I expected the Aeotu. I expected a supernova of light and sound. I expected the shivering, alien voice reaching out. I expected "sister".
I didn't expect this.
It's not Aeotu. It's... more? Less?
It's me. Or not me. Or a twin, if a twin was an alien. Or...
I just... I can't.
The thing before me is humanoid. Four arms, two legs. A head. Skin that's not skin, but the strange alien metal-stone that forms Aeotu's bulkheads, and blood that's not formed of haemoglobin and iron, but energy, pure, blinding energy, the kind that burns organics alive. The kind that powers FTL engines. And it's not alive. Not alive like I'm alive or Aeotu is alive. And it's not dead either, not a tank of biogel and circuits.
It looks like me, or like the me that's slumped in the maintenance tube, covered in fug armour. The same broad chest and muscled thighs, the same pattern of lines and whorls tracing under its skin. It's... disturbing and also... I want to say cool but it doesn't feel right, not for something like this. Is it real? Does this thing exist or is this just a figment of my imagination? An illusion created by Aeotu?
A mirage plays around it, half-seen. Of cables and ribs, a frame holding it upright, and little spots of yellow, like heat signatures. I peer closer, trying to make out the scurrying things... they're tiny, minute. Dude is a giant beside them. I lean closer and closer and just a little bit more...
Nanites; nanoscopic machines running around the thing like blood.
Awareness reaches out to me. Familiar. Comfortable. Rising from the pit of my gut, from that place where Hunt came from, where all that knowledge resides. How I knew about the thickness of the hull, the levels of nitrogen and oxygen in the atmosphere. Where the sense of danger came from. Here. It all came from here. From that. From the me-thing.
It does not move. Does not breathe. Doesn't have eyes or ears, but it's looking at me, reaching out to me. Listening to me. Not my words, but... I don't know. I can feel it, the pulse of power through its muscles, the throb of the generator in its belly.
I don't want to follow the thread, don't want to feel the... the thing, but there's no escaping it. It's like trying not to feel the wind against my face, the brush of hair against my cheek. The urgent, leg-crossing need to piss.
I might as well chop off my arm, or ignore the curiosity that urges me to crawl through access tubes, to curl up in the Hatchery and watch critters being made. It's impossible.
The thing doesn't have a name. There's a sense of identity but's it's blurry, half-formed, like it's still growing, developing. It's aware, and it needs, has a purpose. It's the need that's reaching out to me, hooked into my belly with that shifting multi-hued cord. A psionic umbilicus strung between us.
I wrap my fingers around it, unsure if I want to rip it out or just feel it. My knuckles turn white, my arm tenses. Knowledge shoots through the cord, eddies against my fist. The awareness cuts off. Stops.
And... nothing. Silence perhaps, a chill working its way up my spine, wrapping around my heart? A vague notion of emptiness, a hollow space in the core of me.
The thing fades, merging with the everything.
I let go.
Awareness and the thing spring back. I squeeze again.
The thing fades. Let go. Squeeze. Let go.
Fade and reappear, fade and reappear.
Awareness and curiosity, coming and going.
There's no emotion from the thing, no reproach just that awareness sharing knowledge with me.
I let the umbilicus go. Step back, and slip out of the eter.
Dude's still on the ceiling, nose to the ice, but he's looking at me, concentrating on me.
'What is it?' I ask him, only half-expecting an answer.
He keeps sniffing, swinging his muzzle back and forth, stalking whatever it is like a particularly tasty puddle of goop.
'I know you know.' I can feel it in his gaze, in the expectation. And I wonder, if I slipped into the eter and looked at Dude, really looked, what would I find.
I'm not going there though. After everything, I just need something to be easy, to be the way I expect it. The way it should be, the way things were before.
I clench my hands. Not that there's much chance of that, not anymore. Not with fug crawling all over my body and that... Whatever that thing was. Still connected to me, the umbilicus stretching between us, pulsing, singing. I'm trying to ignore it, but it's hard to push aside the awareness. Now that I know it's there and where it leads, it's like trying to ignore my heart, or a sun or Grea. I'd have more luck pretending I wasn't sitting in an ice tunnel, that Citlali wasn't being swallowed by an alien ship, and my folks weren't shit scared whenever they looked at me.
