The Stark Divide

by J. Scott Coatsworth

  There he was, like a firefly in the darkness, but he was closed to her for now.

  She would have to wait.

  BACK IN her lab, Ana sat in her chair and put a small portion of the skin sample between two plasform slides, pressing them together to compress and separate the sample. She flicked the switch on the ship’s microscope, slid the slide underneath the machine’s powerful lens, and locked it down.

  Hammond and McAvery were counting on her.

  Her wide console was immaculate, free of anything personal or frivolous, except for her father’s journal, which was tucked into a pocket on the wall.

  She’d spent more than a decade working with these cell cultures, including both the originals her father had created and those that had ultimately been used to birth the seed.

  Ana peered into the microscope to see what the sample had to offer.

  Something was badly wrong. The cells that normally formed up into consistent rows, linked together like overlapping panels of a chain-link fence, were in wild disarray. The lines of cellular matter weaved back and forth at crazy angles, and there were small cuts and breaks throughout the structure.

  In addition, there were bright, sulfurous yellow spots wrapped around the existing cells. There was something obscene about the shape, the way it bulged around the middle, looking like nothing more than a human fat cell, gorging itself on heavily processed sugars.

  She shivered.

  She pulled out her tab and took a few notes, preparing to cross-reference her findings with the ship’s medical database. Something about these strange cells tickled her memory, but she couldn’t recall exactly what.

  As she stared at the culture, the lights in the lab flickered.

  She frowned. That wasn’t normal. Dressler, what are you up to?

  Only one way to find out.

  She began her search through the ship’s medical database, looking for a match.

  JACKSON HAD almost finished searching the walls of the hold for additional lesions. He glanced nervously up at the one on the ceiling, which seemed to have grown slightly larger even in the short time since he had discovered it. There was now a slow but steady drip of ichor, which aerosolized in the absence of enough gravity to bring it to the hold’s floor.

  It reminded him of those early days in his first home with Glory in Fargo, when the roof had sprung a leak during a heavy storm.

  This leak was so much more dangerous. I miss you guys. If they didn’t beat this thing, he might never see them again. He wrapped his hand around his cross, whispered a quick prayer, and moved along to the next section of the ship’s wall.

  McAvery appeared at the door from the runway, making a beeline to the ship’s entirely mechanical lifeboat. The captain opened the hatch and the inner air lock door and clambered inside. Jackson could hear him checking over the small craft’s diagnostics.

  “Any change?” McAvery called without looking out of the lifeboat.

  “Nothing much,” he shouted back, “but I think the patch is a little bigger. I haven’t found anything else yet.”

  He crawled down off the side of the metal floor to look at the condition of the ship’s flesh beneath it. Heavy titanium posts supported the platform, sunk down into the bones of the Dressler. The tissue here looked healthy enough, springy to the touch, making him feel a little better about the floor on which they were standing.

  He’d never fully trusted this melding of flesh and metal. There was something… unnatural about it.

  He’d long ago accepted that medical intervention was essential in this modern world, as had most of those of the faith. Indeed, who didn’t know someone with an artificial hip or artificial heart? These things were simply an expression of man’s ability to improve the lives of his fellow man.

  But these ships, and the other new “wonders of science” like them, were something exponentially different. In a very real way, mankind was playing God here, creating something that had never existed under the heavens before.

  The Church called these ships abominations, and he’d had more than one argument with his priest over that issue after services, but he’d always defended the program. Mankind had to find a way to go to the stars or it was doomed to destroy itself at home.

  Now he wasn’t so sure. This new problem had him spooked.

  He was about to climb back up onto the floor of the hold when he noticed something strange. At the base of one of the metal posts, there was a discoloration. He reached out his hand to touch it, and it came away sticky with a yellow goo.

  “Captain,” he called out, “you’re going to want to see this.”

  ANA WAS about to run another test on the samples she’d collected when the captain entered the lab, holding something.

  “Doc, we’ve got another problem.” The captain held out another sample bag. “Hammond collected this underneath the decking in the hold.”

  She set down the slide she’d been working on, annoyed at the interruption, and turned to take the new sample. “What is it?”

  “I was hoping you could tell me. I don’t like the look of it.”

  “Let’s not panic just yet.” Carefully she opened the specimen bag, took a small piece of the substance, and set it onto a clean slide. Normally she’d have taken quarantine precautions with an unknown substance like this, but everyone had been exposed to it already, and time was short.

  She set the sample under the lens and then peered into it to see what they had.

  Under the microscope, it looked just like the previous one—a yellow lump of some unknown organic material.

  “My best guess is some kind of biological agent,” she said after a minute, biting her lip. Where the hell did you come from?

  “From where?” He looked agitated, his handsome features twisted into a caricature. “We’re in the middle of open space, for God’s sake.”

  “I don’t want to speculate just yet. Give me a little more time to cross-reference these samples with the ship’s database.”

  McAvery frowned. “Doc, we’re running out of time.”

