Tainted Garden

by Jeff Stanley

  God jerked, his mechanical half shuddering. His eye on its articulated shaft spun about, facing the warped doorway. Seeming to forget Dersi, he stalked across the room, the machinery overhead following on a track recessed in the ceiling.

  “Security alert! Security alert! Containment breach. Repeat: containment breach. Security detail to elevator twelve.”

  Captain Lhedri swore and swiped the back of his hand across his sweat-soaked forehead. In his other hand the acidrod slowly cooled, its slugs spent. He held onto the rod as a weapon of last resort. With its length, it gave him greater reach than the sword at his belt, and its heavier base could serve as a cudgel in his capable hands.

  “How many more slugs do you have, Cadrin?”

  Beside him, his lieutenant checked the shaft of his weapon. “Two.”

  “I’m empty.” Lhedri leaned against the cool metal of the walls and took stock of their situation. Of the dozen men who had crowded into the mechanical throat with him, five still breathed. Around them the others lay in puddles of spreading blood, tangled with the corpses of eight naked, bestial women. At Lhedri’s feet, Bhunto’s glazed-over eyes stared up at him from his severed head. Pushing down his gorge, Lhedri prodded the head on its side, removing himself from its flat gaze.

  “We’ve thirteen slugs between us, Captain,” Cadrin said. He passed Lhedri another acidrod, its shaft slightly warped and covered with blood. “Here. This has four slugs remaining. Sannin won’t be needing it.”

  “Thirteen.” Lhedri stared down the corridor. The lifeless tentacles connected to the female corpses oozed liquid on the metal floor. They disappeared in the darkness of the hallway, a short distance from where Lhedri and his men rested. “That won’t be enough if more of these women come for us. We used too many slugs in destroying the door.”

  Cadrin, beside him, shrugged. “It couldn’t be helped. Besides, we still have hand weapons.”

  Lhedri wanted to argue that swords and knives would do little good against the monstrously powerful women-things. He did not. He could see the others looking to him for leadership, for guidance. Any display of uncertainty would ruin what chances they had of getting out of this place and back to Lord Meloni. And of finding—and rescuing—Lady Dersi.

  “Gather the men, Cadrin. Waiting here’s not going to get us out of this.”

  Cadrin barked out orders and the men groaned, raising themselves from the floor, dripping with sweat and blood. There were no wounds between them other than minor scratches. The bestial women had been determined in their attacks, and quick. Those they had reached with their long-fingered hands lay dead, their bones broken and their flesh torn.

  A few minutes later Lhedri led them along the corridor, keeping well away from the tangle of umbilicals on the floor. Ahead, the light panels on the walls flared into brilliance, illuminating their way. The corridor curved toward the left.

  A subtle click and a low whining sound preceded a brilliant scarlet beam that lanced down from the ceiling, striking a man just behind Lhedri in the forehead. The rear of the man’s head exploded in a spray of blood and brains, and he dropped without a sound. Lhedri jerked. Cadrin seized his shoulder and pulled him back, beyond the curvature of the wall.

  “What was that?” Cadrin asked. Lhedri stared down at the corpse of another of his men. The man’s expression was staid; he had died without warning. A perfectly circular hole the size of Lhedri’s thumb pierced his forehead. The back of his head, pressed against the metal floor, smoked; his white hair fanned out like a halo in the spreading pool of his own blood.

  “Take his weapon,” Lhedri ordered. He felt his heart hammering against his ribs. His mouth was parched, his tongue thick.

  Lhedri leaned his acidrod against the wall and drew his dagger. He tossed it into the corridor, beyond the curvature. The whining sound erupted again, and the brilliant beam speared out, striking the knife. The blade melted into a running pool of silvery metal.

  “We’re trapped,” Cadrin said.

  Lhedri spared him a withering look, but said nothing. He glanced behind them at the ruin of the door to the lift. Acid fumes still rose from the slurred metal. A dead end on one hand and an unknown killer on the other. They were trapped in a fifty-foot-long section of corridor swimming with gore.

