The Hematophages

by Stephen Kozeniewski

  Helena flips the switch for the electromagnet and the full weight of the can opener drops into our grasp. We slowly lower it to the ground, rim downward, and Helena turns on the safety mechanism so that it won’t accidentally go off and burn a hole through the deck of the umbilicus bridge. A perfect hole, the exact diameter of the can opener, now offers us ingress to the twelve o’clock facing pod. Its edges still gleam white-hot from the plasma which had carved it, and the missing piece of hull clatters inward into the seed ship, its edges similarly glowing.

  “We’re go for cold juice,” Helena says, pointing at me.

  I reach into the pocket of my jumpsuit and pull out an aerosol can of coolant. Most station bunnies like me are well trained in cold juice procedures, which go hand-in-hand with welding procedures. Certified welders and coolers are about as commonplace stationside as commodes. Everybody stationside has to be on call in case of an emergency decompression. I had never used a can opener before, obviously, but cleaning up afterwards is as natural to me as wiping my ass after a shit.

  I spray the outer ring once clockwise, once counterclockwise, then once more for spots. I pulled out my thermal gauge and run it quickly around the hole. Just the fact that it’s no longer visibly glowing doesn’t make it safe to crawl through yet, but my gauge tells me it’s well within tolerances. I stick my head and torso through the hole and repeat the procedure with the severed disc.

  “We’re good,” I say.

  “Nice job, virgin,” Zanib says, clapping me on the back and crawling through the hole.

  “Yeah, well done, Ambroziak,” Helena says, poking me in the chest with her finger, “That’s what I expect from you now, not those monkeyshines back there with the can opener.”

  I nod. It’s like being lectured by my Ma (well, my Ma if she were much younger and had a facial deformity.) Helena barrels through the hole next and I realize for the first time, with no barriers left between us, how truly terrifying the idea of boarding an ancient ghost ship is.

  It’s not only terrifying, it’s exhilarating, too. The director promised me a place in history. Now I’m about to take it. With trepidation, I lift my leg and stick it through the hole.

  Eleven

  Helena grabs me by my scruff so I don’t fall. Outside of the tiny circle of light that we cut in the hull, all I can see of the interior of the seed ship is a deep, seemingly impenetrable darkness. I fumble for my floating glow-globe.

  “Hang on there, speedy,” Helena says, pressing her hand over mine.

  She’s starting to get awfully handsy, and I’m not sure how I feel about it. Now, if Zanib wanted to start getting handsy with me that would be a different story. But Helena isn’t my type.

  “Speedy, virgin, you’re getting all kinds of new monikers today,” Zanib says with a laugh.

  She’s waving a glowing green wand through the air, which is attached to her jotter, and she periodically checks the jotter.

  “Well, shit. Air’s good. Temperature’s good. No unknown toxins. I’d say we’re safe for globes, ladies.”

  Helena takes her hands off mine, and I shake my globe, which immediately takes up a position over my head to illuminate as much around me as possible without shining in my, or anybody else’s, eyes. It just follows a simple algorithmic program. It could hardly even be considered AI, but everyone always thinks of their globes as little pets. I call mine Millie. Millie remains tethered to me by a short length of rope, probably the same supposedly unbreakable kind that currently keeps us tethered to the Borgwardt.

  The other two do likewise.

  “Did you say the air’s breathable?” I ask, “Can we ditch our breathers?”

  “Not unless you want to forfeit your insurance policy, you won’t,” Helena replies.

  I look to Zanib for succor. The breathing mask is uncomfortable. It’s slightly better than a boom suit, I suppose, but still not that great. Zanib shrugs.

  A few custodians – I only recognized Eden – hurry after us to retrieve the can opener from where we left it.

  “What now?” I ask.

  “What now?” Helena repeats. “Now you earn whatever we’re paying you.”

  Two pairs of eyes focus on me and the whole reality of how in over my head I am sinks in. A brick of ice settles over the exit from my stomach into my intestines. I pull out my jotter and immediately fumble it. It clatters end over end to the deck, shattering the still and quiet silence of the dark pod, though, thankfully, not its screen.

