Black Phoenix

by B. V. Larson

  He turned his back to his partner, who pulled a folded portable gurney out of his backpack. “We’ll get him to an infirmary right away for an evaluation.”

  “How did you know?” Neva repeated.

  “Just a coincidence,” one said.

  “Purely by luck,” said the second. “We were strolling by, and we heard him zerk out. We heard yelling and thumping. This sector is so quiet on better days.”

  “…I was just saying how calm it was in the passages today,” the first man said.

  Neva’s eyes slid from one to the other and back again.

  “There was no yelling,” she said.

  The two men glanced at each other.

  “Well,” one of them said, “we must have heard something, otherwise we wouldn’t have stopped by. Right?”

  Neva let their lies fade into a moment of silence. “He’s going to be red-zoned, isn’t he?”

  “No, no.” They flipped a few latches and popped the gurney into shape. “A lot of things have the same symptoms as this. A few pills, he could be back by this afternoon, good as new.”

  They got him loaded and strapped down and began maneuvering him around the furniture to the front door.

  “Good day. Glad we could be of assistance.”

  They both smiled, nodded, and rolled Dallen away.

  Neva pinged Turtle and waited only minutes before he called back.

  After she reported what had just occurred, Turtle was unhappy. “So what we have is an organized program. But who’s organizing it? I thought the good guys were running things now.”

  “Do you have anything on Scarn yet?”

  “Nothing. It’s a slow process.”

  She squeezed her eyes shut. “I guess you would have told me.”

  “The process is too slow,” Turtle admitted. “I have to ease into the person’s consciousness without throwing them into a new hysteria, and then look and listen for anything familiar, like any of Scarn’s memories—or if their memories contain any traces of seeing Scarn. Some of them, if they’ve been badly zerked, are very quiet inside so it takes a while. And these god damned probe units.... Anything with Gomax installed for us might as well be a piece of snot with a wire through it.” Turtle’s image looked at her. “You’re showing your brooch.... Does that imply one or two things?”

  “It does. I’m surprised you know that much about us.”

  “And you have to work with Chisolm? He’s not going to get under your skin today, is he?”

  “No.” With the slightest smile she touched the red and black spider below her neck. “Not today, he won’t.”

  Chapter THIRTY-ONE

  Neva was unhappy to run into Luan in Chisolm’s office. She was a guest descendant, but some would say she’d descended too far in choosing to become an openly sexual person.

  The shape of Luan’s nose had been in style a year ago but was now considered a bit too thin for current tastes. She had large eyes and from various treatments had lost all her body hair below her neckline. Despite her baby-skin, she displayed extravagant eyebrows, eyelashes, and a thick ponytail. A lot of her skin was visible through openings, meshwork, and transparencies in her clothes, including portions of her legs, buttocks, torso and breasts. The skin on all of them was as smooth and blemish-free as the finest quality latex.

  Women routinely admired her clothes, but she thrived on men admiring the entire package.

  “You’re late!” Luan snapped when Neva entered the office. Luan had her little feet propped on a chair and was watching something on her handpad.

  Neva sat at her station and told it to power up. Dozens of subsystems had blown out the day after Stattor had. Like Stattor, they were still dead. The common blame went to the substandard replacement parts, and the resulting work-arounds were intricate, time-consuming, and not completely reliable.

  But whether it was bad equipment or the rumored sabotage, so many systems had gone down during the upheaval that even life-support had been compromised.

  Once her navigational calculations had been finished, Neva’s new assignment was to enter blocks of data, manipulating and filtering them six directions. This would instruct each system or another on Tarassis to continue, modify its function, or shut down.

  Neva checked the to-do screen and found it packed with three or four times the normal load. Once again, Luan had been useless.

  “Haven’t you done anything today?”