  Lord Meloni reacted without thinking. Seeing a guardsman with an acidrod dangling from his lax fingers, Meloni snatched the weapon, reversed it, and expelled a slug at the first of the monsters. The slug slammed into the serpentine creature’s torso, erupting, opening a ragged, smoking hole the size of a fist in the scaled, tentacled flesh. The creature screamed as the acid ate into its insides. Its spindly legs buckled and it collapsed, screeching.

  Others pressed forward, but now guardsmen raised their weapons to their shoulders and fired on the monsters. The unarmed pressed back, away from the crush of hideous creatures, screaming, crying, wordlessly moaning.

  A creature wobbled forward on legs running with open sores and reached into the crowd. It seized a woman in its misshapen claws, raised her high over its tentacled head, and ripped her in half. Blood washed over the creature in a red shower, and it tossed the halves of the woman’s body away.

  More monsters poured into the council chamber, wading into the panicked crowd. Pressed back by the Bhajong tide, Meloni slipped and fell to one knee, losing his grip on the acidrod. It clattered away beneath the pummeling feet of the Bhajong. A knee slammed into Meloni’s face, and he felt his lip split. He tasted blood as he scrambled to his feet and fought through the tightly packed bodies toward the rear of the room.

  The scent of blood and acid hung heavy in the air, making his eyes water and his nostrils burn. He felt something touch his shoulder and ducked, throwing himself to one side. Glancing over his shoulder he saw a multijointed arm tipped with a four-foot blade of serrated bone rip through a woman’s abdomen and emerge from the small of her back. She was lifted up and dashed against the ceiling. Blood rained down on the crowd.

  A child screamed near him, and Meloni turned to see a many-legged creature with a ring of arms dripping orange fluid twist a woman in half. One of its arms shot downward, seizing the screaming child from the dead breast of its mother. The little girl stared in wide-eyed horror at the gaping, sucker-lined maw of the creature as it raised her by her ankles and began lowering her into its mouth.

  “No!” Meloni screamed. He saw a bloody blade on the floor, pinned beneath the severed legs of a man, and snatched up the sword. He threw himself on the creature, his sword hacking down into the thick arm. The creature jerked, losing its grip on the child. She fell into the screaming throng, and the creature turned its attention to Meloni. Its arms lashed out, wrapping around Meloni’s midsection. He slashed with his sword, feeling the biting sting of corrosives eating through his clothing and into his flesh. Again and again he hacked at the arms, until the blade bit on hard bone and stuck. The creature hissed and dropped him. He lost the sword and landed on his shoulder, momentarily stunned.

  “Lord Meloni!” a guardsman screamed, pumping acidslugs into the threatening creature. It reeled back, its flesh sloughing off in great, bubbling waves, revealing bloody bones. Meloni rose to shaky feet and pushed toward the guard.

  A horrendous cracking sound erupted, and the floor beneath his feet shook. Stumbling to one knee, he put out his hand to steady himself. Fine, jagged cracks laced through the resinous floor, and ooze bubbled up from below. He jerked his hand back, dragging long streamers of viscous fluid. His knee sank into the floor, and he struggled to rise.

  Screams rose to a crescendo in the council hall as the Bhajong surged back from the spreading lacery of cracks in the floor. Fluid spumed into the air, falling on startled, panicked faces. Cries of agony and alarm tumbled from half a hundred mouths as feet and calves sank into the floor, hard chunks of resin breaking apart, revealing pulsating, glistening bulges of ool musculature. A thousand fine filaments shot up from churning pools of ichor, wrapping around ankles and calves, pulling. />
  Meloni pulled back from the sucking liquid and tentacles. Behind him, he could sense the monsters, hovering in a containing ring about the Bhajong, moaning, screeching, caterwauling. As he sank to his knees in the sucking goo, sharp cracks pierced the ceiling, releasing a flood of liquid. The shower fell over him, coating his body, sticky and hot. Around him he could see the other Bhajong similarly covered, swimming through a pool of expanding ooze.

  Movement constricted, Meloni fought to free himself, hearing the brittle cracks of breaking resin as the liquid began to solidify around him, encasing him. He screamed, and a wash of hot fluid poured into his mouth, silencing him. More fluid bathed his eyes, locking him away into darkness.

