Dark Between Oceans Read online

  For an organism bred to clean up biological junk, programmed by the kin do a single job and then die, he's pretty smart. Old Terra, if I think about it, he's pretty smart for a human too.

  There's something big up ahead. The HUD is full of whatever it is, a glowing orange blob, bright at its core but not enough to burn my retinas. I can't tell whether the glow is heat or power, or both. Whatever it is, it rivals a shuttle in size. Wide and squat.

  Some of that energy runs through the ice. I stop a few paces away from the first vein of it, threaded through the floor and walls in a fine web of the pale pink. It's almost not visible, a trick of the light dancing on the edges of my vision. If not for the flotilla of corpses blocking my way, I wouldn't have stopped at all.

  Dude's a ball of grief. I pluck him off my shoulder and cuddle him against my chest. The fug-armour wraps around him too, like it can sense his grief, or maybe it's just reacting to my desire to shield the little fuzz butt against what comes next. I need to know what the glow is, and to do that...

  At least I'm not stepping on corpses. That's one good thing about the lack of gravity, the dead critters are floating around me; for every one I push out of the way, others bump into my shoulders and legs, bobbing and twisting in my wake. They're all the same, small and black, covered in hard plasform shells, the clear bubbles cracked and shredded, spilling blood and other things into the void.

  One moment I'm walking through critters, and then... The HUD is going crazy, filling the world with diagrams and readouts, and flashing yellow shapes. It's enough to make my head explode. I close my eyes, but the riot of colour is behind my lids too, Hunt whispering from my gut, parsing the shit on the HUD, and Dude—

  I slam my shields in place. Everything stops, and I'm alone inside my head, just me, just the darkness behind my eyes, without even the tug of the umbilicus at my gut.

  I open my eyes again. The HUD is still flashing and pulsing. I shake all the diagrams and readouts aside and rely on my own fleshy, humanoid vision. I've passed through the critters into an open space, not big, just wide enough for me to stretch my arms. It's round-ish but jagged, bits of ice sticking out at odd angles, driven into the walls and ceiling. There are massive cracks, most spreading from the ice shards, some are filled with the red fug, brighter than what I've seen before, no longer dull pink but the bright screaming red of fresh blood. The atmosphere is filled with the same colour, a frozen reddish mist.

  The thing that really gets my attention are the holes in the floor and ceiling. They're huge, I could lay across them and not touch the edges. They're deep too. I can't see much, just the grooves in the sides, as if something had drilled through the ice. Something like a grappling cable.

  Plasform is stuck in the roof. As if that triangular shard is a trigger, I start seeing other shards driven into the ice. I turn. Look closely at what I thought was a tunnel, at where it would have continued, at the way ice is crumbled, broken, cracked.

  It dawns on me, slowly, very slowly, what some of those readouts on the HUD where telling me.

  Looking at them piled on the sides of my HUD brings the readouts front and centre. They're still a confusing jumble of languages, and so I lower my shields and reach for Hunt. Understanding comes gradually, the symbols wriggling and twisting in my brain, finding places to lodge, but when it does... I want to be sick.

  Vomit rockets up my throat, and it's only the thought of it hitting the faceplate and spewing back in my face that stops it erupting from my mouth.

  You figured it out, Grea whispers in my head. What they're using the new critters for.

  I figured it out all right, and I really wish I hadn't.

  The critters escorted a bomb to this spot. It went off. They were still here.

  I'm standing in vaporised critter. Blood and bone and flesh. All of it swirling around in this little crater that used to be one of Aeotu's grappling cables.

  It's not that I don't get it, don't understand why they blew up the cable, but did they have to annihilate critters at the same time? I recall the carnage behind me, the little bodies torn apart by fug. Maybe there hadn't been a choice, maybe they had to blow the critters to free Citlali, but surely a drone could have done the same job.

  Why? I'm asking Grea, but also myself. There has to be more to it.

  Grea doesn't answer, is gone from my consciousness, leaving just a trace of herself behind, the cherry red clouded with secrets.

  Something moves within the ice, a ribbon of orange in the black.

