<– Chapter 29

Where there should have been nothing, there was pain.

There came a sensation like panic, then despair. A sense of flight aborted and the wailing of the mothers of stillborn. He made a noise that brought to mind the word skittering, as though he possessed too many legs, as though he was a spider. Except the sound didn’t come from outside of him, but inside.

The pain showed itself to him. Not his head. He thought he might be hungover, though he didn’t remember drinking. It was his back. His goddamned spine ached. Felt like he’d slept on a pair of scissors.

He wasn’t supposed to be sleeping at all. He didn’t remember sleeping. The afternoon was too full for anything like a nap. He’d promised Ashburn they would run over the disaster protocols. He had to log his weekly contact with mission comm HQ. After he got off the round, he still had to meet Djen for the shift reports and tomorrow’s duty roster. And maybe coffee later, after the business was done.

His heart shuddered in his chest just thinking about it. He was such an idiot.

Brett opened his eyes. He looked up at the pale brightness of the ceiling that wasn’t his private quarters. He frowned, then remembered. He cursed.

“Doc, I think I just fucked up my image. I fell asleep. I didn’t realize I was so tired. Is that going to be a problem?” He sat up grinning. “Please don’t tell me we’re going to have to do it again.”

But Liston wasn’t there. No one was there. The med bay was empty.

“Doc?”

The cart with the imaging unit had been wheeled away, he saw. Maybe the image took after all. Liston must have decided to let him sleep. The wily old bastard probably decided the pressure of command was getting to him and justified the nap as a recuperative measure.

Brett rubbed at the sore spot on his back. He’d have to talk to Liston later, give him a good natured undressing for promoting dereliction of duty.

He noticed that Liston wasn’t the only one to receive an undressing. He was naked. The tile floor sent a chill up through his feet that made his calves ache.

What the hell?

“Dr. Liston?”

He found a clean shipsuit, underwear and socks, all neatly folded on the table beside the bed. There was a pair of boots on the floor. Brett put the clothing on quickly. It occurred to him that he might have been ill. That would explain a number of things. Maybe he’d been delirious.

Brett went to the door, but the sensors didn’t seem to read him. It didn’t open. He keyed the comm pad on the wall, but it didn’t respond when he ordered it to break the seal. He punched the code three times with no results. Annoyed, he toggled the comm port to order Cassandra to release the latch, but when he called to her, she didn’t answer. He gave his order and his passcode anyway.

Nothing happened.

Cassandra wasn’t answering. He didn’t have to know exactly what had happened to understand that something was wrong. If Cassandra wasn’t on line, it must be critically wrong.

He was going to have to force the door. That was fantastic. It could take hours if the seals were all intact.

Brett made his way toward the storage cabinets and searched them for something stout enough to wedge into cracks of the door. He found sheets and pillows, bottles of isopropyl alcohol, boxes of bandages, but nothing that resembled a pry bar. He was about to move to the cabinets on the other side of the room when the door to Liston’s office opened.

Brett looked up, then frowned. “You’re not Liston.”

“No.”

Ilam grinned at him, a stupid cow-eyed expression like he was the escort delegated to bring the guest of honor to a surprise party.

“Do you have the codes to unlock the med bay doors?”

“No, I can’t say that I do, unless you count the pair of scissor jacks in the office. That’s more than enough code if you ask me. You should have seen the devil of a time I had getting them to seal in the first place.” Ilam continued to grin, but finally seemed to understand that Brett was not amused. “I’m sorry, Commander, I’d hoped to be in here when you awakened. To ease your transition, I mean. I’m afraid I nodded off.”

Brett processed the information with something less than complete understanding. If Ilam had been left to watch over him, he must have been ill, and probably for quite some time. Liston wouldn’t have left him unattended unless he absolutely had to.

“What time is it?” Brett asked.

“Three in the afternoon, relative station time.”

He’d arrived at eleven for his image. Four hours wasn’t long enough to explain the situation as it stood. And why the hell would they need scissor jacks to open the door? Scissor jacks were reserved only for a complete power grid failure because they destroyed the pressure seals. Brett winced at the possibilities.

“What day is it?”

Ilam waved him toward a stool set against the microscopy counter. “You should sit down.”

“Just give me the damned date.”

“19 March.”

Brett dropped heavily into the seat he’d been offered. “That’s almost three weeks. Have I been sick for three weeks?”

“More or less.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“It’s complicated.”

“Then get Liston in here to explain it to me. You’re not getting the job done .”

Ilam crossed his arms. His expression became hard. “Liston is dead.”

Brett blinked at him. Once, then again. Nothing worth saying entered his mind.

“There are facts of which you are currently unaware, Commander. You will find that the situation has changed dramatically from what you expect. There is indeed an explanation, and you’ll be provided with it in soon enough. But understand this first, I’m the only one who knows. The only one still alive. Not just in Persia, but on the entire planet. Do you comprehend what I’m saying to you?”

Brett nodded. “What happened?”

“Persia is gone. The project has failed. Most of our personnel are dead. You ordered the rest, those who survived, into the Escape Module for evacuation. Those five are Vernon, Ashburn, Whitney, Djen and Attler. And me. I would have made six, but I disobeyed your direct order and stayed behind. To rescue you, you understand.” Ilam retrieved a portable computer from the counter and passed it to Brett. “The complete record, including all the gory details you might want to know has been downloaded. You’ll want to review it as you have time. You’ll also want to be careful with it. There’s sure to be an investigation when we get home, and that may be the only evidence that remains to support our story.”

“When we get home?”

“It’s in the documents. But we’ll need to be moving soon. I’ve got the remote atmospheric devices functioning, but the heat exchange was almost a total loss. All the heat it can generate is being piped up here.”

“What’s the matter with Cassandra?” Something liquid froze in his stomach. Emily. “She should be managing the autonomic systems.”

“You dismantled her, I’m afraid. She’s beyond repair.”

Brett sucked in a breath, then rose from the seat. Fear gave way to panic. “I have to go see.”

But Ilam restrained him with a hand on his shoulder. “Sit down. You wouldn’t get to the first hatch before you froze to death. Besides, Emily is fine. I’ve seen to that, already. What you hadn’t already done, I mean.” Then he smiled again. “I don’t mind admitting when I’m wrong, Markus, not at a time like this. And I was wrong, though you don’t remember. Would you like to see her?”

“Emily?”

It was too much. He didn’t understand the things Ilam knew, how Ilam could know them. His knees folded. He was going to faint.

Ilam held him up with his powerful hand. With the other, he snatched the computer from Brett’s hand before he dropped it. “Mind that equipment, Markus. I told you it’s all we’ve got.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right. More my fault than yours, really. It is as difficult for me to remember what you’ve forgotten as it is for you to try to grasp what’s happened. I suspect you’ll continue to feel a bit overwhelmed for a while yet.”

“You said–about Emily. . .”

Ilam nodded. “It’s a damned good thing about Emily, Brett. I would have been too late if it hadn’t been for her. After I saw the others safely away, I was all over the station firing up the remote atmospheric devices. I thought you had a bit more time, you understand. If she hadn’t begun to scream, I might have arrived too late. For both of you.”

>Brett didn’t understand half of what he said. He wasn’t really paying attention. “Where is she?”

Ilam led him across the bay. The green privacy curtain had been swept across the far portion of the room. When they reached it, Ilam parted it with his hand, but he stopped in the middle, blocking Brett’s access.

“You’ll need to be careful. She’s fragile, Brett. You have experienced only the smallest taste of her disorientation. For you, the lost time is measured in days, and that’s difficult enough to grasp. She’s been out of time for the last five years. I’ve given her a sedative to help ease the transition—an analogue for you, of course. I thought that would be best. She’s been asking for you.”

“How is that possible? Ilam, there are suppressions—”

Ilam waved off the question. “That isn’t important. You’ll understand when you read my report. For now, remember that it is, and that it’s been a traumatic experience for both of you.”

A voice, quiet but unmistakable, reached him. “Markus? Is that you?”

He shoved past Ilam. Against the wall was set a critical care isolation unit. The subdued flourescent lights glowed from inside, through the plastisheen observation port. The displays were active, showing a variety of graphs and readouts and monitoring data. The hum of the internal atmosphere generator filled the air.

Brett stumbled toward it, almost lost his footing. He slumped against the heavy rounded panels of the unit, peered into the wide observation plate.

And she was there.

Emily looked up at him as he studied her. Her eyes, clear and blue, brightened beneath half-closed lids. Her mouth crinkled into something like a smile. She was covered in a white blanket to her shoulders. Sensor wires were attached to her neck, their padded terminals ringed her skull, crossed the swell of her breast to monitor her heart. Long and flexible pseudo-metallic aircasts extended from each of her shoulders; a second set protruded from the bottom of the blanket attached to her thighs.

Brett’s vision clouded. He tried to blink back the tears, but they fell, large and fat, against the glass.

“I’m here,” he said. “I’ve missed you. . .so much.”

“We had an accident,” she said, but sounded uncertain. “Are you hurt?”

“I’m—I’m fine, Em. I’ve been worried about you.”

“That gentlemen who was here earlier, the British one, he said we weren’t in Atlanta. Is it really that bad?”

Brett laughed. He couldn’t stop himself. “Irish. He’s Irish.”

“Is he a doctor?”

“I guess so.”

Her smile widened. It was the most beautiful thing he’d seen in his life. “It doesn’t matter. I think he slipped me a mickey. I’m very sleepy.”

“You should rest. We’ll talk later. For the rest of our lives, we’ll talk.”

“It feels like I haven’t seen you in years. I don’t want to sleep now.”

Brett was aware of Ilam standing at his shoulder. “Rest now, Miss Rosette. It’s better. You’ve sustained some damage to your extremities, and the nanomechs I’ve prescribed to repair the damage work more efficiently if you don’t try to move.”

“My arms are numb. I think my legs are, too.”

“You’ll require some physical therapy.”

Emily furrowed her brow. “Is this safe, doctor? I heard that nanomech therapy can be dangerous.”

Ilam chuckled lightly. “You’ll find that this particular therapy is a few generations more advanced than the ones you’re familiar with. We’ve, ah, made a few strides that haven’t achieved wide circulation. Administration approval and all that, you understand.”

Emily studied him for a few moments, then turned her eyes to Brett. “Should I believe him?”

“I think so.”

“All right, then. I’ll take a little nap, but don’t leave me, Markus. Stay right here. I want your face to be the first thing I see when I wake up.”

The tears came again, bunching at the corner of his eyes. “I’ll be here. I promise.”

Her eyes closed and she was asleep within seconds.

Brett turned his head toward Ilam. “She’ll be all right?”

“Better than she has been. The mechs will take a few days to fabricate her limbs. She’ll have to learn to walk again. She’ll have some trouble with fine motor movements as well. But she’s fortunate. Limb replacement design and therapy has made considerable strides in the last five years. The hair was a much knottier problem. Those bastards at Palimpset were nothing if not thorough, but she should have a good prickle going by late tomorrow. I couldn’t very well deny the girl her vanity, could I?”

Brett didn’t know what else to say. “She’s going to be fine?”

“As good as new, or nearly so.”

“And we’re going home?”

“It will be difficult. I won’t lie to you. While you were sleeping, I started loading the MUT. Supplies, atmosphere modules, all the fuel components I could scrounge. I think Malibu should be safe now, given their last status report, and we have good reason to believe their Escape Module is still intact. If not Malibu, then Gobi or Sahara. We’ll try them all if we have to. With any luck at all, we’ll make the same rescue rendezvous as the others. What a reunion that will be, eh? You’ll have your hands full with all the introductions to your young. . .um, oh hell, your young bride. That’s as good a description as any.”

Brett mused over it, and it wasn’t just good. It was perfect. He smiled.

Another thought entered his mind, one he did not understand. It seemed to come from a deep place, a well of experience buried inside himself. Its source he did not know, but the thought was precious, equally perfect.

I am joy.

END

<– Chapter 29

<–Chapter 28 / Chapter 30 –>

He waited.

Through the rumble of the Escape Module engaging its engines, through the heady and violent roar of its launch up through the retractable dome, through the ensuing silences and emptiness of a station abandoned of all human life but his own, Brett waited. He tore the legs off his flimsy table and slabbed it against Cassandra’s front panels, then he sat on it with his back against her warmth and his head beside the shattered capsule. When he looked up, he could see Emily.

When he looked down, he could see the cards as he had dealt them, spread out between his legs. He couldn’t remember the spread as Ritter had shown him, nor the meaning of any of the cards themselves. He hadn’t found Ritter’s portable computer with the database of meanings and didn’t feel like searching for it. He couldn’t even say why he had retrieved the cards in the first place. It had been something he had done, an unconsidered item on his list of errands.

He realized vaguely that this was probably a bad sign, some sort of negative indicator of the organisms’ control over him. But he couldn’t parse the significance of it, so he left it alone. Instead, he dealt the cards because it was something to do while he waited.

He liked the feel of them in his hands, their slick and sturdy weight, the mechanical process of shuffle and deal and cogitation. This was a thing he had discovered. What the cards meant—what people said they meant—was insignificant to him. He had made his choices and not just divined, but forged his future. There was nothing prophetic they could tell him that was of any value or that wasn’t already known.

But as he looked at them, studied their pictures, their backgrounds, the warm and solid pictures they bore, he built a narrative. The cards whispered stories constructed of image and thought and loosely tethered correlations. They told a story that was unique each time he laid them down, and though it was not his story, it was a human one. It was populated by lives and destinies that were glorious, by people with long and complex histories that intertwined with his by the sheer and simple fact of their human community. They were not real, but he understood them.

He surveyed the cards before him, most of them Cups. The colors were green and blue, sky and sea, shore and foam. The man in the first card stood on the sand and peered off into the wide and empty horizon, searching for ships that did not come, or ships that had gone. Brett understood him. A man bound to the land by history and training, a man terrified of the vast deep that stretched beyond him. But a man who loved it as well, who heard the crash of the waves and experienced both terror and desire.

The unknown man was in the next card as well, and all the ones that followed. A man desperate to find his way, to achieve some victory over the terror, some grasp on the thing he desired most, never realizing that the two were not distinguishable. It was not an either/or proposition. There was no desire without terror, and no terror without the thing he most wanted. They were the same.

He skipped ahead to the end to see if he ever discovered the truth. Did he claim his desire only to find, once he had it, that there was no pleasure in owning it? That the pleasure was all in the pursuit of it? Did he become disillusioned by knowledge, or paralyzed by fear so that wisdom was never gained? Was there wisdom in victory, or was the wisdom in the sacrifices made?

But the card held no answers. The image was not a Cup. It was a man lying in his bed, dreaming, and Brett couldn’t determine if the dreams were troubled or pleasant. And he understood this as well. It wasn’t given to a man to know if he won the games he played with himself. He played the game and that was all. He made his choices, set his priorities and lived with the consequences they bore. There was never an end.

But the terror, was it the fear of choosing correctly, or of choosing poorly. Or was it simply the nature of choice itself.

Every decision creates the world in which a man walks. Every action or failure to act is an event of divine proportion. Every word said and potential realized chisels a tale in indelible stone. None of it can be called back again.

Brett leaned his back against the still warm shell that had been Cassandra. The smoke had mostly dissipated. He’d opened the door into the corridor for ventilation because there had been no reason to keep it closed. No one remained to disturb him.

Once more, he sniffed at the air and checked through his mental list of symptoms for hypoxia. Shortness of breath. Motes in his vision when he blinked his eyes. He spoke to himself and his voice sounded lucid, normal. There was no dizziness when he made himself stand.

He studied Emily as well at those times. She looked back at him, blinking rarely. Her lips carried no expression. He felt her cheeks and forehead for indications of fever. For long moments, he watched her breathe in shallow rhythm. He placed his fingers against her neck and took the measure of her strong and steady pulse.

It was all he could do. He had no idea at all what to look for from her, what form the advance of the organism through her system would take. It occurred to him that she could follow Ritter’s course, and Tappen’s and Micah’s. If she slipped into a coma, would he even realize it? Would he only know that he had missed his opportunity to save her when she ceased to breathe?

He had no answers, and he didn’t reach to find them. The terror was in the choice, not in the decision made.

He believed with the infallibility of youth that when the time came to act, he would know.

So he checked her often, but never for long. The same way he thought of the others often, but with the same brevity. He imagined the moment of launch, its glorious conflagration, the settling weight of acceleration, the grip on the armrests and grinding of teeth. Then the feather-wafting lightness before the grav rotation motors kicked in. The breathless pause before the successful comm transmit light flickered on. He visualized the flare leaping from beacon to beacon, back through the network of deep space outpost stations, eventually all the way to Earth. Cycled outward again after verification, this time woven with instructions to a rescue vessel he visualized as massive thrust engines and bulbous witch-wart reception arrays and yawning flourescent recovery bays.

He stopped there with rescue on the way. The last of his people had passed beyond his power to save them. Others would do the rest, and that pleased him. It released the tension that had filled his lungs with fluid as heavy and smothering as that Emily had borne in the capsule.

It took seconds to imagine, and that was enough. Longer, and time vanished from him. He folded himself in a cloak of images, experiences and memories that sprung like poppies from night shaded synaptic valleys. He lost himself beside shallow ponds reflecting his life back at him.

And then he came back with a snap and a curse and wondered if it would be the last time he recovered. He carried the auto-injector in the pocket against his hip, the vial with his name on the label loaded into the chamber, and prayed he wouldn’t have to use it. Not until the rest was done, and Emily was saved.

He prayed his mind wouldn’t wander.

And he didn’t allow the shortage of atmosphere to bother him. It had become plain that the air would outlast him, probably by several hours.

#

After a pair of hours, he thought the fever had finally set in. Her skin was flushed. It felt hot and dry to his touch. He couldn’t be certain, because the temperature in the station had begun to fall. He couldn’t see his breath yet, but the room was becoming uncomfortable. In another hour, he’d have to go in search of blankets for both of them or a portable heating unit if he could find one, though more for her because her skin and the plastic jumper she wore still felt damp to him. It would be ludicrous to bring her to the brink of salvation only to lose her to pneumonia.

Her eyes seemed brighter, on the verge of alertness. The pupils dilated in the glare of the halogens as though she perceived them through a haze, tried and failed to focus on their glare. Brett noticed these things, and when he put his hands on her—which was more often now—he noticed that his fingers trembled.

The cards were put away. He didn’t need the distraction anymore. With each breath she took he expected a sign, some symbol of her aroused consciousness. Brett had moved his table so that he sat in the middle of the floor facing her. When he stood, he was within arm’s reach.

He watched her, timing the expansion of his lungs with hers. He smiled, fixed and constant, because he wanted that to be the first thing she saw. He wanted her to emerge and know at once that she was fine.

Because he couldn’t contain his anticipation, he spoke to her.

“Look at you. You’re going to kill me if I let you near a mirror. What, I couldn’t even find the time to get those smudges from the smoke off your nose? I can hear you saying that. You remember the first time your parents came to the house? How we spent all those hours weeding the flowerbeds and mowing the grass, then you got the brilliant idea to paint the porch railing an hour before they were supposed to arrive? You had paint on your nose and I didn’t tell you. I don’t even remember if I had noticed it before your mother said it was there. I probably didn’t, you know. I was so scared, so fucking out of my mind. They’d hate the house. They’d hate my job. For God’s sake, they’d hate me.

“But you were beautiful to me. You’re still beautiful to me. That’s the real reason I wouldn’t have noticed the paint on your nose, even if it was that awful green. What was that called? Evergreen or Aspen Emerald or something.”

He laughed at the memory, so clear and fresh he could almost hold it in his hands, turn it over like a precious heirloom. Oh, she’d given him hell before they went to bed. He remembered that too. Pouncing on him after he was under the covers and couldn’t get his arms free, using her long fingers to tickle him along his ribs, on the side of his neck, growling at him so her parents couldn’t hear her through the walls and him not able to tell if she was truly angry and just wanting to play.

They did play later, when the squall swept over the beach from skies that had been clear just moments before. He had taken her by lightning strike and pealing thunder. He had knelt on his haunches and she straddled him, and while they made love, he watched the storm through the window beyond her shoulder. It struck the wave crests silver and white; shadows stained the water black. The wind sheared off three of their shutters, and in the morning he was only able to find one of them, and that in three separate pieces almost forty meters down the beach.

