Kzine Issue 19

by Graeme Hurry et al.

  “Mari—oh Jesus fuck what the hell happened to you?”

  “The Hunt. The Hunt, they—” Mari’s knees gave out as Brenner’s hands closed around her forearms. The words felt ill-formed on her tongue. “Need to go back.”

  His face smeared into the wall as he half bent and then picked her up. The sudden change of position sent her spinning off into an even less coherent space, hands flapping uselessly to grasp at anything solid.

  * * *

  Her head still ached, but she could hear herself think over the pain now. Mari lightly explored the side of her skull with shaking fingers: her hair had been partially shaved away, her puffy skin held together by a tacky, uneven layer of emergency NuFlesh under the stiff patch of a bone growth stimulator.

  “You okay now?” And there was Brenner, sitting against the curved wall of the little medical bay. He had his feet propped up on the end of the thin bed, though she couldn’t feel more than a vague stir of irritation at that. There wasn’t really anywhere else for his feet to go.

  Mari let her hand drop back down onto the soft white sheet. “I don’t know. Am I?”

  “Heh. Ish.”

  “Okay-ish.” She traced a wrinkle of fabric with her fingertip. “I don’t think I like the sound of that.”

  “You had a skull fracture. And you scared the hell out of me.”

  “Sorry.”

  “How did it happen? There’s nothing that hard in our rooms, and just the amount of force you’d need…”

  She remembered the Hunt, the taste of dirt in her mouth. A thrill of fear tickled down her spine—that shouldn’t have been real, not like this. Her skull begged to differ, however. And if she couldn’t explain it herself, how would she explain it to Brenner? Mari rasped at her lips with a dry tongue. “We skipping soon?”

  “No. We’re sitting dead in space at the moment.”

  She tilted her head to take a better look at him. “Something happen?”

  “Other than your mysterious skull fracture?” He raised an eyebrow. “Course corrections came out wrong again. I checked everything by hand, twice. Then just for shits and giggles, I ran a new set of corrections after I got you settled in here. Got a completely different set of calculations, this time. The right ones.”

  Mari closed her eyes for a moment. That seemed proof that Jonah had been interfering with the computer—and also that he wasn’t any more. She felt numb at the thought.

  “Know anything about that?” Brenner asked.

  Mari looked at him again, trying to read his face past her own disorientation. He was angry, and there was the expectation she was used to seeing on his face. But there was a subtle shift to it, an openness perhaps. Maybe it was the difference between wanting a particular answer and an answer. “Maybe.”

  Brenner sighed. “I know there’s something going on. We’ve been in this ship together for months, Mari. Even if we hadn’t slept together, I know you. Kind of hard to live in someone’s pocket this long without caring about them. I’m not asking for anything more than the truth, okay?” She thought about Jonah and his deceptions. “It’s going to sound like I’ve lost my mind.”

  Brenner laughed. “We’re being pulled off course by an invisible anomaly, and that’s supposed to be impossible. The computer’s having a mental breakdown. And somehow you managed to break your own skull open with a blunt weapon that doesn’t actually exist. Try me.”

  She couldn’t help but laugh even though it made her head pound. “All right. But just… let me get to the end before you call bullshit.” She drew in a deep, shaking breath and told him everything, from the strange non-dreams during the timeless instant of the skip, Jonah, the Hunt, up to the injury that had followed her back into reality.

  Almost everything. The implant, she simply glossed over, passing by the topic as unseen and unfelt as Jonah hiding in the space beyond space. The mission might be FUBAR, but there’d be other missions if they got out of here alive. The implant in her head would get her ejected from the service, maybe even prosecuted for lying on her contract.

  When she finished her story, Brenner’s face was paler than normal, freckles standing out in stark relief, but thoughtful. He lifted his hand to nibble at a hangnail. She tried not to stare at his hand or the suddenly alien movement of his lips, since he might take that the wrong way. “All right,” he finally said.

