by Lauren Esker
He pushed his way to the airlock through jammed-together crates. After his last shopping trip, his hold was packed, and his credit with every merchant in this sector stretched to the breaking point. At the airlock, he used the cuffs to summon up a reflective sheen in the air and took a look at himself. In some situations, it was best to go in looking like a million credits; in this case, he looked like a thousand miles of bad road. He practiced a sneer, showing off the jagged rows of sharklike teeth he'd spent significant time and effort getting to look right, and hoped he could avoid biting off his own tongue. How Galateans managed to work around their sharp, fanglike canines, he had no idea.
The patch was working, taking his headache down to manageable levels. It didn't seem to be helping much with the vertigo, but he could deal with that. He didn't waste time wishing he had backup. He worked alone and he liked it that way.
He cycled the airlock and stepped onto the station.
His buyers were already waiting, a group of horse-bodied centaurian Hnee and a slim, insectile Mantid. The Mantid clattered his claws and stepped forward. "You kept us waiting. Where is it?"
"So impatient," Skara remarked. He patted his belt. "Right here. Let's see the credits."
The Mantid nodded to the horse-men. One of them, a huge bruiser with a red beard, opened a case filled with credit chips, set it on the floor, and shoved it toward Skara with a hoof.
Skara knelt and swept his cuff over the case. His custom-made subroutine checked whether the chips were counterfeit and found none of the usual tell-tale markers.
"Seems legit," he said, standing up. "For our agreed-upon price, there should be two more cases."
"First let us see the merchandise."
The vertigo returned as Skara unbuckled his belt pouch, and he had to fight to keep from staggering. Damn it. Whatever this bug was, why couldn't it have held off just one more day or two? It didn't matter, he told himself; soon he'd be rich enough to spend the next year recuperating on a nice resort planet.
He brought out the small refrigerated case and snapped it open, holding it out to show them the row of little vials nesting in the insulated casing. "Prime Birthworld DNA. Each one guaranteed unique and uncontaminated. Now give me the rest of my money."
"I'm going to need to examine those before I give you anything else," the Mantid growled.
"Sure, pick one to look at and I'll hand it over. Your choice." This produced nothing but a scowl. "What? Look, I'm not giving you this case 'til I have my money." He had to blink sweat out of his eyes. The dizziness was getting worse, along with a growing nausea. Keep it together, man. Just need to get through this and get my payment.
The Mantid hesitated, then pointed at a vial in the middle. Skara popped it out and tossed it across the space between them. His aim wasn't quite up to his usual skill, with his vision blurring and doubling, but the big Hnee redhead snatched it easily out of the air. The Mantid nipped it neatly in a claw and ran a scanner across it.
"Good enough for you?" Skara's voice came out in a rough bark. He fought to modulate it, and his foot twitched with the urge to tap impatiently. Waiting wasn't something he was good at under the best of circumstances, let alone when he felt this sick. On top of all his other discomfort, his skin was starting to itch.
The Mantid looked up from the vial, opened his mouth to speak, and then left it open, staring at Skara.
"What's the matter? Is it good or not?" Skara demanded. The Hnee were staring at him now, too. He didn't like this.
The Mantid clicked his jaws together and then said, "Have you always had that many arms?"
"What?" Skara said blankly. He looked down at himself.
Beneath the two muscular, spiky arms that he normally had in this form, another pair of skinny, humanlike arms had extended from his ribs. As shock rippled through his body, the arms suddenly sprouted several more fingers on each hand, giving one hand seven and the other nine.
Skara could only stare down at himself. What the heck?! He hadn't lost control over his shapeshifting like this since he was a small child.
He looked quickly back up at the black market genome dealers to find a number of guns pointed at him.
"What have you got against four-armed people?" Skara demanded, planting his new arms on his hips while reaching for his pulse rifle with the others. "This is blatant discrimination!"
"You didn't have four arms when you walked in here," the Mantid said.
"Yes I did," Skara said quickly.
