Hunted lop-4

by James Alan Gardner

  Silence. No more gongs.

  We had crossed the line, and the whole crew was dead. Even the woman who called me angel.

  It made my eyes sting: that she died kissing a complete stranger.

  I laid her body onto the floor as gently as I could. "I’m sorry," I said. "If the League of Peoples wanted to kill someone for being bad…" I looked around the room at the corpses. "Sorry," I told them all. "I thought it would be me."

  2

  INSPECTING MY COMMAND

  I couldn’t think of what to do next, so I just sat down on the floor beside the admiral woman. People look so helpless when they’re dead — like they’re expecting you to make it all better. Any other time, I might have tried CPR to start the woman’s heart again; but it wouldn’t work now. When the League of Peoples kills you, you stay dead.

  Dead forever, the woman who kissed me. And everyone else. So quiet: the music had stopped when the gonging began, and now there was no one to tell the sound system, "Resume play." The lounge walls continued to show Italian masqueraders laughing and dancing in feathered masks, but they were just silent pictures. No sound.

  No breathing.

  You don’t know how much you miss the sound of breathing till it’s not there.

  In all that silence, I desperately wanted to do something. Help these poor people. But all I could think of was wiping the little saliva string from the admiral woman’s cheek. So that’s the useless stupid thing I did.

  When I looked at my finger, some of the purple splotch had come off on my skin. I rubbed the woman’s face again; the splotch was a waxy sort of makeup she must have put on for the party. Was it the popular fashion now to wear big garish blobs? Or was the admiral woman like the man in pink pajamas, dressed up to imitate somebody I didn’t know?

  The woman might not be an admiral at all. Maybe this was just another costume.

  I wanted to wash her face: scrub off the gunk so she’d look like herself. Underneath, she might have been pretty. But when people died, you weren’t supposed to touch them. Contact Security and leave the site undisturbed — that’s what they always said in VR stories when things went terribly wrong.

  "Ship-soul, attend," I called out… hoping that was still the phrase you used when you wanted to talk to a starship’s central computer. "Can you please call the security officer who’s on watch?"

  A sexless metallic voice answered from the ceiling: "There are no security officers available."

  Uh-oh.

  "Ship-soul," I said, "please connect me with…" Who? The captain? No, he was dead inside the hive-queen. (I avoided looking that direction; even if the queen was just a hologram, she still gave me the jitters.) "Please connect me with the ship’s commanding officer."

  "The commanding officer is Explorer Second Class Edward York."

  "Me?"

  "You are the highest-ranking officer aboard Willow."

  I swallowed. "Is anyone else alive at all?"

  "No, Captain. Awaiting your instructions."

  Nobody had ever put me in charge of anything before. That was fine with me; I knew I wasn’t captain material.

  If you want the honest truth, I wasn’t Explorer material either. When Samantha joined the navy’s Diplomatic Corps, she absolutely insisted I go with her on her first assignment. She wanted me for her bodyguard — the only person in the universe she could trust one hundred percent. I figured Dad would make a big fuss, but he gave in almost immediately; Sam knew all the ways to make him say yes, and he never found a single way to tell her no.

  Being an admiral and all, Dad pulled strings to slip me around the entrance qualification board and straight into the navy. He didn’t want me going Diplomatic like Sam — Dad had been a diplomat himself before becoming an admiral, and he refused to let me "sully" the Diplomacy Corps’s gold uniform. For a while he was set on me being a Security officer, since the Security Corps was officially in charge of protecting Outward Fleet dignitaries… but that fell through when the senior Security admiral got pissy about Dad forcing "a totally inadequate imbecile" into her command. (The Security admiral had never set eyes on me; I guess she’d heard Dad bad-mouth me for so long, she pictured someone all gibbering and drooling.) Dad tried three more service corps without any luck, then he finally just made me an Explorer. I never went to Explorer Academy — you can’t get past the door there unless you have real brains — but Dad said I’d still fit in just fine with the other Explorers. "None of them are normal either."

