The hazards of interstellar transportation…first, a work, and then, another, and more and more, until there is an infestation of worms aboard the ship. Or was there?
It starts with one.
They always start with one. Infestations, I mean. You find one, but there’s always more, right? For every one of ‘em you see, there’s usually three, four, or maybe five that you don’t. That’s why they are so pernicious.
In this case, it started with one right in the middle of the cargo hold.
The hold had been cleaned out. Cargo containers had been stacked up to the ceiling the day before, all of ‘em harnessed to the bulkheads. We had done a run from Stepton and had loaded new cargo at every subsequent stop till we were full to bursting. I could barely get through, there was so little space between stacks. But then, we hit Proviso and the entire hold got emptied out.
That’s a satisfying feeling when your cargo hold is yours again. I was walking the empty deck, making sure it was empty, and that nothing got left behind.
I would have stepped on it if the lights had been low, if the banks of illumistrips hadn’t been on full. I wasn’t sure what I was seeing at first despite the illumination, but there it was, right in the middle of the deck, squirming around in a little pool of its own mucus.
A worm.
Mostly brown, but with mottled blue accents. I’d never seen anything like it, least of all in what should have been a pristine cargo hold.
I think I was outraged. I remember I was angry… angry enough to reach down with a thumb and forefinger and pick the little fucker up off the deck and stare at it in… yeah… that was it… outrage.
The mucus was sticky, and the worm had a smell that wasn’t immediately distasteful. There was almost a sweet redolence to the thing, but my anger at its mere presence soon overwhelmed any other consideration.
“Goddam,” I breathed aloud.
“What’s up, Evan?” Franklin, the engineer asked from behind me.
I turned and showed him.
“Is that…?” he stared at it, his mouth agape in incredulity. “…what is that…?”
I shrugged. “It’s a worm,” I said.
“I can see that,” Franklin said. He’s a lot smarter than I am, but sometimes allows himself to say dumb shit. “Where did it come from? From off one of the containers?”
“Maybe from inside one of ‘em,” I suggested. “The hold was in vacuum for most of the passage. It shouldn’t have survived if it was stuck to the surface.”
“That makes sense, I guess,” Franklin said.
Like I said, he’s a real smart guy… one of the most gifted engineers I’ve ever known… but you’d never know that from just talking to him.
“You should show that to Doctor Barnes,” Franklin said. He turned to go, then stopped and turned back. “Probably shouldn’t have touched it without gloves on.” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Bit late for that now.”
I found a small container and put the worm in it. Then I went to find some solvents to get rid of the pool of mucus that was staining the deck of my cargo hold.
#
Technically, it’s not my cargo hold. Technically, the Alizarin Crimson belongs to Captain Boris Tankready, so the cargo hold is really his. I wasn’t going to bother him with the worm, because it would be my responsibility to deal with it anyway, but he happened to be in the sickbay with Doctor Barnes when I brought it in. Barnes dropped two pills in his palm and handed him some water. Tankready swallowed the pills and drained the cup. He scowled at me and my container.
“What the hell is that?” he asked.
“It’s a worm,” I said. “I found it in the cargo hold. There’s probably more.”
The Captain looked into the container, then looked away, his dark skin turning pale and just a bit green. “We’re taking on cargo when we reach Abigail. Expensive cargo. Make sure it’s dealt with before then.”
“That’s in four days,” I said.
Tankready hefted himself from his seat and loomed over me (something that he didn’t have to try hard to do, given the stark difference between his height and mine). “Just get it done, Evan,” he growled as he left sickbay.
“What’s wrong with him?” I asked Barnes.
“Feeling under the weather,” Barnes said, looking curiously at the worm in the container. “Probably brought on from stress.”
“Oh?” I said. “I would have assumed it was brought on by the bottle of Spaceways rum he put away last night.”
Barnes raised an eyebrow at me. “Evan, before you say anything, you really need to ask yourself three questions: Is it true? Is it necessary? Is it kind?”
I thought about that for a moment. “Yes, no, and no.” I answered.
