by Ally Blue
“Gordon here. What’s up?”
“Let me help you look for Ryal. And Dr. Timms, she’s missing too now.”
“Christ on a bike. Two missing people. Wow.” Gordon sighed over the com. “You can’t be serious.”
“Why not? I have security training.” Not the kind Gordon was thinking of, but he didn’t need to know that. “Besides, Ryal is a friend of mine. If anyone can get him to give himself up, I can.”
Silence. Deep, thoughtful silence. Mo fidgeted and kept quiet.
Finally, Gordon barked out a short laugh. “Okay. What the fuck. I recruited Tsali from engineering to help. She’s an ex-bodyguard. I’ll send her over to get you and you two can search section A.”
Mo grinned. “That’s perfect. Thank you.”
“Yeah, yeah. We’ll see if you still say that later. Out.”
Mo cut the link and parked himself beside the door to wait for Tsali. Finally, something useful to do.
Or not. Twenty minutes after leaving the med bay, Mo and Tsali had searched nearly every corner of section A without finding the slightest sign of Ryal or Timms, and Mo was starting to get restless.
“Okay, we got the library and aquarium left to search.” Tsali peered around the dim hallway—it shouldn’t be this dim, and the light shouldn’t flicker like that; it wasn’t right—with her ice-blue eyes that never stopped moving. “Which one you want to do first?”
Like it mattered. “Library.” The way Mo figured, the aquarium offered no place to hide. Therefore, the library was most likely to turn up their missing persons. “Can I go in first this time?”
She glared at him, and he raised his hands in defeat.
They entered the library the same way they had the cafeteria, the lounges, The Beach, and the theater: Tsali first, Mo after she’d determined there was no immediate threat to his life.
God, that was galling.
The only light was the faint blinking glow of the computer interfaces. Mo frowned. “Lights on.” Nothing happened.
“They’re not responding.” Tsali glanced at him as she made her way to the rear of the room, her weapon at the ready. A tranq gun, not a real one. Mo couldn’t decide if that made him feel better or not. “I don’t know what’s the deal with that. I’m gonna go check in back. Stay here and don’t go poking around.”
Mo nodded to placate her. As soon as she turned the corner around the shelves of carefully preserved marine life specimens and rare paper books, he wandered among the cabinets and computer interfaces in the front of the room, listening and letting his senses pick up whatever might be there.
To his right, the life-sized Entwined Lovers sculpture hovered like a shadow in its plastic display case. Mo walked up to it. There weren’t many pieces of art on BT3, and the few they had fascinated him. This one most of all. The way the naked woman’s head arched backward to rest against the shoulder of the man who held her, blank gaze trained toward the unattainable sky, sent hot and cold shivers up his spine.
The man intrigued him even more. The empty carved eyes seemed to follow him, the half smile on the thin lips hinting at dark thoughts flowing through a mind that positively could not spark and throb with life in that hollow wooden head.
The sensation of an unfriendly stare raised goose bumps on the back of Mo’s neck. He turned away from the statue man’s blank eyes and peered around him. His gaze lit on the storage cabinet on the other side of the room. It wasn’t a large space. Then again, Ryal wasn’t a large person.
He considered calling for Tsali. But that would alert whoever might be in the cabinet, and that would not be good. He had a knife, and he knew how to use it.
Strange, how fast the things he’d learned thirty years ago came back to him.
Drawing his switchblade, he eased away from the Lovers and across the room toward the cabinets. Around the workstations, past the computers, down the corridor of pressurized tanks containing specimens of deep-sea life.
He’d almost reached the cabinet when he heard a stealthy sound behind him. Soft, faint, whispery.
Alive.
Fear ran in paralyzing waves from his chest down his arms and legs and curled like ice in his stomach. Heart racing, he forced his frozen body to move, to turn and look, because damn it, there was nothing there.
Only there was. The plastic encasing the sculpture was gone, and the statue man’s body had finally caught up with his living mind. Malicious intent glittering deep in his empty eye sockets, he pulled his arms off of the woman with a hissing sound like a snake slithering across concrete and stepped around her. His body, brown and wispy as a vine, creaked with the movement.
