by D. Rus
I heard the tester muttering sweetly. The next second, he gave a cry of pain, and the sound of a body splashing in the water reached my ears.
I looked back. He was in a death agony, his HP bar melting away. It turned out that the crafty plant had a second passive defense method, which consisted of spikes that looked transparent in water and a capsule filled with poison growing along its main stem.
I pitied the tester, but the discovery was vital. We were now in possession of an effective means of taking out biological objects. At least humanoid ones.
I proceeded with great caution, watching where I put my feet and closely studying the mossy carpet.
Moss was everywhere. According to the knowledge extracted from the archive, the ship almost certainly contained damaged recreation area greenhouses and breached biological treatment tanks. The spores of the modified plants had spread everywhere and successfully adapted to the space aboard the carrier. They sprouted abundantly, crossbreeding uncontrollably and giving rise to the most savage offspring with completely unpredictable properties.
Our main problem was that there was very little room available. The stasis hall was tightly sealed off with emergency and counter-boarding bulkhead gates. Breaking them was possible, but incredibly difficult. Bare hands and the brave heart of a Komsomol member were definitely not enough.
Boom! Boom! Boom! came the deafening noise as if in response to my thoughts. The resting soldiers stirred in their capsules.
I listened, trying to determine whether this was the pounding coming from my left or right. If this was the left-side pounding, that meant that it was Ilya’s group persistently pounding a crooked girder on the wall next to the gateway. Our mechanics had estimated that the bulkhead gates were not as strong as the ductile armor of the air-tight door.
However, there was also a pounding on my right; someone was trying to break into our hall. It was either a non-sentient or someone ill-disposed toward us. The unknown entity neglected all our communication attempts whether we knocked or talked to it. It kept hammering on the gate doors, leaving large, whitish bumps in the composite. We could only guess what kind of creature it was. A heavy stormbot with an upgraded controller? An armored xenomorph? A repair servobot gone haywire?
The group was nervous. I found consolation in the fact that this event was probably scripted to keep us on our toes. I doubted that the designers of our location intended to feed us to some monster in our first 24 hours on site. Most likely, this pounding was a very straightforward hint that we really needed to hurry up and find a way out of this trap. If we took too long, then the creature would surely break in.
We piled all the large junk we could find in front of the gateway. Even if it wouldn’t slow down the intruder, it would reduce the noise, of which we were already sick.
It turned out the really loud pounding came from the left. With a sigh of relief, I headed there. Thankfully, I didn’t have to walk far. Everything was close in that hall, 40 seconds being enough to get anywhere.
Stacks of stripped-off moss had faded slightly and shone with less intensity, but still gave enough light to make out what was happening in that corner; a furious Ilya was busy dipping one of his soldiers into the slush beneath his feet, yelling, “The order applies to everybody in the group! Piss in capsule number 288. What do you think you’re doing, shithead? This is our drinking water!”
Shit, I thought, barely refraining from spitting. Hygiene was our current religion. We were allowed to sweat, blow our noses, and defecate in limited amounts, only in the specially designated spots. The hall’s environmental conditions had their own specifics. And the “virtual Amazonian reality” was incredibly lifelike. The soldiers who had caught a strain of the dysenteric virus and now sat like sad eagles atop the toilet capsules were living proof of that.
The fellow in Ilya’s grip gave me the guilty, pleading look of a kitten being stuck in its own fresh droppings as punishment. I decided to cheat a little and seize this opportunity to win easy popularity. The soldier had already learned his lesson anyway, it seemed.
“As you were, Corporal!” I ordered. “We don’t want to drink his drool either. Send the violator to the logistics unit to filter water. He can press it out of the moss, then let it stand.”
Ilya made a wry face: “That’s a job for a legless cripple! He can carry dead capsules instead. Oops, sorry about the cripple thing, Commander.”
He must have played poker like an expert, for he instantly took notice of how I curled my lip unwittingly. There was also the fact that I currently hobbled around on frozen legs, plus the large number of ex-cripples among our ranks. He could easily reach the correct conclusion.
