Chunk 20

"I choose to save."

"Good."

For some reason I expected we'd somehow seal our agreement. Slap palm against palm with a flourish—like in movies. Something like that. But she simply walked up to the gate, scattered leaves near one of the posts and opened some hatch in the ground. A switch clicked. The mechanism sneezed loudly, and the gate with a rattle crept aside.

"And what have you planned?"

"Evacuation," she said without turning around.

"Meaning escape?"

"You can't escape from here. You can't fly of your own free will. You can't terminate the contract early. Simply taking into respect that it's one hundred sixty thousand light years to Earth. I'm talking about general evacuation."

"General?!"

"Exactly. We'll force them to shut down the mission as such—before everything here gets covered by one big cock and we become a continuation of all this..." she outlined a circle with her finger, pointing at the city around us, "...cemetery."

Irma walked first, like a person who'd spent more than one day here. The complex had about thirty identical buildings, several defensive towers along the perimeter, a landing pad. A bit farther, powerful transmission antennas were visible.

"What was here?" I asked.

"Research station founded by the government sixty years ago. Object code name 'Two Zeros'... Don't be scared here..."

She said this as if in passing, nodding at something on the wall of the nearest building, and I just as mechanically looked there. And froze. From the wall protruded forward like an eerie bas-relief a female face distorted by scream and pain. For some reason ash-gray, it jutted from the smooth plastic as if she was trying to break free from captivity of the polymer coating. The horror reproduced on it was the most terrible grimace I'd ever seen or could even imagine. Mouth open in a silent frenzied scream—it seemed wider than physically possible. From the strain on the thin and

probably once beautiful neck, veins swelled unnaturally... Her eyes—wide open and bulging from their sockets—were devoid of pupils and from this seemed even larger. On both sides of the face, as if trying to push through the wall from inside, two equally gray palms were visible...

"Oh God... What... What's wrong with her..."

Irma had managed to go ahead and now turned back.

"This isn't a person. A colony of fungi. Mold. And this mold depicts our senior biologist Rosalyn."

"Did she die?"

Irma nodded, but with some uncertainty. The guess that flashed in my head was completely absurd, and I didn't dare voice it. But then I still asked:

"Is she inside?"

"No," Irma smiled. "Rosalyn didn't die here... I tried to destroy this abomination. First just scraped it off, but this thing grew again. Then I took a fire axe and chopped everything to fucking hell along with the wall... Only mush remained. But in about two weeks a new image grew in the same place. When Corps reconnaissance arrived, they removed Rosalyn's portrait along with the polymer sheet and transferred it to the lab. And it grew again. So this Rosalyn is already the third one."

"And what did they say in the lab?"

"Nothing. Mold is mold. Except that it grows in the form of Rosalyn writhing in agony... That's how it is. And generally there are several portraits here—one lovelier than the next. Let's go."

We came out to several large buildings in the shadow of a huge alien overpass. They were absolutely ordinary and even typical. Almost all mobile complexes look like this—from a geologists' camp to a construction town. If not for the fanciful city around, you could think we were on Earth.

"When people flew here, the city was already dead?"

"All the cities," Irma answered sadly. "This planet was discovered a year after launching the 'Ora Pro Nobis' system. Orbital telescopes allowed them to see the cities. And that life was teeming in them. Of course, everyone understood that due to the extreme distance we were seeing a picture that existed one hundred sixty thousand years ago. And yet they sent an expedition here, hoping to establish contact... And we were late by just a bit. By some hundred years..."

"You?! You mean you were in the first expedition?! Sixty years ago you simply weren't born yet! Or are you hinting you're well preserved?"

Irma smiled.

"If you consider astronomical time, you also flew here for twenty years. But that doesn't mean you were fifteen when you left Earth?"

I sighed uncertainly:

"So it turns out you're... Wow... Okay... And... How was it?"

"There were fifty of us," Irma said. "I stood equally stunned as you today... And this city was the first we found."

I almost saw them, wrapped in spacesuits, surrounded by wary, nervous soldiers of the escort group. How they stand at the edge of the city carved into earth and no one dares speak first.

