by Anna Gaffey
He pushed into the Harmon’s conference center. Dark, but he could’ve walked through his ship blindfolded. It was a smaller room, sparsely decorated in reds and browns so it appeared larger, with a large oval polymerine table dominating the area. Dark, seemingly empty, but he felt a presence.
As if in response, Alice Silverman’s voice floated out of the shadows. “Lights up, please.”
The lights rose obediently. Silverman lurched out of the corner and skirted the table. His first thought was that she must be ill. Her hair stood out in wild tangles. The skin around her neck and face was sunken and pouchy. She wore blue pajama pants and a simple white tunic, all rumpled with evidence of hasty dressing. She gave off a stink of enraged desperation. She was completely clean. No vile aura of silvery haze surrounded her.
Con’s mind clicked back online. Bang went his danger sense, and his body tensed, his hands readied. She was clean. Somehow she was clean, she’d gotten hold of Restore. How? Had she pegged Quinn or Lashti? Vanna hadn’t said anything to indicate that. He let his eyes widen, just a touch. Enough to look like stifled fear. His pulse thrummed in his ears.
“…don’t lie. I can feel it. Picking at me, whatever it is. From the station or the planet. As soon as we woke from cryo, I could feel it.” She slapped the Warringer onto the table with a deep reverberant chung and swiped it with her thumb. It unfolded, its velvety mass cushioning a pile of glassine vials and a soft-patch injector. “I tried to take more serum, but it didn’t help. What is it?”
“More serum?”
“I formulated my own. Rebirth. But it isn’t helping. Tell me why.”
Con shrugged, and she shrieked at him.
“Don’t pretend! I know you can feel it, too. What is it?”
She snatched a vial full of clear liquid and slapped it into the injector. “Do you know what this is?” Her grip was unsteady: she jabbed the air with it as she stared at him, her breath ragged and ferocious. “Succor. Succinylcholine blend. One press will paralyze you. Shut down your system in three minutes. You’ll die a wax dummy on the floor. Unable to even blink unless you do exactly as I say.”
“Sure.” Con raised his hands slowly.
“Oh, put them down. We’re going to find Dr. Jeong, get the…” She faltered for a moment. “The real serum formula by any means from that bastard, and leave. I did what you wanted, against my better judgment. I could’ve skipped this whole reassignment farce, had him yanked back to the Bends. But we’re here.”
“Why do you hate him so much?”
“What?” She looked confused, then angrier. “Hate. Hate has nothing to do with it. He’s a fool who squandered a gift. And I won’t. I can give that gift to humanity. Properly. Once I find it—”
“Maybe. But you haven’t been successful, either. He has what you need. Even damaged like he is, he’s better than you.”
“Still hopeless. Still missing him?” Silverman laughed. “You’re a fool, too. And I don’t need you.”
“All right.” His voice sounded unreal to himself, bland, almost mocking. “Come on, then.”
Con had never had a sadistic nature. That was why he’d been so good at what he did for Defense, for black ops, for Science bidders; he didn’t savor it. He did the job and went home. The cold wash of satisfaction he felt as she seized his arm shocked him. He snapped her wrist back with one hand, gripped her neck with the other, and transferred the injector’s soft surface to her own forearm. She was so cold, her flesh speckled with goose bumps. He pressed, and the injector left a wet smear on her skin.
“Wait,” she said hoarsely, staggering back. She beat at the air and collapsed onto the carpeted floor. He followed her down and arranged her limbs as comfortably as he could, pulled down the Warringer, and propped her head with the silky mess of black velvet. Dark bruises from his fingers were already rising on her neck.
“Three minutes, you said.”
“Can’t—you can’t,” she worked out before her mouth slackened. Her eyes, wide and wet with fright, burned into him. Con’s fingers itched. His mind went wavery, and he blinked and gasped as if he’d been dunked and now he was trying to see underwater. Then the choking ripples cleared. He looked down at her—and saw a creeping, silvery mist forming around her temples. The Leech had returned to her.
