by Hugh Howey
Sadie felt the hull vibrate suddenly and twisted around to look back toward the Myopsina. Were the pirates fixing to shoot? But then she saw spindly cargo arms extending from above toward the free-floating cargo. Sadie grinned wildly and stopped her count at sixty-four. If the cargo arms were out, that meant an open bay. An open bay into which she could shove that jammer bomb. A net only worked if the ship that cast it stayed within range. If she could do enough damage to the pirate ship, she might be able to drive them off, or at least disrupt the internal systems. She just hoped this bomb was big enough to hurt.
Sadie pushed away from the hull and started to drift back toward the Myopsina. She got far enough out that she could see where the cargo arms extended from. As she’d hoped, they came from an open bay inside the ship, the arms extending from a control box at the back of the bay. The whole place was helpfully flooded with light, and Sadie smiled.
She cued her suit thrusters and sent herself flying straight toward the opening with the gel-encrusted jammer bomb held in front of her. She hadn’t meant to get so much thrust. The opening sped toward her until she could make out rivets on the arms of the machine and could see moving forms behind the windows of the control box. She adjusted the thrusters, ignoring the beep inside her helmet as the batteries continued to drain.
Sadie twisted, and with a mighty kick she sent the jammer bomb speeding straight at the control box. Her momentum slowed, and for one precarious second she hung just inside the cargo doors.
The jammer bomb hit one of the box windows straight on. Gel and plexi and metal exploded outward as the chamber depressurized with the explosion. Sadie was thrown backward on her tether. Her shoulders hit one of the extended cargo arms and she felt something give. Pain blinded her for a moment. She heard a hissing sound and forced her eyes open.
She was drifting away from the crippled pirate ship. She watched as one of the cargo arms tore loose and drifted out below her. The hissing got worse, and she realized her suit was leaking. She tried to turn her head to see the Myopsina but it hurt too much, and her body wouldn’t obey her. She couldn’t tell if she was still moving, or if they were pulling her in. She wasn’t even sure where the Crawlies’ ship was anymore.
It doesn’t matter, she thought. My suit has a leak and my head is gonna explode soon anyway. She stared out into space. I thought there’d be more stars. Something pounded into the back of her helmet. She tasted blood. Then, nothing at all.
* * *
Everything hurt, but she could breathe, and some of the weight was off her head. Something warm and velvet-soft was pressed against her cheek. Sadie forced her eyes open and looked up to see Chiro carrying her. She willed one of her hands to move and pushed it against his chest. She’d never felt anything that soft in her life. She leaned her cheek back into him. Chiro looked down at her, his skin that rich purple like before.
“I knew you wouldn’t let my head explode,” she said. Her throat was raw.
Chiro hummed and looked back up. Sadie looked at her hand again. There was blood on it, and she wondered if it was hers. Probably. She was pretty sure that Crawlies—no, Teuthiads—bled green or blue or something, not red.
One, she thought, trying to ignore the growing pain in her back, head, and chest. Two. Three. Four.
* * *
Walvis explained to her later that the pirate ship had pulled away after the explosion. They weren’t sure what her crazy stunt had damaged, but the net went down and the pirates cut and ran. Sadie thought they were probably scared ’cause they thought the Teuthiads would have friends coming. Or maybe she’d really blown some sensitive tech all to bits, though she thought a cargo bay was a stupid place to keep something like that. It had been a pretty small ship though, not all cool like the Myopsina.
Her head healed up quickly, but her shoulders still hurt her sometimes in the morning. Chiro said he wasn’t used to human physiology, but he was pretty sure she’d broken her collarbone and torn a bunch of muscles. He had her mix a blue powder into her water; it tasted like mold but it helped the pain, and she’d recovered enough within a cycle to follow Chiro all over the ship asking questions.
She spent the nineteen cycles that it took to get to Mirzam helping Chiro and learning about Teuthiad plants. Omma and Walvis both came to visit her and showed her what some of their tools did too. Walvis even taught her how to write some of the Teuthiad numbers. She saw Pyro twice during the whole journey, and she was pretty sure he still wanted to eat her. Chiro laughed in his odd, humming way every time she thought about that, but she noticed he didn’t disagree with her.
