by Brit Jones
“I don’t see him,” she said and looked back at me. Her eyes scanned the bulkheads above and below, like she was trying to see through them.
No. He was not outside clinging to the lifeboat because I wasn’t going to let him be. I refused to let him be. “Let’s get the fek out of here. Recovery, can you hear me?”
“Yes, Captain.”
“We beat him to the lifeboat. Here we come.”
“Wait,” Walkabout said, but I wasn’t listening to her. I wanted to live. I launched us. I felt the strain of the cables, then we pulled free.
“What if he’s on the hull? We can’t take him with us.
We can’t.”
The panic in her voice made me look out the airlock’s tiny window again. No sign of him, but I couldn’t see much of the outside and the lifeboat’s limited sensors weren’t designed to detect much more than the broad side of a planet. “He’s not there,” I said, trying to figure out how to make sure. “He’s not with us.”
“What if he is?” She pointed the knife at the window, her eyes hollow with everything she’d lived through.
I wanted to tell her she was paranoid, that she was wrong. I wanted to shout that we had escaped and left him behind. That we were going to live. Instead I only strapped myself in and watched the Queen’s massive bulk dwindle behind us, until I could see the entire beehive again. There was nothing moving across her surface—no sign of the Hand.
“Kira,” Walkabout said, “we have to get out and check
the hull.”
I shook my head. “We’re moving too fast. It’s not safe.” Even if we did go out and look, he would take us—dominate our minds—if he was there, which he was not, because I wouldn’t let him be. I felt the stress and Gs pressing me down into the seat.
I looked out the cockpit, over Walkabout’s head. The Recovery was there, scorched. Next to her was, I presumed, the Merryweather. It was a sleek ship, like Recovery, built for finding, not for hauling booty.
“Captain, I am receiving a strange transmission,”
Recovery said.
“Strange how?”
“The sender says she is the Queen.”
“Let it through.”
“It is nearly time,” a voice I thought I’d never hear again spoke, a clipped principal’s tone. “Where is the Hand?”
“He went outside,” I said. “We left him there somewhere on your hull. You’re about to surprise the fek out of him, Queen. Walkabout and I are on the lifeboat. There’s another ship out here. We’re going to get away. She’s going to live.” I said it like a prayer. As if, by passionately believing it, I could make it true. The pressure built, a headache with it, like I was being flattened inside my own body.
“Praise Hezu. I’m glad. Please tell her I am glad to have known her. Please tell her goodbye again.”
I told Walkabout, but she just nodded and didn’t bother to wipe the wetness off her face.
“Merryweather, prepare to receive two new passengers. Then we need to get the fek out of here before this hulk blows.”
“I read you, Captain,” the deep voice said.
“Queen, what’s your time table?”
“Six minutes.”
“Recovery, does the Merryweather have room for you? Can you transfer to one of her drives? We won’t have time to fix you before the Queen blows. We’ll have to all get out together.”
“Yes, Captain. She has made an accommodation for me.”
“Can you still talk to me using her communications?”
“I am now, Ma’am.”
We were going to make it. The strain lifted, and I could think clearly again.
I hesitated.
If he really were on our lifeboat, escaping wouldn’t do us any good. Finally, I let Walkabout’s common sense penetrate my own panic. As much as I wanted to believe we were in the clear, I had to find out for sure.
“Recovery, have the Merryweather scan our hull.” I said. “I need to know if there is anything on it. A body, maybe.”
“Captain, your acceleration would make space walk unavis—”
“I need to know, Recovery. Is there anyone clinging to the hull?”
“The Merryweather and I estimate there is insufficient time for a thorough scan. If you do not slow your acceleration and dock with us very soon, we will not be able to achieve minimum safe distance. Both vessels will be destroyed if we linger,” Recovery said.
“We have to, Recovery, or none of this will matter.” I felt the grim truth of my own words hanging in the air. “If there is a body clinging to the ship,” I said, “I will have to abort our approach. I need you to get out of here with the Merryweather and leave us behind.”
