The Icarus Void

by CK Burch

  ″Eat it! Eat it, you fuckers!″ Mac laughed as he pumped his fist in the air and tears fell over his cheeks. He imagined Clarke and Hartman in the next room over. ″You fuckers.″ His voice became weak.

  A warning alarm sounded on the control panel below him, and he looked down; the inner core was burning too hot. Fuck. He'd gone in there personally and worked on that himself! Jessups and her team had provided the statistical information earlier, and he'd worked with them to get the tesseract axis back in alignment. Now not only was it grinding down, it was burning too hot at the same time. The fusion core was going to melt over soon enough, and that would cause a chain reaction explosion. The whole ship would go up, and the worst part was that he couldn't get into the engine to fix it while it was firing.

  ″Burke!″ he shouted. ″Problem!″

  ″We're reading it, too!″ she replied. ″Heat overload! Can you stop it?″

  ″Not from here! I'd have to get inside. We're going to have to pull out of orbit and immediately shut down the engines once we're out of the gravitational pull!″

  Meanwhile, the beasties on the engines refused to pop. All of them were burning bright, glowing hotter and brighter than anything he'd ever seen before. It was like they were feeding off of the energy and the heat.

  Mac looked down at the temperature readout: they were getting close to overload. ″Burke,″ he said, ″tell me we're out of orbit.″

  ″We're clear! Shutting down main thrust!″

  Mac watched for the temperature to go down, but nothing happened. Main thrust was still burning hot and bright. ″Uh, Burke? Still burning here. Engines are coming damn close to temperature overload. Copy back.″

  ″Chief, something's wrong. We have no response. Repeat, engines are not responding to bridge control. Can you do anything about it?″

  Mac looked over the control schematics and located the problem: the burnout on the port side, the one Jessups had pointed out to him earlier that would eventually cut out the power flow to the orbital thrust. The power flow ran through the port thruster as well, but instead of depleting the amount of power to the engine, it had severed the shutdown controls. The port engine was sucking up energy now through the starboard engine, using the fucking emergency routing, and that was overheating the lockout controls to the starboard engine as well. Fucking Christ. There was no way to shut them down. Even from here, utilizing the direct engine shutdown procedure override. Holy God in Heaven, the engines were going to go into overload no matter what they did.

  ″Chief?″ Burke. ″Chief, talk to me!″

  ″Uh,″ Mac said. He didn't know what to do. He'd patched that router himself earlier to buy them extra time, and now it had burnt through everything, including the failsafe. Without the failsafe they were going to –

  Wait.

  ″Burke!″ he said. ″We need to activate the emergency EMP!″

  ″What? Are you insane? Shut down the goddamn thrusters, Chief!″

  ″I can't! The controls are fried and the failsafe is down! We have to activate the emergency EMP!″ It was their only chance. The Icarus had a wide-burst electromagnetic pulse device that could be used to disable any enemy vessels nearby – standard military application in all ships, science class or no. The problem was that the whole of the ship, and every powered device inside it – including the HES Mac was wearing – would be turned off until each individual reboot system could come back online through backups. It was better than a fusion core breach. But Mac was staring at the white-hot beasties on the engines, wondering what they would get themselves into while the power was down.

  There was no choice, really. It had to be done.

  ″Burke!″ he shouted. ″We need to activate the goddamn EMP!″

  ″Mac, the whole ship will go down! Quarantine – ″

  ″Fuck the goddamn quarantine! The ship will fucking explode! Hit the EMP! HIT THE EMP NOW!″

  Mac looked down at the engine core temp. It was five degrees away from critical mass.

  He closed his eyes. It was too late.

  But then there was an explosion, like a fat rush of air from a balloon exploding in slow motion, and a wave of energy buffeted him forward into the control panel, which he bounced off of and onto his back. His helmet HUD flickered and vanished, and the joints of his suit locked into position. Without the battery pack, the powered suit couldn't move. But outside he could just barely hear the sound of the engines humming slowly, slowly into a descent, a cooling, the tesseract axis spinning uselessly until friction slowed it into a halt. Mac smiled; he whooped. The EMP had worked!

