Challenge 307 suspense_horror
Title: Red Dust
Author: ingvild
Characters: Noin, Zechs, Howard
Rating/word count: Teen, 799 words.
Warning: Well, it’s a horror/suspense fic here, guys. Highlight for more specific warning: Biological engineering, rot, and misformed foeti. Pregnant people read at their own risk.
Mars is a place for people to come who wish to be rid of their past, and look towards their future. It brings together people with wildly different backgrounds and unites them in their struggle to create an environment it is possible to live in on a dry planet with no breathable atmosphere.
Unfortunately, it is also a place for people with no scruples.
*****
It started with an anonymous tip delivered to the Preventers Mars’ Headquarters, where there only are three employees – deputy director Lucretia Noin, her second, the mysterious Simon Mallard, and the eternally optimistic forensic-and-science guy, Howard Howards. How he manages to wear a clean Hawaiian shirt every day in an environment mostly consisting of red dust (and even though they wear space suits outside, some always gets on the indoor clothes) is one of the great mysteries of the Mars settlement. It is a very small settlement, and everyone recognizes everyone else.
And if anyone recognizes someone from who they were before they came to Mars, no-one says anything about it. This is a place for new lives. Either way, that Peacecraft guy wouldn’t come here, his hair would never fit in a normal space suit, and Mr. Mallard has short hair as well as Ms. Noin’s complete trust.
But if people can be asked to ignore that one of their current peacekeepers once blew a hole in a planet, they may also ignore other things, things that had been better off not being ignored.
Perhaps that is why it took so long before someone said anything.
No-one knows where they got the uterine replicators from, but it can’t have been too hard – the things are till the most common method of birth in the colonies.
The Mars colony is 18 months old. The normal gestation period of a human foetus is 9 months.
******
The smell is the first thing she notices. It’s the smell of chemicals, first and foremost that of bleach. It is strong enough that she has to put the helmet of her spacesuit back on again just to be able to breathe.
The lab is sterile and lit with harsh lights. They have been on since the lab was abandoned two weeks ago – in fact, the reason anyone realized that something was wrong was the outrageous waste of electricity.
The room is completely bare. Zechs is waving his sensor tool around, but Noin already knows that there is nothing here for them. Something, perhaps a childhood spent watching B-horror-movies, is telling her that their quarry is behind the next door.
She doesn’t want to open it. Every instinct in her is telling her to leave, to grab Zechs and go back home, to drag him off to their bed and have him hold her the entire night. She has to force her legs to continue towards the door to the adjoining room.
This room is not lit. The smell in it strikes at her even through her helmet, which is impossible. Perhaps she is developing some kind of instinct-smell synaesthesia.
She is not a chemist, but even she knows that the results that show up on her sensor screen mean that something is rotting in the room.
Zechs turns on the light switch. She could strike him for it, wants to, but her legs are glued to the floor. She can’t move.
“What the hell is that?” Zechs whispers hoarsely, looking at the rotting mass of flesh on the floor. Noin can’t answer, because in the midst of that mass of flesh, too much to even be an adult, she’s made out a small hand, tiny fingernails still intact.
*****
Howard later tells her that even though the lump of flesh really was a child of only 9 months of age, it had five times the normal set of limbs. The skeletal pieces he’s found fit together too well to be anything but one body.
He also tells her that even though the lab has only been abandoned for three days, it seems like the person responsible dumped the contents of their tubes only right before they left – the remains are decomposing extremely quickly.
On the vidphone with Une, Noin learns that this might have been the next step of the war had it not ended when it did – mad mechanical engineers might have begun to give way to mad biological engineers.
Zechs tries to hold her, to comfort her. She can’t bear to let him touch her. He’s shaken as well, and she’s not being fair, she knows, but he has no idea. No idea at all how she feels right now.
After all, she hasn’t told him yet what she’s found out.
Some types of birth control are cancelled out by prolonged contact with otherwise harmless terraformation chemicals.
