by Ian Creasey
I think Psamathe is more shocked, even more hurt, by my betrayal of our world than by my desertion of our marriage. She would have found it insulting had I left her for one of the coarse, hairy Kerners, but she cannot believe that I would leave my post for an abstraction.
Can I be of more use on Kern, among strangers with whom I share nothing, paying out my lifespan on a project that must, in some measure, fail?
Some few worlds will help, planets close enough to build and launch ships to take the children of Kern to safety. But they will be far too few. Others will send token fleets, or devote funds to pay for a tithe of ships, or shrug their shoulders tragically and write long, soul-searching epics about humanity’s failure to take care of its own. They will feel exquisitely sad and deliciously guilty, and morally superior for expressing the enormity of their crime with such eloquence.
And I? Am I engaging in another self-indulgent whim, another proof of weakness and fecklessness? I am not qualified to judge. But any small measure of work I can provide – be it only building things with my hands – will be more than what I have accomplished here. It could hardly be less.
Black Sun
By David Tallerman
“That’s uncharted space.” Solberg, the dark, flat-featured Norwegian, frowned at the map that glistened like hard frost in the center of the room. “We have no jurisdiction.”
“We have a responsibility.”
Solberg turned his glare on Wei. “We have no responsibility.” He spat into the map. For an instant, the streaming globule burned a comet’s course past endless pinprick stars. “The signal isn’t human. Not from any of the syndicated races, either. So not our responsibility. Not our business.”
“He’s right,” said Jeikes, from the doorway that led into Forward. “About the language, I mean. It’s a level seven syntax, stridulation-based. Something new. As for that other …”
“It’s the Captain’s call,” finished Wei, and Jeikes nodded agreement.
Solberg made to spit once more and then thought better. “I’ll talk to her,” he said. He pressed through the doorway, easily elbowing Jeikes aside. The door whined shut. Jeikes dragged a hand through tightly curled blonde hair, scowled, and then smiled suddenly.
“Adusei won’t listen to him. She thinks he’s an asshole.”
“She knows it for a fact,” said Wei. “Still, who knows? Maybe it would be better if she did.”
Seven hours later, and Wei was still watching the map. The others were in Forward, with the fifth member of the crew, navigator Karras. Wei, who had no part in the flying, command, or maintenance of the dredger-pontoon Fixed Identity, was useless for their current business – which was the business of staying alive.
The hostiles had come out of nowhere. One minute the instruments went haywire; too-strong gravity churned in waves, the little vessel fell into a flat spin. Adusei, strapped into her restraining harness, wrestled and cursed abominably. The Fixed Identity had wallowed, groaned with metal-stress, and stabilized.
But by the then, the attack was in progress.
Wei had seen glassy black shapes, barely visible against the utter dark of space, only showing at all when they tipped an edge that returned some hint of starlight. They were curiously geometric, impossible to count – and hellishly fast. One loomed nearer, nearer, certain to collide, and dipped away at the last possible instant, leaving the whole airframe shuddering.
Wei had been on the floor by then, slithering on hands and knees, only the rigor of fear keeping him rooted. Adusei, seeing him, had roared, “Get back! You’re in the way.”
In the way of what? he’d thought. We’re all going to die.
But he feared the Captain almost as much as the flickering slivers of night outside. Somehow, he’d made it to his feet and through the door.
Now here he was with the map, and the map was worse.
The ship’s Hindbrain, recognising the threat, had zoomed to capture the scene with microscopic intensity. At the center, minutely detailed, hung the Fixed Identity. The hostiles swarmed around, spinning and tumbling like flies in a hot room. They moved nonsensically, or rather with a hint of mathematical precision too abstract to grasp. They dipped, drove in, and the tiny dredger-pontoon ducked and weaved, surviving by a chain of last-instant avoidances.
The dance went on and on, and Wei’s fingers drove against the map-board, nails cracking unnoticed. On and on. Without respite. Until it seemed it might last forever.
