Chapter 3

Chapter 3

I don’t know if there’s going to be another warbot. It seems unlikely, but it’s not impossible. The previous warbot would have reported its departure location, so if anyone’s going to now come looking for me, I shouldn’t stay here. I give myself a few minutes to recover, with Sheep beside me, and then I crouch and get to my aching feet.

I creep to the water’s edge, and wait for clouds to move past the moon so I can have some scant light as I try again to ford the river.

My bag is long gone, so crossing is easier this time. Sheep huffs in protest, but swims ably alongside me. We’re soon at the far edge.

Something unnatural catches the moon’s light before the clouds cover it over. I make my way to it in the blackness, worried I’m about to discover Ambrose’s vaporized body. But it’s not him. It’s his backpack.

I take it up into my hands, sling it over my shoulders, and hitch it tight. I now have a change of clothes that are too slim to fit, but also some food and maybe a tool or two. Since my own supplies are long gone, whatever is in this pack is better than nothing. “Come on, Sheep, let’s go,” I whisper, and find a pathway in the open spaces between the trees.

Sheep and I have been hiking for maybe half an hour when we come upon an old park service shelter, really just a roof with two remaining walls, the far corner sagging against its one splintered support. My chilled body is racked with shivers, my muscles cramping—this shelter couldn’t have come too soon. The wood around us is too wet to light, and I don’t have the energy to gather kindling anyway. I sit on the slimy floor of the structure and rummage through Ambrose’s bag, resorting to feel when vision fails, like a raccoon sifting through a tree hollow.

I find a heat stick and break it, and I hold it in my lap, drawing warmth from the chemical reaction of something that produces no light. I used heat sticks back in training exercises, and I’ve never quite gotten used to them. But the warmth helps calm my tremors, so I’m grateful for it now.

I’m also grateful for Sheep’s body beside mine. She was shivering, too, without her coat of wool, but she calms with the radiant heat.

My eyes close and reopen. It’s sort of a blink, and it’s sort of something heavier. I try to stay awake.

“Kodiak,” a voice I know says. A hand is shaking my shoulder. It feels familiar.

“Li Qiang,” I say. I tilt my head so the hand is between my cheek and shoulder, so I can caress it, so I can feel its warmth. It’s been so long.

“No,” says the voice. “Wake up, Kodiak.”

My eyes flip open. Long lashes, freckles peppered across brown cheekbones, dark eyes. It’s Ambrose.

I want to dash to my feet, but my body is too exhausted. “It’s you,” I say. “I have your backpack.”

“Yes, I noticed,” Ambrose says.

For its own inexplicable reasons, my heart surges. I fail to speak.

“I followed your directions,” Ambrose says wryly. “They were good directions.”

“And the warbot, you saw...,” I sputter.

“Yes, it left,” Ambrose says. “Good news for us.” But his voice doesn’t make it sound like good news, not at all.

“You’re alive. How... did you find me?” I ask, interrupted by Sheep crankily butting her head against my ribs. I stroke her scabby skin.

“It’s more like how did you know this is where I was heading,” Ambrose says. “It’s the only shelter on the map in this direction.”

“—and therefore the trail I was on led me right past it,” I say. “All perfectly logical.”

“How did you survive?” Ambrose asks.

“I drifted in the current as far as I could, and when the warbot finally got close, it stopped. Its transport arrived and picked it up.”

“Yes, that’s what I saw, too,” Ambrose says grimly.

“Why is that bad news?” I ask. “We’re alive.”

“Because there’s no good reason for them to call off hunting me, except that it’s not necessary anymore.”

“Not necessary anymore? What does that mean?”

Ambrose squeezes my arm.

Ah. I see. The world has greater things to worry about.

The war has escalated yet again. The Fédération military either needs the warbot to win a conflict elsewhere, or can’t risk keeping it here. Where we are.

“I think I get it now,” I say, sitting up.

“I suspect no one’s going to be worrying about you and me for a very long time,” Ambrose says.

“Even so, we should be careful,” I say, taking a moment to focus so I won’t betray that I’m shivering. “I won’t be able to sleep for a while, so I’ll take the first watch.”

“Actually,” Ambrose says. He unloads his pack, then tests whether the rotten bench in the shelter will give way before resting his weight on it. “I brought WakeSleep up from Mari.”

