Kudzu, Chapter 48

Tags

book 6, kudzu, novel

Kudzu, a Novel

Chapter 48

 

“All right,” Ash said, “when I said ‘you can say that again’? That didn’t mean you could say it again.”

Slim looked up at him with that stupid raccoon smile. “Then why’d you say it?”

“Say what?” a voice said from the other side the chamber.

“Colleen!”

Slim bounded across the ossuary, heedless of the braided bones that clattered underfoot.

Ash followed more hesitantly. The room was a maze of alabaster structures, and the floor itself was series of bone foot-bridges raised a bit above the natural floor of kudzu vines. The bones were too small to be human. Ash guessed they were cat legs or something, woven into a sort of carpet with kudzu creepers, and then suspended over the natural floor with what he hoped were thicker vines.

Someone clearly had too much time on her hands.

Colleen knelt down to hug Slim as he dashed toward her, but seemed to get distracted, glancing up just as Slim reached her. The two of them went down in a tumble of fur and limbs.

She’d just seen the centerpiece of the ossuary, Ash figured. The display of human skulls was a grim reminder that they were all skating just ahead of death, and had been for the past sixty-five years. And death didn’t care who you were, or how old you were. With Ash’s luck, lately, old fart Jaworsky’d outlive the lot of them.

Ash stepped out onto the macabre footbridge. The bones shifted under his feet and Ash froze. His stomach lurched. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply through his nose, and when his gut calmed, he tried again.

And tasted acid.

He stepped back quickly, off the bone bridge and onto solid kudzu.

“I’ll, uh, I’ll wait over here.”

“Chickenshit.”

Michael’s voice. Ash could see his head visible over the elaborate bone structures, standing in the doorway on the other side of the chamber. Asshole. Didn’t see him rushing out into the middle of the ossuary, either.

Still, it was a bad way to start a reunion. He bit back the retort half-formed on his lips. It tasted like venom as he swallowed it.

“Guilty as charged,” he said.

“There’s a surprise,” Michael said.

“Fuck you,” Slim snapped, finally untangled from Colleen’s limbs. “That chickenshit went space-walking without a tether to save my life, so you got something to say to him? You say it to my face first.”

Slim was turned toward Michael, and Ash couldn’t see his face. But he could imagine it. Stupidly, he felt tears fill his eyes. He turned away and brushed them away with his sleeve.

He heard movement behind him, the clatter of bone against bone under a tentative tread. He flinched at Michael’s hand on his shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” Michael said.

Ash searched his face for any hint of sarcasm. He found none. He nodded.

“Thanks.”

Michael squeezed his shoulder and let go.

“Yeah, so I seriously hope they’re all coming this way,” he said with a shudder, “because I sure as hell don’t want walk back out into that shit.”

~

Amelia left her space suit out in the hallway.

Without power, the interior of Beagle, shielded from the Sun’s rays by the bulk of the kudzu plant and the shadow of the Earth, was getting a bit chilly. But she’d been in contact with the hand-things while wearing it, and there were enough metals and polymers in the suit that she had to assume it was infected.

Because that’s what it was. She was sure of it. Some sort of non-organic infection, or colonization, that had gotten into the ship somehow. They’d probably picked it up around Triton, or maybe even on the way out. And now they’d brought it back with them.

“So, what do you see?” Susan’s voice came from the other side of the med-lab door, from the radio in her suit.

“It looks okay,” Amelia shouted. “No sign of infestation up here.”

“Good. Grab what we need and get your ass back here.”

But it wasn’t that easy. The medical equipment they needed to treat Jaworsky, and possibly any other survivors for as long as they were stuck up here, was prime feeding material for the creatures that had taken over the ship. From what she could see, the more intricate and delicate the instrumentation, the more easily it was subsumed into the creatures’ internal structures. And medical devices were the very definition of intricate and delicate.

And of course, she was working in the dark.

She was wearing her goggles, of course. She prayed they weren’t infected. Or if they were, that she could keep from transferring the infection to the equipment.

Some of it, of course, was already packaged and sterile. The equipment that wasn’t, she wrapped first in gauze, then plastic. It all went into two large plastic bags, which Amelia then wrapped in several layers of cotton sheets. Enough, she hoped, to create a physical barrier against both macro and microscopic versions of the Jaworsky-hand things.

“I’m leaving my suit behind,” she told Susan, who protested. “Too great a chance of infection,” she continued. “We need the meds more than we need my suit. I hope.”

Climbing with the two large packs presented a more significant problem than she’d expected. Together, they were more than twice her mass. She ended up going back for another bedsheet, which she tore into strips to weave into improvised ropes. Then, with the bags attached to loops that went over her shoulders and chest, and strapped to her hips, she started to climb.

Thankfully, it became easier as she progressed. She was able to launch herself up past spots of obvious Jaworsky-hand infection, catching herself on rungs like an acrobat in the low gravity. By the time she got back to Susan and Jaworsky, she was mostly recovered from the exertion at the beginning of her climb.

“Ditch the suit,” she said to Susan. “Jaworsky’s, too. I don’t want anything infecting this stuff. It may be the only medical gear we have for a long time.”

“Gotcha,” Susan said. She stripped off her suit and began pulling off Jaworsky’s.

Amelia frowned at Susan. “Get rid of anything metal. Belt buckles. Zippers. Buttons.”

“What? You mean, take my pants off?”

Amelia nodded.

“What about your hat?”

Amelia pulled off her hat. She sighed, then threw it deep into the depths of the Beagle.

“That’s my favorite hat,” she said.

Once they had created as close to a sterile environment as they could, they unpacked what they needed.

“The I.V. won’t work without gravity,” Susan said. “We need either gravity or power for the pump, or it won’t work.”

“Let’s get the stump cauterized first, so we can get the tourniquet off him. Afterwards, maybe I can rewire things so we can get the pump working.”

Susan examined the cautery tool and took a deep breath. She looked pale. “Okay,” she said.

The end of the tool heated until it glowed red. Susan lined it up with one of the torn arteries in Jaworsky’s stump. She closed her eyes as she pressed the heated metal to the wound. The stench of cooking meat filled the air.

“Oh, God,” Susan said. She swallowed bile.

“No puking,” Amelia said. “Remember, puke and zero-G don’t mix.”

“Fucking hell, I missed the vein. I…”

“Give me that,” Amelia said.

Susan nodded faintly. “I think I need to sit down.”

You do that, Amelia thought. She cupped Jaworsky’s elbow under her foreleg to hold the stump still, and pressed the metal to the vein.

“Mmmm, bacon,” she said.

“Fuck,” Susan said, her voice weak. Then she was scrambling away from the improvised surgery, rustling through the foliage beyond the air lock door. Amelia could hear her heaving.

“That was for you, ya big lunk,” Amelia said to Jaworsky. “Now you got no choice but to wake up, so I can tell you all about it.”

~

Eric Tharp was rotating slowly in the air. It was a slow rotation, maybe a couple hours for a complete rotation. He’d turned enough now that he could see the massive dent the Beagle had made in the giant chamber, and the wide open docking bay.

There was a sudden spew from the docking bay of what looked to Tharp to be small particles — gravel, or rocks, or something. Like there had been an explosion inside that expelled shrapnel through the air lock.

The chamber was so big it was hard to get a sense of scale. It probably wasn’t gravel. It was probably a lot bigger, but he was too far to see what it was.

Whatever had just happened, it was now more certain than ever that Susan and Jaworsky and Amelia were dead, and he was drifting alone with his guilt. At least until Michael and the others rescued him.

An hour later, he was facing the other direction, and drifted into a more humid pocket of air. Moisture beaded up on his suit, and on the glass of his helmet.

He licked off what had accumulated, quenching a thirst he’d been unaware of.

Hopefully there would be more humidity. There was no telling how long he’d be floating there.

End of Book VI

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Kudzu, Chapter 47

Tags

book 6, kudzu, novel

Kudzu, a Novel

Chapter 47

 

It was one of the Jaworsky-hands. Even in the darkness at the edge of her light, Amelia was sure of that. It hadn’t noticed her, though, so she crept closer, as quietly as she could.

Yes, definitely one of the hands. It was facing away from her, supported by three jointed finger-legs. Its eyestalks were focused on whatever its other two fingers were doing. Its long tail was curled around its body, and seemed to be gathering bits of material and scooping it in front of the hand.

