“What is it?” Edison couldn’t help but jump to his feet.
“Just . . . a worker’s badge. It’s been printed, extruded, like a copy.” Rosalyn held it up for him to see. It was flat, about eight inches by five, with a photo, reflective scanning tag and company branding. The badge had been tucked into a clear plastic sleeve and attached to a black lanyard. “Danny Russo? His Merchantia file says Piero Endrizzi. Christ. Which one do you think is real?”
Edison joined her near the trunk, waiting until she offered the badge to take it.
“ISS?” He turned the thing over, but the badge didn’t seem like anything special. “Incorporated Shipping Solutions. They’re partnered with Merchantia now; they handle all of our biohazard and dangerous materials. Maybe it’s just his old job.”
“Then why the different name?” Rosalyn asked. “Look at the issuing date. That thing is current. ISS . . . Why does that sound so bloody familiar?” Standing, she snatched the badge back, pulling it up close to her visor for a look. Rosalyn pulled the badge out of its transparent sleeve, and a tiny slip of paper, no larger than her pinky nail, fell out. Crouching, she picked up the folded paper and carefully opened it up. It had been squashed into an accordion, but once she flattened it, she could see tiny, handwritten print.
“Anything interesting?” Edison asked, squinting over her shoulder.
“Numbers,” she said. “Coordinates, maybe?”
She used her VIT monitor to scan the numbers. “I can’t do a networked search, but I can at least run these against the downloaded MSC data on my VIT.”
It didn’t take long for a match to appear. They weren’t coordinates at all, but dates.
“These are launches,” Rosalyn breathed. “They’re all in the MSC database, which means they’re all our launches. Science vessel launches. For the Quant-7, and . . . that was Alexia Courtney’s gig, and Reevey’s command . . . These are the recent code blues. Entire ships that went dark under suspicious circumstances, and every single one of them left campus before Piero joined the Brigantine.”
Edison whistled. “That doesn’t sound good.”
“And ISS handles biohazard deliveries? That can’t be a coincidence. This must be what Tuva found, and why he had to kill her. It’s the Foxfire, Edison, it has to be. He must have been handling it for ISS and brought it aboard for some reason.”
Josh Girdy, the son of a bitch, was right. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to get Piero’s tainted biohazard deliveries onto science vessels. But why?
“Shit,” he muttered. “We need . . . we need to know more. This is heavy.”
You know all you need to, baby. Why does it matter? You’re with us now. You’re with your cluster, your siblings, your mother . . .
“Stop using her voice!” He hadn’t meant to shout, but it gnawed at him each and every time, hearing the horrid monster in his head use Diana’s voice like that. Rosalyn’s eyes could have swallowed him up for their size.
“She sounds just like my real mother,” he whispered, pinching his forehead. “It’s . . . not easy.”
“Think about that song,” Rosalyn said, humming a few off-key bars. “Or Misato. Or me.”
He did. He did think about Rosalyn, breathing hard, seeing in those huge eyes the kind of sympathy he hadn’t expected to find. Sliding the badge copy into her suit pocket, she swayed again, and, carefully, he put out a hand to steady her.
“Tired,” she said. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry, that’s—” A series of red lights flashed above her visor, three tiny dots that lit up in sequence. “Bad. That’s bad.”
“Yes, it is,” Rosalyn almost shrieked, putting both gloved hands over the bottom of her helmet, as if reaching for her mouth to gasp. “It’s my filters. My clean oxygen. All these spores . . . They must be wreaking havoc on the filtration system. Oh God. Oh God. What do I do?”
Edison took hold of her more firmly, guiding her by the shoulders, turning her toward the ladder. His mind raced. One lone human on their ship and her only guarantee against the Foxfire was about to fail. He should’ve seen it coming. Damn it, he was the captain, after all; of course this level of air corruption would jam up a suit after this much exposure.
Captain, captain, captain, be the fucking captain.
