He yanked up the hatch, which slid into its housing halfway and then jammed. The snapping steel beak of the Guillotine filled the space and sliced at his head. He reared back and suddenly remembered what was in his hand, jammed it into the hole and squeezed off three shots.
When he took the ugly little black pistol out of its hiding place behind a battery, his hand didn't want to hold it, and set it spinning before his dazed, burning eyes. It was like a snake, he thought. You think it'll feel slimy, but it's hard and cold and smooth. "This is a .12-caliber gyro-needle gun. It fires ten rounds, but only with the safety off. It's recoilless, the rounds ignite and go like little rockets, but there's still a kick in micro-gravity, so brace yourself. Don't take the safety off until you get to the hatch, but for God's sake, don't forget."
He hadn't. He followed the pistol through the half-open hatch and into the node, panic-firing once more into Kvant 2. The gyrorocket round smashed into the far wall with a flat smacking sound. Special rocket-propelled needles that crumple on impact, so as not to puncture the hull when putting down a mutiny—or foreign spies.
He looked around. All was still, but for the grumbling of the oxygen generators and the carbon-dioxide scrubbers. A generous arc of blood drifted past, mingling with the omnipresent globs of coolant. The Guillotine floated by his head, and he grabbed it, but it was impossible to wield with one hand, so he pushed it back into Spektr. He peeked around the corner into the Soyuz capsule. The wires were pulled or cut, neat, severed piles of spaghetti blocking the mouth of the capsule. Only the readiness lights blinked inside, but there was nowhere for anyone to hide. It was like that insipid American movie the Russians gleefully tormented him with, whenever they weren't ogling
Mir
's capacious library of Italian softcore porn. The one where the sole survivor gets into the lifeboat and blasts off, only to find the creature waiting for her in there…
Gun-first, he dove for the capsule.
Something swooped down out of Priroda module, directly above his head. A hand clutched his wrist and twisted the gun away. He looked up to see that the "hand" grew out of Ilya's pants-cuff, where he had until recently had a foot. The leg flexed, wrapped twice around Moxley's arm, pointed the gun back at his head.
Moxley looked up. Ilya hung by his hands from the mouth of the hatch, his legs bending all the wrong ways in so many of the wrong places. Moxley tried only to get out of his reach, because touching it meant it was real.
"Help me, God, please help me—"
"What's the situation, Sherman?" asked the American voice.
Ilya's other prehensile foot caught Moxley's wildly flapping free arm and lifted him into Priroda. Ilya threw him across the science module, charged after and pounced on him with all four grasping hands before Moxley's hurtling body reached the far wall.
He hit so hard, Moxley was dazed and lost. The headset cracked, his skull rang and grated, but through it all, like a ray of sunlight piercing the darkness of the bottom of a well, he heard the American voice crackling in his ear.
"Say again, what is the situation up there, Sherman, over?"
Ilya's hands clutched his neck, shredding the muscles in an iron grip, but he didn't choke Moxley. "Tell them, Sherman, explain the situation."
"I'm—help, he's got me, and he's hurting me—"
"Where are you, right now, Sherman? And where is he?"
"We—oh God, oh shit—we're in Priroda—"
"You're both in Priroda, right now? Is the hatch sealed?"
"No, but—I can't get to Soyuz, he's on top of me—"
"You've got to fight him, Sherman. Use the damned gun, for Christ's sake."
He reached out for the gun tumbling end over end just out of his grasp. Ilya grabbed his hair, and every last strand of it just came out and fluttered away, oh God, he was so sick, but he was still alive, he could fight.
"I can't—"
Moxley kicked out from the floor, flying up with Ilya on his back, but the mutant cosmonaut arrested their flight and shoved back, driving him into the floor face-first and bending his legs backwards until he howled.
"Sherman, this is very important, listen to me, now. Is he the only one who's—changed?"
"He and I are the only ones alive—"
"And you're both still in the Priroda science module, the one NASA calls R block?"
"Yes, do something, do something, please, God!"
"We have a contingency plan in place, Sherman."
"Good, do it, please, he's killing me!"
