by Tim Wirkus
During those first moments of consciousness, the dream she’d just had felt supremely important—she needed to discuss it with de Bronk and Valenti immediately—but as the sun rose, filling the clearing with soft light, that sense of importance gave way to an intense and perplexed embarrassment. She had felt certain as she’d woken up that the dream had been a product of the cake she’d eaten the day before, but if that were the case, what was she supposed to make of it? The dream had been so strange yet so useless, bringing her no closer to the Bulgakov Apparatus, leaving her with no clue as to how they might proceed.
As the rising sun woke Valenti and de Bronk, Sertôrian shook off the last scraps of nocturnal uneasiness and assumed an assured attitude of command.
Still, though, so many questions remained, and thus, while they ate their meager breakfast by the warmth of a chem-fire, Sertôrian asked Valenti and de Bronk if they had experienced any noticeable effects from eating the cake.
“No,” said Valenti.
“No,” said de Bronk.
Probing more directly, she asked how they had slept the night before.
“Fine,” said Valenti.
“No complaints,” said de Bronk.
Still lacking a better plan, they spent the day searching the area around their camp for any additional clues that might point them in whatever direction the makers of the Green Beacon intended them to go. They found a hollow tree, but there was nothing hidden inside of it. They found a cluster of granite boulders—could they form an arrow, a glyph, a compass rose?—but on careful inspection, the arrangement appeared completely natural. They also, not far from the boulders, nearly walked right through a patch of stinging hemlock, but Valenti spotted the distinctive flower clusters just in time. Other than that, it was standard forest as far as the eye could see.
When late afternoon rolled around, they returned to camp, the stagnation already turning Valenti and de Bronk vicious again. They’d sniped at each other all morning, and now, sitting at opposite ends of the fallen tree trunk behind the cake box, they glowered at each other with undisguised malice.
Trying to keep the focus on the task at hand, Sertôrian opened the chilled glass box and, as she had with the strawberry cake the day before, divided the vanilla DAY TWO cake into three equal pieces. She felt again the impulse to eat alone, so she walked to the edge of their campsite, her share of the cake cradled in her hands. Once again, it was delicious and once again Sertôrian ate her entire piece. She dusted the crumbs from her fingers and savored the taste in her mouth for another moment or two before she and her crew continued their surveying while they still had some daylight.
Eventually dusk fell and Sertôrian’s mind returned to the previous night’s dream, the haunting unease creeping through her body. Again, she felt an impulse to bring it up with Valenti and de Bronk, to see what they might make of the strange, imagined encounter she’d had with her sister, but again, discretion prevailed and she said nothing. When the time came to turn in for the night, Sertôrian lay between her shipmates, wrapped tightly in her blanket, resisting sleep.
She didn’t last long.
In her second night’s dream she relived with horrifying fidelity her vision of the previous night, beginning with Rosa’s bitter accusations and ending with her gleaming innards sitting in a pile at Irena’s feet.
She woke lying perfectly still on her back, every muscle in her body tightly clenched, the sky above her gray with predawn light.
The second day passed much as the first one had, with a lackadaisical reconnaissance of the area, and a lack of any apparent effects from eating the cake. Sertôrian worried as they tromped through the Declo Forest that their time here would become nothing more than a less-rainy sequel to their sojourn on the Plains of Chubbúhc. How long would they have to wait here, she wondered, before the next move became apparent, assuming a next move even existed? And how much longer would it be before Valenti and de Bronk would be—quite literally—at each other’s throats again?
That afternoon, Sertôrian cut up the third and final cake, observing the same solitary ritual of the previous two days and eating her portion at the edge of the campsite, looking off into the forest. Today’s was the best of the bunch, a rich chocolate cake with a bittersweet frosting that Sertôrian relished.
Earlier that day, she’d wondered aloud if they needed to eat all three cakes before the intended effect would kick in. Valenti and de Bronk had both allowed that this could be the case, although they hadn’t sounded too convinced. Sertôrian wasn’t too convinced herself, and she understood as she ate the last of her chocolate cake that if something didn’t happen soon to point them in the right direction the onus was on her to fix things somehow.
