A Chain Across the Dawn

by Drew Williams

  “Oh, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me.” A moment ago, I would have given anything for the tunnel I was in to widen out again—despite my aforementioned lack of claustrophobia, I had been growing more and more unhappy about the ever-tightening passage. Now that it had opened up, I would have given anything to crawl back into the confines of the tunnel.

  “Yes. That.” Schaz said. It took me a moment to force my hand to work, but I managed to reach up and mute my comms, a singular act of bravery, in my opinion. I didn’t need Schaz—or Jane, or our pursuer—to hear the noises of sheer terror I was about to make.

  “Those who await redemption,” my ass. The chamber before me was packed full of the cultists’ dead. They’d left redemption behind a good long while ago.

  The corpses were stuffed into alcoves carved into the rock; they were stacked like cordwood up on the floors; they hung from the ceilings on chains. They’d all been preserved somehow—the smell was intense, but it wasn’t decay, something else, drier and more chemical. These weren’t mining tunnels any longer—they were catacombs.

  Because of course a people obsessed with death wouldn’t just consign their dead to the void around them like anyone else would. Of course they’d make some kind of maze of dead bodies the very heart of their asteroid. And of course the path I’d need to take led right through the middle of said maze. That was just . . . that was just how things worked.

  If I survived long enough, I wondered if this moment would be my very own “sinking of the Ishiguro,” a story to drunkenly regale some green recruit with after I’d tied on half a dozen too many and decided to regurgitate my private nightmares all over everyone in earshot. Then I decided I’d be perfectly happy if that were true—because it meant I’d lived through this.

  I was not going to enjoy the next twenty minutes or so. I started forward anyway, pushing my way into the tight corridors lined on either side with corpses.

  They were dead; they weren’t going to wake up. They were dead; they weren’t going to wake up. None of the hands I kept brushing up against were going to reach out and grab me; none of their eyes were suddenly going to pop open, a precursor to the army of corpses around me lurching into motion. None of their sunken chest cavities were going to suddenly swell into breath as the dead came back to life, just long enough to attempt dragging me to my own place among their number. Why would they, that would be stupid: the dead didn’t need to breathe, they’d just reach for me without even that much warning.

  Stop it. Stop it. They were dead; they weren’t going to wake up.

  No matter how much I told myself that, it still seemed almost a guarantee that they would. As I pushed my way past the limbs hanging free of the alcoves and ducked under the hanging bodies, I let out a series of tiny yelps and muted curses. It didn’t get any better when I passed through what must have been the exact center of the asteroid, and gravity got weird for a bit; I was suddenly climbing where I should have been falling, jumping where I should have been crouching, using the alcoves as handholds and crawling over the corpses themselves when “down” suddenly became “sideways,” and then “up.” Some of the bodies were floating. I did not enjoy that, either.

  Finally gravity got its shit together again, and a little ways past that point I saw the exit, another small tunnel, hopefully leading back to another ladder and up the other side. Halfway through Valkyrie Rock; the armored asshole’s ship was somewhere above me, in another docking bay, the same as the one Schaz had set down in.

  Still no word from Jane.

  CHAPTER 12

  After the catacombs, the rest of my passage through the bowels of the asteroid was a comparative breeze. Still no word from Jane, though. No more creepy broadcasts in dead languages from Charon, either. Every once in a while I could feel tremors through the rock around me, but I didn’t know if they were from the normal operation of the machinery that kept (had kept) the cultists alive, or if they were reverberations from Jane’s fight with the . . . whatever the hell he was, starting to take a toll on the stone itself.

  I emerged from the maintenance tunnels in a thoroughfare remarkably similar to the one Jane and I had left behind, only this one was lacking the macabre sight of a stack of bodies turned into a bonfire, a fact for which I was profoundly grateful. “Left,” said Schaz, and I obediently turned, making my way toward another docking bay.

  “Any word from Jane?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” she said, and I could tell by the silence that she was just as worried as I was.

