I got out my sample kit, took a scraping off an edge, and dropped it into the analyzer. Smik and I both watched until the sampler beeped and analysis came up on the readout. The metal identified as allosteel with a decorative fragmented coating. Also present: human saliva.
“No flippin’ way,” I said.
The sampler beeped again. It had identified four different genomes in the saliva. I stored the results. “Have you had the same passengers for a while? What about staff?”
“The current passengers embarked from Mars Station. Terra is just a stopping point before we head back. The only people we took on at Terra were you, your spawn, and a replacement chef. We lost one chef in an unfortunate flambé accident. All other personnel same since Mars.” He was talking pretty good for a bubble-mouth. I could understand almost all the words.
“Are there other damage sites you want me to check?”
“Yes. One we know of.” He let the cover fall back into place and contacted the engineering department to let somebody know the bar could be fixed now. We retreated to the crew-ways and took a lift down to the gym level.
The gym had lots of fancy padded equipment with steel parts that looked to me like torture machines. Some people were already in them, moving things around in the lo-grav. One of the things was a vertical pole, and a woman with long, loose hair was spinning around it, gripping rings. She was scenic.
Smik led me to a cordoned-off shower stall (gravity was slightly higher in the shower room so the water would fall down instead of floating). The stall was brushed steel, only where it wasn’t: something had nommed chunks out of it.
I ran tests on the compromised material and got similar results: allosteel, human traces on it, only this time there was a trace of a second, unidentifiable species in the mix. My sampler came up with five more genomes, none matching the earlier ones. It couldn’t tell me anything about the alien. Another new species. Then again, I still didn’t know what Smik’s species was.
“Are there any more sites?” I asked.
“Likely, but we haven’t found them.”
“You have passenger and crew genomes on file?”
“Purser has,” he said.
“I don’t know if this is a job for me. If the pests are passengers, you don’t want me exterminating them, do you?”
“Humans do not eat metal,” Smik said.
So obvious, so true. How did I miss it?
I didn’t miss it, really. I was just eeking about maybe shooting people. My Skikka used to dream about the day he could open fire on humans. He’d tell me about this any time I came close to peeking under his veil, which a thing like that can drive you crazy, you know? What could be so terrible? But he never, ever let me see.
I followed Smik back to crew country and up the lift to the purser’s office. Her name was Sellis, and she was small, wrinkled, and grumpy. She didn’t recognize Smik until he took his fake head off, and she was less than complimentary about my suit, which wasn’t fair; my Skikka taught me the suit is the most important thing I own, and I always maintain it, though maybe not cosmetically. She let me use one of her terminals to check genomes, though. I came up with a list of nine names. Two were crew, and seven were among the wealthiest passengers on board, according to the purser, who dropped her other duties and talked to me and Smik when she found out what I was doing.
“These people are doing what?” she asked.
“Munching on metal,” I said. “Maybe that’s the good news, though. With metal mites, you have a lot of decontamination where I need to shut down whole areas of the ship for several hours while the fumes do their work. These guys are easier to isolate. Gotta figure out what’s happening to them, and is it contagious.”
“I don’t think we can authorize isolation with these passengers,” said the purser. “They have too much clout.”
“Can we test the crew members?” I asked.
“With the captain’s authority.” She hailed the captain and talked to him about the situation, then quietly alerted security to round up the two crew members I’d fingered and quarantine them. One was a nurse and the other was a waiter.
While we were waiting to hear back from security, Smik and I camped out in the purser’s office, which she wasn’t too thrilled about. “Why didn’t anyone hear them?” I said. “Must be noisy, chomping on metal. Do you think they all did it at the same time, or were these just random visits to the same spot?”
“How can we know until you ask the beings involved?” Smik said. I didn’t know his body language, but I got the impression he was getting fed up with me.
