by V. M. Law
The alarms still shouted, redoubling their effort after an enormous groan came to them from the portside aft docking bays. The security camera monitor, which still shuffled through differing views of the Age’s interior, displayed the flaming husk of the Leviathan as it receded into the blackness of Neptune’s orbit. Kasey felt her heart slamming against her ribs. She couldn’t control her breathing, and her chest rose and fell in rapid and uneven heaves.
“The Leviathan has been ejected, and the port side aft docking bays have been permanently sealed. Beginning emergency landing protocol. Would you like me to send an SOS to the electromagnetic signal emitting from the planet Neptune?”
“Yes,” Ajax said to the computer.
“We need to get into the cabin. It’s the only place secure enough for us to survive the impact,” Gustav said. He turned to Ajax. “Charybdis will make it. The holds are deep.”
Ajax nodded, unable to do anything but hope that the weapon he transported would not be damaged in the emergency landing.
The four of them ran into Ajax’s cabin, hurdling dead bodies and grabbing as much ammunition as they could carry. They sealed themselves in the captain’s quarters, and firmly secured their bodies into their seats, Gustav strapping himself in last to ensure that everybody was properly secured.
The monitor screens inside the cabin showed Neptune, constantly growing as they approached, and Kasey felt the rush of adventure that overcame her when she and Llewellyn sat in the bar in the lowest levels of the Age of Discovery, discussing conspiracies and treason. She felt confident that she would never reach Earth again, knowing that the journey took weeks with no interruptions and when the two planets were at the utmost closest proximity to each other.
She thought of Corbin, and of everyone else on Earth. She thought about the Ides and Morgyn Farrow and Ajax, and through the unstoppable stream of thought that rushed through her brain, she felt in her heart that she had found home, had found a place where she belonged.
I am a killer, she thought, still holding her rifle and loving the power that its pistol grips made her feel. She kept her eyes trained on the screen displaying Neptune, looking forward to the moment when she would meet the Commoner, shake his hand, and tell him that she would fight beside him until every MarsForm and Terran Council lackey bled in a pile at their feet. She steeled herself, accustomed now to the smell of hot blood and the heat of a laser rifle that scorches a veteran’s eyebrows after too long.
Chapter 23
Nigel floated in his incessant, whirling circles, hovering over her like a bird of prey and making her think that if she did not get off this ship soon, the smell of shit and piss and laundry detergent would force her to dash her brains out on the nearest metallic object. She sat in the cramped room, not conversing, only staring alternately at the computer that moved from station to station, activating whatever launch sequences and thruster control programs would send them off into the stars again, and the panoramic view of the Ides’ transporter. The name of which, Nigel informed her, would be completely unpronounceable, a mess of sound that could not possibly issue forth from a human tongue.
Through the window, a large cavity—the largest cavity in the vessel—teemed with Ides, gangly and sick looking, fighting over boxes of antique laundry detergent scavenged from a museum on the surface of Earth. They fought hard over the white powder, ripping limbs from their opponents in their drive to sate their desire. Their blood ran yellow, and even through twelve inches of bullet proof glass, the aroma of butyric acid that emanated from the Ides’ bodily fluids tickled her nose and kept her face locked in a menacing glare.
She felt envious of her commando unit, kept safe in the external docking port of the Ides vessel, unable to see or hear or smell the cacophony and catastrophe of the Ides fighting over pallets of bleach.
From the ceiling, translucent egg sacs bobbed back and forth, and through the glaze of slime that rolled down their curved surface and dripped to the floor below, she thought she saw movement, an Ides soldier hatching. Knowing the spectacle fascinated her and disgusted her, terrified her and inspired confidence in her ventures, Nigel informed her that the Ides were engineered to be killers. Any hatchling that fell to the floor, that did not learn to fly in the two or three seconds it took to hit the ground from a forty foot ceiling, would be devoured by its parents below, or trampled underfoot until it blended in with the grime caking the entire bay. She fixed her gaze at the being swimming in its egg sac.
