by Blaze Ward
“Stand by.”
“Merde!” the woman continued a few moments later.
“Talk to me,” Kathra said calmly.
“There appear to be two sources of…something, Kathra,” Iruoma said in a voice suddenly much shakier than normal. “The gem itself is a massive sink of power, but there’s a second something behind it, I think. Like the gem is resting on the platinum housing and a second one is contained in the metal somewhere. The gem contains much power, but is not doing anything. Whatever is behind it is much brighter on the scanners, but not emitting external signals I can detect.”
“What’s that even mean?” Daniel asked, apparently loud enough for the microphone to pick up.”
“The signals are only visible if I almost touch the scanner on the thing,” Iruoma said. “If I’m even forty centimeters away, they disappear.”
“The gem and the frame are communicating?” Kathra asked.
“Maybe,” Iruoma said. “Never seen anything like it.”
“Haunt, return to the ship,” Kathra decided. “There’s nothing more out here we can learn, and if it’s not going to pick a fight, we won’t either.”
Kathra brought the nose of Spectre One around and began a burn. She was the farthest away of everyone right now, so she’d be the last one home, but they couldn’t start without her.
Whatever it was they were doing next.
15
He was getting better at spaceflight. Daniel hadn’t even felt queasy once on this flight. Granted, it had been a short jaunt, just out to circle the turtle once and then home, but he hoped he was getting the hang of flying in zero gravity.
After all of these shenanigans were done with, Kathra Omezi would either get rid of him quickly, or keep him around for a while.
Daniel wasn’t sure which thought frightened him more.
They had landed. Always an interesting chore, where the Commander slid her ship up close against the hull on their left side, the ship’s outer hull itself rotating away from them in such a way that a pilot had to hit her mark just right the first time, or either chase it around the trunk of the ship or wait for the dock to circle ’round again.
A quick burst of maneuvering thrusters and Spectre One fell into the docking cradle on her left side. A thump as two arms engaged and held the ship, and then a quick rotation on the nose axis so that down was down as the two entities became one. And he didn’t even think he would vomit this time.
Daniel wondered why they didn’t just dock with the cockpit looking up, and hadn’t thought to ask one of the women. The Commander didn’t seem like she wanted frivolous questions today.
One roll, from laying on your right side to sitting upright, like a really good drunk, and the Commander powered her ship down. Daniel waited until he heard her unbuckle things before he did the same. She was much faster and more experienced at this than he was, but there was precious little space aft of the cockpit. Just a small kitchenette and a bathroom, plus the ladder that would descend from the ceiling.
If he moved too quickly now, he’d be standing on her shoes while she tried to cook, always a recipe for disaster. Or at least an elbow in the ribs.
Instead, he knelt on his chair, facing rear and watched her climb out of sight before he went after her. Up the ladder and into the belly of WinterStar, or something. It always felt like emerging from the sewers, to go from the crowded dimness of a Spectre ship into the well-lit, curved hull of the flight deck.
They had only been out there for perhaps thirty minutes, so he didn’t know if the mechanical crew would need to pull the ship inside where they could work on it, or just leave it there for now. Or maybe they would move it over to one of the flight tubes for quick launch while he was working inside.
Hopefully, he could go back to his kitchen now that they were back. Lunch was getting cold and sticking to pans if nobody from the other kitchen had been tasked with doing the cleanup that should have been mostly his responsibility.
“Come with me,” the Commander said as he emerged into the light like a groundhog looking for his shadow.
Six more weeks of something, that much was sure.
Daniel fell into her wake, along with several other women from other Spectres, and climbed two decks to end up in medbay.
“Ew,” the noise came out of his mouth as soon as he stepped across the threshold.
“Tell me about it,” Iruoma nodded with just as sour a look on her face. “Got the fans turned up full blast, too. What did you do to him?”
“Beat the salaud to death,” Daniel said as a wall of rotting something filled his nostrils.
In the kitchen, that smell was something that had gone so utterly rancid that you burned the box it came in and hosed yourself off with ammonia.
What the hell had happened?
The creature looked like somebody had attached a vacuum pump to a beachball and deflated it. Skin wrinkled into the sorts of folds you got when you stayed in the tub to finish the book instead of doing the reasonable thing and going to bed.
And the smell…
Daniel was a chef. He was used to strange smells, but death on this scale wasn’t one of them. Fortunately, several of the women behind him were doing even worse.
Only Iruoma and the Commander looked phlegmatic at this point. But they would.
“Talk to me,” Omezi drew herself up to her incredible height and pulled Daniel right up next to her.
Nothing like looking a woman in the shoulder.
Iruoma pulled out a small box. Maybe thirty centimeters tall, twenty wide, and about as thick as a pack of cigarettes. He could see a screen on the top and a bunch of antennae and stuff sticking out the bottom. She pushed a button and the machine happily beeped to itself for a moment.
The screen changed, but he was at a bad angle to read what was on it.
“How is that possible?” the Commander asked.
“You tell me,” Iruoma answered. “The curves have just about followed the projections over the last hour, so whatever is happening is predictable.”
