The Wrong Stars

by Tim Pratt

  Elena wanted to prepare herself mentally, too, but she was surfing a wave of terror chemicals, and there was no time, anyway: Callie raised her sidearm and fired once, then pivoted a step, and fired again. Her gun was different from Elena’s: it didn’t seem to fire a bullet, but some sort of white-hot pulse. Plasma? Physics wasn’t her area, and the physics of weaponry even less so. Elena thought she heard something, a clatter of metal on metal, and she pointed her own gun into the fog.

  “Your ten o’clock!” Callie shouted, and it took a moment for Elena to realize what she was talking about: she’d heard that sort of thing shouted in old war movies, and it indicated a position, relative to Elena’s own, where she should direct her attention. She tilted sixty degrees left and aimed at the ground and fired blind, the gun jerking upward in her hands when she did. The gun was set to semi-automatic, firing bursts of three bullets at a time, but it only spat out two bursts and then stopped: Ibn must have used up the rest of the clip earlier. The bullets struck the floor and whanged off in wild ricochets, out into the fog. A silvery spider the size of a dessert plate appeared at her feet, entirely unharmed, and began to climb up her leg.

  Elena unthinkingly beat at the spider with the butt of the rifle, which at that point had become nothing more than a heavy metal club. Striking the spider didn’t seem to do much damage, but it did make the spider tighten its grip on her leg. The tough material of the environment suit dimpled, and she felt multiple points of sharp pain, but the suit wasn’t punctured – all sorts of alarms would have gone off in her helmet had the spider punched through.

  Elena drew back the gun to smack the spider again, but it was too fast, scuttling up her chest, and then to her head. Her faceplate was mostly obscured by its circular belly, and her ears filled with the sound of its scrabbling legs trying to get through the sides of her helmet. The spider wasn’t made to tear a helmet off a human, though: it was made to latch onto the head of a quiescent slave the size of an octopus. The little robot was doing its best, but this was beyond the scope of its programming, which gave her a chance.

  The spider’s belly irised open, and a myriad of small arms unfolded from within the cavity and began to tap at her faceplate, like fingernails drumming on a table top. Did Liars have skulls? Were the spiders made to punch holes in Liar skulls, so they could reach the tender blob of ganglia within?

  Elena took a deep breath, extended her arm, bent her elbow, and punched herself right in the face.

  The angle was awkward, and as such it wasn’t a very powerful blow, but it was enough. Her gloved fist, with the brushed titanium rings on her first, middle, and ring fingers, smacked into the back of the spider. She actually saw electricity arc inside the spider’s exposed interior, a blue flash of minor lightning, and then the spider fell off her helmet and landed inert on its back. Elena brought the heel of her boot down on the spider, hard, and twisted her heel, grinding its internal workings to fragments.

  The spider was dead. Her blood still thumped in her ears, and her extremities tingled, but she’d slain the beast. She looked around – Callie was on her knees, checking on Ibn, just as Shall reappeared from the mist. “Did we get them all?” Elena said.

  “Looks like it,” Callie said. “Good work. I’m just glad these spiders have some kind of hot little engine inside them, so they showed up on my heat vision. It might have been bad if they’d surprised us. Let’s hope we don’t get another wave.”

  Elena took the gun’s strap off over her head and lowered the useless thing to the floor. “Now what?”

  “Now we hope Ashok is figuring out a way to save our lives.” They all turned and looked through the glass. There was no sign of Ashok or Lantern. “We also hope the genocide squid hasn’t taken this opportunity to kill us all.”

  “If the story Lantern told us was true, she’s sort of on our side,” Elena said. “Her superiors were the genocidal ones, not her.”

  “I don’t care,” Callie said. “Her sect, her people, her responsibility. She should have argued better. Blowing up Meditreme Station isn’t something you can make right with an apology.”

  “It’s not as if Lantern pulled the trigger herself. Is every soldier responsible for the decisions of their superiors?”

