Dead Space: Catalyst

by Evenson, Brian

He was halfway down the hall when the sound brought him back. A strange sound, a sort of crackling noise. He took out the laser saw and headed back.

  One of the bat creatures loomed over Waldron’s body, its wings enfolding him in a sickly embrace. It had inserted a bonelike tube into his forehead and seemed to be pumping something into him. The body itself was not the same body he had left a moment ago. It had begun to change, transforming into one of the creatures, bone and flesh tearing and re-forming, slowly coming back to life. He turned on the laser saw and rushed forward, arriving just as the flying thing had withdrawn and taken off. He leapt after it, managed to cut through one of the wings. It fell flopping and he cut it down the middle, until it stopped moving completely.

  And then he turned to take care of Waldron.

  The thing that had been Waldron was already up, hissing, swinging its scimitars. One of them caught him in the side and spun him sideways, knocking him down. It leapt on him, trying to bring its mouth to his neck and he found himself grunting, struggling to keep it away. It gave a cry of what might have been frustration and thrust its blade down at him, just missing his arm. He dragged the laser through the bladelike appendage and severed it, and for a moment its balance was off and it reared up and he could bring his arm across enough to sever its other blade. It still held on to him with the stumps, was still trying to bite his neck, and for a moment it did get its teeth in. He gave a cry of pain and frustration and shoved it off, managed to roll it over so he was on top, and then he very quickly severed its head.

  It took just a moment more to separate all the limbs and make sure he was immobilized once and for all. Then he lay there on his back staring up at the ceiling. Hardly fair, he thought, to have to kill the same person twice. But then again, he told himself, life is never fair. He lay there a while longer, catching his breath, and then he got up and went on.

  The control room was only a little farther along. He followed the curve around and there was a reinforced steel door, a plate-glass window next to it. He looked in and saw the back of a man busy taking a piece of machinery apart. The desk in front of him was scattered with circuit systems, some of which he seemed to have joined artificially together with twists of wire. He tried the pad beside the door, but it wouldn’t open. He went to the window and knocked on it, but the man didn’t seem to hear. So he went back out to the room with the corpses and got a truncheon and brought it back and rapped as hard as he could on the glass.

  This time the man heard. He spun around and stared and Jensi was a little shocked to discover it was Henry. But Henry was quite a bit more shocked. He fainted dead away.

  * * *

  Even when he was conscious again, Henry still couldn’t quite believe it. He wouldn’t open the door for Jensi at first, just stared at him. Then finally he came over and worked the intercom, spoke with him through the glass.

  “This isn’t happening,” he said. “You’re just another hallucination.”

  “No,” said Jensi. “It’s happening.”

  “That’s exactly what you’d say if you were a hallucination,” said Henry.

  “I’m not a hallucination,” said Jensi. “I just crash-landed my pod into the prison. You and I were speaking until they jammed your signal.”

  “That was you?” said Henry. His face was lined and drawn, his eyes still suspicious, but he seemed to be trying to believe him.

  “I’m real, Henry,” said Jensi.

  “But what if you’ve been sent by them to get me to open the door?” said Henry. “What if I believe you’re real and open the door and then they rush in and kill me? It would be smarter just to ignore you.”

  “Henry,” said Jensi. “I’ve come thousands of miles just to be here. I just had to fight my way through creatures that seemed to feel no pain and had no interest in dying. I met a prisoner named Waldron and then had to kill him and then he came back to life so that I had to kill him again. I’ve been through a hell of a lot. Damn it, let me in.”

  Henry stared at him for a long moment, then shrugged and opened the door.

  * * *

  There were a few more awkward moments after that, moments when he said something that made Henry doubt again that he was real. Once Henry became so suspicious that he picked up a screwdriver and tried to jab out Jensi’s eye, and if Henry hadn’t been weak from lack of food he might have succeeded. But as it was, Jensi took the screwdriver away and Henry became placid, and remained so for a brief while until he began to be agitated by suspicion again.

  Or maybe it wasn’t even something he said, but just something else, the side effect of what Henry kept referring to as the pulse.

  “What kind of pulse?” asked Jensi. “What do you mean?”

  Henry tried to explain it. Scientists had come, he said, and they had recorded it. One of them had explained a little to him, though he didn’t think she was supposed to. A pulse, doing something to the brain, created by something called the Marker.

  “The what?”

  “The Marker. I’ve never seen it,” said Henry. “I don’t know exactly where it is or what it looks like. It’s in the research facility. Hush-hush stuff.”

  “What about Istvan?” asked Jensi. “Did the creatures kill him?”

  “No,” said Henry. “The scientists came and measured the pulse and scanned the area, and then they dug a hole. Once they’d done that, they became very interested in Istvan, and then took him and left.” He turned to Jensi and gave him a serious look. “But if the same thing is happening over there that’s happened here, he’s probably no longer alive.”

  “He’s got to be alive,” Jensi insisted.

  “He’s probably not,” said Henry. “I know you’ve come a long way to be here, but it might be time to admit that.”

