“You don’t have to apologize. We all get it.”
That drew her head up, both of her brows rising. “I wasn’t going to apologize for being cornered, but I am sorry for what’s happening to you.”
Edison wasn’t surprised by her frankness or wounded by it; he could hardly expect her to be unfailingly sympathetic when he had nearly hurt her. And it was nice, if awkward, to talk to someone. Someone with human eyes.
“You can’t imagine what it’s like,” he told her in a hushed voice. “To have something take control of you like this. To feel this powerless.”
“Yes,” Rosalyn said, just as softly. “I can.”
He frowned and tried to think of the right thing to say but she cut him off, tossing her nonexistent hair back and sucking in her cheeks. “I know what it feels like, and I’m sorry. You didn’t ask for any of this to happen, and it’s certainly not your fault.”
“I’m sorry, too,” Edison said. “Yeah . . .” He still felt unbalanced by her response. She knew. Right. Of course. He scrambled to come up with that goddamned question. Any way he phrased it she would be put off, so he decided to just be direct and hope for the best. They were running out of options. And time. They had a day at the most, he figured, before the Merchantia ships turned up to investigate, maybe far less if someone in the area was redirected to their coordinates. At the risk of sounding insensitive, he blundered on.
“So, all right. Well. There’s no polite way to say this, I guess, but I think you and I need to make a deal. Or a promise. No, a deal.”
Her face relaxed a little, full lips quirking to the side. “A deal?”
“We can’t be here when those ships arrive, it’s too unpredictable, and I think we both would like to avoid more people getting contaminated with this bullshit. But without access to the thruster controls, we’re just sitting ducks. We need our scanners back on, the piloting mode fully engaged, and then we need to get the hell out of here.” At least it came out coherent, he thought, watching her mood darken by the word.
“We’ve been over this,” Rosalyn spat. “I’m not giving you my credentials.”
“And instead?” He gestured broadly. “Look around! We’re running out of options. If we just sit here, we’re as good as a baited trap. More ships will come, and there’s no guarantee I can control the crew long enough for you to warn them and escape. Things are getting worse. You can’t see inside our heads, but trust me, it’s worse.”
“That’s not a deal,” she said.
“What?”
She rolled her eyes and marched up to the clear barrier, poking it as if to poke his chest. “Let’s say I play along, mm? You get my credentials and we avoid the Merchantia ships. Then what? That’s only benefiting me so far, and a deal by definition cuts both ways.”
Damn. Edison ground his teeth together, wishing she hadn’t caught on. It would be simpler to explain later. Simpler, but meaner.
“Fine. Fine. I want to go back to CDAS and make sure they didn’t accidentally run into Foxfire like we did. If we took all of it and nobody else is infected? Then fantastic. Great. We can part ways. You get dropped off at the station and you can report the contamination, get us quarantined and shipped off to be studied or whatever else. I just cannot—cannot—live with myself knowing I had the chance to do something and didn’t.” Edison turned away from the glass, pacing, removing his spectacles to find that when he rubbed his eyes, tears had formed there. Why wouldn’t she listen? She had to listen. This went so far beyond them only a selfish idiot would refuse to take action.
“It’s my job,” he added quietly. “I’m the captain. It’s my duty to protect people. I failed to do it with my crew, but I won’t fail you and I won’t fail the rest of goddamned humanity.”
He waited and waited, convinced she would refuse him again. She appeared to be listening, really listening, and maybe even softening up. Then he felt a tender hand on the back of his neck. He shivered.
We can fix that, baby. Give her bliss. Give her our gift. She can refuse nothing if she’s one of us. Let her join the cluster. Be kind to her. Be generous.
“Agh.”
Edison grabbed his head, squeezing his temples, falling back against the shield from the sudden blast of pain in his skull. Vaguely, he heard Rosalyn tapping on the other side of the barrier.
“Edison? Edison?!”
