by JCH Rigby
Chambers stared dully at the cabin ceiling, watching without interest as lights and displays flickered and changed. The drugs numbed the pain in his chest, but they’d trapped his thoughts in a feedback loop of dread. Horror tracking them, patiently and with determination.
The lander lurched sideways as it engaged with the cradle. A clank, then grinding movement across the ledge and toward the hangar. Smooth, deep blackness slid away above them, to be replaced by hard-edged, distant ceiling girders, light units, an impression of gantries. A deep rumble reverberated through the hull as the outer doors slid closed, the sound of a faint breeze swelling steadily to become a gale as air was forced back into the hangar. The familiar infrastructure of human space. A hiss as the hull doors slid upwards. Ears popped as the pressure equalized. Still no one moved. A gentle sigh eliciting a muffled curse. After a moment or two, Chambers tried feebly to raise his arms, only to find crash straps pinning him in place. He began to struggle, but some command must have been sent to the lander to override the release. Chambers and his companions were imprisoned.
Pounding feet on the entrance ramp, a rush of black-clad bodies as the police entered the cabin, weapons pointing left and right, up and down. Lots of shouting from the cops, though no one argued with them. Welcome home. Chambers saw a distorted face in the mirrored visor of the officer in front of him, curiously saddened by the weariness and pain carved into its features. That guy’s been through a lot, he thought, realizing with a start he was looking at himself.
The police held them there for a while, locked in place by the stubborn crash straps, until two of them abruptly released Keegan and dragged her from her seat. They evidently expected her to struggle, but she simply stood stock still until they shoved her toward the hull door. He watched bleakly as she was bundled out of sight.
Then it was Richter’s turn, followed by Harvetz’s, and one after another they were led out into the hangar. When they finally reached him he went along obediently, yelping once when his escort bounced him against a seat-back on their way to the door. He lurched down the ships steps, catching sight of the others lined up along the hangar floor, surrounded by armed cops. One cop held a kind of hose device across his body; the rest seemed to have rapid-firing needlers. Why do you need needlers? That’s not a police weapon. Soldier humor had it one burst from a needler resulted in pink mist. Orchard’s police seem to have raised their game. Yet even here Richter, unarmed and surrounded by dozens of cops, dominated his surroundings, tired and wounded though he was. Dull metal eyes incapable of showing emotion. Silvery mottled skin hinting at the enhanced skeleton lurking within. A face devoid of emotion but with a hint of barely suppressed menace regarded the black uniformed police. The other soldiers kept glancing across at him, waiting for his lead.
Chambers was nudged forward again, and he limped carefully down the steps. At last his feet touched the battered surface of Orchard Habitat. It wasn’t that he felt at peace, but there was a strange emotion like snuggling in against his mother for comfort. However bad things were, this was home.
The feeling didn’t last. Chancing a glance around him to see the rear ramps of the ship lowered, two medical caskets standing on the scuffed dock surface. Arden and Drovan. Were they still alive in those sealed container, in any sense which humans would recognize? Chambers doubted it. Were these few all that remained? He thought back to a shattered corpse in the fragments of a broken landing pod, a screaming woman trapped in the command cupola of a blazing carrier, a raging metal-eyed soldier dying with her in an apocalyptic flash of overheated ammunition, a dreadfully-wounded man screaming as he tried to escape a vengeful nightmare. Yes, this was all of them. All that had managed to escape from the creatures that had nearly ended him and the onrushing Euro-Japanese forces intent on capturing Richter and his comrades.
Paying this much attention was tiring. Chambers was finding it hard to stand. The cops shoved him into position at the end of the line, and he swayed for a moment as if he might faint. Chambers noted he was staring straight down the menacing muzzle of a police weapon. I’m not the threat, you idiots. It almost made him smile. If they’d known what he knew the cops would have been facing outwards toward the deep wide black instead, and they’d never look away.
