24
THE MOIST RACES
OTHER SPECIES WERE disgusting. Devanshi was a professional; she never said this out loud. She took her job to protect Eternity and her residents, but come on. Some species were simply neater than others. For example, the Phantasmagore were dry sentients who felt other species with a high amount of water in their system were just disgusting. And Eternity was about to start welcoming beings that were fifty, sometimes sixty or seventy percent water onto the station. Surely that would break the balance of her biosphere, right?
But the biosphere wasn’t Devanshi’s problem, and she kept her disgust to herself. She honestly didn’t like to admit it. It was her job to protect them all.
The scientists assured her that the humans wouldn’t throw the biosphere off. So she couldn’t complain that much.
But when these wet sentients—Let’s call them what they are; they’re aliens—got injured or died . . . Just, the mess of it all.
Gurudevs like Ren were closer to the Phantasmagore in terms of body chemistry (although wetter), but they were much shorter and more compact, and they had no ability to blend in with their surroundings, unless they were next to a tree, that was.
But when Ren had died, it had been messy. His body should be disintegrated by now, but the copious smears of his blood in the hallway remained. They trailed off, though, so the body thief could be anywhere.
She couldn’t investigate the Heart of the Station because the station and her new host would not let her in. The thick membrane that Mallory had found had grown over every hallway that led to the Heart. Devanshi unfolded several fingers and tapped on it. It was clearly thick, with oil—even the stations were part wetness—running through. It wasn’t just a thin layer of skin. If she cut through this, who knew what could happen?
Ren would have known. He was annoying, wet, pedantic, and unfriendly, but he was the station expert. And now he was dead.
Osric stood beside her, sharpening his left nails. “Should we cut?”
“No, we shouldn’t cut, you moron,” she snapped. “Have the ventilation shafts been searched?”
“Not that I know of.”
Devanshi hadn’t gone inside the working parts of the station before, but she knew it was possible. Maintenance nurses were always checking up on Eternity’s vitals.
“We should get some nurses down here to get us into the vats and let us know how the station is doing internally,” Devanshi said.
“The problem with that is the station-specific medical bay was destroyed in the first breach,” he said.
Devanshi felt her anxiety spiking and blended into the fleshy wall behind her in automatic defense. She came out almost immediately and said, “You’re saying we have no medical teams available for the station herself now?”
Osric paused, then pulled up his tablet and did some research. Devanshi fought the urge to blend into the fleshy wall again. He finally said, “There are AI bots. Some have been cleaning the detritus from the shuttle attack, some are working from the outside on the breaches, but the ones suited for internal medical work on the station, this info says they were all spaced.”
Devanshi swore and blended into the pink wall again to think. Osric turned pink in reflexive sympathy.
The real reason that Devanshi hated the watery sentients was that they could lie. Some of them had physiological changes when they experienced strong emotions, or when they lied, but she couldn’t detect many of them. Every emotion was so damp. And you couldn’t read the dampness as emotions because some dampness meant different things at different times.
Humans leaked water out of their eyes when they were very sad, but sometimes when they were happy and sometimes when they were angry. Water broke out of their very skin when they were nervous or frightened. It also did so when they were lying. The thought utterly horrified her. The fact that they were made of water was bad enough, but did they have to leak it everywhere?
Phantasmagore always knew where they stood with one another. A friendly being would mirror coloring, a fearful one would blend into the background, and attacks always came from a place of camouflage. Not that Phantasmagore fought, she reminded herself.
“See if we can access the maintenance bot paths, and we can try to get into the Heart. A station as old as Eternity should be able to start stabilizing immediately with a new host, so something is still wrong,” Devanshi said, and the station shuddered, almost in response. “And hurry.”
DEVANSHI HUNG UPSIDE down, propping her limbs across the sharp slope of a ventilation shaft. Normally, Phantasmagore digits could grip most any wall, but the smooth steel of the shaft meant she had to carefully lower herself or fall. Below her, an AI bot drone buzzed as it flew, not caring about the steep grade.
“Are you there yet?” Osric asked over their comm.
“I would tell you if I was,” she reminded him. “I’m close, I think.” She relaxed a fraction and allowed herself to slide a few more meters. “It smells terrible in here.”
The smell was of wet meat, a heavy, acrid, smoky odor that crawled inside her nose and set up camp.
“Reports from security base say that the station is losing pressure in seventeen different areas,” he said. “The stabilization we experienced seems temporary; she’s breaking down again. Whatever you plan on doing, do it fast.”
A metal clunk echoed up the shaft, and Devanshi slid a few more meters. The AI drone had reached the vent, it seemed. She judged the distance by the low light drifting up from the Heart and decided to take a chance. She let go and pointed her arms straight down to help her punch through the shaft.
She would have landed properly if not for the drone. Her right arm caught it on the way down and together they went through the vent, which bent and then broke from their combined weight.
Devanshi landed hard on her right side, crushing the drone beneath her with a crunch. She came to her feet, slightly dazed and favoring her right leg. The drone spat sparks and started to roll in a circle, running into her with confused beeps.
She picked it up and held it under her good arm. At least it doesn’t leak.
The room was bathed in red light. It wasn’t the warm, happy red that Devanshi had seen multiple times; this was the red of rage. The room itself pulsed on a sonic level that hurt Devanshi’s ears.
Covering the floor were more smears of blue blood, clearly from the late, murdered Ren. But the bigger mess was from the human.
