At the sight of the deactivated virus clumps, the Scipio became very afraid. It wriggled and heaved, rocked its head backward violently but to no avail. Tania’s grip was strong, her mass much greater than the alien’s. She pushed it into the ventilation duct—or whatever it actually was—where Vaughn wrapped it up in his waiting arms. Tania continued on into the elbow of the tube, trusting Sam to close the grate behind them. Vaughn, with the alien in his arms, fell backward and down deliberately. The brief journey ended with him on his back, the creature on top, squirming but now, somehow, less urgently. Resigned to its fate, perhaps. Tania pushed herself down after them and landed in front of it. Her form, her red-hued face behind the visor, must have been the most shocking thing the Scipio had ever seen. It went rigid, vibrating with terror.
Above Carthage
PRUMBLE HADN’T SLEPT through the whole business, after all.
As Sam came back down the silo to the floor of their little hideaway, she found the others huddled around the alien as Prumble put the finishing knot on an improvised binding.
“Cables,” he said. “Yanked them from behind a loose panel on the wall.”
“Resourceful,” Sam noted.
“Sometimes you have to do your scavenging for yourself, right?” He winked at her.
Sam grinned.
“And behold,” the big man said, turning about. He’d wrapped some of the wires around himself, lashing his aura shard to his back. Prumble finished his wholly ungraceful twirl and held out his hands, demanding praise.
“The judge from China gives you a nine-point-five,” Sam said.
“Ah, very kind.”
“Australia? A three-point-one, I’m afraid.”
Prumble frowned. “Now that is discrimination. New Zealand objects!”
“Hey!” Tania shouted. She quickly lowered her voice. “Do you two mind? We’ve got a prisoner here. The poor thing is terrified.”
Sam stood by as Tania knelt before the trembling creature. A meter separated them, and the thing had been wrapped in cable until only its head and feet were poking out either end. A shivering, wide-eyed Scipio burrito. Sam kept her wrist weapon primed and pointed in its general direction all the same.
Vaughn positioned his aura shard a few meters from the prisoner. “In case it can somehow use the virus cells,” he explained. A wise precaution.
“We need information,” Tania said to it. A series of symbols flashed across her visor.
The Scipio did not notice. It had its eyes shut tight, Sam realized, and had probably done the equivalent of pissing itself. She gave it a little kick on the leg. Not hard. Enough to get its attention.
“Relax,” Tania said to her.
“I’m quite relaxed,” she replied. “It’s looking at you now. Try again.”
Tania turned and sat on the floor, one ankle tucked under the other. She rested her arms on her knees and spread her hands out. “We need some information.”
The symbols flashed on her visor again. Nonsense to Sam, of course, but the Scipio seemed strangely calmed by it. The shivering diminished, then stopped.
It said something—rather, it made a few odd noises with its mouth. Sam’s own visor displayed a single word in the lower corner.
REVISE.
“Revise?”
Tania’s upheld hand quieted her. “Our suits have centuries-old data on their language, remember. This is going to require some time.”
“Time is not exactly on our side here.”
Tania waved her off. “Just…give me a few minutes, will you? Guard the entrances or something.”
Samantha glanced up at Vaughn and shifted her eyes to the back of the room where they’d found the twisting ventilation shaft. He nodded, understanding immediately, and trotted off in that direction. Sam eyed Prumble next, and jerked her head toward the main door.
“What, me? Guard?”
“Yes.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Keep an eye on our guest.”
The big man wandered toward the door, grumbling to himself. “You look like a Sherpa with that shard lashed to your back,” Sam called after him.
Without looking or breaking stride, he raised one hand and extended his middle finger.
Sam shifted her gaze back to Tania, and gave her a nod.
“We wish to know things,” Tania tried this time. “If you answer some questions for me, you will not be harmed.”
The creature studied her for a moment, then made a sort of circular gesture with its chin.
“You must speak,” Tania said. “We do not understand your facial expressions.”
It puzzled over this for a time, then made more of its peculiar speech noises. DELIVER YOUR QUERIES, the translation said.
And so it went, back and forth, for what seemed like an hour. Sam stood by, doing her best to seem threatening despite sensing this creature felt no concern at all once the initial shock of being grabbed and hauled through a ventilation shaft by a bunch of armored alien strangers had passed. Give the little bastard some credit, Sam decided. Though, on the other hand, it did appear to be completely rolling over on its own kind. Every question Tania asked it gave an answer to. These were nearly always cryptic or utterly incomprehensible, but Tania remained calm and patient through it all.
In this way much was learned. Sam filed what she considered tactically relevant and left the rest to Tania and Tim, who stood nearby with his arms folded, silent and serious.
Tactically relevant: The Scipios had only a minimal security apparatus, relying on their Swarm Blockade to keep unwanted visitors out, and their ever-present clouds of artificial viruses to attack and subdue anyone not specifically authorized to be wandering around Scipio facilities or the planet below. The fact that these tall aliens standing before it were unaffected by their viruses seemed the source of most of the shock and fear the creature had displayed. This, Sam gathered, was something unprecedented. Just wait until you learn the word immunity, my friend, she’d thought.
