Stasis (The Ascendants Book 2)

by V. M. Law

  Her mind. What was happening up there that she couldn’t grasp? Couldn’t control? The headache that had begun splitting her skull open when the reality of her escape from the escape pod sunk in had trebled in force by now, and as Llewellyn and his abject, morose simplicity reentered her mind for the first time since she regained consciousness, she screamed, more to destroy the imprint his smile had left on her mind than to silence those who deliberated over her fate.

  “I am going!”

  The words echoed over the shouts of Anton and Sasha, the Captain and his underling who menacingly brandished their pistols. Panting, feeling strained for breath, she repeated, “I am going with them. I recommend you guys get into your own pods, and set your beacons on high.”

  And she walked away, leaving them stunned, staring in silence as her footfalls drowned out and she disappeared around the corner.

  Caspar Faulk, the man who had saved her, shouted meekly at her shadow, warning her that the areas she approached were not safe. Anything could happen. But she had already blocked out their voices and thought only of the space station in the furling ice clouds of Neptune.

  So many dead, and their faces lingered with a clarity extending even beyond the definition of a holograph.

  ***

  She found her way to the bridge and lost herself in its darkness, the cool smell of dust and muck that already accumulated in the body of the ship, now that the air purifiers had been shut down and the entire ventilation system was probably clogged with the molting of the grasshoppers. She didn’t fear them. She welcomed them, and the only thing she remembered from her time in the chamber was the feeling of the air circulating as their wings sliced through it. They bore down on her there, in her own mind, and she invited them. Yearned for them. To feel one thick slice through her abdomen and fall with a pale face smiling at the ceiling. To be freed.

  She wanted it.

  Her thoughts had strayed so far that the Captain wishing to take her away to Saturn snuck up behind her and she remained unaware of his presence until he spoke up. “I am sorry. We have not been particularly well met.”

  He extended his hand to shake hers and looked foolish standing there, half-bashful, with his hair pushed into an approximation of an orderly appearance. She did not receive his hand shake, but only stared with a vague malice written in her eyes and a contempt for tone of voice he spoke with, resentful that her memory-dam had collapsed on her mind as her gaze first settled on the man, though she couldn’t imagine why. He looked familiar.

  Finally, after what felt to Kasey Lee like a lifetime, the man dropped his hand to his side, left it to hang there, and then abruptly wrapped it around his other hand behind his back. A curt nod to signify that he understood the rebuke. “The Saturn base is a dangerous jump and there is no guarantee we’d even make it, especially in a stolen trawler”—he continued talking despite her raised eyebrow at the mention of his theft, “but it’s your only chance. Our only chance. From there, we can make Earth.” He spoke the final word gravely, as if it were an incantation, and its utterance would bring the revolution of the celestial bodies crashing to destructive halts.

  His eyes did the rest. The way they softened as he finished begging and waited patiently for her response. She bent her mouth into a snarl. “I don’t even know what year it is. I don’t know if anyone I’ve ever known is alive. You say Saturn? Earth? Fine. You’re dragging a corpse.”

  She turned away from him and resumed her silent meditation.

  “Kasey—”

  “And why should I trust you, anyway. I don’t know who you are. I don’t know a damned thing about you. You could be in my fucking head, for all I know.” She felt her voice trembling and thought, for the first time since she was awoken, that she might cry. Her headache returned. She rubbed her temples.

  “You knew my father.”

  She looked up when the words registered and found the Captain staring at the floor.

  “Ajax Hardmason,” he finished, raising his gaze to meet hers. His eyes were dry, but a lump had formed in his throat, and his voice sounded as if that lump were struggling to catch every syllable as it flew past. He swallowed. She didn’t think that she heard him properly and she asked him to repeat himself and he looked at her with a grave countenance and repeated that she knew his father, that his father was Ajax Hardmason.

