It was the kind of fear a child might have, to be soothed by a parent’s voice and touch. Devlin recognized the fear. He knew where it came from, why it was so universal, what it represented, how to respond to it. His own worst memories had faded, the ones of waking in the back alleys of D’al-Jarkata, the unrelenting metallic taste of fear.
But that had been years ago, a decade and more. He knew how to take those memories and temper them, how to transmute despair into compassion. What surprised him now, even adult and educated, was the strength of the aloneness.
Why should those memories return now, like an omen?
“Devlin?”
Light broke the darkness of his cubicle, the dim, almost reticent glow from the lowest setting. A silhouetted form moved toward him. Shizuko.
“Did I wake you? You cried out in your sleep.”
He felt her floating closer, the warmth of her skin, inhaled the faint spicy smell of her body cream. Light softened the curves of her face and throat, gleamed off the jet of her eyes. Her nostrils flared and he wondered if she could scent his loneliness.
“I couldn’t sleep, either,” she said in her softly husky voice. “Better sometimes not to say anything at all.”
Her mouth moved against his, an unspoken question. Do you belong to us? Do I belong to you?
He had no answer, only the pleasure of her touch. He freed himself from the webbing and put his arms around her. Beneath her micropores, her bare skin felt like sun-warmed silk. He traced the curves of her thighs and buttocks, the way zero-gee lifted and shaped her breasts, the long muscles of her torso. Her pubic hair was thick and crisp, parted by a slippery ribbon. She inhaled sharply as he ran his fingers over the long, luscious inner folds and valleys. A shudder passed through her. Her fingers dug into his shoulders. With one quick movement, she brought her knees up and out. He felt the pressure of one heel behind his low back and then she was pulling him inside her body with exquisite slowness. Her internal muscles tightened, hard and sudden to send a jolt of almost electric arousal through him. He slid further in. She moved against him, relaxed rhythmically, holding him as he pushed.
When she climaxed, it was with an arching of her body, head thrown back so that he could not see her face. His own left him breathless and with a strange clarity of mind and enervation of body. He realized that for all the intimacy of their bodies, he really knew nothing about her. He knew only that he would trust her with his life.
o0o
At first, December’s space station shone like a mote of silver against the milky sweep of the galactic arm. It grew to megaton size, no mere relay, but a small world unto itself.
The station floated above Devlin like a celestial leviathan with its gently swelling sides and pale ceramometallic skin. Even though he had seen TerraBase, the size of a small city, Devlin felt a rush of awe. Human hands had built this thing, here in the vacuum, beyond the thinnest fringes of air, beyond the kiss of December’s gravity.
Spider web antennae and solar membranes shimmered against the darkness. An isolated storage unit was anchored alongside. Bright orange stripes covered its curved sides.
“What do the orange stripes mean?” Devlin asked.
“It’s a storage unit for solid rocket propellant,” Verity said. “We’re carrying the next shipment.”
“Proximity alarms should be going off.” Fidelio’s voice said. “Maximum caution now.”
Verity piloted them in, slow and smooth, matching the station’s rotation. The party prepared to board. Verity and Shizuko double-checked every safety measure, strapping on the power packs with redundant tethers.
As they propelled themselves across the gap, Devlin saw the grace in their movements, an eerie serenity, the coordination of their thruster jets as a dance. Shizuko’s suit, like her micropores, shimmered under a fall of plum blossoms.
“You’re off target a few degrees counterclockwise,” came Rhea’s voice from the ship, comparing their position with the computer-generated schematics. “Adjust your trajectory by —” She rattled off a string of coordinates.
They found the airlock hatch just where Rhea indicated. Set in a corona of white and black lines, it looked undamaged.
Shizuko positioned herself beside the airlock and opened the cover. The manual controls were designed to be operated by even an inexperienced civilian in an emergency. The instructions were in both written and pictograph form. In a moment of fancy, Devlin wondered if they would make any sense to a creature with a structure radically different from the human norm. What would a being with sixfold radial symmetry or pseudopods think of the simplified drawings of a two-armed, two-legged human with a bulbous circle for a head?
