***AS SEEN IN*** PLANET SCUMM #10

**Written by Matt Hornsby**
*Illustrations by* *Maura McGonagle*

Deep Clean

Matt Hornsby

The dining room floor was hidden under a carpet of voided alco-imbibers, discarded clothing, and high-caste delicacies that had missed their consumers’ mouths. Arcs of dried fluid coloured the walls; Polya’s chem-senses labelled them as the saliva, vomit and ejaculate of various human gene-strains, mixed with a few rare Terran wines.

“The entire domicile, Excellency?” Polya asked.

The boy took an anxious puff from his somno-stick.

“All three levels,” he said. “Can you do it, Polya? Please tell me you can. If you can’t, it’s over for me.”

For a Terran aristocrat, the boy was tolerable. He was high most of the time; the somno-stick took the sharpness out of his eyes. For all their eagerness to take it over, the local narcotics seemed to be the only things the Terrans liked about Monda. Even with Earth’s vast superiority in resources, she still struggled to understand how her planet had been conquered by these people.

“It is a rest day, Excellency. I have offerings to make at the temple.”

The boy’s eyelids fluttered as he took another hit, smoke wafting in the half-green Mondanese daylight creeping through the thick windows. The Terran administrators’ homes were clustered at the bottom of Stalactite City, closest to the cloud-ocean. The wealthy bought themselves the privilege of more light and distance from the convulsions of the world-lung as it purified the passageways of the city, filtering breathable air from the fetid and voracious atmosphere of Monda’s great world-cavern.

It was brighter than Polya was used to. Before the occupation, she had dwelled near the city’s highest point, twenty kilometres upward from the tip of its spear. There its roots met the world-roof, which bristled with flame-cannons and armoured bunkers. Monda’s warrior caste had erected the city’s defenses over thousands of years of battle against the planet’s ecology. They had never expected to fight other humans.

“I wouldn’t have bothered you, not until tomorrow,” said the boy. “But then the message from my parents, and you know what they’re like. You can do it, can’t you?”

She imagined the boy’s mother and father encountering this. It might be entertaining to watch. And missing her offerings would undoubtedly offend her ancestors. But she had dishonoured them enough already. And she could not guarantee that the Parteks would not find a way to blame her for the ruinous condition of their home.

Polya noted the time on her wrist console. The Parteks’ ship had just registered with Monda’s orbital station. They would be following the path of the invasion fleet; sweeping over the planet’s radiation-scorched surface, then down the ancient tunnels that opened into the world-cavern. A five-hour journey. This was a high-pressure, high-stakes mission with multiple variables. Just what she’d been bred for, what her grandmother and the other Caste-Mothers had trained her for. Perhaps they would understand.

“Please, Excellency” she said, “don’t get in the way.”

Polya activated her two cleaning drones: bat-sized quadcopters custom-rigged with chem-sensors and miniature sprinklers. As she assaulted the dining room with a precision-grade suction engine, she reviewed their reports. The kitchen had flooded; she tasked an immediate mop-and-dry.

On the second level, the sheets in the master bedroom had been rutted on with abandon. Used stim-packets were piled at the bedside. Crimson streaks of wine lacerated the Parteks’ great rug—the pelt of some bizarre, expensively gene-replicated Terran animal.

All easily dealt with. But Polya had logged something much more troubling.

Small growths were appearing where spores had settled. Polya recognised the species: the bluish plaques of Cordyceps and the mossy-furry heads of Morotofex. The fastest-moving fungal clades, the scouting force ahead of an invasion. A few tiny wing-worms wriggled across the ceiling, looking for organic matter in which to lay their eggs. The biosphere was inside.

“It was five minutes that the filters were down, if that,” said Partek junior. His eyes shone wetly like shinestone slivers, darting around as if they wanted to pop out of his skull.

“The alarm system was not triggered, Excellency? Normally this would be a matter for the authorities.”

She looked straight at him. He took a long drag on his stick. Glow crystals popped inside the device. He’d moved onto the stronger stuff, then.

