The Immortals: Anchorage
Monsters don’t sleep
under your bed.
They scream forever
inside your head.
— Extract from ‘A Dance of Dreams and Nightmares’, an Uynovian poem
Ever since the Founding, Colonial settlers whispered of ghost ships; silent, empty vessels drifting between the stars, steel tombs for their crew. Ships that set out from Earth and, for whatever reason, never made it to the stars.
The causes were innumerable. A leaking reactor. A pathogen. An unstable passenger who took a knife and obeyed the voices in her head.
Or worse.
Recruited into the mysterious Synapse Foundation, Nicholas Caddy—still bearing the scars of an interstellar war—is dispatched on his first mission with the Immortals. A passenger liner, the Anchorage, has gone silent. Their task is simple: find the ship, salvage what they can, report what happened. Simple.
Simple.
This is Part two of The Immortals series set in the Universe of War, thirteen years before the events of Symphony of War: The Polema Campaign.
Anchorage
DT-Y 44 Transport Lahore
Deep space
0025
January 1st
2231 AD
Three years after The Immortals: Kronis Valley; thirteen years before the events of Symphony of War: The Polema Campaign
“HAPPY NEW YEAR, Caddy,” said Golovanov as he threw a dossier on my chest, the feeling jolting me awake. “Here’s your present.”
It took me a second to process all of this. I sat up in my bunk, shielding my eyes with my prosthetic hand, squinting in the harsh glare of the Lahore’s overhead lights. I sent my implants a mental command to dim the lights and the ship mercifully complied, dropping the illumination down to a manageable level.
“Wait,” I said, swinging my legs over the side of the bunk and opening the steel-grey dossier. “We got a job?” The screen lit up, showing a bunch of writing and ship schematics.
“Yup,” said Golovanov. “The Synapse Foundation is putting us in the field. You’ll like this one: it’s gas.”
I brought the lights back up as my eyes adjusted. Seemed like all we did every day was train. Adjust to the Immortal Armour. Working in a team with the other Immortals. Fire drills.
I skimmed over the documents, absorbing as much as I could as we spoke. Something about a ship in distress. “What’s the deal?”
“The Anchorage,” Golovanov said. “A DT-Y 44 just like this one. Passenger liner. It went silent about three days ago and has been drifting through Polema’s space since. Not responding to hails. Long range scans show low power and thermal signatures, but spectrographic analysis suggests there’s at least some atmosphere left. So we get to take a look-see.”
Any excitement I had at the potential for action slowly faded. “A bunch of civilians bought it out in the black? This is a job for the Coast Guard.”
“It is, and they’re contracting it out to us.”
“What a beating,” I said, and considered a moment. That was very odd. The Polema Coast Guard—named for their nautical forbearers—were tasked with sorting out this kind of garbage. “Wait, why the hell would they do that? The Coast Guard is one of the best funded agencies in the colonies. Why do they need us?”
Golovanov sat at the edge of my bed. “Maybe you should save your questions until you finish reading,” he said.
“Reading is for nerds,” I said. I switched off the dossier with a mental command. “So. Are we mercenaries now?”
“Eh.” He shrugged. “I prefer to use the term Private Third-Party Offshore Conflict Resolution Engineers. You can tell how fancy it is by how many words it has.”
“So, mercenaries.”
“There’s no money in integrity. You got a problem with that?”
“Naw,” I said. “Like they say on Eris, money doesn’t buy happiness, but poverty doesn’t buy anything. If we’re here to do dodgy stuff, and we’re going to make a buck doing it, that’s fine by me.” I stretched out my arms. “But I thought we were supposed to be tracking down and recovering Earthborn technology. Who cares about some civvie freighter?”
“The Coast Guard suspects,” said Golovanov, “that the Anchorage was attacked by Earthborn raiders.”
Well. That would explain a lot of things. “Why not call in the Colonial fleet?” I asked. “If the Earthborn are pushing up into our space, we should hit them hard. Another Reclamation would be… “ I didn’t even want to think about it.
“Money talks, but wealth whispers.” Golovanov’s eyes met mine. “Polema wants to avoid making waves—their economy is only just beginning to recover from the Reclamation. If the Earthborn really did hit the Anchorage, this might be just an isolated incident. You know, some renegades blowing off steam, or maybe a bunch of clones went rogue. Not an organised attack.”
My thoughts went to the same place. “And if that’s true, and Polema raises the alarm, and it all turns out to be nothing, they’ll lose tens of trillions of creds. They want this whole mess to be taken care of quietly.”
“Right,” he said. “A few hundred civvies die, but the rich get richer and that’s the important thing.”
It was as it always was. “The Prophets Wept.”
“It’s not all bad,” said Golovanov. “This is a gas opportunity for us, too. If the Earthborn really did hit the Anchorage, they probably left stuff behind. Stuff we could use.”
“Right,” I said, standing and stretching out my cramping legs. “Whatever. It’s gotta be better than more drills.”
* * *
I splashed some water on my face and adjusted my chrono implant. It began feeding my body chemicals to suppress drowsiness. By the time I left my quarters, I felt like I’d slept for a year then chugged ten cups of coffee.
Almost. Synthetic sleep was never the same; it was too perfect, too fake, as though some part of my brain were silently screaming in protest. They said it was bad for you.
But so was falling asleep during a firefight.
My suit of Immortal Armour was waiting in the cargo hold, an empty space at the rear of the ship. The Synapse Foundation had converted the area to a hangar. My armour, like the others, hung suspended from the ceiling by thick cables, a ten foot tall ape-like monster, boxy and metal. A caged hunter begging to be unleashed.
“Caddy,” said Angel, from behind her suit, one of the seven others. She seemed to be in a particularly bad mood. “You’re late.”
“Came as fast as I could,” I said. “How far out are we?”
“Six hours,” said Angel, stepping into view—shaved hair, muscled frame and all—and reached into the suit’s cockpit. She pulled something out that sparked before it went silent. “The Anchorage should be coming up on external sensors momentarily. Golovanov said he’d pipe the feed down here. AI, let me know when we have eyes on it.”
“Of course,” said the voice from her machine. Genderless. Empty.
I didn’t know how I felt about Angel. We’d been training together for months now. Things had been very professional. We hadn’t bonded properly yet; the Immortals and I. Angel least of all.
She was from a world called Uynov. They called themselves The First to Suffer. Uynov had been trashed by the Earthborn during the Reclamation; their bio-weapons turned it from a watery paradise to a shit-hole full of toxins and quarantined areas. Most Uynovians lived in space these days and they tended to be broody and aloof.
There didn’t seem to be anything Angel loved more than weapons drills, or practising endlessly with her armour. Angel might as well be a robot, an observation compounded by her heavy cybernetic augmentation. Prosthetics jutted from almost all parts of her flesh, blunt chrome slivers. Her face was hard, hair shaved, skin rough as cracked desert earth. She couldn’t have been older than twenty five but looked in her forties.
She was the first Uynovian I’d ever met. I wasn’t sure what I expected. But, you know, a smile occasionally wouldn’t go amiss.
“Hey Caddy,” said Stanco, clapping me on the shoulder from behind. “You ready to do this?”
I also didn’t know how I felt about Maddisynne Stanco. He was built like a bull with biceps like fire hydrants. Fun fact: he was also born a she. A trans-man. Not that there was anything wrong with that.
Although we were all supposed to be enlightened these days, and we’d been taught to accept trans people for what they wanted to be, I couldn’t. I tried. I knew it wasn’t right—if someone wanted to identify as an eggplant or something, why couldn’t they?—but, sometimes, I couldn’t look past the parts of Stanco’s facial structure that were effeminate. The way he sometimes looked at me or others.
