Uvlechenie by DeAnna Knippling

Anechka docked Misha’s ship, expecting to be arrested. When she disembarked, a dockworker bumped into her, and she scowled at him.

“Where were you?” a voice asked from behind her.

She turned, raising her fists. “Back off.”

It was Misha. She took a few steps away from him.

“Where were you? You owe me at least that much. It’s my ship.”

Anechka’s eyes filled with tears. She felt mad. She lowered her fists and ran down the corridor. She knew it wouldn’t do any good. She was on a space station. Where could she go?

She’d be fine in a few days. The more the drug wore off, the better off she’d be. It was making her irrational.

She was opening the door to Misha’s room, seeing them together. It didn’t bother her, seeing Veronika. It was Misha that bothered her, the mindless, eager look on his face. His weakness.

And then the worm had taken over her mind. What? For company? Because it could?

She had to destroy it. Before it could control anyone else.

She stopped running when she reached the smoking lounge. The smell was familiar, but didn’t set her to craving a cigar. She palmed the door lock, and it let her in, more out of habit than out of any reflection of her credit score. The door shut behind her.

She looked around. The smoke was actually quite pretty, both as it swirled from the patrons’ cigars and as it gathered in a haze that caressed the ceiling.

She didn’t see anyone she could use until Dow waved at her from the other side of the room. Dow was a trader who had been hitting on her for years. A nice enough woman, but unappealing. Had the credits she needed, though.

“Anechka!” Dow said. “How are you? You disappeared for a few months. Everyone’s been wondering what happened to you.”

“I need a job, Dow. Know of anything?”

Dow’s eyebrows went up. She gestured with her cigarette. “Misha?”

“I can’t take the thing with Veronika anymore.”

“You should give up on that trollop,” Dow said. “She’d never do good by you.”

“I don’t know what I ever saw in her.”

“You could always work for me.”

“I’d like that.”

“What about Misha?”

“Who cares?”

Dow nodded. Her rings sparkled on her fingers. “I know how that is.”

Anechka wasn’t sure what they were talking about anymore.

“Want a cigarette? You must be broke. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you without your cigars. Even when you couldn’t smoke them.”

Anechka said, “I’m trying to quit.”

“Are you feeling all right?”

“No.” And then, embarrassingly, she burst into tears again. She grabbed a napkin from Dow’s table and wiped her eyes, wadded up the napkin, and threw it in the recycle bin.

Dow cleared her throat. “Behind you.”

Anechka scowled. It was Veronika.

“Did you come running back to all your old addictions when the drug wore off? Why couldn’t you leave Misha alone?” Veronika, her sweet, unforgettable angel’s face still beautiful, threw herself at Anechka, clawing at her face.

Anechka turned to the side, but not fast enough, and a concealed blade slid down her cheek. Somebody gasped.

Anechka, finally in her element, grabbed Veronika’s wrist and made her drop the razor, then knocked her on her ass. “You crazy bitch.”

“Stay away from Misha!”

“He’s the one who found me! He wanted to know why I stole his ship! Or isn’t that reasonable enough for you?”

“Stay away from him!”

“What? Afraid I’ll steal him? Why don’t you watch him instead of me? It’s not like he’s the faithful type.”

“I love him!”

“You liar. I took your drug. You didn’t. You still won’t. You’re a craven little dog, master, master, pay attention to me! Master, master, master!”

Anechka kicked Veronika hard in the short ribs, one kick for every time she said the word master. “And to think I wanted you.” She leaned over, grabbed Veronika by her long, silky brown hair, and said, “Thank you for killing my infatuation with you. Thank you.” She let go of Veronika’s hair, and her head hit the floor with a thump.

Veronika curled up in a ball and started crying.

Anechka looked back at Dow, but Dow was gone. So much for that.

Once again, Anechka expected arrest, and once again, nothing happened. She had her face stitched up, and that was that.

She waited near Veronika’s quarters. Rumors were starting to get out about the Anerosma, both from their fight in the smoking lounge and from her test subjects, NDAs be damned.

Space. It was the biggest small town in the universe.

Veronika came down the corridor with a box of papers. Anechka stepped out from her neighbor’s doorway and said, “Veronika.”

Veronika tossed the box of papers at Anechka and ran down the hallway.

“You started it,” Anechka called. After a few minutes, she picked up the papers and put them back in the box. Papers. Who printed on papers anymore?

Veronika returned a minute later. “You give those back!”

Anechka dropped the box on the floor in front of her. “I want some Anerosma.”

“What?”

“I want some—”

“I heard you; I just don’t understand.” Veronika babbled for a few minutes about everything she didn’t understand.

Anechka interrupted her. “I’m going back into space. One of the things it does is keep you from noticing how bored and crazy you’re getting. I’m leaving. Get it?”

