Living Hell

by Catherine Jinks

  ‘But they should have come after us.’ Dygall had finally found his voice. ‘Why didn’t the others follow us? Tuddor and Firminus and the rest?’

  ‘No time,’ said Arkwright. ‘They had to seal the air duct before any samplers got in.’

  ‘But -’

  ‘When I last saw Tuddor, he was alive. Firminus too,’ Arkwright added.

  ‘If they were alive, they would have come after us!’ I gasped, and Mum suddenly seemed to snap out of her daze. As Sloan fell back, she came up and put her arms around me.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said, as if she were trying to convince herself. I could feel her shaking. ‘Dad’s smart. Dad’s very smart. He’ll think of something. He will.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Dygall agreed faintly. ‘He – he could have got out while the samplers were attacking someone else. He could have.’

  ‘He had to seal up the duct, Cheney.’ Yestin’s contribution was low and lifeless. ‘Maybe he had to get out of BioLab before he had a chance to unseal it. Maybe he’s hiding somewhere.’

  Sloan said nothing. I was staring over my mum’s shoulder, straight at his angular profile. His dark eyes were narrowed. He looked very pale.

  ‘Listen,’ said Arkwright. ‘There’s every chance they’re still alive, because these attacks aren’t random.’ Failing to get any response from me, or my mother, he addressed Sloan. ‘That thing targeted Lais. It went straight past Tuddor. Why?’

  ‘Because Lais was marked,’ Sloan volunteered, after a moment.

  ‘Exactly. Lais was marked. So was Zennor. Both of them. The blue tag -’

  ‘And Ottilie, too,’ Sloan murmured.

  ‘Yes.’ Arkwright paused. ‘I – I don’t hold out much hope for Ottilie.’

  ‘Antibodies,’ Sloan continued, slowly and thoughtfully.

  ‘They’re like antibodies. Antibodies are markers. Each one has evolved to recognise a particular virus. They lock onto its spikes, so the virus can’t clone itself. And they mark it for destruction.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ Mum breathed, into my neck. She squeezed me hard. Dygall spoke up beside me.

  ‘Are you saying . . . Do you mean that the samplers won’t hit you unless a scent pellet hits you first?’ he asked Sloan.

  ‘It makes sense. Scent pellets and samplers. Antibodies and T cells.’

  ‘It would explain why so many of these . . . these entities seem to ignore us,’ said Arkwright in a slightly distracted tone. ‘What if there’s only a single scent-pellet antibody for each person on board? Or just a few of them, perhaps?’

  ‘You mean there’s something out there with my name on it?’ Dygall screeched.

  ‘Shh,’ said Yestin, flinching. But Sloan shrugged.

  ‘Looks like it,’ he conceded.

  ‘And we’ve got to ask ourselves: What’s the recognition factor?’ Arkwright surveyed our huddled group, his hands on his hips. ‘How do they pinpoint their targets? Where does the information come from? What allows them to match their target specifications with our personal details?’

  There was a long pause. At first I didn’t understand what he was getting at. My brain wasn’t working very well, at the time; I was still fighting back the urge to scream and wail and fall on the floor, crying out for my dad. Mum, too, was not at her best. Dygall hadn’t fully recovered, either.

  It was Sloan who lifted his wrist, suddenly, and stared at his ID band.

  Then he looked at Arkwright, wide-eyed.

  ‘Signal codes,’ he breathed, and Arkwright nodded gravely.

  ‘That’s what I think.’

  ‘The wrist bands!’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘We have to get them off,’ said Yestin. He had snapped out of his stupor; something appeared to have clicked in his head. ‘Quick!’ he exclaimed. ‘Before they find us!’ And he began to gnaw at his own wrist band.

  It was a futile attempt, as Mum knew full well. ‘Yestin,’ she protested, ‘don’t do that, it’s pointless . . .’

  ‘It’s too tough for teeth,’ Arkwright agreed. ‘It has to be cut. Have you got anything, Quenby?’

  ‘Who, me?’ Mum stared at him in utter confusion. I knew just how she felt.

  ‘Didn’t you bring your Medkit?’ Sloan asked.

  ‘My Medkit?’

  ‘Of course she didn’t!’ Dygall snapped. ‘She didn’t have time!’

  ‘What about you?’ Sloan turned to Arkwright. ‘Don’t you have an atomic screwdriver, or something?’

