Ghost station, p.24
Ghost Station, page 24
“Just shut up and listen,” she says. “I thought, at the time, it might have been another prank.”
He grimaces.
“But now I think … I think I might have been sleepwalking. It’s not uncommon for patients to experience more than one kind of parasomnia. Night terrors. Sleepwalking.”
Ethan hesitates, then shrugs. “So you were sleepwalking. Sleep disturbances are not uncommon on R&E missions, as you’ve pointed out.”
“Not usually this early on, but that doesn’t matter.” Ophelia folds her arms over herself. “And then, last night or this morning, I had this dream, but it was also part memory. I was there again.” Only, as my father. Fuck, how had she not seen this earlier?
“Where, exactly?” Ethan asks, confused.
She swallows hard. “Goliath.”
“The old space station in the Carver system?” he asks with a frown. “Why?”
“I’m … I was born there.” It feels like letting go of a lit match she’s been carrying for years, trying not to get burned, trying not to drop it.
A snort of disbelief escapes him, seemingly before he can stop it. He quickly regains control of his expression. “No, you weren’t. You were born on that cult outpost.”
“Commune colony,” Ophelia corrects automatically. “That’s what we told everyone, yes.”
“Celestia whatever. Everyone knows that.” He pauses. “Why are you saying this?”
Of course he’s going to believe the media over her, the actual person involved. She wants to shout at him, Do you think I don’t know where I was born? Do you think I wouldn’t want to forget this if I could?
Okay, okay, breathe, slow down. She needs to build the case for him. “If I hadn’t found that shoe, I would never have realized I was even out of bed. I would have just assumed I’d slept in my bunk without interruption. It might even have happened other times.” Those dreams of wandering down corridors in the dark, had they not been dreams at all?
“You’re telling me you think you killed Birch in your sleep.” His tone is acid.
“It’s not sleep, exactly. It’s a memory. I’m reenacting a memory. Or a version of the memory, I don’t know. It’s confusing.” She presses her fingers against her forehead and the headache throbbing within.
“Doctor, I agree with you that we have a problem here,” he says, clearly struggling with his temper. “That’s why we’re heading home. But I don’t think there’s any reason to assume that Birch’s death was—”
“I woke up with blood on my hands and face this morning. I thought … I thought it was just another bloody nose, like what Kate had. But it was a lot.”
This time, Ethan’s not quite as fast to respond. “It probably was a nosebleed.”
“I wanted to check on his arm last night,” Ophelia says. “My arm had this weird rash, breakout, I don’t know. That’s why I was scratching last night.” She shudders at the memory of the movement beneath her skin. “Maybe it’s part of this whole thing, maybe it’s not. I wanted to check to see if Birch’s was the same, but he wouldn’t let me, threatened to tell everyone about me.” She draws in a slow breath. “It’s the same arm that was … dissected this morning.”
“Breakout?” Ethan asks. “What kind of—”
“You’re not listening to me,” Ophelia says through clenched teeth. “I was born on Goliath.”
“So you’ve said, which I still don’t under—”
“I lived there until I was eleven, almost twelve.” But that’s not the real secret, is it? She feels like she’s walking up to the cliff’s edge, inching closer and closer, until pebbles are flying out from beneath her feet and the wind is pushing at her back. “My name was Lark Bledsoe. Field Bledsoe was my father.”
Ethan rocks back as if she’s taken a swing at him, clearly recognizing the name, but uncertainty still flickers around the edges of his expression.
Time to end that. End everything. Jump.
“Bloody Bledsoe is my father.”
23
Before Ethan can protest, tell Ophelia that she’s delusional—obviously not an impossibility, given their current situation—she continues. “I’d tell you to check with Birch. He recognized me. But obviously we’re a little late for that.” She flings her hand in a gesture toward her office and Birch’s body within.
Ethan shakes his head, but he steps away from her, retreating toward the central hub. That hurts more than she expected.