The hangar’s inner partition slid out across the floor, slicing into the wide-open space separating them from the battered lander. Chambers turned his head to follow the movement as the heavy partition closed with a resounding boom. Through the glazed panels in the vast, moving wall he saw the burn marks on the lander’s hull, the impact damage around the landing gear covers, the bent and torn panels over the motors. How the hell had it gotten them back to the ship, never mind home?
The cradle started to drag the near-wreck of the lander back toward the outer vacuum doors. Beyond the partition amber and red lights flashed, and a siren began to howl. With the atmosphere seal fully closed, the distant outer doors slid slowly apart. Chambers felt grudgingly proud of his home. Orchard might be poor, overlooked, almost forgotten—but it had a slick dock operation, with no loose rubbish blowing about in the gale of outbound air. The siren noise faded, disappearing with the departing atmosphere beyond the wall. They were going to dump the lander off the ledge, ready for it to be towed away from the habitat. Well, fair enough—how could the cops know there wasn’t a self-destruct weapon on board?
A loud, gravelly voice echoed through the hanger: “Go on, then. Get on with it.” Richter, pissed off but holding himself in check. “Get all this stuff done and then listen to what we have to tell you. It matters—”
His voice cut off abruptly. The cop with the hose device stepped forward and raised the nozzle and squeezed the trigger. Richter was enveloped in a cloud of grey smoke, which quickly settled solidifying around him, sealing his head and chest in a thick coating of hardening polymer. The line of soldiers tensed, Keegan took a step forward. The cop with the hose thing turned to face them brandishing the nozzle.
“Stand still, you people. He can breathe, but he can’t see or speak. The fogzone will come off when we tell it to, and he’ll be none the worse. Now you—”
Richter’s voice boomed out again, the sound coming from the overhead speakers. The cop with the hose thing jumped, and stared around the hangar searching for the source.
“That won’t work. Stand still, everyone. I said listen to us. None of these men and women will resist while you do what you have to do. But what we know is important, and the message needs to get out. So, hurry up and do your stuff, then get us to where we can speak to your government.”
Kirov let out a chortle. “I can’t believe you just said, ‘Take me to your leader,’ Richter. Couldn’t you do any better than that?”
Bad timing. The boss cop was close to losing it. “Quiet, all of you. No more smart comments, no more back talk. You’re going where we say, when we say. All you need to know is we’re taking you out of here.”
And didn’t they just. Within five minutes the lander was long gone, dragged from the ledge by a shunter and towed into the black, edging away until it vanished from view, cut off by the hangar doors. On their side of the partition flashing blue lights announced the arrival of a convoy of shiny new police vehicles, white armored things of a type Chambers didn’t recognize. The cops loaded them all into the wagon’s onboard cells, bouncing Richter about vindictively as they did it. He didn’t react.
As Chambers was hustled into the wagon, he noticed one officer in particular staring at him.
“Aren’t you David Chambers? The journalist?” The cop asked. “How did you get caught up with this lot?” A few heads turned. The cop seemed familiar, probably after some encounter in a police station, when he’d been following a local story.
“Yeah, that’s me.” Chambers replied, surprised that someone on Orchard remembered him, then, the cop’s boss interrupted the almost-conversation “Move!”
The police machines were vacuum-sealed and designed to operate on a dock le
dge. At the time it never occurred to Chambers how efficient and well equipped the police were considering, when he had left Orchard five years before, the security budget had been a pittance. The landing ledge cleared, hard-ball prisoner-handling, disabling fogzones, the lander removed, armored wagons. What had they been expecting?
He still hadn’t found out. That was the last time he saw the others. Richter, Keegan, Barclay, Kirov, Arden, Harvetz and Drovan. Simply disappeared. Fate unknown.
Chapter Two
Cyborgs and Trash Like That
Sunday, July 3rd
Chambers had to admit, the cheff wasn’t bad. Why should that surprise him? He wasn’t sure, but it did. He drained the cup and decided on another. It seemed somewhat positive he took that much interest in life.
