by Anna Gaffey
He stepped through the pools of shadow and deteriorating light, wishing for a guide, an infallible dream-Con to follow. He looked back to the pod—scarcely visible through the growing swathe of branches he’d put between them—but the real Con was nowhere to be seen. Likely he’d climbed back inside the pod.
The trees drifted back and forth. Jake had a surge of terrified déjà vu, and the unpleasant thought that he might have been unwise to disdain Con’s company. No, you’re okay. If the trees turned triffid, Con wouldn’t be able to save you, anyway, not even with ten fryguns or bazookas, right? Ease. Ease. Ease.
He chanted it to himself along with each step forward, an inexorable mantra of feet and mind. It matched the throb of the steadily growing pull in his head.
A patch of vague light glowed in the overhang of green leafiness, revealing an opening through a snarl of spindly black branches. Without hesitation, Jake plunged into the brush. Brambles caught at his sleeves and his hands, scraped his skin with long welts, but a few shoves and he was through and clear, out of the trees and in the open.
As he blinked and tried to make sense of his surroundings, a thrum rushed into his feet, up his legs. What was that? The tablet gave an electronic squawk and burred in his hands. His eyes adjusted, and Jake realized he had arrived.
The foundation stones jutted up from the grass before him like broken teeth, haphazard and rocky throughout the entire clearing. His dream landscape. The source of Santos’ jittery light emanations. Home.
He ignored that creepy thought and played with the scanning interface. It showed an incredible spread of the weird, shivery light: the gleaming spot ranged over the whole area. Jake tilted the tablet down and watched as, on the screen, the glow spread under his feet. Something funny fizzed around the edges of the tablet. He tried holding it a different way, and the effect disappeared. Tilting it back up revealed only faded grass, pebbles, and dark, cold soil to the naked eye.
It was getting difficult to see anything. The light from Eos had faded into a misty greenish twilight. The clouds had gone, and the wide sky above him was already salted with stars, one in particular rather close, streaking leisurely across the upper horizon. The station. Gods, but it was moving fast.
Just for fun, he calculated a collision guess in his head. Two hours at the most, from the time of Santos’ hail, but it’d probably be less. Figuring where it would hit for certain (even with Santos’ relayed estimate) required too many unknown variables. Considering their current flammable chemical and fuel cell payload, it would be a bright blast. An impact event wouldn’t involve the whole of Selas, much less destabilize it. But he’d still want to leave before the hit.
They would, his mind corrected. He ignored the thought.
Rrrrrrrrr.
The tablet was still burring in his hands like a trapped bee. Jake dialed down the readout and tried to parse the noise, his nerves twanging at the breeze that quaked the shadowy grass.
Carmichael and Nat and Boxhill were absent. Of course they are, he told himself. There’s no one here but you. Keep it together. This wasn’t his dream. And the terrain was mercifully clear of bodies, but Jake could identify this patch of Selas as if he’d stepped into his own footprints. It was as if it had been waiting for him.
He wasn’t sure how to proceed. He fingered the knife on his belt and pulled it out of the sheath. The blade glimmered weakly.
Whatever that stuff is contributing to this craziness, we won’t know any more until you get the hell down there and find out.
Well, he was the hell down here, Santos. Jake examined the tablet readouts, the steadily glowing pulse, but it revealed nothing. He scoured the tree line, the stones, the grass. Nothing there, either. And what was he expecting to find? The alien equivalent of a door, complete with alien welcome mat and all species-accessible doorbell? This had been a gold-stellar plan all the way. Jake picked his way through the outcroppings and slippery tangles of grass to the center of where the spot gleamed on his tablet, sank down on a crag of foundation rock, and waited.
Nothing happened.
Eos disappeared completely below the tree line, and his only light came reflected in sickly yellow from Helias, hanging like a jaundiced eye in the far east. The tablet blinked and burred in his hands, but the readings did not waver.
What could he do? He was in the midst of the mammoth gleaming spot. Unless something happened, he’d still be sitting here when the station gave Selas a nice, hot, fuel-injected kiss. He held the tablet up against the brambly tree line, and the gleam ended abruptly.