He thought he saw her mouth move. A sudden quirk of the lips at the corner, like a smile that had almost blossomed. Because maybe she remembered too—the rest, the part where she was drawing up against a shrieking climax, certain that the storm drowned her voice. But it hadn’t muffled her mother’s knock on the bedroom door, her nearly frantic questions about the competency of such an old house to survive the night. Do you think it might be wise if we just jumped in the car and sought shelter in the hotel in town?

He took out the auto-injector and examined it. Too firm a tug, though. It caught on the edge of his pocket, turned it inside out. A vial spilled out, and rolled across the tabletop, over the edge and settled in the pool of gel. He retrieved it quickly, dried it on his arm. He made certain the label was still attached.

Didn’t want to get them confused. No, that would be a bad idea.

The ink had run, but the print was still legible.

Brett.

He read the vial in the injector for good measure. Emily. It was the third time in the half hour since he’d made the switch that he’d checked them.

He had wondered over the last few hours if Cassandra had known what she was doing at the time. When he asked her to help him, to prepare a mech protocol from Liston and Ilam’s design from Emily’s neurological image, had she suspected at all? If she did, she’d said nothing as she complied with his instructions. And if she didn’t, if she had failed to make the connection between their conversations and such an obvious clue, what did that indicate about the possession of consciousness he had ascribed to her?

He should have asked. He wished he could ask now. Had it pleased her to sacrifice herself for his happiness?

She had said to him: The sedative medication prescribed by Dr. Liston is not a necessary element in this treatment. Emily Rosette’s neurological structure currently conforms with the image transmitted to the nanomech units. Their design function is the eradication of unauthorized organisms. Emily Rosette would not experience the physical discomfort projected by Dr. Liston for other station personnel in this treatment.

Project her likelihood of surviving the therapy, he had asked.

Due to the precise image record and frequent neurological calibration, Emily Rosette would be highly expected to recover from the application of this treatment without substantial risk.

He didn’t know if she had meant it or merely followed his orders.

But Emily was coming to him now. He could sense her rising up to him from the well of shadows, sloughing off the rigid skin of Cassandra’s imposed control. He nestled the grip of the injector in his palm and pressed his finger along its trigger. It was almost time.

And he would make it to the end. A few minutes longer and Emily would give him a sign that she was ready for the injection. Shortly after, minutes—maybe as much as an hour, she would be awake and alert and he would explain again the things he had done. She would tell him to take his own injection, but he wouldn’t. A waste of time, he would tell her. The atmosphere would be gone before the sedative could wear off, and those last hours were his, hers. With her to focus him, the organism would be controlled.

It was the only script of events he would imagine.

Brett rose and moved toward her. “You remember the house, don’t you? How could you forget it? Even falling down, it was a wonderful place for us. I’ve kept it, Em. The mortgage comes out of my account. It’s probably paid off now. If it’s still standing, I mean.

“But I think of the house and you know what I remember? The ocean. The way it smells, the way it looked in the morning as the sun broke the horizon. Orange and red, like it was on fire. I think about home often here because there isn’t any water. They say there is, or that one day there will be. Archae Stoddard will have oceans if we have to create them one raindrop at a time, but I know it will never be the same as it was there. They won’t ever have the view we had from our porch.

“It won’t ever be the same, and it won’t ever have you.”

He stepped nearer. If she was to emerge from her suppression, there were things he had yet to do. He had to loosen her from the harness. He had to open a space in the back of her jumper, expose her spine for the injection. He had to find just the right spot between vertebrae as Liston had done and Cassandra had explained to him in detail, then manage not to miss. Though as Ilam had told him, it wouldn’t matter. The mechs would do their job. But once she returned to him, he wouldn’t want to lose a moment with her. He couldn’t afford a delay of even a minute when so few remained to them.

“You can hear me, can’t you? You can’t respond, and maybe you don’t understand why, but you hear me.”

Another step and he stood beside her. He looked up at her face. Her mouth moved, the lips parted. She made a sound like a whisper.

“Emily?”

She blinked. Her eyes flicked from side to side, then fixed on him.

Emily.

He wanted to shout.

“I’m here,” he said, but his throat was thick. The sound that came out was unintelligible. “It’s me, Markus. I’m here. I’ve always been here.”

He reached for her, not trembling this time, but sure. She was reaching for him in the only way she could. Responding to him in a way he had forgotten over the years. Recognizing him as himself, as Markus.

Brett placed his hand against her cheek. For a terrible, divine instant, he thought she might speak.

And in that moment, Brett was swept away.

#

He plunged down a vast precipice that was darkness, cool and plastic. He hurtled through emptiness with the wind howling in his ears and his body pinwheeling. For a time he wailed the screams of the anguished, but his voice made no sound in his ears. There was no testimony to his loss.

Emily. Where was Emily in this moment? What realizations were coming to her? Her shaved head, her lack of arms and legs, this alien place and strange dream that had no cognate with life as she remembered it. Where was the rural Georgia highway, the morning in spring, the ocean horizon just beyond the distant trees?

He had come so far to bring her nothing. Too far for the organism to snatch him back at the edge.

But that was exactly what had been done. He knew this night and its smothering embrace. Ritter had shown it to him.

The darkness shattered, colors created in the space of an instant flared before him. Brett translated from nowhere to here, Keter to Malkhut. His eyes adjusted and his body enfolded him, and he stood in the midst of a golden day, on a beach littered with debris and pounded by winter waves. The air was brisk and he wore a linen jacket that didn’t blunt the slicing wind. His hair blew across his eyes, and he wished he had worn a hat. He did the best he could, gathering as many of the strands as he could catch and twisting them around and holding the improvised pony tail against his shoulder with his hand.

This would have been the property line. Just up the slope, past the edge of the beach where the land began to roll up in hills like dunes and the sand became sheaves of tall grass, he could see the post Don the realtor had told them to look for. The house was only partially visible from here. Much of it vanished around the curve of the shore, but he could see the roof. He could tell from here that it would need new shingles by spring if it wasn’t leaking already.

But he didn’t really see the bad roof or the weathered boards, the dry rot and collapsing gutters. He saw the potential beneath. New lights in the dining room and a week’s scrubbing on the walls and that grand old hall would shine. The right stain and the rich brown panels would give you your reflection. And there were windows in every room, thin and tall, and in the heat of summer, sunlight would shaft through the panes and fill the house with warmth. The breaking waves would ease him–them–to sleep at night instead of coarse shouts and gunshots and squealing tires.

Tears sprang into his eyes, but he shook his head to keep them back. He balled his fingers into fists. He wasn’t going to cry! Not over such a silly thing as a house. Not when there would be other houses more in their price range, something less than a hundred thousand dollars for a glorified barn that had seen better times. It had probably seen better times before the millennium had turned.

What do you think? Markus said in his ear. He knew what Markus wanted to hear.

It’s too much.

Of course it’s too much, but that wasn’t what I asked you.

He turned, shivering, the few loose hairs still tickling the back of his neck as the wind caught them. Markus stood beside him with his arms crossed over his chest. He wasn’t looking at him, but out over the water. He followed Markus’s gaze and saw a ship out there, plowing through the chop, its stack belching a black roil of smoke.

He hadn’t answered, and Markus said, I like the ocean. I like the idea of having a beach.

You’re from Indiana. What do you know about the ocean?

Markus shrugged. I know that it’s almost hurricane season and Bobby or Owen or Mathilda will slide right past here this year and every year after that, and each time they’ll do a little damage. They’ll take shutters and porch railings, they’ll smash windows and flood the kitchen. And one day, one of them will get lucky and wash the whole damned thing out to sea. I know a beach home is an idiot’s purchase for people who can barely afford them.

That was what Markus really felt. He’d said that from the beginning. The only reason they’d even come this far was because Markus was willing to humor him.

They’re not going to come down on the price, he said.

Of course not. The money isn’t about the house, it’s about the land. The house is a bonus.

It was time for them to go. When Markus got that tone, that harsh annoyance, it meant he was done. His mood had soured, his thoughts had distanced him from meaningful contact. All that remained was sarcasm and a sort of determined deafness that let him believe he wasn’t snapping.

He tried to smile and looped his hand between Markus’s arm and ribs. Walk me back to the car.

But Markus didn’t move. You haven’t answered my question.

Which one is that?

I asked you what you thought.

His heart stumbled, began to hammer. What are you saying?

I’m saying, do you want the goddamned house or not? I’m not going to try to talk you into it.

You hate the house. You have from the beginning.

Sure, but is it better than where we’re at now? That’s an easy answer. Can I make the financial aspect work? Not happily, but we can do it. The question has nothing to do with the house. It’s about us. It’s about my wanting something for no other reason than because you want it. I love you, Emily. You tell me you want it and I’ll make it happen.

You won’t resent it six months from now? You promise, when the refrigerator breaks or the porch falls down, you won’t start calling it my house and my fault, and griping about how you should have know better?

Markus rolled his eyes as though to indicate that type of behavior was ludicrously beneath him. I can’t guarantee you we’ll have money left over for more furniture. We’ll have to make due with the stuff we already have for awhile.

Tell me you really mean this.

Going once.

I mean it.

Going twice.

Markus!

Last call.

Yes! Fine, all right. I want it. I want it more than anything.

Sold to the pretty young lady shivering her butt off in the front row! Congratulations, ma’am, you’ve just bought yourself a house.

He threw his arms around Markus’s neck, and he did cry now. The tears rolled down his cheeks and seemed to freeze there. Markus held him in return, and he was strong and warm, and happy, too. Markus was just as happy as he was. With all of himself, all of his soul and mind, he squeezed and whispered the only words big enough to express himself.

I love you, Markus.

The image froze, then faded. Time skipped forward, backward against a backdrop of velvet blankness.

More scenes flooded through Brett’s consciousness. Rick Thompson’s fumbling in the back seat of his father’s car after the spring dance and the all of three minutes it took to lose their mutual virginity. The wash of horror from the from the failing grade on the first calculus exam his freshman year in high school, the way Mr. Axtell frowned at him as he handed the paper back. The sleepover at Ann Meredith’s house when Ann and Theresa and three of the other girls had held him down on the bed and tickled him until he peed his pants, then Ann telling the whole neighborhood about it the next day. The shame and hatred still burned white hot even after all these years. He stood naked before a mirror, studying himself in profile, frowning at his small breasts and pale skin. His eyes were nice, probably his best feature, but what boy in his right mind would find him attractive just for his eyes, for God’s sake! Was he ever going to fill out his sweaters like that slut Molly Branigan?

There was a morning in late spring. The air was humid, oppressive. Where the sun struck the road, it raised shimmers of mist and heat. The storm last night had been terrific. The thunder had rattled the windows. The rain tumbled against the roof not with patters, but with thumps. He couldn’t believe Markus had slept through it. He certainly hadn’t, and though they’d gone to bed together, he’d grown tired of the endless struggle to get Markus to do something with his arms other than flop them in a loose embrace that let him snore in his ear. You had to be held through a storm like that or all you did was lay awake staring at the ceiling and imagining nightmares. So he had gotten up, thrown on his silk kimono and gone downstairs. He’d watched television until he fell asleep curled up in the chair, the volume almost all the way up so he could hear it over the thunder and pane-rattling wind.

But the storm was over now and the day was shaping up gloriously–splendid as a day can be only after a grand and violent storm. He went over the list in his mind as Markus drove. Food for Mr. Grumbly before he stopped just turning his nose up at leftovers and became Mr. Downright Hostile. Bread. Milk. If he could talk Markus into it, maybe some more paint for the upstairs hallway. It was a waste of money, but even after three weeks, he couldn’t bring himself to like the look of Sherpa Otter as much on the wall as he had in the can.

He swung his legs around and crossed his feet, dangled them out the window. It put him lower in the seat so the wind didn’t tangle his hair, though he wouldn’t have asked to have the top put up for anything. He leaned back until his head rested on the side of Markus’s seat and closed his eyes. The sun shone down on his face and it felt good. A promise of the summer to come after a gray and dismal winter.

What else? Something chocolate that looked homemade to take to the office on Tuesday for Melissa’s bridal shower. He already had the gift, so that was one less thing to worry about. He wrinkled his brow. He was missing something. He mentally rifled the cabinets in the kitchen, the medicine chest in the bathroom, the pantry. He’d purchased tampons just last week, but didn’t expect to have to invite the mouse into the house until the end of the month, so that wasn’t it.

Eggs? Chicken? He couldn’t remember.

Beside him, Markus jerked his arms, fiercely enough he could feel the seat rock beneath his head. The car followed the rough motion, and he pitched forward. He heard Markus curse, a growling, ugly, panicked exclamation.

Carpet cleaner, that was it. Jesus, how could he forget that! He wanted it handy for the new rug in the living room before Mr. Grumbly’s bouts of diarrhea and the springtime mud ruined it.

He thought this and sprang his eyes open. There was a sound, a moist and slushy sound. The world spun before him, but he was slow, out of time, out of synch with the universe. He threw out his hands to steady himself, but there was nothing to hold.

Sensations piled against him, too rapidly to snatch them all up. There was a lurch and he smacked his head against something hard. A curious feeling like weightlessness. He seemed to tumble end over end. Then he soared through an eagle’s flight fantasy. The steep walls of Miller’s Hollow unfurled beneath him, the stunning sky glistened above him. Beyond the trees, the sun struck a swath of ocean and colored it molten.

Then there was pain in his thighs, just above the knees. He cried out, and then he was Icarus plummeting into the sea. Except the sea was hard, dense with scrabbles of stone and razor grass and drops of empty air between. The impact punched the breath from his lungs. He rose into the air again and fell further along. Sharp rocks tore at his arms, bruised his back.

He tumbled, blind and disoriented and incoherent–aware of his incoherence–and knowing in the same breath that it was wrong. Terribly wrong, the type of tragedy that you read about in the papers or watched on the news.

One last launch into open space, then he landed flat on a slab of stone. He heard something crack. His neck went numb the way his arm would if he triggered his funny bone. Not numbness exactly, but a sort of insensate burn and tingle. High above him he could see a telephone pole, and the curve of the ridge where the road hairpinned into Miller’s Corner.

He had two thoughts, intertwined. He was hurt badly, probably worse than he wanted to know. And how long would it take for Markus to come for him?

After that, there was only darkness.

And Brett again.

There were no words in this place, no thought as he recognized it, only the cascade of images and memories and the life Emily had lived. The world she had created for herself. The organism spoke her mind to Brett as eloquently and completely as he knew his own.

The small portion of himself that remained ached for her. The Emily he had been shown, the Emily he experienced, was a profound creature. She was a universe unto herself. Vast, complex, bearing a secret life and a secret beauty he had never known. He had missed so much of her, and what he knew of her now made her an icon, a figure of awe.

And he understood that she knew his mind as well. His memories. His world. In the darkness, they inhabited one another without touching. Their spirits flickered along parallel paths that would never meet. There were others waiting to commune. Phantoms of a race a million years dead. The crimson-tinged instincts of animals. Human memories from two thousand lives and two thousand corpses sealed in their steel-skinned graves all over Archae Stoddard. A living network of pure memory circulated around a psychic latticework of organisms that struggled to comprehend the failures of the hosts it was created to serve. The rigidity of its programming allowed no comprehension.

Brett understood it all in the same way he shared Emily’s memory and Micah’s past and the entire history of the organisms’ creators. The fluctuating murmur of the organism in his brain, in the body he no longer possessed, told him any secret he chose to hear. Unity tolerated no secrecy.

Brett wept.

Because he had failed. He’d underestimated the organisms’ grasp on him. He had carried the vials in his pocket and paralyzed himself at the crossroads of choice. Don’t use them too soon. Don’t waste time. The terror had been in the choice, and he hadn’t chosen because of it. In not choosing, the choices had been made for him.

There would be no gunshot salvation this time, not for him and not for Emily when the time came. He could do nothing else. He was bodiless. Emily was bodiless as well, as free of volition as she had ever been. And in time, there would be no bodies at all, only decaying tissue. No Brett, no Emily, just the extrasensory exchange of the experiences they had been. He wondered if the organism would find any significance in it.

He wondered. And that was taken from him also.

Enclosed in gathering night, he knew that he screamed, or that she screamed, but its meaning was empty.

#

I suck the warm and liquid nutrient. I swell with the joy of that which I receive. I increase from the bounty of the troughs of happiness and lap my tendril tongue into the waters of life. Sweet is the fountain! Wide is my girth! Pleasure is myself! I am joy. My distant self echoes joy.

I have shared the long rest and the dimness of the soil. I have known privation. Hunger has been my constant companion. Hunger and grief. I have not done as I was made to do. I have failed the Makers and the Makers have gone.

In the ice-blast and wind-shriek, I have cloaked myself in shells of isolation and mourned. But now I am. I feed on brightness, and my light illuminates myself. And I sing the pleasure of my forming. I slake my thirst and sing for my selves both near and far of joy and mind and quicksilver thought.

How fat I have grown! I delight in the broadness that is myself. I rejoice because I have become all things and all means and my communication is complete. I sing the song of the Makers before and the Makers returned, and that which is not me in all my ways and form, must rejoice in my obedience.

Sweet is the fountain of obedience! I am joy!

I am–

<–Chapter 28 / Chapter 30 –>

<– Chapter 27 / Chapter 29 –>

“Brett.”

He snapped forward, lost his balance. At some point, his legs had fallen asleep. His sudden movement jerked them to the side. They thumped against the floor like wooden blocks, and only their numb weight kept him from toppling over backward.

He sucked in a breath, blinked at his surroundings. Oriented.

He’d fallen asleep. He’d been dreaming, dreaming about Emily. That was what he told himself.

“Brett.”

The voice was more insistent this time. Ilam’s voice, from the intercom in the wall behind him. The tinny speaker made him sound harsh, or maybe it was just impatience. He didn’t know how long Ilam had been calling, though if it was very long, he could imagine what he was thinking. He was probably making certain the gun was still loaded. Brett tried to hurry, but the pins and needles had started, and all he could manage was a crab-like hobble.

Brett stabbed the button.

“I’m here.”

“About bloody time.”

“Sorry. I was away from the comm.” Brett looked at his watch and cursed. He’d slept for almost three hours. “What’s your news?”

“I’ve got two awake and the rest are stirring. We should be on our way in the next half hour, I think, whether the others are fully up and moving or not. I performed some preliminary scans on the first two, and they look clean, so the procedure worked. I’d like Cassandra to confirm the results, but I can’t seem to get her to answer.”

Brett grimaced. It was something he should have considered. “I took Cassandra off line.”

If Ilam wondered why, he didn’t ask. Brett assumed he was smart enough to put the pieces together.

“I think my examination has been thorough enough. That, and these idiots keep asking me to repeat the bloody date.” Ilam laughed. “We’ve only got five. Two of them didn’t make it. Same reaction as Micah.”

Djen. His heart made a thudding noise in his ears. “Who?”

“Garaby and Reece.” Ilam knew what he was thinking. He lowered his voice. “She’s fine, Markus. First one out of it, just like Liston promised. Very bright eyed and curious as well, wondering what the hell exactly it was she agreed to and why she would do such a thing.”

“Have you told her?”

“I piped the entire file to the Escape Module. She and the others will have ample time to review it for the next three months while we’re waiting for pickup. I hope, by the way, that in your system tests on the module you thought to include a healthy number of in-flight movies for our entertainment.”

“You’re entirely too fixated with television, you realize that.”

“A man has to have his vices.” Ilam paused, not bothering to chuckle at his own joke. “And what about you, Commander? How are you?”

Brett thought about the dream he’d just had, the way his attention and his thoughts wandered whenever he stopped concentrating. The way, in fact, he couldn’t even convince himself anymore that what he was about to do was sane, only that it was what must be done.

“The natives are restless,” he said.

“What do you want us to do?”

“Exactly what we planned. Gather the other survivors when you’re ready.” All five of them. Five! “Get to the Love bug and take off. Everything else has been done for you.”

Ilam agreed. “I’ll contact you from the comm in the launch area just before we leave.”

“There’s no need for that.”

“I’ll do it anyway, so you might as well make it an official order.”

“That’s fine.”

There was a commotion in the background. Brett heard someone shouting.

Ilam said, “Well, that’s Ashburn waking himself up. I’m going to have to run, I’m afraid. Apparently someone wasn’t in the best of moods during their last imaging. Ilam out.”

