Keystones: Tau Prime

by Alexander McKinney

  A shadow dropped from the ceiling and boiled into the water. Darkness coalesced into a tapered cylindrical blob that morphed into a crude human outline before becoming a man. The young man in a torn coat of black leather was shorter than Deklan, but that made him no less intimidating. His skin was pallid, with a web of black veins under the surface. The dark touch was everywhere but strongest near his left eye, where a tangle of dark and broken spirals etched the skin. His eyes were familiar puddles of black, making it impossible to tell where he was looking. His hair, never still, moved like an oil slick, or shadows dancing in a fire.

  Deklan’s immediate impulse was to try to escape.

  “I’m not here to hurt you,” murmured Stalker.

  “You dragged me into the darkness earlier,” protested a skeptical Deklan.

  Stalker nodded, his eyes alight with dark pleasure. “Yes, three times.” His smile showed the darkness of his tongue playing over bright teeth. “And saved you twice.”

  “Saved me?” Deklan hadn’t expected that.

  “Mutuari was going to kill you.” Stalker held a hand out and snapped it shut, illustrating the extinguishing of Deklan’s life. “Part of the agreement was that I had to find you and save you.”

  Goosebumps ran over Deklan’s skin. The conversation had taken an unexpected turn. Deklan didn’t know what Stalker was talking about. “What agreement?”

  Stalked tapped the side of his head, and a smile creased his face. “The man who caged the Void.” He rolled his head on his shoulders, an expression of pure pleasure on his face. “It’s still there, demanding death and murder.” His smile grew wider. “But I don’t have to listen anymore. It can’t hurt my brother, and it can’t hurt my family.” A fierce expression replaced the smile. “It lied.”

  The psychotic madman, inferred Deklan, had a voice in his head telling him to kill people. “Who freed you?” Deklan asked, already knowing the answer.

  “Cheshire.”

  Again Deklan sagged against the wall. Every step of the way Cheshire had come into his life and intervened. “Why did he free you?”

  “To keep you alive. Mutuari”—a chuckle shook Stalker’s shoulders—“was going to kill you. Cheshire didn’t want that to happen. Then you were going to die here. He told me to ride in the ball and feast when you let me out.” The dark tongue crept over his lips. “Feast.”

  “And now?” asked a shuddering Deklan.

  “Now I keep you alive.”

  “He did, Deklan.” Jamie’s fingers were a comforting presence on his arm. “He went through the blocked door and overrode the emergency lockdown. With all of the water’s pressure, the door couldn’t open. We would have drowned.”

  Nothing, however, could make Deklan happy that Stalker was there. He didn’t trust him; he didn’t trust Cheshire. From Stalker’s story Deklan realized that the tenebrous Keystone had enjoyed killing those guards and AnnaLea at the First Freehold. Nothing good would come of that. “I don’t trust you,” said Deklan.

  Stalker’s eyes glowed, their black surfaces suffused with a glossy sheen. “Here.” He threw the ball from which he’d emerged to Deklan. “I can ride in that. Call me when you need me.”

  Without thinking Deklan caught the ball. In it he could feel a small opening that hadn’t been there before. An inky cloud flowed from where Stalker had been standing a moment earlier and funneled into the sphere. A slow trickle of shadow became a torrent. When it stopped, Stalker was gone, and the ball was closed.

  Deklan stared at it as one might stare at a viper. He couldn’t throw it away, but he didn’t want to keep it. Stalker was an uncontrollable time bomb, though even that metaphor failed to describe the true danger that he represented. Without Susan around, Stalker was invulnerable. His invulnerability coupled with his taste for homicide made Deklan want to drop the ball into a furnace.

  “Keep it, Deklan. We may need the help.” Calm’s voice was stronger than it had been since he’d been shot, but Deklan could see that little more than an iron determination was sustaining Calm.

  It was true: they couldn’t afford to give up any advantage, no matter how despicable. Deklan reluctantly put the ball in his pocket. “What now?” he asked.

  Deklan and Calm turned to Arkady, who in turn pointed at Jamie. “She knows the way better than I,” said Arkady. “Before today I’d never been here before.”

