Twenty-Eight #4
“Then you’ll have to come up with something else,” Campar said. “I will have a little head start. The distance between the shelters. And if it catches me, there’s however much time the fight takes and the return trip. It’s a gamble. I won’t say it isn’t. But I think it’s the best chance you have.”
“I agree,” Vaudai said. “This is a good plan. Bravery in client species is often noted by the Carryx.”
“Hooray,” Campar said.
Ghati didn’t speak. He only looked into Campar’s eyes and then a moment later looked away.
Campar waited at the hatch, opening and closing his hands, enjoying the feeling of tightness and release.
He tried not to think too far ahead. The aurora would fade, he would make a break for it slowly until the enemy was on him and then as fast as he could.
Vaudai had talked him through the pathway: forward toward the front of the ship for three intersections, then left and going on for two more, then left again down a long service hallway with no doors or intersections.
If he reached the end of the service corridor, then to the left again and forward until he reached the same hallway that they were in now and began the whole loop again.
As many times as he could. And better not to consider too closely what the end would be.
“The field effects are waning,” Vaudai said, though Campar couldn’t hear any difference in the complaints of his hearing devices. “You should go now.”
And so he did. The corridor was darker than before. The overspill seemed to have knocked out a few of the ship’s lights and set others to an uneven strobing. The glow of the aurora was less and fading visibly. Vaudai closed the hatch behind him.
Campar had a vivid memory of being eleven years old on a playground outside his mother’s church. One of the older girls had challenged him to race from the edge of the playground around the whole building and back before any of the adults saw that he’d left the yard.
“If you get caught,” he said aloud, “you’ll be in trouble.”
The hatch to the shelter down the hall opened, and the thing came boiling out. Its tentacles whipped, grasping at the walls and deck, throwing itself forward. Campar fled.
Moving alone in the hallways without Ghati or Vaudai, he felt a hesitation that he didn’t know he’d been harboring fall away.
There was no one to protect. No one he might fail by leaving them behind and in danger.
He hadn’t known until now, grabbing the frames of doors and hatches and hauling himself forward into the flickering dark, that he’d been guarding the rear of the group.
With nothing left to defend, he moved faster and more surely.
He didn’t look back, but twice an accident of the failing lights threw shadows of mad, thrashing shapes of inhuman limbs down the hall ahead of him.
As they neared the intersection, he rotated, leading now with his feet. His plan was to hit the wall and kick off in the new direction. He’d still slam into the wall, but if he didn’t give the thing warning…
He looked up the corridor retreating around him.
The black thing was right behind him. It grabbed at the walls, the deck, the ceiling.
The awkwardness he’d seen in it before was still there, but also a roughness like desperation.
Malign intent radiated from it. It wasn’t an enemy soldier.
It wasn’t a beast. It was the living avatar of heedless violence, and its whole focus was on him.
He hit the wall and kicked, launching himself down the new corridor.
The wall hit him like a cargo transport going full speed, but it hit the full length of him.
No bones broke that he could tell. And the three-legged enemy overshot the intersection and had to stop itself to come back.
By the time it emerged around the corner, Campar had widened his lead by another dozen strides.
His breath had taken on a rhythm, two strokes in and two strokes out, the same he used when he was running.
Each new push forward drew a little of the sweat from his brows into his eyes.
He ignored the stinging. He reached the service corridor, pulling himself into it with aching arms. The monster was nearly on top of him now, and Campar could feel the fatigue burning in his muscles.
It wouldn’t be long. At least it wouldn’t be long.
The fear was deep and animal, and Campar rode it.
When he ran out of adrenaline or when he overtaxed the breathing device on his shoulder or when the enemy reached out and took his ankle, yanking him back, it would hurt for a moment, and then…
Then whatever happened to a mind when its body failed would happen to him.
The dreamlike chaos of a brain dumping all of its stored chemicals at once, maybe.
Or a light and the beloved dead, the way the Gallantists promised.
Or the same nothingness as before he’d been born.
Campar tried to be curious about it. Tried to wonder and look forward to the moment that he wouldn’t be able to avoid.
The corridor around him glimmered.
The field overspill was coming back to set the vacuum on fire. It was going to work. The black thing was going to die and Ghati and Vaudai would have a chance. That was all he could give them, but they’d have it. Parting gifts.
He slammed into the end of the service corridor.
He’d lost track of himself, and the hallway’s end had snuck up on him.
He felt his collarbone snap, and then the impact of the enemy as it barreled into him.
A tentacle wrapped around his arms, and another snaked around his right thigh, constricting like a steel band.
Something else beat against his neck, and it took a moment to push away the panic and pain to recognize it as the stump.
The thing was trying to throttle him with a limb that wasn’t there.
Campar lurched forward, following the path he’d rehearsed without thinking why he was trying to go on, only that it was what he’d planned. The aurora thickened around them, and stabs like red-hot needles pricked at him, burning him from the inside.
And burning the enemy too. It writhed when he did, its grip loosening as they tumbled out to the beginning of the loop again.
The shelter with Ghati and Vaudai was just a few doors down.
They’d find his body here when they came out.
He hoped it wasn’t too hard for them, seeing him like that.
The corridor was filled with a glowing fog that hurt to look at, hurt to move through, hurt. His vision went complex and golden.
Something tugged at him. Something released. Someone was screaming, and it wasn’t him.
“You should move him into shelter now,” Vaudai said.
“I’m fucking trying,” Ghati answered, but Campar didn’t know where either of them was.
He wanted to ask, but all that he managed was a low animal moan.
His eyesight returned. He was in the shelter he’d started from.
The bunks with their restraints. His sample kit.
The hatch was open, and the three-armed thing was floating in a brightness that was more than light.
The black flesh was bright—yellow and orange and gold.
As he watched, it flared to white. As Vaudai began to close the hatch, Campar found his sample case.
All the tissues and information he’d gathered for the Carryx.
All the work he’d done to earn the right to live.
He threw it out the hatch into the aurora where the terrible light unmade it.
He tried to breathe, but he was screaming in pain. His consciousness was a single disembodied sensation of misery and illness. He was dizzy. He was nauseated. His throat was thick and swelling shut.
“It’s all right,” Ghati said.
I’m burning. There was a light made of poison , Campar thought, but there were no words in the sound he made.
Time did something, and his skin shrieked.
The vacuum sheath was breaking apart, and air was lighting his blistered skin with incandescent pain.
Somehow, he was on the expedition ship. A Sinen overseer sprayed something on the white-and-red mass of blisters that was his bare skin and the pain dulled to mere illness and horror.
He tried to turn his head, then stopped.
Vaudai was by him. And one of the Carryx, its fighting arms braced to the deck.
Campar realized he was breathing free air. That the sounds he heard were the sounds of the ship. Of the humans and Budon and Carryx. Ghati was beside him, not touching him, but there. Campar wanted to take his hand. He couldn’t move without making the pain and nausea worse.
“Ghati?”
“I’m here. I’m right here.”
“Happen’d?”
“You came back around just when the overspill was starting up. You and the enemy were cooking off together. We got you apart and brought you inside. You’re welcome.”
“Battle?”
“The Carryx won. And your brain is a little fucked up from the trauma. This is the third time you and I have had this exact conversation.”
“Oh,” Campar said. And then, “I’m going to die.”
“We all are, dear,” Ghati said. “But not from this. They say we’re done here. They’re sending us home.”