Dizzie Drexler
Reconnecting with Divak and the Bane brothers should have felt triumphant. After all, they were still alive – they had survived the first attack of a hideously vicious, dangerously evolving predator that no one had seen coming.
They should have, though. Dizzie should have; they were the expert on Xenium here, the one who knew the most about both the mineral and the mold. Not that what they knew could fill more than a thimble – they didn’t even have a way to properly scan for the mold, not like they did with the Xenium, since no one had a complete record of its molecular structure – but still. They should have enforced more precautions, made everyone take more care. They should have been more careful back when careful could have helped, before it was too late.
Now Mason Bane was recumbent on a table in the ancient ship’s lab while his brother fussed over the severe burns that had destroyed his eyes, and Corinus was locked up in the testing bay along with a sample of mold while Dizzie pored over the data they’d collected over the past few days, trying to answer the question everyone was asking – how in the hell did this happen?
“Yelling at me isn’t going to make my work go any faster,” they said for the fifth time to Grayson, who was using a roundtable approach to shout at anyone and everyone about his brother.
“What are you even doing? You should be figuring out a way to fix your friend, not staring down a microscope!”
“I’m examining a sample of the mold.” They’d already taken a DNA sample of it, gingerly scraping Corinus’s festering, darkened wound with a swab without meeting his eyes. Their particle analyzer was processing it right now. Dizzie had a theory about why the mold had reconstituted, but they weren’t about to broach it with the rest of them before they’d proven they were on the right track. “It’s incredibly responsive. It changes to protect itself in the presence of heat and pressure and pH variation… and does so quickly.” They pulled their face off the scope and looked over at Divak. “It’s a good thing you burned up the other one when you shot it. That probably reduced the speed with which its mold will spread to the other body pieces.”
Divak lifted her chin. “Reduced it? I would say I demolished all chance of it. The explosion was bad enough to do this sort of damage to flesh from half a kilometer away.” She indicated Mason, who gave no indication that he was aware of anything going on around him. Dizzie wondered if he was in shock.
How do you treat a cyborg for shock? Put his feet up?
“I wish I could confirm that you did enough,” Dizzie replied grimly, “but this mold is one of the most tenacious materials I’ve ever encountered. I’m not sure what would be enough to completely eradicate it once it’s infected a host.”
“It’s a simple enough problem to investigate.” Divak gestured to the testing chamber, where Corinus was lying on his side with his knees pulled up to his chest, muttering to himself in his native language. “Kill this one and see what happens.”
“Screw you!” Dizzie snapped as Corinus simultaneously leapt to his feet and shouted, “No!”
He shouted it on more than one level – both out loud and psychically. Everyone in the room was driven into a pained crouch with the reverberations of his telepathy – except for Six, who didn’t even seem to hear it, and Mason, who was already prone.
“Sorry, I’m sorry,” Corinus said shamefacedly as Dizzie straightened up with a grimace, “but please, please, don’t kill me. I can’t die, I’m not supposed to die here. I’m not! I need to live, Dizzie, for my people! They need me back! I promised Dr Yoche that I would come back!”
“I know,” they soothed him. “I know, I’m working on it. First, we need to figure out why you were infected, and not the rest of us.”
“He was bitten,” Grayson said slowly, like he was talking to a child. “Got the mold into his bloodstream.”
“Look at the rest of us!” Dizzie snapped. “We’re all covered with cuts and bruises and – hell, even open wounds, look at Mason! There’s mold on all of us, and half of you haven’t put on a helmet since the first day! But the only one obviously affected by it so far is Corinus, so why?”
“Perhaps it is a matter of concentration,” Six suggested. “Small amounts of mold over a large surface area can be fought off by the immune system, while a larger amount deposited directly into the bloodstream results in an infection that can’t be cured.”
“We don’t know that yet,” Dizzie insisted. “It might still be curable.” Corinus curled back up into a ball and began to whimper inside the chamber. His skin had darkened with fever from milky white to a sickly grayish shade, and his inhalations sounded painful. “I’m not giving up,” Dizzie insisted. “But I need to know more. Like–”
The particle analyzer beeped, indicating the results were ready. Dizzie downloaded them to their pad and opened it up, half eager and half afraid to see what they would find there.
Well, shit.
“I think I know how this happened,” they said, forcing the words out past stiff lips.
“How?” Grayson demanded.
“The mold… it’s carrying DNA markers that link it to the original Caridians, the carapaces we found here, but there are also DNA markers linking it to us.”
Six walked over, his mandibles clacking in distress. “What does that mean?”
“It probably means that the mold was here when we arrived,” Dizzie said numbly, trying to cope with the magnitude of how greatly they had underestimated this organism. “It was ancient, though, dried out and completely inert, but not dead. This stuff… I already pointed out how adaptable it is. It was affected by our secretions, our bioshedding, our live cells. As soon as we took our helmets off, we started giving the mold what it needed to revitalize itself. Think of it like… like a living glue that’s using these skeletons as a framework.”
