My eyelids start to flutter and I just let the end settle in. Then I feel a prick in my arm and a cold, familiar dose of crank bleeds into my veins. My heart starts racing and I sit up like a shot. My hands are quivering as I roll up my sleeve. My armband has a clock on it, and the hour’s just passed. Peavey’s mistake had been in trying to kill me quietly and discreetly. If she had just out-and-out poisoned me a dose of adrenaline, stims, and vitamins would have done nothing. Instead, my body is now a mess of conflicting impulses.
My left arm is numb and refusing to move but I manage to drag myself up and stumble back into the Mercado. Australia is supposedly a dealer in clean crank and other personalized synthomeds. Every station bunny or ink surfer who frequents Yloft, though, knows to meet her around back when you needed something illicit.
“Holy shit,” the narco dealer says as she presses her palm to my forehead old-school style, “You look like shit, Paige.”
“Thanks,” I mutter through my quavering lips, “You look gorgeous yourself.”
“What happened?”
“Bad dose,” I lie.
She fixes me with a look like she believes that about as much as she believes in the Giant Space Baby. She pricks my finger with a mousetrap needle I’m guessing wasn’t particularly well-sterilized and then sucks the end of my finger with her mouth. Australia was born a super taster – a genetic abnormality to begin with – but a few genetic grafts and even good old fashioned subdermal chips had turned her tongue into a potent diagnostic tool. And that tool’s determination is…
“You’re a mess.”
I can tell. I shiver even as the sweat pours down my forehead and into my eyes. She looks at me.
“This is going to cost you.”
“It’s all right. I’ve got a job.”
Australia gives a short, abbreviated, delighted grunt.
“Do you now? I suppose you’ll want my standard Unincorporated Data Company horseshit line on your invoice?”
“If you don’t mind.”
Australia runs my wand for me. I don’t mind. It’s not so much that I trust her as that I just want to lay down and die, and the worry of her cheating me is the least of my problems right now.
●●●
I grab Peavey’s head by the ear and slam it onto the desk. Her mouth works like a fish’s as she tries to get a grasp on the situation, then extricate herself from it, but I hold her fast. I lean down and whisper in her ear.
“Nice try, asshole.”
“Ambroziak!” she mumbles through half-depressed lips.
“Yeah, it’s me. You’re only about a quarter as clever as you think you are. I guess that’s why I’m still alive.”
Panicked, her eyes begin to circle around her limited point of view.
“You called the goons on me?”
I shake my head and then, realizing she can’t see the gesture, release hers and sit down opposite her, straddling a chair.
“No. Security’s not coming for you. That’s pedestrian. I don’t do pedestrian.”
Slowly, her left hand shaking so badly she has to slap at her armband for a shot of calming crank, she raises her head to look at me. Bearing the look of a cornered ruminant she reaches up and gently rubs her crushed-in jaw.
“What… what are you going to do?”
“Right now? I’m going to finish up a couple of hours of research, then report to the Borgwardt. You remember, that job I stole out from under you?”
I stand up and fling the chair along the tile so that it slams into her knees. Not a hard knock, I know, but a cathartic one.
“Wait!”
All eyes in the archives are suddenly focused on us. I raise an eyebrow and plant my hands on my hips, waiting. She glances around, embarrassed at her outburst, though she seems to already know she’s in deep shit. We have grown up together, but I’ve always been better connected than Peavey. I have friends. People like me. They just tolerate her.
She approaches me. The interested eyes, seeing that we’re colluding out of earshot, flicker away.
“What… I mean… what are you going to do to me?”
“Do to you? Why would I do anything to you?”
She stares at me.
“You’re not going to get me back?”
“Academia’s a minefield, Peavey. A viper’s nest. They told us that the first day. I can’t go flying off the handle every time I get bitten, can I?”
She almost seems to relax.
“Does that mean we can let bygones be…”
I jam a finger into her sternum.
“That being said, don’t you forget this is a minefield, either. Keep both eyes over your shoulders, girl, because you’ll never know when the explosion’s going to take you out.”
I make a low rumbling sound from the back of my throat like a bomb going off and pantomime it in the air. Peavey turns a shade of white normally reserved for porcelain latrine stalls.
I strut smartly away, smiling to myself. I don’t really have any plan for her. A few ideas have crossed my mind, but none that I can put in motion before I leave the station. Peavey will keep. Or maybe she’ll run. But either way she’s going to be looking over her shoulder for a long, long time. And that’s ample payback for now.
Three
The hatch opens. I don’t look up.
“Howdy, there, stranger!”
A roommate. Maybe I should have specified no roommate in the employment contract. I didn’t, though. I grunt and roll over in my bunk, turning my back to her.
“My name’s Zanib. What’s yours? Hello? You ain’t deaf, are you?”
A country girl. Probably a cornhusker from Tafra-Nell or somewhere. Great. I roll back to face her.
“Listen. Zanib, is it?”
She smiles and her head bobs like a bird’s. She’s a pretty girl. Dark skin. Brown eyes. Hair in two identical pigtails. Maybe I shouldn’t be so harsh. But, no, this is me we’re talking about.