Eris, my home, was very traditional. Osmeon, Stanco’s world, was viewed by most Erisians as decadent and hedonistic. Of course, they saw us as uptight, bigoted prudes.
But now, at the end of the day, we were all in this together. They had to accept us, and we had to accept them.
I was trying.
“Yeah buddy,” I said, trying to smile my best. “Our first real mission, huh?”
Stanco leaned up against Angel’s suit, folding his big hands behind his head. “Fuck yeah. It’s going to be gas, my friend.”
“I’m sure,” I said, and I took a few steps to my suit.
Tall and strong, a mirror of the others, a hunchback made of steel.
“Morning Caddy,” said the suit’s AI, smooth and feminine. I had named her Sandy, after Sandhya, a woman I’d fought alongside during the Reclamation.
I probably shouldn’t have done that. Sandhya hadn’t come home. We’d been close: we shared ammo magazines, tactical info, and far too often, a bedroll.
I probably shouldn’t have done that either. I had been married to Valérie at the time. Valérie, who had stood by me after I’d been wounded. Valérie, who’d been endlessly understanding, endlessly loving, endlessly patient.
Almost endlessly. We were divorced now. I hadn’t seen her in years.
“Morning Sandy,” I said. “How’s your diagnostic coming?”
“Coming along nicely,” she said. “I think I’ve narrowed down the stability issue; the gyros weren’t aligned correctly. It shouldn’t happen again.”
That was gas. The suits were new technology—not only were they inherently unstable, to give us better maneuverability, they required an AI to operate. We were the guinea pigs, working out the kinks.
I wanted to ask Sandy more about exactly how she was fixing this complex problem in software, but Golovanov stepped into the hangar and everyone fell silent.
“Immortals,” he said, casually folding his hands behind his back. Just like the old days.
“Ho,” we said in chorus. Only Angel, Stanco and I were here. We had eight suits. Where was everyone else? Nobody seemed concerned. Maybe I should actually read the mission briefings in future.
Golovanov’s eyes flicked to me, then he addressed the group. “We’re coming up on the Anchorage,” he said. “Should have eyes in a few minutes. Based on the large amount of debris, it’s starting to look like someone did, in fact, attack the ship.”
“Cunts,” spat Angel. “Of course the Earthborn would prey on civilians.”
“Any information from the distress beacon?” I asked. “Maybe they mentioned who was attacking them.”
“It’s just an automated beacon.” Golovanov narrowed his eyes. “So if it was the Earthborn, they struck fast.”
That was their MO.
“Deployment is three suits,” said Golovanov. “That’s you guys. The rest of the Immortals will cover you. Float over from the Lahore, get inside the ship, find what you can. Take some emergency bulkheads in case you need to secure an area and dismount, but have someone maintain overwatch. Deployment is with standard layouts for Angel and Caddy, Stanco as fire support with the assault gun.”
Standard layout was an autocannon, grenade launcher, and flamethrower. “Fire support on a boarding mission, sir? Don’t you think that assault guns are kind of overkill?”
“Hell no,” said Stanco. “Automatic weapons are the most casualty producing weapon in the fire team. It’s more than simply fire support and suppression.” His face lit up in a wide, cheesy grin. “Plus they’re fucking rad. I feel like a god when I spin that thing up.”
“Deific posturing aside,” said Golovanov, “we have no idea what’s going on aboard that ship, and if the Earthborn are aboard, we want a firepower advantage. Even if it’s in close quarters.”
“Sounds gas,” I said. “I’d rather have it and not use it than need it and not have it.”
“Exactly,” said Golovanov. “Any questions?”
Angel raised a hand. “Who’s lead suit?”
All eyes fell upon her. She was the obvious choice.
“Angel is leading this op,” said Golovanov, as we expected she would. “Don’t get me wrong—you’ll all get your turn. Next time is Stanco. Caddy, you’re next.”
“Sounds gas,” I said. “Gives me time enough for everyone else to make the mistakes.”
Stanco laughed. “Gee, thanks.”
“Never forget that your eyes are connected to your brain.” Golovanov pointed to my suit. “Go suit up. Make sure you’re comfortable. I’ll put through any more info as it becomes available. Learn what you can, and get back here ASAP.”
“Right,” I said. Six hours locked in a metal box. No worries.
Come on, I sent to Sandy via my implants. It’s time to go to work.
Sandy’s chest opened up, peeling back like a blooming flower. I turned around and stepped backwards into the suit, the metal petals closing in around me. Thin cables snaked out from the suit and latched into my exposed implants, magnetically attaching to the metal. Three, two, one…
My vision went dark and a numbness enveloped my whole body. The quiet hum of the hangar disappeared; I felt as though I’d been thrown into a bucket of ice water, silent, black as night.
Then I was standing in the hangar, eight feet tall and strapped to the ceiling, as the suit’s body became mine. My eyes could see so much now: the heat of the booting up suits, green boxes around the other suits, and text floating in air giving me ammunition counts, power levels, and whatever Sandy wanted to highlight for me. My world was fish-eyed. I could feel one of the cables brushing against the EVA pack on my back.
I was ready for the activation but it was always disconcerting.
“Looking gas,” said Golovanov. He looked so small now, like a child who only came up to my waist. He gave me a thumbs up.
I returned it. “Connection is solid,” I said, my voice synthetic, an approximation of my natural voice, just deeper. “Ready to go.”
Angel’s portrait appeared on the left side of my vision. “Immortal Armour active,” she said.
Stanco’s face appeared below her. “Ready to chew arse and kick bubble gum,” he said. “And I’m all out of arse.”
“Right.” I chuckled, trying to sound natural. Why did he have to sexualize everything? Not every guy was like that. It reeked of over overcompensation.
Not that there was anything wrong with that. I kept telling myself that.
Golovanov left, leaving the three of us hanging from the ceiling. I couldn’t feel my real body; I knew it was hanging there, limp and immobile, inside my chest cavity, weak as a baby.
“Incoming transmission,” said Sandy. AIs couldn’t give suggestions or advice, it was against their programming. “From Operations.”
“Put it through,” I said.
A floating box appeared in front of my eyes, labelled Anchorage. It was a vision of space, untwinkling white dots on a black field. At the centre of it, barely perceptible, was a ship.
The optics zoomed, straining to show us more. The screen pixelated for a moment, and then in the harsh light of false-color optics, I could see a ship floating in space, tumbling slowly, unlit and unpowered. Even its emergency navigation lights were off, and it was surrounded by a sparkling field of debris, like the tail of a comet stretching out beyond the edges of the screen. Readouts showed no infra-red or electromagnetic activity. No radiation, either, so the reactor was intact. Just a lump of steel crying in the depths of the black.
“What a fucking wreck,” said Stanco, blowing a low whistle—a prerecorded sound composed by his AI.
The ship tumbled, revealing a jagged, oval gash along one side, about eight meters on its longest edge. It reached right to the name emblazoned on the side in stark white lettering. Anchorage.
“I’m reading a pronounced hole in the starboard side,” said Angel. “That should serve as our entry point.”
Gas plan. I looked over the information Sandy provided. “No sign of internal fuel or ammunition detonation,” I said. “No sign of external scoring, either, or buckling on the hull… no stress or micro-fractures. It wasn’t weapons fire or a high-speed impact.”
“Something caused that big hole,” said Stanco. “What else but weapons fire?”
“Maybe the crew cut it out,” I said. “It looks like the kind of damage an untrained worker with a plasma cutter would make. Could be they were trying to vent a section manually… “
“Well,” said Stanco, “at least we know they weren’t attacked.”
