Injection Burn

by Jason M. Hough

  Prumble grunted a laugh.

  Skyler ignored it, went on. “But I’m talking about something deeper than intel. Tania, we need to know what this is truly all about. What are the stakes? She and her kind, the Builders, were forced out of this system ages ago. Why? What’s so important about it that someone’s been holding an entire solar system hostage ever since?”

  Tania raised one hand, nodding now. “I understand. Let me talk to her? We’ve got a rapport going, I think. And besides, I need to review the shutdown procedure.”

  “Don’t forget the wake-up procedure,” Prumble said. “That seems important, too.”

  “Of course,” Tania agreed. Her gaze never left Skyler’s. “Let me try. Okay? I’m not sure why, but I sense she’s more comfortable speaking with me.”

  “All right,” Skyler said. “And while you’re at it, get everything you can from her about this ship. Schematics, manifests, whatever she’ll provide. We’ve been here for weeks and hardly explored any of it. The more we know, the less chance we’ll need to wake her up early to solve some problem.”

  Prumble gave a vigorous nod. “Vanessa and I tried, weeks ago. To get a map, I mean. Most of this place is inaccessible. Chemical storage, infrastructure, crazy Builder techno-whatever. Eve said it was ‘incompatible with human physiology,’ and barred our access.”

  “Well,” Skyler replied, “it’s a good thing she made us this impenetrable armor, isn’t it?”

  Place Unknown

  Date Unknown

  COHERENT THOUGHT, UNCLOUDED by pain, was a rare and wonderful gift.

  He hung, suspended in air by ten thousand wormy tendrils that pulsed and slithered, pumping things into his body, or taking things out.

  The last time he could think clearly, those tendrils had been blue as a summer sky. Right now they were almost black, in total contrast to the white, undefined background. Were those walls a meter away, or an infinite abyss? He had no idea.

  He couldn’t move his muscles, not even his eyes. A new thought formed in his mind that even his own heartbeat had been taken out of his control. All he could do was sense, and what he sensed for time indeterminate was pain.

  How long had it been? An hour? A day? Years? Impossible to tell. The very concept of time had become slippery. No longer just a relentless march into the future, but a malleable thing. A thing that could be toyed with, provided you knew the secrets.

  Or is that just my sanity slipping away? He tried to ponder this, but judgment of one’s own sanity never went well.

  What he needed, Alex Warthen decided, was a bookmark. A flag he could plant. An anchor to drop. Something real and tangible he could use like a seed. Build a scaffold of tangible facts around it.

  But what?

  Himself?

  All he knew of himself was that he was stretched out like a starfish, buoyed by a writhing maze of tubes that wrapped about his limbs like creeping vines, becoming impossibly thin at their tips where they seemed to slide under his skin between the hair follicles.

  What about before, though?

  He’d been on the massive Builder ship, with Grillo. Fighting the damn immunes. Skyler and that protégée of Neil Platz, Tania. Tania, that doctor-scientist from India, a researcher who somewhere along the way learned how to fight, and damn well at that. He’d underestimated her. Underestimated all of them. The battle hadn’t gone well. He…he’d died, hadn’t he? The memory slipped away.

  “Hello, Alex.”

  The voice came like a soft breeze, not even a whisper. A woman’s voice, as soft as silk. Someone he knew? He didn’t think so. Had it even been real? He doubted it. He’d seen a lot of things since he’d come to be here. Relived entire portions of his life in near-perfect fidelity, real in every way except the one that counted: He was only there to observe. No, this voice must be in his head.

  “Alex? Are you still there?” the voice said. An actual whisper now. More defined. He could almost feel the breath on his cheek.

  He tried to reply, but could only think the words for his mouth would not move. Hello?

  “Good,” she said. “Good. I feared I’d gone too far that time.” Her voice came from everywhere. From that endless white beyond the tentacle forest.

  Who…who are you?

  “Unimportant.”

  Where am I? What are you doing to me?