  I wondered if my father might possibly feel proud of me now, seeing as I’d become a sort of a kind of a captain. No. Not likely. From the day Sam and I were born, she was the precious jewel and me the steaming mound of dog turd. Just look at what happened when things fell apart on Troyen, with the riots and war and all. The surviving diplomats got evacuated all the way back to New Earth, but I only made it as far as a stifling little observation post on Troyen’s larger moon.

  Twenty whole years Dad left me stuck there; dumped into exile and isolation. Twenty years without a break, while the other observers got rotated off in six-month shifts. Dad left me on that moonbase like something stuffed into the far back corner of the attic, something he couldn’t get rid of but never wanted to see again.

  Because of what had happened to Sam.

  Because I hadn’t been a good enough bodyguard.

  If Dad found out I’d become acting captain of Willow, he’d probably say, "Get that moron out of there before he wrecks the ship."

  It took me a while to learn anything helpful from the ship-soul. I didn’t know which questions to ask, or the keywords real captains used when they wanted a status report. Eventually though, I found out this much: Willow was locked on autopilot, heading toward a navy base near the free planet Celestia. Regulations wouldn’t let the ship dock unless we had a competent human pilot at the helm; but we could hang off at a distance till the base sent over someone who knew how to drive. Barring accidents or breakdowns, I’d be sitting in port within a week.

  That wasn’t so bad — nothing for me to do but wait and stay out of trouble.

  I decided my one and only order would be to have the ship-soul lower the temperature in the lounge: make it a big walk-in refrigerator. There were dozens of dead people lying around, and I didn’t want them starting to rot.

  My first inclination was to sit out the week in my cabin… but soon I couldn’t stand moping there, wallowing all morose. The crazy thing was, I wasn’t really mourning; I was feeling bad for not feeling worse. All those people dead people who’d talked with me and flirted with me, and even one who’d kissed me — but now that they were out of sight, I felt more alone than sad. Pitying my live healthy self rather than all those blank corpses.

  What was wrong with me? Shouldn’t I be crying and grieving and all? But the most I could do was touch my lips over and over, like maybe if I remembered the kiss exactly, I would melt into some decent sorrow, the way a normal person would feel.

  No. I just felt dull. Deadened and distant and dumb.

  After a while, I decided this was no way for a captain to act. A good captain doesn’t hang about sulking, trying to prod himself into emotion; a good captain looks after his ship. Maybe when the crew members died, one of them had left the water running, or a pressure pot boiling up coffee. In my years at the Troyen moonbase, it’d been my job to watch for things like that. So I decided to walk around Willow, every square centimeter, hoping maybe I’d find something productive to do instead of brooding all by myself.

  That’s how I found the hive-queen. A real one. Except she was just as dead as the crew.

  The venom sacs on the queen were inflamed bright green, just like the holo I’d seen in the lounge. I guess that’s where the hologram came from — the captain had taken a picture of the queen as she sat in the ship’s hold.

  From the look of the hold, the queen had done more than just sit there: she’d tried to rip straight through the walls with her claws. You wouldn’t think a creature of fle
sh and blood would be strong enough to gouge out whole chunks of steel-plast… but the far bulkhead was ribboned with huge ragged furrows, so deep I could stick my hand in up to the wrist.

  If the walls looked bad, the queen’s claws looked worse. With all that smashing and bashing, her claws had got their points hammered down blunt and their armor plate fractured like peanut brittle. Sticky brown blood was still oozing up through the cracks in her shell.

  It made me go sick in the stomach to see a queen all damaged and smashed. Injured. Broken. But it was a good thing she’d hurt herself too much to keep whacking on the walls; otherwise, she would have bashed through the hull and let hard vacuum into the ship.

