Resilience

by Fletcher DeLancey

  Ekatya had seen it at the same time as Rahel: a second creature dropping from the ceiling to land on Murray’s chest. It sat still, apparently watching the first one, which didn’t seem to be doing anything.

  Except . . .

  “Fucking Hades,” she whispered. Beside her, Cox made a small noise of horror.

  With that characteristic rippling movement, the creature had flowed off Murray’s head to the floor. His scalp had disappeared, and the exposed skull looked soft and misshapen.

  The second creature flowed up over his face and fastened itself over the warped bone.

  “Cooperative hunters?” Rahel said.

  A light knock preceded the entrance of Commander Jalta, who stopped inside the door. “Holy crap.”

  Rahel rose from her chair and offered it. Jalta sat in a daze, her eyes never leaving the scene.

  The two creatures traded places twice more, moving backward and forward with equal ease, before breaking through the skull and exposing the brain beneath. One settled in to feed for several minutes, removing what looked like a third of the brain—and the skull walls with it—before moving off and letting the second take over. It appeared to eat its fill, leaving only a small amount for the first to finish. When it was done, the remains of Murray’s skull looked like an empty cup.

  They left the body behind and rippled up the wall to a bundled set of cables running the length of the chase. Clinging to the top of the bundle, they moved away and were quickly out of view.

  Cox pulled up the next cam in the chase, found the right time index, and set it to play.

  The creatures came into view and paused where a duct crossed the top of the chase. They flowed up to the junction of duct and wall and again took turns sitting over a specific point.

  A small hole appeared in the duct, its edges melted just like the crates had been on the Tutnuken. Ekatya would have sworn that hole was too small for them, but they elongated themselves, squeezed inside, and vanished.

  “I think that’s a feeder duct to the carbon scrubbers,” Rahel said.

  Cox stopped the playback. “They could be anywhere. If they’re melting holes—there’s no way to guess where they’ll come out.”

  Ekatya looked past him to Jalta, whose face had not recovered its normal skin tone. “Commander Jalta, are you all right?”

  “Huh.” She rubbed her face with both hands and shook them out. “Sorry, this is a little difficult to take in. Watching predation on other animals is one thing. Watching it on one of us . . .”

  “I understand. Do you recognize the species?”

  The question seemed to jar her back to business. “I think I’ve seen it before, actually. In an article on the Enkara Preserve. Give me a second.” She pulled the pad from her sleeve pocket and began searching. “Commander Cox, could you send me that still image? I can do a comparison search on the Enkara database.”

  “Certainly.” He reached over to the panel on the reclining chair, and Ekatya pushed herself out. “Captain, it’s—”

  “You need the controls. I need to move anyway.”

  As he slid into place, she stepped over to Rahel and spoke quietly. “How are you doing?”

  “I’m fine.”

  Ekatya touched her arm and drew her to the opposite side of the room. “If I could detect a lie through a palm touch, would you still tell me you’re fine?”

  Rahel’s shoulders rose with a large inhale, and she let out the air slowly. “I wanted to explore. I didn’t quite have this in mind, but it’s, um.” She looked vaguely ashamed. “What happened to him is horrifying. But I don’t feel horrified. This is something from another world, Captain. Not even you know what it is. I want to know more about it.”

  “I can see Lhyn’s influence on you.”

  A smile brightened her face. “I liked learning new things long before I met Lhyn. I practically lived in the library growing up.”

  “Oh, yes, the Head Librarian. Lhyn mentioned that you introduced her in Whitesun. I’ve been informed that she’s going back there at the end of this patrol. I hope your librarian has the patience for a cargo transport’s worth of questions.”

  “She had the patience for me,” Rahel said. “I think she can handle Lhyn.”

  “Got it.” Kade Jalta looked up from her pad. “It’s Resilere miin.”

  “Could you repeat that in Common?” Cox asked.

  “There isn’t a Common name for it. But the scientific name means, er . . .” She checked the pad. “Resilient miner. They lay eggs above the high tide line and—oh, you’re not going to like this. The parents protect the eggs until they hatch.”

