In the sub-levels of the hospital, far beneath the day-to-day bustle, Vergil believed he was dreaming. He lay on a rough bed of interwoven white roots with their thin, hooked thorns digging uncomfortably into his skin. He was dimly aware of a transfusion hooked into his arms, and of some exchange between him and the ancient tree but could make no sense of it. Something inside him was blooming, ripening, changing, though he couldn’t think straight enough to understand what. He flickered around the edges of consciousness, a corpse that hadn’t been allowed to fade away and rest.
Who’d been the two women he saw by firelight?
Where was he?
Why didn’t it all hurt?! It had hurt for so long, so deeply, that he felt the absence of pain like an absence of himself.
Women in green bustled about him. He didn’t know any of their faces. They came and went like visions of a world he wasn’t sure was real.
Pain, his beloved pain, had become a memory of a dream, fading just like him in the sterile white light of the leaves. Whatever his headware had to say had become just a tangle of absurd strings of characters. He couldn’t keep up with the constant, red-flagged alerts.
Vergil Vansce fell headfirst into a long dream of a time before…
“Damn, my shift starts in fifteen minutes. I’m going to park my character here and finish up the mission when I get back.”
“What’s your assignment today, Vansce?”
There were three men around the campfire, all three wearing mismatching sets of armour pieces from a dozen time periods. The dead littered the ground around them in a grim display of bloodshed.
“Carbon dioxide scrubbers, S14. Routine check.”
One of the knights shook his head, making a sound of disgust. His armour rattled dully.
“I don’t envy your schedule, man. It stinks down there.”
“Don’t I know it. Anyway, I’ll come back online after. Don’t kill the boss without me. I need the levels. I don’t want to wait another six days for it to respawn.”
The knight nearest the fire waved a salute to the others and then reached over his head. The neural connector disengaged with a barely audible click and the grey reality of his small cabin reasserted itself.
“Vergil Vansce, please report for duty at: Carbon Dioxide Scrubber, Section 14. Details have been uploaded to your heads-up display. Ten minutes to start of work shift.”
Argia’s slightly metal-tinged voice echoed from a speaker in the wall as if on cue. Vergil sighed as he dressed in his work overalls, banging his shoulders and elbows as he struggled in the cramped space. The trick was to fold himself instead of the clothes and do up the zip only after walking out.
“Natural born, how lucky I am,” he griped for maybe the millionth time as he tried to stretch without banging his head on the low ceiling. A family line that had no truck with genetic tampering had produced him much too tall for the Gloria Nostra and then discarded him as soon as he could be put to work. How lucky indeed.
A natural born male was worth exactly as much as his excrement to the gynocracy that led the Gloria.
His cranial implant already fed him the day’s assignment as well as directions toward his planned work location. He didn’t need any directions, especially as the route Argia suggested was always longer than it needed to be. She said it was safer, as if there was anything to be safe from.
His cabin’s door slid open with a slight electric whine and the light inside went off. In a few minutes the inside would be freezing cold as all power was cut from it for the duration of the workday. How lucky he was to be of use at such a tender age.
Vergil knew by heart the maze of ducts, walkways, and corridors that made up the lower levels of the Gloria. Most of the ship’s operation was automated and barely ever required human supervision, so he would very likely be alone for the entire day. Again. The quiet thrum of machinery working as intended accompanied him as he made his way towards the outer ring to the literal belly of the ship.
He paused by one of the rare observation ports, a window in the side of the ship no larger than his head.
Bright blue stretched away from him, the curve of the planet below just barely visible on the edge of the port. His heads-up display attached a pointer to it. It was designated as Athos III and had been there his entire life. He tried to crane his neck and catch a glimpse of the other two SPRAWL ships that he knew were also in orbit, but they were out of position at that hour. Nonetheless, the sight of the planet improved his disposition. It often did. A storm brewed above the planetary ocean and the angry swirl of clouds fascinated his attention for a few moments before an angry red text popped up in his display to hurry him along.
Some of the guys from his Alternative Reality Experiences had said the Gloria would be breaking orbit before the year’s end. The terraforming of Athos III had been completed, ahead of its century long schedule so all three SPRAWLs were preparing to head back out into deep space once the space port for their youngest sister was completed. He could see the shape of that floating on a lower orbit, ships moving in a slow dance around its massive hulk.
“Not long now,” he mused.
The idea of that single observation port filling with blackness made an ugly lump in his throat.
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“Argia, would it be possible for me to transfer to a surface colony?” he asked the open air, savouring the sight for a minute more.
“No,” came the reply as a text in his vision. “All five colonies on Athos III have reached stable population thresholds. No new personnel will be allotted for planetary settlement.”
Pity. Not that he would have ever qualified for settlement duty as a male with no higher qualifications, but it was worth the question.
Despite Argia’s laid-out route, he opened an access hatch close-by and took the ladder down. It would bypass several levels. Engineers never bothered to lock the hatches properly, not down there, and Argia’s complaints could be ignored while he was out of her many-eyed sight.
