The Hematophages

by Stephen Kozeniewski

  “We could be persuaded to negotiate on such a minor matter,” Myrna says. “We could let you two go unmolested. In an escape pod, perhaps.”

  “You don’t get it,” Nia says.

  “I get it,” I say, belatedly.

  The hematophages are looking back and forth between us, their rifles leveled at each of us.

  “Explain it to us, then,” the thing that was Myrna spits out.

  “She’s a skin-wrapper. A terminally ill patient suffering from cancer so bad that flaying off her skin and living in zero gravity is better than the alternative. She’s probably been prepared to die since the day she came to space. Is that about right, Nia?”

  “You said it a little fancier than I probably would’ve, but that’s about the gist of it. I’d die in a second before helping you.”

  “If you really mean that…” Grace starts to say, raising her weapon.

  “Oh, I do,” Nia replies, cutting her off.

  She puts her hand on the knob in the center of her chest plate. The infested both jump, not sure if she’s reaching for a weapon or what. But I know what she’s reaching for. With a flourish, she cranks her boom suit’s internal gravity up to the maximum.

  Her ghoulish countenance is grinning, even as it begins quivering.

  “This is going to be pretty gross,” the skin-wrapper states. “I’m just sorry I won’t get to see it.”

  Waves of visible energy ripple through her exposed muscle and sinew. She tips her head back, laughing manically as her body begins to quiver and quake. The hematophages and the infested are mesmerized, perhaps mortified, watching as the gravity inside Nia’s suit begins to redline. They’re distracted, and I wonder if that’s why Nia did this rather than letting herself be shot. I suppose it is a unique way to go. A story I’ll tell for ages. But she also seems to be giving me an opening. Her lidless eye twitches, and I wonder for the briefest of seconds if it’s a wink, but it scarcely matters as both of her eyes begin to melt.

  I drop to the deck and grab my rifle. I really hadn’t kicked it very far away at all.

  All the muscle sloughs away from Nia’s face, exposing pure bone. Then her skull begins to compact in on itself. Skull and teeth splinter and fracture. Nia, at least, what’s still left of her in the suit, staggers backwards, tips forwards and then her brain and chunks of skull spatter the inside of her plasteel visor. The chunks of grey matter drip away from the screen faster than usual in the artificially-heightened gravity, like water swirling away down a drain.

  Nia’s empty suit begins to collapse. It flutters to the ground, empty, until only the boots are still upright, full of what looks like maybe half a meter of leg in each. It occurs to me with a sickening feeling that of course her legs are not still there. Her pureed body has sunk into her boots. What was formerly the skin-wrapper captain is now reducing to two pantlegs filled with red pudding.

  The infested turn on me. I have the beam rifle in my hand, but there are two of them. What are my options? I glance at the singularity, frozen in time and space, sitting on its side. I can attempt to breach it, which will cause the entire ship to implode. I’ll die. We’ll all die.

  I can attempt to shoot it out with the infested. Two against one. And I’m not much good in a firefight.

  I can do what they say. Take the deal. Which they almost certainly won’t honor. And even if they do, civilization will still collapse. Mostly thanks to me.

  Only one option seems reasonable. I put the beam rifle in my mouth and finger the trigger.

  Thirty-Four

  “Stop.”

  My eyes are pinched shut, but I know, deep in my heart, that I don’t have the guts to do it. I take the rifle out of my mouth and lower it to the ground.

  “Your friends,” the Myrna parasite says, her eyeballs still dangling around her chin. “You haven’t forgotten about them, have you?”

  “They’d rather die than let you win, too.”

  “Maybe. Let’s ask them.” Myrna takes out a jotter and speaks into it. “Lift the communications ban.”

  Suddenly the room is filled with holograms. The galley as I left it behind is here in the engine room with me now. Diane, Quinn, and Tampa are still alive, sitting at a table, unmolested. Tina’s parasites have emerged from her eye sockets. Several of the colonists from Pod Eight – obviously not as clean as we thought after being screened by one of their own – are also proudly displaying their parasitic colors. Tina drops the body of one of the clean crew members, exsanguinated by the eels poking out of her brain.

