h'Rawd's command sphere leads the way, directing my feet through Aeotu's broken corridors to an access tube. At least, I'm assuming it's a tube, h'Rawd thought it was.
The tube looks pretty much the same as the rest of the alien ship, a little skinnier maybe, a little rounder, but the sides still move with the same shifting patterns, whorls blending into lines, into circles. Like before, the awareness is trying to untwist them, whispering the possibility of meaning; it's enough to give me a headache.
The end of the tube is in front me before my head has time to explode. One moment I'm staring at a solid bulkhead, the next it's a translucent bit of skin, power running through it like blood, and then it's snapped into the deck and I'm walking through a double hand-width section of steelcrete, the metal pock-marked and holey. Fug-eaten.
I'm on the edge of what used to be Engineering, the topmost of Citlali's decks, excluding the little pimple that is the Attrium. It's the pile of metal and the skeleton of what used to be a work shuttle that give it away, the rest of the space…
The rest of the deck is full of holes and the remnants of spaces that might have been familiar once but are now alien, and not in the way Aeotu is, with its carved bulkheads and curved ceilings.
This is worse. This is the familiar warped and broken, a ruin where once was smooth steelcrete and colourful holos.
What happened? I need to talk to Core now more than ever, to know what happened in the time before I woke up. Before I was ejected into space, the fug had been repairing Citlali, making her whole.
The awareness has no answers, but deep in the back of my brain, in the place where the sticky web of darkness came from, is the memory of battle, of critters spreading disease. Of kin and humans walking through Citlali's corridors, spewing fire.
It makes my heart stop, my head light. I want to know, want to see the faces of the people, want to know when and how and where. Where are they now? Why didn't they come find me? And lastly, most importantly—
'How long was I out?'
I'm getting sick of the way my voice echoes, bounces from strut to the hole in the decking, repeating over and over and over. Getting sick, too, of the lack of answers.
Maybe, just maybe now that I'm aboard Citlali, and if there are crew awake… 'Core!'
Core. Core. Core.
'Core! Answer me!'
Core. Answer. Core. Answer.
I'm drawing in breath for another yell, feeling those too-big lungs like a mirage, when the air shimmers. It's not much, a flicker of gold over the lacy remnants of a bulkhead. It flickers again, bright sparks in the darkness, and is gone.
Breath burns in my lungs as I wait for it to come back.
Nothing.
I release the breath in a rush.
Typical.
H'Rawd's command sphere nudges the back of my brain, moving me forward. It guides me around piles of debris, through twisted bulkheads to a hole in the deck.
It's as wide across as I am tall, and black as the void; there's no way to tell how far down it goes. It could be just a couple of metres or all the way through the ship. It probably hasn't ruptured the outer hull though, or this whole section would be in vacuum. Still, jumping down it doesn't seem like the smartest idea, although… There's that whisper, the awareness telling me it's safe, that it's the best way to find the others. What decides me is Dude, his front paws perched on my chest as he looks over the edge of the hole and then back to me, expectation clear on his fuzzy little face.
I bounce a little on my fug-feet, feeling the springiness, the strength in the turned-back ankle. Take a deep breath. The memory of another tube, of my grav-belt failing, rings in my brain. Another breath.
Dude fuzzes.
'Whatever. I guess I've done dumber things.'
I jump.
Turns out, jumping down the hole wasn't the stupidest thing I've ever done, and that my fug accessories are tough, like, really tough. So tough, I hardly felt the impact, and hey, look Mum, no broken bones!
I take it as a win, even though I have no idea where I am. I might have started on Engineering, which, given the lack of bones poking through my skin, should have meant I was on one of the two Lab decks right below it, but this place looks more like Medical – a lot of plasglas walls and dark blue deck plating. What there is of the bulkheads is a soothing pale grey. That would mean I dropped three decks, nine metres straight down with the gravity on and I'm walking away like it was just a short hop off a table.
If it weren't so fucking freaky, my fug-self would be cool.
The last time I was on Med deck, it was choked with fug. The corridors might be clear of it, but the scars on the bulkheads and the holes in the deck show where it once was. As I make my way deeper into the level, the fug signs fade.