Horn's face flashes behind my eyes, the way his neck gaped open, how his parents' corpses were left to rot in their pods. At least I get some of why they were scared, and why h'Rawd looked at me like he was wondering how best to kill me.
So many questions, so few answers.
A chitter, and Dude's scurrying across the tunnel, nose still to the... I was going to say ground, but he's clinging to the walls now, and I'm wondering if those are his fug-claws or his natural ones, or maybe both, leaving tiny holes in the ice. Whichever they are, I'm starting to reconsider letting him ride on my shoulder.
Ever helpful, the HUD is outlining Dude's tracks, calculating the depth and age of them even as it tracks his progress across the ice, projecting the rest of his path down the wall and over the floor. It's kinda interesting, in a 'stop-cluttering-up-my-vision' manner, and I'm a second from ripping the mask off my face, vacuum or no, when I notice something else. There's more than one set of tracks up there.
They're outlined on the HUD too, translucent, almost invisible against the bright white of Dude's, and they're all over the place. Tiny marks in the ice, just like the critters, some shallower, some deeper, but all with the same triangular incision.
'What is it?' The words are out of my mouth, and I'm not really sure why, except the awareness feels a little like having Core over my shoulder. Watching. Ready to deliver the answers to the universe.
There's no response. I mean, why would there be? Whatever that thing is, it's little more than a fragment, a half-AI, if there is such a thing, and it doesn't speak my language.
I'm on my own. You'd think after everything that's happened, I'd be getting used to that.
Even if I can't make out all of what the HUD is telling me, I get the gist. And I already know, what with Dude right there, but it would be nice to hear another voice.
An army of critters marched through here.
Why? How?
Critters need oxygen just as much as the rest of us, and I'm pretty sure they don't do well in vacuum either, not without fug-armour at least.
So...
So. Given the lack of fuzzy, frozen corpses floating in the tubes, someone obviously found a way around those two problems, but why expend the resources? Hatchery would have had to grow critters especially for the job. Or bio-tanks, like the ones on Med deck.
There're Mum's words too, about critter slag sticking. What's critter slag? Some kind of vomit? And what does it do? The mystery nags at me, like a sore tooth, or a psionic umbilicus. Why? Why? Why?
Awareness creeps up the back of my head on soft feet, barely noticeable amongst the questions until the HUD changes. New readouts appear, big swathes of red snaking across the ice, weaving and criss-crossing like vines. Like fug vines. Like red fug vines.
Red fug.
As soon as the thought pops into my head, the HUD is picking up little pockets of inert nanites.
And I get it. The critters were chasing fug, but not just any fug, the red stuff. The same type that attacked me. I guess the critters won, or the red decided to choose another battle, because there's nothing here but ice. The HUD is tracing the inert red, and Hunt is urging me forward, my feet are following and it doesn't seem to matter where I'm going, so long as I'm following the trail.
The claw marks get thicker as I go, pock-marking the ice, changing the texture from smooth and hard, to soft and fuzzy. The nanites are getting thicker too, and soon enough little splotches of faded red coat the ceiling, the walls, and then the floor, a shadow of what was here before.
At some point, Dude lands on my shoulder, chittering his little head off. There's anger leaking from his paws, a rebuke and a sense of... wasting? I don't know, it's a new one, and right now, I've got other issues. Such as the corpse bobbing in the tunnel.
It's small. A black ball of frozen fuzz encased in plasform, like a miniature envirosuit.
The little guy's belly is shredded, the milky plasform torn, leaving room for frozen guts and globules of blood to explode out his stomach. It hovers around him in a shower of gore; the HUD picks it out in excruciating detail. Before, I would have chucked up my own guts, whatever was left in them, probably just bile by now, but the urge doesn't hit me. I feel, numb. Tired.
