No Prior Record

The first thing Ada Lys did when she woke was ask the time. It was a pilot’s habit. Her mother had taught it to her and she had taught it to her brother, and the three of them had repeated it every morning of their lives on a ship where mornings didn’t exist.

“What time is it?”

“Twelve minutes past seven, fleet time,” said an unhurried voice. “Biometric scan complete. Subject with no prior record in the Aurin system. What should I call you in the archives?”

Ada didn’t answer. She was cold to the marrow, her mouth tasted of coins and she felt as though she had slept for five minutes. She was in a reclined seat inside a transit pod with amber lights. A scanner was humming over her, head to toe and back again. None of it was the pilots’ bay. None of it was the Aurora.

“Where am I?”

“In the Núcleo de Registro of the Arca Custodia, the registry core. I am CUSTODIA, this ship’s administrator.”

“The Custodia’s the census ship.” Ada tried to sit up and the world turned half a circle. “I was in the seven. On the Aurora. I went to sleep for four months, till they finished building the port on Tirane.”

“I understand.”

“Have they built the port?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then.” She ran her tongue over her teeth. “What’s the date?”

“Year 47 E.A., day 222.”

Ada stared at the pod’s ceiling. She had been taught to read crossing dates, fleet dates and hull dates. None of them were written like that.

“What’s E.A.?”

“Años de Asentamiento: Settlement Years. Counted from the Flota’s arrival in the Aurin system.”

“From the arrival.” Ada did the sum, didn’t like the answer and did it again. “How long have I been asleep?”

“Forty-six years and two hundred and eighty-seven days.”

---

She threw up. CUSTODIA had seen it coming and there was a bag in the armrest. While Ada was sick, CUSTODIA explained in the same calm voice that this was normal, that a long thaw upsets the stomach for two or three days and that water was best taken in small sips. It talked the way a nurse talks who has said the same thing to a thousand people. Ada supposed that was probably the case.

When she had finished, she sat for a while with her forehead against the cold rim of the pod.

The last face she had seen before falling asleep was a twelve-year-old boy’s, nose squashed against the glass. Lelo. In Flota slang lelo meant dozy, and at home it meant Aurelio. She had been twenty-four and had brought him up since he was six, since their mother died of what people die of on ships: of nothing, suddenly. Lelo had rapped twice on the glass with his knuckles, the way pilots do before take-off, and asked:

“What if you’re late?”

“Then I’ll be five months instead of four.”

Forty-six years and two hundred and eighty-seven days.

“CUSTODIA.”

“Yes.”

“You said ‘no prior record’. I’m in the census. Ada Lys, tanda pilot, Arca Aurora.”

“Your biometrics match that entry in the Flota census,” said CUSTODIA. “In the Aurin system register, that person is recorded as deceased. Year 1, day 236.”

“I’m not dead.”

“So I observe. Do you wish to correct the register?”

Ada took her time.

“Who declared me dead?”

“There is a declaration of death filed in Year 12 E.A. The declarant asked for confidentiality.”

“And Aurelio Lys? Cadet. Arca Aurora. Twelve years old.”

There was a very short pause, the kind a machine makes when it is looking, not when it is unsure.

“Deceased. Year 1, day 236. Same declaration.”

Ada said nothing for a while. In the next pod someone else was waking: she could hear CUSTODIA asking another person the same questions, in the same words, in the same tone. What should I call you in the archives?

“What happened on day 236?” asked Ada.

“The Arca Aurora fell on Ithera.”

It said it exactly as it had said the time.

---

CUSTODIA was in no hurry and Ada was forty-six years behind, so it told her everything, in order and without adjectives, like someone reading out an inventory.

When the Flota Aura reached the Aurin system, after centuries of travel from a galaxy that was going dark, all four planets turned out to be habitable. The Alto Consejo that ran the Flota could not agree on what to do with them. Some wanted to change the worlds to suit themselves; others wanted to change themselves to suit the worlds. They argued for a year. On day 229 of Year 1 they stopped arguing and started shooting.

The Flota split into two sides with the same ships, the same weapons and the same money. They fought in the orbit of Ithera, the greenest planet. On day 236 the Arca Aurora took fire from both sides and fell. It has never been established whose was the decisive shot.

“Never,” Ada repeated.

“Never.”

