Stocky walked up to the open doorway of Patterson’s office and looked in quietly. She was reading files at her desk. He couldn’t see clearly through his nictitating membranes, but he guessed it was work related. Her forced and careful movements showed the pain she was in. His stomach tightened and he thought about turning back. Maybe it was better to leave the matter alone for a bit.
But he would be out here in Delta-Hydri or some other empty system with her for years. But years of what? Would she resent him or fear him? Was he condemned to endure her scorn? Avoidance? Or could he be forgiven and get close again? And he needed to be close to her – even if just to keep her safe.
A cough settled the decision for him. A low, wet hacking that he couldn’t hold back. Her head turned and they looked eye to eye. At least, he imagined they did. He feared they did. And he considered that he should have waited till he could fold his inner eyelid back and look at her like a person. He couldn’t even smell to tell if she was afraid.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
He gained a glimmer of hope. It sounded like a genuine inquiry. She didn’t sound angry or frightened. “None of us are okay,” he said. “But I feel better than I look.” He watched her carefully so see how she responded further.
“How’s your respiration?”
Again, her voice showed genuine concern. But maybe she was just being professional. “It’s fine. The coughing and the nasal drip is annoying.” He coughed some more. It was hard to talk without coughing. “I need my sense of smell back or I don’t know how we’re going to hunt that Creature. That’s not why I came in here though. I’m concerned about…”
“What?”
He just barely stepped through the doorway. “About what happened. I don’t understand what took hold of me, but it will never happen again. I promise that I won’t hurt you.”
“That was unpleasant for me too.” She tightened in her seat as if reliving the moment. “Very frightening. I’m not all that familiar with true fear. With terror. I think you were right about that.”
Fear. She was afraid of him now. He couldn’t fault her for it. What he was so ready to do to her was wicked. He considered leaving. Like everything else, fear fades with time. But maybe it had so taken hold that it could never fade enough. “Can I help you with anything?”
She remained silent and he nodded. “I understand.” He looked back out into the hallway.
“No.” She rolled her seat away from her desk and pointed at an empty chair. “Sit down.”
He slowly, fearfully walked in and sat. He wasn’t sure if he wanted this conversation.
She took a breath. “I understand what you’re trying to do, and I appreciate it. I can’t forget about what happened because that would be dangerous. But I want you to know that I have already forgiven you, and I need you to forgive me. Because I should have done some things differently also.”
“I have no justification for a grudge.”
“No, listen. You don’t need to worry about losing control. Pazuzu isn’t affecting you. You behave the way you do around me because of pheromones. I’m designed to be desirable. That engineering certainly manifests in my visual appearance, but it likely increases pheromonal activity too. Especially since I’m in the fertile window.
Humans don’t respond to pheromones. A lot of humans don’t even have a formed vomeronasal organ, which is what’s responsible for receiving such signals. And it’s just a vestigial remnant for those of us who do. But you have one that works very well because your designers wanted you to have a secondary means of olfactory sense. This is why you breathe so deeply around me. I’ve been affecting your brain like a drug the whole time you’ve been aboard. We know this now and can be more careful.”
A drug. Drugs have predictable effects. And they can be diminished or even neutered with other drugs. “Is there something I should take for this?”
She sighed and thought silently for a moment. “If it gets to be a problem again. And I don’t think it will. I do wonder about your medical file though because you have no history of this phenomenon recorded by Doctor Chakwas. Do you ever remember behaving similarly around another woman?”
“No, I haven’t.” He answered reflexively but then actually thought about it. “I never have.”
“Oh.” She almost appeared to smirk.
“I’m not really aware of it though. The smelling. The breathing. I feel the need to do it when I’m near you, but I don’t think about it. If that makes sense.”
She nodded. “I follow. It’s an automatic response.”
“I know I’ve never had the need to do that with anyone else.”
She relaxed in her seat. “Okay.”
“What do we do?”
She got up and walked to the door and closed it. “I still trust you,” she said. “I trust being alone with you. I need you to know that. And I need you to trust me. We’re in trouble. The test we did isn’t foolproof. You, me, and Chandna have mostly been together. But I can’t have much confidence about the others. And even if we’re all still ourselves, we don’t know where that Creature is. Or what it will do next.”
He thought about what she said. If anyone in his crew had been changed then he could probably smell it – when he recovered that sense. After all, he had smelled the difference with her. And he had with Chandna too. Chandna? There’s something wrong with Chandna.
“I never noticed anything wrong with Qureshi while I was out there with her. But I smell something wrong with Chandna. I think Ghost does too, and that’s why he keeps away from him.”
“You think he’s been affected by Pazuzu?” She looked genuinely surprised.
“I don’t know. He’s very strange. But he’s been this way since he came aboard.”
“There are no substantial abnormalities in his medical file.”
He reasoned that was so. The Company would not have sent him if there were known abnormalities. “Well, he has some problems. Or had them. I knew an idiot on the Abydos who got himself crushed. He had most of his ribs braced, several spinal discs replaced, and some abdominal organs replaced with synthetic parts. Chandna smells like he did after that. He’s got a manufactured quality to his scent.”