  “Jonny and I took the walkways here,” explained Jamie. “It was fast and easy. With some luck the airlocks won’t be affected by the flooding.”

  “Lead on, Jamie,” directed Calm with another forced smile.

  “Our progress will be too slow if I teleport Calm while you two wade through the water. I’m going to teleport all of you forward one by one.” Jamie grabbed Deklan’s arm. “I’m starting with you.”

  In the blink of an eye they were forty meters down the passageway, and water exploded out from where the two of them were now standing. Jamie kissed Deklan before pointing a finger at him and delivering a sharp comment. “You need to stop scaring me.” Then she was gone.

  Deklan didn’t have time to process the fact that he was being kissed before being lectured and abandoned. Calm soon reappeared with Jamie and then Arkady. Grabbing Deklan again, she said, “I mean it,” as if there hadn’t been a break in their conversation. “No more getting shot, drowning, or anything else like that!” Her finger waggled in front of his face.

  “Okay,” he replied contritely.

  Four more times Jamie repeated the cycle of teleporting, and each time Deklan was certain that the water was a little bit lower than before. Calm was silent, hiding whatever pain he felt from the gunshot. Unless the doctors had given him anesthetic, and Deklan didn’t see why they would have, the jarring from all of the teleporting must have been excruciating. Arkady’s face, though still delicate and pale, resembled a cloud of despair. “We’re going to find them. It’s going to be alright,” Deklan said to her.

  “Them? Who is them, Deklan? My sisters? Darya is dead, and Veronika ran away. My father? He doesn’t wear a resistance suit like the rest of us. He couldn’t have come back into gravity.” Her hands clenched, and she closed her eyes. “He was on Sanctuary when it hit the wall. There was no other place for him to be. So who are we going to find?”

  Guilt seized Deklan at the core. If they’d never come to Tau Prime, none of this would have happened to her. “Friends?” he said. “Other family?” His voice sounded tentative and weak even to him.

  Arkady looked away. “Nothing will replace what I’ve lost today. Nothing. We will get to the ship, and we will save your Terra Rings. I will not lose my father and my sisters for nothing.”

  Jamie had stopped teleporting them for the duration of the conversation. Arkady gave her a significant look, and Jamie took them twice more to reach the airlock doors that led to the walkways.

  It took Arkady only a few seconds at the control screen to open the doors. The current created by the new space for water to flow into made Deklan stumble. Jamie’s hand shot out to catch him. “What did I tell you about not hurting yourself?” she asked in exasperation.

  Deklan produced his most winning smile, but Jamie was unappeased.

  “Everyone inside,” ordered Calm.

  Deklan followed the others into the airlock, and the door closed behind him. Water drained from the chamber at a steady rate. In under a minute the room, while not dry, was left with only residual water on the surfaces. The exposure to cool air reminded Deklan again of how cold he was, but he couldn’t think about it. Soon they’d be on a ship where he should be able to find a dry shirt, one that didn’t chafe his skin the way his sodden pants did now.

  The other side of the airlock opened with the familiar hiss of escaping air. The room on the other side was deserted, as were the short hallways that led to the moving walkway. From there they traversed to the shipyard, passing three Tau Primans headed in the opposite direction, but apart from that the foursome encountered no one else.

  Transi
tioning from low gravity to zero gravity should have been fun, as it had been earlier, but the wet clothes that Deklan was wearing this time made it an exercise in Arctic torture. He could feel every current of cold air run along his skin and clothes, drying everything and freezing him in the process.

  A cold drop of water splashed against his now dry chest, then another and another. Deklan wondered whether the droplets were streaming off Jamie, but that didn’t make sense because they would have been hitting him from the beginning of their journey’s final leg. It had to be a problem with the environmental systems. Perhaps, he thought, they had been overtaxed by the flooding. He heard a splash. Dozens of icy spheres rolled off Jamie and floated into him. Deklan saw that the air was filled with hundreds of little globules of water. They were everywhere, and holding onto the walkway made it impossible to avoid them. “Arkady,” he called over his shoulder, “is this normal?”

  “No.”

  “Could it be the flooding?”

