Infinity Wars

by Jonathan Strahan

  Bianchi came over for a final briefing.

  “I don’t have the counter-virus.” Ekundayo said, “and nothing in my mission files explains how I’m supposed to deliver it—only that I need to get to the main control center of the Patchwork ship to have the best chance of establishing the infection. So hand it over and tell me how to use it.”

  “You already have the counter-virus,” Bianchi said.

  She patted down her uniform to check for anything in the pockets, but all she had was standard equipment and the oxygen-reducing breathing mask Sturgeon had given her. Her flightsuit was vacuum-sealed into a specialized pack, but she wouldn’t be using that until after the virus was delivered. “Where?”

  “It’s in the wings.”

  “You’re shitting me.” She bit down on her lip. She hadn’t meant to say that out loud, but Bianchi was hardly in a position to reprimand her, given the circumstances. “How exactly was that not part of my initial briefing?”

  “Plans regarding the counter-virus require a higher security clearance than you possess. Telling you earlier might have jeopardized the mission.”

  “Yeah, because if I’d known what I was getting into, I’d have turned you down—and I’m the only one on the ship with sickle cell trait...” Ekundayo stopped. They’d stationed her here eleven months ago, on purpose, in case she was needed for this mission. And all this time they hadn’t told her. “You son-of-a-bitch.”

  Bianchi ignored her reaction. “The counter-virus is dormant and harmless to humans. It won’t start replicating until you’ve removed the wings and you’re off the ship.”

  “If the mission goes as planned.”

  “Yes.”

  “And if I fail?”

  Bianchi stared at the shuttle behind her and said nothing. He didn’t have to. Patchwork combined alien parts into a single entity. The connector plates that Sturgeon had used were designed to be temporary. Once the plates broke down, the Patchwork would be all that kept her immune system from attacking her spare parts. If she was still wearing the wings when the counter-virus activated, her body would destroy itself in an effort to reject everything that was alien.

  “I knew I hated these damned wings.” She made a rude Squidder gesture with one of her tentacles and went to join the rest of her team in the shuttle.

  Jaxon chuckled. “He’s fluent in about twenty alien languages. I wouldn’t be surprised if he knows Squidder.”

  “Don’t care. I’d refuse the mission to spite his lying ass, but I won’t jeopardize the war, and he knows it.” Ekundayo flailed at her harness, but she couldn’t get it over her wings. Jaxon took the straps out of her hand and gently secured them in place. He was looking at her weird, and—“Oh, come on. I’ve got one Leonid leg and suddenly I’m attractive?”

  “You smell good. You never used to smell this good.” His voice was low and soft, sheepish but alluring.

  Part of her wanted to sneak off somewhere to make out, but most of her hurt like hell from the surgery, and she was irritated at Jaxon’s sudden reversal. Besides, they’d be accelerating too hard to be out of their harnesses anyway. Not that she was going to. Maybe. Damn. “I’m probably going to die, you know.”

  “Don’t die. Win. Finish your mission and we’ll come get you.” He kissed the top of her head and strapped into his own harness.

  They launched, and the shuttle engines were too loud for private conversation. Jaxon hummed to himself, eyes closed. He’d told her once that he was terrified of shuttles—being inside such a tiny thing against the vastness of space. Ekundayo didn’t get it. On astronomical scales, the station was equally small. But seeing Jaxon with his eyes squeezed shut made her wish she was close enough to hold his hand, or stroke the soft fur on his back.

  Sturgeon turned on an advanced tutorial on Patchwork viral replication, and Ekundayo watched the slideshow of magnified blood cell and virus images. She didn’t have enough medical training to make sense of most of it, and the volume was too low for her to hear the tutorial over the ship engines anyway.

  “If I use my breathing mask to trade excruciating pain of vascular occlusion for extra time, how long will it buy me?”

  Sturgeon paused the tutorial. “I don’t know. In its current form, Patchwork utilizes the iron from red blood cells in its replication process, and the deformed shape of sickled cells impedes the mineral harvesting—but Patchwork is highly adaptive.”

  “Rough estimate.”