Grayson’s face went dark. “Are you blaming my brother for this? Because he couldn’t help that his mask broke when that goddamn bolt of lightning threw him halfway across the hangar out there.”
“No,” Dizzie said tiredly. They leaned one hip against the table, suddenly exhausted by the inevitability of it all. “No, I’m saying that… that probably anything would have been too much. Every time we exited and entered the ship, air that was permeated with our cells entered the atmosphere. And Six, you programmed the ship to deposit loads of waste straight into a hole you cut into the ground beneath the ship, right?”
Six’s antennae waved so hard his head wobbled. “I did.”
“So, there’s more biomatter right there. Harder to get at, but in a concentrated quantity. Losing our masks didn’t help, but without going back in time and converting this expedition to follow strict hazmat protocols, I don’t think we could have avoided this.”
Corinus’s whimpering grew louder. Dizzie shook their head, bringing one hand up to wipe away a traitorous tear. “I don’t know how to fix this,” they confessed. “I don’t know how to cure Corinus or how to make sure that we won’t become infected ourselves. The longer we stay on Sik-Tar, the greater the likelihood that we’re all going to become infected with the mold eventually. Our immune systems will only be able to fight the airborne particles off for so long.”
“We must return to wearing masks immediately,” Six said.
“That will help,” Dizzie agreed. “What we really need to do, though, is get back up into space and go into lockdown protocol. That’s the next step for the four of you. I’m going to stay here in the lab with Corinus and keep working on a way to–”
“Don’t be an idiot!” Grayson snapped. “He’s as good as gone, and you know it. You need to get your head out of the stars and resign yourself to the fact that the only person who’s gonna be stayin’ on bloody Sik-Tar from here on out is Dr Lifhe, and – the hell are you doing, Divak?” Grayson sounded horrified.
Dizzie turned just in time to see Divak touch the panel beside the testing chamber that was keeping it enclosed, turning the force field off. “He asked to come out,” she said in a monotone voice.
“He’s using his telepathy on her – Corinus, no!” Dizzie shouted. They leapt toward the testing chamber as Divak stepped forward, but collapsed at his front feet a moment later, the victim of an aggressive telepathic attack. Grayson and Dizzie followed suit.
Dizzie had never been the subject of a Centauran telepathic attack before. They’d known it could be deadly – there were several instances in Coalition history of dozens, even hundreds of people dying as a result of Centauran self-defense. They had imagined it to be like cutting a wire – one second the brain worked fine, the next it was blank, the equivalent of a computer in sleep mode.
This was nothing like sleep. This felt like their brain was on fire, burning up inside their skull, all their ability to think and move and feel reduced to a singular sensation of pain. Was this what Corinus felt right now? Was he simply sharing his pain with them, or did he even feel pain anymore?
“Dizzie,” Corinus murmured, grabbing them by the upper arms and lifting them up. Their brain burn cleared slightly as they focused on their former friend. “Dizzie. This happened to me because of you.” His eyelids were steady, completely unblinking. This wasn’t the Corinus that Dizzie knew.
“Corinus,” they said weakly, trying without luck to pull away. “Let go of me.”
“I can’t. You’re all that fills my mind.” Tiny bumps began to appear beneath his skin, bleeding through to turn the smooth white into mottled grayish green. “I see you. Stay with me. Join me.”
“Join you in what?” Dizzie asked, fumbling a hand toward their pocket. Corinus had a tight grip on their upper arms, but if there was enough wiggle room to reach their pocket…
“In a new existence.” As Dizzie watched, his right eyeball began to pulse, the violet center of it protruding farther and farther from his eye socket with every push. “A new way of being. Living out a discovery like this is the ultimate goal of every scientist, isn’t it?”
“Oh, Cor.”
Green pus seeped around the edges of his eyeball, and a second later the liquid expanded into a circle of tiny spore-like protrusions, a mockery of his own eyelashes. He didn’t even flinch.
“You’re not living out anything,” Dizzie whispered. “You’re already gone.”
Gripping the syringe tight in their right hand, they brought it up the center line between their bodies and stabbed it into the soft flesh of Corinus’s third eye.
His telepathic attack instantly eased. As the others got back to their feet, Corinus kept staring at Dizzie, holding them even closer than before.
“Interesting,” he said. “What else can we learn from you?”
A second later, Divak brought her chainsword down with a shout, severing both of Corinus’s arms at the elbows and freeing Dizzie. She kicked Corinus back into the testing chamber and reset the force field before he could even stand up again. The arms fell to the floor.
Dizzie stared at him with guilty fascination. He wasn’t bleeding from his horrific new wounds. By the time he was back on his hind legs, it was mold that oozed from the fresh cuts instead. He stared straight at them, then prodded the spot where Dizzie had injected him. “Very interesting.”
Divak snarled at him, then turned to face the rest of them. “I’m not staying in the same room as that filthy creature,” she hissed, all her usual haughty disdain replaced by quivering anger… and maybe fear. “I’ll prepare the rover for our return to the ship instead.” She stalked out the door before anyone could so much as take a breath, much less argue.