  Instead of answering, he found himself reliving another moment. The worst, and last, moment of his life, now in perfect fidelity. Fighting the intruders inside that room within the Builder ship. His hands around the neck of a woman he’d never met, an immune and therefore an enemy. He squeezed until his knuckles went white and her face turned red. She was beautiful, and she was dying. Half of him wanted to stop, to be merciful. The other half knew what would happen if he disobeyed the fanatic, Grillo. So Warthen ground his teeth and squeezed even more, feeling the blood pounding in his temples, the sweat pouring from his brow.

  Then another pair of hands, huge and powerful, came into his field of view. He’d had time to think, I’ll strangle her before you strangle me, only to realize his assailant, the smuggler Prumble, had no intention of choking him. Those meaty hands grabbed Warthen’s face and neck, fingers clamping down on his cheek, his jaw. One slipped into his eye socket and the pain, though nothing compared with what he’d experienced here in this bizarre void, would have made him scream for mercy if he’d had the chance. But Prumble did not give that chance. He’d twisted, and the last thing Alex Warthen had felt was a brilliant spike of agony somewhere in his neck.

  Then blackness.

  Then…this place. The white void, the chameleonic tubes, and the pain by which all other pain had to be measured.

  Alex forced his mind to clear. Tried to push away the phantom voice. Clearly his mind had finally fallen off that delicate edge that separated sane from insane. He’d have to claw his way back. He found he wanted to.

  “You’re not insane,” the voice said. She sounded so close. He could almost feel her lips tickle the fine hairs on his earlobe. For an instant he thought perhaps he knew her. Something about her voice resonated, as if gently echoing and with each reverberation transformed it to someone he knew. Tania Sharma. That pilot, Skyler. Himself, even. A ripple of anxiety spread through his mind.

  “Why am I doing this?” she said. “I need to understand your kind, but I dare not put the others at risk. They are too important now.”

  What others?

  “The others like you. Those you call immunes.”

  I…I’m immune?

  Silence. Then, “You didn’t know?”

  If Alex Warthen could have closed his eyes and wept, he would have. Through all the pain he had never felt sadness for his predicament. But this, this knowledge could shatter what remained of his brittle mind.

  All this time he’d been immune. Safe from the plague that ravaged Earth beyond the city of Darwin, Australia.

  He could have left. Just strode out toward the aura that protected the city and kept on going. Found himself a quiet place, an island perhaps, and enjoyed an open horizon for the first time in his adult life. Instead he’d spent those wretched years cooped up in Neil Platz’s space stations, trapped between that insufferable old goat and the lunatic Russell Blackfield on the ground. His life had been a constant bureaucratic slog that often felt more like managing spoiled children than handling security along the space elevator. And all the while he’d dreamt of the abandoned planet beyond Darwin, and how much he’d rather be outside, listening to waves lap on an empty beach instead of the constant mechanical whir of air processors.

  “You didn’t know,” she repeated, though not a question this time. He knew then she could hear every thought going through his head. She was inside him. She was him.

  As if in response to that a face appeared at the corner of his vision, just beyond the thin tubes that protruded from under his eyelids. She leaned in and studied him, like a scientist gazing into a petri dish and finding only disappointment.

&n
bsp; “I know this is difficult for you,” she said, her strange voice floating out from an angelic face. Like the odd accent, her features seemed familiar, as if she were the child of someone he knew. No, that wasn’t right. The offspring of everyone he knew. The thought only caused his anxiety to grow.

  Why do you want to understand us? Because your fucking plague didn’t wipe us out completely?

  “Your immunity is something new. Something that could be the key to everything we hope to accomplish. Yet for all my efforts I cannot unravel it. There appears to be no difference between you and the other that would explain it.”

  Anxiety turned to a cold, hard ball of rage. What other?

  She began to move across his limited field of view. A second passed before he realized it was he who moved, rotating to his left. There, perhaps ten meters away in this endless white void, another body lay suspended by the hair-thin tendrils. Jared Larsen, Alex’s second-in-command. He looked awful. His skin, what little Alex could see amid all those tubes, was pale and mottled with bruises. In fact, he looked like a corpse. What have you done to him?

