His perspective changed the instant his back was turned. Horus now moved for Horne, his hammer raised above his head. When the hammer came crashing down, Horne caught Horus’s meaty wrist, unflinching against the brute force behind it. Horne’s hand glowed, like it surged with energy. The deep blue became darker still until it was almost black. The lack of color crawled into Horus, through his suit. Through his facemask, Delphyne could see veins of black snaking across the big man’s face.
She watched as the mysterious blackness swallowed both Horne and Horus. It had already swallowed Horne. He wasn’t Horne anymore; he was something else. A thing. The blackness crept out from the inside, and he was the blackness. But Horus wasn’t. Not yet.
“Open fire,” she yelled. “Target Horne and open fire!”
Croft and Byron did not hesitate. They leaned from their cover and fired at Horne. Roker nodded, an affirmation to herself that she had assessed the situation and come to the same conclusion. Even Graeme took aim, but he did not fire. Whether he realized that he would have done more harm than good, his hands shaking uncontrollably, or he just couldn’t bring himself to squeeze the trigger, it didn’t matter.
None of it mattered, because Horne did not fall. He didn’t even loosen his grip.
Wilco pulled his blade free from the deck. Shoving off and then igniting his boot thrusters, he swooped around front and slashed across Horne’s arm. The blade sliced through the containment suit and carved a gash through the blue-black skin.
“Energy weapons have no effect,” Roker yelled over the blaster fire.
Horus fell to the deck, free of Horne’s grip but too weakened to move. Croft and Byron dropped their blasters. They moved like wading through waist-deep water, drawing their knives. Wilco slashed again, hitting the same mark, and separated Horne’s arm just past the elbow. Finally reaching the melee, Croft and Byron sunk their blades into Horne’s midsection. The creature that was Horne stumbled back a half-step. He grabbed Croft by the elbow and wrenched his grip free, tossing him away like so much trash. Byron’s grip was tighter, which only earned him a solid fist to the temple. He went limp.
Delphyne pushed off a destroyed control panel, launching herself at Horne like a missile. She slammed into his chest and managed to grab one of the knives still stuck in him. She twisted.
Horne grabbed her as easily as he did the others, lifting her so she was eye to eye with him, staring into his dead face. His skin pulsed, color growing darker by the second, blue turning to black. He closed his fingers around her throat.
Overcome with desperation, she threw her head forward and slammed her facemask into his. They both cracked. She did it again, and the cracks snaked across her vision. She lifted her right foot and drove it through Horne’s facemask, fully exposing him to the oxygen-deprived environment. His breathing didn’t even hasten, if he breathed at all.
“What are you?” she cried. “What do you want?”
“I am the Void. And I want everything.”
The black glow radiated from him. She felt the heat pour from his body and into hers, the energy clogging her throat as black veins climbed up her face.
Horne’s dead face showed the first sign of emotion—surprise. He looked down to see a sword sticking out of his chest. Horne’s grip slackened, and the fire receded from Delphyne’s face. She floated back down to the deck and touched gently, like a feather fallen from a bird in flight. She only just noticed the alert displayed on the inside of her facemask. The artificial gravity and life support in this section of the Forager was declining rapidly.
The sword disappeared from Horne’s chest as Wilco withdrew it. Horne tilted forward. His feet rose from the deck, and he floated in place, suspended forever as this grotesque thing.
11
Memories plagued Hep that night. He woke unrested, a fluttering in his chest that made him fear he was having a heart attack. He checked his vitals as he sat at his desk. Blood pressure normal, the computer said. Heart rate normal. Oxygen levels normal.
A picture of health.
He pressed his palms into his eyes hoping to scrub the sight of the last day from his vision. The sight of his friend and officer, so distraught, so changed. He needed to understand what had happened to Sig. What was happening. Maintaining his quarantine, they moved him to the sickbay for continued observation. Hep monitored the feeds from his cabin after the docs kicked him out and threatened to drug him in order to force sleep.