  Chapter 37

  APF 0361

  Magda Kellahar cursed and slammed the datapad onto the desk in front of her. Beakers and other glassware rattled, and a tech had to snatch a vial in midair before it shattered on the floor. Magda ignored the exasperated expression on his face.

  Tired. So tired. She rubbed at her eyes, trying to worm away the ache behind them, the ache that came more and more frequently as the years pressed in upon her.

  I have no time!

  The tech placed the vial gently back into its cradle. “Doctor Kellahar? Are you all right?” He raised a hand as if to touch her, thought better of it, and dropped it to his side.

  “All right? All right?” She glared at him. Stupid child!

  He stepped back from her. The other researchers in the laboratory stopped their inane chatter. Magda could feel their eyes upon her.

  They did not know. They did not know.

  She sighed, shaking her head. It was not their fault. It was not the tech’s fault. How could they know?

  “I’m fine,” she said at last. “Just tired.” She sank onto a lab stool. It creaked beneath even her slight weight. “So tired.”

  Doctor John Everette approached, touching her shoulder. “Go home, Magda. You work yourself like a drone, and you’re not exactly a teenager, you know.”

  Magda glanced up at Everette, noted the concern in his eyes, and felt every one of her seventy-odd years pile in upon her. Her shoulders sank. She shook her head. He did not understand. He could not. She sighed.

  “What is it, Magda?” Everette waved the tech away and knelt beside Magda, taking her old, wrinkled hands in his own young, strong ones. She noted the telltale ring of tiny scales circling his wrists, sign that the contagion had begun to work its curse upon him. Another sign of failure.

  “The newts,” she said at last, forcing her other, greater worries aside for the moment.

  “The newts?”

  She nodded and gestured toward her datapad. “The newts we released last month.”

  He picked up her datapad and scanned its display. “The vectors. But this is impossible. They should have . . .”

  “They didn’t. Like the others, like the ferns and the cockroaches and the bumblebees before them, they succumbed. Quickly. Not even thirty days before complete assimilation. We’ve failed. Again.”

  Everette shook his head, staring at the display. She knew what he saw, could see the realization of utter failure that had become so commonplace spreading across his features like a black wave. Time and time again they had genetically engineered life-forms to be immune, or at least resistant, to the landskin contagion. Time and time again they had failed. Within weeks, sometimes days, the life-forms had been perverted and altered by the contagion, something other than what they were. Genetic alteration on a cellular level, a physiological change that defied all of their efforts to curtail or prevent it.

  They could not halt the contagion, much less wage war upon it.

  Everette sighed and replaced the datapad. He forced a smile. “Well, at least there are the worms.”

  Magda waved absently. “The worms. They thrive, beyond our expectations. But they’ve been changed, too, far beyond their architecture. It was pure accident and . . . providence, I suppose . . . that created those monstrosities. They’re as dangerous to us as to the landskin.”

  He shifted his feet, falling into awkward silence.

  She rubbed at her eyes, wishing her headache away. “Don’t mind me, John. I’m old and tired. And sick of all this . . . failure. Just ignore me.”

  “You should go to medical, Magda,” he said.

  “I will. Help me up. My knees ache so fiercely I don’t think I could move my ass off of this stool by myself.”

  He chuckled and pulled her up, then motioned to one of the nearby techs. “See Doctor Kellahar to the infirmary, please.”

  “I’m all right, John,” she protested.

  He shook his head. “No. Magda, no. Go to the infirmary.”

  Magda grimaced as she swung her legs around and put her bare feet on the cold ceramic floor. Her toes curled in protest at the chill touch. She pulled the open-backed gown tighter about her body and brushed a lank strand of iron-gray hair behind her ear. Her fingers lingered on the strands, remembering them deep, luxurious, and the brown of chestnuts, like those seen in the holo-vids of vanished Terra. So many years, and so much experience.

  An orderly whisked through the door, responding to the chime Magda knew had sounded at the first touch of her feet on the floor of the isolation room. The lower half of his face was a white void beneath the filter mask he wore. He paused in the doorway, made a quick notation on his datapad, then stepped toward Magda.

