Pierce had to answer for his crime, and perhaps Stellan could regain some control. His one consolation was that Daelen was safe in medical, away from all of this madness. Knowing that was the only way he could focus on saving the Atlas.
"Wait up, Chief!" Doug huffed. He'd followed Stellan to the cargo bay in hopes he could help. Now, he followed in hopes he could talk sense into Stellan.
"Pierce had to do it," Doug said. "They were getting torn up in there. It was mercy."
"For the ones we'd lost," Stellan said. "Hundreds of others? He killed them."
At the central lift, there was an awkward current between them as Stellan wasn't sure whether Doug followed in support or to rush to Pierce's aid. The doors to the lift opened, and they boarded.
"You shouldn't be doing this now," Doug said.
"Are you going to stop me?"
Doug knew he couldn't if he tried. "No."
"So what are you going to do, Doug?"
"You aren't thinking straight."
Stellan laughed at the thought of Doug being a beacon of rationality.
"I'm serious, Stel. With everything that's happened, you haven't had time to grieve or anything. Are you sure you want to do this?"
Stellan's eyes narrowed. "Do what?"
"Go against the captain. Mutiny. Don't worry about what I'm going to do. Worry about what you're going to do. I just want to keep the peace. Keep us all on the same team. This only leads one way."
"There's no such thing as peace," Stellan said.
The lift stopped, and the doors parted onto the command deck. The frantic tapping of the department heads on their glass keyboards stopped, and they craned their heads in dismay.
"And we haven't all been on the same team for a while now."
Stellan marched down the command corridor toward the bridge, where Pierce stood like a monolith at his platform. The sight of him made the fire in Stellan's stomach rage. It burned in the back of his throat.
Doug lumbered behind him. He could feel the eyes of the department heads lingering.
Pierce stood his ground as Stellan marched closer. Pierce's solid stone face gave nothing away, and Stellan's eyes burned. Some kind of energy sparked between them as the on-looking crew willed them to stay away from each other. Pierce's face changed when he realized Stellan was not stopping. It became a surprised, dumbfounded look that shattered when Stellan's fist connected with the bony line of his jaw.
Doug tried his best to restrain Stellan. In seconds, Arlo was on his feet and there to break it up. None of that mattered because Pierce showed no will to fight even as Stellan tried to break from Doug's hold and hit him again.
"I know you're angry," Pierce said, wiping his mouth and rubbing his jaw. "We did what we had to do."
"No!" Stellan screamed. "It didn't have to go like that!"
"I made the call!" Pierce said. "Would you rather I let you in there to join them in quarantine?"
"They weren't soldiers! They didn't sign up for this! They were innocent people who deserved a chance!"
"Everyone deserves a chance," Pierce said. "Can you give it to them?"
"How do you know I'm not sick? How do you know you're not sick?"
"If we are, we all are, and we're all dead anyway," Pierce said. "Someone had to make the call. And goddammit, I'd do it again if I had to! Anything to save as many as I can."
"We owed it to them to try! We owed it to ourselves to try!" Stellan said, finally shaking Doug's arms off. Doug reached for him again, but Stellan showed no desire to continue his attack. The time for throwing fists had passed.
"What if you'd failed? What if you'd gone in there and the quarantine failed and it got out? You would have given your life for nothing. As much as you seem to want to do that, what then? What about the rest who deserve a chance? What about Daelen?" Pierce asked.
"Don't you dare!" Stellan said, again reaching for Pierce. Arlo and Doug struggled to hold him back.
"I know you won't let this go, Stellan, and that's fine," Pierce said. "In time, you'll see it clearly. I know that, too. For now, do your duty, and go with Officer Fowler into holding. You've been through a lot. Cool off. We'll get you if we need you."
Stellan shook Doug and Arlo off. "This won't work. No one's going to make it. We're all going to die."
"Get him out of here!" Pierce said, and Stellan went willingly.