  “Galley here,” Tina says. “Things are pretty much over down here. We’re keeping the remaining uninfested as snacks or hosts.”

  “Slight change in plans,” Myrna replies. “We haven’t got the engine working yet. The pirate killed herself. We’ve got the historian. She might be able to do it… properly motivated.”

  Tina hisses.

  “Just infest her!”

  “Now now,” Myrna chastises, “we’re civilized beings here. We can take into account the feelings even of vermin. What would it take for you to start the engine?”

  I shake my head.

  “There’s nothing. Nothing you can offer me.”

  “Not even your life? The lives of your friends? You could be the hero here, Paige. No doubt the company would reward such behavior. Instead of a complete breakdown of an entire mission, just a really big fuck-up. What do you think, madam director?”

  Diane’s face is an icy, implacable mask. Myrna walks up and crouches down beside me.

  “She won’t talk,” Myrna says. “That’s fine. She never talks. You know, Myrna despised her. Resented her. Never let it show. Did you know that, madam director? Did you know your own secretary didn’t have a shred of respect for you? She let her work drop. She wasn’t half as dumb as you thought she was. She just didn’t respect you enough to do things right.”

  Diane’s mouth doesn’t even flutter. The hematophages are barking up the wrong tree if they think they’re going to get under her skin. But, no, that’s not really what she’s going after at all.

  “What about you?” the Myrna-thing asks, the female hematophage snapping around in front of my lips until it’s practically kissing me. It’s Myrna’s mouth that continues moving, but I know it’s this particular eel that is speaking. “What do you think about your director? It doesn’t really matter now, does it? You can be honest.”

  “I don’t have anything to say to you. Kill me. Or don’t.”

  “That’s pretty gutsy coming from someone who obviously doesn’t have the guts to kill herself. You want to know what we believe you think about the director? We think you couldn’t care less about her. We think you couldn’t care less about anyone in there. We think people don’t mean a whole hell of a lot to you at all. You know you’re supposed to have relationships, affection, dislike, but you don’t. You look at people the same way we do, like vermin. Creatures you have to tolerate to survive in a cold universe.”

  “With one small difference: I’m not a lamprey hitching a ride in someone’s brain.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  My witty rejoinder is cut off, never to be recalled again, because the room has succumbed to the sounds of hissing. Only, it’s not hissing. Not in the sense we would use it. It’s the hematophage equivalent of cheering. It’s the lampreys who are making the noise, the need to manipulate their hosts forgotten in their momentary joy.

  All the infested in the galley are staring at the plasteel of the sewage and water system. For a moment I wonder why, but then I see the red cloud. Then the cloud disappears as the red waters of the dead fleshworld rush in. All of our freshwater is lost, tainted by the first drop of hemoglobin. The Borgwardt’s water system is wriggling with hematophages.

  “Ah,” the Myrna-thing says, “the last of our passengers have come on board. Now, Paige. I can infest you. And my children can eat your brain away and hope that they’re smart enough to rely on your muscle memory and the deep-seated knowledge hidden a
way in your brainstem. But I think having you fix the engine would be better than rolling the dice on all that working out. Don’t you?”

  I’m beyond responding. Beyond even caring. I am numbness. I am like a great draught of Novocain. I hold out my hand. Allow Myrna pull me to my feet. I put my hand out.

  “Jotter.”

  Bemused, Myrna puts the jotter in my hand. I hook it into the engineering computer.

  “Troubleshooting mode,” I say.

  “Troubleshooting mode locked by order of the director,” the jotter’s tinny voice responds.

  I turn to Myrna and Grace.

  “And if I do this you’ll let me go? Uninfested?”

  “Of course,” Myrna coos.

  “Not you. I want to hear it from you.”

  I point at Grace. She approaches and the roly-poly male hematophage lurches sickeningly towards me.

  “What do you care what we have to say?”

  “You haven’t made a bunch of empty promises.”