Barnes nodded. “Then maybe keep quiet next time. What do you want me to do with this?” he indicated the container.
I shrugged. “Find out what will kill it.” I said.
#
I went back to the cargo hold. Sure enough, I found two more worms sitting in a pool of mucus. They were in the far corner furthest from the main hatch.
This time, I got gloves and put them both into another container. They were mostly brown and had the same blue mottled coloring, but something about them felt different. It wasn’t until after I’d cleaned up the corner with the solvent and sat down in front of the container that I noticed that these two had hairy filaments coming out all over their length.
They also had eyes.
They were just round blue spots, but they were in position near the head and resembled eyes. I would have just chalked it up as a coincidence, except that both worms had the exact same markings.
These ones moved differently as well, somehow. The first one had slow, deliberate movements. These two moved in a jerky, almost frantic fashion.
I was feeling a bit light-headed at this point, so I figured I’d better go to the mess and grab some ship stew. Franklin was there, his tall frame and bald head bent over a bowl. I watched his artificial arm working the spoon with just as much dexterity and precision as a regular arm would. The construction of that arm intrigued me, as it usually did. It was stronger and more precise than any piece of equipment I’d ever seen, but when it wasn’t required to do something extraordinary, it could do ordinary with amazing ease.
Sri sat down beside him, handing him some water. Her blue skin reflected the overhead illumistrips in a most engaging way and her smile was dazzling as always. “Hello, Evan,” she said in her musical lilt. “Are you okay? You look tired.”
“I’m fine,” I smiled back as I spooned some of the stew into a bowl. Sri was Franklin’s engineering/life partner and as pretty a creature as I had ever seen. I could get lost staring into her eyes, but I dared not do that, especially when Franklin was right there and his arm could crush me down to nothing with little effort.
“Did you take that worm to Doctor Barnes?” Franklin asked.
“Yeah,” I said, sitting down beside them at the table. “Only I found some more now.”
“Uh-oh,” Franklin said. “You know we have to take on more cargo when we reach Abigail…”
“I know, I know,” I said, wolfing down my stew. “I’ll have it taken care of by then.”
But when I went back to the cargo hold, I found more.
There was another pool of mucus on the deck in which one worm wriggled and two more pools in a storage container. A total of five worms.
I used gloves again and had to find a bigger container to put them in. Once they were safely ensconced, I was able to examine them. First thing I noticed was that they were different again.
They had the hairy filaments, but these ones were more pronounced. I could see them more clearly, see how they protruded from the body. They were also clustered more along the front.
And they had eyes. I mean, the blue mottled color on either side of the “head” at the top of the body, but also now they were bulged out and looking like they had a slit in the middle. They looked like a pair of prizefighter’s eyes after they’ve been beat and swollen shut.
At this point, I was still feeling dizzy. I went back to the mess to get some more water. Cord, the Crimson’s pilot, was there helping himself to some stew.
“I hear we’ve got worms,” Cord said, sitting down with his bowl.
“I’ll have it under control before we reach Abigail,” I said, pouring myself some water. “As long as we don’t arrive early.”
“Well, don’t count on that,” Cord said. “I’ve got a bet with Kude that I can shave off enough time on our travel route to get there a full half-day ahead of schedule.”
“You’re kidding,” I said. “You can’t do that.”
“I am deadly serious,” Cord said. “I will be enjoying breakfast in the coveted dome lounge at Montague’s less than three days from now – on Kude’s dime – or my name isn’t Cordwainer H. E…”
“You can’t,” I protested. “That won’t give me enough time.”
“I absolutely can and I will,” he boasted. “So you better hop to it and get rid of those worms, my friend, because I have a breakfast date that I intend to keep.”
I felt sick after that. Dizzy, nauseous.
I went back to the cargo hold. There were three more pools of mucus on the deck, each with a few wriggling worms.
Where were they coming from?
I gloved up and gathered up the ones I could see, then went on a hunt into the nooks and crannies, lockers and bins, holds and housings.
I found over twenty of the things in various mucus pools, all of them wriggling away.
