ALIEN THE COLD FORGE

by Alex White

  It still comes for him, entrails dangling, painting the floor a brilliant red like the stroke of some massive brush. One bullet is never enough when the target is committed. He pops it twice more, and it trips from the blood loss, drugs, and guts, sliding into his feet, and then going still.

  Kambili crouches in the corner, his screams merging with those of the chimps.

  10

  SERVICE & SERVERS

  The station has a med bay, right outside the crew quarters module, though Blue has rarely had occasion to use it. Her room is equipped with most of the advanced technology she needs for her complex daily care. She hasn’t been to a real hospital in years. So it feels strange to her to be standing in the med bay over Kambili’s bed, his face so bandaged that only one eye and part of his mouth are visible.

  She’s fatigued, and the connection to Marcus’s body lacks its usual sparkle—her brain can’t buy the illusion that she’s a healthy, safe person. Phantom pains crisscross her chest, and she finds herself coughing for seemingly no reason at all. Her real body is a dream. Marcus’s body is the truth. It has to be, because she refuses to live her final days fading away like a pathetic husk.

  Because, looking at Kambili, she knows her work will be put on hold, and she’ll soon be fired.

  He coughs, and she instinctively reaches out to touch his hand. It’s a stupid gesture. Marcus’s skin, though warm, feels wrong somehow. No one would take comfort in his touch—no one except Anne, and Blue feels certain that’s some kind of fetish.

  Glitter Edifice could’ve been something great. It could’ve been the cure for all genetic disease. It could’ve ushered in a new era of medical miracles. It could’ve been Blue’s ticket back to a wonderful life full of press interviews and symposiums. Her intellectual property might’ve belonged to the Company, but the book deals and film rights would’ve been worth a fortune. She’d have been set for life—a much longer life. Plagiarus praepotens is the ultimate builder, able to rewrite and reconstruct organic matter in seconds. It should’ve built her a brighter tomorrow.

  She’d never bought into the foolish Company vision of a weaponized snatcher. It was as if she’d split the atom, and all they wanted were nuclear bombs.

  Kambili stirs beneath her, and his mouth makes a clicking, gurgling noise. It must taste like penny syrup inside there—Blue knows the sensation well. One of his hands rises to point to his half-exposed lips. She leans down so she can hear him better.

  “This…” he slurs, his voice hoarse and broken from screaming. “This is your fault.”

  Blue steps back, eyes wide. “What?”

  “Was trying to prep next sample.” His voice is barely a whisper, but Marcus’s perfect ears hear every detail. “You rushed me. Threatened me. You should’ve been there.”

  “I didn’t have a choice, Kambili. Sudler is a problem. I needed you to prep the chimp, ASAP.”

  “Because… you’re dying?” He laughs, falling into bitterness. “Now I have no face. Why is your life worth more than mine?”

  She frowns. No one has ever said that to her. “This isn’t just my life, or your life. If I’m right, this could change the entire shape of genetic research.”

  “Call it whatever you want, you selfish bitch.”

  Her sympathy evaporates. “You should’ve been more careful.”

  “Get out,” he whispers.

  “Kambili—”

  He tries to sit up, despite the sedatives in his system. “Get out.” The words are muffled by the bandages around his mouth, and his voice cracks. He falls back to his gurney, groaning and sobbing.

  Blue turns to leave, only to find Lucy in the doorway, staring at her with hollow eyes.

  “What the fuck did you say to him?” she asks, but Blue walks past her without answering.

  There’s no way for that discussion to go well, so she dodges it altogether. She prays she won’t see Sudler when she walks into the hall, or Anne, or Dick—or anyone else for that matter. She doesn’t have the strength to deal with all of the recriminations.

  She’s read Dick’s report of the incident, filed on the re-imaged SCIF computers. Other than the startup logs, it’s the first entry on the new system. She knows how it will look. It’s another major accident in two days. They’ll send her project into suspension, if they don’t shut it down altogether. She’s doomed.

