Dizzie Drexler
It was hard not to reach out and pull Grayson back as he marched off to his death. Dizzie knew they couldn’t do it, knew that Grayson was making his own choice and that nothing they said would deter him, but… It didn’t seem right. It felt too much like Corinus all over again, someone sacrificing themselves so that the rest of them – Dizzie specifically – could live. Why were they the worthy one, though? Why weren’t they doing the sacrificing? The guilt of living did battle with the visceral fear of dying until they fought each other to a laborious standstill in Dizzie’s mind, leaving them exhausted by their own emotions.
Dizzie almost envied Six’s cool, unemotional response to the whole thing. They might have raged at him over it, demanded answers, demanded that he teach them how to put up such a perfect distance, but there was no time for that. All they had time to do was hide in the farthest corner of the room as the revenant that had been Mason went storming past, chasing his brother down with claws akimbo.
Holy shit, Mason was fast. Dizzie and Six were going to be lucky if they made it out of this hallway before Grayson was caught and killed, never mind them getting all the way to the pod. Maybe the best thing to do would be to stay right here and wait for Corinus to come and find them – or better yet, to go to him! He was waiting, after all; he’d been waiting patiently for Dizzie for hours now, so it really was time to come together again and move on to the next stage in their personal evolution as a tea–
What the hell? Dizzie gasped, clutching their head as they forcibly wrenched their thoughts back to reality. What the hell was that? There was no way Dizzie or Six were going to Corinus! And he shouldn’t care about them, either – now that he was free, he should be going to join the rest of the revenants, not skulking around here.
Except… Corinus was different from other revenants. Different from other Xenos entirely – after all, how many of those infected with the mold had maintained their ability to speak? How many, if any of them, had been psychic?
Damn, but Dizzie wished they had more data on the shapeshifting Empusa who was rumored to be part of the original expedition to PK-L7. It would at least give them a baseline for comparison and… and…
And Dizzie loved comparison. Loved it so much that the best thing to do right now would be to infect themself with mold and then compare their changes to those of the other people in their crew. It would be fascinating, and give them a firsthand experience of how the mold could literally reshape an entire body. They couldn’t wait to discover the rush of that initial infection, and the characterization of the pain scale alone would be–
“No!” Dizzie hit the side of their head with one fist, ignoring Six’s murmurs of concern from the other side of the room. “Stop it! I don’t want that!”
But Corinus did. And he had finally learned how to make his telepathy work with the mold, rather than having to work around it. The serum Dizzie had been dosing him with had long since worn off, and now… now he was free. Now he was apex, the cleverest mind in the collective. He was prime, center, master, and would be even more once he had everything he wanted. And what he wanted was…
Dizzie pushed to their feet, stumbling clumsily toward the door at the end of the mess hall. They turned once, just once, managing to gain enough control of their own body to look back at Six. They knew there was desperation written on their face, clear in their eyes even if they couldn’t voice it on their own.
Help me! Save me!
But Six simply stood up and watched Dizzie stagger out into the hall, his antennae waving wildly but the rest of him remaining completely immobile.
Dizzie walked on unstable legs down the hall to the laboratory, so briefly a place of hope and excitement before descending into despair. The wall beside the door was a mess, completely destroyed thanks to Mason. The force field itself was turned off now, and just within the door of the lab was Corinus. He was barely recognizable now – his eyes were as big as the rest of his head, and he had two extra legs growing from his torso and supporting him in an upright position. When he saw Dizzie, he smiled.
“There you are. I knew you would come to me if I asked nicely.”
The confirmation was bitter. Dizzie gritted their teeth and managed to get out, “You’re… in… my… head.”
“Yes. My telepathy isn’t back to its full strength yet, but that won’t take long. Come inside.” He stepped back and made room for Dizzie to enter the lab. They tried to make their feet drag, tried to slow down the seemingly inexorable advance into death that they were making, but it was impossible. All Corinus had to do was think, “Come,” and Dizzie came.
“Good.” He tilted his head slightly, big eyes twitching on their stalks. “Hmm. Even with the mold’s help, I still can’t penetrate the Caridian’s mind. No matter, of course. I’ll do so in person soon enough. But it’s frustrating to be denied something I want.”
“So… sorry… for… you,” Dizzie gritted out between their teeth.
“I know you’re not, but that’s all right. I want you far more than I want him, after all.” Corinus gestured to the testing chamber in the back of the lab. “You and I were both scientists not so long ago. This mind retains its scientific training and curiosity. There is much I would like to learn about the mold, and how best to ensure its successful spread across the galaxy. Just as you restrained me within this chamber for your tests, now I shall run tests on you.”
