Black Phoenix

by B. V. Larson

  He hit the OPEN stud by the suit hangers and the hatch opened to the interior of Tarassis. Only then did Scarn unseal his helmet and lift it off. The air was heavy, moist, and it stank of skin and clothes that had been sweat-soaked repeatedly until the air was dense with odor.

  He unfastened the front closures of his suit and stepped out of it, noticing as he did so that he was being watched by someone inside the ship. They crept among the shadows, five or six meters distant.

  The figure stood only half-concealed. It stopped moving as if aware of his scrutiny.

  Scarn looked directly at him—then he startled and stepped backward. It was a man, scrawny, long-limbed, probably in his thirties—but he looked much older.

  “I’m psychonaut Scarn. I—”

  The man lurched backward. “Don’t hurt me!”

  “I was in trouble and had to stop here. Why would I hurt you?”

  The man slumped and cringed behind the crossed arms he held in front of his face. “I don’t mean any harm!” he barked, still backing away. “I didn’t do anything!”

  “I didn’t either,” Scarn said. “My shuttle malfunctioned while I—”

  “Scarn! You’re dead!” the man cried, cowering and protecting himself with his arms. “The voice told us! Scarn is dead!”

  “I don’t feel dead, and you can hear me talking.”

  “They said—but you—” The man staggered sideways and let himself drop into an unpowered formchair. He bowed his face to his knees and made hacking sobs into his hands. In bits and pieces, he spoke again. “I don’t know anything anymore. I can’t understand anything anymore, and I can’t tell what I’ll do next.” His back heaved and shuddered.

  Scarn noticed that the man’s clothes were rotting and spotted with filth; his hands, slick with tears and mucus, were scabbed and damaged, as though he had used them as tools.

  Scarn moved away from him to appear less threatening and leaned back against a console.

  “Who told you I was dead?” Scarn asked.

  The man looked up at him, out of sunken red eyes. “The voice. It said you were possessed while you were in the shuttle and killed yourself. Suicide.”

  “That didn’t happen. The shuttle was rigged to kill me.”

  “The voice said you were a hero of United Tarassis, but that you were dead.”

  “The voice was wrong on all counts.”

  Scarn reflected that Commander Dallen had prepared elaborately for this trick.

  “But you could be dead,” the man said. He crawled out of the formchair and stood up. His mouth tightened into a wrinkled slash. “You probably are dead, and you probably aren’t even here. I’m possessed, you know.”

  He came nearer, gliding toward him like liquid while his hands formed into crusty fists.

  “Look at me,” Scarn said. “Look at what’s in front of your face instead of what’s in your head.”

  “Sometimes I see things that aren’t real, and the only way I can tell if they’re real or not is to tear them apart.” His eyes now had the focused look of a predator. “You’re dead,” he said flatly, starting to move on Scarn. “You’re dead and I’m imagining you.”

  When the man drew back his fist, Scarn gave him the heel of his hand, not too hard, in the middle of his forehead—the man was frail and slow—but Scarn needed to refocus the man’s attention. The poor bastard staggered awkwardly away and fell across one of the consoles.

  Casually, with no hostility, Scarn spoke again. “I’m imagining you, and I’m imagining that you’re feeling better. I’m imagining that you want to talk to me, like you used to talk to people when everyone was well. I’m thinking that you’re feeling a little better now.”

  The man’s eyes rolled around the control room like a drunk’s and back to his own feet on the floor. From his pigeon-toed slack-shouldered slump, he nodded.

  “Sit in the chair,” Scarn said.

  Moving like his bones were softening, the man complied. “I hate my mind,” he mumbled. “I hate everything.”

  The man’s lips, Scarn now noticed, were gray and swollen.

  “When I first looked into this lounge, I saw three people in here. Where are they and any others?”

  “They’re afraid of everything. I’m the sanest one. We’re all possessed... by demons or by aliens. We don’t know.” His eyes became large and round. “If you’re imagining me, imagine me dead, all right? If you’re not dead, could you kill me? Please? The thing in my mind... it makes everything confused. I get scared, and it gets scared.”

