ALIEN THE COLD FORGE

by Alex White

They step out onto the hull, their bodies no longer shielded by the thick, metallic walls of the Cold Forge.

  If they get caught out in the sun, it’s going to hurt. He shoves her forward.

  “Achievable: we will make it if you move your ass, Lucy.”

  She cries even harder as he forces her to take step after step toward the docking bay puncture. The gash where the Athenian struck RB-232 isn’t that large, but it certainly caused more than its share of damage. She pauses, and he shoves her so hard she almost comes unglued from the hull. The soles of her shoes flash a yellow warning light.

  “Results-focused. You will keep walking, or I will leave you here to burn to death. No distractions. No more hesitation.”

  They’re not far now, and the gash looms large before them. Dorian inspects the escape pod as they tromp past. It looks like it took a bit of damage in the crash, but nothing more than superficial—there’s a long scratch down one of the sides and a small puncture, but he’s guessing it’ll fly. Control lights are visible inside it.

  The edge of the Cold Forge starts to glow with the rising sun. It’s about to complete another revolution, and if they don’t get inside, they might be roasted.

  “And time-bound,” he says, pointing to the forming halo and dragging Lucy forward. “Either we get inside in the next few seconds or we burn. Now go.”

  One of Dorian’s first assignments had been with Weyland-Yutani’s massive steel-smelting operation outside Johannesburg. He’d watched them work before closing the plant. When they’d poured out the contents of the crucible, two thousand gallons of molten steel, it’d tanned his skin, made his hair feel crispy.

  When the sun pierces the horizon of the Cold Forge, shining its infernal light upon his suit, Dorian feels as if he might die then and there. The golden tiles of the station become fiery white. He closes his eyes, and his lids begin to burn. Lucy screams, but that seems to be her default state. What shocks Dorian is his own screaming.

  He can’t see anything. His whole body roasts. The only thing he knows to do is make for the gash, wherever it was. He grabs Lucy’s hand and yanks her forward, stomping across the surface until his boot finds only a hole. Dorian forces Lucy down into it, then dives into darkness after her. Blackness fills his vision, and he tumbles before striking his back, hard.

  But the shadows are cool and merciful. He’s safe.

  Gradually, his vision returns, and the world comes into dim focus. He’s inside the torn docking bay, and gravity is only a fraction of what it is elsewhere on the Cold Forge. A long scorch mark runs the wall opposite to the tear, where radiation has reached the inside of the station, which lacks the reflective protection of the exterior. Kaufmann has been carving on it like a sundial.

  Panicked, Lucy struggles with her helmet, so Dorian braces against the deck and sinks a fist into her gut as hard as he can. She’s shielded by the space suit, but his punch drives the point home. Her sobbing becomes uncontrolled.

  “You can’t take off your helmet in space, Lucy,” he says over the comms. “Now let’s get that escape pod opened up.” He takes her to the pod hatch, a smaller tube about half the size of a normal docking tube, and finds something curious: white blood.

  “Marcus,” he says with a smile.

  Dorian’s eyes travel the scene in search of more blood, and he easily spots it near one of the maintenance tubes. Marcus has been using the emergency seals as an airlock for his android body. It’d never work for an adult in a space suit, but for someone who doesn’t need to breathe, it’s ideal. He must’ve crawled from Juno’s cage, through the tunnels and into the pod. But why?

  Lucy’s caterwauling is starting to bother him. Her mind must’ve gone. He pops open the control console for the escape pod and gestures to it.

  “The code, if you please. I’d like to get out of here.” But she keeps crying. He shakes her and bangs her against the wall, but her suit stops him from having any real impact.

  “I’m going to need that code, Lucy.”

  Nothing. She’s utterly incoherent. Letting out a disgusted grunt, he searches the broken-down docking bay for anything that might be of assistance, and finds his answer in the burned slash across the far wall.

  Dorian grabs Lucy by the shoulders, and she tries to bat him away. He spins her to face the scorched trail along the wall and marches her one step toward it. A sliver of brilliant light forms at the top, throwing the whole docking bay into sharp relief.

  “Lucy,” he says.