  Lab techs dodge her in the hall. Dick’s facilities guy gives her the stink eye. She passes Josep talking anxiously with his trio of engineers, and he gives her a guilty look, like he’s the one with something to hide. Yet he’s the only project manager who hasn’t royally fucked up.

  She needs to get back to her lab, but she has no plan. She’ll figure it out when she gets there. Maybe she can access her logs. Maybe she can perform the noxhydria experiment by herself. Maybe she should just tell Sudler what she’s doing, and hope for the mercy of the Weyland-Yutani Governance Board.

  It’ll take weeks, though. It could take years.

  Blue is almost back to the SCIF when Daniel flags her down. Like everyone, he shows signs of stress, but they’re subtle. His easy, commanding smile is a little slower, the creases of his eyes a little more pronounced. He hasn’t put his clothes through the ironing machine, and he’s the only crew member who cares about that sort of thing.

  “The SCIF is closed until further notice,” he says. “Before you ask, it’s on my authority.”

  “So I don’t need to go kicking Sudler’s ass?”

  He smirks. “I wouldn’t recommend it. Things are tense enough.”

  She puts her hands on her hips and looks down at the deck with a sigh. “Please, just let me in. I’ve still got work to do.”

  Daniel sucks his teeth. “You know I’m charged with everyone’s safety. This is a major accident. Sometimes you science types get ahead of yourselves, and it’s my job to rein you in. This is for your own good.”

  She shuts her eyes. “Fuck that, Dan. Please, just let me in. I need to feed the chimps.”

  He arches an eyebrow. “That’s Dick’s job… and since the mishandling of those animals is what got us into this situation, I will not authorize that.”

  She points to her head. “Remember? I’ve got two faces and the grip strength of a power loader. I can handle myself.”

  He folds his hands behind and spreads his legs to shoulder width, the classic military “at ease” posture. She won’t be passing him.

  “I said no, Blue.”

  “Fine,” she says, shaking her head with gritted teeth. “That’s just fucking great.” Without another word, she heads back to the crew quarters. These bastards are going to kill her.

  Reaching the end of the long strut, she enters the corridor with all the crew rooms. At the end of the hall she spies the sign for the observatory, and glares. Nothing had been on schedule, nothing was according to plan, and yet everything seems so much worse now that Dorian Sudler is here. She wishes him a stroke, or an aneurysm. She wishes the glass would fail in his room, sucking him out into the scorching vacuum beyond. She wishes she could trade bodies with him, her failing form his only anchor.

  Blue has never hated anyone so much in her whole life, and that’s before Anne backs out of his room, pushing disheveled hair back into place.

  The physicality of an android body prevents true anger. Marcus has no heart to race, no breath to quicken. His is a cold fury, with calculating eyes and quick synapses. Blue sometimes fears his inhuman strength, and the things she might do with it.

  Instead, she stops in her tracks, narrowing her eyes. “Really, Anne? How stupid are you?”

  Anne glances back at her and freezes, wounded. She juts out her lower lip, her arms tensing with the muscles Blue had once caressed.

  “I don’t want to do this with you right now.”

  Blue gives her a wry grin. “Why would you? You just did it with Dorian.”

  Anne closes the distance between them with remarkable alacrity and bares her teeth at him.

  “You k
now something, Blue? You need to figure out how to make some friends really fast. I don’t fucking belong to you, so don’t pull this macho shit on me.”

  Blue gestures to the door. “But him? What is wrong with you?” She watches Anne’s jaw muscles work in her slim cheeks, and her irises contract.

  “Maybe I just wanted to feel alive for once,” she hisses.

  She storms off, and Blue lets her pass with eyes downcast. For no rhyme or reason, it still hurts. Those nights they’d spent together were her first to feel like a normal human since her diagnosis. Maybe she did love Anne Wexler. Blue shakes the thought away as soon as it rears its ugly head, because she can’t let it be true. She can’t let anyone into her heart anymore.