28

Cold rain was falling. Irma looked at the dead city cut into rock—silently, like all the others. "Miracles don't happen"—this thought insistently spun in her head while she, together with the rest of the team, slowly realized that the most distant mission in the history of space expeditions had failed.

The merciless three words sounded in her brain in her mother's voice. How could it be otherwise—mama repeated them every time something went wrong. She never said "everything will be fine" or "better luck next time." Her optimism wasn't even enough for a simple "don't cry." All she could tell her daughter, who was half a second short of first place in swimming competitions, was "miracles don't happen." She said the same thing when Irma's stepfather, drunk as a pig, broke her jaw deciding to give his stepdaughter a slap. As if marrying at least not an alcoholic was from the start something improbable for mama, requiring merciful intervention from above. "Miracles don't happen," mama said philosophically when her daughter was nearly beaten to death on the street by two strangers

because they couldn't tear the purse from her shoulder. And only God knows what exactly she meant at that moment. "Miracles don't happen"—as if everything good, deserved, or just normal in this life was a miracle.

Now, having ventured on the riskiest adventure of her life, having passed through all the circles of hell of the strictest selection, having given interstellar space forty years that Grandma Earth would live without her, Irma looked at the dead city and with her own lips repeated the hated slogan of her childhood: "Miracles don't happen."

An error in calculations threw them into the "Magellanic Cloud" with a small margin of error. Tiny from the standpoint of mathematics. Absolutely insignificant on the scale of the galaxy. But the intergalactic frigate "Artillerist Hans," which was saving fuel for the return jump, had to trudge to its destination at sub-light speeds for another two years—long and painful, like a prison term. They'd abandoned stasis-sleep technologies with the discovery of transverse jumps. And the only thing that allowed people not to go mad in the steel belly of the space frigate was the goal for which each of them decided to fly: an alien civilization.

The alien civilization never waited for them.

Actually they suspected something wrong even in orbit, when instruments couldn't detect any movement in the cities. The military, who comprised two-thirds of the expedition, thought these were some defensive measures and waited for who-knows-what. But Irma already doubted then that the entire planet could in a single impulse hide in a bomb shelter. Especially because of one ship. Even such a formidable one as the intergalactic frigate "Artillerist Hans." Therefore now, looking at the dead city overgrown with forest, she was almost not surprised. Almost.

Actually the mission only ended in failure in the point "establish contact." The main, but not the only one. For the coming years they'd study both the deceased civilization and the planet itself—they were, after all, for the first time beyond their native galaxy. But the main thing that distinguished this mission from all others, and the one thing for which Irma headlong rushed to the recruitment center, was lost.

Miracles don't happen.

The first three months people spent inside the temporary camp almost in siege mode. There were only cautious sorties. They removed spacesuits only in sealed residential complexes. They took water samples, soil, tissue specimens, materials... And then the epidemiologists said that regardless of the cause of death of the local aborigines, it definitely wasn't from their field—no viruses, no bacteria. People continued to walk in large groups—forest devils and death beetles (though they hadn't yet been given such telling names) announced themselves immediately.

And yet the tension of the first months remained behind. The camp less and less

resembled a military position and more and more a research expedition. Everyone began getting used to the new place, which already seemed no more frightening than any terrestrial forest...

Probably if you'd asked Irma then what troubled her, what made her constantly search for signs of unknown infection in herself or wake at night from another nightmare, she would have answered like this: "It's too good here. Too good for a place where an entire civilization died. Too good for an expedition that began with an error in transverse jump calculations." But the truth would sound like this: it was too good there for someone raised under the slogan "miracles don't happen."

"Wait," I interrupted Irma mid-sentence, "what about the cancer?"

"As I said—suddenly. Our medics decided sending me to Earth made no sense. Even if someone decided to shuttle a whole frigate back and forth, which of course is impossible..."

Irma fell silent, as if examining something on her boots. The sun began tilting toward sunset, and the light acquired a tender peach tint. She looked at me and squinted like a cat in the sun.

"Continue," I asked. "Sorry I interrupted. What happened next?"

"And next... Next it all came to an end. And I, as always, missed the most interesting part."

