by Mark Anson
The rockets fired outside briefly, adjusting their descent and keeping them on the planned trajectory.
‘What are you going to do when we get there?’ Clare demanded, ‘you can’t land this thing.’
‘We don’t need to,’ Mordecai sighed, and he flung his head back and breathed in deeply. ‘We’re not landing on the surface, we’re going through the gate. And you’re coming with us, at least some of the way.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You’ll see, captain, you’ll see …’ His voice was a sighing whisper round the room. He turned his attention back to Collins. ‘How are we doing, lieutenant?’
‘Final descent in one minute. Then it’s three minutes to the end of the valley.’
‘Just four minutes to go!’ Mordecai exulted, ‘Just four minutes until we go through the gate.’ He breathed in deeply, and the roar of the air in his windpipe filled the room.
The ship slid towards Psyche, riding the thin green line that sloped downwards away from them. A green rectangle appeared just ahead of them. It slid closer as they watched.
‘Top of descent,’ Collins said, and as the ship passed through the marker, he fired the engines again in a short burn, reducing their forward velocity. He held the ship on its thrusters, firing them downwards to slow their rate of descent. The ship settled down into a slow track over the asteroid’s surface, and it widened out around them, changing from a planetary surface into a grotesque and blasted landscape that stretched off to the horizon.
Great drifts of dust filled the folds and valleys, piled up against the iron mountains like grey snow. Five billion years of turning in the distant sunlight, alternating cycles of heat and cold, had flaked the thin rocky covering to dust, until it covered the entire surface.
‘There’s the entrance to the valley,’ Mordecai breathed, and the room shook with his anticipation. Ahead of them and slightly to one side, two red-lit mountain buttresses reared up towards each other, and between them, a steep-sided valley stretched away into blackness.
Collins altered course slightly, taking the ship towards the centre of the gap. As they drew closer, the true size of the feature became clear; it grew around them, rising higher with each passing moment, the mountain sides rearing up towards the stars.
Clare stared at the mountain-guarded gate in rising fear. There was something about it; some primal fear, or was it the blurred and half-imagined shapes that crouched on the cliffs on either side, watching the ship glide through into the blackness? For a moment, she thought she saw two gigantic statues of winged lions standing there, guarding the entrance to the valley, then the image dissolved into a riot of noise, and when it came back, they were just two outcrops of stone. Whatever it was, she felt a formless terror rise up inside her as they passed into the valley, and she looked about her, seeking some way of escape.
‘It’s no use, captain,’ Mordecai’s voice welled up around her, even though he wasn’t looking at her. ‘You can’t escape. Lieutenant, I think it’s time. Bring the gun over to me.’
Collins set the autopilot, and walked over to where Mordecai’s couch. He handed the gun to him, and turned to face Clare.
‘Make her kneel.’ The colour in the room darkened to a deep crimson. Collins drew a knife, and went behind Clare. She felt the plastic handcuff securing her to the ladder being cut, and he shoved her forward in front of Mordecai’s chair. Before she could do anything, he kicked her, twice, in the back of each of her legs. She gasped with the pain, and he pushed her down, so that she sank to her knees in front of Mordecai.
‘Captain, you have one last thing that you can do for me.’
‘What’s that?’ Clare said fearfully, dreading what was coming.
‘The crew of the Ulysses had to make a sacrifice to pass beyond the gate. Moreno gave his life so that the others might live, so that they might pass beyond the gate. And you – you will be our sacrifice …’
‘You – are – mad!’ she screamed in panic, ‘You’re not too late to stop this – order Collins to stop the descent, go back to the Mesa and surrender this vessel! You don’t have to do this!’
A deep sigh filled the room. ‘I’m afraid I do, captain. But your sacrifice won’t be in vain. I wish you could see what we’re going to see. Lieutenant –’
Clare sensed him behind her; she knew he had a knife in his hand. It was now or never. She dropped onto her side on the floor and flung her legs out behind her. The bruised muscles hummed with pain, but she caught Collins at the ankles, swiping him off his feet. The knife in his hands spun off across the deck and clattered against the hatch of the hibernaculum.
‘Stop her!’ Mordecai yelled, but Clare had been here before; she knew she had only seconds before she would be subdued, and then it would be the knife, and the despair, and the long slide into the dark, and she wasn’t ready for that yet. Her hands were cuffed behind her back, but she still had her legs, and she kicked out, hard, at Collins’s chest, his side, anything she could hit; she had to keep him down.
He cried out at the blows, but his hands were reaching, clawing out for her ankles. Once he had hold of those she was doomed; she was no match for his strength. She changed her aim and kicked out at his hands and arms.
