Injection Burn

by Jason M. Hough

  An oddly long pause followed. “Unfortunate. I only now have registered their…escape. This complicates matters.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question.”

  Another pause. “It was necessary to study the human form more closely, both an immune and a nonimmune. So I k-kept them after the battle. Revived them, and studied them.”

  Images filled Tania’s mind. Grotesque experiments and dissections. The pair of them pushed to the limits of pain tolerance, killed, then revived all over again for another spate of tests. Disgust roiled in her, fair or not. She battled it back, a thousand other questions on her mind, but only one that she felt she had time to ask. “How many did you hide?”

  “Two.”

  “And one of them is an immune?” Tania racked her mind to think who else might have been kept. Skadz and Ana, both immune, both refused to come along on this journey. Had she really…? Could she?

  “Alex Warthen.”

  Relief and confusion coursed through her. Alex, immune? But of course how would anyone have known? He’d been in space, near the protective elevator, for the entirety of the subhuman plague. “Alex. And what…what did you learn?”

  “I learned,” Eve said, “to use a-a-a cliché from your world, that immunes see things differently.”

  Tania slid to a stop, her path taking her to an iris door near the end of the long spiral hall, a door that led in toward the center of the ship. “What does that mean? Immunes aren’t human?”

  “They are very much human,” the ship replied. “It is a subtle difference, this, but no less important. Immunes simply have a m-more evolved way of analyzing the information their brains receive, which seems to subvert the attack vector used by the virus. I do not yet understand why.”

  The door’s sections pulled away, allowing Tania through. She stepped inside and recognized the space immediately.

  The key room.

  The final piece of the puzzle Eve had presented to humanity, back on and above Earth. Memories of her experiences here came flooding back. The elation of discovering this place, and the mad adventure with Skyler here that had almost killed her. The gruesome final battle with Grillo and his henchmen, ultimately leading to this journey, this moment.

  Tania swallowed, wondering just how final that final battle had been, for at the far end of the ten-sided room several Scipios were working to dislodge an iris door that remained steadfastly closed to them.

  They were not living things themselves, Tania knew, but more like spacecraft. Yet each did hold a living pilot, a small creature barely larger than a monkey. Creatures designed and bred specifically for the task of piloting these vessels.

  “What do I do?” Tania whispered.

  “Annihilate them,” Eve replied. “Quickly. Bef-f-fore they disable my power source.”

  Tania raised her arms and watched in morbid fascination as two fiery beams of energy lanced out. Her aim was off. Both beams slammed into the ceiling in a shower of flame and sparks. She adjusted, ignoring the sensation of heat on her hands and the way her arms felt as if being pushed backward. She moved the beam onto one of the Scipios and held it there, watching as the thing writhed and twisted under the unrelenting torrent of energy.

  A familiar feeling swept into her mind. She’d felt it the first time in Hawaii, a gun in her hands, the subhuman before her toppling to one side with half its face torn off by her bullets. Tania knew she should detest this feeling, this bloodlust. But some primal reaction took hold, its power too strong over her. She kept the beams on her target until it twitched, crumpled, and fell all the way to the floor at her feet.

  Eve was saying something. Tania hadn’t heard over the war drums in her ears. “Repeat,” she managed.

  “You waited too long,” Eve said. “They are through.”

  The ceiling erupted in a torrential shower of sparks. Tania’s feet left the floor as the press of gravity faded.

  Eve was no longer accelerating away from her pursuers.

  “New plan,” was all the AI said.

  The Wildflower

  6.AUG.3911 (Earth Actual)

  HAD HE THE air for it he would have laughed.

  Instead Alex Warthen just bobbed against a bulkhead, lips moving like a fish out of water, his amusement entirely internal.

  It was the sound that had triggered his funny bone. One moment he’d been in a shouting match with Xavi, the braggart jackass of a navigator for this cursed boat. The argument had come about over whether or not Xavi could keep his helmet on, during which Alex had ordered the airlock tube disconnected. Xavi had refused, claiming among other things that he did not know how to work the tube. An obvious lie. The bastard was buying time.

