“If you plug in your jotter you can watch the security footage from Pod Nine during the security team’s foray there.”
To my surprise, Diane reaches out and takes hold of my wrist.
“Though I want to suggest again that you don’t. I know not knowing is difficult and it is painful, but sometimes not knowing is better than knowing.”
“I don’t believe that’s ever the case,” I say with absolute conviction.
Diane nods.
“Then you can use this code to access the records.”
She punches in an alphanumeric which populates the field as asterisks and leaves it to me to press the enter key. I rise, tentative despite my conviction to find out what happened to Becs.
“Don’t do it,” Tina warns as I walk towards the cash register.
“Fuck her,” Nia says, “Let her see what she did.”
Twenty-Nine
I’m so ruined by full-color interactive holography that I’ve almost forgotten how to watch a simple, 2-D recording. But, of course, it wouldn’t be cost effective for the company to render countless hours of security footage into real-time holographs. In a way, watching the simple black and white images flash by on a screen is infinitely creepier than being immersed in the middle of a movie.
Helena leads the way into Pod Nine. This, I take it, is immediately after I left them. Prosser and Tampa join her, all three swiveling their heads like exotic birds. They’re wearing boom suits this time, a precaution against a second gas attack, I guess. Helena fires her rifle at something off screen.
“Did I get her?” she asks aloud, her voice tinny through the boom suit microphone.
Prosser advances, puts her finger to the ground and holds it back up. She has chocolate sauce on her fingers…oh, no, wait, I see. It’s blood. The lack of color in the feedback is playing tricks on my eyes. But, of course, it’s really blood.
Then my wheels begin spinning. Beam rifles cauterize the wound as they go through. They’ll still kill you, but you certainly won’t bleed. I just saw it with Eden, the infested custodian. The far more experienced security goons have reached the same conclusion I’m already grasping for as they regroup and begin to move away from the blood spatter.
“They’re baiting us,” Prosser growls.
“Be careful,” Helena warns, “First the gas, now this trap. They may look like savages but they’re smart.”
“And this is their home turf,” Tampa adds.
The security guards play leapfrog, covering one another as they move into new positions to cover each other for the next movement. It has an elegant, almost balletic, hypnotic quality to it as I watch it in absolute silence.
Pod Nine itself is a nightmarescape. Substances that I suspect would have been difficult to identify even viewing them in living color drip from the bulkheads and ceiling. The deck appears to be coated with dung and offal. It must smell like a sewer. The goons are fortunate to be encased in self-contained boom suits, though none of them breaks their silence to state out loud what I am thinking as I watch them.
The dance ends suddenly and unexpectedly as Prosser makes an apparently wrong move and Helena’s hand goes flying out, holding her back by the ribs, like a mother holding her child’s chest as a vehicle crashes.
“Don’t move,” Helena warns.
Gingerly, Helena prods a pile of goo on the ground with the end of her beam rifle. She strikes something, and a crudely constructed bear trap snaps closed, its teeth jagged and composed of salvaged ship parts rather than sliding together perfectly. Helena angrily kicks the bear trap off of the end of her rifle, rather than prising it open and off.
“Thanks, boss,” Prosser says.
“I just want to napalm this fucking ship and these fucking people,” Helena mutters.
“But the cook, boss,” Tampa chimes in.
“I know. That fucking Ambroziak. I can’t believe the director listened to her. I knew this was a bad idea.”
Heat flushes my cheeks. I have to look away for a moment. When I look back, Prosser puts a hand on Helena’s shoulder.
“Forget it, boss. Head in the game.”
“Head in the game,” Helena agrees.
They return to leapfrogging. They kill another colonist. Uncover another trap. Once, Tampa nearly slips in the fecund matter coating the ground. One of the others (I can’t identify which) steadies her before she does.
When they finally find Becs, I wish they hadn’t. I wish I hadn’t chosen to watch. I wish I hadn’t lied to Diane about what I thought was best for the company. I wish I hadn’t signed on with Hestle, or come on this expedition, or started working on my doctorate, or ever been born.
