“Let me do it,” said Calix. “You can’t see what you’re doing with your broken nose.”
“And you can’t set my nose while you’re bleeding to death. I’m fine.”
Calix snorted.
“I’ll be done in a minute,” said Gunner, removing the sterilization wrap from Calix’s shoulder.
They were in space now, had taken off maybe twenty minutes prior. Saffron had breezed in and out for some bandages for her neck. Damned woman never seemed to get hurt much. Tough as nails, but graceful like a dancer. Twirled away from the blasts and bullets.
“You said that ten minutes ago,” said Calix.
“And I would be done already if you didn’t keep squirming.”
Calix let out a string of barely intelligible swear words.
Gunner opened a package of synth skin. He applied it to the wound and then pressed bandages over everything. “There. Done.”
Calix peered at it. “Fine.”
“You’re welcome,” Gunner said pointedly.
Calix chuckled. “Sit down.”
Gunner did, perching on the edge of a cot. There were two in the medic bay, both bolted into the wall and neither particularly comfortable. But discomfort was the least of his worries. He had a feeling whatever Calix was going to do to his nose wasn’t going to feel good.
He was right, and Calix didn’t waste any time. There was a cracking noise and a bright, hot pain in the middle of his face.
“Fuck,” Gunner growled.
Calix laughed. “You’re fine. You look much better now. Less crooked.”
“I hate you,” said Gunner.
Calix nodded. “Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard it all before.” He rummaged until he came out with a cold pack. Snapping the thing, it immediately turned blue to indicate it was cooling down. Calix applied it to Gunner’s face. “Ice’ll keep the swelling down. There’s an analgesic in there as well.”
Already, Gunner could feel a pleasant cool, numb sensation spreading over his face. “I take it back. You’re an angel from heaven. That feels great.”
Calix laughed again. “You can up my salary any time you want.”
“What salary?”
“Exactly.”
They both laughed.
Calix’s smile slowly faded. “You didn’t have to give him the guns.”
“Mac Non?”
“You give anyone else guns today?”
Gunner shrugged.
“You had him. You could have blown his head off, dug the weapons up, and we could have been on our way.”
“We don’t have any need for all those weapons,” said Gunner.
“Maybe not all, but some,” said Calix. “Could have sold the rest.”
“What need might we have for them?”
“In case we ever need to fight.” Calix raised his eyebrows. “You do remember fighting.”
Gunner got up off the cot. “Yeah, I remember fighting. Of course I remember. We did a lot of that, you and me. Nearly died more times than I can count. Got the scars to show for it. What’s your point?”
Calix shrugged.
“You calling me a coward?” said Gunner.
“When we joined the war effort, we were going to show those alien bastards—”
“Yeah, well, that was then,” said Gunner.
“So, now, we just run?”
“I don’t like to think of it as running. I like to think of it as surviving,” said Gunner. “Not everyone does, you know.”
“Does what?”
“Survive.”
Calix looked down at his shoes. “Shit, Gunner.”
“I got captain things to do,” said Gunner, heading for the door.
“If I ever try to talk about anything important, you always bring her up.”
Gunner paused at the door, hand on the button to open it. “There some reason I shouldn’t talk about her?”
“I don’t think she’d appreciate being used to shut me up.”
“That isn’t what I did.”
“Like hell you didn’t. But maybe I’m not going to shut up anyway. You know what I think? I think you made sure those guns were out there because you wanted to be sure that they got where the Resistance wanted them to go. Because no matter how much you say that we’re not on anyone’s side anymore, you do still want to fight. Deep down, you want to shove those bastards back into whatever hole they were spawned in and—”
“No.” Gunner’s voice was cold. “That isn’t it.”
“Listen—”
“I only want to survive. That’s all.” Gunner pushed the button. The door slid open sideways. He stalked out.
* * *
Eve made her way through the winding corridors of the Star Swallow, trying to remember how Pippa had explained to her to get to the cockpit. Pippa had invited Eve to come and spend time there. Pippa said that she’d be up there doing some routine calculations and maintenance, which was mindless and boring, and she wouldn’t mind some company. Eve was bored too. She had nothing to do, and when she was alone, she kept thinking about how she was supposed to sleep with the captain.
Which she didn’t want to do.
At all.
And anyway, even if she decided to do it anyway, how was that supposed to work? It was very unlikely that she and the captain were going to somehow organically end up in a situation conducive to conceiving the champion of the human race. Was she supposed to make a move? She had no idea how to do that.
Even if she wanted to.
Which again, she didn’t.
She hated going through all that in her head, so she was happy to go and find Pippa instead.
But Eve was pretty sure she was lost.
Up ahead, it looked like a dead end. All these corridors looked the same. They were narrow, with rounded, metal walls and a black rubber track floor underfoot. The ceilings were low and she felt closed in. Which might have bothered someone else, but was actually comforting to Eve who’d spent her whole life underground. Of course, when she thought about the expanse of space on the outside of the ship, she felt overwhelmed and terrified again. It was amazing to think this hunk of metal and propulsion was hurtling through the stars. It boggled her mind.
