Into Darkness

by Peter Fugazzotto

  “What the fuck?” said Orlov.

  “Don’t be stupid,” said Gomez wheeling towards Orlov. “We go in hot and we’ll end up blasting holes in the only ship that can bring us back home. Hendo, pop the door. I’ll clear the cockpit.”

  “I’m in with you,” said Marley.

  Gomez’s stomach dropped as Hendo counted down with his fingers. Gomez’s breath rose, his limbs drained and his guts suddenly twisted. He had done this before, scores of times whether kicking through the door of a tenement apartment or blasting a hole in a transport vehicle. He was a veteran. A professional.

  Yet every time he was nervous.

  He imagined the worst behind ever the door.

  He gulped in air.

  Hendo cranked the handle and kicked open the door.

  Gomez, knife in fist, sprung through the gap.

  The cockpit was empty.

  Not only empty. But gutted, wires exposed, panels gone. Even the chairs had been taken.

  “What the hell happened here?” said Hendo from the doorway. Contrary to Marley’s orders, he leveled his assault rifle in front of him.

  “Looters,” said Orlov peeking from behind the big man. She too had ignored Marley’s orders. Her laser target moved around the cockpit. “Look at all this.”

  Gomez stared at the control console. Panels had been pried open, processors and circuitry pulled out, and red, black and white wires twisted into disarray. “How bad is it?” he asked.

  Marley shook her head. “I don’t know. I think we need to bring Finn or Adams over here to assess the damage.”

  Gomez cursed. “This mission’s a clusterfuck and we haven’t even done anything yet. Do you think we can even get this thing off the ground?”

  “I’m more worried about our air supply,” said Marley. She glanced at the indicator gauge on her suit. Gomez’s was still green but he knew it was only a matter of time before it slipped over into the yellow. Time was not on their side.

  They left the cockpit and cleared the remaining rooms in the vessel. The rest of the ship had been gutted and looted. Someone or something had methodically dismantled the valuable parts of the vessel, the functional mechanisms and electronics, and left a shell of a ship.

  Orlov stuck close to Gomez and patched in through a private channel. “Where the fuck the robots? Those advance robots, they’re combat models. Something took them out. We’re fucked.”

  “We need to figure this shit out,” Gomez said. He looked at Orlov’s indictor light. Very little green. She was running out of oxygen. “We’re not going to last long out here. We’ve got to get into the main compound, and pray the atmospheric system is working. Otherwise, we’ve flown an awfully long way to die on a rock.”

  “You think she knew?” Orlov allowed her laser targeting to rest on Marley’s back who inspected a torn open panel ahead of them.

  “What?” asked Gomez.

  “You think Marley knew she was leading us into this? She told us nothing. Can we trust her?”

  Gomez laughed. “She works for the AIs and she’s half a fucking machine. Of course, we can’t trust her. As far as I’m concerned this mission is over, and the only thing that matters now is survival. Screw her. Screw Prime. Screw everything.”

  Finally they came to the crawl space leading to the chamber housing the ship’s AI. The panel had been ripped from the wall and lay dented on the floor.

  Marley bent low, the light from her rifle vanishing into the long tight passageway. Gomez found himself drawn to her bent shape. He cursed at himself. He glared at an abomination of machine and flesh. Marley turned to Gomez. “You coming with me?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing in here. I’m going to check the perimeter.” He did not want to be near her. He wanted to be as far from her as possible.

  He left Marley gaping, and retraced their steps until he stood at the top of the ramp.

  He looked back at the vessel in which they had arrived.

  The HDC-117 had been destroyed. Its emergency systems had kicked in after the crash landing and it had chemically suppressed the fires and self-sealed the ruptures tubes. But it didn’t matter. The vessel was mangled metal. The thrusters’ legs had burst upon impact. Shards of metal on the landing pads splayed about like an open flower blossom. One of the thruster legs had been completely torn off. The aft of the vessel had been crushed flat, the impact collapsing the roof towards the floor.

