by V. M. Law
“Hardmason relayed your SOS, right?” Anton asked, setting the pieces in line as he uttered the words. Caspar watched his face grow white, wondering if he had any firearms concealed in his clothing.
“He is coming to get us. He will be here shortly, and when he arrives, he will take us, and the escape pod, back to the center of the system. That is where we stand. Help will arrive, and until then, we find the source of that signal.”
Anton settled himself and took a seat at the table again, though his soup had ceased steaming and he paid no attention to it. The others also had absent looks about their faces, and only Sasha looked back at him when he surveyed their reactions, one at a time.
Did she nod?
He couldn’t tell.
***
They had disbanded and taken their own areas to rest. Caspar imagined, as they walked away, that they would be discussing their plans for mutiny, or else debating his sanity, and decided that none of it would matter. They wouldn’t have time to enact a mutiny before Hardmason got here, so long as none of them followed him.
Even Sasha.
Sympathizer or not, he couldn’t have her following, meddling.
He darted down the short corridor on the aft of the bridge proper, the sleek set of arched titanium beams that led through a tunnel of soft light into the captain’s chambers. Cromwell wouldn’t mind, Caspar thought. He wouldn’t even find out.
The code he entered activated the lighting of Cromwell’s personal room and shut the door at the same time, and when he felt the air on the nape of his neck that signified the sealing of the passage behind him, he removed the hidden SatCom from beneath the rubbish in the dead man’s drawer, where he had hidden it before the survivors’ arrival. It had the weight of iron in his hand, and he struggled to raise it to his ear, dreaded the sound that would come when he did.
“Hello, Badger.”
“Hardmason.”
“There are survivors. They found their way in.”
A pause, and Caspar imagined the man strangling the nearest adjutant. “It is no matter. Have you secured the pod?”
“I am about to.”
“Keep it safe. Radio silence.”
And the line went dead. Caspar sat in the silence of the captain’s cabin with a ringing tone in his ears and his feet up on the dead man’s desk. He stroked his chin, thinking about the SatCom with a hazy look in his eyes that would have made an observer think he drank too much. It was a look of mourning, of despair thinly veiled as preoccupation.
Get it over with, he told himself.
He picked up the device again, entered the homing code, raised it to his ear, waited.
Nothing. For a moment at least.
Long enough for him to think that he would be spared the sinking feeling of talking to the other one. The handler. The seconds passed by like the dripping of water in a subterranean cavern, and his stomach began to flutter as each one went. Fifteen of them. And then twenty.
He was busy. He wouldn’t answer.
Maybe he finally fucking died, Caspar thought.
“Speak.”
Not so lucky. The voice made him retch, internally, and he stumbled over the words he had prepared in advance. “I have lost the signal, sir. It faded from the detection relays twenty nine seconds ago and hasn’t come back. I have reason to believe it has been struck—”
But he never got the rest of his falsified report out, for the man on the other end cut him off in a flurry of anger. “You told me you found Kasey Lee! You told me you had the parcel!”
“I know, sir, and I did, so to speak—”
“So to speak! So to speak!” Eugene Farrow continued to rage at him from a thousand light-years away, and he let the words echo in his empty head without producing much of an effect. Either Hardmason would come or he wouldn’t. If he did, Eugene Farrow would find an abandoned freighter and no pod.
If Hardmason failed in his rescue attempt, then—
—he didn’t know, exactly, but it didn’t involve falling into the hands of Eugene Farrow.
“If you don’t relocate that signal and find its origin, I’ll skin you alive and feed your hide to my dogs! DO you understand?” Eugene ceased his screaming now, waiting for Caspar to acknowledge the fact that he would be skinned alive and fed to a canine if he did not return the pod to its rightful owner.
“Yes, sir,” he said.
“Get back to fucking work!”
And, for the second time, the line went dead, and Caspar was left alone with the anger of another reverberating through his body and buzzing in his mind.
Chapter 20
The Althaea coasted beyond Uranus and when it broke through the planet’s pull, Jakob Hardmason felt the engines’ vibrations change, becoming a dull roar now that they did not fight the force of gravity sucking them toward the swirling, gaseous mass of ice. He relished in the feeling, knowing that Neptune would be that much closer. That the end of their search for Kasey Lee rapidly approached.
The conversation with Badger had excited him, gotten his heart hammering and his blood flowing, and now, as he paced about in his quarters with the appraising eyes of Jessup, whose wrinkles had become deep grooves since they first made contact with the Ascendancy man on the Vulcan. “Sir, we still have to ask ourselves why the Ides attacked that freighter, and with such force.”
“They are blood-thirsty drones. Is that not enough of a reason?”
“It could be.” Jessup spoke the words as if he withheld the other half.
“But it’s not, you’re saying.” He hated the way Jessup spoke, when he danced around things, when he made implications. The hinting.
“They haven’t taken a human crew since the invasion, and they manage to take an entire freighter? Something must be calling them. Like they’re looking for something.”
He had considered it. Looking for a meal? They wouldn’t need to travel far for that, and weren’t averse to cannibalizing their own rank. “The Emissaries?”
