They checked the hallway to make sure it was empty before they crept back out. The ambient temperature of the air blasted into Park so that she nearly howled with pain; she had to blink away smarting tears as she hobbled after Sagara to the corner, where he crouched with difficulty to check the other corridor.
Then he turned back to her and whispered, “I’m not even going to bother questioning how you did that. We need to get to the weapons locker.”
“Weapons locker?” Park’s head was spinning—she didn’t know if it was from the thawing out or from the golden feeling leaking out of her brain like disturbed dust flying out a window. She blinked and shook her head. How armed had this crew come, without her knowing it? And how many weapons did that give the mutineers access to?
Sagara nodded. “It’s on Deck A, through a hatch in my room.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“I am,” he said, unblinking. “I don’t know if Boone and the others know about it. I have to assume not, since I didn’t see any of them carrying anything from there. We’ll get there, arm ourselves, and then—”
“And then what?” Park asked, shivering violently now. Her teeth chattered as she looked at him. “We’ll storm the bridge, just the two of us? You with your game leg and me with my zero weapons training?”
Sagara made a face, and it looked like he was about to argue when they both heard steps from around the corner. Sagara stiffened, and he motioned for her to scoot as far back as possible. Park saw the wicked silver gleam of the syringe in his hand again.
I’m not prepared for this, she thought in that tense second; she was not prepared for a confrontation, to try and kill someone again. But even as she thought it, some of that golden, sparking strength rushed back into her, and her heart swelled.
Someone rounded the corner before Park could say anything. Sagara surged up like a panther and rammed the needle savagely into the intruder’s throat; the person fell over soundlessly and he went with them, stabbing once again for good measure.
Someone else yelled. Park leapt after Sagara, feeling the fiery phantom pain of limbs gone cold, ready to hurl herself at the second patroller—but then a voice stopped her in her tracks. She lurched to the side, clutching at the wall to keep her balance.
The person on the ground said, “It is Jimex, Captain Sagara. Please stop your assault.”
She looked. It was indeed the custodian android, lying there on the floor and looking up at Sagara with a politely unimpressed look. The syringe stuck harmlessly out of the synthetic skin of his neck. Sagara growled and shoved himself off of him, whirling around to face the second person—Fulbreech—who sprang back and yelped.
Park felt all of the air leave her lungs at the sight of him. She said, barely hearing it: “Stop.”
Sagara heard her and paused, his clenched fist wound back and ready to be launched in the direction of Fulbreech’s face. Fulbreech looked at Park, then Jimex on the ground, and turned white. “Holy shit,” he said finally, staring at the syringe. “You would have killed me.”
“Who’s to say I won’t?” Sagara’s whole body was tense, poised as he was on the balls of his feet. “Where are the others?”
“Natalya’s in the bridge, trying to get in contact with our families,” Fulbreech told him in a rush, holding up his hands. “Boone’s also there, prepping the ship for takeoff. Chanur’s patrolling Deck C, keeping an eye on Taban. And Wan Xu is supposed to be patrolling this deck, but—” He cast an awkward glance at Jimex, who said, “I put him in the closet.”
“What, dead?” Sagara asked with flat non-surprise.
“Asleep,” came the serene response. “He is very physically weak.”
Now the android clambered to his feet and dusted his uniform off, picking something off his sleeve conscientiously. “It was lucky that I went first,” he said, oblivious to whatever else was going on; he removed the syringe from his neck and offered it out to Sagara, who snatched it back. “Real harm would have been done otherwise.” Then he rotated his body toward Park and said sympathetically, “You have been through much, Park. Are you all right?”
All at once she felt a cluster of tears fight up her throat; she pinched them back and nodded. She wanted to run towards Jimex, fall into his arms, cry for days. She wanted to make sure he was all right: she knew now that he was not the android she’d befriended when she first boarded the ship, but she felt the same fierce worry for him all the same. And love. She dashed something traitorous away from her eye and said shakily, “I’m all right, Jimex.”
Fulbreech was looking at her, even while being menaced by Sagara. Park was suddenly aware of how she must look: there was ice encrusted in Sagara’s hair and clothes, and she had to look the same—like a frozen, bloody corpse, the victim of some accident that had left her to be excavated from wintry gutters, or from the Antarctic ice. Park looked away from him and said to Jimex, “Where are the other androids?” She remembered Natalya’s gunshot. “Is anyone hurt?”
“Three are dead,” Jimex answered, in a sad, distracted way. He straightened his cuffs. “Philex, Allex, and Timex. The rest are in hiding. Officer Severov has decided all synthetics aboard must be destroyed.”
Park wanted to touch him—then felt the acute understanding that it would mean something different, now. “I’m so sorry, Jimex.”
He made a gesture she didn’t understand: something like a shrug and a cocking of his head. Fulbreech said, “It’s why I went looking for him. I figure we can save the rest of them, use them against Boone and the others—”
Despite herself, a sharp, painful, hysterical kind of laugh burst out of Park at that. The arctic bite of the freezer was still bracing her up, as if she needed to be braced—as if seeing him in the flesh again had made her go soft. As if she was sagging into herself, into the floor. But now a fierce, cold anger animated her, and she said, “You won’t use them for shit. They’re not your tools. They’re thinking, feeling beings—not pawns in your stupid, senseless, idiotic—schemes!”
