“Lauren! Lauren, can you hear me?”
The wheel gave a little.
“Lauren, it’s me!”
Active resistance, on the other side. The wheel jerked back, even as he held tight.
“LAUREN, OPEN THE GODDAMNED DOOR!”
With a final, epic pull, Nathan turned the wheel. The hatch groaned as it popped open and the bridge peeled into view. Alarms sounded from almost every console, an interference pattern of chimes and buzzers that indicated multiple system failures. Even more terrifying, the main viewer showed the disc of Mars beginning to tumble. The planet loomed closer, growing in size and steadily filling the screen—a graphic indicator of a decaying orbit.
Almacantar was spiraling down.
Nathan leaped onto the bridge.
All the officers were slumped at their stations, most of them dead. The center seat was also empty, the captain nowhere to be found. Launching himself at the ops console, he pulled a helmsman off the controls and dumped him on the floor, taking a seat at the station and trying the interface. It responded to his touch, the panel lighting up as he tried the maneuvering thrusters—but nothing happened. Almacantar was still losing altitude, drawn into the inexorable pull of Martian gravity.
Nathan hit the thrusters again but still got no response.
“Come on, dammit.”
Warning lights flashed from the console, alerting him that orbital control was off-line.
“Fuck it.”
If Nathan couldn’t nudge the ship back into orbit, he would blast her out using the ship’s main engines. Bypassing the safety overrides, he accessed the pulse-fusion system to cold-start the reactors. One by one, they appeared on his panel—core temperatures rising slowly, his finger hovering over the button to engage—while outside, Almacantar’s hull plates were buffeted by their first brush with the Martian atmosphere
Just don’t blow up on me, Nathan prayed.
And felt arms wrap around his throat.
Brute force yanked him out of the chair, dragging him away from the console. Sporadic pressure crushed against his larynx, cutting off oxygen in spurts—as if his assailant didn’t mean to strangle him, but refused to let go. Nathan’s hands pried at the vise that held him, clamping down on one wrist and twisting himself free. As he whirled around, he prepared himself to confront another rabid crewman—but nothing in his imagination could compare to the ghastly face that returned his stare, the cracked mirror reflection of an old friend.
“Lauren…” he whispered.
Farina snarled at him, lashing out like a woman possessed. Behind that face, Nathan saw the anguish of his captain—the shocks that prodded her against him, the desperation of her torment. Only half-there, she barely contained the forces chewing her up from the inside.
Her eyes rolled over white, then locked once again on Nathan. A deep, anguished cry erupted from within—a sound that chilled him to his soul, as if Almacantar’s entire crew had channeled their suffering through the captain. Farina then hurtled toward him, guided by insanity and inertia. She caught Nathan full in the chest, knocking him down as the two of them entwined in a deadly embrace. They rolled across the deck, with Farina digging at his arms, his chest, his face—anyplace she might draw blood. Nathan winced as fingernails sliced open his cheek, the betaflex short-circuiting his nervous system like a lingering anesthetic.
But not his reaction.
Drugs sparked an adrenal surge, targeting the reptilian core of his brain. Nathan punched Farina in the side of the head, catapulting her off him while he wiped his eyes. By the time he recovered, she was on him again—only now, he didn’t hesitate. Kicking Farina’s legs out from underneath, Nathan dived onto her. She kept clawing at him, even as he landed one blow after another, screeching between mangled lips and teeth caked with blood.
Nathan cracked her skull against the floor.
Farina went limp on impact. A dark red pool expanded behind her head, shocking Nathan out of his violent fugue.
“Oh, Jesus—Lauren…”
Nathan scooped her up, cradling Farina gently while she lolled back and forth in his arms. Still half-conscious, her eyes fluttered—struggling to keep a focus on him, fading in and out.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
Raising one hand, she brushed his cheek. She trembled, but not from pain. She was past that now, grateful for the peace—but lacking absolution.
“My fault,” she said. “Should have listened…”
“Just hang on, Lauren. We can get through this.”
She smiled weakly. “Too late for me,” the captain told him. “Not for you.”
Nathan shook his head slowly, but she saw through his denial.
“Take care of my ship, Nathan,” she ordered. “Get her home.”
His hand closed around hers.
“I will,” he promised.
“I know,” Farina said, and sank into darkness. Nathan pressed her up close, gently rocking her as he felt the waning beat of her heart—its rhythm contrasting with the insistent toll of the alarms that rang throughout the bridge. Almacantar rocked from even more turbulence, spinning ever closer to a fatal altitude. He didn’t have much time.
But he didn’t want to let go.
“Lauren—” he began, angling to see her face.
She jerked out of his grasp and hit the floor again.
A seizure turned Farina into a tangle of limbs, her torso heaving up and down as her lungs gasped for air. Nathan held her shoulders down, hoping to steady her long enough for the episode to pass, but her breaths only turned more labored and desperate—starved for oxygen, her lips turning blue.
Like the others.
Those bodies also began to twitch—anyone who might have been alive when Nathan stormed the bridge, including the helmsman splayed out next to him. The ones with strength enough clutched at their throats, though most could only flop around as their respiratory systems began to shut down. By then, Farina had gone cyanotic—her mouth drawing air in hitched gasps, her eyes glazing over.