Dude feels more than I do. Maybe he feels for us both. Sadness joins the anger radiating from his paws, turns the bright red a dusty shade of purple.
I duck under the corpse and keep moving.
The inert red fug forms trails now, crissing and crossing just like the claw marks. I imagine vines draping from the tunnel's roof, more clinging to the sides, and giant waving reeds growing from the floor. In fact... there are cracks in the floor big enough to stick my pinky in, signs of something burrowing into the ice. They get bigger as I go along, and by the time I find the second corpse, they're big enough to stick my arm in, and the inert fug is no longer just a stain on the ice, but a thick carpet, coming up around my toes and clinging to my fug-feet.
Every step kicks a little of it into the atmosphere, until it fills the place with a fine pink fog.
I keep going, the awareness drawing me deeper. I have the sense we're getting close to something, whether that's Citlali's inner or outer hulls I'm not sure, but there's something at the end of this, something I have to see.
Dude doesn't agree with me, although the heavy brown of his disapproval has faded under the blue of mourning, every critter corpse we encounter makes it deeper, harder.
I wrap Dude in an emote, filling it with joy and warmth and my own shredded memories of being in Mum's arms. It's thin, filaments of our last encounter winding their way through what should have been happy memories, but I hope it's enough, a kind of emotional shield against the constant battery of Dude's kin turned into icicles.
The blue fades a little, replaced with pink and warmth, and there's a note of thanks, a bright yellow directed at me. It doesn't even strike me as weird anymore, that Dude knows the shield is mine, that he's even capable of sorting out what's what in the eter. If he decided to speak to me right now, in actual, human-understandable words, I wouldn't blink an eye.
For an organism bred to clean up biological junk, programmed by the kin do a single job and then die, he's pretty smart. Old Terra, if I think about it, he's pretty smart for a human too.
There's something big up ahead. The HUD is full of whatever it is, a glowing orange blob, bright at its core but not enough to burn my retinas. I can't tell whether the glow is heat or power, or both. Whatever it is, it rivals a shuttle in size. Wide and squat.
Some of that energy runs through the ice. I stop a few paces away from the first vein of it, threaded through the floor and walls in a fine web of the pale pink. It's almost not visible, a trick of the light dancing on the edges of my vision. If not for the flotilla of corpses blocking my way, I wouldn't have stopped at all.
Dude's a ball of grief. I pluck him off my shoulder and cuddle him against my chest. The fug-armour wraps around him too, like it can sense his grief, or maybe it's just reacting to my desire to shield the little fuzz butt against what comes next. I need to know what the glow is, and to do that...
At least I'm not stepping on corpses. That's one good thing about the lack of gravity, the dead critters are floating around me; for every one I push out of the way, others bump into my shoulders and legs, bobbing and twisting in my wake. They're all the same, small and black, covered in hard plasform shells, the clear bubbles cracked and shredded, spilling blood and other things into the void.
One moment I'm walking through critters, and then... The HUD is going crazy, filling the world with diagrams and readouts, and flashing yellow shapes. It's enough to make my head explode. I close my eyes, but the riot of colour is behind my lids too, Hunt whispering from my gut, parsing the shit on the HUD, and Dude—
I slam my shields in place. Everything stops, and I'm alone inside my head, just me, just the darkness behind my eyes, without even the tug of the umbilicus at my gut.
I open my eyes again. The HUD is still flashing and pulsing. I shake all the diagrams and readouts aside and rely on my own fleshy, humanoid vision. I've passed through the critters into an open space, not big, just wide enough for me to stretch my arms. It's round-ish but jagged, bits of ice sticking out at odd angles, driven into the walls and ceiling. There are massive cracks, most spreading from the ice shards, some are filled with the red fug, brighter than what I've seen before, no longer dull pink but the bright screaming red of fresh blood. The atmosphere is filled with the same colour, a frozen reddish mist.
The thing that really gets my attention are the holes in the floor and ceiling. They're huge, I could lay across them and not touch the edges. They're deep too. I can't see much, just the grooves in the sides, as if something had drilled through the ice. Something like a grappling cable.
