by A. K. DuBoff
“Right, uh… Gosh, it all happened so fast.” Meegan rolled her hands, digging for the words. “From what I understand, it started with a tray of candied mollusks in the lunch buffet that was tainted with some kind of parasite. It didn’t affect the Sturf or Gormix, or even humans. But once a few Qualexi got a taste of it…” Her face flushed. “It wrecked their brains. They just drifted around like they were sleepwalking. And then… you know.”
She made claws with her hands and put them to her mouth, gnashing them together. A shudder ran through her body so violently that it transferred to Rico. He pulled a hand through his graying pompadour and cursed under his breath.
“Mertz. How many of them ate the stuff?”
Meegan shrugged. “Enough. Apparently it’s highly contagious. After a few hours, everyone with tentacles had become a monster.”
“But… seventy percent of the crew are Qualexi.”
“Were,” Meegan corrected. “And anyone who’s immune is either dead or evacuated by now.”
Rico eyed her skeptically. “What about you?”
“Once the infection started spreading, it was total chaos. I didn’t make it to a lifeboat in time and…” Meegan’s expression darkened. “They’re all launched. They’re gone, Rico.”
Panic tightened Rico’s jaw. “No way. The ship has more than enough lifeboats for everyone on board. They can’t all be gone.”
“That’s what I thought, too. Once everything quieted down, I started searching deck by deck. I couldn’t find anything. I was just about to give up hope when…” Meegan wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “When he found me.”
“Who found you?”
“The captain. He refused to abandon ship until he was sure all the survivors had evacuated. He was trying to get me to safety when…” Her voice went hollow. “They got him.”
Her mournful eyes drifted to Rico, searching for solace. He cast a reverent gaze to the floor. “I’m sorry. He was a good man. A good officer. And a good friend.” Rico had only actually met the captain once. The guy seemed like an uptight prick, honestly. “And he died as he lived. A hero. Trying to get you someplace safe.” He let his eulogy settle for a moment. “He didn’t happen to mention where that was, did he?”
Meegan nodded. “He said there’s only one lifeboat left. His lifeboat. The Captain’s Yacht.” She blew out a frustrated breath. “I’ve been searching for the stupid thing for days.”
Hope sparked in Rico’s mind. Yes! The Captain’s Yacht was still on board! And with his band in emergency mode, he’d have the authority to launch it. He could be there in two minutes. If he weren’t partially crippled. If the ship wasn’t full of bloodthirsty mermaid-squid zombies. He evaluated Meegan’s brawny form and rubbed his chin. He could make this work.
“I know where it is. I remember it from my shipboard orientation tour. The Captain’s Yacht launches from the command bridge.” Rico patted his swelling thigh. “But we can’t get to it. Not with my leg like this.”
Meegan nodded and held out a hand. “Yes we can. I’ll help you. Come on.”
Rico took Meegan’s arm and winced as she hauled him to his feet. Between her hard muscles and his scrawny physique, the maneuver was surprisingly graceful. He put an arm over her shoulder and she wrapped one around his back and squeezed him tight. Rico’s nose wrinkled. An unknown number of days spent struggling to survive had filled her clothes with a heady tang of body odor.
A powerful olfactory memory clawed from his subconscious.
For a sparking instant, he wasn’t in a kitchen on a cruise ship. He was in the locker-lined hallway of a scumbag high school in a scumbag farm town on the scumbaggiest moon of Molnar Prime. A teenage Meegan had her arm around him. He could feel the padding of her round body molding itself against his bony hip. He could see her greasy little face beaming at him. He could smell her pubescent musk boiling through her overalls. But young Rico was barely aware of her. He was too preoccupied with the stares of his classmates. Judging him. Laughing at him. Maybe even pitying him. He shut them out. They didn’t matter. None of it mattered. This was only temporary.
The pain rocketing through his hip shocked Rico back to the here and now. With Meegan supporting his weight, he managed to take a step without blacking out. Then another. Together, they hobbled to the double doors, and he touched his crewNav to the lock-pad, popping them open.
