by Ramy Vance
Toner nodded slowly. “Okay. Virgil is working on the scanners, and it will be a while still before the new crew members are, uh…decanted. Why don’t you go back to your quarters and get some rest?”
“I just took a nap,” she said irritably. Toner pushed himself closer and rested a hand on her shoulder. Jaeger flinched but forced herself not to look away.
“You got a few catnaps in the last thirty hours or longer,” he said. “Come on. There’s nothing else you can really do right now, and you’ll think clearer with a few more hours under the belt.”
She wavered.
“Listen to your first mate,” he intoned, waggling his long fingers in front of her like a hypnotist swinging a pendulum.
“First mate, huh?”
“Sure. By default, if nothing else.”
Jaeger allowed a small, tired smile and relented. Toner, with Baby trundling behind, escorted her as far as the base of the command column, where they parted ways. “I don’t think I sleep quite normally,” he said when she asked about his need for rest. “I don’t feel physically tired at all. Don’t worry about me. I’ll find a coffin somewhere and decompress with a pinup model.”
To which Jaeger could only shake her head. Baby lingered in the juncture threshold, but she refused to step into the spinning column. She stared sightlessly at Jaeger as the door slid shut between them.
Then Jaeger dragged her increasingly heavy body back to command crew quarters and spilled through the hatch into her bunk.
She activated the video journal on her viewer screen and fell asleep to the sounds of an unknown child singing about how far she would walk “to come back home to you.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
“Long-range scanners have found a few celestial bodies that may suit our raw materials needs,” Virgil said sourly. “Emphasis on may.”
Jaeger scrubbed her fingers over eyes that had, in the last five hours, grown a thick crust of sleep. “Okay. Hit me with it.”
The AI interface in the No-A break room flickered to life. Toner had found a large sheet of metal somewhere and used it to fan the drifting chunks of foam through Baby’s tunnel. They were now littering the fighter bay, and Jaeger didn’t have to worry about picking scraps of foam off her cinnamon roll.
Toner turned his makeshift fan on her, wafting the smell of cinnamon sugar away, with his head turned to the side. “Ugh. That smells revolting. How can you stand it?”
Jaeger pushed herself to the screen, which displayed a map of the local cluster. The white hole took up the upper left corner of the display, with the Osprey a tiny dot blinking in its shadow. The nearest star, a red dwarf, was about one light-year away and surrounded by a few rocky planets and a slender asteroid belt.
“Spectral analysis indicates the presence of lead and trace amounts of iridium across the asteroid belt,” Virgil said. “I have no doubt we could harvest the necessary lead from the asteroids alone but collecting enough iridium there could take years.”
“We don’t have years. What about the planets?”
“Trace amounts of either, as well, except for the innermost planet.” Virgil enlarged the image. “Where I do detect small but concentrated iridium deposits.”
Jaeger studied the orb on her screen. The Osprey’s spectral analysis scanners worked leagues better than her visual telescopes at this range. The planet was a blurry, blue-green dot on the screen.
“You said that was a rocky planet.”
“Of course. Trying to harvest either material from a gaseous planet would be so impractical, given our current resources, that I wouldn’t even bother—”
“Why is it blue and green?” Jaeger sipped her chai latte, the necessary complement to a cinnamon roll.
Virgil didn’t answer right away. “The planet is largely covered in oceans and has an Earth-like atmosphere,” it grunted. “Analysis suggests high levels of photosynthetic activity across the surface.”
“She’s alive,” Jaeger whispered.
“Yes.” Virgil had the gall to sound unhappy. “Very much so. On first analysis, it appears to be a ninety-three percent match to the ideal Earth substitute described in our mission details.”
Jaeger felt a twinge of nausea clench her gut and ignored it. “Well. Too bad it’s not a candidate for colonization,” she said brusquely. “It’s too far away from the fleet.”
Toner drifted closer, clutching something he had pulled out of the fabricator in one claw hand. It was a deep purple-red, glistening, and gave off a smell that stung Jaeger’s nose.
