by Sara King
“She’s my infant.”
“Yeah, but still…”
The first man made an unhappy sound. “I have to leave them both, don’t I? Could I put them back into stasis?”
“We can’t keep them in stasis forever, sir. Besides, they’re in less danger blending in. If Orion and the Division figured out we did it on purpose, they’d kill them both.”
Anna frowned. Again, something about the scene seemed very familiar. When she tried to move, though, it was like her body was tied down. Or…wrapped with something?
Yes, Wideman Joe said. Wrapped.
Anna blinked in the darkness, realizing she was being pinned down by her own blanket. Had Wideman crawled into bed with her? “What in the ever-loving fuck is going on?!” she screamed.
The flat little beast becomes dimensional, Wideman said. At least for a time…
“Fuck you, mushroom man!” Anna snapped. “Patrick! Patrick! Wideman’s in my room again!”
But Wideman’s baby-sitter didn’t come running, as he usually did. Instead, the two other men in the room with her kept babbling away about non-applicable shit, and Anna remained thoroughly pinned down.
“Someday, I’m going to tear my brother’s heart out and make him eat it,” the first one was going on. “Damn him. I’ve kept the arrangement!”
“And he used the extra time to boost the Division and brainwash more kids. We’ve got to stop it, sir.” Wait. That sounded like…Dad? Anna stopped struggling to listen.
“What about little Candycorn? She won’t understand.”
“She’s shown the greatest potential we’ve ever seen. She’ll understand.”
“No she won’t.”
“Kestrel says she’s already understanding basic concepts in speech. At two months, sir. You’ve gotta give her the benefit of the doubt.”
“So she’s understanding us right now? She knows I’m about to leave? She knows what we did to her sister?”
“I wouldn’t go that far, sir. Kestrel’s…eager…to prove her theories about Yolk, but sometimes I think she’s a bit too enthusiastic.”
“What kind of man lets someone experiment on his own damned daughters?”
“One who knows that if he doesn’t, one day, they’ll both die because his brother’s a backstabbing, murderous psychopath.”
“Must run in the family,” the first man said quietly. He sounded so miserable. So stricken with grief. Anna wanted nothing more than to see him, but something was still holding her in place. “Is she gonna remember this, Dave?”
“What, the reconstitution process?”
“Not Magali. Anna.”
“Man, I dunno. You know Kestrel. She’s sickeningly positive right up until the bodies destabilize and explode all over her goggles.”
The first man sighed. “All right.” Anna felt big hands around her, lifting her, then, suddenly, the cloth was lifted from around her face and she was staring up into the rugged, bristly face of a man she barely knew.
“Candycorn, sweetie, if you can understand me, I’m sorry,” the vaguely familiar face said. “I will come back for you. Dave’s gonna take care of you for a while, now, but I promise, Anna. I’ll come back.” Then he leaned down to plant a kiss on Anna’s forehead, and in doing so, Anna caught a glimpse of something horrible happening to her sister… Then he walked over to the glass canister holding liquefied parts of her sister, giving Anna an up-close view of her sister’s veins floating like blue and red ferns in the water, pulsing with every beat of the disembodied heart. The man put his hand on the canister of cloudy crimson water. Above Anna, he lowered his forehead to the glass. “Goodbye, Dragonfly.”
“Robot!” Anna screamed, sitting up, panting.
But the man holding her didn’t seem to notice. He kissed her forehead again and pulled away, giving Anna an unobstructed view of the tubes, the lines, the human-shaped mold, the chemical slop that was becoming her sister…
“Man, don’t let her see that,” the first man said. “What if she remembers?”
The second man made a sorrowful sound. “She won’t.”
But she will, Wideman said. Won’t she? He was sitting in the corner beside the machine that had dissolved her sister, watching her with a bemused smile.
Then the first man shoved the cloth over her face again and the darkness faded to light.
“The last Encompate judge surrendered this afternoon with his family, Empress Landborn. He’s begging mercy—he says there’s nothing left of the Coalition for him to fight for. Would you like to execute him publicly or privately?”
