Its boots are clasped to the metal floor just like his, but the rest of it waves and ripples in the absence of gravity, boneless as waterweed. There is not enough volume in the folds of that suit to comprise a human body, and yet the suit compresses it, defines it into something fluidly humanoid as it stands at Zaine’s shoulder like a whispering advisor.
Meshner’s instincts take the moment out of any technologically adept hands and he bellows Zaine’s name in the close confines of his helmet, half-deafening himself; half-deafening Zaine to judge by her jerking flinch. Then the thing has a flowing glove on Zaine’s shoulder and she catches the image from Meshner’s camera, seeing herself, seeing her companion.
Her own shriek is soundless, communicated only by the spasm of her limbs. She flings the thing off and loses touch with the floor, boots detached but failing to kick off properly so that she is left with limbs flailing, turning head over heels in the centre of the room directly before the thing, which lazily reaches out an arm that ripples beneath the fabric of the suit.
Meshner panics – he wants to run forwards and grab Zaine but he can’t move his feet, fear and magnetism immobilizing him. Instead, Artifabian leaps, just like the Portiid the robot resembles, striking Zaine in the chest and sending her end over end through the air, weirdly slowly because even an artificial Portiid weighs far less than a Human.
For a moment the spacesuited wraith just undulates, rooted, but then its own boots disconnect and it drifts into the air like a discarded piece of clothing. Some part of the antique suit emits a plume of stale gas and it flies towards them with the underwater lethargy of a jellyfish on the tide.
‘Go! Meshner, go!’ Zaine pushes off from the wall towards the airlock, but of course there is no hurrying the doors. Their makers made them well, and their later octopus masters only reinforced them. There is no swift escape from this chamber, because it is a prison and now they are face to face with its inmate.
Still, Zaine makes a game try of it, cramming herself into the narrow chamber with its awkward, inhuman controls. The yammer of comms from the Lightfoot clogs all the channels now but Meshner has no capacity to pay attention to it.
The suit is coming for him, drifting across the chamber. The helmet is turned towards him but he sees no face in its glass window, only darkness. He can’t get his boots to disengage properly. He backs away, each step tortuously slow, a nightmare making the effortless transition to the waking world.
Artifabian leaps again, tearing into the quivering spacesuit’s leg, dragging it sharply sideways. The intention was surely to simply pin it there, away from the vulnerable Humans, but instead the friable old fabric of the suit just shears off at the knee, leaving the robot in possession of a single boot, sending the remainder of the antique spinning, its torn leg vomiting . . . fluid.
Ichor, comes a word into Meshner’s head, he has no idea where from. It is an oily, dark substance, lumpy as though full of half-formed sinews and tissues, clumping and oozing over itself in the centre of the room.
For a handful of heartbeats, as Zaine screams at him, it roils and re-forms, bundling itself into the semblance of a human figure. There is a face turned to them, sightless eyes staring past Meshner. Protean lips move and he is horribly certain it is saying, We’re going on an adventure.
Then it breaks apart into pieces and the pieces become other living things: spiny urchinous protrusions, quivering raw tissues, whips, spasming amoebae, radially symmetrical jellyfish shapes that claw a purchase in the stagnant air, pulsing themselves forward in sudden bursts. Zaine is yelling for him to get into the airlock with her, but Meshner is still lurching, step after magnetically-locked step like a zombie.
He feels impacts on his back, soft, barely noticeable. Something dark begins to ooze-crawl its way across his faceplate. Zaine is still yelling at him – everyone is yelling at him – but he stops moving. His limbs are locked with terror. He watches more of the stuff accumulate around the release catch of his helmet. He can see it flow together, shift shapes, grow extrusions of itself until it is a pair of ragged claws, glutinous simulacra of human hands joined at the wrist, experimenting with an unfamiliar mechanism but learning, learning. The back of one of the hands boils. He sees features form and dissolve there: an eye, a mouth. We’re going on an adventure.
He swings his body to lock eyes with Zaine. She cannot open the far door until the first is shut. He tries one more leaden step, but his legs won’t work for him.
I will give you clarity. The voice is fabricated in the chambers of his implant, spoofed into the auditory centres of his brain. Kern’s voice. Get yourself out, Meshner. I need you. I will help you. And the panic is gone, the fear stripped from him. He is numb, as though a great weight of suppressing medication has flooded through his system. He can think terribly clearly, and no action he contemplates has the possibility of upsetting him. ‘Artifabian,’ he instructs. ‘Get into the airlock and close the inner door.’
No! says Kern, spiking him with a sudden lance of outrage and fear and pain – his own, but played on a stage for her benefit – but the robot is already scuttling to obey. Perhaps it has its own survival to think about. It is a Kern-instance after all. Perhaps it argues furiously with its older sister all the way to the door.
He takes another step, for the form of it. Then those wriggling hands have understood the release catch from first principles and his suit – knowing only that there is a safe atmosphere outside – lets them open up his faceplate.
He has a brief glimpse of Zaine on the far side of the closing door before they reach for him.
8.
Portia transmits over and over: Lightfoot, Portia present, are you there? Something has gone wrong, but Helena feels deaf and blind: her translation system is still configured to wring what meaning she can from the octopus visual language, and she receives only the most basic of translation as Portia and Viola speak. And now Viola has just stopped replying.
Helena doesn’t need to stretch her imagination to come up with possibilities. Her mind is still full of the images that Baltiel recorded, long, long ago. Something deadly lives on that planet, the one he’d called Nod. Something insidious, that gets inside you. It got inside Lante and her fellows. It got inside Baltiel.
She turns back to the octopuses, still watching her – or at least mostly keeping one eye on her during their constant back and forth amongst themselves. She sees a lot of agitated hues and textures there. Whatever the plague of Nod actually is, the locals are terrified of it.
And yet, and yet . . . She focuses on the oddities, the flickerings and undercurrents across their skins that go against the chroma of the majority. She is already seeing a great deal of something she loosely translates as ‘forbidden’, backed up by code from the data channel that repurposes warnings and prohibitions used in Old Empire computer routines. Except there are a few flickers that seemed to contradict this. She already knows that contradictory emotions and thoughts are the very meat and drink of her hosts, but these are covert, flashed just between a couple of her interrogators; a minimal targeted display, one to another, the baglike bulk of their body hiding the aside from the rest. If they thought of her fully as a sentient creature then perhaps they would conceal the sentiment from her as well, but apparently she doesn’t rank so highly.