by I. O. Adler
Chapter Seven
Dr. Leavitt returned to Agent Barrett’s bedside.
The shadow hid again, this time inside the curtain. Without contact, it could only make out a few words. Most of their communication was little more than vibrating throat sounds without meaning. As it spied, Barrett sat further up and finally attempted to climb out of bed despite the doctor trying to keep him down. Finally, a pair of larger humans in hazard suits coaxed him back under his sheets.
When one of them brought another cup with pills, he refused. He uttered more words at a raised volume. What was causing his outburst? But the shadow couldn’t draw closer for a touch without being seen.
It peered above the curtain to take in the rest of the emergency room. Most of the personnel, including Dr. Leavitt, gathered around where Jenna Vincent lay. They were moving her entire bed. Soon they departed, leaving only a few of the humans. And only one lingered near Barrett’s bed. Barrett appeared to have nodded off.
Had he taken a pill?
The lingering human was busy on a handheld computer. The shadow craned forward to see. A screen of symbols and colored bars and boxes made little sense. But deciphering their tech would be easy, as they didn’t possess implants for their computers.
It would take this human and go outside to see what they were doing with the harvester sphere that had touched down. First, it needed to figure out how to open the suit. The smooth material was both pliable and tough, no doubt designed to protect against gas and liquid. The shadow had no way to cut a hole. As it inched closer, it examined a pair of exhaust valves on the back of the outfit. Too small. For a push, it needed a broader touch. Otherwise the human would have time to react and raise an alarm.
Beneath a flap near his neck, it discovered a zipper. It stepped next to the man and slid it open. The man murmured something as the shadow fixed itself to his back. The zipper would allow the removal of the top portion of the suit covering the man’s head and shoulders. But it only needed to open it partway. It wormed its way inside. Found clothing. And beneath that, flesh.
The human screamed. But the shadow stifled his cry and pushed. He stiffened. It wanted him to turn and begin walking before anyone noticed. The shadow slipped completely into the suit with the man. The man’s muffled outburst became a mewling as tears ran down his face. But then a series of tremors ran through his body. The shadow tried to get him to stop, to be still, to breathe. The man’s device clattered on the floor. He spun and collapsed, and the shadow couldn’t do anything to arrest his fall. His heart was pounding in an erratic rhythm and he wasn’t drawing in air.
During those few seconds of initial contact, it heard Barrett.
“Hey! It’s here! It’s got him! Help me!”
He had seen. And the man in the shadow’s grip was of no use. It squeezed back out of the suit. The curtain? No. Barrett was sitting up, eyes wide and still screaming. Other voices were approaching. It could attempt to flee. But Barrett knew.
It jumped on him. Its body landed with little force, but it seized him around his head and face and poured down around his body beneath the sheet and the flimsy garment. And it pushed. Silence first, blessed silence, even as a suited human arrived to crouch next to her fallen comrade.
“What happened?”
It’s here, the shadow knew Barrett wanted to say. It’s on me dear god please help get it off get it off!
All he could do was exhale slowly. The shadow forced a worried look. Tried to voice a concern for his fellow human who had suffered some unknown episode. A heart attack? A seizure?
But the shadow couldn’t make the words form. Barrett remained quiet as others rushed over to tend to the fallen man. Lights and a high-pitched beep summoned Dr. Leavitt moments later. They cut his clothes back, injected him, pushed at his body, and began delivering shocks to his bare chest.
None of their efforts helped. The human was dead.
It didn’t take long for the others to remove the body.
Dr. Leavitt lingered and washed up, finally checking Barrett as the shadow hid beneath him.
“The nurse said you saw something,” she said. “Agent Barrett? What happened?”
Barrett’s responses would be incomprehensible for the shadow to manage. The social and language portions of the brain remained a jumble. Just translating required so much effort.
The agent sat mute.
The doctor dabbed his forehead with a wet cloth. “You’re covered in sweat. If you saw anything, you need to tell me. Agent Barrett? Raymond?”
Only his father called him that. Or his wife when she wanted to provoke him. The name triggered the memory of an argument over his wife changing the passcode on her phone so he could no longer check her text messages. She called him other names, cursed him. He had shouted and threatened, and the neighbors had called the police.
“Guk!”
Barrett almost slipped from the shadow’s control. The shadow pushed. Chided itself. This was not the time for research, despite the memories being delicious and full of raw energy. It had tasted nothing so sweet on any of the survivors in the Framework, and certainly not from the sickly Cordice.
The doctor shined a light in one of Barrett’s eyes, then the other.
The shadow could reach for her and end the examination by either eliminating her or using her to leave the hospital and return to the sphere. But what if she was as fragile as the nurse who had died? What if most of the humans weren’t as strong and pliable as Barrett?
The brood had taught the shadow to be cautious. The risk of being revealed remained a threat, even if the humans were backward. They had made their first steps into space. They might also have enough resources and animal cunning to kill it if they were frightened enough.
And on the matter of fright, Agent Barrett was terrified as the shadow locked down on him.