  “All right?”

  “It’s probably the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. But the hell of it is, it makes more sense than anything I was able to come up with on my own. Don’t know what that says about me.”

  “I’ve been talking to an alien, Brenner.” Why point that out, when it looked like she wouldn’t have to argue at all?

  “I thought the whole point of this trip was to find new life forms. Well, and map stable gravitational points. But that first is the reason I signed on.”

  Funny. “An alien that’s been trying to steer our ship off course.”

  “To meet him. Well. I hope. I’d be sad if it was all because he was trying to steer us into the heart of a neutron star or something.” Brenner tilted his head as if he’d just heard a sound at the edge of his perception. “Wonder why he decided to just talk to you and not me.”

  The question filled her with cold dread. “Probably just timing of the various skips. I’m not really certain, myself.”

  “Do me a favor and ask him the next time you speak. I’d give my right arm to talk to a real live alien, you know.”

  Maybe he wasn’t taking this as seriously as she’d originally thought. “I though you said we weren’t skipping anymore.”

  “I think we’re going to have to start again. Look, you were right before, and I admit it. If it’s an anomaly, it’s going to pull us off course either way. We can’t just stay here indefinitely, and we can’t wait for help. So I’ll have the navdat run another full set of diagnostics and we’ll just have to see what happens.” He smiled wryly. “But I appreciate having an idea of the certain death we’re running toward, now.”

  “I think… this next skip we should try using the incorrect calculations. That’s where the alien was trying to send us.” And she’d just hope Jonah had been serious about not using them as bait any more.

  Brenner half-laughed. “Now there’s an idea that freaks me out. But if I want to meet an alien…”

  “Guess those are the breaks.” She gave him a wan smile.

  He stood, a peculiar motion that required folding his legs back into the chair and then rearranging himself to be vertical, and the chip gave her the precise equations for each shift of weight. He rested his hands on the edge of the medical bed, now leaning in far too close for Mari’s comfort. “You should have told me sooner. It would have saved a lot of trouble.”

  “I would have if I trusted you.” Painkillers, perhaps, propelled that bluntness. But it felt strangely good to say it.

  “Jesus, Mari, what more do you want me to do? Walk over broken glass?”

  She eyed his hands. “I made mistakes. I admit it. I shouldn’t have crossed the line between us to begin with, and that’s my fault. But I can’t give you what you want. I need that line back, and you keep—you keep just leaning over it like you think I’m going to change my mind. I’m not. If you can’t respect something that simple as my friend, how the hell am I supposed to trust you?”

  Brenner drew back as if slapped. “It’s not that easy.”

  “You have to do it anyway.”

  She expected yelling, or accusations, like there had been before. She was thoroughly drugged; this sounded like an excellent moment to have another discussion about her endless character flaws. But instead, Brenner rubbed his forehead with one hand. “No. Okay. I’ve got to—okay. I’m going to run the course corrections.”

  Mari leaned back on the gel pillow and simply breathed for a moment after Brenner left. Then she began poking at the wound on the side of her head again, finding the shape of the weapon that had created it and shuddering.

  And she
was going to let Brenner send her back to there.

  * * *

  It’s dark, the landscape rendered grainy and monochromatic by eyes fighting to see with only faint, cold, star light. But she feels the torn earth beneath her feet, churned to ridges and whorls. And she smells blood.

  Filled with dread, she stumbles toward where she recalls Jonah falling. Her feet skid in something slick (normal force, lubricated friction) and she falls to her hands and knees. The air is chokingly thick with rot and metal. Trembling, she feels along the ground, but finds no body, only wet. Her hands are dark with it—with blood—when she raises them.

  The horns call.

  Gasping, Mari struggles to her feet, stumbles into a run. Closer behind, the horns sound again. She hears crashing in the forest in front of her, the sound turning into a tearing howl, the sound of trees bursting, bark rendering to shreds. Splinters and fragments rip into oblivion, an even deeper darkness rapidly approaching.

