The Venusian Gambit (14 page)

Inside, the room had been split in half. To her right, a bank of computer equipment and monitors kept constant watch over the left part of the room, sealed off from the rest of the station by every means imaginable. It had its own airlock, environmental controls, bathroom facilities—even the fresh oxygen was fed in through a tank latched to the outside of the station, rather than Ride’s usual atmosphere.

On a small cot in the corner, Stephane sat, looking at Shaila intently. Just as he did every day for over a week.

They had zapped him to hell and back again when they brought him aboard Ride, and someone had taken the opportunity to clean him up and put a fresh uniform on him. The hair and beard were still a mess, but at least they weren’t greasy anymore. The med techs told Shaila that he’d been living on just 1,000 calories a day, tops. His body showed signs of extreme exhaustion, as if he’d been going with just two or three hours a sleep per night for the last several months. He was emaciated, his muscles atrophied; it seemed he’d spent most of
Tienlong
’s transit to Earth in zero-g, in the ship’s labs rather than its living quarters. And yet, much to the med techs’ confusion and consternation, his energy levels were off the charts. By rights, he should be utterly exhausted, and yet there he sat, wide awake.

Watching.

She walked over and pressed the comm button on the door of the containment cell. “Hey.”

Stephane’s body twitched slightly—was it a sign of recognition?—but otherwise he simply continued to stare at her, slightly glassy-eyed, regarding her as one might watch a goldfish in a bowl. It almost seemed disdainful.

No response, as usual. Shaila turned to the monitors. Accelerated heartbeat, signs of physical stress, exhaustion, exceedingly odd brain-wave patterns—and trace signs of Cherenkov radiation emanating from his cerebral cortex.

The diagnostic computers settled on “UNKNOWN INFECTION,” which was an odd echo of the official line regarding whatever he picked up on Enceladus. But deep down, Shaila knew that it was more than a mere pathogen. He was under the influence of an alien intelligence, and as much as she wanted to reach inside him, rip it the hell out and stomp on it, there was nothing she could do.

Except talk. Every day, several times a day.

“I talked to your mom today,” she said, returning to the comm. “I couldn’t tell her what happened, of course. But I told her you’re alive, and we’re doing everything we can to make you well again,” she said. “Of course, she doesn’t have to know that we have no clue what we’re doing, or how to get that fucker out of you. But we’re trying. We’re working on it. And we
will
get that thing out of you. No matter how long it takes.”

Another twitch.

Shaila turned and saw his already elevated heart rate start to climb, pushing 120 beats per minute. His brain-wave patterns likewise started getting weird. That hadn’t happened before. She had no clue what it meant, but she knew something was going on.

“You hear me, Stephane? I know you’re there. I bet that’s you, isn’t it. Fighting. I know you. You’re a cocky little joker, this laid-back guy with your sweet talk and your pretty smile, but deep down, you’re a fighter. That’s how you got me. That’s why I fell for you.”

He twitched again, quite visibly. His whole body shuddered. His hand fluttered.

Shaila’s heart started to race. “You’re the guy who pulled off a miracle back on Mars. You risked your life, sneaking into a weird temple to free us and stop Althotas. You climbed to the top of a fucking pyramid to cut a rope to stop that insane alien bastard from opening a rift between dimensions. If you hadn’t done that, none of us would be here. That was you, Stephane. All you. I wouldn’t be here now if it weren’t for you. Maybe none of us would.

“And if it weren’t for that, we wouldn’t have…”

Stephane’s entire body was fluttering now, subtly but uncontrollably. It was if he was shivering in brutally cold weather. Or had a colony of ants in his jumpsuit. And he had, finally, broken eye contact with her. He was now staring at his twitching hands.

“If it weren’t for that,” she continued, whispering, “we wouldn’t have fallen in love, now would we? I love you, Stephane. I really do. Which is why you’ve got to fight this thing.”

As if suddenly struck by lightning, Stephane jumped to his feet, his eyes bugging out of his skull. He staggered a moment, hands grasping his head. His mouth was moving, but Shaila couldn’t hear. Then, finally, his body froze for a long, agonizing moment.

“Stephane?” Shaila said.

