Dark Between Oceans

by Belinda Crawford

  I'm still staring at it when darkness explodes in the middle of the ruined Attrium, fire writhing around it.

  Everything stops.

  Guns, growls, the kins' icy daggers. Just. Stops.

  The darkness unfurls, standing in a smooth, graceful motion, its fire becoming long tendrils of red, fanning around its feet like a cape. Dragging on the ground. At its edges, the fug, both red and green, rolls back, leaving a half-metre of scarred and broken deck in its wake.

  The only thing that dares approach are the critter balls and they're swatted out of the air like bugs.

  Grea stands in the midst of it, the focal point of all that darkness, all that fire. Purpose bleeds through the barrier between eter and the physical, staining the atmosphere a shining bronze.

  She's not wearing a mask. The harsh glow of the battle plays across her face in harsh shadow and violent orange highlights, washing out her complexion, making the sharp lines of her cheekbones and the hollows of her cheeks stand out in stark relief. She's changed again since I last saw her, grown taller, gotten older, and I wonder how long she kept me in the dark place, wracking my body with pain.

  Not long, little brother. Her eyes find mine, boring through my faceplate. Euiva needed an older body for what comes next. Pain echoes through the words, the memory of it laced with determination.

  Is it my heart that chills or Aeotu's? It's not Hunt's, although there's a new whirring in the depths of my brain, calculations, vectors, numbers, strategies piling up in its consciousness, a sense of impending danger.

  Why would Aeotu be afraid? And why would Euiva need Grea to be physically older?

  The fear that shivers under my skin is all mine. Other emotions, though, the wonder, the joy and shock. Those are not mine. Those are carried on the colours of Mum and Dad's minds, of Mac's dad and the white/black of Onah. They splash against my back, trying to thaw that shiver, almost succeeding.

  'Grea?' Mum's voice comes through my comms, echoing in my helmet.

  I doubt Grea can hear her, not in vacuum, without comms to bridge vacuum. Of course, nothing's ever impossible.

  Grea turns, facing Mum, a smile lighting her face, and I guess, if Grea's face still isn't a frozen block of flesh, if she's somehow immune to the vacuum, then hearing Mum despite the lack of comms isn't that far of a stretch.

  Grea's mouth moves. There's no air, not even enough for her breath to frost, and yet... 'Hi Mum. Sorry about not coming to find you, but I had to do something.'

  It's Dad's turn now. He clumps forward, not quite as graceful in his envirosuit as he usually is. 'Baby, what's going on?'

  'I have to go, Dad, there's not much time, but Kuma knows, ask him.' She turns away, the red closing in tight around her, darkness following, but she pauses a moment before she's swallowed by it, and smiles at Dad. 'It's okay,' she says. 'We'll be done soon, but you should go now.'

  There's a thud, a kind of muffled explosion, and then she's gone, disappeared through a new hole in the deck.

  I'm over the edge of it, peering at the faint blue shimmer of emergency bulkheads lighting up the tunnel, my HUD scanning the hole. Ten decks, Grea just bored her way through all of Citlali's decks, not just one or two, and she did it like it was nothing, or like she was made of the same stuff as Aeotu's grappling cables.

  I jump in after her. It's not an action I think about, and the moment my feet leave the deck I wonder if my fug-self can soak the damage, if falling forty-eight metres is the same as nine, or if I'm going to wind up with broken legs and my spine lodged in my brain. Probably something I should have figured out before the leap.

  I have a nano-second to regret the impulse, and then warmth flares on my back. The thrusters.

  Hunt is running numbers in the back of my brain. According to it and the HUD, there's enough power in them to prevent me from breaking every bone in my body. Armour is shifting, flowing from my torso and arms to my legs, just in case.

  "Just in case" doesn't inspire confidence in Hunt's calculations.

  Still. I only have seconds to regret my decision.

  There's a jolt as I pass through the emergency bulkhead, an electric, biting ripple that starts in my toes and surges up my body, and then air is rushing past my face, lifting my hair. The armour is bulked around my lower body, just the thrusters attached to my back and a thin skeleton around my face, enough to support the HUD.

