by Richard Fox
“Right.” Tyne beckons to Isobel; she’s got the cadaver bags. “Let’s get started.”
***
Humans. He had been surgically meticulous with his remote emanations, yet there are humans. Warm. Breathing. Alive.
He is patient. He can wait.
***
Holly is the first one to come back across.
Gina, pressed into service in the cryo chamber by Adéja for an extra pair of hands, and wearing mask and gloves and a surgical cap, is surprised to see her alone; she’d thought that Holly and Tyne would make two-person trips, something like a fireman’s carry. Cadavers are massy even without the bulk of a suit, and Holly is staggering under her burden, her helmet’s visor up, the faceplate fogged by her heavy breathing. She shakes off both Gina and Adéja’s attempts to help her, and maneuvers the shrouded body into the nearest open pod herself, before popping her helmet’s seals and tugging it off. “Never thought all that college weightlifting would come in handy,” she pants.
“You should let us help you. Take a minute and catch your breath,” Gina answers, handing her a cloth to wipe the vapor from the inside of the acrylic. She bends to help Adéja open the Mylar bag and work it away from its occupant: a woman who looks to be in her mid-50s, her face sunken away from her sharp cheekbones, her lips purple, her skin ashen with a bluish tinge. She’s wearing a plain blue station suit with no name tab or insignia. “Where are Brett and Dr. Sanchez?”
“He was opening the hab module when I left,” Holly says. “He’s got Isobel prying up an access plate to get to the station’s data recorder.” She stares into the pod at the body; Adéja lays a stack of folded white cloths at the side of the pod, and begins to unzip the dead woman’s suit. “Really, Captain, you should get back to the cockpit,” Holly decides, straightening up to put her helmet back on. “Really. Let Brett and I do the hard work. It’s what we’re for.”
***
That had been just the first one.
Gina stays in the cryo chamber for the retrieval of the second body—a man, brought over by Tyne, who’s grim-faced but looks like he hasn’t even broken a sweat—and the third, another woman. At that point, despite wanting to help Adéja, she concedes to Holly’s advice; it’s too much, seeing blue suits and frost on cyanotic faces and livid sagging mouths. Somehow, she realizes, she’s made it to fifty without ever seeing so much death at such close range.
She wonders how her parents are doing on Earth.
She’s just changed her flight suit and taken up the helm again when Isobel comes into the cockpit, struggling to get her helmet off. Gina rolls her eyes and stands to pop the seals for her. Just as well this woman isn’t trying to wrestle a body; she’s so thin she’d snap in half from the weight. As it is, Isobel has an object lashed to her torso by cords: gray, bulky, rectangular. Gina just helps her get free of her impromptu bonds; she suspects they were Tyne’s idea. “What’s this?”
The slender woman has to take a few deep breaths to speak. “Data recorder,” she manages, setting the large gray box at her feet. “They’re about to go into the command module. What should I do now? I can’t...carry anyone.”
Of course she can’t. Gina turns to her radio. “Holly? Brett? How many left?”
“Should be two, Chief, if I can get this damn door open.” There’s static in the channel and strain in Tyne’s voice. “Four aboard.”
“Take your time,” Gina tells him. “Dr. Sanchez? Go get out of your suit. I’m sure Adéja could really use your help.”
***
When the command module’s finally breached, Tyne just leans in the doorway a moment. “This woulda been easier without the gravity,” he observes wryly; he can’t see much of Holly’s face through the condensation she’s producing inside her helmet, but he guesses she’s just as tired as she is. He hasn’t even bothered checking his chronometer to see how long they’ve been at this. “Slower, but easier.”
She huffs. “I’d settle for doors that work and surfaces that aren’t frozen.” The ice had been even thicker in the hab, closest to the rupture, than in the main module; here it’s slightly thinner, like the fragile crust atop a snowdrift, but her helmet’s display tells her the temperature’s a kelvin colder. “Are we sure this is an old American module and not a Russian one?”
“Does act like it’s patched up with duct tape an’ hope, don’t it.” It’s not a question. Tyne approaches the first visible body; the bulky figure is sprawled on the floor in a full spacesuit, minus the helmet. “Think we just found the commander. This might take both of us.”