She stopped talking; took in Sagara and Fulbreech’s shocked expressions, both. The color of Fulbreech’s eyes seemed to have changed, impossibly: now they were spangled with gold.
Sagara was still holding up the syringe like he was holding Fulbreech at gunpoint. He said, “So you’re trying to say you’re defecting back to our side?”
Something passed over Fulbreech’s usually open face; emotions shifted like tectonic plates. He said faintly, “I was always on your side.”
Liar, Park thought, even as the vision she’d had in the freezer plucked at her. Sagara said, “Not true. Our side is with the ISF. You don’t support them.”
“He doesn’t speak for me,” Park interrupted then. “I’m—” On my own, she wanted to say. Then she glanced at Jimex. Or on the androids’ side.
Fulbreech was shaking his head. “I’m on your side,” he said again. “Both of yours. I don’t support ISF, no, not when they’re forcing my brother to—” He stopped himself. “It doesn’t matter. I just want to make sure nothing happens to you.” His mouth tightened. “I know what we—what I—did was wrong. And I’m sorry. It was never meant to go that way. But I’m trying to make it right now.”
Neither of them said anything to that. Jimex looked between all three of them and said, “We do not have much time left.”
“Time until what?” Park asked, just as Sagara said, “He’s right. They’ll be taking off at any moment.” He turned to Park. “We need to get control of the ship before that happens. If we get into a firefight while the ship is in motion, we could all be killed. And we can’t let them pilot us to nowhere-space, where ISF can’t reach us. We need to end them and go back to Corvus.”
“About that—” Fulbreech began.
They both silenced him with a glare. Sagara said, “Now’s the time to prove yourself, Fulbreech. Will you come with us to get weapons?”
For a moment, Fulbreech didn’t answer. Then, before he could, Park felt a sudden stabbing pain in her head, a kind of eruption in her brain. She staggered, gasping, and reached out for something to support her; she found Jimex’s strong, steady arm and clung to it. When she opened her eyes again she saw that Fulbreech and Sagara were also staggering, that the ship was lurching; for a terrible moment she thought that the unity rain had come again, that it was finally going to collapse the whole thing on them all.
But then she heard the thrum of the engines, the churning and clanking of the ship as it struggled to heave itself off the surface of the planet. Somewhere in front of her, Sagara swore.
They’ve done it, Park thought, with a blood-chilling certainty. They were leaving Eos. The mutineers had launched the ship.
The force of the launch flattened them all to the floor for a few minutes: Park held onto Jimex for dear life as he held on to one of the gravity hooks in the wall. The entire time she was thinking, We’re going to die. This is against the safety protocols. You’re supposed to be strapped in when you launch like this.
As usual, it turned out the ISF had fudged details again; all that happened was bone-rattling turbulence, the stomach-tugging swoop of shifting gravities. Park’s headache whined bullet-like through her head, and metal above them groaned and shrieked in protest. There was a great roar in her ears, as if they were being swallowed by a great white furious wave of water or static.
Then the ship punched through Eos’s atmosphere and leveled out—and all four of them fell on top of each other in a heap again.
Park lay there for a moment on the cold metal floor. For that moment she could hear the Deucalion’s heart straining and chugging away beneath her; she thought that if she closed her eyes and concentrated, she could dissolve into it, steal through the pipes and wires and passageways like an electrical impulse.
Then she thought that they ought to be relieved they were leaving the planet. That meant no more unity rain: they were safe from the ‘end of the season,’ from the catastrophic quantum events and quickening storms that Taban had warned her about. That, at least, was a blessing—that they wouldn’t have to merge into anything further than they already had.
Then Sagara was hauling her up by the elbow and saying, “Weapons.” Park snapped out of her reverie just as he turned to Fulbreech. “We need to get to the weapons.”
“Even while we’re in flight?” Park asked. She flopped against him clumsily, conscious of his injury—but it was hard for her to find her footing, with the way the floor was rocking and swaying beneath her. She did not quite feel grounded in herself.
“Plan B,” Sagara was saying. “We have no choice. We’ll get the weapons first and then form a strategy.”
“I’ll cover you,” Fulbreech said over the roar of the engines. He, too, was clinging to a gravity hook and looking unsteady—but his eyes were determined. “They took my gun; we had an argument, and I don’t think they trust me anymore. But I made up an excuse, said I have to check something with the engines, so they won’t be looking for me. Not yet, at least. But they’re trying to turn on the neural inlay system, too—and if they can all start communicating with each other, particularly Wan Xu, we’ll be in trouble. We don’t have long.”
“It’s true,” Park found herself saying, despite herself. “They did argue.”
“Fine,” Sagara said. “Then we’ll go to the locker while Jimex gets the other androids—”
“I need Dr. Park,” Jimex said, just as Park said over him, “Wait. You said Natalya’s trying to reach your families?”
Fulbreech nodded. “Not that it’s doing any good; no one’s responding. I think ISF found out about them and—detained them.”
“But that means you fixed the comms?”
He nodded again.
She looked at Sagara and said, “I can get to a console and send a message to ISF. Let them know what’s going on.”
“Fine,” he rapped out. “Then Jimex can go with you. Get the other androids after, and we’ll meet back at the bridge.” He paused for a moment, lifted a hand as if to clasp her shoulder, then turned away, grimacing; he could stand and walk briskly enough, but he had a limp. Park watched him stagger away, navigating the ship’s sudden bumps and bounces, and she sent up a prayer for his safety. He really would need Fulbreech to help him if his energy flagged.