Then a single night-black wedge darted forward and past, turned with impossible grace, dove through the starboard thruster mount. It sheared off cleanly. Wei watched it tumble away in miniature, streaming plasma like fairy dust, even as the ship’s hopeless lurch pinned him hard against the wall. He hung spread-eagled on cold metal, sure that in a moment the onset of G-forces would strip the meat from his bones.
Gravity returned in a hammer blow. Wei tumbled to the floor, slid and struck hard against the map table. Another lurch tore him away, just in time to watch the second thruster mount snap free, spin in three widening loops, and combust. The explosion set the Fixed Identity quivering end to end. The gravity gave up altogether. Wei struck the ceiling, darted out a hand, found an edged surface to clutch with bloody fingertips. He hung on.
The map was below him now – like some obscene game, a miniaturized catastrophe.
Was that a planet?
The Fixed Identity ruptured its guts into space. The Hindbrain panicked. Waves of blue and orange light vibrated up and across the walls, while every alarm sounded all at once. First came heat, then awful cold. The pressure was like a fist, closing and closing.
Could that sick, deathly orb be a sun?
The ship gave one awful heave, an animal choking in its final throes.
Wei blacked out, and was glad.
The light was wrong. Even with his eyes closed, it was wrong. Not electric white. Not natural. Too dense, pulsating, wretched up from some part of the spectrum he had no understanding of.
There was little in the way of pain. Wei felt a vague ache centered on his chest, and the occasional stab of soreness. He knew there were things the ship could do, final deathbed protocols, which would preserve him a while in a state of limbo even when his body was nothing more than soup of scrambled flesh and bone. Was that what was happening?
He tried to feel his fingers and toes. Tensed nerves sent messages back. Evidence enough to believe he was in one piece.
Wei opened his eyes.
He struggled to make sense of the view, failed, screwed his eyes up, opened them, tried again. After the second attempt, he gave up. It was stupid to bother. Nothing in his experience looked like this.
In front, roughly at eye level, the broken remnant of the map flickered insanely, confusing planet and galaxy, vast and miniscule, into one coruscating whole. Beyond, the side of the Fixed Identity gaped in an awful wound. One flank of the ship was gone, and the fact that there was air to breathe could only be explained by some last-ditch action on behalf of the Hindbrain. Wei thought he could see the faint, smoky dance of flax shielding where the wrenched metal bordered onto …
Onto what?
Black ground, carved and regular, ruptured by strange, angled protrusions that stretched far off to hills more of the same except in scale, all barely distinguishable from a sky almost as black but somehow subtly different. All of it bathed in that terrible, wrong light; an almost ultraviolet shade, yet visible to Wei’s unmodified eyes.
He vomited. The vomit, splashed over the metal-panel floor, looked purple. It didn’t make him feel any better.
Someone called his name. It took him a moment to realize the words weren’t audible.
“Captain?” he thought.
“You’re awake?”
“I guess.”
“You hurt?”
“Don’t think so.”
“Good. Then get the fuck into Forward, Doctor.”
They were all of them alive. It should have been some comfort.
“Is anyone hurt?” asked Wei, remembering suddenly the function he’d spent years training for.
Adusei stared at him, her eyes just visible by the touch of retinal white. Under the warped light, her dark skin and pupils had become almost invisible. “Not enough for worrying. Hindbrain knew it was beat. Set us a course, a few minutes of stasis. Burned the core near out.” She turned an appraising glance on the flickering control boards. “Waste of fucking time, you ask me.”
“You call this no one hurt?” muttered Karras, holding up an arm wet and torn along its edge. “Anyway, better alive than the other.”
“Maybe,” said Adusei, still looking at Wei. “Maybe not.”
The Forward screens confirmed Wei’s first fractured view. Ebon cascades of rock as polished as glass, as inscrutable as glacial ice. Adusei’s cynicism was famed in a hundred rat-hole ports, but this time she had a point. The Hindbrain, by its own logic, had saved them a quick death in space for a slow one planet-side.