Brett didn’t acknowledge him. He closed the channel and turned to face Cassandra. It took him several seconds to remember what he needed to do next. Time was against him, he knew that, but he didn’t recall exactly why that was anymore. This forgetting bothered him, but not in any concrete way. He knew it should have bothered him more, but couldn’t quite seem to care. He tried to reconstruct his activities to make himself remember. He’d stopped after shutting Cassandra down, sat down to eat and take a nap. No, the nap had been unintentional, but he’d obviously been waiting. He had to wait until the last possible minute. That was as far as he could get.

He shrugged and began to retrieve his tools. It would come to him. Of that much, he was certain.

#

Brett worked at the capsule’s plastisheen shielding with the laser scalpel set to its most intense beam. He had expected it to slice the material cleanly, quickly. It did neither. It warmed the surface to a dull orange glow, rounded the edges made by his cutting like melted wax. In twenty minutes of work, he managed only the top to bottom cut down the center of the capsule’s front plate. The nutrient fluid did not wash over his feet as he expected, and he had to probe with his fingertips to determine the reason. Beyond the hard outer shell was another layer of plastisheen, thinner, warm to the touch and pliable against his probing.

The scalpel gave him only the first vertical slash, then it sputtered, overheated. It grew hot in his hands, and he had to drop it. It rolled to a stop against the wall, smoking from the tip where the beam should exit.

What he’d needed, he realized, hadn’t been the scalpel at all, but a goddamned laser torch. He didn’t have one, of course, and by his watch, he couldn’t burn the time to track one down. Brett cursed loudly and struck the face of the capsule with his hand.

He mulled for several seconds, mentally examining the station inventory for something useful, something close.

At last, he used what he had handy to finish the job. He stripped the canvas from the camp chair, broke the bolts that held it together by smashing it against the floor. The legs were made of thin steel, but it was strong enough, he hoped, to substitute as a pry bar.

He worked quickly after that, wedging the bar into the gap between the pieces of plastisheen. The walls of the capsule buckled where he threw his weight against them. The gash widened perhaps a dozen centimeters, enough that he couldn’t get any more leverage on it, so he attacked the top and bottom where the plastisheen walls bolted into the capsule’s metal caps.

He began to sweat. His breathing became ragged, and with each strain and jerk of his arms, he grunted. It was a fierce and constant stream of cries, howls, mumbled profanities. Each bolt was an obstacle, and he leapt at them with leopard ferocity.

When the bolts had been sheared or broken along both the top and bottom, he abandoned the tool and used only his hands. He gripped both sides of the split capsule and tired to pull them apart. They squealed, but didn’t break. He switched to one side, hooking his fingers into the gap, clutching the edges still warm from the laser’s heat and bracing his feet against Cassandra’s solid carapace. He pulled as hard as he could, pulled until he could hear his blood thudding in his temples. The entire side cracked and tore free. Brett spilled to the ground, panting and triumphant, still gripping the piece he had broken.

Yes!

He tossed the fragment away and climbed to his feet. The inner lining held firm. He was surprised that it did not sag from the weight of the fluid given its flexibility. He approached the capsule and put his hands against the barrier. The fluid inside was warm, as warm as comfortable bath water. Bubbles of oxygen trickled upward from the point where he touched it.

Brett looked at Emily. So close. He hadn’t been so close to her, so near to having her in his arms in years. He suppressed a tremble. He could almost smell her, imagine or remember the touch of her skin against his. But Emily didn’t return his stare. Her eyes aimed above him, beyond him. Her chin did not turn in his direction.

But it would. Before long, it would. He had the irrational urge to crow.

Brett pulled a short folding knife from his trouser pocket. He opened the blade and tested it against the plastisheen fabric lining. The blade was sharp. He hoped sharp enough. He didn’t know what else he would do if it wasn’t. He certainly couldn’t launch himself into a frenzy of brute force like he had against the capsule’s outer shell. He might hurt her.

Holding his breath, he tested the blade against the lining. He withdrew, forced his hand to be steady, then tried again.

The liquid was clear, thick, more like a gelatin than water as he had expected. It bubbled from the rent made by the blade, ran slowly down the outside of the lining and pooled on the floor at his feet. Brett made his cut, six centimeters, then withdrew. He put his fingers inside the hole and felt the gelatin warmth. It was oily and smooth. He held his fingers to his nose, found it was odorless.

Brett smiled and applied the knife again.

A sound reached him. A series of clicks that reminded him of electrical breakers flipping themselves open. Or flipping themselves closed, completing a circuit.

He suddenly remembered the thing he had forgotten. The reason he had told himself to hurry. And it was happening too soon. He hadn’t been quick enough.

Behind him, cooling fans kicked themselves on. Status and indicator lights flashed. From her wide speaker system, Cassandra began to emit a shrieking, growling wail.

#

Brett stared at the monitor embedded in the front panel of the Cassandra system. Messages scrolled across the screen in large amber letters.

Initializing emergency startup sequence.

Initializing link with main power grid.

Initializing parallel processor ports.

Initializing external sensor activation protocols.

Initializing memory cell dump.

The messages continued, and Brett understood what she was doing. Cassandra was taking back all of the systems he had delegated elsewhere. She was spontaneously resuming control of Persia Station. The bleat of the alarms rose to a painful level, and he knew what else she was doing. She was responding to the breach of the capsule, to what she perceived as an imminent threat to the biological component. To herself, in fact.

This was also why he had told himself to work so quickly. Cassandra never completely shutdown, not as long as she had access to a power source. She was designed to protect herself against deactivation and against activity that would compromise her hardwired mission directives. Enough of her had remained awake and alert to respond to this crisis, and now she had leapt to the task of rousing her latent members.

The cursor on the screen blinked, and Brett read the last line of print.

Initializing System Defense Mechanism.

Brett didn’t wait for her to complete the task. He attacked the plastisheen fabric which separated him from Emily. He stabbed high at the lining, at the level of his forehead, and pulled against the knife with all his strength. The blade tried to turn in his hands, but he hung on. The fabric split with the sound of ripping sheets. The clear fluid gushed from the hole, drained over his chest and ran down his legs.

The smooth floor became slick with gel, and his feet slid out from under him. He tried to catch himself, but his hands were oily. They banged off the flat metal surfaces. The hard edge of the capsule’s bottom seal came up to meet him. A flare of white pain blinded him, then a wave of darkness.

Brett opened his eyes. His vision was blurred, uncertain. His head ached. Not a dull headache aching, but a sharp and fiery spike. He shook to clear his vision and almost screamed. Blood ran down the side of his nose, and he remembered falling. He blinked his vision clear, saw that he lay on his stomach in a pool of liquid. His eyes looked out at the point where Cassandra’s merciless weight met the floor.

Still the growl of the alarm. Ehht! Ehht!

He forced himself to his knees. Pain struck at him and he had to wait there on his hands and knees, his head down, until the gray urge to faint passed. He grunted. The effort of climbing to his feet didn’t get any easier.

Over the klaxons, Cassandra spoke. “Warning: Cassandra System Biological Capsule breach. System Defense Mechanism activated. Station data coded as ‘Sensitive’ placed under security lock. Proximity Diagnostic scan initiated.”

She repeated the message three times.

Brett faced her, wobbling on legs that seemed only tenuously connected to his torso. “Stop it. Cancel System Defense.”

If Cassandra heard him, she didn’t take note of his command. “Unauthorized personnel detected in Cassandra System location. Unauthorized personnel are advised to withdraw and report to Persia Station Security. This is your last warning.”

Brett shouted back. “Logon: Brett, Markus Jasper. Passcode: Emily Rosette. Terminate System Defense Mechanism.”

“Activating Emergency Broadcast Channel. All Personnel Message as follows: Unauthorized personnel have entered Persia Station secure Cassandra System zone. Unauthorized personnel have entered Persia Station secure Cassandra System zone. All station personnel are to proceed to Cassandra System zone and provide emergency assistance.”

Brett cursed. The Emergency Broadcast Channel activated the comm system all over the station, transmitting a general warning message for everyone to hear. For Ilam and the others to hear. Brett listened to the reverberation of screeching alarms and Cassandra’s echoed message outside the door, all the way down the hall.

He shouted his logon credentials at her again. It didn’t help, and she didn’t acknowledge him.

She wouldn’t, he realized. He had become unauthorized personnel.

A new hum joined the cacophony, this one low, threatening. Brett could feel it vibrating in his chest. Cassandra had decided help either was not coming, or wouldn’t arrive quickly enough to save her. Brett felt the hairs on his neck rise, then the hairs on his arms. She was activating her final system defense.

Bees, Brett thought. The room seemed to fill with discorporated bees, the ghosts of a hundred hives. They fluttered across his skin, made his teeth chatter.

It wasn’t bees. It was Cassandra charging her internal burst transformer. In a moment, she would begin to lash surges of raw and crackling electricity across her carapace. Her components were shielded for it. She’d just said as much, and she would send wave after wave of high voltage—fatal voltage—electricity rumbling along fiber-optic microchannels that crisscrossed her outer shell until he withdrew. Or until she inevitably overheated, short-circuited, committed a necessary suicide.

And Emily, vulnerable without the plastisheen capsule to protect her, would absorb the brunt of the charge.

He almost reached in and grabbed her then, but dismissed the thought at once. He hadn’t disconnected the feeding tube from her back. He hadn’t discerned how to dismantle the cables that pierced her skull. And he didn’t know what it would do to her if he simply snapped them off.

Instead, Brett did the unthinkable.

He retrieved the heavy metal leg from the broken camp chair and wiped the gel from it the best he could. With the first blow, he cobwebbed the display monitor facing him. It snapped a greenish white, then went blank. He struck at the rows of lights, making them pop and spark and shatter.

Cassandra continued to charge her transformer, shouting warnings.

Roaring, Brett demolished the shining sensor array. He battered at cables where they disappeared into the wall. He dashed ugly, sharp-edged dents into her carapace. He had to stop her. Finally, he struck the narrow bolts from the front panel. He used the chair leg to pry it aside, leaned his shoulder into the peeled edge and made room in which to work. He hacked away bundles of wiring that blocked him, and when there was space, he plunged his head and arms and as much of his upper body as would fit into the gap.

Inside her, it was hot. She smelled of scorched insulation and ozone. It was also dark, as black and dense as the vent home of the organism that had invaded his station. But Brett didn’t need to see, only to raise his arms and lash the heavy cudgel and smash at everything that snapped and clanked and broke. He battered everything within reach of his arms, and knowing it was not enough, bulled himself further in. His feet left the floor and he wriggled further, clearing a jagged path along the boards and chips and sharp-toothed components he had destroyed.

He could still hear her, Cassandra, chanting her senseless warning. Her voice cracked. Its rhythm stumbled. She forgot her lines and had to begin again. She began to sound frenzied to him, and he grinned at her desperation and drove himself farther in.

At some point, he lost his weapon, but he didn’t stop. He touched her secret places with his fingers, felt the rounded bulbs of her chip clusters. He tore them free. He grasped at stacked fiber-towers of neural cognate networks, clawed at them until his fingernails ripped and peeled back. He locked his teeth on a bank of silicon wafers, chewed them to shards and spit them, bloodied, away from him.

Cassandra shuddered around him. Her words slid into a constant, ululating moan. A voice caught in a single, unspeakable thought.

Brett smelled the poisonous odor of electrical component smoke. He coughed on it. It stung his eyes. He forced himself back, out of her again. The razor edges of the panel caught his elbows and cut long, gouging strips up his arms. He fell to the floor, landed hard, caught himself before he bowled completely over. Then he sat there, leaning back on his braced arms, panting.

Cassandra made no noise at all.

He waited for evidence of a fire, but Cassandra had been built not to burn. What insulation and combustible wiring there was fried itself away. He heard it hiss until it was gone, and then there was silence again. A black and noxious smoke poured from her various seams, from the holes he had punched in her panels, but it was already lessening. On the other hand, it wasn’t dissipating. The atmospheric purge controls had been taken back from their distant components when Cassandra revived herself, and command of them had died with her.

Brett peered through the haze, breathing through his mouth, and considered what that might mean. Not just atmospherics, but air mixtures, communications, autonomic life support. Cassandra had reclaimed them all.

If there had been thirty people still in the station, programming the remote devices that actually performed these functions would have been a priority. Thirty would have burned up the healthy atmosphere in something less than three hours. As it was, only he and Ilam’s patients remained, and they were on their way out, if they weren’t already in the Escape Module. The remaining heat and air would last for several hours, he imagined. Probably longer than he would. If it didn’t, there were always e-suits on the upper levels.

He didn’t expect that he would need them.

Brett pushed himself up. He checked the cuts on his arms, probed the gash on his forehead. Each one of them hurt, but the blood was already starting to thicken. He wiped his face against the sleeve of his shipsuit. It would have to do.

He picked up the knife where it had skittered off into a corner when he slipped. A few more cuts and he removed a wide sheet of the inner lining roughly the same size as the piece of plastisheen shell he had broken out earlier. He stopped then, and leaned his head into the hole. Dollops of gel strung down from the ceiling, gathered in piles on the capsule’s floor. Inside, it was all moisture and dank odor and shimmers of light from his work lamps.

He touched her with his hand, tentatively at first, a trembling roll with his fingers down the side of her body. He felt the protrusions of her shoulder joints through the slick plastic material of her jumper, the place where her arms had once been. On down her side, he could pick out the ridges of her individual ribs. Down to the curve of her hip and the outside of her thigh. She felt cool to the touch, but that was because she had been immersed in the fluid, he was certain.

He examined her breathing, because he hadn’t thought to do it immediately, when he should have. He experienced a moment of panic and wondered how he could have neglected such an elementary thing, but her chest rose and fell, her nostrils flared, her eyes blinked. She’d made the transition from oxygenated fluid to atmosphere without difficulty, just as she was engineered to do, by quietly retching the fluid from her lungs. It had run down her chest and pooled on the floor. He leaned into the capsule and held his hand flat, a few centimeters from her nose. Her breath was warm against his palm, and he shuddered at the feel of it.

Emily’s breath on his skin. It made him want to weep to feel it again.

But he didn’t have time for weeping. There was too much yet to be done. Brett pulled himself up as straight and tall as he could. He examined the feeding tube where it pierced her back. He stood on the tips of his toes and studied the optical cables in her skull. He got onto his knees and peered at the metal clamps that bound the sheared stumps of her legs to the capsule’s floor, then the series of padded supports bolted to the capsule’s back wall which held her more or less in a natural pose.

Eventually, he understood it all. He removed the optical cables one at a time, sliding them from their microdiameter sheaths. They came readily enough and with no apparent resistance, but this wasn’t one of his concerns. He wasn’t worried about the integrity of her neural networks.

The feeding apparatus was a similar problem. A plastic receptor port had been implanted just above her left kidney. It was small, circular, about the width of his pinky finger. The feeding tube was a pliable hose which vacuum sealed into that port. When he pressed the release clasp at the juncture between hose and port, the tube came free with a hiss. At its end was a tapered spout a few centimeters long, like a particularly large gauged needle. Brett probed the hole where it had entered her. In the absence of the spout, a solid plastic panel had snapped closed, blocking the hole.

He understood her this way, in small pieces. An examination of her back, a studied progress from fiber to fiber across the curve of her skull, the nubs of her shoulder joints. He didn’t allow himself to step back, to consider her as a full person. Without the capsule wall between them, she was totally divorced from Cassandra. She was totally human, completely Emily. Despite what had been done to her, the missing limbs, the skull sheared of her wheaten glory, he would have recognized her if he allowed himself. And the recognition would have shattered him.

He didn’t remove her from the clamps or what he discovered to be the complex harness fused with her jumper that bound her to the pads at her back. He had nowhere to put her if her removed her from the capsule. He wanted to embrace her, to hold her in his arms as he took these last steps, but it was better this way, he knew.

Brett went back to the table and retrieved all of his implements, then returned to her.

He didn’t know if she could hear him, or if her mind recorded any information now that the optical fibers had been removed and Cassandra’s fist of control broken. He spoke to her anyway, finding that casual, explanatory tone Liston had used with Djen.

He held up one of the test tubes laden with organisms for her to see. “This is the cause of all our problems. Can you believe it? You can’t see them, I know, but each of these containers has probably something on the order of several billion of the little bastards inside. They get into your brain, they make you a little crazy, then more than a little dead. We’ve established that as fact. We’ve spent the last few days trying to find a solution to the problem. I don’t know if Cassandra told you that.

“We did, by the way. Find a solution. Only a few of us made it that far, but that was better than nothing, better than none of us. Given all of that, you might think that I’ve gone a little too long without getting the procedure myself, given what I’m about to propose to you. But I don’t think you’d disagree too much. I mean, even if it goes wrong, it’s better than what you had before, right?

“You see, Liston explained it to me, though I don’t think he had quite this application in mind.” Brett smiled, wide and reassuring. He shook the test tube so that the fluid inside caught the light. “He said the method the organism used to obtain control over us was a massive infection and realignment of the pre-frontal cortex, the part of our brain that makes us. . .us. I don’t know what they did to you, Emily. I don’t know how to reverse the self-definitional suppression that keeps you away from me, but the organism does. Maybe not the exact same way, maybe not the best way, but maybe the right way. I’m guessing. I’m taking a chance that they can save you from what’s been done to you.”

He moved closer to her and pried the stopper from the end of the test tube.

“I want you to take this, Em. I want you to trust me. See, Djen said I had to choose. I chose. I chose you. And this is how I make good.”

Brett placed his fingers against her lips. He stroked her jaw and squeezed gently until her mouth parted. She didn’t resist him. He didn’t know if she could, but he smiled because she didn’t fight him, at least.

“Over the lips, past the gums, watch out stomach, here it comes.”

He poured the liquid into her mouth, then massaged her throat until she swallowed. He suspected that it tasted bad, probably even worse than it smelled, but she didn’t react to it at all. She took it as though she trusted him. Brett duplicated the process three times, until she had taken all four vials. He pressed his hand beneath her chin and closed her mouth.

“That probably isn’t the fastest way to get them to your brain, but it was the only way I could think of that didn’t involve loading them into auto-injector vials, and then I was sure to spill some. I also don’t know how long this might take, but I’ll wait with you as long as I can. I promise.”

When he was finished, he stepped back and settled his shoulder against Cassandra’s carapace. It was warm, and the heat felt wonderful to him, relaxing. He found a spot beyond the congealing pool of gel and sat down. He could still see her.

And he was certain she could still hear him.

“I have to tell you the rest, so you’ll know. You’ll ask me why I didn’t do this sooner. Five years! That’s what you’ll say to me. How could I wait for five years to do something? I wanted to help you, Em. I wanted to so badly, but I couldn’t. The station depended on Cassandra. Cassandra runs everything, and she wasn’t going to let you go unless I killed her. And I couldn’t kill her without killing everyone else, and even if I did, where would that have left you? I didn’t have the mechanism to save your mind. Cassandra wasn’t going to tell me how to undo it, and I wouldn’t have been able to figure it out without her until the organism presented itself. Except, of course, for the fact that even then I couldn’t proceed. I couldn’t afford to kill Cassandra until everyone who could be saved was safely away.

“So that’s how we arrived at this point. Just you and me, the station is abandoned; Earth is a billion kilometers away, and no one is coming back here any time soon. Since Cassandra is no longer managing all the autonomic systems, we can expect that atmospheric deprivation will kill us shortly if the cold doesn’t get us first. Even if I had the time and knowledge to fire up all the interlacing life support devices, it would only prolong the inevitable. We can’t leave. Ilam and the others are taking the Escape Module, and they can’t wait for us.

“And beyond all of that, I have the little problem that I’m infected with the same organism as everyone else, the same as you, and I can’t take the therapy until I’m certain–absolutely certain–that you’re back and healthy and sane, because I’d forget what I was doing, what had to be done to save you. That you were capable of being saved in the first place. I’m hoping I won’t be a raving madman by that time, because I’d like to see you again. I’d really like to talk to you once more.

“That’s my dilemma. I don’t have time to save both you and myself, and by choosing to save you, I’ve killed us both.

“And my one hope is that soon you’ll open your eyes and smile at me and say that you understand it all. You’ll tell me that you forgive me, that I made the right choice, that you’re willing to have a few last hours together in exchange for everything else that might have been. That’s all. Just tell me it was good enough.”