Dizzie felt like the world had slipped out from under their feet, taking all of their surety along with it. “I never meant for this to happen,” they whispered. “Please, I never – I would never have brought you if I’d known this was possible.”
“He is gone,” Six said, probably trying for comforting but failing. “And there is no sense in apologizing for something that isn’t your fault. The expedition was my idea, after all. In the end, all responsibility lies with me.”
“Best thing you can do now is torch the body before it has a chance to spread,” Grayson opined. When Dizzie glanced back, they saw that Mason had righted himself. His face was still a mess, but with the number of cameras built into his body he probably still had five times the vision that anyone else did.
“Whatever you just did to stop his brain from makin’ us let him out, there’s no way of knowing that the mold won’t find a workaround,” Grayson finished.
“But…” Dizzie couldn’t deny the practicality of that suggestion, but not only would it mean losing the body of their friend, it would mean losing the chance to study him.
Have you lost your mind? What is wrong with you? How can you pivot from best friend to lab rat so quickly?
Dizzie tried to justify it to themselves – they were both scientists first and foremost, and keeping Corinus around for study was honoring him in the only way they still could. He would do the same to them if he got the opportunity, too. Dizzie knew full well that Centaurans were trained from birth to prioritize first themselves, then their people, then their own research before things like the lives of other species.
But he saved you. He risked his life for you, and this is how you’d repay him?
The fact that Corinus had saved them was a testament to their friendship, but Dizzie had to face facts. The odds of figuring out a treatment that could actually save Corinus was now nonexistent, while the knowledge that could be gained from studying him was… compelling.
“I know we need to leave,” they said, forging ahead after their moment of uncomfortable introspection, “but this is probably the only chance I’m ever going to get to study the effects of the mold in person. There are still so many unanswered questions about it! How similar is it to the molecular structure of the mold found in the PK-L system? Is it the same species? It seems like the effects on the infected here might come on even more rapidly than the original strain did – does that make this strain more advanced? Maybe this one is the site of origin!”
Now that they’d started thinking about it, they couldn’t stop. “Speaking of origins, is it native to this planet, or did someone else bring it here? Is mold possibly a natural byproduct of Xenium, or perhaps the other way around? If it is a natural byproduct of Xenium, how long did it take for the ancient Caridians to find that out? It seems like they came to Sik-Tar with the purpose of mining Xenium – would they have dedicated an entire ship to this process if they knew the risks were so incredibly high? Did they–”
“That’s bloody damn enough, already!” Grayson’s shout startled Dizzie out of their monologue. “Whatever questions you got, this ain’t the time or the place to answer ’em, not if we want to survive! You said we need to be wearin’ helmets – well, mine’s back on the ship, and so’s Mason’s. You said the chance of infection goes up if the mold gets into a wound – look at his face, mate!” Grayson pointed to his brother’s ruined skin and lymph-coated, unseeing eyes. “He’s got a helluva wound right now! An’ I’m not taking any chances that he could become like that thing in the chamber over there, so we’re packin’ up our shit and gettin’ out of here now. Got it?”
“Got it,” Dizzie said in a small voice. He was right. Of course he was right. Scientific curiosity or not, the focus now had to be on survival. And Dizzie had the feeling their own chances of survival would plummet if they didn’t go along with Grayson’s plan. It was such a terrible waste, but… Corinus had already proven himself a very risky experimental subject. Their time with him was over. “I’ve got plenty of readings to work with,” they said with a deep sigh of regret. They activated their communicator. “Divak, is the rover ready to go?”
There was no answer. The three people in the room with working eyes and no mold infection exchanged fearful glances. “Divak, come in,” Dizzie said. “Divak, come in!”
“Do y’think another revenant got her?” Grayson asked quietly, glancing back at Corinus like he was thinking of running despite the barrier between them.
“If I may,” Six said after a moment of consideration. “I’d like to put forward another theory.” He picked up his tablet from the nearby tabletop and tapped it a few times. “The rover has a positioning system relative to both my ship and myself, as well as a camera. In a moment, we will be able to see whether Divak made it there.”
They all held their breath as they waited to see what the camera showed them.
A second after the image lit up the screen, Grayson let out a litany of swearwords so long that Dizzie wondered how he was breathing around them. “She’s takin’ the rover and running!” Sure enough, the camera was on the move, bouncing up and down as the rover made its way over the wet ground. “We’ve got to get out there, now!”
“It’s worse than that,” Six said, adjusting the camera so it was pointing backward toward where Divak had just abandoned them. “Look at the ground. Do you see it?”
Dizzie squinted for a second, then felt a fresh chill course through their body.
The ground behind the rover – ground that was mold-exposed after the rev that Lefty had lured away had exploded – was moving. And it had taken the shape of an entire army of undead, bright green revenants.
Well. It looked like they knew where the bodies of most of the dead Caridians had been kept before now – outside, perhaps buried in a mass grave, perhaps abandoned wherever the mold left them and blown into rocky crevasses over time.
Now they were awake once more, and on the hunt.