“Well, they weren’t really worried about profit. This was back before… I mean, they really didn’t understand the importance of profits. It was old-fashioned. They were worried about things like honor and pride and, I dunno. Old-timey stuff.”
Zanib nods.
“What was the goal, then?”
“Well, just to establish a self-sustaining colony.”
“I don’t get it.”
A smile flutters across my face. I’ve been in academia so long I’ve almost forgotten how to explain complex, antiquated concepts to laywomen.
“Well, back then people weren’t thinking in terms of benefiting their companies.”
“They weren’t?”
“Well, some were, of course. But there were also these nation/state things that were concerned with stuff like mass warfare and cultural hegemony. America wanted to expand its reach to other worlds partially for the prestige and partially just so there would be more people loyal to their flag.”
“That flag?” she asks, pointing at the banner in the background behind the captain’s head.
“That’s the one.”
“What about the livestock? I mean, didn’t they know it was a waste of space and…”
“Zanib.”
“Yeah, virgin?”
“I have to talk about all this stuff at the meeting tomorrow. You’re going to be there, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Then ask me questions then. Right now, I want to find out if they break orbit or not.”
I lean my head on her shoulder and she starts the movie again.
Four
“Anything to add, Zanib?”
I thrust my elbow with such shock and verve into the soft spot under Zanib's ribcage that I’m surprised she doesn't shout. Luckily her eyelids snap open before every head in the room turns to her and she manages not to jump at my elbowing.
Without missing a beat, she says, “I think the xenoclimatologists have covered it. We really worked quite closely on this presentation. But if there are any specific questions...?”
Elegantly played. There’s some light murmuring.
“If there is alien life on the blood star, what can we expect?” a watery voice lips.
This is Helena, our security chief. Like all goons, she wears glasses, supposedly rattling off vital stats about the people and environment around her. She’s a light-skinned mountain of a woman, and she once suffered some kind of terrible, smashing injury to the right side of her face. Her right nostril and the right side of her mouth are asymmetric, and several of her teeth are made of metal alloy. Such long-term disfigurements are so rare with today's plastic and dental expertise that my only guess is that she was patched up in the field by a less-than-expert hand, and no amount of reconstructive surgery could fix the lasting damage. I doubt she minds. It makes her look intimidating.
Zanib nods.
“Thanks for the question, Helena.”
Groaning, Zanib hoists herself out of her seat and steps to the front of the conference table. I don’t know why she’s so tired. I’m the one who’s been up researching feverishly for the last day. But while crank, coffee, and the sheer excitement of the mission keep me teetering on the edge of crazy, Zanib is succumbing to the usual soporifics of interstellar travel.
“Right, so, if we think of the fleshworld as basically a giant, um, blood blister, there is a, uh, sort of a something you might consider skin but that’s kind of a misnomer because it’s really just the pressure of the atmosphere causing coagulation at a very surface level. Basically it’s just something a bit thicker than blood, through and through. Porridge. Am I, ah, misrepresenting the case at all?”
She glances at the xenoclimatologists, who had zoned out as soon as their briefing had been completed. The scientists largely wear lab coats, if for no other reason than to identify themselves as such. Some of the accountants and other white collar types wear skirts, pumps, dresses, and the like. I’m not entirely out of place in a jumpsuit, as security and some of the more hands-on laborers favor utilitarian wear. The only universal is the green bows in everyone’s hair. In that respect, at least, Opal didn’t lead me astray.
“Oh, yes,” one of the xenoclimatologists agrees, nodding her head urgently, “Very good comparison. Sludge, or, yeah, oatmeal.”
“Right. So, the center would be unlivable. Maybe it’s easier to think of it like a cherry with the pit still in. The actual blood part is the top layer. I apologize, everyone, if I’m mixing too many metaphors. You know, theoretical xenobiology is more art than science.”
That causes a titter of laughter. For the first time, I realize that Zanib may not even have caught the initial question. She’s just vamping for time, going over the same ground the xenoclimatologists covered.
“So, if there is life…” I say, more a statement to be finished that a question.
Zanib nods. I hope no one else can read the gratitude on her face.
“Right, if there is life…” She seems to notice the slideshow for the first time. “Have we got my slide uh… G… uh… are these my slides?”
“Here’s G-7,” the slide controller says, bringing up a crosscut of a fleshworld, not unlike the pitted cherry Zanib just described.
“No, it’s uh… like two or three more.”
The slides move forward at a deliberate clip.
“There! Stop there.”
The slide that comes up is a series of anatomical drawings of the mouths of animals, eight or ten, lined up in discrete ranks, each one more disgusting than the last.
“While we have no way of knowing with certainty anything about the creatures we might encounter on a fleshworld, we do know that they essentially live in blood. Or, at any rate, a solution so similar to what we could consider blood as to make no difference. They don’t just occupy it, they live off of it, they thrive on it. They must move through it and survive on it. So, what we can extrapolate about the creatures we encounter on any given fleshworld is that they will likely resemble, in at least some respects, terrestrial hematophages.”
Silence drops over the room like a funeral shroud.
“Hemato…” Helena starts sharply.