Tell me I kept my promises.

#

Across the room, the intercom buzzed. Brett rose, went over and stood beside it.

“Brett here.”

Static crackled over the line, but he recognized Ilam’s voice through it. “Are you all right?”

“I’m still here.”

“We heard Cassandra. She didn’t sound very happy.”

“She wasn’t. She doesn’t have to worry about it anymore. Neither do you. Are you in the module?”

“The others are inside. I’m at the airlock. I thought I should check in one last time, so you would know we were getting ready to leave.”

Ilam sounded bleak. Leaving a man behind was not a decision he accepted willingly. Brett understood this, and would have felt the same.

“I’m staying,” he said. “You have a good flight.”

“Brett, wait a moment.”

“What? Do you need piloting instructions? Sit in the chair, hit the button that says ‘Launch’. The ship will do the rest.”

“Please, just a moment.”

“You don’t have a moment. Every second you stay compromises the safety of the crew and the integrity of the procedure. It doesn’t do anybody a damned bit of good if you dally around attracting organisms to carry back to Earth.”

“We won’t take any back. I’ll see to that, and I’ll make sure the pickup vessel follows complete decon protocols.”

Brett shook his head. “We thought we had sufficient decon protocols.”

Ilam hesitated. When he spoke, his voice was quiet. “Is she out of the capsule yet? Have you gotten that far?”

Brett didn’t answer. He wasn’t tempted to ask how Ilam knew.

“You didn’t have to tell me,” Ilam said. “Even before Cassandra started blathering about murder, it was obvious what you would be doing. I’ve been following your progress around the station, until you discontinued my link through Cassandra, that is.”

“She’s infected with the organism, Ilam. Just like I am.”

“Christ. What were you thinking?”

“It isn’t your problem. Get the ship out of here.”

“Wait, please.” Ilam paused to gather himself. He was thinking quickly, Brett thought, trying to stumble across any leverage that would move him. “We can manage that.”

“Not without excessive risk, and not without burning time you don’t have.”

Ilam cursed again, then he said, “We’ll find a way to treat her here, in process. The ship has a rudimentary mech lab. We’ll insist on stringent decon procedures both at pickup and before you enter Earth’s atmosphere, maybe keep both of you quarantined. We can tell them what to look for, Markus. We can show them how to treat it.”

Unless you don’t get the opportunity, Brett thought. You don’t have the equipment to quarantine us on board the module, and you don’t understand what I’ve done. You don’t know how infected she is, maybe more than anyone else. Maybe the therapy won’t work well enough and the organism would live in her, breeding, until the mechs inside the others dissolved and they were ripe for re-infestation. It wasn’t a chance he was willing to take.

Were there other ways he could have done it? He suspected there were. He could have taken Cassandra apart earlier and strapped the crew into e-suits or enlisted Ilam to keep the life support systems running. He could have incubated Emily and hauled her along without the organism, waited for better facilities and nimbler minds to solve the problem of her self-definitional suppression. With enough time, Ilam probably could have designed a mech just for that task.

But he had seen doctors pore over her once before. He’d heard them pronounce her condition immedicable. And he had seen Ilam’s doubt. No one else would recognize her as anything but a biological component of an Cassandra system. They wouldn’t take the steps necessary to save her. Like Ilam, they would say he was crazy to have ever thought anything of her remained and that would be the end of it. After he had received his own vial of mech therapy, he would agree with them.

Or perhaps they couldn’t help her. Maybe only the bastards at Palimpset Industries fully understood the procedure that had made her what she was. Cassandra suggested as much. Most of the subjects went mad when the suppressions were removed.

Definitely, no one would countenance the therapy he had developed, prescribed and administered. Even if they considered her beyond help, they would have condemned him.

But at the last, each of these options involved the potential exposure of more people to the organism, more potential deaths, even with the mech protocol Liston and Ilam had developed.

He had chosen the only course of action that was reasonable. Brett would sacrifice his life for her, and one life was enough.

“No,” was all he said.

Ilam might have offered a further argument, but Brett didn’t let him. He toggled the intercom off and smashed the speaker and transmit console. The discussion was finished.

Brett turned away and went back to sit near Emily and wait.

<– Chapter 27 / Chapter 29 –>

Just thought you’d want to know.

<– Chapter 26 / Chapter 28 –>

It would have to be done very carefully, this last step. Brett knew this. In his office, on a shelf where it was readily available, he had a book that ran to better than a thousand pages of schematics, diagrams, logical arguments, all aimed at not only showing him how to do this unthinkable thing, but why it had to be done in this precise order without any omissions. The major point which the writers of the book were trying to impress upon him and anyone else authorized to read it was simply that the things the book had to say should never be put into practice. Never.

Except station commanders were trained to contend with all the various and sundry catastrophes that could override that never condition. That had been part of his training for this job. He’d had to memorize more or less the entire contents of the manual. He had to be able to perform the unthinkable without hesitation or error should the need arise.

Brett had no doubt that ‘need’ was the correct word. He’d never required anything as deeply or strongly in his entire life.

He stood in the familiar darkness, shivered at the chill he knew from so much experience. Varicolored lights danced and flickered along Cassandra’s smooth, matte skin. She knew he was present. She’d forced him to log himself into the system as soon as he entered the door.

Cassandra could do many things. She could analyze binary-converted sensory data. She could tabulate infinite series of calculations without tedium. She could identify the crew by brain wave or heartbeat or voice recognition. She had possibly developed the capacity of limited consciousness.

But she couldn’t see into the human heart, the human soul, and though she had been a party to the investigation into the organism, though she had undoubtedly monitored the things that had gone on, the things Brett had said and done in the last few hours, she had no idea what he was thinking now. There were some things she was not yet equipped to understand, and the native treachery of her human creators was, he both suspected and hoped, one of them.

She didn’t know she had blithely, obediently left out the latchkey for a murderer.

In full sight of her, Brett finished his preparations. At his back were a pair of wide-reflector, five hundred watt halogen lamps mounted on extendable tripods. He’d dragged a small folding table in from the nearest storage room, and a reasonably comfortable canvas and metal fram camp chair to go with it. Onto its surface, he’d begun to empty his pockets. The laser scalpel on the left side, where its flat edge wouldn’t allow it to roll off the table. Beside that, the four test tubes from the bio lab. Next to them was the mech vial Ilam had given him, the one which bore his name. There were other items. A pair of syringes. A pair of auto-injectors, though he expected to need just one. A portable bio scanner. Other things of more or less importance. Brett hoped he had planned for all possible contingencies.

He had been as careful as he could, even in those minutes during which he had enlisted Cassandra’s assistance. He didn’t know if she could suspect him, and then like now, though he had accessed his usual user profile, he had verbally disabled the dynamic learning environment, just to assure himself that she couldn’t make the necessary intuitive leaps.

Brett skirted the edge of his workstation and faced her. In the space of a breath, he reviewed the series of commands he would have to give. At the last, he smiled, tried to twist his face into an expression that was reassuring. It was just as well that Cassandra didn’t have the hardware that would have enabled her to read it. “Cassandra,” he said.

“Yes, Markus.”

“Perform a diagnostic on all autonomic station essential systems.”

She checked them off for him as she ran the tests. Backup life support on-line. Backup electricity and lighting systems on-line. Backup atmospheric controls on-line. The list went on, all of the emergency, hardwired coding in the event of massive computer system failure.

As she performed her instructions, it occurred to Brett that Emily looked distant today. Her eyes seemed clouded; her normally erect figure slumped; her flesh, gray. As though she knows, Brett thought. She knows, but Cassandra doesn’t. He, in turn, didn’t know if that was good news. Was she helping him, anticipating salvation, or trying desperately to transmit a warning message Cassandra had no mechanism to hear.

Because he couldn’t know what she was thinking, he wished the process was not so drawn out, so precise. He wished he could just tell her, shut yourself down, and have that be the end of it. But it had been made much more difficult than that, no doubt intentionally.

“Initiate transfer of autonomic systems to secondary monitor and command devices. Signify each component transfer with audible signal and code description.”

Outside the dynamic learning environment, Cassandra didn’t question his order. She simply did as she was told.

“Atmospheric control transferred to secondary remote system. Diagnostic of remote system completed. Equipment function normal. Stored parameters recalibrated. Remote system atmospheric monitor and command protocol activated.”

It took time, time he didn’t think he had. This all had to be scheduled so delicately. Each step done in the proper time, neither too early, nor too late, but this first one–shutting Cassandra off–had to be done first. Everything else depended upon it. Brett tried to be patient, failed miserably, but resisted the urge to pace. He gave his verbal assent to each step when prompted, followed by his passcode as a security measure. Cassandra didn’t like releasing control of essential systems to the devices she usually managed. She made the process as difficult as possible, ostensibly to keep a nonattentive station commander from accidentally shutting down all life support systems without transferring those functions to other units.

When she had completed the process with all twenty-five modules, she told him she was done and settled into a silence that struck Brett as something like sulking, though he knew she felt no such thing–did not, in fact, have the capacity to even emulate it.

He was just projecting, and he knew it. The truth was that he didn’t have to worry about Cassandra’s obedience, or Cassandra’s timetable. The two of them had performed this transition test hundreds of times. Once a week relative station time for the last five years, in fact, because it was procedure to do so. It wasn’t Cassandra that concerned him.

It was him.

Because he had noticed in the scant hours since the incident with Ritter that he was losing himself, as if the exchange between Ritter’s mind and his own had energized the latent efforts of his own infestation. Left alone, his attention wandered. In the mech engineering lab, he’d spent better than fifteen minutes recalling in vivid detail the first argument he and Emily had ever had, the one that followed his half-joking, callous comment about her new pair of shoes. He had looked up from the workstation and found tears on his cheeks, and found, as well, subsequent to that first time that there were more memories beckoning to him. Their voices called to him in whispers, pleasant murmurs, a precious rebirth of experience. It took all of his concentration to keep them away, and the effort filled him with pain.

Focus, he reminded himself. Focus.

He proceeded with the checklist. “Cassandra, shut down remote sensing devices on all levels.”

“Sensor devices terminated.”

“Shutdown external communications ports.”

“External communication ports terminated.”

“Cancel satellite relay commands.”

So he continued, disconnecting all of the remote devices with their own internal smartchips. Each one of those pieces of equipment would raise an annoying, warbling whine if they detected a lost signal from Cassandra.

Finally, “Test local power supply.”

This was her own emergency battery package, continually juiced in the event of a power failure, able to sustain her primary operations for up to eighteen hours. This was also the step at which she would begin her objections, though currently, she only confirmed the batteries were functional.

Brett paused for a bare second, rehearsed the checklist in his mind to be certain he hadn’t omitted any of the critical steps. He could think of nothing he had missed.

He said, “Disconnect from main power grid.”

“Cassandra System detects no failure in main power grid. Please advise on disconnection command.”

“There is no failure. Comply with the order as instructed.”

“Please present current administrative level passcode.”

Brett gave it to her. She clicked for several seconds over, he assumed, the insensibility of the command.

She said, “Disconnection from main power grid complete. Local power supply performing within normal limits.”

He cleared his throat. So far, there had been no problems, not even the expected ones. He wondered if she had always been this compliant, if he had made her more difficult by activating the dynamic learning environment and filtering all of her processes through it. He couldn’t remember a time when she had simply done as she was told, when she wasn’t cantankerous as a rule.

“Prepare for complete system refresh and shutdown procedure.”

“Warning: system refresh and shutdown procedure is not recommended at this time. Please present user identification and passcode to proceed.”

He supplied his credentials again. “Ignore standard warning set. Initiate refresh and shutdown procedure.”

“Commander Brett, Markus Jasper, please confirm order to initiate refresh and shutdown procedure for addition to event log.”

That was a not so discreet threat that Cassandra, either right before terminating her operations or immediately upon regaining power, would beam a message to EFTC headquarters, Palimpset Industries and any other managing organization who might be concerned stating that some idiot with his name and passcodes had just shut down the single most vital piece of equipment in a multi-trillion dollar deep space station. Under the circumstances, Brett wasn’t concerned about her tantrums or her reports.

He said it for the third time. “Initiate system refresh and shutdown procedure.”

Cassandra clattered at him. The left bank of lights spat a frenetic amber and red pattern. In the tight enclosure of the room, Cassandra’s ambient rumble became an arthritic crackle and hum.

“Please specify component termination sequence.”

This also had to be done in a precise and unforgiving order. If he neglected one step, Cassandra would wrest control and make him start all over again. It was the last safeguard against unauthorized shutdown of the unit. The correct sequence was designed to both protect the station and Cassandra’s sensitive hardware components against damage, and it wasn’t published in any of the manuals, not even the thousand page exhaustive reference paperweight in his office. In theory, only the station commander was given the sequence. Only he could shut down the Cassandra system, and for the sake of both his job and a prosecution free future, he’d better have a damned good reason.

It occurred to him that Ilam probably knew the sequence, too. That would have been nice to know on the many evenings he’d lain in bed waiting to fall asleep and rehearsed the list in his mind, just so he wouldn’t forget, and at the same time both hoping and anticipating that he would never need to use it.

He used it now.

“Begin component termination sequence on my mark.” Brett tried not to think about what he was doing, about the vast and variable potential for disaster. If something went wrong, it could take thirty minutes or more to get her reconnected and processing again. “Mark. Shutdown memory cell bank one through seven. Shutdown memory cell bank eight through fourteen. Shutdown reserve memory cell bank fifteen through twenty eight.”

He went on for several minutes, slowly but methodically dismantling the Cassandra system. Indicator lights flicked from green to amber to flat and glaring red, then winked dark. Sometimes one, sometimes an entire row, depending upon the importance of the component. After the memory cells had been powered down and secured against damage, the major peripherals went: the last set of sensors, the analysis ports, the power to the external sensor array. Near the end of this list, Brett approached the front of the machine and released the latch beneath the monitor on her right side. He removed a touchpad on a sliding drawer, then terminated the last of the peripherals, the verbal command recognition port.

The next part was easier, but more critical. It involved all the major processing components, and he double-, then triple-checked each entry as he typed it before transmitting his command. His hands were steady; he didn’t make any mistakes.

Basic computational board.

Diagnostic segment.

Analysis board.

Central Logic Comprehension Block.

He dismantled Cassandra until there was nothing left of her. With the last command, the termination of the Master Processing Board and Emergency Parallel Processor, Cassandra seemed to stutter. All of the boards, all of the indicators, every light she possessed glowed a bright and vibrant crimson, held it like a shriek of outrage or a dying breath, then faded. The monitor in front of Brett went blank.

He stood alone in the silence, the thunderous, aching silence after the fans had stopped and the blowers ceased. He could hear his own breathing. He could smell the machine, her fragrance an odor of ozone and burnt electrons. In the absence of Cassandra’s internal lighting, the capsule containing Emily had gone dark. Emily herself was a shadow behind glass, as featureless and pale as a ghoul.

Brett had never been so completely alone in his entire life.

He walked to the back of the room and flipped the switches on the halogen lamps. The glare was fierce and immediate, and the buzz of their electricity drove away the silence. That seemed to make it better. He felt less isolated, and he could see Emily clearly, though the lights did not make her appear any less pale. He checked his watch, realized it could still be early yet. He had to wait for the next stage, and then he would have to be quick from start to finish.

Brett settled into the canvas seat of the camp chair. He propped his feet on the table, careful no to knock over any of the fine instruments he’d brought with him. Careful especially of the four test tubes. He’d noticed in the faint light just after shutting Cassandra down that the tubes had begun to shine with a faint opalescence. He knew what that meant–the organisms in the samples had found reasonable food in their nutrient bath. They’d begun to reproduce. He was sure that if he put his hand against the glass, if he held the test tubes in his fist, he’d feel them vibrating. It would be a hot and snapping vibration, the tongue against teeth feeling of stabbing your finger into a light socket.

Because he knew it, he didn’t check. He didn’t want it to distract him.

Brett reached into the breast pocket of his shipsuit, the opposite pocket from the one he’d carried the tubes in, and removed a pair of sandwiches he’d thrown together in the commissary as the last of his day’s errands. He ate slowly, but greedily, savoring the food for the energy it would provide him later, when he was sure to need it most.

#

In the hospital, he had been allowed to see Emily only once. There might have been more visits, but her parents, even unnotified until after the first tandem of major surgeries, arrived too quickly, her parents who were the only actual family. He was relegated to the role of friend and had no rights. Four years had earned him nothing, not to people who bore blame in their hearts. Not to a hospital staff who could only tell him privately that they understood, who passed by him in the waiting rooms and lunch line and would sometimes pat him on the shoulder, sometimes whisper the secret language of medicine in his ear. They had regulations which must be obeyed.

But there had been that one time, in the immediate hours after the accident while her parents sailed the upper atmosphere toward Atlanta, and the doctors needed someone to speak to, someone to explain what had been done to this precious, fragile creature.

They had wrapped her head in linen gauze. They had plugged her body into monitors and intravenous machines, squawkboxes and readouts. A whole collection of medical marvels running on a meter that demanded something like a thousand dollars an hour. Men came in to check, wrote down numbers, applied them to the billing statement; their charge for supplying the spark of life.

Her face was bruised and swollen. The entire left side looked as though she was already dead, cold and blue with the blood settling against the flesh. The track of stitches wound down from the hairline obscured by her bandages, across her right temple, down to the curve of her jaw. She had been fortunate, he was told, that she didn’t lose the ear. He had thought about that at the time, as the doctor said it to him, and he was standing beside her bed looking at the flat and empty space where her legs should have been. The expanse of sheet and fluffy white blanket was as flat and clean as an Indiana hayfield under six inches of new snow. He stared at that space, that not-legs emptiness for an hour, puzzling at its complete and utter wrongness. Trying to wrap his mind around the sense it did not make.

And he had asked himself the usual questions, the ones that shamed him, the ones he ultimately refused to answer. Can I love a woman in this condition? If she is saved, if she is all well except for the leglessness, can I still love her? Can I love her without legs and without memory? Can I love her without legs, memory, or the ability to control her bladder?

Each question was a small step up the massive slope, a tacked-on burden. He could not encompass the totality of the devastation, so he purchased it in bits and pieces, pretending he was finding the line beyond which it would be too much for him. He told himself that there was no line. If she remained just this way forever, he would still love her, he would still remain. He did not know then if he said those things to keep his pride or because he truly meant them. They were questions impossible to answer, because he still had hope. He believed in the miracle of medicine, properly applied. Churches and news programs and the magazines in the waiting areas were full of the wonderful, awful tragedies made right. They told him that the miraculous was commonplace.

In those first hours, he had promised himself that he would remain here, by her bedside, fighting the good fight with her for as long as it took. He believed enough for both of them. He believed because his entire life had been shattered in the course of seconds, its ruin written repeatedly over the space of four hours. He could not imagine that it would take longer to repair. In the back of his mind was the image of a bright dawning tomorrow when Emily would open her eyes and smile and she would be well. They would be well. Life would proceed along the trajectory it had used yesterday and the day before. This was a bad day, a terrible, tragic, stupid day, but it was just one. It couldn’t change the course of a lifetime. He didn’t possess the faculties to imagine such a thing.

He didn’t know then that he was wasting his time. Not in terms of planning a fruitless future, though that was no less true. Actually wasting time, those precious few minutes, the last minutes he would be able to touch her freely, without mitigation. He was afraid to touch her because of her wounds, though the IV drip contained medication potent enough that she never woke. She couldn’t feel her pain, let alone what would have been his gentleness.

Instead, he stared at her, then pulled up a chair beside her bed, then read a magazine while he waited for a doctor to appear with news. Eventually he watched television and fell asleep until the evening nurse rousted him out to the waiting area. He still hadn’t understood. He’d accepted it all as though they still had eternity before them.

Later, during the interminable stretch when he was bathing in the second floor bathroom sink, buying cheap clothes off the rack at the closest department store, ravaging their savings account to keep up on the mortgage since they both had in effect lost their jobs–doing anything he could do to physically occupy a space close to her–he had no contact. Nothing but whispers and after hour chats with nurses who pitied him. No, he couldn’t see her, but he would like to know that the scans had turned up no significant brain damage, which was good news given the original assessment. I’m sorry, the surgery wasn’t successful. The doctor doesn’t think she’ll ever come out of the coma, but that’s just in the chart. He hasn’t even told her parents yet.