  Gomez had been grateful they had survived. But now staring at the destroyed vessel he was not so sure. They had no way off the colony and they had limited supplies of air.

  If the oxygen levels in his suit dropped too low, he would shoot himself in the head.

  Better a quick end than slowly suffocating.

  The thought of suffocating brought him back to the memory of a summer night long ago on Earth. He was a boy, living with a distant uncle, his father and mother and sisters having returned to the desert wastelands between Mexico and the United States. He had stayed in the San Francisco Bay Area with his uncle in Richmond, a former oil refinery community before the facility had burst into flames.

  That late summer night, he and a few other neighborhood boys had snuck a six-pack of beer and a bottle of rye whiskey and lay in their shorts by a pool trying to be the first to spot the space ships lighting the skies.

  The dream of star travel – strange new worlds, the edges of the known – did not captivate him. Space flight only meant a way out – putting behind the cramped shared room sour with laborers, brushing away the memories of his father’s stinging hand, and running away from becoming one of the unemployed huddled on the sidewalks.

  That night young Gomez had washed the stinging shots of whiskey down with warm beer. After a while, he realized he had drunk too much. As he lay on his back, the stars spun, a universe trying to orient. He felt sick.

  So he rose on unsteady feet to find his way back to his house. But with his first step, he fell into the pool. The shock of the cold water shrunk his lungs. Almost immediately he inhaled water. His feet scraped the rough blue floor of the pool. He stretched his arms but he could not find the cold air. An impossible distance away, the field of stars bent through the pliable surface.

  He had woken to fists pounding his back. He knelt on the concrete, palms wide to hold him up. Chlorinated water mixed with whiskey and bile coursed through his lips. He wanted to look up at the stars but his head hung heavy as if made of stone.

  But even though the world spun around him, he knew one day he would get to the stars. One day he would escape.

  Across the slate gray stone and dust of the surface of Mining Colony TS34, the dull metallic buildings of Alpha Port squatted.

  If they stayed out here among the ships, they would die. Drown in their own breaths.

  Marley stomped onto the ramp next to him. “They took the AI. Pulled it right out of the housing.”

  “Can we get the atmosphere functioning again?”

  “The ship’s gutted.”

  “So we’re fucked.”

  “Gomez, we need to go into Alpha Port. Find out what the problem is. Then get the planet back online. That’s why were here.”

  “What if the atmosphere’s not working there?”

  “Rather die out here?”

  Twenty

  MARLEY SHOT THE surveillance camera and fragments of glass and resin showered down over the access door to Alpha Port.

  “You gotta do that, right now?” asked Finn. The technician knelt at the access panel, a screwdriver in one hand and pliers in the other. Pieces of glass and plastic clung to the top of his helmet and shoulders.

  “Don’t want any eyes on us,” said Marley.

  The access door, twice as tall as Marley and just as wide, was painted in diagonal yellow and black stripes.

  Marley ran a gloved hand over the dents and scrapes marring the surface. It looked as if something had tried to break through the door. She glanced over her shoulder, scanning the horizon but seeing nothing moving.
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  “Bad drivers,” said Finn.

  “More likely someone, or something, trying to get in.”

  “That’s reassuring.” He glanced behind them before resuming trying to override the lock.

  “Find out soon enough.”

  Marley backed up until she was standing on one side of the door, Orlov at her side. On the other side of the access door hunkered Gomez and Hendo. They pointed their rifles at the door. Always ready to start shooting.

  Marley had felt the gaze of Gomez on her ever since they had risen from the stasis sleep. As if he knew something and held it back. She did not trust him.

  She wondered if he played dumb and knew as much about the mission as she did. She wondered if she was being played. The first team on her list did not include a single Augmented member. Not an artificial hand. Not a robotic eye. Had to be a reason. Or maybe Prime did not trust her completely.

  She would need to keep an eye on Gomez. Any wrong move and she would kill him. She just hoped if that happened that the others were not nearby. Too much firepower to deal with on her own.

  Finn cursed at the tangle of wires in the access panel.

