Something went wrong in the jump.
I remember the crash.
I must have died in that crash.
I figured I’d been reconstituted, because when I came to, my pod was dry and upright, and I was not coughing up space phlegm like it was going out of style. I could even see Phoenix's silhouette outside my pod, waiting for me to hit the release tab so he could catch me and my wobbly knock-knees just like all the previous times I’d come back.
But when the pod door slid up and my straps came undone like wet noodles, I slipped out and hit the hull of our drop ship like a marlin landing in the bottom of a fishing boat. I hissed in pain as I shakily pushed myself up to look up at my drop partner. “The hell, Nix,” I grumbled. “Sleep on the wrong side of the pod again? What happened? Did we crash?” When my eyes finally adjusted to the unnatural light, my breath caught.
Phoenix wasn’t dressed for a jump. He was outfitted for another deployment. Clipped onto the front of his raid suit was his landfall rifle in a low-ready position, a finger hovering over the trigger. Next to him was Salamander in similar dress, but while Nix’s face was covered by his helmet, Sal only wore a neck warmer and a tired look of resignation. I only recognized it was him because his blue eyes still seemed to pierce through anything he stared at. His cheeks were hollow, covered with dark stubble, his expression otherwise haunted. The baby fat that had made him look fifteen was gone, leaving behind the bones and sinew of a man who’d seen one too many things he couldn’t unsee.
Phoenix said, “She’s yours today. Keep an eye on her.” His cold voice sounded crunchy and robotic as it passed through his helmet’s mic, sounding scuffed like it had been dropped in water and never reprinted. Then he turned and left the pod bay without another word.
Salamander got a glove under my armpit to help me to my feet. “Come on, Hornet.”
“Fuckin’-A, you look…” I started.
Salamander managed a self-effacing smile. “Like a million credits? Thanks. You too.”
“I was gonna say you looked like shit, but yeah. A million credits sounds right. What the hell happened?”
“You… We crashed,” Salamander said thoughtfully. He helped me over to a bench and then rummaged through a broken footlocker, tossing a few bits of clothing at me. “Your suit’s in the cargo bay. We’ll go there first.”
As I got dressed, I took the opportunity to look around. The drop ship was indeed a mess. Whole walls were ripped off, but what was more, the torn edges of the structure were rusted, malformed, or half-reprinted. There was mud and grass and debris in every corner. The air was humid and smelled slightly like mildew. Even though it had to be at least ninety degrees in the shade, I shivered as I rubbed at my sleeves. “Can I at least grab my…?” My locker where I normally stashed a spare suit for reco’s was empty, the door ripped off. The person-sized locker was completely gutted. Even the drawings I’d taped up inside of it were gone. The loss of my personal effects felt like an assault on my stability of spirit.
“That was… It doesn’t matter who it was. That’s why your suit’s hanging in the bay,” Sal explained.
I let the kneejerk anger come and go. “O-kay… Where is everyone else? How… How is everyone? Why did it take so long for me to reconstitute? I should’ve popped out with everyone else. Was my pod damaged?”
He frowned, some emotion crossing his face that I couldn’t place and hadn’t seen on him before. It was half angry, half guilty. He wiped at his mouth. “I… dunno. Everybody’s… I hate this.” He shook his head like he was trying to clear cobwebs. Then he handed me a pair of well-worn boots and said, “I’ve explained this to you, like, a million times and it never gets easier. Phoenix said it would get easier. But it just gets harder. It gets worse.”
“A… what?” I blinked at him, going through the familiar motions of tying shoes. Tying shoes made sense. You don’t ever forget how to tie shoes. “What’re you talking about? How many times have I reco’d today?”
“Not today. Try nine months.”
“Excuse me?” That was not how reconstitution worked. If I died, I would just get reset to my last checkpoint. We always made electronic back-ups on a twenty-four-hour rotational basis. The longest amount of time I could lose was a day!
“Your memory matrix was damaged in the crash. Every time you reco’, it’s like we crashed this morning.”
“What?” There was a humming noise nearby. I had a feeling the sound was in my head, like tinnitus. Or maybe it was a rush of blood or adrenaline. All I could hear was a never-ending explosion as my heart started hammering away in my chest.
He put up his hands as if that could ward off the panic attack. “Sometimes we pretend it just happened yesterday, so you don’t freak out. We can’t have you freak out. So, don’t freak out, okay? We need you to open the doors. If you freak out, we’ll have to kill you and if we kill you, we’ll have to wait for you to reco’ again and it’s just such a pain, so please don’t freak out!”
I wasn’t freaking out. Who was freaking out? Not me. I didn’t freak out. Other people freaked out, but I was definitely the queen of not freaking out. I smiled at him serenely as something inside me screamed. “Doors?”
