The Animus Gate (Book One of The Animus Trilogy)

by Thomas M. McNamara

  “All right,” said Cahill. “This box is gonna be home for the next few days. It’s a basic smuggler’s berth. Hop out, have a look around. Let me know if you have any questions.”

  Darius climbed out of the skiff and took a moment to stretch. His seat hadn’t been uncomfortable, but he’d been stuck in it for hours.

  He’d never been smuggled through space before, so he took a look around the container with interest. A small handful of haphazardly placed lights cast a pale blue glow on the cramped space. Its walls were painted in an industrial orange scarred with what looked like generations of scratches, stains, rust spots, and graffiti. A dented metal table had been bolted into one wall, and it was flanked by two backless benches that had also seen better days.

  On the far end of the container, a basic shower-sink-toilet setup lurked in the shadows. There was one more light back there, sputtering like a death rattle that just wouldn’t stop. A freestanding privacy screen painted a faded institutional mauve would allow someone to do their business back there with a modicum of dignity.

  “I see you got the deluxe suite,” he said dryly. “Where do we sleep? In cold vacuum?”

  Cahill reached into the skiff’s cockpit, moved Darius’s seat forward, and pulled two hammocks out of a storage container behind the seat. Now that she had her helmet off, he could finally get a better look at her. She had short-cropped dark hair streaked with gray, an angular but not unattractive face, faded blue eyes, and several long scars. He knew at a glance that he would take orders from her in the heat of battle, and that they would be smart ones.

  She handed him a hammock. “There should be some hooks along the walls, towards the back. I’ve got dibs on the shower. There are some protein bags in the container here. We can talk more when you’ve washed up.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She grinned. “Call me Sandra. Or Cahill, if you insist.”

  She headed over to the shower while he set up his hammock. Some time later, she was waking him up for his turn to get clean. He didn’t remember falling asleep. She told him he had been out for about twenty minutes.

  Darius stepped into the shower. Hot water coursed down him for the first time since he’d answered his brother’s phone call forever ago. Memories flashed through his mind: Rali’s apartment, the goons, the stab wound, the sewers, the motel, the jungle, the tea, the ruins. He leaned against the side of the shower and fought off dizziness. There was nothing to distract him from the past now.

  I’m fine, he told himself. I’m fine.

  He opened his eyes and stared at the shower controls. He watched the water trickle down the wall. He couldn’t close his eyes, because every time he did, he saw his brother’s face, pale and sweaty. He saw him laying against that tree in the jungle, bleeding. Bleeding his life out, but smiling as he looked back at Darius. Smiling because he was finally free.

  Darius’s tears mixed with the water streaking down his face.

  I’m fine, he thought. It’s fine.

  There was no Nadira here now to help him carry the bodies. To take the shovel from his hand. To make it so that he didn’t have to think. There was just Cahill, an aging warrior he barely knew but to whom he owed his life. A ghost who dreamed of vengeance, and of a future that he could barely imagine right now.

  He stood up. He looked down at the mitt on his right hand. He rubbed his face with his left and tried to shake off the world. He ran his hands over his buzzed scalp.

  We keep fighting, he thought. We will keep fighting. I will keep fighting...

  He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He did it again and again, methodically, until he had exhaled all the pain that he could. He nodded to himself and reached for the soap.

  I will keep fighting.

  ✽✽✽

  He stepped out of the shower, dried himself off, and donned his pressure suit. He didn’t feel like putting the armor back on. Right now, it reminded him of too many things.

  Cahill was at the table and bent over a holoscreen. She glanced over at him. “Hey. Just filing a report. I’m almost finished. Have a seat.”

  He grabbed the stool on the other side. While she tapped away on the screen, he examined the skiff. “How do you deal with it?” he asked. “Fighting your own empire, I mean. Sometimes killing their operatives. Does it ever affect you?”