  “A couple hours?” Sturgeon’s tail tapped against the metal of the shuttle floor. “Maybe as many as four.”

  Neva initiated the deceleration sequence and spoke in a loud voice over the rumble of the engines, “We’re getting into formation with twenty other shuttles. When we reach our target, the decoys will disperse and all of us will orbit the enemy ship at a safe distance. You’ll load up in the maintenance pod, Ekundayo, and we’ll fling you over to the ship.”

  “How the hell did we get a Patchwork maintenance pod?”

  Neva laughed. “While you were sleeping off your surgery, I went out and nabbed one. It’s in the airlock.”

  “Is it... empty?”

  “Yeah.”

  Neva didn’t expand on that. Ekundayo raised an eyebrow.

  “The pods fly themselves, but this isn’t really the time to get squeamish about killing Faceless soldiers.” Neva paused. “All of our shuttles will broadcast to the Patchwork ship on all radio frequencies. We’ll be putting out a constant chatter, so the Faceless will have a hard time separating out our encrypted transmissions to you, if they even bother to listen. Your audio implant is programmed to filter for our communications, so you won’t hear the rest.”

  “Great! You can tell me what a good job I’m doing. That will be helpful.” Ekundayo had what little information they knew about the enemy ship loaded into her implants. Communicating with the shuttle seemed needlessly dangerous.

  “Funny.” Neva scanned her instrument panel and made a tiny adjustment to their course. “We’ll be doing ‘human checks’ at regular intervals to determine whether you’re too far gone to complete your mission.”

  “And what, you’ll blow me up if I’m compromised?” She was joking, because even Bianchi would have mentioned a detail like that during briefing.

  Neva’s voice got quiet. “Our original orders were to abandon you after 10 hours, regardless of the state of the mission. I convinced command to switch to this at the last minute, which is why it wasn’t in any of your briefing materials. We can stay as long as you pass the human checks.”

  “And if you feel yourself starting to slip, you can trigger a sickle cell crisis—” Sturgeon chimed in.

  “Yes, I know.” Ekundayo turned back to Neva. “So how do we determine if I’m still human?”

  “Faceless don’t have a good sense of time or individuality. If you’re absorbed, your memories and theirs will mingle together until you’re unable to sort out which is which. I’ll ask you questions like ‘when was the first time you left your birth planet?’ Things that are easy to answer if you’re still you.”

  “Thanks for this, for giving me the best possible chance,” Ekundayo said. “If I get absorbed into the Patchwork, you can have the leg Sturgeon cut off.”

  “Ew.” Neva crinkled her nose. Ekundayo grinned and stuck out her tongue. It was like they were kids again, squabbling over who got the last chocolate-covered salt bug or whose turn it was to pilot Dad’s old shuttle.

  One of the decoy shuttles sent Neva a set of coordinates to cross-check, and the momentary connection to her childhood was gone. It was time for Ekundayo to get into the Patchwork maintenance pod. Jaxon went with her into the airlock that separated the main cabin from the cargo hold.

  “The maintenance pod is infected with live Patchwork virus, so I have to leave before you go through, but I wanted to come with you as far as I could.” He pushed a strand of hair away from her face. “Win. Come back safe.”

  Jaxon knew Ekundayo hated goodbyes, so he didn’t
wait for her to answer. He went back to the main cabin and the hatch sealed itself shut behind him.

  Ready? Neva’s voice came through Ekundayo’s audio implant.

  On the other side of the airlock, Ekundayo would be exposed to an alien virus that would strip her of her humanity. Her hands were shaking, and what she most wanted was to turn around and go back into the main cabin of the shuttle, but instead she answered quietly, “Ready.”

  The cargo hold was mostly empty, illuminated by strips of white light on the ceiling and walls. The alien maintenance pod was tiny, barely big enough to hold her. Part of it was metal, but there were seams made from a pale green organic material. The pod pulsed with a slow and steady rhythm, like a beating heart. Neva had assured her that the inside of the pod was airtight, capable of holding a crew of one—she’d seen Faceless soldiers use them as escape pods when battles went poorly.

