Cold Between Stars Read online

  Fug was one thing. Ancient alien enemies were another. But being surrounded by a double handful of scared, angry Jørans was something else entirely. Onah might not eat me, but none of the others are that friendly. H’Rawd in particular seems hungry.

  The rucnart shakes off the surprise of being revealed first. One second the tree-kin leader is on the other side of the eter, the next he’s snarling, shoving his hot, stinky breath in my face.

  Maybe hitting them with the emote hadn’t been a good idea.

  Anger and frustration roll of him in waves, turning the air a murky red that hugs my skin and tries to dig thorns into my flesh. Sharp, angry pulses beat again my shields, the kind of rhythmic pulse I recognise as words but can’t make out ‘cause I’m not a telepath and all, and h’Rawd has forgotten to mould his thoughts into something I can understand.

  ‘I can’t understand what you’re saying.’

  H’Rawd snarls, shoving teeth and a barrage of images in my face.

  I stagger. They’re flying by too fast to make out, but one catches my attention. It’s the tang of blood, the hot taste of it in my mouth. I see a man who looks like Dad but isn’t, with dark hair and tilted eyes, green instead of the dark brown of my father’s. He runs, leaving a trail of fear, as electric as blood. I catch the memory, hold it tight. Others whip past; some cling to it, bringing with them other images, more emotions. Frustration. Fear. Defeat. Anger. A pulsing disc. Human faces. Fascination. Excitement. Argument. Discord. The captain saying ‘No’. Dad holding the other man back, hands on the other man’s shoulders, while I lash my tail and bare my fangs.

  Fear rides the air, coming from different places, with different meanings, but all of it tastes the same.

  I stagger, and rip myself away from the flood, and then it’s Onah’s turn.

  He pushes h’Rawd aside, or rather, pushes me back. There’s no movement though, no hands on my shoulders. One moment h’Rawd has his muzzle in my face and the next he’s a distant spot, hidden behind Onah’s bulk.

  You will do as we need.

  Unlike h’Rawd, Onah’s voice is perfectly modulated, his thoughts sinking into my skin with none of the sharp edges or spikes of the rucnart’s. None of the anger either, although there’s still that rough edge of fear snaking up his wings.

  ‘I don’t get it. What do you need? Why me?’

  You are awake.

  ‘But—’

  You are awake, and you have the ability. “Ability” is said with a hint of awe and frustration and a brief reminder of the emote that shredded the kins’ darkness like Old Terran paper.

  ‘But—’ I figure if I keep saying “but” Onah might actually tell me something useful, like what the fuck it is they need me to do.

  You must, or we die.

  ‘That’s not helpful. What do you need me to do?’

  The push comes out of nowhere. It’s not the same push that Onah used to get me away from h’Rawd, not a physical relocation. It’s a mental push. The kind that only telepaths, and really powerful ones at that, can accomplish.

  It hits me in the back of the head. There’s no colour to it, no emotion. I can’t even tell if there’s any thought. It’s a ball of nothing, blasting through my shields like they’re not even there, sinking into my psyche with razors tipped in ice. It doesn’t hurt, not yet at least. And then it’s gone. The razors, the push, the Jørans. Only Onah is left. I know, because the eter feels less full and more personal, like my face is smooshed up against the qwan’s neck and all I can breathe is the dusty, coppery scent of his feathers.

  I have a moment to blink, to wonder what in the Old Terra just happened, before the pain hits.

  Qwans aren’t exactly the gentlest of psions. Onah’s better than most. He at least sees us hybrids as something a little higher on the evolutionary chain than dirt. They were like that before the war, or at least, that’s what Mac’s dad says, and a hundred years in space hasn’t changed them much. A bit like the AI and her struggle with physics-defying psionics.

  Still, it was Onah who lead that push. It’s like I’ve been stabbed in the brain. My eyes are blurring, and dark, inky swirls of pain are winding up my legs. If I can figure out how to use my vocal cords, I’d scream, but I’m too busy trying to figure out how to keep being.

