Dark Between Oceans

by Belinda Crawford

  The last time I was on Med deck, it was choked with fug. The corridors might be clear of it, but the scars on the bulkheads and the holes in the deck show where it once was. As I make my way deeper into the level, the fug signs fade.

  Most of the bulkheads on Med's inner rings are intact, with the occasional scorch or claw mark. A few places are honeycombed with holes, the steelcrete reduced to thin filaments of itself. The signs of fighting are heaviest around those areas, the walls black with char, the deck thick with what looks like dust, if dust was a dull, grey-green colour.

  The dead fug puffs up around my feet, coating my legs to the knee, sticking there and… Is it my imagination, or is the me-fug absorbing it? As I watch, the dull patina on my shins fades and the stuff covering my thighs reaches fractionally higher.

  'Okay.' I look up and concentrate on the junction ahead. 'Okay,' I say again, ignoring the squishy, sick sensation in the back of my throat. Focus on the things I can control, like getting from here to wherever it was h'Rawd wanted me.

  It would have been nice if h'Rawd had included a little more in the way of actual directions instead of this vague pull of home, but whatever. I'll take what I can get.

  At the junction, the pull drags me toward the left and the outer rings, away from Med's inner workings, where the heart of the Medical units and Command are, but… There's a new sensation tickling the back of my mind, another tug coming from my gut, telling me to go right, deeper into the core of what used to be Citlali's nerve centre.

  The only place more protected than Command and central Med labs was Core, where Citlali's AI lived. Lives. Where she lives. I saw that flicker on the bulkhead, remember?

  A little bit of me, the bit that holds back all the shit I've seen, that bit is telling me to grow up and stop believing that any of this is going to be all right, that someday I'm going to wake up and everything is going to be as it was.

  That bit is a prick, and I'm ignoring him

  I'm not ignoring the tug at my gut though, not now that Dude is sitting to attention, his little nose pointed in the same direction as that tug.

  It guides me first down one corridor and then another, turning left and then right until I'm staring at what used to be main sickbay, the place I spent a couple of days healing up after I entered the ora for the first time. Where I first talked to Aeotu and where I launched an assault on the fug. That place. It looks different from the outside, different from how it used to be. The plasglas walls are dark, not with soot but turned opaque by the AI.

  The tug in my gut keeps me moving, turning away from the main lab and away from Command. The fug-dust gets thicker the farther I walk. It clings to everything, sticks in my nose, coats my lips, and even the me-fug is having trouble absorbing it. I skirt around the inner ring, and just as it seems like I've been walking forever, I stop.

  Dude vibrates with tension and his fur – dulled to a dirty yellow by the dust – stands on end. His ears are flat to his head and all four of his eyes are fixed on the door in front of me.

  It doesn't look like much. I've passed any number of doors the exact same shade of middling grey, featureless, their corners rounded. Before the fug, a holo would have popped up at eye-height, telling me what this room was for and who worked in it. Now, there's nothing save the ever-present charring and the fug-dust, a thicker coating here than anywhere else.

  I guess a lot of fug died here, but why?

  The important parts of the ship were closer to the centre of the deck – Command and Medical. Why fight over a lab on the outskirts of nowhere? Was there something in the decks above or below?

  I'm looking at the deck like I can see through it. Stasis is below, and the fug had conquered that before Onah pushed me out of my pod. However long ago that was. The awareness is whispering numbers to me, but they're too big to be real.

  The answer to why – why this lab, why do I feel the need to go inside – is behind the door. A door that doesn't budge no matter how I push or prod. The need to get in is building in my gut, it's not just the tug anymore or Dude all tense and silent on my shoulder, there's a stench on the psionic plane that whispers of the same wrongness that clung to the skeletons on Aeotu and raises the hairs on my nape.

  It mixes with the frustration in my chest, acid to the base already there, and explodes out of my throat in a yell and shoots down my arm, my fist cracking into the door. Pain shoots up my arm, throbs in my knuckles, but it's distant, dulled by the head-sized spiderweb of cracks radiating from the impact.

