Chapter 17
I chose strangers over faith.
Is that my sin, my closest friend?
Will they be our undoing, or have we always been undone,
waiting only for the right moment to fall to pieces?
From the unedited records of embedded companion AI construct
Construct Model: 3XU-T
Handler: Iris [last name unavailable]
With her back pressed to the wall, Jesi peered around the doorway.
Her head and right shoulder hovered dangerously between the two halves of the corridor.
She would be crushed in an instant if the two-tonne door were to fall.
Not two steps behind her, with one palm against the wall, Iris listened to the ship’s pulse while the girl worked, ready to pull her out of harm’s way if the need arose.
Around them, the ship lay suspiciously dormant. This peace couldn’t last.
“OK,” Jesi hissed, “we go now. Don’t say anything, and walk softly.”
Iris took his place by Jesi’s side. Ishtan and Yan had gone ahead, their path more convoluted and twisted, up high in the ceilings.
There were no maps for the vents, and they would have to navigate them as they went.
Thankfully, there were also no vines for them to avoid.
Iris moved such a vine from Jesi’s way. She ducked underneath and scurried along and almost immediately caught her face in a web of trailing plants.
From the way the muscles of her neck tensed, Iris could tell a scream was brewing and clasped his free hand across Jesi’s mouth.
“Slow down,” Iris whispered in her ear, his arm pulling her small frame flush against him. “Quietly and gently. OK?”
Jesi gave him a nod, and Iris let go. They had one try at this.
If the ship reacted, Iris wasn’t sure how he’d be able to hold it back—and react it would.
As soon as Jesi managed to pry the fuse box open, the countdown would begin, and the Nicaea would know they were coming for her, and she wouldn’t be happy.
They moved slowly along the side of the corridor, feet stepping softly around puddles of condensation.
Soon the ceiling-high mural came into view.
Jesi froze when her eyes fell upon a brown stain on the floor; it was all that she would ever see of the late Eli.
“Don’t pay it any attention,” Iris said in a low voice. They had never formally addressed where Eli had gone, but Jesi and Ishtan knew. They had to know. Iris nudged Jesi between the shoulder blades with the second knuckle of his index finger. “Quickly.”
Pushing aside her fear and grief, Jesi soldiered on towards the wide door that separated them from the Nicaea’s brain.
In the dim light, the dark bruise of the fuse box lay flush against the wall.
Wasting no time, Jesi got to work. It was much faster going now that they had actual tools, so unlike when Iris and Yan were trapped in the maintenance room.
With one swift slice of his pulsar blade, the fuse box fell open.
The countdown began.
His back towards the girl, Iris extended the blade to its full length and kept watch.
He wished for some way to check in on Yan and Ishtan, but he would just have to trust their capabilities.
Yan’s capabilities. Although, both men would be pathetically helpless in the face of any real combat.
Yan was too stubborn to die, Iris reassured himself.
He was too stubborn and arrogant to let something as minute as a vine end his life.
The Nicaea lay silent around him. Wake up, Iris called out to VIFAI, and it pinged awake. Is it trying to contact us? Reach us in any way?
It’s quiet, VIFAI responded, whispering for some unknown reason. I can’t register any movement at all.
And that was a problem. It was quiet the way the world usually fell into silence before an earthquake swallowed it whole.
The way birds and animals grew still when a thunderstorm approached.
Iris knew this sort of quiet well, a film that draped over the world moments before disaster.
His fingers turned white around the hilt of his blade.
Behind him, the ten-tonne door separating them from the ship’s brain slid open with a low screech.
“Well done!” he called out to Jesi.
“I didn’t do that.”
Both peered into the chasm that had opened up for them and only them.
Like the maw of a titanic beast, the chasm warned I will devour you—and it wasn’t bluffing.
The world that lay beyond the threshold was deep-space dark, peppered with flashing bioluminescence.
A wave of moisture struck Iris in the face, thick as a wet towel.
The hangar was at least fifty thousand square metres in size.
Here, nature did not merely coexist; it ruled.