The two continued into an abandoned restaurant—one of those Franco-Gormix fusion places, where the walls were covered in rough barkshell paneling with brassy inlays of the distinctive silhouette of the Eiffel Six generation ship. A fully stocked bar dominated the back wall and a few neatly set tables filled the space. A yellowish sheen of light filtered through the translucent electric wall stretching across the entrance. Elegant script hung in the middle of it, declaring the restaurant closed and listing its operating hours. The rest was a swirling wallpaper image of delicious algae fondue.
Meegan squinted into the shadowy corners of the room. “How do we get out of here?”
Rico gestured toward the glowing wall. “Over there.” He held up his wrist. “I’ll drop the forcegate and we can make a break for the lifts. From this level, there should be one that goes all the way to the bridge.”
Meegan nodded and helped her injured companion limp to the gate, but before he could touch his band to the lock-pad, she grabbed his arm. “Wait! Look.”
Rico followed her gaze through the hazy sheen. On the other side of its swirling pattern, he could make out the dark shadows of tentacled crewmates. Way, way too many tentacled crewmates.
“Mertz. I think we got their attention.”
The infected Qualexi slapped against the forcegate, sending ripples of distortion across its face. Meegan backed away slowly. “Can they get through that?”
“No way. Probably not. I don’t know.” Rico warily considered the tiny emitters glowing in the corners of the entrance. “These gates are designed to keep old people from wandering in during off hours, not to hold off a pack of rabid—” He tried to take a step and wailed. His leg gave out but Meegan did not let him fall. “Agh! Son of a—”
“Shhh, it’s okay.” Meegan gingerly lowered him into a plush kelp-leather armchair. “Maybe if we stay put for a bit they’ll get distracted and move along.”
“Staying put sounds aces to me.” Rico gritted his teeth and cradled his ruined hip. “Get me a drink, will ya? Something with a high enough octane to make everything numb.”
Meegan cast a glance at the bar, and then back to Rico. “Bad idea. You’ve got to be sharp and ready to go when we get the chance. Trading in pain for a drunken stagger isn’t an improvement.”
“It is to me,” Rico moaned.
Meegan’s somber glare softened. “You poor thing. Let me have a look. I might be able to help.”
She knelt down and rested a broad palm on Rico’s leg, applying gentle pressure. Cold waves of torment rolled through his nerve endings, tempered by the warmth of her hands. She rocked forward, tenderly probing all around his hip. As her fingers caressed his upper thigh, the sparking pain became a sizzle of exhilaration.
Rico took advantage of his nurse’s moment of concentration to study her up close. Patches of subtle freckles flecked her cheekbones, swooping up to meet at the bridge of her petite nose. His gaze drifted down her neck to the collar of her shirt, unbuttoned far enough to reveal the soft skin over her broad collarbones. He closed his eyes, letting his imagination uncover what the gingham obscured. No scales. No fur. No exoskeleton. Just smooth, warm, human flesh.
Man, it had been so long since he’d been touched by a human. In all his time cruising the galaxy, that was the one and only thing that ever made him homesick for Molnar Sux.
Rico had been born and raised in an agrarian human colony on the sixth moon of the planet Molnar Prime. Every other natural satellite was designated a number. Officially, the “Sux” was a typo that never got fixed, but Rico believed it was intentional. The Molnari always looked do
wn their two noses at those “dirt monkeys in orbit.”
Rico was no dirt monkey. He was different than the hicks on the Sux. Better. They were a bunch of uncultured rubes, but Rico… he had the voice of a Shellinic songbird and a stage presence like a supernova. He was destined for bigger things. But nobody ever left the Sux. Passenger ships rarely visited, and even when they did, tickets were prohibitively expensive for the struggling farmers. Moonside, there was only one vessel with engines powerful enough to reach escape velocity. A second-hand Sturf barge that ferried a moonload of crops to the orbital docks above Molnar Prime after each harvest. Every cubic centimeter of cargo space was so precious that carrying passengers was absolutely forbidden by the laws of—
A quick jerk of Meegan’s shoulders rammed Rico’s dislocated femur back into its socket with an audible pop. His entire body stiffened on the power of the earsplitting shriek of profanity ripping from the very core of his soul. Meegan leaned away—eyes wide, hands raised—as Rico scrambled back in the chair, seething and gasping for breath.
