Parasite, p.29
Parasite, page 29
Mitzi tried to imagine what he must have gone through, navigating the hallways in the pitch dark, suitless, with no way of knowing if he was about to walk into a Cymic, no way to contact his team. He’d had only the smallest chance of ever finding them again. It was incredible.
Her hands faltered as she traced a cable. More than incredible. It was impossible…
He’d found his way into the control room in under ten minutes, when he’d already told them he was kilometres away. Then he’d found the permission card almost immediately so that he could let them in. And he’d been awfully quick to volunteer to accompany Mitzi to the maintenance room when he’d heard she would need to step out of her suit…
Your own brother could be a Cymic, and you wouldn’t know until he attacked you.
“Mitz, did you hear me?” Nic broke through the awful fog that was filling Mitzi’s mind. “That’s the right cable. R-two-four-nine is the right cable. Cut it, and you can open the door.”
“Right,” Mitzi said, her voice so thin that she doubted Nic would hear. Her mind was buzzing. The logical side that cared about her self-preservation fought to be heard over the emotional side that was screaming in horror and fear.
All of her weapons were in the ADE, four feet away, and there was no way he would give her the chance to suit up. Her team was waiting at the top of the stairs, and even if she screamed, they wouldn’t get to her in time. They might not even hear her. She glanced left and right out of the corner of her eyes, but the pipes were all tightly attached to the walls, and she couldn’t see anything hefty that she could use as a weapon. All she had was the small pocketknife in her hand, which wouldn’t even slow Cymics.
Crap, crap, crap…
“Is something the matter?” Franc asked, and there was an awful gravelly quality to his voice.
Mitzi turned, dreading what she was about to see.
Chapter Fifty-Four
Franc smiled at her, his eyes full of gentle optimism and good humour. A crack ran the length of his face, and even as Mitzi tried to back away, it began widening, splitting his head open. His eyes swivelled oddly to continue watching her as each half of his face was pulled to the side to expose the monster inside.
Mitzi ran for her suit, but Franc was too fast. He raised an arm, and a tendril shot out of it, shredding the skin that had covered his hand. Mitzi pulled up to avoid it, and it swung towards her, hitting her in the chest and sending her reeling back against the wall. It hurt an awful lot more without the protection of her suit.
The tiny flashlight fell to the ground as Franc dropped his human disguise. The skin sloughed off, curling around behind him to be stored inside his monstrous form. Mitzi searched desperately for something to fight him with. But she was cornered, and everything that might have been useful was out of reach.
She opened her mouth to scream, hoping that her team would hear her or Nic would figure out what was happening and alert them. They’d be miles too late to save her, but at least they would be warned. A tendril hit her before she could make a noise, though, and forced her into the concrete wall. A cracking noise and searing pain across her chest told her that the impact had broken a few of her ribs.
Franc slunk closer. One tendril pinned her to the wall while a second sought her mouth, trying to push inside.
Not like this, Mitzi begged. Let me die, but please don’t let me be turned.
She struggled, kicking, punching, digging her nails into the slimy, cold flesh, but Franc paid no attention. The tendril pushed past her teeth, and she gagged on the sickening taste.
Then she heard a crack. Franc twitched, pulling back. Mitzi gasped, suddenly able to breathe again, and spat. Franc was turning, stretching out more limbs. His body rippled as he pulled the human flesh back out so that he could see and hear. She heard another crack, and Mitzi saw something shining dimly in the doorway. Franc released her, and she collapsed to her knees, shivering and feeling sick.
It only took a second for Franc to fall, too. He’d succeeded in half-covering himself with the human flesh, and the result was a repulsive pile of twitching black substance and a shrivelled human skin. His eyes were rolling wildly in their sockets as he shuddered, and for a second, they fixed themselves on Mitzi. They were filled with pure hatred and unadulterated fury. She turned away and saw two red darts stuck in his black skin.
Nerve toxins.
Footsteps were approaching, and Mitzi looked up, squinting in the dim light. She caught a glimpse of Mir’s face behind the suit’s helmet before someone picked up the torch and turned it on her, blinding her.
