The Hematophages

by Stephen Kozeniewski

  “Any questions?”

  The silence is deafening.

  “All right then.”

  We all shuffle out of the conference room except for Diane. Out in the corridor, Tina walks up to Grace and Jaime with a smile.

  “Excuse me, ladies, would one of you mind coming with me? We’re going to run some tests. See if we can’t find out more about this disease that’s been plaguing you.”

  Prosser glances at Helena for confirmation. Helena nods.

  “Of course,” Jaime agrees.

  Zanib’s jotter beeps. She glances at it and begins patting my side wildly.

  “What?” I whisper.

  She holds up her jotter, which is displaying a dozen lights. Eleven are blinking red but one is solid green.

  “Caught a rat. Too bad you can’t come see.”

  “I’ll go,” Grace says, sounding so much like she’s replying to Zanib’s statement that it jars me out of our sidebar. “You should head back and speak to the others.”

  “All right.” Jaime looks up at Helena. “Would it be all right if I went to speak to my people alone at first? I’ll have to ease them into this.”

  Helena’s glance ping-pongs between the two colonists.

  “That’s fine,” she says, “but let’s reverse it. You go and you stay. A little bit of an insurance policy, you know?”

  “A hostage, you mean,” Grace corrects her. “No offense intended. I would’ve insisted on the same thing in your shoes. I’d have been insulted if you hadn’t.”

  “Ah, excuse me. How long do you think this will take?” Zanib interrupts, raising her hand like a schoolchild.

  Grace shrugs.

  “Twenty, thirty minutes. I’m generally brief. Why?”

  “Perfect. We’ll meet you at the umbilicus. Right now, I have to check on a local specimen we caught. Make sure we didn’t just catch a boot. And I need Paige’s assistance.”

  She grabs me and started dragging me back toward the bowels of the ship.

  “Patel,” Helena says sharply, not needing to say another word to get her point across.

  “I know!” Zanib shouts, putting out her hands as though there’s nothing she can do. “We’re in a time crunch. Burn the candle at both ends. I’ve still got to get this done.”

  That seems to placate the goon. I can’t believe how fast Zanib is moving. She’s practically flying along the corridors, like she’s wearing hover boots. I’ve never seen her so excited. This is her life’s work, I suppose. She’s in her element now.

  It seems like only a minute before we’re back in her secretive menagerie. As soon as the hatch closes behind me she grabs me and slams me against it, crushing her lips against mine.

  Eighteen

  “Zanib…”

  “What? Don’t tell me you’re not into it. I don’t think I could handle that rejection right now.”

  “No, it’s not that,” I reply, “It’s not that at all. I’m interested. Very interested.”

  “Then what?”

  “There isn’t time for this.”

  “There’s always time for this.”

  I feel my zipper coming down on my jumpsuit, almost magically, as if of its own volition. I’m concentrating so hard on her tongue gently caressing the inside of my mouth. A tiny impulse in me says to fight back, but a vastly stronger feeling urges me to let it go. Zanib is stroking my stomach, the sweaty area under my breasts, and then, with almost no further deliberation, she slides right down to my crotch.

  I’m embarrassed. I haven’t shaved in ages. My only lover has been the university on Yloft for so long that such niceties seem a waste. She slips a lone digit into me and I gasp. My heart is racing like a hummingbird. It really has been a long time. I break away from her lips and smile, coquettishly, I hope.

  “Aren’t we forward?” I whisper.

  “Well, I thought we didn’t have much time. What’s changed your mind?”

  “Zanib.”

  “Yes, virgin,” she mutters, nuzzling my neck and continuing to finger me.

  “Is there a camera in here?”

  She looks up, startled.

  “I… I don’t know.”

  “Didn’t Diane say the cameras are always running?”

  Zanib’s lips purse and she slams a fist against the bulkhead she’s pressing me against, hammer-style.

  “Dammit! This is so frustrating!”

  I take her face in my hands.

  “You think you’re frustrated? I’m halfway over the moon and we have to stop.”