“Why?” Recovery asked.
Walkabout stared at me, unable to hear what Recovery was saying through my earpiece.
“What’s happening?” Walkabout asked.
I ignored her, and knew Recovery wouldn’t believe what Walkabout and I had been through—even if we had time to try and explain. “Biological contaminant. I can’t dock with the Merryweather if it’s with us. Eyeball us if you don’t have time for anything else.”
“Yes, Captain. Commencing visual scan.”
I turned the boat slowly over as I guided us toward the Merryweather’s lock. She was a small ship, like Recovery, but she’d be able to accommodate three just fine. We were going to live, unless I broke off in the next few seconds and pulled away. If Recovery saw something I’d tell them to leave us to the explosion. “Recovery? What do you see? I need to know right now.”
“There are no biological contaminants detected, Captain,” Recovery said. “Proceed with docking maneuvers. We must leave in two minutes.”
I let out the breath I was holding.
“Kira?” Walkabout asked.
“We’re clean.” I smiled at her and engaged the auto-docking program. The boat connected and the seal pressurized. I felt us begin to accelerate as the Merryweather fired her own engines and started taking us out of there.
“Hello, Captain. Is it safe?” Merryweather’s captain asked.
“Yes. Just me and one innocent survivor. A kid. Just warning you—we stink like hell.”
He laughed. He had a nice voice.
“Is this really happening?” Walkabout’s eyes were wide as we entered the air lock together.
“Yes.” I smiled at her. “We’re getting out of here.” I activated the lock. It slid open. The captain of the Merryweather looked through the window at us and I heard the hiss of the decontamination jets as they washed over us. I waved with my good arm. The lock opened. Merryweather’s captain had his gun out, but he smiled nervously and stepped back. Balding, with a bit of a belly, but he had a nice face. He was in a plaid robe and a pair of slippers. Pretty much what I usually wore.
“Thanks, Captain,” I said. “Shall we?” I turned and realized Walkabout had stepped back into the lifeboat.
“Something’s wrong.” Walkabout stood still, holding onto a handful of useless wires in the lifeboat’s cockpit.
Something swollen and frozen thunked against the cockpit window behind Walkabout.
It was a human hand.
“Recovery!” I shouted.
“I am programmed to preserve human life, Captain, even against orders. Your fear of corpses is illogical. You must—” Recovery interrupted herself. “—insufficient resources.”
“Recovery?”
“Insufficient resources.”
Then Walkabout swayed in place. “Something’s pressing on me . . . .” Her words trailed off and her mouth gaped open. The demon was trying for her. Even through the compreglass, he was trying for her.
“No! No, no, no.” I lunged back inside the lifeboat but tripped and landed on my knees. I grabbed her and hugged her. “Fight him, Walkabout. You fight.”
She trembled in my arms, shaking like a bad engine. Her mouth moved, wordless.
“Kira? What’s going on?” Merryweather’s captain shouted above the sound of
the decontamination jets. I ignored him.
“You fight.” I watched her eyes. She was losing. The Hand was taking over. I felt her move her arms and I looked down.
She held up a small black box. I looked into her eyes and saw her determination. She was going to do it.
“Fek no. Oh fek.” I dragged her into the Merryweather through the sanitizing mist, bumping into her captain, who backed out of our way. “Close the lock!” I kept going, past him, past the rim of the outer lock, as deep into the Merryweather as I could go, and grabbed onto a rail. If I could get Walkabout away from him she would beat him. I knew she would. I wouldn’t let her fail.
“Walkabout.”
She didn’t answer.
“Elizabet, please!”
Her mouth moved silently. I leaned close to make out
her words.
“Everyone’s dead,” she whispered with her last breath. And I watched the Hand beat her, and the light go out of her eyes.
The box slipped from her lifeless fingers, and they spasmed a second too late to catch it. It bounced once on the deck, then detonated the explosives rigged all over the lifeboat’s exterior.
