New Cthulhu 2: More Recent Weird

by Elizabeth Bear

  Cynthia nodded tersely, lips thin. “I didn’t say it was a good idea.”

  Hester looked like she wanted to say something else, but Wandrei called her over. Cynthia stayed where she was, not wanting to intrude on an Arkhamer conversation.

  Although . . . was Fiorenzo an Arkhamer? Cynthia’d learned enough to recognize the names of the Arkhamer ships—all of them named for one of the nine which originally set out from Earth—and Fiorenzo wasn’t one of them. But Wandrei called her Doctor Fiorenzo, and she’d introduced herself the same way—Julia Filomela Fiorenzo. No “Jarmulowicz” or “Burlingame” or “Dubois.” So either she wasn’t a Arkhamer—whom the Arkhamers treated like an Arkhamer, and Cynthia wasn’t buying that for a second—or she was an Arkhamer and her ship had disowned her.

  Well, gosh, Doctor Feuerwerker. I wonder why.

  Her ship had disowned her, but Wandrei hadn’t—and Cynthia remembered the comments about Wandrei getting in trouble, remembered the President’s suspicions, and knew that, yes, Wandrei had brought them out here, not on a mission of mercy, but to check in on Fiorenzo’s experiments. Experiments which the rest of the Jarmulowicz Astronomica did not know about, or at least did not know were still on-going.

  Sweet merciful Buddha of the Breathsucker, Cynthia thought and looked down to discover that she’d wandered over much closer than she’d meant to get to the dissection table where Fiorenzo had been working when they came in.

  The creature on it had once been human. It should not still be alive.

  Or possibly it wasn’t. She twisted her head, forcing her gaze away from the wet holes where the thing’s face had been, and found Major Ngao watching her. Watching? Staring at? Staring through? She had to squeeze her eyes shut and bite down hard on her lip to keep the bubble of hysteria from escaping, and when she opened her eyes again, she was staring down at the dead, twitching creature’s chest.

  Where, under the blood, the words Free Ship Calico Jack were still, just barely, legible on the scraps of its uniform.

  Cynthia stepped back, a big over-dramatic step that caught everyone’s attention, Fiorenzo’s voice dying in the middle of a sentence: “the bodies just aren’t fresh enough. I need—”

  “Doctor Feuerwerker?” Wandrei said, with that nasty snide tone that every teacher in the universe used when they’d caught you not paying attention in class.

  Cynthia opened her mouth, without the least idea what was going to come out—and more than half convinced it was going to be, There’s nothing to ensure freshness like harvesting them yourself, is there, Doctor Fiorenzo? But some remnant of self-preservation interfered, and what she said was:

  “How did the Charles Dexter Ward die?”

  “What?” Fiorenzo said; Wandrei was frowning. Cynthia repeated the question.

  “Oh. There was . . . the mirror broke,” Fiorenzo said with a vague gesture. “And the doppelkinder came. They killed the crew and the ship.”

  “How did you escape?” Meredith asked, wide-eyed.

  “Luck, I think,” Fiorenzo said with a shrug that almost looked like a spasm, and a bitter laugh. “I was the pathologist, and I was in the morgue when it happened. I think they just couldn’t smell me. And you know they don’t last very long.”

  Yes, like homicidal mayflies. They rarely lasted more than a few hours after they’d killed their primary host. Cynthia nodded and did not—did not—look at the dissection table. “And you’ve been here ever since?”

  Fiorenzo offered a sad, slanted little smile. “There’s been nowhere I can go.”

  Fiorenzo wanted, she said, to transfer her most promising experiments to the Jarmulowicz Astronomica. As she and Wandrei and Meredith started a discussion of how that might be accomplished, Hester caught Cynthia by the arm and dragged her grimly out into the hallway, still within the light of Fiorenzo’s rigged operating theater, but well out of earshot.

  There Hester stopped and leaned into Cynthia’s helmet again. “She’s lying.”

  “About what?” Cynthia said, her mind still stuck blankly on that poor twitching thing strapped down on Fiorenzo’s operating table.

  “Doppelkinder can’t kill a boojum. They won’t even go after one. Boojums don’t recognize their own reflections.”

  “Wait. What?”