  Arkwright shook his head. He glanced around at the dim expanses of the Stasis Banks, as if hoping that something sharp might materialise out of the shadows. But there wasn’t an edge left in the whole place. It was all doughy soft tissue and slimy surfaces.

  Sloan remarked, ‘There are two sides to this, you know. Those samplers need our wrist bands to target us, but they also need our details on file. If we could get into CAIP, and wipe those files -’

  ‘Yes, well, we can’t just now,’ Arkwright retorted. Then Mum took a deep breath and pointed out that we weren’t far from the Infirmary.

  There were plenty of penetrating instruments in there, she said.

  ‘If we go through the two pressure-seal doors at the end of this compartment, we’ll get into the next cell.’ Mum sounded as if she was drained of all energy. ‘The Infirmary’s over there,’ she added.

  ‘But what if the samplers are, too?’ Dygall was beginning to harangue us; his voice seemed to grate on my ears. ‘What if we open the doors, and they all come flying in? They’ll get us then! We won’t have a hope!’

  Again, there was silence. Mum’s grip on me had slackened; we were still entwined, but loosely. My mind was just starting to tick over again. I thought: pressure seal. Double doors. Airlock filter. Sloan, however, jumped in ahead of me.

  ‘Are you saying it’s an airlock filter, through there? With two pressure doors?’ he asked my mother.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘So even if those things start eating their way through, it’s going to take them twice as long?’

  ‘I – I guess so.’

  ‘Well, then – why don’t you people stay here, while I use the air duct?’ Sloan squinted up at the access panel. ‘I’ll try to get into the Infirmary that way. Pick up a few laser probes or molecule displacement scalpels, and bring them back.’

  ‘Oh no.’ My mother stiffened. I caught my breath. Even Yestin gave a squeak of protest. But Sloan wasn’t going to listen to us.

  ‘It’s the best solution,’ he insisted, before we could say anything further. ‘It only puts one of us at risk. If I don’t like the look of the Infirmary, I can always move on. Or come straight back.’

  ‘But we shouldn’t split up!’ Mum demurred.

  ‘We must. What other option do we have?’

  ‘Just one,’ said Arkwright, pulling at his pointed chin.

  ‘I’ll go.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s not your decision, Sloan.’ Arkwright used the same detached tone I’d often heard him employ when he was trying to pull me out of a circuitry quagmire during our training sessions together. ‘I outrank you. It’s my decision.’

  ‘Then use your head,’ said Sloan, with equal calm.

  ‘You’re not expendable. I am.’

  ‘Sloan!’ Mum exclaimed, and I cried, ‘That’s not true!’

  ‘Of course it’s true.’ Sloan flicked me an impatient glance. ‘We all are, to some degree, except Quenby and Arkwright. They’re the only ones with enough expertise to solve our main problem – which is getting into CAIP. Arkwright, especially. You can’t risk yourself, Arkwright, it wouldn’t be logical.’

  Arkwright blinked. He seemed taken aback. As he searched for an answer, Mum said, ‘Your father wouldn’t allow it, Sloan.’

  Sloan turned his head in a deliberate fashion. I couldn’t see the expression in his eyes. It was too dark. But his voice, when he spoke, was hard and cool.

  ‘Since my father isn’t here – and is in fa
ct very probably dead – his opinion isn’t relevant. So let’s just forget about my father, and concentrate on the matter at hand. Which, let’s face it, is the preservation of our entire species.’

  We were stunned. Even Arkwright couldn’t find the words. I didn’t know how to feel – I was both appalled and impressed. Dygall gaped. Mum seemed to shrink. Yestin swallowed audibly.

  When Sloan spoke again, after regarding us silently for a few seconds, he emphasised his point with just a few incisive phrases.

  ‘If we’re going to survive, we’re going to have to start thinking clearly,’ he announced. ‘This is a matter of survival. There’s no room here for fussing or fuming, or worrying about inessentials. About other people’s feelings.’ He addressed Arkwright. ‘Now give me a leg-up,’ he ordered, ‘and I’ll be back in a few minutes.’

  Arkwright obeyed. Sheepishly, he heaved Sloan back into the air duct. I stood there catching my breath; it was as if someone had just thrown a bucket of cold water in my face. For a short while, nobody said anything. The only sound was a series of squeaks and rustles, as Sloan’s feet disappeared from sight.

