Cold Between Stars Page 8

  Dude’s still on my shoulder. The little guy must have claws of plasteel, ‘cause I don’t know how he’s holding on as I duck and weave and try not to fall on my arse. At least he’s not going for the fug wriggling up my shoulder. We came to some kind of agreement along the way. He didn’t eat fug and I didn’t freak out. It seemed reasonable at the time. Doesn’t stop him from giving me a heart attack though. Like now. He dashes for the fug, and I ignore the tendril for a second, ripping the mould off my shipsuit.

  A second is all the fug needs to strike.

  Something hits me from behind.

  The Franken falls from my grip and skitters across the deck. Dude goes with it, not even his wicked little claws enough to keep him attached as I go flying.

  Right into the fug.

  Not the blackened, retreating carpet of the stuff either, but the deep, thick, viscous crap.

  My heart’s got enough time to squeeze before I hit the deck on my belly.

  Air bursts out of my lungs. My vision goes white and for a second I forget where I am.

  It’s like coming out of stasis all over again, except this time, when my vision clears, there’s no decking, no AI to remind me to breathe. Just fug. In my face.

  I’d rather be staring down a rucnart.

  Everything goes still.

  The stuff’s got no eyes and yet it’s staring at me. I don’t know how, but I can sense it. A sweet spot of tension between my shoulder blades, and I know that it’s waiting for me to make the first move before it pounces.

  The Franken’s there, a lunge and a shuffle from the tips of my fingers and Dude’s sitting on top of it, like an island in the middle of a volcano. He’s not moving either, and I imagine, if this were a vid, he’d be standing on one paw with little swords in his hands, snarling at the mould.

  I shake the image off. I need to get out of here, and I’m not leaving Dude.

  What’s the fug waiting for?

  There’s a grey-green shadow in the corner of my eye. I can’t quite make it out but it’s long and thin and it looks a lot like the tendril that was smacking me around. I have the sense that it’s growing, or maybe that’s because it’s getting closer, sneaking over my head for a kill shot. Dude’s glaring at it, his little body tensing, his fur sleeking out, his tiny muzzle wrinkling, lips pulling back over sharp, sharp teeth. And it’s like, holy Terra, there’s a miniature rucnart crouched atop the Franken, and I swear, I swear that’s an emote coming off him in a spine-curdling blast of menace.

  For just a second, the fug pulls back.

  That’s it. I lunge. One hand propelling me forward, the other reaching for the Franken.

  The fug attacks.

  My hand closes over the plasform. Dude’s climbing up my wrist and it’s like I have eyes in the back of my head. I see the grey-green shadow aiming for my back, its sharp, spear-like tip going for my heart.

  Roll. Point. Shoot.

  The fug’s screaming again, the stuff that’s not clinging to my shipsuit. There’s no time to rip it off. I’m in the middle of the shit now. Green at my feet, new tendrils breaking out of the freight tube, cracking the steelcrete, ripping out of holes. All of them coming for me.

  Point. Shoot.

  I spin, searching for the hatch.

  There.

  I guess getting thrown into the fug was both good and bad. The hatch is a few steps away, and now that I’m in the thick of it, I’m not worrying too much about not stepping on fug. The faster I move, the harder I am to catch.

  One step. Two.

  Burn fug, burn.

  The fug’s eaten the control panel. But really, what else did I expect? It’s fug.

  There’s not much left of the panel, a few bits of biogel and a nub of plasform to show where it once was.

  The fug hasn’t gotten as far with the hatch itself. Either the steelcrete here is thicker, or the fug’s got better things to do, ‘cause there are only a few shallow pock marks in its surface. Which, I hope, means it hasn’t got to Medical yet (or wherever I am). Of course, that also leaves me with a problem. How to get through the hatch.

  I need another pair of hands, someone to hold off the fug while I search for a way in. But it’s only Dude and me, and Dude’s not big enough to hold the Franken.

  I’m gonna have to be quick—

  Rage. It hits me under the ribcage. Bloodlust follows it, a sucker-punch to the jaw, and for a second my vision goes red, and I can taste something strange on my tongue, something musty and sour. I want... I want...