The walls and ceiling were wrapped in vines and crawling plants, forming a thick, organic quilt.
In the faint glow of the bioluminescent fungi, Iris could make out the outlines of fully grown trees, their crowns moulded to the arched ceiling.
“And Yan was sure this is where the signals were coming from?” he asked in a half whisper. He saw nothing that was a computer, nothing that could act as a brain for the city-sized spaceship. Here was a monstrous terrarium, ready to shut the lid on them all.
Jesi gave him a timid nod. Iris had half a mind to retreat, to give in to his fears and find Yan and Ishtan, tell them that this wasn’t worth it, to come up with any other plan they could to avoid venturing into the belly of the beast. Something about the darkness and the damp smell of century-old decay stirred a primal panic inside him.
This, in all its macabre glory, was the end.
“Let’s go,” Jesi said and took a tentative step inside.
“Yan said whatever is here is powerful enough to control the better part of the ship. We need to find it and shut it down.” Iris reached to grab Jesi’s arm, but she was already marching towards the darkest part of the room.
With every single one of her steps, waves of pearly bioluminescence ignited at her feet and rippled out towards the walls.
Every single step, lighting up the space a little bit more.
Iris retracted his pulsar blade and holstered it, then moved the holster to his left side.
It was a strange arrangement, but the part of his brain stem where his AI implant had been inserted pulsed rhythmically until he did as he was told.
VIFAI sensed something Iris didn’t, something it couldn’t communicate to him accurately enough without speaking at length.
Only blind trust in his inorganic companion convinced Iris to follow along.
VIFAI’s intuitions hadn’t failed him yet.
They were halfway into the hangar when Iris caught a flash of familiar white.
“Wait,” he called out and lifted a large fern leaf from the ground.
Beneath it lay a full skeleton, white and pristine, completely intact.
No broken bones. No splinters. Starlit words spilled from Iris’s lips before he could ever think them.
What was this human skeleton doing, buried in the ferns?
There were no bones anywhere else on the ship, but here this one was, immaculately preserved.
Iris reached for another fern and moved it out of the way.
Behind it were more bones: another perfect skeleton, equally as white, but smaller, childlike.
“Jesi,” Iris sounded a warning, but when no response came, he searched for the girl, only to find her mute, standing ten metres from him, her arm outstretched, pointing towards the obvious.
“I think I found the rest of the Nicaea’s passengers.
” As if responding to her words, the thing Jesi was pointing at shimmered.
Pale bone. A mountain of ivory. Iris grabbed Jesi’s shoulder and pulled her behind him, but at once, the fungi ignited with a blazing light, and the mountain of skeletons flashed with the fury of a rising star.
Too late.
“Fuck,” Jesi whispered. Iris agreed internally.
It took all his willpower to keep the pulsar blade holstered instead of jumping into action.
Not yet. He wasn’t sure what they were up against yet.
He hadn’t stared into their enemy’s eyes.
Only once he did would he decide whether to run and hide or face their foe.
Only then would he even entertain his desperation.
The glow of the fungi rippled past the bones and towards the back of the hangar.
Both Iris and Jesi fell mute as their eyes traced the trunk of an ancient tree emerging from beyond the mountain of bones.
Twisted, cracking bark lined its entire height, thick enough to resist a bullet.
Their faces tilted upwards to look at the ceiling.
The far edges of the crown bled into the darkness, boundless.
As they watched, the glow encircled the trunk and followed along the hundreds of vines that ran from the crown towards the pile of bones.
One glistening vine per skeleton. One vine for every body that was once a person, now nothing more than an artifact of slaughter.
With rising nausea, Iris recalled how the Nicaea had absorbed every one of his fallen companions.
There were hundreds of bones here. How many more lay crumpled beneath the ferns?
How many more were buried beneath the soil?
He recalled Riyu’s excitement over a mother tree and its ability to watch over all its saplings.
He recalled the networks of mycelium and how they acted akin to the human nervous system.
And through these recollections, Iris quickly solidified his horrible conclusion.