  We could watch his progress in the air duct, because both it and the ceiling were now constructed of slightly elastic material. The bulges made by the pressure of his hands and knees were clearly visible as he crawled away from us. Naturally, we tried to stay beneath him, plotting his course until he passed over the first pressure door. Then we had to stop, releasing a collective sigh.

  With trembling fingers, Dygall prodded the door – which was no longer so much a door as a giant valve.

  ‘This looks okay,’ he muttered. ‘It’s not even hot. I don’t think anything’s reached it, yet.’

  ‘But something’s bound to come soon.’ I shivered, thinking about the BioLab door. And my dad too, of course. ‘Don’t – don’t you think we should disable the pressure pad?’

  ‘With what?’ Dygall’s voice cracked. He sounded ready to explode. ‘We don’t have a magnetron pole.’

  ‘Disable anything, and it might alert CAIP,’ Arkwright warned, at which point Mum reached out and patted Dygall’s shoulder.

  ‘We’ll be safe once we’ve cut off these bands,’ she assured him. No doubt she was simply trying to comfort the children (this, I knew, was how her mind worked), but her simple remark had an unexpected consequence.

  Because Yestin, who was also fingering the door, suddenly asked, ‘Why will we be safe?’ When he received no immediate reply, he swung around to stare at Mum. ‘Why should we be safe, Quenby?’

  ‘Well – ah . . .’ Mum struggled to provide a satisfactory answer. I was holding her hand, and I squeezed it. ‘Well, as Arkwright said, we – our ID bands provide a target -’

  ‘Yes, but why go to all that bother?’ Yestin now fixed his round, greenish eyes on Arkwright. He was genuinely puzzled. I knew the signs. ‘It would be easy enough to kill us, without attacking doors,’ he said. ‘You could shut down the photosynthesis machines. Or stop dispensing food. Why doesn’t the ship do that?’

  It was a good question. It was a very good question. And I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t considered it before.

  Too much else happening, perhaps.

  ‘He’s right,’ said Dygall, and fixed Arkwright with an accusing glare. ‘How come we can still breathe and eat?’

  ‘Maybe – maybe the oxygen just hasn’t run out yet.’ I hardly liked to say it, but it had to be said. ‘With so many people dead, maybe it would take longer than normal . . .’

  Mum made a strangled noise. But Arkwright shook his head, frowning at the floor. ‘No,’ he said, dismissing my suggestion with a flick of his fingers. ‘No, because what about the gravitational pitch? That’s still normal. There’s been no depressurisation. The lights are still on. Why are the lights still on? Why let us see? The samplers don’t need to see. The Remote Access Units don’t have eyes, they have sensors.’ He looked up. ‘Yestin’s right. He’s nailed it. Those lights are for our benefit. So is the air quality. So are the rotation stabilisers and the food dispensers. In which case, why haven’t they been turned off?’

  Was it a rhetorical question? I glanced at Mum. Yestin glanced at me. We were lost.

  ‘It’s obvious,’ Arkwright went on impatiently. ‘If the ship’s trying to get rid of us, why keep the systems running?’

  I cleared my throat. ‘Because . . . because the ship needs them too?’ I proposed, tentatively.

  ‘Correct.’ It was turning into another training session. ‘Because the ship needs them too.’

  ‘But why?’ Mum leaned forward. ‘Why would anything living need lights inside it?’

  ‘Because of the cooling system,’ I cried. Suddenly, I understood. It made sense. All the endless training I’d done in Sustainable Services, about balance and seamless systems and sustainability and carbon cycles – at last it had paid off. ‘The cooling system’s adjusted to neutralise the extra heat produced by the lighting system!’ I went on, thinking aloud.

  ‘Precisely,’ said Arkwright.

  ‘And the microbe populations were engineered to survive at normal temperature, in an exactly calibrated level of ambient light -’

  ‘Yes.’ Arkwright thrust his face into my mother’s – the way he often did when he got excited about something. ‘This ship was as complex as any living organism even before we hit that emission wave. Fiddle with its systems, and you throw the whole balance out of whack.’

  ‘So whatever was normal before -’ I began.

  ‘. . . stays normal,’ Arkwright finished, and Dygall gave a bark of wild, scornful laughter.

