Event Horizon

by Steven E. Mcdonald

  There was no answer from his radio, or along the duct.

  Somewhere in the pitch darkness, far away and far too close, there was the sound of a single drip of water. Weir felt cold, alone, ready to panic.

  “Captain Miller?” he whispered.

  He felt as though he was falling. He knew that could not be so. The artificial gravity had been turned on.

  Water dripped again, echoing in the darkness. Weir closed his eyes, his breathing difficult.

  A woman’s voice, as though at the bottom of a cavern. Weir looked up, opening his eyes, seeing only darkness. He knew that voice, knew it all too well even now.

  “Billy,” Claire said, her voice soft by his ear. “Come to me.”

  She could not be here. His breath came in a ragged gasp. Claire could not be here.

  The walls pressed in upon him.

  “Claire?” he whispered. His voice echoed away into the darkness. He banged the flashlight against the side of the

  duct, over and over, trying to make it work, giving in to desperation.

  “Be with me,” Claire whispered, and he almost screamed.

  The flashlight flickered to life.

  Wet hair hanging like seaweed in her ashen face, Claire stared at him, inches away.

  “Forever,” she said softly.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Miller bent down to look into the duct, wondering what was going on with Weir. The darkness inside the duct seemed to be total, which meant Weir had gone pretty far into the thing. The radio link had been silent for minutes, but he could not be sure if that was because Weir had not said anything since crawling into the duct, or if there was something in the duct that was blocking radio signals, He was about to straighten up when all of the lights went out. Even the main console had gone black.

  He took a deep breath, focusing on calm, keeping the storm of panic away from himself. He bent down again, finding the edge of the duct with his fingers.

  “We just lost all power in here,” he called into the duct. He heard his voice echo somewhere deep inside, but there was no answer. “Dr. Weir?”

  Nothing.

  He straightened up, trying to see something in the darkness. To his surprise, he was successful.

  The surprise gave way to fear. He knew he was looking toward the Core, but the red glow that he was seeing was not something he would have expected from the Core in its normal state.

  He took several steps back.

  The glow at the Core resolved into a humanoid figure consumed by fire. The sounds of inferno filled the air, and Miller felt a wave of heat pass over him.

  The figure lifted a blazing arm, fire dripping from it like water, pointing at Miller.

  The holocaust whispered, “Don’t leave me….”

  Miller squeezed his eyes shut, his chest hollow.

  When he opened his eyes again, the burning man was gone.

  Chapter Thirty

  Cooper was still outside, but everyone else had gathered back on the bridge. Miller figured he probably looked about as burned out as the rest of the crew by now. Even Weir, sitting back at the briefing table, looked thrashed, his easy manner gone away completely. Weir had emerged from the duct looking like death warmed over.

  DJ was mooching about on the bridge, a scalpel in his hand that he was unconsciously flicking against the leg of his flight suit. Miller could not figure out how DJ had so far failed to draw blood.

  “Carbon dioxide poisoning produces hallucinations, impaired judgment—” DJ

  was saying.

  They had been around this particular track once already, trying to put Miller’s vision into some sort of psychological pigeonhole. “Goddammit, DJ, it was not a hallucination!” Miller turned to Weir, who was staring blankly at the two of them. “Dr. Weir, you were in the duct, you heard it.”

  “No,” Weir said. His voice sounded rusty.

  “You must have seen something.”

  “No,” Weir said. His expression never changed. Miller knew he was lying, but he was not sure that Weir was lying about what Miller had experienced. “I saw nothing.”

  “I did,” Peters said.

  They all turned to look at her. She looked from one to the next, looking uncertain.

  “About an hour ago,” she said. She looked at DJ, apologetic. “In Medical. I saw my son. He was lying on one of the examination tables and his legs were…”

  She trailed off, working to contain her emotions.

  “Isn’t it possible,” Weir said coldly, “that you were traumatized by finding the body on the bridge?”