  Her tapping stopped. “Darius...” She rubbed her chin and squinted at him. “Before our people left Earth, war amongst ourselves was actually a regular thing. Damn near constant. When we turned our eyes to the stars, we left those wars behind, and we made new enemies to shoot at and blow up.”

  Cahill sighed. “But we kept some traditions up, and one of them is training people to kill people. That spec ops guy I popped probably never had a doubt about a single hit. He did it for humanity and the empire. Sure, some of them snap. But Sar-Zin’s program is down to a science. The kind of killers he has now can look into the eyes of a baby in a burning building and just shut it all off. Blood like ice. Their kind—I have no problem removing them from the order of things.”

  “But don’t you risk becoming like them? Or snapping yourself?”

  “Every single time. But the cold apathy of their evil is the enemy of my universe. So I do it always with fire in my heart. Find your own enemies, and maybe you too will find something to believe in along the way. Then what you find can carry you through the worst of it."

  "What's the worst of it?" he asked.

  "When you have trouble believing in yourself.”

  From somewhere outside the container came the sound of grinding metal, lots of yelling, and a shuddering thump. This had gone on periodically since they’d landed. Such was the ambiance of a working ship.

  “You know,” said Darius, “you’re no ordinary jarhead. You think about shit.”

  She chuckled. “Maybe that’s why I’m still alive.”

  Cahill turned back to her holoscreen and resumed her tapping. Darius wandered over to the skiff and got out a protein bag. He thought he wouldn't have much of an appetite, but he was finished before he knew it.

  She heard him burp. “Have another if you like,” she said. “I’ve got plenty. Mostly because I can’t stand the taste. In all my years, I’ve never gotten used to it.”

  He gave her a quizzical look. “What exactly do you eat, then?”

  “Actual meat protein, mostly. It’s not cheap, but...it reminds me of the ranch back home. It keeps me...connected.” She looked up at Darius. “As long as I have a way to remember it all, I’m never truly separated from my roots. My people are around me. Even in death.”

  “Gods, Cahill. You’re a heavy person to be around, you know that?”

  “So I’ve been told.”

  Darius looked over to his hammock, but something was nagging him in the back of his mind. “You've dealt with aliens a fair amount, haven’t you? In ground operations as a Marine?”

  “I suppose so, why?”

  “Have they ever communicated to you without...without their lips moving? Like, you could hear their voice in your head? I don’t know. It probably sounds silly. It was probably my imagination.”

  Cahill squinted at him, “They do tend to have more ways to talk than we do. But most humans can’t pick up on that stuff, and aliens rarely try anyway. It tends to...complicate diplomacy.”

  “But it could be used as a tool in warfare.”

  “That has been the empire’s speculation,” said Cahill. “So their infantry’s standard-issue environmental helmets are designed to filter that out.”

  “Hmm. What kind of damage might break that shielding? Or would I have to take the helmet completely off?”

  “I don’t know, Darius. I’ve never looked into it much. Why do you ask?”

  Darius chewed thoughtfully. "Because on Kareeva, I could have sworn that the enemy was talking to me like that. Trying to rattle me, maybe. There was no record of the communication in my logs, so I couldn't make heads or tails of it. But I also had it happen to me
long ago, when I was a child back on Telamat. Some aliens came to visit my father, and I seem to recall them being able to talk that way."

  Cahill bit her lip thoughtfully. “I don’t know Darius. Maybe you’re just better at picking up on that stuff.”

  Darius went over to his hammock and lay down. “I’m gonna try to catch some Z’s."

  “Didn’t spook you, did I?”

  “No, ma’am. Army life just taught me to grab sleep when you can find it, because you never know how long it’s gonna be until you get another chance.”

  “You’ll miss the in-flight movie,” said Cahill.

  “I’ve got plenty in my head lately, believe me.”

  The next few days passed uneventfully, which for Darius had come to be an ominous sign. Whenever the pain of the universe receded, that seemed to be just fate winding up its next haymaker.

