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“I am.”
“We have two extras.” Zhe’l waved for me to follow. “One from a lost comrade, another that we found frozen in the tundra.”
While it was customary to return the shuttles to the mothership so they could be reused by the hunters grown to replace the ones that had been lost, some hunter groups preferred to keep them as a reminder of their fallen friend. It also forced the mothership to create a new shuttle, and the more we had, the better.
“The one we found has a messed-up computer.” Cade scratched his head. “I don’t know for sure, since I know fuck-all about machines, but that’s the only explanation. Everything checks out fine on paper, but nothing works quite right.”
“It’s dangerous to fly it the way it is,” Zhe’l said, “if you could even get it off the ground. But if Sam can get Pip into it, it might work. If you get it operational, it’s yours.”
I grunted, then belatedly added, “Thank you.”
Zhe’l went to look for Sam and Cade led me to the shuttle. It was parked behind their building and left uncloaked. There was a boulder wedged in its doorway.
“That’s to keep it from locking us inside,” Cade explained.
I frowned. Pip had done that to Sam. What if it wasn’t a malfunctioning computer so much as a feisty one? I sat at the console and tried to start the sequence to program it to react to my presence. Nothing happened.
“Yeah, sorry, like I said, it’s a mess.” Cade looked to the door. “Oh hey, Sam.” He stepped out to let her in.
“What exactly happened to this shuttle?” she asked.
“We don’t know. We found it the first winter we were here, frozen in the ice with its door open. Everything in it is super glitchy. When we started working with the hunters, they tried to figure out who it belonged to, but there’s no history or logs or anything. And these things don’t exactly have physical bar codes or manufacturing details.”
“No, the mothership just churns them out. They’re all identical except for the computer when they’re brand new. Jask’l says anything they added after, like the updated climate controls, need to be tacked on afterward. Such a huge waste of time. Lenny was talking to Ror’k about rewriting the code so they could have more control over everything the mothership does.”
“Yeah. I heard they had trouble with the third mothership. The abandoned one, I mean.”
The mention of my mothership caught my attention.
Someone called Cade’s name, and he excused himself, leaving me alone with Sam.
“What happened to my mothership? I thought it was still orbiting Earth.” I’d been afraid to ask all this time. I’d always felt a bit guilty for abandoning it.
“Originally, yes, they sent it back up to orbit Earth,” Sam said. “But after a while, the ship insisted on going back to the planet it was originally supposed to go to.”
I scowled. “That planet is not worth the lives that would be lost.”
At a certain point, it had become no longer worth it to fight the scourge there. If we were already in place we would have continued to fight because we were supposed to, but to send new hunters was a waste. There was nothing left to save. It was better instead to monitor the situation, letting the scourge eat anything there was to eat until there was nothing left, then trap them on the dead planet when they tried to leave. There was already a contingent on the planet doing just that.
It had been the message from that contingent telling us we were no longer needed there that had finalized the decision to come to Earth instead. I’d thought that after all this time, the mothership would have given up on that mission, but clearly, it hadn’t.
“The programming on the mothership doesn’t care about hunter lives,” Sam said. “It views you all as disposable, just like the Xarc’n military. Anyway, they tried to get it to select a new destination, somewhere more beneficial to the fight against the scourge, but it kept defaulting back to that planet. So they grounded it. It’s still on Earth.” She turned her attention to the shuttle. “Okay, let’s see. Maybe we can find a way to make this shuttle work for us now that the other one is gone.”
Sam tried her hand with the shuttle. It ignored her too, and instead of showing her its history, the lights just blinked on and off. I told her my idea, that maybe it was just being ornery like Pip, but she shook her head.
“I already had Pip try to connect to it with the laptop,” Sam said. “He says there’s nothing there. Or if there is, it’s not responsive. He even threatened to turn it off permanently, but it still didn’t answer. I think it’s dead.”
The idea that a shuttle could die was chilling. Surely, this shuttle hadn’t always been like this. It had had a hunter once and had helped him fight the scourge. Suddenly, Pip’s fear of being turned off and never turned back on again became very real in my head. Pip could die, and I’d ignored his fears.
All this time, I’d thought of him as only an inanimate object, even though he’d been so much more. He’d been my sole companion during the long winters here on Earth when I had no one else.
“Is it safe to put Pip in this shuttle? What if the same thing happens to him?”
“Pip says the shuttle itself looks perfectly fine, just a bit braindead—his words, not mine. I agree with him. If he thinks it’s worth the risk, I’m willing to do it.” She opened up the toolbox she’d brought in with her and started strapping on a headlamp.
“Uh, you don’t have to stay and watch, you know,” she said. “I’m not going to mess up the shuttle any more than it already is.”
I frowned. I wasn’t staying because I thought she was going to mess up the shuttle. I was simply curious to see her work. Plus, I wanted to be here to greet Pip when he came online again.