Picking at me. As soon as we woke, I could feel it.
There was exultation in the air around him. The veil rejoiced as it reclaimed her, hungrier and less satisfied than he’d ever sensed.
“I can feel it, yes,” he said to her. “There’s something out here. But it’s something familiar, from Earth.” Con stood up as the Succor’s torpor stiffened her limbs. The grey film shrouded her. His stomach heaved, but he didn’t look away. “I’ll find out what it is. You won’t. And you won’t hurt him again.”
It was quicker than three minutes. The greyish mist quaked over her, and he kept a good distance as he waited. He took deep breaths to calm himself. The grey writhed over her, ground into her like millions of infinitesimal blades until her darting eyes slowed, dulled, and rolled back into her head. He touched the soft groove of her throat. No pulse.
Then he stooped, gathered her into his arms, and carried her out of the room, down the bright corridors of the Harmon and into the shadows of her personal quarters, his countenance lost in the darkness. He was un-Con, an anti-Con, a pure con, a rip in physical space. He snickered and then sobbed in relief.
As expected, a small hand touched his arm. “It’s done?”
He could not see them, Quinn and Lashti, but he could feel their closeness in the small space. Silverman was light and stiff in his grasp. Bending, he arranged her carefully on the floor. “Yes. And yours?”
He could almost hear them nod. “Done,” Lashti said. “We injected Arsène Bouvier five hours ago, and he’s recovered. His arms have healed.”
Quinn shivered. “Do you feel that? It must be the planet. It feels hungry…”
Then they turned and stared into the wheeling shadows. Con swayed, his face sunken and horrified but whole.
—Please, Jake—
Eyes, eyes, too many eyes stared into his. Jake gasped and gasped, and fell out of Con’s mind and back into Selas, reality as he knew it, his veins bright and hot with borrowed memory and Restore.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
“The greater good. Always.”
Excerpt: personal ship’s log
30 October 2242
Dr. Alice Silverman
Clinical pathologist
Personnel Carrier Leah Harmon
United Worlds DS 2150-1
Docking, Selas Station, Satellite, Eos System
[Data recovered 02 Dec 2242, Gunaji rights per salvage]
2 November 2242 AEC
02:10
He rolled away from Con, off the landing pad and back into Selas, into the clammy alien grass where he retched into the cold mud.
Con helped him up. As soon as Jake felt steady on his feet, he shoved Con’s hands away.
“Jake, I—”
“Don’t speak. Don’t say a word.” He was sick of Con’s voice, inside or outside of his head, reeling with every sensation through Con’s perceptions. He spat, and wiped his mouth.
Then he realized he was standing without pain. His knee no longer ached under the steel crush of the brace. That was something. He shook his leg. Still no pain. His head still ached, but given the mental gymnastics he’d just endured, that wasn’t a surprise.
“That was a delightful confessional you put on all the way down here.” His bullshit detector was gone, ruined, on permanent fritz. “Did you practice?”
Con reached for his arm, and Jake jerked away. “I really don’t think so, no.”
“Please, Jake.”
“If you’re going to say anything, it can be yes or no.” The foulness wouldn’t leave his mouth. “From the beginning? You and Silverman?”
His jaw set, Con dropped his hands to his sides. His eyes were very green in the fading lig
ht. “Yes.”
“She wanted my research, because I wasn’t sharing. Not even with Rebecca, supposedly. She figured I was getting close, so she purchased your services.”
“Yes.”
“With Science liaison credits.”
“Yes.”
“Of course. Your Defense profile showed you had a mountain of them. And she gave you the amazing security clearance, too.” His leg did still ache, but only a little, as if he’d slept on it wrong. Jake felt vibrant, thrumming, healthy—full somehow and yet freer, as though he’d pushed back at a heavy cover only to have it give way easily, and he could stretch his arms out and out and out, no barriers, no restraint. It felt glorious. And yet, he wanted to verify it. How could this be real sensation? He wanted to run scans on himself for a day or ten.