“That doesn’t make sense,” Ethan says. “It’s not possible. Bledsoe’s family, they died in the attack. I was sixteen. I remember hearing that.” His expression goes somewhere distant. “We had trouble getting food shipments in the Lunar Valley for a while because of the new transport regulations.”
The lunar colony famine. More pain that could be traced directly back to her family.
“But I bet you didn’t hear a lot about his family, did you?”
His silence is enough of a response.
“My mother fell in love with Field Bledsoe, and the Brays cut them off. They spread some story about her going on some special assignment somewhere because they were embarrassed. A Bray marrying an asteroid miner? Perish the thought. Brays are meant to work miners to death for greater profits, not procreate with them.” Even the words taste sour in her mouth. “And after … after…” She swallows. “They paid. Everyone.”
“No one can do that. Not even the Brays.” But he sounds less certain now.
“I would agree with you, but the fact is, I’m living proof.” Ophelia forces a shrug, more casual than anything she’s feeling right now. “Goliath and the other stations were Pinnacle owned. Not to mention on the fuck-edge of nowhere. And when you have enough money, you can hide anything or pay people not to care.” Sometimes she suspects it was more the latter than the former, which gives her even more doubt about humanity.
“But you work for Montrose. They would have done a background check and—”
Ophelia laughs, but it’s a hopeless, empty sound. “They missed that Birch was from Goliath. I can guarantee you, my forged records are a lot better than his.” And a lot more expensive. Plus, Montrose wanted her to work for them—all the better to rub it in her family’s face. Even if they had spotted something odd, Ophelia doubts it would have mattered.
He scrubs his hands over his face and turns away from her.
She follows a step or two, then stops. “I don’t know what’s happening, what’s causing the changes in behavior here, but I can’t take the chance that I might hurt someone.” Again. “Please, just listen to me. Put me in one of the—”
“Why are you here?” he asks. “You requested this assignment.”
She stiffens. “I’m trying to help. I’ve devoted my life to helping prevent ERS. It was an opportunity to try new—”
“What I’m hearing is that you were so concerned with proving yourself and getting rid of your guilt that you put us, my team, in additional jeopardy just by being here. Is that about right?”
Shame washes over her. “I had no reason to believe that anything would—”
He spins to face her, so suddenly that Ophelia lurches backward. “How am I supposed to do my fucking job and keep people safe if no one tells me what’s going on?” His face is flushed with fury.
There is still a part of her that wants to flinch away from a man, an authority figure, vibrating with anger. She hates that that part of her still exists after all these years. Part of her father’s legacy, before he became Bloody Bledsoe.
She lifts her chin. “You’re not hearing me. No one knew. I wasn’t hiding it from you, specifically. Don’t flatter yourself, Commander. You’re not that important.” She winces internally at the words and the coldness, even as she’s still saying them. Hell of a time for her grandmother’s influence to make an appearance. As much as she would have preferred that Miranda Bray had no hand or share in who she is, it seems that Miranda is impossible to escape.
Ethan glares at her, then his gaze skates away. “Never mind. Forget it,” he mutters.
She’s missed something, and she’s not sure what.
“No,” he says after a moment.
“No?” Ophelia repeats, confused.
“No, I’m not going to lock you away in a hab where you can wait for this to be over,” he says icily. “Hiding is a privilege, Doctor, as it seems you already know well. The rest of us have to own up to our responsibilities.”
She gapes at him as if he’s slapped her. “I’m not hiding, I don’t want to hurt—”
“Everything you told me is about what your father did. Not you.”
“But Birch—” Ophelia begins.
“There’s nothing to indicate that his death isn’t exactly what it looks like. No footprints leading away from him. Please explain to me how someone would have done that to his arm without stepping in the blood. Particularly someone on some level unaware of their own actions.”
That stops her. She hadn’t thought about that. “Still, the genetic predisposition, combined with a violent upbringing—”
“Any of us might have that same predisposition. You’re just the only one who knows for sure. And there’s been plenty of violent upbringings on this team.” He gives her a grim smile. “So theoretically, we all have the same amount of risk, for all anyone knows.”
