Starbleached

by Chelsea Gaither

  She squinted and could just make it out, a few floating weeds moving with more purpose than the rest. “I’ll need things. I don’t know what I’ll find. You’re going to have to let me go ahead alone so you can put it together.” It looked down at her, mouth open just enough to let her see the light of its tongue. Disgusted, she fished a data pad out of her pocket and tapped the formula into it, then passed it over. “You said you’d let me go if you had it. Now, you have it.”

  The monster looked at the handheld as if it had never seen one before. And perhaps she were going blind, but it looked as if its alien hand began to shake. It pocketed the device quickly and handed her one of its own. “This is a communicator. When you find the source of infection, press the button. I will bring you whatever you need. My word.”

  She nodded, sucking in air like it was all about to fade. “The man I loved made that.” She said, turning her eyes up to the blank faceplate, the ugly lips below. “If you use it to break us, I’ll hunt you down and make sure you die.”

  “I would do the same,” The monster whispered, “If our roles were reversed.”

  She turned around and hiked through the village. It took all her willpower not to look back.

  *****

  Then:

  “Move!”

  The warning came seconds before an explosion ripped through med bay. Most of the patients had been cleared. Now Adry was deleting important files. Vanishing large portions of data the Overseers didn’t need to see. But the lobbing of a grenade into her workspace was not something she expected. Only her intern’s quick movements saved her from being a splatter on the rad field.

  “They’re here.” He whispered, and she nodded. Everything they could do was done. It was time to go. The first stun bolt came through her unit’s door just as she and the intern slipped out the back into the service halls.

  They passed service elevators, emergency shafts, ventilation modules. The water pipes had shattered before cutoff was enabled, and the hall they chose was ankle deep in water. An alarm sounded as they passed under it. It was a middle tone, triple blast. Oxy venting from battle damage was becoming a problem. They had to get out soon.. The meeting place she and Bryan had agreed on was just ahead. A few more steps and they’d be safe.

  Sun bolts hit the bulkhead just ahead. “Down!” She shouted. A bolt passed harmlessly over her head, and her vision fizzled with its passage. “This way!” They took the next turn. Two more to the military hall. We’re going to make it, she thought. They hit the doors hard, spilling into the hallway. And her heart plummeted like a stone, because so many people were running to the evac ships, but Bryan wasn’t one of them.

  The Overseers were right behind them, seconds away from the hall. If they lost the tunnel, Bryan and any other survivors in his branch of the station wouldn’t get out. But there were survivors in the other side as well, cut off by the Overseers but still alive. Valkyrie, she thought. The chooser of the slain. She had seconds to decide. Footsteps were rushing towards her, light human tapping, heavy alien thumps. I have been here before.

  “Can we cut the access to this hall to that half of the station?” She asked, pointing back the way they came.

  “That button right there. But no one will be able to get out once we do.”

  People. Perhaps ten, perhaps a hundred, perhaps a thousand, all trapped in that warren with no escape. Their lives, for the ten, hundred, or thousand lives that happened to include Bryan. “I didn’t see anyone,” She said. It was cold inside. It was all so cold. “Did you?”

  The kid hit buttons. “I’ll cut locks to all the doors. They won’t get in or out of this block. Go get him. I can’t guarantee you’ll make it back if you don’t go now.”

  She nodded, and sliding the last of their data files into his hands. “If I’m not back in twenty, cut the doors and get this out.”

  He nodded, and Adry ran.

  Up the hallway, drab beige walls zipping past, regular white numbers ticking out apartment blocks or entryways. Which one was Bryan’s? She couldn’t remember his code. Legs burning, chest on fire, ears pounding with her own pulse. It didn’t look like the Overseers had found this branch of the utility tunnels. They must not be communicating worth a damn. Another turn. Her feet skidded on another puddle of spilled water. Bryan’s lab was up ahead. The walls were shaking with the impact of weaponry. She hit the door, ear pressed against it, and heard the sound of Overseer voices.

