Wincing at Light

<– Chapter 17 / Chapter 19 –>

He wasn’t sleeping. The smothering cloth of fatigue notwithstanding. The aching-backed, stumble-footed exhaustion notwithstanding. Fuck, even the mellow warmth of Djen’s slender arms and scented embrace notwithstanding.

Brett lay in his bed in the dark and stretched out his vision toward the ceiling he could not see. He listened to the hum of the circulation fans. Eventually, he amused himself by teasing erect the nipple she kept pressing into his ribcage. When she clambered bleary and short from the well of sleep long enough to swat at him until he quit, he knew he had to do something else. The sandman wasn’t coming around to his bedroom window tonight.

The problem was that there are only so many things a man can do in the middle of a night in a practically deserted deep space station. Most of them involved work, and Brett had done enough of that for one day. He had the equal promise of too many more hours piled up and waiting for him come sunrise. He was supposed to be sleeping. He craved sleeping the way he had craved the inside of Allison Butcher’s pants back in high school. The idea of it felt to him as satisfying as the way cotton candy tastes.

Sleep was also his only viable excuse for not working, for not striving to fend off a crisis he was the least equipped to comprehend. Brett wanted that to mean that if he didn’t sleep, the time was still his. He was still allotted the right to do something with it other than moon over little green invaders from space.

It occurred to him that the truth was the opposite–giant pale nutrient fleshbag invaders from space–but he didn’t find that particularly amusing.

He grumbled out of bed at last. It was an epic struggle of grasps and whimpers and octopus limbs, but somehow he managed not to wake her. He dressed in the dark and let himself out the door as silently as possible. Brett checked the glowing dial of his watch. It was just after one. He thought about Liston, who was under strict orders to be sleeping for the next fifty two minutes. Had the doctor bothered to obey? Brett didn’t particularly care.

I’m too goddamned tired to care. Goddamned fucking tired. He heard his mother, saw a scratchy film of her in which she wore her blue muslin Sunday dress, the one his father had buried her in. She stood in front of the clapboard country church, at the foot of the lime green concrete stairs, two steps removed from the tire rut drive and the rows of neatly spaced marble headstones that swept up most of the church lawn. She was shaking her head. None of that rock star language in my house, young man. I won’t have it.

Except it had been a time of rock stars and hard rock language. In the late forties, teen years, he’d tripped toward young adulthood on the anthem, Say your fuckin’ , just like everyone else he knew. He could still, if he wanted, recall in audio-eidetic memory D-Jack Harm’s smoke and gravel bellow and the heavy bass line intro riff. Dum-dum-dum-wheeew-da-da. Dum-dum-dum-da-da-dum. That song had defined an entire period for the young people of his generation; he had lost his annoyingly persistent virginity with it blaring on his car stereo. He had to admit he couldn’t remember most of the words and none of the apparent meaning now. Hadn’t, in fact, for nearly ten years. Something about parental-cultural oppression.

Brett started to walk, padding his bare feet against the cold concrete floor. His knees began to ache from the chill. The feet themselves didn’t. They went numb long before they hurt. Somewhere between saying his fuckin’ and making the turn, he had decided what needed to be done. It might not get him to sleep. It definitely wouldn’t do much to extricate Persia from peril. But it was work, if only technically, and that was better than nothing.

He would try the radio again. Not Mission Comm HQ, but the emergency beacon, the life line that connected Persia to Malibu, maybe Markus Brett to Jack Overton. It wasn’t any more reliable than the portable comm unit sitting on the desk in his office, but he hadn’t tried it yet. It was a thing he could do that hadn’t been attempted.

Not that there was anything Jack would be able to do if they did make contact. He wasn’t any more of a sci-tech than Brett was. Malibu was so far beyond a reasonable range of assistance it was ludicrous. But if they connected, they could commiserate. And at the very least, if things went badly in the future, someone would know what had happened at Persia during the radio silence.

