Sargasso

by Russell C. Connor

  “You okay?” Ray asked, starting toward her.

  She waved him back. “Yeah. I’m fine.”

  “What the hell did it do?”

  The recording of the alien language cut off, and the tone they’d heard before on the scanner sounded, the one that preceded a translation.

  “I think it just took some language lessons directly from my head.”

  All around them, a calm voice began to speak in perfect English.

  11

  The squealing of the ship rats wasn’t quite as bad as the baby on the yacht, but it still sounded thunderous in the enclosed corridors. The disgusting creatures were nipping at his heels when Lito spotted the swinging door to the engineering room ahead. He plunged through, then forced the door shut. There was no way to lock it, so he once again settled for putting his back against it as the rats piled up against the other side and clawed at the doorplate. The click of their claws was like rain falling on sheet metal.

  It was only then that he swung his flashlight over and saw Carlos squatting on the floor on top of Jericho, who had a metal stake stuck through his chest like a new age vampire. His friend pawed weakly at the younger man’s face.

  “Get off him, you little fuck. Right now.”

  Carlos looked like a guilty teenager caught sneaking out of the house in the flashlight’s glare. He and Jericho were both covered in blood. “It...it ain’t like that! It was an accident…” His eyes flicked to the shotgun just a few feet away as he spewed excuses. Lito knew he would have a similar accident if he let the boy get the upper hand for even a second.

  He leveled the Walther at Carlos as the tinny shrieks from outside got louder. The door jumped and shuddered behind him. “Save it. Your friends in the speedboat told me all about what you’ve been up to. Now get over here and help me.”

  Carlos pushed up from Jericho, who went limp on the ground. He approached cautiously, cradling one hand that bled profusely. “Yo man, what’s out there?”

  “You don’t wanna know. Find something to hold this door.”

  Carlos grabbed several heavy chairs and dragged them over. Even their weight wasn’t enough; the door shoved open a few inches and several plump, misshapen rodent heads squeezed through, hissing. Carlos yelped and jumped away as Lito crushed them with the toe of his boot.

  “I need you to hold it then!”

  “Uh uh, man, no way!”

  Lito fired the gun, putting a bullet in the bulkhead wall beside the boy. “Don’t make me ask again.”

  They traded spots. Lito went to Jericho, who was taking big, panicked gulps of air on the floor.

  “It’s all right,” Lito whispered, “we’re gonna get outta here, buddy. Ray’s waitin for us, and we’re goin to California just like you wanted, okay?” He couldn’t tell if the man heard him or not, but decided not to remove the length of pipe from his chest. He went around and slipped his hands under Jericho’s arms, and started to pull him toward the room’s only other exit, another water tight hatch. Lito had no idea where it led, but at least it would put a solid door between them and the vermin.

  “Wait, what about me?” Carlos yelled.

  For a second, Lito was tempted to leave him. He deserved no better. Everything that had happened to them was his fault.

  But he couldn’t. The boy might not think of him as a father, but Lito was the closest thing he had.

  “Let me get Jericho out, then we’ll make a run for it!”

  He pulled his mechanic to safety on the other side of the hatch, into a long room along the starboard side of the ship, with portholes that allowed in the strengthening sunlight in dusty shafts. Back in the other room, he picked up the shotgun and yelled, “Go and don’t look back!”

  Carlos bolted away from the door. It swung open, letting in the tide of glowing rats. Lito pumped the remaining shells in the shotgun at them, slaughtering them wholesale, but it did little to stop the flow. When the weapon ran out, he flipped it over and used the butt like a hockey stick, sweeping the floor back and forth, flinging rats in all directions.

  He saw the hatch swinging shut from the corner of his eye. Carlos was trying to seal him in. Lito jammed the shotgun through the slot before it could close, then rammed his shoulder against the steel as hard as he could. He heard a grunt of pain as the edge of the door swung back into Carlos, then jumped through and sealed the hatch before any of the beasts slipped through.