Plasform is stuck in the roof. As if that triangular shard is a trigger, I start seeing other shards driven into the ice. I turn. Look closely at what I thought was a tunnel, at where it would have continued, at the way ice is crumbled, broken, cracked.
It dawns on me, slowly, very slowly, what some of those readouts on the HUD where telling me.
Looking at them piled on the sides of my HUD brings the readouts front and centre. They're still a confusing jumble of languages, and so I lower my shields and reach for Hunt. Understanding comes gradually, the symbols wriggling and twisting in my brain, finding places to lodge, but when it does... I want to be sick.
Vomit rockets up my throat, and it's only the thought of it hitting the faceplate and spewing back in my face that stops it erupting from my mouth.
You figured it out, Grea whispers in my head. What they're using the new critters for.
I figured it out all right, and I really wish I hadn't.
The critters escorted a bomb to this spot. It went off. They were still here.
I'm standing in vaporised critter. Blood and bone and flesh. All of it swirling around in this little crater that used to be one of Aeotu's grappling cables.
It's not that I don't get it, don't understand why they blew up the cable, but did they have to annihilate critters at the same time? I recall the carnage behind me, the little bodies torn apart by fug. Maybe there hadn't been a choice, maybe they had to blow the critters to free Citlali, but surely a drone could have done the same job.
Why? I'm asking Grea, but also myself. There has to be more to it.
Grea doesn't answer, is gone from my consciousness, leaving just a trace of herself behind, the cherry red clouded with secrets.
Something moves within the ice, a ribbon of orange in the black.
The ribbon pulses, once, twice, a third time. The HUD is throwing new diagrams at me, new symbols, and Hunt is translating, giving me numbers and sensor readings.
Three-point-seven metres. The thickness of the ice between me and the orange thing.
Iron, plasform and haemoglobin. The composition of the mist, of the shards embedded in the crater.
The chemical structure of the ice; hydrogen, oxygen and— That word doesn't parse, bounces off my brain. Hunt can't translate it, the word has no relation to the language I know, is something that at its core, is alien. There are other impressions, half-formed images that make no sense; a vast, grey-green tank; tiny robots splitting in half, eating and multiplying.
It's the fug. The fug is part of the ice.
There's a tug at my consciousness, a shadow of Grea, and the orange thing pulses harder, like it's acknowledging me.
Alarm, my alarm, Dude's alarm, Hunt's alarm, all of it has me backing up. My eyes are caught up in the orange pulse, stuck on it, until the HUD screams at me, and ice spews in my face, pinging off my left side as red fug erupts from the ice. I'm running then, and I'm not looking back.
Dude leads the way, and now, an hour later, I'm standing in front of another hatch. One that doesn't look like any hatch I've ever seen on Citlali, but looks a little too much like the ones on Aeotu.
I'd accuse Dude of a shit sense of direction – right after I stopped wondering how the fuck we got to Aeotu from within Citlali's ice hull – if there wasn't a familiar pull in my gut, a sense of Grea reaching through the hull.
There's no lock pad, no instructions, just those lines and whorls, twisting together in some kind of language, teasing the back of my brain with knowledge. And behind that... behind that, the awareness rises in my gut, the thing reaching through me, ordering the symbols, bringing understanding with it, making one of the whorls brighter than the others.
I touch it, not sure how I feel about the thing, now that I know what it is, or some of what it is. How I feel about the umbilicus. Still, Grea is behind the bulkhead and the lockpad is between me and whatever is on the other side. I need the… thing, the being on the other end of the umbilicus. For now.
The whorl wriggles under my fingers, and the awareness guides my hand, moving muscle and bone, twisting my wrist, spreading my index finger and thumb. The whorl moves with me, shifting, changing. Touching other lines. On my HUD, I watch heat signatures – veins of power – spread through the bulkhead, watch it find an edge, watch it describe a doorway, watch the bulkhead turn translucent, the patterns in its surface still opaque, until it resembles skin more than whatever metallic stone shit Aeotu is made of.
