There’s a lot to know about Mars, but only one thing that matters: you can’t find good whiskey anywhere.
The first time I came to Eisen Four was to pick up eighteen school kids and their teacher. They’d come to the colony on a field trip, and were leaving in freezer bags on account of a faulty air unit. Colony management didn’t like the attention the incident brought them, so they offered to pay me double the haul fee. I gladly accepted. Kids are small, easy to move. All in all it was a good day, and I’ve been coming back ever since.
A few hundred years ago Mars had a mystery to it, an allure that appealed to dumb kids and dime novelists. The Egyptians called it Horus of the Horizon and drew it as a god with the head of a hawk. We called it The Red Planet and saw faces in the rocks, surely carved by the little green hands of little green men. The Mars of our minds had princesses and warriors and ghosts hiding in its canals. It was the wild west but better, because it was out there, above our heads, in the black and infinite field of space.
Then we got there. Then we did what we always do. If you know anything about the real wild west, you know it wasn’t as romantic as people like to think. It stunk of body odor and horse shit. The cowboys were criminals and rapists, their heads crawling with lice as they mumbled to themselves with mouthfuls of rotting teeth. So yeah, Mars was a bit like that—minus the horses.
As for space? It was a whole lot of nothing. Emptiness, more than the mind could hold onto. The good news was you could drift off in any direction and no one would ever find you. The bad news was everything else.
After a few weeks of solo travel, I was more than ready to put my feet on the ground. That much time in a tin can makes Mars look like heaven carved from iron oxide, and I felt that familiar sense of calm as its thin atmosphere gave way to miles of lifeless mountain and craters named for dead scientists. Miles of cold rock, and then the ping of a beacon signal.
Eisen Four was a metal scar with landing lights, built in the northern plains where the ground had been flattened by lava flows. Not a coincidence, given its primary export was mined materials. After landing, I wobbled down the stairs on space legs and checked in with the Deckmaster, a staggeringly old woman with eyes like solar flares. Her name was Madge, and she coughed madly but otherwise didn’t say much. Her bones clicked and her hair was as fine as spiderwebs.
“You planning on retiring any time soon?” I asked as she approved my docking pass.
“You’ll be the first to know,” she grumbled, spitting up a bit of blood.
“Second, I imagine.”
My stomach was eating itself alive, but I decided to see Griesmeyer first. Griesmeyer was the Head Doctor at Eisen Four, because he was the only Doctor at Eisen Four. That also made him the Surgeon and Dentist and, most importantly to me, Coroner.
When he wasn’t out front in the Medbay, I took it upon myself to wander into the operating room, where I found him elbow-deep in the splayed ribs of a rotten cow. I guess that made him the Veterinarian, too.
“There’s easier ways to find a steak,” I said in way of announcing my presence. He didn’t flinch or tell me I didn’t belong back there, he just looked up at me with one telescoped eye, then back at his gruesome work.
“Third animal to drop dead in a month,” he said, his voice sounding like a recording of a recording. “I’m trying to determine cause of death.”
“Probably the giant hole where its belly used to be,” I said, then added: “I move animals, too, by the way.” I moved in closer, staring down into the ravine of red gore, a war of muscle and bone. “You don’t think something …”
“Killed it? If so, it was an inside job.”
“What does that mean?”
He looked up at me with an enlarged eyeball. “There are no markings on the skin, no injuries, no claw or tooth marks or cuts to indicate a blade. Not so much as a scratch. It just simply … burst open.”
“Barotrauma?”
“Too extreme. And no evidence of it in the lungs or sinuses.”
I backed away, my appetite lost. “It’s always nice catching up, Doc. Forecast says there’s a dust storm coming, so I’ll be here three sols max. You have a tag count for me yet?”
“Nothing final.”
“Well make sure you wrap ‘em up real nice. The last shipment leaked. If I wasn’t so agreeable, I’d send you the bill.”
I waited for either an apology or an argument, but he was already lost again in Ribcage Valley. My retreat was covered by the sound of breaking bone.