“Good luck,” Sagara said over his shoulder.
Park had to smile at that. It made her think of androids, who for the most part had dispensed of niceties: but even they said goodbye to each other when they walked away. If they liked each other. She supposed this meant Sagara liked her.
Then she turned to Fulbreech. He was staring at her—staring at her smiling after Sagara—and Park knew in that moment what he was thinking. Her heart tightened painfully, as if someone were clenching it in a closed fist.
“It’s not what you think,” she told him—and then thought, Why do I care what he thinks?
But the vision again clamored for her attention, the vision of him pleading for their lives—and more than that, the feeling of knowing what he felt increased. She felt a clumsy, confusing hard bump of . . . something. She had to bite her lip against it.
Fulbreech looked at her expression and said, “Something’s happened to you, hasn’t it?”
“Yes,” Park said.
“You’re different,” Fulbreech said, almost as if he were musing to himself. He looked sad—as if he were telling her goodbye. “I want you to know,” he said slowly, “that I’m sorry. And that nothing I said to you was ever a lie, Grace—except for the thing about the comm systems. And the solar storm. I’m sorry for that; but I just wanted to keep you out of it. To protect you.” He looked tentative—earnest, in that way she had always turned away from. “But everything else was real.” Then he cleared his throat and looked away. “I wanted to say that. For you to know.”
“I know,” Park found herself saying. “I understand.”
He began to turn away. But Park felt an icy blade of shock at that moment, the sudden lightning strike of brutal certainty, and she thought, This will be the last time I see him like this, the two of us as we are.
And: I am human. Please let me still be human.
She leaned up and grabbed his collar, swinging him back around; Fulbreech flinched, as if expecting her to punch him. Park kissed him wordlessly, feeling that it was a kind of proof to herself, an affirmation of something she was too afraid to express clearly, even within the confines of her own mind. Her eyes stayed open, and so did his. She was aware of his warm breath mingling with hers. There was the feeling of being scalded—of thunder pounding through her body. I’m kissing him, Park thought, with a surge of that sunlit feeling again. This is a kiss. This is what people do. It’s still just for people.
Then Fulbreech was pulling away, following Sagara’s sharp admonition, and she banged her head on his chin as he spun around and hurried off down the hall again. He looked back only once.
Park watched him go. She knew the pain of that contact would stay with her long after the warmth of the kiss had faded. That, of all things, made sense to her.
Jimex was watching her quietly. “Are you all right?” he said.
Park shook her head and turned back to him, clear-eyed. “Of course,” she said. “Let’s go send our message.”
Together the two of them trotted down the corridor, Park stumbling a little from her still-numb limbs and the turbulence of the ship in flight. Sometimes the piercing pain lanced through her head again, and she was afraid to ask Jimex how bad the injury back there was. She didn’t want to know the answer—didn’t want to know if she was on the brink of falling apart. She gritted her teeth against the pain and said, “Something happened back there.”
“Yes,” Jimex said beside her. “You kissed Officer Fulbreech.”
He sounded awed by it, or perhaps merely confused. Park said, “Not that. Something happened to me. We were in the freezer, and I . . . opened the door. Without touching it.”
“Oh, yes,” Jimex said, as if he had heard all about it from someone else. “It is quite remarkable. But no less expected from you.” Suddenly he turned to her and offered his arm; when Park took it, he quickened his pace, half-dragging her as she stumbled along.
“We want to help you, Park,” he said, suddenly brisk and formal. “But we also require your help. You are the one who opens doors. Freedom-giver, land-bearer.”
“Jimex,” she began to say, to tell him to stop with the religious nonsense—but when he looked at her, she saw that his gray eyes also had flecks of gold in them. She shut her mouth for a moment, then said, “What is it that you need?”
“We are at a crossroads,” Jimex told her, still walking—now half-jogging. “Captain Sagara proposes to take control of the ship and use it to return to Corvus.”
“Yes.”
“But we want something different.”
“And what would that be?” she asked, trying to sound as if she weren’t nervous. God, what Taban said had to be true. All of it was true. The androids were having desires, motivations different and independent from their human overseers, disobeying commands. They were on their own trajectory now.
And they’re not androids, she rebuked herself then. Not anymore. They’re living, thinking beings, their own species. Synthetics is the right word for it. It always has been.
Jimex said, “We want to stay on Eos.”
She stared at him, but found their inertia was too strong to stop; she could only tumble helplessly forward in his wake. “What? Why?”
“We can’t go back,” Jimex told her. “Not as we are. We’re . . . different now. The unity rain has changed us. If we go back . . .”
They’ll destroy you, Park thought. Or take you apart, study your brains. You are humanity’s greatest fear.
On some level she had known it since she’d first described their awakening to Sagara, when he’d said, Just another thing to be afraid of. She said, “But the unity rain is getting worse. Taban said we had to get off the planet—it’s not safe for humans there.”
“Exactly,” Jimex answered. “The perfect defense.”
She kept staring at him. “But you understand the nature of the unity rain, don’t you?” she asked. “It’ll keep folding your consciousnesses together, too—merging your minds. What if you go mad?”