Salamander saw the numbness creeping over my face and grabbed my hands to prevent them from making knots out of my shoes. “Hey! Hey… Listen. You did this. After the crash, you sabotaged the drive. You fried Lobster’s pod and would have done the same to the rest of us if Phoenix hadn’t stopped you. Mayfly can’t reco’ because of you. We’re fucking stuck here because of you.” His voice got more and more quiet as his grip on my fingers started to hurt. He didn’t seem angry. It sounded like he’d gotten over angry a long time ago and was now somewhere between insane and exasperated.
“Why?” I asked, gritting my teeth. “Why the fuck would I do that? And where the fuck is here?”
He suddenly let me go, like he was afraid he’d actually hurt me. Salamander was a sweetheart. In all the time I’d known him, he’d only ever managed to kill out of self-defense. His behavior now was so bizarre, it was like he was a different person.
He looked off into the middle distance as he said, “Terra incognita, Hornet. But even though it’s not on any charts, there’s infrastructure here. There are tunnels that bypass the surface. We’re pretty sure they’re old Colony runs. Right now, we’re on a roll. We’ve managed to get by a few doors with your help and we’ve even set up a forward base. We’re hoping we can set up the pods there, but we need to get the rover running and to do that, we need more power. There are lights in some of the tunnels. All we need now is to tap a service terminal that isn’t protected by the security system. Goals. Pheonix said goals will keep us from losing it. It’s how he’s done it so long. It’s how we’ll survive.”
I too tried to focus on the problem and not the cause. “Why can’t we just hardwire something? Bypass it?”
He shook his head. “None of us have wetware. We can’t bypass the security protocols without frying whatever line we tap into and we’re afraid we might fry an airline or oxygen regulator. We’ve gotta do things the old fashion way—find a terminal and plug in to interface with our plastic credentials.”
“If it’s Colonial, there’ll be satellites. Why not use the planetary network? Why not call off-world for that matter? We could ping an interstellar—”
He made a frustrated noise. “You destroyed our long-range communication rig and torched the back-up! You even smashed our black box. We’ve been working this problem for ninemonths. Scavenging for parts is all we’ve been able to do. You think we didn’t think of everything? It’s driving me nuts. You say the same things every time like you don’t remember… and I know you don’t, but it kills me every time we have to tell you… You, with that condescending tone like you still can’t believe you made the shit situation we’re all trapped in, you—!”
I waited for his tantrum to be over before I asked, “Food? Water?”
“The replicator and purifier are still in good shape.”
“Okay,” I said, getting to my feet. “You said there are doors. Well, I’m a key. Where’s the next door to open?”
“About time,” Salamander said with a sigh as he handed me a neck warmer. “This’ll keep the sun off your head where we’re going. And it’ll keep most of the mud out of your hair too.”
“What’s a little mud?” I asked cheerily.
“This mud has skin parasites in it that like to burrow under your surface dermis to lay their eggs. And then they like to hatch after a couple days.”
“What a beautiful headcover!” I said as I wrapped it around my neck and head half a dozen times.
Salamander managed a small laugh at my expense, then seemed to convince himself to sober up as he gestured at the pod bay door. “Come on. Let’s get out of here before someone decides to kill you for fun again.”
“Excuse me?”
“Long story,” he muttered. “Through here. Your suit’s been patched up a few times.”
I blinked slowly. “Lemme guess… Slug holes?”
He tried to consol me by explaining, “I guess it is a short story after all. We used knives at first, back when we were worried about the integrity of the ship’s hull. But then we found a stockpile of ammo and the Alpha drop ship in basically pristine condition fifty miles away and said, ‘Fuck it’.” He mimed shooting me in the face a couple times, then gave me an apologetic look. “Sorry.”
“All good,” I sighed, even though it really wasn’t.
But why do I not blame him? I wondered to myself. If I really did do all that to fuck us over, I’d wanna shoot me in the face too. What I really wonder is why Phoenix didn’t just shoot me as soon as I rolled out of the pod. I would’ve shot me if I were him.
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The Alpha Run was completely mapped. It was a fifty mile warren of tubes and rooms ending climactically at Alpha crews’ mangled dropship. Sal didn't say one way or another if there had been any survivors of our point team. Since we wouldn't be trekking to the ruin in this instance, I didn't ask.
Charlie's Run, despite being discovered before Alpha's Run, had only been mapped out two miles from our crew's crash site.
The Colonial-styled tunnel led off into two cylindrical directions, like brachial tubes. The floors were gray and black, porous and pitted like poured concrete. The curved walls had stratification lines where some of the layers had been constituted using native geopaste; they were rusted brown mostly but shimmered red in places when our headlamps passed over them, betraying semi-precious impurities.
“How old are these highways?” I asked, my damaged helmet mic clicking audibly when it stopped keying. It was already annoying.
