The Hematophages

by Stephen Kozeniewski

  “What am I supposed to do with that?”

  “It’s a good faith offer. As a show of good faith, you should take it.”

  I can almost picture Nia’s missing lips curling in displeasure. Her two naked rows of teeth part from each other, strands of dry, mucusy saliva connecting the mandible to the maxilla like rubber bands in a retainer.

  “We need something green.”

  The director doesn’t have to double-check the manifest.

  “I’ll give you a dozen heads of cabbage. And a liter of strawberries. The alternative, of course, is to board us.”

  I find myself transfixed by Nia’s eyes. They sit caged in pockets of meat, lidless, browless, staring, but no less expressive for being so. I wonder how the skin-wrappers sleep at night, with their eyes open to the world like that.

  “Blow it out your airlock and be on your way. We’ll recover the goods from space.”

  “Have a pleasant morning,” Diane responds, a blade of a sentence that could have sliced through the bulkhead.

  She punches the kill switch and the grotesque visages of the skin-wrappers disappear from the vidscreen. She jerks a thumb over her shoulder.

  “Go.”

  The chef nods and sprints for the hatch. The protocol officer rises and clears her throat ostentatiously.

  “Shall we adjourn for…”

  Diane cuts her off sharply.

  “We haven’t the time to adjourn and we’ve already wasted more time dealing with those pirates than we should have. I want to find out what our golden child has to say. After all, this expedition is depending on you in so many ways, Paige.”

  I rise and smile.

  “That’s kind of you to say, Diane.”

  Six

  Wait patiently for the absent parties to shuffle back in, heads hung just a little low in shame. A reasonable accommodation isn’t supposed to be shaming, but for some people there’s just no getting over it. Smile at each of them as they go by. Welcome them with mindless pleasantries. Okay, that’s sorted.

  Introduce yourself.

  “Hi, everybody, I’m Paige Ambroziak, although you probably know me better as the golden child.”

  Chuckles. Good. The director is unamused. Fuck her. She doesn’t care what I have to say. This little gladiation match is for the mob, anyway.

  Prove you’re worth a damn.

  “I am a Ph.D. student from Yloft. I wish I could tell you I’m a doctor, but you’re not paying for degrees, you’re paying for results. Slide H-1, please.”

  Take control. Make them eat out of the palm of your hand.

  “Actually, could I have the remote? It’ll be easier that way. Thank you. Ladies, what you are looking at is a seed ship, circa, oh, let’s say, one hundred and fifty, two hundred standards ago.”

  “Could we be more specific, Paige?”

  She’s trying to throw you off. No worries. Don’t miss a beat. Don’t hesitate. Make some shit up.

  “A hundred and eighty-five, to be more specific, madam director. Of course, this particular model spans the time frame I just laid out, but we’re looking at The Manifest Destiny, so why futz around about it?”

  They’re fussing. They’re buzzing. They know the movie. Of course they do. Who doesn’t? I’ve got their interest. That’s not the same as them being interested in me. That’s only reflected glory, like the moon and the sun. But they’re listening.

  “Yes, this is The Manifest Destiny. Some of you may remember the movie. Fewer of you, I’ll wager, remember the book.”

  More chuckles. Good. Easy crowd. Work jokes work on them.

  “The Manifest Destiny was named after a 19th century nationalist philosophy, blah blah blah, this is all flavor text. You can read it on your own time.”

  Click through the slides. Imply that you’ve got more information than they could ever need. Make them hang on your every word. The words you vocalize are the important ones then, yeah? The slides can completely contradict what you’re saying, but say it confidently and they’ll believe you and not their own eyes.

  “Here’s where it gets interesting. Everybody’s favorite topical: technical specifications.”

  Mock groans. Good, they’re playing along. Better than sleeping.

  “Now, now, ladies, it’s not so bad. I’m supposed to be briefing you on seed ships in general, but I’ve chosen to use The Manifest Destiny as an example in most of these slides for two reasons: firstly, because it’s a nice, middle-of-the-road example of the thinking of the engineers of that era. Secondly, well, I’ll let you guess about secondly.”