And they looked different again. The filaments were now looking more like extremities – little arms or legs – and the eyes… They were definitely orbs under the blue mottled skin. Most of them were closed, but some were slowly opening. The eyeballs underneath the swollen lids were mostly black, but they had some kind of structure to them.
I had to dump a container of phillibolts to house them. They oozed and wriggled at the bottom of the container, and my stomach heaved at the sight of them.
I locked the hold for the night and dragged myself to my quarters. I’d take a couple hours sleep in my bunk and tackle it fresh in the morning.
I dimmed the lights and lay down, trying to sleep, but when I closed my eyes, all I could see were wriggling worms.
And something whispering at me. Whispering words that I couldn’t quite make out.
After four hours of tossing around, I gave up on sleep and went back to the cargo hold. I unlocked the hatch. It slid open, and I immediately heard voices.
They were indistinct and muttering, but they were clearly voices, clearly speaking some kind of words. They sounded like they were coming from all around me but there was no one in the hold.
There were several large pools of mucus, though, each of which hosted a small enclave of the wriggling worms.
Where the fuck were they coming from?
I gloved up. I grabbed the phillibolt container that I had repurposed yesterday, and I started scraping up the various pools and dumping the worms into it.
I stopped once to let a wave of dizziness pass. I looked down at the four worms in the palm of my glove. Their eyes were open, and each worm was staring up at me.
They were different again. No more filaments. They had limbs. Arms. Legs. Heads and tails.
They were no longer worms, but I could not identify what kind of creature these things had evolved into.
One of them craned its neck out of the mucus. It blinked and then narrowed its eyes like it was studying me. Then it frowned, and that was when I realized that… yes… they now had mouths.
“You have an ugly beard,” the thing said in a tiny, high pitched voice.
I stared at it, absolutely rocked at what I had heard, but also not quite believing that I actually had heard it.
“What the fuck did you say?” I asked.
“You heard me,” the worm squeaked back.
I scowled at the little worm. “You’re speaking, though. You’re speaking a language that I understand?”
“Like that’s hard,” the worm scoffed. “It’s obviously easier than keeping a beard neat and trimmed. Look at you, you scruffy bastard!”
“Hey! I’m a busy man! I don’t have time to…” I said, then stopped myself. I was arguing with a worm. Besides, if the worm could actually talk, it had more important questions to answer. “Where do you come from?” I asked.
“You know. You picked us up off the deck.” the worm said.
I shook my head. “I don’t mean that. I mean… where are you coming from? Are you dropping from the ceiling? Are you guys multiplying between the bulkheads?”
“We’re just here,” the worm said. “We were always here.”
“He’s really stupid, isn’t he?” one of the other worms piped up in an even higher-pitch. “Ugly and stupid.”
That caused the other worm to snicker. That caused me to get mad. “Are you laughing at me? That’s pretty bold considering I’m carrying you in a gloved hand. One squeeze and you’re all just so much goo!”
“Ooooh!” the first worm said, wriggling in my hand. “Big strong man threatens tiny worm! How much of a bully can you possibly be?”
“Yeah,” the other worm piped up. “Why don’t you pick on someone your own size?”
“Yeah!” another worm joined in. “Big bully! BIG BULLY!”
That was when I began to hear a droning of high pitched voices all around me, coming from every corner of the cargo deck, echoing off the bulkheads. “BIG BULLY! UGLY AND STUPID! BIG BULLY!”
I felt a wave of dizziness. The stew and the water were threatening to come back up. I dashed over to the big container and I tossed the worms in with the others. I heard shouts of protests but I paid them no heed. One of the worms stuck to the glove and I had to give it a shake to dislodge it. As it plopped into the mucus that now coated the bottom of the container, I thought I heard it screaming something about brutality.
I peeled off the gloves and left the hold, sealing it up behind me. I leaned against the outer bulkhead and let myself slide down until my bum touched the deck. I wrapped my arms around my knees and concentrated on not throwing up.
I had to do something and I tried to think what that would be. Another wave of dizziness passed over me and I had to fight to keep my stomach from chucking up. I could still hear the tiny tinny little voices in my head. Big Bully! Ugly and Stupid! I squeezed my eyes shut and clamped my fists over my ears.
