The Human Experience
Chapter 32

Quarter P (or Half P?), day (I won’t even guess), 3418.

It was curious to see more and more Helms follow Del’s example in the hours after her announcement. It made it easy for the soldiers to force the rest to the hangars – there hadn’t been enough to constitute a real rebellion. It’s been days since then. The last Helm finally went catatonic, and the hangar doors have been sealed. Del was among the last to succumb, even though she’d gotten Infected first, gave her mind willingly, and had at least seven Voices attached to her. Now she’s in the north wing with the others for rehabilitation.

As a result, I’m bored. I considered unbolting the hangar doors and setting the Voices loose just to see what people would do. But then I thought, with all the Helms unconscious and the nobility safely tucked away in the northern wing, I won’t get the chaos I’m hoping for. That’s not fun.

So I just cart the catatonic to and from Orcadis’s chambers. Sometimes I check in with the north-wingers to make sure they’re nursing the reviving patients. They’ve stopped complaining, for the most part. Or at least they don’t complain when I’m there.

But oh, the boredom. The complete and utter tedium. If only the chirurgeon would hurry up with those engines. I’m so desperate for entertainment I’ve even taken up reading, “Supernovae in Binary Systems: Gas Accretion of the Companion White Dwarf Star.”

Gods, I hope things pick up on this ship soon.

Lykus strut through the halls freely, savouring the fact that he was the sole person not confined to any one wing. It was time for his daily entertainment: tormenting the Voices.

He heard them moaning before he even came in view of the hangar doors. They’d already consumed the radiation in the stones Del and Jesreal had brought, and longed for release. Lykus stopped by the doors, bashing on their hinges as always, the hollow clangs and rattles of juddering metal accented by the parasites’ own groans.

“Hello, friends,” he said. “Hungry? I hear you. I’ll flay the next food distributor who hands me nut medleys and filtered piss-water.”

Whines and whimpers in a hundred different frequencies answered him. They were the howl of wind through branches, the muffled asphyxiation of drowning animals.

“Can you smell my delicious brain? All that tasty radiation coming out of there? Tell you what. I’ll free you if you have a nice steak for me behind there. What do you say?”

Orcadis Durant...he did this...he did this! Must...punish...

The rest of the words morphed to non-human shrieks. Lykus smirked. “No steak, then?”

Punish...kill...kill him!

Kill? That was a new development. The Voices were certainly hateful – they’d moaned and groaned against Orcadis for days – but before they’d been ambiguous about the sort of punishment they hoped to exact. “No can do,” he said. “Without Orcadis we can’t revive the catatonics. Hector seems to care about that. So no.”

It still felt odd to him, hearing such angry Voices. Helms were forbidden negative thoughts, and he supposed that was why the Voices they’d created had been mild things that used love for connection with their victims. But these bastards...

The chirurgeon posited that the Helms had angled many hateful thoughts at Orcadis since learning the Voices were his botched science experiment. Lykus called it the Kaed Effect. Hateful thoughts, hateful Voices. All their confusion, fear, and anger had been transmitted to those whining things rattling the hangar doors.

He needs to pay!

“And I need steak. Life isn’t fair, is it?”

The doors gave a particularly powerful jostle. Thump. Like some physical force had slammed its weight against them from within. It came again: thump. Lykus cocked his head, blinking at the distended bulge in the metal. How curious. Voices weren’t made of matter. They couldn’t create a physical dent in the doors, could they?

Thump! No, they definitely could dent the doors. The bump had gotten bigger.

He leaned in, analyzing it...

An explosion blasted Lykus off his feet. He spun in mid-air, vaguely aware of a silver shadow swooping over him before the pressure screwed his eyes shut and he was flung against steel.

Everything spun. Lykus tried to get his bearings, but the shockwave left his eardrums hot and throbbing. Hands grabbed him by the shirtfront and dragged him into a sitting position, making pain jab through his back.

“What happened? Lykus, what did you do?”

Ah, so he could hear. Good. Lykus shook his hair out of his face, blinking up into a pair of frenzied green eyes. Kaed? No, the voice had been a woman’s. Jesreal’s face took focus as his vision cleared. “Why could the Voices break down the door, if they’re not matter?” he asked, voice slurred.