Mo stared, horrified and captivated. Stop, he thought at the thing, and wished his voice would work.
As if it had heard, the statue that ought not to be alive—but was—halted. It reached one slender arm toward Mo, fingers stretching, elongating, flexing in ways that raised the hairs on Mo’s neck.
“You’re not real.” Mo said it out loud, because maybe that would make it become true. “Go away.”
When the wooden lips opened into a wide grin, revealing a mouth full of short, thin tentacles where teeth ought to be, Mo felt as if he were being mocked. He grasped his indignation and held on to it as if it were the only thing keeping his sanity intact. It might just be.
Statue-man took another step, so silent Mo would have thought he wasn’t there if it weren’t for the visual evidence. The blue-green glow of the tanks glinted off something on the end of a tentacle. And another, and another. Mo couldn’t tell what it was. Instinct warned him he would not like it, but the adventurer in him wanted to know. He squinted, trying to see.
Statue-man stepped closer. Closer. Unable to move, shaking with a mix of terror and curiosity, Mo stared.
A single shimmering pearl of fluid dripped from the tiny metal fang at the end of one agile little tentacle and burned a hole in the library floor.
Hot fury surged through Mo’s blood. He pointed at the impossible wooden man. “Fuck you. You’re not real.”
“Who’re you talking to?”
Tsali’s voice surprised him. He whirled to see her hurrying toward him from the back of the library, her weapon pointed toward the ceiling. “Tsali. This might sound weird, but do you see anything . . . well, out of place?”
She glanced left. Right. Met his gaze again with caution stamped all over her face. “No. Why? Do you?”
Reluctantly, Mo peered sideways. Statue-man was back in his plastic box, willowy wooden arms wrapped around his lover and dead lips blessedly sealed.
Mo shut his eyes. Opened them again and studied the library with deliberate, methodical detachment. The tank filters bubbled. Tank and terminal lights cast a cool blue glow over the room. Statue-man stayed put. Nothing else moved.
He rubbed a hand over the ache blooming in his forehead. Either he was losing his shit, or what he’d seen was real.
Or whatever had happened to Hannah and Ryal was happening to him.
The idea sent waves of nausea thumping through him. Sweat beaded on his upper lip.
“Just my eyes playing tricks on me, I guess.” His voice shook. He cleared his throat. “So. No sign of Ryal or Dr. Timms, huh?”
“Not yet. I’m not done looking yet, though. There’s still the storage room to check. I came up here when I heard you talking to nothing.” She gave him a stern frown. “Stay here, be quiet, and don’t do anything, okay? I’ll be right back.”
Mo sat in the nearest chair and gripped the arms hard so he wouldn’t follow her. Right now, he didn’t much want to be alone with that damned statue. Or his own imagination. Especially both at the same time.
He didn’t remember the cabinet he’d been about to open earlier until the neck-crawling sensation of being watched came back. And of course he’d picked a chair that put his back to the cabinet.
Shit.
Calling on the stealth he’d learned all those years ago in Dubai, he rose and turned in one smooth motion, switchblade o
pen in his hand.
Ryal stood less than a meter away.
Time slowed to a crawl. Mo’s heart pumped once. Twice. He felt the blood push through his arteries, down to his capillaries, feeding his cells one by one. Giving him strength to defend himself against the long, thin fingers that had crushed a man’s windpipe like tissue paper.
Staring into Ryal’s black-light eyes, Mo saw no trace of his intelligent, fun-loving friend. But he had to try. “Ryal? Are you in there?”
“I haven’t gone anywhere, Mo. I’m just different now.” Ryal’s mouth twisted sideways and his brow knitted, as if considering what he’d just said. “It’s hard to explain.”
He sounded calm. Reasonable. Hope sparked in Mo’s chest. “I’m listening. I want to understand.”
Ryal sighed. “It’s too late for that. All that’s left now is what has to be done.” He took a single step toward Mo, stopped, and pierced him with a stare that put the lie to his sane, measured tone. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry. You were always a good friend.”
Instinct dropped Mo into a crouch when Ryal rushed him. Ryal missed Mo’s throat, fingers raking the top of his head instead. He whipped around with inhuman speed and came at Mo again, lips pulled back in an angry grimace.