Eleven
The Atlas shuddered, and the light drive's drone wound down into a silence that left an absence in their bodies like a destructive addiction that was no longer sated. They noticed it instantly, and while their minds cleared, a part of them wanted it back.
For the time, the light drive had fulfilled its duty and would rest. The run junkies, the Atlas' crew who lived in that space between worlds, would have to wait. They had returned to the Shiva.
Pierce leaned on his railing, set on his platform above the crew, weary and haggard like a tired watchman. Though he had no cue from the sun, no regular cycle of daylight, his body knew the hour was late and that it was overdue for a sleep cycle. It had been a long time since he last slept after leaving the Shiva, and even then, he had not slept well, wracked with worry over the accident, the planet and its precious cargo, and Emra.
Most of all, he worried about her, his last bastion before total obscurity. He looked forward to the few days he was able to spend with her each month because she didn't look at him like everyone else looked at him. She admired and respected him, but she felt those emotions as an equal. She was the only person he could connect with. She was the only person in the universe he could allow himself to be vulnerable with.
Even through all that had transpired on the Atlas, the deaths of his crew and the pursuing madness, his mind dwelled on her. For a moment, he wondered if the exhaustion had affected his judgment. He wondered if the desire to bury his face in her warm chest made him selfishly endanger the lives of his crew. He wondered if the way he justified his decisions to himself, that the sum was greater than the parts, that some would need to be sacrificed to save the rest, was all so he could see her again and to just ensure she was okay.
Perhaps that was true, but the fact remained that he was saving more lives by allowing some to perish. Letting go, as it was, never troubled Pierce when he thought of it in this light, focusing on the good. Yet, it concerned him that, if he pulled his scope out far enough, even letting them all die was preferable to allowing the epidemic that plagued his ship to reach New Earth. Of that much, regardless of his emotions, he knew he'd done right, and his conscience was clear.
"Sir," Navigator Evans said. "The Atlas is showing substantially more debris than before. I'm not sure we can squeeze through."
"Arlo?" Pierce said. His pilot bit his lip and gazed nervously at the proximity readout interface before him.
"All stop," Pierce said. "On screen."
The Atlas placed an image of what lay in front of them, and it made Pierce stand at attention, fully awakened in every meaning of the word. Exhaustion no longer buzzed in his mind. All he felt was loss and heartache.
The Shiva of the Trinity lay burning on the face of the Apophis planet, its arms wrapped around the celestial body's surface in a lover's embrace. Pierce's command for all stop suddenly held more meaning, as no one on the bridge moved or spoke.
Time dilated in a way Pierce had never experienced before as he struggled to comprehend the meaning of what he saw. It takes the tenacious mind time to recover when it sees something that is contrary to what it believes absolutely. For a moment, the expectation or prediction of what it might see overlaps what it actually sees, and the resulting paradox leads to physical pain as the brain dumps a cocktail of emotions into the body.
"No," Pierce said, his eyes refusing to blink for fear that closing might be a kind of finality, that in that split second of darkness, his brain would process and accept what he saw.
Someone on the bridge gasped. Another cried. Most stayed silent. The destroyer of worlds had taken its last l
ife: its own.
As he began to admit the reality of what he saw, Pierce could look upon it no more, and he had to see something, anything other than the screen.
"Sir," Evans said. "I'm picking up a beacon in the debris field." Pierce's stomach fluttered with the hope that it was a lifeboat, a chance that she could still be alive.
"The prefix in the signature reads as a comms buoy," Evans said. No life forms. Comms buoys were used to relay or leave messages. This one would tell the Shiva's final tale. It would be its crew's collective epitaph.
"Let's hear it," Pierce whispered. Evans instructed the Atlas to play the message.
