Explorations: War

by Richard Fox

  The phrase is written throughout the depository, on the walls, on the floor, up toward the ceiling, in the spaces between stacks of UEF-marked seed crates, even on the breached black door of the utterly empty restricted section. It devolves into nonsense words, broken stick figures, and then, again, into numbers.

  Gina knows blood when she sees it. She can’t bring herself to even be startled.

  The body is naked—the generic blue suit discarded in a corner—and too decayed to be recognizable even by gender. The fingertips are worn to pointed bone. Gina looks steadfastly away; she’s not foolish enough to take off her helmet and breathe the rot the way Tyne had. But when he and Adéja try to maneuver the remains into a bag, and the mess comes stringily apart in the middle with an audible wet noise like a tearing bedsheet, it’s all Gina can do to keep down her bile. “Jesus.”

  “Yeah, don’t think he’s involved in this ‘un.” Tyne’s grimacing as he straightens up. They all are, even with suits on. The stench is almost visible.

  “Way too far gone to be one of Nocturnal’s crew.” Gina activates her helmet’s camera. “We may catch hell for being here, but this needs to be documented and sent back to Heritage. Adéja, can you make a guess at how long it’s been?”

  “Eeeh.” Even the doctor can’t hide her revulsion. “In this state, hard to say from looking. Three weeks? Four? Assuming natural causes without some kind of intervention.” She squats to hurriedly close the bag. “But other ships have been here, yes? Because this, this person can’t have easily been hiding.”

  “Lord, whoever came aboard from Nocturnal had to notice,” Tyne agrees. “Are we lookin’ at some kind o’ crime scene here, Chief? Do we need to just back away slowly an’ call in the Marshals?”

  “I honestly don’t know.” Mining asteroids out beyond Mars sounds so, so good right now. Gina can’t exactly put her head in her hands, not with this suit on, so she points away, at the nearest wall. “Brett, tell me if I’m imagining things or if those look like more coord—”

  Something pale flits into her vision, and her head explodes with pain.

  Tyne staggers. Adéja drops fully to her knees and pitches forward, cracking her helmet’s faceplate against the floor.

  He’s here. He’s here. It’s a whisper inside Gina’s skull, a seeking tendril as nebulous as the icy orange haze suddenly clouding her vision. Her eardrums flutter, a discomforting drumbeat rhythm that’s all she can hear. Liquid rolls hot from her eyes, from her nostrils, scalding her lips. The soft voice tightens around her brain and squeezes, pressure, palpable.

  “He’s here.” Black visual field, sparks. “He’s here.” Copper on her tongue. “He’s here!” Spike of agony through her skull, forcing out words she can’t hear. “He’s here! He’s—”

  Blackness. Silence. Termination.

  ***

  “Oh my God.” Holly can see the pale golden iridescence spilling off the supply station, vaporous as smoke, but wafting inexorably around Persephone. She scrabbles out of her harness just as the first bolt of pain shoots through her right eye. “God, no, got to get over there...”

  “He’s here.” That’s Gina’s radio whisper, awe and terror. “He’s here.” She screams and the sound distorts. “He’s here! He’s—”

  Isobel is sitting there with her eyes closed, her lips moving. Holly yanks her harness off and shakes her. “Come on, Isobel, come on, we have to help them—”

  “No.” Isobel opens her eyes. “No. It’s not time. It’s not time. Closer. Let us come closer.”

  The voice isn’t her own. Holly stumbles back.

  The yellow glow flares and winks out.

  ***

  They are here.

  Little meddling curious things. His patience has been rewarded. They have seen his beacons, heard him, come to him.

  No. The first, the touched one, speaks. No. It’s not time. It’s not time. Closer. Let us come closer.

  Closer.

  No.

  ...Yes.

  He is patient.

  He will wait.

  ***

  Holly is cleaning the medbay floor. Isobel, nose wrinkled, has donned gloves to pick up the bloody towels. “Put them in the recycler,” Adéja commands; “they’re too wrecked to save.”

  “I think I know the feelin’. That goddamn crawlin’—” Tyne swipes unsteadily at his face. Holly had mopped up most of the mess that had been released when she’d pulled off his helmet, but there’s still blood caking in his nostrils and drying in his beard, and his pass leaves a faint red smear on the back of his hand. “Goddamn crawlin’ son of a bitch—oh, Jesus, my head.”

