Skull Full of Kisses

by Michael West

  “You’ll think I’m a head case.”

  The doctor chuckled. “I already know you’re a head case. We all are. We’re pissing our lives away out here.”

  “Yeah.” Sean offered up a laugh of his own, but it was a poor attempt, void of any real amusement. “Here’s the thing...This is crazy, but I was just in the cockpit with Lee, and his face looked like a rubber mask. I saw it tear, saw something move around inside his head, like some kind of...some kind of creature.” He cringed as he spoke the word. “It was like Lee was just a costume this thing was wearing, a disguise, like it was spying on me. I could feel it looking at me, not with Lee’s eyes, but with eyes behind his eyes.”

  They regarded each other a moment.

  Edwards was first to break the silence, “That’s the craziest Goddamned story I’ve ever heard in my life.”

  Sean’s mouth went dry. “It looked so real.”

  “Bullshit.” The doctor pointed at him. “If you thought it was real, you would’ve gone on the com system, announced it to everyone instead of walking in here to talk to me. Besides, I sat across from Lee at breakfast this morning, and if he was some kind of alien, I think I would’ve noticed.”

  Sean ran his left hand over his mouth and chin. “So I’ve lost all my marbles, and Lee is just...Lee.”

  “Lee’s fine,” the doctor assured him.

  “Thank God,” Sean whispered, exhaling as if he had held his breath for a very long time.

  “And you’re not crazy,” Edwards went on to say.

  Sean raised his eyebrow.

  “We both know what it takes to make it onto one of these flights,” the doctor said. “You don’t work for Nova or anybody else unless you’ve passed all the genetic and psychological testing.”

  He listened; relaxed a bit.

  “Sean, did you know that if your great-great-aunt on your mother’s side had the genetic marker for stuttering, you wouldn’t be here right now.”

  He looked at the doctor.

  Edwards nodded. “I’m serious.”

  Sean laughed, a nervous, relieved chuckle.

  “I’d chalk it up to stress,” the doctor told him, “but you can’t be under any more stress than the rest of us. The damn ship runs itself. Something happen on that asteroid yesterday?”

  “I don’t know...” Sean shrugged, feeling the dull throb in his shoulder become a stabbing pain. He winced. “I think I pulled a muscle working on the rig. Hurts like hell.”

  The doctor stood and walked over. He touched the side of his visor. “When did you first notice it?”

  “This morning.”

  “Before you saw that monster in Lee’s head?”

  Sean nodded. Hearing the doctor say it like that...it sounded so ridiculous, so far-fetched.

  Edwards hit his visor button again, switched to a different type of scan. “And you’ve had that prosthesis of yours for...what?—six years now?”

  “Yeah.” Sean had a sudden, frightening thought. Could the pain be a signal that, after all these years, his body was rejecting this foreign apparatus?

  The doctor nodded and moved away, walked to the monitor on the back wall. Sean could see the man’s face reflected in the screen. It looked somehow distorted, as if the glass was a funhouse mirror. “Besides your little fieldtrip with Carla, when was the last time you worked in natural gravity?”

  “I don’t know...six years ago, I guess. On Titan.”

  “Ahuh.” He touched the screen, initiated a download from his visor into the system. Images strobed on the large monitor: bones, shadowy ribbons of tissue, bright bolts and wires where Sean’s prosthesis had been attached to the sawed-off stump of his surviving right arm. “Well, I think I know what’s causing your pain and your visions.”

  “Don’t keep me in suspense, Doc. What is it?”

  Edwards continued to study the screen. Sean could not make out the small text displayed there, but when the doctor spoke, it almost sounded as if he were reading it aloud. “Fifty years ago, when they perfected artificial gravity, medical officers discovered that prolonged exposure caused people to develop pressure-induced conditions, similar to what deep sea divers experienced on Earth when they were down too long. Today, the technology has been fine-tuned, and the disorder only occurs in a small percentage of people who live and work in space, but the symptoms are clear: manifests as pain in the joints, most commonly the shoulder. Can lead to hand tremors, claustrophobia, and...drum roll, please...delusions.”