  Why was Willow transporting her here on her own, without attendants? Queens go mad if they aren’t milked every day. Her poor venom sacs were like two swollen balloons bulging up where her tail met her torso: both sacs had turned grass green against her yellow body, so you couldn’t possibly miss how full they were. Queen Verity once told me it hurt like daggers to go unmilked for even a few hours past ripeness, and this queen…

  This queen wasn’t Queen Verity. And at the moment, I didn’t want to think about Verity, not with one of her royal sisters lying dead in front of me. Which one was this, I wondered. Queen Fortitude? Clemency? Honor? Or one of the queens-in-waiting who escaped from deep freeze while Troyen was spinning into civil war?

  Me, I couldn’t tell; Verity was the only queen I really knew. The palace’s chief of protocol claimed that Verity would feel grossly insulted if I ever set eyes on another queen.

  High Queen Verity had been fiercely, deeply jealous about me… but then, she’d been fiercely, deeply jealous about all her husbands. 3 WATCHING THE QUEEN

  That night I had bad dreams: a woman dying in my arms, but I couldn’t tell whether she was the blotchy-faced admiral or Samantha. Her death left something black and oily on my hands — everything I touched got smudged all over with the grease. I looked up, and floating overhead was a mirror showing that the stuff covered my face too, smeared thick everywhere… till suddenly, the oily gunk went one way and I went the other, so there were two of us standing side by side. Me, and then a second me made of sludge.

  The sludge — me screamed and screamed and screamed.

  Then a different dream: being chased by a queen in venom-frenzy, down the long promenade that swept along the side of Verity’s palace. All kinds of people cluttered the pavement, humans, Mandasars, Fasskisters, Divians, everyone hanging about, getting in the way; and I had to dodge around them or knock them over, which drove me frantic with frustration even though the queen never seemed to close the gap behind me. She ran like she could catch me anytime, but was toying with me, letting me tire myself out. Now and then she’d aim her stingers at me, and they’d spray me down with venom, like fire hoses. Eventually, the promenade got so slimy with bright green poison, I slipped and fell down hard. Before I could get up again, the queen was bending over me… only it wasn’t a real queen, but Samantha, with her head on a queen’s body…

  I woke in the darkness, all prickled with sweat. Alone in my cabin. Alone on the ship. Trembling with cold night terrors.

  That’s when it finally hit home: just how alone I really was. Nobody else on Willow but corpses. Maybe no living thing within light-years.

  As alone as a human could get.

  The realization spooked me. Gave me the rabid creeps. I suddenly got the idea that any second I’d hear a scratch at the door: the dead woman wanting another kiss, except now she was some withered skeletal thing, moaning with hunger. Or maybe it would be the queen with her blood-cracked claws, trying to break down the door and stab me with her stingers, just to ease the pain in her venom sacs.

  I held my breath, waiting for the scratching noise. Scared stiff to move for fear something outside would hear me. But nothing happened. The dead don’t really get up and walk… even when you panic yourself into thinking it’s possible.

  After a while, I thought of turning on a light. I did it fast, before I had a chance to get the creeps about that too. With the light on, it wasn’t so hard to get out of bed and get dressed; maybe it would be a good idea to go to the cafeteria for something to drink. Not alcohol — I was acting captain. But in stories, people talk about warm milk making you feel better. I couldn’t remember ever drinking warm milk, but I thought why not give it a try.

  The corridors were quiet. And empty. And dimmed down to twilight because this was Willow’s sleep shift. I could have ordered the ship-soul to power everything to daytime brightness or to play bouncy music wherever I went, but that wouldn’t fool me. The manuals pretend that night and day are just arbitrary conventions on a starship, that you can flip them back to front and no one will know the difference. Me, I felt the difference. Deep in my bones, I felt pure night smothering all around me — like it’d been waiting for years and years to catch me alone, and finally had its chance to grab me by the throat.

  Samantha would have slapped me for imagining those kind of things. She used to roll her eyes and laugh: "You’re such a child, Edward." Usually I’d laugh too and say she was the child — younger than me by a whole ten minutes.

  But I knew I was acting like a kid, letting myself get scared of nothing. Fifty-seven years old; I should know better. Halfway to the cafeteria, I turned around and headed for the captain’s quarters instead. I was supposed to be master and commander, not some puss-puppy trying to make it all better with warm milk. As of now, I’d devote myself to captainly things instead of hiding back in my cabin.