Most of the bulkheads on Med's inner rings are intact, with the occasional scorch or claw mark. A few places are honeycombed with holes, the steelcrete reduced to thin filaments of itself. The signs of fighting are heaviest around those areas, the walls black with char, the deck thick with what looks like dust, if dust was a dull, grey-green colour.
The dead fug puffs up around my feet, coating my legs to the knee, sticking there and… Is it my imagination, or is the me-fug absorbing it? As I watch, the dull patina on my shins fades and the stuff covering my thighs reaches fractionally higher.
'Okay.' I look up and concentrate on the junction ahead. 'Okay,' I say again, ignoring the squishy, sick sensation in the back of my throat. Focus on the things I can control, like getting from here to wherever it was h'Rawd wanted me.
It would have been nice if h'Rawd had included a little more in the way of actual directions instead of this vague pull of home, but whatever. I'll take what I can get.
At the junction, the pull drags me toward the left and the outer rings, away from Med's inner workings, where the heart of the Medical units and Command are, but… There's a new sensation tickling the back of my mind, another tug coming from my gut, telling me to go right, deeper into the core of what used to be Citlali's nerve centre.
The only place more protected than Command and central Med labs was Core, where Citlali's AI lived. Lives. Where she lives. I saw that flicker on the bulkhead, remember?
A little bit of me, the bit that holds back all the shit I've seen, that bit is telling me to grow up and stop believing that any of this is going to be all right, that someday I'm going to wake up and everything is going to be as it was.
That bit is a prick, and I'm ignoring him
I'm not ignoring the tug at my gut though, not now that Dude is sitting to attention, his little nose pointed in the same direction as that tug.
It guides me first down one corridor and then another, turning left and then right until I'm staring at what used to be main sickbay, the place I spent a couple of days healing up after I entered the ora for the first time. Where I first talked to Aeotu and where I launched an assault on the fug. That place. It looks different from the outside, different from how it used to be. The plasglas walls are dark, not with soot but turned opaque by the AI.
The tug in my gut keeps me moving, turning away from the main lab and away from Command. The fug-dust gets thicker the farther I walk. It clings to everything, sticks in my nose, coats my lips, and even the me-fug is having trouble absorbing it. I skirt around the inner ring, and just as it seems like I've been walking forever, I stop.
Dude vibrates with tension and his fur – dulled to a dirty yellow by the dust – stands on end. His ears are flat to his head and all four of his eyes are fixed on the door in front of me.
It doesn't look like much. I've passed any number of doors the exact same shade of middling grey, featureless, their corners rounded. Before the fug, a holo would have popped up at eye-height, telling me what this room was for and who worked in it. Now, there's nothing save the ever-present charring and the fug-dust, a thicker coating here than anywhere else.
I guess a lot of fug died here, but why?
The important parts of the ship were closer to the centre of the deck – Command and Medical. Why fight over a lab on the outskirts of nowhere? Was there something in the decks above or below?
I'm looking at the deck like I can see through it. Stasis is below, and the fug had conquered that before Onah pushed me out of my pod. However long ago that was. The awareness is whispering numbers to me, but they're too big to be real.
The answer to why – why this lab, why do I feel the need to go inside – is behind the door. A door that doesn't budge no matter how I push or prod. The need to get in is building in my gut, it's not just the tug anymore or Dude all tense and silent on my shoulder, there's a stench on the psionic plane that whispers of the same wrongness that clung to the skeletons on Aeotu and raises the hairs on my nape.
It mixes with the frustration in my chest, acid to the base already there, and explodes out of my throat in a yell and shoots down my arm, my fist cracking into the door. Pain shoots up my arm, throbs in my knuckles, but it's distant, dulled by the head-sized spiderweb of cracks radiating from the impact.
I step back, look at it, look at my knuckles, at the thick ridges of fug forming over the bleeding skin. Turn my attention back to the door.
Huh. I wonder…
I ball up my hand, do it again. Without the yell this time.
Another crack and the spiderweb grows. And this time, even though I feel the impact jarring up my arm to my shoulder, there's no pain and the fug over my knuckles is thicker.