Salamander's mic wasn't in better shape, but through the cast catchers in my ears, it was like he was talking directly into my helmet. I wondered why my radio caster didn't work… and if it had to do with the many times my own team had killed me, or with the adverse environment we were in.
He said, “Best guess is twenty years. Hard to tell since you destroyed our diagnostic equipment.”
Of course. “What was my fucking prob—?” I muttered, my last word cutting off half-way through to make static instead.
Sal still managed a small chuckle. It sounded hysterical. “We still have no idea. You left notes when you left the first time, I think? But Kurage destroyed them before I could read them. Garbage, she said. Excuses.”
I'd have to talk to my bestie the next time I saw her. “I wonder why she did that if it really wasn't that important…”
“I wonder too,” he whispered.
He led me down the right path and after asking where the left led, he answered mysteriously, “Phoenix said not to go that way.”
“Dangerous?”
“What isn't dangerous here?” He made a huffing noise before he explained, “The Colonials made these highways to bypass the fauna on the surface. It's nothing but death up there… But when things went wrong for them, they scuttled the speeder and blew the magnetic track. Now every path leads to a lock, a trap, or a surface access hatch—mostly locked ones. The way we're going leads to Checkpoint One and beyond. We're three doors past it now, but we've hit another lock.”
“And that's where I come in?”
“Yeah.”
“What went wrong for the Colonials?”
“Beats me. Whatever scared them, they beat feet in a hurry. I'm just glad they left most of their equipment behind. Wherever their central base of operations is, we landed far enough out that they weren't thorough or creative.”
“What the fuck could scare the Colonials so bad that the deadly fauna paled in comparison?”
“Your guess is as good as ours.”
Your. Ours. Salamander really didn't consider me part of Charlie anymore. The exclusion ached with every step.
But I'd done it to myself.
Why? What had been so important that I'd turned my back on my entire team, my way of life? It made less and less sense as we carried on.
We walked in silence for a while before I felt brave enough to ask, “You guys only let me wake up when you need me, don't you?”
“Do you blame us?” Sal asked seriously. “It's another mouth to feed… and when your mouth isn't full of food, it likes to judge and antagonize everyone. If you didn't have the wetware, we'd leave you in stasis just to keep the peace.”
“Forget I asked,” I mumbled.
“I can't unfortunately,” Sal replied softly. “You know, I used to admire you.”
“Yeah?”
“Now I just feel bad for you.”
Great. That feels good.
The scenery changed around us, transforming into bubble-like rooms and tube-shaped corridors. The place had already been ransacked and looted of its contents, presumably by Charlie if the recent drag marks in the dirt and dust were any indicators.
“Supply bay,” Salamander offered tiredly. “We already used up the raw materials in the printer. It was mostly aluminum. Some ceramic pieces—left over deflector tiles we think. We gave up on raw mat like that months ago when we found Alpha's site. Plastic and organic materials are what we need now.”
I appreciated the clarity. “Noted.”
“I'm mostly reminding myself.”
I sighed. “Right.”
He reached out to Mayfly via the midrange comms and skipped any etiquette to relay, “Hey, we're at the first bubbles.”
Mayfly took a second to respond. “How's she holding up?”
“Like a three-legged table.”
“I'm right here,” I groused quietly.
Mayfly barked a laugh and said, “Better you than me. I would've pushed her down the left run.”
“I know, which is why I'm in here and you're in the climate-controlled box.”
“Jealous much?”
Salamander let out a leaden sigh. “I'm calling because I can't remember which way the checkpoint is after the bubbles. Is it through the L-room or down the shute?”
Mayfly took a moment to respond. When she did, she sounded like she had a pencil or cigarette in her mouth. “L-room. The shute that doesn't end in spikes and razor blades is after. Should be cushioned at the bottom if Phoenix did his part.”
“Thanks May.”
She disengaged the comms without a goodbye.
Salamander must've taken my thoughtful silence as judgment because he said defensively, “In this situation, radio discipline is the furthest thing from my mind.”
“I didn't say anything.”
Sal froze. Then he slowly nodded. His next words were surprised, almost curious. “You're right. You didn't say anything this time. I wonder why not.”
I shrugged. “Like you said, this is a shit-uation. Why would I expect you to maintain any decorum given the circumstances?”
“Aaand there's the passive-aggressive sarcasm after all. I was just starting to miss it.”
I couldn't help my answering laugh, and it even got Sal to snicker a little despite himself.
We passed through another series of empty tunnels and slipped down a fifty-foot decline that felt like an amusement park slide. At the end of it, the both of us flipped and rolled onto a series of fabric-covered cushions filled with foam and shredded textiles, giggling like kids.
“That used to be a pitfall, with six-inch spikes at the bottom,” Salamander said, brushing himself off. “Killed Kurage and Phoenix the first time we encountered it.”
