Chapter 9 #3
“I should go,” Iris pushed out, his ears turning a deep shade of red.
“I have a lot of work to do.” He rocked to his feet and took a few, quick steps backwards.
Yan didn’t say anything. He just gave Iris a short nod and lit another cigarette.
The cargo bay suddenly seemed impossibly far away, and he couldn’t reach it fast enough.
“One last thing,” Yan called out over his shoulder. “Did you ever see what it was that attacked Ishtan?”
His hand already on the cargo bay doors, Iris froze. “I found him unconscious, but—”
“That’s not a yes.”
“He was unconscious when I found him. No need to let suspicions run wild.”
Yan chuckled. “I’m very particular about my suspicions.”
Iris slinked to cargo bay and shut the door.
Of all the people whose company he’d been in, Ishtan was the last suspect Iris would entertain.
But he was quickly learning that grasping at straws gave Yan a sense of control he so desperately needed.
They all needed some certainty in this time when each new moment brought unfathomable new dangers.
Iris too was adrift without a rudder, the ship and the company all uncharted territory. Yan more so than others.
Isn’t this a good thing? VIFAI asked, tone innocent and coy. Your engineer doesn’t hate you.
“Not my engineer.”
Iris knelt by the pile of bones and fished out what looked like a radius.
He knew bone, its texture comfortably familiar.
This particular one had fractured radially.
Dirt caked the jagged splinters, lined the cracks.
How many more unnatural deaths would Iris discover if only he dug deep enough? How much violence would he unearth?
“Did you find anything useful on generation ships before we got attacked?” Iris asked.
With a mild, induced vertigo, VIFAI uploaded all the texts.
“Read them, please, aloud,” Iris asked. He could retrieve the texts from his own memory if he wanted to.
Most monks did just that. Learning new information was too unnecessarily taxing and time-consuming when you had such a convenient alternative at your disposal.
But Iris needed a human voice, even if mildly inorganic—a safe voice.
A voice that knew when to press him and when to back down. Please, he asked again in his mind.
Seven generation ships have been identified so far. Only Ascension, docked at P’Ilani, carried any living passengers. All others passed en route.
“Any violence?”
Almost always. But never enough to wipe out the whole ship.
Most experienced complete infrastructure collapse instead.
First generation teaches second generation how to repair pipes and drain coolant, second generation slacks off, third generation doesn’t know how to repair pipes and drain coolant.
Water reclamation fails. Oxygen reclamation fails. Everyone dies.
Iris pulled another radius from the pile and placed the two side by side. If he worked diligently, he could finish assembling at least another three skeletons before he needed to rest again. “Try to sound less thrilled, please.”
No routine immunisation. Everyone dies. Hit by a meteorite. Everyone dies. Cabin fever—
“Everyone dies.” Iris picked up a child’s femur and set it aside for later. “Have you been able to recover any images from the other seven ships? Anything similar to the murals we’ve seen?”
VIFAI played two descending pitches—negative. We don’t have anything on hand, and I can’t go to the feed for more.
Any records of early AI systems being discovered on any of the ships? The question formed itself in his mind before Iris could fully comprehend what he was implying.
Again, two descending pitches.
In theory, could there have been early AI systems?
Ask your engineer, VIFAI laughed and blipped out of their chat before Iris could chastise it.
Then the Nicaea was special. Unremarkable when it came to the survival of her crew, but perhaps unique in how they perished.
Iris couldn’t stop fidgeting with the fractured radius before him.
Radial fractures were never accidental; they required someone to deliberately twist the bone, hard, to hold out against struggle.
Bullet wounds to the head were also deliberate.
And there was the matter of the very lack of bones throughout the rest of the ship.
There had been violence, and Iris had no stomach for it.
Naturally, to quell his unease, he ventured to sit with the most violent thing he could conjure in recent memory.
By the time Iris squeezed through the crack in the cargo bay door, Yan had already packed up his things and gone, and the corridor was engulfed in a familiar, ear-ringing silence.
A few minutes of walking, creeping around corners, and Iris found Ordan’s body exactly where he had left it.
