The Chemical Mage: Supernatural Hard Science Fiction (The Tegression Trilogy Book 1)

by Felix R. Savage

  They sprawled at the desks provided for the future garrison, exhausted by their ordeal. Fifty people could have worked in here without bumping elbows. Displays and mechanical controls for the base’s life support infrastructure and equipment lined three walls. The fourth wall was one big window, not a screen but an actual window, overlooking the underground hangar where the garrison would park their ships. Twenty craft the size of the crewship would fit in there. At present it was empty. Emergency lighting cast sinister shadows behind the refueling tanks and hoses.

  Colm felt unpleasantly exposed up here. But he’d put in the window himself with the waldo. He knew it was blastproof, rated to withstand 400 psi of atmospheric pressure. He pulled his gaze from the hangar and uncapped one of the bottles of water they’d brought with them. The water was still frozen. But hot wind roared from the vents, promising relief from the cold shortly. The air smelled of new plastic, a reminder that this base had literally just had the packaging taken off.

  Tan sat at one of the desks in the middle of the room. A state-of-the-art holo display tarnished his face. “I’ve sent that Mayday to Triton.”

  “Good,” Colm said. “Let’s see what they say.”

  Fitch said, “They’ll just forward it to Gna.”

  Unfortunately, Fitch was probably correct. The outpost at Triton was a water refinery, not an air ambulance dispatch center. A rescue craft might be launched from one of the orbital factories in the Belt. But more likely, their request would get bounced to Gna on the basis that they were not in immediate danger. Either way, they were looking at a minimum of two to three days before help could be expected to arrive.

  Colm resolved that they would not wait. They would rescue themselves. He’d once been a Navy pilot. He didn’t need an Uzzizellan construction company to pull his ass out of the fire—or rather, the deep freeze.

  “We should just go ahead and send our own drone to Gna,” Fitch went on, “instead of sitting here waiting—”

  “Right,” Colm said. “And that’s why we’ve got to repair the crewship.”

  Zhanna interjected, “Guys. Guys. We’re all exhausted. OK? We just had a really close call. I think we need to give ourselves a little while to recover.”

  Colm almost overrode her, but then he remembered about preventive maintenance. He’d lapsed back into the Fleet mindset of pushing through and getting the job done. But he wasn’t fighting Ghosts now. Their enemies here were the cold, and their own physical and mental limitations. Zhanna was right.

  So he sat down and surrendered to Kuiper Belt Time. Zhanna prepared some instant noodles—she’d brought a bunch of the self-heating packets where you just had to add water and pull the tab. Colm inhaled the savory steam and thought about the crewship, sitting out on the ice, rapidly cooling to the temperature of liquid nitrogen.

  “You’re not eating,” Zhanna chided him.

  “Still feel a bit ropey.”

  But the rad pills were working. Soon he felt well enough to take Tan’s place at the comms desk. He used the base’s FM radio to connect with the gearship. They’d spent the last two days loading the construction machinery into the hold. Bulldozers, the crane, the drill ... He found what he was looking for: the cargo crawler. It was a platform mounted on treads, with an integrated handler. He reversed it down the gearship’s ramp and bumped it across the ice to the crewship.

  “Need someone to operate the handler.”

  Smythe plopped down at the control center’s waldo station. Like all of them, she had Crasibo Lovelace infocals that enabled her to view remote optical feeds. Manipulating the handler arms with the control gloves, she lifted the crewship onto the crawler. It was a circus trick, like balancing an airplane on a skateboard. It would not have been possible in proper gravity. It would not have been possible without their combined four years of experience in Kuiper Belt construction. Colm felt a glow of pride at their successful teamwork as he inched the crawler up to the base.

  The hangar door unlidded. The crawler glided inside with its 1,500-tonne burden. Drifts of methane snow shrank and vanished off the ship’s stubby wings.

  Fitch stood by the window. “Who left the engineering airlock open?” he said.

  CHAPTER 18

  “I DIDN’T.” COLM JOINED Fitch at the window. “No one’s even been back there.”

  “Well, it’s open.”

  The hatch of the crewship’s engineering airlock jutted at right angles, casting a misshapen shadow on the fuselage. “That shouldn’t be possible,” Colm said.