  “I felt it,” Gina says. “I felt it,” and she’s sobbing helplessly, eyes leaking, and she knows the tears will come away pink again. Her head’s pounding like her brain’s on fire, her vision getting jarred with every throb. “It’s like Isobel said,” she manages, letting Holly wipe her face; the wet towel is a painful rasp. “Exactly like she said.”

  “Captain, you hush now.” Adéja had been the first to bounce back, although her forehead is creased with pain, and her sclerae are livid with ruptured blood vessels. She has a med-stick in her hand and she pulls Gina’s collar gently aside to bare the skin. “Hush. You’re safe. We’re going home.”

  The sting is a gnat’s bite against the hammer blows rattling the captain’s head, but the stick starts working quickly. There’s a long moment of dizziness that makes her clutch at Adéja’s shoulders, but when it passes, so does most of the pain, and a new clarity rushes in. Gina pushes away from her. “No. Not yet. We have to find it. Him. We have to find him.”

  Adéja has another med-stick for Tyne; he just yanks his collar down, gritting his teeth in anticipation of the kick of the painkiller. “Chief, please tell me you ain’t serious.”

  “It’s what he wants.” Is that her own voice? Gina looks upward; there’s a fuzzy yellow halo around each of the lights. She blinks. It doesn’t disappear. “We have to get closer.”

  “Yes,” Isobel whispers, “it’s what he wants.”

  “Now listen.” Tyne takes a step forward and sways, reaches out blindly, finds Holly’s shoulder. A fresh rivulet of blood breaks from his nose and splatters on the floor. “Aw, hell, you two ain’t sayin’ this.”

  “It’s true.” Gina’s tone has dropped to hush, to reverence. “It’s true. Empyrean speaks. I’ve heard him.” She stares groggily at Isobel. “So did Dr. Rostov. So have you.”

  “Chief—”

  “Doctor,” Gina says pointedly. She’s suddenly clear-eyed. “Those coordinates we saw near that body—”

  heiscomingheiscomingheiscoming

  Her eardrums twitch. “—Look them up, please.”

  Isobel hands Tyne a wad of gauze; he jams it against his nostrils. “An’ we’re all just goin’ along with this idea? You hear anythin’ talk to you, Adéja? Holly? ‘Cause I sure didn’t. Goddammit, we got people to get home!”

  “Do it!” Gina snarls, struggling to get off the exam table. “It’s not a suggestion!”

  Adéja goes back to her side, taking her by the upper arms, trying to ease her into a resting position. “Captain, Captain, hush. Lie down. Holly? I should perhaps not do this thing, but another med-stick, please.”

  She looks over her shoulder. “Brett? Do what she asks. If it will help. If it will calm her down.”

  “You said it first!” Gina shouts at him, twisting. “It’s personal now!”

  She doesn’t feel the second med-stick, but a few seconds later, soft darkness rises up and drags her down.

  ***

  Gina doesn’t know how much time has passed.

  She’s calmer, now.

  She’s disengaged Persephone from the supply station to idle in Dysnomian orbit. Gina shifts in her chair and sips her water and presses her knuckles into her eye sockets. They ache like bruises, and she pushes a little deeper, causing blossoms of white lightning to form in her visual field. Though it’s morning by Persephone’s chronom
eter, she’s switched the ship’s lighting profile to the night program. Anything else hurts her eyes and makes her head throb.

  Even the map Tyne’s got up on the main viewscreen is just this side of too bright. Gina takes another drink and squints, feeling the muscles in her face tense up. “This is what we found in that supply cache? This is...what?” She studies the image: a small dense celestial body, nearly dead black, surrounded by jagged shapes. There’s not enough useful light at the location for the computer to render a more accurate depiction. “Asteroid field? A protoplanet with an accretion disc? Small black hole?”

  Tyne double-taps the screen, trying to zoom in; it doesn’t help. “It’s the Valor shipyard around Tartarus.”

  “Oh.” She’s heard of it: an enormous ship graveyard, far into the Kuiper Belt toward the Oort cloud and well past the termination shock, gravitationally locked around a cinder of a plutoid. Speculation has it that Tartarus, the farthest known object in the Belt, had been a protostar that failed. “There was a battle here, or a series of them,” she remembers, scanning the crudely-rendered field of metallic debris. “Tens of thousands of years ago. Before humans ever dreamed of leaving the trees, let alone Earth itself.”