“WakeSleep?” I ask. “What’s that?”

Ambrose gets a head-of-the-class tone to his voice that I’m starting to recognize. “Natural sleep shuts down higher cognitive functions so your memories can be pruned down to what’s useful while your muscles rest. WakeSleep cycles your individual sleep stages, but without the loss of consciousness. You’re asleep, but also awake the whole time. Parts of your brain flicker in and out, but you can think and look and process and still come out totally rested after a few hours.”

“Which means we can both be on watch,” I say.

“We could even try to march onward,” Ambrose says. “But we’d be moving like we’d had a bottle of PepsiRum each, so maybe that’s not the wisest idea.”

I look suspiciously at the silver packet Ambrose shakes in the air. “Since you rescued my pack it means we have perimeter triggers, too,” he continues. “I’ll place them around the shelter, and they’ll give us a hundred-meter warning if another warbot or a human or even a big animal approaches.”

I nod, impressed. “You have some plans.”

“I didn’t arrive here totally unprepared, no,” Ambrose says. He grins and looks down at his body, still soaked and streaked with mud from the river crossing. “Despite appearances.”

He pulls two foil packets out of his bag and lets me pick one. I didn’t think he would poison me, but I still appreciate the gesture.

I open the packet, pour the powder into my mouth, and quaff it with water from Ambrose’s canteen.

“There’s another nice bonus to WakeSleep,” Ambrose says, watching me swallow. “It’s got a meal’s worth of calories in it, too.”

Once we’ve placed the perimeter alarms, we sit around the heat stick. Ambrose and I are wide awake, but Sheep is already snoring in the corner of the two remaining walls. Ambrose’s bag is packed and ready. We have nothing to do until dawn but to listen for the perimeter alarms.

And maybe talk about what we discovered from the trial of Devon Mujaba.

As my eyes adjust to the semidarkness, Ambrose’s outline comes into fuller focus. He rubs his neck. “Did you... what did you know about the sabotage?”

“I had no idea the sabotage was happening,” Ambrose says. “I thought we were recording a reel that would reveal the truth to the world. But Devon Mujaba used me as a cover to do his own work.”

“So you didn’t modify any of the protozygotes yourself?” I ask him.

Ambrose looks around before answering. I only know because the moonlight on his eyes flashes with the movement of his dark irises. The earth starts to spin under my body; probably an effect of the WakeSleep. Ambrose said taking it was a good idea, but I feel drunk and I don’t like it. If we survive to camp another night, I won’t be taking any more of this drug.

“Of course I didn’t,” he says. “But here’s what I know from my studies: it is possible to make crude changes to the development of the amygdala. It’s perfectly feasible someone could plant a virus to roam through the zygotes’ DNA while they’re dormant, making alterations that will turn them aggressive. The zygote would seem perfectly viable initially and pass inspection by mission control, but then be altered over the voyage, outside the purview of OS. A sort of timed detonation.”

I think about Ambrose’s words. This means the young colonists... could turn on their parents and siblings, might destroy the fledgling civilization they’d begun to create?

I know that idea should be harrowing. But it is so abstract... so far away and so far in the future. What are the chances that the Coordinated Endeavor will even make it to Sagittarion Bb? This betrayal is unpleasant to consider, but it’s not really going to happen to me. Or only sort of to me. I’m confused by it. Maybe this is all part of the WakeSleep, too. I’m hating the effect of it still, but also—I can see why Ambrose would consider this drug pleasurable. Here I am, untroubled by something that I know, distantly, should be worrying me.

“Why wouldn’t Devon just make the zygotes unviable from the start?” I ask. “Instead of having them slowly turn aggressive?”

“He might have done that, too,” Ambrose says. “The hormonal triggers could be a second-stage fail-safe. Cusk scientists would be checking and double-checking everything, but altered development of the amygdala postpuberty, by a virus so tiny it’s virtually undetectable? There’s a chance they aren’t going that deep into the DNA of every protozygote to find a few hundred thousand unusual base pairs of the virus, that they were just confirming overall viability and then washing their hands.”

“And the zygotes are behind that gray portal, as Devon said,” I say. “Nothing the OS can access en route.”

