Cold Between Stars

by Belinda Crawford

  P’Endr has all the adrenalin that fear and panic can lend her. Not much can keep me out of someone’s mind, but that will do it well enough. Heightened emotion is tough to overcome, kinda like trying to colour over black with yellow. Add in adrenalin and you have a mind so focussed on one thing that it’s tough to convince it to let go. Still, I’m getting somewhere. There’s enough room in my brain to consider things other than keeping p’Endr out now, enough for me to spare some thought for my body.

  I push away from the bulkhead and stumble down the corridor. The spaces between hatches is getting wider, meaning I must be in the Jøran section, where the units have to be bigger to accommodate their size. I can almost see p’Endr now. The trail of her fear shimmers in my mind’s eye, leading me straight to the round hatch, which is good and bad.

  Good because I’ve found her. Bad because her emotions are punching me in the face, and the emote I laid over her? She smashes it.

  The backlash has me on my arse before I’m really sure what’s happened, and then I can’t really think about what’s happened because—

  Old Terra. My heart’s racing a million parsecs an hour, pounding its way out of my chest and all I can see, all I can feel is the grey-green fug wriggling down my throat and eating my fur. I lash out at the hatch, claws leaving long furrows in the clear, human-made glass, trying to catch the red square in front of my muzzle, but they slide through. I yowl and thrash, choking on the blue liquid even as blood stains it red. The need for oxygen is burning my lungs, the fug eating my insides and—

  I’m released. A rush of liquid, a gasp of air. For a second, the sensation of the cold on my fur merges with the deck beneath my arse, and it’s hard to separate the sensations, hard to peel p’Endr from my mind. She’s out of the pod, panic and fear still ruling her emotions, giving them strength and making them sticky, but the relief, the air in her nose and the hard steelcrete under her paws, gives me a second to myself. A second is all I need to slam my shields in place.

  I flop back on the deck. I’m me again. The pounding of my heart is my own, so too the sweat on my brow. All me. P’Endr is out of her pod, behind the door, still gasping for breath as the stasis gel exits her lungs. That much is clear, but she’s no longer trying to swallow me whole.

  I frown. Is she too quiet? Rucnarts aren’t exactly peaceful, especially when you do something stupid like sprinkle their dens with pepper, and coming out of stasis with fug eating your fur and blood—

  Blood. The word pops into my mind on the memory of the stasis gel stained red, the coppery taste of it on p’Endr’s tongue. Oh shit.

  All the adrenalin that fuelled p’Endr is now mine, pushing my heart faster, getting me on my feet, my hands pushing at the emergency release, grabbing the handle. Every muscle in me strains, my lungs scream for air and my vision goes white, but the hatch pops open.

  It takes years for the hatch to roll aside enough for me to squeeze through. I don’t hesitate, not even when I’m halfway through and a memory of Dad telling me never to approach an injured Jøran blooms in my brain. Claws and fangs and rage, that’s what he said, all of it searching for a squishy human – hybrid or no – to sink into.

  Stupidity overrides fear though, that and the need to get inside the unit. Is it p’Endr’s need or mine? Does it matter? I’m in the unit now. The lighting’s on the fritz, only the dim, yellow-orange emergency lights illuminate the pods, the flood of blue-green gel and the rucnart sprawled over the decking. She’s on her side, like she’s too tired, and maybe she is. She doesn’t lift her head when I finish squeezing through, doesn’t flick an ear. I can hear her breathing though, long wheezy inhale and shuddering exhales. Her emotions are quiet, too quiet, like all that fear and adrenalin have done what I couldn’t, and zoned her out, except...

  It doesn’t feel right. I step further into the unit. Now that I can see her – paws as big as my face, the gleam of fangs – Dad’s voice is making my steps slower, raising the caution that my concern obliterated. Gingerly, half an eye on the hallway beyond the hatch, I step around p’Endr, until I can see her eyes. They’re open, all four of them, but half-lidded and her upper eyes, the ones kin only open when they’re playing with your mind, are unfocused, the slit pupils large, the usually red iris clouded. She sees me and her lower eyes, the regular everyday ones, open a little wider. She twitches, forelegs and sides heaving as if she wants to sit up. For a second she’s almost there, forelegs folding and head rising off the ground, but then it’s like she gets stuck, frozen, and she crashes back to the deck.

