Benedict interrupted Pandor’s thoughts with a sound of contentment. “You don’t know what you’re missing, Seigo.”
“Leave him alone,” said Gogolac.
“All I’m doing,” said Benedict, “is introducing him to the finer things in life. That’s not a crime, is it?”
“What you’re doing,” said Gogolac, glaring at Benedict, “is nettling him. For no reason.”
“You’re a mind reader?” asked Benedict. “I didn’t know that.” He turned to Philip. “Did you?”
“Tris,” said the administrator in a conciliatory tone, “this is—”
“Unnecessary?” Benedict ventured. “Uncalled for? Or is it just that everyone’s too damned sensitive around here?”
“That’s enough,” said Shepherd.
“Why?” asked Benedict. “Because you say it is? You’re a safety officer, not the dinner police.”
“He’s right, Tris,” said Philip, backing Shepherd up for once. “You need to settle down.”
Pandor was about to agree when he felt a pressure in his chest, just behind his sternum. It felt as if something was pushing to get out of him. And though at first it was just uncomfortable, it rapidly evolved into something more than that.
It hurts, he thought.
This time, everyone was too focused on Benedict to see the expression on Pandor’s face, which must have been an unpleasant one. Pressing his fist against his chest, he tried to relieve the pressure, but it didn’t help. The pain was getting intolerable.
Looking down, Pandor saw a small red blotch on his shirtfront. It was marinara sauce, a dollop he hadn’t noticed—right? But it looked to him a lot like blood.
As if he had been stabbed. And hell, it felt as if he were being stabbed. But not from the outside—from within.
“Elijah?” someone said.
Then they were all looking at him again. And he couldn’t reassure them as he had before, because this time he had a feeling he might be in trouble. Grimacing, he felt the pressure build into something agonizing, something he couldn’t take sitting down.
“Elijah!” someone cried out, louder this time than the last.
As he got to his feet, his fist pushing against his chest, he heard the scrape of chairs on the floor and the rapid-fire issuing of orders. Abruptly, his colleagues were all around him, taking him by the arms and ushering him out of the mess hall.
Until, halfway to the door, Pandor felt something emerge from him—the loudest, longest, most unmannerly burp he had ever had occasion to issue in his entire life.
But all of a sudden, the pressure was gone. And so, it seemed, was the sense of urgency among Pandor’s colleagues.
“What the hell … ?” said Cody.
Angie began to laugh. It was a beautiful sound, like the pealing of little bells.
“Are you all right?” asked Shepherd.
Pandor nodded, his cheeks hot with embarassment. “I’m fine. Just a little gas was all.”
“How lucky are we?” asked Benedict.
Gogolac turned to him. “Just shut up, all right?”
“I think,” said Angie, still chuckling a little, “your digestive system is just working out the kinks. There was nothing in you for a while and then you stuffed yourself. There were bound to be a few … anomalies.”
Pandor managed a smile. “Is that what you call them?”
Seigo muttered something to himself and returned to the table. Exchanging looks of relief, the others joined him— Pandor included. But when their banter started up again, it was less contentious. A good thing, Pandor reflected.
He discovered his appetite wasn’t the least bit diminished by his rather unsettling experience. In fact, having cleared out some room in his digestive tract, he was even hungrier than before.
Which made it a bit easier to ignore the tentacles.
11
To the ancient Mayans, the kapok tree was sacred. The souls of the dead, eager for the grace of heaven, were said to climb the kapok’s branches to get there.
The legend gave Philipakos pause as he used his shears to prune back the kapok’s lowest tier of leaf-covered branches. He didn’t want to prevent any enterprising souls from rising to heaven. But as far as he knew, none of his colleagues was on his or her way to an afterlife at the moment, and by the time anyone needed a helping branch the tier would have grown out again.