She nodded slowly in thought. “I remember hearing about that accident. Black eye for the Company. Synthetic augmentation wouldn’t violate the Paramount but it should be in his file. Let’s set the matter aside for now though. Heal and focus on Pazuzu.”
She turned back to her computer and began to type. “I’ll add that information to the project folder in case it becomes relevant. Pazuzu’s infection seems to have affected healthy people mostly the same so far. But we haven’t seen its work with a cyborg or replicant yet.”
“Or a splicer.”
“Or that, yes.” She paused for a moment. “We do need to get some monitoring in Aux Two and learn what it does with De Silva.” She finished and got up. “Let’s go.”
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They went out into the hall and she turned back to him . “Also, remember that you stopped when you realized I was afraid. And you protected me from those creatures too. I thank you for that. You’re a good man. Recognize error, renounce it, and then move on having learned from it. Don’t beat yourself up over this. You’re a good man, not a monster.”
He gazed into her eyes and saw sympathy and gentleness in them. She had forgiven him. He tried to hold back his smile and then followed her out.
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Shortly thereafter, Stocky waited in consultation with Chandna, who was dressed in a full biohazard suit and logging his recent work. Patterson had left them to perform an independent analysis of their blood samples. Stocky hoped she would find them all to be clear of Pazuzu infection. They were now almost at the point where they couldn’t work in two groups.
Patterson came back in, nodding at Chandna. “Everyone passed, just as you said.”
“That’s good news.”
“I’ll tell Holly,” Chandna said.
“I already did,” Patterson said. “I knew they needed to know.”
“Alright, do you want to jump straight into the autopsies?” Chandna asked.
“Yeah,” she said. She looked at her hands with reservation.
He saw the dread in her eyes. “What do you want me to do?” He wanted to take whatever small measure of strain off of her that he could.
“I would like for you to come with us,” Chandna said. “I want to talk with you both.”
He looked at Patterson. “Get suited up,” she said. He perceived the uncertainty in her eyes. She was wondering about what this ‘talk’ would be about too. Chandna certainly knew that something out of character had happened between them. He left consultation and went to the storage room to get a biosuit.
He slowly worked his way into it, trying not to aggravate the hundreds of random shaped patches of inflammation. For the first time he could relate to a human’s displeasure of work. He truly would punt this task out if he could afford to do so. He sealed and pressurized his suit. The cold air felt kind of good. He verified that his pressure was holding while walking to the elevator, and then he headed up to the Isolab.
Chandna already had the alien hybrid-horrors which had once been Fuller, Qureshi, and Garvey on operating tables, and he was cutting into Garvey’s sternum with a whirring bone saw. Bloody tools lined the surgical trays. He walked up beside Patterson and watched as Chandna opened up the ribcage. Many ribs, damaged by gunfire, cracked and splintered while he spread them apart. Then he cleaned up with a scalpel to slice through membranous tissue and expose the chest cavity. The two scientists peeled back the tissue while sopping up blood with a rag, and then they peered inside.
“It all looks quite normal,” Chandna said, pushing organs around to expose more surface area for viewing. “As best as I can tell, given the gunshot trauma. Don’t you think?”
Stocky couldn’t tell. The liver was badly lacerated (almost in pieces) and the lungs had been punctured too. The heart and stomach looked undamaged, but he couldn’t tell whether the tissue had been contaminated just by looking. He waited on them to do the inspecting and he just got the first sample jar ready to receive an organ.
“It does to the eye,” Patterson answered. “He may have still been human, and alive. Still in the process of losing his mind. I think we’re going to see a dramatic change in Qureshi and Fuller. We still want to get some of his tissue under a microscope though.”
Stocky glanced at the other two creatures, noting the discoloration and the lesion like growths all over their skin. And also Fuller’s swollen tire for a neck. They may be different?
“I’ll retrieve tissue samples for microscopic analysis after the other autopsies,” Chandna said while picking up a scalpel. “I don’t think we should tell anyone that Garvey may have been alive.” He started pulling on the tissue of one of the lungs while using the scalpel to scrape it free.
“No, definitely not,” Patterson said.
“The interesting question,” Chandna said, “is whether we can define a sharp transition between life and death for the infected. It might be that the victim organism never really dies in the traditional sense. The vital organs keep functioning the whole time and they gradually change into Pazuzu. After all, death is noticeable. It wants to avoid that.” He gave Stocky the first lung. Blood dripped out of the gunshot holes, showing that the creature had lived for quite some time after having its lung punctured.
Patterson nodded. “Once it’s Pazuzu the person has in all respects died – ceased to exist. And we know that Zhu died – by the classic definition.”
“How did Zhu escape?” Stocky asked. He had set the lung aside and held a new empty jar.