  “Why won’t we like that?” Ekatya asked as she and Rahel returned to the front of the room.

  “Because the eggs take three tidal cycles to develop. Meaning the parents survive more than a hundred days out of water.”

  Cox groaned. “You’re right. I don’t like that at all.”

  “Better to know what we’re dealing with,” Ekatya said. “What else?”

  “There isn’t much more. They’ve never been seen by the underwater probes. We wouldn’t know about them at all if one pair of researchers hadn’t come across a nesting group and set up cams.”

  “They nest in groups?” Rahel asked.

  Cox sagged in his chair. “There are more than two. I’ll bet my new custom boots on it.”

  “Possibly.” Jalta spoke absently, reading her pad. “At this point, we might know more than the authors. They observed the Resilere digging nests in a rocky substrate and theorized that they were using an acidic compound to dissolve the minerals. And that they might be getting nutritional benefit from those minerals, which could explain how they survived three tide cycles with no other food. Once they hunkered down with their eggs, they didn’t come out to forage. The cams didn’t record them again until they emerged with their hatchlings at high tide and guided them into the water.” She flipped past a few images. “They were imaged in two different color patterns. One matched their nesting rocks, and the other was what we saw here.” She gestured at the enlarged image on the display. “The authors thought Resilere might be camouflage artists. But no one has seen them on any other substrates, so it was just a theory.”

  “Not anymore,” Ekatya said.

  Jalta looked up, her brows furrowed. “What?”

  Cox was already resetting the time index of the first log. He found the moment when the Resilere had first appeared, then backtracked several seconds and paused. “Anybody see it?”

  Ekatya stared until her eyes were crossing but couldn’t find it.

  “There,” Rahel said.

  “Where?” Jalta rose and took a step closer. “Shippers, I still can’t see it.”

  Rahel walked up to the display and held her finger above the surface. “Here. This is the main body, and here are the legs.” She traced an outline.

  “Arms,” Jalta said. “They’re thought to serve more of the function of arms. But I’m still not—oh! Look at that.”

  From one blink to the next, Ekatya’s vision adjusted. “Great galaxies. That’s incredible camouflage.”

  “Not just color.” Jalta’s voice was awed. “Texture, too. It’s imitating the cables!”

  The Resilere was crouched next to a junction where several cables entered horizontally and exited vertically. Its skin was rippled outward in such a way as to look exactly like a set of cables, right down to the spacing in between them. Both the color and texture matching were perfect.

  “We could have walked right past them and never known,” Cox said.

  “Like the mission team did on the Tutnuken.” Ekatya could picture it. “They were probably in the cargo bay the whole time.”

  “Then why didn’t they attack?” Cox asked.

  “Lack of opportunity? Already full? The bigger question is, how did they get here? I want a look at the shuttle bay logs from when the mission team landed.” As Cox turned to his controls, Ekatya thought aloud. “That shuttle was closed up whil
e the team was out. The Resilere couldn’t have gotten inside without melting a hole in the hull.”

  “Which my team would have noticed,” Cox said, fingers dancing over the armrest panel.

  Jalta snorted. “Sure, from the sudden cold breeze when they were flying back.”

  “No, I mean before that. Korelonn did a visual inspection before they left. He didn’t see anything amiss. Here we are.” He looked up as the scene on the wall display shifted to show the open space of their shuttle bay.

  The shuttle was descending to its parking space. As they watched, it powered down and disgorged the team members, who exited the frame while techs flocked in.

  “Fast forward,” Ekatya said. “The crew chief didn’t report anything strange, so I doubt the Resilere did anything until after the post-flight checks and maintenance were done. We don’t need to watch an hour of that.”

  Cox scrubbed the footage forward until the shuttle stood alone. “Phoenix, resume playback at the point where anything changes in the frame.”

  Movement drew Ekatya’s eye. A line of Resilere was emerging from beneath the shuttle and collecting around a point on the deck two meters away.

  “How many are there?” Jalta’s voice was hushed.

  “Too many,” Cox growled.