  Luan clicked off whatever she was looking at. “I got about ten minutes into it, then Chisolm walks in. ‘I didn’t sleep well last night,’ he says. ‘So?’ I said to him. And he says, ‘The news today is agitating.’ He actually said that: ‘The news today is agitating.’” Luan rolled her large eyes. “Well, we all know what that means. So I told him, ‘I can’t help you. I had a lot of activity last night and I’m resting up from that.’ You know how he humps up his little chicken-bone shoulders and smooths down that hair of his when he gets huffy? He stood there and did that. Hump and smooth.”

  Chisolm’s door silently opened behind Luan. He stepped just inside their work area and listened to her with an expression that grew fouler by the moment.

  “So he goes into all this ‘If you refuse to help me, then you’re refusing to help benefit the ship’s welfare, blah, blah, blah.’ You get the idea.”

  Chisolm walked into the room where Luan could see him. She was not intimidated. She even looked at him as she finished: “I told him ‘Sorr-rry. Shop’s closed.’” With a looping demonstrative sweep, she crossed her legs.

  Luan opened a desk drawer beside her and began fishing around in it for something. “You take care of him,” she mumbled to Neva. “Pretend he’s somebody else. It’s what I do.”

  Chisolm glared angrily to Neva and back to Luan. “I’m acting captain, and I’m going to give you one last chance,” he said to her. “You’re not going to appreciate the consequences of disrespect.” He held his chin up, trying to look taller and more authoritative, but the attempt only made him look stupid.

  “No way, Chisolm. First, you’re not acting captain. Security Chief Venner is. But that’s not the point. It’s not like I’d mind or anything. I like getting attention from a new man on a good day. In fact, there’s a humongous party on Deck 32 where I could make some valuable connections.”

  Chisolm fumed, but he made no more threats.

  “First Officer Chisolm,” Luan said cutely, “the word is you’re going to be out of a job in the near future. Like about the time you can get your hair glued down straight. See it from my point of view: You’re a bad investment of time, energy, and effort.”

  She finally pulled a small purse from the back of the desk drawer and brushed it off with her hand.

  Neva watched Chisolm undergo a visible change of attitude: He craned his neck up as he forced himself to swallow. He twitched his shoulders like he might be trying to relax and then grimaced a smile toward Luan.

  “Well,” he said, “could you do one small thing before you go? Just enter this one last data block, and we’ll call it quits. It will be...” He looked up and blinked ferociously before lowering his head and continuing. “It will be a token action.... A token affirmation of my authority in this office.”

  He forced a smile that only looked weird. “It will allow me to give you a positive referral.”

  “Just one data block?” Luan asked.

  He was holding out a memcube. “It’s the only one on here. Just enter it.”

  Luan’s large eyes flicked up and to the right. A modified eye-roll. “One entry? Whatever.” She took it out of his hand, looked at it a moment and inserted it into her console. On her unit, she entered the required access codes. She defined the memcube’s attributes, ran through a dozen other preliminaries, monitored the input, and ran the filters. Then she did a recheck and hit FINISHED.

  “Satisfied?”

  “Oh yes.” The weird twist of his lips began to look more like a smile.

  Luan picked up her little purse again.
“Hair’s crooked,” she said and walked toward the airlock.

  She got halfway to the door. There, she slowed and stopped....

  Neva saw Luan’s mouth drop open like her jaw had broken free. Her tongue flicked between her perfect teeth and she seemed to be nodding yes, yes, yes, but the nods became violent and convulsive. She staggered between the desks, making high-pitched squeaks till she fell over a formchair and thrashed on the floor. She arched her back and grimaced so fiercely that it seemed her skin might split across her face.

  After a minute, the shudders became more liquid. The involuntary movements became smaller until they ceased. She breathed with her mouth open, with her eyes showing only white. She seemed unconscious.

  “You see?” Chisolm said with a hint of pride. “There we are. I even feel somewhat relieved.”

  Neva checked on Luan. She was alive, but she wasn’t in good shape. She called the medical deck, and they said they’d send someone up to help but they sounded so bored that she wasn’t sure.

