Stasis (The Ascendants Book 2)

by V. M. Law

  “I need a human vessel, to set foot on your planet.”

  “My planet?”

  “Yes. Earth. It is where we must go. Where we will find the girl, the prophet.”

  “But how? Why?”

  “The time for your thinking has passed, Eugene Farrow. It is time for the action of the Emissaries.”

  Eugene Farrow made no reply, couldn’t, for he found that he had lost his words. He could think of nothing. Even his name escaped him, as he watched the fissure open up in the air again, the fissure through which the Emissary entered the cockpit originally. He didn’t try to stop himself from pushing against the floor and standing up, placing one foot before the other and proceeding toward that sickening, unearthly glow that again bathed the cockpit in its ever changing light. He felt it pulling him, and though he didn’t know his name anymore, he saw the flashing of a face in the colors of the portal. A familiar face.

  Morgyn, a small voice in the back of his mind said, but the word had no meaning to him, and left him in a state perplexity as the light washed over him like cold, oily water.

  Chapter 38

  They hid in the trawler and listened to the sound of the grasshoppers jumping, prancing, pouncing. Gnashing and gnawing and the screams of the MarsForm security force that had them pinned into a corner. With the blast shields drawn down over the windows of the trawler, blackness reigned, and without visual stimulation, the sound of the horror outside the trawler in the hangar reached their ears with utter clarity. Only the light of the biometric monitors pulsed out their hideous green numbers and Jessup sat at the console, deciphering their meaning.

  No more heart beats.

  No vocalizations save the tittering of Ides fighting over what remained of the MarsForm crew.

  “We are safe. Almost safe, at least.” He sounded tired, exhausted, and looked to have aged infinitely since he had boarded the Vulcan a couple days ago.

  “Wait,” Caspar Faulk said. “We shouldn’t leave until the jump is complete.”

  The whine of the engines rose to such a high pitch as to be undetectable to the human ear, and Kasey still felt the electric sizzle of her hair standing at attention all over her body. Her bones vibrated, her skin shook over the quivering muscles that made up her frame and as she crouched in the darkness, huddled and mildly afraid with the others, she wondered if the sensation of being electrocuted would ever pass. She didn’t think so. Throughout the entire firefight, she felt the pulse of energy coursing through her and she knew that something would happen. Something with great consequence.

  Only she didn’t know what.

  Caspar told them that the drive was experimental, that they could easily find themselves lost in a wormhole, a gap in space with no hope of reentry into the universe that they knew.

  It terrified her, more than any amount of bullets or any hoard of insectoid aliens ever could. She felt unnatural, even as every function in her body stood out in her mind. Her heart racing, her bladder full and fit to burst, her scent glands working over time. All of it stood out in stark contrast to the impression she had that they were—nowhere.

  Nowhere at all, as if the entire ship and every life form on it blinked out of existence. The pain was immense. It blinded her and she knew others felt it too, for a moan escaped from Anton’s grimacing mouth and the others screamed with elation, with fear, with excitement.

  The electrocution feeling heightened, and Kasey fell to the floor, began rolling around and tossing her arms about, as if she were burning and by flailing, she could put out the flames licking her. But at the same time, she felt as if the burning fire that scorched her were something from within, something that couldn’t be touched and that she would have to live with the feeling of roasting alive until her final breath.

  And then, as suddenly as the sensation of burning, of being electrocuted overcame her, it vanished. Gone. Her skeleton ceased its vibration. Her skin, cool to the touch, and nothing remained of the terror she felt save the sickly, glistening sweat that left her feeling clammy and cold. A retching sound in the dark, and the smell of butyric acid reached her nostrils and made her crunch her facial features together in a mask of disgust and disorientation.

  “We did it.” A small voice, in disbelief, reached her ears from where Caspar Faulk sat. “We jumped.”

