Nebula Nights: Love Among The Stars

by Melisse Aires

  Giancarlo looked up, shook his head and lay back down on the ground. “Nope.”

  “I didn’t have a choice, you know. It’s not as if they advertised what they were doing. I needed a job and a place to start over.”

  “I can appreciate that. Sometimes life sends you unexpected places.”

  “You mean no one becomes a Lunar Sheriff for the view?”

  He snorted but moved on, breezing right by the fact that his training had heralded the end of their relationship. “How long you been here?”

  “Three months. No, four. Feels like forever. I had these huge dreams, ya know? I was going to come out here and make a difference.”

  Giancarlo’s warm hand returned to her back, patting it and sending tingles down her spine. “History is full of folks with good intentions. Lots of people find themselves in a situation and want to help but don’t. You’re one of the few who did. That’s something to hold your head up about.” Giancarlo paused, shielding his eyes with one arm. “Is Marius still walking?”

  “Yes. He walks left, right, goes back a few feet and starts over again.”

  “Not good. You’re a doctor. Why would you do that to someone? The walking around them, I mean.”

  She knew what he was asking, though she’d been trying to ignore it. They were watching a patient assessment. “The last time I did something like that I was freelancing on an Arctic research vessel. One of the crew had fallen overboard for about six minutes. It may not sound like much but…” Her voice drifted off and she shivered at the memory.

  “But you needed to check his mental acuity. Right?”

  “Yep.”

  “So you walked around, maybe moved your hand to see if he could follow along. Hmmm?”

  “Yep.”

  “And you deemed him okay when he—”

  “Did.”

  “Your voice started to go there at the end. They’re watching Marius, aren’t they?”

  “I’ve studied the ones at base, but these clones are different.” She didn’t say any more, instead getting up to go stand next to Marius. The computer analyst’s eyes were red and swollen and she didn’t think it had anything to do with the dust.

  A few of the clones had the vacant look she’d almost grown used to seeing. Some rubbed their wounds, but others silently wept. She moved closer, stunned at this string of impossible behavior. Marius’s pointing finger wiggled in her peripheral vision. Solia followed its direction and jumped back, screaming.

  Giancarlo was there in an instant, weapon drawn. “What is it? I don’t—ah, hell.”

  Solia’s knees gave way. She reached for the nearest available object capable of keeping her upright: Giancarlo. Slamming her eyes shut didn’t erase the memory and it burned clear through her reddening lids.

  There, in the corner of the second container, were four clones with their teeth bared.

  She sifted through her clogged brain for an explanation. Maybe they were in more pain than the others? It took a lifetime for her to work up the courage to open her eyes again, but when she did, the faces of the four clones were laced with emotions she knew well. Actual emotion, not pain or animal instinct.

  “They’re pissed,” Giancarlo said, giving voice to her internal fears. “I don’t know what you took out of them, but I know an angry man when I see one.” He reholstered his weapon and leaned in.

  Big mistake.

  One of the four lunged. The huge man jumped back when a clone scratched, drawing blood. Giancarlo sucked in air as he wiped the droplets against his shirt.

  Lee flew past them both, hollering out an archaic battle cry. Before she could figure out what was happening, the security chief took out his own weapon and executed the clone at point-blank range.

  A scream ripped from her throat as the physician in her rioted. She ran to Lee, pummeling his chest with her fists. Someone tried to pull her away, but she didn’t let up. That same someone, Giancarlo she soon realized, lifted her until she collapsed into a heap of tears, cradled like a child in his arms.

  “Shh, it’s all right now,” he whispered in her ear.

  “He didn’t have to kill them!”

  There was a thunking sound and more screaming, this time from Marius and, surprisingly, Mol. Solia tried to look over his shoulder, but Giancarlo’s massive hand held her head in place.

  “Let me go. Let me go!”

  “You don’t need to see this, baby. Trust me.”