  Ekundayo folded her wings close to her back and she climbed into the pod, clutching the pack that held her flightsuit to her chest. The pod expanded slightly and hissed like a Leonid that felt threatened.

  The maintenance pod sealed itself, and Ekundayo was immersed in darkness. Tendrils reached out from the walls of the pod, cold and damp, and she screamed as hundreds of tiny thorns pushed through her uniform and pricked her skin.

  She pulled away the tendrils, wincing as the thorns came free. The tendrils didn’t resist, and why would they? She was contaminated with Patchwork.

  “Human check.”

  It was Neva’s voice. Ekundayo subvocalized to broadcast back, “I was infected less than a minute ago. Seriously?”

  “You pass, but next time wait for me to ask a question.”

  “Well, ask faster next time.”

  “Take care of yourself in there.”

  It was too close to a goodbye. Ekundayo felt tears welling up in her eyes. “Launch me.”

  Neva opened the outer doors to the cargo bay, and the Patchwork maintenance pod, with Ekundayo inside, was blown out into space.

  “The Patchwork ship is sending several other pods in your direction, and they’ll herd your pod to the ship. Good luck, sis.”

  EKUNDAYO CLIMBED OUT of the maintenance pod and surveyed her surroundings. She was in a hangar full of soldiers, most with the smooth gray heads of the Faceless, the original species in which the Patchwork virus evolved. The soldiers weren’t cleanly assembled hybrids like Jaxon and Sturgeon; they were monstrous creatures with uneven seams between parts from myriad different aliens. One soldier had a human torso with two Faceless heads and half a dozen legs, each a different shape and color. Another had a fierce Leonid head, oozing sluglike feet, and long spindly arms from some alien race Ekundayo had never encountered.

  A vaguely doglike creature with a giant scorpion tail and a human head approached her. His eyes were bright and curious, but with a glint of mischief. He reminded her a little of a fire kitten and a little of Jaxon. “You came from outside. You have all the right parts, but I can’t talk to your mind.”

  “I’m newly arrived,” Ekundayo explained. “I came through the jump point in that maintenance pod.”

  He rose up on his hind legs and wrapped his forelegs around her. For a moment, Ekundayo thought he might kiss her, but instead he stung her, in her human leg, with the stinger of his scorpion tail.

  “Your blood tastes right. Clean, although your Patchwork levels are low.” His human face was mere inches from hers, and he studied her closely, squinting. “Venx will assign you quarters.”

  Ekundayo nodded and hurried away in the direction he indicated, relieved that he’d stung her leg and not her wings. She lost an hour locked in a small waiting room with a dozen new arrivals because a Faceless soldier with two gray-mushroom heads—presumably Venx —insisted on assigning everyone to quarters one at a time, in the order that they arrived. There were seven sickly-looking soldiers still in the waiting room when Ekundayo finally managed to break herself out.

  “Human check.” It was Sturgeon’s voice coming in through her implant this time. “Where were you born?”

  “In the bed of a transport truck, pulled off to the side of the road, halfway to the hospital. Also that’s a terrible memory question because I obviously do not remember my own birth.” Her dad used to love to tell the story of it though, which is probably why Neva included the question.

  “You pass.”

  Ekundayo tried to orient herself based on the schematics Bianchi had uploaded to her implant. She was in the aft section of the ship, near where the long trailing tendrils attached to the hull, but she couldn’t get the internal layout diagrams to match up with what she was seeing. She wandered the corridors, lost, wasting valuable time. The hull of the ship was mostly metal, but everything inside was organic. The walls pulsed in time with the alien nerves grafted onto Ekundayo’s spine, as if they were breathing together or keeping their heartbeats in sync.

  Discarded body parts were scattered on the floor and pressed into the walls. A soldier with a dozen arms pulled one off and pressed it into the wall. Tendrils grew out to embrace the discarded limb. The soldier went a short distance, then stopped to harvest a limb that was growing from the floor. The ability to swap out old parts made the Faceless nearly immortal—like living ships of Theseus, replacing themselves bit by bit until eventually none of their original parts remained.

