OxCrimes

  Thank you.

  Confluence. Existence and non-existence, tearing at the fabric of reality, at the walls between universes.

  For killing me.

  One more mirror stood in the cellar. Felder saw himself reflected in it: this Felder, this moment, fixed by the decisions and actions that had led him to this place. The walls drew away from him, leaving only shadows behind, and out of those shadows emerged children, some little more than crawling infants but others older, and more watchful. Their rage was a cold thing, for there is no rage quite like that of thwarted youth, and he experienced it as a multitude of surgical hooks and blades cutting into his flesh. His reflected self began to bleed, and he supposed that he must have been bleeding too, although he could see no wounds. He could feel them, though. They were all inside: deep inside.

  He died slowly, or one of him did, the only version of himself that he would ever know. In the logic of his dying he understood that, in another universe – in many universes – the torment of Dr Lyall by her children would continue, but in this one it had ended, just as his own must surely, mercifully end.

  As the life faded from him, a line of ink moved inexorably across the filthy floor, then faded away to nothing.

  YRSA SIGURDARDÓTTIR, born in Iceland in 1963, works as a civil engineer in Reykjavik, as well as writing crime novels and children’s fiction. She is best known for her six crime novels featuring Thora Gudmundsdottir, an attorney and single mother, the latest of which is The Silence of the Sea. The series has been a bestseller across Europe. In 2012 she published her first horror novel, I Remember You, combining crime and the supernatural.

  Black Sky

  Yrsa Sigurdardóttir

  The message was disturbing. It began with electronic crackle and ended with a plea. ‘Help us. Please help us.’ The piteous voice sounded almost rusty, as if the radio waves had gathered dust on their long journey. And the words were out of place. There was nothing wrong and no one needed any help. Dixie pricked up her ears in case more was to follow, but in return she got nothing but a dense silence. The frequency and wavelength of the communication was still visible on the radio dashboard but gave nothing away. No one on her team had been given this wavelength, or anyone from the new base. Since there were no other people around, this implied that the strange message had either come out of nowhere or did not exist at all. Which was ridiculous. She had heard something. Some statistical anomaly must have aligned electric disturbance in such a way that it came out as words. Dixie relaxed. That was it. She had read too much into the sounds, imagined a voice where there was none. She was, after all, in a place where the senses could easily be confused. It was a known fact and believed to relate to lack of stimulation. There was little to see, little to hear and almost nothing to smell. But despite this knowledge, the echo of the eerie voice in her head made her long to rip the headset off, throw it into the farthest corner of the control room and stamp on it until it became one with the colourless flooring.

  ‘David? Is that you?’ No reply.

  Dixie linked up to the system operator. ‘Jenna. I just got an odd message over the headset. Can you check it for me?’ She read out the frequency.

  ‘Must have been a glitch. It’s not from us or the commissioning team at Base-3. Don’t know who it could be. Want me to recover it for you? I can also trace where it’s coming from. Get you a direction and distance.’

  ‘No.’ Her reply was curt, more so than Dixie intended. ‘It was nothing.’

  ‘OK. Whatever.’ As always Jenna sounded uninterested. Nothing outside the world of signals, pixels, processes and fragments held any importance for her. ‘I’m up to my neck here anyway. There seems to be something wrong with the communications systems. People can’t reach home. Most likely your thing had something to do with that.’ The line went silent as the connection was cut. No small talk. No goodbye.

  Dixie got back to work, forcing the message out of her head. The last mining shift she would ever supervise was about to wrap up. Only five hours of sunlight remained, to be followed by a little over two weeks of total darkness. It was a still darkness unlike any night anywhere on Earth and the long day’s departure was not marked by twilight. The sun simply vanished from the black sky, slowly disappearing behind the rounded corner of the horizon and cutting off visibility. Day, night. Night, day. There was no need to celebrate the never-ending cycle with any fuss. Life was never meant to set foot here, much less make itself comfortable and stay. In the original scheme of things, the moon was meant to be barren, simply to serve the purpose of powering tides on earth thereby ensuring that oceans did not become stagnant and toxic to marine life. Aside from this role the moon was of no consequence. And it showed. Beauty had found no foothold here; nothing remotely appealing was to be seen aside from the starry sky. Even the grey colour of the regolith was monotone, showing only the merest hints of variety in its hue. Nature’s artistry had been left out of the picture and even the most gushing of bleeding hearts would find it hard to muster up enthusiastic complaints about the strip mining that took place here. This made Dixie’s life a lot easier. She had no qualms about her job, even when looking over the seemingly endless ground they had covered since her assignment began just under a year ago. Within the perimeter of the mined area the ground looked pretty much the same as it had when virgin. Grey. The works left the terrain a little smoother, removing the occasional small crater and any bumps or rocks and replacing them with uniform ripples. It was almost as if they were striving to produce the solar system’s largest Zen garden, not harvesting helium-3 for Earth’s bottomless energy production requirements.