Mercy, Wideman said. Monsters never give mercy.
Ignoring the idiot’s babble, Anna blinked, trying to understand how she could have destroyed the Encompate already. She opened her mouth to ask, but was interrupted by a teenage voice sneering, “Oh, let’s make this one public.”
“It’s not funny! It bit off my finger!”
Beside Anna, a very young toddler giggled in glee.
Magali gave her a hurt look and stormed away, clutching her wounded hand as the tortoise casually went back to snipping off sap-bulbs and swallowing them.
Killers don’t have DNA, Wideman said. But beasts do.
As Anna watched, the severed finger dissolved into a puddle of ruby liquid before the finger soaked into the ground and disappeared.
Beside Anna, the toddler, also watching the finger, stopped laughing.
“Are you certain you want to experiment on Captain Eyre? It is a violation of the Codes of Conduct.”
“Whose codes of conduct?” Anna’s voice demanded. “You should know by now I don’t care about anyone’s ‘codes’ but mine, Dobie.”
Beasts don’t have codes, either, Wideman told her. He was sitting in the corner of the hospital room, observing with a wry smile. All they have is spite.
Anna swallowed hard. “Okay, you withered old walnut. What’s happening to me?”
Wideman smiled, but he didn’t answer.
Doberman, who hadn’t heard her, went on to retort, “Actually, it was your hero Ghani Klyde’s in A Society of Merit. On the fifty-third page of the seventh edition, he wrote, ‘For the greatest civilization to form, it takes every individual within it to only be willing to wreak upon their fellow man what they would be willing to have wrought upon themselves, regardless of infraction or perceived trespass. This, however, is what stands between us and the evolution of the human race, since it only takes one strong-willed and selfish individual to instill hardship and cruelty in millions.”
Beside Anna, her own voice snorted and said, “I read Klyde for the strategy and the liberty propaganda, not because I want a roadmap to a true and noble life.” Her doppelganger gave a derisive laugh.
Dobie seemed to consider that, then said, “I’ll ready the anesthetics.”
“Oh,” Anna’s voice snickered, “we won’t need anesthetics.”
“They actually hit Fortune? But the Coalition is dead.”
“It was an attack of spite, my Empress. They had no hopes of reuniting the Coalition—they just wanted to strike one last bitter blow. But don’t worry, everyone important had left the planet months ago.”
Anna swallowed, watching as a man bowed in front of her. Wideman was standing a few feet off, watching the scene with bemused interest. Beasts are too short-sighted to worry about the future.
“How many did they kill?” The teenager’s voice demanded. She sounded pensive. Sad?
The man blinked and looked up from where he crouched on the ground. “Well, all of them, my lady. They used a Kelthari crystal. But they killed themselves in the process. Just a band of kamikaze rebels with an axe to grind. Survivors of Aladia, I presume. Probably trying to symbolically replicate your destruction of their homeworld as an effort to gain support from the masses. Terrorists, really.”
“Wait,” Anna said, frowning. “They destroyed Fortune?”
The beast lost its lair…
“Stop calling me a beast, you zucchini-fondling g
remlin!” Anna snapped. “Where am I?”
Everywhere, Wideman replied.
Anna narrowed her eyes at the little vegetable-muncher, determined to give him that dose of nerve-dissolver she’d been planning for the last couple years. “You’re toast, little man.”
“Wait,” the teenager’s voice said, as Anna plotted. “Say that again.”
“Survivors of Aladia?” the kneeling man offered.
“No,” the teenager’s voice said. “The part about rebels.”
The man grunted. “Oh. Just a band of kamikaze rebels with a grudge. Nobody of note.”
There was a silence, then her teenage doppelganger said, “Would you say that we were just kamikaze rebels, back when the Coalition still didn’t know who we were?”
The man hesitated. “I certainly didn’t intend to die, Anna.”
“Did they?” the teenager’s voice demanded.
“Judging by the amount of supplies and weaponry we found in their ship, I’d assume not,” the man replied. “I think they intended to build an outpost somewhere we didn’t know about, then start a rebellion against your rule.”
