by Ramy Vance
There was a beat of silence.
“I’m only reading one life form in the junction.”
“Oh yeah,” Jaeger said weakly, slipping the multitool triggers around the fingers of her left hand. “My infrared says he’s stone-cold, too. Jesus, he scared me.” She pushed herself a little closer. “White, looks like. Very pale. Platinum hair, pale blue eyes. Thin. Hard to place the age, maybe in his fifties?”
“Is he wearing any identifiers?” Virgil asked.
Jaeger winced and drew herself within arm’s reach of the body. He was wedged between support struts, pinching several thicker coolant lines shut. His long, colorless hair drifted aimlessly in the zero-G. He stared, unblinking and glassy-eyed, into her face.
“It looks like he’s wearing a flight suit,” Jaeger said. “Pretty similar to mine. I don’t see any obvious identifiers.” She reached out and touched the bone-white claw of his hand. Her spike of fear faded into pity. “He must have been a crewman.”
“I cannot confirm. I still can’t access the ship’s manifest,” Virgil said.
The dead man’s skin looked papery, almost transparent and cold as the grave.
She shut her eyes and let out a long breath. “He was a crewman,” she decided, heart growing heavy. “Must have been. Came down here for maintenance, or repair, and…” Gently, she put her hand on his chin and tilted his head to see the mat of cold blood at the base of his neck. “And got smashed up real good in the turbulence. Shit.” She turned her head away and scrubbed her face, forcing back the sudden sting of tears. She sucked in a wavering breath and reached for her computer. “Shit, shit, shit.”
“Captain?”
“Just, shit, Virgil, okay?” She slammed her computer against the strut and activated the coolant schematics. Her vision blurred. “I don’t remember his name. It sucks. He was alive, and now he’s dead, and I’ve got to untangle him from the pipes like he’s a piece of fishing line.” A lump formed in her throat.
“Your multitool has a plasma cutting function,” Virgil said indifferently. “On its lowest setting, it should cut through flesh. It will make detangling easier.”
Jaeger froze, heart in her throat as she thought over what the AI said.
She deactivated her multitool and took the dead body by the hand. She pushed and watched him drift in the tangle. She pulled in a different direction and watched the way the knot pulled around him.
She started the long, arduous process of untangling the dead body from the hoses.
“Virgil?” Her voice was hoarse.
“Yes, Captain?”
“I don’t ever want to hear you suggest dismembering a crewman again. Do you understand?”
There was a long, long moment of silence. Jaeger nearly cried out in horror, disgust, and grief as she wrenched the man’s limp arm from between two support struts. She thought she heard the faint pop of a dislocating joint.
“Understood, Captain.”
“Good.” Jaeger turned the computer speaker off. She’d had enough of the soulless AI for a little while.
“I’m sorry.” She cringed as she wrenched the man’s head violently to one side, pulling his torso free of the main line. “I’m sorry, man. I’ll get you to a good resting place. I promise.”
A tune bubbled to the surface of her mind, and she found herself humming an old, sad song as she salvaged the body of a man she didn’t know—but felt she should.
“Swing low, sweet chariot…”
It took her twenty minutes to pull the body free. Once she had him clear of the hoses, she re-activated her infrared and watched, relieved, as the cool blue lines reconnected on their own.
Feeling a little better, she re-activated her comm. Virgil’s voice crackled through the speaker before her finger left the button.
“Are you all right, Captain? I lost contact.”
“Yeah.” She let out a wavering breath. “I needed a human moment.”
“Coolant flow levels are normalizing,” Virgil said. “Ninety minutes to full pressurization. Then it will be safe to increase generator output and bring more systems back online. But please note, Captain Jaeger, this is a temporary fix. Eventually, we will need to repair the ship.”
Jaeger nodded. “How long do we have until the ship falls apart again?”
“Difficult to assess. It depends on what other challenges the ship will encounter.”
“So we’re good for now?”
“We will be once we’ve full pressurized in—”
“In ninety minutes. Got it. Might be the perfect amount of time for a little nap except I have more important things to do.”