  “Doppelkinder hunt in mirrors,” Hester began with exaggerated patience.

  “Not that,” Cynthia said. She’d been terrified of doppelkinder since her first Civil Defense class when she was five. “Boojums don’t see themselves in mirrors?”

  “Two-dimensional representations don’t mean anything to them. Cheshires are the same way.” Hester managed a smile, although it wasn’t a very good one. “That’s why there’s that folk saying about how you can’t fool a cheshire. The most cunning optical illusion ever created won’t even make them twitch.”

  “And doppelkinder are dependent on optical illusions,” Cynthia said, finally catching up to what Hester was trying to say.

  “They don’t eat people’s eyes for the nutritional value.”

  “Right. But if the doppelkinder didn’t kill the Charles Dexter Ward, what did?”

  Hester folded her arms and gave Cynthia a flat obdurate stare. “I think she did.”

  “Fiorenzo?” Cynthia spluttered a little, then caught herself and regrouped. “Not that I don’t believe she would do it in a heartbeat, but why? Why the boojum, I mean? And for the love of little fishy gods, how?”

  Hester’s gaze dropped. “You were supposed to talk me out of it. It’s a crazy idea, and I know it’s because I’m jealous.”

  “Jealous?”

  “If Professor Wandrei had even once shown this kind of interest in my work . . . ” She trailed off, her face twisting.

  “I understand,” Cynthia said and dared to offer Hester’s shoulder a clumsy pat. “But, Hester, I don’t think you’re wrong. I’m pretty sure she killed the crew of that little scavenger ship.” And she told Hester about the uniform.

  “We have to tell Professor Wandrei,” Hester said, taking a step back toward Fiorenzo’s little island of lunatic light.

  This time it was Cynthia who caught hold of Hester’s arm. “Do you really think he doesn’t know?”

  She hated herself a little for the sick expression on Hester’s face, the knowledge that she, Cynthia Feuerwerker, had just opened her mouth and killed something irreplaceable.

  Hester said, barely whispering even though they were still helmet-to-helmet, “What should we do?”

  Cynthia opened her mouth to say, What CAN we do? and all but physically choked on her own words. Because that was how war crimes happened. That was how you ended up a future-ghost on a Arkhamer ship with the lines of a scowl bitten so deep in your face you never really stopped frowning.

  And Hester was watching her hopefully. Hester, knowing what she’d done, was still willing to believe that Cynthia would do the right thing.

  Cynthia took a deep breath. “If she killed the Charles Dexter Ward, how did she do it? I mean, you and Wandrei said there were only two ways, and she clearly didn’t cut him to pieces, so . . . ?”

  “She must have rigged some kind of galvanic motor,” Hester said. “If she hooked it up to the UPS—and a hospital ship would have to have one, even a liveship—that would take care of the power requirements . . . ”

  Cynthia got a good look at the wideness of Hester’s eyes before she realized that here in the dark corridor, even with their helmets leaned up together, she shouldn’t have been able to make out the details of her friend’s expression. Hester stepped back slowly, her features revealed more plainly as Cynthia’s shadow no longer fell across her face. Cynthia forced her gaze to the right.

  All along the passageway, bioluminescent runners were crawling with unexpected brilliance. Fiorenzo had reanimated the Charles Dexter Ward.

  “Aw, shitballs,” Hester said.

  Part Three

  Looking away from the light that showed the Charles Dexter Ward was no longer entirely dead wa
s as hard as opening a rusted zipper. But Cynthia did it, and didn’t let herself look back. She pulled Hester a little further down the corridor and said, “Now we really need to know how she killed him. And whether it’ll work a second time.”

  “It should,” Hester said. “Whatever force is animating him, a big enough shock should disrupt it. We just have to find her machine.”

  “I like your use of the word ‘just.’ Something like that—would it be portable or not?” The Charles Dexter Ward’s bioluminescence was continuing to ripple and pulse in an arrhythmic not-quite-pattern that was like nothing Cynthia had ever see a boojum do before. It was already giving her the mother of all headaches, and if it was a reflection of the Charles Dexter Ward’s state of mind, then she couldn’t believe it was a good auspice.

  “One that could kill a boojum? Definitely not.”

  “So wherever she built it, that’s where it is. But how do we find it? It’s a boojum—how do we even look?”

