ALIEN THE COLD FORGE Page 5

  “I just wanted to meet you in person,” he says with a smile, stepping over the threshold. He holds in his right hand a pack of cigarettes and a sterling silver matchbox. It’s hard for her to make out any details, but judging from his well-groomed appearance, the matchbox is probably some expensive heirloom. Normal people would use a cheap lighter, but not this clown.

  “You can’t smoke anywhere near here,” she states. He puts his cigarettes and matches down on her nightstand, obnoxiously close to her, and smiles.

  “I wouldn’t dare,” he says, then he gives her a long look. “I didn’t expect you to be so…”

  Blue waits for him to say “frail.”

  “Black.”

  “You said you were with Human Resources?” she asks, looking forward to reporting this conversation.

  “Yes, but don’t be so sensitive. It’s ‘Special Resources.’ Highly classified assets like yourself, so we can skip all of the typical nonsense training. You know how it is. The regs don’t really follow you out this far from Earth.” He narrows his eyes. “Sorry, I simply got the wrong impression from that Aryan doll you walk around in.”

  Blue’s breath comes out in an angry hiss. “Okay, well… we’ve meet in person, Director Sudler,” she says, lacking the force of Marcus’s voice. “I’m off the clock, so I’ll thank you to leave now.”

  “I have trouble with faces,” Dorian says, languidly waving a hand next to his eyes as though there’s something physically wrong with them. “Hard to interpret emotions from synthetics. Do you ever have that problem?”

  “It doesn’t matter if you can’t read Marcus’s face, Director,” Blue says. “Weyland-Yutani pays for my scientific acumen, not my feelings. Please get out.”

  “All right, all right,” he says, raising his hands and starting to back away. “I didn’t mean to disturb you. Just so you know, I’m at the end of the hall if you need anything.”

  “You’re in the observation deck? That’s not a bedroom.”

  “Facilities is making a few modifications,” he says. “I like the view of the sun.”

  “Yeah,” she replies, remembering the view of the boiling fusion through the panoramic black glass windows. “Everyone does. That’s why it’s a common area.”

  “I won’t be on the station long,” he says. “Like you, I have some unique needs for my quarters, and I need to be able to spread out—get a bunch of archival records in there.”

  Your “unique needs” are nothing like mine, you prick.

  “In case someone misses the view, though,” he adds, “I have an open-door policy. Feel free to come in any time and chat or relax. I love company. If you ever need to talk—”

  “I won’t.”

  “—about what happened with Miss Coto…” he says, but trails off at her comment. “I’m sorry, you’re right. I’ll leave.”

  She reacted. She knows she did. It’s not as easy to control her face when she’s outside of Marcus. Blue may as well ask. “I’m sorry, what happened to my boss?”

  “I just got the news, myself. They sent it to my ship terminal during the demos.” Dorian jams his hands into his suit pockets. “Miss Coto has been arrested and placed on administrative leave. They found her accepting payments from an old competitor, in serious breach of contract, and that she’d embezzled from company coffers. Caught with her hand in the till, I’m sad to say.”

  Blue’s lungs become blocks of ice. She covers her panic with a feeble cough.

  “That’s terrible,” she chokes out. And it is. Elise has a family. Blue imagines what that’s like for the kids, watching their mother be led away. Elise won’t have her fortune to defend herself. She won’t land in a minimum-security prison. Her breach of contract and the ensuing civil battle will sap any assets she had. Blue hopes her old boss had a war chest squirreled away for a day like this.

  “In the extreme,” he agrees. “What a waste.”

  “Okay, then thank you for passing it along,” Blue says. “Letting me know. I need to get some rest, so just… show yourself out.”

  “As you wish.” He turns to go.

  “And another thing, Director Sudler,” she says, trying to keep her voice steady. He turns back. “I’d appreciate it if you don’t ever contact me inside my room.”

  Sudler hesitates. “What I’d like to know is, why did Coto do it? She had everything: power, influence… Hell, this place basically belonged to her. Didn’t she have enough money—without resorting to career-ending thievery?”