“Like what, Captain Jaeger?”
Jaeger didn’t answer. She unhooked her toolkit from its tether and watched it drift away. There were more toolkits in the generator room.
She took the end of the line and bound the dead man’s wrists together.
“Captain?”
“I’m coming, Virgil.” With the other end of the rope, she tied a taut-line hitch around her ankle and pulled it snug. Then she began the trek back to the Jefferies tube, towing a dead body behind her. “I’m getting him out of this tomb. Least I can do is get him a proper burial.”
Virgil, wisely, said nothing.
Towing a dead body in an environment without gravity would normally be a fairly simple task. All you’d need to do is push it in the direction you wanted it to go and let inertia take care of the rest. Even dragging a body through a narrow tunnel wouldn’t be that difficult—if the way were clear.
The Jefferies tubes, though, weren’t clear. They were cramped, narrow ducts crammed with random rods and pipes and wires of every sort. A dead body was a collection of wiggling limbs that wanted to bang against every corner and hook around every bend in every pipe.
Jaeger had to stop every few meters to shake her legs, wiggling the poor crewman free of whatever he’d gotten caught on. The tubes were warming—though she couldn’t tell if that was increasing radiant heat from the generators or her exertion. Sweat began to bead on her face but couldn’t drip away without gravity. It stung the corners of her eyes as she peered down the length of her torso to see the corpse’s wrists caught on the U-bend of a pipe.
“Are you Jeffery, my man?” she asked the dead man as she wriggled her leg, trying to shake him free. “Are these your tubes?”
“Are you well, Captain?” Virgil asked through the comp speaker.
Jaeger wanted to scream at the AI. She forced herself to swallow a lump instead. “Virgil, can you get me a temp reading in this duct?”
There was a moment of silence. “I don’t have sensors in the ducts themselves, but with the generators powering up, the life support systems are gradually increasing temperature throughout the ship.”
“Starting with right here. Yeah. I hope the tomatoes survived a little frost.”
Just beneath her feet, Jeffery drifted free, and she looked forward again. She was overheating. She pulled her exo-gloves off with her teeth and tucked them into her neckline before pulling off her thermal hood. That was a little better. Thirty meters to go, she told herself. Only thirty meters.
Twenty meters, she told herself as they passed the cross-tube that ran off toward the Tetra sector. Once again, Jeffery tried to drift the wrong way. She had to take a few stabilizing breaths to stop herself from screaming, then started the de-tangling dance, apologizing silently every time Jeffery’s poor head or shoulder slammed against a pipe. She was growing nauseous, and her headache was coming back. This time, she suspected, no amount of painkillers would silence it. She needed to rest.
“Come on, buddy,” she begged. “We’re almost there. Don’t make me cut you loose. You don’t want to rot here like a rat in a fuse box, do you?”
Jeffery bobbed free of the juncture.
Jaeger let out a long breath and started down the last leg of her crawl when a deafening crash rang up from the Tetra tube.
She did scream, then, her whole body tensing at the sound, her a
rms flailing out to find the walls and push herself at all possible speed. Pain lanced through her hand as her bare palm caught on the jagged edge of a metal panel.
“Fuck!”
Jaeger froze, her heart slamming in her throat and ears straining, not daring to breathe. The iron scent of blood filled the tube.
A distant metallic rattling drifted up from the conjoining tube—the one that ran to Tetra sector, right alongside that sealed storage locker.
She remembered the horrible, animal thrashing noises coming from behind that red door and didn’t dare to breathe.
Slowly, the distant rattling noise faded. She counted to thirty before allowing herself to breathe.
Twenty meters, said a small and increasingly frayed voice inside her. One step at a time.
She looked at the distant white portal to the generator room and resumed her trudge, ignoring the bloody handprints she left with each push. There was another first aid cabinet in the generator room. The gash was wide and bloody but not deep enough to cause nerve damage. She could patch it later.
One step at a time.
That was when an icy hand clamped like iron around her ankle.