Philipakos liked pruning—especially the sweet, nutty smell of the severed wood—which was why he did so much of it. But he only worked close to the ground, leaving the higher tiers to more able souls like Shepherd, Cody, and Pandor. The last thing he wanted was to break his fool neck and leave a power struggle in his wake.
He chuckled at his own joke. As if any of his people would want his job when he was gone. But isn’t that all the more reason to live forever?
His thought was interrupted by a buzzing in the open breast pocket of his jumpsuit. Fishing out his comm unit, he depressed the receive button with his thumb.
Then he said, “Philipakos here.”
“It’s Shepherd, Phil. I’m reading a ship on the long-range. Looks like a cargo hauler.”
They hadn’t seen a ship other than a supply vessel in years. And it could hardly have wound up there by accident.
“Have they tried to communicate?”
“Not yet,” said Shepherd.
Philipakos looked regretfully at the half-shorn kapok and said, “I’m on my way.”
* * *
“See?” said Hendricks, indicating the spot.
Cody nodded. “I do.”
“Looks like as good a place as any,” said Pandor.
He picked out one of the two dozen violets that had arrived in the cryo tube, removed it from the back of the flivver, and set it down in the crevice Hendricks had indicated—a shallow one between two gray rocks, protected from the intensity of unfiltered sunlight by the drooping branches of a perfumed Ylang Ylang tree.
Even back on Earth, violets couldn’t survive the glare of the sun. Hendricks knew how they felt. She didn’t like the spotlight either.
Using his hands rather than a trowel, Pandor scooped some rich, dark soil out of a pail they had brought with them, and dumped it into the crevice. Then, gently, he patted it down around the naked root system of the violet, careful to avoid its thick, hairy leaves.
Hendricks remembered Pandor’s saying that he liked the feel of the dirt, and that the day he resorted to a trowel was the day he looked for another career. She hoped that day didn’t come for a while.
“How about the nutrient bath?” asked Cody, shading his eyes against the midday light.
Pandor looked at him. “I didn’t bring it. There are plenty of nutrients in the soil.”
Cody frowned. “As long as we’ve got the stuff, why not use it?”
“The way the food shipments are going,” said Pandor, “we may need some nutrient bath ourselves.”
Cody made a face. “That’s disgusting.”
Hendricks didn’t get involved in their exchange. Even if she knew for certain she wouldn’t say anything stupid, she wouldn’t know when to jump in.
Pandor turned to her. “Where’s our next spot?”
She showed him. It was a couple of meters off to the side, a shaded location between two other rocks.
“Beats me,” said Cody, “how you don’t record any of this.”
Hendricks shrugged. “I’ve got a good memory.”
People had always commented on it, as far back as she could remember. She might not have been a great intellect in other ways, but she had always had a knack for remembering things.
Picking up another violet, Cody took it over to the place Hendricks had selected and put it in the crevice. Then he picked up some soil with a trowel and poured it in around the roots.
“Aren’t you going to pat it?” asked Pandor.
Cody chuckled derisively. “Maybe I should give it a good night kiss while I’m at it.”
“I understand,” said Pa
ndor with a twinkle in his eye, “and believe me, I admire your dedication. The sooner we finish up here, the sooner we can move on to our next job.”
Their next assignment was to change the filters in the dome’s ventilation system, so they didn’t want to complete the violet job too quickly. No one liked changing filters— not even Philip, who seemed to like most everything.
“On the other hand,” said Cody, playing along with the joke, “I hate to shortchange the little darlings. Maybe a couple of pats are in order after all.”
Pandor smiled encouragingly. “That’s the spirit.”
“Let me show you the next spot,” said Hendricks.
“By all means,” said Cody. “You know, there was a time when I was the soul of efficiency around here. Got everything done in record time, no goofing off. Of course, that was before I was exposed to some negative influences.”
“Hey,” said Pandor, “you know what they say. You lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas.”
Suddenly, he made a face—like the one he had made in the mess hall, only worse. Gas again? Hendricks wondered.
