Chapter Text
John’s leg hurt. He'd left his cane outside the dock as it was just too impractical to carry. He had thought he could push through the pain but it was exacerbated by the ugly, mint-green suit that was slightly too big for him. It made him feel like he was trying to walk while wrapped up in heavy curtains. On top of that was the cold. Even through the layers of insulated weave, through computerised plastic that could detect and stopper leaks, through two layers of thermal clothes from his luggage, he could still feel the teeth of the cold. Frost half a foot thick covered the walls and floor of the corridor leading them into the heart of the Orbiter. John’s breath steamed even inside his helmet and his eyes stung.
“This place is a graveyard,” he whispered into his earpiece. They were retracing the footsteps of the yarders from their previous trip. There were long drag trails where Dimmock had been half-carried back to safety.
“Then where are the bodies?” Sally’s voice replied over the radio. She was a few steps ahead, and didn’t look back when she spoke. Anderson was walking backwards, watching their rear.
“What?”
“The bodies,” she repeated. “Lestrade says the Captain’s log put the initial survivor count at three hundred crew and passengers. So where are their bodies?”
“There was a lot of external damage around the top of the ship,” John said. “I saw it when we were approaching. If there was an explosive decompression, a lot of them could have been jettisoned.”
“I don’t think we can fall back on comfortable explanations at this point,” Anderson snorted.
There was a dark spill of shadows up ahead. Sally pointed. “That’s where the floor gave way and Dimmock fell.”
“Looks like we can get around the side if we hang off those pipes,” Anderson hurried ahead to test his weight close to the hole.
“Look at that,” John said quietly. He adjusted his torch down to the floor of the corridor on far side of the hole. “You said Stamford was standing right there when he disappeared?”
“Right there,” Sally nodded, her torchlight mingling with his as they both inspected the scrabbled marks in the frost.
“But there’s no footsteps,” John raised his light to survey the corridor beyond. “There’s no sign he was pulled away, there’s no footprints of him or anything else running away.”
“Yes there is,” Anderson said quietly. Sally and John looked at him and then followed the beam of his torch, up, up and onto the ceiling.
The frost above where Stamford had stood was almost wiped clean with imprints. Upside-down steps shaped like no human foot trailed away down the shaft and vanished around the corner.
“Jesus Tittyfucking Christ,” Donovan whispered, which was more or less what John was thinking.
Anderson made speedy work of clambering around the fringe of the collapse despite the extra weight of his weapon and suit. John told Sally to go ahead so neither of the yarders saw his arm trembling as he hung off the pipe and edged his feet along the tiny skirting of the corridor. He glanced down at one point and saw broken pieces of the walkway far below, through a second smashed corridor floor. The edges of the hole were honeycombed and pocked as if they had rapidly rusted away, but there was no flaking or the ruddy colours of oxidised alloys. In fact, some of the steel floor seemed to have melted. Thinking about this was easier than thinking about how much his shoulder was beginning to shake. At last, he dropped off the skirting onto the solid floor where the yarders stood, almost in the same spot where Stamford had been taken. The three of them hurried forward at a light jog, John limping slightly behind.
As they came around the corner, Donovan threw out her arm and pointed. John saw at once what had caught her attention. There was a series of humps under the frost in the vague shape and size of a prostrate man. The frost couldn’t possibly have spread so quickly since Stamford had disappeared. Perhaps this was one of the bodies whose absence had so alarmed Sally.
John crept forward and wiped a little frost from the head area.
“What is that?” Anderson whispered, as John shot to his feet and stumbled back. Beneath the frost was not a man, definitely not a human being at all. Anderson and Sally both had their guns pointed at the head area, but the creature didn’t shift from where it lay. John knelt down again and wiped more frost away, but detected not the tiniest flicker of movement. There were signs, in fact, that parts of the creature’s lower half had been eaten.
It was nothing John could compare to terrestrial life. It had a skeletal black carapace like an insect, but its top half looked bipedal and dexterous, vaguely humanoid but for a long, eyeless skull that curved back over its shoulders like an endless forehead, almost touching the long protrusions that rose from its shoulder blades. Its mouth was open in a parody of a scream, filled with two rows of silver teeth.
“This is it,” Anderson was muttering. “This is what we came here for. Jesus. Jesus. It’s impossible.”
“Guys?” Lestrade’s voice crackled over their headsets.
Sally jumped and whacked Anderson on the arm when he laughed. “Yes, boss?”
“Molly’s doing another scan for life every minute. Something’s just appeared on her radar, about four hundreds yards ahead of you at a big junction. Now I don’t want you to get excited, but there’s a frequency blip sitting right on top of it that looks like it could be Stamford’s earpiece.”
“Roger that, sir, we’re heading right there.”
Sally stepped forward, shoved John aside and stomped on the creature’s neck as hard as she could.
“What are you doing?” John stood up as she slammed her foot down again and again.
“Finishing the mission,” Sally snapped, as the monster’s head finally parted from its body with a wet crack. Its insides seemed to be dry, mummified by the cold and the desiccating air. Sally dragged a large net bag from the small pack on her back and shoved the head inside with some force, then managed to jam part of it into her pack. She tied the bag to her shoulder straps to keep the hideous trophy from moving and then jerked her thumb at the corridor.
“Let’s find Stamford and get the hell out.”
After two more bends they saw the door to the junction standing open. Beyond was the blackness of a large antechamber. John could imagine it had been a major thoroughfare in the glory days of the Orbiter. Cadets would have marched through in lines, on their way to the gym to keep up their strength on the long journeys across the stars, while technicians would have driven forklifts and mecha suits carrying huge replacement parts for the engines and the gravity generators. Now there was only the sparkle of the frost crusted on the edges of the doorway and the soft thumps of three pairs of footsteps.
