When Luisa was a kid, growing up in the smog-choked high rises of the city, she dreamed of looking up to the sky and seeing the same constellations and asterisms she read about. She dreamed for it so much that every night, after her mom and abuela went to sleep, she’d sneak up to the rooftops with her brother and peer up into the dark ochre sky, hoping to see just one glimmer of light that wasn’t a passing ship or beacon from a skyscraper. There never was.
Her mother took her obsession as something that would pass, and didn’t pay it any mind, too busy with work to do anything other than indulge her daughter every so often with gifts of books on the stars. Or, on one momentous occasion, a telescope linked with the promise that they would get out of the city to do some real star gazing at some point. It was her abuela that taught her about the asterisms and the stories behind them, about the far off planets at the edges of their galaxy that they’d been discovering since she was a little girl back in the mid-21st century. That they’d been sending ships out to go explore.
Her brother decided not to go to college, choosing instead to travel the world and document every culture he could find with his camera. Luisa went to school for God-knows how many years, and chose to travel the stars instead.
She remembers her first time in space like she remembers her first kiss: her body feeling incredibly warm and light, a pleasant tingle spreading across her face and down her neck, fanning across her skin like blood in capillaries. Stars bloomed under her eyelids and left her feeling dizzy, but this time, she kept her eyes open. This time, the stars are real, and right in front of her.
They’ve been out jetting through the vast emptiness between the stars for years now, she and the crew. Half the journey was spent under stasis, sequestered away in cryonically sealed pods to prevent hypostasis. It was only six years ago that they were released to admire the stellar beauty around them. She got promoted to commander, second only to one person, after four years of hard work, documentation of suitable planets and systems to expand their reach over the cosmos. The crew still calls her Luisa, and just ends up tacking on a ‘ma’am’, almost like an afterthought. She can’t fault them for it. They’ve grown to be like family up here.
Now, she sits quietly in the navigation bay, gazing out through 3 inches of fortified glass into space, run through with spirals of bright orange and magenta. They were sent out to the star system of Gliese 667 to scope out a potentially hospitable planatoid; a hulking blue thing, nearly twice the size of Earth, with a lovely view of the Cat’s Paw Nebula when the light’s right. She remembers hearing about it from her abuela so many years ago, but nothing is quite like the real thing.
The view is absolutely beautiful, and exactly what she craved as a child, but it’s sometimes difficult to remember that such beauty often comes with hidden danger as well. Her sleek, wafer-thin tablet blinks up at her in the low light, almost like a reminder.
A knock echoes behind her, and she turns to see one of the younger officers standing in the entryway. They gesture behind them with an outstretched thumb and she gets up and follows them down the hall without a word. The mood on the ship was melancholy, at best. No one really knows what to say.
“How is he?” she asks after a few minutes. They watch their shoes for a moment before clearing their throat.
“It’s...hard to say. His fever’s gone down a bit, but he can’t keep anything solid down. Throws up immediately. Porter’s got an IV in him now.”
She hums and clutches her tablet closer to her chest.
When they reach the med-bay, she’s greeted with the sight of nearly half of her crew loitering in the hall outside of the main bay doors. They stand immediately as she enters, nodding and muttering quiet ma’am’s and commander’s when she walks by. Porter, their medical officer since the start, meets her at the door and leads her over to the bed where their captain lies prone over the stark white sheets.
Captain Hosuto has been the ship’s captain since its fateful launch from Earth 12 years ago, leading the crew through the vastness of space with a steel-like will and humble heart that endeared him to all of them like a father. Now, his tanned face was a pale, sickly grey that reflected the cold bay lights with a sheen of sweat. His breathing was shallow and rattled in his chest and every so often, a choking cough would make her heart stutter. Especially when she saw the tiny droplets of blood that sprayed the white sheets.
“Captain,” Luisa saluted on instinct. Hosuto waved her off with a great deal of effort, rough hand falling back to the sheets with a thump.
“He hasn’t been able to eat anything solid. Did you hear that? I sent you a message,” Porter went to scrutinize something on the monitor next to the bed. She had dark circles under her eyes that weren’t there a few days ago. “I still can’t identify what he caught, so we can only assume it’s a strain that entered the ship from the outside.”
