Pitch Dark

by Courtney Alameda

  A low growl resonates through the car. Glass cracks as the mourner shuffles inside. The bastard’s so close, I don’t think Holly or I can move without alerting him. It’s probably stupid even to breathe. A footrest digs into my back, putting pressure on a kidney. Or what I guess is probably a kidney. Good thing I only need one of them, right? My leg got twisted under me at a bad angle, which means my bum knee’s complaining while the feeling drains from my foot.

  Despite it all, I don’t dare move. Gritty vibrations work their way through the floor, dragging themselves toward us. Outside, the pod overwhelms the tunnel. The tram shudders as their hands pound the tracks. Their calls ricochet off the car’s metal sides, punching holes straight through the metal. Some of the intact windows shatter. Glass rains to the floor. In the chaos, my ears lose track of where our big bastard’s lurking.

  Until he puts a hand on my head.

  I snort my breath back in and freeze.

  Ah, crap.

  The mourner slides his fingers down my face. Broken fingernails catch and drag the fabric across my skin. They cross the crests of my brows. I try not to imagine him shoving his thumbs into my eye sockets. Or the way the jelly of my eyes would burst under pressure from his cracked nails, or how I’d have to swallow a scream as he dug around in my skull. Just to keep Holly safe—hell, at this point, everything I do will be to keep her alive. Without me, she’s dead.

  The mourner gurgles, incoherent. My lungs start to burn from holding my breath. The bastard puts a hand down on my bum knee. My hip bone pops in its socket. He growls at the sound, pawing at my side, sending bright shocks of pain up my spine and to my brain.

  It takes a lot of nerve to sit here quietly. All I want to do is grab the bastard by the throat and punch him till his face caves in. While there might be enough noise pollution in the tunnel to keep the other mourners from hearing me kill this one, it’s not a risk I can take.

  Not with Holly sitting nearby.

  “Tuck?” Holly asks. “Are you okay?”

  “Still not dead.” I grind my teeth to cope with the pain. Two rows down, Holly prays in her head to a god we left back on Earth. When the mourner can’t find meat in the twisted layers of stiflecloth, it growls and leaps up on the seat beside me, then out the window.

  I don’t know if Holly’s god heard her or not, but the mourners don’t find us.

  * * *

  An hour later, I almost wish they had.

  My gut churns. Saliva rises like a hot tide in my mouth. For the third time in twenty minutes, I press my fist against my mouth and swallow bile back. It burns all the way down.

  When the mourner pod couldn’t find us, they camped around the cold corpses a few hundred meters back. The pod stretches for a good klick once bedded down, much to my endless annoyance. As they sleep, they hum. The sound crawls into the tram. It eats its way through my ears and into my brain, where it scrambles my equilibrium and makes the floor seem like it’s rolling beneath me.

  We curators don’t know why mourners hum in their sleep. We do know they create infrasound harmonics when they hum, which can cause everything from nausea and dizziness to paranoia in humans. I’d get into the science of it all if I didn’t feel so damn sick. For now, just blame it on the infrasound.

  “You okay out there, kid?” Aren asks for the umpteenth time.

  “That depends on how you define ‘okay,’” I reply, hanging my head between my knees, like Mom always told me to do. For the record, it doesn’t help. My mouth still tastes like I’ve eaten out an armpit.

  “Glad to see your attitude’s still alive and kicking,” Aren says. “How’s Holly?”

  “Quiet,” I reply.

  “Her vitals aren’t looking good, and she’s not responding to the med team anymore,” Aren says. “We’re coming to help get you kids out.”

  I almost laugh. “What happened to not risking lives to save lives?”

  “What happened to ‘a lame curator is a dead curator’?” he asks.

  “Touché.”

  “Exactly. Holly’s the last person aboard the ship who reads Japanese fluently. We can’t afford to lose her—”

  “Thanks, I really feel loved and appreciated.”

  “Shut up, there’s not much time. I’m going to take Layla and Marco and create a distraction on Plat 17, three klicks aft of your position. A med team will meet you at Plat 22, but it’ll be up to you to get Holly there. Capisce?”

  “What kind of distraction are we talking here?”

