Black Phoenix

by B. V. Larson

“We understand. No one living has done so. But you have the background, right? The training?”

  Neva nodded, but she was stunned. Navigation wasn’t a realistic career option aboard Tarassis. The ship had only changed course twice, and that had happened long, long ago.

  “I’d estimate we could steer Tarassis onto a different course in about a week. But we can’t even nudge the ship unless we have the decoding routine, which should be in the captain’s office.”

  “That little prick Chisolm would know where it is,” one of the agents suggested.

  Neva huddled with several of the agents and the bridge officers and began planning and exchanging information for the initial procedures.

  With no one holding him or aiming a weapon at him, Scarn decided to leave the scene and take a walk. No one stopped him.

  Chapter TWENTY-EIGHT

  Neva stood across the bed from Scarn and pulled her shirt off over her head.

  “I’ve flushed my system,” Scarn said, “and I’ve been sane for an entire day now—way too long.” He watched the muscles in her arms dance as she unfastened the rest of her clothes.

  “I know how you feel,” she said.

  Scarn stared at her across the white rectangle of the bed and she stared back. Her eyes glittered.

  Like two animals, they went for each other. This time, the pheromones were their own.

  Eventually, Scarn left her to work on her navigational calculations, and the day passed pleasantly. She had to be certain every ounce of thrust was calculated correctly. She even had to take into account the added weight due to bits of accumulated ice they’d picked up on the nose section after passing near a comet years ago.

  Scarn didn’t call her that night, and she noticed it. Finally, during the next afternoon, she called him.

  After a delay, a dwarfish man with the look of a salvaged breather from the lower decks appeared. He was crew, but of the lowest rank.

  “Cleaning service,” he grunted.

  “Mr. Scarn, please?”

  “He’s moved out. He’s not getting his deposit back on this place, either, I can tell you that much…”

  “What? He’s moved?”

  “I guess,” he said. “I’m just the clean-up crew, lady.”

  Neva felt a burning sensation on her cheeks. It was the flush of panic. “I’d really like to find him. Is there anything you can tell me that would help?”

  “Let me be clear: I don’t know, and I couldn’t say if I did. Luck.”

  The channel closed. After taking six rapid breaths, she called Turtle.

  When he answered, his eyes still squinted from sleep.

  “Good morning,” he said. His face was a question.

  “Do you know where Scarn is?”

  “No.” Turtle was now awake. “Why?”

  “Then he’s gone, as in ‘vanished.’ A cleaner told me he moved.”

  “Since yesterday? Bullshit. Meet me on Deck 30, violet sector.”

  What happened next was a shock. Before she could straighten her clothes and get out the door, her husband returned, Commander Jaxon Dallen himself.

  Neva watched him walk in. He didn’t even look at her. Her mouth sagged open. He hadn’t been shot into the core? And he been released from custody?

  Ignoring her entirely, he walked through their quarters while mumbling. “...the possibility of more data on the coding gates....” He went straight to the food dispenser, which had not been working well lately, and squirted a dark tarry coil into a bowl. He leaned low over the counter, hovered over the bowl, and spooned it into his mouth. He began mmming and nodding and mumbling to himself as he swallowed.

  As far as Neva could tell, he was unaware of her presence. That made it easier for her to leave.

  She met Turtle in a far corner of the lounge, away from the loudest people—celebrations had been non-stop since the captain’s evisceration. Nonetheless, the crew was inventing work-arounds to get the ship ready for the prolonged engine thrust they had heard was coming. They hadn’t had to stow equipment and batten things down for decades.

  The crew had been working double shifts. Whenever they got off duty, the spacers bought narco-drinks till they had to be carried back to their quarters from exhaustion.

  Neva told Turtle how she had done the standard search for Scarn, found nothing, and had to assume that he was in one of the quarantined areas again. “Turtle… I need you to find him.”

  They looked at each other for a few moments.

  “I don’t know where to start,” Turtle objected.