  Ekatya counted at least nine but kept losing track as they shifted around.

  At a command from Cox, the playback froze. Glowing red outlines were rapidly drawn around each body, and a number appeared up in the top right corner.

  “Twelve, crap,” Jalta said. “And they’re not all sticking together or we’d have seen ten more in that chase.”

  The playback resumed. Ekatya watched, mesmerized, as the Resilere took turns melting a hole in the deck plating. She still could not detect any distinguishing features on their bulbous bodies, but given the way they moved in all directions without reorienting themselves, perhaps there wasn’t a front or back side.

  The final shreds of deck plating dripped away, leaving behind a dark hole. The Resilere dropped through, one by one, and the shuttle stood alone once more.

  “They really are cooperative,” Rahel said. “Not just in hunting. This is pack behavior.”

  “Lovely. Intelligent, cooperative brain-eaters on my ship.” Ekatya shook her head. “Did they just hitch a ride on the bottom of the shuttle? How is that even possible? They’re adapted to a marine existence but they’re impervious to vacuum? And why weren’t they fried in the exit tunnel during decon?” She turned to Cox. “Did the decontamination procedure fail?”

  He shook his head. “Already checked that. Both the equipment records and the visual logs. Every centimeter of that shuttle was properly sterilized. Somehow they survived it.”

  “Enkara gets bombarded with radiation from its planet,” Jalta said thoughtfully. “It doesn’t penetrate very far underwater, but organisms on the surface would get fried if they weren’t adapted for the exposure. The Resilere are on the surface for over one hundred days, practically bathing in radiation. The radiation in our decontamination beams probably wasn’t a challenge.”

  Rahel cleared her throat. “I have an idea about the vacuum.”

  “Let’s hear it,” Ekatya said.

  “I was thinking about the fish markets in Whitesun. There are a lot of species sold live even though they’re not in water any longer.” She pointed at the image of the Resilere still on the display. “If they’re surviving for so long out of water, they must have some way of sealing themselves off so they don’t dry out. If they can do that for water, maybe they can do it for air.”

  “Very likely. In fact, it’s probably the same biomechanics sealing off both water and air.” Jalta looked at the display with an awed expression. “Resilere is the perfect name for them. They’re adapted for one thing: resilience.”

  “I’d love to share your enthusiasm,” Ekatya said. “But I have to call Command Dome. We’ve been invaded by a species that can survive vacuum and decontamination procedures. They can melt bulkheads and skulls. Until we neutralize this situation, we’re under quarantine.”

  22

  Defense

  “Give me some good news,” Ekatya said as she entered Dr. Wells’s office.

  Wells started so abruptly that her chair moved. “Whatever happened to knocking?”

  “You called me here. I assumed you were expecting me.”

  “I wasn’t expecting you to just blow in.”

  Ekatya stood in front of her desk, too keyed up to sit. “I’ve got a dead man in your morgue and a pack of alien life forms rampaging around my ship, melting holes in it. Social niceties are not high on the list right now. Give me some good news.”

  “I guess I’m lucky I can do that, then.” Wells pushed back her chair and walked to the lab bench set on the far wall. “Here. Put these on.”

  Ekatya tugged on the thin gloves.

  Having donned her own in half the time, Dr. Wells reached into a shallow dish and picked up a thin sheet of something white and fibrous, about half the size of her palm. “Take this and see if you can tear it.”

  “Is this the—”

  “Yes. Murray died of asphyxiation because of this. Given what the Resilere did to his skull, asphyxiation was a blessing.”

  It took five seconds of effort to know she would never tear this material. She shuddered at the thought of having it plastered across her face and held it out. “Is the fact that he suffered less than he might have the good news?”

  Dr. Wells ignored her outstretched hand. “No. Well, it probably should be, but that’s not what I wanted to show you.” She held up a small spray bottle full of clear fluid. “This is the closest approximation I can make to the seawater of Enkara. I looked up the chemical composition and programmed my matter printer.” Two quick squirts soaked the patch Ekatya still held in her palm. “Now try.”