  His eyes brimmed with tears, though he let none fall, and Kasey stared at him in silence wondering what had happened in the world of humankind since she took her leave. Her head swam, and the sound of her heart slamming against her ribcage seemed almost audible. An arm on his shoulder, a grave look in return. “Jakob,” he said. “My name is Jakob Hardmason, formerly the Captain of the Althaea. Now the captain of nothing, or—” he fumbled for words, “—the Althaea’s trawler. Or this vessel. Regardless, we need to leave, and your are in danger here. From one of your saviors.”

  “Danger?” The words came out of her mouth like a razor blade from beneath her tongue and she saw too late how obvious her offense was. Jakob Hardmason shrugged his shoulders.

  “Danger. As in, someone here may be trying to kill you.”

  “Plenty have.” Still, she heard the melancholy ache of offended pride in every word she spoke and kicked herself internally for losing control of her emotions before a stranger.

  “But this one is already an arm’s reach away. And closing.” Captain Jakob Hardmason shot a cautious glance over each of his shoulders as if he expected the silent assassin to burst through the gigantic sliding doors of the bridge and scream for blood in the echoing, vaulted room. “The man who pulled you from space is a man named Caspar Faulk. I am his Ascendancy contact, though I have suspected him of leaking information for some time.”

  “And you did nothing?”

  “There are plans in motion.” His voice sounded small, as if he had never killed a man, Kasey thought. “But we may still need him.”

  Chapter 29

  He escaped the cloud of agitation and resentment that swirled in Executive Hangar 12c and sought solace in the hallways that extended between there and the bridge. Kasey went off in that direction, and Jakob Hardmason followed after shooting him a poisonous look, and now he went, though he had no intention of following the pair. He had business of his own, and needed privacy.

  After searching bunkhouses and cabins, looking for a door that would be jimmied, a nook he could crawl into, and finding one that was left untouched by its previous occupant—who put a gun to her own head and now lied on the floor with her brains on the ceiling—he rummaged through his satchel in search of his SatCom. He didn’t find it, and cursed under his breath with a spewing cloud of spittle. Deeper, more frantically, he searched for the hunk of metal that he knew was in there somewhere, though with each passing second he faced the dread terror of realizing that he had lost his only connection with the only man who officially knew that he was still a civilian.

  “Come on,” he said, a bead of sweat tracing its way down his brow and sticking to his stubble. “Come on, I know you’re in there.”

  And then he found it. With a sigh of relief, he pulled it from its enclave and held it to the ceiling, waiting for its relays and antennae to pick up the channels carried through space by the Terran Council’s ancient communications satellites. The pinging. The whine of its connectors connecting, its relays relaying. Every tweak of its internal mechanism sounded to him like a mudslide, an avalanche. The sound of the Ides warship ripping through the metallic flesh of the Vulcan, as if a great cataclysm were occurring every time the SatCom beeped or clicked or gave some tone to indicate that it would not pick up the proper channels of communication.

  “Fuck you,” he muttered, and he punched the side of the unit with the heel of his hand. “Work, damn you.”

  Footsteps, and he fell silent, each heartbeat accentuating itself until they fell perfectly in step with the tapping of the approaching person. He waited, muffling the beeping of his SatCom beneath the dead woman’s blankets and li
stening, waiting for the footfalls to fade. The voices came as the footsteps drew closer, and he knew it could only be Kasey Lee and Jakob Hardmason.

  “If he a mole, why did he save me?”

  ‘I don’t know.”

  “I don’t trust him either. Something—” She let the statement fall out of her mouth and never bothered to finish it.

  “Trust him or not, he’s the only one we have.”

  And Kasey Lee responded, but what she said did not reach his ears. They were gone, leaving nothing behind but the silent trace of the footsteps echoing in his head. He breathed deeply, only half conscious of the fact that he ceased drawing breath when he heard the approaching steps.

  Besides, he thought, looking at his SatCom, his ordeal would be over shortly.

  He trained his gaze on the SatCom’s monitors and readers, symbols flashing through its screen telling him that no signal was detected. The device had the useless weight of a stone as it sat in his hand, dead.

