A Chain Across the Dawn

by Drew Williams

  “The bulkhead breach, the structural damage,” Marus said. “Can you tell what caused it?”

  “I do not have access to those records; they may be locked behind a firewall I haven’t breached yet, or they may have been purged completely, along with the station’s AI. Based on the orbital decay of the station, though, I can tell you when the damage occurred.”

  “Seventeen years ago,” I said quietly.

  “You are correct,” Schaz acknowledged.

  Of course I was. The Cyn had been here before, and he’d fucked things up, just like he always did, like a force of nature, a hurricane that returns to calm shores again and again and again, tearing down whatever the natives have built in the interim.

  Jane, as always, tended toward the paranoid. “You have internal sensors online?” she asked.

  “Some of them, yes.”

  “Can you scan for life forms? Energy-based life forms, in particular?”

  “There’s no way he somehow survived Jaliad, then beat us here,” I protested. Jane just raised an eyebrow at me, and I regretted the words almost as soon as I said them. At this point, ruling out anything concerning the Cyn was dangerous—and just because he might not have beat us here didn’t mean he might not have cohorts remaining, cohorts who perhaps had never left.

  “I can assure you a Cyn—the one we’ve tangled with, or any other—is not on board,” Schaz said. “There are, however, several divergent scans in one of the higher laboratory facilities, up in the towers.”

  “Life signs?” Jane asked, her hand going to the butt of her gun.

  “Corpses,” Schaz replied succinctly.

  Apparently the station hadn’t been fully abandoned by the time the Cyn arrived, shortly after my birth. More lives to put on his butcher’s bill.

  “We’ll start there,” Jane said. “Can you map us out a route?”

  “With some of the structural damage, it may take some doing; the tram system appears to be entirely nonfunctional.”

  “We can breathe the local atmosphere, right? So you can take us through some of the breached airlocks.”

  “You can, but you can’t so much breathe void, and some of the higher airlocks in breach were still above the atmosphere line when they failed, leading to cascading decompressions. I’ll find you a safe route, Jane, it may just require some travel time. Calm yourself.” She paused. “Would you like some tea while I’m calculating?”

  CHAPTER 7

  We didn’t take Schaz up on the tea. Javier and Marus were already geared up; unlike Jane and I, their positions among the Justified—cartographer and intelligence gathering, respectively—didn’t take them into heavy action quite as often as our escort duty did, but it was still a dangerous universe, and they knew how to defend themselves.

  Both of them wore body armor laced into their clothing, just like Jane and I did—Javier’s under a battered leather jacket, Marus’s woven into the tactical gear he wore under a loose saffron robe, a typical Tyll accoutrement. He’d discard the robe the second we hit trouble, and knowing Marus, it was likely laced with electronic countermeasures or smoke grenades or something, to cover an escape.

  As far as armaments went, Javier wore an ancient long-barreled shotgun slung over his back, and a semiautomatic pistol in a shoulder holster that was the missing triplet to the twins under my arms; Marus carried a brace of submachine guns, both outfitted with permanent suppressors, a necessity given the clandestine nature of his operations. We weren’t expecting combat, but we were in unknown territory, so we acted as though an attack were imminent.

  Though what good our ballistic weapons were going to do against the Cyn, if he showed up and decided to start wrecking shit, I wasn’t sure.

  After Schaz calculated our route, Jane lined us up at the ingress point out of the hangar, a maintenance shaft leading down to the lower levels. Consciously or not, she’d already started taking charge of our little impromptu exploration, taking point herself with Schaz’s route laid out in her HUD, putting me next to allow me free reign with my teke if we hit something heavy, Marus third, and Javier in the rear, I think as much to curtail his natural curiosity as to put his shotgun in a position to cover anything coming at us from behind.

  “Here we go,” Jane said finally as she popped open the access panel.

  We filed down the ladder, and started into the innards of Odessa Station.