  Anger getting the better of him, Alex had launched into a string of profane insults when the pitch of his voice began to rise and grow quiet. His first thought had been helium leak. He realized only too late what was really happening, and found himself now waiting for asphyxiation while his oxygen-starved brain kept pushing him to laugh at the ridiculous way his shouted insults had just dwindled away, as if someone had attached a volume knob to his back.

  Some corner of his befuddled mind recognized this for what it was. This had been no accidental depressurization, or the result of some impact against the hull. No, the air had been deliberately vented from the ship. Sound worked differently in thin air, thus the change in his voice. These details he had to file for the moment. A suffocated man exacts no revenge. The air…that’s why Xavi had wanted his helmet on. Smart.

  Then had come a sudden, wild lurch, throwing everyone to the floor with bone-jarring force. An impact somewhere, a big one.

  Alex clawed for anything that could steady him. Where had he left his helmet? Floating in a corner, of course. The lurch had jumbled everything back into wild motion, his helmet just one chunk inside a space filled with careening debris. He swore at himself for taking the bloody thing off in the first place.

  Xavi lay in a ball on the other side of a bulkhead, a few meters away, only his shoulder visible. Unconscious? Hit his head, did he? Serves you right.

  As for the others…

  The airlock door rolled aside and two suited figures entered the ship. One Alex did not know. The other was the immune Vanessa, back again.

  The blackness at the edge of his vision crowded in, like curtains drawn from all sides, or a funeral shroud, as his brain screamed for oxygen.

  A hissing sound, like an enraged snake, pushed the darkness back a little. Then more. Air? Alex tried to suck it in but his lungs wouldn’t listen.

  He shifted his focus to his helmet. He had to get it on, and quick. The suit had air. If only he hadn’t been so anxious to ditch the damn thing. Alex Warthen groped toward the object, ignoring those around him. The hissing sound went on. The black curtains pulled back a little. Then came the precious moment of breath. His body did it on its own. A jerking, spasmodic inhale that left him unable to do anything but fight back the urge to vomit.

  Sound bled back in. Coughing, confused shouts, and cries of pain. Alex chanced a look down the length of the ship. Vanessa was flying toward the bridge, looking for Jared maybe. That was good, let her look. The other newcomer—the captain, he assumed—tended to Xavi. She took the navigator’s weapon and swung it about. Her aim swept right past him. Looking for Jared, too, he had time to think. They don’t even see me as a threat. Good.

  Below, the engineer stirred. She’d drifted the entire length of the ship when it had lurched, and looked like he felt. But somehow she’d already righted herself. She was staring up at him.

  He held Beth’s gaze and watched as she flung herself upward, straight toward him. So much for thinking him a celebrity.

  Floating, tumbling now thanks to the coughing fit, Alex could do nothing to avoid it. He tried to pull his arms forward, raise his fists, but precious oxygen had yet to make it that far. His limbs felt numb, heavy as sacks of sand. Beth sped toward him like an arrow loosed, her narrow and emotionless gaze laser focused on Ale
x.

  Somehow he managed to swing, not realizing his hand now gripped his helmet. He brought it around like a club. There was a thunderous crack. Beth’s head jerked sideways, and a plume of dark red fluid fountained out and splashed against the sidewall. The emotionless gaze became a vacant one. Her unconscious body crashed into him. Blood from a nasty gash across her forehead spilled into his face, his eyes. He coughed and blinked as he tried to push her aside, the movement sending them both drifting across the central chamber of the ship. Above them, Vanessa whirled, the activity grabbing her attention, her search for the absent Jared evidently concluded. She spotted Alex. She swung her arm toward him, and a bulb grew there, the end of it shimmering with heat and energy.

  Then a wall blocked his view. A bulkhead. He’d floated past one of the bulkheads. Vanessa fired too late. The whole ship lit up with the brilliance of her weapon. Alex could feel the air around him hum with energy, and the bare metal section of bulkhead before him glowed red. The heat blistered his cheeks, even behind the ten-centimeter-thick solid obstacle. Were the skin of his legs exposed he had no doubt his hair would have singed and melted away. A few seconds longer and she’d cook him in his suit. Melt through the wall and then through him. He saw smoke curling off the surfaces as dust burned away and the water in the air around him began to vaporize.