>#

He entered the Command and Communications module from the third level. In the beginning, they had experimented with calling it CommComm, but that didn’t manage to stick. Someone had spread the term C-Two around for a pair of months, but folks had finally settled on simply calling it the Hole.

The Hole was a cylindrical room lodged in the center of Persia Station. It spanned the heart of levels three and four like the pit of a firm peach. Outside its walls ran a narrow hallway which separated the communications gear from the personal quarters of the communications technicians who both fed and digested the constant stream of audio, visual and electronic mission data which sputtered through the satellite net.

Brett stopped inside the double sliding doors and paused at the top of the stair which extended down to the main floor. The catwalk was a naked steel platform, three meters in width which encircled the upper half of the cylinder. Against the curve of the walls grew banks of comm processors, local storage drives and blocks of cream colored panels alight with sensors and idiot flashers and scrolling LCD display screens. Below the catwalk, down on the floor, evenly spaced workstations webbed out from a circular main console studded with terminals, video displays and tangled clusters of headsets. There was a constant clatter of machine processors, clicking drives and the occasional attention buzzer.

Despite its name, the Hole was a bright and thoroughly modern place done in shades of white and chrome and electronic chiaroscuro.

Brett took the stairs quickly, pounding his boots on the steps to announce his arrival. The young woman sitting in the left arm of the main console’s embrace glanced up, frowning. But she recognized him at once and the severity on her face softened. She almost smiled.

“Good morning, Commander,” she said.

The woman’s name was Attler. Brett had last seen her in the dispensary two days previous being pawed by Micah as she received her antibiotic booster. He was surprised to see her now.

“What are you doing here?” She was a mech engineer, not communications. But before she could answer, he went on, asking the more pressing question, the one that should have occurred to him first. “Where are the others?”

Even at this time of night, there should have been three or four duty techs manning the comm equipment.

Attler gave him a look that was nearly vacant with fatigue. There were dark and mottled circles beneath her eyes. “I’m comm second for Jeffers. He didn’t report, so Cassandra notified me. I don’t know about the others. No one else has been here.”

Brett pushed through the low, swinging door into the main console area. He sat in the chair beside her. Four separate but empty cups of coffee sat in a row on the shelf in front of her. She saw him notice and grimaced. “It hasn’t been that bad. With most of the systems down due to the electrical storm, we don’t have much transmission volume. I’ve had to find ways to keep myself awake.”

“You pulled your own duty in mech engineering today, didn’t you?”

She nodded at him, but made a show of straightening her shoulders.

“Were you the only one there, also?”

“No. One of the others showed up. She didn’t do anything but cry most of the day, but at least I wasn’t alone.”

He had been so busy the last few days shuttling back and forth between labs and the medical bay, Ashburn and Cassandra. Brett suddenly realized he didn’t have a clear sense of the rest of Persia’s reaction. Ashburn had tried to tell him, of course, but Ashburn was sec-o and prone to imagining crisis. Djen and Ilam and Liston were as immersed in the work as he was. None of them had bothered to notice what was going on around them. They didn’t have time.

Brett studied Attler’s face now. He could see her fear like a bruise just below the surface of her skin. If she didn’t keep her hands firm and flat against the desktop, they had a tendency to tremble. She radiated a raw sense of horror that was palpable. It hummed in the air between them when she spoke, another form of infection that wanted to leap from host to host.

“How bad is it?” Brett said, hoping to learn from her, but hoping to soothe as well. Despite her fear, Attler was doing her duty. She’d come to work as ordered, and that suggested to him a quality of strength, even if her hold on it was nearing its tattered edges. “I need to know. Is it getting worse? What are people feeling?”

“Since the others. . .not the first, but the second group–the ones who came after the injections–since they went down sick, people are scared. Some won’t come out of their rooms except to run to the commissary, and then they stockpile whatever they can.” Attler looked at him with large eyes. “Nobody wants to be around anyone else. We don’t want to risk that they might be sick and just not showing symptoms yet. We know it isn’t meningitis anymore.”

