Pitch Dark

by Courtney Alameda

  The tunnel shakes and drops several meters, tilting at a freakish, roller-coastering angle. Debris whistles past me. Below, fire blooms toward me like the crown of a mushroom cloud. Mourners tumble into the fire, screaming. The flames show me exposed magstructs and wilting metal. The ship burns faster than I had imagined anything could.

  “Dejah?” I ask in one final, desperate call. “Dejah, are you there?”

  “One moment, please.”

  Holly screams, high and loud.

  The tunnel falls.

  SS PANAM-I2715 CONQUISTADOR

  HALL OF ARTIFACTS

  LAURA

  I wake on the Hall of Artifacts’ crysteel ceiling, stars beneath my head, the world inverted. Fallen.

  My vision’s blurry, but there’s no mistaking the fire crackling a meter away. It pops and hisses as it licks up oxygen. A thin layer of smoke bubbles along the roof. The alarms, now silent, have been replaced by two terrifying sounds—the fire’s growl and the raspy whistle of escaping air.

  What happened? I barely remember the crash: the terrarium, looming impossibly large in the Conquistador’s windows, Alex screaming my name, and the ouroboros symbols burning bright on the Alfa Bridge’s workstations.

  How long have I been out?

  Groaning, I roll onto my back. Ay, ay, ay, everything hurts. My bioware nodes gleam like glassy fish eyes set in my wrists. I tap one node with a fingernail. It doesn’t respond. No surprises there—if the ship’s on fire and leaking air, her silos have been damaged and no longer support bioware functionality. My subjugator lies dead, too.

  I’d call it a silver lining if the crash weren’t total and complete mierda. Maybe I’m free from Smithson influence, but for all I know, I won’t be alive long enough to enjoy my freedom. The ISG calls the regions beyond the Kuiper Belt the “dead zone” for a reason—if a ship gets into trouble so far from home, the ISG won’t come to the rescue.

  We’re on our own.

  The pressure’s too low in the room. I draw deep, dizzying breaths to get enough oxygen. We must be leaking air and cabin pressure, and fast. The grav systems are active, but if I’m on the ceiling, the crash must have scrambled the grav’s drag angles. Everything smells chemical. My head throbs, the pain stabbing through my left eye and out the back of my skull. It’s frigid, so cold I can’t feel the tips of my fingers, nose, or ears.

  Floatglass glints amber in the oscillating emergency lights. A few artifact cases remain in place, hanging like the old images of cave stalactites I’ve seen. The rest lie on the floor, broken and busted, their artifacts destroyed. Thousands of years of history, gone in an instant because I failed to stop a terrorist. The Noh Mask hacker bested me, and now everything I love lies in ruins.

  Now I can only hope my family and friends have survived, too.

  I squeeze my eyes shut, saying a quick prayer to whatever god might be listening. Let my family have survived the crash, I think as loudly as I can. Let us find a way to get out of this mess.

  But when I open my eyes, I know no savior’s coming.

  Shivering, I sit up, wincing as the vertebrae in my spine separate, crack, and adjust themselves back into place. A world map of bruises purples my skin. My clothing’s shredded in places. Small cuts hatch my exposed flesh. Pain bites down on my leg and I moan, finding a bloody piece of shrapnel buried in my thigh.

  Wedge me, seriously? The metal’s five centimeters long and about a centimeter thick, stuck into what I hope isn’t an artery. Blood gums up the edges and stains my pants. When I tug on the shard, pain socks me behind the eyes and bile burns the back of my throat. The agony shoves me back to the ground.

  “Okay, okay, está bien,” I say, blowing out a breath and looking back at the wound. I’m not going anywhere with shrapnel in my leg, but without functioning bioware, I can’t ping for help.

  “Hello?” I call out, my voice raspy. “Mami? Dad?”

  Nobody answers.

  “Ay! Help!”

  Nothing, nada, zip. I clench my teeth and breathe evenly, like Mami taught me to do when I broke my arm out at a dig site. I don’t know if anyone else survived the crash. Listening to the air leakage, I do know I can’t stay here long. My teeth are already chattering. I need to find my family, and then see if there’s a way to save the Conquistador from total burnout.