Chapter Five
Jaeger barely had time to glance down and see the bright, icy blue eyes staring back at her before Jeffery’s jaw fell open. Long ropes of drool bridged across curved white teeth that were too long and too sharp. A bright streak of blood—her blood—was smeared across his forehead.
He crushed her ankle in a painfully strong grip and yanked, dragging her toward his gaping maw.
The sight of those jagged, inhuman teeth washed all exhaustion, fear, and anxiety right out of Jaeger’s system.
Now she was pissed off.
She grabbed a pipe over her head, and with a defiant scream, heaved herself away from the monster. Even through the tough material of her flight suit, his grip around her ankle was burning cold. He thrashed, rattling the tubes, ripping one control panel loose, and filling the tunnel with a spray of sparks and the smell of ozone.
The good news: his hands were tethered together at the wrists, preventing him from gripping with the full force of his arms.
The bad news: that same tether also bound him to her ankle, a fact she only remembered as she heaved to scramble away and felt the vicious jerk of him reeling her back like a fish on a line.
The worse news: he was already lifting his bound hands to his face, his freakishly wide mouth falling open to gnaw himself free.
Jaeger screamed again and kicked downward, levering herself against the side of the tunnel and driving her full mass into Jeffery’s forehead through the heel of her boot. The force of it sent a shock up to her hip. The monster went rigid, stunned.
“Is there trouble, Captain?” Virgil’s mild voice came from her comp speaker as she scrambled to grab her ankle and find the lead rope of her hitch.
“There’s a zombie,” she yammered in a high, chipmunk voice. “There is a goddamned zombie.”
The lead rope. Where was the lead rope? She’d tied the tether too tightly to push it over her mag soles. If she could yank the lead rope, it would loosen—
Her hand brushed the multitool dangling at her belt. A plasma cutter could slice right through the line—and Jeffery.
And the hundreds of vital tubes and conduits surrounding her in every direction.
Jeffery hissed and shook himself, recovering from the stunning kick and reaching for her again.
“I do not understand,” Virgil mused as Jaeger barraged Jeffery with a flurry of bicycle kicks. “I’m not reading any other significant life forms in that sector besides you and the creature in Tetra storage.”
As if on cue, a deafening crash echoed up from the tetra duct.
“You shut the fuck up!” Jaeger roared.
The thing in Tetra sector fell silent. Jeffery froze. Jaeger froze, ears ringing.
They regarded each other as the echoes of Jaeger’s scream faded. She was bent nearly double, wedged tight between the tube walls, her face not even a meter from his as she fumbled with her tether.
Slowly, Jeffery’s jaw opened. It kept opening. In the widening chasm of his mouth, Jaeger saw cold death. She felt the lower half of her body sinking toward him as he pulled the line tying them together.
Her fingers found the lead rope. With one hand, she yanked hard. With the other, she pulled the mag sole from the bottom of her boot and cranked the power to maximum.
There was an instant of terrible, slow-motion silence as Jeffery surged toward her before the mag sole emitted an electric hum.
Then it tore free of Jaeger’s hand, ripping toward the nearest metal strut—which happened to be directly behind Jeffery’s head.
The mag sole flew into Jeffery’s gaping maw. He let out a wet, shrieking choke as the device crashed into his face. The supercharged magnet forced him backward, slamming him against a steel strut and pulverizing his nose.
Jaeger straightened and kicked against the sides of the tube, sending herself slamming toward the generator bay. Sparks bubbled around her as Jeffery thrashed against the wall, fighting the magnet that had him pinned.
She banged hard against struts and pipes, grunting, reckless in the desperate drive to get the hell out of the tunnel and away from the nightmare hell spawn screaming that throaty, rasping scream behind her.
Five meters. The opening to the generator bay was a glowing white portal five meters in front of her.
Her heart was a stampede of wild horses.
The yammering comp at her hip was a useless piece of garbage.
“Captain?” Virgil fretted. “I’m detecting some short-circuiting from that sector. Are you injured? Perhaps you are hallucinating. Are you hypoxic?”
