Neptune's Brood

by Charles Stross

  What we can be sure of (for the cameras in Mausoleum Companionway Four recorded it for posterity) was Willard’s expression of gape-jawed terror as Lady Cybelle’s cadaverous, crypt-pale body loomed out of the dark tunnel and clawed toward him. What we can also be sure of is the way he swung the bulk of his supply sack between his own body and his attacker—and the way Cybelle’s aim shifted, darting toward the fat wormlike sheath of wrapped tubespam, which she grabbed and bit in half in a single fluid motion.

  “Eek,” or “Ick,” said Cook. And, being neither slow on the uptake nor eager to die, he unloaded the contents of the cargo net into Cybelle’s maw as fast as she could absorb it. She sucked down the fat sausage-tubes of warmly pulsing cultured liver tissue, some of them showing the pink freckles of an enthusiastically metastasizing hepatocellular carcinoma; head-sized transparent bags of perfusion fluid that pulsed and wobbled in the microgravity air flow: supplementary saccules of crunchy phosphate-rich shipboard biscuit crawling with unindentured mechanocytes. As she consumed, Cybelle changed shape, her abdomen bloating and new veins forming just below her skin. They pulsed as the skin above them erupted in spikes, piercing the perfusion bags to drain their contents directly into her circulatory system. Like a vast, pallid, avian fetus stripped of its shell, she wrapped herself around the fluid sacks and growled as she gnawed on gobbets of barely processed flesh.

  One may infer from his shifty body language and reluctant posture that Willard was less than enthusiastic about his proximity to the mindlessly feeding priestess; he leaned ever farther away from her presence, eyes swiveling sidelong in search of an avenue of escape. Presently he found one—or rather, manufactured it by unsealing one end of a fat liver sausage and squirting the contents in the direction of Cybelle’s face. Her tongue, gray and wrinkled and tentacular, temporarily tipped with circular tooth-lined maws of its own, slithered forth to lick her eyeballs clean. While she was thus distracted, Cook made his escape and hauled himself hand over hand away from the floating pile of comestibles.

  Willard didn’t pause until he’d closed a hatch between himself and the feeding horror. Then he slumped slightly and reached for his phone. “Emergency, calling you all! Cook ’ere. I just run into Her Grace in Companionway Four, and she’s hungry. Got meself away by the skin o’ me teeth. She be snacking down on the supplies yer ’oliness ordered for ’er, but I am thinking about barricading meself in me kitchen for the duration. Anyone gorra net?”

  A paper-dry whispery clicking answered him from the other end of the companionway he’d taken shelter in. Willard looked up, aghast, as a door opened at the other end of the tunnel. The red sparks of infrared transmitters glimmered in the depths of eye sockets, illuminating them with misplaced sparks of sapience. “I will take care of this,” hissed the skeleton (buzzing with each sibilant, for its speaker was improperly secured to its jawbone, vibrating against an ancient molar): “Return to your station.” Cook cowered, backing against the wall of the companionway as the skeleton approached, followed by half a dozen more mummified remotes: all clad in the ragged cerement remains of space suits, clutching a variety of improvised weapons ranging from wrenches to sharpened docking probes. They streamed past him, clattering and crackling quietly, and formed a circle around the hatch. Willard barely spared them a glance before making himself scarce.

  * * *

  By the time the Mother’s boudoir door clanged shut behind me I was beginning to harbor deep reservations about the wisdom of having booked my working passage aboard this vehicle. One may reasonably expect a certain degree of eccentricity among the long-term crew of a flying church, but there is a point at which eccentricity begins to impact operational effectiveness, and my fellow travelers were well past that juncture. On top of all of this, there was the puzzling and worrisome presence of the stowaway who had attacked me. I will confess to having become a bundle of nerves by this point. And so I fled directly toward my own tiny compartment, with every intention of barricading myself inside it and not coming out again until we entered orbit around Shin-Tethys.

  However, as I turned the corner onto the C-deck passage leading to the various storage compartments and my coffin-sized room, I slowed. A nasty thought had occurred to me.

