His skin felt on fire. Those weren’t his words at all now. But the Foxfire had made a mistake. Bliss. Tokyo Bliss Station. His favorite artist was on the stage, the horn soaring, the drumming vibrating in his shoes. He knew this song and he forced himself to hum it. A good memory could drown out the monster in his head. The monster that had begun to sound just like his real mother.
And so he hummed, and hoped it would be enough to drag him to the surface.
That didn’t do him any favors with Rosalyn, who shook, raising the fire extinguisher to defend herself. Edison felt the Foxfire clench and react well before he could, and he backhanded the canister out of her hands. It flew across the room, landing with a loud clank in the corner.
He heard Rosalyn give a panicked cry as her hand punched the door console again, mashing enough buttons to send the door hissing open. She tumbled away from him and down the hall. Even through her suit he could hear her ragged breathing. The Foxfire made him give chase, but he kept humming, the notes going higher, wilder . . .
His tread was heavy as he ran after Rosalyn, following close on her heels as she scrambled to get away, clumsily finding her way down the corridor and back to the fork, then around that bend and toward the crew deck.
Edison was coming back to himself, he could feel it, but he had to hurry, had to break the surface and gasp air before he did something to hurt her. He would never forgive himself . . . never . . . Rosalyn found her feet; faster, faster she pounded through the halls until she hurled herself through an open door and slammed her palm on the wall. The door didn’t close and she swore, backing away from him, cornering herself in one of the labs.
“Get away from me!” she screamed, turning in circles, hands running over the lab countertops, looking for anything that could be used as a weapon.
Tokyo Bliss Station. The music. He just had to keep humming that song, tear his mind away from her and the moment and get lost in the music. But his feet just kept going and soon he would be in striking distance. Mother wanted her. Bad. The noise filled his head. Mother’s noise. She was furious. Something about Rosalyn set her off in particular. There is something different about this girl . . . She was going to rip the suit away from her, her last line of defense, and expose her to the spores and the network and the bliss no matter what it fucking took.
Edison saw his own hand rise as if through a heavy fog, but the music! The music! He had it now, the beat and the scales and the notes. His fist flew, but he corrected it just in time, sending his knuckles crashing into the wall next to Rosalyn’s head. She collapsed to the floor, scuttling away and breathing hard.
He let his hand go limp. The pain came as soon as the control did.
“Shit,” he whispered, sweating. “It just . . . It caught me unawares that time. It sounded just like my mother, I couldn’t, I couldn’t . . .”
“Stay away from me,” Rosalyn hissed. “Just stay away!”
“I know, I know.” Edison put up his hands and turned around, walking slowly and deliberately to the door. He breached the hall and gave her time to watch him swivel back around. The cold storage rooms were one of the few areas with clear plastic shields that could be lowered for lab observation. Edison put the shield in place, and it dropped between them with a soft plink.
He knocked gently on the barrier. “Get up. You can lock the shield from your side.”
Rosalyn hesitated, then climbed to her feet and approached, eyes so fixed on him it made him go rigid with embarrassment. He deserved that look.
“Six-five-seven-five is the code,” Edison told her. “It’s my administrator’s key.”
“Which you could input from that side, too,” Rosalyn shot back, breathless.
Edison shook his head, lowering his hand. “No, the lab side has priority to protect samples and keep things locked down during decontam. No one can get into that room unless you let them.”
“Or you cycle the engines,” she pointed out.
“Sure,” Edison told her. “But I won’t do that.”
“Right. And I’m just supposed to trust you after . . . after that?”
Sighing, he leaned his forehead against the shield, his breath fogging it a little. “What do you want me to do?”
Rosalyn studied him through the shield for a long time, and he didn’t dare raise his eyes. The last thing he wanted was to see in her gaze what she thought of him. Monster. That acid pit in his stomach sizzled again, but this time out of shame.
“Let me go. I’ll take one of the evac pods and pilot it back to the Salvager, then I’ll leave. I won’t tell anyone about you or what I saw here. Please. Please let me go.”
Even if he wanted to, even if he could . . .
“I can’t let you do that,” Edison murmured, squeezing his eyes shut. “I jettisoned all the evac pods a week ago. As soon as I realized what was happening to us . . . I couldn’t let any of us get out of here and risk spreading the spores.”
She made a tiny, hopeless sound. “You can still let me go. I’ll find a way to get to the Salvager.”
“Mother, I mean, the Foxfire won’t let me,” Edison told her. It was true, but he did wonder. He wondered if he could fight it back long enough, keep his own mind and desires long enough to unravel whatever plan the monster inside had. It was too risky. If he failed, if he hurt her . . . “I’m sorry,” he said. “It won’t let me.”
Even through the shield he felt her go cold.
“You’re pathetic,” Rosalyn whispered.
“Believe me”—Edison pushed away from the barrier and showed her his back—“I know.”
15
Vodka. She needed vodka. The worst of the withdrawal symptoms had passed, she thought, but no, here they were again, louder and more insistent than ever. It was like a drum in her head, an itch in her throat, a burn that went from her tongue to her hands and made her fidget constantly. Just one sip of something would make this all feel far away, like a nightmare she could laugh at in the morning.
