by Scott Reeves
Andy shook his head. “I can’t shoot you, I just can’t.” All he could do was pray for the youth. But of course he didn’t say that.
“Then what the fuck are you good for?” Mal shouted.
He started backing away toward the main hallway, then paused when he was a safe distance from Andy.
He stabbed a finger at Andy and said, “Don’t follow me. In a few minutes or seconds, I’m going to be just like one of them. I’ll try to kill you. Do you think you’ll be able to shoot me then?”
Andy couldn’t answer. But he doubted he would be able to shoot even then.
“Then don’t follow me,” Mal said. “But do me a favor and find Samala, will you? For me?”
“Of course I will.”
“And put your dick into her snatch for me, too, will you? Give her a good boning and tell her it’s from me. Okay?”
Andy blinked at Mal.
Mal winked and broke into strained laughter. “I’m just shitting you,” he said. “We’ve got to keep up our spirits, right?”
Andy nodded.
Mal doubled over again. He gagged and spit blood. When he straightened again, it wasn’t all the way. He stood a little hunched over now, and his eyes seemed to look at Andy with a little less focus.
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Mal said. “Near the center of this level is a ventilation grille with a tiny number stenciled above it. That number is 5429084865. Remember it.”
He repeated the number several times, and Andy struggled to burn the number into his memory.
“Now,” Mal continued. Blood was beginning to accumulate on his lower chin, sprayed there by his speech. “I’m going to run for it. I’ll get as far toward her place as I can. I know I told you not to follow...but follow me at a distance, okay? I’ll take you as far toward her place as I can before I turn into one of them. You got it?”
Andy nodded. He didn’t like it, but he had it.
Mal smiled, blood oozing from his mouth. “Been nice knowing you, Andy.”
He turned and dashed out into the main hallway, turning right.
Andy hurried to the corner and peered around. He caught sight of Mal dodging his way through the crowd of aimlessly shuffling zombies. They seemed to be ignoring the youth, perhaps sensing that he was infected. He was moving at breakneck pace, with all the speed that only someone in their prime could muster.
Andy figured there was a safe distance between them. Any more, and he would lose sight of Mal.
As soon as he stepped into the hallway, the tide of risen dead began flowing his way. They may have ignored Mal’s passage, but they seemed preternaturally aware of Andy’s.
He broke into a run. He began shooting wildly, picking off anything that got in the path of his plasma beam. He was amazed to discover that he was able to shoot after all. He had promised Mal, and he couldn’t let his friend down.
Even the random gunfire from the mechanical man behind him didn’t worry him. He trusted God to keep him safe. And eventually, that danger was far behind him; he was no longer in range of the communal room’s ridiculously faithful guardian.
On he ran through the gauntlet of crazed, infected people. He ran as fast as he could, and even a bit faster, intent as he was on keeping Mal in his sight. The youth didn’t appear to have changed yet, a distant figure moving with a purpose, guiding Andy like the star which had guided the Wise Men on that glorious night so long ago.
Soon, though, the distant figure slowed to a fast walk...
...and then to a shuffle, moving as if his limbs had become leaden weights.
“No,” Andy whispered, the word catching in his throat.
Then Mal turned, a limping, ponderous turn that brought him around to face Andy. The youth stared straight at Andy, apparently having been attracted by the steady firing of Andy’s rifle, or perhaps by some uncanny new sense the youth now possessed.
He began shuffling toward Andy. His eyes were vacant. Mal was no longer there.
Andy slowed to a walk. Was he going to be forced to shoot his friend, just as he was even now shooting and vaporizing these unfortunate soul-less creatures around him?
“I can’t,” he whispered. But how could he slip past Mal to reach his destination? A confrontation seemed unavoidable.
And then the wall to the right of Mal exploded outward. Chunks of metal and masonry blew out into the hallway, knocking Mal and at least a dozen fellow zombies to the opposite side of the hallway, burying them beneath a rain of debris.
Hard on the heels of the blast came the hull of a ship ramming its way across the hallway. Ramming and chewing its way. Huge screws on the bow of the ship ground through the debris and other intact structure that had been missed by powerful cutting beams that lanced constantly ahead of the ship, blasting away at the structure of the building, bringing it down around the heads of anyone or anything nearby.
Andy was still too distant to feel anything more from the destruction than a windy blast of heat, smoke, and powdery debris that dusted his skin and sank into his lungs, making breathing difficult.
He couldn’t even see the whole of the ship. It was so large that it seemed to extend to the levels above and below.
The ship moved ponderously across the hallway, straight through the spot where Mal had been blown, carelessly shoving his broken body aside in a tangle of other bodies and building materials.
It was a magnificent, horrific sight, a great ship flying where none should have been flying, ponderously battering its way into the heart of the building. Through the smoke, he saw stenciled on the hull of the ship: Gina’s Starry Eyes.
“God have mercy,” Andy whispered, his mouth hanging open in shock.
The whole incident took mere seconds. The ship moved ponderously across the hallway and deeper into the building, beyond Andy’s sight, leaving in its wake a huge, gaping, jagged gash in the structure of the building.
