Dead Space: Catalyst

by Evenson, Brian

  He stopped, confused. Why should he wait? What did he gain by doing so? No, it was a mistake. And yet, he waited.

  The loudspeaker crackled out its warning, giving him thirty seconds to return to his cell. He counted it down, and then counted a minute or so more before he heard the cell doors clang closed. Now it is too late, he told himself. Now you are in trouble.

  He raised his hands and put them behind his head so that they wouldn’t think him a threat. He waited. A minute later the doors to the outer ring opened and the guards came in.

  Only they didn’t rush this time. They were moving more slowly, dressed in riot gear, and were flanking four people, two men and two women, dressed in ordinary clothing.

  New prisoners? he wondered at first. But no, their hands were free, they were at ease and relaxed, and they were carrying various pieces of technical equipment. The door closed behind them. Slowly they moved through the ring of cells and toward the central circle.

  One of the guards raised his weapon. “Shall I neutralize him, sir?” he asked.

  One of the four people in the middle, a man just approaching middle age with salt-and-pepper hair who was apparently their leader, shook his head. “No need to bother him unless he becomes aggressive. Leave him as he is.”

  The scientists came forward, sweeping their way into the room, moving back and forth, the guards awkwardly flanking them and sometimes bumping into them as they moved in unexpected directions. Istvan just stayed there, watching them come.

  “Check and see if that one is dead,” said the apparent leader.

  “Will do, sir,” said one of the guards. He came forward and examined the man slumped across the table, then stripped off one glove and pressed his fingers into the man’s neck. “He’s dead,” he said.

  “Ugh,” said one of the others in the group, a woman. “Ghastly.” But despite saying that, she came forward and stared at the body with some interest, as if fascinated. She looked up at Istvan. “What made him do it?” she asked.

  Istvan hesitated a moment, then shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “I didn’t see it.”

  “Of course you saw it,” she said. “You were sitting right across from him.”

  “I heard it,” he said. “But I didn’t see it.”

  Two of the guards were assigned the body. They dragged it away by the arms, leaving an irregular smear of blood in its wake. The other guards and the people with their machines kept circling around, slowly narrowing their focus until they were all standing around Istvan.

  “Right here,” said their leader. “I’m sorry,” he said to Istvan, “but you’ll have to move.”

  You can move now, said the voice to him, and he saw again Conn’s ghastly face flash up before him, his strange smile. You can go back to your cell.

  Istvan nodded. Very slowly he stood and stepped out from the bench. “I want to go back to my cell,” he said.

  Distractedly, their leader nodded. “Yes, yes,” he said, “go on, then.”

  Hands still up, he walked away. The guards’ eyes followed him, as did their weapons. He could feel their eyes still on his back as he went slowly out of inner circle and into the cell circle and then stood by the closed door of his cell, waiting.

  31

  “Right here,” said Briden, pointing at the instruments. “Right where that fellow was sitting.” He turned to Callie Dexter. “I’m right, aren’t I? Some kind of anomaly? Something that responds in a particular way to the crystalline structure of our Marker?”

  “Seems so,” she said.

  He smiled. “So directly under the floor, I’m assuming? We get something in here and we start to dig.”

  Callie shrugged. “Not enough data to know for certain,” she said.

  “Sure there’s enough,” said Briden. “It led us here, didn’t it? There’s nothing here on the surface, so there must be something below.”

  They put the one loose convict back in his cell, then sent someone back to the Marker compound for a contact beam and an engineer to operate it. It took an hour, maybe more, but finally they were there and cutting through the floor.

  The going was slow at first, the engineer working the contact beam and some of the guards recruited to shovel out the rubble. There was a certain amount of danger, Briden knew: they might break into a cavern or other space without breathable atmosphere and then those standing near the hole might well be killed, which was why he stood at a little distance away. Callie Dexter, though, was up close and leaning in, curious, watching the work. He imagined her eyes bugging out and her gasping for air and it gave him a certain perverse satisfaction. He smiled, though he did eventually call for breathing equipment, just in case. But no reason to stop the digging while waiting for it to arrive.

  They went down three feet, maybe four, without finding anything beyond dirt and rock shot through with veins of crystal. Maybe that was it, the crystal? Or maybe there was something there, deeper down? They needed another pulse, something they could correlate and trace and make sure they were on the right track, but it might be hours, or even days, before one came.

  Another eight feet. The contact beam ran out of fuel and they replaced the cartridge, and then it overheated and the engineer hauled himself up out of the hole by a rope, shaking his head.

  “We’ll have to let it cool down,” he said. “A few hours at least. Besides, it’s time to sleep.”

  “We should keep going,” said Briden. “I’m sure we’re nearly there.”

  The engineer wiped his face with his hands. “There’s nothing down there,” he said. “Nothing but rock. You’re wasting your time.”

  Briden was eager to keep going, but looking at the face of the engineer and his fellow scientists he realized it was prudent to wait. “All right,” he said. “A little something to eat, a few hours of sleep, and then we can start again.”