I rented my usual room, a hermetic pod where I’d spent many a screaming night, then headed out into Eisen Four proper. Colonies always felt like a bad dream on the edge of being remembered. Prefabbed modular units built elsewhere and shipped in parts, then snapped together and welded shut. They might be shuffled around a bit, the order changed, this section above that one, but the individual pieces are all the same. If you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all. A bad memory in one colony will follow you to every other.
The streets were strangely quiet for the hour. Only a few ore miners were about, dragging ass to the lava tubes, and a dusty stray cat slipping between air recyclers. They’d repainted the trees since my last visit and I wasn’t fond of the shade.
The usual characters were hanging around at the October Horse, grimers and sand sniffers and the occasional credit beggar. I took a seat by the broken vidwall showing a pair of news readers twitching out month-old smiles. Ray limped his way over and served me a drink I didn’t ask for but didn’t refuse, either. It smelled like copper wire soaked in decimator fuel and tasted about the same. After it stayed down I could hear better, though whether that was a good thing or not was anyone’s call. But on Mars a drink started was a drink finished. No one was in the habit of wasting a damn thing two hundred million miles from God.
I was halfway to freedom when I saw her. My eyes suffered drink static but she was clear as Mercury, two seats down, head low, spine like an unwound spring. Her hair was well-cut but unstyled, clothes new but not clean. Her face wore the thousand lightyear stare of a quake survivor. Everyone else was too drunk or isolation-crazed to notice her, so I leaned in and kept my voice low.
“Gasping for air?”
After a two-second delay her radar pinged. She looked around and found me grinning like a dead rat. She stared back as if I’d just spoken in code, so I waved my hand around to illustrate.
“Colonies. They look roomy from the deck, but pretty soon they start to feel like a barbed wire choke collar. Once that kicks in, there’s not much you can do about it.”
She looked down at her untouched drink. “I don’t feel like talking,” she said, her voice sore from either shouting or lack thereof.
“That’s alright, I don’t feel like listening.” Usually that would get something, if not a laugh at least a sniff, a muffled exhale, but her mouth remained straight, the eyes as cold as Chromite. Naturally I took that as an invitation to continue. “I won’t ask what brought you here, but I’ll give you one guess what did it for me.”
“I don’t care,” she said to her glass.
“Thought you’d never ask.” I took the last swig of battery acid and moved one seat closer. “I’m here for one reason and one reason only: it’s against the law to bury the dead off-Earth.”
Her dark eyes did the math. “You’re a mover.”
“Folks call us Corpsers. Unofficially, of course. Officially we don’t exist. There’s only a few of us who move bodies, and we don’t exactly hold union meetings.”
Ray, apparently not done hurting me, reunited me with my glass and refilled it. This time I paid him, hoping it would keep him away.
“That can’t be true,” the woman with the dark eyes said, “about burying people here. I knew someone …”
“Everyone knows someone who’s been buried off-Earth. It’s either a lie or a story so old it might as well be.”
I took a sip and felt my teeth. “When the first outposts started popping up, Mars turned into a petri dish. After the mess we made of the moon, all that flesh-eating mold, they made some changes. Colonists were given strict instructions how to avoid contaminating the planet, most of which you’ve probably heard.”
She paused a moment. “Everything gets sterilized,” she said.
“Go on.”
“No one sets foot outside the colony walls.”
“Except for workers. And?” I waited for the third rule, but she just shook her head. “Nothing, and I mean nothing, goes in the dirt other than authorized and sterilized metal. And that most definitely includes corpses.”
I paused to sip bile, the taste growing on me.
“And I can already hear what you’re thinking,” I continued. “What about cremation? They tried it. A few microbes still got through, though I’m not sure the techs ever figured out how. The science gets a bit strange out here. Physics, Chemistry, who knows. I still can’t make a decent cup of coffee off-Earth. Plus some religions aren’t sweet on the whole cremation thing. Sanctity of the body or some other thing.”
Her eyes flickered slightly, a passing cloud. I’d managed to catch her fleeting attention. “Why don’t they send the bodies on the transports?” she asked.
“Pilots are superstitious, and normal people don’t care for spending that much quality time with a corpse. They tried a few drone ships but pirates kept taking them.”
