by V. M. Law
Hurry the fuck up, he thought, though, if he had any observers, none would think that his mind processed anything other than the expanse of stars staring back at him through the cockpit’s window.
Finally, after what seemed like a gulf of time in which empires fell, rose again and were once more crumbled into dust, the computer sounded its warbled and distorted voice. “The Vulcan, sir. The ship you are locked onto is the Vulcan, though, judging by her energy output, she is about to jump into hyperspace.”
The computer, with no way of knowing how this news would affect its audience, stated the words in a matter-of-fact tone that made Eugene Farrow slam his fists on the console and curse at the disembodied voice. “Activate your thrusters, computer. Activate every one and don’t let them dip below full thrust. Even if they blow.”
“Sir, I am honor bound to inform you that this vessel has safeguards built into its engine that would prevent me from following your orders. If the engines overheat, I have no choice except to shut the engines down when they reach a certain—”
“None of it! And I’ll not argue with an artificial personality! Damn your honor and get me to where I need to be,” he growled, only vaguely aware of how ridiculous he must appear, arguing with a voice coming from the cockpit’s control computer that was engineered to be as complacent as a human could possibly manage to act.
But he still felt anger bubbling in his chest and wanted to kick at the deformed and bloated body of Buck when its odor reached his nose. He shot a glance over at the captain, who, unsurprisingly, had not moved from where he rested. His throat, ripped open and drained of blood, appeared to Eugene as a second sickening smile, and when he tried to close his eyes and banish the image from his mind, he found that the ragged flaps of skin hanging from the gaping slice in his neck like the lips of a dog would not leave his mind’s eye alone. He grimaced, and turned his head away.
Soon, he thought. He’ll really start to smell soon.
Though when he saw his reflection in the windshield of the cruiser he noticed the way his nostrils flared, as if his nose were being pinched by invisible fingers. The narrowed eyes, slightly watery.
How many bodies? he asked himself. How many bodies have you seen, smelt?
He didn’t know.
Couldn’t possibly calculate the figure as he saw their faces flashing before his mind.
Eyes closed, he thought, with the ghosts of his circulating through the varicolored emptiness behind his eyelids, or eyes open. With Buck.
He stared out the window and waited for the boost of the cruiser’s engines to thrust him back into his seat, but couldn’t stop staring at the distorted reflection of the dead tour guide slumped in the corner like a drunk on holiday. The vessel began to accelerate, and his intestines responded to the increased force by sliding in their places and rubbing against one another, a sensation like sex, or like the feeling of plummeting when you are unafraid of what is rushing to meet you at the bottom of your fall. He loved that feeling, and closed his eyes to relish in it when he felt the ship jumping through its various warm ups.
Hyperspace.
They could be going anywhere.
If he let them slip, let them jump, they would be gone, possibly forever. The Emissaries would not have it.
They wouldn’t stand for it.
As the cruiser reached its maximum velocity and the computer sounded out its acknowledgement of his orders, Eugene Farrow felt the sensation of falling into a deep lake subsiding, and in its place, a gnashing horror rose and tore through his guts. His palms grew clammy, and he balled and unclenched his fists with great rapidity as he tried to think about where in the system they would be jumping.
The Vulcan only had a short distance jumper, a prototype developed for the Ascendancy War and never once used. It would scarcely get them to Centauri. They wouldn’t make it. They would likely implode as the energy required to make such a jump accumulated and burst through its safety valves, consuming the ship. But he couldn’t plan on it.
Where are you, Kasey? Where are you?
The question hung in his mind like the echo of a primeval shout, and he felt his stubble like a million microscopic knives lacerating his fingers. To a space station? How many of those were scattered throughout the realm of humanity? Too many. Too many to visit at least.
Where?
He racked his brain and tried to concentrate on the communications he had received from his contact in the Vulcan. The man had given him surprisingly little. So little, in fact, that, as Eugene Farrow stroked the remnants of his beard, he wondered if the man should be kept alive.
“Hello, Eugene of the Mankind.”
The voice shattered the stillness of the cockpit with such finality that he was left reeling and spinning in his seat to see who had spoken, but the sound seemed to originate from the place between his ears and he cupped his hands over them to alleviate the terrible volume of the address. “Have you any information for me?”
The Emissary.
“No. I mean, yes. I believe my contact is requisitioning the parcel as we speak.” He hoped it was true.
“I don’t believe you, Eugene of the Mankind. I think you are—lying? Is that the proper terminology for the trick you are attempting to play on me?”
He stumbled through his entire lexicon of words and surprised himself by coming up with nothing save, “Ah. I think you are mistaken.”
He meant to continue the phrase, though he never had the opportunity. The voice railed against his ear drums like a caged animal screaming for release, and as the volume mounted, Eugene shrieked and fell from his chair, his legs twitching and convulsing, the veins on his neck standing out and casting shadows that starkly contrasted the pallor of his skin. He sweated, and each bead felt like molten, dripping metal as it coursed down his body. “Don’t question my knowledge, Eugene. I know more than you think.”
