PATCHER Page 3

  Vin nods and says nothing more.

  Chapter 4

  NO SOONER does he reach the emergency hatch than he realizes it’s jammed. All part of the plan, right Ken Doll? Pick a spot next to the emergency capsule, hunker down in the storage deck—all the porn you can watch and all the food you can eat. He pulls the metal handle again and gives up. He can feel a vibration through the metal one that hadn’t been there before, shouldn’t be there at all. And there’s a sound of grinding and ripping. He lets go and drifts back a ways.

  The ship’s gravity keeps trying to kick in, buffering them from the rapid shifts in momentum and force, and more than once, Kendal finds himself flung against a wall or floor, barely missing sharp corners and jagged edges. He floats and shifts to the main corridor—the only other escape capsules are toward the front. He might have to go through the bridge if he can make it that far. He opens the door and freezes as a crewman drifts by, rotates in the air, a patch of blackened skin rolling into view like a charred ham. One white eye stares out at Kendal in lifeless surprise, mouth open, pink tongue lolling amidst missing teeth. Kendal watches the corpse bounce along the corridor and vanish into darkness.

  He emerges into the passageway to find it mostly empty, aside from the passing bouncing body. Some of the crew doors remain closed with that same grinding noise coming from inside, like metal teeth chewing their food. He stares through a peephole in one door, just to see if there’s a pod, and for a moment, Kendal sees space through a ragged wound. There is simply nothing left of that side of the ship. The Luxemburg has been mortally wounded, and by who knows what…

  Beige fills his view through the crack, like a desert half moon as the planet rolls into view. He can’t even remember its name, can’t remember the first thing about it. He wasn’t in Survey, just a grunt in IT, a stowaway. Now he’s a dead man if he can’t get out. It’s too late to apologize, too late to change his mind, too late to take back all the bad decisions in his short life.

  Kendal pulls himself along the corridor and reaches the main travel-shaft. It’s dead, of course. All the remaining power is being diverted to keep the ship together, so he has to crank the doors open manually. He pries the panel away with chipping fingernails, grabs the crank, and starts to pump.

  The burned hand should have been his first clue to stop, but he’s too busy trying to crank the door wide to notice the flood of human bodies, packed as densely as canned food. It’s impossible to tell where one corpse ends and the others begin. That’s the funny thing about those travel shafts. When the gravity starts to go buggy, inertia can toss you around like a giant with a salad shaker.

  It looks like they were all on their way to the pods when the dampening cut out. Open mouths, wide eyes, and twisted limbs, greet him as the door continues to slide open. He wants to close it again, but knows he can’t.

  Maybe they were all coming from the bridge. Maybe they found something worth running from up there.

  The gravity lurches again, and his feet hit the floor. Then it’s off again and he’s floating. He threw up lunch already, and there’s simply nothing left in his stomach now.

  Or maybe they were all halfway up through the tube when the gravity threw them into a pile again.

  It doesn’t matter and there’s no time to guess. He grabs handfuls of arm, leg, clothes, pulls bodies from the chute. They drift behind him and tumble through the air. Gravity kicks in and they flop. Then float again—drop—float—drop. They do the Can-Can down the passageway as he digs.

  Kendal pulls his way through a tunnel carved in Hell, the gristle vat of a slaughterhouse. Dead breath kisses his face as lungs constrict under his movement. It feels like he is trapped in the throat of some awful serpent, squeezed by dying warmth. Light fades as another body falls onto the pile, and he wonders if this is how he will die—trapped in a pile of bodies, a mass grave set to explode under an alien sun.

  He shoves just as gravity kicks off again. The corpse floats away. Blood streams in globules from where a leg had been, sticking to walls and lights, painting his screaming world pink.

  There’s a clear path to the bridge now. The crew there will be the last into the capsules, he hopes. So if any capsules are left, he’ll find them there. He climbs hand over hand in null gravity as the ship howls in torment around him. The bridge door is already open.

