Invasive Species — a short story

by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  "Can we test the crew members?" I asked.

  "With the captain's authority." She hailed the captain and talked to him about the situation, then quietly alerted security to round up the two crew members I'd fingered and quarantine them. One was a nurse, and the other was a waiter.

  While we were waiting to hear back from security, Smik and I camped out in the purser's office, which she wasn't too thrilled about. "Why didn't anyone hear them?" I said. "Must be noisy, chomping on metal. Do you think they all did it at the same time, or were these just random visits to the same spot?"

  "How can we know until you ask the beings involved?" Smik said. I didn't know his body language, but I got the impression he was getting fed up with me.

  "Good point." I could talk to the gym staff, see if anybody had noticed anything. Although this wasn't my usual method. I'm not a detective. Analyze and destroy! Then take the money and scamper. "Who spotted the damage?"

  "Don't know," he said.

  The purser's comm beeped. She spoke to it, then to us. "They've got the two crew in sickbay, isolation room. Now could you get out of here and let me work?"

  Smik put his fake head back on and led me down to sickbay, where I met Dr. Pradip and an armed guard. The doctor was friendly, which was a nice change, and the guard was quiet. The nurse and the waiter were inside a glass-sided room. They sat side by side on a med-bed. The nurse was dark-skinned, tall, and muscular. She wore a teal uniform with a medical insignia on the chest. The waiter was shrimpy and wore what all the other crew on the Promenade deck had been wearing, black pants, white shirt with creases, gold bow tie. They both sat quiet, too calm for people who had just been rounded up.

  "Preliminary scans indicate they are not quite human anymore," said the doctor. He was short and dark and had shiny black eyes. "It's very interesting! They have new metallic structures inside — very slender and hard to detect, but I found them."

  I wished my Skikka was still around. He was not a people person, but he might have known how to handle this.

  "Have you talked to the nurse? Is she someone who works with you?" I asked.

  "Yes. She is my assistant. I thought she was a little strange lately, but I didn't think — a marvel like this right under my nose!" He was all ready to dissect her on the spot. Which kind of put me off, but might be handy in the long run.

  "Can we talk to them?"

  "Sure, sure." He led me over to a console and pressed a button. "Amara? The exterminator is here. She has some questions."

  I did? Again, not my area. "Uh," I said. Both the nurse and the waiter had straightened when the doctor spoke. Their faces still looked blank. "When did y'all start eating metal?"

  "Ten days ago," they said together.

  "Uh, why?"

  "Our systems required it." They were perfectly synchronized in their speech.

  "What for?"

  "To build — " the waiter began, and the nurse put her hand in front of his mouth.

  "To build what?" I asked.

  "That is not your concern," said the nurse in a cold voice.

  "How could you even bite it? Do you have diamond teeth?" I asked.

  "We were given the means," said the nurse.

  "Care to explain?" I asked.

  "No," said the nurse, but the waiter said, "We produced it from our own selves."

  "Quiet!" the nurse said.

  "We have the potential to be so much greater," said the waiter. "You can be, also."

  "Oh yeah? How?"

  "Accept — " the waiter began, and the nurse put her hand over his mouth again. He struggled a little, then straightened and got quiet.

  I lifted my finger from the transmit button and said to the doctor, "Do you know anything about her personal life?" I got that the nurse had changed. I wondered how far, and whether I could come up with some question that would tell us.

  He cocked his head and looked at the ceiling. "She has a sister on Mars. Any time anything funny or strange happens on board, Amara always echoes her."

  "What's her sister's name?"

  "Chika, I think."

  I pressed the button again. "Hey, Amara. Did you tell Chika about what happened to you?"

  "There is no need," she said. "She will know soon enough."

  Well, that was pretty darned vague. I stopped transmitting again. "Doctor, how many tests can you run from here?"

  "I have full scan capability, and I already have their blood undergoing analysis."

  "I get the feeling taking care of this infestation is more your job than mine," I said.

  He smiled. "I like that. Usually the most exciting thing I do on the ship is prepare hangover cures and treat aphrodisiac misfires."

  Smik's comm beeped. "Tell the exterminator we've found another damage site," said the chief engineer's voice. That was when I noticed Smik had his hand on the guard's shoulder, and the guard was just standing there, eyes blank and staring straight ahead.

  Smik let go of the guard and tapped his comm. "Received. Where is the site?"

  "In the day care center," said the engineer. "How's the extermination going?"

  "It is strange," said Smik, and signed off. He stared at me with his fake eyes, and I stared back at his neck where I thought his real eyes were.

  The doctor was burbling, weird non-word sounds that might be confusion or joy, staring at a readout on one of his machines. "Alien cells!" he cried. "Unregistered alien cells in their blood! Maybe I can name them after myself!"

  "I'll go check the new site, see who else is infected," I said. "Smik?"

  Smik's fake head stared at the ground, and then he gave a whole body shrug and led the way out of sickbay.

  "I gotta stop at the cabin and check on my kid," I said as Smik headed toward the crew lifts.

  "All right," he said. We detoured back to my place.

  I opened the door and saw Fern sleeping peacefully on the floor of the care cage. As soon as we came in, though, she sat up, saw Smik, and screamed, even though he was still disguised.

  "Mr. Smik, if you would be so kind," I said, and waved at the door. He didn't take the hint this time.

