by Kali Wallace
We had not checked if it was locked.
Not a trick. A distraction.
“Panya!” I shouted. “Dag! Shut the fuck up!”
The silence was abrupt. I heard the rasp of Malachi’s breathing. I recognized the way he sniffed, inhaled, exhaled, sniffed again.
“They’re gone,” I said. I was going to throw up. I couldn’t breathe. Henke’s blood was forming larger and larger globules in the air.
Panya appeared in the doorway. “What?”
“Quiet,” I said.
There: a sharp breath.
A crackle. A click. Silence. The space suit radios had switched off.
The hostages were gone.
[data corruption] keep everybody in our tents, but nobody is saying why [data corruption] only two from the archaeology field team came back. They lost the others in the ruins when [data corruption] I should go see if they need volunteers for the search party. They haven’t even begun to map the complex. They’ll need the aerial data. I keep looking at it, wondering if we could have [data corruption] The medical shelter is all lit up. Nobody’s getting much sleep. We all need sleep. We all [data corruption]
—FRAGMENT 3, MOURNFUL EVENING SONG VIA UC33-X
JAS
Xiomara was yelling through her helmet. She was right behind me, following so close I kicked her twice, but with the radios off her voice was muffled. I looked back only to be certain she and Baqir were following. I didn’t stop.
We had to get far enough from the computing core that our captors couldn’t follow. They were chasing Ariana. I listened to their arguments and accusations long enough to learn they thought she was an embedded SPEC agent, or causing a distraction to help us escape, or any number of other outlandish possibilities, but I knew the truth. I had seen that desperate flailing and scratching before, the frantic shedding of a protective suit, the instantaneous snap from confused to distraught. I had heard those panicked pleas before. The hallucinations always began the same way. There was something inside. There was something moving. The echoes of those cries had never faded from my memory. Ariana was infected.
I led Xiomara and Baqir farther into the hidden maze between levels. I had kicked up to the door to a computing access room on Level 5, wrested it open, then passed it by for a maintenance tunnel between Levels 5 and 6. Let them think we fled into Level 5. Let them waste time searching. I knew this ship. We could get away.
Ariana was infected.
It shouldn’t be possible, but I had no doubts. Lago’s virus was supposed to be a modification of Zeffir-1, a biological weapon designed to denature after its host died. Infect quickly, kill quickly, vanish quickly. But SPEC’s conclusions had been wrong. The hallucinations, the panicked outburst, the sudden lash of violence, even the swift, eerie calm to follow—it was all the same. The virus, whatever it was, was still here.
That cage of metal tools we had squeezed by, where Ariana pricked herself. There must have been sharp points bloodied by an infected victim. All it had taken was a scratch. Dried blood was still blood. The virus had found a new home in Ariana’s bloodstream, and it was flourishing again.
The maintenance tunnels that had been endlessly exciting when I was a kid were significantly more claustrophobic now. The space between each level was about two meters high, most of which was taken up with machinery and conduits, wiring and ducts, filters and heaters and coolers, water filtration and antistatic and demagnetization systems. The machines were labeled with codes of numbers and letters. L6 for the level. S for the ship’s starboard side. Arrows, numbers, symbols. I had memorized the code as a child. I had been so proud of myself for sneaking through places I was not meant to be.
I stopped at a junction and moved to the side so Xiomara and Baqir could join me. I checked the suit’s environmental readout:
98 kPa 5.7 C 80/20 12% humidity
Still cold, but warmer than the ship’s corridors and rooms.
I lifted a hand to keep them quiet, held my breath, and switched on the radio.
“. . . did she go?” Dag.
“We’ll find her.” Zahra. “She’s not important right now.”
“You don’t know what she could be doing.”
“She can’t escape. She can’t access the radios. What can she do?”
They had lost Ariana.
“Please, everybody, please. We can’t fight each other.” Panya.
“We’ll recapture the hostages later. It will be trivial when we get control of the ship and its surveillance systems.” Zahra again. “Malachi?”
“I told you. I can’t do that here.” Malachi.
“You said you would be able to.”
“I know. I’m sorry, I know, but I can’t. We have to get to the bridge.”
They were still at the mainframe on Level 4. They had failed to hack into the ship’s computer.
I turned off the radio and exhaled slowly, then reached up to take off my helmet.
Baqir grabbed my wrist. His voice was muffled by his faceplate, but his words were clear enough: “What the fuck are you doing?”
“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s warmer here.”
“It’s not safe!”
“The virus isn’t airborne,” I said. “It’s passed through blood contact only.”
“How do you know?”
“My mother figured it out, and some of the others, before they died. She watched how people got sick. There was always violent physical contact. And I was never infected, even though I was breathing the same air as everybody else.” My breath was misting in the cold, pushing small clouds between us. “It was never in the air, okay? I didn’t say anything because they don’t know, and I wanted to find out what else they’ve missed.”
Baqir looked at me for a long moment, then opened his helmet seal and pulled it off. “Then why the fuck did SPEC let everybody think it was airborne?”
