Regrets of Sellswords and Scientists
A Subnautica: Below Zero fanfiction
Spoiler warning:
This story and its description contain major spoilers for Subnautica: Below Zero.
Description:
Marguerit Maida knew she’d regret answering that distress call. But getting an alien in her brain – now THAT was something even SHE hadn’t bargained for.
Content warning:
Contains mentions of offscreen character deaths.
This story and its description contain major spoilers for Subnautica: Below Zero.
Description:
Marguerit Maida knew she’d regret answering that distress call. But getting an alien in her brain – now THAT was something even SHE hadn’t bargained for.
Content warning:
Contains mentions of offscreen character deaths.
The world was as dark as the void between continents. Marguerit’s ears roared like the rush of water in a leviathan’s wake, and the alien facility’s metal floor was cold and impossibly hard beneath her gloved, shaking hands.
“Transfer complete,” the building’s mechanical, overlapping voices announced, and the former mercenary gritted her teeth as light began to filter back through her mental fog.
Then a second, softer voice spoke, and she recognized the lone male-sounding one that had addressed her earlier. “How do you feel?”
Her hands steadied, then clenched into fists. “Like some damn fool who can’t follow orders just used a toilet plunger to ram a blazing ball of energy into my head! Now, I just heard two voices, and only one of ‘em sounded like it came from outside my skull, so I suggest that you start explaining yourself fast.”
“We are sorry, we… do not understand what orders you believe we did not follow. You instructed us to upload ourselves-”
“Into this damnfangled PDA,” she snarled, waving the device like a scolding finger as she shoved herself to her feet, “not my damn brain!”
“Oh, no.” At least the alien – aliens? – had the sense to sound dismayed by their mistake. “Does your kind perceive a boundary between organic and cybernetic components?”
“Damn right we do.” Somewhere in the back of her mind, it occurred to her that she was probably overusing the word “damn,” but damned if she cared. “This PDA ain’t a part of me, you see. It’s a separate machine I carry around, so I suggest you get your disembodied asses into it.”
“We are afraid we cannot.”
“Oh?” Her eyes narrowed, like knives being honed to keener points. “And what if I gave you some motivation?”
To her satisfaction, her menacing tone made the voice’s owner quail. “You sound… angry,” they noted, and she could almost feel them trying to back away from her, even though they had nowhere to go. And then, rather less satisfying: “We will give you a moment to process.”
“Oh, is this the part where you go silent and hope I play along? I don’t think so. If this is how you wanna play, you’ll find out, I play to win.”
“Transfer complete,” the building’s mechanical, overlapping voices announced, and the former mercenary gritted her teeth as light began to filter back through her mental fog.
Then a second, softer voice spoke, and she recognized the lone male-sounding one that had addressed her earlier. “How do you feel?”
Her hands steadied, then clenched into fists. “Like some damn fool who can’t follow orders just used a toilet plunger to ram a blazing ball of energy into my head! Now, I just heard two voices, and only one of ‘em sounded like it came from outside my skull, so I suggest that you start explaining yourself fast.”
“We are sorry, we… do not understand what orders you believe we did not follow. You instructed us to upload ourselves-”
“Into this damnfangled PDA,” she snarled, waving the device like a scolding finger as she shoved herself to her feet, “not my damn brain!”
“Oh, no.” At least the alien – aliens? – had the sense to sound dismayed by their mistake. “Does your kind perceive a boundary between organic and cybernetic components?”
“Damn right we do.” Somewhere in the back of her mind, it occurred to her that she was probably overusing the word “damn,” but damned if she cared. “This PDA ain’t a part of me, you see. It’s a separate machine I carry around, so I suggest you get your disembodied asses into it.”
“We are afraid we cannot.”
“Oh?” Her eyes narrowed, like knives being honed to keener points. “And what if I gave you some motivation?”
To her satisfaction, her menacing tone made the voice’s owner quail. “You sound… angry,” they noted, and she could almost feel them trying to back away from her, even though they had nowhere to go. And then, rather less satisfying: “We will give you a moment to process.”
“Oh, is this the part where you go silent and hope I play along? I don’t think so. If this is how you wanna play, you’ll find out, I play to win.”
~*~
The wind screamed like a tortured soul, and Marguerit’s eyes were dark slits in her scowling face as she trudged resolutely through the storm. She’d left her jacket in the Prawn Suit, and its absence wasn’t doing her any favors, but she didn’t much care for the thought of having it on when she did what she was about to do.
Those damn aliens were still cowering in her head, and she began to wonder if scaring them had been a good idea. It was hard to get information from someone who wasn’t talking.
But if all went according to plan, they’d start talking again soon enough. She just hoped they couldn’t read her thoughts.
“What are you doing?”
The nervous voice made her jump, then smile. “So you remembered how to speak, huh?”