  Violence.

  To tear with teeth and claws, to rip into the enemy and feast—

  I shut the foreign emote out. Shake the red from my vision and try not to let shock slow me down. There’s a golden fuzz to the emote, and even if it hadn’t been emanating from my shoulder, I’d have known who was pushing it. Dude’s got some serious clout for a creature the size of both my fists. I want to know how he’s doing it, but there’s no time. No time for anything except to rip the fug off the bulkhead and pray for an emergency release, and hope even harder the panel isn’t as fucked as the ones on Stasis.

  Something must be smiling on me because it works. The fug’s even been useful for a change. The steelcrete covering the emergency release is gone save for a thin honeycomb of metal. I punch through it. The latch is a little corroded, but it doesn’t shatter when I throw my weight against it.

  For a second, nothing happens. I push harder, hear something crack, try not to imagine the handle snapping even as the steelcrete crumbles under my hand.

  And then I’m stumbling forward, half the latch in my hand, but not caring because the hatch is rolling open and I’m diving through it, the Franken slung over my shoulder, Dude still emoting on my shoulder.

  The hatch snaps shut.

  CHAPTER NINE

  I’m not on Medical. I’m on Lab Two, two decks above Medical.

  I guess I got really turned around in the freight tubes.

  After I shut the hatch, all the fear and adrenaline that had been keeping me going, left in a rush. I had enough energy to get to my feet, strip the fug from my clothes and burn it with the Franken, before stumbling to the nearest lab.

  Sleep’s pulling at my bones, making my eyes cross. It’s only the cold keeping me awake.

  The life-support on this deck is toast, and not the good kind where the butter’s melting into the crumb. It’s the bad kind, the kind where I’m pretty sure Dude and I are the only things generating heat, and he’s too small to do more than keep the frostbite out of my fingers. But there’s stuff in the lab I find, a whole back wall full of junk the last occupant hasn’t gotten around to throwing in the cyclers.

  I crank the thermal layer in my shipsuit all the way up before sorting through the junk. It’s not much. I mean there’s a lot of junk, but the old test tubes won’t do much to keep us warm and of the stuff that will, we’ll make do.

  I use a cutter to chop up a few of the workbenches and make a kind of hut in the corner. Just three sides and bit of plasform on top to help hold in the heat. A few old scraps of shipsuit go on the floor and some thick, squiggly stuff that might have been plasform (if someone stuffed it in a microwave) wraps around the inside. The resulting space is small, enough for me to huddle up with Dude against my chest, but that’s the point.

  If the fug finds us, I’m banking of Dude warning me before it gets close enough to eat me.

  I sleep on the floor, head on my pack, Dude cuddled up under my chin. He’d still emoting when I close my eyes, the same anger and bloodlust as in the tubes, but lessened. It was comforting in its own weird way.

  In the seconds before sleep takes me, I wonder at that. I’ve never spent this much time with a critter, but the things I’ve seen him do and the emoting aren’t something I thought a critter was capable of. They’re a little bit psionic, enough for the kin to rearrange their thought patterns, but they’re not that bright. Or are they? I mean, the rucnarts have to have something to work with, you can’t ge
t an animal to do something if it’s stone cold stupid. At least, that’s what I’ve been told. Maybe I should ask them.

  I hadn’t meant to do more than sleep, but after a nightmare where I ran through stone corridors, shadows moving like snakes on the walls and silver lightning nipping at my heels, I slipped into the Aer.

  The Aer isn’t like what Jørgens experience in stasis/sleep. I mean, it could be, if we all got together and created our own little world. And sometimes a few of us do, mucking around in each other’s memories. It’s something to kill the time. But we don’t do things like the kin. No one does things like the kin.

  Stepping into the Aer isn’t easy, or it shouldn’t be. There’s a wall between Jørgens and kin, not a natural one, but something the Jørans made.

  I press my hand to it, sensing the way it wobbles and bounces at my touch, the static charge that runs up my arm. It’s a warning. There are teeth in the wall, and claws and fangs. All sorts of nasty, pain-filled things designed to keep nosey human half-breeds out. The qwans don’t say it like that, but the rucnarts do. All of us have slipped into the Aer at some point, we’re nosey half-breeds after all, but most of us usually only try it once. The teeth and the claws and all that.