I thought then that I must look like a ghoul to her, a dirty-ragged reaper of the lowest kind, and I unconsciously glanced at the mirror behind the bar, the one meant to shame drunks into good behavior, but my eyes were blurred from drink. I counted too many heads until I found myself looking back, all sweaty and fearful, a shadow lost and found, clutching its glass as if it were the last rung on the ladder.
The glance only lasted a second, but in it I saw the look in my eye, the eating dark, and I did the only charitable thing I could do in that moment. I closed my eyes, held it in, didn’t let it sink its teeth into another innocent catch, another clawing, sweating night spreading my poison.
The drink wasn’t done with me, but I was done with it. I stood from my seat at the bar and credit-tipped Ray on the way out.
“It’s not this place,” the woman called after me. I turned to see her face one last time, scarred and beautiful.
“What’s that?”
“Choking me,” she explained. She finally took some of her drink. Then all if it.
“Earth is never far enough away, is it?”
“No. I guess it’s not.”
“Be seeing you,” I said, ending the transaction. Then I left the bar, as much as you can leave any place behind.
The sandstorm rolled in from the east. Dust slammed into the outer walls of Eisen Four like an ancient leviathan throwing itself against the gates, with a scream that could peel skin and bleach bones. The colonies were built to withstand the weather on Mars, with armored shells that protected its young from punishing winds and temperatures that dropped under negative two-hundred, but there was always room for error. Sand pushing that hard for that long had a way of working its way inside even the tightest of seals. Mars had the patience of an animal that wanted nothing but to eat, but not for the sake of hunger. For the inevitability of the thing.
After I’d checked on my ship- officially listed as Class D Freighter DXC-163-1, but I called her Betty-Sewage- I grabbed a bottle of mushroom wine from the usual store and took an increasingly sloppier walk around Eisen Four, trying to remember the girl who’d broken my heart at Pilot’s Academy. She was the reason I hadn’t followed the military contract that would have set me up like Christmas in springtime, and here I was, struggling to remember her goddamn name. I settled on something-like-Jane and finished the bottle, watching the sandstorm through the blast windows. A hunter checking their traps. A day on Mars was only forty minutes longer than a day on Earth, but even that was too long.
When I was thirteen I packed a bag and snuck off to the city with all the credits I’d saved up, with no plans to return home and watch my parents slowly ruin each other. I got lost among buildings like great, tall spires of bone and glass, and for the first time ever I felt excited about what tomorrow could be. Eight blocks from the mag-station, I looked down the wrong alley and watched a man get stabbed in the belly for his shoes.
As he lay there with naked feet and a mouth sucking for air, I held his hand and watched the color leave his face. I called for help but no one even looked our way. When it was done, I bought a ticket home and told no one. They didn’t even know I’d been gone.
The storm thrashed and howled. The windows trembled and shook, and I did much of the same. I imagined a lightning bolt fissure working its way up the inch-thick glass as if carved by an invisible razor. I pictured the radiation-proof silica shattering like ice under the hull of a runaway ship, and I felt the crushing wind blind me and break my arms and burn the blood from my veins and sand me down to nothing, nothing for anyone to take away. It had been a long time since I’d prayed.
I woke up on a couch in a room I only recognized pieces of, the sound of a woman singing coming from the bathroom. Her voice was terrible and I was surprised to find my clothes neatly folded on the dresser, scratches on my arms. A screen on the wall displayed a date two full sols later than I expected, one beyond my intended departure. I dressed quickly and left before I could see the singing woman’s face. In my mind she was perfect and worth the damage.
Back in my room I showered and cleaned the scratches while listening to the weather report. Mars had as close to clear skies as I could expect, with the usual chance of meteors. I gathered my things and didn’t look back at the room on my way out. Checking out always made me nostalgic.
Doctor Griesmeyer was at the front of the Med Station this time, seated at his desk with the look he gave me whenever I was late.
“Is it yesterday already?” he asked, pulling up the manifest on his screen and throwing it to mine.
“I’d say it won’t happen again, but we both know that’s not true.”
He huffed, a sound somewhere between amusement and disappointment. Then he stood from his chair and told me to follow him.
“Your tardiness worked out in your favor this time,” he said over his shoulder. “We had a late addition last night. Ten minutes and I can have it ready to go.”
