15 minutes ago, Hyperspace, Battleship Singularity
“I heard you started a fight,” Okara said, grinning. “Times sure have changed for you to be causing trouble.”
“It wasn’t like that!” Callie argued. “The Sarge, she just… doesn’t like me.” Her voice fell a bit as she said that. “I don’t know why.” Callie didn’t feel that she’d done anything to particularly upset the Sergeant, just simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sadly, Callie went to stir her chocolate milk. It wasn’t real, fresh dairy milk of course, rather a shelf-stable powder mixed with water. The rest of the crew insisted fresh milk tasted much better, but Callie had never tried it. Milk hadn’t existed on the streets of Sagittarion, nor did fresh milk exist in deep space, but Callie liked the powdered substitute well enough. Mixing it with sweetened chocolate syrup was a favorite late-night treat of hers. “I don’t know what I did.”
“Relax,” Okara urged her. “You aren’t the problem. You’re extremely likable.” It was pretty clear the rest of the Singularity’s engineers adored her, and she’d been his best and only friend in training. She hadn’t hesitated to reach out to him – a strange outcast from an isolationist nation. “Besides, I hear you’re even the Steel Prince’s favorite. How did you manage that?” As he gossiped with the other members of the Singularity’s crew, it had become clear that Callie’s popularity extended well beyond the ship’s engineers. “I didn’t think he was capable of liking anyone.” Rumor had it the man was a sociopath, and Okara’s one encounter with him hadn’t disproved that. The Admiral had a rather eerie calm about him.
Callie rolled her eyes. “I’m not his favorite. Everyone else just pushes him a bit too far. He’s really not so bad.” She had been intimidated at first, but it was fairly clear the Admiral had no intent to hurt her or any other member of the ship’s crew. “Did I ever tell you how I first met him?”
“No.” Not that it really matters, Okara thought. “Leave it to you to befriend the strangest people.” Callie just had that aura about her; a miracle optimism and innocence borne on the streets of Sagittarion’s polluted hell.
“Hey,” Callie reached across the table and playfully shoved his shoulder. “You yourself were pretty strange when I first met you.”
“I think there’s a level of difference between a runaway and the Butcher of New Terra, but whatever.” That was neither here nor there. “Where there’s a you, there’s a way. The Sarge is just dumb.”
Callie laughed a bit. She couldn’t help it. She had missed Okara, and it was unreal to have him here, sitting in one of the old booths in the Singularity’s mess. They had been assigned to different ships after completing training together on Sagittarion, and truthfully, she had doubted they would ever reunite. The fleet had a lot of ships, and while FTL mitigated time dilation, a factor of it was still present. They had traded letters from their posts, he from the Gargantia and she from the Singularity, but having him sitting here in front of her was another matter. It felt unreal. She watched him devour another bite of the granola bar in his hands. It crumbled a bit, sending a few oats into his lap. “Enjoying that?”
“Hell yeah, my appetite’s finally back and the doc lifted my bland diet.” With a major abdominal injury, Okara had been limited in what he could eat as he started to recover. Arguably, a granola bar was still rather bland, but he hadn’t seen one in a while. “You can come get snacks whenever you want?”
Callie nodded, “Mama Ripley keeps the cabinet stocked.” Every member of the crew was allowed to come take what they wanted.
“Damn, we had to provide our own snacks on the Gargantia.” That was fleet standard: food only at prescribed meal times and in regulated places. But, he was quickly learning the Singularity’s crew called themselves Sinners for a reason. They loved breaking regulation.
Okara and Callie weren’t the only two who had come in for a very late night or very early morning snack, depending on how one viewed the time. A big man Okara recognized to be the Chief Engineer and a young Marine who must have been close to Callie’s age were here as well, but they sat at other tables in the ship’s large mess hall. The room was long and open, and currently lit by only a few of the lights that hung above the tables, a power saving measure Okara was familiar with. Long tables with attached benches ran across the room like stripes, and booths lined the edges. The double-doors leading into the kitchen were closed, but Okara could hear the clanging of pots beyond as the cooks started to ready breakfast. “What did you want to talk about?” he asked. Callie had brought him here after tapping on his bunk to wake him.
“You know that incident with the Sergeant?”
“The fight you started?” he teased.
“It wasn’t like that!”
Okara laughed, a full belly laugh that reminded him of the tight bandages on his stomach. “I know.” It was just fun to tease her.
Callie smiled, enjoying his company. It was good to see some strength and energy returning to him. When she had first seen him, barely recovered from the impalement the Gargantia had put through his abdomen, he had seemed too-pale and too-fragile. His narrow features and pale skin had always looked a bit fragile to her, but most Sags were born with rougher traits and tanned darkly from the planet’s destroyed atmosphere. “Well, you know how this ship is supposed to be haunted?”