  * * *

  They would find it, Briden was sure they would find it—it was waiting for them, the Markers had led them to this spot: it had to be there. This was a test of faith, a test of his faith. If he was to be their prophet, he had to persist, had to go on.

  He pushed at the food in front of him, stirred it around his plate, but ate very little of it. Many of the others had already gone off to catch a few hours of sleep on the spare cots in the guards’ quarters or alongside the technicians.

  “Penny for your thoughts,” said Dr. Dexter. She was still sitting across from him, observing him closely as if he were a specimen. He shook his head.

  “Briden…” she said, and for once her voice was gentle, a little hesitant. “You have to realize that there may be nothing there.”

  “But the readings,” he said. “You saw them as well as I did. We traced them as close as we possibly could—”

  “The readings have been slightly different each time. Maybe they’re there for a moment and then not. Or maybe the Markers are off somehow. Maybe they’re trying to broadcast to something that no longer exists.”

  But no, he thought, it couldn’t be that way. It had to be real. He’d invested too much of his life in this project. He knew it was real. The Marker was speaking to him, he could feel it when it pulsed. Unlike Callie, he had faith. He believed in this, believed in what he was doing. There had to be something there.

  “Look,” she said. “I said it earlier. We need more data—”

  “Data,” he groaned. “What good will that do us? We know where we should be. We need to dig. We need to keep digging until we find something.”

  “What are we going to find?” she asked.

  “How should I know?” he said. “But I’m sure something is there. The Marker wouldn’t lead us here if there wasn’t.”

  Callie just looked at him, not speaking.

  “What?” he finally said.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “Why are you staring at me?”

  “You don’t want to hear it,” she said.

  “Tell me.”

  Anger flashed in her e
yes. “All right,” she said. “You’re obsessed. You’ve lost your objectivity. You’ve let your feelings run away with you. You’ve convinced yourself that that Marker is a living thing. You don’t know if you’re coming or going, Briden. You don’t know if you’re engaged in an act of scientific discovery or an act of worship.”

  But I do know, thought Briden. It is an act of worship. How can you be so blind? Trembling, he managed still to keep his temper, but said nothing.

  When Callie spoke, her voice was calmer. “I know you’re trying,” she said. “We’re all trying.” And then she reached out and touched his hand.

  He pulled his hand back as if he’d been bitten. Gathering his plate and utensils, he stood and left.

  Another test, he thought. She’s just another test. Here to confuse me. She’s not right, I’m right. The Marker believes in me, not in her.

  He stalked his way up and around the ring until an hour had passed, maybe more, and his legs were sore. Then he sat in the control room, leaning his elbows on the desk, waiting until enough time had gone by that he felt he could wake the others up and start them digging again. He tried to gather himself, tried to bury the irritation and doubt Callie had made him feel. Not Callie, he told himself, Dr. Dexter. How could she unsettle him so?

  But soon, he told himself, everything would change. Soon everyone will know that I was right and she was wrong, and then we’ll see who unsettles whom.

  * * *

  They dug deeper, another sixteen feet before the contact beam burnt out entirely. The engineer came up shaking his head. “Not made for this kind of work,” he said. “It’s better for just clearing up small piles of rubble. You need something larger, a borer. Something you can sit in.”

  “A borer,” said Briden. “Well, let’s bring one in.”

  The engineer shook his head. “We don’t have one,” he said. “We’ll have to get one sent in.”

  “Let’s do it,” said Briden. “How long will it take?”

  “A month,” said the engineer. “Maybe two.”

  A month? Two? “There has to be another way,” he said.

  The engineer shrugged. “We’ve got another contact beam or two,” he said. “We could burn those out as well, maybe get a little deeper. But I have to tell you: there’s no indication that anything’s there. The rock that’s there, it’s been in place probably for millions of years. There’s no evidence that it has ever been disturbed.”

  Another test, thought Briden, tightening his lips. But who was to say that whatever was there, down below, hadn’t been there just that long. The Marker technology could be eons old.

  “Go get them,” he said. “And order a borer just in case.”

  The engineer sighed and left.

  And that was when it happened. Another pulse, a strong one, which left Briden lying on his back right next to the hole that had been dug, almost falling in, his head throbbing, his vision almost obscured. For a moment he saw something or someone, but he couldn’t make out their features. And then for a flash it was his dead father’s face, and then that, too, vanished and he was panting, lying there, staring into Callie’s eyes.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  He opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out. Near him a guard had fallen to one knee, and was groaning. One of his own researchers was tearing at his hair. From the cells he could hear the cries and howls of the prisoners and realized that one or maybe two or maybe more of them were probably in the process of beating themselves to death. More corpses. More souls opening themselves to Convergence. As he himself would do as well. Only not yet.

  “Did you feel it?” he finally managed to say.

  Callie nodded. “I felt something,” she said. One of her eyes, he noticed, was leaking tears, but only one of them.

  “Wasn’t it glorious?” he couldn’t stop himself from saying.

  She scowled. “Don’t be a fool,” she said and pulled him up.

  The guards were scattered and confused. The two other scientists were slowly calming down, one of them standing there with tufts of his own hair in his hand, the other massaging her temples with her fist.

