Lacuna: The Prelude to Eternity (10 page)

“Believe me,” said Mike, the calm in his voice unsettling as the wind whipped around them both, “what was inside is even worse.”

Was inside.
The ship had no inside now. It was on the outside and everywhere.

“This part’s going to take a long time,” Mike said. “We’re looking for a bright-yellow storage device—something about the size of a forty-four-gallon drum—and an ID fob. The storage device might be ruptured, but that’s okay. If we bring it back intact, that should be enough.”

“Okay,” she said. She wanted to say more, but the whine of approaching engines from above stole her attention.

A strange, blocky ship sank toward them, something that looked like part of a larger spacecraft. It touched down on the ice, a hatchway opened, and a short, wiry Kel-Voran slipped out. He immediately sat on the ice and contributed exactly nothing, not looking at either of them.

Mike looked as though he was going to strangle the stranger. “Going to help us, Belvarn?”

[“Silence.”]

“Well fuck you too, cunt.”

Penny grimaced and then reached out and touched Mike’s shoulder. She flicked her suit over to a private frequency so neither the
Rubens
nor their new companion could hear. “Hey, now we’re alone down here, I want to ask… I know you’re in a bad place now, but are you going to be okay?”

“Nope.” Mike looked at her, and despite the smile on his face, she could see the real pain behind his eyes. “I need one of those hugs that turns into sex.”

“When we get back to the ship,” Penny said, unable to hide a smile. “For now, though, I’m pretty sure that guy isn’t going to help, so… how do we find this fob?”

“It’ll be hard to spot—small, about the palm of my hand, and bright purple.”

She looked over the wreckage, her heart sinking. How could they find something the size of a fist in a field of debris almost the size of a football field?

“Is this Toralii technology?” she asked.

“Yeah,” said Mike. “Matter of fact, it is.”

“Is it flat and shaped like one of those clip-on ID cards?”

He paused. “Yes?”

Penny gingerly tiptoed several metres into the debris field to where a light was emanating, reached down and yanked a glowing device out of the ice, a flat rectangle about the size of a business card. It shimmered as she turned it. “Is it this thing that’s practically an ultraviolet glow stick?”

Mike laughed with a mixture of relief and disbelief. “Wow. Yeah. Of course, it has an emergency locator beacon. That makes sense.”

“Well, turns out you did need my eyes anyway.”

She handed it to him, shielding her face. Mike put it in his pouch.

“So,” said Penny when the light was gone. “What are we going to do with Belvarn?”

Mike dialed his suit to the standard frequency. “Go home,” he said to the Kel-Voran.

[“Finally.”] Belvarn stood and, after a tense silence, marched back into his ship.

The moment he was gone and the hatchway sealed, Penny could sense the tension flow out of Mike. He wasn’t normal although Penny wasn’t sure what normal was anymore, but he was better.
 

“Better” was a start. Belvarn’s ship rose into the air, and when it was just a tiny dot in the sky, she gestured to the bodies. “Who were these guys?”

Mike’s voice tightened a little. “They were Marines. French special forces.
Commandement des Opérations Spéciales
,
Marine Nationale
. Or so Anderson tells me.”

“What were they doing here?”

“Killing all of the Toralii everywhere.” He stated it boldly but completely without emotion.
 

Penny shuffled her booted foot, careful not to step on any remains. “What?”

“
Scarecrow
’s a name of a ship, but it’s also the name of a plan, a plan Fleet Command made before the destruction of Earth to infect Alliance ships with a virus. A sample was in the large yellow drum we’re looking for.” Mike spoke with a mix of apprehension and apathy that unnerved her. “Anderson was light on the details, but from what I can gather, it’s basically the perfect weapon. I’m no expert, but I’m guessing it’s airborne, fast reproducing, hardy, and highly contagious but with a nice asymptomatic period so the thing can spread and spread far.”

Genocide.
Fleet Command, back when it had existed, was planning genocide. Penny felt compelled to ask, “What was the delivery method?”

