by James Wilks
“Ready?” Overton asked her. She looked at him, wide eyed, and she was breathing so quickly that she suddenly worried that her oxygen would give out. She knew logically that she had hours yet on her supply, but it was a disturbing thought nonetheless. She was glad Overton was coming with her; living through harrowing and life-threatening situations tended to form bonds quickly, and the time the two of them had spent on Titan Prime before Gringolet had arrived had made them fast friends.
“No,” she said, but she reached over and tapped the control panel on her arm to disengage the magnetic boots all the same. They both dropped their tethers.
“I’ve got you,” he replied. He turned off his own boots and pushed himself lightly away with his jetpack. The half-meter line between them went taught, and then she found herself being towed behind him out into naked space. Templeton had cautioned her to keep her eyes on their destination, to think of it as down, but she couldn’t help but look around. She was between a rock and a ship, and all around them were thousands of kilometers of nothing. Not the nothing she had seen in the Nevada desert or even the nothing that surrounded Olympus Mons back home on Mars. This was emptiness like she had never known, and she thought how it was quite possible that the two cubic meters of space she occupied did not contain a single atom that was not part of her suit or her self.
“We’re clear,” Overton said in the general channel. Evelyn gave an experimental tap on the jetpack and managed to spin herself sufficiently to gain a view of the ship behind them. From her perspective, it was larger than she had imagined it, and she realized that this was the first time she had actually seen the vessel from the outside. After a minute, Dinah’s UteV emerged from the shuttle bay behind them. One of its capture claws extended and grasped Brutus, none too gently Evelyn thought, and the engineer began to follow them at a respectful distance, robot in hand.
As Overton dragged her towards the shattered polycarbonate shell of the observation room, Evelyn looked down over the ruin of the main receiving airlock of the base. The details the rest of the crew had been given about Dinah’s last visit here were broad in the extreme, but she had gathered that Dinah had been part of a military expedition that had been betrayed. Their ship had been destroyed, and Dinah was the only survivor. Looking at the piece of the ship still attached to the airlock and the debris that floated around the asteroid, she was amazed that anyone had survived. The explosion that had torn the ship apart had sent chunks of it in every direction. Several of them jutted up from the surface of the asteroid like twisted metal trees.
Two minutes later, they were at the rim of their planned ingress. Overton used his maneuvering jets to turn and grasp Evelyn. She clutched his arm, and he gently piloted the two of them into the ruined room and down to the flooring. After a moment of shuffling and awkwardness, they both managed to find their footing and engage their magnetized boots. Jang descended a few seconds later. Evelyn looked up into the starry sky above, and the shadow of Dinah’s UteV came into view. It was roughly the size of a small bus and just big enough to carry two people in EVA suits. There were externally mounted lights, and she shone them down into the cavernous room. They competed with the lights on their suits, creating a disturbing shadow puppet ballet on the walls around them.
Dinah’s voice came over the general channel. “I need a minute.”
The capture arm holding Brutus reared back, and then tossed him gently into the room. The engineer’s aim was sound; Brutus landed on one foot and one knee and instantly magnetized to the floor plating. Evelyn expected there to be a noise when he landed, but there was none.
“For?” Templeton’s asked.
“To see to my men, sir.”
Neither Templeton nor anyone else wanted to argue with that. The UteV spun around, and a few quick jets of compressed air sent it back towards the wreckage of her old ship.
After she had gone, Evelyn looked at the others. “I guess we’d better get going.”
Jang’s face was as grim as ever behind the polycarbonate shield of the EVA suit, and he nodded gravely. Reflexively, he drew his pistol, then considered it for a moment before holstering it again. “I don’t like this,” he said. Evelyn looked down the foreboding and lightless hallway leading out of the room and thought that Jang had a real gift for understatement.
The door was ajar, though she could see nothing down the darkened hallway. She glanced once more up through the roof into space, and the sense of being outside and yet inside was dizzying. She began walking forward, eager to leave the exposed room despite the darkness ahead of them.
Fifteen meters down, the hallway turned to the right. Jang led, Evelyn and Brutus were in the middle, and Overton brought up the rear. When she came around the corner, she saw the remains of a massacre. There were frozen bodies floating here and there, some wedged in corners. They were faceless, all wrapped in matching guard uniforms and helmets. Magnetic barriers were still clamped to the floor, for all the good they had done the people who had set them up. There were dark stains against the walls and floor, and though Evelyn tried not to think about it, she knew they were the results of bloodletting. A suit of power armor stood against a far wall, the visor opaque and the identity of the corpse inside a mystery to everyone except Dinah.
Wreckage from the destroyed ship blocked the path forward, leaving only an opening too small for any of them to fit through. Silently, Brutus came forward and wrenched the debris aside. Evelyn was shocked at the strength of the automaton; the thing’s arms were no thicker than hers were, but she would have sworn it would have taken a bulldozer to move the massive chunk of hull embedded in the hallway floor. Brutus was able to shift it about a dozen centimeters. This cleared a hole just big enough to maneuver through horizontally.