“The more the merrier,” I replied, never one to pass up extra credits. While Doctor Griesmeyer prepared a new freezer bag, I checked on the rest of my cargo to make sure they’d been sealed up nicely. I may have been gifted with a strong constitution, but the stink of that leaking bag had settled into my memory quite permanently.
The cargo looked good. Six bodies, four of which appeared to be miners. Standard stuff for Mars. Mining was the most lucrative profession because it was the most dangerous by a wide margin.
I got to Griesmeyer just as he was about to zip up the bag. A few seconds later and I wouldn’t have seen the face of my final passenger.
“What’s this one’s name?” I asked, looking at the familiar woman in the body bag. Her hair was well-cut but unstyled, clothes new but not clean.
“Dana Harper, according to her idents.”
I turned them over and studied the photo. “They look faked,” I said.
“Well she’s Dana Harper now.”
I didn’t know if I’d been hitting on the woman that day in the bar, and I didn’t know if it made a difference. Whatever she’d been running from finally caught up with her.
Griesmeyer tossed me the transfer protocols and I thumbed my authorization. According to her quarantine info she’d died of an overdose-related seizure.
“Did you ever figure out what was killing those animals?” I asked. He looked up at me with a strange expression, empty and lost, a man trying to make sense out of a senseless place.
“Something just wanted out,” he said. Then he sealed up the bag like it was a suitcase, nothing more.
Madge squinted at her dusty screen, checking the manifest against the auto-crates hovering behind me. One of them had a bad mag-drive and kept dipping low enough to tap the ground before righting itself like an amateur drunk.
“After all this time you still don’t trust me?”
“Corpsers are all the same,” Madge said. Then she pressed a dry thumb to the screen and waved me on.
“I’m looking forward to our date,” I said over my shoulder, climbing the stairs to the cargo lift.
Standing on the lift, babysitting my precious corpses as the hum of machinery moved through my bones, I thought about the woman who’d called herself Dana Harper. A woman I’d met in a bar, and then again in auto-crate designation 89643. I wondered if her story would have gone any different if she’d left that bar with me that day. For all I knew, I’d be lying in the auto-crate next to her, hauled away by the competition.
Once they were brought on-board and loaded safely into the cargo bay, I took Betty-Sewage through the usual launch sequence and took off a bit too fast, leaving behind a slightly burnt landing deck. If Madge didn’t like me before, that maneuver was certain to finish the job. Still, it was worth it to feel the punch in the chest of a good take-off.
Within minutes Mars was another dot in the rear monitor, and I was left deciding what pills to take to make the next few days go by quicker. The hardest part about being a Corpser was dealing with the boredom of a job that could have been done by drones and, in some ways, still was.
Once I’d passed the outer markers and Betty-Sewage was locked into autopilot, I headed to the back and dug around in the kitchen for the cleanest mug I could find, settling for a tin vacuum flask with a large ding on the bottom from when I’d thrown it in a chemical rage, though the memory of it escaped me. But then I could have run for President of InterShipping and not remembered it with some of the stuff I’d swallowed.
As I ran the flask through decon to scrape off the purple mold starting to form around the lip, I noticed a rattle coming from the rear of the ship. It sounded like something heavy was bumping against the hull, my money being on the auto-crate with the bad mag-drive. The damaged ones had a habit of powering up on their own and slipping out of their straps, then knocking about like a sleepwalker driven by sleep logic. If I wasn’t careful, an auto-crate could bash about for hours before vomiting out its corpse all over my cargo bay.
I poured myself a warm flask of recycled water and swallowed three yellow jackets I’d gotten off a kid on Salis Station, then punched in the code for the door and stepped inside. The cargo bay was dark, so dark I couldn’t see my own hand waving at the sensors. The motion lights came to life overhead, sputtering a few times before staying on.
To my surprise, all seven auto-crates sat in the same neat pile where I’d left them, strapped against the farthest wall. Despite that the rattling continued, a metallic thump that went on in staccato rhythm, the sound of it echoing through the mostly empty cargo bay.
When I got closer, I realized the thumping wasn’t coming from the crate I’d expected. According to the invoice it was designation 89643, contents one Dana Harper. It was also, now that I’d gotten right up to it, less of a rattle and more of a knock.