“The Forerunner network. The ID-card thing is actually a piece of very important hardware: Toralii access codes. A computer virus would spread throughout the entire Forerunner system network, find the probes, and reprogram them to jump to a central meeting point to be retrofitted with the virus plus a dispersal agent. They’d then spread out to populated Toralii worlds and deploy their payload. The idea was to affect as many worlds as possible, all at once, so their emergency services couldn’t possibly hope to recover, and they’d all die.” His voice was bitter. “The truth is, the Toralii only did to us what we were planning to do to them.”

As she had watched Earth burn, Penny had prayed to God to make the bastards pay. Now she had been handed exactly what she wanted.

How could she tell if this was the work of God or the other guy?

“We’re here to recover the data and the virus, aren’t we?” There wasn’t much of a question in there.

“Yes.”

“And… you’re going to give them both to Liao and Anderson and the others, so they can use it against the Toralii, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

She stared out at the ice-white horizon, with nothing but the constant wind and the sea of frozen corpses around them. “I’m guessing the virus is engineered to kill only Toralii.”

“Yes,” he said.

A virus wouldn’t know the difference between Telvan and the Toralii Alliance. A virus could not tell allies from the enemy. “And the Toralii Alliance trades with the Telvan,” she said. “Ships come and go every day. They’ll get infected too. Hundreds of them.”

Mike’s facade started to break down. “
Tens of thousands
every day, to systems all over the galaxy.”

Thou shalt not kill
.
“And the virus is active and infectious for a week. A freighter might visit, what… four, five, six systems in that time?”

“More.” He too stared out over the ice. “I’m not going to lie to you, Penny. I’m not entirely comfortable with this.”

Neither was she, but she was the instrument in the plan, not the agent. If she refused to search, then Liao, Anderson, and the others would simply find someone else to do it.

Was that enough? To simply resign oneself to being an instrument of another’s will? Could that excuse evil?

“Let’s leave.” Penny’s visor fogged with her breath. “Let’s just leave and say we couldn’t find it.”

Mike broke through the ice with a pick, shoving shards of frozen water away as he searched. “We need that weapon, love.”

“So the Toralii dug a big grave for us and threw most of us in. So our plan is to dig a bigger one and do the same to them?” Her chest hurt. “It’s wrong.”

Mike said nothing, brushing his hand over the ice. Then he stood up, eyes fixed downward on a sliver of yellow.

“Magnet to
Rubens
,” he said, palpable hesitation in his voice. “I’ve found it.”

C
HAPTER
III

Decanted

*****

Medical Bay

TFR
Rubens

Orbit of Velsharn

S
EVERAL
HOURS
AFTER
J
AMES
LEFT
, Saeed returned. “Well,” he said, his face full of cautious optimism, “I think we’ve gotten the most we can out of your stay in the healing chamber.”

Liao had seen enough of that dark-green world to last a lifetime. “Honestly, the sooner you can get me out of here, the better. What do I need to do?”

“According to the computers, plus the Toralii I consulted about this thing, nothing. Just try to keep calm.”

She took a slow, easy breath to calm her nerves and then nodded. “Do it.”

Saeed pressed a single button. For a moment, nothing happened—all was quiet in the Toralii medical bay. A low whine echoed throughout the chamber, and the green lights inside the tank flickered.

“Odd,” said Saeed. “I expected warning lights.” He thought for a moment, and then realisation dawned. “Of course. They’re in ultraviolet.”

“Of course,” echoed Liao. She felt a ripple through the fluid, a tremor that gave her gooseflesh.

“Close your eyes a moment,” said Saeed, closing his. “The UV light might damage your eyes. Your pupil won’t contract to protect you.”

She did so. She felt a disturbance in the fluid around her, a slight churning, as though she were in a washing machine about to begin its cycle.

“You can open them now,” said Saeed, checking the medical console. “Your heart rate is elevated.”

“That’s probably because I feel like I’m in a giant toilet about to flush. I didn’t anticipate everything suddenly being dark.”

“I understand. My apologies.” Saeed’s console chirped. “Okay, the various sensors are disconnecting. You might feel a slight stinging sensation.”

