Station 333 Read online

  Station 333

  Cymic Parasite Breach Book Three

  Darcy Coates

  © 2016

  Cover © Deranged Doctor Designs

  CHAPTERS

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  1

  “Your shift finished an hour ago.”

  Kala jumped as the cool voice spoke in her ear. She turned to see Vivian standing just behind her. The tall woman’s heavy-lidded eyes were fixed on the window in front of them.

  “Uh, yeah, I figured I’d hang around for a while—”

  “It’s because his ship is late, isn’t it?” Vivian’s lip curled up as she spoke. Her long black hair was plaited so tightly that Kala couldn’t see a single strand out of place, and her silver-and-steel-blue suit was immaculately ironed. Kala had heard that Vivian started her career in the military sector of Mendes Twelve, the communications hub near the centre of the prestigious Mendes cluster of stations, where the standards were higher and the dress code was stricter. Vivian was so cool and precise in everything she said and did that it was sometimes hard to remember there was a live, feeling person inside.

  “That’s not your business.” Kala crossed her arms and turned back the window overlooking the large metal hangar. “But yes, his ship should have been back this morning.”

  “He outranks you,” Vivian observed.

  Kala felt a flush of anger build inside of her. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Vivian finally moved her eyes, flicking them away from the window to glance at Kala’s face. She let the silence stretch until Kala was squirming. “I was only saying he doesn’t need a subordinate fretting about him. You’re not being paid to wait at the door like a love-sick puppy.”

  The hot anger bloomed in her chest, rising across her cheeks and sticking in her throat. Vivian’s implications were clear: she believed Kala had feelings for Stanos. She couldn’t have been more wrong.

  In the eight months she’d been staying at Station 333, Kala had spent a lot of time working with Stanos. Yes, he was handsome, and yes, he’d been kind and patient, even when she’d made mistakes. But Stanos was nothing but a good boss and an even better friend.

  Kala opened her mouth to argue, but her tall, bone-thin companion had already turned and was halfway to the doors leading to the living quarters. Her long black plait swayed gently in her wake as she marched with a well-trained precision. Vivian paused in the doorway, one gloved hand hovering over the sensor to keep the door open, and glanced over her shoulder. “He also outranks you in combat training. He’ll be fine.”

  “Thanks?” Kala said, but Vivian was already gone. The door slid back into place with a quiet whoosh.

  Kala shook her head. She’d been living with Vivian for three months, ever since Vivian’s previous roommate had requested a transfer to a different station. Kala would have thought that was enough time to get to know someone, but she seemed no closer to figuring out what went through the frosty woman’s head than she had been on the first day.

  Kala turned back to the window and leaned her forehead against it. The glass was pleasantly cold, and the business of the docking bays below made a good distraction. Stanos had been gone for just over a week, travelling to a part of the system where gamma rays made communication channels less than reliable and emergency assistance took days to arrive. She missed him, but more than that, she worried for him.

  He and two teammates had been deployed in response to an emergency signal from a remote moon base. Without any information to go on—just a cry for help, broadcast into the vast emptiness of space—they had no way of knowing how serious the situation was. It could be as minor as one of the crew being injured and needing transport back to Central, or Stanos could have been walking into a death trap. They hadn’t heard from him since his ship left easy communication range, and Kala knew that every hour he was late increased the likelihood that something had gone seriously wrong.

  Worse, there had been a spate of similar distress signals—all coming from remote moons—during the week he’d been away. Two distress signals a week was normal. Forty-five in ten days was alarming, and the gossip was that something was very wrong on the remote monitoring stations and that Central had deployed investigative crews equipped with full quarantine facilities, stunner guns, and the most advanced diagnostic tools available.

  Vivian’s right, though. Stanos and his team are well trained. That’s why they were sent; they can cope with danger. They thrive on danger.

  On the other hand, I thrive on security and knowing that my friends aren’t dead, and there’s an alarming shortage of that today.

  She’d meant to stay no more than an hour after her shift, but even though time was crawling by and she was in danger of missing dinner if she lingered much longer, she couldn’t summon the will to move. Just a few more minutes. Just in case.

  A deep humming noise startled her back to attention, and she blinked furiously to wake herself up. The carrier doors were opening, then a familiar silver shuttle glided through the hatch and landed on the tarmac. The artificial gravity in the hangar was weaker than it was in the rest of the station, but the force was still enough to make the ship shudder as it hit ground. Kala waited until she could read the name emblazoned on the ship’s side—Delta Shock—before she let a shaking, relieved smile spread over her face.

  An enclosed walkway extended from the edge of the hangar until it touched the side of the ship. Kala was too far away to hear, but she’d been in enough spacecrafts to imagine the heavy hissing noise that meant the walkway was airlocked and it was safe to open the door.

  Tinted windows lined the walkway, and Kala saw three figures walking behind them: two shorter, slimmer ones and one who was so tall, his head nearly brushed the roof. Stanos and his two female crew members had all returned alive and with the correct number of limbs attached.

