Providence - Max Barry Page 0,45

even coordinate her resource builders in Gamma Fleet, but fine, whatever. Now, though, she knew Jackson agreed with her. She shouldn’t be here. None of them should.

She was alone again. “Somebody get me off this ship,” she muttered. It became a thing she repeated to keep herself sane. She didn’t mean it, of course. There was no off the ship. It was just a mantra. Please, somebody, she thought. Get me off this ship.

7

[Gilly]

THE CASUALTY

It took two days for the ship to rebuild Materials Fabrication as if it had never been damaged. It had been; it had been shredded by huks and spun off into space in bite-size pieces. Gilly double-checked that, because when he ran his board and saw it reporting as online and fully functional, he wondered if the ship was failing to diagnose faults again. He climbed to B Deck and the blast doors stood open and the corridor beyond was almost entirely the burnished yellow of new metal. He explored for a few minutes and developed a strange feeling, a kind of nervousness, because everything was the same but also not. He retreated to his cabin to watch again how it had been destroyed.

How the huks had affected the ship was interesting: In many cases, they’d passed through a room where everything was nailed down and left barely any trace but a couple of holes in the walls. Other times, the huks had dragged every loose object into the air, shredded them, and sprayed the pieces like confetti. And if the path of a huk came close enough to a long section of metal, a wall or pipe or floor or whatever, it would unpeel it like a banana and trail a deadly cloudburst of globular shrapnel. This had happened in Materials Fabrication, which had been struck often and badly.

He pulled footage of the rebuild and watched somewhere in the order of ten thousand crabs crawling around, knitting hull. The ship hadn’t had ten thousand crabs earlier, Gilly was sure. It must have manufactured more. And then the crabs had manufactured more ship.

He sat back. It was what was supposed to happen, but the scale and speed of it were amazing. By his reckoning, the ship had rebuilt Mat Fab faster than it had been constructed the first time.

His mind turned to the core bank he’d drilled into. Those weren’t repairable, but as long as the ship was doing surprising things, he decided to check in on it. When he brought up the system, core bank 996 was green and online.

He blinked. He rewound the damage assessment to make sure he was looking at the right one. He was. The ship was reporting 100% functionality across all core banks.

This he had to see. He closed the board and headed to E Deck. Possibly the damage had caused the ship to stop recognizing it as a core bank, and therefore to stop knowing it shouldn’t attempt repairs. But even so, it should have been unsuccessful, because core bank repair was beyond the ship’s capability. It was concerning either way, because an AI rewriting its own core was a little like a human neurosurgeon opening up his own skull. Any errors could compound, affecting the ship’s ability to recognize that they were errors.

He walked right past the door to Eng-13, lost in thought. When he backtracked, he couldn’t find it. He stopped and checked his location on ping. He was where he’d thought. He took eight steps and stopped and touched the wall. On his film, Eng-13 was mapped right in front of him.

He peeled off his film. He looked both ways. He knew this corridor. He had been here during the engagement. There had been a door. Now it was gone.

* * *

—

“You’re telling me it moved the room?” Jackson said. They had gathered in Rec-2 at Gilly’s request. From Jackson’s demeanor, she had been asleep.

“I think the room is still there,” he said. “We just can’t get to it.”

“How do you know?” Beanfield said.

“Because it’s on ping.”

“But that data comes from the ship. It could be lying.”

“Pardon me?” he said.

“Or outdated.”