On my shoulder, Dude is silent. Almost too silent, none of his usual golden fuzz singing in the back of my brain, and I'm wondering what that is, what it means as a way of not thinking about what's coming up. What I'm going to find.
I punch out of the maintenance tube, literally. Fug-feet tearing through the steelcrete, the fug-eaten metal giving way with a metallic sigh.
Lab Two looks just as I remember. Plain, off-white corridors curving ever so slightly, doors inset in the bulkheads. It's colder than when I was here last, cold enough I feel it through my shipsuit, ice crawling under my skin, freezing my bones. Fug-armour flows over my hands and arms, covers the parts of me it had left bare, and slowly, warmth chases off the cold. Numbers are flashing on the HUD, blinking on the side of my vision. Temperature and atmosphere readings telling me that I really don't want to be here without the armour, or an EVA suit. At least gravity is still working. A small mercy when I'm not at risk of plunging to my death in a maintenance tube.
There's a map on my HUD too, white lines outlining the corridor ahead, a yellow one guiding me to the right, around the curve of the corridor. I shouldn't need it. I know this deck like the back of my hand. Or I used to. Four years and fug have done things to my old stomping ground, demolished bulkheads and made craters in the decking, formed new walls and arches, turned the place into a maze.
Most of the fug here is the dull, grey-green of inert nanites, still clinging to the bulkheads and ceiling. Some of it litters the deck, a grey dust that puffs under my feet, mixing with crumbled steelcrete and plasform. It's everywhere and getting thicker as I follow the guide, winding my way through the reconstructed deck, climbing through gaps in the bulkheads and over the remnants of work benches and hover stools. There's less of the dead stuff here, more of the grey-green; thick ropes of it strung across the corridor, a thicker carpet advancing along the walls, the floor.
A low, inaudible growl rumbles through my skin.
I stop, alarm rising. 'Dude?'
He's standing at attention, a rigid statue of a mini rucnart on my shoulder, his barbed tail curled over his back and pointed at something ahead of us; a little, fug-grown missile.
The HUD is clear, just the outlines of the bulkheads and the yellow line guiding me past the curtain of fug ahead. A curtain of fug. Yeah. Okay. I remember the last curtain I pushed through. The alarm ratchets up another notch. I take a breath, feel the blades slide over my knuckles, and advance.
The curtain parts like it's been waiting for me. I slip through. Adrenalin has my heart beating hard and my lungs sucking down air. There's a readout on my HUD, tracking the uptick in my pulse and the oxygen saturation of my blood. There's a readout for the shit on the other side of the curtain too, and a little display just under it showing me the curtain falling shut on my heels.
Because of the other red shit. The viyusa.
The corridor with its off-white walls doesn't look like a corridor anymore.
I'm standing in a battlefield of fug. Red and grey-green clashing in slow-motion, shifting back and forth, eating bulkheads and ceilings and the deck. It's a duo-toned dance of death, red and green killing each other, dissolving into piles of dust.
There's not a skerrick of off-white to be seen, not a straight line or an arch that looks like a door. It's an endless field of destruction. An alien landscape where the only familiar things are the outlines on my HUD showing me what was, and that yellow line guiding me forward.
I plunge into the chaos.
My fug-armour is shifting, thickening over my knees, forming hard plates up my spine, turning feet and hands into weapons.
I'm not sure it needed to bother. The viyusa is slow, moving like it's stuck in a time dilation field, just a few nano-seconds after me but it's fast enough. A coil of it falls in front of me, a vine the length of my whole body, and thick as my leg. Behind it, another and another. A forest of red, wavy stalactites with pointy ends looking for a fug-fleshy Kuma to wrap up and tear apart. Distantly, I'm aware of the armour thickening still more, new plates forming over my shoulders and chest, slinking down my arms, of bony ridges growing on my knuckles, while Dude hunkers down.
Hunt rises on the adrenalin, calm taking over the hot bubble of panic, clearing my mind and narrowing my focus until all I see are those vines. The fug blades slice through the first, I'm already past it, noting in the same way I noted the armour shifting, that it's still moving, my blade not going all the way through. I'm swinging at the next, ducking under another as it tries to wrap around my arm, a nano-second too slow. Slice, run, duck, slice. Again and again.