  “No,” she says, cutting me a sly glance, “Just from that?”

  “It’s been a long time, roomie.”

  Reluctantly I zip my jumpsuit back up, and we both sigh almost simultaneously.

  “Fuck it. What the hell do we do now?

  “We could slip back to our room. No cameras there. Against company policy.”

  She smiles and slips a hand under my shoulder. Even she must know it’s not going to happen. Our quarters are about as far away from her lab as you can get. Even if we give in to our lust here it would have to be a quickie for us to get back in any kind of reasonable timeframe.

  “Aren’t we supposed to be looking at one of your rat traps?”

  “Ohhhh,” she says, “You’re right.”

  I’ve managed to switch her from her one great passion to the other. In the center of the room lies a circular indentation in the deck next to a small pedestal. Zanib attaches her jotter to the pedestal and punches the green light. The circular indentation opens and Zanib places her hand on my chest to press me back. The rope begins to wind and we stare down waiting in anticipation for the cage to break the surface of the blood ocean. After a few tense seconds, it finally does and I squint down trying to see what we’ve caught.

  “Watch the edge,” Zanib warns.

  I can tell there is something moving in the cage, flipping and flopping around, but it remains indistinct at this distance. The cage winds up the full distance and enters a small conveyor device which brings it up through the hole in the deck of Zanib’s lab.

  “Looks like a new friend for Crassus,” I say.

  It’s not the largest cage. Neither is it the smallest. The creature we’ve captured bears a distinct and unsettling resemblance to the lampreys which Zanib has briefed us on and I kissed earlier. It’s not quite identical. It’s longer and appears to have backward-facing spines running in three seams lengthwise across each third of its body. It doesn’t appear to have Crassus’s distinctive toothed tongue, either. It is also blind, lacking the eyes the stonelickers have on the side of their heads.

  Its jaw, though, is unsettlingly similar. A distended, jawless mouth, with teeth pointing inward at all angles, it clenches its mouth and attempts to suckle at the empty air even as it flops about.

  “Shh, shh, baby,” Zanib whispers, and I think if it wasn’t in a cage she would started stroking its body. “We’ll get you back into a nice habitat in a minute.”

  Zanib begins punching all kinds of buttons on her pedestaled jotter. Lights of varying colors run over the creature, blue, orange, yellow, and finally red, from projectors in the ceiling. When the various scans stop, Zanib sits, rapt, staring at her jotter and flipping through readings. I’m beginning to worry – if “worry” is the right feeling to have toward such a grotesque thing – for the creature’s life.

  “Zanib?”

  “You should check out these preliminary scans, virgin. They’re amazing.”

  “What about the creature, Zanib? It’s suffocating.”

  “What? Oh, shit, you’re right. Where’s my head at?”

  “It used to be on me. Then this fishie came along.”

  She grins.

  “Come on, give me a hand with this.”

  Together we maneuver the cage up and into a tank Zanib has prepared for the occasion, filled with the disgusting brine from the surface, or else a facsimile thereof she has concocted herself. Not knowing the procedures of xenobiology, I can’t
swear which. She unlocks the cage and lets the eel-like thing wriggle out into its new habitat before we retrieve the cage and lower it back through the hole in the deck before sealing it up.

  “You’re reusing the rat trap?” I ask.

  “I’ve only done this a few times before, but I’ve noticed that the rat traps seem to work best by size. If old Number Seven here is what caught this little fella, it’s the right size to catch other little fellas like him.”

  “How many samples do we need?”

  “Ideally? At least a breeding pair. Although after your little speech about population controls, I’m sort of interested in whether we need to start breeding until we have a stable population.”

  I reach out and run my hand along her side and grasp her tight little ass through the fabric of her suit.

  “I knew you still had breeding on the mind.”

  “Oh, you know just the lingo to turn a xenobiologist on.”

  She brushes her lips against mine again, and a spark of electricity crackles through me.