She said the last bit with a faint tone of bitterness. Not exactly an accusation, Brett thought, but something close to it.

“What do you think is wrong, then?” Brett asked. “What have you heard?”

“Rumors about a bug. A hostile microbe. I heard it came from the bio lab, that it escaped containment after they had done some adaptive genetic splicing on the cyanobacteria. I don’t believe that,” she added quickly. “But some people do, I think.”

“You’re right,” he assured her. “It didn’t come from us. It came from outside, from the planet itself.”

He didn’t know what else to say. There weren’t any convenient lies that would allay her fears, but he certainly didn’t want to encourage the belief that someone in the bio labs had made an error as egregious as allowing an experimental bacterium to escape into the biosystem. In the current climate, that would quickly degrade into violence.

Attler shrugged at his revelation as though it was pointless. “Are you working on a solution?”

“We are.”

“Will it save us?”

Brett tried to smile, but failed. “That’s the plan.”

“So, you know what I’m doing here. What are you doing here at this hour, Commander?” The break in topics was so sharp, Brett didn’t know what to say at first, but he understood. He had just asked her to trust him, to trust all of them working on the problem. Attler couldn’t afford to believe anything except what he was saying. She needed to trust that he would live up to his promises, that he would do his duty and preserve Persia Station and its personnel. To doubt him would be the same as surrendering her last hope.

So she changed topics. She chose not to know any more than her trust in him allowed.

“I came to use the emergency channel,” he said. “I try it once or twice a day, just in case.”

“We’ve got the ready link on an automatic loop, but we’re not getting through.”

Brett hadn’t known that. “Was that Ashburn’s idea?”

“I couldn’t tell you.” She hesitated, seemed to chew over an unsavory thought. Finally, she said, “Malibu is too far off to lend us any real help, aren’t they?”

“Physical help, yes. But their station comm was an old salt when the Mars mission was young. He’s been around the star charts a few times and might have some ideas that would be as good as fresh bodies.” Brett smiled in a way he hoped was confident and he patted her arm. “As a matter of fact, I’m going to be at it for at least a couple of hours. Why don’t you grab something to eat or some more coffee. Even a nap, if you want. I’ll hang around until you get back or the next shift logs in, whichever.”

“Can you handle the boards?”

He drew back in mock outrage. “Do you see the title on my name badge, darling? I could take this station apart a bolt at a time and put it back together blindfolded. Of course I can run the boards.”

“Is that true?”

“So says my job description. Go on, get out of here.”

She smiled in gratitude and rose from her chair. “Just a small nap. Page me in my quarters if you need me.”

“Go.”

Without another word, she went.

Brett spun his chair across the open floor and skidded to a stop in front of the primary comm console. He clipped on one of the earpiece/transmitter devices and punched up his login on the keyboard. Cassandra gave him the standard difficulty accessing the emergency band, but backed off once he’d typed in the proper passcodes. Processor lights fluttered as he aligned the communications array, and the screen in front of him counted down the seconds to a coordinate fix on Malibu. A message appeared informing him he was able to transmit.

“Persia Station calling Malibu. This is Station Commander Markus Brett transmitting a maximum priority emergency request message for Commander Jack Overton. Are you receiving, Malibu Station?”

He repeated his message and versions of it dozens of times over the next five minutes. Brett shouted into the microphone. He cajoled the airwaves. Eventually, he cursed roughly every third word while he punched buttons and twisted tuning knobs. His efforts accomplished nothing. Static growled back at him, interspersed with the occasional high and melancholy whine. In desperation, he fired off a command to Cassandra demanding a boost in the communications array, only to be reminded that the emergency band always accessed maximum signal boost capability. Brett cursed some more.

After ten more minutes, he imagined he heard something. A guttural and broken whisper across the ether. He tried to dial the signal in manually, felt himself lose it with his clumsy and unpracticed hands, then rolled back through the dial.

“Malibu, this is Persia, are you receiving?” He barked his frustration into the transmitter. “This is Persia Station calling Malibu Station, is there anyone on the line?”

