Tyger Bright

by T. C. McCarthy

  San was about to turn away when a bright glow erupted above Ganymede’s surface and grew in less than a second into a massive fireball, a sphere of plasma that blinded her as it blossomed larger, the radiative heat so intense it vaporized the warriors and melted a wide swath of ice in an instant. Before the plasma reached her, its spherical shape broke into pieces and tendrils. Then the fireball disappeared to leave behind a shallow crater. Clouds of ice mist hovered, creeping back toward the surface. War was coming, San thought again. Soon.

  Get to Ganymede . . .

  She woke from the dream to find her arms and legs strapped to a table in sick bay, with thick straps across her waist and chest. How? San thought. What happened and who put me here?

  Get to Ganymede . . . This time the voice wasn’t in her dreams; it was an old woman, real, and inside her head.

  “Shut up! Stop talking to me!”

  The medbot spurted a jet of vapor and glided toward her, its mechanical-sounding voice making San’s skin tingle with fear.

  “Rest, Ms. Kyarr. You need to rest.”

  San couldn’t tell if the bot was thinking. It had no idea: war. She imagined that the thing had sympathy, that if she told the bot to set her free, it would. San could make her way into deep space, well beyond the Neptune elliptical into everything cold and dead, where Fleet would burn past her without noticing the tiny hole she’d dug in one of the ice balls of the Kuiper belt—just her, alone. Without energy signatures nobody would notice; the sense of failure would form a coating, a blanket of shame to keep San warm from the absolute zero of space, and a bubble to maintain atmosphere under a dome of disappointment. It would be better than facing her friends as a washout. San dreaded the thought of explaining it over and over, followed by the expressions of sympathy and the—

  A pair of arms unfolded from the bot’s spherical core and one of them reached toward her as a needle snapped out. It plunged the needle into her arm. San struggled, trying to remember her train of thought and keep her focus on expressions of sympathy, but instead descended into darkness.

  Get to Ganymede Orbital Station . . .

  Voices mumbled nearby, but not the one telling her to run to Ganymede and San gritted her teeth at the thought of disembodied words returning with no warning. For now, it was silent. The ones she heard were soft, real, and San rolled in zero g, the weightlessness a welcome relief after having been in Earth’s gravity for so long, her muscles able to stretch enough that she imagined she could gain a full inch of height if she stayed weightless long enough. Then the straps bit into her wrists. Without looking San knew she was still secured to the table, trapped in a loss of time-sense that made everything surreal, fuzzy when she risked peeking from one eye.

  The ship’s medical officer floated next to her, grasping the table’s side and flanked by bots. He spoke with two men. Both visitors wore black pressure suits with thin armor plating covered by Fleet markings that San couldn’t recognize, even after scouring her mind, sifting through all the data stuffed into it; if these were Fleet markings, she should have recognized them. The men’s faceplates were down, tinted gold to hide their features, and it sounded as if electronic masking altered their voices.

  “Dump the girl.”

  “Until she is transferred to family,” the doctor said, “I can do nothing. The regulations are clear: Medical issues must be resolved prior to release, so that injuries sustained during Fleet duty can be documented. She was in a Fleet transport when San fell ill.”

  “You have orders,” one of the men said.

  “Which conflict with regulations! I’m not endangering my career just for you people.”

  “Release her, Doc, or we tell your wife everything.”

  “Everything what?”

  The other man, the one who hadn’t yet spoken, pulled his colleague to the side and gestured for him to head to the hatch. He turned prior to leaving.

  “About the brothels. The drugs. The girlfriends. Then we cancel university allowances for your children. They’ll never find a job other than dock maintenance in occupied Singapore. San Kyarr isn’t Fleet responsibility anymore, and she sure as hell isn’t worth the risk you’re thinking of taking.”

  Once they’d gone, the doctor let go of San’s table and curled into a ball, drifting toward the middle of the room where he cried. The sight unnerved San. The man was much older than her, well into his forties, and for some reason it felt as though he was too old to be afraid. Her father had never cried, not even at his end. She remembered only laughter and the occasional outburst of anger when his frustrations with Fleet regulations boiled over, but these were rare and her father was there—always—when she finished a tank session. San recalled how he’d help her dry off just before playfully snapping the towel and then scooping her into both arms.

  But he never cried. He’d even grinned while whispering his last words: “Never a reason to fear if you’re on the right path.”

  “I hear things,” San said. They’d strapped her to a guidance gurney, which used tiny jets and magnetic-field generators to make sure she couldn’t bump into walls or hatches while the doctor pushed her through narrow ship’s corridors. Crew members watched as the two passed.

  The doctor nodded. “I know.”

  “What’s wrong with me? What happened? I don’t remember anything after the space elevator in Charleston.”

  “We’re at Phobos Station. Your mother is waiting to take you home.”

  “But what happened?”

  The doctor grabbed a handle on the gurney and stopped their forward motion by using his other hand to press against the wall; the corridor was empty. He glanced around to make sure nobody listened and leaned close to San, whispering.