Author: ingvild
Characters: Noin, Zechs, Howard
Rating/word count: Teen, 799 words.
Warning: Well, it’s a horror/suspense fic here, guys. Highlight for more specific warning: Biological engineering, rot, and misformed foeti. Pregnant people read at their own risk.
Mars is a place for people to come who wish to be rid of their past, and look towards their future. It brings together people with wildly different backgrounds and unites them in their struggle to create an environment it is possible to live in on a dry planet with no breathable atmosphere.
Unfortunately, it is also a place for people with no scruples.
*****
It started with an anonymous tip delivered to the Preventers Mars’ Headquarters, where there only are three employees – deputy director Lucretia Noin, her second, the mysterious Simon Mallard, and the eternally optimistic forensic-and-science guy, Howard Howards. How he manages to wear a clean Hawaiian shirt every day in an environment mostly consisting of red dust (and even though they wear space suits outside, some always gets on the indoor clothes) is one of the great mysteries of the Mars settlement. It is a very small settlement, and everyone recognizes everyone else.
And if anyone recognizes someone from who they were before they came to Mars, no-one says anything about it. This is a place for new lives. Either way, that Peacecraft guy wouldn’t come here, his hair would never fit in a normal space suit, and Mr. Mallard has short hair as well as Ms. Noin’s complete trust.
But if people can be asked to ignore that one of their current peacekeepers once blew a hole in a planet, they may also ignore other things, things that had been better off not being ignored.
Perhaps that is why it took so long before someone said anything.
No-one knows where they got the uterine replicators from, but it can’t have been too hard – the things are till the most common method of birth in the colonies.
The Mars colony is 18 months old. The normal gestation period of a human foetus is 9 months.
******
The smell is the first thing she notices. It’s the smell of chemicals, first and foremost that of bleach. It is strong enough that she has to put the helmet of her spacesuit back on again just to be able to breathe.
The lab is sterile and lit with harsh lights. They have been on since the lab was abandoned two weeks ago – in fact, the reason anyone realized that something was wrong was the outrageous waste of electricity.
The room is completely bare. Zechs is waving his sensor tool around, but Noin already knows that there is nothing here for them. Something, perhaps a childhood spent watching B-horror-movies, is telling her that their quarry is behind the next door.
She doesn’t want to open it. Every instinct in her is telling her to leave, to grab Zechs and go back home, to drag him off to their bed and have him hold her the entire night. She has to force her legs to continue towards the door to the adjoining room.
This room is not lit. The smell in it strikes at her even through her helmet, which is impossible. Perhaps she is developing some kind of instinct-smell synaesthesia.
She is not a chemist, but even she knows that the results that show up on her sensor screen mean that something is rotting in the room.
Zechs turns on the light switch. She could strike him for it, wants to, but her legs are glued to the floor. She can’t move.
“What the hell is that?” Zechs whispers hoarsely, looking at the rotting mass of flesh on the floor. Noin can’t answer, because in the midst of that mass of flesh, too much to even be an adult, she’s made out a small hand, tiny fingernails still intact.
*****
Howard later tells her that even though the lump of flesh really was a child of only 9 months of age, it had five times the normal set of limbs. The skeletal pieces he’s found fit together too well to be anything but one body.
He also tells her that even though the lab has only been abandoned for three days, it seems like the person responsible dumped the contents of their tubes only right before they left – the remains are decomposing extremely quickly.
On the vidphone with Une, Noin learns that this might have been the next step of the war had it not ended when it did – mad mechanical engineers might have begun to give way to mad biological engineers.
Zechs tries to hold her, to comfort her. She can’t bear to let him touch her. He’s shaken as well, and she’s not being fair, she knows, but he has no idea. No idea at all how she feels right now.
After all, she hasn’t told him yet what she’s found out.
Some types of birth control are cancelled out by prolonged contact with otherwise harmless terraformation chemicals.