“You okay?” Skye’s voice was thin and terrified.
Mitzi squinted against the light as she tried to think through her patchy knowledge about the Cymics. She knew they spread like a virus, and they infected humans by either spearing them or getting down the victim’s throat. Was it enough that it had been in her mouth, though, or did she need to have swallowed it?
“Keep your gun on me,” Mitzi said, her voice ragged as she pressed one hand to her burning ribs to keep them still. “If I start to change, shoot.”
She was hyper-aware of her body as she started counting under her breath. What would it feel like to be corrupted? Was it painful? How much of it would she be awake for?
Skye had lowered the light so Mitzi could see again, and she watched the nozzle of the neurotoxin gun Mir had pointed towards her. The girl’s face was paper white, and the gun was shaking, but she kept her eyes locked on Mitzi, intense and prepared.
Mitzi counted to two minutes before she let herself slump back with a sigh. “No. I’m okay. It wasn’t enough to change me.”
“Prove it,” Mir said, her gun still trained on Mitzi’s face.
“Come again?”
“We need to be sure. Prove you’re human.”
Mitzi felt a tired grin grow over her face. Good girl. She learned fast. Moving slowly and deliberately, she reached to her right and picked up the pocketknife she’d dropped. Then she pressed the tip into her palm, in the same place she’d nicked herself that morning during the demonstration, and held her palm out so her team could see the drop of red blood.
Mir dropped the gun and threw herself at Mitzi, wrapping her arms around her torso in a hug.
“Gentle, gentle!” Mitzi gasped as the pain in her ribs flared, and Mir drew back and awkwardly patted the top of her head instead.
Skye stepped over Franc’s still body and held out a hand to pull Mitzi to her feet. “You sure you’re okay?”
“Yeah, if I was going to change, I’d know by now.” Mitzi glanced at Franc’s remains then looked away quickly. Her throat felt raw as the shock began to catch up to her. “How did you know?”
“Mir figured it out,” Skye said. “A few minutes after you’d left. You should have seen the look on her face.”
Mitzi chuckled. The sound seemed hollow. “Well done, Mir. I think I owe you a serious debt.”
The girl shrugged, looking awkward and slightly pleased at the same time, and turned back to the stairs. “Can we go now or what?”
“Yeah, I’ve just got to cut the cable. Hang on.”
As Mitzi sliced through the blue cable, she felt an ache develop in her chest that had nothing to do with the fractured ribs. She’d lost one of her team: quiet, dependable Franc, the accountant who’d come on the mission to ensure a world existed for his grandchildren.
Maybe he’s done that. He died leading the Cymics away from us. His sacrifice meant we could live long enough to get to the reactors.
She felt her throat tighten, but she pushed the emotions down as she stepped back into her suit and felt it tighten around her. The pain in her ribs dulled slightly as the suit supported her body. Later, she would grieve for Franc and run through all of her poor choices, picking apart the errors of judgement that had allowed one of her team members to die, but at that moment, she couldn’t afford the luxury of introspection. She had a planet to blow up.
“Nic, please tell me this is the last damn door I have to open,” she said as she jogged up the stairs, gritting her teeth against the pain.
“Last one, doll.” His voice was unusually soft. She wondered how much he’d heard of the scene in the maintenance room.
The stairs seemed even longer on the way up than they had on the way down. By the time Mitzi reached the brighter and more spacious passageway at the top, she would have been completely happy with never seeing another stair in her life. She turned right, towards the door. “What’s next, Nic?”
“The lock’s off, so you can pull the doors open. There’ll be a metal walkway going across the top of the reactor, which will look something like a giant bucket half-full of fuel. Throw your charge in, and then I’ll get you to the top and pick you up, and we can all go home.”
“Sounds good to me.” Mitzi dug her gloves into the crack in the door and began pulling. They ground open slowly and reluctantly, then a cold wind, accompanied by the heady metallic smell of fuel, crept through the helmet’s seal.
