by Wen Spencer
The creature was deliberately dragging him through his past. Nothing would have made him think of that day in such clarity; he'd locked it away for years until the U.C. psych evaluations shook it loose. And he'd buried it again, determined not to think of it. He'd been three years old. He—he—he . . .
"I won't!" To dwell on it would only taint his whole life. What had happened that day. What he had lost. What he had gained.
The creature had forced him to remember. It had slipped into his mind somehow and started a cascade of thoughts. How though? And why? Was it deliberately probing for some specific memory or was it making his neurons fire randomly? When the creature had touched him—seemed to touch him—he hadn't felt anything. No movement of air. No sense of pressure. No change in heat. Like it was a ghost made of his own memories.
"Are you okay?" Eraphie whispered from behind him.
"Can you see it?" He asked, pointing at the phantom.
"The seraphim?"
"Whatever the fuck it is!" His voice rasped and his hand was shaking.
"It's a seraphim." Eraphie whispered.
The mist swirled out in the harbor and Mikhail realized that a second creature had glided up to a piece of lumber floating in the water. The creature reared up, and this time he could see that it had forelegs resting on the flotsam. The wood didn't shift under it, as if the creature had no volume or mass.
He could detect no sound or movement between the one in the water and the one on the dock. The second, however, released the flotsam and swam away, and a moment later the first glided down into the water, following.
"What exactly are seraphim?" Mikhail asked.
"Seraphim are the first rank of angels which encircled the throne of God, existing off the love emanated by Him."
"Angels?"
"Yes, they're angels." Eraphie said it with complete conviction of someone who completely believed what she was saying. "Seraphim are described as vaguely snake-like, and you can see for yourself that these seraphim look like big snaky things."
"They could be some kind of aliens. Or even . . ." Mikhail struggled to come up with something that they could be. " . . .a bio-weapon."
"Bioweapons try to kill you. Seraphim protect people. They saved me. They moved me out of the blast range. They save people all the time by moving them out of danger."
So while they couldn't be felt, they could interact with people more than just making neurons fire. "You didn't mention this before."
"Because you hadn't seen the seraphim. Newcomers don't believe in angels until they've seen them."
The seraphim had spent entirely too much time threatening Mikhail's sanity for him to think of them as angels. "Just because they save people, doesn't make them divine."
"The Hak say that they're holy beings."
"Who the hell are the Hak?"
"The Hak are gods."
Mikhail comline chimed. "Captain, the launch from the Red Gold has landed. What should we do?"
"I'll be out to meet them." Whatever the seraphim were—and any ties they had to his painful memories—had to wait. He had to meet with Hardin.
"Can you do me a favor, Mikhail?" Eraphie trailed behind him.
"What is it?"
"Can you ask Captain Hardin to check with Ya-ya and see if my cousin's ship, the Rosetta, is in port?"
Mikhail really needed to get Eraphie to call him Captain if she was going to be part of his crew. "I'll see how things go."
* * *
The salvage dock had survived fairly intact. A row of buildings, now rubble, protected it from the implosion. It followed the island's L-shaped harbor. The longer leg against the town had a high wide awning to provide shade for workers. Mikhail wanted a strong façade when the crew of the Red Gold arrived, so he had all his Reds at ready in the dock. Hopefully Hardin would assume that the Svoboda was maintaining a standard three work shifts and that Mikhail had three times the Reds than was at hand. Not that Mikhail expected an attack. He did, however, want to appear too strong for the thought to cross anyone's mind.
The Red Gold's launch was a sleek speedboat, obviously newly constructed for this world and not cobbled together from things that crashed into it. It was encouraging to see that somewhere manufacturing was taking place and not everything was jury-rigged salvage.
Hardin had four armed human guards. No Reds, just as Eraphie claimed. The launch hove up beside the dock. Hardin didn't wait for his guards to clear the area. Instead he stepped off the launch before the others could even disembark. The Dakota had only been lost for four years, but Hardin looked older than his last fleet picture by about twenty years. Time had ridden the man hard—his skin turned leather by sun, his hair gray. But it was definitely Hardin—his solid chin, thin lips and long nose. As he moved into the deep shadow of the walkway, he took off his mirrored sunglasses. His steel gray gaze swept over the Svoboda perched in the rubble and the Reds standing guard.
When Mikhail moved forward, though, Hardin focused on him. He cocked his head to one side as he studied Mikhail. "Volkov?" Hardin tapped his nose in the spot where Mikhail's had healed crooked. "You look so damn young, Volkov, I thought maybe they cloned Viktor again. I remember you breaking your nose, though, and not letting them fix it."
Mikhal had been thinking that he and Hardin were virtually strangers to each other. He'd forgotten that being Viktor's clone gave him celebrity status even at the academy. Hardin might know him in great detail despite the fact that they never directly interacted. "No, there's been no new clone."