“I had not forgotten. I simply did not believe it was advisable to continue the conversation while you were agitated.”
“Well, I’m still plenty agitated now – or couldn’t you tell that from reading my thoughts?”
“Your biofeedback does indicate a heightened level of aggravation, but I had hoped that had more to do with the storm than with my continued presence. Your body temperature is dropping rapidly.”
So they couldn’t read her mind. Either that, or they had, and they were playing along. She hoped it was the former. “Yeah? Well, it won’t be the only thing that drops, if you don’t do as I say.”
A tremor of trepidation ran through the disembodied voice. “What do you mean?”
“I mean…” The edge of the iceberg came into view, and Marguerit strode up to it, dangling her toes off the brink and staring down at the thin strip of ice that ringed the base of the cliff. “One way or another, you’re gettin’ outta my head.”
“Surely…” The tremble in the alien’s voice grew stronger, and Marguerit smiled. “You do not intend to fall off this precipice, do you?”
“And what if I do?”
“I am among the last of a dying civilization. If you destroy yourself, a species could go extinct.”
“Not to mention, I’d die.”
“All the more reason for you not to pursue this course of action.”
“Well, then, I suggest that you remove my reason for pursuin’ it.” She pulled the PDA from her belt, and held it in front of her face. “Get your ass into this machine like I told you to, and we can both go back to my seabase.”
The voice hesitated, and Marguerit wondered if she was imagining the secondhand dread that darkened the back of her mind.
“Given the limited storage capacity in that device,” the voice explained cautiously, “if I tried to upload myself into it, I would lose a great deal of information. What remained of my knowledge and personality might become… unrecognizable.”
“Is that so? And the rest of you?”
“What do you mean, ‘the rest of me’?”
“Well, earlier you were saying ‘us’ and ‘we.’ But now, you’re saying ‘I’ and ‘my.’ Just how many of you are in my head?”
“One of us, and all of us. We do not think of ourselves as individual, distinct. However…” The voice trailed off, and the words that came next were tinged with uncertainty and pain. “I have been unable to connect with the telepathic network that links my people to each other. So for now, it is only me.”
“Just one, huh? Well, that’s improvement on the alternative, but here’s the thing: I’m not sure you’re telling the truth about having to stay inside my head, and I don’t know what you’ll do if I give you time to establish yourself. So I’m gonna give you one last chance to get your sorry ass outta here.”
“I assure you, I have no intention of causing you trouble of any kind. But I could not transfer to your handheld device if I tried.”
“I’m prepared to believe you aaaaaany second now,” she drawled, an ominous smile spreading slowly across her face.
“Is there a purpose for the delay in- WAIT!!!”
She’d expected some resistance. A tug at her mind, a freezing of her limbs. But there was only a silent, terrified scream as she slowly tilted off the edge and plunged.
Those damn aliens were still cowering in her head, and she began to wonder if scaring them had been a good idea. It was hard to get information from someone who wasn’t talking.
But if all went according to plan, they’d start talking again soon enough. She just hoped they couldn’t read her thoughts.
“What are you doing?”
The nervous voice made her jump, then smile. “So you remembered how to speak, huh?”
“I had not forgotten. I simply did not believe it was advisable to continue the conversation while you were agitated.”
“Well, I’m still plenty agitated now – or couldn’t you tell that from reading my thoughts?”
“Your biofeedback does indicate a heightened level of aggravation, but I had hoped that had more to do with the storm than with my continued presence. Your body temperature is dropping rapidly.”
So they couldn’t read her mind. Either that, or they had, and they were playing along. She hoped it was the former. “Yeah? Well, it won’t be the only thing that drops, if you don’t do as I say.”
A tremor of trepidation ran through the disembodied voice. “What do you mean?”
“I mean…” The edge of the iceberg came into view, and Marguerit strode up to it, dangling her toes off the brink and staring down at the thin strip of ice that ringed the base of the cliff. “One way or another, you’re gettin’ outta my head.”
“Surely…” The tremble in the alien’s voice grew stronger, and Marguerit smiled. “You do not intend to fall off this precipice, do you?”
“And what if I do?”
“I am among the last of a dying civilization. If you destroy yourself, a species could go extinct.”
“Not to mention, I’d die.”
“All the more reason for you not to pursue this course of action.”
“Well, then, I suggest that you remove my reason for pursuin’ it.” She pulled the PDA from her belt, and held it in front of her face. “Get your ass into this machine like I told you to, and we can both go back to my seabase.”
The voice hesitated, and Marguerit wondered if she was imagining the secondhand dread that darkened the back of her mind.
“Given the limited storage capacity in that device,” the voice explained cautiously, “if I tried to upload myself into it, I would lose a great deal of information. What remained of my knowledge and personality might become… unrecognizable.”
“Is that so? And the rest of you?”