“He didn’t,” Patterson said. “What you destroyed was a facsimile created by our universal constructor. Zhu’s actual body is still harmless in the morgue.”
Chandna turned to Stocky. “Yes, but we can’t study that abominable creation. Somebody turned him into stew meat.”
He glared at him. “How was I supposed to know you wanted him on a table?” And even if he had known, the smart thing was to make sure the creature was dead.
“Focus on what we have,” Patterson said, exasperated. “Let’s also examine the brain.” She looked at his sliced open head. “What’s left of it anyways. And then we’ll do Qureshi.”
She picked up a scalpel and, grimacing, sliced a ring all around his head a little above the eyebrows while Chandna removed the remaining chest organs. She then grabbed the bloody bone saw and started cutting a larger opening in the skull to extract the entirety of Garvey’s smashed brain. The lacerated tissue jiggled from the vibrations of the cutting.
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Holly rested her eyes in the reception lounge in Sci-Med with her team beside her. She gently wiped a cold, wet cloth over her many rashes. Snot trickled down to her upper lip. She reminded herself that it was sinful to wish for death. And it would be wrong to the rest of them too. It was her duty to lead them.
But it was impossible to not want to end the pain – any end.
She opened her eyes and saw Moussa watching her with a long face.
“Are you alright, ma’am?” he asked.
“No,” she said. She remained silent for several seconds and then asked, “Do you want command?”
She waited but didn’t hear an answer. I can’t do this, Lord. I know…I try to do my duty. But I can’t go on. She began to cry. There was too much being dumped on her. “I need something from you, Moussa. I need to know that you will lead if it’s necessary.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I will if it becomes necessary. But you still have your mind. And we’ll carry out your orders as normal.”
“What should we do?” Samoylova asked.
Die. She couldn’t say die. But that was the honest answer for many of them, if not all of them.
She bent over and coughed, and she dropped her towels. “We’ll take what we need from Habitation, sterilize it, and then store it in Command Gate to bunker there. I’ll talk with Patterson about wrapping up any work not focused on these diseases. I don’t think we can afford to keep a team permanently stationed down here. They’ll have to make do with individual shifts.”
“Pazuzu will kill us all if they don’t learn how to kill it first,” Nieves said.
“It will kill us all if we remain separated. We’ve got to be able to fight. And only a few of us now can.”
“You’re right,” Samoylova said. “But don’t rush her. Pazuzu will need time to process the Captain. The big Creature doesn’t seem like it wants to fight us alone.”
“I hope you’re right. You three make a list of the things we need from the Workshops and Farm, and begin moving them to Command. Seal the Gate from both sides and we’ll make it our lifeboat.”
“Can we survive?” Nieves asked.
Moussa looked to her silently, and sternly.
She had to admit to herself it was a fair question. She would use TURING to help them understand the requirements on them. “TURING, Sci-Med is not able to sterilize the ship, right?”
“That’s correct, Captain Holly.”
“I can’t verify that we have full control over the ship. And I can’t make a jump to FTL without that. We’re stuck out here. Our best-case scenario is we recover from this poison gas and then kill the Creature. Then we find a way to keep the contagion from spreading further. We get all the information that we’ve collected on it and send it back with the spy probe.
We’ll continue outbound on the distant edge of Delta-Hydri. We’ll grow our own food, reprocess our water, power down systems we don’t need to save energy. We can take stints in cryo if needed. We’ll survive and wait – because we can. Because we must. The science and research institutions will send us instructions for getting home once they figure this mess out.” She began to cry again, and then hunched over and coughed. Her voice was getting increasingly raspy.
“I’ve never found the Triumvirate to be trustworthy,” Moussa said.
“We don’t have another option.”
“Alright,” Moussa said after a silence. “We’ll gather what’s needed. No point waiting around.”
“Please do that. I’m going to watch Patterson’s autopsy.”
She watched the three of them leave and then she slowly went to the reception desk. Patterson had the station there set up so that one could observe what was happening elsewhere in Sci-Med. She grabbed a PDA on the desk and started going through notes on the computer screen to see if there was anything which would help her find new ways of fighting Pazuzu. De Silva had lost battle after battle because he was blind to what they were fighting. And she knew that she couldn’t do any better unless if she understood it. She skimmed through Patterson’s records, hoping something helpful would stand out.
“…guided by an intelligence…”
“…unsure of means of communication…”
“…exploits senescence…”
“…universal assembler…”
They had clearly gathered enough factual information to have theories on what Pazuzu was, how it functioned, and how to hurt it. She saw on the wall display that they had started the autopsies of the recovered bodies. She turned the volume up to listen.
She watched Chandna dissect Garvey. She was so tired that she didn’t feel the least bit queasy as his organs were methodically removed. Or maybe it was the pain that left no room for disgust. She heard Patterson say that Garvey may have still been alive. The change was not instantaneous. How long would an infected person have?
Patterson had to tell her the path forward. She prayed that listening to the Sci-Med team would inform her about what to ask of them. They had to know more, or at least would after this.