  No. This is not you. This is who they think you are. Get a grip on yourself. Retrieve the jotter. Don’t say something self-deprecating like, “Oops, butterfingers.” Just retrieve it and don’t even acknowledge the mistake. They won’t focus any more on it than you do.

  I pick up the jotter and punch up an internal schematic of The Manifest Destiny based on my research. I overlay it with real-time data streaming from the Borgwardt. This is something anyone could do, though, anyone with a jotter. Prove you’re worth a damn. Prove you know something they don’t.

  I walk up to a girder holding up the ceiling. Here’s something they don’t know. Here’s something only an elite researcher could find.

  “All right,” I say, “we’re in Pod Eight. Pod Eight is facing twelve o’clock, which means that Two is facing six o’clock, and so forth. Adjust your jotters accordingly.”

  Helena and Zanib exchange a look of confusion.

  “How do you know that? I thought all the pods were identical.”

  “They are. And they were constructed simultaneously to cut down on fabrication costs. Which meant that all the building materials were earmarked for their individual construction sites. On most of this stuff the earmark would be invisible, but on a girder like this…”

  I tap the girder. It’s embossed with a numeral eight.

  “I didn’t even notice.”

  I shrug.

  “Not your job to. Now that we know which side is up… literally… we can make some progress.”

  I tap on my jotter to go into edit mode. I adjust Pod One from the twelve o’clock position to the five o’clock and press confirm. The image flashes briefly. My jotter pings and a trumpet announcing a new communiqué appears on the screen. I click on it.

  “Ambroziak.”

  “Hey, Paige, this is Kelly Overland down in operations. How are you doing?”

  “Oh, fine, fine, how are you, Kelly?”

  “Good, good. Listen, we just got an update from you showing that you’re in Pod Eight, but we were anticipating that being Pod One. Have you got anything to confirm your location?”

  I roll my eyes. They must not have been basing their assumption on anything beyond the blueprint of the ship, which always showed Pod One at the nominal top. There’s certainly no easy way to identify the pods from the outside.

  “I’m sending you a photo, Kelly. You ready?”

  “Yep, send it.”

  I raise my jotter and snap a picture of the “eight” mark. Send. There’s a brief pause while Kelly either collects her thoughts or puts me on mute and confers with a supervisor or team lead or maybe just someone smarter sitting near her.

  “Okay, confirmed, Paige. Let me know if you need anything.”

  I won’t.

  “Sounds good. Have a good one, Kelly.”

  “You –”

  I cut the transmission. Zanib and Helena are looking around, already a bit further afield than I am. Helena being the designated grouch of the group, I walk up to my roommate.

  “Oh, there you are!” she says, seeming excited that I’m done with my brief phone call. “Take a look at this.”

  She walks over to the bulkhead and taps on a panel of what appears to be an obtuse artistic decoration behind a primitive plasteel screen. In fact, the transparent substance may even be a thick layer of glass. I’m not 100% sure how advanced the technology was at the time. I should probably be more familiar with these sorts of things, but my modern eyes can’t help but translate what I’m seeing into what I
’m used to seeing.

  “What is this weirdness?”

  The “weirdness” she’s referring to is the art piece itself. I wonder if it’s carved from wood. It seems to just be random shapes, circles and leaf-like patterns, forming a long panel of wood. I don’t remember reading anything about this, and it seems strange that cosmonauts and pioneers would give themselves over to an extensive artistic display when every square centimeter of space aboard this vessel was at an absolute premium.

  “I don’t remember reading about anything like this. Why would they have some kind of woodcutting on board anyway?”

  “Sentimentality?”

  “Based on what I know about the USA from that time period it’s less likely to sentimentality than almost anything else.”

  Helena approaches us, done with whatever had captured her interest as a possible security hazard.

