began to pack away his tools. “Hey, have you seen my drill?”
“I don’t keep track of your tools, Gilly. What, is it your only one?”
“No. But I like to know where everything is.”
“I have noticed that about you.” She unpeeled herself from the wall. “Still think it’s unaware of our existence?”
“Hmm?”
“The ship,” she said. “You said it doesn’t know we’re here. But then we hurt it. So maybe we got its attention. Maybe we made it mad.”
He stopped. “You’re talking about software. Yes, very intelligent software, but it doesn’t think like us. It doesn’t, you know, feel things.”
“Not like we do, of course. But in its own way.”
“Look,” he said, “I can’t tell you what’s going on in the mind of a computer. But I’m really confident that it’s not what you’re thinking.”
She considered. “You don’t think the ship can feel hurt?”
“Uh,” he said.
“Or scared?”
He chose his words carefully. “I think it would be a mistake to consider the ship as anything other than a collection of logical processes.”
“Oh, Gilly,” Beanfield said. “You say that about everything.”
“No, I don’t,” he said. “I don’t view everything as a collection of logical processes.”
She smiled and shook her head. “Forget it. I’m starving. Let’s head back.”
“There is logic to everything,” he said. “You look deep enough, there’s always a rational process. You just need to figure out what it is.”
“There it is,” Beanfield said.
“I don’t know how you can believe otherwise. I mean, don’t you want to know there’s an explanation for everything?”
“I can’t think of anything worse,” Beanfield said. She looked back down the corridor toward where Eng-13 had been. “I hope you find your answers, Gilly.”
There was something in her face that disturbed him, so he stopped. “You can trust the ship. No matter what’s going on, it will always want to protect us, because we’re its DNA. That can’t change.”
She smiled brightly, the way she did in clips. “Thank you for saying so, Gilly.”
“I promise you,” he said.
* * *
—
The next day Beanfield called him over to say she could feel the ship burning. “What?” he said.
“Little tremors.” They were outside Rec-4, which was configured as a gym. Her hair was plastered to her forehead, her white shirt sweat-soaked down the middle, a towel slung over one shoulder. “Are we accelerating?”
“I don’t think so.” He checked his film. “No.”
“You can’t feel anything?”
He knew she wanted him to lift his film, so he did, and listened. It was sometimes possible to feel whether the ship was burning, especially on aft decks.
“Maybe it’s not accelerating yet,” she said. “It feels like it’s about to.”
He wasn’t sure how anyone would sense that. “I guess I could pull an exterior view and look for any unusual activity.”
“I already did that.”
“Oh,” he said.
“It doesn’t matter.” She threw the towel over her face and began to rub with vigor. He remembered how, during the last engagement, Beanfield’s station had been breached. They had never really talked about that, but he wondered how she was dealing with it. It occurred to him that when he was worked up about something, he could talk to Beanfield, but Beanfield had no one.
“I’ll keep an eye on it,” he said.
And, funnily enough, when he woke the next day, he could feel something. He ran his film and confirmed it. They were accelerating. But they weren’t leaving VZ. They were going deeper in.
* * *
—
Three more days passed. They grew tense and excited. Anders didn’t sleep, as far as Gilly could tell. He developed bloodshot eyes and a braying, high-pitched laugh. “Jesus, Anders,” said Beanfield. “Your breath.” He wanted to play ninja stars but hid in such obvious positions that Gilly felt bad throwing shurikens at him. On the fifth day, Gilly discovered him trying to herd crabs into a jetpod. He came around a corner and there was Anders,