163: FLIGHT

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The chip in my hand isn’t mine, obviously. Mine is still in my own arm. Tal or Captain Klees would’ve had to load the code onto one of theirs and then cut it out. I wonder how secret this whole operation needed to be – did they have a doctor up there that they could trust to help, or did one of them have to dig it out of their own bone without professional assistance? It wouldn’t be the first time either of them had undergone ad-hoc ID chip removal. At least this time, nobody would have to pin them to the floor in a ring rapidly filling with carbon dioxide while someone cuts it out of their arm as quickly as possible using no painkillers and modified power tools.

However they achieved it, I have it now, and I can see everything falling into place in front of me, a long path with lots of risky tasks and some flat-out impossible ones, a way to solve everything, all relying on this escape working. All relying on this little chip getting the door open.

Once I make it ready.

Because getting the chip out of someone’s arm is only the first step. I know that the chip measures life signs; body temperature, pulse, that kind of thing. I know that a computer reading the chip can tell if the person carrying it is alive or dead.

I have absolutely no idea whether or not the owner of the chip needs to be alive for Tal’s code to work, because I don’t know what Tal did or how the computer reads or uses the data. And I don’t think I’ll be getting multiple shots at this. I need it to work first try.

I need to get that chip reading my own life signs.

And this is the part where I really, really hope that Mama can’t see in the bathroom. Because as soon as it sees what I’m about to do to myself, it’s going to raise the alarm. It’s going to get a doctor in this room as quickly as possible.

My belt is a thick, solid synthetic fabric. I take it off and put it in my mouth, laying the fabric across my bottom teeth. Then I stick my forearm in my mouth, between teeth and fabric. And I bite down as hard as I can.

It’s actually very difficult to bite through your own arm. Not because it takes a lot of pressure; it really doesn’t. It’s just a lot more difficult than one would expect to actually work up the nerve to do it. I push down at what I’m convinced is maximum force for a solid three or four minutes before something inside me gives and I realise I was holding back almost all of my bite strength. I drive the teeth in until they hit bone.

Then I push the ID chip into my arm. Just slip it into the wound in the general vicinity of the one implanted in my bone. I’m not overly concerned with placement; Tal did this with Captain Reimann’s chip and it worked fine.

I wash away as much blood as I can, then use my belt to bandage my arm and hope it doesn’t bleed through too obviously. I just need to bluster my way out of the room without Mama noticing I’m wounded, or at least, without it thinking I’m wounded badly enough to call a doctor. And I have no idea what its threshold for that is. It raises children; surely small cuts and bruises wouldn’t panic it, right? But then again, you do want to clean and bandage a small cut on a child right away, so maybe any sign of injury would have it calling a doctor?

I wait in the bathroom for a while to calm down and collect myself. My arm throbs dully. I have about six hours before Dr Kim comes back, so my best chance is to just go, now, to hell with it, and see if I can succeed.

I stride out of the bathroom, all calm confidence.

“Aspen! What happened to your arm?”

“Oh, nothing. I’m just trying a new fashion statement.” Hoping the blood doesn’t show, I lift my arm to the ID chip reader.

“Something’s wrong,” Mama says, sounding puzzled, as I hear a click from the door. The click of the lock opening.

“Nothing’s wrong,” I assure the AI. “I’m playing a game. You can’t tell Dr Kim, okay?” C’mon, you raise kids. Let this be something you’ll play along with. I hope you haven’t been instructed to keep me in here…

“Oh, a secret? I can keep a secret!”

Maybe it’s telling the truth. It doesn’t raise any alarms I can hear as I rush for the door, open it, step out into the empty corridor alone; head for the end of the corridor, push on that door, and yes! The lock clicks open, I push it open, go through.

I’m in some kind of decontamination room. Basins and chemical showers line one wall; against the other sit shelves of gloves and masks and robes, all in sterile plastic packages. The thin film of dust on everything suggests that this room hasn’t actually been used in a while, but it’s comforting to know that Hylara at least has all these great quarantine facilities, if they should need them. I wonder if anyone suggested locking the ground crew in here right after we landed, until our pathologies came back. Probably. Everything about our treatment suggests that they weren’t really sure how to do a quarantine or how serious it was, but they surely know how to use these facilities, that’s got to be in their training videos somewhere. They look properly equipped, and Doctor Kim seems to understand them. Was there a big debate over our treatment when we arrived, over risks and optics and whether it was worth offending us or scaring us by sticking us in here? Probably.

Not important right now. I head for the door at the other end of the room; this one isn’t even locked. No locks click open as I push on it and emerge in another room.

A larger room, with floor mats and climbing frames and activity tables covered in strange tools along the far wall. A room full of children.

