by Sara Creasy
The others. The bodies.
They found the first hidden in a bed of fallen vines and splattered with mud. One of the serfs. Finn worked the man’s tool belt loose and took what he wanted, then turned the body over carelessly to raid the backpack. Nearby was another serf, his face turned toward Edie, expressionless, almost peaceful. She dropped to her knees and touched his head. She hadn’t given the serfs a second thought, and she knew no one else would, but this man came from somewhere, had a past, maybe had hopes and dreams if the tranqs hadn’t knocked it all out of him.
His e-shield generator was damaged beyond repair and the battery pack was leaking. She clipped it onto her belt and pried the water torch out of his clenched fist.
She caught a glimpse of the BRAT through the undergrowth, a towering gray giant, its featureless casing mostly free of growth, since there was nothing for moss or vines to cling to. In the opposite direction, a body had been thrown into the undergrowth by the force of the blast. Only the torso was visible, but she recognized it as Zeke.
His body twitched.
“Zeke’s alive!” she yelled at Finn, who was trudging through mud to reach the body of the third serf. Kristos was nowhere to be seen.
Zeke’s shield hissed and flickered, its integrity breached. They had to get him out of there, and fast, before the cyphviruses found him and changed him. Even as Edie processed that thought, she knew it was too late. Within minutes his body would be invaded, his genome transmitted to the BRAT. The BRAT would redesign his DNA according to its unknown target parameters and send out the retroviral code to make changes. Even if they got him off the planet quickly, his body would be infected by those viruses and he’d die without the very finest Crib medical attention. Probably even with it.
She was too far away to extend her shield around him. And if he was infected, it was too late anyway. He had to be quarantined.
She made her way toward him, climbing over rocks and dragging aside foliage. Finn finished raiding the body of the last serf and followed her.
“Don’t touch him!” he called out, having noticed the spluttering e-shield.
Edie adjusted her shield’s frequency slightly so it could not merge with Zeke’s once she got close enough. Zeke’s limbs were twisted at strange angles, his skin slashed by shrapnel and stones thrown up by the bomb. When she saw the blood soaking through his jacket in patches, she drew a sobbing breath. His e-shield desperately tried to remain online, sparking and cycling. It threw a flickering ghostly aura around his body but his left arm was exposed where the connection had malfunctioned. His head lolled to one side and he wore a huge grin.
Come on in, the jungle’s fine.
Edie forced herself step closer, then recoiled in shock. Zeke’s fingers were gone. No, not gone…the creeper vines on the ground had latched onto his arm and entered his fingertips with wriggling tentacles. The veins under his skin pulsed with life. Not his life, but the life of the plants. They had merged with him, drawing his flesh into themselves.
Finn came up behind her. “It’s happening to one of the others, too.”
Zeke’s body twitched again and he opened his eyes. Bloodshot eyes, huge with surprise.
“You’re not leaving me here, are you?”
“No, Zeke,” Edie said. “I won’t leave you.”
He turned his head to look at his hand. The flesh squirmed with slivers of alien vines that had entered his body.
“Doesn’t hurt.” His breath rasped.
“Zeke, it’s okay. We’ll get you out of here.”
Edie swallowed hard and tried not to look at his arm, his smashed-up chest, his haunted eyes. Whatever it was that had invaded his flesh moved up his forearm and into the muscles of his shoulder, even as she watched. It ate away his hand until the end of the limb was grafted into the surrounding lattice of vines.
“Where’s the kid? Where’s Kristos?”
She couldn’t answer him. Zeke’s shield failed for a full second, then flickered back on. Off again. On.
“Turn off the shield, teckie,” he whispered. “No point wasting it.”
“Cat will be here any minute with the skiff,” she lied.
“Cat…”
The breath hissed out of him and he stared at Edie. Unblinking. His arm quivered briefly with new life.
Finn moved to grab the rifle but Edie stopped him.
“Let me.” She couldn’t bear to see him treat Zeke’s body like he had the others, like a dead animal. She collected the shield pack and rifle and unstrapped Zeke’s spur, trying to hold her tears in check. “He was a good man.”
“If you say so.”
Finn had known the serf handler, the drub, the discipline. She remembered Zeke’s shiny laughing face and his good-natured irreverence, their shared resentment of the Crib, and how she had liked him from the start—even if she could never quite trust him.
As she stood up and turned away from Zeke, her commlink buzzed and stuttered. It was Cat, trying to get a message through. Edie went to answer it, an automatic reaction, but Finn stayed her hand before it reached her belt.
“If she’s responsible for this, or Haller, do we really want to be talking to them now?”
Edie faced him squarely. “She’s our only way out of here.”
“Zeke, Zeke, do you copy?” Cat’s voice came through clearly now.
Finn put his finger to his lips and Edie hesitated. He hit his own commlink.
“This is Finn.”