  “No. There are redundant systems that separate the atmosphere here from the atmosphere in the main habitat.”

  It wasn’t a question of whether or not there was a problem; it was a question of how serious the problem was. Spheres of water filled the air like schools of frigid jellyfish. At first they were interspersed as clusters here and there; then, as they continued on the walkways, the clusters were closer and closer together. Deklan was pelted by drops of water that exploded off him, sometimes recombining into larger orbs and at other times turning into miniscule sprays of mist. “Any guesses to what’s going on?” he yelled.

  “Trouble,” Calm called back, “nothing but trouble.”

  The groupings of water grew denser, making it harder to see. Each individual sphere was translucent, but there was another translucent sphere behind it, and so on. The cumulative effect was like that being in a maze of warped mirrors. It was close to impossible to make out details other than color from more than ten meters away.

  “It’s time to downshift to a slower track,” Jamie called out.

  When Deklan swung one arm over to the parallel line of slower-moving handles, a large dollop of water smashed into his chest. Even in zero gravity it was enough to make him slip and lose his grip. Two handles on the slower track slipped by him before he managed to secure a new grip.

  “We’re almost there,” encouraged Jamie. “Keep downshifting.”

  Another five globes of water hit Deklan during the process of slowing down, drenching him to the bone and soaking his pants that had dried in the wind since the start of the journey. When they’d first come to Tau Prime, they had navigated the shipyard by pulling themselves along handholds or bouncing forward from wall to wall, always moving from flat surface to flat surface. Now the feeling of open space had vanished. The air was inundated with water. Deklan caught occasional glimpses of his companions, but by and large he followed blurs of color and the sound of Jamie’s voice. To move forward he had to squeeze between spheres or nudge them out of the way so that they combined with other bodies of water to create larger spheres. It was like tunneling through an ocean of bubbles.

  Deklan stopped moving when he heard a pinging noise. It sounded like rocks hitting metal. “Everyone stop,” he shouted. “Arkady, do you hear that?”

  “Hear what?” Jamie asked.

  “That pinging noise.”

  The others stopped talking, and they all listened intently for thirty seconds.

  “Yes, I hear it,” said Arkady in a worried voice. “I’ve never heard anything like it.”

  “I have.” Calm sounded not dejected but simply weary. “It’s bullets ricocheting off water.”

  Deklan hoped that Jonny had figured out how to pilot The Bloody Fox and that the projectiles being fired wouldn’t damage the ship. “Do we have a way to get in touch with Jonny, or are we going in without a plan?” He lowered his voice to a whisper that he hoped the others would hear as he crept forward.

  A space opened in front of him. It wasn’t huge but big enough for a person to crawl through. Ahead of him Deklan saw Calm’s feet. This, he realized, must be a passageway that Jamie was making through the water.

  “Stay low, stay quiet, and hope like hell the bullets don’t hit us,” counseled Jamie.

  Deklan disliked the plan but then realized that it just might work. It was going to be very hard to hit anyone when there were no straight lines. Moreover, the bullets ricocheted off the water’s surface, and those that did penetrate it would be slowed to stop within a meter of a target. Even if you were hit, by the time a bullet reached you it might prove harmless. “Okay,” shouted Deklan, “let’s do it.”

  Following Jamie and Calm while hugging the floor of the shipyard, Deklan recalled the facility’s layout. In some ways it was like that on the Terra Rings. The shipyard itself was open to a vacuum, with all of the ships in an enclosed space without an atmosphere. Arms snaked to airlocks, allowing for easy transfer to any connected ship. Transparent walls and windows revealed the shipyard where people worked to maintain and repair vessels. To find The Bloody Fox they’d have to hug a wall, looking for visual confirmation while trusting the bubbles to keep them hidden from whomever might be stalking the boarding area.

  Then, however, the bubbles became more sinister-looking. No longer clear and translucent, some had a scarlet hue. If it had been all of them, Deklan would have suspected that Jonny might have dispensed a dye to camouflage the area, but these were interspersed bubbles with varying shades of red. There could be only one conclusion. Regardless of how effective the water was at causing ricochets and reducing accuracy, people were still getting hit.

