Quid Pro Quo

The facility is cold. They've given Laura new clothes; soft and plain, everything in neutral tones, in warm fabrics. Shoes that don't lace. But the air temperature is too low to be comfortable.

Either that or the cold got inside her, and she'll never feel anything else.

It's three days until she sees anyone not wearing full hazmat. She's sitting in the little kitchen unit — stocked with military precision, pristine in a way that suggests a sterile set more than a genuine room, something provided to sustain her while she's contained. She boiled a kettle, tipped it over instant noodles, sits and watches them. Hunger feels much less proximate than the feeling that she'll throw up if she eats.

A neat man in a severely-cut black suit knocks on the doorframe, and she startles.

"I'm Agent Kilperson," he says gently, and she coughs before rustily getting any words out.

"I'm a citizen of the Interstellar Commonweal. Don't I get a phone call or a lawyer or something?"

"You're not under arrest." He moves in a concilitary way, like someone cornering a cat for flea treatment, approaching the table and slowly easing into a chair opposite.

"This isn't—" she gestures tightly, at the kitchen, and beyond it the small room with a bunk and no lock on the door, the terrifyingly state-of-the-art sickbay, the endless corridors of sealed doors from which indistinguishable chrome-visored hazmat figures come and go.

He sighs and reaches slowly for the inside pocket of his jacket, passing a flip-open ID wallet across the table to her.

Davide Kilperson. Special Response.

Special Response. The fucking black ops boogeyman. The B-grade action flick scriptwriter's best friend, when they want to put a real-world name to a shadowy government agency of indefinite, infinite capability and terrifying willingness to exercise it. The agency that brings the quis custodiet to the much-gossiped terror of the Ganzfeld: because when one far-flung human strain develops a psionic talent for reaching behind physics' back and messing with its spreadsheet, the only ones who can police mind-reading and teleporting and who-knows-what is a good Ganz with Amazing Mind Powers.

Really, the Ganz surname should have tipped her off, she thinks, as her hands shake.

"I have a lot of questions," he says, oh so professionally reassuring, "but I hope you'll understand that it's a debrief, not an interrogation. This is protective custody."

She pushes both his ID and the noodles away across the table.

One week ago:

Izzi lets out the controlled breath of someone doing something precise and effortful, then slowly peels her forearms out of the electrode-studded indentations in the ship's Wishbone. She tips her head forward to disengage from the glossy black contact pad at her nape, and takes a step forward to allow the Wishbone to retract into its security capsule.

"All yours," she says, low in her throat.

It's a four-person spacecraft. The team — Laura and Ames and Oscura — plus Izzi Bell. Three civil engineers whose professional development has wandered into the trap of a high-paid government job that it turns out they can't mention the details of on their CV, and one fabulously-paid outside contractor; because site inspectors are fungible, but Ganzfelds are valuable. A Ganzfeld with the right capabilities can teleport across the universe. And the Wishbone, manufactured on their homeworld, its secrets locked firmly into the armoured pod that promises mutual annihilation to reverse engineers, is a cosmic paperclip that keeps the ship attached to the Ganzfeld when they do it.

The ship has two distinct areas. Everything from the bridge down, which is theirs; and up a ladder from the bridge, the contractor's quarters. Starjump is too valuable to capture within a mere employee hierarchy; it's lured with mountains of government cash, and even in the cramped quarters of a spacegoing vessel, with perks like privacy. This is a routine 48-hour inspection window, and Izzi Bell's work consists of two, instantaneous, jumps: there and back. In between, she gets to disappear topside and do...whatever a fucking Ganzfeld does between jumps.

This is the seventh year running that Laura's team is on the rota for this site's annual inspection.

"Tell me about Izzi Bell," says Agent Kilperson.

"She's a Ganz," Laura says. She twines her hands together in her lap to steady them. "You people know everything about her already."

That's the thing about originating as a brutal penal colony; it gives people a very focused sense of us versus them. The Ganz are pricelessly useful; but they don't fucking forget what was done to them, by the people they're useful to. They don't ever forget that institutions' memories might turn to their origins, if they lose their monopoly on what they do.

"I've read every piece of paperwork ever filed on her," Agent Kilperson agrees. "But I've never met her, and it can make a difference."

