Toxic

by Lydia Kang

  After a long silence, Portia speaks up. “Cyclo is not estimated to survive past three weeks. Nor will we.”

  “No one is picking you up at the end of the mission?” I say, my voice rising.

  “No.” Miki points to a tiny bump on her neck. “We have biomonitors in our bodies. What happens to us, as we succumb to the environmental failures, is part of the data. It’s an end-game job.”

  “But what about me?” I ask.

  No one says a word, and no one looks at me, either.

  My heart pounds, so loud I hear the blood in my ears, and my visions swims.

  I cannot die here, not after I only just started to live.

  I can’t.

  I won’t.

  I open my mouth to protest, then Gammand coughs awkwardly.

  “Maybe it’s not the right time for this,” he says, “but I have some news.”

  Four heads swivel to stare at him.

  “We don’t have three weeks anymore. We have two. The data I’ve been collecting for the last thirty-six hours alone tells us that ReCOR’s projections were too conservative. And the projections show the decline isn’t linear. The Calathus is dying faster than we thought.”

  “Two weeks?” Miki says, standing. Her blue skin has paled to a light gray.

  “We all just lost a week of our lives?” I say.

  Gammand says nothing. He doesn’t have to. His face says it all.

  Chapter Eight

  FENN

  I would yell, but it wouldn’t help me.

  The contract is very clear. We signed on to deliver a certain amount of information. We were trained to gather it, trained so I could reprogram my drones for measuring chemicals instead of stealing them. It was all doable. They said we’d have plenty of time, but now I’m remembering there were no allowances for “natural disasters,” as in, the ship dying faster. I remember Doran, in a hologram, telling us that it could all likely be gathered within two weeks, though we would probably have more like six, possibly longer.

  Now we have exactly two. There is no more wiggle room. One less day. If we don’t deliver, we will all have died for nothing, and Callandra will not receive the death benefit. The money for physical therapy. The neural implants so her spinal cord will function better.

  When we all start to leave the mess hall, instead of screaming, I tap out on my leg nervously.

  - .... .. ... / ... ..- -.-. -.- ... .-.-.- / - .... .. ... / ... ..- -.-. -.- ... .-.-.- / - .... .. ... / ... ..- -.-. -.- ... .-.-.-

  This sucks. This sucks. This sucks.

  We are all somber, standing there, when Hana says, “I can help you.” Her eyes are glassy, and her voice quavers.

  “What?” Miki says. She looks like she’s smelled something rotten. I’m suspicious, too.

  “Help how?” I ask.

  “Well, I know Cyclo,” she says. She wipes her tears away with a sleeve before they can fall down her cheeks, and a little kindling of anger appears, replacing the sadness. “I can try to find ways to save her.”

  Gammand shakes his head, and Miki’s the one who says what we’re all thinking. “There’s no saving the ship, Hana.”

  She gives us all a hard look. “How do you know?”

  We’ve had months of training for the inevitability of Cyclo’s collapse. It’s beyond truth for all of us now.

  Miki says, “I can show you the data, Hana, but we don’t have time. The numbers don’t lie. The ship is rapidly dying.”

  Portia holds her hands up because Miki is starting to sound pissed. “Wait. Hana, how well do you know the ship?”

  “I’ve been studying her all my life. I had little else to do besides study.”

  “Can you tell us about her cellular respiration cycle? The three kinds?” Portia asks. Her lip twitches. She’s baiting her.

  Hana narrows her eyes. “Not three, two kinds. Nitrogen based and oxygen based. But yes, I can.” She pauses. “How could you possibly know that she’s going to die if you don’t even know how many respiration cycles she has?” Hana looks angry, as if Portia has somehow insulted Cyclo.

  Portia looks impressed. “And what about her cadmium degradation—”

  “Until about a year ago, it was doing fine, but I think they made a mistake by adding the carbonaceous chelator.” Hana crosses her arms. “That one degrades too fast. Cyclo functions much better with the other biologic filters, the ones that run on the red algae residues.”