“Good point.” I could talk to the gym staff, see if anybody had noticed anything. Although this wasn’t my usual method. I’m not a detective. Analyze and destroy! Then take the money and scamper. “Who spotted the damage?”
“Don’t know,” he said.
The purser’s comm beeped. She spoke to it, then to us. “They’ve got the two crew in sickbay, isolation room. Now could you get out of here and let me work?”
Smik put his fake head back on and led me down to sickbay, where I met Dr. Pradip and an armed guard. The doctor was friendly, which was a nice change, and the guard was quiet. The nurse and the waiter were inside a glass-sided room. They sat side by side on a med-bed. The nurse was dark-skinned, tall, and muscular. She wore a teal uniform with a medical insignia on the chest. The waiter was shrimpy and wore what all the other crew on the promenade deck had been wearing: black pants, white shirt with creases, gold bow tie. They both sat quietly, too calm for people who had just been rounded up.
“Preliminary scans indicate they are not quite human any more,” said the doctor. He was short and dark and had shiny black eyes. “It’s very interesting! They have new metallic structures inside—very slender and hard to detect, but I found them.”
I wished my Skikka was still around. He was not a people person, but he might have known how to handle this.
“Have you talked to the nurse? Is she someone who works with you?” I asked.
“Yes. She is my assistant. I thought she was a little strange lately, but I didn’t think—a marvel like this right under my nose!” He was all ready to dissect her on the spot. Which kind of put me off, but might be handy in the long run.
“Can we talk to them?”
“Sure, sure.” He led me over to a console and pressed a button. “Amara? The exterminator is here. She has some questions.”
I did? Again, not my area. “Uh,” I said. Both the nurse and the waiter had straightened when the doctor spoke. Their faces still looked blank. “When did y’all start eating metal?”
“Ten days ago,” they said together.
“Uh, why?”
“Our systems required it.” They were perfectly synchronized in their speech.
“What for?”
“To build—” the waiter began, and the nurse put her hand in front of his mouth.
“To build what?” I asked.
“That is not your concern,” said the nurse in a cold voice.
“How could you even bite it? Do you have diamond teeth?” I asked.
“We were given the means,” said the nurse.
“Care to explain?” I asked.
“No,” said the nurse, but the waiter said, “We produced it from our own selves.”
“Quiet!” the nurse said.
“We have the potential to be so much greater,” said the waiter. “You can be, also.”
“Oh yeah? How?”
“Accept—” the waiter began, and the nurse put her hand over his mouth again. He struggled a little, then straightened and got quiet.
I lifted my finger from the transmit button and said to the doctor, “Do you know anything about her personal life?” I got that the nurse had changed. I wondered how far, and whether I could come up with some question that would tell us.
He cocked his head and looked at the ceiling. “She has a sister on Mars. Any time anything funny or strange happens on board, Amara always
echoes her.”
“What’s her sister’s name?”
“Chika, I think.”
I pressed the button again. “Hey, Amara. Did you tell Chika about what happened to you?”
“There is no need,” she said. “She will know soon enough.”
Well, that was pretty darned vague. I stopped transmitting again. “Doctor, how many tests can you run from here?”
“I have full scan capability, and I already have their blood undergoing analysis.”
“I get the feeling taking care of this infestation is more your job than mine,” I said.
He smiled. “I like that. Usually, the most exciting thing I do on the ship is prepare hangover cures and treat aphrodisiac misfires.”
Smik’s comm beeped. “Tell the exterminator we’ve found another damage site,” said the chief engineer’s voice. That was when I noticed Smik had his hand on the guard’s shoulder, and the guard was just standing there, eyes blank and staring straight ahead.
Smik let go of the guard and tapped his comm. “Received. Where is the site?”
“In the day care center,” said the engineer. “How’s the extermination going?”
“It is strange,” said Smik, and signed off. He stared at me with his fake eyes, and I stared back at his neck where I thought his real eyes were.