In the space of a day, the ship had wrapped itself around Ordan with vines and fragile tendrils, and erected a cradle, lifting the body from the floor almost a metre.
White, bioluminescent fungi peered through the blanket, and in their dim, blue glow, Iris saw he was not alone.
The second station security guard stood over the body, head bowed.
At the sound of Iris’s footsteps, he jerked away and around, only to sigh with relief.
“I thought something was coming to end me,” he said with a stiff smile.
Not this time. Iris gave him a deep bow.
“You’re doing well, considering the shape they dragged you in.”
Iris nodded, choosing to overlook the guard’s placid tone. Yes, yes, it was only through the efforts of others that he was standing here now and had not bled out completely.
“You kept on fighting Yan, muttering something about being attacked by vines or some other nonsense. Kept on saying the ship was alive.”
A cold sweat broke out along Iris’s neck.
Flashbulb memories of the rushing vines grabbing at his ankles returned to him in painstaking detail.
But the attacking vines were physically impossible.
Iris was familiar with the internal structures of many living things, and no plant possessed the necessary musculature that would allow it to move like the ones on deck three had.
Memory was a lying thing. The more one remembered, the more they created images out of nothing.
Vines, yes, he remembered them, but whether those vines actually existed was unknown.
He remembered Ishtan as unconscious, but was he really that way when Iris found him?
After the injuries and the blood loss, Iris’s memory was murkier than usual.
We could have both hallucinated it.
We didn’t hallucinate the wound.
The wound pulsed in acknowledgement of its realness.
Taking a step forwards, Iris joined the guard at a respectable distance and observed the body.
Muffled by the vines twisting along the walls and the moss on the floor, the room lay in twilight stillness.
Only the sound of dripping water echoed from an unseen place above.
“I must have had quite a knock to the head,” Iris finally said.
The guard shrugged. “Either way, it would be nice to know if the thing that mangled your shoulder is the same thing that ended Ordan.” He turned to walk away.
Ordan. Names. Iris had been so preoccupied with self-pity that he had again almost forgotten to ask the guard for his name.
“What do I call you?” he asked, his words rushing.
“I never got to ask Ordan for his name before he passed. I should have asked much sooner, but—” I don’t want to make the same mistake.
“Eli. It’s Eli.”
At the mention of his name, every feature, from Eli’s light brown skin to the dark curls around his face, the faint blue eyes, and the asymmetrical curve of his nose, joined together into a single identity, one that Iris would carry with him for the remainder of his life. I won’t make the same mistake.
“Yan suspects Ordan was killed by someone who wants the ship more than the academics want it,” Iris blurted out before reason could tell him otherwise. “He thinks Ordan was shot. He’s not ruling out that it was by you.”
You’re terrible at keeping secrets. VIFAI gave Iris a mild shock through the brain stem.
He should know what’s said behind his back.
Eli scoffed lightly, a smirk tugging at his lips. “Yan wouldn’t know a bullet wound if it was in his own chest. He can check my gun if he’s so inclined. I haven’t fired a single shot since we’ve been aboard. He’ll need to find a different scapegoat.”
Yan was quickly on his way to locating such a person.
“You won’t defend your innocence?”
“What’s the use? Yan would talk circles around me, turn the others against me. I won’t give him the satisfaction. He can suspect what he wants. Doesn’t change our situation. Doesn’t change the facts.”
“And what are those?”
“It wasn’t a bullet wound in Ordan’s chest.”
The memories of Ordan’s bloodied chest superimposed themselves over the vines Iris wasn’t sure he had battled. The vines were everywhere on the ship. If they could truly move, what stopped a bundle from piercing a human body? Anything could be a weapon if it accelerated fast enough.
Iris gave Eli a deep bow, ending the conversation, feeling poorly prepared to continue discussing the potential of killer vines.
But instead of leaving, Eli hovered around, half turned towards the door.
At last, he committed and faced Iris. “This may be a strange request. Ordan wasn’t Starlit, but given the circumstances, can you say a few things?
Like a prayer? It’s awfully creepy here, and—”