Their torchlight skimmed across the far wall of the junction, lighting only a tiny corner of the room. As they stepped through the doorway, Sally pulled a flare from her belt and lit it with a loud hiss. A searing glow filled the antechamber and came back to their eyes as a scene of total carnage.
Fresh blood was splattered from one wall of the room to the other and even on the ceiling, painting the frost a cutting crimson. Pieces of plastikev the same green as the ones they were wearing lay in shreds, none larger than a coaster, too small to even recognise which part of the suit they had come from. An earpiece identical to the one Lestrade had given John as he left the Baker lay near their feet, its flashing green light still flickering to indicate it was picking up their transmission. There was nothing that could be fairly called Stamford’s remains. A few clumps of hair, a cracked piece of vertebrae buried in the swept mounds of frost. The chain from around the doctor’s neck, sans its dog tag.
And in the centre of the bloodiest part of the mess, a figure was crouched right over and sniffing the ground like a cat. It had raised its head at the sound of their approach. As Sally lit the flare, John caught a glimpse of stark blue eyes and a black mess of hair around a very human face.
Sally lifted her weapon. John lurched towards her just as she depressed the trigger.
“Stop!”
He crashed into her, knocking her aim wide just as the hollow-tipped bullets sprayed from the end of her gun and embedded themselves in the far wall of the room. John turned and saw the figure disappearing down the nearest corridor. He forgot his bad leg and bolted after it, almost slipping on the slick of frozen blood in the centre of the room. He heard Sally shouting his name but didn’t slow down, skidding around the corner and crashing off the far wall just in time to see the maintenance duct across the way clatter shut. John dived for it and pulled it open before the figure on the far side could shoot the bolt across.
Wide eyes met his through the faceplate of his helmet. The figure hunched inside the duct was a man of indeterminate age, in nothing but a white T-shirt and what looked like grey sweatpants and tight-laced black boots from an outdated navy uniform.
Before John could speak, the figure twisted down onto its shoulder and one of those boots shot up and slammed into John’s helmet. He was knocked flat on his back, skidding several feet through the frost. Pain shot down his neck as he sat up. The acrylic glass of his faceplate, designed to withstand the heat of the unshielded sun and the pressure of the deepest oceans on earth, was decorated with a spiderweb of white cracks. John fumbled at the clasps and ripped the whole helmet off, staring at it in shock. The air – as Molly had promised – was breathable, though it tasted stale and the dryness made him blink.
He tossed the helmet aside, crawled towards the maintenance duct and pulled it open again. There was a shadow vanishing into the tiny space beyond. John crawled in, pulling the spare torch from his belt and putting it in his mouth. His teeth ached, but he was thankful the casing was plastic or he suspected his lips would be frozen to metal right now. He wriggled on elbows and knees through the repair corridor. It was designed for the use of repair bots and maybe very skinny technicians, certainly not a stout ex-army doctor in a bulky space suit.
At last the space opened into a utilities junction, with long-disused pipes criss-crossing each other and rusted tight against their neighbours. Black boots were disappearing over the top of a ladder hung with icicles, but John dodged a loop of wires hanging from the ceiling and hoisted himself up after the stranger. At the top he found a sturdy walkway covered with a frozen tarpaulin for most of its length. On the far side, another maintenance hatch was just snapping closed.
John stood up at the top of the ladder and scrambled across the walkway. Just before his foot landed on the edge of the tarpaulin, he noticed that the footprints he following had a gap in the middle of the tarpaulin, as if the man he was chasing had leaped clean over it. The image of Dimmock’s smashed ankle flashed through his mind in a millisecond, but his weight was already moving him forward.
“Shit,” said John. His boot touched down on the crusted sheet and carried through into the empty space below.
He twisted as he fell, found the handrail had been torn away, and just managed to throw his arms out to crash the top of his body down onto the sliced edge of the walkway. The wind was knocked out of him, but he clung to the lattice with the tips of his fingers, his legs kicking into empty space. He flung a glance over his shoulder and saw with a stab of horror that below him was a thirty foot drop into thick mist. As the tarpaulin fell into it, it wafted the mist away to reveal a pool of clear liquid, fed by a cobbled-together series of pipes. At the bottom of the pool, John could just see the curled shape of another creature like the one they’d found in the hallway. Then the mist reformed over it and John was left only to imagine what could kill a monster like that and what, subsequently, it would do to him.
His shoulder twinged and the fingers of his left hand began to shudder.
“Help me,” John gasped, to no one but the empty air. And then louder. “Help me!”
He couldn’t hold on. The damn suit, the same stupid suit that was supposed to protect him from depressurisation and oxygen drops, was too heavy. It was dragging him down towards the deadly pool.
There was the clang of metal and a thud as a lithe body landed on the walkway in front of him. John looked up into a white, long face of indeterminable age. The man cocked his head, staring down at John without a sliver of expression in his narrow, blue eyes, and then he reached out and seized John’s shoulders. With some struggling and cursing from John’s side, between them they managed to drag the doctor up to safety.
John crawled to the wall and sat against it, gasping in the freezing air. He was shivering all over. The suit was packed tight around his body, but it was still a lot less effective when he was missing his helmet. He massaged his shoulder, grunting in pain.
The man crawled towards him, looking him over inch by vividly studied inch. He was a young man, John decided, judging by the skin on his thin, bare hands. There were signs of old frostbite scars on those hands, and what looked like small burns peppered one forearm. He wasn’t shivering at all even though he was wearing nothing but single layers of polyester.