Cool.
Again and again I hit the door. With each strike the spiderweb grows, the cracks at the impact site growing bigger and bigger until the steelcrete begins to crumble.
A little bit of me, the prickish negative part, is telling me steelcrete shouldn't do that, shouldn't crack under the impact of a shuttle let alone a scrawny boy with fug on his hands. But I'm not looking a gift critter in the mouth, this door is coming apart, and whether or not it's because I suddenly have superpowers or the fug is eating the metal, I don't care.
Even Dude agrees with me. There's excitement in the tension holding his body still, an edginess vibrating from his paws.
One last blow and I'm through, my shoulder slamming up against the door as my fist punches out the other side. The hole widens as I pull my arm out, the metal crumbling, chunks raining down around my feet, thudding into my fug-toes. My hand hasn't even cleared the door before Dude is scampering down my arm and leaping into the darkness beyond.
'Hey! Wait up!'
There's no answer, not even a chitter.
It takes a few more punches before the space is big enough for me to follow, and even then I have to suck in my gut and squeeze.
The lab beyond is small and dark, less lab than observation corridor. No workbenches, no hover stools, nothing except giant biotanks running down either side. The tanks have a faint glow, almost enough to see by but not enough to stop me from catching the fug-paws on the hoses snaking over the floor.
I have a nice up-close view from my place face-down on the deck. There's something strange about the hoses, it's nothing I can see – I mean, it's a tube – but the hairs on my nape are on end again. I can practically smell the wrongness I sensed outside, an old musty smell like that time I forgot to activate the cyclers and our shipsuits grew enough mould to make fug jealous.
A small thud on my back and Dude's fuzz is flooding my system, except instead of the calming gold I've come to expect from him, this is a jagged, unhappy buzz, and it's directed at the tanks.
I push myself up, and get my first real good look at them.
The biotanks are huge – floor to ceiling sheets of plasglas holding back enough biogel to drown a shuttle – and whatever's in them is the source of the wrongness. I concentrate on the crawling sensation, and… It's not kin, although it has the sense of a rucnart, the sharp bite of their minds. It's not Jørgen either, doesn't jump and jiggle like the rest of us human psions. There's a snap there, a creeping hiss that reminds me of the fug.
Maybe because there's a thin layer of the stuff frosting the tank.
My hand hovers over the plasglas with its thin carpet of fug, and even with my fug-hands, I can't quite bring myself to touch it.
Whatever this stuff is, it's different, even fug-me can sense it. The stuff winding around my fingers has retreated, leaving Kuma flesh to hover over the plasglas. The fug on the tank hardly even looks like fug, it's... Ordered, a geometric lacework crawling over the plasglas.
And there's more fug inside the tank.
A mouldy geometric carpet of it, vine-like ropes coiled on the bottom, twisting upward through the liquid, powerlines wound through them – brilliant blue veins of energy throbbing in time with an artificial heart. And the fug itself is a different colour, not the grey-green that covers my hands and feet, but a yellow-gold that reminds me of gelpaks and Core hovering over a workbench, of Dude sitting in a box as the Med AI fixed him.
Shadows are suspended in the tank, connected by the fug-lines; little blobs of darkness the size of my fist. Hundreds of them lined up in evenly spaced rows. I press closer, trying to peer through the murk, and think I can make out miniature paws, sleek bodies and pointed muzzles. They look like critters, all sleeked out, like Dude without his fuzz, but there's something off about them, something about the points of their muzzles, the paddles on the ends of their feet, and their heads... You can't really make out a critter's head amongst all the fluff, not unless you really look, and since they're always scurrying about, only stopping long enough to clean up the latest spill, that's not easily accomplished. Still... I've spent enough time with Dude that the flatness of their heads, without the tiny bump of their eye ridges, strikes me as off, like they don't have eyes. But then how do they see?
There are more shadows behind the first rows, fainter, and I wonder how deep the tank goes, how many critters are growing in there.
Dude's still huddled on my shoulder, still emitting that wobbly fuzz.