“Fine,” he said. “I’m involved in some things that I’d rather people not know about. The house is on its own system, so you can turn off the monitors temporarily. If you know how.”

He looked stupidly pleased with himself.

“That is unfortunate,” said Polya, “A filter failure means I can’t clean the lower level. I must ask you to refer this to the Biosecurity commissioner. Or perhaps his Lordship might do so.” The boy flinched at the mention of his father. She began to pack away her equipment.

“Please, Polya,” said the boy, “I’ll do anything, I promise. How much does Mother pay you?”

She stopped.

“Four hundred a month, such is her kindness.”

“One thousand,” said the boy, “Just for this job.”

That was a lot of money. It could change a lot of things for her. But if the biosphere was inside the lower level, it would be enemy territory. Through the thick windows of the apartment, she could see life gathering outside, attracted by the temporary breach. Black silhouettes fluttered in the nebulous green folds of the cloud-ocean: mothlike fliers, the size of a human hand, dangling improbably long legs; spherical membrane sacs, which would occasionally burst in a shower of purple ichor; and long, wispy, feathersnakes, lazily beating triplicate pairs of webbed wings.

“It’s dangerous,” she said.

“Polya, you must understand. If my Father finds out, he won’t just take the lash to me. I’ve messed up too many times for that. They’ll strip me of my name. I’ll be destitute, sent off to grind nutrient paste in some orbital processing center.”

“I can’t imagine what that would be like, Excellency,” said Polya, her face hard as crystal.

“I know what you were, Polya. Before the war. All that gear you’ve got in your head. The bioengineering. That’s why I know you can do it.” He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “For what it’s worth, I’ve always hated what we’ve done here. We talk about liberation and re-unification, but our system’s no better than yours. Anyone can see that.”

She looked him up and down. He was serious. Her tactical centres were humming, processing this information. Polya reviewed her options. She could leave the kid to the fate he deserved, or take the risk for a big reward. And how big was the risk? She had given the planet plenty of chances to kill her before, and she was still here.

“I look forward to concluding this business with you, Master Partek.”

Domestic equipment would be no good against a filter failure. Polya attached a canister of mineral-leaching agent to the distribution system on her back. She rigged up a high-heat autoscrubber, a steelwool scourer on a telescopic flexi-shaft, and a broad-gauge chemspray, then tested all three. Just like her grandmother taught her: check your systems twice an hour until you’re dead, then check them once an hour after that.

With the two drones projecting a containment field over the utility floor hatch, Polya lowered herself into the thick, rancid atmosphere of Monda. Her neck pulsed as her ambi-gland swelled, filtering toxins from her passageways and distributing aggressive countermeasures. Polya’s caste were bred to fight in environments like these. A normal human would already be two-thirds dead.

The level was crawling with fetid life. Mossy growths and mold blossomed across the walls, beginning to devour the building. In one corner, bacteria had multiplied sufficiently to form mats, which respired with a slow, insistent pulse. The white shapes of silvercrabs darted and scattered over them. Polya tweaked the chemical compound in her sprayer to a hydrocarbon, a cleaning oil, and adjusted the pressure so that it was expelled from the nozzle as a thin mist. Out of her belt pouch she took a firelighter, then pulled the trigger and lit up the mist, turning her sani-spray into a temporary flamethrower. The scuttling creatures and bacterial colonies wilted and deflated under the head of flame, and she swept their husks into the waste disposal unit at the centre of the room.

The disposal unit itself was flecked with growths. It sagged beneath old food containers and rotten meal remains now being devoured by swarms of wriggling, wormlike creatures. There were some items of value amongst the waste—a few old clothes, a broken electronic device—now fully ruined by their exposure to the planet’s life.

Something caught Polya’s eye. She shifted the container to one side and stuck her hand into the piled waste. Her skin tingled as mites began to attach themselves. A hard, smooth object met her fingers. She clamped them shut and pulled it free.

