Pitch Dark

by Courtney Alameda

  When my feet finally sink into the fester on the floor, I sit down, curling my knees into my chest. Shaking. Something clatters to the floor beside me. Startled, I reel away, getting tangled up in my bowstring, before I realize what I’m looking at:

  Half a bow.

  Half. My. Bow.

  My heart jags as the EDDA’s lights settle back on my shoulders. I pick the bow’s broken wooden shaft up—the break’s not clean, the wood splintered like a broken bone. I wish I could tell the EDDA’s nanites to spiral off my fingertip and knit the bow’s pieces back together. If I’d only managed to stay out of the griefer’s range … If I’d moved faster, this wouldn’t have happened.

  I twist the string away from my body. I try not to cry, since I can’t wipe my tears away through the suit’s helmet. Of the three artifacts I managed to save, I’d grown the most attached to the bow. I stick the pieces in my quiver, determined to still take them with me.

  Static crackles in my helmet. I catch a snippet of Tuck’s voice, echoing through the speakers inside.

  “Tuck?” I ask, getting to my feet. I scroll through the menu options inside the EDDA’s helmet, looking for a communication device. Anything to help me home in on the sound of Tuck’s voice. “Tuck! Are you there?”

  No one answers. For one desperate, wild moment, I wish I could hear Tuck’s voice; I need to hear his voice. My knees shake, and my shoulders curl forward and sag under an imagined weight. I’ve been on my own in the deepdowns for less than an hour. No pasa nada, right? At least not compared to Tuck’s two years out here. Walking in darkness and silence, with only the voices in his head for company. It makes a person weary of one’s own thoughts and their fear echo louder than it should.

  Now I understand why Tuck looked at me the way he did when we met—like he couldn’t believe his eyes, like I was a mirage. Or perhaps some creature out of mythology, a girl with antlers growing out of her forehead, or like I had skin the color of emeralds.

  Rather than spend another moment in that lonely headspace, I check Dr. Morgan’s map. A blue line snakes across the John Muir’s foredecks and ends in the bridge, a small directional arrow bouncing atop my destination: the ship’s server room, via the bridge.

  I’m so close. A kilometer and a half away. Closer, I think, than anyone’s been to the John Muir’s bridge in centuries, perhaps. Listening for the mourners’ telltale chirps, I move forward. My eyes scan every shifting shadow. I step with care, sliding over the large, snakelike ducts that rise to hip height, sometimes crawling under them. Mountains of rubble tower around me. Large branches of webbed plastic create a strange canopy overhead. Spines stick out from the fester, curling like massive spiders’ legs. The occasional light twinkles, sparking like the eyes of great beasts.

  Despite the lack of organic material, this place feels primeval. Wild. Before long, the floor grows spongy underfoot. Glancing down, I pull my boot out of a puddle of rust-colored moss. Spores cling to the EDDA, dusting my ankles and calves, almost like the fester but more … vegetable. A few meters more, and strange mushrooms bloom, some standing two meters in height, their stalks as thick and wide as the park’s tree trunks. They shrink away from the light, skins wrinkling.

  In some places, the floor sags under my weight. In others, it’s rotted away, leaving massive holes behind. I test my steps before I take them, and travel almost a kilometer before my bioware’s OS pings me with a warning message:

  Alejandro Mello is currently in critical condition.

  “What?” I whisper. I shake my bioware awake and ping Alex and Faye a panicked, What’s going on? Did the mourners manage to break into the park? Or were the John Muir’s systems failing faster than we’d anticipated? My thoughts whirl as I log in to Mami’s FamiliaStar account, bringing up Alex’s vitals on-screen:

  Heart rate? 150 beats per minute.

  Blood pressure and volume? Low.

  Hemorrhaging in the lower abdomen.

  Infection imminent.

  Bioware response? Overloaded.

  No, this can’t be happening. Not to Alex, he cannot be dying, I think, trembling. What’s happened to you, cari? I switch over to Mami’s GPL locator, which shows a hazy version of the John Muir’s deepdowns, and ask the GPL to search for his bioware’s location.

  Alex isn’t back at the park—he’s seven kilometers away from me, in some strange corner of the ship. Away from medical aid, away from help.

