Cold Between Stars

by Belinda Crawford

  I stop. Feet still, heart hammering. That smell/scent is beyond wrong. It makes me want to puke and then run and then puke some more.

  I hunch over, hands on my knees, spit collecting in my mouth as I fight the urge. It takes more effort than it should. My knees are shaking, my knuckles white and my face is clammy with sweat and nerves. Every fibre of my being is telling me to yell “fuck it” and bolt, to rip myself out of the forest and never come back. It hurts to stand here, to hold onto the Aer. It hurts so bad.

  It’s never hurt this much before.

  Why does it hurt?

  I can’t hold on, but I can’t let go. I have to find out what’s wrong with the Aer, have to talk to Onah. But my insides seem like they’re going to split molecule by molecule and for a moment, as I stare at my hands on my knees, I can see myself drifting apart, my skin turning to dust.

  I can’t hold on.

  Warmth spreads through my cheek on a gentle, golden fuzz. It spreads through my skin, easing the ache in my spine and untwisting the knot in my gut. The sick scent/sense fades, fleeing before the wave of gold, leaving my head clear enough to figure shit out.

  I snap my shields up.

  The pain vanishes, and the pale gold dust that was my hands snaps back, becoming flesh in the blink of an eye.

  I straighten.

  Fuck. What was that? I already know what the fuzz was. Dude is on my shoulder, tucked up against my ear.

  Even with my shields up, the scent/sense is sneaking up on me. The only difference is I can see it now. It’s the fug, writhing over grass and trees like the particularly ugly parasite it is. It’s pooled at my feet, stretching upwards as it tries to find a way through the thin skin of my shield. It burns where it touches, not a hot, immediate burn, where you snatch your hand away from the cooker, but a slower, colder burn, like what I felt next to the ice hull.

  There are holes in my defences where it’s crept up on me and slipped through my shields, but I know what it’s up to now. It won’t get me again.

  I crouch, snapping a tendril of fug off the carpet at my feet.

  How’d it get on the psionic plane? I guess I should have wondered that when I saw p’Endr’s memories, but I was too busy then, too distracted by the dying, so I’ll do it now.

  I’d felt something from the fug before, in the maintenance tunnel. A presence that was there and not, like it was too far away, or too small for me to sense. But how’d it get here?

  Just because something is psionic doesn’t mean it can access the Aer. I mean, except Dude, who clearly isn’t following the rules.

  I shouldn’t be here. The qwans make sure of that, and the rucnarts enforce the rule. But here I am, and here is the fug (and Dude, but we’re worrying about him later). I’m easy to explain. The Jørans aren’t here to keep me out, and well, I’m sneaky. And determined. And maybe a little nuts. But the fug?

  I remember p’Endr’s dying memories, the fug sweeping across the forest, wrapping her in a cocoon of evil. The fug had gotten into the Aer while the rucnarts were still patrolling the edges, when the qwans’ defences should have been at their strongest. How had it gotten in? Why had it gotten in?

  The fug was eating the ship, was it eating the psions too? It wasn’t like you could eat psionic energy. Was it? Was the fug some kind of thought-eating mould? But then what would it want with steelcrete and biogel?

  None of this makes sense, like it doesn’t make sense for the Citlali to stop in the middle of interstellar space. There is nothing in the space between solar systems, that is why it’s called the void. The big black. The space where parents threaten to throw little boys when they don’t make their bed.

  The piece of fug curls and waves in my grip, lengthening to twirl around my wrist. The rest of it gathers at my feet, wisps of vapour rising from my shields where they try to burn through. I never actually studied the fug before. I’d always been killing it or ripping it off my face, but now I have it at my feet, trapped beyond my shields. If I’m ever going to get a chance to figure the stuff out, this is it.

  I sit, folding my legs under me and planting my butt on the forest floor. I push the crackle of leaves and the damp scent of moss aside, concentrating on the mould until the rest falls away. The mould is curled tight around my wrist, like an Old Terra snake trying to cut off my hand. Amongst all the dull grey and green is a sparkle, a bright pop of red like blood, if blood can glimmer. It isn’t much, and it disappears if I look at it too hard.

