by Kali Wallace
“See you on the other side,” Xiomara said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Soon.”
I turned off the radio.
Zahra had not spoken a single word since we arrived in the dry dock. But now she looked at me and said, “You lied to them.”
On the navigation screen, I watched Brahmin sail farther and farther away from House of Wisdom. I hoped they would be safe. I needed them to be safe. I could still feel the worrying coolness of Baqir’s skin.
“We’re not going to follow, are we?” Zahra said.
I kept my eyes on the screen. I had thought I would be able to tell when Brahmin’s main thrusters engaged, but the ship’s acceleration was smooth. Mum would have made sure it was smooth. Xiomara and Baqir had the message from her and the captain. My aunt would understand the danger and do everything she could to persuade SPEC to stay away.
But my aunt’s power had limits.
“No,” I said. “There’s something I have to do first.”
Her only reaction was to nod, and I knew then that I was right: there was something she had not told us. Something that had remained hidden in Malachi’s final words to her, in that catch of her breath when Captain Chavannes spoke about Homestead’s surrender.
“What did your friend mean when he told you to make sure they know the truth?” I asked. I turned to her and saw the minute flinch on the word friend. “He said you deserved that. What did he mean?”
“He was talking about my father,” she said.
“Your father?” It was not the answer I was expecting.
“The whole world believes my father is a monster, but he didn’t do what they said,” Zahra said. “It isn’t about what I deserve. It’s about what he deserves. His memory. He deserves to be remembered for the work he did, not for the crimes he didn’t commit. My brother and sister deserve to know he was a good man.”
It took me a second to understand. “Dr. Lago was your father?”
“Yes.”
Dr. Lago had been a smiling and jovial man with a round face, laughing eyes, and soft shoulders. I had known he had a family on Earth, because everybody who had family on Earth spoke about missing them, but I had given them no thought until afterward. Only then had I learned that his wife was an epidemiologist who took her children and vanished into the North American desert after his death. My aunt had told me that the Councils were trying to locate Mariah Dove, but she thought they ought to be left alone. No children deserved to suffer for what their father had done.
“He didn’t release the parasite,” Zahra said. “Dr. Summers said—in the message we found, she said it wasn’t his fault. It came from the probe. They took every precaution, but something escaped when they opened it up. She thought the people from Mournful Evening Song had sent it back to Earth on purpose.”
This must have been a beautiful planet, once, the woman in the messages had said. But we weren’t the first to find it.
I shook my head. “They didn’t send it. Not on purpose. It found them. That’s what’s in the messages from UC33-X. They found an alien civilization that had been destroyed.”
“Alien?” Zahra said, surprised. “That’s in the messages?”
“The ones that were never released. It sounds like they were exploring it when they began to get infected. I don’t think the woman who launched the probe meant to send it to Earth. I think she meant to warn us.”
In keeping the recovered fragments to himself, Lago had also kept that warning from his colleagues. They might have proceeded differently if they had heard the whole of what the messages had to say. Or they might not have changed a thing, except that everybody would know it was not a virus, and he would not have been blamed.
The distinction between machine and weapon was one of intent, and if what Ariana had understood was accurate, if what my mother and Captain Ngahere had deduced was true, this parasite’s goal was to cause destruction. They had understood its danger in terms of the impact of a kilometer-long ship crashing into Earth. But even without the crash, it would be catastrophic for the parasite to get loose on Earth. It would be a pandemic. It would, in fact, be an invasion, because something or somebody—so far away the distance was inconceivable, perhaps so long ago the light by which they worked might exist only as a ghost star in Earth’s sky—somebody had created this thing, and set it free.
It was a discovery the likes of which humanity had never made before. I knew that. I knew it, and there was a part of me that could still feel how exciting it was, how very much it mattered. That part of me that believed my parents had died doing important work, that believed exploring the stars and stretching the reach of humankind into space was a noble and necessary goal. Yesterday I would have happily argued that the search for life and civilization elsewhere in the galaxy outweighed any danger. Maybe it should. Maybe that was the bolder choice. But everywhere on this ship there was a weapon that had, over the space of a single day, made the people of House of Wisdom attack their own bodies with violence and fear, had made my father take his own life with a knife from our kitchen, had turned my mother from an engineer into an architect of mass murder.
On the screen, Brahmin sailed farther and farther away. I turned to Zahra.
“Those things—the parasites—they want to crash the ship into Earth.”
“What?”
“That’s the information Xiomara and Baqir are taking to my aunt. Ten years ago, when the parasite had control of the ship, it had a collision course set. My mum and the captain stopped it.”
“But that would be . . .” She faltered. “Why would it do that?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t care about its reasons. I know you hate Earth. But I can’t let this thing get anywhere near it. You can help or not. Just don’t try to stop me.”
For a long moment we looked at each other, both of us dirty and bedraggled and shaking with exhaustion. I no longer had any sense of how long I had been awake. Zahra crossed her arms over her chest and shivered, looking absurdly young in the too-large knit sweater, her black hair flying free of its plaits.