  No. She slammed the heel of her shoe into the door controls, praying the resulting short would disable the entry completely. Turning, she popped the cover off the nearest air vent. If Bryan were smart, he’d be in the ductwork. The vents only opened on the outside, but there was no way an Overseer could fit into the cramped spaces. There was a chance he was there, and trapped. She wasn’t leaving if there was any chance at all. She eased in on hands and knees. Light spilled through vents, exposing empty air. No one inside.

  And she still crawled forward. Damn it. There’s still a chance.

  Every movement set the tube humming like a migraine. Light and shadow played across from a primary air intake. Movement. Struggle. She crouched beside it, peering through the filter into the lab.

  Her gut whinged. There were legs beside the vent. The strong, inhuman form of an Overseer and a pair of blue jeans. There’s a real fad for retro around the station, just now. A tanned hand gripped the vent. As Adry watched, the color ran from the fingers like embers consuming paper. It could have been anyone, a lab tech. A guard. A civilian. It didn’t have to be Bryan. She stuffed a hand into her mouth and bit down on the knuckle to keep from screaming.

  The Overseer stepped back, the body hit the ground. Ghost white hair obscured the features; skin gleamed alabaster pale and slickly in the laboratory light. She must have made a sound because the body turned. Vacant eyes met her own, and she did scream now, into her bitten and bleeding hand, smashing backwards into the ducting in an attempt to run, not from this crippled, pitiful thing, but from the reality that should never have existed.

  There’d never been any doubt. Only hope.

  Bryan’s eyes were now colorless, his features melted as if the bone structure had collapsed beneath the weight of his pigment-less skin. She still knew him. And he did not know her. Promise me you won’t get killed, he’d whispered, his lips on the back of her hands. Blood now ran down the inside of her wrist. Valkyrie.

  I’m sorry. Oh, God, Bryan. I am so very very sorry.

  She pushed back so hard she scraped the skin off her palms. Heedless of the noise she made, she moved so fast the vent edges scraped her neck and shoulders. Part of her thought, it is Bryan’s promise. I am keeping his promise. But the rest of her knew it was the horror she was escaping. She spilled out of the ventilation shaft, doors opening behind her. Heavy Overseer boots thumping, their stun guns missing her by inches. She wasn’t outrunning them. She was fleeing what she had seen.

  She burst into the hallway, screaming, “Shut it down! Shut it all down!” as the intern stared in disbelief. Where was Bryan? Where was Dr. Landry? But his hands were already moving, and he hit the button that locked the service tunnels out of the military hall.

  The intern had waited. He’d been faithful. Adry hadn’t. She’d come back without Bryan. She hadn’t kept her word. Oh, God, oh God…she collapsed, sobbing, and the intern had to lift her up. He guided her towards the ships, away from Bryan, who was no longer Bryan, who was an erased slate for the Overseers to rewrite how they wished.

  No. She had to go back. She had to rescue him or die trying. Twisting in the intern’s grip, she made it two steps before stronger hands found her. They pulled her backwards into the evac ship and closed the door behind her. Shawn Miller whispered in her ear, it’s over, Adry. It’s over. It’s over. The hold was full of her patients. No, no, this wasn’t right. They shouldn’t see her now. She was the strong one. She was the guide and the guardian. She was the Valkyrie. She was screaming, and she didn’t think she’d ever stop. A needle
jammed into her neck, and soothing oblivion spread from the tip. Color bleached out of the world. The void opened within her and she dove for it willingly. Vision blurred, emotion dulled, she breathed out and closed her eyes.

  Starbleached, she thought. We’re all starbleached.

  *****

  Now:

  Cold muck, cold water running past her. It wasn’t so much a stream as a slightly clearer current in the contaminated water. She collected samples every fifty feet or so, finding the amoeba in the first hour. It was a weird one. According to the Overseer’s handheld, it bred well in the human body, but not so well in the swamp. There must be a place up here, somewhere, where the amoeba was able to multiply. Some poorly oxygenated hole in the ground was pointed at the village like the barrel of a gun.

