One more node than people know, thought Jensi later, lying in his berth, listening to the drunken snores of the Swede in the bunk below him. Shockpoints were costly to build and took a long time. So the penal colony had not been hastily thrown together but was probably the result of years of planning. Either that, or the result of tremendous resources. Maybe both. The Eibon, too, he had noticed, was not your ordinary cargo freighter. The ship was state of the art, one of the newest models with all the trimmings. He had congratulated the captain on being able to afford such a ship, but the man had just shaken his head.
“Not mine, son,” he said. “Belongs to the powers that be.”
The powers that be, he thought in his berth. That was always the problem: the powers that be, though who they were and where they were to be found was often hard to say. They were behind things, lurking there, almost as if they occupied another world, safe and protected from the jolts and shocks of the world that ordinary people had to occupy.
The node they approached seemed to be under construction, but the captain just plowed through the warning systems as if they didn’t exist. And indeed, they didn’t seem to exist for them: none of the alarms went off and no barriers went up. They were able to drift slowly into the node and then there was the strangeness of entering a kind of tunnel of energy, the disorientation and near panic that came with it, and then the arrival in a new portion of space, the strange reorientation of the stars as other stars, since they were elsewhere.
But where exactly? The sun was not quite right for the Aspera system. For a moment he thought he’d made a mistake and joined with the wrong crew, accidentally murdered a man for no reason, and that he was just as far away from his brother as ever.
“This is where we’re going?” he asked Swanson.
The man shook his head. “No shockpoint where we’re ending up,” he said. “We just got close. Now it’s another two weeks of travel through normal space and then we’ll finally get there.”
For the two weeks of travel, there was very little for either him or Swanson to do. They could only check the supplies and boxes so many times in a day before beginning to feel ridiculous. And so they drank. The ship was well-stocked with alcohol and Swanson had brought a few cases of his own in addition, and Swanson was always eager to start in, so it was up to Jensi to keep him sober long enough for them to do their minimal rounds. Perhaps that had been Talbot’s job, too, when he was still alive.
Swanson became more and more voluble over the course of the two weeks, but it also became clear that he knew very little. He didn’t even know the name of the planet they were going to and hadn’t been curious enough to try to figure it out. The captain himself was slowly warming to Jensi, though he also seemed a little concerned about him.
“Suppose I should have done a security check on you before taking you on,” he said to Jensi early one evening, staring at him thoughtfully. “That’s what the powers that be would have wanted. But we were in a rush, as you know, because of that damned Talbot going and dying on us. Plus Swanson vouched for you. Had I done a check, what do you suppose I would have found?”
“Nothing,” said Jensi.
The captain nodded. “Nothing,” he said. “I’ll accept that. We’ll just have to say that I did the check after all and that’s what I found.”
A few days later Swanson had the captain down to the supply room and opened a bottle with him. They joked back and forth between themselves, talking about other runs, earlier runs, back when the captain had been in command of a very different ship, an old, raggedy freighter that was years out of date.
“And look at you now,” said Swanson. “Look at us now.”
The captain sat there with an enigmatic half smile and just kept drinking. Jensi sat on the edge of a box a few feet away, observing the conversation but not really being part of it.
“The thing I don’t understand,” said Swanson, once he’d had a few, “is why did they choose us? They could have had any captain they wanted for the prices they were offering. Why us?”
The captain shrugged. “Just luck, I guess,” he said.
“Just luck?” said Swanson. “No,” he said. “You’ve had luck before, but it’s mostly been bad.”
“Maybe it was time for my luck to change.”
“Or maybe they knew you could be discreet,” said Swanson, tapping the captain on his chest.
The captain didn’t seem to take the tap badly, but did say, “Not all of us in this room are so discreet,” at which Swanson seemed to take the hint and stopped talking.
They kept drinking, Swanson the most, followed by the captain. Jensi was having just enough to keep up appearances, watching carefully for the captain’s gaze to go glassy and his hand to begin to wobble.
After a while, Swanson crawled off his box, lay down on the floor, and passed out. The captain put down his glass and stood, straightening his jacket, but Jensi stopped him. “There’s still some in the bottle,” he said. “It’d be a shame for it to go to waste.”
Halfway through the next bottle, he’d gotten the captain to talk openly. He wouldn’t quite say the name Aspera, but he’d hinted enough about confinement and treason and the price of freedom that he didn’t have to for Jensi to feel confident about where they were going. He kept prodding the captain, encouraging him, but either he was exceptionally discreet or the man really did know almost nothing about Aspera. He’d done deliveries, but he’d always stayed in orbit; the only ones to go down to the planet’s surface were the freight specialists.
“And in this case it’ll only be Swanson,” said the captain. “They’d have had to clear you back at the spaceport on Vindauga if we wanted you to go down. You can load up-top in orbit, but you can’t go down.”
