Uvlechenie by DeAnna Knippling

The last few asteroids had fallen apart under the drills. The last asteroid had literally shaken to pieces under Anechka’s feet. Didn’t matter; she always stayed in her rig until they were out of the belt, ready to jump away from debris.

Anechka pressed the steering collar of the Uvlechenie toward the floor while leaning back in the seat. The Uvlechenie settled onto the asteroid, (650) 2003 RKN, just the way she liked it, slowing the rotation and leaving the valuable dust mostly unshaken.

It was the only gentle thing she knew how to do.

Misha said, “Lots of iron.”

“What else?”

“Carbon.”

Anechka cursed. Carbon meant they were required to check for organic material, for “life.” Sludge on the bottom of a coffee cup, more like it.

“Would I lie to you?” Misha said.

“We’ll space it.”

“Now, how ethical is that?”

Anechka lowered the drill and ran it a dozen feet to anchor the ship. Hypothetically, this would destabilize the asteroid, sending loose chunks of rock in unpredictable directions. Practically speaking, however, it anchored the ship.

She chewed her unlit cigar. To light it would break another law, the law of killing yourself by using up your oxygen. Cause, effect. “Take a core.”

“Aye, aye, Cap’n.”

She didn’t answer. She looked over the landscape of the asteroid, such as it was, and listened to the sound of stone being ground. Solid.

Then the drill spun loose underneath them, and the asteroid shook them off. Anechka cursed again, pressing down on the collar with her palms until the ship had settled again.

The asteroid was moving in ways that it shouldn’t, bucking and jerking under them.

Something hit her on the back of the head. She gripped the collar. “What’s going on?”

“Sorry.” Misha moved behind her, caught whatever had come loose. “It’s solid rock down to fifty feet. After that—govno, Ane. Something’s moving down there.”

“Pull up the drill.”

She heard the drill lock close, then leaned back and popped the steering collar, making the ship hop backward.

The asteroid was spewing fluid, a full spray that slowed and stopped as she watched. She took a look over her shoulder at Misha. He was half-strapped into the drill rig, clutching the cover of the emergency button.

“It came off again,” he said.

“Get strapped in, you fool.”

On the screen, the fluid dissipated. The asteroid was still jerking under them, and she shifted with it.

“We should go,” Misha said.

Rock bounced off the hull, making the peculiar sound of half an echo. Anechka kept her feet planted. The surface of the asteroid was breaking up in flakes, like paint.

“Come on, Ane.”

Anechka jumped backward, the elastic straps of the pilot rig keeping her from bouncing around the ship. Below them, the outside of the asteroid was thrust away.

“What is that?” Misha said.

“I’ll be damned if I know.”

“Hah. You don’t believe in damnation; that’s cheating.”

A rock plate over a hundred feet across flew at them, and Anechka kicked off from the side of the ship. The jets fired, and the Uvlechenie slid out of the way.

Something heavy slammed into her. She turned her head to see Misha completely out of his rig, leaking blood from the back of his head all over her suit. The screens overhead showed she was about to hit another asteroid, so big the screens couldn’t hold it all. In retrospect, she wished they’d tried that one instead.

But Misha had had a feeling about this one.

Anechka jumped, then ran backward over the surface of the large asteroid. She pressed her palms down on the collar for stability as the jets danced under her. When she was on the far side, she kicked off again, and the plate from RKN shattered against the larger asteroid, spraying shards around, but not into, the ship.

A quick check for more rock, and she drifted backward. With the larger asteroid partially in the way, she couldn’t be sure of what she was seeing, but it looked like a…some kind of animal. It looked like a cord cover. It wound through the rock, nosing along its side where the drill had bitten it.

There was a dot flashing in the corner of her eye. She winked and turned off the recording, then scrolled through the video options with twitches of her jaw until she had the recordings erased. It wasn’t legal, but it was done.

A worm. That’s what it looked like. A headless, sparkling worm.

She spun the ship and ran in the rig until she was winded, increased her oxygen, and kept running, accelerating halfway to Mars, wasting months of fuel.

Misha was no sooner in the med bay on Eureka than Veronika, delicate, beautiful Veronika, was there to see him.

