Injection Burn

by Jason M. Hough

  He felt Tania shift next to him. She’d drifted off, too, and her hand now brushed lightly against his. Despite them both wearing gloves, the touch sent a little ripple of sensation up through his arm. He did not pull his hand away. It was dark, and Tim was not paying attention. The younger man and Prumble were speaking quietly a few meters away, debating the finer points of cricket. They might as well be speaking an alien language.

  “Sky,” a quiet voice said, startling him.

  He glanced up and turned, saw Vanessa behind him. She clung to a branch for support. “What is it?” he asked.

  “Join me on patrol.”

  “Patrol? For what?”

  She wrinkled her nose, and shrugged.

  He sighed, reluctant to leave the warmth, and the feel of Tania’s hand against his. “Sure. I’m too on edge to sleep, anyway.” He slipped his hand from under Tania’s and pulled his foot from the rung on the ground. Then he turned and followed Vanessa into the branches, feeling the leaves brush against his thermal suit.

  From her tone he’d assumed Vanessa truly just wanted company. To talk, move about. Do anything but sit here and wait. Not so much a patrol but an excuse to be busy. But she did not even look back. Her path was deliberate, specific.

  “Wait for me,” he said.

  She braced herself against a branch until he drew up next to her.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “I didn’t want to alarm the others but, well, I think…I saw something. Out there. Outside the sphere.”

  He straightened. “Saw what, exactly?”

  “I’m not sure. It was small, like an insect or small bird.”

  “Loose debris,” Skyler offered.

  “No,” Vanessa said. “It changed course. In midair it just stopped, then continued on in a different direction. Like it was exploring.”

  “Maybe you should get some sleep, Vanessa,” he found himself saying automatically, regretting it the moment the words were out. Part of him recognized the sincerity behind her words. She’d never given him reason to doubt her before. But another part of him wanted no complications. Not now. Not while they were blind and defenseless. “You’re on edge. We all are.”

  “Skyler, I’m not imagining this. Come see for yourself.”

  She pushed off again, and Skyler followed, all the way to the transparent wall of the sphere. “Where?” he asked, stifling a yawn.

  For a time Vanessa said nothing. She just floated next to him, staring out. He began to wonder if this had been some kind of ruse to be able to talk to him alone, but that wasn’t like her. He studied her face for a moment, then turned to look out beyond the barrier.

  “There,” she whispered, pointing.

  He turned to where she indicated, squinting. Sure enough, a small silvery object drifted through the space outside the biome. It could have fit in Skyler’s palm. Loose junk, adrift. Had to be. Though he knew instinctively this could not be right. The ship was utterly motionless. Only movement could send something through the air like that. Unless…

  The object stopped. Froze in place. Skyler sensed Vanessa tense beside him. He gripped her arm and held her, willing her to remain still. Together they watched as the object turned in place. In a circle, then another at a different angle. It repeated this.

  “It’s searching,” Vanessa whispered.

  Skyler said nothing. His mouth had gone dry. What could it be? The most likely explanation was some automaton of Eve’s, accidentally left powered on. Or perhaps she’d left it active on purpose, a way to make sure nothing went wrong. But Eve had explained in very clear terms that no such activity would or could be allowed. Too risky. Besides, he’d only seen small autonomous craft outside the ship, during the hull inspection. So what, then?

  Only one plausible answer: Captors.

  Like a startled fish the object suddenly darted away, upward toward the next biome. Through the slightly fogged glass of the sphere the object became difficult to follow, and vanished just a moment later into the darkness.

  “I’m not just seeing things, am I,” Vanessa said. It was not a question.

  “No, you are not.” He sucked in his lower lip, eyes still searching the darkness. “Let’s go talk to the others.”

  They floated back to the circle. Prumble stirred at Skyler’s return, and soon they were all more or less alert and looking at their captain.

  “Right,” Skyler said, “okay. I don’t want to alarm anyone—”

  “Has anyone ever said that and not alarmed literally every fucking person present?” Prumble asked, voice gruff. He did a little flourish with his hand, urging Skyler to continue all the same.

