Symphony of Destruction (The Spindown Saga, #1) Page 9

  “Oh, Hannah. Good, I’m glad you are awake.” said that same lying robotic voice, this time not merely a memory in her mind. Looking up, there was the robot. He claimed to be a doctor, a priest, a ship captain, a friend. He claimed many things. None of them were true. Here stood a machine, a manipulator, a liar.

  And behind him, behind this robot who had told her that everyone was dead, stood a man. A man, clearly not dead. A man, clearly a crewman from engineering, by the uniform. As he moved out of silhouette her focus adjusted to his face, and recognition dawned, seeing through four months of beard growth. This was a man she knew. A man for whom she felt a hatred twice as strong as the loathing she held for the lying robot. A man named Colin. A man who had molested her friend.

  “Unbelievable,” Hannah muttered to herself in an ironically deadpan tone. A curious mix of anger, betrayal, frustration, dread, and helplessness resulted in a strange emotional cancellation. These emotions were inseparable in her mind though. There was no room for self-analysis, even if she had been the introspective type. Her body moved of its own accord now, stiffly but quickly circling the long way around the room, seeking a route toward the door which maximized her distance from the room’s other occupants. She felt as though she watched the scene separated from her body, through red clouds of fog smudging and obscuring space, time, and personality. There were no more people; simply anonymous objects slowly floating in a graceful, silent circle. She felt no pain as a fist slammed into a medical monitoring device, sending shards of plas-screen skittering across the room. Somewhere, someone’s foot lashed out in a rather clumsily performed dropkick, connecting with the stand of another rather expensive looking medical device, hurling it against the wall with an impressive flash of sparks. As she ran from the fog-shrouded room, she heard her own voice echoing in a muffled shriek; “... stuck here with a fucktard robot liar and a lying rapist!”

  Chapter 30

  Hannah stared at the small dark spot on the mess hall wall. She stood in the middle of the room, having entered moments ago. As she caught her breath, she barely remembered storming out of med bay or running through the corridors. She didn’t notice the stack of panels leaning up beside an exposed wall section in corridor D-1. She didn’t notice the crack in the floor that had appeared since she was last in this room. She didn’t notice that the vibrations of the ship were getting worse. She didn’t notice the streaks of blood that still oozed slowly from her knuckles and stained her fingers. She did, however, notice several empty Roth’s bottles on the floor near her, and these she kicked across the room with an impressive measure of strength and a certain kind of dumb luck in terms of accuracy. The first bottle flew like an arrow, directly at another bottle, also empty, that stood proudly on the counter near the dispenser. Both bottles smashed spectacularly. The next kick sent another bottle sailing directly toward the dispenser. Halfway through its flight her subconscious took note of the trajectory and its possible negative effects. Time seemed to slow, as the bottle continued to spin carelessly along its path. The narrow end smashed squarely into and through the dispenser’s display screen. The crash was accompanied by a sparking sound as the circuitry fried itself. The mess hall lights went out, draping the mess hall in utter blackness. A second later, the emergency lights kicked on, but the single dim red lamp above the hatch emitted only enough light to show the exit path, not to light the room.

  “Shit!”

  She started to run toward the dispenser, tripping over something in the darkness, then made her way a bit more slowly, bumping into a couple of carapaces along the way. She managed to ignore them. The dispenser was for the most part unresponsive, save for a faint, pathetically distorted beep of failure when she tried to enter any commands. A small wisp of smoke wafted out of the machine, bringing with it a horrible smell that made her feel a bit sick. At the same time though, she felt a hunger pang, as her body instinctively recognized the implication of the broken dispenser and had relayed the bad news to her stomach directly, bypassing her conscious mind.

