Draco looked at the corpse of the canid creature. The tendrils that had burst from the dog’s back were still moving. Two of them had latched onto the leg of a water fountain and the tumorous growth had begun pulling itself from the wound. It pulled itself from the lining of the dog’s carcass with a wet ripping sound. Part of the dog’s skeleton went with the little blobbish creature. The dog’s ribs and backbone had been amalgamated into the creature’s structure.
The little brownish red blob floundered on the ground for a moment before Aloysius fired another super-heated blast at it. The creature disintegrated and immediately the pounding on the door ceased.
“It was already dying. It hadn’t been given enough time to grow,” Aloysius mused.
“Grow? What the fuck do you mean, grow?” Ava asked.
“I think it’s time I told you all what I think is happening here,” Aloysius said.
Chapter Nineteen
Veck waited in the containment cell, eagerly awaiting the arrival of his missing limbs. To his left, the cover of a vent fell to the ground, followed by his two disembodied arms. They crawled along using their fingers. They had come such a long way, and now it was time for them to be returned to their proper place. They passed between the energy bars at the front of the cell and crawled towards Veck.
In tandem, they lifted themselves up and positioned their inputs with the sockets at Veck’s shoulders. The metallic ends of the arms and the sockets made small, intricate, complex movements. Small parts twisted and moved as they lined up with their partnered couplings. Hundreds of tiny moving pins and connections met as the arms linked back up with Veck’s body.
He sighed with relief when he felt the comforting intimacy of the wireless connections becoming hardwired once again. Orders that were sent to the limbs became instantaneous instead of taking nanoseconds to send and receive. He checked his primary systems. They were all operating at optimal capacity.
Veck pressed his hands against the cold metal floor beneath him and pushed upwards, rising from the ground in a way that mocked the law of gravity and the normal skeletal structure of the human body. He landed gracefully onto his feet, then cracked his neck back and forth.
He activated his weapons systems to ensure Draco hadn’t tampered with anything. One arm split apart and became a blade. The other reconfigured itself into an energy blaster. Then he disengaged both weapons systems, and the skin re-formed like nothing hid beneath the surface.
Veck walked through the energy bars and out of his cell.
He strode confidently up the stairs to the armory. The sealed door slid open, just as he knew it would. He had placed a prime program masked as a subroutine into Evie’s programming matrix. She identified him as Captain Goldwing. She could not tell the difference between the two. He could override almost any command given by any other member of the crew if he needed to.
When he stepped into the armory, he was very careful to move as quietly as possible. He wanted to get the jump on whoever he ran into, not the other way around. He left the armory through the infirmary door and visibly retched as his natural gag reflex was triggered by ancient, horrible memories. Hospitals always triggered it, even though the events had happened twenty-five years prior.
The memories came back unbidden.
At the age of twelve Veck Simms was donated to the Alliance military. He had no parents, no future, and had a genetic makeup that the military could use. They kept him in a facility on Torusk until he was eighteen years old, outside of Alliance space.
He didn’t remember exactly what happened there, except that it’s where he received his very first supplementary biomechanical implant. Everything else was a dark mess of tubes, blood and pain. He remembered vividly when they placed the first tube down his throat. When they did it, he was still awake, screaming for them to stop.
He cleared the memory from his mind and attempted to regain his composure. He recoiled when he realized that he had touched the operating table. The urge to be sick rose in his throat again, but he successfully pushed it back down once more.
He closed his eyes and strode out of the infirmary. As he crossed the doorway, he collided with another person. Instinctively he reached out and grabbed his assailant. He opened his eyes to see a wide-eyed girl, no older than eighteen. She wore a green jumpsuit and had mousy brown hair. His hand closed around her throat, and she struggled to breathe. After a few moments, her eyes began to roll back in her head and her eyelids began to twitch.
He knew there was something wrong with him. He didn’t know whether it was a fault in his neurotech implant, or whether something in his mind had finally snapped. For a moment he didn’t want to release his grip on the girl’s throat. He wanted to crush her windpipe and leave her gasping for breath on the ground. He wanted to rip her apart and hear her screaming as he pulled off her arms and unwound her intestines like a length of rope.
He breathed deeply, centered himself and extinguished the bloodlust. He would have more chance keeping the situation under his control if he kept the girl alive. He could use her as a bargaining chip.
“I don’t know what they’ve told you about me, but I guarantee you, the reality is much, much worse,” he said as he eased his grip on her throat.
She gasped for air.
“If you scream, I’ll kill you without a second thought. The only reason you’re still alive is because you could prove useful to me. Do you want to be useful to me?”
She nodded quickly.
“Good girl.” He released his hand from her throat.
She dropped to the ground and held her throat.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“I want what every single person on this ship wants. You want your freedom. I want my freedom. Your good Captain wants to take me back to the Alliance to face my death. I’m just not ready for that. I’ve got so much more work to do. I’m sure you can understand that. I’m sure there are lots of things you want to do before you die, aren’t there?”
She cried. Oh, this one was weak. That was good news.
