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Well, here it is, the first part of the Space AU! Jayzus, i love this story. I will totally admit that it's a bit indulgent, beings it's 100 percent of the things i love. Hopefully, you all will love it, too.
Here we have the first part, which is from an outside POV, and which does not have either of the J's in it, really. BUT - this is something that sets up things for the rest of the story and needs to be told - it gives us a background story and events that we need to know about.
So I hope you all can trust me and read with an open mind. :) I suspect DW/LJ will make me post in two posts.
Beta'd by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
darkhavens, of course, and also give an read-through by sweptawaybayou and _beetle_. Thank you, so much!
The title is from The Flight, by Lloyd Mifflin. Timeline and some notes at the end.
Also at AO3.
Prologue - Here it begins.
Without father, without mother, without descent; having neither beginning of days, nor end of life.
Melchizedek - John Henry, Cardinal Newman.
2197 – A team of scientists in Japan complete the first prototype of drug-delivery system they hope will revolutionize the treatment for genetic, endocrine, and chemical illnesses. Their initial goal is to pinpoint minute shifts in brain and body chemistry that precede blood sugar changes, epileptic seizures, manic or depressive swings and psychotic and schizophrenic episodes. A port is implanted at the base of the skull, and a microscopic web of filaments derived from stem cells takes root and threads through the afflicted brain, lymph, or nervous system, targeting areas where the misfires or imbalances occur most frequently. The port is then used to introduce specially compounded drugs which the ‘net’ can deliver directly to the affected areas. It takes thirteen years, but eventually they achieve success. They call it the ANGEL System – Advanced Neuro-Genetic-Endocrine deLivery.
2241 – Deep space mining craft Sally Belle, prospecting in the outer Epsilon Eridani asteroid belt.
"Cap? Got a call incoming, the mothership. To your one?"
"Fuck…yeah, to my one," Issac Harvey got a hand up to his ear and tapped his earpiece twice, switching over from internal to external. "This is the Captain," he said, staring upward at the tangle of wires and circuitry that had, for the last hour, been resisting all attempts to become a functioning environmental control unit. Whatever the hell the refinery platform wanted couldn't possibly be more important than the fact that anybody on B deck was sweating their asses off.
"Captain Harvey, this is Base. We have … anomaly … degrees zenith your position. Seems to … some kind of…."
Issac winced at the crackling bursts of static that made the transmission a garbled mess. "Base, say again?"
"There is a large mass at 23.4 degrees zenith of your position." Base com cleared with a squeal and Issac winced again. "Disengage your current action … protocol."
Issac resisted the impulse to kick something. He started to worm his way out of the unit, eeling on heels and hips and shoulders. "We've got a good prospect here, Base, we-"
"22AX protocol, Captain. Transmitting specifics to you now." Base cut off, and Issac sat up and flung the tool in his hand across the room.
"Motherfucking piece of shit," he yelled. He didn't feel better.
"Guess we're moving?" Wanda Ri, pilot and com-one, leaned in the doorway, her coveralls tied around her waist and perspiration beading along her upper lip. The raggedly hacked-off t-shirt that just covered her breasts was nearly translucent with sweat.
"Yeah, we're moving. Get everybody up top. Damnit, fucking spook-hunt. We're gonna lose this damn claim."
Wanda snorted and turned around, calling on all-channel to get the crew up to the bridge so they could do a burn, find this 'anomaly'. It was probably nothing – probably some eddy in a dust cloud. Double-E was a dirty, noisy system, and somebody at Base was jumping at shadows.
Up on the bridge, the crew was settling into chairs and belting in, bitching and bickering at each other; six months out, and they were due for a break. Issac settled into his own tape-patched chair, reaching for the belts as Zo disengaged the MWD unit from the borehole they were currently drilling into a twenty-ton asteroid. As soon as she gave the all-clear, Wanda kicked them up and over, sending them after the spook Base had tracked.
"Ketty, what's 22AX protocol?"
"Now that's one I dunno about," Ketty said, hunching a little over her screen as she called up the Deep Space Geology handbook.
"Anomaly is…ten thousand and seventy point two-two kilometers and closing," Wanda murmured.
"Anything on the long-range?" Issac asked, and Zo tapped out a sequence, sending an image to the screen in front of Issac.
"Not really. Big mass of something but there's a lot of noise out there right now. Wait, getting something…" Zo leaned in, frowning, and Ketty sat up straight.
"Shit. 22AX is ship in distress. There's a ship out there." Issac shot a look at Wanda, but Wanda was intent on her console, navigating the potentially lethal course they were taking out of the asteroid belt. Zo was on the com, talking to Base, and Ketty started going through backlogs of flight plans and who'd come into and out of the system in the last couple weeks, trying to figure out who was out there. Issac watched their work on the tiny aux screens on his console – watched the image Zo had sent get bigger and less fuzzy but no clearer, really.
"Does Base have anything for us?" Issac asked, and Zo shook her head, scowling, while Base talked into her other ear.
"This is need-to-know, Base, we're not gonna get up close to whoever's out there unless you tell us-"
"I've got telemetry from the anomaly," Ketty said suddenly, and keyed it to all-channel. It was a distress beacon, for sure; garbled and weak, repeating itself through bursts of static, the audio track damaged. But clear enough.
"…Ark Glor…nna, to any sh…p, ma…day, may…. …peat, Uni…ed …th…Ark…."
"United Earth Ark Glorianna," Ketty said. "Mayday. United Earth? That's not…."
"That's familiar," Issac said, and turned left in his chair, reaching for the secondary console – accessing ship's library, searching as Zo said something rude to Base and ended transmission, and Wanda made a sudden noise of pure astonishment.
"Visual on the main screen, holy fuck," Wanda said, and Issac looked away from his screen and froze, staring. She was huge. Even kilometers away, she nearly filled the screen; an uneven dart shape, ragged – pitted with black holes, listing out of true. Dead, it seemed, in every way but for that thready, desperate voice, endlessly pleading.
Issac shivered, suddenly cold, and looked back at his screen, at the scant paragraph of information that the ship's library had. He scanned it once and went colder still.
"The United Earth Ark Glorianna was launched from space station Freedom in June of 2099, with a crew of 35 in stasis sleep and a cargo of…of embryos, eggs…DNA…. Bound for the Alpha Centauri system." Issac shoved his fingers back through his hair and breathed. "She's been out here for over a hundred years."
"Alpha Centauri? How in hell'd she end up here?" Wanda asked, and Issac just shook his head.
"I dunno. I don't know. But she's salvage, and she's ours. Let's go."
Issac ended up arguing with Wanda for most of the three hours it took for them to get in docking range. Zo prepped the vac suits and Ketty put together a Claim of Salvage packet, but Wanda knew - and Issac knew she knew - that it wasn’t legal if the Captain didn’t claim in person, so he was going, even if it made Wanda seriously pissed.
It wasn’t as if Issac could safely navigate the Sally Belle back to Base, anyway - Wanda had six years more training than he did and he’d never been very good with the math. He might be the Captain, but that was only ‘cause he’d had the stake to do the original buy-in. The ship could run perfectly fine without him, give or take a malfunctioning aircon unit or two.
Wanda eased the Sally Belle up to an emergency airlock, carefully matching their own velocity to the wallowing, limping crawl the hulk was moving at. At least Base had been able to come up with a rudimentary blueprint of the thing, and Issac and Zo walked into the Sally Belle’s lock with a fairly good idea of where they were and where to go. Ketty sealed the airlock shut behind them, and gave a little wave through the pressure-window.