The vines are getting thicker, and the yellow line... My destination isn't any closer. I'm swinging and cutting, Hunt moving my arms, twisting and turning my body. Dude's growling, and I can feel him too, bending my knees when a new vine slashes at it, making me jump and twist. There's red in the readouts on my HUD, warnings, swirls and lines, and then I feel it, the burning. Pain blazes up my forearms from the fug blades, a long line of red eating into my flesh, seeking my bones. Inside the shell of Hunt, I scream; scream until I have no breath left, and then I scream some more, but Hunt... Hunt doesn't stop moving, Dude doesn't stop picking up my feet or slashing with the blades.
Viyusa coats the cutting edge of the blades, a thin pink skin creeping over the green, eating it. It's oozing over my knuckles, pooling in hollows between tendons and branching out, thin filaments of it creeping over the armour, each one burning, eating. And still Hunt keeps me moving, keeps me following that yellow line.
The forest of red is getting thicker, more vines dropping from the ceiling, every single one intent on me. I'm not going to make it, not going get to Dad's old lab, not going to reach the beacon hidden in the secret compartment at the back. The one AD Tudor died to protect. The one that led to this whole broken mess.
The last piece of a dying ship.
The thing I need to kill.
Except I'm not moving forward anymore. The HUD is screaming warnings, Hunt is turning me around, and Dude... Dude is doing whatever it is the critter thinks he needs to do. Keeping me alive. Maybe. But I can't stop now, I have to get to Dad's lab. If I'm going to save Grea, it's time for me to take control.
Taking control is easier said than done. Hunt has me bundled up in the back of my own skull, a passenger, and Dude... He's taking part like a master puppeteer, I can feel him underneath my skin, ringing through the golden web, and if I concentrate hard enough, I can even feel him. Not his presence, but his physical self, claws out, body vibrating with tension, I can even feel his second pair of front legs, like they're attached to my ribs. It's weird, but it's a start.
A start is all I need.
While Hunt twists and turns and slashes, retreating back the way we've come, I slip into the eter and reach for Dude. He's a little gold blob in the white, sitting in the centre of his web. Attention streaks out from his paws in blazing white lines, each one connected to a ghost of fug-me, dancing in the eter. It's jarring to see me fighting for my life and to not feel it. Most of it is not being in control, of knowing that I'm an optional extra in the function of my own body, but the other part... The other part is still not recognising myself, the height, the breadth of shoulder, the alienness of the fug armour. I might have stared at myself in the ever, might have had a chance to know, intellectually, that that's me, but I don't feel it, not right in the pit of myself where identity lives.
'Dude?'
The blazing lines of attention shiver.
'Dude?' I say again, this time reaching out to touch him in the middle of his web. 'I have to keep going.'
One of those lines shifts, reaches for me. Touching it is like sticking my hand in an open subline, a rush of power straight to the heart. Holy Terra, the little guy packs a punch, or maybe not... There's that thing behind him, the heart that isn't mine. Hunt. I can see it now, a ghost behind Dude, the growl of its generator echoes through the critter, fills the eter, reaches through the web at Dude's paws and powers my limbs.
I sin
k my fingers into the web and claim Hunt's power for myself.
Control is mine.
I jerk back to the world, still feeling Dude under my skin, Hunt watching in the back of my eyes, but I'm here. No longer a passenger.
Viyusa is everywhere, the pain of it digging at my bones, turning my marrow to mush. It blinds me, and this time my scream rings through the corridor, a blood-curdling screech. Only Dude and Hunt keep me going while my nerves burn, push the agony back, give me room to breathe, to think, to act.
I spin, no longer retreating, but forging ahead. I run, leaping over severed stalactites still writhing on the deck, and there is the remembered gouge from where I rammed a hover sled into the wall that feels like a lifetime ago, before fug. Next to it, half-obscured by the viyusa, is the door to Dad's lab. Hope blooms in my chest.