  More bloodstains in the tunnel leading to the bay; no bodies, though there were shell casings strewn across the floor, burn marks on the walls—the cultists had tried to put up a fight here, presumably when our pursuer had forced his way through the quarantine doors on the docking bay where his ship had set down.

  The carnage, the bloodshed—I still couldn’t wrap my head around it. What was the point? Even if he just wanted to cover his tracks, to leave no witnesses to his passage, he could have set the fusion reactor to blow, just like the bomb he’d set off on Kandriad—why the wholesale slaughter? The cultists hadn’t posed a threat; I wasn’t sure anything could, not after what we’d seen him shrug off.

  The only reasoning I could come up with was one that didn’t help much with the cold shivers of fear creeping down my spine: he had wanted to do it. He enjoyed it. Reveled in the violence, in the death.

  The only person in the galaxy who might hold the key to staving off the pulse, and he was a goddamned maniac.

  Didn’t matter. I was about to reach his ship, and I was going to cobble together a bomb out of spare parts lying around the bay—Schaz had already used her camera access to figure out how I could do that—and then I was going to blow said ship to kingdom come, and he could contemplate his mass-murdering ways stuck on this rock for however long it took us to rally the troops. After that, he’d be the Justified high council’s problem to handle—they could decide his fate.

  I passed through the blown-inward docking bay doors, and . . . yeah. That ship didn’t get any prettier up close. It was knobbly and distended, weirdly thin in some places and bulging in others. The metallic sheen of its strange shielding gave off a kind of hum under the fluorescent lights of the bay; if it hadn’t been for the landing struts and the boarding ramp—thankfully, already lowered, likely in his haste to hunt us down—I might have mistaken the thing for some odd metallic comet the cultists had hauled in for study from the nebula around them.

  I tried to ignore the ship, sitting like a cancer in the middle of the bay; I worked to build the bomb instead, following Schaz’s terse instructions. We still didn’t want to give away what we were doing over the comms, so her commands were less “Wire this part into that part, then attach this thing to the other thing” than they were “There. Turn that. That’s upside down. No, no, no, no, right.” It didn’t help that being alone in a docking bay with the ship of a monster who was currently doing his damnedest to kill Jane was not exactly doing wonders for my nerves; my hands weren’t quite shaking, but they weren’t the steadiest things in the world, either.

  Finally, the bomb was done, clutched under my arm like a child’s toy as I stood at the bottom of the ramp. I took a deep breath, tried to calm my racing pulse. Just ascending into a mass murderer’s ship. Whatever was inside, it couldn’t be worse than the catacombs I’d already passed through, could it?

  Yes. Yes, it most certainly could.

  It didn’t seem too terrible at first—the interior was more of that strange metallic coating, and it was all very . . . rounded, no edges here, there, or anywhere, but at least it wasn’t decorated by stretched-out, carved-off flesh or anything. It wasn’t decorated by anything, actually; Jane and I kept Scheherazade relatively spartan, but compared to this, we were decor-obsessed socialites with a deep-seated need to impress anyone who stepped into our home.

  That just made it easier to notice the cage, and the body held inside.

  It was the only piece of furniture in
the living quarters—though “furniture” seemed a woefully inadequate word for bars of cold steel meant for locking up a captive, no cot, no pillow, not even a toilet inside. The corpse was smallish, dressed in the same flowing robes I’d seen on the cultist corpses earlier; even as I approached, I knew what I was going to find.

  It was a child—a teenager. A Vyriat, younger than me, about Sho’s age—and like the handful of Vyriat peers I knew from Sanctum, her facial tendrils had a green-gold mottling around their base, the hydrostatic muscle groups developing a kind of secondary mutation in the presence of pulse radiation.

  She’d been gifted.

  Vyriat were the only known species to develop a visual mutation in response to a child being changed by the pulse; in that sense, I was . . . lucky. Lucky I now knew why he’d taken her, why he’d been on Kandriad—he was doing the same thing we were, like some fucked-up inversion of the Justified. He was hunting gifted children.