  “Um,” said Hester and tugged Cynthia another few steps away from Fiorenzo’s lab. “The closed stacks have a schematic. Professor Wandrei said not to share it with—”

  “Outsiders,” Cynthia finished wearily, and Hester ducked her head like a reproved child. And of course the Arkhamers had a second, inner archive to which Cynthia had not been given access. It was their secrets that kept them alive and independent. “It’s okay. You don’t have to—”

  “No, at this point it’s only stupid and self-destructive,” Hester said. “Here.”

  Cynthia’s heads-up was filled with a spidery green constellation: the human-scale paths through the Charles Dexter Ward. She had only a moment to appreciate them before her pressure suit ballooned taut and a sudden sharp pressure in her ear canals distracted her. Reflexively, she opened her mouth and closed her eyes—every spacer knew and feared that sensation—but it was just a pressure fluctuation, not a hull breach. She closed her mouth again and blew until her ears popped.

  When she opened her eyes, Hester was looking at her, head swaying in relief. “Good idea, staying suited.”

  Cynthia took a tentative breath and gagged. The reek of putrescence that had poisoned every breath since she stepped through Charlie’s airlock was thick enough to taste now, and she wasted thirty seconds re-checking her perfectly functioning suit seals. “By Dodgson’s blessed camera,” she swore, then belatedly realized she didn’t know how Hester felt about taking sacred names in vain. “I think that took a year off my life.”

  “So long as it’s just one,” Hester said. She ran a gloved hand up one of Charlie’s dead interior bulkheads, tracing the rippling patterns of necroluminescence. Her fingers found an indentation, and Cynthia could see her face screw up with disgust through the bubble of the helmet. When she pushed in, her glove vanished to the knuckles. Charlie’s flesh made a squelching sound.

  Hester hooked and ripped; mucilaginous strings of meat stretched and rent. She tossed a panel to the deck; it rang like ceramic. Behind, a cavity lined with readouts and conduits lay revealed. Hester, wincing, reached for a small rack of what Cynthia recognized as wireless connectors. She tugged one loose, made a face, and—before Cynthia could decide that she really ought to stop her—slotted it into a jack on her suit.

  “Hester—”

  “Shush,” Hester said. “I spend enough time researching the damned things. A dead one shouldn’t bo—oh.”

  “What?”

  “Run.”

  They ran. Suits rustling and rasping, booted feet thudding dully on the decking. Off to the left, something scurried. Cynthia’s head snapped around, but Hester put a hand on her arm and pulled.

  “Tove,” she said.

  Normally, you would never see a tove on a boojum, but Charlie’s death had strained the fabric of space-time, making inter-dimensional slippage easier, and a dead boojum could not eat its own parasites as was their usual habit. Cynthia thought about the shattered ward-mirror, intended to defend against nastier creatures than toves: doppelkinder, raths, and other predators. It worked because it reflected nothing but the Big Empty—even at dock, those warped enormous mirrors wouldn’t reflect on a human scale and thus could not be exploited by doppelkinder, just as they blinded raths. Mirrors were not standard equipment on all ships, but for a hospital ship like Charlie they were an extra line of safety. Charlie broke it dying, she guessed. Fiorenzo had invented the doppelkinder—who didn’t hunt boojums and who would never have left Major Ngao’s eyes intact—as an alibi.

  Then she heard something else, not the scuttling of a tove, but a wetter sound, a bigger sound. She didn’t have the strength of will not to glance back, and there, barely illumiated by Charlie’s twitchy necroluminescence, she saw human silhouettes, a reaching arm with the remains of an Ambulance Corps uniform, the glare of an eyeball in a half-skinned face.

  Hester swung through a hatchway, pulling Cynthia with her, and slammed the emergency plate located behind glass on the other side. A blast door dropped with decapitating force. If the Charles Dexter Ward were to be hulled, it was in the interests of crew and ship that pressure doors should guillotine any unfortunate they caught. It was a case of one life for many, and spacers learned not to stand in doorways.

  “That won’t keep them for long,” Hester panted. “But we can stop for a second.”

  Cynthia tried to slow her breathing, to get more use out of her canned air. “Where in the nine names of Hell did they come from?”