Amelia didn’t dare move any closer, for fear of spooking it. After all, she was the shucker of Jaworsky-hands, and she didn’t know how far that knowledge had distributed among these creatures. Instead, she pulled the goggles on her aviator cap down over her eyes.

Yes, Amelia loved her hats. She’d collected dozens in the few years she had before they shipped out. Yes, they were fabulous and decorative. But they weren’t just fabulously decorative. They were also fabulously useful. At least in the case of her favorite hat — her aviator cap.

She increased the magnification on the goggles until the Jaworsky-hand came into focus, and increased the light-enhancement. It wasn’t quite the same as seeing things under normal lights — colors were still muted, and unless she went overboard on the brightening, which just made everything look blown out, it was just a less dark version of dusk.

But enough to see details.

The Jaworsky-hand was perched on an open control panel, surrounded by dials and digital displays, knobs and switches and buttons. The open panel exposed a number of circuit boards.

The circuit boards were crawling with worms.

No. Not worms. Little bits of circuitry. Transistors. Resistors. Microchips of various sizes, and the busses and cables that ran between them. They were all alive, and moving.

It wasn’t just them, either. It was also bits of silicon, plastic keys, LED lights. The whole damn control panel was crawling with worms made out of itself.

And the Jaworsky-hand?

It was scooping the worms together, pressing them into each other until they mated and merged. Forming a shape.

Teaching the things how to become something bigger, more mobile.

Turning them into another hand.

As Amelia watched, more bits of plastic and metal fell away from the structure of the control panel to become more worms. More inanimate matter became animate.

Amelia turned on her radio.

“Susan, we’ve got a bigger problem than we thought.”

~

The Ossuary.

Slim hadn’t been able to bring himself to ask the cat lady why there was an ossuary. Or exactly how she had managed to construct it.

Or where she had gotten the bones.

He paced circles around Ash.

“Cut it out,” Ash said. “You’re making me nervous.”

“It makes me nervous that we don’t know a damned thing about the cat lady, or why she’s here, or why…”

“Look, we should just be glad she was here to save us from the kudzu.”

“Which I’d gotten most of the way free of before she showed up.”

“‘Oh, it bit me,'” Ash mimed. He waved his hands in the air. “I remember a lot of screaming.”

“That was you. And it did bite me.” Slim pointed to his bandaged leg. “And just because you just got laid for the first time in… for the first time, doesn’t mean that you can just trust her. I mean, the ossuary, for fuck’s sake. Who does that?”

“You’re exaggerating. And it wasn’t my first time.”

“I’m not. I’m telling you, she has a room filled with bones. A big room. I saw it, while you were playing grateful man-whore for our hostess.”

“A graveyard, you mean. And you should know better than to wander off alone.”

“I should’a just sat there and watched you two monkeys go at it? I hate to break it to you, but you primates ain’t exactly the sexiest creatures out there. The only reason I came back so fast was after seeing the bones, I wanted to make sure all that screaming I heard wasn’t you being dismembered.”

Ash reddened. “Yeah, right. So show me the spooky bones.”

Slim led the way through the twisting corridors, pointing out the important landmarks. “Toilet’s through there,” and “Down that tunnel on the left is a kitchen. I think it used to be part of a space station. The refrigerator is full of fish.”

After about twenty minutes’ walk, the winding tunnel widened and ended. A large iris-portal dominated the wall.

“This is it,” Slim said. He stepped out of the way and nudged Ash forward. “You go first.”

Ash pressed his palm against the twisted vines, and they slid against each other, opening to a large, dimly lit chamber.

Ash took step, then stopped.

There were bones. Lots of them. Piles of them. Towers and ziggurats reaching for the ceiling. Statues built of bones tied together with dried kudzu vine and tendons. Bones hung from above in macabre mobiles. Something that looked uncomfortably like an altar constructed entirely of bone filled the middle of the room.

Most of the bones came from cats and fish.

Not all of them. On a backdrop woven from of hundreds of thousands of fish ribs, four adult human skulls framed another, that of a child.

“Jesus.”

“Are his bones in there, too?” Slim said. He sat down Ash’s foot. “Wouldn’t surprise me. But then, I got bit by a plant, so not much surprises me anymore.”

“This isn’t the time for jokes,” Ash said. “Some day that’ll be us up there.”

“Gotta get your laughs where you can, when you can,” Slim said. “While you still can.”

“Yeah,” Ash said. “You can say that again.”

Kudzu, Chapter 46

Tags

book 6, kudzu, novel

Kudzu, a Novel

Chapter 46

 

Susan heard a voice screaming as the disembodied mechanical hands surged over every surface, scuttling like angry scorpions over Jaworsky’s inert body, fingers clicking, tails thrashing. Toward her. When the glass of her helmet fogged up with spittle and breath, she realized the voice she was hearing was hers.

What she wasn’t hearing was Amelia.

The onrushing wave of Jaworsky-hands swept toward her, filling her vision with wriggling mechanical digits and metal palms. She closed her eyes and imagined them tearing at her, ripping first through her suit, then through her skin, tearing the flesh from her body in finger food sized strips.

And then they were on her, slapping against her, crawling over her feet and legs, swarming over her body.

Susan clenched her jaw against the anticipated pain, but it never came. Just the sensation of hundreds of spiders scampering over her, around her, pushing off against her back as they launched themselves through the open door.

“‘Melia?” she asked. Amelia didn’t respond, but now that Susan had stopped screaming, she could hear Amelia’s breath in her earpiece, rapid and panicked.

Susan swiped two of the hands off the faceplate of her helmet, brushed more off her shoulders. There were fewer of the things now, the torrent of mechanical creatures slowing to a stream.

Amelia was curled into a ball, spinning slowly in the air.

Susan shifted Jaworsky’s body out of the way. He spun slowly and drifted away from the doorway.

“Amelia?”

She looked so small. So very small.

There were only a few dozens of the Jaworsky-hands now, still coming out of the darkness of the ship. They skittered across the walls and out the door, escaping into the verdant green of the kudzu satellite.

Susan reached for Amelia, pulled her close. Wrapped arms around her. Susan could feel Amelia’s tiny body trembling through the fabric of her suit.

“Are you hurt? ‘Melia, take a deep breath. Are you hurt?”

“I…”

Amelia shifted in Susan’s arms.

“I don’t think so.” Amelia straightened, turning until Susan could see her face. Her eyes were red-rimmed, and there was a bit of froth flecking her lips. “I thought they were coming for me. Because I killed two of them.”

“I think they sacrificed two of them so we could open the door for them,” Susan said. “Other than that, I don’t think they care about us one way or another. I’m not even sure they recognize us as sentient.”

Amelia glanced at the two split-shelled hands wired into the circuit board.

“I think maybe they do,” she said. “How’s Jaworsky?”

Jaworsky had floated off into the darkness. They could see the shadow of his form turning slowly in the gravity-free chamber.

“Fuck, I forgot about Jaworsky.”

Susan clomped on magnetic shoes toward him. He floated just out of her reach.

“Hold me out,” Amelia suggested.

She stretched out at the end of Susan’s reach and managed to get ahold of Jaworsky’s foot with both forepaws.

“Got him,” she said. “Pull us in slowly.”

Jaworsky was still breathing, but he didn’t look good.

“We really need to deal with this now,” Susan said.

“How? I don’t think he’s strong enough to survive for any length of time in a partial vacuum.”

“I have a feeling that’s not a problem anymore,” Susan said. She shrugged and reached for her helmet. “Let’s find out.”

“No!” Amelia shouted.

Susan hesitated.

“If something goes wrong,” Amelia said, “I may not be big enough to wrestle your helmet back onto you in time. I’ll do it.”

Amelia held her breath as she unclipped her helmet. When she broke the seal, there was no puff of escaping air, which was a good sign.

She took a tentative breath, then another, before breathing in deeply.

“Well?” Susan said.

“It’s good,” Amelia said. “It tastes like life.”

#

Jaworsky, on the other hand, wasn’t good.

With the power out, and the elevators non-functional, there was no way Amelia and Susan could get him to the medical center. And they’d be working in the dark, anyway. At least in the doorway to what had been the docking bay there was kudzu-generated light.

