I was panting from levering the cargo bay open as I went to fetch Val’s moirascope. Practically speaking, the fact that we hadn’t been ambushed by yet more bullshit was pretty good evidence the random walk had worked this time, but we needed to take measurements to be sure. It’d been awhile since I’d had to do those measurements myself, of course, so it was questionable whether I’d actually be able to read the results, but I’d probably muddle through.
The punch switch on the wall dropped the cargo ramp. I took my first breath of Therian air, not counting whatever had gotten inside through the hull breach. Yup. Smelled like air.
I stumbled outside, moirascope in one hand, disruptor pistol in the other. I still couldn’t hear anything, but my comm was rigged to alert me if anything big enough got too close.
Some forests seem built for cinema: the ground is covered in leaves and moss, but nothing that might impede an actor’s movement; the trees are spaced out, the leaves providing a picturesque sort of roof, with enough light shining through to make everything look like a painting.
This was not that kind of forest. This was the other kind, a foreboding playground for insects where there were coarse bushes and random thorns and the ground looked kinda slimy. It smelled like rotting plant corpses. In short, this was the kind of forest that reminded you that the animal kingdom doesn’t recognize your passport.
Godslayers don’t bother with passports. We’d raked the area with disruptor fire before setting down in the hopes of shredding any lesser etheric creatures that might report our location to the pantheon. Theoretically not a detection risk—disruptors should be too entropic to form dyadic entanglements—but that’s what the moirascope was for.
I passed the still-breathing corpse of some kind of cougar-sized lizard as I tried to get the whole ship in the moirascope’s frame. The forest really didn’t want to work with me on that, but I pushed through anyways. Having reached a good distance, I kicked open the moirascope’s tripod and set it down facing the ship.
And what a beautiful ship it was. The Ragnar shone proudly under the tropical sunlight, the radiation shielding giving it a matte iron color. In shape it was somewhere between a tapered cone and a hundred-fifty-foot water bottle, with some aerodynamic lumps toward the rear to accommodate the engine. The port lancer batteries were still deployed, the equipment having jammed due to the ugly gash Lobsterzilla had rent diagonally down the side. The plasma lances themselves were basically slagged—we’d decided for multiple reasons not to tax the translation engines during re-entry, and the friction had melted them.
My poor, sweet, innocent lancers. They didn’t deserve this.
I sighed and activated the moirascope. The Ragnar blazed with dyadic entanglements, but that was normal for a deicide mission. It was also reassuring: it meant the ship would be involved in events down the road, implying we’d successfully get it up and running. Mind you, those events could be stuff like “angels descend on it and kill everyone inside.” Right now, as long as it happened elsewhere, I didn’t care.
We needed time to recover and do the sociological recon that was necessary for a successful deicide. If the careless hand of determinism brought us to another battle in the ocean, the oracle would muster her forces there, which meant they weren’t here. We could handle anything she threw at us if we prepared.
It took me a couple minutes of messing with the filter settings to get the all-clear.
“We’re good,” I reported. “Let’s desecrate some corpses.”
*
The crypt was lit only by pale blue emergency lights, hidden in crevices in the walls. No direct light, just ethereal radiance. The glow seeped out reassuringly from behind the rows of iron-gray caskets tucked into sterile shelves in the walls. Forty-eight of them, electromagnetically clamped to the underside of shelves four high on each wall, all the way to the end of the room. Forty-eight soulless bodies. Well, hopefully forty-six.
With the translation engines shut down for maintenance, the bodies would be kept fresh by intravenous nutrient feeds and chemical misting. Hidden in some of those iron coffins were bodies that looked exactly like us, while the others varied. Bodies with optimized musculature or variant neurotypes or just a different look and build for social infiltration. Most of them with a full suite of military augmentations: bone lacing, neural hardening, gland adjustments, ocular implants, and, most importantly, comm sockets.
The caskets were opaque, but the sci-fi nerd in me insisted that there should be windows in all of them to show the faces inside. With the lights dimmed and the room cast in contrasts of blue and shadowy gray, it also insisted that those faces would open their eyes and follow me around the room.
Instead of eyes, rows of status lights stared back at me down the length of the room. Yellow meant “ready.” That was most of them. Blue meant “active,” meaning they were synced up with our comms, all set to vacuum up our souls when we died. Once they did, the light would turn green.
There were two green lights. Markus sighed with relief.
“Thank Darwin,” I said. I paused for a moment, then realized Markus wouldn’t call me out on the irony and moved on.
“Okay, let me get the gurney in here.”
I stepped further back into the room. Spaceships were much like submarines in that there was no wasted space. The walkway between the shelves was about the width of an airline aisle, and made it just as impossible to squeeze past a wheeled cart.
The first greenlit casket was on the ground. We collapsed the gurney first, then Markus disengaged the safety on the casket and started the draining process. I fidgeted while it shut down. There was a slight risk of the body going into shock as the casket’s various support mechanisms left it to fend for itself. But the casket drained without incident. We rolled the shelf out over the gurney, then disengaged the clamps.
I was closer to the casket’s release lever, so I got to do the honors. The airtight environmental seals made a weirdly satisfying noise when we hauled the lid open, releasing humid, stinking air into the sterile confines of the crypt. Inside was Val, looking just like the corpse in the hallway, except instead of corpse pallor and the blood leaking from every orifice in his face, he was damp with nutrient solution and stiff from reincarnation sickness. You win some, you lose some. He was also shirtless, which I’m sure Markus appreciated. He was in good shape—it’s easy when you grow the body to specifications. The same specifications, every time. Val was basic like that.