“I wasn't with them?”
“You survived ‘cause you landed on their bodies. Managed to climb out and get to the next door after phoning it in. It was hard to get you to press on after that. You got taken out by a chipping machine in that next room, but thankfully your body gummed up the gears. We've since filled it with stone and a seizing agent, so it shouldn't be a problem anymore.”
Fuck. “Oh.”
“The road to Hell isn't paved with good intentions, Hornet. But the mortar is still blood and bone.”
“Depressing.”
“Practical,” he said, and this time it sounded like he was trying to reassure himself. “Or did Commander say pragmatic? Poetic? It was a P-word.”
Pretentious, I thought dryly to myself before waxing aloud, “Nix can make optimistic smoke signals out of a garbage fire if morale is at stake.”
“Thank him the next time you see him,” Salamander replied shortly. “He's the only person trying to keep us all sane.” There was an accusation in his voice directed at me, but I couldn't tell what exactly for, so I let it go.
He slung his landfall rifle into a low-ready position and said, “When we get to the checkpoint, don't relax. The last two times we've come through, there've been Wolves. I'm loaded with incendiary rounds. It should keep them off me unless we see a Big One.”
“A… What? Wolves?”
“They're these black and gray, undulating things made of teeth and claws. They'll use pack tactics to try to separate me from you and th-then… Well, they'll eat me.”
“Are they the fauna the Colonials were avoiding?”
He sighed. I'd probably already asked before. But Sal still humored me with an answer. “We don't fucking know. They could just as easily be experiments. You know how Colonials were always trying to make things that were more suited for the planets they landed on. Darkness, they even tried to genetically alter people before that shit got banned. You… You don't have to worry about Wolves.”
“You’re saying they'll only go after you? Why not me?”
“We don't know. I think it has something to do with your wetware. Maybe they have implants too?”
“What do the others think?”
“Kurage thinks the reason they won't eat you is ‘cause of the shit you did topside while you were on the lam six months ago. I dunno where she got the idea.” Just like me, he probably guessed it had something to do with the notes she destroyed.
“And Phoenix?”
“He thinks it's useful.”
I shook my head. “Of course he does.” But then I frowned. “So, if these alien things don't attack me, why go with me?”
“Because traps don't discriminate like Wolves do… and the crew is still convinced you'll run if we let you go unsupervised.”
My face heated with one part embarrassment, one part pity. “I'm sorry you got picked to be the sacrificial lamb this time.”
He gave half a shrug. “‘Swhy we take turns.” Then he huffed a laugh, mumbling, “You act like I haven't already died a dozen times for you.” He reached out and thumped my shoulder pad. “Come on. The faster we get past the checkpoint, the faster we can make progress. The longer we linger, the more likely we'll encounter Wolves. Not to mention the rogue codes. Or the sinks.”
“The… whats?”
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Too bad Charlie had already looted all the wood in this section, otherwise I might've been able to scare away any evil spirits listening in.
The Wolves found us an hour later, only a single room past the checkpoint when the two of us were just about to sigh in relief.
They sounded like a series of cavern streams meeting together, splashing and morphing. They spilled out from cracks in the walls—black blood from red stone. Inky tendrils clumped and squished together in masses as large as bears or serpopards. There were five, then six of them and they waited for their brethren to fully constitute before moving as a singular unit, limbs slapping the floors and walls with a sound like breaking branches.
As one, they bellowed with a singular, warbling voice that sent a shockwave of primal panic down to the soles of my feet.
An obvious observation surfaced in the back of my mind behind the animal fear: They're howling. Oh my God, they're fucking howling!
But, by then, Sal and I were already high tailing it out of there, our own bipedal footfalls thundering off the tunnel surfaces like the terrified beat of a warning drum.
“I've got seven on your proximity thermals,” Mayfly shouted in our ears. “You need to get some distance.”
“No fucking shit!” Sal gasped as we rounded a corner and ducked under a half-rolled up cargo bay door. Jumping over and slamming into empty metal crates, we got to an archway covered in scorch marks where a door had once been. Ignoring the sounds of our pursuers clambering over boxes, we ducked into another corridor and Sal dug into a pocket and toss me a canister as we hit a dead-end.
“Spray the wall!” He ordered as he took a knee and started firing down the lane. “Like the ones before!”
I sprayed an X to denote we were clearing a new area and then fully faced the wall, seeking a terminal with my gloves. My wrist indicator turned green when I finally found the port and a piece of metal slid out of the way for me to plug into the terminal.
“Hurry, Hornet!” Sal popped off another couple rounds and the smells of burning hair from the expelled cartridges and cooked fish from the screaming Wolves made it through my suits’ filters, so heavy and acrid were the scents.
“Cover me, I'm diving,” I said as I gave myself up to the foreign machine.
