"You know I can't."
"I could make it an order," she said, and they laughed together again. Pierce knew she wasn't serious because she wouldn't abuse her power for her benefit any more than he would. He knew for certain so many things then.
"I'll have some of our security officers detailed to the Shiva if you like," Pierce said. "We'll be back in a month, and you'll see then that everything will be all right."
"What if it isn't?"
"We'll figure something out," Pierce said. "I promise." He kissed her softly again. It was the purest kiss either of them ever experienced. There was no physical arousal. Only their minds and emotions touched for a brief, perfect moment, and it was sweet and comforting. It was enough.
"Close your eyes," he said. She complied.
Pierce reached into a cargo pocket in his pants and pulled out a small paperback novel, its pages yellowed with age and its back cover torn off long ago. It was a story about a young boy who left his love to go off and fight a war, but when he returned, he found she had died. It was titled, The Long Way Home.
"You remembered!" She clapped and grasped at the book. Greedily, she flipped through the pages, feeling the warmth and crisp paper edges across her thumbs.
"Of course."
"I'll have it back to you on your next run out."
Pierce dismissed the thought with the wave of a hand. "It's a gift."
Six
The refineries on the Shiva churned earth with an indifferent malice. The machines moved steadily, their arms dipping and rotating in perfect radial arcs, skimming the fat away from the chunks of rock and ore, and Stellan marveled at how effortless it was. The blades cut; the lasers fired. They did what they were designed to do with a precision and accuracy that was without the taint of intent. The machines didn't mean to do anything. They simply worked. However, Stellan had no doubt that what they did, the continuous eradication of earth, was evil.
The temperature in the loading bay built up from the burning of the waste earth, and the acrid smell of smoldering metal licked the back of his throat. Tears rose in his eyes as he helped buckle a small load of material into a crate for transport.
"What's the matter?" Wendy said. "Your dog die?" She punched him playfully on the shoulder.
"Girl, one of these times, you're going to crack that joke on someone after their dog really did die," Rick said.
"That's why I go with the dog. It's not as serious as a grandmother, and it's just as funny."
"If you say so."
"How do you stand this air?" Stellan asked, struggling with the final latch on the crate. "It can't be healthy."
"We're supposed to wear respirators," Rick said, moving to assist him. "Safety first and all that. But half the time, they don't do a lick of good. They're so old they wouldn't filter a cigarette. Anyway, we aren't getting any of the actual off gassing. This is just the odor. Those guys next door in the refinery, though, they're getting a face full off this stuff, believe you me." The two men pulled in unison, and the final latch closed on the side of the crate. Rick bade it farewell with an affectionate pat.
"You get used to it," Rick said, "but I've never gotten used to how much earth we waste to get the good stuff."
"What do you mean?" Stellan asked.
"Rick's just being sentimental," Wendy said with a dismissive eye roll.
"One-thousandth of one percent," Rick said. "This twenty-ton crate of whatever the hell this stuff is, it's from two million tons of earth. That means 99.999 percent of what the Shiva picks up is destroyed. It doesn't so much excavate as devour."
"And melodramatic," Wendy said. Rick shot her a sharp glance, and she smiled. "I mean it in the best possible way." Innocence was easy for her to pull off; everyone had to play their strengths.
Captain Pierce and Commander Ashland neared, and Stellan noticed when he heard their laughter. Ashland was holding a black brick in her hand, and was clutching a book to her breast. Even though she looked like she hadn't slept in days, a rosy color billowed in her cheeks as she smiled like she couldn't help it.
How could anything be wrong if the commander of the New Earth mining fleet was giddy as a child?
Pierce hadn't told Stellan of their relationship, of how she made him feel. Pierce didn't speak about his feelings. Stellan only knew because of their tone when they were together, that musical language in every person's voice. Pierce spoke softer to her than he spoke to anyone else, and it went beyond respect. The gentleness in his voice touched her as if he would die before he saw harm befall her.