The tiniest breaths possible could only keep a full-grown woman alive for so long, she thought, looking through the window at the host of exoskeletal invaders, towering two feet over the tallest human, hunching over in their gait and emitting the most bizarre clicking and clacking and slurping noises from their mandibles as they argued, talked, ate, shoveled powdered bleach down their gullets and chased it with liquid detergent.
“It is the sodium bicarbonate,” Nigel said, perceiving Farrow’s discomfort and confusion without needing to avert his eyes from his own piloting tasks. “They simply need it. We tried to give them sodium chloride—table salt, as humans call it—but the test subjects that ingested even trace amounts were subjected to painful deaths as a result. I’m sure you can imagine the desertous regions of your home planet are better protected, and the oceans inspire great fear in the Ides, but in time, it will all fall. I take it from your request to board this craft that your soldiers did not succeed in requisitioning the desired vessel?”
“You know damned well they failed.” Her voice carried the venom of a person who is made the bitter victim of extenuating circumstances. “I have my own questions for you.”
“In time, Farrow.”
“Now.” She turned from the disgusting spectacle before her and faced Nigel, knowing that displays of authority and anger did not affect the computer, would not make the ethereal presence of artificial intelligence fear for its life, or duck to defend itself against the lashing out of her hand. She missed Kovel. He was much easier to communicate with.
“If you would like. What do you need to know, now?”
“We need to know who is on the other side of the wormhole, and how they can be stopped.”
The laugh that exploded from Nigel sounded fake, was fake, had to be fake, as a computer can only simulate an understanding of human humor. This is what Morgyn Farrow told herself aboard an alien space ship as a human engineered computer system laughed at her intimidating stance and tone. “Stop them? Ms. Farrow, when your bosses were consulted, there was no talk of stopping them.”
The egg sac that hypnotized Farrow burst in a shower of pus-like liquid that rained down on the jubilant horde. The insect hatchling clung to the remainder of its sac for a second, devouring its protein layers, before it fell with a squeal to the floor, impaling itself on the waiting pincers of the army below.
“That was over a hundred years ago. They didn’t understand.”
“They understood what you understand now, what you must have understood when you received your precious promotion.”
“Yeah? Well enlighten me, toolbox, what the hell do I understand?” She felt the pressure of a thousand bad decisions, committed slowly through a century of time, weighing down on her solitary shoulders.
“Judging by the acceleration of your heart beat, the precipitous rise of your blood pressure, and the sheen of sweat that is forming on your forehead, I wager you understand that the universe is populated by far more dangerous creatures than humans, than Ides, than wayward computers—which you think I am. I am sure that you understand that the only way for humanity to persist in its unfortunate history, is for the leaders of that sorry race to strap down and do the dirty work that every species needs to accomplish before setting out to colonize other worlds. Do you think that MarsForm would be able to defend any colonies, in any other systems, from the natural inhabitants that survive in atmospheric pressure great enough to crush the Age of Discovery like a tin can?”
Morgyn offered silence in reply, an
d as she searched in her head for an answer to his rhetoric, she felt like a child chastised by a school teacher—an estranged aunt, a neighbor who feels she is the block caretaker, anyone who should not be chastising her—and that she had no recourse but to bear it and keep going made her feel sick.
“I take it from your silence that you are beginning to understand how the world—I apologize—the universe works. What is it your kind says? There is always a bigger fish?”
The computer fell silent as well, allowing Morgyn the opportunity to ruminate on the words echoing in her ears, the plans that formed in her head before she aborted them, the silent cries for help that she stifled before they could form a knot of emotion in her throat. The ghastly sounds of the Ides walking, eating, speaking, killing, the entire din of their existence in the den of decrepitude that they traveled the universe’s wormholes in, it all formed a cloud of thought in her head, boring its way from her brain to her heart. It produced there the faintest ember of morality before her reverie was smashed by an Ides who splattered itself on the window she stared through.