“You all right?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. His voice was strained, laced with concern—more so than she would have expected. “It hurts,” he said. He pressed his fist to his chest. “In here.”
Hendricks frowned. A heart attack?
She wasn’t good at emergencies. Something in her always froze, as if she were moving in icewater.
Fortunately, Cody wasn’t so afflicted. Moving to Pandor’s side, he took the botanist by the arm and said, “We’re getting you to the infirmary.”
“I’ll call ahead,” Hendricks offered.
“It hurts,” Pandor gasped, doubling over in Cody’s grasp. “It really hurts. Maybe my heart … ”
Cody didn’t answer him. But something about his expression told Hendricks that he wasn’t concerned about Pandor’s heart. He was thinking it was something else.
Something the face-grabber did to him, Hendricks realized in a flash of insight.
“Make it stop,” Pandor whimpered.
Suddenly, his eyes widening, he unleashed a groan the likes of which Hendricks had never heard before—a sound so deep, so uncontrollable, it made her throat close just listening to it.
Somehow, she managed to open her comm unit. “Hendricks to Angie. Something’s wrong with Pandor.”
“What is it?” came the response.
“I don’t know. We’re taking him to the in—”
Before she could finish, Pandor arched his back and let out another groan—even worse than the first, more grinding and more desperate. Only Cody’s grip kept Pandor from falling backward.
“Screw the infirmary!” Cody barked, loud enough to be heard over Hendricks’ comm link. “We need a portable here on the double!”
Pandor’s hands clutched clawlike at his chest, his face caught in a rictus of agony. He seemed desperate to say something, to tell them what he was feeling, but his words appeared to catch in his throat.
Help him, Hendricks thought.
As if to reinforce her plea, a shriek erupted from Pandor’s lips. And in the same moment, Hendricks noticed something dark and red bloom between the man’s hands—a stain that looked too damned much like blood.
As if he had stabbed himself. But that’s impossible, she insisted. Pandor’s hands were empty of tools—and he couldn’t have ripped himself open with just his bare hands.
“What the hell—?” said Cody, his voice low and disbelieving.
At the same time, Pandor’s tunic ripped open, and something emerged from his chest in a geyser of blood. Hendricks found herself scrabbling backward across the grass, not even sure how she got down there.
The thing that had come out was blotchy with gore, so it was hard to make out any details. But it looked to Hendricks like a mound of flesh. With teeth.
A head, she thought, mesmerized.
But not a human head. Something serpentine, or aquatic maybe. She was reminded of a killer whale she had seen in a vid once, though this thing looked infinitely more vicious.
It seemed to scan its surroundings for a moment, get its bearings. Then it ripped free of Pandor altogether, a short thick body trailing behind it, and skittered off into the underbrush.
Leaving Hendricks gaping, her heart pounding, her hands shaking. Cody, who was hard to rattle, had withdrawn from Pandor as well, and he looked grimmer than she had ever seen him.
“What was that?” he breathed.
Hendricks wished she could tell him. But with the tears welling up in her eyes, she could barely even see him.
Wiping them away with the heel of her hand, she made her way over to Pandor on all fours. She found him lying on his back, the sun reflected in his staring eyes. The horrors of his travail were still evident in his expression.
And there was a hole in his chest the size of a man’s fist, with a couple of bloody, cracked ribs protruding from it like the shoots of an exotic plant. Hendricks felt her gorge rise and ran into the bushes to discharge her last meal.
As if from a distance, she could hear Cody addressing his comm unit. “Phil,” he said, his voice heavy and mournful, “would you answer me, please? Phil … ”
Hendricks was grateful for one thing: she wasn’t the one who had to give Philipakos the news.
* * *
By the time Philipakos reached the control center, the cargo hauler was within an hour of the colony.
“Still no word from them? he asked Shepherd.
“Nothing,” the safety officer confirmed. “And I didn’t want to speak for the colony.”
“Allow me, then,” said Philipakos.