  Seconds turn to hours. Fire is eating me up from the inside out, tendrils of it shooting out my nose, leaking from my ears, turning my hair to inky flame. I feel like my skin should melt, slough off my bones, leaving red pulsing muscle behind.

  It doesn’t happen. Instead the pain vanishes, leaving nothing behind, not even the slicing, sliding sense of the kins’ claws digging through my skull.

  There’s a command sphere in my head. I can’t sense it, but I know it’s there, like I know I have five digits on each hand and my hair is black. Know it like I know I’m a boy, even if I was born otherwise.

  I stand.

  Onah’s studying me, all four eyes open, his beak raised, both sets of wings tight to his sides, impassive but for the green threads of anxiety joining the yellow swirls of fear around his talons.

  ‘Why?’ We both know what I’m asking, even if I don’t yell it in his face. Even if I want to yell it in his face. Even if I want to swear and rage and hit him with all of the fear and hurt filling my chest. I may not be able to open a stasis pod or pry open an emergency hatch, but I’m good at some things. You can’t have focus without control. And no one out-focuses me. Plus, yelling in a qwan’s face usually gets your nose bitten off.

  We need you.

  There’s desperation in his words, the emotion mixed up with snatches of memory, flashes that are gone almost as soon as they appear, but I catch a few. They hit me in the head, made sticky by Onah’s emotions. I close my eyes, trying to keep my feet. There’s the shiny, oval thing, pulsing and squeezing like a metallic heart. With this image comes more emotion, a hint of fear, a spike of desperation, a frantic, scared sensation like I’m running out of time. Chasing it all, comes something else, something that’s… wrong. Slippery, like a mirage or a ghost. A pressure against my psyche that isn’t and is, a shadow seen in the dark out the corner of my eye, that disappears when I focus on it.

  It’s almost enough to dissolve the anger building in my chest, and for a moment the emotion slips, replaced by the fear and frantic need permeating Onah’s memories. Almost. Right up until the moment I sense him pushing. The memories didn’t slip past Onah’s shields. Qwans are some of the best psions Jørn has to offer. They can control the twitch of an insect’s wings while still directing the swarm. And Onah is old, canny, and he knows me. Taught me.

  My muscles are shaking. Fine little quivers that run up and down my arms, making my skin twitch. In my chest, fear is turning to hate, twisting in on itself as the hurt, the betrayal fades. None of it stains the eter though.

  Control is everything in an eter, even when it’s not yours.

  ‘You could have asked.’

  Onah tilts his head, swinging his beak to the side and studying me with the eyes on the right side of his face. The red upper eye catches me, reaching out and grabbing me by the shoulders, trying to pin me in place.

  I shrug him off.

  We will ask next time.

  ‘I’m not coming here again.’

  Yes, you will. And then he pushes me out.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Cold greets me. A bone-deep, icicle-breeding cold that bites my nose and makes my sides shudder. Dude’s still tucked up under my chin; a tiny ball of warmth reminding me that being warm is a thing.

  Getting up is hard. Uncurling from my nest of plasform and junk, surrendering the little heat it provides, seems like a really bad idea but a little voice at the back of head, the one that reminds me of Dad, is telling me otherwise. Plus, Dude feels sick again, that too-full sensation of his weighing down my stomach.

  Moving generates a thread of heat, enough to get me to my feet, but not enough to stop the shudders rippling up my sides.

  As a
wesome as shipsuits are, there’re not nanoskins. They don’t regulate my temperature because Citlali does that… or is supposed to.

  I’m pretty sure it’s colder here than it was on Stasis. My fingertips are blue and I’ve lost the feeling in my lips.

  The enviros are fucked, that’s the only reason for the cold. At least there’s still oxygen, even if breathing it is like sucking down ice.

  So, new goal. Don’t stop moving.

  Besides, sitting here on my arse isn’t going to fix Dude.

  I need to get to Medical but he doesn’t have that much time, not unless I can find a clear run through Lab One to Central, and from the jungle of fug we burnt through getting here, that’s not going to happen.