“Yes, sir. I do apologize—”
“If your contact is detaining the prisoner, why then has another vessel been detected by the Ides warship? Why is another vessel boarding your ship without your knowledge?”
He didn’t know how to respond. He gasped and sputtered and every word he had ever known seemed to have flown from his tongue as the images began to form: Kasey Lee waking up. Hardmason and his goons celebrating. The collapse of the arrangement with the Emissaries and finally, the extinguishing of Mankind over the patriotic fervor of the simpletons left behind when the universe decided it had different plans for the illustrious Man.
“Your predecessor was a much wiser man than you, Eugene. Humans would benefit from the longevity my kind enjoys. But you will never have it. You will die with the rest of them, if my demands are not met. I repeat. Bring me the woman, or the extinction process begins. You will not like my intervention, if it is deemed necessary.”
Again, Eugene tried to respond, to placate the thing speaking in his brain, though he still hadn’t overcome the shock of hearing the voice in the first place. It was as if, as he stared into the vacuum, the voice just happened. Like he was alone with his thoughts until, suddenly, he wasn’t.
And now, only a few seconds later, he was alone again. He was sure of it. The Emissary had left him and he had no more intruders in his head. He questioned himself, wondering if the experience even happened. The only explanation that dawned on him was that the technology he had adorned his head with earlier had somehow burrowed its way into his brain and left its mark there.
He trembled, thinking about the notion.
As quickly as he fell from his seat to the plush carpeting of the cockpit, he jumped to his feet again and reached for the vessel’s SatCom. He needed assistance.
“Calling all MarsForm vessels. MarsForm vessels in the Neptunian orbit, do you copy?”
He waited and nothing happened. He depressed the button again and repeated his call, and again, he received silence in return. Nothing.
“Calling all MarsForm vessels!”
But still, nothing.
&nb
sp; One last shot. “Calling all MarsForm vessels, this is your CEO, Eugene Farrow speaking, urgent directives await.”
He thought nothing would happen for a third time, and his brain whizzed about, settling on a thousand reasons why no one would be responding. The link malfunctioned, a solar flair interrupted the transmission of his signal, a mutiny in the ranks left him stranded alone. Anything.
Finally, as his anger surged and he nearly spiked the SatCom to the floor in a halfhearted display of his impotent fury, the line crackled, sputtered, jumped to life. He didn’t make out the words that were spoken, but he knew that someone responded. He jumped at the link like a grasshopper pouncing on a moving object. “Do you copy? This is the Starshot, reporting with information relevant to the cleanup in the Neptunian orbit. Do you copy?”
“Sir, we hear you. What do you need?”
He meditated on the sound of those words, heard the malice dripping through the other end of the communication relay and thought about the man answering. He scowled, probably, while charging a blaster. Or did he eagerly await the information? Since the Emissary’s intrusion into his thoughts, he couldn’t control his wandering mind and thought absently about whether or not he was hallucinating.
I must be crazy, he told himself, to think that they would suspect my allegiances.
But the lingering unease persisted, and Eugene Farrow found himself at a loss for what to tell the captain of the Harbinger.
“Sir?”
“Yes, Captain?”
“Friesing.”
“Captain Friesing. Are your men prepared for a potentially hazardous mission? A delicate procedure related to your current mission?” As the words left his throat he still did not know for sure the man was trustworthy, if he harbored secret affiliations of his own.
“Yes, sir.” But the CEO of MarsForm thought he heard an unsteady quaver in the man’s response. He persisted anyway.
“I have on my computer the location of a MarsForm freighter recently ambushed by Ides. Can you intercept?”
“The Vulcan? We heard about it. Yes sir. I think we can be there in an Earth day, at least.”
Eugene Farrow bit his knuckles. Too slow. They would have the power to jump wherever they planned on jumping to before the Harbinger even approached. “Cut that time in half and consider yourself in line for a promotion, Captain. This mission is sensitive and in need of a strong commander. Can you copy?”
“Yes sir. If I may ask one question?”
“Speak.”
“What is the status of the vessel? What should we expect?”
Eugene thought for a moment, though he did not want to delay his response for too long. The man might grow curious, if an answer to his question came too slowly. “There are crewmembers alive, we believe. I am inbound myself and will assist with the rescue mission when the time comes.”
“The Ides, sir. They are active?”
“Captain, it matters not to you if they are active or hibernating. The only factor that should affect your decision is that your commanding officer requested your allegiance and he will not be denied. Do you understand?”
Eugene could practically hear the dry swallowing sound clacking in the man’s throat. “Yes, sir. We are en route.”
“Bring as much assistance as you desire. Expect a firefight.”
He killed the communication before a response could issue forth from the tinny speaker and he relished the silence that rose again to shroud him with the weight of his burgeoning thoughts. Morgyn’s image burned itself into his mind after he received the news and she hadn’t left his thoughts since. She nagged. She demanded retribution. You let me die out here, Gene, she said, day in and day out, until he could not even sleep, until his days became extensions of his nightmarish nights and his hair began to fall out at his temples.