“Hekking mertz! What the hekk did you do to me?”
“I fixed your leg!”
“No, you didn’t! You…”
Rico gripped his hip defensively, but the stabbed-with-a-hot-uranium-rod pain had been reduced to a dull, throbbing ache. Meegan’s brows raised in surprise. No, not surprise. Something else. Rico didn’t immediately recognize the expression, because it wasn’t one that he saw often. It was concern. Even with their troubled history, Meegan still cared about him. A warm tingle prickled in his chest. He shook it off.
He stood up, cautiously putting his weight on his wounded leg. “Okay, so you did fix it, actually. How in the worlds did you know how to do that?”
Meegan raked her messy hair behind her ears with a relieved smile. “I’ve done it before. Plenty of times. Never on a person, though.” She shrugged. “Sometimes kids come cowish tipping. The poor things are so heavy, their bones pop right out of their sockets when they hit the ground.”
Rico winced at the imagery, but the thought made his stomach rumble. “Man, I could go for a fat slice of cowish right now. Best steaks of all the large grazing lizards.” According to the Olde Earth settlers who named them, cowish tasted pretty close to the animal they used to get beef from.
Meegan nodded. “My family has been raising them since the soil went sour and we had to stop growing cornesque.”
Rico staggered over and peeked behind the bar for snacks. He found nothing but booze. Booze counted as a snack. He grabbed a bottle and two shot glasses. “So, I take it you’re still living on the Sux?”
Meegan slid onto a stool opposite Rico, eyeing the glasses disapprovingly. “I am. Ma passed not long after you left. After that, I had to take on a lot more responsibility on the ranch and… you know.”
Rico did know. He’d seen it happen too many times to too many people when he was growing up. The gravity of the Sux was difficult to escape physically, but it was nearly impossible to escape socially.
He poured two shots and pushed one toward Meegan. She politely nudged it aside. Rico knocked his back, letting it burn down his throat and sting his empty stomach. He poured himself another. “Well, you must be getting some good harvests if you can throw down the credits for a Constellation Celebration Cruise.”
“Oh, no. I won this trip. At the countystate fair.” A proud smile brightened Meegan’s face. “I had the biggest cowish eggs the judges had ever seen.” She fidgeted with the shot glass, not drinking. “I could never afford a fancy vacation like this. This is actually, uh… this is the first time I’ve ever been off-world.”
Rico’s brow raised. “Seriously? Your old man never took you up? Not even once?”
Meegan’s voice flattened. “Not after all the trouble he caught when the council found out what I made him do. They would have stripped him of his pilot license altogether if anyone else on the Sux was qualified to fly the barge. No more rule breaking after that.” Her eyes locked on Rico’s. “So… did you ever get to your mother?”
The abrupt segue made Rico’s gut clench. It had been a long time since he’d thought of his mother. The decorated Space Corps hero who spent Rico’s entire childhood deployed in the war, leaving his father at home to work the farm and descend into an empty oblivion of loneliness. He slowly worked the cap back onto his bottle as a memory surfaced, sharp and clear as a psy-res holostream.
Meegan’s family farmhouse was a dump, even by Sux standards. A tiny ranch-style squat built of pressed bamboozle board that always smelled of wet boots and unruly armpits. He was perched on a fart-filled armchair in her living room, his slender teenage body throbbing with anxiety and adrenalin.
“Uh, Meegs. I uh… I got some news today. From off-world.” He picked at the chair’s disintegrating arm. “From my mother.”
Teen Meegan subtly stiffened. “Oh, gosh. Is she… uh. Is she okay?”
Rico’s heartbeat pounded in his ears. His mouth tasted like stale metal. “She’s not. Actually. She… She got hit by a radionanite grenade.”
Meegan gasped. “Is she…?”
Rico shook his head. “No. No, she was wearing her armor. But enough of them still bored into her nervous system that she’s… the doctors think…” His jaw quivered. “She doesn’t have long.”
“Oh, Rico, I’m so sorry.”
