by Anna Gaffey
He sees it then, the filmy cloak of sluggish, parasitical alien all around her, the lost Rebecca. He looks down at his own arms, older arms out of place with his past, and sees through his skin into the meaty muscle and fat and veins and cells, deep into his own DNA, where the helixes are marbled with silvery threads—not marred, but connected, woven through his humanity. He realizes with horror. “It’s still in me, isn’t it? The Leech. I thought the Restore would kill it.”
“Merged,” she says. Her dark eyes are alight. “The serum is not a cure, not a stripping of disease. It is a joining with the Leech. It blends us with them. A collaboration of cells. Instant evolutional step. No returns.”
“Leech is part of me?” Is he telling himself this? Or is this Rebecca’s ghost, here with him through some miracle of time and space? He can’t predict her responses.
“You’ve combined. Merged. You’re something else now. More than human. A new species. You all are.” She’s laughing at him. He can see it in her eyes, in the moments when he can tear his gaze from the silvering throb in his cells. “How could such a thing be made painless?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t know. I couldn’t.” She’s so serene like this, she’s nearly unrecognizable. Nothing like the chip’s nightmare version. Nothing like the jerky, muddled parody of humanity the Leech thing’s mask evokes. If there is anything authentic left remains of his sister in the world, this, she is it—a heightened, dispassionate, honest scrap from deep within his mind. She exonerates him even as she shows his guilt. How can he feel so forgiven even as he accepts his burden, his inescapable mistake? But he does. He has moved past the flawed, tortuous path of the chip, closer to peace.
It’s himself, giving Jake what he wants. It must be. He can sense that. He can sense her acceptance as it wraps comforting arms around him, within him, through him. But it’s also true.
Her smile curls into a smirk. “You think I’m you?”
“You are me.”
“You still think you know everything.” She snorts. “I like knowing a few things you don’t. It’s refreshing.”
“I wish you were here.”
She rolls her eyes. “I am.”
He hugs her. She feels warm and solid, even as the room fades around them into a snapshot of memory. He squeezes her reedy shoulders. She smiles against his cheek.
“I love you, Jake. I miss Mother and Father and everyone and breathing.” Under her voice he can hear other words, the actual things she said that day still echoing through the room as her new unfettered mouth talks over them.
The sharp is in his hand, light as a paper stalk.
“I love you, too.” His sight is blurred, but he sees well enough to press the sharp into her port. “I’m sorry, Rebecca.”
He kisses her forehead. She laughs and pushes him away. “See you, brother.”
He moves down the row, and Silverman is there now, helping with injections on the opposite row. He remembers her now, and her presence doesn’t bother him. Not even as they start to die. He watches them all.
Rebecca takes the longest. It doesn’t feel like the nightmare program, although the blood still flows, and scarring and the screams and sweating still come through, pure and bright. But it doesn’t overwhelm him with guilt and self-loathing and rage. It feels hot like fever, like cleansing fire. He doesn’t need to embrace the bodies or work at reviving anyone. They are gone. They have been gone for ten years. They slip into the background of the room, disappear like fluttering ash into the cots. He sees the broken glass, scattered across a lab table. The sharps, the swabs, tablets, a scanner. He picks up a tablet and connects to the Comm system, connects to Con.
Con’s face is sleepy on the screen.
Jake clears Con’s records from his private files. He clears his notes on the serum, new and old. He deletes everything. He tells Con to stay away from what’s coming, to delete all the copies Jake had given him. The trial. Funny how he’d thought to do that, how his one fierce urge had been to protect Con, who, by all indications and present information, had never needed protection. But he can’t stop himself. He did it this way, is doing it now. Will he erase himself? Or allow Silverman to do so? Is he present here, knowingly committing to his fate, a patsy before this moment?
No alarms yet. But Silverman would trip them.
Con’s face, close to Jake’s through the vid-screen, Con’s eyes angry and fearful and loving. “No, I won’t.”