When they reached Mirzam, Sadie was sitting on one of the smooth tables in Chiro’s lab, biting her lip. She wasn’t sure she wanted to go, though she knew her babble patch, the second she’d had to use, would run out soon anyway. Best to not make them waste another one on her. She was going to get a job on a freighter here, she knew it. Leader Bato had written her a letter for the port secretary and given her her own cred stick, too. There was enough on there for her to live like a merchanter for at least a standard week.
Chiro came for her and she smiled at him. She knew he’d miss her, so she had to put on a brave face. Even as she thought this, his skin shifted to deep purple, and she grinned wider.
“Ready?” he said.
“Tip top.” She hopped down and grabbed the silk bag Leader Bato had given her. In it she’d put her letter and her cred stick. She didn’t need a mask for the short walk through the ship.
Sadie hesitated when they reached the threshold between the ship and the station. Pyro stood in the hall as though he’d been waiting for them. She stuck her tongue out at him and then grinned.
“Bye, Pyro.”
“You’re too skinny to eat,” Pyro said. His normal red was shaded suspiciously violet. He abruptly turned and left the docking bay.
Sadie watched him go and then looked to Chiro. She’d already said goodbye to everyone else; today they were busy unloading cargo or making deals or something.
“Goodbye, Doc.” She abandoned her poise and threw her arms around him, ignoring the protest of her still sore shoulders.
Chiro awkwardly wrapped his curling, velvet arms around her. “Do well, monkey,” he murmured.
Sadie pulled away and sniffed. That was enough of that emotional stuff, she thought.
Chiro caught her hand in his own long, soft fingers as she turned toward the station. He pressed something hard and square into her palm. Sadie gripped it instinctively and then looked down as Chiro moved away. It was the box that held the babble patches.
“Three by three,” he said as he flowed down the hall, “three by three.”
A Word from Annie Bellet
Crawlies is a story near and dear to my heart. I woke up one morning and Sadie was there, inside my head, telling me her story. This is a rare treat for me as an author, since I usually have to spend weeks if not months figuring out the details of every story I write. With Sadie, those details were there and just kept flowing, and so this story felt almost born like Athena out of Zeus, springing whole from my head (or really, my fingers).
I’ve always loved the ocean (I took multiple science classes focusing on oceanography/geology/zoology in college), so when Sadie popped into my brain telling me about these “crawlies,” I knew exactly what she meant. Squid and cuttlefish are fascinating and very intelligent creatures, and it was a lot of fun to craft an alien species based loosely on what I’ve learned about cephalopods. Space battles, pirates, explosions, and clever kids are other favorite topics of mine to explore, so it was an easy fit.
I’ve had over thirty stories published in various speculative fiction magazines and anthologies over the last few years. I’ve also published three short story collections and am the author of multiple ongoing series such as The Twenty-Sided Sorceress and The Gryphonpike Chronicles. You can find out more about my work by visiting my website or by signing up for my mailing list.
The Insect Requirement
&
nbsp; by B. V. Larson
“Paul found one attached to his thigh,” said Dr. Beckwith quietly.
Captain Rogers’s body stiffened visibly in his pressure suit. “That’s it then.”
The two men stood in the tool storage pod adjacent to the ship’s engine complex. They both wore full pressure suits of stiff, crinkled fabric. They stood because there was no room to sit.
“What do you mean, ‘that’s it’?” Dr. Beckwith asked. His breath blowing over the microphone poised in front of his mouth sounded like a strong wind.
Captain Rogers picked up a hand-held pneumatic drill and checked the digital pressure readings that glowed in red on the side. He held the drill to his chest and gripped the steel casing in powerful hands. His arm muscles bunched and the casing came loose with a jerk. A piece of black plastic from a ruptured gasket spun away and bounced off the ship’s hull. He could have used tools to remove the casing, but Captain Rogers rarely did things the easy way.