“They didn’t put up a fight,” said Angel. “There’s a difference.”
Curious. “You saying whoever did this was invited in?”
“No,” she said, “but it’s possible the Anchorage didn’t see them coming. Someone cutting on the hull might not have triggered their decompression alarms; passenger ships sometimes only treat their safety equipment with indifferent maintenance.”
Silence reigned for a time, and I watched the corpse of the ship tumble over and over endlessly. There weren’t any other holes.
“Asteroid impact, maybe?” said Stanco. “Something that slipped past their sensors? Or maybe they had a reactor leak. It’s possible they wanted to eject their reactor core, failed, so tried to cut it out… “
All this guesswork was frustrating. “Maybe, maybe,” I said. “Does it really matter? We’re going in anyway, so let’s just focus on the mission until we get there.”
“Couldn’t agree more,” said Angel, then her portrait disappeared.
“Wow,” said Stanco. “Rude.”
“You know what she’s like,” I said.
Stanco snorted. “She sounds like she needs a dicking.”
“Not like you could do that,” I said, the words slipping out before I had a chance to rein them in.
Silence. Angry silence. “You don’t need a dick to be a dude,” Stanco said. “Fucking Erisians.”
“I didn’t mean it,” I said.
“Yeah you did.”
It was difficult to deny that. “Look,” I said, “I’m trying, okay?”
“I know,” said Stanco, without any conviction at all.
I probably should have let it go but I didn’t. “It doesn’t bother me what you identify as. I’m just saying… it’s weird enough seeing women and gays in the military, let alone trans people. There’s a reason most of Eris has their own units, rather than integrating with the rest of the Colonial armies.”
“I know,” he said again, again, not believing a word I said. “It’s fine.”
I took a breath—not something my suit could do, but the armour’s metal muscles and articulators moved in the same way—and used my implants to give my body a shot of a mild sedative.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and I tried to genuinely mean it. I resisted the urge to add qualifiers after that. It was just how I was raised, I don’t know any better, I’m wrong but…
“Yeah,” said Stanco, a little hint of levity returning. “It’s all gas, bro. Shit takes time to sink in. It just sucks when you get all the shit for being a guy, expectations of being a manly-man, but also shit for being trans, too. All the downsides, none of the perks. Makes you a little defensive. So, you know, I’m sorry too.”
“I’m trying,” I said again, and then added, “bro.”
“I appreciate that.” Stanco’s suit turned to face mine. “Don’t worry. Angel’s a bigger weirdo than you are.”
Small comfort.
I returned my attention to the feed of the Anchorage. The closer we got, the higher the resolution climbed.
Closer and closer.
* * *
Six hours later
The last of the air was sucked out of the hangar, hissing faintly around my suit’s microphones before fading to the eerie silence that was deep space.
“Decompression complete,” said Angel. She’d rejoined our channel when it was time to do something productive. “Disable artificial gravity. Commence decoupling.”
With a lurch, I felt gravity shut off. I sent a mental push that detached the cables that suspended my suit from the hangar’s ceiling. I floated in the zero gravity, small puffs of nitrogen from the EVA pack keeping my position steady. Attached to the pack were several emergency bulkheads, heavy and bulky.
Silently, the hangar door began to open. Normally it would be groaning and loud, but with no atmosphere I could hear nothing.
“Move out,” said Angel, and we flew slowly out the open doors into the void of space.
Although I’d spent plenty of time in space, protected from the vacuum of space only by the metal of a ship’s hull, it was different being in a suit. A starship’s hull was measured in meters; the suit was substantially smaller than that. Although it was forged from advanced polymers and composite plates, my face—my real face—was only a meter or so away from the void.
If something went wrong…
I turned away from the Lahore and navigated towards the Anchorage. As I looked at it, Sandy outlined it in a box and zoomed in, giving me a clear look at the ship.
I tried to focus on something other than my unconscious body encased within an armoured steel box, where even the tiniest hole would drain away my air and, thanks to my neural link to the suit, the first I’d know about it was when I started to pass out… way, way too late to do anything but die.
“Your heart rate is increasing,” said Sandy, her voice tinged with genuine concern. “You okay, boss man?”
“I’m fine,” I said.
“Sounds like you need a drink,” she said.
I definitely did not. Sobriety was one of the conditions of joining the Immortals. Golovanov knew my weakness. “Thanks,” I said, “but I don’t think you come equipped with a mini bar.”
“Well,” she said, “I have full control of your implants at this point. I could give you a shot of alcohol, straight into your veins if you want, so you don’t even have to taste it.”
“No thanks.”
She laughed. “You sure? I mean, I could—”
“No.” The fierceness in which I answered surprised even me.
“I’m sorry,” said Sandy. “I won’t ask again.”
I’d pissed off both Stanco and Sandy, and we hadn’t even reached the Anchorage yet. “It’s fine,” I said. “We can talk about it after the mission.”
“If I had feelings,” said Sandy, “I’d think you were brushing me off.” Her voice turned chirpy. “But I don’t. So that’s fine.”
The ship, our target, drew closer and closer. In my fish-eyed vision, I could see the Lahore behind us, shrinking away. Soon it appeared in a box, zoomed in so I could see it clearly.
Sandy was helping me out in subtle ways. Just like Sandhya, her namesake.
Suddenly I missed her. Naming my AI after my dead lover was a stupid mistake. Stupid.
“You okay?” asked Sandy. “Your heart rate is—”
“I’m fine,” I said, giving myself another shot of mild sedative. “Just… please don’t ask me about my heart rate unless it’s much more serious than this.”
“I’ll increase the threshold by 20%,” said Sandy.
Closer. Closer. We drifted through the inky black, three hunchbacked suits of steel stabilised by puffs of gas. Behind us, the five other suits left the Lahore, taking up an escort formation.
Although they were there to cover our approach, I couldn’t help but feel that they were also pointing weapons at our back.
Soon, the zooming effect disappeared from my vision and I saw the ship au naturale. A flood of sensor information floated beside it. Minimal heat. Clouds of debris. Almost no atmosphere present in sections near the outer hull, smaller amounts within—maybe a few air pockets, but the temperature within was well below freezing.
“This ship is a tomb,” I said. “Nobody’s alive over there.”
“We’re here to investigate,” said Angel. “There are taxpayers on that ship.”
“Taxpayer’s bodies,” said Stanco.
Retrieving those was not even on our mission objectives, but I couldn’t see the harm. Civvies deserved a decent burial too.
“So why us?” asked Stanco. “Why can’t the Coast Guard clean up this mess?”
“Because,” said Angel, slightly condescendingly, “if your house is on fire, you can’t put it out from inside. There are some problems the Colonial agencies can’t fix. That’s why we’re here.”
“Oh,” said Stanco. “Got it. By the way, don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re not anywhere near as stupid as you look.”
“You are,” said Angel.
Brutal.
“Right,” said Stanco, clicking his tongue. “Whatever.”
The Anchorage soon swallowed the stars below, the tumbling steel wall of its hull forming a floor. We aimed for the pivot point at the centre, EVA suits straining to push us forward, then slow us down. Sandy did all the work; piloting a metal suit through a field of sparkling debris, landing on a spinning and structurally compromised space ship, was a job better suited for computers.
My boots clunked down on the metal, magnetising with a faint hum that vibrated throughout the entire suit.
Angel’s voice filled my suit. “Lahore, this is the away team. We have reached the Anchorage.”
“Confirmed,” said Golovanov. “Stabilise the ship.”