Oh, boy. I tried to fight off the thoughts of my past. They could break me. I knew my own psyche very well, for I have stood on the edge already. But I couldn’t help wondering how my friends were doing: Kama, Alex, and Yarik. Those boys had risked going to jail and had taken a firm stand against that crowd, giving me a slight head start without dwelling on whether the puny chance of restoring my health was worth their precious hides.
I swear, boys, I thought, if I make it out of this shitty future, I will be in your debt for the rest of my life! Call me, and I will climb down from my deathbed and crawl to your aid, digging my nails into the morgue floor.
My friends and those 140 square feet on the cemetery where the white obelisk of my father’s grave shows against the chamomiles – these were the most precious things I had. And also Lina, who had become a piece of my soul in an instant. I couldn’t cut her off, couldn’t simply cast her out of my mind. I knew all of her feelings, trembled in her fears, and merrily closed my eyes every time she laughed. It probably wasn’t love, but rather… hmm… fusion? A simultaneous orgasm stretching into forever? Weakened by the stretch yet retaining its essence – absolute unity.
I closed my eyes for a second, inhaling slowly, unwinding and putting myself in a calm state of mind. I was my own therapist.
“Doesn’t matter,” I replied, “all in the past. And to answer your question, no, let the girls carry the capsules. This guy will be pressing.” I turned to the soldier, “You still here, kitty cat? Need I kick your ass? Move!”
The soldier took off, splashing through the water and practically slipping instead of running. I waited until he was far away, then lowered my voice and nodded at the four groaning girls lugging a super-heavy stasis capsule. I could feel the fury of the fair sex rolling off them in waves. I was certainly losing popularity with them.
“Ilya, remind me the objective of our first course? We’re space fighter pilots and CAS operators. So why are we digging through shit instead of mastering the technology of hell knows which century?”
Ilya shrugged with irritation. He wasn’t fond of silly rhetorical questions. “They said we’re upping our physical stats. By sweat and blood, with perfect faith, understanding why muscle size and strength increase.”
“Indeed, smart. Then why are you preventing the girls from increasing their strength? This isn’t the real world; they shouldn’t be protected from hard manual labor. You’re harming them personally, or the entire group if it turns out that the weakest group members decrease our cumulative points.”
Ilya scratched his head pensively, then agreed reluctantly, “Makes sense. You know… I’ve remained inactive too long. I should go hammer away at the wall myself. Or else those weaklings will level up to be like Valuev and drown me in the can.”
I kept walking to the measured pounding, slowly passing our group’s modest possessions.
One of our mechanics was bustling on the ground by a wall with the diligence of a prisoner doing life. He was using a crooked piece of iron to grind off the tricky bracketry of a service hatch. We didn’t know what was behind it. Perhaps a simple outlet tester. Or perhaps a refueling station for nanobot cysts. Yet we personally hoped for a toolbox or the hangar of an operable servobot. We would know as soon as we opened it.
A few gatherers were pinching off the
tips of orange moss. This moss was a sure method to stop bleeding and also a nice strength buff, albeit with twice the rollback time and a random special effect. Last chance homeopathy, all-in-all.
Seven neurotics rocked in a trance, listening to the monotonous whisper of the psych support group girl as if enchanted. Despite the drugs, not everyone could refrain from panicking or getting depressed after realizing what was going on. Traveling to the future, cyber-modernization, and a two-year imprisonment in the cold post-apocalyptic world.
The group members were flat and dizzy. They would go from a state of euphoria to profound melancholy. Their efficiency and motivation were almost zero. We corporals could see more stats on our interfaces. Underneath the green HP bar, each soldier had a blue morale bar. For some of us, this bar was suspiciously short and of a grayish-black color.
We sent the affected to our best therapist, Kate, to reboot their emotions. Kate, or Kat, was a huge cat person. She claimed that she could find a common language with any animal and reach a mutual understanding with it. I believed her now. A human being in critical circumstances is like a primate, guided mostly by reflexes.
