by R. T. Kaelin
“You are a good daughter, In’da bin Goden,” said Lai Wan quietly. “Or, at least…you remembered how to be one in the end.” Staring out from her spot in the center of the garden, Lai Wan watched as all of In’da’s wounds miraculously healed at her mother’s touch. Holding back a tear, the psychometrist thought;
Indeed, it is as the old ones say—a happy mother takes away pain.
And suddenly, both women were back in the patient visitors room. In’da blinked, surprised to find herself covered in sweat, her clothing crumpled, dirty and ripped, but her body healthy and unbruised. Looking down, seeing that she and Lai Wan were still holding hands as they were earlier, she said;
“We’re back.”
“We were never gone.”
“It was true. It was all true.”
“No, actually,” answered Lai Wan. “It was not. I lied to you.”
As the two women stared at each other, the psychometrist explained;
“I told you that the demon drew it’s strength from your mother. That it was slowly killing her. This was not true. The Shaitan draw their power not from their seeming victims, but from their loved ones.” When In’da stared blankly, Lai Wan took pity on her considering all she had just endured, and explained;
“It is the caregivers they victimize, those who hold the hands, who stroke the brows, change the bedpans, clean the colostomy bags…” Gripping In’da’s hand with both of hers, she told the woman;
“You could never have beaten such a creature fighting for yourself. If you had known it was feeding upon your suffering—yours—not your mother’s, you would have given up. It would have been easier.” In’da smiles at Lai Wan, admitting;
“And wanting to do things the easy way is what started all of this in the first place, isn’t it?”
Silence reigned in the room between the two women. It was not an awkward quiet, but one filled with the knowing relief only the most fortunate ever experience. Then, in response to something she picked out of the ether, Lai Wan said quietly;
“I sense the nurses are quite excited. It seems one of the patients nearby has come out of her coma.” Looking for but a moment into the psychometrist’s eyes, In’da found her answer and stood immediately, running down the hall to her mother’s room. Her work done, Lai Wan stood and headed for the door, thinking as she walked;
“Yes, a happy mother takes away pain. But then, so do happy children.”
*
Katanoi
by Philip Athans
He was upside down when he started to wake up. Then he was floating. Then he was falling. He couldn’t see, or his eyes were closed, and he couldn’t hear, or there was no sound. Then there was a bang—loud enough that he could feel it. It made him bite his tongue. His arm hurt, and his fingers, and his shoulder, then just his shoulder. He was dizzy, tried to speak, but couldn’t breathe.
Dexter Willis blinked a few times and lay there for a few seconds, making sure he was still alive. He took a deep breath, but the air was thin and he gasped then coughed. He tried to sit up and was surprised by the fact that he could. Pieces of twisted metal and other bits of debris slid off his chest into his lap. He put the palm of his right hand down on the ground—or floor, he couldn’t tell—and he went to brush the garbage and bits of…was it wreckage?…off his lap, but his left arm didn’t work.
He looked down at his left shoulder and that’s where it ended, at the shoulder. His voice was reedy in the thin air. “Where’s my—?”
Something exploded off to his right somewhere. Heat washed over that side of his face. A shrill, pained scream echoed from above. Things moved all around him, their shapes indistinct and obscured by the smoke filling the space—the compartment, he realized then.
“A ship,” he whispered, then coughed again and pulled as big a breath into his tight chest as he could. “Where were we going?” he asked himself as he struggled first to his knees then to his feet, pulling himself up with his one remaining arm.
There was another explosion—smaller, or a farther away—and a few more of the weird screams followed.
“Condition?” Dex asked his smartsuit, but there was no response. “No…I mean, status. Status?” Still no answer. It should be able to tell him what happened to his arm, tell him where he was, and help him breathe. “Suit,” he tried again, “respond.”
But the smartsuit didn’t respond. It had never failed to respond, had it? He reached for his collar to pull his helmet up, but it wasn’t there. He wasn’t wearing his smartsuit.
“Crap,” he whispered. “Where the hell am I?”