“What the hell happened down there? I picked up a massive EM pulse in the vicinity. Did you guys get hit?”
“Yeah, flash bomb, masked by a low-level shield. We have multiple casualties. The serfs are dead, and the opteck kid, and Edie.”
He looked Edie in the eye—a warning. She stayed quiet.
Cat was silent for several seconds. “What about Zeke?”
“He’s alive. Badly wounded.”
“Let me talk to him.”
“He’s unconscious.”
Another pause. Then Haller came on the line. The message track indicated he wasn’t on the skiff. Cat must have already dropped him and his team of two serfs at the next megabiosis, but he’d been listening in.
“You said Edie’s dead?”
“That’s right.” Finn’s voice was flat.
“Fuck.”
“She was on the ground setting up the BRAT shielding with the serfs.”
“But your lag ass was clear?”
“I was securing the perimeter with Zeke, doing my job, sir.” His lip snarled on the word. “Everyone inside the perimeter took the hit.”
“Please forgive my lapse in logic,” Haller said, “but isn’t your brain supposed to fry when the cypherteck dies?”
Finn didn’t miss a beat. “You underestimated her. She found a way to disable the leash days ago.”
Haller muttered another oath while Finn drew their attention to more immediate problems.
“The EMP did some damage to our equipment. We’re losing power on our shields, and the commclips will be dead in twenty minutes or less.”
“How long do you have on the shields?” Cat asked.
“Hard to say. I should be able to cobble together enough power to last the two of us until we get out.”
“You’ve got a six-kilometer trek through the jungle hauling Zeke…six hours, at least,” Cat estimated.
“Cat, return for my team first,” Haller said. “We’re only a few meters into the canopy—we’ll climb up and you can winch us out. Then we’ll decide on the best approach for retrieving Zeke.”
There was a pause as Cat considered the order. Clearly, she’d rather come for Zeke first, but there was more chance of success with Haller and two more men helping in that operation.
“Fine, sir. I’ll check in with Captain Rackham. Stand by, Finn.”
“I’ll be here.” Finn flicked off the comm with a humorless grin. He climbed back over to the area where he’d set up the lamps, and gathered the salvaged equipment together.<
br />
“Why pretend I’m dead?” Edie called after him, struggling to keep up. “If they thought I was alive, they’d race back here to save me.”
“No, they’d tell you to fix that shielding on the BRAT and complete the mission, what’s left of it. If the cypherteck is dead, the mission is over. Home time. Much as I want that paycheck, I won’t die for it.”
“They wouldn’t make me do that, not now that it’s clear the rads were here. It’s too dangerous.”
Finn gave her an exasperated look. “There were no rads, Edie. Rads kill the cypherteck. That flash bomb was designed to wipe out an entire team.”
Her breath caught as the truth of his words sank in. “Then it was someone on the crew. Cat, Haller, Rackham, the two engies…who?” As rovers these people had been through a lot together. She didn’t want to believe they’d betray each other.
“Don’t forget the cook,” Finn added. He couldn’t be serious—Gia didn’t have the resources for something like this. “Or the kid. I guess Cat and Haller are off the hook, assuming they really do stick around to rescue us.”
“That’s why you told them Zeke was alive—so they’d come back for him.”
Finn gave a harsh laugh. “You think they’d come back just for me?”
CHAPTER 25
By the time Cat called back a few minutes later, after consulting with Rackham, Finn’s comm was dead. He answered using Edie’s, only to find that Cat had more bad news.
“Just tried to take off—but I’m not going anywhere for a while. My flight stabilizers are shot.”
“How the hell did that happen?” Haller barked.
Edie and Finn exchanged a look and Edie mouthed the word sabotage?
“I have no idea, sir.” Cat’s despondency sounded genuine, but it might be an act. “Controls felt a bit weird when I landed on the island after dropping off your team, and then they burned out when I fired up the engines again just now.”
“Call Corky,” Haller said. “Tell him to come down in the other skiff to help with repairs.”
“Already did that. This is going to take a while,” Cat said. “Finn, head due north from the BRAT. If we get there before you make it out, Haller and the serfs can start cutting in from the other direction.”
“Understood.” The comm crackled. Finn checked the power and shook his head in dismay.
“We won’t leave…won’t…without Zeke.” Cat’s transmission broke up and faded out altogether.
“You think she’s telling the truth?” Finn gave the comm-clip a little shake, as though it had trapped Cat’s last few words.
Edie remembered Cat’s claim that she’d tried to help them escape by sending a flight plan to the skiff. “Yes, I think so.”
They didn’t speak aloud the fear that the traitor on the Hoi would try again. For now, there was nothing they could do but get out of the jungle.
Edie packed up the salvaged shield batteries and anything else that looked useful—there wasn’t much left. She strapped on Zeke’s spur, hoping she’d remember the firearms lessons Lukas had given her, if it came to that.