  With a bitter flood of emotion, she passes numbly into her quarters to see herself lying on the bed. The brain-direct mask flickers across her eyes, and a glimmering tendril of drool leaks from the side of her mouth. She’s so emaciated and pockmarked. She’s disgusting. It’s like staring into a mirror and finding only a gloomy, malformed reflection of the self.

  What if Blue takes Marcus’s hands and smashes her skinny little throat? What if she takes the tranquilizers designed to help her sync, and injects twenty cc’s of them into her intravenous drip? If she smashed her mirror and took a shard to her wrist, would she feel it, connected as she was to Marcus? She imagines the blazing pain as it slices into her wrists, and watching herself drain out. Would it be any worse than the slow death of Bishara’s Syndrome?

  Reaching out, she lifts her own hand, dizzied by the sensation of holding her flesh and being held. She shouldn’t be here, shouldn’t be alive. No one else with the Syndrome made it past age thirty.

  Her mobile terminal beeps and she lets go, her wrist flopping to the bed. Blue takes the terminal from its charging station and keys in her password. There’s a picture inside her mailbox, and she opens it. It’s Silky, her old cat from Earth, the one she gave away at the start of her tenure on the Cold Forge. The address is scrambled.

  Marcus is calm, but she hears her body suck in a breath. She searches out her cipher drive from her mattress and plugs it into the side of the terminal. It references the picture and the one-time pad.

  A message appears.

  ELISE COTO GONE

  WE ARE STILL LISTENING

  GIVE US YOUR RESEARCH

  WE CAN EXTRACT YOU

  Elise is blown. Her assets will be seized. At this point, it’s far more likely that the sender of this message is a Company agent who’s gotten control of Elise’s side of the one-time pad.

  But then, does it matter? What are they going to do, kill her? Blue encrypts a message into a picture of her grinning cousin at the beach.

  I AM IN

  HOW

  * * *

  Two difficult days pass, and Blue is a ball of nervous energy. Whoever her mysterious benefactor is, they haven’t responded to her question. She imagines the Weyland-Yutani fraud investigators back on Earth, laughing and building a case around her confession. Is there such a thing as entrapment in a situation like this?

  It won’t matter. Her court hearing will take at least six months after she arrives home. She’ll be dead long before the lawyers can decide what to do with her. Unlike Elise, she has no family, no one to destroy.

  Blue needs to get back into the SCIF so she can take the drives out of her server and stash them somewhere, anywhere. She has partial genetic sequences of larval snatchers, as well as the noxhydria face-huggers. While it’s not a clean sample of Plagiarus praepotens, the sequences are still valuable to investors.

  Do her confederates have eggs?

  Can they get a clean sample?

  Anne is her best way back into the SCIF. The other project managers won’t help her. Daniel has already made his allegiances clear. As much as Blue doesn’t want to face her, Anne is the only one who can give her a fighting chance.

  It’s lunchtime. The crew should be in the lounge, chowing down on the food she’d like to eat. She’d stopped going to the lounge after they’d implanted the G-tube in her stomach, taking the one thing she could eat in her quarters—gelatin. Watching everyone else chew would ignite pangs of longing inside her beyond any unrequited love she’d ever felt. And every time the conversation turned to how shitty the food was, Blue would find herself infuriated with her crewmates. She’d give anything to be like them again, easy and carefree.

  Sometimes, she would eat with them as Marcus, but the acute senses that made him so intoxicating with Anne made the food unbearable. Experienced through his senses, her meals were no longer a blend, but sorted into a dozen discrete characteristics, each amplified beyond the capacity for a human brain to process. Sometimes, Blue would take a pinch of sugar into Marcus’s mouth, because it was the only thing that translated well.

  Perhaps if Marcus’s brain-direct interface wasn’t a hacked-together solution, she’d be able to taste morsels like the others. Maybe she could be in there bitching with them about the quality.

  The thing Blue misses the most about eating, however, is the conversation. Yet she can’t simply sit and stare while the others gorge themselves. They become awkward if she watches them. So much of a day, so many worries and hopes, are shared around a meal. She’s been excluded from all of that. Maybe that’s why no one likes her anymore. She isn’t part of the campfire circle that’s existed since the dawn of humanity.

