Stasis (The Ascendants Book 2)

by V. M. Law

  But the fear ate into his belly at the same time, and with every step, he had the growing notion of the horde bearing down on them from behind. He resisted the urge to turn his head and look back over his shoulder. His feet carried themselves now, pumping away and slapping on the ground with an audible clapping cadence until he became aware of the others charging at similar paces, and the collective echoing of their dash down the hall slammed into his vertebrae like a bullet.

  We need to be quiet, he thought but before the thought formulated itself, he threw his body against the door of the executive docking bay—small, no bigger than a unit in one of the Annexes meant to house couples and single occupants—and saw the ice hanging from the sides of the escape pod that rested in the center of the room, a solitary light bathing it in a glowing aura.

  He opened the door, the others paraded in after him, and he slammed shut the door of the hangar, feeling at once claustrophobic and light-headed in the cramped quarters of such a room.

  The moment he had waited for. The moment the Ascendancy had waited for, and of all operatives, it is him who makes the discovery. His heart slammed in his chest and he heard each individual beat of the organ as if they were boulders crashing down an abandoned slope.

  “What is that?” Anton asked.

  “An escape pod.”

  “From where?”

  “They must be dead by now, if it drifted this far.”

  The chatter circulated around his head and he blocked it all out. There was nothing. Nothing except the viewing window—frosted over and obscured—and the latch that held the lid firmly closed like the lid of a coffin.

  “Open in,” he said. “We must open it. Now.”

  Chapter 24

  Jakob Hardmason heard the sound of footsteps drawing closer, urgent and swift. Jessup.

  “Did you succeed, Admiral?”

  The man’s voice came back to him from the shadows, husky and thick and full of emotion. “Yes.”

  Jakob nodded gravely and put on hand on Jessup’s shoulder. His spine sagged and his cheeks did too, and Hardmason thought that the secret war was too much for his partner, that the man would not last the duration if he couldn’t shake the feelings of guilt that came with stranding thirty-four men on a schooner in the reaches of the solar system.

  His father had been left out here. For an unnaturally long amount of time, and he didn’t have anybody shedding tears over his corpse. Nobody even knew where his corpse was. Only that he died in an act of terroristic subterfuge and would be reviled through the ages for his attempts to destabilize the ranks of human politics.

  A visionary, or a loon.

  Either way, he didn’t have the slightest hint of moral compunction as his finger hovered over the detonator’s button. He simply extended his free hand from the recesses of his sleeve and swept his arm toward the open gangplank of the Althaea’s trawler. He waited, but Jessup kept his feet planted, his head down.

  “We don’t have time for this, Jessup. Every second wasted is that much longer the Council can continue lying about what happens out here. We need to move.”

  “Aye, sir.” But the man didn’t change his expression. He kept his shoulders hanging low and shuffled his feet up the gangway.

  Jakob followed, his finger resting on the detonator button. In the cockpit, he activated the trawler’s engine and felt the thrum of it jumping into action, lifting itself off the ground with a great groan and hovering there until Jakob toggled the computer/vessel interface.

  “This vehicle is not permitted beyond the hangar confines—”

  The voice began shouting, and Jakob suffered a break in his calm demeanor when the voice refused to quit its braying. It shouted for assistance, begged them to deactivate the engine, insisted that something did not operate as it was intended to operate.

  “The mechanic squad will be dispatched shortly,” said the computer, who could not fathom why someone might be tinkering with its electronics during the sleeping hours set aside by MarsForm policy. “This discrepancy will be solved—” But it never finished its statement. A blast sounded out in the close confines of the cockpit, and Jakob Hardmason jumped as the sparks showered over his arms from the flaming console.

  Jessup stared back at him, when he lifted his gaze to the copilot, a pistol smoking in his hands and a grim look plastered to his face. “We need to leave.”

  Jakob, no longer needing to override the security features, set his mind to opening the doors without the proper clearance. As he spliced wires, reconnected frayed ends, shoved tools into the circuitry in an attempt to get the blasted doors to slide open, the soldiers swarmed in.