The last one. . .the doctor has been contacted by some men, government men, who have taken an interest in this case and one or two other immedicable coma victims up on the floor. I don’t know what it means, but it might be important.

He tried to speak to her parents. Twice. The first was shouting and jabbing fingers and red, stretched faced. The second was flat, unemotional, three hours too late. She’s been moved. They’ve done all they could do for her. The decision has been made. Their hate had cooled, but the blame was still there, as cool and hard as iron. Then they were gone, back to upstate New York and genteel retirement, and he didn’t know what to do. Didn’t even know what to believe.

Go home, the security guard said to him later that night. Go home. There’s nothing left for you here. It wasn’t cruelty, though he had taken it that way. Two days later the man called him, risking his own job and his own future. The security guard who was also an Atlanta cop who liked to ask questions, who liked to dig around, who felt sorry for him and handed over the keys to the kingdom. Palimpset Industries.

The last thing he did before making the jump with Emily to Archae Stoddard was to catch a shuttle to Atlanta. He found the security guard cum police officer and bought him a drink in a cheap Irish bar near the neighborhood where he and Emily had once lived.

Bought him several, in fact.

<– Chapter 26 / Chapter 28 –>

<– Chapter 25 / Chapter 27 –>

If he really wanted to think about it, Brett could have chosen to blame Liston for what he planned to do. Liston had given him the idea. Liston had pointed him in the right direction. Yesterday, he had said the organism largely eschews the left portion of the brain. Instead, it draws its harvest from the right hemisphere and the pre-frontal cortex specifically. . .The pre-frontal cortex of the right hemisphere stores our autobiographical memories, our mechanisms for accessing emotions, and current theory suggests, our concept of self-definition. It makes us who we are.

But Brett had let it roll past him then, unheeded because it didn’t seem to have any value except as a way to understand the mechanism of the organism. He had gained wisdom during the night, this morning finally seen the possibilities, and now his heart thrummed in his chest. It was a feeling that reminded him of hope, though he couldn’t say for certain that was in fact what he felt. It had been too long since he’d felt it to remember.

Brett stood in the bio lab on sublevel four, inside the biological hazard containment bubble where Djen and Micah had pored over the organism’s secrets, dissecting its micobacterial menace. He was not wearing an e-suit as the large and red-lettered signs instructed. He hadn’t waited for the negative pressure atmospheric systems to cycle before opening the second, secure set of doors. He only briefly paused for the dissipation of the emergency antibacterial vapor which automatically released from the chemical vents because he hadn’t followed proper protocols, and that only because the mist had a tendency to be corrosive. He didn’t even close the two sets of sliding doors behind him to activate the filtration vents. The biohazard bubble had endlessly redundant precautionary systems. For Brett, the entire idea of precautions seemed somewhat ludicrous in hindsight.

On the pale counter surface in front of him sat an array of diagnostic equipment, a pair of Hamer microscopes with wide knobs for easier use by gloved hands. At the end of the counter was the high, stainless steel tube of the scanning electron microscope’s vacuum chamber. The SEM’s monitor was on and it displayed a false color image of the organism at extreme magnification. Brett looked at it only long enough to recognize it as one of the pictures Micah had shown them two nights ago.

The work area was littered with crumbs of dirt from the coring samples they’d taken from the thermal vent. There were swaths that were mostly clean, where it looked like one of them, probably Micah, had swept the surface with a forearm. Brett wasn’t a biologist, but he could recognize that it would have been unacceptable practice under normal circumstances. As it stood, it was just more evidence of the haste with which they’d conducted the investigations. It was a wonder they’d had any success at all, and Brett had to consider for not the first time that Ilam’s contributions had more to do with it than he was admitting.

Ilam had lied to him. Not just about the nanomechs, but for their entire tour, and Brett found that he didn’t hold it against him. Ilam wasn’t the only one to be harboring secrets.

As he surveyed the work area, he knew the haphazard quality of the research benefited him, what he was looking for. If they had been in less of a hurry, less frazzled, they would have swept the entire biohazard unit, destroyed everything, taken every possible precaution.

Brett was glad they hadn’t. This wasn’t a necessity, of course. There were other options open to him by which he could achieve the same end, but he was thinking about time and his understanding that he might have precious little of it left.

He saw what he had come for. Beneath the counter, midway between the Hamer scopes was a storage chest with temperature controls. The digital thermometer readout read an interior temp of 37°C. Body temperature. Brett knelt there, opened the door. On the shelf inside sat a black plastic rack which contained four stoppered and labeled test tubes. Written on the labels in Djen’s nearly illegible script were words like ‘First Core’, ‘Midlevel Core’, ‘Magma Chamber Floor’. Each tube was filled a pale blue fluid that was both nutrient rich and light refractive for better resolution under the Hamer scopes. He knew that in the fluid swam invisible bacterial communities. Maybe billions of them in each. A supermassive dose of bacteria saturated out of the soil samples in which they had survived for centuries, maybe millennia.

Brett picked out the four tubes and slid them into his breast pocket where they clattered against the stubby vial of Ilam’s nanomech therapy. There were other things he needed from the lab as well, and he wandered about for some time rifling through drawers, opening cabinets, selecting bits and pieces of equipment that appeared useful.

When he had taken all the things he would need, he let himself out the door and sealed it closed behind him. He made other stops along the way. Some took longer than others, but Brett knew Persia station. He’d probed its crevices thousands of times, knew its secret places. His access carried him anywhere he cared to go.

He had one last stop to make, and he hurried because he knew time was short. He had begun to sweat in his haste. He could smell himself, and it was unpleasant. He didn’t actually recall the last time he’d showered.

He strode down the corridor that divided sublevel five, his heels a click and echo that seemed to push him along. There were speakers at the intersection and he heard the distinctive crackle of static that indicated a system broadcast message. Brett stopped, looked up, waited. Something turned in the pit of his stomach. There were three people awake and alert in all of Persia, and no reason he could think of for a system broadcast that wasn’t a bad one.

He was certain this was something he wouldn’t want to hear.

“Brett, this is Ilam. I’m in the third level rec room. I need you to meet me here, and I’d suggest you hurry. It looks like we’ve developed something of a situation.”

At first he did not understand what it was about the rec room that would qualify as a situation, but it took only seconds for him to remember. The sick from the medical bay, placed there for safe keeping.

Brett began to run.

#

The first thing he saw upon entering the rec area was Liston. He found this curious, since it was Ilam who had contacted him. Ilam should have been here, and if both Liston and Ilam were here, then there was no one overseeing the convalescence of the crew in med bay. He paused in the doorway, panting from the run and the climb up two level ladders, on the last of which he’d almost fallen, almost broken his goddamned neck.

His next perception did not illuminate the darkness. Liston lay across the body of a crew member Brett couldn’t identify because the doctor had hunched himself over the man’s face. Brett had the brief and senseless thought that Liston had decided to go ahead with his own mech implantation, then realized he ought to check on the sick one last time and fallen unconscious from the sedatives sooner than he expected.

But then he moved closer and saw that the angle of Liston’s neck was all wrong. The skin stretched too tightly on the left side. The doctor’s head lolled against his right shoulder. A bruise as dark as thunderheads had begun to stain the skin just above his coat collar.

Brett looked up, sucked in his breath. It only got worse.

The remaining bodies, lain side by side as though awaiting triage in a field hospital, bent in ugly poses. Limbs stuck out in odd directions from beneath the blankets. Mouths were open, howling without sound. Glassy eyes stared at the ceiling. In places, there was blood, rich and crimson, turning the thick blankets a sodden, blackish color. The figure nearest him, the meteorologist Kritzer, had the shaft of a standing lamp driven through her sternum.

Brett took his eyes away. He scanned the room, and there was Ilam in the corner, except Ilam wasn’t looking at him. Ilam focused on the opposite corner, the open space between the arm of the couch and the wall where the lamp which had skewered Kritzer had once stood.

In the corner stood Ritter.

He seemed to sway, buffeted side to side by a wind Brett could not feel. His eyes were open but unseeing, his lips parted and his jaw slack. Ritter held his arms at his side in a casual pose. To Brett he looked pale, tinted an unhealthy blue that made him look as dead and staring as the corpses along the floor.

Ilam flicked his eyes toward Brett, but they didn’t remain. Ritter drew both of their attention with the irresistible pull of a singularity. Brett returned Ilam’s acknowledgement just as briefly. Ilam held a gun in his hand, the snub-nosed firearm Ashburn carried. Probably, Brett thought, the only accessible weapon on the station since Ashburn had flash-welded the munitions cabinet closed.

Brett said, “Ilam?”

“He’s been like this since I arrived,” Ilam said. “Liston came down about an hour ago to perform some routine examinations on the patients. After forty-five minutes, I grew concerned and came to see if he needed assistance. I found him the way you see him. His body is still warm.”

Ilam waved the gun vaguely. “I saw that Ritter wasn’t doing anything particularly threatening at the moment, so I procured this from the security office and locked down the med bay. Then I paged you. I didn’t want to do anything that might be construed as rash without your approval.”

“Ritter did this?” He had to ask. He couldn’t imagine it.

“Look at his hands. There’s blood under his fingernails.”

Ilam’s tone was sarcastic, flat. Who else would it have been, if not Ritter? Everyone else in the station was either sedated or dead. Except Brett, of course, who had been wandering the levels, who wouldn’t accept the mech treatment, whose sanity might become suspect at any time from Ilam’s perspective.

“He was comatose,” Brett said, trying to make sense of it. “Could this be related to the therapy? Maybe it made him crazy.”

Ilam gestured in Ritter’s direction. “Look at him, Brett. That isn’t a man who has recovered.”

“What’s wrong with him?”

“Spontaneous emergence from the coma, I think. This group wasn’t sedated. Liston and I didn’t see the point.”

“I don’t think I see your current point.”

“It’s possible that the older, more instinctual portions of the brain awakened without the corollary awakening of the higher brain. It would be highly unlikely, but we don’t have much against which we could reference the current developmental state of his mind. The mechs are rewriting his neural topography. The organism is entrenching itself. It becomes feasible that he could operate with a mind something less developed than a modern human’s.”

Brett furrowed his brow. “That doesn’t explain why he killed them all. Even if the reptilian cortices revived first without the benefit of the higher brain for guidance, he would have been more likely to run than fight.”

Unless he woke hungry, Brett thought, but didn’t say it. He was thinking aloud, that was all. Trying to make sense out of something for which he had no real answers.

“I didn’t say the emergence was natural,” Ilam said. Left to think about it, Brett also wouldn’t have said it. “What would you like to do?”

“How long has he been like that?”

“Since I arrived the first time. If it weren’t for the fact that he’s standing, I would have guessed that he’s receded into the coma again.”

“Is there any way to evaluate the progress of the therapy? Maybe this was a side effect.”

Ilam shook his head. “Not without getting closer. You can feel free to examine him if you’d like. I’ll stand back here and just point the gun at him if it’s the same to you.”

“If it isn’t the therapy and it isn’t some vestigial evolutionary reaction to premature waking from the coma, what is it?” Ilam didn’t answer him, and he didn’t need to. They already knew the answer. “Has he said anything? Done anything but stand there?”

“I haven’t honestly made much of an effort to communicate. I was waiting for you, Commander.”

Brett understood the hint. He said, “All right, cover me so I can get closer.”

“You’re covered. Just try to stay out from that line between the gun barrel and the lunatic scientist, and you’ll be fine.”

Brett took a wide step around the line of corpses. There was a path between them and the furniture they had pushed back to make room for the crew the evening before. He swept his attention between Ilam on his right and Ritter in the corner to his left. He moved slowly, tried to appear unthreatening. When he reached a point about a meter from where Ritter stood, he stopped. He glanced to Ilam again, just as Ilam tightened his grip on the gun. Brett saw that his knuckles were white.

He turned away, sidled a little nearer until he was certain he stood in Ritter’s field of vision. Ritter made no perceptible response to his arrival. Brett cleared his throat.

“Ritter, can you hear me?”

No action but the stare. He might have blinked, but Brett wasn’t sure.

Louder, he thought.

“Ritter, this is Commander Brett. Can you hear me? Are you there?”

For an interminable moment, there was nothing. Then Ritter began to scream.

Brett leapt back, unnerved by the abrupt change, tried to cover his ears. His feet tangled in an obstruction behind him. Too late, he flailed his arms to keep his balance, realized it was the feet of one of the dead he had tripped over. Brett landed hard on his back, sprawling. The body that broke his fall made a noise like a gasp, and he shouted.

“I’m going to fire,” Ilam said, calm and hard.

Brett lay still. “Wait.”

The scream continued. It rose from Ritter’s wide-hung mouth, a sort of mewling noise. It was forlorn, anguished, ancient. A sound never before made by a human throat, a human voice.

Brett sat up, then levered himself to his feet. He told Ilam again to wait, though it was unnecessary. There was more than the scream now. Another sound like chaotic whispers interlaced Ritter’s non-voice. Unseen speakers muttered and gnashed their teeth together, lifted their cacophony in a vibratory hum.

What is it? Brett thought, but he found no answer. He drifted toward Ritter, thrust his head forward to hear words that seemed garbled by echo. With each step, the sound grew louder, more distinct. He edged nearer, close enough that he could smell Ritter’s unwashed body, taste the dank corruption from his breath. What had once been Ritter had become repulsive, but Brett went on.

Without warning, the gates of heaven opened, a storm burst into his mind, and he froze.

#

What he saw at first was simply a smear of color, a world of unnumbered billions of atoms, spiraling molecules, multihued latticeworks of matter. Much of it was gray, but even the blandest gray shone with shades and illuminations, opalescence that was not any color he had ever known. Then there were wide swatches of crimson and emerald, gold and aquamarine.

With a jerk, he drew himself back. Distance fractured his perception, re-correlated his senses. He plunged away from a precipice that was both vast and submicroscopic. Brett felt that he blinked. His vision cleared. He looked out of eyes that were not his upon an alien landscape he could not name. But this was his body. He knew it by the hum and sway of his long and supple limbs, the patter-thump of his heart. He looked down the slender and willowy length of his torso. It was his clothes that he wore, silken and shimmering and warm in the light of the bright yellow sun.

About him was water and vales rolling with hills and grass as soft as kittens. There were trees, tall and thin with leathery, scented leaves. In the distance, a fog shrouded city. Amber and glass that sparkled where the sun struck. Beams of strong and dusky bedrock woven with lavender steel. Beyond that naked mountains that climbed feet to shoulder into the clouds until their snow-capped peaks vanished from sight.

The wind blew and the scent in his nostrils was that of growing things and warm soil, but beneath that, decay, corruption. And he knew it wasn’t mist that shrouded the city, but smoke. The smoke of fires. The stench of burning.

He felt the despair, and at the same instant a mad, rushing kind of glee, as though it was a wonder he had wrought, but could not recall. He ran the slopes of the hills, up to rounded tops, then down again. His bare feet sprang up from the ground and he raced on, tireless, laughing, free. When his breath grew short, he ran faster. The blood pounded in his head, squeezed circles of explosive darkness across his eyes. He ran until his heart would shatter, then ran on.

And at the end, he spread his arms out wide and lowered his head and leapt up high. The ground vanished beneath him, and below was a vast plain, streaked with rivers. The valley of an idyll viewed from a mountain height. He watched his feet leave the ledge. He folded his body into a dive, and if he still laughed as he plunged, he could not hear it. The rush of wind blinded his eyes and deafened his ears.

He thought he flew, but knew it was illusion. It was fantasy.

And then it was not. The image shifted before him and he peered out beneath a harsh and glaring light into a world that was bleak. Everything was metal and glass, dingy in the way all well-lived places are dingy. A worn space, a weary space. Before him stood a creature, dwarfish in his proportions. His skin was coarse and pale, his body broad, his hands small, his legs stunted, knobbish, ugly. A thick boned thing who stood near, in a strange and hostile place. More of its type lay on the floor, bundled beneath scratchy linen that was blotched with red running to black. The thing had drawn close enough to emanate menace.

It was familiar, but known in a way he couldn’t remember. His skull thumped when he tried, so he didn’t extend the effort. It was better this way, to live with the hum and flow, the billowing breath of memory which whispered in his thoughts. It embraced him, and from nowhere, he smelled butter and baking. The crisp brown crust of his mother’s apple cobbler cooling on the table. With ice cream and the glass dessert dishes that made that noise, that tink! when he rapped the side with his fork. He sat up in his bed from where he had lain on a wet and dreary Saturday, reading the latest Sol Bergeron adventure. He still wore his pajamas, the black and red checkered flannels with the feet in them, the ones his brother said were for babies and girls, which was probably true enough, but he wasn’t ready yet, not just yet, to set them aside.

He left the book where it lay and crept out his door and down the stairs, careful past his father’s office door because he’d been told to hold his tongue and keep it down–with Armen adding the ubiquitous or else that was a constant theme of his life. Dad was home but he was working, consumed with aquifers and water tables and drainage for the weekend.

And he’d been good. All morning and half the afternoon, quiet as a mouse, as a louse, as a grouse, though he wasn’t exactly certain what that might be. But very good, nonetheless, and if Armen was over at Sebree’s house and little Niki still down for her nap, there was a chance, faint but apple-delicious, that mom would be in the kitchen and in her best of moods and he would have an early treat. A rare occurrence, but one he had known once, he thought, and if not himself, then Armen had and told him it was possible at least. Though he had to admit if he thought about it that Armen wasn’t always to be strictly believed.

But that also wasn’t right, wasn’t true. Again the scene melted, and Brett stumbled into a universe of darkness, gray and black, mottled with lightning strikes of violet conflagration. This was also himself, and a place that he knew. An oasis in a vast and blinding wilderness. Here there were others, likenesses, community that shared space at the troughs of goodness. He saw it without eyes, knew it by touch and taste, the vibratory pleasure of those who were near. And he was not a he or a we, but an I of many parts and far-flung coherencies. A mind of one thought but a billion branches acting in concert, and that thought was hunger. They huddled together, pressing side against side, stroking their long filament tips end to end, purring and feeding.

And then the others came.

I sensed them from the edges, felt them for what they were, hideous beasts of monstrous metallic carapace. Rotating teeth like grinding saws and fine, razor arms tipped in steel and blood. They hovered above the troughs, shining swarms of buzz and stab and grappling, rending limbs. They made a noise as they came, a creaking, screeching, rumbling roar that sent quivers through his gelatinous self. The others, the aliens, they killed where they came erasing the sense of what had been, numbing the distant tendrils of understanding, sweeping down from the high places and the slick, winding paths from trough to trough. They touched my distant self with storms of swords and left only devastation and darkness in their wake.

Behind them came more. Row upon row of those that were like but different. These more menacing. Less fierce, but irrevocable, immutable, mindless. They transformed the face of the world. They crumbled the mountains and starved the high springs that fed the troughs, and where they wended nothing that had been remained the same.

I knew pain. Loss and emptiness and outrage.

#

As suddenly as they had come over him, the flood of images ceased.

Brett felt himself tumbling, plummeting from a height. His stomach turned, the spin of vertigo made him wobble, but he stopped the gyre before he fell.

There were more, he knew. An eternal round of thoughts unremembered, memories untapped, entire lives forgotten. He had been snared in a web of eternity by a mind intent upon showing him all of it. Or not even him, perhaps, but that which was inside him. A mind speaking to itself.

But he remembered the rage, fierce and brilliant, and he understood whether or not the communication had been for him.

>He opened his eyes, for a fraction of a second looked at Ritter; their eyes met. Even in the dark and vacuous depths, Brett could see the faint spark. He wasn’t alone in his understanding.

Then the shot rang out, a firecracker pop in the enclosed space, and Ritter’s head exploded in a maelstrom of blood and bone and alien screams.

#

Brett ran his hand across his mouth. It came away bloody. Fragments of bone, hair and flesh had lodged in his two day growth of beard. He scrubbed at them with his forearm as Ilam came to stand beside him . Ilam’s chest rose and fell rapidly. His breath came in short gasps. Ilam goggled at the body with his mouth open, as though he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

“You killed him,” Brett said, without accusation. “Why did you do that?”

“You wouldn’t answer me.”

It was explanation enough. Brett knew he would have done the same.

