Severance (20 page)

The skating rink was the largest of the many broken and
forgotten toys on the Argos. Wildly popular when the ship first launched, there
had been problems maintaining it, something to do with the artificial surface
not regenerating as expected, or that it was more bother to manufacture than it
was worth, or that it was really hard work, or something. As the surface grew
grittier and stickier, skating had grown less popular. The rink was all but
abandoned now, the ship’s elected officials having spent the last decade farting
about deciding what to do with the space.

But as a kid, Kevin had loved the rink, his eight year old brain
not knowing or caring that it had gone out of style. Harold had taken him here a
couple of times a week, marveling at the pace at which the boy’s skating skills
outgrew his own, while hoping that wasn’t a metaphor for something.

And when Kevin ran away a few months later, Harold wasn’t
surprised that he would run here. Harold couldn’t even recall the reason he had
run — some childish fit with one of his case workers. Security hadn’t paid much
attention. Their thinking, that runaways couldn’t run very far on the Argos,
was solid. But Harold had paid attention, more father than not at that point in
Kevin’s life.

Harold finished strapping up his awful, smelly skates — they
were reason enough for the sport to go out of fashion — and stepped out onto
the surface. Not ice, but a special self lubricating polymer, it had supposedly
worked fantastically for the first forty years of their voyage before running into
its life expectancy like it had hit a wall. Harold lurched and stumbled about
the rink, plowing through the areas of inconsistent friction. He was the only
one skating — the attendant had been sleeping when he had arrived. So, anyone
watching him would look suspicious as hell. But now that he was a full month
into ‘Operation: Bore Big Brother,’ he didn’t anticipate anyone else showing up.
He was safe, though perhaps not from his skating skills he realized while halfway
to the ground, one of his skates having stopped dead in a divot.

After another five minutes of lurch–filled, chancy skating,
with no suspicious–looking goons arriving to watch, Harold decided that he was
probably alone. He picked his way to the edge of the surface and hobbled along
the side of the rink to the locker rooms.

This was where he had found the boy when he had run away.
Kevin had already been gone for a day by the time anyone bothered to inform
Harold. Harold had come to the rink almost immediately, guessing the boy’s
thinking. One of the rink attendants mentioned that he had seen a kid that
looked like Kevin hanging around, and Harold had spent the afternoon searching
the place. The lockers were an obvious choice, as Kevin himself later attested.
His first night away he had tried to sleep in one of them, learning the hard
way about the human body’s preference for consciousness when upright.

Harold checked the lockers now, just for the sake of
completeness. No lost little boys. He backed up, returning to the entrance to
the locker room, where, partially blocked behind the swinging doors of the
entrance, was a smaller door. He opened this, the janitor’s closet. It didn’t
look much different than the first and last time he saw it eighteen years
earlier. The only difference was the shelf full of cleaning pads, which was now
a little further away. During his time here, Kevin had moved the shelving unit
back off the wall, creating a gap behind it, wide enough to build a little
nest. It was artfully done; Harold didn’t know that there were any janitors
actually using the closet, much less any janitors capable of caring about a
shelving unit that had moved.

Harold moved some of the cleaning pads out of the way,
setting them down on the floor beside him. Leaning into the shelving unit, he
peered along the edge of the wall. A terminal. He had to rearrange a few more
stacks of cleaning supplies before he could get at it, but once he did, he
turned it over in his hands, examining it. Someone had vandalized it somehow.
With a flash of recognition, he realized it was a dummy terminal, the network
interface crudely deactivated with something sharp.

He turned the terminal on. Front and center was a video
message, sitting in a directory full of confusingly labeled files. Harold
opened the video. It was a tight shot of Kevin, sitting on the floor of the
same closet, speaking quietly at the camera. His face was shiny — oily or
sweaty, Harold couldn’t tell — and he seemed to be blinking too much.

Hey. I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know who’s
watching this. I hope it’s you, uh…you know who you are. But if it’s not, then
oh well.

