by Jaym Gates
—
Inside, Park pried loose an access panel and got to work jimmying the bulkhead door leading into the Panacea Corp module.
Almost as soon as he got to work, Eidolon messaged him. [Someone in the module is attempting to alert station security. I’ve intercepted the message and am spoofing a response from the station.]
[Damn,] he messaged, [That ain’t gonna work for too long.]
[No. I recommend you hurry.]
—
“Here’s how it is, Frettchen: I got the station, I got the data, and I ain’t signing off on killing all these people.”
There was a long pause. Finally, Das Frettchen said, “You’re hurting our working relationship here, Carter. We’ve always worked well together in the past.”
“No, we haven’t. And you know if we take this to the other proxies, you’re gonna be in the minority.”
“Fine, Carter. But don’t ever ask me for any favors.”
—
With the automech acting as an extra pair of hands, bypassing the bulkhead door was kid’s stuff. Kim was still hacking at the outer lock. Probably a minute or so until she got through. Park couldn’t wait. Eidolon had had to start jamming mesh calls from inside the Panacea module. That kind of activity inside the confines of the station would get noticed quick.
He jerked one more time on his utilitool, the end of which was locked onto a regulator valve in the door’s pneumatics. There was an almost imperceptible hiss of pistons, and the door irised open. He pulled himself through, and the automech followed him with a few puffs from its gas thrusters.
Soon as he was clear of the hallway, he sent a mesh command to the automech. A panel with two pistols racked beneath it extended from the side of the bot. Park stuck the smaller pistol to his belt and linked in to the bigger one. The minute whine of induction coils going hot, that was music. On the tacnet video in the corner of his vision he could see Kim was almost through the back door.
[I’m in,] he messaged.
[Here is a map of the typical module layout,] Eidolon messaged. [Interior partitioning will vary, but the bulkheads will definitely be as shown here.]
A mini-map popped up in Park’s field of vision. Four bulkhead walls radiated from the station’s central floatway corridor, dividing the disc into quadrants. The quadrants ran thirty meters from central corridor to outer edge. Ringing all four quadrants was an outer corridor five meters wide. The outer corridors of almost all of the modules, including this one, were visible from outside due to wide windows. They were packed with plants, which probably provided a lot of the station’s oxygen. What was in each quadrant, though, was anybody’s guess.
Inside, the module was hot and humid as a kleptocrat’s steam bath during an orgy. Condensation clung to the walls, which were all glossy white panels with harsh violet-tinged lighting strips at regular intervals. Mist hanging in the air made visibility crap, and the heat messed with IR, so he did a quick t-ray scan of his surroundings. This wasn’t a place where he wanted to be surprised.
[Ain’t what I expected,] Kim messaged, [Who microfactures drugs in a sauna?] Park could see from her video feed that the dome of the hull wart over her was icing up as the water vapor hissing out of the module settled on it.
Around him in the mist he was able to resolve the shapes of several cornucopia machines, reserves of nanofab feeder stock, three-dimensional cargo palettes, and a few small cargo-handling bots. A boutique pharma manufacturer didn’t need much more than that for shipping and receiving. This section of the module was otherwise a big, empty pie slice with the U-Facture station’s central corridor at the tip. The room took up a quarter of the disc of the module, less the wide corridor ringing the module’s outer edge.
[I should’ve sent Smoke in with you,] Kim messaged, [You should have back up.]
They’d left Smoke aboard the Skink. Park messaged back, [Fa Jing techs don’t show up with police baboons. Keep on cuttin’. I got this for now.]
[You’ll be looking for an actual manufactory,] Cagehopper messaged. [The equipment in that room looks optimized for making boxes. Eidolon, can’t you get a schematic?]
Eidolon messaged, [Jamming them is occupying much of my attention, Cagehopper. Their security AI is of very high quality, and subverting systems while it’s on alert is difficult at best. The best I can do right now is keep it from alerting the rest of the station.]
Park searched for power conduits, feeder stock lines, or anything else that would hint at where the microfacturing equipment might be in relation to his current position. He didn’t find anything, so he kicked off from the airlock toward a bulkhead door that opened on the next quadrant of the module. The automech bot followed him.
