by Gwynn White
“I began searching the moment she mentioned it,” ILO said, “but it’s a large station.”
And radar was short range. “Can you hack into Heliac Nine and use their imagery system?”
ILO paused. “I can try.”
“Dottie’s doing it, hacking in. Can you piggyback in on her?”
“She tried, but hasn’t been able to get in yet.”
“We’re running out of time, ILO.”
“Yes.”
Keva studied Setta’s pod and located what looked like a control panel to the right. “Where are the others?”
“Working their way to you.”
“No. You tell Hale to go after that other ship.” A large, red button encased in glass dominated the panel. What happened if she pressed it and everything went wrong?
Setta nodded in her pod and began punching the plasteel cover.
“I have informed him. He is not happy, but he is returning to the ship and sending Domino to you.”
“Don’t. Tell her to get out.
“He’s not going to like that. He cares quite deeply for you.”
“I know.” Keva breathed, keeping her eyes locked on her podsister’s. “ILO, how am I going to save them?”
“You won’t succeed on your own.”
She needed to get everyone off the station. “Are the charges set?”
“Hale hasn’t yet begun the countdown.”
“Dottie didn’t succeed? Is she headed to you?”
“No, I’m here,” Dottie said at the door. Her eyes widened as she took in the room. “And I brought help.”
A man walked in behind her.
The man from the bed. The one with the modded eyes and metal limbs. “ARO?” Keva couldn’t believe what she saw. He’d played her. He’d asked her to bring the comm disc so he could download himself into a living person. Was this part of Poe’s plan or ARO’s? She couldn’t distinguish between the two anymore.
“Yes.” The man’s voice cracked minutely and his movements jerked as if he wasn’t quite in control. His eyes were dim and his skin had visibly grown over the connections to his metal parts.
“And the man?”
“Vic Vargo was a very bad man, Keva,” ARO said bluntly. “But he is safe inside, living a life he had thought was lost long ago. He is… quite content.”
She didn’t believe that. Not really. “And the body?”
“ARO is healing the body with nanites the comm chip injected into his blood stream.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Do you need to understand right now?” Dottie asked. “Or should we move?”
The woman had a point. “How do we get them out?”
Dottie stepped up to the control panel and studied the tubes. “It’s not that complicated.” She looked around the room at the pods that stretched on for as far as the eye could see. “How many of you are there?”
Keva couldn’t count all the pods that quickly. She couldn’t see them and math had never been her strength. “We started with two hundred.”
Dottie shook her head and rubbed her nose.
“Keva,” Poe’s voice said over the intercom. “Since you wouldn’t set the detonation on the bombs you installed, I did. You have ten minutes. Work quickly, whatever you decide.”
“Was that—” Dottie stared at Keva, dumbfounded. “Was that High Councilwoman Poe?”
Keva nodded. “I learned a lot today.”
Dottie stared out across the room. “I would be impossible to save everyone before the bombs detonate.”
“Can we reset the charges?” Keva needed more time.
“No.” Dottie gave Keva a long hard look. “Batch D-65 is more important. We have to destroy it and all the research so they cannot recreate it.”
Keva knew Dottie was right, but it didn’t feel right.
These were her brothers and sisters.
Sparrow joined them, looking around. “What are we going to do?” she demanded. “Stand around and gab all damned day? The clock is ticking. Can get we get them out?”
Setta nodded vigorously, pointing to something on the other side of the control panel.
Dottie opened the case on the red button.
Keva searched for what Setta might be pointing at. “Dottie, wait.” Just under the lip of the tube was a green lever. Keva glanced at Setta.
She nodded vigorously, her hair billowing and hiding her face.
Keva pulled the lever.
The green water drained from the bottom of the pod.
Setta set her feet on the floor as the liquid continued to drain away. She pointed at Dottie and gestured to the control panel.
With her eyebrows raised, Dottie pushed the button.
The pod opened with a hiss and a pop.
Setta coughed and choked as she pulled out the ventilator and stumbled forward.
ARO caught her.
Setta grimaced at his metal arm, a sort of slime dripping off her body. “Not all of us can survive on the outside, we’ve been modded,” she said, her voice stiff as though it hadn’t been used in a long time.
“Do you know who can and who can’t?” Keva asked.
“Those in green podtanks should be able to.” Setta glanced at the pod behind and to the right of hers. “Any other color was a different experiment grouping.”
What the hell was going on here?
Dottie moved to the next one and pulled the lever before moving to the control panel. “We save as many as we can for a few minutes, but then we have to leave.”
“How are we going to get them to the ship?” Sparrow asked, opening the next pod over and catching another of Keva’s siblings.
ARO eased Setta to the floor and walked to the large hangar-style doors, propping first one half and then the next open.
His shuttle flew in and landed softly, the door open.
ARO glared at Keva. “Do you still think you cannot trust me?”
No. She didn’t, but what choice did they have?
They spent the next several minutes opening as many pods with green liquid as they could.
Several died soon after taking their first breaths.