“Got it,” she said. Plugs fell away from her body, leaving discoloured, pale skin beneath. She had expected pain but instead felt a vague tickling sensation all over and barely resisted the urge to squirm around. “I think the Toralii only say that because they have fur and the current pulls at it.”

“Noted,” said Saeed.

“What’s next?”

Another movement in the fluid answered the question. The green began to drain away from the top, air from the outside slowly creeping down toward her hair. It passed over her face and upper body, and she felt the crushing weight of gravity again.

“Turn down the grip, please,” she said between clenched teeth as the fluid level dropped lower and lower, past her waist. She couldn’t lift her arm—it drooped by her side, her one remaining hand floating in the water.

“It’s already down,” said Saeed, but he adjusted it further. Liao felt a familiar sick feeling rise in her stomach as gravity loosened its grip and her limbs became lighter.

The fluid passed by her knees, and then she was standing surrounded by air for the first time in so long. Her whole body was pruned up except where the plugs had touched her skin, and even in the significantly reduced gravity, she was weak and barely able to stand.

The front of the tank lifted out and away, a cocoon opening to the medical bay, the grub within still tethered to the system and unable to leave just yet.

With a faint
snap-hiss
,
the mask fell away from her face, and the breathing tube began worming its way out. She nearly gagged—it twitched and writhed inside her throat, strangely violating and sickening, a slick, metallic snake fighting to escape.

It slid free with a sickening wet
splut
, slapping against the ground like an angry, writhing snake. It died as Saeed cut the power.

“Well,” he said, handing her a towel. “How does it feel to be out?”

“Cold and awful.” She ran her hand through the remainder of her hair, surprised at how long it had gotten. She had shaved off all her hair before being injured—now she had a half pixie cut, wet and slicked down against her head. The other half of her scalp was scar tissue.

Not ideal but it would do. A rub of the towel soaked most of the fluid from her hair.

An interesting fashion statement.

She tried to take a wobbly step forward, her legs rubbery and put off by the low gravity. Instinct caused her to reach out with her missing arm, and she nearly tumbled over.

“Careful,” said Saeed. “Slowly. Easy.”

“How about that prosthetic?”

“Soon,” said Saeed. “We can get you fitted later today—or tomorrow if you want a bit more time to rest.”

“I’ve been doing enough resting.” She took another step and another, making her way out of the tank completely. “Let’s go do this thing.”

“You’ll need surgery to attach the limb, so it won’t be something we can do right away. That said, we can at least take a measurement.”

Liao nodded her approval. Saeed guided her to a chair. It had been built for Toralii—too large, and with a significant gap in the back for a tail, which seemed, to her, almost precariously easy to fall through—but with a bit of careful positioning, she sat.

“Your recovery will take some time,” he said. “In a few hours, the urge to defecate will return, and you’ll be in for a big one. Other biological processes will return as well. Don’t be alarmed.”

Liao eyed him suspiciously. “Without putting too fine a point on it, I didn’t have one of those things plugged into my butt. What exactly have I been doing in regard to that for the last few months?”

“It’s complicated,” said Saeed. “A significant portion of faeces is e. coli—one of the treatments we gave you killed most of it. Another portion is cells from the intestinal wall, and the liquid promotes cellular regeneration and prevents a great deal of cell decay. We fed you through IV, so there’s no food matter, as such. None of these treatments produce no waste, of course, and if you had been in there much longer, we might well have needed a rectal catheter, but so far so good.”

“I will be sure to give you all the details,” she said. “What about urine?”

“Expelled into the liquid and filtered away.”

She made a disgusted face. “So I’ve been swimming in my own pee for months, and now I am completely, literally, full of shit.”

He smiled a comforting smile. “Isn’t science great?”

They ran a battery of tests. Saeed gave her handfuls of pills to swallow, to counteract the various treatments she had been under when they had put her in the tank. Saeed explained that, as she was the first Human patient to use the system, they had been overly cautious, and future patients would not need anywhere near as many drugs and treatments.

Small comfort. She took the pills. Saeed performed a few rudimentary measurements of her stump and fed them into the computer. A digital representation of the arm was produced—she could see a vague outline on Saeed’s tablet—but he kept it to himself, and Liao did not care enough to pester him for a look.