by Alex White
One metal leg comes down straight between her shoulder blades, bringing a blinding flash to her eyes.
“Every—”
The blow falls again, this time harder and sharper, like a corner of the metal strut.
“—fucking—”
It strikes one last time, and a bony crunch travels up her neck and over her skull, rattling her ears with a singular agony.
“—chance.”
Anne dips into the blackness.
* * *
No. She won’t let it end like this. She forces her eyes open. She can’t feel her legs. Is her spine broken? No. She’d be out cold. Could be swollen. How much time has passed?
Focus, Anne.
Her spine isn’t broken because her whole body flares with agony as Dorian grabs her arm and begins to drag her. Maybe it’s just a vertebral chip. She’s seen those before. She can’t muster the voice to cry out. Her throat feels like it’s been smashed. How long did he beat her after she was out?
It doesn’t matter. She’s not going to die today. She has a boot knife, and she’s going to drive it between Dorian’s ribs, crawl back into the fucking break room and cry for help. Exhaustion and shock tug at the corners of her mind, and she rips her brain free.
Stay frosty.
Beneath the sound of her labored breathing, there’s an insistent scraping, metallic and long. One of her eyes is swollen shut, but she creaks open the other to catch a glimpse of the aluminum chair flashing in the light between strides of Dorian’s long legs. Drops of blood run down one side of it, shimmering across the brushed metal. Her fingers fish for her boot knife, but they’ve been so shattered; she can’t seem to get coordinated. Anne thinks she can make a grip, provided she doesn’t go into shock.
If she could just hook her—
A fresh new hell greets her as Dorian drops her and sets the chair in the middle of the hallway, doing so with a ballroom dancer’s flourish. He’s enjoying this. As soon as she can get her blade, she’s going to enjoy it, too.
“You, Anne Wexler,” he grunts, hoisting her onto the seat, sending dizzying crackles through her neck, “are the closest I’ve ever come to loving someone. I want you to know what an honor that is.”
She tries to spit on him, but it dribbles down her chin. He’s focused on her face. She’s focused on that boot knife.
“Of course, I liked you more when you were prettier.”
It’s going to be tough to swing at him, but she’ll manage. She’ll put every last ounce of rage into it and sink her blade into the side of his neck. Her right thumb still works. So does her ring finger.
“But nothing ever lasts. You were supposed to go that way,” he says, pointing to the exit to the SCIF and the airlock.
She knows better. She never could’ve lived with herself if she’d done that. Her ring finger hooks into her sheath and unsnaps the guard. She murmurs, beckoning him closer. He leans in to try and decipher her words.
“I bet you think you’re somehow superior, don’t you?” he asks.
She’s going to take his sorry ass out. The knife slips free of its binding, coming snugly into her palm. She’s never needed it before, not for a person, but the Marines taught her how to gut a man, how to drive it deep into his femoral artery, and how to slice open his throat. She can really only get the right grip for the throat attack.
He looks into her good eye with the smirk that once charmed away her guard.
“What? There’s nothing you can say?”
She is better than him, and if she can get him to lean a little closer, she’ll prove it. She whimpers something incoherent, and he leans in, putting his ear to her mouth.
He’s been inside her. It’s her turn to be inside him.
Her left hand sweeps out and smacks against the back of his neck. She fights through the pain to make a hook with the remains of her fingers as her right hand rips the knife from its sheath. She has one shot, and no matter how much it hurts, she’s going to make it count.
Dorian easily breaks free of her grip, and her knife impotently bounces off his cheekbone. She drew blood, but not nearly enough. He gasps, clutching his face and staggering backward.
It wasn’t enough. Now he’s ready, and she’ll never get another shot. Still, as her one blurry eye runs across the results of her last attack, it feels nice. Crimson runs down his arm, over his white shirt, and he takes his quivering hand away to stare at it as though he’s never seen it before.
Yes, you pretty boy fuck. That should’ve been your neck. Fuck you. Fuck your executive jawline. Fuck your symmetry.