  “Failsafes don’t work when the power’s off,” Fitch said. “Maybe it blew open when the reactor flooded.”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  “You didn’t get anything?”

  Fitch meant via esthesia. Colm shook his head. “No power, no feedback.”

  “So this has to have happened after the batteries died. Mechanical failure, or ...” Fitch might be annoying but he was not stupid. “Let’s get out there and take a look.”

  Colm hesitated. He felt reluctant to venture out to the hangar. Fitch noticed his hesitation, smiled mockingly.

  “We have to fix the reactor anyway, right? So we need to do a damage assessment. What’s the point of putting it off?”

  “You’re right.” Colm mustered his energy. “Let’s go.”

  They both put their EVA suits on. Colm had cleaned his helmet as best he could, but it still smelled of puke.

  Smythe suited up, too. Colm watched her unhook her gun from her rucksack and sling it across her back. It was her CL-issued AK, optimized to function in vacuum and low temperatures. Before he could say anything, she said, “Just in case.”

  They egressed from the control center’s airlock and went down a short hall. Another airlock led out to the hangar. Colm felt a shiver of agoraphobia in the vast open cavern. Weird: he’d been fine out on the ice. But in here, he felt painfully exposed.

  In the dim emergency lighting, they bounded over to the ship. Smythe put out an arm to hold the men back. “I’ll go in first.”

  Fitch shrugged. Colm said nothing. He couldn’t understand why he was so reluctant to enter the ship.

  Smythe climbed the steps and vanished into the airlock.

  A second later, she let out a terrified, un-Smythe-like yelp.

  Colm leapt up the steps. His headlamp flashed over the tangle of pipes and pumps on the forward wall of the engineering deck.

  He tripped on something, stuck out his hands to break his fall.

  “Stay down!” Smythe crouched by the reactor, her AK to her shoulder.

  Colm landed on a corpse.

  A deep-frozen corpse, wearing a khaki uniform.

  Its ashy blue face stared up at him. Bloody, frozen tears frosted the eyes. A frozen river of vomit trailed from the mouth.

  Colm sprang up in revulsion, kicking the corpse away. It tumbled across the engineering room and landed on another frozen dead body.

  “Get down!” Smythe yelled, jerking the muzzle of her AK up so she wasn’t aiming at him.

  Colm shone his headlamp around. He counted eight corpses. Half of them lay by the airlock that led to the crew quarters, in contorted fetal positions. They had died in agony. Globs of frozen projectile vomit hung from the pipes overhead. Pink, sparkling. You’ve been vomiting blood ... These lads really had vomited blood. And in the midst of their anguish, the engineering deck had depressurized. Even corpses could spew, when suddenly exposed to a freezing vacuum. Colm’s boots crunched on gravel—globules of body fluids, frozen. It would take an industrial steam hose to get this place clean.

  “Colm, Meg, come in!” Tan yelled on the radio. “What’s wrong?”

  Colm sought words to describe the scene, and found none. “You’d better come see.”

  Smythe was begging him to leave the ship until she could secure it.

  “They can’t hurt us now. They’re dead.” Colm turned over one of the corpses with his boot. “I’d say they died during the excursion. They were on the wrong side
of the shield. They took a megadose of gamma rays.”

  Fitch’s shadow split the light from the airlock. “Holy fucking moly. The Ghosts are heeeere.”

  Colm nodded.

  “It’s like magic,” Fitch said, looking around. “Bad magic.”

  The words shattered Colm’s brittle composure. Had there been any gravity to speak of, his legs might have given way. He leaned against the forward airlock on the pretext of checking its integrity.

  “I have a theory,” Fitch said.

  Colm didn’t want to hear it. He said roughly, “Let’s start by clearing these bastards out of our engineering deck.”

  *

  TAN ARRIVED WHILE THEY were chucking the frozen Ghosts out of the airlock. “So that’s what happened to our reactor.”

  “Yeah,” Colm said. He had somewhat recovered from his shock. What mattered, after all, was that the Ghosts were dead.

  Fitch said, “They drained the power out of the heat exchangers. That caused the reactor to flood.” He pointed to the interior airlock. “That’s where we found most of them. They must have died pretty fast.”