“Are you alright?” John asked.
The man’s gaze snapped up.
“I’ve come with a team of yarders,” John said, sitting up a little and touching his own chest. “From Her Majesty’s fleet. I’m a doctor. My name is John Watson.”
The man’s eyes widened a little. He stared at John’s gloved hand and then at his face, his lips parted slightly. There was no mist of breath emerging from his mouth.
Finally he reached out, grabbed John’s wrist and pointed his hand along the broken walkway. “You can go this way,” he said. His voice was low and smooth, totally monotone. “You’re cold, yes?”
“Yes,” John nodded.
“There’s a safe place this way. I sleep there. It’s warm, it’s above the forest rooms. I’ll lead you through the traps.”
John blinked at him. “You,” he looked at the empty space where the tarpaulin had been stretched. “You made that? That was a trap, for those creatures?”
“Yes, for my family,” the man said, standing up. John struggled to rise, and found he only came up to the other man’s nose.
“Your family?”
“They try to eat me, these days,” the man said. Then, for just a moment, his eyes widened with a flicker of emotion. “It’s a liquid sub-zero coolant. I redirect it from the databanks sector through an old petroleum gas pipeline and then recycle the gas back to the condensation facility to maintain the supplies.”
“Do you,” John said, and couldn’t help a laugh.
The man held his gaze, a wrinkle appearing between his brows. “Yes. I just said I do.”
“Do you… do you have a name?”
The man seemed to consider for a moment. “I think that it’s Sherlock.”
“You think?” John frowned. “Why do you think?”
“Because it’s written in my books,” Sherlock said.
John wondered if this moment was just a hallucination in his dying brain as he drowned in the coolant pool.
“Where are the others?” John asked. “The other survivors? Other people?”
The stranger stared at him for almost half a minute. John wondered if he didn’t understand the question. Then he said, “There is me.”
John shook his head.
“Sherlock, I have to go back to the yarders. Those people in the corridor with me, you saw them?”
“Yes. One of them discharged a weapon. That was extremely stupid.”
“Well, I can understand if you don’t like them, but I want you to come back with me. We’re going to go onto another ship. Will you come with me? We can talk about the others there, other humans on board this ship. Come on,” he held out his hand, and the stranger took it without hesitation.
John let go to slide down the ladder and crawl back through the maintenance tunnel to the duct the led into the main corridor. Sherlock climbed out behind him, totally silent.
“I didn’t mean that I don’t like them, John Watson,” Sherlock said, as John picked up his helmet and retrieved the earpiece that had fallen out when he ripped it off. He put it back into his ear and was relieved to hear Lestrade talking to Sally about where he had disappeared. “I meant that it was extremely stupid to make that much noise. My family will have heard it far across the ship.”
---
“That’s it,” Lestrade barked, shoving himself out of the chair where he’d been hunched beside Molly for the last half-hour. “I’m going in there.”
“Captain!” Molly squeaked.
Lestrade raised his hand. “I should have been there from the beginning,” he said. “I’m not leaving them alone.”
Sally and Anderson had just radioed in the discovery of Stamford’s fate and John's chase after what seemed to be a human survivor. He had listened to their pleas for orders, in the rough voices of yarders who refused to admit to any weakness, asking whether they should go after John or get off the ship. Lestrade had hesitated for half a second, and in the silence that followed he imagined that his two best combatants were dead already and knew he couldn’t let another person go down today, not anyone else on this damned, deadly vessel.
“I’m coming in,” he growled over the radio. “Hold your position until you see Doctor Watson or until I reach you.”
He was in the dock before he even heard their assenting replies. He pulled on a suit in twenty seconds and keyed in the code to the armament locker, dragging out a heavy rifle and shoving in a magazine of hollow-tipped bullets. He checked his helmet and opened the airlock.
By the time he had reached the broken deck where Dimmock must have fallen through, he could heard John’s voice returning. “Captain Lestrade,” he called, sounding close to panic. “I’ve found a survivor. There’s someone alive. He’s with me, he’s not hurt.”
“Get out,” Lestrade said. “All of you.”
He stepped back twenty feet, secured his weapon on his back and then sprinted for the edge of the vanished floor. He just barely cleared it, rolling once and then leaping to his feet again and putting on a new burst of speed. A dark shape like a body flashed past him, but he ignored it. He could hear the low conversation of his yarders down the corridor, their voices muffled through their helmets but coming through as a clear echo over his earpiece.
Lestrade came around the corner and saw the three familiar, green suits and a third figure in grey and white. But his attention was grabbed by a shape in the doorway ahead. From the ceiling hung something that was as large as a man, but black and sectioned like a beetle, with long limbs, a huge, extended head carapace, and a thick, serrated tail that scythed back and forth through the air. It crawled like a spider over the top edge of the door while the yarders and the doctor were distracted by something coming from the far side.
“Oh, no you don’t!” Lestrade roared, aimed and opened fire.
If the blast of bullets hadn’t been loud enough to get the attention of the others, the creature’s scream certainly would have. It twisted like an eel and launched itself down towards Lestrade, green ichor streaming from its wounds, and landed on his chest as he was knocked to the ground. For all its agility, it felt as heavy as a mountain, and Lestrade’s ribs didn’t have the strength to pull in a single breath. A sting of pain whose origin he couldn’t yet identify was blossoming in patches across his torso and arms. The creature leaned down. Its mouth opened mere inches from the faceplate of his helmet and he felt pure, white-hot panic rush through his heart as he saw the second set of teeth extending from its throat.
