Resilience

by Fletcher DeLancey

  “We’ve already done a thermal sweep,” Korelonn said.

  “If the stowaways are cold-blooded, the thermal sweep won’t find them,” Jalta pointed out.

  “Visual check,” Serrado said. “Your first priority is the safety of your team. Second priority, download their navigation logs. Third priority is finding out what happened to the crew.”

  “Understood.” Korelonn snapped off his light. “All right, everyone, you heard the captain. Let’s go for a walk.”

  Ekatya watched the red dots on the holographic model of the Tutnuken hovering above the table. Lieutenant Kitt was on the bridge, working to break into the computer and download the captain’s and navigation logs. One security officer watched over her. The rest of the team had split into two groups of three to search for the ship’s crew.

  “This section still has environmental controls,” Korelonn reported. His team’s three dots had crossed into the engine room. “But not gravity.”

  “That’s strange.” Zeppy caught Ekatya’s eye. “That means it wasn’t a power loss to the section. It was something that specifically targeted the gravity plating.”

  “Lieutenant,” a security officer said. “I’ve got blood.”

  “Blood as in, someone scraped their hand on equipment? Or blood as in—oh.” Korelonn’s video feed now showed the same thing his teammate’s did: perfectly round globules floating through the air.

  “That’s a lot of blood,” Dr. Wells said. “Those aren’t droplets, they’re blobs. You need consistent flow to get something that size. You’re looking for someone with a punctured artery or major vein.”

  “So, dead?” Korelonn asked.

  “Unless they got immediate help from someone who knows how to seal a bleeder.”

  “You could have just said ‘yes,’ Doctor,” Ekatya murmured.

  Dr. Wells glanced over. “Do you want accuracy or not?”

  “I think what the doc meant was ‘probably.’” Commander Cox looked far too pleased.

  “The chief surgeon meant what she said,” Dr. Wells said curtly. “That ship has a medic on the crew manifest. If whoever lost that much blood got to the medic in time, you’re not looking for a corpse. But you do need to be looking in their medbay.”

  “Not necessary, Doctor.” Korelonn had rounded a bank of carbon dioxide scrubbers reaching from the deck to the ceiling. Floating behind them was a man in brown coveralls. At least, Ekatya thought it was a man based on the body shape. Given the condition of the head and neck, it was hard to tell.

  Cox leaned forward. “That doesn’t look like any weapon I’m familiar with.”

  “I don’t think it was a weapon.” Korelonn held up his light, this time set to the laser pointer. The bright green point settled on an area of the ravaged neck that showed—

  “Are those teeth marks?” Cox blurted.

  “Lieutenant, please focus in on that,” Dr. Wells said.

  The helmet cam zoomed in, filling the display with a gruesomely close look at melted and torn flesh. The wound was so deep that the severed ends of veins and arteries were visible, as well as a gleam that Ekatya thought might be the trachea.

  “A little too close,” Shigeo muttered. He looked slightly green.

  Ekatya checked to see how their newest officer was handling this. Rahel was intent on the display, her face showing nothing but curiosity.

  “That does look like teeth marks around the edges,” Wells concluded. “But from small teeth.”

  “From whatever crawled out of those crates?” Korelonn asked.

  “Your guess is as good as mine. The melted tissues—that’s consistent with a highly potent acid. What I find interesting is the lack of blood in the wound. In zero gravity, the blood would adhere to itself and the surrounding tissues. What’s floating was jettisoned under pressure. Once that pressure ran out—” She pressed her lips together in thought. “The most obvious reason would be that it was removed.”

  Kade Jalta appeared nearly as green as Shigeo. “You’re saying something with small, sharp teeth tore open his neck and drank the blood?”

  “Can we see his face, please?” Wells frowned and pushed her head forward, as if trying to get a closer view. “What the Hades is that? It looks like some kind of glue.” She sat back, shaking her head. “If that’s impermeable to air movement, he would have been unconscious in a few minutes and dead in a few more, even without the blood loss.”