“We’ve lost too many men. We’ll have to leave.”
“But the contract—” began Dr. Beckwith.
“They didn’t pay me enough to die here. Nobody could pay that much.”
“It’s not that bad, really—we aren’t going to lose him.” Dr. Beckwith fought to keep the panic out of his voice. The muscles in his neck were stretched like guitar strings. When he moved his head, pinched nerves twinged as if plucked by playful fingers. He rubbed and scratched his left hand through the thick material of his glove. He had to have more time.
They were in the first Earth ship to have landed on the planet, which they had christened “Jade,” the name specified in the promotional section of their contract. Although the executive who had come up with the name had never seen the world, Jade deserved her name. The newly discovered planet was vast, tangled jungle. Huge landmasses of brilliant foliage dwarfed small seas. Seen from space, the seas appeared as silver-blue islands in an ocean of greenery. Above all, Jade was a world of wet, green life. An immense tropical hothouse.
But in addition to the flora, particularly large and vicious insects had evolved here. They buzzed and hummed everywhere. Every yard of ground rustled with them; they wriggled in ponds and darkened the skies, their bodies massed in overwhelming swarms. Some of them were as big as a man’s hand and just as powerful.
Captain Rogers gunned the pneumatic drill experimentally. The glowing digital readings fluctuated wildly, climbing up the scale, then dropping back. Rogers was a big man with bulky arms and shoulders, and his pressure suit exaggerated his size, making him look like a massive white giant with thickly wrinkled skin.
“How did it happen?” he asked.
“What?” replied Dr. Beckwith.
“I mean Paul—how did the bug get into his suit?”
Dr. Beckwith waved impatiently at the air with his gloved hands. “I don’t know—he must have been carrying eggs or larva since his initial exposure.”
In contrast to Rogers, Beckwith was a man of medium height with a bulging midsection that barely fit into his suit. His arm muscles were like loose rubber bands. He blinked rapidly as he brought his mind back to the present. He had been thinking about what Jade would mean to Earth. A whole planet full of living creatures men could eat without being poisoned. An entire planet to be homesteaded and explored. Back home there would be parties and bands. He could open a school of extraterrestrial biology. The colonists would name one of Jade’s mountain ranges after him.
“Is he hemorrhaging?”
Beckwith shook his head vigorously inside his helmet. He regretted it immediately, as fingers plucked painfully at his neck muscles. “We’ve got that stopped. He’s conscious, too.”
Captain Rogers said nothing as he finished adjusting the drill and tossed it back on the workbench. The heavy metal drill hit the bench with a clang that neither of them could hear through their thickly insulated suits.
The suits the men wore were entirely self-contained. They carried nutrient pastes, air compressors, waste-recyclers—everything. They had been living in their suits since the first day, the day they had landed, when the native insects had swarmed and killed most of the crew. That meant drinking recycled, distilled and body-warm water and breathing compressed filtered oxygen that tasted like hot vinyl. Beckwith and Rogers conversed by radio; it was either that or trying to touch helmets all the time. The only sounds that could penetrate their helmets from the outside came up through the soles of their feet, usually from vibrations in the steel-plex hull of the ship itself.
Beckwith scratched the knuckles of his left hand by rubbing them up against the underside of the workbench. He shook his head, although no one could see him. His neck twinged. They couldn’t leave Jade now, not without the conclusive proof he needed. Everything would be ruined. He shifted his shoulders uncomfortably under the weight of his air tanks. He felt a touch of nervousness—it seemed that he couldn’t get enough air. Quickly, he adjusted the oxygen gauge on his forearm up a few hundredths. After a few moments he relaxed. For a moment longer, he listened to the hiss of his air valves and breathed in his own steamy exhalations.
“Let’s have a look at him,” said the captain finally. He laid all his tools on a piece of canvas and shoved them back out of the way.
Nodding his head sharply and ignoring the plucking fingers, Beckwith headed with hurried steps toward the bulkhead. Rogers followed at a much more leisurely pace.
