by Rachel Bach
There was something outside the ship. Something huge.
In my shock, all I could think was that it looked like a squid. A gigantic squid glowing like the moon with its own blue-white light. It was so big I couldn’t even see all of it from the Fool’s window, so big that the asteroids that dwarfed our ship looked like grains of sand floating around it. It had no eyes I could make out, no mouth or nostrils or any other opening. Just two huge clusters of tentacles, one at either end of its tubelike body, waving slowly through space like the thing was treading water.
There were so many tentacles I couldn’t begin to count them. They started out enormous where they attached to the creature, but then they tapered off, finally ending in a delicate point that was still twice as big around as the Fool. I knew that last bit for a fact, because there was one right next to the ship. The thing we’d bumped into earlier.
“Devi!”
I jumped. I’d been so wrapped up in the monster outside, I’d actually forgotten about the cook until he yanked me away from the window.
“The coms are down,” he said, his voice calm and serious as he turned me toward the hall door. “I realize this is frightening, but I need you to go to the bridge and tell them to prepare for another jump. The system should be coming back up in just—”
“What the hell are you talking about?” I shouted. I was too freaked out to care that the cook was trying to give me orders. I tore away from him and ran back to the window, stabbing my finger at the glass. “Don’t you see that thing?”
Without my rear cameras, I couldn’t see him behind me, but I knew the cook had turned to look. Instead of the horrified gasp I expected, though, he just sounded bewildered. “What thing?”
And that was when I got the sinking feeling in my stomach again, the one I was becoming way too familiar with, because that was when I realized the cook didn’t see anything outside the window. I was hallucinating again.
But fast as it had come, the sinking feeling vanished. I couldn’t be hallucinating. He’d felt that bump earlier just as I had. Whatever that thing was, we’d hit it, and you sure as hell didn’t hit hallucinations.
I reached back and grabbed the cook, yanking him up to the window. “Shut up and look,” I said, pointing at the tentacle floating beside the rear of the ship. The one that had bumped us. The one it was impossible to miss. “Do you see that?”
To his credit, the cook looked hard. In the end, though, he shook his head. “I don’t see anything,” he said softly. “Just rocks.”
I swore and let him go, staring hard at the monster while I tried to think of something that could explain why I saw it and he didn’t. This turned out to be a good move, because my staring was the only reason I saw the blow coming.
With astonishing speed for something so huge, the monster flicked its tentacle like a whip. As the undulation ran down the huge appendage, I saw for the first time that the monster’s flesh wasn’t just glowing, it was semitranslucent. This thing had the same frosted-glass look as the tiny bugs, though my little bugs were to this monster what specks of dust were to a mountain. I felt a bit like a speck myself as I watched the huge tentacle swing through the expanse of space, growing brighter and more solid as it raced toward the ship.
“Oh shit,” I whispered, bracing against the glass, the only thing I had time to grab. “Here it comes.”
The cook looked at me in alarm. “Here what com—”
The tentacle landed before he could finish, sending the ship tumbling. All the alarms began going off at once as the Fool spun like a whirligig. The centrifugal force crashed me into the window, banging my unprotected head against the glass hard enough to make me see spots. The artificial gravity had cut out on the second spin, so at least I didn’t have to deal with that, but I still felt like I was going to throw up by the time the emergency thrusters finally kicked in to stop the spinning.
I was back up before the gravity reestablished, using my suit’s magnets to keep my feet on the ground as I wobbled toward the door. It was much harder than it should have been. Without my helmet, I couldn’t see any of my readings, but I didn’t need them to know something was seriously wrong with my Lady. She was moving like she’d been dunked in cement, fighting me for every step.
My Lady wasn’t the only one struggling. The Fool was going nuts. I don’t know if it was the impact or something else, but the whole ship seemed to be going haywire. The emergency lights were flicking on and off, the alarm changing pitch like something was messing with the speakers, and the gravity was swinging wildly. We also had a pressure leak somewhere—I could hear it hissing—but the breach alarm seemed to be the only one not going off.
