Sisters of the Vast Black

by Lina Rather

  She wanted to say hello to him, but she was forced to live out history once more, and her mouth stayed stubbornly silent. In those last brutal days, she had found herself growing more and more silent, as if having used her tongue to do evil she could no longer use it for anything else.

  “Do you think,” her husband said, “that anyone will remember us fondly? History is written by the victors, after all. Even if the victors are a bunch of scrabbling, squabbling children who will not know what a good thing they’ve destroyed.”

  It was this moment, she remembered, when she had felt her love for him wither and die. Only moments before, California had slid into the sea. They had watched Shen, who had been a friend to them both before he became a monster, beheaded in the ruins of the city where they had fallen in love and spent so much of their lives. She did not care if they were remembered fondly, or at all.

  “I’ve set it loose,” he said.

  He turned to her and his eyes were ringed pink and orange and gray. In reality he had only started showing symptoms. She knew what he was talking about. He had called it their child. He had called it their swift and terrible sword. Their virus, a destroyer of worlds. Almost certainly lethal. Highly contagious. Later, the reports would say: It’s as if someone made this, how could evolution create something so cruel? And no one would ever know that they were right, that ringeye had been the last vindictive act of an angry man, who could not lose without taking as many with him as possible. And she was just as bad, for she had lied to herself about what he was doing. Disease was natural, she had thought, in her ignorance and her callousness. This would not make a difference.

  The only reason she had survived was because she had run from him. She hadn’t meant to flee. She’d gotten on a supplier ship with every intention of coming back when the roiling disgust inside her had settled back where it belonged. But the next morning, the Martians took the Moon. Half the habitats depressurized in the fighting, including her home.

  “Mrs. August,” the lieutenant said. She snapped back into herself. The images of yesterday faded to the background but did not dissipate. “Why are you on board a convent ship? What is your purpose?”

  She had no answer. He knew it.

  “Stop that ship,” he said, to someone else. The other two ships turned toward the moon. “Mrs. August, we will board your ship and establish your identity. This will all be sorted shortly, I am sure.”

  The Reverend Mother sat down in the chair in front of the navigation array. She rested her hands on the soft nubs sticking up from the console, each one a nerve ending that, when touched, sent electrical impulses rushing through the ship’s brain, directing it onward through space. She touched the one that activated the secondary chemical thrusters, and the ship shivered. These were for emergencies only. The auxiliary engines gave them a temporary burst of great speed, for just a few seconds, greater than anything the ship could accomplish under biological power. It would be enough speed to surprise the military cruisers. They would not be able to evade her.

  * * *

  “They’re gaining,” Jared said. He had bitten his thumb to the quick, and left a pinkish smear across the steel of the navigation console. “I think we’ll be able to land, but they’re coming up so fast, they’ll be able to incinerate us before we can scatter.” The ship lurched as it broke the atmosphere. Outside, the world was on fire. The heat of reentry. Gemma pressed against the porthole and she saw the dark shadow of the third military cruiser coming up hard behind them like a wolf who’d caught the scent of prey.

  Jared banked hard, curving around above the colony to slow their speed. The cruiser stayed right on their tail. Below, the fields and homes of Terret’s colony came into view, so small they looked like playthings yet.

  “It’s breaking off,” Vauca whispered, pressed against the opposite porthole, like she didn’t believe it. “It’s breaking off.”

  It seemed unbelievable. Gemma held her breath until her chest hurt. But the cruiser stopped and turned and vanished back into the clouds.

  Jared brought them around again and landed the ship in a field a dozen meters away from the colony’s farmland. They did not see any of the soldiers yet, but one of the shuttles sat just across an empty field. Something felt very wrong. Gemma peered into the sky, but there was no sign of the cruiser. There was no explanation for it. She might have thought it a miracle, but then Sister Lucia made a sound, a sound halfway between a gasp and a sob, like all the air was rushing out of her lungs at the point of a knife. Gemma looked and saw immediately what had happened. On the screen a white line showed the trajectory of the Our Lady of Impossible Constellations, the point where it was and the point where it had been. The line between the two cut straight through the military cruisers. She thought, absurdly, about the old maps of constellations and the imaginary lines drawn between one star and another. She couldn’t think too hard about the rest—about how a collision like that would shred even a living ship’s callused skin.

  “Hush,” Sister Faustina said, and laid a hand on Sister Lucia’s shoulder, though not unkindly. “That won’t keep them forever. Let’s go before they remember us.”

  “She’s dead.”

  “Very likely. Possibly not. Either way she wouldn’t want you to hesitate.”

  That gathered them all up. Gemma could imagine the carnage above—bits of the cruisers turning to sparks and molten metal as they careened through the atmosphere, the Our Lady of Impossible Constellations bleeding out into the vacuum and the blood freezing to droplets of green ice, the Reverend Mother’s skin turning gray and blue from lack of air. She could imagine it, but it would not be real until she saw it, so she put it out of her mind, strapped on her faceplate, and ran with the others for the colony.

