Рич Ларсон - Tomorrow Factory - Collected Fiction

He slipped his arm free from the cable and let go. Hurling towards the breach, head over heels, spinning madly. He felt his organs shuffle spots. The jagged lip of the torn ceiling jumped at him, then the bubbled mass of the bioship’s grappler, and then Silas was out of the ship and surrounded by nothing at all.

Vertigo swamped him. Space was vast, and his momentum was hurling him towards far-flung stars. Biting down the panic, Silas triggered his radsuit’s directional jets, working in short bursts of compressed gas to bring himself to a dead stall.

Craning his sweat-cold neck, he saw that the bioship, and what was left of their own ship, had ended up above him. Silas felt the vertigo returning. He’d been carried further than he’d realized. The slick bulk of the bioship filled the space above him, and he could see only the nose of his former ship. The rest was enveloped by grapplers or already gone, fed into the electric-orange maw of the smelters.

The oxygen meter in the corner of his eye was dropping. He opened the wide channel.

“Io?” he said, his own voice echoing back to him. “Yorick?”

No response, either because the bioship was walling him off, or because of something he didn’t want to think about. Silas roved the outside of the bioship with only his eyes, not daring to turn on his scanning equipment. He needed all the computational power he could spare to keep Haley’s imprint intact. The old ship was completely gone now, as if it had never existed. Another candidate for elegy.

And Haley’s body was gone, too. The realization jolted him. Her genes were backed up, but clones took time, and money, and she might opt for a different body altogether. But none of that would happen if he died out here.

Silas jetted closer, half watching his oxygen, half searching for the airlock. He brought himself to a careful stop. The bioship seemed gargantuan now, an impossible labyrinth of flanges and feelers. The squid had become a kraken. He scanned with growing desperation for the hole he’d left with the howler. How fast could a bioship repair itself? Was the exit wound already fully sealed over, invisible?

He jetted parallel now, wondering if he’d ended up on the wrong side completely, but just as his panic was welling and his oxygen was turning a chiding shade of orange, he saw a tell-tale pucker in the bioship’s exterior. An airlock sphincter. Maybe the same one, maybe not; Silas didn’t care. He angled himself and triggered the jets.

Nothing.

“Oh, shit. Oh, shit, Haley.”

Silas squeezed again. He’d used too much on the way in. The tank was dead empty. He checked his trajectory and felt his mouth go dry. He’d been jetting along the side of the bioship to find the airlock, and unless the tendrils started moving again to block his path, momentum was going to carry him right on past the aft of the ship and out into space.

“I am a fucking idiot,” Silas said.

Haley’s silence felt like agreement. He only had one shot now, and it was not an easy one. He held the viola case against his chest and measured the angles as best he could. He aimed his back towards the airlock, apologized, and stiff-armed the case away from himself.

It drifted off towards the stars, and Silas drifted equal and opposite, achingly slow, towards the hull of the ship. His oxygen meter was a throbbing red now, and he wasn’t sure if it was his imagination or if his temples were beginning to throb in tandem.

It was several long moments before he realized he was off-course. He flexed his gloved fingers. Off-course, but not by much. If there was something, anything to grab hold of on the hull surface, he would be able to crawl the half meter to the airlock and break through.

If not, he could very well end up caroming off back the way he came, and he’d jettisoned his instrument for nothing. The oxygen was definitely coming thinner now, and the insulation inside his radsuit had turned icy. Silas tried to take shallow breaths as the hull approached. His skin itched for a bit of euphoria.

The bioship’s carapace was smooth and gleaming here. No tendrils, no serrations. Silas’s gut churned. He was barely off. He stared pleadingly at the pucker of the airlock, as if he could magnetize himself to it.

Something stranger happened. A fleshy nub pushed its way out, turning this way and that as if searching for something. At first Silas thought it was only an extension of the bioship’s hull, but as he drifted closer he saw a misshapen and featureless head, stubby limbs reaching through after it. It looked like a clay monster.

Silas laughed. Maybe it was the low oxygen, maybe the adrenaline crash. His voice sounded tinny bouncing back at him, confined by his faceplate. He wasted the last of his air laughing. He was hardly even surprised when the thing stretched out its forelimbs and gestured him to do the same. Silas stretched, breathing on his own hot carbon dioxide. His lungs felt thick. Soupy.

The monster caught him and pulled him gently inside.

Once the sphincter had resealed behind them and his radsuit gave a happy chirp, refilling its oxygen tanks from the bioship’s atmosphere, Silas took his first breath. It swam his head and nearly splintered his ribs. He tried again, not so deep, and the vice squeezing his vision black slowly loosened. He could see the bioluminescence spackling the dark ceiling like constellations.

He could see the monster standing over him, upright now on two thick stumps of legs, and could see, despite it being the same rubbery brown flesh as the rest of the bioship, that there was something very human about it. Silas rolled onto his stomach, tested his limbs, then got slowly, slowly, to his feet again.

He stared at the thing. The thing maybe stared back. Strips of flesh were peeling around its lumpy head and shoulders and the rubbery brown took on a gangrenous tinge around its stumpy feet. A decaying biosecurity module? No. Not with the way it was standing there, impatient, almost, waiting for Silas to decide on fight or flight.

Bile surged from his stomach. With clarion certainty he knew, suddenly, that Yorick was wrong. The bioship hadn’t eaten the crew. Not all of them, at least.

“Were you a crew member?” Silas asked faintly, external mic.

The thing nodded its lopsided head. Silas tamped down his urge to vomit. The bioship had to be equipped with some rudimentary gene labs, in case injured miners needed limbs regrown or a tweak for high-gravity work. He could picture the swath of tendrils conducting struggling crew members there one by one, fitting them into surgical pods, setting to work with mutagens and autoscalpels and artificial viruses. The bioship had played god and remade them in its image.

“Oh, fuck,” Silas said.

The thing nodded, this time gesturing with one arm.

“Lead on,” Silas said, and he fell into step behind it. He had passed through a different airlock: this corridor had less flesh and no waving tendrils. He checked on Haley’s ghost again. It was still intact, still pristine, but before long the code would start to crumble around the edges. If he found Io and Yorick he might be able to rig something more stable using the processors in all three of their radsuits, but that was another temporary measure.

And it assumed Io and Yorick were alive. Silas took another look at the thing’s mottled hump and shuddered. “The two others with me,” he said. “Do you know where they are?”

Head shake, or at least Silas thought it was a head shake.

“Can I radio them?”

Head shake again.

“The bioship will pick it up?”

A nod, at last. But maybe Io and Yorick had gotten away and holed up somewhere on the bioship. He’d distracted it quite thoroughly, after all, when he took off sprinting. Silas held that comforting thought in mind as they arrived at what Silas guessed was the engine room.