Shattered glass—vials of yellow liquid, next to that. Familiar, all of it. Sharps, swabs, tablets, a scanner.
“You have to,” Jake says. His hands were wet. He looked down at them and saw they were covered not in blood, but in slick yellow serum.
“I won’t. Listen, I have to tell you, you don’t understand what I did, what I am—”
A slim hand reaches across his. Ends the transmission. He catches a glimpse of red hair, of a white coat. Silverman. Then there is a dull, cold push behind his ear and he drops into blackness for a while.
Out of the blackness come the alarms. The banging against the sealed security doors as he comes to with his face stuck to the laboratory floor. Where is he? His memories collide, the knowing future-Jake and the lost, mentally-stripped past-Jake, waiting for the verdict and wondering what had just happened, his younger self standing up to see a gory nightmare of the lab, bodies and blood and ruin and no memory of any of it. The lab brightens as the security Defense officers break through the door, and then the room quakes, shivers, folds abruptly back in on itself—
Jake found himself across the misty engine room and upside down, his body aching in one continuous bruise. He was back. Out of his head, and back into his head. He still knew who and where and when he was. He was still deep within Selas. He felt more tranquil than he could ever remember feeling in his life. Perhaps that meant he was about to die.
Repair. What is this?
The room echoed with a thunderous explosion. The thing bent over him. It was more of a mess than ever, its shape weaving in and out. Rebecca’s face twisted into Con’s and meshed improperly with Nat’s. It did not look satiated. “Tell us. Tell us what is happening.”
“Oh.” Jake tried to think. “Well, the big boom is probably the station. I forgot to tell you. It’s crashing into Selas. The planet. Your engine. Is that going to be a problem?”
In the middle of the floor where Jake had been lying, the chem satchel sat in a sad crush of leather. A puddle of vivid yellow liquid spread slowly outward, hissing as it advanced across the glassy surface. He didn’t know how, but he sensed it: serum. Restore. No matter what Con had said or thought, Angelica Padula Jeong had indeed sent her son a parting gift.
“Explain.” The Rebecca-Con-Nat muddle leaned back in toward him and pointed to the satchel. “Explain what that is doing.”
“Nah.” Jake fell back, bumping his head against the floor. What was one more thump? “Think I’ll just sit this one out.”
The room began to flash in and out between brightness and shadow. He wasn’t sure if it was due to his failing vision or if it was actually happening. No, it was. Con was crouched beside him.
—Jake—
—I can’t do it—
Jake couldn’t quite remember what it was Con was supposed to do. He certainly wasn’t being very active himself. But to be fair, his spine felt as though it was shaking apart. Sssh, he tried to tell the floor. Just relax. It’ll be over soon. I’ll join you then. Con pressed his hand.
“Do it now,” Jake told him. “This thing. It’s going to kill me. Although maybe, that’s okay, now. But do it now. Whatever it was you were going to do.”
The thing came back, and Con recoiled.
What is happening?
“I’ve got no idea.” Jake tried to shrug. It hurt. “Con, stay back—”
With a snarl that shredded his nerves, the thing dove at them.
His own name became merely a word, one he’d never spoken. He saw an image in a mirror, a man—a what?—a human touching th
e side of his head, and did not recognize him—it. A hand holding his; he didn’t know whose. He saw a room with glass and silver implements and fluids encased in blue light, a woman with red hair, his hand around her throat. He did not know any of it. He was untethered, alone, but not alone. Unfamiliar memories mingled back and forth between them, through the flagging pressure of the hand in his.
He could feel the thing straining to clean him, them, of their energy. It hurried through his mind like a scythe, and even as it devoured, it weakened, it screamed in agony. —You are unpalatable. Why why why why— He was still himself—who am I?—and he clung to that, a point of light with matter swirling about it, a star being born or dying, he wasn’t sure. He imagined he felt his heart shriveling into a tiny, crinkled pellet.
