Adrift Collection

by T. J. Land

  “Why didn’t you go with them?” Antoine asked.

  After a short pause, Rux said, “There was limited space on the ship. I was strong and healthy. I decided to stay behind and take my chances so those weaker than me might survive.”

  Thomas looked touched. Antoine looked sceptical. The captain reserved judgement and asked, “Rux, I’d like a better idea of what we’re walking into. What are the chances that wild animals will have made their homes in the ruins?”

  Rux assumed his human form, green-skinned and gloriously naked. Thomas had evidently planned for this, thoughtful soul that he was, as he took a pair of clean, folded briefs out of his suit’s pocket and gave them to him. Putting them on, Rux replied, “I wouldn’t concern yourself, Captain. There are a mere handful of carnivorous species in this hemisphere and none that would not be deterred with a warning shot.”

  “Is it safe to fire?” asked Thomas, who had also brought his laser rifle at the captain’s behest. “I mean is there anything lying around that’ll explode if we hit it by accident?”

  In mildly offended tones, Rux answered, “No. As I have told you, my people were wise and prudent. Even in our last days, we didn’t leave dangerous materials scattered about.”

  Raising his voice, the captain said, “One last time, has everyone checked that their equipment is in working order? Your comms in particular?”

  “Yes, sir!”

  As he led them into the city, Antoine walked at his side. In French, he said, “I have bad news, Captain.”

  “Oh?”

  “You know how whenever we leave the ship and you’re wearing that suit, half the crew can’t stop staring at your rear? Well, I’m afraid to have to tell you that their attention is now divided between your good self and our newest recruit.”

  Glancing back, the captain ascertained that both Zachery and Thomas were sneaking peaks at Rux’s briefs.

  “Good for morale,” he said briskly.

  A sidelong glance allowed him to observe that rarest of wonders—his first officer’s dimples. “Very good, I’m sure.”

  Ahead of them lay the largest of the surrounding buildings. Like the rest, it was grey and featureless, though its roof was more rounded that those of its peers. On the side facing them, there was a black circle, in the centre of which were a series of black squares of varying sizes.

  “It is our language,” Rux said. “It demarcates this building as the foremost scientific research facility in the city and warns away trespassers.”

  “So are we going to get vaporized the second we walk through the front door?” Zachery said.

  Rux frowned at him. “Is it instinctive to your kind to assume the worst? It will be fine. I will show you.”

  The closer they got to the building, the more apparent its decrepitude became. Its greyish colour was the result of an inch-deep coating of some moss-like substance. It had several dozen round windows dotting its exterior, many of them cracked or broken, and all so filthy as to be impenetrable. Tall grass pressed up against what seemed to be the main entrance. A single featureless panel sealed it off and on the left were a series of black markings; although their placement suggested they served some functional purpose, they had a curiously organic look, as though they’d been scratched into the building by large claws.

  Rux stepped up to them and stood there unmoving.

  “He does know what he’s doing, I presume?” Antoine whispered to the captain.

  Glancing his way, Rux frowned again and pressed one of his fingers against the markings. With a low rumble, the wide panel slid away, revealing the entrance. Peering in, the captain surveyed a lightless corridor stretching deep into the abandoned building’s heart.

  “I have disabled the security systems,” Rux said. “You see? There is no need to worry. I lived in this city for many years. In fact, I worked in this very facility. I know how everything works.”

  Returning to his feline form, he stepped through the entrance. His green skin was bioluminescent and lit the whole corridor with an eerie emerald glow.

  The captain looked back on the faces of his crew, now green-tinged. Irene—intrigued. Thomas—nervous. Zachery—impatient. Antoine—anticipatory. Echo—reflective, although only the captain could have known, as he wore his habitually blank expression like a shield.

  My crew. My men.

  “Let’s go,” he said and stepped inside.

