Pelquin's Comet (19 page)

“Oh yeah, really? And how would you know?” More laughter.

Tull was showing off by doing a series of split-jumps over a row of low, knobbly rock formations, which resembled the gnarled stubs of half-burned candles made irregular by the flow of congealed wax.

The final one looked a little different – something which afterwards everyone claimed to have noticed but no one had commented on at the time. It seemed newer, fresher. By the time Tull reached it he was overbalancing a little and losing momentum. If he’d had any sense he would have pulled out and given up on that last one, but no chance: this was Tull, after all.

The jump was an ungainly one, lacking any real height, and his crotch caught on the tip of that final mound. He was laughing and doubtless anticipated a painful blow, as did the onlookers, but instead the irregular top of the pile crumbled away. Not rock, then, at least not solidly so. Instead it was formed of dust and earth and stuck together with goodness knew what. A nest, as Leesa would subsequently learn, a hive, deliberately fashioned to mimic the prevailing rock formations as camouflage.

Unprepared for the comparative lack of resistance, Tull did overbalance then, sprawling onto his hands and knees amidst a cloud of reddish dust, still laughing.

The laughter choked off in an “Ow” of surprise and pain. At first Leesa assumed Tull’s knees or hands were stinging following the fall, but there was something odd about the dust he’d kicked up. Most of it had settled, but some still seemed to be moving, and not as she would have expected. It took her a moment to realise what was happening. What she had taken to be dust was boiling out of the decapitated ‘rock’ and flowing with apparent purpose directly towards Tull. Already his lower legs were covered in a red, writhing, stain. Not a stain; this wasn’t one single thing but a multitude, a living carpet of tiny creatures moving with common purpose.

Tull started to scream. Whether from fear or pain, Leesa wasn’t sure. He leapt to his feet and jumped into the air but still the mites found him, clung to him, bit him.

Meg started towards him as if to help, but Zané grabbed her, thank goodness. Tull was cavorting around as if in a macabre, disjointed dance; an undignified, hot-footed jerk, body convulsing, arms shaking vigorously in an attempt to dislodge the mites. And the screams – definitely pain now – took on an air of desperation. They were unrelenting and the most chilling thing Leesa had ever heard.

“Help me!” he yelled amidst them. No one did; no one could. Even Meg had stopped trying to. Part of Leesa wanted to look away, felt that she
should
look away, but she couldn’t.

The mites continued to boil from the nest, rising in a red tide to engulf Tull’s body. Someone else had joined in with the screaming. It was herself, Leesa realised.

Tull’s struggles lessened and then stopped all together. He sank to the ground and, with only occasional glimpses of his skin or clothing visible beneath the writhing mass of ruddiness, it seemed as if his very body were melting.

Zané still gripped Meg by the shoulders, though by then Leesa suspected more for his own comfort than to restrain her. Meg had begun to cry in fitful wails, her face contorted as tears spilled down her cheeks. Zané simply stared, ashen-faced.

As she glanced across, Leesa saw movement beyond her two friends and instantly froze. As if things couldn’t get any worse. An Xter stood there, presumably drawn by the screams. Neither Zané nor Meg had noticed it as yet. Once they had, its presence did nothing to calm the situation. Meg’s crying turned to hysteria. Her screams replaced Leesa’s, who had lost the ability to give voice to anything. Meg scurried around the far side of Zané for protection. As if puny little Zané could protect anyone from a falling leaf let alone this adult Xter. The alien was all quick-legged movement. It didn’t dart, but somehow Leesa had the impression that it was about to, all the time. It ignored them, scuttling towards where Tull lay cloaked in a blanket of crimson mites. One of the creature’s forelimbs held a broad-nozzled object which looked to be a cross between a gun and the business end of a hose. The alien pointed it towards Tull and a jet of white liquid shot forth, directly at where the red mites were the thickest. The effect was immediate. The mites disappeared wherever the liquid touched – either dying or recoiling, Leesa couldn’t be sure which. Within seconds, Tull was wholly visible again, the flat crimson limb of mites that had covered him withdrawing back into the mound that spawned it.

