She followed Wandrei, she thought, because she had so little idea what else to do. This is how war crimes happen. People get overwhelmed and follow orders. If you were as brilliant as one of these Arkhamer doctors, you’d know what to do besides whatever Wandrei tells you.
And then she bit her lip inside the helmet and thought, If I were as brilliant as one of these Arkhamer doctors, the Richard Trevithick might be as dead as Charlie here.
That thought chilled whatever part of her the quietly guiding dead man had missed.
Something brushed Cynthia’s right glove, then grabbed it. Her throat closed with fright, and she turned as she tried to pull away, looking down to see what horrible thing had caught her. But it was a suit gauntlet, tight against her own, and when she looked up again, she met Hester’s gaze dimly, through two helmet bubbles glazed with the reflected light of the lab up ahead. She’d stopped, lost in thought. The idea of being left out here in the dark with the stars knew what made her heart jump like a ship’s rat in the claws of a cheshire.
She squeezed back and caught a flash of Hester’s teeth, bright against the darkness of her face. They moved forward together, though any comfort from the other woman’s presence was abrogated by a series of scraping sounds that Cynthia’s medical ear easily identified as metal on bone.
Five more steps brought them into the lab. Cynthia found herself fascinated by the way the light — clip-on work lighting trailing to batteries, and not biolume — caught on the scratches on Meredith’s and Wandrei’s pressure suits as they stepped out of the shadows of the corridor. She was avoiding looking past them, at whatever the lab contained, and their broad shoulders mercifully blocked most of the view.
Then Wandrei stepped to one side, to make room for her and Hester, and raised both hands to open the catches on his helmet. As he lifted it off, Cynthia had to fight the urge to reach out and slam it back into place — as if a standard, somewhat worn pressure suit was any protection in a situation like this.
Cynthia stayed on suit air anyway. It made her feel a little better, and she noticed Meredith and Hester were in no hurry to uncouple their helmets either.
“Dr. Fiorenzo,” Wandrei said pleasantly. “Allow my to introduce my colleagues. I take it you’ve had some success?”
“Limited,” Fiorenzo answered in a light contralto, turning from a dissection table upon which the twitching remains of something that couldn’t possibly still be alive were pinned. She did not seem at all surprised to see them — and that Wandrei apparently did not need to introduce himself. “I’m pleased you’re here. After the accident . . . Charlie dead and all the crew . . .”
Her face revealed grief, tension, relief. What would it be like, trapped alone parsecs off any shipping lane, inside an enormous dead creature slowly rotting around you?
The introductions were a scene of almost surreal cordiality. Fiorenzo was a narrow-shouldered, olive-skinned woman. Her face was smooth everywhere but at the corners of her eyes as she smiled, and she wasn’t old enough to be going salt-and-pepper yet, though what few strands of grey there were stood out like silver embroidery on black velvet against the darkness of her hair. She wore it in a pixyish crop, like a lot of practical-minded spacers.
I thought you’d be older, Cynthia didn’t say, in the hellish mundanity of pleasantries carried out while the relic of Major Ngao stood against the far bulkhead, arms folded across his chest, watching cloudy-eyed but seemingly intent, as if he were following the conversation. She was spared from having to shake hands because Fiorenzo was gloved, and she was spared from having to come up with something else to say when Fiorenzo paused at her name, frowned, and said, “Feuerwerker. They threw you off the Richard Trevithick just before — Damned shame. That was good research. It’s about time somebody found out what’s in one of those biosuspension canisters!”
Cynthia managed not to step back, rocked by a peculiar combination of the warmth of a fellow scientist’s regard and the horror of who, exactly, was praising her. Her jaw was still working on an answer when Fiorenzo continued, “Well, you’re welcome here now. We’ll find some things out, you and I! Maybe even a thing or two about the Mi-Go!”
“Thank you,” Cynthia said weakly. She let Fiorenzo, Meredith, and Wandrei step away. Hester crowded close and leaned their helmets together in order to whisper: “What did you do?”
“I thought everybody knew already.”
“Tell me anyway.”
Cynthia couldn’t quite figure out where to start. She was still fumbling when Hester broke and asked outright, “You were trying to reverse engineer a Mi-Go canister?”