The door release lever lay within an indentation, marked with large directional arrows. Shizuko grasped the flat, textured end. For a long moment, nothing moved. She braced herself, shifting slightly first one way and then another. Devlin heard her percussive exhale.
“It’s well and truly stuck, to use precise technical jargon.”
“Try another airlock in the same section,” said Fidelio. “We’ll get you the coordinates.”
The party returned to the shuttle and swung it around the station’s curved side. A cloud of debris came into view, glittering like metallic snow.
Over his helmet speakers, Devlin heard Archaimbault March’s voice, although he could not make out the words.
Shizuko bent to consult the instrument module at her belt. “It seems to be the remains of a shuttle. There are shreds of carbon-based material. Water — ice, that is. Traces of organic iron compounds.”
Myoglobin? Hemoglobin?
“Hold on,” Devlin said. “I want a sample.” No one said anything as he scooped up a portion of the debris cloud.
Keeping close to the station, they proceeded to the next airlock. This time, both Verity and Devlin tried the release lever. Long heartbeats later, it still hadn’t budged.
“What the hell?” Verity muttered. “One airlock might malfunction...” She didn’t finish the thought.
As far as Devlin could tell, the station had been sealed from the inside. But why would anyone lock himself inside a space station, orbiting a dying planet? Why put yourself beyond the reach of help?
He thought of an alien satellite spinning its lonely orbit in the far reaches of December’s system. Space, so distant from his own personal nightmares, no longer felt safe.
o0o
The next module they reached contained arched docking bays, wide enough to accommodate a ship the size of Juno. The arms looked fragile, like fairy wings. Again, there was no response from the airlock controls.
“Do you want us to keep trying?” said Shizuko.
“Don’t give up!” Archaimbault March’s voice sounded ghostly, distant. “You’ve got to find out —”
“Keep at it for a while longer,” Fidelio cut him off.
Shizuko began cutting through to the airlock hatch controls with the laser. Incisions appeared in the outer skin, accompanied by eye-searing light and off-gassing, gaping wider and deeper with every passing moment. Working cautiously to avoid damage to their gauntlets, Verity and Shizuko pulled a flap of the outer skin free, folded it back and secured it to the hull with magnetic clamps.
“I’ll try the manual lock from here.” Shizuko’s head and shoulders disappeared into the rectangular opening.
There was no visible movement in the airlock hatch.
“Doesn’t anything work on this station?” Verity floated closer and shone her helmet lamp into the opening, over the curve of Shizuko’s shoulder.
“It’s not the relays.” Shizuko sighed audibly. “We’ll have to cut through to the lock itself.”
“Give me the laser and I’ll do it,” Verity said. “There’s about enough room to spit in there.”
“Verity, please. We both know this has to be done right.” Without waiting for a reply, Shizuko dove with slowmotion grace into the opening.
“You’re going to get yourself killed one of t
hese times.”
“Is that a threat or a promise?”
A few minutes later, Shizuko’s voice came from the opening. “I’m through and into the lock. You’ll need light.”
“Let’s go,” said Verity.
Devlin followed her through the jagged opening into the airlock. In the light of their helmet lanterns, the airlock looked gloomy, a cavern that had never known sun or wind. The walls had been painted a cross between teal and gray.
Verity and Shizuko used the patch kit to seal the opening. Then they pressurized the lock. The seal flexed, gleaming like a living membrane, and held.
At a touch of the controls, the inner hatches whispered open. A short passageway, this one a slightly lighter shade of gray, led inward to a second lock.
After the condensed, meticulous order of Juno, the station seemed expansive, almost luxurious. Rotation created a gentle approximation of gravity in the circular corridor. A short walk brought them to the broad passageway. Colored bands, corresponding to the various sections, ran along the walls.
