Not even all that water can put out a baryon-ignited fire, he told himself confidently. He wondered how many screams he would hear before it was all over. How many people would beg for mercy. How many would simply die before they even realized death was near.
And he wondered about himself. Will I scream? Will I take it like a man? Will I regret everything or will I even care?
65
W
hen Arilynn Smith finished sketching the final component of the devil in the blue box, she beamed. She tore the sketch from her pad and placed it upon the floor with all the others.
There were nine component drawings, and Arilynn arranged them into a completed jigsaw puzzle. Her jaw dropped as she studied the finished product.
“Whereyoubluebox?”
Her mind had shown that this devil was locked safely inside a long, deep blue container that protected it from strangers. But now, she could not see the container.
“Youdevil.”
The cylindrical device was replete with digital display board, intersecting nodes and an exterior encasement of long, narrow tubes.
“Telldaddyit's devil. Telldaddy.”
About that instant, as dizziness forced her to stumble backward half a step, Arilynn saw something quite different before her, and she shook her bald head.
The devil was on the move.
She saw unfamiliar colors. She saw conduits and wires waving as if in a breeze. And she saw the cylinder begin to rotate, the long tubes briefly disappearing as the devil turned over on itself.
There were no longer nine component sketches. There was no longer paper. Only the devil. And three-dimensional shapes began to form, and the devil rose from the floor.
And Arilynn, amazed as she was terrified, stepped forward, reached for the devil.
“Getyougetyougetyou devil.”
But as she swiped at the straddle bomb, her hands met only the air. The image remained aloft, and she saw it on all sides at once.
“Iknowyoudevil. Youdeath.”
Her hands clasped over her mouth, Arilynn stumbled back in horror, as other shapes and sounds began to emerge immediately around the devil. She saw huge monitors, viop spheres and colorful grids. She saw a man with gray hair, a large belly and glassy eyes.
“Youdeathdevil. Lovedaddytoo. Killalldevil.”
She knew this place. She had been there many times before.
And she knew the man.
“Gonnaget youdevil. Stopyou devil.”
She licked her lips, and then Arilynn dashed from her bedroom to find the devil.
Part Four
Into Little Pieces
66
L
ara Singer stepped out of the SlipTube, heard Peter cursing and decided she wanted no part of examining the data encrypted beneath Adam Smith’s message.
Mifuro regained his composure, cleansed his face of any remnants of tears and politely asked to regain the swivel at his workstation, breaking up the threesome who were studying his data-filled monitors.
“Un-fucking-believable.” Peter continued to rant at no one in particular. “Says here 95 percent of the countries joined those damn ECs by popular vote. What kind of people would just vote away their nationalities like that?”
“Tired people, I would think,” Miguel said. “People who had finally gotten fed up with endless wars and social unrest and poverty and crime and on and on and on. After the Super Depression of the 2070s, most of us knew we were marching toward something quite different. So along come the ECs preaching this thing called Universal Homogeneity and, well …”
“Politicians with spreadsheets! That’s all they are.”
Lara did not want to get caught in the debate, and she was momentarily relieved when Fran motioned her over to the workstation where the biologist was sitting alone.
Her voice was low. “Lara, sit down. I need you to see something.”
“Yes?”
“For some damn reason, I decided I just wasn't curious about the subtext on that message from Earth,” she said. “So, after I got the computer bioscan running to check for any sign of ku-ccha in the water supply, I figured I might as well get back to what I was doing before all this – before the debacle with Susan. What we were doing.”
She pointed to the central monitor of her workstation. Lara recognized the internal heat sensor array.
“Did you find something else?”
“Yes. Big trouble. I think.”
Fran swiveled toward the monitor and gave the gentle command, “Computer, replay full sequence.”
“Is this in the same time interval as before?” Lara asked. “Tenth-of-a-second intervals?”
“No. I didn't have to do that. This is in real time, but I've broken the program into four 30-second intervals. Watch.”
Just as she remembered from Fran's initial demonstration, the chronometer counted as the expected nine pricks of yellow indicating crew location remained in focus. Most of them were stationary, but a couple were moving. When the first aberration that purported to show more than 300 lifeforms appeared, Lara could have sworn it lasted at least a full second. In the second sequence, the 300-plus pricks returned, and this time the chronometer showed them intact for 1.8 seconds. On the third sweep, the aberration lasted 2.9, then 3.7 seconds on the fourth replay.
Lara exhaled deeply. “What does it mean, Fran? Is this for real?”
“I have a bad feeling that it is, Lara. I don't know what it is, but the duration of its appearance and the frequency of the appearances is increasing.”
“Frequency?”
“Yes. The time lag between the anomaly just before the stasis explosion and the first appearance in this sequence was 58 minutes. The lag between each subsequent appearance has decreased by a consistent ratio. If this pattern holds, then we’re six minutes from the next appearance.”
“Is the computer still insisting these blips are unknown lifeforms?”