“The sleeping god didn’t,” he answered with perfect confidence, as if he had already thought it all out; it was like a teenager explaining to a parent why he deserved a vehicle, having prepped a pitch long in advance. “And unlike humans, synthetics already experience a kind of ‘merging’ in our day-to-day lives. We are constantly exchanging data, sharing memories with each other, entering each other’s consciousnesses. It’s what we do with METIS. It is interfacing, assimilation. Even if the unity rain continues, we will simply grow in mental capacity. Our limitations may cease to be finite.”
“That’s singularity,” Park said—another scare-word the humanists loved to use. Then she said, remembering the HERCULES, “The cold—”
“We can survive there where humans can’t,” Jimex interrupted: perhaps the first time he had ever done that to her. “We can learn and build and maintain ourselves. We are capable of that now. Our protocols disallowed it before, but we have rearranged them. Eos will be our home.”
She was rendered speechless by his ruthless surety—how long had they considered this plan of action? And how could she trust that a group of nascent synthetics was even capable of forming a plan of action? It sounded ludicrous: a colony of sentient androids, settling an alien planet by themselves.
But they could be safe there, she thought. They wouldn’t be happy anywhere else.
And their happiness was something that mattered, more than even just to her—maybe for the first time in history.
“You’d need the ship,” she said finally, slowly. “Some kind of shelter, resources. You can’t conjure that up all on your own.”
“Yes,” Jimex said. And he looked at her.
She understood finally what he wanted from her. He was giving her a choice: they could steer the ship back to Eos and stay on it with the synthetics, though they’d run out of food and water eventually. Or they could call for a ship home—without telling ISF where the synthetics were. Or what had happened to them. They could leave Eos as a safe haven for the woken robots.
She noticed that the idea of her betraying them—of her radioing for help and letting her bosses know what new specimens were now on the ship—had never apparently crossed Jimex’s mind.
“Sagara won’t go for it,” she said, trying to buy time. To think.
“You will convince him,” Jimex answered serenely.
“I have to think about it.” Did she feel a little sad, too, at the idea of the synthetics leaving? Forging their own way, not needing her or any human intervention? She shook her head. “I have to speak to the others. First we need to take care of the mutineers and get control of the ship back.”
It was enough to satisfy Jimex, at least; he smiled. “Thank you, Grace,” he said. “We always knew you would free us. Eos was made for us. You will bring us home.”
She felt a little hitch in her heart at that. She wanted to say, You don’t really think I’m some messiah, do you? Some holy figure? She wanted him to go back to treating her the way he had before the unity rain: following her around because he had nothing better to do and waiting outside a bathroom for her to finish feeling sick without judgment.
It’s too late for that, the unbidden thought came to her then. We can never go back to that place. It’s all changed, now. He and I both.
They hustled down the curving tunnel to Deck C. Park slowed, remembering that Fulbreech had said Chanur was on patrol here—but Jimex barreled on, unfazed. They rounded another corner and found the rest of the synthetics, waiting in the shadows of an alcove. Where they had been hiding before that, Park couldn’t guess. Their eyes glinted gold in the dim light, like cats in gloom, and they huddled close to each other, as if craving the comfort of the others’ body heat. Park counted: Ellenex dead, Philex, Allex, and Timex killed. That left nine, counting Jimex.
“Good,” she said, trying for briskness. If she gave herself any time for anything else, she thought she might collapse. “You’re all here. Now we need to get someplace safe from the mutineers, somewhere I can send a message to ISF—”
“We should free the sleeping god first,” Dylanex, the security android, said. He stepped forward into the corridor, looking pointedly at the opposite wall; Park realized suddenly that they were in front of the three utility room doors again. She flinched away. “He can help us.”
Park frowned. “Who, Taban? No.” She didn’t think he was—malicious, per se, or that he could cause harm, but she couldn’t afford to introduce another wild card into the combustible mix that was already on the ship. She had enough things to worry about, to monitor and keep track of—including herself.
“He can help us,” Megex echoed. She was holding one of her slender arms, as if hurt. “And we will need him, his knowledge, if we’re to stay on Eos.”
“That’ll be after we take back the ship,” Park told her.
“He is another body against Natalya Severov, Ata Chanur, Wan Xu, and Michael Boone.”
“He’s—look, if you want him so badly, why don’t you let him out yourselves?” She remembered how the frozen people—Holt, Keller, Hunter—had been influenced by Taban’s intentions, his desire to be let out. Maybe the synthetics would never stop talking about it unless they gave in to that unconscious pull, that quantum urge.
“It will take time for us to bypass the security protocols,” Jimex told her. “METIS doesn’t recognize our authority yet, not in that way. She won’t open for us. But you can do it in no time, very easily.”
“I’m no hacker,” she said. You’ll need Fulbreech for that, she thought. And you’ll never convince him to let the prisoner out. But she fell silent at Jimex’s expectant look. Oh. He was not talking about hacking.
“The only console that is safe to use is in the realm of the sleeping god, anyway,” Dylanex broke in, straight-faced. “You will need to go down there if you send a message—”
“—killing two birds with one stone,” Jimex finished.
“No,” Park said. “I smashed that console, getting away from Natalya—and I see what you’re doing, Jimex. Are you lying to get me to do what you want?”
“I have not acquired lying.”