“Oh.”

Veronika unlocked her door with her thumbprint, carried the crate inside, and returned with a rack of vials, five by five, with only three missing. “Sure, take it. I have to get rid of it.”

“Get rid of it?”

“It doesn’t work.”

Anechka said, “Of course it works.”

“It doesn’t work, savvy? The company decided it would cost too much to fight the Ministry.”

“Oh. Yeah. Okay.”

Veronika handed her the rack of vials, then covered them with a napkin. “Try to be discreet. You’re really leaving?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s a relief.” Veronika closed her eyes and leaned forward. “Goodbye kiss.”

Anechka drew back, shocked.

“I guess not. Bye!” Veronika slapped the door latch and waved as the door closed between them.

Anechka tried the lock on the Uvlechenie. It still opened for her palmprint, which puzzled her. She stowed the Anerosma in a storage compartment on the pressurized side and booted up the system.

The Uvlechenie was fully fueled, fully stocked, ready to go. All she had to do was figure out whether Misha had told the station not to release on her orders. She knew a couple of people in Control; too bad she didn’t have any cash for persuasion. Oh, well. She’d sleep with them if she had to. She’d been keeping herself off the market for just such an occasion; according to gossip, bedding Anechka rated almost as high as getting your hands on a virgin.

My body is a credit score, she thought.

She shut down and locked the door behind her.

Misha was running down the hallway toward her, shoving technicians and their ever-present carts out of the way. She wanted to smile, but she was too sick at heart to allow herself the luxury.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he snarled.

“I was going to steal your ship,” she said.

“Why?”

She shook her head. “I’m not talking to you about this in the corridor.”

Misha palmed open the door of the Uvlechenie and pushed her inside. He closed the door as she untangled herself from her rig. “Talk.”

Anechka booted the system.

“What are you doing?”

She checked the comms; Eureka had automatically connected them with a half-dozen distress and other monitoring channels. If she had a month, she could figure out how to turn them off.

She started to climb into the pilot rig. Misha grabbed her arm; she jerked it away.

“What are you doing?”

She said, “We’re still being monitored.”

“So?”

“We’re still being monitored.” She climbed into the rig. This time he let her.

He went through the co-pilot checks as she requested permission to leave the station with intention to head back out to the asteroid belt, back in six months, etc.

Misha hadn’t removed her permissions; she could have left without him.

She piloted the ship away from the station and ran for a few internal miles to work out her kinks, but didn’t let the ship build up external speed.

“Now tell me what you’re doing,” Misha said.

“It wasn’t a gas leak,” Anechka said, jogging. “It was an egg.”

“An egg-splosion?”

“No. The entire asteroid had been hollowed out, filled with a worm. An egg.”

“Zavali yebalo.”

She shrugged, putting a shudder through the ship. “When I drank the Anerosma—”

“What?”

“Veronika came to me and swore she would drink it if I did. So I did. I thought you might be able to get rid of her for once and for all. But she ran off like the coward she is.”

Misha cursed under his breath. “Why?”

“It’s complicated.”

Misha didn’t answer, and she was fine with never saying another word. Finally he said, “She came to me and said she’d drunk the stuff herself, and her feelings hadn’t changed. When you came in—I’m sorry, Anechka. I know she’s bad for me. But I can’t seem to get her out of my head.”

Anechka laughed. “Either I want her, or I hate her. Now that the drug has worn off, I hate her. But I know what that means now. You’re right. I’m just trying not to want her.”

Misha said, “But that’s not what we were talking about. You made first contact with an alien? What did you do, kill it?”

“I ran away,” Anechka said. “And when I ran away from you, I ended up back there again. It took over my mind, Misha. I played with it like a puppy for months, and then it let me go when the Anerosma wore off.”

“So what are we doing here?”

“We’re going to kill it.”

“So it doesn’t cut into profits? That’s cynical.”

“No. So it doesn’t hurt anyone else.”

“How did it hurt you?”

She fluttered her fingers. It had seemed so obvious until he asked her. “It made me stay here and play with it. It made me.”

Misha said, “Maybe it was meant to be, you finding the first intrasolar alien.”

Anechka snorted. “Hardly. If they’re so easy to find, they must have been found before. And killed.”

“That’s sad.”

“Let’s take it back to the station, then, and have it make all the inhabitants come out and play. Think it understands about pressure suits?”

“It’s still sad.”

She looked over her shoulder at him. “Go to sleep, Misha. I will wake you when we reach the alien.”

Misha sighed, leaned back in his rig, and flipped a few switches, dimming the lights. “I hate sleeping in this thing. No matter how many times I try to set it for ‘feather bed,’ it always shifts back into exercise mode and I bounce around. I swear this thing is so sensitive that I can feel you breathing.”