“I’m afraid to ask,” she said.
“Oh. Uh.” Toner slipped the thing behind his back, looking a little guilty. “It’s a lobe of beef liver.”
“Raw?”
“Well, yeah.”
“God in heaven.”
“There was a whole file of raw parts recipes in the fabricator.” He sounded defensive. “All offense intended, but your sugary crap makes me nauseous, and this genetically modified man cannot live on blood pouches alone.”
He wiped something from the corner of his mouth and nodded at the screen. “It’s pretty, but that planet is no bueno, Captain. We’ve already met the locals, and they kicked our ass.”
Jaeger let out a hiss of dismay. He was right. If that was a planet of the saucer-people, then slipping in unnoticed might be impossible, and they couldn’t afford another run-in.
“I do not detect radio chatter or telltale signs of industrialization.” Virgil sounded grumpier than ever. “Nor any satellites that might suggest a space-faring civilization. If the planet is inhabited, it’s by primitives.”
“No kidding.” Toner chewed thoughtfully. “Well, that’s…convenient.” There was a hint of suspicion in his tone.
“Analysis?” Jaeger asked.
Toner swallowed a too-large of a lump of liver and licked his fingers. “I find it hard to believe that a space-faring civilization wouldn’t have at least one base on a juicy little planet like that. It’s right there. It’s awfully convenient.”
Jaeger shook her head. “What looks tempting to us may not be interesting to aliens. We don’t know that the saucer-people have the same requirements for life that we do. They might be methane-breathing silicon creatures. They might be an entirely post-natural machine race that best thrives in cold vacuum.”
“True, I guess. Still. Maybe they’re just really good at cloaking their presence.”
“Maybe.” Jaeger frowned. “But we’re going to have to risk it and find out. Virgil, you said the planet might suit our needs. Why ‘might?’”
“Iridium is a trace substance. There are some denser deposits of it on the planet, but there is no guarantee that you’ll be able to collect enough to meet our needs.”
Jaeger frowned at the spectral analysis readouts for the asteroid belt surrounding the star. “How many repair droids do you have up and running?”
“Thirty-seven out of sixty.”
“How hard would it be to program them to collect the minerals? We could swing by the asteroid belt, drop most of them off, then pick them up again on our way out of the system.”
“Extremely difficult.”
“Can you do it?”
“Yes.”
Jaeger grinned faintly. She finally felt like she was getting a handle on the cranky computer. “Then get started. We’ll take a few with us to the planet to assist in the collection, but the rest are on asteroid duty.”
“Yes, Captain.”
“How fast can you get us into the system?”
Virgil sighed audibly. “Generator capacity has recovered to thirty percent. It’s a relatively short jump. We could make it in twenty minutes.”
“How fast can you get us there without buckling the damaged hull and killing everyone on board?”
“Ah, well, that might take another hour.”
“Perfect.” Toner slapped Jaeger on the shoulder, making her jump. “Our new crew members are about to wake up. Gives us some time for a meet-and-greet.”<
br />
“I dug up a catalog key on the sector database while you were napping.” Toner bobbed happily into the cathedral toward the activation pod dais. He sounded quite proud of himself as he made an idle pirouette in the open space. “Checked the codes against the embryos in storage and bada-boom.” He swept his arms across two of the pods. “I present your crew.”
Jaeger mounted the last step and saw what was in the two pods.
She screamed.
Toner’s satisfied expression vanished instantly. He whirled and went unnaturally still. “Oh. Um.”
Something had grown inside the two pods at the end of the line, but Jaeger would not dare to suggest that either one of the pale, twisted masses of flesh was human.
“What the fuck,” she whispered.
“That’s not right.” Toner hunched over the instrument panels, scanning the screens.
“Mutations,” she murmured. “Something happened to them in cold storage. Radiation…”
If Toner’s choice of diet had left Jaeger with a vague feeling of disgust, the two things before her made her want to double over and vomit. Without gravity to give her a sense of direction, however, all she could do was stand, stunned, with her guts roiling. Either of the things might have been human, originally. They were far from it now.