A tremble rattled through Rico’s voice. “She told me she regrets not being here to watch me grow up and…” He sniffled and blinked hard. “She wants to see me. In person. One last time before…”
He didn’t say it. He didn’t have to. Meegan squeezed his hands. He squeezed back.
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. The hospital is on Shellin. I think I have enough saved to buy a trans-system thrustbus ticket that far, if only I could get to the orbit docks. But I could never pay for passage on a gravity breaker. Not if I worked ten more harvests. And by that time…” He trailed off as his eyes went distant. “At least I’ll see her when the casketpod is delivered.”
“Oh, Rico. Oh no.” Meegan climbed into his lap and squeezed him. He felt the heat of her body and the dampness of her own tears falling on his neck as she held him, desperate to make it better but knowing it was hopeless.
Until she had an idea.
Meegan begged her father to help. She cried. She pleaded. Two days later, Rico was hidden in the bottom of a bushel of cornesque on its way to the orbital docks.
Rico blinked, drawing his focus back to the present and to the tentacled shapes pop-popping their suckers against the fondue forcegate. Meegan stared at him, expectantly. He rolled the booze bottle in his hands and carefully returned it to the shelf.
“I did get to my mother. It took every centicredit I had, but I made my way to the hospital on Shellin. The facility was a paradise. Rolling gardens, flowing water, whispering ivy on trellises. Such a peaceful place.” He looked far into the distance, as if gazing through the years. “Mom was ravished by her illness, but even so she was still beautiful, in that stoic, warrior way.” He sighed and shook his head. “The time she and I spent together is something I’ll always treasure. I stayed with her until the end.” He flexed his fingers thoughtfully. “I was holding her hand when she passed.”
Meegan’s eyes narrowed and her lips pressed tight with simmering emotion. “I’m so happy you got to be with her for her last days.”
Rico held up his drink in toast. “All because of you. Thank you, Meegan. From me and my mother. Your kindness meant the worlds, to both of us.”
Meegan raised her glass without cheer. Rico clinked it and downed his shot. Meegan set hers back on the bar, still full.
“So, after she passed, why didn’t you… I mean, did you ever think about…” She met his eyes and took a steadying breath. “Did you ever think of coming back to the Sux?”
In a lifetime of womanizing, Rico had never seen a face so wounded. He knew exactly what Did you ever think of coming back to the Sux? meant, and it was
not a question of logistics.
“I did. Of course, I did. I wanted to come back, but…” He sighed helplessly. “That’s not what Mom wanted for me. Her dying wish was for me to get out and see the galaxy. But not the way she had. Not delivering death, but delivering joy. Through the gift of my voice. Ever since then, I’ve been honoring her memory by—”
Rico’s narrative crescendo was interrupted by a bass-filled hiccup of the ship’s engines. The lights flickered, an alarm buzzed, and a stern but pleasant female voice enunciated from the walls:
“La Marais du Fromage is currently closed. Please visit us during regular business hours. Thank you.”
The message repeated as Rico spun toward the entryway. Thin bands of crinkly light clung to their emitters across one corner of the arch, but the rest of the forcegate had completely collapsed in the power surge. Six parasite-infested Qualexi spilled inward, tripping over each other as they staggered into the restaurant.
Rico picked up Meegan’s drink and threw it down his throat.
Meegan leapt to her feet, a storm raging in her eyes. “Rico, arm yourself!”
She snatched her barstool and hefted it over her shoulder like a battle ax. Rico grabbed the heaviest bottle of hooch he could reach as two Qualexi porters squashed toward him from either direction. With a cowardly yelp, he dropped his weapon and clamored over the bar and behind Meegan.
The infected closed in around them, drooling and hissing. Meegan pounded one in the chest with her stool, knocking it to the ground. “I’m sorry!” Her hair whipped across her face as her biceps flexed, slinging her weapon the other way to clear a second mutant with a wet crunch. “Rico! Move!”
He didn’t need to be told twice. Rico’s stocking feet thumped the carpet as he raced through the hole Meegan had cleared in the wall of attackers. He limped out into the promenade, his head swiveling and eyes darting. Just up ahead a bank of three lifts sat idle, their polished goldtint doors open and ready.