  Soon, it was time to ship out again, and they were packing everything back up.

  Someday I’ll be one of those people that good things happen to, he thought. I was before. Wasn’t I?

  Darius climbed into the skiff for the next leg of their trip. Cahill still hadn’t told him how far Dharma Base still was. Apparently that information was available only on a need-to-know basis, even for someone who was being taken directly there. After a while, he stopped asking. He didn’t know what she knew, and he didn’t know what she didn’t know, and that was going to be that.

  So the skiff disembarked from the barge, and Cahill flew them to another large civilian ship, then another. There was no clear pattern to any of it. Sometimes they would stay for six hours, the next time for 48. And they weren’t slowly advancing in a particular direction. It was a zig-zag across the galaxy.

  It had been nearly a week of this when Darius sat down at another stool in another smuggler’s berth while Cahill filed another report.

  “Cahill...are we being followed?”

  She stopped tapping and gave him an inscrutable look. “What makes you ask?”

  “Sandra. We’re bouncing all over the place like we’re trying to shake every bounty hunter in the quadrant. Or do we not know where Dharma Base is, and we’re just throwing darts at the map while blindfolded?”

  “No, I know where it is.” She began typing again.

  “We didn’t verify the kills, did we? At the extraction point.”

  “Well, I said that the cave-in ought to slow them down, Darius. We know for a fact that this ‘Ollie’ guy is KIA, and the one who identified himself as ‘Ragnar’ appeared to catch a grenade with his face. As for the woman dubbed ‘Akanna,’ I’ll be honest, I think she’s still out there. Between her brief and the recorders on their suits, the empire should have pieced together what happened inside that mountain.”

  “Have you?” asked Darius.

  “No, and I don’t want to know. I can tell when certain operational details are above my pay grade.”

  “Hell,” Darius grunted. “They should be over mine, too.”

  “I get it, Bakari, you never signed up for any of this. I read your file. The parts of it that I’m cleared for, anyway. But nobody signed up for this.” She gestured all around her. “Nobody decided to be born a certain kind of person, on a certain kind of planet, facing a certain kind of future. No one deliberately takes a bite out of the shit sandwich of the universe. But the thing is, you can still spit it out. You don’t have to chew it, and you certainly don’t need it to—”

  “I get it, I get it. I just ate, you know.”

  “Fine. The point is, you may lose a few battles. Just don’t lose sight of the war.”

  “I’ll keep that mind,” said Darius. “But if I read you correctly, you believe that someone may be tracking us, or trying to track us.”

  “I know what I would do if I were in the empire’s shoes. If your intel is as important as it seems to be—to the point of tangling with black ops wetwork—then they will probably move heaven and earth to find you.”

  “Then there must be some pretty important people at Dharma Base who think I know things that are critical to the function of the resistance. Otherwise they wouldn’t risk exposing their location to the empire.”

  Cahill shrugged. “I try to stay off the chessboard and just run my ops. As soon as I’ve delivered you, I’m gone. But there is one thing, while we’re on the subject. You may find yourself facing off against imperial troops. Granted, you’ve probably killed one already, back at Hephaestus. But once you start doing that in an offensive posture instead of a defensive one, you will be branded a terrorist like everyone else in the movement. Like me, you won’t be able to come home until the empire is brought down.”

  Darius took a seat on the other chair at the table, and looked around the room as he formulated his thoughts. These contraband cargo pods had started to blur together so much that he wondered if he'd been in this one more than once. Sometimes the lighting was better. Sometimes the scratched paint and weathered walls were a different color. Sometimes there was no shower, or no hooks for a hammock.

  He and Cahill were the constants. Cahill with her holopad under the harsh light at one metal table or another as she filed her reports, and him going from protein bag to sleep to protein bag while he stared at the walls and tried not to contemplate the roller coaster that his life had become.

  All because he'd answered a damn phone call.

  “You know, Cahill, for someone as dedicated to the resistance as you are, I would have expected a grand speech at some point about the inherent nobility of the cause of freedom, and all that.”

