by Phil Rossi
Marisa looked blurry, as if his eyes were having trouble focusing. But the walls and lights, the cross-hatched pattern of the floor panels—those were all clear. He rubbed his eyes, but she still looked fuzzy. He followed her at a jog and then a full-out run, but despite his efforts, Gerald could not seem to gain any ground on her.
He followed her down random and seldom-used empty corridors, dodging scattered crates and dislodging cobwebs and dust. He almost lost her with each turn. The last let him out at a dead end. The only exit Marisa could have taken was a narrow service channel clearly meant for the station’s smaller service robots. The gap was barely tall and wide enough to accommodate his frame. Not again, he thought as he squeezed himself through the opening.
Gerald stumbled out of the channel into a large, barrel-shaped chamber. He nearly fell down a spiral staircase that curled down either side of the room’s curving walls. Polished chrome handrails gleamed in light cast by dim halo-globes suspended above the center of the room. The luminous spheres orbited one another slowly. He was in the foyer of the Crescent auditorium.
A reverberating bang drew his attention downward, where Marisa yanked open a large, red lacquered “employees only” door with such force it crashed against the wall. She stepped into the darkness beyond. Gerald hurried down the staircase two steps at a time until he reached the bottom. He hesitated when his fingers wrapped around the chrome handle of the red door. The metal was ice cold—almost too cold to touch. It sent a shiver up his arm. He pulled the door open. Marisa was all the way across the concert hall’s floor. She looked small at that distance. She stood with her hands on the stage and her head bowed. The image of her was as crisp as everything else in the space.
“Marisa!” His voice echoed. She turned at the sound of her name. High overhead, parallel rows of translucent panels flashed on, flooding the room in a milky white light that pooled on the floor. The gray, photosensitive floor material began to swirl with muted color. Gerald and Marisa walked toward each other in wide steps. They were running by the time they met in the center of the floor. When they threw their arms around one another, Gerald felt Marisa trembling against him.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“I’m fine… I think.” Her voice was even and calm, but she continued to shake. “You felt it too, right? I know you felt it too.”
“Yeah. I felt it,” he admitted.
“I don’t remember leaving, Gerry. The lights went out and then, like that, I was in here. I don’t know how I got here. How did you get here?” she asked.
“I followed you,” he answered.
“I walked here?”
“Yeah. You did.”
Marisa pulled back and looked up at him. Her eyes were wide and tired. They were clear, though.
“I was brought here,” she whispered.
“I know.” He thought of the lifeboat. He couldn’t help it. The presence that Gerald felt in the derelict’s tight engineering shaft was very much like what he had felt in the closet. The similarity was impossible to ignore, as much as he would’ve liked to. “What I felt in the closet when the lights went out.” He took a deep breath. “I felt that before.”
Marisa kept her eyes on his, and Gerald saw something blossom on her face. A look of hope? A look of relief? He realized then her face was a mirror of his own. If he’d known that opening his mouth about this crap would have been so damn liberating, he would’ve done it after his first night on the station.
“Gerald. When did you feel that before?”
“The deleted entry on the data log.” He let go of her. It was confession time. “I was running a salvage mission for Donovan Cortez.”
“The surgeon?”
“The archaeologist. Doc Cortez had reason to believe there was an ancient lifeboat somewhere out in the asteroid field that orbits Anrar VI. Well, whatever made him think that a ship was out there—he was right on. We found an Anrar III lifeboat just sitting there in an asteroid’s crater. I had to go on the boat to eject the reactor core so I could haul it back to Crescent.” He stopped talking. He didn’t want to go back there in his mind—the memory still made his stomach clench. But expectation was creasing Marisa’s brow, so he went on. “I couldn’t tell you how many so-called ghost ships I’ve found myself on over the years. The lifeboat felt different than any old and dead ship I’ve been on. It felt bad, Marisa. Do you know what I mean?” She nodded and waited for him to continue. “I found the crew and passengers of the lifeboat. Dead, frozen, and ripped to pieces. I heard shit. Voices. Sounds. Impossible, because there was no atmosphere on the ship, right? And the noises weren’t coming through the comm, either. When I was leaving the boat, I got this feeling. Fuck. I don’t how to describe it. It was like I wasn’t alone on the ship… There was something almost there with me. Almost. Like this thing only partially existed on the lifeboat—in this reality—and the rest of it was somewhere else. This… whatever-the-fuck it was, came after me. I don’t know how I got off that boat. I think it must’ve wanted to let me go. Like it knew that I’d be taking it off that rock.”