  ✩✩✩

  Zachery was disappointed. The facility had looked so cool and scary from the outside. Inside, it looked like nothing more interesting than an abandoned hospital. The walls were white, the floor was grey, and most of the rooms were either locked or empty. Now and then, he caught sight of a bug scuttling into one of the cracks in the ceiling tiles, but that was about as exciting as it got. There were no signs of violence; the previous occupants had apparently left the building in an orderly fashion, packing up all their valuables and switching the lights off behind them.

  That didn’t stop Antoine from going nuts every time they came across a sign or a room that wasn’t completely empty. The words “What does this say?” and “What does this do?”’ had been an omnipresent background noise for the last half hour, always followed by a polite, brief explanation from their alien tour guide.

  Zachery, not a patient man by nature and anxious to get back to Rick, was getting peeved. Antoine had been having that effect on him more and more often of late.

  Antoine Lionel Mbaye, he thought, watching him skip ahead like a schoolgirl on a field trip. First Officer of The Prayer, first class pain in the ass. Earth-born, scientist, black, thirty-five or thereabouts, though he might have used rejuvenation tech, in which case who knows how old he is? What else do I know about him? Not much. He speaks French. He wears glasses. He mentioned once that his mom was a supermodel; I can believe it. Look at him, sashaying around like the world’s his catwalk, like he can’t imagine not being the centre of attention.

  Antoine and Zachery had never had a warm and fuzzy relationship. Things had become even chillier between them ever since Antoine had lost his temper and shot Zachery with his stun gun for being insubordinate. While Zachery was still smarting over that one, he didn’t enjoy knowing he was on Antoine’s bad side. If he’d had his way, they’d have settled matters between them with a punch-up and a manly handshake. But no matter how much Zachery provoked him, so far Antoine had refused to be drawn into a fight. He probably thought it was beneath him.

  “Hey, Ant,” Zachery said. “You think maybe we could quit stopping to see the sights every two minutes?”

  Stiffening at the nickname, Antoine gave him a frosty look. “I beg your pardon, Mister Halberstam?”

  Zachery gestured to the sign Rux had been translating for Antoine. “Not that it ain’t all fucking fascinating, but I thought we were here to scavenge spare parts. At the rate we’re going, we’ll be wandering around this dump all day.”

  “Mister Halberstam, if you feel we are moving too slowly for your liking, you are welcome to proceed alone.”

  “No!” said the captain, coming to stand between them. “We will be remaining in one group. That is not up for debate.”

  “Sure thing, Captain,” Zachery said, shrugging. “But, you know, maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea if we left Ant and Rux here to get better acquainted while the rest of us do what we came here to do. They make a cute couple. I guess it figures that it would take an alien to get him going, seeing how no human being’s ever managed to do it.”

  He gave Antoine the most provocative grin he could muster. It was no secret Antoine was one of the only people on board who hadn’t once hooked up with a crewmate in the four years they’d been lost in space. No one knew why.

  Not like he isn’t hot enough, Zachery thought. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say his highness thinks he’s just too good for the likes of us.

  “That’s enough, Zachery!” the captain snarled, to Zachery’s surprise. He’d thought Antoine would be the one to get angry. “On
e more word and you will return to the ship.”

  “Yes, sir,” he muttered as Antoine shot him a smirk. Little shit.

  As they started moving again, Thomas poked his ribs and teased, “Captain yelled at you, man.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Captain’s gonna send you back to the ship. Gonna cut off your allowance and make you go to bed with no supper.”

  “Shut up, twerp.”

  ✩✩✩

  Despite his annoyance at Zachery’s troublemaking, the captain couldn’t help but roll his eyes heavenward as Antoine chirped “Ooh, what’s that?” for the twentieth time that hour.

  This time, however, the object Antoine was pointing at wasn’t a sign or a light fixture or a smear on the wall. They had come upon a room with two translucent sliding doors, which parted as soon as Rux stepped in front of them. The room beyond was much bigger than any of the others they had entered. It was dominated by twenty opaque tubes, all twice as large as The Prayer’s med pod and connected to one another by thick, serpentine cables. To the left were a series of consoles, and on the floor a dark green stain stretched from one wall to the other. It seemed to begin at the tubes themselves, and was, presumably, the result of some fluid that had leaked out eons ago.