  Numbers are counting down. And there's the bottom of the shaft, highlighted in red and yellow. The thrusters are firing, slowing my descent, but the numbers on my HUD are still high, still make my gut clench with the expectation of pain, even as they leach all the energy from my bones. Impact comes both sooner and later than I expect. The deck meets my feet in slow-motion, my knees bending, force rushing up my legs, making the armour ripple. Warnings are screaming, force meters red to rival the emergency lights, but there's no pain. No crunch of bones, no tear of muscles. Just fug, cracking with a wet scrittch, turning grey, crumbing to dust as the nanites die.

  Weight falls off my back, the thrusters joining the pile of dead fug at my feet.

  I follow it, collapsing to the cold deck, exhaustion turning my bones to steelcrete, my muscles to biogel, pulling my eyes closed. It's cold, I know it's cold because icicles are forming in my nose, clogging up my airways, but I can't summon the energy to get up.

  Maybe jumping after Grea wasn't such a good idea.

  Grea. I reach for her. She's ahead of me, racing down the corridor, darkness and viyusa propelling her faster than any human can move on their own.

  I feel her stop, feel her turn and look down the corridor, straight through the curve of the bulkhead. For a moment it's as if she's standing right there, the tendrils of viyusa brushing against my sides, skittering away from my armour like it hurts.

  She hesitates, leans forward, and warmth springs in my chest – she's coming back for me – but then someone else tugs at her psyche. It's faint, weak, but insistent, powerful with urgency, with desperation.

  Grea turns away, purpose driving her from me.

  Grea! My own desperation, the first stirrings of fear, colour the call.

  My twin, my other half, ignores it. And then she's gone. Just. Gone.

  Alone. Cold.

  I should be used to it, should have inured myself to the creeping chill, to the numbness as ice forms in my blood, slows my heart, makes it hard to remember why I'm here. And yet… and yet this is different, this is a dagger ripping my heart in two. This is a piece of myself gone. Lost. Torn away. Stolen.

  This is unacceptable.

  Brother.

  Aeotu crouches beside me, the dark, sleek shadow looking so much like Mac in his armour, except it's not him. The kaleidoscope dances under Aeotu's skin, purple, green, blue, the colours I have no names for, no ability to describe, twisting and turning. Whorls and lines sucking me in, talking to me, to Hunt. Sharing secrets and whispering lies. Endless. Infinite. I can see the void in her skin, the infinite cold of FTL, the possibility of the universe.

  Brother. She reaches into my back, through flesh and bone and fug, her sleek, talon-like fingers wrapping around my heart. And I realise, as those deadly claws pierce the muscle, that she used the male pronoun. Up. Lightning, the kaleidoscope jumpstarting my heart, pumping energy into my blood, my bones melting, my marrow throbbing.

  I'm on my feet. Fug is flowing over my flesh, the grey-green rippled with the yellow of the neo-critters, encasing my feet, my knees, hiding the gold of Jørgen-me under the armour of the new me. The one with claws that tear into steelcrete, with a miniature sun on his back and blades sheathed in his arms. That Kuma, the one tearing down the corridor, mind stretching ahead, finding Grea, slipping into her mind, pushing past the shock, sharing her eyes as she powers up the shuttle. Sensing the other, Euiva, as it whispers in Grea's ear.

  Don't. The word is mine.

  I have to. There is a world behind that response, centuries of loneliness and pain, of floating in the void, an abandoned hull leaking
atmosphere. Of emotions that bubble up from deep within, as alien as the dark swirl of colour it rises out of, as powerful as a sun.

  Sister. Aeotu speaks through me, her voice reaching through the connection that is Kuma/Grea to speak to the thing on the other side.

  Grea jerks, tries to rip herself away, but I'm holding tight. It can't have you, I say.

  A denial, violent, angry. It reaches through Grea like Aeotu reaches through me. Hooks into the connection. Cold. Hard.

  Aeotu screams.

  I scream with her.

  Grea rips away. Is gone.

  I skid through the shuttle bay doors on my knees, pain stealing my coordination. The doors snap closed. Lights are flashing, a hazard holo is in my face. The sleek, egg-shape of the shuttle is rising, hovering over the deck before it turns, thrusters firing white hot, the hover jets creating a mini tornado, sweeping the crumbled remnants of deck and scaffolding.

