“I’ll go get her a bottle and a clean diaper,” he said, and headed for the door.
“Try maternity,” Tyra suggested, and he nodded. Turning back to Atara, she looked for a chair she could pull up to sit beside her daughter’s bed, but the only chair was floating up near the ceiling in the far corner of the room. No point sitting down in zero-G anyway. She stood beside Atara’s bed, stroking her daughter’s hair and answering questions that only a five-year-old would ask.
“Is daddy a murderer?”
“Why would you ask that?” Tyra replied.
“Because he killed the alien with his name.”
“It’s not murder to kill someone if it’s in self-defense. He was protecting you and your sister.”
Atara nodded slowly. “Are the aliens going to come back?”
“We’ll make sure they don’t.”
“How do you know if they got them all?”
“Because Astralis has sensors that can detect every living thing on board. We know exactly how many people there are on the ship.”
“Aliens, too?”
Tyra smiled. “Yes, Aliens, too.”
“I feel like he’s still here, watching me.”
Tyra’s brow furrowed. “When the technician asked you, you said you couldn’t feel him anymore.”
“I did?” Atara asked.
“Yes. It’s just your imagination, honey, don’t worry. Nobody’s watching you.”
Atara nodded slowly and appeared to relax. Her eyelids grew heavy, and her eyes drifted shut. Tyra watched her with a worried frown.
It wasn’t strange that Atara didn’t remember the questions the technician had asked—no one remembered what happened during a mind probe. But what was strange was the discrepancy in her answers during and after the probe. It was supposed to be impossible to lie during a probe. Had Atara somehow defeated that, or had she simply told the truth as she saw it in the moment?
Tyra hoped those feelings of being watched really were just Atara’s imagination.
She glanced at the door, willing the therapist to hurry up. Whoever it was had their work cut out for them.
All of a minute later, the therapist did arrive, as if she’d somehow read the urgency in Tyra’s mind, which was ironic, because this particular therapist actually could read minds.
“It is good to be seeing you again, Tyra.”
“Troo?” Tyra said, looking the Fosak up and down. She was covered in black fur. Prominent fangs protruded from her upper jaw, and huge green eyes blinked as she approached.
Tyra held out her hand in greeting, and Troo offered a three-fingered, two-thumbed paw in exchange. The alien grinned with a mouth full of sharp teeth. Standing on her hind legs, Troo was almost as tall as her.
“It’s been a long time,” Tyra said. “You’re working as a therapist now?” Troo and Lucien had a long history together, but they’d lost touch over the years.
Troo nodded once. “Yes, I is being therapy now. I see that you is being politics.”
“A politician,” Tyra corrected. “Councilor of Fallside.”
Troo nodded, and released her hand. She walked to Atara’s bedside and hissed quietly as she gazed down on Atara. “She is being largeness now. How many years?”
“Five,” Tyra said.
“What happens to her that she is needing to speak with me?”
Tyra explained what had happened, and Troo listened carefully.
“I is needing to touch her mind to feel her pain,” Troo explained.
Tyra nodded her consent. “Do you need me to wake her first?”
“No, that is not being necessary,” Troo whispered as she placed a hand on Atara’s forehead. The alien’s green eyes drifted shut, and she mewled softly.
“There is much anger...”
Tyra nodded, her anxiety mounting. “What else?”
“Pain... hatred... death. Your daughter is deeply troubled...”
Tyra was saddened to hear that. It made sense given what Atara had been through, but she’d hoped the emotional damage wouldn’t be that bad. “What do you think we should do? Erase her memories?”
“We is speaking in a dream now. She says that she is being scaredness... and that she is not being alone.”
“Did she say who is with her?”
“I is asking her...”
“And?” Tyra prompted.
“She says it is Death that is with her, and that he is to be coming for us all.”
Chapter 17
Astralis
Troo spent nearly half an hour working with Atara, during which time Lucien came back with Theola, his police chief’s uniform covered in spit-up.
