Drd muttered to himself as he locked in the coordinates.
“You ever been there before?” I asked Rilk.
“Couple of times,” he replied.
“What was it like?”
“What do you think? Bars and booze, just like everywhere else!”
“You ever go in a place called Slimelight?”
“Sounds familiar.” Rilk thought for a moment. “Yeah, I remember. First ship out round the ring. There's a bar in each of the old ships and we sort of worked out way around. Slimelight was first.” He grinned “Probably why I can remember it. I got slammed pretty quickly after that!”
“Fdrp!”
I smiled at Drd's comment. The Kwa insult was difficult to translate, 'waster' was close but didn't do it justice.
WE HAD PULLED AWAY from Nine without trouble and the two days it took us to get to Zestrade passed without incident. Now we were only thirty minutes out and I was getting nervous. It wasn't that Zestrade was a dangerous place, it was as safe as any other in the lawless outer reaches of the Kwa system. Originally a mining colony, Zestrade was what was left after the ore ran out, a hollowed-out asteroid at the centre of a flimsy network of derelict mining ships and transport vehicles. It was a confusing warren of tunnels and open spaces filled with a bizarre collection of traders, techies, smugglers and countless others who scraped a living on the edges of society. It was the kind of place where you could sell or buy anything, no questions asked, no permits needed and with no enforcement agents hassling you for taxes. Sounded like my kind of place, but I still felt nervous and I didn't know why. This was the easy bit, we hadn't done anything illegal yet just going from one place to another, at least that's what I told myself. So why did I feel like I had an itch I couldn't scratch.
“Drd,” I said. “You had a signal yet?”
“Thrtt.” He shook his head.
“Can we get anything in visuals?” The little pilot reached out and flicked a switch and the view screen in front of us glowed and then focussed on the view ahead.
To our left we could see the edge of the great sea of dust, a chaotic dance of tendrils reaching out into space. On the right the dazzling glare of light reflected from the seas of Kwa 14. Before us stretched a scattered line of diamonds and the furthest and largest of them all was Zestrade.
“You see anything?” Rilk asked.
“Nope.”
“Thrrt prrp?” Drd looked at me. I nodded.
“Worth a try,” I replied. He reached out and adjusted something in the control panel. There was a brief blur and then the view changed, dust and light vanished to leave the asteroid clearly visible in the centre of the screen.
“Can you see anything?” Rilk asked.
I didn't respond. The asteroid hung in its metallic web, each delicate strand twinkling with reflected light. I devoured the image, desperately looking for the sign of danger that my screaming nerves demanded but seeing nothing.
“Open a channel,” I instructed Drd. A moment later a faint hiss told me I was live.
“This is sloop Fading Sun to Zestrade control, request permission to dock.”
Silence. I tried again several times, all the while watching the screen in front as the asteroid grew with our approach.
“I've seen nothing move,” Rilk said. “What're we going to do?”
I glanced at Drd. He shrugged, but the growing blue tinge to his eyes told he was worried.
“Keep going,” I said.
“Shields?” suggested Rilk.
I snorted with laughter. “You're not on one of your gun ships now,” I replied.
“No shields?”
“Nope!”
“What about weaponry?”
I reached under the control panel.
“Just this,” I said, pumping the shotgun for emphasis. Rilk stared for a moment and then laughed, a great guffawing sound that broke the tension.
“I knew there was a reason I liked you,” he said.
Drd took us in slowly. There was still no signal from the asteroid and on the viewer nothing stirred. As we got closer I searched for clues of what might have happened but there was nothing. I had that feeling you get when somewhere is uninhabited, when you just sense that you are alone, but that would mean that the entire population was gone. I tried not to think about it.
“Tht ttrrt rat pffrt vaddapdy.” Drd pointed at the wall.
“You're right,” I said as I pulled open a panel and brought out two respirators. “Better to be sure.” I threw one to Rilk who caught it in his right hand, there was something in his left.
“What've you got there?” I asked. He smiled sheepishly and lifted his hand.
“Just something I brought in case,” he said.
“A gun?”
“A low velocity automatic with a choice of hollow point or explosive shells to be precise.” Rilk grinned disarmingly. “It was sort of a leaving present.”
“Sort of?”
“Well I was leaving...”
“Come on,” I said, pulling the respirator over my head. “Time to go.”
We jumped from the stern to the empty dock. We fell slowly and I experienced a brief moment of terror as I realised what an easy target we made. But the wide docks remained devoid of life and around the towering walls only empty view screens looked down. Rilk made it to the main doors with practised ease, gun held two handed, and nodded his head. I followed, spun the locking wheel and pulled. The heavy door swung outwards. Inside a wide corridor stretched into the bowels of the asteroid, shadows jumping in the flicker of the emergency lights.
“You go first,” said Rilk. “I'll cover you.”
“Why do I go first?”
“You think I'm gonna let you stand behind me with that thing?”
I glanced down at the shotgun and shrugged. It was a fair point.