Nathan shook her hard.
“Lauren!” he shouted, his own voice a distant echo.
She didn’t respond.
“Come on, Lauren! Breathe!”
Dizziness intruded on him. Nathan shunted it aside, leaning in to give her mouth-to-mouth—until he tumbled over, suddenly losing his balance. Flat on his back, he stared into a shrinking ceiling, vision compressed into a soft gray tunnel. A narcotic wash bathed his thoughts, while his chest expanded under decreasing pressure. Nathan kept exhaling, an instinctive measure to keep his lungs from popping—but as he inhaled, he quickly discovered that there was nothing left for him to breathe.
That’s when he heard it: the tinny, almost inaudible hiss emanating from the vents.
Losing pressure…
The atmosphere was venting into space.
Nathan peered through spots, the bridge a massive smear around him. He found the environmental controls and rolled over to reach for them—but that was as far as he could go. His body no longer obeyed commands. Moments from complete blackout, with no oxygen anywhere, all he could do was wait—and die.
Your belt…
Nathan seized upon the portable O2 canister strapped to his belt, making sure he hadn’t dropped it. Only then did he remember his helmet, still attached to the back of his biohazard suit. He pulled it over his head, starting the flow as he zipped the seals shut. He doubled over hacking as his lungs inflated with air, his vision igniting in a bloom of harsh colors. In the grip of that receding rush, he found his legs and picked himself up. He collapsed into the center seat, gripping both sides of the chair while Almacantar re-formed around him.
The macabre dance had stopped.
The bridge crew lay still, frozen in suffocation. All sound bled into nothingness as vacuum descended, alarms reduced to an ominous series of blinking lights that popped off in random succession. On the main viewer, the surface of Mars rotated in a blur—flat plain
s blending into canyons and mountains, the white wisp of clouds streaking by. Passing through that illusion, Nathan imagined Olympus Mons gazing up at him in ruinous contemplation: yet another survivor, cast out into exile.
All alone.
Nathan slid out of the command chair, back over to the ops station. Reactor status appeared borderline on the control panel, intermix temperatures still dangerously low. Nathan also checked Almacantar’s orbital position, worried that the main engines could ignite the excited gases around the ship if she was too far down—but he was out of options, and falling fast.
“Hang on, Skipper,” he said, and engaged the engines.
Almacantar shuddered as power coursed through her frame, eerily silent within the airless bridge. Nathan held on, sinking into his seat under the mounting g forces, the deck heaving beneath his feet. A whole array of new alarms glared up at him from the control panel, integrity sensors going haywire as massive shear twisted the ship in different directions, subjecting her to forces she had never been designed to withstand. Nathan quickly punched up a structural schematic, watching grimly as failures spread from bow to stern—flashing red dots that peppered the hull at vulnerable points, all those sections close to buckling.
Almacantar, meanwhile, began to climb.
“Come on, old girl,” Nathan urged. “Show me what you can do.”
The bridge shook even harder than before, tossing the dead around like an afterthought—Farina among them, who slid away from Nathan and out of sight. Looking up at the viewer, he extinguished a flare of panic. Mars was in retreat, but still throttling Almacantar with gravity and friction. Nathan didn’t know how much longer the ship could hold together.
“Just a little more.”
The control panel responded with another warning.
Son of a bitch…
The display lit up as one of the reactors went critical. Internal pressure had already risen to the point of an imminent breach—and if that happened, the resulting explosion would incinerate the ship. Working from instinct, Nathan routed main engineering through the ops console and tried to scram the reactor—but got nothing. Like the orbital maneuvering system, those controls were now off-line.
Nathan jumped out of his chair, stumbling over to the engineering station. The circuits were all intact and sprang to life as he activated the interface. He keyed in a sequence to isolate the reactors from localized commands, transferring full authority to the bridge. He then rammed a kill code into the network pipeline, and waited for an acknowledgment to come back.
It materialized less than a second later.
REMOTE OVERRIDE REJECTED
INVALID OR UNRECOGNIZED CODE SEQUENCE
“No!” Nathan shouted, bashing the console. The reactor was now past maximum tolerance and still rising. Nearly out of ideas, he tried the kill code again—but added a tracer, parsing out the reason for the previous failure:
REMOTE OVERRIDE ALREADY ENABLED
REMOTE OPERATIONS CANNOT BE DEFINED
CONCURRENTLY AT SEPARATE LOCATIONS
What other location?
Nathan entered a query before the thought even formed, eyes darting between pressure readings and his harried diagnostic. His heart stopped when the result crawled across the screen:
REMOTE OPERATIONS ROUTED TO MAIN COMPUTER CORE
“My God.”
Nathan tried to bypass the core, but the system locked him out. Attacking the layers of security, he smacked right into a wall of encryption—the same ice used to partition the crawler from its conventional components. It now asserted total control, isolated behind an impenetrable barrier of chaos logic.
Jacked by an outside source.
