Posted 23 Feb 2017 drafting science fiction
The following is the first part of a short story series that will be continued on Patreon for my supporters. This may or may not be the final version that will eventually be packaged in a collected volume. ========== Chapter One == Harrow's Tusk was almost entirely self-sufficient. On most days Ehl'i Landor wished this wasn't the case, just to have something to do. Once a full crew had played backup to the monitoring systems and automated drones that did the real work to keep the ship running. Of two-hundred fifty crewmen, Ehl'i was their token Iscillian. A fragile hydrostat serving as bantam among the vertebrate Xendari. It had always felt crowded aboard the Tusk. A too-large crew for a too-efficient ship, and she perpetually felt that she was about to be stepped on. Now in the corridors throughout the ship, there was only silence, punctuated with the contented beeps and tones of fully functioning systems. Ehl'i was the sole living entity on board after the accident and even so the ship barely seemed to require her attention. She'd set a course days before, selecting a relatively close star system out of the countless options that the nav comp had to offer. As the Tusk slipped along toward the pinprick of a star, she had only to wait. The ship recalculated its route to travel around stormy nebulae and interstellar debris, slowed to avoid igniting pockets of unstable gasses, and resumed its traveling velocity when space cleared again. Once she locked in the destination, her presence at the nav station was unnecessary. If she had ever bothered to learn more about the ship's systems, she could have used the new-found free time to work on her problem. But while she was dexterous, clever, and mechanically inclined, her duties thus far had only been to follow instructions and schematics. She could, when so ordered by the Xendari, reconnect electric synapses in the blink of an eye, or install new silicone boards with one hand. She knew where all the circuit panels were, knew the components they were made of, and how to replace them if they failed. But the larger concepts, such as how the factors station on Science deck 2 related to the strings of KM pulse cells draping from the highest bulkhead in the Engineering atrium, were foreign to her. As for repairs, Harrow's Tusk required only the one. The gate drive sat darkened in the aft wall of Engineering deck C, a delicately designed honeycomb of useless components. Its status readouts blinked a stubborn red, its particular vibrations becalmed. The morning of the accident, Ehl'i had been performing requested modifications to the drive's circuitry, which was supposed to be disconnected from all ship's systems and power. And yet... A drumming pulse, like the stamp of echolocation under water, had been the first hint that something had gone wrong. It rippled across Ehl'i's neural system, sending a shudder of tyrian purple across her peach flesh. Then her skin cells went opaque black. Through the observation window in the chamber, Ehl'i watched as the crew on Engineering deck C turned transparent, flickering like degraded holo transmissions until they winked out of existence. At the same moment, the AI drones dropped out of the air wherever they hovered, the light of their soft blue monocular lenses suddenly lifeless and dark. When he inspected them later, BEETL observed in his emotionless voice that their processors were burned out. That was an understatement. The metal discs were charred, cracked, and melted into the blackened chunks of acrid-smelling plastic that had once been circuit boards. Burn marks crisscrossed the insides of the drones' chassis. While he and his built-in tools assisted Ehl'i with the modifications, BEETL had put himself in standalone mode to prevent his data signals from contaminating the gate drive. It had saved him from the overclocking that burned the AI hive processors. And saved Ehl'i from being completely alone after the accident. Inside the isolated chamber, Ehl'i had been the only one exposed to the radiation from the gate drive. That was by design. Isolation was meant to reduce the danger to the rest of the crew should anything go wrong. But the cordoning-off of the drive had the opposite effect. When the dimension-puncturing isotopes escaped their containment capsules, she had stayed in sync with the ship's phasic dissonance, unlike the rest of the crew. By the time Ehl'i could cycle the inner seal on the tiny chamber and rush out onto the anti-static deck panels, the ship was empty. BEETL had immediately initiated a vent of the radiation, spilling the majority of it from the ship. The emptiness around the Tusk glistened with a purple-red dimension rift as the isotopes thinned the fabric of reality around them. But the ship did not resolve solidly to one dimension or another, and the crew did not reappear. The rest of the ship's drones littered the corridors and stations. Ehl'i had cleaned them up, clicking the units back into their mounts in the storage compartments along the bulkhead. It was as much for something to keep herself occupied as to remove them so BEETL wouldn't have to come across them constantly. Likely the AI drone didn't care that his hive mates' bodies were laying lifeless on the decking, but it made her feel better to get them out of sight. The drone only commented that stowing them properly would keep their power cells charged if they were ever able to manufacture new processors and repair them. This was as much of a "thank you" as she was likely to get from her companion. BEETL seemed optimistic that he would be able to repair the gate drive, once the source of the malfunction was identified and the necessary components could be replaced. In the absence of the other AI drones, however, he complained he was as slow as one of his predecessor models from centuries before. Each drone was designed to draw computational resources from the others when demand required, but with the Tusk's other drones gone, he was left without access to the CPU/RAM pool of the hive. Even so hindered, with his direct access to the complete schematics of the gate drive, and his infallible quantum calculations, Ehl'i knew he would still fare better