It was an irregular crystal, between pink and purple, shining faintly from within as it caught the light. Glow. The addicts in the slum-quarter would chip shards from one like this and dissolve them in bitter tea. It was worth a lot, she guessed; five times as much as the boy was offering her. It was also highly illegal. She put it in her pocket.

As she stood, a wave of dizziness hit her, and the temperature in the room dropped. Her vision blurred and grew dark at the edges. A wedge of clay formed in her throat, dragging a net across her windpipe. Detecting a threatening spike in foreign toxins, her ambi-gland had gone into overdrive, restructuring her breathing passages and releasing its own hormones to mitigate the threat.

She had not noticed the white growths on the wall. Now she looked closer and recognised what she had been too sloppy to see before. A tremble of instinctual terror ran through her body. It was a sight that Polya had been taught from birth to hate and fear. A colony of corpse-pale polyps, curling curiously from the wall. The Enemy was here.

They quivered on rubbery stalks, extending tiny tendrils into the atmosphere. As she approached, her gland contracted again. The fungus had sensed her interest, pumping the air with a visible mist of toxic spores. Her breathing dragged like a heavy chain through her body. All her tactical systems had shut down; she was operating on pure organics now.

The gland in Polya’s neck throbbed. Her fingers ached, twitching sluggishly at the controls of her sprayer as she checked it. It wouldn’t be long before she blacked out. She dragged the thick collar of her overalls over her mouth and doused the wall with an acrid burst. The cloying sensation in her head briefly relaxed before welling up again.

The fungal advance-growth of the Enemy was incredibly toxic; a worthy foe. Any normal human would already be undergoing digestion. But it had not counted on Polya na Labbardi, and now she was on the attack.

The polyps were fused cleanly to the wall, as if they were an off-growth of the structure itself. They struck back at every cloud of sanitizer with a pulse of toxins. Holding an arm across her face, she alternated volleys of biocide and flame with physical force, hacking and striking at the growths with the sharp edge of the auto-mop.

Her body screamed out, but behind her mask she was smiling. She had not tasted battle in so long, and it was longer still since she had tasted the only sweeter joy: to see one’s enemy wilt and crumble under a storm of fury and flame.

Polya came back up through the hatch to Partek junior, his skin twitching in anxiety.

“You’re my saviour, Polya.”

“It is my pleasure to serve,” she said, meeting the boy’s eyes, “for such generous compensation.”

“Of course,” said the boy, nodding. “You didn’t find anything else down there?”

Polya considered the chunk of Glow in her pocket. It was a risk to handle it. She could sell it back to the boy for a price, maybe get him to double what he’d offered her. But until she’d seen the money, she didn’t trust him. Better to keep several options open.

“Nothing but waste,” she said.

“Ah, that’s good,” he said, sliding his tongue over his lips. “That’s good.”

From upstairs came the hydraulic hiss of shutters.

“They’ve arrived,” whispered the boy.

Lord Barnival Partek’s jaw grimly conveyed the unassailable authority of a senior Terran administrator. The starched white fabric of his uniform looked as thick as armour plating, a high collar wrapping his neck in a death grip. He was flanked by a gene-amped clone bodyguard; his wife was pouring a glass from one of the Terran wines Polya had salvaged.

“I am disappointed in you, son,” said Lord Partek, “Although I cannot say that I am surprised.”

His voice was pitched finely between disinterest and contempt. Lady Partek joined the attack.

“For your father to return, after a hard year on the Council working to protect this family, to rumours of unspeakable debauchery in his own home!”

Polya had done her best, but the boy hadn’t been able to cover things up. Just as well she had held onto the Glow. Her payment was looking shaky.

Her Ladyship’s face was the colour of fresh lava, matching the gleaming jewels on her chest. As she advanced, she took off her trim coat, lined at the collar with the skin of some unfortunate creature—a cousin of the rug downstairs—and threw it to the clone, who caught it one-handed, barely shifting its stance.