  I have to wonder… I can’t be sure, but I have to wonder. They claim to be more intelligent than us, to have greater minds. But at some point, when you’re digging around in someone else’s memories and occupying their body, how can you know where you begin and they end? There must be some kind of osmosis. The Tina-thing acts just like Tina. The Myrna-thing acts just like Myrna, albeit off the leash she usually keeps herself on. It stands to reason that the Grace-thing would act like Grace. Or at least enough for me to trust her if she gave me her word.

  She nods, ever so slightly.

  I turn back to the jotter. I tell it Diane’s code, which she gave me earlier to view the assault on Pod Nine. I memorized it because of course I did. Diane rises.

  “Paige!” she says sharply.

  The Tina-thing kicks out sharply, knocking one of Diane’s prosthetic legs out from under her. She crumples into her chair. I’m not sure where she would have walked or what difference it would have made, but the point has been adequately made.

  “Don’t do this, Paige. That is a direct verbal directive.”

  “Run it by EO and the union first,” I reply. “I don’t have to listen to you just because you’re management.”

  Everyone in the holographic galley is on their feet (with the exception of Diane who can no longer get to her feet) shouting different things. I’m pretty sure the equal opportunity officers and the union stewards are urgently telling me to listen to management. That’d be funny if it still mattered. Hilarious, if it had ever mattered.

  But it doesn’t. I’m not listening to any of them. I’m listening to the jotter, and watching it, as it gives me moron-level instructions about what’s wrong with the engine and how to fix it. It even comes with blinking diagrams and issues me codes as I need them. With Diane’s password, fixing a singularity core is no harder than changing the toner in a photocopier. Without it, after having been spiked correctly by the crew, no engineering team in the galaxy could reverse the spike.

  When I look up from my fussing, everyone in the room, real or projected, is staring at me.

  “Is it fixed?” Myrna asks, looking like she’s going to fall over if she leans in any closer.

  I make circles with my hand over a handle switch.

  “As soon as I pull this,” I say.

  “Pull it,” Myrna says.

  “Paige, don’t you dare!” Diane shouts.

  I look to Grace.

  “You’re going to kill me along with the others, aren’t you?”

  Grace shrugs and nods. Her hematophages have retreated back into her headspace. They are peeking out through her eye sockets, dagger-toothed mouths flexing inside the skull, but happily ensconced in the warm womb of Grace’s head again.

  I nod and pull the switch. The hematophages all begin hissing in glee again.

  “I figured,” I say.

  “You can consider this your notice of dismissal,” Diane states flatly.

  “Have a little faith, madam director,” I say, clipping a carabiner from my belt onto a control panel. “Kelly, have you been listening?”

  “Yes, Paige,” my “imaginary” friend responds.

  “And you know what to do?”

  “Yes, Paige.”

  “What… what’s happening?” the Myrna-thing says, her eels writhing around in the air like mad.

  Grace has already figured it out.

  “She’s outwitted us.”

  The Borgwardt suddenly rights itself, and everyone falls to the side. Kelly, I reflect, is dead now, her last act being to sacrifice herself by inputting the commands for us to right ourselves and blast off into the atmosphere.

  Grace points her rifle at me. She’s willing to take me out as a last act of vengeance against the human vermin. But it’s already too late for her and Myrna before she can even aim at me. We’ve passed the atmosphere. Her shot goes off, but it goes wild as she’s sucked into the hatchway out of the engine room. She strains against the jamb, attempting to force herself back in, perhaps to grab purchase on something more solid. But it’s no use. Myrna slams into her, and both are sucked out into the hallways.

  They’ll be bounced around like pinballs out there. Their bodies, both those of the hosts and the parasites, will be pulverized by striking every flat surface in the Borgwardt half a hundred times until they’re finally sucked out into their ultimate destination: open space. I’m sucked out as well, but the carabiner I’ve attached to the control panel is holding me fast. I’m just a dog on a very short leash, enjoying the zero G.

  Millie, my ever-faithful glow globe, is not so fortunate and is ripped right off of my belt. The loss of the puppy-like tool would be cause for sadness on an ordinary day, but today has been so full of loss it barely even registers. Nia’s suit is sucked past me as well, her pulverized remains sloshing around like river water in a fisherman’s set of soggy boots.

