Malefactor

by Robert Repino

  The boat ascended again on the next wave, so high that for a moment, D’Arc no longer saw the water, only the overcast sky. She was ready for the impact this time, absorbing the shock, bracing for the cold. She straightened herself. With her free hand, she lifted the binoculars and peered into the clouds.

  She felt the engine slow. The captain would give chase only for so long.

  “Come on,” D’Arc said. “Where did you go?”

  As the engine eased, she heard a hissing sound approaching. Dead ahead, a gray curtain descended from the clouds, disturbing the surface of the ocean. A few seconds later, the first icy drops splashed against her snout, making her blink. Winter rain. Too warm to freeze, but so cold that the droplets pelted her fur, numbing the skin underneath. D’Arc glanced at the deck, where the crew members fled for cover. Harlan, one of the human scientists, zipped his yellow slicker. Behind him loomed the security officer, a bear named Moab who did not approve of these excursions.

  On the bridge, Captain Vittal waited with her hands folded at her belt buckle. The raindrops obscured her, though her bright blue jacket and cap remained visible. At her side, the ship’s pilot, a dog named Koral, struggled to keep the wheel steady.

  D’Arc faced the wind and rain again. Her muscles tensed when she saw something—a black dot streaking through the clouds.

  D’Arc pointed at it and barked. Koral spun the wheel. The engine kicked again. D’Arc held on as the boat accelerated.

  “I see it!” Harlan said, a huge smile splitting his red face.

  The flier descended farther. D’Arc wiped the lenses of the binoculars with her thumbs. When she looked through them, she could make out the general shape: round body, black armor plating, transparent wings beating at a near-sonic speed. A winged ant. One of the only live ones that anyone had seen since the war.

  Though confused by the rain and possibly injured, the ant became a majestic black angel cutting through the storm. The ants that D’Arc raised herself could never do this. They loved their daily walks through the forest. They loved feeding time. The most adventurous ones, like Juke and Gai Den, splashed in the stream like puppies. They would have loved to fly.

  Shaking away the memory, D’Arc waved her arm at Koral, begging him to go faster. The engine revved another notch. The weightlessness brought on a wave of nausea, strong enough to make her drop to one knee. She leaned over the side, facing the foamy water as it slammed into the hull.

  “Hey, Mountain Girl,” Harlan said. “I thought you were over the seasickness!”

  Mercifully, her gut settled. She wagged her tail in relief. “Why don’t you try standing out here?”

  “No thanks,” Harlan said.

  As always, Moab did not react. The rain dripped from her thick brow and from the tip of her enormous nose.

  “Holy shit, look!” Harlan shouted.

  D’Arc turned. The ant descended until it skimmed the surface in a great white splash. The wings kept flapping as the ant corkscrewed. It landed on its back, legs twisted over its belly, the antennae broken. The rising waves hid the body, then revealed it again.

  “Harlan, get your people ready!” D’Arc said.

  As the boat approached, D’Arc put her hands in the air to tell Koral to slow the engine. She guided the boat so that the fallen ant bobbed along the port side, where a crane could retrieve it. D’Arc followed the body as it scraped against the hull. On the way, she grabbed a telescopic boat hook that leaned on a cleat. She reached the pole to the ant and latched on to a joint in its leg. The science team swarmed around her. Two humans held out their own poles, using them to pin the ant to the side of the ship.

  “Drag it toward the crane,” D’Arc said.

  Despite the rain, the entire crew stood on deck. Everyone wanted to see. The gawkers made room for Moab’s team. The security guards lined the gunwale, all aiming rifles and readying to fire the moment the ant so much as twitched. Early in the expedition, Moab had let everyone know that she hated these missions. Even the half-eaten, stiff-as-a-board carcasses they found before this one put her on edge.

  At the bottom of the crane’s arm hung four heavy chain loops, fashioned solely for this purpose. While the boat swayed, D’Arc and Harlan fastened the loops around the ant’s body. While bobbing in the water, the insect resembled any other piece of debris they encountered. One of the brittle wings crumpled against the metal.