Of course there was no one on the line, he thought. When Jack “Slow Burn” Overton said he was taking a vacation and his whole goddamned station with him, he meant it. Overton was legendary for working his crews like a brutal slavemaster for fifty weeks out of a terran year, but when he granted Leave and Liberty, he granted it totally. He demanded a great deal and he repaid his people for what they gave him. No one was even going to think about picking up the comm line–even the emergency comm line–just three days into their break. And that was assuming there was any fucking crewman sober and conscious enough to understand Brett’s bleat from their speakers in the first place.

In that moment, he almost tore the headset off his ear from sheer frustration. He almost pounded the counter and screamed at the empty room. He almost threw the whole comm apparatus across the room.

Later, he almost wished he had.

>#

“Commander Brett?”

Brett instantly removed his hands from anything and everything he’d been touching. He hunched over the comm board, driving his anger and outrage deep below the surface, withdrawing his senses from the room, the surrounding sensors. Brett leaned into the disembodied voice with his entire being. He closed his eyes. He bent forward a bit more, resting his elbows on his knees and his forehead against the cool surface of the desk.

The signal wasn’t clear. It swam in and out, pierced by spikes of distortion. But the channel was open. He wanted to shout for joy, but he didn’t. Instead, he focused his senses until only the voice from out of the frigid night penetrated his consciousness.

“This is Brett,” he said, keeping his voice steady. “Are you receiving?”

There was a pause due to the distance. “I can hear you. Not very well, but mostly. I don’t know how to work this thing. Thank God you called. I didn’t hear it at first, then couldn’t find my way. I was afraid you’d stop.”

Dread formed like a stone in Brett’s belly. The voice he heard was young, male, next door neighbor to hysterical. And he recognized it at once, because Brett’s understanding made the stumbling collision of words eloquent. It might as well have been any man or woman huddled deep in the bowels of Persia.

A small voice flared in the recesses of his brain. Hang up, buddy. Hang it up now. Let that kid believe the connection was lost by accident. He’s already said he doesn’t know how to work the board. Nobody wants to hear this, most especially you. It was more difficult than he would have liked to admit to push that advice away.

Brett spoke at once, his own words falling in spitfire succession. Just so he wouldn’t be tempted.

“Who is this? I need to speak at once with your station commander. I need to talk to Jack Overton. This is an emergency band broadcast.”

“I’m Michael. Michael Stepson.”

Go easy, Brett advised himself. There was a quality in the boy’s voice, something liquid which told him the kid could be spooked easily. Once spooked, he’d be gone. Brett started from the beginning, speaking in slow and deliberate fashion.

“Michael, this is Commander Markus Brett from Persia Station. I need to speak with your station commanding officer. I need Jack Overton. Can you get him on the line? This is an emergency situation.”

“I’m sorry,” the boy said. “Jack isn’t here. He’s gone.”

“Where did he go?”

“He’s dead.” Michael laughed, a hollow and joyless sound. “I meant that figuratively. Jack is dead.”

Brett processed the information in a wink, then shoved it away. He didn’t have time for it. “Who is in command at Malibu, Michael? Let me talk to the highest ranking officer.”

Another pause, but this one was not the transmission of waves over great distance. It was a brooding hesitation.

“You’re talking to him, sir. Second Meteorological and Topographical Analyst Michael Stepson. That’s me, and I’m the interim commanding officer of Malibu Station. I’m the only officer of Malibu Station.” The voice sighed in Brett’s ear, and at the end of it was a muffled catch. The boy was crying. He said, “I believe I’m the only person left, Commander Brett. They’re all dead here. Sample and Millik are, I know. Jack and Priest must be as well. Priest was our sec-o, sir. He would have stopped what they were doing if he’d been alive, so he must not be.”

“Michael,” Brett said. “Calm down, son. Tell me what happened.”