“Zero-G feeding is not recommended,” Lucien said before she could ask. Then he noticed the furry therapist standing on the other side of Atara’s bed. “Troo? Is that you?”
The alien turned to him with a grin, and he walked over to give her a one-armed hug. Theola took advantage of her proximity to stroke Troo’s fur.
Troo withdrew, hissing, her nose scrunched up, and eyes accusing. “You is being wetness! And you smell like rotten fish.”
“It’s good to see you, too,” Lucien replied, still smiling. He turned and nodded to Atara. “How is she?”
Troo shook her head. “She is not being well. She is thinking someone else is being with her, someone called Death.”
Lucien frowned. “Is that true?”
“I is not feeling any presence besides hers,” Troo replied. “I is thinking it to be a symptom of her trauma, a suggestion that the alien made perhaps.”
“Well, we’ll know soon enough,” Lucien said. “The mind probe will tell us exactly what changed inside her head.”
Troo nodded and pointed to Theola. “What about this one? She is new. Is she to be needing treatment?”
“That’s Theola,” Tyra supplied. Troo had never met her.
Lucien nodded. “She’s still badly frightened.”
“May I?” Troo asked, and extended a paw toward Theola’s forehead.
Lucien nodded, and Theola giggled and squirmed under Troo’s paw. She grabbed it with both hands, and tried to push it away.
“Shhh... be calmness little one,” Troo said as her eyes drifted shut, and Theola subsided. “She is being more resilience, this one.... She is not understanding what she saw, but she is having great fear of the blue ones.”
Troo’s eyes popped open.
“That’s it?” Tyra asked.
Troo nodded. “She is to be fine. Her fear of the blue ones may be giving her nightmares, but I is not thinking there to be any other lasting effects.”
Tyra sighed. “That’s a relief.”
“Thank you, Troo,” Lucien said. “Since when did you become a therapist?”
A comm call trilled in Tyra’s head and the comms icon flashed in the top right of her ARCs. “Excuse me,” she said, and walked by them to the window in the far corner of the room. A curtain of icicles hung from the top of the windowsill, glittering in the sun. Far below, stretched frozen forests and icy lakes. Thankfully, Winterside was cut-off from Fallside by the shield walls that contained the climate zones on Astralis, so none of the chaos from the hull breach had touched the city.
“Acting Chief Councilor Ortane speaking,” Tyra said as she took the call.
“Chief Councilor, this is Doctor Fushiwa.”
“Doctor, any news from Atara’s probe yet?”
“I haven’t checked. I’m calling about an autopsy we performed on one of the aliens. I thought you might want to know what we found.”
“I see. Go on.”
“It might be better if I showed you. Can you meet with me now?”
“I suppose.”
“Good. We’re down in the morgue. Sub Level two of the hospital. I’ll send the location to your ARCs.”
A data transfer request popped up before Tyra’s eyes, and she accepted. The green diamond of a waypoint appeared along a pale green compass/heading indicator bar at the top of her field o
f view.
“Got it. I’ll see you soon, Doctor.”
Tyra turned back to Lucien and Troo. “I’m sorry, I have to go.”
Lucien regarded her with a frown.
“Duty calls. I’m the acting Chief Councilor,” she explained, but somehow that explanation didn’t seem good enough. Lucien nodded and looked away, and Tyra felt her mood darken. What did he expect her to do? Resign in the middle of a crisis?
Shoving those thoughts aside, she went to kiss Atara on the forehead and then kissed Theola on the cheek. She waved goodbye to Troo on her way out.
“Bye,” Lucien said accusingly as she left.
She’d deliberately not said goodbye to him. Despite her best efforts, she was fuming at him all the way down to the morgue. Lucien had this unrealistic, romantic idea about life and marriage, that it should all be one long honeymoon, with them spending every waking minute together, and to the netherworld with mundane concerns like paying for a mortgage or expensive private schools.
