Toxic

by Lydia Kang

  The two mantle cell chambers are colored reddish orange. They remind me of the speckles on the outside of the ship before we landed.

  “Are they ready?” I ask.

  “Some are ready. I guess we try to implant them in her outer membrane, but Cyclo may be willing to put them there herself. I can ask her.”

  “Can you also ask her not to kill us?” Portia says, staring at a swirling incubate of purple, the one stem cell chamber.

  “I can,” Hana says, but she doesn’t look terribly optimistic that she’ll get an answer we like.

  Hana leads us to one of the back hallways, with several rooms filled to the top with packages of nutritional powders. Portia is already pulling down fifty-pound packs, piling them in a row. I peer at them, reading.

  Hydrolyzed itrik protein

  Amino acid concentrate

  Micronized carbohydrate crystals

  Buffered mineral supplement type D

  Vitamin formula, stage 030

  There are so many. “Which ones?” I ask.

  “All of them. They’ll all be useful. But maybe best if we mix them. Like formula,” Portia says. “For a killer baby,” she adds under her breath.

  Luckily, Hana doesn’t hear her colorful side commentary. We get to work. Portia works on a batch of nutrients in the rear of the lab, whirring them inside some sort of sonic mixing machine, tapping buttons here and there to adjust concentrations. We all pitch in with the heavy lifting, without much effort.

  “Fenn,” Hana says. “Let me show you how I got the incubates started. Just in case you need to know, too.” I walk over, and she points out one of the displays. “This is how I started. It was really straightforward.” She leans close to me, scrolling through a display.

  “If it’s so straightforward, why are you showing me?”

  “I needed an excuse. To do this.” She moves closer until we are shoulder to shoulder, and her hand closes over mine. It sends a tingle right up my arm, and it’s everything I can do to not turn and just start kissing her in front of Portia.

  “We haven’t been able to talk once since last night,” she whispers, still staring straight at the monitor. Different oxygen levels are whizzing by on a graph. “I miss you already.”

  “I miss you, too,” I whisper, squeezing her hand.

  “Hana,” Portia hollers. We quickly unclasp hands and turn around. By the distance of her voice, she’s gone far down the hallways, past the storage areas. We find her in a large room with several tables built into the walls, with complicated monitors around them. It looks like the room where I was evaluated before our trip, with pods that descend from the ceilings to deliver medicines or oxygen.

  “This is one of the hospital bays,” Portia says. “According to our maps, there are five of these, depending on the age of the patient. But this one is for adults.”

  “Oh,” Hana says, putting her hand to her mouth. “Mother must have been in this room when she died.”

  “Yes. I came looking for more supplies. I thought you might want to see the room.”

  “Thanks. I’ll take a look around,” Hana says, and Portia leaves to go back to mixing formula.

  I start investigating one of the larger monitors, but the records are blank. I try a few old hacker tricks to see if there are ghosts of the old data, but there’s nothing. If anyone was going to unearth something here, it would be Gammand.

  No Gammand, no data.

  “I can’t get any records here,” I say. Hana is wandering around the unit, looking at the tables where patients used to lie, and the wall cases that hold some medical equipment, like dissolving bandages and a tray of medicated dermal films. She stands in front of another case, and it’s got a chaotic assortment of bandages, gauze, and splints.

  “Look,” she says. “This cabinet is a complete mess. Some of these are half opened, half unrolled.” She shifts nearer to one side. “Here. They reached for them from this angle.” She turns. There’s one table close to that side, only two feet away. She peers at it, narrowing her eyes.

  I crouch to look at what she’s looking at. Most of the tabletops are pristine and glossy white. But this one isn’t. There is a smear marring the surface and making it matte. I touch it—it’s slightly sticky. And then, on one corner, I see it. Hana does, too.

  “What is this?” Hana asks.

  “It could be bodily fluids,” I say.

  “Do you think it could be Mother’s?” she asks.