A week ago, they flew unwittingly into a small asteroid field that left some surface damage on their hull and thrusters. As he always did, Hosuto offered to accompany their head engineer outside the craft to assess the damage and assist with repairs, but something went wrong. A missed step in zero gravity; he flew off course for a moment before colliding heavily with the column of an unright thruster nearby. He was immediately rushed back inside to be repressurized before anything irreversible happened, despite the heavy duty suits. Luisa and everyone on board held their collective breath until he was cleared by Porter. A knock on the helmet didn’t seem too consequential at the time, but later inspection revealed a hairline fracture in the glass visor and a slightly loosened ventilation tube. At the time, Hosuto insisted he was fine, save for a few bruises, but a day later, he was coughing up a lung and running a fever of nearly 102°.
“You’ve done scans? To see if any foreign matter got into his system? Maybe he was introduced to something on the last planetary surface run we did.”
“Nearly a month ago? Luisa--”
She cut Porter off. “Do them again. Maybe a brain scan too, he seems delirious. Maybe a latent concussion from last week is causing the nausea.”
“I’ve done every test in the book since he came down with this bug last week. I did one right after he got out his suit--”
“Do them again.”
Porter sighed and nodded, walking off to get the machines ready. She knew she was being difficult. She knew Porter had checked every possible cause and was just as worried as she was. But this man had grown to be like a father to her, caring and supportive in the way she always dreamt her real one was like, had he not left. She couldn’t just watch him wither away like this.
Luisa stalked out of the med-bay and motioned for rest of the crew to get up. “Porter’s running some more scans, so in the meantime I want everybody to get some rest. Try to eat something and sleep; I’ll keep you posted via network messaging,” She wiggled the tablet under her arm. “I know it’s hard, but we still need to keep this ship functioning and the mission going… for his sake.”
The crew grumbled their assent and wandered off to their respective cabins, save for one; Isaac, a sweet young man who was only 21 when he volunteered for the interstellar program, and one of the only ones who actually goes out of his way to call her the proper title.
“You should get some rest too, commander,” he said. “With the captain out, technically you assume his position since you are the second in command.”
“I need to stay and supervise his recovery,” she insisted.
“I know you haven’t gotten a full night’s sleep since he came down. I can tell,” His eyes were so sympathetic and she hated it. “You won’t do him any good if you’re dead on your feet.”
She opened her mouth to protest, but it got caught in her throat. He was right, of course. She’d barely had 15 hours of sleep in the last week. With a final pitiful, understanding nod, Isaacs walked off and left her in the cold synthetic light of the med-bay. She chose to take his advice and go back to her cabin to try to take a nap. Curled up on her thin cot with the starchy sheets pulled over her head like she used to as a child, she tried to think of one of the stories her abuela would tell her when she had nightmares in the middle of the night. Eventually, after a while, she fell into a fitful sleep and dreamt of the mottled ochre skies of nights in the city.
#
Luisa was startled awake by the abrupt sound of her tablet buzzing and beeping furiously on her bedside table, the screen flashing warningly as it received an urgent call from the med-bay. She was up like a shot, out the door and running down the hall before she even answered.
“Porter?! Qué? What’s going on?”
Onscreen, Porter’s face was flushed and sweaty, hair matted to her forehead. “Something on the brain scan! You need to see this!” The last part she whispered urgently, her voice high-pitched and strained. Within minutes, she reached the med-bay doors, expecting them to automatically open, but came to an abrupt stop when they remained shut. She flashed her ID at the scanner beside the doors and jumped when it flashed a warning yellow. But it wasn’t long before the doors released a pressurized hiss and Porter appeared on the other side and ushered her in. She looked frightened and harried, her normally immaculate braid loose and frizzy.
“Luisa. On the scan...there’s something…”
“What?” Her voice was harsh and too loud for the empty lab. Porter dragged her hand over her face and pulled her over to one of the machines. Behind it, through a wide window, she saw Hosuto laid out over a gurney by the hulking scanner. The room flashed with sickly yellow lights and made him look even gaunter than he was before.
“I was doing the secondary brain scan when I noticed something. And I know that it wasn’t there the last time I did it.” She tapped the screen and pulled up a series of blue on black holographic images: x-rays of Hosuto’s brain. They appeared to be normal.