A knock from inside.
“Fuck you, Griesmeyer,” I said, because I’d never been big on pulling jokes, especially when it came to work. I wasn’t about to cut the doctor some slack just because he got me paid. Late addition my ass.
But the more I stood there, listening to that knocking from inside the crate, the more I doubted the idea of it being a joke. Griesmeyer was as dry as Martian soil, and he wasn’t about to risk his position for the sake of a joke, let alone one played on a no name Corpser with a second-hand liver. My God, what a waste that’d be.
Yet still the knocking went on, like Morse code from a way station too distant for audio transmissions, a language of banging and scraping, and I wished then that I’d washed those pills down with something quicker, even as I reached out and unlocked the crate that wouldn’t stay quiet.
I didn’t have to open the lid; Dana Harper handled that bit herself.
The body in auto-crate 89643, who according to the faked idents found on its person used to be called Dana Harper, danced inside the black freezer bag like a chrysalis.
After it sat up, pushing the crate open with its head, the body twitched inside the bag like sped-up footage. And me, I just stood there thinking about how far Mars was behind me, how much further the next planet was, and how long it would take for anyone to find me, put me in restraints, and tell me my mind had finally collapsed under one too many pills.
“L-l-l…” the body said, although ‘said’ isn’t the right word. The sound had been squeezed out of her, the vibration massaged from the woman’s voice box, air pushed up the neck and worked over a marionette tongue. “L-l-let. Out. Out. Let.”
It didn’t sound like a good idea to me, but then I was in no condition to judge. I stared at it for a while, that black bag sitting up in the crate. It stayed perfectly still, without the sway of life. I considered every option I could think of, including pushing the bag down, forcing the lid onto the crate, and shutting myself inside the bathroom to ride out the pills. That seemed to be the most sound idea, the one that didn’t end in my own blood leaking all over my cargo bay.
“Now. Now out let,” the corpse in the bag said, sounding more practiced by the second. The cargo bay vibrated red, my teeth grinding together like a mortar and pestle. I’d been hauling corpses a long time, and poisoning myself even longer, so I considered myself an expert at both. And still, everything about this had me shaking like it was my first day in Riot Prison.
Despite it all I unzipped that bag, quick as I could, then took a step back and waited to see what would happen. Call it professional curiosity.
After a second or two the bag started to move again, the arms inside pushing this way and jerking that. It looked like an old clip I’d seen once of a magician working his way out of a straight jacket, while his half-clothed assistant smiled at the camera. If this was a magic show, then that made me the assistant, and I was doing anything but smiling.
When the bag finally slipped down enough to give me a look at what was causing all the trouble, I was surprised to see Dana Harper’s face appear. I must have convinced myself that no matter what came out, there was no way it could be the lost-looking woman from the October Horse. In a way, I was right. Whatever was looking back at me from inside that body bag, it may have had Dana Harper’s face, her body and her voice, but it wasn’t her.
If you’ve ever woken someone up from a deep sleep, and I mean a deep one, the kind brought on by chemical induction, you might have seen the way a person looks back at you when you strip away their evolutions. In that moment before words have meaning, before rules and sins carry value, you might have caught a glimpse of the ancient brain at work. The primitive, the non-rational. It may have horrified you to see someone you know reduced to a blood-throttled lizard, a beast capable of eating your face far before it could kiss your hand or hold a door for you.
The way Dana Harper looked at me was worse than that. It wasn’t just primitive, it was without time. It wasn’t pre-human because it wasn’t human at all, and to see that looking out at me from behind her eyes filled me with an uncanny dread that froze me to the deck, even as Dana Harper slipped out of the body bag and stumbled from the auto-crate on dead baby deer legs, slapping onto the floor arms first, the impact so solid I expected them to break, never taking those cold eyes off me even as she picked herself up like a puppet working its own strings.
Dana Harper’s corpse was doing a lot of things; tensing the muscles in her arms and legs, curving her back like she was test-driving her spine, her tongue slapping around inside her mouth. The one thing she wasn’t doing was breathing.
“You’re not alive,” I said, figuring she’d want to know.
