by V. M. Law
The feeling of nausea still hadn’t left the pit of her stomach and she wanted nothing more than to double over and retch, but she closed one eye instead and pressed the stock of her rifle to her cheek. The first soldier made it through the clouds of smoke and the slippery sheen of blood that coated the floor, the labyrinth of laser that crisscrossed the bridge. Kasey dropped him with one cool shot from her rifle. He went down, his chest becoming a hollow cavity that resembled his twisted, screaming mouth.
Jakob stood up from his command station and brandished his pistol, firing with rapidity and accuracy. He dropped the soldiers faster than they came in, and from the uniform look of horror on their faces as they came out on the bridge-side of the smoke cloud, it revealed to him that the MarsForm security wing did not expect to receive such a fine welcome. They wanted to walk in. They wanted him to abdicate his power and walk into their arms with his own held high.
He would show them.
But as he fired his pistol and killed the incoming soldiers, more stormed in to take their place and Kasey watched them overtake the son of Ajax Hardmason. She screamed, jumped from behind the cover of her steel support column and ran through the haze of smoke of lasers to where she saw him fall. Firing her rifle as she ran, she saw two men go down, heard another scream. But the smoke drifted thick and enveloped the floor with such obscuring particulate matter that she could not find him. Bullets and lasers traced insidious paths around her and Anton ran up to tackle her to the ground.
“Fall back!” Caspar screamed, now firing his own pistol, and Kasey scuttled along the floor with Anton behind her. They both fired, and through the smoke, Kasey could make out the positions of the surviving crew members by the flashes that erupted from their guns. All of them—five remaining, and she didn’t even see anyone get hit—were being funneled to the portside bridge entrance, the cavernous hallway that led to the docking bays, to the trawler from the Althaea.
“We lost Jakob!” Kasey screamed when she saw Jessup lumbering through the smoke. “He went down on the risers, but I can’t find his body.”
“Sasha!” Anton called out, frantically searching for her face among the drifting clouds of smoke. He fired his gun into the mayhem of the bridge floor as the remaining survivors made it to the portside residences, the hallway adjacent to where the MarsForm security force stormed into the bridge.
Jakob Hardmason, standing with a gut shot and a pale face, held his fingers on a detonator.
“Wait,” Anton cried. “Sasha is in there!”
“There is no time. If she didn’t make it, she didn’t make it, but we need to blow this door,” he replied, his eyes locked onto the detonator.
“She could still be alive,” Kasey interjected. “She fought for you. For us.”
“And she will be remembered for it.” Jakob pressed the button and the charges placed on the sliding steel doors exploded, muffled pops compared to the force of the grenades, the force of Anton’s rage.
“You fucking bastard!” He yelled at Jakob, but the man didn’t react or seem to even notice. “You killed her. You killed her.”
Kasey Lee shot Jakob a reproachful glance, but she did not say anything. She knew. What else could Hardmason do? Their plan, a lark’s gambit to begin with, proved reliable enough, and their jump would commence as soon as the energy built up in the engines. The Ides would take care of the remaining MarsForm soldiers and the trawler would take them to the surface.
The hard part was done, and Jakob did what he needed to, Kasey figured. Anton would have to understand. The party ran down the hall, their footfalls echoing back at them and their elation mounting as they drew closer to the Althaea’s stolen trawler.
Chapter 36
Captain Friesing paced eagerly in the bridge of the Harbinger as he awaited news of what transpired on the Vulcan. His heart raced and he thought that the commanding officer should have gotten back to him by now, and he ran through contingency plans in his mind, thinking of every possible outcome to every possible action and finding all of them wanting. He had failed.
Finally, the communications line jumped to life, and in the moment before it calibrated, Friesing righted his posture and tried to regain his appearance of a stalwart general. The commanding officer’s face appeared on the screen before him, and before the man even opened his mouth, Friesing knew that something had gone terribly wrong above the Althaea.