  I step back, look at it, look at my knuckles, at the thick ridges of fug forming over the bleeding skin. Turn my attention back to the door.

  Huh. I wonder…

  I ball up my hand, do it again. Without the yell this time.

  Another crack and the spiderweb grows. And this time, even though I feel the impact jarring up my arm to my shoulder, there's no pain and the fug over my knuckles is thicker.

  Cool.

  Again and again I hit the door. With each strike the spiderweb grows, the cracks at the impact site growing bigger and bigger until the steelcrete begins to crumble.

  A little bit of me, the prickish negative part, is telling me steelcrete shouldn't do that, shouldn't crack under the impact of a shuttle let alone a scrawny boy with fug on his hands. But I'm not looking a gift critter in the mouth, this door is coming apart, and whether or not it's because I suddenly have superpowers or the fug is eating the metal, I don't care.

  Even Dude agrees with me. There's excitement in the tension holding his body still, an edginess vibrating from his paws.

  One last blow and I'm through, my shoulder slamming up against the door as my fist punches out the other side. The hole widens as I pull my arm out, the metal crumbling, chunks raining down around my feet, thudding into my fug-toes. My hand hasn't even cleared the door before Dude is scampering down my arm and leaping into the darkness beyond.

  'Hey! Wait up!'

  There's no answer, not even a chitter.

  It takes a few more punches before the space is big enough for me to follow, and even then I have to suck in my gut and squeeze.

  The lab beyond is small and dark, less lab than observation corridor. No workbenches, no hover stools, nothing except giant biotanks running down either side. The tanks have a faint glow, almost enough to see by but not enough to stop me from catching the fug-paws on the hoses snaking over the floor.

  I have a nice up-close view from my place face-down on the deck. There's something strange about the hoses, it's nothing I can see – I mean, it's a tube – but the hairs on my nape are on end again. I can practically smell the wrongness I sensed outside, an old musty smell like that time I forgot to activate the cyclers and our shipsuits grew enough mould to make fug jealous.

  A small thud on my back and Dude's fuzz is flooding my system, except instead of the calming gold I've come to expect from him, this is a jagged, unhappy buzz, and it's directed at the tanks.

  I push myself up, and get my first real good look at them.

  The biotanks are huge – floor to ceiling sheets of plasglas holding back enough biogel to drown a shuttle – and whatever's in them is the source of the wrongness. I concentrate on the crawling sensation, and… It's not kin, although it has the sense of a rucnart, the sharp bite of their minds. It's not Jørgen either, doesn't jump and jiggle like the rest of us human psions. There's a snap there, a creeping hiss that reminds me of the fug.

  Maybe because there's a thin layer of the stuff frosting the tank.

  My hand hovers over the plasglas with its thin carpet of fug, and even with my fug-hands, I can't quite bring myself to touch it.

  Whatever this stuff is, it's different, even fug-me can sense it. The stuff winding around my fingers has retreated, leaving Kuma flesh to hover over the plasglas. The fug on the tank hardly even looks like fug, it's... Ordered, a geometric lacework crawling over the plasglas.

  And there's more fug inside the tank.

  A mouldy geometric carpet
of it, vine-like ropes coiled on the bottom, twisting upward through the liquid, powerlines wound through them – brilliant blue veins of energy throbbing in time with an artificial heart. And the fug itself is a different colour, not the grey-green that covers my hands and feet, but a yellow-gold that reminds me of gelpaks and Core hovering over a workbench, of Dude sitting in a box as the Med AI fixed him.

  Shadows are suspended in the tank, connected by the fug-lines; little blobs of darkness the size of my fist. Hundreds of them lined up in evenly spaced rows. I press closer, trying to peer through the murk, and think I can make out miniature paws, sleek bodies and pointed muzzles. They look like critters, all sleeked out, like Dude without his fuzz, but there's something off about them, something about the points of their muzzles, the paddles on the ends of their feet, and their heads... You can't really make out a critter's head amongst all the fluff, not unless you really look, and since they're always scurrying about, only stopping long enough to clean up the latest spill, that's not easily accomplished. Still... I've spent enough time with Dude that the flatness of their heads, without the tiny bump of their eye ridges, strikes me as off, like they don't have eyes. But then how do they see?