  Replaying my memory of my assailant I thought, Does she not look somewhat familiar? Why, yes: I had become used to seeing that same face reflected in my tattered wall retina every day on Taj Beacon, whenever I cleaned myself before venturing out in public. And what had she said? What is your name? Indeed. And there was the matter of Andrea’s too-long-ignored message packet, now that I thought about it, and of Ana’s disappearance.

  I began to incubate an unwelcome hypothesis. Imagine for a moment that Ana’s disappearance was not an accident: that she had in fact been disappeared. (I made a note to write a letter to her former lover or debt collector or whoever it was who had been asking after her.) Suppose that her abductor had been interested in the activities of our little syndicate for some time. Suppose that they had become aware of my impending visit, under cover of pilgrimage. Suppose that they were sufficiently ruthless and greedy. Taking all of this into account . . . what if they imagined that I was a courier, perhaps bringing to Ana the other half of a large, orphaned, slow money transaction, and that once we got together, we would be in a position to assert ownership of the aforementioned bond by right of salvage? If such a person supposed that a not-inconsiderable amount of money might be at stake, a sufficiently ruthless individual might be tempted to take actions that— Oh dear.

  It was in this paranoid frame of mind that I approached the door to my room. I had let my guard down somewhat once I was aboard the chapel, and we were under way. I had not discussed the sub-rosa sororal syndicate, of course, but I had let my guard down a little with Dennett and the others. Now I began to chew over the question of whether I might have accidentally disclosed too much information about my purpose here in Dojima System. As I approached the door, I groped for the retina I’d hung on the wall of my room with the corner of my mind that deals with inanimate objects. I could feel it, distantly tugging at my proximity sense. Pausing, I screwed my eyes shut and looked out through its face.

  My room was dark, but not dark enough to conceal the dim infrared fleshlight of a lurking intruder, waiting for me just behind the door.

  I withdrew my vision from the retina. Glancing round hastily, I spotted the nearest cleaning-supplies locker. As quietly as possible, I made my way to it and nudged the hatch open. There was, as I expected, a canister of emergency sealant. That would do the job, but I’d need to wedge the door shut while it set. It took me a little longer to confirm that a high-gee broom would do the job, threaded through the spokes of the hand wheel that manually disengaged the teeth of the door’s seal. And so, within a matter of minutes, I jammed the door to my room shut and carefully extruded the caulking gun’s freight of sealant around the rim. Designed to set rapidly and hold back the pressure of escaping air in event of a micrometeoroid strike, the sealant should suffice to keep my stalker confined while I went in search of help.

  I congratulated myself on a job well done, then went in search of the deacon in order to tell him about the stowaway and to see how he was managing Her Grace.

  * * *

  Now, here is a curious fact to which, for some reason, neither Deacon Dennett nor I had given due consideration:

  Pirates tell lies.

  * * *

  Ifound the deacon in the crypt, supervising the reinterment of Her Grace in the Soyuz sarcophagus, a small army of ambulatory skeletons in attendance. Some of them were a bit the worse for wear, pursued by various stray arms and legs (and in one memorable case, a jawbone) which were anxiously awaiting reattachment to their missing bodies.

  “Ah, Ms. Alizond. If you would be so good as to help tighten this strap?” Dennett barely looked up as I approached the thrashing ghoul. He had somehow—presumably in conjunction with Gould’s little helpers—managed to trap
Lady Cybelle in a space suit with its glove rings locked together, forming a field-expedient straitjacket. She was placid for the time being, suckling on a bottle of Fragile blood, but he was clearly intent on taking no chances and was busily lashing her to the commander’s reentry couch within the capsule with a fearsome array of fetters. “Once she’s in place, I can plug her back in and restart the nutrient flow. It’s strictly a temporary measure—we can release her when her mind returns—but for the time being she needs close supervision and restraint. If you would be so good as to grab this strap and brace yourself, then afterward, if you could fetch Cook—”

  “There’s a stowaway!” I couldn’t contain myself. “She attacked me, but I’ve glued her inside my room! You didn’t issue me a telephone, so I couldn’t report—”

  “Most of the shipboard communicators are in use inside the skeletons,” Dennett interrupted me. “How do you think Gould operates them?”