“Sir, we’re overrun! The Ides are everywhere. The bridge proved heavily defended.” The commanding officer, shrouded in smoke on the screen, fired into the swirling grey and screamed for more firepower. He turned back to the screen, blood trickling down his forehead and into his left eye. “But, we believe we have her. Alive.”
Captain Friesing felt horror blooming in his stomach when he first saw the beleaguered appearance of his officer, but as he spoke those final words, the feeling in the pit of his stomach dissipated and a great smile appeared on his face. “Good,” he said. “Hold out just a little longer, soldier. Your reinforcements are en route.”
“Yes, sir—” and he again stuck his gun over his shoulders and fired at the Ides bearing down on him, curses laden on every breath. “One more thing, sir.”
“Go.”
“The crew of the Vulcan seem to have activated something. The engine is approaching maximum power and the entire thing is set to blow. Looks like their going to scuttle the vessel, sir.”
Captain Friesing’s mood swung low again and he tried not to let the news affect his grin. “No matter, soldier. The extraction mission is underway and you will receive high honors for your bravery.”
“Yes, sir.”
The line went dead and Friesing, in his command post, was left with his thoughts. Did the Vulcan have a test drive? Were they jumping? If they jumped with the parcel still on board, the mission would be as good as a failure and his career would amount to the same. The thoughts zoomed through his mind and he couldn’t contain them. If they jumped, they could go anywhere. They could go to Earth. Saturn.
Centauri.
Did they know about Centauri? How much information had the vectoring technician revealed? How much did he know?
With his spirits plummeting, he reached for the communication interface device and issued a bland, monotone order to the Harbinger’s computer. “Patch me through to Eugene.”
Chapter 37
The music washed over him like the waves of an ocean, enveloping and carrying him to vistas in his mind, where Kasey Lee was already dead, the Ascendancy vanquished, and Jal Durek, Emissary of the Center, had left his mind, intact and functioning normally.
Violins. Cellos. Where have we gone? Eugene Farrow asked himself, as the crescendo peaked and his heart slammed along with its frantic rhythm.
A complicated question.
No answers in his mind, either. Perfect, he thought. With his eyes closed, the music seemed louder and he rested his head on the back of his seat, feeling his lungs inflating and hearing the hiss of carbon dioxide pouring through his nose like steam from a ventilation machine as he exhaled a monstrous breath.
Static, interrupting his reverie.
“Incoming transmission,” the computer told him.
“Send it through.”
He opened his eyes and placed his glass of champagne on the table beside him, out of the communication hardware’s field of vision. He put on his best captaining face, a leader’s mien, though as his eyes fell on his own reflection in the viewing portal across from him, he felt the falsity of his posture and the brevity of his time in power. This would be his last journey. He knew it.
Captain Friesing’s face appeared over the portal and blocked Farrow’s view of his reflection, the questioning stranger staring back at him from somewhere in the abyss. The Captain, when his features achieved equilibrium on the holographic display, looked like a walking corpse. Sweat poured from his forehead and he dabbed at it with the cuffs of his uniform. His tie appeared too tight, and Farrow thought that the man resisted a great urg
e to loosen it as he fidgeted on the screen.
“Sir, can you hear me?”
The line all broken and confused, the sentence lost. Farrow said nothing and waited for the man to ask again if he was being heard.
“Speak, Captain,” he said, though he already knew what would be uttered. A great failure, a great loss of life. A mess for the company, the shareholders would need answers and he, Farrow, would likely see the inside of a cell before it was all over.
If Durek would let him, that was.
“The Vulcan, sir. It is—” his features clumped together in a look of consternation as he searched for the words to continue, eventually settling on, “—it is infested. Total loss.”
“Ides?”
“Yes, sir, my men are holed up on the bridge and need extraction.”
Eugene Farrow ran over these words in his mind and tried to ignore the budding headache that erupted in his brain. “Have you secured the parcel?”
“Yes sir, my men have secured the parcel. We have extracted her. She is safe.”
