Pitch Dark

by Courtney Alameda

  I pause at the first major intersection, catching myself on a wall. Panting. Nobody’s dead ahead. The right tunnel stands clear. Down the left, I catch sight of an EVA-clad form, moving some thirty-five meters uptunnel. I could try to cut them off at the Colorado bulkhead, but I don’t want to let the pendejo out of my sight.

  Resisting the urge to shout Stop!, I launch myself off a wall, sprinting past a sign reading NO CORRA/NO RUNNING. The man in the EVA—he’s built like a man, at least, tall and broad in the shoulders—pauses and glances back, startling, as if the sight of me has electrocuted him. In better light, I realize he’s wearing one of the Conquistador’s old EVAs, one with the identifying markings rubbed out. We got rid of those suits when I was ten.

  A long-term crew member? Someone we trust? No, it’s got to be a trick.

  We stare each other down for two seconds; then he scrambles into a run. I give chase. Down two tunnels and through the Solar Quads, which lie deserted at this time of night. The intruder’s quick, and not exhausted from a fifty-meter ascent up a silocomputer’s face.

  Adrenaline surges through my body. I pump my arms. My feet slap against the tunnel floors. I don’t dare call out for the ship’s guards. They’ll ask questions about my climbing gear. My bare feet. The spark burns on my left hand.

  I’m gaining—four seconds behind and closing—when the intruder turns a right corner. I plunge down the hall to follow him, then stop cold when I find myself staring down a dead end.

  He’s disappeared. Without a sound. Without a trace. Almost like he’s ghosted into the ship’s walls. I put my hands on my hips, lungs burning, breath exploding. Dios mío, even my insides feel like they are sweating.

  “Where did you go, pendejo?” I say in a choked cough. This close to the ship’s medical wings, there aren’t any hidden tunnels or hatches. Having done most of my growing up on this ship, I’d play escondidas with my siblings and the other children in the ship’s halls. The best places to hide were near the loading docks or mech bays, places riddled with hatches, loose grates, and big pipes. But here, near the living quarters, the walls are smooth and featureless. There’s nowhere to run, and nowhere to hide.

  How did you escape? Where did you go?

  There’s another hacker on this ship, one who may be a black hat looking to somehow undermine us and this new find. After all, we needed the gravidar to locate the USS John Muir, as well as keep our own ship within range. A malicious attack on the gravidar is an attack on the terrarium inside the John Muir, which is an attack on humanity’s future.

  Historically, there’s only one organization that wants to watch humanity burn.

  “Dammit!” I say, wishing I had something or someone to punch. I hate being bested.

  My bioware pings with another message from Alex. I ignore it. I need to get to the bridge, access Mami’s captain’s chair, and shut down the bioware. That’s my first priority. After the Smithsons are locked up in the brig, I can work with my parents to find and—

  “Laura?” a male voice asks.

  I startle. My heart stumbles in my chest. I turn, shock sparking in my fingers and toes.

  Sebastian Smithson stands behind me, pinning me with his gaze. As one of the few people authorized to bring non-mission-critical clothing aboard, he’s not dressed in a flight suit like me, but in a chest-hugging V-neck and matching black pants. He’s all sugar-white skin, black hair, and eyes so green, even jealousy would envy them. I spend a full second wondering if he was the hacker in the Narrows, but no. Sebastian’s taller than the man I saw in the hallway. And unless he’s got a way to spoof his height and weight, it wasn’t him.

  Even now, I feel a sort of magnetic pull toward Sebastian, as if he could use the subjugator to command my heart. But I know the symptoms of Stockholm syndrome, too. Maybe my most primal instincts respond to his square-cut jaw, muscular shoulders, and full lips, but my head knows he can’t be trusted.

  He’s a bastard. A pendejo. A betrayer. A liar. He thinks he’s el mero mero, but to me, he’s scum.

  “It’s Lao-ra. Accented au sound,” I snap. “Not your white-bread Law-ra, you know that.” Ever since we broke up, Sebastian stopped pronouncing my name with the proper Spanish accent—the subjugator only seems to respond to the mispronunciation of my name. It’s a weapon the Smithsons use to crush my confidence. To belittle me. Each time Sebastian says Laura wrong, it’s a slap in the face. Another way to try to take away who I am, and to try to separate me from the people and culture that gave me my name.