  “Feeling better, Doctor Kellahar?” the orderly asked.

  Magda scowled. “There’s not much time. Call the team together. This body’s had it.”

  The orderly’s brows pinched together and he glanced at his datapad. “Your vitals read within statistical norm. Are you certain?”

  Magda waved impatiently. “Go. Now. I’ve been through this enough times in one form or another to recognize the signs.”

  A slight ping sounded from the monitor mounted on one wall of the pristine isolation room. A geometric pattern of lines and angles fluctuated on the screen, and a voice emerged from the hidden speakers. “I concur. Initiating vessel preparation. See to it, orderly.”

  “Yes, Father,” the orderly said, nodding in the direction of the monitor. He saluted, fist on breast, and turned to leave the room. In the wake of his passage the door slid closed, an almost silent hiss of escaping air, effectively sealing the room off from the remainder of the Enclave.

  Magda stared across the small white room toward the monitor, wondering if she had the strength to cross that slight distance and interface directly with Father. With a sigh she realized she did not. She sank back, leaning against the cold ceramic of the table, and waited. Breaths wheezed from her lungs, wet and bubbling.

  “The degeneration comes quicker each time, Singh.” The voice that emerged from the speakers held nothing of humanity, no warmth, no tone, no inflection. Flat. Sterile.

  Another voice, Singh’s, distinct yet as cold as the first, emerged from the speakers. “It is to be expected. With each passing generation, even the Founders begin to suffer from the effects of the contagion. My latest data indicates this generation maintains a genetic purity matrix of point-nine-nine-nine-four, compared to the previous generation’s point-nine-nine-nine-eight. It’s accelerating. The next vessel is the closest to statistical norm, but she rates out at only point-nine-nine-nine-seven.”

  “Father?” Magda forced back tears.

  “Yes, Magda?” Santiago answered.

  “I don’t want to die, Father.” Foolish, and she knew it. Foolish. She could not help herself. Age crept relentlessly over her, weighing her down, robbing her of strength and will. Her bones ached. Her flesh felt as dry and brittle as parchment. With age came fear, though she warred against it with cold, hard logic. At such times, with flesh-death approaching closer with each passing moment, logic held no sway over her.

  A cold, electronic sound issued from the speakers. Santiago laughed. “You cannot die, Magda. You are not alive, not real. You’re being foolish.”

  “It is
a very real psychological expression, Captain,” Singh said. “After a human lifespan augmented by the rejuvies, even an Avatar can become attached to the life they have known. In a very real sense, she is as human as what remains of the Founders. More so, given her genetic purity.”

  “A moot point, Singh. Reclamation of Magda is essential to the formulation of the next Avatar.”

  A burst of electronic static, Singh’s closest approximation to a human sigh, floated from the speakers.

  “I . . . I understand, Father,” Magda said. She brushed away a tear from the corner of her eye. The Avatar brought up Magda’s hand and stared at the thin skin stretched taut over swollen bones. Veins and arteries could clearly be seen through the near translucent skin, except where darker splotches marred it. For so long had she dwelt in this usurped flesh, that she had come to think of it as her own. “I look forward to rejoining you.”

  “No, you don’t. None of you ever do. But that’s of no matter. Your purpose is done, Magda. Your knowledge will be added to the whole, broadening my understanding through the direct interaction and human perception you’ve experienced over the past seventy years.”

  Magda nodded. She knew she was not the first Avatar. There had been dozens before her, each usurping a vessel of flesh and moving among the growing Enclave, gaining experience, leeching knowledge and input from the Gagash surrounding them, then returning to Father, expanding his consciousness in ways electronic monitors and sensors could not.

  Magda’s time was done. Another Avatar awaited, a blank slate that would enter the world of the Enclave without the accumulated wisdom and knowledge of Father, only a driving need to learn, to grow, to experience. It kept Father new. Fresh. It allowed him to insinuate himself into the growing society, guide it without direct intervention, keep its collective feet on the path he had determined would eventually return them to their heritage.