“Jesi,” Iris sounded a warning, but when no response came, he searched for the girl, only to find her mute, standing ten metres from him, her arm outstretched, pointing towards the obvious.
“I think I found the rest of theNicaea’s passengers.” As if responding to her words, the thing Jesi was pointing at shimmered. Pale bone. A mountain of ivory. Iris grabbed Jesi’s shoulder and pulled her behind him, but at once, the fungi ignited with a blazing light, and the mountain of skeletons flashed with the fury of a rising star.
Too late.
“Fuck,” Jesi whispered. Iris agreed internally. It took all his willpower to keep the pulsar blade holstered instead of jumping into action. Not yet. He wasn’t sure what they were up against yet. He hadn’t stared into their enemy’s eyes. Only once he did would he decide whether to run and hide or face their foe. Only then would he even entertain his desperation.
The glow of the fungi rippled past the bones and towards the back of the hangar. Both Iris and Jesi fell mute as their eyes traced the trunk of an ancient tree emerging from beyond the mountain of bones. Twisted, cracking bark lined its entire height, thick enough to resist a bullet. Their faces tilted upwards to look at the ceiling. The far edges of the crown bled into the darkness, boundless.
As they watched, the glow encircled the trunk and followed along the hundreds of vines that ran from the crown towards the pile of bones. One glistening vine per skeleton. One vine for every body that was once a person, now nothing more than an artifact of slaughter. With rising nausea, Iris recalled how theNicaeahad absorbed every one of his fallen companions. There were hundredsof bones here. How many more lay crumpled beneath the ferns? How many more were buried beneath the soil? He recalled Riyu’s excitement over a mother tree and its ability to watch over all its saplings. He recalled the networks of mycelium and how they acted akin to the human nervous system. And through these recollections, Iris quickly solidified his horrible conclusion.
“Don’t touch anything,” he warned Jesi, extending his arm so that she was completely hidden behind him. “Back away towards the door. Slowly. Don’t make any noise.” He sensed the girl move away from him. Jesi’s faint footsteps echoed on the ground in bursts of light as she retreated. The ship’s pulse rose. It swelled and quickened, until it reached a monstrous crescendo. They were out of time.
Before Iris could yell for Jesi to run, the door to the corridor slammed shut with a force that sent pieces of moss and shrubs hurtling towards them. The sound of the impact nearly would have ruptured Iris’s eardrums if not for his palms pressed tight against his ears.
Along the tree’s gargantuan trunk, the fungi flickered in a frenzy, their luminosity growing with each passing moment. Iris marched over to where Jesi had fallen and grabbed her shaking hand. “Give me your thumb,now.” Iris grabbed the pulsar blade and pressed Jesi’s thumb roughly into the indentation.Add her fingerprint and her stress response to the authorised list,Iris commanded VIFAI. When it began to protest, he cut it off:Now.In a moment, the scan was complete, and Iris stored the pulsar blade away once more. He leaned down and whispered into Jesi’s ear, calmly, patiently; she would need to remember his words exactly if they were to have even the slightest chance of making it out alive. His eyes again fell across the mountain of bones, and Iris prayed for Yan and Ishtan to lose their way in the vents and avoid this killing field.
He forced his fingers into the ground beneath him. The soil gave way. It was well packed, but soft. He could move well on soil like this.Stay on high alert,he told VIFAI and got to his feet. It was a shot in the dark, but it was the only way to prove himself right. It was probably the only way any of them were leaving this ship alive. “You have us here, trapped, willing to listen,” Iris called out, his voice cracking. “What is it that you want?”
No answer.
Jesi looked up at him like he was insane, and to her, he surely was. For a moment, a cold chill crept up Iris’s back, and he envisioned Ishtan and Yan, already absorbed into the ship, both dead, necks snapped clean. What would he do if theNicaeaspoke to him in Yan’s voice? Would he uphold his promise and protect Jesi, or would he simply surrender to his fate? “What is it that you want?” It was better to yell into the abyss than to drown in one’s thoughts. The speakers above him crackled, and Iris instinctively bent his knees, ready to flee or fight.
VESSEL IRIS, a voice—if one could call it that, a culmination of Eli, Ordan, Riyu, and Tev—said. It was discordant and triggered some part of Iris’s brain that made it hard not to dry heave onto the ground.
“Oh fuck, oh fuck, ohfuck.” Jesi muttered the words like a half-forgotten prayer. Her eyes darted back and forth across the vast room, failing to locate the speaker.
VESSEL IRIS, the voice repeated. It shifted towards Riyu’s tone and softened its edges, like it had picked up on Iris’s discomfort.
“Yes?” Iris didn’t know where to look, so he looked straight ahead at the tree.
WE CAN FINALLY SPEAK TO ONE ANOTHER. WE CAN FORGO THE GUESSING AND MISUNDERSTANDING.
Iris was taken aback by the eloquence of the speech. It was like he was speaking to a completely different construct than the one that had simply recited Ordan’s and Riyu’s words. While that voice had been robotic and flat, this, this was almost too human-like. “If you could tell me where you are, I could face you,” Iris said. There were ulterior motives for knowing where the ship was speaking from, but he would refrain from disclosing those just yet.
The ship laughed. At least, Iris thought it laughed. It was strange to hear the inorganic tone pitch in such a way. He had only heard VIFAI do that, but it had been speaking in his own voice for decades.WOULD YOU NOT RATHER ASK WHERE YOU ARE IN RELATION TO ME?
He had known it, but it wasn’t until that moment that Iris truly understood that they wereinsidethe thing that was theNicaea. They were walking down its corridors, same as the blood flowed through Iris’s own veins. The ship was the whole organism, each panel, each shattered light bulb. It was connected to every bit of itself at all times, every shrub, every deck, every piece of itself reaching out towards the edges, gathering information, processing data. It knew itself completely, had complete mastery of every vine.
YOUR FRIENDS WILL BE HERE SOON, VESSEL IRIS, the ship said.WE CAN ALL TALK TOGETHER. With that final word, a vent panel high above popped open and tumbled to the ground. Ishtan’s head poked out, only to recoil as two vines lunged towards the opening and pulled both the archaeologist and Yan out. Yan cursed and fought against the vines as they tightened around his shoulders. Ishtan just hung there.
“Put them down,please,” Iris said, careful so that his voice didn’t telegraph the violence that was brewing below the surface. He could be dangerous if he was pushed; the ship already knew this.
Once Yan’s feet hit the ground, he shrugged his restraints off and ran towards Jesi, who was still in a pile somewhere behind Iris. Ishtan simply crumpled onto the dirt. No one went to his side.
NOW WE CAN TALK, the ship said with the tone of an irate mother.
“Who’s that?” Yan muttered.
PLEASED TO MEET YOU, PROFESSOR FUKUI. YOU’RE SPEAKING TO THENICAEA, THE SHIP IMPOSSIBLY INTERFACING WITH ORGANICS AS WE SPEAK.
“Fuck.” Yan’s fear, no matter how palpable, instantaneously gave way to professional curiosity and frustration with being wrong. Certainly, a rare occurrence for him. He grinned at Iris. “It appears you were right, Vessel.”
The left corner of Iris’s lips tugged upwards, rebelling against the gravity of the situation. “I take no joy in being right.”
BANTER AMONG FRIENDS,OH, HOW I’VE MISSED THIS.
“They’re not friends,” Jesi whimpered from the ground.
