by Brit Jones
“Countless? I thought everyone was dead.”
For the first time, I thought I heard the sigh of a machine frustrated by the sluggish human mind. “It accessed my core. It knows where all the populated worlds are throughout this galaxy. It knows how to use an Alcubierre wave drive. If it acquires one, for example, from the next salvager to find us, it may tire of us and seek out more prey. Its hate is vast. It will not stop until every person is dead—everyone in the known worlds and beyond. Do you understand?”
I bent over and surrendered to my threatening hyperventilation for a moment. If what she said were true . . . I imagined the Hand wreaking havoc on a space station, an established colony, one of the central planets—doing what it had done to the colonizer everywhere else. But an explosion big enough to destroy a reinforced hulk like the Queen wouldn’t be much less than that of a small sun.
Which gave me an idea.
“Why not haul the Queen into a star’s gravity well?”
“We are on the outer rim, Captain. There are no stars close enough and our wave drive was destroyed in the first explosion.”
“What about your explorers?”
“Walkabout has jettisoned their essential wave-drive components. We did not want the entity to escape with the knowledge it now possesses. There was no way for it to travel.”
“Except for the Recovery.” I remembered the charred, bony fingers tapping at the airlock. “Which is now fekked.”
“Yes. The entity could escape, even now, if it so wished, but I do not believe that is its primary goal. As I told you, it thrives on torment. I believe it wanted to use the Recovery to torture us, perhaps taunting us with the knowledge that it could go at any time and bring doom to humankind. I believe its objective will be to drive us mad and destroy us before it sets out to feast on those trillions it knows exists.”
“You seem pretty sure.” I knew AIs were programmed with sophisticated psychological profiles, but I wasn’t so sure those applied to a fekking demon right out of one of the old stories in the big black book. Hezu Christos. It wasn’t possible. I’d never heard of an AI believing in demons. I barely believed in them myself.
“If the entity wished to escape, it could have done so after it penetrated my data. Instead it continued to strive with me, hunt the crew, and carry on its deadly spree until we trapped it. I am certain it knew I would seek the destruction of all wave-capable drives. It also gathered from my protocols that someone would search for us if we did not make contact. It expected someone like you, Kira, and it has patience. It will await another.”
“Then why would it try so hard to take over the Recovery? It seemed pretty intent. Why not just wait for the next idiot?”
“Queen just told you! He’s evil,” Walkabout said. “He was probably going to fly around and make us think he was leaving. Or maybe because it would make you mad, Kira.”
“Because fekking up my wave drive doesn’t make me mad.”
“As I said,” the AI interrupted, “someone else will come, eventually. We must destroy the colonizer ourselves before that happens. Only one step remains. I don’t suppose you have an engineering background, Captain? The two of you might finish very quickly together,” the Queen said.
“You want a quadrant of space combed for something lost, I’m your girl. Never cared much for science, though I know how to repair most of Recovery’s parts.” I’d been in salvage for twenty years, and a body can’t spend that much time relying on machines to keep her alive without incurring some incidental engineering and mechanics skills.
“Very well. We shall do our best. Hezu willing, it will be enough. Now that the Hand roams free, we must be as quick as possible. We must accelerate our plan.”
I’d never heard an AI use the Lord’s name before. I wondered if she prayed for Walkabout whenever the kid boarded the colonizer with that thing. An AI who followed the black book, it was almost harder to believe than the dead man I’d seen crawl out of the airlock.
“You and Walkabout must carry my most powerful processing cores to Cargo A and install me in the interface she has built. Then I will perform the calculations necessary to destroy the ship. With your help, it will only require one trip.”
“Hold on a minute. You’re talking about the ship we happen to be living on right now.”
“Your sacrifice would preserve the life of trillions of fellow humans.”
The cameras zoomed in and out again. I wondered what her psych profiling programs were telling her about me.
“Can’t you delay the detonation or something so we could get away?”
“Not if the entity is present. He will begin to strive with me, and, in this state, I have no redundant cores to flee to. Even in this compressed form, I am immensely complex. He would achieve an eternal body, one that would never decay, and one that is capable of processing and carrying out commands many, many times more quickly than a human mind. I know my own value, Captain. TerraCo would be very interested in recovering me. When I am found and installed in TerraCo Central he would be unleashed.”
