Apex Magazine Issue 34 by Richard Bowes Mari Ness Jay Lake Julia Rios

Author:Richard Bowes, Mari Ness, Jay Lake, Julia Rios
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Apex Publications
Published: 2012-03-06T00:31:10+00:00

We trudged across the dry crystal beds, gravel washed down from the distant cliffs. They smelled like talcum, with the astringent overlay of this world’s native organics, stirred by the hot winds to a sort of dehydrated atmospheric soup which would eventually damage our lungs if breathed too long. The sun glinted hot, mauve steel in the sky, hiding the mysterious Ray Gun somewhere behind its glare.

Ray Gun had to be inhabiting Broken Spear’s missing command section. I glanced upward, shading my eyes from the daystar’s killing brilliance. Where was she?

It.

Of course. Ray Gun was an “it.”

“Deckard,” I said, picking my way past a shining bush that resembled a fan of coral rendered by a drunken glassblower. “Did Broken Spear have onboard AI support?” Intelligence-boosted systems went in and out of fashion over the decades in a sort of endless tug-of-war between the inherent instability of such self-aware entities, prone to mental collapse after a brief, hot life-cycle, and the high value of an intelligence not subject to the disorientations of supraluminal travel nor the stresses of high acceleration.

“Depends,” puffed my engineer.

“Depends on what?” asked Beaumont nastily.

I heard Deckard grunt, almost as if struck, but he could take care of himself. He chose the high road: “On whether she was pre- or post-Yankelov Act. Her ship class originally did, but there was a refit wave after the AI regs changed, right around the time Broken Spear was lost.”

I thought that over. “So Ray Gun might be Lehr’s ship’s systems. All alone up there in orbit all these years.”

“Crazy as an oxygen miner three days after a comet claim,” said Marley.

“Indeed. And one of Lehr’s daughters.”

“Maybe Cathar’s the other one,” Heminge said.

A stranger stepped from behind a pillar of stacked rubble and glittering silica. “Cathar is a traitor,” he declared.

Heminge and Beaumont both drew their weapons. I kept my own hands away from my holstered pistol and the swift death it could deal like the sword of justice. This was not my courtroom. Instead, I studied the stranger as he studied me, ignoring the armed threat my men presented.

He was whipcord thin, naked as the landscape and much like the sullen world around us covered with white dust that sparkled and flecked as he moved. That coating matched the sparse, silvered hair upon his head and about his shriveled penis, and the thousand-kilometer stare in his eyes, which seemed to bore right through me from beneath his hooded brows. Here was a man who looked across years, and bore their wounds upon his body. I could count his ribs, and the cords on his neck twitched as he spoke. He was no better armed than the wind.

“Another one rises from the earth,” I said mildly. “Of the crew?”

“Lieutenant Fishman,” he replied. His voice was as cracked as his skin, also a thing of this world. What this place had done to people, I thought. He raised his hands. “You should go. Before Granny Rail finds you.”

“Surely you mean Ray Gun?”

“No.” He laughed, a mirthless chuckle dry as an old bone.

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