Jesreal groaned, releasing him to plaster both hands over her face. Lykus slumped to the side, still unbalanced from the ringing in his ears. She looked like the last thing she wanted to do was verse him in elementary science. After a deep breath, she stood, her expression recalibrated. Two of the technicians who had followed her from the engine room grabbed Lykus beneath the arms and hoisted him up.

She barked hurried orders at the rest of them. Secure the area near the hangar. At no cost open any doors. Send a message to those in the southern wing to make an announcement. Have the north-wingers reinforce their doors with whatever they can replace. That’s where the Voices would head, she guessed – the north wing had the most potent supply of radiation now, in the minds of soldiers and aristocrats and reviving Helms.

But Lykus had another guess. “They’re going to Orcadis,” he said. “To kill him.”

Something shifted behind the chirurgeon’s eyes. “Delmira’s love – the thought-wave detector! That’s the strongest source of radiation left on the ship. Lykus!” She grabbed him by the front again, giving him a shake that made his aching back protest. “When you came here from the southern wing, did you seal the doors behind you?”

“Uh...” Your planning skills rival a stone’s, Lykus. He chuckled at the absurdity of it.

“Damn you!” Jesreal threw him aside and broke into a run down the hall. Her technicians stayed behind, sharing glances, looking at the twisted hangar doors completely torn off their hinges. Lumps trembled in their throats. They wouldn’t follow her into the heart of peril.

Lykus, though, was immune. And this was the most interesting thing to happen all week. So he went after her, still disoriented from the explosion and bumping off walls when his feet took slanted trajectories.

He passed the consecutive rooms in the southern wing, heading for Orcadis’s quarters. Silence lay heavily around him, ripe with portent like the moment a skyward-thrown ball lingers, static, before starting its inevitable descent.

He picked up his pace as he realized what he risked if Jesreal got Infected. Without the engines fixed, everyone – including him – was doomed.

Orcadis was wheeling a gurney into the hall when Lykus arrived. There were five more piled outside his quarters, all carrying his recently revived patients, and several unconscious people lay on blankets on the floor. The man worked inhumanly fast. He’d already run out of gurneys. Lykus had left fifteen minutes ago for his walk, and now there were a dozen more reviving catatonics to take to the north wing.

Jesreal, it seemed, had hit a brick wall in breathlessly explaining the situation to Orcadis. The Greathelm just stared at her with glassy eyes. When Lykus got closer Orcadis looked over her shoulder at him, distracted. “There you are, Lykus. No slacking, now. Go empty the stretchers.”

She grabbed his shoulders to command his attention. “This isn’t a joke! The Voices are coming for the detector! We need to get it to safety!”

Orcadis scrutinized her, blinking like he was half-blind. Then he shrugged off her hands and moved back into the room behind him, where a man hooked to a metal box lay on a table with steel helmet over his brow. “No time...such nonsense...can’t distract,” Orcadis muttered, placing the last of the suction cups on the man’s temples. His eyes kept crossing as he worked.

“What’s wrong with him?” Jesreal cried, rounding on Lykus.

Lykus shrugged. “Hasn’t slept in days. He barely drinks and only eats what I manage to shove into his mouth while he’s working. Says proximity to so much radiation is dangerous. He told me he’d rest when he finished reviving every catatonic.”

Lykus supposed operating the thought-wave detector day and night had given Orcadis so much exposure to residual radiation that he’d become some sort of super-Helm. The man was so caught up in his mental world he’d almost forgotten the physical one. Once Lykus had had to inform him that he’d set one of the gurney’s wheels down on his own foot, crushing it.

Jesreal squeezed past him into the room, headed to the back of the detector and opened the flap to the energy compartment.

“What are you doing?” Orcadis boomed, whipping around with wires still in his hands. It was the most lucid Lykus had seen him all day.

“The Voices are in this wing. Lykus will take the moonstone away from here. It needs to be locked up somewhere until we figure out how to trap the Voices again.”

Orcadis lunged, snapped the energy compartment shut so quickly Jesreal had to whip her hands back to avoid catching her fingers. “People will die. I can’t stop. Not now. Some are already severely dehydrated, and it takes days to regain consciousness after the procedure. They won’t make it much longer. ”

“All of the catatonics will die if the Voices come here and strip the stone of radiation,” Jesreal said in her reasoning way, softly but assuredly. “It’s the only source we have left.”

