Sly Mongoose

by Tobias S. Buckell

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Sheikh shuddered its way through the new course corrections that would plunge them into the cleansing nuclear fires of Chilo’s sun. Grenada and Pepper made their way through the maze of corridors, bulkhead by dogged bulkhead. The ship had transited the wormhole leading into Chilo and continued a heavy bout of acceleration, forcing them to anchor themselves on walls that flipped into angled floors due to acceleration.

  “She using up all the fuel. She given up,” Grenada said. “No sense conserving antimatter when you know you all dead.”

  “Point.” Pepper dropped off a ladder to the bulkhead’s surface, the thrum of the Sheikh passing through his heels. They moved at double-time: two gees acceleration.

  They would whip right past Chilo, with Pepper stuck on the doomed ship.

  “There are emergency pods. We get you launch early, you should live to get pick up.”

  “What about the passengers in the great room?”

  “Canden say you don’t want go there.”

  They moved together in silence, Grenada taking point as a human shield of sorts, but one armed with a shotgun and with pistols dripping off her waist.

  The first attack came from the front. Like any past encounter Grenada pushed forward, closing the distance and firing a burst with the shotgun that obliterated the zombie’s head in a spray of blood and brain tissue.

  But the second attack came from under the floor panels behind them.

  Pepper whirled as the heavy grates clanked and dropped to the side. Three zombies clambered up, unsteady on their feet, but moving quickly to surround him.

  He shot the one to his left in the head, decapitated the one on the right by sword, and kicked the one in front of him backward into the uncovered pit under the floor.

  Grenada stepped forward and fired the shotgun down at the top of its skull.

  The loud echo rolled throughout the ship.

  “That was a trap,” Pepper said.

  “They getting smarter.” Grenada cracked the shotgun open and shoved more rounds in. She snapped it back closed. “We need to think of them as different than zombies.”

  The stumbling, biting, and moronic behavior of the infected people in the great room had faded away. Now the zombies still moved slowly, but they had gained intelligence of some sort.

  “Move.” Grenada pushed him forward. “They go be coming after that gunshot sound something serious.”

  Pepper resisted the push. He walked back over to the bodies and poked his boot at the crumbling spikes growing out of the body’s shoulders. “What are these?”

  Grenada looked at him. “Do I look like a biologist to you, man?”

  Pepper drew the sword and walked over to the decapitated zombie. He sliced the throat open and pushed aside petals of flesh. “Vocal cords look like they work, but I haven’t seen any of them do anything but groan. How are they coordinating?”

  “Fucking telepathy? Who knows, who cares?”

  “I do.” He poked at the spikes again. “Ask Canden to scan all the wavelengths. Ask her if she’s detecting anything.”

  “You think they growing antenna?”

  Pepper sheathed his sword again. “Maybe. Or maybe all that synchronized touching is how they talk and plan. It’s a question someone needs to ask. If they can coordinate, that’s a problem for us.”

  “Still don’t explain why they getting smarter. Even if they could talk, the early ones was dumb.”

  “I don’t have an answer.” Many feet moved with purpose toward them in the distance, shuffling footsteps echoing down to their ears.

  “Let’s move.” Grenada raised the shotgun. “I don’t have much time before the fever coming for me.” Beads of sweat stood out on her forehead.

  “And Canden?”

  “She ain’t hearing nothing. Now move.”

  Pepper looked down at the corpse. “Okay.”

  Ten minutes later they stopped. Both bulkheads ahead filled with shuffling bodies waiting for them to try and step through.

  “All they want do is bite you once,” Grenada said.

  “Maybe.” Pepper walked forward. “But they didn’t circle around behind us. They didn’t even try and spring a trap like back there.”

  “They learn better?”

  “Or they really, really don’t want us coming this way. Any other places we can reach a pod?”

  Grenada shook her head. “Low budget. Keep them in the cargo hold. Can’t afford to retrofit the ship out with passenger pods all throughout.”