  Water swished around her ankles. The sun was starting to set. She needed to find it soon, before the swamp nasties came out. If she used the communicator, the Overseer would come get her. The idea itself was chilling as hell, but she’d rather deal with the scary alien monster than this planet’s version of an alligator.

  But you gave it the enzyme formula. Now, it might not come.

  A light blinked up ahead. The soft, blue/blue blink of Overseer tech, she thought. Her gut sank. So it was all a play. A game. Position something upstream to make people sick, show her the ill and dying, convince her to find the source. Leave her in the swamp to die. Evil, evil son of a bitch.

  She was so convinced that for a moment she did find the device she expected. Then black carapace dissolved into slick olive-beige metal. The blinking light was LED, not phosphorescent substitute. Cyrillic writing declared it of Russian origin.

  She whistled, feeling weirdly like an ass. Hey, you only blamed the life-sucking alien for the murder of a whole village. It must be used to that by now. Pre Jump-drive tech, these devices were sent out to seed worlds with oxy-rich algae. Five hundred years or so in space, then a crash landing on an alien world. It sucked to be a terraforming rocket. But with Jump-drive invented while this thing was still in transit, humans had gotten here first and set up housekeeping without its input. The main tank was bashed in and full of a thick, nasty soup. Here was the amoeba breeding ground, alright. With so much dead, stagnant water inside, the little shit could have been multiplying inside for years.

  And the tank was the size of Marel Sander’s hold. Thank God she had a life sucking alien willing to help her clean it up. Jesus Christ, she thought. We did this to ourselves.

  The Russians would still have to sterilize everything, of course, but without this thing creating an infectious plume, the village would have a chance to recover. She reached for the communicator on her hip…and froze.

  Footsteps were swishing through the water off to her right. She took a deep breath, reaching reflexively for a gun she didn’t have. She dropped into the contaminated water instead, searching for something in the murk she could use. Fingers closed over a slick palm sized rock. She pulled it up, weighing it carefully, and then waited.

  Was it the Overseer? …no, she decided. The movement was too light. But it had the purposeful sound of a two-leg stride. Someone from the village sent to find her? Hair prickled on the back of her neck. She would wait, she decided. Wait until the last possible moment. The footsteps came nearer. She heard the unmistakable click of a round being chambered and turned, rock raised high.

  And then her heart soared.

  The person behind her was not just human, he was someone she knew. Cobbled together leathers and a flack-jacket about to give up the ghost couldn’t hide the SF bearing. Haunted brown eyes like, and forever unlike, a pair of lost blue ones looked into hers. The swamp muttered around them, and she saw nothing but her rescue.

  It was Michel Landry.

  And it didn’t matter at all that he was pointing a gun at her chest.

  *****

  Then:

  Bryan was gone.

  Not dead. Not buried. Erased. Eradicated. Removed from the world and beyond reach and rescue. And now Adrienne sat in a room with four other people: Bob Harris, Bryan’s best friend; Paige Jones, the base counselor; General Miller, glaring at her as if she had done wrong; and a new security man named Jason Mangle.

  I bet he gets teased a lot, she thought, without enthusiasm. Because what they were telling her made her feel sick.

  “You’re telling me that he can remember? That…that we could have put him back together? And I left him back there to die?

  Paige shook her head, gently taking Adry’s shaking hands in her own. “Not exactly. The slave process doesn’t erase you, precisely. It..” she sighed. “Memory is like a library. When you want to find a book, you access a filing system that tells you where that book is. Words, sights, sounds, smells are memory’s filing system. Its triggers.”

  Lately, Adry had been spraying Bryan’s cologne on his side of her bed. For an instant on waking, she could imagine he was there. “I get that.”

  “The slave process destroys the catalogue. The memories still exist, but the slave can’t find them. In a few cases the memories do return. It’s rare, but…” She trailed off.

  “So Bryan could remember.” Shawn Miller sighed. “And he knows too much for that to be safe.”

  “It helps us that they start programming their victims immediately. There won’t be anything familiar to trigger the catalogue, so to speak, and the longer he goes without remembering, the worse his chances for recovery get. They’re going to take him to Foster, or New Greenland, and they don’t look anything at all like a human world anymore.”