  She leaned against the dispenser. And sobbed. The dispenser had been the last thing she could trust to take care of her. Inexplicably, it suddenly seemed to act as a stand-in for her mother, now departed, and never really grieved. She had not said goodbye. She had not fully accepted the hard truth. “Everyone is dead” was somehow a much easier concept to process than “my mother is dead.” The impact of this realization shook Hannah to a depth she did not recognize and would never have guessed could exist. Some deep buried cavern of emotion never explored was suddenly flooded as if by a great wave. Her body racked in great heaving wails as tears soaked her cheeks. She had never known such pain. The torment of this loss was a tangible yet shapeless thing. It surrounded her like a heavy blanket, muffling her thought, her breath, her very life.

  Eventually, Hannah slept. Pain turned to numbness, and numbness to oblivion. Hours passed. Maybe days. Her subconscious mind slowly fermented fear and anger into sorrow. Her anguish became a well-worn cloak of blackness and silent sound. That impossible sound emanated from a hidden seed within Hannah’s psyche. It ebbed with her choking breaths. It wove a resonance between her pulse and the white noise of her unfathomable neural rhythms. Slowly, as Hannah let the pain of loss and trauma emerge and flow uninhibited, the dark blanket transformed its mass into sharp energy.

  Periodic bursts of uncontrollable sobbing gradually became interspersed with deeply exhaled sighs. These sighs gradually moved from her chest to include nose and throat, instigating first her sinus to a tingling energetic sensation, then her larynx to engage a passive voice, allowing each sigh to become a small vocalization, a humming buzz, a primordial word stripped of semantic limits and thus containing all possible meaning.

  Eventually, this humming took on tone, and the tone became a wandering melody. An improvisational tune of remembrances of human connectivity. It gradually resolved into a very specific song of remembrance, of mothers singing sweet little homemade lullabies to their young daughters.

  “Little babe, blessed babe, there’s nothing to fear, so sleep my dear.”

  Chapter 31

  Colin looked at Brother Anderson, then the hatch through which Hannah had stormed out, then the wrecked medical equipment and their splintered pieces. He had no idea what they were for, but he knew they looked expensive. He looked back at Brother Anderson.

  “Shouldn’t we go after her?”

  “Definitely not.”

  “That looks like blood there, doesn’t it? - She’s hurt.” He nodded at the splinters. Indeed, there were several drops of blood among them.

  “Yes, it is. But... It is most likely superficial lacerations. Still...” he hesitated. “I’m continuing to monitor her vital signs as usual. If there is substantial blood loss, I will know.”

  It seemed a bit strange. Why such hesitation? It almost seemed as though the doctor was afraid of this girl. Not without good reason. Colin certainly recognized her fury, and he felt no small trepidation himself, but for a robot to feel it; wasn’t that impossible?

  “Umm, well. I’m gonna head down to engineering for a bit.”

  “Very good, chief. Call me if you need anything.”

  “Will do. Oh, are comms actually working? They came up yellow on my scan.”

  “Partially, yes. The link in engineering appears to be active. Call me when you get there just to be sure.”

  “10-4,” Colin joked.

  Leaving medbay he hesitated, then turned left - the opposite direction from engineering. Walking a few meters down the corridor, he visually scanned the floor for drops of blood. There was one. A few more meters. Nothing. The doctor was right; the bleeding wasn’t serious. Still, he felt he should go after Hannah. It didn’t seem right to just leave her alone. Perhaps he could help her somehow. But how? Perhaps Brother Anderson was right about that too. She hated him. How would she like it if he were to follow her? That would just upset her even more. Resignedly, he turned toward engineering deck.

 
Chapter 32

  Brother Anderson stood outside the mess hall. He could not bring himself to open the hatch. “She’s fine,” he told himself for the hundredth time. “Her pulse is normal, her breathing sounds clear and relaxed. Her temperature just slightly cooler than average.” These were really the only vital signs he could track indirectly. He could do so from anywhere on the ship. Yet here he was standing by the mess hall hatch. Despite the available evidence, he was concerned for her. As his patient, he truly did have her health in mind. She had been asleep a long time. Way too long. It felt weird.