  “One way to find out.” I run a handheld analyzer—Gammand’s—over the surface and peer into the diagnostic screen.

  “What does it say?” Hana asks. She’s wringing her hands together as if she knows what it’s going to say.

  “It’s human blood, for one,” I say. “There’s enough DNA to identify. UY4021.”

  “It’s Mother’s blood,” Hana says. Her knuckles are white. “Anything else?”

  I read through the list of molecules running down the screen, and their percentages. “Carbon-based. Oxygen, hydrogen, iron, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium…and trace metals in a lot smaller percentages. Chromium, manganese, selenium, thallium, zinc—”

  “Wait, wait. Did you say thallium?” Hana asks. “Thallium isn’t a normal element in the body. It’s poisonous. Why would she have thallium in her blood?”

  I call Portia over.

  “I just dumped about ten thousand gallons of formula into the empty hallways behind the back of the gestational chambers, where her matrix is still functional!” Portia announces triumphantly. When she sees our faces, she frowns. “What happened?”

  We tell her what we’ve found.

  “Thallium? I don’t know why it’s here, but there’s a lot of thallium on the ship. It’s one of the essential elements in Cyclo’s metabolism,” Portia explains. “But it has an isotope decay product. Some of the poorly functioning parts of the ship have a lot more of the radioactive thallium.”

  “Like the southern quadrant, where Gammand was killed?” I ask.

  “Yes. But we didn’t know what it meant. It appears to have bad neurologic effects on Cyclo.”

  “What does that mean?” Hana asks.

  “It means the radioactive thallium is a potent neurotoxin. It changes Cyclo, so she can’t think or communicate with us the way she normally does. She acts less…reasonable. More like a plain old jellyfish, if you want me to spell it out.”

  “Maybe it was from her tattoo,” Hana says. “She had that blue tattoo of a lotus flower on her arm. Ever since I was a child, it was there. It glowed slightly in the dark. Maybe it was degenerating, too. Maybe that’s what killed her.”

  “I doubt it,” Fenn says. “The thallium is leaking from Cyclo’s core. It’s not likely that your mom’s Cyclo implants were affected, too.”

  “What about the blood?” Portia wonders. “I know how ships like this run. They’re scrupulously clean. The surfaces are automatically sanitized. The fact that you even found blood means the auto functions of this room were turned off or weren’t working. Have you looked to see how much blood is on the table?”

  We all look. The table is white, dully so, but there is no obvious red blood besides that drop we picked up. And then I peer in closer because I realize something—there are spots all over the white table. White spots.

  “What are those?” I ask, touching them. They feel tacky to the touch. Portia goes to the wall, looking at the operational panels there.

  “What are you doing?” Hana asks.

  “Looking to see if they have an iron-avid, europium-doped strontium borate phosphor source,” she says, touching the controls here and there.

  “A therapy light,” I tell Hana. “I used to steal the strontium from them. They’re used for skin treatments but will illuminate human blood.” She is standing behind me, stiff as a board, eyes wide and watching.

  “Got i
t.” Portia touches the pad, and immediately the room goes dark. I’m disoriented for a second, splaying my fingers out and trying not to bump into anything in the black of the room. There are a few greenish, fluorescent dots and blotches on the table before me—the ones I’d felt with my fingertips.

  A hand clutches my forearm—it’s Hana, and she’s turning me around.

  Behind me on the floor, right behind where I’d been standing, is a riot of glowing green. Huge pools of fluorescent color lie in smears and drips. There are marks where it looks like limbs, dripping with blood, rested with finality on the floor. But there is a very obvious size and shape of the blotches, like a body was lying here. And most of the blood is pooled around where the head must have rested.

  Hana’s mother didn’t just die. It wasn’t just some arrhythmia or heart attack. And it wasn’t a quiet fading away. The blood splatter shows she was thrashing around in her last moments here. She must have been in agony, and she must have had horrific wounds. But I don’t say this out loud. I can’t.