  “What about our chances of finding him?” General Miller asked Bob.

  “To rescue, or kill him?”

  “Either.”

  Bob Harris sighed. “Needle in a haystack.”

  They looked around their new base; a tent posted on Gaga’s soil. Ships landed and took off with metronome precision. They’d made no move towards a more permanent structure. Miller and the rest of the brass seemed more interested in staying mobile. She supposed it made sense. If you’re moving, they can’t find you. At least the green around here was real. Maple-like trees grew all around them, intense purple flowers just starting to open at the end of twigs. General Miller sniffed at the pollen. He switched the chips out of his reader and sighed.

  “Well, to fill you in on our other problem child, Michel Landry is officially AWOL from the local garrison. He left before we arrived. Stuck around just long enough to get Bryan’s POW status notification. Then he blew.” Shawn dropped the report chips he held hard enough to crack one.

  Bob cursed. “We should have arrested him the second he touched down.”

  “Maybe he went to rescue his brother?” Paige said.

  “Maybe pigs will fly tomorrow,” Adry said.

  “Yeah.” Shawn sighed. “Mich was in a twisted competition with Bryan. Without his brother here to play the game, there’s nothing to hold him. He already knows he’ll be thrown out of the service. Maybe even put it jail.” Shawn tapped a chip on a pad of paper now too valuable to use. There was no more excess cellulose for manufacturing. Holton itself was gone. “We’ve told our contacts on the other worlds that if Mich turns up, they need to pass word on to us. If we can scrape the cred together, we’ll post a reward. And Parker?”

  She looked up, tear streaks glittering on her damp cheeks. “Yes, sir?”

  “You’re going to resume Landry’s work tomorrow. You were closest to him. You can finish his work for us.”

  The horror in her gut was low, dull. Kind of like having your stomach acid burn through your spine. “Sir—”

  “No arguments. As of right now, Dr. Parker, you are Landry’s replacement. You will do his work, cooperate with his sources, and finish his projects in due time. Or so help me God I will drop you down the biggest hole we can find. Understand me?”

  She nodded. Did it matter if she did, or didn’t? Bryan was gone. With that fact alone, she was falling. And she would never, ever stop.

  ***** />
  Now:

  “Michel?” She asked. Swamp water ran around them, carrying the deadly disease through her clothes.

  The blond man smiled, his eyes widening in delight. He holstered the gun. “Adrienne? My God, you’re alive? I thought for sure they’d put paid to you in Holton.”

  She shook her head. “No. We made it out. I got grabbed on the way to New Houston. What are you doing here?”

  His smile was slow and sly. “I got my sources these days. Make my way tracking down obscure things a person might need. I heard an Overseer was making a little free with my brother’s discovery, and I wanted to know what it had down here. Didn’t expect to see you though.”

  “It grabbed me a few weeks ago. It wanted me to reverse engineer the enzyme.” She shivered.

  “Probably using you to keep its private heard doctored up, too. You get a good look at it?”

  “No.”

  Mich looked at her, then at the swamp. “My sources call it a renegade. So nasty the other suckers won’t go anywhere near it.” He smiled, not nicely. “Come on, kiddo. Let’s get you out and safe.” He offered her a hand.

  She hesitated.

  “What? You want to stay here in the muck? Spend the rest of your life running from the sucker?”

  Rocky and shaky, hope throbbed through her system like a straight shot of heroin…but something was wrong. For some reason, taking his hand felt worse, more wrong, than touching the hand of the Overseer.

  “Come on.” Mich smiled. “You want to get out of here, right?”

  Reluctantly, she took his hand and held on tight.

  *****

  Then:

  Time was an enemy, Adrienne thought. Every hour between now and the loss of Holton Station was a shovel of dirt in a grave. She marked it by vials. Another trial, another attempt, and another near success. After the second month she knew they were on to human testing…but how could they do that? How could they dare to give this drug to a human and pair him up with an Overseer as prey?