  Callie scowled. “Not necessarily, but for all we know, Lantern did fire the shot that blew up Meditreme. She could be the head of her cult, playing on our sympathies and manipulating us. We only have her word to go on. I’m an investigator, among other things, and that means being skeptical, especially when you’re talking to a Liar.”

  Elena nodded. “That’s fair. I just– I guess I want to believe there’s good in her.”

  “I like that about you.” Callie smiled, and it briefly lit up her face. “Unfounded optimism can be good for morale.”

  Ibn stirred and groaned, and Elena crouched beside him. She put her facemask up to his so he could see her clearly. “You’re all right,” she said. “We’ll get you food, medical care, we’ll take you–” She’d almost said “home”, but that was an absurd concept for her crew. “We’ll take you somewhere a lot nicer than this.”

  “I still can’t believe you’re real.” Ibn’s eyes were red-rimmed and exhausted. “How did you find help? We’re millions of miles from anywhere. Did a ship just happen to pass by?”

  “It’s a long story. And, as a scientist, it will annoy you, because it involves technologies we don’t even remotely understand. I can assure you the trip back to Earth will be a lot faster than the trip out here was.” Assuming they got out of this glass cage before they died of thirst, of course.

  “Earth,” Ibn said. “It still exists?”

  “It thrives,” Callie said.

  “I was right. Hans was wrong. It’s hard for me to take any pleasure in that now.”

  “The kaiju is moving.” Shall stood poised on sharp legs, just under the spot on the wall where the opening had been, though it looked now like smooth unbroken glass.

  The bio-drone lurched away from the wall where it had collapsed and did an oddly delicate stumble-dance across the space on the other side of the glass. It paused, lifted its closed-flower head on its long flexible stalk, and then lurched abruptly backward several meters. Then it turned again, doing a clumsy sort of pirouette on its many legs.

  “It looks like it’s drunk,” Callie said. “I’m envious.”

  The drone went still again, its head now facing toward the glass, and slowly moved forward. It bumped its bulb against the glass – and an opening irised at its touch. The kaiju snaked its head through the hole, and Shall scuttled back. The bulb opened up like a lily, and Lantern dropped out, landing easily on her tentacles. “All aboard the Kaiju Express.” She paused. “Ashok told me to say that.”

  Then the bio-drone darted its flower-head and swallowed Shall.

  Within minutes, they’d all been consumed and uncomfortably squeezed up through the kaiju’s esophageal tube in a series of pulsations. Ibn had resisted letting it take him at first, trembling and traumatized by his last experience with the kaiju, but Elena soothed him, and followed him inside. Callie came last, covering the escape for everyone else, just in case more spiders arrived.

  Soon they were all back in the soft belly of the drone, light shining in from the ragged hole in its side. Ashok was standing near the front of the drone, a flashlight array on his prosthetic arm flashing what seemed like random strobes.

  “You hacked the drone,” Callie said. “I’m impressed.”

  “Lantern should get the credit,” Ashok said. “She told me, it’s all about signals. The bio-drone gets a signal to go scoop things up and then come here. The bio-drone gives the wall a signal that says ‘Open up for prisoners’. Then the drone is supposed to tell the wall, ‘OK, all done, close up again’. Except we blew a big hole in the side of the drone and scrambled its systems and sent it into emergency repair mode. There’s some failsafe in place, though, so the aperture doesn’t stay open forever, and after a certain amount of time, it closed
automatically. The spiders are dispatched by a signal, too: the bio-drone picked up five bodies, so the system dispatched five spiders to tinker with their brains.”

  “You hacked this whole system?” Callie said.

  “Ehhhh.” Ashok seesawed his hand. “We don’t know how to talk to the station, really. But the bio-drone is pretty simple. It has external light receptors, and internal ones, here on the body cavity wall. Lantern figures these drones were used as transport by the Liars back in the old days. That way they could travel around the station in style, right? There are no levers or switches or buttons, so we thought, maybe they drove them with pulses of light. We started flashing light at the receptors, and, well, you saw. We started lurching around like crazy. A little trial-and-error and we figured out how to make it move. There must be a transmitter in the bio-drone’s head that makes the aperture in the glass cage open up. That was lucky.”