  The route wasn’t quite as bad as Schaz had implied—though that may have been simply because she was guiding us around the more damaged sections of the station—but it still involved a great deal of what felt like backtracking, heading half a mile down one section of corridors, only to climb down another floor, backtrack a full mile, picking our way through long-silent machinery, then to climb back up and retrace the same mile yet again.

  Most of what we saw was either typical space-station machinery—if you’ve seen the inner workings of life-support systems and gravity generation on one station, you’ve pretty much seen them all, and for whatever reason, my work with Jane seems to take us through station support machinery a good deal—or anonymous corridors, some of which were flooded with the cyan fog of the planet below, the shifting mists just slightly heavier than the station’s generated atmosphere, meaning it hung low around our knees, making it feel more like we were wading through a slow-moving river than passing into a cloud.

  I tried not to think about the notion that my parents had perhaps walked these halls, the parents I’d never met, the parents I didn’t even know what they looked like. It didn’t matter—they were where I came from, genetically speaking, but that was just biology; my real family was close by, the three people willing to brave a dying station sinking into the storms of a gas giant just because I wanted answers. I concentrated instead on moving forward, sometimes using my teke to clear our path, forcing open sealed doorways or widening already-existing breaches in bulkheads so that we could pass through, following the low river of fog as it wended its way through the interior caverns of the station.

  “All right,” Jane said, turning to the rest of us as she neared a sealed door. “Good news is, we’re almost there.”

  “That is good news,” Javier agreed. “Why do I feel like you didn’t turn around just to tell us that?”

  “Because you’re an observant fella sometimes,” Jane replied dryly. “The laboratory with the signals bouncing back from Schaz’s scans is on the other end of this tramway tunnel. The bad news is, that particular tunnel is just below the water recyclers that feed into the fusion core’s coolant systems, and sometime in the last decade or so the recyclers sprung a leak.”

  Marus sighed. “How bad is it?” he asked.

  “Schaz isn’t sure; she doesn’t have internal sensors in the tramways,” Jane said. “Based on her scans, it’s not entirely flooded, since it’s still draining out somewhere, but we are all going to get wet.”

  I was finally going to get to go for my swim after all. Hooray.

  “Great,” Marus said. “Spelunking. My favorite hobby.”

  I almost laughed. “That’s not a real word,” I told him. “You just made it up.”

  “Did not. It means cave diving. Well, cave exploring, actually.”

  “Why wouldn’t you just call it that, then? Also”—I nodded at the sealed doors—“not a cave.”

  “Close enough.”

  “Come on, guys, we’ve all done something like this before,” Javier said. “Nobody here’s allergic to water.”

  “I haven’t,” I pointed out.

  “Well then, welcome to the wide, wonderful world of spelunking through a manmade cave system, Esa.”

  “Still not a word.”

  “Keep in mind,” Jane told us all, “it’s pitch black in there. It was a tramway—nobody but maintenance was ever supposed to be inside, so there wasn’t ever much lighting, and what there is has been shorted out by the water.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Javier sighed. “Can you share your HUD mapping data?”


  “We don’t have mapping data; just blueprints. No sensors in there, remember? Schaz is extrapolating the flooding based on coolant levels and the higher operating volume of the recyclers on the floors below, where the draining liquid is getting soaked back up.”

  “Well, it’s already been kind of a foggy day around here,” Marus said, gesturing with a smile at the blue atmosphere hiding our boots. “Might as well add some artificial rain to it.”

  “I just didn’t want you to say I didn’t warn you,” Jane told him.

  “Well, now you did. Esa?” Marus nodded at the door.

  I reached into the interior machinery with my mind, getting my “fingers,” otherwise known as the edges of my teke field, in between the sealed doors. I braced myself mentally—since yes, Newtonian physics still applied to quantum state telekinetic force, in a kind of fucked-up way—then started pulling the doors apart, steadily applying more force until the machinery inside the walls gave and the panels shifted back into their housing, releasing a small rush of water that washed into the mists already lapping at our knees.