  “He thinks he’s good,” said Orlov. “Better to be good with a gun.”

  “We need him to open the door.”

  “Crazy man coming,” said Orlov pointing with her rifle back towards the wreckage of the HDC-117.

  Adams stumbled across the rocky landscape, a giant metal box strapped on his back. Adams and Finn had extracted Penelope’s “brain” from her housing deep within the HDC-117. Finn and Adams had bolted the brain, a silver box with proliferation of wires, to a metal frame and then strapped the whole thing onto Adams. A giant metal backpack. A portable lithium battery clung to the underside.

  Adams stopped, panting, hands on hips, in the front of the door.

  “Stand away from the door, Adams,” Marley barked.

  The captain plodded to her side, each step a tremendous effort.

  “I thought you were staying with the ship?” asked Marley.

  Adams’s face was covered in a sheen of sweat. “The colony AI. He’s the only chance Penelope’s got. Not getting off this rock.”

  “We have no communication with Ragnar yet.”

  “I’m not going to watch her die. I’m going to fight for her.”

  Marley frowned. Adams was going to slow them down. But she read the pain in his face. He was losing someone that he loved. Marley knew what that felt like. The only difference was that Adams actually had the chance to save that loved one. Marley bit back welling emotion. She needed to focus. She needed to bury any feelings. She would never get Hsu back.

  “Got it,” said Finn standing up from the panel and slipping his assault rifle off his shoulder. “Door opening in three.”

  Time stopped for Marley and the memory of waiting before another door flashed before her.

  She had waited in New Shanghai outside of a warehouse staring at the thick steel garage door. Bands of steel had been bolted to the surface. She and her team huddled in a delivery vehicle. The driver was dead and stuffed on the floor in front of the passenger seat.

  As Marley crouched in the back of the van, helmeted and armored, hand held missile in her arms, Prime filled her mind with a cascade of green code and, in the numerics and letters, forms took shape. The data became visual. She saw through the cameras inside the warehouse. Connected, she was as vast as the AI. She was powerful.

  Sykes, a shadowy figure, separated from the stairwell. His Augmented legs, uncovered, bare for the world to see how far he had risen, gleamed as he strode across the parking garage to his transport.

  Marley could not see Sykes’s face. Static washed across her vision as if the memory refused to live for her. But she knew her target. She knew what he had done. She knew what she would do. The memory already had an end.

  Sykes had betrayed Prime. Sykes had thought Marley had died in a transport hit by an armor-piercing missile, a military weapon he purchased off channel in the black markets of New Bangkok. He had left as soon as the missile he fired sent the transport into a ball of flames. Sykes thought he had gotten away with it. After all, who would suspect one of Prime’s agents of assassinating another agent?

  But Prime was everywhere. He could see anything. He had raised her from the dead, given her a new life and a new body. He had taken away the pain.

  She saw him, not Sykes, but Hsu in the mangle of metal. The heat from the flames seared her skin. The sour stench of plastics filled her chest. Hsu, lost to her forever. She stretched out her hand, burnt, bones and tendon revealed, but she could not reach him. Blackness arrived too soon.

  Six months later she crouched in that van, rebuilt by Prime. Sykes died that night. By her rebuilt hand.

  “One,” said Finn, and the access door of Alpha Port grumbled open.

  Twenty-One

  AS SOON AS the access door slid up, Gomez angled his rifle around the doorway. He had attached a small mirror to the barrel. He pushed the tip of his gun forward and tilted it so he gradually could see the decompression chamber in the reflection.

  He caught himself clenching his jaw. He should not have been this nervous. But this mission had gotten under his skin.

  “Clear,” he said, and with a wave of his hand, the team folded into the room and spread to the corners.

  Inside the decompression chamber was even more battered and dented than outside. Cameras had been torn from the ceilings and a red overhead light flashed. A rusty, gritty red stained the floor. Even through the filter of his breathing apparatus, he smelled sour hydraulic fluid. He ran his gloved fingers over the walls. Shrapnel and bullets punctured the wall.

