by Sara King
That’s a combat water purifier, Encephalon said.
“But it would, say, liquefy a human body if caught in the blast, right?” Tatiana pressed excitedly.
No, it is a water purifier.
Tatiana frowned and dropped it. “Fine. What’s the most dangerous weapon on this ship?” Then, before Encephalon could respond, she said, “Oh, wait. Never mind. It’s that thing locked away in its super-top-secret room so nobody can touch it, right?” Then, before Encephalon could respond to that, she said, “So what’s the second most dangerous weapon on this ship?”
The ship’s response seemed almost tired. We consumed quite a bit of resources today. We recommend you return to your chambers and think about whether or not you want to witness your entire species consumed by the most dangerous creature this dimension has ever seen.
There it went again, talking about the Phage like it was a creature. That was just, well, superstitious crap.
Superstitious? the ship demanded, sounding suddenly furious. We lost Our entire civilization to this creature. We spent ten molt-cycles studying it, trying to find ways to thwart its spread, and it always prevailed. It preyed on the scientists first, then the archons. It fed Us wrong commands, wrong information. It sabotaged Us from the inside as it learned, gained strength. For cycles.
“Sounds a lot like the myths from Old Earth,” Tatiana agreed. “They always panicked when they were being wiped out by a plague.”
For a long moment, there was nothing but silence in her head. Then, a bitter, You must be very tired. You should sleep. And, a moment later, Tatiana felt the stomach-churning roil of transport, then dropped to the floor beside Milar inside the cushiony red-and-blue archon’s chamber. She was frowning, just starting to sit up to say she wasn’t a five-year-old to be grounded, when she inexplicably lost consciousness.
CHAPTER 12: Survivor
18th of May, 3006
Uncharted Jungle
Fortune, Daytona 6 Cluster, Outer Bounds
“What’s the time?” Jeanne asked.
Joel groaned, feeling like he’d been set upon by orangutans with hammers. “Huh?” He spat out blood, then followed that with a couple teeth. Palladium ingots: 2. Joel Triton’s Face: 0.
“We were supposed to pick Patrick up at nine. Ten at the latest.”
Joel blinked, trying to make sense of his situation. He was reeling and dizzy, and his whole body felt tingly, almost electrified. Nerve damage? he thought, swallowing hard. He felt around him, trying to determine which way was up, and was surprised to find over two thirds of the palladium bars he remembered were gone. Brain damage? his panicked mind added.
He prayed it wasn’t brain damage. He’d already had his fair share of that, when the Nephyr in Yolk Factory 14 had used his lifeline to wipe his language center clean a few—five?—days ago. Then, by pure dumb luck, he’d had some sort of weird reaction to the raw Yolk he’d fallen into during his struggle with Martin, and his memory had apparently come back better than before, leaving him using words like ‘sepia,’ ‘ochre,’ and ‘olivaceous’ in his everyday speech—ridiculously obscure words he didn’t even remember learning, much less ever using.
At least his chest wasn’t hurting any more. That was nice.
“Jeanne?” Joel managed, propping himself up against the steep slant in the floor. It was dark except for his cracked datapad screen, which was buried under several bars of palladium against the wall. Joel himself had been flipped over and was lying on his head, the rush of palladium packed around him, holding him there.
“The time, Joel,” Jeanne said. “I can’t figure out what time it is.”
Joel extracted himself from the palladium with a groan. “Jeanne?” He had seen her kill herself. He had seen her blow her brains across the ship. He reached out and pulled the datapad free of ingots. With the screen cracked, he had to squint to make out the cockpit, which was now awash in sacks of Shrieker nodules, some of which had ruptured, coating the walls, electronics, viewscreen, ceiling with the blue goo of coagulating Yolk… When the ship had started to roll, it must have shot the grav generators, because it had turned everything inside to hamburger. Under the mess, beside the copilot’s chair, he saw a foot.
“Hey Jeanne,” Joel said, “think you could get me out of here, now? I’m beat up pretty bad.”
There was a long pause. “Get you out of where, Joel?”
Joel frowned. “The goddamn box you locked me in, woman.”
She hesitated. “I locked you in a box?”