“Are you alright, Evan?” I heard despite the fists over my ears. I looked up and saw Hein, the Crimson’s weapons specialist, his close cropped white hair and trim mustache looming over me. “Heard we have a worm problem, eh?”
I nodded. “It’s an infestation,” I admitted. “I have to have it dealt with before we reach Abigail.”
Hein put his hand to his chin. “Hmmm,” he said. “Not much time. I heard Cord bragging about how he was going to try to shave time off our run to get their early.”
I nodded. “Yeah. I’m not sure what to do. They’re everywhere, and they’ve started…”
“Scorched Earth.” Hein said, pointing a finger directly at me. “That’s the only way to deal with them. Exterminate them utterly.”
“But they’re…” I began, trying to explain about their use of language.
“Come on, you ape,” Hein said. “You wanna live forever? The only good worm is a dead worm. Make it happen.” Then he turned on his heel and walked off.
He was right, of course. It was them or us, and I was gonna vote us.
I marched to the equipment bay and grabbed an atmosphere suit. We had only just achieved our full quota of suits for the crew (the fact of which we were obliviously unaware until we purchased the final suit that made us compliant with regulations) and there was one in my size which I pulled out of its locker and donned carefully and with steely purpose.
I suited up and checked the seals as best I could – it being technically a two-person job. I marched back to the cargo hold.
I stepped inside and I locked the hatch. I got to the control panel and I set the grapples to unlock on a voice command. The hold was technically a separate ship, albeit without any engines or piloting ability. It gripped on to the Crimson with several grapples and could detach from the rest of the ship in extreme emergencies.
Setting the unlock command was a precaution and I, of course, hoped that it would not become necessary to execute it, but it was best to be prepared in any case.
The cargo hold also had its own gravity generator, separate from the rest of the Crimson. I accessed the controls and set them to zero.
As soon as I did, I started to hear the squeaky, tinny voices in my ears. They were coming through the suit helmet’s internal speaker.
“Hey!” they shouted (or variations thereof) “What’s going on! What’s happening!”
I ignored the voices and floated up towards the hold’s ceiling. I started checking seals between the illumistrips. I checked all the cracks and crevices, all the nooks and crannies.
I found globules of mucus everywhere I looked. I pulled them out by the handful and set them floating in the air. Every time I did, I heard a chorus of high-pitched voices squealed in protest. “What are you doing?” they screamed. “How can you do this to us! We weren’t doing anything to you! We were here first!”
…and in between protests were the insults; “Big Bully! Ugly and Stupid!”
I felt something hit the back of my leg through the material of the suit. I didn’t think anything about it at first. I just assumed it was a loose phillibolt that was floating around with me, but then I felt it again, then again… and then again.
I kicked my legs to turn myself around, and I saw worms somehow launching themselves out of their pools of mucus and aiming their bodies towards me. I saw one aiming itself at the faceplate of my helmet. I tilted my head away at the very last minute. The worm bounced off harmlessly, leaving a splotch of red-tinged mucus where it slid off the plasteel.
“He killed him!” I heard an outraged voice squeak. “The big ugly stupid bully killed Phritss!”
“I gotta get rid of these things,” I breathed to myself. Unfortunately, the suit was set for send/receive, which was standard and would have made sense if I were working with someone else who was wearing a suit, but somehow it made it so the worms could hear what I was saying.
“What did he say?” I heard. “He’s trying to get rid of us!” came the reply.
“But… that’s genocide!” another voice squeaked.
All the squeaky voices soon picked up on the word. “Genocide! Genocide! GENOCIDE!”
I tried to ignore the voices as I moved from corner to corner, from wall to wall, pulling out globs of mucus and sending them floating towards the center of the hold.
The voices were getting louder. Shouts of protests. Mostly it was name calling. “Big Bully!” “Stupid and Ugly!”. But then, the protests had turned to chants. There was one I kept hearing again and again. “From the main hatch to the back bulkhead, the cargo bay shall be free!”