Who, of course, stare at me.

A toddler raises a long, bony finger to point at me. “Earth!” they announce.

This breaks the silence like a spell. “Earth person! Earth person!” kids grin at me and chatter at each other. The kid who’d pointed, who looks… I don’t know, three or four? Who can tell with Hylaran kids?… walks towards me, only to be blocked by an older kid, maybe six years old.

“We don’t touch people who come out of that door, remember?” the older kid scolds them. “That’s where sick people go! What if they’re still sick? Do you want to get sick?”

“I’m not sick,” I say, and apparently that’s all the permission they need, because I’m suddenly surrounded by kids, inspecting my hands and running their fingers over my balder-than-theirs skin and marvelling at my height.

“You’re from the earth system!”

“I sure am.”

“You came on the new spaceship!”

“I did.”

“Are you here to kill everyone or to be friends?”

“To be friends, I hope.”

“What’s your name?”

“Aspen.”

“I’m Zop!”

“Pleased to meet you, Zop, and everyone else. I’m in a bit of a hurry. Can you help me get to the surface?”

“We’ll help you!” Zop announces, and ‘we’ seems to indicate someone specific, because most of the kids back off. Zop, the toddler who first pointed at me, and five other kids of the same age surround me. Two of them take my hands and lead me towards another door.

“I’m Garblan,” the kid holding my right hand says. “and that’s Zipper, and that’s Sand Queen – ”

“Sand Queen?” I ask.

Sand Queen raises a proud fist. “My name is Sand Queen!”

“That’s a nice name.” I’m named after a tree, who am I to judge?

“ – and that’s John, and Scarb.”

“I’m going to be Kul,” Scarb says, “but there’s already someone called Kul, so I have to wait for him to die first.”

“That’s not a nice thing to say!” John berates Scarb-someday-to-be-Kul.

“What? I didn’t say I hope he dies! Only that when he does, I’m going to be Kul.”

The pack of toddlers rush me through a door, and then another, and suddenly, I’m somewhere I recognise. The front room of the ship, the one we saw on our tour.

There’s a Hylaran adult in there, apparently on some sort of monitoring duty. Staring at me.

I don’t bother to try to figure out if she’s likely to help or hinder me. I just run. Run into the metal-lined corridor, run for the huge steel doors that lead aboveground. Praying that there’s some sort of manual opening mechanism on the inside, for safety reasons, because sometimes you need to be able to get people out of a collapsing tunnel or something and of course there would be, there’s no reason to design a place like this to make it harder to get out of the tunnel, all the security should be to stop people from going the other way – and yes, yes there’s a lever, and I shove it and the huge doors start to open and even though nobody’s chasing me I don’t wait for them to open very far, I squeeze out as soon as there’s enough room and only then notice that my breathlessness isn’t just from fear but is in fact actual breathlessness, because here I am in the thin, oxygen-low Hylaran atmosphere without an oxygen tank, like a fucking moron.

My knees tremble, threatening to collapse, and I immediately stop trying to rush and force down my panic. Trying to overexert myself is a great way to pass out. I don’t think I’m in any danger – the air would probably be survivable for anyone going slow and careful enough, and I’m a DIVR. That troublesome little geneset will keep me alive in a low pressure, low oxygen environment, no problem. What it will not do is keep me conscious if I go dashing across the sand, and if I pass out here then the first person who sees me will immediately alert medical services and Doctor Kim will show up and I’ll just end up back where I started. Fuck that.

So I engage in the slowest, calmest race for freedom ever. I walk slowly but steadily toward the camp, pausing for breath when I need it. Even though the camp is very close, even though it’s almost immediately within sight, I don’t give in to the temptation to run. I just walk, steadily, and wave at the first Hylarans there who spot me, and hope that whoever they rush off to tell is someone who’ll listen to me and isn’t one of Dr Kim’s allies.

The people they rush off to tell are, apparently, very close by, and even better, they’re Captain Klees and Tall. And they have oxygen tanks on, and they are not approaching at a leisurely pace. They sprint across the sand at full speed and sandwich me between them in a hug that squeezes out the breath I was trying so hard to conserve. My vision goes fuzzy before the captain, realising my predicament, presses his breathing mask to my face and I take several breaths rich with blessed oxygen.

“Missed you,” I gasp. “We’ve got a lot to talk about.”

“We sure do,” Captain Klees says grimly. “We – ”

But he was cut off from a voice emanating from a speaker somewhere near Tal’s oxygen tank. Elenna’s voice. “Tal! Tal, I can’t stop them getting in, they’re going to – ”

And then the voice abruptly stopped.

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