“Stupid,” the teenager’s voice said softly.
Anna, however, didn’t think it sounded as if she were talking about the rebels.
Beasts don’t think about mistakes, Wideman said. Beasts don’t make mistakes, because the world of a beast is made by the beast.
“If I wanted someone to spout philosophy, you greasy floater, I’d get Patrick in here,” Anna snapped. “Shut the fuck up and tell me how I can get out of here.”
But Wideman grinned. The beast wants to leave the beast’s own nest. Funny beast.
“I swear to Aanaho,” Anna snarled, stepping towards him, “you call me a beast again and—”
“I’m sorry to move things on so quickly after learning news of your homeworld,” the man on his knee said, apparently not seeing Anna marching across the audience room towards him, “but the war continues. The Phage just swallowed another section of the Core and the Aashaanti just massacred two of our outposts in the Inner Bounds. They’re reinstating their old technologies and are headed for the Core. We think they’re going to try to exterminate all intelligent life inside their containment web to stop the Phage.”
“Even the non-afflicted?” the teenager demanded, turning from the window to look back at him.
“The Aashaanti see them as potential hosts,” the man replied. “They’re destroying our fleets one by one.”
“Have any of my goddamn admirals tried talking to them?!” the teenager snapped. “We’re not the enemy!”
“We’re on their ancestral lands,” the man said. “Our colonies are in their dormant cities. We have no one to talk to them since you killed Tatiana Eyre. They’re going to kill everything and take back their old planets.”
“We can’t fight the Aashaanti and the Phage,” the teenager argued. “We just got done fighting the Coalition.”
Poor beast, Wideman commented. The sheep she penned won’t fight for her. Nobody loves a beast.
Anna wanted to punch him.
“Unfortunately,” the man on his knees said, “the Aashaanti aren’t giving us a choice…”
Anna found herself standing in the dark, frigid cryoroom of an interstellar Marquis Sovar. The air reeked of decay and mold, clinging to the inside of her nostrils, coating her lungs. Black cold-growths obscured the inside of the row of glass tubes in feathery ebony lines that pulsed as it ate the cryo gel and the bodies contained therein. Every single tube was clogged with the stuff.
Contaminated. The whole room was contaminated with Arlyx cold-growths. Militarized mold specifically created to attack cryogenic transport, back before the Phage, in the war between the Arlyx and the Kelthari. Something that could never be eradicated, despite the Aashaanti and the Coalition’s best efforts, because it could withstand Absolute Zero, thriving on the ultra-cold conditions inside a stasis cell. Sixteen thousand years after the Aashaanti disappeared, it still contaminated one out of ten thousand ships, and those ships were unfailingly destroyed.
Immediately, Anna’s heart started to pound, remembering what came next.
“Warning,” the ship’s speaker system blared, “Impact imminent. Course adjustment necessary. No secondary course provided. Please advise.”
The beast survived, Wideman said. How did the beast survive?
“Shut up,” Anna whispered, shaking all over.
All around her, the ship suddenly shuddered, the scream of tearing and crushing metal around her like someone was pounding the outside of a tin can with a sledgehammer. Then total silence.
“Warning,” the ship declared, “Ship off-course. Navigation equipment malfunctioning. Unknown trajectory. Please advise.”
Anna swallowed hard, looking at the black mold pulsing on the inside of the cryo chambers. She fisted her hands, her heart pounding like a runaway nexus generator.
The beast knows she’s a beast, Wideman said.
“Shut up, old man,” Anna whispered, but she was unable to put any force behind it. She was so horrified she could barely breathe.
This one is interesting, Wideman said, giving her a smug look. Let’s stay a little longer.
“No!” Anna cried. But, like in a bad dream, the scene sped up, showing the pulsing mold filling the last tube on the left. As she watched, the ship continued asking for assistance, until, at the pre-arranged date, the ship closed out its flight plan and asked for new instructions.