They edged in, struck dumb. Mitzi had guessed the reactor must be large, but large felt like such an insipid word compared to the fixture she faced. She stood on the lip of an immense hole; only a waist-high concrete barrier divided her from the drop. Steam rose from the hole, obscuring the opposite side, but Mitzi guessed it had to be at least a kilometre wide.
A little to her left, metal stairs rose sharply then opened onto a walkway that stretched across the divide. It looked hilariously fragile suspended above the abyss.
Mitzi swallowed as she approached the lip of the concrete divider and leaned forward, shining her torch into it. The beam reflected off something shiny, forty feet down. Mitzi squinted at it through the steam then felt her heart freeze as the thing inside the reactor moved.
“Eoin?” she asked, mouth dry, not daring to move. “You know about this station, right? What’s the fuel based on?”
“Its base?” he asked. “An altered form of poly-carbon-azatope.”
“I see. And that’s—”
“Water, of course.”
The movement in the reactor was increasing. Shiny black shapes rolled over each other, twisting and writhing, their moist skin glistening in the fuel.
“What’s wrong?” Nic asked.
Mitzi found it nearly impossible to say the words. “There’s a Cymic in the reactor.”
“Just one?”
“Yes.” The heaving shape rose, filling the entire width of the hole. “And also a million.”
Seeking somewhere quiet and dark, the million souls lost on Station 335 had congregated in the fuel-filled reaction chamber. And they’d consolidated. Central had never warned her about that.
Mitzi turned off her light, but it was too late. She’d already woken them.
Chapter Fifty-Five
A thousand thoughts sped through her mind. With the Cymics diluting the fuel, would the charge still work? Would her team have time to get to the surface and be picked up? Was there even a sliver of a chance left of rescuing Adam and Ellen?
She had to try. She had to do her level best to complete the job, even if it cost her and her team—her beautiful, loyal team—their lives. Mitzi fumbled in the suit’s pouch for the detonator and whimpered.
“What’s wrong?” Skye’s voice was tense.
“The detonator’s gone.”
Mir swung towards her. “What? Did you drop it?”
“Impossible.” Mitzi’s mind ran through the previous hour and fixed on one single moment: when she’d been tracing wires in the maintenance room. Franc’s torch had wavered as though he’d moved.
He took it. Just in case I got away.
She thought of the four levels of stairs she needed to run down to fetch it, and a shudder ran down her back. She could no longer see the Cymics in the vat, but she could hear them, shifting and crawling upwards. She began backing towards the door, ushering her team behind her. The Cymic couldn’t hear in its current form, but that didn’t stop her from whispering. “You three get to the surface. Pick up Adam and Ellen if you can, but don’t take unnecessary risks. Get on the ship.”
“What about you?” Skye asked.
Mitzi had only opened her mouth to reply when the ground under her feet shook, throwing her off balance. Dust rained from the ceiling, and the walls shook, seeming to sway, as metal squealed.
“No!” Mitzi thought of the pipes that would be running out from the reactor to feed into different parts of the stations. They were full of the Cymics, too, and if those Cymics decided to exert their full force against the pipes… “They’re trying to collapse the station.”
“They are collapsing the station.” Nic was typing furiously. “Get out of there!”
“The detonator’s in the maintenance room.”
Nic swore. “Well, you’re not getting it back. The station’s being crumbled from the lowest levels up. You’ve gotta move before they get to you.”
Mitzi could feel the intense, raw power below her feet, rising closer with a deafening rumble. The concrete floor cracked in huge black gashes, an arm-width wide and growing larger. She stepped back to be clear of them. “Door!” she hissed. “Open the door!”
Skye wrenched open the sliding doors, but she was barely in time to leap backwards as the outside corridor crumbled. Then the walls and roof smashed down to block the passage. The ground under them heaved again, throwing them closer to the pit. Mitzi, who was closest, hit the concrete barrier and threw out a hand to grab Eoin before he went over the edge. She twisted to see into the pit, and sick nausea grew in her stomach. The mass of Cymics continued to rise, stretching out immense tendrils the width of tree trunks. Thousands of pale shapes loomed out of the darkness, but Mitzi didn’t recognise what they were until she focussed on the nearest one and stared into the blank white eyes of a human face. The parasites were raising their skins.