We walked along the slowly spinning hull until we reached the stern. The three of us lined up at the edge of the ship and knelt down. I set my magnetized hands on the metal and locked my knees in against the hull. My suit’s EVA pack roared to life, firing at full power; Stanco’s and Angel’s did the same thing.
The Anchorage strained in protest, slowed down its spin, and then, after a minute’s work, stopped completely in space.
“Gas,” said Golovanov. “Proceed into the hull.”
Angel, Stanco and I walked on the hull, from port to starboard, putting one magnetized foot in front of the other. As we got closer, we got a better look at the hole.
It was nearly thirty meters wide and fifty long, roughly oval. The edges were melted, blackened and jagged, as though the metal had been dissolved. The floor below was pitted and scored, like the surface of Eris’s moon, or an asteroid; hundreds of tiny holes and divots were cut into the exposed bulkhead.
Sandy drew a box over a section of the melted hull and enhanced it.
“What kind of weapon could do this?” I asked her. “There’s no scorching away from the impact site. Not even the best Earthborn torpedoes could cause something like this.”
“It looks like fluid erosion,” she said, confusion in her artificial voice. “Some kind of acid.”
Angel looked to me. “No acid could possibly melt through starship hull. It would take days and days, weeks even. Surely someone would notice.”
Nobody had any answers.
“Lights are out,” Stanco observed. “Even emergency power has run out.”
“Hello darkness my old friend,” I said.
The tension evaporated. Stanco laughed. “Darkness never returns my damn calls. Sometimes I think I barely know her any more.”
I couldn’t help but chortle. “Darkness is a strong black woman who don’t need no man.”
“Cut the chatter,” said Angel. Humorless Uynovian. “Split up. Stanco, head toward the stern. Caddy, head toward the bow. I’ll make for the reactor at the core.”
“In we go,” said Stanco, climbing down to the hole and swinging into the corridor. His huge suit had to crouch to move forward, magnetized limbs keeping him pressed against one of the walls.
I crawled into the hole as well. Sandy magnetized my hands and I carefully made my way in the opposite direction.
After a few minutes crawling, I came to a door. The centre of it had dissolved, leaving a hole almost a meter radius.
No. Half that; one meter diameter. I had to remember I was twice as large as I normally was.
“Got a bulkhead,” I said. “Emergency decompression door. Something burned its way through… looks to be whatever cut through the hull.”
“Yeah,” said Stanco. “I got one too. Same deal.”
“Employ a manual bypass,” said Angel. That was the euphemism of the day. Manual bypass.
A simple instruction easily followed. I reached out with my hands, prying the metal. The suit’s articulators groaned faintly and, for a moment, I didn’t think it would bend; then the metal peeled back and the gap widened.
I pulled myself in, wiggling and kicking, pushing through the metal gap. The metal of my suit’s armour scraped against the edges of the hole, but I fit.
The corridor on the other side was stained with blood, splashed down with rust-colored gore and a strange black fluid. The bulkheads were riddled with holes from high velocity bullets. A rifle floated oddly in space, along with dozens of shell casings and debris. I recognized the type; standard civilian Polema issue Type 1. It wasn’t Earthborn.
“Someone actually did put up a fight,” I said. “Got a gun and signs of a struggle.”
“Act tough, die rough,” said Stanco. “Any Earthborn shit?”
“Unless you want me to scrape their blood off the walls, no.”
“Don’t disturb the bodies,” said Angel. “Note the location and have the Lahore retrieve them.”
I looked around. The corridor had been stripped bare, leaving only stains on the metal. “There aren’t any. Just blood, and lots of it.”
“Maybe they got sucked out,” said Stanco.
“That’s blown out,” said Angel.
“So, okay, maybe they got blown out. And I bet you know a fancy word for killed to death by space too.”
It was unlikely the bodies had been either sucked or blown out. We’d have seen them by now. Anyway, before I’d widened it, the hole was barely big enough for a person to fit. Nothing made sense. “Getting a bit sick of hearing the word maybe,” I said, a little snappier than I intended.
Sandy pinged my vision, drawing a red dot over something deeper in the ship and painting a red line on the corridor that lead toward it. “Nicholas, I’m reading a room with air. Sealed. Trace amounts of heat.”
An intact room? “Pass it along to the others.” I changed direction. “Guys, got a room with atmo’. Looks to be about deck seven, ‘bout forty meters away from the hull.” Right at the core of the ship.
“No way,” said Stanco. “Survivors?”
“Who knows?” With a mental thrust I transferred the information Sandy had compiled for me to my team.
“We’ll meet you there,” said Angel.
Floating through bloodstained halls, I made my way further and further into the ruined hulk of the Anchorage, following the red line deeper into the ship’s heart.
* * *
I floated past a lot of things. I saw computer screens powered down and inert, I saw half-melted emergency bulkheads breached and useless, I saw personal effects floating in the nothingness and loose bulkheads and yellow oxygen masks drifting like tentacles, their precious cargo long ago discharged.
But I saw no bodies. Personal effects, plenty. Weapons and shell casings, sure. Blood, and lots of it, including some that looked like the victims had been dragged. Not a single corpse.
Finally, the red line led towards a thick blast door labelled Secure Hold. There was a button to open it, but the display glowed with an angry red hue and flashed the words decompression failure. The metal had the same acid scoring as every other door we’d seen, but this one had held up, probably due to its significant thickness and anti-theft reinforced polymers.
The shipbuilders valued the passengers’ gold more than it valued their lives. Although, by booking passage with that particular ship, the paying customers were de-facto supporting them.
Whatever. It wasn’t my job to feel sorry for anyone.
“Man,” said Stanco as he crawled around the corner, “we are going to get so much free shit.”
“Salvage of non-Earthborn items isn’t one of our objectives,” said Angel, appearing right behind him.
“You kidding? What’s the point of being a Crisis Exacerbation Specialist if you don’t get to loot anything afterwards?”
I shook my head. “Golovanov said we were Private Third-Party… something-or-rather Engineers.”
“Golovanov,” said Angel, “can also hear you. The audio is piped into mission command.”
“We’ve been through a lot,” I said. “He can handle a joke.”
Stanco floated toward the door, peering in close.
“Thoughts?” I asked.
He extended a giant metal hand, reaching out and touching the pitted and scarred door. “Knock knock,” Stanco said, rapping silently on the metal. Anyone inside could hear us, but we had no hope of hearing them through the vacuum of space. “We should send through a probe first.”
That sounded gas. Stanco pulled a small metal oval about the size of a discus off his back and clipped it to the wall. It glowed faintly as it began to cut into the door.
The minutes ticked away.
“How long could someone survive in there?” I asked. “There’s air, so presumably they didn’t just die.”
Angel’s suit’s head appeared over Stanco’s metal shoulder. I could see her portrait on the side of my vision, but I looked her in her optics, too. Some human habits died hard. “With food and water, a long time. The ship was well stocked, and no matter how strong that acid is, they must have had some time to prepare. There were armed guards at the first door to be breached, after all. As each door went down… they probably stockpiled as much as they could inside and waited it out. Fortunately, these doors won’t open if there’s no air on our side, so if they’re in there thinking they’re saved, they’ll have to wait a bit longer.”
Made sense.
“What do you think they did to pass the time?” asked Stanco. “Played cards? Drank?”
“Sex is an excellent recreational activity,” said Angel, matter-of-factly. “Although I imagine that privacy would be at a premium.”
“A substantial part of the crew would be Osmeons,” said Stanco. “They wouldn’t care.”
“And some would be Erisians,” I said. Just thinking about having sex while someone else watched was super weird.
