The Burning Dark

by Adam Christopher

  Zia’s crew were not only highly trained but highly paid as well, and when their employer told them to jump, they asked for the height, distance, and details of the bonus remuneration offered for the task. At Zia’s call, Fathead had dragged Ivanhoe from the infirmary and readied the Bloom County without pause or hesitation. When Zia joined them, they didn’t speak unless spoken to, and the trio blasted off to their destination ahead of the official schedule. Neither Ivanhoe nor Fathead asked about Dathan, and Zia didn’t mention him. The only thing her two remaining crew members knew was that they had to get away from the Coast City quickly. As well as miners and pilots, they were bodyguards and minders. Zia Hollywood was one of the most valuable private assets in all of Fleetspace, and protecting her was a deep-drilled instinct. They were a three-person self-preservation society. Saving their asses was the prime directive.

  The slowrock field lay on the other side of Shadow, forming a cone-shaped spearhead of rubble powering cometlike toward the star. Perhaps it had been a comet, one that had broken up into its constituent rocky parts. Over time, if it wasn’t engulfed by Shadow or vaporized by its strange light, the field might separate until its density became almost undetectable in deep space. This was the bounty Zia had come to hunt. The readings were off the chart, making it a prize worth crossing half of Fleetspace for. Each bite-sized chunk, according to the data leaked to them by the Fleet, was composed nearly entirely of lucanol, a metalloid that, when combined with herculanium, made an alloy strong enough to construct the core filaments of quickspace drivers. Half a standard mining hopper of rough lucanol ore could buy you a small asteroid of your own to call home. A Bloom County skipful of the pure metalloid meant Zia could buy the Fleet itself. Maybe that was her plan.

  Or had been. The new plan was to get the hell out of the system, and fast. The question of the slowrocks hadn’t even entered Zia’s mind until they came up close, quite by accident as the ship curled away from the Coast City and into a trajectory that would take them away from Shadow. The ship’s mining computer got a lock immediately and started pumping out data without anyone even asking.

  The readings were impossible. Lucanol was soft, reactive; that’s what made it so rare. So either the readings were subject to the same kind of weird interference from Shadow’s radiation … or they were being altered somehow. Deliberately.

  Two hours later and they’d swung by the leading asteroid’s perihelion, the debris looming large on portside as they raced along. It was black, solid, a single triangular wedge, something too perfect, too regular.

  Then the Spiderbaby under their feet had begun to twitch. It was unusual, but within bounds, and probably due to the light of Shadow as they skimmed its corona. They were close to the star, far closer than they’d intended.

  The first sign of trouble had been when the movement of the mining legs had stopped. A minute later and the Bloom County’s engines cut out. As Fathead scrambled over the controls, they went dark. The control cabin cooled a little as the environment systems shut off, giving Zia’s crew just a few hours of life support before they’d freeze in space.

  Ivanhoe worked on the engines while Zia and Fathead got the backup systems online. Minimal life support and emergency communications, and that was it. The flight deck was dark, lit by the weak orange of the emergency communications screen and the dull purple glow of open space coming in from the large window. Zia thanked the stars for their light, and the fact that their ship had real windows and wasn’t reliant on viewscreens.

  She’d seen it first. The starlight itself began to dim. The debris field was suddenly looming over them, much closer than it should have been as they’d drifted unpowered toward it. It was impossible. Unless the great black nothing had steered toward them itself.

  As Zia watched, the window went dark, leaving them with nothing but a sick orange from the comms channel as it sprang to life, filling the cabin with a hard-edged roar of white noise. Then the light from even that dimmed, as the darkness came through the window and filled the cabin like a heavy, black gas being poured into a tank.

  Fumbling in total blackness, Zia called for Ivanhoe and Fathead. At first her crew replied and Zia walked and stumbled, arms outstretched, the small flight deck impossibly large in the dark. Then the voices stopped. Zia realized then that there had been three responses: Ivanhoe and Fathead … and Dathan.