The kitchen light brightened, and he slid the cup under the spigot. The first sip tasted great, but while the warmth trickled into his stomach he felt selfish and shallow. Here he was, contentedly having a brew in his apartment while the others had been taken who knew where. Coming back to Orchard had been his idea. He’d convinced them this was their best option, here they’d be taken seriously. Instead, they’d been held in police cells, separated, questioned, tormented and vanished, and then he’d been arbitrarily released without them. This was all his fault.
Saturday, July 2nd
CHAMBERS' TRIP IN THE unmarked police car had been frightening. Sure he was being transported deeper into some paranoid security labyrinth. Vanishing from the sight of the everyday world, rendered away to some clandestine, hidden jail? He’d been well enough hidden already—why would they need to take him further away? Sudden dread filled him—perhaps they weren’t going that far. This might be a one-way journey.
Chambers hadn’t seen anyone other than his escorts during his walk through the long, bland corridors. Richter and the others as lost to him now as on the day they landed. They’d never know he was gone. Who else even knew he was on Orchard? He may possibly die today. How stupid to survive his experiences on Parnassus and Harmony, only to die once he got back home and disappear into recycling. Yet he went along with them passively. All resistance drained from him.
Pale-green paint, bare walls, and a sluggish sensor system which brought up the lights a few paces behind them rather than above, their shadows constantly thrown forward to merge with the gloom ahead. Door after anonymous door to either side, with the occasional halt as his escorts opened barred gates across their path. No pattern to them—a swipe card at one door, an intercom and whispered conversation at the next, here a keypad, there a retinal scan. Finally, an incongruous and ancient iron key in a mechanical lock. An elevator ride down to a parking garage, police vehicles of every kind stretching off into the distance, in various conditions ranging from decrepit veterans to a few gleaming new ones. Chambers’ guards led him to one of the newer cars, popped the doors, folded his head down, and shoved him into a seat. A figure in the back turned toward him. Recognizing him, Chambers flinched as his interrogator eyed him with a steely gaze before turning to face front without a word. The guards climbed in and the car moved off silently. No blue lights this time.
When they’d pulled up at the train stop, he’d been uncomprehending. Leaning forward, trying to see through the darkened window, the interrogator reached out a hand, placing it on his chest, and pressed him back into his seat. He’d come to think of the expressionless man as Blank Face.
The interrogator hadn’t let a trace of emotion touch his features during any of his sessions with Chambers. He never laid a hand on the reporter, showing neither pleasure nor satisfaction when the guards did. No anger or contempt for crime, no irritation that his work was being made harder than necessary, no hatred for evil or political error, no distaste for tears or screams or blood or vomit. If anything, it was concentration; his brow furrowed in an intellectual effort to understand where truth might lie, what pressure points to touch, how to divine the honest answer from the deception, how to pick data from noise. Chambers came to fear his blandness far more than the guards’ aggression.
The interrogator turned to face Chambers and a sunny, tooth filled smile spread across Blank Face’s normally expressionless features, as if a switch had been thrown on some ancient and rather rusty machine, taking Chambers aback. When Blank Face spoke it seemed to be with genuine good humor, as if thanking him for giving them all such an entertaining time.
“Well, then, David. You have given us some fun. The stories you’ve told us!” The smile vanished, as quickly as it arrived. “Now, don’t make a stupid mistake, here. You might persuade a very few gullible people, but I don’t believe a word of it and neither will anyone else with a brain.
“We know you, David. You’re a good Orchard boy from way back. You’ve been away from us, making a name for yourself out amongst the other worlds, but you’re still an Orchard boy.”
Boy? At his age? Chambers was probably fifteen years older than the police officer. His own image reflected in the mirrored face mask of the police officer on the landing dock came to mind. An image that belied years of good medical and real food. If anything, he looked more like some old tramp swept up off the streets.
