Invasive Species — a short story Read online

  INVASIVE SPECIES

  by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  INVASIVE SPECIES:

  A Short Story

  by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  Invasive Species­:

  A Short Story

  by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  Kiriki Press, P.O. Box 10858, Eugene, Oregon 97440 U.S.A.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in part, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters have been created for the sake of this story and are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright 2010-2013 by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  "Invasive Species" first appeared in A Girl's Guide to Guns and Monsters, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Kerrie Hughes, DAW, 2010.

  Cover models: Loreen Heneghan and Linden. Design by Nancy Etchemendy and Kiriki Press.

  eBook Design, Kiriki Press

  This eBook edition was produced by Kiriki Press

  Originally Printed in the United States of America

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Table of Contents

  Beginning

  Invasive Species

  About the Author

  Connect with the Author

  Other Nina Kiriki Hoffman Titles

  Invasive Species

  Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  My name is Random Delaney. I'm a vermin hunter, but I'm not allowed to use real bullets. Bullets and lasers are hard on spaceships, and that's where I generally ply my trade. I have a lot of other cool ordnance, though, some of which I don't understand. I was trained by a Skikka, and you know how those guys are, all about the mystery, you can never see behind the veil, yada yada ping pong. Some of the stuff I use, he didn't even tell me what it was called, which makes it hard to reorder.

  There's a bunch of different ways to squik a ship. The best and easiest is the Total Body Squik. If the ship is between trips, you can do the job outside of atmosphere. If everyone's cleared out and took all their junk with them, you gas the whole thing, sonic it to kill all the gas-resistant pests, wander through in your suit and shoot anything else that moves, then open up the doors and vent the atmosphere and everything else not tied down. After that, you scrub every surface with all-purpose pest-end and blast every crack and nook and do it all again.

  This is my favorite method, because it's sweet and simple and you get to totally explore a ship — systemworks and living areas and everything in between — at your leisure. I love alone time when I can snoop. People think they've taken everything, but there are stashes that maybe they forgot about, under panels, in conduits, tucked into workings and waste space. I find things. Sometimes not even solid things, but records and memories. It's all treasure. I can swoof the solids out of the ship with a beacon attached and pick them up later. The memories I store with my own.

  Second easiest is to squik the ship while it's in port, though atmosphere complicates things. So many things can survive in atmosphere. Why we constantly need new bug-stompers.

  Almost nobody wants the Total Body Squik. Often people discover they have pests while they can't stop what they're doing long enough for a decent all-wash. Most of my jobs involve pest-hunting while people are in residence. Cuts down on the poison options a bunch, and requires more finesse, not one of my strong suits.

  The Evander job looked simple. An in-system run, like most of my jobs — I'm planet-based for now, and maybe forever. I'd need hella big jobs to be able to afford my own runabout so I could go to where the work is, and a fortune would have to fall out of the sky before I could afford to system jump. While I'm waiting for that ship to come in, I get enough routine work to keep the four-year-old daughter in nutriblocks.

  The only thing different about Evander was it was a luxury run. Big old cruise liner, ferrying rich people around the solar system while they gorge on great food and enjoy the zero-G pleasure rooms, low-G gyms, and all kinds of other entertainments. Never traveled on one of those before; most of my clients were small-time freighters and haulers and the cold-sleep ships that took workers from Terra to Luna, Mars, Titan, other local colonies, and the asteroid belt.

  Evander's chief engineer thought the ship had metal mites, so I geared up for that, but I also packed the rest of my armaments, and the most important equipment I own, my suit. Armor, personal climate, propulsion unit, weapons nest, yeah, I feel safer in my suit than anywhere else, and it's got a collapsible carry compartment for Fern, the kid, too.

  Usually when I take away-from-home-port jobs, my side-gran and her partners look after Fern for me, but this time the job came when Gran was on a business retreat. Fern and me live in a room in Gran's enclave. We live in SubTerra, but we have a pipe up to sunlight, and get a spot on the floor most days. Fern's got mirror blocks, and she sets them up sometimes to throw light all over our room.

  I didn't have babysitting backup this time, and metal mites didn't sound Fern-endangering, so I loaded the kid on calmers and brought her with me. Goes to show you should never let clients diagnose, and also that I should never have been a mother, but I knew that before Fern was born.

  The Skikka had taught me pretty good how to collapse everything into a manageable parcel. They're always surprised at the shuttle port how much mass and how little room my luggage takes. My Skikka taught me how to hide things from scans, too. They didn't stop me at customs.

  My ticket didn't authorize Fern, so I had to pay half for a second one. Maybe I'd get lucky on Evander and find pests plus loot.

  Fern and me made it up to the orbital station without too much trouble (I put more calmers on her snack stix). I collected my luggage, and went to the Evander's dock.

  "My stars," said the doorman when he opened the servants' entrance of Evander to my buzz. "You're Delaney's Pest Control?"

  "Yeah. This is my dwarf assistant."