“Oh, yeah. Freaked Commander Fairlocke the hell out. Allegedly, at least.” That had been the joke on the Gargantia’s engineering staff. Better get the crucifix and bless the engines, the Commander’s coming down. “Doesn’t she kill crew?” At least, that was the rumor?
“No,” not in the stories Callie had heard. “She forewarns death.” Crew that saw her always succumbed to their injuries, regardless of the injuries’ cause.
“Freaky nonetheless,” Okara shrugged.
Well, I think I might have met her. That was what Callie intended to say, but a sudden impact shoved her into the booth’s vinyl cushions and robbed the breath from her lungs. As her head snapped back, whiplashed by the force, she saw Okara get thrown into the table. Anchored and unmoving, it shoved into his gut, folding the rest of him around it as he face twisted in agony.
When Callie came to, sprawled diagonally in the booth, everything hurt. Drawing breath past her lips felt like breathing fire, and the wetness running down her face burned like lava. Every movement she made, and every sensation she endured felt like her nerves had been seared by a rusty cast iron over an open flame. She couldn’t move, couldn’t think, paralyzed by pain.
Then, a moment later, it was gone. A machine-cool presence reached in and scraped the pain away, peeling its layers from her until she was left with nothing but the sensation of warm and gentle comfort.
Flinging her eyes open, Callie bolted upright and searched her surroundings, half expected to see a lingering shadow seeping back into the deck. That strange presence, foreign, yet warm, was familiar to her now.
Looking around, she saw no gnarled entity, no tricks of the light. She saw only disgruntled crew, slow to get up, and Okara limp and face-down on the table top between them. He didn’t move when she shook his shoulder. He didn’t even gasp, his breathing fast and shallow.
Then slowly, very slowly, did she recognize the shadow on his shirt was no crease in the fabric. It widened, then deepened, then reddened. Blood.
“Stars,” Callie jumped to her feet and ran to Okara’s side of the booth. She pulled his limp body off the table and dragged him toward her. He wasn’t a big man. His figure was slight, face and bone structure narrow. That was common in the Coalition, he’d said. The colonists that founded the Cassiopeia Coalition had all been of the same ethnicity, and the nation’s isolationism kept the population mostly homogenous. But, that didn’t help Callie. However slim Okara was, Callie was still much too small to lift him. It was all she could to slide him close and wrap her hands around his torso as it grew wetter and wetter, trying to staunch the bleeding.
Okara had been cleared for light work, but his injury was far from healed. There were healing accelerants that could help strengthen bones and close lacerations, but the doctor hadn’t yet applied them to Okara, citing that they had to make sure his internal organs were healed and functioning before they sealed the wound. The doctor was surely right, but it left Okara’s abdominal wound able to re-open. Though, perhaps, as she felt Okara lapse into shock, stitches weren’t the only thing he had busted. “Hang on,” she told him, turning to look for help in time to see the door to the kitchens burst open.
A crewman ran out screaming. “Get it off! Get it off!” Frying pan in hand, he swung it around, trying to swat something off his back. The barbeque-sweet smell of frying meat hit the air and the crewman screamed louder, wordless and guttural. The frying pan fell from his grip as he seized up and crumped to his knees, howling in utter agony.
The young Marine hauled himself to his feet, covered in a crust of unappealing oatmeal, spilled and mixing with the blood dripping from his nose to be disturbingly chunky. Cadet Santino, Callie recognized him. He was a member of Corporal Yankovich’s unit, the same unit that held the ship’s sniper: Cadet Blosse. He looked a lot younger without his helmet on, but that should have been no surprise. Next to Callie, he was the youngest member of the Singularity’s crew.
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Santino still had his body armor on, fresh off a guard shift or patrol. He moved easily in it, sprinting toward the cook. Santino leaned over and tried to pry something off his back, but the Marine quickly yanked his hands back, as if bitten.
The cook’s screams went abruptly silent. His jaw stayed open, wrenched apart in agony, but the look in his wide and frightened eyes was going glassy. As he found Callie slumped in the booth, clutching at Okara’s wounds, the light of consciousness left the cook’s eyes, and slowly, he keeled over, face-first into the deck. His back was black and bloody, carved with deep burns. Burnt cloth spider-webbed the crispy char of his skin, still sizzling. A pungent steam was rising visibly from his body.
A metal spider a foot in diameter rode on the cook’s back, its spindly legs piercing through the cook’s clothes to keep itself attached. A projection of cobalt-blue flame erupted from the spider’s spherical head.