Evelyn shuddered, but followed Jang nonetheless. She wasn’t claustrophobic in the least, but the experience was still terrifying. She knew logically that the EVA suit was made of tough material, but all she could picture was a jagged corner of wreckage snagging her suit and tearing a hole in it. She would die frozen and gasping in seconds.
After a minute of weightless pulling through the newly formed tunnel within a tunnel, they were all through. Evelyn righted herself and saw three more bodies here, all in power armor in various states of disrepair. There was a hole in the ceiling where the wreckage had come through, and so Evelyn was quick to re-magnetize her boots. As she glanced around at the results of the explosion on the interceptor, she caught sight of something jutting out from under the hull piece. It took her only a second to realize that she was looking at the missing piece of Gringolet’s chief engineer. She shuddered again and fought hard against tears, knowing they would just stick to her face and obstruct her vision. She turned away forcibly and followed Jang further into the facility.
A minute after Evelyn and the others had left her severed foot behind, Dinah’s UteV returned to the observation room. The engineer exited her UteV and pushed herself down into the observation room. A tether spooled out behind her; it was attached to the tiny craft, which in turn was clamped to the asteroid with both capture claws. Once she was out of the room, she pushed herself along the fifteen-meter hallway and into the chamber where she had killed the security guards nearly three years ago. She glided past the uniformed corpses and over to the power armor with its dark visor. Her gloved hand stroked the helmet, and she said quietly, “Teller.” She reached back and unclipped the tether from her waist.
Ten minutes and three doors later, Evelyn, Jang, Overton, and Brutus stood in another room. Incredibly, the emergency lighting dotted across the ceiling still illuminated the space. Evelyn conjectured that some battery deeper in the facility was still supplying power to them. The lights showed a room full of bodies, perhaps a dozen in all. These were not soldiers like the others, however. They were civilians, contractors by the look of them, in plain clothes. The airless cold of space had preserved them in a disturbingly mannequin-like simulacrum of life, though the bullet holes they bore were plainly visi
ble. This time, Evelyn had to fight back not tears but the urge to vomit.
The killing of armed soldiers she could at least understand if not condone, but this mass murder of unarmed people, computer programmers much like herself, was overwhelming. She tried to marry this casual brutality with the woman who had saved her from being raped and found that she could not. Evelyn had somewhat idolized Dinah since that night, but this complicated her feelings immensely. The enigmatic engineer had previously seemed to be a silent protector, a kind of strong and capable woman that Evelyn sometimes wished she resembled more. Now a new vision painted itself in her head, one of a cold, calculating killer who had intervened not to protect Evelyn, but simply for an opportunity to beat Quinn and Parsells to a pulp. She shook her head to clear it. These were thoughts for later; she had work to do.
“Captain, I’m not very good at this, but I think we have a problem,” John said from his wife’s chair in the cockpit.
“Gonna need a little more than that,” Templeton said as he leaned forward in his seat. His brow was furrowed in concern.
John Park’s eyes flicked over the readouts in front of him. “I think…” he scrolled through numbers, realigned signals, and compared data. The anticipatory tension was palpable, and Bethany was staring at him hard. Staples willed him not to say what she dreaded he would.
“I think there’s another ship out there.” He kept shaking his head as he spoke, his hands moving quickly.
“Goddamn it,” Staples exclaimed. “How far? Where’s it headed? How fast-”
Templeton reached out and put a calming hand on her forearm. “Always knew this might be a trap. Let the man work.”
She swallowed her questions and waited. She thought that the silence in the cockpit had never bothered her so much.
John looked over his shoulder at her apologetically. “It’s not clear. There are too many moving objects out there, but one of them is accelerating.”
Templeton sat back and swore. “That’s it then.”
“Towards us?” Staples asked, though she knew the answer.
John turned back to the information on the surfaces in front of him. “I think so, yes.”
“We’ve got to go, Captain,” Templeton said.
Staples sucked in a reluctant sigh. She wanted so badly for the man to be wrong. If it was another Nightshade vessel, she didn’t know how they would escape. There were no outposts for a million kilometers, no public eyes that they could use to hide from Victor this time. The warships had proven faster, better armed, and more maneuverable than her ship. She now faced the very real possibility that the decision she had made to come here would result in the deaths of all her crew. Even as she felt the self-recrimination well up in her, she pushed it down. They had had to come; without a weapon against Victor, they were only delaying the inevitable by fleeing an inexhaustible enemy. Without a way forward, the malevolent intelligence would eventually run them into the ground and finish them. The chance had been worth it. She only wished it hadn’t been the trap she had feared it would be.
She blew out the breath. “All right. John, get down to the ReC. We’ll need you there. Don, get our people back on board and then get Charis up here. I need her.”
“She hasn’t even been asleep for three hours. She’s not likely to be very useful,” John warned her.
“Well, she won’t be sleeping once we get running, so she might as well be up here anyway,” Templeton said. He turned to the coms panel beside him and keyed the general channel to warn the crew on the asteroid station.
An examination of the primary workroom in which they had found themselves had yielded very little. The computer stations all had bullet holes in them, the result not of random violence but systematic destruction. Evelyn was just about to call it a loss when she spied a promising surface-shaped bulge in the jacket of a skinny corpse floating near the far door. The body was desiccated and frozen solid, but the woman’s dark eyes were still open.