  While she waited, Neva replayed what had just happened. Luan had just run one of the standard block routines—the same thing Luan had done earlier... but Chisolm had clearly caused this accident.

  “You gave yourself away, didn’t you?”

  His grin began to fade.

  “These codes we enter don’t have anything to do with maintaining the ship’s systems. What we’ve been doing is related to the madness that’s spreading all over Tarassis.”

  “You are so unbelievably wrong. The complexity of the situation—”

  “Your motivation is either money or power. Stattor’s dead, but his right hand continues to operate in the chaos. Why hasn’t someone killed you by now?” She moved sideways and closer.

  Chisolm waved his hands no-no-no. “My work is the work of saving lives. In saving lives, there are sometimes choices that have to be made—”

  He stopped when he saw the brooch on her breast, which he had never noticed before.

  “That—when did you start wearing that?”

  She reached up and touched it. This time, the brooch glowed into life, activating with a reddish gleam. “It’s from Earth, from the old days. An ancient weapon that was forbidden on the homeworld.”

  “You mean to assassinate me?”

  “Humans are assassinated. Insects such as yourself are stepped on. I feel no sympathy for you, First Officer Chisolm. You’ve assumed the captain’s place, despite being far from the appropriate rank. Worse you’re causing more suffering.”

  “Look,” he said briskly, trying to bolster his image, “your tender-heartedness could risk the entire—”

  “Chisolm, those people you’ve sent to the quarantine zones… they beg to die every day.”

  “’It’s temporary, believe me, and no one’s dead. No one’s being killed.”

  “You wouldn’t know a thing about any of it, would you? And lying is always easier than finding out.”

  He backed away from her. “How dare you accuse a crew officer of lying.”

  She moved on him till he cornered himself. In her eyes he was an insignificant substance that caused an unnecessary hazard. It may have showed.

  “Wait! Wait!” Chisolm waved his hands in front of his face. “The aliens say their world is being pre-empted. They say their god is making them move on. We don’t know what they mean by that, but we’re helping them. They have their own probe units, so they gave us the coordinates to a list of possible home worlds for us. In return, we’ve let them come here.”

  “So you let them invade our psychonauts with their alien minds? Do you think these aliens expected to lie abandoned in rotting heaps? They don’t know what they’re getting into when they come here, do they?”

  Chisolm recoiled as she shifted position again, putting herself between him and the airlock that led back down into Tarassis.

  “There was an agreement,” he admitted. “But no… they don’t exactly know.”

  “You’re telling me that Tarassis officers betrayed our own workers and the aliens alike?” She thought about that for two seconds. “Tell me more, Chisolm. Spell out exactly what the aliens don’t know. ”

  He took a micro-glance at the door and started to break for it. He shoved her back and rushed for the exit. She let him take his first step, and then she burned him in the back.

  Chisolm’s suit slashed open as if cut by a hot knife. A wisp of steam rolled up from the wound. The beam of intense heat had sliced into him, cauterizing flesh and melting his uniform right into the meat over his right kidney and scapula.

  Shocked by the pain, he pitched forward into the corner and grabbed at his back and wailed. He was exposed, and winced away as she approached. Her fingers pinched the sides of her brooch. The jewel in the center glittered.

  “Next time,” she told him, “I’ll take your eyes.” She positioned herself in front of the door again.

  “Don’t! Don’t put your hands on me!”

  “Tell me what I want to know.”

  “We put in cross-talk. When they send their personality scans, we intercept and purposely mismatch the alien and human scans so there’ll be transpsychic cross-talk. We did it because we didn’t know what we’d get by combining a human and an alien consciousness together. It could have been—”

  “Smarter than you? More honest than you? Something that kept its word? Something with a shred of decency? I can see how UT would be threatened to the core.”