“These are from last week. Right after he came in from fixing the hull and I checked for a concussion.” Porter swiped her hand and the images shuffled to show another set. “These are from today, not one hour ago.”
She peered at them for a moment before she saw it, and even then she wasn’t sure what she was looking at. A solid white mass sat at the base of Hosuto’s skull, nestled snugly between the cerebellum and the spinal cord. She squinted at it, then squinted at Porter. “What am I looking at? A tumor?”
“That’s what I thought. But after a minute...well,” she let out a shaky breath, “let me show you this.”
Porter pulled up another document that revealed itself to be a recording of the video feed of Hosuto in the MRI. Once it started to play, she scrutinized the little white ball with the attentiveness of a hawk until, about 20 seconds in, she saw something that made her rear back from the screen.
It moved.
She watched in disgust as the white mass seemed to unfurl itself and wiggle around the cranial cavity, tentatively feeling at the soft tissue of the cerebellum.
“What. The fuck. Is that?”
Porter kept staring at the hologram with rapt morbid fascination. “I don’t know. Some sort of parasite, obviously. That’s why I put the lab and the scan bay into quarantine. Like I said, I know for a fact that it wasn’t there last week, and for its size it must’ve taken some time to grow--”
“But that doesn’t make sense,” Luisa insisted. “Where would it have grown? I think the ship’s sensors would have picked up a two inch-long alien worm long before it could have crawled its way into someone.”
“But that’s just it,” Porter turned her steely gaze and looked her right in the eyes. “There’s no signs of entry on Hosuto’s body. No punctures or lacerations, or even residue in the nasal cavity and ear canal--”
“Wait, you think that it crawled into--”
“--so the only feasible way I can figure it got in there,” she continued, ignoring the disgusted outburst, “is that that’s where it gestated.”
“What.” The word was loud and blunt.
“It’s inside the skull, Luisa. It’s not right under the skin, it’s right under the brain.”
“And that’s feasible?!” Her voice turned high pitched and hysteric. “That the captain’s had an alien parasite gestating in his skull for a week?! We still don’t know how the fuck it’s egg or whatever got there in the first place!”
“I actually have an idea, but it’s a tentative one. It’s just… we’ve never seen anything like this ever before. Ever! Even other interstellar exploration crews have never reported anything of this nature--I mean alien lifeforms, sure-- but an alien helminth like this--”
“Porter. Your idea?”
“Right.” She turned and looked at Hosuto on the other side of the glass. “I think it was from the accident last week. When he was outside the ship.”
“In deep space,” Luisa said skeptically. “With no heat or any supportable gases.”
“We’ve never seen anything like this before!” Porter repeated insistently. “We don’t know what kind of lifeform we’re dealing with! Maybe this star system has dormant lifeforms waiting just outside the planet’s atmosphere for something to latch onto! Only when they find something suitable do they become active.”
“A host.” She felt the nauseating feeling of dread bubble up in her stomach.
“Hosuto had some malfunctions with his suit after his little slip-up. One of the ventilation tubes came loose, not enough to compromise the integrity of the whole respiration system, but maybe enough for something to slip through,” Porter’s eyes turned grim and her voice lowered to barely a whisper. “Something like an alien parasite egg.”
“Airborne? And airborne worm?” Just saying it sounded ridiculous.
“Spaceborne?” Porter wondered. “If it is a helminth, maybe it’s such an advanced lifeform that it only needs a single cell to replicate from once it has a proper environment. Like I said, we’ve--”
“Never seen anything like this before, right.” She rubbed her eyes and tried to will away the pounding headache she could feel coming. “Dios mio…”
“Should we tell the rest of the crew?”
She jolted. “No! No… I don’t think so, not yet. To spread news of a possibly hostile alien parasite onboard might cause panic, and with everyone so stressed as it is, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“We don’t know if it’s hostile,” she reasoned, albeit weakly.
“It’s inside his skull, Porter. A worm, inside his skull. We can’t just leave it there.”
“Well what do you want me to do, drill into his skull? In his condition? He might not make it!”
“What else do you suggest?!” she snapped, and Porter blinked at her in surprise. She sighed heavily and shook her head and walked off, leaving Porter to stare at the holograms of the parasite working its way into Hosuto’s brain. When she was in the hall outside the med-bay, she stopped and slumped down the side of the metal wall and stared at her reflection in the meticulously polished floor.