“Emergency access in place. Be fucking careful, hear me?”
“We hear you. Wanda, open her up.”
The blinking green light above the door went amber and then red as the lock sighed open, revealing the dingy white, ribbed tube of the emergency accessway. They were buffeted by the change in atmosphere, and Issac put his hand on the safety line - clipped his tether to it and pushed gently away from the sill of the lock. He drifted forward, pulling himself along the line and feeling it jerk and dip as Zo took hold behind him. A twist of flex-lights glowed overhead, yellow-white.
A minute or so of careful hand-over-hand got them to the airlock. The skin of the Glorianna was pitted, burnished bright in a couple spots, scorched in others. The lock-access numbers stenciled on the door were still legible, and Issac flipped open the cover on the keypad and pressed a button. It was dead.
“Gimme the kit,” Harvey said, and Zo pushed a palm-sized lozenge of battery and wire into his hand. Issac popped the whole front of the panel off and tugged out the twist of wires underneath; spent a minute or so cutting and stripping and clipping, humming tunelessly under his breath. When he was done, he pressed a couple of keys on the lozenge and the panel glowed to life, a sickly blue-orange.
He wrapped the whole cobbled-together mess with a sticky-strip and tapped the code into the panel. The airlock door shuddered and moved, lifting itself up and sliding sideways along the hull of the ship, edge just touching the side of the double-wide access tube. Beyond was a blackness so complete it seemed solid.
The blue-white beam of Zo’s suit light cut over Issac’s shoulder, illuminating the interior of the lock. There was a fur of frost over the surfaces, glittering like diamonds. Issac toggled his own light on and stepped gingerly into the lock. His suited foot skidded an inch and he stopped, only moving again when it felt solid, clearing the doorway and crossing the lock. The interior access was dead, too, so they left another battery pack tethered there and entered the ship.
“Schematic says you’re in the general crew area - mess, classrooms and rec.” Ketty’s voice was tinny over the suit com, a little staticky - ghostly, and Issac took a long breath in, settling himself. “You’re gonna want to go down about ten decks and forward...fuck, half a klick, at least. Scan says...there may be some rotation in the aft area. Might be gravity down in engineering, med labs...hydro. Might.”
“Shit, okay,” Zo muttered, and Issac oriented them in the right direction and started moving forward, a low, bounding stride that was easy to maintain.
“We’ll get directions when we’re closer,” Issac said, and then there was only the muted thump of his feet, coming up through the suit, and his and Zo’s breathing on the com.
Half an hour in, a bark of surprise from Zo had Issac turning too sharply and knocking into a wall. Conduits were down everywhere, here - long drapings of wire and tubing like intestine, glistening with frost - and Issac grabbed onto a thick twist of wire and dragged himself to a halt. The ceiling showed signs of fire damage as well as the walls, and a ragged, gaping hole down near the floor showed evidence of the explosion that had caused the damage.
“What the hell, Zo?” Issac barked, and Zo waved him over, her breathing a little short, a little panicky on the com.
“There’s something...I think it’s a body. But it’s not...it’s not right.”
“Not right? What does that mean?”
Issac disentangled himself from the conduit and moved to Zo, crowding against her and peering into the open doorway, his brain stuttering over thoughts of biological contamination, mutations, some kind of extro.... Beyond Zo’shoulder was what looked like a storage closet, a room about ten by ten with shelves bolted to the walls and a litter of stuff - it looked like boxes of spare clothes, maybe? - charred and compressed along the floor and up into the corners. Almost like a nest, and in it....
“Holy shit,” Issac muttered. He moved forward slowly, suit light trained on the huddle of wizened flesh and charred bone in the center of the mess. Two, three... four skulls, fetally curled arms and legs and slender rib-bones. “Ketty, you copy?”
“Copy, Cap. What’s up?”
“Was there-? I thought the crew were all adults. Were there kids?”
“Not really? I’ve been doing some digging,” Ketty said, and Zo pushed past Issac and crouched down carefully, little ready light on her suit-cam blinking, taking pictures as one bulky, armored hand reached out to very, very carefully touch a burnt-amber skull. The bone shivered and went to dust under her touch, and she pulled back with a curse.
“So what’s the news?” Issac asked. He swept his cam over the room, searching, and stopped at a collection of handprints on one wall. Scorch-marks had mostly destroyed them, but three or four were clear, in some kind of dull-yellow paint. They were tiny.
“The Ark ship was a...a seed ship. Generation ship. It was supposed to hit decel and start coasting toward its destination about fourteen years out. The crew would be woken up and they’d start the baby labs. They had it set up so by the time they got to what they hoped was a habitable planet, there’d be a set of fourteen year old kids already training and ready to go, with another birth-set at thirteen, twelve, eleven...you get the picture. Ready-made colony, with the adult crew there to keep it all organized.”
“Well, fuck.” Issac turned his gaze back to the remains. “You see this, Ketty?” he asked, and he heard Wanda’s ‘What in fuck is that?’ in the background.
“I see it, Cap. Not sure I believe it.”
“Believe it,” Zo said. She stood up and moved away, the look in her tilted eyes one of horror and pity.
“It looks like...like they woke ‘em up. They started the birthing.”
“They could be alive,” Zo said, and Issac groaned softly, closing his eyes for a moment.
“Shit, shit, shit. Yeah, okay. This may be a rescue mission after all. You got any life-signs, Ket? Anything?”
“I dunno,” Ketty said, and Issac turned and followed Zo out, back into the corridor - back on track. “There’s power, sure, or otherwise there’d be no mayday. But the thing’s shielded six ways to Sunday and there’s a lot of interference. They’ve picked up all kinds of crap on their trip, so.... I just can’t tell. I’m trying to fine the signal down but we’re not really equipped for this, Cap.”
“Yeah, I know. Okay. We’re gonna take the next access down, see if we can make it to the bridge level and get to the ship’s comp. On our way.”
“Be careful,” Wendy said, and they moved.
Downward accesses were mostly clear, though between decks eight and nine they had to find a work around, as something had taken a chunk out of the Glorianna and section seals were in place. Useless, really, since none of this part of the ship had atmo or even power, but perhaps at some point it had saved lives. They got around, eventually, took a break to sit and sip at stale suit-water, panting, and then, finally, they were coming up the corridor to the bridge.
It was a mess. Some consoles seemed to have been cannibalized, and the low, winking light of the mayday signal was the only sign of life. They spent a few minutes poking through the debris, and then Zo settled down into a torn chair, handheld computer on the console and her tool kit spread open beside it, to begin the laborious task of patching into the antiquated comp system. Ketty hadn’t been able to find any of the access codes for the data recorder, but it was made to be read, and Issac had faith she’d crack it.
Meanwhile, Issac made forays down side corridors, finding a ready room, what looked like the ship’s library and map room, and offices for some of the crew. None of them showed much wear or use. A couple of the offices were cluttered with some scraps of paper, a shattered mug or two, as if they’d been awake - alive - and then whatever had knocked the power out and holed the ship had sent them running, never to return.
There were, thankfully, no more bodies, but Issac found more handprints at different heights - different sizes, some in the dead yellow, some in a watery blue, a couple in what looked like dried blood. Everywhere was frost, darkness, a profound and absolute silence.
“Got it!” Zo called, and Issac snapped out of his contemplation of a row of marks that could be some kind of tally and headed back to the bridge. Code and data was scrolling down Zo’s comp screen, too fast to read. “You getting this, Ketty?”