"I'm very sorry, Dr. Moxley," said the American voice, and the headset went dead.
"How painful, to discover that one is expendable," Ilya whispered in his ear.
Moxley thrashed one last time, putting all his strength into getting the gun, but when he pushed off the floor, the whole module shook and seemed to drop out from around him, so that he smashed into the porthole.
Whatever Ilya said next was lost in the roar of the module being explosively ejected from the
Mir
station. Rolling out of control from the trajectory set by the tiny explosives in the node's coupling ports, Priroda was sent spinning like a torpedo at the earth. A blasting wind sucked at Moxley, but he clutched the rim of the porthole and looked out at the unbelievable view of the earth.
"Do you see me, God?" he screamed into the wind.
The hatch slammed most of the way shut, but cables clogged the mouth. Ilya leapt off him and tore the cables free, sealed the hatch and turned to smile at Moxley.
"We still have a few minutes before we burn up, Sherman. How do you propose we pass the time?"
Moxley pressed his face against the porthole and prayed.
"That's right, Sherman. Pray Until Something Happens, yes?"
He kept on praying, and presently, something happened, but it wasn't what he'd prayed for, at all.
~28~
She woke up in the back of a van.
Outside, champagne-colored dawn broke and scattered in rainbow prisms on rolling snowfields. They were on a two-lane highway somewhere in Wyoming and bearing down on a place called Muddy Gap, according to a buckshot-chewed sign. She felt sick when she sat up, so she lay back down. She saw him behind the wheel, but she did not really see him. What she saw was a big man she didn't recognize, because he had no skin. What little meat did cling to his bones looked like chum from a shark-bucket. She assumed it was Him, because it was always Him, everybody was Him, or would be. Or it was a dream.
But in dreams, things happened, and here, the van only kept rolling, and the sun kept rising, and the man's skin grew back. He stopped and topped off the gas in Muddy Gap, and filled the back of the van with fruit and meat and juice and jugs of water and Gatorade, freshly laundered winter clothes and wool blankets. Head swimming, feverish, she tried to eat, but nausea overtook her. She vomited for what felt like hours, thick black and red fluid and clumps of tissue, everything she had inside coming out in a jet. He stopped and came back and held her head through the worst of it, and she tried to hurt him when he got close enough, but he held her arms at her sides and whispered, "Get Him out, get Him all out of you," over and over again, and when she realized this felt too awful to be a dream, she fell asleep.
And when she woke up again, she was in Colorado, and he was telling her she was safe, everything would be all right…. She was cold. Her mouth tasted like shit and afterbirth. She drank a gallon of water and ate some fruit.
He sat watching her, his face masked by the shadows of the gathering dusk and the fog of his breath. Snow dripped from his coat, he'd been outside—
"What did you do to me?" she demanded between gulps. Her voice was an airless croak.
He shrugged. "You feel better?"
"I—I don't know—" Her skin was crusted with a slime that flaked away when she touched it, and smelled like sewage and the tomb and the ocean floor and Him. Her hands were ragged, tattered sticks, her clothes rags held together by dried blood. When she looked inside herself, she was almost terrified to find that she was alone, again. He was gone.
All things considered, she felt pretty fucking good.
"Where are we?"
"We'll be safe, here," he said, and opened the side door. Snow whipped at them, cold that blew down from the moon seeped into her bones as he led her through a forest to an abandoned mine shaft. Another hole in the ground. She fought him then, but he dragged her, murmuring comfort he nakedly didn't feel himself, and looking all around for something or someone trying to kill them.
Wittrock wanted them caged, but there was no question about trying that, again. Stella enjoyed the scientist's momentary look of pained disbelief when he saw her in the outer quarantine bunker. He remembered her, too.
The doctors wore bio-isolation suits with air tanks on their backs when they came in. They circled around them with their monitors and particle detectors, talking to each other about them as if they were some sort of contamination, a leak that had to be contained. One of them approached Stella with a steel gun with a big needle instead of a barrel, but Storch grabbed his arm and twisted it behind his back. "Get away, all of you fuckers!" he roared. In the end, Stella let them take her blood.