  Dixie looked away from the control room screens that provided her with an overview of the outside. She blinked, fighting off a fatigue that had appeared out of nowhere. She had slept well, as she always did thanks to the sleeping aids administered religiously to the entire crew. This yearning to lie down had nothing to do with lack of sleep. Neither was it related to physical exhaustion; to her recollection, she had done nothing strenuous since waking up and strapping on the weights that kept her from walking as if her feet had been replaced with coiled springs while she dozed. The day had been the same as countless others. The lethargy was most likely a result of her body’s increased tolerance for the medication required to get by here. The in-house doctor had told her to look out for this but she had pushed the creeping signs away, not wanting to take more. Already the small pile she swallowed in the morning left her not wanting breakfast. One more pill added to the fistful would most likely cause her to throw up.

  She vaguely recalled being worried about the effects of the medication when she first arrived. Now it seemed so trivial and ridiculous that she couldn’t help but smile. The radiation tracker she carried showed she had so far accumulated radiation that amounted to her having had about seven chest x-rays a day since her arrival. About twice the annual dose she would have received to date down on Earth, but per day. Seven hundred and thirty times more if you measured it by year.

  Perhaps the effects of this had now come home to roost. Her overwhelming feeling of tiredness was compounded by this depressing thought and the conditioning imprinted on her during training kicked in, forcing her into thinking positively. Find something good and focus on it. Focus. Focus. Focus. Her mind came up blank until she finally caught hold of a positive recollection. At least they had lost no one to a radiation burst from solar storms. The warning systems had proved their worth and all outside had managed to shuffle into the underground chambers of the station in time. Chalk up one for her team. Screw radiation. Screw the fact that she’d never be able to bear children. Worse things had happened.

  Dixie repositioned her headset and selected the line that would connect her to David, the foreman currently winding up the shift outside. The final shift. Soon she and the rest of the crew could go back home to Earth. To normality. To life. If her ravaged insides hadn’t planned for death in its place. Or if the pressurisation unit in the shuttle bringing
her and the crew back didn’t break down and kill them all, as had happened to one of the Base-1 teams years ago. She made a mental note to see the doctor. She was obviously showing signs of depression and another pill or two wouldn’t kill her. It would even be good practice for her resumed life on Earth. She didn’t expect the pile of tablets to shrink once she got back home. This she knew for a fact after being allowed to speak to some of those that had manned her position in the past. Not that they had been particularly forthcoming, answering her questions as briefly as possible. At the time she’d felt as if they were merely counting down the minutes until her interview was over. Now she realised she would have been exactly the same. Her contract stipulated one half hour – annually – if future candidates wished to question her. She would give them precisely that. Not a minute more.

  ‘Hi, David. How’s it going?’ The niggling feeling that something was wrong weaselled itself in between her scattered thoughts. Her mind was suddenly filled with images of one of the workers ripping his suit, his body bloating and the saliva in his mouth starting to boil on his tongue. She had been made to watch footage of such accidents before coming here, in preparation. At the time she could not line up the incidents in a worst to least worst scenario. There was no best. Everyone that died here, died horribly.

  The company had always been clear on this. Never once did they try to sweep the hardships of the job under the rug – the moon is only for those tough in body and mind. The weak will die. Only the strong were selected. In the case of her team, those the screening process misjudged had paid for the error with their lives. In the year that had passed two people had died, one who turned out to have a low tolerance for radiation and one of a heart attack after panicking when the temperature control in his suit went haywire. Their bodies had been reduced to dust and gases in the heating chambers as the cost of the trip back to earth was exorbitant, a luxury only allowed the living. The dead stayed behind. It was some consolation that the death toll on her watch was way below the average. Usually a high percentage of the crew members died during the last month of their stay, but she had lost no one since the second death three months ago. Their safety figures were the best to date if you ignored the last crew to work out of now decommissioned Base-1, who all died in an accident on the way home. While still mining they had only lost a single crew member, though.

  ‘Did you hear me David? How is it going?’

  ‘Hxxtr.’ The reply was distorted and the software installed to fix that kicked in. The man’s crisp voice suddenly sounded as if he was standing next to her. ‘Yeah, yeah. We’re OK. I’m making my way back now. The helium-3 containers have been sent by rail to the mass driver and the mobile miners have also been mobilised. The operators will follow them for a while in case something goes wrong at the onset. They are under instructions to be back before nightfall. I’m a bit worried about mobile miner one though. The conveyors stalled and since there is so little time left we didn’t have time to locate the problem, let alone fix it in situ.’

  Dixie didn’t waste time discussing his decision. He’d made the right call and he knew it. It wasn’t as if an extra hour of operation of one machine of the three would make much difference to the yield. ‘How far off mark are we?’ His answer was much as she had expected. Perhaps a little lower. The best areas within reach from the base had already been exhausted. The area they now had to work with contained a mere thirty parts per billion of the precious helium-3 the Earth craved. As a result, for the past four cycles they had not been able to meet the expected quota although she had childishly hoped that this last cycle would somehow and miraculously exceed expectations: that the site would go out with a bang. When Dixie and the crew first arrived they had still been working within the area that yielded twice as much. That was before they’d had to start making calls to the company, explaining that they would come up short.