The monstrosity in the first tube drifted pale and naked in the gel. He had the abdomen of a boy, with skin stretched drum-tight over slender ribs, and the rod-thin legs of a famine victim. A single spindly arm curled protectively around his hollow gut and tucked between his thighs.
All of that might have been upsetting but understandable. Tolerable.
What Jaeger couldn’t wrap her brain around was the mass of thick, sucker-lined tentacles coiled around the child’s body, as if somehow an octopus embryo had stowed away in cold storage with the human. Now that the activation pods had hyper-accelerated the growth of each, the octopus had turned inside out and was slowly devouring the boy from the head down.
Either that, she thought with a thrill of horror, or they’ve merged like some Frankenstein monster.
If the boy had a head, it hid behind the coiled knot of tentacles.
The second creature was easier to comprehend and somehow much worse. It looked like an overgrown fetus, skeletal and pink, doubled over in the tank. Its head was misshapen, bulbous and distended, with orbital sockets the size of coconuts and long flaps of translucent flesh hanging off the sides of its skull. Its fingers, a foot long and talon-tipped, were stick-thin and put Toner’s unnaturally spindly claws to shame.
“Hm. Instruments do note a problem with activation,” Toner conceded, studying the readout.
“No shit,” Jaeger said, breathless.
“Yeah, but…” He tapped the screen and frowned. “That’s odd. It’s not with the actual genetic makeup of the, uh, subjects. It’s saying that the genetic signature for each of them matches with what’s on file. They’re…supposed to look like that?”
Jaeger forced herself to turn away from the tortured masses of flesh. “I doubt that.”
Toner shrugged and made room for her to join him in studying the readout screen. “That’s what it says. Genetic status: approved. The problem is further down the list. Right here: chronological fidelity. Error.”
Jaeger poked ferociously at the genetic status line, opening a window to display further details. She stared at the lines of code and analysis that appeared. Toner was right. The computer, at least, thought everything about the genetics of those creatures was well and good.
It did not, notably, designate either of them as human.
It did, however, designate both as successfully augmented.
“What the hell does that mean?” She tapped the offending line.
Toner shifted his weight. “Um…”
“What?”
“Okay, so about halfway through the growth cycle, the computer asked if we wanted standard or augmented specimens.”
Jaeger’s eyes narrowed. “And you…”
“I figured we could use every advantage we could get.” He shrugged. “I didn’t figure that meant growing tentacles and stuff. Anyway, you were sleeping. It was my call.”
Jaeger groaned. “Virgil!”
“What?” The AI sounded annoyed from some distant speaker. “I’m very busy reprogramming the droids.”
“This won’t take long. Just…what can you tell me about this? What’s going on with these…things?”
“They appear to be the crew you requested,” Virgil snapped. “The No-A databases are not completely patched into my network. I cannot tell you anything more than what you can read for yourself. Now let me work.”
The speaker deactivated with an unnecessary blare of static.
Toner and Jaeger stared at one another.
“You know,” Toner said slowly, “Come to think of it, nowhere in the catalog did it say that the crew was human.”
“It shouldn’t have to,” Jaeger said. “This is a human mission, to save humanity. It should go without saying. These things, they don’t…”
Toner gave her a long side-eye.
“What?”
“Well.” He shrugged. “I mean. I don’t know about you, but I’m not exactly in a position to get all high-and-mighty about what qualifies as human.”
Jaeger said nothing.
“It’s a big scary universe out there,” Toner added, pushing himself closer to the octopus-creature. “Maybe a lot of us have been augmented with unique tools to help us survive in the great unknown.”
He cocked his head, then added: “I was kind of getting to like being unique and cool. Get hip with the program, Jaeger. Splice in some eagle genes. Give yourself some badass wings. I mean. Standard-issue human? So blasé.”
“That kid doesn’t have a head,” Jaeger hissed.