A tear runs from his eye, slipping into his cut to blister it with his salt. He shakes his head.
“Why do you make me love you so much at the end?”
“If you loved that,” she slurs through broken teeth, “come back. I got more for you.”
“You were beautiful to the last moment,” he says, and then he straightens. “Your ride is here.”
He disappears from her vision, leaving her alone in the corridor. The break room door hisses closed out of sight, but the hiss doesn’t stop when it hits the floor. She cranes her head to find the silhouette of one of Blue’s creatures dripping down out of the rafters to land gracefully on its talons. It takes a careful step toward her, and she shakily raises the knife.
The beast’s lips twist and part, obsidian teeth seeming to grow longer and longer with each moment of revelation. It understands when it’s been challenged.
It charges.
I wanted to see you again, Blue.
23
TRUE COLORS
Blue awakens from dreams of teeth.
Now that she’s had her meds and a feeding, her body is marginally more bearable. She needs to reconnect with Anne and put a plan into action. Arms aching, she pulls the BDI headset from her nightstand and drops it into her lap, her breath already quicker than it should be. She misses her android’s careful ministrations, his help with setting up their interface. She misses the days when she was simply dying, and not dying on board a doomed space station.
She flips open her portable terminal and logs in, connecting the cipher drive. There’s another message.
>>TICK TOCK MARSALIS
CANT WAIT FOREVER
She can’t do anything about their demands, but at least she can see what Marcus has been up to while she slept.
Blue: //Marcus, are you there?
The response is almost immediate.
Marcus: I see you are alive and well, Blue. That is welcome.
Blue: //Did you get the power loader hooked up?
Marcus: Yes. I told you already, but you forgot because you are only human.
Marcus: Also Juno is online, for the survivors that are hiding out in Rose Eagle.
Marcus: I’ve connected her to Titus so they can share processing power. Your credentials are intact. The safety of the station’s occupants supersedes classification restrictions.
Blue: //Oddly sentimental.
Marcus: I am a machine, not a monster. Not like you.
The wet crunch of Javier’s throat comes roaring back into her ears. She’d done him a favor. No point dwelling on it now.
Blue: //Go fuck yourself. I’m jacking in.
Marcus: Very well.
She hoists the headset over her scalp and leans back. The feeling of mentally invading a passive-aggressive target sits strangely in her gut, even as shapes resolve around her in the darkness. First, steel panels, then signage. She’s near Rose Eagle, in the common part of the SCIF—near Anne.
A few light-footed sprints and she’s outside the door to Rose Eagle. She knocks a rhythmic pattern, and the door slides open to let her inside. She ducks in without a second glance, only to find a surprised group of seven survivors emerging from the various side rooms.
“Marcus,” Lucy says, large eyes running over her like she should be holding a Christmas goose. “Where are the others?”
Blue looks over every face in turn, making sure she’s not mi
ssing something. It can’t be right.
Anne isn’t here.
“Where are the others, Marcus?” Lucy asks, with the sort of tone a parent might take to an errant child. “Did you find them?”
Blue looks at her. “I’m not Marcus.”
Tension winds across the faces of the other survivors. They look at her like a criminal, or a murderer… or maybe a wolf. It doesn’t help that her synthetic body poses a real threat to anyone Blue doesn’t like. She’s not sure what conversations have happened in her absence, but she knows they weren’t flattering.
It’s the first time she’s been face-to-face with the rest of the crew since her sequestration. She considers telling them she’s sorry, for lying to them for more than a year, but she’s not. She stole funds and resources from a weapons development project to try and cure all genetically based diseases. She’s only sorry that a piece of shit Company auditor showed up to fuck up her plans.
Lucy’s question sticks in Blue’s head.
“What do you mean, ‘where are the others?’” Blue asks. “Which others?” Marcus’s smooth voice fills the roomful of ragged people. It’s not Lucy who answers, however, but Nick, one of the techs. Blue doesn’t remember much about him, other than the time she caught him sleeping behind some crates in the SCIF commons. The weird guy who likes to work long hours and sleep anywhere he falls.
