Alien--Echo, page 16
At the bottom of the bag, I find a pile of data cards. Each of them responds to my thumbprint, flashing its contents at me. I have the financial access authority necessary to get to all the money Mom and Dad have saved up over the last seventeen years. I have the routing numbers to move it from bank to bank, according to my needs. I have the medical files for myself, and for Viola, including the full DNA workup they did to try and find the root of the genetic condition that had weakened and eventually killed her.
Best and most importantly of all, I have the access codes and launch keys for our family shuttle. I stare at the card in my hand, reeling from the realization that we can get away from here. We can leave. All I have to do is find Viola and get her safely back to the launch port inside the main colony dome, and we can get off this planet and never look back.
I wonder if Kora will come with us.
The thought is sobering. Of course she won’t come with us. No matter how angry she might be at her mother right now—and she’s very angry, anyone who understands humans can see that; she’s angry enough that if I don’t hurry up and get out there, someone’s going to wind up getting shot—she’s not going to leave her behind. That’s her family. Not everyone cares about family, but Kora does. If Viola and I flee Zagreus, I’m going to have to say goodbye to Kora, and right now, I’m direly afraid that saying goodbye to someone on this planet is as good as pulling the trigger myself.
This is not a safe place. I don’t know why I’m so sure of that, why I’m so convinced that three creatures could possibly be enough to spell the end of an entire colony, but I am. It’s something in the way they move, something I recognize, even though it’s entirely alien to anything I’ve experienced before. This world, it’s theirs now. We’re just waiting for them to finish taking over.
I slide my new treasures back into the bag, except for the gun. It has a holster. I strap it around my waist and secure it there, balancing the comforting weight of the volt gun. Then I shrug the pack back over my shoulders, give my damp, blood-streaked reflection one last glance, and start for the door.
It’s time to get moving.
Delia is seated at the island in the kitchen when I emerge from the washroom, her hands resting on the marble where Kora can see them. Kora is still holding her borrowed gun on her mother, although her hands are shaking, and there are tears running down her cheeks. She looks like she’s on the verge of breaking down. Delia, on the other hand, is perfectly calm, almost serene. She looks like a woman who has faced the worst, and found her peace with it.
“Hello, Shipp girl,” she says when I move back into view. “I don’t actually care which one you are, the living or the dead: we’re all the dead now. You may just have beaten us there.”
“I told you, I’m not an android,” I say. I step up next to Kora and stop. “I’m as human as you are.”
“I don’t know about that,” says Delia. “Right now, I might count myself as a little less human. I did this, after all.”
“Tell her, Mama,” says Kora. She sniffles, but the gun doesn’t waver. “Tell her about the call.”
“I just received communication from one of the seasteads,” says Delia. She looks at the tablet in front of her, eyes unfocused. She doesn’t seem to see her screen. “They’ve been overrun by strange creatures. ‘They’re like knives,’ that’s what Julian said, before the transmission stopped. ‘They’re like knives that hunt.’ I say ‘overrun,’ but based on his report, it only took four of the things to kill them all. Twenty people lost. Do you think they were the same creatures that you saw?”
The nearest seastead is almost a hundred miles away. That’s a fair amount of distance for anything to cover on foot, no matter how tireless. But we know at least one shuttle made it away from the survey ship, and there may have been more than one in the initial expedition; there may have been escape pods still available for use. It’s not hard to imagine someone tricking one of those things into an escape pod, or being pursued when they tried to flee, and launching the whole thing into space.
Sometimes getting away only matters for a few seconds before it turns into a whole new kind of being trapped.
“I think it was the same species, yes,” I say carefully. That description, like knives that hunt … I can’t imagine anything else on Zagreus fitting that description. The wildlife here is strange and diverse and dangerous, but it’s not that. It’s not impossible.
“But not the same individuals.”
I shake my head. Delia sighs heavily.
“All I wanted to do was help my colony,” she says. “All I wanted to do was make a life for us here, away from the corporations, away from the greed, away from the human tendency to pick the corpse of every world we claim until it’s nothing but bones and ashes. Was that so wrong of me?”
I stare at her. “I don’t know,” I say finally. “But you messed up. And now the rest of us have got to pay. I’m going to go now. I need to find my sister.”
I turn my back on both of them. I know that if I don’t go now, I won’t go at all, and so I walk without hesitation to the door, and I let myself out, back onto the stairs, heading for the second door.
I’m almost there when I hear a slam behind me.
“Olivia!”
Barely daring to hope, I look back. There’s Kora, her hair a tangled corona around her head, the gun still in her hand, my blood still on her cheek. She’s never been more beautiful.
“I have to go,” I say.
“I know,” she says. And then, most miraculously of all: “I’m coming with you.”
I should argue with her, tell her why this is a terrible idea, why she needs to stay here with her mother. I don’t want to see her die. I don’t want to take her outside the walls to where the monsters are and see her die. But even more than that, I don’t want her to die here, where I can’t see, where I can’t ever know for sure.