She emerged from the elevator and walked down a corridor to the examination room that Doctor Fushiwa had marked on her ARCs. He was waiting for her outside the door.
“Doctor,” she said.
He nodded in lieu of a reply and waved the door open to reveal a room crowded with more doctors in operating gowns—as well as Marine bots and a human sergeant. Everyone was clustered around a steel operating table with a naked blue-skinned being strapped to it.
As they approached the table, the crowd parted to let them in, and Tyra eyed the Marines, wondering what they were doing there.
She turned her attention to the dead Faro. Anatomically, the alien had no visible genitalia, but the body looked male in terms of its shape and musculature. “What is it you wanted me to see, Doctor?”
“This.” Doctor Fushiwa took a scalpel from one of his colleagues and ran it across the alien’s chest. The skin flayed open and black blood oozed out. Silvery bones peeked out at Tyra, and she frowned, wondering what they were made of. While she was wondering about that, the wound sealed itself before her eyes.
Tyra jumped back from the table, and her eyes darted to the alien’s face, expecting to see its eyes pop open.
But nothing happened.
She blinked and shook her head. “How did he do that?” And right on the heels of that question came another: “He’s alive?”
“He wasn’t when we began the autopsy,” Doctor Fushiwa explained. “He woke up with his chest open and started screaming. We had to induce a coma for our own safety, but we’re having to administer high doses of three different sedatives in order to keep him under.”
“You’re saying he was dead, but then he somehow resurrected himself?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure he really was dead? What was the cause of death?”
“We assumed that he bled out from all the bullet wounds, but by the time he got here, those wounds had sealed, and the bullets had been pushed out.”
Tyra shook her head. “By what?”
“Their blood appears to be filled with billions of microscopic machines.”
“Nanites,” Tyra said.
“Yes.”
“Then the Faros are actually bots?”
“They’re genetically-enhanced cyborgs as near as I can tell. The level of biological and mechanical integration is astounding, far beyond anything we’ve been able to manage.”
“Well, that explains the lack of genitalia,” Tyra said, nodding to the alien’s crotch.
“Yes,” Doctor Fushiwa replied with a grim smile. “It also explains why they don’t wear any visible technology, yet seem to receive all the benefits of doing so.”
“Have you found a power source? It must be very dense for them to be able to shoot bolts of plasma from their hands and have such strong shields.”
“The power source is more or less where you’d expect to find our heart and lungs.”
“So they don’t have a heart and lungs?” Tyra asked.
“They do have something analogous to a heart, but smaller. It circulates their conducting fluid, which doubles as coolant to keep them from overheating. And they do have a kind of lung, but they don’t breathe in and out as we do—they circulate air constantly with a turbine, and they don’t appear to require oxygen or any other type of atmosphere. Their air circulation system seems to be part of a secondary cooling system.”
“They sound more like bots than organics to me,” Tyra said.
“Indeed, that may well be the case.”
Tyra jerked her chin to the Faro on the table. “How did you learn all of that if the subject woke up while it’s chest was open?”
“We did have about ten minutes to examine the alien’s internal structure before it woke up, and we’ve taken scans since then to model that structure without having to open him again. There are also other autopsies being conducted in other hospitals, and we were able to collate their findings with ours. For example, not all of the patients woke up. The ones who were beheaded, for example, never revived themselves.”
“So the only sure way to kill one of them is to lop off its head.”
Doctor Fushiwa nodded. “That, or to critically damage the power supply in their chests, but to do that you have to get past their breastbone—not an easy feat. We had to use laser scalpels on full power, and it still took us half an hour to cut through.”
“I saw silvery bones when you ran your scalpel through his chest,” Tyra mentioned. “I’m guessing they’re not like our bones.”
“A metal alloy, lightweight and porous, with an extremely strong molecular structure, at least ten times stronger and a hundred times lighter than solid duranium steel.”
