Memory's Exile

by Anna Gaffey

  Short One took Jake’s arm, and they frog-marched him the rest of the way to the lab doors. He resisted the urge to struggle.

  Tall One extended a gloved hand, a tiny gray earbud nestled in his/her palm like a pebble. Jake picked it up with his fingernails, examined it, and deposited it in his pocket. No fucking way was he putting an unknown quantity in his ear from these mutes without scanning it first.

  Short One huffed in obvious irritation. There was something strange about the sound, something familiar. Tall One murmured something inaudible, presumably into a commbud ‘caster, listened, and then thumbed the lab door. It shot open.

  “Thanks a whole bunch. You guys were great.” Jake threw the sack over his shoulder and instantly regretted it as a faint, dull pain spiraled over his back and through his wrists and hands. He’d need more time to heal, and another KO dose soon. He stepped into the lab.

  Astrometrics was formidably wide and bare, even more so in the dark. The only illumination came from the cold gleaming lines of auxiliary lighting in the walls, and from a corner workspace, an active console. The observation window circled half the station’s width, transparent viewscreens coating the polymerine. A paper-thin white layer of settled halodine residue covered all like a dusting of snow: the consoles, the workbenches and their console wells, the floor. A confusion of footprints scurried around, and equipment and cases sat in a pile nearby. But the lab was deserted.

  The quiet pulsing creak of the immobilizer boot filled the silence. Jake swallowed, too audibly. “Why am I here?”

  The door gathered shut behind him, and Short One circled him. Reaching up, he undid the straps of his hood, lifted his goggles to reveal achingly familiar dark brown eyes and quirked eyebrows. She pulled down the mask, and Jake looked into the face of Rachel Santos.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  ATTN: Tobias Carmichael, VIP and Chief Dictator of Selas Station

  …he is the most intelligent and the most dictatorial (excepting Your Chiefness, of course) crewmember, yet the least bureaucratic. He toils and he spins. He dissects, dismembers, and micromanages any other crewmember who will allow it. And he is a valuable member of our team, noted by consensus that (and here I quote), “he is not so bad once you get a few beers into him.” I thereby judge him to be a safe addition to our crew.

  …in closing I recommend that all future personnel reports on Dr. Jeong be submitted through Dr. Ticonti in the form of psych reports, as I am ill-equipped to do so. (And also: it is not in the Quartermaster contract description. Sir.)

  Your faithful servant,

  Rachel Santos, QM, ex-1LT.

  She Who Must Be Obeyed.

  Excerpt: requisitions and personnel report (unofficial/satirical?)

  09 January 2242

  Rachel Santos, 1LT (retired)

  Quartermaster

  United Worlds DS 2075-5 [Selas Station]

  Satellite 1H-24HM, 24HM System [updated: Eos]

  [Data recovered 02 Dec 2242, Gunaji rights per salvage]

  1 November 2242 AEC

  23:34

  Jake dropped the sack. Gems tumbled out in a rush of dull gold and green and red and blue, yottabytes upon yottabytes of data storage rolling every which way across the floor. He couldn’t even spare a glance. Santos was alive. She was whole, corporeal, undamaged.

  “Thank the plaguing virulent gods—”

  She held up a hand. Jake stopped, and found that he’d launched himself toward her. “Rachel?”

  “Don’t move, please.” Her dark eyes were cold.

  “But. You’re alive,” Jake said stupidly. “Lindy didn’t say anything. Wouldn’t tell me who was in charge. And I thought—I thought I’d—I didn’t know you were alive.” Alive and pissed, to judge by her demeanor. You pushed me, Jake. He swallowed hard. He hadn’t. He didn’t. But he didn’t remember, either.

  “Disappointed?”

  Didn’t think you had it in you, not really. Santos’ voice echoed in his head. Stupid of me. Stupid of me. Stupid of me.

  “That’s not funny,” Jake burst out.

  “I know.” Santos’ lip curled. “You have him.”

  “I have who?”

  She looked meaningfully beyond him, and Jake realized she hadn’t been talking to him. “Griffin. You have him?”

  “Yes,” came the regretful reply from behind him. Tall One. Jake’s faltering relief punctured and sank.