The doctor appeared to be finished with her initial inspection. “I’m going to check on Jenna Vincent. She’s in the middle of surgery and we’re trying to figure out what they did to her. But then I’m coming straight back here. You’re going to tell me what happened.”
She left them.
Barrett hadn’t given up trying to beg her to save him from what he now knew was a stowaway alien who had been on board with them during their return trip to Earth.
The shadow should have killed him and departed to find another. But the terror Barrett was feeling invigorated it. The sensation was beyond anything it had ever experienced. Lingering was dangerous. A departure from its conditioning. Yet it clung to Barrett even as he strained his mind to exhaustion. And before he could pass out, the shadow pushed and pushed and found even more recollections it could savor.
Chapter Eight
“I’m here and ready to answer questions.”
Carmen stood before She Who Waits inside the shuttle, waiting for the translator to respond. She set her helmet down. But She Who Waits remained standing at what Carmen called the altar at the front of the hold. Her shiny replacement case reflected the soft illumination from the walls and ceiling.
“Are you listening?”
The blimp bot docked itself with a series of soft clicks, tucked out of the way in a recess near the airlock next to a set of identical machines.
“I said I’m here.” Her throat remained sore from the mouthful of alien atmosphere she had inhaled. Was She Who Waits paying attention? Purple and gray swirls churned in the sandy atmosphere inside the shell. Carmen knew the bright sparkles meant she was accessing information, and it was yellow when she was thinking. But she hadn’t decided what the darker colors meant.
Carmen got some water from the sink. It was cold and good going down, but the ache reasserted itself too quickly. It felt like she had been bleaching her dad’s bathroom during a deep cleaning and had taken in too many fumes.
“So that’s the Framework. You had a lot of juggling to do. So many voices. And you can keep track of it all and make out what everyone’s saying.”
A red translation
cone winked to life on top of the altar. “It is my function.”
“And I’m saying you did an amazing job.”
The churn turned a lighter gray. “You were injured during your wandering.”
“I’m okay. I know I should have listened. But I couldn’t wait any longer. Are you upset?”
“I am responsible.”
“And I appreciate everything you’ve done. So the Framework is trying to contact Earth?”
“Yes. I am assisting remotely. We are sending a message across all receiving bands. The time delay means a response will take thirty-three minutes.”
“Assuming there’s someone to answer.”
Carmen’s heart sank at the thought. Surely the disconnection was something as mundane as an antenna failing or a computer glitch. But having been inside the harvester, with the ship having become an extension of her body, she doubted anything so ordinary had knocked her away from the controls.
The patterns inside She Who Waits’ shell continued to shift brighter. Flecks of diamonds popped in and out of the swirl.
“I want to hear the replies,” Carmen said. “You can translate if they’re not in English?”
“The Cordice engineer would speak with you first.”
Without further prompting, a second red light appeared and the first vanished.
The engineer’s voice was serene yet loud enough for Carmen to understand clearly. “Greetings Carmen Vincent. As we said, we need to discover what caused you to lose control of the harvester.”
She took a deep breath. It felt like she was about to confess to her dad for blowing out one of his stereo speakers. “I’m here. But I don’t know what I can tell you. I brought one of the harvester spheres down with my sister and Agent Barrett on board. I had a spindlebot with us. There were army people there in hazard suits. They were coming to greet us. And then it happened. I woke up here, the connection severed.”
“We see no damage suffered to your person.”
“I felt nothing. But how would you know if I got hurt?”
“The Melded shared their most recent biological scans.”
Had Ovo or She Who Waits allowed this? The thought creeped her out. “So if you know all that, why can’t you look at your missing ship and diagnose the problem?”
“We remain locked out. Either you still hold encryption or it has reset. Initial observations of solar winds and cosmic ray activity show no excessive levels to account for a catastrophic failure. We are trying to learn more about the possible weapons the humans may have brought to bear.”
“You think someone attacked us?”
“It is a possibility. The harvester isn’t immune to a nuclear blast.”
“I didn’t see an explosion. Why would they do that?”
She didn’t want an answer. Her mind raced at the possibilities. The army personnel had been approaching the sphere. If they were going to nuke her, they wouldn’t have come, would they? No. It was too crazy. But hadn’t she seen something during the chaotic last few seconds before the disconnect?
A shadow. No, not quite. Something had moved, a light, a reflection, a smear of color that had reached out to her…
She searched for the right words. “Look, I had people coming for my sister, helicopters, tanks, trucks, all while controlling your spaceship and keeping it from crashing. I had a face full of screens and a hundred more wanting to pop in my head. So it’s probably nothing. But something moved towards me from inside the sphere. Something which had been there before we landed. A living thing, I’m sure of it. Which means whatever it was had nothing to do with the army or my planet. It had been on board the entire time I was flying the harvester.”
***
Carmen drifted off to sleep while waiting for an answer.
The Cordice engineer had disconnected, needing to consult with his own council after the revelation that there had been an intruder on board their ship. And if the message to Earth had a reply, She Who Waits hadn’t woken her up to share. With no windows and no watch or clock, Carmen felt disoriented when she finally stirred.