Sitting down behind a workstation, he sent out a standard overture. For nearly a minute, there was no response. Then the room filled with a strange voice.
It was feminine, but not at all pleasant. “Botanical colony,” it said, “we read you. Go to visual.”
“This is Domes Epsilon,” he said, switching to a full audio-video array. “Please identity yourself.”
The woman’s features weren’t unattractive. Soft dark eyes beneath gently arched brows, delicate cheekbones and sculpted nostrils, a mouth any man would have found desirable.
But there was also a hardness to her, a bitterness and a resolve that he found intimidating. Not that he would let her see that. As far as she was concerned, he wasn’t scared in the least.
“Are you the one in charge there?” she asked, ignoring his request.
“I am,” he said, doing his best to remain professional.
“You need to open a supply bay to us.”
Shepherd’s expression turned disdainful. He seemed to be asking Who the hell does she think she is?
But it was Philipakos’s job to remain detached in situations like this one. Holding a hand up to calm his safety officer, he resumed his conversation.
“I beg your pardon?” he said.
“You heard me. A supply bay.”
“What’s your business here?” Philipakos asked.
He felt his comm unit buzzing in his pocket, but he ignored it. He had what was clearly a more pressing matter at hand.
“You’ve been exposed to something you don’t understand,” the woman said. “We’re your only hope of surviving it. But you have to do exactly as we say, and you have to do it now.”
He felt her eyes boring into him, fixing him on the spits of their urgency. “I see,” he managed to say. “And to what, exactly, have we been exposed?”
“An alien creature,” she said. “One with an irresistible urge to kill.” She leaned forward slightly. “Any of your people encounter anything odd recently? A big leathery egg, maybe?”
Philipakos felt the blood rush to his face, betraying him.
The woman cursed softly. “Has it opened?”
“What if it has?” he asked uncertainly.
His comm unit continued to buzz. Whatever the problem, it would have to wait.
&nbs
p; “Then,” the woman said, “you’ve got even less time than I thought. The thing in the egg—its job was to latch onto a host body, shove an appendage down its throat, and deposit an embryo into its chest cavity. So one of you is carrying a developing alien inside him.”
“That’s absurd,” Philipakos said.
“You won’t think so when the embryo comes out.”
His eyes narrowed. “What does that mean?”
“It makes its own birth canal,” the woman explained, her mouth quirking on one side in a parody of a smile. “Once you’ve seen it, you won’t forget it. It’s an image that tends to stay with you.”
The colony director swallowed. “No one here is carrying an alien embryo, I assure you. What’s more, I—”
“How do you know?” she interrupted. “Have you checked?”
They hadn’t, of course—why would they? There was that shadow on the resonance screen, though it hadn’t occurred to anyone that it could be an embryonic life form.
“Whatever has happened,” he said, knowing it was an admission that something had happened, “we will take care of it ourselves, with the options we have at our disposal.”
“You don’t get it,” the woman said, a current of anger rising in her voice. “You can’t take care of it. Without our help, all you can do is die.”
“Is she nuts?” Shepherd asked.
Philipakos wanted to believe it, but he couldn’t. She knew too much about what had happened to Pandor.
But he also couldn’t allow himself to trust her. “I’m not going to open my supply bay to a perfect stranger.”
“You already have,” the woman told him. “What you need now are some imperfect strangers.”
Philipakos’s comm unit buzzed on relentlessly, sawing at the edge of his consciousness.
“How do you know what’s happened here?” he asked. “And why are you so interested in helping us?”
She frowned. “We don’t have time for this. You’ve got five minutes to open a supply hatch. After that, we’ll make our own way inside. It’s up to you.”
Philipakos felt his mouth go dry. “You can’t just force your way in here.”
“Can’t we?” she asked.
She wasn’t bluffing—he could see it in her eyes. And haulers like hers had adaptable docking ports, a necessity if they were to trade personnel and materials with the vast variety of vessels they might encounter.
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