“You see, Morgyn. You are not of their kind, obviously. I do not have to tell you that. I do believe, however, that I am responsible for informing you that they are beyond your reach. They are beyond my reach—the Ides—they were born into existence and programmed at birth for one thing, namely, the extermination of any being they come across that is not one of their own.”
“But who? That is what I need to know.”
“I am sorry, Morgyn Farrow, but that information is trapped within my memory banks and requires an encrypted access key to discover. All you must know is that the beings on the other side of the wormhole do not possess your species’ sense of morality. They created the Ides to serve their ends, and they are far too powerful for humans to oppose. Your ancestors realized this and made a wise decision.”
“They didn’t know! They couldn’t have!” A disturbing memory rose in her mind, from the reaches of her subconscious. That of her father passing away, dying before her when she was a child, and bequeathing upon her the MarsForm legacy: “You will take our people to the stars,” he said as his last gasp escaped him. “You will be the one.”
Now, at the edge of the solar system, she stifled a grim laugh at the memory of her father, and wondered how much he knew when those words fell dead from his lips.
“They knew and they calculated, your father included,” Nigel said, as if reading Morgyn’s thoughts, stealing her private memories. “They heard the signal and deciphered its meaning and they knew instantly that the only option was compliance. Maybe they hoped there would be a day, that a someone would rise, that some disaster would befall those on the other side and that the remnants of humanity would benefit. Maybe they hoped a guerrilla war could be won, that some would escape the Ides. Who knows? The fact stands that the time for any of that human pride, insipid bravado that doomed your species from its earliest days, is long gone. You would do well to retrieve the Age of Discovery before it can used by the Ascendancy.”
“If they’ve actually docked on Neptune, the Age of Discovery is stuck. They can’t possibly have the fuel rods to escape its gravity or the pressure of its atmosphere.”
“Good. Everything will be clear when you succeed in capturing or destroying the stolen vessel.” Nigel turned to face her for the first time since she entered his crammed, rusted bridge. Even without a proper face, he conveyed the authority of his speech clearly and effectively, setting Farrow on edge before he asked her politely to depart from the bridge and stay entirely within the confines of her docking vessel’s port. The Ides do not do well with visitors, he warned, and the safety locks holding them in their caverns are old.
Chapter 24
The Age of Discovery had not been docked for long before Kasey and Llewellyn were given a glimpse into the history of the planet from whence they came, and to where they sought to return. When they landed and docked at the former MarsForm Neptune base of operations, they exited the Age with caution, firearms leveled at the piles of junk and rust that piled in the halls all around them. There was only one path to take, its doors and barriers propped open by bent pieces of steel, its way lit only by the flashlights that were fastened to the crew’s breathing apparatuses.
“Most of the station is powered down, and we’ll need to wear these until we reach the base’s core. That’s where the Commoner lives,” Ajax told the newcomers before they disembarked, and Gustav chimed in, saying that even if their HUDs displayed a green oxygen light, the air would be poisonous, unfiltered and rank from years of being pumped through neglected filters.
“Then how does the Commoner breathe? Certainly he doesn’t wear one of these all the time,” she asked, feeling the discomfort of leather straps on the back of her head, the pressure of padded goggles on her forehead and cheek bones as she looked around at the comically ancient breathing suits they had all donned.
“That is the surprise, the gem of the solar system,” Ajax said. “I doubt you will be underwhelmed.
***
Kasey dreaded the expanse of the station as they approached it in the Age, and now, as she followed Ajax and Gustav through its one solitary accessible hall, she realized that it contained much more volume than she had imagined when she stared at it through the hazy upper atmosphere of the planet. Visibility was always poor on Neptune, Gustav told her, and that was part of its allure for the Commoner. It was almost impossible, he explained, to detect any trace of the massive electromagnetic behemoths that kept the station suspended in the only habitable pressure zone on the planet, three hundred miles from its crust of frozen water and crystallized nitrogen. Kasey thought it looked like a carcass hanging in a slaughterhouse as they approached, and as they journeyed to its center, the image stuck to her consciousness.