  “So long, skin-wrapper,” I mutter, surprised to find myself waving goodbye to a woman who, only hours before, had been my mortal enemy.

  The blood in the sewage system is draining away, too. I can hear the hematophages screaming in terror. It is the most horrifying noise I have ever heard, and in the last few hours I thought I had grown utterly desensitized to such things. Funny to think that creatures which were also my mortal enemies, even at that very instant, and an existential threat to my very race, not even a member of my race as the skin-wrapper had once been, could be capable of eliciting such a dread feeling in me.

  Their screams are beyond the screams of the damned. They are shrieking in an agony beyond all knowing for me. Perhaps they really are more intelligent than us, more emotional, more poetic. Their shrieks as their lives are snuffed out resemble those of creatures who have thought long and thought hard about…well, not the human condition, I suppose. But the condition of any living, sentient being. I’ve exterminated a race of poet-philosophers with a single pull of a handle. I’m a perpetrator of genocide, one of a very few. Probably the only one currently living.

  I’m blacking out. It’s hard to ignore. All of my problems are swirling away, but all of my oxygen is, too. Kelly must have blown an airlock to allow explosive decompression, and one of the outer facing sewage pipes as well. I hope she timed it to stop at some point. I have no idea how long it would take to clear all of the hematophages out of the office, but if it’s more than five or six minutes I’ll be suffocated as well. Even if I’m not, I may not have enough air to make it back to Yloft, the nearest outpost.

  A chair is flying at my nose. I flinch, then realize as it passes right through me that it was a hologram. There’s a sinking feeling in my stomach. I hadn’t even noticed it at the time, but Grace and Myrna weren’t the only ones sucked out. The holographic projector is still projecting. It’s just that Diane, Quinn, and all the survivors have been sucked out as well. The hematophages are gone, but the last of my compatriots have left with them.

  I’m passing out now. No more oxygen. I hope Kelly entered a stop command on the explosive decom
pression. I can’t really blame her, though, if she didn’t.

  Thirty-Five

  “What do you think you could have done better to prevent this?”

  I don’t look up. My head is pointed downward, at the deck. Showing my eyes would show earnestness. A lot of people seem to genuinely believe you can intuit someone’s feelings – some even say soul – from their eyes. The truth is that’s all horseshit. Eyes don’t smile. They don’t laugh. They don’t cry – well, they do, but you can tell when they’re crying because salty liquid is pouring from them.

  The truth is that eyes are just white and black and a little bit of color. Whatever you see in them is exactly as meaningful as looking at the stars and seeing ancient gods fucking one another, or looking at planetscapes and imagining a face or a skull. Eyes are empty, but they reflect the human desire to anthropomorphize every fucking thing.

  The purpose of this question is to show contrition. They want you to list a mistake – ideally a whole litany of mistakes – and show your chagrin. Admit you were wrong.

  “I could’ve not taken the job.”

  The goon is no Yloft station bunny, or I’d know her. Hestle imported her for the purpose of getting to the bottom of my ass, probably at great expense. She’s probably a shadow-hunter, likely a former shadow herself, recruited for the purpose of rooting out her black-hatted kin. She’ll have conducted thousands of interrogations like this, on subjects far cagier than me.

  I’m surprised, then, when her response is simply, “Excuse me?”

  I don’t look up. I know my hair is hanging over my face and consequently my voice is muffled, but I just don’t give a shit.

  “I knew I had Hestle over a barrel. They would’ve paid any amount for me. I wasn’t the best but I was the best available and in the ink sometimes that’s all that matters.”

  The corporate shadow-hunter adjusts her spectrometry spectacles. She’s trying to get a bead on my biochemistry. Her lenses are telling her all about my body temperature, heart rate, all the vital signs as we speak. I’m not controlling any of them myself, but I’m sure they’re all steady or normal or negative or whatever the right medical/procedural term is. The only thing that can’t be controlled is my blink rate. So, I have to keep my eyes hidden. Windows to the soul.