  COLIN HURRIED back to his own quarters, frowning.

  A biological agent. It had to be terrorism. The Interveners or one of the other quasi-religious sects?

  It must have been introduced by someone back on Frontier. How had they done it?

  There were layers upon layers of security for anything entering the ships at the station, and he’d personally checked the backgrounds of everyone who worked on or near the Dressler. If there was an Intervener among them, he had no idea who it was—and there were only two other people on board.

  He just hoped that this agent, whatever it was, didn’t have a taste for people.

  “Dressler, have you finished the diagnostic?” he asked, entering his cabin. He pulled out some antiseptic wipes and cleaned his hands vigorously, just in case.

  “Negative, Captain.” The ship’s normally dulcet tones sounded rough. “My internal systems are running more slowly than normal.”

  Something else to worry about. “Estimated time to completion?”

  “Fifteen minutes, Captain.”

  Colin closed his eyes and thought of Trip. Out there somewhere in a ship of his own. What if this was bigger than the Dressler?

  He didn’t want to panic his partner, but he had to know.

  He tapped his loop. “Dressler, patch me in to Captain Tanner.”

  “One moment.”

  “Hey, Colin.” Trip’s voice boomed in the small cabin.

  “Hey, Trip. Where are you?”

  “Just closing in on Frontier Station, so I’m a bit busy. What’s up?”

  Just hearing the man’s voice calmed Colin considerably. “Just wanted to say hello. We’re in slowdown, approaching Ariadne. Hey, everything okay there?”

  “Everything’s fine. Looking forward to seeing you in a couple days.”

  That made Colin’s legs go a little wobbly.

  “Hey, is everything all right?” Trip asked.

&n
bsp; “Yeah, fine so far. I’ll keep you posted.” He didn’t want Trip to worry, not yet. It might be nothing.

  “Gotta run. Love you.”

  “Backatcha.” He sighed in relief. Trip was okay. He tapped off the loop.

  As he saw it, he had three options on the Dressler.

  One, fix the problem, whatever it was. Dr. Anatov was one of the primary experts in ship genetics, so they had a fighting chance there.

  Two, try to make it to Ariadne, where they could await rescue. He considered this the most likely option. The ship had enough oxygen to sustain them for some time, provided she held her structural integrity.

  Three, abandon ship. He resolved to do this only in the direst of circumstances. The three of them could only survive a short time in the lifeboat, and they would be hard to find in the vastness of space, even with an emergency beacon.

  “Dressler, where’s Hammond?” he asked. He had to do something.

  There was a short but noticeable pause in the response. “Hammond’s in cabin three.”

  The first thing to do was to finish the inspection.

  ANA WORKED quickly through the samples Hammond and McAvery had brought her from several locations inside the ship. As she worked, she hummed under her breath, like her father used to do when confronting a new problem. Daddy, where are you now?

  He seemed so far away, in both space and time, and yet everything around her was a living legacy of his work.

  There had been moments in life when she’d questioned whether she would ever meet his high standards, even though she’d had successes of her own over the years. At work, he’d been capable of a single-minded focus on a problem, an ability that often eluded her. He could put everything he had into a project, and when he was finished, it was flawless.

  She looked down at one of the samples. It looked diseased. Maybe not so flawless after all.

  She finished inserting the last of the specimens into the reader.

  In twenty years, only one of the Mission-class ships—the Vixen—had failed. That had been due to human error—substandard materials used for part of the ship’s nonliving architecture, metal piping, the failure of which had ultimately compromised the integrity of the ship’s hull.

  The Mission-class ships were built for self-repair, but severe enough damage could outpace even their advanced capabilities.

  She closed her eyes for a moment, waiting for her lab systems to run a complete analysis.

  She’d been all of four years old, her toes dug into the cool mud of the river near her father’s farm retreat in the Caucasus Mountains, when it happened.

  The cold water rushed past her calves, striving to carry her along with it. The silt made it red, like blood.

  The noise began slowly, a generalized rumble below the rushing roar of the river—so low she first became aware of it as a vibrating hum, deep in her bones.

  It grew quickly, like the dull rumble of a truck engine, one of the old combustion ones they still used on the farms.

  She glanced up, the wind blowing her dark hair in tangles across her eyes, and saw something in the sky above her—an indistinct, elongated blur.

  Only it was no longer crossing the sky but hurtling down from it.

  The noise built quickly to a screaming crescendo.

  Instinctively she threw herself into the river, and the current dragged her away. There was a flash above, followed by a loud crash. The water churned all around her. She struggled against the river as it pulled her downstream, tumbling head over heels. She forced her way above the water to grab a breath, and then she was spinning again, the world filled with red water and bubbles.

  Desperate, she swam like her father had taught her—long, powerful strokes—pulling herself up toward the light and finally forcing her head above the water again.

  The air was full of dust and acrid smoke, but the current carried her quickly out of the cloud, and after a few moments she was able to paddle back to shore.

  She would learn later that it had been a piece of an old satellite that had fallen from orbit.

