But he had to admit it was really quite a fascinating academic study on the interaction between the star’s strange light and the station’s own artificial magnetosphere. As the amber glow of data flowed across the screen, he noted a few spikes of stellar activity that corresponded to the static on the set. He could try to retune, or perhaps, given an hour, come up with an algorithm to work the mess out of his signal. Ida poked at the screen, the amber of its data tables and the blue light of the radio the only illumination in the cabin.
Clive kept talking. Castle, a civilian mining engineer whose job supervising the construction of a drill head on one of the moons of Arbitri clearly left too much free time on his hands, butted in occasionally to express his satisfaction with the juicier aspects of Clive’s adventures in Polarii love and to ask respectfully for more technical data on the difficulties of human–Polarii anatomical interaction. A newcomer too, calling himself Captain Midnight—Ida wasn’t sure whether this was his rank and name or some kind of superhero identity—seemed to be enjoying the chat. Ida didn’t quite believe he was calling from inside a black hole, but, hey, the radio hams of the galaxy were a bunch of sad, lonely losers with nothing better to do. If Captain Midnight wanted to be inside a black hole, then let him be inside a black hole. On the radio you could be anyone and anywhere you liked.
Ida wondered whether he should tell them about his adventures over the skies of Tau Retore, and whether he’d get a better reception here than among the jarheads that inhabited the Coast City.
DeJohn had been quite right about Fleet service being an honor. In the middle of a difficult, decades-long war against an alien machine intelligence, a citizen could do no greater service for humanity than enlist in the Fleet. And Ida knew full well how he would feel if he came across someone claiming a heroic action that they had no right to.
But was he really so far out on the edge of Fleetspace that the news about Tau Retore hadn’t made it? He’d saved a planet and seen off a whole Spider cluster—including a Mother Spider. Why else did they think he’d been awarded with the Fleet Medal?
And, he thought, an artificial knee, an enforced honorable retirement, and a final posting to one of the most remote backwaters in Fleetspace. To oversee the decommissioning of an unremarkable space station well past its use-by date.
Ida absently flexed his robot knee, which had grown stiff as he sat at the desk.
He sat and thought.
Something was well and truly FUBAR, and not just on the Coast City, but at Fleet Command itself.
Something that, maybe, he should look into.
2
Space is black. Everyone said so—in verse, prose, even song. Except in the Shadow system, space wasn’t black; it was purple.
Serra took a breath. She stared at the violet-tinged metal wall in front of her, her eyes flicking over the green HUD projected onto the inside of her helmet visor. Among other things—suit status and integrity, temperature, oxygen, constant (and pointless) system notifications from the Coast City’s main computer—the HUD’s main features were two glowing brackets on either side and an upside-down T right in the center, showing which way was up and which was down. Although such things lost meaning in space, the Fleet liked to impose its own order on the universe. The slice of it occupied by humans wasn’t called Fleetspace for nothing.
She wanted to turn around, but, clamped on to the outer hull of the space station, she could only manage to get her helmet around enough to look awkwardly over one shoulder. She wanted to turn, needed to look, but she was afraid.
“Carminita…”
The voice again.
“Date la vuelta, m’ija.”
Turn around, my child.
It echoed inside her helmet, washed with static, and she swore whenever it spoke the comms indicator on the HUD flickered. But she knew the voice wasn’t coming from the station. And it certainly wasn’t coming from Carter, working just a few meters away on the hull.
“Carminita, está bien, nena.…”
It’s okay, baby.
Serra closed her eyes and took another breath, pulling on the atmosphere a little harder than the suit expected. She heard a whirr as it compensated.
“That’s it. Cycle the power again.”
Serra opened her eyes and turned her head slowly. The front of her visor was an inch from the station’s hull, and she watched the metal slide out of her vision until it was replaced by the black—by the purple—of space. Until there, just at the edge, she saw something brighter, a violet-tinted white.
Immediately her suit’s HUD changed from regular green to a bright, angry red. A countdown appeared, superimposed over the inverted T in the center: 4′38″, and a third column that spun too fast to read.
“Ahí estás, Carminita!”
There you are!
She closed her eyes.
“Serra?”
Serra blinked and gasped, but the suit ignored it and didn’t broadcast her sharp intake of breath to Carter. She turned back to the hull, and the HUD turned green and the counter froze on four minutes thirty-one seconds and remained in view for a few more heartbeats, just to make sure the reader got the message.
Serra got it: The light of Shadow will fuck you up. It wasn’t hard to understand. First it would eat through the shielding on your visor; then it would burn your mind out through your optic nerve. Shadow was an evil mother.
“Earth to Carmina Serra. Come in, please.”
Carter’s voice was loud, exasperated—not quiet, not female, like the … other. The comm caught the rasp as he scraped his chin against the padding inside his helmet.
Serra turned and her partner propelled himself toward her. As he approached, he reached past her helmet and yanked at the manual power override switch she was floating right in front of. Serra watched the fabric of his suit’s sleeve press against her visor, but it made no sound.
Carter sighed and pushed off again, back to where he had a service panel open. “You awake in there?”
