my arm. Okay, I’m gonna take the steps real slow.” Lydia heard the dull thud of a foot on the steps; a long time passed before she heard another. For a moment, she thought she glimpsed the shimmering of a soft glow in the sky, and then it was gone.
She backed inside and struggled to push the massive door shut, surprised at how much effort it took.
“Lydia?” Matt said.
She shuffled slowly toward him. The cold air was congealing around her. She struggled across the room, wondering why Matt seemed so far away. “Matt?” The thickened air flowed into her mouth and into her lungs. “Matt?”
“Lydia?” His voice was as deep as Olaf’s had been. “Are…you…still here?”
“Yes.” She tried to swim toward him, but the air was beginning to jell around her arms and legs. She thought of Olaf and Gretchen and wondered if they were still towing themselves toward Olaf’s house along the rope or were already trapped outside on the steps.
“I’m…glad…you…stayed.”
She opened her mouth to reply, but was already embedded in the thick, frigid darkness; motion was frozen.
She wanted to say it, but the words escaped her.
“Matt,” she whispered, and her voice was as deep as his had been.
Her hand clawed through the solidifying darkness and clutched his as everything stopped.
PERMANENT FATAL ERRORS, by Jay Lake
Maduabuchi St. Macaria had never before traveled with an all-Howard crew. Mostly his kind kept to themselves, even under the empty skies of a planet. Those who did take ship almost always did so in a mixed or all-baseline human crew.
Not here, not aboard the threadneedle starship Inclined Plane. Seven crew including him, captained by a very strange woman who called herself Peridot Smith. All Howard Institute immortals. A new concept in long-range exploration, multi-decade interstellar missions with ageless crew, testbedded in orbit around the brown dwarf Tiede 1. That’s what the newsfeeds said, anyway.
His experience was far more akin to a violent soap opera. Howards really weren’t meant to be bottled up together. It wasn’t in the design templates. Socially well-adjusted people didn’t generally self-select to outlive everyone they’d ever known.
Even so, Maduabuchi was impressed by the welcome distraction of Tiede 1. Everyone else was too busy cleaning their weapons and hacking the internal comms and cams to pay attention to their mission objective. Not him.
Inclined Plane boasted an observation lounge. The hatch was coded ‘Observatory’, but everything of scientific significance actually happened within the instrumentation woven into the ship’s hull and the diaphanous energy fields stretching for kilometers beyond. The lounge was a folly of naval architecture, a translucent bubble fitted to the hull, consisting of roughly a third of a sphere of optically-corrected artificial diamond grown to nanometer symmetry and smoothness in microgravity. Chances were good that in a catastrophe the rest of the ship would be shredded before the bubble would so much as be scratched.
There had been long, heated arguments in the galley, with math and footnotes and thumb breaking, over that exact question.
Maduabuchi liked to sit in the smartgel bodpods and let the ship perform a three-sixty massage while he watched the universe. The rest of the crew were like cats in a sack, too busy stalking the passageways and each other to care what might be outside the window. Here in the lounge one could see creation, witness the birth of stars, observe the death of planets, or listen to the quiet, empty cold of hard vacuum. The silence held a glorious music that echoed inside his head.
Maduabuchi wasn’t a complete idiot – he’d rigged his own cabin with self-powered screamer circuits and an ultrahigh voltage capacitor. That ought to slow down anyone with delusions of traps.
Tiede 1 loomed outside. It seemed to shimmer as he watched, as if a starquake were propagating. The little star belied the ancient label of “brown dwarf”. Stepped down by filtering nano coating the diamond bubble, the surface glowed a dull reddish orange; a coal left too long in a campfire, or a jewel in the velvet setting of night. Only 300,000 kilometers in diameter, and about five percent of a solar mass, it fell in that class of objects ambiguously distributed between planets and stars.
It could be anything, he thought. Anything.
A speck of green tugged at Maduabuchi’s eye, straight from the heart of the star.
Green? There were no green emitters in nature.
“Amplification,” he whispered. The nano filters living on the outside of the diamond shell obligingly began to self-assemble a lens. He controlled the aiming and focus with eye movements, trying to find whatever it was he had seen. Another ship? Reflection from a piece of rock or debris?
Excitement chilled Maduabuchi despite his best intentions to remain calm. What if this were evidence of the long-rumored but never-located alien civilizations that should have abounded in the Orion Arm of the Milky Way?
He scanned for twenty minutes, quartering Tiede 1’s face as minutely as he could without direct access to the instrumentation and sensors carried by Inclined Plane. The ship’s AI was friendly and helpful, but outside its narrow and critical competencies in managing the threadneedle drive and localspace navigation, no more intelligent than your average dog, and so essentially useless for such work. He’d need to go to the Survey Suite to do more.
Maduabuchi finally stopped staring at the star and called up a deck schematic. “Ship, plot all weapons discharges or unscheduled energy expenditures within the pressurized cubage.”
The schematic winked twice, but nothing was highlighted. Maybe Captain Smith had finally gotten them all to stand down. None of Maduabuchi’s screamers had gone off, either, though everyone else had long since realized he didn’t play their games.
Trusting that no one had hacked the entire tracking system, he cycled the lock and stepped into the passageway beyond. Glancing back at Tiede 1 as the lock irised shut, Maduabuchi saw another green flash.
He fought back a surge of irritation. The star was not mocking him.
* * * *
Peridot Smith was in the Survey Suite when Maduabuchi cycled the lock there. Radiation-tanned from some melanin-deficient base hue of skin, lean, with her hair follicles removed and her scalp tattooed in an intricate mandala using magnetically sensitive ink, the captain was an arresting sight at any time. At the moment, she was glaring at him, her eyes flashing a strange, flat silver indicating serious tech integrated into the tissues. “Mr. St. Macaria.” She gave him a terse nod. “How are the weapons systems?”
Ironically, of all the bloody-minded engineers and analysts and navigators aboard, he was the weapons officer.
“Capped and sealed per orders, ma’am,” he replied. “Test circuits warm and green.” Inclined Plane carried a modest mix of hardware, generalized for unknown threats rather than optimized for anti-piracy or planetary blockade duty, for example. Missiles, field projectors, electron strippers, flechettes, even foggers and a sandcaster.
Most of which he had no real idea about. They were icons in the control systems, each maintained by its own little armies of nano and workbots. All he had were