“A vacant one,” Cynthia said in weak protest. “Not one with somebody inside.”
“Sweet breathsucker,” Hester said. “Haven’t you heard about what happened to the Lavinia Whateley?”
A boojum privateer. Vanished without a trace after pirating a cargo of the Mi-Go’s canisters of disembodied brains. Rumor was that all hands and even the ship herself had wound up disassembled and carted off to the outer reaches of the solar system, living brains forever locked in metal tins, going immortally mad.
Cynthia nodded tersely, lips thin. “I didn’t say it was a good idea.”
Hester looked like she wanted to say something else, but Wandrei called her over. Cynthia stayed where she was, not wanting to intrude on an Arkhamer conversation.
Although . . . was Fiorenzo an Arkhamer? Cynthia’d learned enough to recognize the names of the Arkhamer ships — all of them named for one of the nine which originally set out from Earth — and Fiorenzo wasn’t one of them. But Wandrei called her Doctor Fiorenzo, and she’d introduced herself the same way — Julia Filomela Fiorenzo. No “Jarmulowicz” or “Burlingame” or “Dubois.” So either she wasn’t a Arkhamer — whom the Arkhamers treated like an Arkhamer, and Cynthia wasn’t buying that for a second — or she was an Arkhamer and her ship had disowned her.
Well, gosh, Dr. Feuerwerker. I wonder why.
Her ship had disowned her, but Wandrei hadn’t — and Cynthia remembered the comments about Wandrei getting in trouble, remembered the President’s suspicions, and knew that, yes, Wandrei had brought them out here, not on a mission of mercy, but to check in on Fiorenzo’s experiments. Experiments which the rest of the Jarmulowicz Astronomica did not know about, or at least did not know were still on-going.
Sweet merciful Buddha of the Breathsucker, Cynthia thought and looked down to discover that she’d wandered over much closer than she’d meant to get to the dissection table where Fiorenzo had been working when they came in.
The creature on it had once been human. It should not still be alive.
Or possibly it wasn’t. She twisted her head, forcing her gaze away from the wet holes where the thing’s face had been, and found Major Ngao watching her. Watching? Staring at? Staring through? She had to squeeze her eyes shut and bite down hard on her lip to keep the bubble of hysteria from escaping, and when she opened her eyes again, she was staring down at the dead, twitching creature’s chest.
Where, under the blood, the words Free Ship Calico Jack were still, just barely, legible on the scraps of its uniform.
Cynthia stepped back, a big over-dramatic step that caught everyone’s attention, Fiorenzo’s voice dying in the middle of a sentence: “the bodies just aren’t fresh enough. I need —”
“Dr. Feuerwerker?” Wandrei said, with that nasty snide tone that every teacher in the universe used when they’d caught you not paying attention in class.
Cynthia opened her mouth, without the least idea what was going to come out — and more than half convinced it was going to be, There’s nothing to ensure freshness like harvesting them yourself, is there, Dr. Fiorenzo? But some remnant of self-preservation interfered, and what she said was:
“How did the Charles Dexter Ward die?”
“What?” Fiorenzo said; Wandrei was frowning. Cynthia repeated the question.
“Oh. There was . . . the mirror broke,” Fiorenzo said with a vague gesture. “And the doppe
lkinder came. They killed the crew and the ship.”
“How did you escape?” Meredith asked, wide-eyed.
“Luck, I think,” Fiorenzo said with a shrug that almost looked like a spasm, and a bitter laugh. “I was the pathologist, and I was in the morgue when it happened. I think they just couldn’t smell me. And you know they don’t last very long.”
Yes, like homicidal mayflies. They rarely lasted more than a few hours after they’d killed their primary host. Cynthia nodded and did not — did not—look at the dissection table. “And you’ve been here ever since?”
Fiorenzo offered a sad, slanted little smile. “There’s been nowhere I can go.”
Fiorenzo wanted, she said, to transfer her most promising experiments to the Jarmulowicz Astronomica. As she and Wandrei and Meredith started a discussion of how that might be accomplished, Hester caught Cynthia by the arm and dragged her grimly out into the hallway, still within the light of Fiorenzo’s rigged operating theater, but well out of earshot.
There Hester stopped and leaned into Cynthia’s helmet again. “She’s lying.”