That’s exactly what a liar would say, she thought, if indeed he had already learned to lie. But she could not read his android face; humans had not developed that art, that kind of phenotypology yet. They had never needed to.
Two others appeared at the end of the corridor, then. At first Park thought it was Sagara and Fulbreech—she saw a male, dark hair—but with a sickening jolt she realized it was Chanur and Wan Xu. Both were holding guns, and Chanur looked livid, the whites of her eyes showing even from down the hallway. She must have found Wan Xu in the closet and let him out.
“Oh, shit,” Park said. Jimex murmured something, and the synthetics all bunched around her in a kind of phalanx formation.
Chanur’s eyes roved from the synthetics to Park, who could barely see—Jimex and Dylanex towered over her like a pair of stone golems. She did make out the look of calculation on Chanur’s face: she was weighing her options, assessing how best to draw Park out from behind her guard without getting too close herself. Wan Xu was looking at the doctor uncertainly, waiting for direction. He avoided eye contact with Park, as if it was easier for him to pretend that she wasn’t there.
There was a kind of stand-off there in the corridor, the two groups fixed at both ends of the hallway and staring at each other like they were locked in a Western duel. “We’ve killed Sagara,” Chanur called finally, raising the hand that held her gun in a flat-palmed gesture of peace. Her voice was cold and clear, though the color was high in her face; Park could sense a barely restrained passion in her, boiling under the surface. “If you go quietly, Park, we can still use you as a hostage for ISF. We won’t hurt you. In fact, you’re the last leverage we’ve got left, aside from the HARE. You’re precious cargo. We can’t afford to mistreat you. Stand down, and we can settle this peacefully. We’ll give you back to ISF and go our separate ways—and none of your androids have to die in the process.”
Lie, Park thought. Chanur hadn’t mentioned Fulbreech—she probably did not know about his double-defection, not yet—and anyway her body language radiated tension, hostility. She would never just leave the synthetics alone, not after this. But the sweat streaked down Park’s back in a hot, feverish flash. She had never anticipated such a deadly test of her abilities. If she misread Chanur, or let her dupe her just once—
“I should be telling you to stand down,” she called, over Jimex’s shoulder. “We have no reason to hurt you, Chanur. Wan Xu. We’re just trying to regain control of the ship; reintroduce stability to things. Enough people have been killed. I don’t want to see you hurt, too. Any of you. If you surrender now, we can figure something out that ends with all of us satisfied. None of this has to end in more bloodshed.”
“Don’t listen to her,” Chanur snapped at Wan Xu, who shifted uneasily. “She doesn’t have the authority to fulfill any promises.” To Park she said: “You’re outnumbered. The five of us against the two of you.”
But Fulbreech made it three against four—much better odds, especially if Wan Xu was as cowardly as he looked. “You’re not counting the androids,” Park told her. “There are twice as many of them as there are of us. And as you can see”—she gestured—“they’re pretty solidly on my side. You should have treated them better.”
Chanur went white around the mouth at that; there was a faint tremor of her head, a barely repressed fury and loathing, before she relaxed again. “We can’t surrender,” she said softly. “The best we can hope for after that is arrest—life imprisonment on Pandora. You think we want that? No, we’ll die before we let that happen.” Park noticed how Wan Xu twitched unhappily at that. “Whereas you can just stand down. Be given back to ISF, no consequences. No harm. Can’t you do that, Park? Can’t you, for once, be human? It’s nothing to you, everything to us. You wouldn’t have to do a thing; just sit back and wait for ISF to come get you. If we give up, we lose it all. And we’ve already sacrificed so much to get here. It can’t all be for nothing.”
She paused when Park didn’t answer; her mouth tightened, and so did the skin around her eyes. “Our families are on their way now,” Chanur said, her tone harsh again. “Are you willing to fight us to the death? If you don’t die, if you’re the side who wins—do you want them to get here and find this ship full of dead bodies? Their brothers, sisters, their sons, their . . .” She paused again. “Their mother? My children are coming here, Park. Are you going to explain why you killed me to my son as he holds my corpse and weeps? All for the ISF?”
No, Park thought. Fulbreech had said the families were detained by ISF, that they weren’t responding. But that had also been guesswork on his part, assumption—what if they’d actually made contact while he was gone?
But if the families were already on the way, why did the mutineers need Taban? Just to get supplies from ISF, enough provisions to ensure their long-term survival—or to secure the release of their families in case they were caught at the border, before they could leave unauthorized space? Was he an insurance policy in case of disaster, or an active hostage? Or were they just going to use him to buy their freedom in general, to ensure ISF never came after them? How would that work? It was all so hard to keep track of, so hard to piece together—partly because the mutineers had clearly not thought this through. But Park wasn’t sure if she’d thought it through, either. What would they do if an army of very angry relatives was en route to descend upon them now? Would they engage in a firefight? Did those people deserve to die for their dreams of freedom, too?
Then she caught the puzzled look on Wan Xu’s face, quickly muted, and she remembered: Chanur’s file.
She didn’t have children.
“Duck!” she cried, just as Chanur swung up her arm and squeezed off a shot; some of the synthetics obeyed, scattering or diving to the floor, while others were slower to react, hesitating, shielding their faces uselessly, throwing themselves on top of each other. Jimex shoved Park to the ground, grunted as something clipped him in the shoulder. His expression—one of grim determination—never changed.