“You read my Defense file?” Con said slowly. “How did you get that?”
Jake scoffed. “Please. Try and make me feel guilty now. Especially about that doctored-up pile of garbage.” He leaned down and unstrapped the brace. Ah, there—his leg muscles felt better, so much less constricted. He folded up the metal. His leg felt good. His everything felt good. Good was too mild. Jake waved a hand at himself. “How long does this last?”
“As long as you live, hopefully.”
“How long might that be? Longer than the other test subjects, I suppose.”
Con shook his head, uncomprehending, and Jake was struck with incandescent rage. He rushed Con and thrust him back against the pod, the leg brace at his neck. Con scrabbled at the thin stellarcore struts.
“I trusted you, and you lied to me.” Jake shoved the brace harder. “From the very beginning, till now. Why didn’t you tell me?”
His earpiece crackled. Santos’ voice cut in and out. “…hear me? The—ation…going. Please— spond if— hear me—”
“Mrgh,” Con said. For all that Jake had caught him off-guard, he’d already managed to worm his fingers in between the brace and his throat. Feeling foolish, Jake let the brace fall with a thump onto the landing pad.
“You wouldn’t have trusted me if I had,” Con rasped, massaging his throat. “I wouldn’t have trusted me.”
“Please shut up. Rachel, we can’t read you clearly.”
“—Jake, you need…come back. …station is—no future. Jake? Con?”
“We read you,” Jake shouted. “But you’re not getting through. Say again.”
“—peat. The station is dead. Tried everything…just too fragmented, too confused—too damn old.” For a minute, Santos’ voice piped through with unbearable clarity. “I’ve made the call. We’re abandoning. Taken the protocol Heart gem and all the backups. …tracking trajectory. She’s predicted to crash somewhere in the—quadrant. That’s near your last stated location.” She paused, and then rattled off a string of numbers. “I repeat. We’re abandoning. If you’re reading me, Jake and Con, this is your official civilian order to get your plaguing asses back up here now. Do you hear me? You have to—”
The comm connection agitated in and out in squealing electronic frenzy, and then died with a faint putter.
The station, their home, dying. The creaky lift, the fickle water temperature and the questionable toilets, the constant updating and rewiring and repairing of circuitry, every finicky irritating problem they’d fixed and broken and fixed again. Jake couldn’t swallow past the sickly lump in his throat.
“You had to trust me, Jake.”
He didn’t want to think about it. He wouldn’t think about it.
“You had to take the serum.”
He had to put it out of his mind. Focus.
“We don’t have any idea what’s down here, but I can sense it, Jake. Can’t you? It shouldn’t be able to control you anymore. Not like it controlled Nat and Mei and the rest of you on board the station.”
Yes, the pull was strong as ever. The spike in his brain. How the hell would he know whether it was controlling him? “If you’re suggesting I wasn’t able to handle myself before—”
“Of course that’s what I’m suggesting.” Con bent over and took a deep breath. “Look at you, damn it, you could barely hobble without an overdose of painkillers before I injected you. And now you’re menacing me with your own goddamn leg brace. You were walking around like a concussed zombie, now you’re speaking like yourself again. I couldn’t let you go into danger without some protection, this time—I couldn’t—not again.”
He stopped and gulped for breath. He laid a palm on Jake’s arm, and—
Flash in breaking glass, burning, screaming, Jake’s younger self, shattered, peering out of a vid screen
Jake yanked himself back and away, which unfortunately meant tripping over his feet and landing hard on his ass in the dirt behind him. “Stop doing that.”
The distance didn’t help. Sensations still flashed through him, muddled into an amalgam of Con and himself: his younger fingers on his/Con’s wrist, the vein standing out in his arm, his mouth against his mouth, tasting himself, his fingers digging into Silverman’s slender neck—
He glared up at Con. “I don’t want you in my head, not now, not ever again.”