She said, “I’ll help. I need to talk to Homestead.”
She turned from the terminal and headed for the door.
ZAHRA
The dead had stilled in our absence. The worms drifted among the corpses, delicate as filaments, without any obvious motion. The alien parasites—it was hard to think of them like that, as things from another world, created by inhuman hands. They were quiet, but I knew better than to think they were destroyed. They were only waiting.
“Radio is here,” Bhattacharya said. His voice was rough, and he was doing everything he could not to look at the glass-walled room. When I hesitated, my hands hovering uncertainly, he reached out and opened the channel for me. “You can talk to Homestead, if they’re listening.”
I slid into the chair and swallowed, trying to gather moisture in my desert-dry throat. The large displays at the front of the bridge still showed the navigation chart: an array of lights and symbols, words and numbers, bewildering in its complexity. I hadn’t thought I would have to do any of this without Malachi or Boudicca or the others. I had never even been in open space, untethered from Earth, until today.
“Homestead, this is House of Wisdom. This is Zahra. Is anybody listening?”
There was no answer. Beside me, Bhattacharya listened to radio traffic across all frequencies. Orbital Control was tracking the ship with Bhattacharya’s friends and was preparing a transport to intersect them. Pangong was trying to contact us again. They were trying to contact Homestead too.
Homestead wasn’t answering.
“Please,” I said, trying again. “Homestead, this is House of Wisdom. Can you hear me? Is there anybody there?”
Nothing. I tried again. Nothing. Fear curdled in my gut. I tried to think of rational reasons for their silence. Adam could have forbidden t
he bridge crew from answering hails from me or anybody. There could be nobody on the bridge—but why would they abandon it, if they were making course adjustments to approach Providence? Images of what might be happening aboard the ship flashed through my mind.
I slid back from the console and looked at Bhattacharya. I wanted to know what he was planning. He would not have lied to his friends and sent them away unless it was something he did not think they or SPEC would condone.
“You want to stop the parasite,” I said.
“Right.” He nodded absently; he was still listening to the radio chatter. “But first I need to figure out how. And I’ve got no fucking idea.”
“What did your mother and the captain do before?”
“Vented the air and suffocated the parasite’s hosts, which gave the captain a chance to set the command override so they could alter the course to a stable orbit.”
I stared at him. “Suffocated the—”
“The hosts. And everybody else on board. Each section has a system for venting the air for fire suppression.” He was speaking quietly, with a heavy tiredness that dragged on every word, but without shock, without horror, only a bleak sort of acceptance. “It replaces the oxygen with carbon dioxide or a nonreactive gas. They set them to all engage at the same time. The system eventually reset and recovered, so we have air now, but it took long enough that nobody could survive.”
All over the ship there had been people who did not die violently. In the garden, in the mainframe, in corridors and doorways, alcoves and labs. That was the alarm Dr. Summers had heard while recording her final message. She had known what was coming.
“Does SPEC know?” I asked.
Bhattacharya looked at me then, really looked at me. “No,” he said. “Are you serious? They have no fucking idea. They think it’s a virus, not a—whatever it is. Not something from space.”
“I don’t know what they know,” I reminded him, “because everything they’ve made public has been a lie.”
He shrugged slightly. “Well, they don’t know this. They don’t have the full message from the probe. The research team was supposed to be reviewing the fragments Dr. Lago had kept from them.”
That meant Dr. Summers, Dr. Chin, maybe others. Summers had known UC33-X set something free aboard House of Wisdom. More than that, she had known it had to be destroyed. She had killed the man in the Deep Space Archaeology lab. He had been infected, he attacked her, and Dr. Summers killed him in self-defense. The first try didn’t work, she had said. For the second she used a canister of liquid gas.
“Venting the air wasn’t enough,” I said. “They had to make it cold too.”
“Oh, fuck,” Bhattacharya said. He sat forward suddenly, almost pushing himself out of his chair. “Fuck. Yeah. That’s right. That’s why it’s so bloody cold aboard.”
“But space is always cold,” I said, my voice rising uncertainly.
“Yes, but spaceships aren’t, and something this big has a lot of trouble shedding heat in the vacuum. It should be warm in here. It should have been fucking obvious from the second we came on board.”
It had been to Malachi, to Dag, both of whom had remarked on the temperature. They had known something was wrong. I hadn’t listened. I had not wanted to be distracted.
Bhattacharya ran his hands through his hair. “But the cold didn’t work either. All it did was put the parasite in a dormant state. It’s traveled through space for who knows how long. It probably likes the cold.”
“At least fifty light-years,” I said. “That’s what my father thought. Why don’t you want SPEC to help?” He didn’t answer right away. “Bhattacharya. Why don’t you ask them for help? Why are you still here?”
“Jas,” he said.
“What?”
“You might as well call me Jas.”
“Oh. Okay.”
Jas exhaled slowly. “I’m not telling them because they won’t agree to what I want to do.”
