by Barry Lyga
For the first time in his life, Thanos said the words “I don’t understand.”
“There isn’t much to understand.”
“What are we doing, then? Where are we going?”
A shrug. “I don’t know, honestly. He’s searching for something. He won’t tell me what. But it has something to do with the Asgardians and some kind of power. He says he can resurrect the planet. He just needs to get his hands on ‘it.’”
“It.” Thanos realized he was gripping the control board so intensely that the rickety thing threatened to break off in his hands.
“Yeah. ‘It.’”
“And whatever it is, the Asgardians have it.”
“That’s what His Lordship says.”
“I see.” Thanos detected no trace of ire or disappointment in Robbo. He was, apparently, happy to jaunt around the universe in a death trap of a wheelship, serving up psychic spikes as needed, all in the name of an insane infinity quest on the part of a lunatic. He was either as mad as His Lordship or a true believer. Or he wanted this mysterious source of power for himself. Regardless, there was no point to further discussion with Robbo.
“Thank you for the information,” Thanos said.
“Just keep the ship going and point it in the direction His Lordship gives you,” Robbo said as he headed for the door, “and everything will be fine.”
CHAPTER XVII
SEVERAL DAYS LATER, THE INEVITABLE HAPPENED—ONE OF the wheelship’s spokes, struck by a micrometeorite, buckled. Its dented, damaged, debris-pocked structure finally lost the last bits of its integrity. Even in the engine room, on the opposite side of the ship, Thanos felt the reverberations as the alloy hull twisted and pried itself loose from its moorings. The entire Golden Berth shook and trembled in space.
By the time Thanos arrived on the scene, most of the spoke had twisted away from its connection point with the wheel itself. A series of overlapping emergency shields held the vacuum at bay, but they wouldn’t last long. Like everything else on the ship, they were rickety and well past their functional dates.
A cluster of crew members clotted the corridor to the tear site. Thanos used his size and status to bull his way through. Cha Rhaigor was already there, on his knees beside a bleeding Vorm, who couldn’t stop thrashing.
“Stay still!” Cha commanded. “I’m trying to give you an injection!”
But the young Vorm was in too much pain to cooperate. Caught at the juncture of the spoke and the wheel when the tear happened, he’d been gashed across the abdomen by flying metal. Bruises formed up and down his flank, and blood gushed from his stomach.
Thanos stepped over to Cha’s side and, without a word, leaned down and knocked the Vorm unconscious.
“Thanos!” Cha admonished.
“It was just a light tap,” Thanos said.
“You punched him!”
“Now you can give him the injection,” Thanos pointed out.
“You could have been gentler,” Cha grumbled, easing the needle into the Vorm’s arm. “Now I’ll have to treat him for a concussion, too.”
“Better than preparing him for a coffin.” Thanos peered around. There were terrified crew members huddled just this side of the tear, as well as gawkers and onlookers. Just a few paces away from where he stood, the spoke twisted and dipped, sharp metal shards protruding from every angle. He could see more wounded crew members bouncing around down in the dark confines of the spoke.
The ship’s artificial gravity had gone wonky down there, the tube waffled and flapped out of sync with the rest of the Golden Berth. The wounded were being smacked off the hull and ricocheted into and off one another.
“Clear this area!” Thanos ordered, gesturing to the crowd.
No one moved.
“Move your asses!” he bellowed at the top of his lungs.
The crowd dissipated quickly, leaving only him, Cha, and the wounded.
“Those fields won’t hold for long,” Thanos said grimly. “We need a team to abseil into the spoke and get the wounded out. If we work from both ends, we can go faster.”
Just then, a small black-and-white screen set into a nearby wall flickered to staticky life. His Lordship’s image yawned into the camera.
“How’s it going over there?” he asked.
“We have multiple casualties both within and without the spoke,” Thanos told him. “But I have a rescue plan that I can execute. I’ll need two teams of four each, medical assistance on both ends of the spoke.”