  “It’s ready!” D’Arc said. “Take it up!”

  The machine lifted the insect. The body went stiff as the water dripped from its exoskeleton. Everyone gasped. The rifles raised, their barrels tracking the crane as it swung over the gunwale. D’Arc met the creature as it hovered over the deck. She was the first to touch its cold shell. The bristly hair tickled her palm. The rain, the wind, the shouting people—all of it vanished for a moment. She was at her ranch again, riding on Gai Den, wearing a straw hat to shield her face from the sun. The other crew members remembered these creatures as the enemy. She remembered them as part of her youth, a fact that would always separate her from the people who survived the war.

  The crane lowered the ant to the deck. Moab ordered her soldiers to make space. “Back away,” she said. “Keep your distance.”

  “Let’s get the measurements,” D’Arc said.

  Harlan was already on it. He dropped the tape at the abdomen and unrolled it to the mouth. “Nine feet, five inches.” He moved on to the diameter of the abdomen and the length of the legs, calling out each number. One of his human assistants recorded each one while shielding her notepad under her raincoat.

  D’Arc placed her hands on the ant’s upper body. This Alpha was shaped all wrong. The thorax bulged out like a camel’s hump. And the jaws barely covered the opening of the mouth. Judging from its condition, the Alpha could barely feed herself, let alone attack. So much time had passed since the Colony had collapsed. These last few stragglers, so lost without their Queen, did not even realize that they had become obsolete. For all D’Arc knew, this misshapen ant was the very last of her kind.

  She ran her fingers over the ruts and dents and scars in the ant’s armor. Thousands of stories, all etched into the tough skin of this abomination. “Where you been, girl?” D’Arc said. “What’ve you seen?”

  “Jesus, she’s talking to it,” one of the humans whispered. Harlan shushed him.

  Captain Vittal exited the bridge. Given her small stature, the crew gave her room to see. D’Arc detected a poorly concealed revulsion in the captain’s expression. Like all the humans, she most likely witnessed one of these creatures killing the people she knew and destroying the places she would never see again.

  “I need forceps,” D’Arc said. Harlan’s assistant handed them to her. She clamped the metal onto the antenna and lifted it from the deck. “No buildup,” she said. “This ant still cleaned herself.”

  “No acid port in the abdomen,” Harlan said. “No defensive claws. A scout, maybe?”

  “A regular Alpha could scout just fine. I don’t know what this thing was expected to do.”

  With the forceps, she peeled the mandible away from the ant’s mouth.

  “No signs of any illness,” she said. “You’d think that—”

  The jaw snapped shut with an audible click, snatching the forceps from her hand. Before she could say a word, an enormous furry paw grabbed her shoulder and wrenched her away. She landed flat on her stomach. The rifles unloaded. She covered her ears as the guards fired. The shockwave punched her in the chest. Feet scurried away. Voices shouted orders.

  “Stop!” Captain Vittal screamed. “Stop it!”

  “Hold,” Moab said.

  D’Arc rolled over. The bear towered above her. A few feet away, Harlan uncurled himself from the fetal position. The Alpha leaked fluid from multiple bullet holes. The rain washed some of it away. Pieces of shell lay scattered about. One of the legs had skittered to the rai
ling.

  Moab crouched to meet D’Arc’s face. The bear sighed. “The next time you bring one of these on board, I might just let it eat you.”

  Moab had taught D’Arc a saying from her people: What is bravery one minute is foolishness the next. She spared D’Arc the lecture this time. Instead, she helped D’Arc to her feet.

  “You have your specimen,” Vittal said, her jacket now completely soaked. “Do what you must with it. Then throw it overboard.”

  The captain headed for the bridge. Moab gave D’Arc a disapproving snort before moving aside.

  “You heard her,” Harlan said. “Let’s get this over with.”

  D’Arc arrived at the mess hall long after the last call for chow. The red night lights had already switched on. The engines slowed. The ship would go virtually silent until sunrise, save for a few people playing cards or filling out reports on the day’s activities.

