Yeah. Stalking sounds cool until you remember that. So, not stalking, but still, the fug-feet don't just walk, there's a springiness in the ankle, a bounce that turns my regular human stride into something more, into something other.
Glide, let's go with glide.
I glide down the corridor, moving around crumbled sections of bulkheads and mounds of dull grey fug. Stepping nimbly over the remains of critters. And all of it happens without thinking, without me even really noticing. Those other senses, the ones I felt when I first became aware, play in the back of my mind, telling me things like the oxygen-nitrogen ratio and the rate of decay of the bodies on the deck. They tell me other things too, things that have no place, that spin in my brain looking for a home, some of them find meaning in parts of me that don't feel like me, like the fug-feet. And even though I can't understand it, I can sense the communication between them, and that... that doesn't disturb me like it should.
Not like the dark mountain of fur ahead.
I stop. Not just stop but freeze, every hair, every muscle, every fug-laden part of me still as the shadows around us.
I can't make out much in the dark, can't see more than the lumpy silhouette with its fuzzy outline, but an alarm is ringing in my head, a new surge of adrenalin dumped into my bloodstream. Fear colours the tension, brings with it the memory of hot breath and teeth, makes my shoulders hunch and my stomach knot, but it's all buried beneath the sudden painful focus of the Hunt.
The mountain doesn't move. It's sprawled across the corridor, the red and orange of flickering glows picking out bits of fur, highlighting the sharp points of ears and muscled limbs.
That awareness tells me it's not fug. For a moment, I wonder if it's one of Them, if somehow one of the aliens stayed behind when Aeotu was evacuated, somehow survived half a millennium floating in the depths of interstellar space on a ship slowly cannibalising itself.
But the awareness says no, tells me a story of biology too low in fat stores, of claws that are designed to climb trees and jaws to tear flesh from bones. Tells me too that the mountain breathes, that its heart beats faster since I opened the hatch. That it's waiting for me.
There's only one thing that climbs trees on the Citlali. A tree-kin.
In the back of my brain, the Hunt tenses, a warning that feels old, ancient like the sticky strands of darkness from before, ringing.
I push it aside.
'Hello?' The too-deep voice booms from my chest, and is swallowed by the bulkheads.
The mountain twitches, irritation blooming in the air around it. Relief blooms in my chest, which you might think is strange, but kin – tree-kin especially – aren't fans of verbal communication, and now I know it's not fug I'm talking to.
'Hey,' I say again. 'I know you're awake. I'm Kuma, I'm crew.'
I take a stiff, halting step forward. The fug-feet are fighting me, the Hunt is fighting me, wants me to stay put, to shut up and wait the other hunter out. But I can't, and they're my feet, Old Terra damn it, the fug's just hijacking them.
The mountain doesn't move but I sense the tension coming off it, a red-veined ripple in the air. The red smells of bloodlust and rage, and the Hunt rises, grips my insides and demands I halt.
I fight it, taking another shuddering step forward.
'Do you need help?' I say again.
A snarl. Bloodthirsty.
The rucnart rises. Slowly, one inch at a time. Shoulders first, then haunches, almost as if she's stretching. The last thing to rise is her head, swinging around, pinning me with all four eyes.
H’Lott. Tall and lean with a stumpy tail, her coat a hundred shades of orange-gold, perfect for blending into the harsh sands of Jørn's largest desert. She's a sub-matriarch, just below p'Ender in the clan. Only h'Rawd outranks her. Only h'Rawd is scarier.
She's never much liked those of us on two legs, always going out of her way to avoid us. I've only met her a few times, enough to know she reserves a special hatred for Grea and me. I'd once wondered if we'd done something, stepped on her paws or snatched her favourite protein slab, or if her hate was something we represented, an old memory she couldn't shake. Or maybe her dislike stemmed from years spent on a ship with humans. I guess now isn't the time to ask.
Menace drips from the gleam of her fangs, pushes outward from her eyes.
For a moment, a split-second, I remember my time in the dark, remember the scrape of teeth, the prickle of whiskers over my chin. It's just a moment, just a wobble, but it's all the Hunt needs to take me over.