  A light titter. After the presentations by Zanib and the xenoclimatologists there’s scarcely any doubt left. I glance at the director. She remains unmoved, made of stone. Fair enough. We’re all playing along at this point. We all know damn well it’s The Manifest Destiny actual we’re all going to salvage, but the first person to say it loses the game. Childish. But when aren’t office politics childish?

  Fall on your face. Make yourself seem human. They’re wanting to dislike you, but they can’t dislike you if you’re just like them. Or you make them feel better about themselves.

  “Next slide, please. Oh, I forgot, I have the remote.”

  I shake my head like I’m a ditz. Click the button. There it is. The Manifest Destiny. A reversed mushroom in shape, the “cap” consists of a bundle of cylindrical tubes, like cylinders. The “stem” is crap, just a huge reservoir of fuel and water. I say as much.

  “If they had to jettison the central portion, it wouldn’t really have affected any shipboard processes. In fact, that’s not just true of the central portion. What we call a single seed ship is really dozens of interlocking, self-sustaining miniature pods. If one malfunctions, it can be sealed off and jettisoned from the main mass instantaneously. In practice, they likely would’ve taken the few minutes required to drain the fuel and water from the malfunctioning pod and possibly save the crew members before jettisoning it.”

  The director leans back in her chair and folds her arms. Is this… could it be? Is this my moment?

  “That seems supremely wasteful.”

  It is! It’s my moment. It was bound to happen. Do it. Leap on her. Eviscerate her. But do it in a deeply respectful manner.

  “Actually, it’s the entire purpose of the ship. The point is the built-in redundancy. Each individual pod could, in desperate circumstances, serve as a seed for a stable community. Let’s take a closer look.”

  Next slide. One of the cylinders, sliced in half and looked at sideways.

  “Here’s the engine. Not much room for fuel, hence the central carrier. But in a pinch, one of the pods can act as an individual craft. Throughout you see the sewage systems and the hydroponics systems, intermeshed, in fact, with filtration systems throughout. While in the ink water is far too precious to waste and even human waste can be broken down into its component vitamins and fed to the plants. Precious little waste has to actually be discharged into space. To put it simply: they literally shit where they ate.”

  A few chuckles. Good enough.

  “Despite extensive scouting, the colonists of a seed ship would not have expected even theoretically habitable planets to have alien life capable or even worthy of domestication. It’s the age-old problem we still face: what good is discovering aliens with a silicon- or sulfur-based biochemistry when we can’t eat them? Maybe you could find beasts of burden. Maybe you just find nuisance animals. In any case, their solution was terrestrial chickens.”

  Next slide. A silly comic featuring a chicken in an office setting. The sort of thing you’d pin to your jotter wallpaper if you’re over fifty. A pun about eggs. Not very funny, but still good enough for a laugh. Just the fact I’ve included it is good enough for a laugh.

  “Chickens bear meat. And eggs. They don’t eat much and perhaps most importantly they provide for an important diversity of diet. If we go even further back than the seed ship era, there were interstellar flights attempting to base successful coloniz
ation on hydroponic agriculture alone. Radishes and onions and beans are fine, but ultimately for healthy, expansive colonization, livestock had to be reintroduced on some level.

  “And on The Manifest Destiny, that level was poultry. About a hundred females with a far greater diversity in frozen seed material. As long as you keep an eye on it, track genetic markers for a generation or two, and mandate diverse breeding and multiple births that’s right around the bare minimum to establish a stable gene pool.”

  The next slide is a chart, not a lot different from a family tree, outlining how two individuals, even with the introduction of outside seed material, failed to generate a stable gene pool. The next slide is more crowded, with ten individuals also reaching a terminus. The third is even more crowded, but shows how a hundred individuals generate a self-sustaining population.