  “But there’s an intruder!”

  “One problem at a time.” He sighed. “Where did you meet this person, and what induced you to glue her inside your room?”

  “I was on my way to the kitchen; I ran into her in one of the companionways. She asked who I was, then threw a knife at me—a ducted-fan blade. I got a door between us, then ran. I don’t know who she is but she looks . . . just like me . . .” I slowed.

  “So you’ve discovered your evil twin?” Dennett asked, not unkindly. “Have a seat.” He gestured at the copilot’s couch beside the madwoman. “It would be best if we don’t have to worry about which one of you is the real Ms. Alizond, don’t you think?” I froze, then glanced over my shoulder at the open hatch. A grinning skull stared back at me. “Further confusion would be undesirable.”

  “But I—”

  “Grmm. Brnz,” Her Grace mumbled around a mouthful of raw meat.

  “What was that?” Dennett leaned over her, losing interest in me all of a sudden. I glanced at the hatch again. “Oh I say.” He turned back to me. “Listen. I think you should stay here. I’ve sent for more supplies; just keep her well fed, and nothing will go wrong, do you understand?”

  “Wait, what—”

  A distant thud, more felt than heard, rippled through the capsule. “I have a mission to run,” said the deacon, straightening up (insofar as it was possible for him to do so in the cramped confines of the sarcophagus). He turned toward the hatch. “And it’s probably best if we keep both you and your twin in known locations for the time being. So if you will excuse me . . .”

  He scrambled out: Skeletal arms reached in to replace him with a bright blue mesh basket of feedstock canisters and a talking box, then the sarcophagus hatch slammed shut overhead. “Glrmmmm!” moaned the thing on the couch. It subsided into a routine of sucking and munching. I shuddered and looked at the recently resurrected zombie. Were those cheeks slightly less hollow, those eyes an iota less mad?

  “Maintenance operator,” blatted the talking box, “secondary nutrient spigot one requires refilling urgently. Remove the expended A4921K cartridge and replace with a fresh A4921K cartridge!”

  Another thudding bang rippled through the floor of the capsule. I bent over the bag of stores and rummaged desperately for a fresh A4921K—a cylindrical green assembly with a valve at one end and a spindle protruding from the other—then swore at the talking box until it explained, in monosyllables, how to install it. There were more distant bangs. The Soyuz was very close to soundproof; whatever was going on outside must be extremely loud to carry through its hull. The small porthole in the wall of the sarcophagus was positioned inconveniently, pointing at one wall of the crypt. I will confess to stealing a glance through it from time to time, but most of my attention was directed at Lady Cybelle, who, for the most part, lay slobbering and quiescent upon her couch (although from time to time curious spasms rippled through her, as though she was testing the breaking strength of the restraining straps).

  After a while, I began to feel dizzy. Not ill, merely disoriented—as if the chapel was undergoing some sort of very slow maneuvering. I lay down on the second couch and just in time, for moments later the stack of supplies toppled sideways. There was another deep thud from beneath. Cybelle moaned quietly. “Where? Whaaaare?”

  “Hush,” I replied, preoccupied by what a deep sense of foreboding informed me must be the onset of a slow-motion space battle.

  “Need . . . control.” I turned sideways to look at her. She stared back, sidelong, with the beginnings of lucidity visible in her unnaturally smooth and immobile face. Her expression was disturbing, as inexpressive as a corpse whose collective anima had died but whose mechanocytes had not yet voted to liquidate the collective: However, compared to the mindless ghoul that had ravened her way through the crypt before Gould’s skeletal remotes subdued her, she was a paragon of lucidity. “Who. Am. I?”

  I told her, but the news clearly upset her bitterly, and I was compelled to silence her with another bolus of blood-liver pâté while I took stock of my thoughts. Meanwhile, the banging from outside continued: At one point a shudder rippled through the floor and set the muted clappers high above to thudding against their muffled bells. The supplies drifted up toward the top of the sarcophagus, and I nearly followed them: I was forced to net them together and drag them down to the floor (and a good thing I did so, for seconds later the gravity resumed—about a hundredth of a gee, offset at a thirty-five-degree angle if I am any judge of such things).

