Toxic Read online

  HANA

  The scream dies inside my throat as everything happens slower than time can possibly allow.

  Gammand’s body, split in half, is there for all to see for an instant. It is the color that shocks, beyond the actual tearing of a life—intestines a surprising shiny pink color, magenta liver glistening, broken vertebrae so very white. Impossibly white.

  “Run!” Fenn cries, as he grabs my arm and pulls me down the hallway.

  But I can’t. My Cyclo. How could she do such a thing? As Fenn tries to drag me away, I watch because I cannot bear not to—my Cyclo, engulfing his body, immediately tearing him to pieces, extensions of her rising from the floor and wall to take in pieces and bits of flesh. The blood sprayed over the floor and wall is absorbed quickly, leaving only her scarred blue membrane. Through the translucent matrix, I can see Gammand’s face, mouth still open in that last scream, eyes rolled into his sockets. His head is soon parted from his body, and layer by layer, Cyclo dissolves skin, then muscle, then bone.

  It happens very quickly.

  Gammand is utterly consumed.

  I cannot move. My heart has stopped beating; my eyes won’t blink. There is screaming, right in my ear, something about running away, we must run away, when Fenn sweeps me up in his arms. He gallops as fast as he can from the southern quadrant, along with Portia. I am stiff and cannot move. Fenn’s arms hold me with painful tightness so that I cannot possibly escape, but he doesn’t realize that there is no escape.

  My Cyclo.

  My Cyclo has killed Gammand.

  She is a murderer.

  My head is a buzz of terror and the wordless keening of a broken heart, the kind that happens when worlds fall apart. The same sound I heard in my heart when I woke up and found Mother gone. The day I found out that Mother was dead.

  There is nothing in my ears but the sounds of despair.

  At some point, I hear my name. Hana, Hana, Hana. Hana, talk to us.

  I am still in Fenn’s arms, and slowly my ears seem to start working again, no longer feeling like they are stuffed with cotton wool.

  “She’s in shock. Hana?”

  “Never mind her. We need to figure out where to survive here.” It’s Portia’s voice. Strong and steady, still working like a perfectly well-functioning, emotionless AI, except she’s not AI. “Where will we be safest from her?”

  “The gamma or delta ring,” Fenn says. “It’s the most dangerous, and closest to the vacuoles, but most of the walls have been blocked from the toxins. That is where the ship is no longer able to communicate well. Sensory organs are shut down, so it’s inert—from a consciousness point of view.”

  “Yeah, we so much as accidentally poke the walls with our fingers, we’ll be burned by radiation or acid in seconds,” Portia says. I don’t hear Fenn’s voice, but I can hear him breathing hard and fast. He is running at a clip to keep up with Portia. “Good God, Fenn! What happened back there?”

  He doesn’t answer, just waves his hand onward. I can’t speak yet, I just can’t, but I also won’t be carried when I feel well enough to walk. I wriggle in his arms, and Fenn pauses to let me down. My feet find their rhythm, and I run alongside Fenn, who’s afraid to look at me. So I grab his hand, and despite our connection making running more awkward, he grasps it as hard as I do his.

  Fenn tries repeatedly to call upon Doran. Again and again, he’s not reachable.

  “Another star flare messing up our communication,” Portia says. “But as soon as he can, the first thing he’ll see is the feeds. He’ll know immediately.”

  Finally, we round the bend and face a long hallway sloping upward. Each side is covered in the white, waxy secretion that Cyclo made to keep the walls impenetrable to the water-based poisonous liquids from one of Cyclo’s burst vacuoles.

  “Through here,” Portia says, looking at her feed. “Cyclo has no sensory capacity down in the second vacuole storage area. The radiation levels are elevated but won’t incapacitate us.”

  “What about food? Equipment?” Fenn says.

  “We have enough supplies and tech with us for now. We need a safe place while we figure things out.”

  While we figure out how not to let Cyclo kill us, too.

  Even though it’s the truth, I can’t bear it.

  “Let’s go,” Fenn says grimly, and we go forward and ascend.