“Have we put out a beacon?” Wei asked.
“Can’t. Not till we know what’s here. Answer the call that brought us ‘fore we drag any more down.”
“What about those ships?”
“Not ships,” said Adusei.
Wei started, at her tone more than the words. “What?”
Karras paused from the task of strapping up his arm. “I worked the data after we came down. Never seen ships move anything like the way they did. Like the Captain says, it’s ‘cause they weren’t.” He yanked the strap tight and bared his teeth. “It was debris. Probably from this place, and moving in a field.”
“What sort of field?”
The navigator shrugged his massive shoulders. “Can’t say for sure. Never seen anything like that either. I tell you this, though. It’s coming from that sun.” He pointed at the screen, to the violently colored sphere squatting half-way up the sky. “If it is a sun.”
They set out toward the epicenter of the distress signal. What else was there to do but wait and rot? Of course, no one said it that plainly – not even Adusei, who treated plain speaking like an art form. They were all old hands. It was barest chance that they’d picked up the transmission in the first place. The odds of another vessel catching their signal were better, but not by much.
Nor did anyone question Jeikes’s claim that those seconds of dissonant clicks and scratches were a cry for help. Jeikes was in charge of communications and translation. Like all of them, his natural talents were enhanced with an array of specialized augmentations. Within his specialization, his word was gospel.
Jeikes knew, though, that they all had their doubts – perhaps he most of all. Even as they started toward its source, he kept the message in a constant loop, trying to tease meaning from the phrases that had eluded him before.
“Had to be a fucking bug-like language,” he said, to no one in particular.
The Fixed Identity had come down on its side and sheered open, leaving puddles of wreckage in its wake. It would certainly have kept going if the nose hadn’t been mangled by collision with one rectangular block jutting from the cliff face. At that point, it had flopped to its belly, like a fish drowning in air. It was hard to imagine it now as something that had cruised the vastnesses of space.
They were in a short valley, closed on three sides. The view through the shredded hull had revealed the fourth, open side, a wide gap between squat crags. It would have been difficult, though not impossible, to climb one of those slopes. In any case, the signal led in the easiest direction. They travelled in convoy, a few feet apart, Adusei leading and Solberg bringing up the rear.
They relied on the suit communicators at first, but the static was appalling, an arrhythmic screech. Fortunately, they were close enough that their internal network still functioned. Even then, the interference remained as a dull hiss that rose steadily when the gaps between them increased. It was easier to bear, if unsettling. After a while, Jeikes realized it continued faintly even when no one was using the channel. There was something so unpleasant in the way it mingled with the looping alien signal that he had to give up on the latter, though he was no closer to teasing out its final intricacies.
It was an hour’s hike to the opening between the bordering cliff faces, not so much because of the distance as the difficulty of maneuvering over and around the endless geometric protrusions forming the valley floor. The light pulsed between extremes, at one moment painfully bright and the next almost too dim to find their way by. The beams from their helmet torches were no help. The black rock seemed to swallow them. Karras struggled more than the others, with his one heavily strapped arm and his ungainly bulk. He cursed often and imaginatively, and always with his network link open.
The uneven ground obstructed any wider view of the planet until the very last moment. Each of them stopped in turn at the point where visibility finally opened up beyond a few meters, then stood, staring. Nobody spoke except for Karras, and that was only to mumble a thick, drawn-out, “Fuuuuck …”
The valley they’d passed through fed into a vastly more spacious gorge below. This one, too, was shut by mountains on its three remaining sides. In fact, in most respects it was the same. The surface was a litter of jutting rock forms, and the bruise-black sun pulsed over it mercilessly.
It was the differences, however, that held their attention.
First, what could only be a tower of some sort, though it looked more than anything like a spike of splintered crystal driven into the ground. Its irregular walls were plain and somehow delicate-seeming, though it must have been immense to stand out at such a distance. It protruded from the ground at an angle of about seventy degrees, like something thrown from the stars.