With a guttural shout, he picked up the cot and, with surprising strength and speed, threw it at the comm speaker.

Sparks flew. Plastic cracked. Pieces fell to the floor.

Shaila had ducked reflexively, and when she once again turned to face Stephane, he had already sat back down in the space where his cot used to be. He was once again completely still, and fixed Shaila with that terrible, distant gaze.

But she knew, in that moment, that she was right all along.

“I got you,” she said, even though she knew Stephane couldn’t hear her. “I got you, you fucker. He’s in there.”

At that moment, a tech rushed in, looking as though she had just been rudely awakened. Which she had. “What the hell happened? I got an alarm and…oh.” She paused to look at the wreckage inside the containment cell.

“I pissed him off,” Shaila said, grinning despite herself.

The tech, a young Chinese woman with an Australian accent, returned the smile. “That’s brilliant! We’ve been trying to get a rise out of him ever since he got here!” She scurried over to the computers to check the readings. “Look at this! I haven’t seen brain-wave activity like this…ever. And the irregular heartbeat….wow, the Cherenkov readings dipped too. This is incredible!”

“Thanks,” Shaila said, turning to leave.

“Wait! You can’t go!”

Shaila turned around with a surprised look on her face; she was pretty sure she outranked most folks on the station, and definitely sure about this particular tech. “Excuse me?”

“Um, well…will you come back? Try again? I mean, this is really something here.”

In all honesty, Shaila had no intention of repeating it right then. But she did want to repeat it soon. “Go over all the data, match it to the holovid recording, and write up a report. Figure out exactly what worked and didn’t. Then we’ll go another round. Yes?”

“Yes, ma’am,” the tech said, nodding vigorously before turning back to her instruments, hands fluttering across the controls. Shaila used that moment to escape quickly, shutting the door behind her and leaning against the hallway bulkhead to compose herself. She was trembling, her heart beating fast. She was oddly elated and frustrated at the same time, and utterly terrified at what she saw. Was that Stephane or Rathemas? Was Stephane winning or losing? Did she help him or hurt him?

She had no idea.

“Aren’t you supposed to be on your rest cycle, Jain?”

Shaila opened her eyes—she had no idea they’d been closed—and saw Diaz standing before her, hands on her hips, a slight smile on her face. “Sorry, ma’am,” Shaila said, drawing herself straight. “Couldn’t sleep. Decided to visit Stephane. It was…interesting.”

“Yeah, I got pinged on it. Come with me,” Diaz said. “Dr. Ayim says he’s ready to give me a full report on that jury-rigged piece-of-shit we found hooked up to the comm system on
Tienlong
. Tell me about Stephane on the way.”

Shaila fell in beside Diaz and gave a brief description of her encounter, along with a heavily redacted version of her own feelings about it. “It’s bound to be something positive. Better than him just staring, I suppose,” Shaila concluded.

“Let’s hope. The President’s not too thrilled we got three alien-possessed people on the station and managed to lose whatever others they might’ve gathered. I’m hoping Stephane can get it together enough to give us some useful intel on these bastards,” Diaz said, then looked over at Shaila. “No offense, Commander.”

“None taken, General,” Shaila said neutrally, trying her best not to sound hurt. “I hope he can get it together too.”

The two walked for a few moments of silence until they arrived at another lab, where Ayim had set up shop with the contraption Stephane was found with on
Tienlong
. The door was open, and they found Ayim himself doing last minute checks of the device, which was within yet another containment cell.

“Ah, there you are, General. And Commander. Come in, come in! I think we finally figured out what happened here. Very interesting, very exciting!” Ayim said.

Shaila gave Diaz a sidelong glance, which was returned with a smirk. Gerald Ayim was very much a stereotypical academic, with a head for quantum physics and not, sadly, for social interaction. “So, Gerry, did you find our little critters?” Diaz asked, closing the door behind her.

Ayim looked slightly panicked. “Umm…no. No, we haven’t, but we do have an idea or two on that. Shall I take it from the beginning?” Without waiting for an answer, he walked up to the glass of the containment unit. “So let’s start with this green stone. Previously unknown geologic composition, odd green glow, bursting with Cherenkov radiation and, most likely, linked to—if not existing partially within—another dimension.”

