When Jane was done—and starting to work on herself—I took a look in the mirror; the ultimate design was actually kind of . . . pretty, gold and gray in a sort of tessellating waterfall design. What Jane had been working on for herself was significantly creepier: purples and blues in the shape of dozens of different eyes. It was good work, though—I would have confused us with demons, which was sort of the point.
With that taken care of, we all crowded into Schaz’s cockpit again as we approached the far edge of our destination system. We dropped out of hyperspace—right into a sort of pulsating veridian fog, already inside the nebula.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I said, disgusted. “First the gas on Kandriad, now this. Is there . . . have we stumbled into some kind of fucked-up theme, here, Jane? Are you doing this on purpose?”
She smiled at that—the effect of which caused a few of her drawn-on eyeballs to seem to wink at me. “Nah,” she said, the stick in her hand as she maneuvered us through the gas of the nebula, hopefully toward where we were going: I couldn’t see a thing out the viewscreens—beyond “green,” I mean. “The universe just hates you.”
I sighed. “You might not actually be wrong about that,” I said. “After all, I can never seem to—” The witty rejoinder I’d been preparing went unspoken as our destination appeared in the viewscreen.
A massive rock loomed out of the mist, first not there, then there, fully formed. It was honeycombed with metal structures and tunnels, like it had been imprinted with circuitry; in several places on the crust large machines sat silent and still, remnants of the mining operation that had once toiled within.
Jane slowed Scheherazade to a stop, just outside of orbital range. Then we just . . . sat.
“What are we doing?” Sho whispered. I understood the inclination.
“We’re waiting for the locals to see us,” Jane replied, not exactly whispering back, but her voice lower than it usually would have been. “That’s only polite, giving them time to decide whether we’re dead or demon.”
“Shouldn’t they have picked us up on scans?” I asked, then felt stupid for asking; of course they hadn’t, just like Jane hadn’t picked up Valkyrie Rock on our own scans. Something about the nebula threw off long-range scanners.
Which also meant the strange ship with the armored guy we were chasing could have been right behind us, and we wouldn’t have known it. Not a comforting thought.
Jane just shook her head. Abruptly, a searchlight cut on, sweeping through the mist from the exterior of the asteroid to focus on Scheherazade. Jane had set a comm channel open; a voice came through, almost sibilant. “This is Charon, operational AI for Valkyrie Rock,” it said. Jane frowned at that, but didn’t answer. “You are advised to dock at the indicated bay.” Our consoles flashed as the AI flagged one of the gaping holes in the asteroid’s surface. “Please land your ship, shut down your power, then await the greeting party that will decide your intentions.”
With that said, the comms shut off abruptly; not much of a conversationalist, this Charon. Jane was left narrowing her eyes at the viewscreen, not happy about something.
“What’s wrong?” I asked her.
“This isn’t . . . the AI shouldn’t have greeted us,” she said flatly. “It should have been one of the priests, with a series of questions to sort out our intent.”
“Are you just annoyed that you’d memorized the right answers, and now you don’t get to use them?” I asked.
“No,” she shook her head, then backtracked. “Well, yes. But not just that.”
“You think crazy armored glowing guy is here already?” We really needed an actual name to put on this asshole.
“Possible,” she allowed. “But if so—if we’re right about him setting off the nuke on Kandriad to cover his tracks, he hasn’t done the same thing here, and he could have: the asteroid is powered by a fusion reactor, and it’s not hard at all to convert a fusion reactor into a fission bomb.”
“It terrifies me that you know that.”
“I know a lot of things that would terrify you. Regardless of whether he’s here already or not, though, we’re here to find him, which means we need to get on board.” With that said, she leaned over the controls again and kicked Schaz into motion, guiding us gently toward the docking bay.
