Twenty-Eight #2
Campar pulled himself to the black, misshapen thing and prodded it.
Numbed as he was by the vacuum sheath, he couldn’t be sure, but he thought the texture of the flesh was different as well.
Harder, and somehow more mechanical. It might only have been how the five-limbed things reacted to being burned, but it was strange enough, he thought, to be worth noting.
He took out a fresh bottle and put the scalpel to the black thing’s skin.
The skin would not cut. Campar braced himself against the nearest workstation and pressed with the full mass of his body, but all he managed to do was bend the scalpel’s blade. The black thing showed a thin, livid line where he’d attacked it, but that was all.
“Well, aren’t you something special,” Campar said.
He tried again with a fresh blade, but no better success. In the end, he managed to scrape a few bits of the dark thing’s flesh off the open wound of its stump, but it was hardly more than dust. He made sure to label the bottle clearly. It would have been easy to mistake it for empty.
“I know now!” Vaudai crowed. “The failure was a physical one!”
“Huzzah?” Campar said.
“It is an important insight into the enemy design philosophy,” Vaudai said.
“Also, it means they will be unable to detonate the ship remotely, though they will surely try. It will require direct attack. I have located all of their command protocols and communication records and transferred the information to a portable form.”
The great slug lurched across the floor, its wide single foot leaving a clean line behind it where it had adhered to the deck.
“Wait, are we done, then?” Ghati said.
“The Carryx informed me that the Budon of Luus have begun singing. The enemy assault is imminent. I find these antics repetitive and tiring.”
“Tiring?” Ghati said, his voice fluting up into a squeak of outrage. “That’s what you call it?”
Vaudai reached the break in the door and hauled itself through. “If they wish to be less tiring, they could try doing something new and interesting for once,” it said. “You should bring your tools now.”
Campar put the sample case back together—bottles, scrapers, solvent, and the remaining scalpel. Ghati floated beside him. “We’re going to be all right.”
“Of course we are,” Campar agreed.
Squeezing back out of the control room felt strangely more threatening than going in had.
Something about the awareness of the dead behind him filled Campar’s mind with children’s stories about monsters grabbing at ankles.
Vaudai had already started off, inchworming its way down the dark corridor in the direction of the transfer skiff.
Ghati followed after it, and Campar brought up the back with the work light in his hand throwing long, dark shadows across the walls and deck before them.
He spared a glance over his shoulder, but the halls were pitch black.
If something had been following them, he wouldn’t have known.
It was almost a relief when the ship lights clicked on.
Warm, full-spectrum light flickered in the ceiling of the corridor, filling the metal halls with the sense of a spring afternoon. Control lights on the doorways lit orange then blue then green as the ship returned to life.
“Is this us? Did we turn the lights on?” Ghati said.
But Vaudai, only a little farther down the hallway, was turning circles in distress. “No no no. Shelter! We must reach hardened shelter!”
“Why?” Campar asked, but the great slug had turned down a side corridor, its body stretching thin to reach ahead and then bunching together as fast as a running man.
Campar tried to follow, but his weightlessness and need to stay connected to the floor or risk spinning off out of control made speed impossible.
Ghati moved faster, yanking his feet off the deck and launching from one wall to the other, pushing himself forward with every collision.
Vaudai ducked down another hall, and Campar thought—though he couldn’t be certain—that it was one of the places where they had employed the scanning sheet before.
Ghati made a little pirouette as he hauled himself around the corner.
Campar’s urge to yank his feet off the deck and fly like Ghati overcame him, and he launched himself awkwardly and cracked his head against the ceiling.
He rebounded, and for a moment, the walls and deck floated out of his reach.
He imagined himself here, unable to grasp anything or move himself along when whatever Vaudai was fleeing came.
But the same drift that had gathered the dead against the deck affected the living, and Campar pushed himself forward again.
When he reached the corner, Ghati had opened a door that had, Campar was certain now, been shut when they’d scanned it.
A damp, clean path showed where Vaudai had already gone through.
Ghati held out a hand, fingers wide, and Campar launched toward it.