“Carajo. Sorry, sorry.” Serra shook her head. Should she tell him?
No. A psi-marine hearing voices—a voice—wasn’t usually taken well by the regular crew. The psi-marines were essential to the Fleet, now more than ever as the fight against the Spiders seemed to be getting harder and harder. While this earned her class respect, she knew some found specialists like her more than a little creepy. She didn’t want to give them the excuse. Not that Carter would tell anyone, but sometimes he joined in with the ribbing with the rest of them.
“Don’t blame you if you need a little shut-eye,” Carter said as he worked, arms deep inside the skin of the space station. “Didn’t get much sleep last night.”
Serra shook her head and smiled as Carter’s laugh snorted across the comm. She wondered whether anyone in the station’s bridge was listening in. She wondered whether she cared. The ship’s manifest would have shown the two of them spending most nights in each other’s cabins anyway.
“You hear what our honored guest has going on?”
Serra turned back to Carter. “Cleveland?”
Carter snorted again. He pulled something out of the service panel, checked a connection, and pushed it back in. “Got himself hooked up with a space radio.”
“Oh.” Serra wasn’t interested. She wished she had more to do out here. She didn’t like being in Shadow’s light, but EVAs always had to be done in pairs and Carter had assigned her a simple task. “I didn’t know they still used those.”
“They don’t. Nobody does. Seems he’s a bit of a geek, among other things.”
“We need to talk about that, Charlie.”
“Not now.” Carter grunted and floated a few feet back. He had another part in his hands, a long black pipe with silver connectors at either end. He held one end up to his visor, then the other. “Damned if I can find anything wrong with this thing. It’s not the coolant conduits. I think in engineering terms, this whole thing is fucked.”
Serra laughed. Carter’s h
elmet turned slightly in her direction, and she could see her own golden-mirrored visor reflected in his.
And … something else. A black shape, like there was someone else out there, stuck on the side of the hull like a clam, just behind her.
Serra gasped. The comms ignored it again.
“Bridge, come in, please.” Carter spun the black pipe and let go. It continued to revolve in the vacuum between him and the Coast City.
Serra turned her head quickly, the joint between her helmet and the neck of her suit clacking loudly. There was no one else outside. Of course there wasn’t.
“M’ija, no tengas miedo.…”
My child, do not be afraid.
Serra closed her eyes and turned back around to the hull. It was the light of Shadow—that fucking magical radiation from the technetium star—that was the root cause of all their problems. The voices in her head. The instability of the station’s internal environment system. Shadows where there shouldn’t be.
Her comms clicked again. It pulsed a little with static as Shadow’s light played with the data stream.
“Sergeant Major, I have Marshal King here.”
“Sir, no faults out here,” reported Carter. He pushed off a little from the hull and looked up. Above them, a demolition drone was crouched on the hull, parked temporarily but with a green winking light on its back indicating it was just waiting to continue its job. “The drone didn’t report anything, because there’s nothing to report. Fault must be elsewhere.”
There was a pause before the provost marshal responded. He must have been holding the comms link open with his thumb, because Serra could hear a rushing sound in the background for a second before he spoke.
“Okay, back in. We’ll just have to keep monitoring.”
“Roger that, sir.”
The comms beeped and went dead. Carter grabbed his spinning part and grabbed on to the door of the service panel to pull himself back toward the hull.
“Cycle the power back off, lemme get this piece of shit back together.”
Serra nodded, and then realized Carter couldn’t see it behind her mirrored visor. She acknowledged over the comm and flipped the lever back to the off position. She gave a thumbs-up, and Carter got back to work.
Serra closed her eyes and said, “Do you think there’s anything out there?”
Carter grunted as he worked, but after a few seconds she heard his considered reply. “There’s always something out there.”
When Serra opened her eyes, the metal wall in front of her still had the alien violet hue. She could feel the star behind her, and … something else. A presence, something real, something alive right at her shoulder. It was impossible, they were alone, but—
“But the Shadow system is uninhabited, if that’s what you’re talking about,” said Carter, the sudden appearance of his voice in her ear making Serra jump. “No planets. Nothing but slowrocks and dust. Not exactly the kind of light you can grow plant protein under, right?”
Serra laughed.
Carter reappeared from behind the service panel. “Tell you what, though, those slowrocks are probably worth a bit. I heard the marshal a couple of cycles back. High yield of lucanol. Said something about someone coming out to take a look soon.”
“Uh-huh,” said Serra with total disinterest. If someone wanted to come out this far to look at some asteroids, then they were welcome to them. But there was something else in the Shadow system, she knew. Something watching, waiting for … something.
Carmina Serra blinked behind her visor, then turned her head back around to the left. The hull slid away, the purple of space reappeared, the glow of Shadow at the edge, her HUD red.
4:31
4:30
4:29
3
Ida lay on his bed. The lights were off and the room was dark but too cold and not particularly conducive to sleep. Even here, just on the edge of the occupied deck of living quarters, the station’s systems were struggling. But at least he was left alone—there was nothing much beyond his cabin that hadn’t already been sliced by drones and packed away, and the only person who bothered coming along to his end of the deck was Izanami, which suited him just fine.
