The Icarus Void

by CK Burch

  The thermals were close enough. He turned off the hydrogen. ″Shutting down!″ he shouted out. Instantly, the heat and the blue-white cascade over the artifact's surface ceased, the rolling stopped, the bulging and the swelling calmed into a flat, geometric edging again, and Straub relaxed. All of that had looked wrong, disgustingly wrong. Pulpy and wet and meaty, bad meat, like sausage. Pork. Why couldn't he stop thinking of it in terms of meat and skin and muscle?

  He dropped the field and, reluctantly, joined Tybalt next to the artifact. Immediately he noticed that the ideograms, the grooves and the carvings along the skin were still present. Always before they had sunk into the object's surface and disappeared until solidarity had resumed, but now they remained constant, if not wavering. Behind the edging of the grooves was a deep, faint amber tint. He frowned. It didn't feel right. He wanted more numbers and data before standing this close to it and examining it. Even at its most alien reaction, Straub had felt a curiosity towards the object. This was...he wanted a better word than wrong, but that was all he could think of. It was wrong, down in his gut and his knees and his groin. He felt it. It was just fucking wrong.

  ″This is amazing,″ Tybalt said. ″My god. Why do you think it's retained the markings across it this time? Something to do with the consistency of the plasma reaction? You know, now that I think about it, I remember seeing the markings when I attempted to bring it aboard before. It hadn't occurred to me until just now. All those other reactions, they were different, but this, this almost seems normal.″

  It seems wrong, Straub thought, but shoved that word away. It felt like vomit. He watched as Tybalt retrieved the measuring cable from their makeshift workbench. She unspooled some three feet of length and activated the charge in the cable; instantly it stiffened into a pole, and she slowly pierced the side of the artifact with it. There was a wet slurping noise as the cable was pushed. Straub couldn't discern between a sexual or a surgical sensation. He wasn't sure which was worse. Tybalt was moving it in like a syringe, going deeper and deeper, until she'd gone up to her hands, all three feet of the erect cable, and she pulled it out and looked over at Straub, aghast.

  ″Holy shit,″ he said. ″What was the last measurement you took? From the last reaction?″

  ″It barely submerged to seven inches,″ she said. Giddiness invaded her voice. She walked around to the side with quickened pace, erected the cable to seven feet, and measured the outside of the artifact. ″Six feet, four inches across. Holy shit, we did it! We punctured the void!″ She was laughing, actually laughing, and Straub wanted her to stop. He didn't want to go through this again, but she was returning to where she'd been before, this time keeping the seven-foot-pole at the ready, and gently pushed it in. At three feet, she checked the measurement, then continued to four feet. Five feet. Six feet. She stopped there and turned to Straub. ″Go around to the other side! Tell me when the cable extends through!″

  Straub didn't want to but he did. On the other side, he caught the texture of the artifact up close: it was bumpy, like gooseflesh. Christ this was unnerving. He felt his own skin go goosebumpy and he shivered. ″Ready!″ he called out, but the last thing he really wanted to see was the skin of this thing bubble and burst open like a pimple to allow the cable to come out.

  A minute passed. ″Well?″ Tybalt called out.

  Straub was confused. ″Well what?″

  ″Did it come out or what?″

  ″No. Did you push it through?″

  ″Seven feet even! It should be dead center on your side!″

  Straub looked up and down, all across the surface of the artifact and saw nothing. ″Hang on,″ he said, and backed up five large paces. From this perspective he could see Tybalt holding the cable, her hands an inch or so away from the surface, and he could see the other side, where conceivably he ought to see the end of the measuring cable poking out. There was nothing.

  ″Well?″ Tybalt asked.