  We all stare at her blankly. This girl knows her stuff. A few months ago, I’d have no idea what she was talking about. Even now, I barely do. I’m just a miner, really. I tell my drones to fetch, and they bring stuff back.

  In the ensuing silence, she says, “May I ask you a question?”

  “Of course,” Portia says.

  “Did you bring any phosphorous binders? They help bind the calcium buildup that slows her neural networks, but we were running low last time I asked Mother. There are some things that could help. Have you considered reverse engineering her stem cells? It worked on smaller bioships. What about evaluating some of her toxins and asking—what’s the company’s name? ReCOR—to send in supplemental energy sources until she can regenerate?”

  “We didn’t…we can’t…”

  Miki answers for Portia. “Like we said, we’re here to collect data, run a few tests, but our mission is not to save what can’t be saved.”

  Hana looks like she’s been bitten. “ReCOR has no imagination, then.”

  “We are expressly not allowed to interfere with Cyclo’s demise. It’s in our contract,” I finally say. “Hana. We can’t.”

  “Or what? You survive and Cyclo survives?” Hana says, exasperated. “Why is that bad? Why can’t I try to live?”

  “Because this is not about you!” Gammand roars.

  We all go silent in stunned shock. Gammand never raises his voice. A blood vessel sticks out of his neck, and his eyes have gone red-rimmed. Thankfully, he doesn’t have his tranquilizer gun in his thigh holster. He might shoot Hana straight between the eyes if he could.

  Portia puts a hand up and turns to Gammand. “It’s all right, Gammand. It’s all right.”

  Shockingly, he turns and walks away. Of all of us, Portia has been the only person who’s been able to talk to Gammand these last few months.

  “Yes, Hana. You can help us,” Portia says. “Look, she knows the ship better than any of us. She can help. And if it’s not us trying to save the ship, we won’t ruin our contracts.” She thinks for a second. “At least, I hope not.”

  Miki shrugs. “In any case, we have to sleep. Living quarters are dispersed throughout the beta ring. Take your pick. We’ll meet back here at oh six hundred for breakfast and get to work. Shifts will be staggered from here on out.”

  Despite the notion that we have a whole ship to wander around for privacy, we all stick together. After all those months on the Selkirk, and with the shrinking amount of time left, no one seems to want to be too alone anymore. Hana trails behind me like a shadow.

  As Portia passes by us with her long legs, Hana asks in a quiet voice, “Is it true that Prinniads scream in their sleep?” She looks so impossibly sad asking the question.

  Portia turns her red eyes on her. “It is true. We scream.”

  Gammand yawns as he walks nearby. He’s cooled off considerably since a few minutes ago. “They’re also known to be violent, so let that be a warning. She’s not legally responsible for what she does when she’s unconscious.” He rubs his arm as if he’d been recently punched there.

  Portia smiles her toothless smile. “Next time, a little more space is advised.” She pats his sore arm, and he grunts and nods.

  I think we’d all appreciate an accidental punch instead of being lonely. I like Gammand’s quiet, though he’s clearly hiding a rage machine behind those enormous hours of wordlessness.
And Portia, as smart and snappy as she is, doles out more smiles than any of us. Despite her lack of teeth, they are appreciated. Miki? She seems alternately placid, like a grazing elephant, or silently pissed off. We’ve bickered plenty, but I also catch her crying when no one is looking, silently shaking when she thinks we’re all sleeping, so I cut her all the slack I can.

  If not for the trip to get here, I might hate them all—I’ve always found reasons to dislike anyone around me. I don’t like spending too much time with anybody, I guess for fear I’ll get attached. Look at what happened with my family. They all probably despise me for not being the perfect brother/son/pilot they always wanted, and they know me best. So nine months on the Selkirk with these guys was a trial at first, but they all see through my sarcasm now. We know each other well enough to know there’s no time to waste on hate anymore.

  After some more walking, Hana says, even quieter, “I don’t scream in my sleep. But I might now.”

