Voices of the Void

by David V. Stewart

  Surprisingly, it only stunk slightly.

  “He must have died of thirst, having forgotten how to get out,” Andrew said. He stepped around the corpse to one of the lockers. He found it unlocked, to his surprise. “Any preference?” he said to Mariela, gesturing at the open locker. She was standing aghast at the sight of the dead man, her mouth open and eyes trembling.

  Andrew snapped his fingers at her until she looked at him. “Sorry you had to see that. I forgot to tell you to expect something like that.”

  She gave him a puzzled look.

  “Now. Do you have a weapon preference?” He gestured again at the open locker, which contained an assortment of small arms.

  Mariela shook her head, clearly confused.

  Andrew nodded slightly to her. He took a twelve gauge shotgun out and placed it on a nearby table, then looked through some drawers and found the ammunition. After some searching, he found a few boxes of buckshot and put them on the table too. Next, he found in a drawer a 9 millimeter pistol. He saw that it was locked to an electronic security bracelet. He brought it to the table and quickly took it down. Using a multi-tool from his belt, he pried out the identity device that was attached to the trigger group and threw it away, chuckling. The slide went back on, and he tested the trigger, watching the hammer move smoothly through the long action double-action.

  He put in a magazine and racked the slide, then eased the hammer down. He made to hand it to Mariela, then withdrew it. A thought had just occurred to him

  If she’s invisible to the Wrtla, will I be able to see a future where she intends to kill me? He remembered all the people he had slaughtered in the other sector. What if he had already killed her parents, and she was looking for revenge?

  He saw that Mariela was looking at him questioningly, clearly not understanding what was going on his head.

  I saw her in the vision… was that just incidental?

  His past self pushed forward You saw her in the past.

  But…

  He sighed and handed the pistol to Mariela, barrel first in case she tried to shoot him. He held his breath as she looked at it with half familiarity. She placed it in her right hand and weighed it.

  “That’s just your sidearm.” Andrew turned back and found a few loaded magazines. He slid them across to the girl, who stuffed one of them in her pants pocket and the rest in her backpack. “Your main gun ought to be this,” he said, picking up the shotgun. He found the bolt release and pressed it down, then racked the bolt a few times, ejecting what he knew were beanbag rounds. He opened up one of the boxes of buckshot and loaded eight fresh shells in the magazine, then dropped one in the open chamber. He released the bolt and it slammed closed. He held it to Mariela, who took it doubtingly. “Put the rest of the ammo in your backpack.”

  She nodded and put down the shotgun carefully. She then put the extra shells into a pocket on the outside of her backpack.

  “You sure you know how to use it?”

  Mariela nodded and picked up the gun. Her left hand held the foregrip uneasily, but as she rested the stock on her hip, it settled down. Andrew nodded slowly. Keeping the girl in his periphery, he turned back, checking the rifles in the locker. They were all chambered in 6.2 millimeter, not his old rifle’s 6.8. He shook the satchel at his hip, feeling the weight. It was light. He put his hand in and felt three more loaded magazines. Normally he would feel fine with ninety rounds, but his prescient mind was whistling at him.

  With a sigh, he picked up one of the security rifles and popped open the receiver. With his multi-tool, he removed the electronic security block on the auto-sear and tossed it aside. He slung the rifle around him, annoyed that it lacked a more ready suspension system, like the bungees that held his main rifle. A quick search of the gun locker found a whole drawer full of pre-loaded magazines, along with a few empties. He put them in his satchel, feeling suddenly very weighed down, even in the lower gravity of the colony.

  “After you,” he said, pointing to the open door. He watched Mariela exit and turn down toward the elevators.

  They reached them and stepped inside. Andrew put his own rifle down, leaning it against a corner to retrieve on the trip back. Mariela fumbled with the shotgun slightly, leaning it next to his rifle. She brought the terminal to life, and the lift car was soon moving back through the dark, toward sector six.

  “You don’t have to come too, you know. You could wait for me at the dorms.”