  “My God,” Portia says, her own irises glowing under the strontium light. “She probably died before they could even get her on the treatment table.”

  “This is why they evacuated the day she died. They didn’t just evacuate the same day—they shut off the auto functions of the ship immediately. They were trying to subdue Cyclo. They fled right after your mother was murdered.”

  Hana lifts her hands to cover her face and weeps.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  HANA

  Why? Who would kill my mother?

  It couldn’t have been Cyclo. It’s just not possible. If she was hungry, she could have killed anyone else on the ship. It wouldn’t make sense to go after her. Mother and Cyclo worked together to nurture every newborn on the ship. Once they were out of their gestational chambers, they went into Cyclo—the first real sleep, first embrace, first feeding. No one loved Cyclo more than my mother, and Cyclo knew this. I’m sure she did.

  Could Cyclo have been angry at her? But it took extremes of stress to her physical self before she hurt Gammand and Miki after they spoke to me, and even Fenn, in a way that wasn’t…nice.

  “It must have been a person who hurt Mother. Some member of the crew,” I say finally, my voice already scratchy from aching.

  “Or an accident,” Portia offers. “An explosion, perhaps?”

  “No,” Fenn says quietly. “Not an accident. This was deliberate. This was the taking of a life—violently. Look at the amount of blood that was lost. The pattern of where it was when they dragged her into this room to escape. Cyclo doesn’t have access to this room, does she?”

  I shake my head. “No. The walls are thick plastrix. Some of the auto functions work with Cyclo’s matrix, but not many. This is where patients came when Cyclo’s matrix wasn’t helping—it was all direct human intervention.”

  “They must have brought her here to save her. To keep her away from Cyclo,” Fenn says.

  “No. I don’t believe Cyclo would have killed Mother. Who’s to say they didn’t try to save her here—it’s the medical ward. And they just ran out of time,” I say. The normal lights are back on, but I can almost sense the ghost of Mother’s presence. The blood, refusing to completely disappear, begging me to tell the story. To unearth the secrets and tell the truth.

  “Anyway, look at how Gammand died. No one could have escaped an attack like that. How could they have saved her from that? It must have been a crew member.”

  “Maybe,” Fenn says, “but Cyclo learns, doesn’t she? Perhaps she is getting better at killing. Her first time was sloppy. Your mother called for help. Got help, but too late. Cyclo has been a lot neater since then. Look at Miki.” Fenn pauses, and his face contracts with pain. “We still never recovered any trace of Miki.”

  Portia puts a hand to Fenn’s back and frowns with him. “Our poor Miki. But, the question we need to consider is why. It might be just from lack of energy, but the killing of a single person doesn’t quite make sense. Not then, not three weeks ago, when they fled. We’ve watched her energy stores drastically decrease since then, as Cyclo’s functions have deteriorated. Cyclo wasn’t nearly as hungry three weeks ago. With Miki and Gammand, she was.”

  “Stop talking like Cyclo killed my mother,” I yell. “I’m telling you, it’s not her. She didn’t do it.”

  “But you don’t know that!” Fenn says.

  “And you don’t know that she did! Cyclo cared for her. She cares for me!”

  I’m so ready to flee this room, to get away from the words they keep flinging at me relentlessly. I don’t believe it. I can’t.

  “But Hana,” Portia says gently. “What happened to Gammand—you can’t explain that away.”

  My shoulders drop, and my eyes fill until the world is a blurry, watery mess. She’s right, and I hate to admit it, to see the truth.

  “Look,” Portia says. “We know your mother died on that day. And the evacuation happened at the same time. We need to know why your mother was killed. Maybe she did something that angered Cyclo, or someone.”

  “Or rather, maybe she was about to do something,” Fenn adds.

  Suddenly, Portia’s and Fenn’s holofeeds turn on automatically. It’s Doran.