Jessup nodded with a grave look better suited for funerals. “They are coordinated, sir.”
Jakob Hardmason racked his brain for a response, a plan, and came up wanting. “Badger will have the pod. He is securing it as we speak, and will maintain radio silence until we have arrived at the coordinates he sent us.”
“And you trust the coordinates? You believe in the man?”
“We don’t have a choice.”
“We always do. We can rally men,” Jessup said.
He meditated on the words; it was true that the Ascendancy had grown exponentially since the wreckage of the Neptune station began making its way back to Earth. And surely there would be supporters on the vessel already when the call went out. But to take an entire schooner, and capture the escape pod before anybody else arrived?
He didn’t know. It seemed too risky.
“Captain, we need—”
“We abandon ship. When we are in range, we steal the trawler. Room for five—”
“Jakob, that’s insane. The crew will notice.”
“They will notice, but they won’t be able to pursue.” He paced about now, in the grip of a wild imagination, picturing the plan working out with perfect execution. Every step happening exactly as it should.
Prep the trawler’s launch during the dining break.
Sabotage the engine. A detonation device fastened to the core’s frame would disable it, render it unstable, incapable of producing enough energy.
Before anyone had the opportunity to stop them, they would be leaving the docking bay in the only vessel on board large enough to sustain deep space’s rigors.
It would work perfectly. It had to.
“Captain, you’re going to kill both of us, and Badger, and Kasey Lee, if that signal is her—which we can’t confirm. Now, I understand that risks need to be taken, but you can’t expect us to complete that plan without killing ourselves! It’s not—”
A low droning tone sounded through the address system and a voice cut in from t
he screen mounted by the door. An adjutant, young and pimply-faced, with a swath of greasy hair falling on his face and a voice that sounded as if it hadn’t dropped yet, spoke with a tremor, as if exhilarated by the responsibility of talking to a captain.
“Sir, we have picked up a radio response signal coming from the Vulcan. How shall we proceed?”
“A beacon?” Hardmason questioned. His eyes were locked on Jessup’s, and the Admiral stared back at him with a grim countenance that screamed, I told you so.
The adjutant, detecting the importance of his response, fluttered, wondering which answer his boss would like to hear the most before settling on the truth. “No. A private signal. Encrypted beyond our capabilities of cracking, sir.”
“Where is it going, adjutant? Is it directed?”
“It doesn’t have a stamp, sir, but that could be in the encrypted information.”
“Thank you. Continue trying to crack it and tell me if you detect anything else from that ship.” The boy saluted and almost signed off, but Jakob Hardmason stopped him with added order. “Monitor the Ides activity in the area, as well. We have reason to believe they may be active in this region.”
The boy, who had probably never seen a dead body, let alone a mangled corpse, gulped down his fear and failed to control his voice as he said “Aye,” and killed the line.
“Bastard,” Hardmason snarled, a low tone, barely audible to Jessup, who said nothing and only continued to stare at his partner.
“He’s talking to MarsForm. Or the Council. We need more men.”
But Jakob Hardmason wasn’t listening. He ran over to his navigational display, three dimensional and shimmering on the table before him, a perfect representation of the cosmos with the Althaea in the center of everything. Every radio signal, satellite dish, planet, comet, in the solar system, represented by a pinprick of light, a floating orb with a set of analytical numbers hovering close by, numbers that changed and shifted with the indefatigable movement of the Althaea in the middle, pressing closer to the rescue beacon that emitted from the Vulcan. Not much activity this far out. There never was. But now, other than the beacon, the entire expanse off their bow was entirely deserted, devoid of life.
Would they make it, in the trawler?
“We need to contact Ascendancy men, now,” Jessup said.
Jakob Hardmason stormed up to Jessup and grabbed his lapels, bringing his face to within inches of the other man’s, until he felt his breath and saw his own reflection in Jessup’s eyes. They didn’t seem to change at all. Jessup’s eyes.
“There is no time! If Badger is communicating secrets to the company, to anyone, then our identities could be compromised. The coordinates could be compromised. An entire fleet of vessels is probably on their way, right now, to the coordinates that fucking snake sent us.”
“And what will the trawler do? We’re at least 50 paces from the Vulcan, and they haven’t even gotten the damned pod yet,” Jessup let his anger out, throwing his arms around wildly as he spoke and never letting his eyes wander from the man he screamed at. “We need to get closer.”
He weighed his options. The man was right. He couldn’t deny it. To take the trawler now and attempt such a long journey would leave the two of them fighting for oxygen and warmth when the resources ran out and the fuel spent itself.
“Get the bridge prepared. We need to dash.”
A ripple of conversation went through the ranks of bridge command officers at their desks and monitors when Jakob Hardmason delivered his orders. “Ignite all four engines. Main thrusters on maximum power.”
The coordinates echoed in the hall and he knew they all questioned him. Why? So far out? Another agenda?
He heard the snippets, or he thought he did, though he decided that it didn’t matter anyway. They would be marooned, in a day’s time. Left adrift. Let them all rot.