  Only then did Kala realise how stupid she must look, hanging around the docking bay after her shift was finished. Vivian was right; Kala hadn’t intended it that way, but she would look like a desperate puppy waiting for its master to return.

  “Jeeze, what were you thinking, Kal?” she muttered and quickly turned towards the living area’s doors, hoping to slip out before Stanos saw her. She was a second too late.

  “Holcroft!” a familiar voice called, and she turned back to the hangar doors that had just opened to admit the three returned travellers.

  Stanos’s long, sharp face was still damp with sweat from wearing his helmet, but he looked genuinely pleased to see her.

  Kala returned his infectious smile. “Good to see you back, sir.”

  “You waited up for us? That’s perfect, actually—I’ve got a small job I’m hoping you can help me with. You won’t mind putting in a bit of overtime, will you, Holcroft?”

  “No, of course not!”

  His two crewmates, both middle-aged women Kala didn’t recognise, swept past her and left through the door to the living quarters without saying a word. It was a bit cold, Kala thought, to leave their captain without saying goodbye. Maybe they’d had an argument on the trip back.

  “Great.” Stanos beckoned for Kala to follow him in the opposite direction, towards the labs. “It shouldn’t take us too long if we work at it together.”

  2

  Kala had to jog to keep up with Stanos’s long strides. She liked being asked to help; the station’s recreational activities weren’t especially stimulating, so she often found it more enjoyable to work late in the labs. She and Stanos had pulled a lot of long shifts together. They sometime worked well into the early hours of the morning, both of them so absorbed in their jobs that they hadn’t realised how late it had becom
e.

  Kala was part of the science crew on Station 333. Her job was to examine, categorise, and document samples of life submitted from other, more remote stations. Their database held hundreds of thousands of samples, divided into twenty-nine rough categories, and it continued to billow out as humankind’s long arm stretched farther and farther into the void of space.

  At the bottom of the scale were lifeforms that were little more than bloated bacteria. The list also included vegetative forms that couldn’t think or move but still responded to stimuli. Then, less often, they found active lifeforms—the equivalent of Earth’s animals—that ranged from brainless to highly intelligent. While they hadn’t yet found a creature with an intellect developed to a human’s level, leading scientists predicted that they were out there, living beyond humanity’s reach.

  Whenever a new planet was colonised, an inevitable slurry of samples were sent to Station 333 and similar science crews on other central stations. Less frequently, established colonies sent in new samples when lifeforms came in on asteroids or space rubble.

  Kala followed Stanos into the empty lab. It was a large room filled with desks and cluttered by microscopes, test chambers, and DNA extractors. A double door to the right led into the containment area they used for larger samples—anything bigger than your head goes in there, Stanos had told her during her first day working there. Protective suits were kept at the back of the rooms, near the sinks and a door leading to the showers.

  As they began pulling on their canary-yellow protective suits, Kala glanced at her boss. “What was the alarm about?”

  “Hmm?” Stanos asked, apparently deep in thought.

  Kala zipped up her suit and pulled a set of gloves out of the box hung beside the sinks. “The assistance request you just came back from. What was it for?”

  “Oh, some minor drama with a lifeform the station workers thought was dangerous. It was all resolved days before we got there, but they asked us to hang around for half a day to help repair their solar panels instead.”

  “Good,” Kala said then caught herself and laughed. “Well, not good for you if it was a wasted trip. But I’m glad there wasn’t anything dangerous waiting for you.”

  “Me too,” Stanos said, beaming at her as he tied off his gloves. “Ready?”

  “Ready.”

  Kala followed her boss to the table they often shared. Stanos turned around to lean against its edge, ankles crossed, in the pose he always adopted when he needed to explain something to her. “Even though the initial threat wasn’t a problem, I did find something I thought could be noteworthy while I was repairing the solar panels. I’d like you to take a look and tell me what you can about it. Okay?”

  “Sure thing.” It was odd that Stanos wasn’t doing the study himself; he was both more qualified and more experienced than she was. Maybe he already knows what it is and this is a test, Kala thought, subconsciously straightening her back a little.

  Stanos reached inside his suit and pulled out a small vial with a rubber stopper. Kala took it and squinted at the substance inside.

  It was pitch black, like ink, but clumped in a little ball. It seemed stuck to the side of the glass, but when she shook the vial, it came loose and bounced about.

  “Is this the full creature or just a section of it?”

  “Both,” Stanos said. He was wearing a crooked grin, apparently enjoying her confusion. She had to raise her eyebrows at him before he explained. “If you cut a section off the parent lifeform, it becomes an organism in its own right.”

  So he’d already examined it, after all, and wanted to see what she could find out about it. Fair enough. She decided to play along. She pressed the power button on the recording system installed at the back of the desk and began her usual spiel for cataloguing new species.

  “This is Kala Holcroft, examining a potential new lifeform sourced from”—she glanced at Stanos, who mouthed the answer to her—“Station 691 on the eighteenth of March. Subject was submitted by Commander Julian Stanos, who will be assisting me with my examination.”

  Stanos gave her a slight nod to continue.