Not far, not far. The HUD measures the distance, the numbers switching between English numerals and the lines of Hunt, fritzing around the edges like it can't quite decide which language to use. It doesn't matter, with Hunt sharing my eyes, I can read them both. Ten metres.
I'm going to make it, I going to make—
The deck crumbles, steelcrete giving way like a sinkhole, opening beneath me mid-leap.
Red slashes across my vision. The HUD screams in my ear. Viyusa vines whip toward me, and the big dark hole rushes at my feet.
Oh shit.
I plunge into darkness.
The darkness burns. Acid in my lungs, creeping through my muscles, eating my nerves.
I scream until my throat is raw, and then I scream some more.
There are bands around my arms, my legs, my ribs. They squeeze and contract, the ones around my chest do it every time I yell, like they're helping to squeeze every last bit of air from lungs.
Eventually, the pain subsides. Or maybe I get used to it because I stop screaming. At some point in the interminable hours, days, weeks, I've been in the darkness, I found that place Hunt shoved me when it took over my body. The pain was still there, still eating me, but it wasn't me it was happening to, wasn't me who screamed until his voice broke.
Dude is huddled in here with me, in the away place. I'm pretty sure he screamed too, his little voice high and piercing, drowned beneath my own. The only one who doesn't scream is Hunt. It sits in the back of my mind, behind my eyeballs, watching, calculating.
That wasn't nice, little brother. Grea, reaching out through the viyusa. Trying to kill Euiva.
I was saving you.
What makes you think I need saving? She's hovering in the darkness, a part of it. And where before the darkness was a cloak at her feet, now it's the red, tendrils of it draped over her shoulders and head like a cowl.
Euiva is controlling you, changing you.
And you think Aeotu isn't doing the same to you? Hasn't already done it?
She hasn't.
What about Hunt? She pulls the memory from the back of my brain, of the awareness moving me through fug.
That's different.
How? Grea's face is in mine, our foreheads touching.
It was helping me.
And Euiva's not helping me? Grea cocks her head. She helped me save you, brother.
She's destroying our home!
Our home is already dead. Grea's in my face and the darkness is twisting around my legs, trying to find its way under my skin. We're giving it another life, another purpose.
What?
Did I stutter? Grea moves toward me, not walking but gliding, pulling the red with her, around her, a swirling mass of... Of something I really don't want to touch me. All this, it's not about you or me or even Aeotu and Citlali anymore, it's about the Sisters.
Sisters. The word echoes, and for a brief moment I hear Aeotu.
Who are the Sisters?
Grea smiles and the expression… chills. She smacks me on the forehead and knowledge shoots through her palm, drowning me in images and emotions. Part memory, part something else... something that comes from the red. It wraps around me like the vines, but instead of clamping around my arms or my chest, it sinks into the heart of me, seeking out my anima. It hurts, hurts just the same as the viyusa, burning, eating. Acid poured on all of the tender places.
Dude's growling, chasing it, hunting it down. It gets him too.
Stop!
I'm showing you, brother.
You're hurting us. You're letting it hurt us.
Grea is everywhere, riding in on the thread that connects us as twins, that makes us the same. It's the only way, she says.
There's another memory overlaying the pain, one of Grea, curled in a ball, alone, only the light of a drone for company. Her face is grey, and her lips are bleeding, but it's the whimpers that dig at my soul, that make my heart clench. I want to tell her I don't want it, whatever this knowledge is. I don't need it, she can just tell me, but there's that look on her face. The cold, hard thing, and behind it... behind it there's Euiva, and all that pain, all that loneliness is hers.
It eats at me. I'm trying to hold it off, fighting it with hands that shake. Blood running down my fingers. And Dude... the worst is Dude – the sound he's making, the high, quiet whine drilling into my heart, splitting it in two. One half for me, the other for my twin.
My twin. Who's looking at me with Euiva behind her eyes, without mercy, without anything that I remember as her.
No. The word is less a word than a force, a denial pushing outward from my anima. A shield. No, I say again, and this time it ripples through the stuff that makes me me. I gather it to me, make it stronger, harder. I yell it. No!