“Yes. Same number as well. But, Lara, there's something else. As their duration has increased, I've been able to study their locations on Andorran. There's something very interesting here.” She pointed to the monitor, where the last batch of yellow pricks was frozen onscreen. “Most of these ‘lifeforms’ are located in habitable parts of the ship, but look at this grouping up here.”
Lara recognized the schematic of the Ion Propulsion Generator.
“If I was to believe these things were for real, Lara, I'd have to believe that they could exist inside the core of the IPG.”
“But that's not possible,” Lara said matter-of-factly.
“Of course not.”
“And what's more,” Lara began, “If there are so many of them, more than 300, why haven't we seen any of them? Even if they were only taking form for a couple of seconds, surely one of us would have seen them by now.”
As the words came out of her mouth, reality struck Lara hard, but she wasn't ready to admit it verbally.
“That's simple to explain, Lara. I asked myself the same question, so I filtered out the locales of the nine of us at the exact times of these appearances. None of them ever appeared within our line of sight. Never in the same pod as any of us.”
“Never?” Lara asked hesitantly.
“There were some close calls, even a case of a few feet away but separated by a SlipTube door, I would suppose. Here, look at sequence three.”
Lara immediately sensed what she was about to see, and she thought of turning away. Dreams, she told herself. All dreams. That's all they were.
Fran ordered the computer to scan in on one grid of the display and magnify it. Lara thought she recognized the diagram.
“Medpod,” Fran said flatly. “At the instant of this appearance, there are four of us in there – Olivia, Sue, Nat and you.”
Lara really didn't need for her to go any farther with this. There were five yellow pricks on this diagram, two of them close to each other and separated by a ...
“S
lipTube door,” she whispered.
Fran didn't seem to hear her. “This would have been less than a minute or so after Miguel and I took a Tube up here to listen to the message from Earth. This is the closest physical distance I can find between one of us and one of, well, one of it. Them. Whatever. Whoever. A sighting would have confirmed or refuted everything.”
Lara was perspiring. Ghosts, she surmised. I'm not dreaming. I'm seeing ghosts. Must be. She realized how incredibly stupid that would sound if the words came to her lips.
Fran turned to her. “I assume you didn't see anything, or we would have heard about it, Lara. Right?”
She couldn't look Fran in the eyes, and instead kept her focus upon the schematic. Her throat was very dry – the soothing effect of the hot tea had long since dissipated. Fran said something else to her, perhaps asking the same thing, but Lara heard other words echoing from the recent past: Do you believe in the union?
“Lara?” The biologist asked again.
The words fell meekly but in a complete sentence, and Lara was surprised: “I dismissed it because I didn't think it could be real.”
“What? You saw something?”
“I thought it spoke to me.”
“Spoke? What was it, Lara? This is damn important. What was it?”
“I thought it was a Fyal.”
Fran was incensed and obviously as terrified at the same time, and she was hesitant to respond to Lara's admission. Instead, she turned on her swivel.
“Captain, I think you folks had better come over here. We've got ourselves a helluva situation.”
Lara tried to sit in cold silence as long as she could. But when Fran finished her explanation, Lara looked up. They were all staring at her, their expressions an odd mixture of curiosity, terror and skepticism.
Miguel asked her to confirm what she told Fran, and she did, adding nothing else. Something inside convinced her not to admit she thought the Fyal was Sh'hun itself, or to even quote the words she knew absolutely she heard. And the similarity to the dream, well, it was a given she was not going to pursue that.
“It was so quick,” she told them. “I was so stunned I didn't really pay attention to the words. I was horrified. And then we received the message, and I just didn't think ...”
“I understand,” Miguel offered a comforting hand, and he smiled softly. “You must have been in a very awkward position. Fran, is there anything else you can offer?”
“No. I've given you everything I have. But I think two things are damn obvious now. One, this is not a computer glitch,” she said, turning to Peter. “Two, we've got some kind of emerging lifeform on this ship and we'd damn well better do something about it.”
“And what in the hell would you propose we do?” Peter shot back. “We don't know what this is, if it's even for real. This could be ... this could be ...”
“A manifestation of something that doesn't exist,” Miguel added calmly, and all eyes turned to him. “Yes. Possibly. I haven't forgotten what we discussed in the agripod, and I've been ruminating ever since. Many things have been unclear in my mind, for obvious reasons, but I've managed to think back over some of the discoveries we made while on Centauri III. As you may recall, one of the last concepts the Fyal revealed to us regarding their beliefs of life and death was that of the dual existence. The physical traveler and the spiritual traveler. Not terribly unlike many of our own religious notions of body and soul, but with a key difference.”
There were stares, mostly grimaces. Fran and Lara looked at each other, then at Miguel.
“What?” Lara whispered.
Miguel continued. “The Fyal insisted each of them was actually two different beings, each with its own predetermined destiny, and each capable of living apart. The physical traveler existed as a manifestation of the Fyal's current level of evolution. The spiritual traveler represented their next level. At some point in the near future, the physical travelers would cease to exist, leaving only the spiritual travelers.”
“I don’t remember ever hearing anything like that,” Peter said, and others shook their heads.