Becs – what’s left of her, more accurately – is lying on a slab which I can’t identify as either sectarian altar or dinner table, but appears to be engaged in the business of both. Crouching around her are the denizens of Pod Nine, mouths stained black with blood and some gnawing on strips of her flesh.
It is worse than I could have possibly imagined and I had imagined many awful fates for Becs. They have stripped the flesh from her legs down to the bone. Her chest is gaping open, her organs dug through and strewn about like a horn of plenty. They have been eating her, and she has been screaming and fighting back. It’s unclear exactly when she died.
The security detail had spent only a few minutes assembling, and maybe twenty minutes exploring before finding her, yet it seems to me that Becs was doomed from the moment we breathed in the gas. Why did they choose her and not Helena or me? Perhaps a superstitious reason. Perhaps Becs was the lightest to carry. Her end was an undignified one, and a horror beyond imagining.
Helena takes the only action a reasonable human being could take when faced with that horror. She calmly, slowly, evenly begins gunning down each and every one of the colonists as they cry and plead for mercy. The ones that try to run she shoots first.
After a hesitant moment, Prosser and Tampa join in. I cannot see their faces, but I suspect they are not exulting in the same way as they had in destroying the skin-wrappers. In spite of their lost humanity, the dregs of Pod Nine seem more pathetic than anything else, like a pack of jackals unable to bring down their prey except through cowardice and trickery.
When every colonist in sight is dead, punctured through with a clean, cauterized beamhole, Helena stands with her weapon still leveled, as though desperately craving more targets.
“What do we tell the director?” Tampa asks.
“We report exactly what happened. We have no responsibility to hostile strangers,” Helena says.
“They shouldn’t have started this war if they didn’t want us to finish it,” Prosser agrees.
Of the three, Tampa seems the most reluctant to report on their massacre, but even that only really seems like hesitation. What is the “right” reaction to cannibalism?
A thump from a source I cannot spot, even as I go back to rewind and pause, startles all three of the goons and they turn in circles, hopelessly pointing their weapons in every direction. Helena is the first to identify it.
“Fuck me,” she mutters, “would you look at this?”
The three goons approach a glass panel. It is identical to the hydroponic garden we saw on Pod Eight. There is something about this one, though, that has them upset. I can’t identify what it is. What are they seeing?
“Is this their water system?” Prosser asks.
Helena nods. Prosser taps on the glass.
“It must be contaminated with that stuff outside.”
I realize that the hydroponic garden has turned red, tainted by the blood ocean. It’s something I never would have identified watching a black and white rendering. It took the women who were there long enough to notice it in person.
The bump sounds again, and the goons are startled again, but this time the source is obvious. One of the hematophages has latched onto the plasteel, suckling at it as if desperately trying to get at them.
“What the hell is that?” Tampa asks.
“Local fauna. A bloodsucker. Remember? Just like the xenobiologist predicted. What’d she call it?”
“A hematophage,” I say aloud.
“A lamprey,” Helena says.
The head of a colonist jumps. I jump with it. It starts to turn, turning towards the security goons. Slowly, lovingly, the hematophages within wheedle out first one eye, then the other, avoiding the telltale pop that usually accompanies such an action.
I see it before anyone who was actually there does. I know what’s happening long before anyone else has figured it out. But they’re trapped in there, in the tiny little rectangle in my jotter, trapped in the past, unable to avoid what’s happening, unable to be aware of it like I am. It’s like watching “The Manifest Destiny” holovid and knowing the damn ship is going to crash from the very first image and no one on screen can do a damn thing about it, despite all their attempts to stave off the inevitable.
The hematophages slither out of the cannibal’s head as the goons continue talking to each other. I can’t hear a word they’re saying because I’m too fixated on the actions of the parasites. They crawl along the deck, seemingly pained by being out in the open air. Of course, they must be. They’re used to swimming around an ocean of bodily fluid. They only leave to take up residence in an unsuspecting host’s body. Being in the open air must be torture for them, like fish out of water or humans with their heads forcibly held under.