“Hematophages,” Diane states, as though it were the commonest word in the lexicon. “Blood drinkers.”
“Yes, very much so, Madam Director,” Zanib agrees. “Forgive me if I slip into Latin. It’s an old habit of, ah, all theoretical xenobiologists, and as we all know, mores mori difficile.”
“The term’s Greek, actually,” the director states flatly, “but please continue. This is not my briefing, after all. Although I was hoping to benefit from it.”
Zanib sobers up quickly. The laughter which had abetted her half-assery has dried up.
“My apologies, ladies. As I stated, any creatures we encounter will be hematophages, meaning blood-drinkers, and therefore we must surmise that their behavior and appearance will mimic one of the common blood-drinking apparati of terrestrial fauna. I’ve brought a small menagerie of these creatures on board for observation.”
“Why?” I can’t stop myself from asking, surprised that no one else has the same question on the tips of their tongues.
“Ha! Good question, Paige. It’s common practice for theoretical xenobiologists to keep sample species on hand so we can examine their behavior. If the behavior of the xeno species perplexes us, we can observe the behavior of the analogous sample species in the same environment, and try to glean clues from that. Macht Sinn?”
I nod.
“Don’t worry, I’ve cleared all of the analogue species with health and safety. Let’s take a look at a few. Starting from the top, the mosquito, you’re all, no doubt, unfortunately familiar with, has a proboscis, or elongated nose for sucking out blood. Here you’ll see the silhouette of a vampire bat, although I suspect it’s rather fanciful to expect a flying, bloodsucking mammal…”
“Perhaps you could stop wasting all of our time, then.”
Like a chill wind on a
hot summer night, a change comes over the room. It’s as though everyone who’s either been playing along or hadn’t noticed Zanib flying by the seat of her pants has suddenly wised up. And Zanib herself feels the change and her demeanor sharpens. All it takes is ten words from the director to do all that.
“Yes, of course. Most likely any creatures we encounter will be designed by evolution to churn through the swamplike conditions of a fleshworld’s surface. The closest terrestrial analog would be any of the thirty-eight species of petromyzontiformes known as stone-lickers or lampreys. Next slide, please.”
I nearly retch when the slide changes, but a huge part of me is transfixed, fascinated. Admittedly, it’s been a long time since I’ve studied terrestrial zoology (only the most useful and therefore dull stock ever makes it into the ink) but I don’t recall ever seeing anything like this. The grotesque creature displayed from several angles resembles an eel, or an especially tubular fish. I have no special love of eels, but this one is particularly repulsive, being jawless. Its mouth resembles a great circular pit of teeth.
“How large will they grow?” someone whose name escapes me asks.
Zanib nods, as if she had been anticipating the question.
“Well, there are no limitations. In an ocean of essentially blood, a hematophage could grow to be the size of a terrestrial shark or even a whale.”
Helena snorts and rolls her eyes.
“So, giant leech-monsters the size of busses. That’s what we have contend with?”
“Potentially,” Zanib agrees. “Of course, the big ones aren’t the problem. We have biomonitors that can detect them and a simple electric shock should be more than enough to ward them off. The real concern would be smaller hematophages, tiny ones that could get into our systems.”
“And how would we defend ourselves against that?”
“Not enter the ocean.”
“How glib,” the director says.
“N… no, I’m serious…” Zanib stammers.
“I know you are. But we’ve all already jumped to the next move of the checkers match. There’s nothing much to be done about native microfauna in any case, and in a slapdash expedition like ours it’s just one of the risks. Now, Paige, I believe you’re next.”
I nod, straighten my skirt, and rise, words on my lips, when the hatch opens and the directorate secretary, Myrna, comes strutting in as fast as the three-meter aluminum ramrod crammed up her ass allows. She clutches in her hand a piece of actual stationery – expensive beyond all reason in our current paperless environment.
“Inappropriate, Myrna,” the director says through clenched teeth, until she spots the sheet in the agitated secretary’s hands. “What’s that?”
“It’s a memorandum, ma’am.”
“I can see that.”
Diane snatches the sheet of paper out of Myrna’s hand. Her face barely changes as she reads it top to bottom, eyes moving left to right like sensor bot heads. Just the tensing of her jaws is enough to make me retake my seat like a deflated balloon. I look at Zanib questioningly, but she just shrugs.
After taking a few seconds to mull over the document, the director clears her throat.
“Right, well, we’ll take it from here. Thank you, Myrna.”
The protocol officer rises tentatively from her seat at the foot of the conference table.
“Shall I reschedule the meeting, Diane?”
The director shakes her head, sharply, only once.
“No, no need to dismiss the cats and then herd them all back in. Although, ladies, if any of you have a reasonable accommodation for nausea on file, please wait outside.”
I look at Zanib again, my eyes wide.
What the hell?
“Skin-wrappers!” she mouths.
I sit stock-still, as though petrified by Medusa’s glare. A few of the attendees rise and leave the room in an orderly fashion, as though this were all very by-the-numbers. I don’t have a reasonable accommodation, but I start to rise, tentative, wiggling my butt in the air in indecision. Zanib grabs a trash basket and shoves it into my lap, forcing me down. I wrap my arms around the basket as though it were a woobie. I’m really not sure what to expect, but clearly Zanib doesn’t want me to miss the experience.