  So. Medical is out. At least for now. That doesn’t leave a lot of options, but at least I’m on Lab Two. That’s something. Something that may save Dude’s fuzzy butt.

  Citlali’s not any old ship. It’s one of five ships sent out from Jørn on a mission to explore the galaxy, and like any good expedition, it’s packed with scientists. Lots and lots of scientists, the kind who like sticking their noses in alien crap and seeing what they can do with it. Which isn’t good for the alien crap but is great for me. And Dude. I just have to find Mae Liu’s lab.

  There’s no sign of the fug on this deck, and that’s about as good as it gets in an attempt to find Mae Liu’s lab.

  It shouldn’t be this hard. I know Lab Two like I know my bedroom. Dad’s lab is on this deck, and I spend enough time wandering the corridors that I can find my way around blindfolded with the gravity turned off. Literally.

  But... I don’t know. Either Mae Liu got another lab assignment before the last stasis cycle, or the Lab AI is messing with me. Seriously messing with me.

  Given the fact that Lab doesn’t have a sense of humour, that seems unlikely.

  Unfortunately, it doesn’t change the fact that Mae Liu’s lab isn’t where it’s supposed to be.

  ‘Lab!’ My voice echoes in the corridor.

  As on Stasis, Mae Liu’s should be on the third of the middle rings, although this time, it’s not because she’s more important than anyone else, but because she doesn’t need access to the docking bay, which suits her. Mae Liu hates going EVA, and she doesn’t so much study alien stuff as figure out how to apply what the others have discovered, to the ship. And us.

  The curve on the third mid-ring distorts sound, and my voice echoes back at me in a dozen fractured words, all yelling the same thing.

  I wait for the echoes to fade and try again. Just for luck.

  ‘Lab!’

  Was that a ripple on the wall, or a trick of my imagination?

  I move away from the hatch and press my hand to the wall. ‘Lab? Hey, you there?’

  Nothin— Wait, what was that? Further down the corridor another ripple of light catches my eye, there then gone, like a mirage. What the fuck?

  ‘Did you see that?’ I ask Dude.

  Dude fuzzes, the sound slow, weighed down by the too-full feeling and the beginnings of fiery blades running down his spine.

  I scratch his head. ‘We’re getting there.’

  I follow the ripple.

  It leads me to the outer ring and around the other side of the ship, jumping first from one side of the corridor to the other and back again, like some kind of demented lightning bug. Rippling once and then gone.

  Maybe Lab’s vocals are on the fritz and this is the only way she can communicate. But then, what was with the flashes of light on the walls? Why not use words or appear herself? Was there something wrong with the holo-emitters?

  I tell myself to give up worrying about it, but that leaves room for other worries to intrude. Ones less pleasant, accompanied by the sweet smell of rotting flesh and the iron tang of blood.

  Worry about the holos. It won’t give you nightmares.

  Thankfully, the ripples stop before thinking about what’s making Lab coy leads my thoughts right back to where they were.

  Lab’s given up on ripples, throwing them over in favour of a giant pulsing beacon that I’m pretty sure is bright enough to burn out the emitters, right after they burn out my retinas.

  All throwing my hands up and shutting my eyes does is turn the sun-like glare into an angry red glow.

  ‘Lab, I see it! Tone it down.’

  The blaze vanishes.

  It takes a little bit for my eyes to figure that out.

  I lower my arms and blink.

  The world’s a little blurry but I’m pretty sure I’m standing in front of a door.

  Another blink.

  I’m going to have stars in my eyes for the next year, but there’s definition in the haze of colour now, and yeah, that’s a door.

  One final blink and the door comes fully into focus, an all-too-familiar off-white hatch with a long deep scratch at shin height, running through the door and down the corridor.

  This is Dad’s lab, but the name over the door isn’t his.

  AD Tudor floats high enough I can’t miss it.

  I know I’m in the right place. I know I am. For one, there’s that scratch in the holowall, a deep scar of pale grey, a metre and seventy-seven centimetres long. I know that because Captain—

  A clawed hand reaching out of biogel…

  I shake the image away.