  Dixie shifted one of the external cameras to show the procession of the massive mobile miners to their new home. They looked worse for wear, having spent ten years slowly passing over the moon’s surface, running the regolith through a heating process that separated valuable elements from the loose material covering the surface. In addition to the helium-3 payload they were here to acquire, these elements also included the oxygen and nitrogen necessary for life support at the base. Everything here revolved around these monstrous, looming machines. They worked non-stop during the bright two-week-long lunar day, undergoing routine maintenance during the corresponding two-week night. During this non-productive phase the helium-3 that had been processed was sent to Earth using a mass driver situated at the edge of the dark side, a thirty hour journey away from the base. The capsule sent hurtling into space every two weeks was intercepted by the company’s space station and shipped from there to Earth where the helium-3 was used for electricity production via a pollution-free fusion process. Dixie did not want to consider the implications of the shortage if the new site did not meet expectations. The world was now completely dependent on the shipments arriving. Fully loaded, not partially.

  As captain of the base, she was responsible for everything running smoothly. And now her tour of duty was as good as over, as was the useful lifetime of this particular station. Next week the new mining base would take over and the base they had called home would become derelict. Despite the extreme cost of shipping materials over from Earth nothing aside from the mobile miners and some of the heaviest equipment would be recycled, as this would mean a halt to operations while the bones of the station were picked over, and the Earth could not afford to lose its constant supply of energy fodder. So this base was destined to become a relic, like the preceding station which they could see on the edge of the horizon, slowly being eaten away by radiation bursts from solar winds. The same solar winds that had peppered the moon’s surface with helium-3 particles for billions of years. Unfortunately these were rejected by the Earth’s protective atmosphere, so mining there was out of the question. In addition, the so-called ‘dark side’ of the moon received more of these particles than the side facing the Earth so mining was banished to the God-forsaken place visible on the screens. It would have been too easy any other way.

  ‘Come and see me when you get back.’ Dixie needed to go over the remaining tasks with the foreman. It would not take long; the tasks were few and clear-cut. They were to write a final report providing the new team at Base-3 with a summary of lessons learned during their year of operations. They were also to be on call in case something went wrong on the mobile miners’ long journey to the new base. The handover of the equipment would not be face to face as the new base was situated far enough away to make human accompaniment impossible. They had no vehicles or spacesuits able to provide breathable air for the ten-day trip. Which wasn’t all bad as it meant the entire crew would spend their remaining days here indoors. They had already had their full share of exposure to the atmosphere these past twelve months. Despite advances in every field since human-kind first mastered space travel, man had yet to conquer the effects of prolonged living outside Earth’s protection. A year-long assignment was already pushing the limits. Dixie could feel the effects of low gravity on her bones and muscles and the effects of the artificial atmosphere on her lungs and heart. Effects that time and proper therapy would mostly correct back on Earth. But never fully.

  Of this she had been repeatedly warned during the recruitment phase, the last and final time when signing the actual contract and sealing her decision. But the words had faded to a whisper as she focused her eyes on the huge sum she was to be paid. Not to mention the bonus if she stuck it out for the full year. She would never have to work again, and could live the kind of life most yearned for but would never attain. She deserved it. Until now she had spent her life studying hard, training and toning her physique and obtaining the mechanical and management skills that this job required. And now it was time to reap the rewards. Like those who had come before her, Dixie would enter the ranks of the privileged. She would be allowed to
travel and be provided with a larger share of Earth’s diminishing resources than the average civilian. At the time these privileges had seemed irresistible. Now what she longed for most was a blue sky.

  ‘Is it OK if I take a rain check?’ David’s voice sounded hollow. The removal of static from the transmission also leached every trace of humanity from his voice. He was one of the calmest people she’d ever met, taking everything in his stride and able to deal with the most difficult of situations without missing a beat. ‘I was going to make a trip up to the old base if you don’t mind.’

  ‘What?’ Dixie wondered if she had misheard. Few had ever shown any interest in the abandoned station and those that had never suggested a field trip over there to have a look around. The people working here were not that type. Their lives were on hold. They worked, ate and slept while counting down the days until they could get back to Earth and resume their real existence. She hoped they were different people there, if their personalities since they arrived were anything to go by. It was hard to tell. This place had a way of suppressing any personality quirks or defining characteristics. For example, no one had ever thought of giving names to the objects or areas they commonly referred to. Instead they used numbers. Miners 1, 2 and 3. Bases 1, 2 and 3. Areas 2-1, 2-2 and so on. It had been this way since they began mining here. She should probably count herself lucky that she and the crew had not begun referring to each other with numerals during their mission. She wondered what number she would have picked if they had. Number one would have been too obvious. Seven, maybe.