A tactical positioning module, Polya guessed. When she had entered the room, the simian quasi-human had changed position again, logging her as a new variable. No one else acknowledged her existence. She was glad of that, for now.

“Despite our investment in your upbringing, you treat us like this,” continued Lady Partek. “Some of it might perhaps have been bearable. The orgies. Even the appropriation of your family’s money to support your dissident lifestyle. But selling illegal substances to lowlifes out of our home. The Partek villa!”

The boy had his back against the wall.

“Account for yourself, son,” pronounced his father. Polya felt a twang of sympathy. She knew what it was like to disappoint your family. She was fortunate that her own had not lived to see her undergo the curious version of mercy the Terrans afforded their enemies.

The boy looked from Lady Partek to Lord Partek. Then he looked at Polya. She saw something shift in his features as their eyes met. He suddenly relaxed.

“Mother, I had not wanted to say anything. You know I have a sensitive nature. The truth is that I have been hiding something, but I can do so no longer, if only to protect my own honor.”

His mother sneered. The boy turned to his father, searching for a more receptive audience.

“You’ve never approved of my sympathies for the natives, father…”

His parents’ arms were folded, but neither interrupted. He continued. A tactical alert started pinging in Polya’s head. This could be bad.

“The fact is that our maidservant has taken me into her confidence; out of sympathy for her circumstances, I had hidden some things from you. It is, I regret to say, she who has been dealing in these forbidden substances, and she has been using our home to do so. After all, you pay her so very little. I believe she is even carrying some on her person as we speak.”

Polya searched for an indignant rebuttal. But the uncomfortable fact of the Glow crystal was jutting into her side.

All three Parteks now swivelled on her. She met the boy’s eyes directly. His face slowly twisted from panic into mocking and cruel satisfaction, and a century’s worth of Monda’s foulest curses died in her throat.

“Detain her, Claw,” said Lord Partek. The clone advanced on her like an assault vehicle. There was nothing she could do.

The storeroom was small and dark. At least it was clean – Polya had sanitized it two hours earlier. Not much she could do on the lock without tools. She rattled through the codices and doctrines saved to her tactical log. For the fifth time, she reached the end of her options, none of them offering a chance of success exceeding point-three percent.

Every warrior must make peace with their end. Mondanese soldiers could not look forward to a gentle exit from the world; theirs was a war that would never finish, and the weapons of the Enemy were neither swift nor precise. Perhaps it would be dissolution in a cloud of bio-acid, or perhaps their body would be devoured from within by a plague-swarm. But Polya could not imagine an end more ignominious for the last issue of the House of Labbardi than this. She entertained an image of herself gouging her thumbs into the Partek boy’s fat, wet eyes. But the fault had been her own. She had allowed herself to be deceived and tempted. No amount of money could do her any good now. Even if she escaped, she would have to get out of the city. Maybe even off-world. Her ancestors would go a long time without an offering.

There was a twinge in Polya’s neck. A familiar, insistent cloying around her nose and mouth. A sudden urge to relax. Polya guessed what had happened. On the sleeve of her undershirt hung a thread of the white growth that she had exterminated in the lower level. She had fought in enough of the fungal wars to know that it had not got there by accident. In the fury of the battle, it sensed its defeat and identified the only escape route as her. Even in this quantity it could still easily overpower a human that didn’t have Polya’s defensive bio-mechanisms.

It had been a long time since Polya had felt she had any power over anything. Now, she held the existence of this sentient thing in her hand. She raised a fist to crush it into a milky smear.

But something pinged in her head; her hand stayed still. A new factor had been flagged. She logged the fungus into her options, recalling one of her grandmother’s trademark doctrines: maximum adaptability, improvisation, and flexibility. But even Semna na Labbardi might have shied from the course of action Polya was considering.