She shot herself in the head. Joel grimaced. “Yeah, but I’ll explain later. Just open up your secret palladium cubby for me, okay?”
“Is this an attempt to figure out where I stash my goods?” Jeanne demanded, voice sharp with suspicion.
Joel snorted. “No, Jeanne, this is me trying to save your life before you exsanguinate.” He flinched, realizing what he’d done, and that Jeanne would have no idea what the word meant. “Look, you shot yourself, okay? Just open up the cubby for me and let me take a look.”
There was a confused hesitation, then, “I didn’t shoot myself…why would I shoot myself?”
Joel groaned. “Please, Jeanne. Just trust someone in your miserable life, okay? You told me about my son Courage, then you shot yourself, then we crashed going like Mach 3.”
The ship around him shuddered as something else, somewhere, exploded.
“Jeanne, hurry, okay? We’re lucky this thing hasn’t been hit by fires yet.”
“I put out all the fires,” Jeanne said.
And, though the ship’s electronics should have been smoking from the engine surges, at the very least, there was no roasting equipment assaulting the sanctity of the cabin. Joel peered at her foot, which was even then sticking out from under several broken-open bags of Yolk nodules. So the crash hadn’t been as bad as he’d thought… “Jeanne, please just open up your palladium store. It’s in the lower right side of the left-hand wall going in.”
“There’s a safety release in the lower front left corner,” Jeanne said. “If you’re really in there, get yourself out.”
“It’s completely blocked by palladium right now,” Joel growled. “It shifted in the crash. It would take me ten minutes to get to the bottom of it.”
“Then I’ll see you in ten minutes,” Jeanne responded.
“Jeanne,” Joel growled at the foot, “do you want to die? You shot yourself. Open the goddamn door!”
There was a moment of hesitation, then the door slid open, light assailing his senses. On the cracked datapad screen, Jeanne stepped into view and squinted at the secret compartment. “Holy shit, Joel. How did you get in there? Is that why we crashed? Ugh, just look at your goddamn face. Tell me you didn’t bleed on my palladium.” Then there was hesitation, followed by an icy, “Joel, why is two thirds of my palladium missing?”
But Joel didn’t hear the last. He had frozen in place, icy fingers of terror working down his spine as he was suddenly given a view of a perfectly empty room—except for Jeanne’s combat-booted foot jutting from the mass of torn and mangled Yolk sacks. On the screen, though, Jeanne was standing with her arms crossed, glaring in at him. Joel’s heart started to hammer like a broken freighter engine. “Jeanne?” he whispered.
The woman on the screen sighed, deeply, and bent to reach into the compartment to pull him out. Even though the Jeanne-image reached all the way back to where Joel had extracted himself, he felt nothing. She pulled back looking irritated. “So, what, you beg me to let you loose and you’re just gonna sit there?”
Joel’s heart was running away with him, on the very verge of panic. “Am I hallucinating?” he asked. “Or dead?”
“You don’t look dead to me,” Jeanne muttered. “Though I guess if I told you about Courage, you were probably on your way to getting that way. Why’d we crash, Joel? I don’t remember it. You said someone was shooting at us?”
Though the woman on the cracked screen was peering into his chamber, Joel saw nothing but e
mpty air in the cockpit itself. He swallowed, hard, terrified to move, terrified to go uncover whatever lay under those broken bags of Yolk, terrified to speak, terrified to breathe.
Jeanne sighed, deeply. “All right, you just stay there. I’m going to go get this baby flying again. You’re free to sit there and feel miserable, if that’s what your mommy let you do whenever you stubbed your toe.” She turned and walked off his screen again.
“Jeanne?” Joel rasped, suddenly afraid of being alone with his troubled mind.
She ignored him, leaving him nothing but the pounding of his heart to fill the silence of the empty room.
“Jeanne!” Joel shouted.
“Goddamn it, what?” she cried, from a distance this time. “I’m seriously busy, Joel. Belle got tore to shit in the crash. We wanna get outta here, we’re gonna have to do some serious patch-up work. Aanaho loves us, though. The cores are intact.” The screen remained empty.
