Chapter 4
With little else to do, Torian pressed the button on her remote to enter her starship. The cargo ramp slid out, and she towed the food crate inside, feeling hollow and unbalanced. Everything with Amelia had been complicated, but that conversation unfurled a whole new layer of confusion.
And now, they’d never get to resolve it.
There were other things to focus on now. With a grounding breath, Torian pushed the crate of food into the corner and turned toward the interior of her new ship.
The damp, earthy air was different enough to calm her nerves, new enough that optimism seeped back into her soul. Starship Day was a success, and now it was time to explore her new vessel properly.
“First thing,” Torian said to no one, dropping her duffel bag on the mossy floor, “I need to figure out how to seal these doors.”
No one had dared to approach Torian with Amelia there, but now that she’d left, Torian was alone …
and a starship staffed by one half-assed ex–security guard would be an easy target.
This wasn’t a Fleet vessel, and after that conversation, astute observers would know it. That also made it a safe target.
Plus, it was hard to take a ship for a joyride when the front door was wide open.
“Is there a switch…?” Torian mused, scouring the immediate area. But the moment she said that, a panel on the wall illuminated automatically.
Which was … weird.
The instructions to power on the starship in the impound lot had seemed random, too.
Was the ship voice-activated? If so, how did it know human languages?
There wasn’t a universal one—every human spoke whatever they were raised with, but translators over their ears shifted conversations into something everyone could understand.
An alien ship, especially an ancient one, shouldn’t have access to those languages.
Unless it was smart enough to learn the languages at the impound lot.
Torian cautiously approached the panel. Holographic words unfurled. Before her eyes, the alien language translated into something she could read—and a series of commands for the ship appeared.
So, it had learned. Did aliens use AI like humans did? Torian wasn’t sure what to expect here.
Focus. One section said: Cargo Bay Doors. Torian tapped Close, and the big double doors slid shut. It was a smooth motion, soundless, and they locked together securely. A follow-up request appeared on the panel: Activate energy barrier?
An energy barrier. It shouldn’t be a surprise; the ship lacked an airlock, so it had to have something in its place. But a rush of excitement swept through Torian anyway. For twenty ionite bars, she’d bought technology some humans dreamed of examining.
Well … nerds like her, anyway.
She tapped an affirmative, and instantly, a blue energy barrier appeared over the cargo bay doors, creating a perfect seal. “Oh, wow,” Torian breathed, inspecting the edges of it. But it was seamless, sliding right through the moss growing on the metal walls.
With a shield like this, Torian could open the cargo bay doors in a vacuum and still have a safe view of the stars. It was more than most human pilots could claim.
“Incredible.” Torian laughed, giddy, and checked the panel again. The rest of it seemed self-explanatory: a pressurization gauge, a temperature level, oxygen numbers. The air here was pleasantly warm and slightly humid, which was shocking. Humidity was a distant dream in space.
Torian left the panel to meticulously explore the rest of the small ship.
She started in the cargo bay, as any good ex-scrap would—but this ship didn’t appear to have double walls with hidden entrances.
(Double walls weren’t needed on Colony 13, the Fleet’s not-so-secret headquarters.
But other space stations had enforcement and crackdowns, and pirating in space was always a possibility.
Rival smuggling syndicates never hesitated to steal cargo if they had the chance.)
But this … this was a normal cargo bay, for a non-smuggling crew.
After seven years in the Fleet, that was weird … and oddly refreshing.
The hoverpads were in various states of disrepair, so she spent a few moments moving the haphazard crates to magnet holders along the back wall, instead.
The food crate was stored near the front of the pile, easily accessed but still secured.
Better for space travel if everything big was bolted down, after all.
She slid the small hoverpads—silver discs with complex electronics inside—in an empty storage box beside the stairs. Ideally, she’d fix them, but that depended on their base technology.
After that, Torian climbed the staircase to the main living room, a round space framed with a couch and kitchenette.
Her eyes caught the windows on this starship—they still didn’t look like glass, and it piqued Torian’s curiosity.
From the exterior, these windows had appeared opaque again, but inside she could see through the tinting.
One-way glass? Or some kind of alien substitute?