  “So now we have a ride?” Callie said. “We can roam around the service tunnels or whatever until we find the rest of Elena’s crew?”

  “Better,” Ashok said. “We can get to the master control room. Lantern thinks from there we can get a look at the station as a whole, and find out exactly where her people are, control the security systems, the whole deal. Maybe even dispatch bio-drones to fetch any other survivors.”

  “Sounds easy. And therefore unlikely.”

  “You’re a cynic, cap.”

  Callie glanced at Elena. “People keep telling me that. We need to get Ibn to safety first, though. He’s dehydrated and starving and in various kinds of shock.” She cleared her throat. “Did you, ah, feel strongly about recovering your friend’s body, Elena?”

  Elena thought about it for a moment, then shook her head. “I suppose it’s not worth the risk to recover him. My crew all expected to die alone in space far from anyone.”

  “No,” Lantern said. “We shouldn’t leave any trace of humankind here. If the Axiom ever wake, or some of their machines do, and they discover evidence of another spacefaring race, in one of their own facilities? They might dispatch hunter-killer probes all over the galaxy to track you down. From the control room, I hope to be able to destroy all the records stored on this station since the Anjou’s arrival, but covering our tracks that way is wasted if we leave a body behind. Even the blood should be burned off the wall. It would be good if the stray bullets were collected too, but that is less urgent – the discovery of a few bits of brass or steel would not lead inexorably to the conclusion that unknown aliens were ever here.”

  Callie cocked her head. “That’s good thinking, Lantern. You would have been a good security officer, if you hadn’t gone another way.”

  “I didn’t go another way. I am a security officer.”

  “I can collect Hans’s remains, and the guns left behind, and I have blowtorches to erase the physical evidence,” Shall said.

  “Go ahead,” Callie said. “But go fast.”

  Shall scurried back up the esophageal tube. They all waited in thoughtful silence for ten minutes or so, and then a corpse fell out of the hole and landed with a loud thump.

  Ibn shrank away and let out a strangled sob. Shall came after, carrying the guns that had been left inside. “I am sorry. There was no other way to get his body in, other than to push him ahead of me–”

  “It,” Ibn said. “Not him. The soul inside Hans has moved on. We should treat his remains with respect, but the body is not the man.” He turned away again and began to pray softly to himself.

  “Ashok, take us back to the hangar so we can get Ibn over to the Raven.”

  “Sure thing. I think there’s a way to make the drone retrace its steps, a lot of what these things did was repetitive, so there are shortcuts.” He and Lantern consulted, and then Ashok flashed lights at the wall, and the drone lurched around and scrambled upwards, presumably heading for the tunnels. Shall moved toward the ragged opening in the drone and spanned it with his body, so no one would accidentally fall out. That was good thinking, because the trip was rough, bumpy, and fast, and sometimes weightless.

  They reached the hangar and the kaiju swam down through the air, but because of the hole in its side, the aerodynamics were bad, and it flailed and listed and wallowed. Eventually it settled near the opening in the wall and Ashok and Lantern stopped flashing lights at it.

  “Ohhhh, I have my brain back, that’s much better,” Shall said.

  “Stephen?” Callie said. “Can you hear us?”

  “I can. Good to have you back. Robin is doing well. She was fretting greatly over the rest of you, but consented to a sedative, and is getting some rest at last. Do you have more patients for me?”

  “One, Ibn, but he’s only suffering from hunger and shock, as far as we can tell.”

  “It’s thoughtful of you to space them out for me this way. I was expecting more of a trauma center experience today.”

  “We’re sending over another Anjou crew member, Hans, too, but he’s… he’s beyond help.”

  “I’m terribly sorry, Doctor Oh,” Stephen said. “I will treat his remains with all due respect and care.”