One moment I'm all me with just this little bit of other talking in the back of my brain, and then I'm not. Or, kind of me but other too.
And that part, that other... Hate is the wrong emotion to describe what it feels, because it doesn't feel, doesn't hate like I know it, doesn't experience that volcano of emotion erupting from its core. What it experiences, both better and worse, is the drive not to destroy but annihilate, to leave nothing of h'Lott behind but blood and memory.
It rises through my bones, turning my muscles to steelcrete. Me, Kuma, the boy who loves critters and cried over a carpet of the dead fuzzbutts, who tried to save a dying rucnart. That boy is pushed aside. Buried. Encased in metal and left to pound against the walls of his cage.
I'm the Hunt now, and I remember fleeing before a wave of teeth and terror, of creatures that rose out of the ground and tore my creators apart with teeth and claws. Of others, unseen, who reached into the sister-brain and turned us into killers, made the creators sabotage and then abandon us.
I remember them.
I'm still here, still watching h'Lott snarl in the darkness, fear blooming in my gut, but the emote I should be summoning, should be rolling toward her on an inescapable wave of calm... it's stuck behind the anger surfing through my amygdala, triggering fight or flight hormones and turning my blood to ice.
Come and get it, that part of me says, the part that's Hunt, that feels nothing, no guilt, no remorse, and leaves nothing of its enemies behind.
The real me, the bit that's peering through the mask of the other, that bit flinches, wants to throw up.
H'Lott's snarl falters.
Opportunity. Hunt urges me forward.
The fug-feet glide, smooth, silent save for the NICK NICK of the claws.
She backs up. One step, two, every movement in sync with mine.
{{ Danger. }} The awareness flashes the word in my mind, presses on me the perception of another heat signature, another vibration in the decking.
But that bit of me that is Hunt is tangled up in the human me and it doesn't care. H'Lott is mine, this corridor is mine. Her flesh will tear beneath my claws, her teeth will crack on the armour growing over my shoulders and neck, and she will scream in that high, piercing death-yowl and—
A shadow, seen too late.
The awareness screams. {{ Danger! }}
I spin. H'Rawd leaping out of darkness, fangs and claws and the mad, mad blaze of his eyes.
No time to brace, only time to hang on, to dig fug-claws into fur as almost nine-hundred kilos of fury hits me in the chest.
What little bit of Kuma that was left is gone, there's just Hunt now, just the TH-THUMP of my heart, the rush of adrenalin, the cold hard embrace of the fug encasing my arms, my legs, my chest. The awareness pumps data into my brain, tells me about the vulnerable spot just behind the rucnart's skull. And now I'm twisting and turning, clinging to h'Rawd's neck, climbing onto his back, and the hand-claws are no longer claws, but blades, matt-green and curved, springing from the backs of my hands. I lift one over my head, that vulnerable spot clear in my mind's eye—
A roar. A weight slamming into my side.
The deck. The constellation of Kuma going off in front of my eyes. The cage around the real me cracks, and for a moment I am Kuma, just Kuma and then rage blasts through me. H'Lott's and h'Rawd's rage. All of it hitting me in the chest, blending one into the other until there's no telling which emotion belongs to whom, or if they're mine.
They are all mine. Once I feel them, I know them, they belong to me, they answer to me, roll over and play dead for me. Never piss off an empath, that's all I'm going to say, especially not one rocking a new internal other.
I gather the emotion into a ball, draw it into my chest and whisper to it, listen to its secrets, the loose threads of thought and memory it drags from its hosts. Images of betrayal, memories of death, flashes of grief, the need to protect and avenge. I grow it, nurture it, turn it around and tell it a different story, one of fear, one of defeat. And then I throw it back.
H’Lott collapses, her weight pinning my legs to the deck, while h'Rawd freezes, his eyes, all four of them, wide, his head up and throat exposed.
Victory pumps through my veins, gives me the strength to rise, to grab a dying fug-vine, to pump energy into it, to draw it back and—
My muscles seize, holding me fast.