  But first, I have to save myself.

  Pinching the shard between my fingers and thumb, I try to tug it from my flesh. The pain rolls over me in a wave, pounding my brain and better senses. Cursing, I roll on my side and clutch my thigh.

  If I rip the shard out fast, I won’t have time to think about the pain … at least not till after.

  It takes a few seconds to get my courage together.

  Now.

  I tear the shard out. The pain hits hard, shooting through my body and bursting out of me on a scream. I chuck the shrapnel away and it patters off somewhere in the darkness. For several long moments, my whole world’s made up of nothing but my pounding heartbeat and an overdose of agony. I curl into the fetal position, tears leaking from my eyes. Blood seeps through my fingers as I grip my injured leg, trying to put pressure on the wound. Part of me wishes I’d just black out, that my brain could be so merciful.

  Am I bleeding too much? My head feels light, like it’s going to float away. I press down harder on my wound, fumbling around for something to stanch the blood with. I think I’m losing too much blood—

  A long, low wail slices through the haze in my head.

  I pause. What was that?

  Blinking, I prop myself up on my elbows, listening. Thirty seconds pass and I think my pain-stricken brain may have been imagining things, until I hear the wail a second time. It’s closer now, echoing down the Hall of Artifacts and bouncing off the wreckage.

  My heart jags. It sounds like the cries of La Llorona, the weeping woman, whose wails bode ill for those who hear them, or so the legend goes.

  I rest my head back down, hidden behind a collapsed artifact case, its glass spiderwebbed and opaque. The glass on my side shattered in the crash. A suit of fifteenth-century European armor lies jumbled inside.

  If not for the nearby pedestal the case fell into, the floatglass case would’ve crushed me into the wall during the crash. I’m lucky. I think. Nothing moves on the other side of the case, but I’m not alone. In the maze of broken artifacts, something pads and rasps along the floor. Like footsteps, but not quite.

  Wincing, I sit up again, stamping the ground with my bloodied handprints. I roll into a crouch, using the floatglass case to brace myself and gritting my teeth against the pain. The glass cracks under my touch. Several large pieces shatter on the ground. I freeze.

  The scraping sounds stop. A voice titters, making a giggly, breathy sort of noise. I can’t discern any intelligible language. It doesn’t sound like someone dragging themselves toward the medbay, crying for help. I don’t dare call out to whoever—or whatever—is out there. I’m scared, but I’m not stupid.

  The scraping sounds resume and grow closer, accompanied by a chittering, batlike squeak. Humans can’t make sounds like that, can they? Panic seizes me, squeezing my chest between the tectonic plates of stress and helplessness. Desperate, I examine the shards of the floatglass case to see if one would make a serviceable dagger, but the pieces are too small or too broken.

  Then I spot the bow.

  An ancient recurve bow lies at the bottom of the case, among the glitter of shattered glass. Several other old British weapons had been on display with this particular suit of armor—one of three medieval suits Dad christened Larry, Curly, and Moe—including a mace and a broadsword. I know I won’t be able to lift a mace or a sword, but I’m a decent shot with a bow.

  I silently thank my dad, who insisted that before his kids entered uni, we learn an instrument (guitar, for me), a dead language (Latin), an ancient weapon and school of martial arts (archery and a little aikido), a Latin dance (flamenco), and a recipe (tamales). Dad’s loco about keeping dead
traditions alive. For the first time in my life, I’m grateful.

  Peering over the top of the case, I don’t see anything moving in the darkness except the flames. It’s getting colder, and my breath bursts from me in big, cumulonimbus-sized puffs. My flight suit’s not meant to deal with subzero temperatures, and it can’t adjust to colder temps without my bioware’s input. I need to move, before I either suffocate or freeze to death, and there might only be a few minutes to find shelter or an EVA suit. I grit my teeth to keep them from chattering.

  Another burst of giggles resonates down the hall. Closer now.

  I rise, the injured muscles in my thigh burning and dripping blood. Swallowing a whimper, I push broken glass away and kneel beside the case, still stupidly barefoot from climbing the Narrows.

  As I move to retrieve the bow, carefully avoiding the glass’s serrated edges, a shriek rends the air. I clap my hands over my ears. The big cracks in the glass deepen, their veins branching through the glass. My blood patters on the ground, regular as a leaky tap.