  The outer doors open. The little atmosphere in the hangar is sucked into space, taking me with it.

  I flip on my belly, ram claws the length of my forearm into the deck, picture hooks forming on the ends, holding me in place even as the rush of atmosphere lifts my body from the deck.

  The shuttle is pointed at the outer airlock, toward the dark tunnel of the ice hull.

  Grea. I try again.

  Euiva encases my twin; my call bounces off.

  Thrusters fire.

  The shuttle is gone.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Mum's standing in the shuttle bay looking like Grea took the shuttle and smacked her in the face. Dad's next to her, looking the same and Onah...

  Honestly, I never really thought the air-kin cared about Grea that much. I mean, he's always cared about me, in his own way, but the emotion coming off him now...

  I double-down on my shields. There's too much emotion in the air and not enough of me left to care.

  Or maybe there's too much of me left. Too much raw skin and heartache, too much feeling. I want to explode out of my flesh, want to run through Citlali's corridors screaming. I've done so much, so much has been done to me, that this part, the part where I get to fall into my parents' arms and go to sleep beside my twin, it should be easy. And I guess it would be, if I got it at all.

  But all I can see is Grea gunning the shuttle, all I can feel is that slimy, creeping madness looking out of her eyes, using her voice and leaving me behind.

  Always leaving me behind.

  Brother.

  I ignore it, tighten my shields, give them forcefields and coat them in lava.

  Brother.

  No. I twist the forcefield, turn it into a beam of light and shoot it at the kaleidoscope on the edge of my eter.

  Except it's not coming through the eter, not entirely.

  The umbilicus pulses with Aeotu's presence. Hunt is behind her, and there is urgency in its touch, pushing Aeotu forward.

  Brother. Danger. Darkness rolls behind her, carrying words and impressions that make my eyes cross and slip over my brain without touching it. Things too alien for me to comprehend.

  Hunt though... Hunt gobbles it up, its processors whirring, spinning images in my brain, little bits and pieces that don't make sense. Strange fragments of tubes and vines that remind me of fug, if fug were smooth and round, with sharp edges and—

  The images SNAP together, forming a whole that makes my heart sink. 'The FTL engines.'

  Dad turns. 'What about them?'

  Aeotu/Hunt are still speaking, shoving more and more information at me. And Old Terra help us, it's coming together and that sinking feeling, it doesn't encompass what Grea has done, what she's left us with. What she's planning.

  But why? Why does she want to blow up Citlali?

  Why? I send the thought winging through the void, chasing after my twin. There's no answer, and I wish there were, something to wipe away the horror taking over my anima.

  'Kuma?' Hands on my shoulders, jerking me around, pulling me face-to-forehead with Dad. 'Kuma,' he says again. 'What about the engines?'

  There's fear in his voice, in his grip; knowledge too, an awful kind of inevitability.

  Somehow, some way, Dad already knows what Aeotu is telling me, what the AI has only just discovered.

  'How?' I ask him. 'How do you know what she did?'

  It's an interesting thing when Dad pales. The blood leaves his skin, takes the warm, rosy flush out of his cheeks, leaves his lips the colour of death and turns the flesh under his eyes the colour of old blood. His fingers might as well be bone digging into my biceps, trying to scoop out the marrow in my bones.

  'It was Grea.' The statement is soft. Dad's looking at me, but his gaze is clouded by the images behind his eyes, and his aura... I've never seen one break like that, split right down the middle and collapse. Heartbreak. You learn something new every day, I just wish I didn't have to learn it from Dad.

  Over his shoulder, Mum's aura is the same. Dark and split.

  Dad shakes himself. 'The FTL engines have been rigged to overload. We don't know how, some kind of amalgamation of Their tech and ours.'

  'You thought it was me.' It's an accusation. Hurt is blooming in my chest, you wouldn't think there was room, or that I'd be used to it, but there's a Grea-sized hole in my anima now. Plenty of room for other things.

  Dad doesn't answer with words, his eyes tell it all, catching on Dude perched on my shoulder, sliding off the fug.

  I step back.