  She wheezes again. The sound is different this time, heavier, like she has to work harder to move her lungs in and out.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I say. ‘It’s the stasis gel. It’ll dissolve in a moment.’

  P’Endr gives me a look, and I lower my shields enough to let her in.

  Pain. The taste of blood. A rattle in her chest; breathing like the fabric of her lungs is full of holes. A sense of something wrong, so very wrong.

  I stumble back, shutting her out of my brain with a sharp SNAP of my shields. My face is cold, like the blood has rushed out of it, and I’m suddenly light-headed. That’s when I notice the red stain around her muzzle, the pink froth caught in the crease of her jaws.

  ‘Citlali!’ I yell the AI’s name. It echoes off the walls loud enough to make p’Endr flatten her ears.

  Nothing. No pop of light, no shimmer of her avatar materialising beside me.

  I spin around in case she’s behind me.

  ‘Citlali!’ I yell again. ‘Citlali!’

  Nothing, nothing save p’Endr lungs rattling behind me, the deep, chest-tearing cough, the whine. I spin back around.

  She’s hacking up blood and... other things. Whatever it is, it’s thick and grey, chunky almost. That’s not right. I know it in my bones, know it the way p’Endr knows it, and the knowledge makes me cold.

  ‘What do I do?’

  She stares at me and there’s panic there, but it’s dim and tired. I sense her, beyond my shields, and that same tiredness is in her thoughts, soaking them, making them slow. She’s trying to tell me something, and so I open myself up again, not quite all the way, but enough for her to enter my psyche like Onah did, but where the fug was a sickness hidden behind the white/black of his mind, p’Endr’s green/lilac was being eaten away, her animas full of holes. The fug couches everywhere in her psyche, coating the bright colour with its ugly film.

  A thought packet sits on the edge of her thinking, as clouded as the rest of her mind. She holds it out to me. Slowly, with all the caution of Dad’s warnings sounding in my head, I reach for it.

  It tastes like mould, coating the back of my tongue with an ugly, cloying film, dulling my senses. I try to clear it out, to scrape the mould out of my psyche. It’s like scraping crud out of the cyclers, the thick goopy stuff sticking to my hands, but once it’s off the message underneath is clear and bright. The thought packet dissolves in my brain, the knowledge within sinking into my psyche like it had always been there.

  It’s a memory.

  I’m floating in the eter, the minds of the crew bright stars amongst the darkness of space. The humans shift slowly, the Jørgens are restless nodes of energy zipping and sliding between them, always moving, disturbing the psionic plane with their restlessness. And there, points of being hidden behind a wall only other Jørans can see, are the kin. Tree and Air merged in the Aer, a world constructed from memories and the power of their combined psyches, where they can leap through the great trees of mountain forests and fly through the clear desert skies.

  The Aer changes, a shudder disturbing the earth, a note of wrongness singing through the leaves.

  It tastes like rot, and as p’Endr stands atop a stony outcropping and lifts her nose to the breeze, she sees it. A grey-green stain rushing over the forest, swallowing tree and air-kin alike. The memory shudders and for a moment, barely long enough to take note, I’m in a blank spot, like part of the memory has been cut away, everything
except an ancient sense of knowing and fear.

  Then the blank spot resolves and I’m back as p’Endr, but she’s no longer atop the outcropping. Time has shifted and she’s perched in the lower branches of a forest behemoth, fighting the fug. She growls and snaps at the writhing grey-green carpet, leaping off the branch to confront the intruder on the ground, but it pays her no mind, just keeps rolling on. She sees h’Spa swallowed by the fug. Hears him howl, senses his pain and confusion before she senses nothing from him at all.

  Overhead, a shadow breaks from the trees, wings beating furiously as the air-kin, as Onah, breaks for the edge of the Aer. The fug almost seems to look and then stretches toward the fleeing shape.