  Red lights blink in warning, the static message on the screens reading COLLISION. Well, no shit. Probably something the size of a pebble hit the ship. That’s all it takes. Most of the crew has likely died in their sleep, the rest caught off guard with little chance to save themselves. Damage is extensive and terminal, save for the cargo hold, which is amazingly unaffected. He’d laugh if he wasn’t so terrified.

  The planet grows to encompass the screen. Alarms buzz and crackle, ignored by the ragdoll crew. They speak to him as he remembers their faces.

  He looks to his left and sees Navigator First Class, Michael Indiigan, (“Hey kid, I need my email password reset.”) his head split open in a grin, squeezed red by the chunk of bulkhead that fell on him. Now Michael is piloting the ship with his face. Kendal turns to his right and it’s nothing but smoke and gore. Bodies lay across the exposed cables and panels. Captain Aymes (“Are you supposed to be on this floor?”) lays beside his chair, still connected to fine cables embedded in his spine, the cables that should be flying the ship.

  Wind howls through clarinet holes torn in the hull. Smoke seeps out with them.

  Decompression had killed most of the crew, he figures, sucked into space, screaming with airless lungs. The bridge smells like over-cooked meat, and all he sees are red flashing lights, static from a screen. A feedback loop shrieks through a speaker as the ship’s AI dies. The stabilizers go with it.

  The ship tilts violently as Kendal fights his way to the capsule over crew and console. Mountains, oceans, gorges, jungles. It all rolls past as he tumbles in a five hundred foot metal coffin.

  A body lays just three yards from the pod door…well, half of him. Kendal steps over Tom Bixby (“Welcome aboard. We could use an IT guy who listens to people for once.”) and slams his fist against the red panel along the wall. A door opens with a hiss—he can feel the air escaping around it.

  I’ll probably come apart in reentry. This pod probably took a piece of debris on the way in… and I wasn’t even supposed to be on this ship… that means nobody will even come looking for me… and I’ll die alone and sad… and I’ll never be able to say I’m sorry…

  Kendal steps inside. The door seals itself behind him, lowering the roar of wind to a buzz. A white cushioned chair sits in the center of the pod, laced with small buttons and switches—all of it so ergonomic one would think it was carved from a living creature. The pod is equipped with the bare minimums—a shell of heat-sink ceramics and plastic surrounding a gel-chair and an oxygen tube. As he spins on a heel to fall into the seat, webbing shoots from emitters in the armrests, covering his body and melding into the fabric of his jumpsuit, cocooning him in secreted sedatives and happy feelings. Oxygen fills the empty space around his nose and mouth.

  He feels a heavy clunk! His stomach lurches. Ears pop. The clamps have just let go.

  Then he is falling, falling, falling into the unknown.

  Light appears in the form of a small screen over his face, something to show him what he would see with his own eyes. A small circle displays the Gees of his fall in red, the rotation of the capsule in blue. A tiny camera shows the outside world, shows the sky, the mountains, the ground rushing to meet him beyond that gray cloud layer.

  With each spin of the capsule he can make out the Luxemburg through the tiny screen, a wounded bird, tumbling through the air, shedding great black feathers of steel and graphene, ceramic and smoke. A long blackened hole in its flank billows smoke in a trail behind its ragged aft. Pieces of debris emerge and twist like confetti from newly formed holes. Some of them are people.

  He spins.

  Less of the ship is visible now as atmos
pheric friction eats away at the hull. The CORPORATE MATERIAL SOLUTIONS eagle that once was so prominent below the bridge tears away as the nose of the ship flattens, superheats, and explodes.

  He spins.

  The Luxemburg is now a cloud of smoke, lit in pink by an alien sunset. It looks almost to Kendal like a flower. Chunks of hull shoot off at crazy angles like drunken bats. They tumble away.

  He spins.

  Then the capsule begins to shake as he falls into the gravity well, compressed air heating the pod’s casing. He is only three feet away from ten thousand degrees of hot metal, traveling at five-times the speed of sound.

  I didn’t even get to say goodbye…

  Kendal spins and blacks out. He doesn’t even feel the impact.