You let me die, she said. Over and over again, a mantra in his head.
He let her die. He admitted it to himself, despite the pleas of his head doctors and his advisors and his own family. The guilt would never leave, he suspected. Not while the Ascendancy lived. Not while Kasey Lee drew breath. He thought about that one, floating in the abyss and dreaming an unending dream that became a reality after a certain point. He knew about cryogenics, had experienced the deep freeze himself, and wished the hell of subliminal dreaming in all its vigor upon the girl who floated in the deep.
She would be found. Was found already, if the Emissary were to be believed. And why wouldn’t he? The fucking thing tapped into his brain and steered his thoughts from untold light years away. Why wouldn’t he be right about Caspar Faulk?
Chapter 28
Kasey Lee sat alone on the edge of the group, saying nothing as they exchanged shouts and threats, curses and invective that befit a wanderer’s tongue. She had no opinions on the matter. Earth or elsewhere, the lifeboat or the Vulcan. It mattered not to her. She thought only of the dream that had plagued her for so many years, an eternity in her mind.
But now it faded, and she was left with nothing but an uneasy recognition that something important had slipped her memory, and the act of incessantly rubbing her temples with her first two fingers would not make the important something spring back into her conscious mind. Every avenue of thought Kasey followed in the labyrinthine cityscape of her mind led to one place: him. The face of the man whose throat she throttled when she came to. Eyes bulging, spit running in a shining and transparent line from the corner of his mouth as the vein on his forehead first pushed itself outwards against his skin, and then began throbbing with the rhythm of his pulse as it beat against her finger tips. They all shouted. They all gasped.
Now, they all stared at her with sidelong glances and she thought that maybe one of them would end her misery with a blunt object to the side of her skull. The headache pounding against her brain made her wish for it. Yearn for it. The way they screamed, it horrified her at the same time it bored her, and as they all carried on she felt the urge to vomit surging and passing, surging and passing, like the tides of the oceans sloshing about on Earth.
The man who pulled her from the tank—middle aged, squat and haggard, his hairline receding and revealing the veins of temples that squirmed as he masticated his tongue. He took his tongue lashing with his shoulders slumped, his eyes downcast. “You told us you had her alone. Meaning, with no one else. Who the fuck are these people?”
The man meant to speak, but he was cut off before any words could escape his gaping lips.
“Jessup, get him bound. We are taking him in.”
The man who had been lurking in the background of the fight, his blaster pistol trained at the ragged company of people circling her savior, stepped forward to grab the middle-aged man and throw him to the ground, but the others interceded. A large bear of a man—Anton, they called him—stood in Jessup’s way and looked down at the Admiral with a glare that stopped the advancing interlocutor in his tracks.
“We don’t need your direction,” he growled, his voice a low rumble, like thunder in the distance.
The leader of the pair, the swaggering, stalwart young captain who wore his stripes despite the fact that he apparently deserted his vessel, laughed with venomous glee, his head upturned to the ceiling above. “You don’t need us? You do seem to be doing fine without us, after all. I can see how well your crew handled a pack of wild grasshoppers.”
Anton cocked his fist back to strike the insulting captain, the intruder who wished to take one of their number, but the woman at his side threw herself on his bicep. Sasha, her name was. “Anton, don’t.”
“Yes. Anton, don’t.” The captain had a smug, cocksure grin and he tilted his head back so that he could look at the assembled host down the bridge of his nose. His hair—frazzled and nappy and bearing the signs of poor sleep—stuck out in every direction and its fiery orange color added to his look of insanity. His lips trembled as he waited for a reaction, an invitation, any movement at all from the survivors of the Vulcan disaster. Anton stepped forward and the two me
n—of almost equal height and build—stood face to face, and Kasey felt a distant certainty that they would come to blows any minute. Anton jabbed a finger into the Captain’s chest and barked, “How do we know you’re a Captain? Where’s your crew?” and the Captain cocked back his fist and they all began screaming again. The Captain screamed that they were all doomed, that the transport he arrived on represented their only chance, and it wouldn’t make it to the stations orbiting Saturn if they all crammed in.
“Saturn? Who said we’re going there?” someone cried, and the rabble rose again to the ceiling and echoed through Kasey’s mind. She stayed out of it.
“We are taking that woman and bringing her—”
“Taking her? You can’t—”
“She isn’t safe here!”
“Safer than with you!”
And their argument degraded into a slew of insults, a whirlpool of invective that pulled its participants down its funnel. Kasey wanted to slip away, but her memories racked her brain and overcame her senses, her ability to control her body. She began panting as it washed over her—Ajax and his swarthy manner, his grin and laughter, the audacity of his planning and schemes. The other one, Gustav.
She had been blocking the images of Llewellyn and Brysen that haunted her, following her through her dreams as she slept in the cryogenic pod. But now, as the tide of anger and bickering resentment washed over the group of strangers who ripped her from the company of her grandfather and pulled her back into a world where everything had already died and decayed into residual organic matter, leaving behind only the vaguest of imprints that anything had been there at all.