to a halt.
Maris signed for radio silence. They fanned out, peering through view-ports into the red-lit interiors of the two cylinders. Somerset’s orange-suited figure, at the far end of the workspace, raised a hand, pointed down. The others clustered around him.
Alice stared up at them through the little disc of scratched, triple-layered plastic. After a moment, she smiled.
They opened the airlock’s secondary hatch and cycled through, the four of them crowding each other in the little spherical space as they shucked helmets and gloves. Alice was waiting placidly in the center of the cluttered workroom, floating as usual in midair, hands hooked under her knees.
“Oh my,” Maris said in dismay.
Still in its yellow p-suit, Symbiosis’s sunburst-in-a-green-circle logo on its chest-plate, Barrett’s body was strung against the bulkhead behind Alice. Its arms were bound to its sides by a whipcord tether; a wormy knot of patch sealant filled the broken visor of its helmet. The end of Barrett’s braided beard stuck out of the hard white foam like a mountaineer’s flag on a snowy peak. Maris didn’t need Bruno’s pronouncement to know that the supervisor was dead.
It took Ty ten minutes to get the story from Alice. He asked questions; she answered by nods or shakes. Apparently, Barrett had come looking for her after his AI had decrypted and audited Somerset’s infonet usage records; he’d boasted about his cleverness. He had been friendly at first, but when Alice had refused to answer his questions, he had threatened to kill her. That was when she had immobilized him with the tether and suffocated him with the sealant.
Somerset found Barrett’s weapon. It had fetched up against one of the air-conditioning outlets.
Ty asked Alice, “Did he threaten to kill you, honey?”
A quick nod.
“Why did he want to kill you? Was he scared of you?”
Alice nodded, then shook her head.
“Okay, he was scared of you, but that wasn’t why he wanted to kill you.”
A nod.
“He wanted something from you.”
A nod.
“He probably wanted Alice,” Bruno said. “She has been gengineered by Avernus. Her genome, it must be very valuable.”
Alice shook her head.
Ty said, “What did he want, honey?”
Alice put a finger to her lips, assumed a sudden look of inward concentration, and started, very delicately, to choke. She shook her head when Ty reached for her, coughed, and started to pull something from her mouth.
Blue plastic wire, over two meters of it.
Maris’s parents had owned a vacuum organism farm before the war; she knew at once what the wire was. “That’s how vacuum organism spores are packaged.”
Alice smiled and nodded.
Maris said, “Does it contain spores of the vacuum organism growing on the shuttle?”
Alice nodded again, then held up her right hand, opened and closed it half a dozen times.
Ty said, “It contains all kinds of spores?”
Bruno said, “This is why you were a passenger. You were carrying it all the time.”
“Symbiosis knew about it,” Maris said. “They must have had the complete cargo inventory. When they didn’t find it in the cargo pods, they searched the lifesystem for the only passenger. And Barrett knew about it too, or found out about it. That’s why he sent drones to watch us as we stripped out the lifesystem.”
“He did not watch us work outside,” Bruno said.
“Barrett is a flatlander,” Maris said. “It didn’t occur to him that the passenger might be hiding outside. Outside is a bad, scary place, as far as flatlanders are concerned; that’s why he hardly ever left his ship. But then he discovered Somerset’s trail in the infonet, and worked out that we had found Alice. He wanted her for himself, so he couldn’t confront us directly; he waited until we went to work, got up his nerve, and came here.”
Somerset was hanging back from the others, near the hatch to the airlock. It said, “You grow an intricate story from only a few facts.”
Ty told the neuter, “Don’t you realize it’s your fault Barrett found out about Alice?”
“I asked Somerset to make a search on the infonet,” Maris said. “It isn’t its fault that Barrett’s AI was able to break into its records. And I was stupid enough to ask Barrett about the shuttle’s cargo, which probably made him suspicious in the first place.” She took a breath to center herself, called up every gram of her resolve. “Listen up, you three. We all brought Alice back; we all decided that we couldn’t give her up to Barrett; we’re all in this together. We have to decide what to do, and we have to do it quickly, before the crew of the Symbiosis ship start to worry about their boss.”
“Somerset has a point,” Bruno said. “We don’t know what happened between Alice and Barrett.”
“He didn’t come over for a social visit,” Ty said. “He wanted these spores, he threatened her with the weapon. That’s why she killed him.”
Somerset said calmly, “I am not sure that Symbiosis will believe your story.”
Ty knuckled his tattooed scalp. “Fuck you, Somerset! I know Alice is no murderer, and that’s all that matters to me.”
“That’s the problem,” Somerset said, and pointed Barrett’s weapon at Ty. It was as black and smooth as a pebble, with a blunt snout that nestled between the neuter’s thumb and forefinger.
Maris said, “What are you doing, Somerset?”
Somerset’s narrow face was set with cold resolve. It looked wholly masculine now. It said, “This fires needles stamped from a ribbon of smart plastic. Some of the needles are explosive; others sprout hooks and barbs when they strike something; they all cause a lot of damage. It is a disgusting weapon, but I will use it if I have to, for the greater moral good.”
“Stay calm, Somerset,” Maris said. “Don’t do anything foolish.”
“Yeah,” Ty said. “If you want to play with that, go outside.”
“I want you all to listen to me. Ty, before we found Alice, you were convinced that she was a monster. I believe that you were right. Because she looks like a little girl, she triggers protective reflexes in ordinary men and women, and they do not realize that they are being manipulated. I, however, am immune. I see her for what she is, and I want you all to share this clear, uncomfortable insight.”
Ty said, “She killed Barrett in self-defense, man!” He had drifted in front of Alice, shielding her from Somerset.
“We do not know what happened,” Somerset said. “We see a dead man. We see what looks like a little girl. We make assumptions, but how do we know the truth? Perhaps Barrett drew this weapon in self-defense.”
Maris said, “You don’t like violence, Somerset. I understand that. But what you’re doing now makes you as bad as Barrett.”
“Not at all,” Somerset said. “As I believe I have said before, if you take the side of a murderer with no good reason, then you are as morally culpable as she is.”
“She isn’t a murderer,” Ty said.
“We do not know that,” Somerset insisted calmly.
“You fucking traitor!” Bruno said, and dove straight at the neuter.
Somerset swung around. The weapon in his fist made a mild popping sound. Bruno bellowed with pain and clutched at his right arm. Suddenly off-balance, he missed Somerset entirely, slammed against the edge of the airlock hatch, and tumbled backward. And Alice spun head-over-heels and threw something with such force that Maris only saw it on the rebound, after it had sliced through Somerset’s fingers. It was a power saw blade, a diamond disc that ricocheted sideways and lodged in the door of a locker with an emphatic thud. Somerset, its truncated right hand pumping strings of crimson droplets into the air, made a clumsy grab for the weapon; Maris snatched the black pebble out of the air, and Ty knocked the neuter through the airlock hatch.
Ty and Maris trussed Somerset with tethers, and Bruno staunched its bleeding finger stumps and gave it a shot of painkiller before allowing Maris to bandage his own, much more superficial wound. Alice hung back, calm and
