The Hematophages

by Stephen Kozeniewski

  Well, that explains the palpable sense of disappointment. Quinn is descending very slowly, a rifle slung over her back. She reaches the bottom of the ladder and claps her hands together nervously, as though shaking the dust from them. She looks around at the assembled women.

  “Madam director,” Quinn says, “may I speak to you? In private?”

  Diane does not betray any emotion, but the rest of the crowd is upset, even disgusted.

  “Yes, of course,” Diane replies, looking around for some way to logistically make that happen. She can’t exactly say, “Step into my office.”

  Helena practically pushes women out of the way as she emerges from the crowd and steps towards Quinn. Immediately Quinn has the look of a spooked rabbit.

  “Where’s the rest of your team?”

  Quinn shakes her head mournfully.

  “What the fuck does that mean?” Helena shouts, stepping up into Quinn’s face. “Report, you piece of dogshit!”

  “Helena!” Diane shouts.

  “They… they didn’t make it!” Quinn responds.

  Helena looks for a moment as though she is going to slap Quinn, but then seems to think she’s not worth it.

  “I should’ve known. I should’ve known you couldn’t handle it. You have no business being a security goon anyway. If this was fifty years ago, I would’ve already had you shot for dereliction. Those women’s lives were in your hands!”

  “The same way Prosser’s was in yours?”

  Helena starts an abortive charge. This time, I think she’s going to kill Quinn, like she didn’t kill me. But to everyone’s surprise Quinn raises her beam rifle and points it directly at Helena. Helena halts on a dime.

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Ladies,” Diane shouts, limping over into the scrum as fast as she can, “this is not the manner to…”

  “You back off, Helena, you fucking bully! I do a good job. Maybe I can’t do as many pull-ups as your favorites can… correction, as your favorites could… but I’m good at my job.”

  “Pointing a gun at your supervisor, you call that good at your job? Because I call it grounds for dismissal.”

  Diane doesn’t step in between the rifle and Helena. That would be suicidal. But she does stand slightly to the left of the squabbling goons.

  “You’ll both be dismissed if this doesn’t stop promptly. I can assure you of that.”

  “No need to worry, madam director,” Helena says, without taking her eyes off Quinn, “this one’s always been all talk, zero walk. She doesn’t have the intestinal fortitude to swat a fly, let alone gun down a grown woman in cold blood.”

  “You know a lot about gunning down people in cold blood, don’t you, boss?”

  Tampa emerges from the crowd.

  “Quinn. Come on now. You don’t want to do this.”

  “What the fuck do you care? What are… what are you people doing? Don’t you know what’s going on out there? There’s worms crawling into our heads and you all just keep acting like it’s another day at the office. ‘Nice to see you, Sam. Nice to see you, Jean. See you at the water cooler later!’”

  Quinn is quivering, sweating. I don’t like the look in her eyes.

  “Quinn,” Diane says quietly, “put the gun down now. We’ll forget all of this. All of this business. It’s forgotten.”

  “You might think it’s forgotten, but I don’t forget shit. I’m a fucking elephant,” Helena says, stepping forward.

  “Why are you always,” she pauses, floundering for words, “picking on me? It’s not the end of the world! So what if I didn’t get the engines started? All we have to do is survive. Remember? AginCorp is sending a super-dreadnought out here. They’re not going to ignore our distress call. They’ll probably love having a hold full of Hestle employees to wave in corporate’s face.”

  Diane purses her lips. Quinn looks wildly between her and Helena. The rest of the crowd is chattering now. Diane looks at the crowd. It’s obvious she has something on her mind, but wouldn’t normally say it in front of this many people. Helena feels no such hesitation.

  “You’ve fucked us, Quinn. There’s no rescue mission. There’s no race any more. We heard from corporate two hours ago. Our saboteurs on Yloft have managed to scrap every rival mission. Nobody’s coming for us for days. We’re dead now and it’s your fault.”