  He leaves without waiting for an answer.

  Blue has her suspicions about Elise’s motivations. When Blue was a fellow at Johns Hopkins, she was diagnosed with Bishara’s Syndrome, and the irony of the case brought it to media prominence. “Prominent Geneticist Suffers Rare Genetic Disease.” There were twelve others diagnosed in the world, all children of lifelong colonists and spacers. She was the subject of numerous puff pieces about taking charge of her destiny, and having access to the greatest medical supplies and minds in the country.

  In the beginning, she’d believed the bright side of the story, conducting her research in Earth-borne labs, finding corporate partners, uncovering the mystery and seeking to solve it out of public heroism. But then she grew short on sand in her hourglass, and tried more and more desperate solutions. She began to self-medicate. She lost her fellowship.

  Along came Elise Coto saying, “I know where you can find your cure.” She flung Blue to the stars, to this pit of hell, nestled in the heavens. Blue remembers the pain of her first days here, the screech of the first snatcher, the horror at the face-hugger, how she’d thought of herself as the heroine of a journey.

  If she could only reach the end, she’d be well again.

  But the snatcher became a tool, and the journey a job.

  They’re going to subpoena Elise’s records, she realized. They’ve probably raided her house. How long before they find the secret messages passed to Blue? How careful was Elise? Will they only see pictures, or will they find the pair’s shared ciphers?

  Dorian Sudler is playing some kind of vicious game, she thought, but what? When she looks over to her nightstand, she sees his silvered matchbox standing guard by his cigarettes. She picks it up and inspects it—rubies inlaid into an engraved constellation—one she doesn’t recognize. She doubts it means much to him, either, considering that the suits are almost never scientifically minded. Pretty boy probably just thought it was a neat design.

  Out of spite, she slides it open to look inside: some fragrant, sweet wooden matches and a torn-off piece of striker paper. She removes his striker and most of his matches, leaving just enough for it to rattle when he picks it up. She tucks them into the underside of her mattress and smiles.

  “Good luck finding more fancy matches on a space station, fucker,” she says, muttering to herself.

  An hour later, Dorian returns, apologizing, asking about his cigarettes.

  INTERLUDE

  JAVIER

  Being an IT guy for an air-gapped SCIF isn’t the sort of cybersecurity job Javier Paz had hoped it would be. When he’d gone into network security and counterintelligence, he’d expected to be conducting forensic sweeps, locking down nets, and chasing away hackers. The SCIF at the Cold Forge sounded like a dream. But there are no hackers that can cross an air gap.

  And so, Javier’s job is to flash all the computers after Silversmile has had its way with them. It wreaks hell on the systems, but usually only gets as far as the power supplies. The virus is programmed to notice anything they care about and fuck it up as much as possible. In a lot of ways, Silversmile resembles middle management to Javier.

  * * *

  As he walks down the line, flash tool in hand, wrecking the data on the ICDDs, Silversmile has done another thing it was programmed to do.

  It’s found another pathway—in the flash tool.

  Silversmile latches onto the tool with little difficulty, riding on the bits that confirm the destruction of data, loading itself int
o the onboard drive image—a pathway that never would’ve existed without some help. Now, when each drive is imaged, it gets a fresh install of Silversmile. It’s a greedy virus—taking control of everything it can. It will proceed to burn out all of the power supplies overnight.

  * * *

  When Javier is done, he locks up the Silversmile lab and heads for Juno’s control console. He needs to put the flash tool back on the charger and connect it so Lucy can update the image to whatever she wants next.

  The instant Javier connects his flasher to the bus on Juno, the lights in the room go red, a klaxon sounds and the console monitor flashes.

  >>SYSTEM BREACH DETECTED<<<br />
  5

  RESCUE PUPPIES

  The first time Blue took Marcus for a sprint down the central strut, it was euphoric. Hurtling forward through the kilometer-long hallway felt like flying, and reminded her of her undergrad days of triathlons and cross country. For the first time since she’d begun to die, she felt alive.