  “It’s changing,” said Briden. “It’s growing stronger.”

  “It’s becoming more dangerous,” said Dr. Dexter. “We need to be careful.” She gestured around her at the little patches of mossy tendrils clinging to the floors and walls. “You see what’s happened to the corruption?” she said. “There’s more of it now. It’s spread with the signal.”

  “Then it’s part of the Marker,” said Briden. “We shouldn’t be trying to clean it up, we should be encouraging it to grow.”

  Cassie shook her head. “It’s just a by-product,” she said. “We should get rid of it. We need to be careful.”

  She unstrapped her portable reader, getting the feed from the computers in the control room, checking the signal, figuring out where the exact center of this one was. She stood beside the hole, adjusting the apparatus until it was right.

  “Interesting,” she said.

  “What?” said Briden.

  “Try yours before I tell you,” she said. “Let’s see if we end up with the same reading.”

  He took out his reader and turned it on. The other two scientists were doing the same with theirs. He waited for the new data to load, chose it, then waited for it to compute the nexus point and determine his location. At first, when the distance was still great, it looked just fine, as if he was exactly where he was meant to be, but as the machine dithered and the map scale became more precise he realized that no, he was nowhere near the nexus, was perhaps a hundred feet away from it. He looked at Callie’s screen, saw the same.

  “We needed more data,” said Callie. “Told you.”

  He nodded, began to move here and there, toward where he thought the new nexus was, Callie alongside him, the two other scientists following behind, still a little shaken. It moves, thought Briden. But what was it? What did that mean? Perhaps it was something they couldn’t see, something they wouldn’t be able to catch hold of. But still he kept walking, kept following his reader.

  They came to the wall at the end of the inner circle but they weren’t quite there. It was on the other side of that, somewhere in the cell ring. He exchanged a look with Callie and they both headed for the opening into the cell ring and started down it, tracking down the hall. They passed half a dozen cells until, finally, they came to the one that his machine told him was where the nexus had been.

  Inside, a young man sat on his bed, his feet flat on the floor, his hands flat on his knees. His eyes were closed and he was breathing slowly in and out in a very measured way.

  “It’s here now,” said Briden. “If we start digging right away, maybe we can catch it this time.”

  “Briden, no,” said Callie Dexter, taking his arm.

  “What do you mean, no?” he said, turning to face her, angry. “Who’s in charge here? If I say dig, we dig.”

  But she pulled him back, pulled him away from the bars of the cell. Half whispering, she said, “Don’t you recognize him?”

  Confused, he turned and looked back at the man sitting serenely in the cell. He was just one of the prisoners, so what? And then the man turned and opened his eyes and looked at him and smiled.

  “He was sitting at the table when we got the first reading,” said Callie. “He was sitting exactly where we dug.”

  “No,” said Briden.

  “And now here he is, sitting just where we got our most recent reading.” She sounded at once excited and confused, her objectivity momentarily shot as well. “Briden, we’re not looking for something buried. We’re not looking for a piece of equipment. We’re looking for that man.”

  PART FOUR

  32

  He would listen to the voice, he would follow what it said. After all, it had not led him astray so far. No, quite the opposite: it had broken the bonds of his imprisonment. It had plucked him from Hell and brought him here.

  “A
re you comfortable,” the lead scientist asked him. What was his name again? Barden? No, Briden. He nodded.

  “Can I get you something?”

  He waited for the voice of the dead to tell him what was needed, but it didn’t say anything. Briden was staring at him; Istvan was not exactly sure how much time had passed. He shook his head. “Not now,” he said.

  “Maybe later?” asked Briden, strangely eager.

  Istvan nodded. The movement felt odd. When the voice was more distant from him, everything felt false, slightly off. He felt too much like he had felt growing up. Like the world was in charge of him rather than he being in charge of the world. He didn’t like that.

  Briden was sitting across the table staring at him. Much like the small gray man had done. What did Briden want exactly?

  “What is it like?” Briden asked.

  “What?” said Istvan, surprised.

  “It chose me, too,” he said. “It reached out and touched me, and I knew I would become its prophet. Did it do that to you, too?”

  Not knowing what Briden was talking about, Istvan hesitated, then nodded. Briden broke into a smile.

  “What does it want from us?” he asked.

  “Want?” asked Istvan.

  “It’s here to save us, isn’t it?” said Briden. “It wants only our own good. It wants to bring us to Convergence. Has it told you what Convergence will consist of? Has it told you when it will come?”

  Confused, Istvan just stared.

  Briden watched him, expression open and waiting. When Istvan didn’t respond, a flicker of irritation passed over his face. “You can tell me,” he said. “I’m one of the chosen.”

  “Chosen for what?” asked Istvan.

  “Is this a test?” asked Briden. “Are you toying with me?”

  Who was this man and what did he want? Istvan listened for the voice to tell him what to do. It was speaking, it was always speaking, but it wasn’t talking about the man in front of him, wasn’t telling him what to do. He tried to stare his way through this world and see the other world, see the face of one of his dead and feel the voice in his mouth, but the veil wasn’t ready to fall. He could not make it come.