  “Yeah. We know it’s there, we found it, we named it. What it was about, who took what sides, whether or not it contributed to the fusion failure, that we don’t know.” Tyne zooms the map back out, far enough that it shows a series of four distinct plutoids, marked with red circles. The first is Eris; Gina only has to look out to see it. The others are further afield: Viduus, Lima, Tartarus. Known, named, distant and dead and impossibly cold, yet tenuously held in Sol’s grip. Each jump will lead them out another ten billion kilometers or more, further and further from home. “What might be waitin’ for us if we go there, we don’t know that, either.”

  “I’m afraid I do.” Gina wraps her hands around her water bottle. She remembers screaming, feeling that distinct squirming presence in her brain. “The rumors are true, Brett. Whether it’s Empyrean, whether it’s something else, it does talk to people. Dr. Rostov and Dr. Sanchez heard it. So have I.” Her face is too warm. “...It’s calling me. It wants me to go,” she gestures at the map, “there.”

  “Now, Chief, just because you weren’t yourself for a little while—”

  “I know what I said, Brett. I heard myself. Isobel, too.” She caps her bottle. “I know it’s stupid, okay? I know it’s dangerous. But I have to see. I have to see it with my own eyes. Besides, if we find a threat, we have a lot of people to warn.”

  “Right now I just wanna get back to Georgia an’ nail my feet to the goddamn ground.” Tyne’s console lights up with a triple chime. He squints at it, shielding his eyes. “Message inbound.”

  “If it’s from Commander Yue, tell her to go to hell.”

  “It’s from UEF headquarters. All systems.” Tyne’s silent for a moment, then, “Nocturnal’s gone. Dropped off, like Cerberus. Last known trajectory had ‘em headin’ deeper into the Belt. Last message from Captain Harriman suggests he was sufferin’ from ‘altered mental status’. I think we can put two an’ two together here.”

  Gina’s stomach clenches. It’s beginning to feel familiar. “Gone? Brett, we only missed them by what, a day? How can they be gone? We’d see them.”

  “They ain’t on the map, Chief.”

  “Couldn’t they just be out of range? I know Nocturnal’s a displacement ship.”

  “Could be, but...” Tyne bites his lip, staring at the hologram. “...What if they encountered the same thing we did? If Harriman ain’t in his right mind...” He trails off for a moment. “What if he’s listenin’ to that thing? They got a cargo hold full o’ stolen nukes.”

  No, Gina thinks, no, they can’t harm— She forces the thought away. “You’re sure?”

  “It’s a reasonable enough guess,” he answers. “They cleared somethin’ from the restricted section o’ that cache an’ broke the door in to do it, an’ I don’t know exactly what, but the only things I know the UEF would keep stashed so far out here are planet busters an’ encapsulated singularity warheads. Black hole nukes, Chief. So, one o’ those two.”

  “So,” she repeats. “If the drive holds and we make three jumps out to Tartarus and Valor, how long will that take?”

  “Mmm.” Tyne calculates mentally. “Two days an’ a couple o’ hard burns.”

  “Then we’re going after them. Since we’re going that way anyway.” It’s not a suggestion. “I’ll get everyone. Lay in a course and send Commander Yue a message—don’t tell her where we’re going or why, just that we need a couple of days.” Gina pulls herself upright. “No time like the present.”

  Valor shipyard, Tartarus orbit, forty-eight hours later

  “This is it,” Tyne says when they’ve shuddered out of the last displacement and back into reality, “fifty-seven billion kilometers from Sol. Enjoy the view.”

  Gina relaxes a little but says nothing. Staying clear of the debris field of the ship graveyard, and the immense gravity of Tartarus itself, has required an orbital path that’s farther out than she’d like—but Persephone is a defenseless scouter, not a freighter or warship; she’s built to be light and fast, not to withstand damage. There are ships out here, pieces of ships that match no designs she’s ever seen. Some of them are huge and nearly whole, tumbling almost sedately; others are fast-spinning scrap clouds. All of them are moving, jostling, crawling toward accretion around this tiny, dense black husk of a planetoid. There are too many pieces for the ship’s imaging sensors to resolve them all. “It’s not much to look at.”

