Stranded Read online

  On the edge, all things are possible...

  From Stranded, by Anthony Francis

  She crested a ridge overlooking the wreck—and froze, bewitched.

  Climbing from the ship were the most beautiful people she’d ever seen.

  They wore armored spacesuits, patched in a thousand places, and painted to look like animals. Helmets folded back revealed inner pressure suits decorated too: one girl in a leopard outersuit had a snakeskin helm, adorned with feathers, over skin painted a pale blue.

  Serendipity gasped. These were adventurers. The gravity was clearly punishing their slender frames, but they kept going, crawling out of the smoking ship from every hatch, rappelling down on spacelines, tools jangling on their belts when their boots touched the broken earth.

  Not one of them looked a day over sixteen.

  That should have meant nothing—her grandmother didn’t look a day over sixteen—but as fractured shale dislodged by her slogs crackled down the slope, they turned and stared at her with youthful shock. They had none of the smug poise of ancient souls newly young.

  What Serendipity saw instead, and felt keenly, was fear. Her gut churned. The boys were armed with projectile automatics.

  Stranded

  Anne Bishop

  James Alan Gardner

  Anthony Francis

  Bell Bridge Books

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), events or locations is entirely coincidental.

  Bell Bridge Books

  PO BOX 300921

  Memphis, TN 38130

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61194-182-1

  Print ISBN: 978-1-61194-166-1

  Bell Bridge Books is an Imprint of BelleBooks, Inc.

  A Host of Leeches © 2012 James Alan Gardner

  A Strand in the Web © 2012 Anne Bishop

  Originally published in Orbiter in 2002 by Trifolium Books Inc.

  (now part of Fitzhenry & Whiteside).

  Stranded © 2012 Anthony Francis

  Printed and bound in the United States of America.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  We at BelleBooks enjoy hearing from readers.

  Visit our websites – www.BelleBooks.com and www.BellBridgeBooks.com.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Cover design: Debra Dixon

  Interior design: Hank Smith

  Photo credits:

  Cover Art (manipulated) © Philcold | Dreamstime.com

  :Esx:01:

  A Host of Leeches

  James Alan Gardner

  Dedication

  To Anne, who got me the invitation to this party

  Author’s Note

  If you were invited to write a science fiction story about someone getting “stranded,” I’ll bet your first thought would be, “Okay, somebody gets stranded on an alien planet.” Then, if you’re like me, you’d think, “So how do I do the opposite?”

  What’s the opposite of being stranded on a planet? Being stranded off a planet. I pictured a girl who wakes up all alone in a spaceship. That’s a good place to begin, but she needed characters to interact with. The only problem was that if she met other humans, she wouldn’t be alone anymore. What could she meet instead of humans? Robots. Or aliens. Or both.

  Mix together The Omega Man, The Wizard of Oz, and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slapstick or Lonesome No More!, and it all makes perfect sense.

  A Host of Leeches

  She woke and heard silence for the first time in her life.

  No music. No voices. Not even the hum of machinery or the of distant traffic.

  When she breathed, she could hear air going in and out of her nose. She could even hear the slow beat of her heart. She was in a bed—she could feel that much—but the room was as black as a blindfold.

  “Balla?” she whispered.

  No answer.

  “Balla?” Her voice cracked as she tried to speak as if she hadn’t talked in a long, long time. Her throat was gummed with mucus.

  “Balla!” This time she managed a hoarse shout. The name echoed faintly, then the silence returned.

  It scared her. She’d never before been this alone.

  She sat up and brushed her left fingers across her right forearm, where Balla should have been. She felt her own bare skin, and the small stent-hole where Balla was supposed to jack into her bloodstream. The hole was plugged with a little plastic cap.

  It almost made her throw up. She felt dizzy, as if she were going to faint. She kept still until it passed.

  Silence. Just her own breathing and heartbeat.

  She wanted to scream.

  When the nausea faded a bit more, she pushed back the sheets and sat on the side of the bed. She could feel she was naked, but the physical exposure was nothing compared to being stripped of Balla. She could also feel . . .

  Her hand went to her head. Her hair was gone. Her scalp felt as smooth as a bowl.

  This time she was sick. There was nothing in her stomach, but the heaves still came.

  She waited again till the nausea went away. Then she stood and shuffled forward, hands out so she didn’t collide with anything. The floor felt like hard plastic tile, but at least it wasn’t cold. The air wasn’t cold either: just the neutral temperature of her skin.

  Her hands touched a wall. She felt her way along until she got to a door. When she touched the ACTIVATE pad, the door slid open and the ceiling lights came on.

  The room around her held the bed and nothing else. The windowless walls were covered with the same plastic tile as the floor: a checkerboard pattern of black and white. Immediately above the bed, the wall had several holes, each big enough to stick a finger inside. She thought she should know what the holes were for, but she couldn’t quite remember.

  There was a lot she couldn’t remember. Her brain felt like mud.