“Alive not needed,” she replied. Each word sounded separate from the others, spoken in different rhythms and tones, like they were spliced together from an audio feed. As I heard the sound of them, watched the corpse that had spoken them learn its controls, I thought of Doctor Griesmeyer and his burst-open cows.
“The animals,” I said. “That was you.”
“Have did not what was looking for.”
I could see it then, or the vague shape of it, a picture of this thing. Whatever it was, however old and from what distance, crawling inside of the living, trying them on like suits, hermit crabs testing out more and more elaborate shells to see what fit. Then, dissatisfied, destroying the shell on the way out. Whether or not it had killed the woman calling herself Dana Harper didn’t matter. What did was that I’d been the one stupid enough to give it a lift.
Next stop: Earth, with all the shells you could ask for.
“What were you looking for?” I asked, half curious, half stalling for time while I worked out how fast I could make it back to the door and lock it behind me, and whether or not that would be enough to trap a thing that could slip inside a person without showing up on a Coroner’s examination.
I never got the chance to figure out the answer. Betty-Sewage’s impact alarm began screaming in my ear, the ceiling lights spinning like a dance party, and my dance partner, the corpse of Dana Harper, stared at me as the light pulsed across her face.
I turned to run, away from the corpse and toward the cockpit to see what the trouble was. Before I took one step the EMP hit, purple-black electricity passing through the ship, the cargo bay, my body. My fists clenched and my toes curled and my jaw locked and then I was falling, a brain full of static pulling my eyes back in the sockets.
I woke up expecting to find myself on the couch of a room I only recognized pieces of, with terrible singing coming from the bathroom. Instead I sat in the pilot’s seat of Betty-Sewage, holding my head as it throbbed so hard I could feel it kick.
But that didn’t make sense. Wasn’t I in the cargo bay, investigating a noise? Wasn’t I talking to a woman named Dana, a woman who’d died on Mars and woke up in an auto-crate heading to Earth with someone else behind the eyes? I had to go see for myself, if it had been nothing but bad pills or if I’d actually seen what I’d seen.
“I said yours don’t move.”
A man’s voice came from my right, and I just about pissed my chair. The horizon pitched as I turned to see who it belonged to, my stomach feeling like engine-less free-fall.
The angry end of a Denial Rifle was pointed at my face. When I managed to get both eyes pointed in the same direction, they found a man with no hair and even less teeth holding it, radiation burns covering one half of his face.
Pirates. Wonderful.
“Where at yours cargo?” he asked. Behind him, two of his crew-mates were turning my storage bins inside-out. “Where at yours cargo?” he repeated, louder.
In the cargo bay, dumb-ass. That’s what I thought, but thanks to the EMP that had scrambled the speech center of my brain, it’s definitely not what came out of my mouth. Based on the way he looked back at me, I’d say I nailed less than fifty percent.
“On yours feet.”
The burnt pirate pulled me out of my chair. I pitched forward, nearly toppling, but he caught me with his free arm, righting me on my feet. If I’d have been in full control of my body I would have taken the chance to borrow his Denial Rifle, but it took everything I had just to stay on my feet. Then he was pushing me forward, and I had to learn how to walk on legs I barely felt.
At the door to the cargo bay, the youngest of the pirates was busy trying to crack the door code with a handmade number-cruncher. She threw the burnt one a look that said the job was above her pay grade, though that only seemed to excite the rest of them further. The bigger the lock, the bigger the prize.
The burnt one hissed in my ear to open the door, which I happily did, my floppy fingers punching in the wrong code more than once. I thought I did pretty well, considering each press of a button felt like landing an overweight rig in a dust storm.
The moment the door slid open, a gray-skinned pirate ran ahead and tore the top off one of the auto-crates. He made a sound somewhere between disgusted and disappointed when he leaned in and got a look at what was inside.
“Yours a Corpser?” he asked, and the others all cursed and spit on my floor. I tried to say yes, but just sort of choked a bit and bit the side of my swollen tongue. I think they got the idea.
I had more important things on the brain, like that the auto-crate holding Dana Harper’s body was closed up, the lid fitted snugly in place.