  Jensi turned away. Maybe Henry was right, but he wasn’t quite ready to give up. One part of Jensi wanted to become reconciled to the idea of his brother’s death, but another part still felt that his brother was still alive, was almost sure of it. Which part was correct? The one that accepted the reality of his brother’s death or the part that insisted on continuing to try to find and save him?

  “I have to try,” he said to Henry. “He may be dead, but I can’t give up until I know for certain.” He’d had years of frustration over not having been able to prevent Istvan from being taken away, and all those years were gathering together to make him feel that he had to prove himself, that it was now or never.

  Henry backed off. “Of course,” he said. “Who knows? Istvan may somehow have managed to survive. We’ll have to go to the research station to find out, but we were going to have to go there anyway. There’s nowhere else to go.”

  And so they went.

  46

  They found Henry a RIG and then took the contained all-terrain vehicle through the hostile atmosphere of the planet and toward the research facility. The landscape struck Jensi as strange, more like a moon than a planet: deep reddish-black dust and rock, no plant life at all, no signs of life at all apart from the penal colony and the research facility.

  Jensi caught Henry staring at him. “Watch where you’re driving,” he said.

  Henry looked away and shook his head in astonishment. “I still can’t believe you’re here,” he said.

  “Neither can I,” said Jensi. “And I can’t believe the shit that’s going on here.”

  “It’s like a nightmare,” said Henry.

  “It’s worse than a nightmare,” said Jensi.

  For a while they didn’t speak much, just drove.

  “What do you know about this place we’re heading toward?” asked Jensi.

  “Almost nothing,” said Henry.

  “Are we likely to have trouble getting in?”

  Henry shrugged. “It’s a secure facility, so yes, I’d imagine so. But then again they aren’t expecting us.”

  Or at least they weren’t until about a few miles away from the facility itself, when the receiver crackled alive and offered a prerecorded message.
>
  Caution. You have entered a restricted area. Enter your code and authorization. If you do not have a code and authorization, stop your vehicle now and turn around.

  “What do we do?” asked Henry.

  Jensi shrugged. “Keep going,” he said.

  The message was repeated twice at intervals of about thirty seconds. Each time they ignored it, kept driving. Thirty seconds after that, a new message came:

  You are in danger. Stop immediately or you will be destroyed.

  Jensi kept driving.

  “I’m going to try to hail someone,” said Henry nervously. He was just starting to do so when something struck the ATV. It spun them around, threw the vehicle into the air, brought it down hard to land upside down.

  * * *

  Jensi hung head down in his webbing. The inside of his faceplate was obscured by a fine mist of blood and this, in combination with the cracks that had come from the pod crash, made it very difficult to see. He groaned, shook his head.

  He turned and saw Henry hanging beside him, seemingly unconscious. Jensi pressed his webbing release and fell in a heap onto what had been the vehicle’s roof, and from there he turned around and worked his way to kneeling. He shook Henry, knocked on his faceplate, but Henry didn’t respond.

  Carefully he positioned himself to bear Henry’s body and then pressed the release for his webbing, letting him down slowly and easily. He dragged him out of the ATV and spread him out on the ground outside.

  He connected to him via comlink. “Henry,” he said. “Henry, wake up.” He checked the suit for tears and holes but there was nothing, and as far as he could tell, manipulating the limbs through the suit, no broken bones. He seemed to be breathing as well.

  The ATV, though, was useless. The back half of it had been torn off by a mine or by a rocket, no way to say which, before being flipped upside down. They’d been lucky that the explosion had hit where it had; a little farther up and both of them would be dead.

  “Henry,” said Jensi. “I can’t leave you here, but I can’t carry you, either. And I don’t know if either of us have enough air to go far.”

  47

  Callie would hear noise through the slot, but it was never anyone human. The creatures would come from time to time and if they heard her they would scrabble at and try to break their way through the door, but she would hold very still and after a while they would go away.

  She had been left there on her own for three days, listening to the shouts and screams. Her food had run out at the end of the first day, her water, carefully rationed, in the middle of the second. She was likely, she realized, to die of dehydration. That was better, she told herself, than dying out there, killed by the creatures. All the same, she’d like to go down fighting.

  She had examined her equipment, trying to figure out if she could build something out of it, manage some sort of primitive bomb. It didn’t seem possible; she didn’t have either the right materials or the right tools. And so, not knowing what else to do, she kept doing what she always did, examining her data, continuing her research.

  But there was not enough data. Never enough data. What had happened to the guard to make him go mad? And what had happened to him after that, to change his dead body into something else? A parasite maybe? How did it simulate consciousness? Was it tied to the Marker and its broadcasts or was that something entirely different?

  No, what she needed was to get to the control room, get back to a place where she had access to all the data. If she had full access, maybe she would be able to figure it out.

  But she wasn’t even sure if anybody was in the control room anymore. For all she knew, everybody might be dead. She turned back to the data she did have and tried to make the most of it.

  * * *

  She was working over the same figures, the same numbers, yet another time when she heard a noise at the door. At first she thought it was one of the creatures returned again, coming to try to get at her, but then she heard the beep as a keycard was scanned and the lock dropped open. She turned and waited, watched the door open.