  Mariela stared at him, then wrote slowly, I’m not afraid. Are you?

  “Yeah. The me that’s me is. The me that sees the future, not so much, which should be reassuring, but I don’t trust him. He doesn’t answer a lot of questions.”

  She looked at him with a puzzled expression.

  “I have a few residents upstairs. They’re all me. One lives in the future, one lives in the past, one lives in my past, but I don’t talk to him much.”

  Mariela wrote on her pad, Are you insane?

  Andrew paused and ran his tongue over his teeth. “That’s what a doctor would say, but I’m still alive, and most wouldn’t be who have tread the paths I have. Paths like this one.”

  Mariela stared at him.

  “Where do you think a kid would be in sector six?”

  She shook her head.

  Andrew took a slow breath.

  The car slid on in silence, eventually approaching the landing for sector five. Andrew could see several shapes moving amid the lights, scattering as the car approached. They slid through, and all that could be seen were a few pair of vacuous, open eyes watching them pass.

  The running lights along the track were brighter here, and the space through which the lift moved was less uncomfortably open. They passed through open caverns and small cut shafts, sliding downward and deeper into the rock. The car swayed as the track leapt over a chasm, infinite darkness extending above and below them. It looked to Andrew like the track abruptly ended a few yards ahead, but he felt no impending dread.

  It was just the end of the running lights. They moved on along a darkened track, the line of yellow beams disappearing behind them. The lights inside the lift car were enough to dimly illuminate the rock walls as they slowed and entered another shaft. Andrew readied the security rifle, pushing the fixed stock into his shoulder and flipping off the safety.

  “You remember where the safety is on that?” Andrew said, nodding to the shotgun.

  Mariela nodded. She picked the gun back up and pointed to the little steel dot right behind the trigger. Andrew nodded back.

  “Be careful. Don’t shoot if you don’t know what something is.”

  She nodded.

  Mariela couldn’t speak, and Andrew was content to let the lift move toward its final destination in silence. Slowly a light in the distance grew. The atmosphere outside began to whistle in the cracks of the car, which swayed slightly as it ran on. The growing light turned into an image – an open mining area, surrounded by the blackness of a natural cavern above, too high for the operating lights to touch. It was deserted, but a pale dust hung in the air, creating white halos around all the spotlights.

  “There’s been activity recently.”

  Mariela looked at him quizzically, as if she thought such a statement was obvious.

  Finally, the car reached the landing and stopped. The track, which had run an unknown number of miles from the original mining colony, ended in a great steel stop covered with large rubber bumpers. The door opened.

  Andrew stepped out quickly, checking the corners behind him and looking for any ledges above. When it was clear, he motioned for Mariela to exit, but he found she was already standing right beside him, holding the shotgun awkwardly, the stock clutched under her arm.

  He nodded for her to follow him and continued visually checking every spot as he moved through the staging area. It was deserted and dusty. Computer terminals stood in the appropriate stations, but all the monitors were dim. A wide shaft ran downhill in front of them, lit by a long row of sodium bul
bs. Due to the slope, Andrew could not see ahead.

  He tapped a fist to his head. “Don’t fail me now.”

  They started down the shaft, which he quickly realized was a full-width access tunnel, made for the passage of the heavy machinery which would be on the final and most active mining sector. He looked down at the floor and saw a litany of tracks in the dust, including those of a large steel-treaded digging machine. Each track was nearly three feet wide.

  “How did they get something so big down here on such a rickety lift?” he whispered to himself. Mariela touched him to get his attention, then made a series of hand signs he did not understand. He jumped to the correct conclusion anyway. “They assembled them here. Makes sense.”

  Mariela nodded. She pointed ahead, and there the tunnel diverged into two. One set of tread tracks was new, the other old. Mariela pointed toward the new ones.

  “Good thinking,” Andrew whispered. “Of course, they could have moved anywhere.” He heard something faintly, and he quickly pulled Mariela to the side and knelt down. “Did you hear that?” he said through his teeth.

