crew before Acosta’s group can.”
“Do you know where they are right now?”
“I have no sensors in the upper part of the ship. I can only tell you that I don’t see them in the corridors around the Dragon shuttles. I may not be fully accessing all systems.”
Dragon and Wolf. The ship danced through Tyce’s memories of those words—he couldn’t describe it any other way. Images whirled—a Chinese Dragon, a werewolf, an Arthurian legend, a story he’d once read about dog evolution from the wolf, another about coywolves and terraforming. It all spun through his memories with a childlike joy.
“Christ, what the hell were you thinking?” John’s voice had a brittle edge of anger now.
“That we were screwed. I can put it in prettier words, but that's the bottom line.”
“So you sacrifice yourself?”
“Ama asked for a suicide bomb option for the flamethrower. Go yell at her about sacrifice.”
“She's Ribelian. I expect that sort of stupidity out of her,” John shouted.
Tyce stomped down on his anger. “Are you suggesting that only Ribelians are willing to give their lives in order to protect their crews?”
“Of course, I'm not,” John snapped, “but they have all those weird beliefs about death being a pause button on our eternal souls. Why couldn't you have let one of them make the sacrifice?”
In all the years Tyce had known John, he’d never heard the man make such an assholish statement. “First, you don't have to talk like I'm dead. I'm not. I haven't even hit the pause button. I'm just stuck inside the ship.”
“While the ship makes you part of its neural engineering.”
Tyce couldn’t deny that. The Command engineer had been right that the ship needed to interact with an individual to make goals. She needed a Purpose. “I admit that doesn't sound good.”
John scoffed and when he spoke, his voice was soft and ragged. “Why did you do this?”
The raw pain in his voice gutted Tyce. “You know I didn't have any other choice.”
“You're the smart one. You're the one who can always come up with the perfect plan in a quarter of the time as the rest of us. I still remember you trying to teach me that trick, telling me to stop looking at resources as a whole and start looking at each individual aspect. You told me that I didn't need to think outside the box; I needed to start thinking of the box itself. Was it cardboard or metal? Would it conduct electricity? Would it be large enough to hold something? You taught me to consider every possibility, and you couldn't come up with a better plan than this?” John ended with a sob.
God, Tyce remembered those lessons. Sometimes he would invent some stupid version of an electronic trap around John’s personal files and challenge John to figure it out. At one point it had taken John almost two months to figure out that the key to a puzzle was a paperclip.
Tyce had used one to hold the scenario papers together. So, when one clue had been that Tyce had already handed John the key, John had torn through their dorm for every object Tyce had ever given him, holding each up to the computer’s camera in the hope it would unlock his game files.
After a week, Tyce had offered to unlock the computer, but John had dug his heels in and insisted that he would figure it out. Two months. John had been locked out of his entertainment programs for two months.
“I remember the time you designed a puzzle for me and it turned out that I had to sweet talk people into giving me passcodes,” Tyce said with a chuckle. “That was a level of hell. You were always so much better with people than I was, maybe because I always saw them as their bits and pieces and not necessarily as a whole.” Tyce was fairly sure people didn’t appreciate that. “I’m sorry if I ever did that to you.” The truth was that Tyce had dismissed John because his parts hadn’t fit into the career Tyce had planned for himself.
“Oh no. Don't you talk like you're on your deathbed here. We’ll figure out a way to get you out of there.”
Tyce had a mental image of neurons needing to regrow and a feeling of regret and desperation. It was a rather unique mixture. “You can’t save me. The ship is old. More than that, she's alone and confused. She won’t let you pull me out of here.” A wave of generalized horror swept through Tyce as he imagined the alcove with synaptic connectors ripped and torn from their place. The pain of it felt like a fire at the back of his neck. “I wouldn’t survive if you tried.”
“We have to do something,” John said, and he had a dangerously determined edge to his voice.
“You don’t want to go up against the internal security measures, and if you rip me out of here, I can't stop her from deploying them. After all, she vented entire decks to keep the Imshee away from the Dragon’s shuttles and those children.” Tyce thought about that crying child and wondered when she had developed that protective streak because there had been a time in her history when humans had suffered in her and she hadn’t acted.
It made him wonder if she was a good guy.
“Oh, Tyce,” John whispered.
Tyce didn’t have an answer.