She surmised from the slack posture of Ajax and Gustav that any threat of danger they might have expected upon arriving here was relegated to the extremities of the station, and that the inner portion they traveled through remained relatively safe. The two men dropped their weapons from their shoulders and spoke in voices unbridled with fear of being overheard. Kasey continued walking gingerly, with her gun shouldered, and she noticed Llewellyn following her example.
They reached the final door that separated them from the Commoner’s living space. Here, the magnetic doors still functioned, and the airlock on the other side of its steel panels kept them from releasing their masks until the air filters circulated through every molecule, every atom, ensuring that nothing could enter the vault behind the airlock that would upset the balance of elements and compounds that Earth bound people called air. The fact that any machinery requiring such precision still functioned was not lost on Kasey, and she already felt the power of the Commoner’s aura reaching for her through the airlock door.
With a beep and a swooshing of hydraulics, the door retreated into the wall, revealing to Kasey first, then to Llewellyn, a gigantic structure that looked familiar to them. But it could not be the object they thought of, for its size and its girth towered over any other samples they had seen in their youth on the surface, or in the massive greenhouses that fed the members of the subterranean Annexes.
Kasey felt she had walked into a dream, into a film from before the collapse of everything, when Corbin was a child. Grass extended from the door to the other side of the vault, except where rows of carefully planted and tended crops circled what Kasey could only imagine was a maple tree, a hundred feet tall and reaching its arms out to embrace the artificial sun that beamed down from the apex of the room’s sloping ceilings.
“Is that?” Llewellyn asked, fumbling for the words and coming up with nothing.
“It is,” said Ajax.
“But I thought they were extinct.” He dropped his rifle to the grass and ran to the trunk of the tree, like a child, trying to fold its width in his arms. “I thought—”
“They are extinct. On Earth. Here, however, the Commoner has managed to make one of our seedling
s take hold,” Gustav explained.
Kasey stood there, blank and silent, unable to partake in their fascination. She smelt grass, and soil, and she remembered being on the surface of a planet that would still nurture her, would still bear its fruit for her benefit, and she felt a tear welling up in her eye. She turned from the group to conceal her display of emotion, not wanting to seem weak, affected by the beauty of an inanimate object.
“This tree is the prize of the Ascendancy, its symbolic rallying point. We love her,” Ajax was saying to Llewellyn, who still acted like a child in the summer sun as he ran between the beds and rows of crops and the trunk of the tree, equally fascinated by the array of vegetables that grew over everything. Grapes, tomatoes, potatoes, corn, squash, and a million other variety of bulbs and sprouts and fruit that he could not name, that were lost to all of humanity except to those who shared the space of the Commoner on a planet millions of miles from their place of origin.
Kasey walked away from the group, to the other side of the circular room at the center of the space station. Her leg ached, and the walk from the Age of Discovery to this strange chamber in the center of a derelict space station felt like crossing a desert to her. She walked through corn rows, hiding from the gaze of Gustav, whom she felt would not let her out of his sight, as if he suspected her of sabotage.
She hid from them, Mantiss included, and felt the parasitic flower of guilt blossoming in her heart. She dragged him into this, and he did not even realize—none of them did, except maybe the German—that they had only been granted a momentary stay of execution.
They could live here, but the Ides would come eventually. MarsForm would fall, but the alien legs with too many joints and not enough toes, would continue to trample around the galaxy, the universe maybe, devouring everything until they encountered a larger, more fearsome menace.
She hung her head, mimicking the corn stalks that appeared starved for water. The three men laughed jubilantly at something Ajax said, and she felt glad to be out of hearing distance.