In case audible communication would make things right, they turned their smile on Lante and let Lortisse explain, ‘We’re going on an adventure.’
She went for them with her syringe and it pierced their sleeve and got some of the material into the vessel’s bloodstream, too little to make any difference or so the consensus hoped. Such an adventure! Now he had Lante’s wrist but abruptly they weren’t alone. For a moment Lortisse swayed, trying to process the multiplication of external entities that had abruptly occurred. The vessel’s own archives helpfully supplied names for the newcomers but then went on to supply a vast amount of supplementary data that We-in-Lortisse could not process quickly or understand, a whole tide of emotional content, likes, gripes, histories, issues. They lost control momentarily, the vessel swaying and the space beyond becoming an impenetrable chaos of motion and light and garbled information. The vessel was being pushed and pulled. Auditory information was a clashing row of contradictory noises and the vessel itself was filled with the chemicals of distress and hurt. A threat seemed imminent and they had none of the usual recourses because this vessel was of such an unorthodox substance and organization.
Lortisse blinked, finding Baltiel and Rani gamely trying to pinion his arms as Lante programmed a fresh syringe. ‘What . . .?’ He hurt, every part of him hurt, joints and skull and guts. ‘What are you doing?’ His words were lost in the noise of their voices, yelling at him to stay still.
‘Erma?’ he got out.
‘Hold him still,’ Lante instructed.
Lortisse twitched, trying to hold himself still, and a generation of thought rose and fell in the centre of his brain. He lunged forwards as Lante came at him with the syringe, feeling his joints pop, muscles tear, the pain abruptly an ecstasy of freedom. His teeth closed snap on Lante’s hand, ripping into her flesh, grinding bone. Baltiel was trying to force the vessel’s face into one of the medical cabinets but they were more familiar with the geometry of these large spaces now and any kind of control over the vessel was predicated on causing it pain and on its limbs retaining their original configuration. They let the vessel bend and twist until Baltiel and Rani had no hold on it, and then used one hand to take Rani by the throat. Baltiel was striking the vessel about the sensory organs, and in time that would prove an inconvenience. Consensus amongst We-in-Lortisse was that the vessel was damaged beyond salvage and appropriate measures were taken to encrypt experience and history in suitably durable archival form for later retrieval and present dispersal.
Lortisse was still watching out of his eyes, still grinning, in fact, though Baltiel had knocked loose several teeth from his bloodied gums. His body sung with adrenaline and an ecstatic mix of hormones. He felt a scale of cosmic vastness that was at the same time bounded in the smallest nutshell. He felt an incomparable, religious rightness as the muscles of his hand clenched explosively, far beyond their tolerances, tearing loose from their anchor points even as he rammed a splintering thumb into Rani’s neck, letting his blood become her blood. Baltiel struck him again, and then something impacted on the vessel far harder. Lante had a tool in her intact hand. That part of him that retained access to his memories recognized that it was used to cut wreckage but Lante had used it to carve deeply into his vessel, into their body, and now a great deal of that body was coming out, great gouts and pieces of it.
The others detached Rani from their ruined grip but they were already shutting down and withdrawing from the control centres of Lortisse’s mind by then. Shortly afterwards the vessel started screaming, alone on the floor of the quarantine lab, and after that, it stopped and lay still.
8.
Baltiel sealed the lab with Lortisse’s body inside and they dragged themselves to the main bubble room of the habitat. Lante was swearing, one hand shaking as it worked on the other, disinfecting the wound that Lortisse’s teeth had made, weeping with pain but, Baltiel guessed, more with fear that something had gone in. Rani was . . .
Rani was unconscious on the floor, her own blood painting her from neck to waist. He grabbed a medical kit and started applying a pressure bandage, but surely it was too little, too late. The woman was ashen grey. Lortisse had punched a hole in her throat with his finger.
‘It’s impossible,’ Lante was saying over and over. ‘It can’t . . . We can’t be infected . . . different biologies. Different proteins. Different cell structures. It can’t be happening.’
‘Shut up,’ Baltiel told her shortly. ‘Help me, here.’ Rani’s body was shuddering, her limbs twitching and flailing. Death throes, or new life? ‘Your treatment – the stuff you were going to use on Lortisse—’
‘Back in the lab,’ Lante said shortly.
Baltiel was linking with the habitat systems, shunting medical functions to the main chamber’s fabricators. He set them making emergency supplies: plasma, anti-shock, whatever was quick and resource-cheap. Everything else would have to come from the isolation lab Lante had set up. ‘Go get what you made. I’ll get us set up here.’
To her credit, Lante’s rebellious look was only momentary. She’d pumped herself full of painkillers, and doubtless now she was thinking that her own best chance was back in that lab, as well as Rani’s. Without a word she stomped off back the way they’d come.
Lante felt her pulse rise and rise, despite the medication that should be controlling it. Was that a symptom? Had Lortisse felt the same, in amongst the many and varied klaxons of his body failing? She wasn’t suffering the same colossal system shock as he had, at the intrusion of the foreign organism. Did that mean his bite was no more than that, or had the entity learned a way to stealth its way through a human body without setting off the alarms?
She knew how irrational it was to think of things that way. Of course the alien sludge hadn’t learned. It was some slime mould analogue, some bacterial clot, just a disease of tortoises. And yet it had found its way to Lortisse’s brain and . . .
Obviously it had driven him mad. What she had seen was Lortisse, his brain swollen and feverish – despite the fact that she’d put monitors in place for just that and none of them had warned her – acting out some psychopathic delusion. Any projection of alien intent was merely her own brain piecing patterns together out of misfit scraps. The thing wasn’t controlling him, just damaging his brain so that he wasn’t responsible for his actions. The enemy had been Lortisse’s diseased id, and not . . .
Lante found herself staring helplessly at the man’s body, sprawled on its side in a slick of his own blood. He looked as though he’d been through some sort of industrial crusher, joints twisted, one hand splintered where he’d forced it into poor Rani’s neck. The wound she’d dealt him was mostly hidden, but she knew she’d cut him open from shoulder to sternum, and even then he hadn’t reacted as a man hurt. Surely there was no frenzy or delusion that could see someone abuse their own body in such a way.
Forget him. Need to save Rani. Need to save me. She lurched forwards to gather the syringes the dispenser was filling for her. Her hands shook; two of them tumbled to the floor, and then a third. Is this it? Am I losing control? She tried to examine her own thoughts for an alien presence. Am I still me? Are these my perceptions? Was I like this a moment ago? Her personal monitor was warning her that she was hyperventilating, her heart rate approaching dangerous levels. Is it killing me?