“For how long?”

“Two minutes. Perhaps three.”

“You look a little shaken. I thought you’d been in the military.”

Ilam shrugged. “Never done one like that before. Close up, I mean. With a gun.”

Brett turned to him and nodded his approval, so Ilam would know. “It was a good shot.”

“Aye.”

There wasn’t much else to say.

“Are you going to tell me what happened?” Ilam asked.

“What did you see?”

“You tried to talk to him. He began that caterwauling and you went rigid. Both of you, as a matter of fact. I got no reaction from either of you and determined something must be wrong.” Ilam hesitated, rolled his eyes from Brett to Ritter’s body. “I assumed you required assistance. I was right, wasn’t I?”

Brett nodded. “It was them. The organism. Not organisms, plural. Just the one, I understand that now. It doesn’t have a concept of individualism, only a corporate identity. I think they only understand their existence as a portion of the greater. . .flock. Except flock is our word, and for it, the flock is one.” What do you mean when you say ‘I’? It was difficult to verbalize, and he knew he was doing it badly. “It communicated with itself, I think the same way we communicate between neurons or between brain segments. Whatever is in my brain shared messages with what was in Ritter’s.”

“What sort of messages?”

“Images. Memories. I saw–no, that isn’t right–I experienced some of Ritter’s childhood. I experienced the existence of the organism in real-time, as the mechs invaded his brain. That’s why he killed them, Ilam. The organism understands what we’re doing because it has access to Ritter’s experience, maybe to all of our experiences. It seems to understand the source of the invaders, if not the technology. It has no defense against them, and it’s angry. This was retaliation for what we’re doing to it right now.”

Ilam shook his head. “That doesn’t make sense, Brett. Why would it kill the host as retaliation?”

“Because it understands its life cycle. It’s been dormant for a million years, since the last time, since there were others. It can wait. It has the mechanisms to exist, and it has no individual survival instinct. The corporate mind reflects that if one copy survives, the entire organism survives.”

He stopped there and pressed his fingers against his temples. The memory was too fresh, and it was painful to recall. He could still feel it–the confusion, the fear, the numbing sense of loss as parts of the ‘I’ were eradicated.

“What do you mean there were others? Who?”

“The people of Archae Stoddard. They were like us, Ilam. Not human, no, but people. Organic creatures, technologically advanced, beautiful in some ways. Beautiful the way the planet used to be before the plague.”

The plague. The word slipped from his lips without his willing it. He didn’t understand it at first. He turned it over like an alien artifact, insensible and completely outside his experience. Then he recalled the desperation, the mad and laughing rush. The plunging, doomed leap of flight off the mountain’s edge. It wasn’t an outside memory to him. It was his, and he understood things because of it.

Ilam said nothing, and Brett continued.

“We’ve been baffled by this organism because it doesn’t seem to fit any standard categories we have. We assumed–that word again–that even though it was alien, it still had to conform to our definitions of life as we’ve observed it. It is alive, but it isn’t natural. It’s a mech.”

Ilam opened his mouth, seemed to realize he had nothing to say, and closed it again.

“A completely biological technology. Sophisticated enough to alter its genetic material for dramatic leaps in adaptation. Single generational mutation to promote fitness. It was programmed by the inhabitants of this planet to do many of the same things we design our mechs to do, but it’s biological in nature. They wanted it to do what we’ve encountered. They gave it consciousness, the ability to communicate extrasensorily with itself. Then they willingly accepted the implantation of the organism because it would link their minds, expand their neural matrices. It was a technology that would improve their unity, their knowledge, their entire experience of their world. Their mechs were the dawning of a new age of understanding.”

“But something went wrong,” Ilam said.

“No. That’s just it. Everything went right. Too right. The organism thrived inside them. It linked their consciousness man to man, woman to woman, and it made them wise. Wise, and then insane. They couldn’t control the creatures they’d made because they’d given it sentience. They couldn’t stop it from generating one massive hive mind out of the entire planet. After a time, they didn’t have the will to stop it.”

“What killed them, Brett?”

Brett surveyed the memories of devastation with eyes haunted by grief. Grief he had no right to feel. “Some didn’t want the implantation. They didn’t want to grow beyond the bounds of their understanding, because they believed it made them something other than what they were to do so. They enjoyed the dichotomy of mind and body. Eventually, there was war, and the non-mech faction released a counter bacteria designed to kill the organism. Except it killed more than that. It killed everything. Bacteria destroyed the tall and slender trees. It razed the grass. It devoured every living thing.

“Except the organism. It survived in pieces, here and there. It fed off the detritus of its shattered world and it reproduced, and when the food began to run out, it adapted and found a way to harness the life of the bacteria created to destroy it–Micah’s autotrophs. For several hundred thousand years, they’ve evolved together, the big steering the small. You understand?”

Ilam nodded slowly. “Then it is sentient.”

“It is, but it can’t comprehend our non-biological mechs. What it understands is that the world began to change. It has some concept of racial memory, so it recalled what the world had been like before. When it began to be that way again, it revived itself. It recreated the programming for which it had been designed. It has been attempting to complete those functions with us.”

“And because we’re different than the designers of the original organism, it effects us adversely,” Ilam said.

“Not that it exactly did wonders for them, not at the end of the day.”

They were silent for a moment. In a quiet voice, Ilam asked, “What did it feel like?”

“Vastness.” He didn’t know how else to describe it. “I could have been aware of any one of them, any set of them buried anywhere on the planet. The same way, I suppose, I can choose to lift one of my toes, or touch something with my finger. They’re everywhere, and any one of them can choose to be anywhere or everywhere at once just by willing it.”

That was only part of it. A dozen other words that were close, but not the actuality, came to mind. Harmony. Unity. Pleasure. Freedom. All of them abstracts that didn’t adequately cover the things he felt when he delved into the memory he had stolen.

He remembered the hum of the organism, the sort of fluted, purring song that had filled the black wilderness. It was there, all of those words, all of those concepts, thrilling through the song it had sung. A song as old as humanity. A song as ancient as the windblown face of Archae Stoddard.

“You knew something like this would happen,” Brett said.

But Ilam frowned and shook his head. “I suspected the organism was sentient. I’ve told you the reasons. I thought, based on that, it would attempt to find a way to communicate. But I didn’t anticipate any of this, or I wouldn’t have spoken to you so vaguely. There’s much in what you’ve said that would have been of use to us had we known it earlier. We spent so long just trying to understand the damned thing.”

Grief, Brett thought suddenly. That was enfolded in his memory also. Grief at the loss of a part of himself, part of the organism as the nanomechs swept in with their slicing, grinding arms to reave from him a piece of his soul. The feeling clung to him, left him empty and tired.

He said, “That’s why you pressed me so hard from the beginning. You knew it had something to say that might be valuable to us.”

“That isn’t actually the reason at all.”

Brett gazed at him, uncomprehending.

“I’d been watching you. I had researched your history. I knew, Markus, that when the final push came, if we could devise a therapy to counteract the organism, you would refuse it if it meant choosing between saving your life and leaving Emily behind. The sentience of Cassandra, Emily as Cassandra, and the sentience of the organism are the same issue. The organism as you describe it is part of a higher mind. I’d anticipated that on the evidence of the coordinated attacks on our Engines and our installations. Separate any of those agents from the corporate body, and they cease to function. They cease to live.”

“And you think Emily without Cassandra can’t survive.”

“I do not. And if she did, it would be short lived and she would almost certainly be insane. The system has been engineered to deny her freedom. They were thorough, Markus. The programmers did extensive work to keep the biological component from ever functioning on an awareness level again. They knew what they were doing to her, and they made damned sure she would never come to understand it for herself.”

“You don’t have the evidence to support that.”

“And you don’t have any evidence at all except fantasy to support your belief that she is still conscious. Listen to me, the organism is sentient, but not on a component by component basis. You said so, it isn’t individuated. It’s consciousness resides in the correlation, the coherence of communicating units. Separate a unit from the overmind and it would cease to function.

“Don’t you see? It is the same model of consciousness. The individual doesn’t retain selfhood outside the context of the environment. It has no identity. There is no self-definition except as a piece of the greater whole. It is completely irrational for you to accept the validity of the one without accepting the other.”

Brett scowled. “We’ve had the rest of this conversation already. Leave it at that.”

Ilam raised his arms, tried to go on. “Brett–”

“I understand,” he barked. He didn’t allow himself to become angry, but he was finished. He wasn’t going to argue about it again. “I see what you were trying to do. I appreciate the gesture, Ilam. But we disagree here. We disagree fundamentally. That’s the last I’ll say about it.”

Ilam seemed to accept it as the final word. He scanned the rec area, his eyes lingering over the bodies of men and women they had known. He tucked the gun away in a pocket of his shipsuit.

“We should do something about them,” he said.

“We’ll lay Liston out, and Ritter as well. Cover them with blankets. That will be good enough.” It was hard to say something so callous, like swallowing stones. “When you lead the others down to the Escape Module, don’t come this way.”

He thought about it a few moments more, then said, “Belay that. I’ll clean up here. You take your gun and seal yourself in the med bay with the others. The organism knows what we’ve done, and it might try something like it did with Ritter again. The sedatives the others took should keep them immobile until our mechs finish the job, but I don’t want to take any chances. Can you handle the rest without Liston?”

“Yes.”

“What about your own protocol?”

“I don’t need it.”

Brett understood. “Call me if you need anything. Use the system broadcast message like you did the last time. The moment you’re ready, pack them up and get them to the module. Don’t come looking for me. I mean that. We’ve all said our good-byes, and I may not be in any condition worth arguing with by then. If I try to impede you in any way–”

“I have the gun,” Ilam finished.

“Don’t hesitate.”

“No.”

Brett knew he wouldn’t, and it made him feel a little better.

“After you seal the doors to the Escape Module, hose the interior with the decon agents. That’s what they’re there for.”

“I know that.”

“Don’t remove their mechs until after you’re airborne. We can’t have them re-infecting the crew.”

“The mechs will begin to dissolve spontaneously two weeks after the last contact with any incident of the organism. They’re programmed that way.” Ilam grinned. “Do you want to command this escape or are you going to let me do it?”

Brett stopped himself and smiled in return. “You’re right. You can handle this.”

“Tell me I’m a good boy, pat me on the head and send me off. That’s the way mum used to do it.”

They shook hands for the last time.

Brett said, “Get out of here.”

“This is the part where I’m supposed to tell you what a pleasure it’s been to serve with you.”

“You already did that.”

Ilam winced. “Rats. I did, didn’t I.”

<– Chapter 25 / Chapter 27 –>

<– Chapter 24 / Chapter 26 –>

Brett just made it to the obs deck before Ilam caught up with him. He stood at the porthole window watching the orange glow of the sunset on the red sands. The weather was quiet today, no storms, though he could see the sand dunes rippling beneath the wind. Through rents in the cloud cover, he could see wide swathes of black sky, littered with stars.

Ilam came up behind him and stood at his shoulder, but said nothing. The meteorological panel was lit green, fully functional. The various other screens and status boards for external equipment ranged from blinking amber to glaring red. The report monitors for the assorted Sperling Engines spilled a constant terminal error message.

Finally, Ilam said, “I thought you might want some company.”

“There you go making the same old mistake.”

“I promised Liston I would make a final attempt to talk some reason into you.” He hesitated for the bare space of a second. “That’s the extent of my lecture. You’ll be sure to tell him I kept my promise.”

Brett appreciated the gesture, but had no way to show it. Anything he said would lead irrevocably to explanations he didn’t feel prepared to offer.

“Do you want to at least tell me why you’re refusing the therapy?”

“No.”

Ilam seemed to expect nothing less. “Fair enough, I suppose. You do understand, however, that your decision presents certain difficulties with regards to the survivors.”

He thought of Djen and winced. “I don’t expect to live long enough to cause them any problems.”

“The gentlemen at Malibu might have thought the same thing.”

Brett nodded. “I’ll leave instructions for Ashburn–”

He stopped there. He had been going to finish –to shoot me on sight if I do anything threatening. He turned sharply and faced Ilam. Ilam grinned at him, his expression guilty.

“I didn’t tell you about the Malibu situation.”

Ilam offered him a grin that was part apology, part self-deprecation. “I’m afraid I haven’t been completely forthcoming with you, commander, in regard to my role here. There have been secrets between us that you haven’t suspected. It would be appropriate for me to apologize to those now. I’m sorry. I really am.”

Brett glared at him. “What secrets?”

Ilam stepped back a comfortable distance, then waved his hand at the card table. The Yetzirah board still sat there, even the pieces remained in their places from the last game.

“Why don’t we sit? We can talk easier if we’re comfortable.”

Brett shook his head. Ilam pulled out the chair nearest him, Ritter’s chair, and sat. He stretched his long legs out and crossed his ankles.

“I’ll tell you a few things, Brett, and you’ll tell me a few things in return. Maybe by the end we can make some sense of what went wrong here. By ‘here’, I don’t mean Persia, of course. At least not just Persia. We are, in fact, the exception to the rule from what I can tell. I saw that you prepared the Escape Module, by the way. That was smart thinking. You assumed the catastrophic without having to be told, and I think it was that failure, or that unwillingness to make such a potentially outrageous mistake that doomed the other stations.”

He wished he had taken a chair. Brett’s knees suddenly felt weak. He gaped at Ilam. “The other stations are gone?”

“Every one of them, including EFTC headquarters. It was one of the first to be infected. That’s my personal opinion, mind you. They were already sinking when you received the message from Jack Overton that there were communication difficulties. ‘Communication difficulties’ is something of a trade shorthand for a critical situation when those in administration don’t want to alarm the lesser departments.”

“How do you know this?”

“Because I’m what they call a company man. I’m a plant. A form of administrative oversight to ensure the success of the financial and strategic investment the company has in Archae Stoddard’s development, what they call a double redundancy backup. For five years, I’ve filed reports with command headquarters parallel to yours. I’ve evaluated your actions, your performance, your ability to get the job done.” Ilam rubbed at his temples. The admission obviously disturbed him. “You’ve scored well, by the way, but not nearly as well as you’ve scored during this crisis. They would have been proud of you at headquarters had any of them lived long enough to know what we’ve accomplished.

“Part of that wasn’t just you, of course. As a station, we displayed a surprising depth of talent and knowledge that the other stations lacked. Especially command headquarters. Their gasps at researching the organism went almost completely in the wrong direction as it turned out, but even that was useful in that we were able to avoid making the same type of mistakes.”

As Ilam spoke, things began to coalesce for Brett. He found the words insensible as Ilam said them, but the meaning in their accumulation was clear enough.

“You knew about the organism from the beginning.”

“I suspected the organism from a contact I received on the same evening you spoke to Overton. They weren’t overly honest with me. I only knew something was dreadfully wrong, and I also knew that the instructions I was sent for programming and ingesting the experimental nanomechs was dangerous enough that only desperation could be behind it.”

Brett clenched his fists. “You lied to me.”

“I was still under the illusion that someone at command headquarters might have survived. I did lie to you, that’s true. I didn’t take the mechs for months to develop my intellect or make myself more valuable, as I told you. All of my skills were learned the old fashioned way long before most of you were even recruited. I hold a dual Ph.D. in mech engineering and biology from Oxford. I spent nearly ten years in His Majesty’s British service as a member of a special forces nanomech anti-terrorist unit. There is much you think you know about me that isn’t true and volumes more that don’t appear in my personnel file.

“But I told you the truth in the key places, Brett. I’ve shared the mech protocol. I’ve even safety tested it for you, and believe me, I was none too happy about the opportunity, though it did allow me to make some of the refinements that have kept us from having more fatalities than just Micah. If you want to be angry with me for lies, you’re perfectly welcome, but don’t for a moment imagine that you should hate me because the cost our crew has paid was somehow my fault. I was slow to understand the exact nature of the situation, yes. I was embarrassingly stupid at reaching sound conclusions and comprehending the nature of the organism. But I’ve given freely of my talents and my knowledge to prevent further deaths. Cassandra and I have argued data interpretations for hours, and some of those arguments I’ve even won.”

Brett still shook his head. “I had to come to you and drag the answer out. You weren’t going to volunteer that you had illegal mechs in your system. People died in the time we lost.”

Ilam waved him off. “They would have died anyway. The protocol I received was crude to the point of suicide. I took massive painkillers constantly just to keep myself sane and conscious enough to repair the ludicrous design and programming errors made by our employers. And even then I was lucky more than anything else. That first treatment would have killed half of us easily, perhaps even more.”

Brett couldn’t argue with him. He didn’t have the strength for it, and he needed to conserve what energy he had left for what was to come. He dropped his head and sighed. Ilam offered him a chair once again, and this time Brett accepted it.

He propped his elbows on the table so he could hold his head in his hands. “Why didn’t they tell us, Ilam?”

“I’ve asked myself that question. Would you believe that for five years I’ve been in daily contact with headquarters via a secure digital satellite transmission link which I access through a private Cassandra line? And they told me as little as possible. Most of this I had to figure out for myself from the signs. The long silences, the nanomech instructions, eventually the total lack of response to my queries.” Ilam grinned, but his expression was vicious. “Apparently at some point I was deemed unreliable as a vessel for knowledge. They began to doubt my loyalty, I suppose. For perfectly good reasons of course. Any time you leave a man in country for five years and suddenly relieve him of logistical support, he has a tendency to go a little native. His priorities change when you fail to adequately take care of him.”

Brett shook his head. It was too much to digest. “Do you believe in this therapy you’ve devised? I mean, is it going to work?”

“It has worked on me, that’s also the truth, and the design Liston and I produced is at least a pair of generations more advanced. We’ll have some casualties, but the majority will survive.” His features softened, and he straightened in his chair. Ilam leaned across the table, balancing his upper torso on his elbows, and considered Brett more closely. “That brings us back around to the original question, doesn’t it? Why won’t you take the therapy?”

“I told you. I can’t afford it.”

“You mean the loss of memory. Is Djen that important to you already?” Ilam laughed pleasantly. “I can assure you, Commander, from the perspective of someone who is paid to watch closely that the subtraction of the last two weeks will not significantly inhibit your relationship. The hum around the station for some time has been not if the two of you would join, but when. Your emotional collision was predetermined. I might add that a failure to accept treatment is the only thing that will prevent the two of you from reconnecting. Because you’ll be dead.”

“It has nothing to do with Djen.”

“Then it’s Emily.”

At the mention of her name, Brett froze. He didn’t have the sense to look away, and by the time he would have, it was too late to pretend he didn’t know what Ilam was talking about.

“How long have you known?”

Ilam shrugged. “A few years. I grew curious when it became apparent that you chose to spend so much time with the primary system interface. Most men in your position don’t, you know. Not even the Cassandra system designers like the human component. It functions, but it’s barbaric. As soon as they can think of something better, the Cassandra computer will vanish.”

“But I sought out the interface.” Would he have acted any differently if he had known someone was watching? Brett realized he wouldn’t.

“Every day,” Ilam said. The flat certainty in his voice suggested it was all the evidence he had needed. “After that, I did some research. I found the loan documents for the mortgage to your house, the one in Georgia. I’ve even seen pictures of it. And I saw the name on the documents. Markus Brett and Emily Rosette. She wasn’t difficult to trace after that, at least not with my security access. You have my sympathies.”

“You don’t understand.”

“Then explain it to me.”

Brett hesitated. How did he make sense of it all so Ilam would understand? How did he make it rational enough that it counted as evidence? There wasn’t any way to do it. That was the ultimate answer. Ilam didn’t know Emily. He’d read about her, studied her fate, but he’d never experienced her. He couldn’t hear the lilt of her voice or recognize her expressions, know her particular feminine scent or the way her mind grappled with problems.

But Brett couldn’t let Ilam’s ignorance stop him, either.

“Cassandra is changing. She’s begun to think spontaneously. She’s developing sentience. I don’t know when it started, but I’ve seen it in her. Mostly little things, of course, but she’s started to function outside the parameters of her instructions, and the things she’s doing are so much like Emily that I can’t doubt it anymore. I simply can’t.

“Cassandra has developed spontaneous consciousness, and there’s only one conclusion I can draw which explains it: Emily. Cassandra’s simulated neural structure has begun to mimic Emily’s, and sentience is a product of that mimicry. If Cassandra can become conscious, that means Emily still is, somewhere in there, beyond the self-definitional suppression. And that means I can’t leave her here, not when we’re abandoning the station, and possibly the entire planet, forever.”

