Black Hull (7 page)

A long night expired. Father never
returned home.

“So do they know who they are—that
they’re your brother and father?” Mick asked Sera when the droids had left.

“No idea. I don’t even call them by
their real names. In fact, I don’t even know if this transfer is going to work.
But I’m going to take a shot.”

“So where’s their identity?”

“It’s called a .hum file. It houses each
of their souls. The file is only partially mounted on those droids, because
their models don’t read .hum files. The expancapacitor model will fully mount
.hum files.”

.hum files. And me, assassin of
expancapacitor droids. Does she guess I’ve killed before?

“How do I kill this guy?”

“It’s a woman. You’ll flush her .hum
away. Her name is Emily Husson. Grand Governor of the sector we’re breaching
now.”

Mick looked out the port window at a
neon blue world coated with turquoise film.

“That planet?”

“Yes sir. Use this,” Sera said, handing
him a gun.

“Shoot her?”

“EMP. She drops. Then use this.” She
handed him another gun. “That will format her .hum.”

“Sounds easy enough. Does she live
alone?”

“Do you know where we are Mick?”

“No idea.”

“This is Bessel 9. Way too close to
Bessel’s solar flares. No one lives out here except for crazies. Luckily for
us, she’s a rich crazy. A trickler.”

XJ motored into the room. GR followed
behind him, a wrench in his hand.

“We’ve fixed the engine, Sera.”

Sera smiled at Mick. The droids did not
seem to notice that the ship had been cruising steadily toward its destination
for the past several hours, the engine running fine.

“Thanks,” she said.

“Mick, will you be joining us on our
voyage to Utopia?” GR asked.

“I’ll be going home, as soon as we kill
this droid and sell the ore. I can T-jump to the time and location of my
choice, right?” Mick said, turning back to Sera.

“Your choice Mick. Although with Utopia
here and now, I can’t see why you’d want to waste your share going back.”

“My family,” he said.

“Right. Well, Utopia will have them
stored there. Archived. Anyone can be summoned. You wouldn’t notice the
difference.”

So this is the ultimate product of human
evolution: A secluded everything for the wealthy: immortality, all beings, all
history, time no longer relevant, the perfection of intelligent design.

“Then why go through the trouble of
killing this droid? Let’s sell the load and I’ll be off. You can go to Utopia,
find your brother and father there, get rid of these two,” Mick said.

“I said
you
wouldn’t notice the
difference. I would.”

Emily sipped black tea from a china mug.
Her pale finger fondled a scarf in her lap. A figure strode in from the hall
outside her chamber. He stopped at the door, entered as she nodded, and
surveyed her quiet maple bedroom.

“Docking request from Sera of Bessel 2.
Goods to unload. Permission?”

“Of course. Magnadraw and Hoila, right?”

“So she says,” said the servant.

“Tell her to come to my chamber. I’ve
bad news to deliver.”

“Yes, Grand Governor.”

The servant abruptly left and closed the
door. Emily turned to pictures by her bed. Seven faces adorned her bureau—the
line of the Hussons: all the ones before her who’d died to earn her the right
to everlasting life, the noblest goal of a fortieth century family. A soft,
round face stared more deeply from inanimation than the others: her
grandmother. The dictum was recounted endlessly in the Faith of Energy, a
religion grounded in the pursuit of eternal life: Only a generational
commitment can secure the UCD and connections required to procure an
expancapacitor system. According to the Faith, one must trust that his great,
great, great, great, great grandchild will bear the fruit: Eternal life, and
now, Utopia, so that a reunion of familial souls may forever assemble.

Emily slipped into a daydream. She
remembered from her studies of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, the major religions
of the first, second, and third millennia, the idea of heaven: it had been the
foretaste of Utopia, man’s ambition set to mysticism because science could not
yet achieve it. The only disparity between the old mystical idea and its
fruited form stemmed from levels of accessibility. Emily sighed. The romantic
notion had been proselytized, and soothingly received by believers despite its
unscientific foundation, that death secured heaven. In that ancient model, all
people had free access to heaven, guaranteed upon their biological end.
Paradoxically, Utopia had proven that only the wealthiest gained access to
heaven. She had decided that Utopia should be for everyone, not just the
tricklers; her new mission in life was to spread her own wealth. For her rogue
desires, and rebellion against her lineage, which had allowed her the eternal
life she enjoyed, she’d been forced into exile on Bessel 9. The Coalition of
Utopia for All was her purpose: A liberal push to get more people into
paradise.
Could it still come to be: the old idea and the new one joined? A
forever reunion of familial souls for everyone?
 

A knock sounded at the door.

“Come in Samwell,” she replied.

A figure returned to her door, but it
was not Samwell; the figure was human, dressed in a spacesuit.

“Who are—” she said, but could not
finish her question. Mick fired his gun squarely at Emily’s chest. She slumped
against her bed. He walked briskly toward her, watched her eyes close, turn
off. He fired again, a different weapon. He picked her up, slung her over his
shoulder, and walked out.

“How’d it go?”

“This is her I hope,” Mick said,
striding into the Cozon’s hull bay. He gently laid the body down, half-human,
half-robot in appearance. XJ appeared startled.

“My god Mick. Your fugitive dossier said
you’d had a violent past, but I didn’t think for a moment you’d kill someone,”
XJ said.