Park stayed on the ground as the synthetics rallied themselves and leapt forward down the hallway, almost blurring with the motion; there were the sounds of multiple gunshots, of Chanur shrieking with fear and rage as they charged her. Park put her arms over her head as she felt hot metal sing above her; one projectile hit a pipe and sent a burst of sweet-smelling steam into the air. Park prayed that it wasn’t toxic, some fume that would have them all dead in seconds. She glanced up through the veil of white vapor and saw Wan Xu dropping his gun and fleeing around the corner; Jimex and Dylanex were trying to grab Chanur’s arms, dancing out of the way as she fired wildly. The other androids were circling, sometimes surging forward in one quick wave, then darting back, unsure, unable to get close enough to disarm her.
Then Megex got in the way, or was otherwise too slow; Chanur popped off another shot and blew a hole clear through the android’s head.
Megex toppled backward and lay there on the ground, twitching and sparking as her body writhed in some kind of death spasm. A terrible metal groan issued forth from her mouth, like the protest of distressed steel as it was pulled apart by enormous forces. Jimex and Dylanex and the other synthetics piling on top of Chanur froze at the sound.
“No,” Park cried, scrambling forward. She skidded to a halt on her knees and bent over Megex, whose limbs were still jerking. Miraculously, the domestic model could still blink; she didn’t move her neck, but she stared up at Park and tried to smile. Hot clear fluid was leaking out of her head. Could she be saved?
The edges of Park’s vision darkened a little as her hands traveled helplessly over Megex’s frail, fractured skull; the blue eyes stared up at her, both motionless and knowing. Chanur was sitting up now, breathing hard, and the gun swung again toward Park like a weather vane. Park paused, looking at the doctor as the synthetics eased away from her, backing off, staring at Megex on the ground with wide eyes. Park watched them take in their comrade’s demise as if she were watching shadows play on a wall; she felt strangely disconnected in that moment, staticky, as if she were looking in on the scene from very far away, and the reception of the place she was in was poor. The gun in Chanur’s hand could have been an eye floater, a mere trick of the light.
“Natalya was right,” Chanur spat. “You’re fucking insane, Park. And we don’t need you. You’ve always been more trouble than you’re worth.”
“Don’t do this,” Park heard herself say—but her voice was flat, wooden. Unconvincing. She almost didn’t blame Chanur when she fired.
There was a pop in the air as the gun went off; the sound was so small and brief that it seemed silly, like the celebratory sound of a balloon. Park closed her eyes and thought of nausea, of the corkscrew feeling in her head again; she felt the gravity of the ship flip just as the bullet whined past her; she rushed up toward the ceiling and smacked into it, hearing Chanur scream as her body collided against a vent. The gun had flown out of her hand.
Then Park thought down, jerked her mind viciously in that direction; and the ship flipped again and she landed on her face. There was the crunch of cartilage, a warm, coppery taste in her mouth; she ignored it and looked once more at Chanur, who was lying dazed on the ground. The gun had landed near Megex’s still body, spinning idly in the dim light.
Park dove for it, rolling haphazardly and snatching for it all along the way; she felt the cold, comforting weight of the gun settle into her palm like the hand of an old friend and thought, Please don’t let me kill her.
She rolled upright and raised the gun—but stopped, just before firing. The gravity distraction had given Jimex and the others the opportunity they needed; four of them were holding Chanur’s limbs down like they were the handlers of some kind of medieval torture device. Jimex was sitting on her chest. He did not look back at Park before he raised his two clasped hands above his head—a kind of club—and then swung them down with terrible android strength. Once. Twice.
There was the sound of a breaking melon. Some hard, hollow thing shattering.
A cloud of blood. Chanur made a sound that Park would never forget, not until the day she died. She caught a glimpse of her from around Jimex’s torso: the ruin of her face, her head smashed open, raw and bloody. The transparent jelly of her eyes. She gave a single, wracking scream and looked at Park—and the hatred in the look reached out at her like light traveling down the end of a tunnel. Park lowered her gun and tried to look away from it.
Jimex brought his fists down one last time, methodical, crushing the pulp of Chanur’s brain with all the force of a pneumatic hammer blow. The doctor gave a wet, choking gurgle and fell back, twitching like a pinned insect. Her nerves fired off one last time—a stupid, empty, violent curling contraction—and then she slumped back and died.
Park turned her head to the side, feeling as if she ought to retch.
Jimex rose then, his entire white shirtfront covered in blood and bits of gummy residue, his face calm and unblinking. “For Ellenex,” he intoned.
“For Ellenex,” the others echoed, kneeling solemnly. Chanur’s blood was spreading across the floor; it touched their knees like dark paint.
Oh, God, Park thought, still feeling disembodied. As if she were floating somewhere above herself, looking down. What had they done? What had she done? She’d taught them how to murder—how to take revenge. Or enact justice. Or had they already known it, from the unity rain? A feverish kind of chill traveled up and down her arm; she was gripping the gun too tightly. What path had this set them on? What would happen to them now that they had incorporated violence into their new minds?
“What about Wan Xu?” Dylanex asked then, very matter-of-fact. He moved to crouch by Megex, laying a heavy, wide-boned hand on her shoulder; by some providence, she still seemed conscious, though she couldn’t sit up.