'It's okay, Dude. They're just critters, like you.' Except I'm lying, whether to myself or to Dude it doesn't matter. There's that sense of wrongness about the tank, about the yellow-gold fug. It grates along my spine, trying to find a place to lodge in my psyche.
The wise part of me, the bit that sounds like Mum telling me not to touch the holofire when I was three years old, is whispering that slipping into the eter and investigating the wrongness is a bad idea. The rest of me... I'm already in, leaving my body behind for the endless white of the psionic plane, and I'm reaching out and pulling that grating sensation with me.
One moment I'm all alone in the eter, and the next I'm staring at the biotank. The shadows are no longer shadows but balls of yellow-gold, calm and sleepy, barely aware. There aren't as many as I thought, a few hundred, in fact... I twist the tank in my mind, shrinking it until I can see the whole thing. There are gaps in the field of critters, blank spots disrupting the even spacing. Dead critters? Embryos that didn't make it? Without seeing a report, it's hard to tell.
That's not what's grating along the inside of my head though, that's something else, something that even here, is eluding my sight.
The spark is what gives it away, yellow-gold lightning forking between the shadows. I've seen that before, know it like I know how to slip through the threads of reality and find the other place, the place where Aeotu lives. The ora, Grea called it.
Where the eter is an endless field of white, the ora is everything and nothing all at the same time. There is no light, no colour, no time. There is just possibility. Infinite. Unending. It's like being in the cradle of the universe, where galaxies are made. And it's dangerous. All too easy for me to lose myself – to kill myself – hunting shadows.
The first time I came here, chasing the fug, Aeotu was a mirage on the very edges of my reach. A vibration felt more than seen, and so far away I almost died trying to find her. Now... Now Aeotu is everywhere. The ora is no longer empty but filled with the kaleidoscope of her being, blazing like a sun.
But she isn't the source of the grating against the inside of my ears. That's different, carried on the yellow lightning zapping over my skin.
Sister. Aeotu's voice shivers through the darkness.
I slap it away.
I'm not your sister. I'm not even a girl. Girl bits notwithstanding.
A pause. I can feel her considering me, considering too the space around me, the wrongness against my skin and then… Anger. Fear. It lashes out, not at me but at the wrongness. The wave blasts over me, powerful enough to rip the skin from my bones.
It's gone and my flesh is still attached but the lightning is no more.
Safe. Aeotu's whisper ripples through the eter, and I think… I think that she was protecting me.
What was it?
Nausea punches me in the gut, the sense of small angry teeth gnawing on my bones, of a fog rolling through my thoughts turning part of my brain numb. Illness, Aeotu says. Given.
"Given" is violent, rips a hole in my chest and shoves the grating in. A cold wriggling ball of sickness that feels like pieces of kin, Jørgen and Aeotu held together with cherry—
Lightning wraps around my ribs, yanks me out of the ora, but not back into my body.
Grea stands in front of me, her hands in my chest, wrath scrunching her face, baring her teeth.
I rip her hands out.
'Shit, Grea!' A mental projection or not, my chest feels like Grea punched through bone and muscle and stuck a subline into my heart. 'That hurt!'
She grabs my face, squishing my cheeks together. 'Are you okay?'
Once again, I push her away. 'I was until you decided to jumpstart my central nervous system.'
'What'd Aeotu want?' It's less a question than a demand, hiding a spark of desperation.
'I don't know, she was just there.' I rub my chest, trying to ease the cramp forming where her hands were. 'Don't you have a mainline to her or something?'
Grea looks different. There's a nimbus, a dark mirage around her body that shadows her every movement from hands to toes, it's darker around her shoulders though, seeming to flow from them. She's looking over my shoulder, eyes distant, teeth gnawing on her lower lip.
'Grea?'
She keeps chewing, still not looking at me.
'Grea!'
She glares at me, but it's distracted, her eyes unfocussed. 'What?'
'Where are you?' And I'm not talking about her physical location, but where she is now, mentally.
Is it my imagination or does Grea's mirage whisper?
She nods, and her gaze snaps to me, pinning me to the spot. 'You gotta find me, Kuma. Don't trust Aeotu, don't trust anyone. Just find me.'
She's gone before trepidation has finished freezing my spine.