The doctor was burbling, weird non-word sounds that might be confusion or joy, staring at a readout on one of his machines. “Alien cells!” he cried. “Unregistered alien cells in their blood! Maybe I can name them after myself!”
“I’ll go check the new site, see who else is infected,” I said. “Smik?”
Smik’s fake head stared at the ground, and then he gave a whole body shrug and led the way out of sickbay.
“I gotta stop at the cabin and check on my kid,” I said as Smik headed toward the crew lifts.
“All right,” he said. We detoured back to my place.
I opened the door and saw Fern sleeping peacefully on the floor of the care cage. As soon as we came in, though, she sat up, saw Smik, and screamed, even though he was still disguised.
“Mr. Smik, if you would be so kind,” I said, and waved at the door. He didn’t take the hint this time.
“Purrrrfect,” he bubbled in a low voice, darted forward, and reached through the bars of the cage. Fern shrank back from his seeking hand, but one of the fingers shot out and wrapped around her wrist, then dragged her closer. She screamed and sobbed and tried to shove away, with her heels dug into the cage’s floor.
I tapped my index finger rocket and shot a rubber bullet at his finger-tentacle. The bullet bounced off and winged me in the chest plate of my suit, leaving a dent. What was this guy made of? I activated a wrist blade and slashed at his hand. Even though I keep these blades supersharp and they’re made of titanium alloy, it couldn’t hack through him; didn’t even scratch the skin.
“What are you?” I yelled, kicked the suit’s augmentation hydraulics into play, and launched myself at him. I succeeded in knocking off his fake head and bouncing off his body to whack into the cabin wall, which didn’t hurt me, but put a dent in the ship. Meanwhile, he slapped something on the back of Fern’s neck, and she screamed even louder.
“Stop messing with my kid!” I screamed. I slapped the side panel on my hip compartment and brought out my big gun, something my Skikka gave me and told me to use only when things were life-threatening. I slapped it down on Smik’s headbump, hoping his brain was somewhere nearby, because the alien technology in the Crown of Thorns would send probes digging down into him until they contacted the seat of sentience, no matter how thick and resistant his skin might be, or what they had to go through to get there.
They hadn’t met much resistance when my Skikka used the Crown on me, have to say. It took a little longer for them to penetrate Smik’s integument. While he was struggling to pull off the Crown, I did an end-run around him and got the care cage’s door open. Smik had finally let go of Fern. I grabbed her, ducked into the cabin’s bathroom, and locked the door behind me, though I didn’t really expect Smik to come after us, not with the Crown working on him.
There were four red spots on the back of Fern’s neck. My heart staggered a little, and my eyes squirted. “Baby, baby, baby,” I said.
“Mommy, it’s all right. I took it off before it could bite me.” She showed me a small square metallic thing pinched between her fingers and thumb. It had all kinds of little legs, which were twitching and jerking but couldn’t reach around behind it to get at her fingers. Four slender tentacles with bloody tips flopped around.
I grabbed a sample box from a side compartment of my suit and held it out. Fern dropped the thing in and I sealed it shut. Only when I was sure it was immobilized did I hug my daughter.
“Mommy, stop! You have your strength on!”
“Oh, crap! I’m sorry.” I opened my arms and checked Fern for damage. She pursed her lips at me and laughed. Not even a bruise.
I don’t know everything about my daughter, but I do know she’s super tough, like her daddy. Which is a good thing, if you got me for a mother.
My Skikka said there are definite steps to a successful invasion. Infiltrate. Insinuate. Turn the invaded into your own people, and then reproduce with them—harder to fight family. Absorb and colonize.
Pest control works backward from that. If you can interrupt the invasion in its early stages, it’s a lot easier to stop.
Once the Crown subdued Smik, I put a whole bunch of restraints on him. I had to take the Crown off and hide it, because it’s forbidden tech, or it would be, if anybody else knew about it. But it had pretty well quieted Smik down.
Then I called security.