  "Purrrrfect," he bubbled in a low voice, darted forward, and reached through the bars of the cage. Fern shrank back from his seeking hand, but one of the fingers shot out and wrapped around her wrist, then dragged her closer. She screamed and sobbed and tried to shove away, with her heels dug into the cage's floor.

  I tapped my index finger rocket and shot a rubber bullet at his finger-tentacle. The bullet bounced off and winged me in the chest plate of my suit, leaving a dent. What was this guy made of? I activated a wrist blade and slashed at his hand. Even though I keep these blades supersharp and they're made of titanium alloy, it didn't even scratch the skin.

  "What are you?" I yelled, kicked the suit's augmentation hydraulics into play, and launched myself at him. I succeeded in knocking off his fake head and bouncing off his body to whack into the cabin wall, which didn't hurt me, but put a dent in the ship. Meanwhile, he slapped something on the back of Fern's neck, and she screamed even louder.

  "Stop messing with my kid!" I screamed. I slapped the side panel on my hip compartment and brought out my big gun, something my Skikka gave me and told me to use only when things were life-threatening. I slapped it down on Smik's headbump, hoping his brain was somewhere nearby, because the alien technology in the Crown of Thorns would send probes digging down into him until they contacted the seat of sentience, no matter how thick and resistant his skin might be, or what they had to go through to get there.

  They hadn't met much resistance when my Skikka used the Crown on me, have to say. It took a little longer for them to penetrate Smik's integument. While he was struggling to pull off the Crown, I did an end-run around him and got the care cage's door open. Smik had finally let go of Fern. I grabbed her, ducked into the cabin's bathroom, and locked the door behind me, though I didn't really expect Smik to come after us, not with the Crown working on him.

  There
were four red spots on the back of Fern's neck. My heart staggered a little, and my eyes squirted. "Baby, baby, baby," I said.

  "Mommy, it's all right. I took it off before it could bite me." She showed me a small square metallic thing pinched between her fingers and thumb. It had all kinds of little legs, which were twitching and jerking but couldn't reach around behind it to get at her fingers. Four slender tentacles with bloody tips flopped around.

  I grabbed a sample box from a side compartment of my suit and held it out. Fern dropped the thing in and I sealed it shut. Only when I was sure it was immobilized did I hug my daughter.

  "Mommy, stop! You have your strength on!"

  "Oh, crap! I'm sorry." I opened my arms and checked Fern for damage. She pursed her lips at me and laughed. Not even a bruise.

  I don't know everything about my daughter, but I do know she's super tough, like her daddy. Which is a good thing, if you got me for a mother.

  #

  My Skikka said there are definite steps to a successful invasion. Infiltrate. Insinuate. Turn the invaded into your own people, and then reproduce with them — harder to fight family. Absorb and colonize.

  Pest control works backward from that. If you can interrupt the invasion in its early stages, it's a lot easier to stop.

  Once the Crown subdued Smik, I put a whole bunch of restraints on him. I had to take the Crown off and hide it, because it's forbidden tech, or it would be, if anybody else knew about it.

  Then I called security.

  They found a lot more little colonizers in a hidden pocket nobody knew he had. I found out his species was called A'kla, and there were only a few of them in the solar system. We'd only made contact recently. The chief engineer said he was a great engineer, and she was going to miss him. The doctor was excited by the bug I gave him, and even happier about the collection security extracted from Smik.

  The colonized didn't get off so easy. The bugs he slapped on them had worked their way inside, set up residence in the brains, got the bodies to acquire the materials they needed to be comfortable in their new homes. They're all messed up, but it works okay as far as keeping them alive. The doctor is conferring with major medical clinics on Terra, Luna, and Mars to figure out how to treat them, so there's hope. Meanwhile, they are pretty much just weird and creepy shadows of their former selves, and that includes three of the poor kids in day care.

  My job was done, and they didn't know how to compensate me, since it wasn't exactly metal mites I fought. Fern and me are taking it out in trade. I finally took off my suit, and now we spend most of our time in passenger territory.

  I watch my daughter play and wonder about her daddy, my Skikka, what part of himself he put in her while I had the Crown on my head. She's much more fun than the people the A'kla invaded. But I worry about her teen years.

  =End=

  About the Author

  Over the past thirty years, Nina Kiriki Hoffman has sold adult and YA novels and more than 250 short stories. Her works have been finalists for the World Fantasy, Mythopoeic, Sturgeon, Philip K. Dick, and Endeavour awards. Her fiction has won a Stoker and a Nebula Award.

  A collection of her short stories, Permeable Borders, was published in 2012 by Fairwood Press.

  Nina does production work for the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. She teaches through Lane Community College. She lives in Eugene, Oregon.

  For a list of Nina's publications, go to: http://ofearna.us/books/hoffman.html.

  Connect with the Author

  You can connect directly with the Nina Kiriki Hoffman through Facebook.

  Other Nina Kiriki Hoffman Titles

  You can find the following titles online. The links below will allow you to purchase directly from Amazon or read free fiction online.

  Short Fiction:

  "Trophy Wives," by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  "Family Tree" by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  "Escapes" by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  "The Ghosts of Strangers" by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  "Ghost Hedgehog" by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  "How I Came to Marry a Herpetologist" by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  "The Weight of Wishes" by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  "Key Signatures" by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  "Fast Wedded to the Ground" by Nina Kiriki Hoffman