  That’s why his reflection still looks so odd in the monitor glass, Sean told himself.

  Edwards went on, “We know what it is. We can treat it. Your world will be much less interesting very soon.”

  “So...what?—I just need to take a pill or something?”

  “Years ago, they’d stick you in a hyperbaric chamber and let you decompress.” The doctor snickered. It was a peculiar sound, distorted, hollow. “Today, all I have to do is give you an injection of Talavera.”

  Edwards turned away from the wall monitor and the blood left Sean’s head. It had not been a trick of the glass. The doctor’s face had changed. It was now a pale, lifeless masquerade, and just as in the cockpit, Sean could sense a presence behind that façade, appraising him.

  “So, let’s get you fixed up,” it said, its speech a twisted impersonation of the doctor’s distinctive voice.

  Fear crawled through Sean, leaving an icy cold in its wake. Part of him was willing to believe this was all a mirage, a side effect of the condition Edwards had just described to him, but there was another voice in his head, the primal voice of instinct, of self preservation, and that voice was telling him this thing was not the doctor, and that he was now in very real danger.

  Sean stood, fighting to maintain his composure. This isn’t real. This isn’t real. This is— “Great...great. I’ve got some things I need to take care of right now, but I’ll come back later and we can—”

  “Sit down, Sean. This’ll just take a second.” The creature opened a drawer in the wall beneath the monitor and reached inside, bringing something out into the light.

  The object was shaped like a gun, but it wasn’t constructed of metal, or plastic, or even ceramic. It appeared to be bone and corrugated tubing, covered over by a thin, gray membrane, a living thing with a latticework of black veins that pulsed and breathed. It was tapered, ending in a wrinkled sphincter that rhythmically constricted, then relaxed. A pink snake slithered out through this opening, an obscene tongue crowned with a long, barbed thorn.

  “What the hell is that?” Sean asked, unable to stop himself.

  “Just relax,” the doctor-thing told him. He acted so calm, as if Sean shouldn’t find anything odd about the writhing thing in his hand. “You won’t feel a thing.”

  It’s a syringe, Sean told himself. That’s all it is. Edwards isn’t behaving strangely because he doesn’t see what I see. He doesn’t share my delusion. He doesn’t—

  He doesn’t know you can see what it really is.

  The creature took a menacing step forward and Sean dove for it without thinking. He grabbed its camouflaged face in his robotic fingers, latched onto its wrist with his human hand, kept its fleshy weapon and alien stinger at bay. He pushed it back, crashed it into the wall monitor, shattered its skull beneath the force of his hydraulic grip. A black, viscous fluid spilled from its torn mask, oozing out between Sean’s metal fingers like used motor oil.

  He released his hold and backed away, staring at the remains with disgust. The Edwards-thing hung there on the wall, arms at its side, suspended by the jagged shards of monitor glass that dug into its ruined cranium.

  While the alien was now dead, there was still life left in its vein-laced tool. The object fell from its master’s dead grasp and landed with a clang on the metal flooring below. Its pink tongue whipped and writhed, its barb searching for a suitable target. Sean couldn’t tell if it was an animal or a device, but when he stomped on it, grinding it beneath the tread of his boot, it let loose
a shrill scream, like the bleat of a dying lamb.

  Sean caught sight of his prosthesis, of his metal fingers covered in dark fluid, and the smell of freshly sheared copper assailed his nostrils, gagging him. He edged away from the body, took a few wobbly backward steps, and bumped into the desk. Sean gripped it like a drowning man latching onto a floatation device, his heart running a marathon as he frantically tried to assess his situation. He could not believe what had happened.

  He’d just killed a man.

  No, his mind corrected, not a man.

  Sean shook his head at the absurdity of it all. He was sick, temporarily insane.

  He forced himself to look at the weapon, to stretch out his human hand and actually feel its soft, slimy surface. It was like caressing an earthworm.

  A pink tendril poked through the weapon’s ruptured side.

  Sean leapt back, pressed himself against the edge of the desk, and watched as a small squid-like animal crawled out onto the floor, a single black eye surrounded by writhing tentacles. He counted them, noting that there were seven, not eight or ten like the animals of Earth.