  This area is dark. Fenn and Portia turn something on their holofeeds, the light garishly illuminating their faces. The walls are studded with gruesome-looking blisters filled with various liquids of different colors, some nearly at the breaking point.

  “Don’t touch anything. Avoid stepping on anything that looks like it’s about to explode.”

  “Best advice ever,” Fenn says.

  There are corridors left and right as we continue, but many are blocked off, either by beige-colored scar tissue, or thick, waxy plugs that almost glow in the darkness. Finally, Portia takes us up one last set of handholds and steps, and my stomach seems to bounce against my chest as the g-force lessens. Portia leads us into a small, circular room. Blisters pockmark the walls, but they are thicker blisters, less apt to explode or ooze, and the floor is mostly flat and normal looking. Like the rest of the ship in this area, the walls are a dead, beige color interspersed with a midnight blue.

  “Cyclo cannot hear us here, nor can she sense us,” Portia says.

  “So we’re in her blind spot,” Fenn says, and Portia nods.

  I, too, can feel there is no sentient Cyclo here. We might as well be living on a knocked-out tooth or fallen hair from a human, it feels so unlike Cyclo’s usual vital self.

  Portia sits down and passes around a flask of filtered water. We all take a few minutes to catch our breath and bring ourselves to working order. The time to be frantic is past. At least for now.

  “Fenn,” I say. “Tell us what happened. Every detail.”

  So he does. About how they’d worked for a while, until Gammand confronted him about asking Cyclo for permission to fly the last nanobot.

  “You asked permission?” Portia asks. “Why?”

  Fenn sighs at her questioning. Likely he went through this before with Gammand, though not as civilly.

  “Because Cyclo feels,” I tell her. “Because she didn’t like the nanobots the first time. Fenn was trying to be considerate.”

  “It could have been me,” Fenn says. “I might have been the one killed. When we first got here, I wasn’t very…respectful of this ship.”

  Portia nods, acknowledging this truth. “But when he treated Cyclo as a machine, and less like a creature with a soul…”

  “But she never kills people,” I say. “She would never.”

  “How do you know, though?” Fenn asks. “I mean, you’ve been in seclusion all this time.”

  “I don’t know, I guess. But I know she has never been jealous or angry. Never vindictive. Never.”

  “But that was then. Things are different now. She’s changing. She’s not the same,” Portia says.

  “She is the same!” I stand up, finding my voice. “Just because I grow into an adult, doesn’t mean I’m also not the child I once was. It’s part of me.”

  Fenn stands up and looks at me steadily. “But you’re a human, Hana. Cyclo isn’t. You can’t make those comparisons. And let’s be honest here—people do change. From good people to terrible, and vice versa,” Fenn says, his eyes imploring me to understand.

  I close my mouth. I’ve seen Fenn change, for one. I can’t argue with what I know.

  “Fine. So she’s changed. We need to figure out why she’s done these things.” I pace the tiny area of the room. “I mean, maybe she is scared. Maybe she’s hungry.”

  “Hungry? One humanoid to Cyclo is like me eating half a peanut,” Fenn says.

  “Right. But if you were starving to death, and someone offered you half
a peanut, wouldn’t you take it? In a heartbeat?”

  We’re all quiet. Of course we would.

  “But if Cyclo is that desperate for food, why haven’t we all been consumed by now?”

  No one has an answer for that.

  “What about trying to make the Selkirk work again?” I ask. “There is no other ship, and the evacuation pods are all gone.”

  “The Selkirk had a limited fuel supply. The ion engine cores were changed out before our mission for ones that wouldn’t last long.”

  “We could find a different energy source on Cyclo somewhere,” I say. “Couldn’t we?”

  “Doubtful, but it can’t hurt to look. But trying to salvage energy sources? Cyclo might try to stop us. Even if she doesn’t, it will take a long time to rig up a new power source for the Selkirk. And we have no way to survive on here past the next six days. Probably less. And then we’d have no food. We’ll end up eating each other,” Portia says.

  “That is not going to happen.” Fenn stands up, looking noble and resolute. “You all look like you’d taste terrible.”