  “Turn around, please.” It wasn’t really a request. Con sounded disembodied and otherworldly in the chilly, white-dusted darkness.

  Jake turned, and watched as Con detached himself from the shadows. His blue hood and mask askew, he circled Jake with a cautious tread, then halted an arm’s breadth away and raised a fully charged frygun to Jake’s head, the muzzle fizzing with tiny blue sparks.

  “Buddha fucking cornholes.” His face ablaze, Jake shoved down his stifling gas mask. Granted, they were practically shrouded in the haz-mat gear, but how could he not have recognized either of them? Not to mention this was the second frygun to his head in as many hours.

  “Careful,” Santos warned. “Slowly. Turn back to face me.”

  “What am I going to do?” Jake growled. “KO you with my mental powers?” Forget not recognizing them. Forget his instinctive trust and rush toward Santos. Con’s hand on the gun was much more shaming. Con, who had protected him, laid down with him, let Jake wrap his hands around his neck, beat down Nat right in front of him. Con. It smarted, to put it mildly. And he couldn’t comprehend this, not after they’d saved him in the cargo bay. Had he hallucinated all that? Had he hallucinated the whole thing, from the EVA onward to now? Where did it begin and end?

  Queasy panic churned through him, and he swallowed it back. Careful, he told himself. If he started down that road, he’d have to follow it all the way back to the Bends, to another unknown version of himself, one who would wake up screaming from a sick, extended experimental dream-and-nightmare of release and a life, two years aboard an imaginary satellite station named Selas with friends and colleagues born of his own mind.

  That this was a dream? That couldn’t be real. He couldn’t think that, not without shutting down. He refused.

  In any case, it was too old-time formulaic. He looked back and forth between them, Santos and Con. How were they now working together? “That was a great act, making me think you were suspicious of him, Rachel. Why’d you bother to stop Nat?”

  “It wasn’t an act,” Con muttered.

  Santos shook her head, her expression lost in shadow. “No. And I couldn’t let her kill you, no more than I could let Con kill her. Even though she won’t tell me her code. We’re not murderers. Not even by abstention.”

  “Big talk.” Jake swallowed. “If you fire that frygun against my head, well, the research is old, but it still shows that’s pretty much a kill shot. Probably quicker than being beaten to death with a wrench, though, so I guess I should thank you.”

  He thought he saw Con wince. But it could’ve been a trick of the shadows, of the growing heat in the lab. The faint light trails blurred, and Jake shook his head to clear his vision. His head. He could barely feel it, he was so numb and hot and cold by turns. Just how many damned painkillers had been pumped into him? Couldn’t they at least work consistently? “What are you waiting for? The station. We’re drifting, Lindy said that it was a priority that I get up here.”

  “She wasn’t lying that we needed you up here. But we’ve got a little time.” Santos moved closer. Her face was drawn and weary, her eyes growing large and shiny with…wayward gods, Jake hoped those weren’t tears. They couldn’t be. This was Santos. “What happened out there? Out on our EVA?”

  He licked his lips. “I don’t remember.”

  She laughed, a dry death rattle in the quiet. “Old methods work best, huh? Let me refresh you, Jeong. You went all confidential on me, and then you faked your little fit to get me off my guard. Worked beautifully, I have to say. One second, you’re convulsing, and I’m trying my damnede
st to keep you from flying off into space. The next, I’m sailing off like a comet. You tried to kill me.”

  Stupid of me, she whispered in his mind. Jake shook his head. “No.”

  “For all I know, you’re waiting for a second chance.”

  “No.”

  “Yes. Why? See if you can answer me honestly without any Clarify.”

  “Lieutenant,” Con began, sounding troubled.

  She cut him off with a sharp flick of her hand. “Answer me, Jake.”

  After a moment, Con tapped the side of the frygun, and Jake smelled the sudden crisp burnt odor of a rising charge to the highest setting. He thought of cooking chili, of cheese sandwiches on charred toast. “Rachel. I don’t remember.”

  “Try again.”