  “Something is out there, floating around, and not randomly. Not just loose debris. It’s moving like a small robotic fish.”

  “Something of Eve’s?” Tania asked.

  He shrugged. “Possibly. Hard to say. But, I think we should risk someone going out there and grabbing it. It could knock into something. Bump against a switch and light this place up, for all I know. Better to deal with it quickly than to sit in here and hope it doesn’t ruin the plan.”

  “Could be the plan is already ruined,” Sam said. “Suppose that’s one of the enemy.”

  “Yes. I thought of that, too, but everything we know about them is they favor viruses, bold action, and vast numbers. No, I think this is just a mistake of Eve’s. A maintenance drone, or something.”

  “I’ll go,” Sam and Vaughn said in unison.

  Skyler shook his head. “Not this time. Vanessa, you’re up. Just you.” Sam started to object but he cut her off. “The fewer of us outside, radiating heat or whatever, the better.”

  The couple nodded in unison, reluctantly but for once without any apparent sarcasm. Skyler nodded back, and turned to Vanessa. “No thrusters. No weapons. No comms. We can’t risk some kind of microwave signal radiating out into space.”

  “Right,” she said, and turned to go.

  “Sam? Vaughn?” Skyler said. “You’re the backup. Help her prep, and wait suited by the airlock in case anything goes wrong.”

  “Will do,” Sam replied.

  The trio glided to the cave first, emerging a minute later with an improvised sack made from what Skyler presumed was a torn up blanket. They proceeded to the airlock and finished suiting up. A minute later Vanessa was outside, a dark smudge against the blackness beyond the sphere, drifting up toward the second biome.

  Place Unknown

  Date Unknown

  IN AN ADJACENT chamber they discovered an incredible gift. Despite the utter darkness Alex knew what he’d found almost instantly.

  “Our space suits,” he whispered.

  They dressed in silence, save for the occasional anguished grunt from Jared. He was in pain, clearly. A powerful headache that had the man flirting with delirium. “Stay focused,” Alex said. “We’ll get out of this.”

  Jared could not quite vocalize a reply. He managed only a muted agreement.

  The suits had been dumped into the chamber with total abandon. By feel alone Alex could find no damage to his. Not a scratch. He’d expected tears or cuts after the battle he’d fought with the immunes, but the suit appeared to have been expertly cleaned or repaired, maybe even both. The material felt odd to the touch, as if it had been covered by some kind of transparent grit. The fit was more snug than he’d remembered, too. Still, despite the incongruities he felt a rush of joy when he flipped the helmet’s computer into the on position and saw the small bank of LEDs begin to cycle colors as the systems powered up.

  Alex twisted his helmet into place. Green and blue readouts on the visor flickered to life, blinding after so much time in the dark. Warmth seeped into his body from every angle, so welcome it made his skin tingle. He gave his eyes a moment to adjust, then triggered the lamps mounted on either side of his head. Pure white light flooded the space before him. Gray undecorated walls, caked with filth, as if he were in some underground storeroom in a water tr
eatment plant. Except for the lack of gravity.

  He swung his head and accidentally blinded Jared, who raised an arm in defense even as he squeezed his eyes shut. “Sorry,” Alex said, looking away.

  “Hell, that hurt.” The other man finished suiting up, with obvious difficulty, then turned his own lights on.

  Alex studied him from the corner of his eye. Jared looked like he’d just come out the wrong end of a weekend-long bender. Bloodshot eyes, pale lips, and a thousand-yard stare. The man shook his head every few seconds to clear the cobwebs.

  “Any coffee?” Jared asked, then laughed a bit too hard.

  Alex laughed with him, then turned his focus back to the space they were in. “Tell me what you see,” he said.

  Jared took a moment, realizing what the question meant. Was this another reality they experienced differently? Another shared dreamscape? But Jared described the room around them exactly as Alex saw it.

  “Good. I was worried there for a moment,” Alex said.

  Jared grunted agreement. “Now what?”