Daniel found both women staring at him. All the women stared at him, including the handful out in the hallway where the air was presumably not as foul.
“What?”
Iruoma showed him the screen. He spent several seconds just figuring out what it was telling him, as he had never used something like this. Way more complicated than the devices he had used in his kitchen to judge the internal doneness of a Beef Wellington or a Steak Tartar.
“Does this say he’s been dead for two months?” Daniel looked up at Iruoma in total confusion.
“It does,” she smiled grimly. “And that’s about what a corpse smells like in a closed system, if it doesn’t dry out over that time.”
Huh.
He turned to the corpse. They apparently expected him to have an expert opinion on an alien species nobody had ever encountered before. Presumably on the basis that Daniel had been the one who killed it.
Didn’t that mean it was someone else’s job to clean it and cook it? Wasn’t that how it was supposed to work?
Kathra Omezi didn’t look like a woman in need of a moment of levity, so he kept the joke to himself.
Dead. That much was obvious. Daniel hadn’t gotten a good look at the face before. Two eyes, nose slits, mouth. Mostly normal-ish. Holes on the sides that looked like ears without the ears. Scales everywhere.
He had never had to skin a snake before cooking it, so Daniel reached out and plucked a scale just to see what happened. It came away well enough.
Waxy. Not rough like fingernails. More fishlike, maybe.
He had lots of experience with dead fish.
Skull smushed in. Brains leaked out. Blood mostly dried. Body room temperature.
“What did you say?” Daniel asked, turning back to the Commander.
“Nobody said anything.” She looked at him with almost a crossness to her eyes.
“I could have sworn…” Daniel let himself fall silent to listen. “T
here.”
“Nothing,” Omezi’s scowl had deepened.
“Hey, I got something,” Iruoma was peering at the scanner device in her hands. “Normally I only got that frequency when I’m standing where you are, but something blipped the system louder this time.”
Daniel was an entire step backwards before his brain engaged. He bumped both women lightly with his shoulder blades as he did.
“What are you doing?” the Commander asked.
“Standing over here,” he said simply. “She couldn’t pick up a signal unless she was right on top of it. Then she could, clear over here, when I got too close. Ergo, don’t get too close.”
“Step over there again, Daniel,” the Commander said in a quiet voice that seemed to promise untoward pain if he didn’t.
He studied her eyes, weighing a black eye and a concussion against whatever the dead guy wanted to do to him. Even dead.
He wasn’t going to win this round. Not with her. Never with her.
Daniel took a deep breath and kind of sidled closer to the bed with the dead guy on it.
“Anything?” the Commander asked behind him.
“Nothing,” Iruoma said.
“Do it again, Daniel,” Omezi ordered.
“Do what again?”
“Whatever it was you did before,” she snapped.
What had he done before?
Studied the dead guy. Held his breath shallow and breathed through his mouth so he didn’t have to smell it as much. Plucked a scale off the jawline to see what it was.
Touch?
Merde.
Touching the months-old corpse causes it to do something?
Daniel glanced back, but Commander Omezi was apparently reading his mind, because she had drawn her pistol and was holding it tight against her side, in case she needed to shoot something in close quarters.
Hopefully, a zombie and not a chef.
Daniel nodded and gulped. Twitchy fingers reached out and just poked the neck of the thing this time. He didn’t trust that his nerves were up to actually doing fine work right now, and he didn’t have a knife to get a larger piece of skin to work with.
“There,” Iruoma said. “It spiked again.”
Yes. It had. He had heard it.
Like someone had opened the door to a loud room for a second, letting a previously-silent space fill with one echo of noise.
Because Omezi had a gun in her hand, Daniel went to his left, clear to the bottom of the bed so she could shoot the zombie, and not the chef. At least not accidentally.
Silence now.
“Touch it again,” Iruoma said.
“Absolutely not, madam,” Daniel dug in his heels. “You do it.”
“Daniel?” Commander Omezi had her attention focused on him, but not the gun.
Not yet, anyway.
Her voice was softer this time. Inquisitive.
“I heard it,” he offered.
There didn’t appear to be a vocabulary to encompass the sound.
“Heard what?” she asked, gun rock steady and pointed at his heart.
He would have done the same, so Daniel didn’t begrudge her that. Hell, he might have already fired by now, but that was why she was The Commander, and he was just her personal chef.
Daniel licked his lips and searched for a word.
“A cocktail party in another room,” he finally said, about the time the two women were starting to fidget.
“What?”
“The noise,” he tried to explain.
It was like explaining blue to a woman born blind.
“What noise?”
“When I touched him, I heard something like a group of voices in another room,” Daniel said. “Voices, but the words weren’t clear. White noise, but people speaking.”
“And?”
“And you touch it now,” he could feel the edge of hysteria wake up and look around.
Kathra Omezi fixed him with that hunter’s stare for long enough that he did begin to twitch. Not bad, but not good.
Oh, so not good.
This might be what a heart attack felt like. Good thing he was in the medbay and could fall into one of the other three beds. As long as he didn’t mind sleeping with a zombie.
Maybe he’d just stagger back to his kitchen and pass out there. Anything to get away from that smell.