Anechka held her breath, then let it out in rapid pants. The ship twitched with her as she wiggled a foot along with her breath.

“Ha, ha,” Misha said. “It’s good to be back—in the ship.”

Anechka smiled without smiling and went back to the controls. The next time she looked, he was asleep.

The worm was easy enough to find; it was inside the same asteroid she’d left it in, (227) 1996 RDR.

“Is it trying to take over your mind?” Misha asked.

“I don’t think so, but I haven’t taken the Anerosma.” She settled the ship onto the asteroid. Despite what she’d just said, she could feel a twinge in her guts. She knew where the alien was, because she knew, not because the ship log had told her.

Her hands pressed down on the steering collar, and she dragged her fingers across the surface.

The asteroid shuddered as she tickled it with the jets. It would be over in minutes, it wouldn’t know what hit it.

“What are you doing?” Misha asked.

She ignored him as the asteroid shook out a pattern. It was one she knew, and she was afraid she was never going to be able to figure it out. She double-checked that the ship wasn’t making a recording.

“Anchor the ship,” she said.

“It almost killed us last time,” Misha said. “I don’t think we should.”

“Zhopa, what did you think we were out here to do? Pat it on the head and give it a biscuit?”

Misha sighed. “Anechka—”

“What did you come out here for? To try to talk me out of it?”

“I just think you should—you should see your face, Anechka. Like you’re killing your grandmother.”

“You can’t see my face. You can only see the back of my head.”

Misha cleared his throat. When she looked back, he was pointing at something on the ceiling in front of her. A mirror. Damn him, how long had that been up there?

“You don’t want to kill that thing,” he said.

“It brainwashed me!”

“You brought all that Anerosma for a reason, Anechka. I think you should use it.”

“I don’t know what I brought it for. It was a mistake.”

Anechka woke up with drool clinging to the side of her mouth, slumped over the steering collar.

“You bastard,” she said. But Misha was asleep.

She turned off the rig and slowly unstrapped herself. The fasteners made a ripping sound as she tugged them free, but Misha was out good.

She pushed away from the rig as slowly as she could, a bare touch.

As she got closer to Misha, she noticed his eyes twitching under their lids. His face clenched, unclenched. His mouth opened, and he moaned. If he was trying to say something, she didn’t know what it was.

She touched him and said, “It’s just a nightmare. Don’t let it control you.”

A fat tear rolled down the side of his face. She touched it and started to drift away from him. He tried to talk again, but she couldn’t understand.

She bounced herself around the ship until she was in front of his control panel, disabled his controls, and assigned them a password. Then she transferred the drill rig functions and climbed back into her rig.

She activated the rig and lowered the drill. Her stomach was quivering. “You can’t do this to him,” she said. “Myself, I am nothing. But you cannot do this to him. No matter how much you deserve to live, to be recognized.”

The drill bit in, and Misha jerked awake. “What are you doing?”

“I’m killing the alien.” She was sobbing now, tears flying into the walls, into the electronics, into her ears.

“You can’t!”

“It was controlling you while you slept.”

The drill sank into the rock, drilling down harder. Anechka found herself hoping the drill would reach its extension before it hurt the alien and forced herself to think of something else. It was worming its way into her mind again.

Then the ship wrenched against the drill so hard that it snapped off. The Uvlechenie tumbled into space.

Anechka looked over her shoulder. Misha said, “It wasn’t controlling me.” He had the cover of the emergency button in his hand.

“You—” she growled. “What have you done?”

“It wasn’t hurting me.”

“You took the Anerosma, didn’t you? It took over your mind.”

“No.”

“You were—it was—”

“I was dreaming about you finding me with Veronika. It was a nightmare. That was all.”

Anechka slumped in the rig. A warning buzzer sounded, and she jerked her chin to turn off her access to the controls.

“What’s the password?”

She dangled in her straps. “Just ‘Misha.’” She rolled backward to face him. He was upside down to her, which made her smile. She found she could afford such a thing as a smile, for the moment at least.

Misha turned on his controls and assigned himself the pilot function, bringing the ship back under control. “Don’t you understand what a miracle this is?”

“No,” Anechka said, truthfully. “But if you say it is, then it is.”

“Don’t patronize me.”

“Do I sound like I’m patronizing you? But don’t accuse me of believing in your sacred space ghost, or I will.”

Misha turned off his rig and unstrapped himself. He twisted around until he had aligned with her, then grabbed the straps of her rig. It was either a thrill of anticipation or the vibration of the elastic cords, but she was shaking either way.

“Thank you for stopping me,” she said.

He brushed his hands across the back of her head and kissed her, then pulled open the fasteners on her straps—and let her out.


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