by Paul Bishop
“Well, it wasn’t hypothermia. My suit kept me warm. I was never outside my spinner.”
“They brought you in half-undressed,” he reminded her. “With frostbite and burns on your hands.”
“The burns are from the side magnetic array panel inside the cabin. After the indicators went orange and we were hit by that storm of normal ticks, I reached beneath and tried to pull the lead component. Sparks flew everywhere.”
“It serves you right,” Slade said. “You only fly the thing. Leave repair work to the techs.”
She gave him a skeptical look. “Seriously? Slade, I’ve fixed my own ride since my dad taught me how to swap out the vintage Holley four-barrel carb on my ’74 Camaro. I’m not gonna stop now.”
He knew then what he loved about her.
Jen wasn’t gonna stop. He’d known stubborn women, stupid women, and women with a death wish. This wasn’t any of that. This was fortitude, integrity, and self-confidence that, when faced with an entire world against her, would stand up alone and be counted.
“There’s a story in your file about falling off a horse,” he said. “I came over here prepared to give you a pep talk. I was going to tell you things would be okay.”
“Were you going to tell me that if you fall off a horse, you should jump right back on?” she said. “That’s an old schtick for me, Colonel.”
“Let’s back up. Some things still don’t make sense,” Slade continued. “Where’s your spinner, Jen? If you never left your ship, where is it now?”
“You didn’t find it?” Confusion played over her features, and she rubbed her forehead.
He shook his head—slowly and deliberately so she would understand.
“I assumed that I docked at Endurance Base,” she said, “right before the storm.”
A nagging itch buzzed at the back of his scalp.
“There’s no trace of the ship,” he said. “And I covered considerable ground looking after we came in last night. Before the blizzard.”
“I saw the weather turn to crap,” she said. “I’m sure I made it in before the blizzard hit.”
“You see, that’s the thing, Jen. You didn’t,” he said. “I was the last spinner in before base lock-down.”
She was honestly baffled by the information. “I’m telling you I flew into base as normal, sequenced in, and docked. I was hurting from the burns, sure—and tore up by the ticks. That’s how my suit got damaged. That’s what you saw.”
“Tore up by the ticks. Tell me about that?”
“You were in the same storm I was, right? The normals? The billion pin-sized SOBs smashing against the hull outside?”
“I was,” he said and dug a finger into his ear. “My head’s still ringing.”
“Did they get inside your ship?” Jen asked.
The itch spread into his neck and shoulders and began to wind itself around his spine like a centipede.
“No. I buttoned the vents. Nothing got inside.” He took the hand she absently put forward. “Did the ticks get inside your cylinder, Jen?”
When she answered, her eyes were far away and the pupils seemed to expand to encompass the brown. “There were millions of them, Slade. Like stars. Like snowflakes. No two alike,” she said.
“But you buttoned the vents? You followed procedure. Jen, tell me the ticks didn’t get inside your ship.”
The tip of her tongue touched her front teeth and he knew she pictured the dogfight and remembered what happened inside the spinner. “I closed everything down,” she said. “At the first rap across the canopy, I sealed the ship tightly. The noise…” She drew her fingers away from him and held her hands to her ears. “The noise was awful.”
Slade knew how bad it could get. He’d carried the rap-rap-rap ringing of a normal storm for hours afterward. The cacophony of literally a billion little balls—harder than diamonds—as they pounded into carbon steel at seven hundred mph wasn’t something you could shrug off.
The normals were far from normal.
Their abdomens were stronger than tungsten and their wings, while of common housefly size and shape, were lined with razor-sharp edges. If they got inside a spinner chamber…if even only one or two got inside cramped quarters with a pilot…
“They got inside. Yes. But at the same time, they didn’t,” Jen said. “That’s what I meant earlier when I was talking about dreams.”
“Tell me.”
“We were flying into the barrage, me a little way ahead of you. I sealed the ship and prepared to ride the storm. You know how you can sometimes catch a wave of them and coast out to the edge of the swarm?”
“Sure.” It was a familiar maneuver to him and he’d done it dozens of times. What he didn’t understand was how she knew about it. According to her file, she’d never been in an actual dogfight and the simulators didn’t have an app to simulate a tick storm.
“Then, my indicator light changed from blue to orange. I talked to you on the commlink and tried to pull the module that burned my hands. Then, I—”
“What?”
“Then they flowed through the ship—like water or like snow. They flowed through me.”
Jen shuddered, clutched his hand, and squeezed until his fingers turned bright red. “Cold streams burning like liquid nitrogen but immaterial.” Slade knew she struggled to describe something that was indescribable. “Packets of light that felt like snowflakes when they smacked into you. No two alike.”
“Colonel Slade,” a voice said and a portly guy who must’ve been Jen’s grumpy PA stepped into the cubicle. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but the doctor is here with Commander Morocco’s test results. You probably ought to step outside.”
“No,” she said. “No, he can stay.”
Slade relaxed and remained seated on the bed. “I’d appreciate it,” he said. “I’d like to stay.”
“Suit yourselves,” the PA said.