According to the low-level worker on the floor before Tania, even now a response was being prepared for the catastrophic incident aboard the nearby “vessel reprocessing apparatus” earlier that day. The workers had all been told to keep a lookout for anything out of the ordinary. Sam took heart at that. Keeping a lookout for “anything” meant they still weren’t quite sure what the hell was going on, and that was good. Very good. Assuming she’d interpreted the awful translation correctly.
“Have there been any other such incidents?” Tania asked it. “Reports of other attacks, or anything like that?”
Sam ground her teeth, unsure of the wisdom in asking that. Granted, they might learn of Skyler or Vanessa’s fate, but at the same time she’d basically just hinted—strongly—that there were more aliens just like them running around. Not the wisest move.
NO, the Scipio replied. KNOWLEDGE SPREADS SELECTIVELY.
“It sure does,” Sam muttered. She nudged Tania. “We need to know how to get away from here. Before they realize this one’s missing.”
She nodded, and turned to her subject. “We wish only to leave. To return to our…own place. We know you have vessels that cross the vast distances of space. Where can we find one?”
UNKNOWN, came the eventual reply.
“Bullshit,” Sam said.
Tania held up a hand, urging patience. “How do you move between your various apparatus above this planet?”
A seemingly endless series of misunderstandings and clarifications followed. Sam’s thoughts turned to what they should do with the prisoner once—if ever—Tania learned what she hoped to learn. The age-old dilemma, Sam mused. Kill your prisoner and have blood on your hands, let them go and risk them talking, or tie them up and hope someone finds them before they die a very cruel death.
The first option, Sam decided. And she’d had enough of this chatter. She stepped forward.
“Thank you,” Tania was saying. “That is very helpful.”
Sam hadn’t
been paying attention. She came to stand beside Tania, her eyes on the almost-mummified prisoner, already tied up. Sam raised her wrist, anyway.
Tania’s hand came to rest on her forearm. “Let’s discuss this first, please?” She spoke louder, for everyone. “In the corner, over there? All of you, please.”
She pushed down on Sam’s arm, which Sam resisted, but only for a second. She’d didn’t really want to kill this one. It was the risk of not doing so that had convinced her to take that path. A few more minutes can’t hurt. Let it make its peace, if they do that. She followed Tania to the corner of the room, about fifteen meters from the Scipio. Prumble and Vaughn followed. Tim came last, walking backward, keeping watch. He remained that way until he reached the loose circle and even then, turned only halfway. One eye on the conversation, one on the prisoner.
“Right, then. What did we learn?” Sam asked.
Tania took a steadying breath. “There is something, a shuttle or buslike vehicle, that moves about the stations autonomously.”
“Will we be able to operate it?” Prumble asked.
“Maybe,” Tania admitted. “If the controls are marked with translatable words, perhaps, but who knows if that is the case.”
“I’ll tell you who knows,” Sam said. “That one, right over there.”
Tania shook her head. “It said it has only ever been a passenger.”
“Of course it said that. Wouldn’t you?”
Tim joined the conversation fully. “Were I the prisoner, and you were asking me how to pilot a spacecraft, would you assume I knew how? I think it’s a stretch to—”
“Oy!” Vaughn shouted. He was off, running toward the captive. Sam whirled in time to see the creature buck wildly despite its bindings. It launched a full meter off the floor, writhing, a fountain of horrific brown liquid erupting from its mouth.
“What the hell?” Sam asked, already moving toward the creature without really thinking it through.
By the time she reached Vaughn, he was holding the Scipio to the ground, making an utterly futile effort to diagnose the problem. It was already too late. Sam could see that instantly. Its lifeless eyes and still features said everything.
Sam knelt beside Vaughn. She said, loud enough only for him, “I guess that solves that problem.”
He nodded grimly.
“What happened?” Prumble asked.
“No way to know,” Tim said.
“Sure there is,” Tania corrected. She pointed off toward the machinery deeper in the room. “No aura. Vaughn’s shard drifted away somehow, allowing access to the virus.”
“We all had our backs to it,” Sam said. “Except you, Tim. What did you see?”
“Nothing,” he said. “It was just lying there. Perhaps when I turned to you all to speak, it managed to nudge the shard.”
Sam didn’t like that explanation, but the alternative—that one of them had deliberately or even accidentally pushed the shard into motion—appealed even less. She glanced at Vaughn, who was looking right at her, and she knew he was thinking the same thing.
“So it accessed the virus. So what?” Prumble asked. “How is it suddenly dead?”
Tania folded her arms across her chest, as if suddenly cold. “Impossible to know for sure. Given access to the virus, perhaps it committed suicide through some silent command.”
“Or they knew this one was missing,” Tim offered, “and the viruses were already looking for it.”
Tania nodded. Her features were unreadable. “Eve once implied they use the cells to communicate. A bit like our old HocNets.”
“If that’s the case,” Prumble said, “we can’t stay here. It could have told them where we are. How many of us there are. That we have a way to disable the virus. Christ, everything.”