  The glowing wall lurched forward. For the barest fraction of a second he thought it had bubbled or warped, but his mind caught up in time to realize the truth: acceleration. Lots of it. The little spacecraft dangled like a can from a wedding limousine as the Builder ship it was attached to suddenly roared to life.

  He was falling now. Alex had time to turn his head before his face smacked into that glowing patch of metal. The heat seared the skin of his cheek in an instant. He rolled aside on pure instinct, feeling the charred flesh tear away. The pain came a moment later. Vile, eye-watering agony. He screamed then, despite what the contortion did to his face. Some part of him realized the weight he now seemed to possess. The ship—this one or the behemoth it was connected to—must be at full burn. The force of it pinned him to the smoldering bulkhead, though only his suit touched the surface now and it seemed up to the challenge.

  Something touched his hand. The helmet. His helmet. He had to get it on.

  Alex screamed as he hauled the gear over his ravaged face. He felt it tighten as if alive when the neck rings met and connected. The pain along half his face became something more. An assault on the senses. Like a constant roar, as if he stood beneath an aircraft at takeoff.

  Once the helmet settled into place, everything changed. The pain subsided, a wave drawn back from shore. His cheek felt hot but also somehow numb. The nausea faded, too. Emergency auto-medication, kicking in. Alex rolled onto his side and then his stomach. Xavi lay across from him, on the other side of the ring-shaped bulkhead, out cold but breathing.

  Alex leaned over the open space in the center of the bulkhead and peered down the length of the ship.

  Beth lay motionless in the basin, near her engineering computer. He wanted to feel nothing. She’d come at him, after all, and was one of the enemy. But some part of him hoped she’d survived the fall.

  Beside her, down there, were the others. The captain in her EVA suit, moving, struggling. She pulled herself toward Beth and checked for a heartbeat, fingers pressed at the neck, though Alex could not tell from her reaction if the news was good or bad. And then Vanessa, who lay curled in a ball like a sleeping child. Perhaps she’d hit her head in the fall. If Alex leapt now he’d fall on her with the force of an elephant dropped from an aircraft. Could her armor withstand it? Could his own body?

  “Come back to me.”

  Alex jerked away from the precipice, looking for the source of the voice. Panic gave way to recognition. It was the woman. The ship. In his head again. He shouted at it. “Fuck off!”

  “You still have a role to play in this, Alex Warthen. You can still make a difference—”

  “I’d rather die.”

  “—you, and Jared.”

  Jared. An implication, there, and a promise. A dangled carrot. Jared was in trouble, diseased. “You can save him? Fix him?”

  “Not exactly. He is beyond repair, though his memories live within me now,” she replied. Then, “Time to decide, Alex. I’ve unlocked your weapon. You have one shot. Use it wisely.”

  “My weapon?”

  A great instant of pain washed over him, as if his entire body had been covered in a bandage that was now, all at once, torn away. He cried out and looked down, expecting to see flame enveloping him. What he saw instead made him gasp. His space suit had changed. Or perhaps it had never been his suit at all. Instead of his own recovered outfit, he wore that same black armored outfit that Vanessa did. Another of Eve’s tricks?

  Something clicked in his head, as if some extra part of his brain had just now been attached. With it came a sense of capability that hadn’t been there a moment before. The confidence of a gun, invisible until now. A sense of raw power surged through him, banishing the last memory of his burned face.

  Alex rolled again. One shot? Why one?

  Vanessa was the target, surely. Finish this now while the chance was there.

  He took aim, hesitated when the woman called Beth stirred. She twisted and groaned. Her eyes flickered open. To his surprise and dismay she began to claw her way over to Vanessa. Dazed or not, her first waking instinct had been to help the other. Alex watched in strange fascination before remembering himself and his goal. He renewed his aim, but Beth blocked the shot now. He had to get closer.

  Fine, he thought, and struggled to his knees. The power of the acceleration made standing impossible, but from this position he could at least fall. Alex steadied himself, narrowed his gaze, and pitched forward over the hole in the floor that led to the lower levels.

