Sly Mongoose (12 page)

“You want to EVA?”

“You think there’ll be zombies in spacesuits outside trying to stop us?”

“That or Canden will have a surprise for me.”

“Whatever you think Canden’s about, you wrong.” Grenada paused in front of the airlock.

“You reading my mind now?” Pepper folded his arms.

“Ain’t reading no one’s mind.” Grenada shook her head. “Just you actions.”

“Then you have just the tiniest fraction of the picture. I understand what she’s doing. I’d do the same in her spot.”

Grenada looked surprised and unsure. “For true?”

“She’s just trying to keep control. We going in there?” Pepper tapped on the thick porthole looking into the airlock.

“Yeah, okay.” Grenada tapped in a code. The door creaked open. “Canden don’t like it.”

“Of course not.” Pepper grinned and walked in between the pair of plastic benches. Grenada squeezed in past him to stand in front of the suit locker.

It opened with her fingerprint on the thick lock. Four bright red
deflated spacesuits hung inside the racks, snugged in between acceleration gel to protect them against sudden movement.

Pepper pulled the top one out and shook it. The fabric responded by loosening up.

“What’s in, what’s out?” Grenada held up her belt of handguns.

“They should fire in vacuum.” Bullet casings held everything they needed to explode. “Just watch out for jamming.”

“It’s more a case of what we’re going to fire coming in to the storage bay.”

“Keep your shotgun out, then. But don’t fire it while skipping around outside. It’ll blow you clean off the ship.”

Grenada belted herself back up, and pulled the baggy suit up over it all. Pepper helped her with the fishbowl helmet, sealing it around the neck ring. Grenada tapped the small wrist readout and gave a thumbs-up. Another tap and the suit constricted, shrinking itself down like a tight second skin, bulging around her weapons and clothes.

“You keeping your trench coat on?”

“It comes in handy in situations like this.” Like reactive bulletproof underlayers. One didn’t throw away a friend like that.

Pepper pulled the extremely baggy spacsuit on over the trench coat without too much fiddling about to make it work, and pulled his dreadlocks back into a ponytail. Grenada helped set the helmet down over them, and then pushed it down on his head. The seal connected and Grenada twisted the helmet in.

Text scrolled across the inside of the clear bowl as the suit booted up and scanned itself.

Everything was go.

The tiny oxygen tank was no larger than a hip flask with an hour of air. The scrubbers in the suit would reclaim everything else, presumably it would be a while before he’d even have to dip into the tank.

“Hear me?” Grenada asked.

“Yep.”

Pepper picked up his sword off the plastic bench as his spacesuit shrunk to snug itself, bunching the tails of his trenchcoat to the back of his legs.

He belted the sword outside the suit. “Tell Canden to spin the ship down, then let’s go.”

“You think she’ll do that?”

“I think Canden understands what we trying for.”

The ship shook, shoving them against the benches as Canden decelerated it out of its spin. “Did you think she wouldn’t?” Pepper leaned against the wall to let Grenada past.

Grenada’s voice echoed in the helmet slightly. It crackled a bit at first, but as the two suits agreed on frequencies and protocols it cleared. “I think you both all twist up, so much you understand each other.”

“Maybe.”

“No maybe about it.” She tapped the airlock code and stepped in. Pepper followed. A minute later the outer door opened, blowing out air and moisture crystals.

Pepper looked out into the vacuum, and then clambered out around the edge. His entire perspective shifted. From climbing out into the dark, to crouching on a massive, grooved metal field. The hull’s outer plating was pitted and cratered and stripped clean of paint from the constant abrasion of space dust and tiny rock impacts. The larger ones sealed with putty and gel. “Let’s move.”

With a powerful kick, his hands cupping the ladder’s rail that ran the length of the ship, Pepper traversed the ship’s hull.

Every twenty feet he let go, nothing holding him to the ship, to dodge spots where the ladder was welded to the hull.

“Canden just jettisoned the pods,” Grenada said. “You ain’t getting off.”

Pepper clenched the ladder and came to a stop. Grenada caught herself before slamming into him. “What?”

“I saw red.”

“Spacesuit red?”

Pepper hooked his foot under a rung and pushed himself up for a better view. There: a form hunkered down behind a mass of three communications dishes.