  Unable to vocalize any longer, a shriek like a steam engine comes from Quinn’s mouth and she points her rifle directly at Helena’s head.

  “I didn’t do anything! I didn’t crash us in the ocean!”

  “Go ahead. Do it. You don’t have the…”

  I guess the next word out of Helena’s mouth was going to be “guts.” Perhaps another more colorful synonym. I’ll never find out. A perfect, thumb-sized, cauterized hole unfortunately appears in the speech center of her brain at just that instant, cutting short whatever she was about to say. Helena blinks after she’s already been shot. She blinks as though confused. I don’t know if it’s a nerve impulse or if she’s somehow clinging to life for a few instants after having her skull drilled clean through by a beam, but either way, she stands there and blinks before finally collapsing into a puddle.

  Tampa tackles Quinn immediately, wrestling the weapon out of her hands, though there is precious little fight left in her. It seemed that having discharged her rifle all of the fight has gone out of her like air out of a balloon. Tampa looks up at Diane.

  “What do I do with her, madam director?”

  Diane slowly reaches up and takes off her glasses. She stands there, polishing them absently for a moment, then replaces them.

  “Get her out of here,” she whispers.

  “Where?”

  Diane stares at her. I wonder if we’re all finally going to see the director lose her cool. No. Not this time, anyway.

  “The freezer,” she says flatly.

  “The freezer? You can’t put me in there. That’s cruel. I want to talk my union rep. I want to talk to equal opportunity.”

  “Yes,” Diane agrees, her voice a million light years away, “we’ll of course provide you with all of that. But for now, throw her in the freezer.”

  A bang resounds through the galley. Then another, then another until we’re all looking up at Nia, standing up on one of the tables, pointing at a plasteel screen which, due to the addled nature of the ship’s alignment, is now running vertical instead of horizontal.

  “Anyone know what this is? No need to all answer at once. This is the water that we need to survive. And you know what’s all around us? An ocean of parasites who want to get in. They’re going to get in, they’re going to taint our water supply, and then that’s all she wrote. There won’t be a civilized planet or station in the galaxy that won’t shoot us out of the ink after that. Even corsairs will fire on sight rather than board.”

  That last statement, coming from a skin-wrapper, is perhaps even more sobering than anything else. There’s being an outcast, and then there’s being an outcast even among outcasts.

  “Now a lot of you don’t trust me. I don’t give a shit. I want to live. I don’t trust a single one of you. Guess what? I don’t give a shit. I want to live. The colonists don’t trust the ink surfers? Guess what? I still fucking want to live. Crew doesn’t trust the colonists? I’m not dying over that. Even your own security detail is gunning one another down? Guess what? I. Still. Fucking. Want. To. Live.”

  She surveys the room. Everyone is chattering. The energy is electric. For the first time since her downfall, I can see how Nia became a corsair captain.

  “Now you people brought me on board here. Otherwise I’d be happily floating dead in space right now. So, guess what? You’re responsible for getting me out of this mess. We need to get the engines fixed and get out of this fucking ocean. I’m going to go do that. And I don’t care who comes with me. And I don’t care about your regs. And I don’t care about anything right now except for number one! Now who’s coming with me?”

  In
a movie, this would be where a cheer goes up through the crowd. In real life, it’s where I stand up. My medi-packs have finished their work. I’m not at 100% but I can stand and probably hold a gun if I have to.

  “I’ll go.”

  “All right, we’ve got the historian. Who else?”

  Jaime also stands.

  “I agree. Now is not the time for petty distinctions. For any distinctions, really. I’ll go as well.”

  “Bully! Three’s good. Four would be better.”

  Grace rises. She raises her hand. Says nothing.

  “That’s a fourth. Madam Gash of a Director… we’re taking the guns that are left. That’s not me really asking, it’s more like telling.”

  Diane looks up at Nia, then over at me and finally at the colonists.

  “If the four of you can get my office moving again I’ll throw you a fucking parade.”

