Starbleached (8 page)

He nodded, and Adry ran.

Up the hallway, drab beige walls zipping past, regular white
numbers ticking out apartment blocks or entryways. Which one was Bryan’s? She
couldn’t remember his code. Legs burning, chest on fire, ears pounding with her
own pulse. It didn’t look like the Overseers had found this branch of the
utility tunnels. They must not be communicating worth a damn. Another turn. Her
feet skidded on another puddle of spilled water. Bryan’s lab was up ahead. The
walls were shaking with the impact of weaponry. She hit the door, ear pressed
against it, and heard the sound of Overseer voices.

No
. She slammed the heel of her shoe into the door
controls, praying the resulting short would disable the entry completely.
Turning, she popped the cover off the nearest air vent. If Bryan were smart,
he’d be in the ductwork. The vents only opened on the outside, but there was no
way an Overseer could fit into the cramped spaces. There was a chance he was
there, and trapped. She wasn’t leaving if there was any chance at all. She
eased in on hands and knees. Light spilled through vents, exposing empty air.
No one inside.

And she still crawled forward.
Damn it. There’s still a
chance.

Every movement set the tube humming like a migraine. Light
and shadow played across from a primary air intake. Movement. Struggle. She
crouched beside it, peering through the filter into the lab.

Her gut whinged. There were legs beside the vent. The
strong, inhuman form of an Overseer and a pair of blue jeans.
There’s a real
fad for retro around the station, just now.
A tanned hand gripped the vent.
As Adry watched, the color ran from the fingers like embers consuming paper. It
could have been anyone, a lab tech. A guard. A civilian. It didn’t have to be
Bryan. She stuffed a hand into her mouth and bit down on the knuckle to keep
from screaming.

The Overseer stepped back, the body hit the ground. Ghost
white hair obscured the features; skin gleamed alabaster pale and slickly in
the laboratory light. She must have made a sound because the body turned.
Vacant eyes met her own, and she did scream now, into her bitten and bleeding
hand, smashing backwards into the ducting in an attempt to run, not from this
crippled, pitiful thing, but from the reality that should never have existed.

There’d never been any doubt. Only hope.

Bryan’s eyes were now colorless, his features melted as if
the bone structure had collapsed beneath the weight of his pigment-less skin.
She still knew him. And he did not know her. 
Promise me you won’t get
killed,
he’d whispered, his lips on the back of her hands. Blood now ran
down the inside of her wrist.
Valkyrie.

I’m sorry. Oh, God, Bryan. I am so very very sorry.

She pushed back so hard she scraped the skin off her palms.
Heedless of the noise she made, she moved so fast the vent edges scraped her
neck and shoulders. Part of her thought,
it is Bryan’s promise. I am keeping
his promise
. But the rest of her knew it was the horror she was escaping.
She spilled out of the ventilation shaft, doors opening behind her. Heavy
Overseer boots thumping, their stun guns missing her by inches. She wasn’t
outrunning them. She was fleeing what she had seen.

She burst into the hallway, screaming, “Shut it down! Shut
it all down!” as the intern stared in disbelief. Where was Bryan? Where was Dr.
Landry? But his hands were already moving, and he hit the button that locked
the service tunnels out of the military hall.

The intern had waited. He’d been faithful. Adry hadn’t.
She’d come back without Bryan. She hadn’t kept her word. Oh, God, oh God…she
collapsed, sobbing, and the intern had to lift her up. He guided her towards
the ships, away from Bryan, who was no longer Bryan, who was an erased slate
for the Overseers to rewrite how they wished.

No. She had to go back. She had to rescue him or die trying.
Twisting in the intern’s grip, she made it two steps before stronger hands
found her. They pulled her backwards into the evac ship and closed the door
behind her. Shawn Miller whispered in her ear,
it’s over, Adry. It’s over.
It’s over.
The hold was full of her patients. No, no, this wasn’t right.
They shouldn’t see her now. She was the strong one. She was the guide and the
guardian. She was the Valkyrie. She was screaming, and she didn’t think she’d
ever stop. A needle jammed into her neck, and soothing oblivion spread from the
tip. Color bleached out of the world. The void opened within her and she dove
for it willingly. Vision blurred, emotion dulled, she breathed out and closed
her eyes.

