Taia fights, movements fluid as her dance, striking hard, kicking high. To my eyes, her shape is changing, no longer so thin. Limbs fluid, transforming to something else. She swings backhand, strikes. A shape stills, and falls.
Another flies at my head, attacks, digs in fingernails. Frantic, I try to pry it off. I grasp, worthless, unprepared. My training, not physical. Can't defend myself, can't focus enough to make sense of these pages. I scramble away, toward the bookshelf.
Behind, Taia fights for us both. Her arms flail, deadly fists swinging.
As I crawl beneath the shelf, I realize I've lost the book, dropped it behind me. I turn, try to reach. Something grasps my wrist and pulls, drags me into the room. I can't quite see what it is, even as it's lifting me to my feet.
Taia's fighting several at once, whirling in wild-eyed desperation. One of her limbs is seized, then others, constraining her. She can only struggle, mouth contorted in agony. Nothing like herself. Experienced, as if she's done all this before. Also, even as she fights them, I see she's angry, angry at me. I want to help her, try to pull free, but the fluttering thing knocks me down, grasps my ankle, pulls me back. She tried to save me, now I should help her. We might not make it, maybe neither of us.
Just then footsteps approach, not the fluttering of intruders from the gates, but tangible steps, familiar. Mancer rushes in. With a clap of hands, he strikes the midair door. It shuts with a pop. From within his cloak, he draws a thick wand, heavy as a half-staff, and swings it, whirling fast as Taia did before. He strikes one, another of these squalling, half-visible demons.
"Why are you killing them?" I cry. "Aren't they what you meant to bring?"
Mancer swings without looking, again and again. His arms trace fluid arcs of a routine practiced a thousand times before, trajectories planned long before this incursion. When he finally stops swinging, the workroom is quiet. No murmuring, no whispered words, no atmospheric fluctuation.
Mancer hides the half-staff and folds his hands, instantly calm.
Taia joins his side. They're both angry.
Mancer glares. "This isn't what I sought. I told you before, you lack sufficient knowledge to understand, let alone assist. What paths you opened, I tried long ago. I realized my failure, and worked harder. Much trial and error, thousands of hours refining technique. I strengthened, learned. You are still not one tenth what I was when I began. I seek something deeper."
I look to Taia, the muse. She'll tell him I meant well.
Her eyes narrow. No help.
Mancer grips my shoulder, fixes me with his eyes. “I can forgive ignorance or error, but not curiosity. Some things should remain unknown.” He turns to depart, stops, turns back. “Except by me."
Relieved, still half-stunned, I start back to my closet. Taia follows, grasps my shoulder. The gesture feels protective, not exactly the sort of contact I hoped earlier to experience with Taia, but now it's just what I need. Comforting.
"I thought that would be our end." I pause, trying to keep my voice from breaking. "I'm sorry." I want to say more, admit how ashamed I feel. I thought I possessed knowledge and skill adequate to handle whatever might come, but I wasn't prepared. I thought I was capable enough, smart enough, to deal with anything.
"You're still a child," Taia says. "It's arrogant and stupid to believe what your child's eyes tell you must be true."
I want to ask her to explain. Everything word she says, always a puzzle, always leaving me craving explanation. Maybe that's what I like about her, that hint of something held back.
I stop outside my door. "Why will Mancer let me remain? I failed."
"Because he sees. Finally your mind is where it should be." Taia's eyebrow lifted. "You were inept, humiliated. Now you'll be less reckless. Realize your smallness, how far removed from the kind of power and attainment necessary to approach... such things."
"But--"
"Now your apprenticeship begins."
I think of something else. "Why not let me see you, the way you really look? Now that I realize how different we are."
"I should let you see." She appeared to consider. "Maybe you would finally leave me alone."
I almost promise, but stop myself. I think she knows. "I want to see."
Usually I can't stop myself staring. Her body, her colorless skin. Now I find her eyes, brilliant pink, white lashes.
Taia seems to study me. It must be the first time we've seen each other this way.
She flips back white hair, which settles near-weightless over her shoulder. "The most useful lesson is understanding the multiplicity of truths you'll never, ever gain." Taia's shape doesn't change, but she leans in, looks at me closer.