Toner pressed his face to the glass and squinted. “I think he does. The tentacles are in the way.”
“This is unbelievable.” She looked back to the readout. The computer had registered an error. Hoping for anything to make sense of this nonsense, she tapped for further details.
“Okay. So.” She nibbled her lip. “Chronological sequencing. It says…there was a, uh, connection error between the tanks. Both subjects have…failed to reach the approved aging standard.”
“What does that mean?” Toner tapped the glass like a child hoping to excite a python at a zoo.
“I’m not sure. Virgil said the program is supposed to accelerate their aging to about thirty years.”
“Well, this one’s definitely a kid still. Stunted growth. Crap, I hope he still got all the important engineering lessons downloaded into his head.”
“Me too. What do you think of the other?”
“Mmm. Hard to say. Ugly fucker. Looks fully grown though, I guess. So…” Toner turned back to her. “What do we do, Captain? The recipes may have been a bit wonky, but these cakes baked. Are we gonna leave them in the oven because they’re not real pretty?”
Chapter Twenty-Four
There was a bubbling, rushing sound as the activation tanks flushed out the hydrogel, leaving the contained bodies drifting and covered in thick, ropy mucous.
Toner had found a stash of welcome baskets for the decanted crew and stood between the two tanks, shaking the creases out of the stiff robes that had all the charm and warmth of hospital gowns.
As Jaeger stared, the tentacles coiled around the child’s body began to ripple. The rows of suckers flexed, sending a cascading shiver through the body, and slowly drew away from the mass and reached out, probing against the tube’s walls.
“He’s just a kid,” Jaeger said softly, staring at the fragile, almost cherubic face they revealed. The tentacles sprouted from a thick bud in his shoulder, where his left arm should have been. Although the rest of him was emaciated, the tentacles were thick and powerful, busy probing the glass as the boy appeared to sleep.
The boy’s eyes slid open, large and coppery and terribly beautiful.
He bli
nked long lashes and smiled gently at Jaeger. His tentacles fanned against the tank as if they were trying to reach out and touch her.
Jaeger forced herself not to step backward. She swallowed hard.
“Let the kid out, Captain,” Toner said in a low voice. “I promise I won’t let him hurt you.”
Jaeger felt a pang of guilt but nodded. Steeling herself, she unsealed the pod.
A rush of warm air hissed out as the lid swung slowly open. Tentacles spilled over the rim, crawling like an eager octopus.
Jaeger did step backward, then. She couldn’t help it. She gasped, fingers falling instinctively to her multitool.
The child’s body followed, downright waifish behind the powerful tentacles.
He drifted over the dais but kept his distance before anchoring himself with one of his suckers to the pod. Still, he blinked around the cathedral. He took in the arching sweep of the ceiling, the rows of stacks fading into the distance, the mostly empty ring of pods around him.
Then he looked at Jaeger and offered a shy smile. “Hi. I’m really thirsty.”
Toner collected his wits faster than Jaeger and dug through the welcome basket to find a bottle of liquid. “Yeah, the instructions said you might be.” He checked the label, then held it up to the boy. “Here. It says to drink this first. Full of electrolytes, I guess.”
The boy cocked his head. One of the tentacles reached forward, coiled delicately around the bottle, then lifted it to his lips. Once he drained the bottle, he looked down at his body. A puzzled frown crossed his face. “This isn’t the body the Instructor said I would have.”
“The…Instructor?” Toner asked.
“The one in the dreams. He said he wasn’t real, of course. He said all of the lessons and knowledge we have were downloading into an empty vessel. It was all back story, written by the experts. Our real lives wouldn’t start until we woke up from the activation pods in Tribe Six.” Absently, as if in a programmed motion, the boy lifted his spindly arm to his forehead in a proper military salute. Then he wiggled a few of his drifting tentacles. “Those work as intended,” he decided. Then he looked down at his child’s torso and frowned again. “Something went wrong with the chronological sequencing, didn’t it?” He wriggled his body.