  Jericho lay on the floor where Lito left him, unmoving. Blood had stopped oozing from the pipe in his chest. When Lito knelt down to check, he could find no pulse. He looked up at Carlos, standing sheepishly a few feet away.

  “You murdering shit,” Lito snarled. There would be no meditation, no calming techniques that could stop the rage boiling through him. He grabbed the boy and punched him across the jaw, hard enough to make the bones in his hand hurt. The kid’s legs failed, dropping him to the ground, but Lito followed him down, still putting knuckles to his face. Lito’s own father had cut loose on him a few times like this, and maybe the man had the right idea after all.

  He might have kept going, might have caved in the boy’s face, but after the fifth or sixth hit, something crashed against the back of Lito’s head hard enough to put the lights out.

  12

  Carlos’s vision had tripled at some point during the beating, but he was still able to make out the shadow that peeled away from the wall and smashed Lito unconscious. The figure jumped on the captain, going through his pockets while it muttered, “Where is it, goddamn it, where is it? You gave it to her, didn’t you, you wetback fuck?”

  “Who…w-who…?” Carlos stammered.

  The figure turned. In the watery sunlight from the portholes, he was finally able to make out the face of the rich white gringo from the yacht.

  “You’re Carlos, right? We didn’t get a chance to talk before, but from what I hear, we got a lot in common.” He pulled an object out of Lito’s shorts and held it up. Carlos recognized the walkie-talkies from their ship.

  Eric grinned, the expression ghoulish in the weak light. “In fact…I think you and I just became best friends.”

  13

  “This is a warning to all sentient species of planet designation E68239, capable of receiving low-yield transmissions,” the voice said over the ship’s speakers in that sexless, robotic drone. As Amber had suspected, whatever scan the spacecraft had just performed on her had fully translated the message, or probably gotten as close as the two languages would allow. Her capacity for awe had been so numbed by everything else that happened tonight, she wasn’t even curious about the amazing technology, but just content to listen to the solved mystery. “Please be advised, you have entered a dangerous quarantine zone. My ship has suffered cataclysmic engine failure in the form of a core breach. Repair attempts have been unsuccessful. I have no choice but to set the core to automatically vent radiation at critical levels, or risk a detonation that could destroy a full quarter of your world. Be warned: these releases can cause temporal and dimensional displacement of anything within a five mile radius.”

  At this, Ray grunted and opened his mouth to speak, but Amber silenced him with a finger to her lips.

  “Scans indicate my vessel’s particular isotope signature is not native to this planet, so this radiation is also expected to have devastating molecular effects to all carbon-based life forms. For preventative measures, I am directing my ship to display a visible spectrum which should simultaneously attract any irradiated specimens while repelling those unaffected, in order to prevent the spread of infection. I will also begin continual broadcast of this transmission with an adaptive language cipher to attempt communication with any replies. This should continue for at least the half-life of my ship’s core—approximately fifty-thousand of your planet’s revolutions—or until my craft’s systems degrade too much to continue the venting procedure, in which case, an explosion is probable. I regret that I was not able to do more. Please leave the affected area immediately, or get to safe
containment within adequate radiation shielding.”

  The voice cut off. Another bong sounded, and the message began to repeat in full Spanish.

  “Oh god, it learned every language I knew,” Amber said. Then, on a hunch, she called out, “Stop the broadcast, please!”

  The ship’s speakers went silent.

  “Uh, I think I caught about one out of every five words of that,” Ray said, “but it sounded to me like a goddamned intergalactic apology letter.”

  “It’s a tower of thorns,” Amber muttered.

  “Huh?”