“I locked myself in the central heating crawlspace. I did that almost first thing, and that’s why they didn’t find me. Not that it matters, you understand, sir. The stars are coming out shortly. I can’t see them from here, but they’ll be out down below, and that means it’s just a matter of time. I knew that when I came out for this last bit. I was hungry, so hungry, Commander Brett. I had to come out, but I knew–or maybe because I knew that there wasn’t much chance anyway. I knew the stars would twinkle there as well as here.”

Michael seemed to gather himself as he spoke, as though the act of speaking to someone who listened fortified him, even if that other person was just the sound of breathing on the wrong end of a thousand kilometer line.

“I need you to tell me more, son,” Brett said. “From the beginning, and everything that happened, as well as you can recollect it.”

“You know about the microbe,” Michael said, his voice flat. “That’s why you called, isn’t it? Dr. Isaiah took to calling it the ‘chigger’ at the last. He said it made everyone feel like they had an itch they couldn’t scratch.

“Have you ever seen a dog with a real bad case of fleas? They can drive even a good mutt right out of his head. I had a dog like that once, when I was a boy in Alabama. I had to put him down. Over some goddamned fleas, sir. Some goddamned fleas that made him a little wrong in the head, you understand? He got in his eyes this faraway look, like all he could think about was that nipping on his backside. He’d get this little shimmy going when he walked like he could keep them from biting on him if he bounced them around. He took at snap at one of the little girls from a neighbor farm, and my dad told me what I had to do.

“That’s what happened to us, sir. Some of us got the itch and went a little mad. Mean-crazy. Dr. Isaiah said we all would get that way eventually, but some of us never got the chance.”

The young man fell silent. Brett heard him snuffle into the microphone, imagined him sitting just as Brett himself was in a mirror reality, a twin Persia, a replica Hole, probably wiping his nose on his sleeve from crying. The air about both of them was pregnant with electronic hums, the walls bright and technicolor with buttons and screens. No human presence intruded on their communication. They sat in parallel universes, unconsciously mimicking one another. Except Michael’s was a dead universe, and Brett’s was merely getting that way. The chasm that loomed between the two, between existence and potential, was as vast and blackened as a pit woven from the fabric of nightmares.

Brett could think of nothing to say except, “Yes, we know about the organism. The chigger.”

Bacterium motherfuckacoccus!

“We should have known something was wrong when Jack told us we were taking some time off. Jack never let us take off, especially when we were consistently failing to meet our quotas. And we were having a hard time of it. We were short some crew, three or four that had gone down with what Dr. Isaiah said was some rare form of meningitis. Plus, our engines were all on the fritz, that’s what I heard. We were popping screens quicker than electrical breakers in Bostlanta Sprawl.” The boy laughed gently. “But when Slow Burn says to take a day or two, we don’t question him. We take the time and we enjoy it, even if it will get tacked on at the end.”

The boy was fragile. Brett sensed that, but there were things he had to know. Persia Station was his responsibility, and if that meant pushing Michael nearer the edge of an emotional precipice, Brett had to do that.

He said, “What did your doctor discover about the nature of the organism?”

“I don’t know.”

“Anything would be a help, Michael.”

“Dr. Isaiah didn’t last but four or five days after it began. He collapsed at his desk and nobody was able to rouse him. He didn’t have much of a second, and Widmark was dead by the end of the next day. I know that doesn’t help much, sir. I’m sorry.”

Brett tried to hide his disappointment. “Can you access your Cassandra system? Maybe the doctor uploaded his findings before he became ill.”

“Jack shut the Cassandra down,” Michael said, his voice sad. “All but life support and some other basic functions. Said he was tired of getting all those warning messages that didn’t mean anything. But that’s just rumor, Commander Brett. I can’t say for sure.”

Brett let it go without asking the obvious question. Why the fuck would he do that? What man in his right mind would terminate his Cassandra system? The answers were pretty straightforward. Jack wasn’t in his right mind, not at all. And Brett didn’t need any analysis from a kid like Michael, who probably wouldn’t have been in a position to know, to piece it together.

