Rosalyn stumbled through into the storage bay. It was roomy, most of the crew-supply crates pushed to the edges of the space. Someone, the captain, probably, had dragged a mattress onto a few crates and stacked more around it, making a kind of sleeping cubby. The growth had infiltrated it, pulsing lightly along the cubby ceiling. It reminded her of the dumb little glow-in-the-dark stars she had stuck to her bedroom ceiling as a kid. She had tried to bring them to boarding school, too, but they were confiscated. Back then she had wondered when she would go see the stars herself, and if she would get to, and now here she was, wishing she could go back.
A folding table was set up to the left and it was littered with notes, monitors and the captain’s VIT, which had either been powered off or run out of juice.
She wandered to the middle of the bay, still clutching her one and only weapon.
“And besides, what exactly would make me nervous?” he asked, walking with that same tired gait to the table and putting both hands on it. She wondered why he wouldn’t face her. The Servitor stood between her and the door, which closed, sealing them inside.
“You’re going to, what, knock me upside the head with that canister, then go finish off the rest of my crew, but also somehow deactivate JAX, pilot the ship alone and get to safety? That the plan?” He finally turned around, resting his lower back against the table and crossing his arms over his Merchantia crew jumpsuit. “You would also have to decontaminate yourself and your entire ship or risk bringing Foxfire with you. Oh, and good luck explaining this mess to HQ. They’d probably quarantine you for life just in case. Did I miss anything?”
Rosalyn worked her jaw back and forth, feeling stupid. “I’m not sharing my plans with you.”
The captain gave her a slow, wry smile and then spread his hands wide. “Go ahead. Bash my brains in. It won’t do a damn thing. The Foxfire will just fix it all up. You’ve seen Rayan, right?”
“What if I cut you into little pieces?”
One dark, thick brow raised above the rim of his glasses. “Hadn’t thought of that. Worth a shot maybe.”
Rosalyn frowned, finding his laughter a little annoying.
“You’re not like the others,” she said softly.
“Better looking, you mean.”
“Ha. Ha.” She rolled her eyes, taking a careful step toward him. The lighting in the storage bay was as dim and infuriating as it was in the rest of the ship, but he had set up a few emergency lights near the table, giving her a better view of his face. Bookish, she thought. Kind. Tired. Tired and handsome. The kind of man she would give a second look in a bar under extremely different circumstances.
“I’ve managed to keep my situation in check,” he added, taking off his glasses and scrubbing at his face with an open palm. He stroked his short beard for a second and then put his spectacles back in place, sighing. “Meditation helps. Music, too, one song in particular. If I can keep a familiar tune in my head then I can . . . feel more like myself.”
“That’s good,” Rosalyn said. She hadn’t meant to sound so excited. “Right? That’s good. That means you might actually listen to me.”
“I wouldn’t go that far.” He laughed again, but it was humorless. “I’m Edison—Captain—Edison Aries. But I’m guessing you know that. Salvagers don’t go in blind, right?”
“I know who you are,” she replied, nodding. “I’m Rosalyn Devar. MSC fell for Rayan’s fake code blue, so here I am. My pilot . . . he’s dead. Rayan cycled the engines while my pilot was trying to get in.”
Edison crossed his arms over his chest again and grunted. “Foxfire cycled the engines. Rayan would never do that, he’s a good kid.”
“Fine, well, I don’t want to argue semantics. Someone on your ship killed my pilot. Fair?”
“No, not fair. It wouldn’t have happened if we weren’t . . . all fucked up like this.”
Rosalyn scrunched her eyes shut and turned around.
“You’re angry,” he said softly. “It’s understandable.”
“Yes, obviously I’m angry. I just . . . I want to shoot this thing at your head so badly but I can’t. I . . . I’m trying to keep this civil. Believe me, I’m trying, even if I don’t seem very good at it.” Rosalyn spun to face him, half tempted to chuck the extinguisher across the room in frustration. “I’m not an idiot. I know I can’t take on all four of you and an AI, and I’m not going to try. What should I feel if not angry?”