  “It’s up ahead,” Jamie whispered back to Deklan.

  They were coming up on a ship, or at least Deklan thought it was a ship. Through the bubble-induced haze it was hard to tell, but he hoped that it would be The Bloody Fox. It was time for the ordeal to end.

  Deklan heard a gasp followed by silence. Jamie didn’t call back or scream; she didn’t let whatever she’d seen deter her. Deklan had seen her deal with hand-to-hand combat, and she’d rescued him from dying more than once. Whatever else could be said about her, she was tough. Anything that startled Jamie in this environment was going to be something that Deklan would rather not see. He steeled himself for the worst.

  He glided forward through a dense cluster of globes, dreading what was coming next. The narrow tunnel that Jamie and Calm had cleared opened up to a serpentine walkway leading to a ship. Here the spheres of water weren’t packed in tight clusters like everywhere else but had been pushed away. What shocked Deklan was the sight of a headless body floating in the air.

  The body was that of a man wearing Tau Priman clothing. The wound where the neck should have been was jagged and rough, as though an explosion had gone off at its base. Blood and gore had permeated the surrounding water, giving some of it a crimson hue and seeding bubbles with chunks of flesh. One such chunk was part of a face. Jonny’s face.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Escape

  Deklan retched violently into the surrounding water. Jonny was dead. Deklan had thought that going to the shipyard would ensure Jonny and Jamie’s safety. It was supposedly the less guarded, less fortified, and less dangerous objective. It had been Deklan’s idea for them to go there. It had been Deklan’s idea that killed Jonny.

  He retched again in dry heaves that tore at his chest.

  Hands were on his back. “Breathe, Deklan,” urged Jamie. “Just breathe.” But he wasn’t ready to forgive his mistake. He was a cancer to those around him. “It’s not your fault,” she tried to assure him.

  “Deklan, whether it’s your fault or not, we need to go. It’s not safe here. We don’t have time for your hysterics.” Calm’s words were like a splash of ice water in Deklan’s face.

  He was right, of course. Deklan could get someone else hurt while he was mired in grief and guilt. “Let’s finish this,” he replied with grim resolve.

  Jamie met his gaze, and he could sense
her evaluating him. She didn’t say anything but nodded twice.

  “Stay sharp,” said Calm. “We don’t know what we’re going to find aboard the ship.”

  Jamie vanished and soon reappeared. “The hallway’s clear,” she announced. She took Deklan’s wrist and kicked off from the ground, sending the two of them flying toward the ramp. “We’re going to find hostiles here.” Her voice was low enough that Arkady and Calm couldn’t hear her. “Calm can’t move fast enough for combat, but I don’t know about Arkady. Can you hold yourself together?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then we’re probably going to need Stalker. He can go through the ship and solve all of our problems.”

  Deklan’s aversion to the idea was immediate. “No,” he replied. “What if Arkady’s people are aboard? He might kill everyone. We can’t risk that. I don’t know what kind of control Cheshire has over him, but Stalker’s a psychopath. You saw him kill. I’ve been inside the darkness into which he drags people. I can’t unleash that on someone who’s not trying to kill us.”

  “Then tell him not to kill anyone who looks like Arkady.”

  That seemed a directive too easy for Stalker to ignore or get wrong, and there was no undoing that sort of accident. “He only needs to get it wrong once,” rejoined Deklan, “for there to be more blood on my hands than I can bear.”

  “Fine,” said Jamie, “but if there’s trouble you’ll have to throw that black ball.” Her tone left no room for argument.

  Deklan desperately hoped it wouldn’t come to that as they landed just inside the top of the ramp, soon followed by Calm and Arkady.

  “Arkady,” asked Calm, “what kind of ship is this?”

  “A Teal Class Transport Ship.”

  Hearing that description, Deklan knew what the craft would look like. The ship would be about two hundred meters long. Stubby wings toward the rear would be positioned below curved intakes that ran the length of the main body, and the front section would curve in a way that made the surfaces look like the segmented carapaces of a beetle. Short struts anchored to the hangar floor gave it the appearance of crouching low. The airlock would be located at the front, such that when the ramp leading to it swung away, it resembled an open mouth.