I really don’t know what I’m doing.

Okay. The basics. The captain of the ship has a plan to
split the ship in two. Yeah. Just look at the attached files. It’s all in
there.

I know this because I’m a lieutenant in the navy. Three
months ago, I discovered we were off course. Not badly, but we’re definitely
off course. We can correct it, but it will cost us a lot of reaction mass.
Fuel. I don’t know the complete details, but that means we might not have
enough fuel to stop. Not stop the whole ship, anyways. A smaller ship could
arrive at Tau Prius. And this ship can do that. Split in two, I mean. But the
thing of it is, there’s stuff that doesn’t make sense about the fuel. But then
I’m told to shut up, and…Listen, like I said, it’s complicated. Look at the
attached files. It’s way clearer there.

Anyways, whether I’m wrong or not, the ship needs to know
about this. The public. These kinds of decisions can’t be made behind closed
doors. You should hear the way they talk. So, I took copies of everything. For
weeks, I’ve been copying everything I’ve seen. It proves everything. You’re
holding this right now.

Actually, what you’re really holding is my backup plan. I’m
going to try sending this into the feeds. That won’t be easy. I think IT is scanning
for this. And they’ve got programs to wipe material off of the network. But I
think I’ve got a way around that. I’ve taken some precautions.

And if it doesn’t work, well, I guess that’s my career over,
then. It’s worth it, though, I think. Gotta try.

But that’s why I’ve hidden this here. The backup, the last
copy. The proof. If you find this, be careful with it. Maybe just pretend you
didn’t see it? It hasn’t done me much good. But I couldn’t let it disappear.
This has to get out sooner or later.

I better go now. Good luck confused janitor, or whoever you
are.

Harold realized he was leaning heavily against the wall.
Oh,
Kevin. You brave, foolish boy
. Ignoring Kevin’s warnings, Harold tucked the terminal
into the waistband of his pants, rearranging his clothes atop it. Then, he
returned to the locker room. As he was leaving, he caught a glimpse of himself
in the mirrors and stopped, suddenly light–headed. There, looking back at him,
was the same bleached and hunted look that he had just seen on Kevin’s face.

“This is bullshit,” Bruce wheezed as they jogged along the
first level.

“Bullshit,” Stein agreed, measuring her pace so he could
keep up with her. “We haven’t done anything!” Beside her, Bruce came to a stop,
hands on his knees. She stopped to watch him vomit noisily on the ground.

“No, not that part,” Bruce said when he was done. “That part’s
okay. I have done things.” Extending his finger like a gun, he shot Stein
several times. “No, the bullshit is how they waited for us to get drunk first.
They coulda…they coulda…waited for tomorrow. Issss bullshit.”

Stein didn’t remember much after the violent shaking had
rattled the ship. Dust everywhere. People rushing into the streets. People
rushing off the streets. She saw at least two people literally running in
circles. She might have herself for all she knew. Mostly, she had wandered in a
daze, replaying what she knew. They had split the ship in two. She could see
it, a model of the ship spinning around in her head, as the aft of the ship
detached like a cork and rocketed away. They had been working on disconnects
and cutting the ones that were jammed. They had been evacuating and evicting
people from the aft. And when Gabelman had stumbled upon this, a week too
early, they had killed him for it.

And now, it was over. She was on half a ship.

She didn’t know why they had done it. She still didn’t even
know
who
had done it. Kinsella and his trolls? The navy, alone? She didn’t
care. She eventually washed up at a table in the Prairie with a bottle of
Orange in her hand. She was mildly surprised to find the bar mostly empty; apparently,
everyone else had gone south to gape at the bulkhead doors. A few messages had
convinced Abdolo Poland to leave his nest — the promise of booze worked well.
And there was no need to hide any longer. Their hunters were thousands of miles
away by that point and weren’t coming back.