  The dead man’s face was hidden beneath splatters of a pearlescent whitish substance. One spread across his eyes; another covered most of his lower face. His mouth was wide open but still sealed, as if he had tried desperately to breathe through the slime.

  Ekatya took a deep breath in unconscious reaction, imagining what it would have been like to have both nostrils and mouth sealed off. Her skin crawled at the thought.

  “Captain, I’d like to autopsy this man,” Dr. Wells said.

  “Absolutely not,” Cox snapped. “The risk is—”

  “Mine to decide.” Ekatya shot him a hard look.

  He snapped his mouth shut with a flash of irritation, then took a visible breath as Ekatya stared him down. “My apologies, Captain. It’s my opinion that the risk is far too great to bring anything aboard from that ship. Especially when we have no idea what did that. It could be inside him, for all we know.”

  “Which is my point,” Wells said in an exasperated tone. “We won’t know anything until I can autopsy the victim. If there’s anything inside him, level ten isolation procedures will keep it there. Just like it does for highly contagious diseases.”

  Next to her, Rahel frowned across the table at Cox, clearly unimpressed with his assumption of authority. Ekatya was too, but she had already slapped him down and besides, she agreed with him.

  “I understand your position, Dr. Wells, but at this point in time, there’s no pressing reason to take the risk. Lieutenant Korelonn, tie off that body so it doesn’t drift and mark the location. We might want to come back for it. See if you can locate any of the other crew members. But the moment Lieutenant Kitt is done with her download, I want you all back here. Let’s get answers from those logs before we go poking into any more dark corners.”

  “Yes, Captain.” Korelonn’s camera pulled back and his gloved hands were immediately busy in the frame, hooking a length of cable through the dead man’s belt.

  Cox leaned back in his chair with a triumphant expression but had the sense to keep his mouth shut.

  “Captain,” Wells began.

  “I hope you’re not going to ask me to reconsider.”

  “No. I understand you’re putting the safety of this crew first.” She pointed at the display. “But whatever did that is nothing we’ve seen before. If I can’t autopsy the body here, I’d like to do it over there. They have a medbay, and an envirosuit is the equivalent of level ten isolation anyway.”

  “Not if something with sharp teeth tears open your suit,” Cox said. “Or melts it with acid.”

  Rahel did not move, but her eyes spoke volumes. Ekatya had a feeling that if she approved Wells’s request, she’d have to approve intensive envirosuit training for Rahel as well.

  “I’ll take your request under advisement. Let’s see if the logs tell us anything first. Lieutenant Kitt?”

  “I’m through the main security wall and into the navigation logs,” Kitt said without waiting for the question. “The captain’s logs will take a little longer.”

  “Thank you. Sorry to add more to your list, but we’d like the medical logs as well.”

  “No problem, those are under the same level of security as the nav logs.”

  Kitt was as good as her word, reporting both the nav and medical logs downloaded five minutes later. While she worked on the captain’s logs, Korelonn’s group went to the medbay and found a second victim on a bed, also with the asphyxiating goo sealing her eyes, nose, and mouth. But her throat was intact.

  “Bizarre.” Kade Jalta had gotten over her initial horror and was sho
wing the curiosity that Ekatya expected from her chief of science. “This makes me think we’re looking at a predator that uses asphyxiation to neutralize prey. Which would make the throat wound a means of consuming it. So why not consume this one? Did it get interrupted? Was it storing the food until later?”

  “Could have been an opportunistic kill,” Lokomorra suggested.

  “Um . . .” Rahel cleared her throat nervously. “What if it’s not about prey? What if that’s a defensive measure?”

  Everyone looked at the image on display. The woman’s mouth was open as wide as the man’s had been, a vivid sign of her panicked final moments.

  “Defensive measures that kill?” Jalta said thoughtfully. “It’s not the norm, but it does happen. You think we’re looking at a prey species, rather than a predator?”

  Rahel glanced at Ekatya, who nodded. “You’re a senior officer, First Guard. That gives you a voice here.”