Most could pull themselves to the shuttle, leaving a stretched-out line of slime in their wake.
“How large will the blast radius be?” Keva asked, trying to calculate how much time they had, and how much more she could buy to save the rest of her pod.
“Too large for us to avoid,” Dottie said.
Roro fell into her arms. He gulped in a lungful of air and smiled up at her. “Missed you, Keva.”
She’d missed him, too. Roro had taken her under his wing in weaponry and taught her everything he had known.
“We won’t be able to get out of here if we stay any longer.” ARO helped the man he’d just released toward the shuttle. “Come on. We need to leave.”
Keva didn’t like it. There were still dozens of pods left. She couldn’t just leave them.
Roro tugged on her arm, pulling himself up. “Sounds like you’re talking about a bomb?”
“And we don’t want to be around when the agent is dispersed,” Dottie reminded them. “We might survive the blast, but those of us who weren’t grown in a lab won’t survive the agent. We have to go now.”
Keva nodded.
Someone pounded on the pod beside her.
Yling.
Keva’s entire world stopped.
“Let’s go,” Roro said.
Keva pulled away from him and pushed him toward the shuttle. “You guys go.”
“The bombs are about to go off,” Roro said.
“It’s Yling.”
Roro clamped his mouth shut and turned, hobbling, naked and slimy toward the shuttle.
ARO paused at the shuttle door. “We’re getting outside of the station. If you’re staying, find a place to hide. Plug all ventilation and air circulation. If we can find a way back to you, we will.”
Otherwise, she and her twin were dead.
Sparrow handed her charge to R
oro in the shuttle and walked toward Keva.
“What are you doing?” Keva demanded as the shuttle took off.
Sparrow shrugged.
Keva released the lever.
Sparrow waited and then pushed the red button.
When the pod released, Yling fell forward, the ventilator still on her face.
Crap. She wasn’t risking her life just so Yling could die. She slapped Yling’s face.
Her dark eyes blinked open, her chest rising and falling in mechanical rhythm.
Sparrow shook her head, meeting Keva’s gaze.
Keva couldn’t be the one to take out the ventilator if it ended up killing her podtwin.
With a shrug, Sparrow removed the ventilator.
Yling took in a shallow breath, and then another and another.
Keva released a relieved breath of her own. What was she doing? She was insane. A bomb carrying a DNA altering agent was about to go off just a few rooms over and she was trying to save someone from a pod. A pod, which would probably have kept her safe—
Keva met Sparrow’s gaze as the idea hit her.
Sparrow’s eyes widened and she shook her head. “That’s a bad idea.”
“Do you have a better one?”
Holding Yling up, she shoved her sister back into the pod they’d just freed her from.
It was a tight fit for the three of them crammed in the small pod, but they closed the door.
It clicked behind them.
“Oh, great,” Sparrow said, her head above Keva and Yling’s. “I’m going to die in the same kind of pod I escaped from.”
“You’re the one who came back.” Keva worked her sleeve off her right arm. It was the only one she could move in the confined space. “Shove this inside the ventilator, see if we can’t keep some of the DNA agents out.”
“And when we need to escape? What then?”
She hadn’t thought that far ahead. As soon as she’d seen Yling, she hadn’t thought at all.
Yling pressed her cheek into Keva’s shoulder. “You came back for me.”
“I didn’t know you were here.”
“What they did…”
“Save the oxygen,” Sparrow said softly. “We don’t know how long—”
A loud explosion penetrated the barriers of the plasteel glass of the pod.
The floor rumbled.
A second explosion rippled past the first.
A fissure opened in the floor that led from the door toward their pod.
Keva didn’t know what they would do if the pod broke open.
With the next explosion, the crack in the floor extended toward the base of the pod.
The pod in front of them fell forward.
The next explosion sent their pod falling.
The door popped open, the seal releasing.
A familiar orange dust filtered inside.
Keva’s eyes widened. She reached for the door but grasped to find only air.
The next explosion toppled another pod onto theirs.
The plasteel cover cracked.
More orange dust rained in.
They were so spaced. The DNA altering bio-agent was inside the pod. They were breathing it in.
Sparrow fell through the now mostly open door and staggered to her feet, orange dust settling on her shoulders and in her hair.
Keva dragged Yling out of the pod and held her close, waiting for the pain to come, waiting for death.
32
The explosions stopped.
And Keva felt no pain. None of them began convulsing the way the people of Red Sky had done before they died.
Running toward the blasts wasn’t a great idea, even though that was the quickest way to the docks.
But maybe they didn’t need to get back to where their ship waited. A station this size would have other docks and other ships. She just had to find them. All they needed was one ship. Keva took Yling by the arms and pulled her to her feet. “Can you walk?”
Yling nodded, but her legs weren’t steady and she leaned heavily on Keva.
So, no.
Sparrow took Yling’s other arm and together, they ran in the opposite direction of the bombs.
“What happened?” Yling asked.
“Bio-weapon,” Keva answered curtly, leading them toward a door she just glimpsed through the maze of pods.