By dinnertime, though, nothing had happened. Sitting around a chem-fire, the three shipmates chewed thoughtfully on their night’s rations, Sertôrian growing more and more uneasy. Night had fallen and darkness hugged the small circle of light cast by the fire. A small moth circled nearer and nearer to the flickering flames, until an incautious dive brought it too close to the heat and the fire consumed its papery body.
“This reminds me of the night Berezhnoy died,” said Valenti.
Why bring that up now, Sertôrian wondered.
Lieutenant Anton Berezhnoy had been her third-in-command, an amiable giant of a man with an encyclopedic knowledge of galactic imperial military history.
“How so?” said de Bronk, sounding inexplicably annoyed.
“The waiting,” said Valenti. “The waiting for him to come back, and then him not coming back. We were sitting around a fire, remember?”
“No,” said de Bronk, his voice rising. “There was no fire.”
“There was,” said Valenti, with condescending patience.
“No,” said de Bronk. “There wasn’t. And he didn’t die at night.”
“There was definitely a fire,” said Valenti.
She and de Bronk were standing now, fists clenched, teeth bared.
Wearily intervening, Sertôrian said, “There was no fire, Valenti.”
“I remember a fire,” said Valenti with a growl.
Sertôrian said, “Berezhnoy was stabbed on Catreus V, and it was too hot on Catreus V to ever build a fire.”
Though she didn’t look convinced by this reasoning, Valenti sat back down, unclenching her fists, and de Bronk followed suit. Still, a palpable tension remained.
“Maybe,” said Sertôrian to the now sulking Valenti, “you’re thinking of the night Dr. Ivanova died.”
Ilsa Ivanova, their ship’s surgeon, had been buried by an icy avalanche on the treacherous slopes of the Promethean Mountains on Chryses II, a virtually uninhabited planet that Sertôrian had believed would give them no trouble at all.
“I’m definitely thinking of Berezhnoy,” said Valenti.
“Fine,” said Sertôrian. “Can we just let it go?”
The chem-fire crackled and popped.
“Wasn’t Ilsa the first?” said de Bronk, ignoring Sertôrian’s suggestion. “To die, I mean.”
The fire settled in on itself with an eerie flutter.
“Yes,” said Valenti. “And then it was Katkov and Robinson.”
Midshipman Oleg Katkov had gone space mad while their ship, the Circe, had been hiding from a fleet of reputed cannibals in an asteroid belt. In the grips of the disease, Katkov had become convinced that First Gunner Grace Robinson was an imposter plotting to destroy them all. He’d strangled Robinson in her bed and then slit his own wrists in the pantry, all while the rest of the crew had slept.
“Do we have to talk about this right now?” said Sertôrian, almost inaudibly. She could feel strength ebbing from her body with each death they mentioned.
Again ignoring Sertôrian, Valenti said, “And then it was the three: Ogawa, Araújo, and Teixeira.”
Commander Masaki Ogawa, Midshipman Bruna A
raújo, and Second Gunner Leonardo Teixeira had disappeared into a cavern on Euxanthius XII in pursuit of a hermitic scientist they’d been tracking for days on the strength of some rumors they’d heard on the previous planet that this scientist had developed a super-efficient rocket fuel that could get Sertôrian and her crew out of the Minoan System once and for all. Ogawa, Araújo, and Teixeira had never emerged from the cavern, and the search party Sertôrian had sent after them had found no clues explaining their disappearance.
A bat fluttered through the illuminated clearing and then back into the darkness of the forest.
Sertôrian couldn’t see the point of this catalog of fatalities. It was just too much right now—couldn’t they see that?
“Then Carr,” said de Bronk.
In an absurd and tragic bit of bad luck, Sublieutenant Greg Carr had slipped in the shower one morning and hit his head on the hard, metal floor, losing consciousness immediately. He’d died two days later of complications from the injury.
“Then it was Berezhnoy,” said Valenti.
“Yes,” said de Bronk. “And then a lull.”
“And then Ribeiro,” said Valenti.
The most recent casualty, Quartermaster Igor Ribeiro, had died in a tragic fluke just two months earlier, fatally bitten by a mortitius spider on Deucalion VI.