  He became aware of a floating sensation. He was in the air, bobbing silently. The artificial gravity had gone off in the EMP burst. That was okay, it would just be a shitty bump when the gravity restored, but he'd be wearing the suit. No problem.

  Then he thought about the life support.

  There was no new air being cycled throughout the ship. Sure, what was here would last them long enough for the systems to reboot, but – fuck. He had a dark thought. What if the air scrubbers didn't reboot? What if the whole damn ship refused to reboot?

  He realized that he had no air cycling in his suit. Every breath he took held a little bit more CO2.

  Mac began taking very, very shallow breaths as he waited for the HES to reboot. As he did, he wondered if he'd just condemned the crew to a slow, agonizing death versus instant vaporization.

  ***

  CHAPTER XIII.

  Straub and Collins fell out of the artifact and kept flying with no foothold. They sailed forward in opposing directions, and a moment after Straub felt himself collide with a hard, unyielding surface, he heard Collins cry out as she apparently did the same. It was pitch black; Straub had no idea where he was, or why he was floating through the air end over end. What the fuck just happened? The last thing he'd seen on the surface of the star had been the star-eater's massive tentacle, rumbling over and down the incline of the hill towards them and the artifact. He was still shivering from it, but the displacement of the area they were in now was even worse. Zero gravity, complete darkness. For a moment Straub wondered if they had fallen through into another world, if the artifact could change lanes so to speak, take them to different locations through its void.

  ″Where the fuck are we?″ Collins asked. Her breathing was fast and her voice was strained; she was going to panic any moment now.

  Straub felt like panicking himself. ″I don't know!″ He switched on the field lights on either side of his helmet and felt two opposing reactions: relief at the sight of the cargo bay in his light, and terror at the darkness and the loss of gravity in the ship. ″We're back,″ he said softly.

  Collins turned on her lights as well. ″Jesus,″ she muttered. ″What the hell happened here?″

  Straub activated his magboots and immediately sunk to the floor, feet first. Collins followed suit. They both looked around: aside from the artifact, the cargo bay was barren. The electromagnetic battery, the hydrogen extractors, hell even the various containers and cargo boxes that had been secured in place were no longer present. It was as if someone had come in and done a thorough spring cleaning. Only the artifact remained. Straub felt chills all up and down his body. The silence of the place was unnerving. He hadn't realized until now just how many ambient noises he was used to hearing while on the ship: energy routers flowing, the engines thrumming and vibrating beneath his feet, the lights themselves a high-pitched tingle. Now there was no sound. It amplified the thump of his magboots, which with each step left a metallic echo in the cargo bay that bounced back and forth along the empty walls. He'd never paid any attention to the sound of his footsteps before. They were loud, absurd, exaggerated now. He didn't like it.

  ″This place feels dead,″ he said.

  ″Don't say that.″ Collins was looking up, down, all over the place, her pulse rifle following her gaze. She was looking for the crawlers. Of course she was; they had probably come in here through the artifact with them. ″How co
uld this happen so quickly?″

  Straub stopped. ″What did you say?″

  ″This.″ She waved her hand about the room. ″Power's gone, grav is gone. If my suit is reading the air right, there's no circulation in effect, either. The ship has been turned off, the cargo bay swept clean. How could that happen in just ten minutes? We were only gone ten minutes.″

  He thought about that. He also thought about what Doctor Tybalt had said when they had first seen her on the star: How on earth did those two get suits on so fast? He hadn't paid her any mind at the moment, because it had been fifteen minutes, more than enough time to suit up and be ready to go inside the artifact. But there was something more to the way that she had said it. She'd been genuinely surprised at the swiftness with which she'd been pursued.

  How could this happen so quickly?

  How on earth did those two get suits on so fast?

  He wondered. Was it possible?