I worked my way down the left wall of the corridor. I could see nothing and all I could hear was my heart thumping in my chest. I resisted the urge to check that Rilk was following and kept going. Directly ahead a flicker of light showed where a door stood ajar, darkness showed where the passage branched left. I motioned to Rilk and then held up three fingers, then two, then one. We sprinted the last few metres, Rilk rolling forward to end in a crouch, gun extended towards the passageway, while my shoulder slammed the door open and I swept the shotgun across the room.
I needn't have worried. There was no one in the room, no one alive that is. The light was coming from the only vid screen that remained unbroken. Chairs and stools lay smashed across the floor and among the debris lay three crumpled bodies. Through the respirator I caught a whiff of corruption, they had been there some time.
“Will?” Rilk’s voice was quiet. “I think I see bodies.”
I stepped back through the door. He stood looking down the passage, gun at the ready.
“There's three in there,” I said. Rilk looked at me. The respirator distorted his face but I thought I read concern there.
“I'm ok,” I said.
We made our way down the corridor. A flattened heap on the floor became a woman. She lay on her back, one arm twisted awkwardly underneath, the other flung out as if pointing. She looked like she'd been trampled to death.
The passage twisted right then left, leading deeper into the asteroid. Every so often we passed a doorway, the rooms inside devastated, with bodies lying where they had fallen.
“What mix was the population of Zestrade?” I asked as we stood in the doorway of another debris filled room. Before me were more bodies, small ones this time. At first I had hoped they were Kwa-nrt but it was as I feared, these had been children.
“Roughly three-way split,” answered Rilk. “Human, Kwa and Rakeesh.”
“Did you notice...”
“All the bodies are human.” Rilk finished my sentence, and then continued. “What the fuck happened here?”
I had no answer, I don't think he expected one. We were at the end of the passageway, a burned and twisted door, with
the hint of a much larger space beyond.
It looked as if it had been a trading area, roughly oval in shape with a high domed ceiling. The debris of the market stalls was piled round the walls, cleared away to make room for something far worse. They lay in rows, not twisted where they had fallen like the other bodies we had seen, but laid out, ordered, arranged. There must have been over two-hundred, stretching away into the dim interior. We walked along the rows with a sense of unreality, like being in a dream that you know can't be true because it just doesn't make sense. Perhaps that is what we mean by evil, that feeling of instinctive wrongness that grabs us by the gut and twists.
“I remember this place,” Rilk spoke quietly. “I bought some food from a stall over by the door. The place was full, buzzing you know? All kinds just talking, arguing, making deals, shouting. It was so, alive...” His voice tailed off.
“It makes no sense.” I offered.
“Look at them,” he said. “Just beaten to death.” His torch glanced along the rows, picking out crushed faces and broken skulls.
“Don't!” I said and turned away.
“Look at this,” he said after a moment.
“I'd rather not.”
“No, it's something else.”
I looked up. Rilk swung his torch up so that it illuminated the wall. Letters straggled across the surface, letters written in blood.
“Looks like Kwa,” I said.
“What's it say?”
“It's not a word I recognise,” I replied. “I'll ask Drd when we go back.”
“Going back sounds like a plan.”
“Not yet.” I used my comm unit to take a pic of the writing. “We still need to find that bar.”
“You really think they're going to be there?”
“No.” I shook my head. “But we've come this far, we might as well check it out.”
“Is there something you're not telling me Will?”
“No, it's just...” I couldn't explain the compulsion. “Let's just go see huh?”
Rilk shrugged. “I think it was this way.”
WE ENTERED THROUGH an old airlock after pushing our way along a flimsy looking tube of steel and plexiglass that led from the asteroid to the first of the disused spaceships that made up the rest of the habitat. Even in the dim flicker of the emergency lighting the Slimelight was the kind of place that a riot could only improve. There was the same devastation that we had seen throughout Zestrade but here it just looked like window dressing. The decor was industrial overlaid with graffiti, mostly swear words in an assortment of languages, the bar was pitted and scorched steel and the drinks menu looked like it had been burnt into the wall with an industrial laser. There was a lot of choice as long as you drank beer. Next to the bar, three doors were labelled 'Dudes', 'Bitches' and 'Freaks' and I suspected this was not an attempt at humour. At the far end of the bar a rusted door marked the entrance from the rest of the hulk, I was glad it was closed.
“Classy place Rilk!” I said. When he didn't reply I glanced round to see him squatting in the corner, his torch shining on a huddled shape on the floor.
“What is it?” I asked.
“You need to come and look,” he replied.
The Kwa-nrt lay on his back, arms outstretched, eyes staring upwards as if in supplication. His mouth was wide open, lips pulled back from the sharply pointed teeth. Shards of metal had been driven through two of his arms, pinning him to the floor, the other was cut off at the elbow. What looked like a chair leg had been hammered through his stomach. It looked like it had taken him a long time to die.
“Strange.” I looked around, trying to make sense of the scene.
“Strange?” retorted Rilk. “It's barbaric!”
“How many non-humans have we found?”
“Well, none but...”
“So why is he here?” I started picking up the furniture.
“Maybe he wouldn't help them.”
“Them?” I walked over and checked the floor behind the bar.
“The ones who did this.” Rilk stood and looked round the squalid room. “What are you looking for?” he asked. I looked back at him across the room.
“The missing arm,” I replied and opened the door to the toilet.
