"All I require from you is to contain him until my return."
Contain him. Ash uttered a ruptured sigh. The creature had been here, what, three days? And already it had crossed the Torrent despite a strong subliminal message not to, got itself close-to-fatally injured wandering about where it had no business being, and then tried to feed on him, whatever the hell that meant, when he rescued it. So, containment; not so much.
Ash rested his elbows on his knees and crushed the heels of his hands into his eyes, yawning. He'd been up close on thirty-six hours, and whatever that enzyme was that the creature had injected into him, the stimulant effects had faded into the sort of hungover stupid-crash that usually followed a three-day festival binge on the kind of moonshine you could use to disinfect surgical instruments. A Fetcher deposited a handful of pills at his elbow, and he sighed and scooped them up obediently, not even bothering to look what they were before tossing them to the back of his mouth and gulping water to wash them down. As he lifted the glass again and drank more deeply, he noticed an odd, sweetish smell and sniffed dubiously at the liquid, wondering if there was a problem with the water supply again, but it smelt and tasted fine and he placed the glass down, puzzled, and sniffed tentatively at his hand.
A faint, sickly scent clung to his skin, and he snuffled the length of his own forearm before a shock of recognition galvanised him: the Torrent. Shit. How could he have overlooked it? He was off the couch and yanking the shirt off over his head as he ran for the shower, yelling for Fetchers, heart pounding in his throat as he twisted the controls and stepped under the jets of water. A stab of nausea doubled him up, and he dropped to his knees, dizzy black dots filling his vision as he dry-heaved. The spasm passed, and he submitted to sitting hunched under the drumming water while Fetchers swarmed over every inch of him, scouring the chemical taint off his skin and fur. At insistent tugging, he turned over and let them continue, although the well-meaning attempt of one particularly conscientious individual to decontaminate the inside of his mouth set him off retching again. Shock, it's just shock. Oh God, I hope.
The sensation of hundreds of tiny feet tracking through his hair made him want to scratch his scalp bloody, and he gritted his teeth against the urge, forcing his mind away from the physical discomfort. He'd ported into the sea with the tide coming in, only yards away from the Torrent on the other side of that spine of rock, of course the water was contaminated, how could he not have thought of it? Ash, you idiot.
Ash brushed away Fetchers who were trying to flush out his eyelids with some stinging stuff, and walked shakily into the outer room to get dried. Blame it on being distracted by the creature he'd rescued, blame it on that damned enzyme screwing with his brain. No way to tell yet how badly he'd been contaminated, or even with what; hell, nobody had ever managed to sort out the crazy mixture of substances that came down from the Glass Tower with the Torrent. It changed all the time. If he was lucky, it'd just be a handful of dodgy alkaloids that would give him the shakes for a day or two, and maybe some low-grade radioactives. As with all things to do with the Torrent of Glass, it was probably best not to think too hard about what would happen if he was unlucky.
Ash sent Fetchers to incinerate the shirt and trousers he'd stripped off, and rummaged through the alcoves to find something warmer, still chilled by the shock. He pulled on soft woollen leggings, and struggled into a loose hooded tunic as he walked to the eyrie. He'd lost the urge to sleep, at least for now. He sent Fetchers to increase the speed of recycling in the Tank water, just in case, but they'd already scrubbed the creature's skin with meticulous thoroughness when they prepped it for surgery. He tried not to think of what the effects might be of the thing having swallowed a bellyful of the stuff.
He extended one claw and trailed the back of it along the smooth rock of the passage wall as he walked, an old habit, and soft light bloomed ahead, died behind, as it always did. He climbed up and stretched out in the deep contours of the chair in its alcove, and pushed his hands into the soft gel of the interface, feeling it snug up warm against his skin, a faint thrill of sensation letting him know it was ready.
First things first; he checked on the vitals readout from the Tank, and frowned at the seemingly contradictory data. The system was trying to make sense of alien life signs using a human matrix, but he didn't have any better way to filter it. Ash puffed out his cheeks, and felt his way through the readings: blood pressure, heart-rate, muscular tension all low, a positive vasodilatory effect, parasympathetic response pretty much as it should be, though the endorphin level was lower than he'd have expected. The creature had come round from the anaesthetic block a couple of hours ago, and its brainwaves had slipped into theta-state with barely a wobble.
He didn't usually monitor the inside of the Tank visually, but before he ported out earlier he'd reconfigured a Snoop, damping all but passive functions, and held it flat against the moisture-beaded surface until its suckers got a grip. Now he called up its live feed on the screen above his head, and spent a few seconds correcting the image to resemble normal lighting conditions.