  Man. We’ve known for a while that we were on a death mission, but I can’t imagine what it’s like for Hana—coming out of her hidden room to find that she’s going to die, and then even sooner than expected. Her body seems to drag as she walks along, her eyes big and empty.

  I don’t respond. It’s been quite a day, and I’m exhausted. We just found out we have one week less to live, and it’s weighing on everyone. Hana walks ahead of me, out of earshot. My holo visor buzzes on my forehead, and I blink it open. Doran appears. He’s appeared on Miki’s holo, too.

  “I want one of you to stay with Hana,” Doran says, sounding more distant than usual. He’s looking strangely pixelated. “We’ll need to get info on her, too, whether we like it or not. All living organisms on the ship are a source of data and must be included.”

  “What? That just increased our work. You know we only have two weeks now! There’s nothing in our contract for that kind of change!” Miki complains.

  “No, there isn’t,” Doran says, “but the contract is clear. All life forms. That was supposed to be only us, and any indigenous bacterial flora. But whether we like it or not, the terms are the same.”

  “Can we at least try to ask for a bonus?” I ask.

  “Can’t hurt to try, but I can’t guarantee anything.”

  What if I could earn more for Callandra, and for my parents? That’s classic Callandra, actually—going above and beyond to perform at her utmost excellence. My sister always looked for ways to improve the odds. Me, I always looked for more ways to break the rules. My conscience nudges me, and I speak up.

  “I volunteer to keep an eye on the girl tonight,” I say.

  Doran’s holographic face nods. “Fine. We’ll rotate from here on out. Why don’t you send a nanobot into her while she sleeps? If I had another humanoid biomonitor, I’d use it, but they only gave us four. It may be helpful to have data and samples right off the bat.”

  “Sure thing,” I say.

  “And another thing,” Doran says. He opens his mouth, then his image disappears completely in a cloud of disorganized pixels.

  I call to him. Miki looks at me.

  “What happened?” I ask. “Why did he cut out?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he had to talk to another crew.”

  Doran is one person on a space terminal at the center point of several ReCOR missions. A single humanoid, in charge of about four different trips. Doran is our only intermediary communication with everyone in the nearby galaxies.

  “Gammand?” Miki calls. He circles back. Being the data storage guy, he’s also the best at communications. She explains what happened. Gammand tries to call up Doran on his visor, but it doesn’t work.

  “I’ll check first thing tomorrow, but Doran warned us that this might occur. Some of the radiation flares from the star clusters nearby might interfere with our communication. But our work doesn’t change. Time for sleep.” A curve of crew quarters comes up, and Portia takes one room, next to Miki, next to Gammand. The doors pinch closed behind them, and I run to catch up with Hana.

  “Hey,” I say, but she keeps walking. “Hey!” She keeps going. “Hana! Stop for a second, will you?”

  She stops and turns to me, wonderingly. Her eyes are still sad and red rimmed. “Is that what you meant when you said ‘Hey’?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “Then why didn’t you just say ‘stop’?”

  Oh my God, this girl is going to make my brain turn to jelly. “I don’t know. Look, I’m assigned to stay with you tonight.”

  “Why?”

  “To, uh, watch you.” Okay, I think I just earned the award for Most Creepy Guy in This Galaxy.

  “That’s unnecessary. Cyclo watches me.” She adds, “I’ll be fine,” though she doesn’t sound convincing. She looks lonely. Like I probably do, but don’t want to admit.

  “Doran says I must.”

  She nods but then stops. “Well…what if I say no?”

  “Well, we signed this contract with this company called ReCOR, see, and we have to—”

  “I signed no such contract.”

  She’s right. In fact, there’s nothing to prevent her from wreaking havoc on each and every part of this mission. And then what?

  Then I won’t be able to do my job, and ReCOR won’t give my family the payout. I’ll be a failure in my family’s eyes, yet again. This girl, this tiny scrap of an organism, has the capability to destroy everything I’ve tried to make right. I start talking before I even have a plan.

  “I know a story,” I say.

  She crinkles her eyes. “Excuse me?”

