Dead Space: Catalyst

by Evenson, Brian

  “It chose me, too,” said Briden, defensively. “If it hadn’t chosen me, you would still be in there.”

  That was true, in a matter of speaking, thought Istvan. But even when Briden had been staring right at him he hadn’t seen him. It had taken the other scientist, the woman, to recognize him. But to try to calm the fellow, he nodded.

  It did calm him. Briden smiled and leaned back in his chair a little. “Now the question is what does it want us to do?”

  But Istvan had a hard time paying attention. Inside his head the voice had started to speak again. See me, it said. Understand me. Share me.

  “See me,” he muttered.

  “See you?” Briden said, surprised. “But I do see you. I’m right here, sitting across the table from you.”

  “No,” said Istvan, “See him. I want to see him.”

  “Him? Who is him?” asked Briden. And when Istvan just stared, he said, “Do you mean it? Do you mean the Marker?”

  Did he? What was a Marker? He didn’t know for certain and the moment in which the voice seemed like it was giving him specific direction had faded into a quieter recital, not things he could hear exactly or know why they were important, but he still could feel his brain taking them in.

  “All right,” Briden said. “Yes, why not. You’ll see it. That makes sense. We’ll have to ignore a few security protocols, but I am after all the director of this project. This is much more important than a few security protocols.”

  The vid near the wall chirped. Briden glanced at it briefly. When he turned back there was yet another look of irritation on his face. “You’ll have to excuse me a moment,” he said. “This won’t take long.”

  He stood and approached the monitor. When he accepted the link, Istvan could see a woman’s face, the face of the female scientist who had seen him and recognized him.

  “What is it, Dr. Dexter?” asked Briden. “I’m busy.”

  “The prisoner’s not in his quarters,” said the woman. “Do you happen to know where he is?”

  “First of all,” Istvan heard Briden say, “he’s not a prisoner. He’s our guest. Second, yes, I do know where he is. He’s here with me.”

  “What’s he doing there with you?” asked Dexter. “Why didn’t you follow protocol?”

  “I needed to talk to him,” said Briden. “And I didn’t think that protocol applied in this case.”

  “No? Why not?”

  “I don’t have to explain myself to you, Dr. Dexter,” said Briden.

  “No, actually you do,” said Dexter. “And be careful what you say. You can be sure that it will all appear in my report.”

  He started to retort, then apparently reconsidered. Istvan watched him take a deep breath. “You still don’t understand, do you?” he said.

  “Understand what?”

  “The work we’re doing here. The nature of it. How important it is. There is no turning back now, Dr. Dexter.”

  “Briden,” she said, bridling. “You can’t just—”

  But that was all she had a chance to say because Briden had cut the feed.

  He came back to the table, his smile restored. “Now where were we?” he asked. “Oh yes, you wanted to see it. Follow me.”

  * * *

  It was late, the workday mostly done. The few scientists still seated and working within the control room turned and looked at them when they entered. Most of them turned quickly back to what they were doing, but one or two kept staring for a time. Briden ignored them. He simply walked across the room and over to the observation window on the other side, drawing Istvan by the hand after him.

  “There it is,” he said, and pointed.

  Through the window Istvan could see it, a strange twisting obelisk, blackish red and with a reddish glow, inscribed all over with strange figures. Or not so strange, really, for as he looked at them, he began to see in them the warp and weft of the other world, the material which the veil was made of when it fell, even the very lineaments and workings of the faces that came to him in that world. If he was allowed to look at it long enough, he felt, he would even begin to see how these signs and symbols formed the hiss and mutter of the voices that came to him. Yes, here was the thing that brought everything together, that made everything make sense. Here was the key to everything in existence.

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” said Briden.

  Istvan nodded. It was hard to take his eyes off of it, but he slowly dragged them around to look at Briden. “I want to go in there,” he said.

  “There’ll be time enough for that,” said Briden. “Can’t do everything all at once.”

  “No,” said Istvan. “Now.”

  They stared at one another for a long moment, Briden with a certain curiosity, Istvan steadily, his gaze hard. Finally Briden sighed and turned away.

  “All right,” he said. “If that’s what needs to happen.”

  He slid his keycard through and entered the code. As the door slid open, more of the scientists turned to watch them. Then Briden ushered him in.

  “Not strictly protocol,” he said, almost as if he were talking to himself. The door closed behind them.

  The room itself was not the same as in the rest of the complex, Istvan saw. It had a floor made of solid stone, and the bottom part of this chamber had been cut out of the rock, with man-made walls built up on top of it. The Marker rose in the middle of it, at once brutal and majestic. He could almost feel the energy emanating from it. Just looking at it made him dizzy.

  “There,” said Briden. “Now you’ve stood in the same room with it. Let’s go.”

  But Istvan ignored him. He began to move slowly toward the Marker.

  “Istvan,” said Briden. And then louder, “Istvan!”

  He felt the man’s hand on his shoulder and shook it off. He kept going. Briden said something, but Istvan could hardly hear it over the sound of the voice guiding him forward, leading him toward this thing of great beauty.