  “And not coincidentally the crew of each pod was about the same size. One hundred females, young, of childbearing age, with nurseries and room to expand the population even in mid-flight. The only difference of course, is that all that stuff I just said about chickens with mandated breeding and a mandated number of children starts to sound an awful lot like eugenics when you apply it to people.”

  “Presumably these pioneers volunteered for the task.”

  I hadn’t thought Helena had been paying attention.

  “Exactly so. Just coming from a time when our species was all but earthbound, simply a chance to see the ink was enough to inspire people to give up their life, their family, even control over their own bodies.

  “Now, as I was saying, one pod could theoretically function as a base for a colony. It would be cramped and terrible, but it would suffice. Twelve allows for all the vagaries of space travel and still the certainty of a basis for an extremely strong colony.

  “A seed ship, as you can probably guess, is an extremely expensive venture, one that our modern corporations would find fiscally unsound. Only in the time of jingoist nation-states would such a venture have been undertaken. Even bearing that in mind, the loss of a single seed ship would be a catastrophe. In addition to the human and physical cost, the loss of prestige worldwide and to be frank the lack of will to start again – the shaken nerves, if you will – make The Manifest Destiny itself such an extraordinary case. How did the USA so poorly mis-scout Vilameen as a colony?”

  The director clears her throat.

  “All fascinating background, Paige, but no need to focus so exclusively on a single case study. Maybe you could cover a little more general ground.”

  I’m supposed to be unflappable, but this has me seriously… flapped. Why would they have us learning about fleshworlds and seed ships if we weren’t dealing with the most famous seed ship disaster in history? Is it possible we’re not actually going after The Manifest Destiny? Is there a smaller incident I missed in my zeal and certainty? Have I really wasted all my time putting in the research on it?

  I can’t tell from Diane’s countenance. I want to harden my heart and my grimace, but I can’t. She’s actually gotten under my skin.

  “Yes… well.”

  I flip through the next few slides, covering some rather in-depth background on The Manifest Destiny itself.

  “Ah…”

  I can’t even talk anymore. I’m toast.

  “The, ah, each… pod is functional. As a shelter. If need be. Goal being of course to… break down the pod eventually and use it as raw supplies for building a town. Hopefully you land somewhere with lumber, but if not, there’s the pod. Hopefully you land somewhere with a breathable atmosphere, but if not, you can stay in the pod. It’s not ideal, but, um…”

  I trail off. My mind is a literal blank. I discharge a long breath of air from between my two front teeth. I’ve lost them. It’s not so much that I’ve lost them. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. They’re all focused on me like lasers, like scavengers sensing a weak meal about to become carrion. One mocking comment is all it’ll take now and I’ll be a laughingstock for the rest of the voyage, if not my career. And I can see one forming on Diane’s lips.

  Only Zanib seems to be worried for me, seems to be encouraging me, is mouthing something but I’ll be damned if I can tell what. Maybe it’s something specific. Maybe it’s nothing more than “keep going.” Or maybe it’s “sit down.” If I sit down now do I lose or win?

  I can hear the director filling her lungs in preparation for the withering remark that will cut me down and cost me not just my pride but my bonus. But instead of words the air is suddenly filled with a buzzing alert over the intercom.

  Seven

  Helena is on her feet instantly. She snatches a telecommunication device off the bulkhead – an analog throwback only included in these offices to make the security personnel feel better – and begins shouting.

  “What the hell is going on up there?”

  Our ears are flattened against the sides of our heads, desperately listening, as though the room is silent, even though the monotone drone of the emergency alert is deafening.

  Helena hangs up the phone. Her eyes are locked on some far distant object she can’t see through ten rows of bulkheads. She presses a few buttons on the phone and the alarms cut out. She kneels down next to the director and the two exchange a feverish whispered dialogue that none of the rest of us can overhear, strain though we might.

  Helena nods, rises, and points to two of her officers who rise and follow her out of the room. Like groundhogs our heads all snap towards the hatch in unison as we hear Helena and her goons seal it behind us.

