“Go in,” he said, bellowing over the howling wind, but I hesitated, the portal to the ship a perfect void, repellent, a circle of oblivion surrounded by the rust color and flecks and darker, stringy swirls. “Fingernails,” I said, revulsion rising through me. “And blood,” I said. The blood of the corpses surrounding the ship had been painted here, mixed with their fingernails and swirls of their hair to coat the airlock and hull. “You painted this ship in blood.”
“The Earth shuddered, and Naglfar was released from its moorings,” said Hyldekrugger, “carrying the bodies of dead warriors to wage war against the gods.”
Fingernails of the dead, the ship made of nails. Mursult’s wife, his children—their fingernails and toenails removed, brought here. Marian Mursult, the dead echoes. How many others? Thinking of the scale of this death overwhelmed me, like seeing a mountain but realizing it was a cresting wave.
Hyldekrugger forced me toward the airlock, that black circle. I climbed through the shadow into the ship, but the moment I stepped inside Libra, I lifted— My feet flew upward from the ship’s floor, my body spinning upward. Weightless, I hit the ceiling, bounced, no gravity. I was in free fall, rolling. Hyldekrugger closed the airlock, my body a rag doll ricocheting from ceiling to wall to floor with nothing to break my fall until Hyldekrugger caught me. We floated together. There is no gravity.
“What’s happening?” I asked him.
“Quiet now,” he said.
We were near the engine room, and soon I heard the two-tone clangor of the Power Plant Casualty alarm wail through the ship.
“That’s the nuclear reactor,” I said. “Something’s wrong.”
“The bull nuke was trying to break the ship, but Bietak saved us,” said Hyldekrugger, his voice drowned by a clattering burst of nearby gunfire. “Now,” he said, and pulled me through the portal that led into the engine room, the place veined with tubes and pipes, cords and wires, most of the chamber taken up by the silvery steel cauldron shape of the nuclear reactor. Ring-shaped particle colliders encircled the B-L drive, housed in its own compartment. It looked almost like a human heart, dipped in silver.
The body of a man floated near the reactor, a long, sticky blood bubble ballooning from the holes where bullets had rent his gut. I could tell by his uniform patches that this was the bull nuke, the officer in charge of the nuclear reactor and the B-L drive. Hyldekrugger’s eyes were wild. He ripped a Maglite from the Velcro wall of small tools just as the nuclear reactor groaned and whined and the lights of the ship cut off, plunging us into pure darkness. The Power Plant Casualty alarm still screamed, warning of a reactor failure.
“Move,” said Hyldekrugger, switching on the Maglite. “We don’t have much time. Bietak will be back here to fix this, and then Mursult comes to guard the pass. We don’t want to be here when Mursult comes. We don’t want to fight him, not here.”
“Tell me what’s happening, what is this—”
But Hyldekrugger struck me. “Move,” he said, and pulled me through another portal. We moved like swimmers through the passageway, Hyldekrugger sweeping the light ahead of us. We passed the engineer officer’s room, a cubby with a writing desk and filing cabinets fitted around the walls and ceiling. The engineering department had its own mess room here, and a meeting compartment with bench seating curved around a compact table. We passed the offices for the A-Gangers, the Reactor-Laboratory Division, the Electrical Division, and soon came through a passageway lined with windows. I looked out the first window expecting to see icy wind and raging fire, the pathways of trees but instead saw stars in the infinite night.
“Where are we? Where are we? What is happening to me?”
Hyldekrugger dragged at me, but I clung to the window and saw along the length of the ship. Where there had been several inches of ice coating the hull, there was now a crystalline crust, bright white and shimmering like a coat of minerals or like diamond barnacles encrusting the hull. The crust was thickest at the stern, over the engine room behind us, growing in jagged torrents of opalescence and radiating away from the ship like brilliant white sunbursts.
“Why is this happening?”
He struck me in the spine with the butt end of his knife, said, “Hurry, the lights will be on soon.”