“I don’t know. I was unconscious in a hospital bed when word got out it was Zeffir-1. By the time anybody asked me, they’d already distributed the vaccine. Lago was already dead. I guess they didn’t think it was worth backtracking on their claims and letting everybody know they had no fucking idea what happened here.”
Xiomara snapped her helmet off. “I don’t fucking care what SPEC did or didn’t do. We need to help Ariana!”
It was what she had been shouting for several minutes, only now the words were loud enough to make me wince. “We can’t.”
“We shouldn’t have left her. We have to—”
“We can’t,” I said again. “There’s nothing we can do. It’s too late.”
“You don’t know that! You just said nobody has any fucking idea what happened here!”
“Don’t shout,” Baqir hissed. “They’ll hear us.”
“I don’t care! Can we get—” Xiomara’s voice broke, and her face screwed up with the effort of keeping the tears at bay. “We can get help. If we can get her to a doctor . . .”
“It’s already too late,” I said.
“Fuck you,” Xiomara spat. She shoved me with both hands. “I am not giving up. I am not going to fucking let her die.”
I let her push me. I understood why she was angry. But I also knew there was nothing we could do.
“You knew about this. You could have said something,” she said.
“Don’t be stupid,” Baqir said. He grabbed her arm to yank her back. “Like these people would listen.”
“Not to them,” Xiomara said. “Before! To everybody! You knew what it was like here. Why didn’t you tell anyone? Fuck SPEC. You could have told the public.”
“Really? Would that have helped? Would anybody have believed me, if SPEC was denying it?” I asked. “If I’d gone against the Councils and SPEC and told everyone that no, actually, Dr. Lago didn’t send up the nice kind of virus that just lets people die in their sleep, h
e sent the bad kind, the kind that made them go so fucking crazy they hacked their own limbs off trying to cut out invisible bugs? Tell them that the reason SPEC wouldn’t release the transmissions was because all they showed was a massacre? That I didn’t feel much like talking about it because I’d just watched my father carve himself up with a kitchen knife? And all of that happened because somebody who was their friend, who came over for fucking dinner and told jokes and they all laughed and the whole fucking time he was thinking about how to murder them to prove a point? Do you really think that would have stopped these—these—”
“Jas,” Baqir said.
I shut my mouth. Looked down. Rubbed my hand over my face. The feel of the grimy, cold space suit made my skin crawl. I opened the seals and tugged off the gloves, let them dangle like severed hands on the ends of my sleeves. I ran both hands through my hair and tried to breathe steadily. Tried, but it was so hard. I felt as though my entire chest was spasming and seizing. The air was so fucking cold. I couldn’t panic. Not now.
When I finally looked up, Xiomara was wiping tears from her eyes.
“I got this,” she said. “But I don’t know how to use it.”
For the first time I saw that she was not empty-handed. She was holding a small black object with prongs on the end. It was a suppression weapon, the sort SPEC Security used to shock or sedate targets. Baqir and I stared.
“Where the fuck did you find that?” he asked.
She shrugged. “It was in a console by the—you know. The crew. I didn’t even know SPEC crew were allowed to be armed. I took it. I don’t know if it still works.”
“You can check the charge with—that button, there,” Baqir said, pointing.
Xiomara turned the weapon, then simply handed it over to him.
“It’s charged,” he said after a moment, studying the weapon thoughtfully. “The charging node must have had power. It won’t last long in this cold, but at least now we have something?”
He tried to hand it back to Xiomara, but she shook her head, so he tucked it into the collar of his space suit, where the battery would stay warm.
“We have to check our suits,” I said. “Any puncture. Any tear. We have to be sure. Before we do anything else.”
“Okay,” Baqir said quietly. “We’ll check each other.”
We found no tears or signs of self-sealing. None of us had felt any prick, jab, or scrape. We looked, then we looked again, the three of us in an awkward, waiting silence. We found nothing to indicate our suits had been breached or our skin broken.
Finally I said, “I can get us off this ship, but we have to get to my mother’s lab.”
“Why there?” Baqir asked. “There are evac airlocks on every level, aren’t there?”
“They’re locked down—that’s part of the medical quarantine. And if they haven’t shut down the security drones, we would be vulnerable in evac suits. But Mum’s workshop isn’t locked, and there are two more experimental ships. We can use one of them to get away.”
“What about the security drones?” Baqir asked. “If they attacked the shuttle . . .”
“Mum’s ships can outfly the drones. It’s always pissed SPEC off, that the engines fast enough to beat the security web are stuck inside of it.”
“We can’t leave Ariana behind,” Xiomara said. “They’ll kill her when they find her again.”
“Xi,” I said softly. “She’s already gone. Nobody survives the virus. Not once it’s in them.”
Xiomara shook her head, swiping tears away still. “You don’t know that. You don’t even know what it is. You can’t know that.”
I started to say something, but Baqir shook his head minutely to stop me. To Xiomara he said, “Think about it. If there is some way to help her, what’s the best way to do it? She was firing at us too. She didn’t recognize us. She could be anywhere on the ship. Doesn’t it make more sense to call for help? SPEC can send a whole medical team. They can put her in quarantine and get her real help. You heard what those people said. There’s already a ship close, and probably more on the way. The shuttle sent out a distress signal.”