They seem to debate, and I watch as they undulate, their bodies bundling together and apparently exchanging some form of communication. These are no dumb animals. I don’t know why I still thought of them as such, even after everything I’ve seen, but somehow, I thought it was us providing them with intellect, and not the other way around.
The breeding pair seems to have agreed to a plan, and working together, they each bite into the pantleg of Prosser’s suit and pull in opposite directions. The hematophages must have jaws with preternatural strength to be able to rip open a boom suit. I know they’re not impenetrable, but I didn’t think the action of any human or animal alone could pierce one. Up until now. Only now do the goons notice what I’ve been watching, horrified, all along. Prosser’s suit begins beeping, announcing, “Suit integrity compromised! Suit integrity compromised!”
Prosser and the others are turning around again, utterly unable to identify the threat. Tampa even looks up at the ceiling, the exact opposite direction of where she should be looking. It’s too late. It was too late the moment they started pulling at her pantleg. Prosser is shrieking in horror. They’ve slithered into her suit. The secured, protected atmosphere has been turned against the security goon, ensuring that she is trapped with the parasites as they slither up her leg.
Prosser is shrieking louder and louder now. Helena and Tampa are utterly flustered, unsure what to do. Prosser pops off her helmet and casts it aside, not hard enough that it breaks (nothing, essentially, can break plasteel) but sending it bouncing around the room. She is trying to slough off the rest of her suit. She’s still unable to articulate what is happening to her, and is howling in something approaching what I imagine to be the Platonic ideal of pain.
The other two finally rush to help, stripping Prosser of her suit as quickly as they can fumble the pieces apart. Once the pants of her suit are off we can all of us, both those present and those voyeurs who might be viewing later, see what’s happening. One of the hematophages has already disappeared from view. Prosser is choking, hinting that it is crawling up through her esophagus and seeking the sweet climes of her brain. The other is squirming around, its tail poking out of Prosser’s tight underpants.
With a mighty yank, Helena rips Prosser’s panties right apart. The other woman is now naked from the waist down, with a ridiculously encumbering boom suit still over her upper half. The problem, though, is with her genitals, as the second half of the breeding pair of hematophages is burrowing deeply into her vagina. Tampa has her beam rifle leveled at Prosser’s crotch, but she looks to Helena for instruction. This is utter madness.
Suddenly, around them, other bodies begin disgorging hematophages. Tampa begins firing, missing more often than not, but occasionally scoring a hit on the parasites and causing them to scream, a disturbingly human-sounding noise, as they sizzle and die. The whole room becomes a shooting gallery full of tiny, serpentining targets.
Not every colonist is disgorging parasites, but way too many to manage are. Who knows now if the denizens of Pod Nine had been reduced to their degraded state by years of isolation and space madness, or by the semi-rampant rampages of the hematophages among them. Perhaps a combination of the two. In any case, it’s clear that this is what awaits us on the Borgwardt if we can’t keep ourselves clean and defeat the threat.
“We have to get out of here,” Helena is the first to realize.
The parasites are not tough, but they are small, wriggling, and difficult to shoot. Helena even tramples one underfoot. They are closing in on the two women who remain their potential prey.
“Please don’t leave me!” Prosser shouts.
The second hematophage has completely disappeared. Prosser loses all ability to speak and begins coughing, the second half of the breeding pair now making its own way up into her brainpan. Blood begins to trickle from her ears. The first hematophage is enjoying a tasty feast of grey matter.
I am fixated, fascinated. This is like nothing I’ve ever seen before, or even been able to imagine, though I suppose I knew that Zanib, Eden, and the others must have become infested somehow. The reality of it, though, is an utter nightmare.