Ophelia doesn’t have an argument for that, damn it.
“I’ve lost another crew member under my care, and we’re in a dire situation where we don’t know the variables, other than the fact that we can’t leave.” As if in response, the wind rages against the hab, and Ophelia would swear she can feel her ears pop from a pressure change.
“I can’t take the chance that locking you away is the better bet,” Ethan continues. “I won’t. I need all hands.”
She opens her mouth to protest.
“And that’s my call.” He cuts her off. “I’ll live with it. Well…” His mouth does that thing again where it quirks in a smile that is almost equally grimace. “As long as any of us will, I suppose.” He pulls up his sleeve, tipping the inside of his forearm to her view.
Those little red raised nodules dot the surface of his skin.
“Shit,” she breathes. She knew it was real.
Whatever this is, he’s afflicted, infected, as well. “Nothing came up on the diagnostics I asked Kate to run,” he says. “Not even anything unknown. The bio filter in the decon unit is supposed to hold anything it can’t identify in stasis. But there’s nothing.”
She reaches out with a cautious finger and presses one of the raised areas.
As with her arm, the reaction is immediate. The nodules scoot away from the pressure.
Shuddering, Ethan yanks his arm away with a muffled curse. “What was that?” he demands. Even as he lowers his sleeve, he’s running his short fingernails over the area, trying to scratch and not scratch at the same time.
“I don’t know. Mine did the same thing. Vanished by this morning.” Ophelia shows him her arm, now smooth and unremarkable as ever. But have they vanished, though? Or simply relocated to somewhere she can’t see?
Dread swells in her.
They’re in trouble. Really in trouble. And maybe not the kind of trouble she’s been preparing for her whole life.
The memory of herself in that wavy mirror this morning, bloodied and uncertain, returns. She’s been living under the weight of her father’s actions for most of her life, fearing the possibility of becoming him, avoiding anything that reminds her of him. Maybe it’s time to take a different approach.
“There’s a sealable body bag in the medikit,” she offers finally. “In the Kellerson pack.”
His eyebrows lift slightly, but then he nods. “Good. Let’s go.”
* * *
It takes longer than it should, the whole process of just finding the scattered pieces of the medikit in Ophelia’s trashed office. Ethan had insisted on wearing envirosuits to go back into her office with the antigrav sled.
“You realize even if this is some kind of biological contaminant, we’re already infected,” Ophelia pointed out as they suited up in the airlock. “Possibly even through the suits.”
“We have no idea how it works, so we’re going to follow level five quarantine protocol,” he said. “By the book.”
By the book. Ethan is very much a rules-exist-for-a-reason type of person. He must despise everything about her existence. Nothing by-the-book about it.
“I’ve got it,” Ophelia says now, holding up the trifold fabric pack of old-school emergency instruments. It’s much lighter than it should be, which makes sense, given where one of the scalpels and the scissors are. “It was under the desk.” She pulls herself up with her other hand, using the edge of the desk. Even though their suits weigh the same inside and out of the hab, they are more cumbersome in an enclosed area.
Ethan joins her as she opens the pack. Most of the elastic tool loops are empty, leaving her to wonder where the rest of the instruments are. Scattered on the floor, perhaps.
“Are you sure it’s in there?” he asks.
The outer pocket of the pack looks much too thin to hold anything large enough for a body. And yet when she awkwardly sticks her gloved fingers in to search, something crinkles in response. With some clumsy maneuvering, she manages to tug the contents out—a thin rectangle of opaque plasti-seal the length of the open kit.
At Ethan’s doubting look, she starts to unfold it.
It is horribly thin, but it should do the job. “I don’t think it’ll hold up under the weather out there for very long,” Ophelia says. It’s not really meant for this kind of a thing. More just a temporary solution until the deceased can be placed in cold sleep—cold storage at that point—back on the ship.
