The Ghost Line Read online

She stood and walked to the bar. The male synth nodded and held out a plate, which she took. On the table next to him were sauces and salvers, bowls of vegetables. He served her a generous slice from the roast, then put a little of everything else on her plate.

  Saga returned to her seat. The beef on her plate looked real enough. Pink in the middle, a trace of juices around the edge. The vegetables had grill marks. But the only scent came from her own unwashed body.

  She picked up her knife and fork, cut a small piece of beef, and lifted it to her lips. She hesitated, remembering Wei’s description of Ayanti’s black eyes, his sealed mouth and nose. But she’d come this far; there was no backing out.

  The roast had a faint flavor, not unpleasant, but definitely not meat. She chewed and swallowed, feeling a prickling of sweat on her forehead. She forced herself to eat some vegetables. Everything was room temperature and had the same mild taste. Like milk, bread, or potato dumplings without seasoning, bland and comforting.

  Then she sat and waited.

  Around her the recorded conversation ebbed and flowed, teetering at the edge of her understanding. Words burbled up, but she couldn’t make out complete sentences. Time passed. She couldn’t have said how much. Her eyes were closed. She imagined that she was drifting in darkness, cold and alone. The immensity of space enveloped her.

  “Darling.” She opened her eyes. Krasivaya stood beside her, holding out her hand. “Come with me.”

  Saga took her hand. Her thoughts were muddled, as if she’d been woken from a long sleep. The synth’s fingers were warm and dry. “What happens now?”

  Krasivaya laughed. “Music and dancing, of course.” She tugged and Saga stood.

  “No,” Saga said. “I have things to do.” She wobbled, the room spinning. She felt hot, unwell. A sick realization that she’d made a terrible mistake washed over her.

  She staggered to the door. It opened and she was out in the corridor.

  * * *

  As she walked Saga rubbed an itch at her side, just over the hip bone. The dress felt slick under her fingers. Its fibers were artfully interlinked long-chain polymers: she saw their structure in her head. She knew how to tweak the ship printer to extrude them.

  She walked, more steadily now. When she ran a hand against the wall, her fingers left shimmering trails. She came to the passageway to the propulsion module. The door’s edges were scorched by Wei’s welding. She wished she could just kick her way through, but she knew that the ship’s long process of transformation had not yet hollowed out the stern.

  She left the spin module and came to the cargo area, floating in front of the door to the compartment Wei had evacuated. After Gregor ruined the docking port she’d made it into a temporary air lock to help them escape.

  Saga touched the door and closed her eyes. Her vision dimmed, then brightened again. If she focused she realized she could see Wei: she was attacking the reactor housing, laser in hand, still in her suit.

  Wei was a parasite, an itching, burrowing thing that had to be removed.

  Saga reached out and twisted some internal muscle, and the lights went off in the propulsion module.

  “Nice try,” Wei said. “Whoever figured that out. But you’re too late.” Wei flicked her suit lights on, illuminating the space. She’d already cut pieces of plating from the wall, exposing armored and shielded conduits. She adjusted her laser and started cutting again.

  Saga felt a tingling in her hip where the laser touched metal. Her body was the ship. Her body was also a frail thing of flesh and bone, floating in the hallway by the cargo hatch. Like the metal body, the frail body was changing. She had to wait for it to finish.

  She was the third body; something had gone wrong with the first two. Whatever had infected them had not understood how a human body worked. It had operated Ayanti and Gregor like a crude puppeteer. But it had learned.

  “Oh.” She made a sound: lungs forcing air past wobbling flesh to make noise signifying understanding.

  Saga came and went. Sometimes she was herself. Sometimes she was the ship. Sometimes she was a child in a small room, curled under her bed while her parents raged in the house below. Wishing she could melt into the air itself and escape.

  The lights went out and Saga was blind. Her new senses could no longer feel the propulsion module. Wei had succeeded in cutting it off from the rest of the ship. She had control now. The rest of the Queen switched to emergency power. Lights dimmed, doors closed. Essential systems only.