Commander Eliassen’s lying face-down. Holly turns her over with effort, and steps back; the black woman’s eyes are fixed open, miniscule ice crystals on her eyelashes, her frostbitten lips pulled back in an obvious grimace. All of the others had been completely unconscious, had looked peaceful enough, but this woman looks like she’d died terrified, awake to the end. “God, I hope she wasn’t still alive when Nocturnal was here,” she mutters, and looks away, catching sight of a flat white object on the floor just inches away. She scoops it up and prods it. “Must be her tablet. No charge.”
“Better hang on to that.” The final victim is on the floor several feet away, next to a bank of dead display screens. The face is turned to one side, coated with a layer of powdery ice. Tyne stoops to brush it away and lift the man’s face. “Oh God,” he says, and backs up abruptly, stumbling against the commander’s chair. “Oh, Jesus. Oh, holy mother o’ goddamn.”
***
Tyne’s first exclamation brings Gina to her feet. “Brett! Brett, talk to me, dammit, what’s wrong?”
“I—oh God, no.”
“Brett!”
Tyne breathes hard for a few seconds, the sound harsh in her ears, then swallows audibly and seems to collect himself. “It’s okay, Chief. I’m fine. I’m fine.”
Gina scowls. “Brett, don’t give me that, I heard you—”
“It ain’t nothin’. Noth-ing.” He enunciates the two syllables hard. “Just, just somebody I used to know.” Tyne’s breath heaves and stills and he’s silent for a long moment. “Right. Right. Come on, Hol, let’s get ‘em home.”
He closes the channel with a click. Gina heads for the airlock. Something’s wrong.
***
Once all the victims have been recovered and the spacesuits have been stowed away, Gina gathers everyone in the cryo chamber. The pods line the curving interior wall of the room—eight, when they’d needed only six. Holly and Tyne stand beside one pod, leaning on each other, both miserably exhausted after more than four hours in and out of Cerberus. Tyne is narrow-eyed and scowling. Nothing Gina’s tried has made him talk.
No oily life-sustaining suspension fluid for these pods; their contents will be kept at Cerberus’ current ambient temperature until Adéja’s done with her testing, then chilled even more once they’re closed for good. Adéja has stripped the bodies of their suits and covered them in white draping, tucked into the open pods as though they’re autopsy tables and not preservation units. Smaller cloths cover the swollen, frostbitten hands; only the faces are bare. She has her tablet out for video, and gestures Isobel close. “Dr. Sanchez? I recognized Commander Eliassen by her suit”—Adéja gestures at the first pod—”but no one else has a nametag on theirs.”
Isobel grimaces a little, avoiding eye contact with the tablet the doctor’s holding up. “They’re utility suits,” she mutters, “the others were just for visitors...” She takes a few deep breaths, steadying herself, and when she walks up to the second pod and touches it, her hand shakes only a little.
“Dr. Marko Hopkinson,” she says, “astrometerologist. Nobody used ranks here, just first names. There didn’t seem a point.” There’s a little waver in the words, but she moves to the next pod, the first woman brought aboard. “Dr. Lark Peres, solar meteorologist.” Pod four: “Dr. Bakary Traoré. Same position. They squabbled over it.”
Her voice definitely cracks there; she puts her hands over her face. Adéj
a just keeps pace with her, with the tablet. “My mother was a Traoré from Mali,” she observes; the man’s ashy brown skin is lighter than her own. “Maybe a cousin somehow.” She shifts the tablet to one hand to put the other on Isobel’s back; the thin woman is starting to shake. “Come on now. Only two more.”
Isobel nods jerkily, approaching the fifth pod. She lays both hands on it to steady herself. “Dr. Jaia Kolata, plutoid atmospheric specialist.” Another deep breath, and she goes to the last occupied pod, looking down at the floor. “And our xenoclimatologist, Dr. Jesse Sawyer.”
Tyne flinches, and the motion makes him sway. Gina puts a hand out to steady him. “Brett, come on, we’ve seen enough. You should get some sleep.”