Starbleached,
she thought.
We’re all starbleached.

*****

Now:

Cold muck, cold water running past her. It wasn’t so much a
stream as a slightly clearer current in the contaminated water. She collected
samples every fifty feet or so, finding the amoeba in the first hour. It was a
weird one. According to the Overseer’s handheld, it bred well in the human
body, but not so well in the swamp. There must be a place up here, somewhere,
where the amoeba was able to multiply. Some poorly oxygenated hole in the
ground was pointed at the village like the barrel of a gun.

Water swished around her ankles. The sun was starting to
set. She needed to find it soon, before the swamp nasties came out. If she used
the communicator, the Overseer would come get her. The idea itself was chilling
as hell, but she’d rather deal with the scary alien monster than this planet’s
version of an alligator.

But you gave it the enzyme formula. Now, it might not
come.

A light blinked up ahead. The soft, blue/blue blink of
Overseer tech, she thought. Her gut sank. So it was all a play. A game.
Position something upstream to make people sick, show her the ill and dying,
convince her to find the source. Leave her in the swamp to die. Evil, evil son
of a bitch.

 She was so convinced that for a moment she
did
find
the device she expected. Then black carapace dissolved into slick olive-beige
metal. The blinking light was LED, not phosphorescent substitute. Cyrillic
writing declared it of Russian origin.

She whistled, feeling weirdly like an ass.
Hey, you only
blamed the life-sucking alien for the murder of a whole village. It must be
used to that by now.
Pre Jump-drive tech, these devices were sent out to
seed worlds with oxy-rich algae. Five hundred years or so in space, then a
crash landing on an alien world. It sucked to be a terraforming rocket. But
with Jump-drive invented while this thing was still in transit, humans had
gotten here first and set up housekeeping without its input. The main tank was
bashed in and full of a thick, nasty soup. Here was the amoeba breeding ground,
alright. With so much dead, stagnant water inside, the little shit could have
been multiplying inside for years.

And the tank was the size of
Marel Sander’s
hold.  Thank
God she had a life sucking alien willing to help her clean it up.
Jesus
Christ,
she thought.
We did this to ourselves.

The Russians would still have to sterilize everything, of
course, but without this thing creating an infectious plume, the village would
have a chance to recover. She reached for the communicator on her hip…and
froze.

Footsteps were swishing through the water off to her right.
She took a deep breath, reaching reflexively for a gun she didn’t have. She
dropped into the contaminated water instead, searching for something in the
murk she could use. Fingers closed over a slick palm sized rock. She pulled it
up, weighing it carefully, and then waited.

Was it the Overseer? …no, she decided. The movement was too
light. But it had the purposeful sound of a two-leg stride. Someone from the
village sent to find her? Hair prickled on the back of her neck. She would
wait, she decided. Wait until the last possible moment. The footsteps came
nearer. She heard the unmistakable click of a round being chambered and turned,
rock raised high.

And then her heart soared.

The person behind her was not just human, he was someone she
knew. Cobbled together leathers and a flack-jacket about to give up the ghost
couldn’t hide the SF bearing. Haunted brown eyes like, and forever unlike, a
pair of lost blue ones looked into hers. The swamp muttered around them, and
she saw nothing but her rescue.

It was Michel Landry.

And it didn’t matter at all that he was pointing a gun at
her chest.

*****

Then:

Bryan was gone.

Not dead. Not buried. Erased. Eradicated. Removed from the
world and beyond reach and rescue. And now Adrienne sat in a room with four
other people: Bob Harris, Bryan’s best friend; Paige Jones, the base counselor;
General Miller, glaring at her as if she had done wrong; and a new security man
named Jason Mangle.

I bet he gets teased a lot,
she thought, without
enthusiasm. Because what they were telling her made her feel sick.

“You’re telling me that he
can
remember? That…that we
could have put him back together? And I left him back there to
die?