  Saga’s body had curled in on itself. She straightened out as she inhabited it fully once more, the rest of the ship receding, but not gone. It was in her consciousness, but manageable now. She felt her skin tighten. Her nose and throat closed, constricted by newly grown muscles. The changes had not quite finished, but she had run out of time. The door opened in front of her and she pulled herself through.

  When it closed the air was removed from the room. Then the second door opened. She felt a million pinpricks across her skin, a dangerous tension in her joints. Ahead of her she saw the rip in the ship’s hull where the Sigurd had broken free. She floated to the hole and pushed herself through into the blackness of space.

  The stars lit the sky.

  A part of her was startled to the point of incomprehension. She should be dead. But here she was, grasping handholds and pulling herself across the hull of the Queen, heading aft toward the propulsion module. Holding her breath, somehow unaffected by the lack of atmosphere.

  At the propulsion module she focused her attention on the emergency hatch. There were red arrows painted on it, and warnings in six languages. A red light glowed beside the manual hatch control. The hatch couldn’t be opened from the outside while the inside was under pressure. There was no way she could trigger it without access to the module’s control systems. And Wei had cut her off.

  She was running out of air. She felt the ache building in her chest. In her mind she could see the module’s layout. The four maintenance ports. The largest one was by the starboard radiator grid. She pulled her way to it, moving from handhold to handhold.

  She wrapped her legs around a radiator strut for leverage and removed the port cover. Then she opened the secondary pressure hatch. The port was barely fifteen centimeters in diameter.

  Saga could fit an arm or a leg, but not herself. Not as this human body.

  She pushed back and looked up the length of the Queen. Mars was a red dot; Earth was a bright point of light on the other side of the sky, the moon a faint glimmer next to it. An immensity of space and time surrounded the ship. The few days since they’d broken into the Queen were nothing compared to the years the liner had traveled between the two worlds. And those decades were nothing compared to . . . to what? She had a sense of darkness and a slow drift. Geologic time and distance. A span of years that made her life seem like the brief spark of an ember floating up from a fire.

  She focused her attention, and schematics blossomed in her mind. A safety system: a series of explosive bolts around the propulsion module. They could be manually triggered with the correct codes, jettisoning the entire module in an emergency.

  The reactor and engines, Wei—they would just float away. The Queen would continue on without them, diminished, cooling.

  It was the only choice left. Everything that had happened to her before was so inconsequential. Her entire existence was nothing compared to the life that inhabited the Queen.

  She started moving toward the explosive bolts.

  As she moved she reached out, her hands grasping grip points and struts. Something shone on her left hand, reflecting the far-off sun—a metal circle. It had significance. It jarred something loose in her. She was not just a tool.

  Was her life nothing? Maybe. But she remembered her mother, her grief. And she saw Michel, asleep in the stateroom. She knew this was an actual image, not just a memory. He was lying there right now. Still himself. Still worth saving.

  He would die if she jettisoned the propulsion module.


  She held on to the realization. There had to be another way. She reached out with her mind again and dove into the vast, dark sea of time and memory that lived in the ship.

  She wandered for what could have been days, weeks. The Martian Queen was a million fireflies in the shape of a spacecraft. She roamed the places between them. It was a wilderness, but there were paths if you knew how to look. She sensed the strange intelligence that inhabited the Queen. It was unfocused and tentative, driven by instinct more than anything. But she could affect it: she pushed and it reacted. She was a part of it now, and as she understood this, she realized she could change herself as well.

  But.

  She would not be the same, never again the same if she were to do this.

  She conjured up the inn from her trip on the ring road with her mother. Opened the door and entered the warmth and light of the place. She curled up on the rug with the old chocolate Lab she’d fallen in love with as a girl and stroked his fur.

  Saga had thought that coming out to the belt had been a sacrifice: her work would pay for the cure for her mother’s broken mind. It would be her penance. But of course it had been another kind of running away, just as she’d fled Iceland in her teens. In the belt she lived much as she had back on Earth, constantly moving from place to place, from exploration to exploration. Always looking for the next experience. And she’d dragged Michel along, who’d come out of love for her.

