Ghost Planet

by Sharon Lynn Fisher

“Good thing. A man can only take so much.” His hands worked into my hair.

  I pulled his head down to mine, whispering, “Murphy?”

  “Mmm.”

  “I want to lie down.”

  “Tired, are you?”

  “Very.”

  “Okay, come on.”

  My insides fluttered in a warm, expectant way as we headed for a doorway at the other end of the galley. The door slid open, inviting us in, and a sweet, floral aroma wafted out.

  Filtered sunlight streamed through a window, illuminating the untidy sleeping compartment. There were two beds, both a jumble of knotted sheets and blankets. Vines dangled from the ceiling over one of the beds, and the delicate white flowers explained the perfume.

  I gasped as Murphy bent and lifted me. He navigated around piles of clothing and stacks of books to the bed with the vines.

  “Sorry, Garvey,” I murmured against Murphy’s cheek.

  As he leaned to deposit me on the bed, I knotted my hands in his shirt and pulled his mouth to mine. He drew away, raising his thumb to my swollen lip.

  “It doesn’t hurt,” I said, pulling him back. It did hurt, but it would have to hurt a lot more to come between me and Murphy’s lips.

  He wrapped his arms around me, holding me tight. He felt and smelled so good I let out a little moan of happiness, and his arms coiled tighter.

  “I wanted to kill him for hurting you. I’ve wanted to kill him a dozen times just for the way he looked at you. I’d give anything to have done it for you.”

  “Don’t think about it, Murphy,” I said soothingly, hands kneading his back. “We’re out. They can’t hurt us anymore.”

  I pressed him onto the bed and peeled off his shirt. Bending over him, I worked my way down his chest, teasing with my lips and tongue. He groaned softly, one hand moving to the back of my neck.

  “Mmm, Elizabeth.” His low murmur sent a shiver of anticipation through me.

  But after a few moments of this he went very still. I nibbled at a rib and glanced up at him. “Are you okay?”

  His gaze locked with mine. “There’s something I need to tell you.”

  My breath stopped. My heart stopped. I sat up, staring at him with a very different kind of anticipation.

  He rose and cupped my face in his hands. “I’ve held something back from you.”

  Oh Jesus. I studied his expression and realized I’d seen it before. The night we’d made love at the institute. He’d asked me if I trusted him. There’d been something pleading in the way he looked at me. Something frightened.

  “What is it?” I whispered.

  He drew me closer, pressing his forehead against mine. “You’re pregnant, Elizabeth.”

  ?!

  I pushed him back so I could see his face. “What?”

  His features twisted in anguish. He took hold of my hands.

  “Murphy, why would you say that? I can’t get pregnant. Mitchell told me. They did five thousand scans of my uterus and ovaries.”

  He closed his eyes. “Did you ever wonder why they did five thousand scans of your uterus and ovaries if you can’t get pregnant?”

  I shook my head, not understanding. Not wanting to understand.

  “I saw one of those scans today,” he continued. “Mitchell showed it to me. There wasn’t much to look at, but there’s no question.”

  I began to tremble. “She told me no ghost had ever … reproduced.”

  “You’re the first, as far as they know. But it was no accident, her telling you that. She wanted you to believe it wasn’t possible. She didn’t want it to stop you from…”

  Oh God oh God oh God. I was pregnant—with what? And he hadn’t told me everything. Something worse was coming.

  His fingers tightened over mine. “It’s been one of Mitchell’s objectives since the beginning—to produce an offspring from a symbiont and a colonist. Her firm has a contract from ERP. The Species Compatibility lead astrobiologist wants to study a hybrid—thinks it may provide some answers about the origin of ghosts. But Mitchell’s failed with both artificial insemination and in vitro.”

  I felt sick. I let my head sink onto his shoulder. “They let you come to me so we’d…”

  His arms curled around me. “They were monitoring you—they knew when your body was ready. She played with your emotions—lied to you, made you talk about me, finally let you see me—to make you more vulnerable. More receptive.”