Polya turned her attention to her breathing. It was a process she had been taught by the Spiritualists as a child: visualizing one’s own lungs as the lungs of the city, and one’s body as the great stalactite, a perfect system in its strength and balance. Her vision dimmed, and time slowed. The nodes and switches of her bio-digital anatomy presented themselves like a circuit. She practised her control, artificially raising and lowering her pulse, deliberately secreting hormone bursts. Then, she raised the white strands to her face, and inhaled.

Red clouds flashed in front of her, her neck burned, and countermeasures surged through her body. Breath by breath, Polya suppressed her automatic responses. With each respiration, she felt the presence become clearer. She had felt it before; in the heat of battle it had been a nightmare that she had strained with her entire being to repulse. In the quiet and darkness of the storeroom, it was different. A vast network of beings, all sharing elements of a single sentience, unknowable, in a world without light or shadow. She began to recognise something more familiar in it, something almost human. Aggression. Hunger. Fear. She and the Enemy circled each other warily.

Deep in myth, there were tales of warriors who had bridged their minds with the world-fungus; a suggestion that the relationship between the humans of Monda and their planet had not always been one of war. Caste doctrine had labelled these stories as lies and pacifist-ecologist agitprop. A soldier’s instinct should be to respond with aggressive countermeasures as soon as it felt the first alien strands worm into their mind. Since the occupation, the stories had begun to spread again. Polya had heard whispers in the slum-quarters’ alleys: the Mondanese may look like Terrans, but they really shared a soul with the other life of their planet.

She allowed the fungus to taste her emotions. It was no longer attacking, but exploring, probing at her. As a show of power, Polya briefly allowed the fungicides in her blood to surge again, and she felt the sentience retreat. Stabilizing, she began to set out her thoughts in clear and open sequence: an offer. A bargain. Co-operation, and mutual gain. Around each idea, the fungal entity closed its neural tendrils in investigation. She felt inquiry. Consideration.

Clearing her mind again, she presented the keystone of the proposition. A host in exchange for help. Her neck throbbed again as the fungus focused all its energy on this final concept. Then, it subsided, and her mind warmed. Understanding. Acceptance.

Polya respired deeply and allowed her countermeasures to surge to full capacity. The sentience in her mind winked out; the room came back into focus, and she vomited into the corner. Her clothes dripped and her skin fizzled. She’d need all her grandmother’s blessings now.

“Water,” Polya shouted.

She rapped at the door again, holding one eye to the crack. The Parteks had probably returned to familial bickering while they waited for the security squads to arrive. Perhaps they would simply dispose of her at their own convenience. The rights of indentured natives were a subjective matter on occupied Monda.

“I need water!”

A shadow moved in front of the door. From its movement and size, Polya could tell it was the clone. Better than no one coming at all, but only just.

“Please,” she said, working desperation into her voice. The clone was most likely a model without empathetic capabilities. It never hurt to try. For a second, the shape outside was still. Then it spoke, in a slurred, childish voice.

“Prisoner. Request. Water.”

The shadow cleared, and Polya saw the neuro-lash at its waist as it walked away.

She attacked as soon as it entered, thrusting her wrist towards its face. The container of water hit the floor in a wet explosion of glass. The clone shifted, its huge body off-balance. Polya grabbed at it. She wasn’t strong enough to bring it down neatly; its enormous weight knocked her backwards, a hand clamping around her right arm before she could squirm free.

Pushing her onto her knees, it grappled with her like a child with a doll. Her bones and muscles buckled. She tucked her head into her chest and held her left wrist to her body, denying the creature an opening. It grunted as it thrust an arm like a utility lifter’s power claw around her neck. It was too strong. Her eyes blurred as it began to squeeze. She’d made a good fight of it––at least her ancestors would know that-—but it was over.

She recalled the defense academy. The cadets had complained that hand-to-hand would be useless against fungus and bacteria. That hadn’t stopped the bigger and stronger male cadets picking on her, the girl from a famous family. Her grandmother had shown no sympathy. “You have to learn the price of your name,” she’d said. But, eventually, she’d shown Polya a few things.