I found it in the last cubicle, matted and bloody, the small fingers still clenched in a tight fist. I carried it out and set it in the bar.
“Do you think he hid in there, before they found him and attacked him?” Rilk asked.
”Maybe, either that or he did it himself.”
“He cut his own arm off, you can't seriously think...”
“Maybe,” I replied. “Kwa are different from us. They can grow back an arm.”
“But why would he do it? I mean, the pain must have been terrible.”
“I think there was something he couldn't let them have.”
“What do you mean?”
“There's something in the fist.” I carefully took hold of the fingers. “Hold the arm steady for me, would you?” Rilk pulled a face but grabbed the forearm in both hands, pressing it down into the bar. The fingers were stiff but slowly I pulled them apart, revealing a tiny pellet of folded paper.
“Listen!” Rilk reached over and grabbed my arm.
“What?” I paused for a moment but could hear nothing. “You're jumping at shadows!”
“Wait,” he hissed, squeezing my arm. For a moment all I could hear was my pulse thumping in my ears, then I caught it, right at the edge of hearing, the sound of a voice.
Five
WE WENT THROUGH THE door together, shotgun and pistol at the ready, Rilk kicking the door open with a crash that reverberated through the cavernous space of the cargo hold.
“Sorry,” he said as the echoes whispered back to us out of the dark.
“Clumsy fucker!” I replied.
“Not what you said last night!” He grinned at me and then pointed over my shoulder. “There!”
I turned to see a flicker of light in the distance.
We walked as if through limbo towards the dancing light which only served to make the shadow darker. The emptiness crouched above like an oppressive god, pressing us into silence and forcing us to tread lightly. As we got closer the voice became more distinct, filling the dark with echoes of elusive meaning. Slowly the light steadied and started to resolve itself as a huge wall loomed up before us.
“This is where the hold ends,” said Rilk. “After this it's all engines.”
The light came from a large view screen on the wall above our heads. It was showing the same grainy clip over and over, flickering off then on again.
“I think it's broken.” Rilk stood and stared upwards. As we watched it began again, a face turning and speaking before the picture dissolved. The language was Kwa, but the face was human.
“What's he saying?” asked Rilk.
I waited until it played again.
“Thus falls the shadow over...” I hesitated over the last word. “Wait.” I pulled out my comm unit and checked the picture. “It's the same word, the one on the wall.”
“This is weird as fuck!” Rilk turned and looked around as I recorded the clip from the screen.
“Will!” I looked back to see Rilk beckoning me over to a bank of large lockers where an airlock bulged from the wall. As I watched he put his ear to the ventilation holes that were punched into the top of the doors. He turned and put his finger to his lips.
“What is it?” I whispered as I got close. He leaned in and I felt the brush of stubble on my skin as he spoke directly into my ear.
“I think there's someone inside!”
“You open, I cover?” I whispered back. He nodded and stepped back to the door. With one hand on the bolt he held up the other showing three fingers, then two then one. In one swift movement Rilk threw back the door and stepped away, but not quickly enough. Something small and blonde erupted out of the locker, hitting him in the chest and knocking him backwards. I started to swing the shotgun up, but then started to lau
gh as the girl screamed obscenities and pummelled Rilk with her fists.
“Hey!” he shouted as he tried to grab her arms, and then “Ow!” as she bit his hand. “Stop laughing and help me!” he added. Tempting as it was to leave him to it, I slung the shotgun over my shoulder, stepped behind the girl and wrapped my arms around her, pinning her arms to her sides.
“Steady!” I said calmly as she began to kick. “We're not going to hurt you!”
“Put me the fuck down!” she yelled, twisting and squirming in my grasp.
“You going to calm down?”
“I'm gonna fucking kill you!” She threw her head back, narrowly missing my chin.
“We're not going to hurt you!” I repeated. “It's ok!” I sensed her starting to relax. “It's ok!” I said again, making my voice as soft as possible. All of a sudden, the fight seemed to go out of her. I put her carefully down and stepped away. She stood looking bewildered for a moment, her green eyes dark within their sockets. For a moment they stared fiercely before filling with tears. She buried her face in her hands and started to sob.
Rilk looked at me almost in panic. I shrugged. What did I know about girls? He hesitated for a moment then leaned down and put a hand on her shoulder, which she shrugged off before plonking herself cross-legged on the deck. Undaunted, he knelt down in front of her.
“What's your name, sister?”
“It's Bex, and I sure as fuck ain't your sister!”
“It's just a term of endearment.”
“Well maybe I ain't feelin too fucking endeared to right now!”
“Do you know any sentences that don't use the word 'Fuck'?”
“Fuck off!”
“I think that's a no,” I interrupted. “Maybe you'd do better if you weren't still holding a gun.”
“Hey!” he said standing up. “You're so good with kids, maybe you should try!”
“I ain't no fucking kid neither!”
We both looked down. She'd stopped crying and now just glared at us, her eyes angry and her face red.
“When are you two freaks gonna tell me what the fuck's going on?” she asked. Rilk and I shared a look.
“We were hoping you were going to tell us.” I replied.
Thus Falls the Shadow Page 3