  For some reason, he’s with Sebastian. In the middle of nowhere. Dying.

  My gut twists. If my friends went into the deepdowns with Sebastian, something’s gone horribly wrong. My mind whirls, presenting me with a myriad of scenarios, each one more awful to contemplate than the last. Alex and I have been friends all our lives. Our parents studied archeology together at the university. To me, he’s family.

  Answer me, I ping Faye. What’s going on? Why aren’t Alex and Sebastian still in the park?

  I wait, begging Faye to reply, unable to look away from my ioScreen. When she doesn’t respond, I glance over my shoulder at the footprints I’ve left in the moss. Every part of me yearns to run to Alex, to find out what’s happened, to help him. He’s been in my life for sixteen years, and I expected him to be in it till our faces wrinkled and our hair turned white. We dreamed of striking out on our own when we got old enough, and running our own outfit under my family’s umbrella.

  But if the John Muir fails, everyone dies. Mami. Dad. My family. The crew of the John Muir. Tuck. To abandon my mission now would be to forsake them all, because I have no guarantee I’d be able to retrace my steps safely in either direction. If I’m not moving forward, I gamble with the last chance we might have to save the ship.

  Sniffling, I take one shaky step forward, toward the bridge. My heart needs to go back for Alex. My head knows I can’t, not if I want to save the ship. The needs of the community, of humanity, come before my heart’s.

  Lo siento, my friend. I grit my teeth and hug myself. Every step I take feels like a betrayal. I’m turning my back on someone I love dearly; and the forces of what I must do and what I want to do each take a corner of my heart and pull. They seem to tear my heart in two, despair hemorrhaging in my chest and flooding my whole soul.

  I’m sorry. I put another foot down.

  I love you. Then another.

  Please don’t die on me.

  One step after another, all the way to the bridge.

  USS JOHN MUIR NPS-3500

  MUIR’S AIR LOCK

  TUCK

  The air lock panels shake open. Keeping one hand anchored on the lip of the Muir, I step outside. Gravity lets go. I tighten my grip on the air lock to keep my ass from floating away into space. The world drops out from under me. I forgot how much I hate looking down at stars twinkling under my feet. My equilibrium’s always glitched for hours afterward.

  Everywhere you look, stars stretch into forever. Endless. They run so thick out here, it’s like being trapped inside a glittery snow globe, with some crazy perverse god who keeps shaking the damn thing. Frag this place. If I survive this, I’m never traveling to deep space again.

  Never say never, my mom’s voice echoes in the back of my head.

  Shut up, Mom.

  Outboard Station B lurks in the darkness, its lights blinking. A magnetic orbital system tethers the outboard ships to the Muir. I don’t remember how long Mom made the tethers. With zero reference points between here and the station, I can’t tell how far away it lies. Not exactly.

  A knifelike cold slices down my spine.

  What’s powering the outboard stations? Did they reboot when we brought the ship back online?

  I think of the footprints in the dust back at the platform.

  None of those prints were made with a curator’s bare feet.

  Fan-fricking-tastic. Can’t wait to see what’s hiding out there.

  “I’ve got a visual on the outboard station,” I say to the others, floating back into the ship. “Let’s move.”

  I
help Alex to his feet. I’ve patched up his suit the best I can, but even with the compression-tourniquet, he still hunches over, holding his stomach. Sebastian keeps his rifle pointed at us, but stays out of reach, too. I admit Sebastian’s not as stupid as I’d like him to be. He’s thinking strategically, complicating an already thoroughly fragged situation.

  I grab one of the old hydrapacks off the floor, one with blasters that will carry us between the ships. Out of the fifty left in Air Lock B, only two would fire up for us. So we’re sharing. No matter what era it was built in, tech doesn’t last. It breaks down, it dies, it changes, becomes obsolete, forgotten. Useless. Part of me thinks humanity might be just as frail. We weren’t built to last ages—not without evolution. We’re supposed to learn from our pasts. Rise up. Become better.

  Turns out we’re not so good at that, though.

  “I might be happier dead,” Alex says, groaning.

