Page 8 of Mutiny

"He didn't reply," Bulwark said after a long moment. "But he heard you."

I stared at the bright, joyful woman painted on the cold steel wall.

Someone else had been here.

Someone who understood what monsters could become.

"He'll answer when he is ready," I said, stepping into the field. "First, I need to know who painted that."

FOUR

BULWARK

The Taygetan space grain didn't need the amount of ceiling space, and before the ship broke free, it hadn't had that kind of space. The ship had lifted the ceiling in the room up to an excessive height, and I couldn't figure out why. But there were other problems to address, one of which had been identified after the rest of the women had piled into the farm. At first, they expressed relief to find one of their missing members, Carla, comfortably situated in a bedroom attached to the side of the farm. Several people were very excited that she had painting materials to mark the walls. However, it also raised the issue that the other missing person, Milly, was still unaccounted for. All my queries about her to the system went ignored.

The chef, Noelle, had spent time staring out at the farmland while muttering to herself before loudly calling everyone back together for a meeting on the edge of the farm.

"We're going to run out of food," Noelle said.

The fragile calm shattered the moment she spoke. The gathering of women erupted into chatter at her proclamation, words layering on top of one another as sharp questions echoed off the massive domed ceiling.

Adesewa held up her hands, and the group fell quiet.

"Please explain in greater detail, Noelle," Adesewa said. "Are we running out of food in a week, in a month? What do you mean?"

"I can't give a specific timeline," Noelle said. "As we are still finding new storage rooms and we don't know how many of those food cubes are stashed away in places we haven't discovered yet, but when we run out of those, what I can say is that this farm isn't going to be enough to sustain us. We don't even know if this monocrop has the full nutritional complement we need; we don't even know if it is edible, or if they use it to make biofuel or anything at all! We don't know anything!"

Her voice rose as she spoke, until she was shouting the last words.

Panic, fear, my body language subroutine reported.

I saw the same fear in all of them, the tension in their shoulders, the grimaces and expressions they made. It was the same fear that drove Mei to build an unsafe tool to cut through the walls of neurofilaments. They lacked information. They were trapped on a spaceship they couldn't control or communicate with, headed toward a destination they couldn't control.

I hadn't fully recognized or understood the emotion, because it had sprouted from a sense of helplessness that was second nature to my entire existence. I never had to worry about supplies or destinations or anything, because I couldn't do anything about it. I had no control over my life up until the point where these humans had freed me from Plexus control.

I couldn't just promise them that the ship would take care of everything, because I didn't know that for certain. I knew it was likely that it intended to keep us all alive simply because it hadn't killed us yet.

But that wasn't reassuring.

These women needed reassurance, and from the way her knuckles whitened as she clenched her hands into fists, it was clear that Mei needed it too.

The ship wouldn't offer information, but I could.

"The crop is Taygetan space grain," I said. "Humans have a similar appearance and biology to Taygetans, and this crop is what is used to produce your nutritional cubes. It is a standard crop for Vaurelcar ships as it is engineered to have a broad, sticky root system that holds onto dirt and prevents the dirt from moving even in the event of zero gravity."

"So it is edible," Noelle said, her hand going to her chin as she stared out at the field. "We're going to be okay."

"Yes and yes, but also no," I said. "You are correct that this field is not enough to sustain the needs of the ship as well as the guests. The ship is large, and he has to eat too. After acquiring your group, we made regular stops to restock on nutritional resources to maintain you in captivity until processing was complete."

"We can start collecting our shit," Saoirse said. "Make some night soil and expand the farm."

"The ship already has a waste-to-fertilizer processing facility," I said. "Let me query if the ship is aware of the problem and likely has a plan to stop for resupply."

I sent a query to the ship's system regarding that.

A file came back, containing details on a single planet in a small red dwarf system. It was uninhabited by intelligent life, which made it safer to approach while we were still in Calicium-controlled territory. Calicium ships never bothered with uninhabited planets because it was much simpler to gather materials from planets with an existing workforce that could be exploited. It was standard procedure to lie and manipulate the local population into stripping their own planets of valuable materials before bringing the population in for mass processing. It was easier in populations that adulated emotionally dramatic leaders and allowed individuals to pursue excessive personal wealth. Those individuals often abused the population for the Caliciums, accepting rewards in the form of technology that let them better control and manipulate their own population.

"We need more than there is likely a plan," Mei said, her arms crossed over her chest. "We're not all like Andrea, who puts faith in dick before actual information."