  Seven.

  Its cyclopean eye rolled from side to side, taking in its surroundings before coming to rest on Sean’s shocked face.

  It shot across the room, those odd-numbered tentacles propelling it, leaving behind a trail of mucus. Sean chased after it and slammed his foot down hard, tried to crush it like a roach, but it was too fast for him. It reached an air vent and slid through the grate into the ducts that catacombed the ship.

  Sean suddenly wished he could talk this over with Doc Edwards, that he could hear the man tell him this was still all in his head, and then it hit him like a cold spray:

  The doc was going to inject that thing into my body.

  When Sean walked in, Edwards had been studying the crew’s medical records. He didn’t find anything odd about that at the time, but now it appeared the alien may have been researching their bodies, trying to make these copies as perfect as possible, or perhaps searching for reasons to call crew members in for an injection.

  If that squid had entered Sean’s body, what would have happened to him?

  There was still so much he didn’t know.

  Sean glanced back at the ruined tool on the floor. Their technology appeared to be constructed of living tissue. If that was the case, then the squid may have been another kind of device, designed to tap into a human brain. Perhaps it could download memories as easily as the doctor’s visor relayed images, memories that could be given to the alien who would later pose as Sean.

  The vision of a beast in Sean’s clothing walking up to Carla flashed in his mind, and he shuddered.

  An extra lab coat hung on the wall beside the monitor. Sean used it to wipe the dark, sticky fluid from his prosthesis. When he was done, he tossed it to the floor, his face twisted in a grimace of repulsion.

  A section of frosted glass slid open, then closed tight behind him. Sean realized he had to make sure that the door could not be re-opened, that no one else could get in to find the doctor’s body. Acting quickly, he turned and put his metallic fist through the control panel. He saw a bright flash, felt a powerful jolt course through his body, and was thrown across the room. He landed near the hatch, his prosthesis smoking.

  Jesus, that was stupid. Still dazed, Sean managed to roll onto his knees. He tried to reach out for one of the beds, but his metallic arm was now limp, useless, heavy. Great. Just...fucking brilliant.

  Sean used his left hand to pull himself up, held onto the foot of the bed until the room stopped spinning, then staggered into the thin corridor beyond the hatch.

  ***

  Sean ducked beneath a bulkhead, fear propelling him down the access tunnel. Ambrosia’s lower levels were like a maze of mineshafts, dimly lit by the miles of fiberoptic cable that lined the walls. The ceilings were low, and the corridors just wide enough for a single technician or repair droid to slide through. He slowed as he approached each intersection, afraid of what might be lurking around the next bend.

  He was close to the engines now; could hear their steady drone, feel their vibrations in the metal of the flooring, the walls, even his prosthesis. The mechanical limb dangled at his right side, its dead weight pulling on his shoulder, sending waves of pain to soak the shores of his reeling brain. He clenched his teeth and wedged his way through an open hatch into the ship’s hold.

  The cargo area was nothing more than a tall hallway. A steady drip of condensation from coolant pipes left bumpy, reddish-brown patches of corrosion across its walls and floor. Overhead, supplies hung like stalactites from the high ceiling, suspended by a complex system of pulleys, wires, and chains.

  Sean wasn’t surprised to find Sanderson among these cartons and tools. The quartermaster occasionally bunked here in the ship’s bowels. And the fact that Sanderson was not really Sanderson didn’t shock him either. If these aliens took over when they were off the ship, it was likely Sean and Carla were the only two human beings left.

  What Sean did find astonishing, however, was the speed in which he was able to identify this new imposter. With Lee and the doctor, it had taken some time to see through whatever hologram or cloak they used to make their suits appear more realistic, but he had known this one at first sight.

  “Hey there,” the Sanderson-thing said.

  Sean raised his left hand and gave a slight wave of acknowledgement.

  The weapons locker was on the opposite wall, on the other side of the alien. Looking at its face, Sean wondered if he could get away with this. Glass eyes, rubber skin. How was he supposed to pretend he didn’t notice? It was going to realize he could see.