Morning. Sleep. How was she supposed to sleep? Rosalyn paced, flexing her hands and then stretching out her fingers, over and over again, hoping the pattern would somehow become soothing. It didn’t. The little room she had locked herself in was bathed in the harsh orange cast of emergency lighting. With her mind jumping from thought to thought to thought she almost didn’t notice the one thing that was conspicuously absent from the room.
No Foxfire.
Rosalyn scrubbed at the bloodstain on her visor with both hands until the dried muck flecked away. She searched along the walls, floor and ceiling but found there wasn’t a trace of the blue glowing stuff. Outside the safety of the plastic shielding, the flowering spores ran right up to the doorway and then stopped, as if shying away. She turned around, staring for a moment at the decontamination chamber next to the cold storage lockers.
It was just fungal matter, sophisticated, surely, but could it actually know not to come near the decontamination area? Was it possible even the growth itself was afraid of the room?
It wasn’t a triumph, but at least she felt relieved that she might have blundered her way into the safest part of the ship. Her suit came standard equipped with environmental filters, but this much contaminant in the air would wear them out quickly. At least in a more or less clean zone the filters wouldn’t be bombarded with spores. Eventually the suit’s filters would need to be replaced, and she didn’t imagine they had an infinite supply aboard.
But that was about where her luck ran out, she thought, going to the cubby and bench near the lab equipment and sitting down hard. She leaned back and called up her AR display. Without a recognized network connection, she would have access to only limited functions, but she could at least start a running list of what she knew and understood about her circumstances. And she still had the crew dossiers. Maybe she could mine those for more information . . . They were all clearly dangerous, the crew, b
ut it seemed like Edison was using his own memories and past to somehow fight back the Foxfire’s control. If she knew the crew, then if they turned on her again, she might be able to call up some tidbit from their profile to bring their humanity back.
Rosalyn snorted. God, that was idealistic. She let the text app idle on her AR display, staring through the blinking cursor to the door and the glowing corridor beyond. It was true, what she had told Walters; in the darkened ship the pulsing blue covering the halls was almost beautiful. Either the exhaustion was really taking hold now or the millions of scattered turquoise spores were flashing slowly in time to something, and if she concentrated, the rhythm of it seemed like a heartbeat.
Madness. The crew was mad and now it was gripping her, too. She knew their environmental suits were meant to withstand a vast array of contaminants, but she couldn’t imagine any salvager had run into something like Foxfire before. Rosalyn called up the factory warranty for her suit on the AR display, skimming the fine print for exactly what the suit protected against.
Contaminants deriving from molds, fungi . . .
That made her feel marginally better. The suit would keep her protected as long as it maintained integrity, and there was a chance that Rayan’s experimental injection might be developed into something truly useful. But how long would that work? The crew was not the least bit stable, and it would only take another outburst to compromise her suit and expose her to their horrible fate.
She laughed again, hoarse and fatigued, letting her body go limp against the wall as she drew her knees up to her chest and hugged them. Self-preservation was a stupid idea. Triage was probably the best bet. Solutions, solutions . . . She couldn’t let this stuff spread any further, she decided, it had to stop here, with them. With her. It was the shock or the fear, she also knew, that made hot tears gather behind her eyes and spill down her cheeks. She would have to die. They would all have to die. No Merchantia ships were equipped with self-destruct functions, but there were plenty of ways to destroy a vessel, and destroy it she would.
The finality of it, the simplicity of it, felt like comfort and resolution. When she woke up she would know what to do, but she would need strength and rest to do it. God, she didn’t want to die. She didn’t want to die. But what else could she do? She had seen the wild inhumanity in Edison’s eyes as he chased her through the ship. He would have killed her. Piero would have killed her. These weren’t men and women anymore, they were aliens, trapped and doomed, imprisoned in their own bodies.
Rosalyn let her eyes droop and then close, knowing what had to be done, tears still streaming out of her eyes as she fell fast asleep.
16
Misato Iwasa did not have time for this shit. She had been deep in conversation with the monster in her mind, the one that cruelly called itself “Mother,” and they had just been starting to get somewhere. Time. Time was in short supply, and she needed every single second available to her before . . .
Before it was too late.
There was nothing for it. Edison prowled outside the door, not knocking but lingering, and she could sense him easily through the cluster network binding them together; even without it, his noisy pacing would’ve given him away. And through that same network she repulsed him, letting him know firmly that she was not in the mood for visitors. She would never again be in the mood for visitors, not until she found a way to beat back the enemy and win the war raging in her head.
Mother. Ha. This thing was nothing like her mother.
She sighed and opened the door to him.
“The eternal optimist,” he said by way of greeting.
“And what should I do? Give up?” Edison towered over her, but he always seemed to shrink a little in her presence, as if faced with a disapproving teacher.
“No, no, that’s not like you. How’s that working out? The optimism.”