  “Buuuut…” she says, dragging out the single, abbreviated syllable, “we have to get back.”

  I can’t help pouting. We’ve gone from being friendly to low-level flirting to actively teasing each other in such a short period of time, but I really can’t be letting this take up space in my head when I have a mission to do, and lives (not to mention a big fat bonus) are on the line.

  Zanib seals the tank containing the new arrival.

  “It’s a shame,” she says. “We really ought to name him.”

  “Him?” I say, mildly surprised. Of course, I’m aware of the concept of males. It’s just strange to think of them outside the context of xenobiology, which I’ve never really studied.

  “Oh, yes. Our little friend here is a member of the dead gender.”

  “Huh,” I grunt, “well, what would you want to name him?”

  “That’s the thing,” she says, running a finger under my chin. “I’d want to name him after you. But he’s a boy. Is there a male form of Paige?”

  I shrug. A question for academia, if there ever was one, though not, unfortunately, my area of expertise.

  “What would you call him?”

  I smile, the only male profession I can think of springing to mind.

  “King.”

  “King Paige. I like it. All right, K.P. it is.”

  Nineteen

  We arrive in the airlock only two minutes later than we were supposed to. I half expect Helena to start yelling at us, but she’s pacing the airlock like a caged dog and clearly doesn’t wish to be disturbed. She doesn’t even look up when we came in.

  My heart is fluttering. I wouldn’t say I’m excited at the idea that we might have been caught on tape – we never spotted a camera in Zanib’s lab – but I feel like a kid who snuck a cookie from the cookie jar. My mind’s already racing with thoughts of how to escape what sounds like an interminable fourteen remaining hours of scavenging ops – all on duty for me – to sneak a guilty twenty-minute romp with my roommate. No way immediately jumps to mind, and, strangely, the next fourteen hours loom ahead like far more of an insurmountable obstacle than the last three years or so I’ve gone without a lover.

  I can’t tell what Zanib’s thinking – well, not exactly what she’s thinking – but the way her eyes keep roving over my body and her tongue keeps seeming to involuntarily flick out like a lizard’s to coat her lips with saliva, I can certainly guess.

  We go to the porthole to look out, but the umbilicus remains resolutely empty. Grace is either still talking to her people or dead. We settle down, slouching against the bulkhead and not far from each other, and as the seconds tick by I begin to gravely regret not letting Zanib talk me into being a few minutes late.

  I don’t know how, considering how horny I still am, but somehow I doze off. Next thing I know, Tina and Jaime are standing in the shipside entrance of the airlock. Zanib snorts awake next to me and Helena, I note, has abandoned pacing the room to take up a position looming in the corner like a gargoyle.

  “Where’s Grace?” Jaime asks.

  I shrug.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Not back yet,” Helena snarls. “Is this a declaration of war? Should I say a second declaration of war?”

  She steps deep into the smaller woman’s personal space, obviously trying to intimidate her, but Jaime doesn’t even tense a muscle. It occurs to me that she has been so calm and well-mannered her entire time aboard the Borgwardt, that I had somehow forgotten she has risen to apparent leadership over a gang of presumably undisciplined survivors on a merciless deathworld. Helena, I think, senses the same thing: restraint and discipline rather than weakness and softness. She backs out of Jaime’s small circle of air.

  “My people can be… difficult to rally. But I have faith in Grace. She’s ever been my trusted right hand.”

  “What about you?” Helena asks, jutting her chin towards Tina. “What’d you learn?”

  “Don’t speak to me like I’m one of your little goons, Helena,” the nurse replies. “I don’t work for you. And I’m not the reason you’re in a mood. I’m the reason you’re not in a body bag.”

  Tina pokes the security director in the shoulder, and Helena actually flinches. I’m holding my breath. But instead of storming into a rage, Helena actually seems to calm down.

  “Sorry, doc. Did you learn anything? Pretty please with a cherry on top tell me?”