Tyra slowly shook her head. “I want a full work-up on the abilities of these aliens. Analyze them for weaknesses. There must be some way to get past their shields besides overwhelming force. We can’t always assume we’ll have them outnumbered.”
“We’re working on it, ma’am,” Doctor Fushiwa said.
“My husband mentioned using one of their own swords to kill them. That might be a good place to start looking for weaknesses.”
The Marine sergeant was the one who replied to that, “We don’t know how those swords work, but they do appear to be able to get past the Faros’ shields—and ours,” he added with a grimace. “Our own razor swords might offer a similar advantage.”
Tyra nodded to the sergeant. “That’s progress. Who’s in charge of reverse-engineering the Faros’ technology?”
“Last I checked, the Marines were, ma’am.”
“I’ll ask Commander Wheeler about it, then.” Tyra redirected her attention to Doctor Fushiwa. “Thanks for showing me this.”
“Of course.”
Tyra’s gaze slid away from his, back to the impassive face of the Faro on the operating table. “Keep an eye on him. I’m going to see about moving the captives to a more secure facility—stasis maybe. We don’t need them waking up and breaking free.”
“Second that,” the Marine sergeant said.
Tyra turned and left, wondering as she went if it wouldn’t simply be safer to cut off all the Faros’ heads and be done with it. She grimaced at the gruesomeness of that thought, but it might be the lesser of evils. One of the most hateful truisms of war is that you have to kill in order to stop the killing.
May the universe have mercy on our souls... were that we had them.
Chapter 18
Astralis
SEVERAL HOURS EARLIER...
Nora Helios ran down the stairs to her basement. Her mag boots were set to grav-mode to keep her feet rooted. Nora had been watching the news when the gravity had turned off, and just a few seconds later she’d seen the fiery hole open up in the sky. She’d known what that meant even before the reporter figured it out.
Upstairs she heard windows exploding as the air pressure in Fallside abruptly dropped with the city’s atmosphere streaming out into space. If she didn’t do something soon, she’d suffocate.
She shut the door, sealing herself in with whatever was left of the air. The room was designed without any ventilation, so would-be abductors couldn’t inject poison or sedatives into the air. Being the director of Astralis’s Resurrection Center was a heavy burden. Enterprising criminals could extort just about anything from anyone if they could find a way to threaten their lives and the backups of their memories and consciousness in the Resurrection Center. Nora was one of the few people with administrative access to those records, so she had to live in a fortress.
Her eyes skipped around her safe room. It was a home within a home: a kitchen, living room, bathroom, bedroom... and to one side of the living room, sat the mirror-smooth golden dome of her own private quantum junction. It was locked down to prevent unauthorized entry, but it would work just fine to jump her away in an emergency.
Nora considered using it now. That would probably be the safest option. With all of the chaos in Fallside, her security team had probably been forced to evacuate the premises.
Bang, bang, bang!
Nora whirled around, eyes wide as she stared at the door to her safe house. Maybe her security hadn’t all left. They couldn’t seriously expect her to open the door so they could ride out this disaster with her. “Who is it?” she demanded.
No answer.
BOOM!
The shiny metallic surface of the door shivered, and glowed a faint, molten orange around the edges.
Nora’s heart started pounding in her chest. “I’m calling the police!” she said. “You won’t be able to get in before they arrive!” It was an empty threat with all of the chaos in the city, but maybe whoever it was would believe her and leave.
Unless it was one of those aliens.
BOOM!
The door shivered once more, and glowed a brighter shade of orange.
Nora shook her head. It was supposed to be impossible to break through that door. The security company had assured her... It didn’t matter. She could sue them later. She turned and ran for her quantum junction, using her ARCs to activate it as she approached. The shiny golden dome of the junction hovered up on four shimmering pillars of light. Underneath that was a black podium with two glowing circles: one red, running around the outer edge of the podium, and a smaller green one inside of that. Nora just had to make it into the green circle and activate the junction...
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