  Peters’ head snapped up and she gave him an angry glare. “I’ve seen bodies before. This is different.”

  “Peters is right,” Miller said, folding his arms and looking down at Weir.

  He wondered what the scientist had seen in the duct, if he had seen anything at all. “It’s not like something in your head, it’s real. Smith, what about you?”

  Smith was leaning against the hatchway, his arms folded and a troubled expression on his face. To Miller, he looked about ready to bolt from the Event Horizon at a moment’s notice.

  “I didn’t see anything,” Smith said, truculent, “and I don’t have to see anything. But I’ll tell you something—this ship is fucked.”

  Weir turned to look at Smith, a dismissive expression in place. “Thank you for that scientific analysis, Mr. Smith.”

  Miller could have kicked Weir for his blatant attempt to provoke Smith. All they needed now was a physical battle, not that Weir stood a chance of bringing Smith down.

  “You don’t need to be a fucking scientist to figure it out!” Smith yelled, taking a step toward Weir, who regarded the pilot with a stony expression.

  “Smith!” Miller growled. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw DJ moving closer to Smith.

  Smith ignored his captain. “You break all the laws of physics,” he snarled at Weir, “you think there won’t be a price? You already killed the last crew—”

  DJ reached out and put a hand on Smith’s shoulder.

  Ah shit Miller thought. Of all the moves DJ could have made.

  Smith swung around in a flash, slamming DJ back. DJ twisted away, grasping Smith’s flight suit with one hand, using the pilot’s momentum against him.

  Continuing his movement, DJ slammed Smith up against the bulkhead, not attempting to soften the impact.

  His hand blurring, DJ raised the scalpel, pressing the tip of it just below Smith’s ear. Smith froze in place.

  “DJ!” Miller yelled, crossing the bridge. He would never have expected this sort of thing from DJ, certainly nothing as fast as this.

  DJ took a deep breath, shuddering. He let the scalpel fall to the deck as he stepped back, releasing Smith. DJ looked helplessly at Miller, at Smith.

  “I’m sorry, I… I don’t know why I did that.”

  “Carbon dioxide,” Weir said, his tone sarcastic.

  Smith lunged at Weir, fists swinging. The scientist flinched back. “He’s fucking lying! You know something—”

  Miller got in front of Smith, grabbed him by the upper arms, squeezed.

  “That’s it, that’s enough for one day, Smith!” He glared into the pilot’s eyes, giving him a look that threatened to shred the younger man on the spot.

  “I need you back on the Clark, I need you calm, I need you using your head.

  You make a mistake out there, nobody’s getting home, you understand?”

  Smith had started to try shaking Miller off, but the litany and the expression stopped that. Smith seemed to want to look everywhere but at his captain, but, in the finish, he met Miller’s eyes. Miller was glad to see Smith cooling off, even relaxing a little.

  Finally Smith said, in a calmer voice, “Sir.”

  “We’re a long way from home and we’re in a bad place,” Miller said, letting the pilot go. “Let’s not make it worse.”

  Miller shook his head. He needed a few minutes to walk off the anger and the growing stress. With
out saying anything more, he left the bridge, finding his way into one of the corridors that lined this end of the ship.

  He was aware of Starck following him. Unfinished business, probably, most likely something he ought to take care of. He wanted nothing more than a couple of minutes alone, but he was not going to get that.

  “Miller,” Starck said.

  Miller did not break his pace, merely kept going, determinedly hewing to his course to nowhere. “What is it, Lieutenant?”

  “I’ve been studying the bio-scan,” she said, hurrying to match pace with him, “and I’ve got a theory.”

  Miller raised an eyebrow. “Proceed.”

  “I think there’s a connection between the readings and the hallucinations, like they were all part of a defensive reaction, sort of an immune system—”

  Miller increased his pace, still avoiding looking at her. “I don’t need to hear this.”

  Starck pushed her pace, trying to keep up with Miller. The effort left her almost running to match Miller’s long strides.