I was still getting hit now and then from worms launching themselves at me. Most of the time, it hurt the worms more than it did me. The ones who collided with my suit were usually okay, but the ones that launched themselves against my helmet suffered horrendous self-damage. A few more splattered themselves across my faceplate.
I tried to wipe away the mucus but it just seemed to make it worse. I could barely see and the cacophony of tiny voices was driving me insane.
When I figured I had enough of the worms pulled out of the corners and floating roughly in the middle of the cargo bay, I maneuvered myself back to the control panel.
The suit had a tether which I unlatched and hooked to a brace near the display screen. I took a last look around to make sure everything was tied down. Everything was, except for the giant glob of mucus and the container fill of mucus and worms. I was not concerned about sacrificing that. I could always get another one.
I hit the sequence on the display that would open the back hatch and I confirmed my lockout code. I held on waiting for the big hatch to open.
I could hear the voices louder now. All of them shouting. “What’s he doing? What’s going on? What…”
The main hatch unsealed and the air started to rush out. I could hear screams from the worms. I felt another wave of dizziness and nausea as I listened to the tiny voices screaming in terror as they were blown out of the hold.
The ball of mucus twisted and stretched as it slipped out of the hatch. The container in which I had placed many of them slid along the deck, then upended as it tumbled out into space. The screams were abruptly cut off as the atmosphere was jettisoned and the silence that followed it felt empty and cold. I closed my eyes and counted to thirty before reversing the sequence and closing the hatch.
As soon as the main hatch closed and the oxygen was hissing back into the bay, I turned the artificial gravity back on. As it was, I turned it on a bit too fast. I felt my body slammed to the deck,
and I lay there for a moment in pain.
Then something hit me. Hard. It hit me in the leg and I cried out at the unexpected pain. I heard something clunk to the deck, and when I looked around me, I saw a single phillibolt.
Something hit me again, even harder this time, right in the middle of my back. I heard it clunk to the floor and turned to see another phillibolt lying on the floor.
Suddenly, I was being pelted from all sides by the little bolts. I threw up my arms to protect my helmet, but several of them bounced off the hard shell. One of them bounced off the faceplate. The faceplate was encrusted with dried mucus so I couldn’t tell if it had left a crack in the plasteel.
The voices were loud in my ear now. Angry, tiny voices.
“You killed my family! My father! My mother! You monster! YOU MONSTER!”
I tried to run, but no matter where I moved to, I was still pelted by the phillibolts. I did not know how they managed to get hold of them, but at that moment, all I cared about was whether the suit would hold up against the sudden assault.
I dashed back to the control panel and quickly set the artificial gravity to zero. Phillibolts were still raining in my direction, and some of them hit me before I was able to bounce off the deck and up towards the ceiling.
Happy for the momentary reprieve, I looked around and saw that the bulkheads, the ceiling, and now the deck was crawling with worms. They were no longer within their pools of mucus, but crawling freely. Neither were they worms anymore. Their bodies now had appendages that they used to pull themselves around.
Some of them, realizing that the gravity was gone, started launching themselves towards me. I heard angry shouts as they launched. Instead of bouncing off harmlessly, though, these worms were able to grab on to the fabric of the suit.
I could feel them crawling all over me. I tried to pull them off, but I couldn’t get enough of a grip on their wriggly bodies.
“LET GO!” I screamed at them. “Get off! GET OFF! GET OUT OF MY CARGO BAY!”
“This is not your cargo bay!” I heard the tiny voices shouting, though they seemed to be growing deeper and louder now. “This is our cargo bay! THIS IS OUR CARGO BAY!”
I managed to pull a few of them off. I slapped at the others, trying to smack them off, or squish them so that they would stop crawling over me. I managed to use the helmet’s chin controls to shut off the external microphones.
In the blissful silence that followed, I was able to think. I was still trying to dislodge a few of the worms that were desperately holding on, but most had let go to tend the others that I’d wounded with my slaps.
I managed to turn myself around and push myself off a bulkhead. Only two of the most determined worms still held on. One of them crawled along my faceplate, and I slapped it off angrily. A trail of red now stained my view.