She was right. Walkabout figited. I was the one who broke the silence.
“We can’t let him get away,” I surprised myself by saying.
“Finally,” Walkabout said. “Let’s go. We’re running out of time.”
The Queen gave us her last instructions and said tender things to Walkabout, about what a brave girl she was and how proud she was of her. Walkabout scrubbed her face with one dirty forearm whenever she didn’t think I was paying attention—I was pretty sure she was wiping away tears. I pretended not to notice and numbly followed Walkabout’s instructions to unhook the cables feeding into the Queen’s dual cores. The AI cycled down to bare minimums as we unplugged her, feeding off just enough internal power to stay conscious, which would allow her to see what was happening during our mission and take the final, desperate action of self-deletion if necessary. Which didn’t explain what Walkabout and I were supposed to do if that happened.
If it were only the two of us left, he could kill either one of us and gain a new pair of hands. Unless we cut them off ourselves. I looked down at my fingers and wiggled them and marveled what wonderful, beautiful machines they were. Could I do it? Could I cut off my own hands?
“Let’s go.” Walkabout helped me loop the straps of the Queen’s bigger core over my back, and then I strapped the smaller one around the kid’s spare frame.
“You sure you can carry that?” I asked. I was pretty sure she’d have carried it even if she had to crawl.
“I got them here, didn’t I?” she said.
I shook my head and stared at the determined thrust of her chin. When I was her age, I barely knew how to pilot a basic jumper. This kid was taking on a demon, even though it meant her own death. And I was more scared than she was. “Okay. Let’s go before I realize what a stupid idea this is.”
“Here.” Walkabout passed a knife to me. “Hands are good, especially if you know how to cut the tendons just right on a wrist. The hand will flop right over. But if you can cut off his head, that’s even better. It takes him a while to get out of only a head, but necks are way harder to get through than wrists, ‘cause there’s too many muscles.” She made a sawing motion at her own wrist.
“I’m not going to cut your hands off, Walkabout.” I stepped into the lock and sealed my faceplate.
“You will,” she said, her words dulled by the compreglass over her face. “If he takes me.” And she opened the lock, and the vacuum sucked away our air and anything I might have said back.
The Queen’s core was heavy on my back when we re-entered the colonizer’s gravity envelope, but not unmanageable. Walkabout led me through the ship without hesitation, not showing how much the burden she carried weighed, except that she moved a little more slowly and her voice, when she spoke, was strained around the edges. She knew the colonizer very, very well. She stopped to interface a viewpad into the Queen’s rudimentary systems, the ones that still provided data tracking of
moving crew. Quinquilleros was in Cargo A, waiting for us.
“How does he take someone over?” I was stalling. I knew it, and felt shame for the attempt, but I tried to delay the inevitable anyway.
Walkabout studied the screen without looking up at me. “I don’t know. Queen says she felt sort of pressed when he moved into her lesser cores. I guess he tells you to die. At least, that’s what . . . what I heard.” I realized she’d watched everyone she knew die, killed by this thing.
“I won’t let him get you,” I said, without realizing I was speaking aloud.
She turned to look at me.
“I won’t let him get you either, Kira.” She took off her EVA glove and spit in her dirty palm. “Shake.”
I did the same and squeezed her hand. I’d just made a death pact with a thirteen-year-old, and it made me feel safer.
But there wasn’t anything terrible waiting for us outside Cargo A. The huge doors were shut.
“When I open this door, he’s probably going to try for you, okay? You’re older, and he likes to take over older people.”
She was as bad as the Recovery. “Fifty is not that old.”
Walkabout ignored me and kept talking. “You have to keep the Queen safe. When he comes after you, you run. I’ll follow behind and when you get ahead, turn around quick and shut a door behind you. I’ll be behind him, then we’ll trap him between us, right? I’ve got all the panel covers off. Tear up the wires inside so he can’t get back out again and I’ll do the same on my side. Then we circle back around.”
“I am really not sure about this plan.” Any strategy that relied on my general physical fitness was not the best idea.