“We have visitors,” She Who Waits said.
“Coming to the Framework?”
“No. Here at my shuttle. Designate Melded, along with designate Sylvia Vincent.”
Carmen rushed to the hatch. Clicked the button. The door didn’t open.
“Let me out.”
“They’re armed. The Melded didn’t announce their visit. Their intentions are unclear.”
“I asked to see my mom. Maybe she didn’t want the Primary Executive to know she was coming. Unlock the door and close it behind me. But I need to go out there.”
The hatch to the airlock slid open. She Who Waits glided forward and followed Carmen outside to the landing pad. Her mom approached up the curved ramp with two Melded Carmen hadn’t met right behind her.
The skin around her mom’s face was etched with black lines, but her eyes remained bright. The hair on the back of her head was shaven. She wore a heavy chest pad that covered one shoulder and looked like an asymmetrical version of what a baseball umpire might wear. But the chest pad had several ports, nodes, and lights. Her arms were bare. Several bulging veins formed dark lines running down to her fingers.
Carmen choked up as she ran to embrace her. Her eyes stung.
Sylvia Vincent clung to her daughter. “Oh, honey.”
“Mom? Are you okay? What is all this?”
“It’s a machine to help my heart while the doctor fixes it.”
“This is fixing it?”
“It’s not instant. There are microscopic machines inside me repairing the damage I suffered. It’s miraculous. It truly is. If only you had let us help Jenna instead of risking bringing her home.”
Carmen held her mom at arm’s length to get a better look at her. Except for the dark lines and the device, her mother appeared vibrant and perhaps even younger and better rested than when Carmen had seen her face-to-face on Earth before she had departed for her last mission.
With a trembling hand, she touched the chest piece. “They’ll take this off when they’re finished?”
“Of course they will. They’re committed to helping as many as they can. What happened on the Cordice home ship was a series of miscommunications.”
“No, Mom, please. You can’t believe that. The Primary Executive came to steal the harvester and was willing to murder anyone who got in his way.”
“He doesn’t speak for the Melded anymore.”
“Then explain why he was doing the talking during the Framework council meeting.”
“Because he’s good at it. The Melded believe in merit. He’s what they needed when the Cordice departed. For the meeting, the Melded chose him to speak. But he’s not the Melded leader right now.”
“Who is?”
“Their doctor. At least, the doc is a placeholder until they take the time to vote.”
Carmen had seen the doctor once when she had used a bot to break into the Melded frigate. He was a two-foot-tall insect with multiple arms, but she hadn’t spoken with him. But the alien physician was responsible for transforming her mom into one of them.
“We’re going to help the Framework recover the harvester,” her mom said. “I want you to come with us.”
Carmen fought to keep a quaver out of her voice. “Who decided that you should come and try to convince me to join you?”
“You’re being difficult. You traveled this far to save me. Now I’m here in front of you. I’m me. I can’t think of another way to prove it. I won’t let anything happen to you, sweetheart.”
“So if we head back to Earth, I’ll be allowed to leave their ship?”
“If that’s what you want. I’ve already warned you about what’s coming. It’s not a joke, Car. The enemy is real. I won’t give up trying to convince you to stay with us and leave.”
“Then why can’t you send a message to NASA and everyone else to warn them?”
Sylvia Vincent’s face tightened. She had nev
er been able to fake a smile. “Because it might be too late.”
“But you don’t know that. I’ve only had a few conversations with the Cordice and with She Who Waits. It seems no one knows when this enemy might hit Earth or the Framework. All everyone can agree on is that it’s going to happen soon. But soon sounds like it could be days or years.”
“And what if it is years? What can Earth do in that time?”
“Earth’s us, Mom. It’s Jenna, it’s Zach and Landon, it’s me. We try, even if it’s days or a century.”
When her mother moved to embrace her again, Carmen shoved her.
“I don’t want another hug. I want you to act like a person for a minute.”
“And you need to understand the situation like a grown-up. We can rescue a handful at best. I can save you and we can try to get Jenna and the boys. But human physiology isn’t suited to fast space travel. The Melded are helping my body so I’ll be able to handle hard g’s over a long period. It’s that or uploading to the Cordice sim. Getting anyone to understand what’s involved with either choice will take time. And who do we pick to come with us? Will you do that? Will you decide who gets to go?”
“You used to work alongside a lot of smart people,” Carmen said. “Let them know what’s happening. Put the cards on the table.”
“This knowledge will mean turmoil.”
“That can’t be helped. The Big Wipe already stirred things up. Then you show up with the harvester and collect me and Jenna? The world knows something’s up. Why keep them guessing?”
“Give me a few minutes,” Sylvia said. “Let me talk to the Melded.”
“I’ll wait inside.”
Her mom stood for a while next to the Melded guards, not moving.
Carmen sat back with her space suit peeled down to her waist. She watched what was going on outside on a viewscreen that She Who Waits provided. The translator lingered next to her without comment, the colors in her suit having again darkened.