  “My apologies, ladies, but the security director has advised me that we’ll be safest in here at present, at least for the duration of the emergency. I’m afraid I need to negotiate with the interlopers. Those of you who wish to leave but are unable to due to the emergency situation… please feel free to file a complaint with Equal Opportunity or the union after the emergency has concluded.”

  She does not need to add the obvious caveat “or shut the fuck up.” As she depresses the button for a third time that day, even the women who had left the room earlier due to their reasonable accommodations are transfixed. Nia seems to have been waiting for us to re-establish contact. Her naked teeth are bared in what the musculature of her face suggests is a ghoulish grin, but otherwise is impossible to identify without the normal hints of the skin.

  Nia holds a potato peeler, sharpened to monofilaments, across our chef’s neck. The chef is quivering in her whites, a wet patch over her crotch and tears blobbing away from her eyes and floating off in the zero-G hinting at the true level of her panic. Still, she doesn’t move in the skin-wrapper’s grip.

  “Delilah,” the director says deliberately, “are you all right?”

  “I wouldn’t say I’m all right, madam director,” the chef fairly shrieks.

  “I don’t want you to worry. I want you to relax. You’re going to be…”

  Whatever Diane was about to promise the chef she was going to be didn’t really matter, because Nia had decided she was going to be a peeled carrot. With a single, more than deliberate gesture, she flays Delilah’s neck, once from lower left to upper right and then again from lower right to upper left, forming a grotesque red “X” across her neck. Blood begins to spray from the nicked jugular, forming into irregular blobs in the zero G like a child playing with cleaning solution bubbles. Nia shoves the chef’s neck directly into the camera, turning our view into a literal rose-colored world.

  Nia waits for the gore and bloody chunks to drift away from the camera feed before letting go of the chef’s lifeless, exsanguinated corpse. Delilah drifts off thoughtlessly into the background, while globules of her blood continue to pirouette around one another.

  “You were saying, madam director?”

  The skin-wrappers behind her toot up in a horrible chorus of gallows laughter. They sound just like the ghouls they look like as they chortle over our chef’s terrible fate.

  Diane raises her hands up, palms toward the ceiling, in a show not of supplica
tion, but of frustration.

  “You executed the hostage. What do you think you’ll get from me now? You’ve got no leverage.”

  Nia takes the time to painstakingly remove all of her bandages. Her appearance is even more grotesque than I had imagined. Whatever ailment she suffered from in life – I remembered thinking it was cancer – it must have been sheer agony for her to prefer being flayed and floating, never to be able to rest comfortably on a bed or even a chair, zero G being the only buffer between her and endless agony.

  Only her eyes betray something like humanity.

  “This isn’t a negotiation. It never was. That was your first mistake.”

  Nia points a remote control at the screen. I expect her to cut the feed, but instead it is replaced by a recording. I check the chronometer on my jotter. Judging by the time scrolling by on the screen this was just a few minutes ago.

  This is the outside of the Borgwardt. As the camera turns left and right, I see skin-wrappers, stripped down to less than their skivvies and floating in space sheathed in just thin layers of plastic, inflated to just a few centimeters off the skin. They remind me of packaged meat at the grocer’s.

  Then I see an arm gesturing. I realize the camera is being directed by one of the pirates. She gestures for her two comrades to lie flat against the Borgwardt. With a grace and expertise that can only be gained from a lifetime in zero G, they barely even use their propulsors and move, one to either side of the airlock hatch.

  The airlock hatches open with a whoosh and the tiny spritz of lost oxygen. As though being fired from a shotgun, crates of milk and eggs shoot out into the ink. The camera turns left and right, reminding us that this is shot from someone’s point of view. Then the camerawoman deftly dodges a pint of strawberries that seems aimed at her. When she refocuses on the open airlock, the skin-wrappers who had been hiding on either side of the hatch are gone, already inside and standing on either side of the inner hatch. Through the porthole on the inner hatch stands Delilah, the chef, staring anxiously.