Amelia scrambled through one of the coon-holes that ran parallel to the elevator shaft. As she moved, the slow spin of ship — and of the plant the ship was now part of — introduced gravity, though not as quickly or as strongly as when the Beagle had been under its own power.

Made sense, Amelia figured. The kudzu mass covered a much larger volume than the Beagle, and if you wanted to make sure your outer regions weren’t afflicted with crushing centrifugal forces, you had to reduce the rate of rotation accordingly.

Still, at some point along the trek, a human would have had to turn around not to pitch headfirst down the hole. How stupid was that?

“How did you creatures become the dominant life form, anyway?” she asked.

“Big brains,” Susan said. “Very convoluted.”

“That doesn’t help if you’re always falling on your heads. How’s Jaworsky doing?”

“Pretty much the same. The tourniquet is holding, but he lost a lot of blood. You remember the list I gave you?”

“Yeah. Bandages, antibiotics, IV fluids and needles.”

“And that sealant shit.”

Amelia shivered. She’d seen “that sealant shit” used once, when her partner on the maintenance crew had lost his legs in an accident, severed above the knees in one of the ventilation turbines, because Amelia didn’t have the mass or strength to pull him away fast enough. She’d had to apply it herself, before he bled out, even though it guaranteed that he’d lose another few centimeters of tissue if he wanted to be fitted with prosthetics. It was like foaming spray insulation, but it generated enough heat to cauterize a severe wound. She remembered the smell of burning flesh and Joe’s screams. After that, she’d worked alone.

Not that it mattered. Joe died anyway. She’d found his body still in his bed, eyes bugged out from the sudden vacuum as the explosion ripped holes in the hull. Unlike the others, she hadn’t slept the whole way back to Earth. In her waking time, she had explored the damaged ship, trying to figure out what had caused the main engines to explode.

She hadn’t been able to determine the cause, but she found the bodies. There was a notebook in one of her pouches, in which she had written down their names, and where she found them, and everything she could remember about them.

Her vision blurred suddenly, and she angrily brushed tears from her eyes. They were dead and gone. What mattered now was surviving, and making sure that everyone who was left did, too.

She focused on where she was putting her paws.

And stopped.

In the darkness at the edge of the light cast by her LED headlamp, something was moving.

Amelia held her breath, and crept forward.

Kudzu, Chapter 45

Tags

book 6, kudzu, novel

Kudzu, a Novel

Chapter 45

 

Eric Tharp had been daydreaming when he heard the voices. Or maybe really dreaming. The chamber in which he floated was so vast, so lush, it really was like something out of dream. Where the outside of the kudzu had been sprinkled with shiny black-and-silver leaves that simultaneously sparkled and sucked light, the inside was dotted with the opposite — softly luminescent leaves that filled the chamber with a pulsing, green glow. Over the hours, the lights had become hypnotic. Combine that with the fact that he’d started rationing his oxygen, and things were getting kind of trippy.

Which probably wasn’t a good sign.

But it was better than thinking about what an utter failure he’d been. He’d killed them all. First Ash and Slim, then Michael and Colleen, who had surely asphyxiated by now. And then he’d run in abject terror from whatever the fuck thing Jaworsky’s hand had become, dooming everyone else in the process.

Including himself. Without the ship, he was as good as dead.

Maybe it would be best to just take his helmet off now. Get it over with.

Because his hallucinations were haunting him.

“That’s just not right,” Slim’s ghost was saying. “That’s some creepy shit, there.”

Michael’s ghost replied, “I keep feeling like I should know what the word means, like I’ve heard it before, or read it somewhere.”

“Probably better that way,” Slim’s ghost said.

“Colleen doesn’t know what it means, either.”

“An ossuary—”

Another voice broke into Tharp’s hallucination, cutting off Slim’s ghost, a voice he’d never heard before.

“Well, don’t go spoiling the surprise for them, dearie.”

Ossuary? Tharp had been to the ossuary outside of Prague, back when he was a student, traveling for the summer. A church built of human bones. He’d had nightmares about that place for years, finding himself in it, and all the skulls had his friends and family’s faces superimposed on them. He’d never been able to watch zombie movie without imagining a real person, full of hopes and dreams and love and heartbreak, behind each decomposing face.

“Slim? Michael? Am I dreaming this?”

“Tharp?” Michael said. “Goddamn, it’s good to hear your voice.”

Tharp heard a woman’s voice in the distance. Away from the microphone. Colleen’s voice.

“Hah, that’s a first.”

“For the record, Captain, I’m glad to to hear from you, too.” Slim’s voice came high and fast in raccoony excitement.

“I don’t understand,” Tharp said. “How is this possible? There’s no way your oxygen would hold out this long.”

“Are you kidding me?” the unfamiliar voice said. “What do you think the point of growing kudzu in space was? It’s a plant. It produces oxygen. That’s what plants do.”

Tharp’s brain stuttered, trying to grasp what was happening. He felt like he should respond, but what do you say to that?

“What about the others?” Slim asked. “Amelia? Jaworsky? Talk to me.”

Tharp bit his lip. He tasted blood. This wasn’t a conversation he wanted to have. This was a conversation he couldn’t have. This time, there was no hesitation. He pulled his helmet off in a quick movement. If luck was with him, he was in a vacuum, and would die a quick death without ever having to face the consequences of his cowardice.

Luck wasn’t with him, and he gasped, lightheaded in the heady, rich air.

~

“So here’s the plan,” Amelia said, half her body still inside the wall. “These little guys are mechanical, yeah, but they’re not really put together in any rational sense. They’re not built, not motorized, per se. They’re mobile and self-propelling and all that, but there’s nothing I can think of that allows for fiber optics to move independently. Fiber is just a thin strip of glass in a plastic sheath. No moving parts.”

“Tell that to these fuckers,” Susan said. “I can’t get them to stop staring at me.”

“Yeah, so something else is going on there, and I haven’t got a clue what it is. But. They’re able to generate a magnetic field that lets them stick to metal surfaces. Which means—”

“An electricity source. Brilliant. So there’s a battery in there.”

“Or a tiny generator. Either one works for our purposes.”

Susan looked at the creatures she was holding. They were… hand sized. “Not to rain on your parade,” she said, “but there’s no way these things have enough power to open that door.”

Amelia extracted herself from the wall.

“Don’t need it to open the door. That’s what you’re for.”

She returned several tools to her belt pouch and rummaged for something else.

“This will do,” she said, extracting a heavy wrench. “All I need is enough power to reset the locking codes. Then we can manually override the door. Give me a hand, here.”

“Um. My hands are kinda full right now.”

Amelia’s laughter was halfway between a bark and a chitter. “No, I mean give me one of those hands.”

The Jaworsky-hand struggled as Amelia braced it on its side against the wall. She swung the wrench hard against the base of the thumb. Susan winced at the sharp crack. Her own thumb ached in sympathetic pain.

Amelia shucked the hand quickly, leveraging it open with a screwdriver and popping the back of the hand off. The hand went into spasms. Amelia poked at its innards.

The other one, the one Susan was still holding, started struggling frantically, eyestalks thrashing. It clicked its fingers together, until Susan used her free hand to hold them still.

“Yeah, this should work,” Amelia said.

She extracted some pre-stripped wires from her pack, jabbing them one by one into the guts of the hand, and then twisting them tight.

She repeated the process with the second hand, though it struggled more strenuously than the first. Its fiber-stalk eyes searched wildly into the darkness behind them, as if it was waiting — hoping — for something. For rescue? Susan shined her light out into the darkness, but the other hands were all keeping well away from them. It took Amelia three strikes with the wrench this time, with all the squirming the hand was doing, to crack it open.

Once the two hands were gutted and wired together, Amelia crawled back into the access panel with two of the wires.

“Moment of truth,” she said.

There was a spark, and a sizzle. Both hands jerked, and then became immobile. Something inside the wall clicked.

“Holy shit,” Amelia said. “That actually worked. I can’t believe that actually fucking worked!”

“So now what?” Susan asked.

“What are the hands doing?” Amelia asked, as she extracted herself from the wall.

“Nothing. I think they’re dead.”

“No, I mean the others.”

“Just…” Susan frowned. “Nothing. They’re just watching us.”