  “You’ve got to listen!” she said.

  Miller’s course had taken them through the ship into an airlock bay. Miller stopped abruptly, causing her to stumble. He turned to face her. ‘ To what?

  What are you saying? This ship is alive!”

  Starck shook her head. “I didn’t say that. I said the ship is reacting to us. And the reactions are getting stronger. It’s getting worse.”

  Miller was breathing hard, trying to examine the concept rationally, unable to fathom it. “Starck, do you know how crazy that sounds? It’s impossible.”

  Her stare was unwavering. “That doesn’t mean it’s not true.”

  Miller looked at her for a long time, silent. Finally, he said, “Don’t tell anyone what you just told me.”

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Time passing. The lights flickered throughout the ship.

  Smith had left the Event Horizon.

  A dark sensation swept through the ship. If Miller had been willing to accept the notion, he might have thought the ship was breathing, displaying signs of life.

  They were all becoming afraid of the Event Horizon, Weir thought, sitting at the gravity drive workstation. Miller was barely talking, and Starck was constantly glancing around herself, always checking the corners as she moved.

  Peters had returned to Medical, but she had been frightened, either for Justin or of what she might see.

  DJ and Starck were still on the bridge. DJ was scraping blood samples from the bulkheads, being as thorough as possible in the time they had left. Starck was trying to make herself useful, but between the lack of communication and the difficulties with the bio-scan, she was frustrated and angry. She had chased off after Miller, obviously with something on her mind. She had returned to the bridge looking even more frustrated than before.

  For his part, Weir had settled down with the gravity drive workstation and a nice embedding diagram. It rotated slowly on the display in front of him, while he gazed at it, unraveling the intricacies of it in his mind. The funnel-shaped wireframe image could tell him a great deal, under normal circumstances. For the moment, it was not telling him anything he did not already know. It was hard to concentrate right now. He could not get the image of Claire out of his mind. Old wounds had opened up again, old nightmares.

  Starck walked up behind him, leaned down over his shoulder, looking at the display. “What is that?”

  “A phase-space model of the gateway,” he said, not caring if she understood him or not.

  She looked at the embedding diagram for a moment, watching it spin. “Tell me something. If the ship’s engine is a black hole, when you power it up, it sort of… to put it in the simplest terms, it sucks the ship in and then spits the ship out somewhere else.”

  “Well,” Weir said, trying to adjust to her simplistic perspective, “basically, yes.”

  “Except the Event Horizon got spit out seven years too late.”

  Weir nodded. “It’s possible.” He waved at the wireframe model. “If I reconstruct what happened when the gravity drive was activated—”

  “It could tell us where the ship’s been for those seven years.”

  “Exactly,” Weir said. Thank you for rambling through the obvious, Weir thought. He was growing impatient with Starck and her questions.

  She was studying the wireframe intently, following the curves and lines with her eyes. The sides of the funnel never quite touched, never quite went anywhere, which was just as it should be.

  “That’s the black hole,” Starck said.

  “Yes,” Weir said, softly. “The singularity.” He half-smiled, suddenly enjoying himself, focusing on one of his favorite subjects. ‘ The curvature of space becomes infinite and physics… physics just stops. A region of pure and unmitigated chaos.”

  Starck was looking at him, almost curious, almost amused. “Why, Dr. Weir, I think you’re in love.”

  “Hmm,” Weir said, absently, lost in his rapture. “Claire used to tell me I loved the Event Horizon more than I loved her. I told her that wasn’t true, I just knew the Event Horizon better, that’s all.”

  “Claire is your wife?” Starck sounded as though she was warming to him, he noted. Nothing like the suggestion of domesticity to break the ice.

  Flatly, he said, “She was. She died.”

  Starck almost recoiled, shocked. “I’m sorry.”

  Weir did not bother to respond. He kept his eyes on the shifting wireframe.

