by Nick Webb
“How much water have you ever been in?”
Mari shook her head. “Shower’s worth, I guess.”
“I don’t...” Sym made a frustrated noise. “What is it like to walk around in the air all the time without being inside another being?”
“Uh.” It was what Mari had always done. She didn’t know any different. “I get your point. What if I asked how swimming made you feel?”
“Depends.”
“On what?”
“The size of the water.”
Mari rolled onto her side so she could see under the desk. Sym’s box was barely visible, and it looked small from her corner.
“Yeah,” Mari said. “I can see that.”
* * *
The monitors powering down for the day roused Mari from a nap. She still wasn’t sure what Sym’s rest cycle was, so she slid off the desk as best she could and opened the door.
“There’s a red button on the front of my box. Push it for three seconds, and my box will slide out. You can take it wherever.”
Mari, halfway out the door, jumped. “Sorry?”
“The size of the pool, Mari.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I haven’t been on my planet for three years.” Sym sounded matter-of-fact. “I lived in the oceans. Ectos came in and forced us out three years ago. They needed another planet to mine for resources, and when our planet denied their petition for immigration, they forced their way in and killed millions of us. Hosts, symbiotes.”
Mari put a hand over her mouth.
“I was one of the lucky ones.” A moment of silence, and then, “Do you remember what I said? If you need to get my box out...”
It took Mari a few moments before the words came out. “Red button,” she finally managed. “Push and hold for three seconds, and slide.”
“Sleep well, Mari.”
Mari turned, wanting to say...something. What could she say?
“Good night, Sym,” she finally managed, wiping a tear away.
She left the office, and the door closed behind her.
Once Mari blinked the tears out of her eyes, she could see that the repair crews were gone. Probably back on their ship for the night. Their tools were still scattered around, and that included a laser cutter in the middle of the damn floor. It was turned off, but if she needed a reminder that safety didn’t matter at all on the station, there it was.
She picked the cutter up, intending to put it in the toolbox, but she hovered before she put it down. A laser cutter could be helpful if she was trapped in her room again.
Mari shook her head at herself, but she took the laser cutter with her to her cabin anyway.
* * *
When Mama had told Mari that she was dying, she’d said, “I’ll send you a vid of my own when I pass. None of those official ones. You’ll hear it from me.” Mari had replied that she would do her best to be there to say goodbye face-to-face, and Mama had said, “I know how hard it is.”
Mari wasn’t surprised to be awakened two hours after she’d gone to bed with Mama’s message.
It was short. “Mija, if you’re getting this, I’ve died. I’m so proud of you. Remember how worthy you are of everything you have and everything you don’t. I love you.”
Mari downloaded it to her watch and sent Sym a message on the station display saying that she wouldn’t be going to work that shift. She didn’t bother informing the station manager.
She stared out her small window at the green-red planet below until she was ready to sleep again.
* * *
“Mari. Mari. Do you hear me?”
“Mama?” Mari asked, rubbing at her face. She didn’t open her eyes. Mama would shake her awake if it was really important.
“Mariana, wake up.”
She groaned, but Mari opened her eyes, and…
No, this wasn’t one of the old cabins she’d shared with her mom. It was the one on the space station, and her mother’s face wasn’t on the display. Unless Mari played Mama’s goodbye message, her mother’s face wouldn’t be on a display again.
“Mari.”
She finally recognized the voice. “Sym?”
“You need to get to the office. There isn’t much time.”
Mari’s mouth went dry, but her head was still thick with sleep. “Time? For what?”
“You have ten minutes. Maybe. Grab your things and come get me.”
The transmission cut off, and Mari’s heart started pounding.
* * *
Mari traveled light. An old superstition. When she was a child, she was convinced that, if she didn’t have much and kept her things in her bag except for when she needed them, she’d get planetside one day. She’d be worthy of it. Mama had figured it was better to make the best of what you had and brought crates with her everywhere so she could decorate the cabins she and Mari shared. Mari had loved it, but she hadn’t taken anything of her mom’s when she’d started working on her own.
It meant that, after Sym’s wake-up call, Mari was out of her cabin and on the way to the office in less than three minutes.
All the overhead lights in the station were off. The only light was coming from Verdu outside the station. There weren’t many portholes, but there were enough that Mari made her way to the office in the greenish-red light.
She paused at the office door. There was a pounding noise coming from the direction of the airlocks.
“Sym,” Mari said, cramming herself inside the office so the door would close. “What the hell is going on?”
“Planetary coup.” Sym sounded cheerful. “I need your help.”
The words “planetary coup” rang in Mari’s ears. “Help?”
“Yeah. Can’t get to the elevator by myself.”
“Wait, you’re leaving?”
Sym spoke like she was reading off a recipe. “The Ectos will kill me if I stay. You might have a chance if you lock yourself in here and call one of your ambassadors. Oh, and if you grab some food from the kitchen. This door’s reinforced, I think, but that won’t do much good if you starve.”
“Who is ‘they’?” Mari’s head spun. “Won’t ‘they’ kill me for helping you?”