  “No chance in hell.” I use a makeshift harness I rigged out of a busted hydrapack to secure Alex to Sebastian. He’s taking Alex with him, if only to keep me from sabotaging his hydra. “Do you know what Laura will do to me if anything happens to you, vato?” I throw the Spanish in to rib him.

  Alex grins, but it’s more half a wince than anything else. “Tell her I gave you a free pass.”

  “I’m not going to be your Dr. Kevorkian,” I say, turning on my hydrapack and hoisting it onto my shoulders. The pack’s four arms engage, whirring as they lift overhead. “No way am I going to let you die.”

  “Doctor who?” Sebastian keeps his rifle trained on me.

  Oh, now that’s an opportunity I can’t pass up: “Doctor Who?” I say with an edge of mockery. “You call yourself archeologists and you don’t know about the Doctor?”

  “Which doctor?” Sebastian asks.

  “The madman with a box?” I ask. “Bad Wolf? We have a lot of running to do?”

  They both look at me as if I’m the one who’s lost my damn mind.

  “All righty, then,” I say, stepping over the edge of the air lock. “Allons-y. Let’s go.”

  I launch myself into space.

  For a few seconds, I let my forward motion carry me. The weird thing about free flight in space? The stars don’t move around you. Everything’s so big and vast, the nebula stays locked in place. My stomach senses my forward motion, but my eyes can’t make sense of it all. I engage the hydrapack’s four thrusters. The pack’s octopus-like arms engage, slowing my trajectory. Controlling it, too. I rotate to look back to check on the others.

  “Move it, Mello,” Sebastian snaps. They end up in a tangle of limbs and tethers, stumbling through the air lock. After a few minutes, they manage to catch up. Sebastian’s wearing the pack and pushing Alex forward with his rifle’s muzzle.

  I wheel, flying forward. The outboard station looms, a boxy ship stretching some three klicks. Ships of the Muir’s size had anywhere from five to eight large outboard stations. Before the jettison, these stations functioned as escape pods. Mecha storage, too. If something happens to your big rig in deep space, you don’t want your major repair tech going down with the ship.

  Light blasts through the ship’s large windows. As we get closer, I try to see what moves inside. All that’s visible are boxes, old mecha parts, and a jumble of rusted tools.

  After several minutes of flight, we reach the old docking station.

  I alight as the outboard station’s gravity tethers kick in, drawing me down to a small platform. The door bears the ship’s name and ID marks—USS JOHN MUIR NPS-3500—as well as the ouroboros symbol underneath. I run my fingers over the snake’s back as the others reach the platform. It leaves a fine white powder on my gloves. I rifle through my memory for the outboard door codes, but nothing comes to mind. I’ll have to crank the door open. Goody.

  Sebastian stiffens. “Why would there be a Pitch Dark logo out here?”

  “Damned if I know.” I jam my door crank between the panels. Exterior doors have a better sealing system. Plus, it’s possible these doors haven’t been opened in years. Centuries, maybe. I’m sweating before I’ve cracked the door even a centimeter.

  “You’d better not be leading me into a trap,” Sebastian says, unhooking himself from Alex.

  “I told you not to come,” I say with a shrug.

  “Why would the terrorists be out here?” Sebastian asks.

  “Probably because the Muir’s crew couldn’t reach them out here. Not without EVAs.” A bead of sweat rolls down my forehead. I try to wipe my brow with the back of my hand, but bang my fist into my helmet. Dammit. “We might be knocking on their front door. Or on their tombstones.”

  With an oof, Alex sinks down to the ground. None of us have a lot of time left. Not Alex. Not Laura. Not the Muir.

  “I suppose we have advanced tech,” Sebastian says.

  “One of us does,” I say, glancing at his pulse rifle. Guns in my time sure as hell didn’t shoot laser beams, or whatever the bullets are made from.

  He shifts his weight. “We can deal with whoever’s in there.”

  You keep telling yourself that, man. I put my back into cranking the door open. Around, and around, and around. My mind reels, too, presenting me with a different death for Laura every few seconds. We need to hurry. She might have the EDDA suit, but not even Mom could make her invincible.