  There’s something in it, something more than the sparkle teasing the corner of my eye. I bring it closer, narrowing my focus, making that little pop of red the only thing I see. Ditching the murky smell of fug, the vapour rising off my shields, the grey-green tendril, leaving the red nowhere to hide. It isn’t as easy as it sounds. The red fights me, pulls shadows over itself and burrows deeper into the surrounding fug. The grey-green gets in on the action too, climbing up my shields, twining around my torso, growing tendrils until they reach over my head, waving and burning.

  But if there is one thing I can do really well, it’s focus; focus so hard that the beat of my heart falls away and I forget to breathe. The fug doesn’t stand a chance.

  Eventually the Aer falls away, leaving me and the red standing in a vast white space. The older Jørgens used to call it the void, that place where we go when we leave our bodies behind to concentrate on the psionic, but when you spend your life in the black of space, “void” doesn’t seem like the right kind of word for the place in our heads. Somewhere along the line, we started calling it the eter. It’s meant to mean something in one of the Old Terran dialects.

  The eter is a big white space on the psionic plane, formless until someone like me starts playing with it. It’s kinda like a holowall before Grea gets through with it. Once she does, there’s a whole new world on it, full of sound and colour. That’s what the eter is like, and right now it spreads around me, endless and empty, except for me and the red.

  The red’s bigger now, it’s given up hiding. No longer a thin ribbon of blood wrapped around my fingers, but a cloud floating in front of my face. It’s a ball of mist, thin at the edges and thick in the middle. It pulses, flashes of light streaking through its core, almost like it’s reasoning. There’s nothing coming off it though, no emotion, no thought, no bright puddles of curiosity or halos of fear. Nothing. And yet, it tried to hide.

  I circle it slowly, then over it and under it, in that physics-defying way only possible in the eter. It’s the same on all sides. Flashes of light, like lightning, in a ball of red mist.

  I look closer, making myself smaller, trying to peer through the outer layers, to see what makes it tick. The eter turns pink as I sink deeper into the mist. It’s not until I’m deep inside, the red wrapping around me like a creepy eter, that I sense anything. It inches up on me slowly, a tingle down my spine, a fizz in my fingertips. There’s no colour to it, no emotion, and it’s almost too late by the time I notice the presence. The mist has changed, grown thicker and solid. One moment I’m gliding through it, focused on the lightning at its centre, and then I’m caught, trapped in a solid mass of red. I try to lift my feet, but no matter how I tug or twist, they’re not going anywhere. The mist travels upwards, wrapping me up like nanites in plasform. And now that I’m studying it, I can see it gathering around my knees, getting thicker and thicker until it’s no longer mist. And if I really look, it glimmers with tiny sparks of light full of intention and... I don’t know. There’s still no emotion for me to pick up. The mist appears empty, and yet it can’t be, because it’s doing stuff. Planning. Hunting. That takes more intelligence than your average mould is capable of, even the steelcrete-eating kind.

  Whatever this stuff is, whatever intelligence drives it, I can’t see it. It’s hiding itself somehow, pretending. Grea will tell you there’s something wrong with me, a defective gene that sees something that wants to eat me and decides to fuck with it.

  The mist is no exception, and the fact it’s being sneaky mak
es me want to screw with it more.

  Being trapped doesn’t bother me. I mean, it would, if I wasn’t in my eter, but I brought the red into my mind, and here I make the rules. I let it continue to slither over me, wriggling up my chest and over my head. I can see it better now. It thinks it’s winning and so it’s not hiding itself. The lightning is stronger and more frequent. There’s still no emotion in it, nothing beyond that sliver of intent, but there’s something buried in the lightning, a glimmer within the glimmer. I filter out the mist, concentrating on the lightning.

  I’m pretty sure it was waiting for me to do that.

  The lightning explodes.

  I’m not trapped anymore, which is not as good as it sounds. My arms and legs might be my own, but the lightning has turned into a raging river in the midst of a maelstrom and I’m rocketing down it, surrounded in silver and blinding flashes of light.