  It doesn’t matter how I know how long the scar is, it matters that it marks where I crashed Dad’s hoversled and that it was right in front of his lab.

  The second way I know that shit is weird is this; I don’t know who AD Tudor is. Not a clue or inkling or anything else that might be an idea. That might not be a problem if I didn’t live on a ship. But I do. I know everyone. Every. One.

  Whoever the fuck AD Tudor is, they don’t live on Citlali.

  The lab door is open. A crack between the frame and the thin plasteel shell. My body doesn’t seem to care that its brain is still trying to figure out what the fuck is going on. It’s shifting muscles and squeezing tendons, lifting bones and curling appendages and before I know it, I’m opening the door that says AD Tudor and entering Dad’s lab.

  Dad’s not AD Tudor. He’s Jori Darzi, a tall, dark-haired man who smiles as he drags me out of bed and frowns like it hurts when he grounds me, but even though the name on the door is wrong, the insides are all his, right down to the acid burn on the decking and the black mark in the centre bench.

  My legs take me inside, my feet steer me past the bench with its acid burn, down the aisle between it and the shelves full of rocks and jars of minerals, all the way down the back, into the little cubby that houses the food dispenser and the toilet. They stop at the back bulkhead, the only bare and empty space in the lab. In any lab.

  In all the hours I’ve spent in here, watching Dad do his thing, that blank space has never struck me as strange, but now... Now, with my feet holding me rooted in place and my hand lifting, I’m thinking that it’s more than strange. It’s downright suspicious. Or maybe that’s the command sphere blooming again deep in my skull. I can’t feel it, but just because I can’t sense something doesn’t mean it’s not there. Plus, there’s the disconnect between body and brain and the way my fingers know to press that spot right there.

  The bulkhead parts, splits right down the middle and sucks itself into the wall on either side, revealing a small slither of space beyond, just big enough to wedge a person.

  I wish it was a body behind the wall. This is worse.

  It’s hard to imagine worse than a corpse. A minute ago I would have said a rotting corpse, but this... I really wish it was a dead person.

  The black oval stuck in the wall is bigger than my chest and pulses like a metallic heart. Finger-width strands move under the surface like muscles, contracting and expanding in slow motion, and there’s this impression coming off of it, like being in the ice hull except… creepier.

  I know what this is. The knowledge flows up from the back of my head, a strange mix of memories that are mine and yet aren’t.

  It’s th
e disc I saw in h’Rawd’s and Onah’s memories. The thing AD and Dad fought over. And with that realisation come other memories, filling in the blank places in my head like they’d always been there, waiting for me to remember. And I know now what the argument was about, can remember the human words thudding in my ears, loud and jarring, making my fur bristle and skin clench even after all these years. I watch blood flush human skin, smell the anger in the air, strong enough to match mine, and I remember wishing that these hairless beasts had teeth and claws, could hear the song of the beacon so that they would understand.

  The thing in the bulkhead isn’t Jøran and I know, right down to the pit of my stomach, that it’s bad. There’s a sense about it, a sinister, half-felt tingle up my spine, like a shadow lurking in the corner of my eye. I’ve felt it before, not only in the Jørans’ memories but here, on the Citlali, except it’s stronger here. I can taste it, like old meat, musty and sharp, like it’s got teeth.

  The disc repulses me and yet…

  My arm has a life of its own, muscles tensing, fingers stretching. The oval seems to pause a moment and then start up again, beating harder and faster than before as my fingers inch closer.

  ‘The specimen was recovered in the Megora system.’ The AI’s voice booms out of the walls and I swear, if we were in orbit, I’d have left it.

  An AI floats next to me, or part of one. My heart settles back in my chest as I recognise the small green head and bland expression. Looks like Lab found a working holo emitter somewhere.

  ‘I don’t remember Megora.’

  ‘It is the first system out from Jørn. You were not yet conceived.’

  Right. Well, that would explain that.

  ‘What is it?’ I point to the oval.

  ‘I do not know.’