Cold Between Stars

by Belinda Crawford

  I didn’t even get in far enough to see the face attached to the hand. It’d taken me whole heartbeats to figure out it was a hand, and that’d been enough.

  I was going to dream about that.

  As I’d walked around the Core, I’d made a deal with myself not to look in the units with the gaping holes. Almost all of them had holes.

  There are ten units on the inner ring, ten families who are meant to keep Citlali, keep me safe. I didn’t peer in the units, didn’t count the holes. If I don’t, I don’t have to know if they’re dead, don’t have to know if they’re hanging out of their pods like the captain, clawing their way through stasis gel turned hard. If they’re not dead, there’s still hope, still a chance that I can fix this… Whatever this is.

  Some part of me, the bit I’m trying to ignore, kept its own tally. Peered into every hole, saw the shadows, smelled the sweet, putrid scent of decay.

  It’s not easy ignoring your own thoughts, but I’m doing my best. I’m pretending it’s Grea knocking on my brain, getting back at me for covering her bed in critters, or sneaking into her not-as-secret-as-she-thought stash of chocolate and replacing it with cheese.

  She hates cheese.

  I’ve stood still too long, trying to ignore the creeping sensation on the back of my neck, not watching the fug.

  I can’t save Grea from here. I can’t get into the Core. I can’t wake the captain or the XO or… or… The hesitation is an invitation for my brain to show me all the things I didn’t want to see.

  No. No. No.

  I have to get out of here.

  There’s nothing I can do for them, nothing for me here but ghosts and the smell of death.

  I stumble back, or try. One foot moves but the other refuses.

  I glance down.

  Fug has slithered over my boot, greedily reaching around the sole and covering the toes, sticking it in place.

  Fear blooms in my chest and gives me a surge of strength. There’s a thick, meaty THHHRIP and I’m free.

  Free and running all the way home.

  There is no home, only darkness and the endless echo of my boots.

  I don’t know how far I ran, or even really where, just that I’m on the Outer ring, as far from the Core as I can get.

  It’s cold. I imagine my breath frosting on the air, the white puff trailing from my nose. It’s the kind of cold that makes Mum yell at Jim Engineer for forgetting to overhaul the enviros. And then Jim checks out the controls in the quarters I share with my family, and he gets this funny expression on his face, fiddles with things a bit and tells Mum he’s sorry and it’s all fixed now.

  No one tells Mum that Grea was “improving” the cabin’s AI again and fucked up the sub systems.

  Sometimes it’s like my twin gets all the love.

  But if she were here, if it was me stuck in the pod instead of her, she’d be doing something. Something clever, something genius. She’d be kicking the fug’s spore-ridden butt, not sitting here in the dark, imagining her breath misting on the air.

  I wipe my cheeks.

  I’ve gotta get to the Core.

  The fug’s not going to stop me.

  CHAPTER SIX

  It’s cold in the freight lines, colder than Stasis. My fingernails are going blue and I’m pretty sure my lips are going to fall off any second now.

  To make it worse, there’s a breeze. The breeze is how I know there’s a cargo palette coming up behind me. There’s not an actual wind aboard Citlali, those sorts of enviros are limited to Agriculture, and sometimes the Rec deck. This breeze is caused by the palettes moving through the system, pushing air in front of them like a giant cleaning bot gathering up dust. It gets stronger as the palette nears, nipping at my heels, making my hair snarl and tangle. I jump off the line.

  There’s no sound at first, nothing but that rush of air, but as it grows stronger, the rush becomes a hum and then a boom as the palette rips past, fast enough to catch me in its backdraft.

  There are all kinds of ways to get around the Citlali. Most of the adults settle for the corridors and lifts, some even have mini-hovers, the qwans like to ride the rucnarts, the critters use the tubes and the kids... We’ve got the speedway.

  Some of the older folks, the ones who actually grew up on Jørn, like to tell us about the street races, illegal gigs where people teamed up and rode their companions around the city. Everyone would be out to get everyone else, using drones and bombs to take out the competition. It always sounded kinda fun, but I reckon it’s got nothing on the speedway. Not even the fastest companion can run as fast as a cargo palette with its safeties turned off. They can’t go vertical either, or do a loop ‘de loop. Not that there are a lot of loops on the Citlali, but we make do. You also can’t shoot a companion out into space. Well, you can, I guess, but expecting them to come back alive would be tricky.