She again thoughtfully stared into nowhere and fell silent. I didn't rush her, though I wanted to hear the continuation. Finally Irma seemed to wake up:

"So... Three months after arrival the headaches began, vomiting and other shit... They shoved me into the medical unit, put me in this damn hospital gown, like 'ready to meet the pathologist'..." she twitched with disgust. "I knew about what was happening at the base, but mostly from other people's words. At first it was scary. Probably it's hard to imagine greater helplessness than when you're forced to lie in a hospital box and hear gunfire and screams

outside... And soon I felt so shitty that even death didn't matter anymore. Mentally I even hurried it along."

Irma fell silent, and from everything it was clear continuing was difficult for her.

"Who gave you the pollen? Someone from the biologists?"

She looked at me with an empty gaze. Then, returning from memories, nodded.

"Yes. Rosalyn. No one knew if it would help or not."

"I already understood. Experimental drug. In your situation you had nothing to lose."

"Exactly!" Irma smiled, and it even came out cheerful, but then a gray shadow of memories lay on her face. "And when I came to, there was no one here anymore. I climbed into the diagnostic box and found out the cancer was gone."

"No one was here—in what sense?"

Irma wanted to answer, but large tears treacherously rolled down her cheeks, and she fell silent, pressing her lips together. She only shook her head.

"They died?!"

Irma sniffled and resolutely wiped away the tears:

"You'll see everything now."

We approached an elongated low building. Such buildings usually house a warehouse. Pushing aside tall grass, she bent down and got something out.

"Hiding place?" I asked.

"Yes... I knew I'd return someday. Here."

She held out a key card to me. Similar to ours, only instead of Corps symbolism it bore the emblem of the Government Space Research Agency. Next to the photo of a flame-red man were a name and surname.

"Nathan Gogh? Who's this?"

"Our commander. Disappeared without a trace."

She again reached into the hiding place and pulled out another card. In the long-haired girl in the photo I recognized Irma. Almost unchanged. Except the hairstyle... "Irma Salvatiérro. Biologist."

"Some locks here open with two cards simultaneously," Irma explained. "Stand on that side."

Massive double doors of the building were crossed by wide yellow strips with warning inscriptions:

"STOP—BIOLOGICAL HAZARD—STOP—BIOLOGICAL HAZARD—STOP—BIOLOGICAL HAZARD—STOP"...

"Are you sure?"

"Don't worry, everything's under control," she winked at me. "By the way, at the object they left everything as it was. Over there's the garage, and in it, as I know, a working transporter."

"And here?"

Instead of answering Irma tore off the warning tape. We simultaneously applied the key cards from the hiding place to the electronic locks. The doors clicked open loudly. Luminescent panels flashed with even light. We found ourselves in a large room without any partitions. It was filled with tables in several rows, warehouse carts, folding stretchers that equip medical shuttles, and even beds resembling hospital ones... And on all of this lay long, black, tightly fastened plastic bundles.

Hundreds of identical body bags gleaming with quality plastic! Hundreds!

"What the..." I couldn't gather all my thoughts into one question. "You said there were only fifty of you!"

Irma silently walked up to a table and unzipped the nearest bag. The man's body inside had dried out, but the facial features were quite recognizable. Freckles were visible, organically complementing the flame-red hair and thickly covering his face and neck. If you don't consider all these postmortem wrinkles, you could assume he was about forty, if not less.

"Look at the tunic," Irma said.

On the right above the breast pocket was a patch: "Nathan Gogh."

"Wait," I checked against the writing on the key card Irma had given me. "But he disappeared, you said!"

"Well, officially that's what they called it. Since with the formulation 'died' there are certain problems," and she resolutely unzipped another bag.

Red hair and freckles were recognizable. I didn't even need to look for the patch. Without waiting for my questions, Irma

unzipped the next bag. And another. And another. And another! The zippers made a defiant "z-i-i-ip" under her hands and revealed more and more new red guys about forty—with patches, without patches, or simply naked.

In half a minute Irma stopped, having shown me no less than fifteen identical Nathan Goghs. I silently returned from the last to the first and again examined everyone—from first to last. Some had sectional stitches left by the pathologist, others had gunshot wounds, one had several obvious slash wounds, but ultimately they were all identical.

