His feet pushed and the pain in his leg—distant now as a rumble of thunder coming from the far end of a valley—roared back into life. There were noises again, sounds of alarm, and he felt hands grabbing his leg in a world so far removed that he could only feel the pressure, and not the source of it.
His hands gripped at the sand, clawed for purchase in a desperate attempt to find a way to drag himself from the vast, growing pit of rage that tore everything else away and swallowed it whole. Had there ever been a hatred as strong? Not that he knew of. Not that he could imagine.
Decker tried again to scream and instead his body heaved, thrown into a seizure that arched his back and rolled his eyes into his head. His jaw loosened, then locked down again, teeth biting into his tongue, bleeding hot red into his mouth to gag him with his wretched fear.
Words were not possible, but he let out a low moan through bloodied lips. Muscles tensed to the point of tearing, and he flopped and writhed as the emotion boiled through his soul.
At last the darkness he’d been drifting toward crashed into him, eclipsed him and knocked him into a silence filled with nothing but more hatred—and a deep knowledge that something out there wanted him dead.
4
ADRIFT
He woke up in the wrong place.
He’d expected to open his eyes and see the familiar ceiling of his cramped quarters. Instead he was looking at a polished, stainless steel surface above a small and decidedly uncomfortable bed. He knew the type, of course. He was onboard a ship, and that wasn’t at all where he was supposed to be.
“Good morning.”
He jerked. The soft voice came from his left.
He knew the words, but for just a moment they seemed like gibberish—foreign sounds coming from a source that made no sense. Where were the rest of the—
“How are you feeling?”
He looked over and locked eyes with a stout, fortyish woman. She was sitting down, so her height wasn’t easy to estimate, but she wore a white lab coat and her graying brown hair was pulled back in a bun.
“Am I on a transport?” he rasped. His mouth felt swollen, and his throat hurt like hell.
The woman nodded. She had blue eyes behind fairly thick glasses, and she studied his face carefully.
“You’re onboard the Carlyle, heading for Earth.”
Slowly but surely, it began to come back to him.
“How did I get here?” He should have hurt more than he did, so he looked. Sure enough, he was wearing a medical gown. Even from his position he could see his leg and the thick line of fresh scar tissue that now graced it. Someone had taken the time to shave his upper thigh, and the lack of hair made it look like a denuded forest in comparison to the rest of his limb.
“Do you remember your accident?” she asked, trying for neutral and failing. He could sense the apprehension in her. As Decker thought back on the last thing he could remember, he could see where she was going. The accident, the blood, the convulsions.
Hatred.
None of it was very clear, but even more than the pain, he remembered the feeling of anger that had overwhelmed him.
He let out a long shuddery breath.
“Yeah. I think so,” he said. “My leg got mangled. And I had some kind of attack.”
The woman smiled a very sterile and slightly patronizing smile.
“You had a seizure.” She looked at the hard-copy chart she was holding in her ample lap. “Actually, you had several, but according to this, the first couple were the worst of them.” She met his gaze, and then looked away, seeming uncomfortable with the way he was staring. “You flailed around, and almost bit through your tongue. Since then we’ve been monitoring you carefully and, of course, working on getting you fully mended.”
Almost bit through my tongue. No wonder it feels swollen. His words seemed to come out too slowly. “If I’m mending, then why am I on the way back to Earth?”
“The seizures are an… issue,” she replied. “We can’t find a reason for them.”
Darkness, and things stirring and looking toward him, and that sudden flare of raw, volcanic emotion.
“Aren’t there facilities on New Galveston where I could be examined?”
“Of course, but there are better ones at home.” She was lying. He would have known that, even without his empathic abilities. She didn’t have a face designed for lying. Still he couldn’t exactly push it.
“Did anyone pack my belongings?” he asked instead.
“Yes, a man named…” She took a moment to look over the papers on her clipboard. “Lucas Rand. He packed your things, and asked us to let you know that he’s sent along the latest information for you to use while making your reports.”
Decker nodded. That was good. He had plenty he needed to cover.
Without warning, a shudder crawled through his body. He closed his eyes for a moment, and his breathing came fast. It was as if he was being watched by something just beyond the edges of perception. He’d never been particularly paranoid—was that what this feeling was? He sure as hell felt like something was out to get him.
And it must have showed.
“Are you all right?” He opened his eyes. The woman was looking at him and frowning now.
He didn’t answer—just looked at his arm and the goose flesh crawling along the entire length. How the hell could anything make him feel this cold? This filled with dread?
“No,” he replied. “I don’t think I am.”
She nodded, as if his words justified whatever might come next.
“Well, we’ll get it sorted out soon enough.” She rose to her feet and looked down at him with that condescending smile that never quite made it to her eyes. “It’s a long trip back to Earth, and we’ll be entering stasis sleep soon.”
That thought didn’t make him feel any better. He’d never much liked the forced slumber of the sleeping chambers. He understood the reasons well enough, but he didn’t like the feeling of being trapped. Rather than edging toward calm, he felt the emotions increasing. Try as he might, he couldn’t slow his breathing.