  The speedway is how the ship moves cargo around. It’s not actually a speedway (it’s not even called a speedway), and it’s not really meant to be used by humans, which I reckon was a major oversight. Command tried to keep us out of it for ages, but there’s only so much they can do, and the Citlali... well, the AI didn’t seem to mind us playing around in her insides. Eventually Command gave up trying to keep us out, especially when a few of the older crew got in on the action. Kinda hard to make something illegal if your second-in-command is egging your Chief Medic on.

  I guess someone might have tried to get a barrier racing team going, but there aren’t any striders aboard the ship. Companions big enough to ride are too big for a ship like this. Plus, the rucnarts hate them. Like, really hate them. Guess it’s got something to do with that thing during the war. No one’s ever been stupid enough to ask though. When rucnarts bite your head off, they use their teeth.

  I mightn’t have been able to get into Core through the front door, but there’s always a back way. That’s one of the things you discover on a ship like this. As simple and secure as the engineers like to make things out to be, there’s always a work-around. And right now, I’m going for the indirect route.

  That means hitching a ride on the speedway to the maintenance tunnels that run throughout the ship’s skeleton.

  The speedway is a web of square tubes with rounded corners. Three of me can lie end to end across one and still not touch the other side. They’re as dark as Stasis except for the mag-lines – thick lines of bio-gel and steelcrete running down the middle of the bulkheads, deck and ceiling. They’re glowing enough to make out the shadow-lines, where the plating fits together. I shut my palm unit off.

  My map’s useless now anyway. Good thing I know my way around. Mostly.

  I’ve never actually been this way before, at least when I’m not going one twenty klicks an hour, and definitely not to get to Core. For one, it doesn’t really go to Core, not directly; and two, Core’s kinda boring. Nothing to see there but bio-gel and databanks.

  The maintenance hatch I want is up ahead, I can see the star, Citlali’s symbol, on the wall. There’s something funky about it though. Instead of six sharp points, like spears thrusting from a circular centre, the star is fuzzy, like there’s a layer of fog between me and the hatch… or the fug that gunked up my sister’s pod. Some of the nerves I left behind in Stasis start dancing in my stomach.

  I tell myself it’s simply the dark and distance messing with my vision. My stomach doesn’t quite believe me, but I ignore it. I wish I’d convinced Mum to let me get an optical upgrade, I could have zoomed in on the hatch, figured out if the fuzziness really was a figment of my imagination.

  Not that it would matter much, I can’t open a hatch by eyeballing it.

  Another breeze pushes me along the tube, gentle but getting stronger with every passing second, almost like it’s trying to hurry me along. And maybe it is. The hatch is on the bend, and there’s not a lot of room between the mag-lines and the wall for me to avoid getting squished by a palette. I’m not worried about it though. The palettes are programmed to stop long before
they hit anything, namely me.

  Still, I pick up the pace as the breeze becomes a wind. The nerves are doing their jig, breaking out of my gut to climb up my spine, and whatever’s coming up behind me isn’t helping. It must be big, or maybe the AI is using all the lines, because now the wind is pushing me along, and the lines are humming, loud enough to blot out the echo of my feet. Citlali gets kinda pissed when we hold up the big loads, not that the AI is capable of true emotion, but she does a good job of faking it.

  I’m running now, and not because of Citlali. The mag-lines aren’t merely humming, they’re glowing, all four of them getting brighter and brighter. The hatch is ahead and I can make out the fuzziness now, a grey-green mould hugging the star and edges where it meets the bulkhead.

  The thought of touching it sends the nerves up my throat, along with a little bit of sick, but that hum... I don’t know what it is, but the hum, the way the mag-lines are trying to burn themselves onto my eyeballs, it’s scaring the shit out of me. I don’t care what the safety protocols are, I’m getting out of this tube before the palettes have a chance to smear me across the bulkhead.