  P’Endr strikes, ignoring the pain as she sinks her jaws into the fug. The enemy screams, the sound piercing her ears. She snarls and shakes her head, not letting go until the enemy is focussed on her, then she runs. The fug chases, nipping at her heels until it corners her on the rocky outcropping overlooking the forest. The forest is no longer green. It’s dull and grey, the edges fading, the trees becoming indistinct as the fug swallows it until only the iridescent sphere, the last stronghold of the kin, in its centre, remains. It’s already stained, the fug climbing up its sides like an ugly mould. If it doesn’t hold—

  Fear, a hot, all-consuming wave holds her still. And that’s when she’s caught.

  The stain snags her tail, she feels it bite and tries to spin, to confront it with her teeth, but she’s stuck. The fug is sliding over her paws, sticking her to the ground.

  The memory ends.

  I blink, my vision dark as my brain readjusts to using my eyes.

  That...

  There are no words, only the lingering sense of p’Endr’s memory, the fading kin and the fug writhing over the forest. The fear is the worst of it. It’s not the same pounding, adrenalin-fuelled explosion as before. It doesn’t hammer at my psyche trying to get in. It doesn’t need to. It’s already sitting in my chest. Cold and hard, but tiny, like it’s hiding from itself. Right over my heart.

  I rub my chest, crouch beside p’Endr and—

  She’s dead.

  Unmoving. Eyes open, mouth gaping, tongue slack and hanging between her jaws.

  Dead.

  I don’t...

  I don’t know.

  I just...

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The pry bar shatters. Like, explodes into a million tiny pieces. Right in my face. Up my nose, down my shipsuit. Everywhere. I swear I’m going to be spitting out plasform for the next week. The front of my shipsuit is covered with the stuff and it’s going to take forever to get it out of the little creases in my hands. But that’s nothing to the carnage around me. The deck is littered with the remnants of other pry bars.

  My hands hurt and there are little nicks and cuts all over my palms, little streaks of blood on my shipsuit where I’ve wiped them. The streaks are already fading into the fabric, the molecules broken down and stored away by the nanites. My stomach is threatening to eat through my spine

  So now I’m sitting on my butt, staring at the shards in my hand, hoping they’re going to develop nanites and reassemble themselves. I stare really hard. Hold my breath even. But no. The shattered bits of white plasform remain shattered.

  Damn it. Old Terra, damn it. And then maybe Jørn too and Onah and Mum and—

  Take a breath, Kuma, you’re not going to be able to curse the pry bar back together. I close my eyes. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Except that reminds me of Citlali, scrunching her nose up as she pretended to breathe.

  ‘Crap.’ I’m back staring at the remains of the bar. I’d finally found the maintenance locker, jimmied it open (because of course, it wasn’t working either) and dug through a web of... I don’t know what it was. Funky grey-green stuff that reminded me of the fug wriggling over my sister’s pod and p’Endr’s—

  No. I wasn’t thinking of that.

  The fug clung to everything and I had to pull it off the pry bar. It stuck to me as well, clinging to my fingers and seeming to slide over my hands. Even now, the memory of it makes me want to gag. There was something wrong about the web, something that bit at the edges of my psyche.

  But I’m not worrying about that now. No. Now I’m worrying about the pry bar and the emergency panel between me and Jim’s pod. There’s a dent in the top, a tiny lip peeled away from the door. When I press my face to the door and peer down, I can see the emergency release handle, but no way am I getting my hand down there.

  I plonk back on the decking. The bar shouldn’t have shattered like that. I don’t know much about engineering but I know that much. I take another look at the pieces in my hands. Maybe that funky web weakened it. What am I going to do now? I don’t know how long I’ve been at this, but I’ve hit every locker on Stasis from the inner ring to the outer. Some of them didn’t even have doors anymore, only the grey-green web. The tools in those ones had been so much dust. Others had appeared okay, but the bars crumbled as soon as I picked them up. Only those from the last few on the outer ring lasted long enough for me to wedge them against the door.

  What was that web?

  There are no critters on the ship that make them, at least none I know about and I spend a lot of time down in the Hatchery, much to my sister’s disgust. She really hates it when I send the fuzzy ones after her.

