Shipmind Chapter 30

Sam stalked back into the compartment at Pepper’s back. “Hyperspace bombs. Suicide implants. Your Empire’s a real piece of work, you know that?”

“That’s not what the implant is really for,” I said. I was still animating my human avatar on the screen for Marcus’ benefit. Time to see how they’d take me spilling the beans on this. “It can do that on command, if we need it to, but it’s not its primary function.”

“Enlighten me, then.”

“Its real purpose is to help keep you alive. Medical monitoring and intervention.”

Marcus sat up again and nodded. “It’s probably the only reason I’m still here. Everyone in the Navy gets one before they go into space. If you’re wounded, irradiated, or whatever the hell else, it keeps you going until help arrives. You don’t have anything like it?”

Clearly thinking about this, Sam leaned back against the hatch frame. “When you put it like that, it sounds like we really should. Never occurred to me we might need implants though. I bet Pepper would know what we use instead.”

Marcus looked incredulous, but I knew what was going on. “The Commonwealth doesn’t have the same taboo on genetically modifying sapients that the Empire does. Humans from the Diaspora actually have a couple of organs that you and I don’t, or didn’t.”

Sam brightened. “Right, symbiotic bacteria and crap like that. Just works without us having to think about it. Glad you said something, Ransom, that was going to bug me the whole way home until I figured it out.”

“…what did they just call you?” Uh oh. Marcus noticed the name.

“Let’s take a walk, Marcus. I’ve got some explaining to do. Sam, you okay keeping an eye on things here in case Rober wakes up?”

Sam shook their head and stood up straight again. “I’ll get Crow to do it. They don’t have much to do right now we’re underway. Main job is to get your attention if something happens anyway.”

Which was fine with me. I just didn’t want Tann dying the way it looked like Thio might. I’d lost too many friends already.

While we talked about that, I was having one of my background processes fabricate a drone for me. I was getting better at using those as more of the Ransom part of me came back, and this one was a standard design anyway. An interaction drone was pretty much just a wall-screen attached to a basic locomotor to let the shipmind—me—have a moving conversation with someone without flicking my avatar from wall panel to wall panel. None of the few I’d had before survived, but they were so simple to make that one was waiting outside the hatch before Crow even arrived to relieve Sam.

“Ready for your tour, Marcus?”

“So they actually are going to let us out of this compartment. Huh. All right, I’m game, but I still want that explanation.”

“Most of the ship’s uninhabitable even now but there’s a few things I want you to see.”

“I’m guessing you’ve had this tour already.”

“About that… you know what a Commonwealth shipmind is?”

Markus blinked a couple of times at the apparent non-sequitur, but kept following the drone into the corridor, its screen with my synthetic face pointed back at them.

“I got the same briefings you did. Artificial intelligences that run their ships.”

I nodded my avatar’s head. “The true captain of the ship in all but name. There’s a bit of nuance the briefings missed, though. It’s called a shipmind because the ship itself is essentially their body. It can’t function without them in the same way that your body couldn’t function without your brain.”

“Makes sense. Where are you going with this, Erin?”

“Their shipmind was dead. Killed by the same energy shockwave as most of the rest of the crew.”

Sam, following a few paces behind, picked up the explanation, seeing what I was leading up to. “Right. So, when we picked up your old skipper here, we thought they were off the Fearless, same as me and a couple other survivors. We had a bit of Kuto techno-wizardry on hand that we were using to keep their brain alive even though their body was toast.”

“Not that my brain was in much better shape. Only think I could remember at first was my rank.”

Marcus scoffed. “Of course you remember that of all things.”

“What can I say? I haven’t changed that much. But they thought I was Captain Rathens of the Fearless. So, well, they trusted me more than they would have otherwise.”

“Erin, we’re two digressions deep now. Get to the point.”

“It’s all important. And we’re just coming up now on the first thing I wanted to show you.”

I’d led Marcus and Sam along a few twists and turns, and up a ladder. Now they were coming up on the door to Pepper’s office, where my brain—brains, I supposed—still sat in the corner, plugged into a data port on the wall.

“That’s me. Or all that’s left of me. I needed a body. Their ship needed a mind.”

“Ransom… as in King’s Ransom? The name of the ship.”

“That’s right. I’m the shipmind now.”

I wasn’t at all sure how Marcus would react to the news. I’d imagined all sorts of possibilities, some good, others not so good. I’d even envisioned the remote possibility that they might try to kill me by smashing the machinery keeping me alive.

What I didn’t expect was for them to flop into Pepper’s chair and laugh hysterically.