“It will work,” she said. “He’ll think we’ll run away, like before. Ready?”
“No,” I said, but Walkabout stood on her tiptoes and reached inside the mess of wires coming out of the control panel by the big cargo doors.
I wasn’t ready, and I couldn’t have been. As soon as the doors started opening, bodies spilled forward. A cascade of swollen, unrecognizable faces tumbled down on top of us. Someone was screaming—it was me. Fluids ran everywhere, draining out of wrist holes and rents in the uniform fabric. Rotting intestine slapped against me and piled, slippery and wet, onto the deck. I tried to push the bodies away, but my legs were pinned by the mass of them, and gore sprayed across my faceplate.
I felt the presence of the Hand, his hate, his evil. He was coming for me again. In vain, I looked around for Walkabout, hoping she was going to rescue me.
Walkabout cowered against the wall under the control panel. Two bodies rimmed with frost advanced toward her, stutter-stop. One was tall and slender, with a brush-top of short auburn hair, the other smaller, rounder, on her head a mass of kinky dark curls dusted with frozen moisture like snow. The tall one crawled, then went limp, and then smaller one moved, then collapsed. They inched forward like a wave, as though the Hand were jumping between them to come toward her.
“Elizabet,” the small round one said, its frozen mouth forming the word clumsily. The skin was burnt by cold. “I want to hold you.”
“We love you, Elizabet,” the tall, slender one said, its lips blue and deformed. It reached an icy, swollen hand toward her. I realized these four hands were the ones Walkabout was missing. The corpses’ lapel badges read LOVARA.
Walkabout’s parents.
The one speaking collapsed again, and both of them stopped moving. Walkabout made incoherent sounds and couldn’t seem to raise her knife. Her mouth stretched in an empty circle of repulsion and longing.
The Hand waded through the sloppy dead like a tide, unblinking eyes drinking in what he was doing to that strange, brave little girl. She folded in on herself, rocking, sobbing. Then the Hand’s burnt corpse slumped, and I realized he was jumping between her parents’ bodies again. I recognized the signs—both bodies had spent extensive time in vacuum. They were very well preserved, recently brought in from the dark.
I couldn’t watch her come apart and do nothing. I thrust against the corpses pinning my legs. What I touched parted under my fingers, and rotting flesh came off in sodden chunks. There were bones under the rot, and I gripped them and flung them off, kicking my way free.
Walkabout screamed—her parents had reached her and pawed at her in turns. One dropped, then the other embraced her in its frozen arms, then vice versa. It was horrible—but I realized Walkabout’s torture meant the Hand’s favorite body was vacant. I surged through the rotting people, slipping over and around them, falling, getting up again. When I got close to where Quinquilleros was crumpled on the deck, I didn’t wait for correct aim. I sliced the knife into its charred arm, skidding the blade down to the one remaining wrist, slicing through the thumb bone and deep into the charred meat of the hand.
The entity’s consciousness flooded back into Quinquilleros. He hit me with the stump of his other arm, but then I gave everything I had and yanked the knife until the hand came off, fingers and all. The peeled eyes tracked my face and the lipless, tongueless mouth gaped. Then I felt the pressure.
He was going to take me now. Quiet seeped through my chest, spreading from my stilled heart. He was too strong. I felt myself slipping away, sideways from myself, as though I were being sucked out into space. Quinquilleros’s body knelt and embraced me with its handless arms. The Hand was moving into me, and I could feel it. There was pain, all over my body, but the strongest was in my arm. I looked and saw I’d brought the knife against my own flesh, cutting into my wrist just above my EVA glove. I bore down and felt a sharp heat as skin and tendons parted. Blood welled out of the cut. The Hand raged as it tried to crawl inside my mind and push me out, but I wouldn’t go. I hung on and heard a small, lost voice in my head repeating, over and over, “Everyone’s dead—” Everyone would be, everyone everywhere, if I gave up.
