by Brit Jones
I pinched two wires together, and the door screeched start-stop open, revealing a dark hole beyond, one slice at a time. My light crept inside, and then the smell hit me. I realized what the lumps on the floor were when burnt meat and the rot of decomposition invaded my nose and lungs. Bodies. I breathed out hard and slammed my faceplate down, hoping the scrubbers would help when I had to breathe in again. They didn’t, and worse, my fogged faceplate was slow to clear. Knowing the corpses were lying there in the dark without being able to see them was worse than smelling them, but when the plate cleared I wished it hadn’t. I counted about thirty and reported those to the Recovery. Every one of them was fuel for nightmares.
“I’m sorry, Kira.”
“Thanks.” Programmers give limited AIs, like Recovery, rudimentary sympathetic responses, but when she said stuff like that, it felt hollow. No feeling behind it. The lack of sentiment helped me keep my voice steady. “Log those officially. They’re in uniform—mostly engineers. Map shows engineering’s on the other side of this corridor. They were probably trapped in here when the air was vented to put out the fire.”
“Captain, your heart rate is—”
“Can’t help it. Don’t tell me about it.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
I wanted to close the door again, go back to the Recovery, and leave. But the kid was on the other side of those bodies. I turned up my air so it blew out of the collar of my suit and sent hair tickling across the back of my neck. I stepped over the threshold and picked my way through the bodies using my unsteady shoulder-lights to see by. Some of the corpses were scorched, so that was good. The cooked parts weren’t as hard to look at. The others were oozing—there wasn’t much skin visible, thank Hezu for modest uniforms, but what I could see had purpled in death. The faces of those bodies were rot-melted masks, no longer distinguishable as human, all sunken eyeholes and slit mouths. They were featureless, like poorly made dolls. I called out the names I saw on the lapels for Recovery’s report. Some of the skins had burst, pooling liquid out of the uniforms onto the floor. The cold air in the ship had kept them from decomposing as fast as they might have, but hadn’t preserved them enough. I stepped as carefully as I could, but I couldn’t avoid getting some of the slop on my boots.
“Captain, you must stop. Your cortisol levels are above the recommended safe threshold.”
“On the other side.”
But when I reached the door at the end of the corridor, it wouldn’t open.
“Recovery, any luck with the Queen?” I knew she was tracking me like she had the girl in Cargo A. “Can you open this door?”
“I cannot access system control.”
I had a hard time opening the panel, particularly because I was shaking and sweating so much I was afraid of dropping my tool. If I dropped it, I fek-all wasn’t picking it back up again. The insides of the control panel were scorched and burnt. The fire had disabled it, melting wires; there was no chance of it opening.
I’d have to go back through the bodies.
“Captain, I highly recommend you cease strenuous activity.”
“Shut up, Recovery.” I picked my way back through, trying to put my feet down without looking at the slowly liquefying corpses. I couldn’t help but notice every one had twin pools leaking out of the wrist cuffs. Halfway across, I realized they didn’t have hands.
I stopped and took a long, slow look that left me dizzy, panting in shallow gasps.
Handless. Every one. As though someone had cut them off.
“Captain?” Recovery actually sounded a little alarmed.
“I’m okay.”
“The data disagree.”
“I’m all right. I just noticed something about the bodies, that’s all.” I spared her the gory detail. The room seemed to hold a hush that didn’t want to be explained. “I’m getting out of here.”
After I closed the first door behind me, the empty corridor of the Queen felt almost cozy. Something splashed—I looked down—putrefying liquid had pooled out of the room and trickled down the hall. I wanted to take off the boots even more now, but settled instead for turning up my air to full. It didn’t save me from what I’d already breathed in, which seemed to have taken up permanent residence in my nose. I consulted the map. I could get to cargo by going around engineering, up a few decks above where I’d seen the explosion that had breached the hull, then back down. Or I could get a laser torch from Recovery and cut through the door I’d just tried, but I didn’t want to repeat what I’d just experienced. Not ever. Even though I knew I would anyway on long, sleepless nights. So, around and over it was.
The first lift I came to was disabled, but rather than go looking for another one, I took an access ladder. It felt good to climb up and away from the bodies, like I was escaping them somehow.