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
He was also intubated. Markus pulled out a handful of IV needles while I got the tube out of Val’s face. My hands and arms tingled whenever they crossed the boundary of the stasis field and it told them to chill out and go to sleep. With the invasive stuff removed, all we had to do was rip off the biomonitors taped to his rebirth-slimed chest. At last we were done; Val was a biologically independent organism again.
The last step is to start the brain. We flicked the last switch on the casket. The neural cradle on the back of Val’s bald head crackled alarmingly, causing the body to convulse and cough.
In a fit of whimsy, I dipped a finger in a pool of nutrient solution that hadn’t drained and flicked it on his forehead three times. Get it? Now he was born again.
“Rise and shine, Val,” I said cheerfully. “I hope your new brain is nice and fast, ‘cause you’ve got a lot of thinking to do!”
Val kept his eyes closed, wrinkling his brand new face for the first time. His hand, shaking slightly, pinched the bridge of his nose.
“Naturally,” he rasped, each syllable an obvious effort. “You two won’t.”
“We love you too,” I said, beaming. “Let’s go, Markus!”
We got him situated in the med bay. Bit of hydration, some calisthenics, he’d be back on his feet by dinnertime. Well, okay, dinnertime in a week. Then it was back to the crypt.
“Place creeps me the fuck out,” I said conversationally to Markus on the way back.
“Sometimes I forget you’re not Velean,” he said. “They’re just bodies.”
“One of mine is male!” I protested. “It’s not me!”
“Could be,” he said. “It’s good to have the option. Unless you’re static.”
“Whatever. You first, hold the door.”
We got the commander’s casket down. Markus pulled the lever this time. I braced myself. I’d never seen Val in another body. The commander, on the other hand, I’d never seen wear the same body twice.
Her new body was short, but heavily muscled. With those abs, I’d peg her as a mountain climber or something if I didn’t know she cheated. Female again this time. Soft face, not too pretty, might look better when her hair grew in. Her ocular implants glared green through her eyelids for one eerie moment before subsiding. She shifted weakly.
“Thanks,” was all she said after the trauma of rebirth.
How many times had she woken up in one of these caskets? How many bodies had she taken for a spin and discarded? Your memories don’t all transfer. Some of that information is only encoded in the brain and doesn’t come with you. Just little episodic things, the stuff not important enough to leave an imprint on your soul. Veleans don’t care about that stuff. To some degree they’re objectively correct—if there’s no sympathetic effect, then it categorically doesn’t matter—but I wonder sometimes if it matters in the aggregate. A thousand meaningless experiences adding up to make you into you. Until your body dies and you become someone else.
I didn’t know the answer. I had never flashed. But in my line of work, it was only a matter of time.
The corpses went into the newly vacated caskets. Their status lights glowed a dull red—spent. With unreliable translation engines, they’d stay that way.
Forty-six to go.
*
My melancholy didn’t last long. I was overjoyed to have Val and Abby back, even if the latter was entirely different in looks and slightly different in behavior, which was the more distressing part. Markus and I helped them recover over the next few days while they adjusted.
“Ooh, this one’s adrenal gland is way more active,” Abby said, prancing back and forth on the sparring mat. “Oh, this is very good.” She threw some lightning-fast punches at an invisible opponent. “Ha! Like I’m flying a Celerity. I should have been on stimulants my last life.”
“Celerity’s the super expensive one, right?” I asked, stretching.
“Top of the line, top of the sky,” she recited in a kind of sing-song voice. Marketing slogan, I guessed.
“Not much of a car girl myself,” I said. “Might have been if Earth cars could fly. Alright, I’m good to go.”
“I should show you all my garage when we get back from this mission.” Abby took a stance. “I used to think I’d start my own line when I retired from the service.”
“Oh yeah?” I said, starting to circle. She did the same. “What changed?”
“I don’t think I’ll ever retire.” She stepped in, opening up with a kick. I met it with a knee block and tried a counter-offensive, but she slapped my fists away and stepped past me. I took an elbow to the side as she did. I’d like to blame it on my injury—despite Abby’s somewhat hacky fix, I still wasn’t at 100%—but I’d probably never beat her in a fight. She had at least three hundred years’ combat experience on me.
“Ow. Nice one,” I said, bouncing a bit.
“You need to be faster on those blocks,” she said, and suddenly the chatty woman had been replaced by the commander again. “Your weight was still on the left foot when I hit you. That’s why you couldn’t get out of the way.”
“Yes’m,” I said automatically.
She smiled. “Attagirl.” I charged her. I feinted a right cross, then went for the gut punch. Abby pivoted so the blow glanced off her back, shoulder-checking me. A leg hooked around my ankle as I stumbled backward and I took a blow to the collar bone that dropped me on my ass, knocking the wind out of me. I signaled a pause by holding up a hand, as if my wheezing wasn’t enough. She grabbed my hand and hauled me up. I coughed a couple of times.
“You hit harder now,” I said.
“Adrenaline is a magical drug,” she replied. “Come on, let’s keep going.”
“You like winning more, too,” I said, narrowing my eyes playfully.
“Oh, I’ve always liked winning,” she laughed.
“Pick on someone your own age, why don’t you.”
She didn’t.
Twenty minutes later, thoroughly sore—at least, I was—we made it back to the common area, where Val was engaged with Markus in his own kind of sparring.
“Ah! Just in time. I believe that’s the game,” said Val, placing a white stone on the board. They’d raided my board game stash. Val preferred Go to chess, even though I kept telling him he was totally a chess guy.
“I’ll take your word for it,” said Markus.
“You are no longer able to defend this area,” said Val, indicating an area of the board. “Play here and I capture that section; defend that section and my defense on the right becomes immortal. Either outcome results in a majority of the board under my control.”
“Man, why can’t you just do math problems to warm up?” Markus complained.
“Numbers,” Val said, smiling viciously, “don’t fight back.”
I smiled too. We were all alive.