"No he didn't," Redbeard put in.
"Are you disguising yourself somehow?" the Mantid asked suspiciously.
"Of course not," promised Skara, who totally was.
"He might be sick, boss," another Hnee murmured. "He looks sweaty."
"It's hot in here," Skara growled, as sweat dripped off his artificial spikes. At least he hoped he still had spikes up there. He also had a bad feeling he might be growing a tail. "My species is a cold-weather species."
"Yeah, what are you, anyway? I've never seen anything like you before."
"I think he's got some kind of disease," said the nervous Hnee, backing away with his tail switching across his flanks.
Skara could feel the deal, and all that lovely cash, slipping away from him. "No I don't. Look, do you want to examine the whole case?" He held it out. "Here you go. Just take a look and I can take my money and go."
"It's a trap," Redbeard said. "He's with the Galateans. He's diseased. He's come in here to contaminate us with some kind of bio-weapon."
"What kind of disease makes people grow extra arms?" Skara demanded, gesturing wildly, at which point he discovered that he was now gesturing with six arms instead of four. Shit.
Everyone backed away a few more steps.
"The deal's off," the Mantid said. "Give us back our money. We're getting out of here."
Skara took advantage of one extra arm to snatch up the credit case. "No way. This is my down payment. Look, the rest of the DNA's right here and you can have it as soon as—"
The answer was a sizzling burst of plasma fire. It crackled off his shield and ricocheted around him.
"He's shielded, you idiots. Shoot the airlock," the Mantid snapped. "Whatever game you're playing, friend, we're taking that case and keeping the money."
Skara lunged for the airlock. Another volley of gunfire washed hot and crackling across his shield, but one shot scored on the control panel in a shower of sizzling sparks. Skara stopped short in front of the now-sealed airlock.
"Now," the Mantid said flatly, "we'll just take that case and go."
"That's what you think, sucker," Skara muttered, and summoned his symbiont to portal out.
Nothing happened.
"The hell?" he snapped aloud, barely noticing more shots depleting his shield. In moments it would be drained. Right now, a bright violet portal should be whisking him safely back to his ship. But there was nothing.
It was like the symbiont didn't exist.
"Fuck this entire day!" Skara yelled. He drew a dazzle grenade, spun around, and threw it at his attackers.
The black-marketeers flung themselves in all directions, and there was a bright glimmer of shields going up. Skara spun away and squeezed his eyes shut as the grenade went off in a brilliant flash of light. This would give him seconds, no more. He shifted one hand into a pointy spike, used it to pry off the cover of the damaged control box, and hit it with a jolt of energy from his rapidly depleting cuffs. The airlock slid open, Skara tumbled through, and flung the case of credits at his attackers. They were briefly distracted scrambling for the scattered money, just long enough for him to slam the airlock door behind him. He spun around and threw the emergency release to cut loose the grapples. It was never a good idea to uncouple manually while docked, with no one on the bridge to fly the ship, but he didn't have a choice. It was that or get boarded.
The grapples cut out and his ship fell free. Skara ran for the bridge, tripping over crates and stumbling into the wall as the Discordia boun
ced off debris in the asteroid field. "Come on, girl," he muttered as he clawed his way onto the bridge, his physical discomfort nearly forgotten. "Hang in there, keep your shields together 'til we can get out of here ..."
The viewscreens gave him more bad news, namely the black-market dealers' ship undocking as well and swinging around to fire on him. "Shit, shit, shit!" Skara yelped, throwing himself into the pilot's seat. He didn't bother with delicate maneuvers, just threw the shields up to max and hit the engines. The Discordia's gentle freefall turned into a surge of momentum, pushing him back in his seat even with inertial damping.