He sat at his station, the control panels flickering and changing colors, splashing their glow on his face and reflecting the sweat there. He hoped it didn’t stand out. The sound of his personal door sliding open reached his ears and he made no acknowledgement of the sound as Jessup slipped back into the rank and file of the bridge command personnel.
The engines kicked to life, and though he knew it was a delusion, he felt the slip of the Althaea picking up its pace and forging through the deep vacuum of space. One more night.
Chapter 21
The crew slept soundly and he watched them in the dark, the monitor throwing an eerie pall over his face and casting an elongated, distorted shadow against the wall behind him. Someone stirred, throwing their arms over their torso and extending their legs in a deep, sleepy stretch.
And everything else was still.
He crept from his seat, pushing it in carefully behind him and removing from his bag the object that Hardmason had left in his possession before the day’s clarion sounded.
Be careful, he had warned, No sudden movements.
The thing had the weight of a meteor in his hands, and he kept his gaze firmly latched onto its dials, the timer, the radio receiver that would hear his signal and detonate in the depths of the engine, hobbling the Althaea forever and leaving her souls stranded in space. No other way, according to his partner, but Jessup wondered. Certainly if the captain abandoned ship, someone would notice. But a rear admiral responsible for watching a screen all day? Anybody could take his place, and a fabricated story could easily explain his absence, but Hardmason refused to see the clarity of his idea. Refused to stay back.
Why? Jessup didn’t know.
He left the sleeping quarters, placing each foot carefully on the ground in front of him with one hand extended into the dark to ensure his safe passage through the rows of sleeping officers tucked into their bunks and dreams. A snore reached his ear, a sneeze. The spring of a cut rate, army surplus mattress purchased for nothing by MarsForm after the civil war ended, if his estimations were correct. With every step he took closer to the door, a surety rose in his heart that the next sound would wake someone. Foreknowledge dawned on him, a call from the deep: “Where are you going? Why are you out of your bunk?” Whatever the words would be, their utterance would startle him to such an extent that he would drop the parcel cradled in his left arm. Time would take a stutter-step as the parcel approached the floor, and in the final moments before its collisions with the metallic surface below, he would know that the cause was lost. That he had failed.
He dreaded that voice from the darkness. The beam of light that would fall over his face, blinding him.
But it never came.
He gained the relative safety of the hallway and knew that his journey had only just begun. The hallways of the Althaea were vast, though, as a schooner, not so vast as a deep space freighter. Still, the engine room hid below numerous decks. A ladder ran between them, but it would be hazardous traveling with one arm cradled around the bomb and the other clinging desperately to the rungs. He would have to make it, though.
Nobody knew about the service entrances. Some did, but they were mostly forgotten, and certainly not patrolled. If a night man found him prowling the halls with his arms laden with such a package, he would be shot on sight and Hardmason would likely pull the trigger for fucking up. But the service ladders, they weren’t patrolled.
He told himself this as he stood at the entrance to one, peering down into it like a well shaft and wondering where the bottom was. The sound of the engine loomed like a beast living in its cave, slumbering and waiting for someone to come along and wake it. The gears clacked, the pistons whined. As the energy created by the engine trebled, quadrupled in volume, the intense feeling of static electricity licking the nape of his nape and making his hair stand on end drove him mad with an eager desire to escape.
One foot on, the other planted still on the firm ground of the executive level hallway through which he absconded, under cover of darkness.
Just pick up that other foot, he told himself, though he found it impossible to move.
; Pick it up!
But his foot stuck there and refused to comply with his directive. Finally, he reached out with his free hand and grasped the cold steel of the ladder’s highest rung. Only his right foot remained tethered to the hallway floor. With a deep breath and a silent affirmation, he shifted is weight and pushed with the ball of his right foot off the ground and felt the suspension of half of his body hanging over the drop for one second, before planting it carefully on the same rung as his left.
He stood on the ladder, sliding his feet down and letting the hand he grasped the rungs with drop one rung at a time, feeling terror and vertigo and the anticipation of violent death every time he removed it from the safety of the ladder to the one just below it.
He made his way down the ladder in that fashion, taking his time and sweating, feeling his hands grow slippery and wishing he could survive the fall. He would jump if he could, he felt so terrified on that ladder.
But he made it down.
And as he approached, the floor came into view, set off by a dim blue glow that emanated from the engine and a loud, throbbing thrum as the engine burned through its fuel. It was deafening. Rattling. He felt the vibration of the sound waves washing over him in every joint, every bone of his body until he thought his skeleton would fall apart.
He craned his neck, pivoted his head from side to side, and still could not absorb the expanse of the engine’s surface. It towered. It loomed. It obfuscated everything in his visions with its massive bulk and blinding light. The heat alone made him fear the bomb’s detonation, and he scurried toward the moving parts of the engine’s core to hasten his fleeing from the room. He had been in the solar system, off planet, for two decades. He had never seen an engine, except in diagrams, and as he stood before this one, he found the experience to be eerily similar to the time he stood before his father, who laid dying in an Annex hospital bed with mucus pouring from the holes in his face.