Kzine Issue 19

by Graeme Hurry et al.

  “Mari?”

  “I’m almost there. Almost there.” Be calm. Sounding calm would help her feel calm. She bit back a scream.

  “Mari!” He wasn’t even pretending to be calm any more.

  “Hold! Hold, in three… two… one…” She began to back fire, to try to dump some of the acceleration. It was too little, too late. She arrowed in through the open airlock and shot down the long corridor that ran the length of the ship, still trying to dump velocity. As the smooth, curved wall at the end of the corridor approached, she shouted, “I’m in, close the airlock and go!”

  She hit the wall hard, curled protectively around the cylinder like she had around Jonah as they went over the waterfall.

  * * *

  There is no forest.

  There is no light.

  There is no air.

  And yet still they breathe, all around her they breathe, as she tries to scream through a mouth filled with blood.

  * * *

  She screamed, a high, thin, dying wail that came in short gasps. The sound echoed in the confines of her helmet, drowned out all the external noise.

  “—ri! Mari! Mari! Fucking breathe!”

  She did her best, over the sharp pain of her ribs. She drifted in the middle of the hallway, still propelled gently by the rebound of impact. The cylinder bumped lightly off one wall, the only spot of color in the pale hallway and she could barely think over the sour taste of fear and the vinegar of white. “Brenner?” she wheezed. “Did we skip?”

  “Yeah, and then you just started screaming your damn head off the minute we dropped out.”

  She went limp in the air for a moment. “They know me. They know me. Oh fuck, they’re looking for me. Oh fuck, Brenner—”

  “They who? What? Mari—”

  “The Hunt! The Hunt. Oh shit, Brenner.”

  “Calm down. They were following the alien guy, right? How would they know to look for us? They pretty much ignored you before, didn’t they?”

  An amber light began blinking in her HUD, warm and sweet and nauseating when combined with so much acrid vinegar. “Oh shit.”

  “Oh shit,” Brenner echoed. “Mari, the gravitational—”

  “I know!” She made ineffectual swimming motions in the air, then remembered the maneuvering jets, forced herself to breathe and recall the training on how to use them. Little bursts, controlled movement to propel herself down the hall. Her implant helpfully supplied velocities, vectors, timing on the bursts and angles of acceleration. “They’re tracking me, Brenner.”

  “What? How?”

  The conclusion was inescapable; it had to be the same reason Jonah could talk to her, the little secret in her skull that was now slowly driving her mad, refusing to shut off and betraying her in every possible sense. Betraying them both, now. “Unseal the door for the medical bay. You’ve got the hall pressurized again?” The medical bay was where they’d stowed the emergency repair tool kits as well, as a half-joke.

  “Yeah, just let me—”

  “No! Stay in ops. I had one last piece of debris with me, it’s still in the hall. We don’t have time to fuck around. Does the drive have enough power for another skip?” She unsealed the medical bay door and pushed through, spinning to orient herself. They’d just have to decon everything later. Hell, they’d have to decon her. She couldn’t do what was necessary with her helmet on.

  “A short one. It’s not fully discharged.”

  “Okay, prepare for another skip. I don’t care to where. Just pick a point.”

  “Mari, what—how the hell are they tracking you?”

  She unlocked her helmet, broke the seal, and let it float away. She was in ship. Brenner would be able to hear her just fine, talk to her just fine. “I have an implant. A neuroprocessor. Jonah said, that last time, that’s how he was talking to me.”

  “A what—shit, Mari—”

  “Save it. Just save it. I’ll tell you the story later.” And why not? She had no secrets left. Not caring about the mess, she tore into the tool kits, looking for something very specific: a magnetic hand tractor, intended for use in moving delicate metal components. She’d been warned, after all, right after installation that those things could destroy a processor if not used carefully. “You got your course yet, Brenner?”

  “Working. Another sixty seconds.”

  “How’s the gravitational anomaly looking?”

  Pause. “Don’t ask.”