He shook his head like a stubborn child and returned to attaching suction cups.

Something stirred in the corner of the room. Lykus’s gaze was drawn to Star-King Serasta – the real one – dozing in a chair, both hands cupped over the head of a cane. Now that he could walk he sometimes came to sit with Orcadis while he worked. He never said anything to him, just sat and watched him work in silence. The noise must have roused him, for he lifted his sagging head and peeled his eyes open.

“Lykus,” Jesreal whispered, eyes flicking to Orcadis and back. “Think you could...” She mouthed the rest of her request, “restrain him?”

Orcadis didn’t turn to face them as he said, “Surely Lykus enjoys the use of his limbs too much to relinquish them so readily.” Apparently he wasn’t as distracted as Jesreal had hoped. Lykus shrugged at the chirurgeon. He was rather fond of his limbs, and he had no doubt Orcadis could snap them like twigs if it came to it.

A new figure appeared in the doorway. Auburn hair fell past her shoulders in waves, her face round and soft-featured, freckles dotting her pale skin in a way that drew attention to eyes so dark they were almost navy-blue. Lykus’s interest piqued. Finally, someone who wasn’t boring!

“Del! You’re awake!”

She didn’t even glance his way as she stepped into the room, eyes locked on Orcadis. Son-of-a-bitch. Still? Even now? The man was half-cooked from the engine fire! Would Lykus have to do something really grotesque to get her attention?

Orcadis’s mouth twitched into a smile. He dropped the wires, managing to focus his eyes on her.

But something was wrong. Del was almost...glowing. Her eyes exuded light, and that same light seemed to pulse just beneath her skin, to be trapped in every strand of her hair, intensifying her colouring like a stained-glass window with the sun behind it. A faint silver blaze outlined her figure.

Orcadis noticed, too. He reached to touch her arm. His hand went right through her.

The Greathelm flew into the back wall as though yanked by invisible ropes. His hands snapped up, invisible manacles binding his wrists to the wall over his head. Muscles bulged out of his arms as he strained to free himself.

Ghost-Del just stood, peering up at Orcadis through veils of her wavy hair, a malignant glint in her too-bright eyes as the pressure mounted on Orcadis until he grunted, chest struggling to rise.

Jesreal pounced on her, but her arms closed around nothing and she staggered forward from the momentum of her jump. Lykus tried his luck too, awestruck as he passed a hand through Del’s head, down her neck and into the middle of her torso. Her image wasn’t translucent, and it didn’t so much as waver when matter cut through it.

“No!” King Serasta limped between ghost-Del and Orcadis. He flung out his cane. It punched through her image cleanly, and she traced its path straight between her ribs, a disdainful curl to her lips.

The cane flew from Serasta’s hands, clattering to the floor. “If I have to die,” she said in a hollow medley of voices, each syllable a different pitch, “so does my creator.”

Del stared hard at Orcadis and Lykus heard something crunch within him. His face twisted, eyes rolling into the back of his head.

With a yell, King Serasta grabbed her throat in both hands. Del gasped, fastening her hands over his. Serasta’s eyes darted to his hands, firmly closed around her neck, and his lips parted. Lykus guessed he hadn’t expected to be able to touch the thing. He shoved the glowing Del-rendition back and it wobbled, as surprised as he was.

“I said no!” he repeated firmly.

The Del-ghost flung itself forward and Serasta met it head-on, again pushing it back. It began pulsing brighter, figure melting out of a woman’s shape, and then the image burst into a thousand shards of silver light.

Orcadis slumped down the wall, landing in a heap on the floor as Jesreal rushed to him.

This is not the end, the reverberating voice-medley promised, as the silver light coalesced and whooshed from the chamber like a winter tempest. I will get justice!

Serasta gaped at his hands, flexing his fingers as if trying to determine what magical property they retained. As Orcadis revived, climbing to his feet with Jesreal’s help, Lykus considered the situation.

The Voices had merged into one very angry being, it seemed. It hated Orcadis, and only King Serasta could physically contain it.

“Well,” he said, “I suppose things will get interesting on this ship after all.”