He broke off—one of the fields crackled and spat, sparking out of existence with a flash of blue light. There was a strong, sucking wind for a moment, and then an overlapping field powered up to compensate. Still, he could see black space through the tear in the hull, and the whine of the fields told him that they wouldn’t last long with the additional strain on their projectors.
“We can rescue them all,” Thanos said, “if we act quickly.”
His Lordship shook his head. “And risk the fields failing in the meantime, sucking half the ship’s atmosphere out into the void? No. Not a chance. Activate the emergency cutoff.”
Thanos shot a quizzical look at Cha, who had just finished stitching the Vorm’s abdomen with a spool of old heat thread. “The spokes can be jettisoned,” Cha said quietly, rocking back on his heels and staring at his bloody hands as though they were disconnected from his body.
“Jettisoned?” Thanos glanced up and around. Sure enough, he spied explosive bolts at the intersection of the spoke and the wheel, as well as a covered slit. He figured there was the same setup at the other end of the spoke. The bolts would disconnect the spoke, and the slit would no doubt open to slam down a blast door to keep the atmosphere in the ship.
“That won’t be necessary,” he told His Lordship. “We can rescue them.”
Without waiting for a response, he stripped off his tunic and ripped it into strips, which he wrapped around his hands for protection. The null gravity in the spoke would make maneuvering difficult but would also make it easier to move the wounded.
“What are you going to do?” Cha asked.
Thanos backed up several paces. “Run. Jump.” His momentum would carry him through the weightless area. He would grab as many as he could. Fling them to the other end if necessary.
“That’s insane.”
His Lordship chimed in. “Hey, Thanos! It’s the switch on your left. Just hit it and we’re done here. We can’t risk the entire ship for a couple of crew members.”
“There. Are. Ten,” Thanos said through gritted teeth. “At least.”
“A couple. Ten. Compared to the hundreds on board? Think!”
Thanos brushed aside the command. He took a deep breath and started to run—
—and the blast door came down so suddenly that it almost crushed him. He pulled up short at the last possible instant and managed to twist so he hit the door with his shoulder, not his face.
At the same time, a cry went up from Cha Rhaigor. Thanos whirled around, his shoulder throbbing, and saw that the blast door had come down squarely on the Vorm’s head. The skull had been thoroughly smashed to pulp from the bridge of the nose up. A fan of blood and brain matter sprayed up the lower portion of the blast door.
“Oh!” His Lordship exclaimed. “That was the remote switch! Great.”
The screen fuzzed back to black before Thanos could do or say anything.
Cha shook. With rage. With anguish. With shock. Thanos had never been good at reading people; he couldn’t tell. But he knew that this called for a gesture of friendship and comfort.
The most he was capable of was to lay one hand on Cha’s shoulder.
That was all it took. Tears erupted from Cha, and he collapsed against Thanos, clutching his hand as though it were a lifeline.
“He would have made it,” Cha wept. “He would have been fine.”
Thanos stared numbly at the blast door. Having been tucked away inside the ship all these years, protected and unexposed, it was in good sh
ape—sturdy and pristine except for the remains of the Vorm’s skull cavity on the lower third.
And he saw. He understood.
He couldn’t just plot to escape the ship. For the sake of every living thing aboard the Golden Berth, His Lordship had to die.
CHAPTER XVIII
THANOS MADE A POINT OF SEEKING OUT KEBBI LATER THAT day. She had seemed, at that first dinner, to tolerate His Lordship, in contrast to Robbo’s sycophancy. Perhaps he could learn more from her.
She again wore a kerchief over the lower half of her face, making her expressions inscrutable. But when he asked to speak with her privately, her eyebrows rose in a significance that he could not ignore.
They huddled in a small outlet berth for one of the escape pods that the ship no longer boasted. All of them had been used, Thanos learned, a hundred years ago, when the original crew ran like hell from the madness of His Lordship.
