The ship was nice and flat, flight deck, ready room, and Engineering all on the same basic altitude but Engineering way towards the back. You got to Engineering via the crew deck. Down and up, easy as that. Let’s go check on Engineering first. El walked slow and quiet down the gangway, giving a quick look over the edge of the metal ladder leading down to the crew deck. Nothing moving down there, just the steady glow of the Tyche’s lighting, the soft hum of ship systems, and the quiet dry hiss of life support.
Life support.
El’s eyes were drawn up towards the pipework in the ceiling. Conduit, air, water, all flowed through the ship. Big tubes leading from Engineering like a big heart, pumping blood to everywhere else. Tubes big enough to hide in, if you were inclined. You could even put things in there, like a bunch of cockroaches that lived inside people’s heads.
And here was El, without her helmet. She’d seen the damn vids. She’d seen what those Ezeroc did to people. Hell, she’d even taken the time to read some of the files Hope had flicked up to her console. It wasn’t pretty reading. It wasn’t fun reading. It was the kind of reading you did that made you go everywhere with your damn helmet on. It was the kind of reading that made you sleep in your helmet.
Her helmet was in her room.
She gave a quick glance behind her. Horror holos always had some motherfucker come up behind you with a sharp knife and end your brief ride in a shower of gore, and El wasn’t up for that today. But there was nothing there. Her cabin was right next to the ladder, just down there, so she backed up, nice and slow, and nice and quiet. Another glance down the metal ladder showed nothing. Not even a shadow moved.
The door to her cabin was shut, like it always was. El monkeyed down the ladder, leaned against the sill to her room, keyed the lock, and pointed her pistol inside.
Empty.
Not entirely empty. Her locker, her bunk. Just not her helmet. Her helmet was next to her bunk, or it had been when she was here last. It wasn’t here now. El moved inside her room, a last quick check outside — still clear — and then looked under her bunk. In her locker. On the shelves. Nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing. She tore stuff out of her locker, a console, some clothes, some spare ammunition, her old Empire flight suit.
No helmet.
Could she have left it somewhere else? Think. No. She was sure it’d been here. Some fucker had taken her helmet. Some fucker who maybe, just maybe, wanted to infect a crew. Have some live samples. She wiped at her face with the back of a hand, feeling the sweat there. She hissed, “Penn.”
• • •
El could just wait in here. It’s what she’d been doing for the last ten minutes. Door shut, locked from the inside. Gun in her hand, cold steel resting against her skin.
There were two problems with that approach as she saw it.
The first was that Hope was still out there in the ship. Hope, who hadn’t had her twenty-fifth birthday yet if you still thought Sol years counted for jack. Hope, who was useful and important for keeping the Tyche flying. Hope, who was also her friend, and as a general rule you didn’t let your friends be eaten by insects.
The second was that the room was getting hot. El had stuffed her old flight suit into the life support’s air vent, blocking it. That was a temporary solve, because she’d eventually suffocate. She’d need Nate to get back, and Nate wasn’t coming back.
“Fuck,” she said to the room. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
Nothing for it: time to get moving. She stood, tasting fear in her mouth, and then keyed the lock on the door. It opened with a hiss to an empty corridor.
She led the way with the gun. El stood outside her room for a second, then reached a fumbling hand behind her to close the door. It locked with a beep. That beep was too loud, too obvious in the quiet of the ship. Something from down the metal stairs hissed, and she heard something moving towards the ladder. So she pointed the pistol over the side and pulled the trigger. There was a massive boom, the gun bucking hard in her hand, and she screamed, “Stay back, Penn! Stay back, you motherfucker!”
El ejected the casing from her gun, the plastic popping as it hit the deck. A new shell inside, she closed the breach.
Silence.
In any normal day there’d be a bunch of people shouting at her for firing a weapon inside the ship. Hell, she’d be one of the people shouting. Not this time. No-one made any noise, no-one at all.
She edged her back along the crew deck towards Engineering. She kept swinging the gun about, trying to point it everywhere at once. When her shoulder bumped against the ladder to Engineering, she almost screamed, because she hadn’t expected to make it, and thought a monster had come to get her. Nope, just a ladder then an airlock. She keyed the lock, and the door opened with a hiss and a clank.
Inside were Hope’s console and acceleration couch, the console dark, the couch empty. Engineering itself was dark, the only lights coming from backscatter from the status indicators on the reactor. At least the Ravana still had something useful to give the universe.
“Hope?” El moved farther into the darkened room. She made sure not to point her gun too close to the reactor, because while it was unlikely the weapon would blow a hole in it, using any kind of firearm next to a reactor was against the general gist of shipboard survival rules. Systems in here blinked and thrummed. It was cool, at least, the life support still working fine.
El looked up at the top of the room, where the ducts for air were. She couldn’t see shit. Fuck this — if I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die being able to see it coming. She tapped on her suit’s console, asking the Tyche for a little more brilliance. The ship obliged, bringing more light, and El could then see a couple of things of an alarming nature.
First thing: Hope’s rig, with the visor and the manipulator arms, was on the floor next to her acceleration couch. It was bent and twisted, the visor smashed.
Second thing: there was a rent in the pipework in the ceiling. Rent out, like something had come from that pipe and into this room. Something large, bigger than El’s shoulders. Something the size of a man, like Penn.
Fucking Penn.
She pointed her gun at the hole, making her way back to Engineering’s airlock. El cycled it open, slipped through, and locked it behind her. Back to the crew deck. Time to check on Kohl. El stopped at the top of the ladder from Engineering, listening for a second. She got nothing but the sound of ship systems, so she slung her legs over and slid to the deck below. She dropped into a half crouch, pointing her gun in what felt like six directions at once.
The crew deck was where the sick bay was, and the captain’s cabin. And Penn’s makeshift room.
El moved to the sickbay. The big glass window showed Kohl still inside, still on the table, machinery still keeping him alive. She opened the door, slipped inside, locking it behind her. She moved to Kohl’s side. His skin was still grey, kind of pasty, but — and she wasn’t sure if she was deluding herself — it looked like there might have been a shade more color in his cheeks. Nothing obvious in here that looked like a pile of insects or a warrior drone. She shrugged, then leaned close to Kohl’s ear. “Kohl? October Kohl. I don’t know if you can hear me, but there’s something on the ship. Something on the Tyche. I … I don’t know what I’m doing. So, you know.” She couldn’t think of anything to say, so she turned to leave.