As we got closer, I could see the strange designs the cultists had carved into the surface of their home, probably with mining lasers: all sorts of swirls and spirals, tiled frescoes and massive raised reliefs depicting scenes of death and wandering. It wasn’t the most comforting thing in the world to see as we drifted out of the fog, the muraled surface of the rock looming closer and closer, then swallowing us whole as we entered the docking bay tunnel, the mouth of which had been carved into overlapping rows of hideous gargoyles. As the tunnel closed in around us, it was impossible—for me, anyway—not to look up and notice that the grimacing statuary looked a hell of a lot like teeth, giving the impression of a fanged maw closing around us as we entered the interior of the asteroid itself.
The carvings and designs continued on the inner walls of the tunnel; one by one lights came up, just ahead of our passage, until we’d finally reached a large, circular chamber at the end. At least that was familiar: a docking bay was a docking bay the whole galaxy wide, complete with various hanging machinery and stacks of sealed crates filled with repair materials.
Jane set Schaz down in the very center of the bay—no alarms or klaxons were sounding to alert the natives to an aggressive presence, hopefully a good sign—and we stepped out of the cockpit, letting Sho wheel forward, to the comm station. “If you need to reach us, press here,” Jane showed him a button. “But try not to need to. We’ve got Justified encryption, so the cult won’t be able to hear what we’re saying, but chances are they’ll still know we’re talking, and that will make them nervous. We don’t want to make them nervous.”
“I mean, we kind of do, right?” I asked, a little nervous myself. “Shouldn’t . . . shouldn’t demons make them nervous?”
“We want to make them ontologically nervous, not ‘draw guns and fire’ nervous,” Jane answered. “There’s a difference.”
“A difference I might understand if I had any idea what ‘ontology’ was,” I grunted in reply.
“It means . . . don’t worry about it. When the priests arrive to greet us, just remember: don’t look at them. Don’t speak to them. If you’re asked a direct question, bare your teeth and breathe in, deeply. Let me do the talking.”
“Funny how we always seem to default to that.”
“Do you know how to convince a bunch of cultists that we’re demons from the great beyond, sent to test their faith, and further that we’re the type of demons who shouldn’t be trifled with, rather than the type of demons that should be thrown into an airlock and then sucked out the other side? Then further still, how to convince them that there is a threat coming to invade their home, and we need their help ambushing and capturing that threat, so that we can take him alive?”
I took a deep breath, then let it out. “No,” I said with a sigh. “No, I do not.”
“Well, then. Let me do the talking.” She’d unsealed Scheherazade’s loading bay as we had that little discussion; she strapped on her revolver and a few knives, gesturing for me to do the same, but that was it for armament. No body armor, no larger guns.
“If we have to defend ourselves, I’m going to feel fairly naked without Bitey,” I told her.
She grinned at that. “Then I’ve taught you well,” she said. “Still, if it comes to that, feel free to throw your teke around: that ought to seem fairly demonish.”
“Gee. Thanks.”
“You know what I mean; quit being a teenager.”
“I am—”
“I know, it was . . . just get ready.” Jane sealed the inner airlock behind us; through the window, I could see Sho, turned to face us in the cockpit. He raised a hand in a wave. I waved back, then turned to face the outer door, fitting my shoulder hols
ters on and dropping the semiautomatic handguns Javi had given me into the rigs.
“Ready?” Jane asked, one of her hands resting on the butt of her gun; that was comforting.
I nodded, taking a deep breath in and facing the outer door. “Ready,” I said. Under my breath, I started muttering to myself: “I’m a demon. I’m a demon. I’m a demon. I’m a gray-gold afterlife demon, and I’m here to track down an asshole or devour souls, so you better be willing to help me with the first if you don’t want the latter to get done to you. The longer I have to wait for the asshole to appear, the more peckish I’m going to grow, so you’d best get ready.”
“You don’t have to convince yourself, Esa,” Jane told me—I could hear a smile in her voice, even though I wasn’t looking at her. “Just them. I also don’t know that a demon would use the word ‘peckish’ to describe her all-encompassing hunger for mortal souls.”