The doctor introduced himself as Ramey. He was slim and good-looking and wore khaki wool slacks and a navy-blue shirt under the traditional white lab coat. With a slight dusting of gray layered through his dark hair, he was old enough to be Slade’s dad. His accent put his origins somewhere on the Indian subcontinent.
“How do you feel, Jennifer?” he asked and slipped between Slade and his patient with practiced ease. He put his left hand down on the railing and a gold wedding band gleamed in the fluorescent light. In his right hand, he held an electronic tablet.
“I’m fine,” Jen said.
“Yes, you are. And no, you’re not,” he responded. “I’m listing your condition as stable.”
“What’s the problem, Doc?” Slade asked.
“The commander’s vital signs are good. Considering where your core temp was when you came in, you’ve made remarkable progress in a very short time,” he told her.
“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” she said nervously.
The doc raised his eyebrows. “To be honest, your recovery is too good. Based on the cursory data alone, you could be released to full duty at any time. Frankly, that’s beyond belief.”
“You’re not releasing me to full duty.” She said it like a statement of fact.
He concurred. “In good conscience, I can’t. Not until we know more about the ticks.”
“What ticks are those?” Slade asked quickly.
The centipede at the back of his neck had ballooned to the size of a boa constrictor and he felt it crush his lungs as the doctor delivered the news.
“The ticks inside Commander Morocco’s body.” He turned back to Jennifer. “We estimate that they’ve embedded themselves in seventy percent of your muscular tissue and forty percent of your vital organs.”
“Wait a minute,” Slade said. “Hold on. To do that, there would have to be—”
“Around a million,” the doctor stated. “Ranging from the smallest, with a diameter comparable to a grain of sand, to the biggest, say the size of your fingernail.”
“What can we do?” he asked.
&nbs
p; “I’m not sure, but I’ll tell you this. We need to do something sooner rather than later because they’re feeding. And they’ll only get bigger.”
5
Slade knew he was looking at a terrestrial arachnid whose ancestor carried a mutation caused by an alien substance with an unpronounceable scientific designation.
“Call it what it is, doctor,” he said.
“In the common parlance, it’s known as the goo,” Stevens said.
Everybody understood that the stuff had been more or less contained behind the walls and under the desert dome in Africa. He said so and the scientist simply shrugged.
A select few, including them, also understood that at some point in the not too distant past, an evolved arachnid—or three—with goo for blood was carried into the New Zealand research unit two hundred miles from Endurance Base.
The goo-exposed tick’s descendants had evolved at an incredible rate, more so in Antarctica where there were no natural predators.
He looked at the illuminated slide on the table in front of him where an eight-legged tick was pinned down.
Part of him protested that he now believed in ten-foot-long scorpions and sand ticks with sharpened wings. He had to believe. His life depended on wrapping his brain around ideas that would have seemed absurd back on his grandpa’s farm.
But no matter what, he didn’t believe in ghosts.
What Ramey and Stevens showed him on the specimen slide wasn’t possible.
“By the way, I appreciate you agreeing to see me this morning,” the latter said. “Again, I apologize for my outburst yesterday.”
After the medical doctor’s revelation about Jen’s condition, he had tagged along with Slade to his associate’s office. In Lab Space Four, the three men huddled over a bright, glowing paradox.
“This is one of the normals we removed from Jennifer’s flight suit,” the scientist explained. “It’s both there and it isn’t.”
The creature measured a quarter of an inch long by an eighth wide and seemed sluggish. Its eight segmented legs waved with languid carelessness. Stevens slid the tip of his miniature pincers under it. He counted to ten and the tick changed color from tan to gold to white before it began to flicker like an old movie film with damaged frames. The man moved his tool perpendicular to the slide and lifted it through the space still occupied by the oscillating tick. Finally, he dropped the pincers through again and made sure they made a distinctive click when they touched the glass. He counted to himself again and the tick wavered into sharp-edged focus.
“You passed the pincers right through it. Like it’s not even there?” Slade asked incredulously.
“That’s correct. For the duration of the phase, the animal can’t be affected by material objects or physical laws.”
“You can pass objects right through it.”
“Or it can pass through you,” the scientist confirmed. “At first, when we analyzed the raw data from your encounter, we thought it was an issue of density, of redistribution of weight or mass. Then, after we obtained these samples last night from Commander Morocco, our hypothesis changed. We assumed the ticks were rearranging their structures on a molecular scale.”
“Even on its own, that’s enough of a scientific marvel for one day,” Ramey commented.
“It turns out that the creature is going through a quantum phase shift of some kind,” Stevens continued. “For those few seconds during phase, it exists in two possible space-time scenarios simultaneously. It’s quite remarkable.”
“It’s disgusting. This is how the ticks got inside Jennifer,” Slade retorted acerbically.
The man nodded. “They passed through the hull of the ship and through her suit and skin. It’s also how they seem to travel at transonic speed.”
“Seem to travel? You’re saying they don’t?”
“I’m saying that during phase, the same creature might be in two separate places at once, possibly traveling through pinholes of space-time. We don’t know enough to make a rational judgment.”
Slade wanted to know more. “If they were immaterial, why didn’t they simply keep going? Why did they stop and embed themselves in Jennifer?”
