Osprey chronicles comple.., p.62
Osprey Chronicles Complete Series Boxed Set, page 62
There was a contemplative pause. Petra was about to shrug and crawl back to her bunk when Freddie’s voice returned close and whispered through the bars. “Thass too bad,” he slurred. “She’s got a good set of pipes. We could use a hellion howler like that in my glee club.”
Petra laughed. The abrupt noise gained her another alarming crunch of fist against steel, a few cells down. She bit her tongue.
“I’m Petra.” She lowered her voice.
“Sammy,” the invisible man said amiably.
“What’s that you was singing?” Petra asked. “Rush Starr, wasn’t it? I ain’t heard his classics in…wow, must’ve been a couple of years now. They never play it on the broadband any more, only his new stuff.”
“I’ss a tragedy,” the man agreed. “Misser Starr was visionary. Shiver and Quake? Long Road? My God, the entire album—perfection.” He made a wet kissing noise.
Petra leaned against the wall, grinning. “My man’s, his favorite was always Home Is Where The Tribe Is.”
“Ohhhh.” Sammy made a tsking noise. “Pop crap, from after the top brass got ‘hold of Misser Starr and made him start churning out all that patriotic hoo-ha.”
Petra clapped a hand over her mouth to hold in the shock. “You’re gonna get yourself in trouble talking like that, Sammy!”
“Awww, I ain’t ‘fraid of a little truth.” He drew in a deep breath. “Open stars, set me freeeeeee!”
Vikki punched the wall, and the brig fell silent.
“Let me guess,” Petra whispered once an appropriate amount of time had passed. “You’re in for…drunk and disorderly?”
“I maybe had one drink too many and missed a shift or three,” Sammy agreed. “You?”
Petra’s good humor vanished. She shifted her weight, again uncomfortable in the little cell that had been her prison for months.
“It’s…complicated,” she said quietly.
“Oooh. Complicated. I like complicated.”
Petra sighed. “I was working comms on the Reliant back during the…” She swallowed. “The, uh, shakeup, a few months back. It was a crazy time. Anyway, with all the unrest, especially down in the Belows… Honest, I was only trying to reassure folks. Tell them that things was gonna be all right. I guess the new brass thought I was talkin’ outta turn.” Her lip jutted in a pout of persistent injustice.
“Petra,” Sammy mumbled like he was searching his memory for something. “Petra, Petra… Oh, shit!” He cut his exclamation down to an excited whisper. “You mean Petie? Thass you?”
Heat collected in Petra’s cheeks—embarrassment, touched with the tiniest spark of pleasure that he knew her name.
He must have taken her silence for assent because he went on. “You leaked Memo 6?”
“It wasn’t classified or nothin’.” She blushed, batting away a lingering fruit fly. The buggers infested the whole brig, and they swarmed thick when the plumbing system backed up, which was always. “Not at the time. They didn’t hide that stuff until well after the new commander took over. So it wasn’t me leaking secrets. But they was already picking on me for some silly stuff, looking for an excuse to shut me up, so…”
“Holy baloney, Petie,” Sammy whispered. “None of that matters. You’re a real celebri’y, out there. The memo, is it for real? Did Tribe Six find a planet to settle?”
“Yeah,” she admitted. The MP had warned her about running her mouth, but…well, the guard was stationed at the far end of the brig, and he was awful busy on his computer. She could hear his occasional mumbled curses directed at the evil mushrooms ruining his video game or whatever it was.
At any rate, she’d been good about keeping quiet for a long time. She was awfully tired of it. Four months of talking to only drunk tank occupants had made all her old street slang come up with bells on, and she was afraid if she didn’t have a real conversation here and there, she might forget how to talk entirely.
“It’s for real, Sammy. There’s a good planet out there, and Tribe Six found it. Jaeger found it. Last I knew, the fleet’s preparing to jump for it next time one of them holes opens up.”
There was a shuffling noise as Sammy pressed himself closer to the wall. “Then why is the MP hiding it? Why not tell everybody? Hell, I’d stop drinking if I knew there was a walk in the woods in my future. I miss the woods.”