As soon as I plugged my lead into the terminal, all my senses blacked out. Deaf, blind, and floating in an abyss of code, I quickly set up a neural construct and found myself on level ground within the slipstream of data, patching my perception into the nonexistent landscape.
A room solidified around me as dotted white lines on black planes. Three dimensions would help ease my vertigo, but otherwise, the construct was barren, save for a humanoid figure that materialized in front of me. They were assembled out of dots and dashes. It surprised me that it was a naked woman's shape, though her proportions were elongated, spindly. Her hair was swept back; her apathetic features and manners were bird-like. Most interfaces were androgynous, non-threatening, and nondescript, but I could almost see a frown of disdain on her delicate face.
The interface sounded within my mind like the querying whisper of an otherwise indifferent goddess: Hello again, Hornet. What is your intent?
“I need to open this door.”
Why?
I'd never had an interface ask me why before. A moment of panic came and went as the interface took my distress and filed it away as user data better experienced outside the electronic construct. Uncontrollable biological responses serve no purpose in cyberspace.
“Why do you want to know why?”
I want to know your intent.
“My intent is to go through this door.” My impatience came and went.
Why do you wish to go through this door?
“Are you fishing for a chicken-crossing joke? To get to the other side. What else is a door for?”
She took my frustration and tilted her head. A door can also be a barrier.
My thoughts manifested as discarded dialog, thrown to the ground for both of us to see but not act upon: Oh great, a fucking literal AI. Just what I fucking need. I said aloud, “I want this particular door to stop being a barrier and turn into a portal.”
We have had this discussion before. I will make the same distinction I did before. You must give me the pass code.
“Do I know the pass code?” When she silently affirmed my question with a spark of flashing binary, I said, “Recover pass code.”
Impossible.
“Why?”
You have already exceeded the recovery protocol limitations. You must wait one additional sun cycle before reattempting pass code recovery.
They'd woken me up a day too early, I realized. A jilted sensation came and went, followed by its friend, IT fury. “What's on the other side of this door?”
Classified.
“Dangerous or protected?”
Protected.
“Pressurized or ventilated?”
Classified.
Fatalism came, but was snatched up by the AI who said, Do not force this door, Hornet. Lethal force will be swift and indiscriminate. When my satisfaction was also claimed by the interface, she added, I can assist you in finding an alternate route.
“Do it.”
She dumped the data into me without safeties in place and my physical pain hit the data cache and dumped. That would mean one hell of a headache as soon as I left the construct.
The interface's mask contorted. The expression was practiced, but still uncanny—a thing that had never been human trying out a reassuring smile that didn't touch its empty eye sockets. She said, You are everything we desire. See you again soon, then collapsed the construct, forcing me out of the Colonial tech with the equivalent of an electronic shove.
I gasped as I collapsed to my knees. It was hard to tell what Salamander was shouting over the ringing in my ears, but then he gestured to my helmet, and I tilted back my head instinctively to stop the blood from running from my nose. The iron in the back of my throat helped to ground me and I choked out over the white noise, “We've gotta get outta this corner! There's another door on the other side of the hall!”
“Expanse take this fucking tunnel!” Salamander hissed as he unlatched a singular grenade off the front of his vest.
The corridor was only twenty feet long. I reached out toward his blurry shape. “DON'T!”
He pelted the bag toward the remaining creatures, currently contorted, stuck in the archway as they all tried to force their way over the charred bodies of their fallen kin, gaping mouths spitting violence.
The bag saddled itself in a meaty nook. A second before it went off, Sal realized how close they were relative to us and how unprotected we were. “Fuck,” he commented appropriately. He twisted and covered me with his body as the grenade went off, deafening us both. Heat hit us first, followed by a barrage of bone and stone. The twin keenings of my bio-indicators going off and Salamander bitching through a volley of woundings told me I was still alive.
A dose of pain killers had me tasting almonds as I slowly rolled Sal over to make sure the Wolves were dead. After confirming they'd been flambéed into stillness, I got him on his side and shouted through the tinnitus, “Are you from Jupiter?!”
He inhaled sharply as his own suit’s life support went into overdrive. The back of his outer shell had been pierced in a dozen places, but I could already see silver sealant greasing out around the wounds, plugging up any holes and preparing the debris for later, presumably safer, extraction.
Through his tinted faceplate, the inside of his helmet was coated in wetness. He managed a pink smile as he said hoarsely, “I've been stupider.”
Over the comms, Mayfly interjected through an earful of static, “—ood, Rookie? Queen?”
“They're dead,” I told her as Sal listlessly got to his feet, using the pitted wall for support. “But Sal's hanging on like a half-punched chad.”
“I saw both your suits flash. Oh! Sal, the commander is already on his way. I forgot to tell you. When you asked about the L-room, he took off into the tunnels about five minutes later. Some-body’s in trou-ble!”