“What do you mean, ‘the rest of me’?”
“Well, earlier you were saying ‘us’ and ‘we.’ But now, you’re saying ‘I’ and ‘my.’ Just how many of you are in my head?”
“One of us, and all of us. We do not think of ourselves as individual, distinct. However…” The voice trailed off, and the words that came next were tinged with uncertainty and pain. “I have been unable to connect with the telepathic network that links my people to each other. So for now, it is only me.”
“Just one, huh? Well, that’s improvement on the alternative, but here’s the thing: I’m not sure you’re telling the truth about having to stay inside my head, and I don’t know what you’ll do if I give you time to establish yourself. So I’m gonna give you one last chance to get your sorry ass outta here.”
“I assure you, I have no intention of causing you trouble of any kind. But I could not transfer to your handheld device if I tried.”
“I’m prepared to believe you aaaaaany second now,” she drawled, an ominous smile spreading slowly across her face.
“Is there a purpose for the delay in- WAIT!!!”
She’d expected some resistance. A tug at her mind, a freezing of her limbs. But there was only a silent, terrified scream as she slowly tilted off the edge and plunged.
~*~
She’d done her best not to think about what came next. This would only work if they didn’t know what she was planning.
As she fell, she held the PDA out in front of her, waiting for the alien to exit her head or take control of her body.
They did neither. The only feedback she got from them was a frantic jumble of sensations and thoughts, flashing through her mind as pure secondhand knowledge without being fully put into words.
I can’t die here.
Now I can never atone.
Does she hate me this much?
I deserve this.
Interesting. But before she could take the time to think about it, there was one thing left to do.
The ice below her was dangerously close, and if she hit it at this speed, she was done. At the last possible moment, Marguerit flipped horizontal, slammed her feet into the cliff, and flung herself clear of the frozen shelf.
The water struck like a blow, but she knew she could swim it off. Adrenaline surged through her body, and that was expected, but she knew the vague hum of panic and shock in the back of her mind was not her own.
Her arms thrust in front of her like an arrow, then flung two handfuls of water behind her as she kicked toward the surface. Her face found air, and she sucked in a breath before addressing her unwanted guest. “So, either you knew I was plannin’ to save myself, or you didn’t have the ability to take control of my body and stop me.”
“I am merely housed in your cerebral cortex,” the voice replied, shaking with the remains of their moment of terror. “I do not have control over it, which means I have no access to your motor functions.”
“I see.” She began swimming toward the Prawn Suit she’d left at the foot of the iceberg. “Well, that’s good to hear, assuming it’s true. And it seems you were serious about not being able to transfer to my PDA, if you didn’t realize I was planning to survive.”
“I can perceive the information you receive from your senses, but I cannot hear your thoughts, or access your memories. I sincerely believed you had chosen to die rather than endure a brief coexistence with me.”
Taking this a mite personally, are we? “And you seemed to think you deserved it.”
“What?”
“What do you mean, ‘what’? Am I to take it you didn’t mean to think those things out loud?”
There was a moment of silence, and she suspected her passenger was reviewing the thoughts they had shouted during her fall. “It would seem,” they confirmed slowly, “that in my moment of alarm, I projected my feelings more strongly than intended. I… apologize.”
“For what, panicking?” She hauled herself onto the ice, then quickly began to wring the water from her hair.
“For intruding upon your thoughts with my own. I know you find my presence in your storage medium upsetting.”
“Nothin’ personal; I just don’t like having another person in my head. But what I currently find more worrying is the fact that you’ve done something that made you think you deserve to die, and I don’t know what it is.”
“That… is a long story. Perhaps you would like to focus on creating a new storage medium to which I could transfer? As I said before, I cannot transfer to your PDA; it does not have the required storage capacity, nor any means of extracting my data from your brain.”
“A long story, huh?” She donned her jacket, climbed into the Prawn Suit, then set a course for her nearest outpost. “How about you tell me while we head to my greenhouse.”
“I… find it difficult to speak about.”
“And I find it difficult to believe it’s a good idea to assemble a giant alien without knowing what you’ve done, and whether or not you’re planning to do it again. I’ve seen one of your people’s skeletons in those old buildings you left behind, and it was easily twice my height.
“Now, I’ve killed bigger sea monsters, but you’re smarter than them, and I don’ t know what all you can do. Given what your laser cannon did to my ship, it’s not a risk I’m inclined to take.”
“I assure you, I have no intention of harming you. And the quarantine platform was merely to prevent other species from carrying the Kharaa bacteria off this planet.”
“And you didn’t think to post a warning sign first?”
“We did set up warning beacons, but it seems that over the past millennium, they have become inoperative.”
Millennium? It’s been that long? “And you didn’t have any maintenance crews?”
She almost felt the alien flinch. “My people’s failure to maintain the beacons… makes me fear that there might not be any of them left.”