Finally, the probe flashed a bright green, and Sandy connected the link.
Darkness. The probe’s light turned on; the camera was looking at the back of a metal crate. It snaked out around it, thin optic fibre slipping between tiny cracks, weaving its way through a tightly packed maze.
“They barricaded the door,” said Angel, the first hints of… something filtering into her voice. Stress, maybe? Relief? Fear? Did crazies from her world even feel fear?
The optic fibre tried to push a box. It didn’t move. Its laser worked again, drilling a tiny hole. This, unlike the reinforced bulkhead, fell away quickly. Harsh, white light flooded in from the other side. The lens adjusted.
The secure storage room was a low-ceilinged metal box fifty meters squared. The far side of it was stacked with boxes, most neatly arranged, although some had been hastily opened. Deep scratches lined the floor where they had been dragged over and welded together to form a crude, additional barrier.
In the centre of the room, a pile of people, over thirty of them, lay huddled together on the metal, dressed in thick clothes. Weapons lay scattered all around, close at hand, ready to pull up at a moment’s notice. Empty bottles and food wrappers lay scattered all around.
“O2 is solid,” said Stanco. “It’s pretty cold, though. -10c. Miserable but survivable.” He sighed. “No loot for us. Wakey wakey, sleepy heads.”
Our view floated toward the huddle. It slid close to one of the people, a woman with long, dark hair who lay on her back. The camera manouvered around to look at her face.
Her eyes were rolled back in her head, skin pale and desiccated. A rusty stain spread out from underneath her chin, and the pistol she clutched in her hand was held by thin, shrivelled fingers. The camera moved to another one—a young boy. He, too, had blown his brains out on the deck. The camera panned over a half-dozen faces, all dead.
“This is why I don’t fly coach,” said Stanco.
The camera rose and swung out. “They had plenty of food,” said Angel. “Water. Air. Warm clothes. The bulkhead was holding… “
“They probably heard the acid melting down the door,” I said. “Decided they didn’t want to be prey for the Earthborn.”
Angel shook her head, her tone turning venomous. “This isn’t their style. Earthborn desecrate the bodies of their enemies, they would never give up just because they were already dead. They couldn’t let an opportunity like this go to waste.” The only time she seemed to feel anything was discussing our long-lost cousins.
“You okay?” I asked her, using my implants to send the signal just to her.
For a moment, she said nothing, then her suit looked back at me. “We’re all animals,” she said. “Some just wear clothes.”
“They’re still people,” I said. “Them and us. These dead civvies, the Earthborn, everyone they killed on Polema. All humans.”
“What makes a human life inherently so valuable that ending one is so terrible?”
“Life is preferable to death,” I said. “For most people.”
“Not on Uynov.”
I tried to grimace with muscles I didn’t have control of any more. “Going to be honest Angel, and don’t take it the wrong way, but why didn’t you just kill yourself if life on Unyov was so bad? How’d you get to be here?”
“Suicide doesn’t end pain,” she said. “It just gives it to everyone else. When we die, the only thing we leave behind is the joy we give to others. I don’t want my legacy to be distilled suffering.”
I digested that. “Erisians believe all life is sacred, and only death is owed to those who cannot abide this simple tenant.”
“People only say all human life is valuable because that means the speaker’s life is valuable. It’s an ultimately selfish action.”
It was hard to argue with that.
“So,” said Stanco, “if you two are done staring creepily at each other, are we going to head in or what?”
* * *
We sealed each end of the corridor with emergency bulkheads, then retrieved the probe. Air hissed through the tiny hole it had drilled, white and visible as rushed to flood its new home, and slowly the pressure equalized. The open button turned from red to green.
Time to dismount. The world went dark again, and then Sandy’s suit opened up and rotten, frigid air blew against my face.
I’d almost forgotten that smell. Dead things left to rot in a too-small place. I stepped out of the suit. The ship’s corridors were so much bigger when I wasn’t crawling through them.
I unclipped a light carbine from the outside of the suit and watched as Angel stepped out of hers, taking a weapon and shouldering it with the detached air of someone who had done so a million times before. I was nervous, and the smell was getting to me, but Angel might well have been taking a stroll down to the mess hall.
“Ready?” I asked, hand hovering over the button.
“Breach it,” she said, and so I pushed.
The doors groaned, strained, the metal underfoot vibrating. The motors whined loudly. The reverberation travelled through the metal of the ship, shaking its deckplates, and then with a horrible grinding noise the bent, battered door retreated into the floor.
“Make more noise why don’t you?” Stanco reached around with his giant metal fist and pushed the box-barrier away, breaking the welds and collapsing it easily. How strong the Immortal Armour seemed as a mere mortal…
Angel and I stepped inside, weapons shouldered. The smell of the dead got stronger as we drew close. I put one hand over my nose, holding my rifle with my prosthetic. It was strong enough to comfortably hold it up.
“We should check them,” she said, her nose wrinkled but otherwise seemingly unbothered by the stench. “Whoever attacked this ship was looking for something. I intend to find out what.”
I gave one of the corpses a nudge with my boot. “Where are all the bodies aside from these arseholes?”
She didn’t answer. I looked her way, then followed her eyes.
One of the dead was wearing combat armour. Where she had found that I had no idea. Maybe she was a soldier, maybe she was a merc’. That didn’t matter.
What did matter was the large claw protruding from the ceramic plate covering her gut. It was curved, nearly half a meter long and was wickedly serrated. It was dug in deep, bone yellow and attached to a green, leathery limb which had been severed with a laser cutter.
“What the fuck is that?” I asked, crouching over it for a better view. She’d killed herself, just like the others, although instead of using a pistol she’d injected a dozen morphia needles into her leg.
“Caddy,” said Golovanov in my ear, “retrieve that corpse when you go.”
“Aye aye,” I said, staring at the claw, transfixed. Despite all the medication its victim had injected, she still seemed so terrified…
“Sometimes,” I said, “I think that if I ever decide to just kill myself… I wonder how it should go. Should I go the painless way, or the painful one? After all, once I’m dead none of it matters anymore. Maybe I can snatch a glimpse of the other side before I go.”
“I have had my fill of pain,” said Angel. “It is nothing to be romanticized.”
I let go of my weapon, switched my rifle into my flesh-hand, then touched the bone; it was smooth, and covered in a thin layer of slime.
The slime began dissolving my prosthetic finger.
“Shit!”
Even though I’d had a metal and polymer arm ever since the war, human instinct was a powerful thing, and hard to override. I flicked my fingers, trying to get rid of the stuff; the array of sensors in my prosthetic fed me information. It felt cold, wet, tasted of brine and salt… and plenty of pain, too.
My finger dissolved up to the third knuckle before the acid became too diluted to do any more damage. I stared at the withered remains of my index finger. It hurt; the prosthetic was wired directly into my nervous system. I used a mental push to lower the implant’s sensitivity, turning down the pain on that finger completely. It slowly went numb.
“You okay?” asked Angel.
“Yeah,” I said, “but getting the body out is a no-go. That acid is wicked stuff.”
Angel inspected the wound on the corpse. “It doesn’t seem to be dissolving the victim,” she said. “Maybe it reacts only to non-organic material… “
Before I could stop her, she slipped her glove off, and poked the bone with her finger.
Nothing.
“What kind of creature is coated with an acid that only reacts to metal?” I asked. “Some kind of bioweapon?” I felt a vague sinking in my gut. “Is the Anchorage… a weapons test?”
A faint sound reached my ears. The sound of rain on a metal roof, from above.