  “Tower of thorns. It’s a language barrier problem that the scientists who deal with nuclear waste are having. They bury the stuff in the ground, where it needs to stay for ten thousand years until it’s safe again. The only problem is, how do you mark it so that future generations will know it’s dangerous? Language changes so fast and so drastically, you can’t be sure any sign or symbol would still be in use. The best solution they can think of is to put up some menacing structure, like a tower of thorns.” She touched the strange chair in the middle of the room, suddenly feeling a kinship with the creature that had sat in it. “That broadcast…and the lights in the sky…those were its tower of thorns. It was doing the best it could to warn people to stay out of the Bermuda Triangle, but I have a feeling all it’s doing is just attracting more and more ships.”

  “Nothing brings in human beings like curiosity,” Ray agreed.

  “At least it’s fully translated into three languages now. If this ‘adaptive language cipher’ works, than anyone else who attempts to answer the broadcast will get the full message.”

  Ray slid down the wall until he was sitting, leaving a smear of blood against the gleaming white surface. “I get most of it. The energy that powers this thing, just like we figured, it’s drivin everything apeshit: people, animals, plants, even the damn seaweed. And the more doses you get, the worse off you are. But what do you think it meant by all that ‘temporal and dimensional displacement’ talk?’”

  “It means whatever weird radiation this thing produces isn’t just tearing holes in time, like Lito thought.” She shook her head and gnawed at her bottom lip. “That’s the real reason there are more ship out there than have ever disappeared in the Sargasso. They’re not just from the past or the future. As insane as it sound…I think they’re from different dimensions, too.”

  “Woah…that’s gettin a bit heavy for me.”

  “Fly’s eyes,” she said slowly, tasting the phrase as if it was the first time. “That cruise ship? It might not even be from our future, it might be from the future of a completely different Earth. Tuan, too. This ship has been bouncing through time and space for god-knows-how long, and dragging everything that stumbles through the area with it. It must’ve visited—or will visit—our world a few times in the past, enough to start the legend of the Triangle, but it could’ve been doing the same thing in these other dimensions.”

  “So 1970 on our world for a few hours, then a couple of days in the Middle Ages on some other world?”

  “No pattern, no purpose,” Amber confirmed, answering her own question from earlier. She couldn’t stop thinking about the diamond in that ring, the one that was now somewhere on the ocean floor. And the game she’d played as a child, the one with multiple versions of herself. If she was right, this ship had been to places where there might actually be other Ambers.

  Ray whistled. “Jesus, this thing is just throwin out a fishin net and seein what trash it can haul in.”

  “More like a spider’s web. And all these people—along with us—are caught in it.” She blanched at the image. “We have to get clear of that five-mile radius before the next pressure release hits.”

  “We could just stay here, or go back to Tuan’s ship. The broadcast said we could shield ourselves.”

  Amber shook her head. “That’s a last resort. You said it yourself before. Even if we escape the radiation, we’re going wherever this thing goes next. And that’s a one-way trip.”

  “Well, it sure would be nice if the pile of dust in the corner had told us how long we have.”

  Amber’s jaw fell open. She turned slowly, and pointed at the bar on the display screen, with the scrolling numbers above it. There was just a scant six or seven inches left till it would reach the far left side. “How much you wanna bet that’s the venting program?” She raised her voice. “Um, hey, computer? Would you please translate the front…screen to English?”

  Her clumsy command must have been sufficient, because the alien characters became familiar numerals. It was indeed a timer, with incremental columns for seconds, minutes, and hours.

  There were 18 minutes remaining, and the seconds were ticking down as they watched.

  “Call Lito,” she said. “Tell them they have to get out. Now.”

  He raised the walkie-talkie to his lips and said, “Lito, you copy? Answer me right now if you can hear me, goddamn it.”

  “He’s indisposed at the moment,” a voice purred from the device. “But you can talk to me. This is the one with the ponytail, right? El Capitan’s right-hand man? Is Amber there too, or is she too busy sucking your cock to come to the phone?”

  “Shit. That’s Eric.”Amber motioned for the radio, and Ray handed it over. “What did you do with them, you bastard?”