The director fusses in her chair, trying to strike a dominating pose by leaning forward on the conference table and balling her hands. It’s the closest I’ve ever seen her to out-of-sorts. If the stories about the skin-wrappers are true, I’m in for quite a show.
The main vidscreen turns on. The woman next to me immediately turns and pukes her guts up into the garbage basket between my legs. I hand it to her.
“Thanks,” she whispers, wiping her mouth.
Five
The skin-wrappers are not sitting around a conference table like us. In fact, unless I miss my guess, skin-wrappers would never sit.
They occupy what appeared to be a large, open plasteel dome, free (or as free as possible) of gravity. I can’t shake the feeling that as they stare at us through the vidscreen, they are also periodically glancing through the transparent plates of their command center to look at the Borgwardt directly. Each of the skin-wrappers I can see beyond the looming face of their (I presume) leader, are in various stages of total cutaneous debridement.
The leader herself halfway resembles a mummy of ancient Earth. Every centimeter of her flesh has been flayed down to the meat, but she’s wrapped most of her body loosely in gauze, possibly for our benefit. The way the bandages float in the zero-G still leaves great swathes of her glistening red flesh exposed, and her face in particular has the look of a ghoul.
The others behind her have not taken such pains to set us at ease, and are everything from barely wrapped for medical purposes to completely exposed in all their glistening, sickening glory.
“Good morning, madam director,” the leader of the skin-wrappers hisses through her exposed teeth in a dry, rotting voice.
I watch Diane for some sign that she’s shaken up, or at least off her game, but there’s none. She doesn’t even check her watch.
“Good morning. And what am I to call you?”
“You can call me Nia,” the skin-wrapper responds so snappily as to be almost peevish, “and shall I call you Diane?”
I feel a shiver run down my spine. They know our complement. This is no chance encounter.
“Yes, that would be fine,” the director responds acidly.
Nia pushes off lightly from her bulkhead, tumbling through zero G with a precision and ease that could only be gained from years of practice. She comes to a rest maybe a meter further back from the camera, and for the first time her floating, intravenous robot comes into view. She reaches out and fondles the thick, plastic tube connecting her to the whirring device which even now is delivering a steady stream of nutriments and medicines directly into her bloodstream. It’s a device not unlike my own armband, writ large.
Likely she has terminal cancer. The skin-wrapper subculture evolved from the victims of various burns and diseases which were better treated in zero G. The corporations, ever seeking cost-cutting measures, gradually withdrew funding and staff from their own hospital ships. The skin-wrappers gradually became healers and patients both, tending to their own and welcoming only their own. An entirely spaceborne people, their limbs grew long and their muscles weak, used to no gravity. Nia herself is particularly gaunt-looking.
“It doesn’t surprise you that I know who you are?”
“Hardly. There are plenty of spies on Yloft for anyone willing to pay.”
“I prefer to think we don’t have spies so much as friends. Friends who wish us well.”
“Friends who… slipped you our manifest?”
Nia turns back and a wave of gauze flutters away from her face, exposing cheekless jaws and naked nostrils. She doesn’t bother to replace the wrapping.
“You make it sound so tawdry. We merely patrol these shipping lanes, collecting tolls. Your corporation is reasonable. Surely they don’t o
bject to paying what they owe?”
Diane purses her lips. We all wait expectantly. It’s an extortion job, plain and simple. While some corporations charge docking and orbital fees at planets and way-stations they own outright, being in the ink is supposed to be, for all intents and purposes, free. Claiming a tax on a shipping lane is a not-so-subtle bandit’s tactic.
And this is the dark side of the skin-wrappers. No matter how tragic their origin, they’ve become a plague. Over time, they took to piracy, reaving for supplies from the corporations that had abandoned them to their fates. They don’t have children, their ranks gradually replenished by volunteers who judge a few years of swashbuckling better than dying in a planetbound hospital.
“They’d be happy to. Please issue them an invoice.”
Evidently Diane has decided being extorted is better than being boarded. She reached for the kill button.
“Actually,” Nia replies, “we’re low on supplies and would rather accept barter.”
A smile curls across the director’s lips.
“Barter implies an equitable trade.”
“Free passage will be yours. Dump half your fresh fruits and vegetables. A quarter of your meat and dairy. We’re not savages, after all.”
The director holds out her hand without a word. As though psychically bidden, a woman in chef’s whites slinks up and presses a jotter containing what I presume to be the galley manifest into the director’s hands. She scans it as though running through routine paperwork, even taking the time to scroll down and adjust her glasses once or twice. Finally, she slaps the jotter down on the table and looks up.
“I’ll give you thirty liters of milk and two crates of eggs.”
Milk and eggs. Both perishable. We can spare it and it may go bad anyway. I’ve never dealt with pirates before, except the sort who have abandoned the life to take up jobs as objects of curiosity in the Mercado, and I always assumed those were more bark than bite. I’m not sure whether Diane is making a reasonable offer, insulting the skin-wrappers, or attempting to haggle.
The Hematophages Page 4