“That’s fine,” Brett said instead. “We’re making some progress on our own down here. Finish what you were saying, Michael. Tell me about Malibu, about what you remember.”

“I remember thinking it took us too long to figure things out. We were too late, I mean. By the time it occurred to some of us that something was wrong, it was irreversible. Jack was maybe just the last sign. We’d been having problems, little things, with people not getting along. There were some fights and other nastiness, a couple of sexual assaults. Priest did the best he could to keep order, but everyone really just thought it was the stress, you know? We’d been whipping ourselves for a few weeks trying to get caught up, and everybody was frustrated because the engines were failing. There were lots of external missions, and you know how dangerous those can be. It put people on edge.

“Last week, one of the missions went out. I think there were five in the party, and they had some trouble. Not much going on by way of radio, mind you, but some kind of problem. Only two of the boys came back. They blamed it on the storms, but there were suspicions. Priest wanted a full investigation, and he might have had one, too, if things hadn’t started getting out of hand.

“It might have been the crew outrage that started it. Those three that had died, they were likeable people. Everyone thought so, except maybe Sample and Millik–they’re the two that came back. The two girls were friendly, pretty, a couple of our best. Some grumbled over meals that Sample’d had his eye on one of them, on Lara, but that she wanted nothing to do with him, and that rankled him. He and Millik found themselves shoved off into a corner. Isolated by suspicion.

“Some folks went to talk to Jack about it, and maybe Sample and Millik went as well. It was obvious he needed to do something to smooth things over before the tension became really disruptive, but Jack flat told them he didn’t give much of a shit about it. Dead was dead, after all, and we had that couple of days leave coming on. You’ll all get drunk together, he said, and bygones will be bygones. That doesn’t sound much like Jack, does it?”

Brett shook his head. “No, it doesn’t.”

“We were pretty well split as a crew, I think, between those who think they’d done a crime and those who were content to call it accidental, with a few more on the criminal side. It simmered for a few days, and when the liquor was broken out, bygones didn’t go by as Jack thought they would. Things got ugly. Priest locked up the weapons because he said he didn’t trust the combination of drunkenness and access to guns, but we’ve got other things around. Rivet guns, knives, hammers. All it took was somebody looking the wrong way at somebody else.

“I saw it start in the commissary. This was three or four days after Dr. Isaiah had found the chigger out. He’d been performing autopsies on that external mission crew; said he noted some anomalies in the brain, things he said matched up with some of the readings he was getting on the crew with meningitis. He said that some of the trouble we’d been having on the station could be connected. There was a long medical explanation I only partially understood, but enough to be scared. I was there when he told Jack–since I’m the youngest, Jack would let me hang out to watch him sometimes. He’d send me on errands for him, or try to teach me some of the things that make a station go. I thought I knew him pretty well, but I was stunned when all Jack told him was to look into it, but not to bother him with it until he had something concrete. Isaiah was in a coma by nightfall, and that was that.

“It was enough to show me that I needed to watch myself, though. Me and everyone else, so I was real nervous in the commissary that day. So much tension, it was like being duct taped to a transformer. There were maybe fifteen folks there, most of them Sample’s. They were drinking and watching an old vid, and somebody said something. In less than a second, Millik had a knife and he put it right in Tabert’s stomach. That was it. The groups went at it fist to fist and anything else they could find worth throwing or using as a bludgeon. Me, I just ran as soon as it started. I went looking for Priest or Jack. Somebody chased me for a while. I think it was Jeremy from chem prog, and I was scared to death. He came on, but it wasn’t like just chasing, he was mad, and every once and a while he’d howl like some animal.

“I lost him by ducking into the meteorology section. Jeremy didn’t have access and couldn’t budge the door, though he tried. He screamed and cursed through it, and for a while I thought I heard him scratching at the seal, but I waited until he’d gone to do anything else. He’d scratched all right. He left two of his bloody fingernails in the seal, sir. He’d torn them right off in frustration.