  “I don’t.” The gun sizzled in Jake’s ear. Even with the immobilizer holding him up, his knee was sending out unmistakable warning twinges. He tried to ignore them. He needed to be steady now, even though he was roasting, burnt as the toast... He blinked with a sudden foreboding. Here was the rolling, intensifying heat again, with no pressure suit malfunction to blame. What did that mean? A connection to the EVA incident, surely. But if it was, then Rachel was right: he was just as likely to attack her right now, and damn the lethal weapon at his ear.

  No. No, like the Bends fantasy Jake couldn’t believe that and stay sane, even if it was true. If he could only map things out the way he did in the lab: beginning and end, start and goal, a nonlinear path from one to the other with all possible permutations branching out in fine webbed strands, finite and traceable. He could figure this out. Steady. But he had to start with Rachel.

  “One second you were there,” he began. “With me. Outside the station, climbing down. And the next, I was dreaming again. About Selas. Like in the lift and the infirmary, like I told you, remember? It wasn’t bullshit. It happened. And then I came out of it, and you were gone. I thought—I thought I’d killed you.”

  Her face was implacable.

  “Believe me. Regardless of what you two…do with me.”

  The choking heat overwhelmed him, and Jake was uncomfortably reminded of the long, long moments outside against the station wall, of dream-Con’s glassy attack, the sweet thick suffocating press of it all. If he just relaxed, just let go and surrendered into whatever this was, he could rest.

  Yes…

  Rebecca extended her arm, dragged her fingernails over her forehead, lay face down in sparkling, shattered pressure helmet glass, raised a wrench high in one clenched fist.

  “There,” he heard Santos say, and saw her eyes widening. “Do you see it? I see it, my gods. It’s there.”

  She had a tablet in her hands, and her fingers fiddled over it too quickly for Jake to follow. “You see, if you’d killed Nat? It would’ve been wrong. This is what happened to her, too—she wasn’t in control of herself—”

  “You don’t know that,” Con snapped, but he was waning, uncertain.

  “And to Mei and to Mick and to me. To all of us, all of us, except for you...”

  She stared at Jake with mounting horror, her face metamorphosing into Rebecca’s, Nat’s, Mick, Mei, an anonymous muddled death mask of features known and new. Jake collapsed forward under the returning weight of the heat, and into the chill bracing air of Selas, the hypnotic sound of the trees rushing in his ears, in his head, and the breeze turned into a wind, propelled Jake backward.

  Hands gripped him. Someone held him upright, while gentle fingers pushed his gas mask out from under his chin.

  “Jake. Jake.” A pause. “Con, give me the medkit.”

  He heard the medkit flap scritch open, and the shredding tear of sterile packaging. Then a cold softness pressed on the exposed flesh of his neck, and Jake snapped back into himself. His functioning leg had buckled beneath him, but Con supported him in a loose, careful hold.

  “Spirit and fluid patches,” Santos said. “Can you hear me?” Her face hovered close to his, and briefly Jake fancied head-butting her. A hot flush of shame and anger ran through him. She did not seem to notice, however, and inclined her head. “Con? Are you reliable?”

  For what? Jake wondered. To put Jake down if she ordered it?

  “No,” Con said over his shoulder. “Not anymore.” His nearness filled Jake with a stomach-roiling revulsion, but with something still worse: an appalling sense of shelter, of wellbeing. He wanted to mash his own face into the halodine dust and inhale until his lungs brimmed with it and gave out.

  “Jake, can you hear me?”

  Instead, he shifted his weight to his uninjured foot, and tugged free of Con’s grip. “Yes, unfortunately.” Jake managed to make it to the nearest workbench.

  Santos nodded. “I’m so sorry.”

  The hell? He couldn’t help it; a completely inappropriate laugh gurgled up and out of him. “You’re apologizing to me?”

  “Yes. We needed a baseline. I can explain, but you need to work on the legacy gems while Con and I try to get the thrusters back on line.”

  “From here?” Jake’s still-fuddled brain attempted to parse that. “But wouldn’t Control save you the time of rerouting?”

  She exchanged a look with Con. “Will you collect the gems?”

  Con nodded. Avoiding Jake’s gaze, he picked up the sack and followed the curling, narrow trails through the halodine. Santos scuffed her way over to the workbench and leaned against it alongside him.