  Two sailors occupied the far end of one of the tables. A human and a cat. D’Arc had forgotten the human’s name, though she often saw her smoking on deck late at night. She was middle-aged, former United States military judging from her tattoos and crew cut. One of Moab’s security personnel. She and the cat often lingered in the mess hall, arguing politics, trading war stories. The woman would laugh at her own jokes and the cat would sit there, stone-faced. They glanced at D’Arc, gave her a nod. Then they continued their conversation.

  The woman lowered her voice. Not that it made a difference. “Ninety-six hours,” she said.

  “Ninety-six,” the cat repeated.

  “Ninety-six.”

  D’Arc poked her head over the counter to find a human named Kang kneeling in front of the cupboard, with both of its metal doors hanging open. Kang had migrated from China to California many years earlier and was one of the few people to make it across the country during the war. On the al-Rihla, he was both head cook and an engineer responsible for maintaining the solar panels. Everyone on board served multiple roles.

  D’Arc waited for him to notice her presence. But he went right on counting the bags of black beans by tapping each one with his finger and mouthing the number. He wrote the amount in his notepad before moving on to the sardine cans. Ever since the resupply at Golgotha Base a few days earlier, Kang needed to get creative to store all the new foodstuffs. Stovetops and oven racks served as shelves. The walk-in cooler was stuffed so tight that someone said it resembled a game of Tetris.

  “You know why that’s the time limit for a rescue?” the woman asked the cat.

  “No.”

  “Because that’s the record for a person lost at sea with no supplies. After ninety-six, they call off the search.”

  Okay, D’Arc thought. She’s Navy. Maybe a Marine. Like so many of the humans on board. Makes sense.

  Kang wrote another number in his notebook. D’Arc got his attention with a light bark, almost like a sneeze.

  “There you are!” Kang said. With some effort, he got to his feet. “Don’t worry. I got you.” He opened the door to the refrigerator and grabbed something from the shelf, an object wrapped in tinfoil. As he brought it over, she could smell it: bean protein rolls flavored with Worcestershire sauce. Her tongue found its way out, dangling over her chin. He handed the food to her, then pulled it away when she reached for it.

  “You know it’s against the rules to serve you this after the mess hall closes,” he said. “You snooze, you lose.”

  “I wish I had been snoozing.” She had spent the last few hours performing an autopsy on the ant. In the lab, the organs and limbs were now spread out and labeled. She left the assistant to store them in the cold locker.

  Kang gave her the food. “Find anything good?”

  “Learning is always a good thing, right?”

  He eyed her. “I guess that’s why we’re out here.”

  She lifted the tinfoil to her nose and inhaled. “Thanks for dinner.”

  “What dinner? You don’t know me; I don’t know you.”

  D’Arc walked by the woman and the cat as they began debating whether a dog could survive for more than ninety-six hours at sea.

  “Dog would shit himself,” the woman said. “Lose most of his hydration that way.”

  “Depends on the breed,” the cat objected.

  The woman laughed. “Whoa, I’m not touching that with a ten-foot pole.”

  The two stopped and whispered as D’Arc exited. They knew who she was, and they were probably wondering what she found, and why the al-Rihla had gone so far off course chasing these insects. The question came up a lot lately. She figured the answer was obvious. That did not stop people from asking.

  D’Arc’s bunk occupied a tiny sliver of space in a long hallway. She slept between two women. Verasco on top, Anderson below. Both served on the laundry crew this evening, which gave D’Arc some privacy. The rules of the ship separated the crew by gender but not by species, which meant the various crew members often traded gossip late into the evening. The humans liked to ask silly questions about how different species had sex. They would squeak and snort with laughter before D’Arc could finish her answer. She could not figure out if they meant well. This vessel had a guiding principle: No one above the other. Everyone, from Captain Vittal to the people who cleaned the toilets, was expected to leave the old rules behind, as well as the war that overthrew them. These women may have genuinely believed that their banter helped to fulfill this ideal. And yet, every time, it reminded D’Arc of her place on this ship. She was an outsider. An oddity. It couldn’t possibly be any different.