  Reaching the lounge door, she pauses. They’ll assume she’s there on business, and be annoyed with her for even showing her face. Maybe she could choke down a meal to get back in the good graces of her crewmates, then see if Anne will speak to her in private. Would that look desperate?

  The door opens, and she scans the room, spotting a few of the lab techs, but no project managers. There’s a ping-pong table in the back corner where some of the crew congregate, obstructed by the serving buffet. Anne likes it over there. It’s one of the only sports where she can beat Blue’s synthetic body.

  When Blue rounds the corner, she finds Dorian Sudler staring at her, eyes shining, wearing a grin far friendlier than he deserves. He sits holding a pair of chopsticks over a plate of steaming teriyaki noodles, the kind she would kill for if she could still have them.

  “Doctor Marsalis,” he says. “I didn’t expect to see you in the lounge.” He gestures to Marcus’s body. “I didn’t know your type ate… you know, food.”

  “I can. I don’t, though.” She returns as much of his smile as is required by decorum. “I was looking for someone.”

  “Oh. Who is it? Maybe I’ve seen them?”

  “It’s fine,” she says. “Just Commander Cardozo.”

  Sudler digs into his noodles, and Marcus’s olfactory receptors deliver her the salt, wheat, and umami scents she cannot enjoy. She briefly fantasizes about slamming his head into the plate so hard that the table snaps from its mounting brackets.

  Placing a clump of noodles in his mouth he chews with relish, then swallows.

  “Sad to say that he’s still in the SCIF. Lots of cleanup to do after this past week.”

  “How long before we can return to work, Director? I was getting somewhere with my project, and—”

  “Maybe you’d like to brief me on that?”

  She flexes her fingers to avoid making a fist.

  “I’d rather have some results before I do.”

  He picks through the noodles, looking for bits of meat. Finding one, he pops it into his mouth.

  “You know, Doctor, any progress would be a result for Glitter Edifice. I can take you over there now, and you can show me what you’ve learned.”

  She bites her lip. “I’m not ready yet.”

  “Okay, well, let me know when you are. Meanwhile, I’m sure you’ve got a number of tasks outside the SCIF you can attend to.”

  “Sure.” She nods. “Okay.”

  He regards her for a long moment while he consumes another strand of sticky noodles. She wants to leave, but he looks as if he’s going to speak again.

/>   “Can I ask you,” he mumbles, taking a swig of water in order to speak more clearly, “what got you into genetics?”

  That takes her by surprise, and she casts her thoughts back. Blue’s uncle died suddenly when she was only eight years old. One day he was fine, and the next his immune system turned against him, destroying his skin and respiratory system. The medical community had created gene therapies for multiple sclerosis, Tay-Sachs disease, Parkinson’s, and numerous others, but those took time. There still was no rapid response system for cases like his, and colonists like him were at particular risk for one-off genetic disorders.

  She wanted to help the colonists and stop future cases like her uncle’s. But she’ll be damned if she shares any emotional memories with Sudler, though.

  “I was smart enough to be a doctor,” she replies, “and gene sequencing was paying better than it ever had before.”

  He nods, taking it in. “So when you were in college you didn’t, you know, know about your condition?” She hates it when people ask her that. The medical press found it particularly entertaining.

  “No.”

  “That’s so amazing. How fortunate that you have that training.”

  “It’s almost as good as being born with a real life expectancy.”

  “Sorry,” he says, that smiling mask never falling from his face. “Didn’t mean to hit a nerve.”

  “It’s fine,” she lies. “Please let Daniel know I’m looking for him, would you?” Before he can speak again, she turns and leaves.

  When she reaches her room, she glances over to his door. He’d only just started eating and won’t be back for some time. If he’s going to shutter her project, she may as well find out who else is getting the shaft. She taps the open key, and the door slides aside, allowing her passage into the observation room.

  “Guess you ought to rethink your ‘open door’ policy, fucker,” she mutters, passing inside.