  Portia covers her face. But Fenn’s humor helps, because we end up chuckling and groaning.

  “None of this matters if Cyclo is going to kill us as soon as possible,” I say. “I think we should find ways to give her more sustenance while we figure out what to do. And try to see if the Selkirk can work again.”

  “So feed her?” Fenn says, raising his eyebrows.

  “Yes. Why not?” Portia says. “Poor thing is hungry.”

  Portia speaks of Cyclo like she’s an abandoned puppy needing comfort. It is strange to think of Cyclo like she is the one that needs help. All she’s ever done is take care of everyone else.

  Fenn rubs his chin thoughtfully. He looks rather adorable doing so, but of course, I don’t say that out loud. I’m learning the customs of what to say and not to say. “What about our contracts?” he asks. “We’re not supposed to alter the natural history of this ship.”

  “We aren’t,” Portia says, but then she points to me. “But remember: Hana can do whatever she wants.”

  I nod. “I’ll do whatever it takes to make Cyclo better. But what are we going to feed her with?”

  “There are some food stores we can dump, to see if she’ll take them.”

  I snap my fingers. “In the gestational chambers, there are huge stores of embryonic nutritional supplies. I have several chambers running for those stem cells, but they’ll only use a fraction of them.”

  “But you can’t heal Cyclo without giving her energy to keep her cells alive, even if they’re brand new.”

  “Which is why we’re trying first to fix her photosynthetic cells. It could halt her death spiral.”

  Everyone thinks in silence for a little while. “It’s worth a try,” Portia says. “After all, your first experiment with the hormones bought us extra time. How are the cell cultures doing?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t checked on them recently,” I say. “If we do this—how will the underwriters of the contract know you didn’t tamper with Cyclo? That it was me?”

  “Well, it’s all in the records, for one thing. We’ll record it as such. And to be honest, all of this may be moot. You are the one thing they didn’t count on when they created our contracts and this mission. That could be a game changer, for the good of us all,” Fenn admits.

  “Sometimes I get the feeling they knew this would happen,” Portia says. “That they are just playing with us. Like that Earth game, the king and queen and the babies.”

  I lean over and whisper, “It’s chess. And they aren’t babies, they’re pawns.” Portia smarts at her mistake, her eyes flashing redder than usual.

  “No.” Fenn holds up his metal pendant with the hidden compartment in the back with the suicide medicine. “They couldn’t have. If they did, why give us the option to kill ourselves?”

  “ReCOR has all the incentive it needs to find out exactly how wrong things can go on this ship, so they can build a bigger and better one, and make more money,” Portia says. “In the end, it’s all about money. ReCOR is about ten years ahead of any other company that creates synthetic bioships. It would be a huge liability to find out the ships murder crew once they grow old. Fixing it, and knowing exactly how and when it happens, means making better ships. It makes sense to ReCOR to see how we suffer.”

  “Exactly. Our death seemed like an inevitability. Now, it looks like our impending murders are part of the data, too.”

  Portia zooms through a long scroll of data on her feed. “You know what? Cyclo’s biometrics did improve a touch after Miki’s death. I didn’t correlate them before. There was a bump of activity after the hormone release, and a smaller one later. I think Miki’s death did nourish the ship, to a certain degree,” Portia admits.

  “So…you think it really was Cyclo that killed Miki? What about the hand marks on her neck?” I say.

  We think for a bit. Hand marks, with thumbs near the front of her neck, fingermarks wrapping around the sides. I touch my neck, as does Fenn. He looks at Portia suddenly.

  “I just realized. When we found Miki, I don’t remember seeing her pendant around her neck.”

  “You’re right. It wasn’t there. She took it off when she slept. Maybe she forgot to put it on again.”

  “Which means, if she was attacked—if she wanted to die with the medicine in her pendant, she wouldn’t have been able to.”

  “What do you mean, Fenn?” Portia says, her face going paler.

  Fenn raises his hands to his own throat as if to throttle himself into unconsciousness. His hands are in exactly the same place as if someone else tried to strangle him.

  “Those handprints may have been self-inflicted. Miki may have been trying to end her life because she was attacked by Cyclo.”