  The wind is blowing my hair past my face, pressing the seams of my shipsuit into my back hard enough I reckon it’s going to leave marks. I race the last hundred metres. My breath is coming hard and the light’s so bright it’s hurting my eyes. The control panel is buried under a carpet of fug. I wipe it away with both hands, resisting the urge to hurl.

  The sound of the palette coming down the tube helps with that, no longer a hum but a roar. It shouldn’t be doing that, and I guess that’s why my hands are shaking and I’m managing to ignore the fact that the fug is now crawling over my hands. The damn stuff is alive, I can almost see it slithering up my brain stem.

  ‘Crap, crap, crap.’ I try to shake it off but the damn stuff is stickier than nano-glue. I hesitate, imagining fug eating the pry bars, the blood on p’Endr’s snout, before wiping my hands on my shipsuit, leaving streaks of grey-green behind. I’m pretty sure they start moving, but I’m not paying attention. Not. Paying. Attention.

  There’s no time to freak out about the fug eating my clothes. The wind is strong enough to blow me over now, and I have to hang on to the edges of the hatch to stand up.

  The control panel is messed up, parts of it hanging out of its casing, the holoscreen spitting little bits of light as I press my hand to it. I even see bio-gel dribbling out the bottom. It seems like it’s working though and—

  A siren blares. With all the force of the wind behind it, the sound knocks me off my feet, makes my vision wobbly.

  That’s probably what saves my life. I fall into the gap between the lines and the palette rushes past me, over me, around me. It’s huge. Taking up all four mag-lines. For three heartbeats it surrounds me, a rush of sound and colour, before I’m tumbled in its backdraft.

  I spend a few seconds on my back, not sure what I’m seeing, but the mag-lines are going back to their usual soft glow and the hurricane of the palette’s passing has faded to nothing. I’m just glad I’m alive. And then I see the fug. Not only on the hatch but inching up the bulkhead and across the ceiling, stretching out toward the mag-line there and hugging it. It runs along either side like a weird vine, changing as it does so, growing broad, flat appendages like leaves, if leaves could slice up plasform like it were butter.

  That shit is freaking me out.

  ‘What the Old Terra is it?’

  My voice echoes in the tube and no one answers, not even the Citlali, who should be around here somewhere.

  That’s why I’m here though, not lying around admiring the fug as I wait for another palette to flatten me.

  I’m on my feet and opening the hatch. It doesn’t slide aside like it should. It’s a little stickier than it should be too, like something has eaten the sliders, and takes more effort to shove aside. Behind it, the tiny walkway is choked with the same webs I found in the maintenance lockers, except its thicker here and...

  Okay, now I really want to back up and get outta here. The webs are moving and not in some breeze, because there isn’t anything to push air around in the maintenance tubes. Nothing. But no one’s told the fug that.

  It’s strung across the thin crawl space in thread-fine filaments, stretching from ceiling to deck to bulkhead. Some threads are thicker than others, more grow as I watch. But that’s not what’s really flipping me out. There are tendrils curling from the bulkheads like they’re trying to catch something. I swallow my nerves. I really don’t want to go any further. Creepy-crawly curly shit is not my thing, especially when it looks like it wants to eat me.

  Unbidden comes the memory of Grea curled in a ball in her pod, of p’Endr lying on the deck of her stasis unit, eyes staring at nothing. It overlays the one of Grea, and for a moment it’s not the rucnart on the deck, it’s my sister.

  My heart lurches. My insides turn to ice. For several long heartbeats the image stays with me, burning itself into my brain. I know before I take my next breath, the image is one I’ll remember for the rest of my life. It scares me. Scares me right down to my bones. Scares me more than fug.

  I’m going to hold this over Grea’s head for eternity. The day I walked through creepy fug to save her from... well, fug. She’s totally going to owe me.

  Taking a deep breath, I plunge into the creepiness.

  I should have brought a flamethrower or an envirosuit, or maybe gloves.

  I gave up trying to wipe fug off my face around the same time my hand started sticking to it. Consequently, it was also about the time the fug got too thick to walk through.