But it was the memories that haunted him. One memory in particular. A dog he and Wilco took in after a few months on the street. Hep had been insistent on keeping the mutt, childishly so. He still wasn’t attuned to the harshness of their new reality, the day-to-day brutality it took to survive. Wilco, it seemed, was born with that instinct. Hep wasn’t sure he’d ever developed it.
A week into caring for the dog, who they’d never bothered to name, it got sick. Alternating between eating nothing and eating trash didn’t agree with the creature. Hep had begun dividing what little fresh food and water they were able to scrape together and giving a portion to the dog. Wilco was furious when he found out. He kicked Hep’s wrist, knocking the hunk of bread out of his hand as he tried to feed the dog.
“Not damn likely.” Wilco picked up the bread and shoved it in his mouth. “The mutt ain’t keeping us alive. I am. If you’re stupid enough to give away your food, then it’s going in my mouth.”
“He’s starving.”
“So are we.” The fire in Wilco’s eyes had always been terrifying but never more so than those days when survival was a daily uncertainty.
“Okay, I won’t feed him no more. He can scrounge for himself same as us.”
“No.” The finality in Wilco’s voice confused Hep. “If he’s scrounging around us, that’s still food he’s taking out of our mouths. Mutt’s gotta go.”
“Go where? He’s got nowhere to go. Like us.”
Without a word, and before Hep could object, Wilco was on top of the dog. His arm wrapped around the dog’s neck. The creature barely resisted.
His legs felt alien. Lumps of meat sewn onto his body that he could not control, just extra weight for him to lug around. Hep swung them over the side of his bed and let them fall to the floor. He turned on the monitor feed for sickbay. Sig was still pacing his quarantine unit. After scanning the recording, Hep saw that Sig had been pacing all night long, six hours of pacing the same three meters without ever slowing or stopping.
He minimized the feed. Several icons on his monitor blinked, demanding his attention. He checked the daily job log. A few outstanding. Just paperwork that needed finalizing and submitting to wrap up the backlog. Then hammering out the details for the upcoming slate of jobs. They had enough lined up to keep the ship fueled and crew fed for another couple months. And it was work that kept them on the outskirts of the war. Vulture jobs, Byrne called them. Picking at the bones. He never wanted to be in the position where he had to take jobs that brought him into the thick of fighting, scouring active battlefields for drive engines that he could repurpose and sell, collecting weapons that he could sell back to the Navy or Byers. He never wanted to have that active a role in the war. Cleaning up after it was fine with him.
He closed the job log without committing to completing any of the tasks contained within. Only one thing mattered now.
The air in sickbay burned with sterilization agents. It was both the cleanest and most toxic area aboard the ship. But that wasn’t why Hep held his breath as he entered. Lauren Hauser wasn’t a doctor in the technical sense. She had finished medical school, passed all her exams, and collected the required accreditations. But she had trouble operating within the bloated medical establishments of the United Systems’ more developed planets. Also insurance fraud. She stole quite a bit of money. But, in practice, she was as much a doctor as any of the licensed, overpaid, non-disgraced doctors in the Systems.
Hep had found her working out of a back-alley clinic after a run-in with a rival group of salvagers dur
ing a planet-side job. One of them had pulled a knife and saw fit to insert it in Sigurd’s shoulder. She patched him up and, in exchange for a fee, negotiated a permanent position aboard the Fair Wind for as long as she deemed fit. No contract. She could leave whenever she wanted. She’d been the crew doc for going on two years now. She was in her early fifties and her skin sagged slightly around her eyes, making her appear tired most of the time, but her demeanor quickly dispelled that assumption. Despite her often gruff nature, she had a nurturing side that came out when it was needed.
“Any news?” Hep asked as he approached Hauser, his eyes fixed forward.
She threw her arms up. “I have no idea. I couldn’t tell you what I’m even looking at. He’s free of biological contaminants. Nothing fungal or viral.”
“So he’s not contagious?”