But while my suit was on the fritz, there was nothing wrong with my battle instincts. Despite the confusion around me, I knew exactly what I had to do. Whatever that thing outside was, it wasn’t a hallucination, and if I was the only one who could see it, that meant it was up to me to shoot it.
With that goal to guide me, I took a huge breath and popped the lock on my malfunctioning suit. The Lady released me with a relieved hiss, falling off my body like a shed shell. The second I was free, I sprinted for the cargo bay stairs. I was plotting the fastest way through the toppled piles of nut crates to the gunner controls in engineering when the ship bucked again, sending me flat on my face.
I landed on my chin, knocking my teeth together so hard I tasted blood, but I couldn’t even feel the pain. I was in the battle now, and I heaved myself up instantly, charging the door. Considering how the last hit had sent us spinning, I probably should have stayed down, but luck was with me this time. This new blow only rocked the ship instead of sending it hurling like before, and I took my chance to run. But before I could reach the first stair, an iron arm wrapped around my waist, stopping me cold.
“No!” I shrieked, digging my fingers into the cook’s arm. “Let me go! I have to shoot it!”
“Devi, calm down,” he hissed in my ear, yanking me off my feet. “There’s nothing you can do.”
Bullshit. There was always something you could do, but I didn’t waste my breath telling him that. Instead I craned my neck back, looking over my shoulder to try to catch a glimpse of when the next hit would land, but the tentacle wasn’t there anymore. All I saw through the window now was flat blue-white fog, almost like we were in some kind of weird hyperspace. It was so unexpected, it took me a moment to realize that the reason I couldn’t see was because the creature’s tentacle was wrapped around the ship. That was why the last bump hadn’t sent us flying; the thing had caught us.
And like it had been waiting for me to notice, the monster chose that moment to start squeezing.
The Fool’s hull began to groan, and then the lights died completely, leaving only the soft blue-white glow of the monster itself. The alarms died next, sputtering out with choked squeals. The engines cut out a second later, and I suddenly felt like a fool for taking off my suit. If I got thrown into space with nothing but my skin, I’d have only myself to blame.
Suit or not, though, I wasn’t done yet. If I could just get to the ship’s cannon, maybe Mabel could get me enough power to use it. I couldn’t aim with the cameras out, but with the tentacle wrapped all the way around us, it wasn’t like I could miss. I just had to get there, which meant I needed to get away from the cook.
He might not be able to see the monster, but he’d certainly heard the crunching as it began to squeeze the ship, because his grip was growing slacker, giving me the opening I needed. I hurled my weight forward, slipping out of his arms. But as I was starting my charge down the stairs, light blossomed over the ship.
For a moment, I thought someone had conjured a miracle and gotten the hyperdrive back on line, but then I realized the light was the wrong color. Jump flashes are pure, harsh white. This light was softer, like moonlight, and it rose up from the center of the ship like water from a welling spring. When it passed over me, my skin tingled, but when it reached the monster wrapped around our hull, a scream hit m
y mind like a switchblade.
I fell to my knees on the stairs, hands clapped over my ears. It did no good; there was no blocking this sound. Behind me, the cook was on his knees too, but I didn’t have time for him. All I could do was sit and try to keep myself together as the scream ripped through me. Then, just as it started to get really unbearable, the tentacle outside the window began to dissolve.
Everywhere the soft light touched, the tentacle vanished. It was like the light was melting it, evaporating the translucent, glowing flesh as I watched. As the glowing mass dissolved, I could see the monster behind it again. It was thrashing wildly, flinging its countless arms through the floating rocks that were supposed to be a thriving aeon colony world. But though other tentacles were flying by, the tentacle around us was nearly gone. In a few seconds, it had faded altogether, and the Fool’s engine sputtered back to life.