  “Attention, we have you surrounded! Step out of the trawler, or we will have no choice but to shoot.” The muffled cry reached their ears through the windshield, and when Jakob looked up, he saw a detachment of riflemen staring back at him with their weaponry trained forward at the viewing window.

  “Open the fucking door!” shouted their commander, the veins popping out of his neck.

  Jakob looked up at the man and tried to catch his attention. He waved the detonator, a smile reaching out across his face and the laughter of a wild man escaping his mouth. He held the detonator up and pointed to it with other hand before depressing the button. The bomb, deep in the confines of the engine’s core, exploded with a tear of metal, collapsing catwalks and flames that engulfed everything below deck. The soldiers felt the vibrations through the soles of their boots and some began firing.

  The commanding officer screamed, and shot his own rifle, but Jakob Hardmason had already gotten the door of the hangar to slide open, and before any of the soldiers outside the cockpit of the trawler realized what had happened, they froze to death and were pulled into the void.

  The trawler shot from the gap the second it opened wide enough to accommodate the girth. Jakob screamed and whooped at the ceiling, punching the air above his head with a balled fist, while Jessup watched the rear view feed to catch the smoke billowing for a moment, hanging in the vacuum before being sucked away by the currents of the malfunctioning engine intakes.

  He did not holler, did not celebrate. He only set his gaze rigidly forward and waited for whatever would happen next.

  Chapter 25

  “Open it.”

  They obeyed. Circling the escape pod like a coffin ready for its procession, the survivors waited for the first move to be made. Caspar Faulk stood at the head, with the controls to the cryogenic mechanisms beneath his fingers.

  With a hiss of frozen air, sublimated ice, the door latch unhitched itself and the clasp fell against the metal frame with a light clatter, like fallen cutlery. He waited for the condensation to subside, and reached his hand out. The lid lifted easier than he imagine it would; it practically jumped off the booth, releasing the last of its bent up gases in a great mushrooming cloud that reached the ceiling of the docking bay. They all held their gaze rapt on the body in repose, in perfect slumber beneath the sheet of dispersed gas.

  Kasey Lee.

  He figured the others watching would have an idea of their find. Would have seen the news reports in the past seven years and known what they looked upon. But none of them moved a solitary muscle in any of their bodies. They swayed on their feet, rocked back and forth on their heels or put their hands on the rim of the pod to keep themselves balanced, but none reached for a concealed weapon or showed any indication of dangerous intentions toward the girl in the cask.

  The simmering liquid of cryogenic freeze still submerged her, and he searched through the control box for a means of draining it. He found his target and depressed the button, watching as the liquid was sucked away from the main container and into its reservoir, beneath the bed. Drained of fluid, the escape pod resembled a coffin even more than it did when it lay closed and undisturbed. She looked like an ice sculpture. Her skin, bluish and swollen in the cold, did not give way to the pressure exerted on it by his finger as he prodded her cheek with the questioning nature of a scientist. />
  When the last of the subzero liquid drained itself into its reservoir and the body glistened in the light that swung from above, they stood in silence until Sasha opened her mouth to venture a question, to guess at who lied before them. “Is that—”

  Caspar did not respond immediately. He was held in rapt silence by the sight before him until the alarm on the pod’s mechanism started flashing, reminding him that Kasey Lee’s vitals had dipped seriously low, after the fluid had been drained. He entered another code on the keypad, and more liquid—clear and steaming—poured into the cask, filling the tub with a scent like embalming fluid and leaving the company assembled there retching in the backs of their throats and covering their noses with their sleeves, their hands, anything that would block the smell of death that rose out of the pool and swirled through the air.

  “God!” shouted Anton, and he heaved from the bottom of his stomach when the smell hit his nostrils.

  “This is the moment,” Caspar began, feeling as if the impact of the moment shouldn’t be lost due to a foul stench, “in which the Council’s lies are exposed before you all. I don’t know if any of you lend the Ascendancy a sympathetic ear, but if you haven’t yet, this is the moment to begin.”