There was a sudden, loud boom behind her, and Collins yelled in pain as a red splotch opened on his shoulder. Her right ear registered the whipcrack of a bullet.
She had her back to Mordecai. He had only just missed; the next shot would kill her. She spun round, leaving Collins struggling on the floor. Mordecai was holding the gun out in front of him, struggling to aim it; the needles in his cranium made it impossible for him to turn his head. She stepped quickly to the side, just as he fired again. The shot went into one of the memory banks behind her, and she heard a rush of escaping coolant.
Collins was dragging himself across the floor with his good arm, reaching out for the knife. Mordecai aimed blindly to his side, and fired again. The bullet smacked into the ceiling. She lifted her leg and kicked his wrist once, twice, and the gun fell from his shaking hand onto the deck.
She turned around to face Collins. She had no way of picking up the gun and firing it with her hands tied behind her; she was going to have to be brutal, and kick him into submission. But she saw with relief that he wasn’t a threat any more; his movements were slowing; he was bleeding out from the huge wound in his shoulder. Blood spread out from under him, and he was struggling to keep his head up. As she watched, he collapsed onto the deck with a low moan, and lay there, motionless.
A noise like a whirlwind filled the room. Mordecai’s fury broke across her, his thoughts amplified a thousandfold. He let out an incoherent scream of rage that battered on her eardrums. ‘Kill him!’ he bellowed, ‘kill him – the gate needs a sacrifice!’
‘You sick fuck,’ she said, looking down at Collins’s motionless form. She didn’t have time to see to him; it wouldn’t matter anyway unless she arrested the descent.
She walked over to where the knife lay by the hatch to the hibernaculum, and she crouched down, back-first, to retrieve it, then went through the difficult task of cutting through the thick plastic band that held her wrists together. It seemed to take an age, with Mordecai’s voice booming round the room, and she twice nicked herself with the knife, but finally her wrists came free, and she stood there, blood dripping from the cuts, facing him once more.
‘I think it’s time we went back, doctor,’ she said, and turned her attention to the console next to him. But her expression faded when she tried to disconnect the autopilot. Collins had locked it before he moved away; she couldn’t alter the ship’s course.
‘Did you think we were stupid, captain?’ Mordecai boomed, ‘you’ve already tried and failed to take this ship from us by force – we weren’t going to leave the controls free for you!’ He twisted round, trying to look at her. Trickles of blood ran down over his face from the needless that pierced his head. A grin of madness creased his features. ‘You can’t stop me from going th
rough the gateway – you’re coming with me, whether you like it or not!’
He seemed to find this somehow amusing, and the room shook with his disembodied thoughts.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Clare pounded the control console in frustration, but Collins had locked it good and proper, with his own code. She turned to face Mordecai in the couch, his eyes glaring madly sideways at her.
‘You – you are insane, we are on a flight path down a valley towards a sheer rock wall. If you don’t tell me the release code for this console in the next few minutes, we’re going to smash into it.’
‘Oh no we’re not,’ Mordecai said, his lips barely moving, the machine amplifying his thought. His eyes swung up to the ceiling. ‘I don’t blame you for doubting; you haven’t seen what we have, you haven’t seen what lies beyond the portal. Collins saw – he saw and he believed.’
‘What did he see!’ Clare yelled, taking hold of him in the chair, and shaking him by the shoulders, ‘you’re talking in riddles, like the captain of this ship did before he disappeared with all the crew! What in hell is so important that you’ll all die to reach it? Tell me!’
‘Do you really want to know, captain – will you really listen?’
‘Yes!’ Clare’s only thought was to try to convince him to release the ship’s controls.
‘The drawings – it’s real. It’s a gateway to the next world, to the land of shadows,’ he said, and his spoken thoughts were like the sighing of the wind in treetops in the summer. ‘It will open for us, and we will pass through. That’s where the crew of the Ulysses went, only they didn’t make the sacrifice properly – they had to do it before the gate, before they went through. They killed Moreno too soon, too soon …’
‘I’ve got news for you, doctor – there won’t be any sacrifices on this ship.’ She pointed down to Collins, and as she did, he moved slightly. Mordecai went white, and his thoughts shrieked round the room:
‘You’ve got to kill him! The gate needs a sacrifice!’ He looked up at the displays. ‘We’re nearly there!’
Clare glanced around at the viewscreens, which still showed the infra-red view around the ship. As she watched, the ship rounded an outthrust crag, and there, dead ahead of them, the scene opened up that she knew so well from the drawings of the crew – the two shoulders of the mountains to each side, and a sheer rock wall at the end of the valley.