  I can’t stop it. I’m in my eter. Freezing the maelstrom should be easier than breathing and yet…

  And yet…

  There’s a sense, an uneasy shift in the space around me, like the fabric of everything is splitting and I’m about to slip through the threads of reality to see something impossible, and if I can do that, survive that, I’ll know everything.

  Everything.

  I stop struggling—

  I’m yanked out. Out of the river and out of the changing eter.

  It shouldn’t be possible. I mean, it might have been warped but it was my eter, my space, my world. Mine.

  And yet, here I am. Not in my eter.

  I should really stop expecting the possible.

  I’m in somebody’s eter, that much I can tell. It’s more than the darkness, the cold that bites at my nose. It’s the ground under my feet, the smell of roses and the musk of feathers in the air. It’s a bone-deep sense of not being me. Yeah, and I know that sounds weird and screwy, because of course I’m me, I’m just not in me anymore. And that’s weird.

  Not weird because I’ve never been in someone else’s eter before, but weird because this feels too... I don’t know, personal I guess, like I’m sitting in someone’s bathroom while they’re taking a piss kind of personal. It’s uncomfortable and I’m glad it’s dark, because I don’t want to see what’s going on in the space around me. Whatever I’d see out there, it’d be more than someone’s pants around their ankles.

  I clear my throat. ‘Hello?’

  The darkness absorbs my voice, and somewhere, something ripples in response.

  I try again. ‘Umm, why’d you bring me here? I mean, thanks, I guess, but... ugh, you brought me in past your shields and all.’

  The ripple moves through the space under my feet, and I sense more than see a shadow rise in front of me.

  It is protected. The white/black voice is inaudible even in the eter. Instead the words reach out and sink into my skin, like light.

  ‘Onah?’

  There is not much time.

  ‘Time for what?’

  They will breach the engine containment soon. You must stop them.

  ‘The fug? I’m trying, but it’s like eating shit and the critters can’t stop it and the AI is screwed and I can’t wake anyone!’

  No, you must stop them.

  “Them” is not a word, it’s a memory and it comes out of nowhere, hitting me in the forehead and swallowing me whole.

  It’s not like the memory of the Regan. It’s old and tattered, with the imprint of a million different minds embedded in the fabric. A teaching memory, one shared and passed down from parent to chick over and again, until the mind it originally came from is lost in a storm of colour.

  Pain comes. Crippling pain. It consumes my arm, my chest, the right side of my face in fire. I scream, the sound high and piercing. It comes out not human, but the shrilling cry of a qwan.

  The pain is not mine. Not mine. I chant it until I believe it, until the burning recedes and other senses began to take over.

  Smell is first, the charred scent of burnt feathers and the iron tang of blood, then sight. Giant trees crashing to the forest floor, trunks a dozen wingspans wide falling through the green, taking others with them. Branches as thick as a rucnart snapping, trunks breaking. The BOOM as they hit the ground, vibrating through my feet, through my bones, the screech of the birds and the scream of chicks.

  Grief wails through me, rips my heart to shreds, leaving nothing but rage behind.

  The scene changes, the perspective with it. I’m no longer seeing through the eyes of a qwan but down the sharp snout of a rucnart as they rip the throat from something… alien.

  Its blood has the rich tang of iron, stains the creature’s soft white fur a blazing red. It falls backwards under the rucnart’s weight, two thick arms straining to hold the rucnart’s jaws away from its neck, while two more try to staunch the flow of blood. But while the creature holds the jaws from its neck, the rucnart’s claws shred the stiff fabric of its clothes.

  The memory changes again and I’m running down wide curved halls, my snout and claws stained red, the musty metallic scent of the invaders thick in my nose, bloodlust and rage gripping my insides as I hunt them through their under-mountain home.

  The hunt and the blood go on forever. I chase the creatures, ripping and tearing their pale flesh. They fall in endless waves. Some fight back, raising weapons that spit bolts of light. They die first. But for as many that fall to the kin’s teeth and claws, more escape, fleeing in machines that roar as they dart into the sky.