  “About a girl. A girl with brown hair and golden eyes.” I touch my pendant, and her eyes fall to the shining metal in my hand. “She left me a message on this, actually.”

  I pause there. Hana’s lower lip has dropped, and she cocks her head slightly, waiting. She plays with the pearl around her neck, and her other hand goes to her eyes, wiping them where they had started watering again. I go on.

  “She always smells like caramel—it’s her favorite candy, and she even knows how to make it from scratch. For her twelfth birthday, her parents bought her a pair of wings.”

  I can even see them, in my mind’s eye. Pearlescent green and blue wings, small and crumpled on Callandra’s pale skin. As the biosynthetic implant began to grow a vascular system of its own, the wings began to expand and grow. I can still see them fluttering feebly, their first attempt at flying. Like most cheap biosynthetic attachments, they withered off after a few months.

  Hana’s eyes grow wide, and the sadness drops away. I can see for the first time that her eyes are dilating a touch, deeply black within the brown. She’s thinking hard. “What happened?” she asks. “Could she fly? What does the message on your pendant say?” She steps up to me, and we’re so close that I can see my reflection in her eyes. Her eyelashes are dark and straight, and I have the weird urge to reach out and touch that ice-cream hair of hers. Man, she’s pretty.

  Fenn, stop that, I think.

  “I haven’t listened to it yet. But maybe I can tell you more about her tonight. I need a place to sleep,” I say.

  “Only Mother sleeps in my quarters,” she says, defensively.

  I nod. “Sure. I don’t want to cause any trouble. It’ll ruin my contract. Maybe I’ll tell you the rest of the story another time.”

  “No, wait.” She puts out a hand and grabs mine. Her skin is cool and soft. “Oh.” She stares at my hand, still in hers.

  “What?”

  “Oh. I’ve never held another person’s hand before that wasn’t my mother’s.” She doesn’t let go, and I’m actually really glad she doesn’t. “You can stay. Only this time, I guess.”

  “Okay.”

  She doesn’t let go of my hand as she leads me down the corridor. She’s holding my hand funny, the way that someone puts their hand over yours, instead of under.
r />   “Here, this is how you do it,” I say, moving our hands so they fit better. Internally, I’m thinking This is absurd, don’t hold her hand, don’t get attached, but it’s just hands, it doesn’t mean anything. But I really like this. I’ve never held a girl’s hand before, if you don’t count Callandra, but damn, I kind of sort of like this. I want to yell at myself.

  Stop it, Fenn.

  There are flashes of green light along the corridor floor, going left and right, showing the way to northeast alpha.

  “What does that mean?” I ask.

  “Oh. Cyclo is showing you the way forward, even though I already know. She’s being polite.”

  “Hey. Can you take us through the core of this thing on the way?” I ask.

  She stops and lets go, and I hide any disappointment at not having her soft hand in mine. “The gamma ring? I suppose so. I know how to get there, though I’ve never been myself.” The floors and walls flash white streaks. She turns to frown at me. “Cyclo says it isn’t safe. We’d better not.”

  Eventually, we’ll have to go there, but I don’t tell her. Instead, she grabs my hand again, and we keep walking. This time, she says, “Can I try this? I always wanted to see what it felt like.” She intertwines her fingers with mine, and I suppress a shiver. If I’m not careful, a huge grin might take over my face, so I concentrate on walking. Hana seems to have decided that I will become untethered and loose, forever lost, if she doesn’t clamp on to my hand, so okay.

  We travel counterclockwise within the Calathus for another ten minutes. The walls and floor aren’t always a uniform blue, with the light streaks leading the way. I see yellow patches and brown spots oozing some corrosive liquid, leaving what looks like chemical burns on the walls. I don’t turn on my holofeed to find out what the data scanners say about them, but they make me worry.

  You’d think that someone who was going to die soon wouldn’t worry so much, but it’s not true. Every minute becomes a little more precious than the last, particularly when I have work I have to accomplish on a limited timeline. So I’m careful to not step on or touch any of the spots. I can investigate them tomorrow.