by N M Tatum
Joel leaned on the bar and let out a heavy sigh. “You totally blocked me there, Sam. She was about to get a drink with me.”
With some effort, Sam managed to hide her disbelief that Joel was so obtuse as to have no clue that Debbie was about to tear him apart. “I’m sure she was. Now, how about that drink?”
The bartender finally acknowledged Joel’s existence, and he ordered two lemon drop shots and two beers. Joel and Sam clinked glasses, and then Joel tossed his back.
“Some advice?” Sam said as she sipped the shot through a dainty straw. “Don’t lead with alcohol. And don’t be so forceful about it. Seems like you’re trying to get her drunk, which is beyond sketchy and gross. Get a name first, at least. Have a conversation, make a connection.”
Joel didn’t say anything. He just sipped his beer and nodded along thoughtfully.
Finally, he made a face like he’d come to some conclusion and said, “Let’s do another shot.”
Sam chuckled as she shook her head. “Fine, but I’m picking this one. No more fruity bullshit.”
They all rendezvoused at their table fifteen minutes later. Cody decided to head back to the ship, which drew calls of ‘Lightweight!’ from Joel and Reggie. Joel put in another order of cheeseburgers, which drew looks of astonishment from everyone.
“How is that possible?” Sam asked.
“They aren’t for me,” Joel said. “They’re for Peppy.”
An unfamiliar sense of calm washed over Sam as she sat. These friends were like brothers to each other. Maybe they would be to her one day, as well. And Sonic, her new home, however temporary it may be, felt comfortable. And now they had Peppy, their new dog.
Well, dog-thing.
She had taken a job and stumbled into a family.
Joel stood suddenly, urgency plain on his face. “Holy shit,” he said, clutching his stomach.
Sam shot up too, his urgency triggering her fight or flight. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
“Just said.” Joel pointed to his stomach. It gurgled like it was trying to say something. “Holy shit. I need to find a bathroom.” He started shoving his way through the crowd. “Can you wait for my food?”
Families are gross.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Sonic Shuttle
It was rare to be on Sonic alone. Cody found it both refreshing and unnerving. It was so quiet. Again, that fact was both welcome and strange. The only time it was ever this quiet was when Joel was hiding and planning some kind of prank. Cody walked through the ship expecting Joel to jump out of a closet.
He strode through the kitchen, past the bunk, past the supply room, and into the engine room. He’d set up a makeshift lab in there a few weeks ago. Up until now, he hadn’t had reason to use it, aside from a place to get away from the guys and be alone. But now, he had a reason.
Cody cleaned the area first, throwing away the napkins and dirty plates that had accumulated. One cannot work in a dirty lab. Then he set up his station. He was excited to put it right. He set the box of samples on the table and began taking them out. One at a time, he would take the insect sample, study it, turn it over in his hands, then set it down, until they were spread out like a periodic table of bugs.
He had always been fascinated with insects. Even before his aptitude and affinity for computers and networks emerged, he was digging in the backyard, catching bugs in jars, and just watching them. These here were samples he had collected since boarding Sonic. Each planet they visited, he would take some. A few from Torex. A few from whichever space station they’d pass through.
And one from Sector 12 Transgalactic Station. He took the final sample out of the box. The ShimVen. A full bug, about the size of a small dog, mostly intact—aside from the hole in its head made from a pincer being shoved through it, courtesy of Reggie. A cold sting shot up his spine at the sight of it. Not yet having mustered the nerve to examine it, Cody moved back to the other samples. He sorted them based on type and pinned them to a corkboard hanging on the wall.
He spread the rest of the equipment on the table: syringes, scalpels, slides, vials,
microscope. Some of the stuff he’d brought from home. Some of it, Joel fabricated from junk they were able to gather.
Cody sat back and marveled at his workstation. Now this is a lab, he thought. And labs are meant for working.