He shoved me from the window just as the Power Plant Casualty alarm fell silent and the dim running lights snapped back on. We were headed to the brig, I realized, and I followed him, submissive in my shock and confusion, my fear. We came to the NCIS office, the walls stained with the spherical spatter patterns of weightless blood.
“What happened to the NCIS agents aboard this ship? Where are they?”
“They protected the CO,” said Hyldekrugger.
He opened the iron door of the brig, the brigs on NSC TERNs much larger than their counterparts on waterborne vessels, NASA psychiatrists having warned of the possibility of “space madness” even from the earliest missions. There were eight cells here, stacked like berthing bunks, each cell an iron box. Hyldekrugger took me to Cell 5. I kicked against him, and he hit me, opening my nose again. A sticky stream of blood burbled from me, I couldn’t fight him. He grabbed my prosthetic leg, pinned my chest with his boot, and pulled—hurting me until I managed to reach down to release the vacuum seal.
“I consider you a suicide risk,” he said, “and I can’t have you hurt yourself with this thing.”
He locked me in the cell and left the brig, pitching me into utter darkness. I floated, fetuslike without sight or any sound. The pain of my shattered nose and broken teeth flashed like lightning through me. Soon in that vast silence, I heard my ears ringing and my breath whistle through collapsed sinuses and heard my blood plash softly against the cell.
Hours passed.
I was an echo. An echo, I realized, of Shannon Moss, brought through to terra firma when I was rescued from the cross. I understood that now. The woman in the orange space suit was Shannon Moss, she was real. I had seen her, in the snow. That woman is dead. You’re here now. I had come from an IFT with no Terminus but was just a figment of that IFT, an IFT that had blinked even as I had lived, an entire existence that had been cut away. Was I real? I was a void, an oval of darkness where my face should have been, as if my body were hollow, or stuffed with straw. But the pain was real, the pain in my battered face, and my despair, and my fear. Aboard the USS William McKinley, O’Connor and I had once been forced to confront a sailor whose nerves were frayed by Deep Waters, who’d struck an officer. We wrestled with him, brought him to the brig and placed him in a cell—he’d had the brig to himself, but the thought of this iron confinement and the solitude terrified him more than any other corrective measure could have. He begged us, pleading like a whining child for us to let him free. I thought of that sailor now, how he’d scratched at the walls.
I was on Libra somehow, without gravity. I had seen the bull nuke murdered—but how was that possible? I heard distant sounds. A soft clacking, like someone tapping fingernails against a table or like rats’ claws scrabbling across metal. Popping sounds, and then I placed it: the sound of small-arms fire followed by the louder clatter of automatic weapons. They’re fighting in the ship. And I wondered if the Navy had found this place, come to rescue me, or the FBI, the Hostage Rescue Team, thinking maybe Vivian had somehow lived, or maybe someone had followed us here. Then a scream outside the brig door, several people screaming, a wave of sound that died abruptly.
The brig door opened, and my eyes were pierced by a sliver of light. I squinted against the glare and was able to see a woman slip inside the brig before she closed the iron door, plunging us again into darkness. Nicole, but she was just a child here, a teenager. I heard her movement. She was trying to stay quiet, but she breathed heavily, she was crying, and in the dead silence I heard every soft whimper. She floated between the cells, floating nearer, and when she reached my cell, I said, “Nicole, help me.”
Startled, she whispered, “Who is that?”
“I’m an NCIS agent,” I sa
id. “I want to help. I need you to let me out, Nicole.”
“I don’t know you,” she said. “I’ve never seen you before. Why are you locked here? How did you get here?”
“Let me out.”
“I can’t,” she said. “No, I can’t—”
Another burst, an exchange of fire, louder now. Then another burst, right outside the door: bullets ricocheted off the metal passageways, a metallic staccato against the iron door.
“They’re doing it,” said Nicole. “I can’t believe . . . they’ve killed her, no, no—”
Nicole’s words were seared with tears, I heard her rubbing her face with her hands, saying, “No, please, please don’t do this.”
“Who did they kill?” I asked.