  “Well… I wasn’t going to, but since you put the cherry on top…”

  Tina holds up her jotter so that we all can see. We all gather around except Jaime, who presumably has already been told about her medical condition. It occurs to me that it’s probably a violation of medical ethics to show a bunch of strangers a patient’s chart, but Jaime either has no concept of privacy codes or else simply doesn’t care.

  I can’t make heads or tails of what I’m looking at. Luckily, I’m not the only one, so I don’t have to be the first to voice my ignorance.

  “What the hell does that mean?” Helena asks.

  Tina grins. It’s a joke – she knows none of us, with the possible exception of Zanib, know what the jotter is saying.

  “It means she has a clean bill of health. At least as far as I can tell. No known mutagens or pathogens. I even tried extrapolating based on everything we know about the fleshworld, based on all the passive readings and active research we’ve been doing since we got here. Science marches on, but I can’t find a thing.”

  “Then there is no disease?”

  “I’m not infested,” Jaime says, “which I already knew. The trouble is: can you identify anyone at all who is?”

  “I don’t know,” Tina admits.

  “So then we’ve accomplished nothing,” Helena growls. “We still don’t know if there is a disease or if she has it.”

  “No,” Tina agrees, “but now we have a baseline. We can do this thirty-one more times and compare the results. I mean, we can never know with certitude what we don’t know – there’s no way to disprove a negative – but maybe we’ll get lucky.”

  “Luck: the ultimate planning method.”

  “It’s called science, Helena.”

  Zanib nods.

  “That is kind of the long and short of science. Keep trying until you get lucky.”

  “What about you?” Tina asks.

  “What about me?”

  “Your specimen?”

  “Ohhhhh,” Zanib says, stretching it out, “you mean K.P. He is a handsome little guy. Wouldn’t you say, Paige?”

  “Charming,” I agree, rolling my eyes.

  “Excuse me,” Jaime says, “is this some sort of animal you’re talking about? A local specimen?”

  “It is,” Zanib replies. “Are you familiar with the local fauna?”

  Jaime shakes her head.

  “After the infestation took hold in the lower decks we remained sealed off. But we weren’t aware there was local life above the germ and viral level,
or possibly fungi. That is to say, except for the planet itself.”

  “The fleshworld is a fascinating ecosystem,” Zanib says, “but that bit’s above my paygrade. It’s really the climatologists and the chaos theorists who are trying to make sense of that. But I’ve always suspected that a fleshworld had the potential to be home to essentially an ecosystem of parasites. And it seems I’m right.”

  Zanib plugs her jotter into the bulkhead adapter and presses a few buttons. A shimmering, three-dimensional image of K.P. shimmers into existence in the middle of the room, so photorealistic I feel sure I can reach out and touch his slimy flesh. It’s the same technology we used to watch “The Manifest Destiny,” adapted for business use. The hologram bucks and slithers through the naked air, mimicking the parasite’s movements in the tank Zanib had relocated it to.

  “Grotesque,” Helena states simply.

  “Oh, I think they’re beautiful,” Zanib counters, approaching the hologram and petting it. “These are going to be named after me one day, you know?”

  “Are they edible?” Jaime asks.

  Zanib reflexively tucks the projected K.P. under her armpit and hides him from Jaime’s view. Apparently, it is an interactive hologram. I’ve only ever seen such things at children’s parties. The projectors at the university are very much pragmatic.

  “You wouldn’t dare eat my little beh-bie!”

  Jaime smiles wanly, and for the first time I felt that she is truly forcing herself to act pleasant. Zanib must have struck a real nerve to cut through the Vilameenian’s steely reserve.

  “There have been times – many times – even in my own lifetime when we have suffered from famine. Even been forced to resort to…”

  She pauses.

  “Cannibalism?” Helena asks, more intrigued than repulsed.

  Jaime doesn’t respond, but I get the jangly feeling in my nerves that Helena has guessed correctly.

  “It’s taken massive efforts and the better part of my lifetime to get the hydroponics gardens secured and producing enough food for even our small population. It’s by far the most popular target of sabotage for the infested.”