  ″Nothing,″ Straub confirmed. ″Nothing! You sure on that measurement?″

  ″Completely! Hang on.″ Tybalt took a few steps back, pulling out part of the cable, then began unspooling more length. The cable became erect as she fed it into the artifact, stiffening and sliding in. Straub heard the wetness of the artifact as it accepted the firm, hard measuring cable and he was reminded of a bad one-night stand from his college days. It had been sloppy, ugly, sweaty skin against sweaty skin, the girl had smelled bad, he'd been drunk and close to nausea the whole time, but he also hadn't gotten laid in months. It felt like an even call, bad, gross, disgusting meat sex to waylay the blue balls, but the morning after had brought memory recall and the vomiting had started. He hadn't been able to stop throwing up. Never in his life, not even during that miserable 48-hour research project at academy, no shower and no sleep, had he felt that disgusted in his own skin. Right now watching the skin of the artifact accepting the measuring cable felt worse. It felt worse. He wanted to –

  Straub turned away at the first dry heave and composed himself. This was bad. Whatever the fuck was going on with his brain, he couldn't stop thinking of wet meat and juices. ″I don't feel good,″ he said weakly, triggering another dry heave, nearly puking in his helmet. That thought sobered him up greatly and he held it down. ″That sound is killing me.″

  Tybalt was ignoring him. ″I've got fourteen feet of cable shoved in there, take a look! Where is it?″

  With great effort he turned to look again. There was nothing coming out the other side. Tybalt stood where she’d been standing before, and yet still there was no extension on the other side.

  Straub walked up next to her, thankful that he couldn’t smell anything other than the recycled oxygen in the suit, purified with electrons. He looked down at the cable marker next to Tybalt’s grip: fourteen feet. Just like she’d said.

  He ignored the clench of his stomach as he turned to look at the artifact, then turned back to Tybalt. He kept thinking that he heard it moving, just beneath the surface, like a subcutaneous layer of maggotry. He looked again. It was moving, pulsating, sweating like an egg sac. Beneath the surface he thought he saw things crawling around, like wild veins whipping about with abandon, connected to nothing, just moving, wild hoses with no one holding on. What could produce such a thing? What could lay an egg sac like this, if that's what it was? Oh fucking god, please, please stop thinking of such things. It was bad enough looking at it. ″There's nothing on the other side,″ he said. ″It's just...in there.″

  Tybalt looked past Straub, her eyes running up and down the length of the artifact. ″What the fuck does that mean?″ she asked.

  He didn't know. He wasn't sure he wanted to know. But Tybalt was smiling like she wanted to know and that she was going to do whatever it took to find out.

  ″I'm going to take an atmospheric sounding,″ she said. ″I want to go in there.″

  Straub's eyebrows went up. ″Excuse me?″

  ***

  Laguardia squeezed off a few more than a few rounds, the pistol report hard and fierce in her ears. She hadn't worn the earplugs provided over at the ammo desk, didn't want them. She enjoyed the sound even in close confines such as these. She needed to hear it. She was too goddamn on edge and she needed to take it off somehow, some fucking way before she went mental herself. Now her eardrums were buzzing, the ringing would kick in soon, but instead of doing the smart thing like putting the practice pistol down and finishing she reached for another clip, ejected the empty one and once it had been replaced she pressed the holo for a fresh target and began shooting again.

  The shooting range on the recreation deck was where she spent her time post-dive easing the stress. Not this time. This time the mounting stress was mounting further, like a horny boyfriend who'd yet to blow his load after an hour of fucking. And she was getting confoundingly annoyed to a gruesome degree. To the degree where she felt the need to punctuate half a dozen gunnery range targets with four clips worth of ammunition just to feel like she had her head on her shoulders stra
ight and true. No one else was here, so it didn't matter. The rec deck was a ghost town. The weights were untouched, the bags hung from the ceiling still and decorative. Fuck, the pool tables were all clean and muss-free. Because everyone and their mother were running about the goddamn ship trying to put the fucking thing back together. Because no one was taking the required rest that Captain Markov had ordered be taken in shifts to keep everyone together and as cool as possible. Which was why Laguardia was in here, squeezing the trigger over and over on her service pistol, depleted uranium rounds sizzling into molded statues at ten yards. She was trying to stay frosty. It wasn't working and that scared her. It scared her because she knew better than this, she had trained herself over and over to keep herself from cracking, because if there wasn't at least one person on the ship that could hold it together no matter what then all hell could go to shit and back at any minute, and that one person was supposed to be her, god fucking dammit.

  She ejected the empty clip, put the gun down and took two large steps back before she could reach to pick it up again. Now her ears were ringing hard and she needed to stop this. She needed to stop this.