  “Would you like to explain why your GPL locator shows you at the Spiegels’ apartment?” Sebastian doesn’t even acknowledge that Faye’s a Peréz first. “But strangely enough, your little … device pegged you in the Narrows?”

  Sebastian doesn’t say the word subjugator aloud. Even he refuses to name the ways in which he oppresses me, as if using a euphemism somehow absolves him of guilt. It makes me sad and sick and furious, all at the same time.

  “I went to that bloody party to find you,” he says, spreading his arms wide. “But lo and behold, you weren’t there.”

  I don’t have to reach far to find a plausible lie: “I caught a hacker in the Narrows—some jerk messing with the ship’s gravidar systems. Thanks to your interruption, he’s escaped.” Lifting my head, I turn my back on Sebastian, heading downtunnel, trying to go somewhere, anywhere else. After what happened on Launch Day, I’ve made it a point to never be alone in a room with him. His ability to command my subjugator is in check when we’re in a crowd, but alone? I’m vulnerable. My body knows it, too, every muscle screaming at me to run. “I need to check the ship’s logs to ensure he hasn’t cokebottled anything—”

  “Laura,” Sebastian says. “Stop.”

  The subjugator responds, issuing orders to the nanobots in my bloodstream. Every muscle in my body locks up. Even my lungs struggle against the command.

  Ten, nine…, I count aloud in my head, not even able to move my eyes while he’s locked me down. Subjugator voice commands last ten seconds. Every ten seconds, he has to reinitiate the voice commands or else they lapse.

  Sebastian’s footsteps echo behind me. Sweat flushes against the small of my back. My heart quivers, but still beats. I tell myself I’m not afraid of him, knowing it’s a lie.

  Eight, seven …

  Having been raised by an archeologist mother and a historian father, I know a few things about pre-Exodus human history. Like about Manifest Destiny, and the so-called Divine Right of Kings, and the rise of the Nazi Third Reich, all these ideas white men propagated to secure power and turn it against people who didn’t look, think, or believe like them. I’d like to say that in the last few centuries, humanity’s grown past those compulsions in a moral sense, that we’ve become better. Nobler. Wiser.

  But we haven’t.

  Sebastian’s power over me is terrifying on so many levels. When I tried to tell Mami about what happened with the Smithsons on Launch Day, the subjugator closed my throat up. The sensation was like going into anaphylactic shock, as if I was allergic to the words I was about to speak. When I started to ping Faye and Alex about the device, it forced my fingers to delete the message. I’ve attempted to reverse engineer the subjugator’s code; ventured to tip off the ship’s doctors; even considered breaking my own wrists to deactivate my bioware, if only to keep the subjugator from controlling me.

  After three months of racking my brain, trying to find a solution, I gave up and made plans to break my parents’ rules and hack the captain’s chair. Unless I escape Sebastian now, he’ll foil that plan, too.

  “Now, look at me,” Sebastian says, lifting my face to his with a finger. Grinning, he leans close and kisses me on the lips.

  Three, two, one … My stomach clenches. I feel like the ground might be shaking under my feet. When his hold on me breaks, I shove him back. “I’d punch you if I could,” I say.

  “That’s against the rules, now, isn’t it?” he says, his gaze dropping to my lips. “You still ha
ve the softest lips of any girl I’ve kissed. Have I told you that?”

  I’m trapped, alone, with my ex-boyfriend. My abuser. My captor.

  And nobody knows.

  22 MONTHS AFTER WAKING

  USS JOHN MUIR NPS-3500

  SHIP’S DEEPS, TIER TWO, SECTOR 15

  DEEPDOWN TRAM TUNNELS

  DATE: APRIL 12, 2435

  TIME: 1:35:02 A.M.

  TUCK

  We are the forgotten, the fearless, and the totally fragged. Nobody knows we’re out here, so nobody cares.