The emote takes flesh and bone with it as it rips Euiva from my psyche.
Grea screams. Rage fills the air, frustration. Fear. Loneliness.
She stumbles back through the dark, the viyusa clinging to her, the emotion/memory flung in her face, bright, hot. Burning.
She disappears.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Aeotu sweeps me up.
I'm tumbling through the kaleidoscope of her mind. It's different from the last time I was here, more… natural, I guess. Easier. Before I was a Kuma-coloured bubble in Aeotu's mind, struggling to keep myself on the river that rages toward her core, pulled this way and that by the tributaries that branch off the main thrust of her thoughts. This time the river doesn't threaten to drown me, doesn't batter my shields.
The tributaries, the fragments of Aeotu's self, still call to me, want to tell me things like hull pressure and oxygen ratios, but they don't tug, don't fight over my attention. It's Aeotu herself, the core of her, who guides my path, nudging me away from the river that leads directly to her anima, toward a smaller tributary singing with the warm bronze of home.
I don't know what I'm expecting, what a ship calls home. A drydock? A massive steelcrete skeleton orbiting a moon? Whatever it is, it's not the glittering bronze web, a constellation of minds thrumming to the same beat as Aeotu's, an interconnectedness like what I have with Grea, except closer. It's the Sisters, the other ships like Euiva. And they're all gone, the stars dark, only the memory of them left behind, the places where they used to be, faint glows kept alive in Aeotu's memory. All except one.
One of the stars is alight, a crimson glow. Not as it was, but alive. Joy fills the space, pain too. Aeotu's emotions swirl around me, not crushing but buffeting me in their wake.
The tide of Aeotu's mind pushes me closer and closer to that glow, and I'm pretty sure I don't want to reach it, 'cause I know what's there, know deep in the pit of me.
Euiva.
The dark net in my way is a relief.
The web is strung across the rushing tide of Aeotu's sub-mind in strands of black fug. Menace rolls off it, like the darkness that surrounded Grea. It pulses with old memories and fear, has its own gravity, a pull that has me reaching for it, even as the sane part of me, the bit that used to wake in the middle of the night convinced of the bogeyman in the wall units, recoils.
I grab a strand. It's midnight in my grip, the absolute cold of th
e void, the despair of floating in the stasis unit, waiting to die. The strand twists around my wrist, slowly at first, hesitant, like it doesn't know what to make of me. For a moment, it tastes me, rolls my essence around its mouth. I think it likes what it finds because the strand tightens on my arm, lifts me from the tributary. My feet are dangling above the flow of Aeotu's consciousness until the tips of my toes brush the surface.
There are new waves, black crests in the darkness. Fear is universal, it seems, and it stains Aeotu's thoughts. It's an old fear, rising from the depths of her being with threads tracing all the way back to her core.
But here... Here doesn't feel like a part of Aeotu. It's different, the blackness a foreign body embedded not just in the AI's psyche, but trailing through the constellation behind it. Sticky little tendrils reaching out to each of the withered, faded stars of the Sisters.
The vines wrap tighter around my arm, and now more of them are coming out of the dark, twining around my waist, my legs, my shoulders, encasing me. That little part of my brain, scared of the bogeyman, is whimpering, curled up on itself, hands over its head, calling for Dad, but it's far away, hidden behind layers of... home? Not Aeotu's home – the constellation of minds – but my home, or what's meant to be my home. The planet where my parents were born, Jørn.
Giant trees reaching for blue skies; the endless push and pull of ocean tides; hot desert breezes, sand in my coat and under my paws. A full, brilliant moon.
Home. Somehow, in the pit of me, right next to the whimpering toddler, I know that's Jørn. A place I've only seen in holos, only experienced in training memories, a place I'm meant to care about, but don't.
Psionic schisms are strange things. It's like standing on the edge of a crater with your dad on the other side. He's talking to you, but there's a problem with the comms and, while you can see his mouth move, you can't make out the words. Except all of that is in your own brain.
There's a schism forming now, a split right down the middle of my psyche, and there… There is the creeping dark reaching from the depths, trying to take over part of my brain, trying to plant something there.
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