In place of the image of the Shiva's wreckage, a video of Commander Ashland's face appeared. She looked harder than the last time they'd seen her, and her blue eyes peered at them ghostly, almost transparent. Behind her hung pictures on the wall that Pierce recognized: her grandchildren running in a field of tall grass, another picture of them with their parents: Ines, Emra's daughter, and Ethan, Ines' husband. Pierce was the only one who knew what they meant to her, and he was the only one who knew they were the reason Commander Ashland had committed herself to the space mining program so entirely on an excavator, isolating herself in oblivion. They had all died in an accident years ago, and like so many on the Atlas would have understood, she had used service to NESMA as a way to create a junction in her timeline, to effectively start a new life.
The pictures placed her at her desk in her cabin when she recorded the message.
She spoke: "This is Commander Emra Ashland of the NESMA excavator Shiva of the Trinity. We have failed. This message is a warning. Beware this place.
"Several weeks ago, we arrived at Apophis 259 and, as instructed, immediately began digging for the layer beneath the crust, which was an unidentified material. We refined, processed, and packaged it per established procedure, and by all accounts, this crew performed exceptionally. Something went wrong. I don't know where it started. My crew began to act strangely. We thought it was the black madness. We thought being so deep in the black and spending so much time in FTL was playing tricks with our minds. The death of my senior engineer was sobering. Others died of bizarre circumstances, and violence broke out all over the ship. We barely had enough unaffected people to hold it together.
"That's when the Atlas showed up to make its pickup. During transfer, there was an incident, and two of my men were exposed to direct contact with the material, in direct violation of containment code article 252.59. Against my better judgment, I allowed a third man, from the Atlas, to be brought back to be treated aboard his home ship. I know now how grave a mistake that was.
"When my men awoke hours later, they seemed fine. Healthy. But they descended quickly into madness. We tried to restrain them, but they attacked several other crew before we could subdue them. One was killed in the struggle.
"The crew they attacked also began to display signs of madness, and several hours later, the man that was killed emerged from the morgue, attacking everyone in sight. We barely managed to control that situation. We wouldn't be so lucky again.
"The ones he attacked, if they didn't die immediately, died within hours. A fever accompanied their dementia, and eventually, death. They, too, rose from the dead. I've personally observed instances of this, and as a result, we've lost control of this ship. Even the extra security forces we borrowed from the Atlas only staved off the inevitable.
"This plague or curse, whatever it is, we couldn't stop it, and it can't be allowed off this ship. It can't be given the chance to get back to New Earth. So I'm going to take the Shiva into what remains of the Apophis planet, killing all aboard. If you find this message and find my ship still in orbit of the Apophis planet, you'll know I have failed, and I beg you to put this crew out of its misery. If I succeed, that hopefully won't be necessary. To be sure, burn this place.
"There is one loose end that is beyond my reach. The carrier Atlas was almost filled to capacity with this material. That it is the cause of our blight I have no doubt.
"Gordon, if you are the one to find this, I am sorry. All I have left is hope that you won't have to do what I must do, but I have to order you to destroy your ship, its contents, and all the crew if you cannot ensure the safety of New Earth. Nothing is more important. This thing kills humanity, the good with the bad, everything that makes us what we are.
"My only regret is the time we shared was limited. I know you will do what is necessary."
Outside the vantage point of the video message recorder, pounding, gunfire, and distant screams distracted Ashland. She regarded the sounds with indifference. If her concern escalated, she didn't show it.
She fixed her eyes deliberately in the center of the screen.
"I love you, Gordon," Emra said. She then reached down into a drawer in her desk and removed a handgun. Placing it on the table, she stood, reached behind the camera, and the message ended. The image on the screen cut to black, and then the Atlas display faded into the burning wreckage of the Shiva.
Ashland had succeeded, and now it was Pierce's turn to do his duty. He wasn't ready to execute that order yet, however. Returning to the Shiva was isolation in itself, and they had bought some time.
Pierce walked toward the lift at the back of the bridge. "Get that shit off my ship."
"Sir?" Evans said timidly. "If we open one, we open all."
"They're gone now, and there's nothing we can do for them," Pierce said. "We're not giving up on everyone else. Not yet."