“The Emerald Tablet,” Shaila said.

Ayim gave her a brilliantly white smile. “If you want to call it that, by all means. But I cannot say. All I know is that this stone has exceptional quantum properties that will take years for us to figure out. Years! I don’t even know where to begin. But, that’s not why you’re here is it?” Again, he surged forward without waiting for a reply. “So you see this sort of electronic cradle around the device, very makeshift, this thing. Yet it somehow harnessed a bit of the energy this stone is giving off, and connected it to the two tanks you see here on either side. Now, these tanks—”

“—were used to gather up the water
Tienlong
took on from Enceladus. And the critters in the water that were throwing off the Cherenkov radiation pings, yes?” Diaz said. Shaila got the impression it wasn’t the first time Diaz interrupted the scientist.

“Exactly, General! And we found enough tubing, and a homemade vacuum pump, to come to the conclusion that the
Tienlong
crew vacuumed up as much of the water as they could. Now, there was still extensive water damage aboard
Tienlong
, as you saw from the state of the lighting systems there, but they got most of it. More importantly, after several sensor sweeps, tuned to the molecular level no less, we found zero traces of any alien proteins. They seemed to be able to find and gather them all—a 100% success rate.”

Shaila thought on this a moment. “Between the Chinese guy infected in Egypt, and Stephane on Enceladus, it seems like the possessed people can coordinate without comms, from any distance,” she said. “Makes me wonder if Stephane and the others could pretty much sense where the proteins were on the ship, and vacuum them up accordingly.”

“Exactly our thought as well, Commander,” Ayim said. “Now, these tanks should be full of living alien proteins, correct? We thought we might find them in there, with this stone somehow giving them the power to maintain themselves. But they’re all dead and decomposing.”

Diaz stood taller. “Come again, Doctor?”

“The proteins. They may have been stored in these tanks, but when we examined them, we found they were no longer intact. They’ve decomposed at the molecular level. The amino acids are, right now, in the midst of dissolving. There are very few chains intact. Mostly, all we have are sodium and carbon atoms, along with nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen isotopes. And water, of course.”

“So it didn’t work,” Shaila said. “They’re dead.”

“They are dead, but that is not the really interesting part!” Ayim said, almost joyfully. “As we were investigating these tanks, we thought, why would you put this device in the communications room, of all places?
Tienlong
has labs for this sort of thing. Much better spaces for this. And we figured out why when we followed the wiring. Because this device was hooked up to their main relay dish.”

Both women were still for a moment as they wrapped their heads around this. Diaz got there first. “There was a transmission burst aboard
Tienlong
right after the teams boarded. We assumed it was a distress call, and we couldn’t intercept the packets, and Stephane or someone else wiped the computer memories clean. So how are these proteins related?”

Ayim clapped his hands and laughed. “That is the big question! Now, as we saw from the destruction of Enceladus and the minute traces of Cherenkov radiation immediately after, I think we can safely assume, for the sake of theory, that these proteins at one point had interdimensional qualities—that they perhaps existed in more than one place, if you will. Now, it would take years to even figure out how such simple proteins could be placed in a quantum state between two parallel dimensions, but the fact remains they were! And that, I think, is the key as to why they were hooked up to this machine, and to the communications relay.”

Ayim stopped there, grinning, leaving Shaila and Diaz staring for a moment before looking at each other, confused. “You may want to keep going, Doctor,” Shaila said. “We aren’t following.”

The physicist furrowed his brow a moment, then plowed forward again. “All right. If you are going to hook up series of proteins to a data transmitter, then can we not assume that there was something having to do with these proteins that could be translated into data? I think we can. And the fact that they are in a quantum superposition between parallel dimensions, the amount of data potentially ‘stored’ on each protein could be immense.”

“So these proteins were glorified flash drives?” Diaz asked.

“It’s possible! Yes, a crude analogy, but we believe that this device here somehow read the chemical makeup of these proteins, translated the quantum superpositioning, and then took the resulting data and downloaded it into a file to be transmitted to Earth.”

“But we have no idea what that data was,” Shaila said.