“I’m fine.” He shakes her off. “Lemme go see how that tablet’s chargin’. I’m fine.”
But she knows he’s not.
***
Tyne heads for his seat in the cockpit; Gina follows with Holly, who’s practically gray with tiredness. “Both of you,” the captain says. “This can wait. You need rest more than you need to worry about what’s on that tablet.”
“I reckon I’ll judge what I need,” Tyne says shortly. He lifts the tablet from the console’s charging station and double-taps the screen; it springs to bright life, icons a neat grid across a leafy green background. “Hot damn, it still works.”
“Maybe we’ll get some idea of what happened.” Gina slides into her seat, feeling Holly’s weight leaned against the headrest. “Put it back on that dock and let me get in through our computer. It’ll be easier to search the files if I don’t have to open three dozen apps.”
Tyne acquiesces and leans back in his seat, eyes half closed, breathing slowly. At the chime that indicates a connection’s been made, he perks up slightly. “Any recent high-priority messages? Comin’ in or goin’ out.”
Gina dabs at the central screen in front of her. “No.”
“Anythin’ that looks like an emergency log?”
“No.” Gina frowns. “The most recently accessed file is a twenty-eight-second video made...” She squints. “Five and a half days ago. That’s...”
“‘Bout right,” Tyne finishes. “Play it.”
Gina touches the screen. The file loads as a holographic projection against the main viewscreen and begins playback.
“...connection? Do I have connection?” Alia Eliassen’s face fills the image, ashen; there are grayish splotches along her cheeks. She’s leaning against her chair; she’s breathing hard, fast, the video shaking. “Not...the last. Not the last. Got to—” A burst of audio static. “No comms. Air’s going. I can’t, I can’t reach, he’s coming.”
Pale clementine light spills into the image from one side. Literally crawling, Gina thinks, remembering what Isobel had said, and her stomach knots with nausea. In microseconds Commander Eliassen’s body is glowing, swallowed.
“He is coming!” she shrieks breathlessly. “He is coming! He is here—” She coughs out a wet noise and a spray of blood exits her mouth toward the camera. “Here, here, here—”
Her words devolve into gibberish, into syllables and grunts. Abruptly her gaze locks on the camera and her eyes fix, red running down her chin as her mouth works wetly. All at once she falls toward the screen; the image breaks into snow as the tablet bounces and comes to rest, showing the module ceiling and the corner of the chair, all aglow. Her helmet’s clearly visible in the seat.
The video ticks off its last few seconds. They stare, silently.
“She could’ve survived,” Gina mutters. “If she’d had her helmet on like this Sanchez woman. She might have survived.”
“With no way to communicate and no way to get out.” Holly stirs and stands upright. “What did she mean, not the last?”
Tyne shrugs. “Reckon she remembered they had two outside.”
“Can you play that back?” Holly asks. “Some of that nonsense almost sounded like numbers.”
“Not right now.” It’s not the babbling that bothers Gina, or even the blood; it’s the sick feeling the weird light gives her, even seeing it onscreen, and the sudden paralysis of Eliassen’s bulging eyes. “You two need to sleep. Me, I’m not sure I can.”
She gets up and gives Holly a little shove, beckons Tyne from his seat. “Take care of yourselves first, all right? Tomorrow. We’ll sort this out tomorrow.”
***
Oh, insomnia.
Gina has to admit that Persephone has Seraph soundly beaten when it comes to crew quarters: four cabins for its usual eight crew members, each with its own bath. No cramming everyone into racks in the same space; no competition for the head. They’ve stayed close anyway—she’s bunking with Tyne, and Holly with Isobel, with Adéja getting space to herself so she can make ablutions and pray without inconveniencing anyone else—but Gina has to admit she could get used to this. Some designer planned well.
She stretches and tries to get comfortable in the captain’s seat, and wishes the galley wasn’t all the way at the other end of the ship. She could use some coffee. Hell, she could use some sleep. Only Adéja is still up working, as far as she knows; she’s amazed Holly and Tyne hadn’t dropped from exhaustion the moment they’d come off Cerberus.