Should she even go all the way up to that dead end? Shouldn’t she turn around? Well, there was a ladder at the dead end. Maybe she’d climb it and see where it led.
The last ladder she’d climbed had taken her to the plascannon pit. She had felt chilled and breathless at the thought of something shooting at them in space.
And then she’d thought of this impending war with the Xerkabah, the one that her son was supposed to lead the human race in. There would be a lot of shooting in that war, wouldn’t there? She was intrinsically part of it all, but she only had the barest of knowledge about how to fight and protect herself. And no practical experience.
She started to climb the ladder, and that was when she heard voices from overhead.
“We’re going to Durga?” came Pippa’s voice. “You never told me we were going there.”
“I’m telling you now.” The captain’s voice. She already recognized it.
She paused, hands on the ladder, not moving, just listening.
“Okay, but why couldn’t you tell me earlier?”
“I didn’t know we’d be going there,” said the captain. “I was hoping we’d find the ration bars at Ceymia 4. But all we got there was credits and potatoes.”
“Oh, those potatoes,” sighed Pippa. “I swear I forgot how good they can be.”
“They don’t provide much in the way of protein or vitamins, though,” said the captain. “We can’t survive on potatoes alone.”
“I’d sure like to try,” said Pippa. “But, okay, you’re obsessed with ration bars, so—”
“I’m obsessed with us surviving, Pippa. We need food.”
“Sure, sure, if you say so. I think you like the taste of them, personally.”
He chuckled. “I think they’re as tasteless as everyone else. Ju
st plot the course, okay?” And now his voice was moving, coming closer.
Oh, Eve should move. She started to step down the ladder—
And was suddenly somewhere else.
She stood outside her cabin. Pippa was there, smiling. “Well, now that we’re on Durga, I thought we could go—”
A spiky protuberance burst through Pippa’s throat, spraying blood all over her face, all over her clothes. Pippa’s mouth was still moving, but her eyes were confused and blinking.
Eve reached for her friend.
The protuberance slid out.
And Pippa was lifeless and still, falling into Eve’s arms, revealing the monster behind her, its mouth a gaping maw, its long, swinging arms tipped with spiky claws.
It grabbed Eve.
* * *
Gunner descended the ladder from the cockpit, only to find the Eve girl lying at the bottom, eyes rolled back in her skull as she convulsed.
Oh, hell, he thought, kneeling down next to her and making sure she wasn’t hurting herself.
He noticed that since coming aboard, she didn’t wear that head covering anymore, which meant he didn’t have to worry about it while she was lying there, which was a good thing, he guessed. But they could have told him she was epileptic before he let her on board. That was a hell of thing to leave out—
Her eyes snapped open.
“Hey, there,” he said. “It’s all right. You’ve had a seizure. You do have those, right?” What if there was something else wrong with her?
She pushed him away, scrambling to her feet. Her eyes were wide. “I had a vision.”
Oh, no. That was too much. “You don’t have visions, princess,” he said as gently as he could. “You have a medical condition. It’s fairly common, and there’s treatment, but nothing a hundred percent, so—”
“We can’t take the ship to Durga.”
“How do you know we’re even going there? Were you eavesdropping down here?”
“No, I overheard, but I didn’t mean to,” she said. “Look, I saw something. If we go to Durga, a vidya will be on the ship. It kills Pippa. I think it might kill me. Who knows who else? If it’s loose on the ship, it could—”
“Vidya? Why would you make something like that up? Besides, that’s ridiculous. The Xerkabah haven’t deployed them since the war.” They weren’t real vidya, after all. The real vidya were all extinct. They were the last species to go up against the Xerkabah. The Xerkabah had wiped them all out, all except a small few, who eventually died out in the Xerkabah ghettos from lack of resources and food.
No, the only vidya that were left were actually Xerkabah, who were shapeshifters. They could assume the form of anything organic that was roughly the same mass as they were. Hell, that was the reason the humans hadn’t known the Xerkabah existed in the first place. When they sent the colonists to Ceymia 4, they only detected plant life and unintelligent sea creatures. How were they to know that the Xerkabah were taking the shape of those life forms?
Seemed to be what they did, as a matter of course. No one knew what their “true” form was. They liked to copy other forms. Apparently, some of them copied the vidya for so long that they got pretty comfy in that form and wouldn’t shift back. It was said that the prolonged time in that form had changed something in the Xerkabah’s brains and now they were half-vidya or as good as.
Gunner didn’t know. What he did know was that vidya were vicious creatures. He’d run up against them in the war. They had a tough armored skin around their torsos that protected them from gunfire. The only way to kill them was to shoot them in the head or to cut it off—if you could get that close, that is. And you never could.
He still remembered their wide-set, beady black eyes. Things gave him nightmares.
“I’m saying it because I don’t want Pippa to die,” she said. “We can’t go to Durga.”
He glared at her. “You always make up crap like this? Stuff where people are in danger and dying?”
“I’m not making up anything.”
“Why? Does it make you feel powerful? I thought you and Pippa were friends.”
“We are,” she said. “That’s why I’m warning you.”
He took her by the arm. “Come on.”