  As her eyes adjusted, Zia could make out the comms deck ahead of her. The shadows seemed to move at her peripheral vision, black-on-black shapes darting out of sight as she turned her head.

  And then a new voice.

  Ida scratched his chin and looked at Zia. “The voice,” he said, waiting a moment as Zia tilted her head quizzically “You sure it was him?”

  “On the ship?” she asked. “I know my own father’s voice.”

  Ida nodded.

  “Y’know,” she continued, “the very worst thing is that part of me wanted to go.”

  Ida glanced at her. She sat cross-legged on the bed, her hands twisting at the sheets beneath her. Ida thought back to his own temptation on board the Coast City, in the lifetime ago before Zia had even arrived.

  Zia sighed. “D’ya think it was really him?”

  Ida didn’t answer for a long time. “It’s either him, or something pretending to be him. Whatever it—they—are, they can get into our heads, into our minds.”

  “You’ve seen ’em too?”

  Ida nodded. “I saw someone who was once very close to me.”

  “Dead?”

  “Yes, she’s dead.”

  They sat in silence for a while. The shadows under the bed didn’t move.

  “I couldn’t go,” said Zia eventually.

  “No,” said Ida. “Me neither.”

  “He said he’d forgive me if I came.”

  Ida looked up. “Forgive you for what?”

  But Zia wouldn’t meet his eye.

  39

  Quicker than Ida expected, Zia changed the subject. “What makes us so damned special?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Zia shifted on the bed. She let go of the bunched-up sheets and began gesturing with her hands as she spoke. It was good, Ida thought. She was focusing on solutions, not problems. First step: gather data.

  “They … she … it—whatever ‘it’ is—is taking people. The marines, the commandant, everyone on this fucked-up space station. Fathead, Ivanhoe, Dathan. And who knows who else. How far does this go? How many people have vanished in Fleetspace?”

  Ida frowned. “And this station—or rather, this system—is at the center of it. Must be. Shadow is an unusual star, unique. Can’t be a coincidence. But more important, what are people being taken for? There must be a reason.”

  They fell into silence. For once, Ida didn’t miss the static roar from the space radio.

  Zia unfolded her legs and lay down. She looked at the ceiling, and then crossed her arms behind her head.

  “So did all those fancy heroics really happen?” Zia asked.

  Ida coughed, his train of thought broken. “Tau Retore? Yes,” he said, looking at her. “It really happened.”

  “So if you saved an entire planet from the Spiders, how does something like that get erased from Fleet records? What I heard, the war isn’t exactly going as planned. Win like that would be shouted to the heavens.”

  Ida felt the panic rise in his chest. Just a twitch, just enough to remind him that, weirdness aboard the good ship Coast City aside, there was plenty else wrong with the universe.

  Unless, of course, they were connected. Another unlikely coincidence.

  Zia sat up and leaned forward. “No, I’m serious. Damn thing never happened. I ain’t never heard of it, and none of my crew have either. It’s just smoke in the wind.”

  “What do you mean? How do you know?”

  Zia raised an eyebrow. “I checked. We were given a crew list of the station when our stop was approved. It was a long flight. I looked you up.”

  “What did you
find, exactly?”

  Zia shook her head. “Nothing, is what. There ain’t nothing recorded. No name, no rank. No record. Nothing at all. You, my fine Cap’n, don’t even exist.”

  Ida laughed, but the laugh died and he stared at the floor. Zia shook her head again. “But…”

  “But?”

  “Well, here you are.” said Zia.

  “Here I am,” said Ida, throwing his hands open. “Stuck out in the back end of nowhere, surrounded by shadows and ghosts. Tau Retore happened, and then I was sent here.”

  Zia blew out a lungful of air between pursed lips. “And so was I.…”

  Ida straightened in his chair. “You were sent here? I thought you came of your own free will?”

  “Well, yeah, but only because we were fed the readings on the slowrock field. If those readings didn’t show a whole damn gold mine floating out in this fucked-up system, I wouldn’t be here.”