  “Feeling better?” it wanted to know.

  “Fine.” Sean strained to put a pleasant smile on his face. “Why?”

  It shrugged. “Lee said you were sick.”

  His grin slipped a bit. “Word spreads fast on this ship.”

  The thing said nothing, and Sean found himself wondering what it was doing there beneath its disguise. He looked down, studied the clipboard it held in its hand. It had been taking inventory, checking to see what types of equipment were stored here in the hold. If you asked the real Sanderson where something was, he would reach out and find it without even looking.

  “Must’ve been something I ate.” Sean forced himself to meet the alien’s eyes. “You know how bad that re-hydrated pizza can be.”

  It stared at him for a moment, uncomprehending, then gave a lame chuckle. “Yeah...yeah, I do.”

  Sean nodded. Sure you do. “Anyway, I saw the doc and he gave me a shot, made me all better.”

  A hidden mechanism pulled at the mask’s rubber lips, forming a satisfied smile that sent chills down Sean’s spine.

  Now it thinks that squid’s inside me, he realized. What was it supposed to do?

  “Glad to hear it.” The Sanderson-thing turned away, going back about its business of cataloging human tools. “So what brings you down here?”

  “Carla’s missing a core sample. Just came to see if Orpheus still had them.”

  “Orpheus?”

  “Yeah, the driller.”

  “Oh, right.”

  It didn’t know the name. It really didn’t know.

  “Be my guest,” the thing told him, pointing over its shoulder. “It’s back there.”

  Sean took a deep breath and made steps toward the arms locker, keeping the creature in the corner of his eye as he passed by. Would it have one of those stingers with it? —Perhaps some other, more lethal bit of alien technology? If it did, it made no move to use them.

  When he reached the locker’s keypad, Sean entered his personal code to open the doors. No alarm would go off, but if they decided to run a report, it would show that he was the last to have access. They appeared to still be learning their way around the ship and its systems, however, so he doubted they would take the time.

  “What are you doing?” the Sanderson-thing asked, its synthetic voice curious but ste
rn.

  Sean stopped. He glanced at the rock climbing equipment on the wall beside him, finding a blue-handled pickaxe. He reached for it, yanked it from its perch, and whirled around—driving the spike through this forgery’s ear and skewering the alien within. The thing dropped to its knees, teetered a moment, then collapsed, the pickaxe handle rising like a blue monolith from the oil slick that poured across its rubber face and onto the floor.

  Two down, Sean thought.

  He turned back to the weapons trove; found it loaded with pulse rifles, 9mm handguns, and six drawers of seismic survey charges. A small pushcart sat empty nearby. Sean pulled it to him, filled it in a hurry.

  Carla was waiting.

  ***

  The cafeteria was small, dimly lit by tiny incandescent spots above each of its dozen tables. There had been a running joke among the crew that this lack of light was intentional, so they wouldn’t have to see what they were eating. Each table was a gray metal mushroom, bolted to the floor and surrounded by swivel chairs.

  Sean’s gaze darted to the left.

  Four doppelgangers in the room, two men and two women. Lee was among them. His face was now patched, that window to the squirming, flapping alien within closed up, but he still looked just as counterfeit as he had in the cockpit. The other man was meant to be Copeland, the women Fritz and Montgomery. Montgomery had been sitting with her back toward him, and Sean held the glimmer of hope that she might still be human...until she turned her head. These things were much better at replicating hair than human skin. They sat around their table, huddled over uneaten lunches, conversing in whispers.

  Sean’s eyes flew back to the right, finding Carla. She sat next to the food dispensers, just a few short meters away. He swallowed before entering, the cold metal of a hidden 9mm pistol against his abdomen, providing him comfort.

  The hatch closed behind him with the sound of a striking cobra, attracting the Lee-thing’s attention.

  “Doc fix you up?” it asked.

  Sean offered it a polite nod, then walked over to join Carla, trying his best to act nonchalant. Her tray was empty and she nursed a large cup of Ambrosia’s coffee as she read her technical journal.