  “Lucky for us,” Pepper muttered. The nightmare continued. Then a horrible thought occurred to him. “They’re escaping the ship.”

  Grenada looked down at the waiting shadows. “Canden say she ain’t detect any launch. Yet.”

  Pepper turned and started walking away. “We don’t have long-range communications. These things got smart quick. They’re going for the pods.” He was going to have to find another way off the ship.

  But Grenada stood still behind him. “If that’s true, we have to take them all down, secure the hold with the pods in it.”

  “And it looks like most of the infected crew is standing between us and the pods.” Pepper wouldn’t make it through without a bite.

  “You want this shit unleashed in Chilo? Traveling back to New Anegada? I know you got friends there, I know you have strong connections, and you go turn you back up on them just like that. You that selfish?”

  Pepper stopped. “There’s no guarantee we can stop them.”

  “Giving up without a fight? Now that’s something I never thought I would see from you. All that legendary shit-kicking just that, legend?”

  He turned around. “You dewey-eyed innocents and your freaking stories. I don’t save lives, I don’t join causes, I’m no hero, I play to be paid. Paid well. There’s got to be another way off this damn ship.”

  “What were you doing past the DMZ watching a Satrap die?”

  “I like seeing my enemies suffer.” Pepper stalked forward and stared down at her. Fuck her. He’d gone because he was missing something, and he wanted to watch the creature suffer to see if it would fix that rage inside.

  But it hadn’t made him whole again. He was still the same person, still casting about for something he hadn’t found yet. Lost memories, lost friends, lost worlds.

  “That’s it?” Grenada smiled. “Just a field trip?”

  “It’s easier to go where they ask you, do what they tell you. Then the mistakes, they aren’t your fault. I need that, I need that after all the things that I helped happen.”

  “You helped found the free worlds here. New Anegada wouldn’t exist without you. We all in your debt.”

  “Stop that. Please. No one is in my damn debt.”

  And Grenada laughed. “Is responsibility you scared of.”

  Pepper pushed her aside. “No, that’s not it.”

  It was her. Her and the hundreds of others he’d attached himself to. Close friends, colleagues, brothers in arms. All dead. “The alien machinery inside me, the hundreds of years I’ve lived as a result. Everyone dies around me. And I’m tired of trying.”

  “You’re muddling through some damn crisis. Pepper, I’m dying!” She grabbed his shirt. “There is no other fucking way off this ship but through them unless you want jump out in nothing more than a spacesuit, which will land you in the sun with us, only you’ll be a couple hundred miles over that way.”

  “No other way.”

  “You need a pod. We need stop them. And I want you to tell them we saved them. You understand? I never asked them for much, other than a chance at revenge, and I know what you saying. After Tangent Run I had nothing, until I came here. This is my family, and they’re dead, and I want everyone to know why. Can you just do that little thing for me?”

  Pepper looked back down at the zombies. If that was the only way off the ship . . . “How many crew were there on the ship?”

  “I would imagine that’s the rest of them there, waiting
to stop us.”

  Really.

  “I need more ammunition. Then we come back this way.” Pepper said that out loud. Then he turned his back on the crowd waiting for them.

  She’d said he couldn’t get away from the ship unless he jumped off in a spacesuit. A good idea, that.

  He walked back up through the ship, Grenada behind him.

  “Where are the spacesuits?” Pepper asked.

  “Service airlock. Few hundred feet ahead. You ain’t going for more ammunition?”

  “The dumbest thing you can do in a battle is play on the enemy’s chosen field. Running through a corridor surrounded by those things. I’d have been bitten.” And maybe she knew that and had tried to use him to help stop them by dangling the promise of getting away alive in front of him.

  “You want to EVA?”

  “You think there’ll be zombies in spacesuits outside trying to stop us?”

  “That or Canden will have a surprise for me.”

  “Whatever you think Canden’s about, you wrong.” Grenada paused in front of the airlock.

  “You reading my mind now?” Pepper folded his arms.