Except for a smear of light deep within the brambles. For a moment, it pulsed out of step with the drumming rhythm around him, and then it vanished. Jake rubbed his eyes and held the tablet up again. The brambles were dark. He caught another glimpse of the fizzing around the edges of the tablet again. His fingers slipped, and he saw through the tablet that the fizzing came from his own hand, in alarming little tufts of light that spindled off into the darkness. Trembling, Jake held his full hand up to the stars, under the tablet, and flexed his fingers. They glowed against the dark. He shoved back his sleeve. The light wandered up his arm in an unruly stain.
So the weird wobbly light was in him now. Another serum strangeness? Or perhaps he’d overexposed himself to the glowing light, had allowed it to seep under his skin, sway him, subvert him. Jake dropped the tablet. His arm looked like his arm again. Non-glowy. Safe.
Who knew what all there was to study here? For a moment he envisioned himself as an explorer, striking out into the wide unknown flora and fauna of Selas, living in the trees. He could smell and hear the crisp rustle of grass…the grass shivered beneath his feet, and he imagined it flourishing around him, like the lab creeper…
Yes. Exactly like the lab creeper. The leafy profusion that clustered around his feet, that curled up and over the foundation stones—it was the same glorious, mysterious, implausible stuff. Jake traced the stems back to solid stone. He could not for the life of him see how they joined. He yanked at a thick mass of leaves, and instead of giving way, they twined invitingly through his fingers. Jake shook his hand free and knelt against the rocks.
The throbbing sliver in his skull intensified. What did it want? The glowing spot on the Selas scans had showed a tunnel going down, deep into the core of the planet. So he had to get in. He realized he was now crouching against the boulder, stroking it with his hands, and he pushed himself away, made himself stand up despite the throbbing onslaught in his head.
He remembered Dream Con and his I need a welcome to come in.
Open for me, then, Jake thought.
Nothing happened. The continuous pummeling headache was not his idea of success. He didn’t understand what he was supposed to open, or how. Was he supposed to blast it open with Carmichael’s magical bazooka? Or say open sesame? He deeply and profoundly cursed all historical texts, all folklore, all stories and signifiers and signals.
Signals. Legacy data. Jake dove into the tablet layers and drew out archived directories of access codes, passwords, thumbprint codes, and he sent it all spinning out in a wide broadcast, dispersal extent limited to the big gleaming spot.
Open. I don’t care how. Open already, you enigmatic useless piece of—
Something in his head shifted, the proper key from a ring of hundreds slotting by accident into a lock.
The foundation rock quaked, and sank into the ground. The pockets where the rock receded were small and winding, except for a large cleft nearby, and the cragged boulder he’d sat on just moments ago had disappeared completely. For a moment, the suppressive fog lifted, the icepick disappeared from his brain, and he could think again.
Jake crept toward the cleft and peered down into the consuming blackness of a wide, deep tunnel carved from the earth. He reached down and ran his fingers over the bit of exposed inner rock. With a stomach-heaving shudder, the clamoring pull was back upon him, pressing up through the sudden open pathway he’d made with the broadcast, with his thought of
Open already. The tablet buzzed excitedly in his hand.
He came back to himself as the pull receded again to an unpleasant mental ping. Jake spat and hawked and spat again into the grass, and tottered back to the sinkhole.
He was glad he was alone. There was no possible deterrent, no one to ask if he should go down or run away. The pull would not be denied. He wiped at his forehead with his sleeve and examined the tablet. The gleaming spot still surrounded him, but now the screen shivered and fluctuated in and out. One moment the tunnel appeared as a dark mouth in the middle of the spot, the next, it was gone. Popping in and out of sight of scanning reach…or gods help him, of existence.
Jake sat down and shoved the tablet in his bag. He dropped one foot in the hole. What if there wasn’t a bottom, should he just jump in feet first? He gripped his knees. If he died, the UW Gov Board could probably track him by following the shuttlepod trail, and his footprints, and then perhaps his body—if there was a body left to find at the end of this hole, his mind whispered—and then bill him, properly, promptly, and posthumously for his part in the station’s misfortune. He thought briefly of Con, and whether it was wise to think of him now. He thought of Con’s hands at his elbow, with the serum in his hands. Of his letters, of the tentative offer of his hand. No, that’s not all, remember? He made himself linger on Con’s knuckles as they squeezed Silverman’s neck, on the conspiratorial look in Silverman’s eyes as she gripped Con’s wrist. They were entwined, and couldn’t be undone.