  She screams and hits him, so he pins her arm behind her back and twists.

  “Lucy, please listen,” he says firmly. “I’m trying to be reasonable here. If you don’t punch in that code, I’m going to put you under the tanning slash so I can see how long your face lasts.” He’s able to wrap his whole hand around her middle finger, and he bends it backward. “Lucy, are you listening?”

  “Yes!” she screeches. “Fuck! Let me go!”

  It’s annoying behavior of her to make demands like that, so he pulls harder on her finger.

  “Would you like to add a magic word?”

  She tries to turn to face him, but he has her arm locked up. He imagines he could break it even through her suit, if he tries hard enough.

  “Please, Dorian.”

  He shoves her against the console. “It’s Director Sudler, Lucy. Now unlock the goddamned pod.”

  She taps in her code, one number at a time, and he watches carefully: four-eight-zero-eight-sigma. The pad lights green.

  Dorian spins Lucy to face him. She looks so tired, so frightened—mentally demolished from the harrowing ordeal.

  “Thank you.”

  With a quick set of movements, he unclips Lucy’s helmet and twists it free. Frosted air shoots from the sides, then vanishes. Her bug eyes go wide for a moment, then roll back in her head as sudden and complete decompression takes its toll. Dorian marches her backward to the gash, then with a hard kick, consigns her body to the brutal rays of Kaufmann’s light.

  Her skin boils up under the solar load, and she convulses as though something of her consciousness has returned. Her hair smokes, and globules of zero gravity fire emerge from her collar, stoked by her oxygen tank. Then the tank blows, propelling her out of sight.

  He’s wanted to do that since laying eyes on her.

  Besides, what would’ve happened if she’d gotten home with him? What might she have said? Better that Dorian was the only one to make it out. All he needs to do now is step into the escape pod and he can leave.

  He can’t hear it, but he feels a tremendous grinding through the deck of the docking bay. Something huge is moving through the SCIF side of the central strut. Maybe it’s one of the emergency bulkheads opening up. If it’s Blue coming after him, Dorian will have to move quickly.

  He rushes to the unlocked escape pod and opens the door, clambering inside. There’s no atmosphere, but he can change that when it’s time to flee. For now, he simply checks his surroundings for anything he doesn’t like.

  He finds Marcus, lying on the ground, his white blood frozen to his face. Gone is the synthetic’s kind smile, replaced with a malformed look of idle curiosity and evaluation. Maybe it’s the closest the android can get to genuine fear, or maybe it’s that Dorian fucked up his face so badly Marcus can no longer appear sympathetic.

  “How you doing, buddy?” Dorian says.

  Marcus replies, but the vacuum steals his words. He wants to ask Marcus what the hell he’s doing here, but he’d have to charge the atmosphere if he wanted to do that. Instead he sidles over to the open door and peers out, searching for the source of rising vibrations.

  Jets of misty air shoot from the emergency bulkhead on the SCIF side, and yellow warning lights flash. The shield rises up, revealing an ailing power loader, burned and melted in places—it fits with the rest of the ruined docking bay interior. It carries an egg crate in one of its pincers, barely able to hold onto the enormous titanium box. It’s not moving like a human anymore—it must be on a so
rt of autopilot.

  Anger burns in Dorian’s gut. Why is she still trying? Doesn’t she understand that she’s lost? Does she know of another way off the station?

  Then his heart freezes.

  The loader is carrying an egg crate. Blue was able to get back into Marcus after Dorian shut him down. Maybe she’s the one that set the creatures free, and now she wants an egg for someone who’s coming to pick her up. Those eggs may have cost the Company a modest sum to procure, but they’d be worth untold millions to the competition.

  If she’d let the beasts out, if she’d put everyone in this position… then she’d helped Dorian discover himself. She holds some stake in his new identity. Like a poison, this very idea taints all the magic he’s experienced, the epiphanies he’s experienced.

  The bitch is still trying to win.

  She’s been mouthing off to him since he got here, and she doesn’t have the good sense to lie down and die. She subjugated the snatchers. She struck him. Now she may have devised a way to escape—a way that might work. Even if she can’t get off the station, she can still kill herself peacefully.