“If you do what I tell you to do, you’re going to live a long, happy life. If you do anything stupid, I will remove that pretty little head from your shoulders. Understood?”
She nodded, sobbing.
“Now, I want you to take me to the bridge.”
She nodded feebly as he pulled her to her feet.
“What are you waiting for? Move!”
She moved.
In the cockpit, Arak felt utterly useless while Draco and the rest of the crew were on the Metropolis Seven. All he had to do was set a few parameters and sit back in his seat and wait for orders. With the push / pull system he didn’t even need to worry about watching hull pressure, velocity or trajectory.
He was so bored that he had started to watch what was going on down in engineering. Reban and Rhken had been working hard to get all the kinetic energy tethers ready. They were a great team. But as the action started to die down in the engine bay Reban sat back on her recliner and started to read a book that Arak had suggested to her.
They had been on the burn from Torusk for a couple of weeks before they detected to distress signal from the Metropolis Seven, and eventually Arak’s hesitancy to reach to his new crew melted away. He talked to Raze about Old Earth and the cataclysm that caused the Exodus. He trained with Ava and Vynce, and connected with Nook, Rhken and Reban by trying to figure out what made the Icarus tick.
Eventually discussion in the engineering bay turned to books. Nook was an advocate of reading for enjoyment, and Rhken needed no convincing. It was Reban that was the hold out. She insisted that books were a silly throwback to the years gone by, but Arak insisted that they had a certain charm. His enthusiasm was infectious, and Rhken’s disapproving expression was enough to make Reban relent. She said that she would give it a try, even though she didn’t see the sense in reading something written centuries before she was born.
When Arak suggested a novel called Binary, Rhken’s
eyes lit up with excitement. She had read it before and enthused about it, which broke the ice a little with Reban. The novel was ultimately about love that rose above boundaries. It told of a woman named Lyriana who fell in love with a Child of iNet named Claren. The story of their love, and the persecution they both suffered from their individual peoples became legend. The power of their love transcended the physical limitations of their incompatible species.
At first, Reban had laughed and told Arak that she thought it was silly. She thought that any kind of love between partners that was destined to fail was a waste of time. But the enthusiasm from both Arak and Rhken had worn her down.
Arak was not simply watching Reban for her interest in the book he had recommended. He had his own interests in her, and they were not platonic. But he was from a different life – an incompatible life. One full of blood and fury. He was not right for her, and Arak knew that Nook would murder him if he acted on the feelings that were developing. He saw a sensitive, thoughtful girl who lived in the shadow of her brilliant sister. If they still lived on New Earth, their roles would be reversed. Reban’s beauty would outshine Rhken’s brilliance.
When it was obvious that she had settled in for a long reading session, and Arak felt embarrassment at watching her so intently, he switched his focus to other parts of the ship. First, he viewed the camera facing backwards from the back of the ship. The kinetic energy tethers held them securely to the Metropolis Seven. Behind the ship was the burning planet and its twin suns that had threatened to destroy them all. They were on their way back to safe space.
He opened another camera view and watched Veck in the containment cell. He saw Veck standing up in the middle of the room, eyes closed, apparently deep in thought. He’d moved from the last time Arak had seen him. Veck had been seated in one position for weeks, and now he was standing. He looked different when he was standing. Why the change? Why now?
It was when Rhken got up from her terminal and walked towards the cargo bay that Arak realized that Veck had suddenly sprouted arms. Draco had locked those away, and now Veck had them back. Something very wrong was happened.
Arak immediately put the bridge in emergency lockdown. Heavy reinforced doors slammed down on either side of the entrance. Not even Evie could override this command, and it would take hours for a sunstorm welder to cut through the thick steel. The bridge could only be opened from the inside.
But that meant that Nook, Reban and Rhken were locked out too. Arak looked back at the video stream from the containment area and Veck’s cell was empty.
They were now trapped in the ship with the worst mass-murderer in human history, and he was free.
Arak attempted to open a comm channel to Draco as Veck marched Rhken towards the bridge, but the channel that he had used before couldn’t be found.
Instead, he opened a channel to the rest of the ship.
“Attention all crew members of the Icarus, Veck Simms has escaped from his cell. Repeat, Veck Simms has escaped from his cell!”
A message appeared on his terminal.
Broadcast blocked.
All broadcasts must be authorized by the Icarus’s new Captain: Veck Simms.
Chapter Twenty
Draco and the rest of the crew left the corpses of the two canid creatures and continued down the corridor that led into a crew lounge. There was no sign of violence here. None of the vent covers in the ceiling had been breached, but the crew members all kept a careful distance from them. It was a rare moment of respite. Draco sat down first with an audible sigh. They’d bitten off more than they could chew. The rest of the crew followed his example. Aloysius remained standing in the middle of the room and Jaxon leaned against the far wall, behind him.
“Out with it, Al. Tell us what’s really going on here,” Draco said.
“There is an alien presence on this ship,” Aloysius said.