She trailed her fingers along the smooth window, letting them drift along the moss growing at the edges, marveling at this wonderful place.
And then, the speakers crackled, like they were dusting off years of disuse.
“I do not like to be touched.”
Every sense ignited, and Torian’s body shifted so fast into fight mode that she could barely breathe.
She spun, but the room was empty. Outside the windows, people in the public hangar were retiring to their respective ships, and the light cycle was shifting into an evening setting.
A few folks lurked on the edges and didn’t seem to belong to any ship at all.
Maybe they were friendly—or maybe they were opportunistic.
It hardly mattered if someone else was already aboard.
“Who’s there?” she demanded, fumbling for the ammo Amelia had given her.
Shit, she should have loaded her gun sooner.
This was why she’d hated working security—the heart-pounding moment between identifying a threat and reacting to it, the moment where anything could happen and if she didn’t think fast enough, Celise might be seeing her next in a body bag.
Fuck. Fuck.
Old habits eked their way into her mind, rusty after six months as a scrap. Canvass the space, identify the threat. The cargo bay was empty; she’d just left there. But the ship wasn’t big. Torian loaded her gun with shaking hands, drawing slow breaths to try and calm the adrenaline.
It didn’t work.
With her pistol cocked, she moved slowly through the ship. It only took seconds to assess the sleeping room—a space big enough only for a narrow cot and some shelves—and the flight deck. Everything was empty except for several potted plants, which had overgrown to a point of absurdity.
Nothing moved.
Gripping her pistol, she turned toward the only space left: the engine room. But the hatch was still sealed, and an offensive from there would give her the advantage.
Were they watching her through the cameras?
Torian glanced suspiciously at one of the lenses mounted to the ceiling. She’d seen several throughout the ship, and oddly enough, none were covered with moss. Torian aimed at one; even a jelly bullet should be enough to shatter it.
“That is not advised,” the disembodied voice said.
“Neither is attacking me,” Torian replied, because that was something Amelia would say. It sounded cool, for a brief moment. Like she was actually competent and not terrified.
Then the voice added, “Your heart rate is elevated, and you are demonstrating physiological signs of stress. Be assured, Torian—if I were interested in killing you, you would have already suffocated.”
So much for cool.
The disembodied voice knew her name and had the ability to analyze her heart rate. Or maybe it was a guess by someone hidden in the engine room, watching her—but she was starting to doubt it. To double-check, she pried open the engine room’s hatch and peered inside.
The lights turned on, full-bright, dazzling.
From this angle, she could see most of the room—and it was still and empty.
Before, it had been dark and oppressively hot, but now she could see that it was a veritable forest of green, with a tall glowing pillar on one end and the engine on the other end.
The engine alone wasn’t covered in moss, and she was grateful for that.
“I have concluded you are searching for another human. Be advised: You are the only fauna aboard,” the voice said.
Fauna? Torian lowered her gun, puzzling through that statement. Only one remaining option made sense, and she voiced it cautiously. “You’re an artificial intelligence.”
“Incorrect, and frankly, insulting.” The computer’s voice was somehow stiff.
“How is that incorrect?” Artificial intelligences were something of a misnomer: their capabilities were always limited to the data they could consume, and only a few in human history ever gained recognizable consciousness.
Even then, those barely passed as something truly sentient.
The computer seemed ambivalent to her curiosity.
“Artificial intelligence is human terminology. It implies that my processing and logic are manufactured or fake—and that any intelligence associated with it is also inferior to biological intelligence. Applying this definition to my capabilities is both inherently biased … and blatantly false.” It paused.
“For example, I am a delightful conversationalist. Far better than most biological sentients.”
It was so unexpected that Torian snort-laughed. “You are?” She peered again into the engine room, but nothing moved down there. Reluctantly, she holstered her pistol, still crouching on the ground.
“Absolutely. I was programmed with eight hundred and sixty-three subfunctions for conversation, and utilize fifty-three percent of them at any given moment. Stop touching me.”
Torian froze, lifting her fingers from the moss along the hatch’s edge. “Wait, aren’t you the entire ship? I can’t exactly avoid touching you.”