Kat handled everybody. A one-hour session restored soldiers' morale by a third, enabling them to make it until the next session.
A few group members were subject to exclusive control. Withdrawn, they shrank into themselves, becoming insusceptible of therapy. Even Katie gave up on them, saying that they needed professional treatment by a psi-master, a mentat, or a fully functional 6th generation “purgatory” medical complex. According to her, it would have been ideal to pass their souls through astral filters, restore default settings, correct their life traumas, null their anchored states, and clear out any other psychological junk.
There was nothing we could do. Just cheer them up a bit, pat them on the shoulder, have the group’s most gorgeous girl give them a kiss... and, of course, to watch them closely with mixed feelings and to see what exactly the complete depletion of the morale bar entailed.
In case they went berserk, we left a couple soldiers with simple weapons to watch the “depressed.” It was a cynical, yet rational move. Plus, it gave idle minds something to do. We had many people and not enough work. Group members were tapping on the walls out of boredom. Actually, their efforts were not in vain. They found the slim outlines of several sliding doors concealed beneath mud and rot.
With a group effort, they had already cracked open two tiny rooms. Probably not janitorial closets, but rooms of a similar layout. The first was a former recharging and self-service station for medical servobots. The purpose of the second room was hard to determine; it had been reduced to ashes by a hollow-charge projectile or a plasma beam that had gotten through the bulkhead gate. The smart morphing composite had fixed the shot hole, leaving us nothing to peak through.
As leader, I claimed a sooty cabin for my office space. It had a slightly higher habitability index than the other rooms. Plus, it was dry and moss-free. Apparently, the moss couldn’t strike root in this sterile compartment.
Lina also moved in there by unauthorized acquisition. Clearly, she had wanted for personal living space in the past, and instantly entered nesting mode. She removed the dislocated door, made it into a crooked table top, and hung a curtain weaved out of dried moss stalks at the entrance.
Molten blobs on the walls concealed the amazing holopictures of a brochure advertising the ruby beaches of New Guinea – God knows where that came from. Personal numbered capsules served as beds. To my great chagrin, they wouldn’t transform into double family beds. Hand-picked combinations of colored moss pressed into containers of different sizes illuminated the cabin with their iridescent lights.
The system rewarded our efforts; Lina gained points for “Directing field camp beautification,” and everyone else received a congratulatory message informing them that they completed the optional mission of creating a minor recreation area. HP points restored 10 percent faster inside our little cabin. The family nest quickly turned into an overcrowded government-financed resort of sorts.
Lina hissed and cursed under her breath, accumulating fury and irritation just like a woman. A few times a day, she would unleash her emotional tsunami, chasing everyone out of the cabin so that she and I could rest in solitude which we were so unaccustomed to.
The second cabin was less lucky. Because it was the only closed space, the group reached a unanimous, unspoken decision, and made it a dating room. The HSC Marat would now often shake to rhythmical moans…
I’m obviously exaggerating, but the psych support group girls turned out be swell geishas. They could keep the ball rolling, relieve the tension with a joke, and take the soothing conversation into the horizontal plane.
I didn’t know if these were their natural talents, or if the pragmatic Amazonians had touched up their instincts. But the moment you looked one of these psych support group girls in the eye and winked at her with a smile, she would blush and raise an eyebrow. Yet these girls always chose the therapy method themselves. A soldier wouldn’t always get sex. The girls would simply pat him on the head encouragingly, or chastely kiss him on the cheek. Such was their hypertrophied maternal instinct that held the entire group together.
The military profession girls were in no rush to sleep with anyone. They would curl their lips in disgust and take a good look around themselves; they had plenty of quality males to choose from, males who had passed the toughest bioreactor selection.