  She needed to calm down.

  She turned away and left her gun at the firing wall – she didn't want it on her right now, who the hell knew who she might shoot – and walked out and down the corridor to the weight room. She started a circuit of the machines. Then some free weights. Eventually her skin glistened with sweat and she felt her scalp dampen. That was good enough. She put the weight back and got on the treadmill and started a light jog. There was a twitchy, nervous shake to her knuckles. She wanted to hit something. Punch someone.

  And if she was feeling this way, how was the rest of the crew handling it?

  As she ran, she put her mind to use. She'd always wanted to be one of those old school detectives from the 20th century, Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep, Dashiel Hammet stuff. Cool, affable, calmly taking in the sequence of events and putting together a mapwork of who went where and how the butler stabbed the old man in the back to get the money and the broad. The twists and turns were romantic, who gave a fuck who knew. Instead she'd worked towards her military degree and became a staff sergeant. Funny how things work out.

  Kerrick had gone crazy on Straub over perceived betrayal.

  Udeh was having claustrophobia issues triggering panic attacks.

  Straub couldn't get his mind off his ex.

  Fixations.

  Laguardia thought of her own fixation. Control. Keeping things calm, keeping a strong arm. She thought of the way she'd changed herself over the years to maintain control. To become an icon of control, the avatar of control. Maintenance. Because of how on another ship, another dive, she'd seen things get out of hand, she'd seen chaos. Order needed maintenance. She was the divine avatar of order and she'd made it her religion and her communion was intimidation. The intimidation of being the biggest threat in the room; the ultimate authority. So much so that Captain Markov had allowed it. There was no control here and she needed to have control. She needed people in line and not freaking out. She needed to freak out so no one else would freak out.

  She realized that she couldn't breathe.

  Laguardia slammed the holo control and leapt, sideways, rolling on the floor and pathetically collapsing. She breathed, huge gasping breaths and threw up. Her stomach clenched again and she threw up twice more, just acid, nothing in her stomach since yesterday. Only water and she'd passed that hours ago. Her arms were shaking and burning. She had to consciously roll to the side so her face didn't land in the stomach acid she'd just upchucked. She tried to control her breathing but couldn't. Couldn't control. Anything. No control.

  Jesus Christ, she thought, what that fuck is wrong with me?

  Maybe Straub was right. Maybe it was this goddamned artifact with radiation off the charts in undetectable amounts doing obviously nothing but obviously something. No sensors were picking up any of these effects, but she sure as fuck could feel them.

  She kept her eyes shut and refused to open them. Deep breaths through her nose and out through her mouth only, again and again with no allowance for anything else except willing it to be done so.

  After a few minutes she felt slightly more at ease. If that was even possible. There was a distinct grasp on reality that needed to happen, and it needed to happen fucking soon. She'd pushed herself too damn hard just to get the fight out of her system. Denying it wouldn't make any sense. If Udeh was having panic attacks because of this thing, if Kerrick had gone bi-polar on Straub and if Straub was being haunted by his dead fiancee, then it was more than likely that there were others on the ship who were under this influence too. She'd just nearly run herself into collapse without realizing it. Or almost. There had been a point there that felt like it was all normal, driving forward into the breaking point. The exact thing that she'd always been looking out for in the rest of the crew she'd nearly done herself. So, what was the connection? Fear? Regret? Kerrick and Udeh seemed to be ruled by fear, of rejection and small spaces respectively. But what about Straub? Longing? Wanting to go back and change things in the past? Or just loss? That was more complicated. Jealousy and betrayal, that was complicated in itself, sure, but it had the base of fear behind it. Straub, whatever was going on with him had to be deeper, rooted further. All that said, he was handling himself better than any of the others had, so that was saying something.

  Laguardia stumbled down the corridor, leaning against the wall for support, trying to keep herself upright. Jesus fuck, she hadn't gone and overdone herself like this since academy. She bypassed the target range and went to the bar, where the pool tables kept her company as she found the cold water tap at the bartender's stool and poured herself a glass. She emptied the glass and drew another. Then she felt better. Above on the ceiling, a number of fans, spread out, were rotating, cooling her off. She'd always thought them annoying before, added for ambiance or some bullshit, but now she was grateful.