Mo backpedaled, his knife brandished in front of him. “Stop. Don’t make me hurt you.”
Ryal laughed. “You can’t hurt me. It’s a new world. I’m a god here.” Grinning, he lunged at Mo, deadly hands reaching for him.
Something went pop to Mo’s left. Ryal stopped, put a hand to his neck, and yanked a small dart from the muscle. He threw it to the floor. Before Mo could move, Ryal spun and leaped on Tsali, knocking the tranquilizer gun from her hand. The two of them crashed to the floor with Ryal on top, both his wrists clamped in Tsali’s hands as she fought to keep him from strangling her.
Heart racing, Mo hooked his arms under Ryal’s and pulled with all his strength. Ryal hissed like a snake and hung on to Tsali with his knees. Since Mo outweighed him, though, he couldn’t bend forward. Tsali used that window of opportunity to drop one of Ryal’s hands and punch him hard in the temple.
His head snapped sideways, and Mo thought she’d coldcocked him. But he snatched at her wrist, yanked her hand toward him, and sank his teeth into the web of skin between her thumb and index finger.
“Ow! Goddamn it.” Wriggling one leg free, she kicked Ryal in the balls. He growled at her, but dropped her hand. The grip of his knees must’ve eased because she scrambled out from under him, gained her feet, and glared down into his upturned face, holding up her injured hand. His teeth had left puncture wounds. “Fucking little shit.” She punched him again.
This time, he sagged against Mo’s chest. He turned to grin up at Mo. “Big things are coming, Rees. Great things. Just wait ’til they take you. You’ll see.”
To Mo’s shock, Ryal’s eyes rolled up into his head and his body began to convulse. “Oh, fuck.” Mo laid him on the floor, careful to keep him on his side in case he vomited. “Tsali? Call the med bay. He’s having a seizure.”
Tsali activated her com and called for urgent medical assistance. Mo left her to it and kept his attention on Ryal jerking violently in his lap. It was all Mo could do to keep Ryal’s head from slamming into the floor tiles and giving him a brain injury on top of everything else.
Ryal went limp at the same time as the library door swooshed open and the medical team—two of the staff biologists, who Mo guessed were second wave ad hoc medics—came barreling in. They pushed Mo out of the way and bent over Ryal with their equipment and their competency and their air of getting things done.
It was too late. Mo had already seen the weird purple light die in Ryal’s eyes, felt his body sink in the peculiar way bodies did when life left them, and he knew. But he stumbled out of the way without saying anything, because the team had to do their own work and come to their own conclusions. Nothing he could say would make any difference.
Tsali was searching through the cabinets where Ryal had been hiding. Looking for Dr. Timms, Mo realized after a moment of confusion. They still hadn’t found her. He crossed the room to help Tsali search. She said nothing.
Mo was glad. If he had to stand there like an idiot while everyone else had a job to do, he thought he might lose it.
He’d opened the last cabinet and was shining his flashlight on the boxes of fish food and piles of tank maintenance equipment when one of the medics swore. “Hell. That’s it, folks. I’m calling it. Time of death, oh-four-seventeen on May 17, 2137.”
So that was that. Ryal was dead, killed by some unknown contagion that they had no idea how to stop. Mo shut his eyes and rested his forehead on the cool faux wood of the cabinet.
A hand gripped his shoulder. He opened his eyes and turned to meet Tsali’s sympathetic gaze. “Sorry, Rees. I know you guys were friends.”
“Yeah. Thanks.” Mo hauled himself to his feet, trying not to watch the medics zipping Ryal into a plastic body bag. “I guess we ought to keep looking for Dr. Timms, huh? I mean, she’s not in here, and I assume no one else has found her since we haven’t heard any updates.”
“Yeah. You’re right.” Tsali stood, crossed to where her tranq gun lay wedged against the base of a fish tank, and scooped it up. Her hand had stopped bleeding, though the four unexplainable punctures were still there instead of the human tooth marks she ought to have. She studiously didn’t look at the wound, and peered at the activity going on behind Mo’s back instead. Her face was unreadable. “Come on.”