But the zombies around Andy didn’t pause in their determination to maul him. They were entirely unfazed by the ship’s passage, their vacant minds incapable of realizing the extraordinary event that had just occurred.
And so Andy advanced toward the destruction, his pulse rifle coughing forth plasma, clearing his path.
He headed to the far side of the wide hallway, where he found Mal’s body crushed to a pulpy mess between two huge, ragged chunks of masonry.
Low on the wall beside the remains of his young friend was a ventilation grille which had narrowly avoided the destructive passage of the ship.
Stenciled above the grille was a number: 5429084865. He wasn’t entirely certain, didn’t entirely trust his memory, since it had always been relatively poor. But he thought it might be the number Mal had mentioned.
He went to the gaping hole in the wall and craned his neck around the new corner, careful to keep his balance and not fall through the floor to the level below.
The ductwork into which the grille gave access was gone, casualty of the ship’s passage.
But the ship appeared to be going in his direction, so there was hope. He would simply have to follow in the thing’s wake. It might actually make things easier.
Just then the fatline phone tucked away in his pocket began to ring. He looked down at his pants as the phone vibrated. He had entirely forgotten the thing’s presence.
He pulled it out and flipped up the cover. “Hello?” he said into the mouthpiece.
“Mr. Watson?” said a female voice. “This is Joyce Rider. Do you remember me?”
Andy barked a laugh, thinking it was one of the most absurd questions he had ever heard. As if he could ever forget any of the people he had met in this time of ultimate crisis. “Do I remember you? Of course I remember you! What’s going on?”
“Well,” she began, “I’m in the infirmary of the starship that landed just before you left the roof. The ship’s doctor just murdered Doctor Dmitriyano and the Captain. Rodor Batsalam has recovered, and he saved me from Dmitriyano’s secretary, that Hocking woman. We sen
t her through the transmat and are looking for a way out. Doctor Chebbors locked us inside, and we don’t know what’s going on elsewhere in the ship. Can you help us?”
Andy shook his head as if to clear it from the sudden rush of new information. “I’m sorry, Joyce. You’ve blindsided me. Hocking came out of the transmat down here a few minutes ago and attacked Mal. She’s dead, or more dead than she was, and now so is he.”
“Huh?” said Joyce, sounding as dumbfounded as Andy himself felt.
They spoke for a few minutes, each describing their recent experiences in detail. As he listened and spoke, Andy had to pause several times to pick off approaching zombies.
“Is there any way you can help us?” Joyce repeated when they had caught each other up.
Andy scratched at his head. “I’d like to, Joyce,” he said. “But I don’t see how I can. I’m a few miles at least below you. It would take me too long to get back up there to be of any use to you.”
He paused to vaporize a zombie that had gotten a little too close for comfort.
“And I’m having difficulties of my own,” he continued as the gory mist settled onto him. “Sorry, but to put it bluntly, you’re on your own. Let’s keep in touch, and I’ll let you know if anything changes.”
There was a pause, and then she said, “Okay. We’ll do the same.”
“Oh,” he said. “And one more thing. I’d appreciate it, if you’re able, to get your ship to wait on me. On us. Because I intend to return with Samala. I promised Mal.”
Another pause, then: “We’ll try.”
“Thanks.” Three zombies moved into position around him, apparently about to launch a concerted attack. “I’ve got to go!” he said, closing the phone and shoving it back into his pocket.
And they came at him.
Harlan Fargo
On the bridge of Gina’s Starry Eyes, Harlan Fargo stood at the Mining station, looking over Polk’s shoulder at a monitor on which was displayed a schematic of this level of the Murray Building. The home level of both himself and his crew.
A small green blip marked their current position, nearly halfway into the building.
A jagged white line extending from the ship to the outer edge of the building marked their path. A series of numbers and letters floating over the white line provided information that would have been relevant had they been on an actual mining expedition: composition of the material through which they were boring; current market estimates of how much a given volume of it would bring; depth; width of the tunnel at any given point.
A series of interconnected red rectangles marked the positions of the apartments belonging to each member of his crew.
The green blip and the red rectangles were just about to touch.
“This is as close as we dare get unless we want to run them over,” Polk said. He shut down the blasting lasers and the boring screws. “We’ll have to go outside and go the rest of the way manually.”
Harlan nodded and turned from the station. He waved a hand at Jacy. “All stop,” he commanded.
“Aye, sir, all stop.” Jacy pulled back on the throttle.
In the holotank at the front of the bridge, Harlan watched as the wall that had been growing ever larger as they slowly approached now held its position.
There was a slight forward lurch as the ship came to a complete stop; the inertial dampers had been deactivated, since even the non-precision mining they had been doing for the past twenty minutes required the chief mining technician —Polk— to be able to feel every little movement that the ship made, every piece of debris with which the ship came into contact, to allow him to make adjustments accordingly.