  She doesn’t deserve a peaceful death.

  He hides as the loader shambles past, shoving through the detritus of the docking bay. The far emergency bulkhead slowly opens, and the power loader disappears from sight. There’s an airlock by the crew quarters. If he took a spiral path along the outside of the central strut, he could outrun the sun and reach her before the power loader.

  He could show her such exquisite pain.

  31

  THE HARD WAY

  Blue sticks to one side of the corridor as she pulls herself along the central strut. It won’t be enough to save her if one of the creatures finds her, but at least it might buy her time. She can always pretend to be a dead body.

  A troubling smell wafts up from her stomach, where her tubes should’ve been—a faint forewarning of something far worse, like sepsis. If she doesn’t get some antibiotics soon, she won’t be pretending to be a dead body at all.

  She glimpses the med bay. She’s so tired, so beaten. Dorian has almost certainly left without her, and she’s indulged in a fool’s errand. Yet she carries on, every inch closer to an unknown goal. Her eyes drift to the med bay again. If she’s going to die, she may as well have some measure of peace. She can wait there in safety.

  Blue misses her wheelchairs. The first one must’ve fallen into Kaufmann’s gravity well by now, becoming a pile of carbon and slag before fusing with one of the most effusive power sources in the universe. The second one burned in her room. There aren’t a lot of backups. Maybe she could’ve gotten someone’s office chair? No, her legs would just dangle uselessly over the side.

  Her stomach hurts so much. It’s been through too many traumas, and when she rests her hot cheek against the cold deck, she can press her fingers into her abdomen. It’s hard. That’s bad.

  Changing course, Blue struggles toward the med bay, ready to scream with each passing foot. If she could only get some painkillers, she might be able to bring herself up to a baseline needed to continue. Or she could drift off into peaceful slumber. There’s always the comforting embrace of death…

  She never wanted to hurt anyone, she tells herself, but knows it’s a lie. She wants to hurt Lucy for helping Dorian. She wants to hurt the corporate penny-pinchers who came after her project when she’d tried to produce a cure instead of a weapon. She wants to hurt the fuckers that are coming to pick her up, who indulged in intrigue and espionage, instead of honestly funding a goddamned cure. They could’ve rescued her, could’ve rescued everyone, instead of leaving them scrapping for the remaining escape pod like a bunch of animals.

  Most of all, she wants to hurt Dorian, and see him brought to his knees like the unspeakably evil bastard he is. He should die for what he did to Anne, and to everyone else he has hurt. He reveled in his actions, and for that, he needs to feel pain.

  Blue doesn’t bother going to one of the beds. She knows she’s beyond fixing, and the blasted things will try to sedate her. She isn’t falling for that again. She just needs a place to set up her terminal so she can see what’s happening in the outside world—and maybe get a dose of pain meds to blunt the edge. She feels like she’s dying, but she’s felt like that every day of the last decade, so it’s nothing new.

  Inching her way toward the compounder, she croaks out a verbal order for an opiate. She’s one of the few crew members with authority to order addictive substances, and so it readily complies. She makes it a super-stiff one, since she might not need to wake up, and the machine spits out a syringe. She places the intellijector to her hip, but waits to deliver the payload. She needs to know how much time she has.

  Flipping open her terminal, she connects to Marcus.

  Blue: //Where are you?

  Marcus: I’m in the escape pod.

  Marcus: Dorian was here.

  Blue swallows. She taps the keys, one finger at a time.

  Blue: //But he’s not now?

  Marcus: He left. I think he’s coming to kill you.

  Marcus: Don’t let him kill you, Blue.

  It’s not good to die.

  You see—I’m helping.

  I’m here to save you.

  The loud hiss of the crew quarters airlock cycle pierces the air. The rush of wind filtering through steel sounds like the cry of one of the creatures, and Blue shivers uncontrollably—she’d rather have a gut full of Plagiarus praepotens than Dorian on her body. The creatures are swift, businesslike. The video of what Dorian did to Anne plays through her mind. Dorian takes pleasure in the kill.