I ran into another locked door when I tried to cut across the decks. “Can you hear me, Recovery? I’m at a dead end.”
“Yes, Captain.” Her response was broken with static. I’d passed the first atmospheric bulkhead, and it was already interfering with the signal. “If you go to the bridge and activate the AI’s communication module, I may be able to assist your navigation.”
“My only goal is to find that kid and get us off this hulk.”
“I know, Ma’am, but I will be able to maintain communications if I can tap into the Queen’s systems. I am uncomfortable with the amount of strain I am detecting in your vitals, Captain. You are no longer a young woman.”
“Thanks for the reminder. And fifty ain’t old.”
“After fifty years of age, stress tolerance rates are decreased by—”
“Fine. I’ll go to the bridge if you stop telling me how old I am. Shut up already.”
“Yes, Captain.”
As much as I didn’t want to admit it, the AI was right. I wasn’t young anymore, and even though I spent the required time on the exerciser every day, I didn’t exactly lead an active lifestyle. The bridge of the colonizer was at the head of the beehive, so to speak, and that was a long, long climb.
After what felt like an eternity of listening to my own echoing breaths, I stopped to rest. My boots still stank, but I felt cleaner after the exertion. It was tempting to stop at crew quarters on my way to use the head, but I had no idea what I might find there. I didn’t want a repeat of what happened in that corridor. And my knees ached.
“Talk to me, Recovery.”
“Yes, Captain. Are you making progress?”
I consulted the map. “Over halfway there. Any changes?”
“Unsure.”
“What do you mean, ‘unsure’?”
“The data are in fluctuation.”
“What do you mean? What fluctuation?”
“TerraCo Engineer Giacomo Quinquilleros is in Cargo A.”
“No, he’s not. I stepped over his remains. You don’t forget reading a name like Quinquilleros off a lapel badge.”
“I’m sorry, Kira.”
“Don’t be sorry, Recovery. Be accurate. Don’t tell me I’m going through all this for nothing. Is the kid fluctuating data too?”
“No, Ma’am. Juvenile Elizabet Lovara is two decks below you, in crew quarters.”
“What? Why didn’t you tell me she’d left Cargo A?”
“You told me to shut up, Captain. I thought it best not to disturb you.”
I swore. Damned literal AIs. “She moves, I want to know about it.”
“Yes, Captain. She is in crew quarters, heading in your direction.”
Cold knuckled up the back of my neck again. I didn’t want to be caught on a ladder in a tube by a kid who might or might not be totally mad. Fluctuating data or not, someone had cut off those hands.
I climbed off the ladder at the next hatch and tried the panel. No power, like the others, so I pried open the cover as fast as I could and twisted wires together. It slid up, and I went through another pressure bulkhead.
For the first time I was inside a room that had its own source of light—flicker
ing blue emergency beams and a couple of spotlights on tripods trailed cables into an open power interface. More panels were off the walls, wires dangling down. There were steel tables, cabinets, and open crates of foodstuffs. I checked the map. Galley. I looked down the access ladder. No kid. I shut the door and looked for something to defend myself. I rifled through two drawers, one full of spatulas, the other oven mitts, before Recovery interrupted me, her words partly blocked by static.
“Captain . . . has . . . sec . . . Lovara . . . closing . . . your current . . . .”
I got the gist. “Which way?”
“ . . . through . . . mess hall . . . several . . . . ”
I looked—the steel portals between the galley and the mess stood opposite a set of glass doors, probably refrigeration or freezing units. They’d be an ideal place to hide even if they were cold, because I was in an EVA with its own heat source. I picked one and ducked inside, sliding closed my faceplate to muffle anything Recovery might manage to transmit. I’d chosen a freezer with frosted boxes jumbled across the floor and rows of narrow shelving stacked high with slim packages. I backed up and crouched down, shutting off my lights just as a glint bounced off the galley door swinging in.
Someone walked through it. She was small, about four feet tall, wearing an EVA for juveniles with a bubblehead helmet, faceplate closed. She paused, looking around the galley. Her arm raised—she held a long knife that reflected the blue emergency lights, and she walked straight to my freezer door. I scrambled back, looking for anything for defense. I grabbed one of the packets from the shelf, intending to throw it. It felt wrong in my fingers. I looked down.