  “Now we find a way out of here. Get back to Gateway. Rally our men.” He said the words even though he felt sure they were hollow. Something inside him, some deeply seated sense of time or place, perhaps both, told him that battle was long over. But he had to try, and he needed Jared.

  Whether the other man believed him or not, he agreed readily. Perhaps only because it was something to do.

  “We stick together,” Alex said.

  “Yeah. Could you take point? I can’t think straight.”

  “Sure, no problem. Unless we stumble on a way out damn soon, our first order of business is food and water. Maybe some ibuproxin for you.”

  “Don’t forget coffee.”

  “Sure, yeah.”

  “And a weapon would be nice.”

  Alex nodded. “Something tells me our jailer isn’t leaving guns lying around, but you never know.”

  “Right now…nnngh…I’ll take anything I can swing.” Jared sounded like he had a mouth full of gravel.

  “Agreed. All right, let’s go.”

  —

  Alex led the way, carrying the battered hatch of the spherical chamber he’d kicked away. He didn’t know if he could swing it, there were no easy handles, but he thought if they ran into trouble he might be able to fling it.

  He floated with his headlamp on the lowest possible brightness and narrowest beam, and Jared kept his completely off. After several long, bending corridors and three intersections, however, Alex began to feel they were utterly alone in this strange place. Not to mention lost. It was only with the sudden firm grasp of Jared’s hand on his arm that his senses sharpened.

  Jared motioned for Alex to kill his light, and Alex did. Together they huddled behind a bulkhead in the blackness. Then Jared tapped his arm, and Alex saw immediately what had concerned his officer. There, at a junction ahead of them, a small silvery object moved. It floated like a fish, darting from one position to the next, barely visible in the lack of light.

  Only, there was some light, Alex realized, and it was growing. Gray patches formed as the darkness became stark shadows. A light, approaching. The silvery fish-thing darted away as the luminance grew and then the body appeared. A figure in black drifted through the junction and was gone, following the tiny mechanical fish.

  In the now weakening light, Alex glanced at Jared. The other man nodded, ready to follow Alex’s lead.

  So he shot ahead, took the turn, and heaved himself forward. Ahead, the dark figure drifted after the little fish like a youngster chasing a lost pet, oblivious that it had pursuers of its own. It stopped at an end in the corridor to adjust course. Just the chance Alex needed. He gripped a pipe and propelled himself, moved fast, closed the distance in just seconds. The creature never saw him.

  Alex made his hand flat and knifed the being at the back of its neck, just below the bulbous helmet it wore.

  The body went limp, and floated away.

  Alex Warthen studied the spread-eagled figure, and realized with sickening fear that he’d seen such a creature before, back on Earth. A terrifying, armored version of the subhuman creatures that roamed the planet. A monster he’d only glimpsed but never faced.

  And now this. A similar creature, here, lurking in the hallway. More evidence that this place was a Builder installation. Perhaps the ship where he thought he’d died, perhaps something else. Either way, the goal remained the same: get out.

  The monster on the road in Belém had gone through a dozen trained fighters like a warm knife through butter. This one, moving at a snail’s pace away from him, arms and legs splayed wide, didn’t seem so tough. It had just been floating there, oblivious, in the middle of the hall. And one crack on the back of its neck had rendered it unconscious.

  “We need to tie it up,” he heard himself saying. “Before it wakes. Get as far away from it as possible.”

  “Tie it with what?”

  Alex forced himself to breathe. He shook his head to clear the last remnants of his fear. Good thing he’d not realized what sort of enemy he faced before attacking. “We’ll figure something out. Or we kill it. Bring it back here.”

  Jared flew forward, positioning himself in front of the being. He reached out to stop the creature’s progress and then pulled his hand away. There was surprise on his face, but no fear. “It’s a woman,” he said.

  “Of course it is.” The sex was obvious from the curves of the body, though now that he studied it more closely Alex thought the suit ill-fitting compared with the skintight armor he’d seen back on Earth. The same material, yes, but loose. There were folds at the joints. The head was different, too. Larger. More like a helmet.