Joel waited where he was, staring at the combat-booted foot for several minutes before he could work up the courage to leave his tiny cubby prison. He crawled through the muck of dead Shrieker larvae and torn Yolk bags, dragging his datapad with him until he was within arm’s reach of Jeanne. He hesitated, then reached out and pulled the Yolk sacks away from her body, revealing the woman who had birthed his only child into a pile of leaves and forest detritus, dead in a sickly pool of blood and Yolk.
…or was she?
After a moment, he realized her chest was still rising and falling, and his heart beat a staccato against his ribs. “Jeanne?” he asked.
She didn’t so much as twitch.
“Jeanne!” Joel slapped her face gently. “Come on, baby. Wake up.”
Her head didn’t roll right, which made Joel flinch, dread coalescing in his stomach. He gingerly turned her face to look at the damage.
Half of her skull was gone. A good third of her brain had been sheared completely away. Blood was oozing slowly out of the wound, adding its crimson to a much-too-large puddle on the floor.
“Oh shit,” Joel babbled. “Oh shit oh shit oh shit.” He picked up her hand, which was cool to the touch. “Jeanne, I’m so sorry. I’m so very sorry.”
She didn’t respond. As he watched, her breathing was slowing. He felt for a pulse. It was there, but weak.
Joel’s heart was hammering as he said, “Jeanne, look, you never deserved that. I’m sorry. I’m so very sorry. Before you go, just know that, okay? I was an execrable person when we met. Shit, maybe I’m still an execrable person, but I’m trying, okay? I’m trying to get better. I promise.” Tears were stinging at his eyes, now. “Jeanne, I always wanted a kid. I thought the gods were punishing me by not letting me have one, but it was the other way around. I wouldn’t have done anything but wreck a kid’s life. I’m so sorry.”
After a pause, Jeanne drew another ragged breath, a rattling struggle suggesting broken ribs, lungs full of blood. When she let it out, crimson burbled to her lips.
“I wanted a kid,” Joel said. “Not back then, but lately. I’ve been looking back on my life, thinking what an utter wretched person I was. I spent all my time thinking about money and trying to survive, you know? I never spent much time thinking about people, unless you counted wondering if Geo was gonna cut on me a little for peculating a few nodules here and there.”
There was another pause, longer, and Jeanne took another rattling, wheezing breath. Shallower this time. More blood leaked down her lips on the exhale.
“Oh Jeanne.” Joel dropped his head to her hand, miserable. He was responsible for this. He knew that down to his very core. He was responsible for her hurt, responsible for the scalps and the necklace, responsible for her death. He, of all people, had known what it was like to be young and idealistic, the awfulness of being robbed of that innocence, and yet he’d used her anyway, left her stranded anyway because he’d become too hardened by hunger and greed to care. It began to weigh on him like someone was piling stones inside his heart.
Jeanne took another breath, barely a whisper. This time, she didn’t even fill her lungs.
“Jeanne, I’m sorry,” Joel said. “I’m so very sorry. Please forgive me. Please.”
Jeanne Ivory, the feared pirate who had wanted to be a smuggler, died as he held her. Her body relaxed, and the fluttering under her eyelids ceased.
“Sorry,” Joel whimpered. “I’m sorry.” He took a deep breath, felt those stones in his stomach and heart begin to turn to acid, and dropped his head to her chest and cried.
“What the hell are you doing, Joel?” Jeanne asked a few minutes later. “That someone you know?”
Joel jerked and spun to look. The cockpit was empty.
“Huh. That bitch looks a lot like me. They try to send in an agent or something? I hear they got robots they use to infiltrate rebel networks. That what made us go down?”
Joel detected a bit of motion on the datapad and looked. On its cracked screen, Jeanne was crouching beside him, peering at her own corpse.
Suddenly, his throat was too constricted to speak. He had to swallow several times to get it loosened enough to say, “Jeanne?”
“Yeah, asshole? I can call you asshole, right? Seeing how you said I actually told you how much of an asshole you’ve been, I figure it’s only fair.” On the datapad screen, she looked at him. “How did you get me to talk about it? I don’t remember much after leaving Wideman with Patrick and you commandeering my ship to go steal Yolk. I know I intended to kill you, but jeez—what a total clusterfuck this is, huh?”