  “You mean your little boyfriend here? He’s fine, and he’ll stay fine as long as you do what I say.” Eric gave his mean-spirited chuckle. “Déjà vu, huh? This seems to be happening to you a lot tonight, but with different guys. Price of being a whore, I guess.”

  “We don’t have time for this, Eric. This whole area, all the derelicts, they’re about to go…somewhere else.”

  “Oh, I know. And if you do what I say, we can all get out of here together.”

  Amber swallowed her anger, taking one of Lito’s long breaths. She didn’t trust him, but their only choice was to play along. “What do you want?”

  “I want you and my statue, back on the top deck of the cruise ship, ASAP. And my new friend Carlos wants Ponytail to come over and play, too. Who else is with you? I know Cherrywine isn’t; she had a little accident of her own. What about Justin, he over there?”

  Amber bowed her head at the confirmation of the other girl’s death. “No, he…turned into one of those things. He’s somewhere on the cruise ship.”

  “Well, too bad for him then. Get your asses over here, right now. We’ll lower a lifeboat for you.”

  Amber dropped the radio to her side and took the statue out of her pocket. So much trouble for such an ugly little thing.

  “Just go,” Ray told her. “Drop me off at the cruise ship. I’ll do what I can to save Lito. You just take the speedboat and run. Get out while you can.”

  A sudden rush of determined heat spread across the back of her neck. “I’ve run away from enough tonight.”

  14

  Another lifeboat waited for them, connected to the deck of the cruise ship high over their heads by its thick cables. The sun was climbing the horizon now, its warm beams reflecting off the water in an amber smear, like an Impressionist painting. The derelicts looked a little less scary in the morning light with their shadows banished.

  This time, Amber and Ray tied the speedboat off to one of the massive steel girders showing through the Atlantic Queen’s diseased side, then stepped over into the lifeboat.

  “No guns,” Eric said over the radio. Amber looked up and saw him leaning over the guardrail to watch them. “Let me see you throw them in the water.”

  The only weapon they had left was Ray’s pistol. He tossed it over the side.

  “Very good. Now hang on, children.”

  They were hoisted into the air. The ride was less smooth going up, the rusted cables jerking and bouncing them. The fiberglass hull kept swinging into the side of the cruise liner with bone-jarring thuds. She and Ray held on to the benches until they reached the top. Carlos was there to swivel the boat over the deck. He had to perform this operat
ion with one hand though; the other was wrapped in blood-soaked rags and held to his chest. Not only that, but someone had beaten the holy hell out of the kid. His face was a black and blue landscape of lumps and one eye swollen to a slit.

  Somehow, he still managed to sneer at Ray. “Guess I ain’t gettin off at the next port after all, homey.”

  “Go to hell, you weasel. And from the looks of you, somebody already tried to send you there.” Ray held his side as Amber helped him back out of the rowboat. His wound was bleeding freely again, and his skin was ice cold and pale. “What did you do with Jericho and Tuan?”

  Carlos sidled up closer and patted his cheek. Ray turned his head away. “They both dead, like you ‘bout to be. Then I’m findin a way to tow the Runner outta here. That bitch is mine, now.”

  Amber saw a fire come into Ray’s eyes. “You really think you’re gonna go work for the Dominican? Cause lemme tell ya, him sendin a hit squad after us don’t show a lotta confidence.”

  “He doesn’t have to worry about pandering to Caribbean drug lords anymore.” A few yards away, next to the empty deck pool, Eric stood with gun in hand, pointed at the sky. “Carlos is thinking bigger now.”

  Lito lay face down on the wet deck beside him. Amber wanted to go to him, but kept her face a mask. The side of his head was bloody, but he was conscious, blinking up at her and Ray. Eric put a foot on his back and said, “You went into whatever’s glowing down there. I saw you come out. What is it?”

  “It’s an alien spaceship,” Amber answered. “The answer to your precious Bermuda Triangle. And in about ten minutes, it’s gonna release a burst of radiation that will pull all these ships into another dimension, and give us all a nice, blue suntan.”