  “Some people take up arms for political reasons, Darius. The people who stick around do so because it’s personal. Sure, I could talk to you about all the other planets like mine that have had trials like mine, due to the empire spending too much time pushing its territory and not enough effort protecting its citizens. But it may not resonate with you. You have to find your own reasons to stick around. And I suspect that you have some already.”

  Darius leaned against the wall of their latest container. He saw the faces of his reasons all the time, in his dreams of the jungle. Frequently covered in blood.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I suppose I do.”

  ✽✽✽

  Darius was almost at the point of sneaking off their latest ship when Cahill announced that they’d finally arrived in the Dharma Base system.

  He pulled up the star map on his visor. “This can’t be right. Here? None of these planets are habitable anymore. This is a ghost town.”

  Cahill nodded. “That’s correct. Now get in, and let’s finish this last leg. ETA is eight hours.”

  He strapped in yet again, and they launched back into space. Darius pulled the system up in his visor as they made their way to the base.

  He’d only heard about these planets and moons in stories.

  Neptune. Jupiter. Mercury. Mars. Venus. Earth.

  “Why the Sol system?” he asked her.

  “Exactly. No one thinks to come here anymore. It’s the perfect hideout.”

  “Not even Old Earth? What about...I don’t know, the archeology? The history?”

  “Most of it is underwater now, and the megastorms have practically swept the remaining surface clean. Maybe someday, when terraforming gets cheap enough that the government can do it for sentimental reasons, we’ll come back. But until then...Sol is one big dusty tomb.”

  “Gods. So where are we going? Don’t tell me that you’re keeping a lid on it all the way there.”

  “Jupiter,” said Cahill. “Well, in orbit around Jupiter.”

  “So wait, Dharma Base is a space station, or something?”

  “In a way. I think it’s best if you see it for yourself.”

  Darius spent the next eight hours poring through the zodiac. He could see many of the famous constellations from the skiff’s cockpit. He’d seen images in vids before, but it wasn’t the same. Orion’s Belt, the Big Dipper, Gemini, Saggitarius, et cetera—only Sol had a heritage like this. Only Sol had had explorers,
traders, and cartographers who had once needed these particular clusters to navigate a world after the sun went down.

  The landscape of the night sky was like a fingerprint unique to each planet, even to a hemisphere. To look up with the right knowledge was to know where you were among the stars and planets.

  And every planet of the empire had a map that marked Sol, to remember. But there were no more ancient gods or goddesses to mark the heavens for the lost.

  Darius was still reading through ancient Greek and Roman mythology when Cahill’s radio began chattering. He turned off the text feed in his visor and beheld something that he didn’t recognize at first.

  According to his visor, he was looking at a generational colony ship.

  “Cahill, is that...is that Dharma Base?” His visor identified it as the Pegasus. Officially, this vessel had been lost nearly 500 years ago. “What is this? What am I looking at?”

  “Your drop-off point, Bakari. Welcome to headquarters.”

  Darius peered through the transglass of the cockpit. The Pegasus already filled up the whole of his view. “Where did they find this thing? How long have they been using it? Can you just live on this thing indefinitely?”

  “Hell if I know, Darius. Like I said, I try to keep off the chessboard. As long as the Council isn’t doing something outright stupid, I don’t ask too many questions.”

  “The council?”

  “Yeah, the Federation is into representative democracy. Or at least, they don’t give absolute power to a single individual. It may not be a perfect system, but it’s the best one that mankind has come up with so far, if you ask me.”

  They came into the largest docking bay that Darius had ever seen. He imagined that only Sar-Zin’s capital ship Agamemnon could have had a bigger one. But evidently, this one had not been chosen for its size, as there was only moderate activity. The real reason for recovering and resurrecting this antique appeared to lay elsewhere. He suspected it had something to do with a generational ship’s ability to sustain itself open-endedly.