  His presence on Kandriad had been about Sho after all. I hoped I wouldn’t have to be the one to tell the young Wulf pup that.

  I knelt beside the cage, reached in to close the Vyriat’s staring eyes. It looked like the thing in the armor had locked her inside, then left her here when we’d triggered his tripwire—she’d been alive, not long ago, was still warm. If only I’d moved faster, I could have saved her—it hadn’t been the creature hunting us that had killed her at all.

  She’d done that herself, with a piece of her robe. Facing abduction at the hands of the . . . thing that had cut his way through the ranks of her friends and family, that had massacred his way through her home, she’d chosen to end her own life rather than learn where he was taking her. I couldn’t blame her for it. But god, if only she’d waited; how close had I been when she’d made the decision to do this?

  I stood up from the cage, a terrible rage burning inside me; I don’t know why this was somehow worse than seeing the factory city on Kandriad go up in flames, than seeing all the dead in the halls outside, but it was, all the same. Maybe even worse than Sho’s mother, making the decision to trust us with her child, knowing she likely wouldn’t survive the attack that was coming. She, at least, had died with the hope that her son had escaped: this girl had no such respite in her last moments. She’d died afraid.

  The thing in the armor was taking gifted children, using them somehow, and felt no compunctions against murdering his way through their families to get to them. Whatever we had to do to him to learn his secrets, to learn how he dispersed the pulse radiation: I was suddenly fine with it. Even if it was painful.

  A part of me hoped it would be.

  I turned away from the dead Vyriat girl—nothing I could do to help her now—and gave the living quarters another cursory look: if I wanted to get the thing into the not-so-gentle hands of Justified interrogators, I had a job to do. There was nothing else noteworthy in this part of this ship, so, nursing the low-burning coals of my rage, I made my way to the cockpit.

  Same thing there, at least as far as the strange architecture was concerned. More of a “mild depression in the otherwise raised contours of the floor” than a “helm”: no flight stick, no pedals or throttle lever or Jane’s beloved bank of switches above a pilot’s head—just a handful of alcoves in the rocky metallic surface of the ship that seemed to glow faintly when I wasn’t looking at them.

  This place was fucking weird.

  I was just about to turn and retreat from the cockpit when I saw it: in the glass of the canopy, staring directly at me, was the snarling steel face of the creepy motherfucker that had locked the girl in the cage. I actually felt my heart skip a beat, and damn near dropped the bomb clutched under my arm; for a moment I was sure that he’d evaded Jane, that he was right outside the cockpit and staring in through the window, and I was going to be trapped on board his ship with him about to come in.

  Then I realized if that was the case he’d have to be floating, because the canopy was easily twenty feet off the docking bay floor. It wasn’t the glowing thing staring at me at all—it was just another one of his masks, or rather, the reflection of one in the glass of the canopy, the mask itself mounted behind me, on the cockpit wall just beside the airlock, as if in a place of veneration.

  I turned to face it, trying to glare away my fear; the mask just glared right back. Why the hell would he mount it behind him in the cockpit? Why wouldn’t it be in the living quarters, presumably wherever he kept the rest of his armor? Had he been wearing a mask when he murdered everyone on the asteroid? What did that make this one—his replacement mask? Evil asshole formalwear?

  Nothing about this ship made sense. Nothing about this guy made sense, if he was a guy at all. The voice over the comms had been vaguely masculine—that was about all I knew.

  More to stop the creepy thing from staring at me than anything else, I reached up and detached it from the wall—it gave a slight hydraulic hiss as I did so, and I really hoped that didn’t mean I’d just set off some alarm system in the rest of his armor, warning him that someone was inside his ship, fucking with his second-best mask. I tucked the terrifying visage into my pouch and backed out of the airlock; Schaz could scan it later, maybe tell us something we didn’t know.