  In that moment, her worldview was shattered. There were strange things up there, and they could fall—down here.

  Bad things happened.

  An insistent beeping brought her back to the present. The tests were finished. Fortunately, her lab’s analytical systems were separate from the main ship’s systems and were also independently powered.

  She scrolled through them on her console. Nothing. Nothing of use at all.

  She went back to the initial sample, taken from the ship’s hold. “Magnify.”

  The yellow goo expanded into a series of small organisms, little yellow dots with dark red centers and a strange hooklike feature. Something about that little hook teased her memory, but it lay just beyond her grasp.

  It reminded her of something her father had shown her. Maybe?

  She pulled up e-copies of her own diaries on her console, flipping through the virtual pages.

  It had to be here somewhere.

  Chapter Four: Warnings

  THE CAPTAIN worked with Jackson on the runway, searching every inch of the Dressler’s internal walls for lesions.

  They found one, then a second, and then a third. They were more like small discolorations at this stage, bruises on the otherwise healthy ship skin, and they were all close to the entry to the hold. Whatever it was, it seemed to have started there and was now working its way through the ship—and far too quickly.

  Jackson poked one of them gently with his pliers, and the skin pulled back as if afraid of his touch. Little sensitive today, are we? “She’s a bit of a Frankenstein, isn’t she?” He glanced up and down the long passageway that bisected the Dressler. He continued slowly down the other side of the runway, pulling himself from rung to rung, searching. “Bits of metal attached to living flesh—”

  “She’s a miracle of modern genetic engineering. That’s what she is,” McAvery shot back, sounding a little annoyed. “If you’d ever flown in the last generation of ships before the Mission-class came online, you’d know what an improvement these hybrid ships are.”

  “I flew on the Ostereich for three years before getting posted on a Mission ship. I know what a miraculous thing she is. I just wonder—”

  “What?”

  He paused to think out what he wanted to say, wary of setting the captain off. “I just wonder, sometimes, if we haven’t taken on more than we can handle here. We think we understand these creatures we’ve created.” He gestured around at the walls of the Dressler. “We think that we can control them. That we own them. What if we’re wrong?” Helluva place to be having such thoughts.

  McAvery chuckled ruefully. “This might not be the best time to talk about this, don’t you think?”

  Jackson grinned. “What, you mean while we’re in the middle of nowhere inside one of the things, at the mercy of fate?”

  “Something like that.” McAvery reached the end of the runway. “I count three more lesions on this side, all in the early stages.”

  Dressler’s voice rang through the runway, slightly slurred. “Capt-tain, the dianostichhh is complete.”

  The two men exchanged a worried glance. “Affirmative, Dressler. I’ll take the report on the bridge. Hammond, can you finish up here? We’ll call a meeting as soon as I have a chance to review the results.”

  Jackson nodded, continuing down his side of the runway as McAvery pulled himself through the doorway onto the bridge. Hammond watched him go and turned back to the task at hand.

  The bare skin of his fingertips brushed the skin of the ship, and an electric shock went through him, knocking him clear across the runway into a metal rung on the opposite wall, unconscious.

  ANA HAD flipped through twenty years’ worth of her e-diaries, full of her father’s musings, technical lingo, sketches, her own thoughts, and more. A history of her personal and professional life.

  She had started keeping them when she was fifteen, after she and her father had esc
aped Capitalist Russia to relative freedom in the West. They’d settled in Sacramento, the biggest city in California and home to the National Institute of Health’s Western Region offices along the banks of the American River.

  Her father had received a government grant to continue the genetic research he had begun in Russia and had recruited his young daughter to help him keep his notes organized.

  She’d been an awkward teenager, more interested in books than boys or girls, a choice she sometimes regretted now that she was in her midthirties and alone.

  She was sure she’d seen something like the pathogen before. It was too complex to be a mere accident of nature—unlikely that a mutation had spontaneously arisen to which the ships would be vulnerable. But not impossible.

  The captain suspected the Interveners. It was possible, but she thought it was just as likely that it was industrial or governmental espionage. AmSplor had its enemies in both the business world and among the Eastern Front countries—China, India, and North Korea—each of which had their own designs on the future of space exploration and resource recovery from the asteroids.

  She finished her last journal. Nothing.

  She sat back, crossing her arms, one hand on her chin. It was there somewhere. It had to be. I’m missing something.

  Then her father’s leather-bound journal, tucked away in its pouch, caught her eye.

  She’d brought it along more as a reminder of her father than anything. It was one of his personal paper journals. He’d loved pen and paper for capturing his thoughts—he’d been old-fashioned that way.

  On a whim, she reached for it and began to leaf through its old, yellowing pages. The small reminder of him warmed her heart. She missed him fiercely. You would never have given up so easily.

  She was almost ready to put it away and try something else when she flipped the page. There it was… a little yellow dot with a dark red center and a little hook. “Gotcha.” She reviewed her father’s notes from so many years before.