  Thirty-One

  I feel like a character in a horror flick. It seems like there’s always gibbering and running feet off in distant corridors. And it all seems so distant and indistinct until the moment a monster drops on me from out of nowhere.

  “Don’t get distracted,” Nia says. “All that smoke and noise is for the rubes. We’ve got this on lockdown.”

  “You’re pretty good at this,” I say.

  She smiles.

  “Did you forget how I make my living? Piracy is pretty much nothing but creeping through scary wrecks where everyone wants to kill you.”

  “The only difference here is,” Jaime intones, “your former enemies did not wish to eat your brains.”

  Nia snorts.

  “I take you’ve never tried to board a Gore-Fa gunrunner. Those fucking punks play for keeps. Hey, historian. Which way to ops?”

  Sadly, of the four of us, with my two or three days of experience I know the ship best. I’m finally doing what I was hired on to do: direct people around a ship. Only, in this case, it’s not a derelict vessel no one knows anything about. We already firebombed that historical landmark. Now it’s our own office, and we’re trying to get it back under control.

  I point the way to operations.

  “I don’t trust these damn things,” Nia mutters.

  I turn to her, confused. Is she talking to me? Grace is habitually silent and Jaime is bringing up the rear.

  “What damn things?”

  She slaps the stock of her beam rifle.

  “Light particles are no good for shipboard combat. Give me a good old-fashioned plasma thrower any day.”

  “Weird,” I reply, “somehow I prefer not to smell the burning flesh of my victims.”

  She might be smiling, but it’s not clear behind her plasteel screen and lipless mouth.

  “All these beams bouncing around. It’s not safe. Right now, we don’t know what it’s doing. In space there’d be explosive decompression. In here, that gunk could be leaking in. Those things could be slipping in.”

  “Through a bullet hole?”

  “What do you know about how small they start out? Or how flexible they are? I saw an octopus squeeze into a Mason jar once. More concerning though is the sewage and water system. I don’t know how long we have until that’s tampered with.”

  “They’re probably tampering with it right now,” Grace growls.

  I glance back at her, and heft my rifle. I can’t really bring it any closer to me than it is, but moving it around a little makes me feel better.

  “How many people are unaccounted for?” I ask.

  “Seven,” Nia replies. “Well, that was counting you. And the custodian, she’s dead now. And your friend Zanib Patel. That means we’re down to four.”

  “Four’s not so bad.”

  “It would only take one to spike the sewage system.”

  “That’s what you were doing when you found me, then? Hunting down missing people?”

  Nia nods. It’s strange to see her head move behind the plasteel but not the helmet.

  “We have to assume everyone who’s missing is infested. And one of your operations people is still missing. That’s… that’s a big concern.”

  “Not Kelly Overland?”

  “That’s the one.”

  Shit. I had really liked her.

  “Who else?”

  “The office secretary. Another custodian. And… I forget who the last one is. It’s on my jotter.”

  “But they might not be infested, right? We don’t know.”

  “No, we don’t,” Nia agrees, “But we have to assume they are. Those are boss gash’s orders.”

  “Diane said that?”

  Nia nods again.

  “You were supposed to shoot me?”

  She turns and fixes me to the spot with one of her signature ghoulish grins.

  “You’re lucky you weren’t too twitchy.”

  “Are they always twitchy?”

  “Not always. There’s only one way to be sure.”

  Grace makes a slurping, popping noise and motioned as though she was sticking a spoon into her own eye.

  “Yup,” Nia agrees. “We’ve reached ops, by the way.”

  “We have?”

  I look around. I knew we were almost there, but never saw the hatch.

  “You’re standing on top of it.”

  Embarrassed, I step away from the hatch to operations. I guess it’s good that I’ve gotten so used to the office being on its side. At times like this, though, it’s embarrassing to forget.

  “What’s your name again?” Nia asks me.

  “Paige,” I reply.

  “Right. Whatever. I want you to use your jotter and get this hatch open. If the parasites have jammed it or anything, get in contact with your boss and she’ll give you a skeleton key code.”