"I met her, I guess." Laura shrugs. "It was the team's seventh trip to Amanita Upsilon. Her sixth, we had a different guy the first time out. Johnny something."

"We've spoken to him," Kilperson says blandly.

"I guess the NDAs don't mean a lot to you guys."

He sighs and adjusts his cuffs. "SR isn't above the law," he says. "Even if it often suits us to be thought of that way."

"I do maintenance inspections on government black sites for a living," Laura says. "Sure, tell me how the law and secrecy and the government all interact simply. Go on."

He laughs. "Bell's worked with your department a lot. You must have seen more of her than that."

"She's a Ganzfeld." Laura shrugs helplessly. "What do you want me to say? Yeah, I saw her pass by the copier a bunch of times, I guess."

Laura could say: Izzi Bell wore perfume that smelled of lilies. She wore two thin silver bracelets on her left wrist. She smiled more than she had to, and she did it because she meant it, not for other peoples' benefit. And Laura is pretty sure she's dead, and she's pretty sure if she talks about it they won't believe her; or, worse, they will and she'll never get out of here. She's dead, and Laura never really talked to her because she was a Ganz, and now that doesn't seem to matter at all and it's too late.

The Amanita Upsilon IV orbital beacon spat out its canned, nonspecific quarantine message when they arrived, and Ames starts their checklist, selecting the correct encryption keyring to open up the service console on the buoy. Not that there's much to it; a list of ship transponder keys, logged whenever someone trips the beacon.

Their own is at the top of the list, followed by their own a year ago, and the year before, and a couple that the system refuses to resolve — military, then, presumably undertaking the repair work that they'd submitted a report about the year before that. Amanita Upsilon is way, way out. You wouldn't come here without a Ganz, and to come here with one you'd need to do it on purpose; and there's nothing to come here for.

As far as almost anyone knows.

The planet doesn't support any form of life that humanity is yet familiar with. It would take massive effort to terraform, and nobody's ever tried.

And down in a deep, deep surface fissure, there's an ancient structure built into the cliffside.

The inspection suits float down from low orbit, thistledown-light on drop gravitics, using the fall to trickle-charge regenerative power banks that will offset the drain of the pulse gravs back up to the ship. There are strata of warning signage down the canyon walls; modern Commonweal governmental standard signs highest up, layered atop older and older versions of the same messaging, eventually and abruptly giving way to the original, ancient, pre-Commonweal warnings, in dead scripts and symbologies. And at the bottom of it all, cut into the cliff, a huge square indentation, big enough to land a craft of some kind on its floor; and in the wall at the back, a door big enough to swallow a house, if you could load a house onto a forklift.

Someone back then took a lot of trouble, not only to build a very big door, very far from anyone who might stumble on it, but also design it in such a way to make it look as locked as it possibly could, and then make as sure as they could that anyone who nonetheless found it would understand it to be Not A Place Of Honour.

"I want to be very clear to you," Laura says. "I can't tell you any more about it, not because of the NDA, but because the whole of the job was to inspect the door and bring back assurances that it's intact. I don't know what's behind it. I don't know anything is. I don't know if anyone knows, and if they do, I don't know who. I do know that it's specifically my job not to know."

"And not to ask."

He doesn't say it as anything but an acknowledgement, but Laura shrugs. "Tell me your job's so different."

There is something in Laura's memory that her attention slides away from, sizzling, like a water drop hovering frantically above a hot surface, boiling away.

There's something she knows she knows she doesn't want to.

"Laura?" Agent Kilperson is saying, frowning. "Laura, are you all right?"

Heart hammering, she gasps for breath as if she's been held underwater. They're in the kitchen. They're in the kitchen and she's in her new, neutral-coloured clothes that she can't tell apart and there are no clocks and she doesn't know what they were talking about.

The noodles aren't on the table.

He makes as if to rise.

"Don't," she chokes. "Don't bother. If there was anything to find by taking blood samples, you'd have found it in the other dozens. Or it'd be gone by now, anyway." Her arms are clutched around her chest, as if against the cold.

It is cold.

"What makes you think Bell's dead, Laura?" he says quietly.