There was a stuttered round of gunfire and the back of the creature’s head exploded. Lestrade rolled and it fell off him, still writhing and slashing with its claws. Donovan and Anderson emptied the rest of their magazines into its body.
The stinging on his body was turning to a sharp burn. On the ground nearby, the mutilated body was sinking into the frost and then beyond as its blood disintegrated the solid metal deck. Lestrade smelled a caustic stench and melting plastic and looked down at his suit. The creature’s green blood was splattered across him, and it had already eaten through the first layers of his suit.
“Sir!” Donovan cried, dashing forward. She yelled at Anderson and John, “Help me! It’s burning, get it off him!”
Two pairs of hands tore at Lestrade’s suit as John wrenched at the clasps of his helmet and knocked it off just before the sizzling acid dripped through the faceplate into his eyes. Lestrade tried to help them, dragging his arms out of the sleeves as Donovan peeled them off, but the pain was rising to a crescendo now and a wave of dizziness swept over him. He grabbed Donovan’s arm with his bare hand as he slid to the ground. The cold air seemed to be eating into his bones.
“It’s all over him—”
“Oh, God—”
“My hands, ah, it’s on my hands—”
A strange, pale face loomed over Lestrade and he felt hands scraping at the agonising burns on his chest.
“What’s he doing?” Anderson barked from somewhere above.
“The frost. He’s using the frost to dab off the blood,” John replied. “Here, Sally, put your hands down here, scrape it off with the frost – try not to get it on the rest of your skin—”
Lestrade gasped for breath, his skin screaming as it stretched. He reached out to grab the bare-skinned arm of the man who was cleaning his wounds. He felt another swell of darkness buffet his consciousness, but he clung to the thought of his mission and his promise to Mycroft. The young man’s face was unfamiliar, but there was something in the coldness of his expression, the sharpness of his features. Lestrade’s babbling thoughts convinced him of what he couldn’t possibly know.
“Mycroft,” he wheezed to the stranger. “Mycroft sent me to find you.”
He felt John and Donovan lift him under his arms and the young man's face vanished from his field of vision as he was set on his feet. Donovan's fingers curled over her burned palms and she had lifted him with her wrists. Anderson had his weapon pointed back towards the far corridor of the junction.
“They’re coming,” said the stranger. “This way is faster.”
Anderson opened his mouth to retort, but John was already tugging Lestrade and Sally down the unknown path. Behind them came the faint click of dozens of prowling claws.
---
John’s leg gave way as they crashed through the door into the dock foyer, Lestrade groaning beside him. He saw Sally pulling the outer airlock closed manually rather than waiting for the hydraulics. As the magnetic clamps kicked in with a hiss like an untied balloon, there was a thud against the outside and Sally leapt away with a gasp. A second bang followed it, and then a third. John watched her back through the second door and pull that closed, wincing as she took hold of the handle with her sore hands.
“Dubugue,” she murmured into her earpiece. “Disengage the dock. Get the Baker away from the 200B, and once we’re far enough away, blast that ship with at least four anaerobic missiles.”
“I need the Captain’s permission—” the pilot crackled in John’s ear.
“Do it, Dubugue!” Lestrade croaked. A few moments later the floor shuddered and there was a screech as the two vessels pulled apart at the tiny metal coupling, as if separating from a kiss. By that time, however, the yarders were already carrying Lestrade to the med bay.
Dimmock was sleeping heavily under the sedation of his painkillers. Molly emerged from her lab with her hands pressed to her mouth, asking what had happened in a cheeping little voice. Donovan shoved into her arms the pack with the monster’s head still poking from the top.
“Here’s your damn samples,” she snarled. “I hope it’s bloody worth it.”
John had no thoughts about samples or the yarders' mission right now. Lestrade’s palour was clammy and bloodless, and his roving gaze told John that the captain’s lucidity was falling away in clumps. John leaned him against Anderson for a moment so he could pull out a second fold-away bed and help Lestrade lie down. He barked for Anderson to get the showerhead over the sink and bring it over, grabbed the scissors off the bench next to the boot he’d cut from Dimmock’s foot and used it to remove the melted remains of Lestrade’s shirt from his chest. The burns were red and blistering already, with patches of raw and bleeding flesh in the worst parts. John directed the flow of the showerhead over the burns, heedless of the water was flowing over his shoes or the mess he was making of the bed. If the Yarder ship was designed like the military vessels John was used to, a drain in the infirmary floor would take the contaminated water to a holding tank for purification or disposal later.
Sherlock appeared at his elbow. In the panic, John had disregarded his presence, but now he remembered the man’s detailed description of the coolant trap. He looked up at the detached face.
“Do you know what this is?” John panted. “This chemical that’s burned him? It was their blood, those bastards’ have it for blood.”
Sherlock glanced at him. The light was back in his eyes. “It’s a peptide-bonded acid that has an unusually high vaporising point but chemical properties similar to hydrofluoric acid,” Sherlock held out one arm and pointed to the small scars scattered across it. “I have always managed to avoid major exposure, so I don't know the effects.”
John hadn’t heard much beyond ‘hydrofluoric acid’. That was very, very bad. But if Sherlock was right, then at least John knew how to minimise the damage. He gave Anderson the showerhead and began to search the med bay’s cabinets until he found Epsom salt and a bottle of calcium chloride solution.
Donovan came through the doorway as John was diluting an IV bag to administer the calcium chloride. She was holding her hands to her chest.
“The 200B has been obliterated,” she said in a dull, exhausted voice. She seemed to be speaking to the room at large, but her gaze sought out John’s face. She glanced down at Lestrade. “Is he going to make it?”