  It was in his head, too, he now felt, or something like it anyway, all the necessary details and plans were stored up there now: that was what it had been doing as it prodded his brain. It had been making itself a space within him.

  But there was Briden, grabbing his arm again and spinning him around. This irritated him, made him bare his teeth at him. But Briden hung on. Not now, he was saying, we have to clear it first for the sake of—

  And then the door behind them opened and Dr. Dexter came in. She looked angry, her face flushed and red.

  “Briden!” she shouted. “Even you have to know that this goes far beyond the boundaries of—”

  But Istvan had stopped listening by then. Briden was listening though, distracted enough so that Istvan could wrench himself free. He stumbled onward, toward the Marker. He cast a brief glance behind him, saw the two scientists shouting at one another, Briden’s gaze darting back and forth between Dr. Dexter and him.

  And then he was at the base of the Marker itself. He reached out and pressed the flat of his palm against it and he felt the veil of that other world falling over his gaze again, a tremendous power behind it. In the distance, someone was shouting. Slowly, carefully, he opened his mind up, unfolding it gently. And then he closed his eyes and waited.

  For a long moment, nothing happened. And then he felt something flowing through him, sorting through his mind in a million ways at once. The other world rushed up and blotted everything else out as if it never had existed—and who knows, maybe it never had. He looked up and there, where the Marker had been, was now the face and body of murdered Conn, six or seven times as large as he had been in life. Conn was staring at Istvan, looking down at him. He bent farther down, brought his face closer until his head obscured much of Istvan’s gaze and Istvan was standing in his shadow. And then, blood still dripping from his neck, he smiled.

  Suddenly there was a rush of energy that made Istvan’s body vibrate to the very core. All around him, he heard the sound of screams. His mind cleared itself in a burst of white light.
He neither knew who he was nor where he was, nor even if he existed. And then he collapsed.

  33

  It came in a burst big enough that even Grottor felt it. It made him shudder. He steadied himself on the rail, waited for the feeling of vertigo to pass. Orthor clutched his head and gave a little cry and then began beating his head against the desk. Others on the bridge were struggling as well, looking dazed or confused or even crazed, and Grottor told himself once again that if it was this bad up here, thank God they weren’t on the planet itself.

  When it finally died away, the first order of business was to get Orthor to stop beating his head against the console. The man’s forehead was bruised and the skin had begun to split; in just a few minutes he had done himself serious damage. But it also gave Grottor an excuse to have other crew members bundle him off and put him in the brig, thus killing two birds with one stone. Now Blackwell would have no eyes and ears, would not know what he and the gray man were planning.

  Only then did Grottor turn to Ensign Haley. She was scribbling madly away, as if possessed, and mumbling under her breath as she did so. She kept spinning him image after image, all of it obviously connected to the Marker, followed by several pages of equations and instructions. He immediately spun them along to the gray man.

  By the time she was done, five or six hours later, she was exhausted and shaking, ready to fall apart. He helped her back to her quarters and helped her lie down.

  “But,” she was saying, “I … the—it’s still calling me to—”

  “Shhh,” he interrupted. “There’ll be other times.”

  * * *

  Thirty minutes later, he had the rest of the crew back on the bridge, including a replacement for Orthor. He made sure that everything was okay, then left. He visited Orthor in the brig and found him suspicious and resentful and paranoid. He had torn most of the bandages off of his head, and he kept asking clumsily veiled questions meant to try to determine what had happened in his absence. Grottor stonewalled him, then left.

  He’d only been back in his own quarters a few minutes when the gray man contacted him by vid.

  “These are very good,” he said. “Very helpful. They teach us a lot.”

  “What do they teach you exactly?” asked Grottor.

  The gray man smiled. “Too early to say,” he said. “But we need more. What are the conditions that led to this?”

  “I’m not certain yet,” said Grottor. “A headache, I believe.”

  “What caused the headache?”

  “I don’t know,” said Grottor. “What normally causes a headache?”

  “Check the Marker readings,” said the gray man. “But don’t stop there. Find out what’s going on down on the planet and how it correlates with what’s happening with her drawings. If other data is an indication, there’ll be a connection.”

  “Other data?”

  The gray man smiled. “Need to know basis,” he said. “Find out what you can, get her to do more. If it gets too dangerous, get out. Above all, keep both her and whatever’s happening down on the planet a secret. Nuke the planet if you have to: if we get enough out of her, we’ll be fine without it.”

  34

  “They’re not responding to our hail, sir,” said the communications officer.

  “No?” said the captain. “Well, keep trying. While we’re at it, we might as well move into orbit.” He turned to the navigator. “See to it.”

  From near the back of the bridge, Jensi watched. He wasn’t supposed to be there exactly, but when he’d arrived nobody seemed to give him a second glance. He was curious to see the planet from the air, curious, too, to get a sense of who or what might be down there, who would answer the hail.

  Apparently no one.

  “You have the right frequency?” asked the captain.

  “It’s the same frequency we used before.”

  “Same coding?”

  “Same coding.”

  “Try other frequencies,” the captain said. “Other codings as well. Maybe they had to change it and neglected to tell us. See if anything comes up.”