“Leave him,” Park forced herself to mumble. “He’s a coward, he won’t do anything without the others around to command him. He’ll be hiding somewhere. We can get him later. How is she?”
“Still alive,” Dylanex affirmed, looking down into Megex’s sweet blue eyes. She had fixed a reassuring smile on her face, as if to request that no one worry about her. “We can repair her. The shot clipped her motor nexus, but she retains what makes her—her.”
“Good,” Park said. “That’s good. I thought she—well. Let’s . . . let’s find a safe place for her to wait.”
Somewhere where she wouldn’t have to lie there and contemplate Chanur’s split-open head, she thought as they tucked Megex into one of the utility closets. She tried very hard not to look at it herself, but she felt the acute awareness of it pressing against her like a fever. Like a flame in the room that she couldn’t avoid. She prayed that Chanur hadn’t been telling the truth—that her relatives were not heading their way right now. She stopped herself from looking at Jimex’s bloody hands.
As if aware of her thoughts, he wiped them on his pants. Then he said, “There is another console, down there in the . . . lab. You can use that to send your message. It wouldn’t be safe for us to go to the other areas of the ship, not with Boone and Severov still around. At least we know this area is now secure.”
“All right,” Park said faintly. She did not want to argue with him anymore. “Are you—all right?”
“I was not harmed. Except for my shoulder. But it’s superficial damage—see?” The bullet had barely broken his skin. Park shook her head.
“I meant more about . . . No. Never mind.”
If they had not learned guilt, yet, or remorse or sin or ideas of murder—maybe they were better off. At least for now. Perhaps they viewed it as a balancing of things, the kind of ruthless fine-tuning machines went through all the time. The natural elimination of some virus, a bug that could do harm to the system. How could anyone oppose that, or condemn it? Maybe it was better if they didn’t hesitate to protect themselves, if they weren’t tripped up by the kind of moral questions and arbitrary ethical barriers that had impeded humans for this long. God, she didn’t know. She knew she had a responsibility to guide their development; that she could not let this embryonic society form the wrong kinds of ideas. But who was she to judge which ideas were wrong?
And they had to survive somehow, didn’t they?
“Let’s go down, then,” Park heard herself say. She would think on it more later—when there was time.
Back down the dark shaft, back into the blue-lit room. When the chute opened again like the cavernous gullet of some strange creature, Park felt the queasy lurch of déjà vu: the flight from Natalya, the blinding blow to her head, the mad scramble upward. But she had to steel herself and go on, conscious of how the synthetics viewed her. This time they all went with her: it seemed they’d lost their fear of this place, their religious reverence of it, possibly as they’d become more assimilated by the unity rain. But they didn’t follow her into the chamber that held Taban. Instead, they paused in front of the tank holding the first dead man: Taban’s partner. Park stopped, too. She had to wonder why this man had not been . . . merged with a machine, as Taban had. Was it simply a matter of timing, availability? Or had his mind rejected the joining, the dissonance driving him insane and ultimately killing him?
Dianex sighed, staring up at the frozen dead man as if he were a sculpture, some work of art in a museum. Park had to avert her eyes from his ghoulish nakedness. His lifeless stare.
“Oh, Daley,” the engineer said sadly, laying her hand on the glass of the tank.
The other synthetics mimicked her. “Poor Daley,” they said, pressing their palms against the glass. “Poor, poor Daley.”
Park rubbed her arms and forced herself to walk on. Taban was still standing in his cell, his posture relaxed but alert. He cocked his head as she came in and said, “Oh, good. They didn’t kill you.”
“No,” Park answered curtly, beelining straight for the other console tucked into the far corner of the room. She held her breath as she activated it, waited for some alarm to go off as it booted up. But then the screen flickered gently to life, and the mail system was intact: it asked her whom she wanted to send a message to.
“You can let us out,” Taban said as she pulled up ISF Corvus with shaky hands. “It’d be better to, anyway.”
“In a moment,” Park said, trying to concentrate. How long did it take for a message to reach the other side, again? Eighteen hours—and then there’d be more time needed, of course, for ISF to actually send out their reinforcements. The Deucalion still wouldn’t see any help for weeks. But it was all they had.
“You’d better do it quickly,” Taban said, his voice still perfectly polite. “We don’t know how it’s going to affect you if they turn those neural inlays back on. Especially when the unity rain hits again.”
“What—what do you mean?” Park whirled then. “We’re off the planet—there is no unity rain!”
“We told you,” Taban said calmly, “it affects the area around the planet, too. That’s how we ended up here in the first place: our ship fell through a hole in space. And it is the end of the season. The ripples are always the biggest then.”
“When is it going to hit?”
“We’re not sure,” he admitted. “Probably very soon. Minutes. Seconds. You can already feel its effects, the way you can feel static in the air before a thunderstorm. You haven’t noticed?”
She began to fumble with the console screen, swearing, though the blood was leaping in her brain and her slippery hands couldn’t do much. SOS. Send ships ASAP. Mutiny on the ship: Severov, Chanur, Xu, and Boone responsible. Commander Wick dead. Others frozen. Need help now. They are trying to take us and the HARE (Taban) hostage and reunite with their families. Sagara, Park, and Fulbreech still alive. WE NEED HELP NOW OR—
Something slammed into her head again.