  The horns. The black. She gazes into that abyss and sees raw possibility that becomes a whining scream in her ears, too much, too much, and smoke is acrid in her throat as the processor begins to overheat.

  Caught between death and abyss, she runs with her hands over her eyes, breath sobbing in her throat. The sound of hooves to her left. The roar of oblivion to her right. The ground beneath her shreds into nothing, and she falls.

  * * *

  “No!” This time, at least, she’d been smart enough to cocoon herself into the cot with emergency webbing. Monitors over her shoulder shrieked in protest of her rapid breathing and heart rate and the sounds felt like sandpaper, and then gravity pushed her back down into the cot. “Brenner? Brenner!”

  “I’m here,” he answered over the intercom. His voice was tight and strained. “You feel good enough to get out of bed? You need to see this.”

  “Yeah. I’m coming.” It took her longer than she liked to disengage the webbing. Her head ached and pounded, but the worst of the dizziness had passed. The constant vinegar taste of all the white around her made her want to close her eyes, but she focused on following the line of parabolic inflection points that governed the shape of the corridor to ops. “What is it?”

  Brenner stood and moved from the pilot’s couch to give her room. “Wreckage.”

  She took his spot and scanned the displays. A debris field sat just beyond the nose of the ship, with the wreckage all packed tightly together, a strange thing. An impactor should have scattered everything off in a set of trajectories that would have described its original shape, angle, and velocity. Metallurgy of the wreckage was unknown—it wasn’t an EES ship, then—with unidentified organics, and—

  Mari sucked in a shaky breath. “Alien.”

  “Yeah. I think we found your alien.”

  She covered her face with her hands for a moment. “Shit.” There was little to no chance something was alive in the wreckage. So focus, then, on what she could do, on what had brought her out into the black to begin with. “We have to get back to home space.”

  “Yeah. This is too big.” Brenner ran his hand distractedly through his hair. “If we strip out everything that isn’t absolutely necessary for a dead-ass run back to Gemini station, we could fit a lot of that debris in here.”

  “So then we’re grave robbers.” She stared at the displays, saw the volumes and packing equations and knew that Brenner was right. Jonah had brought them here specifically. Maybe he’d meant to meet her physically, but in those last moments, she doubted he’d had any illusions about survival.

  “Grave robbing is a victimless crime,” Brenner said, a note of gallows humor in his voice.

  She took a deep breath and fought down her repulsion. “But… we need to move fast.”

  “Any reason for that?”

  She turned to look at him, where he leaned against the curved ops wall, arms crossed. He hadn’t tried to touch her this entire time, she realized. “Nothing solid. Just… I saw something during the skip. I don’t even know how to interpret it, other than to know I don’t like it.”

  “Okay. Your feelings have been… pretty on the nose so far.” Brenner turned to head out of the room. “You get us in as close to the wreckage as possible. I’ll start stripping the rooms.”

  “Understood.”

  “And Mari?”

  She glanced over her shoulder at him, dreading whatever might come next. Just from his tone; it wasn’t all business like it had been moments before. “Yes?”

  “I’m sorry. I thought about what you said, and I’m sorry.”

  It was something. It was a start. “I’m sorry too, Brenner.”

  * * *

  Exhausting hours followed; it only took her a few minutes to program a useful relative position to the oddly static debris field, though Mari decided to hold its execution until they had finished generating their own clot of space junk. Then she headed in to the ship to help Brenner. After brief discussion, they turned off the AG field so that it would be easier to maneuver loads to the airlock. The generator itself was something they could space. They’d be able to get back to the station quickly enough that they wouldn’t experience any permanent health damage from prolonged zero-G.

  “How many years worth of salary do you think we’re flushing?” Brenner asked as they guided another webbed-together mass of scanners down the ship’s main corridor.