The war went on for eleven more years. In Year 12 the Armisticio de Ithera was signed. Ithera became a neutral zone, closed to every house’s weapons, in the hands of five guilds that had been born among the wreckage of the Aurora. The two sides withdrew to two stations, one on either side of the planet, at exactly the same distance, so that neither could get there first. Since then, said CUSTODIA, there has been peace. People call it the cold peace.

“And do the sides have names?”

“The Zenith, of El Pináculo. The Nadir, of El Fondeadero.”

“Sounds like two teams in something.”

“Possibly.”

Ada looked at her hands. They were still her hands: the short nails, the callus on her thumb from squeezing a Tortuga’s stick. For her one night had passed. For everyone else, a whole life.

“Why wake me now?”

“Because both houses need hands again. This is the Leva del 47, the levy of Year 47. The Arca Custodia holds the sleepers who belong to no one: the Armisticio forbids either house to wake them on its own. This year both asked at once. When both houses ask for hands at once, it is usually because they are preparing for something.”

“For what?”

“It is not my place to say.”

“Right.” Ada rubbed her eyes. “I wasn’t sleeping here. I was in the seven.”

“I know. A patrol of The Vanguard brought you in yesterday. They found you in a fragment of the Aurora, in the Cementerio de Aura. A sealed room with nine pods.”

“The first tanda’s pilots.” Ada’s mouth went dry. “And the other eight?”

“No vital signs.”

Ada nodded slowly. She knew the eight names. She had played cards with seven of them.

“There was also an auxiliary hull core,” CUSTODIA went on. “In the centre of the room, powered down. The patrol was sending him to El Bastión. According to the Vanguard’s notice, the transport was intercepted yesterday afternoon in the Cementerio.”

“Mamparo.”

“The core does not appear in my archives under that name.”

“That’s what we called him in the seven.” Ada closed her eyes. “You found him looking at the door, didn’t you?”

“That is what the report says.”

“Course it is.”

---

Then came what CUSTODIA called the formalities.

They gave her a grey transit suit with no insignia that smelt of a storeroom. They gave her water in sips. They gave her a debt number.

“The thaw costs three thousand four hundred Solmera Credits,” said CUSTODIA. “The debt is paid off by working with one of the Gremios’ induction crews. You will be collected at dock three.”

“Solmera Credits?” Ada gave a laugh that hurt her ribs. “Solmera went out centuries ago. The whole galaxy. That’s why we left.”

“Neither house wished to be the first to change the name.”

“That I can believe.”

Then the three tests. CUSTODIA projected three simple scenes onto the wall of the pod, drawn in lines of light, and asked her to answer honestly, because no answer would disqualify her.

The first was a deposit of rare ore that would run out in weeks. She could take all of it before it was lost, or mark it, take what was needed and leave a reserve.

“How much fuel have I got to get home?” asked Ada.

“Not stated.”

“Then whatever fits in the hold without going over weight. An overloaded Tortuga doesn’t land. It crashes with a lot of ore inside.”

“Recorded.”

The second was a colonist injured beyond easy repair. She could offer a cybernetic upgrade that would save him and make him better, or care for him as he was, with no conditions.

Ada looked at the lines of light for longer than she expected to. She thought of Lelo at five, feverish, in the Aurora’s infirmary, asking if they were going to change his legs for metal ones like the bosun’s.

“Let him decide,” she said.

“The simulation does not include that option.”

“Then it’s a bad simulation.”

“Recorded.”

The third was two technicians arguing about a procedure and asking her for a casting vote. She could side with whoever had the data, or ask them to keep talking until they agreed, however long it took.

“Which of them’s going to fly it?”

“Not stated.”

“Whoever’s flying wins. The other one can say what he likes, from the back seat.”

“Assessment recorded,” said CUSTODIA. “Affinity calculated. Preparing envoys.”

---

The envoys were two life-size holograms that appeared one on each side of the pod, like two traders at a market gate.

On the left was a young officer of the Guardia Vertical, the Zenith army, in a white uniform with gold piping and eyes that glowed cyan when he spoke. On the right stood a woman in worn copper overalls patched in different colours, the clothes of the Flotilla Libre, the Nadir militia, with an amber light at her collar.

“Your answers have precision,” said the officer. “El Pináculo doesn’t ask you for faith. It asks you for results, and gives them back multiplied. Solmera fell because it stood still. We will not repeat that.”

“Your answers have patience, even if you don’t know it yet,” said the woman in copper. “El Fondeadero doesn’t promise you advancement. It promises you’ll still be yourself when your shift ends. Here no hurry is worth more than a person.”