He took a deep breath and went back to the ShimVen sample. He hadn’t told the guys he took it off the space station. They already thought his bug thing was weird, and they would probably lose their shit if they knew he brought one of these things on the ship.
The bugs were dead, and that might be enough for Reggie and Joel, but Cody needed to understand them. Something had been nagging him about the ShimVen ever since the Waystation, and it only got louder after Ludite. He needed to satisfy that feeling, or he’d go crazy.
He’d been doing some research on the net, whenever he could find the time, since they’d left the Waystation. According to reports, the ShimVen had become a huge menace in shipping hubs and manufacturers around the system. There was nothing outright odd about that; according to experts, infestations happened aboard space stations all the time. But, until recently, no one had ever heard of the ShimVen. It was like they’d appeared out of nowhere.
From what Cody observed firsthand on the Waystation, the leap from one generation of ShimVen to the next in terms of adaptation should have been impossible. The second wave had already gotten stronger and faster, if only incrementally, and they were from the same parent as the slightly weaker first wave. That kind of growth as a species should have taken multiple generations, hundreds of years.
It wasn’t natural. Which meant it was engineered. And that kind of tinkering would leave a trail.
Cody gripped his scalpel. His hand shook. He steadied it with a calming breath, then pressed the tip of the blade to the bug’s upper thorax, the chest area just below its head, and green liquid beaded around it. Before pressing further, Cody put on goggles and a mask, ashamed that he didn’t have them on already. Any good scientist knows that safety is of the utmost importance. Then he cut the thing wide open. He pierced the thorax and drew the scalpel down the length of the bug.
The smell hit him like a punch to the face, even through his mask. It was a smell reminiscent of rotten meat and cheese farts. Cody pulled open the thorax and pinned each side, giving him a complete view of the bug’s insides. He catalogued the organs, mapped the endocrine and digestive systems, and compared them to known species. Once finished, he determined that the ShimVens were members of the insect order Dermaptera, like earwigs.
Now that he knew what he was looking at, he knew what to look for. He knew what should be there, what shouldn’t be there and how everything should be arranged… And he’d already found something that wasn’t right. The corpus allatum was an endocrine gland that played a crucial role in metamorphosis. This bug’s corpus allatum had been altered; it was enlarged and discolored.
Cody jabbed a syringe into it. The vial filled with a glowing yellow liquid.
“That doesn’t seem right,” he said to himself.
He deposited a few drops of the liquid on a slide, slid it under the objective of his STEM instrument, and looked through the ocular. He took a screenshot of the magnified slide and ran a program that compared it to known substances.
Then he sat back and waited. There was so much unknown about these pests, like how they survived in space. Tapping into dark energy was the theory, but that still left more questions than answers. Did it collect it from the ether, using it to propel itself from the back? Cody laughed as a fart joke echoed in his head.
“Nice hidey hole,” Sam said, sticking her head in Cody’s corner of the engine room.
Cody nearly fell out of his chair. “Shit, Sam. You can’t sneak up on a person like that.”
“Didn’t realize I was sneaking up on anyone,” she said. “I was just coming to run a diagnostic on the engines before we shoved off in the morning
.”
Peppy bounded into the room between Sam’s legs. He leaped onto Cody’s lap and began licking his face.
“Oh, goddammit,” Cody said, trying to keep Peppy from licking the inside of his mouth. “Why’d you bring him?”
“I didn’t. Little shit followed me.” Sam examined Cody’s workstation, her eyes falling on the dissected ShimVen. “You’re awfully accusatory. You trying to shift the focus from this weird shit you’re doing in here?”
Cody shoved Peppy off him and stood. He tried to shove Sam aside as well but had little luck. He walked around her instead. “It’s not weird shit. It’s science. I just found out that the ShimVen’s corpus allatum is enlarged and discolored.”
Sam wrinkled her brow. “That sounds like some weird shit.”
“I believe it was intentionally altered.”