  “Better not to think about it. You know crying doesn’t work right in zero-G.” It felt good to at least attempt to joke with him again.

  “We just have to hope that ‘alien space junk’ turns out to be worth more.” Now well-practiced, they got the load settled in the airlock and Brenner keyed in the cycle. Like swimmers, they kicked off the wall and headed back down the corridor.

  Bringing the alien debris inside required more ingenuity. They had to be cautious of contamination; foreign biologicals had been detected, and the transportation of such material had never really been the aim of the survey ships. Between the two of them, they engineered a decent enough work around: they sealed off the few compartments they would absolutely need to access during the journey home, then flushed the rest of the ship into hard vacuum. Bundled up in their emergency EVA suits, they opened the airlock to space and began carrying debris in as efficiently as possible. They would have to rely upon the footage automatically acquired during the activity by their suit-mounted cameras to record the original state and arrangement.

  A sense of sourceless urgency dogged them, the longer they bounced back and forth between the debris and the rooms in which they tethered and netted anything small enough to transport. Mari’s palms and forehead ran with sweat despite the optimal operation of her suit’s coolant systems.

  “Mari?”

  “Yeah?” They passed each other, two pale shapes in the black.

  “Don’t know if I’m losing it, but I feel like there’s an ax just… lowering toward us.”

  “It’s not just you.” Obliquely comforting as it was worrying. Careful to not disturb the debris—they’d already bounced a couple of pieces out into space, to be lost for good—Mari edged deeper into the wreckage.

  A warning light blinked in her HUD. For a heart-stopping moment she thought she’d torn a hole in her suit on the debris, but no, the light was amber, sweet and warm on her tongue, not red. It was an alert sent by the ship’s AI. “Brenner?”

  “Yeah, I see it. I’m on board, I’ll handle the query.”

  Trusting him to do that job, Mari edged forward a bit more. An odd blue glimmer caught her eye, perhaps the last spark of power from a dying panel, but the color hit like the crash of cold water from the stream. She moved a bit more debris aside with tiny directional bursts from the suit’s maneuvering jets to reveal a cylinder the size of her chest, the light glimmering from a crack in its side. She checked her radmeter, but it showed nothing above normal background.

  “Uh, Mari? Get back in here.”

  “What is it?” Even as fear clenched her gut, she swept away more debris, using the
hand welder from the standard tool belt to free the container where it was still attached to a large plate.

  “Gravitational anomaly.”

  “What kind?”

  “The kind that appears out of nowhere and is moving closer. The this can’t possibly be good kind.”

  Maybe it was foolish to leap to conclusions; it was beyond a leap of logic to assume that must be the Hunt in some way. Not making that leap would have been even more foolish. “Coming back now.”

  “Hurry.” His voice sounded strained. “Drop everything and go all out.”

  She almost did. But she saw that blue glow coming from the cylinder again, and her nose suddenly stung with the taste of hydrogen peroxide. The taste resolved itself into a thought, a number—630, the twitching of her fingers against the black muck as her ears rang and Jonah screamed in the distance. Her processor cheerfully translated that number into a thousand possibilities, one of which had a frequency of terahertz instead of beats per hour and yielded a light wave length of 476 nanometers, the same as the light bleeding from the cylinder. One last message from Jonah, perhaps, sent in a way the Hunt wouldn’t have been able to intercept?

  She didn’t have time to overthink it. “Hell.” Mari wrapped her arms around the cylinder, got her trajectory lined up, and fired off every ounce of thrust she had, which seemed pathetically little now. Her approach felt horribly slow.

  “Mari?”

  “I’m coming in as fast as I can, Brenner.”

  “I know. I know. Just… shit. Anything you can do to go faster?”

  He delivered the question calmly, but it made her breath hitch. The back of her neck prickled, like she expected to hear the horns in the distance, transmitted somehow through the vacuum of space. The pale shape of the Thalassa filled her vision.