The tiny medical ward at the heart of the ship was a tight fit. Beckwith and Rogers stayed in the corners, trying to keep out of the way. The nursing unit, named “Mom” by the crew, moved anxiously around the prone figure of Paul Foster. Her three multi-jointed arms moved independently, whirring and whining as innumerable electric motors and hydraulic screw-drives worked in unison. When either Dr. Beckwith or Captain Rogers got in the way, Mom politely bleeped and waited for them to move.
Technical officer Paul Foster lay on a stainless steel table. A thin sheet of sterile white paper separated his body from the metal. Tubes and sensory wires ran from where they were taped to pale, bloodless flesh up to a panel of self-monitoring devices that hung in festoons from the ceiling. As they watched, an IV bottle dribbled the last of its liquid contents down a tube leading into Foster’s bloodstream. A soft alarm went off and was immediately acknowledged by Mom. Within twenty seconds the robot had replaced the bottle with a fresh one.
“He doesn’t look good,” commented Rogers. “I think—”
“It’s just the anesthetic. Don’t think that he’s dying.”
Rogers shook his head. “Why can’t Mom just take that thing off him? Look at that—just look and think about what that must be like.”
Foster’s eyes were half-open, but glazed and obviously unaware. His dead-white arms were strapped to the steel table so he wouldn’t injure himself. On his exposed right thigh crouched an earth-colored lump about the size of a golf ball. Faint red lines traced up his leg from the insect, showing where its feeding apparatuses had crawled inside his arteries.
“Mom can’t just pull it off,” explained Beckwith. “See those cilia, those hair-like things around the base of it? If we even touch the carapace, it injects toxins.” His neck twinged again, a twinge of guilt. He shook his head dismally. “I warned him, I warned them all not to use repellent that first day.”
He should have worked harder to impress his theory upon the crew, but he hadn’t known with certainty what would happen. How could he have known? He squirmed inside his ill-fitting pressure suit. He rubbed the painful, itching knuckles of his left hand against the underside of the operating table, feeling the stiff fabric of his glove rasp on swollen flesh.
“I still don’t understand why the repellents didn’t—” began Rogers.
“The repellents did work,” snapped Beckwith. The captain was a fool, and Beckwith had little patience for fools. “As I tried to explain, the insects here have evolved to attack any creature bearing some sort of chemical defense against them. That’s partially why they’re
in such a dominant position in the ecological system.”
He recalled the way the insects had swarmed in reaction to the repellents. In seconds, five crewmen had become man-shaped mounds of biting insects. Dr. Beckwith had noted that several species had swarmed in unison. There had been blue, wasp-like creatures, about the size of a man’s index finger, with curved retractable stingers of shiny, black chitin. He remembered a double-winged variety of the flying spiders as well. Even a few of the crab-sized beetles that lived in the mossy undergrowth had joined in the attack. The crewmen had screamed and stumbled blindly about like men engulfed in flames. Beckwith had been quite shocked. It was very rare to have several species combine their efforts in such a manner.
“So you’re telling me that I didn’t get attacked because I wasn’t wearing repellent?” asked Rogers.
“Correct.”
“Huh,” grunted Rogers. He changed the subject. “Couldn’t we just…” He made a hacking motion in the air with his gloved hand.
“Amputate? No—we don’t have the equipment for that here…” Beckwith stopped, remembering that he didn’t want to give Rogers any excuses to leave Jade ahead of schedule. He made a nervous fluttering gesture with his hands. “Well, of course, we could do it, but the insect’s, ah—feeding tubes extend up the femoral to his heart, and…” He shook his head and then added a lie. “I don’t think any medical facility could ensure the patient’s survival during such an operation.”
For a minute or so they quietly watched Mom perform her duties. Mom clicked and whirred steadily, simultaneously monitoring Foster’s pulse, breath rate, temperature, and neural responsiveness. They watched as the machine gave her patient an injection. One of Mom’s three appendages slid open a compartment, and a needle with a tube attached came out of it. The skin of Foster’s upper arm dimpled inward, and the drug pumped into his bloodstream under measured pressure.