  I showed him my I.D., and he did scans to verify it, then scanned Fern into the system and took a copy of her I.D. bracelet. He frowned. "We didn't budget supplies for two of you."

  "Hey, we can eat leftovers. You get those, right?"

  "We recycle them."

  "She doesn't eat much," I said. "Is there day care on the ship?"

  He allowed that there was.

  "Come on, Stall-boy, I can't just dump her in the station. She's all the way up here, she might as well come."

  He muttered some more about highly irregular and caved, handing me the crew badge that would let me into areas passengers couldn't go.

  Our cabin was on the inside, against the core, along with all the other staff and service people cabins. The passengers' cabins were all against the outer walls of the ship; some had TruGlas portholes so the inhabitants could look out and see the actual starfield. The less expensive ones had screens they could program to show what was going on outside, or anything else they liked. (I'd read the brochure.) Even the service cabins had little screens flanked by curtains so we could pretend we weren't locked up in small windowless compartments like machines.

  I unfolded Fern's care cage and set her in it with food and water dispensers and the omnigame. She dialed right past all the interactivities, piggybacked the ship's net, and started snooping around. I guess she's seen me do that too many times.

  "You okay?" I said.

  She frowned at the omnigame and waved a hand at me, like she couldn't be bothered. She's prob
ably seen me do that too many times, too.

  I'd researched the ship's layout before I left Terra. I geared up, including my suit, in case explorations took me to the outer hull or some of the non-atmosphere parts of the inner workings, though I kept the helmet retracted until needed. I headed down to report for duty.

  A lot of things were happening in the engine room. The chief engineer was a human woman named Skeeter Johanson. She had hired me over a comm line; we hadn't met, but she had checked my references. "Delaney. Did I just see you come out of one of the passenger lifts?" was the first thing she said to me, and, "What's with the outerwear? Are you trying to alarm our guests?" was the second. She tapped the "Delaney Pest Control" logo on my chest, her face twisted into a huge frown.

  "Uh," I said, "Yes, I didn't know there was a different lift for crew, and no, I'm not trying to scare anyone. Just want to do my job."

  "You need a suit to deal with metal mites? Never mind, we're about to cast off. Get out of my engine room and back to your cabin, and take the crew lift this time. Someone will call you when we need you."

  "The crew lift is — ?"

  She turned her back to me. "Smik! Show this groundhog where the crew lift is!"

  One of the people rushing around checking telltales and doing engineering stuff broke off and dashed up to me. He had four arms and blue skin, an alien type I couldn't place. I thought we only had contact with Skikka and two other alien races, but I'm not always up on the news. He had a lump for a head, with eye spots all the way around it. "Come," he said in a mushy voice — his mouth was in the center of his naked blue chest — and he trundled out of the engine room, using his lower two arms along with his two legs to locomote. He was hard to keep up with.

  He rolled right through a hidden door that led to narrow gray halls. Whaddya know, there were three lifts back there. He tapped a button to summon one and didn't wait around.

  I played with Fern in the cabin until we were underway, and then Johanson called down and said she was sending someone to take me to the damage sites for inspection, and would I please take off my damned suit?

  Since she put it in the form of a question, I decided not to, but I didn't tell her that. Someone else was going to show me around. Maybe Johanson would never find out.

  I hung my sampling case off my shoulder and slapped a cloth patch across my Delaney Pest Control logo. Sometimes you want to advertise, and sometimes anonymity is better. The door guard pinged, and I opened it to discover Smik. He looked past me at Fern. "You brought your young?" he asked.

  Fern stared at him and screamed. The calmers had worn off, for sure.

  "That's not the way I raised you, young lady. You be quiet now," I said. It didn't work. She hid behind me and screamed and sobbed.

  "Mr. Smik, could you wait outside? I'll be with you in a minute," I said.

  "She is perfect," he said.

  I couldn't disagree with him more.

  The door snicked shut and Fern stopped crying. She pushed away from me and stared into my eyes.

  "I have to go to work now," I told her, "and you have to do your job, which is being a little kid. In the care cage."

  "Okay," she said. I locked her in and she rolled around on the floor of the cage, smashing into the bars, which were cushioned and gave. "You should get a cage, Mama," she said.

  "I've got one that walks." I tapped my chest and went out to Smik.

  "We must go to passenger territory," Smik said. He had more liquid in his mouth than humans usually did. "The suit is disturbing."

  "We can just tell ’em it's a costume for the ball tomorrow night." Fern had accessed the ship schedule of passenger activities, which had amused both of us. Now I knew what kinds of things rich folks did for fun. "How do they react to you?" I asked Smik.

  Smik shook his head lump, and parts of his anatomy between his eyes and mouth swoll up a little. I sure didn't know how to read that.

  We took a crew elevator up to the promenade deck. Smik stopped at a storage space while we were still in crew territory and took out a pale robe, which he dropped over himself. It had a maintenance crew patch on the front. It covered the extra arms, and the high collar concealed the fact that he had no neck. The ring of eyes and the smooth blue surface of his headbump were quite odd-looking. He pulled something else out of storage and dropped it on his headbump, and I shuddered. He'd just put what looked like a human head over his, complete with short, dark hair. He tapped the collar of the robe, and the new head adhered to it.