Some good news, at least, Farrow thought. Even if Friesing, the security crew, and every soul on the Harbinger died, was torn apart by Ides, fried in explosions, he would at least have the corpse of Kasey Lee. He would at least be free from the mental intrusions of Durek and his kind. He would at least have his sanity, his life. “You get her into a maximum security cell and make sure no one sees her. No one besides myself is to have access to her block, and she is to be given no food. No water. I want to talk to her.”
The captain nodded in affirmation of the order, but something about his lingering presence on the viewing portal of Eugene’s hijacked cruiser made him think that the captain of the Harbinger hadn’t said everything. He swallowed, as if to stop illicit words from popping out of his mouth, but he couldn’t stop them. “They have activated something in here, sir. A drive of some sort.” He paused before finishing his statement, his gaze locked on the face of Eugene Farrow. “We believe they are jumping.”
Eugene tried to process the information, to make sense of it. The Vulcan had a test drive, but no one knew about it. Cromwell didn’t even know, and he had been captaining that vessel since the Ascendancy war kicked off. Suddenly, it seemed to Farrow that the vectoring technician that worked for him as an Ascendancy double agent had chosen a new side, had been passing on information to the guerrillas that should have stayed in the engineering test labs in Saturn’s orbit. Caspar Faulk. He would pay. The man would pay, if he didn’t succeed in getting the Vulcan into a wormhole. If he did get the vessel into a hole—if he did jump—he would likely never turn up again.
“Stop that ship from jumping, Captain. That is an order. You must not let them jump.”
He didn’t wait for a reply. He simply slammed his finger down on a button and the captain’s distraught face vanished from the holographic projector on the viewing portal. Alone again, the music of ancestral stringed instruments rang in his ears, and he thought that, if he were able, he would disappear into their scales, give up his corporeal body and become something as fragmentary and disembodied as a musical note escaping from the echoing hole of a cello.
But not yet.
He would be free of his burden when Jal Durek had Kasey Lee, dead or alive, and the human species would be spared. He would receive no alms, no thanks, nothing. He would be reviled, if they knew, but he saved them.
He saved them.
And the journey approached its climax.
His eyes darted over to the box on his bunk, the case enclosing the headset that would build a mental bridge between him and the Emissary, linking their thoughts and putting them in perfect communication. He thought with horror at the feeling that ripped through his head when he communicated with Jal, and sipped his champagne gingerly in a moment of premature celebration. He could not help himself. His ordeal would be over, so soon.
But before he gathered the strength to attach that gruesome piece of technology to his brain, the atmosphere in the cockpit became tenuous, fibrous, as if the oxygen in the air suddenly became a thick mat of solid particles that shimmered in a nonexistent breeze. He questioned his eyes. Maybe Jal Durek ruptured something in his brain, and he was cursed with hallucinations. Maybe he was having a heart attack, and the fibrous mass of air forming and writhing before him in the cramped cockpit, obscuring the rotting corpse of the vessel’s former owner from his view, would envelop him like a shroud when he breathed his final breath.
He watched, aghast, as the fissure in the cockpit became a widening door, a portal. Through its opening, swirling light of a spectrum he had never seen or knew existed, indescribable and beautiful and burning his retinas as he stared. But he couldn’t turn away.
Jal.
This was his doing, this hallucination.
As the thought entered Eugene Farrow’s mind, a towering behemoth of a figure appeared in the light, in the doorway that fissure had become. He watched as the silhouette grew and took on shape, form. A human, but like none other Eugene had ever seen before.
But the figure emerged from the fissure that formed in the air of the cockpit and when he emerged, Eugene Farrow knew that no hallucinations plagued his brain.
“You have failed me, Eugene Farrow.” His voice was a misfiring engine, a broken vase. Its tone—so low that Eugene could scarcely make out the words—grated on his eardrums and he resisted the urge to draw his hands up, covering his ear canals and protecting them from such an awful sound.