"I would say something about Novaya Rus weeping over its lost prodigal son, but I guess they'll just make another once they realize you're not coming back. God forbid, they let someone new take command."
Odd, how having someone else voice his opinion made Mikhail's hackles rise. "Unfortunately, we Volkovs are just too damn good at it."
"Good is the enemy of great." Hardin smiled as if trying to take the sting out of his words. His eyes stayed hard and bitter. "But that's not ours to worry about now seeing that we're stuck here. Welcome to my paradise."
"Paradise?"
Hardin laughed at the skepticism in Mikhail's voice. "Yes, paradise. Look around you." Hardin swept his hand out to take in the endless blue water and the sky. "The Nippon call this the Cradle of Life; where God tested creation before he made the universe. Perfect air for humans. Water easily made drinkable. A sea teaming with life. Open your eyes and see the bounty! A hundred planets worth of living space all at ideal human conditions. Best of all—no nefrim. This is the salvation of man."
"Put that way, it would seem a paradise. I'd argue that the obvious problems with landing safely outweighs its benefits."
A frown flitted across Hardin's face, but he forced himself to laugh. "Yes, a few kinks to be worked out." He looked past Mikhail to study the Svoboda. "Christ on a donkey, Mikhail, but God does love the Volkovs, doesn't he?"
"Pardon?"
"You hit land. Do you know how rare that is? Fenrir here is considered a good landing, despite the fact they didn't hit land so much as sink beside it. Half their human crew dead. A mutiny within the first week killed what they had in the way of officers. But still, a safe harbor and supplies enough to make a go at it."
"All gone now."
"Yes. Shame about that." Hardin pulled his gaze away from the Svoboda to sweep over the rubble. "They'll be back. You err toward overly cautious here. Without fishing boats, this rock doesn't produce enough food to feed more than a dozen people. You protect the boats first, then organize supply chains to feed workers. A hard thing to do when everyone scattered to friendly ports up and down the axis."
Friendly ports? Then there were unfriendly ones too.
"Any come to the Dakota?"
Hardin frowned at him. "No."
"Why not?"
"That's a long sad story."
"If you hadn't noticed, I'm not going anyplace anywhere soon."
"True, true." Hardin sighed. "The Dakota is gone." He made a
fist and then flung open his fingers, like a star going nova. "Poof. There one minute, gone the next."
Mikhail waited, giving Hardin silence to fill.
"We'd been under heavy fire off the shoulder of New Haven, providing cover for the evacuation of civilians. When the order came through to jump out, and the warp field powered up, we actually cheered because we thought we'd survived."
Hardin glanced to Mikhail. "You've been through it. That blinding blue where there should have been black. A few seconds to think you're in shallow orbit around a planet. Desperate maneuvers to pull out of a gravity well—and all you've done is make matters worse. Then you're in the water and sinking with a ship full of people who have no clue how to swim."
"Your damn Volkov luck put you down on land. We landed in deep water." Hardin moved out into the blazing sunlight. "You would never know how by looking at it, but water is dark as space when it gets deep."
Harden fell silent. The sea birds cried overhead like lost souls. After several minutes of the wind whirling fine rubble about their feet in dust devils, Mikhail asked, "You had to abandon ship?"
"We had no choice. The pressure started to crush the ship. You could hear the metal groaning. We deployed everything we could launch off of the Dakota. Troop landers. Fighters. Escape pods."
"How many were you able to save?"
"Less than a thousand."
Thinking of Eraphie, Mikhail asked. "None of your Reds?"
Hardin stepped close and spoke lowly. "We were adrift for a long time. Sacrifices had to be made."
Meaning he had killed all the Reds that had survived the crash.
Hardin saw the realization in his eyes. "Don't you judge me," he whispered. "You landed pretty but you used up all your luck. You don't even know how badly you're screwed."
"Trust me, I'm aware that my situation is tenuous, but that does not mean I'm helpless."
Hardin glanced at the Reds. "Yes, I can see. But a warship is stocked with only a hundred days of rations. Once it's gone, you don't have the tools to catch enough to feed your Reds. Or the knowledge. All that muscle bulk needs twice the food as a normal man, and they start to waste fast."
"Did you just sacrifice Reds, or did you have to move up to humans too?"
Hardin scowled darkly at him. "No."
Mikhail gave Hardin silence to fill.
"We were spotted by Tonijn Landing. They're a small subsistence landing. Once we were able to cobble together the Red Gold, we went nomadic. We move around the Sargasso without a home landing."
"The Sargasso?"
"One of this place's many names. The Sargasso Sea on Earth was known as a graveyard of ships. It seemed fitting to name this place after it."
"What do you think this place really is?" Mikhail asked. "Was it made? Or is it natural?"
