by Gwynn White
And it feels oddly empty as I poke around.
My brows furrow together as I work.
“What’s wrong?” PC asks, noticing my concentration.
“Just a different system than I’m used to,” I say. “Nothing to worry about.” Then, as if to reinforce my statement, I find the folder name that I’m looking for.
/patents/infinity
Exactly what the brief told me to look for. The file itself is encrypted and behind so many firewalls that I have to run a few hacking programs to even get permissions to copy it. I won’t be able to access them, but I don’t need to, unless I want to figure out what the hell was so important that Chairman Maas is willing to pay us a fortune and risk our lives. Not that he cares what happens to us, but this must be a very important piece of information.
Curiosity piques my interest. Then again…
I grimace as the door shakes, even harder this time. The door won’t hold much longer. I quickly move the files onto my internal storage system, packing it tightly and safely, and then I unplug.
“Got it,” I call out to PC and Daisy as I shove my glove back on. “Let’s get the fuck out of here. Taka, how’s that door coming?”
“Ready when you are,” he says as the door opens.
“All right, let’s move!” I say, grabbing my zapper and getting to my feet.
Daisy rushes the other door while PC slowly walks backward, his eyes still on the door. It shudders again, and I know that one more good ram, and it will be broken.
I touch him lightly on the shoulder, seemingly breaking him out of his trance. “Run,” I say.
We both turn and sprint towards the far end of the room, thirty yards away. Taka is already on the other side, working on that panel to close the door behind us. I feel the door behind us burst open, but I don’t take the chance to see if the creature is after us.
I just keep running.
It isn’t until PC and I are on the other side that we turn around to fire shots back at the creature. I scream in anger, shooting at the thing.
It’s so damn close, reaching out towards us.
The door shuts, sealing it in the bridge.
“Dammit!” PC curses. “Dammit, dammit, dammit!”
“What now?” Daisy asks.
I give her a brave look. “We run to the dock as fast as we can.”
She doesn’t need to be told twice. For a big woman, she moves surprisingly quick, her shorter legs pumping her massive body along, running faster than I thought possible. Taka follows her, then PC. I take up the rear, shouting directions as we move.
Funny how they didn’t know much about the layout of the Nova before, but now that our lives depend on it, they’re remembering it a lot easier. In many cases, they don’t need my directions. I still say them though, since a wrong turn could be our last.
I just keep thinking that if that thing is sentient, if it knows how we’re trying to leave, it could try to intercept us at the dock…
Don’t think about it.
We round a corner, and, like a dream, the dock is there, still in the same state. No creatures here, just the wire and the harpoon that Daisy shot out. I make a mental note to disconnect ourselves as soon as possible in case the creature gets any ideas.
“Orion, we’re coming back onto the Pícara. Prepare the airlock for us,” I command as I help usher Daisy onto the wire.
“Is it safe?” he asks calmly. “I’m detecting a space-born—”
“Fuck you,” PC snarls, not calm himself. “You need to let us get off this hunk of space junk.”
“Clementine?” Orion asks.
“It’s safe,” I say. “We just need to hurry. If the torpedoes on the Pícara are working, I suggest we send one to the Nova to give it a push towards that blackhole though.”
I can only imagine that nightmarish thing swimming its way towards our ship and getting attached to it.
“I will see if that can be accomplished,” Orion says. “But I am concerned.”
“Do you think that thing is what caused the hull and the dock to be breached?” Louis asks.
“I don’t know,” I say as I help Taka grab the wires and propel himself towards our ship. “Those holes seem to be a bit too big, even for that.”
Louis pauses. “So maybe they were firing at the Nova because of that creature?”
I hadn’t thought of that, and I exchange an uneasy glance with PC. “Possibly?” I admit. “I just want to get out of here.”
“Did you get the loot?” Louis asks.
“Yeah.” I pat my arm for good measure. “It’s all there. So, regardless, we’ll get the money.”