  “Thank you. I, um, I don’t know what kinds of things are out here, but in Wildwind Bay we have a fish species that can squirt mucus from glands on its body. It clogs up the predator’s gills, and the fish gets away while the predator is trying to get rid of the mucus. Fishing crews hate it because if they catch it by accident, it contaminates their nets and turns their decks into a slippery mess. This just . . .” She waved at the display. “Reminds me of it.”

  “That might tie in with the holes we saw in the crates,” Dr. Wells said. “This species could produce different compounds for different purposes. Acid, to dissolve certain objects, and mucus, to plug others.”

  “This is total speculation,” Cox began.

  “Captain Serrado?” Lieutenant Kitt’s voice interrupted. “I have all the logs.”

  “Excellent. Lieutenant Korelonn, get your team together and come home. Maximum decon protocols.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  No other crew members had been found, though there had not been sufficient time to check every room of the ship. Nor was there any sign of the creatures that had killed at least two crew and probably more. Ekatya had more questions than answers, a state of affairs she hated.

  She didn’t breathe easily until the shuttle had cleared the cargo ship and was safely on its way back to the Phoenix.

  17

  Logs

  Ekatya’s hope for quick answers was dashed when Lieutenant Kitt informed her that she had loaded the captain’s logs on her workstation and run right into a second, harder layer of encryption.

  “He was keeping some big secrets,” she reported. “It’ll take me a few hours to break this.”

  Nor were the medical logs much help. “There’s nothing here,” Dr. Wells said after reading through them. “Their medic held a Class Three certification. Good enough for bumps and broken bones, not for dealing with unknown life forms. He doesn’t list anything on that patient in the medbay that we couldn’t see from looking at her, but I can tell you she was the first victim. He never saw the one in the engine room. The last entry is four days ago, at sixteen twenty-one.”

  “What did it say?” Ekatya asked.

  “He responded to injuries incurred in a fight between two crew members. Tempers were frayed, he said. That’s it. My guess is, he was one of the next to die.”

  Even the navigation logs were a washout. Not because they hadn’t recorded the Tutnuken’s whereabouts, but because someone had corrupted a significant chunk of data. The data systems techs were painstakingly reconstructing it, but it would take days.

  Though Ekatya’s shift had ended, she was not about to go off duty while a ghost ship hung off her starboard side and the only answers were locked in encrypted logs. She did leave the bridge long enough for dinner in her quarters, but what was supposed to be a quick break somehow turned into a full hour, which she blamed on an unrepentant Lhyn.

  “A rested brain makes better decisions,” Lhyn said in her best academic’s voice.

  That, Ekatya thought later, was probably the jinx that got her in trouble.

  She kissed Lhyn at the door, crossed the empty corridor to the lift, turned in place, and promptly lost her breath.

  Lhyn was leaning against the door jamb of their quarters, casually sliding her finger down the front seal of her Alsean shirt. It smoothly split apart, showing nothing but skin beneath.

  “Oh, that is cruel,” Ekatya said. “You could have done that during dinner.”

  “Then you wouldn’t have finished. Nutrition is important.” Lhyn ran a fingertip between the shadowed curves of her breasts, then slid her hand out of sight beneath the open shirt. “Enjoy your overtime.”

  “Evil, evil woman.” Ekatya shook her head at Lhyn’s wicked grin and added, “Bridge.”

  Her last view as the doors shut was of Lhyn making a kissing motion.

  For once in her life, she wished the magnetic lift would move slower. She was going to need more than a few seconds to get that vision out of her head and snap back into work mode.

  The light took on its usual blue cast, indicating movement—and then vanished, along with the lift’s propulsion and inertial dampeners. Taken by surprise, Ekatya slammed into the side wall and hit the deck in an ungraceful heap, unable to break her fall properly given the total darkness.

  Red emergency lighting came on a second later.

  “Nice timing,” she groaned, rolling onto her back. “Serrado to Przepyszny!”