  Mariela shook her head.

  Andrew strained. Faintly, he heard a voice, but he couldn’t make out the words.

  “This way. On your guard.”

  He moved down the shaft with the fresh tracks as silently as he could, hoping each time he heard a pebble bounce or scrape under the sole of his shoe that the people here were as dimwitted as the first ones he had come across. As he inclined his ear, he marked such chances as slim. The voice was repeating words, but he could not make them out. It was one voice. A man’s voice, drowned in the reverberation of the long tunnel.

  Andrew knew there was no real way to tell how far away it was. Underground, in tunnels and other spaces where sound could bounce around, distant noises could sound immediately close; things right next to you could sound incredibly far away. Everything would be distorted. But the voice was getting louder, and clearer.

  Andrew stopped as he felt a pull on his arm. He turned to see Mariela cup her hand to her ear. She awkwardly put her shotgun in the crook of her elbow and gave Andrew a thumbs up.

  Andrew pulled close, knowing that if he could hear the voice, even a whisper might carry back. He put his lips to Mariela’s ear and said, “I can’t make out what he’s saying, can you?”

  Mariela gave him an incredulous look and shook her head. She cupped her ear again and pointed to it, frowning.

  Andrew shrugged and continued forward. The voice grew clearer. Finally, he made out one word clearly: deeper.

  He stopped and whispered back in Mariela’s ear, “Did you hear what he said?”

  Once again, she gave him a confused look.

  A few steps further in, through Andrew’s focus and straining to understand, the voice suddenly became clear. He dropped to a knee and brought his rifle up, looking down the tunnel in anticipation.

  Deeper. Down. Deeper down. Dig deeper. Deeper. Dig deeper down. Down and down.

  Andrew’s pulse quickened as the voice grew louder and clearer; the reverberation diminished. He waited for a vision of the future which would not come, silently cursing his decision to return to the deep.

  Dig it deeper. Don’t stop digging. Just a little further, and he’ll be free. Free, you’ll see. Dig deeper down.

  The voice sounded like it was in his ear, but he could see nobody – nothing. Frantically, he looked to the ceiling, then behind him. Mariela stood holding her shotgun, watching the empty tunnel. The voice sounded like it was coming from her. She turned to look at him, and though her lips didn’t move, Andrew was sure she was saying all the words.

  Free him, be him, see him. Don’t stop digging. Andy, Andy An-diggity-dig-down-dy.

  Andrew could almost detect her lips moving, taunting him. He flipped off his safety, overcome with an urge to kill the demonic girl, the deceiver.

  Deceivers, demons, oh yes, And-diggity-dy.

  She had been playing him all along, pretending so that she could bring him down – deep down, where the digging was dug – and present him to the master, the demon inside. The wrtla.

  And-diggity-demon-dy. Digging deep day by day. Oh yes.

  Suddenly, the prescient side of his mind cried out in pain. He saw, burning into his sight, Mariela being dropped to the ground, beaten, shot. She was screaming and blood was splashing everywhere.

  Andy – Andrew – realized he was the one doing it in the vision, and he snapped his head back and forth.

  Kill her, Andy. Or let me do it. What do you want from her first?

  Andy – that was himself, the other himself, talking. He saw Mariela backing away from him in the present, her shotgun leveled on him. He dropped his muzzle and held out a hand of surrender.

  It was his past self. It had been talking the whole time, saying the same things over and over. With effort, he pushed it back. It had tricked him.

  With a sickness in his stomach quite apart from the gun being pointed at his head, Andrew said, “I’m fine. Don’t shoot me, please. I’m fine now. I was… tricked.”

  Mariela looked at him apprehensively. The muzzle of the shotgun was shaking with her unsteady forward left hand. She let the gun drop back down and she stifled a moaning cry. Though her face was contorted as if tears were coming, none came, for whatever reason. She sobbed softly.

  Andrew stood up. He’s far more aware of what is going on than I thought. He waited for the perfect time to spring his trap for me – to take control.

