Dead Space: Catalyst

by Evenson, Brian

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  He didn’t say anything, just stood where he was, staring at her through the slot.

  “You should get immediate medical attention,” she said. “You’re very hurt. Perhaps in shock, too.”

  She moved a little closer and suddenly he thrust his arm through the slot and tried to grab her with it. Only it wasn’t his arm exactly, she realized, but a long scythe. Where had he gotten a scythe?

  And then she realized that it was made of bone. It was not a scythe at all, but a part of him.

  * * *

  It scrabbled at the door, trying to get out. It was dragging the sheet behind it, parts of the sheet still adhering to it. It kept scratching, butting against the door.

  Down the hall were the guards, still gathered outside the door to the next ring, the inner ring, milling about, getting more and more irritated and anxious as their leader spoke to Wandrei over vid. One of them, a young blond man named Millar, was more nervous than most. For days now, he’d been itching for a fight, something to sink his teeth into. And now was his chance to have one. But Wandrei was refusing to open the door.

  “Calm down,” said Ramirez, the guard standing nearest to him.

  “I can’t calm down,” said Millar. “I have to be out there.”

  “You can’t be out there yet,” said Ramirez. “We can’t go until we’ve been given approval. It may not even come at all.”

  “Like last time,” said Millar.

  “Like last time,” Ramirez agreed.

  Millar continued quivering: shaking, stretching, nearly bouncing off the walls.

  “You’re driving me crazy,” Ramirez finally said. “You’re getting everybody wound up. Look, if you need to get some energy off then take a walk. We won’t leave without you.”

  Millar was off like a shot, rushing down the hall. It felt good to move a little, maybe it’d help. He moved as quickly as he could, following the slow curve of the hall. It didn’t help much, but it helped a little.

  He went to the end of the hall and the locked door there, and stopped. He was just turning around and starting back again when he heard a strange scrabbling sound inside the door.

  “Anyone there?” he asked.

  The scrabbling grew louder. A kind of hissing, strangling noise joined it.

  He unhooked his truncheon from his belt, hefted it in his hand. Someone or something was in there, and he was going to find out what it was.

  He reached for the door, and then stopped. Whatever it was, was it dangerous? Should he be doing this on his own?

  But no, he told himself, he was wearing full riot gear. What could possibly happen to him?

  * * *

  At first glance, it seemed to Henry like he was watching a man’s back, the spine clear and pronounced, but there was no head. No, it couldn’t be a man, he told himself, he was experiencing some odd sort of perspectival shift, was seeing things wrong. And there were no arms, either, but rather strange flaps of skin, wings almost. And then he saw that yes, they were wings, and the creature took off. He followed it from monitor to monitor as it flew short distances and alighted, searching for something. What was it searching for?

  And then another one came out of the hole, too, half fluttering its way to the top and then alighting there on the rim of the hole, waiting for a moment. It was still enough that Henry could see it clearly and see now something that at first he couldn’t believe. He understood now why he had first thought it was a human’s back: it was because whatever the creature was now, it had once been human. It was formed out of one of the corpses in the hole.

  How was that possible? Henry wondered. He shook his head. He must be hallucinating, he thought. But no, when he opened his eyes, the creature was still there.

  And then there was further movement in the hole and he saw a strange swordlike object slide out and anchor itself against the floor. More like a scimitar really, though not that exactly, either. And attached to something that was strangely banded but still evidently flesh.

  A face and body followed. He could recognize it as the face and body of the man who had leaned over the hole and fallen in, could even see bits and scraps of his prison clothing. He knew it was him, but still couldn’t believe it, couldn’t believe how the man had bent and changed, had been taken apart and then put back together in an incomprehensible way. It was a face and body unlike anything he had ever seen.

  40

  The creature that had once been a guard roared, clawing at her through the slot in the door. It either did not remember it had the key to the door or, in this state, did not know how to work it. In any case, it did not open the door.

  At first she crouched against the back wall, afraid, eyes squinched shut. But slowly her scientific curiosity got the better of her and she began watching it, even coming a little closer. Whatever the thing was now, it had once been human, but she could see little human response left in it, little to suggest it still had a connection to its human side. Even its movement seemed almost programmed, a repetition of certain patterns along a search for living bodies. She could move to one side of the cell or the other and it would turn to follow her, like a flower following the sun.

  After a while she was convinced that it wasn’t human any longer. Not only that, she wasn’t certain that it was a thinking creature at all: it was more like something constrained to draw from a limited set of responses. Was it really alive? It was moving, yes, but it didn’t seem to be breathing. If it was alive, it was not alive in the way that it had been before, back when it had been human.

  But the important question was first how to get out of the cell and second how to get past it. She had lots of electronic equipment here; maybe she could construct something to broadcast out with, make some kind of distress signal.

  She was just starting to sort through her equipment to see what she had when from down the hall she heard a shout and the creature turned. Several shots rang out, and she even saw one of the bullets tear through the creature’s chest before it started down the hall. The bullet didn’t seem to affect it much at all. It didn’t seem to experience any pain. Interesting, she thought, as it lumbered down the hall and out of her vision. A moment later, she heard a series of additional shots, and then a series of screams, the latter cut suddenly short.