The zombies
did
knock out the communications, by getting out in spacesuits. He wasn’t particularly surprised to find them out here.

Grenada snorted. “Whoever make them regulation for fire-engine red on the suits deserve a thank-you card.”

“That and whoever designed my eyes.” Pepper looked over as Grenada pulled a handgun free. Pepper grabbed her wrist. “No. Don’t blow yourself off the hull.”

“I can brace myself.”

“Save your strength.” Pepper floated free as he pulled his sword out. “They’re in spacesuits, so am I, they can’t bite me.”

“That why you have a sword?”

“I like a variety of weapons.” He kicked off toward the cluster of dishes, skimming over the pitted surface, sword held out wide.

“I’ll warn Canden not to make any course corrections.”

“Appreciated.” Pepper closed in on the base of the three dishes.

And here they came. Four red spacesuits linked by hands flying toward him like a human net.

N
o holding back now, no watching out for bites. Pepper slammed into the spacesuits and cracked visors with the hilt of the sword, watching faces pinch as the vacuum sucked at them.

He snapped the sword at exposed limbs reaching for him with clumsy, grasping hands, and spun around follow up on the cracked visors. The infected bodies spun down the hull.

Pepper wrapped his legs around the torso of the nearest, raised the sword high, and beheaded the infected crewman.

Within a mental thirty-second count four heads spun free of the
Sheikh
, their bodies limp in the air near him. A cloud of crystallized fluids slowly spread out away from him.

“Watch out!” Grenada’s voice crackled.

Seven red suits swirled out the nearby airlock. “Shit.” The net of four had been a feint to drag him closer and then overwhelm him.

Pepper kicked off the body he had latched on to as the cluster of new suits slammed into him.

“Too many of them,” Grenada said. He couldn’t see her. The entire world spun with red suits, inky space, and flashes of pitted hull. Pepper sliced off arms, legs, and smashed in more faceplates.

The next batch to slam into him impaled themselves on his sword, hands grabbing for the hilt.

He had to be careful not to throw them away and toss himself into space. Instead, Pepper twisted his sword free and shoved off at the airlock. “I’m going in.”

“You think that smart?”

“How many crew did you think we have left?”

“Sixteen, now. Ten dead out here, twenty-six total.”

“Sixteen’s doable.” Pepper hit the rim of the airlock and rolled inside. Three inside waited to stop him from getting in. Sixteen crew to kill, then head back for the passengers. If he could kill everything aboard the ship and make a distress call maybe he could still get picked up.

The waiting infected held large wrenches. Another new habit. Pepper got ready for the attack. But they stepped back as he moved forward.

This was new.

Grenada clambered in after him. The outer door shut and the lock repressurized.

He moved again, and as one, the infected retreated through the inner door. Pepper and Grenada stepped out into the bay, surrounded by yellow-eyed, silent crew members.

But no more attacking.

The three nearest removed their helmets and cautiously stumbled forward. The fans on their backs strained against the red suits, which had forced the structures to fold down. They still twitched under the fabric.

“We,” said the first one.

“Can,” said the second.

“Now.”

“Talk.”

“Our.”

“Numbers.”

“High enough.”

Pepper stared. He stepped forward, and all around, the infected shrank back again. They had decided they couldn’t afford to attack him.

“What are you?” he asked.

The group touched hands, the fans on their shoulders writhed, and waves of motion ran throughout the wave of bodies like wind through grass.

“I.”

“Perhaps we.”

“Are.”

“The Swarm.”

“I’ve never heard of you,” Pepper said.

The words that followed ran down the lines of emotionless voices.

“Your failings.”

“Do not.”

“Concern the Swarm.”

Pepper felt annoyance unwind inside him. “What do you want?”

“The Swarm seeks.”

“A truce with you.”

Pepper walked forward again, and they all moved back to the walls. “A truce? Am I that dangerous?”

“Currently.”

“Yes.”

“Too dangerous.”

“To attack.”

“Could miss.”

“New objective.”

“What is your objective?” Grenada asked.

All heads turned to regard her. The words moved from voices right to left this time. “Expand.”

“Seek.”

“Seek what?” Pepper asked.