A shot from the other ship's forward railguns clipped his shield, but not enough to cause damage. Skara brought up the navigation computer. One of his standard safety measures was to lay in a course for a few safe jump points before going into a meet like this—for exactly this kind of situation, so he didn't have to wait for the nav-comp to calculate a route. It looked like, on his current heading, the best bet was Gristol, a largely uninhabited system that was a standard space-pirate hangout and refueling depot. Even if the black marketeers followed him (which they might; there weren't many single-jump destinations in this area), Gristol had one cardinal rule, which was don't bring your fights here. They couldn't attack him there without getting a whole bunch of pissed-off space pirates after them.
As his shields registered another hit, he jumped. The stars smeared to blurry colors, there was an instant of overwhelming disorientation, and then the stars stabilized and there was traffic around him. He checked quickly to make sure he was in the right system and had the ship send its heading to Gristol traffic control.
He slumped back in the pilot's seat and stared blankly at the stars and Gristol's red giant sun. A thought occurred to him and he patted his belt pouches, and heaved a deep sigh when he found that he'd dropped the DNA-sample case back on the asteroid in his desperate hurry to flee. So he had no money and no merchandise to show for the entire adventure. All he had was a hold full of cargo that he'd gone into debt to buy and wasn't even getting paid for.
"Well, that couldn't really have been more of a disaster," he muttered.
He let himself collapse back to his natural shape, purple-skinned with 100% fewer spikes and damn good looking if he did say so himself. That, at least, seemed to go okay. He looked down at his hand to check for extra fingers, turning it over and inspecting the swirling patterns on the back, pale against his slightly ashy violet hue. The white patterns were natural to Iustrans, as unique to each individual as their fingerprints. Right now they were bloodless, almost albino-looking. He was definitely ill.
He got up, held onto the back of the seat for a minute, and then went down the hall to the medbay. Now that he was no longer expending energy holding his shifted shape, he felt a little better, but he was definitely still off. He had the medbay scanners run a full diagnostic on him.
The first thing they found was also the worst thing: no teleporting symbiont.
How was that possible? He hadn't lost it. He couldn't. It was a part of him, and it had been ever since he'd, ahem, acquired it from the Rhuadhi, the people who made them.
Unless ...
Could someone have taken it from him? The only person he'd been in close contact with was that Earth woman.
"That little thief," he said out loud.
That extremely hot, extremely good in bed thief. It just figured that the one Earth woman he'd decided to take to his bed was a symbiont bandit.
Otherwise, all the diagnostic computer could tell him was that he seemed to be slightly under the weather. It found no traces of viral or bacterial infections, but his temperature was slightly lower than normal and his metabolic processes seemed to be slightly disrupted.
All of which he assumed was related to losing the symbiont, since he had felt fine a week ago. Who knew the damn things were addictive?
He told the computer to run a search for information on the side effects of removing Rhuadhi symbionts, and opened a drawer full of injectors and patches from the well-stocked pharmacy he kept on the ship. A metabolic enhancer and a heavier-duty painkiller ought to take care of the symptoms for now. The shapeshifting issue was ... problematic, but in his natural form it didn't seem to be causing him any problems.
That sneaky little ...! How had she done it? As a professional thief himself, he was impressed. She must have played him somehow, drawn his attention to get close to him. The whole time, he'd thought he was the one flirting with her, but all along she had been nothing like the innocent Earth girl she'd seemed. And then she had gotten the symbiont out of him somehow. He hadn't even known it was possible.
"Your results are ready," the computer announced. "Rhuadhi symbionts are necessary for their host's survival. Removing the symbiont kills the host."
"Well, for a Rhuadhi, sure," Skara retorted, pressing an injector to his upper arm. Relief spread through him immediately. "What about an Iustran?"
"Your medical data suggests that any host will suffer similarly. There will be a period of decline, approximately two to three standard weeks for a Rhuadhi, of unknown duration in other hosts. This will be followed by coma and death."
Skara stared blankly at the wall of the medbay for a minute, unblinking.
Then he said, "Computer, lay in a course for Earth."