Tull lay twitching and spasming. Where exposed, his skin was puffed up and blotchy, his face almost unrecognisable. Without hesitation, the alien scooped up the boy’s form in its forearms, lifting Tull as if he weighed nothing, and then started towards Liaise. Leesa did her best to keep up but the Xter’s four-footed gait was far too swift for her. This was the first time she’d been so close to one of the aliens, and, despite the way it moved sending shivers up her spine, she was fascinated. The body wasn’t segmented like an insect’s but the way it carried itself almost horizontal to the ground and the arrangement of limbs suggested one. The face was dominated by multi-faceted eyes, far more sensitive than a human’s, and it was impossible to tell what it was wearing – she couldn’t distinguish between clothing and skin. Xters normally walked using all six limbs, though analysis showed that even then most of the body’s weight was carried by the thicker middle and rear limbs, but they could swap seamlessly to a four-footed gait when carrying something; such as now. Leesa knew all this from lessons, but witnessing the real thing in motion was something else entirely.

Making light of its burden, the Xter negotiated inclines that the humans could never have attempted, and the alien was soon lost to sight despite their best efforts. By the time Leesa and her friends reached Liaise, the whole settlement was alerted and on the case.

She never saw Tull again. None of them did. Leesa learnt from Liat, her noon-father, that despite the alien’s haste Tull had been dead on arrival, and there had been nothing anyone could do to revive him. She further learnt that the Xters called the mites that had killed him ‘red dust’, a name that needed no explanation. Red dust was evidently a hive creature, aggressively territorial. Individually, each bite was relatively harmless, the implants carried by all of Liaise’s citizens would have nullified the toxin as a matter of course, but the mites attacked in the tens of thousands, biting all the while, and in Tull’s case the protection afforded by his implants was simply overwhelmed.

Red dust had been eradicated from the area decades ago, but recent signs suggested that a colony had re-established itself. The Xter that helped them had been one of a number tasked with hunting down the infestation, but evidently it hadn’t occurred to them to inform the human colony of a possible threat.

Liat did his best to put a positive spin on events, telling Leesa that Tull hadn’t died in vain, that he’d discovered the red dust nest and so helped to remove a serious threat. He went on to say that Tull should be considered a hero, but she wasn’t buying it. Tull was simply a buffoon who had tried to show off once too often. That was the problem with Liat: he always treated her as if she were still a kid and overestimated her gullibility. A mistake Kegé would never have made.

When she came awake this time, Leesa was aware of being not quite cold but on the cooler side of comfortable. Her bed sheets lay strewn on the floor and she guessed she must have been tossing and turning in her sleep. Again. This wasn’t the first time she’d relived Tull’s death – it wasn’t a memory she enjoyed but presumably the incident had affected her deeply, or why else would she keep returning to it?

Leesa sat up, dangling her feet off the side of the bed, and rubbed her eyes. She didn’t need a clock to tell her the time, her aug took care of that. She knew it was early hours of the morning, ship’s time. This particular dream always disturbed her. Besides, her throat was dry and she reckoned sleep had been given enough chances for one night. She slipped out of bed and, after making a token effort at tidying things by picking up the sheets and dumping them back where they belonged, she padded to the galley on soft feet, conscious that no one else was likely to be awake yet. Shifts weren’t split aboard the ship. The captain claimed there was no point in keeping a night watch when they were in transit; alarms would soon rouse anyone who needed rousing if anything interesting happened. She supposed he had a point, but she’d have kept one anyway.

Leesa didn’t bother with lights. Her aug could pick up and amplify the slightest hint of illumination, enabling her to see in just about any conditions short of complete darkness, and when that occurred she could always fall back on the infrared.

For company, all she had was the ambient hum of the engines, but she was enjoying the near-quiet, the sense of solitude.

A light flickered on automatically as she entered the galley – the sensor working fine, the light itself less so, stabilising at the third or fourth attempt. The
Comet
had a lived-in charm which somehow failed to extend to the galley. This place, which should have been the heart of the vessel, struck her as cold and functional – all grey plastic and metal, no sense of any time or effort spent here. Perhaps none of them were cooks. She’d soon change that. Leesa smiled at the thought, pleased to have hit upon a possible way of ingratiating herself with the crew.

She made a beeline for the large cool cabinet squeezed in between the far wall and ceiling, pausing before its double doors. A dilemma: chilled water or juice?

A slight noise from behind sent her spinning around, automatically dropping into a fighter’s crouch as she did so.

The banker, Drake, stood in the entrance. How the hell did he get there without her hearing him? Bastard must move as daintily as a cat.