“About what?” Cynthia said, her mind still stuck blankly on that poor twitching thing strapped down on Fiorenzo’s operating table.
“Doppelkinder can’t kill a boojum. They won’t even go after one. Boojums don’t recognize their own reflections.”
“Wait. What?”
“Doppelkinder hunt in mirrors,” Hester began with exaggerated patience.
“Not that,” Cynthia said. She’d been terrified of doppelkinder since her first Civil Defense class when she was five. “Boojums don’t see themselves in mirrors?”
“Two-dimensional representations don’t mean anything to them. Cheshires are the same way.” Hester managed a smile, although it wasn’t a very good one. “That’s why there’s that folk saying about how you can’t fool a cheshire. The most cunning optical illusion ever created won’t even make them twitch.”
“And doppelkinder are dependent on optical illusions,” Cynthia said, finally catching up to what Hester was trying to say.
“They don’t eat people’s eyes for the nutritional value.”
“Right. But if the doppelkinder didn’t kill the Charles Dexter Ward, what did?”
Hester folded her arms and gave Cynthia a flat obdurate stare. “I think she did.”
“Fiorenzo?” Cynthia spluttered a little, then caught herself and regrouped. “Not that I don’t believe she would do it in a heartbeat, but why? Why the boojum, I mean? And for the love of little fishy gods, how?”
Hester’s gaze dropped. “You were supposed to talk me out of it. It’s a crazy idea, and I know it’s because I’m jealous.”
“Jealous?”
“If Professor Wandrei had even once shown this kind of interest in my work . . .” She trailed off, her face twisting.
“I understand,” Cynthia said and dared to offer Hester’s shoulder a clumsy pat. “But, Hester, I don’t think you’re wrong. I’m pretty sure she killed the crew of that little scavenger ship.” And she told Hester about the uniform.
“We have to tell Professor Wandrei,” Hester said, taking a step back toward Fiorenzo’s little island of lunatic light.
This time it was Cynthia who caught hold of Hester’s arm. “Do you really think he doesn’t know?”
She hated herself a little for the sick expression on Hester’s face, the knowledge that she, Cynthia Feuerwerker, had just opened her mouth and killed something irreplaceable.
Hester said, barely whispering even though they were still helmet-to-helmet, “What should we do?”
Cynthia opened her mouth to say, What CAN we do? and all but physically choked on her own words. Because that was how war crimes happened. That was how you ended up a future-ghost on a Arkhamer ship with the lines of a scowl bitten so deep in your face you never really stopped frowning.
And Hester was watching her hopefully. Hester, knowing what she’d done, was still willing to believe that Cynthia would do the right thing.
Cynthia took a deep breath. “If she killed the Charles Dexter Ward, how did she do it? I mean, you and Wandrei said there were only two ways, and she clearly didn’t cut him to pieces, so . . . ?”
“She must have rigged some kind of galvanic motor,” Hester said. “If she hooked it up to the UPS — and a hospital ship would have to have one, even a liveship — that would take care of the power requirements . . .”
Cynthia got a good look at the wideness of Hester’s eyes before she realized that here in the dark corridor, even with their helmets leaned up together, she shouldn’t have been able to make out the details of her friend’s expression. Hester stepped back slowly, her features revealed more plainly as Cynthia’s shadow no longer fell across her face. Cynthia forced her gaze to the right.
All along the passageway, bioluminescent runners were crawling with unexpected brilliance. Fiorenzo had reanimated the Charles Dexter Ward.
“Aw, shitballs,” Hester said.
Part Three
Looking away from the light that showed the Charles Dexter Ward was no longer entirely dead was as hard as opening a rusted zipper. But Cynthia did it, and didn’t let herself look back. She pulled Hester a little further down the corridor and said, “Now we really need to know how she killed him. And whether it’ll work a second time.”
“It should,” Hester said. “Whatever force is animating him, a big enough shock should disrupt it. We just have to find her machine.”
“I like your use of the word ‘just.’ Something like that — would it be portable or not?” The Charles Dexter Ward’s bioluminescence was continuing to ripple and pulse in an arrhythmic not-quite-pattern that was like nothing Cynthia had ever see a boojum do before. It was already giving her the mother of all headaches, and if it was a reflection of the Charles Dexter Ward’s state of mind, then she couldn’t believe it was a good auspice.