  It was Anna Tilton, Callie saw, the cryptologist. She was a member of Briden’s circle and a Unitologist. Despite the dizziness Callie was feeling, she stood slowly up and tried to look unbroken and proud.

  “So Briden’s finally decided to free me, has he?” she said. “Finally realized the error of his ways?”

  Anna held out a bottle of water to her. Callie took it, her fingers shaking. She had a hard time getting the lid off, but when it finally came, she started to gulp it.

  “Not too quickly, or you won’t be able to keep it down,” said Anna.

  Callie had to make a conscious effort to slow down and stop, but she managed. She held the bottle a moment without drinking, then took a slow careful sip.

  “So what changed his mind?” she asked.

  Anna shook her head. “No, Briden didn’t send me,” she said. “I came on my own.” She reached into her bag, came out with a chunk of bread, which she handed over. Callie took a small bite. She couldn’t believe how good it tasted.

  “So what do you want?” Callie asked.

  “It can’t have been meant to happen like this,” Anna said. Callie looked up and saw Anna’s troubled, distracted face. “Death and carnage and those … things. It’s not some religious enlightenment. It’s not part of the divine plan, no matter what Briden thinks.”

  “I think we can agree on that,” said Callie. “But why bother to tell me? Why have you released me?”

  “Because you have to stop it,” said Anna. “You have to stop Briden before it’s too late.”

  48

  He waited, trying not to expend too much oxygen or energy, occasionally shaking Henry. How much time had gone by? One minute? Two? Five? When would he reach the point where he would not have enough oxygen to make it to the research facility?

  It would be better to leave Henry behind, he knew. If he were just to abandon him and try to make it on his own to the facility, he might have a chance. But he could not bring himself to do so. No, Henry had been there for him after his mother’s death and for years afterward, had been a true friend. He was not willing to leave him behind.

  And so he sat beside him and spoke to him through his transmitter and shook him until finally Henry gave a little groan and began to come around.

  “What happened?” Henry asked. “Where are we?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Jensi. “What matters is that we have to go, right now. Can you walk?”

  Henry moved his limbs, winced. “Something’s wrong with my arm,” he said.

  “Can you walk?” Jensi asked again.

  “I think so,” said Henry. Jensi helped him up by his uninjured arm, got him standing on his feet. He stood there, holding one arm in the other.

  “All right?” said Jensi.

  Henry nodded. He looked dazed, but basically okay.

  “We’ve got to be quick,” said Jensi. “We’ve got to try to get there before our oxygen runs out and we die.”

  * * *

  They took off over the landscape, Jensi leading the way, Henry stumbling behind. From time to time he would call back to him, goad him along. They weren’t running exactly, Henry was too dazed to run, but they were moving quickly, Jensi’s heart speeding up.

  They were perhaps a quarter mile from the facility when the warning on his RIG sounded and Jensi knew he had only a little bit of oxygen remaining. He picked up his pace, hoping Henry would be able to follow. He shouted to him, encouraging him on. The building had grown large now, and he kept his eyes open for a door or an airlock, hoping they were coming toward it from the right direction to find one. If they had to circle the building, there was little if any chance that they’d have enough oxygen to make it.

  He heard Henry’s voice in his ear. “You’re getting too far ahead,” he said. “I can’t keep up.”

  “Follow my tracks,” Jensi said.

  “But—”

  “I need to find a
way in,” said Jensi. “Oxygen’s almost gone. It’s urgent.”

  Henry was saying something else, but he paid no attention to it. He was running now, moving as quickly as he could. The building was only a little way ahead of him, the corner of it, but he couldn’t see far or well enough to glimpse a door. Which way should he go?

  He flipped a coin in his mind and went left, running beside the wall. He ran perhaps forty yards and then decided he’d made a mistake and almost turned around and went the other way, but had enough presence of mind to realize that if he turned around he’d simply use up whatever little oxygen he had getting back to where he was. He kept going, ran perhaps another thirty yards and suddenly reached a dark opening.

  He flicked his RIG light on. It was an airlock, the outer door left open for some reason. He immediately turned around, went back for Henry.

  He found him near the corner of the building, weaving and swaying, just starting to turn the wrong direction. He called him and stopped him, then got ahold of his good arm and steered him the right way. His oxygen feed had shut off, having run out, and he realized he had very little time left. He felt lightheaded. There was his mother, standing just next to the building, smiling. It’s a hallucination, he told himself, she isn’t real, and he shut his eyes long enough to rush through her, pulling Henry along with him. He stumbled and nearly fell. He was breathing now already exhausted air, the little pocket of it left within his helmet, and was beginning to grow dizzy, but then suddenly there they were, inside the airlock.

  He searched for the controls to close the outer door, but couldn’t find them. His mother was there beside him, having followed them in.

  You always were the smart one, weren’t you? she said.

  “I don’t know,” Jensi said.

  “What don’t you know?” asked Henry.

  If you’re so smart, his mother said, let’s see if you can figure out a way to get out of this one.

  The darkness was crowding up around him, reducing his vision. He was, he knew, about to pass out. He watched his hand grope around the wall and finally find the panel and press it.