“Let’s find that transport,” Sam said. “Right now. No debate.”
Nobody argued.
At the exit, Sam took one last glance back at the body on the floor, still wrapped in cabling. She’d taken many lives in her years as a scavenger. Subhumans, mostly, but also those who worked against the success of mankind. Never an innocent, though. Never anything like this.
It did it to itself, a voice in her head tried to explain.
Sam bit her lower lip, sent a silent apology, and left.
—
They climbed through the ventilation shaft again. The wide hall beyond was still empty.
“Which way, Tania?” Sam asked.
The woman cast her gaze upward. “It said the docking port is at the top. I guess maybe that way they can float down to the deck they need to access upon arriving somewhere.”
“Who cares why. Let’s move. Vaughn, you’ve got our backs?”
“ ’Course.”
“Good man.”
“I know.”
Sam hopped up on the railing and glanced at the space above and below. The central open shaft of the space station vanished into inky black in both directions about fifty meters away. Flakes of Scipio virus cells floated down like snow, stirred here and there by the occasional push of air from the ventilation systems.
No Scipios to be seen.
One last glance back at her companions, and Sam was off. She leapt, powering up the thrusters in her suit at the same time. For a few seconds she just hovered, allowing herself time to get used to the gravity. Then she accelerated, swooping upward, arms held out before her, feeling like a superhero. The white viral snow fell past with growing speed. Sam forced herself to ease off. She glanced down. The others were already out of sight. Above and below, only darkness and falling snow.
Sam laughed at her accidental poetry. What the fuck is wrong with my brain? She shook her head and tried to clear her thoughts, without success. The line kept echoing through her mind. Above and below, only darkness and falling snow. She looked down again, knowing Vaughn was in that darkness, somewhere, making sure the others got off that railing safely. Sam grinned wickedly. She knew exactly what she’d do to clear her head if they got out of this hellhole, and it wasn’t poetry.
A reinvigorating thought if there ever was one. Grin still firmly in place, Sam lifted her chin to the unseen ceiling and powered on. She rose past seventeen more decks, all identical save for markings on the wall she didn’t bother to stop and “read”—the translator was practically worthless, in her view. Instead of cafeteria it would probably say something like “gut satisfaction.” Not a bad name for a restaurant, she mused.
She chuckled again. Seriously, what is wrong with me?
A blinking orange indicator on her visor finally registered. Sam took her eyes off the snowy dark and scanned the display. Nitrogen levels were way off. “Shit.”
The ceiling pushed through the darkness before her like the face of a giant mallet. Giggling inanely, it took every ounce of will Sam could muster to swing her feet up and propel herself to one side. She came so close to collision that she was able to brush her hands along the smooth surface and guide herself to an ungraceful but successful stop, then let her thrusters power down slowly until her feet were back on solid ground. Another hallway with an open railing, only this one at the very top of the space station. She turned and ramped her headlamp to full power.
“Something wrong with my air,” Sam said.
Tania floated up through the silolike chamber, at a much less reckless speed. She joined Sam and immediately went to work examining her helmet and suit. Tim and Prumble came up and over the railing almost together.
Vaughn was last. “What’s happened? What’s wrong?”
Sam laughed.
“Your heat sink is absolutely coated with this viral gunk,” Tania said. She wiped furiously at Sam’s lower back, sluicing away a small pile of white powdery residue onto the floor. “The suit has a special pad between these two armor plates used purely for thermal management. It seems to be attracting the virus cells.”
Prumble had crouched next to her, assisting in the effort. He turned to examine Vaughn’s back, finding the same problem. Tim,
however, seemed mostly unaffected, with less than half the amount of buildup. Tania and Prumble, too, once everyone had been checked.
“Why only us?” Sam asked no one in particular.
Tania’s mouth twisted in concentration. “The two of you have been using your weapons and boosters a lot more than us. More heat to manage.”
“Okay,” Sam said. “But what does any of that have to do with nitrogen levels?”
The woman thought about that, then gave a small shrug. “I can only assume the suit was forced to use more power than it normally needs in order to cool things while you were under thrust, and that resulted in robbing power from the breathers.”
“Well, shit,” Sam said. “That’s a serious design flaw, isn’t it?”
“Relax,” Prumble replied. “Easily addressed. This simply means we all need to scratch each other’s backs once in a while.”
“Lovely.”
“Like a monkey picking lice from a troop mate’s fur.”
“Not helping, mate.”
Prumble laughed. “Think of it as a bonding experience.”
“Can we keep moving, please?” Tim asked. A sober silence fell over the group. “Where next, Tania?”
Tania studied the doors closest to them. Not immediately finding what the prisoner had told her to look for, she motioned for Sam to lead the way farther along the hall. Sam obliged.
Moving along the wide corridor felt familiar. Not much different than securing a site for scavenging in a hundred different cities back on Earth.
Sam’s visor indicated her air mixture had returned to something approaching normal. She still felt a little drunk, and decided not to worry about how long that would take to pass. Right now it was taking the edge off and that was all right by her.
“There,” Tania said. She pointed at a door directly across the circular chamber.
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