  Tan said, “But at least one of them lived long enough to open the exterior lock.” He shook his helmet in puzzlement. “Where did they think they were?”

  “Someplace with air,” Smythe muttered.

  “I still don’t understand how they got here,” Tan said.

  “Powered equipment,” Fitch said. “A nuclear reactor? That’s the caviar of powered equipment.”

  “But a spaceship? The Ghosts don’t invade spaceships.”

  Colm used the butt of his power screwdriver to knock down another pink icicle. He kicked it out of the airlock. “I think what you mean is they’ve never invaded a spaceship before.”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Tan said.

  Fitch seized the chance to expound. “We’ve always assumed they can’t invade spaceships. The process ... whatever it is ... only works if the power source stays in one place. Spaceships are always on the move.”

  “But this one wasn’t on the move,” Tan said, nodding.

  “Correct.” Fitch spread his gloves. “It had been sitting in one place, with its reactor running, for two months.”

  Smythe said, “I still think they didn’t know where they’d be ending up. If they did, why bother? What’s the point of invading a freaking Kuiper Belt Object?”

  “A Kuiper Belt Object with a new, unoccupied defense installation,” Fitch pointed out. “Including CO2 lasers and a railgun.”

  “The Ghosts don’t even know what a CO2 laser is.”

  They were all dancing around the horrific fact staring them in the face: the Ghosts had arrived in Sol system.

  Yeah, barely in the system.

  But still.

  When they got that FTL drone off, it would carry the worst news in human history.

  Colm abandoned his desultory tidying. He had no heart for it. On a more practical note, he couldn’t really do anything back here until the temperature rose above freezing. The FTL drone couldn’t be launched, either, until he restored power to the ship’s systems. He said to Tan, “We’re going to have to station someone back here when we get the reactor cranking again. Just in case they try it again.”

  “Roger that,” Tan said.

  Colm jumped back down the airlock steps to the hangar floor. Tan followed. Colm pointed at the far side of the hangar. “In the meantime, I’d like you to hang out in the reactor room.” The base reactor was bigger and more powerful than the ship’s reactor. And it was presently running flat out. “Take a weapon with you.”

  “I want a raise in my hazard pay,” Tan sighed. “You got it.” He loped away.

  Colm went forward to the crew quarters. He sat down at the circular table where they had recently enjoyed Zhanna’s home cooking. The bitter cold had cracked and warped the wood-look plastic. The moisture in the atmosphere had snowed down on all the surfaces, looking like hoarfrost. He drew patterns with a gloved finger in the white rime on the tabletop, trying to get his thoughts in some kind of order.

  Smthe came in. “Oh, there you are,” she said.

  “I was just going to tidy up a bit,” Colm said.

  “That’s my job.” She began to pick up broken plates and deep-frozen fragments of cake. After a few moments, she said, “Fitch was telling me his theory of Ghost invasion.”

  “Moving power sources versus static ones. Yeah, I heard. Makes sense.” It made more sense than Colm’s own thoughts.

  “No, not that.” Smythe went into the galley for a disposal sack. While she was out of sight, she said, “About Stage Three.”

  “Ah, the ever-mysterious Stage Three,” Colm said as she returned. “Has he got a theory about that, too?”

  “Fitch has theories about everything. You just never listen to him. He thinks the Ghosts built the pyramids, and he also thinks the sentrienza are in league with the queazels to screw us over—”

  “He thinks that?”

  “—but even a stopped clock, right? Regarding Stage Three, he thinks it’s been happening all along, and we just haven’t noticed.”

  “I’m no wiser.” Colm went on doodling in the frost on the table.

  “You know how they all look alike?”

  “The Ghosts?”

  “Yeah.”

  “They don’t. I’ve seen dark ones, fair ones, tall ones, short ones—”

  “Yeah, but you get batches that all look alike. Did you take a proper look at the guys who invaded our engineering deck? They could be twins.”

  “Octuplets.”

  “What?”

  “There were eight of them, so octuplets.”

  “Oh, fuck you, Colm.” They called each other by their first names nowadays. Everything was free and easy and oh by the way, fuck you.