  What is that thing?

  Reaching into the case, I collect the bow off the ground and test its string with my thumb. It’s weak, but the restoration hemp string will do for the moment. The bow’s made of yew wood the color of yellow peppers, smooth to the touch. The quiver’s top-grain leather, stitched and waxed, and holds some twenty-five goose-feather arrows. I pull an arrow out to make sure it’s not a blank, relieved to see a reproduction iron arrowhead at the end of the shaft. Iron isn’t cheap these days, either. No Earth resource can be mined easily; while we can still send people in EVA suits to the planet’s surface to recover materials, the operations are expensive.

  Thank you, Mami, for your insistence on historical accuracy.

  Thank you, Dad, for teaching me how to shoot a bow.

  Light ripples on the other side of the cracked glass. A pale being stalks by on all fours, dragging its knuckles along the ground. Small hiccuping noises burst from its throat. My hands shake as I nock the arrow and rest the bow on the tops of my thighs, one hand keeping the arrow in place, the other ready on the string. Every heartbeat feels like a tiny explosion in my chest. My adrenaline spikes.

  What the hell is that thing?

  Did we find extraterrestrial life?

  … Or did it find us?

  The creature’s starved angles and ropy, inhuman muscle refract in the broken glass. It pauses on the other side of the floatglass case, cocking its bald head, its back to me. Big, bony spikes stick out of its vertebrae.

  Move along, you ugly chupacabra … está bien … just walk away …

  Then it screams. The sound barrels over the ground, a shock wave that’s got mass, shape, and sharp edges. The floatglass case implodes in front of me, glass blasting in my direction. My hands jump from my bow to my face, shielding my eyes from the barrage. The shards clip my hands, my arms, and cut tiny red lines into my skin. I fall backward onto my tailbone with a grunt.

  The creature whirls on me, growling. The sound has heft, slicing off a section of my hair. I take in too many details at once: the creature’s white, flaky skin covered in pus-filled boils; its teeth jutting from its jaw like jagged shale fragments; its eyes crusted shut, nose flattened and half-gone. When its throat balloons, the flesh turns yellow and translucent.

  But the most frightening thing about the monster? Its … no, his golden wedding band glinting on his left hand.

  No way he was human. No. Way.

  I grab my bow. He coils back like a compressed spring, chest swelling, getting ready to shriek at me. My hand tightens on the bow’s grip, but when I try to lift it, one corner gets stuck on the floatglass case. With no room to draw and no time to aim, I jam my foot against the bow’s limb and push forward, releasing the string when it bites into my fingers. I fire.

  The arrow catches the creature in the roof of the mouth and slams out the back of his skull, dark matter and bone clinging to the arrowhead.

  He collapses to the floor.

  I spend about 0.23 seconds gasping, then scramble away from the floatglass case, bow in hand, and toss the quiver’s strap over one shoulder. With a quick scan of the hall, I limp toward the bridge, picking my way through the worst of the devastation.

  What the hell?

  What. The. Actual. Hell?

  He was human!

  What happened to him?

  Stumbling forward, I keep watch for sharp objects along the floor, skirting broken cases and knocking away chunks of floatglass with my toes. As I approach the bulkhead, I walk under the shattered vault that used to house the Declaration of Independence. The top of the case broke off in the crash. Long spikes of broken glass reach for me as I pass, fragments falling on my shoulders.

  When I look back, the Declaration’s case hangs by a fistful of cables through a hole in the case’s side. It turns, glinting in the low light.

  All my parents’ hard work, destroyed in an instant. We may be able to salvage some of this, but not all. Not even most.

  With a sob, I limp as fast as I can for the bridge.

  * * *

  As I move past the bulkhead, I hear my mother’s voice echoing through the bridge: “… Find us.”

  “Mami?” I call out, my spirits lifting. I hurry past the bulkhead. My hopes shatter like little sugar skulls when I see a projection of my mother shooting out of a portaScreen node placed on the floor, and not the woman in the flesh.