“Step back!” Nic screamed, his voice hoarse.
Mitzi tried to stagger back towards the doors, but the ground had tilted, turning into a funnel, as the floors behind them rose, shooting up jagged shards of concrete and a flood of water from burst pipes. It was too steep to climb while the floor was shaking, and the plumes of dust were making it nearly impossible to see. Mitzi was thrown onto her back and felt herself sliding down the slope, towards the reaching, grasping arms of the Cymics. She tried to scramble backwards, but she found it nearly impossible to grip anything while the ground tossed her about like a rag doll. Her feet hit the concrete barrier—the only thing standing between her and an inevitable plunge into the maw of the monsters below—and Mitzi bit down on a scream as the concrete began to crumble.
A boom, so loud that Mitzi thought it must have deafened her, rocked through her, and she understood why Nic had told her to move back. The roof was falling. A huge circle, directly above the Cymic pit, plunged downwards, breaking into a multitude of fragments as the supports failed to hold the immense bulk together. It hit the reaching tendrils, crushing them back down into the pit. Mitzi spotted two small shiny shapes clinging to one of the pipes jutting out of the top of the collapsed roof.
Adam and Ellen.
They’d somehow blown the ceiling into the reactor with nearly perfect precision. Mitzi squinted through the billowing dust clouds to see Adam raise an arm and wave to her. She felt frozen with shock, but her mind was galloping, digging through plans, grasping at straws.
They couldn’t get through the door behind them. They couldn’t go down. That left—
Mitzi glanced at the hole in the ceiling, which gave her a glimpse of blue sky. “Nic, where’s your ship?”
“Not far from the reactor, doll.”
“Get as close as you can.” Mitzi grabbed Eoin’s and Mir’s arms and began dragging them left, towards the remainder of the metal bridge, ushering Skye ahead. The concrete lid Adam and Ellen had dropped wouldn’t keep the Cymics down for long, but she had a plan—a crazy, stupid, recklessly dangerous plan that even she couldn’t believe she was about to try.
The falling roof had sliced through the middle of the metal walkway, but the edges were still functional, if a little twisted. Shuffling, rolling, and pushing, Mitzi urged her companions across the horrifically steep incline and towards the bridge. “Get on. Get on!” she yelled.
The block of concrete was still pushing the Cymics downwards, but it was slowing. Any second, they would be rising again.
“Climb!”
The floor had risen so steeply that that the steps leading up to the walkway were nearly sideways. Mitzi struggled up them on her hands and knees, gripping the metal slats so tightly that her suit’s gloves crushed the metal, to prevent the lurching, rocking motion of the room from throwing her off. She reached the top of the stairs, where the remainder of the walkway, all twenty feet of it, stretched downwards like a slide before it warped and broke off.
“Follow me,” she barked to the three team members behind her. Then she threw her legs onto the walkway and let gravity drag her down it. Her gloves ground against the rails as she sought to keep herself from being knocked off, and shudders ran up her body, sending her teeth chattering. Her heart was in her throat, and eyes were wide as she faced the end of the walkway. As she’d guessed, the Cymics were rising again, pushing the concrete up with them, but there was still a ten-foot drop from the end of the walkway into the pit. She couldn’t even see if there was an intact piece of concrete where she was going to land.
She shot off the end of the walkway and stretched out her feet, bracing for impact, praying that she would land on solid ground rather than the sucking flesh of the Cymics. She heard a gasp but didn’t dare look back. Concrete rose to meet her boots, and she hit it with such force that the metal suit groaned, and a spike of pain ran up the leg that had been damaged. Barely a foot behind her, the concrete ended, and the black flesh rippled, still struggling to come to terms with having a hundred tons of concrete dropped on it.