  There are more shadows behind the first rows, fainter, and I wonder how deep the tank goes, how many critters are growing in there.

  Dude's still huddled on my shoulder, still emitting that wobbly fuzz.

  'It's okay, Dude. They're just critters, like you.' Except I'm lying, whether to myself or to Dude it doesn't matter. There's that sense of wrongness about the tank, about the yellow-gold fug. It grates along my spine, trying to find a place to lodge in my psyche.

  The wise part of me, the bit that sounds like Mum telling me not to touch the holofire when I was three years old, is whispering that slipping into the eter and investigating the wrongness is a bad idea. The rest of me... I'm already in, leaving my body behind for the endless white of the psionic plane, and I'm reaching out and pulling that grating sensation with me.

  One moment I'm all alone in the eter, and the next I'm staring at the biotank. The shadows are no longer shadows but balls of yellow-gold, calm and sleepy, barely aware. There aren't as many as I thought, a few hundred, in fact... I twist the tank in my mind, shrinking it until I can see the whole thing. There are gaps in the field of critters, blank spots disrupting the even spacing. Dead critters? Embryos that didn't make it? Without seeing a report, it's hard to tell.

  That's not what's grating along the inside of my head though, that's something else, something that even here, is eluding my sight.

  The spark is what gives it away, yellow-gold lightning forking between the shadows. I've seen that before, know it like I know how to slip through the threads of reality and find the other place, the place where Aeotu lives. The ora, Grea called it.

  Where the eter is an endless field of white, the ora is everything and nothing all at the same time. There is no light, no colour, no time. There is just possibility. Infinite. Unending. It's like being in the cradle of the universe, where galaxies are made. And it's dangerous. All too easy for me to lose myself – to kill myself – hunting shadows.

  The first time I came here, chasing the fug, Aeotu was a mirage on the very edges of my reach. A vibration felt more than seen, and so far away I almost died trying to find her. Now... Now Aeotu is everywhere. The ora is no longer empty but filled with the kaleidoscope of her being, blazing like a sun.

  But she isn't the source of the grating against the inside of my ears. That's different, carried on the yellow lightning zapping over my skin.

  Sister. Aeotu's voice shivers through the darkness.

  I slap it away.

  I'm not your sister. I'm not even a girl. Girl bits notwithstanding.

  A pause. I can feel her considering me, considering too the space around me, the wrongness against my skin and then… Anger. Fear. It lashes out, not at me but at the wrongness. The wave blasts over me, powerful enough to rip the skin from my bones.

  It's gone and my flesh is still attached but the lightning is no more.

  Safe. Aeotu's whisper ripples through the eter, and I think… I think that she was protecting me.

  What was it?

  Nausea punches me in the gut, the sense of small angry teeth gnawing on my bones, of a fog rolling through my thoughts turning part of my brain numb. Illness, Aeotu says. Given.

  "Given" is violent, rips a hole in my chest and shoves the grating in. A cold wriggling ball of sickness that feels like pieces of kin, Jørgen and Aeotu held together with cherry—

  Lightning wraps around my ribs, yanks me out of the ora, but not back into my body.

  Grea stands in front of me, her hands in my chest, wrath scrunching her face, baring her teeth.

  I rip her hands out.

  'Shit, Grea!' A mental projection or not, my chest feels like Grea punched through bone and muscle and stuck a subline into my heart. 'That hurt!'

  She grabs my face, squishing my cheeks together. 'Are you okay?'

  Once again, I push her away. 'I was until you decided to jumpstart my central nervous system.'

  'What'd Aeotu want?' It's less a question than a demand, hiding a spark of desperation.

  'I don't know, she was just there.' I rub my chest, trying to ease the cramp forming where her hands were. 'Don't you have a mainline to her or something?'

  Grea looks different. There's a nimbus, a dark mirage around her body that shadows her every movement from hands to toes, it's darker around her shoulders though, seeming to flow from them. She's looking over my shoulder, eyes distant, teeth gnawing on her lower lip.