  “You lost your mind and tried to steal an escape pod, almost killing two crewmen in the process. The whole time you were screaming about having to get to Ganymede Orbital Station. There is no orbital station on Ganymede. So I ran some tests and found something with your brain. It’s . . . changing.”

  Get to Ganymede . . .

  “There’s a voice in my head, even right now. It’s an old woman telling me I have to get to Ganymede. Why is my brain changing and what do you mean?”

  The doctor started pushing her again, floating behind the gurney. “It’s a kind of tumor, but one which is snaking itself throughout your neurons and tissue. Inoperable. We haven’t had time to do a biopsy but the remote reading indicates it’s a novel type, causing auditory hallucinations. The voice isn’t real, San; try to remind yourself every time you hear it. New synapses are growing at a rate that’s impossible and if we didn’t have you dosed on pain killers, your head would feel as though it’s splitting in two.”

  “Who were those men?” she asked. “The two men in black pressure suits who came to speak with you.”

  “The less you know, the better. I don’t know who you are or why you’re so interesting to them, and I don’t want to know. I just want you off this ship.”

  At the airlock, two crewmen punched in a key code so the inner door cycled with a hiss and one of them pulled the circular hatch toward them. The doctor nudged her into the tiny room. Both San and he waited for the door to seal behind them, which triggered the outer door to hiss open, after which he glided through, yanking San’s gurney. He didn’t get far before a woman’s voice cried out.

  Her mother looked worse than when San had left. Even weightless, the woman’s spine twisted so badly from infection that she stooped into a near C shape, her bone disintegrating and muscles tightening. San’s father had looked the same before he died. She fought back tears at the sight before noticing something else had changed: Her mother, Nang, wore a black robe over her pressure suit and long hair had now been cropped close, almost bald. Nobody told me, San thought, she had joined an order. The robe was so dark that its shadows gave birth to shadows, drawing her focus so that the vision, combined with the drugs administered earlier, pulled her into a darkness which encased San’s thoughts. The Church, she thou
ght. It had risen from the death of obscurity and emerged from the catacombs of time, reasserting itself with at least enough vigor to have captured her mother in its grasp.

  San began sobbing in the microgravity of Phobos Station; tears welled and detached, drifting toward air recirculation intakes along the corridor floor, one droplet larger than the others. Maybe if I can concentrate hard enough, it will block the voice. At first it worked; the water undulated in gentle air currents, back and forth, then settled into a perfect sphere that reflected the ambient lighting in a display of sparkling flashes.

  Get to Ganymede Orbital Station . . .

  San started screaming. She stopped when her mother grabbed her hand. “I’m here, San. You must be strong. This is not the end.”

  “I’m going insane.”

  “No. You are not. This is only part of your journey. Your father and I decided to take this course long ago, when you were still inside me and I do not regret a thing.”

  “You made me a short, fat creature. And now I’ve failed at what I’ve been designed to do. Where do I go now, especially now that I have a brain tumor?”

  Her mother smiled again and used the sleeve of her habit to wipe the tears off San’s cheek, then turned to the ship’s doctor. Her voice became stern. The commanding tone made San feel safe—a child again—and she was almost certain her mother would fix this.

  “I work in one of the research institutes planet-side. Why is my daughter strapped down like an animal?”

  “Ms. Vongchanh, this is Fleet’s decision. I don’t have the authority—”

  “Fleet,” her mother said, “has abandoned my child. They have no say here. What happened? She was fine when she left.”

  Their voices disappeared. San saw the doctor’s lips move but it was as if a throbbing hum swallowed all sound and before she knew it he had grabbed the gurney handle again and San flew through Phobos Station’s tunnels. The voice again materialized in her head, intruding into her thoughts: watch and remember.

  The odor of humans trapped inside a rock hit San, making her wince with the smell of recycled sweat and disinfectant, just enough chlorine spray to prevent mold from growing within pools of condensation. Phobos reminded her of a prison. Narrow cylinders had been carved into the moon’s rock, with silver handrails that its occupants used to pull themselves along in microgravity. San tried to grab one, forgetting that she couldn’t move, but her arm came free of the straps and both hands moved through the rail, which gave no resistance at all. You’re hallucinating again, she thought. As if to confirm, San now floated off the gurney at the same moment a man emerged from another corridor and passed through her body, so that she began to wonder if she had died. How else could this be possible? I am a thing made of air and consciousness, nothing else—a phantom soul. The humming volume increased to a roar, drowning her thoughts, and the voice reminded her to watch so that San concentrated, following her mother’s flowing black robe while they moved past another docking airlock. This one had been emblazoned with the warning symbols of a ship preparing for imminent departure. San stopped; she pressed her face closer to the screen, which danced in a series of red and green data markers, the shorthand of Fleet and indecipherable to anyone but those practiced in the vagaries of logistics and space port regulations.

  She absorbed every detail, taking in every system status no matter how inconsequential: a scout ship, military—fueled and waiting for its pilot who was returning from Mars’ surface in just a few hours.

  Get to Ganymede Orbital Station . . .