Verity consulted a map and traced out their route to Operations. It was coded blue, which Devlin thought macabre. They followed it to a blue-circled portal. This door, like the airlocks, refused to open manually. Shizuko cut through it with the laser.
Inside, bathed in pale light, cold and indirect, lay a wide sweep of a room with banks of work consoles, instruments and control panels, darkened screens. That, combined with its emptiness, gave the place a mournful quality, a tomb built for an entire dynasty and never used. But it was not empty.
Shizuko, first through the gap, let out a sharp cry. A clump of bodies, seven or eight, lay just inside the door. Some of them bore hand lasers, made for fine work and too low-powered to affect even an interior wall. More mummified skeletons made a tangled heap beside one of the work stations.
Shreds of skin, dark and wrinkled, clung to the clean curves of skulls and intricately shaped cervical vertebrae. Standard issue jumpsuits draped loosely around the bones, giving the eerie suggestion of flesh.
Devlin touched Shizuko’s shoulder, felt the atavistic tremor even through the insulating layers of her suit, thought of the legends of plague ships and crews gone mad. He bent to study the bodies, reaching inside for clinical detachment.
“It must have happened quickly,” Shizuko murmured, “and there was no one to help.”
“Or no one tried to,” Devlin said, his jaw tight. The bodies beside the door touched long-buried memories. “I’ve seen sick people charge an aid station. Some of them were walking corpses, just enough holding them together to keep them moving on, infecting everyone they touched. The militia gunned them down.”
“Norton’s plague? The one that wiped out half of Old Jarkata?” Shizuko’s brows drew together behind the crystal curve of her helmet. “But you would have been a child —”
“So what killed these people?” Verity said, too stridently. “Vacuum, vented monoxide, voltage through the door’s electrics?
Devlin brushed the fingers of his glove over one slender radius, laying alongside the ulna like lovers in death. He pointed to the fracture lines, the splintering of bone that indicated a struggle.
Dimly, as if from a far distance, he heard voices over his helmet speakers. Fidelio was asking questions, Shizuko answering in a low, tense voice, and Archaimbault March was saying something about mutiny. Devlin straightened up from his examination of the corpses.
“Be careful,” he told Shizuko and Verity. “Keep your suits intact.” Carefully, they proceeded into the room.
“Look at this.” Verity rushed to the communications bay. She pointed to what was left of the control systems, a swathe of blackened metal and plastic. Intersecting jagged lines gleamed like fused glass, while other areas had been sliced and torn, and shards of unrecognizable parts lay scattered everywhere.
Shizuko let out a breath. For a long moment, no one said anything.
“Devlin and Verity, keep searching.” Fidelio’s voice came over the helmet speakers. “Shizuko, we need to know what’s in the computer core. Can you handle it?”
Shizuko lifted her head. “I’m all right,” she said, but whether those words were meant for the captain or for herself, Devlin could not tell. She left Operations, following the color-coded guides.
Devlin and Verity proceeded on a systematic route through the various areas: Engineering, Life Support, Officers’ Quarters, galley, and storage areas. They passed through the medical area, a suite of rooms as well equipped as any TerraBase hospital, including emergency medical cryounits for critically ill crew who could not be treated with local facilities.
They found several more bodies, singly or in groups. One pair appeared to be trying to cut off power to Operations when they died. There were no other signs of damage, no indication of what had happened.
From time to time, Verity reported back to Juno. The initial shock had worn off; the depressing sameness created a sense of drifting through a tomb. Time took on an eerie, distorted quality. Devlin could not have told how long they had been wandering.
“Have you heard from Shizuko?” Fidelio asked. “She’s not answering.”
“Interference from the station?” Verity asked.
“No, we’ve been following you two loud and clear.”
Devlin and Verity exchanged white-eyed glances. Before either could say more, Shizuko’s voice came through.