  He triggered the hatch and it slid open with a faint scratching sound, as opposed to its usual smooth whoosh. He looked at the crack in the floor. Yes, it had grown. The room was moving slightly out of alignment, causing the hatch to scratch against its sill. The sound, however small, was not inaudible to a perceptive ear. Hannah heard it subconsciously. Her breathing halted for a second, and she turned over in her sleep. In the poorly lit room, Brother Anderson relied on his infrared vision, which allowed him to note the sudden rush of warmth to the left side of her forehead, which until moments ago had been pressed against the hard floor. In normal lighting, this spot would now have been clearly visible as a red splotch on her face, a crescent lock of dark hair draped clumsily across it.

  She could really use a pillow. Yes. Brother Anderson decided to get her one. Had she really lived all this time in the mess hall without one? He was a fool for not thinking of this before. He turned, and allowed the door to shut behind him, moving back along the corridor, back toward med bay to retrieve a pillow and a blanket. Along the way he derided himself. Hannah had claimed that he did not care about her. He now saw that the evidence had proved her to be right. He had left her alone in a cold room without a pillow for months. No pillow, no blanket. Just hard picnic tables and a basic washroom. A bare floor and all the food she could ever want was about all the luxury he had afforded her. But it wasn’t even a bare floor really. Not bare at all. It was littered with the corpses of her fellow man.

  Brother Anderson was in fact a terrible person. Had he possessed tear ducts, he may have wept at the realization.

  Chapter 33

  Colin tinkered with the comms systems. Several of the circuits were dead; most likely due to blown amplifiers, but since most of the ship was now unoccupied, he saw no reason not to steal a few components from the unneeded sections to repair the sections that mattered. One such component made a small spark as he unplugged it, and he hoped it wasn’t damaged. He routed it through to the med bay circuit and gave Brother Anderson a call to test it.

  “Hello Colin.”

  “OK good - just testing something.”

  “Alright, is there anything else I can do?”

  “Hmm no, not right... Oh! Well actually, yes. I’m looking at the comms subsystems maps here. Have you used the long range comms lately by any chance?”

  “No. We are still in the comms shadow.”

  “Yeah that’s what I figured. Well, maybe I’ll give it a couple fresh parts just in case. Can’t afford any trouble with that one.”

  “Very good, Chief.”

  “Oh, and how long you figure until we come out of the shadow?”

  “At our current velocity, it should be about another five or six days.”

  That was good news. Colin knew very well that the vast majority of the flight of the Ventas-341 was made in the radio shadow. She travelled deep within asteroid belts, behind billions of tons of rock. It was safe enough. They stuck to well defined linear channels, naturally clear of debris due to their particular orbital distance. Colin had been along this particular route enough times to know that it was a roughly six month journey from the load-up back to the civilized world of comms. Back to data streaming, and links to home; back to decent entertainment. By his math, calculating the time he’d been asleep, and the time before the crash, and now adding about a week according to Brother Anderson’s estimates, that would mean they were more or less still on course. The ship drifted along in a regular orbit just like everything else not acted upon by other outside forces. She used no thrust, once up to cruising speed. But he had been worried about the collisions. Hull breaches could generate thrust as pressurized atmosphere escaped. To say nothing of explosive fires and the like. He had only a basic intuition of these facts though. He could not begin to speculate on the magnitude of such forces. Would they have been enough to throw the Ventas off course? Surely not, he reasoned with himself. A fully loaded freighter had so much inertia going for her it would take a huge effort to bump her off course even slightly. Still, he had worried. Just another thing floating around in the back of his mind. But he felt better now, knowing. They were still on course - and they were nearing civilized radio-space.

  Back to the task at hand; Colin finished the planning for his next stage of troubleshooting, flagged a select few of the more important circuits with a Jiffy Marker, then began working his way through the repetitive steps of actually replacing and unit testing various components. It was not rocket science, and he soon found his mind drifting.