“Eh. It could be worse. Let’s get this door open.” Amelia handed Susan a massive flathead screwdriver. “This is probably more useful than plastic piping.”

Susan fit the head into the seam of the door and tried to twist. Nothing. She couldn’t get it deep enough to get it to catch. Amelia handed her the wrench, which she used as a hammer. Was it…? Yes, it was open, just a crack. A soft, green glow shone through it.

There was a sound, coming from all around them. The click of thousands of little fingers on metal. Susan swung her light in a wide arc, but no, the hands were still keeping their distance.

She pushed the screwdriver deeper and levered the door open further. Amelia jammed the PVC tubing in the gap and pulled at it. Susan gripped the edge of the door, got her foot into the gap, and strained against it.

Slowly, it slid open, until the gap was wide enough to fit Jaworsky through. Susan’s muscles screamed at her, and she let her body sag in relief.

It was done. They were free. On the other side of the door was a vast, green forest that had once been the Beagle’s docking bay. Beyond that, the kudzu opened into a wide cavern. Luminous leaves were scattered throughout the darker foliage, creating the eerie, pulsing glow that streamed through the open door.

Fascinating, Susan thought.

“Oh, fuck,” Amelia said.

“What?”

Susan followed the cone of Amelia’s headlamp. Back into the depths of the ship.

Dark shapes moved toward them. Hundreds. Thousands. They flowed like a sea, scuttling across the walls and launching themselves through the air, converging from all sides until the sheer mass of them obscured all vision.

Kudzu, Chapter 44

Tags

book 6, kudzu, novel

Kudzu, a Novel

Chapter 44

 

When Amelia went off hunting the Jaworsky-hand knockoffs, she had turned off her helmet lamp. Then she launched herself into the dark. Susan heard the scampering of little fingers like thousands of centipedes, heard a crash and scuffle, and concentrated on her assigned job in an attempt not to think about it.

Susan had taken apart and reassembled countless computers and tablets in her time, mucking about in hardware so miniaturized that it required a jeweler’s glass to see the slots in the tiny screws. But she’d always had gravity as an invisible helper: the screws came out of the equipment and went into a bin on her desk, and they stayed there until she needed them.

Here, everything acted as if it had a mind of its own, the tensile strength of the materials interacting with the inertial mass of other materials in calculable ways, if you know what values to plug into the equations. Without those values, Susan found them completely unpredictable.

Susan had had a short-lived affair with a mechanic, when she was still in grad school. Helene, whose calloused, dirty fingers had taken her places she didn’t know existed. Susan still couldn’t remember what she’d said, one drunken evening, that caused Helene to walk out of the bar. She’d left a dozen voice-mails before getting a curt text back.

I can’t be with someone who can’t see that people can be smart in different ways. Don’t write back.

Of course she wrote back: Stupid cunt. And she’d gone back to boys who were all too happy to worship her, body and mind.

Jaworsky or Amelia, or even Slim, could have taken apart the panel with their eyes closed. They’d know instinctually what the materials would do. They wouldn’t need the math; they’d be able to calculate it by sight and feel.

Half the screws had floated off into the darkness. One of the wires had pulled loose when the panel twisted, and she couldn’t figure out where it was supposed to connect.

“I think I fucked up,” she said.

Amelia’s voice came through her earbuds. “You’re only human.”

When Amelia drifted back to the loading bay airlock, her eyes glittered metallic green in the darkness, reflecting the light of Susan’s helmet lamp before any of the rest of her was visible.

“Got two of them,” she said. She held them out to Susan.

“I don’t want them,” Susan said, instinctively backing away. The damn things creeped her out, with their segmented fingers and waving eyestalks.

“Fine, I’ll hold them. You rewire the airlock.”

Susan snatched one of the hands away from Amelia. She held it up in front of her helmet. Its fingers wiggled as it tried to twist free, and its eyestalks waved, as if it was surveying everything. Plotting. She turned the Jaworsky-hand away from her, but the eyes curled around to face her.

“How do I get it to stop staring at me?” she asked.

“Eat its eyes,” Amelia said.

Susan didn’t realize she’d made a noise until she heard Amelia laugh.

“You don’t actually want to do that,” Amelia said. “Fiber optics are as high in glass as they are in fiber.”

“Give me that,” she said, snatching the other hand away from the raccoon.

Amelia immediately turned her attention to the control panel. She pulled some tools from her belt and placed them against the wall. They stayed there.

“They’re magnetized?” Susan said.

“Uh, yeah. Of course.”

“Oh. You could have told me. I almost lost your screwdriver.”

Amelia pulled her head out of the hole behind the access panel and peered at Susan. “It’s been a legal standard for spacecraft maintenance for at least fifty years,” she said. “Or a hundred fifteen now, I guess.”

“Yeah, well, I work on computers, and we don’t trust magnets.”

“Whatever,” Amelia said, and stuck her head back into the access panel.

Susan resisted the urge to pull her tail.

~

Colleen watched the old woman watch Michael as he scrambled to get his pants up from around his ankles. She wiped her hand on Michael’s shirt and handed it to him.

She was, Colleen decided, more weathered than old. A rough life aging her faster than time. Her skin and hair said she was in her late forties or early fifties. Her eyes proclaimed her infinitely older.

Which also meant that the woman’s parents had probably been in kindergarten when the Beagle had departed Earth’s orbit for Triton.

The woman’s clothes were a patchwork quilt of fabrics, tattered and threadbare, but clean. She’d obviously stopped brushing her hair years ago; it was matted and bedraggled, too straight and thin to make proper dreadlocks like Michael’s, so it ended up looking more like a nest made by a schizophrenic bird.

“I’m Colleen,” she said.

“Yes, I know,” the woman said. She crossed her arms and leaned against wall, watching Michael with hungry eyes.

“You’re very rude,” Colleen said.

“Am I?” The woman laughed. “You hear that, Astrid? I’m rude. Proud of me now?”

Colleen looked around. She didn’t see anyone else.

“Is that your name? Astrid?”

“My name? Gods, no. I may have learned how to be rude, but I’ll never be that manipulative and narcissistic. No, no, I’ve given up on names. No need for them up here. You’ll see, when you’ve been here long enough. No need for them at all.”

~

It was hard to tell if the woman was just being deliberately evasive, or if she was insane. As they walked through the winding passageways to the kudzu, she and Colleen maintained a conversation that could hardly be called a dialogue. More like two verbal streams that occasionally intersected.

Michael followed the two women, and worked on getting his radio wired back into his space suit’s battery pack. As much as possible, he’d been using power drawn from the kudzu lamp-leaves, to conserve the battery. But this woman made him uncomfortable, the way she had stared at him, and he wanted to touch base with Slim — and even Ash — to find out more.

The radio popped and hissed as it came online.

“Hey, Slim, you there?”

No response.

They climbed a set of stairs that wound like RNA into a large chamber. The woman led them along the wall for a short distance, and then into another twisting corridor.

“Michael?” Slim sounded out of breath. “You still there?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m here.”

“Sorry, I was playing with the kitties.”

“Playing… I hope that’s not a euphemism.”

“What? Ew. They’re animals, for fuck’s sake.”

Michael’s face burned. He tried to think of a way to make what he’d said less offensive. There really wasn’t.

“So, we’re following the lady you sent to find us.”

“Yeah? So what do you think? She’s a piece of work, isn’t she? You fucked her yet?”

“Have I what?” Michael nearly tripped over his own feet.

The woman glanced back at him. “You okay back there?”

“I’m fine. Got Slim on the radio.”

“Oh yeah? I love that little guy. He’s just adorable.” The woman stepped in so she could speak into the radio microphone. “Don’t you worry, Slim,” she said. “You’ll be seeing your friends in no time.

She stood way too close, her breast pressing against Michael’s arm, her thigh against his. Her breath against Michael’s neck. She smelled like sex.

Of course, Michael probably also smelled like sex, but why? No, he didn’t want to ask. He wasn’t going to ask.

“Are we going stand here gossiping,” Colleen asked, “or can we keep moving?” She looked perturbed, Michael thought.

What did I do this time?

No, too easy to fall into old habits, old patterns. Taking the blame for other people’s behavior. He pushed passed the woman.

“This way?” he asked.

