“No,” said Nate. “Locked her down. So that fucker Penn doesn’t steal my ship. Also, my comm is down.” He checked his comm just in case. Yep, still down.
“That’ll be the Queen,” said Grace. “Piloting a human somewhere on this planet, just like she did to me. To control the comms.”
“What? Nah, I barbecued her.”
“She’s not dead,” said Grace, tapping her head. “I can still hear her.”
“Oh, come on,” said Nate, for what felt like the hundredth time. “Well, at least those big ones are gone.”
There was a rustling of trees, branches and boughs being pushed aside. An entire tree gave with a crack, and one of the big crabs came forward.
“You,” said Grace, “need to stop talking.”
Nate looked at his blaster, then at the big crab. “Grace,” he said. “The ship. The Tyche? She’s ready. Ready to fly. El will take you anywhere. I’ll draw ’em off.”
She snorted. “You wouldn’t get ten meters,” she said. “They’ll pull you apart.”
“Gives you a running start,” he said. “With this damn leg, I’ll only slow you down.”
“Who said anything about running?” she said. “I’ve been running for as long as I can remember.” She sucked in some air, blew it out. “It feels good to breathe.”
The Ezeroc charged.
• • •
Back to back.
Nate could feel Grace through his suit. Her body, next to his. Both of them, facing outward. His blaster, her sword.
An Ezeroc drone came at him, slavering, chittering, and he blew chunks out of it. Behind him, the snick-crack of the sword.
Something fell at him from above, one of the smaller Ezeroc, and it clattered against his helmet, blocking the view from his visor. All he could see was legs, and those claws, searching for a way in, seeking his skin. Nate smashed it with his metal hand, knocking it free. He felt Grace move against him, and he turned with her, her sword making short work of the drone. He in turn fired at two running towards them, bright arcs of plasma lighting up the night, charring and burning. The blaster snap-crackled with each squeeze of the trigger. He didn’t hit every shot, but when they got too close, Grace was there.
A flash of movement from his right side, and he turned in time to be knocked through the air — again, come on! — by the big Ezeroc crab.
He impacted against the building — again — and lay dazed for a second. In that second, as he watched Grace pivot around the big crab’s legs, her sword clanging against its armored body, he thought if the big one’s alive, and it’s controlled by the Queen, where the fuck is the Queen?
More movement from around the corner of the building, and there she was, clawing herself along. More of the smaller drones surrounded her, there must have been at least five scuttling towards Grace. She still moved and spun, but he could see she was getting tired. Or she’d started tired, and was getting to breaking point.
And here you are, asshole, resting against this wall.
He got up, took aim down the iron sights of his blaster, and put five shots into the queen. Five shots, one after the other, into the head of the creature, or what he guessed the head was. The battery on his blasted pinged empty, fell to the ground, and he put a new one in. Last one. Make it count. Turned back to Grace, to help her with the giant Ezeroc, but it had stopped moving with any kind of purpose, just walking around the small clearing.
One of the smaller Ezeroc landed on his arm. He tried to shake it loose, but it was held firm, pincers around his wrist. The claws pulled back, then slammed home, piercing his suit glove. Nate screamed in pain, raised his blaster and blew it to pieces.
Silence.
The warrior drones were pulling back into the forest. No more of the smaller fuckers either. Grace looked to have dropped a couple more, but the air was free of them. She walked to him, concern in her eyes. “Nate,” she said. “The claws.”
“Hurts like a motherfucker,” said Nate.
“It’s how they infect you,” she said. She raised her sword. “Look, I can try and cut the arm off. I can—”
He laughed. Bent over, hands on his knees, and laughed.
“Your crazy,” she said. “It’s already infected you. I have to, I, uh … Nate? Tell me it’s still you,” she said.
“Grace Gushiken,” said Nate, pulling off his suit glove, and holding up his metal hand, “it’s still me. Except for the bits that aren’t.” The metal skin of his hand had been pierced by the claws, the creature putting God knows what into the inside. But it was metal, and plastic, and ceramic, and wasn’t a part of him. It couldn’t infect him.
Probably.
“It’s just,” said Nate, “they tried to make the hand real, you know? So, I can feel things with it. Like an alien sticking parasitic goo into me. That’d be uncomfortable, if it was the other hand.”
“They know,” said Grace, “that you’re the captain of the ship.”
“How,” said Nate, “do they know?”
“Because of me,” she said. “Because of what I am.”
“Oh,” said Nate. “That’s … great news.”
“It just … wait, what?” she said.
“Well,” said Nate. “They think I’m the captain of a ship they’ve infected with alien DNA or whatever it is, right? And they’ll let me back on the ship, to ’infect,’” and here, he gave little air quotes, “my crew. The way I see it, they’ll leave us the fuck alone for a while until that happens. A quiet hike, back to the Tyche.”
“I … hadn’t thought of it like that,” said Grace.
“Less things trying to eat our faces,” said Nate.
“I think I’ve got it,” said Grace.
“You know,” said Nate. “No killer death roaches or anything.”
“Really,” she said. “I’ve got it. I’ve really got it. You can stop talking.”
They walked back towards the forest. “Do you think,” said Nate, “that the Queen would have been wise to this whole thing?”
“Yeah,” said Grace. “She was … smart. Ancient. Young. I don’t know.”
“Cool,” said Nate, looking back at the smoking ruins of the Queen. He smiled into the dark. “Finally. Something’s going right for a change.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
When Grace looked up, Nate’s arm draped over her shoulder, his weight heavy against her, she was expecting to see the bright, welcoming light of the Tyche’s cargo bay airlock. A hand, held out to her, palm up. A smile. Welcome home, guys. What she saw instead was the barrel of a blaster. It was leveled at her face. It surprised her because of all of Nate’s talk of the ship — the Tyche — being a home, and how they were all a family. With him by her side, she felt it coming off him in waves. How could she not? He’d been so close to her while they’d walked, and then he’d started to drag. He’d still been feeling like he’d been heading to his family when he stretched himself out on the forest floor. Something inside him was broken, and he’d spat out a little bit of blood, said he was fine, just fine and then couldn’t stand.
Grace had hauled him to his feet, her with a grunt and him with a scream, and dragged him back to the ship. The forest around them was alive, things rustling in the trees, branches swaying like there was a powerful wind. Except the air was still. Grace couldn’t see them, couldn’t feel them, just the hiss in her mind, a kind of static she’d grown to associated with the Ezeroc. It wasn’t static, that was the wrong word, because in the gentle hush of it were words, words she could understand if only she had the wit to listen.