  After coming of age on a sprawling ranch, the adjustment to a two-by-seven-foot bunk as her only private space still proved challenging despite many months at sea. If the Old Man ever saw her stuffed into this cubbyhole, he would have snickered at her change in fortune. “What are you doing out here?” he’d say. “Smells like human in this tin can.”

  D’Arc slid the curtain aside and lifted the mattress. Underneath, a row of compartments stored her toiletries, her vests and boots, and some random personal items, including her logbook. She grabbed it, dropped the mattress into place, and crawled into bed. Above, the scabbard of her sword hung duct-taped to the bottom of Verasco’s bunk. She had positioned it in such a way that she could unsheathe it while lying flat on her back.

  She opened the logbook at her last entry. Marking the page was her medallion with a raised image of St. Jude, patron saint of lost causes. A gift from Wawa, the Chief of Tranquility, whose recommendation got her on board the al-Rihla. Wawa believed in her, and in the mission. But here, D’Arc lay staring at her terrible handwriting, wondering if she should have somehow learned to be happy at the ranch. She could have tamed her curiosity. She could have been grateful for what she and the Old Man had built together. She could have found meaning long after the last of the Alphas died, long after she was too old to go on some foolish adventure. She could have done all those things if she had listened.

  “Oh, stop it,” she mumbled. She belonged here, no matter how much she missed home.

  She checked her watch and wrote another time stamp for January 15.

  2235 Autopsy complete. Report due to Captain Vittal at 0630.

  On the last page of the logbook, she found a map folded in four. She opened it. On the translucent paper, a dark line traced the path of the al-Rihla, as best as she could determine in her navigation class. The line went from the mouth of the Delaware north to Maine, where they encountered an extended family of black bears. That day, the senior officers, along with the security personnel, took the patrol boat to the beach. The crew watched with binoculars while the ship anchored. As D’Arc heard later, the bears’ leader told Captain Vittal that his people were claiming all of the former human settlements in the “cold country,” as he called it.

  “We mean you no harm,” the old bear said. “But there is nothing for you here.” As a peace offering, Vitta
l left them with a copy of the Prophet’s sayings and a pack of rechargeable flashlights. The elder bear did not thank her.

  From there, they skimmed the coast of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. At every stop, they discovered the same thing. The earth had reclaimed the towns and cities. Only a few crumbling ports remained. The people in this part of the country lived like the bears did: foraging for food, forming into small nomadic groups, bartering for essentials. No one had seen a human in years. As the weather grew colder, the bears withdrew to their dens, and the flocks headed south as if the war had never happened. By the time the al-Rihla reached the southern tip of Greenland, a silence had fallen over the land. There was some discussion about continuing across the Atlantic. But Vittal had her orders: stay close to the American coastline, don’t stray too far. Later missions would find out what happened to Iceland, the British Isles, and all the rest.

  To flee the encroaching winter, they headed south to Bermuda, where they discovered a thriving community of rats, the largest fauna on the island. The rats knew the ship was coming, thanks to a flock of swifts that patrolled the seas. The al-Rihla spent a week there, gathering information, establishing an alliance so that ships could use Bermuda as a way station for an eventual trip to Africa. Few of the humans on board could hide their disappointment at the news that none of their kind survived on the island. The rat matriarch swore that the humans left on their own after a series of attacks from the Alphas. There was no way to tell if she was lying.

  “These rats seem awful fat to me,” one of the crew members remarked at dinner. Nevertheless, the Bermudans were generous hosts, donating supplies and food. They even gathered at the dock and waved goodbye as the al-Rihla lifted anchor.

  The ink on the map then went directly west from the island to the newly formed landmass of Golgotha, the former nerve center for the Colony. At least three crew members served there during the great battle. The place still felt like a graveyard. No beach, no hills, no flora of any kind. Only an expanse of brittle gray rock. For years, the scientists tried to grow crops there, but the Queen had built it as a bunker, not a quaint farmland for mammals.