  That had not been a real sacrifice. She had not borne the cost of it: everyone else in her life had.

  She looked at Michel and made her decision.

  * * *

  Time passed, and Saga came back to herself, clinging to the side of the ship. The aching need to breathe was gone. Her limbs felt longer, looser. Her whole being was lighter. She knew what to do now. She slid forward, grasped the edge of the maintenance port’s pressure hatch, and poured herself through. She traveled the darkness, down into the heart of the ship.

  There was another hatch at the end of the port. It was trivial to open it now. She emerged into a dark chamber. She closed everything tightly as she moved through the spaces of the module, maintaining the ship’s integrity. It was important, this part of the ship. Nothing had been changed here. Propulsion was sacred. Heat and light were food.

  Saga came to the human space inside the module. She was still wearing the dress, still barefoot. There was frost in her hair; she shook her head and a drift of snow floated away, melting where it touched deck and walls.

  Her connection to the rest of the ship was cut off by reactor shielding and by Wei’s sabotage, but she was not alone. She had found a ghost among the fireflies and brought it with her. It followed her still as she floated through the narrow access corridor toward the reactor controls. She remembered Orpheus and Eurydice, the long ascent from the underworld, and his mistake.

  Don’t look back.

  Wei was now working beneath the bulbous shape of the reactor housing. There was an acrid smell in the air. She’d been busy with her cutting laser, obviously trying to disable the reactor itself.

  “Wei,” Saga said. “Please stop.”

  Wei’s body jerked with surprise. She let out a strangled noise as she quickly pulled herself out from under the housing and locked eyes with Saga.

  Saga held out her hands, showing they were empty. Wei fumbled for the laser, pointed it at her. “Don’t come any closer. I’ll do it; you know I will.”

  “You don’t know what you’re doing,” Saga said gently. “Do you? You don’t understand what’s happened to the ship. It isn’t what you think.”

  Wei frowned at her. “How did you get in here? How did you get through the doors?”

  Saga smiled. It was too difficult to explain. Wei’s face narrowed with suspicion. “You’re not really Saga, are you? You’ve been taken over.” She lifted the laser, her trembling finger hovering over the activation stud.

  “This isn’t about me,” Saga said. She felt unnaturally calm. The ghost was just around the corner now. “This is about something bigger than either of us. This ship has to remain safe. Michel has to remain safe.”

  There was a hum from the cutting laser, a flickering light, and a sharp burning smell. Saga looked down at the cut across her abdomen. She could feel that it had happened, but there was no pain. Perhaps this was shock. She frowned at Wei.

  “It was an accident,” Wei stammered. “I . . . I didn’t mean to fire.”

  Saga looked down again. Her dress had melted, and under it the skin too. Her left hand had been in the path of the laser and two fingers tumbled through the air. She held her hand up, looking at the hollow space where her fingers had been.

  She watched as the silvery stumps of her fingers slowly sealed themselves. She put her other hand on her abdomen, slipped a finger into the healing cut, felt the empty space behind it. “I’m a hollow person,” she said, her voice full of wonder. “I don’t feel hollow.”

  Wei lifted the laser, her face full of resolve. “I’m sorry,” she said. Then her expression faltered. She looked over Saga’s shoulder and Saga knew the ghost had arrived.

  She turned. A familiar-looking long-limbed man, wearing a T-shirt and loose pants, floated beside her.

  “Ayanti?” Wei said, her voice breaking. “Ayanti?”

  Saga watched the man. He smiled, but didn’t speak.

  “I killed you,” Wei said. “I burned you up.” Tears glimmered in her eyes.

  Ayanti continued to smile, his face serene.

  Wei turned to Saga, anguish contorting her face. “Why won’t he speak? What is this, some sort of trick?”