  She laughed humorlessly, finally finding the hand tractor. She tore off the gauntlets of her EVA suit. “Okay, listen to me. As soon as you get the course laid, hit the skip. Don’t wait for confirmation from me. Just do it.” Tools pinwheeled through the air around her; she brushed them away like insects.

  “Mari what are you—you’re not going to like flush yourself out the airlock or something, are you?”

  She turned on the hand tractor, adjusted the settings for a field that should provide maximum disruption. “Don’t worry, I don’t like you that much.” Nice to know that in the shit, they could at least be comfortable and easy again. “Just something nearly as stupid.”

  “Mari?”

  Mari raised the hand tractor in her left hand and pressed it to the curve of her jaw, then triggered the field generator.

  “Ma—!”

  * * *

  It was a blink in time, one second a strange pull at the base of her skull, the next she found herself looking up at Brenner. Her head hurt, but her head had already hurt.

  “Mari? Can you understand me?”

  The fact that she couldn’t hear out of her left ear? That was new. “Bluh.”

  “Oh shit, did you fucking scramble your brain?”

  She swallowed, tried again. “I can hear you.

  Understand you, even.” Her mouth tasted like blood. A fumbling swipe of her hand revealed that was probably because there was actually blood in her mouth and not from a random neural connection made by a malfunctioning processor. Tiny ruby spheres drifted away from her fingertips.

  Spheres. She thought the word, didn’t taste it, didn’t perceive it as its geometric equation, vectors, and dimensions. Just spheres of blood.

  Brenner tipped his head back against the cabinets sharply enough that she winced. “Oh thank Christ.”

  She began to sit up—oh look at that, she’d ended up on the bed again, that was nice—but she’d been immobilized with safety webbing. “Did we skip?”

  “Yeah, as the Senior Navigator ordered. While she was apparently turning her own damn brain into swiss cheese, so maybe I shouldn’t have listened.”

  “No gravitational anomaly?”

  “Not yet.”

  Yet. They hadn’t followed yet. Well, it was a question that couldn’t be positively answered by the absence of evidence. She could try to comfort herself with that.

  “Good thing you listened. How long since we skipped?”

  “Two hours.”

  “That’s something.” Last time it had happened within minutes. She wiggled her jaw, then decided that was a bad idea. The left side of her face and neck felt like a giant, knotted bruise.

  “Oh yeah, and you were bleeding out of your left ear.”

  “Oh.” She sighed.

  “I’m getting tired of you randomly bleeding. Please stop.”

  Mari laughed dryly. “I’ll try.” She thought about the debris in the hall; Brenner wasn’t in his EVA suit anymore, so he must have taken care of the decontamination while she’d been out. “I just like making you do the hard work.”

  “My senior navigator is an asshole.”

  “Yeah.” She sighed. It felt so strangely good to hear Brenner say that again, in his special tone of voice that was all affectionate exasperation rather than frustrated rancor. “But so’s my junior navigator, so it works.”

  * * *

  Mari slept for the next four shifts, during which time they skipped as often as the drive charge allowed, once every four hours. The gravitational anomaly remained, mercifully, abs
ent.

  And the moment of skip had become, as before, nothing more than the blink of an eye.

  Mari began taking her assigned shifts again, but there was no need for a constant presence in ops, since they weren’t doing even routine scans as they rushed toward occupied space. She and Brenner put on their EVA suits and cataloged the debris as best they could, trying to sort it into some semblance of order. “Whoever we hand it over to will probably re-do everything,” Brenner said. “But I’d like to know what we have. I don’t trust them to tell us jack shit later.”

  She couldn’t help but agree. And as terrifying as the discovery had been, it was theirs. They’d confirmed the presence of alien life in the wider universe. She wouldn’t relinquish that easily, and it might be the last discovery she ever got to make. There’d be no hiding the presence of the now-slagged neuroprocessor still sitting in her skull from a medical examination, and they couldn’t leave it out of their reports either. But what a note to be grounded on. Maybe this discovery, Jonah’s wreckage, would become her new escape, its secrets her new destination.

  “Hey, this is the last thing you brought in, right?” Brenner asked, giving the large cylinder a little prod so that it spun slowly at the end of its tether. “And only cracked.” Nearly everything else had been twisted shards of metal.

