Free Starbleached by Chelsea Gaither

down!” as the intern stared in disbelief. Where was Bryan? Where was Dr.
Landry? But his hands were already moving, and he hit the button that locked
the service tunnels out of the military hall.
    The intern had waited. He’d been faithful. Adry hadn’t.
She’d come back without Bryan. She hadn’t kept her word. Oh, God, oh God…she
collapsed, sobbing, and the intern had to lift her up. He guided her towards
the ships, away from Bryan, who was no longer Bryan, who was an erased slate
for the Overseers to rewrite how they wished.
    No. She had to go back. She had to rescue him or die trying.
Twisting in the intern’s grip, she made it two steps before stronger hands
found her. They pulled her backwards into the evac ship and closed the door
behind her. Shawn Miller whispered in her ear, it’s over, Adry. It’s over.
It’s over. The hold was full of her patients. No, no, this wasn’t right.
They shouldn’t see her now. She was the strong one. She was the guide and the
guardian. She was the Valkyrie. She was screaming, and she didn’t think she’d
ever stop. A needle jammed into her neck, and soothing oblivion spread from the
tip. Color bleached out of the world. The void opened within her and she dove
for it willingly. Vision blurred, emotion dulled, she breathed out and closed
her eyes.
    Starbleached, she thought. We’re all starbleached.
     
    *****
     
    Now:
    Cold muck, cold water running past her. It wasn’t so much a
stream as a slightly clearer current in the contaminated water. She collected
samples every fifty feet or so, finding the amoeba in the first hour. It was a
weird one. According to the Overseer’s handheld, it bred well in the human
body, but not so well in the swamp. There must be a place up here, somewhere,
where the amoeba was able to multiply. Some poorly oxygenated hole in the
ground was pointed at the village like the barrel of a gun.
    Water swished around her ankles. The sun was starting to
set. She needed to find it soon, before the swamp nasties came out. If she used
the communicator, the Overseer would come get her. The idea itself was chilling
as hell, but she’d rather deal with the scary alien monster than this planet’s
version of an alligator.
    But you gave it the enzyme formula. Now, it might not
come.
    A light blinked up ahead. The soft, blue/blue blink of
Overseer tech, she thought. Her gut sank. So it was all a play. A game.
Position something upstream to make people sick, show her the ill and dying,
convince her to find the source. Leave her in the swamp to die. Evil, evil son
of a bitch.
     She was so convinced that for a moment she did find
the device she expected. Then black carapace dissolved into slick olive-beige
metal. The blinking light was LED, not phosphorescent substitute. Cyrillic
writing declared it of Russian origin.
    She whistled, feeling weirdly like an ass. Hey, you only
blamed the life-sucking alien for the murder of a whole village. It must be
used to that by now. Pre Jump-drive tech, these devices were sent out to
seed worlds with oxy-rich algae. Five hundred years or so in space, then a
crash landing on an alien world. It sucked to be a terraforming rocket. But
with Jump-drive invented while this thing was still in transit, humans had
gotten here first and set up housekeeping without its input. The main tank was
bashed in and full of a thick, nasty soup. Here was the amoeba breeding ground,
alright. With so much dead, stagnant water inside, the little shit could have
been multiplying inside for years.
    And the tank was the size of Marel Sander’s hold.  Thank
God she had a life sucking alien willing to help her clean it up. Jesus
Christ, she thought. We did this to ourselves.
    The Russians would still have to sterilize everything, of
course, but without this thing creating an infectious plume, the village would
have a chance to recover. She reached for the communicator on her hip…and
froze.
    Footsteps were swishing through the water off to her