Flames blew passed me and I slammed into the deck. My EVA squealed alarms and my useless hand lost hold of Walkabout. Then, just as suddenly as I was blown forward, I was sucked backward. As I scrambled to grab something, anything, my limbs skidded across the deck. Then I caught hold of the edge of a bolted-down cabinet. The docking compartment of the Merryweather emptied of air, sucking out the hole blown in the lock. Alarms sounded and the warning lights flashed. The force of it bowed my head toward my feet. I had a clear view of a small body in a white juvenile suit tumbling away into space, moving its arms and legs, the Hand trying one last time to save itself inside Walkabout. A plaid body tumbled not too far away from it—I had never even learned his name. There were more body parts—legs, an arm, wearing the burnt remains of a colonizer uniform. The shattered remains of the lifeboat shot backward, tumbling, falling toward the Queen. The vector of the explosion had blown the Merryweather away from the colonizer. She shrank, and I saw Recovery’s shell spinning off in another direction.
Then the Queen exploded.
Walkabout’s white form disappeared against the brightness of the explosion. My faceplate darkened to automatically protect me from the light, but it seared into my eyes, the new sun dawning. The Merryweather’s fire control protection kicked in, and the bulkhead doors came crashing shut, sealing me off from the ruined docking compartment and the expanding Queen. The Merryweather’s engines fired—she was trying to save me.
Then the shockwave hit her, and I banged all around inside as the ship rode the wave, tumbling over and over. It was an endless nightmare of rolling. A minute became more, and I lost track in the senseless spinning. My brains scrambled inside my head. I think I passed out.
Finally, the Merryweather stilled and righted herself with maneuvering thrusters. There was no sound. I lay blinking for a long time. There wasn’t a part of my body that didn’t hurt.
The first question on my mind, right after figuring out if I were really alive, was if I were really alone. Was there a way for the Hand to reach me through the black void? There was only one thing I could think of to protect myself from him. It had worked before.
“Recovery.”
“Yes, Captain.”
“Report.”
“The Queen has been destroyed. The Merryweather has rudimentary propulsion. She is sorrowing for her captain; she was with him a long time.”
“Tell her I’m sorry.”
“Captain, protocol states we should—”
“Shut up.” I wanted to rage at her. I wanted to scream that it was her fault Walkabout was dead, and that she’d nearly killed us all with her damned superior AI brains. But it wouldn’t do any good. She wouldn’t understand, and it wasn’t really true anyway. Instead I lay there and cried.
“I’m so sorry, Captain.” Recovery said after endless minutes of no sound but my own echoing sobs. The sentiment almost sounded real.
“I need you to play something for me, and you need to keep playing it, you hear me? Also, you and Merryweather need to use every sensor you have to comb the outside of this ship. I don’t care if it’s a corpse or a hunk of metal—anything that doesn’t belong to you, you report.”
They did. There were no bodies. Only mine. Recovery obliged me and played what I asked. I also instructed them to destroy the ship if they detected any hacking. Some other searcher would come and find us. I hoped whoever that was found us before they found the Hand, wherever it was now, so I could give warning. The modeling program the AIs created predicted a ninety-nine point six percent chance that that the body of Walkabout, the Merryweather’s Captain, and the corpse clinging to the lifeboat had been pulled into the gravity well of the small star created after the Queen exploded. In theory, we were safe. But I’d been safe before. Or thought I was. I hadn’t listened to Walkabout, and she’d been right. She’d been right the whole time, about everything.
As I was in the medical bay administering the anesthetic to myself, I told my story to the AIs and had them record it for posterity. They promised to transmit it and a complete record of the whole incident toward the nearest relay station.
“Everyone’s dead—” a high, child’s voice continued to cycle from Merryweather’s speakers like a protective talisman. I couldn’t trust the small ship AIs to understand the meaning of sacrifice for the greater good, so I hoped the voice was right and everyone and everything that had been aboard the Queen really was dead. That thought brought me comfort as I thrust both wrists under the laser saw and amputated my hands. Walkabout’s voice echoed over the sound of searing flesh, a small defiant human noise against the vast darkness outside.