  * * *

  Millar hit it hard with the truncheon, gave it a blow that should have paralyzed it, but the creature hardly seemed to notice. Abruptly it had leapt and was upon him, its batlike wings wrapping him in an obscene embrace. And then the creature leaned in, but its proboscis knocked against the front of his faceplate. Ha, Millar thought, I’m safe, it can’t hurt me, and he tried to work his arm free so that he could hit the creature again. It knocked up against the faceplate again, and hissed, and then the proboscis darted forward hard and cracked the plastic. Oh, shit, he thought. Another blow and the creature was almost through. He tried to shake it off, tried to break free, but it wouldn’t let go of him. He screamed. It struck again and this time it went not only through the faceplate, but deep into his brain.

  * * *

  Henry watched as one of the batlike creatures apparently found what it was looking for and swooped rapidly forward, wrapping itself around a convict’s head and shoulders. The man, screaming, tried to push it away, but the creature held tight and then pulled him tighter, and then a proboscis shot out of its body and through the center of the man’s forehead. The man collapsed, dead, but the creature was still on him, the proboscis obscenely pumping something into the man’s head. Then the batlike creature pulled free and waddled off, awkward now on the floor.

  But as bad as that was, what followed was much worse. The body itself, already shivering by the time the creature left it, started to transform. Bones and muscles twisted and broke and inverted. Bones pushed out through flesh and changed, thinning, becoming something else. The whole body became something else, something other—became just like the creature with scimitarlike arms that he had just
seen crawl its way up out of the hole.

  Oh my God, thought Henry and realized that before long all the men in the room would become those things. Panicked, he opened the security door and then watched on the monitor the men trying to push their way in while the guards rushed out, striking all around them with their truncheons.

  “No,” he said on his headset to the guard leader. “Don’t hit them! Get them in here! Save them!”

  “What?” asked the leader.

  “Drag them in,” he said, “and get your men back in as well, but keep those creatures out.”

  “What creatures?” asked the leader and then he saw one of the shambling beings with bladelike arms. He ran toward it, truncheon lifted over his head, and a few moments later his head had been severed from his shoulders.

  Henry turned on the loudspeaker. “Fall back, fall back!” he yelled. Some of the guards did, but a few didn’t, and many of the prisoners, too, were still out there. But he saw the batlike creatures and humanoid ones coming closer and felt he had no choice but to close the door.

  It slid slowly shut. A body was in the way so he had to use the override to get it closed, and when it did close it slowly tore the body in half. There were men still outside, many of them, and one of them lost his arm in the door. He quickly tried to count the creatures, his eyes flicking from screen to screen, and was pretty sure that they were all there outside. They were safe.

  Or so he thought until he heard the sound of screaming from down near the door.

  * * *

  As the alarms went off, Istvan remained calm. He watched people come and go, rushing in and out, and after a while everybody was gone, except for him and Briden.

  “Not all of them will come back,” said Istvan. “Very few will.”

  “What?” said Briden.

  “It will keep us safe,” said Istvan, gesturing to the Marker.

  “Safe from what?” asked Briden.

  But Istvan did not answer. He closed his eyes and bowed his head and waited.

  41

  Henry closed the doors to the control room and locked them. It was the only way he could be sure of staying alive. He tried not to listen to the screams and yells, but he could not help but hear them, even through the doors, and he could see, through the glass of the control-room observation portal, the creature slowly tearing one of the guards apart. Then it moved on to another man, a convict this time.

  Where had it come from? How had it gotten in? Had he simply missed it?

  The guards tried to beat it with their truncheons, but it didn’t seem to do much good. The creature just kept on coming. One of them, one of the guards, managed to make it back to the armory and unlock a gun, but when he fired it at the creature it had little effect. It just kept coming at him until it had him in its scythes and was eating away the side of his face. Four or five men were already down. Then another man, a prisoner, plucked up the gun and this time, instead of firing into the creature’s chest, he shot repeatedly at the creature’s leg until it was little more than tattered mass of tissue that gave out as soon as the creature put weight on it. And yet the creature kept coming, dragging itself forward now with the tips of its scythes until the man put enough bullets into the joint connected to the scythe to break it off. Even then, the creature kept coming, crawling like a worm and trying to chew the man’s leg off until one of the others had stamped on it enough times to separate the head from the shoulders. But the torso still moved, as if it were still alive.

  So perhaps the only way to stop it is to immobilize it, thought Henry. Cut off the limbs or render them inoperative in some way. Even then, it was still moving, but its ability to attack had been drastically diminished.

  The remaining guards and prisoners looked grim and seemed hostile to one another. Eventually, they took the bodies of the dead and put them in a line against one wall.

  So the creature was dead, thought Henry. Locking the doors of the control room to keep everybody else out had been premature. They had survived.

  He was just preparing to open the door when a wave of pain swept through his head. He grimaced, nearly fainted, and for a moment he could see, standing just beside him, as real as he had ever been when he was alive, his grandfather.