  He felt stupid saying the words, but the gushing sound of the rank liquid sloshing about in the chamber of the escape pod sounded so much worse than his hackneyed phraseology. No one rose to meet his gaze, or acknowledged that he had spoken at all, and he began to think that maybe they were all locked in a trance, held at attention by the spectacle of technology that they had never witnessed before. Even he had not witness the miracle of cryogenics. He knew it existed, but had never witnessed it himself.

  They waited for something to happen, no one making a single movement and everyone training their eyes through the steam that rose from the pod and into the eyes of Kasey Lee.

  Her eyes opened, wide and filled with horror, and the group knew that she would survive. She shot her hand out of the water with lightning agility and the grabbed the first thing that she could take hold of: Caspar’s neck. He screamed in surprise, but the cry was muffled into a gurgling. bubbling sound that caught in his throat at the place where she squeezed his windpipe.

  Kasey jumped out of the water, her naked body shining in the light and the party gathered before her shielding their eyes, ducking for cover and hiding from the fury of the woman who thrashed out at Caspar Faulk.

  Would she kill him? He didn’t know, but his consciousness began swimming again, as it did when he guided the tractor beam to its proper alignment, and he figured that in fifteen more seconds, he would fall into unconsciousness for the second time that day.

  But she released his neck with a gasp, seemingly shocked by the force that her hands commanded, and jumped out of the water. Her eyes darted around. She covered herself, though no one intruded on her modesty. Sasha offered her a towel to cover herself with from the commissary.

  Kasey Lee accepted, not saying anything, not looking at anyone. She had a distant look in her eyes that made Caspar think, possibly, that cryogenics were more of a curse than a miracle. He wondered how long she dreamed. A century? Two?

  A grey streak ran through her hair and her eyes were caught in the parenthesis of her crow’s feet, which reached out from the corner of her eyes and swooped up the side of her face in either direction.

  She looked ancient, though her frame was still compact and muscular, her posture perfect. It seemed, when he looked at her, that the seven years past since the fall of the Neptune station had bore their mark only upon her eyes.

  “Where am I?” she asked.

  Chapter 26

  “Almost there,” he said, more to himself, as Jessup had fallen asleep hours ago and the only company he had was the computer’s automated alerts, that still reminded him in a deep, drawling, malfunctioning voice, that the trawler had strayed too far from its point of origin, and that, if it didn’t turn back, the computer would have to alert its handlers at MarsForm.

  “Fuck you,” he muttered as the computer gave him another demonic warning. Listening to that voice made him wish that Jessup hadn’t blasted the console in the Althaea’s hangar.

  The radar pinged out the location of the Vulcan.

  The approach was bumpy, the way littered with space trash and the refuse of the busted freighter. A gaping metal hole had been torn into the freighter’s underside and, attached to the wound, an Ides transport clung like the bag of an IV drip dangling from a wounded patient.

  How badly did the Ides get the Vulcan? he wondered. Judging by the destruction, he figured that the answer was pretty bad. Pretty fucking bad.

  Would have to be, if only Badger survived.

  “Approaching vessel,” said the trawler’s broken computer drone. “No engines firing and no weapons systems activated. Heat sensors detected from tractor beam muzzle.” The machine spoke as if it required the last of its pent up energy to make the utterance, and it fell into a crackling silence as the trawler drifted toward the docking bays lining the top terrace of the ship’s outer surface, its skyscrapers and towers, the jungle of its topside exterior. Flying between the satellite relays and the defense guns, Jakob Hardmason felt as if he coasted the forgotten streets of an abandoned city, an explorer of bygone worlds. Scorch marks everywhere, and in more than one location, the hull had been torn through and small clouds of debris from the ship’s interior clouded around in frozen limbo.

  “Wake up, Jessup.” But his admiral didn’t stir.

  “I said,” he wound up his fist, “wake up.” He drove the balled fist into his partner’s shoulder and the man jumped to life, his hand shooting down for the pistol in his lap and finding it on the floor by his feet.

  “If I wanted you dead, you wouldn’t have had the chance to get up,” Hardmason began. “Remember that.”

  Jessup had nothing to say. His mouth hung open and he gawked in slack jawed surprise at the wreckage of the Vulcan.