Very few other workers ever had cause to venture so low and the state of the shaft showed their neglect. Loose panels on the walls, exposed wiring, air vents that wheezed with accumulated filth. Even the ladder was barely still fastened to the wall. Its rattles echoed as he descended.
When he was just a few meters off the lowest deck, the ladder shook. He clung tighter to the metal rungs and produced his flashlight. Something scrambled into a vent when he tried to shine a light on it.
“What was that? Argia, is there someone else on the level with me?”
“Negative,” came the text reply. “See secondary assignment for the day: find missing specimen / burn \possible\ nest. Please use approved route.”
“What missing specimen?”
“Details available in work file.”
With the ladder stable and nothing moving down towards him, he finished his descent.
If that wasn’t just fantastic! How lucky he was. The scrubbers were some of his favourite places on the ship precisely because they were quiet, deserted, and generally did not give him any work to do. There was nothing in the air scrubbers for pests to feed on.
“Secondary assignment: specimen retrieval / removal. Specimen appears to be aggressive. Caution is advised.”
Vergil reviewed the files uploaded to his headware. Normally he wouldn’t have bothered but normally his ladder wouldn’t shake in the dark. Some pictures of the creature were also available. It had broken out of a containment tank in one of the ship’s bays and bolted for the air ducts. Covered in carapace, four-legged, about a meter long, and with a wicked looking tail, it looked like something Vergil would not enjoy finding.
“What a wonderful life I live,” he mumbled as he walked the narrow passageways, his motion detector in hand. Lights flickered to life and died away as he made his way deeper into the ship, motion sensors his only company for a long time.
He had to stop at one point when he ran into a group of five women. Three wore the grey uniform of Engineers and the other two were in full body armour and armed with some nasty-looking rifles. He turned towards a wall, lowered his head and they passed him by without harassment. By their conversation, they were also looking for the missing specimen.
Seeing the security detail escorting the Engineers brought the unfamiliar and uncomfortable feeling of danger. Hairs on the back of his neck rose as he unholstered his own special-issued plasma pistol. It was considered non-lethal for humans but powerful enough for most critters that would infest the ducts. Vergil, as a pest control technician, had only fired it half a dozen times in the three years since he had been assigned to the job, and intensely regretted his lack of practice.
With the motion detector in one hand and the pistol in the other, he walked slowly among the tall machines that produced the very air the whole ship breathed. Most of them were hidden behind thick protective casings that only the maintenance crew could access so that only left the corridors and general access hatches to check.
Lights failed to turn on down one of the corridors.
“Argia, I am at corridor number seventeen, sub-level three. There’s no light,” he informed the machine spirit of the Gloria.
“Motions sensors do not register movement at hatch seventeen, sub-level three,” came the reply instantly.
Vergil waved his pistol toward the usual placement of the motion sensors.
“I’m here and moving around.”
“Maintenance ticket has been created. A maintenance crew will be there shortly to investigate malfunction.”
The motion detector in his hand came alive with a beep.
“Of course there’s something right in there.” Vergil sighed and clasped the detector to his waist to free a hand for his flashlight. It could be the missing specimen, he thought, but it could also be any other pest chewing through the cables. He had given up trying to count the number of times that had happened with critters brought up from the planet. Too many of them had a taste for copper and silver, sometimes even for electricity. If he’d leave it for the maintenance crew, he’d get scolded and punished again.
The motion detector beeped as he walked into the dark corridor, his shadow long ahead of him. There was no sound aside from the constant, echoing beeps in the narrow space. He stopped; the beeping stopped. When he moved, it started again. The light from the main Scrubber deck turned off after some time and he was left only with the narrow cone of the flashlight and the sickly green glow of the motion detector.
He spun in place, a creeping fear mounting on the nape of his neck.
Nothing behind him. Nothing to the sides.
Whatever it was, it moved quietly through the wall.
All in all, a good sign. If it was that quiet, doing that much moving around, then it couldn’t be the missing specimen. A thing that size would register somehow.
He looked for and found a wall access panel. With a set of screwdrivers, he pried it loose and stuck his head in the crawlspace. Sure enough, the smell of burnt electronics hit him instantly. Somewhere to the side something threw up sparks and he could hear the whine of a damaged electronic component.
“Argia, I found the damaged area,” he said when coming out. “There’s a strong smell coming out of wall panel D, in—”
Pain flared under his chin. Something sharp stabbed up through the soft tissue there, went up through the roof of his mouth and punched out through the centre of his face. He choked on blood and spasmed in shock. Like a fish on a hook, flaying his arms and kicking his feet, he was lifted into the air.
In his final terrified moments of consciousness Vergil saw the creature slithering out from among the mess of cables crisscrossing the ceiling.
The specimen had grown. Its long, serrated tail effortlessly brought Vergil level with its head. He gurgled thick hot blood. The creature’s black lower jaw opened up into two pieces, fangs as long as his fingers shimmering in the dark.
Angry red messages crowded for attention in Vergil’s dimming field of view. The shine on the silver fangs was infinitely more fascinating and urgent.
Pain lasted for much more than a moment.