Even if I'd been wearing my fug-feet, the door would have been twice as tall as me, and half again as wide.
The hatch SNAPS back. There and then gone.
I'd seen Them, the aliens the kin were so afraid of, in h'Rawd's memories, knew how big they were, but still... there's nothing quite like seeing something with your own eyes to give you a better appreciation.
I don't know if these things are on a timer or have some kind of sensor, so I'm through quick smart.
The hatch SNAPS shut on my heels, all sign of the gaping hole gone. Just another bit of the hull.
Beyond is a room, an airlock maybe? It's small, a couple of really big strides across and a dozen more length-ways. The bulkheads are curved. All the bulkheads on Aeotu are curved, or at least those that I've seen, like They had never seen a straight line they liked. Great squishy domes, like eggs on their sides, and everywhere, the walls are carved with patterns. Shapes and lines that speak to the thing, that shift and change, that beckon me to follow them until the end of time.
Pain shoots through my shoulder. Small but sharp, enough to knock me out of the mesmerising effect of the pattern.
'Thanks, Dude.'
He chitters at me, reproach in his voice.
'Yeah. Yeah, I know, don't look at the walls.'
Except I have to get out of here and the patterns are the only way to do that.
That, and the thing.
In the short time – a full day-cycle the awareness tells me – I've been crawling around Citlali, Aeotu has changed. Power hums in the walls. I can hear it like my own heartbeat, thrumming in my ears. Warm on my flesh.
Feverish almost. I'm sweating under the fug, clammy, and there's something in the back of my throat, something that feels like that time I had the flu and Mum shoved me under the shower to bring my temperature down before rushing me off to Med.
Aeotu is sick. That knowledge pops into my brain all on its own, no help from the awareness required. How does a spaceship get sick?
The answer's down the next corridor.
Red and yellow-gold crawl over the bulkheads, veins of fresh-spilled blood and sunshine creeping up and over, winding in the carvings. Moving, shimmering.
The yellow-gold reminds me of the carnage in the ice hull, the shards of plasform, the traces of blown-up critters, or the tanks with their amalgamation of alien and human tech. The red though…
Fury rises off it, shimmering waves rising in the air. Not seeking, not reaching, just hanging there, hovering over the red fug like a conductor. Unlike the stuff that chased me through the ice or attacked me and Mac, there is no direction, no objective. It just sits there. Not inert or frozen but... directionless.
Dude's digging fug claws into my shoulder, and the awareness/thing is blaring in the back of my brain, yelling warnings, while my HUD fills with danger signs of its own. I shake them to the side, blocking the thing out and sending a thought to the armour on my shoulder, imagining it thicker, so thick not even Dude's fug claws can pierce it. There's something in the red fug, something that's been tickling the back of my brain. Something... strange.
Focus is my greatest talent and I use it now, stalking the red, half in and half out of the eter.
The corridor fades, not all the way, just enough so it doesn't get in the way as I focus on the red, on the way it shimmers and twists in the air.
Like when I first drew the fug into the eter, I get in close to the red, pulling it apart until the mirage is a cloud of red, thin at the edges. And like that first time, there are sparks in the depths of it, glimpses of an intelligence driving the fug. But unlike back then, when I'd been trying to stop it from destroying Citlali, the red doesn't attempt to trap me. It's… waiting. Unattended. Whatever is behind it, whatever drives its attack, isn't there. I sink into the cloud, burrowing deeper, chasing the sparks of lightning buried in its core.
They're faint, distant, thick with the sense of waiting.
I reach out to bring the sparks closer and... There. A pause, a moment of nothing and then... and then... The lightning is gone. Disappeared, leaving the faint scent of ozone and... cherries? I grab for it again, the lingering aftertaste of the intelligence behind the red. It stains the eter, trips a memory of home, of Mum and Grea, smoke pouring out of the cooker and—
It's gone. Vanished from the eter like it never was.
There's a shiver in my spine, caught there.
I pull out of the eter, and know, deep in the pit of me, that this isn't going to end well.