  His assurances didn’t stop her. She turned, forced down her legs and, with as much strength as she could muster, kicked him. She tried clawing at his neck. She bit his arm. She elbowed his stomach. Still, he did not let go.

  The thudding stopped. She could hear the sounds of retching and Lee swearing. She tried to hear more, but her ears had clogged from all the crying. “Gian?”

  “They are self-aware,” was all he said. He forced her away from the clones and toward the vehicle. There was a brief moment when she could have stolen a look, but deep down, she knew she didn’t want to. Whatever had happened out here, she wasn’t sure she could stomach to see it.

  ***

  The cruiser had been rendered useless by the storm. It could work again but would need both refueling and electrical recharging first. Despite having no clue where he was going, no one protested when Giancarlo walked away from the cages, past the vehicle, and toward the not-yet-visible road.

  He wouldn’t have cared if they had. He couldn’t stay there. The image of the clone—no, man, or whatever he was—banging the head of one of the more mindless ones against the bar wasn’t a picture he’d soon forget. He’d forced his eyes open, picking up as much as he could of the events.

  The other two of the trio shared identical grins as their compatriot smashed his victim’s head against the bars. The skin broke and blood covered the floor. It seemingly hadn’t been enough. The rapid fire knocks didn’t stop until brain matter flowed out of the nose of the newly deceased.

  Its sick goal achieved, the thing dropped its toy, tilted his head, and went back to staring. So had the others behind it. If not for the blood splattered across his clothes, it would have been impossible to tell the ringleader apart from any of the other dozens of clones he’d seen today.

  These things were more than aware. They were intelligent.

  The bundle at his chest squirmed until one arm wrapped around his neck. “It fought back, didn’t it?”

  “They have an intelligence. At least some of them and they’re smart enough to hide it. The ones involved in the…” He searched for the right word. None measured up. “The ones involved in the incident had enough brainpower to taunt us. They blanked their faces, hiding that spark we’d noticed earlier. They can blend in.”

  “A simple mutation,” Mol said behind them.

  Giancarlo turned to see that she was walking so close to Lee that she bumped into him once or twice. “Scared yet?”

  “No. Just a harmless mutation,” she repeated in a pitch higher than he’d heard out of her since he’d arrived. “A few of them have mutated. That’s all.”

  “They’ve evolved. It’s what life does to survive,” Solia said, wiggling free of Giancarlo. He didn’t fight her this time. No need. They’d walked far enough that she could turn around and not make out the details of the horrific scene.

  Silence took over then. They dragged on for what seemed to be hours, taking the same path they’d driven down earlier. Lee took lead at some point and herded them in the direction of a recently terraformed lake. “This is as good a place as any. We’ll make camp here for the night. I’ll take the first watch.”

  Giancarlo didn’t object, but he didn’t go to sleep, either. Today’s event left him trusting these fools even less than when he’d first arrived. He didn’t doubt that Mol and Lee were still holding something back. That made them more than corrupt. It made them dangerous and he planned to keep his guard up.

  There were few good defensive positions, but while Mol kept Lee occupied, he made his way to a b
oulder large enough for he and Solia to lean against. At least their backs would be safe.

  “Could you find a more uncomfortable spot?” Solia slunk down next to him with the trace of a smile on her face. Gian winked, but Lee caught his gaze and nodded. One warrior to another, Lee knew what Gian was about.

  A few times during the night Gian drifted off, but he didn’t think sleep caught him for too many consecutive minutes. Every so often he’d hear something or Solia, who’d snuggled against him, would shift in her sleep. She fit against him perfectly, melting into him as she always had. Her body made it impossible not to remember, but that didn’t stop him from trying. She’d made her choice, it hadn’t been him. He didn’t intend to relive that heartache again.

  To clear his mind he got up and circled their boulder at various intervals. He never went farther than a few feet away, not even to relieve himself. That paranoid part of him, the one that made him a great sheriff, felt twitchy. The hairs on his arms rose up like the hackles of a wild animal and he had a hunch he was being watched.

  Lee.