“We . . . Shit. We find you new filters and hope like hell they’re not already contaminated. We can get you back to the lab,” he said, kicking open the hatch. “You’ll be safe there, right? You can breathe there until I find new filters.”
Rosalyn closed her eyes and reached for the ladder, her face turning pale behind the visor. “If you find new filters,” she whispered, trembling. “If.”
23
He expected suit storage, just next to where Edison made his home on the ship, to be empty, but he was not alone.
In the corridor, surrounded by the pulse-throbbing glow of the Foxfire nodules, Edison felt his own pulse jackhammer. In his heart he knew—knew—that what he was seeing was not real, but it made him stutter to a stop nonetheless. The door to his makeshift home was open, too, though it had been jammed closed for a long time. Rayan had tried to keep them all sequestered, and while Edison slept, and waited and stewed in his quarters alone to fight the Foxfire in his head, he came to the conclusion that the young scientist had bought them valuable time. Being apart like that seemed to make it easier to control the fight. Not win, of course, but maintain a shred of humanity while the Foxfire bled into his every thought.
And now it was bleeding over again, and badly.
Edison stopped just inside the suit storage door, watching, listening to his mother hum an old Earth tune. They were lucky to still have a house on Earth, given the state of things. GATE, the Global Alliance Technology Effort, had convinced the United States government to start evacuations. Resources were drying up. Floods. Quakes. Hurricanes. Only government and environment critical would be allowed to stay. Diana Aries had finagled a pass for them, her long service in the army granting them reprieve.
Their neighborhood gradually emptied out, but Diana stayed. Even when Edison took his own posting and left Earth, she stayed. Whenever he got back it was the same damn thing—homemade spaghetti and his mother singing to herself at the stove. Garlic and oregano filled the kitchen, filled the house, and he was a little kid again at heart, hiding in his room, knowing his mother would be furious when she found out he had broken his record player.
The vision in front of him in the suit storage room, of Diana at the stove, flickered. Oregano and garlic. Something about that smell, all over him now, seemed to disrupt the illusion. But then it strengthened again, and oddly, the room filled with the smell of citrus. When he took one more step inside, she turned.
Oh. This day. That memory.
Diana dropped the stirring spoon at the sight of him.
“Surprise,” he said with a chuckle, but the spoon, messy with tomato sauce, hit the floor. Edison rushed to pick it up, burning himself. He swore and looked for a rag to wipe up the stain on the floor.
“That’s all right, baby,” she said. “These hands aren’t so sure these days.”
“Let me help. I’ve got you.”
Edison rinsed the spoon, stood with her at the stove. He noticed the tremor in his hand was in hers, too. His had started with the Foxfire, but hers?
“You got any good news for me? What about that promotion you were sniffing out . . .”
“No, ma’am,” Edison said, shrinking.
“Next time, then. Next time.” Her fingers went stiff, and she fumbled for the spoon.
“You all right?” he asked. His demeanor always changed around her. Edison could relax, take off the military man, just slide into home. The vanishing accent of her roots crept into his voice, a tiny flicker of Atlanta.
“I’m just fine, baby. Just fine.”
Edison saw her hand flex befo
re the spoon dropped again, but this time he caught it.
“What’s going on?” he asked. “Why no hug?”
“Of course I would hug you,” Diana whispered. “I just don’t want you to feel how brittle these bones have become.”
Edison felt the memory flicker around him. At his side, his mother stirred nothing, just a wooden spoon going around and around on top of a stack of dirty environmental suits. She was blue, all blue, made of glowing turquoise starlight.
“It’s in my bones, in the marrow,” she told him, gruff. “The cancer. I’m gonna feed you and then we’re gonna sit for a long time.”
“There are options.” The words came out too fast, like a reflex.
“No options but one,” she said. Diana put down the spoon and shook her head. “I know you aren’t going to take clean filters out of here. I know you won’t do that to me.”
Edison froze. The spoon was gone. The scent of garlic and oregano vanished, leaving him in the rubber and antiseptic stink of the storage room. He backed away from her, from his faintly glowing mother.