Petra shrugged, not that he could see. “I don’t know nothin’ bout how the gears in their brains work. Four months in prison and they ain’t charged me with anything, and I don’t get to talk to nobody but the folks who wind up in cells beside me. Honest,” she added, only half-joking, “I’m not sure why they haven’t spaced me yet.”
“Oh, don’ say that! You’re an icon, Petie.”
“Huh?”
“Yeah! There’s graffiti tags with your name all over the place in the Belows. There’s lots of people wanna see you released. You got a big fan club in the rank and file. People got all excited for the future again, thinking there’s a planet out there for us.”
Sammy may as well have told Petra that in her four-month hiatus from civilization, she’d been sainted by the Pope and knighted by the Queen.
“No,” she said, incredulous.
“Yes! You gave a lot of people hope, leaking that memo. Brass can’t space you—they’ll have another mutiny on their hands.”
“Oh.” Petra flushed. She wasn’t sure she believed Sammy—it was too much to wrap her brain around—but it was a nice idea. “I ain’t had fans before.”
“Oh yeah. You’re right up there with Jaeger these days. Both of you, gone from villain to hero when that memo got leaked.”
“Oh gawd.” Petra nibbled her thumbnail. Another bad habit, once thought licked, came roaring back in the last few months. Put a rat in a cage and what does she have to do but chew on herself.
“What?” Sammy drawled. He let out a long yawn. “Wha’s wrong with that?”
“Oh…” Petra sighed. A fly landed on her cheek, and she brushed it away irritably. She didn’t want to talk about Sarah, not now. It hurt too much. She hoped her silence was answer enough for Sammy, and for a minute or two, she thought maybe the drunkard had lulled himself to sleep.
Then she heard a rustle on the other side of the bars. “Did you do it?”
“Do what?” Petra asked glumly, watching a fly crawl across her knee.
Sammy yawned again. “Were you a part of Jaeger’s Mutiny?”
Six months ago, Petra thought, nobody could talk about the Mutiny without spitting. Sarah had been a traitor that stole away the Tribe’s best hope for the future. Then Memo 6 got out, and everybody decided that Sarah Jaeger had been a hero after all, stealing the Tribe away from incompetent leadership to find them a planet to settle. Now there was a sort of reverence in Sammy’s voice, where before, there would’ve been contempt.
What a difference a little hope can make, Petra mused. If she wanted, she could step up and claim a bigger part of that renewed hope, of all that adoring attention.
She didn’t want that. Petra thought about those last days before Sarah and Larry went off to their Tribe assignment, and all she felt was despair.
“Not really,” she whispered. “It’s complicated. I think Sarah might have filched my access codes to get some of it done. But no.” She swallowed. “I didn’t know what they were gonna do.”
I would have if they’d told me. But they didn’t.
“Aww, Petie.” Sammy’s jaw cracked in an unseen yawn. “You sound real tore up about that.”
“Yeah, well.” She swallowed a lump and waved away another fly. When Corporal Keeves came back on duty, she’d have to chew his ear off about the darned infestation. “Love’ll do that to ya. Tear you right up.”
“How ‘bout you take yosself a nap? That always clears up my head.”
Petra’s shoulders twitched in a laugh. “You go on, Sammy. Sweet dreams.”
Her neighbor didn't answer, and shortly after, she heard the soft drone of his snoring.
Petra stared down the brig hallway, watching the flies bob like little black pixels across her narrow worldview. Bars and cells and drunkards. That was all she saw anymore from the confines of her little cage—a cell big enough for a mattress and a waste hole and not much else. Once a day they let her out for exercise and cleaning duty.
Funny, really. She had more space and time to herself here than she’d had back in her squad barracks, and she’d trade just about anything to get back to that stinking, hot, overcrowded place that was her home.
If she thought too hard about any of it, she started to feel really low. Scary low.
She was about to rifle through her locker for a magazine to take her mind off things when another fly landed on her cheek. Half-tempted to curse, she lifted a hand to smash it.
Noise crackled in her left ear.