“So, you hate His Lordship and want to mutiny,” Kebbi said matter-of-factly before Thanos could speak.
Thanos balked. He hemmed and hawed for a moment.
“Don’t play coy, Thanos of Titan,” she told him. “You’re new here. All the newbies want to overthrow His Lordship and get the hell off this deathtrap as soon as possible. You haven’t been here long enough to have your spirit crushed or your mind enfeebled by Robbo. So of course you want to team up with me, bump off the old man, and take the ship somewhere sane and sensible.”
Thanos had planned on slowly and subtly feeling out Kebbi, eventually revealing his plans only if and when he decided she felt similarly and could be trusted.
So much for that idea.
“Is there a way to remove the collars?” he asked quickly. “Once they’re off, we can overwhelm His Lordship and take control of the ship.”
She blinked rapidly, and her eyes danced back and forth. “Why do you want the collar off?”
“The psychic spikes. Unless you know a way to get the control device from Robbo?”
Kebbi shook her head. “Oh my. Oh, you don’t get it, do you? You think… The collars have nothing to do with the psychic spike. That’s Robbo himself. It’s his power. He’s a psychic projector. The collars are just an identifier. An affectation of His Lordship’s, really. They remind him of home.”
With fingers gone numb, Thanos probed at the collar around his neck. All this time, he’d thought the collar was a weapon. But it was nothing more than an ornament.
Robbo was the true problem, then.
“Why is he so loyal?” Thanos asked. “He’s trapped here like the rest of us.”
“Some people lead,” she said with a shrug. “Some people want to be led. He feels like it makes him a part of something bigger.”
“That’s insane.”
“I never said it wasn’t.”
Thanos grimaced. “We outnumber Robbo. He can’t possibly project psychic spikes into everyone at once. Why—”
“Why haven’t we overwhelmed him, killed him, killed His Lordship, and taken control of the ship?” Kebbi asked.
The question was more straightforward and brutal than Thanos would have preferred, but it was honest. “Yes.”
She shook her head. “It would be pointless. We have to keep His Lordship alive.”
“Why?”
“Have you ever heard of a sympathy circuit?”
He confessed that he had not. “But I am not overly familiar with space travel.”
“It’s pretty simple,” Kebbi said. “The ship is quantum-paired to His Lordship’s heart. If his heart stops beating, the ship’s engines overcycle, blowing up the ship and killing everyone on board.” She thought for a moment. “Well, a few might survive, I guess, but explosive decompression’ll kill them right afterward, so there’s not much point living through the blast, right? If you think the spoke’s breaking was bad… imagine that happening to the entire ship.”
Thanos rocked back on his heels. His Lordship’s health was poor—on a daily basis, the man coughed up enough phlegm and sputum to fill a tankard—and those he’d enslaved seemed overly concerned with keeping their captor alive and hale. Thanos thought of how everyone perched on every cough and sneeze from His Lordship’s leaking, crusty orifices. The creatures who collected his sputum. For medical tests, no doubt.
Now he knew why. His Lordship’s death meant the death of everyone aboard the Golden Berth.
“There is no way out,” she told him. “This ship is the universe’s most perfect prison, a rattling, broken-down suicide pact made solid, wandering the galaxy until either he dies—at which point we all die—or the ship falls apart.”
“At which point we all die,” Thanos supplied.
“Yep. All we can do is stretch out our days and hope for a miracle.” She tugged down her kerchief for the first time, and he saw that the lower half of her face was a massive reptilian maw, the jaw low-hinged, her teeth a double row of more than a hundred needles, and her tongue forked.
“Got any miracles on you, Thanos of Titan?” she asked. “If not, don’t bother.”
He lay awake all that night. Partly because he had to absorb the new information he’d gleaned from Kebbi, but mostly because he feared another repetition of the dream.