“Gerald.” All the color washed out of Marisa’s face. “You should never have brought that lifeboat back here.”
(Part XII)
It was quiet in the auditorium. With no other bodies or obstacles to break the sounds of soft conversation, Gerald and Marisa’s words drifted and reverberated with a gentleness that made the sounds seem like they would hang in the auditorium forever.
“How long have we been sitting here, Marisa?” Gerald asked.
“I’m not sure,” Marisa replied and looked to the PDA strapped on her wrist. Gerald followed her eyes. According to the small display, the two of them had only been talking for an hour, but it felt much longer than that. “Has time felt strange to you lately?” Marisa said, as if she could read the thought on his face. “How do I put this… Inconstant? Some days fly by like mere minutes and some hours feel like they last for weeks.”
He knew what she was taking about and nodded. Time did feel sketchy. Like something was causing the whole shebang to tremble at random.
“Perfect example. Don’t think—just answer. When did all that shit go down at Heathen’s? How long ago was it? Don’t think, just answer,” Marisa said.
He couldn’t answer. He opened his mouth to speak, but realized there was no concrete timeline of events. Which was ridiculous, because the Heathen’s incident was some traumatizing shit.
“It’s like time is a pool, Gerry. And something keeps twitching in this pool, disturbing the water. And this something doesn’t belong in our pool. Every time this thing moves, it makes new waves. New currents. That’s what we feel. We feel it twitching. Moving. Waking.” Marisa’s voice trailed off and she looked away. A dreamy expression softened her features. “It’s struggling,” she said after a long pause and climbed to sit on the edge of the stage, her legs dangling below her.
Gerald sighed and shrugged. The conversation was giving him a solid headache. He decided it would be best to rein things in before Marisa brought out the crystals and incense.
“We’re going on a big tangent here,” Gerald said. “Let me ask you this, because this matter is immediate. It’s now. What should I do about good Doc Cortez and his burning desire to visit the surface of Anrar III?” It was strange for Gerald to talk about the Cortezes with Marisa. It didn’t seem right to have Ina anywhere near the front of his mind when he was with her. Marisa was clearly going through some serious shit and needed him in a big way. He had to focus.
“Gerry, I think you have to take his offer. You have to go down there,” Marisa said. He looked past her and beyond the dance area in front of the stage. The far reaching auditorium floor was reacting languidly to the dull light falling from the parallel rows of panels above them. The colors in the floor shifted from muted oranges to pinks, to whites, and to deep blues.
“Are you kidding me? I’m of a mind to get off this orbiting bucket of scrap metal altogether. In the next
day, if I can manage it. I might’ve been on the fence before we had this talk, but in truth, this is all freaking me out a little bit. There are other places to make money out there,” Gerald said and climbed onto the stage to sit beside her.
“I read somewhere that it’s not just places that get haunted, but people too. What’s to say, if you took off, it would be over for you?” Marisa said. Her eyes narrowed ever so slightly. “What’s to say the walls will stop bleeding and phantom children will stop playing in your washroom.”
“Whoa, whoa. Who said anything about haunted?” Gerald gritted his teeth. “There is something going on here, Marisa. But, this isn’t like some goddamn scary holo-vid.”