“Yeah, getting it. Dumping it into aux store, I’ll get the comp searching keywords soon’s I got the whole thing. You find...anything else?”
Zo looked up at Issac, who shook his head.
“More nothing. When we’re done here, we’re gonna head aft, to the zones with power. See if...if there’s anything to see.” More bodies, Issac thought, but didn’t say. He really, really hoped not.
It took them a good two, hard hours to get to the first section seal with not only an emergency lock-through, but atmo behind it. Atmo and power; a wan, bluish light shone feebly through the scratched porthole in the lock door. Issac stepped up as close as he could, pressing the bubble of his helmet against the porthole, trying to see beyond, but the light was too flat and fuzzy, the corridor beyond too dim. Issac and Zo leaned into the wall by the lock, gulping air and panting. Even with the re-breather and scrubbers in the suit, their oxygen intake was a little lower than normal, and Issac could feel the headache that suit-wear always brought creeping up the back of his skull.
“Okay, so, we’re at access AW-328. We’re gonna go through. Any progress with the flight data?”
“Getting there. Seems like something went wrong a little over a century into the trip. Some kind of damage, or a glitch, it gets really fucked up about then. Seems like....” Ketty’s voice trailed off, and Issac glanced aside at Zo.
“Seems like what?” Issac asked, looking up from cross-wiring the lock door so they could force it open. The access numbers weren’t handily painted nearby, this time.
“The ship went live. I mean - the birthing labs, everything. Woke the crew up and started making babies. It looks like...I think it still is.”
“Shit”, Zo said, and Issac closed his eyes, taking a long breath. Children - so many children on this ship. For years....
“Some of the damage seems...pretty recent. Can you see-? Do you know how many were alive when the fire broke out?”
“I’ll...I’ll find out. Had to be a lot, Cap.”
“Copy that. Okay, we’re going in.”
“Copy,” Ketty said, and Issac twisted the last wires together and jammed his finger down on the button. The door shuddered and shifted and then ground open, jerky and reluctant. Something seemed to be caught in the tracks - ragged bits of plastic sheeting or cloth. Issac shouldered it open the last few inches and then stepped inside, moving over so Zo could fit in after him. The interior button worked, and the door groaned closed with a rumble they could feel through their boots.
The lock chamber cycled and they sagged a little as gravity slowly infiltrated, pulling them down. They clung to the handrails, orientation arrows showing them which way to point their feet. Issac looked at Zo for a long moment, nerving himself; watching her deliberately settle her breathing down, roll her head on her neck inside the helmet. Then she nodded at Issac and he opened the inner door. Atmo pushed at them, a moment’s buffeting, and then they were stepping out and sealing up behind them, staggering a little, off-balance after so long in zero-g. The corridor beyond was bathed in the sickly blue-grey light of the overheads - light that flickered and strobed, never steady.
His suit hummed, taking in an air sample and ticking over as the unit in the small of his back worked. A section of his field of vision lit, HUD scrolling through the suit’s findings even as the transmitted data showed on the Sally Belle.
“Gravity’s a little less than Earth-normal, not by much. Atmo’s okay. Some contaminants...looks like mostly just dirty systems and leakage, but there’s stuff I can’t identify, either. I’d keep your faceplate down,” Wanda said.
“No worries there,” Zo muttered. Issac felt the same - no way was he going to take any part of the suit off. He toggled the exterior audio on and then clicked to lower the volume as a sort of groaning wail invaded the mic.
“What the hell?”
“Sounds like the rotation cylinder’s about gone.” The ship clicked and moaned and creaked, noises no crew ever wanted to hear, and Issac suddenly just wanted to be done. Find the dead, please let there be only dead, make the claim, get off this floating tomb and get the hell back home. He started down the corridor, going slow. More plastic sheeting was tangled along the floor in dirty-white drifts, and Issac stepped carefully over it. His heart was pounding and his breath coming too fast, the sweat on his body itching and his legs shaky from the long walk. It didn’t help that once he’d stepped through the lock, his muscles had gone rigid with strain and anticipation.
“Seems to be deserted so far.”
“If the birth labs kept working at capacity, there would be over three thousand kids on that ship. Almost four thousand,” Wendy said, and Issac gritted his teeth and side-stepped a hanging coil of conduit, shuffling his feet through a mess of crumbled ceiling panels.
“That many?” Zo sounded a little panicked, and Issac didn’t blame her. “What the hell are they...is there food?”
“Seems like the hydro-gardens were put online, but who knows if they worked or if radiation got to ‘em.... There were some food stores on board for the crew, until the gardens got established, and of course baby...stuff.” Issac could imagine Ketty’s hand-flail at ‘baby stuff’ - she didn’t like ‘em. “Enough standard stuff for a while, at least, for the adults. Powdered, uh, formula and stuff and emergency concentrates.”
The corridor branched and Issac looked left and then right and then left again, sure he’d seen something moving. Fucking light, it was tricky - dim and weird and colorless, washing out the dark rust-red of their vac suits to a muddy brown and tricking the eye, shadows seeming to move just at the edges of Issac’s vision.
He turned right and started walking again, pretty sure they were headed for the med-labs. The measured clank of his and Zo’s boots got louder as, mercifully, the rotation-noise faded a little as they moved deeper into the interior of the ship. But there were other noises, too, and Issac found himself jerking and startling, over and over. Aged ventilation fans clacked and rattled, the lights emitted a low sort of buzzing, and the atmo itself seemed to make noise - leaky seals letting air hiss and rush, like something was dragging along the corridor behind them.
He could hear Zo breathing hard, muttering little curses, and he knew she heard them, too; knew it was getting on both their nerves. A skein of frayed wires thumped against the corridor wall and Issac all but screamed.
“Fuck, Cap, what-?”
“Nothing, it’s- Fuck, it’s nothing, it’s just...damn spooky. It’s okay.” Issac twisted around a little to check on Zo, hoping to see her smirking at him, ready to tease. Another shadow moved beyond her and Issac’s gaze jerked to it - dismissed it - and then he was staggering backwards, staring.
“Zo, there’s something- Fuck, something in the corridor, something behind us!” He fumbled after his sidearm while Zo jerked around with a startled shout.
It advanced, a hunched figure, hands nearly touching the corridor floor, thin limbs and weirdly shaped head. It scuttled, a jerky, stumbling, forward locomotion that seemed ready to spill it on its face, but the thing caught itself every time, glittering eyes in a filth-smeared mask, mouth open on an eerie, breathy kind of uh, uh, uh.
“Holy shit! What is it, what the fuck-?”
“One of them, it’s one of them, has to be-”
The thing leaped, screaming, and Zo staggered backwards as Issac brought the gun up, pure reflex. A snapping pop of the taser and the figure was down, limbs convulsing. Something slammed into the back of Issac’s suit, ripping, kicking, screaming. Issac could hear Ketty and Wanda yelling from the ship, panicked babble in his ear.
“Get it off, get it off!”
Zo lunged for him and grabbed at the hands that threatened to rip loose umbilicals and breach his suit, and Issac stumbled backward and slammed the thing into the corridor wall. Zo dragged the shuddering body off him and slung it away down the corridor and then they both froze, staring. The corridor ahead and behind was filling with shadows - figures, hunched and staring and wailing, beating their hands - and makeshift weapons - on the walls and floor, a nightmare mob of skeletal monsters.
Issac felt Zo against his back, braced for a fight. He could feel her trembling through the suit. His own hand, holding the useless damn taser wove and swung like a drunk.