  “Here we go,” Jane said, cutting on the light built into her tactical vest; she didn’t need it, not with her HUD, but neither Javier nor I had low-light implants, plus the lighting would make the footage from her body cameras easier to study, if for whatever reason we needed to do so later on. Even with the added illumination, we still couldn’t see much within—falling water arcing in streams from the pipes above and the rain-slick walls beyond, and that was about it.

  “Look on the bright side, kid,” Javier whispered to me as Jane started descending down the stairs. “At least you don’t have to wait for your hair to dry.”

  “Speaking of which,” I whispered back. “Did I tell you that I figured out how to control energy with my mind?”

  “You mentioned; that sounds awesome. Wait—does that mean—”

  “Yep! I can grow my hair back out now. I am so excited by that.”

  The metal stairs went down into the slick of water below us; it was impossible to tell how deep it was, the lack of light and the shifting layer of misty atmosphere on top of the water just making it seem like we were descending into an actual river. Jane had already sunk up to her knees, and she was still going, but when it was about waist-high on her, she stopped. “I think I found the tram line!” she called up to us, feeling at something with her boot.

  I breathed a small sigh of relief. I wasn’t the world’s best swimmer, especially carrying about forty pounds of combat gear—including my weapons—and I didn’t really want to have to try and swim the length of the tram tunnel to our destination.

  Jane was holding her rifle above her head, despite the fact that all of our guns were designed to fire wet, and our ammunition was sealed against exactly this sort of scenario. I wasn’t sure where she’d picked up that particular habit, or when she’d carried a weapon antique enough to not have that kind of sealing, but I followed her lead, raising Bitey up out of the water as I waded in.

  Cold.

  I think the fact that I couldn’t see actually made it colder, as well as giving me the impression that something was always inches away from swimming past my legs, despite the fact that I knew we were the only things living on the station. It also didn’t help that I was the shortest of the group, a few inches shy of Marus, which meant where the water hit Jane at about the middle of her ribcage, I sunk down damn near to my shoulders. For a second I thought I’d just keep dropping—that I’d inadvertently stepped off of the stairs and into a recessed walkway or something, and the water was significantly deeper here than the scant few feet away where Jane was wading—but then I touched down against the metal decking below us, my raised arms still barely clear of the water.

  “All right, let’s go,” I told Jane with chattering teeth. “I’m freezing.”

  She didn’t say anything, just nodded under the curtain of falling water that was spattering her face. She started forward, moving deeper into the impromptu river that snaked its way through the abandoned station, pushing her way through what had once been the connective veins of Odessa. The constant flow of liquid from above us—and the fact that it was draining away somewhere below—meant that, while there wasn’t quite a current, there was still a lot of motion and flow, and I had to work to keep my footing, focusing on just following the shifting beam of Jane’s guiding light as it reflected off the arcs of water jetting down from the breaches above and the clouds of mist surrounding us.

  It wasn’t my favorite bit of exploration ever. Still better than Valkyrie Rock, though.

  CHAPTER 8

  We pushed our way through the slow churn of the dark river; thankfully, no one lost their footing and went for a swim. Finally, we could see more illumination around a bend in the tram tunnel—a flickering something, there, then gone, seemingly at random. We came around the corner in darkness, Jane’s light playing against the rear of a tram car, thrown off the track and nearly on its side in the water; we’d reached the laboratory station.

  Wading past the long-silent vehicle, Jane pulled herself up out of the river, through the mists rolling off the edges and onto the tram platform; whatever the light we’d seen had been, it was gone now, and there was just the darkness and the beam of Jane’s flashlight, filling the abandoned station and the still trams.

  Javier pulled himself up as well, then bent to help me; I’d only just gotten out of the water—shaking myself like a dog—when the burst of light came again, almost blinding to eyes that had just gotten used to being surrounded mostly by darkness. “Contact!” Jane shouted, the word followed almost immediately by two cracks of her rifle, the flash of her muzzle flare blending into the new light, lending a strobe-like atmosphere to the empty station.

