Hiro had just forced Wolfgang to ally with the captain. Damn him.
“We’re on a ship of criminals.” The captain sighed and sat back. Her face had the look of a twenty-year-old woman, but dark smudges had appeared under her eyes, and the worry inside them reflected decades of experience. “It looks like we might have more than one murderer. And why did it happen twenty-five years into the mission? If the person had wanted to sabotage the ship, why not do it right away? We’ve been a crew that has presumably worked together for decades. What did we do wrong to bring all of it down?”
“After all I’ve been through, to be damned to die in deep space, with nothing to show for our mission but some floating blood and vomit,” Wolfgang said.
Katrina’s mouth twisted in a wry smile. “You don’t have the market cornered on difficult lives. Maybe that’s what Hiro was thinking when he hanged himself.”
“Do you think he did it?” Wolfgang said. “We need to still follow the Codicils even in space. We wouldn’t have been able to wake a new Hiro if we knew that’s what happened.”
Katrina snorted. “I think there are several laws to worry about ahead of a suicide. Anyway, the Codicils were made because the humans couldn’t handle us having lives they couldn’t comprehend. Why keep with their laws now that we’re free?”
“I find many things wrong with that statement. But that is a debate for a time of less chaos,” Wolfgang said. “Still—we will debate it. Some terrible things happened to force those Codicils into practice. I have some history texts to show you.”
“Back to the matter at hand. You will work with Joanna to get the criminal pasts of each clone. I will work with the techies to fix our cloning tech.”
“Can we trust them?” Wolfgang asked, waving his hand to indicate the rest of the ship.
“We don’t have a choice. We need to stay alive. When we figure things out, then we can have the luxury of accusing people.”
“You accused me ten minutes ago,” he reminded her.
“And you rightly talked me out of it,” she said, smiling slightly and sticking out her hand. “Lucky for you. For now, truce.”
He looked at the hand and remembered everything it had done over the years. He thought about the future, then, and what it would take to survive it. With distaste, he shook it.
The grisly reminder of his failure hung above Hiro’s head. He refused to look up or acknowledge it until Wolfgang got there. The ship was still accelerating and getting back on course, to his relief. He began studying the readout at the pilot’s terminal. It wasn’t telling him much, only the newest information that had come in the past hour.
He wished he could figure out who accessed navigation to throw the ship off course. But with no log files, they were out of luck.
Wolfgang entered the helm. “What’s your status?”
“Same old,” he said. “Just making sure we’re still on course. Haven’t figured out anything else. Do—do you need help with the body?”
“No,” Wolfgang said. He had already climbed the ladder to the bench and was unclipping the carabiner that held the cable in place. Hiro’s body fell, landing with a soft thump on the floor. Hiro tried not to look at his purple, bulging face. His eyes landed instead on the boot, discarded in the corner.
Wolfgang saw where he was looking. “Why do you think that happened?” he asked.
Hiro shrugged. “I lace my boots tightly. It’s not as if I could have kicked them off in death throes.”
“It looks like you died first,” Wolfgang said, pushing himself off the bench to land lightly beside the body. “Add it to the pile.”
“That’s clever of you,” Hiro heard himself say. “Considering that all the poor bastards in the bay are cut up and couldn’t have come out here to hang me after they all conveniently died.”
Wolfgang had bent to pick up the body, but he slowed. “I don’t think you understand the weight of this situation. Otherwise you wouldn’t be so flip.”
Hiro shrugged. “We probably all got really mad at each other. The scientists who made this thing worried that it would be hard living together for so long.”
“This is too big for a crime of passion anyway. Too many variables.”
“Maybe one of us has complicated passions,” Hiro said, writing a note on a tablet he had retrieved from the middle of the floor. “You never know. And you probably will never know.”
“If you’re not going to help, then at least stay quiet,” Wolfgang said, lifting the body easily.
“You’ve got it taken care of; go solve your crimes, genius,” Hiro said. He bet himself he could get Wolfgang to hit him. And then things would get fun. He opened his mouth to mention what he had heard in the helm, but Wolfgang’s long-fingered hand closed around his jaw and he made a startled erk noise.
“Shut the fuck up and do your job,” Wolfgang said, and he left the bridge.
“Maybe you shouldn’t leave me alone?” he called after Wolfgang. “I could snap and go a-murdering if left by my lonesome!”
Hiro bit his tongue sharply on the left side. The pain was shocking, terrific, and the taste of blood filled his mouth. He knew from experience that he was actually bleeding very little, despite the overwhelmingly copper taste. The desire to bait Wolfgang left him, and he sat in shame, reading the navigation charts.
The problem with this job was that IAN was meant to handle the Dormire. It was a lot easier just to have the computer drive the ship and not let pesky things like human error mess with it. But as the higher-ups dealt with the important life-threatening mysteries, like how they were going to make new clones for the next time someone went on a murderous spree, Hiro wanted to know where they were supposed to be going when they headed off course. A course correction of this magnitude would have to be planned.
He guessed that this was the captain’s problem. Well, it was a problem for all of them, but it was the captain’s job to make the decisions on how to handle it. Hiro checked the solar sail and made sure it was focused in the right direction for maximum radiation soakage. It was. He checked their trajectory. They were doing fine.
Maybe I can do this job without the AI.
He began to get a terrible thought in his head, but he squashed it, as he often did his terrible thoughts. People usually didn’t like Hiro when he thought terrible thoughts. And Hiro didn’t like it when people didn’t like him.
They’d been slowing down and turning toward something. Or away from something. A generational starship with the hopes and dreams of thousands of humans and clones and they were going…somewhere new.