Hauser shrugged. “Not in those ways, at least. But there’s something going on inside him that I don’t understand. Until I do, I don’t feel comfortable releasing him from quarantine.” She raised her tablet for Hep to see, though he had no clue what he was looking at—graphs and real-time monitoring of what looked like vital signs. “Look here.” She pointed to a set of wavy lines, overlaid, fluctuating and crisscrossing at random intervals. “These two lines should be the same. They’re the XO’s energy signature, his unique biosignature. The blue one I took when I did initial physical exams. The red line is his current biosignature.”
Hep nodded like he knew what any of that meant.
“No person’s biosignature should change to that degree. They should remain largely the same throughout the entirety of their lives, accounting only for the degradation of the body as it ages, and even then, it only changes by degrees. This here, this looks like an entirely new signature. Like from an entirely different person.”
“You’re saying Sig is a different person now?”
Hauser threw her hands up yet again. “I’m saying I have absolutely no clue what in all the hells of the cosmos is happening to that man. I’ve never seen anything like it. No one has ever seen anything like it.”
A lab tech called Philips approached hesitantly, his knuckles white, squeezing the edges of his tablet. “Sir? He’s asking to speak with you.”
Hep looked to Hauser for guidance, but she offered none. He relented, sensing no excuse for avoidance was forthcoming. Turning to face the quarantine chamber, it was as though Sig already knew his response. He stood, no longer pacing, and faced Hep, his feet shoulder width apart, hands behind his back, like a soldier at ease.
Sig hadn’t considered himself a soldier in years, not since leaving the Royal Blue, maybe even before that, during the final days of sailing under the Navy flag. His tenure as Chief Security Officer under Captain Drummond Bayne did not end well, and it had left him bitter, disillusioned. He’d committed his life to a purpose that he no longer believed in because the man to whom he pledged loyalty twisted it. To see Sig adopt the posture of a soldier now cast a looming shadow.
“Sig,” Hep said as he approached. “How are you?”
“I need to go to Central,” Sig answered. His voice was flat and straightforward.
Hep caught a chuckle in his throat before it became of full-blown laugh. It died as he noticed Sig’s humorless face staring back at him. “You’re serious? We aren’t exactly welcome in Central.”
“Yes,” Sig said. “Colonel Tirseer would likely have us arrested, or, more likely, if this one’s memories are accurate, she would have us assassinated to eliminate us without possibility of public spectacle.”
Hep went cold. “This one?”
“What?” Sig’s face changed, a subtle, yet monumental change. The muscles in his jaw relaxed. He looked tired, not like a statue. “When am I getting out of here, Cap’?”
The return of the man he knew did nothing to ease the frigid feeling growing in Hep’s chest. “We’re still running tests.”
Sig pressed his palms against his temples. “Don’t know how much longer I can take it in here. I feel like a rat in a cage. Doctors poking at me. I just want to get back to work, you know? We’ve got a full slate of jobs lined up.”
“You mean, after you go to Central?”
Sig looked at Hep like he was crazy. “Central? The hell would we go there for? I’d just be trading one cell for another. If Tirseer didn’t slap a noose around my neck first.” He stumbled over his words for a moment, like he thought about saying something and chose not to. “No, I’ve got no reason to go back to Central.”
Hep looked back at Hauser, who was looking on in equal astonishment. She took the look as more an order than invitation and moved to Hep’s side. “But you just asked to go there,” Hep said.
Sig scoffed. Then he tensed, like he felt threatened. He squeezed his temples again. “No, that’s not right. I wouldn’t.”
Hauser showed Sig the recording on her tablet.
Sig fell back a few paces, like he’d been punched. “I don’t—don’t remember that. I didn’t…” He stared off, like he was looking at a fixed point far away.
“I need to know what happened in there, Sig.” Hep’s voice brought Sig back. “I need to understand how you went in, and then came out like this. Maybe if we know that, maybe we can help.”
Sig ran his fingers through his hair like he was trying to pull it all out. “I don’t know what happened. I was flying. I remember getting into the thick of the field, a dense cluster of rock. There was some light.” His eyes went wide. “I lost control of the ship.”
