“That’s not the mission,” Jaime states flatly.
“The mission takes us right through ops and into engineering,” I say.
“Nevertheless,” Jaime says, “helping that woman will take an unacceptable amount of time.”
“What’s ‘unacceptable’ in your definition, Jaime?”
“Any amount of time is unacceptable,” Jaime says. “We are in the unenviable position of racing the clock while having no idea how much time is left on it. As Nia pointed out, any moment the parasites could flood the water systems. Then all of this is in vain.”
“I’m glad someone else around here makes sense,” the skin-wrapper states flatly.
“So, if you get stuck, it’s okay if we leave you behind?”
Nia stares at me.
“I’d be disappointed if you didn’t.”
“Well, you’re a prisoner. You’re lucky to be walking around. That’s one of my crew-mates down there. She matters.”
“Funny how you always seem to go from self-serving to self-righteous on a dime. Bearing in mind how little I matter, what if your imaginary friend down there is already infested and this is all a trap? If she’s been alive all this time, how come she didn’t reach out and tell us?”
“Because shipboard communications were shut down, remember? And she doesn’t have one of those little phones in there.”
“Maybe. Or maybe she’s fucking infested. We could eliminate that little variable by drilling her right now.”
I glare at her.
“Who would pretend to be trapped like that? She’s not a skin-wrapper, you know.”
Suddenly I’m shocked at Nia’s strength as I’m lifted off my feet by the neck and slammed against the bulkhead.
“You don’t like me,” the skin-wrapper says, leering at me, forcing me to look into her lidless eyes and flayed face. “That’s fine. I don’t care. You can take shots at me, too. That’s fine, too. I don’t care. But do not ever suggest that I would fake illness as a ruse.”
I’ve seen her before but this is the first time I’ve ever really been forced to look at her. It’s easy to forget that in spite of everything else, in spite of being a walking, talking ghoul, in spite of being a reaving corsair who burns people to death with plasma, Nia is, at her most fundamental, a woman grappling with a terminal illness. She takes it seriously. All the snark is a defensive measure.
“I apologize,” I say. “I mean it. I didn’t think.”
She looks me up and down. She seems to take me at my word and lets me drop to the deck.
“Listen,” Kelly says, “I can hear you fighting over me. But it doesn’t really matter. I’m not just pinned, you see. I’m dead. I’m dead already. My spine’s been severed. Really, you won’t even be able to move me.”
The four of us return to the hatchway and peer down.
“We can get Tina down here,” I say. “She’ll be able to do something. At least put you into stasis or something until we can get you back to a proper hospital facility.”
“Honestly, Paige, I’m at peace with it. You really want to do something for me, though, I’m dying for a glass of water.”
I look at Nia. Her face is grim. Well, it’s always grim. Grimmer than usual.
“We need to get to engineering,” she states flatly.
Kelly nods. She presses a few buttons on her jotter and the hatch to the engine room opens.
“All right, you’re all clear!”
I look at Nia and the other two.
“We have to go that way anyway. You can shoot her now, I guess. You know, to be sure.”
Nia says nothing but simply begins climbing down the rows of desks which were bolted properly to the ground. Grace, Jaime, and myself follow, our beam rifles strapped to our backs. When I’m about halfway done navigating my way down the maze of desks, I realize that if Kelly is armed now is the perfect opportunity to gun us down. We’re sitting ducks, our arms and legs occupied and our rifles out of reach. And if we do reach for them, we fall.
I’m struck by a sudden sense of overwhelming and impending doom. I’ve made the wrong choice, yet again. Allowed my emotions – this time, sympathy for Kelly and guilt over what happened to Becs, rather than raw, unchecked ambition as last time – get ahold of me. Whether she’s infested or her story is true, Kelly is dead either way. It would probably be a mercy to drill a bolt through her forehead at this point. Certainly, it would guarantee our safety.