  “Ain’t reading no one’s mind.” Grenada shook her head. “Just you actions.”

  “Then you have just the tiniest fraction of the picture. I understand what she’s doing. I’d do the same in her spot.”

  Grenada looked surprised and unsure. “For true?”

  “She’s just trying to keep control. We going in there?” Pepper tapped on the thick porthole looking into the airlock.

  “Yeah, okay.” Grenada tapped in a code. The door creaked open. “Canden don’t like it.”

  “Of course not.” Pepper grinned and walked in between the pair of plastic benches. Grenada squeezed in past him to stand in front of the suit locker.

  It opened with her fingerprint on the thick lock. Four bright red deflated spacesuits hung inside the racks, snugged in between acceleration gel to protect them against sudden movement.

  Pepper pulled the top one out and shook it. The fabric responded by loosening up.

  “What’s in, what’s out?” Grenada held up her belt of handguns.

  “They should fire in vacuum.” Bullet casings held everything they needed to explode. “Just watch out for jamming.”

  “It’s more a case of what we’re going to fire coming in to the storage bay.”

  “Keep your shotgun out, then. But don’t fire it while skipping around outside. It’ll blow you clean off the ship.”

  Grenada belted herself back up, and pulled the baggy suit up over it all. Pepper helped her with the fishbowl helmet, sealing it around the neck ring. Grenada tapped the small wrist readout and gave a thumbs-up. Another tap and the suit constricted, shrinking itself down like a tight second skin, bulging around her weapons and clothes.

  “You keeping your trench coat on?”

  “It comes in handy in situations like this.” Like reactive bulletproof underlayers. One didn’t throw away a friend like that.

  Pepper pulled the extremely baggy spacsuit on over the trench coat without too much fiddling about to make it work, and pulled his dreadlocks back into a ponytail. Grenada helped set the helmet down over them, and then pushed it down on his head. The seal connected and Grenada twisted the helmet in.

  Text scrolled across the inside of the clear bowl as the suit booted up and scanned itself.

  Everything was go.

  The tiny oxygen tank was no larger than a hip flask with an hour of air. The scrubbers in the suit would reclaim everything else, presumably it would be a while before he’d even have to dip into the tank.

  “Hear me?” Grenada asked.

  “Yep.”

  Pepper picked up his sword off the plastic bench as his spacesuit shrunk to snug itself, bunching the tails of his trenchcoat to the back of his legs.

  He belted the sword outside the suit. “Tell Canden to spin the ship down, then let’s go.”

  “You think she’ll do that?”

  “I think Canden understands what we trying for.”

  The ship shook, shoving them against the benches as Canden decelerated it out of its spin. “Did you think she wouldn’t?” Pepper leaned against the wall to let Grenada past.

  Grenada’s voice echoed in the helmet slightly. It crackled a bit at first, but as the two suits agreed on frequencies and protocols it cleared. “I think you both all twist up, so much you understand each other.”

  “Maybe.”

  “No maybe about it.” She tapped the airlock code and stepped in. Pepper followed. A minute later the outer door opened, blowing out air and moisture crystals.

  Pepper looked out into the vacuum, and then clambered out around the edge. His entire perspective shifted. From climbing out into the dark, to crouching on a massive, grooved metal field. The hull’s outer plating was pitted and cratered and stripped clean of paint from the constant abrasion of space dust and tiny rock impacts. The larger ones sealed with putty and gel. “Let’s move.”

  With a powerful kick, his hands cupping the ladder’s rail that ran the length of the ship, Pepper traversed the ship’s hull.

  Every twenty feet he let go, nothing holding him to the ship, to dodge spots where the ladder was welded to the hull.

  “Canden just jettisoned the pods,” Grenada said. “You ain’t getting off.”

  Pepper clenched the ladder and came to a stop. Grenada caught herself before slamming into him. “What?”

  “I saw red.”

  “Spacesuit red?”