“I—hrm.” Con looked bemusedly down at his hand. “Generally that comes later.”
“What does?”
“The both-ways connection.”
“Both ways?”
“You shouldn’t be able to see into me, not right away. Most people can’t do it properly without help. And some people just can’t at all. It seems pretty random.”
“That’s stupid. Nothing’s random, there’s a reason somewhere.” Jake dug his fingers into the wet grass. “Do most people have a psychic nurse like you trying to shield them from trauma?”
“No. And no, they just bear it.” Con reached out to help him up. “Normally I can control it better.”
Jake disdained his hand and pushed himself up. “I said, don’t touch me.” His brain was rocketing along. Most people just bore it. Who were most people? Con’s people? Underground, off the radar? They couldn’t be scavs. Could they? No. The Harmon crew was full of trained techs, for gods’ sakes. But who else was there? He must mean the Harmon crew, his newly minted healthy mob.
Was it because he’d pushed back and jumped into Con’s head during the serum connection? That made sense on a superficial level. But Jake was theorizing, and uselessly so. Better to stick to the task.
He found the supply satchel in a rumpled heap half under the edge of the pod, and he dug inside. His hands wouldn’t stop shaking. He didn’t seem to have gained much motor control. Another possible side effect, or worse? How would he know? He hadn’t expended much critical thinking, had he, in allowing a fucking liar to shoot him up with magical yellow swill with only a Trust me, brother.
But when you’d lost your mind, there was no sense in chasing it. And the station was dead. He’d might as well go for broke. Finish the mission; given Santos’ message, it was almost certainly his last mission on Selas.
He concentrated on sorting things in the satchel: his small, razor-sharp knife, which he strapped to his belt, a chewy crap protein bar, if his stomach would hold it, the small orange wave pack, his loaded tablet. The chemistry set satchel. The launcher case. For a moment, he considered throwing all of it into the waving grass.
“Can I help?” Con hovered at an awkward distance.
“No.” Jake shoved the chemistry satchel back inside. He shouldered the bag and the launch case, and woke the tablet. “You can stay with the pod.”
“That’s unacceptable. You’re going into an unknown situation. You need help.”
“Not from you.” A host of ugly words rose to his lips, and Jake quashed them. Barely. “It’s better you stay here and try to—” He cast about for something plausible, and found it. “Try to raise Rachel on the pod comm. Verify her transmission. Find out how much time we have before the station hits.”
“We could do that with the tablet, while we walk.”
“Not if I’m blowing all the power on
scanning. Whatever this stuff is, scanning it sucks the energy down fast.” Jake picked up a skinny fallen tree branch.
“I’m not letting you seek this thing out on your own,” Con growled. “It’s wrong. Like…old blood. The smell of it, except in my head.”
“Charming.” But the simplicity of the statement chilled Jake. Whether he liked it or not, Con was a good herald of doom.
“Jake, you can’t—”
“I can, and I will,” he snapped. He whipped the branch through the air with a vicious stroke, cracking it against the ground, and wished it were Con he was hitting, or himself. “What I can’t do is trust you. I don’t know which parts of what I saw were genuine, and because of that, I don’t want you with me. I don’t want you near me.”
Con stared at him. Jake was unnerved by the hurt in his eyes, and also its quality: Con’s pupils had dilated, and there was something painfully quivery about how he focused, as though he couldn’t stand to look at anything too long. Jake stuck the branch under his arm and looked down at the tablet instead.
The scanner had activated. A map of the two nearest quadrants displayed, and the gleaming spot over the foundations pulsed, overshadowing the other readings. Jake realized that the wicked ache in his head had aligned itself to the same rhythm. “I’ll be back before the station hits.”
Con didn’t say anything, so Jake turned and stomped through the grass. The direct path they’d seared on his last surface visit had long since overgrown, so he slashed into the heavy undergrowth at the edge of the tree line. After a while, he found he didn’t need the branch: an eerie breeze wafted through the forest, sweeping the leaves and twigs just out of his face.