“Don’t worry, kid,” Helena announces bravely, putting her arm around Prosser, “We’d never leave you. We’re all getting out of here. Tampa, grab the cook’s body.” She turns to Prosser, as though conspiratorially. “Nobody gets left behind on my watch, right?”
“No!” Prosser shrieks, and the blood is flowing thick and fast from both of her ears, and now her eyes, nose, and mouth, “No, please, no, fuck no! Please, Helena!”
Helena grabs her by the chin.
“I got you kid! I won’t let you go!”
“Kill me! Please kill me! They’re eating my brain!”
Helena is a far better person than I. Monsters worming across the ground, she still lifts her rifle and puts a beam between Prosser’s eyes. Following her orders, Tampa throws Becs’s body over her shoulder, though it sends her sweetmeats flying all over the room, and inadvertently some of the hematophages begin creeping in other directions, drawn by the smell of organ meat. Helena reaches down and grabs Prosser by the neck of her boom suit, firing a dozen more times into her head and turning it to absolute Swiss cheese as the parasites emerge from her eye sockets to seek a new host, most likely Helena herself.
The security goons are running now, running for the exit, bits and pieces of Becs’s offal trailing behind them.
“Ops! Ops!” Helena is shouting, frantically.
“Hey, security team,” Kelly Overland’s voice intones, still attempting to be as friendly as possible, “we’re monitoring your situation and reinforcements are…”
“Tell them to fuck the fuck off!” Helena shouts, “As soon as we’re clear, you need to dump all the plasma we’ve got into this fucking ship. Send it back to Hell!”
Thirty
I stop the playback. The jotter indicates that it’s logging me (by which it means Diane) out. In a shrewder moment I might have told it not to and hung on to Diane’s password for a while to dig around in company records. I am not feeling shrewd right this moment. Nor am I feeling deflated. Nor guilty. Nor sad. I am an empty vessel, devoid of these things you humans call feelings. I am a robot of meat.
No one is looking at me. No one is thinking about me. They’re all focusing on their own business. Diane and a few others are worried about operations and sending out forays. The others are trying not to get underfoot. There is little for a shipping supervisor or a budget tech to do under this new warlike footing.
Tina is busy tending
to the wounded. She stops by and checks on me, tells me everything’s healing up nicely. She gestures to one of the cooks, who seems genuinely excited to have something to do. The woman drops off a tray for me, apologizing that they can’t do much beyond cold sandwiches and that sort of thing with the ovens and other equipment all standing perpendicular. I tell her it’s fine, in such a subdued tone that a wave of disappointment washes over her face and she walks away, chastened. I suppose that was one of those occasions where you’re supposed to ebulliently praise someone for whatever they’ve done. The truth is the tray she’s laid before me is an outlandish repast, even if none of it is cooked. I should have thrown her a bone. I feel no compunction about it.
I feel no hunger, either. It’s all bled out of me. But I know in some intellectual sense I need raw proteins and vitamins to make up for the ones my body has lost, so I begin shoveling it in. It’s all fresh vegetables and meats and cheeses and salads, and my tongue should be luxuriating in it, but my mood has dampened it all down to tasting like ash.
Tina clambers up the emergency ladder into the green room. I gather from the buzzing that Quinn, the outcast security guard, has returned from a mission. The others gather together into a small crowd while Tina is away conducting the spoon-in-the-eye test. Though they have ostensibly been cleared of any wrongdoing, the colonists still gather on one side of the galley and the Borgwardt crew on the other, seemingly shunning each other. Diane knocks with her crutch on the freezer hatch, and Helena re-emerges. She gives me the stink-eye but Diane is watching closely and ultimately Helena simply folds her arms and joins the crowd.
Tina clambers back down the ladder first. She simply shakes her head sadly at the crowd and returns to her business. Everyone in the room deflates. As she passes by me, I catch Tina’s hand.
“What’s going on?”
She sighs.
“Quinn was supposed to get the engines turned back on. I don’t think she ever even made it to ops.”
The Hematophages Page 20