She looked terrible. Her hair was a tangled mess, sticking up in every direction since she never bothered to brush it even before she took that nap. Her eyes were red-rimmed and gaunt, shadowed by dangerously dark circles that made her look 20 years older. She looked like her mother, she realized. After she would come home from a long day of working triple shifts and collapse on the couch and beg her and abuela to make dinner. Her stomach grumbled at the thought of homemade empanadas.
“Ma’am?” A timid voice broke through her memories. She looked up and saw Isaac coming down the hall. “Are you alright?”
“I-- um,” she stuttered, not sure how to respond. She glanced back at the doors of the med-bay and thought of her captain lying prone on the gurney. She prayed that her voice didn’t shake. “Just worried. That’s all.”
He nodded in understanding and joined her against the wall. They sat in a comfortable silence for a while, just appreciating the company.
“What are you doing here?” She finally asked. “Didn’t I tell you to get some rest?”
He chuckled lightly. “I did. Took an hour nap before my stomach woke me up.” Isaacs reached into his uniform pocket and pulled out an opened ration bar, the bits of nuts and dried oats crumbling in his hands. “Want some?”
She accepted his offer and daintily took a chunk of the bar, popping it into her mouth and chewing mechanically. She knew she was hungry, but it just tasted ashy in her mouth, her anxiety ruining the flavor.
“How is the captain? Porter’s tests go okay?”
“Well--”
Luisa cut off suddenly by a loud crash and a scream echoing against the sleek metal walls. She and Isaac were up like a shot, rushing into the lab to find Porter braced behind one of the lab tables and the viewing window of the scan bay shattered, bits of glass shimmering on the floor. Porter shouted at them to get back, but she could only stare at the window, where she saw Hosuto bodily draped over the now empty frame.
He shifted, seemingly trying to work his way into the main lab. Eventually, he dropped over the edge and fell onto the glass-littered floor, rolling over and sitting up and staring her right in the face from 20 feet away.
He was still a pale, sickly grey, the gaunt skin now splattered with bits of red. Blood from the glass shards, still digging into his skin and seeping into his torn johnny gown. His pupils were barely pinpricks, the surrounding irises a jaundiced yellow that was so starkly different from the warm, comforting brown she was used to. Viscous strings of spit dripped out the corner of his mouth and down his chin, splattering on the floor as he shakily moved to stand. Luisa stood stock still as he stood and seemed to survey the room. After a few seconds, those eyes zeroed back in on her and he bared his teeth with a low, threatening growl, and her heart seemed to plummet into her small intestine.
That wasn’t Hosuto.
She faintly heard Porter scream at her again, and felt Isaac pull her back. She went, as if in a trance, unable to take her eyes away from the rabid thing that had taken over her beloved captain.
“What the fuck? What happened to the captain?!” Isaac crouched behind the lab table along with Porter.
“Luisa--” Porter started, hesitant.
“Tell him. Tell me.” She tried her best to snap out of it and steady her voice into something commanding.
“I don’t know.” Porter wheezed. “I was just standing there, looking over the x-rays, when suddenly I glanced up and he was off the table! And standing right in front of the glass, staring at me! God, I don’t know!”
“The parasite,” She muttered, voice suddenly scathing. “That goddamn worm.”
“What?! Parasite?!” Isaac breath stuttered.
“He started punching at the glass. Then he took one of the chairs and just heaved it when that didn’t work. We need to knock him out! We need to get that thing out of him!”
She lifted her head over the edge of the table only to see that Hosuto had taken some of Porter’s glass beakers and vials from a nearby cabinet. He smashed them against the wall, sniffing at the now jagged edges curiously before turning back to catch her eye. Something in those sickly yellow irises sharpened before he started charging at them from across the room.
She yelled for the others to dive out of the way, pushing Isaac’s head down and forcing them away from the oncoming attack. Hosuto crashed into the table, splattering blood and spittle over the stainless steel surface. A grisly crunch reverberated in her ears from his wrist hitting the edge the wrong way, and he was forced to drop one of the broken beakers, but it seemed like he didn’t even notice. He shook it off and swiped at them blindly with the other beaker, an animalistic growl ripping out of his throat.