The hyperdrive came on a moment later, spinning up so fast I could almost see Basil mashing the button. By the time I realized what we were about to do—an ungated jump with no prep in the middle of a debris field—the flash was already washing over the ship. I had one final glimpse of the thrashing monster as it started to edge away from us before the universe vanished, replaced again by the dull gray-purple bleakness of hyperspace.
I flopped over as the sudden stillness landed, collapsing on the stairs in a heap. But my relief was short-lived. Almost as soon as I relaxed, a pair of merciless hands grabbed me under the shoulders and yanked me up again.
Before I could even think about fighting, the cook had tossed me over his shoulder. I yelped in surprise and pain, but it was too late. He had me pinned, carrying me down the stairs toward the cargo bay like a sack of flour. I wasn’t about to let this pass, though. My arms were trapped beneath me, but I could still kick my legs, and I did, slamming my bare feet into his chest as hard as I could.
I might as well have been kicking a cement wall. The cook was freakishly strong and seemingly impervious to pain. I think my kicking hurt my foot more than his ribs, but I didn’t stop, especially since he was now walking me through the door to engineering.
Mabel was there, elbow deep in some critical system. She looked up when the door opened, and I took my chance.
“Mabel!” I shrieked. “Help me!”
The captain’s sister-in-law glanced at the cook, then at me, and then went back to work without a word, her face grim. The cook hadn’t even stopped. He marched straight through engineering, but it was only when we passed the base of the spiral stair that I realized where he was taking me.
“Caldswell?” I shouted, kicking harder than ever. “You did this to get me to Caldswell?”
The cook didn’t answer, just tightened his hold and walked into the captain’s rooms without knocking. Caldswell’s sitting area was in disarray from the earlier spinning, the table knocked over and the couch upside down. The captain himself was nowhere to be seen, and I realized he must be on the bridge. I was about to tell the cook that his little stunt was all for nothing when he turned us around and I spotted the captain at last.
Caldswell was in his daughter’s room, standing over the bed where Ren was lying curled on her side with her face hidden in her hands. Caldswell’s head snapped up when the cook entered, eyes flicking to me. I opened my mouth to yell at him to help me, but the cook beat me to it.
“Sleep her,” he said.
Caldswell didn’t even blink, he just looked from me to the cook, and then he was on the move, striding past us into the little sitting room. “Can’t,” he said. “Ren just gave everything she had to get us out. Hold her down; we’ll do this the old-fashioned way.”
I should have tried to reason with them then, should have told them I’d be good and the old-fashioned way was definitely not necessary, but I couldn’t. The moment the captain had spoken, I was back in the bunker under the mountain on Io5, watching my body fall, the hole still smoking in my head. The vision lasted only a moment, but the horror of it was like a claw in my stomach, and before I could recover, the cook had slid me off his shoulder onto the couch. I’d barely landed before Caldswell’s hand grabbed my neck, turning my head away.
“Sorry, Morris.”
That was the last thing I heard before something hard, sharp, and metal slammed into the back of my skull.
CHAPTER 6
I woke up to the feeling of someone gently slapping my cheek. I made a frustrated noise in my throat and turned away, but the slapping didn’t stop. Eventually I opened my eyes out of self-defense to see Caldswell standing over me.
“Sorry about that, Morris,” he said, dropping his hand from my cheek. Unfortunately, his next move was to pry my cracked eyes wide open to check my pupils. He checked the back of my head too, and I winced as his fingers brushed the painfully tender spot right below my crown.
“What happened?” I muttered when he finally stopped tormenting me.
“I knocked you out.”
My eyes went wide. As he said the words, the memory of how I’d ended up here came back in a flash, and I lurched forward. “You hit me!”
Caldswell dodged easily. “Didn’t I just say that?”
I tried to go after him again, but I couldn’t move any further. I was tied to a heavy chair with my arms behind my back. I must have been out for some time, because my hands were both asleep. I couldn’t even wiggle my fingers. I could yell, though, so that was what I did. “What the hell is this about?”