  “Subject is round and approximately three centimetres wide.” Kala turned the bottle to get a better look. “It appears black and smooth and currently lacks any other identifying features.”

  She pulled her face mask down to cover her mouth and nose then uncorked the bottle. Stanos made no move to cover his own face, so she assumed the creature didn’t contain any spores and wasn’t infectious. She tipped the black ball into one of the glass bowls they used to examine small samples then pulled her desk light forward to shine directly on it. “Subject has shown no sign of response to its environment. It appears either dormant or non-sentient. I’ll begin exposing it to stimuli.”

  She picked her first choice out of the toolbar on her desk: a small metal rod, the heat pen, whose tip would gradually heat from room temperature to a little under a hundred degrees. Many lifeforms, especially ones originating on planets close to their stars, went into hibernation at low temperatures, and the heat pen could activate them by simulating a warmer environment.

  She pressed the tip of the pen against the ball and gasped. “Uh, okay, that was fast. Subject responded to the heat pen before a temperature was even set. Subject appears to have an appendage, which it’s used to grab the pen.”

  To Kala, it looked a lot like an exceptionally ugly leech. The base of the ball had fixed itself to the glass bowl, and the bulk of its body had extended up in a long black tendril to grab her pen. When she pulled the metal rod out of reach, the tendril continued to swivel, probing at the air.

  “Subject is definitely alive and active.” Kala put the pen back in its holder and took up a pair of tweezers. She poked at the waving tendril, and it responded instantly, moving towards her and trying to wrap around the metal tool. “Subject shows interest in its surroundings and responds to my voice. It appears to have at least a rudimentary intelligence.”

  The next hour passed quickly as Kala introduced new factors to the creature one at a time, noting its reactions. Stanos continued to lean on the desk, not speaking or moving, merely watching her closely through dark eyes.

  Most of the experiments resulted in the same sort of reaction: the creature grabbed at anything within its reach, except for when she raised the temperature of her heat pen, and it shied away from the burning metal. Then she offered the creature her pencil. It sucked the writing utensil towards its core, held it for a moment, turned it over twice, then spat it out. The creature seemed to be seeking something, and Kala could guess what it wanted.

  “I’ll offer it food,” she said into the recorder as she swivelled her chair away from the desk to collect a sample from the chilled storage container. “It’s the one thing that motivates every single lifeform. What do you think we should try first, Stanos? Pipka?”

  Stanos shrugged, though his smile widened slightly. “Your choice.”

  Kala grabbed one of the small green-grey creatures out of the cold storage and brought it back to her desk. Just about everything in the known system ate pipka. Not only were the small, rapidly reproducing plants useful for feeding to samples, but they responded quickly to medication, making them ideal for trial runs of new drugs. Every lab kept a small stock on hand.

  The slug-sized plant made a moist, sticky noise as she dropped it next to the sample. The black tendril moved immediately, probing its new companion, then speared into the pipka’s core. Kala talked quickly while she watched.

  “Subject has pushed its protrusion inside the pipka, possibly to consume its insides or to inject a poison. Pipka is moving at a normal rate. The sample is… uh… dividing—”

  The end of the sample’s arm detached from its body and slid inside the pipka. The rest of the sample drew back into itself, returning to its plain spherical shape, apparently no longer interested in its prey. As she watched, the pipka began writhing, twisting around, and slapping its slimy ends against the glass bowl.

&n
bsp; Kala watched in fascination as the pipka gradually slowed its movements, shivered, and fell still. She hadn’t realised Stanos had moved to stand behind her until she heard his quiet voice in her ear, “What do you make of that?”

  “I-I’m not sure. This could be one way the sample reproduces, by gestating itself inside a host. Or it could be eating the pipka from the inside out.” She turned to look up at her supervisor. “What do you know about it?”

  Stanos grinned at her. “Not much. That’s why I brought it to you.”

  “But…”

  That didn’t make sense; Stanos had more experience and training. Why does he need me to examine the strange black creature?

  Kala turned back to the pipka, raised her tweezers, and poked it. The moist slug-like plant moved, writhing as it normally did. The hole the black substance had entered through was no longer visible. If she hadn’t watched it happen, she would have guessed the pipka hadn’t been harmed at all.

  No longer bothering to speak into the recorder—and Stanos didn’t try to correct her—Kala picked up her scalpel and pressed its tip into the pipka’s greenish flesh. It resisted for a moment, indenting, then the blade punctured the skin. A thick black liquid spewed out.

  “Jeeze!” Kala dropped the scalpel and pulled away from the table. “What—”

  The pipka had changed. From the hole in its skin, a half dozen black tendrils stretched outwards, probing at the air, swivelling about, searching for their attacker. One by one, they drew back inside the shell, and the cut Kala had made knitted itself together, resealing the skin so that it looked completely unblemished.

  In the eight months she’d been at Station 333, Kala had assessed and categorised hundreds of new discoveries, and she’d never seen anything act like that before. She looked up at Stanos, expecting him to be just as shocked as she was, but his face was neutral as he continued to watch her.

  “Do—did you—” she stuttered, trying to understand what had just happened. “You saw that, too, right?”