Porter ran ahead, going for the bay doors and wildly motioning them to hurry. “We can lock him in! Once I close the door I can initiate the emergency back-up quarantine! It releases a strong decontaminant into the bay that should knock him out!”
“Should?”
“What else do you suggest?!” Porter screamed.
The two of them booked it for the door, weaving between lab equipment and gurneys, trying their best not to run into each other in the mad dash to escape. Too late, Isaac knocked into the edge of an outstretched table while turning a corner, tripping and falling behind, and she didn’t see Hosuto’s oncoming mass hit him the side and sent the both of them crashing to the floor.
Her feet stuttered, whipping her head around to follow the mad tumble as Isaacs and Hosuto grappled with each other. “Isaac!”
Their captain had Isaac on his back, hovering over him menacingly while he snapped his jaws in a valiant attempt to rip at his jugular. Isaac struggled to hold him back, a knee at Hosuto’s chest and one hand around his throat, the other gripping a clawed hand while it tried to bring the jagged glass of the beaker closer to his eyes.
“Luisa!” he screamed. “Luisa!”
Her heart beat wildly in her chest as she looked around the room for something to use. Finally, over at the edge of the room, she spotted a heavy looking case, a cylindrical thing that looked to be a first aid field kit. With a final glance back to Isaac’s struggle, she darted over and hefted the cylindrical case over her shoulder, quick to turn back and run over to where Hosuto was continuing his attempt tear into her--into his--crewman.
She lifted up the case, readying it like a baseball bat, and swung the thing at Hosuto’s head. He squealed and scrambled off of Isaac, holding his now bloody head, but he still looked up and bared his teeth, and Luisa cursed her bad aim. She lifted the case again and advanced towards him, her face set with grim determination. He made no move to jump her as she neared, and she hefted the case higher and prepared to--
“Lu--uisaaa…”
She stopped, her arms trembling with the weight of the case held above her head. Her captain stared at her, blood and spit dripping off his chin.
“Luis--Luis--aaa…”
It was a wet and raw thing, not so much said as gargled as blood filled his mouth. Not like the strong lilted voice she was used to. She trembled again, but this time it wasn’t because of exertion. Tears pricked the corners of her eyes and threaten to blur her vision as he said her name again… and again. This was her captain. This was her…father. This was not…
She watched as another drop of blood rolled down the side of his face and onto his torn gown, and how his eyes sharpened as he stared at her. She saw the bright, jaundiced yellow that watched her back, not the warm brown it should be, and she sucked in a sharp breath.
This was not her captain anymore.
She looked over at Porter, who was still hovering by the door. Her face was grim, and slightly guilty, but she gave a firm nod that steeled Luisa’s nerves and pushed her muscles into taking that final swing.
Luisa swung the case down like a hammer, aiming the blunt edge for the base of Hosuto’s skull where she knew that fucking worm was digging into her captain’s brain. There was a grunt, and a sickening crunch accompanied with a wet, thick splatter that she felt hit the underside of her arms. Hosuto stilled, and slumped over against the cold floor.
“Mierda.” She whispered, cold and shaky and nearly reverent. “Mierda. Mierda.”
Isaac picked himself up off the floor and frantically went to wipe away the blood and spit off his face. She dropped the case heavily on the floor and listened to it echo around the bay, along with Isaac’s heavy wheezing, and Porter’s choked off sobs. She felt tears of her own roll down her cheeks.
After a moment of staring down at his once again prone body on the immaculately polished floor, a dark pool growing sluggishly around his head, she stiffly guided the two others out of the bay and into the hall and shut the door. Porter flashed her ID and prepared the emergency decontaminant, though it barely seemed necessary now. They stood under the cold, blinking yellow lights of quarantine, a wrecked group, shaken and sore and still coming to terms with the fact that Hosuto was dead. The man they looked up to for 12 long years was gone within minutes. What were they going to say to the rest of the crew? How were they going to tell their higher ups back home? Who was going to do it? Luisa thought about it for a moment before jolting with the realization. He’s gone, and that left--
Porter wiped her tears and Isaac gave a shaky cough, both turning to her.
“Well…what do we do now, Captain?”