  “It’s enough.” Isobel is whispering behind her. “He’s coming.”

  Almost immediately Holly says, “There’s something here. We have life signs in there.”

  Tyne starts typing on his console furiously. “Ain’t possible.” But he begins another scan, and the imaging sensors start to resolve a shape on the viewscreen, pixellated even on a second and third pass.

  “Not enough light,” Gina says, “switch to thermal.”

  The thermal scan is blurry and imperfect, but it brings up a yellow-orange shape with a tiny white-hot core, and Gina’s heart sinks as she recognizes the rough dimensions of a UEF freighter, deep in the debris field between Persephone and Tartarus, turning slowly back and forth as it’s buffeted by the shifting wreckage. “...I think that’s Nocturnal.”

  “I’ll be goddamned.” Tyne huffs. “You know we cain’t get to ‘em, Chief. Not in this helpless little thing. We get in that mess, in that gravity, we’ll be skint.”

  “I know that, but we can’t just leave them here.” Gina’s eyes prickle and well, and she wonders if her tears are still pink. This isn’t what she’d wanted to find. “Holly, see if you can raise them.”

  “Channel’s open, Cap—”

  Before Gina can start to say anything, they’re hit with a backwash of sound.

  “...close. So close. Thought we could fight him.” It’s Nocturnal’s captain, Roger Harriman. He coughs and titters. “Here. Such a long way, such a long way, here, here, he is coming—”

  Oh God, it’s Cerberus all over again. “Captain Harriman!” Gina nearly shouts. “It’s Gina Salter. UEF 572E Persephone. “We see you.” Tyne’s typing is just visible from the corner of her eye as she strains toward the image on the screen. “We’re getting help. Talk to me, Harriman. Tell me what you’ve got aboard.”

  A giggle, high-pitched, terrified. “The means! The means of making holes! He called and we came!”

  “Encapsulated singularities,” Tyne mutters. “He’s got the nukes, Chief. I’m sendin’ our positions back to Heritage. We need a retrieval squad.”

  Nocturnal’s thermal image is dimming, except for that one white spot. The nukes, Gina realizes. “Captain Harriman,” she tries again. “Deep breath, sir. Please, calm down and just—”

  “Not the last,” Harriman wheezes, and the channel dies. Onscreen, Nocturnal darkens, an near-invisible hulk with a burning heart.
>
  “No.” Gina reaches for the acceleration slider. “No. We can’t leave him. We have room for one more.”

  Tyne grabs her wrist. “You are not takin’ this ship in there, it is goddamn suicide—”

  “Look!” Holly yells.

  “He’s here,” Isobel sighs.

  Gina breaks away from Tyne’s hold, looks out, freezes. In the starred blackness, far beyond the cinder of Tartarus, a bright yellow pinpoint flares.

  It winks out, and a vast burning eye opens.

  “It’s him,” she murmurs. “It’s Empyrean.”

  “No. Menon. His name is Menon.” Isobel’s voice is soft and wet, dreamy. “Son of the father. Slave to the master. The patient one. The abiding one. He heeds Empyrean. He came for us. He’s waiting for us.”

  The Star—Menon—whispers.

  Flares unfold from its faraway surface, nebulous as tissue, breaking away into racing wisps, turning the debris disc of Valor into a glittering golden morass.

  Persephone’s engines whine. “Chief, we gotta move,” Tyne says.

  Gina grabs the stick. It’s loose, wobbling in her hand. “She’s not responding.” The whine becomes a drone. “Brett, spool for displacement!”

  He’s sweating. Gina can see it beading on his forehead. “Thirty seconds.”

  It won’t be enough time. Gina stares at the oncoming ejections. “Engage now.”

  The first edge of glowing orange touches the scouter’s hull, and the ship judders as the drive dies. Alarms blare once and fall abruptly silent. Persephone’s interior goes dark, lit only by Menon’s reaching haze.

  “Skein’s breakin’. We’re losin’ it. We’re losin’ all of it,” Gina hears Tyne say, but pain roars through her head and blood bursts from her nostrils. Behind her, Adéja sucks in a shuddering breath and gurgles. Holly screams and starts to thrash.

  Tyne coughs and chokes, limned in pale yellow light. Gina tries to turn to him, flames licking at the edges of her vision, but a massive invisible hand grabs her chest and squeezes.