  He rushed back, but Solia met him halfway.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I have to go too,” she whispered. “You’ve gotta come with me.” He wished he could make out her face. If this was a come-on, it was shit-terrible timing. On the other hand, her constant shifting over the previous hours hadn’t made him unready…

  Her hand found his in the dark. “Hurry up. I’ve been holding it forever and I’m too creeped out to go by myself.”

  He didn’t hold back his chuckle and received a slap across the ribs for it. Grinning, and grateful for the dark that let him get away with it, he led her close to the spot he’d used a few moments earlier and turned his back.

  After a few seconds, she rubbed her hand against him, finally getting hold of a good chunk of his trousers. “I’m done. Let’s get back. Try to keep quiet though.”

  Quiet? Yeah, right. They’d passed that marker a long way back.

  With small, shuffling steps, they made their way to the camp and settled in. He tried to get comfortable, but something had changed in the moments they’d been away. He reached around Solia’s shoulder, drawing her nearer, while exposing the grip of his weapon on the opposite side.

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing.”

  “So why are you holding me like—”

  “What happened to staying quiet?”

  The sounds were the same: Mol’s regular breathing and the soft snores coming from where Marius had gone into a fetal position earlier in the night. He didn’t hear anything from where he thought Lee would be, but then, he hadn’t expected to.

  Every muscle twitched expectantly and he pulled back the action on his old-fashioned semiautomatic. He kept it mainly as a reminder of his father, but no matter how much weaponry progressed, this could still kill a man. He cocked it and sent up a silent prayer of retroactive thanks that the old man had reduced the pull to a hair trigger. Even though he heard nothing else, he stayed in the same primed position the rest of the night.

  Giancarlo kept shaking himself awake as the hours dragged by, but when the morning came and all was still well, he gave himself leave to have a few minutes of a proper nap. He rubbed his thumb across Solia’s arm where it curled around his waist, gave one bleary-eyed look to Lee’s laid-out body, and rested with the small happiness that at least he’d stayed up longer than the older man.

  So when Mol’s scream cracked the morning air a few minutes later, he had to admit it caught him off guard.

  Chapter Seven

  “Wake up! He’s dead.”

  Giancarlo scrambled toward Mol’s kneeling body and the security chief’s very still corpse. He used his boot to lift the man’s head.

  “Have some respect,” Mol said, voice still shaking.

  “Respect,” echoed Marius, his face showing the incredulity Solia figured they all shared.

  Mol’s eyes widened before she made a play for the weapon attached to Lee’s waist. Solia opened her mouth to warn Giancarlo, but he already had his hand over Mol’s and easily jerked the firearm away. “Solia, come get this. No offense, Mol, but I don’t trust you as far as Marius could throw you.”

  She didn’t know the first thing about guns – hadn’t even touched one since Gian proudly brought a plasma ray home one weekend from the academy. She was, however, sure she didn’t want Mol to have it. Avoiding looking at Marius’s reddened face, she walked over and held her hand out.

  “This is safer than mine,” Giancarlo said. “It’s fully charged and looks to have several shots left in her before the power cycles down. This kind has its battery housed in a metalized film and it’ll have some juice, despite the storm. Tighten your belt and shove it down the front. It’s fine, I promise. The thing won’t fire unless you have a full five-fingered grip on it.”

  “And this is safer than your antique?”

  He shot her a dimpled grin. “In the hands of a newbie, yeah.” Then all traces of light left his face as he knelt to examine the body. “You might want to go over there.”

  “I’m still a doctor, you know. Yesterday was… Well, I’ve spent my whole career looking at the results, not causes.”

  “Back at the academy, we were trained that if a case involved someone you knew—”

  Solia took a deep breath, squatted and lifted Lee’s neck. “Rigor hasn’t set in yet and his body temperature is relatively high. This was recent, sometime within the last hour or so. Giancarlo—”

  “Gian.”