The woman nodded. “Yup. Straight ahead til you hit the ossuary.”

Ossuary?

“Oh man,” Slim said into Michael’s ear, “that’s just not right.”

Kudzu, Chapter 43

Tags

book 6, kudzu, novel

Kudzu, a Novel

Chapter 43

 

 

“I wish Jaworsky was awake,” Susan said.

Amelia bared her teeth. Jaworsky wasn’t awake, and wouldn’t be until they could get him some medical attention. Which meant he might never wake up. In the meantime, Susan was losing her shit, flailing ineffectively against the airlock door with a length of PVC piping.

In the meantime, the things in the shadows had come out of hiding. They crawled from behind crates, out of ventilation grills. They broke open access panels and crawled out of coon-holes. They gathered on the edge of visibility, creeping closer as their numbers grew.

They all looked like Jaworsky’s hand.

As they got closer, Amelia could make out more details. For the most part, they weren’t as slick or elegant as Jaworsky’s hand. They were constructed of all sorts of materials, pipes and springs and wires, metal plates and bits of fiber optic cable. No two the same, but all bearing a horrific similarity to Jaworsky’s mutinous appendage.

There were too many to count.

One of the hands sailed past, floating through the air right in front of them. Susan swung at it with the pipe. She missed. The thing followed them with fiber optic eyes as it went past and disappeared into the darkness.

“You tried the manual override?” Amelia said.

“For the thousandth time, yes.” Susan slammed her fist against the door. The sound rang dully. “Tharp must have gotten out before the power died, and left the other side open. We’re completely fucked.”

Amelia looked out at the sea of hands. Fiber optic eyestalks waved, fingers gestured. They crawled over each other like crabs.

Which were even tastier than cockroaches.

“Mmm, butter sauce,” she said.

“What?”

“They’re like crabs,” Amelia said. “Looks like they’ve magnetized the tips of their fingers. I wonder…”

“What?” Susan said, again.

“Shut up,” Amelia said. “I’m thinking.” She closed her eyes and envisioned wiring diagrams. Her fingers traced imaginary circuits in the air.

She grinned at Susan. “Yes, this might actually work.”

Amelia pulled a screwdriver and a Torx set from her belt pack and handed them to Susan.

“Here. Get this panel open for me. There are two sub-panels inside. Pull the top one out so the wires are exposed. Try not to break anything. I’ll be right back.”

“Where are you going?”

Amelia’s grin was feral. “Hunting crabs.”

~

Eric Tharp was beginning to regret his actions.

He’d gotten to the docking bay without difficulty, getting as far away as fast as possible from the horror that was Jaworsky’s hand. Odds were, by now the others were all dead, and him the only survivor.

Problem was, he wasn’t a survivor quite yet.

He’d opened the docking bay door without thinking. Without strapping himself down to anything.

The door had opened to the interior of a vast kudzu cavern. Air from inside the kudzu had rushed into the evacuated docking bay. Rushed in and swirled around, catching up everything that wasn’t strapped down. And then flinging it all out into the cavern.

Tharp had floated across the cavern for hours, watching the Beagle’s loading dock slowly diminish in the distance. Not getting appreciably closer to any of the other walls. It might be days at the rate he was going before he reached the other side.

Still, he was away from that thing.

He tried his radio again, just in case. Before, all he’d gotten was static. Nobody on the other side.

That didn’t mean anything. They could still be alive. The kudzu did strange things to radio signals. They’d seen that when Michael and Colleen had gone in earlier. For all he knew, they could still be alive, too. Alive and abandoned.

How do you apologize for abandoning someone?

How many people can you leave behind to die, and still be able to live with yourself?

Once again, all he got was static.

He exhaled in relief.

About an hour later, he drifted into an air current.

~

Colleen held two fingers up in front of Michael’s face.

“How many—”

“Two. How many times are you going to ask? My vision’s fine. I’m fine.” Michael slapped her hands away. The movement made him dizzy.

“You’re a bloody mess. Stop fighting and let me take care of you.”

Colleen tore a piece of her t-shirt off and wet it from her waterskin, the one without the fish. She dabbed at Michael’s face.

“You’re not going to stop, no matter what I say.”

“Nope. We’re going to be rescued soon. You want to look your best, don’t you?

“All right, fine.”

Colleen peeled his shirt off, got his legs untangled from his pants. She helped him lie back against the glass sphere. It looked like he was resting on infinity.

She washed the blood from his face and chest, and rinsed as much as she could from his dreaded locks.

“You’re going to need a proper bath,” she said.

“I’ll get right on that,” Michael said.

“Maybe stitches, too, if we can find a needle or something. There’s got to be some old stuff left behind in some of these satellites.”

Her hand lingered in the coarse hairs on his chest. Then she slipped it down his belly to wrap around his cock. It swelled at her touch.

“What are you doing?”

“You can’t tell? Maybe you do have a concussion.”

“No, I mean, I thought…”

Colleen leaned forward to take one of his nipples between her teeth, and he groaned.

“The way I remember it,” she said, her hand working the supple flesh over its rigid core, “we were rudely interrupted, just before you were about to come. We’ll be reunited with Ash and Slim pretty soon, so who knows when we’ll have any privacy.”

“Colleen,” Michael said. His hand cupped her ass. Slid to her hip. His fingers dug into her flesh.

“Shush,” Colleen said. She kissed his chest and throat, sank teeth into his shoulder.

Michael’s cock jerked in her hand, spilled across his belly and coated her fingers.

“Oh, fuck,” Michael said. “Colleen, there’s some—”

Colleen touched a finger gently to his lips.

“Shush.”

“Yeah,” a voice said, coarse as used sandpaper. “You just keep doing what you’re doing. Don’t mind little old me.”

Kudzu, Chapter 42

Tags

book 6, kudzu, novel

Kudzu, a Novel

Chapter 42

 

In the years Susan had been on board, the central hub of the OPEV Beagle had been many things: utilitarian, annoying, spartan, cluttered, the morning commute. It was the necessary path from one part of the ship to any other part, and all wiring, ducts, power, and plumbing traversed this long, hollow tube. Over time, it also became a glorified storage closet, with boxes and crates filled with the detritus of various departments strapped to the wall anywhere it wasn’t in the way.

One thing it had never been was creepy, and it sure as hell had never been downright scary.

Not until the power failed, and all the lights went out.

Now, it was just her and Amelia, alone, dragging along a massive and unwieldy form that might be Jaworsky, or might be dead.

No, not entirely alone. There were sounds. The hull pinged and creaked. Things slithered across the outer hull. The horrifically profligate kudzu, she presumed. More frightening were the noises from within: the ticking of a thousand insectoid feet on metal. The sound was all around them, beneath the bulkheads and under their feet, like mice in the walls and rats in the hayloft, but somehow even more horrid.

The only light came from their helmet lamps — pallid, blue LEDs which were fine for illuminating whatever was immediately at hand, but did very little to cut the darkness. Even the ship’s emergency lighting had failed. The only one they’d seen clearly had been Jaworsky’s hand. The others must have been lying dormant, or at least quiet, until some signal that it was time to emerge.

Amelia turned her head, sweeping her lamp across the shadows.

“Fast little buggers,” she said.

“Did you see them? What are they?” Susan had her suspicions about the things, that they were bits of the ship that had gone rogue. But she needed to examine one more closely, and at this point her eyes hadn’t even adjusted to the dim light enough to see more than flickers in the dark. They moved too quickly to identify, skittering into the shadows, faster than her eyes could focus. There were plenty of places to hide.

“Dunno. They’re almost like cockroaches. Really big, juicy ones. It’s making me hungry.”

“Sometimes I forget you’re a raccoon,” Susan said.

“How’s Jaworsky?” Amelia asked.

Susan shined her light through the glass of Jaworsky’s helmet.

“Breathing,” she said. She squeezed Jaworsky’s empty left glove. It didn’t feel to her as if it was full of blood. Not that she really knew what that would feel like.

Susan’s fear was not that these cockroachy robot things would attack them. If her theory was correct, they had had plenty of time and opportunity to assault the organic life-forms — sixty-five years, at least, most of which the crew had been helpless in cryo. But they hadn’t.

