The Hematophages Read online

  Sinister Grin Press

  MMXVII

  Austin, Texas

  Sinister Grin Press

  Austin, TX

  www.sinistergrinpress.com

  April 2017

  “The Hematophages” © 2017 Stephen Kozeniewski

  This is a work of Fiction. All characters depicted in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without the publisher’s written consent, except for the purposes of review.

  Cover Art by Matt Davis

  Book Design by Travis Tarpley

  Acknowledgements

  As always, my thanks go out to Matt Worthington, Travis Tarpley, and everyone at Sinister Grin Press for taking a gamble on me. Special thanks to Carol Tietsworth for her edits. And, as always, thanks to Brian Keene and Dave Thomas for opening up this opportunity for me.

  Thank you K.P. Ambroziak, Trista Borgwardt, and Nia Wright for graciously allowing me to use your names in vain.

  Thanks to Mary Fan, Elizabeth Corrigan, Meghan Shena Hyden, and Stevie Kopas for being there for me to bounce ideas off and just generally to listen to me.

  To Kenny Hughes, Aaron Brooks, Ron Davis, Alicia Stamps, and all my fans: thanks. You make it all worth it.

  This novel is dedicated to Brian Keene, who’s never given me bad advice.

  One

  “What is your greatest weakness as a researcher?”

  It’s a stupid question. One that’s been asked at job interviews since time immemorial. Briefly, the image of a protosapient Neanderthal in a pantsuit made from leopard-hide leaps to mind, asking an applicant what her greatest weakness as a mammoth hunter is.

  I take a deep breath. The air is oxygen-rich. Richer than we keep it on Yloft. That’s good. That’s to my advantage. My pupils are dilated; my senses sharp. I’m tempted to tap the button on my armband, which will deliver a nice cocktail of adrenaline and chemicals directly into my bloodstream, but some employers don’t take too kindly to cranking, at least, not during interviews, and the tapping motion is pretty obvious. It goes off every hour while I’m wearing it anyway, so my desire to crank manually is just a nervous habit.

  I refocus on the question. That creaky old horseshit question, old as the hills.

  The purpose of this question is to turn it around and reveal a secret strength.

  “Truth be told, I’ve found that there are times when I become too obsessive about my work. Burning the midnight oil. Sometimes when I get too wrapped up in a research project I can end up neglecting my personal relationships, leisure time, and, yes, even hygiene. I don’t smell too bad right now, do I?”

  Everyone chuckles. Work humor. The joke wouldn’t even elicit a smile with real human beings. At the office, it brings the house down. Something inoffensive enough to laugh at. A mild panacea for your daily drudgery.

  The next woman on the panel clears a rather unpleasant clog of mucus from her throat to refocus our attention. I realize I’ve forgotten every single one of their names. I think this one is the Equal Opportunity Representative. I’m originally from the Horizant Belt. I’m not sure if that makes me an under-represented population on the Borgwardt or not. I can’t tell from the way the EO rep is looking at me, either.

  “Tell me, Dr. Ambroziak, as a counterpoint, what is your greatest strength?”

  I’m not a doctor. I should probably correct her. But I don’t. Is this part of the test? Should I correct her? Are they probing for assertiveness?

  No, by the five sets of dull glassy eyes staring back at me I can tell they’re not pulling any flashy corporation nouveau tricks out of their collective sleeve on me. They (or just the EO rep) had probably just misread my résumé.

  The purpose of this question is to show restraint, that you’re a humble team player, not a braggart.

  “My greatest strength?” I repeat, trailing off as though I’ve never given the matter a second’s thought.

  I re-cross my legs so that they are reversed. The panel is staring at me, sympathizing. If I make them wait much longer I’ll seem like a dummy, but I need to make them wait just long enough to feel like I’m really digging deep. I exhale painfully.

  “Well, if I had to pick something I suppose my greatest strength is that I’m wise enough to know my own limitations. I know when to ask for help, whether from my supervisor or my peers. I’m not the sort of person who’s going to get in over her head and then keep pretending like I can swim my way out of it. Of course, you all know the story about the mice and the bucket.”

  The panelists exchange glances with each other.

  “The mice and the… bucket?” the EO rep asks tentatively.

  “You’ve not heard? I thought everyone knew that old chestnut.” I look from face to face. All blank. “Well, you see, one day two mice fell into a bucket of milk. The first one couldn’t scrabble up over the side, so she gave up and drowned. But the second one kept paddling and paddling and eventually she churned the milk into butter and then just stepped out. The point is: never give up and never quit trying.”

  The low murmur that follows is like a symphony of mild acclaim. So far I’ve been asked four questions, and so far, I’ve knocked all four out of the park. There are five panelists and if I knew anything about interviews that means one final question is coming.

  “Are you ready for the final question?”

  I nod.

  “What is the meaning of life?”

  I’m not taken aback. Thank goodness, they haven’t strayed from the script in the slightest. This is just Corporate Interviewing 101. Not a single one of them has given their questions any consideration, and every single one has an objectively “correct” answer. I’d be surprised if they hadn’t come from a pre-made list.