“‘They’ are Ectos.” There was a this is so obvious tone to Sym’s voice. “And yes, if they get their hands on you. A lot of Ectos would love to have a rebellious human to wave around, but they’ll probably kill us both if you don’t help me.”
Put it that way. “So you want me to take you to the elevator? And then I come back?”
“Well, unless...” Sym fell silent for a moment. “Do you want to come?”
“To your planet?” The dying biped came to mind, choking on the trapped atmosphere in the elevator. “Won’t the air kill me?”
“There’s a group waiting for me at the bottom. Some of them have bipedal hosts, and their hosts have breathing gear in case they dislodge their symbiotes. You won’t die.”
Probable death on the station versus less likely death on the surface. That much looked straightforward. There was more Mari knew she should ask: would she be able to get off the planet later? Would the Ectos come after them on the planet? Would humans come after them, since they had the treaty with the Ectos?
What she did ask was, “Was the broken gear fixed?”
“What?”
“Will the elevator even work?” Mari hadn’t been at work yesterday, so she didn’t know if the crews finished.
Judging by the inhuman, wordless noise Sym made as the holodisplay turned on and showed the elevator, they didn’t know either. “The gear’s in place, but the controls weren’t all turned back on. I think we can get it going from inside the elevator, but...”
“You don’t know.”
“No.”
So probable death in the elevator versus probable death on the station. Neither sounded pleasant. There had to be a way to settle it.
“Do...” Mari pulled at her ponytail. There hadn’t been time to braid her hair. “Do you want me to
come?”
“I wouldn’t ask you to come if I didn’t.”
That decided her. She had no family left who would care if she was seen as a traitor and went to an alien planet. She had to take a minute to let her throat tighten and her chin wobble. Her mom was dead. She didn’t get to say a real goodbye.
But Mari had a friend, and she didn’t want Sym to die.
“Okay,” she said, pushing the chair out of the office and crouching. “Okay, I’ll go with you.”
“Fuck yes.” Sym sounded relieved. “You won’t regret this. I’ll make sure of that.”
Mari didn’t entirely believe Sym, but she admired Sym’s confidence. She paused with her finger over the button to Sym’s box. “You won’t be able to talk to me after this, will you?”
“Not until we make it to the planet.”
Mari laughed. It was a slightly terrified sound. “Any last words?”
“Just push the fucking button.”
“Good luck to you, too.” Mari pushed the button and held it.
* * *
Mari’s run to the elevator wasn’t the most elegant set of movements she’d ever done. With her things on her back and Sym sloshing in the box under her arm, she was off-balance and hitting the sides of all the doors. Her eyes watered from the jolts of pain as she stumbled down to the airlocks.
Unauthorized station entries weren’t common, so Mari hadn’t seen what reinforced airlocks looked like before. Metallic doors had sealed the openings, and they looked thick and heavy. Someone was cutting into one. It was molten and melting.
“Elevator,” Mari muttered. “Go inside.”
She pressed the button to open the elevator door, and the blue lights inside flickered to life. Empty, of course. The shift that would have opened access to the elevator was still hours away.
“It won’t kill me,” she said to herself. “It won’t kill me, it won’t kill me...”
Holding Sym’s box just in front of her, Mari stepped up to the clear gate. It glowed blue and let them enter.
She didn’t have time to be relieved. A loud clattering sounded behind her, and Mari hit the button to close the elevator so fast she nearly fell over.
If she had been thinking rationally, she might have figured out that it would be better to secure Sym’s box—and herself, for that matter—before anything else. She did put her bag down and sit in one of the biped seats, but the tapping she’d heard in the airlocks started on the elevator door, and...well, the only thoughts she had after that were “we’ll get vented into space” and “I’m going to die”, so she hit the red button for emergency descent before any securing was done.
The damn elevator had looked so sedate on the holodisplay. Speedy, but there was no reason to think it would be rocky. The display had read normal, minus the controls.
Which meant the speed it dropped, and the amount Mari felt it, had to be normal.
Whether it was or not, Mari was only partially in her harness. The elevator was built to maintain consistent gravity to protect the cargo, but the rocking of the elevator combined with Mari’s precarious spot meant she slid...and Sym’s box slid out from under Mari’s arm, too.
The moment before it broke lasted for what felt like years. Mari’s fingertips grazed the edge, and she had just enough time to remember the Ecto being dropped in a bucket of water before the box shattered and a two-headed symbiote went sliding across the floor, a trail of water left in their wake.
It was the first time Mari had seen Sym. Sym looked so small.
The decision to get Sym was instantaneous. It was the easiest part. Look at the box? Check. Was it intact enough to hold Sym for the descent? Maybe. Did it have any water left? No, that had all tipped on the floor.
The elevator took ten minutes to get to the surface. Symbiotes died of exposure in four.