  Something cold skittered down my spine and I sat up straight. I remembered how he’d been that night when he came to me. Preoccupied. Secretive.

  My hand curled over his wrist as I braced myself against my sudden suspicion. “Why did Mitchell tell you all this?”

  He tried again to take me in his arms, but I held him back.

  His eyes met mine. He swallowed dryly, and his lips parted. “She wanted my help. She told me if I didn’t, they’d use you for detachment experiments, and that you probably wouldn’t survive.”

  Understanding jolted through me like an electric shock, and I released his wrist. “No, Murphy.”

  I waited for him to deny it—to take it back—but he just kept pleading with his eyes.

  Jumping up from the bed, I stumbled away from him. “How could you keep this from me?”

  He rose and tried to approach me, but I backed toward the door. “Murphy, this should have been my decision. What gave you the right?”

  “I knew you wouldn’t do it,” he choked out. “I knew you’d choose the experiments. I thought if I agreed to help her it would buy us some time—I never imagined it would happen so fast.” He held out his hand. “Listen to me, Elizabeth. Don’t you know what you mean to me? I couldn’t stand for them to hurt you.”

  I could see how his guilt was tearing him apart, but this had no effect on me. That night had sustained me until our escape. He’d made me feel so safe and so wanted. So alive. And it had all been a trick. A manipulation. While I had believed he was making love to me, he was turning me into a living, breathing test tube.

  The Storm

  I couldn’t breathe. The ship was closing in on me.

  I started for the door.

  “Elizabeth, please wait…” Murphy’s hand closed on my arm. It was exactly the wrong thing for him to do.

  Spinning around, I let my hand fly across his face. It connected with a solid whack, stunning both of us.

  He took a step back, raising his hands in surrender. Okay, I get it.

  I fled to the galley, choking on the grapefruit-sized lump in my throat.

  Leaning over the big stainless basin, I turned on the water. It coughed out some rusty funk, sputtering fitfully a moment before running clear. Splashing water over my face, I hung over the sink trying to catch my breath. I couldn’t overcome the feeling I was suffocating.

  When I heard the door to the sleeping quarters slide open, I turned and headed for the cockpit. I didn’t want to be studied by those eyes. I didn’t want those lips spilling out any more horrors.

  “That was fast,” Garvey chortled.

  I stepped between the two consoles, staring out at clear blue sky and the expansive blanket of green below. My breathing slowed. My stomach settled. Now if only I could erase the last fifteen minutes.

  Yasmina watched me for a moment before she said, “Get out, Garvey.”

  His head jerked in her direction. “What the hell, woman?” But he glanced at me and got up, muttering to himself as he lumbered out.

  “You okay?” asked Yasmina.

  I nodded, keeping my eyes on the window.

  Sinking down in Garvey’s chair, I took a deep breath. The treetops seemed almost close enough to touch. I folded my arms over my stomach and leaned closer.

  “Do you always fly so low?” I asked.

  “Not always. But it’s safer for us.”

  I couldn’t understand why that would be, and my brain was still reeling too hard to puzzle it out.

  “Shall I tell you a secret about this ship?” She cut her ey
es at me, smiling. “You mustn’t ever tell Garvey I’ve told you.”

  “Okay.”

  “No one above our altitude can see us.”

  I thought about this for a second, but again came up blank. I didn’t know anything about transports. “Why?”

  She laughed, and it was a soothing, guileless sound. “We don’t know for sure, but we’re pretty sure it has something to do with our shipmates.” She stroked a broad fern frond. “It took a few narrow escapes from planet security to figure out something strange was going on. Even then, we didn’t understand what. Finally another transport captain noticed we’re invisible from above. The surface of the ship projects whatever is below us, as long as it’s living. Trees. Grass. Even ocean.”

  I spun my chair toward her. She had my full attention now. “That’s amazing. So you’re still visible from the ground?”

  “Yes. Though if we’re actually on the ground it’s a little more complicated.” Yasmina checked one of Garvey’s displays and typed a few strokes on her keypad. Then she glanced at me. “We’re not registered. We operate completely off the grid. Some of our cargo could get us in a lot of trouble. So we fly low and avoid the larger colonies.”