Reunited, the pair quickly got obliterated. Ellen arrived
not long after they did, easily lured to midday bar missions, and protested
that she had trouble keeping up with their self–medicating — “No small
statement, coming from me.” Bruce and Stein told her what had happened, Bruce
pantomiming maybe a few more karate chops into his part of the story than were
probably accurate. Ellen didn’t believe a word of the plot, it all being too
big for her to swallow. “Also, no small statement, coming from me.”

And then the news feeds announced that the doors had opened
back up, revealing the security troops and all the rest of the ship still
there. Ellen had fallen out of her chair laughing. The drinking didn’t abate,
taking on a lighter but more confusing tone.

Stein had been
so sure.
Everything had made sense.
But there were the security officers, coming back through the just opened
doors. Her mind lurched through explanations, trying to shoehorn this new
information into her theory.

Helot’s announcement an hour later, informing Stein and
Bruce that they had nearly destroyed the ship, had not clarified matters. It
did get Ellen’s attention however, their friend leaping into action, immediately
hustling them out of the bar. She whispered instructions to Bruce as they swerved
down to the first level, then parted ways with the pair. Together, Stein and
Bruce moved as quickly as their equilibrium allowed to a safe house, one Ellen
and Bruce had used in a previous life.

“Are you hurt?” Stein asked Bruce, who had been walking for
the past half block with his hands over his face.

“No. I’m hiding.”

“You’re a bit bigger than your hands there, buddy.”

“Your
face
is bigger than your hands.”

Stein checked. “Nope. I’m good.”

“You should disguise yourself, too. We’re fugitives now.” Stein
had noted a few curious glances as they retreated. All people who could point
them out to security later.

“You don’t think that a couple people walking down the
street with their faces hidden in their hands won’t attract more attention?”

“Yeah, because that’s the weirdest thing anyone’s ever done
in public.” That argument seemed airtight to Stein and the two bottles of
Orange she’d had. The pair covered the rest of the distance clutching their
faces.

The neighborhood around their hideout on the first level was
almost completely abandoned. The lights and heating didn’t work as reliably in
that part of the ship, and aside from people who didn’t like other people, it
was mostly deserted. Most importantly, none of the security sensors in the area
were working — something Ellen evidently checked as a hobby.

“In here,” Bruce whispered, flicking his eyes at the non–descript
door of what looked to be a disused fabrication plant. The pair huddled around
the door while he did something funny with the locking mechanism. Stein looked
at his hands; they seemed to be tapping a hidden sensor underneath the lip of
the door panel. It slid open, and they entered into what Stein now understood
to be a Breeder safe house.

“What’s that smell?” she asked. “Did someone die in here?”

Bruce looked at her, his face suddenly tight. “Yeah.” The
door slid shut behind them.

§

Hogg slowly panned the terminal back and forth, looking for
heat signatures in the room across the street. Scattered up and down the block,
his team was doing the same, half of them with their sidearms ready. They had
all seen the footage of the terrorist rampaging through the Bridge — it was one
of the most popular clips of the day — and Thorias had reported that two
officers were killed in the explosions last night. Enough to put an itch in any
cop’s trigger finger. Especially if the cops in question didn’t get to use guns
very often. No one had shot themselves accidentally yet, but Hogg sensed it was
coming.

They were searching a nearly abandoned section of the first
level in the northern end of the ship. The streets were more unkempt than usual
for the bottom deck, littered with broken furniture and disused machinery.
These rooms and buildings were mostly warehouses and machine shops, clustered
in one of the ship’s original and long unneeded fabrication centers. At
different times in the ship’s history, this area had been repurposed into
various forms of residential and commercial space, but in the current epoch,
living in chilly caverns wasn’t that popular, leaving many of the spaces
vacant. A good place to hide, and when sensors had spotted Stein and Redenbach
descending to this area a few hours earlier, Hogg and his team had been ordered
after them.

Stein had completely fooled him. During their first meeting,
he had only had the vaguest sense that she was concealing something, but as he
got that feeling from most people, he hadn’t thought much of it. Not a very
useful skill, really, thrown off by the simple truth that most people
were
concealing
something.