Nia reaches the deck first. She helps the rest of us down. The hardest part is navigating around the big missing hole where the desk that crushed Kelly should have been. It’s like getting used to climbing a ladder only to find halfway up that it’s suddenly missing a rung.
I approach Kelly’s prostrate form.
“Hey, kid,” I say.
“Hey,” she replies weakly.
Her skin is flawless. That strikes me. She’s not wearing a drop of makeup. She’s just got the natural skin of a teenager. She probably is a teenager. Not even twenty yet. Probably joined Hestle as soon as possible at seventeen. Or maybe even before that as an intern and just got offered a job fresh after graduation. Her skin must have gone from betraying her at every turn in her oily early teens to that rare brief moment of perfection before the long march of time leads to crows’ feet and pockmarks. She’s perfect. Except for her spine, severed at the tailbone.
“You’re that pirate,” Kelly says.
“I’m that pirate,” Nia agrees.
Kelly shrugs, then scowls at the pain it causes her to do so.
“Politics make for strange bedfellows I suppose. Did you… by chance bring any aqua?” I pull out my canteen but look at Nia first.
“I didn’t bring a spoon,” she says.
“It’s all right,” Kelly replies, misunderstanding and reaching out with her arms, “I don’t need a spoon or a straw. I can drink it all right.”
Nia shrugs.
“It’s your neck to risk.”
I crouch down and hand the canteen to Kelly, who eagerly swallows too much and begins choking. That long dreamt of perfect sip turns to pain.
“Are you guys finally going to fix the engine?”
“Yeah,” I reply, before realizing what that means.
When the ship has power again and rights itself, Kelly will die. Her living situation is more than simply precarious, it’s unsustainable. A jostle, a shake, and she’ll be gone. We’ll be turning the whole office ninety degrees.
“Kelly, I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right,” she says, shaking her head. “I’ve already entered the commands for the ship to right itself and head for Yloft. It’ll go on autopilot the whole way if it has to. I sure won’t be able to pilot it at that point.”
“You did that knowing it’ll kill you?” Jaime asks.
“Well, I have my duties,” she replies as though it’s the simplest thing in the world.
“Yes,” Jaime replies, “I suppose we all do.”
“Well, don’t let me keep you. There’s nothing really you can do for me and getting the engine started is pretty much urgent. But, Paige, there is something you all should know.”
Nia, Grace, and Jaime, perk up, surprised at the statement.
“Shipboard communications are shut down. It’s supposed to stop the... whatever they are…from communicating with each other. At least… that was the director’s orders. But, you know, I have access to override that from my station here.”
“You do?” Nia asks. “Then why did you never try to contact us?”
“That’s what I wanted to warn you four about. I did. Several times. But somebody shut me out. I don’t think your safe zone is really safe. I think someone in there is infested.”
Thirty-Two
We spend the rest of the trek to the engine room in eerie silence. Kelly’s revelation was shocking, but there’s nothing we can do about it. At least, not until we reach a phone, and the nearest one of those is in… you guessed it… engineering.
We he
ar grunting and the banging of metal on metal as we round a corner. Without giving the order, all four of us douse our globes as one. We all become sober, silent killing machines as we approach, our footsteps muffled as though we have trained as trackers and stalkers all our lives.
Nia takes point. She turns back to me.
“It’s the secretary,” she whispers.
“Alone?”
She nods. I step around her and walk into engineering. It is the first time I have been in the room. In the dead center of the room, held in place by eight super magnets installed in the deck and ceiling, though now it is technically on its side, is a gravitational singularity about the size of a pea. I allow my footsteps to echo and announce my presence. Myrna, the red-headed secretary, is angrily bashing at a control monitor for the singularity.