Damn. She wasn’t supposed to feel sorry for the alien intruder in her head. But sitting in solitary confinement for a thousand years, not knowing if their whole damn species was alive or dead, and carrying crushing guilt alone with no one to help them work through it…
An unexpected, unwanted knife of regret twisted through her gut. Imagine going through all that, and then MY cranky, crusty ass is the first person you run into.
Still, she wasn’t about to risk playing “Build-A-Boss” with a giant alien of unknown abilities and intent. “Tell me about that,” she instructed. “What happened with your people and this bacteria? Do you both come from this planet? And if not, why are you here, what did you do, and why were you in that box?”
“We both hail from planets far away from here. During an exploration of a new planet, a network error caused our usual quarantine protocols to fail. The bacteria spread quickly throughout our core worlds, and we were forced to quarantine entire planets.
“My people sent teams to other worlds, such as this one, to study the bacteria in enclosed laboratories, with careful protocols in place to prevent it from breaching containment. Our goal was to study the local flora and fauna, to see if we could discover a way to destroy the bacterium without destroying its host.”
“Not careful enough, obviously.” She could almost feel her guest hang their head, but she wasn’t about to let them leave her in the dark just because they felt bad about screwing up. “So how did it get out?”
“I… would really prefer that we focus on creating a new body for the time being.”
“Have I not made myself clear?” Her voice sharpened, and she allowed her irritation to make it rise slightly. “I ain’t doing squat for you until you tell me the whole story. The more you hold back, the more suspicious I’m gonna get.
“Besides…” A new thought glittered green in her head, her eyes narrowed, and her fingers closed tighter on the exosuit’s controls. “I couldn’t help but notice the ion cubes sitting around inside your sanctuary. They’re some sort of power source, like a battery, right?”
“Yes.”
“Then how come you lured me over there and created that damn sense of urgency instead of putting more fuel in the tank? Hell, I’m kind of mad at myself for not thinking about that earlier.”
“There is no need for self-recriminations. The situation was indeed urgent, and you responded with the appropriate focus.”
“Thanks, but I still want an explanation.”
She half expected the alien to begin returning her brusqueness, but either their emotions functioned differently than humans’, or they were simply incredibly patient.
Or maybe they felt like they deserved her attitude. For all she knew, they were right about that.
“It is true that the remaining ion cubes could normally have powered the sanctuary for several hundred additional years,” they replied. “But the sanctuary was not meant to remain unattended for so long, and time and the local wildlife had taken their toll on some of the mechanisms.”
“So you’re saying your ion cube receptacle was busted?”
“To be precise, some of the local flora and fauna had begun colonizing its interior, and the maintenance drones were unable to remove them.”
A world full of leviathans bigger than a ship, and this poor sap was almost taken out by something small enough to build a nest inside their gadgets. Ain’t that just the way of things.
“And if I found a way to clear those critters out, would you be able to go back into storage?”
Something in the back of her mind shuddered and recoiled. “That is possible, but I would strongly prefer to avoid that scenario. If I return to storage, I have no way of knowing if I’ll ever be retrieved.”
Their voice grew heavy and hesitant, trembling beneath the weight of the future it described. “It could be another thousand years before anyone visits the facility… if they ever do. In the worst-case scenario, I would wait there… alone… for another millennium, before helplessly fading away.”
A thousand years of solitary confinement, followed by a lonely, hopeless death. All because the first person you met after a millennium of isolation decided they’d rather condemn you to that than spend a few days helping you.
“Damn. That’s a bit harsh, even for my tastes. Whatever you did, it’d have to be pretty damn bad for me to decide you deserve that.”
“It…”
She didn’t like the way their voice faltered. “What, was it that bad?”
“I suppose it… depends on your perspective. I would pre…” They trailed off, as if knowing better than to complete the thought, and Marguerit’s mind filled in the blanks.
Prefer not to discuss it until I’m in my new body. “You’re really not fond of the idea of spilling the beans while I have you at my mercy, are you?”
“Spilling… beans?”
“It’s a human expression. It means giving out information. And it sounds like you expect me to punish you for whatever it is you don’t want to talk about.”
“Under the circumstances, merely refusing to help would have dire implications for my future. I cannot return home and make amends in this state.”
“So what are you making amends for?”
The voice in her head gave an audible sigh, and even before they spoke, Marguerit could sense their weary defeat. “When the bacterium escaped, it was… my fault.”
“No kiddin’. I guessed that much when you started acting guilty and bein’ evasive. So, what happened?”
A startled silence followed her words, and she shook her head. You really thought you weren’t bein’ obvious.
At least her words seemed to break the last of the alien’s hesitation. “We had discovered a species of leviathan that produced an enzyme that was efficient against the bacteria. But the older specimen we had acquired could not produce a potent enough version of the enzyme, so we needed her eggs to hatch.