  The ribbon pulses, once, twice, a third time. The HUD is throwing new diagrams at me, new symbols, and Hunt is translating, giving me numbers and sensor readings.

  Three-point-seven metres. The thickness of the ice between me and the orange thing.

  Iron, plasform and haemoglobin. The composition of the mist, of the shards embedded in the crater.

  The chemical structure of the ice; hydrogen, oxygen and— That word doesn't parse, bounces off my brain. Hunt can't translate it, the word has no relation to the language I know, is something that at its core, is alien. There are other impressions, half-formed images that make no sense; a vast, grey-green tank; tiny robots splitting in half, eating and multiplying.

  It's the fug. The fug is part of the ice.

  There's a tug at my consciousness, a shadow of Grea, and the orange thing pulses harder, like it's acknowledging me.

  Alarm, my alarm, Dude's alarm, Hunt's alarm, all of it has me backing up. My eyes are caught up in the orange pulse, stuck on it, until the HUD screams at me, and ice spews in my face, pinging off my left side as red fug erupts from the ice. I'm running then, and I'm not looking back.

  Dude leads the way, and now, an hour later, I'm standing in front of another hatch. One that doesn't look like any hatch I've ever seen on Citlali, but looks a little too much like the ones on Aeotu.

  I'd accuse Dude of a shit sense of direction – right after I stopped wondering how the fuck we got to Aeotu from within Citlali's ice hull – if there wasn't a familiar pull in my gut, a sense of Grea reaching through the hull.

  There's no lock pad, no instructions, just those lines and whorls, twisting together in some kind of language, teasing the back of my brain with knowledge. And behind that... behind that, the awareness rises in my gut, the thing reaching through me, ordering the symbols, bringing understanding with it, making one of the whorls brighter than the others.

  I touch it, not sure how I feel about the thing, now that I know what it is, or some of what it is. How I feel about the umbilicus. Still, Grea is behind the bulkhead and the lockpad is between me and whatever is on the other side. I need the… thing, the being on the other end of the umbilicus. For now.

  The whorl wriggles under my fingers, and the awareness guides my hand, moving muscle and bone, twisting my wrist, spreading my index finger and thumb. The whorl moves with me, shifting, changing. Touching other lines. On my HUD, I watch heat signatures – veins of power – spread through the bulkhead, watch it find an edge, watch it describe a doorway, watch the bulkhead turn translucent, the patterns in its surface still opaque, until it resembles skin more than whatever metallic stone shit Aeotu is made of.

  Even if I'd been wearing my fug-feet, the door would have been twice as tall as me, and half again as wide.

  The hatch SNAPS back. There and then gone.

  I'd seen Them, the aliens the kin were so afraid of, in h'Rawd's memories, knew how big they were, but still... there's nothing quite like seeing something with your own eyes to give you a better appreciation.

  I don't know if these things are on a timer or have some kind of sensor, so I'm through quick smart.

  The hatch SNAPS shut on my heels, all sign of the gaping hole gone. Just another bit of the hull.

  Beyond is a room, an airlock maybe? It's small, a couple of really big strides across and a dozen more length-ways. The bulkheads are curved. All the bulkheads on Aeotu are curved, or at least those that I've seen, like They had never seen a straight line t
hey liked. Great squishy domes, like eggs on their sides, and everywhere, the walls are carved with patterns. Shapes and lines that speak to the thing, that shift and change, that beckon me to follow them until the end of time.

  Pain shoots through my shoulder. Small but sharp, enough to knock me out of the mesmerising effect of the pattern.

  'Thanks, Dude.'

  He chitters at me, reproach in his voice.

  'Yeah. Yeah, I know, don't look at the walls.'

  Except I have to get out of here and the patterns are the only way to do that.

  That, and the thing.

  In the short time – a full day-cycle the awareness tells me – I've been crawling around Citlali, Aeotu has changed. Power hums in the walls. I can hear it like my own heartbeat, thrumming in my ears. Warm on my flesh.

  Feverish almost. I'm sweating under the fug, clammy, and there's something in the back of my throat, something that feels like that time I had the flu and Mum shoved me under the shower to bring my temperature down before rushing me off to Med.