I don’t know much about engine rooms, but I do know that they are designed with about three hundred fail-safes and dead man switches designed to prevent the black hole that powers the office from being knocked loose and potentially expanding exponentially. Nothing – not lives, not money, not nothing – is more important to the company than preventing an apocalyptic event originating on one of their ships. If there’s even a hint that the singularity could be knocked loose of its cage, the entire engine room will collapse on itself and destroy the singularity. Most modern ships are not lost due to the actions of corsairs, or corporate espionage. They’re lost due to minor containment breaches in the engine room. It’s like sealing up a sinkhole with cement, but better that than the sinkhole collapsing a whole city.
“Myrna,” I say loudly.
She has obviously heard my footsteps, but she is still banging away impotently.
“Not so much anymore,” Myrna replies, her voice low and guttural.
Each of her eyeballs pop out in turn. The hematophages emerge from her eye sockets, the male fat and plump and on the right, the female lither and skinnier and on the left, just like in Zanib. They bob and weave in the air, as Myrna, her eyeballs dangling from bundles of optic nerve around her chin level, raises the wrench like a baseball bat, about to take a swing at the control module.
“If you do that, you die. This whole office will implode. You know that, don’t you?”
Nia, Grace, and Jaime enter, their weapons leveled as well.
“Arrgh!” Myrna growls. “Stupid, stupid, stupid! This human is one of the stupidest among you. She knows nothing about this system. She can barely even understand a damn manual.”
Despite the tenseness of the situation, I have to suppress a smile. Myrna, the idiot, has turned out to be our greatest natural defense against the hematophages. She was too dumb to make a valuable saboteur.
“I’m not lying to you. That’s a black hole. There are fail-safes in place to…”
“Gah! We know you’re not lying.”
The Myrna-thing drops the wrench, which clatters to the deck.
“Of course, you wouldn’t let a singularity go unprotected. This entire solar system would be destroyed. Of course, there are fail-safes. But this…” Myrna gestures at her own head, “is so stupid! We are frustrated.”
“You’re about to be dead,” Grace growls.
“Hold on,” I say. “We’ve got the drop on her. No reason we can’t talk. For once.”
“You think you can negotiate with them?” Jaime asks.
“I’m not negotiating. I’m just talking.”
Nia makes the hand-flapping “talk talk talk” gesture, but at least she holds her fire.
“Maybe we don’t have to be at war. What is it that you want?”
Myrna makes a disdainful noise. She begins pacing like a caged animal. The hematophages continue to bob and weave in the air around her head.
“We need to get off this planet. We’re dying off. It won’t be long now before our entire species is extinct.”
“Good riddance,” Jaime states.
“This is your fault, alien. You killed our planet.”
“Killed the planet? You mean the fleshworld? It’s dying?”
“It’s been dead for centuries. When your little seed ship landed here, it murdered our planet. The ecosystem collapsed. There’s no longer nutriment in the ocean. We used to swim in an ocean of blood. Now we have to occupy your bodies to get fresh nourishment.”
“That must mean there aren’t many of you left.”
“Very few. Our numbers are down to the dozens. Those of us who must stay in the ocean are dying by centimeters. It’s like eating watered-down gruel. And soon it won’t even be that.”
“What if we can get you to another fleshworld?”
The Myrna-puppet barks in laughter.
“How dumb do you think we are? We know there are no other fleshworlds. You would make us promises so we would back down from our plans. And then you’d betray us. It is the human way.”
“What are your plans then?”
Myrna laughs again.
“We feel like a villain in a third-rate entertainment fiction. Yes, of course, you can hear our plans. We’ve been planning to reactive the seed ship. We’ve been working at it restlessly for decades.”
“That’s impossible,” Jaime breathes. “The engines were spiked when we first crashed.”
Myrna points at Jaime.
“You see? You see how long we have toiled hopelessly? And then your craft landed. Now we can finally go free. When we get to civilization we can ride around in so many of your bodies.”
“You have to know we wouldn’t allow that,” I say, “but we could work something out. We could develop a new food source for you. It might not be ideal but you wouldn’t have to kill to survive. I’m sure you don’t want that.”