  A large chamber opened on one side of the corridor. Inside, several Faceless soldiers were contained inside transparent bubbles. Row after row of spheres, each with a single soldier inside. Additional soldiers walked up and down the aisles. What are those? she wondered.

  This is a quarantine area. You are not permitted here. One of the soldiers pushed her away gently. She left the chamber of quarantine bubbles, then realized that neither she nor the soldier had spoken aloud. At the edge of her mind, she heard the whisper of other Faceless voices, and she felt the urge to broadcast her thoughts.

  “Human check—what happened the first time you piloted a shuttle?”

  The question sounded so similar to the background whispers she was trying to ignore that she almost missed it. It was Sturgeon’s voice again, but Neva had clearly provided the question. Ekundayo had gone with Neva for a joyride when her sister was fourteen and she was ten. It wasn’t long after Dad had died, and Neva had handed the controls over mid-flight. A piece of debris punched a tiny hole in the hull, and oxygen levels in the cabin dropped. It triggered a massive sickling event, making her misshapen blood cells get caught in her capillaries. Without enough circulation, her muscle tissue started to die. She’d screamed in pain until she blacked out. Neva took over the controls and flew her to the med clinic.

  “Neva got grounded for a week for taking me out on a joyride.”

  It wasn’t the answer she was supposed to give, but it was true. And if Neva came up with shitty questions, Ekundayo was going to give shitty answers.

  EKUNDAYO COULDN’T SHAKE the sensation that she was inside an animal or perhaps a tree, rather than wandering the corridors of a ship. There were no straight lines, no clean edges. All the walls curved and pulsed. She felt the rhythms of the ship in the throbbing of the nerve bundles grafted to her back. The ship itself was alive and infected with Patchwork. If the Faceless acquired the fire kittens, it wouldn’t just give individual soldiers the power of teleportation—the Faceless would be able to move their entire ship instantly.

  Ekundayo felt her body merging with her grafted parts and with the ship itself. Soldiers broadcasted a cacophony of thoughts woven together like harmonies in a song.

  Delicate sky-tendrils of purple, faint like the web of a spider’s ghost.

  Recalculating coordinates on the galactic plane.

  Eight hundred eighty-seven, nine hundred seven, nine hundred eleven...

  It was happening too fast. Ekundayo hadn’t found the main control center, and the schematics Bianchi had given her were totally useless. She had to slow the virus down.

  Ekundayo strapped her breathing mask to her face
, reducing the percentage of oxygen in each breath she took. She forced herself to move quickly through the corridors of the ship, knowing that the combination of exertion and low oxygen would bring on a crisis faster.

  Pain spread through her body as sickled cells partially blocked blood flow through her capillaries. Her heart thumped wildly in her chest, and for a moment she panicked. If she went into a severe crisis, there was no one here to help her. What if Sturgeon had set the oxygen ratio on her mask too low?

  She tried to calm down. The voices in her head were fading, so the mask was working. There was enough time to complete the mission. She kept moving. The corridor was uneven, dotted with alcoves and branching off into side tunnels. Her head throbbed and her muscles burned, but she pushed herself onward.

  MOVING DURING A sickling crisis was exhausting, and it was hard to focus through the pain. Ekundayo passed two Faceless soldiers who were carrying a third soldier down the corridor on a stretcher. Shadows danced across their featureless gray heads, and Ekundayo was overwhelmed with a sense of concern, worry for the sick individual on the stretcher. The light in the corridor was soft and uniform, emanating from some kind of bioluminescent material growing on the walls. What was making the shadows move like that? It wasn’t the light. It was something else, something she hadn’t seen until she’d been infected with Patchwork. The Faceless had a face.

  She shook her head. It didn’t matter. Dad also had a face, and the Faceless killed him. It didn’t matter that they felt concern for their fellow soldiers. She tried to put it out of her mind, but something about the scene bothered her. Something about the ship. Voices once again whispered at the edges of her mind. The Patchwork virus was regrouping. She took off her breathing mask. The virus had adapted, and she’d be able to move faster if she wasn’t in pain.