  “Are these going to be a problem?” he asked Finn.

  “Bullets are always a problem.”

  “With the decompression chamber. Will it be safe?”

  “One way to find out. Best to keep your helmet on until I can get a reading.”

  “And worst case scenario?”

  Finn laughed. “Worst case scenario is I close the outer door and we get trapped in here like rats. Then they trash compact us.”

  “You think they know we’re here?”

  The red-haired technician shrugged. “What do I know? Maybe people coming and going is not such a big deal. Once we close the outer door, we’ll have a pretty good idea what’s in the store for us.”

  “Everyone in. Let’s go, Adams! You can’t stand out there, fool.”

  “He’s not all there.” Finn pursed his lips. “Don’t be so hard on him.”

  “The guy who put a gun to your head? I’ll be as hard on him as I want. Far as I’m concerned, he’s expendable. Odds are he’s not making it out of here anyway.”

  “You can be an ass sometimes.”

  Adams waited just outside the door, so Gomez grabbed his arm and hauled him into the chamber. The captain hunched beneath the weight of the box. Gomez shoved him against a wall so he would at least be out of the line of fire if bullets flew. The man had no sense of what he was getting into. He should have stayed on the ship.

  It was emptiness in Adams’s eyes that bothered Gomez the most.

  Gomez was reminded of the men he had seen in the American Southwest. Before his first commission, he had been on a military transport packed with other soldiers and watched through the windows the pilgrims trudging along the desert road. Lone men, bent beneath heavy packs, wandered into that dust and sage wilderness seeking something beyond what the world had to offer. Most never returned. They had been walking to their own deaths.

  Gomez frowned. Adams was going to hinder the mission. Gomez would need to deal with this soon. He was not going to risk the safety of his team for an outsider.

  Finn crouched at the other side of the chamber, keyed in a sequence, and the access door to the outside groaned shut.

  The light overhead flashed from red to yellow.

  Gomez felt through his suit the temperature change. Air hissed from wall vents. The overhead light turned
a solid green.

  “Atmosphere check,” said Gomez.

  Finn drew a small hand held monitor from his belt and waved it in front of him. “Seventy eight percent nitrogen and twenty one percent oxygen, and a chilly fifty degrees Fahrenheit. We’re good. Now we gotta hope the inside of the port is functioning.”

  The team bunched by the door leading into the port. Finn rubbed his hands together. “And for the grand finale.”

  “I’m picking up local chatter,” said Marley. She held one hand against the side of her helmet. “They know they got company and if I’m reading the signals right they’ll be on the other side of the door in about half a minute. They’re coming fast! Machine fast! Treat them as hostiles. Shoot first!”

  “Fuck,” said Orlov, dwarfed behind her big gun.

  Hendo pulled the helmet off his head. “Free the beard. Let’s get this party started.” He started flicking levers and pushing buttons on the side of his rifle.

  “Maybe it’s routine,” said Finn. “Customs or something like that.”

  Gomez spat out laughter. “Open the goddamned door! If they catch us in here, it’ll be shooting fish in a pond.”

  Finn tapped the control panel and the door leading into Alpha Port hissed open.

  The loading dock was cavernous, high ceilinged and deep, a concrete floor littered with rock and twisted metal, exposed girders supporting the walls and ceiling. Conveyors belts loaded with ore sat motionless. Several surface rovers, used for travel from the mines back to the port, were idle, their dark glass covered in a fine layer of dust. Robotic arms and scoopers were dormant.

  Gomez had seen mining operations in full swing before – busy with the movement of ore on conveyor belts, the coordinated weaving of the various vehicles, the grind and whir of the machines, and the shouts and curses of the human handlers.

  None of that was here.

  The loading dock had been abandoned.

  In the middle of the floor, the remains of a robotic skeleton lay charred and half melted. Its brain box had been torn from the metal skull casing and the blasters had been severed from its arms. Around the metallic corpse, pits and gashes pocked the concrete floor.