“Wexler and Director Sudler went on a supply run. We’re trying to get Rose Eagle working… so we can call for help.” His face is impassive. He’s not afraid of her. Blue looks him over and nods. He’s one of the few people on the station she doesn’t hate.
“Okay. Where would they be? I can back them up.”
“They were going to hit a couple of places, starting with the break room,” Nick says. “Juno has security cameras, so you could track them if you can find them.”
“Blue, maybe you can let Marcus help us,” Lucy says, “and sit tight for rescue.”
“Maybe you can shut the fuck up, Lucy. You let Anne run outside with that creep.”
Lucy’s eyes turn into saucers. “Fuck you, bitch! Marcus is Company property, and Director Sudler is trying to get us out of this shithole! You selfish motherfucking—”
Blue turns and opens the door, and everyone shrinks back. Lucy’s voice dies in her throat.
“Be back soon,” Blue says. “Keep up the good work, Nick.” Then she ducks away into the dimly lit hallway, leaving the door to slam in her wake. She rushes to a hiding spot, well aware that the beasts will close in on the sounds. She winds through the hallway on Marcus’s silent, strong legs, her thoughts on Anne, alone with Dorian Sudler.
Anne, who left her because she was dying.
Anne, who was the last person to make her feel alive.
She’ll kill him if he’s done anything to her.
It’s the same distance to Juno’s cage and the break room. The break room takes her through a lot of open corridor, but the ascension to Juno would be in plain sight, ending in the server’s glass cage. It was designed to command a view of the common area, and that means more eyes on her.
So she decides on the break room, and moves as quickly as possible, clinging to the shadows. She hopes the snatchers see in visible light. It had been one of the first questions Weyland-Yutani asked about the beasts’ military application, but she never did those experiments. She lied about the results.
She sees it at the end of a long hallway: a toppled aluminum chair, streaked with blood and gore. She can’t tell from this distance if the blood is Dorian’s or Anne’s, but she knows what her heart wants. Blue inches toward it, sharp eyes darting across the ceiling, over the grates of the cable runs. The beasts can hide anywhere, and she’ll be damned if she lets one get the drop on her.
When she arrives, she finds bits of bone, and a trail of blood leading off into the darkness, dead-ending at the entrance to one of the cable runs. The snatchers did this, and whichever body they were carrying would’ve had to be folded or hacked into pieces to be carried away. Worse, there’s no reason to have had a chair in the middle of an open area infested with the beasts.
Whatever happened here, this has Dorian’s stink all over it.
Blue moves to the grating and peers inside, finding only shadow and gore. Desperation settles into her bones. She needs to know that he gave up, plopped down in a chair and left Anne on her own. Maybe the weight of all the people he’d destroyed finally came crashing down on him. There was a lot of bad shit in his past to regret, just like Blue.
Except Dorian doesn’t mind hurting people, so regret isn’t his speed. Blue searches for other palatable explanations—maybe he tried to touch Anne and she kicked his ass, leaving him to die in the hallway. That didn’t sound like something Anne would do, not unless he hurt her. Then all bets would be off.
Her eyes scan the trail of blood for hairs, but finds none. She should’ve brought a flashlight, but that’d make her too easy to spot. Finding nothing, she sighs and drops her hands to her knees. She never should’ve given the okay to separate the SCIF when the kennels were breached. She should’ve gone in there, rescued Anne, and shoved that Company prick into the waiting maws of the beasts.
A strange swishing in her stomach draws her from her thoughts, back to the oozing jet liquid inside her. It’s trying to move—it has locomotion. That, or it’s found a way to start the birthing process. She needs to get to one of the med bay scanners to check it out, but she won’t do that until she’s sure whether Anne is safe… or dead. She can locate Anne from the video feeds in Juno, and stabilize the pressure in the maintenance tubes to get Marcus across. Either way, she’ll need to hit the server cage before she can leave.
She knows she’s supposed to hate Anne, but Blue can’t let it go. Maybe, if Blue rescues her, Anne will come to understand the mistakes she made in casting her off. They could still have something together.