Jake flexed his leg and felt the easy swing and heft of his knee, the overall fullness of himself, the lingering nausea. All sensory. All outweighed by the pull in his mind. The curling vines of leaves rustled behind him.
He submerged his other leg into the blackness of the hole, tucked the launcher case close, and pushed off.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“Thus have I heard, come here, I want to see you, what hath god wrought? For I have entered into the fire and have come forth from the water, in principio creavit Deus caelum et terram I do not know, I do not know […]Once upon a time there was a story, a story, and those who told the story knew not what they told. The eyes are upon me and they will not shut. Please do not answer. Transmission ended.”
Excerpt: final mission commtext
01 November 2130
(translation, reviewed in full: 6 April 2136)
Denys Chubaryan
Mission Head
Station 1H-24HM [updated: Selas Station]
United Worlds DS 2075-5
Satellite, 24HM System [updated: Eos]
[Archived: United Governance Board nonoperational/lost mission records, Earth]
2 November 2242 AEC
[Time unknown]
Dark. Darker than the spacewalk outside the station, so dark that his eyes ached with the desire to adjust, with searching for something, anything to light on. At first it was all Jake could register, the stifling dark and the way it gobbled up the sound and speed of his descent. But he was descending. He felt the unmistakable horror of gravity without ground beneath his feet, the dizzying rise of air around him, his skin holding him in one piece until he reached the bottom of the tunnel and spattered into meat and bone.
He kicked against the air and dark. He reached out, and his fingers buzzed a pebbly, stony surface, the walls of the hole rushing past. It gentled his hand instead of hurting. He let his fingers drift up with it, tried to breathe. The air tasted stale.
With nothing but the dark to observe, his mind continued faster than his fall. It felt strange, foreign and pedantic, not his own brain but that of some pinch-lipped academic writing an overblown treatise for Historical Society circular immortality. Typically these types of scenarios ended with the protagonist careening out of a chute and onto a pile of bones, perhaps human, perhaps those of his/her comrades. Better the latter, as the horror of the adventure heightens when all hope of shared danger, that perilous purveyance of camaraderie, is gone. Worse still: he or she may land on a pile of corpses, soft and slowly decomposing—
Was that light beneath him? It was so faint that at first, he thought he was seeing stars, but a bluish glow crept up around him, growing brighter as he fell. Yes, it was light.
The glow intensified. He dropped into a larger bowl of space, and he could see something rushing up to meet him. Jake braced himself for the inevitable painful landing on femurs, skulls, or possibly scapulae. He dropped and hit and rolled in a bruising jumble. Something in his knee creaked.
Not completely healed up after all, hmm?
But he did not hurt, not really. His cheek lay flush with something cool and smooth. More of the gentle stone, Jake supposed. At the moment, he wasn’t up for anything apart from resting and supposing. He’d have to remember to rest the next time someone presented him with a gene-altering serum or a leg brace removal.
Next time, right. Move now.
He pried his face away from the stone, rolled on to his back, and took stock. He could feel toes and fingers. He could shake his arms and legs. When he pressed on his knee, only a twinge echoed back to him. His spine was a little sore, a tiny echo of Nat and her wrench. Overall, nothing grated, nothing felt broken. Jake dragged himself into a sitting position, and looked around.
Upon closer investigation, the glowing blue light wasn’t that bright. In fact, it seemed to be fading. Perhaps it had appeared brighter simply in contrast to the insensible darkness of the hole. The rest of the space was large and empty, the wall nearest him smooth like stone, but almost yielding under his hesitant touch. There were grooves in both floor and wall. He ran his palm over the clean cut of them. Lines from some sort of vehicle, perhaps, or excavation tools? Who had done the work?