“Remarque. They killed her, they’re killing everyone now,” said Nicole. “Remarque and our WEPS, Chloe Krauss. They were together in the wardroom, barricaded in. They’re dead, oh, they’re dead now.”
This was familiar, this had already happened, and I thought of Nicole’s confession as we stood together near the orchard barn.
“But you’re innocent, Nicole. You haven’t killed anyone.”
“I love Remarque—they know that, I don’t want them to kill me because of her,” she said. “I’ve been hiding, in the life-support room, but they were checking every room, and so I came here. They’re killing everyone.”
“Nicole, calm yourself. I need you to help me. I know you, Nicole. I know that your father convinced Remarque to let you board this ship,” I said. “There was a feast in Mombasa, they threw a feast in her honor. When was that? Years from now.”
“Six hundred eighty-one years,” said Nicole. “When Remarque landed, and Libra, we held a Roho ceremony, celebrating transience. I met my husband there. He saw me wearing garlands, in the almond grove. And my father—he wanted me to live—he convinced Remarque to take me . . . and she wanted me to live, she accepted me—”
“I can help you, Nicole. I just need you to let me out of here.”
Another clatter of gunfire. She came close to the bars of my cell and said, “How do you know my name? I thought I’d met everyone here, but I don’t know you.”
“We knew each other in another time,” I said. “We were close once. You knew me as Courtney Gimm. We used to talk with each other, almost every night, in another time, in the future from now. You told me about Kenya. You told me about the trees, that they looked like emeralds.”
“I don’t know what to do,” she said.
“Let me out. I can help you.”
“I can’t let you out. They’d kill you if they knew you were here. They’d kill me for letting you out, for talking with you.”
“Please,” I said, but she didn’t answer. I saw the sliver of light as she opened the brig door. I saw her slip away, and the brig door closed.
I was alone in that darkness, and time dissolved. Hours, it must have been. Every so often a sticky sphere of my floating blood bumped against me, and I despaired. Eventually a deep, plummeting boom sounded through the ship, shivering through the steel. Another explosion followed, much louder than the first, and as the seconds passed, I scented a faint odor of smoke, a pungent sharpness like an electrical fire. I screamed for help, trapped here, fearing being burned alive in this cell, and soon the lights flared red—emergency lights—and the alarm bells rang a metallic clangor.
The ship lurched, and a heavy steel moan came from the hull. I heard a series of popping crashes, like someone hammering on pots and pans, and a series of explosions that sounded like the air was ripping apart. Steel shrieking, the ship rattled. I thought the hull would break or buckle. Liquid spheres of blue firelight bloomed across the ceiling of the brig, and I tried to float away from the fire, tried to cover myself in the corner of the cell. And that’s when gravity overtook me and I slammed against the wall, the ceiling, rolling in the cell, the blue spheres of fire flattening, spreading. We’re falling. We’re falling from the sky. We fell for minutes, but each minute seemed eternal. I was battered in the iron box, was crushed to the floor. Then the chaos was over. My forehead was gashed, I bled freely from my face. The alarms continued to sound.
I lost consciousness for a time and then woke in pure, milky darkness. I sat as best I could in that narrow cell, listening, and as the moments passed, I felt something like a small electrical charge growing steadily in my chest. The static charge was a discomfort—it seemed to hum inside me—and it grew, a crescendo of intensity, until I felt my hair prickle, waves of shivers passing over me. The tension was unbearable, and I opened my mouth, saw strings of electricity snap from my teeth and race along my fingers like blue filaments in the air. A loud crack, a burst of light—the electrical discharge felt as though someone had punched me full force in the heart. Again I lost gravity, again I floated freely, again the ship resumed its silence.
An explosion rumbled deep within the ship. A few moments passed, and I heard the brig door open, a squeal of metal, but there was no sliver of light. Movement, barely audible. My cell lock clicked, and I heard the door swing open. I drifted against the back wall of the cell, terrified at the thought of who had come, fearing Hyldekrugger. Someone’s hand covered my mouth.