Eye to eye, noses almost touching. I feel her breath, see deep into her eyes, see behind them. There I learn with perfect clarity how much more there is, levels deeper than I will ever know. So far removed from the possibilities I understood this morning, emergent into a world entirely changed.
Taia leans in, kisses me with her pale, bloodless lips. I jump, startled. How much has changed?
Mysteries remain. It's better to wonder, to imagine, than to know for sure. I return to my closet, the tiny, dark place where I sleep and work, and learn to live.
Normally she would cut the lancing pain from the sudden rush of blood past too-cold cell membranes with a smoke, but there wasn’t enough atmosphere for tobacco to burn, and she was too fresh from cryo to drop nicotine straight. As her heart shuddered lazily back to life, Julia made due with a long drag of reclaimed body moisture, apple flavored and pharma tainted. She floated in the center of the pilot-tank, breathing softly in the cloistered monochrome gloaming of the data feeds wallpapering her photonic-crystaline cell. Augmented reality systems were only just coming online, shimmering out of the darkness like the defrost-cocktail bubbling in her guts. The holo emitters lit up, and the bootlog faded into the soft opalescence of the AR's basemode. Muscle memory played phantoms of the Huntsman humming to life on the other side of the meter deep well of light that surrounded her. Julia blinked frost from her eyelashes and extended her arms. A dynamic regalia of luminous red rings appeared around her wrists, spiraling softly as she navigated menus to find the quaint bakery skin she had picked up from a Galilean bard. She had paused by his tiny stall, a single note in the cacophony of the Callistoan central market, transfixed by the heady aromas of a bakery in full swing wafting from the bard’s ARcore. She had wanted it instantly, made the excuse to herself that maybe it would help ‘Granny’ forgive the things she had said before heading upsystem to the Jovian worlds. She couldn’t decide between disgust at her father at mapping his dead mother into an AI persona, or herself for wanting to assuage a machine’s bruised ego. The real Granny would have loved the bakery, and that was all that mattered. Julia spun radiant indices until she had the bakery skin and the AR, pressed them together and slapped the lambent amalgam with her palm.
In the implied distance of the holointerface, the Huntsman’s operations and systems files assembled themselves as a thousand buns, rolls, muffins, and pastries of every kind. Gauges and datafeeds glistened like sugary trifles in the parade of overstuffed bake cases that marched between dark hardwood pillars. Julia’s long empty stomach clenched as a panoply of scents bloomed into being. She turned to face away from the delicious procession and sucked saccharine apple-ish ichor. The forward view screen was a vast plate glass storefront, beyond which the barren depths of the outer solar system clawed at the illusion of light and warmth in the little faux bakery. She had awoken right on target, coming into orbit above her home, but they were radio silent and running dark. In the penumbral abyss between Pluto and Charon, the twin docking beacons of the research station shone brighter than the forest of stars. It was the only sign of life among the stark, polyhedral silhouettes of the station pods in the inky, glacial surface of the little moon.
Julia turned back to the wall of delicious lies and stepped behind the counter. She scanned the grid of buttons on the polished bra
ss mechanical cash register until she found one marked ‘COMMS’ and stabbed it with her finger. The bake case to her right shuddered, suddenly rearranged into a dozen trays of cupcakes, grouped by band from red velvet optical and infrared down to double-vanilla geomagnetic noise. There was silence for several light-hours. The closest radio signals registering this far out were oort-water mines and the Voyager museum.
“Charon Local 337,” she croaked into the comm. “This is L2RH - Huntsman requesting approach vector and docking permissions.” She held her breath while the seconds counted off and the station grew in the darkness beyond the storefront. Something was wrong.
“Charon Local 337, please confirm?” Julia moved down the line of bake cases, reading off their burnished copper nameplates until she found the diagnostics. She opened the case, a wicker basket suddenly weighing at her left elbow. She plucked specialist arbiter protocols from a rack of cream-frosted diagnostic expert-systems and dropped them into her basket. Overhead, the selected systems flashed red on a luminous holo of the Huntsman and the two dozen cargo containers she was towing. Julia had always loved the Huntsman, even when it had been nothing but the inert guts of a type 2 Myrmidon. It had been beautiful when they found it spinning derelict out from the plane of the elliptic, with its long sleek cannon and the jagged thruster fins bristling from the pilot-tank’s casing. Julia had spent half her youth helping her father rebuild it, listening to his stories of the Jovian civil war. Cargo manifests streamed illegibly at each virtual container as the research station’s customs bot validated her haul. Julia paused to squint at the manifests.