  Behind them, DJ said, “Do you think you can give me a hand with this?”

  Without replying, Starck moved away from Weir’s station, joining DJ.

  Whatever ice had been broken had just as quickly been refrozen, which was just as well by Weir.

  He continued to watch the wireframe.

  Suddenly, galvanized, he sat forward. The wireframe was distorting, changing in a way that he had never seen before. The funnel was opening out beyond the singularity and staying stable, forming some kind of wormhole.

  “Impossible,” he whispered, shaking his head. “The gateway never closed…

  it’s still open….”

  He sat back, chilled.

  If the gate was open, what was coming through it?

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Somewhere in her dreamworld, shadows were beating sticks on oil tanks, causing a great booming to resound through the desert landscape of her sleep.

  The sound was growing closer and closer, deafening her.

  Peters woke with a start, wiping at her mouth where she had drooled a little. She had fallen asleep in one of the medical section’s chairs and now had back and neck aches to go with the exhaustion.

  Everything was fuzzy, unfocused. Her ears were ringing. She looked around, trying to remember….

  “Justin?” she said, pushing herself out of the chair.

  There, in the shadows. Justin had somehow fallen from the examination table, taking the sheet with him. Suddenly hopeful, she crossed over to the untidy jumble of person and linen, and pulled back the edge of the sheet.

  Justin was not beneath the sheet. The sheet had been draped over a pair of nitrogen tanks.

  She looked around, wildly. “Justin!”

  No answer.

  Off to one side, a bio-scan display was just starting up.

  There was a familiar metallic pounding in the distance, somewhere in the darkness of the Event Horizon. It echoed through the ship, growing louder. She had heard that sound in her dreams, the crashing sound of the shadows as they came.

  Terror swelled up in her. Whatever it was, it was coming toward Medical, coming towards her. She sprinted for the hatch, wheeled right, and ran like the wind, her mind empty of everything except the need to get away.

  The booming, thundering sound crashed on after her. She thought she felt the shadows closing around her, reaching for her. Her heart was pounding, her breath coming in short gasps.

  She sprinted onto the bridge, turned around, slammed the p
ressure door, bolting it. The sound was momentarily cut off.

  She turned around. DJ and Starck were at one side of the bridge, working on the bloodstains. Weir was at the other side of the bridge, but she couldn’t tell on first glance what he was doing. They had all turned toward her, staring.

  DJ started toward her. “What’s wrong?”

  Peters was gasping, winded from her run. “You didn’t hear it? You must have heard it!”

  “Heard what?” Starck said.

  She could not believe it. She was shaking, terrified, but it was beginning to seem that the evidence of her own senses was in doubt. She took a deep breath, willing herself to relax, starting to loosen up.

  Crash.

  The door shook with the impact. Peters shrieked, whirling around, backing up into DJ.

  The door boomed again, over and over, growing louder and louder. There were rattles interspersed now, parts of the door mechanism and structure loosening, rivets popping. The metal was groaning.

  Starck had her hands over her ears, grimacing. Peters screamed again, rage and terror and pain mixing together. The crashes were coming closer and closer together now, impossibly loud.

  “What is it?” DJ yelled at her.

  She had no idea. How was she supposed to know? “Make it stop!” she screamed at him.

  DJ stood by her, shaking his head, lost for answers.

  Weir had walked away from his console, she noticed. His face was a blank mask, a sleepwalker’s face. He walked slowly toward the door, seemingly oblivious to the thundering and vibration.

  Starck went after him. “What are you doing?” Weir had reached the door, his hand held out. “No!”

  She dove toward him, grabbing his arm. Blankly, he tried to shake off her grip, but she had managed to get him into a wristlock, twisting his arm back.

  He swung himself around toward Starck, raising his other hand, his face furious now.

  The pounding ceased abruptly. The quiet was brutal, frightening, a weight that descended upon the room. Peters’ ears were ringing, feeling as though they had been stuffed with cotton wool.