  "How can you see?" I asked.

  "Eye holes," he mushed. The words came from his chest. All right, nobody wanted him talking to the passengers. The upside was that his blue hands looked like gloves, if you didn't look too close and realize his fingers were thin and stick-like and there were a lot of them, kind of clustered.

  "Lead on," said I, and followed this spooky-looking dude out into the sacred passenger space.

  The decor was like, so two hundred years ago. Furniture was pointy and speckled with spider-like stars, a theme that echoed in the carpet and the light fixtures. The deck was a doughnut shape around the central core of the ship, which had function rooms, like kitchens and laundry, circling the drive shaft.

  TruGlas ringed the entire deck so you could look out at the stars, and very occasionally other traffic. Some parts of the glass had magnification insets. A whole section was polarized to block sunlight. Terra was a huge floating ball, with an edge of Luna beyond.

  Where we came out, a lounge bled into a restaurant that bled into a dance floor, with a couple stages around the edges, and three bars. One of the bars was dark. The other two looked open and ready to get you drunk.

  A cluster of passenger lifts opened onto a greeting area between the restaurant and the lounge. A uniformed crew member stood behind a podium there, smiling at passengers as they got off the lift, and pointing out places they could go. At each area, staff members waited to serve. Other than them, it was pretty quiet.

  "Come," Smik said, and toddled off. With the robe on, he couldn't use his lower arms to walk, so he looked pretty wobbly.

  I followed him over to the dark bar.

  Smik lifted a plastic cover and showed me how the bar's pewter-colored edge had deteriorated: it looked like something had chewed off pieces. No metal mites did that.

  I got out my sample kit, took a scraping off an edge, and dropped it into the analyzer. Smik and I both watched until the sampler beeped and analysis came up on the readout. The metal identified as allosteel with a decorative fragmented coating. Also present: human saliva.

  "No flippin' way," I said.

  The sampler beeped again. It had identified four different genomes in the saliva. I stored the results. "Have you had the same passengers for a while? What about staff?"

  "The current passengers embarked from Mars Station. Terra is just a stopping point before we head back. The only people we took on at Terra were you, your spawn, and a replacement chef. We lost one chef in an unfortunate flambé accident. All other personnel same since Mars." He was talking pretty good for a bubblemouth. I could understand almost all the words.

  "Are there other damage sites you want me to check?"

  "Yes. One we know of." He let the cover fall back into place and contacted the engineering department to let somebody know the bar could be fixed now. We retreated to the crew-ways and took a lift down to the gym level.

  The gym had lots of fancy padded equipment with steel parts that looked to me like torture machines. Some people were already in them, moving things around in the lo-grav. One of the things was a vertical pole, and a woman with long, loose hair was spinning around it, gripping rings. She was scenic.

  Smik led me to a cordoned-off shower stall (gravity was slightly higher in the shower room so the water would fall down instead of floating). The stall was brushed steel, only where it wasn't: something had nommed chunks out of it.

  I ran tests on the compromised material and got similar results: allosteel, human tra
ces on it, only this time there was a trace of a second, unidentifiable species in the mix. My sampler came up with five more genomes, none matching the earlier ones. It couldn't tell me anything about the alien. Another new species. Then again, I still didn't know what Smik's species was.

  "Are there any more sites?" I asked.

  "Likely, but we haven't found them."

  "You have passenger and crew genomes on file?"

  "Purser has," he said.

  "I don't know if this is a job for me If the pests are passengers, you don't want me exterminating them, do you?"

  "Humans do not eat metal," Smik said.

  So obvious, so true. How did I miss it?

  I didn't miss it, really. I was just eeking about maybe shooting people. My Skikka used to dream about the day he could open fire on humans. He'd tell me about this any time I came close to peeking under his veil, which a thing like that can drive you crazy, you know? What could be so terrible? But he never, ever let me see.

  I followed Smik back to crew country and up the lift to the purser's office. Her name was Sellis, and she was small, wrinkled, and grumpy. She didn't recognize Smik until he took his fake head off, and she was less than complimentary about my suit, which wasn't fair; my Skikka taught me the suit is the most important thing I own, and I always maintain it, though maybe not cosmetically. She let me use one of her terminals to check genomes, though. I came up with a list of nine names. Two were crew, and seven were among the wealthiest passengers on board, according to the purser, who dropped her other duties and talked to me and Smik when she found out what I was doing.

  "These people are doing what?" she asked.

  "Munching on metal," I said. "Maybe that's the good news, though. With metal mites, you have a lot of decontamination where I need to shut down whole areas of the ship for several hours while the fumes do their work. These guys are easier to isolate. Gotta figure out what's happening to them, and is it contagious."

  "I don't think we can authorize isolation with these passengers," said the purser. "They have too much clout."