“I get cold.”
“Right.”
She wondered how the mercenary had managed to squeeze through the access tube into his nest. Rolls of hairy flesh poured over his pilot chair, pulsating to the suction. His breasts dwarfed her own. Above, his cardiac shield heaved for breath. She checked and double-checked the enclosure on her garment.
“Comfy?”
“I guess.”
“Okay. I’ll lock you into waste systems—”
“No.” She couldn’t take the risk of slaving into the ship if the urethral, vaginal, and anal links were fully aware biosensors. Cork would find out in an instant that she wasn’t exactly normal anymore. “I can hold it.”
His eyes narrowed. “Suit yourself.” His hand waved over the dashpanel. He grunted as his body loosed to the ship’s probing and gave a satisfied exhalation. “You can clean up the mess yourself if we hit rough water. And shitting on my boat costs double.”
The bulbous drives forward and above the cockpit began the resonance cycle. Maire felt the vessel shudder and jerk against the docking grips.
Tickle.
She studied the panel, the levels, the systems. “What’s your mix?”
“Dark, seventy over.”
“How’s she run?”
“She gets by.” Cork patted the viewshield affectionately.
“Try boosting the dark level to seventy-two five. It’ll compensate for outside interference from resident dark streaks as we get farther out.”
Frown. “Ever sailed the Seychelles, woman?”
“Just trust me.”
“Fine.” He bumped up the level of dark matter in the shred drive to 72.5%. The vessel immediately calmed, the drives above them shivering steadily instead of randomly. “Well, shit. You’re just full of surprises, aren’t you?”
“I try.”
The shred peeled away from the belly of Cork’s destroyer and fell into the black endless of Seychelles, the jungles of empty, the machinery of night. Maire felt the ratcheting of the mercenary sleepers as the pods fell into place in the chain of the vehicle. Snaking through the debris of ancient and [recent] wars, the shred spermed around the hulks of abandoned warships, metal worlds whose interiors had been torn into the suck and cold. Occasional freeze-dried soldiers sparked and ceased before the forward energy sweeper.
“How long’ve they been asleep?”
Cork’s fingers traced over the biologics readings. “Brand new batch. Twenty, thirty years.”
“Good.”
“What’s it matter?”
She shrugged. “I prefer fresh meat.”
His eyes performed unmentionables. “I bet you do.”
The passage through the vessel graveyard was uneventful. Maire froze images as Cork’s ship increased speed: the shell of a destroyer, a planetship scuttled and taken apart for spares, smaller shreds transporting reclamation teams through the complex of spinning metal and hollowed asteroids.
Cork yawned.
He caught Maire’s glimpse and tossed it back.
“You’re different.”
“Hmm?”
“Exactly.” He wagged his tongue from his mouth, the tips circling and rubbing together. “Your voice is different. Flat.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s alright. I’m different, too.” He wiped saliva from the badly repaired cleft on his lip. “But you…There’s something wrong with you.”
Maire smiled. He disgusted her.
around and never through those nonspace tendrils, the black matter that stippled, and swung, and reached
All time went flat.
She’d gasped for a while as the cockpit bubble flooded with nitrox gelatin. Cork’s breathing was steady; he’d been sucking the shielding for decades, and inhaling that bittersweet fluidish was a comforting return to the non-womb of space.
“Let me know where to point this thing.” The voice was choked, slurred. His tonguetips flicked over slicked lips, teeth. Sludgy echoes. Flat time.
“Give me flight control.”
“Listen, no one flies this shred but me, and I’m—”
“Give me flight control.”
Eyes narrow, relent. Cork thumbed the panel release and slid the sticks across to Maire’s side of the bubble, where they locked into place. Her considerably smaller hands gripped the shafts.
“You know how to run one of these?”
“Should’ve asked that before you slid these over.” Smirk.
He watched as she expertly adjusted the shred axes. She boosted the dark mix to 75%. “You’d better know what you’re doing with that mix.”
She gunned the engines. “I was a pilot. Don’t worry.”
They flew.
She locked coordinates and eventually lilted off to sleep in the sway and slosh of the mineral slime’s warm caress. Cork took the opportunity to extrapolate the path she’d set into the vessel’s slave. She was taking him deep into the Drift’s crotch, that hook of realspace bordered with dark matter so thick that entry was a suicide and exit was just as deadly.
He scratched an itch buried beneath suck.
Maire shifted in her seat. Her face rolled toward Cork, her mouth open, struggling to inhale the bubble sludge.
Gotcha.
He leaned closer. There was something different with her; her tongue was deformed. He absently fingered the scar of his cleft palette. He’d seen other deformities who’d been born in the wake of the trinary collapse, but never anything like that…
Her robe had come unsecured in the bubble’s tide.
He considered.
He acted.
Reaching out, his hand navigated around her shoulder, below and through the loosed interfaces above her eyes. He tugged on the front slit, gently enough to mimic the natural pull of the sludge. The robe flapped open.
Her chest was smooth, marked only by the small canyon of her cleavage between two breasts and a scattering of moles. No cardiac shield. No—
Her eyes opened.
She struck out at him, a savage blow to the throat with a backswing that shattered the bridge of his nose. The bubble blackened with the blown ballast of his blood.
For an instant, just an instant, Cork could have sworn that Maire’s eyes were silver.
She pulled her robe shut. “How dare—?”
Klaxons roared to life.
Maire spun to the flight control sticks. In her sleep and Cork’s distraction, the shred had pirouetted dangerously close to a tendril of dark matter. She flailed the sticks and the vessel spun away from the reaching black, over a ridge in the texture of space, down through a valley and
the ships, if they were ships, lay in wait.
Maire gasped.
They scattered, converged, enveloped. Michael had told her what to expect, but what she saw was beyond expectation or reasonable comprehension.
A wave of light swept the bubble. The vessel shuddered.
All around them, the ships swam through space, the tendrils of dark matter licking and following. It was a dance of horror and beauty, the magnificent school of black spiders thrusting through light and something deeper, something ancient and
a tug and
Maire sat alone on the floor, vomiting shield gel into and out of the spot of light in which she wretched. Cork was gone; the shred was gone. Beyond the circle of light, all was the absence of light, but she sensed something there, someone there, someones there. Another fit of coughing wracked her as bubbles of gelatin worked their way out of her lungs.
It was cold.
a heap of shattered images and
zero
flicker
zero one
flicker
one zero one
resolution
you are
fear and
you are ((?))
Maire stood, covered her now-nude breasts with goose-pimpled forearms.
you are ((?))
“I—I’ve been sent.” She struggled to remember what Michael had told her. “I’ve been sent by your creator.”