Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Eight
W ork more efficiently. Do not take rest breaks,” Vaudai said.
Campar pressed a hand to his forehead, trying again by instinct to wipe away the sweat beading under his vacuum sheath. “Oh? Are we in some kind of rush?”
Vaudai went silent only for a moment. “Yes. We are. The enemy ships are approaching us. Sticks-with-meat have terrible powers of recall.”
Ghati turned off his cutting torch and leaned in to better examine what little progress they’d made. “Ignore him, Vaudai. He’s being funny.”
“Oh,” Vaudai said. And then, “Sticks-with-meat are also bad at humor. It’s fortunate you have clever manipulating appendages.”
The enemy ship was, if anything, eerier now that they were the only three living things in it.
The work lights they had trained on the reinforced door made the corridor around them seem darker by comparison.
Even the transfer over had carried a sense of omen, two men and one alien where before there had been dozens.
The silence of the ship was an artifact of the vacuum and the black translators in Campar’s ear canals. It had the feel of a haunted house.
“We’re through,” Ghati said, pointing to the thumbnail-sized hole that was the sum of all their efforts. “I can see the other side. That means the door is as thick as Campar. And even tougher to cut through.”
“Hey!”
“Shielding,” Vaudai said. “Of all the safe zones in the ship, this was the most protected.”
“And still not enough,” Campar said. “Switch settings on the torch and start widening the break? Or start a new one and play connect the dots?”
Ghati frowned. “My instinct is to widen what we have. I don’t think we can get the whole door open. A passage wide enough to squeeze through gets us back to the expedition ship the fastest.”
“Wouldn’t cutting a little doorway in our doorway do that?”
“Maybe, but then you’ve committed to only going through cold metal. If we widen what there is, we get to work where the alloy is already soft. You do know I was a metallurgist once.”
“I trust your judgment,” Campar said.
“You didn’t remember that, did you.”
“It wasn’t the part of your charms I was paying most attention to. Should I take a turn?”
Ghati handed over the torch control and moved across the hall, pressing his back against the deck to shed heat.
Campar placed the cutting tip of the torch on the edge of the tiny hole they’d already made and started it up again.
The beam of heat and energy dug into the metal of the door, stripping it away a flake at a time as the door glowed red then yellow then a perfect white.
“Is there a way to go faster?” Vaudai asked, and the translation half-mind made the words seem plaintive.
“No,” Campar and Ghati said together.
Another layer flaked off the widening hole, and Campar paused, looking through it.
Past the slowly darkening glow of cut metal there was darkness, yes.
But there was also light. Small, glowing points that made him think of the night-lights he’d had as a child or the after-hours lighting panel at the labs back on Anjiin. He brought the torch back to bear.
By the time the break was still a little smaller than his balled fist, he had found a technique that seemed to work well—digging in at a point on the edge and then, once the metal had gone white with heat, moving slowly counterclockwise like he was peeling the skin off an apple.
Soon, there was a little pile of shavings floating in the hole.
“Ready to tag me in?” Ghati asked gently. It was the gentleness that brought Campar back to the ache in his hands and shoulder, the sweat on his face where he couldn’t reach it.
“Don’t want to take all the fun,” he said. “I was working out a method—”
“I was watching,” Ghati said. “Rest for a minute. It’s all right. You don’t have to fix everything by yourself.”
The words hit harder than Ghati had meant them to.
Campar moved back to the far wall of the corridor.
His shoulders were cramping, and he didn’t know how long he’d been working at the breach.
He’d been concentrating hard enough that duration had turned off for a while.
But they weren’t dead. The battle hadn’t reached them. So at least there was that.
It took them hours. It felt like it took them days. When the opening was wide enough to squeeze through, Ghati made the sides safe with a spray of coolant, and Vaudai shoved them both aside, deforming its body to press through into the darkness.
“Impatient,” Ghati said, preparing to follow it.
“Space slugs are a famously enthusiastic people,” Campar countered, and then Ghati reached his arms into the break they’d made and pulled himself into the glittering dark. Campar passed one of the work lights through before he grabbed his sample kit and followed.