“Can we just skip the part where you try to be overwhelmingly chipper, and I try to communicate through body language that I don’t want to be bothered, and then you pretend like you don’t notice or maybe you do notice but you believe in the overwhelming power of kindness, and next thing you know I’m sort of taken by your effervescent charm and start to come out of my shell and just skip right to the part of the movie where we get in a fight and I regret hurting your feelings and not talking to you anymore?”
The country girl lets out a single, halfway forced, “Ha!” It’s not a laugh. She drops her bags in the corner and scrambles up the ladder before flopping in the top bunk.
“I should’ve known you’d never been in the ink before.”
I scowl. She’s baiting me, but it’s not enough to peek my head out from my bunk. No, I’m lying, it is enough.
“I’ve been in the ink before.”
She shakes her head.
“Nope. If I had to guess, I’d say you’ve never been off Yloft.”
I roll my eyes.
“I’m from Horizant.”
Zanib shakes her head.
“Your mum’s from Horizant. You moved here when you were, what, twelve?”
“Eight.”
“I can tell from the accent.”
“Still, that was a long trip.”
“Taking a trip once when you were a kid is not the same as being an ink surfer. Don’t worry, virgin, I’ll be gentle.”
I cluck my tongue and glance down at my jotter. I only have eighteen or so hours before I have to make good on all of my lofty promises. And yet, the sewage and plumbing systems of ancient seed ships has never seemed so boring.
“I told you, I’m not a virgin,” I say, fighting the urge to power down my jotter.
“Mm hmm,” she grunts, “I guess that’s why you’re messing with your roommate. The first rule of the ink is don’t mess with your roommate. Especially when she knows things you don’t. But don’t worry, virgin, I’ll teach you.”
I snort.
�
�What are you going to do? Beat me up? Steal my shoes?”
“Nope.”
She has me curious now. She’s a complete shit-eater, sitting up there, bouncing her bent leg across her knee like that.
“What?”
I look up at her. She’s thumbing through something on her jotter. Ignoring me.
“Oh. The freezeout.”
She smiles and finally looks down at me.
“Don’t worry, virgin. I know how important it is to keep your roommate happy. It’s the code of the ink. I would never freeze you out. Mmm… speaking of which, you hungry?”
My stomach doesn’t quite growl in betrayal, but as with any time I’ve ever been focused on my work for hours at a time, I haven’t even been thinking about my gastric functions for so long that they seem to hit me all at once like a brick. One time, in the archives of Yloft, just out of my undergrad, I was transfixed watching holovids of Shoggoth-Yug disease blister popping that I didn’t realize I had to pee until I had almost pissed my pants. I didn’t, but I made it no farther than the corner of the periodicals section. I blamed it on a derelict, which I felt bad about, because really I don’t mind if derelicts sleep in the archives and they were banned after that.
But I digress. I am hungry. Damn hungry.
“What do you have in mind?”
●●●
Zanib flops down into the seat next to me instead of across from me. She’s one of those. I stare at her, psionically urging her to sit down in the proper spot, across from me, but she doesn’t budge.
Her tray is littered with calories. She empties a tiny paper ramekin of butter on top of a fat ribeye. Fried eggs confuse me as to the matter of what meal, precisely, she believes she is eating. A bowl of heavy whipped cream and strawberries only makes the matter more Heisenbergy.
Before tucking in, she glances at my own tray, clucks her tongue, and shakes her head.
“Poor virgin. I told you to eat the fresh stuff now. You’ll have plenty of that freeze-dried crap when it’s the only thing left on board.”
I shrug, and stir my noodles around. Ramen is what I’m used to and Ramen is what I’m eating.
“I haven’t got…” I grab her receipt and turn it towards me. “Holy shit!”
She snatches the receipt away from me.
“I don’t spend my chits on much. I like to eat.”
Her body doesn’t disagree. She’s got an athlete’s build. I fantasize about fucking her. I wonder briefly if she’d be into a scragged-out academic like me. Maybe, if the trip is long enough. Which reminds me.
“Well, anyway, I don’t have twenty-five chits to spend on galley food, and besides I have it on good authority this mission’s only going to be about twenty-four hours travel time. Two days, out and back. ‘Snot so bad.”
Zanib snorts. She glances around the galley. Even though it’s empty, she makes a big show of putting her head on a swivel for two full rotations.
“It’s not the travel time you need to be worried about, virgin. I have that on better than good authority.”
I shovel a chunk of something green that might once have been a vegetable into my mouth.
“Well, don’t leave me in the dark, roomie. What’s going to keep us on mission for so long that we’re going to run out of steak and cream?”
Zanib pushes her half-finished (!) tray to the side and leans in conspiratorially.
“I guess it doesn’t matter. We’re all going to be briefed soon anyway. You know what my expertise is?”
“Biology?”
She’s mentioned it once or twice already in our brief acquaintanceship.
“Theoretical xenobiology,” she clarifies, emphasizing each syllable as though it were more important than the last. “That means predicting the nature of alien life.”