Her eyes were growing dimmer, the clone’s arm tightening around her neck. Polya tried to find the muscle memory, hidden under layers of organic and cybernetic wiring. Somewhere, she found it.

Polya pushed herself forward as hard as possible against the clone’s arm. Feeling it pull back, she released completely and threw herself backwards, hooking a leg behind its knee. Unbalanced, the creature toppled, bringing her down on top of it. It still had a hold of her right arm, but her left was free. She lifted it, pulled back her sleeve, and wiped a full load of the fungal strands across its face. It rose, swiping at the mess with its arm, but it had already inhaled. Its hand went limp.

Her overalls were drenched with sweat. There was no time to rest. The clone was already starting to twitch slightly. She inspected its eyes; the tell-tale yellow flecks were forming in the sclera. Just like so many friends of hers in her lifetime of war.

A Mondanese warrior was trained to pick out the signs of fungal domination. Most people would be unable to distinguish it from the effects of a night on hard narcotics. The yellow in the eyes, the odd patterns of speech, the occasional stagger in the step. Walking behind the clone, Polya suppressed the urge to make a big hole in its head with the pistol she had taken from it. She had done the same to people she liked a lot more, as soon as she’d seen the head start to move in that way, the feet falling oddly and off-balance.

They surprised the family in the dining room, complexions undimmed from the earlier encounter. Polya guessed that parental discipline had evolved into marital dispute, with Lord and Lady at each other’s faces and the boy cowering to one side.

Barnival Partek looked from Polya, to the gun she had leveled at his head, to the neuro-lash in the hands of his once-loyal henchman.

“Claw,” he said, “Be a good boy. Put that thing down and come to boss.”

The clone shook its head gently.

“He does what I say now,” said Polya, “and so do you. Sit down.” It was a distinct pleasure to strip the pathetic honorifics and kowtowing from her speech.

They hesitated. She warmed up the pistol and fired a shot into the far wall, shattering several of the Terran ceramics that she had tidied earlier. Lord and Lady Partek sat.

“Here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to contact the port authority and commission a transport to pick you up from the dock at this level. Any questions, you tell them you forgot something on the orbital station. Anything other than that, and Mistress dies.”

Partek looked dejected. He’d probably never been held hostage by his cleaner.

“You won’t make it, you know.”

“I’ve made it through worse. Let’s go,” said Polya.

She kept her weapon on his wife as Lord Partek trudged towards the door. Her operational modules had flooded her nervous system with combat stims, leaving her unable to think about anything except getting out of the city alive. That could be dangerous; she flipped a mental switch to lower the maximum threshold of the stim-dose.

Lord Partek gave the clone a strange wheedling look as he passed it, as if begging it to change sides again. Its face was utterly blank, although its eyes followed him across the room with precision. Maybe there was something of the old wiring left in there. Polya waved her fingers towards Lady Partek, beckoning her to move as well.

Something crashed behind Polya; in full combat readiness, she swivelled and lifted her weapon. Lord Partek had launched himself onto the clone, wrapping both hands around its neck and scrabbling in the direction of its command console. It was a brave attempt. Polya even felt a little sorry for the man when his former slave tossed him onto the floor like discarded clothing. She kept her weapon trained on him as he lay.

“Enough messing around,” she said.

A buzzing hiss cleaved the air, and Lord Partek’s head snapped to one side. The clone, face still impassive, had struck him with its neurolash. Polya held a hand up to it.

The lash sang out again, this time striking Lady Partek with a wet crack. Polya winced. Partek Junior began to frantically scramble away, but the clone’s lash caught him mid-stride and knocked him off his feet.

“Stop!” said Polya to the clone, “This is not what we agreed.”

It didn’t respond. Again, it let the lash fly. Both older Parteks were rolling on the ground in agony; now the creature went in for the boy, striking him again and again. He struggled to hold his head upright, bubbles of blood and spittle at his lips and steaming red welts across his face. His mouth produced a string of incoherent sounds as the neuro-barbs on the lash scrambled his speech centres. Polya could imagine what he was trying to say.