  “Why do you think there’s something inside you? It could be your own mind talking to you.”

  The tall man’s face leered up at Scarn. Behind his blotchy yellow teeth, his white tongue flapped inside his mouth. Then he brayed like a tortured animal—it was supposed to be a laugh.

  “I was a psychonaut! I know alien minds.” He gasped and wheezed. His breath stank. “I went out over six hundred times but the last time, when the probe brought me back, something was waiting for me.... I wasn’t ready for it. Fortunately, it wasn’t entirely ready for me. You think I don’t know what an alien mind feels like after six hundred probes?” He grinned an ugly grin. His lips were glistened with thick saliva. “You think I don’t know what’s happening to us?”

  “What’s happening to us?”

  The man began talking rapidly, without intonation, like a machine running too fast. “Things inside us get scrambled. Their language is like barking or screaming...” He seized his head with his hands and squeezed his eyes tight. “I can’t listen, I don’t want to hear it.”

  He panted a moment, released his head, and looked at Scarn.

  “Gone now. You can’t understand anything when that happens. All I get is fear, and how they think we’re stupid, awkward grazers.” He dropped his voice to a whisper. “I think they used to eat animals that look like us. But they’re afraid of something besides being trapped in our flesh. I think they found something bad out here with their own probes....” He whispered even more softly. “They might be hiding.”

  He stopped and dropped his eyes to his wrecked hands. When he again turned his face toward Scarn, it was a mask of disgust. “Look at us! Look at us!” he screamed. “We’re dead people! Why doesn’t somebody help us?”

  Good question, Scarn was thinking

  The man sank back into the limp formchair. His mouth drooped open and his eyes closed to slits. He looked dead.

  For Captain Stattor to allow Tarassis personnel to be compromised like this, there had to be a large personal gain in the form of power and/or money. But how could the captain extract either by letting aliens drive the crew mad?

  “Do you know how I can get out of this area?”

  The man inhaled deeply. “The way you came in. Everything else is sealed.”

  Scarn was afraid of that. If the suit had enough air, he supposed he could crawl along the outside edges of the levels till he found a free area.

  “Why leave?” the man asked. “They’ll just bring you back later and throw you in. You’re safer with the lunatics than with the murderers.” He slouched back on the inactive chair. “I hope you’re wrong about this being real,” he rasped, “because if it is, we don’t deserve to survive.”

  “Is there any other way? Any passages with guards I can talk to?”

  For a long half minute, the man stared at Scarn as though he were from some other world. His blank, pale face looked blanker, and then he alerted, stood, and went to a door that led to an inner part of the level.

  “Follow,” he said.

  Scarn followed, not knowing what to expect.

  Just before the man touched the latch, he spoke to Scarn again. “You’ll soon be dead like the rest of us. This is your future. Don’t worry about it.”

  Scarn stood well behind the man as the door slid back.

  The humid stench rolled over them in a wave, stinking like the feces of a diseased carnivore. The air was dense, wet, and rich with decay and the tang o
f ozone.

  Scarn stepped in after the man, his curiosity overriding his revulsion. The passage before them was cluttered with papers, crushed mem-crystals, smashed containers of electronic modules, broken dishes... and a dozen meters away, some dark and shapeless thing lay against the smeared wall—perhaps it was a body, perhaps it was covered trash.

  He followed further, keeping a safe distance between himself and the man in case he wanted to test his reality again by attacking Scarn.

  Wherever he was being taken, he saw no one—but several times, quickly glancing back, he saw indistinct shapes disappear behind corners.

  “We’re being followed.”

  The man ignored him and led on.

  “Where is everyone?” Scarn finally asked.

  “Ahead.”

  At the midpoint of a cluttered passage, the man swerved toward a door labeled REST AREA and pushed it open.