Edison nodded, sucking in his lower lip and leaning hard back against the table. “Scared. Confused. I get it. Tell me, what did Rayan spill about us?”
Spill. That was an interesting word choice. She couldn’t help but mimic his strained posture. When the adrenaline lagged, there was nothing left behind but exhaustion. “He said he sent out the hail to get someone dispatched. When I first came aboard, he asked if I was here to join all of you. So he must have wanted me to come; maybe he thinks Merchantia can find a cure or something.”
“He lied to you. Not that he can help it. Rayan didn’t send that hail.”
Rosalyn narrowed her eyes, taking another tiny step toward him. “What?”
She could tell he was fighting the urge to laugh again. “Are you surprised? There’s an alien mushroom in his brain telling him what to do.”
“But the code, the hail . . .”
Edison nodded, waving her off. “Oh, some of his intentions might have leaked through, but it wasn’t his doing. I should know—Foxfire is in me. It’s in him. So we’re all in it together. If Rayan managed to get you here, then Foxfire wants you here, it’s that simple. If this weren’t part of the plan, I’d know, I would feel the panic in the system.” He closed his eyes and swayed on his feet a little. His mouth went slack before he straightened up and added, “She’s not calm, exactly, but in control. And you . . . You’re not getting the reaction I would expect.”
“What do you mean?” Rosalyn’s skin crawled. She didn’t like the thought of that thing in him having opinions about her.
“I mean it’s confused. When I look at you the voice goes silent, then so loud I can hardly think, but it’s mostly nonsense. Noise. Like when you turn a speaker up too loud and everything crackles around the edges. And when the Foxfire is quiet, I want to trust you, but I know that’s not me feeling that . . . Maybe it’s because you’re the only one outside the cluster, but none of it makes any sense. It’s like I know you.”
“All you need to know about me is that I’ll do whatever it takes to survive,” she shot back. Then, softer: “And you don’t know me.”
“No,” the captain said, blank. “No, I suppose I don’t know you, so why do I feel like she does?”
She let that sink in for a moment, all of what he had said about the voices and the noise, and especially the strange reaction to her in particular. God, if only she could sit down and take some notes, try to piece together the nature of this thing’s biology. All living creatures had an imperative to live and flourish; this was simply Foxfire’s way of doing it, she knew, even if it felt invasive and sinister. Mother Nature was not exactly concerned with warm fuzzies.
“She?” Rosalyn asked.
“It thinks it’s our mother,” the captain said. “We’re her children. I don’t even know if it’s really that sentient or if it just knows humans tend to listen to their mothers. A back door. A way to win our trust.”
She shuddered. “God, this Foxfire stuff, it thinks it can control me just like it’s trying to control you, right? It’s a symbiotic relationship until it has total dominance over a host, so can’t you tell exactly what it wants?” she asked. “We could use that, you know. If you wanted to work with me. If you wanted help. Maybe we could outsmart it somehow.”
“It’s not a two-way street all the time, Rosalyn,” Edison replied. He gestured back and forth, trying to clarify. “It’s like whispers down a hallway. Voices in another room. My guess? She—we—needs your credentia
ls for something. We’ve been locked out of the MSC comm systems and databases. The hail system works but that’s about it. This low on juice, we’re dead in the water out here, especially after we linked up with the Salvager. We’re not even on autopilot toward campus anymore.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Rosalyn replied, shaking her head. “Your credentials shouldn’t get locked out, even if HQ thought you were all dead. There’s a grace period before your access goes dark.”
Edison shrugged. “Maybe they figured us out, maybe they knew something was wrong.”
“And sent me and Walters straight into a trap?” She scoffed and then laughed, and then went dead quiet. Girdy. Did he know more than he let on? He had been so nervous about this particular crew . . . Maybe Girdy discovered something concrete after launch and sent that divert order. He might have been trying to protect her and Walters from the Brigantine. Or maybe it was just a normal divert order, one she had stupidly chosen to ignore. Girdy hadn’t signed off on the redirect, so her instincts told her it wasn’t him. Someone above him wanted to keep them away from the Brigantine, and it was obvious now why. If they knew about the Foxfire infestation, then Girdy was right, someone was deliberately sabotaging crews who wound up dead.
