Chasing Solace

by Karl Drinkwater

  “No more footprints until the chaos settles,” said Athene. “The creature won’t know which way you’ve gone.”

  Rumbling ground told Opal the Humungr could arrive at any moment. She picked one of the narrowest passageways where the door itself was open but not fully retracted into the ceiling space. That could work.

  After stepping through, she placed her palms on one wall, reached her leg back to place a foot on the other wall, and took the strain as she looked down at the ground. Then she raised her second foot and placed that on the wall too. Luckily the passage was narrow and she was tall – even taller in this suit – and she was able to arch her hips to help put force on her hands and feet where they came into contact with the vertical surface.

  “The wall has a minor exotic metal content, minimal magnetism, but I’ve engaged the grip in the boots and gauntlets anyway. It may help,” said Athene.

  Opal grunted, continued to work her way up as she looked down on the green dust swirling around her. With effort and tension she made it to the space behind the partly-down doorway, her back against the passageway’s ceiling.

  “Lock me in place,” she said, and the suit immediately froze solid, giving her muscles a temporary respite. She heard the heavy pounding thumps as the Humungr entered the nexus.

  “I don’t know if it will work, but I’ve tried the emanation shut-off again,” said Athene. “It makes you invisible on all emission wavelengths, though you’ll still reflect vibration and light, so we’ll have to hope it doesn’t use those senses or emit and absorb its own signals. At least with the dust and darkness you’ll have a good chance of evading ocular detection. If I get the opportunity later, I want to enhance the stealth abilities of the suit. I have a few ideas.”

  “You’re always having ideas,” said Opal, and she knew Athene spoke partly to distract her from her precarious position so close to something that almost killed her on the previous Lost Ship. “But what if it tracks by something esoteric, like thoughts?”

  “Again, the suit should shield you.”

  “Should. I’m too scared to take chances on should.” She closed her eyelids. “Let me try something, please don’t disturb me.”

  When you play dead there are some obvious rules. You hold your breath. You shut your eyes. That’s the easy bit. But to make it more convincing, you still your mind and shut out the external world. That starts to slow breathing, lower the heart rate, and hide the signs of life.

  But there’s also a superstitious element to playing dead. The feeling that if you think of the nearby monster, it will become aware of you. It is inner knowledge all children possess, same as the knowledge that looking in the mirror in the dark of night and repeating the local bogeyman’s name three times will summon it. You call attention by paying attention; you evade by disregarding.

  She was not here. She was just a blankness floating in the long void sea of cryogenic suspension. Cold and endless. No sound. No sight. Just a background sensation tickling your mind. You are not there, you are nowhere; you were there, you’re now here. You are not counting minutes, you are timeless. You do not stress because there is nothing of importance but the floating and the emptiness and the cold and the dreamless hollow that is both within and without, and you cannot be joined or touched or die or fail because you are not you, you are not consciousness, you are not –

  “It’s gone down another passageway,” said Athene, snapping Opal back into her body. Athene spoke at normal volume because nothing could be heard from outside the suit, but Opal still felt the instinctive urge to shush her, to whisper.

  A ping signalled the arrival of the elevator, followed by its doors sliding open.

  And then everything was quiet. No roars. No thumping sounds or vibrations. Maybe the Humungr was gone. Yeah, maybe.

  And maybe it simply watched and waited with alien patience.

  The green particles were settling. Cover was fading.

  “Last time I was on one of these craft, something on the bridge wanted me to take its invitation,” said Opal, “and I never got the chance. I’m not going to risk losing that contact again.”

  “Understood. I’ve unlocked the suit.”

  “I know. It’s making my arms and legs ache.” Opal took a deep breath, then exhaled. “Good. The aches are the only thing keeping me awake.” She was ready.

  Resting

  < 20 >

  SHE DROPPED TO HER feet with a heavy thud and dashed into the nexus. Bright light spilled from the open doorway of the elevator capsule, illuminating the dancing green particles. She didn’t stop, kept running towards that haven-like glow. Heavy thumping sounds boomed towards her, as if the Humungr was striking the walls in its passage, and it was closer than she’d expected. She grabbed the left doorframe of the capsule to swing herself around, hoping the controls would be on that side.

  They were; an illuminated panel with a display above it. She thumped on the top button, jabbing it multiple times hard enough to break it, and the doors slid closed, but too slowly – through the shrinking gap she saw the spiny misshapen torso of the charging creature. She expected it to ram the doors, to dent them, but instead a burst of annelid-like tentacles erupted into that narrow gap and spread to each side, stretching across the door panel surfaces like elongated fingers, and halting the door’s closure. Bunched ripples ran through the glistening wormy limbs and the doors began to part again.

  Opal activated her wrist blades and spun, cutting down with both blades in one precise movement whilst avoiding stepping in front of that widening gap. Sparks flew from the scraping surfaces; most of the squirming appendages fell to the floor and the doors slid smoothly closed. A roar was followed by a series of crashes against the door but they faded as the capsule rose quickly. She stepped away from the wriggling tubes that gradually slowed their twisting spasms. The blurry display by the doors showed she’d already risen a few floors. She was breathing hard.