“I hope we won’t need very long,” he says.
With the bag expanded to its full length and width, it’s harder to manipulate into place, flapping against Ophelia’s suit every time she moves forward. The last thing she wants to do is snag the bag and tear a hole in it.
At Birch’s feet, Ophelia hesitates. Theoretically, she and Ethan could drape it over Birch and then sort of wrestle it around the back of him, but sealing it would be tough.
“Here.” Ethan shoves the other lab table parallel to Birch. “We lay out the bag here and then…” He gestures between Birch and the other table.
Ever practical. Though Ophelia wishes at this moment she could remind him once again that she does not have experience dealing with death and the dead, with a couple (big) exceptions. She can’t even look at Birch, not without comparing and contrasting the living version with the empty flesh and bones that remain. His boots, not standard issue, are scuffed along the toes but otherwise highly cared for, and all she can think is that he won’t have a chance to polish those scuffs out.
She closes her eyes for a second, steeling herself for what they’re about to do. Then she steps to the other table.
With Ethan’s help, she gets the bag situated and the opening pulled as wide as possible. The seal is a simple activation strip. Once the two sides of the opening are pressed together, she just has to remove the strip, which should activate the sealant, theoretically one strong enough to prevent leakage even on a microcellular level.
“You take his feet. I’ve got this end,” Ethan says. If anything, he sounds colder, more professional than ever. His go-to defense when he’s actually feeling more, she’s pretty sure.
She moves to Birch’s scuffed boots, traces the scratches with a fingertip. She didn’t like Birch. Really didn’t like that he threatened her. But no one deserves this.
Ethan steps to Birch’s head. With a grunt of effort, he slips his arms beneath Birch’s armpits and pulls.
Birch flops upright, like a zombie version of sitting up. His left eye is still open, staring at her, the iris already gone cloudy and gray. The right is closed, courtesy of the pair of bandage scissors pinioning the lid to the eye beneath. Bloody fluid rolls out from beneath the lid. And—
“Wait, wait!” Ophelia says.
“What?” Ethan asks, voice tight with strain, emotional and physical.
“Was that … Did I miss that too?” She leaves Birch’s feet to point to the thick black fluid, like ink, slowly seeping from both nostrils. It screams wrong on a visceral level, raising prickles on her skin inside her suit.
But she has to ask, because if she didn’t see the scissors, it’s more than possible she missed this.
Ethan gently sets Birch’s upper body back on the table and then shifts to the side to look. Ophelia knows the moment he clocks what she’s talking about; the jolt of surprise runs through his whole body.
“What is that?” Ethan asks, retreating from the table. The calm in his voice is like reinforced steel, deliberate, unmovable.
“I don’t know.” Blood, drying blood, can have a blackish tinge to it, depending on conditions, but this is clearly not dry. And she’s pretty sure it’s not blood, either.
“No,” he says finally. “That wasn’t there this morning.”
“It’s coming out of his ears, too.” More of the black sludge is slipping from Birch’s left ear, presumably the right as well, curving into the topography of his outer ear.
Ophelia can feel it creeping, crawling into her own ear, and she instinctively reaches up to touch her ear, to reassure herself that it’s just her imagination, but finds her helmet instead.
“All right,” Ethan says. “Nothing’s changed.”
Ophelia wants to argue that, because unknown black stuff leaking out of major orifices qualifies as a big change in her book, but he’s right. They still need to get Birch out of here, the faster the better.
Ethan returns to the table, at Birch’s head once again, and a belated thought occurs to Ophelia.
“Hang on,” she says, searching the ground. She finds an unbroken sample vial from the medikit, with the seal still intact, and then rummages until she finds a still-wrapped swab.
“I suspect we’re going to have more than enough later,” Ethan says.
Ophelia pauses, swab in her gloved hand. “Was that an actual sense of humor I’m detecting, Commander?” she asks. “Perhaps you’re more ill than we realized.”