"That's funny," Ames says. "Is there any record of seismic activity here? Ever?" and his suit lamps play across a regular vertical crack in the wall — not the back wall with The Door; one of the side walls of the indentation. "That looks almost like subsidence or something, doesn't it."

"This place has had more years to subside than most planets have served hot dinners," Laura tells him over comms. "I don't think it suddenly did since this time last year."

It's a job of working long hours in isolation under stress. And people start seeing things, because that's how people work. There's a fine art to navigating not talking about it — in case your medical profile flags, or everyone starts taking the piss — and owning up, in case your suit's air recirc is jacked up and it's a prelude to passing out.

One of the advantages of suits with gravitics is that, on sensitive sites, they don't even have to touch the ground, not leave so much as a footprint

...Laura's memory skitters.

"We wouldn't normally ask," Agent Kilperson is saying, very very seriously. "You have to understand, no matter what people say about us, Ganzfelds care about consent to telepathy, and you're not a Ganzfeld. You can't give informed consent for this. Under nearly all circumstances, I could be arrested for suggesting it."

"I don't know what we're even talking about," Laura chokes out.

"That keeps happening," Kilperson says. "It makes me think someone's already been in there, Laura. And they did something really bad to you."

Ah, she thinks. See? They wouldn't believe what—

—anyway that's why she's here, that's why SR: they think Izzi Bell raped her brain. Which is ridiculous, because Izzi's dead—

"Oscura! Oscura!" Laura yells, wanting to shake them; the other engineer is crying and hyperventilating but there's no way to lay hands on them, no way to get to them while they're both in suits and on the surface of a dead planet. "I need you to stop fucking panicking!"

"He climbed out!" Oscura blubbers. "He climbed out and walked off and then he turned into sand and blew away—"

Ames most definitely didn't climb out of his suit. It's open, sure enough, but he didn't even die from that, not with the volume of arterial spray coating the underside of the open cockpit bubble.

"I saw him climb out," and Laura nearly throws up, because Ames sure as hell didn't, and Oscura's gone to shit under pressure, but jugulars don't just pop. And if something's worth keeping people away from, there's reliably some fuck who figures that's a payday, right?

"Laura."

Laura's on her side on the bed, knees to her chest, shivering. No clock no light cycle no calendar. Nobody there to be talking to her.

"Laura," says poor dead Izzi Bell, who isn't there. "Don't let them into your head."

"I keep losing time," Laura tells her. "I keep losing track."

"If you can't let go of me," says Izzi Bell, "they'll put you in the chair and get in your head and find the thread. They won't know what it is, but they'll pull on it, Laura. Can't you let go?"

"No," Laura says.

"You know they'll fish up something else," Izzi Bell whispers.

"I can't," Laura says wretchedly.

She can't stop shaking, spattered with Oscura's blood, clinging to Izzi.

She'd always, she thinks dimly, imagined the contractor's quarters bigger. Nicer than theirs. It's just another cabin, really, painted cheap titanium white and with barely a shelf for personal items.

Izzi Bell brings a well-loved book of poetry on 48-hour routine inspection missions.

"It must have been in Ames's suit," Laura whispers again through her raw throat. "I just closed it up and slaved it to mine and brought it up."

"It's not your fault, Laura," Izzi says, and she's always nicer to people than she has to be, and she always means it.

"I brought it on board." And now she's sounding as unglued as Oscura...had. "We weren't docked that long, I swear we weren't, I wasn't even out of my harness and it just — climbed in with him and ripped him open."

"It's not your fault," Izzi repeats.

"It turned round afterwards and looked at me, Izzi."

It. Because "it" is a lot more comforting than "he".

"And then it melted into a cloud of bugs and they crawled away into the walls." She balls a fist into Izzi's sweater. "And we both know that's not possible," Laura says, because she's got some kind of stubborn edge, even like this. "Bugs can't go through decking. Which means it did something to my brain and walked away while I was shrieking at nothing."

Which is why nowhere's safe. Why they're hiding up here, for the illusory safety in numbers and the illusory safety of Ganzfeld powers.

"Which means it's a Ganz," Izzi says, lips bloodless but voice steady.

"It's fucking not." And Laura doesn't even know how she's so certain, but — "It felt wrong. It felt wrong. It's not a fucking Ganz. It's not any kind of human."