A few couples formed. A self-confident miniature brunette – the former teacher Tatyana, the only heavy infantrywoman in our group – lay claim on Ilya. I had no idea what qualities she possessed that merited the status of a CAS operator, but her cold gaze could make even the sauciest macho fall out of step, including the loquacious Aru who had lost some of his charm after complete epilation.
Two infantry support bot drivers, Nika and Nick, got together almost from the start. Their fates were as similar as their names. They could read each other’s thoughts without any psi connections.
Their memories mixed together, forming an odd medley. They couldn’t even remember anymore which one of them used to train dogs in the shelter, and which one used to play a pet controller in online games; which one loved to tinker with broken gadgets, which one could return a heavily lagging printer into service with a single gentle slap. It made me think about the fictitious memories that the cunning Amazonians had installed on a couple suitable minds.
Having made a full circle to make sure that no one shirked work, I attended to my own duties. Just like Ilya, I wasn’t about to fall behind my soldiers in levels.
With an effort, I picked up of one of the building blocks of our spacious prison – a broken capsule. Dragging it to the spot I had in mind, I placed it securely and proudly observed that I was perfectly capable of hauling a 220-pound object all by myself.
After a few more trips, my improvised staircase rose to five feet. Now I could easily reach the ceiling.
As I carefully climbed on the capsules, I winked at a mummified skull staring at me through the dull plastic of a capsule lid. I was indifferent to such scenery. Well, almost indifferent, for it stank.
I studied the tiny bumps forming a dotted line which could be seen underneath the moss draping down from the ceiling. There was definitely something there.
With difficulty, I cut off a thick layer of yellow moss. We hadn’t encountered this type of moss before. It could at least serve as bedsheets if dried a little.
I called a soldier over and tossed him the moss so that it would be tasted and cataloged, then dried, ground, steamed, distilled, and God knows what else – the goal was to squeeze out every plant’s full potential.
I discovered a sensor on the once-white ceiling. The knowledge uploaded into my brain had no references. Either the sensor was ancient technology, or simply manufactured in the Russian Empire, not by the wannabe legionaries, the descendants of Europeans.
Upon a closer look, I saw that the bracketry was simple, wit
h six bolts and an unusual design. It would take some work, but at least there weren’t any sci-fi gizmos such as magnetized clutches, nanoglue, smart welding, voice interfaces, and so on. It was simple and straightforward, just like in our time; get a screwdriver and go for it.
However, a simple X-shaped screwdriver wouldn’t do; I needed a sloping solstice one. So, I jumped down and, ignoring the curious looks of the group, unhurriedly splashed over to our workshop. I wasn’t trying to look imposing, but simply tried to save energy. You really have to economize your body’s resources down when your diet consists entirely of grass.
I was glad to step onto dry land and took my time digging through the chunks of iron that made up our tool shop. Picking out a handful of fragments, I returned to my capsule ladder. Sighing, I started the long, boring task.
In ten minutes, I was pulling out the last screw with a happy grin. The sensor had clearly been changed since the carrier left its launching slipway. And the one who had installed it was definitely not a meticulous servobot by corporation RoboBosh, but some goofy Joe Six-pack; one screw was crooked, and two were loose.
Thank you, clumsy mounter, from the bottom of my heart, I thought as I tumbled down; a jet of hot water knocked the sensor out of the weakened bracketry and pushed me off the unsteady platform.
The crashing sound of my fall and the rumbling of the waterfall attracted half the group.
Ilya carefully put his hand under the steaming jet and grinned with satisfaction, “It’s warm! We’ll live, gang! No more freezing to death!”
The group raised in a happy clamor. Everyone had grown sick of shivering and having blue skin and goosebumps.
Lina, feeling my mood, taunted me: “What are we waiting for? Let’s take a shower.”
Rubbing my side, I shot her an irritated look. But she looked so breathtaking from below that I instantly forgave her. As Lina could easily feel my desires, she blushed and grew furious at once.
I had to look away and distract myself by reciting a kid’s poem in my head: Mom sewed some pants for me, made of bark from a birch tree…