  “Yeah. There’s something about it…” Mari noted the markings that covered the surface. Some kind of writing, maybe. There was a dark streak down one side, a zig-zagging path that went from marking to marking. Her hand scanner confirmed the streak was organics and she had to swallow hard. Lightly, she traced her finger along that line, wondering if in a way, she was touching Jonah, following along some path he’d moved in the last moments of life.

  The dark sides of the cylinder faded to transparency, revealing a glowing blue sphere inside. The room around them flooded with its light, like they’d dived into tropical waters.

  Brenner whistled lowly. “If this kills us in the next couple minutes, know that my death is on your conscience.”

  “Jonah told me to look for this… in a way.” She didn’t know how to explain it, the taste, the numbers made by her death twitches translating out into something concrete.

  “Did he say what it was?”

  “No.”

  “Shame.”

  Mari moved her hand slowly over the surface, watching the light move between her fingers as she thought of what else Jonah had told her, what he’d said and how he’d said it: So I could carry them out past the black. They’re depending on me. I’ve got a billion ghosts and none of them talk. Understanding dawned as she added word upon word, implication upon implication.

  “What are you thinking? That’s your thinking face.”

  Did she trust Brenner? Did she want to carry this alone? Two intensely frightening questions. But the mutual lack of trust had nearly killed them both before. “He told me that his people had put him in that ship and sent him out into skip space while they hid. What if this is the key to where they’re hiding? What if this is them?”

  “What, you mean their entire species? That’s kind of far out there, Mari.”

  “So are aliens. And aliens that can reside in skip space. And two different kinds of aliens that can reside in skip space, and fight there.” A litany of impossibility, really.

  “Shit,” Brenner whispered. “Do you really think that?”

  She thought of Jonah, the weight of a world on his shoulders. Unfair, for him to pass off such a burden without even asking first. Had his choice to save her been self-sacrifice, or the only escape he could find from an impossible task? Or had it been a profound act of trust, an apology, a reaching out across the darkness?

  Probably all of those things. No human ever had simple motivations. There was no reason a sentient being from another species wouldn’t be just as complex and hypocritical and confusing, if not more so. She would choose what she would believe, then. She would choose to remember that he’d given his life for her. “I don’t know. But this was worth him dying for.”

  “Shit,” he breathed the word out, as reverent as a blessing.

  DEAD REGRET

  by Simon McHardy

  Edward Kirby was paralysed. His body no longer responded to his commands, he could neither move a limb nor flutter an eyelid. There was only darkness and the soft hum of the air conditioning. Something covered his face, it was soft and comforting, a cotton sheet. A memory played in a loop in the back of his mind; at first he had paid little attention to it as he struggled to regain control of his body but now, defeated, he observed the remembrance. The cold glare of another car’s approaching headlights, a feeling of overwhelming despair that made him grip the steering wheel so tightly his fingers numbed and his knuckles whitened, a sense of relief and exhilaration before his head exploded into a white pain and he faded into blackness and oblivion.

  The darkness now was different. It was the blackness of starless nights and cupboards under the stairs, not the darkness that comes with dreamless slumber or the nihility of the grave. Edward could smell stale blood and hospital disinfectant. Is this a hospital he puzzled? Had a light breeze stirred the cotton sheet so that it had fluttered over his face; the nurses too busy to notice? He heard muffled voices, the click of a door latch and then saw a pale light. “Edward Kirby?” a woman’s voice queried.

  “Hello,” Edward replied startled, his voice shocked him, it sounded delicate, almost ethereal.

  “Yes, that’s him,” an uninterested male voice responded. The woman pulled down the sheet; Edward looked up and found himself staring at a woman attired in sky blue scrubs, her calm, grey eyes studied Edward’s face intently from behind a thick, plastic visor.

  “Car crash, Dave?” she queried.

  “Yeah, Grace, out near Tinsley Falls, he killed a family of five.

  “Asshole,” Grace cursed.