And those sounds.
Kathra Omezi was The Commander of the Mbaysey. Bad-ass warrior and leader.
Daniel watched doubt creep into her eyes.
Not much, but that panicked him even worse than the thought of zombies did.
His breathing got shallow and coarse.
“Okay,” she said, nodding towards him in acknowledgement that they had all just found one of his absolute borders.
Everybody needed to know how far down the path they could go when dealing with zombies, right?
He watched her step into the spot he had been standing before. Saw her left hand come up, the one without the gun in it, and poke the dead guy on the chin with her weapon all set to make him more dead if he moved.
“Anything?” she asked.
“Nothing, Kathra,” Iruoma said.
She turned back to him with cold, black eyes.
“Daniel, I need you to touch it one more time, just to be sure,” she coaxed, staring down at him like a squirrel gone rabid. “Then you can leave. I have a theory.”
Oh, lovely. Now we’re going to be scientific, woman?
But he didn’t say that aloud. Tried not to even think it too hard, afraid she might hear the voices in his head, like he had apparently heard the dead guy’s.
Still, the worst she could do right now was shoot him. Was that a better outcome than the sound?
Toss up.
Daniel tried to get his heart rate back down to only insane. It didn’t want to cooperate, either.
His hands wouldn’t stop shaking. Neither would his eyes, but he could blink fast enough and they sort of behaved.
She stepped back as he continued around the bottom of the bed and ended up across the dead guy from all the women.
That was how it felt right now. This impossible moat of a dead guy separating him from the place that had been a happy life five minutes ago.
Daniel tried to breathe. Tried to pretend that nothing was wrong. That the dead guy with the crushed-in skull wasn’t going to open his eyes and smile if Daniel touched him again. Wasn’t going to suddenly sit up and do whatever dead rapists with mind control rays did when the Devil decided he didn’t want the competition and sent them back from hell to walk the lands of the living.
Daniel stared at the other cold, black eye staring back at him. The one attached to twelve centimeters of barrel and a small particle beam emitter that was capable of knocking him clear over the bed behind him and tumbling his silly ass up against the far wall like a fire hose might.
Dead breath. Death Before Dishonor, or whatever these warrior women told themselves when things got too REAL.
He reached out a shaking hand and waved it at the corpse.
Nothing bit him.
More breathing. Less shaking.
You mastered chef school, you nitwit. You can do something so simple as poking a corpse, damn you.
He reached out a finger. Prodded the thing’s cheek with it.
Listened to the voices suddenly erupt in his head: screaming, ranting, laughing, telling sea stories and dirty jokes.
Somebody screamed. Probably him, but he couldn’t be sure.
Darkness claimed him mercifully.
16
Rather than leave him in medbay, which was probably the smartest option, Kathra had carried the chef back to his own cabin personally, once they were sure he was still alive, apparently functioning, and had merely passed out.
She and Areen had stayed with the male.
The look on his face, right there at the end, had been comparable to what she might have expected had she handed him a butcher’s knife and ordered him to cut off his ot
her hand.
His scream had been what she might have heard had he actually done it.
Iruoma had send Areen after another Scrutinizer with a snide commentary about not losing this one, and remained behind in medbay to watch the corpse of her piratical invader turn into a desiccated mummy. Erin was up on the bridge.
Kathra and Areen pulled chairs into the small sleeping quarters that she had assigned Daniel and waited, watching him from the side. The new Scrutinizer had been programmed to detect the energy the corpse had given off when Daniel had touched it, but Kathra could find no traces in the man now.
The corpse had stopped emitting anything as soon as Daniel collapsed to the deck.
Iruoma and Elyl were both armed and watching it. And each other, just in case, but her theory said they would be safe. For now, anyway, and that was all she could ask.
Tomorrow was always tomorrow’s problem. Today was enough of a risk.
“Is he going to be okay?” Areen asked, flipping her dreads back out of the way with a nervous habit.
“I hope so,” Kathra offered.
Areen was one of the few women in the crew that didn’t mind the touch of a male occasionally, and Kathra knew they had been involved a time or two. She had not heard anything negative about the experience, so she hadn’t intervened.
“Hope, Kathra?” Areen asked, eyes hooded and fierce.
“When he wakes, we will know more,” the Commander said, as definitively as she could.
“I have never heard any creature make a sound like that,” Areen murmured, more to herself than to her commander, it seemed.
“And I as well,” Kathra said.
“Why did you make him do it?” Areen asked.
“Partly, to test a theory,” Kathra replied simply. “Would he be woman enough to actually do it. But also to see if gender had anything to do with why he escaped the first time.”
“Any doubts now?” Areen asked her with a harsh, sarcastic face.
“None,” Kathra admitted. “Hopefully his mind survived.”
“Survived?”
“You heard his description,” Kathra fixed her gaze only briefly on the warrior before returning to the chef. “Voices. The other Scrutinizer went almost off the scale when he touched it the third time. Nobody knows what it might have been, and the device more or less threw up its hands and walked away, but there was absolutely something there. My fear now is that we grounded something into Daniel’s mind, like you touching a live wire accidentally.”