The chamber on the far side was laid out in a rough circle with what were clearly workstations in two tiers.
The lights Campar had seen through the breach were on keypad controls and screens, all of them otherwise dark and unresponsive.
And drifted against the floor by the bare suggestion of centrifugal force that the ship’s tumbling provided, a dozen or more dead bodies.
Campar pulled himself to them. The nearest was a human woman.
Death bloat had stretched the lines of her face, but he could still see the crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes, the laugh lines at her mouth.
Her hair was white and tied back in a bun.
She wore a jumpsuit with writing at the collar in a script Campar didn’t know.
Her half-open eyes were empty. A darkened tongue hid behind perfect white teeth.
Ghati came to his side. The shadows of the moving work light gave the illusion that the dead woman had turned her head, but only the illusion. Campar looked at the other bodies, the other victims of the war.
“That’s clearly a human,” Ghati said. “You can’t tell me these aren’t people.”
“She is,” Campar said. “But look over there.”
In among the corpses of men and women, alien flesh lay dead as well. Thin silver limbs that glistened in the light like salmon skin and met in a small central node. Something like octopuses, but with only five tentacles.
“Have you seen anything like that before?” Ghati asked.
“No, not that I know. But the war is so big, and I’ve seen so little of it, I’m not sure that means anything.”
“When we get home, you’ll have fascinating data for a paper on the origin of human life on Anjiin,” Ghati said. There was something like a warning in his eyes. Campar nodded. Was it possible the Carryx didn’t know about this? It beggared belief.
They floated for a moment looking down at the dead, drifting toward them so slowly it was imperceptible.
“Digits!” Vaudai called from across the room in the intimacy of their earpieces. “I need differentiated fingers! Quickly!”
“Go,” Campar said. “I’ll get samples. Then we’ll get out of here.”
“Do they really not know?” Ghati said, asking the question out loud.
“Fingers!” Vaudai shouted.
Campar took Ghati’s hand in his own and pressed their faceplates together like they could touch their foreheads. “I’ll get samples,” he repeated. “But now, go.”
Ghati went.
Campar pulled his sample case open. His hands were trembling, but whether it was from fear or exhaustion or shock, he couldn’t guess. He took out a glass sampling bottle and a scalpel. When he cut into the back of the dead woman’s hand, frozen blood drifted away like tiny red snowflakes.
“So sorry, ma’am,” Campar said as he tucked the sliver of her skin into the bottle and screwed down the cap. “I didn’t mean to intrude.”
The corpse didn’t answer, and Campar let out a little chuckle that had very little to do with mirth and a great deal with rising panic.
The five-armed alien nearest her was next.
It didn’t seem at first to be wearing clothing, but there were complicated rings near the base of each tentacle that might have been keratin shell that had grown there or artifacts put in place.
He tried pulling one off, and he was fairly sure that it wasn’t adhered to the flesh.
But the five-armed thing was just as prone to postmortem swelling as humanity seemed to be.
“Sorry,” Campar said again. “So very sorry. No disrespect intended.”
He cut through the soft, silvery limb with the scalpel.
The flesh was rubbery and resistant, and it took a long time, even with the sharp blade.
The fluid that boiled out of it was as clear as water, and there was less of it than Campar had expected.
When the limb was severed, the ring slid off easily.
He held it up between his thumb and forefinger to better catch the light.
Ghati and Vaudai were talking about something, but Campar didn’t pay attention.
The little ring had stripes on the inside, like little keys that something might press.
Technology, then. He put the ring into a sample bag, then put a bit of the silver skin and the cartilage-like substrate beneath it into another bottle.
He almost missed the last thing.
The body lay at the corner where the wall met the deck.
One of the five-legged aliens, but this one without the silvery sheen.
It was missing two of its limbs, though the stump of one still remained, and it was utterly blackened.
Campar thought at first that it had been burned like the corpse he’d found on his initial trip to the command ship.
But there was no heat contraction, no bubbling of flesh.
The bodies that had fallen around it didn’t have similar damage.
It would have been odd if a stray field effect had charred just the one soldier and not the others or the deck around it…