“I thought that, by studying Sea Dragon eggs, we could gain some insight into the hatching mechanism. I was… not wrong…”
“But, let me guess. Mama got angry.”
Their tone sounded like a mournful nod. “Yes. I acquired the eggs, in direct disobedience to the directive of my network, only to discover too late that Sea Dragon parents are stronger and more motivated than our facility was rated to withstand. It collided with our laboratory, destroying it and breaching the bacteria samples’ containment.”
Collided… Images flashed through Marguerit’s mind, and the Prawn Suit shuffled to a halt as her grip on the controls went slack.
A smart, sweet nineteen-year-old kid, beaming at her when she brought him some Stalker teeth, and working tirelessly on a cure when he found out they were sick.
His damn paranoid fool of a father, berating her for bringing a wounded Reaper Leviathan back to their seabase so the boy could use it as a test subject.
A too-familiar angry roar, and the sound of metal tearing as the base was ripped apart.
The Reaper swimming frantically through the dark as she clung to it, dragging her away from the people she was supposed to protect.
The ocean stretching around her with no land in sight, leaving her nothing to do but live off the leviathan’s corpse and wonder if her charges were still alive. The father she could do without, but the kid…
She hadn’t needed him. But she had been responsible for him, and now he was probably dead, and it was all too likely her fault.
The whole time she was floating on that Reaper, she’d had little to do but stew in her worry and guilt, until she’d drifted to this damn frozen wasteland and gotten some new problems to solve.
After that, she’d busied herself with survival. With trying to convince herself that she hadn’t just caused the death of an innocent boy, while knowing in her heart she was lying.
She’d spent over a decade alone with her guilt, not knowing if the people she was supposed to protect were alive or dead.
This alien had spent a millennium alone in a box, wondering if they’d failed their whole species.
“As a result of that disaster…” Her guest was still talking, dragging her racing mind back to the present. “…I was infected. My corporeal form was safely disposed of to prevent me from spreading the disease, and my mind was placed in storage.
“I was supposed to be transferred into a new body, but before that could happen… is something wrong?”
The scientist’s tone rose nervously as they noticed her distraction, and the mercenary tried to shake the memories from her head. This poor disembodied soul had been through enough; no need to add any more stress on top of it.
“Yup, I’m still here,” she assured them. “Just taking an unpleasant trip down memory lane. Turns out, you and I have a bit more in common than I’d reckoned on.”
“How so?”
“Before I got stranded on this frozen continent, I was living on a crater with a couple other people. We all got sick, and the scientist kid needed a test subject. I brought him a half-dead leviathan, and it seems another leviathan took exception to that.
“It smashed our seabase, and dragged me out to sea. I managed to kill it, but by then we were so far out that all I could do was float on its corpse and hope I washed up somewhere.”
She shook her head again. “Seems we’ve both had a lot of time to think about what went wrong, and who might’ve died because of it.”
“I suppose we have.” The voice was even softer and quieter than usual, and Marguerit wondered if her uninvited guest was starting to pity her.
If they were, she couldn’t blame them. After all, she was starting to feel sorry for them.
Careful, Marge, you’re going soft.
Heh. More images flashed before her eyes. A village, infested with corrupt security guards. The guards’ corpses, lying on the ground. The wide eyes of thankful civilians, and whispered voices bestowing the unrequested but flattering name of “God’s Hand.”
The disappointment on her superior officer’s face as he dishonorably discharged her for going off-mission, and the knowledge that she regretted nothing.
Aw, hell, I’ve always been soft. If you don’t have a soft spot for SOMETHING, then what are you fighting to protect?
“Welp,” she grunted, coaxing the aging Prawn Suit back into motion, “I can’t say I blame ya for feelin’ guilty and not wantin’ to talk about it, but at least you weren’t trying to hurt anyone.
“Now, I haven’t eaten in several hours, and I’m not doin’ squat until I’ve got some food in me, but after that, I’ll help you build your body, and you can see about checkin’ on your people and trying to make amends.”
“Thank you.” The tremor was back in the alien’s voice, but this time it sounded like relief. “For your assistance, and… for sharing your story. I understand how difficult such experiences are to talk about, but… it helps to know that I am not the only one.”
Marguerit shrugged, forcing down the start of a lump that was trying to form in her throat. “Well, sometimes life happens, and you just gotta accept what’s happened and find a way to move forward from there. You’re welcome, though. Hopefully your atonement will be a bit more doable than mine.”
“I hope so, too.”
The Prawn Suit came to a halt, and she quickly jumped out of it and stepped into her greenhouse. Preston bounded toward her as she opened the bulkhead, and she extended one hand to rub the snow stalker’s head as she closed the door with the other.
“So,” she commented as she began picking potatoes, “since it looks like we’re gonna be stuck together for the next several days, we might as well learn each other’s names. Mine’s Marguerit Maida.”