  ‘You call this normal?’ he squawked, whereupon Arkwright regarded him with a grave look.

  ‘On a scale of one to ten? Yes, I would describe this situation as falling on the normal side of the median point,’ he responded. ‘Just think – we could all be floating around in goo by now. In total darkness.’

  ‘But we’re under attack!’ Dygall exclaimed fiercely.

  ‘Yes, we are. And I think Cheney was right. I think we’re under attack because someone, somewhere, stepped over the line. I think CAIP is trying to restore this ship to a condition of normalcy – that is, to a condition as close as possible to the way it was when it passed through that emission wave. To do it, CAIP must wipe out the threat of anyone smashing up a Remote Access Unit, or whatever it was that happened to trigger this immune response.’

  Mum was gnawing at her bottom lip. ‘So our best hope is -?’

  ‘Our best hope is to do what Sloan suggested. Get into CAIP, wipe all the personnel files, and CAIP won’t know what to look for.’

  ‘But – but . . .’ Yestin’s voice shook. He was using the door to steady himself. ‘But can’t we – I mean – can’t we go back to the way it was before?’ he pleaded. ‘I mean, isn’t that our best hope?’

  I suppose, in a way, he spoke for all of us. All of us must have been nursing the expectation, deep in our hearts, that we would somehow reverse the process we’d been witnessing. After all, this was a ship. It wasn’t a great big space-borne jellyfish, or a mollusc, or any other kind of multicellular life form. It was a ship. It was our ship.

  Surely we could take charge, and restore it to its former condition?

  That’s what we all wanted. But it wasn’t going to happen. I knew it wasn’t, even as I turned eagerly to look at Arkwright, anxious to hear his reply.

  He hesitated before delivering his final verdict. It was Yestin, after all, who had asked the question: pale, orphaned Yestin, with his deformed joints and pinched face and skinny legs. Only the most heartless person could have smashed Yestin’s feeble hopes without a qualm.

  ‘You know,’ said Arkwright, ‘I’ve never been a religious man, Yestin, but what’s happened here – well, you could almost call it a miracle, of sorts. We’ve witnessed the creation of life. It’s something quite beyond our capabilities, even now.’ Arkwright took a deep breath. ‘And quite frankly, if you want my honest opinion,’ he continued
, ‘it would take a second miracle to cancel out the first.’

  His long face grew longer as Yestin dropped his gaze and covered his mouth.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Arkwright finished. ‘I do think we have a chance, I really do. But I don’t think it involves a life that will be anything like our old one.’

  CHAPTER

  FOURTEEN

  Sloan returned soon afterwards. It was Yestin who first spotted the bulges in the ceiling. When Arkwright yelled, ‘Sloan? Is that you?’, we all heard a faint but unmistakable reply.

  So we hurried to the access hole, where we awaited Sloan’s reappearance.

  After a while, his face popped into view, illuminated from below by his collar-spot. He was breathing heavily.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Mum demanded.

  A nod. Then his face disappeared for an instant, to be replaced by his flapping legs. Arkwright caught them, but was kicked out of the way. Sloan preferred to jump down unaided.

  ‘Floor’s so soft,’ he gasped, after hitting it, ‘you don’t need help.’

  ‘Well?’ said Dygall, who had never been one to mince his words. ‘What happened? What have you got?’

  ‘Laser-head scalpel,’ Sloan replied, fumbling in his pocket.

  ‘Is that all?’

  Sloan looked at him. Mum said quickly, ‘That’s fine. We’ll use that.’

  ‘Given time,’ Sloan remarked, raising one eyebrow, ‘I could probably have found more.’

  ‘But you had to get back,’ Mum concluded. ‘Exactly.’ She relieved Sloan of the laser-head, switched it on, and set its frequency. It sliced through her wrist band like a knife through soft butter. ‘Who’s next? Cheney? Careful, now.’

  One by one, we had our ID bands removed. Cradling his, Arkwright observed, ‘These things are heat-powered, aren’t they?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mum. She was hunched over Yestin’s arm, wielding her scalpel with great concentration. ‘They’ll stop working soon, if they’re not placed next to a heat source with the correct output.’

  ‘Then we’ll leave them here,’ Arkwright decided. He dropped his band on the floor. Dygall followed suit. He even ground it under his heel for good measure.