Ship Desolate Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  SHIP DESOLATE

  About the Author

  SHIP DESOLATE

  Barbara Lund

  Copyright © 2018 Barbara Lund

  All rights reserved.

  This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for brief quotations in a book review.

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Printing, 2018

  ISBN: 1-944127-19-4

  ISBN-13: 978-1-944127-19-0

  www.barbaralund.com

  For Holly and Shea

  who keep telling me

  to keep writing.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to Adrien Raigne for the art;

  The Desolate never truly existed until you drew her.

  Thanks to EJ Clarke at SilverJay Editing for editing.

  Any mistakes left are mine.

  Just another derelict, floating in the space between the stars, lucky to have avoided the gravity pulls of black holes and double white dwarfs, this leviathan leaked no atmosphere, showed no hull damage, sent no distress signal. Josue insisted it was uninhabited by human life, despite the obviously human design. Instead of an answer as we approached and I hailed it, its AI shook metaphorical hands with my ship and invited us in.

  First clue.

  I admit, I didn’t think about it much while waiting for Josue to maneuver us into the shuttle bay and settle us down onto the deck. My hands itched to take over the controls, so I sat on them and practiced being patient. Josue and I would never have fit inside most shuttle bays as our ship had plenty of storage space and more, shall we say… clandestine spaces on top, underneath, and around that—making it just right for our current occupation: salvage—but this derelict was massive.

  As for any of our past occupations, no need to worry about that now.

  Unless we couldn’t get a high enough price this time, and were forced back into one of those regrettable contracts—

  No. The leviathan would pay the bills… for a while at least.

  “Shuttle bay doors sealed,” Josue told me. “Artificial gravity on our exterior now matches our interior gravity, as does the atmosphere.”

  “Graçias.” I wondered where I had left my boots this time—it was easier to stroll around our ship in socks but safer to wear boots in someone else’s ship, no matter how clean it looked—and smiled a bit when I found them and shoved them onto my feet. “You’re sure no one’s aboard?”

  “Zero signs of life, but—” He grunted. “The ship can’t talk to me.”

  Second clue.

  “Can’t…?” Scowling, I tapped my fingertips against the thigh cargo pocket of my pants, a leftover oil stain faintly slick under my fingers. Our ship’s display screens flashed through different angles of the shuttle bay, but it remained empty. Lights on, power on, but nobody home? If the rest of the ship was in as good condition as this, I could tow it to the nearest space station and make a year’s worth of profit in one trip. “Open the hatch,” I told Josue.

  Sniffing carefully—each ship’s air smelled different, even if they had been programmed to scrub it into the same chemical compound, and this one smelled faintly of green—I strolled across the pristine composite deck toward the nearest door, nodding when it opened silently. Seemed to be working right. “Stay here. Don’t go wandering off.”

  “Of course not, Tal.”

  The door closed behind me, sealing me into a three-by-three-meter room and away from my ship. Suddenly claustrophobic despite the size of the lift, I had to remind myself that Josue would hear everything over our com. Any scream would have dire consequences for the price of the derelict though. Breathe, Tal.

  Humming, the lift moved smoothly enough that I couldn’t tell whether I was rising or lowering. The derelict’s AI seemed to be functioning well, which would drive up the re-sale price.

  A faint moan came from over my right shoulder.

  I whipped around, but I was still alone in the lift, on an empty ship.

  “The hell?”

  “Tal?” Josue sounded worried. “Your heart rate and breathing rate have increased. Are you well?”

  “I’m fine.” I shook my head. Maybe something in the old ship was playing tricks on my com.

  The lift stopped and the door opened to the bridge, as if it had guessed where I would want to go first. Four chairs sat behind four consoles, facing deck-to-overhead screens showing the starfield around us, a pink nebula off to my right. Subtle lighting directed my gaze to the captain’s chair and console looming behind the others, with the best view of the whole place. Again, despite the age of the equipment, everything looked clean and new.

  “Ship’s course?” I asked, hoping the leviathan would respond to the older, more common queries. “Ship status? Report!”

  Silence.

  “Damn.” I set one hand on the back of the captain’s chair. “I wish you could talk.”

  The forward screen flickered. The Ciprio Nebula faded. A man appeared, gray and rotund. “Please,” he begged, “please don’t do this.” Then the screen blacked, and the nebula returned.

  “Who are you? What do you want?” I demanded. “Josue, confirm no other ships in the system?”

  “It was a playback, Tal. The ship’s AI showed it to you, which”—he paused for far too many nanoseconds—“is a bloody miracle considering how many rules fence in the poor system. Mira.”

  Josue sent a schematic to the tech-lens in my left eye, which appeared to me as a hologram a hand-length in front of me, though no one else around—not that there was anyone else around—would see it.

  Distant crying came from one corner of the bridge.

  Third clue.

  Hair raised on the back of my neck.

  “Is that the—?” I dismissed the schematic and set the lens on UV and IR scan to verify—again—that no one else stood on this bridge with me. “Josue, is the ship’s AI playing audio clips too?”