  “Sorry, Gian, look here, there’s one single trauma source to the back of the head.” She fingered the hole at the top of Lee’s spinal column. “Straight in, but see how it’s ragged at the bottom? Look at the compressions on that edge there. Someone struggled to pull out whatever was used.”

  Her knee scooted beneath her, sliding across a puddle of dark blood. It soaked through the fabric of her trousers and onto her legs. That, of all things, threatened to undo her. It grew difficult to formulate words, and even taking in a solid breath got tough for an instant or two.

  “Got it together, baby?

  “Baby?” Mol screeched and howled. “I knew it.”

  Solia tried to ignore her, but an unexpected heeled kick in the back made that difficult. Solia slid on all fours into the murky puddle of blood and turned to see a frothy-mouthed Mol being pushed by Giancarlo.

  Mol rose, a red fury lit with rage. “Which one of you did it? Huh? You? Or maybe you, Sheriff? You’re the one who had a problem with him.”

  “If I wanted him dead, Ms. McDermott, it would have happened sooner than this. Look around you. All of you. Look and think. That storm yesterday swept up a lot of dirt and deposited just as much. All our tracks are fresh. You tell me, what doesn’t belong?”

  Mol’s gaze flickered across the camp. She gasped and pointed, drawing both Solia and Marius in. “Footprints going that way.”

  “Exactly. One of your creations is free and having a little fun with us.” Gian patted Lee down and came up with a knife from the man’s boot and another in a drop-waisted holster. He gave the biggest to Marius.

  “I thought you didn’t trust me,” Mol said as he handed her the other.

  “I don’t. I won’t hesitate to drop you if you touch Solia again. However, unless you give me a reason not to, I’ll fight to keep you alive. I’d rather have it that way. We need to stick together to make it out of here, but I won’t let you drag us down either. We don’t know how many of these things have mutated. Or do we?”

  Mol shook her head.

  “Right, well, we all need to be armed with something. We stick to the road and walk back. To hell with waiting.”

  Marius sniffed and toed a clod of dirt. “That’s thirty miles,” his mousy voice peeped out.

  “Unless you know a shortcut.”

  “There is one, but it takes us right past the construction areas,” Mol said. “They’re full of clones.”

  “I thought w
e were calling them ‘genetically modified workers,’” Solia muttered under her breath, still kneeling next to Lee.

  “Either way. They’ll be impossible to get around.”

  “You know what? Fine. Stay here with Marius. Good luck. Gian and I are out of here. We’ll find help and tell them where you are. If you live long enough, they’ll come get you.”

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? I wonder—”

  Gian held up his hand, stepping between them. “It’s been hours already. There should have been lights, speakers, flares, something. If they were going to be here, it would have happened by now.”

  “You said you called.” Marius ran for Mol. Solia was sure he would have tackled her if not for Gian’s intercepting shoulder to his chest.

  “I called for backup. It just didn’t show.”

  “She’s lying!”

  “Calm down, Marius. I believe her, at least on this,” Gian said. “For some reason, they can’t get to us. Doesn’t mean they didn’t try. Doesn’t mean they’re not on the trail, but something stopped them from coming all the way. We have two options: hope to meet them on the road and not run into any clones or…well, this is your rock, Mol. Can you think of another way?”

  She crossed her arms, but shook her head.

  “Anything to stop us from running a few miles parallel to the road? Canyons or pitfalls?”

  Another headshake.

  “Good. Ladies, Marius, let’s go. We’ve got twenty-seven miles to put behind us. If we keep a good clip, we can be done in eight hours, ten if we travel like someone’s not trying to kill us. Are there any other water sources?”

  For the first time this morning, Mol’s voice had a little hope to it. “There’s a ground well halfway between here and the facility, but it’s the one we use during their break time. It’ll probably be swarming with them.”

  Solia rose, brushing sand and clumps of brain matter from her pants. “Define swarm.”

  Mol’s eyes looked heavenward. “Don’t know. Three or four dozen? But they all won’t be like those ones. Probably.”

  ***