“It’ll be enough to buy holo-therapy,” PC mutters as he fires his thrusters to pull himself back to the Pícara.
That just leaves me.
“FYI, I’m going to cut the wire, guys,” I say, turning off my Grav-Boots again and reaching for the wire.
“Good,” Daisy mutters. “Cut that bitch.”
As soon as my fingers touch the wire, I see the whole thing quiver, announcing the arrival of something big. I look behind me to see the eight-legged monstrosity arrive at the docks.
Shit, shit, shit, shit, I chant as I fire my own thrusters, a little bit too hard. I nearly lose my grip on the wire, but I’m able to hold on as I right my course. Luckily, I have a pair of wire cutters attached to my utility belt and I pull them out and pick a place far behind me so I can cut our tie to the Nova.
I look at the creature again. It’s standing at the edge of the dock, as if debating whether or not to jump and join us on the wire towards the Pícara.
That seals the deal for me. I squeeze the cutters, and immediately feel the slack in the wire as it loses one end. That doesn’t make our trek to the Pícara any easier, though, as instead of an easy zipline to and from, we now really have to pull ourselves towards it, using our thrusters to aim us in the general direction.
And, just because I’m a masochist like that, I turn my head and see the blackhole, ever so much closer than before. I gulp, feeling impossibly small compared to it, and use that as an excuse to keep us going. I can’t quit now. I have to keep moving.
“Clem, how are you doing back there?” PC asks.
“Fine,” I say, averting my eyes from the horrible sucking sensation of the blackhole. “Glad to be off the Nova.”
“You and me both,” he mutters, and I snicker despite myself.
There’s something wonderful about cheating death and getting away from something so terrifying as that creature. And with that 300 million Space Yen that Syn-Tech is going to give us, I don’t want to do another run for a long time.
I look back at the Nova and see the creature is still there, farther away than before. It’s just sitting there, like it’s watching us. Like it knows that it can’t follow us. Hopefully, it will stay that way.
I breathe a sigh of relief as I continue pulling myself along. Now, all I have to do is get to a console and get the fuck out of here.
The 300-meter trek to the Pícara is long and hard, especially with adrenaline running through me like a quadruple shot of caffeine. I keep replaying everything in my head, wondering which choices we could have made to have a different ending.
Don’t worry about it, Clem. No one died. You got the information. Just get to Alpha, give Maas the info, and collect. Happily ever after.
Right.
With my right hand, I reach out to grab the wire. Only my fingers start to squirm, moving more in and more erratic patterns. What the fuck? I stop and look at it, like it’s no longer an extension of myself, like it’s something else entirely.
“Clem?” PC asks, looking back at me.
“I…” My breathing becomes labored as I put all my mental focus into trying to take back control of my hand. Maybe I lost connection with it and it’s reacting to other stimuli.
Or—and this is even more likely—I downlooted a virus to myself, because it’s that exact hand that I use to connect to the computer. It
’s where I keep my data; it’s where the packet is stored.
Fuck.
I grind my teeth and focus even harder on maintaining control. My fingers move of their own accord, reminding me of space maggots. I move my arm and send a signal to those fingers to grasp the wire.
And my hand reaches one way and then shoots itself across my body,with such force, I lose my grip with my left hand, and I tumble away from the wire and the Pícara.
Towards the blackhole.
.
12
I scream into my microphone as I tumble away from the safety of the Pícara and the wire. My inner gyroscope is spinning, unable to show me which why to orient, and the G-forces on me are enough to keep my left hand from reaching my thrusters.
“Clem!” Louis shouts. “Clem!”
I can’t stop screaming, terror filling every part of my being. My cyborg side is telling me that my pulse is thready and I’m breathing too fast, but even though I’m getting doses of serotonin, there’s no calming me. Because with no way to right myself and to make it back to the Pícara, I’m going to die.