“You may append your seed code to my species designation,” the alien offered. “Please call me Al-An.”
“Al-An, huh? Pleased to meet’cha,” she replied, and to her surprise, she meant it.
So now I’ve got another scientist type who needs my help. Heh.
I can never make it up to the kid, but… maybe this is fate’s way of letting both me and my new passenger have a chance to set a few things right.
As she fell, she held the PDA out in front of her, waiting for the alien to exit her head or take control of her body.
They did neither. The only feedback she got from them was a frantic jumble of sensations and thoughts, flashing through her mind as pure secondhand knowledge without being fully put into words.
I can’t die here.
Now I can never atone.
Does she hate me this much?
I deserve this.
Interesting. But before she could take the time to think about it, there was one thing left to do.
The ice below her was dangerously close, and if she hit it at this speed, she was done. At the last possible moment, Marguerit flipped horizontal, slammed her feet into the cliff, and flung herself clear of the frozen shelf.
The water struck like a blow, but she knew she could swim it off. Adrenaline surged through her body, and that was expected, but she knew the vague hum of panic and shock in the back of her mind was not her own.
Her arms thrust in front of her like an arrow, then flung two handfuls of water behind her as she kicked toward the surface. Her face found air, and she sucked in a breath before addressing her unwanted guest. “So, either you knew I was plannin’ to save myself, or you didn’t have the ability to take control of my body and stop me.”
“I am merely housed in your cerebral cortex,” the voice replied, shaking with the remains of their moment of terror. “I do not have control over it, which means I have no access to your motor functions.”
“I see.” She began swimming toward the Prawn Suit she’d left at the foot of the iceberg. “Well, that’s good to hear, assuming it’s true. And it seems you were serious about not being able to transfer to my PDA, if you didn’t realize I was planning to survive.”
“I can perceive the information you receive from your senses, but I cannot hear your thoughts, or access your memories. I sincerely believed you had chosen to die rather than endure a brief coexistence with me.”
Taking this a mite personally, are we? “And you seemed to think you deserved it.”
“What?”
“What do you mean, ‘what’? Am I to take it you didn’t mean to think those things out loud?”
There was a moment of silence, and she suspected her passenger was reviewing the thoughts they had shouted during her fall. “It would seem,” they confirmed slowly, “that in my moment of alarm, I projected my feelings more strongly than intended. I… apologize.”
“For what, panicking?” She hauled herself onto the ice, then quickly began to wring the water from her hair.
“For intruding upon your thoughts with my own. I know you find my presence in your storage medium upsetting.”
“Nothin’ personal; I just don’t like having another person in my head. But what I currently find more worrying is the fact that you’ve done something that made you think you deserve to die, and I don’t know what it is.”
“That… is a long story. Perhaps you would like to focus on creating a new storage medium to which I could transfer? As I said before, I cannot transfer to your PDA; it does not have the required storage capacity, nor any means of extracting my data from your brain.”
“A long story, huh?” She donned her jacket, climbed into the Prawn Suit, then set a course for her nearest outpost. “How about you tell me while we head to my greenhouse.”
“I… find it difficult to speak about.”
“And I find it difficult to believe it’s a good idea to assemble a giant alien without knowing what you’ve done, and whether or not you’re planning to do it again. I’ve seen one of your people’s skeletons in those old buildings you left behind, and it was easily twice my height.
“Now, I’ve killed bigger sea monsters, but you’re smarter than them, and I don’ t know what all you can do. Given what your laser cannon did to my ship, it’s not a risk I’m inclined to take.”
“I assure you, I have no intention of harming you. And the quarantine platform was merely to prevent other species from carrying the Kharaa bacteria off this planet.”
“And you didn’t think to post a warning sign first?”
“We did set up warning beacons, but it seems that over the past millennium, they have become inoperative.”
Millennium? It’s been that long? “And you didn’t have any maintenance crews?”
She almost felt the alien flinch. “My people’s failure to maintain the beacons… makes me fear that there might not be any of them left.”
Damn. She wasn’t supposed to feel sorry for the alien intruder in her head. But sitting in solitary confinement for a thousand years, not knowing if their whole damn species was alive or dead, and carrying crushing guilt alone with no one to help them work through it…
An unexpected, unwanted knife of regret twisted through her gut. Imagine going through all that, and then MY cranky, crusty ass is the first person you run into.
Still, she wasn’t about to risk playing “Build-A-Boss” with a giant alien of unknown abilities and intent. “Tell me about that,” she instructed. “What happened with your people and this bacteria? Do you both come from this planet? And if not, why are you here, what did you do, and why were you in that box?”
“We both hail from planets far away from here. During an exploration of a new planet, a network error caused our usual quarantine protocols to fail. The bacteria spread quickly throughout our core worlds, and we were forced to quarantine entire planets.