“I’m sure we can all agree on that,” Draco said.
“From what we have seen, the organism can somehow harness living flesh to create its own form. We have seen the smaller creatures made from different parts of the human crew. I personally saw individual creatures made from a hand, a head and a leg of a human being,” Aloysius said.
“I am damn sure I saw a mutant vagina coming towards us back in the engine bay. It was all flaps of skin and tentacles. Fucking gross,” Ava said.
“Must have been like looking in the mirror,” Vynce muttered.
Ava promptly smacked him around the back of the head with the butt of her rifle.
“I didn’t see you complaining,” she said.
“Are you two done?” Draco asked.
He’d known that the sexual tension between Vynce and Ava would bubble over sooner or later, so the confirmation didn’t surprise him. While he didn’t have a problem with his crew letting off a little steam together, he didn’t want it to affect their effectiveness
“We certainly are,” Ava replied and shot Vynce a look that could have melted steel.
“Getting back to the issue at hand, I noticed that no two creatures were the same. They share similar characteristics, but they were not identical in form. This means that the process of transformation from human to other can differ on any number of factors. Perhaps it depends on the genetic makeup of victim, the rate of growth and the place of infection,” Aloysius said.
“Infection? What the hell do you mean infection?” Vynce asked.
“It is undeniably apparent from my observations that something has infected the crew of this ship and has commandeered their organic mass to propagate themselves.”
Jaxon stepped forward. He took his helmet off with a short, sharp hiss. He put it down on the table in between two couches.
“They’re not infected, at least not in the viral sense of the word,” he said, “They’re hosts.”
Aloysius motioned for Jaxon to continue.
“As I’m sure you’re all aware by now, I don’t belong here. You’re probably all wondering where the hell I came from, and why I know who you are. I owe you all answers. If you were to look in the Alliance military records right now, I would not exist. I probably won’t exist in their records for a few years until I enlist as a grunt. Before I boarded Metropolis Seven for the first time, I was just a street kid. I was and still am still stuck on this ship.”
“So are we buddy, but you don’t look like a kid,” Vynce quipped.
Jaxon smiled. He looked at Vynce and addressed him directly.
“Vynce, I want you to imagine for a moment that time is a straight line, but it has hundreds of strands like woven fabric. Kind of like a super highway on New Earth. There are hundreds of vehicles travelling in the same direction, but in different lanes, and everyone has somewhere they need to be. They’re all branching off in different destinations because everyone’s going somewhere different. You can go forward, but what if you need to turn around and go backwards to a place you’ve already been? Imagine trying to get back to your original destination in the same place in the same traffic that you were in the first time you drove down the highway. It’d be impossible, right?”
“Yeah,” Vynce said.
“What if, when you got back into the original flow, you pulled out in front of someone and got into an accident?”
Vynce took a moment to consider this, then spoke, “You’d have a hell of an insurance claim on your hands.”
Jaxon smiled and said, “You’d mess it all up. You might kill a few people, you might inconvenience a couple of others, and you’d make a whole lot of them late for whatever important things they had to get to. But what effect does that have on everything? Things don’t happen in the same sequence that they did originally, and then things start to get complicated for everyone involved.”
“Get to the point,” Draco said.
“My point is that I shouldn’t be here because I am already here. I boarded Metropolis Seven as a seventeen-year-old kid from the fringe worlds who had dreams of getting out and exploring the galaxy. I ha
d just arrived on New Earth, and after starving on the streets for six months I took the only job I could find. Part of the maintenance crew on this ship. I was told that if I served my term on the ship, I could line up for any job I wanted when I got back. The problem is that I am obviously not seventeen years old, nor do I have the stars in my eyes. I’ve seen far too much of them.”
“That’s impossible,” Raze said.
“Is it?” Jaxon asked.
“Time travel is impossible. Or even if it is possible, it’s pointless. Everything that has happened is what will happen. You can’t go back and change things that have already happened.”
Jaxon sighed. “Woven threads, Raze. People expect time to happen in this linear progression of events, because that’s how most of us experience it. This isn’t the first time I’ve met you, but it looks like this is the first time any of you have met me. This is the difficulty of living in multiple time periods. I lose track of things, but I assure you I’m telling the truth.”
Ava took of her helmet with a smooth hiss and looked Jaxon square in the eye.
“Are you seriously expecting us to believe this shit?” she asked.
“Oh… Ava,” he said and smiled.
“What?” she spat.
“You… look different than I remembered.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
Jaxon waved his hand in front of himself and said, “There are two things you need to know right now. The first is that my seventeen-year-old self is on this ship, and I don’t know what will happen if we come into contact with one another and interact.”
“Can you give us the worst-case scenario?” Draco asked.
“The fabric of space and time could collapse in on itself. I’m carrying enough chronal radiation on me that it could change my own future and create a paradox.”
“Is that likely?”
“It’s never happened before, but I plan on safeguarding us as best as I can. When we run into my younger self you need to keep my identity a secret. As far as you’re all concerned, my name is Reinhardt.”
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