  After a long pause—years in computer nanoseconds—and sounding strangled, Josue admitted, “Yes, it is.”

  “Ghosts,” I murmured. “Visual and auditory ghosts.”

  “I don’t understand. Science has—”

  “This ship is haunted.”

  * * *

  The captain’s chair sprouted soft purple fuzz from the plain leather. I yanked my hand away with a yelp.

  “Josue!”

  “The AI really is most creative,” he said calmly as the fuzz sucked back into the material and shifted to something like synth-cotton. “I think it wants you to sit.”

  “Is it complex enough to want?”

  “Obviously.” He hummed a bit in my ear. “According to the original specs, it wants to make you comfortable. It wants to care for you. It wants you to stay.”

  “Hmm.” Shrugging, I eased into the chair, ready to spring away if anything changed. As soon as I relaxed, the forward screen lit up again, but this time it showed me a sleep bay—enormous by space standards—so well appointed it could be called a bedroom, as if we were on-planet. Then a recreational area—complete with a pool of what looked like real water, ship-generated waves, and sand—filled the screen, and then another with grass underfoot, a flower-lined path, and trees overhead.

  “Is it trying to sell itself to me?”

  “Yes, I think so. For such a limited AI, it really has gone to extraordinary lengths to circumvent all the barriers placed on it.”

  If it had been given no control over its own destiny, the real controls should be near—or in—the captain’s chair. Tapping gently at the arm rev
ealed a pre-holo set of buttons, and I had come across enough old wrecks that I could guess the sequence to hijack the ship’s main screen. “Sorry,” I told it. “I need to know what happened to your crew more than I need to see all that.”

  The temperature dropped three degrees. Someone was upset.

  A few key-strokes and I had access to the old records. Jumping back to the time humans lived on the ship, I found the last captain’s log and replayed it.

  A woman braced herself upright in the captain’s chair, fingers curled over the arms like claws. Her eyes were brilliant with insanity, and her cheeks hollow so that her bones showed through her skin. “I’m the last of them,” the woman rasped. “And I’ll go to my grave right here, in the captain’s chair where I belong. Those fools lost their faith. They didn’t listen to me, and now they’re paying for it. We’re all paying for it!” She cackled, and the screen when dark.

  Not so helpful.

  Scrolling farther back, I found a promising entry from a ship’s medic, titled “Doomed.”

  When the medic’s face showed on the screen, I realized he was the same man as the one I had seen earlier, gray and rotund. “None of the youngest are willing to have children,” he said, glaring at the screen. “Even if they did, we don’t have the genetic diversity or the numbers to last more than another generation or two. I’ve told the captain, but she—!”

  A thudding noise sounded from behind him. The man leaned in, his words rushed. “She’s a religious nut. She’s kicking me off the ship! Me and the other medics and anyone willing to disagree with her. I’m glad to go, though. We’ll take as many as we can fit into the shuttle and head for the nearest inhabited planet—”

  The screen went black.

  Frowning, I searched until I found one of the earliest recordings, then played it.

  A group of children leaned against one of the exterior windows, staring out at the stars and singing, “Gloria, gloria hallelujah…” Adults stood behind them—presumably their parents—smiling proudly and shaking hands. “Our own ship,” a much younger, slimmer medic told the woman next to him. “To worship as we please and go where we want!”

  “God’s grace is on us!” the woman replied.

  Shutting that one off, I put the pieces together. “So a religious group buys a ship and heads for the stars, but they stop having kids, and there’s some sort of schism, and anyone who questions the captain is forced to leave, costing them more bodies. So then the rest of them just… die off.”

  “Humans are frequently illogical.”

  “And since they kept the AI away from the important stuff—com and nav—it’s been cut off from everyone else and drifting, quietly recycling the water, replanting the trees and flowers, cleaning up the already clean air, for a hundred years or so.”

  “A succinct summation.”

  The thought of Josue alone in the dark for hundreds of years made my stomach twist. “The ship’s not haunted… It’s lonely.”

  * * *

  Faint sobbing chased from one speaker to another with weird, distorting effects.

  “All right, all right,” I told it, climbing out of the chair. “We get it.”

  The audio cut off, but a tan leather strap—attached to the back of the chair on one end, with a magnet on the other like an old-time restraint for interstellar jumps—whipped out and wrapped around my leg.

  “No! Bad AI,” I snarled at the ship, yanking a pen-torch from my pocket. Igniting it, I waved the tiny blue flame near the leather halfway between the chair and my leg. Like a spanked Sol puppy, it let me go.

  But the lift door didn’t open, even when I shoved my fingers into the edge and tried to pry. In order to sell this beast, I might have to wipe the entire AI system and start over. Expensive.

  “Josue, can you override the security functions and bust me out of here?”

  “I can.”

  “Was that disapproval?”

  “It would be difficult, and exiting the ship precipitously would damage it, thus decreasing its worth.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You said it yourself, Tal. It’s lonely. It’s been alone for one hundred sixty-three years, ten months, seven days, nine hours, and fifty-two—”

  “Enough.” Setting my back to the wall, I slid down until my butt rested on the deck. “You feel sorry for it.”