  “You did it,” said Athene.

  Opal nodded. She retracted the blades and arm gun, but created a double-blink-controlled quick activation to the left of her HUD.

  “This going to take me to the top level?” she asked.

  “I think so. My external positioning scans show that the shaft curves, taking you up the neck of the ship to the afterdeck control sections, near to where the bridge lies. As with most ship designs, there’s no easy or quick route, so that pirates and boarders can’t get control of it too quickly. But you’re nearly there. So close. You’ll do it. I know you will.”

  “Thanks.” It was almost funny. Opal knew her terse manner might look like toughness or professionalism to the casual observer. In reality it was because she hurt so much, especially where she’d been shot, that she couldn’t face speaking.

  With Athene monitoring almost every aspect of Opal’s well-being, it was probably clear to both of them. Athene’s silence on the matter was another sign of their friendship.

  “I mean it,” Opal added. “Don’t ever think I take you for granted.”

  “I don’t.”

  The elevator display included a side view of the ship layout and her current floor, though the numbers were garbled and unreadable. It mostly matched the rough scans Athene displayed in the corner of the HUD. And then the flashing dot reached the furthermost point of the line.

  Opal adopted a combat pose as the elevator rapidly decelerated. Her body rose slightly when it halted. She was ready for whatever was revealed. Hopefully the clean white walls and spacious corridors of a command area; somewhere suitable for officers and bridge crew.

  The doors slid open.

  Nope.

  It was a grey corridor. A wide floor gave way to walls that angled out and in, almost a perfect pentagon in cross-section. The surfaces were industrial-rough, textured with heavy bolts and rust-like stains spreading below them or where panels joined. The doors spaced along the passageway were heavy rectangular shapes that cut into the tidy pentagonal cross-sections. They were able to retract in
to the wall but were all currently closed. Recessed lights in the narrow ceiling cast elliptical pools of orange light down the angled walls, emphasising the reddish stains that implied great age and decay, or violent accident.

  “The first area with functional lighting,” said Opal. “Dial down the silverlight, but bring it back if ever we drop into darkness.”

  “I will. It seems like there is power as we get near the bridge.”

  Before leaving the elevator, Opal watched and waited. It wasn’t a long corridor. There weren’t many hiding places, unless something very thin squatted in the shadows of the occasional support struts. But the place felt like it was waiting. Or something in it was waiting.

  Opal stepped over the decaying worms that had been sliced off the Humungr. As soon as she was out of the elevator she crouched and examined the greenish dust that had settled on the floor. Other particles floated in the air; movement released more of them from the ground as currents in the atmosphere shifted. But the transport nexus she’d just escaped from had given her an idea.

  She got down on her hands and knees and lowered her head to the floor, looking along it. She still couldn’t see anything. That was probably good.

  “What are you looking for?” asked Athene. “Footprints?”

  “Yes. Well, any signs of passage. This is a new area. I just want to know how much company I’m likely to find here.”

  “Let me pattern match and try different wavelengths.” A few seconds later the view was overlaid with various barely-perceptible shapes in the settled dust. Some were removed again as noise-related errors, but enough remained to hint at footprints. They were positioned to imply human-like proportions and ambulation, though the closeness of each disturbance suggested cautious movement.

  “Could be Xandrie,” said Opal.

  “My thoughts, too. If I see any other indications of recent passage I will highlight them. I have additional information on her from VigMAX, but even he does not know much about her origins. Her first appearance in his records is when she was held in a mysterious Genitor base called Paratory Droxious for almost a year, reason unknown. Regardless of what she was when she went in: when she came out, she was the UFS assassin we know.”

  Opal explored the room, ostensibly checking for danger, but really she just didn’t want to move on from this potentially-safe place yet. “Perhaps she was sent there for punishment, or brainwashing?” she asked.

  “It seems likely. I do not know where Paratory Droxious is, which suggests an even greater level of secrecy than is normal for the Genitor cult, but I suspect it is connected to breaking people. Or reforming them, as the UFS would term it.”

  After a few moments Opal stopped walking and said, “I’d rather die than get captured by them, you know that, right? You’d see to me, if there was no other way?”

  “I do not think I could extinguish you, for any reason.”

  “I would want you to. You’d be saving me from worse.”

  “Let’s hope it never comes to that.”

  Opal dropped that line of discussion. For the present. She looked behind some of the support struts that lined the walls. Just shadows. “Does Xandrie know VigMAX is on our side now?”

  “Unknown. VigMAX sent messages asking her to return to the ship. Obviously he could then contain her so she wouldn’t interfere with your mission. He’s had no replies, but that doesn’t mean she hasn’t heard his message. Apparently she goes signal-silent when she’s hunting, and only contacts him if there’s a tactical need – otherwise they act independently. Different protocols. But we can’t rule out the possibility that she has been given a covert backchannel means of monitoring VigMAX.”

  “If so, she’ll know he can’t be trusted any more.”

  “Correct.”