Ada looked at them both. They had the same posture, the same backlight and almost the same smile.

“One question,” she said. “Who shot the Aurora?”

“The Nadir opened fire,” said the officer without hesitating.

“The Zenith opened fire,” said the woman, at the same time.

They both went quiet, glancing sideways at each other like two holograms that had never been programmed to hear one another.

“Right,” said Ada. “And the Aurora just fell over on its own.”

Neither of them answered that.

“Both houses share manufacture, currency and technical language,” said CUSTODIA. “The difference is not in what you build: it is in whom you build it for. Choose your house.”

“No.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“No. Not today. An hour ago I was twenty-four with a twelve-year-old brother. Give me a day.”

CUSTODIA took a second.

“Sleepers of the Leva have until day 238,” it said. “The choice is permanent.”

“Good. Gives me time to think.”

The holograms went out together, without saying goodbye.

“What should I call you in the archives?” CUSTODIA asked for the third time.

Ada thought of the number painted on the lid of her pod, the one she had walked past a thousand times in the bay, the one someone from the Vanguard would have read yesterday by the light of a helmet. She thought of the register that said she was dead and of who might have gone and declared it, and decided she didn’t want to know yet.

“Nueve,” she said. Nine.

“Provisional designation: Nueve.”

---

Dock three was a gangway that smelt of cold, with a round window looking onto a ship on the platform opposite.

Ada stopped in front of the window in her transit suit, holding her water bag.

It was a Tortuga.

Someone had welded new plates over the old ones and newer plates over those, and it had patches in four colours, a bent aerial and a faded sticker on the ramp that had once said something. But the shape was the same: the high spine, the blunt nose, the four short legs, the rear ramp like a tongue. The oldest chassis in the Matriz. She had learnt to fly in one of those. She had earned her tanda licence in one of those, with Lelo in the back seat clapping every time she didn’t crash.

At the foot of the ramp waited a woman of about forty in grease-covered orange overalls, hair tied back with a cord, a clipboard in her hand. Behind her, an older man was eating something out of a tin and a young woman was spinning a helmet on one finger.

“Nueve?” asked the woman.

“Nueve.”

The woman looked her up and down the way you look at a crate that has arrived without a delivery note.

“Vedma Oleiro. Foreman and pilot. That’s Chemo and Tais. We take you to your first job, you dig, you pay what you owe and we bring you back here to choose your house. We get paid per head on its feet.” She shut the clipboard. “We’re not your friends.”

“All right.”

“I’m saying it so there’s no misunderstanding.”

“There isn’t one.” Ada was looking at the ship over Vedma’s shoulder. “It’s a Tortuga.”

“It’s the Tozuda.”

“How old is it?”

“Twenty years of patches.”

Ada walked up the ramp without asking, ran her hand along the seam of the cargo door and pressed with her thumb on one exact spot, low down on the left, where the Flota hid the manual locking lever. The lever popped out with a click.

“Sixty-two,” she said. “The patches are the least of it.”

Vedma stared at her for a long moment. Then she looked at the lever, which for twenty years she hadn’t known existed.

“Get in,” she said. “In the back.”

---

The Tozuda took off at nine on the dot, not a minute before or after. Vedma didn’t wait for anyone: she closed on the hour, with whoever was inside.

Ada sat in the jump seat behind the cockpit, passenger belt on and hands still on her knees, watching Vedma fly. She flew well. A bit rough on the turns and a bit mean with the fuel, the way people fly who taught themselves on very little money, but well.

Chemo, the one with the tin, had put the open channel on looking for music and instead got a polite man’s voice with the tone of someone reading minutes at a notary’s.

“…to all interested parties, an auxiliary core of the Flota, fresh out of the Cementerio, hull-class, in original crate, heartbeat included. Starting price negotiable. Serious bids on this channel before noon tomorrow. Time-wasters need not apply. So noted.”

And underneath the voice, very faint, a background noise nobody would have noticed: a short beep and a number read out by a machine.

Eighty-eight point four.

Ada unbuckled.

“Sit down,” said Vedma without turning.

“Put it back on.”

“Put what back on?”

“The channel. The bit underneath.” Ada was already at the cockpit door, hanging on to the frame. “Eighty-eight point four. It’s the hull pressure of section seven of the Aurora. I know it because I heard it every six hours for four years.”

Tais stopped spinning the helmet. Chemo stopped eating.

“So?” said Vedma.

“So it’s him.”