“Baby, listen to me. You can still win her over. She’s pretty, right? You like her? That’s just fine. You win her over. Just pick up the filter, air it out a little, then give it to her. She won’t know the difference and then she can be with us. Be with you.”
“I can’t do that, Mom. I can’t.” Edison backed away until he rammed into the closed closet behind him. Wincing, he stumbled to his left, his head exploding in pain. He wondered if that was how Tuva had suffered before the end, when her brain felt like it was being lanced with fiery needles.
The captain. Be the captain.
Edison scrambled across the room, to the low bank of plastic shelves bolted into the wall. Several labeled bins held the accessories needed for suit maintenance, including emergency patches, extra gloves, shoe covers and visors, as well as a bin specifically for the new, sealed oxygen filters. He smacked the bin open, reaching in to find their stock was low. Dangerously low. He thought immediately of Piero. Had he tried to sabotage the filters? If so, he had missed two. Two. He had no idea how long those would last Rosalyn, but it would just have to suffice.
Listen to me.
The voice was right next to his ear, shrieking, still his mother’s voice but twisted and rising, higher and higher, as she closed in on him. Before it had been a tender hand and a whispered song, but now it was madness.
Baby? Baby? Listen to me. Listen to me!
He ran, scattering the other bins to the floor as he fled the room. The sealed filters were jammed under his arm, removing the temptation to scratch at them while his mother’s furious voice chased him down the corridor and to the barrier, where Rosalyn waited.
The moment he saw her, the voice cut out.
Silence. Nothing. Just the normal hum of the ship and the muffled sounds of Rosalyn puttering around in the lab. She hadn’t noticed him there, and he commanded his pulse to slow, his breath to ease . . . Their alliance was already on thin ice; the last thing he needed was for her to see him gasping and wheezing with terror.
The whole place was a mess, the ceiling panel ripped open, some kind of schematic of hers drawn on the wall in black marker, tubes, wires and hoses hanging down like so many loose guts. No, not a schematic of hers, but one belonging to the genius mind of Misato Iwasa. Just a simple airflow bypass system using a reversing valve. It was a bleed from Misato, their connection through the cluster giving him flashes of the engineer’s knowledge.
A freestanding atomizer near the kitchenette puffed out a constant stream so thick Rosalyn looked like a mad scientist in some alchemy dungeon. She had pulled one of the safety respirators from Rayan’s research lab, the straps dangling down her back, and they swung freely as she stood on a chair, trying and failing to screw together two hoses with a connector.
Glancing past her legs at the schematic, he cleared his throat and tapped lightly on the clear shield separating them.
“That would go a lot faster with a multi-tool. There should be one there,” he said, pointing to the kitchenette. He had startled her, and she wobbled on the chair, spinning too fast and nearly toppling to the floor. Rosalyn caught herself, holding tight to one of the hoses dangling out of the ceiling, then nimbly leapt down to the floor.
“Bottom drawer,” he added. “Sorry for surprising you. I’ve got the filters.”
“You knocked, thank you.” Rosalyn smiled, as if that small courtesy meant everything. “How many did you find?” Then she pointed vaguely upward as she went to the drawer he had indicated, kneeling. “Did you notice? The hail Piero sent stopped.”
“Two,” he said with a sigh, and waited until she lowered the barrier and he could shove them through quickly. Rosalyn took them immediately to the decontamination pod. “The damage is done. Even a round or two of that hail will draw attention. I don’t need to tell you what that means.”
“I don’t know what you think I can do about it,” she said, her voice muffled and mechanical in the respirator. She had found the multi-tool and snapped it open, climbing back up on her chair to work on the connector again. “Can’t unpluck a chicken.”
“You can’t turn shit into sunshine, but we can hope they don’t notice the signal,” he said.
Rosalyn froze, her huge eyes turning on him. “Where did you learn that saying?”
“I don’t know, just . . . somewhere. Why?” Now that he thought about it, he couldn’t remember saying it until very recently. Maybe it had bled over from one of the other crew members.