  “Yes, you do. You’ve got to search the quarantined decks. I’d do it myself, but they’ve got me plotting a course for the ship.”

  “I don’t know…” Turtle said at last. “There are guards at all the sealed entrances, and I don’t know of any we could bribe. They’ll tell you that medical personnel are inside doing their job. They probably even believe it.”

  “Haven’t they at least recorded the names of everyone who’s in there? They must have trackers implanted, right?”

  “As they would say, ‘Our medical personnel are doing their professional best. You can count on it.’ Reminds me of an old Earth saying: ‘We thought it would be better this time, but it was just a newer version of the same old thing.’”

  “Tarassis is still in shock after the captain’s death,” Neva said. “They’re disorganized… maybe you can’t get in there in person, but I’m thinking you could use a probe unit to search for Scarn.”

  Turtle looked at her blankly.

  “Instead of probing a hundred light-years out, could a psychonaut set his range very, very close? Like a hundred meters, maybe less?”

  “That close?” He looked troubled. “It’s dangerous, I’ve been told. If you lock onto yourself and set up a feedback loop, it’s like putting a speaker next to the microphone. Except in this case your conscious mind explodes inside your head.”

  “Then don’t do that. But could you try it? Investigate the decks without actually having to break through quarantine?”

  “Yeah… Probably. But I’ll need assistance from someone, such as yourself, to help get the probe fine-tuned. I don’t want anyone to come along and flash me after they discover I’m on an unauthorized scouting mission.”

  She looked at Turtle for a moment. “If Scarn’s mind is still recognizable, if he’s still alive, we have to find him, Turtle.”

  “Yeah. He would try for me.”

  Neva gazed at him again. “Pardon me,” she said.

  “For what?”

  She put her arms around Turtle, pressed her cheek against his, and held him to her. Turtle awkwardly patted his big hands on her back.

  Five seconds later, she stepped back from him and said, “When can you start?”

  “Half an hour. I’ll find an unused unit. You go to your quarters, so I can get a position fix. If you feel a tingle between your ears, it’s me.”

  “You would do anything for Scarn,” she said, smiling.

  “He’s all I’ve got.” He gave it a second thought. “But you’re starting to count, too.”

  Chapter TWENTY-NINE

  Days passed, rumors multiplied, but Scarn had not been found. In order to help Turtle keep his probe unit calibrated on her location, Neva had to spend more hours than she wanted in her quarters. Every hour or two, the probe unit vector would become unstable and Turtle would have to reset it based on her known position.

  In the mornings, her mysteriously surviving husband Commander Dallen would sit across the table from her, and in a low monotone, he would recount the reasons why Tarassis hadn’t yet been moved—ranging from inconsequential to incoherent... The codes couldn’t be found. They were found but were encrypted. They were decrypted but then found not to be the correct codes, etc. There was something wrong with his thinking, and she no longer had much interest in finding out what it was. Perhaps he was possessed.

  As for the search for a new captain of Tarassis, he mumbled fragments of what everyone had
heard. That various factions of UT were in disagreement, with the guests wanting more authority and the crew standing firm on tradition. Secret platoons of vigilantes were forming on both sides and some decks were reportedly arming themselves.

  Dallen’s morning monologues, which should have been interesting and informative, invariably devolved into byzantine intricacies and exceptions. Each of his points led to compounded digressions until she found it painful to listen. Eventually, his talks ended in long periods of staring silence.

  Neva knew that the bridge crew was on edge as well. The ruling council of United Tarassis had been unable to select a new captain because the guests and the crew were rekindling their old animosity. Sensing that they needed a fresh unifying hope for the colony, the groups assigned to firing up the old engines and shifting their course had redoubled their efforts. Neva was among these, and she’d completed her efforts at navigational computation. She hoped her calculations would prove correct.

  In the absence of a captain, the Security Chief Emma Venner, working with First Officer Chisolm, had unofficially assumed the role. In the post-Stattor reorganization, many positions had been reassigned.