“What is happening? Report, damnit! Captain, what the fuck is going on?” Wendy shouted, and Issac watched as one figure pushed through the crowd, a little taller, a little more deliberate.
“Kids, we found...found the kids. Fuck, they’re...they attacked, we’re...we’re okay, just...fuck. I gotta- gotta deal, here, just shut up a minute,” Issac panted. He toggled the ship-channel to mute, wanting the silence for a moment. They could still hear everything, though that wouldn’t keep Wendy from tearing him a new one.
The kid stepped closer, out of shadow and into a spot of the watery blue-grey light, and Issac swiftly catalogued what he was seeing. Thin limbs, ribs prominent, legs bowed and the teeth that showed in the animal snarl discolored. He was naked - corpse-pale, speckled with bruises and scars. Most of his hair was hacked off in short, uneven tufts, but long locks over the ears and in a crest along the top of his head were plastered with what might be paint, might be...fuck, anything. Matted twists and spikes hung down past his shoulders.
His arms were wound with long lengths of wire, knotted around his fingers and twisted up to his shoulders, across and around his neck like some bizarre and barbaric ornamentation. He had a long piece of jagged, stained metal in one hand, the grip wrapped with strips of plastic. Issac had no doubt it could rip right through skin and muscle. Probably his damn suit, if the kid tried hard enough.
The eyes in the gaunt, smeared face looked...not entirely sane, over-bright and fevered, a glittering and disconcerting green. His gaze swept over Issac, head to toe, and he lifted the weapon up high, over his head. Issac braced for a leap - a rush - but the kid let out an inhuman bellow, and the mob behind him, behind Issac, quieted.
“Cap, what’s going on? Zo said, shifting against his back, and Issac held both hands up, palms out, trying to look harmless.
“There’s a kid...seems like he’s in charge. Just...be ready. Fuck, be ready.”
The kid stepped forward, two, three cautious steps. Issac could hear his breathing now, a little fast, a little wheezy; could see more clearly the scabbed, rough skin, the ragged nails and chapped lips. He cocked his head, staring at Issac, and then leaned forward a fraction and made a low, interrogatory sort of noise.
Issac stared back, heart pounding, and the kid frowned, and then made the noise again. No, he spoke. Issac leaned slightly forward, as well, making an encouraging ‘again’ kind of gesture, careful and slow with his empty hand. The kid’s gaze flickered to it and then back to Issac’s face, and he took a deep breath.
“Daaa..uc. Daauc?”
“What’s he saying? What the hell?” Zo whispered, and Issac made the motion again as he toggled his mic on.
“Say again. Daaa-?”
The kid startled at Issac’s voice, leaned away and then leaned in again, his whole body going tense with some kind of emotion. He was frowning hard. “Doooc. Doooc!”
“Doo...doc? Are you saying ‘doc’?” The kid made a frustrated, impatient gesture with the jerry-rigged knife and Issac flinched, took a breath. “Doc. Doctor. Is that what you’re saying? Doc...tor.”
The kid mouthed the word, and then his whole face transformed, eyes going wide and his mouth curling into a huge, impossible smile.
“Dooc-or, dooc-or!” He surged forward and Issac almost shot him, but the kid grabbed Issac’s free hand and yanked, with a rangey strength Issac wasn’t expecting.
“I think he thinks I’m a doctor. Something. Zo, come on, just...keep your taser out.” He toggled the ship off mute, catching Wendy in a stream of half-shouted curses and threats. “Wendy! I’m sorry, shut up, we’re on the move, we’re okay.”
“Fucking hell, Cap, get the fuck out of there! We’ll get the Marines in here, we’re not trained for this!”
“Well fuck, hope you already called somebody. Tell Base, tell ‘em what we found. Keep the channel open.”
“I don’t like it, Cap,”, Ketty said, and Issac really had to agree. The kid jerked him along, through the mass of kids who crowded around, staring - reaching. Issac let himself be dragged down the corridor, then down another, branching off, and then through a shattered plex wall. The room beyond was dim, only a couple of stuttering lights showing banks of machinery, everything slicked with condensation or...some kind of liquid. A glance aside at the HUD showed the temperature to be warm - fever-high - heat sinks not working right, or not at all, and nowhere for the built-up heat to go. Issac stumbled over something, looked down and then recoiled with a breathless shout of utter horror.
A wizened corpse lay on the floor, the limbs raggedly torn, the skull flattened. Tiny - it was tiny. A baby. He heard Zo curse behind him and saw there were more - oh, fuck, so many more, barely strung together as anything recognizably human by decomposing tendons and ragged skin. They looked chewed.
The kid leaped up, the weapon swinging and connecting with something, and a light suddenly went on, a whole bank of them stuttering to life. Issac felt his knees buckling, his gorge rising as the kid stood there, grinning that grin, waving the weapon as if to say ‘here, see, look at this’.
It was a birth lab. Rows of artificial wombs, some seemingly full of murky fluid, others empty, the apertures gaping down into incubators. And in the incubators...babies. So many, many babies. Here there were three or four, the bottom ones obviously dead, the topmost body weakly moving. Others had older babies, their limbs mired in filth, skin stripping off from pressure sores. Feeding masks were down on some, milky fluid staining their faces. Some had obviously drowned. Little, breathless noises permeated the room. Babies that had cried until they couldn’t anymore, and now simply made a dim, animal sound of agony and need.
One of the kids scuttled out of the shadows and plucked a baby up, careless - turned it and hugged it and stood it on its malformed feet and let go. The baby collapsed, head bouncing off the floor, making a weak, mewling kind of noise. The kid watched it, a feral look on its face. Zo wasn’t cursing now, she was breathing so hard Issac thought she might pass out, and he reached back blindly and bumped his hand against her arm. Fuck, they had to hold it together.
The other kid - their kid - snarled out a guttural noise and the girl lifted the baby up and settled it back into the incubator, looking chastened. Their kid nodded once, sharply, and turned back to Issac - swept his hand and the weapon out, showing the room, showing what looked like more labs beyond, a corridor crowded with labs, with bodies, with babies....
“Dooc-or! Dooc-or,” he said again, and his spidery, broken-nailed hand reached out and patted Issac’s arm, tugged him forward again, urgent and anticipatory. His meaning was obvious, his message clear.
Issac was the doctor, here were the kids, now he needed to get to work. Issac stared into that manic green gaze and wished, harder than he’d ever wished for anything in his life, that he had a gun - a real gun - and enough ammo to end every miserable life in this grotesque, rotting womb.
“Wendy. Get Base. Tell ‘em code red, tell ‘em extreme medical emergency, fuck, tell ‘em...” Issac toggled on the high-def camera, and heard Wendy and Ketty both react to the slow pan he did with his helmet, images suddenly crystal-clear instead of the flat, low-rez auto cams. “Send ‘em that. Get somebody out here. Get everybody out here. Fucking now.”
“Dooc-or, Dooc-or, Dooc-or,” the kid said, happy - proud of himself - grinning and turning in a half circle, his foot casually shoving a ragged, half-eaten corpse away into the shadows. “Dooc-or!”
2099 – the year the Ark ship was sent out.
2229 - the year Jensen and his sibs are ‘born’.
2241 – the year the Glorianna /Jensen is found
Sally Belle, deep space miner/prospector.