“If your customs protocol is online, you’ve gotta be able to hear me.” As Julia bounded back to the communications display, her basket chimed the completion of diagnostics. She found an animated readout sheet among the empty, crumb speckled muffin cups and wrapping papers. Everything checked out, though bio-med flagged her rehydration and muscle response as below normal defrost rate. She threw open the bake case and grabbed the active cupcakes from the laser comm array and slipped them in among the their chocolate-caramel cousins on the UHF tray. Candied systems-integration data streamed down their frosting.
“Charon Local 337, this is L2RH - Huntsman requesting approach vector and docking permissions.” Juliet forced a level tone. Imagined catastrophes teemed at the edges of her thoughts. “I just pulled six days of cryo Granny! I can’t handle this.” She blurted into the comm.
A third blaze joined the docking beacons as 337’s target acquisition laser painted the nose of the Hunstman, pouring autonav data and permissions into the ship’s computer.
“Finally.” Julia ran her hand along the AR display, gathering up the image of bake cases and bread racks like cloth. She flipped it to basemode, then threw it into the thin air, scattering instruments and indicators. With a few deft gestures, she brought the data suite and tactical systems to fore. Active sensors lit up everything larger than a grain of sand and closer than fifty thousand kilometers. Astrometerics wove the data into her sensorium and the pilot-tank evanesced, leaving the illusion that she was floating in space, slowly spinning towards the hangar pod as she decelerated. There was nothing of significance on the scan. Even the navbouys within a couple of light minutes were quiet. She grabbed the navsys image of her approach, spread it wide with both hands, and pinned it to the air at port. “Bridge command, what’s your status?”
As she asked, flood lamps bloomed in the docking bay. The Pluto Special was still dry docked in the shuttle berth, leaving just enough room for the Huntsman in the auxiliary docking harness if she ditched her cargo first. She glanced up at the holo of the pods, laid out in twin rows opposite the tapering length of Huntsman’s cannon, each one a month’s provision. She tried to position the ship so they would lock onto the outer hull of the station and not just float past, then disengaged the tractor beam.
“Bridge command is currently unavailable.” Granny’s venerable growl was distorted by the format transition. Julia ground her teeth, fists clenching at the mockery of her grandmother’s voice. Too late she realized the AR wouldn’t read the gesture as anger. The Huntsman lurched forwards as aft thrusters burned at full. It’s tail fins caught on the docking harness. The cannon skipped off the hull, spinning the ship up, half out of the harness before Julia could open her hands and counter the thrust. But the ship wouldn’t move. Its gun was trapped in the airlock gantry. Several thruster fins were tangled in the actuators of cargo loading arms.
Julia closed her eyes and prayed for strength. “Look, just put my father on the line.” She snapped and started checking the seals on her suit manually before waving the skin of the pilot-tank aside. When the front wall of the pilot-tank had irised away, it was clear she was in real trouble. The beam emitter at the end of the Huntsman cannon would have to be cut free of the airlock’s frame.
“Jacob is currently in the reactor pod.“
Julia roared into her helmet as she floated towards the airlock, her fingers trailing down the barrel of the Huntsman’s gun . “Look, put me through to a person will you?”
Granny huffed dejectedly on the comm. “I don’t think you should talk to me like that anymore.” her voice rasped. “It’s disrespectful.”
“I doesn’t mater what you ‘think’. You’re not real! Just put a human on the line.”
There was a moment of disapproving silence on the line, then Granny growled. ”No such crew person is available.”
“Where the hell is the crew?”
“All registered crew members are in the reactor pod.”
Julia froze for a moment as she tapped at the control screen for the outer pressure seals. A tremor welled up from her guts. “What?” From inside bulbous gauntlets, her fingers shook against the cold, dead screen as she tried to enter her authorization. “Granny, why isn't the airlock door responding?”