  *

  Softness surrounds him as he opens his eyes in the Home-Ec class. Other students stare at him, including Jess. Assigned seating has made them partners.

  “You going to thread that needle?” she asks.

  “Yeah…” He looks down at the cloth between them, torn beyond repair, a practice quilt with drunken, mismatched patches covering one side. Some of the scrap cloth has been torn from children’s clothing and now bits of cartoon dog, cat, elephant, and penguin stare up at him, their bodies and faces forming a monstrous creature that screams “Kill me.”

  “Careful with that stitch,” a voice says—maybe his father’s, maybe his own. “Sometimes it’s hard to realize you’ve made a terrible mistake until you are well past the point of no return.”

  He plunges the needle through and looks up at Jess. But she isn’t watching him. She isn’t there at all. And the classroom is gone. When he looks back at his lap he sees he’s pissed himself, and can hear distant, faceless laughter…

  *

  For a minute he thinks the spinning and falling was a dream, and that Home-Ec class was the reality. He’s passed out. Or maybe he was on a ship and the cabin pressure changed… It was all some bends-induced nightmare.

  Light filters in through a cracked panel, warm on his face and skin, turning the insides of his eyelids red. They flutter open.

  Night has enveloped him. The webbing has fallen away with no power to support it. He sits up and it tears apart like bathroom tissue.

  He blinks.

  Then vomits.

  It happens fast and without warning. Hot liquid shoots from his mouth and hits the door. He didn’t think he had any left in him. He just sits there for a second, shocked, waiting to see if his body is going to betray him again. It doesn’t.

  Kendal wipes his mouth and looks around. The capsule is squashed, but that’s its job. It’s taken all the kinetic energy of the fall and absorbed it, leaving the precious cargo intact.

  Precious cargo.

  He laughs, and the laughter grows louder until he can’t distinguish it from crying. His hands go to his face and he wails into them, screams until he’s hoarse. Once he’s done, once the grief has been purged, he looks around with fresh eyes, and takes a breath. The air feels thin. Just the act of crying has left him lightheaded. And there’s something else too, a smell he can’t identify from his own sick and the inside of the smoldering capsule.

  He reaches out, grabs a handhold nearby, and yanks as hard as he can. The section of wall comes free, revealing a meager medical kit, a flare gun with a handful of shells, and a clear mask. A small tank of oxygen and a filtered mask rest at the back of the cubby. He takes it all, fitting the mask to the tank and then putting the med kit in his lap.

  Flipping open the lid reveals some gauze, bandages, a tube of antiseptic burngel, some sewing needles and thread, peroxide bottles, and drugs. Lots of drugs, all in little paper packets. He thumbs through the tiny single-dose packets, each with a hidden needle. You just slap one on your skin and press. Instant high. There are drugs for infection, headache, diarrhea, common cold, heartburn. There’s the mid-level stuff for pain, morphine—and then there’s the last packet.

  He picks this one up and stares at it. A skull-and-crossbones in yellow decorate one corner. The amber liquid is just barely visible inside. All he would have to do is press it against his neck and he’d be dead in ten seconds. Maybe even less. No pain, no spasms, no panic reflex—just a closing darkness as his neurons are shut down like an office building closing for the night.

  It’s certainly less messy than the flare gun in his mouth.

  He places the death tab in his pocket and then holsters the flare gun. Strapping the medical packet to his thigh, Kendal leans forward toward the door and grabs the handle.

  Stuck. It might as well be welded.

  He twists the handholds back and forth, and feels them catch on something gritty, maybe debris that got wedged during impact. He can see the sunlight seeping in through the cracks in the pod’s skin, so at least he isn’t underground. That’s a relief.

  Kendal tries harder, feels the gears grind against coarse sand and dirt. Red spots form in his eyes and he lets go, falling back into the seat. Blackness starts to close in around him and he reaches for the mask, taking big desperate gulps before the world returns.

  …and just how long has that scratching been going on?

  As he rests, pulling the mask away, he hears it again. It reminds him of the way a dog will make cursory probes with a paw before digging. Something outside sniffs, moves some dirt, and waits.