  Collins was staring at him. ″What is it?″

  ″I think,″ he said slowly, ″that going back and forth through the void displaced time somewhat.″

  ″You've lost me.″

  ″Think about it. On the star, when we found Doctor Tybalt she seemed surprised that we'd arrived so quickly. To us, she'd been gone fifteen minutes, but maybe to her she'd only been there a much shorter time.″ He kept going, unspooling the theory in mind. ″Who knows how far a distance we covered between here and that star? I didn't recognize any of the constellations there. It could be light-years from here. Thousands of light-years. The distance could be incalculable.″

  ″And...?″

  ″And for us to arrive from one point to the other instantaneously would require a speed much faster than light-speed. Or a technology that we can't even fathom yet.″ Jesus Christ, the potential possibilities of such a system. But which was a more frightening thought? That it could be alien technology? Or a natural occurrence? ″Or a black hole. Black holes are still ciphers in the astronomers club. You go in, you don't come out. At least, not the way you came in. But theoretically it could shoot you through from the place in the galaxy you are in to another point clear on the other side of the galaxy, or to another dimension entirely, in the blink of an eye. This,″ he waved at the artifact, ″does that, but is not a black hole. It doesn't seem like a piece of technology either. It just feels...″

  ″Organic,″ Collins said.

  ″Yes.″ Despite the squeeze in his stomach at the word, he suddenly felt in awe of it. He didn't want to, but for something like this to work the way it did, on an organic level...it was far past his comprehension. The ramifications alone went over his head. Still, he refused to look at it. The slimy nest of insect vaginal flesh. There was a dry heave working its way up his throat just thinking about it. ″But what I think happened is this: we were on that star for ten minutes by our perception, but it's been a lot longer here on the ship.″

  ″How much longer?″

  Straub looked around, inspecting the cargo bay again. ″We'd have to find a chronometer to be sure. But I'd wager to guess it's been a lot more than ten minutes.″

  ″I don't like it.″

  ″Fuck. You think I do?″ He couldn't stop shivering. ″I feel like we're in a tomb.″

  ″I told you, don't say that.″

  ″Come on.″ They walked over to the cargo bay doors. ″I saw Tybalt come through. If I'm right, she's been here a while and probably warned the captain about what was through the void. Maybe they thought we were dead and just depressurized the cargo bay to try and jettison the artifact.″

  ″That would explain why this place is empty. But not why the artifact is still here.″ She was still looking around, her lights flashing about creating eerie shadows along the walls. She was still on edge, but she made a good point: if the crew had tried to jettison the artifact, they'd done a piss poor job of it. Unless the artifact didn't want to go anywhere. That was a far worse thought.

  Straub came to the control panel and tried touching it. It reacted exactly how he expected: it didn't. Shit. If there was no power to the control holo, then there was no power behind the panel itself. Rewiring was out of the question. A small trick he'd picked up during those college hacker days, which wouldn't do any good without some sort of energy flow. ″I think we're stuck in here,″ he said.

  ″Not quite.″ Collins maglocked her rifle to her back, deactivated her magboots and kicked off the floor. She flew across the length of the bay up towards the ceiling, towards the entrance to the ventilation ductwork above. From down here it looked like a deep pit of blackness, barely lit from below by Collins's fieldlights. At the shaft entrance, Collins reactivated her boots and stood on the wall perpendicular to the vent. ″It's open! We can get out this way!″

  ″Will we able to get out into the rest of the ship? There's no power to the controls.″

  ″The vent doors have manual controls. Come on!″ She deactivated her boots and slipped inside easily.

  Straub didn't like it. Something about it was screaming bad, very bad, don't go in there. Still, it was the only way out. He deactivated his boots and kicked upward, floating to the shaft. At the edge of the shaft, Straub managed to reach out and grab onto it without pausing, and he slipped into the narrow corridor. He smirked proudly.

  Behind him, he heard a voice: Stephen.