That helped. Her voice seemed to call him back, though the sizzling in his brain lingered as he righted himself, wincing.
“I’m all right . . . I’m fine.”
“Oh, thank God.” She sighed and took a step back from the barrier. It was her turn to pace. “If we’re going to do this, then you need to promise me you’ll do whatever you can to keep the Foxfire from taking control. Understand?”
“Yeah, obviously, I’m not a fan of it, either.”
“This is serious,” Rosalyn chided. She was pacing faster, working up to something, her hands rubbing together as if they were numb with cold. “I need to trust you, even though you’re all brainwashed. And you need to trust me, even though I tried to blow us all to hell.”
He had to give a wry snort at that. “What a pair.”
“Well?”
“An alliance of convenience,” Edison agreed. “I’m in. Misato will help. She likes you, and she hardly likes anyone.”
She gave one sharp nod. “All right. Jesus, okay . . . How do we know which shipments or whatever have the Foxfire? If those launch dates we found with Piero’s badge are correct, then he could have delivered Foxfire to other ships. Whatever he gave to Captain Reevey made him go mad and murder his crew, but I didn’t see any bodies on that ship that reminded me of Foxfire symptoms.”
Down to business. Edison appreciated that, and it was something to keep his focus. If his mind was too unoccupied, too free, then the Foxfire had a way of creeping in and exploiting that idleness.
“Rayan never incinerated the sample crates we picked up on CDAS, so we still have the serial numbers, the labels, everything. Maybe we can run a full search of any shipments coming or going to see if there are more samples on the station,” Edison explained, his eyes tracing her path back and forth across the room. “We have the badge Tuva found and those dates, too. ISS will have their own docking bay. If we find those same delivery dates in their system, then we have proof it wasn’t just Piero working on his own.”
“And if we can lock down the cockpit, I can send a message to HQ, tell them the situation and make sure they don’t intercept us without a full quarantine crew ready.” Rosalyn picked up his idea as fluidly as if it were her own. “And . . . and . . . we can get a call to CDAS, have them run a scan of their inventory before we even get close. Hell, I mean, we could even link up with the Salvager, get us all aboard and just tell MSC to annihilate the Brigantine.”
Edison snagged on that, making a face. “No . . . too risky. If any part of the Foxfire survived the blast, it could just be picked up by a junker.”
“Damn, all right, fair point.” At last she quit pacing, standing near the chair under the exposed wiring and hoses of the ceiling. He almost didn’t notice. Something was wrong. There was an abrupt absence in his thoughts, a space where none had been before, like a bulb going out in the night.
He tilted his head to the side, trying to chase that feeling. What was missing?
“Edison? Hey. Hey? Everything okay?”
“No,” he breathed. He risked it, letting the line between his thoughts and Mother’s blur until the whole connective tissue of the Foxfire network spread out around him, the growth becoming thick veins, redolent with life and sight. The veins were not as obvious as his fellow crewmates, Misato back in her quarters, Rayan moving about the lab, both bodies vivid and blue, limned in light. An image flashed across his brain, incomplete and hazy. A starched white collar, a smudge of something dark pink. Lipstick.
You can’
t see your sibling, can you, baby? Where did he go? Find him.
Edison shuddered, his mother’s voice shimmering through his head, her touch feathering across his shoulder again. She was right. Piero was nowhere to be found, no longer a weak signal on the periphery but a void altogether.
“Where is he?” he whispered aloud. “Piero . . . It’s like he’s vanished.”
“What?” Rosalyn joined him at the barrier again, both of her palms pressed against it. “What’s wrong?”
“I can’t sense Piero. The others are right there but . . . I can’t . . . I can’t feel him anywhere. I saw something from him, a fragment of a memory maybe, just a smudge of lipstick on someone’s collar. Shit. It doesn’t make any sense. I can always feel them, just distantly. Always.”
She sounded incredulous. “How is that possible? Can’t you feel each other through the network?”
