Oceans of space v1 0, p.8
Oceans of Space (v1.0), page 8
Humanity really had brought this on itself, Marley thought, passing the elevator station, where a monitor broadcast constant images of Earth. The rats wanted a ready reminder of their mission, their goal, and their enemy.
Over the last few hundred years, the human population had spread out so much that superior pest control became necessary to safeguard health and protect precious food supplies. Storage facilities were robotized, complex facilities that attacked intruders of any size with poison, electricity, or worse. In order to survive, parasites and scavengers had had to evolve beyond animal cunning into intelligence.
The first species to break through the barrier into sentience was raccoons, but they were too large and too obvious to avoid detection. Humans caught up with them within mere years of their breakthrough. Some were put into zoos. The rest were wiped out. Coyotes made a try, but they were even easier to round up than the raccoons.
Next came the real survivors: rats.
Having been bred to almost human intelligence in laboratories over the course of centuries, it only remained for a bored and motivated population of captive animals to observe the observers, to understand their speech, to learn how processes and systems worked, and to create a viable language of their own so they could communicate these behaviors to one another. Enough escaped, by dint of their own efforts (or through the assistance of animal-rights groups made up of humans), and settled down to breed a superior species.
The suspected “Lucy-rat,” the first rodent to achieve speech, was never found, but her daughters, sons, and billions of grandchildren soon started an underclass, stealing food supplies and counteracting nearly every trap set for them. Human beings did their best to eradicate the new rat, but they had waited too long. The race had been preparing for survival. Out of arrogance, humanity had assumed no other creature, except cute ones like dolphins and elephants, could achieve intelligence, let alone become a dominant species.
The rats now took the initiative. Having determined that the best way to survive was to wipe out humanity so they could have Earth all to themselves, a few brave and persevering rats swarmed aboard a spaceship that was outward bound to strip out useful equipment from an abandoned space station in the Sol system. Once outside the defense grid of Earth, they took the human crew prisoner, and established the first pirate colony in the orbiting hulk.
Within a short time they figured out how to make the food machines work, how to fire the weapons, and how to work the environmental controls. What they could not do, with their superior intelligence, watchfulness, and above all, ability to breed quickly to fill the ranks of their troops, was perform ship maintenance. For that they needed human slaves.
The first group, survivors from the coup, was unsatisfactory. The workers kept trying to escape or dying inconveniently. The rats figured out they needed to convince their slaves that their cause was just—or maintain a credible threat that kept them from attempting a counterattack.
Marley and her shipmates were from the second wave. They had been the crew of a mining ship on its way back into Earth orbit from the asteroid belts. They were tricked by a distress call. The young female engineering tech who had made it had apologized ever since. Her distress was real. Unfortunately, now so was theirs.
The mining ship Sophia had not been a random choice. Highly maneuverable and with backup systems on its backups, it was intended for long-term missions away from the facilities of Earth. Once it had docked at the space station, a few rats crept aboard while the crew went looking for the humans who had made the call. Before the captives could explain, the rescuers were overwhelmed by hordes of rats. Marley and a few of the others fought their way loose and tried to get back to the ship, but by the time they did, the hatch wouldn’t open for them. The rats had taken control of the systems.
A spectacular explosion consisting of rocket fuel and all the metallic and plastic garbage aboard the space station made it seem as though the Sophia had been destroyed by an internal fault in the drives, so no one would ever come looking for them. Marley had lost hope after that. Her parents had undoubtedly arranged for a plaque on the wall of the main neighborhood corridor in their section, where busy passersby could ignore it on their way to or from work, Marley thought, cynically. Since then, the rats had taken over a gigantic long-range freighter, the Mary Sue, and two more mining ships, the Crowbar and the Simpson (perfect for their intentions of halting and diverting food shipments coming in to Earth). When it sounded like the Terran governments were going to get it together and attack the space station, the rats and their captives had abandoned it and gone to live aboard the freighter. Going back over the vids in their collection, they’d named it the Avast Ye.