  The others stood up. When the waves of nausea subsided and they began feeling comfortable on their feet, a great cheering uproar broke out in close quarters of the trawler’s cabin. Jakob Hardmason looked defiant, hard, as if he expected such an outcome so fully that his previous disparagement would be forgotten. Jessup, still exhausted and haggard, slumped in his chair, the repose of a victor taking over his body and making him seem like a lackadaisical retired general, playing chess with other retired military men in a park on a sunny day.

  Only Anton still huddled on the ground, and the pool of vomit collecting itself at his feet resembled the color of his face when he turned his gaze upward to look at the surviving crew. “We jumped,” he whispered. “But we didn’t survive. This trawler is our tomb.”

  No one else heard. He spoke directly to Kasey and he looked at Jakob Hardmason with a glare that made Kasey’s blood freeze in her veins.

  “Anton,” she began, lowering herself to his level and offering a hand. “We still need to fight, but we did make it. We are on Earth again, when not one of us thought it possible. Remember that.”

  He didn’t take her outstretched hand, only shifted her glare to him. “Yeah. I remember.”

  She dropped her hand, sure he would not take it. The rest of the survivors congealed into a shuffling crowd around Jakob as he produced a bottle of liquor from the drawer beside the trawler’s pilot seat. No glasses to go around, but they passed the bottle, and each took a toast to their survival, the miracle of warp drives, the sanctity of life in a hostile universe.

  “We are still on a freighter crawling with active grasshoppers. We are still on a planet overrun with grasshoppers. We have played into their hand, Kasey, and you—you remain a stranger,” Anton said.

  Kasey, who had the bottle thrust into her hand and took her own slug from its thin neck, relished the burn of the noxious liquid as it coursed down her throat and spread its tendrils to her extremities, turned on Anton, again assumed a kneeling position beside him, and said, “You have lost a friend, and that is a tragedy. But if you don’t want to lose your own life, we need you to stand up and drink this bottle.”

  She extended her hand again, this time, with her fingers wrapped around the bottleneck. Anton stared back at her and made no motion, no attempt to grab the bottle or stand on his feet. Anger pulsed in through his every breath and as he sat crouched in his own vomit, Kasey had the distinct notion that he had become dangerous. His mouth—bent into a snarl, pursed closed, a thin line of hate that he would never cross again.

  But as soon as the notion took hold in her heart, he broke out into a strained smile and took the bottle. Bringing it to his lips, he turned it on its head and the liquid glugged its way from its glass confines and down Anton’s throat. After his swill, he stood up and held the bottle in his hand, offering it to Jakob, for it had gone the complete circle, and now it was Jakob Hardmason’s turn to drink.

  Jakob placed his hand on the bottle, but when he tried to pull it out of Anton’s hand, the bear of a man pulled Jakob into his bosom and clapped his free arm around the captain in a bear hug that looked like it would squeeze the life out of him. She didn’t hear what he said. She only saw the look on Jakob’s face change from a look of mirth and celebration to a dark cloud, like a storm gathering on the horizon. Anton pushed through the crowd and left the cabin of the trawler, preferring instead the reclusion and solitude of its minuscule hold.

  “You killed her,” she imagined. And I’ll kill you? She didn’t know, but the pasty look of Jakob’s complexion told her more than she needed to know.

  Chapter 39

  “What now?” Jakob asked, his gaze trained on Caspar Faulk.
<
br />   “Now?” He considered the question as the others awaited his guidance. “Now, we have to take this trawler to the surface. That is, if it’s still running.”

  “But what about the Vulcan?” Jessup asked. “If we leave it, there’s no way of protecting it, of getting out. We’ll be marooned on Earth.”

  Kasey felt dislodged. Earth. Even the word sounded clunky in her mind. Ten years, she figured. Ten years since she left the surface. She never imagined she would return in this fashion. After the Neptune Station incident, she doubted she would ever return at all, but the planet hung in the void, practically close enough to grasp, and she could not comprehend the change in her situation.

  “Earth is our home,” Jakob said. “We can’t be marooned there. We can fight there. We can die there. But we will never be stranded there.”