It was a human hand.
“ . . . . . . current activity . . . heart,” Recovery said as I dropped the grisly package and the kid opened the freezer door.
Her EVA was streaked with dirt, oil, and other fluids I didn’t want to identify. She pointed the knife. I held up my hands—the universal sign of peace, I hoped. Then again, maybe not for this kid.
She lifted her faceplate. Her kinky black hair clung in sweaty curls to a delicate face with prominent cheekbones. Her dark skin was ashen and her brown eyes protruded—like she was suffering from malnutrition and probably hadn’t spent time under a vitamin D lamp in a while. I said the first thing that popped into my head.
“Don’t stab me.”
“You stupid! You let him out and I was almost done!” I thought maybe her voice was the same I’d heard aboard the Recovery, hoarse and strained, but this time angry instead of afraid. “You don’t open doors. Never.”
“Okay.” I kept my hands up, because she still had the knife. She was short but she looked like she was thirteen or fourteen.
“Come out. Now.” She held the door open. She didn’t lower the blade, but kept it pointed at me, like holding it out and ready was a habit.
I moved slow and steady, nothing sudden, racking my brains for anything useful. I’d watched a space madness training vid about twenty years ago when I’d gotten my salvager license, but now the memory of it was like a missing tooth. Something had been there once, now, nothing. I approached her, and her little turned-up face watched me with predatory care. I slid past her, my eyes never leaving the blade, and she followed me into the galley proper.
“You’re Elizabet, aren’t you?” I said in my calmest voice, the one I reserved for other people’s mean-spirited pets.
“You call me Walkabout.” She lowered the knife, and I felt a tiny surge of hope swoop up my chest. Maybe she wasn’t totally gone.
“I’m Kira. My ship’s the Recovery. I’m going to get you out of here.”
“ . . . Captain . . . data . . . .” Recovery’s voice garbled up from my comm.
“Who’s that?” She pointed the knife again.
“It’s okay, it’s just my AI—”
“No! You have to turn her off!”
“She’s okay, Walkabout. She’s going to help us.”
“No! He can get her. It will take him a while, but he can get her. Then he’ll get away. You have to get off.” She fished a viewer out of her EVA’s thigh pocket, her eyes still on me, wary. She glanced down at it. “He’s moving. Hurry up.”
She slid the knife into a crude plastic sheath hanging from her belt, ran to the tunnel with the ladder, and disappeared through the hatch. She reappeared in a moment. “Hurry, you stupid. I don’t have any codes for your ship and it’s hard to get the hands off while he’s in someone, only after he gets out. You gotta help.”
I stared at her.
“Hurry up. We need to go back to your ship. Now.” Then she disappeared again.
I had no idea what she was talking about, but going back to the Recovery was what I’d wanted to do since coming aboard, so I followed her.
She was quick, way faster than me. She slid down the ladders with the practiced ease of someone who did it every day. I panted like a ventilator, turning my suit lights on and doing my best to keep up.
“Captain, report. I am concerned.”
I’d never been happier to hear my AI’s static-free, emotionless voice. “Recovery, go into lockdown. Do not allow anyone on board, do you hear me?” I knew everyone on the Queen was dead, and the kid was probably raving, but I didn’t want to take any chances she might be right about another survivor wandering around.
“Yes, Captain. Standard procedure dictates lockdown after crew departure. I have been in lockdown since you boarded the Queen.”
“Hezu bless you.” At least Recovery followed standard procedure, if I didn’t. “Let’s keep it that way.”
“I’m sorry, Kira. That may not be possible.”
“What do you mean?” I was out of breath, and the kid opened a hatch and went through, one deck below where I thought the Recovery was docked.
“Someone is attempting to access my core.”
“What?” I stopped, gripping a rung tight. The AI’s core was her central brain and what kept every part of the Recovery functioning, from the wave drive to the life support. She wasn’t diversified like the Queen.
“Captain, I feel … strange.”
Walkabout reappeared at the hatch. “Hurry up, stupid, or he’ll get her.”