  Now I’m burrowing a tunnel through it, using my hands to dig through the web like it was dirt. The filaments stuck to everything. I swear there’s some down my shipsuit, sliding in the gap between my ankle and my shoes. There’s probably a few strands in my brain by now too. I bet they’re slithering through my ears, seeking grey matter like Mac on a cheese hunt. That dude can find cheese anywhere, even the Ag stores where I hid the gouda. It was a prank. Kind of. More like a pre-prank prank. Mac’s into everything and sometimes it’s hard to get anything done, ‘cause he’s like, you know, there all the time. The gouda hunt kept him busy for almost an entire ship cycle. I still don’t know how he tracked it down. I hid that cheese good. But Mac’s weird.

  If he were here, digging through the same fug/web he was trying to save his sister from (not that he has one), he’d probably be smiling.

  I’m not. Smiling means I’ll get more fug in my mouth. There’s already enough of it there to coat my teeth. I’ve even given up trying to spit it out. Now, I’m concentrating on anything but the squirmy, wriggly sensation of it on my tongue, anything but the feel of it trying to slide down my throat.

  Right now, ‘anything’ is the knot of web gripped between my hands. It’s tougher than the rest of it, thicker. I grit my teeth (still safely tucked behind my lips) and yank. It doesn’t budge. I give it another tug, which is about as successful as the first one and sit back on my heels.

  Through the criss-crossing webs, I can make out a junction and the soft glow of a holo that should be the Core’s hatch. Except I can’t see the actual panel, only an orange halo of light where it should be. Merely a few strides between me and it. It doesn’t sound like much, but the fug’s a wall. I shove my hands in it and try again, straining with everything I have. Teeth, shoulders, arms, legs. Everything.

  Pain rips through my hands; that sharp, wet, ripping kind that comes with blood.

  The web stills. The tendrils freezing, the filaments no longer drifting in their imagined breeze.

  This can’t be good.

  It isn’t.

  The fug turns on me like a rucnart on the hunt. Or at least, how I imagine they hunt. I’ve never actually seen it, because then I’d be dead.

  Dead. Dead. Dead.

  Almost like now.

  I’m scrambling backwards on butt and bloody hands and the fug... It’s reaching for me. Those tendrils are stretching tow
ard my toes, tangling in my hair, rolling in the smears of red left on the deck.

  ‘Shit. Shit. Shit.’

  Going backwards isn’t going very fast and the fug is growing, growing with a purpose. I can sense it, like an oil slick over my psyche. It’s cold, mechanical, determined. I’ve never sensed anything like it. Whatever this shit is, it has emotions and that scares the crap out of me. Fug, mould, webs in my world don’t have emotion.

  A memory sneaks up on me. Not mine, one of p’Endr’s. Of the fug biting her heels, the metallic alienness of it invading her bones, and a fear that seemed to reach all the way back, to pull something ancient from the depths of her mind. A memory that traced back hundreds of years and filled her with a fear sharper than the promise of death.

  I shove the memory aside before p’Endr’s fear becomes mine, then I squirm around in the tight space and high tail it out of that tube.

  I’m back, and this time I’m armed and ready.

  The speedway’s quiet, no breeze, the mag-lines shedding their usual soft glow.

  I heft the rifle and stare at the mess of web and tendrils that’ve taken over the tube while I constructed my weapon.

  It isn’t a flamethrower, but it’ll do.

  It took a while, a while in which I wondered if Grea was alright, wondered what she would do if she were here and it was me stuck in the pod, curled up against the fug. There might’ve also been a few moments there were I had to stuff the sobs back down my throat and wipe the tears from face when memories of p’Endr got mixed up with Grea.

  In the end, after raiding every maintenance locker on Stasis, picking up anything that looked remotely useful, I figured out how to concoct a fug-killing machine. It isn’t pretty and Dad’d have my head if he could see the bio-gel tendrils sticking out the side of the old multi-tool. It looks like I murdered a stunner, chopped it up and stitched it back together with a few extra parts thrown in for good measure. A holo-emitter over the muzzle, a power-pak sticking out of the rifle butt and a heap of bio-gel smeared in between. A Franken-thrower.