  Mami’s image stands about as tall as she does in life, a compact 165 centimeters. I still remember the day I grew taller than her, and she grumbled about me taking after my father. Her bright aureole of bleached-blond curls glows like a saint’s halo in the portaScreen’s light. Mami looks bloodied, but the fierce cast of her eyes hasn’t changed a bit.

  She survived the crash. Tears press against my eyes and I don’t bother to blink them away.

  Beyond her, darkness looms. The Conquistador is wrenched open like an old tin can. The bridge is busted, entire shears of metal are bent up like teeth in a prehistoric shark’s mouth, or rolled up in crazy spirals like snail shells. The Conquistador hit the John Muir so hard, the ships have merged together.

  “Attention all crew and staff,” Mami’s projection says, straightening a bit. “For reasons we’re currently still investigating, the Conquistador has crashed and is presumed to be unsalvageable. Due to the failure of our bioware systems, those of you who didn’t make it into an emergency pod remain unaccounted for—”

  Mami’s voice wobbles. She presses the back of her hand against her mouth, composing herself. I’ve never seen her even teeter on the brink of losing her composure, not once in my life.

  “No, Mami,” I say to her image, taking a step toward her. It takes all my courage to suppress the fear rising through my chest. “Don’t tell me you left me here, alone.”

  After a long moment, she composes herself. “I’ve taken the sixty-odd survivors into the John Muir, as the ship appears to have viable life support. Follow us. We’ll be marking our path every five meters with phosphorescent paint. We’ve left some supplies, including flashlights and shortwave radios.” Her image gestures to a now-empty box, which means I wasn’t the only crew member to be left behind. It was probably full of things Dad kept “on hand” because old-world tech could be useful in emergencies. But people like us—prepared, professional, and practiced—aren’t supposed to have emergencies.

  My lip quivers.

  I couldn’t be left behind, my family doesn’t leave people behind.

  No.

  I’m alone against the darkness, to cross dangerous terrain without bioware support, an EVA suit, medical supplies, or even a proper weapon. I hug myself tight. In all my life, I have never been alone. Not like this. I look down at my feet. My toes are blackened with dirt and soot, and crusted with blood. I don’t even have the proper shoes for adventuring, but don’t dare try to get back to my quarters. Not with the Conquistador failing by the second.

  “And Laura?” Mami’s image says
.

  I lift my head.

  “We looked for you,” she says, her face crumpling. She swallows a sob. “In every accessible part of the ship. In my heart of hearts, I don’t want to believe you’re gone, corazón.”

  I want to scream at her, I was behind a floatglass case in the Hall of Artifacts! Fifty meters from where you recorded this message! I. Was. Right. Here!

  All I can muster is a whisper: “But you still left me.”

  “If you’re alive and watching this, follow the markers,” Mami says, wiping her eyes. “They will lead you to your father and me.”

  “How?” I ask. “You could be hours ahead of me, lost in a ship as large as a torus colony.” There’s no one to consult with, no maps of the John Muir’s tunnels, no way to prepare myself for whatever’s out there.

  As if Mami anticipated this response, she says, “You can do this, Laura. Never forget, you’re a Cruz. Our ancestors tamed the stars. Find us. Find me.”

  Her message winks out.

  “Dammit!” I say, pressing the heels of my hands against my face. My tears gush and burn. I whip my hands down, flinging them off my skin.

  All my life, I’ve had my family around me. Supporting me. Guiding me. Protecting me. Never have I faced any sort of real danger alone—I’ve always had Mami’s hand on my shoulder, or Dad at my back; one of the tíos on the communicator; or my older brother, Gael, holding a rope out to me in the darkness. I’ve always had Tía Rosa to tell my secrets to; or my abuela to wrap me in a blanket after a difficult raid. And now I’m left to wonder how many of them survived the crash, only to follow their ghosts into the darkness of a strange ship.

  On one level, I understand why Mami had to leave—she’s the captain, after all. People look to her for leadership, and it’s not like she could risk the lives of the remaining crew to look for her missing daughter. On the other hand, she’s my mother, the woman who’s protected me my whole life long. But to think not even my brother, or Alex, or even Faye stayed behind, to be left for dead by everyone I love … it aches, as if I’m using my own fingernails to tear through my flesh and rip my heart out, piece by piece.