Sertôrian poked at the dwindling chem-fire with a long stick, stirring the flames back to life.
The unspoken question—who would be next?—hung awkwardly in the air. De Bronk and Valenti both stared mournfully into the fire. Sertôrian, no longer able to bear it, decided to introduce a new topic of conversation.
“I’ve been having strange dreams,” she said, “ever since we started eating the cake.”
Valenti and de Bronk looked up at her.
“And I don’t want to talk about the dreams themselves. I didn’t even want to tell you I’ve been having them,” said Sertôrian. “But it’s the only thing that’s been different in the past three days. What I want to know, then, is if you’ve been having dreams as well. On their own, the dreams I’ve been having make no sense, but if you’ve been having dreams as well, perhaps if we put them all together . . .”
She left her question at that. Valenti and de Bronk looked ill at ease, had looked deeply uncomfortable since she’d started talking, de Bronk especially. The chem-fire shot a spark at her foot and she watched it extinguish on the damp ground.
The silence stretched awkwardly forward.
“No dreams then?” said Sertôrian.
De Bronk looked away, his brow furrowed, and when he turned back to Sertôrian, he said, “We didn’t eat any of the cake.”
As soon as the words left de Bronk’s mouth, Valenti shot him a look of aghast displeasure. Sertôrian was sure she looked no less shocked, no less displeased herself. She felt like she’d just been hit upside the head. Dropping the stick she’d been using to tend the chem-fire and sitting up straighter, Sertôrian said, “Explain yourselves.”
Valenti, who’d already composed herself, held out a placating hand.
“De Bronk and I decided not to eat the cake,” she said. Full stop, as if that were an adequate justification.
Sertôrian said, “Star-Guard, that’s a restatement, not an explanation.”
“I believe our decision was well within the bounds of acceptable protocol,” said Valenti.
“Acceptable protocol?” said Sertôrian, feeling the ire rising in her chest. “Acceptable protocol? You disobeyed a direct order. I should court-martial you right here in the field, do you understand that?”
“I don’t remember any direct orders,” said Valenti, poking at the chem-fire with the toe of her boot. “Do you, de Bronk?”
De Bronk, avoiding Sertôrian’s gaze, shook his head ruefully.
For a moment, Sertôrian doubted herself—had she issued a direct order?—before realizing that the question was a moot point. Her crew had willfully lied to her for three full days, conspiring together to perpetuate the deception. Sertôrian understood perfectly well why they hadn’t wanted to eat the cake. It was a heavy risk. But that didn’t excuse the lying. A dangerous rage bubbled up inside her.
Had this kind of incident occurred years earlier, Sertôrian would have castigated the offenders without a moment’s hesitation. Trust was essential to a well-functioning unit, and lying was antithetical to trust. Now, though, lost in the Declo Forest on an obscure planet in a remote system of the galaxy, she couldn’t see the point anymore. How, after all, could she punish them without hurting herself? And so the rage subsided, quenched by a bracing splash of despair.
Sertôrian stared into the dwindling chem-fire, darkness encroaching nearer and nearer.
In the end, there was nothing to do but spread their blankets and go to sleep.
In her third night’s dream, Sertôrian stood in an empty gallery, where the only work of art on display was a framed painting nearly as large as the wall on which it hung. The scene swarmed with tiny people—ancient peasants—the women clothed in simple dresses of red and blue and green, the men wearing rough brown trousers and heavy shirts of the same vivid colors as the women’s dresses. At first glance, the painting appeared to depict a pleasantly bucolic scene, a merry picnic by the side of a deep blue lake, with the peasants dancing, eating, and otherwise enjoying themselves.