Apart from the carved sections of the floor, there were rough patches near him. Jake ran his hand over the curve of one—a curve far too large for something as compact as a skull. They had an unrefined feel compared to their surroundings. Jake rubbed at the curve, and was surprised to see faint indentations, sketches revealed beneath his fingertips. 1H-24HM, his fingers traced. Station pod Alpha / станция с…and the rest was crumbled away. He was touching a small piece of one of the station’s original shuttlepods, a tip of the man-made iceberg. It looked as though the carved sections of the floor had partially consumed it.
The rotten ping in his mind had increased again to a dull throbbing ache. Perhaps the signal would increase in intensity as he neared the source. Apparently, the challenge would be to keep his head from cracking open before then.
The tablet could guide him again. He’d crushed his bag slightly in the landing, but the tablet was whole, as was the stupid plaguing wave pack, the launcher case, and the leather satchel. The protein bars were smashed flat. Jake tore the wrapper open on one. It tasted like chocolate cardboard, but it gave him a small surge of fresh energy.
The tablet was dented and vibrating sadly, but the memory gem was still intact, and the bottom half of the screen still glimmered with data readouts. Jake scraped a mash of protein ration away from the thumbpad and stroked it. A flash of data scrolled by in a blur, and then juddered to a stop.
Archival biotags found. Confirm Y/N?
“Yes,” Jake said. His heartbeat felt heavy and unreal in his chest. The tablet burred and then displayed a scattershot mess of lines, then a bright cluster of light. Signals. Biotags. He shook the tablet, but it wouldn’t give a proximity reading.
29 active links
“What the hell?” Jake asked it. The tablet quivered, and dutifully a new readout scrolled.
0 active links
“What the hell.” Jake shook the tablet again. “Which is it? Something or nothing?”
29 active links
The tablet corrected again. The readout scrolled into a wavering set of names.
Abramov, Aleksey Semyonovich
Johanessen, Georgia Rose
Martinez-Velez, Juan C.
Vysotsky, St-----------------------
Ha-----------
Qui---
D--
--
-
With a whir and a sigh, the tablet died.
Biotags. Here, along with the station’s original shuttles, biotags. Blocked somehow from the station’s sensors, but live and pulsing here, deep inside wherever he was. The original crew’s implanted biotags, twenty-nine tags, one each, minus Chubaryan. Abramov, Aleksey Semyonovich: chief chemist, from one of the Unorganized Zones between what had been Old Georgia and Old Russia. Johanessen, Georgia Rose…Jake gave himself a mental slap, and the chip’s recall subsided.
In any case, a dead tablet was no guide. Jake stuffed it into a pocket and tried to make better sense of his surroundings. The pale light glowed more brightly in the far side of the cave.
Follow the light.
How inspiring—or insipid, rather. He crossed to examine the glow, and, as he did, the pulse in his head clamored, grew louder, swept through him until it seemed as though a giant hand had seized him and clutched him close. Jake gripped his head until the consuming haze faded and he could see again. What was this, an intruder alert system?
Contrary to his initial suspicions, the far side of the cave wasn’t a wall, but a corridor nearly indistinguishable from the walls on either side of it, tall and carved and swooping up into a dim suggestion of a ceiling. Jake stepped over the threshold and into bluish gloom.
It was still difficult to see. In addition to the constant, vertiginous pain pruning away at his skull, the blue misty light frothed the edges of everything and blinded him to all but a meter or so of the corridor ahead. Jake resorted to feeling around with his free hand. He bumbled into a wall at the curve; it was frosty to the touch. The floors and the air were cold, dry, sterile.
He rolled up a sleeve, eyes sharpened for any suggestion of a glimmer under his skin. A flicker of blue chanced over his bared arm—was that it? More strange incandescence leaking out of him? Or was it merely a reflection of the light around him? It had to be a reflection. He no longer had the tablet. To see such a thing in his skin without the tablet’s special scan settings would mean…well, Jake wasn’t sure what it meant. He wasn’t sure what it had meant before. The pressure inside his skull was terrific, and for a moment he played with the thought that it too was made up of light, peculiar wandering light that had taken a wrong turn into his ears and nostrils and was now stuck ricocheting around his brain. What would such aimless, vicious light do to him? Burn him from the inside out, probably, and then continue on its way.