“It is something real pirates say,” the captain had explained. (He fancied himself a cross between Kidd and Drake.)
The converted ships preyed upon food supply ships coming to Earth from the many agricultural colony worlds throughout the galaxy. After taking what they needed, the rats diverted megashipment after megashipment of vegetables, fruit, livestock, and grain to other pastoral planets, often along with the crew members who wouldn’t cooperate in the rats’ efforts.
The loss of the vessels had been put down to space pirates.
“Who knew it was pirate?” Marley had said, ironically, changing the emphasis of the syllables. The rats overheard her. They liked the sound of the word, and officially designated themselves pyrats. Marley was upset with herself. She didn’t want to do anything they liked.
Marley knew the rats saw themselves as the liberators of Earth. Their intention was to starve out the humans, and make them all go away. If humanity died off, that would suit the rats’ purposes, but all they really wanted was to get them off the planet so it could return to a natural condition.
But she found herself wondering if they could restore Earth to its original state. All that green openness she saw in the history vids scared her at first, but soon she began to find it attractive. Her fellow human beings weren’t going to do it any time soon. Why waste room in the megaloburbs for farmland when you can ship in all the food you want from colony worlds? (Not that it was recognizable by the time it reached the people.) She had been raised on cityswill, and shipswill was exactly the same with an added tinny taste from the storage vats.
Earth was no paradise, she admitted that. Living conditions were miserable no matter how you looked at it. People starved there, she thought with a fleeting pang of sympathy that quickly faded as she entered the mess hall.
The enamel wails of the room had been tinted screaming orange, no doubt a bright thought to instill cheery moods in diners by some psychologist who had never set foot off Earth. The curved chairs were unbreakable plastic in a blue so dull it looked like a mistake. The captives had been allowed to keep them only because the rats couldn’t think of anything to use them for.
All fifteen of her fellow human workers were already eating. Marley mentally cursed the captain for keeping her past the beginning of meal break. Had they left her enough food? She hurried to the steel serving table and flung open the hatches one after another. Plenty. Whew! She grabbed a steel tray and began to scoop food into the six compartments. Slices of some kind of brown-red meat. Green things like little trees. Peas; she had tried peas before. They were good. Potatoes. Lots of potatoes. She loved the texture on her tongue. Some little cubes of pale gold fruit in gooey sauce. Milk in a round squeeze bulb. She took three of those.
The other survivors of the Sophia watched her warily as she came to sit by them, curling their arms protectively around their own trays. Marley kept her own food just out of leaping distance. Bell, a small man with leathery brown skin who had been a senior mining tech, nodded to her. His job was to keep the drives and life support running. Iverson, a slim blonde woman with pale turquoise eyes, had been the hydrophonics chief. Now she was seconded to a huge brown sewer rat who treated her with kindness, but acted as though she had the intelligence of a sentient watering can.
Marley nodded at them, and fell on her meal voraciously, sawing chunks of meat small enough to stuff in her mouth in between bites of the vegetables. She could remember when she’d been repulsed by the neon-bright redness of precooked meat, for example. And the different textures of real, fresh vegetables. She had never, ever seen anything like that that hadn’t been reprocessed and reformed into absolutely uniform segments. The remembered flavor of cityswill came back, almost making her gag. The paste consumed by all workers of a certain level contained all the nutrients needed for life. It tasted horrible. She gulped down some of those sweet-bitter tree-stalks to cover the memory. They were delicious. She had to go back for more.
Only when she’d gotten to the sweet fruit compote did she become aware of Bell’s voice. He must have been talking the whole time.
“…Going to be too fat to escape, if we ever manage it.” Marley looked up at him in alarm.
“You can’t talk that way,” she whispered. “They’re always listening.”
“Sorry,” he said, with a sheepish shrug. No one wanted to be overheard talking mutiny. “Just joking around. You get the tub running?”