But as Sertôrian took in the entirety of the canvas, she saw, emerging from the lake in the bottom right-hand corner of the painting, an enormous crablike creature equipped not only with two claws but with eight flailing tentacles as well. Although flailing was the wrong word, as it implied a lack of control. The artist had painted the tentacles moving deliberately across the canvas in twining arabesques that artfully and organically framed the chaos spreading toward the still-festive upper-left-hand corner of the scene. Beginning at the green, shell-encrusted body of the crab monster, its mighty claws brandished at the viewer, Sertôrian allowed one tentacle and then another to guide her eye across the canvas. Each appendage wended its way around clusters of peasants in varying degrees of distress. One tentacle slithered right by a family huddled together for dear life. Another tentacle wrapped around a man holding a now useless axe, his eyes bulging as the creature squeezed the life out of him. Another tentacle pursued a group of men fleeing toward the left side of the canvas, trampling one another in the process. Another tentacle crept up on a man and a woman locked in a passionate embrace, oblivious to the approaching danger.
Sertôrian felt curiously distant from the whole scene—or perhaps not so curiously distant, given that it was a painting. She stepped forward for a closer look.
“Amazing,” said a voice from behind her. She turned to find Valenti and de Bronk sitting on a velvet upholstered bench. They wore crisp new uniforms and both looked ten years younger.
“Yes,” said Sertôrian, turning back around, and she took the painting down from the wall, or someone took it down, or it fell and it was gone, and the only thing on the wall, the only thing that had ever been on the wall, was a military-grade map, unframed and thumbtacked in place. A red dotted line twisted across the topographic terrain and terminated in a heavy, black X.
Sertôrian tore the map down to get a better look.
She recognized part of the area depicted. The dotted line began where they currently camped, deep in the Declo Forest. The line then made its way northeast, winding through the Bogs of Challis, past the Ucon Cliffs, and over the Meridian Hills before culminating at the black X at the Twin Falls.
This time when she woke from her dream, there was no fuzzy transition to consciousness, just a sharp, lucid jolt. She scrambled for her bag, found a pencil, and tore a blank page from her logbook. On the paper’s clean white surface she recreated the map from her dream before it could vanish from her mind. She looked down at her handiwork as the morning birds began to sing.
“I know where to find th
e Bulgakov Apparatus,” she said, waking up her shipmates. “I know where it’s hidden.”
SIX
In a fitting coincidence, today we observed Adastra Peraspera here at the convent, the twice-yearly ritual that commemorates Sertôrian’s suffering during the bleak Minoan years. Given our current circumstances (as far as we know, murderous Delegarchic troops draw closer by the minute), today’s Adastra was an especially somber affair, although not without its moments of beauty:
There was the fog-enshrouded ice sphere passed from sister to sister, the sting of its frozen surface against the pads of our fingers reminding us of the cold loneliness of Sertôrian’s tribulations. There was the precise geometry of the ceremonial hexagons into which we arranged ourselves, following carefully the patterns on the floor, which had been etched with such loving exactitude by the convent’s sacral architect, now deceased. There was Sister Beatriz, this cycle’s designated cantrix, declaiming in her lovely, ringing voice the forty-third stanza of the Astral Passion, that centuries-old blank verse epic that describes Sertôrian’s deepest suffering in lines of stately, relentless iambic pentameter.
As I listened to Sister Beatriz’s striking recitation, however, I found my thoughts turning not to Sertôrian but to Star-Guard Ava Valenti and Technician Ernst de Bronk. Though the Rhadamanthus IX narrative features two or three honest-to-goodness villains, none of them are so reviled in the popular imagination as Sertôrian’s last two surviving shipmates.
Over time, I’ve come to feel that such sentiments do a great disservice not only to the memory of Ernst de Bronk and Ava Valenti but also to the scholarship of those critics who condemn them. Today we all too readily disregard this pair’s admirable qualities (of which they had many) to focus solely on their actions following the discovery of the Apparatus. We should remember as the events of the Rhadamanthus IX episode unfold, though, that it required no small loyalty for Valenti and de Bronk to stick with Sertôrian during their quest for the Bulgakov Apparatus. Traitor is not a word to be used lightly, but too many scholars apply it too eagerly to Valenti and de Bronk. Their entire lives get read through the filter of a couple of admittedly unfortunate decisions made during the latest in a harrowing series of misadventures. I certainly don’t defend their decisions, but I’m uncomfortable with the impulse to search out nascent traces of their supposed treachery from the earliest points in their biographies.