“Contact,” said Stanco. “I got movement out here. Vibrations from the deck above. They’re moving.”
“They?”
Angel and I exchanged a worried look. The sound travelled directly above us, distant but audible, and then toward the stern of the ship. Toward the way we’d come. Drawn by the vibrations of the opening door.
Hundreds of those claws were making pitter-patter rain on the deck.
They were coming for us.
* * *
I ran toward my suit.
“Operations, we are egressing now. Right now!” My rifle bounced against my side as I ran. If whatever was coming for us reached the emergency bulkheads we’d set up, and breached them… I didn’t want to think about it, but through those thin sheets of metal was the logical way to get to the meat the creatures had too long been denied. Sandy moved towards me, the suit opening up. Angel’s AI did the same thing, presenting its open chest for boarding. We passed by the ruined boxes.
Something heavy slammed into the emergency bulkhead. A massive bone claw, just like in the gut of the dead woman, broke through the steel, smoke hissing as it dissolved the barrier.
Air rushed out. Alarms screamed. The button flashed red—the door, hopelessly jammed, strained as it tried in vain to seal off the breach.
Stanco opened up with his assault gun. It fired like a titan ripping cloth, shaking the walls and floor, impossibly loud in the cramped quarters, drowning out the howl of escaping air. Brass shell casings the size of a fist slammed into the bulkheads.
I practically fell into my suit. Darkness enveloped me as the armoured plates closed, and the gunfire became muted and distant. The only thing I could hear was profound ringing in my ears.
“C’mon,” I shouted to the darkness. “Boot. Boot, damn you!”
Plugs attached themselves to my implants, then the ringing went away. For a second, there was nothing, and then I was a metal giant once more.
Bugs. A wall of eight legged bugs, each roughly the size of a horse, some smaller, some larger, all tearing down the shredded remains of the emergency bulkhead. Their eyes glowed red in the dimly lit corridor and the deck was soaked in the same black fluid I’d seen before. The blood.
They were all different; some had massive pincers, some huge claws, others were bigger or smaller or weird colors. A myriad of forms, all trying to tear us to pieces.
Stanco fired again. Rushing air blew the spider-like creatures back, and debris—including the bodies of the crew—thumped against them, but still they came, crawling, hissing, reaching for us with a host of teeth and talons.
I ignited the pilot light on my flamethrower and turned that corridor into a tiny piece of hell.
Orange and red consumed everything, the rushing, escaping air twisting the jet of flame and pulling it off in random directions. I saw dozens of the creatures be consumed by the flames, the sticky, high energy fluid seeping between cracks in their carapace. I bought my right arm around too and added autocannon fire to the mix, heavy shells wailing in the rapidly depleting air.
The deck plate underneath me gave way. I nearly slipped and fell, the escaping air buffeting me from behind.
“I got you!” Stanco grabbed hold of my suit’s leg. “Hang on!”
I scrambled around, digging my fingers into the skeleton of the ship, trying to hold on. I felt Stanco’s metal fingers weaken and a crate slammed into my back.
Then I lost my grip and, torn away from the metal by the rushing air, tumbled down the corridor.
* * *
Sandy fired the EVA pack, trying to stabilise us, but we were a big thing in a narrow box. The suit clanged off metal bulkheads, screamed as it was dragged along the floor, then tumbled head over heels as we were pushed towards the ship’s stern.
I hit an exposed beam and bounced off. Then another. My vision went static-y as the suit’s cameras took a hit. We spun and spun, puffs of nitrogen trying to stabilise us.
Finally, we got stuck arse-first in a door. This one had been melted through like the others.
My head hurt from the close proximity to gunfire and taking a spin through the insides of a too-small ship. A strange sensation, coming from my real body; fake parts of me hurt. Sandy was trying to tell me I was injured.
“Hey,” I said, groaning as I eased myself out of the ruined door. “How about dialing down the pain some?”
“You’re already heavily medicated,” said Sandy. “Are you sure?”
Uh oh. “Did I break something?”
“A few somethings,” said Sandy. “The human body is just not designed to survive these kinds of forces. Fortunately you have lots of implants.”
We’d have to do something about that. There were ways to play with gravity, create it and negate it. The suit would have to be modified for future operations.
I couldn’t think about that now. Not my job. I’d include it in my after action report, though.
Assuming I survived to write it.
“Let’s get going then,” I said. “If I need medical treatment… “
“You do,” said Sandy, her tone sincere.
Then it was time to go. I magnetized my hands and went to crawl once again, back up the way I’d come, but my limbs didn’t stick to the metal.
“Magnetism is damaged,” said Sandy.
Dammit. I knew when I was beat. “Send out a distress signal. Have our escorts cut me out of the hull.”
“You’re not going to like this,” said Sandy, “but that’s a no-go. The antenna is damaged too, and by now we’re deep inside the Anchorage. Metal of this size is going to function as a giant Faraday cage. Range is severely reduced. We can maybe talk to Angel or Stanco if the get close enough, but apart from that, we’re on our own.”
“Fine. We’ll get closer to the hull so they can hear us.” I started to move back the way we’d been blown, pushing off the metal deck for leverage.
Sandy flashed a red warning. “Lots of movement that way,” she said. “Should I warm up weapons?”
AI were forbidden from giving orders or advice. Yet, she always seemed to find a way to let me know what she was thinking.
“So you’re saying that we need to go deeper.”
“I’m not saying anything,” said Sandy. “But we’re down to half a tank of flamethrower fuel and only packing a thousand more rounds of autogun ammo. There’s a lot of hostiles out there.”
I hoped Stanco and Angel were okay.
“Further toward the bow then,” I said, and kicked at the burned-through husk of the door until it broke, and we sailed through.
Sandy drew red lines and I followed them. The corridors widened as we got further in, a change I took as a blessing. I was still forced to crawl, though, but it wasn’t as hard. On the way we passed more battle sites; blood splatters and scorch marks marred the walls, standing as mute testament to the struggle.
As always, no bodies.
I wanted to talk to Sandy. No, that wasn’t true. I wanted to talk to Sandhya. The woman I’d loved on Polema. I wanted her to tell me everything was going to be okay, like she used to. I wanted to hold her again. I couldn’t focus on the mission.
Maybe my brain was damaged. Sandy had been non-specific about what kind of injuries I had. Everything hurt but I kept going.
We turned a corridor. Frozen drops of ice filled the vacuum like little snowflakes.
“The water processing room,” said Sandy. “It must be leaking.”
Ice wasn’t dangerous in small amounts. The armour on my suit could deflect autocannon fire. The main risk would be that I’d be trapped. “Will that be a problem?”
“Just be careful,” she said. “Water expands as it freezes. Structural integrity of the Anchorage is going to be low here; those walls will be close to buckling. Float where you can, touch as little as possible.”
Again, I tried to guess what she was thinking. “You want to drive?”
“It would be more efficient if I did.”
“Go for it,” I said, and the EVA pack kicked in again. I floated amongst the ice crystals, the EVA pack moving the suit in ways I could not, tilting perfectly, tiny puffs of nitrogen guiding me forward.
As we passed the water processing room, I looked inside.
I don’t know why I did. Human nature, I guess. I wanted to see the leak. I wanted to see whatever thing was inside there, mundane or mysterious.
I saw the glint of green reflecting in the ice. Definitely more mysterious than mundane. I shouldn’t have stopped, I should have kept going, pushed on until I could get free of the hull and send out a signal to get picked up.
“What the hell is that?” I asked. “Stop.”
The suit braked. I spun, facing the doorway, then drifted inside.