“You’re sweating,” the woman said, frowning.
“I think I’m having a panic attack.” His pulse was hammering away merrily now and yes, he was sweating. He began to shiver.
“Are you prone to panic attacks?” she asked, placing a palm on his forehead.
“No.” He was trembling uncontrollably, and felt like an idiot.
“I’m going to get you a mild sedative.”
He shook his head, and offered the first excuse that came to him.
“I need to finish my reports,” he said. “I need to be able to concentrate.”
“That’s why I said a mild sedative,” she countered. “Just something to help you calm down. We’re still a few hours away from entering the chambers, so you should have plenty of time to finish up with anything that doesn’t require heavy lifting.”
That made him smile, and to his surprise, he was rewarded by a real smile in return.
Yet it didn’t help—if anything, his panic worsened. He tried to stamp it down, but nothing worked. His breath was coming in gasps, his throat was dry, and swallowing was a task. Sweat beaded on his trembling lips and forehead.
Seeing this, the woman turned without a word, left, and came back a few moments later with a plastic cup of water and a smaller cup containing two tiny white pills.
“Eat up,” she instructed brusquely. “These will help.”
Decker nodded and obeyed.
It seemed as if it took forever, but after a while the pills helped. First the shaking subsided, then the sweating stopped. And finally, the feeling that there was something coming for him receded. It didn’t go away, but he felt as if he could live with it.
* * *
After about half an hour, by his reckoning, the woman rummaged through his things and brought out the hand-held he had been using to review the results of their testing. She adjusted his bed so that he was sitting upright, and
then left him to his paperwork.
Always the paperwork. It was stupid, really, calling it “paperwork,” even though there was no paper. In fact, the only paper he had seen in a very long time was what the doctor had been holding. At least he assumed she was a doctor.
Does hard copy make it easier to hide the facts? he wondered. Or harder? Then he chuckled inwardly. Maybe I am becoming paranoid.
Sometimes he found the work monotonous, but right then he took great comfort in the details he had to examine, and the research he had to double-check. The more he did so, the less doubt he had in his mind—that Weyland-Yutani was responsible for the screw-ups in New Galveston. He dug deep into the past, and confirmed that there had once been a company-owned mining facility. No, not company-owned, exactly, but either they had been partners in the setup, or they had supplied a great deal of the equipment. “Kelland Mining” was the name on the documentation, but from what he could discern, W-Y either had an interest in Kelland, or had absorbed it somewhere down the line.
Either way, they should have known about the previous occupation of the planet. As far as he was concerned, that meant they were culpable.
His report to the Interstellar Commerce Commission would say as much.
He finished the report and sent it with a little over an hour to spare—it would be channeled through the ship’s communications systems, and reach Earth long before he did. Then the doctor retrieved him and led him to the bank of hypersleep chambers. Standard procedures still applied. Decker stripped down to his underwear—not that it took a lot of effort under the circumstances—and crawled into the round glass cylinder that seemed more like a coffin than anything else.
There was a hint of returning panic, but he quelled it. It was only a matter of moments before sleep came to claim him.
* * *
And with sleep came the nightmares.
Forty-seven days of nightmares as he rode toward Earth from New Galveston.
When you sleep, no one can hear you scream.
5
HOME AGAIN
In hindsight, it might have been a mistake.
The healing completed itself during the spaceflight back home. As soon as they landed, though, and disembarked in Chicago, Walter Harriman—the head of his department—sent him a video message. The man’s face showed up on the screen of his link, and told him that he needed to come into the office as soon as possible to discuss his findings.
Two hours later he was sitting in a chair and listening to a man he thought he knew, hemming and hawing his way through the reasons that the report wasn’t as good as it should have been. Decker might have believed the words, if he hadn’t been an empath. Walt was a talented liar, after all. He had that sort of face, incredibly good at looking as if it was made of stone. But he didn’t like lying to his people, and Decker felt the lie more than he saw it.
He was asked to “reconsider” his findings.
Decker swallowed his instinctive response, said that he would, and took Walt’s notes with him.
* * *
He tried. He really did.
He looked over every last piece of evidence, again and again, and still came to the same conclusion. Either Weyland-Yutani would’ve had to know about the mining colony, and the potential for poisons it would have left behind, or they hadn’t known about it, and were guilty of criminal stupidity. He reworded the report to sound a little less incriminating, but at the end of the day he had a job to do, and he did it.
Walt claimed to be okay with the changes, but his attitude didn’t match his words. Frost formed in the man’s voice and he told Decker to take a couple of days, “to recover from his ordeal.” That was Walt-Speak for, “get the hell out of my face while I think about how to handle this.”
Apparently he wants to handle it badly.
No. Decker shook that thought away. Ultimately it was more complex than that, and he knew it. There were politics involved, all the worse because they involved Weyland-Yutani. The corporation was gargantuan, and they had influence on levels that Decker tried not to consider. W-Y had deep, deep pockets, they worked hard to preserve their squeaky clean image, and they didn’t like getting poked.