  In that instant the acceleration ended. His momentum left him drifting through the center of the ship at only a snail’s pace. Debris began to move away from the floors and walls, filling the air. Xavi flopped about, coming to but disoriented. Below, Beth looked as if she were trying to keep herself at the bottom of a pool, still trying to wake the limp form of Vanessa.

  It was the captain Alex shifted focus to. She was up again, and staring right at him, a pistol still in her hand. She swung her arm up, quick as a viper, sighted, and took her shot.

  The bullet hit like the halfhearted punch of a child. He glanced down at his abdomen and saw no damage at all. Not even a scratch. The armor was no illusion.

  You still have a role to play in this, Alex Warthen.

  Alex looked back at his assailant and reveled in the confusion he saw there. She tried to shoot again but nothing happened. Her expression cycled to bewilderment, then fear, and finally stoic resolve. This was her ship, and he’d tried to take it.

  The captain coiled against the floor and then pushed off with both legs, rocketing toward him. Her eyes never left his as she flew up through the spine of her ship, both fists held before her. Alex let her come, he had no choice. He couldn’t move and he wasn’t about to waste his single shot on the wrong target.

  When she arrived he swung, hard. His forearm slammed against the side of her neck with an audible slap that sent her tumbling away to one side. It sent him the other way. Good. He needed to get to a solid surface so he could take aim or, barring that, at least regain control of his movement.

  The motion took him to the airlock door. He grabbed the handle and steadied himself.

  Time to decide. You have one shot. A rather annoying corner of his mind pushed the words through his bloodlust-fueled focus. What had the damn ship meant? Kill the captain? Shoot himself? No, Vanessa. Had to be Vanessa. The immune. His opponent. Right?

  As if in cryptic answer the entire craft rang like a bell, rocking to one side with a violent suddenness that slammed Alex bodily into the airlock door. He fought to keep his grip, ignoring pain from all along the front of his body. Exotic alien armor or not, it couldn’t shiel
d his internal organs from such abrupt collisions.

  Something sliced across his field of view. His face was pressed against the tiny window on the airlock door. Something moved out there. The umbilical tube writhed like a wounded snake, but that wasn’t it. What, then? Skyler?

  The craft, dangling from that Kevlar tube, twisted and swung erratically. Whatever had struck the ship had left it flopping like a fish on the hook.

  A series of thuds clattered across the hull. Alex glanced around, despite himself. “What is that?” he asked of no one in particular.

  “Something’s on the hull,” the captain said, across from him. A trickle of blood ran down the side of her face from where he’d hit her. Their battle seemed momentarily forgotten. “Something big.”

  “That’s not helpful.”

  “A Scipio craft. One of the Swarm Blockade.”

  “Still not helpful.”

  He glanced back out the window, down the writhing umbilical tube.

  A flash of brown and green blurred past his vision. Like a blade, or a claw. It scythed through a section of the white flexible tube, leaving chunks of webbed fabric adrift. Alex could see the blackness of space through the gash. And then a form. Like a snake it slid in through the opening and curled around the inside, groping, feeling. Searching. Another came, then another. One had a bladed tip that looked sharp as any surgeon’s knife, and five times larger.

  Then all at once the whole thing squirmed through, wriggling in through the hole it had carved. Its spherical body settled into the tube, filling it so completely that the fabric bulged out around its form. Triangle-shaped sections of the thick umbilical fabric peeled back around it. The segmented tentacles found purchase on the ribbed metal rings woven along the length of the umbilical, and the robot or creature or whatever the hell it was began to pull itself toward the airlock, toward Alex.

  Time to decide. You have one shot.

  Okay, then. Alex wheeled the airlock door aside. Air, only recently returned to the ship, rushed out with gale force, pulling debris along with it. He felt his legs pulled toward the vacuum of space and somehow managed to hook one foot into a stabilizer rung. Behind him he heard a groan as the captain struggled to keep her navigator from tumbling out into space. She was shouting at Alex. He ignored her. Not helpful at all.