“Do not make a sound,” a voice whispered. “Now is our only chance. We’ll have just a few minutes before they fix the lights.”
The hand remained clasped over my mouth even after I calmed, nodded that I would remain quiet.
“Can you see this?” the voice whispered. A phosphorescent blue appeared in the darkness, a blue light no larger than a marble. I recognized what it was: the cutting of the alien petal that centered Nicole’s amulet. An instant later the light was gone. I nodded that yes, I had seen the phosphorescence.
“Follow the light,” Nicole whispered.
She removed her hand from my mouth, and the phosphorescent blue appeared several feet away, hovering in the darkness before it disappeared. I raised my arms, feeling for the cell door, pulled myself out. I found my way by crawling across the brig ceiling, floating. I became lost quickly in that darkness and stopped, my eyes flashing in tricks of purple splotches until out of the haze of false colors I saw the hovering blue appear again. I followed.
I lost all conception of direction, crawled along one of the walls through an opening. I had left the brig and was in a much narrower passageway. The blue appeared again several feet in front of me, and I propelled myself—quickly but quietly—in that direction. I hit a steel wall, looked for the blue but didn’t spot it until I heard an exhalation, so soft I nearly missed it. The breath drew my attention upward to the blue light hovering above me. I reached toward the blue and pulled myself through a portal. I floated, following the light, and soon we passed into the passageway lined with windows, Nicole’s face outlined in the light of the crystal brilliance, the spectral diamond shapes that grew across the hull and the radiant lines that stretched away forever. It wasn’t Nicole as a teenager, whom I’d spoken with just a short time ago, but rather a young woman who had aged a decade or more. She’d brought me to the airlock where Hyldekrugger had first brought me in.
“Rest for a moment,” Nicole said. “Catch your breath. You’ll have to run soon.”
“I don’t understand.”
“We know each other, in another future, in another time,” she said. “Now you have to go. They will come after you.”
“Nicole,” I said. “Help me understand—”
“We don’t have time.”
“How . . . You’ve grown older.”
“You’ve been in this prison for several years, Shannon,” she said.
“No,” I said, almost wanting to laugh, the mistake of it all, the incoherence. “It’s only been a day at most. Hours.”
“This place, this ship, is an ouroboros,” said Nicole. She showed me her wrist, the copper-colored bracelet she always wore, textured by diamond patterns of scales, a snake swallowing its own tail. “We played with these growing up in Kenya—bracelets, when you wear the b
racelet you can take it off and give it to your friend.”
“A friendship bracelet,” I said.
“Yes,” said Nicole. “An ouroboros.”
She slipped the bracelet from her wrist and placed it on mine, the metal cool; she clasped the tail into the snake’s mouth, and the bracelet fit my wrist perfectly. Nicole held up her wrist. I had seen her remove the snake bracelet, but she still wore hers, it was like a magician’s illusion.
“You give the bracelet to your friend, but you still wear it,” she said. “So they match.”
“But several years,” I said, struggling. “You’ve aged years. I just saw you a few hours ago, and you were younger—”
“And you look the same as I remember, exactly the same. I’ve been living my life for almost twelve years since I saw you here,” said Nicole. “Patrick is dead, Patrick’s family is dead, and you showed up with Special Agent Nestor at my apartment last night. You and a young woman named Petal had tracked me down using my license-plate number that the Blackwater Lodge kept on file.”
“No, I wasn’t at your apartment with Nestor,” I said. “I wasn’t there at all. Nestor tracked you down alone. It wasn’t me.”
“But after Nestor left, you and I spoke for a very long time. You noticed a Salvador Dalí painting I had on my wall, of the Crucifixion, and you confided in me that we had already met in the future, that we were together almost every night, decades from now,” said Nicole. “And that’s when I recognized you. That’s when I remembered we had already met once before, but not in the future. I remembered you from eleven years ago, during the mutiny. I remembered I spoke with someone in the brig, a brief encounter, a woman named Courtney Gimm. Eleven years ago you told me your name was Courtney.”
The Gone World Page 30