“Cannot.”

“Tell.”

Four of the infected ran into the airlock and shut it before Grenada and Pepper could move.

“What are they doing?” Pepper moved to the airlock, sword still in hand.

“Leaving,” the Swarm said as a whole. Another set of four ran for the airlock, but Pepper and Grenada moved to get in the way.

“Leaving, how?”

Grenada dodged another grouping of four. “Look, there.”

She pointed at a large cocoon where one of the infected crew wearing a spacesuit lay strapped down. Two hung over the contraption; they’d been moving it toward the airlock.

“How many already left this way?” Pepper asked.

The Swarm didn’t answer. Pairs of empty eyes regarded them.

“They can’t survive more than a couple hours in a spacesuit,” Grenada said. “Let them die out there.”

“That’s a handmade heat shield,” Pepper said. “That beanbag-looking thing. It’s a blunt cone.” They had taken a fireproof polyurethane foam
from the ship’s damage-control kits and made ablative heat shields. It was almost suicidal, but it worked. In theory.

“A heat shield?”

“How many infected have already left the ship?” Pepper asked as the Swarm just stared at him. “We’re moving too quickly for them to just jump off the ship and hope to get picked up, so if they’re going to aero-brake and parachute down to Chilo, they must be trying to spread there.”

“But why wouldn’t the League try for New Anegada, why Chilo?”

“Why Chilo is a good question.” Pepper wanted to know that as well.

The Swarm spoke again. “Have you.”

“Ever.”

“Had a compulsion?”

“Like breathing?”

“Built in.”

“Deep.”

“Is ours.”

“Spread.”

“Reduce, use the sentients.”

“And now our newest compulsion.”

The entire Swarm rushed them. Pepper slapped his helmet back on to avoid bites. But instead of attacking him, or Grenada, they pushed past him.

He stabbed several, got one’s head lopped clean off, but they rushed their last infected into the airlock, strapped to the personal heat shield. They were all just trying to move around him.

Even the Swarm not in spacesuits clustered into the airlock now. They waited for it to cycle out, dying in the vacuum. But even as that happened, they pushed the zombie the heat shield out of the lock.

Pepper sheathed his sword and looked around the empty bay. “Canden’s idea that she’s killing this off isn’t a hundred percent. I’m going to go out after them. This, infection, the group mind, it’s very hostile to us on general principle. And now they’re getting off your ship.”

Grenada shoved over to the airlock and opened one of the lockers.
She grabbed a pair of large hand rockets and tossed them at Pepper. “You need them for maneuvering.”

Sword at his side, Pepper got into the airlock. Dead infected bumped around, eyes frozen open, mouths wide.

Several minutes later the large doors swung open, revealing the vacuum. As the air blew out, so did Pepper, falling away from the immense hull of the ship.

“Good luck,” Canden’s voice whispered.

“You’ve been listening in all along, but not talking to me?” Pepper used the rocket guns to push himself away from the long, tubular form of the Shiek.

“I did what I could. I done my duty.”

Pepper watched as the ship grew smaller, and twisted himself around. Chilo dominated his field of vision. A lot of people would be surprised as the
Sheikh
blew right past its stop, leaving Chilo’s orbit to head down the sun’s gravity well.

“Pepper. Just make sure you do what you promise Grenada. Let them know how it ended.” Pepper listened, still and unmoving, as the sound of a round being chambered echoed inside his helmet. “Don’t have much time left, seen?”

“I will let them know. Do
me
a favor?”

“Yes.” Canden sounded tired.

“Where are the bulk of these things headed? If their trajectories hold true and planet weather doesn’t do strange things?”

A long silence passed. Then, “They’re like Swarm spores, yes. They’re all grouping, if they make it, for the far side of the planet from Chilo’s Great Storm. They’ll scatter some, they can’t make it alive for the most part, but they’ll be trying for it. I really doubt any of them, or you, can make it.”

“Thank you,” Pepper said. He set about using the spacesuit’s rudimentary navigation systems to compute an orbit that put him on the opposite side of the planet from the Swarm. That would give him time to recover and figure out what they were up to if he made it. He didn’t trust Canden enough to ask her for help. She might give him a trajectory that burned him up in the atmosphere.