Cody waited for the gravity of the sentiment to fully hit Sam. She shrugged.
“That would mean that someone had created those swarms,” he explained impatiently.
“Why would anyone do that?” Sam asked.
Before Cody could answer, the program running his search produced a result.
“Laytonmin,” he read aloud.
“I think I’ve heard of that,” Sam said.
Cody did a quick search of the name. It didn’t take long. A cursory search immediately produced thousands of results from newspapers all over the system. Scandal on top of scandal. Outrage. Lawsuits. Payouts. Careers ended. Jail sentences.
“It was developed as a drug to cure a certain birth defect. There was an epidemic of underweight babies being born on a planet at the edge of the system; something to do with its unique gravity. Laytonmin was meant to help the fetus grow so the baby would be born at a typical size and weight.” Cody scanned further ahead in the article. “And it looks like it worked. To a degree. Turns out, after the babies were born, they kept growing at an increased rate. Some form of gigantism. And, in some cases, the babies showed extremely heightened levels of hostility and rage.”
Cody bookmarked the article and minimized it on his wristcom. He rubbed his eyes, realizing suddenly that he hadn’t blinked in several minutes.
“It made giant, angry babies?” Sam summated.
“Apparently,” Cody said, bright spots dancing across the backs of his eyelids.
“That’s terrifying,” Sam said. “But what does that mean for the ShimVens?”
Cody’s eyes shot open like his brain just processed something that he’d read. He reopened the article and scrolled through at hyperspeed, knowing exactly where to find the bit he was looking for. He stopped and put his finger on it. The name.
“Layton Corp. It was developed by Layton Corp.”
“Okay,” Sam said, not connecting the dots. “And what does that mean for the ShimVens and us?”
Cody shot up from his chair and began a manic pace around his lab, hands running through his hair like a tinfoil hat wearer ranting conspiracy theories. “On the Waystation and Ludite. The engine room and the heat shielded ship. The sources. Of course, this makes so much sense.”
Sam cocked her eyebrow. “Does it?”
Cody took a deep breath and gathered his thoughts. “On the Waystation, the engine room was ground zero of the infestation. Where the mother was, where the eggs hatched. On Ludite, the second swarm came out of that heat shielded ship. In both of those places, I found crates stamped with the name Layton Corp.”
Understanding painted a pale picture on Sam’s face, not quite fully formed. “So, are you saying that Layton created those things?”
“Yeah, I think they did,” Cody said. “Their drug shows up in these bugs, a species that is normally centimeters long, and they are now raged out killing machines the size of small dogs. But I think there’s more to it. According to this article, Layton had a stranglehold on the pharmaceutical industry until this Laytonmin scandal. Their market share shrank significantly after the subsequent lawsuits and bad press. Now, these crates full of nasty, drugged up bugs are showing up in major shipping hubs. I’m willing to bet…” His voice trailed off as he pulled up another window on his wristcom
He nodded as he scrolled through. “Just what I thought. I cross-referenced the names on the manifests and shipping logs from both stations with Layton’s major competitors. They all either had major shipments of their products going through those stations on a regular basis or had offices in the stations. With the stations out of commission, they probably lost millions.”
“Corporate warfare,” Sam said.
Cody threw his arms wide, about to espouse some elaborate theory about a web of lies that stretched across the galaxy, but his attention suddenly turned to a whirlwind of shredded paper behind Sam. “Son of a bitch!”
Peppy was at the eye of the hurricane, twirling and tearing up everything he could get his teeth into. Cody ran at him, flailing his arms, trying to swat the creature away from his lab. They ended up running around in circles, yelling and barking (for lack of a better description of Peppy’s yippy noises) at each other.
Sam didn’t pay much attention to the swirling mess. Her mind was someplace else. Somewhen else. She left the lab without a word to Cody, leaving him to wrangle the rabid little beast on his own.
“When I catch you,” Cody said. “I’m going to dissect you.”