No, her greatest fear now was that she had done a crap job of treating Jaworsky’s wound, and he’d bleed to death inside his suit. Her expertise was software — apps and operating systems — not hardware, and certainly not wetware. What the fuck did she know about dressing a severed limb?

“I hope the bandages hold,” she said. “I don’t think we’ll be able to help him in a vacuum.”

“It’s not,” Amelia said. “A vacuum, that is. Or we wouldn’t be hearing anything.”

Susan felt her face flush. She was supposed to be the smart one on the crew. Or what was left of the crew.

Which was down to three. One of whom might be dying.

“Oh,” she said.

“Pressure’s increasing, too,” Amelia said. “That’s why the sounds are getting louder.”

“I’ll still feel better if we can get the fuck off this ship before those things take it apart completely.”

Susan walked slowly toward the docking bay, her boots clipping magnetically to the hull to give her purchase. She pulled Jaworsky behind her. Why’d he have to be so damned big? Even weightless, he was unwieldy. And Amelia was too small to be of much help.

Fucking Tharp.

They trudged along in silence for a while. Or rather, Susan trudged. Amelia floated alongside.

They came to the docking bay airlock. It was closed.

“I really think I’m going to kill him,” Susan said.

“For being scared?”

“You’re not seriously defending him, are you?”

“None of us is perfect,” Amelia said. “And there’s not enough of us to throw anyone away.”

“He almost killed Jaworsky. He got Ash killed.”

“No,” Amelia said. “Ash got himself killed. Tharp tried to stop him.”

“Do you really think we shouldn’t have tried to save Slim?”

Amelia turned away from her. When she turned back again, Susan couldn’t read her expression. Not that it was ever easy reading a raccoon’s expression.

“Tharp made the right call then,” Amelia said. “So did Ash. Let’s get this fucking door open.”

#

When Michael woke up, he was face-down on the glass of the French space station’s observatory. The glass was tacky under his cheek.

What had happened?

He had been looking down, out at the Earth. There had been lights. And he and Colleen had been…. The memory cut through the throbbing in his head, stirred between his legs. She’d been lying under him, moving against him. And then…

And then what?

He didn’t know. And Colleen was gone.

He peeled his face away from the glass. The spot where he’d been laying was red. His own blood, probably. His nose and lips hurt. His tongue felt swollen. He felt woozy.

“Colleen?” His mouth didn’t want to shape the sounds right.

He stood, wobbled, sat on his ass. His feet were tangled in something. The room spun around him, and he closed his eyes, trying to keep himself from throwing up.

He heard a voice, somewhere behind him. Colleen.

“Oh, hey, Slim,” her voice said. “Can I call you back? Michael’s awake.”

#

Michael was a mess. Blood all over his face. He’d split a lip and possibly broken his nose. But all his injuries had seemed superficial, so Colleen had left him laying face down. There was enough blood that she didn’t want it flowing in, toward his lungs.

So the blood had pooled under his head to congeal.

Better out than in, her uncle Freddie used to say. He’d been talking about burps and farts at the dinner table, of course, but it seemed to Colleen that the same logic applied.

Besides, there was something adorable about Michael lying there, bare-assed. If you ignored the blood, that is.

So she checked his pulse and breathing periodically, made sure there was nothing going noticeably amiss, and in between, managed to re-assemble the radio.

Reuniting with Ash and Slim had become significantly more difficult. Something large had collided with the kudzu ball, Slim had said, and a number of tunnels and passageways no longer went to where they once had, or had been destroyed completely. Ash was certain that it was the Beagle, suggesting that Amelia maybe wasn’t the great pilot everyone made her out to be.

Slim had snarled, and Ash apologized.

Colleen couldn’t help laughing.

“I just hope they’re all okay,” Ash said. “Anyway, just sit tight. It’ll take a little bit to figure where all the pieces ended up, but the kudzu is self-healing, and even if there isn’t a way to get to you right now, there will be soon enough.”

“Yeah,” Slim said. “She said as long you don’t leave where you are right now, she’ll be able to find you.”

There. This was the second time Slim had insinuated that there was someone else with them.

On the other side of the room, a dozen meters from where Colleen had the radio plugged into a kudzu lamp-leaf that curled through the open door to the observatory, Michael groaned. He struggled to his feet, then fell over.

She’d find out soon enough what — or who — Slim was talking about. But not yet.

Kudzu, Chapter 41

Tags

book 6, kudzu, novel

Kudzu, a Novel

Chapter 41

The lights flickered. Went off. Came back.

Susan launched herself through the air, following Amelia to the storage lockers. Amelia and Jaworsky both needed to suit up before they opened the door, before they could safely get away from whatever was going on inside the failing command console. Jaworsky was clearly in too much distress to think straight.

Jaworsky was backing away from the console, a look of terror on his face. Or was it pain? His artificial hand was clenched in a fist, and the muscles in his forearm strained so hard his veins bulged.

Susan had studied the hand’s schematics, back when she first came on board, intending to hack into it, for a joke. But then she worried that if she accidentally overwrote some critical piece of firmware, Jaworsky’d be seriously fucked until they got back to Earth. And with hand’s systems as integrated as it was with his nervous system, there was no telling just how fucked that might mean.

Scrabbling sounds came from inside the command console.

Jaworsky reached back toward the door.

Jesus, he was going to make a run for it.

He was losing it. The way Susan had started to lose it when Ash and Slim died. She could have just drifted off into space at that moment, for all she had cared, and it was Jaworsky who centered her.

“Jaworsky,” Susan said. He didn’t seem to hear her, not through the twin barriers of her helmet and his panic.

The locker door was stuck. Susan kicked at it until it opened. They had no idea if the hull had been compromised. No idea if there was any air on the other side of that door. If Jaworsky opened it before he and Amelia suited up…

“Hey!” Susan shouted, loud enough that it penetrated the glass of her helmet. Deafening through the earphones that she and Tharp wore. “Hey, shit-for-brains!”

That got his attention.

Amelia was at her locker, slipping into her suit. Jaworsky just needed helmet and gloves. Susan flung the helmet at his head.

He caught it one-handed.

“Thanks,” he said. Focus and awareness coming back into his eyes. He let the helmet hover next to him as he got his earphones in place. “Testing,” he said. His voice was shaky. Strained. Like he was clenching his jaw.

“Loud and clear.”

Jaworsky set the helmet on his head, awkwardly with only one hand.

It occurred to Susan that she had no idea how long ago he’d lost his hand, or how. That she’d never cared. And as much as Jaworsky loved to talk about himself, this was one story he’d never told.

“I’m going to need help with the gloves,” he said.

Susan glanced at Amelia. She’d gotten into her suit and gotten her helmet on, and was engaged in an intricate dance of adjusting the suit around her tail before putting on her gloves. When Susan had first come on board the Beagle, she’d found the raccoons’ space suit antics both comical and adorable. Now it was seconds lost.

Tharp, as usual, was fucking useless. He was checking and re-checking the seals on his suit.

“Gloves on now, chica,” she told Amelia. “Adjust your pantyhose later.”

She pushed off against the wall toward Jaworsky, his gloves tucked under her arm.

She was halfway there when he started screaming.

~

Agony.

It screamed through his brain, and the world slanted sideways. Everything looked vaguely yellow, and he couldn’t move his limbs. It was like every muscle was straining against all the others.

He’d seen a man electrocuted once. A slip of a screwdriver. A faulty breaker. A human figure frozen, clenched. The smell of ozone and burning hair.

He couldn’t remember what he’d done wrong.

His mouth tasted like a battery.

He wanted to tell the others he was sorry, sorry they had to see this.

He wanted…

~

Jaworsky’s scream ripped through Amelia’s soul.

She had been concentrating on her gloves, and hadn’t seen what had happened. When she looked up, Jaworsky was hurtling across the room, legs straight and rigid, the rest of him hunched over, curled half-fetal around his belly. His arms were flexed at his sides, muscles bulging with the strain, like some horrific body-builder pose.

Susan was already moving toward where he had been. No way to adjust course until she came to a wall. Tharp, on the other hand, was perfectly positioned to catch him.

Tharp stepped out of the way, and Jaworsky slammed into the wall. Bounced off, slower than he’d hit.

Inelastic collision, Amelia thought.

“I’m going to cut off your fucking balls and shove them down your fucking throat,” Susan growled.