For a second, Anechka saw Veronika running toward her, and her heart ground in her chest like a rock crusher. Then Veronika exclaimed, “Oh Misha!” and Anechka’s stomach flopped.

“You didn’t have to come,” Misha rasped. “It won’t change anything.”

Anechka stood up. “Excuse me.”

“You don’t have to go, it’s not like I’m going to say anything private,” Veronika said.

“Sit,” Misha whispered.

Anechka sat.

Veronika cried over Misha for a few minutes, then dried her eyes and said, “What happened?”

Anechka said, “Uh. We uh. A bad asteroid. Pocket of gas.”

“Is that what it was?” Misha whispered.

Anechka nodded.

“With me half out of my rig. I’m such an idiot.”

She nodded again. “I jumped away from the explosion, and you flew into me like a rag doll. Knocked the wind out of me.”

Veronika had a face like an angel, a half-hesitant smile, and more charm than Anechka would possess in a thousand years of trying, that is, if she ever tried to be charming. She looked like she was made to be wrapped in soft things. Anechka simultaneously couldn’t stand to look at her and couldn’t help doing so. It had been worse when Veronika and Misha had been together, of course.

“Ane, I have something interesting for you,” Veronika said. “I can finally talk about it. My team made a breakthrough. A cure for nicotine!”

Anechka said, “Eh, yes?”

“So you’ll be able to quit smoking cigars.”

Anechka said, “That reminds me. I would like to use the lounge.”

“We don’t have the money,” Misha whispered.

Anechka snorted.

“Oh, don’t go yet, Ane.” Veronika grabbed Anechka’s hand; it would have been the work of a second to twist away from her. “I have more to tell you. It was an interesting project. An addiction to nicotine is not like an addiction to anything else. That is, not like an addiction to any other drug we know. For example, if you were to take morphine, your withdrawal symptoms would be much different—you would not be able to delay the onset of withdrawal, for example. But with nicotine, you can wait.”

“Not that long,” Anechka said. “So hurry up.”

“You can wait as long as you need to, with nicotine,” Veronika repeated. “Don’t you see?”

Anechka shrugged.

“It isn’t a true addiction!” Veronika beamed at them.

“I don’t understand,” Anechka said, who was thinking that if she wasn’t addicted to nicotine, her body was certainly good at hiding that fact from her brain.

“To remove an addiction to nicotine involves the emotions. I was thinking about it one day. What does smoking feel like? Well, of course I didn’t know, so I set up a survey to find similarities between smoking and other types of emotional reactions. It was just a hunch. But I was right! It turns out that nicotine addiction feels almost exactly like falling in love!”

“Falling in love,” Misha croaked.

“Falling in love.” Veronika put her hands on her hips. “So, actually, you should never try to quit smoking while you’re falling in love, especially if you take our new drug, which we’re calling Anerosma. Like it? Take this stuff, and poof! it’s over. You could fall in love or start smoking all over again, but why risk it?”

Anechka couldn’t help looking at Misha. He’d been trying to get rid of Veronika for months.

“But, you know, it didn’t seem to affect any of the test subjects who were already deeply, truly in love.” Veronika sighed, put her hands up to her face, and smiled. “So I brought you some.”

“Me?” Anechka said.

“For your smoking. Unless you’re falling in love with someone, of course.” Veronika batted her doelike eyes.

“What if I don’t want to quit smoking?”

“But it’s so bad for you!”

“So is almost getting killed for getting out of your drilling rig during evasive maneuvers, and I don’t see you mixing up drugs for Misha.”

“Pleeeease, Ane?”

Anechka snorted. “All right. One condition.”

“What’s that?”

“You have to take some, too.”

Veronika put her hands in her lap. Her face was relaxed, but her hands were clenched so tightly she must have clawed herself. “But why? I don’t smoke.”

“Scared?” Anechka asked.

“Of what?”

“That you might not be truly in love with someone, that you might only be infatuated. With pretty boy here, for instance.”

Veronika went beet red.

“He doesn’t love you,” Anechka said. “He told you to leave him alone. You can’t even leave him alone when he needs his rest to heal. That isn’t love.”

Veronika bounced to her feet and left the room.

“We haven’t seen the last of her,” Misha croaked. “God, you’re tactful.”