Gold sinks through my brain, pushing back the rage, fracturing the walls of the cage that keep Kuma contained.
I'm me again. Hunt is gone, and with it my energy. The fug-vine crumbles to dust and my back hits the deck. Exhaustion is dragging at my bones, hunger clawing at my belly, but at least it's not h'Lott's teeth. Not yet at least.
H’Rawd shakes, a violent full-body movement like he's trying to dislodge old biogel from his fur. In a way he is, but an emote is harder to get rid of than that, calls on things buried deep within and sticks to them, an industrial-grade psionic nano-glue.
Another reason the kin don't like empaths. Although they always seemed to get along with Grea well enough, so it's probably just me.
Determination and anger radiate from h'Rawd, pulsing outward, but the defeat and that sinking, sickening fear still has him tight in its grip.
'I'm crew.' My voice is scratchy, hoarse.
He snarls, legs shaking as he stalks closer.
I hold up a hand, not entirely sure what I'm going to do, how I'm going to stop an angry tree-kin with my legs pinned. 'I'm—'
"Crew" gets stuck on my lips as Dude rushes up my arm and leaps right at h'Rawd's bared fangs.
I don't know how he does it, but somehow, instead of becoming critter bait, Dude is sitting on the tree-kin's snout, clinging to the bridge of his nose and staring him in the eye. Not the lower ones, mind, but the upper ones, that ones the kin open just before they turn you into a psionic shish-kabob.
And Old Holy Terra, h'Rawd doesn't eat him.
In fact... Are h'Rawd's ears rising? Is his muzzle un-wrinkling?
I think my jaw is on the floor, mouth open wide enough for Dude to hop in there.
What is the little guy doing?
The eter is a thought away, and now I'm seeing everything overlaid with a rainbow of emotion. Is that chastisement in h'Rawd's aura? Actual chastisement, staining the psionic plan a pink-ish yellow. I take a good look at Dude and—
My heart freezes up. Dude's different from other critters, able to do things that he shouldn't. I've known that for a while, had it hammered home when he found his way into the Aer, the dream space where the kin create their own version of Jørn but this... The bright golden halo surrounding the fuzzball has the strength of a sun. It's too bright to look at, and it radiates from his core, the edges fading to a tear-inducing orange.
Not even Onah has an aura like that. Not even the Regan, glimpsed in the dramatisation of training memories burned as bright as this genetically-engineered janitor barely the size of two clenched fists.
At some point while I floated in the stasis unit/escape pod and the years in the wherever-the-fuck-it-was, Aeotu gave me fug-feet, Dude got an upgrade.
A serious upgrade.
Fuck.
From the way shock is spilling around h'Rawd's paws – a colourless sparkly wave – I'm guessing he's thinking the same thing.
Dude jumps off the rucnart's face onto my shoulder.
H’Rawd's gaze follows, and still that sparkle is spilling around his paws, but turning solid, shock becoming consideration. All four of his eyes meet mine, and he stares at me.
Double fuck.
I don't move. Don't even bolster my shields, don't breathe. Don't do anything save gather every last speck of myself and hold it close, ready to run.
In the face of certain annihilation it is the only appropriate response, or at least, that's what I'm telling myself. The fug has other ideas. I can feel it crawling over my body, thickening around my neck, my fingers lengthening into claws.
Go. H'Rawd's voice booms in my head, a command sphere unfolding along with it, planting instructions in my brain. I don't know exactly what's in it, but purpose ripples down my spinal cord, makes my feet itch with the need to move.
I'm guessing there's another part of the command sphere keeping my mouth shut, bottling up the questions that want to burst out of me, because I'm silent as h'Rawd wraps his forelegs around h'Lott's unconscious form and lifts her.
As soon as her weight is gone, I scoot backward, the command pressing me to move, but still I can't quite—
They need to see you, he says.
"You" is loaded with meaning, an image of Kuma, the boy I was before, and a separate one, of me as I am now, a strange amalgamation of fug and flesh. There's something else there too, a hidden meaning, but… "They" has just exploded on my brain, carrying an image of crew, of Mum and Dad huddled over a workbench, a huge holo lighting up the centre.