  It should have been a comfortable lounging area. It had been furnished with fat sofas and chairs, a few racks of entertainment memcubes, a food and drink dispenser, and even a few books lying here and there.

  It should have been a comfortable place, but now it wasn’t.

  “Here we suffer together, but we always die alone.”

  The furniture had been gutted and the stuffing heaped at one end of the room. Across it, eight or nine people lay in random poses. They lay across each other like they’d been thrown there.

  “Psychonauts,” the man said. “Terminally flashed.”

  Scarn looked at them, but he couldn’t tell if they were breathing. Their color wasn’t that of dead people, but....

  On the pile of bodies, a hand moved. The fingers of the hand opened.

  Scarn followed the arm to the face, a woman’s face. Her nose had been broken and she still had flakes of old blood down her chin. He watched her mouth open, draw her lips back from her teeth, and make biting movements.

  In a rasp, she spoke. “Kill... us.”

  Scarn looked to his guide. “Is she in pain?”

  From somewhere else in the pile, another voice whined, barely audible, “Somazine... today?”

  “What is she talking about?”

  “Every few days, someone throws a handful of Somazine tabs down to us. The stronger ones fight for it. A few people hoard enough for suicide—the lucky ones. Not many. The parasites in us have a stronger will to live than we do. They try to keep us alive.”

  The man turned and led Scarn farther on. They passed through the crossover to the next sector and then along another cluttered passageway. At one point, he staggered over to the handrail and held it as a minor seizure passed over him.

  After a minute, he turned to Scarn. “Those things in us, sometimes they panic. They panic and....” For a moment he seemed about to weep. “They’re as afraid of us as we are of them—and they’ve given up everything to live, insane, inside us.”

  “If I can get out of here, I’m going to see if we can get the ship to change course. Then we can get some help.”

  “They’ll put you in here.”

  The man turned and led Scarn into two facing rows of abandoned probe machines. It was here, at one time, that psychonauts had wired themselves in and shot their consciousnesses to thousands of worlds, looking for technology, minerals, intelligence, work animals, any survey knowledge that could be used or sold later on.

  It was an abomination, the whole thing, and Scarn had been a part of it.

  Here, in some kind of frenzied retaliation, every probe unit had been kicked in, pulled open and gutted, with the smaller parts beaten into rubbish with the heavier ones.

  The tall man pointed to a booth that had most of the wreckage cleared away.

  “Here,” he said. “Before things got too bad, some of the normals in here with us cut a hole through to the next level. You see that tunnel? It goes into a storage area in the normal world.”

  “Then there is a way out—why don’t you leave?”

  “If they found me, they’d throw me into the core. My parasite doesn’t want that.”

  Scarn knelt and pulled aside a bent-edged panel that had been wedged into the opening. “Thank you. What’s your name?” he asked the man.

  The madman’s slack face twitched and his mouth opened spastically, as though he was trying to force a word through his larynx that he was not equipped to speak. He shook his head wildly, like a dog. “I can’t! I can’t!” He began sobbing and gasping and beating his face with both hands. “My voice wants to say... to say...” He held his face. “I don’t know how!” Blood seeped between his fingers.

  Scarn slipped away into the tunnel the poor bastard had shown him. He moved beyond that into an orderly storage unit filled with bed linens and small pillows. The filtered air had no odor, and the neatness of the supplies on the shelves gave him great relief.

  Taking the chance, he stepped out into the open. There, he walked among the busy workers, and everything again appeared utterly normal. Some of them glanced at him, perhaps detecting the trace of a lingering stench, but he moved quickly onward.

  Chapter TWENTY-FIVE

  Walking through the corridor toward the drop-shaft, Scarn overheard pieces of conversation about someone’s coffee break, another person’s previous dinner, and a woman who whispered to another woman about a man who’d brought her a real flower. “An honest-to-God flower,” she said.

