Ascending - James Alan Gardner [76]
Festina clearly felt the same inhibitions as I, stifled under the sergeant’s gaze. Instead of relating how she had grieved while believing me to be dead, or describing the joy she felt to have me back, she seemed at a loss for words; after an awkward silence, she simply began to name the rooms we were passing. “Main Engine Room. Secondary Engine Room. Hydroponics. Gravity generators…”
The lack of conversation might have been more tolerable if I had been allowed to look into any of the rooms as we passed. After all, the engines of a starship must be quite a sight: great fiery furnaces tended by muscular persons with sweat glistening over their rippling torsos. But every door we passed remained shut and unwelcoming…until finally one hissed open just ahead of us.
Festina and Aarhus halted—they must have assumed someone was coming out into the corridor. When no one did, they simply shrugged and started forward again; but I remained frozen where I was, for I had heard a familiar voice.
The voice was distressingly nasal, coming through the open doorway. When the door began to hiss shut again, I dashed forward and grabbed the edge of the sliding panel. The door fought against me for a moment; then it grudgingly slid back into the wall.
“Hey,” Aarhus said, “that’s the main computer room. Off-limits to civilians.”
I ignored him. Striding into the room, I searched for the source of the voice. It was coming from behind an array of computers so tall and wide I could not see past them. I could, however, hear the voice’s words quite plainly: “What did you think you were doing? Why didn’t you test the code first? Did you really think an undebugged program would work perfectly the first time?”
Festina grabbed my arm. “Oar, where are you going? What’s wrong?”
“That is the Pollisand!” I whispered.
My friend’s eyes grew wide. “Oh fuck!”
Then she and the sergeant sprinted forward.
15
WHEREIN I TAKE CHARGE OF OPENING DOORS
Logic Scum
We rounded the bank of computers at a run…then stopped in the face of chaos.
First, there was the Pollisand: exactly as I had seen him in the lava garden. Indeed, I could still detect reddish stains on his feet, obtained when he peevishly stomped the scarlet flowers. This was definitely the same creature I had met hours earlier…or else such a perfect copy I could not tell the difference.
The Pollisand was not the only one with crimson stains on his skin. In front of him stood a human dressed in dark brown attire: a woman whose flesh was dark brown too, except for the fingers of both hands. Those fingers were smeared a vivid red—not blood, but a scarlet dust that sifted off flakes whenever she moved. Speckles of that dust lay scattered across the floor at her feet…and red chalky fingerprints glowed on the access panels of the computer in front of her.
Though those panels were shut, something bubbly leaked out around their edges: a charcoal gray foam, forcing itself through the seams of the computer’s casing, trickling down the machine’s exterior, and pattering onto the floor tiles. The glup had a musty smell, like human feet enclosed too long in stockings. When a clot of the stuff slopped down near the brown woman’s boots, she jumped back fearfully as if the foam could hurt her.
“Bloody hell!” Festina said. Shoving the brown woman aside, my friend drove a kick into the junction between two of the computer’s access panels. The kick must have snapped whatever locking mechanism held the panels in place; both doors swung open, propelled by great gouts of foam that had built up inside. Gray bubbles spilled and gushed to the floor, releasing such a wash of musty odor I nearly gagged.
“What is that?” I asked, feeling choked.
“Logic scum,” Festina said. “Chunks of the ship’s data get encoded in organic molecules: DNA, long chain polymers, stuff like that—then all those chemicals are packaged into a single living cell. A data bacterium. The only problem is that bacteria can be killed.”
She nodded