Things Fall Apart: Chapter 12, Part 2

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PO Sipho Mxenge's last really coherent memory was alarm klaxons, and being hustled off to an escape pod.

No. Now that she was thinking about it, that was really the first incoherent memory. The beginning of chaos, uncertainty, uncountable kiloseconds in darkness, and finally, blessed unconsciousness.

Only now, she was awake.

Not well. She doubted she'd ever feel well again. But she was definitely awake. The bed beneath her had solidity. All her senses except sight were engaged.

Finally, carefully, she opened her eyes.

She was in a starship's cabin. It was not a sickbay, per se, but despite that all she saw was the ceiling, it was so much like the ceiling in her old quarters on Almaty that she wondered if all the chaos had been nightmare.

But no. Her returning senses included pain on a comprehensive level. She had been battered, first by wild G-forces, then by hurling herself against various electronic fixtures to ensure no trace of the madness that had overtaken Almaty's systems had followed them.

She remembered, now, having woken up in this room before. She had been querulous, almost delirious, so even that was a jumble of chaos in her mind, but she remembered another PO—not a medtech, but with a chop that showed she was first-aid trained at least, had soothed her back to sleep.

Sipho did not feel like she was awaking from sedation, this time. She felt about as lucid as her circumstances would probably allow. And so, she dared to turn her head to see her surroundings.

Yes, this was the same room. The two other survivors, Li Chunxia and Gordon Debenham, or so she thought she remembered from her previous awakening, were still asleep. She herself was no medtech, but the displays looked stable. Physically, at least, they were also recovering.

She looked the other way, still not quite daring to sit up or anything more than move her head, and saw a man sitting in the chair near her bed. He didn't look like he was waiting for her, in particular. Honestly, he just looked...tired. Profoundly tired. He was staring at a data pad, and not really paying attention. He had a chief's insignia on his sleeve, and the badge that said that he was an actual medical professional, a nurse.

Before she could think of how she might get his attention—being out of practice with such social niceties like actually talking to anybody, he noticed she was looking at him.

He smiled. It was a sad, weary smile, but a genuine one. "I figured you'd probably wake up, soon. I'm Chief Kasel, acting medical officer, Bellerophon."

Acting...what now? He wasn't an officer, any more than she was. His chop implied nurse, not doctor. How...?

Shit.

He chuckled despite himself, and she realized she'd said that last part aloud. And so the first words she'd actively chosen to speak in at least a megasecond were an apology. "I'm sorry, Chief. PO Mxenge, Almaty. I was just...I realized...I..."

"Yes?"

"It happened to you, too, didn't it?"

He nodded. "If by 'it', you mean most of the AIs in our network went berserk and tried to scuttle the ship, then, yes."

"How...how did..." Words were hard. Maybe she wasn't as awake as she thought?

"As near as we've been able to piece together, a combination of paranoia on the part of our late XO, and the fact that certain AI personality templates are immune. I don't entirely understand the details, even what details we have, but 'immunity by accident' I understand."

She nodded. A moment later, the door opened, and a woman wearing lieutenant's bars, but the skipper's braid, came in, almost breathless. Sure enough, the man—Kasel—addressed her. "Skipper, here is PO Sipho Mxenge." He managed her surname credibly. This was a man who paid attention. "PO, here is Lieutenant—"

"Singer," Sipho said, pleasantly surprised she recognized the other woman. Words, however, were still hard. "Vespa" was all she could think to say.

If Kasel's smile had been weary, but kind, Singer's was almost radiant. "Sipho. I remember." She turned to Kasel to explain. "I was a snot-nose middie!"

Sipho felt herself smiling back, also a real smile, although she had no idea how it looked. "And I was a green crewperson afraid I'd get space sick!"

Their shifts had aligned, and somehow, despite being officer-in-training and crewperson, they had wound up taking their meals together often. They'd become friends. Not Sipho's first in the service, but she'd always gotten the impression that she'd been Singer's. Singer was likeable, but insisted she made friends only with difficulty. Sipho had taken that for a challenge, but it really hadn't taken much.

This was not, however, a time for reminisce. Sipho concentrated, and hoped she didn't look angry or sad or anything as the smile faded. But she needed words, right now.

"I...I'm probably in no shape to hear everything that's happening...but...how much trouble are we in?"

That last came easy. It had become a byword between them, on Vespa. They had, again despite the differences in their "stations", gotten into several shenanigans.

It won another smile, this one wan, from Singer. "So much trouble that we don't even know how much trouble. We'll be surfacing at New Norfolk in about 4000 seconds."

That begged a question. One she wasn't sure she wanted answered, but she asked anyway. "How...how long?"

"It's been about 5 megaseconds since the incident, for us."

PO Mxenge, logistics officer's mate, was suddenly very alert.

"Five megs...and nobody came for us...or for you...or...FUCK!"