“You still can’t think it’s all coincidence—the things we’ve been experiencing. And what about finding that lifeboat and the shit you experienced there? You can’t still be blaming it on the crawl.” She paused, clearly waiting for him to respond. When he didn’t, she spoke up again, “You might find answers down there on Anrar III.”
“Look, I have to go,” he said. It was official. The conversation had spiraled out of control.
“Where do you have to go, Gerald? Gerry? Where you gonna go? Gonna go drink it off?” Marisa said. Venom laced her words.
“Maybe.”
“Five minutes ago you were fine to talk about this.” The anger faded from her voice and was replaced by the sound of raw hurt. “And now you’re acting like I’m crazy again.”
He wanted to tell her that he didn’t think she was crazy and that he didn’t really think he himself was crazy. But he couldn’t get the words out; instead, he only looked over her shoulder to the exit.
“Whatever this is—we can’t get away from it, Gerry. So, we…you…have to follow it down to that planet. Maybe this all has something to do with what happened here way back when… ”
“The ghosts don’t solve the fuckin’ mystery, Marisa. This isn’t some stupid holo-vid.”
“I’m not saying that it has to be like that,” she protested. “I’m just saying. Crescent has never felt… normal… but now. Now. Gerry. You know you have to go down there. You know you do,” she said. Her agitation grew with each word.
Marisa’s wrist PDA chimed; an incoming call. Saved by the bell, Gerald mused.
“Shit. It’s Swaren. I bet he wants an update on our meeting,” she said and took a deep breath. She let it out slowly and ran her hands back over her hair, which had begun to spring out from the now not-so-tight bun.
“What are you going to tell him?” Gerald asked. Relief made a quick exit at the sound of Swaren’s name.
“The truth, maybe.” She paused. “That you did a job for Cortez. A salvage job on a derelict and that you didn’t want Kendall to know about it.”
“You don’t think he’ll be curious as to why I didn’t want Kendall to know?” Gerald asked her.
“I hope he is curious. As a matter of fact, I’m counting on it. You’re going to tell him all about the work you’re doing for Kendall. And then Swaren will look into it and bust Kendall for whatever scheme he’s got going here.”
“Who says there’s even a scheme?” Gerald hopped down off the stage. The sound of his boots hitting the floor was jarring in the stillness.
“Fuck that, Gerald,” Marisa said, slipping off the stage and onto her feet. “I’ve seen your face after each of your hauls for Kendall. You’re no idiot. You know there’s something up. Why else would you be doing side-jobs if not to buy your way out of the contract?” Marisa said.
Gerald had nothing to say to that. Marisa had his number. She was good.
“All right, then. Let’s say there is something up. I’m working for Kendall. Doesn’t that make me just as guilty?” Gerald said.
“Your record is spotless, Gerry. I’ve seen it. It wouldn’t take too much to convince Core Sec that Kendall had threatened you with bodily harm. We won’t have to be all that creative to take him out once there is evidence, and we can vindicate you in the process.”
“I gotta ask this, Marisa. Why are you so eager to take the mayor out?” Gerald was glad that the topic of conversation had shifted, but the new direction represented little improvement.
“Why? Well, for one, Kendall is blackmailing me. He says the shooting at Heathen’s was due to my carelessness. But I know those guns were already on the station. There is no way I let them through. No fucking way. I’m not going to take the fall for that. And no matter what I do or say, I’ll be dropped right into the meat grinder. Guns getting through security might not be a big deal for a mayor, but this shit will ruin me,” Marisa said and shook her head. “My career is all I fuckin’ have, Gerry.”
“When did shit get so complicated?” Gerald asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “But it is. And it seems to be getting a little more complicated every day. Maybe we can figure all this out. All of it, Gerry, not just Kendall’s plans, either. Wipe that look off your face. You have to go down to that planet. You do your part and I’ll do mine. I’ll figure the shit out with Kendall for the sake of both our asses.”
“You don’t think that Swaren will have Bean grounded?” Gerald asked.