In fact, Gina had been surprised Tyne wasn’t in his bunk when she’d awoken from her own ninety-minute doze. She’d been able to hear Holly snoring, even through the cabin’s far wall.
She stares a little blearily at her tablet, skimming the newsfeeds, trying not to think about the video Alia Eliassen had left behind, the mumbled gibberish, the woman’s stricken horrified expression, the plea for air she couldn’t access. Maybe trying to sleep isn’t a good idea right now after all.
Gina swipes through a few articles. Some of them are serious—food shortages, the as-yet unexplained disappearance of a crew of FCF Marshals, sightings of strange angular alien ships—but most are op-ed stuff, chatter, speculation. Wormholes. Conspiracies. Spontaneous combustion. Cults arising on Earth, people idolizing the Star entity they’re calling Empyrean. One small but vocal group claims the increased solar activity portends the rise of an undead dreaming god somewhere in the South Pacific.
The increased solar activity. The strange dimming, the blistering flares. Gina’s been concerned about those ever since the reports of the first massive outburst; she’s all too aware that her little Seraph wouldn’t last a nanosecond in the ropy embrace of Sol’s ejected plasma. Even Persephone, once they’re back at Heritage, could only run so far and so fast.
She pulls up the latest imagery from Longshot, the automated solar observatory anchored on Saturn’s moon Mimas, and immediately wishes she hadn’t. Even in the newest images of the day, dimmed and temporarily quiescent, Sol is a swollen too-red eye. A rash of sunspots is plain on its broiling face, each larger than Jupiter; in Longshot’s high resolution, they look malevolent, like cancers eating black holes into the sun’s surface.
Gina frowns at the pictures and dismisses them. Her wretched cargo aside, maybe hanging around the Kuiper Belt really isn’t so bad—
“I said no.”
Tyne’s voice, drifting up from the medbay access well. Gina sits up straight in her seat, then gets up. In the six years he’s been her copilot, Gina’s never heard him raise his voice in anything but a crisis, and she can’t imagine why he’s doing it now. She half climbs, half drops down to the lower deck; she can’t make out Adéja’s exact words, but the doctor’s tone is soft, conciliatory.
“I don’t care, all right?” Tyne continues. He’s gotten louder. “Just not him. Jesus Christ, Doc, it ain’t like you ain’t got five more to work on, it don’t have to be him.”
“Brett—”
“Adéja. Goddammit, just gimme this one thing.”
Gina walks into the cryo chamber, wincing at the beginning tingle of decay across her palate. Adéja and Tyne are standing by an open pod; he’s pallid but glowering thunderously, she’s looking up at him in exasperation. Isobel is on the far side of the room, staring at the floor
and fidgeting.
“What’s going on?”
Tyne jerks at the sound of Gina’s voice, and when he turns to her, his gaze for a split second is unabashedly hostile; then he reddens and looks away. “I’m tryin’ to talk sense into the Doc here, Chief.”
“Tissue samples,” Adéja answers, still quiet, still trying to soothe. “I’m not doing autopsies, Brett, it’s only tissue samples, needle biopsies, I just need—”
“No you don’t.”
“Stop it.” Gina sighs. A throb crosses between her temples. She has a hold full of frozen corpses, she doesn’t need a fight. “Whatever this is, stop it. Brett, you’re supposed to be asleep. I want an explanation.”
Tyne glares at her for a moment, then shakes his head and pushes past her, toward the access well. “People in hell want ice water, Chief.” It’s a growl. “You do what you gotta do, Doc. I’ll forgive you eventually.”
“Brett...” But he looks so furious, Gina lets him go without pressing. “Adéja, what’s this about?”
“Eeee.” The doctor sucks her teeth, embarrassed displeasure marring her dark face. “Oh, that man, four years I know him and he’s never been like this.” Adéja shoves a thick strand of black hair back under her surgical cap, and reaches into a wall receptacle for a fresh pair of gloves. There’s a woundedness in her gaze. “I don’t know. I just need a few samples to take back to Heritage for study, biopsies, it’s minor, it won’t even be noticeable. It’s not even any of the others he’s objecting to, just this one.”