“Well, uh,” Miguel stumbled. “I could have sworn this was during our open sessions with them. Right toward the end. No one remembers it? Strange. I wonder … maybe, the final day.”
A pall of revelation fell over the captain’s face. “When we met with them. Michaud and I. The last thing they told us before …”
Fran displayed an incredulous smile. “That explains our stupidity. But Captain, are you suggesting that what Lara saw, and what the computer is recording, is some sort of ‘spiritual traveler?’ Perhaps Sh'hun's spiritual traveler?”
“I realize it is a theory that requires a leap of faith, Fran. Is it not unreasonable to believe that what we are witnessing is some sort of echo caused by such a spirit? The disintegration of Sh'hun's body in that stasis chamber could have triggered an after-effect we simply don't understand.”
Lara wanted to believe this, and perhaps if it had come from Fran, she would have. But something was wrong about Miguel's theory. An echo of a spirit? For a reason she could not yet understand, there was no way he should have known this.
Convenient! She decided. Calm. He's too calm. Too confident!
“First of all, goddammit,” Fran interjected, “we've proved that Sh'hun wasn't even in that stasis chamber at the instant of the explosion. Forgot about that, Captain?”
“True, Fran. Questions remain about that. However, it is safe to ascertain that Sh'hun's physical body did, at some point, cease to exist. It never left the ship, and it has not been traced since the explosion. However, the first anomaly occurred at the same time the computer determined Sh'hun's body was no longer intact. Again, I would propose that we may be witness to the existence of what the Fyal call a spiritual traveler. And if that is the case, then we have nothing to fear. They said the spiritual traveler is pure thought and energy. No more.”
“But there are more than 300 separate lifeforms being recorded. Explain that!”
“As I said before, Fran, they're echoes, caused by something we can't understand. Now, I do believe this is something we should monitor carefully. But we are also expecting a craft to rendezvous with us within about 90 minutes, according to the multi-stream with Dr. Smith's message. That means we have much to do.” Fran tried to speak, but Miguel cut her off. “I understand your concerns. Keep me informed of what develops. Until we can be sure that there is any true threat to this ship, we should focus on the future. We all realize we have a difficult road ahead. We must prepare for it.”
The captain turned to Mifuro. “Uplink the transmit code. We need to draft a reply to Dr. Smith. We have to warn them about the Fyal, but it must be done correctly.”
“I'm not believing this,” Fran whispered to Lara, who had to agree. OK, so it was possible that Miguel had somehow pinpointed exactly what was going on. But the odds of that seemed so remote at this moment.
As her stomach swirled, however, she saw Fran left her side and returned to the workstation. Except this time, the overhead monitor was displaying a picture from medpod. It was Olivia.
Boris was next to Fran, attentive. Olivia was shaking her head.
“This is nothing like I thought,” the doctor started.
“What do you mean?” Fran asked.
“Susan didn't come into contact with the ku-ccha through the ship's water supply,” she hesitated. “Yes, it's ku-ccha in her system, but she didn't drink it. I found evidence that it was injected into her. I came across a micro-scar that I ...”
Immediately, Olivia lunged to her right, out of the range of the monitor. “What the hell!” Someone screamed, although Lara didn't think it was Olivia's voice. It sounded more like ... Susan's.
“God help us!” Olivia screamed this time.
“I’ll be fucked,” Peter said. “They've been here all the time.”
They all turned, and Lara felt her heart skip a beat.
Two Fyal stood on the command deck of the Andorran.
67
T
hey were on the move. One of the Fyal opened its protective cone, and the mushroom-shaped head emerged, the eyes a sickly gray-red. The other reached its tentacles into the console of an empty workstation, and they disappeared into the circuitry.
Lara saw something different about these Fyal, something so ...
Unreal.
And she knew what it was. They were not completely corporeal. On the contrary, she saw right through them.
As expected, the familiar clicks and whispers returned.
However, the sounds came not from the Fyal, but from the mouth of the oldest human on the command deck.
Miguel Navarro seemed to be in perfect sync with the Fyal language, at least as much as Lara remembered of it. His lips moved in contortions as he stared at the incorporeal aliens.
“Captain,” Boris shouted, and Miguel snapped out of it.
He was crying.
“I’m sorry,” he stammered. “I can’t … they know. They know.”
He bolted past the entire crew, stepped into an open SlipTube, and vanished within seconds.
The Fyal also disappeared.
The command deck fell into panicked confusion.
Peter rushed to where they saw the Fyal, looking for any physical evidence. “This is insane,” he shouted repeatedly.
Fran quickly recalled the heat sensor array, hoping the computer could offer greater explanation for what was now more than theory. She ignored the overhead monitor, which was still linked to medpod, but to which Olivia had yet to return. Voices emanated from the monitor, but nothing in full sentences. Boris vacated his post and stepped on a Tube, insisting Olivia needed help, if nothing else than to protect her from Susan, who must surely have been driven over the edge by this development, he concluded.
Lara turned to the only other quietly stunned crewmate on the command deck, and Mifuro stared back. She saw his urgent desperation, but she also knew he felt as helpless as she.
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