  “A loud one.” He doesn’t elaborate, which means it’s probably something stupid and dangerous and he doesn’t want me to call precedent on it the next time I do something stupid and dangerous. To be honest, Aren and I never got along back on Earth. But out here, in space? He’s become my de facto parent. We work hard to make each other’s lives infinitely more craptastic.

  “Once the pod’s moved, get Holly out of there, kid,” Aren says. “Focus on that one job, got it? We’ll give you a heads-up once we’re in position.”

  I nod, squeezing the bridge of my nose with my fingers, then realize he can’t see me. “Okay, I’m gonna check on Holly. Don’t get ganked by a mourner out there.”

  “Be careful. Run silent, run hard.”

  “Yeah, yeah, may the force be with you, never give up, never surrender, and live long and prosper, old man.” I roll onto the balls of my feet, inching toward the tram’s aisle. My stomach bucks. I rest my forehead on the seat back in front of me till the dizziness passes. The journey of a half meter starts with a single scoot. I inch around the tram seat.

  Blood stains the aisle. It’s cold and tacky between my toes and looks black in the low light. I sink down beside Holly, saying, “Holly? Hey, you awake?” before gently tugging the hood off her head.

  She’s unconscious, but breathing.

  At least she’s not suffering.

  Bracing myself against the seat, I rise, gritting my teeth against the nausea’s twist and roll. Outside the tram, a sole LE-1 bulb flickers about ten meters away. Shadows rest over the mourners’ backs like blankets. It’s hard to tell where one monster ends and the other begins. They sleep in small, disorganized piles. Feet spoon with faces, limbs get triangled and tangled, and nothing lies still. The mourners move in their sleep, twitching, writhing, moaning.

  They sure don’t sleep peaceful or quiet. Sometimes I wonder if they ever remember their human lives, even if only in their dreams.

  Plat 17 is a few klicks on the right. Aren’s distraction will come from that direction. Once the pod’s cleared out, I’ll take Holly and run left, fast as I can.

  For now, all I can do is wait.

  SS PANAM-I2715 CONQUISTADOR

  ALFA BRIDGE

  LAURA

  When the ship-wide alarm sounds, there’s no time to hesitate or wait. Emergency lights wash across the deck as an impact timer appears on the Alfa Bridge’s main floatglass screens:

  00:02:26

  Two minutes, twenty-six seconds. And counting.

  The hard-shells around the captain’s chair snap off, the bridge’s cooler air rushing in. I scramble onto the captain’s platform, bracing myself against the railing. Below me, all the bridge’s workstations burn bright with warnings, two crescents of bloodred light. “Alex!” I shout. “I need your help. That loco hacker’s trying to crash the Conquistador!”

  “What?!” everyone below me cries.

  I hurry down the steps. “Faye, Sebastian, get to the crash pods. Alex, please—”

  “Cari, I’m not going to leave you,” Faye says, grabbing my hand.

  Sebastian sneers. “If I’m going, you’re coming with me,” he says, taking my other wrist. I pull myself away from them both.

  “Please, just go,” I shout at them, pushing Faye toward the crash pods at the back of the bridge. “I’ll be right behind you, I promise. Go.” With the clock winding down, I turn on my heel and run toward the workstations. The main navigational systems—including the gravidar controls—are
situated in the middle of the first ring. Alex follows me to them.

  “What did you do, Laura?” he asks under his breath, dropping into the chair.

  “Nothing,” I say. “The other hacker hijacked Mami’s chair remotely and started the scramengines.”

  “The gravidar shouldn’t allow the Conquistador to collide with anything,” he says. “That’s what it was originally engineered for—”

  “They compromised our gravidar, Alex.”

  “They?”

  “They.”

  He’s silent for a moment, searching my gaze with his. The fact that he doesn’t trust me, even for a second, slips between my ribs and pricks my heart. “Alex,” I say, grabbing him by the shoulders. I shake him. “You know I would never do anything to jeopardize this crew. We’re family.”

  He looks back at the navigational screens, blowing out a breath.

  Time continues to slide toward zero:

  00:01:58

  He claps one hand over my own. “I trust you, Laurita. Okay?”