  He imagined himself, floating in a spacesuit, driving a thruster-tug, surrounded by tiny virus-piloted fluorine-lattice matrix-ships. His giant hand closing in around one of them, grasping it between finger and thumb like some kind of enormous demigod, and examining it with all-knowing vision.

  “How does one capture a speck of pure volatility?” the demigod mused.

  The virus-pilot removed its helmet and, shaking her head, loosed waves of shoulder-length black hair. She gazed upon the demigod, and in a panicked instant, briefly clawed at the matrix-ship’s emergency jettison lever, before transforming into a calm, rational lattice of steel reinforced hexagonal panels that suddenly grew to a size which dwarfed even the demigod himself. Its giant silver virus head perched atop a pair of kneeling humanoid legs with wheels embedded in the joints. Laser eyes drilled into his own.

  “The ions repel each other,” said the virus. “So a lattice of halogens is impossible!”

  “Unless there were some even stronger force!” Colin’s own voice boomed through his daydream and into the metallic surroundings of the engineering bay.

  “Shit! The doc was right. Maybe I do need some rest.” Colin set down his tools on the workbench, and began walking slowly toward... where was he going? Med bay? His own quarters? He wasn’t sure. He just let his body walk. His mind was already half asleep. Yet it mused:

  If only she weren’t so deadly, so angry.

  Chapter 34

  Brother Anderson felt an odd sense of excitement. He did not recall experiencing this feeling before. Perhaps he had not. He would have to check his extended memory records. And soon he could. This was in fact the source of his excitement. Soon the ship would be back in comms range. Soon he would regain his tanglebase connection.

  “The tanglebase” was the colloquial term for the galactic data cloud. It was the multiply redundant, distributed, and parallel web of corporate, personal, and governmental data. It was the sum total of all human data. Not knowledge, mind you. The tanglebase was all about the raw data. As humanity’s reach expanded, her data resources had multiplied exponentially. Ironically, within the vast expanse of space, connectivity had taken a giant step backwards, and local asynchronous computation was required now more than ever. But even so, all the worlds’ data resource providers had merged long ago, and in so doing, had enabled a single de-duplicated polydimensional compression and encryption scheme that allowed ultra-fine grain access control to every living human. Not that it really made much difference. It’s not like the world was really a better place because of it. Everyone knew everything, but people continued to act as ignorant as ever. And the free access didn’t last long. It was only after a couple of decades that corporate deregulation and greed led back to a monopolizing trend, through incremental price hikes, until most of humanity was again excluded from access. Now their data was the domain of the rich - or the highly technical. There were always workaro
unds for the highly technical; one just had to keep up with the ever-evolving APIs. Brother Anderson could hardly wait to re-connect and get back up to speed on those advancements. He also had a huge backlog of personal data he wanted to revalidate. The current feeling of anticipation was only one such example. His on-ship storage was finite. Much of his prior mind had been left tangle-side only upon entering the shadow just over a year ago. And with his augmented mind now occupying the ship’s full availability, he had so much to explore, to springboard off from. He was root bound and the feeling of a tensioned spring was beginning to grate on his nerves. He needed to break these bounds.

  Chapter 35

  Colin had a fitful sleep. He tossed and turned, tormented by subconscious half-dreams. The virus-pilot was back, this time looking sexier than before, but armed with an assault rifle. She rolled down the side window of her lattice car, leaned out and turned the gun on him. As she pulled the trigger, words came out of the rifle, “the ions repel each other.” it said.

  He twitched violently awake, banging his head against the wall of his bunk. He was drenched with sweat. He still had his coveralls and boots on. A blanket was tangled around his leg. It tripped him up as he attempted to wrest himself from the clutches of his bed.

  There was a knock on his hatch. Brother Anderson’s voice followed.

  “Colin, are you awake? May I come in?”