And it doesn’t help that my hand won’t stop squirming, weaving in weird, erratic patterns that only add to my off-kilter spin.
“Clem, you have to calm down!” Louis says.
“I can’t!”
“Calm down, and you’ll be fine. You have to stop your spin.”
I take too-shallow breaths, and my vision is blacking out. I’m not sure if that’s from hyperventilating or my spin that’s causing the blood flow to go from my head. I have thrusters. I just need to…
A body slams into mine, causing my trajectory to spin in the other direction, albeit slower. I scream at first, thinking that the creature jumped from the Nova and caught me. I’m going to die, I’m going to die.
“Relax, Clem, I’ve got you.”
I’ve never been so happy to hear PC’s voice. I sob, clutching at him with my left arm. The other arm is still acting up.
“Relax,” he says. “And try to get that arm under control.” He reaches down and hits his thrusters. I immediately feel the change in direction as he aims us back towards the Pícara. Back towards safety.
“Thank you,” I whisper.
“Don’t mention it,” he says. “This is what we do. We’re family.”
We’re family. I close my eyes, grateful that he’s able to help when I couldn’t.
The dock to the Pícara is open, and PC initially overshoots, then corrects us, and propels us into the inside of the ship, where Taka and Daisy are waiting for us.
“We’re in!” he yells as soon as we’re inside.
The airlock shuts down, and the artificial gravity is turned on. We both hit the floor, hard, with a groan. I immediately let go of PC and roll on my back, groaning as my arm keeps twitching.
“Hey,” Taka says, as he pulls off his helmet, “let me have a look at that.”
“No, I will.”
We all turn to have a look as Captain Louis enters the airlock, wearing a spacesuit himself. Ridiculously, I wonder why, and then it hits me. He’s afraid of breathing in the same air as us.
He gestures with his head. “You three go to the quarantine showers. We don’t know what that thing is, but if you tracked anything from the Nova onto here, we need to sort it.”
“But—” PC starts.
“Now,” Louis growls. He bends over and drags me to my feet. “Clem, come with me.”
He practically drags me from the airlock to a room just off the dock. It’s a quarantine room all by itself, where we keep anything that looks suspicious during our travels. I remember we kept a reptile here once that PC brought with him, thinking it was a pet. We had to eject it when the thing grew to be the size of a full-grown man. And it was mean as hell.
The room is small and empty as we haven’t picked up anything in a while. There’s a lone table in the center and a pair of chairs. Not our most high-tech room, but it’s hermetically sealed from the rest of the ship.
Does Louis think I’m infected with something?
Louis shuts the door behind us, and I notice that he locks it. And that alone scares me as much as falling into the blackhole.
He seems to pick up on my trepidation. “Let me have a look at your hand,” he says. His expression is grim, but his voice is softer than before.
“Louis—”
“Now, Clem.”
I have to fight with my arm to take off the glove. Seeing my familiar hand move and twitch without me telling it to makes it feel like some sort of alien appendage all its own.
“Do you think you downlooted a virus?” Louis asks.
I blink, taken aback. “I don’t know.”
“Clem.”
“I don’t know,” I say, exasperated. I force my hand onto the table and it still twitches and tries to buck me off. “It randomly just started doing on the way back.”
He gives me a hard look. “Don’t take off your helmet,” he says. “Not until you’ve hit the quarantine showers.”
“Do you think we picked up something?” I ask.
He doesn’t answer.
“Louis?”
“Look, all we know is that Orion picked up something on the sensors when that beast appeared.”
“What was it?” A pathogen? A space-born virus? Is that why it’s headed toward a blackhole?
He shakes his head. “Something…weird. Something different. We don’t know. And with your hand acting this way, we don’t want to take any chances. So, we’re going to remove your hand here and leave it in quarantine. Hell, even just give it to Maas. Make him deal with it.”
I chew on my bottom lip, and he catches my hesitation. “You can use your old arm, Clem.”
