Chapters (32)
“They shouldn’t be here,” I said. “They’re not bridge crew.”
Baqir understood immediately. “So they are infected. And this is . . .”
“What it wanted them to do,” I finished. “Come here. Fly the ship.”
If it could make Ariana attack a man twice her size, steal his weapon, kill him; draw her through a ship she had never been aboard before as though she knew it by heart; open doors, open hatches, evade capture; store and communicate memories from ten years ago and movements from now; isolate the ship during the initial outbreak; disrupt the data transfers—if it could do all that, if it could learn all of that from its hosts—flying the ship was not so different.
“What’s that?” Xiomara said. She and Ariana had moved to the other side of the bridge. They approached a long glass wall.
“The officers’ meeting room,” I said, my attention still on Jessamyn and the others. The parasite was a small thing, small enough to pass through a pinprick of broken skin, small enough to operate on the level of neurons and electrical impulses. It needed hosts to interact with the larger world.
“There’s somebody in here,” Ariana said.
“There are two of them.” Xiomara paused, then said, in a very different voice, “Jas.”
I pulled my way chair by chair across the bridge. The faces of the dead blurred together. I felt as though the cold had seeped so far into my limbs that my bones were turning to ice, and if I moved too quickly, if I moved carelessly, they would shatter again as I had long feared they would. I could not turn away. Xiomara’s and Ariana’s breath had clouded the glass wall of the officers’ room. Xiomara wiped the fog away.
Captain Ngahere had died in her seat at the head of the table. There was a tablet before her, floating just out of reach of her desiccated fingertips.
And beside her, in the chair normally reserved for the first officer, was my mother.