  “Okay.” I squeeze his shoulder as he connects his bioware to the station. I use Mami’s codes to gain access to the system, then use my fingers to move the ioScreen in front of him. He clicks through the menus, initiating the navigational aeroboard and its joystick controls. An entire frame of translucent buttons and switches appears over his chair.

  “I only know what half of these things do…,” he mutters, taking both joysticks in hand.

  The minute he grips the controls, the aeroboard disappears. All the floatscreens shut off in a puff of air—poof! Alex lifts his hands in the air, scooting back from the machine. The rest of the workstations’ screens darken, falling like tiles in an ancient domino game, one after the other.

  Alex and I stand at the center of their dark gravity.

  “What the hell was that?” Alex whispers.

  My mouth goes dry. “I—I don’t know—”

  All the screens blast on again, their light blinding. Brilliant. I squint at the screens, shielding my face with my hand. An image sears itself into my retinas, branding a black mark on my vision, no matter if my eyes are open or shut. It’s a circular image of a snake eating its own tail. A symbol that’s haunted my dreams since I was young, and an icon that’s appeared in ancient cultures worldwide, symbolizing the death of the world.

  It’s the symbol members of Pitch Dark have rallied around since the Exodus.

  The other hacker isn’t just a black hat.

  He’s a terrorist.

  “We need to get out of here,” Alex says, taking me by the arm. The ship announces, “Sixty seconds until impact. Please report to your nearest safety pod and complete bracing procedure immediately,” in a voice that sounds so calm, it mocks us. Alex hustles me away from the screens, from Mami’s chair, toward the safety pods at the back of the Alfa Bridge. As we move toward the pods, three members of the night crew stumble out of the antigrav elevators, cursing drunkenly at one another. Someone points at the countdown clock on the floatscreens, his eyes wide, mouth agape. Two men hurry for the safety pods; one sprints for the navigational systems at the front of the deck.

  “Don’t!” Alex shouts after him, but the man’s already out of earshot. “Keep going,” he says to me. “Nobody needs to be a hero today.”

  “But he’ll die—”

  “Go!”

  As we run for the pods, worst-case scenarios fill my mind: from the crash killing my family and friends, to being bodily jettisoned into space without an EVA suit, to one of our artifacts being destroyed.…

  The artifacts!

  I shove my heels into the ground, tugging my arm out of Alex’s grip. “The artifacts,” I say, thinking of the Hall of Artifacts downstairs, my heart pounding so hard I wonder if it will beat itself to death on my ribs. “S-s-someone has to fill their floatcases with closed-cell foam manually.” Fear makes my voice tremble. After one of our officers initiated the so-called “Foamacalpyse” during an emergency drill, Mami removed remote access to the artifacts’ security board. Nowadays, it has to be done inside the safety pod adjacent to the bridge.

  If I run, I can make it to the Hall of Artifacts in time.

  “Fifty seconds to impact,” the Conquistador’s system says.

  I don’t deliberate. Alex shouts, “Laura, no!” as I turn on my heel and run for the antigrav elevators. I race inside, the doors sliding closed behind me. Alex runs into the translucent barrier, pushing his palms against the crysteel, his eyes wide and wild.

  “Get to a safety pod!” I shout at him, pressing my palms against his before the lift drops. “¡Ten cuidado, Alex!”

  “Laura!” he shouts again. My stomach feels weightless as the lift plunges down, his voice echoing through the lift chamber.

  “Forty seconds to impact.”

  I pound on the lift doors till they open, then sprint across the lower bridge and through the ship’s Rio Grande bulkhead.

  “Thirty seconds to impact.”

  I slide into the Hall of Artifacts, almost tripping over my own feet. On my right, the hall stretches out, the emergency pod lights casting everything in a nightmarish glow. Along the middle far wall, the lower-level crash pod sign blinks like a bright red eye.

  “Twenty seconds to impact—”

  The ship jolts underfoot, knocking me to my knees. A metallic scream, louder than any sound I’ve ever heard before, slices through the air. The lights flicker overhead like fireworks, cutting to black before flaring bright again. A rapid-fire succession of explosions rock the ship: Boom! Boom! Boom-boom-boom!