If she’s not going to stay alive, I want her to die knowing that I did everything possible to save her, and that she has never, even for a moment, been alone.
“It’s dangerous out there,” I say. “Are you sure?”
Kora nods. “My mother … she knew she was risking everything, and she did this anyway. My family hurt yours. I owe it to you to try and fix whatever I can.”
I don’t want her to come with me because she owes me. I want her to come with me because she wants to, because she cares about me the way I care about her and she’s afraid of what might happen if I step outside the wall by myself. I look at her face, her wide, earnest eyes, and I know that I’m asking too much; I should be content with what I have, which is honestly more than I deserve. So I offer her the faintest sliver of a smile, and I nod, and I say, “All right. Let’s go.”
Fewer people stare as we make our way through the streets this time. There’s still blood in our hair and on our clothes—on my clothes, especially—but I’m pale enough that washing it off my skin has made a huge difference. We no longer look like a horror story gone for a stroll.
There are fewer people in general. There’s no sign of a panic. Nothing has been knocked over or abandoned. But the normal array of pedestrians and workers has just … dissipated, vanishing into businesses and residences without comment. As we walk, I see several people’s wrist communicators light up. They raise their arms to check the screens, read the messages displayed there, and suddenly find it in themselves to walk faster, exchanging silent, concerned looks. I glance at Kora.
“It’s the emergency transmission system,” she says, and grimaces. “Which I guess you were never keyed to, since it’s locked to colonist IDs.”
“What does it…?”
“A lot of our early colonists were former miners, former shipping techs, people from backgrounds that didn’t leave them comfortable with open spaces, but did leave them a little twitchy about things possibly going wrong.” Kora’s eyes track another pedestrian as his communicator alerts and he starts walking, quickly, toward the nearest tunnel opening. “No one wants to start a panic. The alerts go out, and people take themselves to secure locations in a quick, organized fashion.”
“No one says anything?” A thought occurs to me. A bad thought. “Who decides which people get notified first?”
“The system is randomized.” At my dubious look, she holds up her wrist and shows me her still-silent communicator. “I’m the governor’s daughter. If there were some sort of unfair prioritization of so-called ‘important people,’ Mama would have made sure I got flagged before anyone else.”
“I guess.” I keep walking, heading for the gate where we came in. I’m not comfortable being here, surrounded by tall buildings and narrow walkways. There are too many places for a predator to hide.
It’s funny, but I’ll feel better—safer—once we’re outside, in the open. The things that killed my parents and took Viola are fast, but all the speed in the world won’t keep them from being seen in the middle of a prairie. We’ll have a better chance when we can see them coming. And we’re armed now, at least enough to make me feel like we could slow them down. Their exoskeletons may provide them with a certain amount of armor, but they have weaknesses. They must have weaknesses. All we need to do is find them.
Kora stays close by my side as we walk, although she doesn’t reach for my hand this time, and I can’t bring myself to reach for her. She must hate me now, after everything that’s happened. She’s only here because she feels obligated, and obligation isn’t the same thing as affection. She’ll regret this soon enough, and when she does, she’ll be gone.
We come around the final curve, and there’s the gate, unguarded, waiting for us. Johnson and Rockwell probably went for cover with the others, assuming no one would be able to get out without them to unlock the mechanisms keeping the gate sealed. I stare at it, dismayed. They weren’t wrong.
“I have no idea how to open that,” I say. My voice sounds dead to my own ears. This is ridiculous. This can’t be what stops me.
But maybe it’s going to be. The wall itself is easily fifteen feet high, and where it ends, the polished dome begins, made of clear plastic that’s caused a shameful number of fatalities among the flying wildlife of Zagreus. I spent our first week on this planet circling the colony city with my dad, scooping dead and injured flyers off the ground and taking them away to catalog. He’d started providing suggestions for how to reduce the number of impacts almost immediately, and started being ignored just as quickly. The dome is self-cleaning, self-repairing; it absorbs any damage done by the native animals without requiring human intervention. Why would the colonists want to mess with what is probably both their biggest investment and their biggest success?
I can’t climb the dome: it’s too high and too slippery, made of material that’s designed to be as close to non-stick as possible. I can’t shoot the dome. If I had a big enough laser, I could probably cut through the dome, but if there’s anything that’s going to summon the missing security teams back to their posts, it would be an assault on their primary means of protection.
It isn’t sealed at the top. The colonists had to leave an opening for the ships to enter and exit through, and to allow the native biosphere to reach the colonists. It’s slow acclimatization. They breathe the pollen, they breathe the spores, and bit by bit, their bodies forget they’ve ever lived anywhere else. They become a part of this world.
For a brief, dizzying moment, I consider the virtues of stealing a shuttle—not my family’s transport, which is too big and too precious for something like this—and flying it straight out that opening. I abandon the idea almost as quickly as it came. Even if I could get to the shuttles, even if I could steal one, they all have lockdown overrides that can be activated from the launch port. I’d never make it as far as the residence, much less to the hills.
“Olivia.”