But the thing harrying him had stopped, had pulled him back to a memory he could still claim, he thought—he was gazing through the glass porthole of a ship as they approached a green marble of a planet, and a long, wide metal cylinder, a space waystation. It was old and patched, built for function rather than form, but it was sturdy and solid and appealing, lit on top and bottom with white winking docking lights. A red-haired man’s blueberry smile. Another man’s dark reflection in the Control windows. A green-haired woman patching a coil. Not his brain, but that was okay. They all shared the station. They all loved it.
He couldn’t understand it any longer, could only swim along the memory. He gazed upon it with affection and annoyance and regret—
Yes, yes. The station. The thing stamped its feet. Your Selas Station. What does all this mean
—regret as he tried to calculate its final trajectory, how much damage it had done, the speed and range and total effect of the impact event, how much fuel had been left in the cells and what havoc it was wreaking. The formulas broke into numbers and symbols and scratchings, and tumbled without meaning from his mind.
Rebecca touched his face. “Get up, silly.”
She was still with him. Her arms encircled him. She thought she could protect him from fiery life-sucking alien death, and he was the silly one? And yet as she embraced him, he felt the shreds of himself joining back together, becoming Jake again, pasting the siphoned losses back into one whole if lumpy piece. She was remaking him, restoring him. She was with him.
Distantly, he heard the thing raging around them. Con screamed in his ear, and Jake could see him again, just barely, twitching and feeble beneath a blanket of silvery mist. A torrent of thought eddies around him. Con’s thoughts, trapped and futile and unable to achieve his organic solution. Jake touched him—reaching through the mist felt like putting his bare hand into acid—and for cold, clear seconds he saw into Con and saw what they had to do.
He felt Rebecca’s hand, cool and strong over his. He thought of the wave-pack, discarded as harmless and inactive in the center of the floor, all its power inert. He envisioned its various connections. The sum of its parts. What path a signal would follow to trigger a chain reaction inside, and an expanding explosion without.
Jake felt the triggering thought loose from his mind and saw a ripple in the air as it shot like an arrow toward the wave pack, saw as if in a mirror his own concentration. An organic signal. The effort bled thick ropes of energy from him, as though he’d opened his throat with a knife. He threw a hand down to keep himself upright, and realized he could no longer feel Rebecca’s calm grip on his hand or his shoulders. Would it be enough? He couldn’t tell—
But the thing saw too, and broke off from Con, with memories and thoughts and senses fragmenting away into dust and space around them.
No. Foolish little food thing. It is nothing—nothing can harm us, nothing, nothi
The room lit with a fierce blue luminosity as the wave pack opened and spread in a wide, silent bubble, gobbling into the floor and the bodies beneath. The room brightened, and it was daylight again. A different daylight, somewhere far off, another place with open skies and clouds. Jake opened his eyes to the brightness and let it blind him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“This is my first official report as Stationmaster of Station 2075-5, Satellite orbiting 1H-24HM, that’s in the system of G-class star 24HM, informally referred to as the Eos system. I have a minimal crew of twenty, including our stellar Head of Medical, Kate Lindy, with more on the way within the month, …
…so far we’ve found everything almost exactly as the Gov Board laid it out in their initial salvage report. Pressure suits are required in the bottom two levels. The cargo bay in particular needs direct attention as it’s hard frosted over. Eerie to see the common area stripped out the way it is, whether by the vacuum or initial salvage. There’s plenty of space for Heart, thankfully. The Control level has polymerine windows pocked all to hell, but they were hidden under heavy shielding. Our quarters were less fortunate. We managed to connect the enviros and get them pressurized, but there are no amenities whatsoever. Certainly no water. And no mattresses.
The word “abandoned” comes to mind, but it’s too soft. Forsaken. Yes, I think forsaken more readily fits the bill.”
Excerpt: weekly progress report
21 February 2235
Tobias Carmichael, Col. (retired)
Stationmaster
United Worlds DS 2075-5 [Selas Station]
Satellite 1H-24HM, 24HM System [updated: Eos]
[Archived: United Governance Board tri-system mission records, Earth]
2 November 2242 AEC
11:13
“Shhh. You’re fine. Try to relax.”