That poor human. No, she couldn’t worry about him. She would have felt sorry for him if he hadn’t fucked up everything. He’d probably killed Ren as well, except he wouldn’t have had time to clean up the body. Whatever he had done, it was obvious he had taken advantage of the situation, one that clearly he wasn’t ready for.
Currently the tree that indicated the biological center of Eternity was covered in thorny vines. Ambassador Adrian Casserly-Berry was caught in the thorns, his body pierced in dozens of places and oozing more watery blood onto the floor. His head had been wrapped in the vines, to where Devanshi couldn’t see anything but his mouth.
The vines pulsed again and the human groaned, the sound of someone who had already screamed themselves raw and exhausted. The pain was still there; but the body couldn’t communicate it anymore.
These humans were major pains. Devanshi stepped forward and activated her comm. “Osric, I’m in. I know the reason for the breaches. Eternity is not bonding with her new host. She’s killing it. I don’t think she knows what she’s doing.”
“Get her to take down the wall,” came the reply. “We can’t help her if she kills him.”
She took another step forward and stretched out a hesitant digit. “Eternity, this is your security chief, Devanshi. Do you know me? Do you remember me?”
They don’t.
She didn’t need this right now. Apparently, Devanshi’s useless symbiont was awake. She had long since stopped relying on them for counsel. She and the sentient vine called Splendid had a relationship of convenience. They slept and fed off a small amount of her scarce bodily fluids, and she used their hormones to facilitate her camouflage abilities. She wasn’t even sure if they had spoken to her five times in the time she had been on the station.
“So you’re awake,” she said. “What do you know about all this?”
They’re hurting.
“That’s fucking obvious,” Devanshi snapped. “If you’re just going to tell me that things are bad, keep quiet.”
She touched an exposed area of skin on the host, shuddering when it allowed her to compress it. It was warm, which was good, but she didn’t know much more about humans.
“How close is the host to death?” she asked.
Not close to death, but the pain has driven them useless for communication until they get relief and rest.
“Eternity, can you hear me?”
They can hear. They don’t care. They’re enraged.
Devanshi thought about all the lives aboard who were relying on this station to be, if not happy, then at least content. “Splendid,” she asked, “do you think you and I together could talk to her?”
Of course we can. You’ve just never asked.
“Well, you don’t say much,” she said in self-defense. “What do I need to do?”
Put your hand on the trunk, where I can touch them.
Devanshi put her injured arm against the trunk, allowing the part of Splendid that wrapped around her to reach out.
The vines reacted immediately, before Devanshi could try to reach Eternity. They wrapped themselves around Devanshi’s wrist and clung tightly, thorns trying to bite into her flesh.
The vines had grown in response to a human, however, and they had no purchase against the bark-like skin of a Phantasmagore. But that didn’t mean she was immune to Eternity’s screaming, which filled her head to the point she couldn’t think. Her own screaming joined that of the station and her host, and she was aware of nothing else.
DEVANSHI CAME TO on the floor of the Heart. The room was still an angry, pulsing red, but the human lay on the floor behind her, finally freed from the vines. They had retracted fully into the higher branches of the bare tree, where they writhed as if upset about something.
The ambassador didn’t look like much anymore. He still bled from the punctures left by the thorns all over his head and body. Eternity had left several holes, out from which ran several different fluids. Both his eyes were ruined messes, and blood seeped out of his mouth and nose. She wasn’t sure what was going on inside him to make that happen, but it wasn’t her job to find out.
Hiding her revulsion, she reached out a digit and touched the side of his face. “Human. Hey.”
They’re still passed out.
“What happened?”
Eternity attacked us. Splendid was not an overly emotional being, but they sounded shocked. They truly are breaking down.
“So we rescued the human but nothing is fixed? I need the station feeling better; I don’t care about that!” She pointed to the bag of seeping wetness on the floor.
She looked at her wrist. The skin was far from breaking, but scratches went from her wrist down her hand and her digits. “How did we get away?”
Your drone separated us.
“My—what?” She caught sight of the drone across the room, lying on its side. A propeller blade and another of its spindly wheels had bent, and it was struggling to right itself. “That’s not my drone.”
It’s part of Eternity, but it held on to a tiny bit of intelligence even not connected with her. It freed us, and Eternity threw it across the room. It sacrificed itself.
“It can’t sacrifice itself because it’s a drone, not a thinking being. And it’s not my drone. I don’t need a fucking pet,” Devanshi said, limping across the room to pick it up. “And I don’t need a human to babysit.” She touched her comm. “Osric, I have a human for the medbay and a drone for an AI expert to look at. I can probably get the fleshy wall down if you can meet me on the other side with people to help out with this.”
“How?” he asked suspiciously.
“Trust me,” she said. She reached down and grabbed the human by the belt, as good of a handle as she could figure. She carried the drone with her injured arm and dragged the human with her good arm, smearing red on the floor. “All right, little gal,” she said to the drone. “Are you ready to help me and Splendid try to talk sense into your mama one more time?”
Not a pet? Splendid sounded . . . amused?
Osric’s voice came from the other side of the fleshy wall. “Talk fast, Devanshi. We’re reading decreasing pressure in several more sections, including the medbay and the main park common area.”
Devanshi dropped the wet human by the flesh wall and reached out with Splendid, and the little drone, one more time.