9
WORMWOOD STAR
Faye Dasalia—Heinlein Industries Perimeter
I awoke into darkness, at the thin edge of the void. There was no light and no sound as I hung suspended over the abyss.
The words floated in the dark as energy collected in my cold chest. My physical body was awakening, but I felt disconnected. The synthetic blood that had gelatinized in its web of veins warmed. It thinned and began to flow as the low vibration of my heart began.
Distantly, I picked up sounds. I heard the whistle of wind and the low creak of metal. I was sitting on a hard, rough surface that was cold to the touch.
I opened my eyes and a dim light seeped in. I sat inside a small space with humid air and dirty metallic walls. Just ahead was the opening of a large steel duct. Thick frost had formed around its lip. It was quiet, except for the sound of breathing. There was someone behind me.
I searched, and found my last coherent memories. I focused in on that section of the field until a bright point of light rose from out of the rest to present itself to me.
I had been standing inside the hidden lab, its walls covered with data. MacReady lay on his back, still-warm blood pooling around his dead body. Fawkes had one hand on my throat, his lifeless eyes locked on mine. I was under the control of someone else.
I wasn’t sure what he’d done. Somehow he’d managed to assert full control. He used me to target Fawkes’s spinal cord, and fired my bayonet….
The image flickered and the memory collapsed. It shrank to a point of light and receded into the sea of others. It was the last in the chain. After that there was nothing until I’d awoken here, inside the room.
I put one hand on the floor. Black blood had congealed there, and I felt it squish in between my fingers.
“Hold on,” a voice said. I recognized it as Dulari’s. Something probed at the back of my neck.
“Okay,” she said. Her breath blew like smoke through the cold air.
Warmth tingled down my spine, and I turned my head. Dulari Shaddrah crawled across the floor from behind me, her right sleeve soaked through with blood. Her red fingers were curled around the grip of a pistol.
“Where are we?” I asked. My voice reverberated in the small space.
“One of the cooling ducts,” she said. “The inflow is from outside; the air here is safe for you.” She turned the dimmer on a small electric lamp she’d placed in one corner, and the room got brighter. I could see a film of sweat on her face and neck despite the fact that she shivered in the cold.
“How did I get here?”
“You walked,” she said. “I took you offline for a while. Any memories that hadn’t been committed to longer term got lost. Sorry.”
Breath blew from her nostrils as she winced. I checked the temperature in the room and realized it was just below freezing. She wouldn’t stop shaking.
“What about Fawkes?”
“He got away,” she said. “He made it outside the building and he’s heading for the transmitter. He’s going to try to destroy it.”
“Why?”
“Because he knows it’s over. He lost control of the nukes. The military is on its way. He set something in motion today, and he wants to make sure no one stops it, even after he’s destroyed.”
Tears brimmed in her eyes and her nose ran. She rapped out her words as she tried to keep her teeth from chattering. I wanted to offer her some kind of warmth, but I didn’t have any to give.
“What did he do?”
“It’s what we did,” she said. “Me and the others. I thought we could stop them, but what we created—what I created—wasn’t fully tested before Fawkes released it. It’s out there now, Faye. I don’t know what will happen, but it scares me…. ”
She reached behind me and dragged over a large metallic case. Her fingers could barely work the security latch, but she got it open. Inside, there was a small box and some kind of folded material.
“Fawkes destroyed any stores of the original Huma product,” she said. “He knows that if anyone gets access to the transmitter array, they can initiate another code change, but to do that they’ll need something to fall back on.”
She opened the small box. The inside was lined with foam, and two clear cylinders were nestled there. Each was filled with black fluid.
“These are the last samples of the current gen-M10 blood inside the country,” she said, holding the box out to me. “You have to get it to the soldiers who come and tell them what to do. They can still stop this.”
I took the box. She patted the bundle of cloth inside the case, leaving bloodstains.
“You’ll have to cut through the middle of Pratsky to get there, but the air is still saturated with Leichenesser,” she said. “This suit will protect you. Fawkes will be forced to go around the building’s perimeter to get to the transmitter. You can beat him there if you go now.”
“What about you?”
She shook her head. “I’m not going,” she said. “I’m sorry …I can’t …reconcile what I did.”
“You didn’t know,” I said.
“This is still our fault.”
I nodded. She lifted the gun and put the barrel against her temple. She took a deep breath and frowned, trying to hold it steady. A tear rolled down one cheek.
“We were wrong to do what we did,” she said. “Get that sample to the soldiers. Promise me.”
Her blood coursed hot beneath her skin. The mass of heat in the middle of her chest pulsed quickly now.
“I will.”
“You’re more human than some humans, Faye,” she said, and her lips twitched into a crooked smile as she squeezed her eyes closed. As I watched, her finger tightened on the trigger and the pistol went off two feet away from my face. The report boomed down the duct as Dulari’s body jerked, and the gun clattered next to her as she fell to the floor with a thud. Blood burbled from the hole in an arc before subsiding to a steady stream that trickled through her thick hair. Steam began to rise from the pool as it slowly expanded.
I removed the suit from the case and managed to climb into it. By the time I formed the seals and straightened the hood’s mask, Dulari’s body was cold.