“There’s no way to know exactly what this acid is doing to his body,” John said quietly. “But I’m doing everything I can.”
Donovan nodded. She looked over John’s shoulder and he turned his head to follow her. Sherlock was sitting cross-legged on the bench, examining the labels of pill bottles with what appeared to be unbreakable attention.
“We need to have a meeting, later,” Donovan said cryptically, and slipped away.
---
Lestrade dreamed of the acid storm on LT-5 and Mycroft’s silhouette against the walls of the barracks. The military tribunal sat in a semi-circle of desks. The lightning glinted off a man’s glasses. Mycroft was missing. Mycroft was supposed to step in and save him from the verdict.
“I didn’t,” Lestrade moaned, shuddering in a drug-induced sleep. “I would never. I wouldn’t trick them like that. They were under my command.”
In the dream, they were taking him to be guillotined in a white-tiled bathhouse. When his head rolled off he saw the bleeding stump of his own neck. The blood was yellow-green, and burned the concrete it dripped onto. There was a brass medal sitting under the stump, but it melted as Lestrade watched.
Mycroft had saved his life, with his quiet words about a man named Moriarty, his whispers in the tribunal’s ear. Mycroft had proved Lestrade’s innocence. But even Mycroft hadn’t arrived in time to save his men. Lestrade hated him for that. Lestrade had been their lieutenant, he had been responsible for them, he should have known by some soldier’s instinct that they were being manoeuvred like pawns, known that their computers had been hacked and their maps had been changed. Lestrade should have died beside them, or if not that, he should have served the life sentence the tribunal had wanted for him. Instead, they’d offered him a medal to make up for their mistake. A medal. A medal like a bribe.
In the dream, Lestrade stared at the sky as the lightening cracked and the acid storm came to end him.
---
“What do you remember about other people?” John asked.
Sherlock was sitting on the floor of Molly Hooper’s makeshift laboratory and staring at the wastepaper bin. He had been doing that for about twenty-five minutes. John, perched on Molly’s desk chair across the room, had asked him three questions before this one, and got an answer to none of them. This time, Sherlock stirred and looked over at him.
“You mean, my – our – species?” he asked languidly. He was wearing one of John’s warmest jumpers and a pair of Lestrade’s spare slacks. John had brought him the clothes and convinced him to change out of his paper-thin ones, which he seemed to have worn until they were almost falling off him.
“Yeah.”
“I don't remember other people,” Sherlock turned back to the wastepaper bin. He reached out and took something from it. It was one of the papers from the secrecy contracts, all three of which had been thrown out in the end. He unscrunched the sheet, smoothed it out on his knee, seemed satisfied with something and screwed it up again before he placed it back in the bin.
“You thought everyone else was dead?” John pressed.
“I knew there were dead people. I didn’t remember any of them being alive, so I wasn’t sure if they ever had been,” Sherlock replied. He unfolded his limbs and stood up, roaming over to the desk and beginning to inspect each of the pens in Molly’s mug one by one.
“What’s the first thing you do remember?” John asked quietly.
“There’s no point in remembering that early, I don’t have a time reference,” Sherlock said irritably. He selected a thick, red marker and drew a perfect circle on the back of his hand.
“How did you learn to speak? To read?”
“Computers,” Sherlock said, drawing an even series of diameters around the circle and then holding it up to the lamp to scrutinise the result.
“AI language programs,” John guessed. “And films, and children’s teaching programs. But what about your name?”
“It's in my books,” Sherlock said, still turning his hand slowly in the glow of the lamp, watching the hairs lift up one by one as the heat dried the red ink. “The books were with my mother.”
“Your mother’s body?” John asked softly.
“What? No, of course not,” Sherlock rolled his eyes. “All the bodies looked the same. My mechanical mother.”
“I don’t understand.”
Sherlock then went over to the wall and drew a line with the red vivid, just over three feet from the ground. “This is when I realised I was getting bigger. I began to mark time after this. It was when I learned that I could learn. Before that – there weren’t words, weren’t numbers. No references, useless data,” he shook his head. “After that, I looked for signs, footprints, spit-marks, smells. I learned how my family lived, how they hunted. I collected books and hacked into the ship's databanks. I saw people in pictures and films who looked more like me than my family, I taught myself language until I could understand all they had left behind. Found instruction manuals, figured out how to keep the forest rooms healthy, make sure the food never ran out. How to work machines. I read about the fuel, that the warmth and food and air all relied on the proper maintenance of the fusion core. I read about math in books and worked out how long I could make the fuel last, by shutting down the boring places. I watched things on the computers. Everybody in the movies has other people. I never did. I realised something must have happened and I had been left behind. I found records of the people who used to live on the ship, I thought maybe there would be a record of me. There wasn't. One day I found the machine where I was born. That had records. They had left me behind.”
"The machine where you were born?" John frowned. "Oh. An AGU. You were born on this ship, from an AGU?"
"I looked up charts of child development and tried to account for malnutrition in order to approximate the time of my birth. It fitted with the machine’s data. I knew I was not a passenger, as no passenger was young enough to account for my being on the ship. Therefore, I was born from the machine."
"My God," John whispered. He ran his hand through his hair. It wasn’t possible. It couldn’t be, could it? A child couldn’t grow up completely isolated from human contact and still be so… so sentient?
“Did you see the creatures from the beginning? Those things with the acid blood?” he asked at last.
“Yes,” Sherlock said. “My family. They were always there.”
“Don’t they try to hurt you?” John asked.