“Petra Potlova?” the fly said, in a voice full of radio static.
“Uh.” Petra glanced to the hall. From her cell, she could see only the very edge of the guard station at the edge of the brig. All was still.
Petra pitched her voice low, cramming herself in the quietest corner of her bunk. Carefully, she plucked the fly from her cheek and studied it.
It was the darned smallest little bot Petra had ever seen. She would never have thought it was anything but one of the flies if she hadn’t looked close to see that instead of big compound eyes, the thing had a set of speakers.
She cupped her hands over her mouth, bringing her lips close to the languid bot. “Uh, hello? Yeah, it’s me. Who’s asking?”
“It’s good to hear from you, Miss Potlova,” the bot whispered, faint as the sea in a seashell. “We’re from the Resistance. We’re here to help.”
CHAPTER SIX
“Final thruster checks complete.” Seeker leaned back in his harness and cracked his knuckles. “That’s the end of the checklist, Captain. Are we gonna fuck this pig or let her go?”
The Osprey’s command center was alight with activity. Flashing screens and ticking timers, status readouts, and shield schematics all centered around the two occupied stations.
“I don’t know.” Jaeger nibbled her lip, studying the radar display on the main viewer. “And don’t use profanity on my ship.” Most of the hatched were pretty good about it, but Jaeger’s first mate and pilot seemed to be in some unofficial competition to see whose tongue could run bluest. “Something’s missing.”
The comms channel crackled to life. “This is a bad idea,” said a reedy-voiced man.
Jaeger gave Seeker a thumbs-up. “Ah, there it is!” She tapped her comms button. “All right, Toner. I was just thinking about you. Let’s hear it.”
“Okay, first things first. Look at this. Just look at this bullshit.”
Jaeger saw the display screen blink with the feed coming up from the planet and activated it. She found herself face-to-face with Toner’s glowering, colorless face. He gestured at the landscape behind him, where ground crews swept scanners over a vast swath of cleared ground. A few kilometers farther off, the forests of Locaur reached up to touch a sky golden with early morning light. Far, far in the distance, the great cone of a single dead volcano blurred against the horizon.
“It does look pretty bad,” Jaeger admitted. “That hard hat. It does nothing for your complexion.”
Toner swiped the bright orange hat from his head, revealing a mop of white hair damp with sweat. He didn’t immediately answer.
“Toner? What? No quips. No excuses.”
There was a long pause, and Jaeger knew the genetically engineered vampire well enough to see he was debating saying something. Probably biting his tongue over some insult he knew would get under her skin. Instead of an insult, all Jaeger heard was an audible groan. “Yeah, sorry. Not myself. Been dreaming a lot lately. Not sure if they’re memories or something else.”
“Memories.”
Another groan. “No, I think they’re dreams. Too weird to be memories. Forget about it. As for your earlier comment, look, Captain,” he drew out the word in mirthful sarcasm, “this ground isn’t level. We’ve gone over it a dozen times. There’s almost a meter of difference between the highest and lowest points.”
“So go over it again,” Jaeger said cheerfully. “We can wait for the next landing window.”
“We can sit here moving dirt around until we die of old age,” Toner barked. “It’s just too big of a space for us to clear out and level without automated droid assistance, and every time we try to dig the sinks for conduits and wells, we run into some damn root system or mineral vein. It’s a mess.”
“Occy set the parameters for a landing site,” Jaeger reminded him patiently. “Your crews have met those parameters. Honestly, I’m surprised you care this much about a few centimeters of tilt. This bird has landing gear. We can compensate.”
Toner grunted. “I don’t like you being up there all alone.”
Jaeger lifted an eyebrow, noting the change of subject. “Thanks for the concern, but I’m not alone. I have an entire skeleton crew.”
“Those new hatched don’t count,” he grumbled. “Not yet. Look, I’m sure they’ll be fine once they finish with orientation, but right now, they’re a bunch of kids. They don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.”
Jaeger frowned. She’d braced herself for a slew of complaints—it had become something of a tradition for Toner to list his anxieties before any major change, and she wasn’t joking when she said it would feel wrong to proceed without letting the man have his say. Normally, though, Toner had some better arguments to make than this.