"Well—it's not the afterlife. I don't believe in the afterlife. We live and then we die. All we get is the time between that first breath and last to chisel our name into stone."
"And a billion of humans over thousands of years have been wrong?"
"Heaven is a placebo for the poor and helpless. It deludes them into thinking that their existence has meaning that will last. That their life long struggle leads to something more than a puff of dust. When I was a child, you had to take your ID chip with you to the bread lines. It had your genealogy records; you used it to justify your existence to get your share of food. It had my parents, and grandparents and so forth back ten generations. Hundreds of people reduced down to some ones and zeroes on a data chip and nothing else. Their own flesh and blood knew nothing about them beyond that. If it wasn't for a hundred pounds of meat on two feet, it would be as if they never existed."
"But there was you."
"Ha!" Hardin spread his hands to take in the world around them. "And I'm there to stand testament? Hell, no, I'm stuck in this obscure corner of nowhere. In the mysticism of immortality, the ancient Egyptians stumbled across the truth. Tutankhamun. Nefertiri. Ramses. Seti. We know their names a millennia after their language stopped being spoken. That's immortality."
"Biblical heaven implies a time longer than millennia."
"Well, I'll settle for a few hundred years."
They were ranging off the subject. Mikhail pushed to get it back on track. "Is there any proof that an alien race created this place?"
"None that humans have found. If another race knows, it hasn't told us."
It stunned Mikhail that Hardin could speak so causally of alien races. The nefrim had been humanity's first encounter with another race.
"Exactly how many alien races are there?" Mikhail asked.
Hardin actually had to count on his fingers. "There's the Hak, the minotaurs, the civ, the obnao, the kites—although I'm not sure if they're intelligent per se—the barbies, the kelpie, the nixies. Ten. Maybe eleven. That we know of."
Hardin hadn't named the nefrim as one of the other races.
"No nefrims?" Mikhail asked.
"Their ships are here. No one has ever seen a live nefrim though; there's something that kills them here."
"And how many human ships?"
"How many arrived here?" Hardin shrugged. "Countless have vanished without a trace. There are a hundred human landings. The largest and oldest is Ya-ya: the Yamoto battle ship and the colony ship Yamaguchi. They landed about ten miles apart with a Hak spiritual retreat between them."
"A what?"
Hardin considered for a moment, rolling his hand as if flipping through possible explanations. "According to the Nipponese, the Hak are zen mystics who only use this area as a retreat from the real universe. They like to sun on a rocky island that's now in the middle of the city. I hear that they come and go without anyone seeing them move, so that might be true."
"The Hak know how to leave this place?"
"If they are leaving, they're doing it without a spaceship." Hardin smiled and Mikhail wasn't sure if he was telling the truth. He suspected that the man was and wanted Mikhail to disbelieve merely so he could have his ignorance expounded upon.
So Mikhail moved on. He'd go back later, or ask Eraphie. "What's the total human population then?"
"Less than a million. Because Yamaguchi was a colony ship, Ya-ya has the means to support scientific research and a college, but most landings are hand-to-mouth."
"And you consider this paradise?"
"Ya-ya is proof that humans can prosper here given the right equipment and a large enough population pool."
"And luck at landing."
"If I could get out and gain access to the right equipment, incoming ships could have safe flight paths and a selection of landing sites." Hardin said it as if it was something he'd put a great deal of thought into. Was his arrival at Fenrir after the engine warped out no more coincidental than Mikhail's?
"Have you figured out how to get out?" Mikhail asked.
Hardin gave a weak laugh and shook his head. "No."
"Someone here at Fenrir figured it out." Mikhail waved a hand at the rubble around them.
"This isn't proof that it went back home. It could have just gone to another dimension we don't know about. Or reduced down to a black hole which collapsed." Hardin paused and cocked his head. "But you should know. You jumped out of normal space after the implosion. Did it show up?"
To hesitate in answering would be the same as admitting the truth. Denying it would limit what he could ask Hardin without tipping his hand. So Mikhail nodded. "It came out of warp near Plymouth Station. No survivors. No explanation as to where it had been. No clue as to what happened to the rest of the ship and why only the engine appeared."
Hardin looked stricken. "So Command doesn't know about this pocket universe?"
"It knows that Fenrir is in an ocean someplace." Mikhail didn't elaborate on what else Command knew and feared.
Hardin looked out at the dazzle of sunlight on water where Fenrir lay.
"Do you know who was working on the engine?" Mikhail pressed for answers. "How they modified it so
it could function in this place?"
"No."
It was a quick, firm denial. It could be the truth if Hardin had little to do with Fenrir's people. Or he could be lying.
14: Blue Blood
There was a storm coming. The heart of the storm, according to Moldavsky, was still two hundred kilometers off, but already the winds was blasting over Fenrir's Rock. It was clearly visible to the naked eye, a black wall sliding toward them over the darkening ocean.