  But not me. And not Grea. I guess it’s part of being an empath, and why the kin don’t like us so much. Their defences kinda slide right over us. All that buzzing, tingling sensation ripping up and down my arm feels like it’s trying to chew through a layer of air above my skin. The teeth and claws graze my arms and neck, but nothing catches flesh.

  I push through the wall.

  For a moment, I’m under water, staring up at the sun, a million flesh-eating piranhas swirling around me in whirlpools of frustrated rage. It’s one of those moments that stretch and stretch, seeming to spread into eternity, and no matter how hard you kick or claw your way upwards, the surface is always out of reach.

  This is where most first-timers freak out and bail. Even Mac. But not me, and not Grea.

  When it’s like the air is going to burn in my lungs, I take a deep breath and step sideways.

  The Aer spreads before me and it’s wrong.

  For one, Dude’s on my shoulder. I want to wonder how he got there, I mean, not on my shoulder, but on my shoulder on the psionic plane, but have to add it to the list of weird shit about him and move on. There’s no time to ponder it now.

  I’m standing on a wide, sun-scorched plain under a sky so blue it hurts to look at. The soil under my feet is red as blood. It puffs and swirls around my boots with every step, carrying with it an iron tang of fear and something else, something that slithers up my spine and lodges in my throat.

  I need fangs. That thought is strange but it sticks in the back of my head and refuses to let go. I try to shake it off, to pry it from my skull, digging my fingers into the thick goop and yanking, but all that does is make it cling tighter. All I come away with is some multicoloured crap that sticks under my fingernails and stinks like old socks and panic.

  Shit. I know what this is.

  It’s the rainbow running through the goop that gives it away. Training memories. I’m stuck in a training memory. The goop sliding over my skull is a psionic history lesson. Forget vids, tutors, or the old timers telling you how it was back in the day, this wasn’t merely history inserted into your brain, this was the memory of someone who’d been there when shit got real. Although judging from the kaleidoscope turning this memory white, it wasn’t just one memory.

  Double shit. Multi-memory trainings were the worst, and this one felt new, stickier than the others I’d encountered, raw like it wasn’t so much a trainer as a nightmare. As if whomever the memories came from was reliving the experience without the dulling passage of time, or the blurring effect of passing through generations of minds.

  I know without trying that it’s not going to let go.

  If my empathic abilities hadn’t been stronger than my minuscule telepathic ones, the memory would have caught me up in a red-hot second. As it was…

  The goop’s sliding over my fingers and I can feel it tricking over my forehead and dripping onto my nose.

  Sighing, I pluck Dude from my shoulder and put him on the red dirt at my feet. There’s no need for both of us to get caught up in this.

  ‘Don’t get lost,’ I tell him before I let the training memories take over.

  I’m still on the red plain, but it’s no longer empty, no longer silent.

  The ground shakes as shuttles roar overhead, while the snap of weapons fire reverberates in my ears and snarls rip through the air, raising the gooseflesh on my arms. It’s the screams that shiver across my flesh though, that make my heart leap to my throat and stop it with fear. They rise high and piercing and then stop, cut off on a wet gurgle.

  The ground is red with more than sand.

  There’s a dome in the distance, the size of a dozen shuttles, its roof shredded, bits of plasform flapping in the wind, the shattered remnants of supporting rods scattered over the ground. Around it are bodies – human and rucnart. In the peculiar way of the eter, one moment I’m standing atop a rock, far enough from the battlefield that the figures might as well be nanites and the next I’m in the midst of it. There’s a wounded qwan at my feet, a trio of rucnarts standing over it, snouts bloody and fangs bared. Not even a metre away, a human in an envirosuit gasps, blood bubbling from his lips and pouring from the wounds on his chest.

  All around me there is carnage, blood, death. Rage. So much rage it rises from the ground and curls around my knees, tugging on my shipsuit, clawing at my shields.

  Then nothing.

  Fear slithers up my spine, turns me around even through everything in me is yelling at me to run. To run and never look back.