Tossing and turning, he jumbled the facts together in his mind. His Lordship’s health. The sympathy circuit. The psychic spike and the collars and the dead planet Kilyan, which made him think of Titan and its inevitable fate, which he would do anything to forestall…
And the power. It, whatever it was. His Lordship seemed to believe it was real, but His Lordship was insane.
Still, even the insane could be right. Sometimes.
He closed his eyes. He saw his mother in her psychosylum, screaming that he was death! Death! Death!
And this time, when he dreamed, he saw her again, only she was rotting before his eyes. Her cheeks were sunken and sallow, her flesh drying.
Gwinth! he called in the dream. Gwinth!
But she only spoke to him the same words she always said, and then collapsed into a heap of bones and desiccated flesh at his feet.
CHAPTER XIX
HE AWOKE TO A NEW PLAN.
To his pleasant surprise, the plan filled him with hope. He turned it over in his mind as he lay in bed, measuring probabilities, compensating for variables. The plan, he concluded happily, would work.
It would require cunning and caution. It would require his talent for technology. It would require assistance.
Most important, it would require violence. Perhaps even a great deal of it.
His body was capable of violence, he knew. Sometimes—as when he’d towered over A’Lars during their furious argument—he’d felt as though his body were a separate thing, a being of its own, with its own wants and desires. And sometimes what it wanted and desired was to put its hands around a throat. And squeeze.
So, yes, his body could commit violence, but could his soul? His mind? His heart?
He was willing to kill half of Titan and himself in order to save it. Killing a few of the aliens aboard the Golden Berth to save the rest—and himself—was just as reasonable and even more defensible.
He sought out Cha in the medical bay. Of all the people on the Golden Berth, Thanos trusted only Cha Rhaigor.
Cha was happy to see Thanos, but Thanos had no time for pleasantries. “Can we speak privately?” he asked.
Glancing around, Cha shrugged. “We’re alone.”
“Is this area monitored?”
Cha laughed. “Paranoia? On you? A poor fashion choice, my friend.”
“This from the man who walks around shirtless,” Thanos reproved. “Are we being monitored?”
“Of course not. His Lordship doesn’t have enough trusted advisers to monitor the whole ship. Fear and self-interest keep everyone in line.”
“Not for long,” Thanos said, and then told Cha what he’d learned—that Kilyan was a fool’s errand, that the ship had five years left at the most, and that His Lordship had no plan B.
Cha took the news as well as could be expected. He gasped for breath long enough that Thanos thought he would need to resuscitate his friend.
“Kilyan is a wasteland?” Cha trembled as he said it, felt around him for support. He slumped onto a bed. “We passed it a decade ago?”
“You wouldn’t have wanted to live there anyway,” Thanos said gruffly. It was the only comfort he could offer.
“It would have been better than this!” Cha shouted. “Better than this damned ship, which smells eternally like refuse and flatulence because we can’t vent safely! Better than eating the same ten meals galley staff can conjure out of whatever the food replicator regurgitates!”
Cha growled and rose up, tipping the bed over. He reached for a tray of medical instruments and hurled them against the wall. For a good three minutes, he exercised his rage on the instruments and gadgets around him. Thanos watched passively, understanding all too well that Cha’s anger was like a forest fire that could not be extinguished but could only burn itself out.
“Breathe deeply,” Thanos suggested drolly, a part of him enjoying the sight of Cha’s placid shell finally cracking a bit. “Find your center.”
When Cha punched a wall and broke his hand, his anger cooled to yelps of pain. Thanos put an arm around his friend’s shoulder and guided him to the section of the medical bay that had not seen Cha’s wrath. There, he wrapped Cha’s broken hand in an old healie as he spoke quietly and calmly.
“When I was fixing the engines the other day, I noticed something on our long-range sensors. An old Kalami Gate about two light-years out. If we shift our course, we could hit the gate and jump free of the Raven’s Sweep. Back to civilized space.”