Issac Harvey - Captain, motorman and roustabout, medic grade C
Wanda Ri – Pilot, communications, toolpusher
Zo Kenneska - geologist, scan, driller
Ketty Hodges– geologist, legal, driller
Part Two
Here we have the first part, which is from an outside POV, and which does not have either of the J's in it, really. BUT - this is something that sets up things for the rest of the story and needs to be told - it gives us a background story and events that we need to know about.
So I hope you all can trust me and read with an open mind. :) I suspect DW/LJ will make me post in two posts.
Beta'd by
darkhavens, of course, and also give an read-through by sweptawaybayou and _beetle_. Thank you, so much!The title is from The Flight, by Lloyd Mifflin. Timeline and some notes at the end.
Also at AO3.
Prologue - Here it begins.
Without father, without mother, without descent; having neither beginning of days, nor end of life.
Melchizedek - John Henry, Cardinal Newman.
2197 – A team of scientists in Japan complete the first prototype of drug-delivery system they hope will revolutionize the treatment for genetic, endocrine, and chemical illnesses. Their initial goal is to pinpoint minute shifts in brain and body chemistry that precede blood sugar changes, epileptic seizures, manic or depressive swings and psychotic and schizophrenic episodes. A port is implanted at the base of the skull, and a microscopic web of filaments derived from stem cells takes root and threads through the afflicted brain, lymph, or nervous system, targeting areas where the misfires or imbalances occur most frequently. The port is then used to introduce specially compounded drugs which the ‘net’ can deliver directly to the affected areas. It takes thirteen years, but eventually they achieve success. They call it the ANGEL System – Advanced Neuro-Genetic-Endocrine deLivery.
2241 – Deep space mining craft Sally Belle, prospecting in the outer Epsilon Eridani asteroid belt.
"Cap? Got a call incoming, the mothership. To your one?"
"Fuck…yeah, to my one," Issac Harvey got a hand up to his ear and tapped his earpiece twice, switching over from internal to external. "This is the Captain," he said, staring upward at the tangle of wires and circuitry that had, for the last hour, been resisting all attempts to become a functioning environmental control unit. Whatever the hell the refinery platform wanted couldn't possibly be more important than the fact that anybody on B deck was sweating their asses off.
"Captain Harvey, this is Base. We have … anomaly … degrees zenith your position. Seems to … some kind of…."
Issac winced at the crackling bursts of static that made the transmission a garbled mess. "Base, say again?"
"There is a large mass at 23.4 degrees zenith of your position." Base com cleared with a squeal and Issac winced again. "Disengage your current action … protocol."
Issac resisted the impulse to kick something. He started to worm his way out of the unit, eeling on heels and hips and shoulders. "We've got a good prospect here, Base, we-"
"22AX protocol, Captain. Transmitting specifics to you now." Base cut off, and Issac sat up and flung the tool in his hand across the room.
"Motherfucking piece of shit," he yelled. He didn't feel better.
"Guess we're moving?" Wanda Ri, pilot and com-one, leaned in the doorway, her coveralls tied around her waist and perspiration beading along her upper lip. The raggedly hacked-off t-shirt that just covered her breasts was nearly translucent with sweat.
"Yeah, we're moving. Get everybody up top. Damnit, fucking spook-hunt. We're gonna lose this damn claim."
Wanda snorted and turned around, calling on all-channel to get the crew up to the bridge so they could do a burn, find this 'anomaly'. It was probably nothing – probably some eddy in a dust cloud. Double-E was a dirty, noisy system, and somebody at Base was jumping at shadows.
Up on the bridge, the crew was settling into chairs and belting in, bitching and bickering at each other; six months out, and they were due for a break. Issac settled into his own tape-patched chair, reaching for the belts as Zo disengaged the MWD unit from the borehole they were currently drilling into a twenty-ton asteroid. As soon as she gave the all-clear, Wanda kicked them up and over, sending them after the spook Base had tracked.
"Ketty, what's 22AX protocol?"
"Now that's one I dunno about," Ketty said, hunching a little over her screen as she called up the Deep Space Geology handbook.
"Anomaly is…ten thousand and seventy point two-two kilometers and closing," Wanda murmured.
"Anything on the long-range?" Issac asked, and Zo tapped out a sequence, sending an image to the screen in front of Issac.
"Not really. Big mass of something but there's a lot of noise out there right now. Wait, getting something…" Zo leaned in, frowning, and Ketty sat up straight.
"Shit. 22AX is ship in distress. There's a ship out there." Issac shot a look at Wanda, but Wanda was intent on her console, navigating the potentially lethal course they were taking out of the asteroid belt. Zo was on the com, talking to Base, and Ketty started going through backlogs of flight plans and who'd come into and out of the system in the last couple weeks, trying to figure out who was out there. Issac watched their work on the tiny aux screens on his console – watched the image Zo had sent get bigger and less fuzzy but no clearer, really.
"Does Base have anything for us?" Issac asked, and Zo shook her head, scowling, while Base talked into her other ear.
"This is need-to-know, Base, we're not gonna get up close to whoever's out there unless you tell us-"
"I've got telemetry from the anomaly," Ketty said suddenly, and keyed it to all-channel. It was a distress beacon, for sure; garbled and weak, repeating itself through bursts of static, the audio track damaged. But clear enough.
"…Ark Glor…nna, to any sh…p, ma…day, may…. …peat, Uni…ed …th…Ark…."
"United Earth Ark Glorianna," Ketty said. "Mayday. United Earth? That's not…."
"That's familiar," Issac said, and turned left in his chair, reaching for the secondary console – accessing ship's library, searching as Zo said something rude to Base and ended transmission, and Wanda made a sudden noise of pure astonishment.
"Visual on the main screen, holy fuck," Wanda said, and Issac looked away from his screen and froze, staring. She was huge. Even kilometers away, she nearly filled the screen; an uneven dart shape, ragged – pitted with black holes, listing out of true. Dead, it seemed, in every way but for that thready, desperate voice, endlessly pleading.
Issac shivered, suddenly cold, and looked back at his screen, at the scant paragraph of information that the ship's library had. He scanned it once and went colder still.
"The United Earth Ark Glorianna was launched from space station Freedom in June of 2099, with a crew of 35 in stasis sleep and a cargo of…of embryos, eggs…DNA…. Bound for the Alpha Centauri system." Issac shoved his fingers back through his hair and breathed. "She's been out here for over a hundred years."
"Alpha Centauri? How in hell'd she end up here?" Wanda asked, and Issac just shook his head.
"I dunno. I don't know. But she's salvage, and she's ours. Let's go."
Issac ended up arguing with Wanda for most of the three hours it took for them to get in docking range. Zo prepped the vac suits and Ketty put together a Claim of Salvage packet, but Wanda knew - and Issac knew she knew - that it wasn’t legal if the Captain didn’t claim in person, so he was going, even if it made Wanda seriously pissed.
It wasn’t as if Issac could safely navigate the Sally Belle back to Base, anyway - Wanda had six years more training than he did and he’d never been very good with the math. He might be the Captain, but that was only ‘cause he’d had the stake to do the original buy-in. The ship could run perfectly fine without him, give or take a malfunctioning aircon unit or two.
Wanda eased the Sally Belle up to an emergency airlock, carefully matching their own velocity to the wallowing, limping crawl the hulk was moving at. At least Base had been able to come up with a rudimentary blueprint of the thing, and Issac and Zo walked into the Sally Belle’s lock with a fairly good idea of where they were and where to go. Ketty sealed the airlock shut behind them, and gave a little wave through the pressure-window.
“Emergency access in place. Be fucking careful, hear me?”