  The dim light flickers across gristle and bone. The ship’s air smells meaty. Warm. Four bodies lay broken on the tram tracks. Shredded muscle and tendon stretch between their torsos and dismembered limbs. Blood puddles in the tracks’ ladder-like rungs. It looks like crude oil in the near darkness. One body’s decapitated, head missing. The torsos are hollowed out like retro Halloween pumpkins. Broken ribs stick up at right angles, tenting the flesh.

  One man’s strung up by his own entrails. He hangs from a train platform beam, swaying gently, throwing shadows.

  Fan-frickin-tastic.

  Blood’s splattered across the crumbling procrete platform. Gobs of gore cover one of the platform signs, which reads:

  PLATFORM 21

  E-CLASS QUARTERS

  DOMESTIC WATER PUMPS

  SANITATION ENGINES

  Twin tram tunnels arch overhead, riddled with rust and decay. My memory’s not what it used to be, but I remember what this place looked like before it went through time’s guts and got shat out the other side. Every surface used to gleam. Now the metal’s weak with age. Kick one of these tracks too hard and it crumbles. The John Muir wasn’t built to last a human lifetime, much less four hundred years. Yet here we are, struggling to keep this shite heap running for another day. Another hour. Another breath.

  Sometimes I wonder why we even bother.

  That’s a lie.

  I wonder why we bother all the time.

  I halt on the train tracks, huffing. My temporary partner, Holly, stops beside me. We’ve run five klicks of the tram tunnel in the last twenty minutes. We have another five before we reach our destination.

  “Oh god,” Holly says through the coglinks, looking at the bodies. The chips implanted in our frontal lobes are useful to a group of people who rely on silence for their survival. Even a whispered word can be a death warrant out here.

  Holly turns away from the bodies. Her stiflecloth cape swirls around her feet. Pulling her ebony hair away from her face, she bends over and vomits. Yellow, chalky chunks of reconstituted egg slime the tracks.

  “Keep it down, newb.” I crouch down by the bodies. Unlucky bastards, these guys. Least they’ve escaped this hellhole. Not sure how much pain I’d be willing to suffer to get off this ship, but the amount gets a little higher by the day. “We don’t know if whatever did this is still running these tunnels.”

  “I’m not a newb, but I’ve never seen, um … what the bodies look like, after?” Holly spits and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. “W-what happened here?”

  “Looks like a griefer’s work.” I touch the blood and rub it between my fingers and thumb. It’s cold and tacky. The victims have been dead an hour or more. I flick the stuff off my fingers. “You see those circular wounds in their torsos? Those were created by a specific harmonic resonance a griefer uses to turn your organs into bombs. If it were mourners, there’d be nothing but scraps. And none of them would be tall enough to do that—” I gesture at the man hanging from the entrails noose.

  Or mean enough.

  Holly shudders. So I don’t mention how the victims are surrounded by bullet shells, but there aren’t any guns in sight. It’s too weird. Or how one of the victims has an ouroboros tattoo on his jugular. You know, the snake eating its own tail? I narrow my eyes, telling my rigid heads-up display lens, or HUD, to zoom in on the guy’s neck. The snake’s looped around the Earth. I’ve seen the logo before. It hides in deep, dark places within the John Muir, painted on pipes or walls, sectors other curators fear to go. My memories aren’t great, but I think it’s a logo I saw back on Earth a few times.

  Never seen it on a person, though.

  “They’re not dressed like our curators.” Holly pulls her balaclava over her mouth and nose to block the stench. She turns back to the scene.

  “That’s because they aren’t ours,” I say, pulling my knife from my belt.

  “How is that possible? Nobody could survive in the deepdowns,” she says.

  “Someone obviously is.”

  “But how could anyone live outside the park, down here…” Holly pauses. “Tuck, what are you doing?”

  I skin the side of the man’s neck with my knife, taking a ragged piece of tattooed flesh from him. I pull a sample kit from my slimpack and plaster the skin to a glass slide.

  “Tuck!” Holly cries.

  “What?” I ask, sticking the sample kit back into my bag. “He doesn’t need it.”

  “That’s … that’s so … ugh.”

  “Survival’s a barbaric thing, sweetheart.”