“But why?” The pain of fighting Corinus’s control was enough to make their head throb, but Dizzie was determined to know the truth before they lost all self-control. “Why bother? You’re so smart – why do you need me?”
“Because I want to know what it’s like to be you,” Corinus said, the fascination clear in his voice. “You are more than merely something to be consumed; you are precious data. Data is what we need. We are more than we appear to be, too, and with your mind on our side and whatever I find from my experiments, we shall all become more and more.” He tilted his head. “I think I will run growth-rate experiments on each of your body parts. How long different concentrations of mold take to fully consume different pieces of your flesh. I will save your head for last, so you can watch the procedure and appreciate what I am doing.”
“I won’t… appreciate… my own torture,” Dizzie snapped. They fought the power of Corinus’s telepathic control with everything they had, but he was too strong – their legs took them into the testing chamber with barely a pause. The walls and floor were coated with mold, and Dizzie went from fighting back to holding very still, so they didn’t fall into it.
“That’s all right,” Corinus said, his eyes moving side to side as he reached one foreclaw toward the control panel on the left of the testing chamber. “I will appreciate it enough for both of us.” He touched the panel, and the force field snapped into place between them. His control over Dizzie’s mind eased, but it didn’t even matter now that they were trapped inside this awful place with no way out. He fully faced Dizzie, looking pleased.
They hoped that Six had made it, at least – he must have taken his chance and run for the pod, and Dizzie couldn’t blame him. This was going to be terrible in ways they’d never imagined before, but if one of the expedition, just one of them, made it out, then at least it wouldn’t all be for nothing. Six would be able to warn others about Sik-Tar, he could try to prevent people from coming back and disturbing this deadly planet any further, he could–
“I believe I will start with a paralytic,” Corinus said, backing up toward one of the tables but not taking his eyes off Dizzie. “It is simple enough to manufacture and can be turned into a gas and pumped into the chamber. I’m looking forward to you experiencing the same thing I did every time you took my telepathy away. Then, I will – hkk.” His brief, tense exhalation was immediately followed by the brutal SNAPSNAP of another force field turning on…
Only this one was held in place by Six, and its components framed each side of Corinus’s neck.
Corinus’s mutated head slid off his shoulders like hot grease off a spatula, landing with a lugubrious splat less than half a meter from the edge of the new force field. His body collapsed to the ground far more slowly, the mold inside it working to keep it going even though the host’s central processor had been removed. Undoubtedly some kind of head would regenerate soon enough, but for now–
For now, Dizzie looked at Six, who stepped out of the shadows behind the table holding the force field he’d probably cannibalized from the end of the hall. He’d hooked it up to a battery with a series of messy connective cables, the sort of thing that should have been impossible to hide, and yet neither Dizzie nor Corinus had noticed him arriving until he’d sliced Corinus’s head off. “You have the most amazing timing,” they told him, awestruck. “I didn’t even hear you coming. Are all Caridians this sneaky?”
“I wish I could have been here sooner,” Six said with polite avoidance, setting their awkward weapon down on the nearest table, then stepping daintily over Corinus’s body to release the force field. “It was surprisingly challenging to create access to a power source large enough to provide the – oof!”
Dizzie cut him off as they stepped out of the testing chamber and went straight into a hug. Six startled as they gripped him, then relaxed enough to give Dizzie a tentative pat pat on the shoulder before stepping back.
“We should go. Our location is severely compromised, and Dr Lifhe will be regenerating soon.”
“Have you seen any sign of Grayson?” Dizzie asked, knowing to expect the worst and yet hoping against hope that perhaps, somehow, he had…
“I’m afraid I have not. I think that it would be… unwise to linger,” Six said, and Dizzie didn’t have to read between the lines to know that Six figured Grayson was already dead, or worse – assimilated.
“Right.” Dizzie looked around the lab quickly, triaging what they had and what they could carry, before grabbing a few instruments off the tables. “Do you have the bag with our–”
“It is in the hallway. We should go,” Six repeated as a sudden piercing scream echoed through the hangar. Oh god, that’s Grayson. “Now.”
Dizzie nodded numbly. “Yes. We – yes.” They followed Six out into the hall, but not without a backward glance at Corinus’s body. Jutting up from his severed head, one of his eyeballs twitched, turning toward Dizzie and Six and following their movements before they finally moved out of sight. “We need to go right now.”