As Pierce walked toward the lift, he knew more than anyone the urgency of their situation. He knew he must be strong, and he knew all of their lives depended on his leadership, but he needed to do something before executing his final options. Before he could be strong, he needed to feel vulnerable again, even if it would be for the last time.
He remembered, in his desk drawer, beneath some pictures of his daughter at a young age, some medals, and a certificate of honorable discharge from the Unity Corps, his sidearm, which was very much like the one issued to Emra, lay in an oak box. He had no doubt anymore that he would need it.
Twelve
Pilot Arlo Stone and Navigator Cooper Evans watched the surveillance feed from cargo bay seventeen on the holographic wall of the bridge. The bodies lying on the floor said nothing, but in a way, the dead spoke to them. And they listened. Out of respect, neither of them wanted to disturb the silence.
It wasn't long, though, before the bodies began to move.
Carter was the first to reanimate, and Arlo and Evans couldn't believe it. Even when Carter stood on the very floor he painted red, they didn't believe it.
"Holy shit!" Arlo said. "Are you seeing this? Am I seeing this!?"
Carter slowly rose and then looked around like he wasn't aware of his surroundings.
"How is he still alive?" Evans asked.
"He can't be," Arlo said. "He's got a fucking hole in his chest the size of my fist, and there's no oxygen in the entire bay." Arlo looked at Evans. "There's no oxygen in that bay, right?"
Evans moved some application windows around on his terminal. "Right."
Carter swayed side to side in a lonely dance. His jaw opened and closed absently, mouthing the words to some song they couldn't hear, and they wondered if there was something in that place where Carter existed, a world between theirs and the next.
"Is this what someone stuck in purgatory looks like?" Evans asked.
"I don't think so," Arlo said with a grimace. "That's not Carter. He's long gone."
"If that's not Carter, who is he?"
"I don't even think it's human."
The idea that the thing they were seeing was no longer a man had not crossed Evans' mind. When he looked closer, into the thing's eyes, he wondered if the body was simply a vehicle. The man they knew was gone. He had no doubt about that, but there was something behind those eyes, an emptiness, like the blackness of space.
In the vacant stare of the man that was Carter Raines, something remained behind
the wheel. Something drove the limbs that were once under the power of a reasonable, logical man, but as Evans watched Carter and considered the things he'd seen this thing do, he knew it lacked reason and logic.
More than anything, however, Carter now lacked the restraint of conscience and awareness, of empathy and sympathy. The void in those parts of his being released his body to commit the acts they'd seen on the surveillance feed. Evans didn't think a human being would ever be able to do what Carter had done relentlessly, and he realized what made a being human was what had been purged from Carter's mind. He now was just a being, and Evans resented it for even appearing human.
"Commander Ashland said people went mad before they became like this. She said the bites changed them. What do you think it wants?" Evans asked.
"It's trying to survive, I think," Arlo said. "People get bit and then become like him. I think it's trying to spread."
"I keep thinking," Evans said, "what if this is it? What if we're sick and don't even know it, and what if this is all in our minds?"
"You're not sick."
"How do you know?"
They couldn't take their eyes off the screen. The fact that Carter moved but didn't move, an aimless wandering of body parts, hypnotized them, and then movement elsewhere caught their attention. The flick of a wrist. The twitch of a foot. The curl of a finger.
"Did you see that?" Evans pointed at the screen.
"I don't know," Arlo said.
Then, they could not mistake the movement of an arm reaching out from under a pile of bodies and digging its fingernails into the deck floor. A leg bent and worked its knee to the floor for support. Some of the dead, the ones attacked by the madness, began to rise. Some slithered out from under other bodies. Others trembled clumsily like children learning to walk, unsure of their appendages. A few stumbled. Once they were fully upright, they each looked around like amnesiacs, having no memory of where they were. And then they joined Carter in his unpredictable swaying.
All the while, Carter didn't even notice.
"They're alive!" Evans shouted.
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