I managed to grab on to a bulkhead and tried to get my bearings. I could barely see, but I managed to figure out where I was. I spied an equipment locker and launched off the bulkhead towards it.
Inside the locker, I found a packet of solvent. I squeezed it directly onto the faceplate and tried wiping away the blood and the mucus with limited success.
It was enough, though.
If I squinted one eye, I was able to see the contents of the locker. All the items were magnetized, so they didn’t float away. I saw sealed containers filled with phillibolts, spare illumistrips, and more solvent. I also spied the welding torch. I hesitated for a moment, trying to decide whether it was a necessary escalation. I grabbed it anyway and another couple packets of solvent. I figured I needed a clearer view than I had at the moment, and it would give me time to think.
Then I felt a phillibolt hit me in the back.
I cried out loud in surprise, and more than a little pain. I had stayed in one place for too long. The worms had time to recalibrate their attack. I turned around and had to duck my head to avoid another phillibolt. Though the cargo bay was in zero g, the force with which the bolts were thrown was still the same. They could eventually crack the helmet or the faceplate, and even if they couldn’t penetrate the fabric of the suit, the bolts still hurt like a motherfucker when they connected.
I pushed off. Several bolts collided with the bulkheads and the deck, and then bounced off. The more bolts that got thrown… the more they bounced around with no gravity to slow them down… the more deadly it would be for me.
The bolts would also devastate any worms they hit, but the worms were much smaller targets than I was.
I looked around and saw that the hold was almost full of worms. They were floating around in the empty space… hundreds of them now… bigger…. uglier and much more aggressive.
I figured I didn’t have much of a choice. I fired up the welding torch.
Suddenly, everything around me caught fire. One of the solvent packages had been damaged and had leaked out. The solvent was highly flammable. I watched as the line of leaked solvent burst into globes of flame, catching several of the worms alight as it did.
I panicked and dropped the welding torch and the other solvent packet. Both of them caught fire. I kicked my legs and connected with a bulkhead, but the flames were still burning around me. I bounced off the deck and kicked off again. I collided with a bulkhead and rolled around.
I spied the control panel and scrabbled for it.
The flames should have used up all the oxygen and gone out, but the solvent was fueling them, turning into white hot incandescent globes of fire.
I should have activated the fire suppression system. I couldn’t see the screen well enough to find its icon, but the open hatch sequence was already keyed in. Panicked, I slapped at the activation control. It was the only hope my addled brain could latch onto.
I tried to reach my tether, but I couldn’t get it hooked on in time. The hatch opened and the air, the flames, the worms, and the phillibolts all got blown out into space.
I saw the length of the hold slip by me in a dizzying tumble and then I was out of the hatch and watching as the Alizarin Crimson got smaller through my mucus-encrusted faceplate.
A wave of dizziness and nausea gripped me all at once, and I passed out.
#
I woke up in the Crimson‘s sickbay which, I admit, was unexpected.
“Where am I?” I managed, my voice coming out as a croak.
“Where do you think you are?” I heard Doctor Barnes’ voice ask. “You’re in sickbay.”
“I mean…” I croaked. “Where are we? Where is the Crimson?”
“We’re docked over Abigail,” Barnes replied.
“How long have I been…?”
“Five days.”
Five days. We would have had to have taken on cargo by now. “What happened to the worms?”
I heard him sigh heavily. Then he walked over and adjusted the med-bed so that I was sitting up. “Don’t try to turn your head,” Barnes warned. “Your equilibrium hasn’t returned to normal yet.”
“My equilibrium?” I asked, looking at him just with my eyes. He sat in a chair beside the bed, facing me to make that easier for me to do. “So what happened to all the worms?”
“Just listen to me and don’t try to argue,” Barnes said. “There were no worms.”
I let out a pffft of disagreement. “Of course there were worms,” I protested. “I killed a lot of them. I tried to kill them all. If they’re all dead, then I am guilty of genocide. I killed…” At this point, I was getting agitated and twisting my head back and forth which, as Barnes warned me, was not a good idea. A wave of dizziness overtook me, and I thought I was going to heave. My stomach made an alarming noise and it felt very empty, so I suspected there was not enough in it to throw up.