Mari could hardly breathe between the fear squeezing her chest and the artificial gravity, but moving her entire body was harder than breathing. A crawl was too ambitious. She tried anyway because she wasn’t going to leave Sym to die. She pulled herself along by her fingertips and reached… reached…
Her height worked in her favor for once. She grabbed hold of Sym, and Sym flailed around in Mari’s grasp. There was no way for a symbiote to sense anything in air as dry as the elevator’s, and Sym was probably thinking “I’m going to die” as much as Mari. Did symbiotes panic the same way humans did? Mari had no idea.
“It’s...okay,” she said to Sym, even though Sym couldn’t hear her, and she put Sym in her mouth.
* * *
The next few moments could be best described as “choking to death”.
Mari had known before that Ectos took hosts by making connections through a biped’s skin. She also had known that symbiotes made connections by going inside the body. “Swallowing the slug” was what she’d heard most often outside of the classroom. What she hadn’t known was that symbiotes sat in a human’s throat, making connections to a human’s major systems through there and filtering air once they were settled.
Before then, the symbiote blocked all air to a human’s lungs.
Sym settling in probably took only seconds. It felt like an eternity to Mari, one where she grabbed at her throat and choked and heaved.
Mari passed out before it was all done. The last thing she remembered before everything went dark was the shaking of the elevator and how lightheaded she felt from lack of air.
* * *
Water.
Mari was floating in... in some place where her skin felt kind of heavy and wet, but it wasn’t until an echoing thought told her water that she understood what the sensations meant. She was submerged, a human floating, even though a flurry around her suggested the water was mostly filled with symbiotes.
The water wasn’t anything like she’d ever seen before. It was green, for one thing. And there was so much.
She tried moving her hands. She flailed at first, but after a few twirls in the water, she managed to travel a bit. The awkward gliding was still freer than anything Mari had ever done in gravity. Water had a bit more resistance than zero gravity, and that was comforting. A nice balance.
Mari blinked.
The water was gone.
Grass.
Mari had seen grass on ships before. The grass she was sitting on was nothing like the green grass that she’d known; it was redder and somehow softer to the touch. There were symbiotes in the grass as well, sliding through wet pockets on their way to other things. The air felt barely less heavy than the water had, and there were water droplets on Mari’s brown skin. She looked down on them in wonder, and—
“Are you finished?”
Mari looked around. She couldn’t see any bipeds. “Who said that?”
“We did.” It was in Mari’s own voice. It took her a minute to understand.
“Sym?” she gasped.
“There you go.” Sym laughed using Mari’s voice. “Interesting mind you have. But it’s time to wake up.”
Mari opened her eyes.
The elevator door was open, and the green sky beyond was like the green sky she’d seen in her dream. Or memory?
“Memory,” her brain agreed. It was louder and more defined than Mari usually thought. “Of course it’s loud. You’re not thinking this. It’s Sym talking to you.”
“Oh,” Mari said aloud. Her throat was hoarse, and she gagged a little. Sym wasn’t as thick in her throat as they’d been before, but Mari could still feel Sym there.
“Yeah, that’ll take some getting used to. Whatever. I need to get to work. Do you mind?”
Mari’s hand lifted slowly. Mari wasn’t the one lifting it. Sym was asking for permission to do more.
“Oh,” Mari said. “Sure.”
Sym moving Mari’s body was kind of funny. Mari was lurching, stumbling for her bag like she was drunk. But Mari could feel Sym’s intense focus, and it only took a few moments of fumbling before Mari’s hand held the laser cutter again.
&nb
sp; “I can do that, you know,” Mari said aloud.
“You can think at me,” Sym thought. “No talking required.”
“Fine,” Mari thought. “Let me use the cutter?”
“Go ahead.”
Mari moved out of the elevator. There were other bipedal hosts on the platform, their skin tinged with red. The water around was green, and Mari spotted movement that suggested other symbiotes in the ocean.
A host spoke in a high-pitched language Mari hadn’t heard before. Sym used Mari’s mouth to reply. It was odd, but exhilarating.
The other hosts helped Mari climb on top of the elevator. Mari turned on the laser cutter. It would take a while to cut the cable that connected the elevator to the space station, probably hours, but she was willing to take the time to do it.
Judging by the fierce determination that flooded through Mari, it seemed Sym felt the same way.
* * *
The hosts moved the platform through the ocean after the cable was cut. Mari still didn’t understand their language, but Sym translated roughly. They were moving the platform to a place far away from any of the underwater settlements, and they would swim to find where they were going again. Sym added that, thanks to the symbiote in Mari’s throat, Mari wouldn’t need to surface for air.
Mari tried to care, but she couldn’t bring herself to. She was sad, still, so sad that it weighed her down, and the movement of the platform on the water was also vaguely terrifying. It felt so unstable.
“How permanent is this host thing?” she asked Sym aloud.
“As permanent as you want it to be,” Sym thought back. “But it’s better than breathing gear down here, and...”
Sym didn’t need to finish the next thought. The symbiotes had probably just declared war on the Ectos and humanity and a bunch of other aliens beside. Apparently, the symbiotes had allies as well, but Mari would likely be considered a traitor by Earth, if Sym’s thoughts were any way to tell.