  An LCD panel in the door said ALYSSA MAGORD. Her name—at least she remembered that much. And Balla . . . of course she remembered Balla. Where was he?

  No lights shone outside the door, but the spill from the bedroom illuminated a large open space. It had a glass-walled cubicle in the middle. Alyssa went to the cubicle and looked through the glass; inside was a desk with a control console, including eight vid-screens turned off.

  The cubicle’s door was on the opposite side. Alyssa went around and entered. She touched all the control panel’s ACTIVATE pads; some glowed red to show they were security-locked, but the rest went green and light flooded the space.

  Three walls of the room had three doors apiece, exactly like the door to the room where Alyssa had awakened. Nine small bedrooms? The fourth wall had two more doors and an open corridor leading off into darkness.

  The silence of the place seemed to press on her eardrums. When Alyssa moved, the only sound was her bare feet on the tiles. She called out for help again. When no one answered, she started checking the doors that circled the space. The first four opened into bedrooms exactly like hers—all empty, with the beds crisply made. The LCD panels on the doors were blank.

  The fifth door opened into a bathroom. Alyssa needed that . . . but as she headed for the toilet, she was stopped by the sight of herself in the mirror.


  She started to cry. Not just because of her baldness, shining under the lights as if her scalp had been waxed. (Her head looked so fragile, as if the tiniest tap would break it open.) Her eyebrows and eyelashes had disappeared too, shaven off or fallen out. And she was so thin! Nothing but bones. She was only sixteen, but her skin sagged like an old woman’s.

  She couldn’t stop crying.

  Words kept surfacing in her mind. I must have been sick. Am I dying? Has everyone left me here to die? There was so much she couldn’t remember—the sickness must have affected her memory as horribly as her body. She was alone and sick and scared, in a silent empty place, and she didn’t know what to do.

  —————

  Eventually, she cried herself out. She washed her face, used the toilet, washed again, and tried not to look at herself in the mirror. She went back to the central room and continued her circuit of the doors. Three more identical bedrooms plus a room full of bedpans and other medical equipment.

  She was in a hospital . . . of course. She’d been sick. But where were the doctors and nurses? The other patients? The robot attendants?

  The final room off the central space was lined with strong metal lockers, each with an LCD name panel like the ones on the bedroom doors. With her heart beating faster, she found a locker bearing her name. She pressed her thumb against the ID scanner; the locker door clicked open.

  Relief! Inside she found clothes, including her favorite pair of running shoes. More importantly, she found Balla. She took him out as gently as if she were cradling a baby bird. His screen was dark and his fine silver chains hung limply; Alyssa felt tears welling up again, but she told herself Balla would be all right once he was reconnected to her blood.

  Even dormant, he was beautiful: an aut of the Dolphin clan, sleek and sinuous—her constant link with the Worldnet. His skin was lustrous gray, firm and rubbery to the touch . . . but unlike real dolphin skin, Balla’s was as thin as a balloon’s because Balla himself was less than a finger width thick. Nestled on Alyssa’s arm, he had always been as light as a second sleeve.

  Slowly, carefully, she put him on. First, his slim body, half-organic, half-silicon circuits, starting with the fingerless glove that went on Alyssa’s right hand (as sheer as nylon, yet loaded with touch-sensitive digital tissues); then his long flat body winding so soothingly familiar up her arm all the way to her shoulder; then the slender silver chains that draped around him, partly to hold him in place, partly to serve as antenna wire, but mostly for the sheer glittering beauty of delicate metal on his skin and hers, binding them together. Lastly she pried the plastic cap off the stent-hole in her forearm . . . and as her blood came welling up, she pushed Balla’s umbilical into the outlet, joining him with her once more.

  She didn’t know how long Balla had been disconnected but he surely needed a full recharge of blood. Alyssa knew she should sit down to avoid passing out, but she forced herself to put on clothes because she was suddenly shivering. When she was dressed, she half dropped to the storage room floor and propped her back against the wall. Several minutes passed in a daze until she heard Balla say, “Alyssa?”

  Her heart leapt. She looked down and saw his dolphin face in the display screen on her wrist. “Oh, Balla,” she said and started to cry.

  She hugged him to her, pressing her right arm to her chest and squeezing hard with the left, the way she’d done when she was little and had bad dreams. He made the same sounds that he’d made then: “Shh, shh, I’m here.” His body was getting warmer. He was alive and she wasn’t alone.

  After a while, she said, “Do you know what’s going on? I can’t remember.”

  “You got sick,” he said. “An unknown disease. Do you remember Montserrat?”

  “Sure.”

  It had been a project sponsored by the Dolphins: the clan of people who were paired with Dolphin auts. Some clans didn’t do much together—the flower-based clans never traveled if they could help it, and Diamonds loudly rejected the whole idea of clan identity. (“How can you possibly choose symbolic animals, vegetables or minerals for children at the age of two? We don’t care how many psych tests you run, no child’s personality stabilizes so young. Besides, an aut is just a tool, nothing more. It’s ridiculous to think an AI with a few bits of flesh or crystal can reflect a person’s character!” Every Diamond in the world agreed on that.)