The creature lay spreadeagled in the waist-deep water, half submerged, arms held out to the sides by cuffs of deceptively slender monofilament, the white hair a halo of pale tendrils fanning out from its head. The tattoos he had noticed in passing when he was supervising the Fetchers earlier now stood out plainly, a stark relief-map of swirling black lines that followed the curve of muscle up from its left forearm over bicep and shoulder and extended down over most of the left side of its body in a series of barbed whiplash recurves, spirals and modified starlike shapes like the one that surrounded its left eye. Below its collarbone, on the left pectoral, an angry-looking slash of proud flesh interrupted the pattern, and Ash recognised it with a queasy tremor as an old scar recently reopened and imperfectly healed: a feeding-mark.
One who may require your services, depending on the outcome of certain tests. What the hell had she been doing to him?
Ash shook his head, dismissing the question for now, and zoomed in for a closer look at the dull black carbon fibre construct that immobilised the creature's right leg from hip to ankle; there was no swelling, and almost no discolouration of the pale flesh, which was surprising but which he supposed must be good. It had been a brutal injury, tibia and fibula snapped clean in two, and the femur compromised by an avulsion fracture where the heavy rotator muscle of the thigh had contracted explosively, presumably in the same impact, and torn a chunk of bone away from just above the knee.
The head injury, by contrast, had turned out to be relatively trivial, bleeding freely as head wounds tended to, but no more than a small gash in the scalp and a bad concussion. Potentially much more serious was the crack in the topmost of its protruding spinal processes, which probably happened at the same time as the other injuries. The thing's heavy leather coat with its high collar and spinal padding had saved it from more severe injury, but still... Ash huffed to himself, calculating; if it was the topmost thoracic vertebra or the lowest cervical, what was that ...dexterity in hands and fingers? It had certainly not lacked in manual dexterity or strength when it grabbed him earlier. He wriggled his own spine deeper into the warm embrace of the chair, pushing the memory away, and went back through the vitals again, this time checking for evidence of cervical injury, but its autonomic responses looked fairly normal.
The sudden jump in heart-rate and blood pressure readings made his own heart start pounding again. He switched hastily back to the visual feed and zoomed in on the creature's face, half expecting to find it awake, but the eyes were closed, the lids flickering slightly, and Ash relaxed, feeling foolish: REM sleep. It was just dreaming, that was all, quite normal in the desensitised environment of the Tank. He scanned across the readings again to make sure: raised heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, brain waves lifting well into the alpha range. A not-quite-normal glycine level, and when he checked the feed he could see the ragged rise and fall of its chest as it hyperventilated, small jerky movements of its head creating tiny ripples in the water. Its jaw muscles clenched, teeth gritting together, and he pulled in audio in time to hear it bite off a breathy sound of distress somewhere between a snarl and a moan.
Ash told himself afterwards that it was the logical thing, the only thing, to do. He needed to find out what was wrong with the creature, what had been done to it; he needed to find out more about the woman who had spoken to him – hell, he needed to find out anything he could about these aliens because he had a feeling that what he did not know in this situation could easily kill him.
He withdrew his hands from the interface, and slipped to the sandy floor of the eyrie. He needed to be close to do this, but there was no way he was getting in the Tank with that creature, restraints or no restraints. He drew a shaky breath, and ported before he could change his mind.
The outer surface of the Tank was cool and a little rough under his hands, the floor a complex pattern of interlocking tesserae under his bare feet. There was always a mineral tang to the air down here, and Ash shivered again at the reminder of the Torrent.
Pale, cold light filtered down from the skylight high above, and as Ash settled his back against the side of the Tank and slid down to sit on the tiled floor, he noticed the glow-lights around the walls dimming in response: it must be morning already.
He closed his eyes, schooling his thoughts away from his surroundings, drifting, letting his awareness still, and stop, and wait. Then, as softly as the brush of a butterfly's wing, he reached out.
Ash was aware of his mistake an instant before the creature's mind engulfed his, but it was far too late to withdraw. Faint and far away, he felt his body convulse, but that was nothing compared to the roiling surge of distress and fury pounding at his mind from the creature in the Tank. He cried out in terror, but did not know whether he cried out merely in his thoughts or with his physical voice.
The alien's memory wound itself around him in a choking fog, and clawed hands pulled him down to drown in deep black water.