Finn shrugged on his backpack. “You set?”
Edie was aware of the creature a split second before he was, saw the pale shape scuttling through the overhead branches. Finn sensed it, looking up just as it flung itself onto his chest trailing a milky white thread.
Edie automatically raised her arm and the spur slid into position. Her thumb hovered over the trigger. But the creature was already falling off Finn, zapped by the shield. Its lightning-fast movement had given her a false impression of its size. It was no bigger than Finn’s boot, beside which it now dangled motionless, its multiple legs curled up underneath its flattened carapace, suspended from a thread anchored overhead. It looked like an overgrown slater.
“What were you gonna do, shoot me in the chest?” Finn yelled.
Edie lowered the spur, surprised by his anger, and realized how stupid her reaction had been. The shields protected them from any creepy crawlies this place could throw at them, but set on low they couldn’t deflect projectiles from a spur. She might have killed him.
“Sorry,” she said sheepishly.
He scowled, grabbing one of the lamps as he moved past her. “Probably one of those friendly bunnies you told me about.”
“I never said anything about bunnies. That was your idea.”
They’d taken a few paces across the clearing when a very human groan stopped them in their tracks. Edie whipped out her diagnostic rod and scanned for e-shields in the vicinity.
“To our right.”
It was Kristos. From the readout, his shield appeared to be intact. They found him tangled up in debris some way back from the rest.
Edie cut through the vines with her shiv and pulled him clear. “You okay? Were you knocked out?”
“I think so.” Kristos staggered to his feet. He looked over his limbs and seemed satisfied he wasn’t injured.
Edie saw his e-shield crackle on a stray leaf. “You didn’t turn your shield down.”
Kristos blushed defiantly, and Finn laughed at him. “You got lucky, kid. But check your power meter.” While Kristos’s face turned from shame to horror, Finn explained. “The blast damaged the batteries. Turn your shield down now or you’ll never last long enough to get lucky again.” He turned away, ready to move on.
“We should still check for concussion,” Edie told Finn. He carried the medkit in his pack.
Finn relented. He shone his penlight in Kristos’s eyes. “You remember what just happened?” he asked gruffly.
“There was a bomb or something…”
“You feel dizzy?”
“No, I’m okay. Where’s everyone else?”
“Cat’s having engine trouble. She’ll fetch Haller’s team and then come for us,” Edie explained. “The others are dead.”
The young op-teck’s ruddy face went white and his eyes teared up. She pitied him—his only two runs with the Hoi Polloi had both ended in tragedy.
Finn returned the light to his belt. “Got a headache? Weakness in your arms or legs?”
Kristos shook his head numbly.
“If you throw up or fall down, let me know.” He turned to Edie. “He’s not concussed. Come on, let’s get out of here.”
Edie shook her head at the good doctor’s perfunctory examination, but he was right—they had limited juice in their shields and they had to move. She helped Kristos get his pack sorted out and followed Finn into the clearing. From there they set off due north.
At point position, Finn had to work the hardest to clear a path. They avoided the low-hanging vines because it was impossible to hack through them—ever since the explosion, they took to quickly closing over wherever they were damaged. The rest of the vegetation was less dense, but much of it was too thick to cut even with a water torch, and they had to climb over it. Then the water torch ran dry and they used shivs. The ground was uneven, thick with prickly undergrowth and punctuated with slippery boulders. Edie’s mind automatically categorized each new lifeform it registered—mosses, ferns, arthropods, worms. Only a few meters into the thick of the jungle, and despite the low light levels, she’d already counted dozens of species. Each one was unlike anything she’d seen before, but was recognizable within broad categories. And each one, she knew, was unlike what it had been seven years ago. Every living thing on Scarabaeus had been transformed at the genetic level as the BRATs controlling the ecosystem beat to their own strange drum.
Finn looked back frequently, checking their progress. Perhaps he thought Kristos’s survival meant they shouldn’t rule him out as the traitor. Edie was more concerned with Kristos’s emotional health. Kristos ploughed on in subdued silence.
The jungle was a cocoon of indistinct shadowy shapes lit by broken rays. They’d been on Scarabaeus for five hours, and it was mid-afternoon. Finn climbed a large, craggy boulder almost as tall as he was, and leaned down to help Kristos and Edie up. On top of the boulder, Kristos put his han
ds on his knees, catching his breath.
“How much farther?”
“Kid, this is going to take all day,” Finn said. “If you’re not up to it, don’t bother tagging along.”
Kristos looked up with a flash of anger. He wasn’t used to being spoken to like that by a serf.
Edie put her hand on Kristos’s arm before he said something stupid. “We’ll make it out of here. A few hours, okay?”
The other side of the boulder was a sharp drop. Finn jumped off, losing his footing momentarily in the soft mesh of plant material on the ground. He staggered a couple of paces, as if the ground had shifted underneath him, before regaining his balance.