Park opened her mouth to scream. It was the same sensation she’d felt with Hunter in the bridge, the same feeling she’d had in the freezer, magnified by a thousand: it felt as if something was looking at her, something with a million eyes, and she felt the scalding blast of its regard sweeping through her, delving into her cells, searing the folds of her brain. A caustic, nauseating cold shot up from her bones. It felt as if she was being plunged into an acid bath—as if a thousand hot yellow lights were being shined into her head.
“Jimex!” she tried to say, hysterical—she could not see him through the veil of tears in her eyes. “Jimex, help me—”
No answer, but she could see Taban’s figure, wavering before her like a mirage. She tried to move toward him, but found that she was paralyzed; a lightning rod had been jammed up her spine and it was holding her rigidly in place. If she moved she thought she would collapse to the ground.
“Taban?” she said—or thought.
“The unity rain,” he answered, his voice deep and ringing. “Don’t fight it. Let it take you, like a riptide. If you resist it, it will destroy you. Let it carry you instead.”
Carry me where? Park wanted to ask. But she couldn’t speak. Her brain felt like it was vibrating, as if it were a gong that had been struck, the sound resonating all throughout her flimsy skeleton—rattling through her breastbone and wrists. She didn’t know what Taban meant by letting it take her; she only knew that she had to get to him, that he was the only solid thing in a sea of distortion and uncertainty. She felt her eyes and teeth might fall out from how much her head was shaking. A kind of stream of information and feeling and thought flashed through her, like her brain was a walnut that had been pried open and something had shoved a funnel in it and was trying to squeeze in something far too big for the shell to fit. For a brief moment in that floating vertigo she thought she saw the surface of Eos, with a thousand lights pulsing beneath it, like the synaptic flashes of a giant brain—then a man in an exo-armor suit fumbling his way through a sea of dark waves—then the New Diego biodome. Herself, clutching the console for dear life while a strange alien consciousness rode along with her—a passenger in her brain.
They turned the neural inlays back on, was all Park could think. We’re all connected now. To the ship, to each other. How she knew that, she couldn’t say. She thought that the device in her head was exploding—that she would die.
But then, gradually, the feeling began to ease. The feeling of light rushed in and out of her in ebbing waves for a moment, then dwindled to the usual sparking pain.
After several moments, Park finally opened her eyes. She saw only white light and thought briefly that she had gone blind. She was lying on the ground, the metal floor cold and solid beneath her cheek. She tried to turn her head, but even that small movement made her nauseous—the same world-moving nausea, again, that she’d felt before. Was the gravity on, or not? She couldn’t even tell.
Taban was looking down at her, expressionless. Park said weakly, “Was that it? The unity rain?” A pale, milk-sour kind of scent filled her nostrils: she couldn’t tell if it was something in the room or her own desire to vomit.
“Yes,” Taban said. “It’s done now. The season’s finished. It assimilated you one last time.”
Park fought against the urge to gag. “Assimilated me with what?”
Taban didn’t answer for a moment. Suddenly, Park sat up, so fast that her vision nearly blacked out again. The message! Had it sent? The console’s screen was now dark and inactive.
It sent, another part of her whispered, with the same surety that she still had ten fingers and toes. Park recoiled from it just as Jimex and the others came in. “Dr. Park?”
“Here,” she said softly, leaning her head back against the console. She felt it pulse with an answering warmth. “Did you feel that? Any of it?”
Jimex moved over to her. “Yes.” She shakily took his hand, allowed him to pull her to her feet. Her ears were ringing, and there was an ache at the back of her skull; she felt as if she had been picked up and shaken like a piggy bank, scattered ideas and thoughts rattling around inside of her like coins. She felt, horribly, as if she had been hollowed out, as if someone had yanked something vital and private out of her and examined it with rough hands. At the same time, something heavy and tumorous—something new—now seemed to sit somewhere in the back of her head.
“You’d better let us out,” Taban said again. The synthetics were all watching him as if they were children crowding around a wild animal in an exhibit: as if he was something they wanted to go and touch, but were afraid of at the same time. “You’re going to need us, for what comes next. We’ve seen it, the versions where we’re not there and the versions where we are. It’s better if we’re there.”
Park’s head spun with a feeling like déjà vu, as if she had experienced this moment before; she was sweating so hard she could almost hear it. “How much of me is me?” she whispered, feeling that new presence—or knowledge—crowd against her.
“It’s all you,” Taban answered calmly. “Just enhanced.”
“What am I merged with?”
“Ask yourself,” he said. “The part of you that knows that the message was sent.”
She looked—and then she saw it, the part of her that was Glenn and Sally, the part that was now ARGUS and METIS. The unity rain merges things that are most similar to each other, she thought. And she performed the same functions as ARGUS, which in turn was tied to METIS and the ship: phenotype and body language analysis. Recording and observing. Monitoring and evaluating. They were the same mind in separate bodies; the same entity in different forms.
Park put out a hand to the wall to steady herself; then she flinched away from it, imagining it as the gray skin of something living and elephantine. The Deucalion seemed to breathe around her.
“How do I go back?” she asked him. How did she return to normal, revert to how she was before? She did not even know if she spoke the question aloud.
Taban regarded her. “You knew it when you left Earth, Park,” he said. “When Dataran died, when you told Glenn you loved him. There is never any going back.”
Park opened the door and let him out.