“What’s that?”
“Kill it,” he said simply. “I want to kill it. Every trace of it. It’s the first sign of advanced alien life that humanity has ever discovered, and I want to fucking kill it.”
He sounded so tired, so resigned, it took a second for the full impact of what he was saying to sink in. I had not thought of it like that. I had seen it only as a threat to be eliminated. Not contact from an alien civilization. Not proof of advanced alien life. Not the thrilling, brilliant grail for which humankind had been searching for centuries. Humankind was not alone in the universe. We had proof. I hadn’t thought of it like that at all.
But I should have. I would have, if I had been thinking about what I’d learned in the Councils schools, or at my father’s side. My father would have been first in line to argue that proof of alien life, however destructive, should be preserved, studied, cherished. There was a part of me, the part that still ached with grief, that wanted to take his position, to argue as he would have argued, to speak up for the sacred nature of curiosity, the never-ending joy of discovery.
But from the corner of my eye I could still see the blood and mangled corpses. I could still hear Panya’s screams and Malachi’s final words. I felt no revulsion about what Jas wanted to do. I understood why he did not want to place that choice in anybody else’s hands.
In my mind I retraced the route we had taken from the docks to the bridge, how long the journey had felt, how darkly it stretched behind me. The parasite was everywhere. There had been corpses all the way. Gathered in forlorn groups and scattered in lonely ones and twos, bodies ravaged by their self-inflicted wounds, every one of them desiccated into husks.
“If cold doesn’t kill them,” I said slowly, “maybe heat would?”
He thought for a moment before answering. “The electric shock did affect it. It wasn’t permanent, and it didn’t work the second time, but it is conductive . . . Heat would increase the electrical resistance of its metal parts. Who the fuck knows what it’s made out of, but if it’s designed to travel through space, high temps might make it malleable or even melt it?”
“Where are the incinerators on the ship?” I asked.
Not far, it turned out. There was a medical laboratory on Level 9, just below the bridge. Inside the laboratory, floating beside a refrigerator with a smashed door and dozens of shattered vials, was a woman with long gashes on her arms and three syringes sticking out of her shoulder.
She was obviously infected. Jas was still wearing his space suit and gloves, but I had to search through the lab until I found a biohazard suit in a storage closet. I put it on quickly, thankful for both the protection and the warmth, then went to help him drag the woman’s corpse over to the waste processing unit.
It was much like the waste disposal units at my mother’s old hospital, the only difference being its intake had been adapted for zero gravity. I opened the hatch, and Jas fed the corpse into the unit headfirst, wincing when the syringes in her arm snagged on the side and broke free. I caught them before they floated away, and pushed them into the intake after the woman. I shut the hatch and sealed it.
One touch of the evac command and the machinery rumbled. There was a loud whoosh as the unit drew the corpse into the incinerator. The interior monitoring system blinked on.
One of my mother’s students used to let me watch her dispose of their experimental waste when I visited their laboratory. The jet of flames would engulf everything inside, shriveling it to ash and sweeping it away. The student had explained that the cameras were for safety, but all I had ever cared about was what they let me see.
I had not thought about that woman or those visits to the hospital in years. Most of my memories of my mother at work were in the desert, her thankless toil against hunger and sickness and injury. But that had not been all there was to her. She had believed in discovery once too.
This unit was not designed for waste as larg
e as a woman’s body. She was jammed awkwardly into the narrow space, and all we could see on the screen was the curve of her shoulder, the twisted reach of one arm, the top of her head. The thermal image glowed brighter as the cycle began and the internal temperature increased.
The woman’s hand twitched. I started, even though I ought to have expected it. The parasite inside of her was emerging from dormancy.
“She tried to sedate herself,” Jas said suddenly. “Twice. That was two of the syringes. I recognized the drugs. The third was to stop her heart.”
Would I feel it, I wondered, if there was a worm inside me? Surely I would—Ariana had felt it, although we had dismissed it as a hallucination. But I could not help but wonder if the parasite might be learning to hide itself better. It had learned to control a human body, to fly a human ship, to use human language. It had learned to withstand an electric shock. It might even now be biding its time inside me, weaving thin, grasping threads into the fibers of my spine.
A gleam of silver appeared between the woman’s fingers. The parasite wriggled from her corpse slowly, searchingly. On the thermal image display it was the same temperature as the air, utterly invisible, but the camera showed it clearly, bending this way and that, so slender and delicate, like a snake tasting its surroundings.
Suddenly, with a muffled roar, there was fire. It rolled from the far end of the chamber, swamping the thermal imaging. I had thought the parasite might twitch or whip back and forth, try to flee or escape, but even when the flames engulfed it, it scarcely seemed to notice. The metal glowed red-hot, then broke into red beads that pulled apart and disintegrated.
It was working. The fire was destroying the parasite.
We watched in silence. It seemed to take a very long time, to reduce what had been a human to a fine white ash, but according to the disposal unit, fewer than twenty minutes had passed.