  “Do you know of other ships with this capability?”

  “Oh sure. There are plenty of military ships on Earth that use advanced camouflaging. But it requires a special hull design, and as far as I know there are no ships like that on Ardagh 1.” She smiled. “Gives us a competitive advantage.”

  The ship climbed with the rising topography as we approached a mountain range. I leaned toward the window again as we sailed over an alpine lake, still mostly frozen. We were so close to the ground I saw a herd of elk flee the water’s edge at our approach.

  “I wonder if it has to do with your relationship with Garvey.”

  Yasmina’s chair creaked. “How do you mean?”

  “Well, you work together. Beneath what seems to me a pretty thin veneer of contempt, it’s obvious you respect each other.” Yasmina chuckled, and I went on. “I’m convinced the bond between you is responsible for the vegetable matter in your cockpit. Maybe it’s also somehow responsible for your protective cloak.”

  As I said this, the view out the cockpit window abruptly changed. Forest still stretched as far as the eye could see, but we were approaching a wide band of dry, dead trees.

  “Look at that,” I murmured.

  “We see a lot of this,” Yasmina replied. “More all the time. Sometimes they’re on fire. You can see the smoke for miles. We’ve seen dead animals too.”

  I looked at her. “Animals?”

  “Yesterday we made a grain pickup in Mill Town, and we flew over a dozen buffalo carcasses in one of those high meadows south of Big Sky. There were a couple of calves, and I got all weepy over it. Garvey gave me hell. Then he started talking about steaks. He’s a heartless old bastard.”

  I remembered the way he’d been talking about her in the galley. “I don’t know about that.”

  Thinking about the galley reminded me that just a little while ago Murphy and I had been teasing and flirting, working up to something I’d been missing in those last weeks at the institute. It wasn’t something I could afford to dwell on right now.

  For a psychology Ph.D. candidate, I was sadly inept at emotional processing. I left problems scattered everywhere, like landmines waiting to explode in my face the moment I stopped watching my step. But growing up with my mother, I had seen what too much emotional processing could do to a person.

  “How is Sarah?” Yasmina asked quietly.

  My gaze drifted back to her face, which had gone soft and wistful. “It’s hard for me to say. She’s zipped up pretty tight, and I didn’t know her long.”

  Yasmina nodded, but I could see she was disappointed.

  “She seems to be getting along okay,” I added. “I think she must be lonely. I don’t suppose she can afford to get too close to anyone there.”

  “Like I said, that’s the way Sarah likes it.” Her bitterness was apparent in both tone and expression. I couldn’t get used to how beautiful she was, no matter what her face happened to be doing in any given moment. Wasn’t hard to see how a womanizer like Garvey would find her tough to live with.

  “Is she … important to you?”

  “She was.” Again she caressed the leaves of the plant in the instrument panel. “She is.”

  “Well, I owe her. She took a big risk helping us.”

  Yasmina turned her chair and gave me a frank look. “I was worried when I saw you. I rarely see Sarah, and then Garvey tells me we’re supposed to help her rescue some pretty scientist. Some ghost she’s formed an attachment to. I can be jealous, possessive, and unpleasant under the right circumstances. But then I saw the way he looked at you—the way he touched you—and I thought, there’s someone who’s in as deep as me. His heart is walking around outside his body.”

  My own heart warmed in a way I considered mutinous.

  “I don’t know,” I murmured, a tremor in my voice.

  She narrowed her dark eyes. “Sure you do.”

  I turned to the window, crossing my arms to stop the loosening in my chest. “He lied to me. He helped those people manipulate me.”

  “Did he tell you why?”

  “It doesn’t matter why.” I shook my head. “He asked me to trust him and then he betrayed me. What kind of person does that?”

  “Maybe he had no choice about what he did, and it was easier doing it knowing you trusted him.”

  I kept staring out the window, thinking she could be right, yet still hardening myself against him.