Her gaze drifted away from him and she shrugged, but something was clearly wrong. “It’s nothing. Never mind.”
Nodding, he leaned against the door frame, stroking his chin thoughtfully again. She had a stronger build than he expected, the tight thermal tee under the environmental suit showing an athlete’s body, muscled shoulders tapering down to a narrow waist. A swimmer’s frame, maybe. The bubbled visor of the helmet had distorted her face, and while the respirator covered her mouth and chin, he was surprised by how delicately defined her nose and brow were. Her voice and posture screamed prep school, maybe even one with a GATE endowment. She had the lightly accented, almost British voice of someone educated abroad and at incredible expense. It contrasted hilariously, nicely, with her now-unkempt, half-jumpsuited appearance, like a trustee turned junker.
“Maybe we could just beam out some Unpronounceable Sound. That would keep everyone away,” Edison teased.
“Don’t be cute,” she muttered.
“Okay, no cute. How about curious?” Edison asked. “What’s this project of yours?”
“I need a place to eat and bathe, so Misato gave me some ideas for rigging up a kind of decontamination chamber. The diffuser spits out oregano and melaleuca oil to kill off any rogue spores. I’ll have to put my suit on before I leave, of course, but it’s something.” Rosalyn trailed off and looked at him again, one hand landing on her cocked hip. “Thank you again, by the way, for the filters.”
“You’re welcome,” Edison replied. “I’ll, um, I’ll try to find more. Just . . . thought I oughtta hurry. Listen, I know you probably want me to get lost so you can sleep, but I think we should talk.”
“That sounds ominous,” she said, jumping down from the chair. Closing up the multi-tool, she slipped it into her cargo pants and grabbed a food pouch from the kitchenette counter. The room only became mistier as the hose system she had finagled kicked in, one of the open tubes hissing softly as it released some kind of gas.
Rosalyn pulled the respirator down and ripped open the food pouch, squirting it efficiently into her mouth. Sweet potato. He hated the stuff but it got the job done.
“You sure it’s safe?” he asked, nodding toward the mask.
“AR display says the only foreign traces are on those filter packs you gave me, but with the respirator on I should be safe. I’m already decontaminati
ng them. Afterward, I can crack the seal,” Rosalyn said. She ripped open another food pouch and dispatched it just as readily. “I added Foxfire’s composition to my atmospheric app; it tracks the air quality for me.”
“Smart.”
“Just practical,” she deflected, mouth still full of mush. “So what are we talking about?”
Edison inhaled deeply, forgetting that he hadn’t quite formulated his question yet. The corridor around him was dark, the crew having adjusted to the low emergency lighting to the point where it was more comfortable to exist in semidarkness. He wondered if the Foxfire was making them sensitive to the light.
I can help you see so much more, baby. Trust your mother, trust me . . .
No. He swore once under his breath and then began to hum, quickly, almost frantically, closing his eyes and filling his head with the song. Not now, not now . . . He didn’t care how nuts it looked; he needed his bulwark against the encroaching corruption.
“Don’t go haywire on me,” Rosalyn pleaded. “Should I sing, too?”
“No. I won’t,” he promised, snapping his eyes open to see her there, lovely but afraid in the fog. She had moved closer to the barrier, her knuckles white around the empty food packet in her hand. “I won’t do that ever again.”
“Ha. And don’t make promises you can’t keep.” Rosalyn tossed the packet over her shoulder. “I scrounged up a hell of a lot of food packets. Maybe I’ll just wait this out. Even mushrooms need to eat.”
“Yes,” Edison replied flatly. Coldly. “Us.”
She glanced away.
“Is that really what you want? Because that hail is going to bring more ships, which means more victims or it means we all die. I don’t think they’ll discriminate, do you?” Edison hadn’t meant for it to sound so cruel. “And besides, I thought we were starting to get along.”
Rosalyn bit her lower lip, avoiding his eyes. “Maybe. Look, about before—in engineering—I thought it was the best way to end this. Quick. Painless.”
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