  Rux touched one of the tubes with his fingertips, his manner pensive. “This is the facility’s cloning laboratory.”

  Thomas gaped. “You made clones?”

  “We did. Although ‘clones’ is somewhat misleading. Most of the people born in this room were amalgamations of four or five parents.”

  Ah, that’s right, thought the captain. He did say at one point that most of his species were poly, didn’t he.

  “We also cloned pets and, when food was scarce, livestock. The wealthy could pay to splice together various animals for circuses and other trivial amusements. There were plans to use the technology to develop astronauts with bodies strong and adaptable enough to enable our colonisation of other planets. The plague derailed those plans before they could come to fruition.”

  He pointed to a door at the back of the room. “Through there is a storage room. I believe it might be a good place for Zachery to begin his search for his ‘DG ring’ and other bits and pieces.”

  “Finally,” said Zachery, clapping his hands and heading towards it.

  When left to their own devices, the captain and his first officer both had a tendency to wander in the other’s direction and linger in their orbit. So it was without surprise that the captain noticed Antoine’s arrival at his side.

  “Captain, have you seen any roads?” he asked quietly. “Any train tracks? What sort of species develops cloning without first coming up with long-distance transport?”

  Interesting point, the captain thought. Though he didn’t want to give Antoine more reasons to distrust Rux, he himself had noticed a certain reticence on the alien’s part when it came to explaining how his people had lived from day to day. He would ramble on for ages about their superior technology, but wouldn’t elaborate as to what specifically they had done with it.

  The captain replied, “Pure speculation, but whatever roads or tracks they built were taken up when they found more efficient means of transportation. Or they were made of a material that has since degraded naturally. Or maybe it had something to do with how their society was structured. They seem to have had a tiny population even at the height of their powers, and the planet’s ecology is quite homogenous, so transporting resources from one region to the next might have been less of a pressing need. And their life spans ran to thousands of years, so saving time wouldn’t have mattered as much to them as it does to us.”

  From the storage room, Zachery called in excitement, “Captain, I think I’ve got it! Hot damn. This might actually work. There’s a ton of other useful stuff here—I’m gonna need something with wheels to get it all back to the ship.”

  “We’ll go back outside and get our equipment when we’ve finished surveying the building,” the captain said, thrilled at their luck. “Echo, mark this room on the map, please.”

  The translucent doors slid open again, and the captain completed his habitual headcount as his crew traipsed from the room.

  Thomas, Irene, Echo, Rux… “Antoine! Hurry up! We’re moving on.”

  “Yes, yes, I’m coming,” said his first officer, who was still peering into the tubes.

  “Now.”

  With a huff, Antoine obeyed, making his way towards the entrance. But just as he was about to step across the threshold, the doors slid shut so quickly they almost severed his foot.

  “Whoa. How’d that happen?” said Irene.

  Having jumped back, startled, Antoine shouted something the captain couldn’t hear through the closed doors.

  “A malfunction, presumably,” said Rux. He sounded, for once, less than utterly confident.

  He helped the captain try to pry open the doors with his fingers, while on the other side Antoine did the same. Their efforts failed; there was nothing that could be gripped, no handles, no knobs.

  “Zachery! You’re the strongest. Come and help,” the captain barked.

  “Um, captain,” said Thomas. “I think he’s still in there with Antoine.”

  At that moment, through the translucent doors the captain saw Zachery emerge whistling from the storage room and stop, gaping at the sight of them. He joined Antoine in trying to slide the doors open, to no avail.

  The captain stood back and said to Thomas, “I’m going to need you to shoot a hole in them, Mister Meléndez. Your rifle is fully charged, yes?”

  Rux cleared his throat. “Captain, I do not believe that would be wise. If the facility perceives us to be a threat, it might activate its anti-burglary defences.”