“What? Why?” Sal grumbled. “I was handling things just f—Ooch! Oh… Oh, that's nice.”
Mayfly chose to ignore his groans of happiness as his LS injected him with drugs. “How'd the lock picking go?”
I answered for us since he was in the middle of receiving a medical grade combat high to keep him on his feet. “We've been redirected by the system. I'm about to wire int—”
“Oh, a rogue interface, huh? In-ter-est-ing. Well, hurry it the fuck up. The sun's going down soon. You'll have barely enough time to turn back. I wouldn’t wait for the boss to catch up. Not if you know what’s good for you.”
She killed the line, and I blinked sweat out of my eyes before asking on a breath, “What happens at sundown, Salamander?”
Sal waved a lazy glove. His smile was tipsy and triumphant. “The heat sinks on the surface dump their thermal cells. It sanitizes the tunnels. No more skin parasites. No more poison spores. No more people. Very clean. Very carbon neutral.”
“Sanitize. Cook, you mean?”
“Like we cooked those Wolves. Except… much… slower.”
“Oh fuck… Wait, then why is Nix risking his neck to come out here if it's that tight a margin?”
“I'd hurry and get that alternate route open if I were you,” he said before muttering into his wet mic, “Why do I taste coconut?”
“If only you guys woke me up a day later,” I said offhandedly as I trudged over to where the interface had indicated. My wrist chimed green after feeling around, and the wall port opened at eye-height.
Salamander cursed under his breath. “I fucking knew this shit was going too smoothly.”
“This is smooth to you?” I barked in disbelief.
Sal just offered a tried exhalation. “Just get the door open before we're deep fried. Easy-peasy. No worries.”
“A please wouldn't kill you.”
“It has before,” he stated. His sudden straight tone was serious enough to get me moving earnestly.
The interface was much more helpful this time. After plugging in, she greeted neutrally, Hello Hornet. What is your intent?
“You know my intent. Open this door.”
Proceeding, User. Stand back.
This time, I was snatched out of the interface by someone's arm around my middle, dragging my wire out of the wall with a pop as several pole arms tipped in jagged metal shot toward my face and chest.
Air whuff-edout of me as I landed back-first onto someone tall and broad. Above me, the lances slowly retracted back into the doorframe with a series of clicking sounds. Then the door swung opened inward with a clatter and bang.
Nix hissed through the comms like the name was a curse: “Salamander.”
I picked up Sal's terrified swallow through my cast catchers. Phoenix pushed me off him and I got to my feet as he bowed upwards menacingly.
As I was inspecting the notched doorway, Nix slammed Sal up against the curved corridor for some wall counseling, chewing him out for various infractions, least of which was blowing up a precious, precious grenade in our own faces. Sal's worst offense was made all the clearer as I let out a shuddering breath and sat back on my heels.
Our alternate route led into a well-lit room about ten-by-ten feet square. The light was a diffused green, casting strange, serpentine shadows along the layered walls. On the other side of the room, there was an open archway, a blue light pulsing above its lintel, making it difficult to see into the darkness beyond.
It seemed like a straight shot, but after being nearly pin cushioned by a trap, I was less inclined to sprint across the cleared space without due diligence… or, ideally, not at all.
Phoenix’ faceplate kissed Salamander’s as he ripped the landfall rifle from the equipment manager's suit and spat, “You didn't warn her about the interface and nearly got flatlined. That's on you. There are no alternate routes. You know better. I expected more. Get back to base camp before you break something irreplaceable.”
“Yes, Commander.” Salamander managed a wilted salute before wrapping an arm around his midriff and skirting around the other man toward our entry point.
“You're gonna take his rifle when there might be more of those things around?” I demanded on a growl.
“They won't manifest this close to sundown.”
“Still, it's dangerous to go alone.”
I made to get up and follow Sal, but Nix put out a hand and pushed me toward the green room. “You're not done.”
“I opened the door. It's all clear from here. The interface doesn't have any more authority than entry control at this level. You'll need to go deeper.” I shoved him away from me and it surprised us both when he let me. I snapped, “Put me in stasis if it makes you feel better. Put me on a shelf until you need me again, Commander. But don't pretend like I'm a part of this crew and then talk at me like I'm subhuman!” Who died and made him leader of this sinking ship anyway? Kurage was second in command before the crash, followed by Hydrake. A wave of nausea swept over me as I tried to remember why Lobster was dead, if Hydrake was dead… and couldn't.
It wasn't that the memories were absent--it was that the memory didn't exist. As far as I could recall, all of Charlie Crew had been alive less than four hours ago. And now it was nine months later and people were missing and dead.
It wasn't real.
I needed proof.
Until then, it wasn't real.