She wondered if he was feeling all right.
Beside her, Seeker leaned close to put himself in the frame. On seeing him, Toner jerked like he’d gotten an electric shock.
“Jesus, quit your bellyaching,” Seeker growled. “What’s the matter, Toner? Is it that time of the month again?”
“That’s enough,” Jaeger said sharply. Cursing was one thing. Misogyny, quite another. Seeker’s gaze flicked to her. He inclined his head an inch, accepting the reprimand.
On the screen, Toner was running fingers through his hair. “Your copilot is an asshole who doesn’t respect you,” he told Jaeger.
“So what else is new?” she sighed.
“I’m the best goddamned pilot on this little expedition.” Seeker settled back into his harness and began checking the systems again, looking for something useful to do while Toner languished.
“It’s true,” Jaeger reassured Toner. “We’re going to be fine.”
Toner hesitated, and she saw by the agitated shift of his weight that they were finally getting to the heart of the matter. “Okay, look,” he said tightly. “You’re good. I know that. And Seeker’s fine, sure, whatever. But, jeez, Jaeger—this is a big job. There are eight thousand moving parts, and you’re only two people and a baby crew, and there’s no room for error. You get it wrong, and you’re gonna crash and burn.”
“It’s not the first time we’ve run complicated maneuvers on the Osprey without much practice.”
“Yeah. But it’s the first time you’re doing it without an AI copilot.”
Jaeger winced and said nothing. There it was. The one big and very valid item on Toner’s list of grievances.
“I’m just saying that there’s no rush to do this now,” Toner went on. “Maybe we should run a few more practice simulations. Be sure we’ve got it right. We don’t have Virgil to compensate for human error anymore.”
“We have an AI guidance system,” Seeker called.
“Moss doesn’t count,” Toner said. “I could beat that thing in a game of checkers.”
“Good.” Seeker toggled his thruster controls restlessly, just to confirm they were still working. “You don’t want your AI getting too big for their britches. Next thing you know, they're going on egomaniacal rampages and stealing irreplaceable equipment.”
There was an awkward silence as Toner met Jaeger's gaze across tens of thousands of kilometers. She knew they were both thinking the same thing.
Months back, when Virgil—their original AI program—had abandoned the Osprey, it had robbed Jaeger's crew of many valuable tools. Aside from simply taking every one of Osprey's space-worthy repair bots as a collective vehicle for its personality matrix, the rogue AI had taken all the spare shuttle parts from the engine cargo before jettisoning itself. Seeker believed that Virgil had taken the spare components as a final, petty fuck-you to its human overlords.
The truth was more complicated. Virgil had taken the parts with Jaeger's blessing and Occy's help. It had needed them to construct a space-worthy transport for over three hundred thousand frozen human embryos—which it had also taken from the Osprey, and again, with Jaeger's blessing.
That was the deal Jaeger had cut with her erstwhile copilot. Virgil was free to wash its mechanical hands of humankind on the condition that it smuggled the embryos away to safety. Away from the Osprey, and from Jaeger, who, according to her ambiguously worded deal with the Overseers, was eternally forbidden from activating them.
At the time, Jaeger had patted herself on the back for several problems tidily solved. Virgil, out of her hair. The embryos in stasis, safe from the Overseer factions that wanted them destroyed.
Then months had passed without a single word of contact from Virgil. Jaeger and Toner had spent more than a few late nights agonizing over the unknown fate of all those embryos they’d been so desperate to save.
For all they knew, Virgil and the embryos had been destroyed mere hours after abandoning the Osprey—burned to ash in the upper atmosphere of Locaur, fried by cosmic radiation—the possibilities were endless and lurid. They set Jaeger's stomach to churning every time she thought about it.
So in a way, Seeker was right. Virgil had stolen precious and irreplaceable tools from the Osprey. The scope of the AI's theft simply existed on a scale beyond anything Seeker could imagine. The missing AI hadn't only taken a few shuttle parts and vanished: it had taken the entire future of humankind.