than she at discovering the cause of their problem. Then, as suited her station, she could assist him with the repair. So she waited and wandered the ship like a ghost. The Intraship Instant Molecular Shuttle, BEETL had warned her, was likely to filter the radiation from her cells and send her out of phase with the ship if she used it to travel between decks. So with practiced familiarity, she opened the hatch on a service access tube and crawled inside, heading for the botany lab. The access ways were cramped and cold, but that suited her. It was in the wider open corridors where Ehl'i felt more vulnerable. Tight spaces were for hiding, defending, escaping. Some of the tubes closest to the outer hull had a coat of biting frost on the rungs of the access ladders, but even there Ehl'i didn't mind so long as her skin didn't stick. She preferred the chill to the boiling tickle she felt when the IIMS activated and made her hyperaware of every molecule in her body. Provided that she exited the tunnels before the pH-balanced water in her Personal Hydration Cycler started to thicken and ice, there was little danger to her. Now Ehl'i approached the access door to the botany lab. It was once labeled as such in neat alpha glyphs above the security pad. Once alone on the ship, in an uncharacteristic fit of rebellion and pride, she had used an ion torch to scar a strikethrough across the old label. Above it, she burned the lab's new name: The Gardens of Landor. The only other life on the ship waited for her within the lab. Her food, and her salvation. Several hours after the accident she had been relieved to see the skin cells of her extremities become vibrant again. Blue and lavender edged away at the matte black. But where the color returned there came with it a sharp burning sensation. BEETL's scans sounded with harsh alarms of critical matter degradation. Without a sustained exposure to the radiated isotopes from the gate drive, Ehl'i would fall out of synch with Harrow's Tusk. Like the Xendari had, only the transition would be slower. A few cells at a time. A straightforward and efficient way to replenish the isotopes was to eat radiated food, but the organics supply in the ship's cold lockers had phased out along with the living Xendari. Faced with starvation, Ehl'i had anticipated that her purgatory would be over in a few short days. BEETL had saved her, not for the first time, by extracting DNA of her last meal from her digestive system. She had felt a flash of hope at the idea and a flutter of curious interest in the cloning process, though it sank beneath a rising press of fear as BEETL pushed the long needle into her abdomen to extract the samples. Under the AI's instruction, she grew the first harvest in borosilicate dishes. There were oily fish, anemones, and an array of vegetation. After only a few hours she was biting into the crisp flesh of cloned peppers. She saved the seeds for what would become the only worthwhile job she had aboard: ship's gardener, tending a lost field in the empty belly of space. Now she had an orchard and a fishery. Trees with accelerated growth cycles towered over her head and brushed the bulkhead above them. Bushes and vines bore vibrantly colored fruit sourced from the compressed nutrition bar she had eaten on the way to her shift the morning of the accident. Tubers burrowed in boxed gardens, squash tumbled out into the aisles between, and vertebrae of sprouts rose out of the precious compost she had gathered. Pumps flushed the waste water from rows of polyplex aquariums and fertilized the soil. The morning of the accident, she had not been especially hungry, and almost skipped breakfast. But the lead engineer, Chezni, had something new she wanted to try. Modifications to the gate drive, something that would improve its efficiency by 0.0017%. Ehl'i knew the ambitious Xendari woman would keep her crew at it through multiple shifts if necessary. It fell to Ehl'i to perform the mechanical upgrade within the gate drive compartment, where only she among the whole crew could compress her body to comfortably fit. Expecting a long day, Ehl'i had made herself eat a half portion of dinner left over from the previous night and then, selected the dehydrated fruit bar as added insurance. It was a serendipitous escape from starvation. The only fortune she could find in her predicament. The phasic radiation was part of her harvest. A peculiar sparkle in her now-black skin, like a twinkling field of stars seen through a fogged viewport, visually reported the appropriate level of radionuclides in her body. Anytime her skin returned to solid black, and especially if it began to color at the edges of her cerata again, BEETL would measure her levels and prompt her to eat. She did not normally have a voracious appetite, and this treatment was beginning to give her willowy body unfamiliar curves. If this continued, she thought, she would not be able to fit in the gate drive's chamber when it was time to make the repairs. She tugged on a well-ripened stone fruit before it could fall from its tree and add decay to the offenses in the air. The branch bowed and for a moment the rustle of leaves covered the hum of the ship's system. Then the branch burst back upward as the stem came free, spreading its sweet scent through the air. A bruise from her grip dimpled the soft flesh beneath her thumb where the setae of her fingers reported the sensations of its fuzzy surface. It would be delicious, she knew, but she was still full and her skin still sparkled. She fed the overripe fruit into the carbon recycling hatch along the bulkhead. There was more food here than she could ever eat on her own. The carbon-based matter would feed the ship as well, and continue the cycling of fallout through HVAC. There was a soft click from the subcutaneous communicator in her wrist, followed by BEETL's cool smooth speech: "Bantam Landor, we are approaching the uncharted star system." ========= Patreon supporters will receive this and other Ehl'i Landor stories in thanks for their support, with the option to download as an eBook or PDF. If you would be interested in supporting my Patreon campaign, please visit my profile on Patreon.Next Quick State of the Disarray Update