They subjected it to stresses and chemical reagents and observed the bizarre and lethal reactions it underwent when threatened. In the end, they discovered what he'd told them in the first place–no one had anything to fear from them, so long as they left them alone.
"Why are we here?" she asked him for the hundredth time. "These
chingalos
want to kill us."
This time, he finally answered. "They want to, but they can't. The green shit reacts to Keogh's DNA. I'm immune, and so are you. It hurts, but you get used to it."
"Still, why here?"
"Because everybody else thinks we're dead. And that's good. They have to help. All this shit is their fault."
"They hate us."
"They fear us, because we're monsters." He smiled. His teeth had grown into a wall of serrated survival knives. "Be a monster."
The hatch opened, and they went through, into the frigid white light of the lab. There were no cages, but the doctors still wore their spacesuits. Stella watched their distorted faces through the bubble hoods as they formed a loose cordon around the two mutants. She realized she was looking for Delores Mrachek.
Wittrock argued with a short, gaunt man with albino-white dreadlocks and a speed-freak rhesus monkey's face, and a zealous, bald black woman. Storch watched them until he'd had enough, and stepped between them.
"This is how it's going to be. We're staying here. No tests, no questions, no bullshit. When I find out where to go next, you hide her until I get back. Fuck with us, and you'll be sorry."
They argued some more. She heard, but didn't listen. She could barely register any sensations beyond the borders of her skin, so loud was the noise of her own body. She burned up food like a furnace and synthesized proteins. She healed, and she changed. Her skin thickened, lungs and heart grew. But loudest of all was the silence at the center of her head.
It felt like a hole, gouged out but already closing over. She probed it and hated herself for what she felt—fear, apathy, loneliness, but not freedom.
"Impossible," Wittrock said, over and over again, in ever more strident tones. "We don't even know what you are, let alone where your loyalties, if any, lie."
"Mister," Storch replied, with a flash of knife-teeth and a wave of one hand that made Wittrock cower, "you don't want to find out what we are."
Stella fell in love with the underground forest.
She left the lab while Storch argued with the doctors, wandering in search of a place to lie down and heal. Three soldiers followed her down the corridors and tried to stop her when she came to the airlock. She stared them down as she threw the wheel that unlocked the hatch and went through. The outer hatch slammed shut behind her, and the soldiers pressed against the plastic shell, watching her and gibbering into walkietalkies.
She opened the inner door and stepped into the biosphere. Her slippered foot crunched on pine needles. A mechanically agitated spring breeze raised goose-bumps on her arms. The trees stirred and hushed, droplets of rain spilling from green-furred branches. As she wandered deeper among them, the full-spectrum lights slowly dimmed in a foreshortened simulation of sunset. By the time she reached the clearing in the center, the plastic roof had darkened to an opaque indigo that she could almost believe was the night sky, except that the only stars were the blinking lights of cameras and thermal imaging sensors tracking her.
She lay down on the soft, spongy loam in the center of the clearing. A deep flush rose to the surface of her skin, pale olive turning to mauve, then violet. The trees loomed over her, the massed voice of their rustling needles lulling her toward sleep. When she lay very still, she heard them living, and she envied them their vegetative serenity. She yearned to grow roots and become a tree in a secret forest.
Time to take stock.
She was alive. In the hands of a man she didn't know and couldn't trust, surrounded by people who wanted her dead. And he was leaving her here. She knew it with a blood-deep certainty hammered into her by thirty thousand generations of memory. Men left women behind, and went to die.
She was alone. Hers was the only voice she heard in her head. She reached down into the glutinous, electrified soup of her brain and scoured every neuron, every synapse, every glial cell, but she found only herself, rebuilding. Her Guardian Angel, her personal God, was dead and gone. Why did that scare her?
She was changing. In the raw, red world of her insides, she saw all the damage being repaired, and modifications made to protect against further attacks. Her back wrenched as new muscles introduced themselves to her spine in an improved buttress design. Her breasts grew sore and swollen as the intercostal muscles beneath them hardened to better defend her innards. The tidal rhythms of her body swept away thoughts and plans, and she lost herself in observing the primal, mindless genius that guided her transformation.