“I knew what had to be done next. I dashed, trying to be quick and careful at the same time, for the Admin section. I found Jack in his office. He was sitting back in his big chair with his legs kicked up on the desk and an unopened bottle of whiskey beside him. He’s got this whole bank of monitors on the wall, and he had each screen tuned to a different part of the station.

“What I saw sent me almost screaming, Commander Brett. The commissary was nothing but blood. Blood and heads. Somebody had taken all those that spoke against Sample and cut their heads off. They put them on the table right next to Sample while he sat there sipping on a beer. Not all the heads, of course. There had been a couple of girls there, girls who weren’t close to siding with Sample because they knew how it must have been for Lara and the others. Women have a sense, I think, about when a man’s dangerous. Sample was dangerous to these girls, sir, and I bet by the time I was watching what Millik and the others were doing to them, I bet they wished their heads were ragged cut and set on that table, too. That’s all I’ll say.

“It wasn’t just the commissary, though. It was everywhere. The whole station was fighting it out, and Jack sat there–stone sober, I could tell–and all he did was watch. I went up to him and said that there was some trouble, but obviously he could see that, and where was Priest, please, and what could be done to stop all the killing. Commander Brett, Jack turned his head just a little, not really looking at me, but not really looking at the screens, either. He sort of smiled and said, ‘Michael, the boys have been working hard. Let them have their fun’. He didn’t say another word. I argued with him, shouted pretty loud, but he didn’t hear me, just watched. Sometimes he’d grin.

“I watched, too, and saw that Sample and Millik were getting methodical. They’d begun to sweep the station from bottom to top, looking for those who had gone against them. They killed those they found. Killed them where they stood or slept or sat. And I knew they were coming for Jack, and me if they found me. That’s when I ran. I knew where they were and how to get around them from Jack’s monitors, so I dodged them and scat to central heating because I knew they’d already checked that zone.

“I’m sorry to say it, Commander Brett. While Priest and a few of the remaining were hiding out, trying to save themselves the best they could, I ran away and hid in a hole. I’m not much of a man. I see that now. Maybe if I’d have helped them, it would have ended up differently.”

Brett noted that the boy didn’t linger over the details of his story. The things he had said, the implications of them, were horrifying. Persia had already seen that, though just a small taste of what could be, and Brett had resisted the urge to shiver through the whole account. But for Michael, his tone was hard, his words doled out like crisp flakes of ice. He’d lived through the terror and replayed the scenes until there was some distance, though how much could only be imagined. He had watched the people with whom he had shared the last five years be brutally cut down before his eyes.

Brett sat silently as Michael finished. A hand closed on his shoulder. He had been so intent on the story whispered in his ears that he hadn’t noticed he wasn’t alone. He reared back against the chair, almost screamed, then froze. His heart thundered in his chest.

It was Djen. She looked down at him, her eyes filled with concern.

She mouthed the words: I have to talk to you.

But Brett waved her off. He calmed his rapid, panting breaths.

“Michael?”

“I’m here, Commander.”

“What happened to the others? What happened to Sample and Millik?”

“Most of them were murdered. Sample had set up a kind of court in the recreation area. When I first peeked in on it, that would have been yesterday afternoon, I thought I was a little crazy myself. It was a picture like the ones that used to be in the old Bibles on Sunday, back in the Baptist church at home. A picture of hell, all blood and red torches and stench. Sample had a tall chair set up in the middle of the room. There was blood on the floor, long streaks of it where they’d gutted some of the others, stacked their insides in little mounds and then dragged the corpses into a pile. Beside it were some of the cutting torches, and some of the bodies were burned, though not very well. I think they were trying to make a big fire, but couldn’t get it to catch. Maybe to hide what they’d done. Some of them. . .some of the dead ones, I mean, had sort of a chewed look about them, if you catch my meaning, sir. That may have gone a bit far even for Sample.