“Stop,” she said to the clone. Things hadn’t gone to plan. Polya didn’t need the situational alerts at the side of her vision to tell her that. The three Terrans were no good to her dead, and they were still humans. The soldier in Polya couldn’t murder a prisoner in cold blood.

She made a decision—an imperfect one, guided by a surface-level appraisal of risks and benefits, and minimal tactical consideration. She lifted the pistol at the clone’s misshapen skull.

“Stop,” she said again. No reaction.

She pulled the trigger. But her hand didn’t move.

Polya’s fingertips flickered and burned. Momentarily, her breathing was interrupted; her stomach tied itself in knots. Shock and stress, she thought. Break through it. She willed her finger to go down over the trigger. It hovered. A black halo sprouted from the perimeter of her field of vision. The shouts and moans of the Partek family echoed dimly through her skull like a faulty recording.

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It took Polya a second to realise what was happening. It took her a full three to realise how stupid she’d been. She’d let the world-fungus into her system, and taking its lack of resistance as evidence of her domination, she’d overestimated herself. Her attention had been on the high-proximity scenario while the fungus had been worming into her command structures, knocking out her defenses one by one, infiltrating every critical node.

Against her will, she lowered the gun. Her body started moving itself towards Barnival Partek, sprawled on his back like a wounded feathersnake. Polya’s feet placed themselves in front of each other with brutal determination, as she strained everything to hold herself still. It was too late. She was putting out a level-five fire with a bucket of water and a mess-tin.

When she reached Partek, she took his head in her hand. He wriggled in her grasp, but she was strong. Stronger than she’d ever been. She felt something swell in her throat and saw Partek’s eyes bulge in panic. Then she spewed a string of globules into his face. He made a few frantic swipes and fell limp.

The clone let the body of Lady Partek slump to the floor after doing the same to her. It met Polya’s eyes with a glacial gaze.

“Clean,” it said. The word didn’t come from its mouth. It didn’t come from the creature at all. It came from inside Polya, the same thing that was inside the clone, the same thing that was now inside the Parteks. It was not a word but a thought. It coalesced from a storm and etched itself on the core of her brain in a language beyond classification.

Clean. Wipe the stain away. Eliminate the impurity. Purge the toxins from the body. It was command and invocation, a divine force rising from within. It shone as clearly as a sun, a beacon to cut through Monda’s swirling ocean of clouds.

Polya felt a sickness rising in her gut. This house disgusted her. These clumsy, improbably four-limbed creatures had gouged a hole in the rock and pumped it with heavy metals, twisted it into hideous angles. They sprayed it with chemicals that smothered all life, it was a waxy cell in which their progeny could bear out its life cycle. And this, she knew, was a poor suburb of the main colony, in which a million pale, wriggling creatures lived, all sucking the life from the world and then fighting one another for a share of the spoils.

The halo had disappeared from her vision now, and she saw more clearly than she had ever seen before. Her movements were no longer constrained. She flexed her fingers in exploration. The bodies of Lord and Lady Partek were standing now. She knew that they would also see the way. They were not others anymore, but part of one great organism, ageless and tireless, that had conquered the world eons ago.

She felt the strength of the great webs that radiated across the world-roof, spanning kilometres, strands dancing in coordination. She heard the churning of nutrients in the farm nodes, where thick ropes of fungus hung, mycelia stretching into the fertile clouds of the sea to gather food.

She was not enslaved or coerced. She was free. But she was suffering from the deep and burning affliction of the sickness around her. There was no choice but to remove it.

She used the body that had been Lady Partek to open the command console and deactivate the filters of the house. No biosecurity alarm sounded. In their nostrils and lungs, they sensed the pure, delightful atmosphere of their own world, creeping into this place, reclaiming it. Across the world, they were advancing on this place. They would expunge the rot, and the world would once again be clean.

Deep Clean by Matt Hornsby [Issue #10 Full Story]

Deep Clean

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