“My people sent teams to other worlds, such as this one, to study the bacteria in enclosed laboratories, with careful protocols in place to prevent it from breaching containment. Our goal was to study the local flora and fauna, to see if we could discover a way to destroy the bacterium without destroying its host.”
“Not careful enough, obviously.” She could almost feel her guest hang their head, but she wasn’t about to let them leave her in the dark just because they felt bad about screwing up. “So how did it get out?”
“I… would really prefer that we focus on creating a new body for the time being.”
“Have I not made myself clear?” Her voice sharpened, and she allowed her irritation to make it rise slightly. “I ain’t doing squat for you until you tell me the whole story. The more you hold back, the more suspicious I’m gonna get.
“Besides…” A new thought glittered green in her head, her eyes narrowed, and her fingers closed tighter on the exosuit’s controls. “I couldn’t help but notice the ion cubes sitting around inside your sanctuary. They’re some sort of power source, like a battery, right?”
“Yes.”
“Then how come you lured me over there and created that damn sense of urgency instead of putting more fuel in the tank? Hell, I’m kind of mad at myself for not thinking about that earlier.”
“There is no need for self-recriminations. The situation was indeed urgent, and you responded with the appropriate focus.”
“Thanks, but I still want an explanation.”
She half expected the alien to begin returning her brusqueness, but either their emotions functioned differently than humans’, or they were simply incredibly patient.
Or maybe they felt like they deserved her attitude. For all she knew, they were right about that.
“It is true that the remaining ion cubes could normally have powered the sanctuary for several hundred additional years,” they replied. “But the sanctuary was not meant to remain unattended for so long, and time and the local wildlife had taken their toll on some of the mechanisms.”
“So you’re saying your ion cube receptacle was busted?”
“To be precise, some of the local flora and fauna had begun colonizing its interior, and the maintenance drones were unable to remove them.”
A world full of leviathans bigger than a ship, and this poor sap was almost taken out by something small enough to build a nest inside their gadgets. Ain’t that just the way of things.
“And if I found a way to clear those critters out, would you be able to go back into storage?”
Something in the back of her mind shuddered and recoiled. “That is possible, but I would strongly prefer to avoid that scenario. If I return to storage, I have no way of knowing if I’ll ever be retrieved.”
Their voice grew heavy and hesitant, trembling beneath the weight of the future it described. “It could be another thousand years before anyone visits the facility… if they ever do. In the worst-case scenario, I would wait there… alone… for another millennium, before helplessly fading away.”
A thousand years of solitary confinement, followed by a lonely, hopeless death. All because the first person you met after a millennium of isolation decided they’d rather condemn you to that than spend a few days helping you.
“Damn. That’s a bit harsh, even for my tastes. Whatever you did, it’d have to be pretty damn bad for me to decide you deserve that.”
“It…”
She didn’t like the way their voice faltered. “What, was it that bad?”
“I suppose it… depends on your perspective. I would pre…” They trailed off, as if knowing better than to complete the thought, and Marguerit’s mind filled in the blanks.
Prefer not to discuss it until I’m in my new body. “You’re really not fond of the idea of spilling the beans while I have you at my mercy, are you?”
“Spilling… beans?”
“It’s a human expression. It means giving out information. And it sounds like you expect me to punish you for whatever it is you don’t want to talk about.”
“Under the circumstances, merely refusing to help would have dire implications for my future. I cannot return home and make amends in this state.”
“So what are you making amends for?”
The voice in her head gave an audible sigh, and even before they spoke, Marguerit could sense their weary defeat. “When the bacterium escaped, it was… my fault.”
“No kiddin’. I guessed that much when you started acting guilty and bein’ evasive. So, what happened?”
A startled silence followed her words, and she shook her head. You really thought you weren’t bein’ obvious.
At least her words seemed to break the last of the alien’s hesitation. “We had discovered a species of leviathan that produced an enzyme that was efficient against the bacteria. But the older specimen we had acquired could not produce a potent enough version of the enzyme, so we needed her eggs to hatch.
“I thought that, by studying Sea Dragon eggs, we could gain some insight into the hatching mechanism. I was… not wrong…”
“But, let me guess. Mama got angry.”
Their tone sounded like a mournful nod. “Yes. I acquired the eggs, in direct disobedience to the directive of my network, only to discover too late that Sea Dragon parents are stronger and more motivated than our facility was rated to withstand. It collided with our laboratory, destroying it and breaching the bacteria samples’ containment.”
Collided… Images flashed through Marguerit’s mind, and the Prawn Suit shuffled to a halt as her grip on the controls went slack.
A smart, sweet nineteen-year-old kid, beaming at her when she brought him some Stalker teeth, and working tirelessly on a cure when he found out they were sick.