I girdled my left wrist, slicing completely through the EVA suit. Blood trickled and my heart was a quiet nothingness. The Hand still tried to take me over, the pressure crushing me down until I had nothing left but the blade and the cutting. My suit released sealing foam to try to repair itself, but couldn’t keep up. Then I was through to the bone all the way around, and my left fingers hung limply. Sweet Hezu. I was really doing it. Too late, I realized it was impossible to sever the tendons in both wrists alone. To do the other and make myself useless to him, I needed Walkabout. She was still huddled against the wall, paying attention to nothing and no one, so I tossed my blade. It skidded across the deck plates and thudded into the bodies of her parents, which were dormant and draped around her like the Hand was with me. My sight started to darken—my heart was a lifeless clump of tissue under my ribs.
Walkabout’s eyes tracked the knife, then where it had come from—our eyes locked and she stopped screaming. She kicked the corpse arms away and raised her knife, tears streaming down her vengeful, wild face. The Hand freed me, flowing back into one parent, then another. The corpses of her parents took turns grabbing her wrists to stop her, saying her name over and over. Elizabet. Elizabet. Elizabet.
The fact that my heart started beating again was a relief at first, but then I realized blood pulsed out of the jagged slices on my wrist. I stepped around Quinquilleros’s empty body to help Walkabout, but the AI core on my back grew heavier with each step I took, pulling me off balance. I was unstable—I wobbled, tripped, and went down in a spray of blood and rot. I lunged forward to grab one of the Lovaras by the back of the leg. The body’s frozen mass was heavy, even though I’d grabbed the shorter, rounder one—her mother. The weight was almost too much, and I slid as I yanked. But it was enough. Walkabout climbed free of the dead arms she’d been poking with her laser saw. There were two severed hands near her—her mother’s. Her father grabbed her helmet. I found my knife on the floor, got up on my knees, and lurched forward with a one-handed slash. My knife clanked against the glass of her faceplate and a frostbitten fingertip flew through the air; then Walkabout was free and scrambling over bodies inside the big cargo d
oor. The Queen’s other core slowed her, ruining her balance, and she crashed sideways into the wall of corpses. Her father’s frozen grasp locked around the collar of my helmet, and I stabbed him in the shoulder. We both went down among the dead.
The cargo doors started to shut, pushing the corpses out of their way. I crawled, dragging Lovara’s frozen corpse, whose arms were locked tight around my knees, and put us both in the path of the crushing doors. I stabbed him again, and my blade lodged in solid flesh. The doors pressed bodies against me, against us, and I felt the pressure of the corpses on either side trapping us. He rolled away, and I lost hold of the knife. The pile of bodies and parts, fluids and rotting organs, surged over me, around the closing cargo door, and I crawled backward as fast as I could.
The cargo door clanged shut. The sound of servos grinding and crushing bone was loud—I knew Walkabout had overridden the failsafes. I didn’t know if I’d gotten my feet inside. I felt numb all over. But I was able to bend my knees and crawl away from the mess by the door. My feet were still attached. I’d made it. I was covered in Hezu knows what, but I’d made it. My wrist bled freely, and I clamped the fingers of my good hand over the wound. I looked around at all the corpses in the room, waiting for the Hand to flow into one, cause it to rise. None of them did.
Walkabout was on all fours by the door controls, hyperventilating, coughing.
“Hey, kid. I need your help.” I slipped on my way over to her, but didn’t look down to see what I’d tripped on. I didn’t want to know anymore.
“Stay back,” she’d recovered enough to lift her knife and threaten me, still breathing hard.
“He’s not in me. It’s hard for him to get ahold of me. I don’t know why.”
She pointed her knife at me, eyes wild. I realized the room was dark around the edges, and the darkness was telescoping in. I slumped down, shock and blood loss draining what I had left.
“It’s me. Help me.” I held up my injured arm.
She looked around at the bodies on the floor and kept her knife out, but she came to me. She untied a bandana from around her neck and knotted it over my wrist with burning pressure. It was probably too tight. I didn’t want to risk loosening it and bleeding out, so I left it. The human remains trapped in cargo with us were in bad shape—whatever he’d done to move so many corpses had damaged them severely. I didn’t feel the Hand’s presence—he probably couldn’t use the bodies in here. But I wondered if he’d figured out what we were doing and if he had a plan to stop us.