Four
Claudia walked down the country road until it came to the bigger highway that, based on her childhood recollections, led to a nearby small town and eventually to Baton Rouge. She kept walking as the day lightened from velvet blackness into a kitten-gray dawn. A couple of cars passed her, and she thought about thumbing a ride but then decided it was safer to walk until she got to town. There, she could borrow someone's phone and call her sister. She didn't know Naomi's number off the top of her head, even though she'd called and texted her hundreds upon hundreds of times; it was programmed into the phone and she always just pushed the preset. But surely she could look up that information. She could call Naomi at work if she had to.
She still hadn't figured out how to explain to her sister that she'd somehow ended up in Louisiana without credit cards, phone, or ID.
She also hadn't figured out what to do about it. Even if Naomi bought her a plane ticket, she couldn't get through airport security without an ID. Maybe Naomi could wire her some money and she could take a bus. Western Union was still a thing, wasn't it?
Could you even pick up money from Western Union without showing ID? She had a bad feeling the answer was no.
Her bare feet were starting to chafe inside her shoes. She sat on a fence rail alongside the road and massaged her ankles. A car approached, and she had to resist the urge to fling herself into the bushes like a movie character hiding from snipers. She sat very still with her shoe clutched in her hand until the car had passed without slowing.
If that woman, or whatever she was, could change shape to look like Barney, she could look like anyone. She could look like Naomi. Like Mom.
Claudia wrapped her arms around her shoulders and shivered for a moment.
But ... no. It wasn't completely impossible to detect an imposter. That woman hadn't been very good at being Barney. She'd sounded different, moved different. Claudia had been able to tell there was something wrong from the beginning; she just hadn't known what. Now she knew.
Great, so all I have to do is look out for random strangers with weird accents and a vague sense of "creepy" about them. That'll narrow it down, all right.
She wondered if Barney could have been an alien all along, but quickly dismissed the idea. He had seemed really different last night. She was pretty sure he'd always been exactly what he seemed like, a mild-mannered, polite little guy who always had a nice word for people in the building.
I hope they didn't hurt him. She wished she could call and find out, but that was going to have to wait until she had a phone.
With a sigh, she heaved herself off the fence rail and started walking again. The scarf she'd tied around her damp hair last night
was beginning to slip. She retied it more tightly, wishing she was wearing something nicer and didn't look quite so much like a homeless person, and kept walking.
It was full daylight when she walked into the small downtown, perhaps six in the morning or so. The town had seemed much bigger to her as a child, and less blighted. She limped past boarded-up storefronts and old houses with sagging porches and weathered, peeling paint. Aside from being smaller and shabbier than she remembered, the core businesses on Main Street were just the same, a little grocery store and a Dairy Queen and a True Value hardware store. Nothing was open, but she could see someone moving around inside Donny's Donuts, where she had vague recollections of Mom bringing them for milkshakes and sandwiches when they were kids.
Claudia crossed the street and knocked on the door.
The young man sweeping the floor inside pointed to the CLOSED sign.
Claudia waved, beat on the door, and finally gave up when he put his earbuds back in. "So much for southern hospitality," she muttered, and sank down on the sidewalk to wait for the store to open.
Around her, the town was beginning to wake up. A mud-splashed farm truck rattled by. Lights came on some of the houses. Claudia tried not to think about how hungry she was. Despite having stuffed her face yesterday, it felt like she hadn't eaten for days.
As soon as Jerk Boy opens the donut shop, or as soon as I see a pedestrian, I'm going to borrow a phone and call Naomi. She'll be able to help me figure out what to do.
The time difference between Louisiana and Seattle might be a problem. Was it two hours or three? She occupied herself for a few minutes trying to remember if Louisiana was on Central or Eastern time, then noticed a woman approaching her on the sidewalk.
Claudia scrambled to her feet. The woman was white, middle-aged with graying hair, and looked pretty normal, but by now Claudia was getting finely attuned to that sense of Something is wrong here, and the way the woman was striding toward her, staring at her, not pausing, was extremely wrong indeed.