A drone, Callie barely had time to recognize, then Santino scooped up the cook’s frying pan and took a swing. He hit the drone solidly, tearing it off the cook’s back and sending it flying cross the room like a silver comet. It crashed into the far wall with a thud and slid to the floor.
Santino sprinted after it, reaching the drone before it could reorient itself. Brandishing the frying pan in his hands, he brought it down with all his strength, smacking the drone again and again and again. Each impact rang out like a musical cymbal, clanging through the mostly-empty mess.
And then it was over. Santino lowered the pan and regarded the drone’s eight mangled legs. For good measure, he stomped his boot heel onto the drone’s round head and ripped it free of its crushed body, severing the wire connections between them.
Santino stared at it for a moment, then turned and ran back to the downed crewman. “Get the first aid kit!”
Ty turned and ran for the kit stored on the wall beside the cleaning supplies. He caught Callie’s terrified brown eyes on the way, “Hang on.” He would come back to help her momentarily.
Holding Okara as tightly as she dared, Callie watched Ty’s large hand close around the white handle of the first aid kit. In that moment, it seemed like everything was going to be fine. Then she heard it, the subtle plink, plink, plink of something tapping above her. She lifted her gaze upward, and there, crawling down the chain of the lamp that hung above the table, was another drone.
Callie screamed, grabbed Okara, and pulled him backward. They both tumbled out of the booth as the spider-like drone dropped onto the table.
“Stars,” Ty cursed. He dropped the first-aid kit to the floor and kicked it toward Santino. It slid, rattling across the textured deck tiles while Ty grabbed the broom sitting in the rack of cleaning supplies. He yanked the brush off its end, keeping its hollow, metal handle. There wasn’t any weight to it, but he took it and sprinted full-speed to whack the drone in front of Callie as hard as he could. It sailed a few feet, skipping across the deck like a stone on water, but soon righted itself and came running back, hopping between other tables and chairs.
Ty watched it, only to see another drone drop out of the ventilation duct in the center of the room. It fell squarely onto Santino’s back as he reached for the first aid kit and belched out a finger of flame. Santino cried out, but flopped immediately into his back, dislodging his attacker as he tightened his grip on the frying pan and went to work.
Clang! Clang! Clang! Ty could barely hear his own breathing over the racket. He focused again on the drone running toward him and took a swing. Impact put another dent into the hollow broom handle and flung the drone back toward the center of the room. The momentum of his swing spun Ty just enough to see another drone drop down onto the vinyl booth behind him.
No! Ty could see the glow of the plasma torch heating up. He swung, but the drone jumped, though not quick enough. The broom handle clipped it, spinning the drone into the wall behind it. The drone tried to right itself, but tumbled into the darkness behind the booth.
Ty took that moment to look around the room, tensing for a swarm of drones to descend from above like a colony of spiders. But only one drone was still running toward him, and before Ty could tense to smack it away, Santino jumped it from behind. His frying pan came down with a thunderous crash, Santino bashing the drone with the ferocity of a rabid dog that had been splashed with water.
Thus, Ty turned to wait for the last drone to emerge from the shadows.
But it never did. Nor did any more drones appear.
Ty waited there, ready to attack, for a long minute. He could feel Callie’s wide, frightened eyes staring at him, waiting, just waiting to be overrun, to be burned as she sat holding the organs inside her friend’s body. She was helpless, even more so than the rest of the crew. Callie had a bright spirit, but she’d never been much of a fighter. Self-defense training was given to all the crew, but she’d barely passed. Now, more than ever, it was clear to Ty. She was just a kid. She was just a frightened kid.
Finally, Ty lowered the broom handle and grabbed the flashlight off his tool belt. He flicked it on and leaned over the booth, shining the beam into the darkness below. A pile of needles greeted him: scattered around a silver disk and a sphere covered in broken lenses – the drone’s remains, ripped limb from limb, its every joint painstakingly torn apart.
A dread Ty could not immediately justify tugged at his stomach. He turned the flashlight to sweep the area. A few crumbs lined the floor, along with hair and dandruff, the usual mess humanity left behind. But there, at the joint between the deck and the bulkhead, was a ventilation grate, and something was moving inside.
Alarmed, Ty tensed, and his hand slipped off the booth’s smooth vinyl. It plunged down onto the drone’s remains before he caught himself. Bits of glass from the shattered camera lenses stabbed into his hand. Involuntarily, he winced and drove them deeper, a gasp escaping from his lips.
Only then did he catch a glimpse of what lingered beyond the grate – a heap of needles glittering in the shaky beam of his flashlight. Round bodies littered the background, filling the volume of the duct. Shattered glass shifted between them like fluid, moving with the flow beneath.