Stellan wondered, then, why Pierce didn't seem more concerned.
"Chief," Pierce said, his voice hard as a rock, "how many men can you spare?"
"That depends on how long I'd need to be without them."
"Commander Ashland has requested a bit more manpower. It would be until the next run."
Stellan felt somewhat relieved that Pierce was concerned enough to order a detail of security personnel, but Stellan needed his men. He needed their eyes and ears on the Atlas, and he needed their presence. As a believer in symbols, Stellan thought simply stationing his men in the right places helped their people not only stay in line, but also feel better about their surroundings. The reassurance helped people live and work. It helped establish a sense of normalcy.
"I can work up a list of names and have it to you before we leave."
"Do it," Pierce said.
"Thank you, Chief Lund," Ashland said. "I suppose you men have some work to do, so I'll leave you to it."
"Yes, Commander." Pierce saluted through a smile. Their gaze lingered on each other as she turned and made her way out of the loading bay.
Before Ashland got far, a man screamed, accompanied by a loud crash of heavy metal. The metallic smell grew so strong they could taste it, and they thought they'd never be rid of the taste of iron, like blood, in their mouths.
Seven
The walls of the Shiva's loading bay encircled them like an arena of pain, the focal point of all of the excavator's dark desires, which man had given it. It was where the ship brought its prey, thoroughly ravished and finally killed. It was where beautiful things moved on, and they were the carriers of the dead, like Kharon, Hades' ferryman.
Stellan wondered how damned they were, if they'd been dead men helping the underworld all along and if he was finally beginning to see the monsters within. Maybe insanity was simply seeing the world clearly. Maybe the black madness was waking from a dream.
A hatch door opened from the refinery, expelling a fine black cloud like dragon's breath. A man clutched the valve handle on the door, stumbling into the greater hall of the loading bay, a plume of black smoke veiling his face.
Stellan swore he could see the man's eyes, though, closed one moment, lazily opening the next, black streaks running outward from his irises like fractures on an egg shell or jagged fingers of obsidian, hiding just beneath the man's corneas.
He fell to his knees, and Stellan's world began to shake. Almost involuntarily, he was running toward the collapsed man.
The shroud of smoke around the man's face lifted, and Stellan caught him as he fell backward, his head flopping over Stellan's arm like a rag. With his eyes and mouth agape in horror, his pupils rolled, but there was no trace of the black cracks Stellan thought he'd seen.
"Medic!" Stellan screamed.
Rick stuttered to a stop at their side, limping on knees that burned with age and arthritic ache.
"Oh God!" he said. "Tom!"
Tom's feet began to knock the deck like a tap dancer with no rhythm.
"He's seizing!" Stellan said. Rick grabbed a small, cylindrical flashlight from Tom's belt and handed to Stellan.
"Use it as a bit, so he doesn't bite his goddamn tongue off!"
The refinery churned on. The arms dipped and rolled. The machine continued to turn. A crowd gathered.
The hatch door swung out again, crashing against the wall. Two more men stumbled from the room, falling on either side o
f Stellan, Tom, and Rick. Both were crew of the Shiva.
"Take one!" Stellan said. Rick rolled the man over who had fallen on his stomach and braced his head between his knees. He pulled his own flashlight from his tool belt and tried to work it between the man's clenching teeth. Rick worked the man's jaw from the chin, and just when he thought he had it, his fingers slipped, and the man's teeth clamped onto the side of Rick's hand. When he was able to pull his hand free, the man's teeth snapped together, breaking an incisor in half.
Rick didn't pause because he was used to working in tight spaces with plenty of sharp edges to catch some skin on. It didn't faze him.
Pierce emerged from the crowd and didn't need to be told to help the other seizing man. The three of them kneeled in place, bracing the heads of the deck hands and could only watch their feet stutter and wait it out.