  “So you and me—”

  Zia nodded. “Yep.”

  “We were both sent here.”

  “Yep.”

  “For a reason.”

  “Yep.”

  Ida stretched his arms in front of him, turning his palms inside out and cracking his interlocked fingers. Then a thought occurred. A connection made, perhaps.

  “I’m not the only one who seems to have dropped out of the history books,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  Ida spun the chair around slowly until he was facing the table. There sat the space radio, narrow and silver, the blue light now a dead black dot on the front of its shiny casing.

  “I made contact with someone with this thing, just before you arrived. Caught a signal and then found a voice.”

  “And?”

  “And she didn’t exist. The transmission was from a thousand years ago and had been bouncing around subspace ever since. The sender was a cosmonaut, mid-twentieth century. Except not one that ever existed.”

  “Subspace?” There was something in Zia’s voice that made Ida want to sit very still, very still indeed.

  “Ah … yes. Some malfunction, the set could pick up—”

  “Goddamn it, Ida, you’ve been listening to a voice from fucking subspace?”

  Ida turned the chair, surprised at Zia’s outburst. But there was something else too, that cold fear again, somewhere in his middle. He could feel his heart kick up a gear and he watched Zia. She was sitting up on the bed again, her eyes wide.

  Zia swore. “Jesus, Ida, don’t you know about subspace? Didn’t the Fleet send you a fucking memo?”

  “I know subspace frequencies are illegal, but—”

  “Holy crap. You know why they’re illegal?”

  “Um.” Ida’s breathing was fast and shallow. The quiet, creeping fear grew and grew and grew. His mind tripped over memories, trying desperately to claw back what he’d learned at the academy, searching for answers, facts that he felt he should know but that he now realized hadn’t been taught by the Fleet, not to him, not to anyone.

  The stories. The half-remembered whispers about subspace, about how it was dangerous. About what lurked below. Hellspace.

  “Um,” he said again. His throat was dry.

  Zia sighed and slouched back on the bed, shaking her head. “Things,” she said, like that explained everything.

  Ida let out a breath and blinked. “Things?”

  “Damn it.” Zia rubbed her forehead. “There are things in subspace. Bad things. You could say they lived there, but they’re not alive, not really. They live in subspace and deeper too. Hellspace. Fuck.”

  Ida swallowed. His throat felt tight, the sound so terribly loud in his ears.

  Hellspace.

  He rolled the word around in his head, trying to convince himself that this conversation wasn’t happening.

  “You’ve been hanging out in too many colonial bars, Ms. Hollywood,” he said quietly, but he knew he was out of his depth.

  She turned her head to look at him. “Don’t you get it?”

  “Get what?”

  “Subspace is illegal because the things that live in it got out once. Followed a signal. Back in the early days of the Fleet, before the Spiders. Took everything we had to push them back, and then subspace was closed off. No one went near.”

  Ida stared at her, his mind racing. Then he shook his head and laughed—a nervous reaction, the laugh of a man afraid, one that quickly died in his throat. He closed his eyes and held up a hand.

  “And how do you know this, exactly? I’m an officer of the Fleet and even I don’t know—”

  “Look,” said Zia, and Ida opened his eyes. She was leaning forward, toward him. “Someone like me, I get to see a lot of things. Hear a lot of things. There’s a whole lot of people, all of them want a piece—of me, of my money, everything. They want my ship, they want to be friends, business partners, lovers. When you’re rich and you’re famous, then doors get opened, you get to go places most people don’t, not even officers of the Fleet. And you’re told things, shown things.”

  Ida shook his head. “Told things?”

  “You’d be amazed at how willing people are to talk when they think they can impress someone like me, thinking it can get them in, get them close. Trust me when I say that those stories about subspace and what lives there are all true.”