“Oh, yes. Often they try to kill me. When I was small, they didn’t try to kill me as much. There were many dead people then and pieces of dead people. My family stored the dead in cold parts of the ship and ate them, and sometimes I would take pieces to eat as well, and my family would chase me away. They didn’t eat the plants like I do. I tried to give them plants, when I was smaller, but they just chased me away. As I got bigger, there were fewer and fewer dead people to eat. My family tried to eat me, very often. I had to get better at hiding, I made the traps to kill them. When I shut off the boring places, made things cold, my family began to sleep, very often. Sometimes they died. I think they were dying of hunger.”
“Starvation,” John said. He could barely draw breath. “It’s called starvation. When you’re dying of hunger.”
“Yes,” Sherlock agreed. “I read that word.”
He looked up suddenly. John turned around to follow his gaze, but he was only looking at a bare patch of the wall.
“You destroyed my home,” Sherlock said, his face and voice totally blank. “All my family will be dead soon, outside of the ship.”
“Sherlock,” John stood up. He took the red marker out of Sherlock’s hand and put it down, rubbing his hands up the impossible man’s arms. “You have a real family. A human family, on Earth. Those creatures were just predators that wanted to hurt you.”
Sherlock stared at him, but if he was going to answer, it was interrupted by the door sliding open.
“Oh!” Molly almost dropped the armful of cloth she was carrying. “Sorry! Should I come back later?”
“Not at all, it’s your lab,” John said. “We’ll go.”
“Ac-tually,” Molly sucked in a sharp breath. “I was sort of hoping Sherlock would help me.”
Sherlock twisted to look at her. The movement was reptilian. Molly smiled nervously. “This is the creature's head,” she explained, coming across to put her package down on top of the workbench. “The one Donovan brought back. I thought you could help me dissect it. If you like. I mean, I need to make detailed observations and maybe you could, I dunno,” Molly clapped her hands together, “help? Since you know these things better than anyone.”
Sherlock’s eyes widened and for the first time since John had encountered him, a smile tugged at his mouth. “Yes,” he said. “I’d like that.”
---
It was four weeks back to Earth on hyperdrive. Despite being down three men, the yarders' sector felt stiflingly overcrowded to Lestrade. Dimmock had taken command for now, and was limping around trying to keep the tension from boiling over. Lestrade knew that the crew was feeling the loss of Stamford even though they'd only known him a few weeks, and the strange young man they'd picked up from the 200B was rapidly wearing out his welcome.
John had moved his belongings up from the general quarters where the rest of the passengers stayed because he was the only one patient enough to deal with Sherlock. John had to teach him even basic social boundaries like not wandering into any room he liked whenever he liked, and not setting up booby traps around the entrance to the tiny dorm he was sleeping in. Locks were no obstacle for him and John had to encourage the others to label every single personal possession they didn't want borrowed ("stolen" seemed like the wrong word for it, since Sherlock had no concept of personal ownership; he had grown up on the ship where everything he saw was up for grabs). It still took four days of John's constant nagging before Sherlock learned that the labels meant "don't touch". Worse still for his popularity on board, he still mostly ignored the crew when they tried to start a conversation with him, yet didn't know when to keep his mouth closed: he observed around breakfast on his first day that Sally had been sleeping in Anderson's bunk, that Molly was synthetic and that Hopkins was the one who had being taking twice his salt ration every day. Sherlock didn't seem to be seeking praise for his observations, and John wondered if he was simply used to talking to aloud to himself.
By the end of day four things were at least starting to settle into a strained routine. In the med bay, Lestrade had been cogent for almost two hours. The burns on his chest hurt like nothing he’d felt before, and he’d once been shot in the arse during his cadet days. He squeezed the synthetic fleece blanket as another throb ran across his skin. He had nevertheless refused morphine. He needed his mental faculties intact.
Sally was sitting on a stool beside his bed, watching the door. For the last hour the two of them had gone over every detail they had learned, from what Lestrade remembered of Mycroft’s stories to all that Sally had seen on board the 200B and everything John had recounted to her of Sherlock’s own testimony. Now they were waiting, and soon enough first Anderson, and then John and Molly arrived in the med bay. Sally had told them they were going to talk about signing the secrecy contracts after all, to appease the higher-ups, but that was something of a smokescreen.
“Right,” Sally said, folding her arms. “Can you shut the door, Molly?”
“Oh, um, okay,” Molly pressed the button beside the handle and the room was closed up with a soft hiss. “What’s going on?”
“It’s about our unexpected guest,” Sally said sharply. “We can’t let him go to Earth.”
Lestrade avoided John’s startled glance in his direction. The doctor frowned, “I thought his brother was on Earth.”
“We’ll need a DNA test to be sure if he really is this Holmes bloke’s brother,” Anderson pointed out.
“This isn’t about whether he has family or not,” Sally said, her hands on her hips. “This is about containing a potential infection. We cannot let him step foot outside of this ship, unless he’s walking into a top-level quarantine centre in orbit.”
“Oh, but I don’t think that’s how it works,” Molly raised her hand. “Sherlock’s studied a lot of victim’s bodies, you see, and combined with the data I got from the 200B’s databanks, I think we can be quite sure the parasitic form gestates for no longer than a few days before explosively chewing its way out of the chest cavity,” Molly illustrated this were an expansive hand gesture and a small giggle. When no else laughed, she cleared her throat and added, “He would have been dead long before now—”
“I’ve heard your theories,” Sally cut her off. “And that’s all very nice, but here’s the thing. We have no clue whether that’s the only way these monsters reproduce. Now that man in there,” Sally jabbed her finger toward the wall that the med bay shared with the temporary lab, “should have been alien dinner before he even learned to walk. How did he survive all those years? Because they let him survive, that’s why.”