  As his breathing slowed, he noticed another noise: the faint but unmistakable sound of grinding in the distance.

  “They’re digging,” he whispered. “Digging down to free the wrtla. He’s calling them… commanding them. We have to put a stop to it.”

  Mariela stared at him blankly.

  Andrew looked up at the ceiling. “We can’t kill them all. We’ll have to… call in somebody else.”

  Mariela pointed at him.

  Andrew nodded. “You’re right. I’m what they called in. We’re far out here, too. At least a few weeks travel from the closest Iber fleet base. We’ll have to think of something.”

  He turned and moved on, closer to the sound of grinding stone – the sound of digging.

  Eventually, the tunnel widened to a large, cavernous staging area, full of equipment and littered with tools. In the whole space, only two people could be seen. Seemingly genderless, they sat near each other in grey coveralls, holding an identical pose: their knees were pulled up against their chins, and they were almost imperceptibly mumbling, rocking slightly on their haunches.

  Andrew hesitated. He could easily kill both of them before they could react, but he didn’t bring a suppressor for his rifle. Of course, even if he had, the rest of the people in the mine would be alerted due to the echoing nature of the caverns. He slid out of the tunnel and over to a railed-in work area. A few of the computer terminals were on here, but clearly hadn’t been touched in some time. A thick layer of dust covered everything and was caked onto the keyboards.

  He watched his two marks carefully. He kneeled down to pause, then flinched as Mariela banged into a chair beside him. It hit the metal desktop and reverberated in the space. The two grey people did not move. Curious, Andrew began to move forward, then froze. He saw a vision of a few seconds in the future.

  The two people were running toward them, screaming. In the vision, he felled both of them.

  Strange, he thought. Not my death, but theirs… unavoidable?

  He didn’t have time to mull it over. Mariela bumped into the railing and it toppled over, all twenty feet of it. It apparently had never been secured to the platform. The heads of both people snapped toward them. They rose quickly, their eyes widening in alarm.

  Andrew quickly shot each of them twice in the chest. The second victim – a woman, he could see now – staggered forward, unwilling to accept the reality that she was dead. Andrew shot her once again at center mass, and she fell like a sack of potatoes.

  A
ndrew looked over to see Mariela shrinking against the desk, her gun forgotten on the ground. She had her ears covered.

  “Damn,” Andrew said. “I forgot you needed hearing protection. You’d better toughen up, I’m sure more of them are on the way.” He tapped Mariela as he moved past her, over to another desk facing out on the platform, giving him some slight cover and a place to rest his rifle for better accuracy.

  Nobody came.

  Andrew allowed himself to listen to his past self – Andy – and heard nothing but the former ravings. Mariela had retrieved her shotgun. Andrew signaled her to wait. He hopped off the platform and went to a nearby pile of equipment. Amid the discarded elements was a pair of active earmuffs. They had been left on. Hoping the battery wasn’t dead, he switched them off and then back on, relieved to see a small blue light let him know there was still charge remaining. He figured they had an auto-off feature.

  He slung his rifle and went back to the platform. He helped Mariela down, who was very careful with her shotgun, then put the earmuffs on her head. He found the volume knob for the external microphone and cranked it up.

  Andrew whispered, “You should be able to hear me really well now, but these will stop the guns from deafening you again, yeah?”

  She nodded.

  “Come on.”

  She followed him as he walked toward the sound of machines. Two dead bodies lay in a state of suspended decomposition near a cart, both their heads turned into smashed craters. The blood was long dried. On a garden world, one with insects and a full microbiome, it would have been a far more gruesome sight. As it was, it was just one more image to file away.

  They entered another tunnel. The sodium lights were lying on the floor in a long strip, dimmed by layers of grey dust. It was almost foggy inside, so packed was the air with the debris of crushed rock. Andrew flipped on his flashlight as they neared the end of the light strand. It barely cut through the dusty dark, igniting countless motes in a long beam flashing out to the abyss.