  “Perhaps we can contemplate the mystery of the weird art installment on our own time, ladies? We’ve only got eighteen hours to salvage this wreck, and worrying about whatever this is…”

  She taps the glass. One of the brown circular whorls comes loose, disappears, and suddenly I realized what I was looking at.

  “This isn’t an art installation. And it’s not wood. It’s not even solid.”

  I slam my entire forearm against the glass, and bits and chunks of the brown stuff begin to shimmy away from the glass. Helena and Zanib gasp, realizing what had occurred to me first. The glass is actually a window onto the combined sewage/hydroponics/fuel system which runs throughout the ship and throughout each pod, all interconnected.

  What is pressed against the glass is vegetables – countless, countless radishes and beans and corn and vegetables. With a few more taps to the glass, we knock much more of it loose, exposing what looks like a cross between a swamp and an underwater jungle. The hydroponics gardens aren’t just functional, they’re blooming. The waterlines which are supposed to flow freely throughout the ship are veritably clogged with vegetables.

  “I can’t believe this system is still working,” Zanib says, “Shouldn’t this all be tainted with effluvia from the fleshworld?”

  “Probably in the lower pods there are breaches. Four, five, and six o’clock which are Pods…One, Two, and Three. But just think, every pod can lock itself off from the greater system. Someone when they realized the lower pods were breached must have locked off Pod Eight. If not more.”

  “But if the hydroponics are still functioning, couldn’t that mean…”

  A loud crack sounds and Zanib and I both rip our attention away from the hydroponic garden. Blood gushes from a hole in Helena’s shoulder.

  Twelve

  Helena looks stunned, like the reality of being shot has not yet reached her brainstem. Her mouth works, as though trying to bring words to her twisted lips. Then something clicks inside her. She growls, a subhuman, animalistic sound, claps her hand over her wound, and shouts, “Get down!”

  Shielding us from the invisible shooter down in the depths of the ship, Helena shepherds us back toward the ingress hole we carved with the can opener. With one hand over her shoulder, she holds her beam rifle at her hip. Not the best way to return fire, I think, but, then, Helena is a professional and has a lot more experience than I did. Maybe it’s just fine for her.

  Another shot rings out and I heard several ricochets, but it doesn’t damage either anyone in our party or an obvious spot of the glass to the hydroponic garden.

  Zanib, finally getting her wits about her, grabs a pack of gauze from her medkit and begins hastily binding Helena’s shoulder, even as the other woman tries to brush off her ministrations.

  “Out! Out!” Helena shouts, “Don’t stop.”

  I scramble through the hole, then help Zanib through. We both tried to help Helena through, but she angrily brushes off our outstretched hands and clambers through herself, hardly letting her beam rifle quiver.

  “Should we replace the…”

  Helena practically palms my entire head and shoves me half a meter across the walkway of the umbilicus. I might decide to sue for whiplash later, but I know my pride isn’t as important as my life in the heat of the moment.

  “I said not to stop!”

  Walking backwards, using her back to shield as much of the umbilicus as she can, Helena practically sweeps us back towards the Borgwardt faster than we can scramble ahead of her. With Zanib’s hasty patch over her shoulder, she’s now leveling the beam rifle with two hands. She must be in pain that would debilitate someone like me, but the only sign of it is a foul expression and clenched teeth.

  “Medical assistance Airlock 3, medical assistance Airlock 3,” Zanib keeps repeating, over and over again into her jotter, as though repeating it will make them come faster. Kelly is just as emphatically assuring her that it’s on its way.

  It’s only when the airlock closes on all three of us that Helena finally gasps in pain, drops her weapon to the ground with a clatter, falls to her knees, and vomits right on the deck. I want to rush to help her, and I think Zanib did, too, but we’ve both seen enough of Helena’s personality to know not to. A nurse in lilac scrubs with a black leather bag comes pounding down the hall and immediately begins laying Helena down to look at her. The nurse’s name is Tina, I think.