“Hang on,” John spluttered. “Once they had no more carrion to feed them, we know they started to go after him. Maybe before that they just didn’t see him as a threat, right Molly?”
Molly chewed the inside of her lip. “From what I’ve seen, and the state of the colonies they massacred… they don’t really, how would you say it, show any mercy. It’s solely self-preservation. They kill and kill until there’s nothing left. They didn’t spare the children on Tatminartok.”
“Don’t you see?” Sally raised her bandaged hands. “Maybe some of them got hungry and desperate, but for most of his life they wanted him alive. He could be a Trojan horse just waiting to spread this thing to Earth and then we’ll end up like those damn colonies, wiped out before we can even start an evacuation.”
John was shaking his head. “Okay, that's just utter nonsense. Molly and I have done every test we have on board, there's no sign Sherlock's infected with one of the parasitic stages of these monsters. Maybe these creatures have some basic intelligence. They might have been aware they needed someone to run the ship, to fix it so the power would last them longer.”
“They’re not that smart,” Sally countered.
“You don’t know that! We don’t know that, do we, Molly?” John insisted, turning to the pathologist.
Molly shrunk under his gaze. “Look,” she mumbled. “How about we find a compromise. You know the Company works closely with the navy’s R&D division, and they have excellent containment facilities in remote locations on Earth.”
“Are you kidding?” John snapped. “You want to hand him over to that sick corporation to be dissected like a specimen?”
“That’s not what I mean—” Molly twisted fingers hands together in front of her.
“Are you programmed to do whatever the company wants? To get them samples no matter what the human cost?”
“No, I swear, I want what’s best for him!” Molly raised her hands.
Lestrade coughed, and the whole room fell silent and looked at him. “Look, we’re yarders and we work for Her Majesty. I’m not taking this kid to a private business for that reason alone. It’s up to the British government what the best course of action is.”
“He’s a human being, not a new toy for the military’s boffins!” John choked out.
“Dr Watson, you are not even officially part of this mission, and I still have the military jurisdiction to arrest you if need be,” Lestrade stared John down until the doctor turned away. He let out a long sigh. “Would the rest of you go entertain yourselves for a while? I’d like to have a conversation with my doctor about pain medication.”
“We haven’t made a decision—” Sally began.
“My decision is that the government will make the decision. Now get up onto the bridge and see if Dubugue needs to be relieved.”
“I can’t fly,” Sally replied, holding up her burned hands.
"Just go find something else to do, all of you,” Lestrade tipped his head back and let out and exasperated groan. “For goodness’ sake, can’t you see I’m still on the verge of death here?”
When he looked back at the room, the door was closing behind Anderson. Only John remained, checking Lestrade’s IV with a look so sour Lestrade was genuinely worried he had a bout of about medical malpractice to look forward to.
“John,” he intoned, and the doctor looked down at him. “You know she’s right. He should never have survived.”
“He’s smart,” John countered. “I think we have no idea yet how smart. He notices things about people that no one else sees—”
“It’s not just that,” Lestrade said, lowering his voice. “You said he was walking around that ship in not so much as a woollen vest. He cracked the glass of your faceplate with one kick. That’s not normal.”
“Where is this going, Captain?” John folded his arms. “What do you want to me to think? How could he possibly be… infected with something that… what? Gives him superhuman strength? How does that make sense?”
Lestrade took a deep breath. “I don’t think it’s an infection. I think it was the AGU.”
John’s brow wrinkled. He shifted his shoulders, shaking his head. “I don’t get it.”
“You know AGUs are illegal these days. You can only get the newer units that gestate an embryo premade in a lab.”
John nodded.
“Do you know why? You’re a doctor. You must.”
“Contamination,” John said quietly. “The original AGUs were designed to combine anyone’s DNA, no matter the parents’ gender, age, fertility, even three or four-parent relationships. But it was too easy for people to tamper with the unit during the pregnancy, for one partner to introduce an illicit lover’s DNA, or people outside the family to put unknown DNA into the mix, creating hybrids,” John shifted from one foot to another. “We had a kid during my residency who was born with severe congenital defects. He died before his fifth birthday. His mum’s ex-partner had broken in and put part of a worm in his AGU. Look, I don’t see what the hell this has to do with Sherlock.”
“Yes you do,” Lestrade said, reaching out and putting his hand on John’s wrist. “These creatures overran the ship. Imagine one of them finding the AGU unit, smelling a little growing meal inside. Suppose it tried to break in, but the casing was too tough. And Molly says the monster's developing tissue is extremely adaptable. Imagine if it left something behind, even spit or a droplet of blood that got into the unit, and forever after the baby smelled a little bit like family—”
“No, that’s nonsense and speculation,” John shook his head, stepping out of the captain’s reach. Lestrade remembered himself pulling away from Mycroft, in a glass office what felt like a very long ago. “You need to rest, Captain you’re not thinking straight,” he backed towards the door, and Lestrade saw his left fist clenching and unclenching, giving a tiny shudder each time.
---
It was three more days before Lestrade could move easily. He limped out of bed to inspect the ship on the third, even though he had to grab doorways and wait for the black spells to pass every few metres. Donovan saw him in the hallway before he got through the first corridor but didn’t force him back to the med bay. He nodded at her and gritted his teeth against the pain as he passed.
He found that Molly’s lab was busier than it had ever been. Sherlock and the pathologist were both hard at work with tubes of the dry blood from the mummified head Donovan retrieved. Lestrade stood in the doorway and watched them mix the powder with drops from black-glassed bottles and touch papers and probes to the mixtures. Sherlock intermittently broke into a monologue of his findings and Molly rushed off to fetch a new reagent or type something quickly into her notes. John arrived a few minutes later with a tray of tea.