  But nothing did. At least not at first. They were just turning into orbit when the communications officer started picking up something on one of the distress channels.

  “Play it aloud so we can all hear,” said the captain.

  “But captain—”

  “Play it,” repeated the captain.

  He put it on.

  This is a warning, it said. This sector has become quarantined. All landing on Aspera is forbidden. Anyone and everyone must turn back. No exceptions.

  After a moment of silence it repeated, on a loop.

  “Does that apply to us?” asked the navigation officer. “Or is that just something they set up to scare the unauthorized away?”

  “Considering that we can’t get anyone to respond to our hail,” said the captain, “I think it does apply to us. Something must have gone wrong.”

  They kept trying to raise someone, without success. The captain stood placidly, apparently unconcerned. Shouldn’t we turn around and leave? Jensi wanted to ask, but he wasn’t supposed to be there on the bridge and his brother was, after all, down on the planet. He wanted to know what had happened to him.

  “What do we do, captain?” asked the navigator.

  “Continue to establish orbit,” said the captain. “We have to figure out what to do about the supplies we were ordered to deliver. If we don’t deliver them, we won’t get paid.”

  “But what about the quarantine?”

  “We won’t send a vessel down until we can raise someone,” he said. “We’ll be careful.”

  And so they established a high orbit, hanging in the sky, still trying to raise someone. Without success.

  “Shall I continue, sir?” asked the communications officer.

  The captain hesitated, finally nodded. And so the officer went through each channel again, still without success.

  Maybe there was a prison break, thought Jensi. Maybe they’ve taken over.

  And then, there on the screen in front of them but growing larger, a tiny disruption in the space in front of them. “What’s that?” asked one of the crew. Nobody answered. They were slowly gaining on it, the disruption gaining in size to become an object. Slowly it resolved into a ship.

  “A Sovereign Colonies gunship,” said the navigator finally.

  “What is it doing here?” asked the communications officer.

  “It’s laying down orbital mines,” said the navigator. “They’re sealing off the planet.”

  “Hail them,” said the captain. “There must be some kind of mistake.”

  At first they didn’t answer, but when the navigator repeated the ship’s numbers and used the emergency frequency, someone finally answered.

  “Grottor here,” the man said. He wore the insignia of a commander, his face hard and craggy.

  “Commander Grottor,” began the captain. “We have three months of supplies aboard. We cordially request…”

  He trailed off. On the screen, the commander had lifted one hand to stop him, and was shaking his head. “I’m sorry,” Commander Grottor said. “You happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  The captain stood there looking confused. On the screen they could see some smaller objects gravitating toward them. At first it was difficult to tell what they were exactly.

  Oh shit, thought Jensi, the mines …

  He turned and began to run.

  Behind him the bridge had gone into action. The captain barked orders as the navigator began to swing the ship around, but Jensi knew it was going to be too late. He kept running, as fast as he could, yelling as he went, raising the alarm. He passed over the elevator and slid down the ladder to the lower decks.

  Halfway down, the first mine struck and he lost his grip, falling, clanging down the shaft. Above, there was a sucking sound as the atmosphere began to rush out, and he was nearly dragged back up the ladder until the bulkhead shield rose and
cut off the leak. He stood up and stumbled down the corridor, found a locker holding an Astrosuit RIG with oxygen storage, and struggled into it. The helmet began assembling itself automatically around his head. From above came the sounds of screaming.

  A few more people had had the same idea as he had and were making for the escape pods as well, rushing toward him. Another explosion came, this time on the lower decks, and Jensi and the people running toward him were sucked backward. He watched them spill out through a jagged hole and into space and nearly went out that way himself, but managed to catch hold of one raggedly imploded edge and held on while the pressure equalized.

  He pulled himself back into the ship. The artificial gravity was disabled now, so he had to use his zero-grav boots to find his footing. The sound, too, had gone strange, rushing out with the atmosphere. Everything now sounded dampened, almost nonexistent. The noise of his boots clomping toward the escape pods was more a vibration that could be barely felt rather than an actual sound. Almost the only thing he could hear was his own panicked breathing. He hurried forward down the corridor, floating now with chunks of debris, only to see open space where the first set of pods should have been, though the next pods seemed intact. Behind him he heard a muffled noise and then was nearly knocked off his feet by the shock wave that came with it. I’m going to die, he thought, and then disengaged his boots and pushed off.

  But without gravity it was hard to do it right. He was, he immediately knew, directing himself too high, was likely to spin out the open hole and into space. He tried to stretch and curl to change his trajectory but little seemed to happen, and he was going out and drifting away. But then there it was, a piece of debris floating up above him and he pushed it as hard as he could. It stopped his momentum and sent him sideways at a slower pace and he got close enough to the outer hull that he could turn on the antigravity boots and let them slowly suck him to it.

  He quickly clomped his way along the hull and worked his way around to the underside, running along the roof and down the wall to the remaining pods. One had its door open and he saw, lying slumped in its entrance, Swanson. His eyes were bugged out and he was dead from lack of oxygen. Another man dead, he thought. He dragged the man up and out of the way and climbed in.