“We hear you. Wanda, open her up.”
The blinking green light above the door went amber and then red as the lock sighed open, revealing the dingy white, ribbed tube of the emergency accessway. They were buffeted by the change in atmosphere, and Issac put his hand on the safety line - clipped his tether to it and pushed gently away from the sill of the lock. He drifted forward, pulling himself along the line and feeling it jerk and dip as Zo took hold behind him. A twist of flex-lights glowed overhead, yellow-white.
A minute or so of careful hand-over-hand got them to the airlock. The skin of the Glorianna was pitted, burnished bright in a couple spots, scorched in others. The lock-access numbers stenciled on the door were still legible, and Issac flipped open the cover on the keypad and pressed a button. It was dead.
“Gimme the kit,” Harvey said, and Zo pushed a palm-sized lozenge of battery and wire into his hand. Issac popped the whole front of the panel off and tugged out the twist of wires underneath; spent a minute or so cutting and stripping and clipping, humming tunelessly under his breath. When he was done, he pressed a couple of keys on the lozenge and the panel glowed to life, a sickly blue-orange.
He wrapped the whole cobbled-together mess with a sticky-strip and tapped the code into the panel. The airlock door shuddered and moved, lifting itself up and sliding sideways along the hull of the ship, edge just touching the side of the double-wide access tube. Beyond was a blackness so complete it seemed solid.
The blue-white beam of Zo’s suit light cut over Issac’s shoulder, illuminating the interior of the lock. There was a fur of frost over the surfaces, glittering like diamonds. Issac toggled his own light on and stepped gingerly into the lock. His suited foot skidded an inch and he stopped, only moving again when it felt solid, clearing the doorway and crossing the lock. The interior access was dead, too, so they left another battery pack tethered there and entered the ship.
“Schematic says you’re in the general crew area - mess, classrooms and rec.” Ketty’s voice was tinny over the suit com, a little staticky - ghostly, and Issac took a long breath in, settling himself. “You’re gonna want to go down about ten decks and forward...fuck, half a klick, at least. Scan says...there may be some rotation in the aft area. Might be gravity down in engineering, med labs...hydro. Might.”
“Shit, okay,” Zo muttered, and Issac oriented them in the right direction and started moving forward, a low, bounding stride that was easy to maintain.
“We’ll get directions when we’re closer,” Issac said, and then there was only the muted thump of his feet, coming up through the suit, and his and Zo’s breathing on the com.
Half an hour in, a bark of surprise from Zo had Issac turning too sharply and knocking into a wall. Conduits were down everywhere, here - long drapings of wire and tubing like intestine, glistening with frost - and Issac grabbed onto a thick twist of wire and dragged himself to a halt. The ceiling showed signs of fire damage as well as the walls, and a ragged, gaping hole down near the floor showed evidence of the explosion that had caused the damage.
“What the hell, Zo?” Issac barked, and Zo waved him over, her breathing a little short, a little panicky on the com.
“There’s something...I think it’s a body. But it’s not...it’s not right.”
“Not right? What does that mean?”
Issac disentangled himself from the conduit and moved to Zo, crowding against her and peering into the open doorway, his brain stuttering over thoughts of biological contamination, mutations, some kind of extro.... Beyond Zo’shoulder was what looked like a storage closet, a room about ten by ten with shelves bolted to the walls and a litter of stuff - it looked like boxes of spare clothes, maybe? - charred and compressed along the floor and up into the corners. Almost like a nest, and in it....
“Holy shit,” Issac muttered. He moved forward slowly, suit light trained on the huddle of wizened flesh and charred bone in the center of the mess. Two, three... four skulls, fetally curled arms and legs and slender rib-bones. “Ketty, you copy?”
“Copy, Cap. What’s up?”
“Was there-? I thought the crew were all adults. Were there kids?”
“Not really? I’ve been doing some digging,” Ketty said, and Zo pushed past Issac and crouched down carefully, little ready light on her suit-cam blinking, taking pictures as one bulky, armored hand reached out to very, very carefully touch a burnt-amber skull. The bone shivered and went to dust under her touch, and she pulled back with a curse.
“So what’s the news?” Issac asked. He swept his cam over the room, searching, and stopped at a collection of handprints on one wall. Scorch-marks had mostly destroyed them, but three or four were clear, in some kind of dull-yellow paint. They were tiny.
“The Ark ship was a...a seed ship. Generation ship. It was supposed to hit decel and start coasting toward its destination about fourteen years out. The crew would be woken up and they’d start the baby labs. They had it set up so by the time they got to what they hoped was a habitable planet, there’d be a set of fourteen year old kids already training and ready to go, with another birth-set at thirteen, twelve, eleven...you get the picture. Ready-made colony, with the adult crew there to keep it all organized.”
“Well, fuck.” Issac turned his gaze back to the remains. “You see this, Ketty?” he asked, and he heard Wanda’s ‘What in fuck is that?’ in the background.
“I see it, Cap. Not sure I believe it.”
“Believe it,” Zo said. She stood up and moved away, the look in her tilted eyes one of horror and pity.
“It looks like...like they woke ‘em up. They started the birthing.”
“They could be alive,” Zo said, and Issac groaned softly, closing his eyes for a moment.
“Shit, shit, shit. Yeah, okay. This may be a rescue mission after all. You got any life-signs, Ket? Anything?”
“I dunno,” Ketty said, and Issac turned and followed Zo out, back into the corridor - back on track. “There’s power, sure, or otherwise there’d be no mayday. But the thing’s shielded six ways to Sunday and there’s a lot of interference. They’ve picked up all kinds of crap on their trip, so.... I just can’t tell. I’m trying to fine the signal down but we’re not really equipped for this, Cap.”
“Yeah, I know. Okay. We’re gonna take the next access down, see if we can make it to the bridge level and get to the ship’s comp. On our way.”
“Be careful,” Wendy said, and they moved.
Downward accesses were mostly clear, though between decks eight and nine they had to find a work around, as something had taken a chunk out of the Glorianna and section seals were in place. Useless, really, since none of this part of the ship had atmo or even power, but perhaps at some point it had saved lives. They got around, eventually, took a break to sit and sip at stale suit-water, panting, and then, finally, they were coming up the corridor to the bridge.
It was a mess. Some consoles seemed to have been cannibalized, and the low, winking light of the mayday signal was the only sign of life. They spent a few minutes poking through the debris, and then Zo settled down into a torn chair, handheld computer on the console and her tool kit spread open beside it, to begin the laborious task of patching into the antiquated comp system. Ketty hadn’t been able to find any of the access codes for the data recorder, but it was made to be read, and Issac had faith she’d crack it.
Meanwhile, Issac made forays down side corridors, finding a ready room, what looked like the ship’s library and map room, and offices for some of the crew. None of them showed much wear or use. A couple of the offices were cluttered with some scraps of paper, a shattered mug or two, as if they’d been awake - alive - and then whatever had knocked the power out and holed the ship had sent them running, never to return.
There were, thankfully, no more bodies, but Issac found more handprints at different heights - different sizes, some in the dead yellow, some in a watery blue, a couple in what looked like dried blood. Everywhere was frost, darkness, a profound and absolute silence.
“Got it!” Zo called, and Issac snapped out of his contemplation of a row of marks that could be some kind of tally and headed back to the bridge. Code and data was scrolling down Zo’s comp screen, too fast to read. “You getting this, Ketty?”
