Providence - Max Barry Page 0,17

and Anders’s pants had followed. She was seeing Anders on a regular basis already and plainly that would have to continue. Right now he was draped across the sofa in Rec-2 because apparently he’d taken a nap in the middle of a day shift. He’d wanted to meet in his cabin but with Anders it was wise to maintain barriers.

“How?” she said. There was no table and she had to keep her arms folded, not something she normally did. She was usually open for business, physiologically speaking, like a good Life Officer.

“You told Gilly to hang with me instead of doing his duties. Now he’s wondering why you think his work doesn’t matter.”

“Oh,” she said. “Damn.” In the interests of crew health and morale, a certain key fact had been concealed from Intel Officer Gilly. For two years, she had been so good at keeping it.

“Just tell him the truth,” Anders said. “He’s a big boy. He can handle it.”

She shook her head. “No. It would be bad for him.” She eyed him. “Don’t you tell him, either.”

“You underestimate him. He’s smart.”

“I know he’s smart. But he needs the lie. Don’t take that away.”

Anders shrugged. She didn’t honestly expect him to understand. To the outside world, Anders was a self-assured, devilishly handsome man with unlikely bone structure and a delightfully roguish twist. In reality, he was mostly twist. About 70 percent of her job was dealing with him, which he lacked the self-awareness to realize. They’d told her back at Camp Zero: You will be the most important person on the ship and no one will know. It was so true. It was so true.

“Don’t do it,” she warned. “You’ll only drag him down to where you are.”

“Then I’ll have company.”

“You have company.” She tried to spread her arms. “I’m right here.”

“I’m kidding around, Beanfield,” Anders said. “I won’t tell him.”

“Don’t,” she said.

* * *

—

She had duties: interviews, messages, reports, and everything else that needed to get sent while they were still in range of a relay. Which was approximately thirty hours, according to Jackson, although that was only an estimate. If the ship detected hostiles nearby, they might spend a week floating around lighting up hives. If it sniffed something in the tilt of a frequency from a far-flung star, they could be inside VZ within an hour. As Gilly loved to explain, the ship was so much smarter than any of them, it was impossible to predict its decisions or even understand why it made them. Humans might not reach the same conclusions even if they studied the same data, because they had tiny wet meat brains instead of house-sized tanks of software writing more software. So who knew.

She felt like she had time, though. She felt like the ship was not quite as aloof as Gilly made out. The day they’d boarded, after all the ceremonies, the salutes, the tearful hugs with family, once everyone had shuttled off and the engines were warming, the ship had greeted them. Every screen, both tactile and virtual, had displayed:

HELLO

“Hello?” she’d replied. She was trained in the subsystems, but hadn’t known the ship did greetings. “This is Life Officer Talia Beanfield.”

The ship didn’t answer. She tracked down Gilly, who was doing something with a torque wrench in a corridor, a bunch of testing equipment scattered around. Talia was confident that nothing on this ship needed the application of a torque wrench ten hours before launch. That would imply a fairly colossal fuckup in the preflight checks. But if it kept Gilly happy, fine. She pointed at the nearest HELLO. “Are you seeing this?”

“It’s a default message,” Gilly said. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

“It’s nice,” she said. “It’s pleased to meet us.”

He tilted his head to one side. She would come to know this gesture well over the next two years: Gilly mentally ratcheting his intelligence down until he found a level he could share with her. “The ship isn’t alive. It can’t communicate with us.”

“But it is communicating,” she said.

He shook his head. “This is software that wrote itself. It has a completely