  Athene superimposed translucent question marks on each of the doors, indicating lack of knowledge as to which might lead the correct way. Opal hadn’t found any clues to help in her decision. No scratches on the metal. No splashes of blood (beyond the disconcerting rust stains). She stood in front of the first door on the left.

  “So she’ll want to escape?”

  Athene paused before replying. Presumably she’d asked him directly. “VigMAX thinks she’ll change her priorities. The new ones will be attempting to neutralise us, with her own preservation disregarded. Along the way she will gather information that might help the UFS. I suspect that’s why she took the pack you had strapped on. She was probably watching and wondered what was in it, assumed it could be useful information.”

  “And once you were temporarily out of action she picked her moment to attack.”

  “Correct. I now believe the small device she attached was a Null-C signal, maybe with a black box download, so the UFS will locate it later. Multiple things achieved from one action: information and communication to her allies, and hopefully hindering your plans too. Maybe critically. And demoralising you along the way. It’s what I’d do.”

  Opal nodded. She squatted down and gripped the bottom of the door to manually lift it ... then let her fingers slip off as she stood again. “Wait. We got power, right?”

  “Apparently.”

  “No need for me to do it the hard way then. That’s such a damn relief.” Opal thumped the button to the side of the door. It shuddered within the frame and rose slowly, and Opal tried to step back to get a better view of whatever was revealed beyond but her legs wouldn’t move and she almost fell, as a rippling sickly yellowness expanded from the other side, translucent creamy tar that exerted a pull, now with enough force to start sliding her towards that dirty jaundiced light even though the door had only risen to the height of her knees. The sucking void exuded a bizarre coldness, like ice spikes melting within her bones, rising with the door.

  She slammed the button again, and after a second the door stopped rising and began to lower. She was already colder than she felt out in space despite the suit’s temperature altering immediately to protect her ... that pus-coloured void was as impossible as she’d come to expect here. When the door finally juddered to a halt she was able to step back, stamping her legs to get feeling back into them.

  “It’s like I was paralysed, stung or something,” she said.

  “I was unable to control the parts of the suit near to whatever was beyond the door,” replied Athene.

  “It looked like there was nothing there. Nothing at all, apart from a colour.” Opal shuddered.

  “I wish I could analyse it, see if it was a localised physical event or some strange matter.”

  “Please, don’t wish for that. I never want to come into contact with it again.”

  Opal eyed the door warily from a few paces away. It did not move, or groan, or bend, or seep muddy mustard light from the frame. It was exactly as it had been when she stepped out of the elevator. There was a second door on that side of the corridor. She turned away from it.

  “Let’s hope I have more luck with the doors facing the other way,” she said. She was also careful to stand to the side this time. She took a deep breath and pressed the button.

  Signalling

  < 19 >

  NO TERRIBLE YELLOWNESS this time. No spirit-freezing cold. Just a long, narrow room. Along one side were clear pipes through which pumped a variety of different-textured liquids and pastes, all of which made Opal feel nauseous just looking at them. Gooey pinks with lumps of gristly-tissue; swirling reds that were almost opaque but included darker lumps streaking down the tube; yellowish liquids that seemed to have coalescing clumps of hair in the mix. There were heavy-duty taps on the pipes, and some of them had dripped to form sticky pools on which grew a collection of moulds. Opal was glad her body wasn’t in direct contact with anything on the ship. Nearby were wheeled ceramic carts that had a mechanism for tipping out their contents. They were stained with a crust of residues.

  Thick rubbery overalls with attached boots and gloves hung on a rack to the other side of the room. The flat lamps mounted on the walls cast more of the elongate
d ellipses of sickly orange light. Only one other door led onwards, opposite her entrance. Nothing stirred apart from pulsing fluids in the pipes. Opal could hear their gloopy movements.

  She entered warily, glancing into the wheeled carts. Then she squatted and looked under the dangling suits to make sure nothing stood behind them. She did not investigate the disgusting matter being pumped around in the pipework. Only some of it was visible, the rest ran behind panels and off through the rest of the ship. Perhaps it was wastes, or processed matter, but it also gave the impression of being a glimpse of the ship’s veins and arteries. It was more like being inside a living thing than ever before.

  When she was halfway across the room, the door slid down behind her. And immediately a warning light flashed on her HUD.

  “What is it?” asked Opal, opening the arm cannon and turning to look in each direction from a crouched position.

  “A communications error.” It was the suit AI’s slightly husky voice. “As soon as the door closed your signal path to Athene was broken. I had to take over. Hello again.”

  “Are we being blocked? Portable signal scrambler?”

  “It may not be anything so ominous. While the door was open I noticed that it – and the walls to either side – were thicker than even blast door specifications require. Depending on the materials used, it could be enough to block out signals. It may be that this section of the ship requires a stronger structure, and the dampening of communications is just a side effect of that. You could try another route?”

  “I’m not convinced any of the other doorways would be better options ... and I feel something. Like a pull to go in this direction. I think this is the right way.”

  “Hopefully this section will not last long.”

  She crossed the room and readied herself before opening the next door.