  Much to her disgust, once Neva had finished her navigational work, she’d been summoned to work several hours a day in the office of Chisolm. He was Stattor’s former right hand, and it was obvious he intended to be his successor. He’d already claimed victimhood and been given a desk in the star-light filled pod Captain Stattor had used for his own.

  Reporting there, Neva found a gigaload of ship-maintenance data to occupy her time, but Chisolm’s frank stares made the work difficult to focus on.

  More days passed and dozens of hours were spent with Chisolm’s data blocks. When she went out in the afternoon or evening, it was usually to meet the exhausted Turtle in one of the lounges. There, they would often see one or more crewmen who would suddenly look up with animal fear in their eyes. That look, that twitchy behavior—they had come to recognize it easily. Something alien was now taking residence in another human mind.

  The only good news was the aliens seemed to be refining their technique. More of the humans could tolerate the invasion. They didn’t like it, clearly. But they didn’t become self-destructive. They might bite their arms, or mumble, but they didn’t murder or mutilate. It was an improvement, but it was no solution.

  Sometimes the possessed managed to accept the situation with a shrug. Their faces might merely go blank, or they would grotesquely curl up their arms and hands in front of their chests and chatter like angry rodents.

  But in the worst cases, they would still panic, shriek, and run wildly. This would continue until bystanders or Security brought them down.

  So far, the worsening conditions aboard Tarassis had only slowed in Stattor’s absence. The snake was without a head now, but it still managed to kill its young.

  After her meetings with Turtle to check on his progress, Neva dreaded going back to her quarters. There, she was forced to exist with what Dallen had become. To do otherwise would gain the further scrutiny of Chief Venner and First Officer Chisolm. She desperately wanted to find Scarn again, but she didn’t want to exiled and end up roaming the quarantined decks to join him.

  And now, in her repugnant spousal arrangement....

  Once she had liked the smell Dallen’s face left on his pillow, but now it repelled her. Now, when he undressed, she would turn her back, not wanting to see the body in which he lived. And this was the man for whom she had left her people behind. She’d been born a guest, but she’d turned crew and studied astro-navigation in order to become an acceptable mate for a commander.

  Looking back, the choices she had made now seemed absurd to her. To have done such a thing for a man she’d so misread.... Others had warned her of the dangers of choosing a mate from the opposite faction, but she’d been as impetuous in her youth as she now was careful.

  Two weeks to the day after Scarn’s disappearance, Neva silently got out of bed and began to dress. She wore a dark shape over her breast, an heirloom brooch one of her distant grandmothers had brought from Earth. She normally made a point of concealing it with her clothes, as it resembled a spider more than anything else.

  She reminded herself who she was and where she’d come from. She was a guest from a very high deck. She’d been born in a suite, not a bunk or dim-lit cargo hold.

  Where crew tended to panic, guests were supposed to coolly examine a situation. Where crew tended to fall into hopeless, self-destructive love, guests might excuse themselves and move on. Conversely, if she desired, she could free herself. She could decide to turn her whims into throes of ecstasy and feel seizures of passion as crazed as any crew or lowly breather.

  Now, however she felt ashamed. She had betrayed her natural charm and guile, which was part of her heritage. Her gifts as a high-born guest had been frittered away. She’d used these talents to love a man who mumbled in his sleep and ate like a dog.

  Finally dressed, she began to feel the darkness was too close around her. She turned on the lights and let her day begin.

  At 7: 20 AM, mumbling a series of numbers, Dallen passed by her on his way to the food dispenser. When he returned with a bowl of brown sludge and a spoon, he was saying something about, “...coherent reassembly of unitary….”

  She called him very loudly. “Commander?”

  He paused and looked up at her from his bowl and spoon.

  “I have something important to say.”

  His eyebrows folded the skin between them. He seemed to be silently translating her words into his private language.

  “Can you understand me?”