  Kendal grips the flare gun, peering through the cracks in the hull, looking for a shadow. There is no movement that he can see—

  A shadow passes over and is gone. More digging.

  Then nothing. He waits, holding his breath.

  He hears the crunch of gravel recede. He tries to count the footfalls, tries to determine if he is hearing two legs or four—or five.

  Kendal moves to the long, eggshell crack in the pod and places his face against it. All he sees is desert rocks and cliffs. He’s in some sort of ravine. The cliffs are steep and hollowed out with what look like caves. Something the size of a housecat moves with shadow smoothness up the red rock and into one of the holes.

  He waits again, trying to hold his panic. He has to reserve oxygen, but holy shit—did anyone else in the room see how fast that thing moved?

  His hand goes to the pocket in his shirt and rests there for comfort.

  So, now I know, he thinks. I’ve seen another world. I’ve made it farther than anyone in my family. My curiosity is sated.

  The hand goes from his pocket to his flare gun as the shadows begin to leak in long streams from the holes in the cliff like black tar surrounding his pod.

  Chapter 5

  BEX WAKES to the sound of desert lizards chirping and Bindo lowing in the barn. She simply stares at the ceiling at first, her mind replaying the events of yesterday—the stalkers, the attack, the gun, the egg… Whatever potential was there is just a congealed ooze festering inside Bindo’s pouch by now. The Patcher has probably even taken notice and cleaned it out.

  So what’s even the point?

  Her legs don’t want to move, her arms hanging limp from the bed of straw and cloth. What is a Tender without a Ward? What had she trained for? She might as well become a Patcher, or a hermit, or a beggar, or anything else, since she clearly sucks as a Tender.

  It isn’t your fault, says the voice of her teacher. Farren had always been too easy on her, and she sees that now. He should have disciplined her, should have forced her to fight harder, smarter. Maybe the Ward would be alive now instead of hardening in the bottom of Bindo’s pouch.

  But then, even Farren couldn’t have seen the attack coming, the armed poachers with their bone blades and long legs, grafted from leafleapers. She can still see Farren’s head rolling along the ground, chopped clear by a scythe-shaped arm. Then she is running and tripping, grabbing Bindo and fleeing through the back alleys of town, praying that nobody sees them as they scurry under night along the Bone Sea shore. And they don’t see her or Bindo. And for the longest time she is safe, just her and Bindo and the Ward. All until the stalkers come.


  “Food’s getting cold.” Vin’s voice drifts up from the lower level and Bex finds the strength somehow to lift her arms from the bed. She sits there, contemplating whether to lie back down, but then the smell of food reaches her and she’s up, if by no other motivation than hunger.

  Vin sits at the dinner table, eating. He gestures to the food there and her stomach growls.

  “Might as well eat something while we discuss payment.” He jabs a strip of meat with a two-pronged fork and shoves it into his face.

  She surprises herself how fast she eats, inhaling the food, crunching bones, tearing at the meat like something feral, like a stalker. When she finally slows down, licking a finger, she catches Vin’s eyes watching her. Embarrassed, she pulls a napkin up to her face and says, “Thank you.”

  “Seemed like you two hadn’t eaten in months.”

  “A week maybe.” She grabs the cup and drinks the water. It’s filtered, tasting slightly of algae. “We had rations.”

  “Well, breakfast is on the house,” Vin says. But his eyes say something different.

  “I can go back and try to salvage the stalker carcasses if you like,” she says. “I have no money.”

  “Mmmhmm.” He picks up a book and buries himself in it while she picks at the last of her meal.

  “Everything costs money,” she says. “And I don’t have any.”

  He puts the book down and looks at her. “Well I guess we’d better be going then if we’re going to earn it back.”

  “We…”

  Vin is already up and putting on a vest. “More and more reports of stalker movement the last few days. They kill the livestock and threaten the farmers. Nobody’s very happy about them and I’m tired of treating damaged brindlegoats.” He pulls a rifle off the wall mount. “Some days it seems the ground journey can’t come fast enough.”