His damn paranoid fool of a father, berating her for bringing a wounded Reaper Leviathan back to their seabase so the boy could use it as a test subject.
A too-familiar angry roar, and the sound of metal tearing as the base was ripped apart.
The Reaper swimming frantically through the dark as she clung to it, dragging her away from the people she was supposed to protect.
The ocean stretching around her with no land in sight, leaving her nothing to do but live off the leviathan’s corpse and wonder if her charges were still alive. The father she could do without, but the kid…
She hadn’t needed him. But she had been responsible for him, and now he was probably dead, and it was all too likely her fault.
The whole time she was floating on that Reaper, she’d had little to do but stew in her worry and guilt, until she’d drifted to this damn frozen wasteland and gotten some new problems to solve.
After that, she’d busied herself with survival. With trying to convince herself that she hadn’t just caused the death of an innocent boy, while knowing in her heart she was lying.
She’d spent over a decade alone with her guilt, not knowing if the people she was supposed to protect were alive or dead.
This alien had spent a millennium alone in a box, wondering if they’d failed their whole species.
“As a result of that disaster…” Her guest was still talking, dragging her racing mind back to the present. “…I was infected. My corporeal form was safely disposed of to prevent me from spreading the disease, and my mind was placed in storage.
“I was supposed to be transferred into a new body, but before that could happen… is something wrong?”
The scientist’s tone rose nervously as they noticed her distraction, and the mercenary tried to shake the memories from her head. This poor disembodied soul had been through enough; no need to add any more stress on top of it.
“Yup, I’m still here,” she assured them. “Just taking an unpleasant trip down memory lane. Turns out, you and I have a bit more in common than I’d reckoned on.”
“How so?”
“Before I got stranded on this frozen continent, I was living on a crater with a couple other people. We all got sick, and the scientist kid needed a test subject. I brought him a half-dead leviathan, and it seems another leviathan took exception to that.
“It smashed our seabase, and dragged me out to sea. I managed to kill it, but by then we were so far out that all I could do was float on its corpse and hope I washed up somewhere.”
She shook her head again. “Seems we’ve both had a lot of time to think about what went wrong, and who might’ve died because of it.”
“I suppose we have.” The voice was even softer and quieter than usual, and Marguerit wondered if her uninvited guest was starting to pity her.
If they were, she couldn’t blame them. After all, she was starting to feel sorry for them.
Careful, Marge, you’re going soft.
Heh. More images flashed before her eyes. A village, infested with corrupt security guards. The guards’ corpses, lying on the ground. The wide eyes of thankful civilians, and whispered voices bestowing the unrequested but flattering name of “God’s Hand.”
The disappointment on her superior officer’s face as he dishonorably discharged her for going off-mission, and the knowledge that she regretted nothing.
Aw, hell, I’ve always been soft. If you don’t have a soft spot for SOMETHING, then what are you fighting to protect?
“Welp,” she grunted, coaxing the aging Prawn Suit back into motion, “I can’t say I blame ya for feelin’ guilty and not wantin’ to talk about it, but at least you weren’t trying to hurt anyone.
“Now, I haven’t eaten in several hours, and I’m not doin’ squat until I’ve got some food in me, but after that, I’ll help you build your body, and you can see about checkin’ on your people and trying to make amends.”
“Thank you.” The tremor was back in the alien’s voice, but this time it sounded like relief. “For your assistance, and… for sharing your story. I understand how difficult such experiences are to talk about, but… it helps to know that I am not the only one.”
Marguerit shrugged, forcing down the start of a lump that was trying to form in her throat. “Well, sometimes life happens, and you just gotta accept what’s happened and find a way to move forward from there. You’re welcome, though. Hopefully your atonement will be a bit more doable than mine.”
“I hope so, too.”
The Prawn Suit came to a halt, and she quickly jumped out of it and stepped into her greenhouse. Preston bounded toward her as she opened the bulkhead, and she extended one hand to rub the snow stalker’s head as she closed the door with the other.
“So,” she commented as she began picking potatoes, “since it looks like we’re gonna be stuck together for the next several days, we might as well learn each other’s names. Mine’s Marguerit Maida.”
“You may append your seed code to my species designation,” the alien offered. “Please call me Al-An.”
“Al-An, huh? Pleased to meet’cha,” she replied, and to her surprise, she meant it.
So now I’ve got another scientist type who needs my help. Heh.
I can never make it up to the kid, but… maybe this is fate’s way of letting both me and my new passenger have a chance to set a few things right.
Author's note:
If you want to read my original stories, you can find them here.
And if you'd like to help me publish new stories faster, please consider supporting me on Patreon, so I can spend more time writing and less time doing other things to make money.
If you want to read my original stories, you can find them here.
And if you'd like to help me publish new stories faster, please consider supporting me on Patreon, so I can spend more time writing and less time doing other things to make money.