  “The regression isn’t infinite. It’s important that we know that.”

  “Listen to me, this is important: I’ve bypassed the details of our contract renewal clause. Do you understand? I’ve revoked our spousal contract. The amendment has already been filed. Do you hear me, Jaxon?”

  He pointed at her with the gooey spoon and cleared his mouth. “What?”

  “Our living arrangement is annulled. Our spousal contract is void.”

  He seemed confused. “But I wasn’t talking about that.”

  She sighed. She considered giving it another try, but his blankly quizzical look told her it would be an additional waste of her life.

  Chapter THIRTY

  Commander Dallen’s hand dropped to his side. The nutrient paste on his spoon slid onto the floor. He lifted the spoon again and pointed it at her. “If you.... If we, um.... You could adjust your mind.” He nodded his head, but his focus was clearly wandering. “You....”

  From outside their door, in the passageway, they heard the sudden shrill yelping of yet someone else who had been zerked. The muffled thumps were the fists and feet striking the floor and walls during the seizure.

  Neither Dallen nor Neva spoke while the noises continued. Security would come by soon and take the person away; they had become very efficient.

  After the final feeble thumps, Dallen spoke again. “Rescuing this ship is of the utmost... but I worry about the photon condenser. The ignition point density....” He began reciting maximum and minimum numbers.

  She peered at him. She spoke to him gently, as though speaking to a pet. “Neither one of us is who we used to be, when we first fell in love.” Those words at least felt honest, whether or not he understood them. She looked on him now as one who needed assistance and monitoring—but it wasn’t going to be from her.

  He stared at the brooch she wore on her chest. “You loved me with that. You need to....” He waggled his head and made gestures with his hand to replace the words he couldn’t think of.

  “Are you saying I should will myself to love you? Have you noticed that you haven’t spoken to me in a week? Have you noticed that you repeat yourself incessantly? Have you noticed that the food you eat has the faint smell of waste? Have you noticed that something is very, very wrong with you?”

  At that moment, he looked more stricken than usual. His head hung
forward, cocked a little sideways, and a thin string of drool began its trail off his lower lip.

  “Jaxon?” she asked in concern.

  He blinked rapidly, his mouth and face twitching, and he began making spitting noises. Like paws, his hands drew up and curled under his chin. Abruptly, he moved sideways, knocking his formchair backward. Strangely alert, with his fingers flexing beside his face like mandibles, he eyed her as though she were strange and dangerous. He backed away and scanned the room in twitches.

  “Jaxon!” she said sharply. “Can you understand me?”

  In response, he chittered and slinked backward. Who or whatever looked at her through his eyes was no longer anyone she knew.

  In a sudden seizure, he choked for air, chewed the inside of his mouth, and his arms flailed in every direction. He slung blood and spit over the floor and cabinets and threw himself across the room.

  Neva was ready to grab and hold him till the seizure passed, but the latch on the front door slid quietly open.

  Two security men stepped inside. They’d used their passcode and now stood there, observing the situation. The blue-uniformed security crewmen stepped farther inside their stateroom.

  One of them casually moved Neva aside with a thick arm. Neither of them made any sudden moves or gave harsh commands.

  “Are you safe, ma’am?” The fatter of the two asked.

  “Yes, I am.”

  The other officer had his trank gun out. He aimed at Dallen and fired. It made the tiniest pop and in five seconds, Dallen slumped heavily into the nearest wall. He slid down it and sat on the floor with his mouth open.

  “And there we go,” the officer said.

  He holstered his weapon. He seemed to be a pleasant enough man.

  “I didn’t call you,” Neva said.

  “But aren’t you lucky we came by?”

  “I didn’t call you. How did you know this was happening?”

  The security man with the gun pointed a finger at Dallen. “Is this gentleman someone dear to you? It looks like he was having a violent seizure reaction and could have hurt himself—or worse—if we hadn’t come by. I’d say he was lucky. I’d say we were all lucky.”