  The water-kin come then. Not one or two, or even a thousand. All of them come, joined together in the blazing, crushing light of a single mind.

  There is no perspective from the swatai. Their training memories are too big, too dangerous to be held in a single mind. There is only the sense of them, an entity so big, so powerful that it can wrap around the world and crush an entire species.

  The invaders that don’t vanish into the sky, the ones that haven’t fallen before the kin of tree and air, scream before they die. Webbed hands clutching their heads, blood running from their wide, flat noes.

  Everything that makes them Them bursting out of their heads and flowing—

  Blackness, a bit of the memory snipped away before I can see it, and then I’m back in the midst of the it and They are gone.

  Gone from the earth, the forests, the mountains. Gone from the skies, the oceans. Gone from the endless black beyond the sky.

  Just.

  Gone.

  The memory ends. I blink, coming back to the darkness, to the weirdly personal space I’ve been pulled.

  Them, Onah says again.

  I want to ask who they are, but I stop the words before they make it to my tongue. Jørans don’t name things like we do. He’s already told me who they are.

  The musty, metallic scent/taste of Them lingers on my tongue, coating my throat.

  Humans weren’t the first species to attempt colonising Jørn, every school kid knows that. We were merely the first to survive the experience.

  There were others before us, a race who built their homes under the ground and who, like those first humans, were unable to survive the Pollen, the spore that saturates the planet’s atmosphere. Like us they were blind to the Jørans presence, seeing only animals where something much fiercer and more complicated stood. Unlike us though, the Jørans drove them out.

  Those were the memories I’d experienced. Them were the aliens who’d found Jørn almost a thousand years before humans.

  They were the beings Onah thought were eating our ship.

  Except I hadn’t seen any big, pale bipeds demolishing the bulkheads. Just fug.

  Okay. That doesn’t make sense. I mean, even less sense than usual, and I mean, usually things kinda happen and you run with it, but you know there’s some kind of logic behind it. This is just screwy.

  And now that I think about it…

  Something’s been bugging me about Onah, something more than the too-personal sensation. It feels… full, like it’s ship soc
cer night and I’m standing in the middle of the Atrium with the rest of the crew. All of us crowded around the pitch, except instead of watching the game, everyone is staring at me.

  I rub the back of my neck, my hand brushing Dude, cuddled up under my ear, making himself as small as possible. Which, FYI, is really quiet. I’d totally forgotten he was with me. I wonder how he’d done it, how Onah hadn’t sensed him, how an eter could have two people and yet be full.

  And I wonder why it’s so dark. What’s Onah’s eter like that he’s got to hide it?

  The light switches on in my head, realisation lighting up the area around me like a floodlight. The darkness pushes back.

  I was wrong. This is not Onah’s eter.

  I spin around, trying to pierce the dark, focusing on the dense shadows. It’s not like focusing on the mist, or the lightning. The shadows resist. Sticky and stubborn, trying to wriggle out of my sight, and that’s when I know, really know. And once that happens... I may not be a telepath or a Regan, able to read minds and create a collective big enough to take on the water-kin but I’m strong. And I’m an empath.

  The emote rips through the eter, a tsunami of joy and light shredding the darkness to pieces.

  Surprise. Shock. Panic.

  Jørans don’t have empaths. It’s a human talent, and one they haven’t quite figured out, let alone know how to counter. The kin hadn’t stood a chance.

  Other emotions follow in the wake of the emote, rising from the spots where the shadows once stood. Now all I see are rucnarts and qwans, throwing their heads and shaking their wings, the ground around them rich with the orange of surprise.

  The only one who doesn’t seem surprised is Onah, but I guess that’s because he’s too busy trying to keep fear from saturating the space around him. I guess it’s hard, what with the snaking veins of yellow winding up his legs and around his torso, binding his wings to his chest. I’d be scared too. In fact, I don’t need to glance down to see the puke-yellow of fear snaking up my ankles.