Blank Face was still talking. “Home, family, community; learning, work, self-improvement. That’s what Orchard’s taught you, and that’s good—just how an Orchard boy should be. Your late mother and father wouldn’t be very pleased to hear you tell such tales, or to see the people you’ve been hanging around with.” It didn’t seem puerile, somehow. Scarily, it made Chambers feel small again, out of his depth in a grownup world. Blank Face went on. “And what a curious bunch. Cyborgs, mercenaries, pagans. How can you associate with creatures like that? I’m disgusted, frankly.
“No matter. They’re gone, if they ever existed.” A chill ran down Chambers’ spine. “I’m going to take a chance on you, David. I’m not a fool so it’s not a very big chance, not really. You might have thought something, terminal, was going to happen to you, but I’m going to let you go.
“That might surprise you.” Blank Face removed his hand from Chambers’ chest and seized his jaw painfully, forcing his head around so they stared into each other’s eyes. “But who will you tell your stories to, my little journalist? Are you really going to let all of Orchard know the venerated and trusted David Chambers has been kicking around with cyborgs and trash like that? Will you really sell—no—tell those stories? Trust me, we won’t let you. We know your editors, your sources, your connections. We know all the people you use, and we know they know you’re back. Don’t be stupid enough to get in touch with them.
“You’re obsessed with cyborgs. We thought we’d done away with those things, but here you go dragging them up again. The whole human race wants to forget those creatures, wants them blotted out from history. You will not persuade people these ancient bogeymen are still around, or they’re our only hope against something even more scary and ridiculous and alien that you’ve dreamed up. I don’t know why you want us to think there are monsters out there, but it doesn’t matter. You’ve picked the wrong story this time. You will not destabilize our world.
Spittle splashed onto Chambers’ face, but he was too frightened to wipe at it.
“We were all so sorry about your tragedy. Must have been why you left, I dare say. Well, while you’ve been gone, one or two of the more—radical? no, let’s say inquisitive—writers whom you might remember have left us. Tragically, we suffered a spate of accidents amongst journalists a year or two back. Along with the odd mugging.”
That toothy smile returned. “Oh, and do you remember Donna Morant? Found out her husband was having an affair. Killed him, then herself. Tragic. Strangely there are still a few over-enthusiastic types prying about. Take me seriously, David. Don’t even think of contacting any of them.”
Blank Face released his grip on Chambers’ jaw. “No, I’m not worried. We’ll be watching you, and we’ll always know where you are. Forget your machine-man chums. They never existed. It
doesn’t suit us that anyone should think differently. You’ve retired. Keep quiet, stay out of politics, leave things alone. Welcome home.
“Now, this is your stop, I believe. Out you go.”
The vehicles door slid open, Chambers almost fell from the car, but caught himself before he sprawled on the pavement. He looked around and initially recognized nothing in the flickering light of a gap-toothed line of ancient street lamps. After a long moment, he realized where he was. Beaudoin, First Town Sector, the old steps which ran up the chilly side of the strut to the mezzanine level of the station. Condensation, falling like rain from the metal roof made the sidewalk slick and began to soak his meager coat.
The driver’s window slid down, and an arm emerged to toss his backpack out. Chambers’ battered slate followed it, slipping off the backpack and into a puddle.
“Quick, now. Here’s your train.” He heard Blank Face say as the glass slid up, and the car purred off into the darkened street. A hand waved cheerily from the rear window.
Blank Face had been wrong, or winding him up. Beaudoin hadn’t changed. It was another ten minutes before the rattling old train arrived, ten minutes which Chambers spent wedged into the corner of the deserted waiting room, with his back pressed hard against the walls, trembling, breathing deeply, his eyes flicking left-right-left like a cornered animal he so resembled.
Chapter Three
Deep Black from Way Back
Sunday, July 3rd
So, they were gone, were they? Never existed? Richter and the others who had risked their own lives to save his. Lost and dislocated Chambers might be, and no threat to anyone, Blank Face had been sure of that. It looked like, somehow, despite the dread and the profound feeling of uselessness, some instinct deep inside him had been obeying a half-forgotten rule of journalism: If you’re not pissing anyone off, you’re doing something wrong.