“Captain,” he peered at Lestrade from under his brows. “Should you be out of bed?”
“I’m feeling fantastic,” Lestrade said, and then just the effort of stepping out of the doorway to let John through made him wince and clutch his side. John shook his head.
“You can have a walk, but I want you back in the med bay in half an hour,” he said with all the weight of a mother warning her teenage daughter to stay within curfew. He went across to one of the work benches and pushed aside folders and bottles labelled with yellow warning stickers until there as enough empty space to put the tray down.
“What is this?” Sherlock asked, when John held out a steaming mug to him.
“It’s tea,” John said. “I’ve been making it for you for three days. Don’t you remember?”
“Hello, Captain,” Molly said cheerily, peeling off her gloves as she approached him. “How’re the burns?”
“Better,” Lestrade replied with an unconvincing smile.
Across the room, Sherlock took the tea off John and sniffed it. "Oh, yes. I must have deleted the information because it isn't dangerous."
“It’s funny,” Lestrade said to Molly, as they watched Sherlock sip cautiously. John was nodding at him. Sherlock stared. John made an encouraging motion with his hand.
"You say something when someone gives you something, remember?" John prompted.
"Oh," Sherlock thought for a moment. "Thank you."
John beamed at him.
“What's funny?” Molly asked Lestrade.
“Well, he seems like more of a robot than you, don’t he?”
Molly blushed. Lestrade hadn’t even known androids could do that.
“We’ll be home soon,” she mumbled.
“Yeah,” Lestrade said quietly. “Home safe.”
As soon as they were in range, he needed to call Mycroft Holmes.
---
John breathed in deep. The London air reeked of pollution, fast food and humidity. It smelled like home. Across the road, mist flowed from one of the many canals that the rising water levels had necessitated. Now that London was below the sea, only long concrete walls stood between it and a soggy mass grave.
“What do you think?” he asked Sherlock as they stepped out of the spaceflight terminal. The taller man was hunched inside the long black coat that John had procured for him during a two-day stop on the moon before they’d got cheap shuttle tickets back to London. John watched Sherlock take in the sight of the massive city sprawled around them. He could almost see that strange mind whirring, absorbing information that John couldn’t even detect and drawing from it conclusions that no one else could have concocted. Sherlock didn’t answer his question, but then, he still didn’t really get the concept of small talk and usually ignored any prying about his personal opinions. If it wasn’t a fact, Sherlock didn’t bother to voice it.
“Where’s my brother?” he asked after almost a minute of silence.
John checked his watch. “He said he’d be at the east end of the terminal in twenty minutes. Do you want to go look at anything before we—”
“He’s already here,” Sherlock said, turning on his heel and heading east past the taxi stands. John grabbed their meagre bags and hurried after him. There were a dozen cars waiting at the east end reserve parks, at least four of them with drivers standing by the doors. He didn’t see how Sherlock could possibly know that a man he’d never met was among them. But sure enough, when they got close enough to make out faces, a tall man standing by a sleek hybrid BMW raised his hand to them in greeting.
“Mycroft Holmes?” John asked, putting down the bags and shaking the man’s hand when it was offered.
“And you must be John Watson, formally of the fifth Northumberland Ghost Squad,” Mycroft Holmes smiled like a man watching his dinner go to the chopping block. But when he turned to look at Sherlock, the suaveness faltered. “And you call yourself Sherlock,” he said, licking his bottom lip. “I hear you learned that much about yourself without anyone’s help.”
“Yes,” Sherlock said, making no move to shake hands or in any way approach his brother. “I found the books. The ones that said, ‘To Sherlock, From Mycroft’.”
The blood drained from Mycroft's face and he was so clearly struggling to control his features that John wanted to look away out of courtesy, but at the same time couldn’t break his gaze. Mycroft glanced down and adjusted the handle of the umbrella hooked over his arm. When he raised his head, his expression was unperturbed once again.
“I thought about you every day, you know,” he said, and John figured the haughtiness in his tone was all he could do the keep it stable. “Even more since our parents died.”
“Funny,” Sherlock narrowed his eyes and glanced quickly at the sky, “I’m a bit new to a lot of this, but I measured our journey here and it wasn’t quite a twenty-four year round trip.”
Mycroft’s mouth closed in a very sharp line. After a long silence that John found quick physically painful, Mycroft said coolly, “I’d like you to come live we me. I want us to be a family.”
Sherlock smiled coldly. “My family is dead,” he said, turned on his heel and walked away. John watched him go, unable to comprehend the idea of leaving anyone standing there to endure this injury alone.
“Will you be sticking by him, John?” Mycroft asked into the muggy air. John glanced up at him in surprise.
“Er, yes, that’s the plan at this point. Depends what he wants, really, but I think he knows he still needs help adjusting.”
“Good,” Mycroft said. “Lestrade assures me you understand the situation fully.”
“The situation?” John croaked, then cleared his throat.
“You know.” Mycroft’s voice was toneless. “When the time comes, he may be the only one of us who can pick a side. My superiors will not be comfortable until they are absolutely sure which one it is.”
John stared at him. Mycroft smiled back, almost pleasantly this time. “Good day, John. See that you take care of my brother.”
He turned and got into his car without another word. John looked across the crowded car park and saw Sherlock standing at the far barrier, looking out across London again. Maybe waiting for John, maybe just observing the movements and systems of a species with which he was so very unfamiliar.
John hurried to join him either way.