  Finally, everything straightened up again, and the clamor stopped.

  “Who. Am. I?” asked Cybelle.

  I stared at her. I had, it’s true, been feeding her more or less continuously for an hour. And the Soyuz had become uncomfortably warm during that time, and I’d lost track of the gurgling and bubbling noises coming from within her space suit, but the heat exchanger it was plumbed into was definitely hot to the glance: and for the first time there was something not unlike sentience in her expression. “You’re the priestess, Cybelle, aren’t you?” I was suddenly acutely aware of my own lack of paramedical training: “Are you hungry?” I asked.

  She shook her head weakly. “Not now.” She swallowed. Yes, definite signs of lucidity. Color was returning to her skin, which was slowly flushing toward a healthy blue. “Hot’n’cold. It’s a, a fever.” Her eyes rolled for a moment, then I realized she was scanning her surroundings. “This suit. Heat exchanger. I’m too hot.”

  Hot. That was what Dennett had been talking about—heating her up, cranking her metabolism up into overdrive and force-feeding her newly integrating organs. “How do I turn the temperature down?” I asked her, pointing at the control panel.

  “Let me—” She tried to sit up, then to raise her arms. For the first time, she saw that her sleeves were locked into one another at the wrist rings. “Was I violent?”

  “You tried to eat the deacon.”

  “I’m sure the traitorous little shit deserved it . . .”

  I made a snap decision. “Let’s see if we can get you out of that thing.”

  It was, I discovered, not difficult to unfasten space-suit glove rings from the outside. As soon as I had unlocked them, Cybelle pulled her hands apart. Then she began to fumble ineffectually with the seat webbing. “Something’s wrong.”

  “What do you remember?” I asked.

  “Not enough. Unfasten me!”

  “There was some sort of accident.” I watched her a moment longer as she batted at quick-release buckles with numb hands. “You were very badly injured. Dennett put you in here to regenerate, supplied a huge transfusion of free-market ’cytes from somewhere . . .”

  Cybelle swallowed. “My hands don’t work properly.”

  “They’re newly regrown.” I began to loosen the straps holding her to the couch. “You probably don’t have full reflex control yet.”

  Something metallic banged against the exterior hatch. I turned to the porthole and froze. A hu
ge, dark eye pressed up close to the glass, occluding the view. It stared at me for a moment, then it blinked.

  “What’s happening?” Cybelle demanded. She wasn’t in a position from which she could see out.

  “Space pirates, I think.” The locking wheel in the center of the hatch began to turn. “They want in.”

  The hatch swung open before I could force the ancient quick-release buckle on Cybelle’s harness. A toothy muzzle covered in dark bristles poked inside, sniffing the filthy air suspiciously. “You! Be gettin’ yourselves out here now!” A whirring knife, screws humming at the air, pointed its deadly blade at us from behind the hijacker’s webbed left ear. “We’s taken this vehicle! Resistance be futile!”

  * * *

  The pirates had boarded the chapel well ahead of their declared schedule.

  Dennett’s mistake was to assume he had plenty of time because he was receiving their transmissions from a slowly accelerating vehicle dead astern of the chapel. Not being a soldier, he’d failed to account for the short-legged high-acceleration boarding craft lying dead ahead in our line of flight. Evidently it had been sent there as soon as the chapel’s flight course became apparent upon its departure from Taj Beacon; at the time, I did not know how the pirates evaded the deacon’s radar, but when all is said and done, churches are not renowned for their military-grade sensor suites. Regardless of how they did it, there was no warning: One minute Dennett was worrying about the large vehicle that was slowly overhauling us from astern, and the next minute the distinctive exhaust plume of a nuclear-thermal rocket was melting the lead flashing on the steeple. While I was force-feeding Lady Cybelle so that she wouldn’t turn her appetite on me, Dennett was trying to evade the incoming boarding craft. To give him his due, he made a decent attempt to dodge the pirates: But the chapel was not built for the wild gyrations and evasive maneuvers required to resist a forced docking. Eventually, our assailants tired of the game, at which point they shot away the chapel’s high-gain antenna and issued a harsh ultimatum—be boarded, or be blown apart.