“You crashed?”
“No. I didn’t just lose control. Something took control.”
Hep cast a curious glance at Hauser. “There weren’t any other ships in the area. No satellites or tech signatures. Nothing that could’ve hacked the puddle jumper. Unless there’s something we’re not seeing. The Black Hole signal. Something copied it. Transmitted it.”
Sig’s eyes went wide with a manic terror.
“Did you find the source?”
Sig grew agitated. He started to pace. “I’m just telling you what happened,” Sig said, his voice getting tight. “The ship went dead, and the—”
“I thought you said it was taken over,” Hep interrupted. “No one could have hacked the ship if it was dead.”
“I never said anyone hacked it. The controls went dead. Electronics were totally fried. I was dead in the water. And then something…grabbed the ship.”
Hep exchanged another glance with Hauser, this one heavy with darker implications.
Sig slammed on the glass wall of the quarantine chamber. “I’m not crazy.”
Hep started and jumped back. “Easy. I didn’t say you were.”
“You don’t think I see how you look at me? You don’t think I know I sound crazy? Something grabs hold of my dead ship, steers me through a perfectly constructed maze of rock, and then…nothing. It’s blank. I don’t remember anything else until I came to back here. In this cage.” He hit the wall again.
Techs swarmed the chamber. They readied the sedation gas. Hep waved them off. “What do you mean, a maze?”
“The rock, it was arranged. Too neat to be random. Like a pattern. Like it was arranged.”
Hep fell away from the sickbay and sank into his own world consisting of just himself and his thoughts. A swarming maelstrom of data that slowly formed into a coherent thought.
A pattern. Arranged. Intention. Intelligence.
He snapped back to the moment. “Sig, you need to remember more. I need to know what happened after it took your ship.”
“I don’t remember.”
“You need to try.”
Sig punched the glass. “I don’t remember!” His eyes went dead. He became a statue again, a carving of the man he once was. “Take me to Central, Captain Montaine. I must reach Central.” His voice was cold but forceful. It sent the ice in Hep’s heart through the rest of his body.
He stepped away the quarantine chamber, unable to look away from Sig. He startled when he felt a hand on his elbow.<
br />
“Captain,” Hauser whispered in his ear. She guided him toward the door and out of sickbay. She still whispered even when they were alone in the hall. “I am now prepared to throw in the towel on this. This is way beyond me.”
“You’re just giving up on him?”
“I’m saying I can run all the medical tests you want, but I am not going to find a solution to this problem. Hell, I doubt I could even identify what the problem is. That… Whatever it is in there, that’s not some contaminant or a Deep Black flu we’ve never identified, that was—well, that was some next level weird. The way he changed. Like he became a wholly different person. That’s not something I know anything about.”
“So, what, we just space him? We kick the XO out the airlock and keep on going?”
She slapped him across the shoulder. “Stop acting like such a damn child.”
Hep’s face burned hot. “Okay, so we need to find someone who knows more about…what?”
Before Hauser could attempt an answer, Akari pinged Hep’s comm. “Captain to the bridge.”
“I’m a bit busy, Akari. Can it wait?”
“A sizable fleet of Byers ships is moving rapidly to intercept us, sir.”
Hep wanted to melt through the floor.
“I don’t know anything about any of that either,” Hauser said. “But I know someone who does. And so do you.”
He knew immediately what she meant, though that didn’t make him feel any better. He wanted to resist, but he knew that he had no options. Sig. The Byers fleet. He was in over his head. He needed someone to pull his head above water. “On my way,” Hep said to Akari.
The entirety of the bridge tensed when Hep entered. They all tried to speak at once, but Hep silence them with a yell. “Akari, what’s our status?”
“The Byers fleet will intercept us in ten minutes, sir. They are mid-jump right now, so I can’t clock exactly how many and what type of ships, but it’s at least four. And one of them is a destroyer. If we do not want to engage them, which I must advise would be absolutely foolish and suicidal, then we must leave now.”
The Deep Black Space Opera Boxed Set Page 44