  Now that sprint can’t end fast enough.

  Blue rockets through the halls as fast as her synthetic legs will carry her, past the empty crew modules, past the docking bay and escape pods, past the open sockets for more labs and servers, toward the open door that leads to the SCIF. Daniel waits in the doorway, waving her onward with one hand, a pulse rifle in the other.

  She enters to find the SCIF in chaos. Sirens shriek, lights flash, red warning lights pop up, then disappear for no reason.

  “Up here!” Anne calls, drawing Blue’s attention up to Juno’s server cage. Anne leans out over the catwalk that lines the structure and gestures to a quick-access ladder. Blue takes the ladder two rungs at a time, throwing herself upward with each pull. When she crests the top, she finds a sizable group of her crewmates shouting at one another while Lucy and Javier frantically type away at terminals.

  “What the fuck were you thinking, Javier?” one of the lab techs shouts. It’s Nick, from Josep’s project, a pushy little asshole from Oxford.

  “That’s how I always charge the tool! It’s fucking ‘read only’… It can’t… You can’t write to it without—” Javier protests, his face unnaturally pale. “It’s supposed to be read only when you’re—”

  “Don’t bother him right now,” Lucy says, her voice uncharacteristically decisive. Blue has never seen her in a crisis, and wonders when she grew a backbone. “We fix the situation first.”

  “What’s going on?” Blue asks Anne, pulling her aside. All of the digital folks are here in Juno’s cage. She doesn’t see Kambili, and that’s a good thing. It probably means the kennels are still in good shape.

  “Silversmile crossed the air gap,” Anne says, “and it’s contaminated Juno. Before you ask, we managed to lock it out of the general quarantine protocols.”

  “Shit. Did they take Rose Eagle offline? We can’t risk the virus getting off the station.”

  “That was the first thing Josep did. Wreaked havoc on it, though. I don’t think it’ll be ahead of schedule for much longer.”

  “Okay.” Blue let out a long sigh. “Any other damage?”

  “The virus started a fire in its own lab while we were dealing with this. Halon took care of it, and they’ve still got backups. Right now they’re fighting for Josep’s Rose Eagle source data. It’s all compromised, including the backups. The virus didn’t eat them yet, but we can’t restore without potentially destroying Juno all over again. Blue, the Glitter Edifice project files… They’re—”

  “I have my own backups,” Blue says quietly, waving off Anne’s concern. “They’re current to last cycle.”

  “What? Where?” Anne’s eyes narrow, and Blue regrets opening her mouth.

  “I’ve been maintaining a private server in the kennels, just in case something like this happened.” Blue glances around, keeping her features neutral. “Looks like I was right.” In truth, she didn’t want Juno poking around her files. She certainly didn’t want the other project managers to have access, when she had no intention of filling her Weyland-Yutani project charter.

  Anne guides her away from the group, out onto the catwalks.

  “An unauthorized server? You know I never would’ve condoned that! How long has this been going on?”

  “Six months.”

  “You kept this from me… while we were together?” Anne bares her teeth and ruffles her hair. “Jesus Christ… Unbelievable.”

  “Don’t be like that,” Blue says, starting to call her “babe,” but the word dies in her mouth. Anne had been the one to end it. She enjoyed Marcus’s body well enough, but she couldn’t stand to be with someone “so close to the end.”

  “Don’t make this about us,” Blue corrects herself. “I took precautions to keep my project intact, and they’re working.”

  “Yeah, well I wouldn’t be so sure. Silversmile has targeted the control systems for the kennels.”

  Blue shakes her head. “It can’t open the cells. No computer can. Only a human has access to those controls.”

  Anne laughs bitterly, resting her hands on her hips. “I know that. Not the cell doors—the heat shield. The virus destroys the most expensive and critical systems. It knows how much we value Glitter Edifice. Right now, everyone is busting their asses to save your big bugs. Just be glad Juno doesn’t touch the life support systems, or we’d all be dead.”

  Panic sets its claws into Blue’s chest.