They picked up the pace, Six leading at a steady jog down the hallway and out into the hangar. There were no revenants to be seen – Lefty had done his job well – but there were plenty of sounds coming from one of the refineries. Dizzie followed the trail of bright red blood and felt their stomach curdle. Grayson must have run in there, tried to take refuge, and Mason had found him.
Was still finding and dealing with him right now, apparently. Ugh.
They wished for the ten thousandth time since they’d started this cursed trip that they’d thought to bring a gun of their own, something that they could have used to defend themselves more deliberately than a scientific multitool, a jury-rigged pair of force field generators, or an unstable, highly flammable chemical compound worth a ridiculous amount of credits. But regrets were useless right now. Grayson had given his life for them to escape.
Corinus had also given his life so that Dizzie could escape. Whatever he’d become, the person he actually was had cared for them enough to make the ultimate sacrifice to save them. That needed to be honored.
“Let’s go,” Dizzie said, and resolutely tuned out the slorping, crunching sounds coming from the refinery as they worked their way through the messy hangar, past the storage containers still full of precious, deadly Xenium, to the one pod that might be their ticket off this dark, hopeless world.
The repairs that had been made earlier were perfunctory, but probably enough to get them into orbit. Dizzie let Six worry about filling the fuel tank – he was stronger, and the last thing they needed was another spill right now – while they sat down at the controls and tried to figure out how to start the thing up.
It was actually… oh, gosh. If Dizzie hadn’t been sure this was an alien ship, they might have assumed that a human had designed parts of it. It was so understandable. Right hand here, managing the throttle, while the left hand worked the control wheel. Even the computer interface was exactly the right size for a human hand. There were additional controls that looked perfect for Caridian claws, but these pieces… they were just…
Power suddenly flooded the pod with a gentle sighing sound, and the door, which had been hanging open up until now, slid closed. Soft yellow light filled the tiny cabin, and a second later the control panel in front of them lit up bright blue. A series of Caridian numerals scrawled across the screen, followed by–
“What the–” Dizzie knew they were gaping, but they couldn’t help it. They turned toward Six. “Why are there commands available here in English?”
Six looked over Dizzie’s shoulder at the panel. “Oh, there are? That simplifies things quite a bit. I was almost sure before, but I’m pleased to have my suspicions verified.”
“What suspicions? Verifying what?”
“That is a question to be answered once we’re off Sik-Tar,” Six replied. “It is asking for a–”
“Password, I know, but you’re the expert when it comes to Caridian passwords,” Dizzie replied. They moved to get up from the seat, but Six shook his head.
“There is no need to displace yourself. Let me try this.” He tapped a series of symbols on the panel. The screen flashed black. “Hmm. That one worked when we restarted power to the rest of the larger ship.”
“Well, it’s definitely not working now, and – aaaah!” Dizzie couldn’t stop the scream that bubbled out of their chest as a sudden impact hit the door of the pod. It was…
Holy shit, it was Mason, only…
Dizzie stared. They couldn’t help it. The picture he made was horrific, stomach-churning, yet at the same time it was impossible to tear their eyes away. He had become an abomination, the sort of hybrid mess that had been outlawed by the Coalition generations ago – a crawling, chimera-like cyborg with two heads sprouting from its metal shoulders. One was Mason’s original head, complete with big Caridian eyes, and the second…
That was Grayson. Just his head, but it was him, he was in there, somehow… and he was screaming. Whatever had happened to lead to his decapitated head being fused to his brother’s neck like a parasite, it was clear that the mold was the only thing keeping it alive. But it hadn’t yet managed to overcome Grayson’s control over his own thoughts. He had no eyes, but he seemed to know what he was looking at anyway, and his voice sent chills down Dizzie’s spine.
“…o! Go already! Get off this goddamn rock, you idiots! Fly the hell outta here!”
“Oh my god.” Dizzie’s hand clenched spasmodically on the throttle before they forced their attention back to Six. “We need a password to activate this thing, now. Before he–” The sound of claws scrabbling at their door, so recently closed, was almost loud enough to overwhelm their voice. “Password!” they shouted.
“Try one of yours,” Six suggested, far too calmly.
“Why the hell would one of my passwords work?”
“Take it on faith, Dr Drexler,” Six said. “What have we got to lose?”
Well, put it that way… everything about this pod was weird. Maybe this would be just weird enough, too. Dizzie tried their standard tab password, the most common anagram of Doctor Vivian Rigby they used for devices – Byronic gator vivid. No good. They tried the anagram they’d used on their old lab – cordy orbiting viva. Still nothing. What else, what else… Finally, they tried the version of her name they used specifically on their Xenium-related research: arv dicing ivy robot.