  Everything was so ordinary that Scarn began to wonder about what had just happened to him. It almost seemed like the insane man had been right. That display of horrors he’d seen…. He would be relieved if he thought he’d hallucinated the whole thing.

  In this place of overwhelming ordinariness, how could he have just stepped out of a nightmare of disease and screaming? But when Scarn paused a moment before entering the drop-shaft, he caught the smell of decay and dead air that lingered in his clothes. It had been real enough.

  He was on a guest deck, but he was clearly crew—and he stank. He suffered their irritated glances without meeting them. When he found replacement clothes in a locker on a side corridor, he took them and threw the others into a chute. Then he dared to make a call.

  He blanked his return image and put in Neva’s ID. He didn’t want any visual trace of him showing up on the UT comm monitors, and while speaking he would alter his tone and accenting and hope for the best.

  He waited nearly a minute and almost ended the call—but then a rainbow of color flickered inside the mini-stage, and Neva’s face appeared.

  She was as lovely as ever, but something was wrong. She lay slumped in a formchair with her hair encircling her face. Her eyes were full of worry.

  “Scarn?” she asked without interest. “Why are you calling now?”

  He felt a pang of rejection. How could her feelings for him have evaporated so quickly?

  “I wanted to see you again,” he said.

  Neva said nothing. She made no movement, but her entire attitude changed. She leaned minutely forward and peered closer at the monitor.

  They were both assuming someone was listening.

  “Security just ransacked my quarters, Scarn. The came in, tore everything apart, and took... They took him...” She leaned forward and covered her face with her hands.

  “Dallen was detained? Why did they take him?”

  “They said he’d killed a psychonaut. They announced it publicly.”

  “That isn’t true. It was me he tried to kill, and he obviously failed.”

  “You?”

  Scarn didn’t feel like he needed to answer.

  Somehow, Dallen had immediately caught all the heat. He wondered how the authorities had made the decision to point a finger at a crew Commander instead of a breather, a much more typical scapegoat. Sure, Dallen was less than likeable, but could it be more than that?

  Had someone higher up found out and disapproved of his little shuttle-trick? Or had the captain simply decided it was an excellent opportunity to rid himself of a rival?

  Scarn was mildly conflicted
. Jaxon Dallen had tried to kill him, so at least he deserved to be arrested, but Neva was upset about it.

  “It’s probably just a formality,” he said, wanting to comfort her while privately hoping they sent Dallen to the lowest levels.

  Scarn disconnected the call and left the lounge, trying to look casual as he surveyed the adjoining passage and then moved on to drop-shaft where he did his best to face away from the security monitors. If anything was going to come to anything, he needed to be thought dead as long as possible.

  Like a stalked animal, he moved out of the drop-shaft and into the flow of traffic. Minutes later, he stood in front of Neva Savvan’s door, heard it signal his presence... and it opened. She frowned in disbelief as she stepped aside for him to come in.

  He put his arms around her, across her back, as she gripped the folds of his shirt in her two hands. He put his face against her hair and breathed in. It was a smell he could never get enough of.

  “While you were on your way over, the bulletin came out that it was you that got killed when your shuttle malfunctioned,” she told him. “Everyone still thinks you’re dead.”

  “It was close. I didn’t think I’d see you again. The shuttle’s sensors were rigged to believe the ship was docking when it wasn’t. I was supposed to be decompressed.”

  “I’m sorry—he did it, that he tried to kill you. He really seems to hate you.”

  Scarn shrugged. He’d been hated by lots of people below-decks. “I guess it isn’t all that surprising.”

  “He said things when they were taking him.” Her voice was muffled against him and he felt the heat of her breath through his shirt. “They forced their way in here. He tried to bribe the security men. After they hit him a few times, he started saying things about Captain Stattor.”

  Scarn pulled back enough to look into her face but still held her close. Her eyes were wide and frightened. “He said Stattor was dealing directly with the aliens. He was letting our people become possessed.” She shook her head, almost like a tremor. “The captain wouldn’t do that, would he?”