  She imagines every one of her fully-grown snatchers, burnt to a crisp in seconds—watching them pop like ancient flash bulbs, vaporized in the heat of Kaufmann’s radiation. If that happens, the Company will cut its losses and shutter her project.

  They’ll send her home.

  She’ll never touch the aliens again.

  “Ladies…” They both turn to see Dick Mackie striding toward them down the catwalk. The Australian’s ordinarily tanned skin is sallow, probably from a long night of drinking. When he finally reaches them, a wave of body odor washes in their direction. “I see we’re having an eventful morning.”

  Anne snorts. “Glad you could finally join us, Dick. It’s been ten minutes since I called.”

  “Had to freshen up,” he says with a grin. Given his appearance, it’s a complete fabrication. Blue has known Dick to get all kinds of contraband onto the station, from unlicensed firearms to cocaine, and she imagines him doing a line to get his head screwed on straight. “What’s wrong? Don’t tell me the puppies are loose.”

  She hates it when he calls them that. When they were testing his kennels design with one or two specimens, he named one “Heath” and the other “Shrimpy,” and moped when Blue had to kill them. In spite of his many eccentricities, he’s created a secure work environment.

  “No,” Blue says, thankful that at least they’re not facing a quarantine all-kill. “But Silversmile has control of Juno. It’s trying to open the heat shield in the cells.”

  “Bloody hell,” Dick says, pinching his lower lip. “You’ve got to get out there.”

  Blue cocks her head. “What?”

  “The Turtle! The EVA thingy,” Dick says. “Since the repair pod went belly up, it’s all we’ve got. It’s not exactly radiation proof, but your kind won’t get cancer. You’re the only one who can do it,” he says. “Well, Marcus is, anyway. I can talk him through it, if you don’t want to control him.”

  Blue looks up to the ceiling. “I’m sick of everybody telling me what to do with this body. It’s the only one I have.”

  “Is this really the time to be complaining?” Anne asks. “Your project is about to go up in smoke.”

  That isn’t true. They still have twenty eggs, and if all the adult creatures are dead, Blue might be able to use it as an excuse to replenish her stock of snatchers. That means accelerated testing for her side project. They could be pulling two embryos a week or more without raising an eyebrow.

  “It’s not worth the risk,” Blue says, and Anne gives her a shocked look. “We still have a small stock of eggs. I don’t have a repla
cement body. You can’t do this project without me, and if I can’t get around, it’s on hold until the resupply.”

  6

  SMOKE & MIRRORS

  When Dorian first hears the klaxons, he expects some kind of minor incident. That’s how things on space stations work—two hundred warnings for every little thing. “Much ado about nothing.”

  His bed is comfortable, his eyes heavy. The light of Kaufmann dimly suffuses the observation deck with an evening glow through the electropolarized glass coatings. It’s a peaceful place, minimalist surroundings balanced against the raging inferno outside. He could watch the glow of fusing gasses for hours at a time.

  But the klaxons won’t go away. He hears crew shuffling in the hall, the rapid footsteps receding down the central strut. Muffled shouting echoes into his room.

  He harbors the tiniest spark of hope that one of the snatchers has escaped, just because he’d like to see what it would do to a crew member. Would it be swift, or relish the violence? Surely the crew would have it all under control by the time he got there. After all, controlling the creatures is the whole purpose of the station.

  He wishes Blue would open up to him more about the animals. He wants to know everything about them. If she has a dead one, he wants to touch it. Somehow the strange claws in the lab vats must be connected to the screeching, chitinous beasts.

  His intercom beeps, and Dorian swears.

  “Director?” says Commander Cardozo. “Are you awake?”

  “I am now,” Dorian replies, the words hoarse. He’s been in cold sleep for a year, but the first time he tries to bed down for real, he gets interrupted. If this is some sort of routine drill, he’s going to kill someone. Or at least see to it that they’re terminated.

  “We’ve got a situation at the SCIF. As the station commander, I’m requesting your presence, ASAP.”