I ignored the burning sensation in my knees and crashed down the ladder and through the opening. Walkabout sealed her faceplate and so did I. She tapped my arm and pointed down a side hall and up. Then she went the opposite direction. I don’t know why I followed her instructions without question, but she seemed to know what she was doing. I went down the hall and climbed the ladder at the end of it.
“Talk to me, Recovery,” I whispered. “What’s going on?”
“Insufficient resources.”
“What?” I moved up the ladder as fast as I could.
“Insufficient resources.” There was no change in inflection or tone, so I knew it was a recording. Recovery had never been too busy to answer before.
I checked the map before I opened the next hatch. I’d come out in a branching corridor not far from the airlock where Recovery waited. I paused. If another survivor were on board the Queen, Quinquilleros hiding among those bodies maybe, he could have circled back to try and steal the Recovery while I was tracking down the kid.
Never open doors. Had Walkabout trapped someone else with those dead bodies and he’d gotten out when I went in? I wasn’t looking that close at first. I could have read his lapel aloud to Recovery without noticing he was playing dead, and he could have slunk out while I was trying to open the door at the other end. That would explain why there’d been so much stink-fluid on the floor, but I couldn’t imagine someone crazy enough to hide among the putrefaction of all those bodies. No one human, anyway. And there was something seriously wrong with that kid and her collection of hands. I wanted to know what the hell was going on, and I didn’t have any answers.
A burst of static from Recovery got me moving again. One way or another, she was in trouble, and she wasn’t just my only way out of here, Recovery was my home, livelihood, and th
e closest thing I had to a friend.
I looked around the corner and ducked low for cover. A man stood in the Queen’s airlock, tapping on the panel of Recovery’s outer door with quick, black fingers. He wore the uniform of an engineer fouled with the slime that had been in the corridor of the dead. The cloth was burnt in places, and so was he. He’d been charred—the back of his head was patched with singed hair and skull showed through, white in places. There was no reason for him to be upright and moving around, much less typing commands on a panel. I looked again. His hands weren’t in black gloves; they were charred remembrances of human flesh. He was not alive. He could not be alive.
There was no sign of Walkabout anywhere.
I edged around the corner, walking toward the airlock as quietly as I could. The EVA boots felt like they weighed a hundred pounds and sounded like a shower of meteors against the plating. They couldn’t be louder than my heart, which pounded in my chest like it was trying to break out of a gravity well.
I was almost to the airlock before the thing turned around. The face was worse than the back of the head—the eyelids had fallen off, so the naked whites in the charred face rotated to look at me like peeled eggs. There were no lips, the teeth bared in an unending smile, and it reached one hand toward me while the other kept working at Recovery’s panel.
I felt the silence of my heart stopping. A warning claxon went off in my helmet, but it wasn’t louder than the breathless alarm twanging through every nerve. My heart was not beating. It had stopped. A pressure opposed me, a mind faster than my own, evil and powerful, squeezing me down and pulling me in. My knees bent and I took a step forward, then another, and another. When I got to the airlock, it reached forward and clamped fleshless fingers on the collar of my EVA. I looked at the dead hand, up the arm, past the lapel badge, into the face. It opened its mouth and said something I could not understand, because it had no tongue to work against its lipless teeth. I understood only that it wanted me, and even though didn’t want to, I couldn’t stop moving toward it.
I started to take a slow step forward, but my EVA boot banged into the airlock and my battered knee finally gave. I lurched sideways and my other knee folded too, toppling me over just in front of the seal. The dead arm was the only thing holding me up, and I slapped it, frantic. In the struggle, I elbowed the controls on the Queen’s airlock. The door slid shut, and the thing’s arm, still holding my collar, was crushed inches from my faceplate by pinching titanium. The seal whined, trying to pressurize, and then Walkabout was there beside me with her knife. She sliced the wrist and the tendons gave way, leaving the hand clinging limply to my EVA, jerking like an overlarge spider. She worked her blade into the door, cutting at the crushed arm. Light bounced off the synthetic diamond blade and shreds of burnt flesh came away, until the door managed to shut and I heard bones crunch. The seal pressurized.