  “Fuck,” he growled again. Another quick slap to the device’s side and he huffed an agitated breath from deep within his lungs. The SatCom did not respond to his fury, his ineptitude.

  Until the red light that had been flashing turned green, and with such rapidity that Caspar Faulk did not believe his eyes when the channel icon flashed and started blinking. A signal. He frantically connected to the communication stream and sent his call out to the encrypted identifying tag on the other man’s device. On Eugene’s. He wondered how far away Eugene was, and considered casting his lot with the Ascendancy, but he felt in danger. Like a prey animal in a burning wood.

  Captain Hardmason thought him a double agent? Well, he did always think his Ascendancy handler had acute perspicuity, and kept a watchful eye on his movements since being inducted into the man’s cell. But he had been so careful. Every communication to MarsForm properly encrypted, every piece of physical evidence destroyed. How did Jakob Hardmason know?

  No time for conjecture, he told himself as the SatCom linked to his other handler.

  In a flash, the scripted response he had prepared for Eugene flew from his mind and left nothing but a hallow opening where the speech had been stored. No sir, I haven’t found the girl, sir. Yes I need rescuing. No, the Ides are not active. Yes, send a transport.

  And every time he played through the interchange in his mind he came to the same end: Eugene Farrow either sending some MarsForm ship to get him from the wreck of the Vulcan, or else sending an assassin to gain recompense for Faulk’s failure.

  Either way.

  He would lose his mind before stores on the Vulcan ran out, and after such a long time in morose inactivity, the Ides in the lower decks would be approaching the homeostasis point from which they would need a strong outside stimuli to return. That wouldn’t happen. Couldn’t.

  The line danced through static and came out sounding much clearer than the last time he spoke with the man. His voice was rough and it sounded as if Eugene Farrow had been drinking when he barked a hasty, “What do you have for me?”

  Just say it, his mind told him, a small voice with a malicious bent that surged beneath the veneer of his otherwise terrifying train of thought, the cool voice of a killer. I found her, send troops.

  But the words coagulated in his throat and he came up with nothing except a croak and a broken syllable. “Whah?”

  “What. Do. You. Have. For. Me.”

  Jakob Hardmason and his smug sneer. Kasey’s brutal clasp on his throat.

  “Sir, I—”

  He hyperventilated, scarcely able to control his voice, his tongue. The words he spoke seemed to just flop out of his mouth and fall to the floor like wet laundry.

  “Sir, I haven’t found the parcel.”

  He braced himself for an explosion that never came. He checked the line; did he lose the channel? Out here, the channels were always subject to anomalies and distortion, and he cursed his luck for losing the fucking thing right when he awaited an urgent response.

  But the line wasn’t dead. Audible, angry breathing came through the speaker and Eugene Farrow on the other end said in a quiet voice that he, Caspar, needed to try harder.

  “The thing is, sir, the signal was not authentic.”

  He winced as he said the words, knowing that he had taken a step down a path that he could not return from. He had cast his lot with the Ascendancy, and would live with that decision even if he died because of it.

  “What do you mean, not authentic?”

  “I mean inauthentic, sir. It seems the Ascendancy has figured out a way to manipulate our beacon frequencies. They’re running circles around you, sir. They may be planning something back on Earth, trying to occupy your attention out here.” He felt the words flowing more naturally and thought that maybe the man would believe his lies. When the response came, Caspar Faulk did not know if Eugene believed or disbelieved him. He knew only that the words he heard were worth repeating, and that only one course of action remained for those who still breathed aboard the Vulcan. “Okay, Corporal, I’ll send a vessel for you. The Harbinger.”

  The name of the ship slammed into his brain and left room for nothing except the dread image of its massive bulk seeming, even in the vacuity of space, a skyscraper, a city, a nation in itself. Full of troops. Full of fuel. Probably full of malice after being sent to the ass end of the solar system on a wild goose chase. But was Farrow really a vessel for him? Could he take the chance?

  No.

  Hardmason needed to know this. A buffoon and an ass he may be, by Faulk’s adjustments, but he alone—and maybe the other man, Jessup—had the experience in dealing with such a situation.