  Kasey heard his words and they stuck in her mind, but as she replayed them, she didn’t know what to think. Earth was their home, Jakob had said. Was it true? It used to be. Was it still? She thought only of Corbin, waiting on Earth in a Terran Council army base, in a cell. Below ground, undoubtedly, and when the images came into her mind she felt a rage boiling in her heart that made her sympathize with Anton. “We are going to the surface.”

  The crew rounded on her. Jessup spoke first. “You would have an easy time saying this, Kasey Lee. How long has it been? Where were you when the Ides touched down? You were on the frontier, and we were—we were down there—and I’ll never forget what I saw in those months.”

  His speech brought tears to his eyes, though he concealed them rather well, Kasey thought. With practiced skill.

  “She is right. We don’t have a choice. We can’t well stay in this cabin forever.” Caspar spoke with a martial tone in his voice that belied his growing confidence. “We are suspended over the northern pole of Earth, and if we don’t act soon, the Siberian base will detect us. If that happens—” He let the sentence hang, punctuating his statement with a shrug and a raised eyebrow.

  Jessup cut in to argue, saying that the Ides warship went through the wormhole too, that the entirety of the Vulcan now was overrun with the fucking things, but Jakob cut him off. “We are going down, and we are not leaving this vessel intact. You bring up a good point, Jessup. This vessel is crawling with grasshoppers and to bring it to the surface would be a terrible mistake. I have set charges. We are going to scuttle.”

  “Scuttle! Scuttle! That was a good idea in the Plutonian orbit, when we could have found a space station to dock in, but here? You can’t be serious, Jakob, we’ll be stranded on Earth until the Council collapses.”

  “There is no choice. Anton’s right. The vessel is a coffin and anyone who stays on board is going to die. It is only a matter of time before the Ides find their way to this hangar. Hear a noise, pick up a vibration from this trawler. When that happens, anyone still inside is going to starve to death or go crazy and wander to their death,” Jakob now turned to the others, pulling his attention away from Jessup and directing it to Kasey, to Caspar, to Anton, who had rejoined the group after his stay in the other room—though Kasey still watched him with a sidelong glance and kept track of his position—to the rest.

  “The other option is to fight. To go to the surface, attack the Siberian outpost, to die with a gun in your hand and a blue sky in your eyes. We all know the lies. Kasey is proof. If it angers you and it gets under your skin that the Council can do as it pleases and barter your lives with an alien race that seek sour extermination, then you can die with a clear conscience knowing that you at least stood for what is important. For what is inalienable.”

  His speech rolling, the others tuning in, Jakob turned back to Jessup. “You say we’ll be stuck on Earth, We belong on Earth. My father died fighting the Council from the fringes of the human universe for us to able to return. This is not our death, Jessup. This last battle will be the realization of a one hundred and forty three years of warfare, fought with honor and lost by the wrong side. This will be the last battle in the human epoch, and I am honored to take part in it.”

  Jessup made no return argument. Silence followed, and before the group lost its momentum, Kasey spoke up in a determined voice and said, “We are wasting time. We need to leave.” She let her gaze drift from one person to the next until she held them all in her regard and confirmed their commitment with an unspoken contract. They would fight together, and die together, and they were all lucky enough to live as long as they did.

  Only Anton seemed surly, discontent. His eyes fixed his gaze mostly on the floor, Kasey noticed, but they had decided on a plan and the trawler kicked into gear, though he followed Jakob with his eyes and stayed on the fringes of the group.

  Chapter 40

  It looked like a mineral stone, floating in black, brackish water. The trawler evacuated the hangar it rested in and the remaining crew of the Vulcan left the husk of floating metal for the final time. They didn’t look back, though. Rather, everybody on board the Althaea’s trawler kept their gaze trained on the planet hovering before them. Earth. Clouds swirled in masses over the oceans and the continents stood out in stark yellow contrast to the indefatigable blue of the vast bodies of eddying water that looked as if they would consume the planet at any moment. The African desert, the polar caps, the mountains of central Asia, all stuck out like the features of a face bruised by years of abuse and neglect. Scars. The bomb holes ripped into her flesh and the arid plains of the surface seeming to her from such a height like bleached clothing, throwaway rags.