“I’m sure he will. That’s why you need to go down there right away.” She stretched. “When were you planning on going down there, anyway?”
“I wasn’t.”
“Well. Now you are. So, when?” Marisa asked.
“If I was planning on going down there, I’d go down on the station’s night cycle,” Gerald said at last.
“Well. Gerry, it’s close enough now. You call Cortez and you tell him you’re going down there now. Like I said, I’ll take care of the rest.”
Gerald wasn’t convinced that the plan was a good one. But, it was a plan. Whether he liked it or not, Marisa was going to tell Swaren that Bean’s captain was running questionable salvage missions for Kendall. Gerald figured he may as well pull the job for Cortez, since there was no telling when he’d be able to make his next buck once the shit hit the fan. Gerald sucked in a deep breath. He felt around his pockets for his pack of smokes but they were missing. He extended his hand. Marisa took it and squeezed; hers was ice cold.
“All right, Marisa. You do your part and I’ll do my part. I hope you have more success than I will. Because if you don’t, that’s both our hides.” Part of him, a big part of him, hoped she’d change her mind when he was down there on Anrar III. He’d take Cortez’s money, and he and Marisa could just run. Or hell, if she didn’t want to run, he could run without her. Gerald was having a hard time envisioning things going well. Marisa smiled suddenly and pulled him forward for a kiss. It felt good to kiss her again. He realized then that he had been missing her—the real Marisa, not the terrified girl he’d come to see recently. This was her, all right, insistent as ever, sliding her arms around his back and pressing herself close enough to him that he could feel her heartbeat. When she broke the embrace, she left him there with a hard-on and a sense of growing unease.
(•••)
“Who’s joining me this time, Doc?” Gerald said as he stepped onto the bridge of the lifeboat. Donovan Cortez spun around so fast, Gerald thought the round man was going to topple over. Cortez’s fat arms pinwheeled as the archaeologist attempted to regain his balance. The sight was comical. Gerald dropped his eyes to the floor and did his best not to laugh. He felt his lips quirking into a grin despite himself.
“Gerald. For all that is holy. You scared me half to death.”
“A little on edge, Doc? Sorry.” Gerald couldn’t blame him for being twitchy. Hell, just thinking about the lifeboat made Gerald nervous. “I thought you heard me come in.” Gerald said and leaned against a dark console.
“No, I was busy. Distracted. What did you ask me? I was too startled to comprehend it.”
“I said, who is going join me on Bean this go ‘round. You or your daughter?”
“Does that mean that you are going to do this for me? You’ll go down to Anrar III?”
“C
ouldn’t mean anything else, Doc. The price has more than doubled, but yeah. I’m in. I emailed you the new quote. I think I’m going to need the money soon. Might be out of commission before long.”
Donovan lifted a puffy eyebrow.
“Don’t worry about it. I’m not grounded yet. So, answer the question, you or Ina?” Gerald cracked his knuckles and then perched a cigarette between his lips. Donovan gave Gerald a reproachful look until the cigarette was returned to the case from which it had come.
“Oh, most decidedly my daughter,” Donovan said. “The atmosphere is very thin down on Anrar III. I don’t think it would bode well for my asthma.”
“All right then. Fair enough. Where is she? We need to leave very soon.”
“Why so soon?” Donovan just wasn’t getting it; Gerald shook his head.
“Like I said. Don’t worry about it. But, if you want to get a look at that planet, we need to leave this station… about fifteen minutes ago.”
(•••)
Donovan looked around the hangar bay in furtive glances. Unease was written in flushed circles on his chubby cheeks. His eyes danced over to Walter Vegan, who stood with his strangely thin arms crossed over his sagging chest. Vegan watched Gerald, Ina, and Donovan with casual interest. Ina did not appear to share her father’s sense of unease. She didn’t seem to even notice Vegan watching them. Her eyes sparkled above a wide and eager smile. After all, Ina had a new-found love for space flight. There was no sign that she cared about Vegan paying them interest.