  “Did Fitch say anything about magic?” Colm heard himself ask. He couldn’t look at Smythe. He gazed at his doodle. It was a grinning face topped with a forage cap.

  “Magic?” Smythe said incredulously.

  “Yeah. He mentioned something, when we were on the engineering deck.”

  “Um. I don’t think he meant it that way. But on the other hand, that would fit in with his ideas about Atlantis and witches and fairies. You could always ask him yourself.”

  Colm laughed heartily. “Witches and fairies? Give us a break.” He swiped his glove over the table, erasing his doodle. He stood up. “I do need to talk to him about our FTL drone, though. I’ll need him to prep that so we can send it as soon as I get the power back.”

  Leaving Smythe tidying up, he egressed from the crew airlock. They were keeping the atmosphere in the crew quarters. Air was too precious to waste, even in the form of snow.

  Back out on the hangar floor, he called, “Fitch?”

  No answer.

  “Fitch!”

  The dead Ghosts lying outside the engineering airlock seemed to stare at him with their crystallized eyes.

  “Hey, Sully. Is Fitch with you?”

  “Nope,” Tan said over the radio. “I’m on my own in the reactor room. It’s boring. I’m not complaining.”

  Colm smiled. Then something tripped his gaze. Something wrong, something not as it should be ... It took him several seconds—in retrospect, an unforgivably long time—to work out what it was.

  The window that overlooked the hangar was dark.

  The lights in the control center had gone out.

  Colm started running. “Zhanna! Zhanna?”

  CHAPTER 19

  COLM COVERED THE DISTANCE to the hangar airlock in about two seconds. Then he had to wait for it to cycle. Then he had to wait again for the control center airlock. He kept shouting, alerting Smythe and Tan, trying to raise Zhanna.

  He burst into the control center. It was as dark as the grave. The window’s polarization must have flipped when the power went out. His headlamp illuminated a yellow-tinted cone of carpet, a chair lying on its side.

  He popped his faceplate. Smelled the awful whi
ff of sulfur. It threw him back in time to Majriti IV, and even further. “Zhanna?” he shouted, stumbling forward into the room.

  Someone crashed into him from the side. Caught unawares, Colm went reeling in the micro-gravity.

  He stumbled backwards against the wall. His headlamp beam scribbled crazily over the room, and caught the gleam of eyes.

  The airlock squelched shut. The LED display calmly tracked its cycle. Whoever had body-slammed him, they were getting away. Colm didn’t care at the moment. He ran, stooping, to the eyes he had glimpsed.

  They were Zhanna’s.

  She huddled under the comms desk in a feral ball.

  “The lights went out,” she said hoarsely. “And I heard someone breathing in the dark.”

  “Breathing?”

  She nodded jerkily. “And then it sounded like they were taking off their suit. Or putting it on. Who was it?”

  Colm held her close. At the same time, he knew he had to get the lights back on. The control center had a dedicated fuel cell—that’s what the lights and computers had been running off. Keeping Zhanna by his side, he went to the master switch. Flipped it up and down a couple of times.

  Drained.

  Keeping incipient panic at bay, he opened the radio channel to the others and told them what Zhanna had heard and seen—or rather not seen. “It could’ve been Fitch, I suppose. Or it could’ve been ...”

  “A Ghost,” Smythe finished bleakly. “I’ll be there in two.”

  “Good. I want you to stay with Zhanna. I’m going to look for Fitch.”

  Tan, in the reactor room, cursed. “Where is he?”

  “I’ll let you know when I find out.”

  But Colm already had a fairly good idea of where Fitch had gone. Or rather, where Fitch planned to go.

  *

  THE ICE GLITTERED, pomegranate-colored in the light of the distant sun.

  The gearship hadn’t moved.

  Yet.

  Colm jogged towards it, following the power cables that stretched from the ship to the base. He held his gun in one glove, pointing down. It was a Void Eagle, the space-hardened version of the legendary Desert Eagle pistol. He’d bought it with his first paycheck from Crasibo Lovelace. After his years in the military, he felt incomplete without a weapon to call his own, but he’d lost the habit of carrying, and had had to retrieve it from the crewship before he came out to look for Fitch.