  The memory of the evening flooded back to him. He had decided he would take a drive out to Tinsley Falls and do a spot of fishing as he used to in happier times with his father; it would give him a chance to think of a way out of the misery and hardship of the last few years. Driving along a mournful part of the highway lined with autumnal oaks he was overcome by the pointlessness of it all, the never-ending cycles of failure, the losses, the disdain of others. He saw the approaching vehicle and without any rational thought he sped up, jerked the steering wheel to the left and crashed head-on into the oncoming car.

  “I’m so sorry,” Edward whispered, afraid to hear his own voice again. Grace did not reply and desperately he looked to her assistant, Dave, who was slumped exhausted in a chair, for consolation but he remained silent content to sip from a white, stained coffee mug.

  Grace busied herself with examining Edward. After some time Dave finished his coffee, picked up a clipboard and stood by Edward’s feet ready to record the injuries. “Massive damage to the right temporal and sphenoid bones, right femur fractured, abrasion on left patella.”

  “Will I be okay?” Edward pleaded, there was no answer.

  “Seven inch gash on right brachioradialis.” Grace continued.

  “What is wrong with you people?” he wailed as they both continued to ignore him.

  Grace took a scalpel from a tray then in one swift motion she began to slice downward to Edward’s sternum. “No,” he screamed, “you haven’t given me any anaesthetic.” It was if his skin were being seared by a blazing poker. He felt the steel cut into his flesh and slash through veins, arteries and nerves. Ignoring his pleas Grace cut from the other side of his chest then following his midriff slit Edward open to his pubis. Edward’s pleas turned to tortured howls as Dave began to work expertly with a pair of rib shears. There was no way to block out the sound of bones snapping, nowhere to hide from the pain, no merciful loss of consciousness. The spectacle was as repugnant as it was excruciating but in the agony came a moment of lucidity, he died last night out near Tinsley Falls, no one could have survived that crash. The cars had hit head on at one hundred and
fifty miles an hour and now he was present at his own post-mortem, his spirit still attached to his body. He was dead but his senses were preternaturally acute. Was this his punishment for killing that family, to linger and endure the torment inflicted upon the corpse of Edward Kirby?

  With the front ribs and breastbone removed Edward’s chest opened like a sanguine bud exposing his internal organs. Grace reached inside the abdominal cavity and began to remove his organs, carefully examining and weighing each one. The anatomical remodelling was sloppy, none of his interior pieces was returned to its rightful place afterwards but rather stuffed them back inside the cavity just as a butcher crams in turkey giblets. The operation concluded with the removal of the brain. As the vibrating saw separated his calvaria from his lower skull Edward experienced a glimmer of hope, if his brain were severed from the spinal cord, how would he continue to be able to feel, see or think? He would at last be dead. Edward clung to the thought as Grace severed the spinal cord with a pair of scissors then he watched in horror as she carried his brain to the scales.

  It was two hours before Grace at last put down her scalpel and began to sew him up. The large, ragged stitches were clumsy in comparison to her knife work Edward thought. The post-mortem completed Dave wheeled Edward back to the morgue freezer and pulled the sheet over his head. In the cold darkness with his screams still echoing in his ears Edward was plagued by a gnawing realisation. He had stipulated in his will that he did not want to be cremated, but rather to be buried in the family plot beside his parents; there would be no quick end to his suffering, centuries of slow rot in the silent earth awaited. In many millennia when they dug him up to make way for a housing development would he still be begging a merciless god for oblivion?

  THE PROS

  by Rhema Sayers

  Ben Forsyth knew a pro when he saw one. And this lady was a pro. He followed well back, careful to appear fascinated by the vendor in front of him. But his eyes were on the little old lady. Hunchbacked, with glasses and hearing aids, she pushed a walker in front of her, the kind with a seat for when you got tired. The walker had a basket in which sat her voluminous purse. Her hair was gray, caught up in a bun and her eyes were a dusky blue behind the glasses. She was wearing a heavy tan coat that reached almost to the packed dirt floor of the tent. She was exactly the type of person that vendors, alert for thieves, would automatically overlook. And she was making a haul.