  They scattered as they reached the buildings. A rumble split the air and Gemma threw herself to the ground but it was only two of the shuttles taking off to go help their comrades stranded in the ships the Reverend Mother had disabled above. That left one. How many soldiers—four? Six? It didn’t matter. They had lost so much time already. Her head was full of incubation periods and life expectancies. They stood on the narrow edge of hope.

  She broke into the first home and found a body. A young man—younger than Lucia even, barely an adult—with pink foam still bursting at the edges of his lips. He was not long dead. She said a prayer for his soul and closed his eyes, but she could not give any more than that. If their treatment worked, and they stabilized the colonists, they would have to get off this moon as quickly as they could. There would be no washing and burying of the dead. They’d need to set fire to everything, if they even had time for that. She stopped for one bare second over the crest of a hill and looked down at what would have been a spinnery, what would have been the communal dining hall, what would have been the town square. So much hope bundled into these bricks and walls.

  There was no wind today. Everything hung eerily still. She would have given anything to hear even the clomping metal-soled boots of an ECG marine, but it did not come. She went to the meal hall and tried to open the door. Something was wrong with it. It hung askew in its track and refused to slide open. She threw her body against it—it moaned, and gave.

  The air inside was stale and hot and hazy with mold spores. It stank of old blood and emptied bowels. She was glad for the face mask. Through the haze she saw two people slumped over a table. They were dead for certain—flies circled them, picking off bits of flesh. She stepped forward to search the rest of the building, and her foot collided with something metallic.

  She looked down. A Central Governance soldier was sprawled at her feet. His stomach was torn open, gray coiled insides glistened wetly in the light from the open door. Now she could hear something, from the far end of the hall. Labored breathing.

  So it was this advanced. She had thought she would be shaking, but she had never felt this sure in her life. She was meant for this. This was her duty. Either she would help this person or they would kill her, those were
the options, and that was good and right.

  She saw him cowered in the doorway, dark stains on his shirt. He heard her approaching and looked up, and even in the dark light she knew that he was blind. The pink and orange rings filled his eyes. One of his hands was bloody and mangled from tearing through the soldier’s suit.

  “Do you remember me?” she asked. His chest heaved, up and down, up and down. By now he had blood in his lungs. She did not know his name but she remembered his face at the wedding feast, smiling as he passed her rice and water. He’d had a nice smile, a shy one. Next to him lay the soldier’s medical kit, scattered. Scalpels, vials, needles. What stupidity. Trying to threaten a ringeye victim who was still able to move.

  She knelt next to him. He did not see her but he heard her and his hands convulsed in claws. She did not know of anyone who had survived this disease, but some of the scientists who had watched victims as they died said that it seemed the people were still locked inside their bodies, like they were resisting the aggression and the manic rage every moment. She had mixed a sedative into each dose of the treatment she had on hand. She just had to get it into him, and they would both be safe.

  She touched his arm. He shuddered at the feel of her glove on bare skin. She readied a syringe and moved her hand slowly from his elbow to his shoulder to his collarbone, where she could tilt his chin back to get the needle in. His heartbeat quickened under her hand.

  “Just a little longer,” she said.

  And then his eyes burst open and he jumped on her. She managed to hold onto the syringe but his knee went into her stomach and even through the vacsuit skin she felt something soft and vulnerable bruise. His hand went around her throat. She gasped. But she could feel the tension in him, his muscles contracted halfway between strangling her and letting her go, his mind fighting with the animal instincts taking over his body neuron by neuron. She pried her hand out from under herself and got the needle into the bulging vein in his neck. His ringed eyes drooped, and then he fell on top of her, silent and spent. She pulled herself up to sitting. His face was wet—she thought it was saliva and phlegm but when she looked, it was tears leaking from the corners of his eyes.

  She sat with him in the ruins of his community for some long moments that she shouldn’t have spared, smoothing his salt-flecked hair back from his forehead, until he was truly asleep.

  * * *

  Sister Lucia readied another syringe while Sister Faustina shouldered down the door to Terret and Joseph’s home with three tries. These war-surplus prefabs had three rooms—a front room, a bedroom, and a bathroom. The front room looked like the family had just stepped out. A glass of water sat on a crate being used as a central table, a tablet lay in the chair. A blue crocheted blanket was folded neatly over the side of the crib.

  They both went to the crib. The baby lay still inside.

  “Oh, little one,” Sister Faustina said, and crossed herself.

  Babies were so dependent on calories. They burned so many trying to grow and starved so quickly. Poor, small soul. Sister Lucia reached in and rubbed the baby’s still-pink cheek. And then—his small fingers reached for her hand. He didn’t have the strength to cry but his eyes opened and focused on her. “Oh!”

  She dropped her bag and fished out the formula they had brought. Just sweetened, fattened soymilk because they did not have real formula on board, but it was calories. She cradled him in the crook of her arm and wet his lips with the formula until he latched. Three mouthfuls, four, and she pulled the bottle away. She could kill him just as easy with too much at once. She had no idea how long he had been here, crying himself out with no one to answer.

  “If the baby’s here,” Sister Faustina said, “Terret and Joseph must be too. They wouldn’t have left him.”

  Sister Lucia swaddled the baby, let him have a last suck on the bottle, and put him back in the crib where he would be safe. Sister Faustina tried the doors to the bedroom and the bathroom; both were locked.