  He was talking fast now. “But, look: Every day we’re here, they relay to us new information on new resources that we ourselves can use or we can sell to others. Our sacrifices are for the benefit of all of us.”

  “Your lies are ancient. You let UT workers die for UT profit. Your existence is a hazard to others.”

  Chisolm looked at her, read her growing anger, and said, “Don’t...” He swallowed.

  Neva gazed at him. If left alone, he would do more damage. She could imprison him, but that would be problematic and time-consuming. She could severely injure him; determining the effective level of severity would also be difficult. Or she could kill him outright; that would resolve all parts of the issue.

  In his corner, Chisolm had no place to recoil, but he seemed to draw further from her. Fear changed his face.

  She turned to the unit on Luan’s desk. She located infirmary storage, found Chisolm’s personal data block—his basic memories, a file kept in the infirmaries in case of head injuries—and pulled it up.

  Peripherally she saw Chisolm’s eyes darting from one exit to her to the other.

  “Please,” she said, “run for it. I could blind you and cut off your legs without a second thought.”

  She scrambled his data block to deep red incoherence. Then finished with the settings, she went over, pulled him to his feet, and shoved him toward Luan’s chair.

  “Sit.”

  He was confused and cowering, but he sat.

  In one motion, she put the contact against his forehead with one hand and hit SEND with the other.

  “Enjoy yourself, you vicious shit.”

  He clawed at the contact, but it was too late. She waited till she saw his eyes dilate and he began hyperventilating.

  Good enough. When she left him, two trails of blood had begun dribbling out of his nose and his breath smelled like something had burned inside his lungs. If he lived somehow, she hoped he would remember her with every breath he took.

  Chapter THIRTY-TWO

  Once out of the office, she realized how unclean she had felt in his presence. He’d probably brought her to work there for the same reason he’d brought Luan: to hit on her.

  Neva wanted to bathe. But, knowing what she knew now—

  She pinged Turtle. He was probably still scanning for Scarn, and she hated to interrupt—but this was big.

  He got back to her by the time she had stepped into the slip-space lift to Deck 1, the bridge. There, crewmen would be working every minute to get Tarassis ready to move.

  “I may ha
ve found Scarn,” Turtle said, first thing. “The god damned unit kept freezing up, but I have a location. Ninety percent sure it was him. Hey….” He paused and looked at her through her handpad. “You look crazy. And this says you’re on Deck 8 and on your way to the bridge. What’s going on?”

  “I learned something from Chisolm: United Tarassis had a deal with the aliens. They’ve been given free rein to reside in our people in return for lists of planets with living creatures we can exploit. But UT misled the aliens and mis-matched the personality scans when they came in. Captain Stattor’ just wanted more data to sell to whoever would buy. He gave us all this madness and death.”

  Neva watched Turtle’s face as he put it together.

  “That’s why they’ve used up so many psychonauts. That’s why the officers never seemed to care, why they covered it up.”

  “Right.” Neva gave him the next-to-last piece: “We need to contact these aliens, Turtle, and see if we can get our people back to normal.”

  “What if they demand we house them in our heads? They’re fleeing Earth’s expansion.”

  “That’s right,” she said, “but I’m assuming that if a personality can be inserted, it can be taken out at some later time.”

  “It can, but it’s complicated.”

  “We don’t have much else. If we can’t get them to cooperate with us, they could just leave our possessed people as they are, helpless and dying—with their own species helpless and dying with them.”

  Turtle looked at her for long seconds. Then he got the last piece all by himself. “Uh… this means we can’t move the ship yet. We can’t change course. We can’t evade them. Not yet.”

  “Not yet,” she said. “Which is why I’m on my way to the bridge.”

  “Got it. How are you going to get them to listen to you?”

  “They have to, or we’ll never get thousands of our people back again.”

  “They’ll be looking for First Officer Chisolm for their orders, not you. He’s technically next in the command chain, even if he operated as the captain’s personal assistant.”