[Mech,] he messaged it, [Start building a detailed schematic of this module. Highlight all exposed power, data, and feed lines. Share with the users on my general comm channel. Visual inspection; local systems aren’t going to talk to you. Start with this room.] If they ended up having to destroy the module, he’d need to know how.
[KK, boss,] the bot said. It hovered off into the mist, staying close to the wall.
[Don’t touch anything, and don’t interface with anything without asking me,] he messaged after it.
[KK, boss.]
He did a bypass on the controls for the bulkhead door. When he was almost done, Kim messaged that she’d gotten through the hull and was casing the outer ring corridor.
Park finished the bypass. The bulkhead door slid open, and a strong smell of jasmine wafted out. Park’d expected an office or something, but instead he was looking into a Hindu temple centered around the blunt, phallic shape of a huge stone Shiva linga.
[Well, fuck,] he messaged everyone, [Think I know who we’re dealing with now.]
—
“You realize that you’ve severely damaged our working relationship, Carter?” Das Frettchen asked.
“What do you want me to do?” Park asked.
“Cooperate. You’ll find the peace of mind that comes with knowing a situation has been thoroughly dealt with does you more good in the long run than thinking you’ve saved some lives but wondering if one day the people you’ve saved will turn on the rest of us.”
“Your shit ain’t worth the methane in it.”
Park cut the call.
—
Kim and Cagehopper drew guns and pulled themselves through the hole she’d cut in the hull. They cased the module’s verdant outer ring corridor. Wide windows let thin sunlight in from outside. The walls of the corridor were slick, reflective white regularly interrupted by glaring UV light strips. The light bounced off the hanging water vapor, having more the effect of high beams in a fog bank than improving visibility. That made her edgy, so she deactivated the helmet on her suit. The helmet melted away, receding into the ring of her collar.
[That’s not wise,] Cagehopper messaged. He’d kept his helmet up. [You don’t know what’s in all this mist.] He took an instrument for sampling the air from a pocket in his suit and stuck it to his shoulder. A shared stream of atmospheric data announced itself on their tacnet.
For now, she didn’t look at it. [Tell me if I need to cover up,] she said, [For now, I want peripheral vision.]
The dense foliage in the outer ring and the stifling heat made seeing anything on visual or IR tough, so she amped up her hearing. Nothing but the quiet hum of recyclers and ventilation, so far.
Based on Eidolon’s schematic, a door to the disc-shaped Panacea module’s large, inner quadrants passed through the bulkhead that formed the inner wall of the ring corridor they were exploring about twenty meters ahead of them. Even with the curve of the corridor, she should’ve been able to see the door, but the riotous plant growth obscured the opening.
They pulled themselves toward the door. Kim used the grab loops mounted between windows on the outer wall, moving somewhat clumsily. She envied C
agehopper, who brachiated between grab points with ease on long, gibbon arms.
They reached the bulkhead door and studied it. [You any good with this stuff?] she messaged Cage.
[I do organisms, not machines.]
She didn’t want to spend ten minutes cutting through another bulkhead with her covert ops tool, not with Park already inside. She could see the temple he’d discovered through the tacnet feed, and she didn’t like the look of it. Religion weren’t never good news.
[Eidolon,] she messaged, [I need a door hacked.]
[I am—]
[Fuck it, man, they know we’re here,] Park messaged.
A brief pause, then Eidolon messaged, [True. Proceeding. Captain Kim, if you are able to pry away the panel to the left of the door and run a cable from your suit interface to the datajack underneath, it would aid me greatly.]
Kim morphed her utilitool into a short pry bar and pushed off the outer ring wall toward the door. Eidolon already knew where the panel was based on Park’s earlier intrusion; he overlaid a rectangle to the right of the door with an AR graphic. Arrows pointed to the edge where she need to pry.