  Once I jack the door, we step inside the air lock. As the door slides closed behind us, the lights flicker on. Only half of them work, but half’s enough. To knock out my nerves, I whistle “Never Gonna Give You Up” while we wait for the air lock to pressurize. A horizontal gauge on the wall above the ship’s door moves from red to orange.

  “Will you shut up?” Sebastian asks me.

  “Nervous much, newb?” I ask, lifting a brow at him. “I guess if I die, you’re screwed ’cause you don’t know the way to the bridge. If Alex dies, Laura won’t tell you shit. You’re the only one with a gun in here, and only God knows—”

  The air-lock doors ding! bright.

  “—what’s in there,” I say, inclining my head toward the doors as they slide open.

  Sebastian blanches a little.

  I move in first, the asshole in me grinning. It covers up the sheer terror that’s turning my heart into bubble wrap. Each beat pop, pop, pops, fast and brutal.

  We step into the station’s mecha hangar. Tall metal ribs arch overhead. The space stretches so large, the crew could rest an entire mecha here flat on its back. I blink, telling my HUD to zoom in while I scan for movement. Metal crates of supplies and tools are stacked in haphazard piles, as if the world’s drunkest Tetris player dropped them here. Massive cranes soar overhead. A few lights glow from the walls. One of them blows out as we walk in, sparks dancing down to the floor.

  “This place is a shit heap,” Sebastian says.

  “Your mom’s a shit heap,” I mutter under my breath.

  “What was that?”

  “I didn’t hear anything,” I say with a grin. I glance at my EVA’s metrics, which show real-time updates on the air quality and pressure. The oxygen levels seem a little low, but the pressure’s around Earth’s sea level. Temperatures here are in the upper teens. With no mourner presence, this area’s the cleanest part of the ship, outside the neardowns.

  Alex drops down next to a corrugated crate with a long sigh. He leans his head back against the metal. “Let me take five, vatos,” he says, closing his eyes.

  “Stay with him,” I say to Sebastian, motioning at Alex.

  He turns his rifle on me. “Have you forgotten who’s in charge, Tuck?”

  “Fine,” I say, turning around and putting my hands up. I inject boredom into my tone. “Then order me to go check the perimeter and find the mecha—”

  A loud clank-grrk-clank! echoes through the station, alarm lights sounding. The floor shakes. A sign on the wall lights up: MECHA DOCKING IN PROGRESS, as the large station doors begin to open. Air whooshes until the oxygen barrier kicks in, and—

  Ah, crap.
/>   “What’s that?” Sebastian asks.

  “Our bad timing,” I snap, backing up a few steps. “Hide, you idiots!”

  I duck behind a large stack of corrugated metal crates, wedging myself between the boxes and the station’s wall. Alex slips behind another set a few meters away. I don’t see where Sebastian ends up.

  Except hopefully caught.

  Four loud bangs echo through the outboard station’s port side. They’re parking now, I think, poking my helmet to turn off all sources of illumination from within the suit. My heart pounds. Just how many of these guys were hiding out on the Muir? Ship seems to be lousy with them.

  There’s a rush of air, a whooshing and whirling. A heavy clank vibrates through the floor as the outboard station’s doors seal shut.

  Footsteps echo across the floor. Alex glances at me.

  “How is that possible?” a woman asks. Her voice is unfamiliar, irregular, filtered through her EVA’s audio system. The answer’s not audible. “She what? Through the biofarm? And she killed one of the big ones?”

  Laura.

  That’s my girl.

  “Where is she now?” a man asks. I don’t dare crane my head around to try to see them, and I don’t recognize their voices.

  “Howell says she’s off the grid, but close to the destination,” the woman replies. “They seem to think she’s working in tandem with Dr. Morgan.”

  “Impossible. Morgan’s dead,” the man snaps.

  Thanks for the reminder, asshole.

  There’s a pause. Even their footsteps halt.

  “Send a team,” the woman says. “Kill her. Take the other girl with you—she’ll probably be able to get closer to the target than you. No, I don’t particularly care how you kill her—go ahead and feed her to the Queen Mother, if you so desire.”

  Queen Mother? I wonder. What the hell is that?

  “How are we getting out of this?” Sebastian asks through our comms. “There are probably ten of them out there, all armed.”