“No, you are mistaken, my liege. We have found the girl.” His head cocked back, Eugene estimated that the being before him—Jal Durek, who else?—stood at eight or nine feet tall, and his rank smell overcame every other sensation that rocked Farrow. Eggs. Sulfur. The stench nauseated him and made him mad with delirium, but he couldn’t turn his head away from the behemoth’s face. He felt silly, obsolete, in the thing’s shadow.
“You dare question me? You think I am incorrect?” Anger dripped from every word despite the fact that Durek’s tone remained neutral, and hadn’t changed once since his dramatic entry into the cockpit.
“Sir, you must be. I saw the woman myself. My best captain has her aboard his ship, a maximum security stronghold. She is yours, master.”
“You have a false prophet. You have a meaningless pawn.”
“But there must be a mistake.”
“I do not make mistakes. I serve the Center, and the Center provides. You are the one who is mistaken, first in assuming that your Captain has the right woman, and second in assuming that I am mistaken. Do not anger me, Farrow.”
“No, master. I wouldn’t.”
“You are.”
“I will find her. I will bring her to you. They are still on the Vulcan, somewhere.”
“Your time is up, Farrow. I warned you about this. I told you that my intervention would not be favorable for you or your species.”
“No! Jal Durek, I will pledge my life to you. Just don’t—”
“You will take me to her, and you will have no agency in the matter. You a vessel, a vehicle of the Center’s will and your species doomed itself by challenging that will. My people learned. But yours persist in fighting what they do not understand.”
Eugene Farrow felt his heart rate accelerating and thought, if he wasn’t having a heart attack when the fissure appeared in the cockpit, he could very well be having one right now. His chest felt tight, and a cold sensation made him shiver in Jal Durek’s shadow. He panted, unable to draw breath and he felt his vision closing in, as if he were losing consciousness. He answered the Emissary’s speech with a tongue that didn’t want to move properly and a voice that sounded too far off. “I understand. I am rectifying the error of my people.”
“You are doing nothing. It is my turn to see this holy cause through, and you will be my sword.”
Eugene felt something bubbling below his sternum, a feeling of pain dampened by his quasi-conscious state and the numb tingling that ran up and down his every limb. He heard the Emissary
disguised as a man screaming in a language that was indiscernible to him and sounded like an assortment of random syllables read in the wrong order, but as the chant rose in pitch, in volume, in frequency, he felt control of his limbs slipping away from him.
He looked up at the massive thing before him, not comprehending what was happening, but feeling a great terror, and found that, despite the volume of the being’s words in his own head, Jal Durek’s mouth remained closed and his eyes changed from their humanoid appearance to gaping black craters, and in those eyes, Eugene Farrow saw the death of everything he had worked for, the comedy of empires falling, and wondered vaguely how many other species had been enveloped by the Center in this same way.
He lost his consciousness eventually, collapsing on the floor.
***
Eugene Farrow awoke with a start on the cold floor of the cockpit and had the sensation that he had just escaped a terrible dream. He felt hung over, like he drank too much champagne, but his glass sat on its side on the carpeted floors of the cockpit and a great stain spread from its rim in an oblong shape. The bottle sat next to the glass, also on its side, and the acrid smell of vinegar and alcohol reached his nostrils like a cloud of nerve gas.
“Hello, Eugene.”
He spun frantically, searching for the origin of the voice. Nothing. No one behind him, no one in front of him, except Buck, but he didn’t say anything.
“I am inside you, Eugene. Or rather, I am you. I have taken you into the Center, where you will stay.”
“No.”
“You cannot fight it. When the Center has a soul, it seldom releases it.”
“No.” But already the realization dawned on him that his every sensation came into his head and was processed by his brain in a different fashion than before he slipped into unconsciousness. The smell of champagne nauseated, though Buck’s corpse no longer bothered him. The cockpit, once dark and kept in shadow, seemed brighter, though Eugene Farrow never flipped any switches or killed any power surges. He wanted to scream, but he had no control of his own voice.