  In fact, there’d been tiny skeletons small enough to be critters tangled up amongst the yellow strands. Like the pry bars, they’d disintegrated.

  If I can’t get to Jim Engineer, then I need to get to the Core. The Citlali isn’t just one AI, it’s made up a bunch of smaller AIs, each one overseeing a specific task, but they’re all controlled by Core.

  That avatar in the stasis unit? That was a fragment of Core, or rather, a fragment of the fragment that looked after all the units on Stasis.

  Here’s the thing with the Citlali. It’s got a personality disorder, in that it’s eight AIs in one. The ship is too big for one computer to control on its own, at least without it being really big, so all the ship’s functions got split up and shared around.

  Core runs the ship. She’s like the brains of the brains, making sure everything is running like it should, and telling off the other bits of herself – the sub-AIs – when they fuck up. Which isn’t often, and it’s not like she grounds them or anything, or like they fuck up that much. Just sometimes. And really, the fuck ups aren’t all that big, not like when I accidentally put my shoes in the food cyclers and everyone had to eat protein mush for a week. Nope, the kind of things the sub-AIs get wrong are like being a nanosecond behind with their reports. Core is all over that, which I guess is why things never get as bad as shoes in the food cyclers.

  Long story short, if you want to get something done, Core’s where it’s at. So that’s where I’m going.

  I hope the fug hasn’t eaten the door.

  The fug has eaten the door.

  Not all of it, but enough to make getting in kinda tricky.

  The big round hatch looks like it’s had a buzz cut, which is, you know, unusual for steelcrete. There’s not a hint of the off-white bulkhead under the grey-green carpet. It’s the same all the way around. I walked the thirty-metre circuit that makes up the inner ring of Stasis to make sure, picking my way over the trails of fug stretching across the deck.

  There were holes in some places, metre-thick sections of the bulkhead eaten away like it was cheese. Some of the holes were big enough to squirm through and I might have tried, if not the faint glimmer of an energy field.

  The blue glow extends around the big hatch that leads to Core. It ripples and pops, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the AI has put some kind of electronic shield around it. Okay, so maybe it does take a genius. I rub my hand. My entire arm is still numb from the jolt that just about shocked me out of my skin. But hey, it’s not like I was expecting a forcefield or anything. I didn’t even know the Citlali could do that. Not outside of the labs at least.

 
; The fug’s writhing all over the bulkhead around the Core. It doesn’t appear like it’s moving and then you realise that it’s taken over the control panel and, Old Terra, you better get out of the way ‘cause it’s coming for you too.

  There are tiny holes in the steelcrete of the bulkhead, almost too hard to see, except for the pops of energy coming off the shield.

  I’m standing as close to the centre of the ship as I can get, right in the middle of Stasis. The inner ring, where all the really important people are, isn’t all that big, I can walk around it in two minutes. Command’s stasis unit is behind me, and the XOs. There’s a bright blue hatch on the other side that holds all the crew who hadn’t made it out of sickbay before stasis/sleep, and the Chief Medic (who’s not Mae Lu, ‘cause then she wouldn’t have enough time to nag us juniors). Core is right in the middle of it all, a circular room three decks high and thirty metres across, holding court with Command and all the sick people.

  The inner ring is meant to be the safest place aboard the Citlali; buried in the centre of the ship, more protected even than the middle rings, where Jim Engineer is. It’s why the Core’s here and the command staff right next to it, so when shit goes wrong they can get down to the business of saving people.

  That hasn’t turned out so well.

  I don’t turn to face Command’s unit. Lyn Captain is kinda cool and her kids aren’t that bad for stinky little toddlers.

  There’s no forcefield on the stasis units, no fuzz and pop of electricity to keep the fug at bay. I can wriggle through the hole in their hatch and I would have, except I don’t want to hurl again.

  There was nothing in my stomach the first time and my abdomen hurts from chucking up bile and then nothing else.

  Just imagining the… mess in their stasis unit is enough to roil my stomach. The memory of the shattered pods, the gel thick and frozen like some kind of decayed ooze, the arm sticking out of it, fingers clawed, is a hot, putrid-smelling coal in my mind.