“The better to prevent unscheduled contact during quarantine.”
Julia’s heart raced. “Qu.. Quarantine?” The word struggled out of her. Anxious moisture filmed between her skin and the cloying mylar lining of her suit. “There’s no broadline about a quarantine.” Julia had grown up knowing that life this far out was tenuous. This was the first time it had ever really seemed true. “Am I cleared to come aboard?”
“I don’t think that’s such a good idea, class 1 isolation protocol is in effect.” Granny whined worriedly. “I can’t promise you’ll be safe, baby.”
“I’m not your fucking baby!” Julia shrieked. “My suit is tight. I’ve got maybe an twenty minutes of atmo left!” She took a deep breath, tried to stop shaking. “Just let me in.”
“I’m just trying to keep you safe is all.” Granny muttered despondently as the airlock cycled down and the hatch spun open. “I can’t help being worried about you...” her voice trailed off to a sad murmur on the comm. Julia clambered in, yanked the emergency atmo rations from the inner wall, and used her reflection on the inner door to aim as she integrated the two white spheres into the thick red metafabric of her suit. When the outer door sealed itself, the station’s atmo filtered into the airlock, bringing a haze of bone white fluff drifting in with it.
“Granny?” A film of the stuff formed on Julia’s visor. “Why is the station quarantined exactly?”
“Surface mission 22-997 introduced foreign elements to the life support core.”
Julia pinched a tuft of the stuff from the filter on the air duct. “Foreign elements?” It was a terrifying prospect, thousands of new diseases had torn through colonies as humanity expanded into alien worlds.
The inner airlock door cycled open. “A fungus like organism.” Granny grumbled on the comm. “It calls itself mi-go.” The inner airlock door opened.
Julia floated down into the vertical access shaft that ran the length of the station. Linear constellations of emergency lighting ran down the three meter wide tube until they vanished in a well of darkness at the base of the station. “Wait. Calls itself…?” All the hatches Julia floated past were sealed
from the outside. “Granny? We had Xeno contact in-system?”
The reactor pod’s blast door was sealed, only a sliver of golden light shimmered at the tiny view port. Granny’s voice dipped to a whisper. “The mi-go told me that it has inhabited Yuggoth longer than humanity has had culture.”
Julia’s suit bleeped irritably at the radiation levels and the heat coming off the reactor pod. “What’s Yuggoth?” There were muddled life signs readings in there as well, enough to account for the whole crew and then some. “Granny? Why are the crew all sealed in the reactor pod?”
“The better to isolate the infection until the process is complete”
Julia pressed the palm of her gauntlet against the access panel for the reactor pod door controls. She flexed her hand slightly against control relays embedded in the fingertips of her pressure glove. The screws holding the panel in place spun themselves up from their sockets and lay down, magnetized against the hull.
“Huntsman?” There was a chime inside her helmet as a tiny icon in the shape of her ship appeared, like an inverted cartoon t. “Send a quarantine order on the broadline. Unknown xenophange.” Julia pulled the main power feed. “Oh, and download Granny. Run some diagnostics on that crazy old bitch.” She prized out the wires she was looking for from the rat’s nest behind the panel. “But, use an isolated processor.” She clipped the two wires she was looking for and tapped the ends together.
The door jumped open. A thick haze of moisture and long alabaster filaments of the pasty fungal spore-fluff poured out like vomit. Julia sucked her breath in sharply. Inside the reactor pod, the circular walls and deck around the reactor were coated in a squirming film the color of bruised flesh through which foamed technicolor masses of fungal polyps oozing heady oils. It enveloped every console and surface, blocking out light and life support. Only the reactor glowed. It was white hot, burning like a tiny sun. It should be erupting, boiling them into an expanding cloud of vapor. Instead, lightning arced from that weird furnace to three pinkish crustacean-things about the size of a man. They hovered, revolving around the shinning orb. Their bodies bristled with limbs, several curled inwards though twin bundles of membranous flesh jutted outwards from each creature’s back; they billowed like light fabric on the wind in the streaming light pouring from the reactor. Each creature was crowned by a convoluted ellipsoid swathed in quivering antennae. They seemed lethargic, or sick, in their furtive gesticulations.
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