The panel came to life under their hands. It was in English, it was in a language that they could read and understand, and the commands it functioned with appeared to be nearly identical to the ones they’d learned to use for operating the Telexa. How… what…
“I would please ask that you get us into space as soon as possible,” Six said, his mandibles clacking as he stared at the mutated Bane brothers trying to break through the pod’s door.
“Yes, right! Yes… OK. Um…” Shit, shit, how do you fly a ship again? Engine check, um, boosters and thrusters and – wait, no, those are the same thing… It took some fumbling, but the pod responded like it was supposed to, and in no time they were ready to initialize the launch sequence. As soon as they did, a fiery blast should propel them up one of the long spires that led out the top of the ship and up through the atmosphere until they were free.
Free. Unless…
Countdown to launch. Ten… nine…
“There’s liquid Xenium on the floor out there,” Dizzie muttered, then glanced at Six, who was strapping himself in beside them. “What if it throws off our launch?”
“That is possible,” Six said. “But I think we’ll make it.”
Dizzie’s head snapped around to look at him. “But how do you–”
“Dizzie.” He reached out and put a gentle claw on their shoulder. Behind him, the scrape of other, far less gentle claws got louder. “Against all odds, we have made it this far. I believe we’re destined to survive. Trust in fate, just this once.”
Four… three…
“Fate,” Dizzie said miserably. But then… there was “fate”, fickle and unscientific, and then there was the only logical action to be taken in order to survive. If they happened to coincide this time, well, Dizzie could ignore that. They nodded.
One… zero.
The little pod’s booster rockets fired, and Dizzie almost fell out of the seat as the ship began to rise off the Nexeri’s floor. Almost simultaneously, the pod was shoved hard to the side, so hard that it scraped against the wall of the chute guiding them upward with a sound like metal against glass. The liquid Xenium in their fuel tank was fighting to outrun the spill on the floor, which was probably soon going to ignite the rest of the store of Xenium in the room any second now, and then they’d really be–
FOOM! Dizzie was flattened back against the seat so hard it made their neck hurt as the explosion from below rocketed around, and then past them, engulfing their pod in white-hot fire even as they soared out of the ancient ship and into the sky. Alarms blared, bright blue warning lights blinked, and for a few seconds they were sure that it was over. They’d lost, they’d been caught by the incredible explosion of all that Xenium; they and every revenant on Sik-Tar were going to die, for real this time, with no mold left to resurrect them. This was the end. This was… this was…
White flames were abruptly replaced by soothing blackness. A moment later, a claw reached out into Dizzie’s field of view and shut off the blaring alarm. They just sat there and watched, breathing hard, too adrenalized and battered by their stupidly rapid ascent to realize what had just happened until–
“Oh my god.” They were alive. They’d made it, they were in space and they were alive! Dizzie turned to look at Six, wincing as the pain in every muscle in their upper body made itself known but able to put it aside as the endorphins of pure, triumphant euphoria rocketed through their body. “We’re alive! We made it!”
Six spread his mandibles wide, giving Dizzie an expression that was as close to a human smile as they had ever seen on him. “So we did.” His antennae waved gently. “Well done.”
Well done? Well done? Damn straight it was well done! “We just survived an apocalypse!” Dizzie pointed out. “I can’t even begin to calculate the odds of us being able to live through something of that magnitude! The Xenium alone was bad enough, when it came to the take off, but to make it through the revenants and the mold and – the mold!”
They let go of the controls and dove toward their pack, pulling out a bottle of decontamination spray. “Stand up,” they ordered. “Right now. We can’t take any chances with the mold hitching a ride on us. We need to decontaminate immediately.”
Six came, as mild as he always was, and stood still while Dizzie hosed him down with mold-killing spray. Then they handed the bottle over to him. “Now you get me.”
Dizzie still wasn’t satisfied until they cranked up their battered particle detection unit – also thoroughly decontaminated – and ran a check on the pod’s small cabin, then their belongings, then themselves. The small percentage of mold stores that still registered on the machine were diminishing as they watched, down into the single parts per billion. After another anxiety-inducing five minutes and a second check, there were no active reads of mold anywhere in the pod.
“Finally.” Dizzie dropped the nearly empty bottle of spray onto the floor and slumped back against a wall. They hadn’t realized until now just how tired they were. The comedown from what had to be the longest day in the history of the universe – had all of them really been together just that morning, it seemed impossible – was hitting, and hitting hard. That plus the sudden plummet of their adrenaline and the fact that they hadn’t eaten or drunk anything in hours was enough to take the shine off their miraculous survival.