  “Which one?”

  Every hair on Sister Lucia’s body was standing upright, her palms were sweating so the nitrile gloves stuck to her skin, she swore she could hear every sound in the village and every color looked like the truest version of itself. Adrenaline. Prey response. “The bedroom. More space.”

  Sister Faustina nodded. The locks on these interior doors were not so sturdy as the ones outside, and there was no reason to have electronic locks on a small, communal-property colony. She popped it easily with a knife from the kitchen. She paused before she opened it. “Did you notice? You can lock the bedroom from the outside. You can only lock the bathroom from the inside.”

  Sister Lucia didn’t understand what she was getting at, but before she could ask, Sister Faustina swung open the door.

  Joseph lunged at them, his eyes pink and orange with as many rings as a very old tree. He could not see them—Sister Lucia knew that even as she searched desperately for somewhere to hide if she needed it. He opened his mouth and licked at the air like he could taste the hot, stinking fear-sweat wetting under her arms. He was far gone enough for the rage to have taken over, but not far enough for his body to have started eating itself and his strength with it. His hands were bloody but she didn’t know where the blood was coming from.

  A hissing, gurgling sound came from his mouth. Sister Lucia thought it was just phlegm hacking up from his lungs but then he made it again and she realized he was begging them to stay away.

  “Joseph, you must try to stay still,” Sister Faustina said, like she was talking to a child getting ready for his vaccinations. Sister Lucia readied a dose of the treatment. “I know it is very difficult.” His head turned, slowly, toward the sound of her voice. His legs trembled, readying to leap upon her. But she still had her sight and she jumped on him first, wrestling him to the ground and pulling his head back. “Lucia!”

  Sister Lucia leapt down into the fray and held Joseph’s flailing left arm down with her knee. Sister Faustina had his head but his teeth snapped dangerously close to her gloved hand. Animal whines burst from his throat. They were hurting him. The disease was taking its toll on his platelets—he was bruising already where they held him. Sister Faustina cupped her hands under his chin to stop him from wrenching his neck around but that left his other arm free to grab for Sister Lucia’s face mask. She meant to be gentle; she could not be. She got the syringe through his skin in a way that left blood running down the hollow of his throat. He gargled on some loose fluid in his throat, and seized, and then finally lay still.

  Sister Faustina went to wipe the sweat off her forehead and then realized she couldn’t. She settled for leaning back against the wall instead. “Come on. Help me get him onto the couch.”

  Together they lifted him up and set him on his side in case he vomited. Sister Lucia lifted up his shirt and patted down his legs, looking for wounds. “I don’t understand where this blood is from.”

  Sister Faustina pointed silently at the floor. Red streaks led under the bathroom door. Sister Lucia sucked in a breath so fast her lungs ached for it. Sister Faustina tapped the tip of her knife into the lock and jiggled it until it popped.

  Terret lay curled in front of the washbasin, cradling the distress beacon. Dark brown blood, dried now, splattered the edge of the basin and the washtub and the composting toilet. Sister Lucia turned her over and found long, deep gouges across her shoulder and chest and belly, the kind made by ragged nails.

  “She locked Joseph in the bedroom and herself in here,” Sister Lucia whispered.

  “And the baby in the front room where neither of them could hurt him.” Sister Faustina crossed herself, which she so rarely had the urge to do.

  Sister Lucia pressed her fingers under Terret’s throat. She had a pulse. Weak, thready, irregular. She peeled open Terret’s eyelids. She was infected, but only her irises were ringed with color, and not the whites. Still. Even if they cured her, she had been bleeding blood that wouldn’t clot for days. Sister Lucia injected the antibodies into
her system and then cut her shirt off to see how bad the damage was. Field stitching was not ideal, but she needed to get some of these wounds cleaned and closed.

  Something clattered in the front room, like a cup dropping. Sister Lucia jumped, and Terret mumbled something desperate in her delirium.

  “I thought you said there was sedative enough in there to drop a horse,” Sister Faustina said. Her face mask was fogged with her own sweat. “I’ll go.”

  * * *

  Sister Faustina kept the little knife in her hand, even though she knew it would do nothing for her. She rounded the corner from the bathroom and saw Joseph’s head still slumped on the arm of the couch. Not even his fingers twitched. Just the last flails of the disease before the sedative really took hold then? Or a seizure?

  Click.

  She turned, to the one corner of the room hidden from her. The ECG soldier pressed up against the wall pointed his rifle at her chest. His kit was on the floor by his feet. Two scalpels, specimen jars, empty syringes. What all were they taking from these people? No wonder so many dead soldiers lay in the square—the soldiers had put these people through pain, and the people in their delirium had fought back. She dropped the knife, and lifted her hands.

  “I am not infected,” she said. “I am a Sister of the Order of Saint Rita. I am here to offer aid.”

  He was really just a boy. A surplus child gathered up from an overcrowded planet and sent here, so far from home, to kill people whose names he would never know and be killed, eventually, by someone who would never remember his face. He held the rifle steady, but his eyes were wet. “Move away or I will kill you.”