  I glance out the airlock porthole and nearly have a heart attack as a solid slug bullet flies straight at my face. Of course, it flattens like a can against the plasteel and slides down the outer airlock hatch like a cartoon character after slamming into a cliff. Only beam rifles of the sort Tampa and Prosser had used earlier can burn through plasteel. Even knowing this, I clutch at my heart. Centimeters of impenetrable alloy notwithstanding, I’ve never felt so close to death.

  I try to spot Helena’s (and now my) assailant, but all I can really see are some eyes glinting in the shadows through the hole we had cut with the can opener.

  “They’re still out there,” I announce. “Should we retract the bridge?”

  “No!” Helena shouts.

  She recoils in pain, having either just pulled a stitch or just overexerted herself. All the fight has definitely fled from her, and she’s turning white. The nurse is muttering dozens of instructions, all promptly forgotten or ignored by the pig-headed patient. I motion as deftly as I can for Zanib to step to the side with me.

  “Is she right?” I whisper, “Or delirious?”

  “I’m still the security director here!” Helena barks loudly, “And I know what I’m talking about. You don’t break that umbilicus!”

  “All right,” I agree. I look at Zanib. “We’d better go see Diane.”

  “Don’t you go over my fucking head!”

  I look down at Helena. She’s completely prostrate, on her back. Sweat is pouring off of her. She still sounds dangerous but I can tell she’s been reduced to the strength of a kitten. I’m not sure what the right thing to do is. I want to put my hand on her head and soothe her, but that doesn’t seem right. Just being a clinical, professional automaton doesn’t seem right either.

  I sit down and cross my legs and take Helena’s hand in my own, squeezing hard, making her squeeze back. She looks at me. All right. We’re not much. But we were comrades in arms for a minute back there. At least, we came under fire, anyway.

  “We’re not going over your head. We have to report. The boss has to know. Don’t tell me it’s not what you would do.”

  “Don’t tell us it’s not the reg, either,” Zanib says.

  Helena looks up at her, then at me, then at her. She has a panicked look on her face, like we’re trying to get one over on her, but she desperately wants to believe us.

  “All right,” she agrees.

  I pat her fist one last time then rise. We’re both double-timing it down the corridor. It’s not often that I find myself struggling to keep up, but Zanib is a farm girl, used to getting from place to place with a quickness. I’m practically running, though, by the time we reach the anteroom to Diane’s office.

  Myrna looks u
p from her jotter as we enter. As she lowers her jotter I see she is reading one of those sex advice sites which poses as a fashion guide. Not exactly high literature. Or, now that I think about it, work.

  “Can I help you?”

  “We need to see the director,” Zanib says, practically walking past the secretary and into the boss’s office.

  I’m astonished at the speed with which Myrna places herself in between us and the hatch.

  “Do you have an appointment?”

  Zanib and I exchange a glance.

  “No,” we both say practically at the same time.

  Zanib is shaking her head. Myrna shrugs as though that’s pretty much the end of the matter.

  “Well, I can’t just let you in then.”

  She returns to her desk and pulls up some calendar software on her work screen. I notice that’s after she minimizes a few more fashion-cum-sex guides and what seems to be research on a trip to Lahiniti.

  “Okay, now let’s see,” she says, staring intently at her screen as though the longer she stares the more days will appear in a standard solar week, “I can get you in at eleven o’clock on Wednesday. Are you both free then?”

  She looks up at us. I can only guess what sort of expressions we’re wearing based on her next sentence.

  “Can you make yourselves free, then?”

  “This is a damned eighteen-hour mission!” Zanib shouts.

  “There’s no need to swear,” Myrna says testily, her face puckering up. “Look, I may keep the director’s schedule but I’m not really in control of it. There’s no point in getting mad at me. I’m just the messenger.”

  I start knocking on the director’s hatch.

  “Diane! Hello?”

  Myrna jumps up.

  “Hey! Stop that! If you two can’t behave, I’ll get security in here. You have no right to act this way.”

  “Look, you bubblehead, the security director is bleeding out on the deck of Airlock 1. Have you got two fucking brain cells to…”

  The hatch opens. Diane is standing there on her crutches, looking between me, Zanib, and Myrna.