She remembered that she was speaking in the presence of the ship's bosun and skipper, then, and amended, "Sorry, Skipper, but...what are we expecting to find?!"

There was no reprimand on either face as Singer said, "We are...well, I am, trying not to have any expectations at all. It's not easy. The whole story, or even the part we think we know right now, is more than you need in your condition. But, you've also correctly discerned the direst part. The TC-buoy network appears to be down; we've had no contact; and the only intact ship we've encountered was a civilian yacht that had suffered an unrelated engineering problem and been adrift since—"

"—because nobody heard their distress call. Oh, hell, Elyah. We are truly humped, aren't we!"

It was not really a question.

If Singer thought this mode of address was beneath her current dignity, she still wasn't showing it. She just nodded.

Meanwhile, from another one of the beds came the weak complaint, "How's a man supposed to die in peace with all that racket?"

Sipho sat up, suddenly, ignoring the spinning head, and said, "Gordon!"

"Present! I'm not sure how, and I'm not sure I want to be, but present!"

The man gingerly raised himself up on his elbows, noted the two ambulatory people in the room, and addressed himself to Singer. "Ensign Gordon Debenham, junior logistics officer, Almaty, ma'am."

"Lieutenant Elyah Singer, acting commanding officer, Bellerophon."

Debenham nodded weakly. "I heard most of the conversation." He addressed himself to Mxenge, "PO, didn't anyone ever teach you not to swear in front of lieutenants?"

Sipho was almost giddy with relief that another of her friends, her crewmates, was a live. Despite her weariness, she managed to feign turning up her nose as she responded, "It was a special occasion."

Debenham snorted, then returned his attention to Singer. "How many of us were you able to rescue, ma'am?"

"Yours was the only pod we found intact, Ensign. Lieutenant Wilder—"

"—was dead megs ago, yeah." Then, "Sorry, ma'am. Didn't mean to interrupt."

Singer smiled wryly, apparently willing to extend at least some of her tolerance for her old friend Sipho to Sipho's shipmate. "Protocol is kind of a mess right now, Ensign. But yes, she died of electrical trauma. In addition, PO Li, I'm told, was mostly dead when we opened your pod."

Sipho exclaimed, "Mostly dead?!"

Kasel responded, "Slightly alive. We're not sure yet what will come of it, but most of the tests we've been able to run suggest she'll actually recover."

Almost on cue, there came a whisper from the third bed. "It's not nice to talk about the mostly dead as if they're not in the room."

"Chunxia!" Sipho exclaimed.

"Absent!" came the whispered response.

Debenham shook his head, and said, "Lieutenant Singer, I present PO Li Chunxia, logistics officer's mate, or the ghost thereof."

A hand weakly raised from the covers and wiggled its fingers in Singer's general direction.

Singer spoke next with a bit of actual authority in her voice. "Ensign, I have only one question, right now, because I suspect—I hope—there will be someone I need to file reports with when we arrive, and yours will need to be a part of it. The one part I need right now is this: if you remember, how did you get off Almaty?"

Debenham looked grim, but nodded. "Our version of Chef was still sane. We're logistics officers. He did everything short of replicating a body for himself and shoving us toward an escape pod, and told us to disable everything we could, just in case."

Singer and Kasel exchanged a look. Then Singer said, "That fits with what we know. Our Chef was one of three surviving AIs. The three of them managed to set up a containment around the exploding reactor, and keep the other reactor from going critical at all."

Debenham nodded slowly, clearly thinking that through, then looked intently at Singer and said. "Two points make a line."

Singer seemed to catch his gist, "Which, as Karenski would say, doesn't tell us an entire shape. But it suggests there's a shape to be discovered."

Sipho had no idea who Karenski was, but the name was significant, clearly.

Debenham redirected his attention to Kasel. "Chief, how soon before we're fit for duty?"

"Not any time in the next 3900 seconds, Ensign, nor for several kiloseconds after, no matter what we find. You'll get whatever news we discover from the comfort of this room. I've been doing what I can to get your bodies back in some kind of shape, but between your time in the pod and your time in bed, none of you are in shape to so much as walk to the head by yourselves."

Sipho interjected, "Oh, you had to say that."

"PO?"

"Now I have to pee."

Singer smiled again at her, a worried smile this time. "Chief, I'm going to leave these three in your care, again. I've got a few paragraphs to add to my report, assuming there's anyone to receive it."

Kasel replied, "I'll get Renata in here to give me a hand. Good shift, Skipper."

The others, even PO Li, echoed Kasel. Singer gave Sipho one last smile, and went out.

PO Sipho Mxenge was still smiling when Renata Begley, who turned out to be the PO she'd met when she woke up the first time, arrived with a chair to wheel her to the head.

Everything might be going to hell, but somehow, one of her favorite people had survived.

She'd always thought maybe hell wouldn't be so bad, if at least your friends were there with you.

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