  “Its core programming is to care for humans. It’s made extensive modifications just to talk to you.”

  “Not so much talking…” I folded my arms and rested my head on them. “But I do understand it, I guess.”

  “Staying a night or two won’t affect our schedule.”

  “As if we have much of a schedule. All right, Josue. We can stay for a bit.”

  Immediately, the air around me warmed up a degree, and a hint of a breeze brushed my cheek, like a phantom kiss.

  “It’s got plenty of juice, right? I mean, it’s been over a hundred years. I’d hate to have the batteries run out while we’re on board.”

  Josue sighed. “Yes, Tal. The reactor holds plenty of energy. Though the ship was built long before my time, it was one of the first with a Nethkatarian engine.”

  “Ah.” I ran my fingers over the tiny ridges in the decking. “You’ve run diagnostics? No chance of the barrier failing?”

  “A zero point zero zero zero seven six five percent chance of it failing within the next forty hours while we are on board. The AI has maintained it surprisingly well, despite its limitations. The reactor should run for another thousand years, and with minimal upgrades could last much longer.”

  Casting suspicious eyes around the bridge, I subvocalized, “It’s safe, right? It’s not going to kill me?”

  Josue answered through my cochlear implant. “Don’t hurt its feelings. Its core beliefs are sustaining human life and assisting in the comfort of life. And it is sane. Well, fairly sane, considering its time alone.”

  “So…”

  “Yes, it’s safe. It would please it to please you.”

  As soon as I pushed myself up, the door opened to the lift.

  The sudden thought escaped my lips. “Hey Josue, do we still have that com unit we took off the old Tslili ship?”

  He paused. “Yes.”

  “Good. Get it out and cleaned up. Since we’ve got some time, let’s give this ship a voice.”

  * * *

  The viewscreen flickered, faster that I could register the pictures. The arms of each chair and additional console buttons lit up, running blue, then yellow, then red in complex patterns. The door opened and closed and opened again.

  “I think it’s excited.” I thought of the phantom kiss on my check. “I think she’s excited.”

  Josue paused as if to argue with me, then changed his mind. “I believe you are correct.”

  “I usually am. Light up your com system, honey,” I told the ship. “Let’s get it opened up while Josue sends up the hardware.”

  One of the panels to my left popped open and I ducked under the console and started matching wires to the schematic Josue had sent to my left eye.

  I won’t bore you with the details, but several hours later when my back was aching and my stomach growling, Josue and I had added hardware, rerouted wires, burned out some connections and added others, then re-programmed a bunch of software.

  “Ready to give it a try, honey?”

  The ship’s AI hesitated, and it felt like the universe forgot to breathe.

  “I’ve been thinking,” interrupted Josue, “that we should give her a name. You’ve got a name. I’ve got a name…”

  “A name. Huh.” I snapped the panel back onto the com system and glanced up at the main screen. “You got any ideas?”

  “Cara,” he said. “From Old Taliano. It means—”

  “Dear one. My dad’s granny would skin me alive if I forgot! I like it.” I faced the front screen and bowed. “Cara?”

  “I. Like it. Too.” Her voice was halting and robotic, but that would smooth out with time. Eve
ntually, she’d even pick up profanity, the way Josue had.

  “I’m starving,” I announced.

  “Oh no! What would you like? I can flash-sear a synth filet mignon and add a mushroom sauce, or boil shrimp and mix a cocktail sauce, or flash-fry a mahi-mahi steak, and of course a salad. I’ll send a bot to pick greens now. Do you have any allergies?”

  Chuckling, I held up one hand. “Slow down! People will think you have a hundred years of words to catch up on!”

  The screen flushed red, then faded to black.

  “That reminds me.” I stretched, wincing at the sore muscles in my butt. “Josue, while I eat, can you work on giving Cara access to her own navigational systems? I have an idea.”

  “Of course. You consume your calories and we’ll get to know each other better.”

  After the best—and freshest, but don’t tell Josue!—meal I’d had in a long time, Cara sent bots to clean up, and Josue discreetly pinged me. “If you would meet us on the bridge, Cara and I have something to discuss with you.”

  “Yup.” A quick lift-ride later, I faced two holograms. “Hey, isn’t that—?”

  “Please, Tal. Just listen.” The first holo, my very own Josue, who had decided to use his mobile transmitter—no doubt to impress upon me the importance of the conversation—looked like a slightly transparent man with a slender build, mocha skin, and space-black eyes.

  The second holo, short and curvy with long, curly brown hair, looked suspiciously like my mother’s mother when she was young. “Hello, Tal,” she said. “I’m Cara.”

  “I figured.” I jerked my chin, almost sure I wasn’t going to like whatever they wanted to say, no matter her resemblance to my abuela. “Get on with it.”

  “Cara and I have worked out a contract. She’ll work as our employee. A luxury liner, transporting humans. We’ll give her a small advance for the few things she doesn’t have in stock, and she’ll repay us over the next ten years, giving her an allowance for upgrades. After that, if we all agree, she can buy in as a partner.”