“I’m here, just busy. Data transfer is complete. What there is of it, that is. Someone’s tried a memory wipe. It’s an unheavenly mess. I’m not sure this computer remembers how to add two and two.”
. . . the station’s computer disabled... crew cut off and unable to effect repairs... while down below, on the planet’s surface, thousands of colonists helpless while temperatures soared and clouds of carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid rolled across the once pristine skies...
They met Shizuko back at the airlock. Plum blossoms glimmered, eternally fresh, across her space suit. The memory capture unit swung from her belt. She would not meet Devlin’s gaze. There was something wrong with her eyes, some hidden darkness.
She turned as they approached, moving with deliberation. She’d managed to get the airlock hatch open. As one small blessing, the temporary seals held up through decompression.
Shizuko was first through the hatch. Her smooth, slow glide halted. She swore, too soft for the words to be understood. Devlin saw her face, perfectly lit through her helmet. In all his years, through D’al-Jarkata and everything beyond, he had never seen an expression so bleak, so determined.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Something must have caught on my suit leg. I didn’t see anything. It felt like a —”
“Spider wire!” Verity shouted. “It’s rigged!”
“Get out of there!” Fidelio barked from the ship. “All of you, right now! Scramble!”
“What —” Devlin began.
Shizuko whirled, a movement Devlin would have sworn was impossible in zero-gee, grabbed his arm, and thrust him bodily outside. He caught a glimpse of Shizuko bracing herself, then Verity’s jets flaring.
A burst of intense, colorless light erupted from the airlock, momentarily blinding him. His helmet radio blared static. The noise filled his head, rattling the bones of his skull. Then he himself was hurled through empty space, surrounded on three sides by distant stars.
Devlin fumbled for the jets on his suit harness, praying he’d find the right ones. When he’d practiced the drill, he hadn’t been half-blind, with adrenaline searing his veins. He blinked and his vision cleared slightly. With a silent prayer, he squeezed the controls. The station’s bulk blotted out half the night. He’d managed to reverse his momentum, so that he was no longer speeding away from the station.
The next moment, a second explosion rocked the airlock. This one must have burst the inner hatches, because instead of a colorless flash, yellow-white flames spurted from the gaping maw in the side of the station. Oxygen rushed into space, fueling t
he blaze.
Fire reached outward, touched the nose of the shuttle. Glowing cracks laced the walls of the tiny craft. In its place, a starburst exploded. Shards of ceramometal scintillated against the black of space.
“Shizuko! Verity!” Devlin couldn’t hear his own voice above the deafening blare of his helmet radio.
The blaze in the space station shifted toward orange. That was supposed to mean something about the materials being burned, but Devlin couldn’t remember what. He blinked again, praying for clear sight, but the fire was too bright. From farther along the curved dark side of the station came another burst of light.
He spotted a single space suit, arms and legs gently flexed, oddly graceful.
Untethered. Drifting.
The radio channels carried nothing but static. His eyes were still too glare-blind to make out any patterns on the suit. There was no way to tell who it was.
Devlin nudged his jets. The suit hung above him now. Somehow, he thought with a curious numbness, he had to coordinate the path of the other suit with his own movement. He’d had no training in precision maneuvering. If he overshot...
The suit continued to drift. Devlin held his breath. From this angle, he could see that he was going to miss it. What did he have to lose? He curled in tight, rotating around his center of mass, and then swept out his arms. As he spun, he realized the suit was still too far. He flailed wildly, like a drowning swimmer. One gauntlet-encased hand closed around something. By pure luck, he’d grabbed the severed tether.
Devlin pulled the suit closer, winding the tether around his wrist. The suit swung around in response to his jerk. His eyes focused on a pattern of orange thunderbolts. He started to breathe again.
“Verity!” He grabbed one arm, turning her so that he could see her face. He was half afraid he’d find a bubble of coagulating blood or a crazework of fissures in the helmet itself.
Price of Silence Page 2