  Besides, it’d be harder to have bad dreams in a captain’s bunk, wouldn’t it? Captains don’t let themselves get carried away by imagination.

  "Ship-soul, attend," I called out loudly as I entered the captain’s room. "Vidscreen on, forward view."

  The room had a nice big monitor, filling up a whole half of one wall. The screen flicked on, showing a calm empty starscape. Nothing out there but nothingness.

  "Aft view," I said.

  More stars in the infinite black. No nightmares chasing us.

  I took a breath. "Interior view, recreation lounge."

  The screen changed to show the lounge and all the bodies, still exactly where they’d fallen. Most of the holograms were gone: their battery power had run down. Instead of the Roman soldier and the alien thistle bush, an ordinary man and woman lay crumpled against each other, both of them naked except for the harnesses that held their holo-projectors.

  The dead people looked so sad and pointless. Even the admiral woman, lying where I’d set her down… she wasn’t going to turn into a kiss-hungry demon who came slobbering at my door. She was just going to lie there and lie there and lie there, never getting up again.

  "Interior view," I told the ship-soul, trying not to let my voice crack. "The hold with the Mandasar queen."

  The image on the screen shifted to show the hold… and nothing had changed there either. The queen lay dead, her claws smashed bloody, her stingers dangling limp, her venom sacs…

  Her venom sacs…

  They weren’t bulging quite so full. They had a tiny sag to them now. And their grass green color had faded a bit.

  That wasn’t right.

  "Ship-soul," I said, walking up to the screen, "can you zoom in on this area here?" I pointed to the closest sac.

  The image expanded, so big I had to step back from the screen to see it properly: a huge looming close-up of the sac, and even as I watched I could see the outer membrane deflate a bit more.

  What was going on?

  On Troyen, one of Verity’s attendants told me queens kept making venom for two days after death… like hair and fingernails growing on human corpses. The sacs on the screen should be swelling even larger, not shrinking. I guess one of the sacs might have built up so much pressure it sprang a leak; but both sacs? Anyway, the magnified view didn’t show any spills on the floor or the queen’s body.

  For a second, I had another nudge of the cold creeps. Something was happe
ning, something I didn’t understand… and whatever it was, I had to deal with it on my own. No one would warn me if I was about to do something so brainlessly stupid any normal person would laugh out loud.

  "Just move," I said to myself. "Just get moving."

  I forced my feet toward the door; and soon after that I was running for the hold.

  There was no one there; of course there wasn’t. The hold had looked empty on the ship’s cameras, and it looked empty when I entered in person. But just in the time I took to sprint down from the captain’s quarters, the queen’s venom sacs had sagged another few millimeters.

  I approached as cautious as a mouse, keeping my eyes on the floor — if venom was spilling down, I didn’t want to step in it. For all I knew, it might eat a hole straight through my boot. Not that venom is usually acidic, but you can never tell for sure.

  It’s strange, dangerous stuff, queen’s venom, especially to humans. Sometimes a teeny droplet on your skin is enough to kill you… like when it contains nerve toxins that garble up signals going to and from your brain. Your heart stops beating because it isn’t getting the right instructions anymore. Other times, though, venom isn’t lethal after all; it just gives you hallucinations… or a rash… or a crusty patch on your wrist, at which point the doctors cut off your whole arm.

  (That happened once to a human maid at the palace. Queen Verity said the spill was just a terrible accident.)

  The thing about venom is it runs through a cycle, over a full Troyen year. Queens are milked every day, and each batch has slightly different properties. The local biochemists have filled up dozens of confidential databases, keeping track of what you get at each point in the cycle, not to mention what happens if you milk a few hours early or late. It’s all gigantically complicated, and the scientists were always struggling over the fine details; during my time as consort, they were constantly finding new trace chemicals that turned up for maybe half a day in the cycle, then vanished for the rest of year. But everyone on Troyen understood the basic principle of what venom did: it made queens.