Mo retrieved his knife and the two of them followed the medical team to the door. Ryal’s body was an unmoving plastic-covered hump on the hover stretcher. Mo trailed behind the group, searching his memory for clues to what had happened. What kind of sickness could’ve turned his easygoing friend into a murderer?
As he stepped out of the library into the hallway, the sudden sensation of unfriendly eyes on him raised gooseflesh on the back of his neck. He turned.
Statue-Man stood only a couple of meters away. The door slid shut on his tentacular grin.
The ChemScan readout of the first sample they’d finally been able to obtain from the object was exciting, if not surprising.
“Seven different unknown substances comprise a total of sixty-eight percent of this thing.” Mandala leaned back in her chair, massaging her neck with both hands. “The rest is a hodgepodge. About fifteen percent carbon, ten percent silicon, a smattering of nickel, lead, nitrogen, and cyanide. Even a trace of oxygen.”
“Good Lord.” Armin planted his elbows on the counter and rested his aching head in his hands. “Well, the carbon could be important. But we can’t really know for certain until we learn more about those other substances.”
“How many samples were you able to get?”
“Four.”
Not enough when they were dealing with something unknown, but he felt he’d done well to scrape off that many shavings. The thing was ridiculously hard for an object that insisted on pretending it didn’t exist. He’d ultimately had to use the pod’s brand-new, state-of-the-art ion scraper, which he hadn’t wanted to try because he wasn’t sure how it would interact with something whose physical properties they didn’t in the least understand. So far it hadn’t seemed to have caused any problems, though, thank goodness.
Mandala nodded. “Well. We’ll do what we can with it. Why don’t you run a repeat of the ChemScan on this sample while I start molecular mapping on sample number two? Maybe the structure can at least give us a clue as to whether or not we’re dealing with something organic.”
She stood and crossed to the sealed, light-protected sample container without waiting for Armin’s answer. Shaking his head, he went to take her place at the ChemScan and programmed it to repeat the test with the same parameters as before. If they’d had unlimited samples, he would’ve run the scan on a new one. For something this unusual, repetition of each test was necessary to confirm their results. But with only four samples, they couldn’t afford to
use multiple scrapings for a single analysis. Therefore, they would reuse each one, and hope for the best. At least the testing equipment didn’t destroy the samples like the machines of a century ago would have.
While the scan was running, he kept one eye on the display and wondered what was going on beyond the lab. Surely Gordon would’ve let them know if Ashlyn or Ryal had been found. Gerald Palto would’ve called personally if Neil had taken a turn for the worse. Armin knew all of that. Yet he couldn’t shake the feeling that fate had already struck. That all their efforts were too little, too late.
The chirp of his com startled him out of his thoughts. “Maximo Rees calling Armin Savage-Hall. Armin, pick up. Urgent.”
Mo sounded shaken. Frowning, Armin lifted his wrist. “This is Armin. What’s wrong?”
“Armin.” His name emerged wrapped in relief, as if Mo had feared for his safety. “Look, we found Ryal, but he . . .” A pause followed, heavy with a story Mo wasn’t sharing. “He had a reaction to the tranquilizer, or something. He’s dead.”
“Oh no.” Armin’s heart went out to Mo, who he knew had been friends with Ryal Nataki. “I’m so sorry. Do you want me to leave the lab? Meet you somewhere?”
Mandala shot him a sharp look, which he ignored. He knew how it felt to lose a close friend to whatever was running loose on this pod. If Mo needed him, he would be there.
Mo breathed an almost-sigh into the com. “It’s awfully tempting, but no. You’ve got important stuff to do in the lab, and Tsali and I still need to finish our sweep.”
Armin knew what that meant. “You didn’t find Ashlyn, then?”
“No. No one has, that I know of. Hang on.” In the background, Armin heard Mo say something he couldn’t make out. Someone else—Tsali, presumably—answered, then Mo came back on. “Tsali just confirmed with Gordon—the whole pod’s been searched, except for the aquarium and a couple of meeting rooms that Tsali and I still have to cover. Dr. Timms hasn’t been found anywhere yet.”