  What happened? she thought. How long have I been gone?

  She couldn’t reconcile the level of destruction visible from such towering heights above the planet’s atmosphere with the verdant field she knew from her days driving Corbin’s tractor. A long thirty years. Forty, by now, though she slept through the better part of a decade.

  As the planet rushed forward to greet the trawler and the passengers holed up inside, the scars rent on the face of the Earth deepened, intensified, and Kasey thought that she returned not to the planet of her birth, but to a nightmarish facsimile, a hell wrought into reality. Tears welled in her eyes, though she wouldn’t let them spill over. She blinked, instead, and rapidly.

  “A few minutes now,” Jessup said, resigned to the suicide mission. “Prepare yourselves for brutal cold.”

  They bundled up. Parkas and infrared goggles found in the emergency kit lock beneath the trawler’s pilot seat. Kasey zipped her coat to the neck and pulled the hood snug over her hair, batting away the white streaks that flared in her vision and pulling the hood’s drawstring closed until no air passed through the gap between the goggles’ frame and the fringes of her parka. She felt encased in warmth, locked away in a padded box.

  “Touching down in thirty seconds,” Jessup said as the Ural mountains grew like the spine of an ancient dinosaur from the flat buttes of the Caucasian steppes. Beyond them, to the west, an impenetrable wall of snow and ice, furling and thrown around by winds that shook the trawler and dislodged it from its programmed trajectory. “Ready your weapons.”

  Jakob kept his gaze glued to the monitors on the panel lining the cockpit’s viewing window. “We have the element of surprise, folks. No detection signals picked up here. Keep it low, Jessup.”

  The trawler flew over the mountains with the agility of a gazelle hopping from one rock abutment to the next. It dipped into ravines and skirted their craggy edges until everyone on board felt the twinges of nausea deep in their gut, and Kasey felt sweat prickling her flesh beneath the warmth of her parka.

  Jessup pulled out of one ravine and dropped into the next. Miles flew by beneath them, and Kasey scarcely had time to dry heave as the old admiral rode the air currents raging through the mountain passes with the experience of a bush pilot. Again, he pulled up as Kasey shut her eyes to the rock wall flying toward them at sickening speeds and just when she felt as if the entire trawler would go up in flames and slam into the geography, Jessup saved them with a swift maneuver that he made seem
effortless. Like ice skating.

  When they skirted the ridge that had almost killed them, a wide plain of ice and tundra greeted them, stretching for immeasurable distances and making it seem, to anyone staring out the viewing window, that they had ceased moving, and were in fact hovering in place.

  Kasey peered into that frozen expanse, featureless and monochrome, until, on the horizon, a finger jutted from the snow. She squinted her eyes and tried to focus on the object, but distance made it impossible. “That’s it,” Jakob said, his voice sounding preprogrammed, rehearsed.

  He has been rehearsing, she thought. Rehearsing for this moment for seven years, at least.

  “Beginning the descent now,” Jessup cried, and turbulence rocked the trawler as it dipped so low that ice crystals flew up in its wake. This close to the ground, Kasey felt the speed of the vessel with amazing clarity and wanted nothing more than to debark the vehicle before she fell into a swoon. She wanted to pull out the drawstring of her hood, but the cold would bite her harder than the motion sickness and she gave up, hanging her head and staring at the crisscrossing metal pattern on the panel floor of the trawler’s load out dock.

  “Wait,” Jakob cried. “Wait! They’ve spotted us.”

  “What do you mean?” Jessup cried.

  “I’m getting some static, the radar. It’s picking up activity on the installation—” Before he finished his proclamation, a laser cannon’s shot ripped through an appendage on the trawler’s exterior and the entire crew fell to the ground as the boat rocked and slammed onto the surface, bounced up and tried to continue flying, but went down for a second time. Kasey felt the world turning, spinning at terrifying speeds and didn’t know if the metal surfaces she slammed into were the walls, the floor, or the ceiling.