He smiled and said in a subdued voice, as if to emphasise the intimacy of their situation with everyone else still in bed, “Couldn’t you sleep either?”

“Something like that.” He’d done all right in the fight against the disberos, but something about the man still made her uneasy, and she couldn’t quite put her finger on why. Perhaps it was his air of supreme confidence, the sense that he was always in control of a given situation no matter what. “How’s your head?” she asked because she felt she ought to.

“Not so bad, thanks. Suffering more from the effects of the doc’s sedatives than from any lingering effects of the blow, I think.”

She smiled and then turned her attention back to the juices. The cabinet door slid open at her touch and she took out an orange bulb. The slight weight of the chilled flexible carton felt somehow reassuring in her hand as she lifted it to squirt a stream of juice into her open mouth. Cold and tart, with just enough sweetness to dull the citrus sting. Part of her noted that she was tossing acid straight onto an empty stomach; Night-father would have been horrified.

“Just from curiosity,” Drake said quietly from behind her, “are you ever able to sleep, I mean
really
sleep?”

She froze on the verge of squeezing a second mouthful of juice, and turned to stare at him.
He knew.
That carefully phrased question cut to the very heart of what it meant to be her, to be auganic. The words might have sounded innocent to any eavesdropper but they conveyed a wealth of meaning to her.
He knew
. She read the truth of it in his eyes.

Drake smiled. Not a gloating or malicious expression, in fact it was almost…
friendly
, but Leesa felt no inclination to respond in kind. Giving a slight nod in the face of her silence, he said, “Well, might as well try to grab a few more hours’ shut-eye if I can. I’ll see you in the morning.” And with that, he turned and strolled away.

Leesa stared after him, her thoughts in turmoil. Without meaning to, she clenched her fist, squeezing the fruit bulb and sending a cold eruption of juice bubbling out to run down her fingers. She barely noticed.

Somehow, that enigmatic smooth-talking bastard knew what she was. So where the hell did that leave her now?

“She really doesn’t recognise me.” Drake was finally able to accept the truth of it. The look on Leesa’s face when she turned around had been unguarded and far too raw to be faked.

No,
Mudball agreed.
There were no physiological indications of recognition at all, not even a glimmer. Her reaction was one of unmitigated astonishment.

“So, I’m a stranger to her.” He still found the concept an oddly novel one, not to mention intriguing. What could have happened to her memory?

So it would seem. Do you intend to enlighten her?

“No, not immediately at any rate; stranger is good for now.”

Even one she now knows is privy to her true nature? Perhaps tonight’s little scene wasn’t the wisest choice of action.

“I had to be certain…”

Quite. Even so, it’s just as well that one of us doesn’t need to sleep at night.

They’d arrived at Drake’s crewcot. He lifted the flimsy cover and slipped inside. “Leesa would never harm me.”

Of course not;
if
she knew who you are. I believe we’ve effectively established that at present she doesn’t have a clue. So as things stand you’re merely a stranger who has alerted her to the fact that you know her darkest secret. Congratulations, Drake, you’ve just managed to make an enemy of the most dangerous person on board. Sleep well.

T
WELVE

Mornings aboard ship always seemed much the same to Leesa: grey and sombre, with the first few breaths of the day tasting of metal, industry, and recycled air. She was the first up, which was threatening to become a habit. She headed straight to the galley and fixed herself a hot, glucose-rich and vitamin-laden fruit drink. The dreams hadn’t helped her that night, dwelling on a part of her life she already knew well – events that had happened since she’d woken on Babylon, confused and stripped of her past. These immediate memories all started and ended on that world, whereas those she sought lay far beyond. She’d known instinctively that Babylon wasn’t her home. From the outset she had been ‘other’ – someone who didn’t belong, even on the farm where her life had restarted. A small community, miles from anywhere – all swaying crops and hedgerows, with trees on the skyline and wind and birds and insects… as different from life on the
Comet
as anything could be. She hadn’t stayed there long; couldn’t afford to linger anywhere until she knew who she was. Her name was all they’d been able to tell her – the farmer who ran the place and his stout and sombre no-nonsense wife. Leesa had considered the name and it seemed to fit, but beyond that no one could or would tell her anything. The couple were middle aged and they struck her as decent, honest folk; hard working but far from wealthy. They were quite open about the fact that they’d been paid to care for her until she woke. When she asked who by, they insisted, “You did.”