"If it can do that to your brain—"

"Maybe," Laura says, as sharply as she can, "it's whatever you bury the knowledge of on dead worlds at the ass end of space, before the Ganz even evolved."

Izzi is silent in a way that says she's thought of that, too. And that, as possibilities go, it's even worse.

"No," Laura says weakly. "No," and Agent Kilperson frowns down at her as they wheel the stretcher toward the sickbay.

"Laura," he says, "there's ice forming on whatever you're touching. Something deeply fucking wrong's been done to you, and it's getting worse."

"Izzi says not to," she says in a small voice, clutching the edge of the stretcher, and he looks at her something like the way she must have looked Oscura, like she's delusional.

"Isn't Bell dead?" he says gently.

"Yes," she whispers, and there's really no fucking way to convince anyone that makes it more important to listen to her.

"You need to get out of here and warn someone."

"That's why we need to risk the bridge," Izzi says.

"We don't fucking risk anything. You teleport right off this fucking bunk."

"No. We risk the bridge, I get to the Wishbone, and we go warn someone."

"Okay, firstly, if we go downstairs we're going to fucking die. Secondly, if we take this ship anywhere, we've broken quarantine."

Izzi shakes her head. "I can't."

"Well you've got to."

"Well, I can't."

"Why the fuck not?"

Izzi looks at her, then at the bulkhead, then back at her. She draws a breath and sighs gustily, then takes Laura's face in both her hands and stares at her.

"I can't fucking leave you here," she explains, in a low, intense way that rattles Laura's bones, and Laura has to hide from it by closing her eyes.

"Oh my fucking god, you useless lesbian," she croaks. "We're both going to fucking die here, then, yeah."

"I'm going to form a link to your mind," Kilperson is explaining, rapidly and with professional calm, as the sheet under her crackles with ice. "Not your consciousness. I will not have access to what you're thinking, but I will be able, with some effort, to locate and loosely understand your memories. There are two doctors present; one will monitor what I do for medical purposes, and the other will be acting as a legal observer. This is, potentially, a massively violating procedure. But something is siphoning energy off you through the Flow Field, and if we don't stop that, you're going under, Laura."

Her teeth chatter. "Out of bounds," she says, and he pauses, a frown gathering on his face.

"Laura?" he says, very quietly.

"She — she said the trick isn't the jump. Anyone who can jump can go anywhere. She said the trick is — knowing the math, because the math tells you where you'll end up." There are spots in the edges of her vision. "She said. She said it has edge cases. Solutions that aren't places. Like telling a computer to move data three feet left of its RAM chips."

It's hard to talk.

"Izzi said she'd fix it," she says, eyes straying off the Agent's dim face to look past him at the ceiling. Poor, dead, lying Izzi Bell, who must have known all along that it wouldn't be both of them to safety and it three feet left of reality.

"She says you mustn't pull it up."

It feels like far, far too much fucking effort, but Laura opens her eyes to the sight of the sickbay ceiling. She works her dry mouth, and makes a couple of attempts to say something, getting a croak out, then ungracefully works on turning over.

There's a heated blanket draped over her, and she peels it back, muscles feeling like she's overdone an inadvisable gym membership trial.

It's very quiet.

It's only when she's struggled to her feet that she turns enough to see the other bed, and then she nearly falls on her face trying to get there in a hurry.

Beneath an oxygen mask, and tucked under a heated blanket of her own, Izzi Bell breathes steadily, eyes closed.

Laura has to cling dizzily to the table for a long minute, eyes stupidly dripping salt on everything, before she resolves to find someone and make them tell her Izzi's going to be okay. She stumbles a little on the way to the door, holds onto the handle for a couple of seconds when she gets there to steady herself, then opens it onto the corridor.

"Oh," she says. "Oh, fuck."

Kilperson's face down in his own blood. One doctor seems to have been slammed into a wall, hard enough to...break. The other is, must be, somewhere in the wet, red, stinking mass of bodies scattered all the way up the long corridor.

"Oh fuck," Laura says, because the only worse thing she can think of, right now, than being a vector for inhuman human-shaped horrors out of time, is one with the capricious smarts to leave them both alive as thanks.