Evelyn approached the dead woman slowly and tried to work up the nerve to grip and maneuver the body so as to reach the object in her jacket. She locked eyes with the dead gaze, hoping that she would somehow become desensitized by the time she reached her, but the closer she got, the more she wanted to turn away. Perhaps it was true what they said, she thought, that while millions dead might be a statistic, one extinguished life remained a tragedy. She wondered who this woman had been, what she had wanted, and whether she had ever believed that programming computers would make her the target of assassination. The parallels to her own life made it no easier.
Just as she reached out a hand for the corpse, Templeton’s voice came over the channel, startling her. “We’ve got a ship incoming, people. Captain wants you all back onboard yesterday. Drop what you’re doing and get here.”
Adrenaline flooded Evelyn’s stomach, a jittery fear that made her skin feel cold and clammy. She looked at Overton and Jang. The two were already moving towards the door through which they had entered. Brutus too was in motion. The robot cocked his head to the side for a second, then pushed himself off from a far wall and reached the door first. Instead of going through it, however, he slammed it shut. The action made no noise, but Evelyn’s hormone amplified brain provided the sound anyway, and it sounded like a coffin lid slamming into place.
“What the hell?” Overton demanded, and he brought his rifle up and pointed it levelly at the automaton.
Jang trained his rifle on Brutus as well and demanded, “Explain yourself.”
Brutus engaged the locking mechanism on the door, then said, “I’m afraid we are not alone in this base.”
“What?” Templeton’s voice cut into their conversation. “What the hell’s going on down there?”
“Brutus just locked us in,” Jang said as he advanced on the door, rifle still trained on their robotic crewmember.
“There are other automatons in this base, and they are headed this way,” Brutus explained. Evelyn tried to judge by his voice if he were lying and found it impossible.
“How do you know?” Jang asked. “You can’t hear them in vacuum.”
“No, but I can feel the vibration of the movement through the base. They’ll be here in less than a minute.”
Evelyn stood very still and concentrated on her feet, but she felt nothing. There was, she reminded herself, a thick layer of electromagnet between her soles and the flooring.
“This body,” Brutus continued, “is equipped with rather sensitive gyroscopes. As far as I can tell, there are three hostile automatons headed towards this door.”
“Can you get past them?” Templeton asked, his voice high with alarm.
“No,” Brutus said. “But we may be able to destroy them. The door will act as a temporary barrier, but it will not hold them for long. As they force their way through it, you may have opportunity to shoot them.”
Jang had not yet lowered his weapon. “How do we know you’re not-”
The door behind Brutus buckled slightly. There was still no sound, and Evelyn might have missed it if she had not been staring at the robot at that moment. It looked as if someone had struck the other side with a high-powered sledgehammer. Another dent appeared, and this time she felt the shock through her feet as well. There was no doubt that something was on the other side of the door, and it was trying to get in.
Jang assessed the layout of the room, glanced at the door, Brutus, and the other exit. Finally, he nodded his agreement, and indicated that Overton should take up position beside him on the far side of the room.
“Evelyn, get behind us,” Overton said. She quickly did so. Brutus, however, remained where he was by the door. As far as Evelyn could tell, he was unarmed. “What are you doing?” Overton asked him.
“I will engage them when they enter. I may be able to provide you with more time and some clear shots.” He looked back and forth between the two men. “Please do try not to shoot me. I am every bit as sensitive to bullets as you are.”
Jang grunted, but he
nodded too, and Brutus stepped to the side of the door to allow a clear line of fire until the automatons entered the room. Given the ever-worsening condition of the door, Evelyn didn’t think it would be very long.
Charis sat in her customary seat, and her face was a disturbing mask of bleary-eyed fatigue and terror. “It’s definitely another Nightshade, Captain. Or maybe the same one. Either way, it’s threading its way through the field towards us. The asteroids are slowing it down, but it’ll be in weapons range in seventeen minutes.”
“If they figure out that Brutus isn’t on the ship, they won’t hold back,” Templeton warned his captain.
“That had occurred to me,” Staples said as she leaned forward in her seat.
“Where were they hiding?” Templeton asked the navigator.
“Not sure exactly,” she responded as she poured over the data in front of her. “Behind a large asteroid I think. Does it matter?” Her tone was somewhat indignant.
“No, I guess it doesn’t,” Templeton conceded.
“Captain, we aren’t just going to wait here, are we?” Charis asked. She turned to look Staples in the face, and she resembled a hound-spied rabbit about to bolt.
Yet another tense silence stretched in the room. “Yes, we’re going to wait, Charis.”
“But they’re trapped!” Charis’ voice rose. “We can’t help them, and without Brutus, they’ll kill us. They’ll kill my husband and my daughter. We need to go.”
Staples thought about the decisions she had made that had led them here. She thought about the poor judgment call she had made regarding Bethany and Declan. She saw his face in her room as he told her he wasn’t going to wait to find out how little she valued his life. She thought about the lesson the Odyssey taught in the form of Scylla and Charibdis, that it was better to lose some for certain than risk losing all. She decided that Odysseus had been wrong.