“Yeah, getting it. Dumping it into aux store, I’ll get the comp searching keywords soon’s I got the whole thing. You find...anything else?”
Zo looked up at Issac, who shook his head.
“More nothing. When we’re done here, we’re gonna head aft, to the zones with power. See if...if there’s anything to see.” More bodies, Issac thought, but didn’t say. He really, really hoped not.
It took them a good two, hard hours to get to the first section seal with not only an emergency lock-through, but atmo behind it. Atmo and power; a wan, bluish light shone feebly through the scratched porthole in the lock door. Issac stepped up as close as he could, pressing the bubble of his helmet against the porthole, trying to see beyond, but the light was too flat and fuzzy, the corridor beyond too dim. Issac and Zo leaned into the wall by the lock, gulping air and panting. Even with the re-breather and scrubbers in the suit, their oxygen intake was a little lower than normal, and Issac could feel the headache that suit-wear always brought creeping up the back of his skull.
“Okay, so, we’re at access AW-328. We’re gonna go through. Any progress with the flight data?”
“Getting there. Seems like something went wrong a little over a century into the trip. Some kind of damage, or a glitch, it gets really fucked up about then. Seems like....” Ketty’s voice trailed off, and Issac glanced aside at Zo.
“Seems like what?” Issac asked, looking up from cross-wiring the lock door so they could force it open. The access numbers weren’t handily painted nearby, this time.
“The ship went live. I mean - the birthing labs, everything. Woke the crew up and started making babies. It looks like...I think it still is.”
“Shit”, Zo said, and Issac closed his eyes, taking a long breath. Children - so many children on this ship. For years....
“Some of the damage seems...pretty recent. Can you see-? Do you know how many were alive when the fire broke out?”
“I’ll...I’ll find out. Had to be a lot, Cap.”
“Copy that. Okay, we’re going in.”
“Copy,” Ketty said, and Issac twisted the last wires together and jammed his finger down on the button. The door shuddered and shifted and then ground open, jerky and reluctant. Something seemed to be caught in the tracks - ragged bits of plastic sheeting or cloth. Issac shouldered it open the last few inches and then stepped inside, moving over so Zo could fit in after him. The interior button worked, and the door groaned closed with a rumble they could feel through their boots.
The lock chamber cycled and they sagged a little as gravity slowly infiltrated, pulling them down. They clung to the handrails, orientation arrows showing them which way to point their feet. Issac looked at Zo for a long moment, nerving himself; watching her deliberately settle her breathing down, roll her head on her neck inside the helmet. Then she nodded at Issac and he opened the inner door. Atmo pushed at them, a moment’s buffeting, and then they were stepping out and sealing up behind them, staggering a little, off-balance after so long in zero-g. The corridor beyond was bathed in the sickly blue-grey light of the overheads - light that flickered and strobed, never steady.
His suit hummed, taking in an air sample and ticking over as the unit in the small of his back worked. A section of his field of vision lit, HUD scrolling through the suit’s findings even as the transmitted data showed on the Sally Belle.
“Gravity’s a little less than Earth-normal, not by much. Atmo’s okay. Some contaminants...looks like mostly just dirty systems and leakage, but there’s stuff I can’t identify, either. I’d keep your faceplate down,” Wanda said.
“No worries there,” Zo muttered. Issac felt the same - no way was he going to take any part of the suit off. He toggled the exterior audio on and then clicked to lower the volume as a sort of groaning wail invaded the mic.
“What the hell?”
“Sounds like the rotation cylinder’s about gone.” The ship clicked and moaned and creaked, noises no crew ever wanted to hear, and Issac suddenly just wanted to be done. Find the dead, please let there be only dead, make the claim, get off this floating tomb and get the hell back home. He started down the corridor, going slow. More plastic sheeting was tangled along the floor in dirty-white drifts, and Issac stepped carefully over it. His heart was pounding and his breath coming too fast, the sweat on his body itching and his legs shaky from the long walk. It didn’t help that once he’d stepped through the lock, his muscles had gone rigid with strain and anticipation.
“Seems to be deserted so far.”
“If the birth labs kept working at capacity, there would be over three thousand kids on that ship. Almost four thousand,” Wendy said, and Issac gritted his teeth and side-stepped a hanging coil of conduit, shuffling his feet through a mess of crumbled ceiling panels.
“That many?” Zo sounded a little panicked, and Issac didn’t blame her. “What the hell are they...is there food?”
“Seems like the hydro-gardens were put online, but who knows if they worked or if radiation got to ‘em.... There were some food stores on board for the crew, until the gardens got established, and of course baby...stuff.” Issac could imagine Ketty’s hand-flail at ‘baby stuff’ - she didn’t like ‘em. “Enough standard stuff for a while, at least, for the adults. Powdered, uh, formula and stuff and emergency concentrates.”
The corridor branched and Issac looked left and then right and then left again, sure he’d seen something moving. Fucking light, it was tricky - dim and weird and colorless, washing out the dark rust-red of their vac suits to a muddy brown and tricking the eye, shadows seeming to move just at the edges of Issac’s vision.
He turned right and started walking again, pretty sure they were headed for the med-labs. The measured clank of his and Zo’s boots got louder as, mercifully, the rotation-noise faded a little as they moved deeper into the interior of the ship. But there were other noises, too, and Issac found himself jerking and startling, over and over. Aged ventilation fans clacked and rattled, the lights emitted a low sort of buzzing, and the atmo itself seemed to make noise - leaky seals letting air hiss and rush, like something was dragging along the corridor behind them.
He could hear Zo breathing hard, muttering little curses, and he knew she heard them, too; knew it was getting on both their nerves. A skein of frayed wires thumped against the corridor wall and Issac all but screamed.
“Fuck, Cap, what-?”
“Nothing, it’s- Fuck, it’s nothing, it’s just...damn spooky. It’s okay.” Issac twisted around a little to check on Zo, hoping to see her smirking at him, ready to tease. Another shadow moved beyond her and Issac’s gaze jerked to it - dismissed it - and then he was staggering backwards, staring.
“Zo, there’s something- Fuck, something in the corridor, something behind us!” He fumbled after his sidearm while Zo jerked around with a startled shout.
It advanced, a hunched figure, hands nearly touching the corridor floor, thin limbs and weirdly shaped head. It scuttled, a jerky, stumbling, forward locomotion that seemed ready to spill it on its face, but the thing caught itself every time, glittering eyes in a filth-smeared mask, mouth open on an eerie, breathy kind of uh, uh, uh.
“Holy shit! What is it, what the fuck-?”
“One of them, it’s one of them, has to be-”
The thing leaped, screaming, and Zo staggered backwards as Issac brought the gun up, pure reflex. A snapping pop of the taser and the figure was down, limbs convulsing. Something slammed into the back of Issac’s suit, ripping, kicking, screaming. Issac could hear Ketty and Wanda yelling from the ship, panicked babble in his ear.
“Get it off, get it off!”
Zo lunged for him and grabbed at the hands that threatened to rip loose umbilicals and breach his suit, and Issac stumbled backward and slammed the thing into the corridor wall. Zo dragged the shuddering body off him and slung it away down the corridor and then they both froze, staring. The corridor ahead and behind was filling with shadows - figures, hunched and staring and wailing, beating their hands - and makeshift weapons - on the walls and floor, a nightmare mob of skeletal monsters.
Issac felt Zo against his back, braced for a fight. He could feel her trembling through the suit. His own hand, holding the useless damn taser wove and swung like a drunk.