A tear slipped down Dizzie’s cheek. They wiped it away, clumsy and angry at their own clumsiness, the way their fingers felt thick and rough and everything from their toes to their ears ached. More tears followed, though, and some of them pooled in the corners of Dizzie’s lips, the salt taste a sharp change from the disinfectant that suffused the air.
“It’s not fair,” they whispered, which – what a stupid thing to say. Of course it wasn’t fair – what about life was ever fair? Humanity had fought for centuries to instill fairness into society and failed at every step along the way. Nature wasn’t fair; the universe wasn’t fair. Why should Sik-Tar have been any different?
The dream that Dizzie had held close in the back of their heart from the beginning of their voyage to this dark planet was finally ripped away, like pulling a bandage from a particularly nasty wound. The dream of discovering a usable source of Xenium, of making their and Corinus’s reputations, of bringing him home safely and securing funding for bigger and better expeditions and finally contributing something to the study of the mold and the Xenos that would make Dr Rigby’s memory proud… all lost. All gone.
What was the worth of data that had such an incredibly dear price? The deaths of two-thirds of their expedition was undoubtedly an affordable price to those in power who had no soul and no conscience, but Dizzie wasn’t like that. Couldn’t be like that, especially not in the wake of so many people dying so that they could live.
If they could have changed places with Corinus right now, if they could have spared his life and given theirs in turn, they would have. That thought was nothing but a funnel for their despair – useless, what good was dwelling on it? What good was dwelling on any of it? But Dizzie couldn’t help it.
They buried their face in their hands and did their best to stifle the sound of their own crying, even though they knew it was futile in such a small space. If Six was kind, he would turn around and look the other way.
He wasn’t kind, though – or at least, not kind enough to ignore Dizzie’s breakdown. Instead, he was cruel enough to acknowledge it by sitting down next to them and offering a hard but warm shoulder to lean against. “The loss of your friend, and of all our companions, is sad,” he said. “There is no shame in acknowledging that.”
“But I don’t want to… I can’t…” Thinking about it made it more real, and Dizzie wasn’t ready for it to be real. They wanted to bask in the warm glow of survival, not look around them and see everything that they missed, everyone they wished was there. Corinus had been their fellow researcher and best friend for the past three years. They’d shared every triumph and every failure, and now… now, to have to face the ultimate triumph that was survival and couple it with the terrible failure that was losing him…
“I, too, am sad.” Six leaned his shoulder against Dizzie’s. “Perhaps you will permit us to be sad together.”
That was it. It wasn’t the support they would have gotten from Corinus, but it was the valuable, incredible reminder that they weren’t alone that sealed the deal for Dizzie. They leaned over against Six and let the tears come, let out the fear and angst and pain that had been haunting them ever since the first ancient corpse came back to life, and cried until their eyes itched and they could barely keep themselves upright.
Six sat with them through it all, a staunch support through the tears and shivers and shakes. He handed them water when they were done, a clean cloth that they could wet so that they could clean off their face, and finally made up a little berth that Dizzie could lie down in.
“Don’t we have to… shouldn’t we…”
There were so many things left to do, so much to figure out. Where the hell were they even going to go now? Could they make it back to the Coalition with the fuel they had left? What would the reaction of their superiors be when they got there? This trip had been an unmitigated disaster in every sense of the word – the faint hopes the Coalition brass had held for their expedition turning into something profitable not only hadn’t panned out, they’d lost valuable personnel as a result of it. Dizzie would be lucky if they weren’t packed off to some corporate lab to do scientific scut work for the rest of their life.
And it wasn’t going to be any better for Six, either. For an alien associated with an aggressively expanding empire to be one of the last people standing, when everyone else who’d died was a Coalition citizen, wasn’t a good look for him. He would probably be subjected to interrogation, to imprisonment, maybe even to death as a result of this awful expedition.
“Whatever you’re worrying about, it can wait,” Six said, his voice a dim whirr against the backdrop of anxiety and fatigue. The heat of his body was real and present, though, a comforting press against Dizzie’s side. “It can all wait long enough for you to rest and gain some peace. Rest now. You will not be alone.”
Not alone. That was probably the best that Dizzie could hope for right now. They closed their eyes, not sure they’d be able to sleep but willing to try – anything to escape the sensation of despair that was doing its best to envelop their brain.
It worked. Darkness turned to nothingness, and in Dizzie’s last moment of self-consciousness before they fell asleep, they were grateful for it.