The one I changed when I was fourteen years old. It was made out of a more brittle metal and rusted in a few places. But I suppose that’s better than going without my arm for the foreseeable future.
I nod. “All right.” I’m not happy about it, but it does make sense.
Louis sits down at the chair opposite me and pulls out his toolkit. “You know, when that thing first appeared,” he says softly, “I thought we had lost you.”
“Me too,” I whisper. I keep replaying the scenes in my mind—and it doesn’t help that my retina videoed the entire thing. I can access it at any time and I just keep replaying it over and over again. It’s absolutely crazy what happened. How an arachni-lift could suddenly just go…psychotic like that.
“Have you ever seen anything like that before?” I ask.
Louis shakes his head. “Never. But that doesn’t mean anything,” he adds quickly. “The galaxy is a big place, and maybe it was just a matter of time something like this happened.”
“But what is this?”
“I don’t know. An experiment gone very, very wrong? Aliens? I don’t know.” He starts prodding at my metal arm, and the entire thing jumps in response. I grunt, holding it down. It’s hard to keep my grip on it, because it’s fighting me.
“We shouldn’t have gone,” I say somberly, averting my eyes from Louis. “We should have called it off at the asteroid field.”
Louis pauses and sighs. “No, Clem. You went with what you thought was right. You thought you had it under control.”
I give a derisive snort. “And it turns out that we had nothing under control.”
“Welcome to being in charge,” he says grimly. He unlatches a section of my upper arm, and despite the fact that my arm is writhing, I can still feel him working in there to disconnect my arm. “I would have still gone,” he adds quietly.
“You would?”
“Yes. We get half-truths from corporations all the time. It’s a part of their whole policy of telling us crucial information on a need-to-know basis. I would have thought that this was one of those cases.” He chuckles dryly. “Hell, this probably still qualifies as such.”
“Orion wouldn’t have gone,” I admit.
Louis pauses again. “And that’s why he’s an android and y
ou’re a human,” he says. “Androids only work in absolutes, Clem. They assess risk, and if the threshold is too high, it’s in their nature to not proceed. But as humans…we can go with the flow, as they used to say on old Earth.” He nods towards my chest. “You have a human heart. You allow for impossibilities.”
“I feel more machine than human sometimes.”
“We all do,” Louis says. “But you do what’s right for the crew, even though you’re not programmed to do so. And that makes you have more humanity than anyone else. Chairman Maas may not have any cyborg parts—but he’s a cold-hearted machine through and through.” He gives me a rare smile. “Remember that.”
I nod and force the lump in my throat back. “Okay.”
It’s rare that Louis and I have heart-to-hearts like this, and we’ve had two in the past few days. I can’t help but feel a sense of dread, like I won’t have much longer to spend with him. And I have so many questions I need to ask, so many unspoken words.
But that’s not our relationship. So I don’t say anything as I just watch him work. Between me holding down my arm and him severing the connections, we make short work of it. Eventually, my fingers stop moving as power is cut off. Gingerly, almost in disbelief, I lessen the pressure. It stays still.
He grins at me. “At least that’s over with.”
Suddenly, my hand springs to life, turning into its computer hub configuration. We both jump to our feet with surprised shouts as it dangles from my shoulder. That doesn’t stop it from weaving its way towards Louis.
And—absurdly—a sharp edge of my middle finger rips through the fabric of the forearm on Louis’s spacesuit and digs into the flesh underneath.
Louis throws his head back and screams raggedly.
I recoil in horror. “Louis?” I ask. “Louis?”
He doesn’t answer—can’t answer—his scream just continuing on and on, for longer than he should have had breath for. His entire body seizes up, and he doesn’t move, but his breath fogs up the dome of his helmet and I can’t see his face anymore.
Just that incessant screaming.
My arm is still connected to him, and I back up from it, trying to let go of him. Trying to stop him from screaming. It doesn’t seem to want to let go though. I start hitting it, trying to knock it free.