  The fibrous patch had already absorbed the water and increased in volume. Ekatya poked at it. When she lifted her finger, some of the fibers came with it, leaving a gooey string stretched between finger and palm. Rubbing her finger and thumb together merely spread the goo.

  She picked up the patch between forefingers and thumbs of both hands and tried to tear it, an act that didn’t so much divide it as spread it into a thinner patch covering a larger surface area. With a little more effort, she managed to break the fibers and end up with two separate sections.

  Dr. Wells wore a triumphant smile as she held up the spray bottle. “We have a tool of self-defense. I’ve already programmed this into the general matter printer menu. If you tell everyone to print one out and carry it at all times, we can prevent any more deaths by asphyxiation.”

  Ekatya stared at the bottle, then the mess on her gloved hands. “Maybe I’m getting too old for double shifts. I don’t understand what just happened.”

  “That’s because you’ve been talking to Cox. He sees enemies everywhere he looks. Captain, think about what we saw on that cargo ship. Only one person wounded, one more dead from this, and all the rest dead from environmental failure. And we know these creatures can get nutrients from minerals.”

  She still wasn’t getting it.

  Wells pointed at the goo. “Under normal circumstances, the Resilere would be utilizing this underwater. The fibers bind with seawater and swell up. Their purpose is to block, not seal. Remember what Rahel said, about the fish that clogs up the gills of predators? I think that’s what this is. It’s their defense. They go after the sense organs—blind the predator, make it choke, make it stop. It’s not meant to kill.”

  “All right,” Ekatya said slowly. “But they did kill three people.”

  “I don’t know what happened to the two on the Tutnuken. But I watched the footage of Murray. He wasn’t attacked until he made a sudden movement. And did you see where the Resilere landed? Right where he split his scalp on the overhead pipe. Where he was bleeding.”

  “Blood.” She looked up in sudden realization. “The minerals in blood.”

  “It was
an opportunistic feeding.” Dr. Wells picked up a small, flat-bladed tool and began scraping the goo off Ekatya’s gloves. “Our scalps have a unique vascularization. The blood vessels attach to a fibrous connective tissue, so they’re not vasospastic.”

  “Which means what, in non-doctor speak?”

  “They don’t constrict when they’re severed.” She flicked the goo back into the shallow dish and returned to her scraping. “That’s why scalp wounds bleed so heavily. My guess is, the Resilere went after the blood on Murray’s head, severed more vessels in the process, got inundated with the blood flow, and kept going. Then it hit the skull plating and found a dense source of calcium, phosphorus, fluoride, magnesium—a cornucopia of valuable minerals. And under that, the brain is packed with nutrients.” Another flick of the tool, and she set it down and snapped off her gloves. “You can take yours off now.”

  Ekatya pulled hers off more carefully and pushed them into the discard bin. “You’re saying it started out wanting to lick his head and then found out how tasty we are.”

  “I’m saying we’re completely unknown to them. Maybe they prey on bone matter and brains of Enkara species, or maybe they really are mineral specialists and those teeth are for breaking apart softened rock. Either way, they haven’t evolved to prey on us. But they’ve been yanked out of their environment and they’re starving.”

  She had no intention of laughing, but it erupted before she even knew it was coming. “I thought you and Cox weren’t getting along because you’re so similar. You couldn’t be more different. He’s strategizing to eradicate an infestation and you’re ready to collect them as pets.”

  Dr. Wells bristled. “That’s simplistic and offensive. And really surprising, coming from you.”

  Hades, she needed to get a handle on herself. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—it’s been a very long day.”

  “I’ve put in the same double shift you have and autopsied one of our crew on top of it. I’m not insulting you.” Wells was not giving any ground.

  “Right.” Ekatya put her back to the lab bench and leaned against it, staring out the windows that overlooked the medbay lobby. “As of ten minutes ago, this ship is under quarantine. Not exactly the mark I wanted on my record after losing my first warship.” She turned her head to meet a slightly more sympathetic gaze. “I didn’t mean to insult you. I spoke too freely because I consider you a friend.”