Even without the geographic metadata, Jeikes would have recognized it as the source of the signal. He had expected a downed ship, or failing that, some decimated city – but seeing the tower, he understood instinctively that it was this and nowhere else that had cried out to them through the void.
Around it, the valley’s second marvel lapped against its shimmering flank: an ocean of fog, swimming with almost sensual organicness. Even beneath the distorting solar light, it was a rich and glistening red. From their height, it was impossible to judge how deep it lay.
Their suits were airtight, could withstand huge pressures. Nevertheless, the possibility of venturing beneath that shuddering crimson surface frightened Jeikes more than anything that had happened so far. But what else could they do? If they inspected the site and found no threat, then they could send up a beacon. After that, there’d be hope, at least.
Adusei opened a pocket and drew out a slim metal case. She flicked it open and touched its inside. Immediately, something minute and silverish trilled into the air. It weaved for a moment in front of Adusei and then darted down the slope, disappearing into the red fog. A minute later, it was back. It danced once more for Adusei and nestled back into its case.
“Nothing the suits can’t keep out,” she said. “We use the ropes, head down.”
The biggest difficulty then became securing the ropes. The pegs, with their microdrill attachments, simply shattered on the rock. Finally, they settled for tying them around one narrow rectangular column. Solberg went first, sliding backward when the surface sloped and rappelling with unexpected grace where the decline was sheer. He stopped on a ledge just above the surface of the red mist. Adusei supervised the lowering of Karras, whose cursing reached new heights. Adusei herself went after. That left only Wei and Jeikes.
“I’m not much of a climber.”
Jeikes started. A moment before he’d been certain the roiling static had produced some intelligible phrase. This comment of Wei’s was like a more palpable echo.
“You’ll be fine,” Jeikes said dismissively. If the static speech came again, he was determined not to miss it.
Wei nodded – a clumsy, almost threatening motion in the suit. He backed to the edge and dropped out of sight. Jeikes, glad of the chance to concentrate, closed his eyes. Ther
e was definitely something amidst the white noise, an undercurrent constantly on the verge of surfacing. He could feel his translator ticking like an aggravated nerve, clutching for fragments of meaning, offering them up to his conscious mind not quite intact. On impulse, he began the alien distress signal again. Sure enough, there was an interaction with the other level of sound, as though two pages of nonsense had been placed one atop the other and a third message revealed. Jeikes strained to hear, to understand.
“Jeikes!”
Meaning, on the verge of comprehensibility, vanished once more into the murk of noise. Jeikes fought a powerful urge toward rage. “What?”
“Your turn now.” Adusei’s voice.
“Okay, sure.”
Jeikes clipped himself to the line. But he kept the transmission looping.
Wei had been in bad situations before. He’d learned doctoring, not through choice, during the first four years of the interminable fighting around Lucida. He’d spent another three years tagging along with Adusei, and Adusei was not a woman who avoided danger, or even did much to discourage it.
For all that, the moment he sunk beneath the crimson mist was the worst experience of his life. There was something ghastly in the way it parted, something powerfully alive, so that even with the suit’s tactile sensors muted almost to nothing he was sure he could feel it sliding around him.
It was like blood. Like a bath of blood.
The instant of submergence was worst, but only marginally. Wei felt like a corpuscle in some interior sea. That he could move and think, that he could hear the voices of his companions, did nothing to dispel the feeling. It made it worse. Perhaps the cells within his own body could do all those things, but that did nothing to change their nature.
The fog was impenetrably dense. They travelled at two-meter intervals; even then, he could hardly make out the bulk of Karras ahead. Adusei, of course, was leading. Jeikes was behind Wei. Solberg – the only one apparently unmoved by the experience – brought up the rear. Wei would have liked to talk to Jeikes, but his attempts at conversation since they’d left the Fixed Identity had all been rebuffed. Instead, he focused on the hovering green arrow superimposed on his HUD, which earlier he’d slaved to the signal source. It was easier than trying to keep Karras in view.