“If the war has really gotten so hot that they recalled the warbot, misson control might not even be actively supporting this mission at all anymore. The colonists might have been on their own ever since launch, and will be for tens of thousands of years.”

How awful. Still an abstract kind—it thinks awful instead of feels awful. All the same, my body is newly chilled. I creep closer to the heat stick. Ambrose does, too, bringing our knees to touch. I try to use words to work through what I’m thinking, like Ambrose would. It’s strange and a little frightening, to start a sentence that I don’t already know the end to. “What you are saying is that... somewhere in the distant future, we’ll have settled a colony and the young colonists will turn on us. And Devon will have made that happen.”

“Yes,” Ambrose says. “And he used me to do so.”

“But you were willing to ruin the whole mission,” I say. “You wanted to scrub the launch with that missive.”

Ambrose sighs. “Yes. It was fine to me if the exocolony never began, but if it did, I’d want our selves to have their best shot at a good life. I take it you refused to let Devon Mujaba record you speaking out against the colonization?”

“Yes, I refused at first,” I say. “I wanted time to think. He was going to return here to try to coax me to start. I was... less trusting of his motives than you were.”

“And for good reason, it turns out,” Ambrose says with a sardonic smile.

Seconds tick by. I struggle against the unnatural calmness of my mind.

Ambrose puts his head in his hands. When he looks back at me, there is steel in his expression. “To be honest, I get where Devon Mujaba is coming from. Now that our countries are fully at war, which could finally be the end stage of human civilization that the pundits have so long predicted, now that we’ve seen the extinction of virtually all vertebrate sea life and the misery of the animals that remain on land... compared to that, what does the suffering of a small colony on an exoplanet matter, so far in the future and so far away? Comparatively nothing. Not compared to the threat we humans represent to every other species that has been unlucky enough to encounter us. Maybe humanity is a scourge, and ought to be stopped, which means Sagittarion Bb should fail. We should fail.”

After everything that our countries have done in our names, I can understand Devon’s thinking, too. We can’t trust that this mission won’t wreck devastation on one world, then spread to yet another. The lives of individual humans seem small in the face of that. All the same, I’m also desperate for this sabotage not to be true. It might feel only distant and abstract, but it’s still horrible to think that our future selves might have fought hard to form a colony, only to find their fellows turning on them, one by one. “Ambrose,” I say carefully, “do you think humanity is a blight?”

His lips purse in the moonlight, while he looks at me. He takes my hand. I pull it away. I miss his touch as soon as it’s gone. “I did think so,” he says. “Not as fervently as Devon or my classmate Sri, but when I found out what had been done to my clones, I was ready to burn everything down. Though now... after getting to know you a little, knowing the man that I would be settling the colony with, it all began to feel more real. I don’t want to stop them, to stop us.”

His eyes gleam. “It’s all got me feeling a little emotional,” Ambrose continues.

“I can see that.”

“So what do we do?” He pauses. “And why did Devon Mujaba risk everything to—”

A sound from the woods. I hold my hand up to interrupt Ambrose, cock my head.

We go quiet. “I don’t think that was anything,” I say. “Except an owl, maybe.”

In the quiet, Ambrose put his hand back on mine. It feels a thrilling kind of dangerous. I’ve always felt that my personality is missing some piece that makes people want to be with me. I’ve had plenty of ryad in my life, but they just wanted to grapple with my body for a while. They didn’t actually want to be with Kodiak Celius. This hand on mine is taking away the serenity I escaped to Old Scotland to achieve. And yet—perhaps this is the WakeSleep—I do not pull my hand away this time.

I lose myself in the sight of our hands. There was something I wanted to ask Ambrose, but I can’t remember it now. I wish he had told me that the WakeSleep would have this unexpected effect. I’m feeling things close-up that I usually keep at a far distance. When I look up from our hands, I see Ambrose staring at me. “Are you okay, Kodiak?” he asks.

“This WakeSleep is more powerful than you said,” I reply.

Ambrose chuckles. “You’re just new to it. You haven’t seen anything if you think this is intense.”

“I think I have... less tolerance than you for mind-altering substances,” I say huskily. “What do we do while we wait for the dawn?”

Ambrose looks down at the ground before looking back at me. “I guess we talk.”

It’s not the first way of spending time that comes to mind, but I don’t know him well enough yet to propose what I’m really thinking. To give up that power.