  “Yes, sir,” he said, trying not to sound nervous, hoping he did not reveal his agitation in the way he started to question Farrow’s statement and then dropped it, mid-word. “I’ll be ready for you when you arrive.”

  “Ready? For whom will you be ready?”

  Caspar felt a bucket of ice slide down his back, trace his spine. His stomach rolled itself into a ball and dropped into his small intestine. He turned. Jessup stood in the open doorway with a pistol pointed at him and a sneer on his face. He repeated his question. “For whom will you be ready?”

  Caspar stuttered and his eyes grew wide, his face pale. “I—I promise you—this is not what you think.” He held the SatCom out towards Jessup and put his other hand in the air. He sank to one knee and then dropped the other on the floor beside the first, so that he was on the ground before Jessup, pleading for understanding. Jessup stepped forward himself, and placed the muzzle of his pistol against the sweaty surface of Caspar’s forehead.

  “Oh yeah? What is it? Are you calling home?” The question had the tone of a joke, but Jessup’s eyes betrayed nothing but malice and hatred. A moment before, the word “harbinger” had stuck a wedge of fear into his spine that made Caspar wish he had died in the womb, but now, as he looked into Jessup’s slitted eyes, he looked forward to the MarsForm arrival and hoped that it would happen in the next few seconds.

  “No—I.” Caspar Faulk had nothing to say. He stammered through a series of words that sounded like the panting breath of a teenager bedding a neighbor girl the first time and Jessup only laughed at the pathetic display.

  “Walk. Hands up.” Jessup jerked the pistol toward the hallway and stood back in the doorframe, allowing Caspar to pass. He thought his legs would betray him, that when he lifted his foot from the blood stained carpet and stepped over the woman’s thighs, he would lose his balance and topple to the floor in a flailing of limbs. He felt the vibration of every cell in his body revolting against his decision to step forward, to follow Jessup to his doom.

  This is it, he thought. An entire lifetime, with only a few moments remaining.

  He walked with his posture corrected, to salvage his dignity as he stepped back into the hollow light of the Vulcan’s bridge. The doors of residencies lined each side in darkness, like immovable sentinels on the road to hell. Shapeless forms comprised of shadows, noth
ing more.

  “Will you kill me?”

  “Yes. When depends on you.”

  Caspar Faulk made no reaction, and expected no other answer from the man walking behind him. Nothing but footsteps. If not for those, he could just as easily be alone. But the sound of Jessup’s footsteps ticked off the seconds as they passed and the end of the hallway seemed even further away from them then when they left the dead woman’s cabin.

  “I can save you. You know this?” A gamble, but he had little options left.

  “Save me? Why didn’t you say so?”

  “I have just received a communication that would interest you, and your handler, Hardmason.” He would have kept talking, told everything about the arrival of the Harbinger and Eugene Farrow’s presence in the outer rim of the system, but a swift jab with butt of Jessup’s pistol silenced him and drove him to the ground.

  “I said no talking.” His voice was disconnected, devoid of emotion or menace in a manner that terrified Caspar more than the sneer he knew the man had plastered to his face.

  “The Harbinger. It’s coming.”

  Silence. His point had planted its seed.

  “And so is Farrow.”

  Now the cold steel of the pistol crashed into the base of his neck, the top of his shoulder. A dull roar of pain sounded from deep within his body and he struggled to keep it pent up in his lungs. Jessup grabbed him by the cuff of his collar and threw him flat on the floor, rolled him over, stood straddling him and blocking the light so that, to Caspar, he appeared as a silhouette. “I SAID STOP TALKING!” And he drove another punch into Caspar’s face. Blood rushed from his nose and dripped to the floor, ran over his mouth and painted his teeth a sickly, bubbling pink.

  Casper continued, “They will be here any minute. They know about Kasey, and they are coming for her with an army.” He saw the words having their affect on Jessup. The man’s face bunched up into a scowl of rage and spoke with a cloud of spittle flying into Caspar’s. He leveled the pistol.