  “Nothing I haven’t done to you. The difference is I keep having to pull the virus back from his body. Yours just…ignores it. Even the mutations I’ve devised. Tell me how this is possible.”

  How the hell should I know?

  She stared at him for some time, no doubt searching his thoughts for any evidence of deception. He waited, giving nothing. If she wanted to rummage about in his head she’d have to work for it.

  “I know you despise me, Alex. Please know that, despite what I have done and what I must do to you and your friend, I hold no ill will toward you. But this must be done. It is too important.”

  Fuck off. Get it over with and let me die.

  “You’ve died several times.”

  Stop reviving me, then.

  “This I cannot do. I need you, and the man Jared. Physically, at any rate. But I want to show you I can be merciful. I have a gift for you.”

  An instant later every needle-sharp lance of agony across his body vanished. He became no more than a mind without a body, floating in an endless pool of nothing.

  Somehow this was worse. The lack of pain made him somehow less than human. He started to think aloud that she should give it back. He needed the pain or he would cease to be.

  But then he felt something else. Not pain. Warmth against his feet. Wind caressing his skin. The white void began to change, and the tubes faded away with it. A horizon began to form. As Alex watched his world became sky above ocean, and himself standing on a beach. Gulls wheeled overhead. The waves lapped on the sand in gentle perfectness. Larger whitecaps farther out crashed with that deep booming sound that was the heartbeat of the world.

  “Alex?”

  He turned at the voice, startled. Ten meters away another man stood. Jared Larsen, dressed in the security uniform Alex had last seen him in. Alex glanced down and saw he wore the same.

  “Where are we?” Jared asked. “Are we dead?”

  “I…,” Alex began. He considered that very carefully. “I’m not sure.”

  —

  For a long time they sat together and watched the waves pummel the shore. Alex found himself scooping up handfuls of golden sand and letting it tumble down between splayed fingers.

  “Did you talk to her?” he asked Jared, after a long silence.

  “Talk to who?”

  Alex lowered his head. Who had she been? Had he dreamt that, or was this the dream? It felt like one. More lucid than any he’d experienced before, but he knew none of it was real. “Never mind for now,” Alex said. “This is no afterlife, okay? This is like a shared sensory chamber. I think we’re still aboard that ship.”

  Jared kept his gaze on the horizon, his face unreadable. He looked haggard, his body gaunt and skin an unhealthy pale hue. Jared had never been what would be considered handsome, but now he looked rather terrifying. “I died, Chief. That immune kicked me so hard I felt my sternum splinter. The bone…I think it punctured my heart, or lung. I felt it happen. Unbearable pain, blood filling my throat, my mouth, nose…” His hand rubbed absently at the center of his chest. “I drowned in my own blood. I’m sure of it. And yet, that was nothing compared with those tubes.”

  “Yeah,” Alex said. “Prumble broke my neck. Didn’t feel that, I think because I died before I could feel it. But then after…”

  Silence stretched as Alex tried to fold up those memories and stuff them in a drawer in some unused corner of his mind. He suspected Jared was doing the same. The younger man had said the voice had not spoken to him. Alex mulled that over, along with the words he himself had heard. They were hazy, already. Slippery like fish out of water. But she’d said something about differences. About pulling back the virus from Jared. So he must not be immune, and Alex was.

  Beside him, Jared shivered, wrapping his arms about himself as if they were in the Arctic. “What are your orders?” the man asked, something new in his voice. Hardness. Resolve. A hint of those things, at least, not to mention the continued respect of rank even here.

  The question surprised him. The idea of rank, of leadership, seemed as distant as that battle, that life. Surely it had ended there, the hierarchy?

  Yet when Alex glanced at the man beside him he saw something unexpected now. That need, a thing so many soldiers possessed, to have orders. A goal, no matter how irrelevant, to focus on.

