“And when you get the drive on, can you find out what year it is, check on the cargo, maybe reach IAN from here?” Maria asked. “With everything else that’s happened, it might be nice to come back with a little bit of good news. Or improved news.”
Hiro nodded, his mouth closed as if trying to hold in something he would regret saying. Or perhaps a scream. He floated over to his pilot’s chair and strapped himself in. The console screen continued to blink bright red at him. “Thanks for that warning, IAN, we hadn’t noticed the drive was gone.”
He typed some commands and poked at the touch screen. A warning siren began to bleat through the ship, telling everyone floating in zero-g that gravity was incoming. Hiro poked at the screen a few more times, and then typed at a terminal, his face growing darker as he did so. He made some calculations and then sighed loudly, sitting back in the chair and putting his hands over his face.
“Well,” he said. “Things just got worse.”
Maria heard the grav drive come online, and the ship shuddered as the engines started rotating the five-hundred-thousand-GRT ship. She took hold of the ladder along the back wall to guide her way to the bench so she wouldn’t fall once the gravity came back.
“What now?” she said. “Are we off course?”
“We’ve apparently been in space for twenty-four years and seven months.” He paused. “And nine days.”
Maria did the math. “So it’s 2493.”
“By now we should be a little more than three light-years away from home. Far outside the event horizon of realistic communication with Earth. And we are. But we’re also twelve degrees off course.”
“That…sorry, I don’t get where the hell that is. Can you say it in maintenance-officer language?”
“We are slowing down and turning. I’m not looking forward to telling the captain,” he said, unstrapping himself from the seat. He glanced up at his own body drifting at the end of the noose like a grisly kite. “We can cut that down later.”
“What were we thinking? Why would we go off course?” Maria thought aloud as they made their way through the hallway, staying low to prepare for gravity as the ship’s rotation picked up.
“Why murder the crew, why turn off the grav drive, why spare the captain, why did I kill myself, and why did I apparently feel the need to take off one shoe before doing it?” Hiro said. “Just add it to your list, Maria. I’m pretty sure we are officially fucked, no matter what the answers are.”
Diamonds
The only part of the Dormire’s mission that hadn’t gone wrong, apparently, was the state of the cargo.
While the ship carried her skeleton crew, within the hold were two thousand humans sleeping in cryo. Within the servers in the hold were over five hundred clone mindmaps. Maria and the other five were responsible for over twenty-five hundred lives.
Maria didn’t like to dwell on the responsibility. She was just happy to hear Hiro confirm that all their passengers were still stable and that the backups were uncorrupted.
Each human and clone passenger had reasons for coming on the journey: Adventure and exploration drove many of the humans; escaping religious persecution drove many of the clones. Between the two groups, a fair number of political and corporate exiles traveled to escape jail, indentured servitude, or worse.
All of them were driven in part by the fact that the Earth was losing habitable land as the oceans rose, and territorial and water wars were breaking out worldwide. So the rich, as always, left because they could.
The reasons the crew were on the ship, however, were slightly different. Each had the simple motivation of being a criminal attempting to wipe the record clean.
Their destination, the planet Artemis, was fully habitable, a bit smaller than Earth, and seemed like paradise. It orbited Tau Ceti, in the constellation Cetus.
Maria doubted their paradise would result in humans and clones living together much better than they had on Earth, but people had rosy dreams and big ideas.
“Have you ever attempted suicide?” Hiro asked as they carried the jumpsuits and chair back to the cloning bay.
“That’s pretty personal,” Maria said, running the fingers of one hand through her long hair and grimacing at the sticky mats she encountered.
He shrugged. “You just saw my answer hanging above us. I’m pretty sure that when all of this is done, Wolfgang will decide what to do with that little detail of today’s misadventures. Earth cloning laws aren’t going to be ignored out here—they made that pretty clear before we left.”
Maria wondered about his criminal past. She sighed. “I did attempt it. Once.”
“What stopped you?” He didn’t ask if she had succeeded; if she had, she wouldn’t have had legal right to wake up her next clone.
“A friend talked me down,” she said. “Isn’t that what usually happens?”
“Wish I’d had a friend a few hours ago,” he said.
“You’d likely still be dead, just in there,” she said, pointing to the cloning bay.
“But I wouldn’t be a suicide. I think Wolfgang’s looking anywhere for someone to blame for this.”
“You’re here now. Let’s take care of the immediate problems. Then we’ll figure out what happened to us all,” Maria said.
The captain’s voice drifted down the hall, a cry of disgust.
“Whose idea was it to turn the grav drive on?” she shouted.
“Yours, Captain,” Hiro said as they entered. “You wanted to be able to stand on solid ground.”
The cloning bay still looked like a nightmare, but at least it was a nightmare under the rule of gravity. Dodging bodies and biohazardous human waste was a situation she never wanted to even think about again. Maria and Hiro had tried to prepare themselves for the new gravity-affected view of the slaughter, but the dead bodies bouncing around the floor—gravity was not yet strong enough to let them stay where they fell—turned out to nauseate them in a new way. The blood and other fluids had splattered on the floor and walls, and some on the crew themselves. Maybe Paul had been smart to want to stay in his vat.
“It was rhetorical,” she said, holding on to the wall and bracing herself on the floor. “I didn’t know it would be this bad. So what did you learn? Did you have any problems without IAN? Or could you access him from the bridge?”
“IAN is still down, Captain,” Hiro said. “Luckily for us, in the unlikely occurrence that IAN is down, the helm unlocks. Otherwise, it’s suicide. Or genocide. Is it genocide if we kill everyone on board?”
Maria winced.
“Speaking of which, all of our cryo-passengers are alive and accounted for. One bit of good news, right? Yay?” Hiro ventured a smile. Katrina didn’t return it.
The captain turned to Maria. “Give me a less chaotic report.”
Maria swallowed. “I’m not sure what Hiro did, but it didn’t take him much time to get the grav drive working again and access the nav computer and check on everything. Anyway, we have more important news.”
“Here, let me.” Hiro held out his hand and counted off his fingers. “We’ve been in space close to twenty-five years. We’re twelve degrees off course and slower than we should be going. Not to mention—”