"Are they human?"

"Yes and no," Irma answered with some sarcastic solemnity. "We called them chimeras. They were studied inside and out, and in a certain way they are human, specifically—Colonel Nathan Gogh. They're his copies. Patterns of papillary lines, retinal pattern, and even the tattoo 'ONLY GOD JUDGE ME' on the forearms, which reads when you fold your arms on your chest—everything matches. But there are also original specimens."

Irma with some gloomy enthusiasm approached another row of tables and unzipped several bags at random, as if searching for something.

"Here, for example," she finally said.

I looked over her shoulder. This Nathan Gogh had two heads.

"Oh shit..."

"The farther from the entrance, the more amazing transformations you can find. Two-headed Nathan is like kindergarten."

"And the other people? Did anyone fly away from here?"

"It all started with Nathan disappearing. In the cabin where he lived they found a pile of food mixed with shit... And in the basement that same day they discovered a huge empty cocoon. They immediately reported to the frigate—everything as it should be... And you know what the reaction was from our glorious, armed-to-the-teeth 'Artillerist Hans'?"

She waited for me to make some guess. But such an answer couldn't have entered my head.

"They recalled the landing shuttles," Irma said, and her voice again treacherously trembled. "All the boats flew off in automatic mode and returned to the frigate. No warnings, no explanations. And two weeks later 'Artillerist Hans' jumped back to Earth. Period. When I came to, no living people remained. Then I

climbed into the automatic medical complex and activated the long-term freezing program. And didn't even know if they'd ever wake me or not. And I lay like that for sixty years. That's the story."

Tears rolled down her cheeks again. She started biting her lips so hard I was afraid—she'll bite through.

"Oh Lord, Irma... You can't be so angry at yourself for emotions. Cry if it hurts."

She covered her face with her hands. Then wiped with her palms and breathed deeply.

"Everything's fine. Thank you."

I surveyed the eerie morgue with identical bodies.

"And here all the corpses are this Nathan of yours?"

"No. There are several varieties of chimeras. That same Rosalyn, who you already know as mold, lies here in about twenty copies. But Nathan is, of course, more popular... Oh God, what am I saying... But if I don't joke I'll just go insane..."

29

GOVERNMENT SPACE RESEARCH AGENCY. OBJECT № 00 SHIP'S LOG. ROSALYN DILAN MESSAGE FOR FRIGATE "ARTILLERIST HANS"

Following the five-line title on the monitor appeared a beautiful woman about thirty-five. If I hadn't read the name, I'd never have recognized in her the one depicted by the mold colony. High cheekbones, beautiful almond-shaped eyes, rounded forehead, neat little mouth... She could have worked as a flight attendant on interstellar flights, and everyone would turn to look at her thinking: "Why are stewardesses so beautiful!" But Rosalyn was not a stewardess at all, but a specialist in alien life. Instead of fashionable liners she flew on tin cans like "Artillerist Hans." And instead of a bright blazer and pill-box hat, Rosalyn wore a "coyote"-colored nylon t-shirt with dark stains under the arms and a pair of army dog tags around her neck.

Rosalyn sat in a small room similar to the one Irma and I were in—a standard officer's cabin. The nightmare experienced over recent weeks had completely (and, it seemed, forever) erased the lovely smile from her face, lowering the corners of her lips, and placed deep earth-gray shadows under her eyes. I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out Rosalyn wasn't thirty-five but, say, twenty-seven or less.

"...We hold less than half the buildings," Rosalyn was saying. "And just in this day we lost six people..."

At that moment someone knocked on the door behind her back. She shuddered but didn't turn around. Sighing nervously, the girl cleared her throat into her fist and continued.

"The nature of the chimeras remains beyond our understanding... At first we considered them clones of Colonel Nathan Gogh and other missing people," someone knocked insistently on the door again, making Rosalyn fidget in her chair. "But the chimeras began to change. Now they're much more dangerous..."

From behind the door a melodious female voice suddenly sounded: "Rosa-lyn! Are you there?"