So there was another problem he would have to face, he thought after the captain had left, as he was slapping Swanson and trying to coax him awake, trying to get him to return to their quarters. He had to figure out a way down to the planet. Maybe he could prepare a box, slip himself into it. Or maybe Swanson could end up sick and then he’d have to go. But the former option involved a certain amount of risk, particularly if he was caught, and the latter would draw attention to him as well.
He managed to get Swanson awake enough to talk about the delivery process itself, though he had to keep shaking him to keep him talking. He hoped Swanson wouldn’t remember any of it in the morning, and suspected he wouldn’t after seeing how the man was the next day after previous drunken occasions. The process was this: they were to link first to a military ship in orbit, which would either give them permission to contact the penal colony or not. Then they would start taking loads down in the shuttle. Typically Swanson would land outside the colony, in a small dome that had a breathable atmosphere, and then he and Talbot would unload. There was usually a military ship already landed there, with two soldiers, and once he and Talbot had unloaded everything, the soldiers went over the manifest and carefully divided the items into two piles.
“Why two piles?” asked Jensi.
Swanson shrugged. “I don’t ask about these things,” he said. “If they want to divide them into two piles, such is fine with me. But if I ask about it, maybe they will ask me to help them move the boxes.”
He looked at Jensi, his eyelids heavy, as if awaiting a response. “I see,” said Jensi finally, not knowing what else to say.
This seemed to be enough. Swanson nodded. “Talbot, he didn’t ask about it, either. But he thought about it,” said Swanson.
“And what did he think about it?”
“He didn’t have to think much about it,” he said. “We always saw the other sets of lights when we were preparing to land. There’s another complex on the planet besides the penal colony.”
“What is it, another penal colony?” asked Jensi.
Swanson gave a sloppy shrug. “Why would they need two penal colonies?” he asked. “No, Talbot didn’t think so. He thought it must be something else.”
“Like what?”
/>
“Who knows?” said Swanson, and then his eyes started to close. Jensi shook him. “What?” asked Swanson, coming to with a jerk.
“If it’s not a penal colony, what did Talbot think it was?”
“I don’t know,” said Swanson. “But he figured it this way: they had us land near the penal colony and unload there, not near the other complex. That meant that the other complex, whatever it was, was something that they wanted to hide more than the penal colony.”
Some sort of black ops operation, thought Jensi. But much more hush-hush than a secret penitentiary in which they illegally imprisoned and perhaps even tortured traitors. What could it be? Whatever it was, it was something deadly serious, and perhaps something to stay away from.
“Where is Talbot, by the way?” Swanson asked.
“Talbot?” said Jensi. “He couldn’t make it.”
Swanson smiled. “Too bad,” he said, and fell asleep.
He pulled the man’s boots off, tucked the blankets up around him. So, he couldn’t officially board the shuttle. And even if he did manage to get on the shuttle there would be two soldiers down below waiting to make sure he got back on again and left. And if he hid himself in a box, there were apparently about equal chances he would end up at some sort of secret compound rather than the penal colony. And to top it off, there was only a day, maybe two, left before they arrived.
29
“What are you looking for exactly?” asked Henry.
“We’ll know when we find it,” said Briden curtly.
“At least he hopes we will,” said Callie Dexter, and winked.
There were six of them in all, with Briden and Dexter clearly in charge. They had arrived only a few hours after the commander’s call, bringing with them a vehicle full of equipment, which they had promptly started stringing all through the space that Henry normally occupied. Some of them were sitting on the floor, others standing idly by. Briden had immediately commandeered his desk and chair, which made it so that Henry had to watch the monitors standing. He wasn’t doing a very good job of that, though, since he was distracted by the newcomers.
“How dangerous are they?” asked Briden. “These are killers or what?”
“A few weeks ago, I would have said not all that dangerous,” said Henry. “They’re political prisoners rather than rapists or murderers. They feel very strongly about whatever their cause was but usually are fairly ordinary apart from that.”
“A few weeks ago, you said,” said Briden. “What about now?”
“Now, I don’t know,” he said. “They’re restless, something’s wrong with them. I can’t predict how they’ll behave.”
Briden was staring at him strangely. He came a little closer, took him by the arm, spoke softly. “How do you feel?” he asked.
“Me?” said Henry, surprised. “Fine, I guess.” He tried to keep his eyes from darting around. What if this was a trap? What if all this had been set up as a way to trap him? Maybe that was why the project was classified. He tried to push the thoughts down, swallowed.
“No … anxiety?” asked Briden, standing too close to him and narrowing his eyes. “No changes in behavior?”
“Uhh,” said Henry, not sure what it was best to answer. “I’m all right,” he finally said. “It’s a stressful time.”
Briden raised one eyebrow. “I can see you feel it,” he said, his voice even softer now. “Are you a believer?”
“A believer?” asked Henry.
Briden reached into the neck of his shirt, pulled out his icon, a small twisting shape, the Unitologist symbol. “Altman be praised,” he said.
“No, sorry,” said Henry almost too quickly. “I’m not a believer. Not that I have anything against it.”
“You will be,” said Briden, slowly tucking his icon away, a smile still frozen on his face. “You’re feeling it already, but you just haven’t admitted it yet.”