Misato had barricaded herself in the women’s crew quarters. At first she hadn’t noticed the forced lockdown Rayan had put them under, because she so rarely left the familiar comfort of their sleeping area. It had been the natural place to stay, a place she knew well while everything inside and outside of her unraveled and became unrecognizable.
She padded to the kitchenette to her left and ran the tap, then started up the 3-D extruder, choosing one of the preprogrammed modes that would print her a cup and a spoon. They were running low on coffee, probably because she did almost nothing but drink it and drink it and let the caffeine speed her thoughts. It helped, she knew, one small advantage in this mind war of attrition.
If Tuva were still alive, she would scold Misato for hogging it all for herself. She missed Tuva so much, even with the scolding. Such a serious girl, but sometimes Misato managed to make her laugh.
“Coffee?” she offered him. “No, never mind. You didn’t come here for that. Something is wrong. The salvager.”
Edison crossed to her, leaning against the wall and watching as she filled the newly printed mug with water and waited for the coffee to brew. She didn’t have long to wait, and soon the room filled with the earthy perfume of the grounds soaking.
“How can you drink so much of that stuff? Everything puts my stomach off,” he said.
“You have your humming,” Misato replied gently. “I have this to keep me human. Stop stalling, Edison, it’s bothersome. I was making progress before you barged in here.”
“I didn’t barge—”
She put up a weathered hand, silencing him. “What’s the problem? Sit down. You’re so jumpy it’s making me nervous.”
“Ha. Yeah. I’m the jittery one.” He chuckled darkly to himself and followed her and her steaming cup of coffee to the round table positioned in the middle of the kitchenette. “How many cups is that? You’re gonna take off like a rocket if you don’t cool it with the caffeine, Iwasa.”
Misato ignored him and sat down, realizing with a worrisome jolt that it didn’t hurt her back as much as it used to. Her brow furrowed as she blew idly on the steaming mug.
“What?” Edison asked, watching her closely, just like he always did. It made him a good captain, that ability to observe his crew with constant intensity.
“My back,” Misato replied with a grimace. “It should hurt more than it does.”
Edison nodded gravely. “It’s the Foxfire. You should see Piero. The salvager smashed his eye damn near in half and he’s waltzing around like nothing happened. And Rayan . . .”
She closed her eyes and sighed. That had been a terrible day. All the days were terrible now, facing the slow, inexorable conversion of her own mind and body, but there was something viscerally awful about seeing the young biologist in so much shock and pain. There was a fight, screaming, the churning, masculine adrenaline flooding the room before Piero lashed out, mocking Rayan for the voices he kept saying he heard in his head. It had been a friendly game of cards, normal, and then Rayan lost it, smashing his head into the wall over and over again, picking up a ration container to continue the job. The blood had sprayed over her hands and the cards, and then there was an odd flicker in his eyes and he slumped over, shattered.
That was just after Tuva’s death, when the Foxfire was still new in them, before anyone’s eyes were blue, before she had to put consistent effort into untangling her thoughts from those proposed by the enemy. But then Rayan hadn’t died. He should have, and very quickly, and so they had only given him something to dull the pain and send him off in comfort. But he never passed, and slowly, to their growing horror and fascination, the blue webs appeared, spidering over his white naked skull, protecting his fatal wound until the exposed bone nearly disappeared.
She shivered and held the mug close to her chest for warmth.
“I don’t like it,” she said finally.
“Piero can deal with it. He had it coming, trust me.”
Misato snorted. “That’s not what I meant. I don’t care what happens to that
brute. He got us into this mess in the first place.”
Edison’s dark brown eyes snapped open wider. “Not this again. There’s no proof, Iwasa. Just because you hate his guts doesn’t make him guilty of anything but being an asshole.”
She lowered her head and eyed him through the steam rising between them. It made sense, of course, that Edison didn’t believe her, but it was quite sad, she thought, that he wouldn’t open himself up to possibilities. Even upsetting ones. Maybe a good captain had to look for the good in his crew no matter what.
“Edison, don’t be naive. What else explains it? He was so insistent that we take an extra day on Coeur d’Alene Station, that we take that shipment . . . It stinks, reeks, really, and you know it. Tuva knew it, too; that’s why he killed her.”
“Also just guesswork,” he said. “Tuva’s headaches were getting so bad she was practically blind. It was a seizure, you said it yourself. There were no marks on her body. Nothing.”
Muttering to himself, Edison rubbed at the whiskers on his chin and pushed his chair back, balancing on the two back legs and bouncing a little with nerves. It didn’t bother her. Eventually he would come around to believe her. That, or she would find a way to toss Piero out the air lock and call it done. Unlikely, of course, given their relative sizes. But nobody ever accused Misato of being uncreative.
“I’m not here to get into that with you. Again.” Edison adjusted his spectacles, one hinge taped up for a fix. She had offered to print him a new pair but he wanted to keep them, sentimental reasons, he said. “It’s the salvager, like you said.”
“You can complain about her if you like, but I already admire her. If she smashed up Piero’s face, then she’s my kind of gal. There’s something about her, something different. Maybe I met her on campus before. I must have, her face is so familiar.”
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