Phoenix rapped a ceramic-coated fist against the side of my helmet, giving me the spins, but also directing my spiral into annoyance rather than apathy. “That's the wrong way,” he said shortly, pointing at the square room. Then he pointed toward the dead-end. “That is the lock.” He pointed at me, and I rolled my eyes as he said, “Oh, look. You're the key.”
I smirked. “You woke me up a day too early, Genius. I don't have the pass code. Otherwise, good job. You know the difference between doors and deathtraps. Bravo.” I gave him a golf clap.
He relaxed, which wasn't what I'd been expecting him to do. Then he walked over to the dead-end interface and gestured with his rifle for me to come hither-thither as well. “I remember it.”
“How do you know the pass code?”
He tilted his helmet at me and, paired with a queasy sensation, the uncanny motion reminded me of the interface. He said, “You told me.”
“You'd really trust me at my word even after all this time?”
He didn't say anything.
I snorted. “Mhm. Yeah. Hate to break it to you, Partner, but I've recovered it since. I've changed it.”
“You didn't. It's still my birth date.”
I did a double take. “How do you know that for sure?”
“It's always my birth date.”
I couldn't help it. His nonchalant tone made me laugh. He tilted his head the other way before I asked, “When's your birthday?”
His voice was remote, emoteless, robotic. But dare I say it sounded almost proud coming from him. “Two-twenty-nine, Solaris three thousand.”
“You're a leap baby? On a millennial year? Very auspicious. No wonder the universe has run out of hero material. They used it all up reco'ing you.”
He was so done with my shit. He took a breath before ordering, “Open the damn door, Hornet.”
I grinned. “Proceeding, User.”
He grumbled something very Nixian and indistinct into his mic, but I made out the words stab and twice.
Message received, I thought to myself as I jacked back into the interface. It took a couple tries. When Nix had pulled me away from the door earlier, the jack got mangled. Then blackness invaded my senses, and the interface said, Hello Hornet.
She sounded almost sweet on me. “What are you for? Some kind of trickster programing? You're not supposed to be able to lie.”
I didn't lie.
I thought back to our last conversation in a reel of incorruptible data and physically sighed. “You lied by omission.”
You failed to disclose any misgivings you may have had. I am omnipresent, Hornet, not telepathic.
Was I being chided by a fucking toaster? I grit my teeth and felt the ghost of a touch on my forearm. The real weight helped me remember what I was doing. I wasn't here to debate or philosophize. I was just a turnkey, a locksmith, a tool. But if that meant my crew survived… If that somehow meant I could make it up to them by being useful…
“Open this door.”
Pass code. I passed her Phoenix’ birth date and the interface only nodded. Satisfaction rolled off it and then disappeared into static.
My horror rose up like bile before being swept away like runny foam.
Satisfaction.
“Are you… alive?” I asked.
She said, I've opened the door. Please proceed with caution, Hornet. There are more stars than men… But there is more space than matter.
“What does that—?” I dropped out of the construct, but Nix caught me as my body went limp and I used him to get my bearings.
“Another hallway,” I groaned.
Phoenix drew and leveled his landfall pistol downrange and popped off a round. A hole appeared in the center of the far wall, about ten yards away, but after the echo of the shot dissipated, nothing else happened.
“Not movement driven,” he said. Then, before I could say anything, he picked up the spent cartridge and tossed it into the center of the room.
I jumped as a series of lasers shot the cartridge and juggled it in the air until it was turned into plasma. Then the lasers shot the plasma until there was nothing left but a round scar in the center of the room.
“Thermals,” Phoenix determined. He tried to reach out to Mayfly on the comms, but her return chatter was so choppy, he just keyed a signal on his wrist pad and waited for her to signal back by keying the comm.
“Morse code?” I asked over his shoulder.
“Simpler than binary,” he said without moving.
“But less elegant.”
“Elegance lies in efficiency. Without a mod, Morse code is faster.”
“Then you need some wetware. In however many years you've been a merc, you've never gotten yourself modified. Why not? Union block? Or are your genetics proprietary?” I couldn’t imagine Phoenix as a test-tube soldier. He wasn’t an Ares, for one—a sexless war machine made of meat and testosterone. Besides, even if his balls were fake, his face wasn’t symmetrical enough.
Nix finished keying another message to Mayfly and said, “Getting modified would make you obsolete.”
“Redundancy is the key to victory, you once told me.”
I'd gotten under his skin again, but this time he chose to retaliate in kind: “You're just being a brat because an AI got the better of you.”
I reached up to cup his helmet between my gloves and he stiffened from boot to cover. I smirked before smacking the crap out of the cast catchers on the side of his head. He cursed under his breath over the sudden ringing in his helmet, ripping off the accessories to stop the noise.