  This is the “spoiler” question. The purpose of the spoiler is to judge whether I’m easily confused or thrown off my game. The answer doesn’t matter. Just answer confidently, as though they had asked you about your education or qualifications.

  Without missing a beat, I say, “The meaning of life is to persist.”

  The hatch behind me opens with a hydraulic hiss. That definitely throws me off. I hadn’t thought much about being seated with my back to the entrance, but I also hadn’t expected to be interrupted. Out of the corner of my eye I spot a woman easily twice my age, limping with some difficulty on a pair of crutches. Her hair is iron gray, every strand so uniform it seems like she was born with it that way. The director.

  I try not to trip over my own tongue. This is the spoiler question after all. Perhaps the interviewing acumen of the employees of the RV Borgwardt is a bit higher than I gave them credit for.

  But it’s too late. The director has already noted my stumble.

  “Please go on, Paige,” she says, settling with a sigh into the corner.

  I clear my throat and take a sip from the alloy cup set before me. Recycled water, not imported like Yloft’s. Almost pure H2O. Of course, it had once been sweat and piss and shipboard vapor, but if you ever think too hard about anything you could find reason to be disgusted.

  I try to pretend as though the imaginary lump in my throat is the reason for my pause, and not the director’s interruption. I doubt they’re buying it, though. Hopefully I haven’t shown myself to be easily shaken.

  “Of course, Diane,” I say with a smile. You can bet I remembered the director’s name, unlike these other mendicants. “As I was saying, the purpose of life is to persist. The desire for self-preservation is pre-eminent and supersedes only the desire to procreate – that is, the desire for one’s bloodline to persist.”

  “So, we exist to exist. It’s
a tautology. A terrible answer.”

  Suddenly I think the director isn’t playing an interview game. Certainly, all of the panelists have stopped taking notes on their jotters and are riveted on the conversation. Are we having a real academic discourse? If she wants to throw down, I’ll throw down.

  I raise my finger.

  “Only if you’re thinking in terms of the individual.”

  “What other terms should I be thinking in?”

  “The biome. Look, the individual organism’s existence is essentially meaningless. You or I could die today or tomorrow and life would persist. The point is that life itself persists. We originated as a bacterium in a puddle, but a bacterium can’t persist in a puddle. It must spread to other puddles or there is the threat that a simple lightning strike or rockfall would destroy all life. And so, we spread to all the puddles. And then the question became what of the fate of Earth?”

  “What of it?”

  I lean back in my chair and press my fingertips together.

  “Our ancestors knew only one thing with certitude: life on Earth would end. At some point the sun would explode, but the possibility of catastrophe before that was approaching a hundred percent. And if Earth was destroyed, whether by the hands of humankind or nature, life would cease to be. All life on Earth, therefore, was in the pursuit of a single purpose: to colonize new worlds with new biomes. To persist, as I said initially.”

  The director sighs heavily.

  “So, interstellar travel is life’s greatest pursuit?”

  I shrug.

  “You could say that.”

  The director snorts.

  “I hardly think a cetacean would give a damn about interstellar travel.”

  “Save the whales, you mean? As I said, the individual – even the individual species – is meaningless in the greater scheme of things. Whales exist to provide an atmosphere for humanity to create interstellar travel. All life from the beginning of time has striven to create a species capable of thought, capable of technology, that would eventually travel to the stars and bring other species with it. To ensure that life itself persists.”

  The director doesn’t blink, doesn’t pause. She just speaks.

  “I want to offer you a job.”

  I nod.

  “I’ll certainly consider it. Send me the particulars and…”

  “I want to offer you a job right now. You just have to answer me one question: can you do it?”

  I look at the faces of the five panelists. They’ve all turned silent, realizing that they are a kangaroo court, a rubber stamp that need not be employed on this particular document. It may as well just be me and the director alone in the room.

  “I suppose that depends on what it actually is.”

  “If I tell you and you don’t take the job it could be considered corporate espionage. On your part.”

  Espionage. Hestle Corporation is notoriously strict about enforcing mandatory capital punishment for spies, with torture and dismemberment at the discretion of the disciplinary committee.

  I uncross my legs and rise, making a show of shaking the hands of each of the women on the panel as I go. They each in turn pretend to smile back at me. The director lets me get all the way to the open hatch before calling me back.

  “Wait.”

  I turn. Her face is puckered up as though she’s just suckled a particularly bitter lemon.

  “Would you agree to thirty-six hours of house arrest and having your assets frozen for the same period?”

  “In exchange for hearing your offer?”

  The director nods. I can’t deny it. I’m intrigued. Why pretend I’m not? I suppose I can suffer the indignity of a day and a half of detention if I have to turn her down. I get the impression it’s not an offer I’m going to be turning down anyway. I re-take my seat.

  “Ladies,” the director says, “is there any reason Ms. Ambroziak is disqualified from employment at Hestle?”

  I notice she, at least, knows I’m not a doctor. The hiring committee members scowl, but none pipe up. They obviously don’t like being treated this way, having their absolute uselessness pointed out to them. But there’s nothing they can do.

  “Good. Thank you. And Connie, will you see to setting up that lien and freeze? Thanks.”