  “You said that you disabled the security,” said the captain, with mounting anger.

  “I…” Rux faltered, avoiding the captain’s gaze. “It is not outside the realm of possibility that I was mistaken.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Antoine’s voice erupted over the comms, making them all jump. His arms were folded and his expression sour. Beside him, Zachery was inspecting the doors’ edges. “Answer truthfully, alien. Is there any way to open these doors that does not involve force?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is there any type of force we can use that will not activate the facility’s security systems?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You said you worked here!” the captain snarled.

  Rux shrank back—literally shrank, losing a foot of height, and went a paler shade of green. “I… That is, I…”

  “Okay, listen,” said Zachery. “Everyone quit panicking. If shooting at the doors isn’t safe, the next best option is to cut them open. We might have something that can do that back with all the equipment we left outside. Someone go get it, and we’ll be out of here in no time.”

  The captain looked at Rux. “Can the doors be cut open?”

  “I believe so,” said Rux, his tone implying no degree of certainty whatsoever. “In order to make up for my error, I will go and retrieve Zachery’s requested piece of equipment, if he will tell me what it looks like.”

  The captain shook his head. “No. No one goes off on their own. That was an ironclad rule even when we thought the environment was benign.”

  “I agree,” said Antoine, to everyone’s amazement. “There’s no point in dividing ourselves up into digestible slices. Zachery and I are in no immediate danger. Captain, you should take everyone back outside and return with the necessary tools to cut the doors open as quickly as you can.”

  Zachery was nodding. “And you can also bring a dolly so we can get all these spare parts out of here and back to The Prayer.”

  It makes sense, the captain thought. Antoine was giving him that look, the one that meant “Come on now, don’t make a scene.”

  “All right,” he said.

  Chapter Four

  This is a fine kettle of fucks.

  Zachery sat on the flo
or, leaning back against one of the clone tubes or whatever they were. For want of anything better to do until the captain and the others came back, he was checking out Antoine.

  The ship’s first officer was pacing back and forth in front of the doors like a caged lion, his hands clasped behind his back. He’d been all icy composure right up until the second the captain and the others had disappeared down the passageway, and then he’d kicked the shit out of the doors and cursed like a sailor for three minutes.

  “You think Rux was telling the truth?” Zachery asked him.

  Antoine stopped pacing and tilted his head to one side. “It’s hard to say. He’s inscrutable. If he knew the building’s security was still active when we entered and decided not to tell us, then that has dire implications for…”

  “No, no. I mean about these,” said Zachery, rapping on the tube he was leaning against with his knuckles. “He said they used these to clone themselves instead of having kids the normal way. Does that sound likely to you?”

  “What makes you think he was lying?”

  Smirking, Zachery said, “Well, if I had a machine that could make clones, I know what I’d use it for, and it sure as hell wouldn’t be churning out kiddies.”

  “What would you use it for, then?”

  “First, I’d make thirty clones of me. Then I’d stick my dick in the first one’s mouth. Then he’d stick his dick in the second one’s mouth. We’d form a chain, yeah? Except the last one, clone number thirty, he wouldn’t stick his dick in anyone’s mouth. Instead, I get him to…”

  Zachery spent several minutes elaborating on the details of his fantasy, watching as Antoine’s face morphed from an expression of mild contempt to outright disgust. It was, he thought, a good look for him.

  “Thank you for that, Zachery,” Antoine said coldly. “I feel that I should point out a potential flaw in your otherwise brilliant plan. That many massive egos in close proximity would be more likely to end in a bloodbath than an orgy.”

  As Antoine returned to pacing, Zachery’s gaze lingered on him. He was, Zachery admitted with no small amount of resentment, more than just a pretty face. Those collarbones were a work of art. Those legs—mmm. Yummy. And even though Antoine and the captain looked nothing alike, one thing they had in common was their gait—an economy of movement combined with a certain subtle slinkiness.