“Where are you taking me?” she said.
He didn’t answer. He tugged her through the ship, hurrying down the narrow corridors until he brought her to the medic bay.
Calix was over on the other side of the room. He looked up. “Gunner?”
Gunner shoved the girl toward Calix.
She stumbled and nearly fell, but righted herself.
“Gunner?” Calix said again, but now there was concern in his voice.
“Can epilepsy cause hallucinations?”
“Actually, yes,” said Calix.
Gunner sucked air through his nose. He was being too hard on the girl. She wasn’t actually making this up. She did see things. She simply didn’t understand that they weren’t real things. And how could she? With people all around her making sure that she never encountered the danger of her “visions,” she’d always think she’d averted them from coming true. “Fine. Explain that to her. Tell her that she doesn’t have visions and that there isn’t going to be a vidya on the ship and that Pippa’s not going to die.”
“What?” said Calix.
But Gunner had already left the room. The girl made his blood boil.
He stalked down the hallway, already feeling ashamed of himself. She suffered from a condition, and he’d dug his fingers into her arm and dragged her through the ship. That wasn’t like him. He wasn’t usually angry and forceful, especially not with young women. Damn it.
It was the fact she’d mentioned the vidya. That girl had never seen a vidya up close. He was sure of it. Maybe she’d seen pictures, heard stories. But to be shooting at a vidya, watching your plasma blasts strike its hard skin and glance off harmlessly, while the thing came at you, swinging its long arms, reaching for you…
They never used weapons. They just grabbed you and tore you apart.
He’d watched one man, another of his squadron in the war, screaming like a tiny child because his arm was gone and blood was spurting out of it like a fountain. Then the vidya had seized the man’s hair and twisted his head. First the man’s neck cracked, which was a mercy, because then he was dead and couldn’t feel anything more. The screaming stopped too, which had been good. But the vidya kept twisting, and then the man’s skin tore, and then there was more blood and then…
Gunner had to stop moving. He’d clenched his hands into fists, he realized. He was grinding his teeth.
He stopped and hung his head and drew in several long, steadying breaths.
Calm down, he told himself.
He reached inside himself for the steel sense of order he kept about himself, the only way to deal with memories like that. He squared his shoulders and closed his eyes.
When he opened them, he was calm again.
He started walking again, going down the corridor at a leisurely pace.
CHAPTER FIVE
Bass Gints was just old enough to start working the lookout position on the outpost on the planet Durga, where he lived. He was sixteen, which was the youngest they’d let anyone run lookout. They said that people younger weren’t trustworthy. They wouldn’t pay attention or they’d go to sleep.
When Bass had been fifteen, he’d wanted nothing more in the entire galaxy than to be lookout. In retrospect, he realized it was because he wasn’t allowed. He’d begged and begged to be allowed to take the position early. “Come on,” he’d said. “I’ll be sixteen in four months. What’s the big deal?” But they hadn’t let him take the position early. They’d forced him to wait. And now, here he was, the lookout, and he was bored out of his mind. There was nothing to do as a lookout except, well, look.
And there was nothing to see.
Which was good. He didn’t want to actually see anything, not now that he was a lookout.
When he was a
kid, he’d had this fantasy. It had involved his seeing some awful threat on the horizon, and then single-handedly blowing it out of the sky with an array of state-of-the-art weapons. Then everyone in the entire outpost had been very grateful to him, especially Sinthia Masters, who was the prettiest girl that Bass had probably ever seen in real life. She was nice, too. Whenever she saw him, she always smiled and said hi.
He usually made noises back that kind of sounded like greetings, but also might sound as though he was mentally ill.
That was because she made him nervous on account of being so pretty.
Anyway, in his fantasy, blowing up all the attackers had an affect on his ability to speak, and he was now incredibly suave. When Sinthia came to him to tell him how grateful she was that he’d saved everyone’s lives, he talked to her like a human being. And then he kissed her. And she let him.
Sometimes the fantasy veered off at that point, but only if he was imagining it late at night in his bunk or in the showers or something. Then it got a little, well, suggestive. Okay, downright pornographic. Sinthia was incredibly grateful and very willing to demonstrate that gratitude.
Anyway, he had to admit that the stupid fantasy had skewed his desire to be the lookout. Somewhere in his psyche, he thought he would be a hero or something.
But the first night he was out there, staring out into the bleakness of the landscape, which was mostly straggly vegetation and low hills and shallow valleys, he found himself hoping against all hope that there was nothing out there.
It wasn’t his job to blow anything out of the sky, thankfully. He was just a lookout. If he saw something, he got on his cator and alerted James, who was his direct superior. James would come up and evaluate the possible threat level, and maybe it would turn out to be nothing. There were some weird birdlike things that lived on the planet. They looked scary, but they only seemed interested in eating the small rodents that lived on the surface. But if it really was a threat, the outpost would lock down.
The outer gates would close. Everyone would gather in the main hall, where meals were usually served, and the big, thick metal doors would be padlocked, and the barriers would go over the windows, and they’d hunker down and wait it out. They could survive there for a while, and not much could get into a place like that.
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