“You,” Caldswell answered. “And what you claim to have seen in hyperspace.”
“I’m not claiming I saw it,” I shouted. “I did see it!”
“Like you’ve been seeing other things?” Caldswell said.
The question was so quick, I almost slipped up and said yes. Caldswell hadn’t knocked all the sense out of my head, though, and I caught myself just in time.
“No point being tight-lipped, Morris,” Caldswell chided. “Hyrek tells me everything.”
I looked him straight in the eyes and said nothing, but my bravado was all bluff, and Caldswell wasn’t buying it.
“I’ve known you were having problems for a while now,” he said, giving me a flat look. “I was trying to give you a chance to come forward on your own. Now, though, I think it’s time you told us exactly what you’ve been seeing.”
“You’ll think I’m crazy,” I warned.
Caldswell shrugged. “I have a pretty high threshold for crazy. Just try me.”
I took a deep breath. Considering how I’d come to be sitting here, I didn’t want to tell this man a thing, but like it or not, Caldswell was still my captain. This was his ship, and as Mabel had proven earlier, my opinion meant exactly zip compared to the captain’s business. If I wanted to get out of this at all, I was going to have to give him what he wanted. I just hoped the truth was it.
So, with a deep breath, I told him. I told him everything I could remember about the first time I’d seen the glowing bugs, both the one out on the hull and the one in the medbay. I didn’t tell him about the one Ren and I had both seen, mostly because I didn’t want to get any more involved with the captain’s creepy daughter than I had to. I didn’t tell him about the dream on Io5 for the same reason, though the fact that omitting this also meant I wouldn’t have to explain what I’d seen in the bunker didn’t hurt. I did tell him about the bugs I’d seen filling the cargo bay when I’d woken up, though, and the bugs I’d seen almost constantly since then, excepting the one I’d seen Ren squash earlier today.
By the time I was finished, I felt like a complete lunatic. To his credit, though, Caldswell had listened to everything with a straight face. He didn’t even look concerned until I got to the part about the monster that had attacked the ship.
“You’re sure about the size?” he said, cutting me off before I could get to the part where his cook had scooped me up like an unruly toddler.
“As sure as I can be,” I said. “There wasn’t much outside I could use for reference, but as I said, the end tip of each of those tentac
les was still twice as thick as the Fool. I’d say the creature’s body must have been several thousand times that.” Or larger, I thought with a swallow.
Caldswell leaned back on the couch with a sigh. “All right, Morris,” he said. “Thank you for being honest.”
I smiled before I could stop myself. “So you don’t think I’m insane?”
“No,” Caldswell said. “Unfortunately for you, I believe every word.”
I did not like the way he said that at all. “How is my being sane unfortunate?”
“Because if you were crazy, we could let you go,” Caldswell said. “But since you’re not, this situation is now officially too large for me to ignore anymore. We need to know what you’ve forgotten.”
My blood ran cold. “My memories,” I whispered. “I didn’t lose them from a bump to the head, did I?”
“No,” Caldswell said. “They were taken to protect you.”
I glared at him hard. “Protect me from what?”
“Us,” said an accented voice behind me.
I jumped. I hadn’t even realized the cook was here until he spoke. I turned as far as I could to see him leaning against the door to Ren’s room, just as he had been yesterday. Behind him, Ren was no longer curled in a ball. Instead, she was lying on top of her bed staring wide-eyed and vacant at the ceiling, which was almost worse.
Looking at him brought the revulsion back strong as ever, but I didn’t drop my eyes as the cook walked over to the bed. Ren stirred when he touched her hand, and then sat up slowly, her movement clunky and stiff, like an old, old woman’s. The cook waited patiently for her to stand before leading her over to take Caldswell’s place in front of me.
“Undo it, Charkov,” Caldswell ordered, moving to guard the door. “All of it.”
I didn’t know what that meant, but the cook’s scowl deepened. “We talked about this, sir,” he said. “A full return is dangerous. If I give it all back—”