  There's resistance, just a tiny bit, Dad's grip tightening before he lets go, hands dropping to his sides. Still not looking at me.

  'Yeah. The kid with the strange appendages must be the one planning to blow up the home he tried to save.'

  'Kuma...' Mum steps up beside Dad. I wait for her to say something, to find the words to soothe the hurt bits, the way mums do. She just stares at me.

  It's my turn to look away. I want to keep looking, to force them to see me, not the fug crawling over my body, but that just makes the hurt boil, makes it harder to hold in the words that want to spew from my mouth, the ones that'll hurt. I'll make sure they hurt, load them up with all the shit inside and fire them not just at my parents, but at everyone; the kind of destructive emote that makes people fear me. The kind that sticks inside and doesn't let go, not for a year, not for a month, not for a millennium. The kind that changes an entire species.

  The kind the water-kin used against Them.

  I swallow the urge, step back and turn away. 'I'll go get her, make her stop it.'

  Too late. Aeotu's voice echoes, not just in my head or through the umbilicus, but in my ears.

  Mum's looking around, hope wiping away the worry on her brow. 'Core? Is that you?'

  No.

  'It's Aeotu. Core's dead.' The words are mine and they're cold. The fact that Aeotu has found a way into the comms doesn't surprise me, I've heard it before after all, and besides, while Grea's absence has left room for shit, there's none for the alarm I might have felt otherwise. Besides, Mum should know that. She's been trying to resurrect Citlali's AI for long enough.

  You'd think I was in a graveyard the way the faces around me drain of colour.

  Not surprising. First, they're confronted with a son who's not quite Jørgen anymore and then the being who remade him is hijacking their systems and telling them the world is falling down. If that's not bad enough, there's Mac, dropping from the ceiling three decks above like it ain't nothing, all fugged out, faceplate down, whorls and lines moving under his armour.

  It has spread. Cannot save sister—

  'Citlali.' That's Mac, translating for Mum before the confusion has thought about crossing her face. 'You have to evacuate.'

  Silence.

  I'm not sure if it's because they're too busy staring at the dark grey humanoid with Mac's voice, or if they're processing what he just said. I know I am, but for them... For them it's probably both.

  In the back of my head I'm remembering another voice, another face, 'stasis separation' ringing
in my ears. We all know how that went.

  No. Not again.

  Mum's saying things about air filters and bio-sponges, all the words adding up to the same thing. They can't. What she really means is 'they won't'. All the junk about pollen counts and oxygen ratios can't cover up the revulsion in her aura. Can't hide the dismay as Mac's faceplate retracts and they see him for the first time. The boy who used to spend so much time in our living room he was practically family.

  I'm not listening anymore. I'm cutting myself off from the torrent of emotion filling the shuttle bay and doing what I need to do. What no one else can.

  I'm going after Grea.

  I'm going to stop her from blowing up Citlali.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  There aren't any more shuttles and the pods we use to make repairs to Citlali might get me where I need to go, in about a hundred years.

  It's okay though, 'cause I don't need them.

  Hunt is in the back of my mind, not saying anything, just there, a beacon guiding me through Citlali's ruined corridors, through the gangway connecting it to Aeotu, and deep into the alien ship's bowels.

  It's different down here, the bulkheads dark, the patterns carved deeper, sharper. Urgency and danger radiate from them, saturating the air, my blood, making my heart beat harder. From Aeotu or Hunt? I can't tell. All I know is that the vision of Hunt, of the faceless thing on the other side of the umbilicus, is more vibrant down here.

  The atmosphere tastes like old sweat and adrenalin, musty and ancient, seeped into the bulkheads over millennia ago.

  I can almost see Them racing down these stairs, almost feel like I am one of Them, fug-feet taking the risers without the awkwardness of my human legs. And now I'm stepping through a doorway, the hatch snapping shut behind and it almost feels familiar.

  There's no corridor here, just a room. An airlock, the last line of defence if the—

  I shake my head. The stuff in my brain is a tangle of numbers and equations, things slipping through Hunt's translation and skidding off my grey-matter. It doesn't matter why this is an airlock, all that matters is the massive, squashed-egg-on-its-side hatch in front of me, and the thing behind it.