A few of my guests discussed holding the bodies for ransom, the way pirates used to do in the days of drone Corpsers, but they all agreed it was a lot of work and way too risky. The youngest suggested searching the bodies for valuables, and they decided that was a better idea. All except the burnt one, who had his heart set on a bigger payday.
“Yours must have something else,” he growled, aiming his Denial Rifle at my neck. “No one lives on dead alone.”
They do if they slip the InterShipping Agent in charge of rotations a few bags of pull powder every so often, then clean up his mess when he enjoys it a little too much. The pirates began opening the crates, and I watched as they made their way toward Dana Harper’s.
The burnt one, meanwhile, was losing his patience with the silent treatment. “Yours mouth says something, or yours mouth gets the trigger,” he said, sticking the rifle in my face.
The gray-skinned pirate reached the last auto-crate. He ripped the lid off and threw it aside, pushing his face inside to look for the shiny stuff.
“B-b,” I stuttered through the shock, and the burnt one leaned in to hear. “B-big … m-mistake.”
He leaned back, looking at me like I’d delivered the lamest joke he’d heard all day. Then a scream pierced the moment. It was a sound like I’d never heard before, not even in the mining clinics where men are dragged in holding bags of their own fingers.
It was gray-skin, screeching at us without eyes. They’d been plucked from his sockets, now twin waterfalls of blood that he pressed his dirty palms to, trying to stop the flow.
The other three pirates converged shouting, including the burnt one, trying to figure out what had gone wrong. I, on the other hand, had already taken the first few backward steps toward the door.
The sight of Dana Harper’s hand gripping the edge of the auto-crate sent a ripple through them. The thumb, just the thumb, was coated in dark, viscous blood.
The pirate closest to her let out a yelp as she sat up and looked at him with those same drained eyes I’d hoped were a product of a pill-poisoned mind, and though he tried to turn and run from the nightmare crawling out of the crate in front of him, it was too late for that. She leapt on him, the puppeteer much more in command of its puppet now, and brought him down to the hard, metal ground. Before the others could reach them, she began pulling his head off like a restaurant patron sampling the lobster, and by the time she was done, the others weren’t trying to reach her anymore.
I was halfway to the door when the burnt one fired his Denial Rifle just shy of point blank into Dana Harper’s side. Its red pulse tore her skin clean off and threw her so hard against the wall her body marred the metal. Luckily for everyone in the room, Denial Rifles were made to work on flesh and bone only, so the hull was left unaffected by its blast.
Unluckily for everyone, it didn’t do much to stop Dana Harper’s body, either. The last thing I saw as I slipped out the door was the corpse getting to its feet, the gaping hole in its side knitting itself back together, slipping on its own blood as it descended on the remaining men. The door slid shut, cutting short their screams. Then I locked the door and ran to the cockpit.
As I’d hoped and feared, Betty-Sewage had rebooted. I fired up her engines and turned her until the ship that had taken her out was in my sights. It was a typical pirate rig, a gangly weld-job with no markings or style, tethered to Betty by a vacuum tube suctioned to her side. I appreciated how shitty the ship looked; it would make smashing her apart all the easier.
With a hard push of the throttle Betty-Sewage lurched forward, closing the distance between the two ships in seconds. The first impact caught the pirate rig on the side of its forward deck, cracking the windshield and sending it reeling. The vacuum tube detached from Betty, flailing wildly in space like a burst artery, followed by the sound of hemorrhaging air where it left an open wound in her hull. I didn’t worry about it much—it wouldn’t matter soon, anyway.
The pirate rig tumbled off-kilter as I throttled up and rammed her again, this time in its belly. Betty’s nose dug in deep. The pirate rig split open, exposing its innards, which began to spill into space in a spray of wire tangles and metallic dust.
I prepared for a third strike, but it wasn’t necessary. The rig tumbled away from us, breaking apart as it went. The pirates would have been heartbroken, I’m sure, if their hearts were still intact.
As the rig drifted off into the darkness, its departure quickened by the air billowing from its gut, I heard the cargo bay door open. Not by explosion or tearing, but by door code.
Without much time, I punched a series of commands into Betty-Sewage, shortcuts I’d set up in case of an emergency. I liked to be prepared for all kinds of scenarios, and though I’d never seen this particular one coming, I had a shortcut that was close enough.