  Saga shook her head. “I saw him in the dining room the first night we stayed here. I went looking and I found him. I didn’t have time to retrieve everything, but he’s still here. His memories remain in the ship.”

  “I’m sorry,” Wei said to Ayanti’s ghost. “I’m sorry I killed you.”

  “You didn’t,” Saga said. “You just destroyed his body. They didn’t know how to integrate properly with a human, not then. But if you destroy the ship, Wei, he’ll be gone forever.”

  Wei stared at her. “How do you know?”

  “I gave up something of myself to make this body,” Saga said. “I ate the food and became a part of this ship, and a part of whatever found it out here. I think it’s something ancient. Something that just wants to live.”

  Ayanti reached out, held his hand open to Wei.

  “He remembers,” Saga said. “He remembers meeting you on Pallas. The fights and the making up. The adventures you had together. He remembers so much.”

  Wei shook her head. “No,” she said. She pointed the laser at Ayanti. “You’re not real. Neither of you are real.”

  Her hand trembled, and the laser cut Ayanti’s head off. It tumbled, revealing its hollowness. The rest of him continued moving, pushing forward with outstretched hands. Wei frantically slashed at him with the laser. Flame flickered on his T-shirt. His leg was sliced open from thigh to kneecap.

  All of Wei’s attention was focused on Ayanti. The anguish in her face as she fired at him. Saga reached her in a single lunge and plucked the laser from her hands. Wei fought back, but Saga was stronger now. She threw the laser and it disappeared down the access corridor.

  Wei struggled against her, screamed. Finally she broke down, tears clinging to her eyes. Saga held on to her until she stopped moving.

  “Just kill me,” Wei said. “Or are you going to force me to eat the food too? Is that it?”

  “No,” Saga said. “Worse than that. I’m going to save you.”

  * * *

  The third lifeboat had only been partially digested. After Saga brought Wei back, she opened the hatch and performed a quick analysis. The radio still worked, and there was enough edible food and water for a hundred souls. Life support would be operational once the changes were reversed. She set the process in motion. Matter was shuffled, reorganized to regrow wires and circuits, the delicate meshwork of filtration systems and atmosphe
re scrubbers.

  Under her command, the male synth reattached the power and data cabling to the propulsion module and welded the reactor plating back on. Krasivaya collected the pieces of Ayanti and brought them to her. Saga didn’t allow Michel to witness the reassembly: he would have a difficult enough time grasping how Ayanti came into being.

  It was still hard to believe she had made another person from her own body. She thought of her frozen embryos, waiting on Ceres.

  In the stateroom, Saga gave Michel an edited version of events, but he didn’t understand. “You said the lifeboat would be back the way it was,” Michel said.

  “Better,” she said. “I fixed a few flaws along the way.”

  He looked at her. “So fix yourself too. Make yourself the way you were before.”

  Saga took his hand. It was warm, alive. “It’s not that simple.”

  “Of course it is.” He pulled her closer. Held her tight. “You’re my wife, and you’re coming back with me.”

  She felt an ache inside that she knew would never completely die away. A part of her would remain human, whatever happened. “I’ve gone too far, Michel; I’ve changed too much. But even if I could go back with you, the Queen would still be out here.”

  She paused, trying to put into words what she knew to be true.

  “Imagine seeds. Imagine them floating for millions of years, waiting to come into contact with a machine of some sort. Maybe they evolved in some civilization on the other side of the galaxy. They’re like viruses; they find machines and they use them to reproduce. They’ve been harvesting the Queen for years. Getting ready.”

  She could feel the next generation of seeds sleeping, distributed throughout the ship’s hollow skin. There were so many of them. She couldn’t help but feel a maternal warmth at the thought.

  “If we all left in that lifeboat,” she continued, “what do you think would happen? The ship would change course again, back to its original orbit around the sun. One day it would come apart like a dandelion clock in the wind. Most of the seeds would never find anything. Jupiter would suck them up, or they’d drift off into interstellar space. But some would reach Earth, Mars, ships, and habitats. They would grow.” She left the implications unsaid.