“Yes.” Edison scrunched his eyes shut and then opened them. “I don’t know. In engineering he completely lost it. I think he’s stopped trying to fight the Foxfire. You didn’t see it but . . . God, it was insane. M-Maybe she’s shielding him, shielding him and punishing us.”
Her eyes were huge and liquid, reflecting his own terrified turquoise stare. He didn’t know what to say to reassure her. He didn’t know what to say to reassure himself.
“Punishing you? Punishing you for what?” she wondered.
Edison didn’t look away from her, even if he wanted to shrivel up and hide from what he had to say. “For this,” he told her. “For you.”
24
Rayan was saying goodbye.
There were many things he still ached to do, but a goodbye seemed the best. The fire in the solar panel array had shocked him out of something, out of a deep and deceptive well of optimism that had kept his cruelest, darkest fears at bay. The salvaging crew arriving had been like a shaft of light piercing a leaden sky, but now he saw that beam of light for what it really was—a scouring flame. The lick of flames on startled skin before the real burning began.
All of his hard work lay before him. Not all of his work, but all of his work relevant to Foxfire. He had been the one to name it that, and it took. Oddly, he felt a pang of pride knowing even the alien consciousness inside him had also adopted the name.
Foxfire, then Mother.
It was from a phenomenon well known on Earth, bioluminescent fungus that grew on decaying wood. Sometimes the more whimsical called it fairy fire, but that didn’t seem right. No, Foxfire sounded appropriately volatile. Aggressive. This was no fantastical forest of dancing lights, but a slow descent into a separation of self, the ripping of the identity from the mind. His research had led him to find that this bioluminescence was the closest known thing to the molecular structure of what now infested the Brigantine and her crew.
Earth. The thought of it made him want to grieve. He had only experienced it at the state-of-the-art virtual reality Dome on Tokyo Bliss Station, spending hours and hours wandering through re-created stages of Earth’s history. He liked the 1980s best, a far, far distant time of new tech and synthesizers and cocaine. Parts of Tokyo Bliss Station reflected those neon sensibilities, the arcade district in particular, so maybe that was what made it all feel like home.
Sometimes he got nauseated from being in the VR for too long. It often gave him vertigo, but it was worth it. He visited his parents’ hometown, but only when it was still thriving and lively. If he closed his eyes and concentrated, he could still see the sunset making a riot of the mosaic tiles on the Wazir Khan Mosque. Once, he invited his mother to come along and experience it with him, but she wouldn’t or couldn’t.
“It was hard enough to leave,” she told him. “It would kill me to go back.”
For a while the virtual insides of that place had been his talisman against the Foxfire. He would fetch his mother’s prayer rug from his locker, kneel and go there, really go there, sit and listen to the chanting and find temporary reprieve.
He kept the rug close by while he studied the Foxfire samples he had collected from himself and the others and the interior of the ship. Of course, there were pure samples from the contaminated crate they picked up from CDAS, but he wanted variety. A broad sampling might let him see tiny changes, and track if the cellular structure changed once the fungus interacted with human tissue.
Like many of the experiments he had done in his life, the results thrilled and terrified him. Never had he come across a compound that spread this rapidly. Fungus could not self-replicate, but somehow this substance grew out of control, colonizing at a rate that was dizzying to observe. A part of him admired its elegance, its efficiency, an almost self-sustaining system that, when viewed under a high-powered microscope, appeared beautifully symmetrical. Even engineered. No, that was a ridiculous idea. Nature and evolution were profoundly startling, and it was egotism to think humans were responsible for this. He had made himself the most unique test subject in a moment of panic, the voices in his head, ones he couldn’t explain or stop, driving him to self-harm. During vanishing moments of sleep, he could still feel the cold bite of the ship’s plating as he slammed his head into it again and again.
So verily, with the hardship, there is relief, verily with the hardship there is relief.