  “Yes, Captain.” Zeppy sounded annoyingly calm in her ear.

  “Can you explain to me why the lift just failed in my brand-new ship?” She pushed herself into a sitting position and grimaced at the twinge in her shoulder.

  “It . . . what? Hold on, let me check.”

  She rolled out her shoulder, found it sore but functional, and scooted back to rest against the wall. If this thing started up again without inertial dampeners, she was not about to be caught standing.

  “The power is out in that whole section. What the—Captain, I don’t know how this happened.”

  “Well, find out,” she said shortly. “And fix it.”

  “Of course, but, er . . . it’s going to take time to diagnose the problem. I’m sorry, Captain, but you should probably get comfortable.”

  “Lovely.” She heaved a sigh and began calling her staff for updates on the Tutnuken’s logs. That didn’t take more than five minutes. She sat in the dim, silent lift for another two minutes, then called Lhyn.

  That conversation kept her occupied for twenty-five minutes, but Ekatya had never been good at not having control. Sitting helpless in a stuck lift was the very definition of it.

  “I’m getting out of here,” she said, pushing herself upright.

  “They’re fixing it,” Lhyn said patiently. “Trust your crew.”

  “I do trust my crew. And I’m getting out of here. There’s no reason why I should sit here and wait.”

  “Besides the fact that lift shafts aren’t designed for anything but lifts?”

  “They’re designed for emergency access.”

  “Right. For emergencies.”

  “This counts.”

  “Ekatya!” Lhyn let out a short laugh. “Now if I were in there, it would be an emergency. You don’t need to be literally climbing the walls.”

  Suddenly cheerful now that she had a goal, Ekatya opened the emergency kit panel and pulled out a small headlamp. “I love your laugh. Have I ever told you that?”

  “This is a transparent attempt to distract me from arguing with you. And yes, you’ve told me. But it’s nice to hear.”

  “It is nice to hear. Your laugh, I mean. You do it so much more now.”

  “Ekatya . . .”

  “It’s true. You stopped for too long. When you laughed again—I mean really laughed, not that quiet little chuckle—that was when I knew you’d be all right.”

  There was a loaded silence while she pulled the lever and watched ladder rungs slide out from the front wall. A lift car had magnetic interfaces on the bottom and all four sides, leaving only the roof as a means
of exit.

  “Why are you saying this to me when I can’t hold you?” Lhyn asked.

  “Because it’s one of those things I couldn’t say.” She settled the headlamp in place. “When I didn’t want to say anything that might hurt you or remind you. Then I stopped having to worry about it so much, and I guess I forgot that I never told you.” A tap activated the light.

  “You are the most exasperating woman.”

  Ekatya could easily envision the smile that went with that. A soft one, with too-shiny eyes and love sitting right at her fingertips.

  “Alsea has been so good for you.” She climbed up to the ceiling and pressed the release for the hatch. “I wish we could have gone there right after.”

  “Me too. But I had to get the physical healing done first.”

  The hatch slid back, and she climbed one more rung to poke her head through. Her light stabbed into the inky blackness of the lift shaft stretching out on either side. She had known from the angle of her impact into the wall that the car had stopped in a horizontal section. Thank the Shippers for small favors; at least she wouldn’t be climbing up a vertical shaft.

  “You know what else has been good for you?” She hauled her upper body through the hatch and turned to sit on its edge.

  “What?”

  “Teaching Rahel.”

  “Noticed that, did you?”

  “It’s hard not to. You come home lit up. You’re full of stories every night.” There wasn’t much space between her head and the roof of the shaft. Uncomfortable with the closeness, she pulled up her legs and spun in a half-turn. Now her legs dangled over the edge of the car.

  “Like the one about asking Lokomorra to pet her?”

  Her laugh sounded strange in this deadened space. “I’m still waiting for the right time to poke him with that one. And still not over my disappointment that you couldn’t set up a recorder.”

  “Me either! One of these days, she’s going to tell me what happened.”