Her hands were black when they shouldn’t have been. So too were her arms and her chest and everything else she could see of her body. A layer of glossy, fibrous material clung to her, tight as any skinsuit.
Horror welled up inside Kira.
She clawed at her forearms in a desperate attempt to rip off the alien organism. Even with their hard new veneer, her nails couldn’t cut or break the fibers. Frustrated, she brought her wrist to her mouth and bit.
The taste of stone and metal filled her mouth. She could feel the pressure from her teeth, but no matter how hard she bit down, it didn’t hurt.
Kira scrambled to her feet, heart pounding so fast it skipped beats, the edges of her vision going dark. “Get it off!” she shouted. “Get this fucking thing off me!” Through her panic, she wondered where everyone was, her one coherent thought amid the madness.
One of the robotic arms descended toward her. The manipulator at the end of the arm was holding a syringe. Before Kira could move, the machine reached around her head and injected her behind the ear, on a patch of still-bare skin.
Within seconds a heavy blanket seemed to press down upon her. Kira stumbled sideways, reaching out an arm to catch herself as she fell—
2.
The panic returned the moment Kira regained consciousness.
There was an alien creature bonded with her. She was contaminated, possibly infectious. It was the sort of situation every xenobiologist dreaded: a containment breach leading to fatalities.
Alan …
Kira shuddered and buried her face in the crook of her arm. Below her neck, her skin prickled with a million tiny fears. She wanted to look again, but she didn’t have the courage. Not yet.
Tears leaked from under her eyelids. She could feel Alan’s absence like a hole in her chest. It didn’t seem possible that he was dead. They’d had so many plans, so many hopes and dreams, and now none of them would come to fruition. She’d never get to see him build the house he’d talked about, nor go skiing with him in mountains in the far south of Adra, nor watch him become a father, nor any of the other things she’d imagined.
The knowledge hurt more than any physical pain.
She felt her finger. The band of polished iron set with tesserite was gone, and with it her only tangible reminder of him.
A memory came to her then, from years past: her father kneeling next to her in a greenhouse and bandaging a cut on her arm while saying, “The pain is of our own making, Kira.” He pressed a finger against her forehead. “It only hurts as much as we let it.”
Maybe so, but Kira still felt terrible. Pain was pain, and it insisted on making itself known.
How long had she been unconscious? Minutes? Hours?… No, not hours. She was lying where she’d fallen, feeling neither hungry nor thirsty. Only drained from the torment of misery. Her whole body ached as if bruised.
Behind her shuttered lids, Kira noticed that none of her overlays were displaying. “Petra, on,” she said. Her system didn’t respond, not even with a flicker. “Petra, force restart.” The darkness remained unchanged.
Of course. The UMC would shut down her implants.
She growled into her arm. How could the military techs have overlooked the organism in her and Neghar? The xeno was large. Even a basic examination ought to have spotted it. If the UMC had done their job properly, no one would have died.
“Goddamn you,” she muttered. Her anger fought back the grief and panic enough for her to open her eyes.
Again she saw the bare metal. Lightstrips. Mirrored window. Why had they brought her onto the Extenuating Circumstances? Why risk the additional exposure? None of their choices made sense to her.
She’d avoided the inevitable long enough. Steeling herself, Kira looked down.
Her body was still covered in the layer of inky black. That and nothing more. The material resembled bands of overlapping muscles; she could see the individual strands stretch and flex as she moved. Her alarm strengthened, and a shimmer seemed to pass across the fibers. Was it sentient? No way to know for sure at the moment.
Tentative, Kira touched a spot on her arm.
She hissed, baring her teeth. She could feel her fingers on her arm, as if the intervening fibers didn’t exist. The parasite—machine or organism, she didn’t know which—had worked itself into her nervous system. The motions of the circulating air were noticeable against her skin, as was every square centimeter of decking that pressed into her flesh. She might as well have been totally naked.
And yet … she wasn’t cold. Not as she ought to be.
She examined the soles of her feet. Covered, same as her palms. Feeling upward, she discovered that—in the front—the suit stopped near the top of her neck. There was a small ridge: a drop-off between fibers and skin that curved around her ears. In the back, the fibers continued up and over the back of her head and—
Her hair was gone. Nothing but the smooth contours of her skull met her exploring fingers.
Kira set her teeth. What else had the xeno stolen from her?
As she concentrated on the different sensations of her body, Kira realized that the xeno wasn’t just bonded to her outside; it was inside her as well, filling her, penetrating her, if however unobtrusively.
Her gorge rose, and claustrophobia closed in around her, choking her. She was trapped, embedded in the alien substance with no way of escaping.…
She bent over and retched. Nothing came out, but bile coated her tongue and her stomach continued to heave.
Kira shivered. How the hell could the UMC decontaminate her when the suit was wound up all inside? She was going to be stuck in quarantine for months, maybe years. Stuck with it.
She spat into the corner and, without thinking, wiped her mouth on her forearm. The smear of spit soaked into the fibers, like water into cloth.
Disgusting.
A faint hiss—as of speakers turning on—broke the silence, and a new source of light struck Kira’s face.
3.
A hologram covered half the wall. The image was several meters high and showed a small, empty desk—painted battleship grey—in the middle of an equally small, equally stark room. A single chair, straight-backed and armless, sat behind the desk.
A woman walked in. She was of medium height, with a pair of eyes like chips of black ice and a cast-iron hairdo shot through with strands of white. A Reform Hutterite, then, or something similar. There were only a few Hutterites on Weyland: a handful of families Kira had seen on occasion during the settlement’s monthly gathering. The older adults always stood out with their sagging skin and receding hairlines and other obvious signs of aging. The sight had scared her when she was little and fascinated her when she was in her teens.
What she focused on, though, weren’t the woman’s features but her clothes. She was wearing a grey uniform—grey like the desk—that had been starched and ironed until each crease looked as if it could slice through hardened tool steel. Kira didn’t recognize the color of the uniform. Blue was the Navy/Spacecorps. Green was the Army. Grey was…?
The woman seated herself, placed a tablet on the desk, centered it with the tips of her forefingers. “Ms. Navárez. Do you know where you are?” She had a thin, flat mouth, like that of a guppy, and when she spoke, her bottom row of teeth was visible.
“The Extenuating Circumstances.” Kira’s throat hurt; it felt raw and swollen.