“Those two, though, they hadn’t been murdered. Sample was slumped in his chair, leaned forward, like he was sleeping. Millik laid at his feet. I found them all swollen up, comatose, like Dr. Isaiah They were the last of us, I think. Those two who had brought so much bad. They were the last. It didn’t seem right to me.”

Michael hesitated for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was a quiet ache. “I took a rivet gun to each of them, sir. I searched until I found one, and I put a solid bolt of steel right through their foreheads. I don’t think they even noticed the difference, though. They didn’t move, didn’t make a noise.

“Now I’m alone.”

Brett could sense Djen’s anxiety. Her eyes bore into him with an intensity that was scorching, but he didn’t look at her. Michael filled his entire universe.

“More of your people were murdered than died of coma’s, is that right?”

“Yes, sir. Though the comas came before the madness by a couple of days. Maybe we’d have all been in comas if it hadn’t happened the way it did. Are your people getting in bad shape, Commander Brett?”

He couldn’t lie. “We’ve had a couple of incidents, but mostly just illness.”

“You’re lucky, then. Luckier than us, I mean. Do you think it’s happening everywhere? Are all the stations infested?”

“I hope not, Michael, but until now, I’d thought we were the only ones.”

“I had hoped the same thing. Just us. As long as I believed that, sir, I told myself that someone would come for me.”

We’ll come for you, Brett thought, but the words lodged in his throat. It was impossible.

“If it’s all the same, I suppose I’ll just stay here,” Michael continued. “If the chiggers have taken the whole project, I don’t want to go where another station might just be on the verge of what I’ve already seen. I don’t think I could live through it again, and I wouldn’t want to, anyway. And if it is just Persia and Malibu, I don’t want to be taking them with me. I assume I would, you know. I assume it’s just a matter of time before I’m comatose or worse.

“It’s the worse that I worry about, sir. Seeing those bodies and the things that were done to them. The way they were chewed. I don’t want to do that, so I don’t go down to those places anymore. I stay away from the bodies. If I could turn the Cassandra back on, I’d have her change the door codes just so I couldn’t get in even if I wanted to. It’s the wanting to that bothers me. I worry about that a whole lot, sir.”

Brett didn’t know what he could say. There was, in fact, nothing. Nothing he could say, no words of encouragement, would make it better. In the end, he offered the only advice that made sense to him.

“Do you know where the sec-o kept the weapons?”

“I do.”

“Can you get into the locker? It won’t be easy, but if you work at it–”

“We have welding torches. And Dr. Isaiah had a laser scalpel. He said that would cut through plastisheen if you handled it right.”

Brett swallowed hard at a thickness in his throat. “Do you understand what I’m saying, son?”

“Yes, sir. I’d already given it some thought. It’s better than the alternative.”

“Don’t wait too long.”

“Once I feel the symptoms, it’ll be too late. I understand that. I’ve been safe for awhile, for the couple days I was in the vent. Because of the airflow, I guess. The blowers were hot and loud, but they kept the chiggers away from me.”

“I’m sorry I don’t have any other comfort to offer, Michael.”

The boy said, “I’m going to go now. I’ve got work to do.”

The line went dead in Brett’s ear. He slowly removed the headset, coiled its connection wire around the earpiece and set it off to the side. Brett turned his chair until he faced Djen. She stared at him, her arms folded across her chest. She’d only heard his half of the conversation, he knew, but it had been enough. Her eyes seemed to smolder with horror.

He said, “We won’t be getting any help from Malibu.”

From the nod she gave him, Djen understood without him needing to explain. “Liston paged you half an hour ago. He wants us both in the medical bay at once. Something’s happened, and it sounds like more bad news.”

“If the start is any indication, then this is going to be a day full of bad news.” He remembered at that moment that he’d promised to cover for Attler. “I can’t leave. I promised the comm tech I’d cover for her.”

Djen frowned. “Fuck communications, Brett. There’s no one out there left to talk to us.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” he said, and knew it was true.

Brett rose immediately and followed her up the stairs and out the door.

<– Chapter 17 / Chapter 19 –>