The Corners Have Arms
Jeremy Hepler
Sophie flicked her cigarette butt out the car window and checked her cell phone. It was 2AM. Fifteen minutes since her last text. Time for another.
WHERE R MY BABIES???
She didn’t expect a reply.
Carlos hadn’t answered his cell or replied to her texts in twenty-four hours. Motherfucker. She never should’ve allowed him to take the twins to the valley. Never. No matter how excited they were to visit that farm house again. No matter how much they begged and gave her the sad eyes. No matter how many times Carlos assured her everything would be fine, that they’d call every day. She should’ve never given in. She knew better.
In the months before the divorce, when the fights had become verbally vicious and occasionally physical, Carlos had threatened to sneak the twins across the border and hide them from her. Raise them the right way. Far away from her worthless ass. But Judge Wharton either didn’t believe her or didn’t care when she’d told him about the threats. He’d ordered that Carlos get the twins every other weekend during the school year, and two weeks of the summer.
His two weeks were up at noon yesterday. And he hadn’t brought the girls home as promised.
Sophie blotted her swollen eyes with the bottom of her T-shirt, lit another cigarette, and took a lengthy puff. Remembering. Regretting.
The last time she’d talked to one of the girls was Thursday evening, the night before they were supposed to come home.
Nine-year-old Cecilia had acted odd on the phone that night. She had been uncharacteristically bland and short with her greeting, and when Sophie asked what she and Monica were up to, how their day was going, she’d stayed quiet for a long moment, whispered something to someone else, and then said, “I can’t talk right now, Mom.” And hung up.
Sophie called right back, and it took Carlos nearly twenty rings to answer. Of course, he blamed her for Cecilia’s behavior. She let the girls stay up as late as they wanted, wear what they wanted, eat in front of the TV, talk back. Worse, she let them watch those violent horror movies, and read zombie comics and Harry Potter books. If they were acting rude or strange, it was entirely her fault.
Sophie sq
ueezed the steering wheel hard, gritted her teeth, the cords in her neck tightening. Fucking Carlos. To him, everything was her fault. The girls’ troubles focusing at school. Their lack of manners and friends. The divorce. His high blood pressure, sleep problems, impotency. Everything.
She released a clutched breath and glanced at the picture of Cecilia and Monica on her cell phone. They were dressed as witches, their laughing faces pressed together. She took a drag and shook her head, disgusted at herself for not demanding Carlos put Cecilia back on the phone that night.
Cecilia had never acted like that before. She usually loved gabbing with Mom, enthusiastically explaining her day’s events as though they affected the entire world. And she’d never hung up without saying, “Loves, hugs, and kisses.” Neither of the girls had.
“She was reaching out to me,” Sophie blurted out. “And what did I do?” She tapped her chest hard enough to make a thud, then glanced at herself in the rearview mirror. Her eyes brimming with tears. “What did I do? Her Mom. I didn’t do shit. Not a damn thing.”
She pushed down harder on the gas pedal, brought the speed of the Toyota Corolla, she’d been awarded in the divorce settlement, up to ninety. “I’m coming, baby,” she said with motherly conviction. “And I’ll fucking kill him if he’s done anything to you. I swear to God I will.”
* * *
Normally the drive from Flat Rock to the valley took nine hours, but Sophie made it in less than eight. She turned on FM 32 as the sun was rising in a puddle of gold and pink.
When the giant house and long rows of lemon and avocado trees bracketing it came into view, she saw Carlos’ cherry red Yukon parked in the long curved driveway, and the tension that had been pressing down on her chest since yesterday afternoon lessened its burden. But only slightly. Because she didn’t see Eloy’s car anywhere.
Eloy, Carlos’s twin brother, was supposed to stay at the house the entire two weeks the girls were there. He’d been there two days ago. Playing Checkers with Monica according to Carlos.