Playing a hunch, Nathan ran a signals sweep for burst communications—and found dozens of active tunnels between C-Deck and the computer core. Triangulating the precise point of origin, he followed those links directly to sickbay—and into the quarantine.
You bastards…
Nathan rammed another query into the console, mapping out the functions under remote control. Line by line, the list grew—until every major system scrolled down the display, including the four that were killing his ship:
ENGINEERING
LIFE SUPPORT
NAVIGATION
ORBITAL CONTROL
Almacantar was beyond Nathan’s reach.
He took his hands off the console, turning to face the view screen. Mars settled into a slow spin as the ship limped back into a stable orbit, but none of that mattered anymore. Within moments, Almacantar and all aboard her would begin to disintegrate. In the meanwhile, at least Nathan had the satisfaction of knowing that the monsters from Olympus would die with him.
Closing his eyes, he welcomed that bright flash.
But it never came.
Almacantar kept on climbing, turbulence subsiding into a smooth glide. She then nudged herself into a high orbit, the telltale plumes of her thrusters flickering at the edge of the main viewer. Nathan watched the surreal scene unfolding before him, a ship with nobody at the wheel and manned by a cadaverous crew. With trepidation, he got up and went back over to the ops console, running his fingers across the glassy surface. It showed the main engines still at one-third—and the critical reactor now easing off to nominal pressures. Somehow the thing had shut itself down, redirecting power through another unit in the stack.
The engines cut out.
Almacantar fell into an uneasy calm. Nathan glanced around the bridge, senses probing every corner to get a feel for the rest of the ship. A deep groan reverberated through the hull, working its way from the aft sections, followed by intense pounding—the sound of impellers unlocking heavy clamps at the stern. The last time Nathan had heard that sound was back in spacedock, when Almacantar was mated to her cargo hull. A flashing message on the control panel confirmed what he already knew, as the ship suddenly lost the bulk of her mass:
WARNING! WARNING!
SERVICE MODULE JETTISON IN PROGRESS
Nathan switched to a reverse angle on the viewer. There, trailing into the vast expanse of space, the cargo section detached itself and started to drift. Sporadic burns on the leading edge caused a steep pitch, casting it out into the void. Gravity took care of the rest, drawing the discarded hull toward Mars and making it tumble faster, finally clearing the ship and leaving her free to navigate.
Almacantar fired her main engines again.
This time she throttled up to flank speed. The ensuing slingshot hurled the ship out of orbit, her velocity on an exponential curve. Nathan hunched over the ops console, watching reactor output spike to maximum, while the red disc of Mars fell away rapidly. He ran a quick series of calculations through NavCon, hoping like hell that the core wouldn’t bounce them before he could figure out the ship’s heading. At the same time, he kept a close eye on structural integrity. Unlike before, Almacantar operated at the outer range of her limits but never went past them. The crawler—and those who controlled it—had apparently learned from their mistakes and had no wish to tear the ship apart.
Lucky me.
NavCon processed his request, displaying the raw numerics on his panel. Nathan washed them through the ops console, overlaying the result on a star chart that displayed Almacantar’s current position and projected course. He followed that line into the Directorate shipping lanes, less than two hundred thousand kilometers distant—the closest designated point for a spatial jump.
All the way back home.
All the way back to Earth.
Like most of South America, the nation of Chile was an annex of the Incorporated Territories—though its Zone heritage was on full display in Santiago, where Lea Prism arrived shortly before dark. The suborbital transport had gotten her as far as Buenos Aires, the last die-hard Collective outpost on her journey, with conventional aircraft carrying her the rest of the way—short hops that became wilder and more dangerous the farther south she went. Stepping off the gangway into the sensory overload of the airport, Lea took in the sigh
ts and sounds of her past: double deals and gutter talk, bargaining and baiting in a dozen dialects, hard currency changing hands—and the crossbred faces that leered, then forgot her from one moment to the next. Though she had never been here before, Lea had spent a lifetime in places just like it. With the practiced ease of street species, she blended into the crowd and disappeared.
Pushing her way through a steady tide of commerce, she hailed a cab to get into town. The driver didn’t speak English, or any of the other languages Lea tried, but understood perfectly when she told him what she wanted.
“Expatriates,” she said.
The driver paused to see if Lea was serious. She made her point by dropping a bag of Krugerrands on the seat next to him. He muttered something that sounded like a prayer, then put the car in gear and drove off toward an electric nightfall.
Twenty minutes later they passed into Las Condes, the casino version of a demilitarized zone. With all the street vendors and bicycle traffic, walking would have been faster; but Lea allowed the driver to go on, feeding him even more coins while she took the pulse of the city—grateful for the reinforced glass that enclosed the back of the cab. The Yakuza were virtually unknown here, the local gangs free to pursue their own agendas. Their incandescent graffiti was everywhere, marking territory from building to building, foot soldiers patrolling outside the gambling dens and mixing it up with their rivals—probably holdouts from the old days, former Zone Authority types stirring the pot to keep a cold war running hot. They ran a constant insurgency in border regions like these, straddling the line between civilization and anarchy. Special Services would eventually get around to clearing them out, but for now at least they ran the show.
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