“Shut the fuck up, Jane, let me get into a . . . demon-y kind of a headspace.”
“Among other things, I also doubt a demon would call themselves ‘demon-y.’ ”
“Just . . . just . . . you know?”
She grinned at that—it never ceased to amuse her when I utterly failed to articulate a thought—and reached out to open the outer airlock.
Welcome to Valkyrie Rock.
CHAPTER 9
It was cold. Why was it so cold? Most species fit comfortably into the same habitable zone of temperatures, and this was an asteroid, an artificial atmosphere; it could be as cool or warm as the inhabitants wanted. So why were they keeping it roughly the same temperature as a freezer?
I rubbed my hands over my arms. “Seriously?” I asked Jane.
She gave a ghost of a smile. “They’re dead, remember? The dead don’t need heat.”
“But I mean . . . they do. They’re not actually dead.” I paused for a moment, and then I couldn’t help it; I had to ask. “I mean, they’re not, right? This isn’t . . . we’re not . . .”
“No, Esa, they’re not actually dead. But they do their damnedest to convince themselves they are.” Jane looked around the massive docking bay, her smile gone, replaced by a frown. I got where she was coming from. This was . . . off.
I’d visited plenty of spaceports with Jane over the past three years, and even in private bays like this one, there was usually some measure of activity—techs running around making repairs, automated systems humming quietly in the background. Here, there was nothing. Just a kind of stillness, one that could only be described as “funereal.”
Of course, I was maybe only thinking that because of the whole “we’re all actually dead” thing.
Still, it was . . . off. Weird. Eerie. There should have been something.
“How long do we wait?” I asked her.
“Until they’re ready to see us,” she replied, though she was staring at the locked doors at the entrance just as hard as I was.
“And if they decide they don’t want to see us?”
“Would you want two demons just . . . hanging out in one of your docking bays, unattended? They’ll see us.”
“Ummmm. Jane?” Since we were both staring at the door, it was hard to miss: not the door itself, but just beside it, near the control panel.
A smear of fuchsia, bright against the cold metal of the wall. Vyriat blood. It led right up to the edge of the door, like someone had been bleeding, reaching for the door controls, then had been dragged away. Likely through the opening, to the other side; otherwise there’d be blood on the floor. Someone had been trying to seal something out of the bay, and themselves in. Not good. Not a good fucking sign.
“Yeah. I see it.”
“Maybe they aren’t coming to see us. Because maybe they can’t. Do we have some sort of plan B, here?”
Jane was still staring at that lone splash of color, grim and vibrant at the same time; she reached up to activate her comms. “Schaz?” she asked. “Can you access their systems—hack your way in, get us camera feeds, find out what the hell is going on out there?”
“That’s a negative, boss,” Schaz replied. “Their networks are firewalled to high heaven.”
“Right.” Jane approached the control panel—didn’t bother punching in numbers, just pulled out her knife and jimmied it open instead, to get access to its guts. She put the blade away, then started digging into the wiring, turning only for a moment to tell me: “Get ready for anything to come through that door.”
I nodded, beginning to pull teke energy into myself. “Can I go back inside Schaz, get Bitey?” I asked.
She shook her head, still crossing wires and attaching things to other things that theoretically shouldn’t be attached. Look, what do you want, I’ve already said I don’t know much about electrical engineering. “We don’t know that the natives aren’t around; they might just be busy,” she said. “They’ll expect us to wear pistols; rifles would be seen as a declaration of . . . ill intent.”
“Jane, you see that, just like I do.” I nodded at the bloodstain. “That doesn’t say ‘busy’ to me, that says ‘not capable of much at all.’ It says ‘very bad things have happened here.’ ” I stepped closer, touched the blood. Still wet. “Very recently.”
“Just get ready.” She crossed one more wire, and the door slid open.
I was usually happy to be right. This wasn’t one of those times.