  The Conquistador lurches sideways, throwing me against the wall. The scramengines begin to whine over the din. Their squeals stab into my ears like needles. Overhead, the emergency lights turn from white to orange, signaling a fault in one of the ship’s mission-critical systems. The floor trembles, chugs like a carnival ride, then drops out from under me.

  For a full second, I float.

  Then the ship’s gravity seizes me, slamming me into the metal floor. I feel the impact in my spine first, like all my vertebrae are a strand of pearls being yanked taut and pulverized under an anvil. Something crunches in my body. My head hits next, the world blinking black and spotty. No, it’s not my vision—the lights are strobing, flickering on and off as the ship shakes and screams and shivers.

  On the next great boom, I slam up against one of the tunnel walls. The Winged Victory rocks on her pedestal, her great stone wings clawing a huge hole into the wall. She tips in slow motion, as if falling through zero gravity. A floatglass case crashes to the ground in front of me. The lights die.

  Darkness rushes into me on my next breath, and everything goes silent.

  USS JOHN MUIR NPS-3500

  SHIP’S DEEPS, TIER TWO, SECTOR FIFTEEN

  TUCK

  For the last few minutes, the coglinks have been quiet. Dark. You know that old saying from John Wayne’s The Lucky Texan, “It’s quiet … too quiet”?

  Well, it’s too damn quiet right now.

  I keep expecting—well, maybe hoping—to hear coglink buzz from the other curators. Something to let me know they’re not bleeding out somewhere in the deepdowns. Dejah hasn’t said a word to me. The mourners’ hum has dampened. Even the Muir itself seems to be holding her breath, her systems buzzing low. The silence puts my teeth on edge. In any movie, this would be the part when the griefer stabbed Wolverine-like claws into the tram’s side, the tips of its talons just centimeters from my face. But that doesn’t happen, because griefers don’t have claws like Wolverine’s.

  The weepers do, though.

  I sink down beside Holly, drawing her inside my cloak and under one arm. Ready, whenever Aren gives the signal, to run.

  Metallic shrieks echo up the tunnel. Holly stirs. The sounds aren’t organic, almost like God’s taking a can opener to the ship to rend open the hull. “Aren?” I ask. “Sure sounds like you’re hitting the ship with a wrecking ball.”

  I can’t make sense of Aren’s answer: “Tuck
”—static—“g-g-et girl”—static—“tunnels…”

  “Hey, what was that? You’re breaking up, old man,” I say.

  “What’s happening?” Holly asks, yawning as she wakes. The pain must hit her then, because she bites down on her lower lip and sinks her fingers into my shirt. “Why’s the ground shaking?”

  “Aren’s supposed to be making a distraction, but—”

  The tram tunnel shudders. Panicked mourner calls spiral through the darkness. Holly clings to me, making a small noise at the back of her throat. I grab the seats to keep us steady. In the distance, a crack-pow-bam! echoes up the tunnels.

  “Dejah?” I ask the AI. “What’s going on?”

  “One moment, please,” Dejah says. Frag me, are there any words in the English language more infuriating than one moment, please?

  The tram lurches hard. Adrenaline bursts through my fingers and toes. Letting go of Holly, I get to my feet, wincing at the stiffness in my knee. Outside the tram, the mourners stampede past, sometimes trampling one another. Up the tunnel, in the direction of Plat 17, the lights wink out one by one. Metallic shrieks race toward me, chasing the mourner pod away.

  “Aren!” I shout through the coglinks. “What the hell did you do?”

  The floor slopes underneath me. I tumble backward until I slam into the back of one of the seats. “Dejah!” I say through a breathless daze. “What’s going on?”

  All she can say is, “One moment, please.”

  “What do I do?” Holly screams. “We’re falling, oh my God, the tunnel’s falling—”

  “Buckle yourself into a seat!” I shout at her, all caution gone. My voice feels like sandpaper grinding against my throat.

  “Are you crazy?” she shrieks.

  “Do it!” Pain radiates up my back and rattles in my skull. Crawling around in the dark, I fumble my way into a seat. My hands find the four-point harness. I slam the buckle into the latch between my legs and brace myself.