Across the loading bay, Commander Ashland looked down at the black brick in her hand and let it roll off her fingertips and onto the deck, like dropping a piece of trash. She watched it lay still for a moment, and then she turned and walked out of the bay, leaving her men to kick and shake on the deck of the loading bay while the Shiva's gears continued to churn the Apophis planet to dust.
Eight
Shortly after Commander Ashland left, the three men stopped seizing. Their shaking eased, their boot heels ceasing to knock and instead drawing narrow ellipses on the deck floor, dashing lines left and right, back and forth. Jerking motions settled into lazy, erratic stretching. And finally, simple tremors and the occasional twitch, flipping their wrists like puppeteers, moving their marionettes in choreographed dance routines.
When they were still, Pierce gently rested his man's head on the deck floor. One of the Shiva's crew took up for him, and Pierce walked across the loading bay to where Commander Ashland had left so silently, without a hint of the smile he so loved. He thought it was odd, but he excused her, knowing she could have done nothing to help them.
He kneeled and examined the black brick closer. For a moment, he thought its surface shimmered. The lighting in the loading bay was not evenly distributed. The brick lay in shadow.
When Pierce reached for it, he felt a pull so subtle he thought he was again imagining things. It was strong enough, though, to convince him it had happened.
He picked it up, and it felt cold in his hands. With its smooth surface and deep black color, he thought it was nothingness. Like space, it was a vacuum but in solid form, something to lock inside the absence of heat, pressure, air, love. When gazing into it, loneliness surged so powerfully it that it sucked away his entire world, and, like gazing at the Apophis planet, it left only a primal malice that he thought might drive him mad.
Stellan approached Pierce silently, respectfully. He saw the brick. More importantly, he saw how Pierce looked at the brick and was concerned. Whatever it was, it had his attention.
"We should take Tom back to the Atlas," Stellan said. "It stinks here. Besides, there's nobody better than Daelen."
Pierce nodded. He heard Stellan's concern in his voice, but he didn't care. A part of him was convinced something was really wrong. The rest of him knew it was too late to turn back. They had entered a jungle unwittingly. If they panicked and raced back the way they came, it would only get them killed faster, as predators had no doubt boxed them in. They had to learn what they were up against. They had to remain calm.
Pierce dropped the black brick in his cargo pants pocket.
"What is it anyway?" Stellan asked.
"A gift." Pierce tried to make his smile comforting, but Stellan saw through it.
Three medics rushed in with maglev gurneys, and when they reached the three men who remained unconscious, Rick stood up and backed away. The medics each took a patient and waved their links. They checked the results of their scans, nodding as if they had any idea what they were looking at, and then commenced loading their patients onto their gurneys.
"We'll take ours with us," Pierce said. The one who worked on Tom nodded in agreement.
Rick wandered over to Pierce and Stellan, deep in thought. His hand stung, so he shook the pain away and examined the gash on the inside of his palm, amazed to find teeth marks like a curved, dashed, red line across his skin. Two streams of blood ran down his forearm, and he wiped them away with a dirty rag from his back pocket.
"What happened?" Stellan asked.
"When I slipped my flashlight in between his teeth, he got a nibble."
"You should have Daelen look at that, too," Stellan said.
"I'll be fine," Rick said. "Should we finish the pickup?"
"Might as well," Pierce said. "We're here. Tell everyone to be more careful. And wear your goddamn respirators."
Rick nodded and walked off to continue the operation, shaking drops of blood from his hand onto the deck.
"That's rather casual, don't you think?" Stellan said. "We might as well continue because we're here?"
"Damage has been done," Pierce said. "It can't get any worse as long as everyone uses their head and watches their ass. Otherwise, if we go back empty handed, it'll be mine. I don't think it's too much to ask at this point."
Pierce walked in the direction in which Commander Ashland had left. Only steps away, he reached down to feel his cargo pocket to ensure its contents were still there.
Nine
The Shiva's medical personnel stabilized Tom and transferred control of his maglev gurney to Stellan's link, and he navigated the device back to the Atlas. He moved slowly and carefully, fearing he would do more harm than good if he rushed.