  But Dolphins loved outings: the more socializing, the better. For as long as Alyssa could remember, Balla had told her about clan excursions to Easter Island, or Mediterranean cruises, or calls for volunteers to build dikes in Bangladesh. She’d been too young to go on her own, and her parents (Oak clan . . . both of them!) had refused even to think of taking her. At last, when she turned sixteen, Alyssa’s parents had reluctantly let her take a summer internship on Montserrat, a Caribbean island where the Dolphins had founded an oceanographic research station. They were only studying algae—great brownish-green mats of it, floating near the island—but that had worked in Alyssa’s favor. Her parents wouldn’t have let her do anything glamorous, like communicating with whales or testing artificial gills; but studying plant plankton was un-frivolous enough to earn their approval.

  As it happened, the algae weren’t as boring as Alyssa had feared. Their chemical balances had suddenly started shifting and no one knew why. Pollution? Changing climate conditions? Alyssa had been issued scuba tanks and sent with a team to take samples—algae, the seawater, fish that fed on the mats . . . then her memories ran into a blank wall.

  Balla told her, “The plague hit everyone on your team. Fever. Spasms. It was bad. Then people outside the station came down with the same symptoms. Everybody in nearby villages. The island was put under quarantine.”

  The dolphin face on Balla’s vid-screen took on a somber look. (Real dolphins couldn’t imitate human expressions but Balla’s simulated image could show all kinds of emotions.) “A doctor decided you were too sick to share blood with me—she said the extra drain might kill you. I got unplugged and had to shut down.” Balla’s face became regretful. “That’s all I know.”

  Alyssa stroked Balla’s gray skin, partly for her own comfort, partly for his. Being unplugged would have been terrifying, especially since he couldn’t know if he’d ever be plugged in again. Auts bonded for life; when their owner died, they plunged into an agony of grief that never went away. The kindest thing was to erase all their data and let them start over. So if Alyssa had died from the plague, Balla never would have been reactivated—he’d have been wiped clean. His body would be given to some new child, but his mind would be gone. His name wouldn’t be Balla, and no part of him would dream of a girl named Alyssa.

  Softly she said, “You’re okay now. You’re okay.”

  “I hope that’s true,” the dolphin said. “But there’s something wrong with my link to the Worldnet. It’s only partly there.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I can access the reference cloud—science facts, historic data—but I can’t find any newsfeeds. I wanted to check on Montserrat, but the channels are missing.”

  “Maybe it’s the quarantine,” Alyssa said. “Back in the Almost War, didn’t they black out news from crisis zones? Maybe this is the same.”

  “Not unless all of Earth is a crisis zone,” Balla said. “I can’t get news from anywhere. And not just new news; I can’t get anything more recent than twenty years ago.” Balla’s face turned into a scowl. “How can I help you when I’ve gone blind?”

  “You help me just by being here. Now I’m not alone.”

  All this time, Alyssa had been on the floor of the storage room . . . like long ago, when she and Balla had hunkered down in the closet to hide from the world. Now she got to her feet, feeling stronger despite the situation. “If we can’t ask the Worldnet what’s going on,” she said, “we’ll do things the old-fashioned way: by walking around.”<
br />
  —————

  Alyssa had checked all the rooms off the central space, but there was still that dark corridor leading away. “At least I can turn on the lights,” Balla muttered. A moment later, the corridor woke with the glow of lumo-panels. They were very dim—they’d been off a long time.

  “Great!” Alyssa said, trying to bolster Balla’s confidence. “What else can you get from the building’s central system? Any people around?”

  “I can’t tell,” Balla said. “Everything is security-locked except the absolute basics—lights, bathrooms, water fountains. It’s all so top secret, I’d say this place dates back to the Almost War . . . like maybe it’s a military hospital.”

  “Why would anyone put me in a military hospital?” Alyssa asked.

  “They might have been really serious about keeping you in quarantine.”

  “Oh.” Alyssa shuddered. The Almost War had ended four years before she was born, but people her parents’ age still sounded tense when they heard it mentioned. Practically no one had been killed—the war didn’t have any battles, just “tensions”—but every country had built huge arsenals of weapons that could kill millions. Intelligent war machines. Computer viruses that made auts drain all the blood from their wearers. Artificial diseases designed to wipe out entire continents.

  Could she have caught that kind of disease? How many vids had Alyssa seen where some bioweapon from the Almost War got spilled or set free? Supposedly, all that stuff had been destroyed after the Peace, but nobody really believed it. Every army, every government probably hung on to a few superweapons, just in case.

  If Alyssa was sick with an Almost War plague, it explained why she was in a military hospital—not just to keep the infection from spreading, but as a cover-up. That’s what always happened in the vids: corrupt generals and politicians didn’t want anyone to know they’d violated the Peace, so they locked up all the witnesses.