  “No. Look,” Jared said. He spun the unconscious form around so it faced Alex.

  The helmet had a clear visor, like you might find on any normal EVA suit, and behind that mask was a human woman of maybe thirty years old.

  “What the hell?” Alex moved closer. “Another prisoner?”

  Jared nodded. “Maybe she escaped just like we did.”

  Alex reached the body and gave the face a long, hard look. He’d seen her before, he realized. “True or not,” he said, “I recognize her. One of the traitors, isn’t she? One of Skyler’s friends.”

  His companion just stared, puzzled.

  “I…” Alex paused. The memory was slippery, like water through cupped hands. A room like a hamster ball, rolling, bodies everywhere. Fighting all around. Fists and blood, savage and raw. The details emerged and flooded into him, hazy but clearing with each second. “She was with Tania. I…I was strangling her. She’d just kicked you so hard I heard the air explode from your mouth.”

  Jared was staring at him, confused. His gaze returned to the woman and then his eyes narrowed. “Yes, I think I remember. It’s like a dream.”

  “I had my hands around her neck,” Alex went on, more certain now. Then another, different hand, a giant hand, meaty and incredibly strong, had slid around Alex’s own neck and clamped down. Another had grabbed the side of his head, the thumb pressing into Alex’s eye. Prumble’s hands. The smuggler. He wasn’t supposed to have been there.

  Absently Alex rubbed at his own neck, despite the suit he wore, as the final memory slid home. Prumble had twisted. The neck this way, the head that. There had been no pain, not exactly. Just the sound of bone and muscle shearing, and the otherworldly sensation that his body had become a separate thing from his mind.

  And then nothing. He’d woken to the tendrils, and the white void, and the woman’s voice. Still dead, or so he’d thought.

  “Are they all here?” Jared asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean we died. I saw you die. I looked into the barrel of a gun and I think I can even recall feeling the punch of the bullet as it entered my heart.” He nodded at the woman. “I saw you choke the life from her.”

  “Maybe it brought us all back, you mean,” Alex said.

  “Or brought us all here
.”

  As if here was not a place for the living. Alex might have supported that theory, there at the beginning while floating in the void, but no longer. The beach and ocean had been a shared hallucination with Jared’s alpine ravine, yes. This, though, this dark hall, was definitely real. And he was most certainly alive.

  Perhaps Grillo was here, somewhere, too. And Skyler. Maybe all of them. Perhaps the battle wasn’t lost, after all. Alex’s mouth actually salivated at the possibility of getting revenge against Prumble.

  “We need to talk to her,” Alex heard himself saying. “Find out what happened. Find out who won.”

  “Who won?”

  “Yeah. I’ve been assuming until now that the traitors were victorious, but we don’t know that, do we? What if we all failed to accomplish whatever endgame the Builders had in mind? Let’s find a room we can secure. Somewhere we can take that helmet off her, and find out what the score is.”

  Jared took point without needing to be asked. He drifted ahead, then turned around at the next bulkhead and waited, his gaze never resting long on any one spot. Alex took to managing their baggage. He wished he had some rope. Moving a bulky object in zero-g should have been beyond trivial, but for her loose arms and legs. Each time he pushed her ahead she took on the form of a starfish, rolling and twisting as she drifted down the dark passageways. Inevitably a hand or foot would smack into a wall and alter her trajectory. Not much, but enough to make the going slow and frustrating.

  “Let me help,” Jared said, taking care now to keep his voice low.

  “You just keep watch, I’ve got it.”

  “How about we split the task. You push her to me, then move up while I wrangle the body. Gives me a chance to stop and rest. Get my bearings.” He sounded like a man grappling with the worst hangover of his life, and Alex couldn’t blame him. “Then we switch. Team…work.”

  The pause in that word came with a shared look. A realization reached simultaneously. Here they were, solving a problem by working together, just like the test they’d endured. The beach and the snowy cliffside. Only now the reality of their situation was identical.