Yes. He was fine. He could possibly try to relax, too.
“Good boy.”
Nat leaned over him, her mouth yawning into a bottomless hungry pit, and he couldn’t stop, he was drawn into it. Pressure on his wrist, in the crook of his arm. Nat faded, became a stern, wood-chiseled woman with hard grey eyes who held his arm and poured secrets into his flesh. He saw the words as they flitted thick and black and noiseless from her hands to his arm. Writing his brain. Infecting him, he thought with sudden fright, an infection he wouldn’t remember unless he fought her, now, before the poison saturated him. He had to get away, had to drive her away—
His terror consumed him, and then a silvery flash blinded him. The pressure from her hands lifted. The woman disappeared.
“What happened?” said a different voice. “Was that enough?”
“I can’t tell. I can’t read him. I don’t know why, I don’t know how this works yet. I think he blocked me somehow. Ease. Ease now—shit, he’s dropping back out.”
He shut his eyes and drifted away from the voices for a while. But they came back, buzzing around his ears like insects. He had the incongruous, doubled sense of eavesdropping, of sitting propped up, a mute witness to proceedings he couldn’t understand.
“…justification is there. Once the fuel’s gone, it’s gone. We don’t have enough to try it both ways.”
“According to this, we don’t have another option. It’s Marathon.”
“But Earth…”
“…we must try for Earth…”
A flat, hard statement overrode through the intermingling voices. “If we do, we’ll end up a floating crypt.”
Who are you? Con asked. The cavern crumbled around them. Please? Who?
When he opened his eyes again, he was in Alpha Lift, rising buoyant and weightless through the station levels. The doors shot open, and he stepped out onto the station’s Control level.
Someone had redecorated. Nothing too drastic, of course; the mission had a hermetically sealed budget. But someone had cleared out all the consoles and stuck a big oval glass table in their place, as if they had thought this was a conference room.
“Enough screwing around,” Carmichael said. He sat on one side of the table, which appeared to have cracked in half. Jagged polymerine splinters littered the floor underneath. “I see that you lost my gun. You’ll have to answer for that.” He arranged a tablet and recorder tidily on the crooked tabletop, and then he pushed the live symbo
l on the recorder. “Please state your name and United Worlds census number for the record.”
His name and number. He had no idea of either. He crossed to the table and sat, the polymerine shatter crunching under his boots. He wiped sweaty palms on his trousers. He tried to think. He knew this man was Carmichael and that they were in the station. That information was ripe and obvious, falling from the tree. His name and number might hide among the branches somewhere, if only he could find it. But the gun…the launcher, the bazooka. “I didn’t mean to lose it. And it didn’t really work, anyway.”
Across the table, Carmichael hunched forward with sudden, inescapable scrutiny. “You’ll have to do better than that, son.” A thin trail of blood leaked from the corner of Toby’s mouth.
“Jake?”
He groaned and opened his eyes. It was dark. His head felt like someone had stuck a swizzle stick in his ear and mixed everything up. And he was horizontal again. An uncertain figure loomed over him, and damn it, he was still in the cave, still under the heel of that voracious, exultant thing—no no no
“Jake.”
“Yes,” he said. He was Jake. He strained to see in the dark. He concentrated on the tension in his legs, on slowing the rapid-fire drill of his heart. “Where am I?”
“Harmon sickbay.”
Where? It was impossible to see anything in the murky light. He fumbled, tested some of the bumps and buttons along the rail of his bed, and golden light slowly spread outward from a recessed lamp in the wall, over the sheets and the floor, illuminating Dr. Katherine Lindy’s busy hands and hard, angular face. The wooden-faced woman with invasive words in her hands, but now he knew her. Her eyes were bright, her mouth primmed into a tight line. For a moment, Jake thought he might cry—in fear or in relief, he wasn’t sure which. He was gratified when he managed to keep it in.
He looked around for Carmichael, but the man was nowhere in sight. “Carmichael?”