While he was deaf to my comms, I asked, “Who's obsolete?” I knew he could read my lips. We’d taught each other in Caldero several lifetimes ago.
He hissed, “It wasn't the first time, and it won't be the last. I'm not trying to drag you, Hornet. I’m trying to warn you.” He snapped his catchers back on.
I crossed my arms. “What good is warning me when I'm expendable.”
“Who said you were expendable?”
“Alright, forgetful then. You can't argue that.”
“No. I can't… But I…” His wrist indicator lit up with another message from Mayfly. He finished his point by distractedly mumbling, “I remember if I don't warn you. I pick at those moments. It eats me alive sometimes. It… I know it's just a passing weakness, but it's still crippling.”
That humbled me down to my marrow. He sounded despondent. Nix never sounded lost. He was Phoenix. He was renewal and reason given form. He was as infallible as the Common Equation. And yet the very human desire to warn me, even when I wouldn't remember, hurt him when he failed to do so.
Whatever I had done hadn't been enough to make him stop caring about me on some human level at least.
I opened my mouth to say something sugary and sentimental, but before I could, Phoenix held up a glove and said, “We missed the turn-around window. This corridor will have to wait until next time.”
He held out his pistol and handed it to me, grip-first.
I looked at it before looking back at him. “We could still try,” I said. I was not shooting myself if I could help it.
He sighed. “We've had this argument before.”
“I bet we have,” I stated bitterly.
His words were clipped, his tone even. “It's a waste of time. It'll take at least a day to reconstitute from a headshot. Our suits will need to be reprinted. And you'll need to be reoriented after you wake.”
“If you wake me up, you mean.”
He seemed to sense what I was about to do before I did it. His other glove struck out like a snake, but I spun away from him, darting for the new corridor.
For the record, a speeding Hornet is not faster than light… but the human mind is faster than most megaplex interfaces—even those of Colonial make. I forced my suit's life support to go full wart-removal and carbon-dioxide iced over my aerosurfaces as I made long strides down the hall.
Phoenix shouted from the doorway as I slammed into the other side and quickly slid my palm around, finding the port, and jacking in. I had seconds. But seconds were all I needed.
The interface said, You will be cut into millions of globular chunks, Hornet. Turn back.
“Open this door.”
It's open. Take some eustress. Then the interface crossed her arms. You are one step closer to the heart of our shared universe. It will be worth all this neuro-electrical distress.
“I'll take your word for it.” I disassembled my construct and then gasped as a tattoo-like sensation scoured through the back of my thighs and I collapsed. It only took seconds. The door before me silently slid open and I fell forward through it. As soon as my torso crossed over the threshold, the lasers shut off without a sound. The lingering smells of burning meat and scorched plastic were eyewatering.
I gathered spit in my mouth and coughed. My LS was beeping frantically at me, but then all that mattered was Phoenix slapping a magnet onto my retainer collar and dragging me into the new room, leaving my boots and knees behind. Pain killers flooded my system, and another shot of Add-line had me smiling at the bizarre image.
I whispered, “You were right. Elegance is efficiency. Turns out I don't have any legs to stand on.”
He hauled me across the floor and propped me up against a wall. Then he slowly crouched down next to me. He said, “Your suit's material is still in good shape. They were clean cuts. Mayfly’s tasking Kurage to collect our pieces in the morning. After we reconstitute, our suits will only be a few hours behind us.”
“Do not put a bullet in my head,” I whispered. “I can still get one more door open before we're deep fried.”
“No,” he said. He holstered his pistol. He said, “I'm not watching that again. You don't know what it does to me.” He shook my shoulder. “Hornet. Imagine how I must feel.”
I batted his hand away, but then he reached for my helmet. There were two of him so it was hard to focus and fight. “You don't really care. You're all in this mess because of me.”
“Yes and no.”
“Huh?”
“Technically Lobster got us into this mess.”
I blinked. “Wait. What?”
“That's why you killed him, isn't it?”
“Nix, how—?”
He snapped off my emergency release tab and my helmet popped off. We were in a vacuum. I know because I was suddenly deaf to my own screams. And then there was no air.
Imagine how I must feel.
Blood rushed into my eyes, pouring from my face as bubbles in the back of my neck popped and a torrent of hot liquid spilled out of my ears.
I fumbled, arms weak, as I tried in vain to snatch my helmet from him one last time. The dark crowded around the edges of my vision as the Space bends twisted my proteins and boiled my guts. Or was it the other way around?
Phoenix’ lips made familiar shapes in the silence: “Every life, another chance.”
He took off his own helmet and, as my personal rorschach framed his exhausted, sweat-plastered face, he set it down next to mine, closed his eyes and cried his own tears of blood, calmly waiting to die.
I will never have his quiet dignity.
There will be claw marks on the inside of my metaphorical coffin lid.
ns 15.158.61.8da2