They found a lot more little colonizers in a hidden pocket nobody knew he had. I found out his species was called A’kla, and there were only a few of them in the solar system. We’d only made contact recently. The chief engineer said he was a great engineer, and she was going to miss him. The doctor was excited by the bug I gave him, and even happier about the collection security extracted from Smik.
The colonized didn’t get off so easy. The bugs he slapped on them had worked their way inside, set up residence in the brains, got the bodies to acquire the materials they needed to be comfortable in their new homes. They’re all messed up, but it works okay as far as keeping them alive. The doctor is conferring with major medical clinics on Terra, Luna, and Mars to figure out how to treat them, so there’s hope. Meanwhile, they are pretty much just weird and creepy shadows of their former selves, and that includes three of the poor kids in day care.
My job was done, and they didn’t know how to compensate me, since it wasn’t exactly metal mites I fought. Fern and me are taking it out in trade. I finally took off my suit, and now we spend most of our time in passenger territory.
I watch my daughter play and wonder about her daddy, my Skikka, what part of himself he put in her while I had the Crown on my head. She’s much more fun than the people the A’kla invaded. But I worry about her teen years.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
P.R. Frost enjoys attending science fiction conventions in her spare time, where she can be found filking and hanging out with costumers. She and her husband make their home on Mt. Hood in Oregon. They frequently hike on the mountain and in the Columbia River Gorge. They share their home with a psychotic lilac point Siamese. P.R.’s musical tastes are as omnivorous as her reading, ranging from classical to Celtic to new age to jazz, and of course filk. Join P. R. on her Live Journal blog
Jim C. Hines’ latest book is The Mermaid’s Madness, the second in his series about butt- kicking fairy tale heroines (because Sleeping Beauty was always meant to be a ninja, and Snow White makes a bad-ass witch). He’s also the author of the humorous Goblin Quest trilogy, as well as more than forty published short stories in markets such as Realms of Fantasy, Sword & Sorceres
s, and Turn the Other Chick. You can find his web site and blog at www.jimchines.com. As always, Jim would like to thank his wife and children for putting up with him. Living with a writer ain’t easy.
Nina Kiriki Hoffman has been writing science fiction and fantasy for more than twenty years and has sold more than two hundred fifty stories, plus novels and juvenile and media tie-in books. Her works have been finalists for the World Fantasy, Philip K. Dick, Sturgeon, and Endeavour awards. Her first novel, The Thread That Binds the Bones, won a Bram Stoker Award, and her short story “Trophy Wives” won a Nebula. Her middle school fantasy novel, Thresholds, will come out in 2010. Nina does production work for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and teaches short story writing through her local community college. She also works with teen writers. She lives in Eugene, Oregon, with several cats, a mannequin, and many strange toys.
Nancy Holder is the New York Times-bestselling author of The Wicked Series (with coauthor Debbie Viguie.) They are launching a new vampire series called Crusade, the first volume of which will be out in the fall of 2010. She is also the author of the young adult horror series Possessions and the sequel, Possessions: The Evil Within. She lives in San Diego with her daughter, Belle, their corgi, Panda, and two very hairy cats named David and Kittnen Snow Vampire.
Tanya Huff lives and writes in rural Ontario with her partner, Fiona Patton, and nine cats—one more and they qualify as crazy cat ladies. In 2009, DAW Books published her Enchantment Emporium and in 2010 will publish a fifth Torin Kerr space marine book—untitled as yet. When she isn’t writing she practices her guitar and complains about the weather.
Jane Lindskold lives in the Wild West and knows many of the resident wolves personally. This does not mean her story is autobiographical. Honest. Lindskold is the author of both the Breaking the Wall series (Thirteen Orphans , Nine Gates) and the Wolf Series (Through Wolf’s Eyes, Wolf’s Head, Wolf’s Heart). For more titles and some great wolf pictures, see www.janelindskold.com.
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