  After a minute or two Yasmina added, “One thing you should know. The place you’re going—you’ll be safe there from these people you’ve escaped. Devil’s Rock is far from any colony. The ghosts there know how to look out for themselves. But if you love him, it’s the wrong time to be punishing him. If you want to be with him, you’re going to have a fight on your hands.”

  I stared at her, alarmed. Before I could even open my mouth to question her, a crack of thunder almost knocked me out of the chair.

  “Shit!” Yasmina punched a button on the console and yelled, “Get in here, Garvey!”

  So far we’d seen nothing but blue sky interrupted by the occasional harmless puff of cotton, but inky black clouds had knitted themselves together out of nowhere.

  The transport bounced as I rose from Garvey’s chair, and I stumbled onto the deck.

  “Strap in,” called Yasmina. “We’ve got some rough air. Where the hell is that old goat?”

  Garvey came pounding into the cockpit, yelling, “Christ, have you gone to sleep up here, Yas?”

  “We got no warning, Garvey, not a blip. Sit down and navigate!”

  Garvey belted in and I rose from the deck, mesmerized by the sky outside the window. Lightning flashed in the bank of dark clouds, exposing the cracks and crevices. The sky let loose a heavy rain, eliminating visibility, and a moment later big chunks of ice started pelting the hull.

  “What the fuck next?” bellowed Garvey. “Locusts?”

  “Just get us out, Garvey!”

  I steadied myself on the back of Yasmina’s chair as we bumped along, afraid if I moved away from the window I’d be sick. But another blast of air caused a steep bounce, tossing me against Garvey.

  “Strap down or get out!” he barked, shoving me off him.

  The ship dipped and I staggered backward into a warm body.

  Murphy hooked his arms around my waist, dragging me to the jump seats.

  “Let go of me!” I protested.

  “You can fight with me later,” he muttered, thrusting me into a seat and strapping me in. “You’re going to break your neck.”

  He belted into the seat next to me.

  “Garvey, what the hell?” snapped Yasmina.

  “I’m trying! The fucking thing is local, just a squall, but it’s like it’s moving with us. Hold on!”

  The ship bucked wildly and the h
arness straps dug into my shoulders. I closed my eyes, releasing a prayer to the universe that this transport ride wouldn’t end like my last one apparently had.

  It wasn’t long before the bouncing began to ease off, but the slower rocking of the ship triggered a wave of motion sickness. I let my head fall back against the wall, willing my stomach to settle.

  My fingers dug into my thigh, and Murphy’s hand covered mine. “We’re coming out of it now.”

  I flinched at his touch, pulling my hand away. “I need you to give me some space, Murphy.”

  He reached for my chin and pulled it toward him, holding it there. “I have something else to say to you, and then I’ll go to hell if that’s what you want. Don’t be confused about what happened that night. I wanted you desperately. I wanted you to want me. I felt that way before the institute. I wish it could have been under different circumstances, but I did what I felt I had to do to protect you.”

  I tugged my chin free, focusing outside the ship, where a gap of blue sky widened between the storm clouds. “You don’t understand,” I said quietly.

  “Then help me to, love.”

  I turned and fixed my eyes on him, though I thought it would kill me. “I don’t get many choices, Murphy. I go where you go. I live how you live, and according to your rules. Who I give myself to, whether or not I have a baby—those should have been my choices. You asked me to trust you, and then you took those choices away from me.”

  On my last words his gaze dropped to the floor. I waited for him to reply.

  It made it easier that he didn’t.

  Devil’s Rock

  “Stay strapped in,” Garvey said when we’d escaped the storm clouds. “We’ll be landing soon.”

  “Can you give us a better idea of what we’re walking into?” I asked.

  Garvey and Yasmina exchanged glances.

  “Okay, how about: I’m not getting off this transport until somebody explains why none of you want to talk about these people.”

  “Blake Kenner, the group’s leader, paid us to pick you up,” said Garvey. “If he hadn’t wanted you out of that hellhole, you wouldn’t be out. Since he’s our best customer, and not a man I ever want to fuck with, you are getting off.”