Amelia mentally plotted Jaworsky’s new trajectory and launched herself on an intercept course. Her mass against his wouldn’t do much to stop him, but she could slow him down a little, and maybe, just maybe, help him.

“He’s being electrocuted,” Tharp said. “If you touch him, you’ll just fry yourself.”

“Idiot,” Susan snapped. “You’re wearing an insulated suit.”

“Well, how was I supposed to know?” Tharp said. “I only had a split second to make a decision.”

Jaworsky’s rigid body loomed close. Closer. The impact was jarring. Amelia tasted blood, felt herself bouncing off his mass. She managed to get one hand out and curled into the loose fabric of Jaworsky’s suit. Her momentum swung her around, and she grabbed onto Jaworsky’s back.

She hadn’t slowed him much.

Her tongue felt swollen.

She clambered over Jaworsky’s back and onto his shoulder.

Jaworsky’s lips were pulled back into a rictus grin. His eyes were open, but they were rolled up into his head; just the whites showed. She couldn’t see if he was breathing.

Amelia deactivated the four magnetic locks that sealed the helmet and pulled it off his head.

Blood droplets splattered against the glass of her own helmet.

Ohgod.

But where was it coming from? Not from his head. There was no blood on his face or head, none on his neck. The blood was in the air, floating with them as they tumbled across the chamber.

Jaworsky’s body trembled, no longer simply frozen.

Susan got to the wall. She caught a hand-hold and turned herself around so she could take in the situation.

“There’s blood,” Amelia said. “I can’t figure out where it’s coming from.”

“His hand,” Susan said. “It’s… what’s it doing?”

Amelia followed the curve of Jaworsky’s arm, climbing its length as if it was a tree branch. Yes, the blood was coming from Jaworsky’s wrist, where the metal met flesh. As she watched, the fingers flexed, and the hand twisted on the wrist.

There was a spurt of blood.

Jaworsky started to shake.

The hand bent forward, pulling away from Jaworsky’s flesh until the fingers could grip the inside of his wrist. It tugged hard, and tore away entirely from Jaworsky’s stump.

There was more blood. A lot more. It smeared Amelia’s helmet and spattered her suit.

The mechanical hand clambered up Jaworsky’s arm, a five-legged spider, trailing a bloody tail of neural interfaces. The tail came free of Jaworsky’s stump and whipped menacingly. Amelia backed away.

The door opened with a hiss of escaping air. Tharp disappeared through it. Air rushed through the opening. Everything floating in the room followed: Jaworsky’s blood, his helmet. Amelia clung to Jaworsky, but Jaworsky’s trajectory shifted until they, too, were drifting toward the door.

Amelia wondered whether she’d be able to catch hold of the door frame and still keep hold of Jaworsky. She doubted it.

Susan threw herself at the door, hammering on the “close” button, pausing only catch the helmet before it was sucked out of the room.

The door closed.

Jaworsky’s body relaxed, and his chest heaved. He fought for breath, loud, sucking gasps as he inhaled the thin atmosphere in massive gulps. His face was turning blue.

“Fucking Tharp,” Susan said, suddenly there, catching Jaworsky’s body before it struck the door. She jammed the helmet over his head. “Find something to make a tourniquet. I’ll take care of things here.”

Amelia flung herself across the room, back to the lockers, faster than she should have. She hit the wall hard, shoulder first. She’d have a bruise. She didn’t care.

There were all sorts of things in the lockers — things that had belonged to the original crew that had piloted the Beagle off Earth. An old, ripped t-shirt. A toothbrush. A first aid kit. She grabbed everything she could carry and flung herself back toward Jaworsky.

“How’s he doing?” she asked.

“He’s breathing,” Susan said. “I’ve got most of the bleeding staunched, but my hands keep slipping.”

“On my way.”

Speaking of hands…

Amelia looked around the command room for Jaworsky’s rebellious appendage. She didn’t see it anywhere.

Kudzu, Book VI, Chapter 40

Tags

book 6, kudzu, novel

Kudzu, a Novel

Book VI: The Beagle Has Landed

Chapter 40

“Left two and up one,” Amelia said.

Jaworsky knew better than to waste time answering. Not that every second was critical, but enough of them were. He just moved her over the surface of the command console as precisely, as quickly and smoothly, as he could. The way they’d practiced.

They had drilled for hours, until he was able to respond instinctively to Amelia’s commands, even with his eyes closed. Not that he was doing that now.

The control panel was a mass of knobs and dials, buttons and switches and trackpads, keyboards and joysticks. And all sorts of monitors — numbers, graphs, fuel and engine thrust readings. It made his head spin just to think about it, so he didn’t. It’s not that Jaworsky didn’t like complicated machinery. He just didn’t like it when every action had real-time consequences.

Amelia was fascinating to watch. Lacking a human’s reach, she made up for it with dexterity and sheer cleverness. Her left front paw typed numbers into a keyboard while her rear right paw worked a joystick that was more than a body-length away. It was an intricately choreographed dance, even beautiful, in its way. Jaworsky’s part was simple: he just listened for her command — left, right, up, back — and responded accordingly.

“Wait,” Amelia said. Which wasn’t part of the script. This was where the forward thrusters were supposed to go off, slowing their speed. “That’s not…”

Jaworsky put her back in position, bit back his questions. Amelia pushed at the buttons. Nothing happened.

“No,” she said. “This can’t be happening.” She hammered at the console, and, after precious long seconds oozed past, the engines kicked into life. The vibration thrummed through the ship.

“Right and right, now!” Amelia screamed. She ratcheted up the thrust to full. The ship rumbled.

“Just in time,” Tharp said.

“No,” Amelia said. “Too late. Everyone hold on.”

Two of the four engines sputtered and died, and the ship began to twist in its course. Amelia killed the other two. The torque was more dangerous on impact than the velocity.

“Impact in—”

Something thudded against the hull, throwing Jaworsky hard against the restraints.

Amelia slipped from his human fingers with a squeak of fear; Jaworsky concentrated on his hold with his prosthetic hand — firm, but not crushing, cupping her chest, fingers gripping her shoulder and thumb under her left foreleg. She curled around his hand and held on. He pulled her close and got his other hand on her, just as the ship smashed into the central bulk of the kudzu.

The control room shook. Metal screamed. A human sound rose to join it: Tharp, his voice shrill with terror. Susan contributed a non-stop barrage of profanity muttered under her breath, punctuated with sharp exhalations as each new impact slammed her against her restraints. The confines of her spacesuit, and the proximity of the speaker, accentuated the sound.

Jaworsky concentrated on keeping Amelia alive, and tried not to think about what would happen to them if the tearing metal reached as far into the ship as this control room. He and Amelia had figured out early on in their practice that the spacesuits restricted their movement too much. Now… now he just focused on keeping Amelia from becoming a red smear on the wall.

~

The Beagle had landed; the ship lay still, half imbedded in the massive ball of kudzu.

Amelia stared at the now-useless console. She felt like crying.

The lights flickered, then stabilized.

Inside the control room there was silence. Even Tharp had shut up. Outside the control room, overheated metal pinged as it cooled, and precious air hissed as it escaped into the void. There was also another sound — the woody, slithery scrape as vines grew over the surface of the ship, holding it fast, making it a permanent feature of the greenscape.

“You okay?” Jaworsky asked her.

“Yes,” she said. “No. I almost killed us all.” Her ribs hurt. Bruised, certainly, but she didn’t think anything was broken. And almost certainly everyone else had similar bruises, seat-belt shaped rather than hand-shaped, but similar nonetheless.

“No you didn’t,” Jaworsky said. “Nothing in this ship has worked right since the accident. You can’t blame yourself for that.”

“You two should get your suits on,” Susan said. “We don’t know what it’ll be like when we open that door, or how long we’ll have air in here.” She unclipped her restraints and pushed off toward the storage lockers.

Amelia flexed her shoulders and rolled her neck. “You can put me down, now.”

Jaworsky kept his grip on her. “The fuck?” he said.

“Very funny.”

“Yeah, I’m laughing my fucking ass off. When we first hit, I was worried I’d let you go, or worse, that I’d crush you. So I got a good grip and locked it. Now it won’t unlock.”