Xiomara ran her hand over her mouth. “What the fuck happened to the shuttle? Do we really think it could have been shot by a missile? Or was it the drones?”
“SPEC doesn’t have missiles,” I said. “And I don’t just mean officially. They really don’t. My aunt and a bunch of other Councilors have been shutting down space-based weapons research for years.”
“You wouldn’t need a space-based weapon to sabotage a shuttle,” Baqir pointed out. “That one lady seemed pretty certain it exploded from the inside.”
“So she says,” Xiomara said. “Shit. This is so fucked up. We need to call for help.”
Baqir said, “Jas? Is there a radio we can get to?”
“There must be.” Xiomara jutted her chin stubbornly as though she was expecting me to argue. “We have to tell them everything we know, so they’re prepared when they get here.”
I nodded. “Yeah. There is. But I don’t know if we can even access the system.”
“Where is it?” Baqir asked.
“We have to try,” Xiomara said.
We were close. Somewhere inside, beneath all the scar tissue and denial, I had known we were close. I had explored this route between levels hundreds of times. It had been my playhouse, my secret fort, my territory.
Level 7. Starboard. Room 23. My childhood home. The quarters where my parents had raised me. Where we’d played silly games after dinner, where they’d argued about whether to send me back to Earth for school, where my father taught me to read and my mother gave me broken bits of machinery to take apart. Where we had lived for eight years. Together, a family, and happy, most days.
Where my father had died, and still remained.
* * *
• • •
The code on the door had never changed. Every time House of Wisdom’s security staff sent around a reminder to change the passcodes on personal quarters, my mother had laughed and said any new combination would slip through my father’s mind like water through a net. There was no need to worry. The ship was safe. Everybody ignored the reminders anyway.
I had not forgotten: 2-9-9-7-9-2-4-5-8. My fingers shook as I tapped it in. 299,792,458 meters per second. The speed of light in a vacuum.
There was no medical quarantine preventing our access. Malachi must have been able to turn it off—and he had turned it off shipwide, not only on the levels they were moving through. He should have been able to trap both us and Ariana wherever he wanted, corral us like animals, but he hadn’t thought to do so.
The door opened. The room was dark. I fumbled for the panel to switch on the lights. They came on dim, more than half the fixtures remaining dark, but at least the glow wasn’t red. The faint hiss of the environmental controls surrounded us: the air was circulating and warming from its stale deep freeze. That was another thing Malachi had claimed he had not been able to fix.
I removed my helmet again, then my gloves, mindful of every surface I touched. There was an arc of blood on the wall beside the closed bathroom door, a smear over the handle, fingerprints smudged across the latch. I remembered lunging for that door, screaming when my mother pulled me away.
On one wall Mother’s favorite sweater was tucked into a net. On another were drawings of my father’s: delicate botanical sketches of the beautiful plants he grew in his laboratories. The tablet I had used for my lessons was tucked neatly beneath a band on the table to keep it from floating free. I had been reading about the life cycle of stars when I last used it, captivated by how such simple equations laid out in so many clean lines could represent the roiling, raging blaze of our sun. Gravitational contraction. Nuclear fusion of hydrogen into first deuterium, then helium. When the hydrogen is gone, another phase of contraction, then expansion, and the contradiction of a star both dr
awing in on itself and surging outward to form a red giant had filled me with so many questions I’d made a list to present to my mother when she got home. So many evenings Dad and I spent here alone while Mum was working late. I carried my mother’s name, and like her, my interests had me gazing toward the stars, but I had always gotten along better with my father. I didn’t feel like an idiot around him. He and his plants were calmer, quieter, easier to approach than my mother with her engines and theories. He had promised to take me to the sequoia groves in North America when we returned to Earth. The largest trees on the planet, he had explained in a voice hushed with awe, showing me pictures of towering giants with specks of people made as insignificant as gnats beside them.
The terminal that connected our quarters to the ship’s computer system had not been folded away. I touched the screen, and the terminal whirred softly, waking with a pale blue glow. The air was warming already, lessening the sting of the cold. A ship’s interior should never be that cold. My mother had always said heat, not cold, was the engineer’s true challenge. A ship produced heat in abundance, and every joule was difficult to shed in the vacuum. My nose was running and my ears ached. I rubbed my hands together and brought the communication commands up onscreen.
For a moment the interface was utterly indecipherable to me. It had been too long. Standard protocol for outward communication was to record the message and pass it to the ship’s central comm, which would compress it for inclusion in a scheduled data burst. That wasn’t necessary when the ship was in orbit around Earth, but communications had remained regulated to avoid overwhelming Orbital Control’s relays and satellites. I couldn’t remember what I was supposed to do. Every minute I wasted, the more danger we were in. I kept thinking about the panic in Ariana’s voice as she swatted at her own arm. The casual way the man on the radio had talked about killing me to persuade SPEC to stay away. The way Zahra had stared at House of Wisdom from the shuttle as though it held the answer to every question.