“Stop moving,” Barnes warned. “Sit still. Close your eyes if you need to.”
I closed my eyes and the dizziness subsided. I opened them again slowly and saw that Barnes was holding out a container. In it was the first worm that I had found in the hold.
“This was the only worm there ever was,” he said.
I went to shake my head in disagreement, stopped myself, then locked eyes with Barnes. “There was an infestation.” I insisted.
“No, Evan,” Barnes said. “There wasn’t. This little guy…” he held up the container with the worm, still and unmoving. “…was the only one there ever was. He was in a container that was shipping from a medical research facility on Stepton to another one on Proviso. The container had several samples of Stepton sourfruit worms that had been genetically modified. It got damaged, and this little guy slipped out.”
“And then what?” I asked. “He… she… multiplied?”
“No,” Barnes said. “This particular strain produces a mucus that contains a chemical – a hallucinogenic chemical.”
“Hallucinogenic?” I said. “So…”
“You picked it up without gloves. The chemical absorbed into your skin. You imagined the whole infestation,” Barnes said. “The only place that was infested was…” Doctor Barnes pointed to my head.
I almost shook my head again. “That can’t be right,” I said. “They were real… they felt real. The things they said… awful things… I was…”
“You were tripping the entire time, Evan” Barnes said. “You convinced all of us that there was an infestation, but when we finally got into the cargo hold, all we found was solvent and burn marks. Not a single worm.”
“They went out the entry hatch,” I said. “So did I. How did you get me back?”
“Franklin was concerned when you vented the hold the first time. He tried to get in through the main hatch, but it automatically locked when you set the system ready to unlatch the grapples. He and Sri suited up to see if they could get in through the cargo access. When you opened the back hatch the second time, they saw you shoot out. Franklin had a spool tether on his suit. He managed to catch up with you and latch on. Sri pulled you both back.”
“Huh,” I said, sitting back and going over the last day and a half in my mind. “Huh,” was all I could think to say again.
“Yeah,” Barnes said, nodding in agreement. “Huh, indeed.”
“So who supervised loading the cargo bay when we arrived at Abigail?” I asked.
“Captain Boris had to,” Barnes said. “He conscripted Hein and Franklin to help, but he still had to do all the paperwork himself. Needless to say, he’s not happy with you.”
“Huh,” I said again. I lay back and thought about everything.
I could hear someone else in the sickbay, breathing raggedly and somewhat loudly, “Am I still hallucinating?” I asked.
“No,” Barnes said. “The company that owned the worm assured me that the hallucinatory effects were temporary.”
“But I hear breathing…”
“Yeah,” Barnes said. “That’d be Cord.”
“Cord?” I said. “What happened to him?”
Barnes took a breath. “He was upset that he wasn’t able to get to Abigail ahead of schedule. We lost time trying to rescue you. He lost his bet, but he went for breakfast at Montague’s anyway. Turns out they got a shipment of bad eggs. He’s sleeping off the food poisoning now.”
“Oh, shit,” I said. “I guess he’s pissed at me too?”
“Pretty much everyone is,” Barnes admitted. “But they’ll get over it. You weren’t in your right mind.”
This time, I did shake my head, and that brought on another wave of dizziness. “That’s no excuse for wiping out an entire species of sentient worms, just because their homeland was our cargo hold.”
I had done exactly that, I realized, and the horror of it overwhelmed me. I felt tears streaming from under my closed lids. “Families,” I breathed. “Children… parents… grandparents… I wiped them all out just to protect the sovereignty of a cargo hold.”
Barnes furrowed his brow. “Again… none of that actually happened… it was all in your…” He sat back and shook his head. “Never mind,” he said. “I’m not dealing with this. I’m gonna give you a sedative.”
Before I could protest, he pricked me with a needle. As the blackness took me over, I remember hoping that I could reconcile the fact that none of it was actually real.
But it didn’t feel that way.
END
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