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“They died inside the ship, Ceph. I’m not going in, I’m just going high enough to take my own peek.”
I was aghast. “But there are dead bodies!”
And that made her laugh for some reason. “Do you know how many dead bodies I’ve seen before?” she said—and it did seem like a lot of them, between her truths and fictions. She brushed around me, putting her boot on the next step up. “I mean, usually they’re not juicy, but I’m not afraid of some skin and bones.”
I hovered behind her, and had two lower-arms wrapped mere inches front of her, ready to pick her up at the slightest provocation.
At the least, she wasn’t dying without me—I would follow her immediately.
I did not want to live alone.
Then she stopped. “Haberman,” she whispered.
It was a word I didn’t recognize. “What is that?”
“Who,” she corrected, pointing up. “He was a friend. And he must’ve been the first person they convinced to come out here.”
“Do you recognize the rest of them?”
“No,” she said, but I could feel her thinking. “But some of them are carrying amphibious rifles.” I pressed my disbelief at her and she continued. “I’ve been in some sketchy parts of the world before, Ceph.”
“It’s not that,” I told her. I was confused. “Those images were real? Instead of hurting people with light, you shove pieces of metal inside them?”
“Sad to say, but yes.” She sank back against me in thought, and then twisted her head to look at me inside her helmet. “I need to go in there.”
I pointed in with an upper and lower-arm both. “With the other humans who died?”
“All their suits are like mine, which means they’ve got data sleeves. If I could get theirs, then I could figure out what they’ve already done—and what they did wrong.” She sensed my impulse to deny her, and her thoughts gained fresh momentum. “Who’s to say they died on their first expedition? This could’ve been their hundredth down here! Donna told me they’d had men at the habitat for months!”
I looked back and forth between the floating corpses and her in a panic. “You are weaponless!”
“No I’m not,” she said, shaking her head, and putting her hand on my arm. “You’re my bodyguard. I have you.”
If the way she’d thought it had not been so pure and true—if she’d been trying to manipulate me even for a moment—common sense would’ve intervened and I would’ve taken her back to her underwater home and found a way to lock her inside.
But as it was all I could do was complain.
“Bah!” I exclaimed on our ’qa, flowing my body beside hers until I was in front of her. “If you die, I will regret that for the rest of my very short life,” I muttered, grabbing my tentacles onto the metal of the floor, dragging myself in.
Everything inside was painfully bright, but the longer I was in it the more my eyes adjusted. The room was roughly half the size of the throne room at Thalassamur, and the walls appeared to be made of the same metal as the outside; they tasted similarly, too. Except there was more ambient glowing in here and on one wall, shades of blue and green repeating, going through a sequence. I couldn’t tell if the strange shapes set onto the floor were meant to be furniture, like the two-leggeds used, or storage objects—or anything number of a billion different things that I now knew about, thanks to Elle’s stories on our ’qa.
“Still alive?” she teased as she stepped forward and I watched her look around. Her awe inside her helmet was obvious, and she was true to her word; the dead bodies didn’t really affect her.
“Have you truly seen so many people die?” Her fiction was littered with as many bodies in it as the bottom of the sea. I supposed that might create some inurement to the process.
“I specialize in reading old bones and languages. Monsters, mostly, but death’s death. It’s all kind of the same thing,” she explained, still looking around—until she got to me. “It’s sad when it’s someone else’s, but it doesn’t gut punch you till you really know them.”
“True,” I agreed. “How would you like to proceed?”
“First off, I just kind of want to stand here a moment and get footage of all this. I can’t believe I’m inside a spaceship.”
The last part was said to herself, but as close as we were now, I still heard.
I decided, instead, to inspect the nearest corpse. It did still have the tail of an umbilical cable, dangling out for about three feet behind it—and I felt Elle coming up behind me. I held it up with a lower-arm to show to her. “It looks melted,” she whispered. “But that wouldn’t have killed him—the cables are separate from the suit, and he’d have had a bail-out bottle of oxygen with enough time to try to get back to the station.”
“Did they shoot each other?”
“I don’t think so,” she said, peering into the suit beside me. “There’s no water inside there.”