  “Papa?” he said.

  But it could not be his grandfather. His grandfather had been dead for years. The man, whoever he was, simply smiled and nodded, then reached out to pat his hand. Very slowly he began to fade, vanishing into nothingness.

  Henry shook his head to clear it. He was hearing sounds from below, but, still confused, wasn’t sure what exactly he was hearing. When he stood up and went to the window he saw that another of the batlike creatures had appeared in the place of a corpse, and that it was huddled over the corpse next to it pumping something into its skull. By the time it moved on to the next corpse in line, the first corpse had already started to shudder and change. Soon the fighting started up again.

  It was terrible to watch, but Henry had a hard time looking away. At the end, nearly all of the creatures were dead, but all of the humans were dead, too, and the room was scattered with corpses. Which was not good, thought Henry. Because the next time a burst came, perhaps these corpses would start walking around. And now he was perhaps the only human left alive.

  * * *

  He tried to place a call to the commander, but got no response. What was wrong? Maybe someone or something was jamming the circuit, he thought, or maybe they simply weren’t answering.

  He placed a distress call on a general circuit and sent it out, hoping someone would hear it and would send help.

  But the signal didn’t last long. After just a few minutes it went dead. He tried to send it out again, but it was being jammed. He was working on it, trying to figure out how it was being jammed and who was behind it, when a vidlink opened and showed him a picture of the commander’s face. He had a stern expression on his face.

  “Do you need something?” he asked. “We’re a little busy here.”

  When Henry quickly filled him in on the situation, Commander Grottor simply nodded.

  “Things have gone wrong at the other sites as well, all at once,” he said, and Henry noticed for the first time that though his expression was stern his eyes were tired and a little puzzled. “God only knows what we’ve unleashed,” he said.

  “Sir, what other sites? Are we a site? What does it mean that we’re a site?”

  “Hmmm?” he said. “Oh, you’re at the penal colony. Of course. You don’t know anything about that.”

  “What’s going on, sir?” Henry asked.

  But the commander said, “I’m sorry, son, but we had to jam your signal. We can’t have anyone stumbling onto this. We need to bring it to an end. It needs to end here.”

  “But you’ve got to get us out of here,” said Henry. “Or me, at least. I may be the only one left alive.”

  The commander shook his head. “There are bigger things at stake here than your life. I’m afraid you’re already as good as dead,” he said, and then broke the link.

  42

  The pod was spinning as it came down, end over end. Jensi tried to stabilize it, tried to straighten it out, but the controls weren’t responding. He kept struggling with the stick, trying to bring it under control.

  He entered the atmosphere and the ship’s apron began to glow cherry-red from the heat. The pod spun backward and he saw the mine following him, and the next time he spun again the mine was closer. He managed finally to get the front end forward and the craft directed and no longer tumbling, but he was still rolling, around and around. And now he couldn’t see where the mine was, how close it was, and when it was likely to reach him. Did he dare deploy the thrusters to try to slow the pod down? Or was the mine too close?

  Now in the atmosphere, the ship was beginning to handle differently. It was still rolling but more slowly this time. He overcorrected for a moment and rolled in the other direction, but then slowly leveled. He was falling rapidly. Down below, he c
ould see two sets of lights, at a little distance from one another. One would be the secret facility, while the other would be the penal colony housing his brother. Which was which? Left or right?

  He stared, looking for a sign to tell him where to go. The lights on the left were clustered a little closer together, which perhaps, he thought, were an indication of a more secure structure, something more compact. Maybe that could be the penal colony? Though perhaps he was thinking about it all wrong. But what else was there to go on?

  So he pulled slightly left. Behind him came an explosion and the craft shuddered. The mine had gone off, triggered by the heat of the atmosphere. The pod seemed undamaged, nothing showing up on the monitors. Though the controls were a little sluggish now—so maybe some slight damage, then.

  He turned on the forward thrusters to try to slow the craft and they came on with a jolt that knocked his helmeted head against the instrument panel. The lights were getting closer and he was slowing down, though not nearly as much as he wanted. He tried to increase the thrusters but they were already going their maximum. The pod as a craft, he suddenly remembered, was not made for landing on a planet; it was just something to get you far enough away from a damaged or destroyed ship so that another ship could pick you up in a few hours or few days. It had limited controls, limited steering, even limited power of movement. And indeed, he could see that some of the tiles on the apron had blackened and charred. If they were to come free, then the craft would get hotter and hotter until he was cooked.

  You can do this, he told himself. He was a picker, he’d taken small craft of all types and quality from the surface of a planet to an orbiting spaceship and back again—he had a lot of experience in this kind of thing.

  He fired the forward thrusters again, felt the jolt, and for a moment things began to slow.

  What sort of impact could the pod survive? He had no idea. How much fuel did he have for the thrusters? Already half gone, he saw on the monitor, so not much. There were separate indicators for the back thrusters, he realized, so they had a separate source. Poor design, he thought. If he had access to all the fuel at once, then he’d probably be able to bring the pod in, maybe even survive.