  “We’re still completely locked out of the Control level.” She gave Jake a shaky little grin. Were they on the same side again? “Nat didn’t manage to complete her destruction plan, but she did enough. Kai says it could take hours to fully break through Mick’s protocol and her code, even with his tricks and me supplementing him. Hours we don’t have. But he’s working on it.”

  “I thought he would be here.”

  “The infirmary’s a better location for him, actually. Access-wise, Heart is more self-contained there than in the rest of the station. I need you to use most of the available processing power here anyway.”

  “Doing what?”

  “I told you. I need you—”

  “—to work on the legacy gems, yes. I can’t work on them if you don’t tell me what I’m doing.”

  Santos shuffled the tablet, and handed it to him. “Just now I was scanning you. To get a baseline. Tell me what you see in the results.”

  Jake expanded the scan layer. Other than the base temp and dimensional readings for the lab and three human bodies, the display showed nothing out of the ordinary. “It didn’t read anything.”

  “Wait for it.” Santos tapped her fingers against the screen.

  For a flash of a moment, all the displayed levels spiked, and the localization showed a blob of wild, colorful activity. The reading numbers and time counter blurred out, and the screen lit with uncanny colors. Jake stared. It looked familiar. Where had he seen it? “What is that?”

  “It’s like it’s wavering. In and out. Intermittent. Almost like a comm broadcast.”

  “Cast from where?”

  “Not us. Not Earth. Plaguing hells, Jake, it practically crashes the scanner. Look at the time counter. And the dimension levels.”

  She paused the scan readout and pointed. The numbers were garbled into smears. Jake rubbed at the tablet screen with his thumb, and scowled at Santos’ withering look. “It’s a reflex. Ease. So you’re theorizing that whatever this thing is, it’s behind my, ah, well—”

  “Freakouts,” Santos supplied. “Yep.”

  “And subsequently the…freakouts of the rest of the crew. Second, this thing is something we just haven’t happened to pick up on the station’s decon and protective scanners. Rather than a—” he shook the tablet, and remembered. The leafy explosion from stone in the lab. The readout of his scan had showed similar schizophrenic colors and data. But had it really been the same as this? “Electronic malfunction,” he finished, weakly.

  “Tablet works fine otherwise.”

  “But overall, this is a spontaneo
us development.”

  Santos shook her head.

  “Come on. There weren’t any murders out here, attempted or otherwise, until pretty damn recently. In fact, I think we can tie the sudden inundation of bad shit happening back to the arrival of a certain vessel.”

  “You might be right about that,” Santos allowed. “But the signal itself is coming from somewhere else.”

  “Radiation? Space dust? No, I know—the ghosts. Nat’s ghosts. Chubaryan.”

  She spread her hands at the dark expanse of windows before them. “Selas.”

  “Headaches, sure.”

  “Headaches? Dreams? Hallucinations, maybe? Is it so bizarre to think the answer is right in front of us?”

  “Yes.” Jake frowned. His own vehemence surprised him, and he tried to reorder his thoughts. “Rachel. I love it here. You love it here. We all do.” Even as he spoke, the skeptical side of him guffawed silently. What kind of a fool’s answer was that?

  “Yes.” Her mouth tightened. “I do. Or I did.”

  “You did. What about the station?”

  Santos puffed out a breath. “It’s not more important than us.”

  Funny, Jake seemed to remember offering a similar solution while they’d loitered in the airlock, pre-EVA, pre-near death. “Could you?” she’d asked him. “Yes,” he’d said. “If it means not dying.” And now he felt more closely connected to their home than ever, while she was ready to do anything to leave. Anything? Home, he’d thought.

  The realization finally broadsided him, and sudden fury stole his breath. “You needed a baseline. For that, that aura or energy or whatever it is, and you thought you could get it if I freaked out. That’s why you had Con pull a frygun on me. You needed to—to induce an output. To use for searching and scanning. That’s why you’re sorry.”

  Santos gazed out into the inky black, and her lack of affirmation or denial or even acknowledgement enraged him further. His head pounded, and heat rose in his face, heat, again—it was happening again—he saw Santos shift and rest her hand on the haft of her belt knife. In horror, he fought his way back to the surface. The warm rush of blood evaporated.