Straightening, Blue slips off the way she came, her heart overflowing with desperation.
* * *
Ordered rows of blinking lights extend across the glass, dissolving into foggy spheres where they cross frosted panes.
From the ground, Juno’s cage looks like frozen starlight. She’d heard rumors from Dick that the SCIF module was originally intended to be a colonial prison, but the Company purchased it at the last minute. It wouldn’t surprise her. It was everything Weyland-Yutani could want: labyrinthine, bureaucratic, gray, repetitive. Most importantly, re-purposing a prison was cheaper than designing a real working environment. The cage would’ve made a perfect guard shack, looking out over an exercise yard.
She takes her first step toward the catwalks and her nerves crackle. Her Paleolithic mind roars at her to stop, that by moving out of the shadows, predators will see her. Blue swallows her fears and forces herself to climb, taking the stairs two at a time until she reaches the first landing.
There are no hiding spaces from here until she reaches Juno. The catwalks are meshed gratings, and even if she went down on her belly, her silhouette would be clearly visible from the ground. There are elevators, but they’re located far from the booth, added as an afterthought. Blue hesitates, puzzling through the best approach, until she realizes that there is no best approach.
So, she runs.
The beautiful thing about an artificial body is that she can sprint up three flights of stairs in near silence, arriving as fresh as a summer rain. Even when she’d been healthy, Blue would’ve been misted with a fine sweat. Reaching the top, she spins to make sure nothing followed her. Empty rafters soar above her, full of cable trays, plumbing, and ventilation ducts. Every curved water and gas return catches Blue’s eye, looking like the domed, phallic skull of one of the beasts.
They’re all just tricks, played by a paranoid mind— pattern recognition.
She slips inside the cage and Juno’s banks lie waiting, long streams of white lights signaling the synaptic firing of code. Racks upon racks of servers twist into the room like the walls of a labyrinth—exc
ept the monsters are outside. She doesn’t have a clear view ahead to the terminal, but she hadn’t seen anything from the ground, so she hopes she’s alone.
The cage stinks of plastic and hot metal. Some of the racks have been destroyed by electrical fire, creating dark gaps like missing teeth. She wonders how much of the server is operational. Maybe Marcus was able to achieve some success.
Taking a tentative step inside, she sticks close to the racks. The place isn’t that big, and when she reaches the terminal, she lets out a breath. Given the extensive damage from Silversmile, she’d half expected to find a smoking ruin or a charred husk. Most of its assaults were superficial—code alterations, deletions, corruptions—but it could have overloaded electrical systems, sent turbines out of envelope, or engaged in any number of other hardware-based attacks.
The terminal stands before her like an obelisk, its screen dark. She approaches the keyboard and taps the wake key, its plastic clack like a gunshot against the white noise of cooling pumps and fans. The Weyland-Yutani logo animates onscreen, then data connections interweave as it boots up. She logs in with her old credentials, the ones Marcus reinstated.
>>WEYLAND-YUTANI SYSTEMS SERVERS
>>TITUS & JUNO EMERGENCY NETWORK
>>BOOTLOADER v0.0.0.1 BY MARCUS
>>QUERY?
Despite the danger, she can’t help but smirk at Marcus’s formality. Only an android would put a version number on an emergency system. Pressing each key slowly, so the clicks don’t resonate in the keyboard’s metal housing, she types.
//CREW LOCATOR: WEXLER, ANNE
>>NO CREW DESIGNATORS
(ABORT/RETRY/FAIL)?
Shit. Anne isn’t going to be listed in the Juno database, since the system was wiped. If it was working, Blue could’ve gotten a public feed, or at least a location. She remembers the chair in the middle of the hall.
//VIDEO ANALYTICS
>>WHAT SHOULD I ANALYZE?
//OBJECTS OUT OF PLACE
>>NO HISTORICAL DATA FOR COMPARISON
(ABORT/RETRY/FAIL)?
Blue glances back. She doesn’t have time to be trading bullshit queries with a brain-drained computer.