  The hiring committee shuffles out, faces long, puffy, and distended. The director doesn’t even wait until the hatch has slammed shut.

  “I need someone who knows her way around a seed ship. Someone who can tell us what’s left, what’s right, what’s up, what’s down. Someone who won’t get lost.”

  I’m taken aback.

  “I’m not… I don’t. I can’t. I can’t do that.”

  The director scowls. She limps over and struggles into the seat across from me.

  “I know that. There’s no one living who does. The question is: can you get smart on it? And more importantly: can you get smart on it without anyone in the Yloft library noticing?”

  “Maybe?”

  The director turns sideways and lifts her (presumably) bad leg up to let it rest on an abandoned chair.

  “And most importantly: can you get smart on it in twelve hours?”

  I shake my head.

  “No. Absolutely not.”

  “I’ll assume you’re a smart kid and you’ve made all the correct logical leaps.”

  I have. An old derelict seed ship’s been discovered somewhere. Word isn’t out yet, but it sort of is. The megacorps are scrambling to see who can get a ship there the fastest. The seed ships came from a time before any standing salvage agreements were signed. That means the race doesn’t go to the fastest. No one can just show up and claim first salvage rights. Whoever can get there first only wins if they can actually salvage the ship first.

  “I can do what you ask if you give me… twenty-four hours.”

  “That’s including transit time?”

  I mull it over. What’s really baffling about this is the question of why they don’t just tow the seed ship to a friendly chop shop. Sure, you’d need protection, but a tugboat and a couple of fighters should be able to make it there in record time. Why even set foot on the ship?

  “Three hours in the Yloft stacks and fifteen hours with the data, yeah.”

  “And six hours for…?”

  “Well, you don’t expect me to lead an expedition into a crashed derelict seed ship without my beauty rest, do you?”

  The director almost smiles. So, all of my surmises are right. The seed ship didn’t die in space. It reached its destination and came down hard. Or maybe went off course and landed in the wrong spot.

  “Your friend Peavey said she’d need thirty-six hours to do it. With no sleep.”

  “Peavey’s a lazy shit. And she thinks she doesn’t need sleep which just means she sleeps more than she means to. You’ve noticed the…”

  I gesture at my eyes, indicating Peavey’s signature purple bags. The director really does smile this time.

  “All right. I’m going with you. That’s 35,000 chits. Per anni solaris.”

  “I was promised fifty.”

  She nods.

  “For a Ph.D. You’re a grad student.”

  “If you’re really into splitting hairs, just go with Peavey. I’m sure she’ll take the lower rate. And you’ll be trying to fight off AginCorp and the skin-wrappers and everybody and their grandmothers while trying to somehow simultaneously run a salvage operation. Because you trusted Peavey. And lost twelve hours doing it.”

  Squeak. Squeak. Squeak.

  She’s unscrewing her leg from her hip. She twirls it a few more times, like taking the cap off a plastic bottle of liquor, then sets it in front of her like a meal.

  “I’ll give you your fifty. And if the mission is successful I’ll give you a bonus thousand. Gross.”

  I purse my lips.

  “If it’s not?”

  “If it’s not you’re going to be answering questions to committees for the rest of your life. The whole thing’s on you
, Paige. The whole thing. You’re young and full of piss and vinegar. You want to prove yourself, get your honorary doctorate, a big fat fast-tracking job, and, oh yeah, a little spotlight in the history books, this is your chance. Fuck it up and…”

  She shrugs. Just a tiny, dainty little movement.

  “You know, most people when they tell you this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, it turns out they’re just trying to sell you used tyres.”

  “I’d venture to say 99.9% of people,” the director says coolly, “But look in my eyes and tell me if I’m one of them.”

  I look into her watery grey eyes. Sure, there’s the cynicism. The “I’ve dealt with a million little whippersnappers like you.” But there’s something else, too. Sincerity. And… excitement. She at least believes her own hype.

  I nod.

  Alea iacta est.

  Two

  I detest standing in the prophylactic airlock after leaving a ship. There’s nothing particularly bad about it – it just consists of standing around waiting, not even in line, but I despise it nonetheless. It’s like giving blood or getting a needle. No matter how much my mind advises me that there’s nothing to worry about it, it’s still squishily unpleasant in some deep, reptilian part of my mind.

  It’s probably because of the story. Everybody knows the story. And everybody hears it at a time when they’re an impressionable child, so it settles in and burrows down into some deep, dark recess of your brain. But I don’t want to think about that right now.

  The RV Borgwardt is behind me. Ahead of me lies Yloft, the place I’ve lived my entire life (less a few unremembered years of my early childhood) and know like the back of my hand. To the left and the right are hatches into open space. I can tell because of the tiny portholes in each.

  It hasn’t been longer than usual to get clearance back into the station, but I’m still tapping my toes. I know everyone on Yloft and everyone on Yloft knows me. I haven’t even flashed my transit chip yet. Why would they even ask? But still, I know there are procedures, and if I expect someone to actually just let me on the bustling way-station without sweeping for germs and checking credentials, I’d have to grease palms. Not that it never happens. Just what would I be paying for? Quick access? I’m not smuggling anything.