The air between Stellan and Tom had never been so still and quiet. It felt good to help Tom without his protests.
By the time Stellan got Tom to the medical deck on the Atlas, Daelen had been informed of Tom's condition, though the details she'd received over the ship's intranet had been vague. A seizure was serious, and any number of things could cause one. Not all of them were cause for concern.
Stellan floated Tom through the door, and Daelen shot up from her office chair and rushed to them.
"What happened?" she cried.
Stellan told her about the collapse and the seizure. He told her the scream startled him and lingered with him the most. He did not tell her about the blackness in Tom's eyes.
She pried open Tom's eyelids with her fingers and shined a light in them to check for pupillary response. She turned his head from side to side to check his oculocephalic reflex. Stellan peered over her shoulder for those black cracks in Tom's eyes and was relieved to see none. Daelen waved her hand over Tom's body, and several windows leaped from her link, displaying preliminary diagnostics.
"Is he in a coma?" Stellan asked.
"No. He's just unconscious. He has to be unconscious without responding to stimuli for six hours before he's technically comatose, and I have to do some other tests to figure out the cause. Right now, it's just important we keep him stabilized and hope he wakes up on his own."
She leaned over Tom until her face was inches from his. "Tom? Can you hear me?"
He didn't respond, and Daelen stood up with a furrowed brow, deep in thought. Stellan didn't like when Daelen didn't have the answers. She always did; it was a constant, something he could depend on.
"Margo?" Daelen called.
"Yes, Dr. Lund?" Margo emerged from a workstation where she no doubt had been performing endless perfunctory tests.
"Take Tom to a private room, please."
"Should I prep for intubation?"
"No," Daelen said. "Not right now, but we should monitor his breathing. Keep an eye on him, and note his respiration. Take some blood. Put it at the top of the order."
Margo took control of the maglev gurney with her link and navigated it toward the back of the medical deck.
"Tell me what happened,” Daelen said to Stellan. “Everything."
"I already told you what I know. He came out of the door, collapsed, and then had a seizure."
"What about before the door?"
&nb
sp; "I wasn't there."
"If you had to guess?"
"Daelen," he said, "I wasn't there!"
She could understand his frustration. Stellan's job was to prevent accidents from happening. He saw Tom's condition as a failure just as, if he died, she would see his death as her failure.
She reached out to him, and he recoiled.
"I'm sorry," he said.
"It's okay. What's wrong?"
"What do you mean?"
"I can tell by your look that there's more to this."
"I have a look?"
"You do."
"I don't know," he said. "Something's wrong. I can feel it. I've felt it this whole run. Worse, I feel like my brain knows it, too, and is teasing me. I'm trying to stay in control, but the more I do, the more I feel like it slips away."
"It's okay, love."
She reached out to him again, and he let her cup her hand around the back of his neck. He brought his forehead down to meet hers, and they stood there together for a moment, basking in the silence.
"All right," Daelen said, breaking their contact. She wandered as she spoke, absently speaking with her hands, dictating to herself out loud. "You bring me an unconscious man, and I can't figure out why he won't wake up. He hasn't been struck. There's no evidence of brain trauma. And you say the two other men in the room with him also came out seizing and are unconscious, so it's logical to deduce that whatever happened to Tom happened to them as well. What could put them all out like that and not leave any obvious traces?"
"A gas?"
"Maybe," Daelen said. "We won't know for sure until we get his blood results. Something in that refinery did this."
"You'll take good care of him. You'll bring him out of it."
"It's not Tom I'm worried about, love," Daelen said. "It's everyone else."
Ten
Stellan returned to the Shiva to help with the remainder of the loading process, leaving Daelen to put together the pieces of the puzzle of Tom's unconsciousness. All she could think about, however, was that she still hadn't told Stellan about their unborn child.
She worked in Tom's room, performing menial tasks. She just wanted to keep her hands busy so her mind wouldn't run too fast for her to keep up.
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