  Questions invaded her: so what now? If she was truly cracking under all this pressure and radiation and what-have-you, then how the hell was the rest of the ship going to be? And what could be done? She figured there was one answer: get the fucking artifact off the goddamn ship. Start there. But not rashly. Do it by the book. She walked back to the range thinking to herself, You're not the authority, you're not the authority, you're just the safeguard. She wasn't the captain and the captain was the one who needed convincing on this. She needed to find him, swallow her pride and explain what had just happened. Straub was right. This was going to only get worse.

  For a moment she paused, her hand wavering over the pistol. Did she really want to take it with her? There was a moment, fleeting in thought, where she almost didn't take it, but then she thought of Kerrick and picked it up.

  The safeguard. She had to be the safeguard.

  The weight on her hip made her feel safer.

  ***

  In sick bay, Sydney Kerrick stared up at the ceiling. ″Home,″ she said weakly. Somewhere to her side, she thought she heard someone reply, but that wasn't right. She was alone in here. She was always alone. She preferred it that way. Ever since she'd been kicked out of mom and dad's house. She still remembered the look on dad's face, how unemotional he was. He'd hated her. He'd been disgusted with her. Was it because she'd gotten pregnant or because of the abortion she'd finally decided on? Kerrick wondered what her father would have done if he had gotten pregnant, but that was impossible of course. Men. They had such an extensive wealth of knowledge of what the female body went through but they had no idea what it felt like. They didn't know. They could never know. Even other women didn't know. They didn't understand how the procedure had felt, how a part of her had been ripped away and torn to pieces. They didn't understand how, even though the fetus hadn't developed enough yet, she had lost her baby. Or what would become her baby. Sometimes she heard baby cries at night, coming back to let her know that she had abandoned it, had kicked it away, and then her parents h
ad done the same to her. Kerrick hated it. She knew it wasn't right. She was sorry, so sorry, but she'd made her choice and had to live with it. And she'd lived with it all through college and beyond, felt no regrets, took few boyfriends but always dumped them before they had the chance to do the same. She wouldn't be rejected again. Not again.

  ″Home,″ she mumbled.

  Yes, home. Home, the place where everyone gets close to you and you feel secure until that rug is swept away into oblivion and you're left caught off guard with no reaction time. Home. Where family and friends reject you. Home.

  Someone said something, but she ignored it because they weren't really there.

  ″Don't want to go home,″ she said.

  No. No going home. Only being alone. She would only be alone from now on. And she would fight for her solace. Her right to cave and be apart from others. She didn't need them. They didn't want her. And oh, Stephen, he'd been so different, so kind, so loving, so stupid she was to think it was different. He was just after some pussy. She'd given and taken her share of sex over the years as she'd wanted, on her terms always, but this had been different. The charmer. The smooth talker. The funnyman. Speaking another woman's name.

  As she began to cry she began to feel hate all over again. She would be alone. She wanted to be alone. She did not want to go home. She did not want to be near anyone ever ever ever again.

  Someone said something.

  ″Not going home,″ she replied. She tried to get up, but was held down. Oh well. Fine. Keep her wherever she was. Where was she? Who knew? She didn't care. She just didn't want to go home.

  She cried and cried as silently as possible.

  ***

  The atmospheric sounder had been up in the science deck, and Tybalt had told Straub to wait with the artifact while she ran for it. Leaving it completely alone meant no one to monitor it, to see if and when it re-solidified, and how long in actuality it was continuing its malleability. This was exciting. This was more than exciting, this was giddying. What the hell had she discovered? It wasn't the Dyson bubble miracle material that she'd been hoping for, but something else. Something else entirely that held endless possibilities at this point. Fourteen feet! Six feet across, fourteen feet penetrated! God, the thing really was like a void. Maybe that's all it was, just a void to nowhere within. Like a portal. If she'd discovered an alien portal to another dimension, or world, or perhaps a transit point between planes then this was better than the Dyson bubble solver. This would put her name in the science books for centuries. She had to finish going over it before they dumped it into space. As much data as possible, and then, after assembling a new crew...well, maybe she was switching fields after this little discovery.