  “Where are you?” he asks, frantic. “Are you all right? Where’s Hana?”

  “She’s with us,” Fenn says. “Did you see what happened? Gammand’s dead.”

  “I saw the whole thing on your live feeds, but I couldn’t get through, and then I lost contact for almost an hour. I’ve been talking to the heads at ReCOR. Portia, Fenn—they swear that they didn’t know this was a possible outcome. They say they had no idea that the Calathus crew believed that something bad happened to Dr. Um. None of this was revealed to me.”

  “How could they not know?” Portia nearly snarls. “How? We found out ourselves that Dr. Um was violently attacked. They must have told ReCOR. You must have known, Doran. We came here to die, but not like this. Not like this!”

  Doran is silent for a long time. Fenn’s veins are sticking out of his neck, and he’s livid with anger. We all wait for Doran to speak again.

  “I didn’t know. I swear on my children, I did not know. But that doesn’t help. You didn’t do this mission to be murdered, but to sacrifice your lives. There’s a difference. But ReCOR will not send a ship out there to rescue you. They say that this is still all in keeping with your contracts, even if the Calathus actively harms you.”

  “And our death benefits will still be enacted?”

  “Only if your work gets done.”

  “Not if we’re murdered early!”

  “They can’t possibly finish under these conditions! They’re doomed to fail. So we’re just going to let Portia and Fenn die here?” I ask, shoving my face close to Portia’s so that Doran can see me. “You can’t. It’s not their fault. It’s murder. And it’s now in the records.”

  Doran pauses and covers his face with his hand.

  “Doran,” I say. “Please. Where’s the closest space station?”

  “It’s in Sector Four, on the other side of Maia.”

  “Wait,” Fenn says. “You’re that close?”

  “Yes. It’s the center of four different missions I’m managing right now,” Doran says. “But I’m resigning my position. I’m going to get hell for this, and lose my job, and probably be indicted for theft given that I’m removing you from a sanctioned, legal mission that you’ve already signed a contract for, but I don’t care.” Doran’s face shifts farther away from the screen. “I’m coming to get you. It’ll take me at least five or six days, traveling in the fastest craft I can get. You have to figure out a way to survive until then.”

  “How will we communicate with you?” Portia asks.

  “You can’t. Once I’m off my ReCOR communication access, they won’t let anyone talk to you. You’ll be out of
communication with everyone.” He looks behind his shoulder. “And if I’m not careful, they’ll find a clever way to detain me. But I didn’t do this job to kill people, dammit. Nine months I spent training you all, and it wasn’t for this.”

  There is a long silence, then Doran finally says, “I’ve got to get out of here before they find out what’s going on. Portia, Fenn…and Hana.”

  “Godspeed, Doran,” Fenn says. I raise my hand, but Doran’s image disappears before my last goodbye leaves my lips.

  …

  I can’t believe it. Doran is really going to save us. But six days is a long time, on a ship that’s dying rapidly day by day, and becoming more murderous as the hours go by.

  We are still in the same room, reeling from Gammand’s death and reveling in the possibility that Doran might save us. If he does, then we don’t die. But Fenn and Portia won’t get their death benefits.

  “Doran said he might be detained by ReCOR,” I say.

  “Which means that we may have to prepare for the worst now,” Fenn says. “And that means fulfilling our contracts so we aren’t murdered for nothing.”

  “You do realize we’ve been set up to fail,” Portia says. “If we can’t make our objectives, I don’t want to die for nothing. We could try to find other ways to survive if Doran can’t get to us in time.”

  “At least you were able to release the nutrient mixtures, off the record. That might buy us some time,” Fenn says.

  My stomach drops, and nausea overtakes me. Something in the chain of events of Mother’s death bothers me. Something that’s missing. That’s when I remember. Mother’s diary. I haven’t read it all—just a page or two here and there. There must be more there that I missed, including the answers I’m looking for.