Really, h'Rawd shoulda just led with that.
CHAPTER FIVE
h'Rawd's command sphere leads the way, directing my feet through Aeotu's broken corridors to an access tube. At least, I'm assuming it's a tube, h'Rawd thought it was.
The tube looks pretty much the same as the rest of the alien ship, a little skinnier maybe, a little rounder, but the sides still move with the same shifting patterns, whorls blending into lines, into circles. Like before, the awareness is trying to untwist them, whispering the possibility of meaning; it's enough to give me a headache.
The end of the tube is in front me before my head has time to explode. One moment I'm staring at a solid bulkhead, the next it's a translucent bit of skin, power running through it like blood, and then it's snapped into the deck and I'm walking through a double hand-width section of steelcrete, the metal pock-marked and holey. Fug-eaten.
I'm on the edge of what used to be Engineering, the topmost of Citlali's decks, excluding the little pimple that is the Attrium. It's the pile of metal and the skeleton of what used to be a work shuttle that give it away, the rest of the space…
The rest of the deck is full of holes and the remnants of spaces that might have been familiar once but are now alien, and not in the way Aeotu is, with its carved bulkheads and curved ceilings.
This is worse. This is the familiar warped and broken, a ruin where once was smooth steelcrete and colourful holos.
What happened? I need to talk to Core now more than ever, to know what happened in the time before I woke up. Before I was ejected into space, the fug had been repairing Citlali, making her whole.
The awareness has no answers, but deep in the back of my brain, in the place where the sticky web of darkness came from, is the memory of battle, of critters spreading disease. Of kin and humans walking through Citlali's corridors, spewing fire.
It makes my heart stop, my head light. I want to know, want to see the faces of the people, want to know when and how and where. Where are they now? Why didn't they come find me? And lastly, most importantly—
'How long was I out?'
I'm getting sick of the way my voice echoes, bounces from strut to the hole in the decking, repeating over and over and over. Getting sick, too, of the lack of answers.
Maybe, just maybe now that I'm aboard Citlali, and if there are crew awake… 'Core!'
Core. Core. Core.
'Core! Answer me!'
Core. Answer. Core. Answer.
I'm drawing in breath for another yell, feeling those too-big lungs like a mirage, when the air shimmers. It's not much, a flicker of gol
d over the lacy remnants of a bulkhead. It flickers again, bright sparks in the darkness, and is gone.
Breath burns in my lungs as I wait for it to come back.
Nothing.
I release the breath in a rush.
Typical.
H'Rawd's command sphere nudges the back of my brain, moving me forward. It guides me around piles of debris, through twisted bulkheads to a hole in the deck.
It's as wide across as I am tall, and black as the void; there's no way to tell how far down it goes. It could be just a couple of metres or all the way through the ship. It probably hasn't ruptured the outer hull though, or this whole section would be in vacuum. Still, jumping down it doesn't seem like the smartest idea, although… There's that whisper, the awareness telling me it's safe, that it's the best way to find the others. What decides me is Dude, his front paws perched on my chest as he looks over the edge of the hole and then back to me, expectation clear on his fuzzy little face.
I bounce a little on my fug-feet, feeling the springiness, the strength in the turned-back ankle. Take a deep breath. The memory of another tube, of my grav-belt failing, rings in my brain. Another breath.
Dude fuzzes.
'Whatever. I guess I've done dumber things.'
I jump.
Turns out, jumping down the hole wasn't the stupidest thing I've ever done, and that my fug accessories are tough, like, really tough. So tough, I hardly felt the impact, and hey, look Mum, no broken bones!
I take it as a win, even though I have no idea where I am. I might have started on Engineering, which, given the lack of bones poking through my skin, should have meant I was on one of the two Lab decks right below it, but this place looks more like Medical – a lot of plasglas walls and dark blue deck plating. What there is of the bulkheads is a soothing pale grey. That would mean I dropped three decks, nine metres straight down with the gravity on and I'm walking away like it was just a short hop off a table.
If it weren't so fucking freaky, my fug-self would be cool.
Dark Between Oceans Page 4