“One that could kill a boojum? Definitely not.”
“So wherever she built it, that’s where it is. But how do we find it? It’s a boojum — how do we even look?”
“Um,” said Hester and tugged Cynthia another few steps away from Fiorenzo’s lab. “The closed stacks have a schematic. Professor Wandrei said not to share it with —”
“Outsiders,” Cynthia finished wearily, and Hester ducked her head like a reproved child. And of course the Arkhamers had a second, inner archive to which Cynthia had not been given access. It was their secrets that kept them alive and independent. “It’s okay. You don’t have to —”
“No, at this point it’s only stupid and self-destructive,” Hester said. “Here.”
Cynthia’s heads-up was filled with a spidery green constellation: the human-scale paths through the Charles Dexter Ward. She had only a moment to appreciate them before her pressure suit ballooned taut and a sudden sharp pressure in her ear canals distracted her. Reflexively, she opened her mouth and closed her eyes — every spacer knew and feared that sensation — but it was just a pressure fluctuation, not a hull breach. She closed her mouth again and blew until her ears popped.
When she opened her eyes, Hester was looking at her, head swaying in relief. “Good idea, staying suited.”
Cynthia took a tentative breath and gagged. The reek of putrescence that had poisoned every breath since she stepped through Charlie’s airlock was thick enough to taste now, and she wasted thirty seconds re-checking her perfectly functioning suit seals. “By Dodgson’s blessed camera,” she swore, then belatedly realized she didn’t know how Hester felt about taking sacred names in vain. “I think that took a year off my life.”
“So long as it’s just one,” Hester said. She ran a gloved hand up one of Charlie’s dead interior bulkheads, tracing the rippling patterns of necro-luminescence. Her fingers found an indentation, and Cynthia could see her face screw up with disgust through the bubble of the helmet. When she pushed in, her glove vanished to the knuckles. Charlie’s flesh made a squelching sound.
Hester hooked
and ripped; mucilaginous strings of meat stretched and rent. She tossed a panel to the deck; it rang like ceramic. Behind, a cavity lined with readouts and conduits lay revealed. Hester, wincing, reached for a small rack of what Cynthia recognized as wireless connectors. She tugged one loose, made a face, and — before Cynthia could decide that she really ought to stop her — slotted it into a jack on her suit.
“Hester—”
“Shush,” Hester said. “I spend enough time researching the damned things. A dead one shouldn’t bo — oh.”
“What?”
“Run.”
They ran. Suits rustling and rasping, booted feet thudding dully on the decking. Off to the left, something scurried. Cynthia’s head snapped around, but Hester put a hand on her arm and pulled.
“Tove,” she said.
Normally, you would never see a tove on a boojum, but Charlie’s death had strained the fabric of space-time, making inter-dimensional slippage easier, and a dead boojum could not eat its own parasites as was their usual habit. Cynthia thought about the shattered ward-mirror, intended to defend against nastier creatures than toves: doppelkinder, raths, and other predators. It worked because it reflected nothing but the Big Empty — even at dock, those warped enormous mirrors wouldn’t reflect on a human scale and thus could not be exploited by doppelkinder, just as they blinded raths. Mirrors were not standard equipment on all ships, but for a hospital ship like Charlie they were an extra line of safety. Charlie broke it dying, she guessed. Fiorenzo had invented the doppelkinder — who didn’t hunt boojums and who would never have left Major Ngao’s eyes intact — as an alibi.
Then she heard something else, not the scuttling of a tove, but a wetter sound, a bigger sound. She didn’t have the strength of will not to glance back, and there, barely illuminated by Charlie’s twitchy necroluminescence, she saw human silhouettes, a reaching arm with the remains of an Ambulance Corps uniform, the glare of an eyeball in a half-skinned face.
Hester swung through a hatchway, pulling Cynthia with her, and slammed the emergency plate located behind glass on the other side. A blast door dropped with decapitating force. If the Charles Dexter Ward were to be hulled, it was in the interests of crew and ship that pressure doors should guillotine any unfortunate they caught. It was a case of one life for many, and spacers learned not to stand in doorways.
The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 26 (Mammoth Books) Page 95