  I nod and kneel down to start getting into the hatch’s operating system. It’s not exactly anything fancy, but I can understand why she hasn’t asked Grace or Jaime to do it. Our computers would be way, way out of their league.

  “All right, you two,” Nia says, pointing at the colonists, “get up here with me and point your guns down. Keep your heads back away from the jamb. If you stick your head out, you make yourself a target.”

  “How are we supposed to shoot at anything if our heads are supposed to be out of the way?” Jaime asks.

  “A mirror,” Grace replies.

  “Hey, I like you!” Nia says. “Best tactical tool in the arsenal.”

  She reaches into one of the pouches of her suit and pulls out what appears to be nothing more than a vanity mirror, with some sticky tactile substance on the rear. She tosses it gingerly so that it sticks to the erstwhile ceiling, which had previously been the bulkhead opposite the hatch to ops. We all look up into it and can see the hatch to ops reflected. When it opens, we should be able to see inside.

  “It takes some adjustment to get used to. Remember right is left and left is right, but up and down are still the same. You’ll have a couple of wild shots at first no matter what, but you’ll adjust.”

  “Maybe we should try talking to Kelly before we kill her.”

  The other three look at me, at least two of them appalled.

  “You want to risk your life on that? Go ahead.”

  “I will, thanks. Just don’t anybody start shooting.”

  I punch a few buttons. The hematophages haven’t locked the hatch down, so I have some hope that Kelly’s just dead and not infested. That’s actually a pretty depressing thought. I’m at the point where I’m wishing death on my friends because it’s better than the alternative.

  The hatch opens and the other three flinch, almost as one, moving their heads out of the field of view of anybody who might be within. I glance up at the mirror. It’s too dark inside to see anything.

  I reach up and grab Millie, my illumination globe, and push her into ops. She can’t illuminate the whole room, but I can see a series of desks festooning the wall like trophy animal heads. Unlike the galley, where the table and chairs were light and (theoretically) not a falling hazar
d if the office went tumbling, the desks in ops are all heavy and bolted to the deck, which is now the bulkhead to the right as I’m looking in.

  “Hello?” I cry out.

  Nia pulls her beam rifle out of the hatchway and swivels around, scanning the hallways. I may be making enough noise to attract other hematophages.

  “Who is it?” a raspy voice from within replies. I can’t tell who it is. It sounds like she has strep throat.

  “Paige Ambroziak.”

  “Good to hear from you, Paige!” the raspy voice replied.

  “Is that you, Kelly?”

  “It’s me.”

  “I’m excited to finally meet you in person. You think you can come out? I’m afraid we’re going to have to keep guns on you, but you understand, don’t you?”

  “I can’t come out, Paige.”

  “She’s infested,” Nia growls.

  “I’m the only one who cares if you live or die, Kelly.” That came out wrong. “I’m sorry, that came out wrong. I mean you need to work with me.”

  “It’s not that. I can’t come out. I’m trapped, you see.”

  “Can you turn up the lights?”

  The lights in ops rise and I have to turn away. They’re not bright. Not particularly bright, anyway. But we’ve been walking around in dark hallways barely illuminated by emergency lighting and globes for so long that just normal illumination is enough to make our eyes water.

  With the lights up I can now see that the desks on the far wall are lined in perfect rows like little toy soldiers, except for one. One fallen soldier.

  Kelly is lying below us, pinned under the fallen desk. The bolts which should have kept it screwed to the deck dangle in their loops. Kelly looks up at me and smiles wanly. She’s a pretty girl. Young. Too young. She is also as pale as a ghost. Only her torso is visible. Her legs and hips are pinned under the desk.

  She waves at me as though we’ve spotted one another at the zoo or the park. I wave back.

  “How are you, Kelly?”

  She coughs.

  “Not so good. I’m stuck.”

  I look at the other three members of the team.

  “I’m getting her out of there. I don’t care if you three help.”