“Yes,” Marley said, gulping down the second bulb of milk. “I can’t understand why the crew sabotaged the plumbing.” She glanced at the next table where the six men and women who had originally been assigned to Avast ye sat alone, under guard by a dozen rats, each almost a meter long. They weren’t permitted near any sensitive or vital installations. Ironically, the shock bracelets had once been collars worn by live animals the freighters sometimes carried. Who’d know the system could be changed to keep humans themselves out of their own control rooms?
“Wish we had some entertainment,” Bell continued. “I’m getting bored out of my skull. I never watched the news before, and you can only look at Earth so long without going crazy.” He shrugged at the monitor embedded in the wall, on which the blue planet revolved serenely.
“Can’t,” Thomas said wistfully. The lanky young man had been their computer systems specialist. “Everything’s on the hard drives, and we can’t get near it.”
No books, no music, no art programs. No cultural enrichment. No gossip. No newsgroups. Marley knew what the others were thinking. They were all suffering from withdrawal symptoms.
“Remember?” Bell asked fondly. “Solitaire. King of the Mountain. Fate. Bomb Shelter.”
“…Space Invaders,” offered Iverson, then tittered nervously as the others groaned. “Well, maybe not.”
“I know I’ll never play it again,” Bell insisted.
“I just wish I could, y’know, get close to the computers again,” Thomas said, flexing his long fingers. “I wouldn’t mess with the control programs. I just want to…connect again. I’m so twitchy. It’s all there, and I can’t touch it.”
“You could become a trusty,” Marley said, her mouth twisting in a sour grimace. The others barked out deprecating laughs.
“Yeah, right,” Iverson said, with heavy irony. “Turn rat. Sure. Like Orcas.”
They glanced over to a table set apart from the rest. A small, thin woman ate by herself. She never looked back at her fellow humans, if you could call them that any longer. She’d gone over to the rats’ point of view, coming to believe that humankind no longer deserved Earth. Marley blamed the brainwashing they’d all gone through when they’d arrived on board. Unlike the rest of them, Orcas wore no bracelets. She didn’t need physical compulsion to stay in line. She’d done it to herself.
One of the guard rats, a huge male, leaped up on their table, ears flattened, black-brown fur bristling, ugly, naked tail lashing. They all cowered back from him. He bared his long front teeth at Marley and seized her third bulb of milk. She watched, terrified, as he tore open the flimsy plastic and swallowed down the contents, all the while keeping a beady black eye on her. He kicked away the empty, then jumped down again to join his fellows.
“Why did it do that?” Iverson whispered. “There’s plenty more in the hatches.”
“Because it can,” Bell said. “Because it wants to remind us not to get cocky. They’re in charge, and we’re not.”
Marley was still thirsty. Keeping an eye on the band of guards, she edged her way around to the hatches and picked out a couple more bulbs of milk.
A klaxon blared, making her drop them.
The proximity alarm! A ship! The warning lights around the doorway began to glow red. Humans had to stay where they were. Any trying to pass the check stations to either side would get shocked. Mariey and the others stared at the screen.
The view of Earth was replaced by the image in one of the ship’s long-range sensors. As it came closer to the freighter—close being a relative term—Mariey could have jumped up and down with glee. It was another mining vessel, this one heavily armed. They were coming to save her!
The screen scrambled briefly. A swarthy, muscular man’s face appeared.
“I am Captain Lichtman of the World Government ship Deloshe said. “We heard your distress call, Mary Sue, and we are coming to help. Anyone in need of medical help? Respond?”
Distress call? Mariey thought. Oh, no! The Delos was flying right into a trap. If Mariey could have, she’d have jumped right through the screen, waving them off.
As it was, she had no choice but to watch as the ship came into near visual range. As it approached, the glow around it of meteor shields gradually died. Don’t do that, Mariey pleaded with it mentally. Why aren’t you more suspicious?