He and Peppy charged each other, both baring their teeth.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Sonic Shuttle
Sam wandered through memories on her way back to her bunk. In a home that felt foreign, with a man she barely recognized. He had short, curly hair. She remembered that when he’d grow out his hair, it would bounce like springs that hung in his eyes. He had a soft smile. No matter how happy he was, it never grew beyond a certain point, always subdued. He could fill a room with laughter, but he only ever filled the living room, when he was with her. He didn’t like to be the center of attention.
Which is what made his downfall so quick.
Sam only found out what happened to her father years later, as a teenager living alone on the streets. He wasn’t a bigwig executive type at the financial firm, but he was more than middle management. Combine that with his laid-back personality, aversion to making waves, and reluctance to stand up for himself, and you’ve got the perfect patsy.
One of those bigwig executive types laundered a whole bunch of money. Took millions from the hardworking folks who chose to invest with him due to his glowing history of trustworthiness. They pinned it on Sam’s father, planted a trail of evidence thick enough to convict him in the court of public opinion. It would have fallen apart at trial, if he made it to trial. One of those who got swindled, a working-class father left with nothing, shot Sam’s dad dead as he was coming out of a convenience store from buying a pack of cigarettes. He had quit smoking ten years earlier. The whole affair had driven him back to the habit.
Now, some more bigwig executive types were playing with people’s lives like they were pieces on a game board, and she had managed to get wrapped up in it. She’d considered, after getting into the merc game, going after those responsible for her dad’s death. But it was a rabbit hole. Dive in, and she would never come out. Every executive answers to someone. Climb the ladder all the way to the top, only to find that guy is rich enough to hire an entire army of private defense. Probably untouchable.
This thing with the ShimVens, though, was stirring up those old feelings, making her feel like a fox aching to dive down that rabbit hole.
Reggie and Joel still hadn’t returned from the bar. She was glad for that. After the news from Cody, she was in no mood to talk.
Her muscles twitched. She needed to move. She wanted to act. But she was part of a team now, and the team moved as one. She walked through the bunk room, careful to step over the piles of clothes and dirty dishes. It was cleaner than usual, but not by much. They made an attempt when she first came aboard. They didn’t so much now, which was fine with her. She wasn’t a princess who needed things clean and wi
ped down.
It was rare that she found herself in a place that wasn’t in desperate need of sanitization. After her father died, Sam was on her own. She went into the foster care system initially, but that didn’t work out. She only tried the one. Her foster dad told her she was pretty, way more than a grown man should. When he tried to touch her, she stabbed him in the shoulder with her dinner fork. She went on the run after that, slept in alleys and dumpsters.
That’s when she’d started wearing the mask. Disease was common on the street; it killed more of the homeless than hunger or stabbing. The mask kept her from catching the communicable diseases common among street people. And it had the added bonus of keeping people away. She was beautiful, and that brought her the kind of attention she’d rather avoid. With the mask on, people treated her like a pariah. They ignored her or treated her like a freak.
Either way, they left her be.
It wasn’t until she met the Notches that someone seemed to look straight past the mask. It didn’t bother them, didn’t change their treatment of her. She assumed the worst of people; it kept her alive, but also alone. She could feel those sharp edges dulling.
Sam grabbed the mask with one hand and reached around the back of her head with the other. She undid the latch and slid the belt out. The mask came down. She stretched her jaw and massaged the joints. Pain radiated through her face but faded quickly. She rarely took the thing off, even when she was alone. It had become part of her, a crucial part of the identity she’d had to craft in order to survive on the street. A mask even from herself.
She set it on her bed and looked in the cracked mirror hanging on the wall. Her mouth seemed foreign to her by the end of a day. She took the mask off every night to clean her face and stretch her jaw. By the time she did, the mask seemed to be the real thing, and her face the fake cover. It was odd to look at herself so objectively, to be so disconnected from herself.