And with that he turned away, went back to directing his team and setting up the equipment, leaving Henry a little shaken and not quite sure what to do with himself.
* * *
It’s here, thought Briden. I’m sure of it. Whatever the Marker wanted them to find was to be found here, and he, Briden, was going to be the one to find it. He had been chosen to do so. His calling was a sacred one, and he could almost feel a holy crown there shining on his head, invisible for all to see except the truly sacred, the truly chosen. He would find it and he would do whatever he needed to do to protect both it and the Marker from all unbelievers.
It had been a mistake to approach Wandrei the technician as he had, but he had felt something, detected something in the man. He knew that Wandrei felt something, just as he, Briden, felt something. Everybody felt a little bit of something—that was how powerful the Marker was, reaching out to believers and unbelievers alike—but for most it was nothing significant: a headache, a little anxiety, or nausea. More and more people, though, were sensing a call to Convergence, a call to lose their life so that they could find it, so that they could find a larger sense of unity and life in the one. Already six people among their number had let go of their lives, or had had them taken away by a well-meaning soul, and Briden had made very certain that their bodies were prepared and preserved for the day they might rise again. Yes, he understood that the work here was holy.
And there was Callie Dexter beside him suddenly. She was his affliction, the thorn in his side. She did not believe and he knew better than to speak to her about his belief: she would not understand it. She would mock him and would try to use it against him. No, she was there as a test for him, something for him to fight against and overcome, but quietly and subtly and with great care.
“We’re all set?” Briden asked.
Callie nodded. “All the monitoring equipment is in place. Now we just wait for a surge.”
“Yes,” said Briden. “But there are things we can do in the meantime.”
“Things? Like what?”
“We need to get a feel for the place,” he said. “We need to walk out there and sense its energies.”
“Energies?” said Dr. Dexter. “What sort of mystical bullshit are you trying to feed me?”
“I mean, measure for any anomalies,” said Briden, backtracking. “Magnetic abnormalities, pressure irregularities, any unusual readings of any sort. Anything that can tell us what’s there, what the Marker is looking for.”
“There you go again,” said Dr. Dexter. “Always thinking of the Marker as human.”
Briden bristled. He wasn’t thinking of the Marker as human. Sentient yes, but hardly human: it was far beyond human. “It’s just a metaphor,” he said. “I don’t mean anything by it.”
Dr. Dexter gave him a hard stare. “I wish that were true,” she said. “All right, let’s see what we can find.”
30
The voice and the changing face that went with it were with Istvan almost all the time now, very quiet most of the time, but still something he could hear and understand as long as he was listening in the right way. It was like having a brother again, only better because it wasn’t going to abandon him as his brother had done. No, this was a new friend: someone, he felt, that was willing to be with him forever, someone with whom he could spend the rest of his life.
It was beginning to teach him things. He could feel it sometimes touching his brain lightly, smoothing parts of it out, scrunching other parts of it up, and doing so in a way that was beginning to build something within him. It was a strangely intimate sensation, as if someone had their hand in his head and was caressing his brain softly, and he wondered if he shouldn’t be afraid. He was, admittedly, a little afraid at first, but then it stroked a particular part of his brain and the fear diminished at least a little. There were shapes and figures beginning to form, strange twisted and watery shapes that he could not only see but that he felt he understood, that he felt somehow, if he just had the right tools and the right training, he could build. It could be glorious, the voice whispering in his head to
ld him. Glorious. The next step in evolution. Marvelous Convergence, the extension of consciousness from bodies to a place both within and between bodies.
It was wonderful, so wonderful that he almost didn’t feel the pain as the burst came, stronger than it ever had been before, and took him into the other world. He could hear, behind that world, in the world before, the groans and cries of his fellow convicts and knew that somewhere they were feeling it, too, though not in the same way as he was. Where the fingers in his brain moved delicately, stroking and rearranging in a way that he found at once sharp and exhilarating, they must have felt like their heads were being torn off. Indeed, once the burst faded and parts of his vision started to return, he did see that the man roughly across the table from him had beaten his head over and over against the surface of the table until that head had cracked open. Blood was pooling on the surface of the table, slipping over it and toward Istvan. Istvan watched it come, unconcerned, not moving even after it began to drip slowly into his lap. Was the man dead? he wondered. What had been the convict’s name again? And then he decided that it didn’t really matter. He wasn’t dead yet, but he’d be dead soon.
The alarm went off, sending them back to their cells. The other convicts looked almost in shock, some of them wandering aimlessly about, others just staring at the body, one hitting his head over and over again with his hands. But slowly they began to come back to themselves and move. Istvan braced his hands on the table, to either side of the pooling blood. But before he stood, the voice said something to him.
Wait, it said.
“Wait?” he said. “Why?”
But for once it didn’t answer. He looked around him, at the other convicts moving back to their cells, at the dead or dying man across the table from him. What did the voice know? If he listened to it, he’d be beaten by the guards, maybe killed. He again started to stand.
Wait, the voice said again.
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