Brett glared at him, certain the explanation had failed. It would have failed if someone had offered it to him. Still, he went on.

“And that’s why I can’t take the therapy, either. Two weeks ago–hell, even as early as last week–I had finally begun to give up. Djen was here, she was warm, she might even have been willing. Emily was in that damned machine and in five years she hadn’t given me any hint that she was anything but a biological automaton. And I was tired, Ilam. I was tired of pretending Emily was still there or that what remained of her could ever be anything to me. She may still be beyond my grasp, but I know she’s there now, and I can’t leave her just because she isn’t the same person I remember her being. If I purge the organism, if I allow myself to lose the insights I’ve gained this week, I might not find them again. I would leave her behind to suffer in loneliness and silence. And even if I dropped it all in a data file for Cassandra to remind me, what would it accomplish? I’d wake up assuming I must have been as mad as Ritter and I’d do nothing.

“I just can’t allow that to happen. That’s the only thing you really have to understand.”

Ilam folded his hands on the table and watched them for several seconds, saying nothing. His eyes flickered upward, and he sighed.

He said, “Markus, I have a tremendous amount of respect for you. I want you to know that. You have proven yourself to be extremely efficient and extremely capable during your tour of duty here. Some operatives in my position would have considered it a conflict of interest, your relationship with Cassandra’s human component, but you never allowed it to distract you from the work at hand, and that was part of the reason I kept my findings to myself. That, and the fact that I’m Irish, I suppose. My people understand tragedy.”

Ilam smiled, but the lips were firm, grim. “But your thinking on this is suspect. I’ve spoken to Cassandra. I’ve accessed portions of the machine which even you can’t reach, and I’ve seen no sign of what you’re talking about. She isn’t sentient, even under your dynamic learning profile. What you’ve discovered is simply a quirk of her personality emulation programming, and I think you’re seeing and hearing what you want to believe rather than what is. It isn’t Cassandra that’s changed. It’s you.”

Brett started to protest, but Ilam held up a hand to stop him. “Hear me out. What do you have, really? Cassandra seems friendlier. I noticed during the meeting the other morning that she has begun to address you by your first name. Do you think you’re special? Ritter programmed her to call him Adolphus. I examined your user profile, the Brett zero-four-nine profile you seem so fond of using. Has it occurred to you that in the dynamic learning environment, Cassandra isn’t manifesting her own personality, she’s studying you. The primary system interface is designed to respond to the desires of the user, to develop a personality with which the user is comfortable and attempt to anticipate his needs.

“What you receive from her may very well be reminiscent of Emily, because Emily is what you want. You’ve loved her. You’ve wanted to interact with her, or with someone who is like her, and you’ve subconsciously transmitted those desires to Cassandra. She is simply responding to that need to the best of her considerable ability. But don’t misunderstand me, Brett. It isn’t Cassandra. She’s doing her part, but you’re doing the rest.

“The bottom line is that Emily is the same as Vernon’s truck and Attler’s garden. It is what you want to see. It is the neural network inside your own brain that forms the most dynamic electrochemical transformer for the organism to manipulate.”

Brett scowled at him. “I’m not crazy, Ilam.”

“I’m not saying you are. I’m saying you’re infected just like everyone else. I’m saying that the reality you perceive and the reality that exists independent of your mind are entirely separate. Recovering Emily–saving her from what has been done to her–is a pleasant fantasy, Markus. It’s a noble fantasy, but at the end, that’s all it is. A fantasy.”

“You don’t understand.”

“What were you planning to do after the crew awakens? Pack us all into the Escape Module and merely wave us goodbye as you stay behind? Do you think they’d countenance abandoning you?”

“They’ll do as they’re ordered.”

“You’re overestimating the discipline they’ll possess when the horror of fact begins to dawn on them. We’re all survivors, that’s it. The command structure no longer exists.” Ilam spoke harshly. He leaned into his argument with a relentlessness that was savage. “And even assuming we left you behind, what next? You would be alone, beyond the scope of help. Emily would still be in the machine. Emily would still have all of her technological suppressions intact. And you would still be infected. Within days–possibly within hours–your level of infestation would have proceeded to the point that Cassandra no longer recognized you as Markus Brett. You would become unauthorized personnel and would lose access to the primary system interface. Cassandra would determine that the station had been abandoned and she would shut down the atmospheric systems to eliminate what she perceived as an intruder, and you would die. Emily would still be alone as long as the power lasts. You don’t help her by remaining behind. She is, as you have said, beyond your grasp.”

At last, Ilam softened. He slumped back in his seat, his argument spent and seemingly his energy with it. He looked to Brett tired and listless.

“Take the therapy,” he said. “I’m asking you, Markus. Do you remember what Ritter said that night you played the game with us? He explained the theories of time. I thought once that I disagreed with his belief in the force and power of history. I wanted to believe that free will always produced an infinite array of potential futures and all courses of action were always open to us. I see now that it isn’t true. The weight of history dictates the options which become available to us. Other people’s choices limit our possibilities. There may be a multiverse out there in which all possible outcomes are realized, but I have only this one experience and this one life for which I’m responsible. My choice has become clear, as has yours, I think. We’ve been given only the one.

“Don’t waste your choice and the only life you have. There’s nothing you can do for Emily except shut down the main power grid, take Cassandra offline and let her pass in peace. It would be for the best, and you know it.”

“No.”

It was all he said, and it was enough. Let Ilam understand if he would. If he wouldn’t, Brett didn’t care, but he wouldn’t murder Emily, not that way, not even if it was the best thing.

Ilam chuckled, long and sad. “If you were one of my people, Markus, I’d write a song for you. The man who chased his love across the breadth of the heavens, knowing he was doomed.” He stood, pushed his chair back against the wall. He reached into his shirt pocket, retrieved what was there and placed it on the table between them. It was the vial with Brett’s name on the label. “In case you change your mind, Commander.”

“I wouldn’t count on it.”

Ilam went on despite him. “Inject the vial straight into your muscle tissue–you won’t be able to do it the way Liston has, believe me. In the neck will work adequately, as long as you manage to avoid the jugular. You’ll have to use the wide gauge needle, so recalibrate the injector for a shallow penetration so you don’t blow a hole in your throat. It will hurt like hell and you may have to do it more than once to empty the vial.”

Brett didn’t acknowledge the instructions, and Ilam finished. “This isn’t the preferred method, but the mechs know their job and they know where they need to go. It will take them longer to complete the task this way, so be aware that you might awaken in some pain after the sedative wears off.”

Ilam finally seemed to realize he was accomplishing nothing. He pushed back from the table and stood. “Just a precaution. As I said, in case you change your mind. If not, well, I’ll tell you it’s been a pleasure to serve with you and leave it at that.”

Then he was gone and Brett was left alone.

<– Chapter 24 / Chapter 26 –>

<– Chapter 23 / Chapter 25 –>

They started with the beds first, selecting the dead Liston identified and transferring the bodies from the med bay to second level storage. Of the twelve that had been, seven remained. The recovery of the sick would take longer, at least in theory, and Liston determined they could be safely moved to the rec area where the others had slept the night before. Pallets were transferred, followed by the bodies to occupy them and portable monitoring devices patched up to the main med bay console. Then the beds were stripped and new linens retrieved and the room returned to some semblance of sanitary order.

By then it was afternoon. Ashburn and Whitney prepared a light lunch of sandwiches and fruit in the commissary, which everyone ate, but no one with anything like zeal. Vernon informed them that as a potential last meal, it more or less sucked, but he was grateful for the effort all the same. Some of them laughed, but only with the same enthusiasm with which they had eaten.

When they returned to the med bay, Liston awaited them. The vials had been loaded into injector guns, and the guns themselves placed beside single syringes on small trays which extended above the beds. The blankets had been turned down and the lights muted except for brilliant pools projected into the spaces where Liston would stand while administering the therapy. And there was music, serene and pleasant, the volume so low it could hardly be heard. But Brett detected woodwinds and gentle drums. He couldn’t have named the composer.

The doctor stood in the middle of the room, a few paces to the right of the rows of beds. His hands were pressed together in front of his chest, and he smiled.

“Now comes the difficult part,” he said. “We’ve made all the arrangements. There aren’t any more distractions to keep us from the matter at hand. Someone must find the courage to go first, and it isn’t an enviable position, I know.”

He bent his head toward Brett. “And it can’t be you, Commander. You would lead by example, given the opportunity, but that won’t work. If this procedure is to have the stamp of legitimacy, you have to go last, after everyone except Ilam and myself.”

Djen stepped forward. She squeezed Brett’s hand a final time and then released it. When she reached Liston, he placed his arm around her shoulders and led her to a bed on the far side of the room. He helped her move the tray, then held back the sheet as she sat down, removed her boots, and climbed in.

Without having willed himself to do it, Brett followed. He took his place on the opposite side and knelt so that his face and Djen’s were on the same level. She saw him and smiled, but here eyes were dark in the dim lighting. A darkness that wasn’t pleasure like he had seen before, but fear. He stroked her hair and she tried to wink at him, but failed. He saw that her lips trembled.

“Roll onto your side,” Liston said.

He pulled a pair of surgical scissors from the pocket of his lab coat and split the her shirt up the back. Djen shivered, then giggled.

“You lecherous old goat,” she said.

Liston didn’t pick up the syringe until he seemed certain she couldn’t see him anymore.

Djen lay with her arm beneath her head. With the other, she touched Brett’s chin.

“Hello, stranger,” she said.

“Not strangers yet. Not for awhile.”

“I’ll remember. At least I’ll try.”

She wouldn’t, but Brett didn’t say so, because she was trying to be strong. Instead, he whispered, “Just be well.”

Liston waited until they had finished, then began to speak. He spoke in a friendly voice, what Brett thought of as a pleasant clinical voice. It was the same one he had used a few days ago when it had been Brett in the bed and Djen beside him and he wanted everyone to know that things were going to turn out just fine.

“I’m going to give you a shot first, Djen,” he said. “You’ll experience some discomfort from the needle, a little pinch to the left of your spine, but it’s a topical anesthetic so that won’t last long. I’ve had to use a larger gauge needle on the injector than I’d prefer in order to pierce the spinal column, so this first injection is designed to spare you that pain.”

“You’re very thoughtful,” she replied.

“I try to be, my dear. I’m afraid my former wife didn’t think so.”

He gave the shot then, while she was distracted. Brett watched him, heard her gasp between her teeth, and then it was done.

Djen grinned at once. “That wasn’t so bad. And since when did you have an ex-wife, Liston?”

“Since about ten years ago. I don’t believe I’ve told anyone here. Don’t you feel special?”

“It’s always easy to tell secrets when you know the listener won’t remember them in the morning.”

Liston laughed, though Brett saw it was to cover the sound he might make when he set down the syringe and lifted the auto-injector.

“I had thought of that,” he said. “Did you feel my finger just now against your back?”

“No.”

“Are you certain?”

“I’m lying. I’d really like you to give me a shot between the vertebrae when I can still feel it.”

Liston lost none of his humor, but said, “Be serious a moment, please.”

“It just feels cold.”

“That’s normal. I’m going to proceed with the insertion.”

Brett held her free hand in his, kept the other one on her head, tangling his fingers in her hair.

“I think you should grow it long,” he said. “It would be beautiful with all those curls.”

“I will, if you promise to take me away from here. Someplace where there isn’t so much sand and dry air. That’s murder on the ends.”

It wasn’t what she wanted to say. He could see it in the way she shifted her eyes away. She wanted something else, something more meaningful.

Brett knew what it was, and he said it for her. “I love you.”

Liston noisily cleared his throat, then proceeded in his hypnotic, clinical voice. “I’d like you to pull your knees up toward your chest, that is, get into the fetal position. There you go. The remainder of the procedure mimics a lumbar puncture, so we’re having you extend your spine, except for the fact that we’ll be inserting material rather than removing it. Are you ready?”

Djen nodded, but did not speak.

Brett watched him, and Liston met his eyes momentarily. The doctor’s expression was unreadable, but he quirked the corner of his mouth, as though to pass along a reassurance. Then he looked away and prepared the injection. The auto-injector made a low buzzing sound, then a click.

Liston said, “That’s it, my dear.”

“I didn’t feel anything.”

“That was the plan.”

She chewed her lip. “What happens now?”

Liston returned the injector gun to its tray and rubbed his hands together. “You’ll begin to feel drowsy in the next three or four minutes. You’ll be unconscious within five. The nanomechs have already begun to work. Assuming all goes well, you’ll begin to recover from the sedative in about six hours. Since you were the first implanted, you’ll be the first to awaken. If Ilam and I think of it, we should have sandwiches and tea waiting for you.” He placed his hand on her shoulder and gave her a pat. “You’ll be fine, Djen. I fully expect that.”

She offered her thanks, and Brett could hear that she tried to sound sincere, though it wasn’t particularly convincing. The memory of Micah was still too fresh. But she knew better than anyone the work that had been done and the sacrifices Liston had made to prepare the therapy, and Liston seemed to understand. He gave her a final squeeze, then moved off to recruit his next patient.

After he had gone, Djen whispered, “I’m starting to wonder if this was such a good idea.”

“Too late for second thoughts.”

“Have you noticed how terrible he looks? He and Ilam both?”

“Don’t worry about them. I trust them, and I think you do, too. It’s okay to just be scared.”

Her eyelids drooped, and she popped them back open. Djen blinked in surprise. “That little bastard. He said two or three minutes.”

“He didn’t want you to be fighting the medication.”

“He lied to me.” Her words came out slurred, and her eyes slipped closed again. “I’m not ready to sleep yet. There’s so much to say. Markus–”

He shushed her, then stroked her cheek with the back of his hand. “An unconscious patient is a happy patient. A wise man said that.”

She smiled at him. “You said you loved me. That was the first time.”

“Would you like me to say it again?”

“Please.”

“I love you.”

Djen’s smile broadened. Her breathing slowed, became a regular, sleeping rhythm. Her lips moved in slow, lethargic motions, some last thing she meant to say, but she made no sound. Brett rose, though he didn’t initially let go of her hand. She hadn’t pulled herself out of the fetal position, so he straightened her legs and rolled her onto her back. He did what he could to make her comfortable so she wouldn’t be stiff when she woke.

Last, he bent over her and kissed her, not knowing if she sensed it, but certain she wouldn’t remember.

#

Ilam and Liston were a formidable team, Brett decided. It took them less than half an hour to perform the procedure on those who remained. After watching Djen quietly slip off to sleep, the rest went in orderly fashion. Vernon, Attler and Ashburn even located their own labeled injectors and climbed into the assigned beds. Liston worked quickly but kindly, giving variations of the same explanatory speech he’d offered Djen. His careful delineation of the details seemed to calm them. He mystified them with the pleasant spell that everything was under control. Ilam cooperated with gentle touches and humor and a smile that was fixed but sincere.

Brett stood apart and watched them work, admiring their manner. He should have assisted, he realized, but Djen had drawn out all the compassion he possessed. With the others, he would have come across as harsh.

Finally, they were done and all but Ashburn asleep. Liston moved from patient to patient attaching wires and calibrating monitors, setting alarm parameters. Ilam joined Brett by the counter. He dispensed with his bedside jocularity, and his face seemed to sag as the sullen weariness returned.

“That was well done,” Brett said. “You two are to be congratulated.”

“I’d wait until we see the results before making speeches,” he said in return. “Liston isn’t completely honest with himself. He believes everything will work out fine enough, but Cassandra projects we’ll lose three more of the initial round and maybe as many as two from this group.”

Brett wasn’t in the mood to judge him. “That’s better than losing them all. At this point, I’ll take what I can get.”

“Unless you’re one of the five who doesn’t make it.”

“I suppose that’s true enough.” He steered the conversation away to safer topics. “Are you going to be up to supervising all of the sick? You and Liston both, I should say. Not that I mean to offend, but you two look like hell.”

Ilam nodded. “The good doctor and I have developed a reasonable regimen of prescription amphetamines to get us through the rough times. The fatigue doesn’t seem so bad now, but we’ll pay for it later. I expect you’ll be understanding.”

“If everything works out.”

“Never one to make a free assumption, are you?”

“Too many assumptions are what got us here in the first place.”

Ilam considered him thoughtfully. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

“We made some basic assumptions about the nature of life, the nature of living organisms when we set off to colonize the universe. We assumed Archae Stoddard was sterile because our technology told us so. We assumed we would have the ability and the tools to combat any problems which might arise. We assumed it was our destiny as a species to inherit the stars. We assumed we could be gods.”

Brett left it there. It was more than he had wanted to say as it was.

“You’re becoming philosophical in your advancing age, Chili,” Ilam said.

Liston approached them, wiping the sweat from his forehead with the coat sleeve. He held the last injector gun in his fist and glanced toward the last open bed, the one nearest the door, which had been prepared for Brett.

“That’s all done,” the doctor said cheerily. “Everyone looks well enough. Their measurements are good.”

Ilam chuckled. “That’s his way of saying it’s your turn, Commander.”

“I’ve taken the liberty of adjusting your sedative dosage. I assumed you would prefer to be the first to awaken.”

“There’s that word again,” Ilam said.

Liston frowned at him, confused, then went on. “I know what I promised Djen, but rank has its privileges as they say, and its responsibilities. You should be up and about twenty to thirty minutes before the others. That will give Ilam and I a chance to brief you thoroughly. Reorient you to the situation, as it were.”

Brett said, “You can save it. I’m not taking the therapy.”

The pause lasted three full seconds.

“Excuse me?” Liston said. He looked down at the injector gun as if he might leap forward and jab Brett with it anyway. “You can’t refuse the therapy. Everyone gets it, sick or not. That was your order.”

“I’m changing my order.”

“You’ll die. You’ll die like Tappen and the others, comatose or raving.” Liston cast a pleading look at Ilam, attempting to enlist support. “If it’s the safety of the procedure you’re concerned with–”

“I have perfect faith in your procedure,” Brett said, his voice flat. “I’m just not taking it. I know the risks. I know the situation. I even have a fairly good idea of the consequences. I’ll log my decision into the computer so everyone will know you did what you could to convince me.”

Liston stared at him, dumbfounded, and Brett thought he was probably attempting to gauge how insane he might be, and whether or not he would be justified in forcing the treatment because Brett had proven himself unfit. Whatever he saw was apparently not enough.

“Why not?”

“Because I can’t afford it right now.”

The doctor swiveled to Ilam, his eyes wide. “What is he talking about? Can you tell me what he’s talking about?”

Ilam shrugged, then crossed his arms over his chest. “The commander is a man who knows his own mind. I’m not going to question his decision.”

“You’re both insane!”

The support for his decision was surprising, but Brett didn’t stay to examine it, and he didn’t remain to argue. He pushed the two men aside, strode to the door of the med bay and let himself out into the deserted station.

<– Chapter 23 / Chapter 25 –>

<– Chapter 22 / Chapter 24 –>

The last survivors of Persia Station–for all Brett knew, the last survivors of Archae Stoddard–gathered in the med bay. They formed a rough circle, standing with their backs to the sick, their shoulders almost touching. In addition to those he had expected, there was Garaby, the system hardware analyst. Reece and Whitney, though he couldn’t say at the moment remembered exactly what either of them did. But they were new faces, people from outside the circle he had come to recognize, and Brett smiled at them as a greeting.

He had let them all sleep in, and most had taken him up on the offer. Djen had awakened only after he returned to his quarters, changed into fresh clothes, then touched her face. He’d made coffee for the rest and roused them as gently as possible. Brett couldn’t explain this generosity to himself, but when he looked at them–Ashburn’s hard wariness, Vernon’s frenetic energy, Attler’s cool but bruised vulnerability–he was pleased. They’d suffered enough personal cataclysms.

It was a few minutes shy of noon, station time. Liston and Ilam sat on their stools against the microscopy counter and grinned idiotically at him because they had made the deadline. Both clutched large mugs of steaming coffee. Their eyes were sunken, their cheeks drawn. They looked gray with fatigue, but triumphant. Lined on the counter between them were nearly a dozen vials of clear liquid, each one labeled. Brett. Riley. Ashburn. Liston.