  “Let’s…,” Alex started, then paused. The woman could read his thoughts. He’d been about to ponder the chances and possible ways of getting out of here, but that would only give away such ideas to her. He tried to clear his mind. “Listen, Jared. I’m pretty sure everything we do is being watched. Even our thoughts. So, we can’t plan, can’t even think about plans. So my orders? Stay sharp, use your instincts. If our chance comes, we take it. Agreed?”

  “Hell, yes.”

  “For now, I guess sitting here isn’t helping anything. Let’s explore the beach.” He stood, and brushed the sand from his hands. It was only a moment later when he realized Jared hadn’t moved. The man was staring up at him, a confused expression on his soldier’s face. Alex squinted at him. “Something wrong?”

  “What beach?” Jared asked. He turned to glance across the landscape.

  “You don’t see the beach?”

  “I see snowy mountains.” Jared scooped up a handful of sand. He held it for a few seconds and then tossed it away, shivering.

  “Maybe not a sensory chamber, after all.” Alex rarely used the entertainment rooms, their ability to fool his brain only good enough to feel eerie rather than convincing. “Okay, what are we sitting on, then?”

  “I was wondering how you could keep picking up the snow like that.”

  “What are we sitting on, Jared? An arctic shore?”

  Jared’s brow wrinkled. “A ridge,” he said, gesturing up and down the beach. Then he pointed toward the water. “The cliff drops off there, down deep into a gorge. Another peak is maybe two hundred meters across the chasm.” He turned and swept his arm toward the impenetrable line of palm trees behind them. “This mountainside continues up. Too sheer to climb, I think.”

  Alex considered this. They may not be seeing the same thing, but the layout at least had similarities.

  “Hmm,” Jared said.

  “What is it?”

  He nodded toward the ocean, for him evidently a gorge that separated their mountain from another. “There’s a door set into the side of the cliff across there.”

  Alex scanned in the direction Jared was looking, but saw nothing but water and sky. “No door in my view. Can you get to it somehow? Open it?”

  The younger man shook his head. “Sorry, Chief. It’s a long climb down and then back up, and no gear. If only I could fly.”

  “Hmm,” Alex said, glancing at his companion. “You can’t fly. But I could swim.”

  “You don’t see the door, though.”

  “So I drag you across. Dead man’s carry.”


  At that Jared tilted his head back and laughed.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “This place is insane. I guess it makes sense our plan is, too. Swim me over there, sure. Why not?” He stood and brushed the sand, or rather snow, from his legs.

  Alex walked down to the waterline and tested it. The temperature was almost unnaturally pleasant. He waved Jared over. “Come to the cliff’s edge, as far as you can.”

  The man complied, walking down to where the frothy water swept over the sand as waves finally petered out and sloshed back out to sea. Jared walked about five meters farther, and though his feet left ripples in the water his movement was strange, as if unimpeded by the liquid. Finally, he slowed and then stopped, knee-deep in the low waves. He leaned over, his movement suddenly very cautious, and peered over the cliff he saw in his world.

  “Right,” Alex said, coming to stand next to him. “I have no idea how this works, so we take it slow.”

  “Agreed.”

  “First a little test,” Alex said. “I want to be sure you won’t drown in the ocean I see.”

  “If I drown it won’t have been the first time. Still, I’m not thrilled about where this is going.”

  “Relax. Just…okay, lie down there at the lip of your cliff for a bit. A minute, I guess, and breathe deep.”

  The man’s brow furrowed. “Why?”

  “You’re knee-deep in water from my perspective. Lying down will have you under it. If you can breathe…” He left the thought unfinished as comprehension dawned on Jared’s face.

  Helpless and, if he was honest with himself, fascinated, he watched as his second-in-command went to his knees and then to all fours. Then Jared lowered himself below the surface and lay under the water. A minute passed. Alex could see the other man’s head moving slowly from side to side as he evidently scanned the bottom of the gorge he saw. No bubbles drifted up from his mouth or nose. Finally Jared pushed himself up and stood. His hair, skin, clothing—all of it was totally dry. “I guess it worked?”