He looked around, blinking, his vision still blurry from the thin air and whatever he went through in the crash. That’s what happened, obviously. He was on a ship, it had crashed, and now the air was leaking out? But his ears weren’t popping or anything. He must have been out for a little while, breathing shallowly, acclimatizing.
Had he lost his arm in the crash?
He felt the stub of his shoulder and found it capped off with some kind of medical appliance, a sort of plastic bandage. It hadn’t been gone long. Could he have lost his arm and forgotten about it? Could it have been amputated while he was asleep? Maybe he’d been drugged? And why hadn’t it been replaced?
Dex staggered through the wreckage—it wasn’t easy as the floor was canted sideways—and stubbed his toe on a locker or cabinet. He was walking on the wall. Turning around he scanned the floor, now a wall, and found a row of sleep tubes—smashed, empty. He must have fallen out of one in the crash.
“Came to too fast,” he said to himself. It would account for the blurred vision, and the memory loss.
He couldn’t make sense of the words on the tube’s side, or those on the flickering, dying screen. He couldn’t read Triss. His eyes opened wide.
Triss.
This was a Triss ship. But the Triss hated him and—
Wait, this was a prison ship. A Triss prison ship.
“Lucky,” he whispered.
He didn’t see anyone else, alive or dead. The chemical odor of melting plastic dominated every breath. Another explosion—hot and close again—and he forced his stiff legs to move, staggering through the wreckage toward what looked like daylight.
Wind hit him, cool this time, and pushed the burning plastic smell aside for a second. He followed the breeze through a rent in the hull. He tried to hop down to the ground but ended up falling and sprawled onto cold, sharp gravel littered with bits of jagged metal and plastic.
He stood. It was easier this time, though he still felt off balance from the missing arm. How had he lost that arm? He examined himself, wondering if he’d lost anything else. The Triss had put him into some kind of shimmery unitard thing and Dex blushed, then shivered. He wanted his smartsuit back, and his melter. He liked that melter: an H&K 48.15 he’d tweaked himself so it was like an extension of his arm.
“Crap,” he whispered again.
The ground was rough and cold. He looked down and discovered he had no shoes.
The wreckage shifted behind him and he heard scuffling that sounded too much like footsteps for his liking. There could be other prisoners, other tubes that had popped open, and he didn’t trust the other convicts any more than their Triss jailers.
Dex couldn’t run—he was just too tired—but he damn well walked away, staggered, tripped, crawled a little, walked some more, and finally stopped to take a breather. He gasped for air.
Looking back, he’d hardly gone ten meters—it felt like three clicks.
The Triss ship had wedged itself against the side of a low mountain, a rocky plateau along a cold gray sea. The hull and superstructure, completely torn to pieces, towered thirty meters or more up into a night sky of deep indigo. Its bulkhead supports lined up like the ribs of some great, decomposing beast. Clouds of greasy black smoke obscured most of the stars. Dex didn’t see any moons.
Something made a noise—an animal?—behind him, near his feet. Dex spun, his only fist up and ready.
&nb
sp; The little creature scuttled back on dry tentacles that scraped against the rocky ground. Its body was a dome less than a third of a meter in diameter, its four tentacles curled beneath its globular body. It crawled into a skinny crevice nestled among jagged, triangular rock shards and stared at him with four wet, bulbous eyes, studying him, evaluating.
Dex had been around enough to know sentience when he saw it. This thing was thinking.
“Um…hi?” Dex said, his fist still up. He’d been attacked by cute little aliens before.
The sounds the thing made in response to his greeting might have been the Eighth Sermon of Gorliiz, the Gettysburg Address, or a long, extended burp. Unfortunately, Dex’s smartsuit contained his translator. No smartsuit, no translator.
“Were you on the ship?” Dex asked it. “Are you a prisoner? Crew? A local?” He knew it wasn’t a Triss.