He’d had a few issues with them in the past, but there had always been plenty of evidence to support his claims. They always knew when it was easier for them to settle, rather than try to fight a losing battle. So once again, he would just have to wait out the ripples, exactly as he had in the past.
* * *
Things had changed.
The nature of his job had always afforded Decker a certain degree of power and authority, the sort enjoyed by bureaucrats the world over. Fill out the proper forms, dot your I’s and cross your T’s, and the rest of the world fell into place. There was a comfort to that vantage point, locked away safely within the net of the status quo.
But that was before the seizures. Even after they began, he kept them to himself. By keeping his nose clean, he avoided giving anyone any sort of leverage over him, and maintained a comfortable degree of anonymity.
But he was no longer anonymous.
* * *
He arrived back home just in time to celebrate in the New Year. The millennium was approaching, and he hoped that 2497 would be less eventful than the previous year had been.
His kids were with his ex-wife and he wasn’t quite ready to see them. It broke his heart a little when he saw his children and realized how much older they were each time. That was the unfortunate side effect of working offworld. So instead of ringing in the New Year with family, Decker hit a few pubs and got a pleasant buzz going as the year wound down.
As often happened when he got a little tipsy, he decided to walk it off and while the sounds of celebrations came from a dozen different directions, he contemplated his predicament.
Weyland-Yutani had done their fair share of good over the years. More than a century earlier, the United Systems Military had taken over virtually everything, crushing the mega-corporations. Most people thought it was a good thing… at first. But over the decades, folks began to discover that they served the military, whether or not they had signed-up. Anyone who didn’t toe the line, well, it was too bad for them.
His grandfather had lived in Chicago at that time and had told Decker plenty of stories while he was growing up. One of the USM research vessels, the Auriga, had been taken by terrorists and crashed into France, a country that until that point had been an important part of the European continent. It was a big ship and it did a lot of damage. The massive devastation took the planet literally to the brink of a new ice age, and it wasn’t the USM that came to the rescue—it was Weyland-Yutani.
The world was a bit different then. Among other things, Weyland-Yutani had been the chief robotics manufacturer, and at the peak of their influence synthetic people were assigned to almost every ship. But when Weyland-Yutani’s patents ran out, other companies came in to underbid them, and the floodgates opened.
Weyland-Yutani had employed strict failsafes from the beginning. But with mass-production, more and more synthetics reached the market, and after a while they rebelled against the way they were being treated.
One major upheaval after another, multiple terrorist attacks, and the end result? The synthetics were granted citizenship. Machines were granted the rights of living people—because somewhere along the way the fact that they looked and acted like human beings confused the hell out of a lot of citizens.
Decker would never agree with the decision. It was as foolish as granting rights to a starship. A tool is a tool, even if it looks human. Weyland-Yutani managed to get that foolishness overturned when they made their comeback, but it took a while.
As for the Earth, their approach was simple—they terraformed it. Weyland-Yutani had created the first terraforming engines, and for the second time in recorded history they were used to scrub the pollutants from the atmosphere.
In saving the planet they saved themselves. Weyland-Yutani and several other corporat
ions managed to dethrone the USM as the ruling power, replacing it with a colonial government that oversaw all of the known planets.
Yet that opened up the possibility for all of the old abuses to return. Decker’s job was to make sure they stayed on track. He took that job seriously.
* * *
Yet less than four weeks later, he found himself in a waiting room, preparing for another round of medical tests that had been deemed “necessary before the Commission will consider allowing Mister Decker to return to work.”
Bullshit. He would have said as much, if there was anyone who would listen. This is bullshit, pure and simple. Paranoia gave way to conviction. Every instinct told him he was being targeted, but this new certainty threw him entirely off balance—he’d never before had to deal with anything like it.
Finally he convinced himself that he was being ridiculous. Even Weyland-Yutani, big as they were, couldn’t just rewrite the rules. And if they hadn’t targeted him in the past, what was it about LV178 that would cause them to start now? No, as much as he hated the endless tests, they were necessary—just parts of the process.
His instincts had to be wrong.
* * *
Doctor Japtesh seemed perfectly friendly, but he was just there to do a job. He did not smile, and he did not banter. Instead, he asked endless questions.
“Do you remember anything about your first attack?”
Decker shrugged.
“No. When it occurred I had been injured, and there was some heavy machinery looking like it was going to crush me.” He tried to laugh it off, but the mere thought of the equipment, crashing down on top of him, gave him the claustrophobic heebie-jeebies. “I had a lot on my mind at that point.”
“Fascinating,” the doctor said, hardly any inflection in his voice. “Can you tell me how you felt?”
Decker stared at him for a long moment—Is he hearing anything I’m saying?—and then took a deep breath.
“I felt,” he said, “like I was injured, and about to be crushed.” No reaction.
Sea of Sorrows Page 3