The male hematophage turns its maw to me. It is eyeless, but I can’t escape the feeling it is staring at me.
“Why would we care about killing vermin to survive?”
Jaime steps forward. Like Diane, she is a stoic, but I wouldn’t be surprised if, in some alternate universe, there were tears in her eyes.
“Vermin? You think my people are vermin?”
“We’ve battled you for centuries. You disgust us. With your pink, oily skin and your tiny, disgusting hairs. You have all these limbs and parts and you can barely do anything. You’re the most disgusting creatures we can imagine, and what passes, futilely, for your intellect is a joke. Our world had poets and philosophers and theologians before you killed it. I know more and understand more than your species will ever be capable of even beginning to comprehend. You’re like bugs to us. I feel no shame in stamping you out. I delight in it; I revel in it.”
“The feeling, I suspect, is mutual,” Jaime says.
She raises her weapon. I’m almost tempted to tell her not to do it, but I’ve tried reasoning with them. They are far, far beyond being reasoned with.
Jaime grins. It is the first time I have seen her do so. She opens her mouth and blood pours from it as she attempts to speak a word. I think it is “treason.”
And treason it is, as Grace removes the blade from the back of her friend’s neck.
Thirty-Three
Grace’s hand grabs the strap of Jaime’s rifle and wraps it around her offhand even as Jaime slips out of the strap and tumbles to the deck. It is almost an elegant move, an unexpected martial pirouette. But now Grace has two guns, one pointed at Nia and the other at me. We both have our weapons pointed forward, more or less in Myrna’s direction.
For once, Grace’s eyeballs do not pop out of her head, although I almost wish they would after I witness what happens next. Instead, each of the hematophages messily devours her eyes from within before lurching out into the open air.
“No more need for deception, we suppose,” the Grace-puppet says. “Weapons on the ground.”
I unsling my rifle instantly. I know I’m beaten. This sort of business is out of my league. Nia seems to measure her options, but ultimately comes to the same conclusion I have and slowly lowers her own weapon to the ground.
“Now kick them o
ver to our colleagues.”
Nia is forceful with her kick, sending her rifle spinning into Myrna’s waiting grasp. Her eyeballs are still dangling, and become entangled on the stock of the rifle as she retrieves it. I am less emphatic in getting rid of my rifle and it doesn’t slide very far, but no one seems very concerned about it.
“How long have you been infested?” I ask Grace.
“Almost three years now,” she replies.
Nia and I are visibly confused.
“But… you took the test. I thought…”
“Did either of you see me take the test?” She’s smiling. “It’s a shame, you know. Jaime was clean. If you’d sent her to the infirmary instead of me, you might all be safe now.”
“And the security goons didn’t see anything?”
Grace is still smiling.
“We stepped behind a curtain. For modesty’s sake. And our babies infested your nurse. Jaime wasn’t crazy. Several of us were infested. And still are. Your so-called safe zone is a joke. The person administering your little spoon test is one of ours. We could take you all out at any moment.”
“Then why don’t you?” Nia asks. “Aren’t we just vermin?”
“Oh, you’re vermin, all right,” the Grace-thing replies. “Unfortunately, you know how your technology works better than this host body or that one. We could probably muddle through. Instead you’re going to fix the engines for us.”
“And just why the hell would we do that?”
Grace grins. Each of her parasites, such as they can, grin as well. It’s an eerie sight, three smiles in tandem coming from a single, gestalt entity.
“Your lives are precious to you. You can have them for a few minutes longer.”
Nia laughs. It is a horrifying, grisly display. She is caught up, as if in a fit, unable to stop laughing. She’s gone practically hysterical. The two infested don’t seem to know what to do. They even look to me for guidance, but I have none to offer. Finally, the short barking of the skin-wrapper’s laughter comes to an end, more out of exhaustion than anything else.
“‘Precious,’” she repeats. “You think my life is precious to me?”
The Hematophages Page 22