The creature made some noises at him, and using a single tentacle, pointed behind Dex. He turned and squinted into the twilight as the little purple thing squeaked and gurgled. Smoke drifted slowly on the trace of a breeze, parting to reveal a series of stone boxes carved into the landscape. Black smoke poured from the squat structures lit by the grim flicker of fires. They almost looked like—
“Buildings,” Dex muttered. He struggled to breathe, and blinked away the smoke and his still-blurred vision. His gaze followed the narrow streets between the stone buildings back to the wreckage. It looked almost like a village.
“Is that where you live?” Dex asked the little alien, glancing back over his shoulder.
The little creature cooed in response.
“Listen, little guy, I can’t—” Dex started but stopped, interrupted by a gruff, almost barking voice echoing up from the wreckage. He jumped as something sparked against the rock wall next to him. His good hand—his only hand—reached for a gun that wasn’t there.
The voice barked again and Dex took two quick steps to slip behind one of the larger triangular rock shards that marched to the plateau wall like a platoon of pointy-headed soldiers. He peeked around the rock and spotted a beluz, a sort of hairless bear dressed in a smartsuit and carrying a slug-thrower of some kind. Beluz tended to be a bit old fashioned, as strong as they were dumb. But they followed orders. Not a surprise that the Triss used them as prison guards.
“Come on, boss!” Dex shouted. “Your ship’s scrap and your captain’s dead—” Dex hoped “—so what say we just let bygones be bygones, eh?”
The beluz guard’s smartsuit translated for both of them, but what came out of the speaker didn’t really translate well—something about going to the bathroom upside down.
“Okay,” Dex breathed. The guard was probably going to march up here, try to arrest him, and then what? Maybe just shoot Dex and get on with its own problems. Dex scanned the ground for anything he could use as a weapon. There were plenty of rocks, some of which looked—and felt, on his bare feet—plenty sharp, but the beluz had a gun.
“Give up, cargo!” the guard shouted up at him. “Come on out!”
“Cargo?” Dex murmured to himself. He had been considering just trying to run away until that. He eyed another rock—bigger than the one he hid behind now—and broke for it, scurrying with head down. Another shot pinged off a nearby stone, less than a meter away. Dex stopped, crouched low, and when he put his hand down to steady himself, he felt something warm and squishy. Startled, he jumped to his left as the guard fired off another shot that ricocheted off the ground right beside him. If Dex still had his left arm, the bullet would have hit it.
“Lucky me,” Dex said with a grimace. The thing he’d touched, another purple ball of an alien, cooed at him then made a sound like someone blowing bubbles in a glass of milk.
“Sorry.” Dex mumbled. He half-jumped, half-fell to another rock, and waited a few seconds. While he picked bits of stone out of his cold, bleeding feet, he listened for footsteps, gunshots, ricochets…anything.
The alien hooted at him and he tried waving at it to get it to shut up. This one was a little different, a bit bigger and with some darker purple spots. It looked up at him with its quartet of big, moony eyes, and pointed a tentacle at its village. Dex tried to tell it there was nothing he could do by giving it an exaggerated shrug, but then he just sighed when it pointed to the same place with a second tentacle.
The guard shot at him again and yelled through its speaker: “Show me that you hold no weapon!”
Dex ignored the order, and resumed his sprint for cover, moving from rock to rock. For some reason, the guard didn’t shoot at him again, but continued shouting. Sound travelled funny in the thin air, but Dex was certain he was putting some distance between himself and the beluz. He ran across another of the little purple locals. Black streaks surrounded by still-sizzling white blisters marred its purple skin. It was breathing, its body slowly expanding and contracting, but its eyes were closed and it didn’t react to his presence.
Dex jumped behind another triangular stone monolith and squatted there for a few seconds, thinking.
He’d moved closer to the village of block houses, and even in the thin air and almost no wind, he could smell burning flesh. No matter where he went in the galaxy, that stomach-turning odor was universal.
He heard a footstep. It sounded close, but he couldn’t be sure.
Pressing his hand against the cool, smooth stone, Dex—just for a second—popped his head past the edge of the rock. The beluz was only a few meters away, thankfully looking in a another direction at that exact moment. Dex pulled his head back and held his breath. He wrapped his fingers around a stone shard and lifted it. Too light, too small.