  A woman stands on the outskirts of the carnage. Short and dark, her eyes like pitiless pools, blood and loss and rage distorting her face. Ice forms in the pit of my stomach. I am a hundred rucnarts all at once, a dozen qwans. We could fall on her in a second, sink talons and fangs into soft human flesh and tear her apart as we have the others, and yet…

  And yet…

  Power whips around her; dark chocolate swirls laced with blue lightning and now she is the size of a mountain, as endless as the sea.

  I know her, know her like I know the fug that chases me through my nightmares, that stops my heart in my chest, but her name is lost in the flash of terror, of dread as she raises her arms and—

  I tear myself out of the memory breathing hard, hands on knees, heart trying to rip its way out of my chest.

  Old holy Terran shit.

  The Regan. That was the Regan.

  Fuck. If that was what she’d been like in real life, no wonder she single-handedly stopped the war.

  Citlali was being eaten by hyperactive mould and the Jørans were having nightmares about the final days of the war. What was up with that? My dreams are full of fug; I’m as sure of that as I am grateful that I don’t remember them. So why are the Jørans focused on something that happened a century ago?

  Unless…

  I dip back into the memory. Not the training memory, but my memory. I don’t want to get caught in whatever horror the Jørans are reliving – the first time was bad enough.

  Overhead, the shuttles roar. I pause it and, instead of looking out at the carnage on the plain, I turn my gaze up. The shuttles are big, sleek machines with patterns carved into their sides and silver-black hulls. And they’re not human-made. Not. Human. Made.

  A lodestone hits the bottom of my gut.

  That...

  Brain reset. A few blank seconds where I try to fit the implications of that into my worldview. Twisting and turning the image above me, trying to find a space in everything I know for it to fit, and then, when I do.

  ‘Old Terra…’

  Except it’s not Old Terran, that image. It’s something else, an echo from the ancient past and a shadow of the war that created the Regan.

  The Regan.

  I bring that memory up, make
it hover on the sand in front of me, the shuttle casting her in darkness. Even in the snapshot I’ve drawn out of the memory, the lightning in her hands snaps and spits, like not even a hundred years and the cast of a hundred minds can contain the power under her skin. Stepping closer makes my flesh crawl. She was meant to be ferocious, to be a force unlike any the world had ever faced. I’d learned her name in class, but it never stuck, only her title, and the fear it brought to people’s minds. A yellow wave rippled with the sparkle of awe.

  She doesn’t look like I remember from the vids, but that’s not unusual, memory warps features all the time, makes her teeth a little sharper, her eyes a little darker. Besides, it’s not her face that tickles my awareness, the sense of something not right is coming from elsewhere. I peer closer, circling her, trying to find the niggle burrowing under my skin. The lightning makes it harder, constantly distracting me, drawing my eyes away from her feet, her clothes.

  The lightning.

  There’s something in the lightning, a flicker, a hint of red that doesn’t belong.

  I reach for it.

  The ground bucks, disrupting the memory. The Regan dissipates, shredding on a non-existent breeze as the space around me changes.

  I scoop Dude up as the red soil turns to snow. Massive ice-covered trees shoot up around me, branches lacing together, forming icicles like spear points aimed at my head. I can see another memory gathering, another human-shaped shadow forming next to me and I know I have to get out.

  Whatever’s happening with the rucnarts, it’s bad enough that they’ve lost control of the Aer. I’m not hanging around to find out what that’s like.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Eventually, I find the forest, the space where p’Endr showed me her memory. It’s different. Quiet as the void. It doesn’t appear as it did in the brief glimpse I had as she tried to outrun the writhing fug.

  It’s... fractured, and the big black sphere that hovered over it all is gone, hidden behind the dirty-grey mist that covers the valley. As I walk under the canopy, the grass cracks and pops like it’s made of brittle plasform. And the air... I take deep a breath, trying to sort out the smell. There’s a thick, musty scent on it, like a cut strapple left too long on the bench, the pale green flesh turned brown. But that’s not all. There’s something else in the air, a scent that’s not so much a smell but a sense, a curdling in my gut that has nothing to do with the silence ringing in my ears.