“What is happening? Report, damnit! Captain, what the fuck is going on?” Wendy shouted, and Issac watched as one figure pushed through the crowd, a little taller, a little more deliberate.
“Kids, we found...found the kids. Fuck, they’re...they attacked, we’re...we’re okay, just...fuck. I gotta- gotta deal, here, just shut up a minute,” Issac panted. He toggled the ship-channel to mute, wanting the silence for a moment. They could still hear everything, though that wouldn’t keep Wendy from tearing him a new one.
The kid stepped closer, out of shadow and into a spot of the watery blue-grey light, and Issac swiftly catalogued what he was seeing. Thin limbs, ribs prominent, legs bowed and the teeth that showed in the animal snarl discolored. He was naked - corpse-pale, speckled with bruises and scars. Most of his hair was hacked off in short, uneven tufts, but long locks over the ears and in a crest along the top of his head were plastered with what might be paint, might be...fuck, anything. Matted twists and spikes hung down past his shoulders.
His arms were wound with long lengths of wire, knotted around his fingers and twisted up to his shoulders, across and around his neck like some bizarre and barbaric ornamentation. He had a long piece of jagged, stained metal in one hand, the grip wrapped with strips of plastic. Issac had no doubt it could rip right through skin and muscle. Probably his damn suit, if the kid tried hard enough.
The eyes in the gaunt, smeared face looked...not entirely sane, over-bright and fevered, a glittering and disconcerting green. His gaze swept over Issac, head to toe, and he lifted the weapon up high, over his head. Issac braced for a leap - a rush - but the kid let out an inhuman bellow, and the mob behind him, behind Issac, quieted.
“Cap, what’s going on? Zo said, shifting against his back, and Issac held both hands up, palms out, trying to look harmless.
“There’s a kid...seems like he’s in charge. Just...be ready. Fuck, be ready.”
The kid stepped forward, two, three cautious steps. Issac could hear his breathing now, a little fast, a little wheezy; could see more clearly the scabbed, rough skin, the ragged nails and chapped lips. He cocked his head, staring at Issac, and then leaned forward a fraction and made a low, interrogatory sort of noise.
Issac stared back, heart pounding, and the kid frowned, and then made the noise again. No, he spoke. Issac leaned slightly forward, as well, making an encouraging ‘again’ kind of gesture, careful and slow with his empty hand. The kid’s gaze flickered to it and then back to Issac’s face, and he took a deep breath.
“Daaa..uc. Daauc?”
“What’s he saying? What the hell?” Zo whispered, and Issac made the motion again as he toggled his mic on.
“Say again. Daaa-?”
The kid startled at Issac’s voice, leaned away and then leaned in again, his whole body going tense with some kind of emotion. He was frowning hard. “Doooc. Doooc!”
“Doo...doc? Are you saying ‘doc’?” The kid made a frustrated, impatient gesture with the jerry-rigged knife and Issac flinched, took a breath. “Doc. Doctor. Is that what you’re saying? Doc...tor.”
The kid mouthed the word, and then his whole face transformed, eyes going wide and his mouth curling into a huge, impossible smile.
“Dooc-or, dooc-or!” He surged forward and Issac almost shot him, but the kid grabbed Issac’s free hand and yanked, with a rangey strength Issac wasn’t expecting.
“I think he thinks I’m a doctor. Something. Zo, come on, just...keep your taser out.” He toggled the ship off mute, catching Wendy in a stream of half-shouted curses and threats. “Wendy! I’m sorry, shut up, we’re on the move, we’re okay.”
“Fucking hell, Cap, get the fuck out of there! We’ll get the Marines in here, we’re not trained for this!”
“Well fuck, hope you already called somebody. Tell Base, tell ‘em what we found. Keep the channel open.”
“I don’t like it, Cap,”, Ketty said, and Issac really had to agree. The kid jerked him along, through the mass of kids who crowded around, staring - reaching. Issac let himself be dragged down the corridor, then down another, branching off, and then through a shattered plex wall. The room beyond was dim, only a couple of stuttering lights showing banks of machinery, everything slicked with condensation or...some kind of liquid. A glance aside at the HUD showed the temperature to be warm - fever-high - heat sinks not working right, or not at all, and nowhere for the built-up heat to go. Issac stumbled over something, looked down and then recoiled with a breathless shout of utter horror.
A wizened corpse lay on the floor, the limbs raggedly torn, the skull flattened. Tiny - it was tiny. A baby. He heard Zo curse behind him and saw there were more - oh, fuck, so many more, barely strung together as anything recognizably human by decomposing tendons and ragged skin. They looked chewed.
The kid leaped up, the weapon swinging and connecting with something, and a light suddenly went on, a whole bank of them stuttering to life. Issac felt his knees buckling, his gorge rising as the kid stood there, grinning that grin, waving the weapon as if to say ‘here, see, look at this’.
It was a birth lab. Rows of artificial wombs, some seemingly full of murky fluid, others empty, the apertures gaping down into incubators. And in the incubators...babies. So many, many babies. Here there were three or four, the bottom ones obviously dead, the topmost body weakly moving. Others had older babies, their limbs mired in filth, skin stripping off from pressure sores. Feeding masks were down on some, milky fluid staining their faces. Some had obviously drowned. Little, breathless noises permeated the room. Babies that had cried until they couldn’t anymore, and now simply made a dim, animal sound of agony and need.
One of the kids scuttled out of the shadows and plucked a baby up, careless - turned it and hugged it and stood it on its malformed feet and let go. The baby collapsed, head bouncing off the floor, making a weak, mewling kind of noise. The kid watched it, a feral look on its face. Zo wasn’t cursing now, she was breathing so hard Issac thought she might pass out, and he reached back blindly and bumped his hand against her arm. Fuck, they had to hold it together.
The other kid - their kid - snarled out a guttural noise and the girl lifted the baby up and settled it back into the incubator, looking chastened. Their kid nodded once, sharply, and turned back to Issac - swept his hand and the weapon out, showing the room, showing what looked like more labs beyond, a corridor crowded with labs, with bodies, with babies....
“Dooc-or! Dooc-or,” he said again, and his spidery, broken-nailed hand reached out and patted Issac’s arm, tugged him forward again, urgent and anticipatory. His meaning was obvious, his message clear.
Issac was the doctor, here were the kids, now he needed to get to work. Issac stared into that manic green gaze and wished, harder than he’d ever wished for anything in his life, that he had a gun - a real gun - and enough ammo to end every miserable life in this grotesque, rotting womb.
“Wendy. Get Base. Tell ‘em code red, tell ‘em extreme medical emergency, fuck, tell ‘em...” Issac toggled on the high-def camera, and heard Wendy and Ketty both react to the slow pan he did with his helmet, images suddenly crystal-clear instead of the flat, low-rez auto cams. “Send ‘em that. Get somebody out here. Get everybody out here. Fucking now.”
“Dooc-or, Dooc-or, Dooc-or,” the kid said, happy - proud of himself - grinning and turning in a half circle, his foot casually shoving a ragged, half-eaten corpse away into the shadows. “Dooc-or!”
2099 – the year the Ark ship was sent out.
2229 - the year Jensen and his sibs are ‘born’.
2241 – the year the Glorianna /Jensen is found
Sally Belle, deep space miner/prospector.
Issac Harvey - Captain, motorman and roustabout, medic grade C
Wanda Ri – Pilot, communications, toolpusher
Zo Kenneska - geologist, scan, driller
Ketty Hodges– geologist, legal, driller
Part Two
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