The beluz was getting closer, his booted foot grinding gravel.
Dex found a sharper, jagged shard with one smoother edge that made a serviceable knife. The whole area looked like a natural weapons factory, thanks to some kind of sheering effect along the plateau’s wall.
The beluz took another step, coming around the rock, his back to Dex. Dex popped to his aching feet, teetering to the left—he hadn’t compensated for his missing arm—and swung at the beluz, his first slash going wide. Dex sucked in a sharp breath—not enough air came in—as the beluz just stood there, somehow oblivious to the failed attack. The big bear-thing, half a meter taller than Dex, hunched over and bulky, held a tiny weapon that Dex didn’t recognize. Up close it looked like some sort of tool rather than a gun. Dex raised his makeshift knife, but stopped as the beluz started walking away from him. Dex, with breath held, lifted his bleeding right foot and stepped back, setting it down slowly so as not to make a sound.
The beluz continued moving away and shouted something that sounded a bit like a pack of rabid dogs fighting over the last scrap of meat. A moment later, the translator speaker blasted, “Prisoner! Where do you think to go?”
Dex turned to slip back behind the triangular rock and found himself staring right into the cold black barrel of a gun only centimeters from the tip of his nose.
“Yeah,” Dex sighed. “Hi.”
Another beluz guard smiled at him through the transparent faceplate of its smartsuit’s collapsible helmet. Its teeth were awful, caught in that intermediate stage between turning from yellow to green, its eyes were dull, uninterested. But the gun clasped in its hand—a gloved paw bigger than Dex’s head—was steady.
“You are returned to custody, cargo,” the beluz said, the translated voice comically out of synch with its fat, stubble-rimmed lips.
Dex raised his hand up to his side. “Where are you going to take me? The ship’s been, well, you know…” He waved to the crash site, but the beluz didn’t take the bait.
“I know you cargo, cargo,” the beluz replied with a grim smile.
“Shot down?” Dex ventured.
The beluz didn’t answer, but something in the way it sort of sagged a little made Dex think he’d guessed right.
So he’d been a prisoner of the Triss, being transported somewhere and somebody shot them down and—“The Androm…?” he sai
d, blinking.
This was one memory Dex wasn’t happy to have crawling back from his too-sudden defrosting. The Triss had hired him to run security for a chemical plant—some jerkwater asteroid someplace—manned by a peaceful if naive species called the Androm. Somebody started organizing the workers and requests turned into demands, and the Triss bosses ignored both. Then the Androm went on strike, and the Triss decided to fire them. But the Triss version of firing an entire worldlet full of innocent workers could only be called genocide.
Dex hadn’t signed up for that, and when he tried to stop it, the Triss tried to “fire” him too. He couldn’t stop what was happening on that asteroid, so he ran.
He’d been on the run for a long time, and when a Symbic loantrader sold him out, he’d made another run for it across another who-knows-where ball somewhere on the ass end of the Neworld frontier, and something on that no-account moon ate his arm. The Triss had saved his life.
Dex hated that last bit most of all. They hadn’t saved his life only to toss him onto some prison ball somewhere. He didn’t even want to think about what the Triss might have had planned for him.
“March, merc,” the beluz said. “Triss don’t like you, Triss pay the bills, makes you cargo, see? So now we—”
Something on the ground squeaked, drawing both the beluz’s and Dex’s attention. One of the purple locals stared up at them. The guard jumped back, startled, and jerked its gun, pointing the barrel at the creature.
Dex shouted, “No! Wai—” as the gun went off. He jumped forward and got the sole of his bare foot on the assault rifle, kicking the weapon out of the beluz’s grip.
The beluz growled and batted him away, knocking Dex to the ground. The alien—its blood as red as any human’s—lay on the ground, not moving. Spotting the guard’s rifle, Dex scrambled over and got his hand on the weapon the same time the beluz did. The guard pushed the rifle instead of trying to pick it up. The gun came free of Dex’s hand and clattered over the rocky ground.