“In other words, horseshit science.”
Zanib’s eyes narrow.
“It’s real science.”
“What kind of alien life are we going to come across, then?”
She shrugs and leans back in her chair, folding her arms.
“How would I know? I’m a horseshit artist.”
I cock my head. Accompanied with the “Oh, really?” look it’s more than enough. The cornhusker is just as eager to spill her secrets as I am to hear them.
“All right,” she says, “Are you familiar with the Gaia hypothesis?”
I quirk my mouth to the right. It rings a bell.
“Something about… Earth being a person or something?”
Zanib shrugs but also wears an expression suggesting I’m not far off.
“Yeah, pretty much. If your body’s made up of cells that make up tissues that make up organs that make up…you…what’s to stop us from thinking that an entire planet isn’t essentially a single organism made up of plants and animals that form ecosystems and ecosystems that form a biome and so on.”
“All right.”
“So Meyerhofer took Gaia one step further and suggested that what climatologists considered a metaphor or a useful way of understanding the world, xenoclimatologists might consider a literal possibility.”
“A planet-spanning organism?”
Zanib’s eyes light up.
“A blood star. A fleshworld.”
So, that’s what she’s getting at. I wave the silly notion off with an abrupt gesture.
“That’s an old canard. We’re not living in the Information Age any more. Nearly twelve per cent of the galaxy had been charted, and nothing even close to a fleshworld has been…”
Then it strikes me like a meteoroid. My spoon clatters into my bowl and pirouettes out, splattering me with juicy Ramen broth from chin to crotch on its way to the deck. Zanib snatches my spoon off the deck when I make no move to retrieve it. She eyes me warily.
“What’s wrong with you?”
I look her in the eyes, as though seeing her for the first time. I think she must see the excitement in my own, because her expression changes.
“The Manifest Destiny,” I whisper.
“Not possible,” she whispers back.
“You’re a fleshworld expert?”
“Well… if there is such a thing.”
“They hired me as a seed ship expert.”
Her lips quiver.
“I didn’t know there were experts on technology that outdated.”
I shrug.
“I’ll be as much of one as there is in a few hours.”
She looks around the room, though it remains aggressively empty. She leans in conspiratorially towards me.
“You know the old anecdote about the three blind women? And one thinks she’s found a snake and one thinks she’s found a tree and…”
“And it’s really an elephant?”
“Do you think that’s what we’re dealing with here?”
“If you’re saying no individual one of us was supposed to piece together what we were doing until we were on board… and what it really is, is salvaging The Manifest Destiny… hell, yeah I do.”
●●●
I snort awake when my chin strikes my chest. I fell asleep with my finger on the scrollbar so I have already scrolled to the end of the document I had been reading. The jotter is repeatedly advising me that I have reached the end of the document, and it sounds as vexed as an inanimate object is capable of sounding.
I look around the room. The lights are out, but something flickers up on Zanib’s bunk. I force myself out and stretch widely. Zanib is surrounded by a halo of holograms, stretching out in a circle around her. I wave until I finally catch her attention. She pats her bunk, so I shrug. What the hell?
I climb up and she moves closer to the bulkhead so I can lay down next to her. Her jotter projects the movie all around us, swirling left and right or up and down along with the camera pans. The point was you never had to move your head to watch the action in front of you, but if you ever felt like it, you could look left or right and still feel like it was happening all around you. She depressed the button so the aud
io would stop projecting directly into her brainpan.
“We can still make it back if we turn around now!”
“We were never meant to make it back!”
The special effects are hokey and the acting is over-the-top, but there’s a reason why everyone still watches the classic version of The Manifest Destiny.
“What’s got you watching this?”
“Shh. This is the best part.”
The semi-legendary seed ship, shaped like a mushroom with a fat circular cap, is already caught in the atmosphere of the fleshworld. The captain fires all rockets in a last-ditch attempt to break free of the planet. Soon the fuel will run out and they will crash, and then comes the big promise scene and the fade-to-black, hinting at the bleak fate the crew actually suffered. We’re practically at the end.
We watch as the filmographer wildly cuts back and forth between the exterior of the ship with boosters on full blast, the sweat-dripping face of the captain as she watches the fuel gauge, and the fuel gauge itself as it slowly, painfully degrades. I’m instantly captivated again. No matter how many times I watch it, no matter how certain the outcome, it’s impossible for anyone to rip their eyes away from the screen.
The image pauses.
Unless you’re Zanib, I guess.
“Do you really know all about this stuff?”
I shrug, remember how bunched up my muscles are, and the shrug evolves into a stretch.
“I guess. That’s what they pay me for, anyway.”
“So, this company, this United Stakes of America…”
“Country.”
“What?”
“Nothing, it doesn’t matter.”
“Okay. So, what do they hope to get out of sending the seed ship to Vilameen? I mean, sure, they didn’t know it was a fleshworld, but they did know it was barren, right? What was the profit?”
I nod. I guess I do have to explain the whole “country” thing after all.
The Hematophages Page 3