When she was less than a meter from the door, something rustled in the foliage. She’d couldn’t stop herself; she wasn’t close enough to any of the walls. A dark green tendril covered in glossy, three-inch-long thorns whipped out from a plant near the door and wrapped itself around her leg. Seeing more tentacles emerging from the leaves, she ordered her suit to extrude its helmet again. The clear bubble closed over her face just in time for another tendril’s thorns to glance off the helmet.
“Warned you,” Cage said. He’d switched to voice comm. Not much point in sticking with messaging over the VPN any longer; they’d clearly been noticed.
Kim growled and squeezed off several shots toward where she thought the center of the plant might be. No effect, and another tendril had gotten a hold on her left arm. She struggled with it, trying to reach the stunner on her belt. “Little help?” she said to Cage.
The hypergibbon was prepping … something. As she struggled with the plant, she saw him swapping his shredder for a small pistol, ejecting the clip, and fumbling to insert a different clip. “Keep it occupied,” he said.
Occupied. Yeah. The plant had four tendrils on her now. She’d imagined being pulled toward some kind of toothy maw, but instead they were constricting, trying to push their thorns through her vacsuit. It was holding for the moment, but she could feel the hard points of the thorns through the skin of the suit. Kim finally managed to get to her stunner. She contorted in the tentacles’ grasp, trying to bend her body so that she had a clear shot between the stunner and the plant’s center.
The tendrils tightened as she struggled. Finally, she jerked one leg to spin herself into the right position. Through the gun’s sight she saw the plant’s center. She fired, the air between her and the plant distorting and crackling with electricity, but at the same time she felt the suit fabric finally give. A thorn pierced her leg; the area around it immediately went numb. The tentacles stopped jerking her around, but they didn’t loosen their grip at all.
[Fuck,] she messaged, [Cagehopper, I’m stung.]
Cage drew a careful bead on the center of the plant and fired a single shot. The bullet went in with a wet sound, and the knot of muscle-like cellulose immediately began to convulse, then shrivel. The tentacles started to loosen their grip.
“What was that?” she asked.
Cagehopper was at her side, running a medical scanner over her. “Splash ammo. Sorry I didn’t have it ready, didn’t think I’d need herbicide. Does your body have toxin filter, medichines, or any other anti-toxic countermeasures?”
“No.”
[Talk to me, guys,] Park messaged.
[Kim’s been stung by a Referium dulcamara. It’s a carnivorous plant from Echo IV. Nasty sumbitch, but I’ve got an anti-toxin swarm I can key to go after it.] He looked up at Kim. “Sorry, but I’m not sure about that leg.”
“Meaning?”
“Tissue necrosis sets in fast with this toxin.” He injected her with something, using the hole in the suit left by the thorn.
“Who the hell has carnivorous plants from a xenoplanet for security?” she asked.
—
Park had finished casing the temple. Nothing there but flower bouquets, suggestive statues, and a giant stone penis. Kim was cussing up a storm as Cagehopper treated her leg. She’ll make it through, he thought, She’s ruster tough, and Cage knows his trade. He was regretting splitting up, though. The module wasn’t that big; breaching it at two points and meeting up in the middle hadn’t looked that hard.
He pushed off for the door to the outer ring corridor. Best plan at this point was to meet up with Kim and Cagehopper, then tackle whatever was left in here as a unit.
[Eidolon, how’s it going?] he messaged the AGI.
[I am helping Cagehopper and Captain Kim get through the bulkhead door here.] Eidolon highlighted their position on the minimap. [The station’s occupants have ceased attempting outside comm calls.]
Park was halfway through bypassing the bulkhead door to the outer ring when the automech bot winked off the network. No damage report, just gone.
[Y’all see that?] he messaged, [Eidolon, what’s happening?]
[The signal from den autobomb est gurbufrixfra**{{>--]
Park smelled a hand touching the back of his neck. His mesh inserts were outside his body somewhere. He stretched but couldn’t touch them. His body grew, his skin whitened, and the temple grew as well, taking on cavernous dimensions. He felt the cool stone of the floor against his back and felt heaviness in his limbs—gravity. Had the module begun to spin? But no, then down would be the outer wall of the temple, but he was laying on the same plane as the enormous Shivalinga at the temple’s center. His clothes and gear were gone, except for some kind of animal skin wrapped around his waist.