Joel glanced at the dead body, then at the datapad, then at the empty air beside him. “Jeanne, I…”
Her beautiful—younger??—face highlighted between two cracks in the screen, Jeanne rolled her eyes. “Oh, fine. I’ll skip the asshole part. After all, for some reason, I really feel better about it. I mean, it’s like a weight fell off my shoulders, you know? Like telling you actually set me free. Must’ve been what it was, ’cause I honestly don’t remember.”
The voice, he finally realized, was coming from the ship’s speaker system.
“Jeanne,” he whispered, as goosebumps began to run up and down his arms. “What the hell is going on?”
On the pad, she grunted and stood up. “Dunno. Looks like we got some structural damage, an overloaded engine, and a dead bitch on our floor.”
“Jeanne…”
“So!” Jeanne said, holding out a mechanicking tool to him on the screen. “You take this and go check on the forward deflectors. I’m gonna go see what I can do about the electronic meltdown in the belly. Once we’re flying again, we can ditch the bitch in a marsh somewhere. I’m sure the Coalition won’t mind, seeing how they sent her here to die.”
Joel didn’t reach for the tool. On the screen, Jeanne snorted and dropped it. “Fine, stay here and whimper over a corpse. I’m getting us back in the air.” Then she turned and, before she was completely off the datapad screen, disappeared.
“Oh fuck me,” Joel said. “Fuck me fuck me fuck me—”
“Maybe later!” the ship’s speakers called to him, from the engine room.
Joel got up, leaving his datapad half-submerged in the pool of Yolk slime and blood, and ran. He got all the way to the back of the ship before his flight was impeded by a mountainous pile of bagged Shrieker nodules, most of which were still intact since they had been packed so tightly inside the ship. Around the surface and edges of the pile, though, where the rolling and jostling of the ship had crushed and pulverized the outside bags, blue yolk dribbled between the ripped canvas, staining the mangled cargo shelves, dripping from the ceiling, slickening the walls and corridor. A million baby Shriekers must have died here today, but stubborn Jeanne Ivory had somehow lived on…
“Aanaho,” Joel whimpered, getting on his hands and knees and starting to crawl over the mountain towards the ship’s exit. “Aanaho I’m losing my mind.” He eased his way through the slime to the cargo bay door, only to realize that the button he needed to hit to exit was buried
under a thousand pounds of Shrieker nodules.
He was hyperventilating, starting to turn around and go looking for a forward escape hatch, when Jeanne said through a speaker only a few feet from his head, “Oh, shit, sorry about that, Joel. Those idiots back on Rath must’ve packed that crap in here good. Here, let me open the cargo bay for you. When you’re out there checking the deflectors, be sure to take a look at the landing gear, too. I don’t think it actually deployed, so we might be in luck. Just some cosmetic shit, maybe a little electronics work…”
The cargo bay door opened, and Joel slid out into the sunlit jungle on an avalanche of Yolk sacks. Immediately, the humid jungle heat began to penetrate his body, making him sweat. Behind Belle, he saw pieces of their ship strewn in the thick, battered foliage. Joel took that all in in a split-second, then turned and bolted into the jungle, leaving the ship nestled in its own arboreal grave.
Behind him, he heard Jeanne call, “Joel?” Then, when he kept running, with more panic, “Joel! Don’t you dare leave me here, you sonofabitch! I need your help!”
I need your help, please call… Joel stumbled to a halt, his chest on fire, his back to the ship. He remembered getting that header message, over and over, while he had been cavorting with whores and high-rollers in Boomberg fourteen years ago. He remembered deleting them, the contents unheard. He remembered getting annoyed at her persistence, amused at the desperation in her voice.
It was the same desperation she used now, as he ran away a second time.
Very slowly, Joel turned, expecting to see some ghostly form standing beside the open cargo bay, some vengeful ghost there to haunt him. Instead, he saw Jeanne Ivory’s expensive pirate ship twisted on its side, propped up against a partially-shredded ancient blackwood tree, a pathetic thing beat to a barely-recognizable hunk of mangled metal.
That’s not going anywhere fast, Joel thought. He had a better chance of getting back into the air by running back to Rath and asking the local shipyard for a free replacement than somehow getting that torn and broken thing to work again.