  “Or not,” Javier told her, still bent over to help Marus climb out of the murk. “Congratulations, babe: you just killed a ghost.”

  “False alarm,” she admitted, lowering her weapon, and I swear to god she actually sounded a little disappointed.

  The gunshots were still echoing down the tunnel, the sharp, fading pops breaking the constant sound of the waterfalls behind us. I turned to look at whatever the hell she’d been firing at—before then, I’d been too disoriented by the darkness.

  The light was coming from a low holographic pedestal, rising just above the thick mist that still eddied around our knees. It was projecting the im-age of a Barious, standing on the projector, an automated greeting for arrivals stepping off the tram—an ancient recording. She was speaking, yet not saying a word: the projector’s audio system must have shorted out.

  Not just any Barious, either: it actually took me a moment to recognize the Preacher without all of her late-life additions. This had been recorded before she’d taken various combat damage and replaced pieces of her chassis with whatever detritus she could find that could be welded into the advanced alloys that made up her skin; before she’d changed out her optics from microscopic calibrations to more combat-useful scans. The Barious standing on the pedestal was worlds away from what the Preacher had been in my first memories; this was who she had been meant to be, a scientist, a leader, welcoming visitors to her sect’s laboratory deep in the hidden reaches of space.

  “What a difference a couple of decades makes, huh?” Javier asked, his thoughts echoing my own. Behind the holographic image, the two bullet holes Jane had left behind smoked faintly—I thought there might have been something subconsciously telling in the fact that she’d shot at an image of the Preacher before she’d realized it was a hologram.

  “Yeah, it’s a blast from the past,” Jane said sourly. She’d stowed her rifle, and had knelt before the panel that would give us access to the sealed blast doors leading deeper into the lab; she popped the metallic cover free with her knife as she trained her flashlight on the inner workings, digging through the wiring. “Say goodbye to the Preacher, Esa,” she told me. “Our cameras have recorded the projection anyway; you can remind her when we get back to Sanctum of what she
used to look like. Meantime, I’m going to have to short out that thing to redirect power to these doors; not even you can haul open something this thick.” She jerked back from the panel as a shower of sparks emerged from the wiring; the system didn’t seem to like her digging around inside with a soldering kit. “Whatever they were doing in this lab, they did not want anyone getting in without permission.”

  “Or whatever was inside getting out,” Marus added, shaking himself off as he, too, emerged from the river and the mist.

  “Wait,” I whispered, ignoring the two of them, still staring intently at the image shifting before me. Then, almost screaming: “Wait!”

  The hologram wasn’t of the Preacher anymore: it had shifted to project a Vyriat instead, her facial tentacles waving a greeting. Then the image became a tall Wulf, dressed in a lab coat, and then another Barious, just like the Preacher, still shiny and undamaged by the outside world. One by one, different faces appeared, scientists and researchers, smiling and greeting those who stepped off the tram.

  The projections were cycling through the various team members who had worked in this lab: the lab run by the Preacher, the lab where the Cyn had dragged the dead from the station, and thus, the lab where his goal, whatever it had been, had been hidden. “Just wait,” I whispered again, something I barely recognized in my voice, something almost like agony. My eyes were locked on the projections; I don’t think an interstellar tug could have pulled me away as the flickering hologram cycled, then cycled, then cycled again.

  Another Wulf, this one with gray-shot fur.

  Two more Barious, their expressions somber.

  Another Vyriat, then a Reetha, the base of the projector rising up slightly to make the shorter species even with whomever might have been emerging from the tram.

  Another Barious, then another.

  A Tyll.

  And then—

  And then—

  I swallowed, made a strange, low noise in the back of my throat, caught somewhere between grief and awe, the sound almost begging, somehow. I was weeping, the tears mixing with the water still clinging to my face from the river we’d left behind as I stared up into the gaze of the newest team member projected onto the holographic platform, a face I’d never seen before that was nonetheless incredibly familiar, a face looking down at me with a gentle smile.