  I stand up and walk around our little blister-filled room, carefully not to touch any of them. “For now, we keep together. No one ever dies when they’re with me.”

  “Yes. We will stick close to you. Like parasites.” Portia gapes her toothless grin, and I can’t tell if she’s disgusted by the idea or happy.

  “Second,” I say, “we’ll go to the gestational lab and program the stem cells for photosynthesizing, and see if we can fix her mantle. And we can get the remaining nutritional stores there and start feeding Cyclo. See if that makes her biometrics improve at all.”

  What I don’t say is that I want to go to the sick bays if we can and find out if there’s any evidence about how Mother died. I have to know exactly what happened.

  Portia stands, her head nearly grazing the ceiling. “Sounds like a plan, my captain,” she says, saluting me in the Prinniad way, which is touching her opposite shoulder.

  It reminds me of that ancient poem, O Captain, My Captain! Except that poem is about a great president dying, and I pray to the stars that my death doesn’t end up being part of the plan.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  FENN

  Hana has become our de facto leader. Though we make decisions together, she’s the only one we are confident could possibly stop an attack by Cyclo. The only one we think Cyclo would never, ever hurt.

  At least, for now.

  We can’t go to the bridge where most of our equipment is, as it’s clear across on the other side of Cyclo. The last of our food stores are there, too. Access to the gestational labs is a long stretch of nearly dead, dark navy-blue corridor—still pressurized and intact. We don’t have to worry about being sucked into space, but we do have to worry about the fragility of the walls. One crack, and we’re done for.

  As we walk along, we follow Hana in a cluster. No one wants to step out of line, to touch the walls. Even walking is a frightening prospect. What if there is a blob of living tissue beneath there somewhere, waiting to rise up and grab our feet, choke us into submission, break us in half?

 
; I don’t want to think about these things, but it’s funny how I think of death far more now than a week ago, when I already knew I’d come here to die. I just thought I’d be dying on my terms, sort of. Cyclo has made all of my reassurances about death a memory.

  Well, at least I have this.

  I reach up and grasp the pendant around my neck. The back panel is easily opened, and the poison there will kill me in seconds as soon as I touch it.

  Small mercies.

  “We’re almost there,” Hana says. As I watch her from behind, I notice that she doesn’t skulk around the corners like she used to. She stands more upright, too, more confident. Her hair swings in a ponytail behind her, swish, swish. It feels like years since she was in my arms last night, when peace was this tiny, precious thing we had. Peace, and privacy. Both are gone. I fear that between the two of us, I’ll be gone first. I miss her so much already. I’m going to miss her more than my family, and that’s saying something. No one ever wanted me, just me, and only me. They wanted me without a criminal record. Me, without my tendency for breaking rules. Me, who put my own survival ahead of my family’s. My soft insides actually ache—God, what a sap I’ve become, but I don’t care. The hurt has turned me a little more human, and I’m going to miss that, too.

  “We’re here,” Hana announces.

  The gestational labs are a network of rooms with chambers. I remember it from when we were doing our recent drone flights. But unlike before, where the chambers were hollow and devoid of life, now they are full. Portia and I tentatively leave our little ball of safety near each other and look at the handful of chambers full of shimmering pastel liquid. Portia smiles, looking at what her few minutes of help has hatched.

  “Look at that. Let’s see how they’re doing,” Portia says, touching one that’s iridescent pink, the liquid spinning lazily inside the chamber. She sidles up next to Hana, who’s reading the biometrics from a wall display.

  “Three different growth mediums. One keeps them in the embryonic stem cell stage, and the other two are maturing mantle cells. Look! They’re doing really well. They’re still dividing and healthy.” Hana walks to one chamber in the center. Like the others, it’s tall—a big egg shape, but held in place by a large cylinder of clear plastrix above and below, showing several tubes attached to the chamber. Hana explains how the tubes are feeding new nutritional mediums into the incubates and draining below to get filtered and recycled. “They’re very delicate. This one is the original stem cells we harvested. The others are for the mantle photosynthetic cells.”