  A memory flooded her thoughts: Fleet had needed something. Her father had been the key to one of their research programs but even now San sensed secrets behind secrets in her mother’s face, tensed muscles causing her jaw to quiver with the stress of knowing a thing that nobody would want to know, and San had once asked why her father had been so important. She’d asked it on the day of the accident, via vid-coms; both her parents had been quarantined. The one thing her mother had admitted was that a bacterial vector had been used for something. For what? Genetic alterations? What could have been so new and important that such an ancient and unreliable vector would have been risked? Whatever the reason, her mother had mumbled that either the vector had mutated or that it hadn’t been understood in the first place and she and three other scientists had exposed themselves before anyone knew there was a problem. Then, just as suddenly as they’d been quarantined, the infection vanished.

  Within a week her mother and father had been released from medical lockdown and for a few weeks the fear vanished. The tests had been successful and her father had called, grinning from ear to ear to let her know that the experiments had been completed and Fleet no longer needed him—or the cybernetic portion of his brain—for poking and prodding. That’s when San had first heard the name Zhelnikov. She’d never met the man. But the tone of her father’s voice said everything she needed to know: Zhelnikov was evil. San’s father never spoke with that quiet and even tone unless it was in reference to something despicable.

  A few days later, her father started coughing. It soon grew into a hacking so bad that he’d gone to medical and one day they’d pulled San from the tanks, calling her to the Fleet training administrator who gave her the news. Both her mother and father were dying. Whatever had infected them had altered her parents’ DNA and touched off a human self-destruct sequence that was working its way through their brain cells and spine, shutting everything down; the best doctors could do was slow the wasting. But with her father’s brain makeup, where so much of his gray matter had been replaced, he had only lasted a few months.

  Soon, I will also lose my mother—because of Fleet.

  San yanked herself from thought and glanced around. The pair waited in a tiny sleeping cubicle where Mars’ orbital station surrounded them with its hum and made it hard to talk, Phobos so small that the noise of supporting machinery echoed through the rock. The walls rang with metallic sounds and clanking.

  “It’s good to see you again, Daughter.”

  “I washed out.”

  The woman kissed San’s forehead. “You don’t see the future. There is a plan and you’re part of it; don’t give up even if you can’t see the point.”

  “What’s wrong with me?”

  “Well . . .” Nang’s voice cracked; her face looked worn with thin wrinkles that hadn’t been there when San left, lines that made her ancient instead of middle-aged. “They say you may have an aggressive brain tumor. But I have never trusted in the wisdom of physicians; they rely on diagnostic equipment, algorithms, and bots that, if they can’t identify an illness, conclude it must be deadly. You don’t have a tumor; you have something similar to a tumor. The two are not the same.”

  San looked away. “You are a Proelian now. A nun? Why? There is no faith anymore; you raised me in the Church, and I don’t feel any closer to it.”

  “I think I’ve always been a Proelian at heart. I just hid it from your father. He was very Buddhist and I didn’t want to cause any arguments between us. The universe is changing, San; it’s smaller than we thought. I have learned much about the Sommen during my time on Mars and you will too. They gave something to the Proelians: hope, and a way to grow. Now the Church rebounds. It has finally come out of hiding and in just a pair of decades our order has found its home throughout Fleet-occupied territories. You are on the side of good. But you have to have faith.”

  “Tell me now. What about the Sommen gave you faith?”

  “It’s not time. You still have to be tested and you’re young. But when you learn, you will understand. There is evil within Fleet, and evil outside.”

  Those words. The drugs had begun to wear off, but still San’s brain refused to function normally and she had to concentrate, finally recalling where she’d heard them before.

  “Sister Mirriam-Ann said the same thing. When will I understand?” She looked down at the straps still binding her to the gurney and realized there was no way for her to break free; they were too
secure, too tight.

  “Soon. Someday. For now we return to Mars; the shuttle won’t be here for a few hours but when it arrives we can board.”

  “No. I have to leave. I’m not losing it, Mom; I just need to find out what’s going on at Ganymede. You told me how Dad had to run to escape from investigators in Charleston, when you first met him. I have to do the same thing. Something is happening to me and I don’t get it.”

  “San.” The woman wiped a tear from her cheek and shook her head. “Stop this.”

  “I’m not crazy!” San told her about her vision of a scout ship preparing to leave Phobos, including the name of its pilot, its manifest number, and ship numerical identifier. The memory was fresh, a photographic image stored in her mind. “I don’t know why or how, but I know that I have to get on that ship and someone or something is guiding me.”

  Her mother gaped in disbelief. The woman then pushed off from the wall and the door hissed open. Before pulling herself outside into the corridor, she turned and shook her head.

  “San, if this turns out to be wrong and you only imagined all those details from the ship’s manifest, will you stop talking this way and agree you need help?”

  “Okay.”

  “I wish your father were here; we need his abilities.”

  “For what?”

  “Wait.” Her mother unsecured the gurney and pulled it toward the cubicle door, looking both ways in the corridor outside. “Because he would be able to access the station’s logic systems—to see if we’re being monitored and surveilled. And he would be able to find that ship without having to venture outside.”