The girl coughed painfully once more and hurriedly continued—in a strained voice, breaking into falsetto: "And now—to the main point... As I already said, we discovered the key to the cause of death of the local civilization. And yesterday we finally managed to cultivate the mutagen in the laboratory. Essentially, these are single-celled microscopic fungi..."

The door suddenly shook from a powerful blow, as if standing there wasn't a woman but at least a bear. The polymer cracked but held.

"RO-SA-LYN!!!" fury now rang clearly in the beautiful female voice.

Rosalyn with a nervous movement smeared large drops of sweat across her forehead and looked at her palm in surprise. Then her gaze returned to the lens. "This is my mama..." she said in some dim, confused tone. "She died... Still on Earth..."

A new blow with a clang bent the door, and now it somewhat resembled a crumpled beer can. Rosalyn pulled her head into her shoulders and quietly screamed. The door, despite its pitiful appearance, still held on its hinges. I involuntarily tore my gaze from the screen and looked back at my own

doorway. And only now noticed there were no entrance doors in the room at all. Only torn hinges stuck orphan-like from the frame, bent and twisted. "This is her cabin," and from this thought my stomach became cold as in a freezer.

On screen Rosalyn collected herself, lowered her eyes and, swallowing saliva, began hurriedly reading a pre-written text.

"The mutagen, with which one can create universal, invincible soldiers—this is the most perfect weapon of mass destruction in history. We realize what the price of such a discovery is. That's why we demand immediate and unconditional evacuation of all personnel..."

The door behind her shoulder suddenly crumpled, as if from that side it was squeezed by invisible pincers, and now it resembled a lump of plastic stuck between the doorjambs. Rosalyn didn't even turn around, only began reading faster.

"Otherwise, the last one who remains alive will destroy the mutagen and all research materials! Repeat studies could take centuries..."

With a disgusting screech the mangled door was torn from the doorway by some invisible force. Rosalyn jumped up, catching the computer (or whatever she was recording the message on) with her elbow, the camera shifted, and the door ended up in frame. Actually, Rosalyn's back blocked the frame almost completely, and only the upper corner of the doorway was visible above her shoulder. The woman's fingers clutched the table, and the camera automatically refocused on the hand. I peered intently at the blurred image of the doorway but saw almost nothing. Only the girl's hand and veins swollen from tension on it.

"Don't..." Rosalyn exhaled.

And then something appeared in the opening. The girl screamed frantically, trying to jump on the table, something dark and large appeared beside her, and the computer flew down. The camera tried in vain to focus on the floor covering pattern, and off-camera sounded muffled, somehow gurgling screams... Then Rosalyn herself fell to the floor with a dull thud. The camera, discovering the long-awaited object, immediately focused on the dim pupil of the dead girl, and then the image disappeared.

"End of recording," Irma stated calmly.

I didn't answer, looking at the black surface of the extinguished monitor. Before my eyes was still that something which appeared in the doorway a few moments before the camera fell. And despite the blurred image, I didn't doubt for a second that I'd seen a woman with dark, long hair like Rosalyn's own.

And this woman was crawling into the room along the ceiling.

30

"How are you doing?" Irma asked.

We were drinking coffee outside—since the solar battery worked, the coffee maker hadn't forgotten how to brew. The beans had long ago gone stale and dried out over so many years, so the coffee tasted like black earth—as if you were licking it off hot asphalt.

"Impossible to drink..." I said and splashed out the remains of the bitter liquid.

Irma nodded, looking at me with concern, it seemed to me.

"Was that a chimera?" I asked.

"Yes."

"And how much time before the same thing that happened here starts in our camp?"

She shrugged:

"It's already started."

"I mean en masse."

"I don't know... Object 'Two Zeros' didn't last even half a year."

For the first time in my life I regretted not smoking. The moment was just right.

"Chimeras aren't just clone-killers," Irma said quietly. "They're capable of changing. Becoming anyone... To more effectively reach their victim. For this they read images in people's brains. For example, that woman on the recording... She died when Rosalyn was about fifteen."

I involuntarily sighed.

"Where do they come from? If they're clones of people, then..."

"They're not exactly clones. That's figurative. And generally they're not independent creatures," Irma looked at me, as if weighing whether to say