The others were awake, flailing in their pods, trying to get her attention, vying to be freed but there was no time, not unless they all wanted to get blown to the Black. She had to save herself and her podtwin.
Her brothers and sisters and she ignored them all.
Yling tripped over a cable.
Keva caught her and resettled her slippery weight. Staying to save Yling had been a bad idea. Especially since the rest of her pod had survived. They were safe.
Or at least they appeared to be safe. Keva didn’t know for sure. The air being pumped directly into their lungs could be infected.
But Keva, Yling, and Sparrow weren’t showing any signs of being affected by the agent, so maybe their pod was immune?
But Sparrow wasn’t part of Keva’s pod. She was part of someone else’s experiments, and she couldn’t believe that all bioengineering projects came from one place.
But what if Sparrow and Keva had more in common than they seemed?
Sparrow paused and grabbed something off the wall next to the door. She pulled away from Yling and slipped the other woman’s arm into a long coat.
“Thank you,” Yling said, putting the coat on and closing it up.
Sparrow met Keva’s gaze. “Okay. You’re not going to say it, so I will. Why aren’t we affected?”
Keva jutted her jaw to the side as she waited for her twin to finish with the coat. “Poe was the lead scientist of our pod.” She gestured at Yling and the other occupied pods. “She was also the engineer behind Batch D-65.”
“She created the agent.”
“The what?” Yling asked.
Keva pinched some orange dust off Sparrow. “This. It alters DNA, reprograms it.”
Yling’s expression fell. “She’s been testing something new on several humans using our blood.”
Keva frowned. “Our blood?”
Yling nodded.
Sparrow held up her hand. “I get that she’s your scientist and she’s the mastermind behind Batch D-65, but what about me? I’m not a part of your pod.”
Keva opened the door. “I don’t have all the answers, Sparrow. We need to find a way off this station.”
“There is no way off unless she lets you leave,” Yling said quietly, stumbling after Keva.
That wasn’t helpful. There had to be a way. “ILO, did Hale and Dottie get away?”
“They did,” ILO said over Keva’s comm unit. “And Hale believes he’s found the other ship.”
“How far away are they?”
“Another hour at least. It’s on the other side of the station.”
That was the size of a moon.
The next room was small and filled with three large cages. In each rested a person.
But as soon as the door slammed shut behind Sparrow all three lurched awake.
The woman to the right sat up straight on her cot, her legs straight in front of her, her hair a knotted mess. Her teeth grew, elongating as they watched, her pale eyes grayed over.
The man on their left grabbed the bars and screamed soundlessly, pain etched in his face. He reached to shake the bars, but instead of moving anything, or even rattling them his hands passed right through them.
The man directly in front of them crouched low, his hands wrapped around his head as he rocked from side to side.
Sparrow gestured with her chin in a direction that would take them between the man clutching his head and the woman with the growing teeth.
Keva nodded and signaled for her to take the lead.
After taking three steps, Sparrow stumbled as if she’d hit a wall, one hand raised.
Yling stumbled and collapsed to the gro
und, green ooze from the pod pooling around her hair on the ground.
Keva rushed to Yling’s side, looking all around to see what could be wrong. Was it the agent finally affecting them? Had something else been introduced to the environment? Were they in physical dang—
Fear slammed into her like a speeding atmoshuttle.
Keva pressed her fist into the floor as her mind raced. They weren’t going to make it out of there. She was going to be captured. Yling would end up dead. She would fail again.
Or maybe Poe would have her kill her own twin.
A scream rose in her throat and she wanted to fight or claw or kill or die.
She was a horrible person, a follower. She couldn’t stand up and fight. She fought only after someone told her to, not before. She obeyed orders. That’s what she did and those orders had already led her to do something horrible. What would be next?
Maybe she’d be ordered to drop a bomb on a settlement like Red Sky. Maybe she’d have to destroy an entire station, or compromise the fusion reactor on Kalamatra. And she would. What kind of person was she? She couldn’t even stand up for what she believed? She believed that people deserved to be saved, that they deserved to live. Right? She wanted to be someone who fought for the little person, the forgotten. But she wasn’t a person at all.
She was a rule follower, not a rule breaker.
Keva, ILO beat through the comm chip in her arm. Fight this. This isn’t you.
“What is this?” Keva panted the words, her mind black and heavy. She pressed her fingers into the metal floor, feeling the sharpness. Something bit into her knuckle, something sharp.
I don’t know, ILO said. But you’re sending me messages, or someone is.
What am I saying?
ILO paused. It says, ‘Kill me.’
Kill me? That…Keva focused on the woman in the cell beside them. They were so close that if the woman stood up and walked toward them, she’d be able to touch them. But instead, she sat on the cot, her teeth now extended almost to her breasts.
The man behind them was no longer in his cell.
And the man crouching beside them stared hard. When his gaze met hers, Keva felt her head want to explode.
She pulled herself back, trying to get away from him.
She crawled nearly two meters before the pain and overwhelming fear ceased.
Was he doing that? Was he affecting them with his mind?