I turn to Kora, opening my mouth to ask her what she wants. That’s as far as I get before she’s grabbing my shoulders, pushing me against the nearest wall, and kissing me.
She’s kissed me before. She’s been the one to initiate almost all our kisses. Either she’s a lot braver than I am, or she’s a lot less afraid of rejection. But this kiss … this isn’t like the others. It’s fiercer, harder, like she’s afraid that it’s the last one we’re ever going to have. She lets go of my shoulders, hands dropping to my waist and then sliding up again, until her thumbs graze the sides of my breasts and my knees go weak, threatening to dump me on my butt right here. She stops there, thankfully, or I don’t know if I could stand it.
Part of me wants to push her away, to say that this isn’t the time and isn’t the place and even if it were either of those things, Viola’s in danger and I need to stop messing around. The rest of me, the portion that’s descended from a million generations of mammals who managed to survive the threats around them, reproducing and improving and fighting and winning until they culminated in me, standing here under an orange, alien sky, that portion says to go for it. This could be my last kiss. I deserve to enjoy it.
When Kora finally pulls away, her cheeks are flushed, making the delicate blood smear I left there stand out even more, and the bridge of my nose is throbbing where Michel punched me. Facial trauma and make-outs are not close personal friends.
“Prime,” I whisper.
She smiles, one corner of her mouth quirking up just a little higher than the other, and says, “I swiped Mama’s access card while you were in the washroom.”
The way she talks about her mother should sound childish—would sound childish, if it were me—but she makes it sound rich and rare and right, like there’s no better name in the world for the woman who bore her, raised her, and is now leaving her to her own devices.
I blink. “What?”
“I can open the gate.” She dips a hand into her pocket, coming up with a flat, burnished metal keycard. “I can close it again, too. We can get out of here.”
This time, I’m the one who kisses her, putting my hands to either side of her face and pulling her close before I can think better about wasting time.
She still tastes salty and sweet at the same time, with that little improbable hint of motor oil. There’s a new taste there now, something savory and sharp at the same time, and it’s not until I’m pulling away, not until I can see the way she’s looking at me, that I realize what it is.
Blood. Everything on this planet is tainted now.
“Come on,” I say. “If we hurry, your mother won’t have time to send people after us.”
Kora nods and holds the card out toward me. I blink. She reddens, and explains, “It’s against colony law for me to open the door without an adult present. You have to be eighteen to come and go freely. You aren’t bound by colony law. So if you open the door, and I just happen to walk through it…”
“You won’t have done anything wrong,” I conclude. “I mean, apart from stealing your mother’s card in the first place.”
She nods. “I figure we’re already going to be in enough trouble. I don’t want to add to it.”
The odds are good that either we won’t be coming back, or we’ll be coming back with a lot more trouble on our tails. It seems cruel to remind her of that, and so I simply smile, and take the card, and say, “You’re a miracle. Totally prime.”
Kora looks pleased. I turn and press the card to the reader on the gate.
There was a code before. I know there was a code. Apparently, “physical card belonging to the planetary governor” is more important than any silly numerical string, because the gate beeps twice and unseals itself, slowly retracting into the wall and revealing the ATV, still sitting where we left it.
There’s a bloody splotch on the ground to one side of the ATV, marking the place where Michel was taken. Several long fronds of the local “grass” are bent double, absorbing it. The blood that had hit the grass is already gone, completely consumed and wiped away. It won’t be long before there’s nothing left to show what happened here. Zagreus will put itself back together, a perfectly functioning ecosystem that wants nothing to do with humanity, and it will endure.
Maybe. For all that the colonists haven’t been willing to fully commit to their new home, they’ve been treating it gently, holding it at arm’s length. The creatures that took my sister aren’t going to be nearly that kind.
I pull the volt gun as I step cautiously through the gate, scanning one way, then the other, and finally turning to look up the wall. Part of me is convinced that this is it: that one of the creatures has been waiting there, ready to drop from above onto the first moving thing it sees.
There’s nothing there. I relax, marginally, and head for the ATV, beckoning for Kora to follow. She hesitates, and for one dizzying moment I think she’s going to turn around and go back the way we came. That might be a good thing. She’ll be safe if she stays inside the wall.
She emerges instead, waving her mother’s access card at the scanner on this side of the wall. The gate seals itself behind her. That’s it; we’re committed now.
The creatures haven’t attacked the ATV. It’s a small blessing. I’ll take it. I climb behind the controls, amazed by how much that small action relaxes me. This is mine. It’s familiar and it’s comfortable and it’s mine. The entire world is spread out around me, I can see everything in every direction. I’m as close to safe as I’m ever going to be again.
Kora climbs into the passenger seat. I pass her the volt gun. She blinks at me, clearly bewildered.
“If something moves, shoot it,” I say. “This is safer to use while we’re driving than a standard projectile weapon. All you need to do is make sure it’s aimed away from us, and we won’t have to worry about ricochets.”
“Got it,” she says. “Where are we going first?”
“Back to my residence.” I start the engine. The ATV rumbles to life around us. “There might be some things in my parents’ office that I can use.”