“That’s her. And we have to get the hell
out of here,” Sera said.

“You said I don’t have a plant, so no
worries?” Mick replied.

“You don’t have a plant, but that
doesn’t mean Samwell won’t come for us. He’ll report it, then give chase
himself. But the delay is all we needed. If you’d had a plant, the alarm would
have been raised the moment she was shot. Still no worries though—Samwell’s no
pilot.”

Sera shut the bay door and raced to the
helm. Mick followed, and GR and XJ began to inspect the new creature, still
warm, lying on the cargo bay floor.

“Here he comes,” Sera said. Her wrists
twisted, fingers working in mechanical wonder. Two viewscreens displayed a
silver-blue dot chasing the Cozon.

“What kind of weaponry does he have?”
Mick asked.

“Not enough,” she said. She flipped a
cap on the throttle in her left hand, pressed a red button. The Cozon vibrated.
Two streaking plasma missiles ripped from the Cozon’s stern, through engine
fission toward Samwell’s ship.

“Missed him,” Mick reported. Sera glared
at him.

“I can see that. Take this,” she said,
putting Mick on the piloting rod. She ripped off her jacket, revealing finely
corded shoulders, and ran to the weaponry console, tapping her fingers in quick
patterns. Mick glanced to the rear viewscreen again.

“Keep your fucking eyes on the front!” she
yelled.

Who is this girl? She’s filthy. Strong.
A take-no-shit bandit.

The Cozon vibrated again—Samwell had hit
them.

“He’s trying to blow us out of the sky,”
she said.

Wouldn’t that make sense? I just stole a
planet’s worth of hardware.

“Doesn’t that idiot know we have his
Grand G?” she said.

XJ and GR walked into the room bearing
Emily Husson’s arm.

“We’ve conducted quite an experiment,
and look Mick—we’ve revived your victim!” XJ cried.

“Jesus—shut them down Mick!” Sera said.

The longevity of Christ—his names bears
the same thoughtful disdain that it bore when I was a child.

Mick yelled at the droids, unable to
look away from the front screen—they’d started to pass into Bessel 9’s wide
planetary ring of asteroids.

“I don’t know how to pilot this damned
thing—XJ, GR, help me here,” Mick called.

They dropped the arm to the floor and
Emily’s fingers began grasping at thin air.

A dogfight a thousand years in the
future. Feels about the same as it used to.

XJ took the pilot rod from Mick and
steadied the ship as an asteroid whizzed by. GR turned in circles along his
hip, his feet somehow stuck in place, confusion imitated upon his robot face.

“Got him,” Sera exclaimed. Mick looked:
exploding yellow light filled the viewscreen. Samwell’s ship was in a million
pieces, shards and vapor on trajectories away from the Bessel system.

“Poor Samwell,” XJ said.

“He was a good-for-nothing parasite,”
said Sera. “Who’s hungry?”

The Cozon crew gathered at the mess
hall. Sera drew out the giant pot and shoveled stew for her mates. Mick watched
her under the table—she’d changed into her night gown, cut high above the
knees, and her muscular thighs relaxed in front of him. He hadn’t been able to
stop thinking about how cool she’d been during the dogfight. Something about it
turned his thoughts from home.

“This haul will get us in, don’t you
think Sera?” XJ asked.

“XJ, you want to play me after dinner?”
GR asked.

“Chess?”

“No—cards tonight.”

“Always avoiding chess. You were never
much of a thinker.”

“It takes more brains to play cards than
it does to play chess. Chess is calculation—poker requires exercising human
faculties of deception, a much more CPU intensive algorithm.”

“Hah! What an outrageous claim, from a
model whom I should expect nonsense from I suppose,” XJ replied.

“The Magnadraw and Hoila will fetch
forty thousand UCD.”

“Forty thousand?” squealed XJ.

“That’s right. Enough to get us in.”

“Into Utopia? What’s it cost?” Mick
said, snapped from his fantasy.

“Thirty-five if you know who I know.”

“And five will get me a T-jump?”

“T-jumping isn’t expensive Mick. You
know why?” Sera asked.

Mick met her eyes.

“Why?”

“Because no one wants to T-jump.”

“Why not?”

“Because why would you want to leave M82
in the year fourteen? This is where everyone wants to be. You won a god damned
lottery to get here, a freak wormhole, and all you can think about is going
home, to some distant, archaic, dumber past?”

“What’s to like about fourteen in M82?
Seems as chaotic a hell as where I’m from. People killing each other, breaking
the law, trying to buy a ticket into tinfoil salvation.”

“Do you know what Utopia is?”

“Yea, a place where the rich can enjoy
eternal happiness with each other.”

“Right,” Sera replied, staring hard at
him.

“Well let me tell you, a man can find
his own peace wherever he is. And mine’s nine hundred years ago, on Earth.”

“You think you’ll find your wife and
family, start over, somehow right the wrongs of the past?”

“Yea, I do. I love my wife. I love my
boys.”

Wife, ex-wife. What’s the difference
though? Just time and place, that’s it. Nothing else. A location in spacetime.
Ex-wife, wife. This hard bitch in front of me.

“How much do you love her?” Sera asked.
She bit her lips and moved her thighs, peering into his soul.