Anna watched several of the cryogenic caskets open—the ones where the web of mold wasn’t think enough to keep it sealed—watched the mold flop out into the room, the pulsing veins curdling to little balls in the warm air, which immediately exploded into spore-bursts. Anna watched herself sit up, choking on spores. Watched her four-year-old self crawl out of the casket and roll onto the floor, shaking, panting. She watched herself look around the room in wide-eyed panic.
“I want to leave,” Anna managed in a whisper.
Good for you, beast, Wideman said.
She watched herself seal off the cryo chamber and stumble around the ship, alone, afraid. She watched herself discover that they weren’t on course, that the ship had no idea where they were. She watched herself sob over the comm, begging for help. Weeks of begging for help. Then she watched herself begin to run out of food…
“Dad,” Anna had whimpered over the com, out of rations and exhausted. “Please come get me, Dad. I’m sorry I left. I won’t do it again. Please.”
Nothing but the cold, dark, emptiness of space.
“I’m scared, Dad,” Anna’s younger self whispered into the comm, knowing no one would ever hear it. “I’m all alone and I’m scared.”
Anna couldn’t watch any longer. She had to look away.
But the beast found a way to survive, Wideman said. Beasts always do.
And she had. The ancient spacer she’d stolen the Marquis Sovar from had maintained an old-fashioned stash of paper star charts—priceless antiques from a time when humans were still killing trees on Aladia—that she’d found in a hidden compartment in his desk when she’d been searching the ship for food. Anna had gone through it and begun holding each chart up to the ship’s three windows, trying to find a match.
Once she thought she found the sector of the Bounds she was in, Anna had started calculating distances and trajectories, teaching herself geometry and physics from the ship’s onboard knowledge-base as she went. She finally entered their new course manually, using star positions—pre-calculating their predicted movement in the galaxy and the inherent inaccuracies of viewing light that was thousands, if not millions of years old—as a guide for the ship’s computer, giving the course like a connect-the-dots rather than as a documented debris-free space path.
Then, out of food, she’d had to go back into that cryo chamber.
Anna felt her heart pounding all over again, watching herself standing at the sealed door to the cryo room, knowing it was full of corpses, knowing s
he should have been one of them, knowing the only way she was going to get back to Fortune was to crawl back into one of those mold-covered tubes and hope she woke at all.
She watched her younger self debate over it for days, tears of fear on her cheeks, then, when the hunger became too much, she opened the hatch and stepped into the room filled with militarized Arlyxian mold.
The beast actually does something brave, for once, Wideman chuckled.
“Shut up!” Anna screamed, the scene overwhelming her even as an observer. Just like the four-year-old examining the caskets, she was shaking all over.
Inside the cryo tubes, there was nothing inside but bones. Even the cartilage was gone, leaving pristine white bones, empty eye-sockets, ribs dripping with slimy black strands of the cold-growths.
Anna watched herself look at her own casket, saw the same black slime covering everything…
…Everything except for a toddler-sized, body-shaped patch in the center of the last tube on the left. Anna remembered spending hours in the ship’s shower, washing that taint from her skin.
The beast knows she can’t decontaminate the room, Wideman said, leaning against the wall and grinning. What’s a little beast to do?
“Shut up you fucking pustule,” Anna whispered. The scene was so overwhelming to her—she’d been so terrified—that, even now, even knowing the outcome, she was having trouble breathing. She’d been half convinced she was in some undocumented layer of Hell.
Out of options, Anna had finally to scrubbed as much of the mold out of the container as she could, then crawled into tube and, with a final, tearful, hyperventilating instruction to the ship, had set the timer with trembling fingers and sealed herself inside.
Anna remembered that terror bitterly. The next time she woke, Milar had whisked her away from the contaminated ship and taken her home, where David Landborn had spanked her upon her return and sent her to her room without supper, despite the fact she had been starving for almost a week. Anna’s fists tightened until her knuckles were white, seeing that play out.
The beast was spawn of a beast, Wideman commented, as they watched it together.
“That small-minded fuck was not my father,” Anna said, hatred making her voice almost too quiet to hear. When she found out who her real father was, she would eviscerate him for leaving her with the paramilitary douchebag.