Or taken over.
Edison was watching her, so she met his eye steadily.
“I’m not giving you my VIT credentials, and only I know the password.”
“Obviously.” Edison winced, eyes flashing, fighting something back. “Piero will try to threaten it out of you. Rayan and Misato will sit there for the rest of their lives trying all ten thousand possible combinations.”
“And you?” she asked, a little nervous to hear the answer.
“Me?” Edison gave a short laugh. “I don’t want your VIT credentials, Devar. I have something else in mind altogether.”
“Like what? I’m no idiot. You’re not going to trick me.”
Rosalyn watched him turn away. She wished he hadn’t, she wished she could see his eyes and make sure they weren’t glowing white. How could she trust a single thing he said? Shifting a step to the side, she carefully watched the table he loomed over, and studied his eyes in the glossy surface. They didn’t change as he put both hands on the table and lowered his head, taking a deep breath.
“Ha. No,” Edison said. “Like revenge.”
13
Deception, Mother was beginning to realize, was a human’s greatest asset. They told half-truths or complete falsities without hesitation. Revenge. Her favorite child wanted revenge. This more than anything else frightened her. She had watched the other children fight in their myriad ways, watched the young biologist crack his head open in despair, not knowing such a mistake only made integration easier. A wound must be tended to by the body itself, resources allocated and diverted, leaving the nervous system less guarded.
No such opportunities presented themselves with her favorite, the captain; in fact, he seemed to be growing stronger in his defenses. She was losing him. Losing him. It was impossible. They should have been fully integrated by now, thoughts, desires and actions utterly linked.
His mother. His mother was always the tunnel that led deepest. Edison seemed to pity and even like the woman that had come aboard their ship. The salvager. His mother had always told him to be kind. You never know what someone else is dealing with. That would make this difficult. His instincts led him to be gentle with the salvager, and that was not what Mother wanted. But. But.
Being Mother was not enough. She had to become his mother. Tunneling. Tunneling deep. Edison protected his memories well, but the salvager had thrown him off balance. His mind was preoccupied with her, with what to do with her, how to help, how to gain her trust . . .
Mother needed that trust. Mother, mother, mother . . . It was a concept that worked so well to bore into the humans, but she hadn’t been specific enough, she saw that now. And so she burrowed deep, and used his distraction to her advantage. The memories surfaced, slowly, seeping up like water through mud. An image emerged. His mother. Diana. Tall and dark-skinned, with short fingernails and rough hands, perfectly straight posture, black hair braided in neat rows back from her forehead. Little ribbons and medals glistened on her chest. It didn’t appear as if she smiled often, but when she did? Oh, when she did . . . it lit up his entire life for days on end.
Mother. Diana. But what did all those rows of ribbons and medals mean? Foxfire tunneled deeper and new concepts broke free, there to be examined and integrated. Military. This woman had been a warrior of a sort, an aggressor. But then she was kind, always kind, to Edison. More ideas seeped up through the mud of time and distance. Her life as a warrior meant she was often away from home. He missed her. He lived to impress her. Straight As. Valedictorian. Tidy room, clean room, always spotless.
He was a child suddenly, kneeling on the blue carpet in his small attic room. Everything, from the carpet under his knees to the air blowing in through the window, smelled strongly of lemons. Lemons but wrong, too sharp, like a cleaning solution, something unnatural . . . His mother knocked on the door, then entered holding a large faded box, one of her rare smiles brightening her face. Crossing the floor, she carefully lowered the box until they sat on either side of it. Her ribbons and medals were gone. Edison liked her better out of her uniform; that was when she was more Mom.
“It’s fragile,” she told him, gently lifting the lid on the box. “Come and look at this, baby.”