  Aeotu is sick. That knowledge pops into my brain all on its own, no help from the awareness required. How does a spaceship get sick?

  The answer's down the next corridor.

  Red and yellow-gold crawl over the bulkheads, veins of fresh-spilled blood and sunshine creeping up and over, winding in the carvings. Moving, shimmering.

  The yellow-gold reminds me of the carnage in the ice hull, the shards of plasform, the traces of blown-up critters, or the tanks with their amalgamation of alien and human tech. The red though…

  Fury rises off it, shimmering waves rising in the air. Not seeking, not reaching, just hanging there, hovering over the red fug like a conductor. Unlike the stuff that chased me through the ice or attacked me and Mac, there is no direction, no objective. It just sits there. Not inert or frozen but... directionless.

  Dude's digging fug claws into my shoulder, and the awareness/thing is blaring in the back of my brain, yelling warnings, while my HUD fills with danger signs of its own. I shake them to the side, blocking the thing out and sending a thought to the armour on my shoulder, imagining it thicker, so thick not even Dude's fug claws can pierce it. There's something in the red fug, something that's been tickling the back of my brain. Something... strange.

  Focus is my greatest talent and I use it now, stalking the red, half in and half out of the eter.

  The corridor fades, not all the way, just enough so it doesn't get in the way as I focus on the red, on the way it shimmers and twists in the air.

  Like when I first drew the fug into the eter, I get in close to the red, pulling it apart until the mirage is a cloud of red, thin at the edges. And like that first time, there are sparks in the depths of it, glimpses of an intelligence driving the fug. But unlike back then, when I'd been trying to stop it from destroying Citlali, the red doesn't attempt to trap me. It's… waiting. Unattended. Whatever is behind it, whatever drives its attack, isn't there. I sink into the cloud, burrowing deeper, chasing the sparks of lightning buried in its core.

  They're faint, distant, thick with the sense of waiting.

  I reach out to bring the sparks closer and... There. A pause, a moment of nothing and then... and then... The lightning is gone. Disappeared, leaving the faint scent of ozone and... cherries? I grab for it again, the lingering aftertaste of the intelligence behind the red. It stains the eter, trips a memory of home, of Mum and Grea, smoke pouring out of the cooker and—

  It's gone. Vanished from the eter like it never was.

  There's a shiver in my spine, caught there.

  I pull out of the eter, and know, deep in the pit of me, that this isn't going to end well.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The sickness gets worse the deeper into Aeotu I go. Every couple of steps I forget I'm on Aeotu, that the corridors aren't Citlali's, that I'm not in some weird dream or kin-built psionic hallucination. Fug covers the bulkheads, crawls over the curving ceiling and trails across the deck but instead of the grey-green, it's a bright screaming red. The yellow's in there too, thin filaments of the stuff winding around the red, but it's the red that makes my skin crawl.

  Menace rolls off it, beating like a heart.

  Maybe it's the way it feels like Grea but not. Maybe, too, it's the way that Grea's presence gets stronger as the red grows thicker, as the rage lifting off it chokes the air. Maybe it's Dude vibrating on my shoulder, or the awareness growing behind my eyes. Maybe it's the sense of Aeotu behind the awareness. Maybe.

  Whatever it is, I keep moving forward.

  I'm standing before a familiar hatch, the membrane snapping back into the deck. Behind is another familiar corridor, thinner with just two doors; one at the end, the other just a few paces in. The end one leads to Aeotu's core, to the only colour, besides the red fug, that I've ever seen on the ship. The other door...

  Grea's behind it.

  My hand lifts of its own accord, hovering over the hatch.

  I can feel her. It's different than before, than when I stood in front of Citlali's engines and felt the cherry-red of her presence. That was a breeze, a gentle brush of silk against my skin. This is a gale pressing not just into my palm but into all of me, demanding my attention. My presence.

  The hatch snaps downwards.

  Beyond is darkness.

  In the corner of my eye, Dude disappears.

  {{ Danger, }} the awareness whispers.

  I step over the threshold.