“Stop calling me God.”

“You know what you’re crazy about? God, and the lack thereof.”

“So?”

“So what if this stuff takes away your ability to hate God?”

“I don’t hate God. How can you hate something that doesn’t exist?”

“Hate is an inoculation against infatuation. Against the first stages of love. What if this stuff affects hate as well as love?”

“Then we have quite the revolution on our hands, regardless of what it does to my lack of faith. A world without hate is not this world.”

“Quite.” Misha closed his eyes.

After a few minutes, she left for the smoking lounge and paid for her air. As she smoked, staring “out” the viewscreen toward the surface of Mars, she caught herself thinking about the worm. If she didn’t keep her mouth shut, they’d have quite the revolution on their hands regardless.

Veronika stopped her in the corridor between the guest quarters and the medbay. “I’ll do it.”

“Do what?”

“Take the Anerosma.”

“The what?”

“The anti-smoking drug.”

“I was joking. Leave me alone.”

“I wasn’t.” Veronika pulled out two small vials, about 5 cc each, from a side pocket. Her hand was shaking. “I talked to Misha, and we decided it was for the best.”

Anechka laughed in her face. “You haven’t got the nerve. You wouldn’t know true love if it was standing in front of your face.” She grabbed one of the vials, idly noticing that her own hand was shaking. “What do I do, just drink it?”

“Yes, but—”

Anechka unscrewed the red cap and tossed back the fluid. It didn’t taste like much of anything. It tingled on her tongue but faded quickly. Her pulse went up, and she took a step toward Veronika. She felt blood pumping through her groin. “I—”

Veronika sobbed once, like a hiccup, and fled.

And then it was gone.

Anechka woke up with the steering collar askew in front of her, strapped into the pilot rig of the Uvlechenie.

“Anchor us, Misha,” she said automatically.

There was no answer. She looked over her shoulder; he wasn’t in the drill rig.

“Misha?” She unstrapped herself and pushed herself toward the cargo hold. It wasn’t pressurized. She put her hands up to the scratched view panel and cupped her eyes to see into the darkness. By the glow of the LEDs, it was empty. She was alone.

What was she doing here?

Where, in fact, was she?

She pushed back to the pilot rig and strapped herself back in. With her head settled, she accessed the computer. The Uvlechenie was close to the former (650) 2003 RKN, on the (227) 1996 RDR—the larger asteroid she’d used to block the explosion of the RKN. She grabbed the steering collar and used it adjust the ship more firmly on the surface of the asteroid, a tickle of jets across the surface.

The asteroid quivered. She held her balance, waited until the shaking had settled, and did it again. Again the quivering, peaking at 3.3 on the Richter scale.

What was it?

Anechka blushed. She felt hot, wrong suddenly. She tried to focus her attention but couldn’t. She was embarrassed. Because she was so curious.

Well, what of it?

She stroked the surface again, sweeping her palms flat across, then doubling back for a quick jab.

The shaking was harder this time, 4.1.

So. She’d found the first non-Terran life form in the solar system, and it was ticklish. What was wrong with her? She laughed at herself for the first time she could remember.

She turned off and erased the recording. Then she checked her fuel. With patience, she should be fine for months. Her food stores, with only herself for company, should last at least that long.

She turned off all communications and settled in to wait.

She took to tapping out simple patterns, which the worm would copy. She came up with patterns and had it guess the next item in the sequence, caressing it with her jets if it guessed correctly. She was not thinking about things.

Gradually, however, the effect of the Anerosma wore off, and she found herself getting bored. She ignored the worm’s repeated attempts to communicate and dwelled on how much she hated Veronika and Misha—both of them. She felt herself getting more irritable by the hour.

She turned on the communications. There were thousands of messages for her to sort through; she deleted most of them, especially the ones from her bank saying she was broke and from Misha demanding the return of his ship. She didn’t answer any of them. In the end, she flew back to Eureka a month earlier than she had to. She tried to keep the journey low-cost, but found herself leaning into the rig, pushing her speed higher. It was out there. It was behind her. It was going to get her. It was going to follow her around like a dog. It had gone into her brain and hypnotized her. She had to get so far away that it couldn’t call her back. Ever. She had to get revenge.

(continued on page 2)


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