But the environment was dodgy all over the station, with wild temperature fluctuations and deviations in the standard air pressure. A side effect of the deconstruction process. Ida had heard a crew went on an EVA to try to rig a fix, but so far they didn’t seem to be having much success.
Not that he really could sleep. Ida was furious, but he’d pushed the feeling away and gotten on with his work, even though the remaining crew were not shy about their annoyance at his interruptions. Now, in the small hours, on his own, that ball of anger had changed into something colder, bitter.
He sat up and quickly swept off the covers, then slipped the top blanket off the bed and wrapped it tightly around his shoulders as he stood. Damn, it was cold, the temperature dropping even since he’d left the warmth of his bed. His breath didn’t quite steam as it left his mouth, but the metal floor was ice on his bare feet.
He turned and hopped to the environment controls near the door, set the heating on full power, and then kicked his boots from where they lay against the wall into the upright position and slid into them. He hobbled to his work desk, boot tongues flapping against his shins. Sitting and securing the blanket around himself, he pulled one of the computer screens toward him on its articulated arm. He checked the clock in the top center of the home screen. It was three in the morning.
The Coast City, like every other U-Star in the Fleet, no matter if they were ships or stations or something in between, and no matter how far from home they were, was synched to a daily cycle that matched the rotation of the Earth, specifically to a cycle that matched the day and time at Fleet Command in the former state of Utah. Three in the morning there was three in the morning in space, no matter where you were hiding or the light of which star was shining on you. It didn’t matter. War was a round-the-clock operation anyway.
He started poking at the display. Proving his involvement in the action at Tau Retore would be easy enough. All he had to do was access Fleet records and call it all up. Even jarheads like DeJohn and Carter wouldn’t be able to deny one of the greatest—not to say rarest—heroic actions in Fleet history.
“E.T., phone home,” he said, tapping the communications browser. The screen filled with the spinning insignia of the Fleet—rendered as a particularly nasty and old-fashioned three-dimensional model in scratchy blue—before resolving into a black empty square. Ida saw himself in a smaller window in the top left, and laughed. What the hell did he look like?
“Name, rank, and serial number,” asked a voice from behind the black window. Ida gave his details, and an icon at the bottom of the screen flicked to green as the video link switched suddenly on. Facing him was an operator at Fleet Command, his chin the only visible feature of the man’s face underneath a large, almost comical communications headset. Every minute movement of the operator’s head made the insectlike eyes of his headset wiggle and catch the light on its myriad surfaces. Crew who worked as operators—the definition included nearly everything that was vaguely technical or skilled, whether it be communications, logistics, or even pilots—had two nicknames. The official one was Ops. The unofficial one, but the one much more widely used, was Flyeye.
“Ah, hi there,” said Ida, pulling the blanket tighter but sitting up a little straighter in his chair. He didn’t want anyone to think that a Fleet Captain—even a former one—was a slouch. “Put me through to Archives, please.”
“Connecting you now,” said the Flyeye; the video flickered with white lines before going black again. Huh. The interference from Shadow was getting worse, crossing over into the supposedly impervious lightspeed link channel. Sunspot activity or some such, no doubt. Ida made a note to check on the readings from the solar observatory again.
Ida waited, and waited. He peered at the tiny view of himself in the top corner. He frowned, a
nd rubbed his face, and tried to flatten his bed hair. With the room heating up, he was beginning to feel drowsy. He shuffled, trying to get comfortable, and then was distracted by one corner of the blanket that had gotten caught under his chair. The room was dark, lit only by the glare of the computer screen and the few small lights on equipment scattered around the room.
Ida sighed and tugged at the corner of the blanket. He leaned down and freed the thick fabric from under the wheel, then sat back up and looked into the screen as he readjusted the blanket around his shoulders. He blinked and peered into the dark, reflective window where he expected a Flyeye from Archives to appear any second. He blinked again and his breath caught in his throat.
There was someone standing behind him.
Another blink, and it was gone, although there was a blur of movement on the screen that might just have been his eyelashes sweeping up and down. Ida felt his heart kick for a beat or two, and spun the chair around on its swivel.
Nothing. He wasn’t sure who had been assigned to the room originally—it was large, clearly designed for an officer, maybe one with a higher rank than Ida’s own. The cabin’s door was on his left. On his right was the bed, which reached to just over halfway into the circular chamber. There was a low bedside cupboard on the side of the bed closest, stacking high with personal belongings not yet tidied away. On the other side of cabin were a couple of tall lockers, still empty, waiting to be co-opted into use. There was nothing else in the room, no place for anyone to hide unless they were on the floor on the opposite side of the bed or had squeezed themselves into one of the lockers.
Ridiculous. But Ida got up and checked anyway. There was nobody beside the bed. The cupboards were empty, and, besides, the doors were stiff and impossible to open without a harsh metal-on-metal scraping amplified by the quiet of the night-cycle. The main door was closed, and on the bulkhead control panel beside it the indicator glowed a pale red, locked, next to the environment control sliders. Nobody had come in or out.
The Burning Dark Page 5