  “Charlie opened a door,” Hester said.

  Cynthia squinted, but that didn’t make what Hester was saying make any more sense. “I’m missing some context—”

  Hester tapped Charlie’s connector, plugged into her opposite forearm jack. “I’ve got access to his logs, and I think . . . I think he didn’t like Fiorenzo killing his crew, because it’s pretty clear from the logs that she was. I think that’s why she electrocuted him. But the reanimated crew was killing the living crew, and she doesn’t seem to be able to control what she makes. So she lured them into a vacuum bay and sealed the door—”

  But vacuum can’t kill things that are already dead.

  “Charlie let his crew out,” Cynthia said.

  Hester nodded, the boojum’s crawling green and violet necro-luminescence rippling across her corneas and the bubble of her suit. “He can open any door I override. And they’re probably not very . . . safe. Anymore.”

  “No,” Cynthia agreed. “Not safe.” Her throat hurt. She made herself stop swallowing and worked enough spit into her mouth to say, “We’d better keep moving. We have to find Fiorenzo’s device. Before her mistakes find us.”

  Part Four

  “She said she was in the morgue,” Cynthia muttered.

  “What?” Hester said, distracted by shooting the rotting hand off their lead pursuer.

  “Doctor Fiorenzo. She said when it happened, she was in the morgue. And she was the pathologist. If she was going to hide something anywhere, she’d hide it there.”

  “I imagine you didn’t get too many people dropping in for a friendly chat,” Hester said. “So where’s the morgue from here?”

  By the time Cynthia had enough breath to reply—running in a pressure suit was no picnic, and although Fiorenzo’s reanimated corpses weren’t very fast, they were undistractable and relentless—Hester had found the answer herself. “One up and two over. Okay then.”

  Cynthia had spent time on a handful of boojums—as passenger, as crew, that last nasty week on the Richard Trevithick as a prisoner—and there was no standard system of orientation. Some boojums had no internal signposts at all; unless the captain gave you the schematic, you were dependent on a crew member to guide you around. The Charles Dexter Ward was probably the best and most thoughtfully labeled boojum Cynthia had ever seen, and even so it was essentially markers to help you plot your position on a gigantic imaginary three-dimensional graph, onto which Charlie only problematically mapped.

  But it was better than nothing.

  And it was better tha
n being torn apart by these mindless, malevolent things that Fiorenzo had created out of what had once been men and women. And surely, Cynthia thought, remembering the row of symbols on Major Ngao’s uniform, the men and women who deserved it least. She had been appalled by Fiorenzo and afraid of her and a little (admit it, Cynthia) envious, but now she began to be truly angry. Not at the pursuit of forbidden knowledge, but at the wanton destructiveness.

  “Up is good,” Hester panted beside her. “The ladder’ll take them longer.”

  “I just wish it would stop them,” Cynthia said. “Or that anything would.” Thus far, though they’d kept ahead of the reanimated, they hadn’t managed to lose them—certainly not to stop them.

  “Here,” Hester said. The ladder was stainless steel dulled with Charlie’s slow decomposition; Hester had to override the hatch at the top with Cynthia crammed against her lower legs to avoid the frustrated grabs of the reanimated beneath them.

  Hester helped Cynthia through the hatch and they slammed it closed again. Then they took off running—two shambling scientists pursued by more shambling corpses than they could stop to count.

  The morgue, when they found it, was long and low and cold—and all too obviously the right place. It crawled with the same decayed-looking light as the rest of the Charles Dexter Ward, but here that light limned empty body bags and open lockers. Cynthia was careful to close and dog the door behind them before they proceeded down the length. Her skin crawled at the idea of locking herself in here, blocking her own route of escape . . . but what waited outside was worse. They’d managed to leave the reanimated behind, but Cynthia had no confidence that that would last.

  They came around a corner to find Dr. Fiorenzo crouched behind an autopsy table, huddling with Professor Wandrei over a gaping hole in the decking. The ragged, ichorous edges framed something that looked like an exposed boojum neural cluster. The former Major Ngao was silently handing Fiorenzo tools. Fiorenzo had a veterinary syringe in her hand, a medieval-looking device with a needle easily four inches long. It was filled with some colorless fluid. Cynthia could make out two more empties on the floor.