ISSUE #10 | Excerpt, "Deep Clean"
AS SEEN IN PLANET SCUMM ISSUE #10
WRITTEN BY MATT HORNSBY
Illustration by Maura McGonagle
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 colored the walls; Polya’s chem-senses labeled 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 kilometers upward from the tip of its spear. There its roots met the world-roof, which bristled with flame-cannons and armored 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 dishonored 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 recognized 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: moth-like 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 reunification, but our system’s no better than yours. Anyone can see that.”
She looked him up and down. He was serious. Her tactical centers 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 center 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, worm-like 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 recognized 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.
*** CONTINUED IN ISSUE #9 ***
MATT HORNSBY lives in Ireland. He has published work in Metaphorosis, StarshipSofa and Electric Spec, and is a graduate of the Odyssey writing workshop.