His mother had given him a small handkerchief with that phrase from the Quran. It was just threads in his pocket now, loved to near nothingness. This, he thought, was also an act of love, taking every scrap of information he had collected, compiling every gleaned observation and laying it all out for someone healthier to understand.
“Your curiosity makes you a good scientist,” his dissertation advisor, Dr. Marcel Kio, had told him at a department party. “Your innocence makes you an outstanding one.”
Innocence, Kio had gone on to say, was hard to find and even harder to preserve. An innocent mind allowed for all possibilities, especially the ones a more cynical person might discard.
“I’ve never heard you say the words ‘that’s impossible’ and that’s . . . well, usually impossible,” Kio added. Probably a little drunk.
Rayan didn’t drink, but now he half wished he did. This whole process might be easier if he could take the edge off. But this had to be done. He wasn’t giving up; he was assessing all available data and coming to the most accurate conclusion: He was losing this fight, faster than he had hoped, faster than predicted, and all the innocence and optimism in the world couldn’t change that.
One had to go where the data led, and the data led him here, to this drafting table with the sum total of his work. It would be impenetrable for most people, but if the Brigantine was found and quarantined and studied, then someone at HQ would find it useful. It was, at least, a record of what had happened and proof that they hadn’t gone down without a fight.
He winced. He didn’t want to fight with his crewmates. Whatever had happened between him and Piero in the past felt like ancient history. Space was lonely, Piero was so . . . odd. And confident. Maybe he ought to regret it, but that seemed silly now. At the very least, the other man never made him feel discarded; all the parameters had been decided up front.
You’re such a beautiful boy, Piero had told him. Nobody had ever called Rayan beautiful before. Cute? Sure. Sweet? Definitely. Beautiful was different. When he closed his eyes and breathed in beautiful, it felt like walking through the peaceful, reverberating halls of Wazir Khan.
A rare, sweet memory that had been all but obliterated by Piero’s swift and mean descent, Rayan mused. His official task was done. The record was straightened and set. There was a blank space on the right side of the drafting table, and he ran his palm over it and thought. He retreated to his locker across the room in the lab. They weren’t allowed many personal effects, just enough to keep homesickness at bay, so Rayan pulled out anything of his that held sentimental value, and returned to his monument.
Gently, he folded his mother’s prayer rug and laid
it on the blank space. On top he placed the printed photo of him and his brothers. Before his AR chip was fried, a holographic display would leap out of it, and his oldest brother Ehsan’s hand would appear behind his head with rabbit ears. They had gone on vacation to Xi’an Station, just the four of them, learning to surf at the wave pools and watching artificial sunsets beamed live from the remnants of Navagio Beach.
Ehsan had gotten fall-down drunk and proposed to a waitress at one of the floating bars, but neither of his brothers snitched. Smirking, Rayan would put his forefinger on Ehsan’s face. That waitress still sent the occasional poke over VIT Chat.
He pulled the shreds of handkerchief from his cargo pocket and laid them reverently next to the photo.
So verily, with the hardship, there is relief, verily with the hardship there is relief.
Last, he put down a handwritten Valentine’s Day card from his first and only girlfriend, Maya. They had met in undergrad, then dated on and off until Rayan got serious about his dissertation and things evaporated. Even Rayan’s mother begrudgingly liked Maya. She was short and plump and always wore dresses that would be hip six months in the future.
“Everything but her eyeballs is pierced,” his mother had complained. But nobody could resist Maya’s crooked smile.
To my perfect cinnamon roll: You’re going to crush this shit. See you on the other side.
Maya had gone into chemical engineering. Both of them were born and raised on Tokyo Bliss, and when they were still furtively bringing up marriage, they both wanted to have the ceremony on Earth. Something so serious, so important, should be done on solid ground, they both agreed, even if it would cost a small fortune and take months to get clearance.
He heard a footstep behind him at the entrance to the lab. That was strange. He usually sensed anyone coming before they arrived. That narrowed down his visitor nicely.
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