  Not even the HUD can penetrate the black, but there's a map in front of me, a three-dimensional layout of the room – the command centre, awareness says – a ghost guiding me around waist-high workbenches and triangular pads atop tall poles that might be stools.

  There's a SSSNAP from behind as the hatch closes, and then light. I'm blind, holding my hands up against the glare. Tears blur my vision, but a couple of blinks and I can make out the central holo blazing like a sun, casting the double ring of workbenches into stark shadow.

  'Grea?' I say, and am surprised my voice doesn't echo.

  'Hey, fathead.' She steps out of the shadows beyond the holo.

  I can't help it. I step back. Horror has claws in my chest, flaming talons sunk deep into my heart. I try hold it back, but there's that second, that split-moment before I take control, before reason raises its voice and tells me that's my twin. My sister. The other half of my soul.

  A split-moment is all it takes. There are no secrets between Grea and me. I don't know what it's like with others, twins or siblings or empaths, any of those. I just know, that in the moment before I slammed my shields in place and reeled back the emotion roiling in my core, that Grea felt it. Know that it hurt, worse than if I'd launched myself across the decking and ripped her face off.

  Nothing shows in her expression. It never does. Grea's got control like I've got focus, got denial down to a fine art. Her face looks exactly as she wants it, when she wants it, and right now... Right now there's a pleasant smile curving her lips, making her eyes twinkle, but the rest of her... Pain rolls between us, a great well of it filling the space.

  'That's not nice, Kuma.'

  'I'm sorry.'

  'You should be.' She steps farther out of the shadows, skin sliding out of the blackness, catching the light from the holo and throwing it back. 'I'm not that hideous. Not like you.'

  That last one is a laser-guided missile aimed at my heart. It hits, like she intended. And I let it, feel it spread under my skin. It's only fair.

  And she's right, she's not hideous, she's just... Different doesn't cover it. I want to say that fug has done to her what it's done to me, but that wouldn't be true, wouldn't cover the extent of the changes. The girl standing in front of me... she's not the girl from the eter, not the twin I remember. She's older, maybe older than me, and the fug... The fug hasn't given her paws or slicked her skin in the shiny black of Mac's armour. Hasn't changed her fingers to spikes, it's... It's hard to describe. She's Grea, but she's not. Her face has changed. Her nose is wider
, flatter, and there's a glow about her shoulders, an aura like she's generating light from inside herself. A holo made flesh.

  I can deal with all that, can be jealous over the way her skin shimmers and her eyes glow, it's the wave of red falling from her shoulders that turns my stomach. It writhes and twists, a million thin tendrils of fug bound together; bits of it separate from the whole to curl around her neck, caress her cheek, twine through her hair. Grea turns, and for a second I can see a bald spot at the base of her skull and the red buried there.

  I stumble back.

  'What happened to you?'

  Grea smiles. She's in front of me and I'm not quite sure how that happened. One moment she was on the other side of Command and now she's holding out her hand.

  Out of Mac and I, Grea is the one who looks most like my memories of her. The fug hasn't made her taller or given her paws, and if I don't look at the cape, don't follow it into the darkness, I can almost pretend that nothing has changed, except... Except she doesn't feel like my twin anymore.

  Dude is fuzzing, the warm gold of his presence threaded with the sharp bite of danger, a bite the other in the pit of me echoes.

  Nonetheless, this is Grea. My other half, and she's waiting for me.

  I take her hand.

  And wish I hadn't.

  That feeling, that sense that Grea isn't Grea anymore, is bolting up my arm, twisting under my skin.

  Yanking my hand back is instinctive, like snatching your hand from a flame, except Grea holds on.

  Fear, cold as the void, grips my heart. 'Let go.'

  'You're scared of me?' It's a statement breathed on a question, riding the air between us on a wave of disbelief, hurt and—

  I'm not touching that last emotion. Not. Touching. It.

  The awareness is blaring in my ear. Danger. Danger. Danger!

  There's something in my throat, tying up my vocal cords, making it hard to breathe. I think it's my heart. And still... and still... This is Grea.

  I tug on my hand. 'Let go of me, Grea. Please.'