  It will take a full minute to cycle the crew airlock. Her quarters will be the first place he looks for her. The med bay will be the second. She needs a plan by then, something like what she did to the alien in her room. But looking around the med bay, her mind is blank. It’s been too long since she’s had her meds, she’s exhausted, and everything hurts. The ventilation ducts are so far away, and even if she could make it, they’re smaller than the ones in her room.

  She doesn’t have a pen, or matches.

  Blue regards the portable terminal by her side. Even if she took over the power loader, it’s still moving through the emergency bulkheads. It won’t be here in time.

  A klaxon sounds as the inner hatch of the airlock slides open. Stomping footfalls. The clatter of a helmet being tossed aside. He’s coming.

  She scrambles back toward the entrance to the med bay, intellijector clutched tightly in her hand. She needs to get the drop on him somehow, with her clumsy hands and slow muscles. Maybe she can level the playing field with her painkillers.

  “Doctor Marsalis!” he shouts, headed down deeper into the crew quarters, away from her. It’s going to take him less than a minute to realize she isn’t there. “I’m here to make a house call!”

  Reaching the wall beside the doorway, she sits back against it and pulls her knees in close. She clutches the intellijector in both hands like a gun, or maybe a rosary. Either way, she’s praying to kill him.

  “Blue!” he calls again, his voice breaking with anger. “Hurry up, I’ve got a flight to catch, and—”

  He stops. He’s found her crispy room. She presses her forehead against the cool metal of the syringe, her heart thundering. More footsteps ring out as he marches purposefully toward her. It’s not hard to imagine him at the Shinjuku office, striding down those glassy hallways, poised to deliver devastating news. Even though he’s wearing a spacesuit, she can almost hear the heel-toe click click of fine Italian leather shoes.

  She raises the intellijector, ready to plunge it into his calf muscle, but stops short. He’ll be wearing a spacesuit. That needle isn’t long enough or strong enough to puncture the thick mesh. She stuffs her weapon behind her back as he rounds the corner.

  She blinks. There he is. The details are blurry, but his form is full and bristling with malice. He steps one foot inside the med bay and looks down at her.

  “Hello, Blue.” Th
e blur wears a sharky grin wide enough for even her failing eyes.

  His large palm wraps around the side of her face, and he slams her head into the wall. Lights explode behind her eyes and she cries out. Then, he does it again and again. She recovers quicker than she thought she would and realizes, he’s being gentle. He doesn’t want to knock her unconscious or kill her—he wants her to feel everything.

  When she raises her hand to push him away, he bats it away with little trouble. He slaps her so hard that her left eye convulses.

  “You were intubated, right?” he asks, grabbing a handful of her gown, and leaning down to get in her face. “I’ll avoid the throat, then. I don’t want you choking to death.” He drags her further into the med bay, no doubt hoping for a more visible reaction, but Blue has grown accustomed to keeping her screams down.

  “‘I didn’t think “director” was an honorific title,’” he mocks in Marcus’s haughty voice. “Fuck you. Trying to lord your degree over me like I haven’t done big things. Who the fuck did you think you were?” He laughs bitterly. “I’m every bit as smart as you, or Dad, or anyone else out there. And you know? If you were so smart, I guess you wouldn’t be so fucked right now, would you?”

  “Don’t leave your daddy issues at my doorstep,” she rasps as he picks her up like a baby, every hard edge of his spacesuit digging into her skin. It’s like being hugged by a cliff face. He squeezes even tighter, crushing her.

  “What was that?” he demands. “What the fuck did you just say to me?”

  “I said,” she replies, struggling for breath, “you ain’t shit and you never were.”

  “Some people,” he mutters, his face reddening, “just don’t know when they’re done.”

  “No, they don’t,” she says.

  With every ounce of strength, every iota of coordination, she jams the intellijector up into his carotid and pulls the trigger.

  The tip flashes red, like a gunshot.

  Dorian sucks in a breath through his teeth. His eyes widen and his face reddens. But there’s no hiss, no thunk, no delivery of a potentially lethal dose of opiates. Blue blinks.