She laughed.
He looked back down at her, and gasped. She was sprouting hair right across her chest and stomach, thick black bristles that scratched and pricked his skin where he lay on top of her. Individual strands began to harden. It was like lying on a hedgehog hide. The long tips were puncturing his own skin, needling in through the subcutaneous layers of fat.
“Fuck me, then,” she said.
He tried to struggle, but all that did was push more needle spines into his abdomen. Marie let go of one wrist. He hit her then, on the side of her ribs, and her flesh gave way below his fist. When he brought his hand away it was covered in yellow and red slime. The spines piercing him turned to worms, slick and greasy, licking round inside the swath of puncture holes down his torso. Blood trickled out.
Anders let out an insane howl. She was rotting below him, skin melting away into a putrescent crimson film of mucus. It was acting like glue, sticking him to her. The stench was vile, stinging his eyes. He puked, the wine from the Tabitha Oasis splattering down on her deliquescing face.
“Kiss me.”
He bucked and floundered against her, weeping helplessly, praying to a God he hadn’t addressed in over a decade. The worms were wriggling between his abdominal muscles, twining round tendon fibres. Blood and pus squelched and intermingled, forming a sticky glue which wedded them belly to belly like Siamese twins.
“Kiss me, Anders.”
Her free hand clamped onto the back of his skull. It felt like there was nothing left on it but bone. Sludge dripped into his coiffured hair.
“No!” he whimpered.
Her lips had dribbled away like candle wax, leaving a wide gash in the bubbling corruption that was her face. The teeth were a permanent grin. His head was being forced down towards her. He saw her teeth parting, then they were rammed against his own face.
The kiss. And hot, black, gritty liquid surged up out of her throat. Anders couldn’t scream any more. It was in his own mouth, kneading its way down his air passage like a fat, eager serpent.
A voice from nowhere said: “We can stop it.”
The liquid detonated into his lungs. He could feel it, hot and rancid inside his chest, swelling out to invade every delicate cavity. His ribcage heaved at the alien pressure from within. He had stopped struggling.
“She’ll kill you unless you let us help. She’s drowning you.”
He wanted to breathe. He wanted air. He would do anything to breathe. Anything.
“Then let us in.”
He did.
Using the sensitive cells in the polyp above Anders Bospoort’s bed, Dariat watched as the injuries and manifestations reversed themselves. Marie’s glutinous skin hardened, bristles retracting. The wounds down Anders Bospoort’s abdomen closed up. They became what they were before: satyr and seraph.
Anders began to stroke himself, hands tracing lines of muscle across his chest. He looked down on his body with a childlike expression of awe which swiftly became a broad grin. “I’m magnificent,” he whispered. “Utterly magnificent.” The accent was different to Anders’ usual. Dariat couldn’t quite place it.
“Yes, you look pretty good,” she replied indifferently. She sat up. The sheets were stained a faint pink below her back.
“Let me have you.”
Her mouth wrinkled up with indecision.
“Please. You know I need to. Hell, it’s been seven hundred years. Show a little compassion here.”
“All right then.” She lay back down. Anders started to lick her body, reminding Dariat of a feeding dog. They fucked for twenty minutes, Anders rutting with a fervour he’d never shown in any of his fleks. Electric lights and household equipment went berserk as they thrashed about. Dariat quickly checked the neighbouring apartments; a stimulant-program writer was yelling in frustration as his processors crashed at tremendous speed; a clone merchant’s vats seethed and boiled as regulators fried the fragile cell clusters which they were wired up to. Doors all around the vestibule opened and shut like guillotines. He had to launch a flurry of subversive affinity orders into the floor’s neural cells to prevent the local personality subroutines from alerting Rubra’s principal consciousness.
When he arrived, puffing heavily, outside the apartment, Marie and Anders Bospoort were getting dressed. He used a black-market customized processor block to break the door’s codelock, and walked straight in.
Marie and Anders looked up in alarm. They ran out of the bedroom. The processor block died in Dariat’s hand and the apartment was plunged into pitch darkness.
“The dark doesn’t bother me,” he said loudly. The sensitive cells showed him the two of them were walking towards him menacingly.
“Nothing will bother you from now on,” Marie replied.
The belt of his toga robe began to tighten round his belly. “Wrong. Firstly you won’t be able to tyrannize me like you did poor old Anders, I’m not that weak. Secondly, if I die Rubra will see exactly what’s been going on, and what you are. He might be crazy, but he’ll fight like a lion to defend his precious habitat and corporation. Once he knows you exist you’ve lost ninety per cent of your advantage. You’ll never take over Valisk without my help.”
The lights came back on. His belt loosened. Marie and Anders regarded him with expressionless faces.
“It’s only thanks to me he doesn’t know already. You obviously don’t understand much about bitek. I can help there as well.”
“Perhaps we don’t care if he knows,” Anders said.
“OK, fine. You want me to lift the limiter orders I put on this floor’s sensitive cells?”
“What do you want?” Marie asked.
“Revenge. I’ve waited thirty years for you. It’s been so long, so very tiring; I nearly broke on more than one occasion. But I knew you would come in the end.”
“You expected me?” she asked derisively.
“What you are, yes.”
“And what am I?”
“The dead.”
Gemal emerged from its jump six hundred and fifty thousand kilometres above Mirchusko, where the gas giant’s gravity anchored it in a slightly elliptical orbit; Tranquillity, in its lower circular orbit, was trailing by two hundred thousand kilometres. Oliver Llewelyn, the colonist-carrier’s captain, identified his starship to the habitat personality, and requested approach and docking permission.
“Do you require assistance?” Tranquillity asked.
“No, we’re fully functional.”
“I don’t get many colonist-carrier vessels visiting. I thought you might have been making an emergency maintenance call.”
“No. This flight is business.”
“Does your entire passenger complement wish to apply for residency?”
“Quite the opposite. The zero-tau pods are all empty. We’ve come to hire some military specialists who live here.”
“I see. Docking and approach request granted. Please datavise your projected vector to spaceport flight control.”
Terrance Smith datavised a sensor access request into the starship’s flight computer, and watched the massive bitek habitat growing larger as they accelerated towards rendezvous in a complex manoeuvre at two-thirds of a gee. He opened a channel to the habitat’s communication net, and asked for a list of starships currently docked. Names and classifications flowed through his mind. A collation program sorted through them, indicating possibles and probables.