What in hell was this? Park tried to clear his head, but it wasn’t going away. He thought around for controls, but it wasn’t a simulspace.
He felt strong, smooth toes, and then the ball of a foot on his chest. The toes stroked from his solar plexus down to his groin, and he could taste their skin on his tongue as they moved over him. He found he could move his eyes. Janu Vaidyar, their quarry, stood over him. She stepped onto him, planting one foot on his belly just above his groin, the other on his chest. Throbbing percussion music and jasmine scent pulsed through his ears, nose, and eyes. Vaidyar’s skin had turned blue, and she was naked but for a few pieces of jewelry, most prominent among them a belt and necklace made of small skulls.
Aw, fuck. Was he about to get sexually assaulted by someone’s religious beliefs? Park wasn’t able to hold a rational thought for long, though. Vaidyar’d hooked her async talents deep into some primal shit, deep enough his lizard brain didn’t want to hear about how relenting would be a bad plan. Vaidyar plunged onto his erection and began riding him. Their bodies expanded beyond the bounds of the room, out into space, beyond the bonds of the solar system, until the universe spun above him. It drifted apart, growing diffuse, and then contracted into a point of infinite density, suspended in its terrible potential even as Park now hung on the cusp of orgasm.
“Help me finish the cycle,” she said, stroking his belly playfully, “The universe needs its rebirth. Lord Shiva’s work must finish.” She squeezed him inside of her. She was holding a tiny cup of soma, offering it to him.
Park groaned, which’d have to pass for a “fuck you.” He wondered why mindfucking him was preferable to just injecting him with exsurgent goop, if that was her plan.
“Because.” She twisted her hips, making him gasp involuntarily. “I desire your assent, your aid. You’ve killed my cats’ paws and put my forks on the run. I want to know who’s hunting us.”
—
[Eidolon, open that damned door, I don’t care what else y
ou gotta let slip.]
Kim floated outside the bulkhead door. Her leg burned where it wasn’t numb; she’d ordered the vacsuit to go rigid around the leg to keep it immobile. Park’s minimap blip was only a few meters from the other side of the door. They’d hustled around the outer ring to his location when he dropped off the tacnet and stopped answering mesh calls. Cagehopper hung on some foliage next to her, splash gun still trained on the wilted remains of another carnivorous plant.
The door hissed open. In the gloom beyond, Janu Vaidyar floated before Kim. She was wearing a plain black second skin, and the weird ripple of an invisibility cloak distorted the air to one side of her. Her legs were wrapped around Park’s waist. She had one hand on his temple and the other wrist, oozing blood from a shallow cut, poised near his mouth.
She turned with one eyebrow raised and smirked at Kim. Kim drew a careful bead and shot her in the head.
As Vaidyar drifted away, Park convulsed. Was he—was that an erection in his trousers? She looked at Vaidyar’s morph, its head wreathed in drifting blood droplets. Seriously, im-ma? Next time don’t bring psychic sex powers to a gunfight. Cagehopper swung into the room to check on Park. She pushed off from the door frame and went to help.
—
They swept the rest of the module and found no one else. The remaining space was taken up by posh living quarters, a medical facility growing backup futura morphs cut to look like pleasure pods, and a pharmaceutical factory. Cagehopper set to work figuring out what they’d been making while Eidolon cracked their records.
Park and Kim were in the medical bay; the module’s doctor bot was working on her leg.
She said, “Before we came here, you said you had a hunch who Cupcake was working with. Now that you, uh, got to know her, any idea?”
Park grimaced, feeling a little embarrassed. “Yeah. Cult of the Destroyer. They’re a corrupt Hindu sect, believe the TITANs got sent by Shiva to destroy us so the next cycle of creation could start.”
“Never heard of ‘em.”
“That’s because Firewall destroyed them, or any rate was supposed to have. On Luna, four or five years back. Looks like Cupcake and a few others copied themselves and kept the dream alive.” Park winced as he watched the doctor bot excise a strip of necrotized flesh from Kim’s leg and spray more medical nanobots on it.