Tag: ghosts on an alien wind

This might get into first draft form by the end of the week! Huzzah!

Oft looked over to the now-uncovered window, which showed Nemo hunched over the Box. The heavy fabric covering him and it both descended halfway to the floor, because you can’t be too careful. “It’s still foul,” he muttered.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “So is trying to kill every person on One-Eighteen. You heard their plan, right?” Both of them nodded. Not that it was much of a plan; the last batch of cultists was going to skip subtlety entirely, and just poison the water supply with deathheart. I was damned if I knew why they thought that would work, but even when it didn’t they’d still probably kill a bunch of people, and contaminate far too much of the base.

“I asked the Redacted to send over a security team,” Oft told me. “They can spare Chalerm Suwern, and only because he’s already present. He is our best Security officer, though.”

“That’s something. Syah, I need somebody to do locks. You checked out on field technical operations?”

“Yes, Pam, but just the basic qualifications. Happy to do it, but don’t you want somebody better trained?”

“We’re doing this now, we’re really short of trained personnel, and I need somebody I can trust.” Then I shifted my eyes, because that admission hit him pretty hard. Which is what I wanted it to do.

Yikes!

“Yes. It’s like that.” I carefully didn’t sit across the table from him. Not yet. Instead, I had a security officer very carefully place the Box in front of Nemo; she and I stepped forward to insert and two keys simultaneously in its back, to reveal a small handheld trigger. I politely ignored the way the security officer beat a hasty retreat afterward. I didn’t blame her for that, after all. If I didn’t need to stay, I would have done the same thing. Instead, I waited until everyone else had left the room, carefully stepped back to the wall, and pushed the trigger that opened the Box.

What’s in the Yellow Box? According to pictures, a weird bit of Amalgamation battery tech. It looks like a ten-sided crystal trapezohedron that radiates energy that we can barely see. What it does is mess with your optic nerves, making you see things that aren’t there. Horrible things.

Yes, it’s a torture device — but not in the way you think. For normal people, the torture comes when you open the Box. For cultists, it comes when you close it. They see the same things we do, you see; they just like them.

I gave Nemo the full two minutes before the Box closed again, carefully staying well behind the lid. After it closed, I waited patiently for the rocking and attempts to scream through the gag to end before talking again. “Here’s how it goes. There’s always at least one cell of you left behind when you do one of these missions. Give us names and their location, and you get the Box again. Don’t, and you’ll spend the rest of your life without it.”

We are getting there!

“[Spoilers]?” I shouted as I shoved against the door. “[SPOILERS]!” I think a part of me knew I shouldn’t have bothered, but it’s like that cat, right? You don’t know if it’s dead of cyanide poisoning until you go and look. Maybe he was okay. Maybe he wasn’t okay, but was hanging on until I got there. Maybe… maybe the hinges on the door finally gave, letting me half-stagger into the room.

I didn’t fall, thank God. There was a lot of blood on the floor, and the walls, and on the windows — and not enough in [spoilers]. It wasn’t all his, not by a long-shot; there were two other corpses in that office, and they hadn’t died any easier than [spoilers] had. One was clutching herself, her guts spilling out over her claw-hooked hands, while the other lay flat on his back, the hilt of a dagger protruding from one eye. There was a terrible satisfaction in that scene; [spoilers] had given as good as he had got.

He was still dead and slumped on his floor, though, with one hand still reaching for his fallen, cracked phon. I wanted to check him, but I didn’t dare. There were a half-dozen awful rents on his body still weeping blood, even though he was clearly dead. Something had kept all the gore in here from coagulating, and I didn’t want it touching me.

This… was the biggest hole in the book. And now it’s been sutured shut! Huzzah!

There would have been a stink about everything, except that, well, there was a giant hole in the cryo-tank and there was footage that did show us getting chased by a blue icicle. Score one for me not disabling all the cameras in the place. Maki couldn’t even complain about me butting in, seeing as I probably saved the lives of whoever would been closest to the morgue when Adam had eventually burst out of it.

She wasn’t happy, though. “You understand you got lucky?” she asked, almost viciously applying dermal paste to my poor, exposed neck and face. “That construct could have ripped you apart. Or Syah,” Maki added, possibly just to see me wince. Well, wince more. “Did you even get anything?”

“No,” I contritely lied. “It was all a waste of time. Whatever happened to Adam, it wasn’t what killed Burcu.” Admittedly, that part I believed. “At least we know that, right?”

“Next time,” Maki grated out, “try to prove something like that without risking your life. Also, thank you for saving mine. I had scheduled an inventory check of the morgue for tomorrow.” My being thanked like that made me feel even worse about lying, but it came out as extra contrition, which was just as well.