As though the captain could hear her thoughts, the Delos slowed, and its exterior started to luminesce again. Mariey let out a heartfelt sigh, echoed by Bell and the others. But the ship’s response had been too slow. Red tracer lines lanced through space toward its hull. Two missed, but one tiny white-hot dot appeared, etching a glowing gash in the metal.
The Delos juddered as its internal stabilizers fought to keep it steady. Three more red lines came from other directions as the conscripted mining ships swung out from behind the hulk of the wrecked space station. Delos rotated and fired its engines to cut and run. Red lines shot out from its mining lasers toward its pursuers. Crowbar took a solid hit in the nose. It spun wildly as hull sections tumbled away. Simpson veered off to avoid the debris, and took a wide angle up and out of sight.
Sophia appeared in the bottom right of the view-screen, its cutters on full force. It fired again and again. Beside Marley, her shipmates cringed. Those lasers were only supposed to cut through asteroids in search of ore, not to kill other humans. Delos was quite a distance out by now. Marley could only see the dot provided by the computer to indicate its whereabouts.
But the shots had been aimed precisely. A bubble of white power expanded, as the explosion consumed the ship’s store of liquid oxygen, then winked out. The dot that was Delos began to spin end over end, hurtling back toward the Avast Ye. By the time Marley could see it again, its exterior glow was gone. Green tracers took the place of red, as the Avast Ye stretched out tractors to draw the helpless ship in.
The captain’s image reappeared on the screen. In the background Marley could see crew members frantically working over their boards, trying to reestablish control.
“What in hell are you doing, Mary Sue?” he demanded. “Who the hell is running things over there? What are all these ships? Mayday, may…”
The screen fizzled into blankness as Marley’s heart sank. For a moment, she’d thought she was going to be freed. She knew the others felt the same despair.
The whole ship boomed as the Delos was dragged close against the Avast ye. Marley felt the telltale vibration humming in her feet as the lasers taxed the freighter’s engines for enough power to breach the captive ship’s hull.
Suddenly, the red lights around the doorframes winked out. The huge rats moved toward Marley and the other humans, gnashing their long, yellow teeth. They lifted their hands and marched toward their cabins.
The door slid open, and guard rats nipped at Marley’s heels to make her jump in.
Six men and women in shipsuits seated on the featureless benches at one end of the room looked up at her. The burly man, Captain Lichtman, stood up as if to catch her when she stumbled, but he withdrew, arms folded.
“Hi,” she said. “My name’s Tobie Marley. I’m here to…interpret.”
“What the hell is going on here?” Lichtman demanded. “You grabbed us, tore a hole through our hull, threw a million vermin at us to get us off our guards…”
“We…I mean, humans didn’t do it, sir. It’s the rats. They did it all.”
The humans sneered their skepticism in her face. “Yeah, right,” Lichtman said, belligerently. “This is an act of piracy! I demand to see your captain.”
Marley glanced at the army of rats at the opposite end of the room. “He’s over there, sir. The white one in the middle.”
Lichtman looked at the captain, who pulled himself upright to his full ten inches. For a moment the human seemed incredulous, then burst out laughing. “All right, I’ve had enough of the trained animal act. Bring me an officer I can deal with.”
The captain was offended. He let out a screech that nearly sent Marley to her knees with pain.
“I demand respect!” he shrilled through the telekythe. His temper had a short fuse. “Tell them!”
Marley gulped. She knew the drill. She’d had to do this before.
“He’s offering you a choice. Three choices. He needs human crew, to do maintenance. You can stay here, or transfer to…a nontechnological planet…”
“Or you can give me back my ship and stop screwing around,” Lichtman interrupted her. “I want to get out of this stench and back to a nice, clean deck before…”
The captain had lost patience. He leaped at Marley, who immediately lay down on her back and exposed her throat. The two-foot-long guard rats were close behind, roiling around her feet like piranha. The captain stopped just short of biting her neck. She could smell his musk.