“What does it do?” he asked.
“Music,” she said. “It plays music in the old way, with big circles like this. This one is new, but you still need to be careful. See, baby? You lift this little neck and then put it down when the record is spinning.”
They sat like that for a long time, just sitting and listening. Diana let him keep the record player and gave him a box of albums. Another day. More music. His mother was somewhere else in the house, the smell of spaghetti sauce filling the whole place. Just before dinner, Edison put on his favorite record and started to dance. Even Foxfire felt the joy of it, the freedom, a boy alone in his room kicking and flailing without rhythm or care. Then he kicked the record player, hard, the music scratched and spun out, and the fragile plastic neck snapped.
That was when another Diana came out. No smiles. Stern.
“What did I say, Edison? I told you to be careful. I can’t believe you’d be this careless!”
Grounded. Grounded for a week. Edison didn’t know what that meant. He barely left the house anyway, just school and homework and the record player, but he didn’t even have that anymore.
A third Diana appeared, sick and sleeping, tubes and tubes and tubes everywhere. A machine controlled everything about her. The place they kept her smelled like medicine and sorrow. Edison was older, and he didn’t say much, just kept his vigil and played music for her on his VIT, the same music from the record player, but never the album he was listening to the day he kicked the neck and snapped it. So many people came and went. Corporals. Generals. Edison let them put solemn hands on his shoulders, let them murmur, and apologize and pray.
Edison just kept looking at the machine breathing for Diana. One day he would have to tell that machine to stop.
Memories offered themselves up to Foxfire constantly now, a steady, overwhelming stream. “Mother” had always been the key, but this was something more. She couldn’t just be the idea of mother, no, she had to be Diana. Rarely smiling, firm-voiced, little-medals-on-her-shoulder Diana. Control, ever fleeting, was close now. Mother Foxfire sensed his defenses lowering, the shock of those painful memories providing the necessary smoke screen. Look here, it seemed to say, look at this loss, this grief, let those emotions bombard your reasoning. Sink into this sadness and then Mother will make it all go away.
What had felt like scrabbling against a steep uphill climb flattened out into a smooth and focused road. A path to integration.
And at last, for a moment, Mother truly had him.
14
It was a short lapse on his part, but that was all it took.
One minute, he was seeing his own hands right there on the table, and the next his mind was somewhere else. Something else. A ghost from his past shimmered to the fore, knocking him off balance. He hadn’t been drunk in a long time but he remembered the sensation, and God was it similar. His vision blurred and his limbs moved on their own. A spinning, nauseating pit formed in his stomach, a well of helplessness that deepened by the second. And worst of all, he could see it on the woman’s face the instant he changed.
“Revenge, yes,” he heard himself say, but his voice was huskier, labored. Words came out of him, words he wanted to say, but now they were all in the wrong order. He felt his feet shifting and he lumbered toward Rosalyn, gait uneven, stuttering, as if he were a toddler learning to walk, all momentum and no grace.
“You will help us. The credentials . . .” His hand turned into a claw and he pawed at the air in the direction of her wrist. “With your credentials we can use the network again, and the navigation systems can return us to the station. Mother . . . Mother wants to go home.”
Rosalyn was backing away from him, her face pale with fright. That pit in his stomach filled with acid, and he drowned in it, so disoriented that he forgot momentarily how to fight it back. How to swim. Her back hit the wall near the door, and Edison watched her pound at the console to try to open it while still keeping her eyes on him.
He had closed the distance, staring down at her from his height, the alien in his body distorting her image until she warped into something small and fragile. No. He had to swim. He had to find air. There was a way back to control but his thoughts jammed. A word, an idea, danced on the tip of his tongue, maddeningly close . . .
“The credentials. If you were one of her children, you would want to help Mother. It would be easier”—Edison heard his voice and shuddered at the raw edges of it—“if you surrendered. The process is painless. Let Mother embrace you and find bliss. With us you can be loved, with us you can be believed.”
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