Harlan clapped his hands to get his crew’s attention. “Okay, people,” he said, pointing at the wall displayed in the holotank, “we’re home. Our families are just beyond that wall. Let’s all grab an excavator and get to work. The more of us pitch in, the sooner we’ll find out...” He paused for a second as a wave of emotion made his voice shaky. When he’d steadied himself a bit, he continued, “...the sooner we’ll see if anyone’s home.”
No one in the crew had yet managed to make contact with friends or family. Even if he hadn’t had the watery eyes of his crew to tell him, he would have known that hopes were not high. By now they all knew of Harlan’s last phone call with his wife.
Jacy put the ship into standby and locked everything down. Then they all —the entire crew, all nineteen of them— went down to the lockers, grabbed mining equipment, disembarked into the hallway in which the ship had parked...
...and got to work mining in toward their homes.
Joyce Rider
For the past half hour, she and Rodor Batsalam had been trying to escape from the infirmary, with no success.
At first they had tried banging on the walls and door, hoping someone outside might hear them and come to investigate. But apparently the walls were soundproof. Either that or none of Dr. Chebbors’s assistants were nearby, or if they were, didn’t care enough to investigate. Either way, the result was the same: they were trapped.
Then Rodor had tried accessing the ship’s systems through the only computer terminal in the room. He had thought that since he had been a high official on Caldor, his codes might grant him clearance. But they didn’t. He couldn’t even get the damn thing to power up from standby mode.
They had looked for ventilation ducts, but found none. The room was apparently air-tight.
Finally, they gave up and seated themselves on the uncomfortable metal stools that were scattered throughout the room. The only way they would get out of this locked room, they decided, was through time: eventually someone would surely have a need for the infirmary. Surely Chebbors’s assistants, who last they had heard were in a nearby isolation ward studying the rest of Rodor’s people, would come to the infirmary to report to Chebbors.
After a few minutes of sitting silently, Rodor suddenly slapped his forehead. “We’re so stupid!” he said. “Or at least I am.”
“How so?”
He pointed to the transmat pad, the very one through which they had so recently sent Emilia Hocking.
“We’re dead, aren’t we?” he said. “Or resurrected, or whatever you want to call what we are now. We should be immune to re-infection. Let’s just beam out of here!”
Joyce’s eyes widened, and she gave him a dumbfounded look that said, “You’re right, we are stupid!”
On Caldor or any other planet that relied heavily on the transmat for transportation, your first thought about how to get anywhere was to use the transmat. Hallways and doors were just sort of redundant afterthoughts.
But on any starship, no matter how big or small, the reverse was true: transmats were backup transportation. Anyone who had had even the slightest bit of experience with space travel, which was pretty much everyone, instinctively put thoughts of transmat travel out of their minds.
This was because transmats were subject to failure on ships. Power sources could fail; passing space warps could disrupt the matter stream; time dilation could play strange tricks on the synchronization of the transmission and reception plates; and a host of other complications. Thus, casual space travelers who went rushing willy-nilly into the matter stream could be a danger both to themselves and to the ship.
So from a young age, people were conditioned to habitually use the corridors, so that if an emergency arose, you wouldn’t hesitate for a few precious seconds as you agonized over which travel method to choose, a hesitation that might cost you your life. People were conditioned to instinctively suppress their urge to use the transmat, even to so disregard its presence that there were actually documented cases where passengers on ships literally could not see a transmat pad even if they were looking straight at it. That policy had saved countless lives during the last thousand years.
People who spent extended amounts of time on starships, such as military or civilian crew, actually had to be de-programmed to cure this “transmat blindness.”
Jo
yce and Rodor both stood and went to the transmat. He accessed the control panel and scrolled through the local destinations until he located a transmat in the corridor beyond the room.
Rodor activated the pad, and they both stepped on.
They made it through the matter stream without incident, although each was astonished to feel, in a place where neither had felt anything before, a presence within subspace that filled them with great joy and boundless love as the current carried them past it. Past Him.
They rematerialized in the corridor outside the infirmary, and the wide smile that each saw on the other’s face confirmed that they had both felt it.
The ship’s corridors were practically deserted. But after a bit of searching, they located two crewmen in the mess hall. When the crewmen were shown the bodies of Captain Michaels and Doctor Dmitriyano, they sounded general quarters, and the ship roused itself.
It was quickly ascertained that the entire bridge crew had suffocated. While a few engineers worked on breaking into the bridge, a detachment of security officers, along with more engineers, were dispatched to Doctor Chebbors’s quarters.
When they finally managed to break in, they found the nude body of Ensign Shobasa on his bed. They found Chebbors himself next to a small control panel that had been concealed within a secret compartment of the bedroom bulkhead. He had self-administered a lethal dose of morphine, as evidenced by the empty syringe found on the deck beside his body, and had died with a smile on his face.
But not before activating Caldor’s planet crackers, something that, the engineers agreed, should not have been possible without the agreement of two officers and a planetary AI. And the planet crackers could not be shut down.
In exactly thirty minutes, Caldor was going to obliterate itself.
And all the crewmen who were qualified to fly the Delphic Oracle had died on the bridge, a bridge that was as yet inaccessible.
As soon as Joyce learned this, she pulled out her fatline phone and made a call.