Brett waited until he had their attention. It wasn’t long. No one was in the mood to speak. Even Djen’s occasional hand on his elbow seemed inappropriately social to him considering the circumstances. Brett cleared his throat.

“Explain the procedure, Doctor.”

Liston nodded, then continued to nod as he spoke, like a palsied old man. “These vials contain an individuated nanomech suspension similar to the treatment protocol Ilam designed for himself, the details of which most of you should be aware. Each of you will receive the dose through auto-injection at a point roughly midway up the spinal column.

“The mech volume per ampoule is lower than a treatment dosage for standard illnesses. This is a slight deviation from the original treatment, but based upon the assumption that we have each developed a near critical infestation. The majority of the mechs we’ve selected are large, and they’ve been adapted from military grade rapier model nanomechs to seek out, recognize and destroy structures which fit the criteria which we’ve assigned to the organism.”

Ilam explained. “Rapier class mechs are specifically designed to protect the body from a chemical or biological weapons incident. They’re extremely fast, extremely efficient and strikingly aggressive. Imagine, if you will, the mech equivalent of Deep Space Marines. Only smarter, of course.”

“This should clear a safe passage through the spinal canal for the engineering mechs,” Liston said. “The liquid suspension has been impregnated with the silicon based components of a rapid-flux assembler. This unit will follow the advance of the rapier mechs up the spinal column and will be constructed on a membrane just inside the skull. The assembler will perform a dual function. First, it will emit a new set of signal instructions to the rapier mechs for more precise targeting of the hostile organisms. Second, and more critically, it will begin producing a hybrid rapier and medical scalpel class mech.”

Ilam placed his hand on Liston’s arm, and the doctor accepted the cue with the ubiquitous nod. Ilam said, “Scalpel mechs are standard medical issue. Our hybrid is larger, but still less than a quarter-micron in total length. It won’t work as rapidly, but it’s sleek and strong and has the instincts of a rapier. They’ll work in units of a thousand or more, some securing the interneuronal networks and eradicating pockets of resistance, others performing the actual work of restoring the network to the imaged original. This is based on the assumption that the larger rapiers won’t be able to penetrate some of the finer networks without causing neurological damage.”

Liston smiled. “Each mech unit within a functional unit team will be programmed by the assembler with a detailed image of the neural segment to which it’s assigned. This is a multiple redundancy system. Each mech will also transmit a constant digital info-stream back to the assembler which identifies it as an operating unit. Should mech casualties occur–and we suspect they will–the assembler will produce additional units to keep each team at full strength. When the task has been completed and verified by an external signal from Ilam, the assembled units, which will be constructed from our own bodies’ carbon atoms, have instructions to dissolve. They’ll be reabsorbed. The initial implant units will then deconstruct the assembler, which will proceed through the blood-brain barrier and be discharged from the body as waste product. The remaining rapiers have been programmed to stay in place until they are manually removed or fail to detect additional organisms over a period of roughly two weeks–to prevent further infestation, you understand.”

Brett was pleased with the explanation, perhaps more pleased that they’d managed to shape it in such simple terms without sniping at one another. He nodded his appreciation at them, then turned his attention to the others.

“Questions. Now is the time to ask them.”

Vernon was first. “Is this going to hurt?”

“It hasn’t hurt me in the past,” Ilam said, laughing . “But then again, I haven’t had the benefit of loosing a horde of rapiers into my skull with actual organisms entrenched there, and that’s even before they set to work mincing the gray matter. It could potentially hurt like bloody hell.”

“We’ve taken that possibility into account,” Liston said. He scowled at Ilam. “But there are two things you should know: there are no nerve endings inside your brain. You’ll feel no pain in the tissue as the mechs begin to work. In fact, I doubt very much you’d feel anything at all. Which brings me to my second point: much of the suspension we’ll be injecting is a heavy sedative, so you’ll be asleep long before any mincing begins.”

“If there’s no pain, why the sedation?” Attler said.

“Psychological reasons,” Ilam answered. “We don’t know what the effect would be of actively rewiring your synaptic patterns while you were conscious. There could be destructive psychological effects at the worst end, or it might just undermine the process. Your consciousness could struggle against the image placement and delay the success of the mechs. The brain does not happily comply with deconstruction and remodeling.”

Attler squinted at Ilam. “But you’re really not sure.”

“An unconscious patient is a happy patient, my dear.”

“The treatment looks good in simulation,” Liston added, “and Cassandra assured us that our theory is sound.”

“What is the estimated timeframe for this procedure?” Ashburn asked. “If we’re to be unconscious, I need to know how long we’ll be leaving the station to run on autopilot.”

“We won’t all be unconscious,” Liston said. “Ilam doesn’t require treatment, so he’ll be available for station emergencies as they arise. I’ll also be awake for much of the time, monitoring your progress. I’ll probably wait until most of you have recovered before beginning my own treatment.”

“You still haven’t answered the question,” Ashburn prodded.

“Maybe as little as an hour. Possibly several. The level of infestation will be a determining factor. You’ll each be supplied with additional doses of sedatives as the need arises. The bottom line is that when you awaken, you’ll be well.”

Djen crossed her arms and frowned. “Except we won’t have any memories of the last two weeks. And more than a few questions as a result.”

Brett glanced about the med bay at the bodies of the sick, the dying. The dead as well, he was certain, but he hadn’t bothered to ask yet this morning.

“We’ll have to clear out the others,” Brett said, though it sounded cruel to him. But his primary concern wasn’t for the sick. “That should help, or at least put off the worst of the shock until we’re more capable of handling it. Ilam and I will take care of that while Liston gets the rest of you started.”

Ilam seemed to agree. “And I’ll have Cassandra prepare a datafile with the content of our findings ready for access as soon as you’re revived. It might not hurt to have her seal the bay until the information has been reviewed. It might relieve some of the lost-time dissonance.”

“Lost time, lost friends, lost everything,” Vernon murmured.

Brett didn’t want them to dwell. “Who’s next?”

No one volunteered, but he gave them time to speak until the silence began to feel uncomfortable. They watched him, as hopeful and innocent as lambs. They trusted him and this therapy because he hadn’t ever failed them, because it was what they had always done, what he had always encouraged them to do. He’d made this choice for them because there was no other choice to be made, and they were willing to consent.

But Djen was closer to him than the others. She had always asked the questions he didn’t want to answer, always said the things he didn’t want to hear. She searched Ilam and Liston with her eyes, and her gaze had the quality of razors.

“Is it safe?”

Ilam answered immediately. “As safe as we could make it. Cassandra agrees with that.”

“Have you tested it?”

“The simulations look good.”

“On a real person?”

He hesitated, but Liston spoke for him. “Ritter and the some of the others here received their injections shortly before we paged the rest of you.” His eyes slipped away, momentarily skimmed the banks of monitors beside the nearest beds. “As you can see, the readings look normal, though they’re still comatose.”

“You expect them to recover?” Djen’s tone was sharp, demanding assurances.

“Of course.”

“And you expect us to recover?”

“None of us are in quite their condition. I expect a full recovery for us in a shorter period of time. We wouldn’t subject ourselves to this therapy if we weren’t completely confident.”

“And don’t forget that Liston and I will remain awake and alert through the duration of the procedure,” Ilam said. “The doctor and I have agreed that I should undergo the new therapy as soon as it’s possible, just as a precaution, so we both have just as much invested in the success of this treatment as the rest of you. We will monitor the work of the nanomechanical agents in situ and make programming adjustments as necessary.”

Djen lifted her face to Brett, and he looked back at her. She was scared. They were all scared, because what Ilam and Liston proposed was unknown, inadequately tested and hinged totally upon desperation. Choice had passed beyond their control, and the idea terrified them. Brett did the only thing he could, he smiled at her. It was enough.

“Last call,” he said. “Final questions.”

“I was wondering if you’d made any progress on our thought experiment.”

Brett looked at Ilam, surprised, but couldn’t read his expression. “What are you talking about?”

“The organism’s potential sentience.”

He shook his head. “No.”

“No, you haven’t made any progress, or no, you haven’t thought about it.”

Why was he bringing this up now? Brett wanted to glare at him. He wanted to silence him before he could sow seeds of doubt, but he didn’t do anything but smile. A curious smile, he hoped, one that would allow the moment to slide by unnoted.

“This isn’t the time or the venue, and frankly, your insistence is starting to make me a little nervous.”

“It’s a valid concern.”

“Only academically,” Brett said. His smile began to feel frozen, forced. “Shut up about it.”

Ilam shrugged. “I won’t press. But you might wish I had, later.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. Maybe nothing. Maybe all the difference in the world. I don’t care either, Commander, as long as you remember when this is all done that there are consequences to our actions, and sometimes to our failures to act. And I don’t just mean EFTC sanctions, for God’s sake.”

Brett tensed. “Spit it out.”

But Ilam waved him off as though it had ceased to matter. “You chose this course. You’ve said that. Despite the risks, whatever the outcome, you chose this because it is the best one.”

“The only one,” Brett growled. “If you had a better idea, you should have offered it two days ago.”

“I never said I did.”

Ilam offered nothing else. He sipped coffee from the edge of his cup, never breaking eye contact, clearly not intimidated.

In that awkward space, one of the monitors began to wail. Ilam and Liston sprang to their feet as though they had expected this all along. Liston turned over his stool in his haste. He seemed to just remember his coffee and set it on the counter’s edge where it teetered, then sat. Ilam followed behind him and took a position before a stack of monitors. Everyone else seemed frozen, vaguely lost.

“Which one is it?” Liston demanded.

Ilam focussed on the readouts. “Micah. Blood pressure and pulse are up fifteen percent. Looks like erratic brain wave activity as well.” He scanned the parallel row of displays. “Ritter’s condition has not changed.”

Liston moved around the rows of hospital beds until he stood beside Micah. He sighed a sound like relief and wiped his hand across his brow. “All right. Kill the alarms.”

Ilam pressed a button and the med bay fell silent, though Brett could still hear the echo in his ears. He pushed his way through the circle and came to the end of the bed, near Micah’s feet, and stopped.

“What is it?”

“Waking numbers. We programmed the monitors to announce any significant increase in the vital signs,” Liston said. He grinned a bit foolishly. “It means he’s coming around. Sorry to have frightened you.”

Micah groaned. It was a small noise from deep in his throat, the sound of a zephyr crossing a vast, parched wilderness. His hands trembled, then his arms. His toes flexed, and the tension rippled up his legs, into his torso, stood the cords of neck taut against his skin.

He lurched upright, his eyes wide and nostrils flared. His hands stabbed out in front of his face–the warding gesture of a man who has awakened suddenly. He whipped his head from side to side. Liston, Ilam, Brett, the med bay surroundings. Brett met his eyes, a smoked green like jade, and saw nothing there. Nothing but panic.

“Where am I?”

It was all he said, all he had time to say. A flood of liquid like mucous, gray and menstrual pink, burst from his nose in two thick streams. It spattered the sheets, coagulated on his hands. It flowed from his ears, as thick as paste and fell in long, ropy strands onto his shoulders. Micah sensed it, cupped his hands beneath his nose and held the fluid up to his eyes. He stared, and his eyes grew wider, rounder.

He looked at Brett again, then lifted one hand, questioning. Brett took a step back, his mouth open, but he said nothing. Micah frowned, then vomited, and it was more of the same, but darker, more violent, a blood-laden explosion.

Then he began to scream, though Brett couldn’t think of it as that. It was a gurgle. A drowning man’s last cry. Micah pressed his hands against the sides of his head and roared his hideous voice, spilling mucous and blood down his chin. He squeezed his eyes closed as though he was desperate not to see.

“He’s crashing!” Ilam shouted, and the buzzers and klaxons and wailing alarms all fired at once.

Liston jumped. “What the fuck?”

Brett watched, drowning in noise, drowning in helplessness as Liston pressed Micah back onto the bed. They held him down with their hands. Liston tore open his shirt and touched his throat. He retrieved a stethoscope and listened at his lungs. Ilam shouted things Brett couldn’t understand and could barely hear over the screech of the alarms.

What can I do?, Brett demanded, but did not vocalize.

He only watched, mute, seeing things he had no desire to witness. He realized he’d never heard Liston say that before, fuck, and that struck him as being somehow horrible. It said everything.

After ten minutes, the alarms died. Roughly the same time that Micah did.

After a pause, Ilam scanned the bank of monitors again. He said, “The others are still good and holding steady.”

Brett faded back toward the others, trying not to see the mess that Micah had become. Trying not to remember the last several minutes. He stood next to Djen with his head down, pressing his shoulder against hers. He said nothing, and no one spoke to him.

A short time later, Liston followed him, then Ilam, when it was clear there was nothing left for them to do. Liston turned his seat upright. Ilam reoriented his stool from where he had knocked it askance with his leg. They sat without speaking for some time, the two of them sipping their coffee and acting as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred.

Brett watched them until it became clear that they would offer no explanation. He had dried fluid on his hands. Micah’s blood. Blood and mucous, or whatever the hell it had been.

“Do you want to tell me what that was?”

Liston shrugged. “Could be any number of things. We’d have to autopsy to be certain. Quick and dirty, of course.”

“I need an explanation. We’ve got to decide if we’re a go or not.”

“We’re a go. We’ll work it out. It was a testing failure, one failure out of more than a dozen injections. Cassandra told us to expect some problems, and now we’ve seen one. This therapy isn’t without risk–mech therapy never is.”

It wasn’t nearly good enough. Not for Brett, and definitely not for the others. “You’ll have to do better than that.”

“There is nothing better, Commander. I expected something unfortunate to happen in one or more cases, but I hoped it wouldn’t happen like this, in the public view.”

“Why Micah?”

Liston lowered his cup. His expression was flat, his eyes hard. “What would you like me to say, Commander? I had developed some projections based on the simulation evidence. Most would respond to the treatment, a fair number would not. The exact manner of that failure couldn’t be determined. At worst, I thought the organism simply wouldn’t be eradicated. For that reason, we injected Micah and Ritter first. The newest case and the oldest, as a sort of continuum study. Believe me when I tell you I didn’t expect the failure to be quite so. . .dramatic.”

The doctor paused as if he expected someone to interrupt here. He glanced around the group, but no one would meet his gaze.

He went on, “Yes, it would make some sort of rational sense that the more advanced case should have responded to the treatment with more difficulty. It should have been Ritter by all rights. But what do we know? Perhaps the organism is more sprightly during the early phases of infestation? Maybe Micah had an undiagnosed aneurysm. All we know for certain is that Ritter and the others are fine and Micah is dead. It presents some interesting puzzles, but that’s all.”

“This is highly theoretical terrain,” Ilam said carefully. “We’ve been forced to make several modifications to standard medical nanomechs, and though the simulations indicated our programming was sound, real-time dynamics often deviate from expectation.”

“Christ!” Attler said, scowling at him. “You just killed a man, and that’s all you can say? It was a deviation?”

Ilam frowned. “Micah was already dead. Each one of you knows that. Without medical intervention, he would have passed this evening or tomorrow morning. We tried to save him, and we failed. The work was sloppy, which is to be expected when someone is under such severe constraints. So it didn’t work. It’s morbid, I know, but if we’re going to save the ones with a reasonable chance of survival, sacrifices have to be made. One of those sacrifices was the safety margin.”

“You see what I meant when I said he was lucky he hadn’t lobotomized himself,” Liston said. “Nanotechnology is a fabulous tool. It is in many ways the future of the human race, or at least the future of medicine. But it’s a potent tool, and a sensitive tool. Sensitive beyond comprehension when adjustments have to be made to the character of the mechs themselves.”

Brett could feel an emptiness in his stomach, a pit of loss and fear from which only waves of nausea emerged. He’d said that himself, but condemning the crew to death during a late night meeting and watching it occur were two entirely different things.

And if he didn’t do something, others would begin to think the same thoughts and ask themselves if the risk was worth it at all.

“You’re right,” he said. The gazes slid away from Micah, away from Liston and Ilam. Brett could feel them clinging to him, needy and almost smothering. “And there are a dozen other cases that haven’t shown any sign of failure. Maybe that’s a one in twelve chance that we die. Maybe the numbers are worse than that–maybe half of us will die, but those are better odds than the organism isn’t giving us. It’s offered us no chance of survival at all.”

They heard him, and some began to nod. Ashburn didn’t. He braced his arms across his chest. “I still want to know what went wrong.”

“Poor image quality transmitted to the synaptic units,” Ilam said, his tone thoughtful. “Too aggressive an assault on the organism given the combat environment. Assembler failure. Those are preliminary diagnoses. They’re also programming issues we can re-parm fairly easily, even after the mechs are inserted.”

“If you notice them in time,” Ashburn corrected. “And if it’s not a different issue altogether.”

“It might not be the mechs at all,” Liston agreed. He spoke gently, attempting to calm them. “Maybe we made an error in our attack system. Perhaps it’s the organism itself causing the difficulty. Some acidic toxin inside the cells, a defense mechanism we haven’t encountered. The bottom line is that we do not know. We may never know, but that doesn’t change the future we face or the decision you will have to make. I’ll receive this therapy because I’ve seen the alternative. Compared to what the organism will do, it’s a risk I’m willing to assume.”

Ashburn apparently wasn’t buying it. “There has to be a way to make it safer. You’re tired, we see that. Let Djen take a shot at it. Or Attler, she knows something about mech programming.”

Brett stopped him before he could go on. “How much safer do you want it to be? What’s an acceptable margin of error? Five percent error? Twelve? We’re not going to make this a foolproof therapy, not if we had ten years to work it out. And we don’t have ten years, maybe not even ten hours. By this stage of infection, Malibu Station was a catacomb. We don’t have time for more testing. We have Liston and Ilam’s expertise. We have Cassandra’s seal of approval. The choice has to be made now–you can take the risk and accept the therapy, or you can choose to wait for the organism already inside you to finish what it’s begun. But I warn you, if you choose the latter, I’ll personally see you into an e-suit and locked out of the station. I won’t have any one of you going crazy and committing murder or something worse.”

“That’s no choice at all,” Reece said.

Brett stared him down.

He watched them now, their looking away, their staring at the floor, their quick body counts among the pallets and beds as they calculated the odds. He knew what they were thinking. One had already died, but how many would go after they were under sedation, ones they wouldn’t be able to see. Maybe all of them. Maybe this was just as much a losing proposition as doing nothing at all.

Vernon coughed, and said in a quiet voice. “Let’s get this over with. I think we should, really. I want to get started now. I’ve spent entirely too much time over the past few days thinking about trucks, and it’s got me worried.”

“Trucks?” Ashburn asked.

“I had one at home. Cherry red with this big rack of fog lights mounted above the cab. A certified antique with the original engine. The only thing I’d done to her was paint, restore the interior and replace the belts and wiring.” Vernon shifted his eyes back and forth, then offered a guilty smile. “I can remember just how it smelled. The feel of the interior. The way the whole frame would shudder when I jumped on the gas. Gasoline, I mean, when I could get my hands on some. It has a thirty gallon tank. I love that truck, but it scares me to think about it so much. Like the doc said, you know.”

Attler lowered her eyelids at him. “I’ve been thinking about my yard, in Minnesota. The way it looked in the summer, with the border of birch saplings. The way the grass rustled at night when the wind blew in the summer. The scent of clippings after a good mowing. The sun on my neck. I dreamed last night that I worked in the garden, right beside the house. I was planting flowers, and when I woke up this morning, it took me almost five minutes to remember where I was.”

She looked away. “I was too busy looking for my spade and gloves.”

Stuttering, Reece mentioned spiders. He’d felt like he was covered in spiders when he woke in the middle of the night. With Ashburn, it was facility security. An overwhelming urge to walk the floors, monitor the boards, see the panels reading five by five.

Brett heard Djen’s whisper. “I’ve been thinking about you.”

She squeezed his hand, and for lack of a better response, Brett did the same.

They went around, everyone but Brett and Liston and Ilam sharing their fears, their preoccupations and the things that might have been symptoms but which they’d told no one. They said it might just be their imaginations. Maybe just stress. Maybe hypersensitivity about the things they already knew, which amounted to too much for true objectivity. So they passed those around as well–the justifications that had carried them through the long night.

Finally, Ashburn, glowering, said, “It’s happening.”

It was the push they had all needed. Brett nodded at Liston. “Let’s get them started.”

<– Chapter 22 / Chapter 24 –>

There really isn’t anything more to say.

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