The room was packed full of chrysalises, olive green and bulbous, ranging in size from a few centimeters to the size of a man. They were sacs of fluid held in place by thin membranes; the majority were clumped together against a broken bulkhead, the others layered the floors and ceiling. Each one extruded thin brown tentacles which burrowed into the ice. Devouring it. Others curled around light fixtures, power outlets, and the door switch. Feeding.
Within were creatures. The smaller ones looked indistinct, just a blob, but the bigger ones… they looked human. An identical person. Androgynous, even genderless, attractive but remarkably plain; olive skin, brown hair. Their skin was markless, fresh, like a child’s even though they looked about thirty.
“This is creepy as shit,” I said.
“Sometimes I’m glad I’m a robot,” said Sandy. “Golovanov will want a sample.”
Wordlessly I extended my finger toward one of the larger sacs, and used my implants to activate the sample probe. With a flash of sparks the device broke off. It was broken too. Damn.
The thing in the sac looked at me. Did nothing more than move its eyes. They glowed red, faintly, just like the bugs had done. I looked at another one. It, too, reacted to my gaze by staring at me. Soon they were all doing it.
So if my sensitive equipment wouldn’t work, I decided to cut to the chase: I punched one. The sac burst like a watermelon and my metal fist slammed into the creature beyond. Its blood exploded, red and rich, all over my fingers. I used my other hand to splatter another one.
“Preliminary examination of the facial structure of these creatures indicates a striking similarity,” said Sandy. “Scraping the samples off your fingers. Analyzing. The two bodies we sampled are identical on a genetic level.” There was something in her synthetic voice. A mixture of wonder and apprehension. “The DNA strands appear to be a combination of… at least a hundred individuals.”
“That’s why there were no bodies,” I said. “The bug-things took them and, somehow, blended their DNA all together to grow this… person. But why?”
“I can’t answer that even if I were allowed to.”
I couldn’t—simply couldn’t—begin to understand what I was seeing, but the cold, empty way their red eyes stared at me told me there was only one thing to do. I floated back to the corridor, ignited my pilot light, and I poured flame into that room until there was nothing left in the tank. The fluid sacs burst, the bodies burned, twitching as flame and vacuum ended them. I emptied a hundred or so high-explosive rounds into the room just to make sure.
“Excellent work,” said Sandy. “I was really hoping you were going to do that.”
“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” I said, and as Sandy began steering us down the corridor again, I tried to get as far away from that room as possible.
* * *
Left. Right. Right. Left. Right. Right. Right. Right. Left. Straight on.
Without Sandy I’d be hopelessly lost. On the Lahore my implants guided me; here, the AI did.
How did people even get around before computers? I remembered they had maps. Gas memories. Or they just got lost a lot. Or…
My mind was wandering when it should be focused. For a moment, I felt odd. Like I was going to throw up; something I couldn’t do without a mouth or digestive system. “Hey Sandy?”
“Yes?”
“I don’t feel gas.”
Sandy said nothing for a moment as the EVA pack guided us around another too-small corner. “You’re dying.”
So simply stated. My nervous system was linked up to the suit’s sensors and inputs, but my brain was within my biological body, and it was screaming.
“How far away are we from the outer hull?” I asked.
“Six minutes,” said Sandy. “Maybe less. I’m avoiding unstable areas. We wouldn’t want to get pinned in here.”
“We would not want that,” I said. “Although I’m sure you’d be fine.”
“I’d miss you,” said Sandy, and I think she actually meant it. The way she said it, though, with Sandhya’s voice… that hurt more than all the broken ribs in the world.
“Hey,” I said. “Just saying. If it makes you feel better… you suits cost over eight hundred million credits each. My death benefit is only about five hundred thousand. Much cheaper for every single one of us to get blown up than one of you guys.”
“That actually makes me feel worse.”
“It wasn’t supposed to make you feel gas, ya’ dumb robot.”
A few seconds of silence. Then, a yellow bar lit up around Stanco’s portrait.
“-addy,” came his voice, heavily obfuscated by static, “you out there?”
“Stanco! Sandy, give him our locat—”
“Already done,” she said.
“Hey Caddy!” Stanco became clearer by the second. “Buddy, mate, I knew you were too fucking cool to be dead.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I said, “but let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. I’m hurting pretty bad. Antenna’s damaged. So’s my magnetic grip. I’m lost, and running low on ammo and options.”
“Right,” said Stanco. “I have a fix on your location. Hold tight.” Seconds later, Stanco’s suit flew around the corner, nearly smashing into me. “Found ‘ya.”
“You’re a sight for sore eyes,” I said. “Thanks for coming back for me.”
“Angel wanted to exfil,” he said, “but Golovanov ordered us back. You got all the other Immortals out looking for you too. We can’t have you ruining our good name on our very first mission now, can we?” He hooked his arm around my EVA pack. “Okay. I’m going to guide you out of here.”
“Sounds gas,” I said, and again, the world seemed a bit fuzzy.
“Hey buddy,” said Stanco. We were moving. He was moving me. “What’s Eris like this time of year?”
What a weird question. “It depends on where you are,” I said. “Planets are big. Frozen areas, forested areas, deserts… what do you like?”
“I like forests,” he said. “Always do. Every time I got married, I’d take the lucky girl or guy to a forest. I like verdant things. Verdancy. Is that a word? Verdancy?”
Osmeons were polygamists. Sandhya had lots of husbands. And wives, too. Girls marrying girls. There was nothing wrong with that.
So I had to keep telling myself.
“Why do you need so many?” I asked. “Why not… just find the one? The person who makes you feel like all the world’s right when you’re with them?”
“Because,” said Stanco. “Sometimes that’s more than one person. And it’s easier to trust when your marriage is a family.” He steered us around a big corridor. “The last guy I married, right? He tried the whole monogamy thing. You know what he told me?”
“What?”
“Something like… I thought having a vasectomy would stop my wife getting pregnant again. Turns out it just changes the color of the baby. He was doing the whole monogamy thing but she wasn’t. I don’t need that shit in my life. If my partners want to fuck around, let them. They’re going to anyway. Better we do it on our own terms.”
“That’s brutal.” I felt tired, distant. Too many thoughts of Sandhya, and of what I’d done to my wife. With her. With the soldier I met on a distant world… “Why are you telling me this?”
“Trying to keep you focused.”
“‘Cuz I’m dying?”
“Pretty much.” Stanco steered us up to a tiny gap I didn’t think we’d be able to fit through, and then—somewhat roughly—stuffed us through, scraping the hell out of the suit. “It’s the game of war, buddy. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.”
“That actually makes me feel worse,” I said, stealing Sandy’s line.
“Hey,” said Stanco. “I can’t make everyone happy. I’m not pizza.”
“I hate pizza.”
He laughed down the line. “You can’t hate pizza. Nobody hates pizza. You’re a fucking monster.”
I didn’t know what to say to that so said nothing. We flew past various rooms. Quarters. Observatories. A bar.
“Hey Caddy,” said Stanco. He just wouldn’t leave me alone. “Want a drink?”
More than anything. If I was going to die, I might as well do it with less pain. “Nah. There are demons in there.”
“You what?”
“I used to have a drinking problem,” I said. It was tempting to mute him but I didn’t. “I still do. But I used to have it too.”
“Alcoholic, hey?” Stanco blasted open a section of the wall. The bulkhead splintered into a million shards. I barely heard the explosion. “You know there’s an injection for that now.”
Was there an injection to take away the pain in my chest when I thought of Sandhya? Was there a jab in the arm that could make the dead come back to me? “I know,” I said. “I could just shoot myself in the head. That’d be great too.”