Jaworsky pulled at his fingers with his other hand, the strain showing on his face. He was able bend back one of them, but as soon as he let go to bend another, the first snapped back to position.

“I’m going to need a little help here,” he said.

He turned his hand over so that Amelia was facing the ceiling. Not that “ceiling” had much meaning in zero gravity, but Amelia found herself staring at a blank, gray bulkhead, upside down in relation to everyone else. Tharp and Susan crowded her on one side, each straining against one finger. Jaworsky fought against his own thumb.

Amelia twisted and wriggled free.

The hand snapped back to position as soon as everyone let go.

Jaworsky’s lips were a thin line, pressed together tightly. His nostrils flared with each breath. Amelia wasn’t sure if it was anger, or fear. Probably a little of both.

“Fucking fuck,” he said. “Nothing on this ship fucking works. Including me.”

His mechanical hand twitched, then clenched into a fist. Jaworsky rapped it hard against edge of the console, twice, and it relaxed.

Jaworsky let out his breath, the relief evident on his face.

Until something inside the console rapped back. Twice.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Jaworsky said. Now he definitely sounded scared.

Amelia chittered her agreement, even though she was sure he was overreacting. The ship was damaged. It was going to make noises. This was a coincidence, nothing more.

Then the sound came again — two sharp raps on the inside of the console, and the lights flickered. And Amelia launched herself as fast as she dared across the room to the storage locker that held her suit.

Kudzu, Chapter 37

Tags

book 5, kudzu, novel

Kudzu, a Novel

Chapter 37

 

Michael fretted. He paced. What if Colleen wasn’t coming? What if he’d blown it? What if…?

He tried raising her on the radio, but there was only silence.

Maybe he should go back and look for her.

Or maybe he should just continue on.

Static crackled in his ear.

“Colleen?” he said, too quickly. “Colleen, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it. I …”

The voice that replied wasn’t Colleen’s. It was higher pitched than hers, gruff and familiar, and not human.

“Michael! Fuck me, it’s good to hear your voice. I was worried I’d be trapped here with just fucking Ash to keep me company.”

“Slim?”

“In the fur. Damn. Ash and I tried to raise you guys for days. I was worried you might have… Well, it doesn’t matter. You’re alive, we’re alive, it’s like a fuckin’ reunion.”

“Wait,” Michael said. “What about the rest of the crew?”

Slim laughed. “Nice and comfy on the Beagle, I guess. I never made it there. Got lost in space and sucked back into the kudzu. Tried calling the ship, but that was a bust. Something about the electromagnetic fields inside the kudzu leaves. Faraday cage, she calls it. Says it’s a design flaw. Ash says that makes sense. He started talking equations and I tuned him out.”

Michael took a breath, trying to make sense of what Slim was saying.

“Ash was on the ship. If you never got to the ship, how are you with Ash?”

“Oh, yeah, remember how I was lost in space? Ash tried to rescue me.” Slim laughed. “We’re both here, so you can guess how well that worked out.”

“I… What? Ash? Rescued you?” Michael waved his hands pointlessly. The idea was patently absurd.

“Yeah, risked his life for a fucking raccoon. Don’t tell his parents or they’ll disown him. Probably would, too, if they were still alive.” Slim sneezed his contempt: a purely raccoon gesture. “We’ve been talking a lot, me and Ash. Anyway, where are you, so we can come find you?”

“Um. Lost in the middle of a giant kudzu ball? Near a spaceship or station or something. Does that help?”

“Yeah, not really. We’ve only been here a couple days, and haven’t had a lot of chance to go exploring. Maybe it’d be easier if you come to us. I could meet you at the ossuary—”

“How’m I supposed to find a, a what? Ossuary? I don’t even know what an ossuary is, much less how to find it.”

“Maybe if you can tell me a little more about where you are, I can get you directions. Is there anything about the spaceship that seems unique?”

Michael looked at the portal into the station. “I don’t know, I haven’t gone in. I was waiting for Colleen so we could go in together.”

“Aw, that’s so sweet.”

“Fuck you. I’ll look now.”

Michael squeezed through the narrow opening where the kudzu had cracked the shell of the station. It was pretty standard mid-21st century construction — too much crammed too close, a thousand compartments protruding from oppressively thick walls into a cramped, narrow space. The station was too small to have managed any reasonable artificial gravity, so it wasn’t designed with a floor. Which meant Michael had to pick his way over an uneven surface.

Michael relayed this to Slim, but didn’t hold out much hope. There were dozens of space stations like this that had been abandoned, and it was a good guess that many of them had been nudged into the satellite graveyard.

He worked his way to one of the bulky hatches. The wheel turned much more easily than he’d expected, and the door opened smoothly on well-oiled hinges.

Inside was another world.

It had been an observation room, a large, glass sphere about ten meters across. Michael stepped through the hatch and let himself slide down to the bottom of the sphere. Other than some scattered handholds built into the glass, the view was unobstructed.

And what a view!

Michael looked up and saw the kudzu vines and tunnels twisting over him, merging with other spacecraft, eventually converging on a thick, central hub from which all things emanated. In the middle of that was a large spaceship.

That, Michael was sure, was where the kudzu originated, and that’s what supplied the initial spin that allowed them to experience gravity, and kept the fish from flying off into the air.

Below his feet: the Earth in all its blue and green glory.

“Wow,” he said.

“What?” Slim said into his ear.

“There’s a giant glass observatory. That’s where we are.”

“That sounds pretty unique. The cat lady’ll know where that is, for sure. Be back soon.”

The connection dropped.

“Slim? Hello?”

Cat lady?

~

Colleen stopped running as soon as she saw the top of Michael’s head, as he climbed out of a crevice in the kudzu wall, and she pressed herself into the soft leaves, trying to catch her breath. She didn’t want to seem too panicked. Too desperate.

Had he seen her? It didn’t seem so.

Her heart hammered longer than it should. What the hell was wrong with her? She didn’t want to feel relief in seeing him, and she didn’t want him to know what she felt. She took deep breaths, when what she probably needed was a psychiatrist. Or at least the drugs.

When she felt she could move without risking passing out, she stepped away from the wall.

Michael was sitting next to the gap he’d crawled out of, leaning back against the wall. He hadn’t seen her.

Colleen approached, trying to keep her gait casual.

“So you decided to wait, after all,” she said. It wasn’t what she’d meant to say.

Michael looked up, a pained expression on his face.

God, I’m such an asshole.

“I talked to Slim,” Michael said, climbing to his feet. “He’s alive, and he’s somewhere inside the plant.”

A wave of relief washed through Colleen. “Good, I’m glad he’s safe.”

“Yeah, he and Ash are here. They’re going to try to get us directions. So we can meet up.”

Ash. It couldn’t have been Susan or Amelia. Or even Tharp.

“And the others?”

Michael shrugged. Feigning nonchalance, Colleen thought.

“Don’t know. On the Beagle, I guess. Anyway, there’s something I wanted to show you.” He glanced at the opening in the wall. “In here.”

He stood aside and let her crawl through, then followed. The inside was a cramped horror of an early model space station. In the old days, people actually lived in these things for months, even years. Colleen shuddered.

“Good thing I’m not claustrophobic,” she said. Though she was, a little.

“Keep going. There’s a hatch up ahead.”

“An airlock?”

Even with her back to him, Colleen could feel Michael’s jaw clench.

“Just joking,” she said. “I’m sorry, I’m just… I’m not good at this.” Whatever this was. Colleen wasn’t sure that even she knew what she meant.

Michael didn’t reply. She got to the hatch. The wheel turned in her hands, and the door came open.

Colleen crawled through…

…into space.

The observation sphere made up for any claustrophobia she had felt. Above her, the kudzu curled and twisted off into space. Below her… Earth, glowing softly in the moonlight.

It was so beautiful, so alive! Even with whatever had happened, even if humanity had been wiped out, after the desolation of Triton and the emptiness of space, the sight of it warmed her.

She slid down the curved glass until the Earth was under her feet. Michael scrabbled down behind her.

“Thank you,” Colleen said. “Thank you for this.”

Still looking out at the gentle curve of the Earth, she reached out, touched his fingers.

He flinched away from her, and she let her hand drop. Her chin quivered, but she wouldn’t, couldn’t look at him.

Then his fingers found hers.