  'Grea?'

  She keeps chewing, still not looking at me.

  'Grea!'

  She glares at me, but it's distracted, her eyes unfocussed. 'What?'

  'Where are you?' And I'm not talking about her physical location, but where she is now, mentally.

  Is it my imagination or does Grea's mirage whisper?

  She nods, and her gaze snaps to me, pinning me to the spot. 'You gotta find me, Kuma. Don't trust Aeotu, don't trust anyone. Just find me.'

  She's gone before trepidation has finished freezing my spine.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The command sphere leads me through Stasis.

  Nightmares walk these corridors. My nightmares. I half expect them to crash through the fug-eaten bulkheads. In a way it would be better if they did, would give me something to do other than wonder if my friends were behind those walls, corpses rotting to dust.

  There's a stasis unit ahead, the hatch cracked and shoved aside, the bulkhead around it showing signs of fug damage, holes through which the blue light of emergency shields glows. A neon glow in the darkness.

  I can't sense anyone inside, no sheen of emotion, not even the jangle of another psion. There's no reason I should go in there, nothing but the pull in my stomach and the memory of Captain Lyn.

  It should put me off, that memory, of her hand reaching through dried biogel and the rancid stench of decay. It should, but it doesn't.

  I have to know.

  I hesitate on the threshold, just beyond the curve of the corridor, the hatch obscuring my vision. Do I really want to do this? That little voice in my head says, "Yes".

  Okay then.

  There's no real memory of walking through the hatch, just the impression of steelcrete held together by thin strands of metal, and then I'm inside, and the pods are right there. Four of them, standing side-by-side, their canopies clouded with dust, surrounded by fug hanging in thick strands, crawling over the covers and around the pods' bases. It's a veritable forest, a jungle, and my heart beats hard, waits for the fug to move, to come for me.

  Dude is a reassuring hum on my shoulder, spreading waves of gold through my skin while the armour contracts around my arms, reminding me that it's there and it's not eating me.

  There are little blooms of yellow-gold and pops of the same wrongness that permeated the bio-tanks. They're peeping out at me from the tangl
e of fug almost like they're trying to hide, and I think that's worse than the fug.

  One of the pods stands open, empty, the space within lined with a fine layer of grey dust and a thin carpet of fug. The others... The fug's thicker around them, the wrongness with it.

  Vines the width of my biceps wrap around the pods, piercing the canopies, where there's canopy left at all. Most are shattered, thick shards of plasform spewed over the deck, the dried remnants of biogel sunk through the grates, some still clotted on the steelcrete mesh. And inside... Bodies.

  There's no smell. That thought hits me first, strikes me as weird in fact, makes me wonder if the air-cyclers here are working or if the fug mask is filtering the scent like it does the air. Probably. Either that... either that or the bodies are so old all the smell has left them, the bacteria that breaks down flesh dead and gone.

  Except there's still flesh on those bodies, faces and hair and naked limbs wrapped in fug. My feet take me closer, fug-paws crunching on bits of plasform, not even registering the pain of the shards piercing flesh. It's not flesh, I remind myself. Still, I can feel it crunch so why can't I feel it cut?

  It's not really the thought to be having, not the important thing staring me in the face, but it's better than what is staring me in the face. I didn't know Horn like I did Mac, or Jim Engineer or Mae Lu. Didn't know him more than to know he was a fiend of the speedway, always pushing to go faster, higher, further. I was there when he overrode the safeties on the freight system and rigged a palette to shoot out in the void and back again. Remembered the tension in the air when he docked and there was Captain Lyn, fury rolling off her like I never wanted to sense again, her face a meteor storm. He'd got off that palette, encased in an EVA suit and tried not to look like he'd just had the time of his life. Horn did a decent job of keeping the grin from his face, but couldn't help the exhilaration rolling off his psyche.

  Couldn't even lock it down enough to prevent the captain from sensing it.

  Even in death, it still looks like Horn is grinning, just not with his mouth.