The air had already grown thin from Betty’s wound. As I typed in the shortcut, the sound of heavy footsteps traced a line up Betty’s spine, slowly and steadily heading for the cockpit.
Sequence? Betty’s screen asked, and I typed:
COLD SWIM
As the footsteps entered the cockpit, stopping just behind my chair, I slammed the enter button and sent the command. Betty’s alarms screamed red, and then a hand shot forward, surprisingly warm around the back of my neck. I was wrenched kicking from my chair, lifted and dragged over the top as easy as a doll plucked from a crib. The headrest dug into my side, scraping along my arm, but fighting only caused my neck to spasm and twist.
As I struggled to plant my feet on the ground, I found a surprising face waiting for me on the other side of the chair. It was the leader of the pirate crew, the burnt one, though his face had healed perfectly, the old scars gone smooth. The face had been restored to its original condition, all except for the eyes. Something new lived there, ancient and cold.
That was how it opened the cargo bay door. It knew what the burnt one knew, saw what he’d seen, and he’d seen me enter the code. I opened my mouth to congratulate it for being so clever, but before the sound could reach my lips, every one of Betty’s exterior doors unlocked at once, the doors parting to belch out the rest of the ship’s oxygen, and I figured that was reply enough. The pirate’s corpse didn’t panic or look angry, at least not on any scale I recognized, it simply looked to the open doors, then to Betty’s dashboard, the control panel overloading itself with an intense static charge that fried the buttons and caused tendrils of smoke to snake up from the steering assembly.
“Humans are assholes,” I explained to the corpse. In response it pushed one hand inside my chest, cleanly, without breaking skin or bone, and suddenly I didn’t feel like talking anymore. In fact I didn’t feel much like anything.
Then, a moment later, I felt like everything.
It’s hard to explain what it’s like to merge body and spirit with a thing so ancient. Unless you’ve ever snorted Plasmax Dust, that is, and then you have an idea of the brain-feel. But this was more than a bad psykosynth trip, it was a stitching together of self at the atomic level. I didn’t just see but heard and felt and tasted worlds that had long ago died under the licking heat of supernovas. I drifted through voids of immeasurable time and distance, clinging to asteroids, waiting for an impact that could bring about transference. I passed from microbes to lichen to simple invertebrates, never satisfied, never fulfilled, until one day I watched as ships arrived at my new, red home. I bided my time, moving first through their crops, then their animals, then at long last, their people.
I understood what it had been looking for, and why it hadn’t found it in the animals. They were too pure a container. They had no capacity for darkness in them, no ambition to spread and consume and control. The bad news was it had found that in me. The good news was, I knew that the last thing the universe needed was me running around in it.
I’d clung to life out of habit, thinking I would serve some purpose in the end. And now, floating inside a broken ship with the air and the heat bled out, floating as one thing that was really two, I’d found it.
The last of me the individual, me the singular, drifted away like the broken pirate rig swallowed up by darkness, tumbling down the void. It was replaced by something entirely terrifying and new: us.
With one last sputter Betty-Sewage died, a victim of her own program, her Cold Swim. Us, floating inside her, our skin and the tissue underneath began to swell. The water in our body vaporised, expanding like a balloon, though our skin was strong enough to keep us from bursting. We held our breath, but all that did was make our lungs rupture inside our chest like a mining charge buried in raw steak. Lucky for us we could heal, over and over. Unlucky for us, we would freeze and expand and burst, over and over.
“You know what I know,” we say. “The ship is dead in the water, no way to reverse it.”
“You will suffer for this,” we reply, unhappy with the situation.
“We deserve it.”
“Yes. All deserve.”
I think about something-like-Jane from Pilot’s Academy. About a man who took me into his home the night I received news of my mother. About Dana Harper and Ray and even Madge, simple people going about their day the best they knew how. “Most,” I say. “Not all.” Then we curled up in the ceiling corner, wedged between Betty’s twin air units, and waited for our lungs to burst again.
Space was more nothing than it was anything, more emptiness than the mind could hold onto. Just like me. The good news was you could drift off in any direction and no one would ever find you. The bad news was, well, everything else.
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