Paige shook her head, gently taking Adry’s shaking hands in
her own. “Not exactly. The slave process doesn’t erase you, precisely. It..”
she sighed. “Memory is like a library. When you want to find a book, you access
a filing system that tells you where that book is. Words, sights, sounds,
smells are memory’s filing system. Its triggers.”

Lately, Adry had been spraying Bryan’s cologne on his side
of her bed. For an instant on waking, she could imagine he was there. “I get
that.”

“The slave process destroys the catalogue. The memories
still exist, but the slave can’t  find them. In a few cases the memories
do
return. It’s rare, but…” She trailed off.

“So Bryan could remember.” Shawn Miller sighed. “And he
knows too much for that to be safe.”

“It helps us that they start programming their victims
immediately. There won’t be anything familiar to trigger the catalogue, so to
speak, and the longer he goes without remembering, the worse his chances for
recovery get. They’re going to take him to Foster, or New Greenland, and they
don’t look anything at all like a human world anymore.”

“What about our chances of finding him?” General Miller
asked Bob.

“To rescue, or kill him?”

“Either.”

Bob Harris sighed. “Needle in a haystack.”

They looked around their new base; a tent posted on Gaga’s
soil. Ships landed and took off with metronome precision. They’d made no move
towards a more permanent structure. Miller and the rest of the brass seemed
more interested in staying mobile. She supposed it made sense. If you’re
moving, they can’t find you. At least the green around here was real.
Maple-like trees grew all around them, intense purple flowers just starting to
open at the end of twigs. General Miller sniffed at the pollen. He switched the
chips out of his reader and sighed.

“Well, to fill you in on our other problem child, Michel
Landry is officially AWOL from the local garrison. He left before we arrived.
Stuck around just long enough to get Bryan’s POW status notification. Then he
blew.” Shawn dropped the report chips he held hard enough to crack one.

Bob cursed. “We should have arrested him the second he
touched down.”

“Maybe he went to rescue his brother?” Paige said.

“Maybe pigs will fly tomorrow,” Adry said.

“Yeah.” Shawn sighed. “Mich was in a twisted competition
with Bryan. Without his brother here to play the game, there’s nothing to hold
him. He already knows he’ll be thrown out of the service. Maybe even put it
jail.” Shawn tapped a chip on a pad of paper now too valuable to use. There was
no more excess cellulose for manufacturing. Holton itself was gone. “We’ve told
our contacts on the other worlds that if Mich turns up, they need to pass word
on to us. If we can scrape the cred together, we’ll post a reward. And Parker?”

She looked up, tear streaks glittering on her damp cheeks.
“Yes, sir?”

“You’re going to resume Landry’s work tomorrow. You were
closest to him. You can finish his work for us.”

The horror in her gut was low, dull. Kind of like having
your stomach acid burn through your spine. “Sir—”

“No arguments. As of right now, Dr. Parker, you are Landry’s
replacement. You will do his work, cooperate with his sources, and finish his
projects in due time. Or so help me God I will drop you down the biggest hole
we can find. Understand me?”

She nodded. Did it matter if she did, or didn’t? Bryan was
gone. With that fact alone, she was falling. And she would never, ever stop.

*****

Now:

“Michel?” She asked. Swamp water ran around them, carrying
the deadly disease through her clothes.

The blond man smiled, his eyes widening in delight. He
holstered the gun. “Adrienne? My God, you’re alive? I thought for sure they’d
put paid to you in Holton.”

She shook her head. “No. We made it out. I got grabbed on
the way to New Houston. What are you doing here?”

His smile was slow and sly. “I got my sources these days.
Make my way tracking down obscure things a person might need. I heard an
Overseer was making a little free with my brother’s discovery, and I wanted to
know what it had down here. Didn’t expect to see you though.”

“It grabbed me a few weeks ago. It wanted me to reverse
engineer the enzyme.” She shivered.

“Probably using you to keep its private heard doctored up,
too. You get a good look at it?”

“No.”

Mich looked at her, then at the swamp. “My sources call it a
renegade. So nasty the other suckers won’t go anywhere near it.” He smiled, not
nicely. “Come on, kiddo. Let’s get you out and safe.” He offered her a hand.