  “Thank you.” Elena appreciated the kindness, but she was distracted, looking at Hans’s body. His faceplate was still blocked by the remains of the spider that had clawed its way into his helmet. She reached out and tugged at the spider, gently, but it was seated firmly. Embedded. Pulling hard would probably tear apart things she’d rather not see torn apart. She thought of the sharp little arms that had scrabbled at her own faceplate and shuddered. She switched to a limited comms channel. “Are we sure this thing is dead, Ashok? Lantern?”

  “The spider took a bunch of bullets right through its body. Looks torn up pretty bad.” Ashok leaned over close, the lenses over his eyes whirring, and Elena had a terrible vision of the spider leaping to life, jumping at his face, burrowing its tiny appendages into his eyes and ears and mouth–

  Ashok shook his head. “No heat signature, the mechanisms are all busted up… looks like dumb metal to me. I took a look at the one we recovered because I was afraid these things might be nanomachine cradles – like, maybe they work by barfing lots of tiny machines into the brain? But all I see are electrodes and magnets, so I think it’s a combination of deep brain stimulation and transcranial magnetism designed to alter thought processes and behaviors. That stuff is macro-scale, so it can be totally busted up with a bullet. I don’t think this one is gonna come to life and kill us all or anything.”

  “Agreed,” Lantern said. “The Axiom were capable of manipulating matter at the molecular level, if not the atomic, but they were careful to keep such technology from their servants. My people would have used such technology against them, after all, to unmake their works.”

  “So there are vaults full of sleeping alien nanomachines somewhere in the galaxy?” Elena said. “That’s not comforting.”

  “Yet another reason we must prevent anyone from entering areas that were once under Axiom control.” Lantern sounded almost prim.

  Elena switched back to the open channel and heard Callie finishing up her instructions. “The canoe will be back in a minute. Shall, you escort Ibn and the body back to the ship.”

  “Are you sure? Drake can bring the canoe back by auto-pilot–”

  “I don’t want to leave Ibn alone in the canoe with his dead crewmate. Not that a giant hull repair drone is necessarily a comforting presence, but you can help them get in and out on the other end, at least. I’d send back Elena, but I doubt she’d go.”

  “Correct.” Sebastien was still in the station somewhere. And Uzoma, though they hadn’t looked so good the last time Elena saw them, and she was a little worried about meeting them again. That intellect and focus in the service of the station would be a terrible thing to confront.

  Callie said, “I don’t want to give up my heavy artillery, so we’ll wait for Shall to come back before we go looking for the control room.”

  “Very well, captain.” Shall gathered up Hans, holding the body
close to his underbelly with a few manipulator arms. Elena swapped Ibn’s air bottle with a fresh one from Shall’s supplies, though the jaunt was so short he could have held his breath. The others helped Ibn climb on Shall’s back and get strapped in place. “We should install a jump-seat up here at this rate,” Shall said.

  Elena held on to Ibn’s hand for a moment. “I’ll be with you soon,” she said. “With the others.”

  “Inshallah.” Ibn’s voice was nearly a sigh.

  The canoe floated slowly into view beyond the ragged opening, and without further farewells or ceremony Shall launched himself out of the hangar toward the waiting ship.

  As soon as Shall was clear, the opening in the wall closed up instantly, and a guttural roaring alarm began to sound.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  A big part of being a leader was making decisions when it would have been much easier to stand around being shocked and horrified. Before the door was even entirely closed, Callie had launched herself at the wall to slap the “door open” switch on the control panel, but it just flashed an angry yellow and didn’t otherwise respond. Then she pivoted and shouted, “Back on the kaiju! Ashok, get us out of here!”

  She hustled Elena and Lantern on board ahead of her, and the kaiju began fluttering its way upward again as soon as Callie clambered in. Lantern’s limbs were trembling almost spasmodically, and Elena gazed around, wide-eyed. The alarm sounded a lot like the voice from the reconditioning chamber, and even though they had helmets on and were snug inside the kaiju, the noise was still deafening.

  Callie looked out the ragged hole in the bio-drone’s side, expecting… what? More spiders? More kaiju? The Axiom themselves, risen from their slumber like mummies in a tomb in a survival horror immersive?