  “You’re going to carry a piece of him around with you?”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “No wonder no one wants to run tunnels with you—”

  The floor trembles. A moan crawls out of the tunnel’s bowels. Holly whirls around to look behind her, checking our six. There are two directions in a tram tunnel, but the metal walls and ribs bend sound. I can’t tell if the groan’s coming from the fore or the aft part of the tunnel. It rises in pitch before dropping into a lower, grittier register.

  “Mourners,” Holly says.

  “No shit, Sherlock.” I rise, scanning the flickering darkness ahead of us. Nothing moves.

  She glares at me, gripping the knife at her hip. “Sherlock? What’s that mean?” At least Holly gets that I’m mocking her, even if she’s not well read enough to get the reference. Plenty of curators aren’t. Or worse, they lost their sense of humor when they found themselves on the wrong side of the universe with no viable engines and zero hope of rescue.

  My mom used to say hate and hope are hard to kill. She was wrong about hope, but hey, I’m doing okay living on piss and vinegar.

  “It means pay attention to our six, not my handsome face,” I say.

  She smirks, but still looks a greener shade of pale. “Becca’s right, you are a jerk.”

  “‘Jerk’ is just people’s default reaction to my special brand of humor, bruh.” Or any humor out here, for that matter. You never take anything seriously! they say. This isn’t funny! they say. But here’s the thing they don’t understand: When you’ve given up on life, everything seems like a joke.

  “‘Bruh’? Is that another one of your old-timey words?” she asks. “Well, I’m not here for your comedy show, bruh.”

  “That’s a damn shame. I’m funny in the deepdowns.”

  “I’m pretty sure humanity stopped thinking that being an asshole was funny in 2016.”

  I swallow my laugh, ’cause I can’t make a sound out here. Why’d it take a catastrophe to have a conversation with Holly? The girl’s got grit. Maybe it’s because she’s a few years younger than me. And she’s right about one thing—I’m not anyone’s first or last pick of partners for tunnel runs, either. The other curators think I’m cursed.

  So I run solo.

  It keeps me from breathing the bouquet of someone else’s vomit.

  Aren wouldn’t let me run this job alone, though. Thirty minutes ago, our ship’s maglev hub went offline. Aren asked for two curators to run the tram tunnels to the aft deck to reboot the system. We curators are jacks-of-all-trades, mechanics, engineers, and duct-tape slingers. We’re the ship’s last line of defense, shaken awake from stasis when she started to fall apart from the inside out. Of the original ten thousand members of the Muir’s crew, only about a hundred and fifty of us woke up on the human side of the stasis pod. Of that number, only a few have the skills to run tunnels and make
repairs to our dying ship.

  Without the maglev hub, our trains won’t work. Without the trains, the curators can’t reach the ship’s primary and auxiliary systems. Without the ship’s systems, everyone’s as good as dead—ship, park, and the remnants of our crew, yada, yada, yada.

  But nobody runs these tram tunnels anymore. There’s no need, not when the trams do all the running for us. Stretching some twenty-five kilometers across the Muir’s outer crescent, the tram tunnels offer no cover, no protection. No places to hide. Here, the silence owns a soul-crushing gravity. The metal ceiling sheds rusty patches of skin. Aging LE-1 lights flicker. Shadows scatter off the dead maglev rails under our bare feet. Even the smallest sound will bury us.

  But the track’s the fastest way to the maglev station.

  I volunteered for this mission, surprising nobody. The whole crew knows I’ve been chasing death for months in the deepdown tunnels, triple-dog-daring the ship to gank me. I’ve traversed almost every centimeter of this place, with the exception of the bridge and some of the outboard stations. I’ve paddled across the deepdown sea. I’ve jumped into a defunct biomaterials processor. I’ve crawled through kilometers and kilometers of ducts and pipes and tunnels, just to see where they led. I’ve fought mourners on top of moving trams, infiltrated Sector Seven to shut down the malfunctioning chlorophyll generators, and nearly been electrocuted by a griefer in the power rooms.

  Nobody knows this ship better than me. Not Aren. Not the other curators.

  Maybe not even Mom.

  Aren says risk taking’s my way of dealing with grief. If that’s true, my five stages of grief weren’t so much stages but sewers. I’ve slogged through them all and made peace with my Maker. When the end comes, I’ll be ready.