Half a dozen corpses lay in the access hallway. They had been butchered, the strange, flowing robes they were wearing stained and heavy with the blood of several different species. Many of the bodies had been burnt as well; the heads, specifically. Specifically, and very purposefully. It was as if whoever had done this had torn them apart, then approached each body, one by one, and scorched their faces right the fuck off.
I let the teke pulse subside, and drew one of my pistols instead. Jane did the same thing. “Schaz?” she said into her comms. “Can you get us a route to the central core of Charon?”
“Can do; I’ve collected mapping data on Valkyrie Rock from your prior visits here. Feeding the information to your HUD.” I couldn’t see anything, of course, but Jane started forward, moving like she had a purpose—Schaz was already showing her the data.
“Where are we going?” I asked, stepping over the bodies.
“Plan B,” Jane told me. “If we can get to the core of the AI running the station, we can reprogram him.” Her eyes were darting back and forth as we approached an intersection in the tunnel, scanning for a threat. “Give ourselves administrative access—cameras, door controls, power, the works. That way, we can figure out what exactly is going on here, and maybe isolate our . . . friend.” We were moving past corpses; “friend” wasn’t the word I would have used.
“We’re going to brainwash the station AI.” For some reason, that made me feel queasy.
“We’re going to flip a switch,” Jane replied. “We won’t change anything else.” She peered down the corridors at the intersection, in both directions; more bodies, either way. “Not that he’s going to have a lot of use left in him after this, anyway. What’s an AI with nothing to serve?”
It was a rhetorical question, but Schaz answered anyway, her voice chilling in its certainty. Or maybe that was just the bodies, making me jumpy. “A ghost,” she said, her tone matter-of-fact.
“Thanks, Schaz,” I said sourly.
We followed Jane’s route into the twisting maze of tunnels, our weapons raised. More bodies, all of them faceless. At least some of them had tried to fight, had weapons lying beside them, shell casings as well. But none of the dead had been killed by bullets. However it was that the glowing monster in the fancy exosuit killed, it wasn’t with ballistic firearms.
We’d known his ship might be faster than ours—that he might have arrived in-system hours ahead of us, maybe even half a day or so. But this—this level of bloodshed, of combat: it still took time. We’d been right on his tail when he’d left Kandriad—this had happened fast. Which maybe explained the lack of any sort of alarms. Still,
I couldn’t wrap my head around how it could have happened so quickly—a whole platoon of soldiers couldn’t have left this much carnage in their wake, not in just a few hours.
Unless he was just really, really good at carnage.
We came to a more open section of the tunnels, the stone walls spiraling out, high enough to allow several different levels, with catwalks and metal stairs accessing what seemed to be storefronts and apartments on the higher elevations. Just a regular main street, for a death-obsessed cult living on an asteroid in a nebula in the middle of nowhere.
The corpses here had been piled high in the center of the thoroughfare, and burned. The stench was awful. The floor was matted with blood, where the bodies had been dragged from where they fell and tossed onto the bonfire. I’d thought what we’d seen on Kandriad, on the front lines, had been brutal, but it was nothing compared to this.
Whatever strangeness these people had believed in—whatever it was that had driven them out here, to try and stake their claim on a forgotten corner of the galaxy where they could practice their weird shared delusion untouched by the rest of the universe—they hadn’t deserved this. No one deserved this. It was tantamount to genocide, wiping an entire belief system out of existence and for . . . what?
I had the sinking feeling that it had nothing to do with their beliefs, no different than the carnage on Kandriad that the asshole had exploited, using a war he didn’t care about to try and achieve his own goals. Whatever this was, it didn’t feel like tactics, like something to do with resources or intelligence gathering or any kind of strategy—it was something else, and the people here had just been in the way. Collateral damage.
No different than Sho’s mother.
But why the burning? Why the . . . ritual, the debasement? Nothing about it made sense, didn’t fit into any logic I could summon. It felt like an act of madness.
A Chain Across the Dawn Page 11