  Ida sighed. He believed her. And if what Zia said was true, then the stories, the rumors, about subspace and hellspace, they didn’t even cover the half of it. There was something out there. Something the Fleet didn’t want anybody to know about. Something that, Ida thought, was now stirring.

  “What if they’re coming back?” he asked. “What if someone made contact again and what if they’re following the signal back out?”

  “Then we’re all dead,” said Zia.

  40

  With only a fraction of operational personnel on board, the Coast City’s hangar was a rare hive of activity, the crew busying themselves with familiar routines and protocols, trying to keep order, control. It was the Fleet’s way. In the middle of a difficult and protracted war, this is what you did. You carried on, and maybe you told yourself that the final transport was already on the way, having headed out early, as soon as the lightspeed link had gone down.

  Maybe. But until it arrived, the crew went about their duties, running the hangar bay and readying the station’s shuttle for its routine patrol of the system.

  The Magenta was illuminated from underneath by landing lights, and from their position behind a row of empty loading pallets, Ida and Zia could see two crew members sitting at the flight controls.

  Ida and Zia had a plan.

  In his cabin, they’d patched into the comm channel between the bridge and the hangar and listened to the chatter between the two for nearly half a cycle before heading down to the hangar. Most of the talk had been the usual system updates and routine checks, although they learned that two crew members who were due on duty were not responding to calls and couldn’t be found on the hub. More taken.

  They waited, listening, until the Coast City cycled into night. The dark was dangerous, the domain of Izanami—the thing from subspace, Ida now knew. But they needed to risk it, because they had to get to the Magenta. Their objective was clear.

  The debris field.

  They’d pored over data from Zia’s wrist computer. The field density readings originally supplied by the Fleet said the slowrocks were pure lucanol—a gold mine, as Zia had said, but one that was impossible. As Zia had seen firsthand, whatever was floating out on the other side of Shadow wasn’t a cluster of asteroids at all, but something regular, artificial: a single solid object, one that had moved toward the Bloom County like it was being piloted.

  Piloted … like a ship. Another coincidence too far. The answers lay aboard it. Ida knew it and Zia knew it and they also knew they had to get back there. They were clean out of options on the station.

  They couldn’t take the Bloom County, not without people noticing. And Zia had refused to get bac
k on board it. But the Magenta was due to make its regular, routine flight. If they could get on board and bide their time as it went about its patrol, they could take the ship over and be at the target before anyone knew about it. Before Izanami knew what they were doing.

  Space Piracy 101: Secrete yourselves on board, wait for the ship to blast off, count to a thousand, and, bingo, hijack. It was so simple, it might just work.

  Zia was restless, and Ida didn’t blame her. They’d been crouched behind the loading trays for more than an hour now. Ida flexed his fingers around the Yuri-G’s molded grip; he looked back at the shuttle.

  “Here we go,” he whispered.

  Two hangar crewmen walked down the Magenta’s rear ramp and headed toward the stairs leading to the control room, a large cuboid box that hung on one side of the bay. They looked tense, anxious, and as they walked in silence they both glanced around, into the shadows that draped the far corners of the hangar. The Coast City’s crew was holding on, but only just. The Fleet’s training was good.

  “Preflight routine complete,” said Ida into Zia’s ear. “The shuttle will be empty for less than an hour.”

  Zia nodded. Ida watched the hangar crew move up the stairs and into the control room. After disappearing around a door, they appeared briefly at the main window as they completed their check, then turned and walked out of view. Just to be sure, Ida counted to twenty, but nobody reappeared on the stairs.

  “Go!”

  Zia led the way, crawling around the side of the loader and then ducking under the superficial railing that separated the cargo pads from the shuttle landing pad. She dropped the three-foot step silently, and ran at a crouch to hide behind the Magenta’s front landing gear. She waited a count of three, just like Ida had told her, and then scrambled to the rear of the craft and up the exit ramp.

  Ida counted to three himself, and then followed her pattern—railing, check; landing gear, check; exit ramp, and on.

  Time to fly.

  * * *