At this point, Virgil, Jaeger thought as she reached for that white portal, I wouldn’t even be surprised.
Her hand found the edge of the Jefferies tube access. Trembling, dizzy from exhaustion, blood loss, and head trauma, she drifted free between generator consoles.
Can’t sleep yet. She fought back the blur creeping into the corners of her vision and looked over her shoulder. The crashing sounds of a flailing space zombie were drawing closer. Jeffery had shaken free of the magnet.
Jaeger swiped her remaining mag sole to the standard setting and settled lightly to the floor.
She could seal the tube shut, locking Jeffery inside.
Where he’ll find his way to the Tetra beast, and they’ll form a Jaeger-hunting power duo, she thought wildly. Or at least fuck up my coolant lines again.
Nope. Couldn’t allow that. Not after all the trouble she went through to get them working.
She fumbled for the multitool at her belt. Now that she could put some distance between herself and any vital part of the Osprey’s anatomy, she could risk using the plasma cutter as a weapon. She didn’t have any other choice.
She saw the dark shadows of Jeffery’s flailing body scrambling up the tube. A gibbering, wheezing zombie pumped full of stimulants, coming at her like a nightmare.
She jammed her fingers into the multitool as Jeffery’s head exploded from the tube. He was hissing and wheezing through a crushed nose, his face covered in a thin, sticky white ooze. He launched himself out of the tunnel, unbound by gravity, and flew toward her head-first. She lifted her tool and pulled all of the triggers.
Nothing happened.
Well, Jaeger thought as she looked down to see the multitool’s low battery light blinking. I think I held up pretty well. All things considered.
She was suddenly exhausted.
Jeffery slammed into her chest, pinning her to the generator bay wall with enough force to crack her ribs.
She had one more thought as a last jolt of pain shot up her spine and his icy cold fingers dug into her shoulders.
He’s not a space zombie at all. She watched, as if from a dream, as he brought his parted lips to her throat. He’s a space vampire.
Huh.
She felt the ice of his breath on her skin, free
zing her blood in her veins. She felt the razor edge of his teeth brush against her jugular – all distant, unreal things.
She felt a rush of warming air as he jerked backward, clutching his temples in both hands.
He let out a high, whining screech as he drifted away from her, crumpling in on himself in the universal body language of agonizing pain.
Jaeger swallowed hard. Had the dead man tried to bite her?
“Virgil, I need to grab a quick nap,” she muttered as her pain and darkness took her. “Keep an eye on Ops while I’m gone, will you?”
Then she passed out.
Chapter Six
Jaeger woke to the sound of rustling and the warm hand of gravity pressing her into a soft bed.
Turning over, she pulled a pillow over her throbbing head. “Just a few more minutes,” she mumbled.
“Uh…okay.”
Jaeger shot upright, all fatigue fluttering away at the sound of an unfamiliar voice.
The vampire stood beside her bed, icy blue eyes bright in the dim light. There was something red and glistening in his pale hand.
Jaeger screamed.
He jerked as if she’d slapped him. He dropped the pouch, which fell to the floor and burst. The iron scent of blood filled the chamber. “Jesus, chill out!” He clapped hands over his ears. “God damnit. I was still eating that.”
“What the fuck?” Jaeger grabbed her waist, but her utility belt was gone. She frantically scanned the room, her heart thudding in her ears. The storage lockers along the wall were all hanging open, showing rows of disheveled clothes. Notebooks and journals covered the bottom of one cabinet, yellowing pages open to the air. The viewer screen mounted on the opposite wall was active, showing a list of stored media files.
Her gaze landed on the multitool dangling off the belt near the foot of her bed.
The man, vampire, whatever he was, met her eye. He understood that she planned on using the multitool like a club.
They both lunged for the belt. Jaeger, not one for foreplay, rammed her elbow into a soft spot between his ribs. He fell back, wheezing, as her fingers wrapped around the multitool. She rolled onto her back, aiming the plasma cutter at the vampire.