  Okay: where else to check? I made my way back through the living quarters, past the cage with the Vyriat girl inside, then headed aft of the boarding ramp instead, trying to find the ship’s drive core, which I wasn’t sure I would even—

  I found the ship’s drive core.

  I would say it didn’t look like any drive core I’d ever seen, but only because I’d only seen a handful of drive cores; even Schaz’s was built behind multiple layers of decking, accessible through the hold only in a dire emergency. The few I had laid eyes on had just been glowing columns of light surrounded by various important-looking machinery; this one was a kind of orb instead, not feeding into anything, just . . . floating, hovering in between spherical depressions in the ceiling above and the floor below.

  “You’re recording this, right?” I breathed to Schaz. If nothing else, I would bet that MelWill back on Sanctum would love to get her hands on a record of what I’d seen in here, so she could go through the vids millisecond by millisecond and devour the strange tech around the core. And since I was planning on blowing the damn thing to pieces, it’s not like she could study it when we returned for our captive, either.

  “You bet your ass I am,” Schaz said. I didn’t have a HUD, but my basic gear package was studded with a handful of cameras that Scheherazade could access and download footage from later. Ordinarily I would have been feeding her footage wirelessly as well—we were in range to do so—but if the thing hunting us had hacked our comms, we couldn’t risk him being able to access that feed, too.

  “Do you see anything?” Schaz asked me, since she couldn’t see for herself.

  I saw a lot of shit, none of which made sense.

  Wait. There.

  Another object that didn’t make sense, but in a different way, as alien to its surroundings as its surroundings were to everything else.

  It was a wonder I hadn’t seen it before—well, okay, maybe it wasn’t, I’d been too busy staring at the floating orb of fire to notice anything else—but it did kind of stand out. Everything else on the ship had those rounded edges, was made of the same metallic material as the ship’s coating; the only exception to the rule had been the cage, basic iron bars sort of melded into the strange material of the bulkheads. This was the same way: most of it was just a computer access port, no different than a thousand others I’d seen on any non-pulsed world, until the wires were sucked into the walls of the hull like the metal had been melted around them.

  So: what the hell did this mean? He’d set the tripwire in Charon’s systems, so he was plenty capable of interfacing with traditional technology—did this mean he had accomplices, people who’d need to use more traditional data storages than . . . than . . . than however the fuck he stored information otherwise?

  Worry about it later.
I dug a remote storage drive out of my pockets, then tapped one of the cameras, the one on my shoulder; I had to risk triggering the feeds so Schaz could take over: I sure as hell didn’t know how to download data from . . . wherever the hell those wires led. Hopefully Jane was keeping our pursuer busy enough that he wouldn’t notice the new signal. Hopefully Jane was alive to keep him busy.

  I held the drive up to the camera transmitting to Schaz; the tiny pinprick of light on the exterior of the plastic clicked to green. Schaz had a wireless signal—she was operating the drive now. I plugged the device into the port, then poked around for someplace to set the bomb.

  We didn’t have the time or the materials to make any sort of wireless receiver or timer, so we’d decided on a dead man’s switch instead; I settled for resting the explosive right up against the core, then held the trigger depressed with my teke as I backed away slowly. I waited a tense moment for the light on the wireless drive to click over to green again—finished downloading—then bent to retrieve the device and booked it the hell out of the ship. At least this way, the Vyriat girl would get one hell of a funeral pyre.

  I didn’t actually know what the range limits of my telekinesis were. It seemed like we were about to find out.

  CHAPTER 13

  I felt my teke start to slip as I passed through the doors to the docking bay; I started running after that. Once the switch triggered, I’d still have a few moments as the chemical mixture that made up the bomb started to combine—of course, given how terse Schaz had been forced to be over the comms, I didn’t know if those moments would last ten minutes or ten sec—

  The blast picked me up and threw me against the far wall, my intention shield absorbing the impacts from the half a dozen pieces of shrapnel that had come whistling down the corridor like bullets made of razors. I hit, hard, then hit again as I landed.

  Ow. Being that close to an explosion sucked.