The heads of six drones were drowned in white, their bodies and legs dismembered beyond repair – a graveyard teeming with neurofibers.
Ty tried to lift his hand away, but the fibers were faster. In the blink of an eye, they shot out past the grate, wrapping his hand and crawling up his wrist. Even with all his strength, Ty couldn’t wrench his hand free. “Santino!” he shouted to the Marine behind him.
“Yes, Chief!” came the reply.
Ty could hear Santino fumbling around, trying to raise the bridge, then the medical bay on internal comms. Nothing was working. Now, Santino was trying to load up the wounded to get to the medical bay. He’d lashed the cook to his back and piled Okara and Callie onto a couple of serving trays so that Callie could hold Okara’s wounds and Santino could pull them both. Realistically, he needed help, but it wasn’t coming, and Ty knew that. “Get them out of here.”
“What’s going on, Chief?” Santino asked.
“Get them out of here. That’s an order.” The neurofibers might be inescapable, but Ty didn’t want to see Callie and the others caught here, however vain that might be.
“Aye, Chief. But I’m sending someone to check on you.” Santino grunted as he took the weight of the wounded. With Okara and the cook’s injuries being so severe, they couldn’t afford to argue.
A horrible scraping rang out as Santino pulled the others along the floor, but it worked. Carrying one wounded and dragging Okara and Callie behind him, Santino got them out of that room. Slowly, the scraping of the serving trays across the deck tiles behind fainter and fainter. A part of Ty expected that to irritate the neurofibers, as if they were hunters, conscious of the fact their prey had escaped, but they seemed unbothered, slowly winding themselves further and further up his arm.
They stopped their climb at his elbow, shifting for a moment more before they stilled. Beads of sweat began to form on Ty’s brow, anxiety gnawing at his core. “Let go,” he pleaded, knowing the fibers could not hear him.
Gathering his strength, Ty tried to wrench his arm free once more. It was pointless. However frail the translucent strands looked, their grip was like iron. They didn’t allow even an inch of movement, only tightening more. He expected it to hurt as the neurofibers constricted, but it didn’t. They tensed and pulled at his joints, not injuring him, but manipulating his fist to open. They splayed his fingers out and began to prod at the flesh of his palm.
Ty’s throat went dry as he recognized their intent. It was gentle. Disproportionately so. But they were mapping out the wounds on his hand, the cuts and glass embedded within. They were points of weakness, prime locations to infiltrate the system now presented to them.
“No,” he begged, watching a few hairlike strands split off from the rest. “Please.” He tried to rip his arm away, to close his fist, but his arm was trapped and held. Not like this. This was how it began, how it always began. Every one of Command’s failed research projects and surely the Matador too. The fibers began to react to people, and wove themselves in, the human body helpless to their infiltration.
Ty had seen those corpses. He had boarded to help recover what was left of the Matador’s crew. What he had seen there haunted him ever since. A few of the engineers had left after that, unable to forgive the Singularity for carrying the same neurofibers that had strewn the Matador’s crew across the walls. Though wary, Ty had stayed, and now the Matador’s nightmare had become their own. All that damage and repair to the ship, years and decades of it, and the neurofibers’ self-replication had encountered an error akin to cancer in biological cells. The fibers could no longer stop their own growth.
The warning signs had been there. The fibers had become more active, present in places they had never been seen before. Now, they were seeking expansion into new systems, even biological ones that they had never been meant to take root within.
Ty barely felt anything as the fibers pushed into his lacerations. They were so thin, it was just the slightest of pricks. It tickled as they delved between the layers of his skin. But that was only the beginning, Ty knew. The neurofibers would burrow deeper, into tissue and veins, then into muscle and bone. They would attach themselves to his nerves, pulsing and testing them. More and more fibers would push their way past his skin, through any orifice they could find. The human body was so small and complex, it would take a multitude of fibers to map it out. By then, he’d be dead, or wish that he was.
Ty watched the outermost layer of his skin writhe, the fibers probing the depth of his shallow cuts. It stung a little, only a little, a taste of what was to come.
And then the fibers retracted themselves, pulling one by one out of his palm. They twirled in the air, tiny shards of glass wrapped up in their ends. Each was a small sliver that had been embedded in his hand. They discarded the glass, tossing it back to the floor, and the shards were too small to make a perceptible sound.
The fibers constricted again, once, just briefly, a squeeze that may have been reassuring had it come from any source but a thousand alien cilia. Then, they slowly unwound themselves, peeling their web from his arm and retreated back into the ventilation duct.
Too shocked for words, too distraught for thought, Ty simply watched the white fibers vanish into the depths of the ship.