Thank God, this section is almost done. I’m going to get back to it today too, hopefully.

How did I get him in there, though? Well, bullets weren’t going to kill him, sure, as I confirmed by putting three three in his torso. Adam didn’t fall down; he didn’t even slow down, not that he was moving that quickly anyway. I did keep his attention, though, which was the idea. I wasn’t sure what would happen if somebody distracted him, and I didn’t want the effects of finding out to be on my conscience later.

The sanitation room was supposed to be empty, with its only feature a small raised alcove, barely large enough to fit a single human. Unfortunately, right now it was half-full of stuff that wasn’t supposed to be there. You know how it is: people will see an open space that isn’t being used, and they decide to use it for storage space. As I ran by the junk on my way to the door to the animal lab, I absently hoped that none of the stuff was really important. Because either way, it was all about to go away.
You see, there was a plan. I would get him inside the sanitation room, get to the far door, slam shut the blast doors behind him, then duck out the other door and slam that shut before he could reach it. Then I’d hit the emergency cycle switch, and hope like Hell a standard sanitation episode would do the job. It should; physics always wins, right — certain recent episodes to the contrary.

In fact, most of that plan worked fine. The only problem was, when I hit the switch, both sets of blast doors came down. That left me trapped inside the room with Adam. It also almost left me with a hand cut in two, but I was able to snatch it back in time. We don’t mess around with blast doors; when you need one in the Tomb Worlds, you need one right now, and with no nonsense.

Almost have this ‘write something later’ section sorted out. Huzzah! …Of course, I may need to move it up a few chapters. Boo!

The corps figured out early on that fewer people die when buildings in the Tomb Worlds all have the same floor plans and room locations. When you have to run somewhere now, you don’t want to waste time trying to remember where it is, right? So you make all the buildings identical, and people don’t have to worry about where they need to go while they’re fleeing for their lives. At least, that’s the theory. The reality is, individual companies have styles, specific governments and corporations have specialized needs, and there’s new practical experience coming out every year about which layouts are safer than others, and under what conditions.

I say all of this to explain why I led Adam to the sanitation room between the morgue and the animal lab. The newer medical center designs might feature dedicated sanitizers in every room, but One-Eighteen’s facilities were about forty years old. Since the planet didn’t have dangerous xenofauna, bio-mutagenic compounds, parasite technology, or ravening grues, I guess nobody thought that upgrading the site was a priority. That ‘nobody’ includes everybody working on this planet, so I’m in no position to point any fingers.

Going along!

My next step was to smack the intercom — which didn’t work, even after I muttered a swear. “Process?” I automatically called out, and then I swore again, and worse. “Syah, tell me you brought your phon.”

“Seeing as we’re currently breaking and entering? No.” Syah looked worried but not panicked, which was good. “I’m good with software, but not that good. Why is the intercom down?”

“I don’t know.” I was very carefully not shouting or screaming, but I was already backing away from the door. “You need to find one that works. Now.”

“Why? Isn’t he locked in?” Just then the blast door shuddered, which it is absolutely not supposed to do, and gave the kind of creak you associate with materials getting heavily stressed.

“No,” I replied. “He burrowed his way out of the cryo-vault; he’ll burst through that eventually. Go get help!”

“I can stay—”

“You can go!” I checked my gun, making sure that there was a new varmint round in there. Most people don’t need to fire more than one of those in their lives, one way or the other. I wondered if there was a club for people with this much bad luck in their lives. “He’ll be coming after for me.”

“What? Why? What does he want?”

“Go get help, and it won’t matter!” Syah opened his mouth again, and I shouted over him. “The only thing you can do here is die pointlessly! So don’t.”

Things are starting to accelerate.

“So now you want me looking into our files, so I can try to figure out who might have connections with the dead worlds.” I sighed. “Again, this would have worked better if you had just asked.”

Rubicon shrugged. “You would have said no, and then where would we be?” I opened my mouth, saw that the Anticipant was ruefully nodding in agreement, and silently conceded the point. “Horribly, the deaths on the supply ship, and my own officer, have at least made it clear to everybody that things are too serious for the usual games humanity plays out here.”

“Are they?” I glared at him. “What if I refuse?”

“I don’t know, Miss Tanaka. We all get seized by invisible monsters in broad daylight, and then devoured horribly?” Rubicon showed a flash of his usual arrogance when he said that, then managed to chuckle. “No pressure, though.”

Put that way, he was right. “You’ll give me full access to your own records, Commander. Including the stuff that’s none of my business.”

“Why?”

“You might be wrong.”