Something was tickling against his skin, tapping him like champagne bubbles.
Ghati grabbed him, hauled him through the door, and slammed it closed behind him all in the same motion.
The latch mechanism didn’t catch, the door swaying back toward them.
The room was small and filled with storage containers lashed one to the other and fixed to the deck with wide hexagonal bolts, but there was space enough for the three of them.
The corridor flashed once and filled with a nauseating, nacreous aurora.
The things in Campar’s ears shuddered and let out a hiss that sounded like pain, and Vaudai slammed its bulk against the door, closing it.
“The battle has begun,” Vaudai said. “We are not under direct attack, but neither do we benefit from active countermeasures. We should wait here until the energy levels decrease, or we will burn alive.”
“Have we considered the upside that burning alive might have?” Campar said, and Ghati shouted, “Stop it! Stop joking! Stop trying to make everything funny and all right! You almost died. Right now. If you had been a few seconds later, if I hadn’t held on to your grip, if anything —”
Campar looked down. If anything had gone worse than it had, Campar would have been as burned as the corpse they’d found in the halls before.
Everything he’d done, everything he’d survived up to now, would have found its final state in the hallway of a ship crewed by dead men and women.
The thought was there, clear in his mind, and along with it, the vital need not to acknowledge it.
Instead, Campar took Ghati’s shoulder and pulled him into an embrace.
Ghati wrapped his arms around Campar’s chest, holding on to him like he was the last buoy in a stormy ocean.
The sample case, caught between them, and the numbing of the vacuum sheath couldn’t dull the need in Ghati’s arms, in the pressure of his head against Campar’s shoulder.
The smell of his own tears filled Campar’s face mask, and the breathing device clicked and hummed, clearing the excess moisture away.
“It will be all right,” Campar said.
“I don’t think it will.”
“Then I’m glad I got to spend time with you, Ghati. Very, very glad.”
Ghati nestled in closer, pulling Campar in like they could merge into a single thing. Like they could find safety in each other.
Campar felt the shift in Ghati’s body before he spoke: a little movement, like he’d been distracted by something. The falling away of a moment.
“What,” Ghati said. And then, “What is that?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
Ghati tapped his fingertip against Campar’s shoulder: an uneven, staccato pattern.
It took a moment for Campar to realize he felt the rhythm against his side as well.
The hard, tapping vibration was coming from the sample case.
The two men released each other. Campar opened his collection of samples.
In the glass jar containing the sample he’d taken from the black thing, the specimens of dust had come together, organizing into a mechanism like a tiny drill. The tapping they’d felt was the sample throwing itself against the wall of the jar.
Trying to escape .
Campar lifted the glass vial over his head. He could feel the small violence against his fingertips. “Vaudai?”
The great slug had attached itself to the wall beside the now-closed door. “With the battle in its current state, further evacuation would be quite dangerous. Our best strategy is to remain here and await the outcome of the violence.”
“But Vaudai, look at this thing. What is it?”
Without letting go of the wall, Vaudai extended itself into the room like a wide, grayish tongue. For a moment, the slug wavered, neither going close to the small, angry sample nor shying away from it.
“Where did that come from?” it asked.
Campar explained about the samples of the dead, and the black thing that had resisted his attempts to cut it.
Vaudai remained still as he ran through all the details he could recall—the white line where he’d tried to take a sample, the missing limbs, the effort it had taken to retrieve even the little bit that he had.
While he spoke, the field effects battered the tiny hardened room like wind whipping a lighthouse.
When the energy reached a peak, Campar’s earpieces hissed and squirmed in discomfort.
Light filled his vision without actually coming through his eyes.
Concentrating on what was happening outside would probably make him go insane, so Campar focused on his report instead.
When he was done, Vaudai remained motionless for a few seconds, then retracted itself back to the wall.
“The deathless enemy is on the ship with us. I am not certain how it was damaged, but as it was sessile until the ship regained power, I believe it was very badly compromised. This is to our advantage.”
“Is it a threat?” Ghati asked.