  “Get on the radio, Jessup. Find this fucker. Badger. Don’t let him know our intentions.”

  “But, boss. If he rescued Kasey, don’t you think he’s trustworthy? He could have killed her by now. Could have sold her to the highest bidder. But he contacted you.”

  “Yeah? He also contacted a personal cruiser with a stamp for a Jovian tour ship. A tourist coffin. Do you know where the stamp cleared the cruiser to travel?”

  “My guess would be, in the Jovian system.”

  “And you remember where the signal reached us from, no?” He couldn’t contain his patronizing voice.

  “Saturn.”

  “And what is a personal cruiser designed to do laps around Jupiter doing beyond Saturn? Nothing good, I bet.”

  He let the argument rest at that, and prodded Jessup when he delayed in getting the satellite communications activated. “Althaea to Badger. Althaea to Badger. Come in if you read me, Badger.”

  But the lines were silent and the pair was left wondering what became of their man on the inside of the Vulcan.

  Jessup repeated his call into the deep, again, and then a third time, until Jakob Hardmason slammed his fist on the controls in front of him. “We’re too late. They didn’t make it.”

  He said the words but he did not believe them, and as he kept circling the abutments and buttresses of the Vulcan’s outer defenses, he waited for the moment the SatCom would light up and the timid and shaking voice of Badger would blare on their broken speakers, and he would say, ‘It’s okay. I’m alright and I have the pod.’ He would direct them to him, they would leave, and nobody would detect them on their journey through the star system.

  He wanted to believe it, and as the seconds passed and he waited for the communication that hadn’t yet come, it seemed like a prophecy to him, an undeniable truth that he repeated in his head like a mantra. But despair hit when he reached the main feature of the Vulcan’s architectural beauty, the bridge. It was shrouded in darkness, and was that smoke? Billowing from the vents? The sight terrified h
im. Like a plunge into icy water, he felt the shock hit him first, then the boredom of nothingness as his brain struggled to comprehend the meaning of the sight before him, then the dread acceptance of the smoking bridge and its implications. Perhaps Badger had hidden the pod, himself even, and they were safe inside. He grabbed the SatCom from Jessup and shouted into it. “Badger, you better start this fucking communication. We’re waiting for your location.”

  Nothing.

  “Answer! Give me something!” But rage had taken over his mind, and in its spell, he threw the SatCom to the ground and it ricocheted where the pistol sat by Jessup’s feet.

  “I’m here.”

  The voice came so low, and was so interrupted by static, that Jakob Hardmason thought himself insane and delusional, until Jessup picked up the communication link and responded with an equally quiet voice. “Badger?”

  In the silent cockpit, Hardmason and Jessup stared at each other, waiting the man’s answer. “I’m here. Executive hangar 12c. You should hurry, and be prepared for anything when you land. We’ve had a bit of a situation.”

  A situation? He flew into a wild explosion of excitement when Badger open his mouth originally and announced his presence on the Vulcan. Now, with his contact’s nervous tone and the cryptic announcement that a situation had been had, Jakob felt as if his heart would burst at the seams. What situation? Some of us didn’t make it?

  “All right, Badger, we’re on our way.”

  He accelerated with the full force of the trawler’s spent engine, swooping low on his approach to the hangars and hoping that the doors would open as they were intended to. A situation? The words haunted him as the wall grew taller, its panels and electronic outfits becoming more defined as the trawler hurtled toward the doors and he felt the weight of the universe pushing him deeper into the back of his chair.

  Chapter 27

  Eugene Farrow waited for the computer to respond to his directive, its clacking and tittering calculations a nuisance in his ear, like a fly. He wanted to bat it away, wanted to ruminate in silence as the body of his former captain and tour guide began to acquire a stench that would need to be taken care of, soon. In the darkness of the cockpit, each jump in the tone of the computer’s thinking was signified by a different colored light, so that the entire panorama of the controls enveloped him, reminding him of the distant solar systems seen only through the lens of a powerful telescope. He kept waiting, though his patience grew strained.