  He stopped. ″Collins.″

  She was five yards ahead, gliding swiftly along the ductwork. ″Yeah?″

  ″Did you hear a voice just now?″

  ″No. Did you?″

  ″Only thought I did.″ It wasn't a lie. It had sounded like Sarah's voice, which was impossible, except in his mind it was a truth. She was always here in his mind, pretending to call to him from behind, whispering. He could picture her in his mind's eye now, a pale-skinned figure in a blue dress, her hair wafting out behind her head in golden curls. Whispering. He saw her too clearly. He saw her as if she would be there behind him if he turned around and looked back down the ventilation duct.

  Oh, fuck. The radiation. It was working over him.

  Straub shook his head. He had to concentrate. He to keep moving and he had to concentrate.

  Stephen.

  ″I'm not listening,″ he said softly to himself. He kept moving down the shaft.

  Stephen.

  He grit his teeth.

  Was she just like me?

  ″Be quiet,″ he whispered. He didn't want to speak out loud, didn't want to give his psyche the ammunition it needed to produce more of these sounds in his head. That's all it was, sounds, echoes, lost signals carried over the depths of time and sadness. Sarah was not really there. Sarah was not really asking him about Kerrick. The extrawave radiation was creating reactions in his brain that were causing him to hallucinate. Which made him wonder: why was he hallucinating when Kerrick and Udeh had merely been affected by phobias? Or was this a phobia? He couldn't tell. He wasn't a psychologist, he was a fucking solar scientist who people-watched as a hobby, for Christ's sake. Still, his mind whirled as he thought of it, and it kept the voice at bay.

  Up ahead, Collins stopped mid-float. ″Here's the duct exit. Should take us into the corridor outside the cargo bay.″

  ″Where are we going to go from there?″ Straub asked.

  ″The bridge. The only place we should be going. We need to see if we can get the power back online, find out where the crew is.″

  ″You think they're missing?″

  ″No. Not exactly. They might have abandoned ship. If what you're saying is true, it may have been hours since we were here. They might have pulled out of solar orbit and left the ship for a salvage crew to return for. Especially if they thought that we were dead.″

  Straub nodded. ″Have you considered the alternative?″

  ″Which is?″

  ″That some of those crawlers came through the void. That they overran the ship and the crew.″

  Collins looked at him. ″Of course I have,″ she said. ″Why the hell do you think I want you to
stop calling this place a goddamn tomb?″

  ″I'm sorry.″

  Collins turned back to the manual control next to the duct vent. She pulled back the panel and reached for a flat primer pump beneath it; she put her hand underneath it and lifted it upward, once, twice, three times, and with each pump the vent slid open a little bit further. Soon it was open all the way, and Collins pulled herself through headfirst and into the corridor below. Straub followed.

  In the corridor, Collins had activated her boots and was slowly walking towards the lift on the far end, her rifle up to bear. She looked to her left at an open panel on the wall beside a HES alcove: it was a weapons locker. She moved to inspect it as Straub activated his boots.

  ″There's a rifle missing,″ she said. ″Ammo, too.″

  ″You think someone meant to use it,″ Straub said.

  Collins nodded. She reached into the locker, then stopped and looked back at Straub. ″You done any weapons training?″

  ″Standard USDSE training course. Mostly handguns. I was actually pretty good.″

  ″Moving targets?″

  He hesitated. ″Stationary. Mostly.″

  Collins grunted and retrieved a sidearm. She held it out to Straub, then pulled out three clips after he'd taken it. ″Take these, lock them to your belt.″ Then she grabbed a few more rifle clips for herself.

  Straub inspected his pistol, found the safety. He'd taken the training course but he'd never fired live ammunition before, only blank holo rounds to simulate. He decided to keep that bit of information to himself. The chances of finding something to shoot at were, what? Pretty damn slim?

  You could have told me that you were going to sleep with her.

  Straub shook his head. Stay sane. There was nothing there. No one there. Especially nothing to shoot at.

  They walked down the corridor to the lift, and Collins manually released the doors again. ″How come there wasn't one of those manual releases on the cargo bay doors?″ Straub asked.

  ″They have to be stronger, reinforced so that they don't weaken any time the outer doors open,″ she said. ″They're so heavy we wouldn't be able to open them manually even if we tried.″