Ramey sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “You won’t like it, but the only thing we can come up with is that they were hungry.”
“Think of it this way,” Stevens said. “You’re in the middle of a massive undertaking. Let’s say it’s a marathon. You’re running and pushing and chuffing, and getting into the flow. But you’re also incredibly thirsty. You’re running low on electrolytes. Suddenly, through no fault of your own, you find yourself inside the lobby of a juice bar. Any refreshing liquid you want is there for the taking. Wouldn’t you stop if you could? Wouldn’t you partake of something to quench your thirst?”
“The one thing you left out of your analogy is that I have free will. My actions are based on reason, not instinct.”
“We don’t know that the ticks aren’t intelligent,” Stevens pointed out. “In their own way, they—”
“I don’t want to hear it.” He held his hand up impatiently. “This is the same kind of thinking that got us to this point in the first place—advocating for arachnid rights and making me use tools of deflection rather than weapons of war. Scolding me for choosing the life of a lovely, intelligent human being over the lives of an invading colony of mutant parasites.”
The scientist grimaced. “Don’t put words in my mouth,” he said.
“I don’t have to,” Slade countered. “This isn’t my first rodeo with you eggheads, and it probably won’t be my last.” He made his index finger rigid like a gun barrel and poked him in the chest. “I don’t care if these things fade in and out, do cartwheels, or recite the Gettysburg Address. I want them out of Commander Morocco. I want them off this base, and I want them dead.” He looked from one doctor to the other. “Is that clear?”
“Clear, but improbable,” Ramey said. “You see, there’s no way to surgically remove that many creatures from her body.”
“Then give her a shot. Something that would kill the ticks but not her. Make ʼem let go of her and her immune system can flush ʼem out.”
“The human body doesn’t work that way,” the doctor insisted. “I’m puzzled by the test results I have, but I have no doubt of my prognosis.”
“Which is what?”
“She’ll no doubt develop a massive blood infection, which will lead to sepsis and eventual death. We’re giving her the strongest antibiotics we have available.”
“What if the ticks phased?” he asked. “Like you just showed me? They phased in so make them phase out.”
“There’s no clear way to force the phase transition,” Stevens said.
Slade chewed the side of his cheek and tasted blood.
He thought about punching one of the doctors in the nose but decided it wouldn’t help.
Instead, he steadied himself against the lab table and issued a calm ultimatum. “Find a way to separate the ticks from Commander Morocco. Find a way to do it before she gets sick or, I swear to god, I’ll have both of you cataloging bacteria in some backwater swamp for the next thirty years.”
The threat was an empty one and he knew it as he stormed out of the lab. The two men didn’t work for him. They worked for Jennifer.
Ultimately, they worked for the government.
Slade thought about the tech potential for what the men had found today. The weapon potential. Phase in a bomb. Phase through a bullet. Phase through security perimeters, fences, and people. Faster than sound. Faster than thought.
Hadn’t those two bright eggheads earned their pay?
He turned down the walkway toward his personal quarters and slammed the hatchway door behind him with a crash.
When he reached his room, he took a shower and scrubbed ferociously, the image of tiny arachnids crawling through his system ten times more terrifying than the big, ponderous monsters they fought with the spinners.
After all, he was a soldier a
nd wanted something he could pound on. More than anything, he wanted something to shoot.
Before he could finish getting dressed, he got his wish.
“Condition One,” said Lin Wu. “Spider at base perimeter, Gate Five.”
“That can’t be,” he protested. “What happened to long-range sensors? How did you not see it coming?”
No answer was forthcoming.
Dammit. She was blinking out too much lately.
Slade pulled his boots on, ran down the corridor, and followed a switch-back to the main mission room where he could obtain logistics. A dozen controllers sat around the central holoscreens and tapped a brightly lit array of control panels.
“Lin Wu, bring up all the security zones.” Again, there was no answer, and the row of floating holoscreens remained as they were, black squares outlined in blue.
“Lin Wu is offline, sir,” a young redhead said. Her nametag said her name was Liz.
“What the hell’s going on with that?” he demanded. “It’s not like she’s not the most important piece of equipment on the base. Jesus Christ, she is the base!”
He patched into the base-wide network and wrestled to keep his frustrations in check.
“Condition One, One-A,” he announced to the residents of Endurance. “Non-essential military personnel stay clear of zone six, seven, and eight. Outer shell duties are canceled until further notice.”
“Stevens for you, sir,” Liz told him.
“Slade. Go.”
“I have three wind experiments running in the outer shell,” the scientist said. “Can you make an allowance for senior grade techs?”
Slade bit down on his reply. That morning, Stevens had offered him a sliver of the olive branch. Now, the tables were turned. In Jen’s absence, with the base under attack and the AI falling apart, the two of them needed to work together.
“Outer shells remain accessible to senior techs,” he replied across the base intercom. “Keep doing your science, boys and girls.”
“Thanks, Slade,” the researcher said.
Dak hurtled in through the room’s second hatchway, followed by Charlie Walton. “What the hell?” she asked. “Is Lin Wu down?”