  Pepper hooked his foot under a rung and pushed himself up for a better view. There: a form hunkered down behind a mass of three communications dishes.

  The zombies did knock out the communications, by getting out in spacesuits. He wasn’t particularly surprised to find them out here.

  Grenada snorted. “Whoever make them regulation for fire-engine red on the suits deserve a thank-you card.”

  “That and whoever designed my eyes.” Pepper looked over as Grenada pulled a handgun free. Pepper grabbed her wrist. “No. Don’t blow yourself off the hull.”

  “I can brace myself.”

  “Save your strength.” Pepper floated free as he pulled his sword out. “They’re in spacesuits, so am I, they can’t bite me.”

  “That why you have a sword?”

  “I like a variety of weapons.” He kicked off toward the cluster of dishes, skimming over the pitted surface, sword held out wide.

  “I’ll warn Canden not to make any course corrections.”

  “Appreciated.” Pepper closed in on the base of the three dishes.

  And here they came. Four red spacesuits linked by hands flying toward him like a human net.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  No holding back now, no watching out for bites. Pepper slammed into the spacesuits and cracked visors with the hilt of the sword, watching faces pinch as the vacuum sucked at them.

  He snapped the sword at exposed limbs reaching for him with clumsy, grasping hands, and spun around follow up on the cracked visors. The infected bodies spun down the hull.

  Pepper wrapped his legs around the torso of the nearest, raised the sword high, and beheaded the infected crewman.

  Within a mental thirty-second count four heads spun free of the Sheikh, their bodies limp in the air near him. A cloud of crystallized fluids slowly spread out away from him.

  “Watch out!” Grenada’s voice crackled.

  Seven red suits swirled out the nearby airlock. “Shit.” The net of four had been a feint to drag him closer and then overwhelm him.

  Pepper kicked off the body he had latched on to as the cluster of new suits slammed into him.

  “Too many of them,” Grenada said. He couldn’t see her. The entire world spun with red suits, inky space, and flashes of pitted hull. Pepper sliced off arms, legs, and smashed in more faceplates.

  The next batch to slam into him impaled themselves on his sword, hands grabbing for the hilt.

  He had to be care
ful not to throw them away and toss himself into space. Instead, Pepper twisted his sword free and shoved off at the airlock. “I’m going in.”

  “You think that smart?”

  “How many crew did you think we have left?”

  “Sixteen, now. Ten dead out here, twenty-six total.”

  “Sixteen’s doable.” Pepper hit the rim of the airlock and rolled inside. Three inside waited to stop him from getting in. Sixteen crew to kill, then head back for the passengers. If he could kill everything aboard the ship and make a distress call maybe he could still get picked up.

  The waiting infected held large wrenches. Another new habit. Pepper got ready for the attack. But they stepped back as he moved forward.

  This was new.

  Grenada clambered in after him. The outer door shut and the lock repressurized.

  He moved again, and as one, the infected retreated through the inner door. Pepper and Grenada stepped out into the bay, surrounded by yellow-eyed, silent crew members.

  But no more attacking.

  The three nearest removed their helmets and cautiously stumbled forward. The fans on their backs strained against the red suits, which had forced the structures to fold down. They still twitched under the fabric.

  “We,” said the first one.

  “Can,” said the second.

  “Now.”

  “Talk.”

  “Our.”

  “Numbers.”

  “High enough.”

  Pepper stared. He stepped forward, and all around, the infected shrank back again. They had decided they couldn’t afford to attack him.

  “What are you?” he asked.

  The group touched hands, the fans on their shoulders writhed, and waves of motion ran throughout the wave of bodies like wind through grass.

  “I.”

  “Perhaps we.”

  “Are.”

  “The Swarm.”

  “I’ve never heard of you,” Pepper said.

  The words that followed ran down the lines of emotionless voices.

  “Your failings.”

  “Do not.”

  “Concern the Swarm.”

  Pepper felt annoyance unwind inside him. “What do you want?”

  “The Swarm seeks.”