“Mmm,” he said. “Doesn’t sound like a fun way to go. How does someone get like that? All suicidal like Angel?”
Easy answer but hard to say. “For most people, it’s when someone dies who you love more than life itself. Substance abuse is gentle suicide.”
“You’re right where you’re supposed to be right now.” I could practically hear the smile in his voice. “You couldn’t not be, friend.”
Where I was supposed to be… “For me, the only thing worse than death is the end of the whisky. And I’ve been sober for a while now.”
He chuckled at that, another prerecorded noise that filtered through the radio. “There’s a saying on Uynov,” said Stanco. “Angel told me. You treat a wound on the skin with grain alcohol. You treat a wound in the heart with spirits.”
“Sounds gas. Spirits keep my spirits up.”
“Except you’re sober now,” said Stanco. “So you’ve found something else, right?”
Something else? What was there? “Naw. Just because you’re sober doesn’t mean you don’t miss it. Biggest days for relapses are anniversaries: first week, first month, first year, first decade. The shitty truth is, you’re never really clean. You’re just trying to beat your record for biggest gap between relapses, and eventually you die.”
“Not today,” said Stanco. “We aren’t dying today. I’m far, far too funny to die.”
“You’re a funny guy,” I said, groggily.
“My humour’s like a little kid with cancer. Never gets old.”
“The Prophets Wept… “ I went to banter more, but from around the corner came the sound: rain on a tin roof. A stampede of spider-creatures, howling as they ran toward us.
“Okay,” said Stanco, “Yeah. Maybe we are dying today.”
Then I passed out for a bit.
* * *
“—CC’s of adrenaline straight into the heart. Going now. Injecting!”
Something dragged me back to life. A chemical coursing through my body, keeping oxygen in my brain.
“He’s back,” said Sandy. The relief in her voice was palpable.
I expected to be waking up in the infirmary aboard the Lahore. But instead, Stanco was standing by an airlock, his metal back braced against one door, a foot holding it open. He had discarded his assault gun and held my autocannon in one hand. He was firing it in bursts, spraying down some unseen target.
I was still in the suit. I was still aboard the Anchorage.
“I took your gun,” said Stanco. “That’s how you know we’re best friends. Sharing guns.”
A quick check of my readouts confirmed I was weaponless. “How long was I out?”
“A minute or so,” he said, firing off another burst. I could see red eyes in the dark, and as the shells screamed into the hull and exploded, the flashes showed more of the spider-creatures. “That’s super bad for you.”
“Super bad,” said Sandy.
Two more rounds, a double tap. Stanco threw the rifle away. “Guns are completely dry,” he said, and pulled a huge blade from his side. “Good thing I bought this.”
I felt vaguely more alert. “Guy I know a long time ago… he practiced knife-fighting techniques. Big guy. Built like a tank. His arms were coiled springs, fingers calloused. He said that the loser of a knife fight dies on the ground, the winner dies in the ambulance.”
“No ambulances here,” said Stanco, and as the first of the spider-creatures rolled over him, he plunged the blade into its head. “So I’m fine.”
I couldn’t contest that argument. The spiders bit and tore at his suit, sparks flying. Still he kept the airlock open.
“We gotta get out,” I said. “Sandy, can you move us?”
“Yes,” she said. “In a moment.”
Right as she spoke, Angel clambered in through the open airlock. The instant her autocannon was tracked she fired, portrait in my peripheral vision was iron and unchanging. Strobes of weapons fire lit up the cramped airlock.
The EVA pack moved once more, pushing us out the narrow gap, and then I was in open space again. Behind us, flashes of weapons fire grew distant, and I saw the Anchorage shrink away, until it was once more outlined in a red box. Seven little stars, the other suits, raced after me, white tails behind them as their EVA packs pushed them toward us.
“All suits clear,” said Angel. “Nuke it.”
Missiles flew from the Lahore, little falling stars that streaked across space. They moved so slowly, their movement almost imperceptible until they leapt past us and beyond. Tick tock, seconds passed, and then the Anchorage evaporated in a bright white light. When the blast cleared, all that was left was an ever-expanding field of debris.
“Heart rate is down,” said Sandy. “Nicholas, you gotta hang on. We’re almost there.”
“Don’t call me Nicholas,” I murmured, feeling at once so tired I could barely stay awake, and as though I’d just chugged a crate’s worth of stimulants. “Sandhya called me that… “
Sandy said nothing. I should probably rename her. Change her voice—it wasn’t right to cling to a ghost, to try and bring my dead lover back to life with a lie. I should probably read the mission dossiers before we launched. I should brush my teeth more often.
I should probably do a lot of things.
So, with a list of all my failings big and small playing in my mind, I passed out again.
* * *
I almost didn’t believe I’d actually wake up in a real hospital, but as the world crept back to me, I recognized the familiar ceiling of the Lahore. A tray of food, along with a plastic cup of water, sat on my bedside table.
“Good morning,” said Golovanov.
“Every time I see you in a hospital, something bad happens to me,” I said, taking a deep breath. My whole chest lit up in pain; I shouldn’t do that any more. Just shallow breathing. Sandy was right. So many broken ribs… “Or has just happened. Do I have any more prosthetics? Losing the arm was bad enough.”
“Nah,” said Golovanov, smiling. “You actually pulled through okay. I mean, you’re beat up pretty bad, and you have a wicked-sick concussion, but you’ll pull through.”
“That’s what I like to hear.” I closed my eyes a moment. “So… what the fuck?”
“Your AI saved your life. Angel and Stanco carried you in. They deserve a fair share of the credit for that, too.”
Sandy was saving me, just like her namesake. “I meant with the ship. The Anchorage.”
Golovanov folded his hands in his lap, sucking in air between his teeth. “Yeah. Not sure what to tell you: appears to be… some kind of spider things. They can survive in space, and they’re tough, strong, and adaptable. We got plenty of samples of their blood, along with the recordings from you and your team… so I’m sure Fleet Intelligence is going to have a field day trying to classify them. There’s a myriad of breeds we observed, I doubt two are identical.”
“The Myriad,” I said, shrugging. “Well, hell of a first contact for humanity. Went to shooting in minutes. Mission accomplished, I guess.”
Golovanov nodded. “Something like that.”
I picked up a piece of stale bread and bit it. “You don’t think they’re aliens? Some kind of Earthborn bioweapon?”
His expression told me he didn’t know. “We’ll see,” he said, standing up and tugging the front of his uniform down. “I have all seven other suits out there right now, combing over the wreckage, making sure that our nukes got every single one of those bastards—although if we could find one alive for dissection, that’d be useful, too. I’ve also put out a fleetwide alert. It was tempting to classify this whole thing, but I don’t see the point. Not for something this serious. In a few days, all the colonies will know about it. I’m calling them a highly infectious biohazard for now, until we have information that suggests otherwise.”
“Hopefully that’s the last we’ll see of them,” I said, sitting up and folding my pillow behind me, making it into a half-chair.
Golovanov tilted his head. “Lots of ships go missing every month,” he said. “Most are never found. I’m sure almost all of them have entirely mundane explanations. But what might have happened aboard the Anchorage if we didn’t show up?” He put on his hat. “Do you really think that this is the first ship these creatures have attacked, or merely the first one that’s been discovered?”
A sobering thought. Speaking of…
“I need a drink,” I said, cracking a smile.
Golovanov’s face darkened. “You know that’s not an option,” he said, and then without elaboration, turned and left.
“Happy New Year,” I said to his back, and then I settled back into my bed, picking up a glass of water and taking a sip.
Mission complete.