The ship was heading straight for it – directly toward the base of the cliff. As Clare watched, aghast, the ship’s flight computer spoke, warning where their flight path was taking them:
‘Terrain, pull up.’
‘You hear that? We’re flying into a cliff, you’ve got to release the controls and let me get us out of here!’
‘Look closer,’ Mordecai’s thoughts hissed in the red-lit darkness, ‘Look at the gate!’
Clare looked at the base of the cliff, the place where all the drawings had shown a gate. As she expected, the infra-red display showed nothing but a jumbled mass of noise in the cool shadows at the base.
‘Do you see, captain? Do you see!’
He was evidently seeing something she couldn’t. The flight computer told her that they were heading for a rock wall, but he was seeing a door.
‘Terrain, terrain, pull up.’
Clare had to decide, and quickly; either trust in Mordecai’s vision, or in the strident voice of the flight computer, counting down the distance to impact.
‘You see, captain?’ Mordecai’s voice was triumphant, ‘We’re expected. Now kill Collins. Use the knife. He won’t feel anything. Make the sacrifice!’
Clare looked at Mordecai, sitting in the chair, an expression of maniacal triumph on his face, and Collins, lying there on the floor, dead or dying. She looked at the infra-red picture of the rock wall, and the shifting mass of noise at its base.
She broke and ran.
She climbed the ladder up to the lounge deck, and kept on going, up to the command deck where her helmet lay.
‘Four hundred metres.’
She grabbed her helmet and pulled it over her head, then found another of the spacesuit backpacks, stowed against the wall. She checked the gauges quickly; there was enough air for maybe two hours, but she didn’t have any plan; she just knew she had to get off the Ulysses.
She connected the air supplies quickly. There was only one way out of the ship, and she was taking a terrible risk; if she had miscalculated, then she would be dead as surely as if she had stayed aboard. But she wasn’t going to stay aboard.
The situation LEDs lit up in her helmet.
‘Three hundred metres. Pull up.’
She bounded into the emergency airlock and closed the inner door behind her. Her breath came in short, sharp pants as she turned to face the outer door. It was now or never.
‘Two hundred. Pull up.’
She took hold of one of the grab handles with her left hand, bracing herself against the hatch frame, and turned the release handle for the outer hatch. The air pressure in the airlock blew the outer door open, nearly taking her with it, but she held on. It was pitch dark outside, nothing could be seen.
She took a deep breath, and jumped.
If I’ve made a mistake, it’s too late, she thought.
There was hardly any sensation of falling; everything was dark around her, and the gravity on Psyche was so low that she felt like she wasn’t moving. She couldn’t tell which way was up, and her word spun crazily as her brain sought a vertical. Then her helmet lights illuminated something in front of her – it was the ground, heading towards her, much faster than she expected. She was falling face-first towards it, and she struggled to turn, but of course it was useless, and she impacted the ground a moment later, striking at an oblique angle, her forward motion causing her to roll over and over in the thick blanket of dust that filled the valley.
The wind was knocked out of her, and she kept on rolling, unable to stop, her helmet scraping against rocks, every impact making her cringe. Eventually she stopped, and she heard the terrible hiss of her air escaping. Her suit was holed – she had to find the leak. She raised her arms, scanned her body, but there was no tear that she could see. The hiss was very loud; it was in her ears. Her helmet – it was coming from her helmet!
She felt a tide of panic rise to engulf her; if her helmet was cracked or holed, she had no hope. She clutched at the outside of the helmet, trying to stop the air escaping, but the noise didn’t stop. She tried to remember all the training – it was all she had to save herself.
Think. Seals. The most common sources of leaks are the helmet seals. The neck seal and the faceplate seal. The neck seal could have been damaged in the fall. She felt around it carefully, feeling for any buckling, or a change in the hissing. Nothing. Okay.
Faceplate. Try the faceplate. She pulled it down, forcing it hard against the seals, and the hissing stopped. The LEDs in her helmet, which had been blinking amber, changed to green. She was safe. A wave of relief washed over her, and the panic, which had threatened to overwhelm her, drained away, leaving her lying there in the dust, her eyes closed for a moment.
She remembered where she was, and that safety could be a very short-lived thing. She looked up. Close by, no more than a hundred metres away, the crew module of the Ulysses hovered over the dust-strewn base of the valley, its navigation lights illuminating it clearly in the darkness. It was moving very slowly; the autopilot was clearly programmed to approach the cliff at barely walking pace. Clare swore; if she had waited for a few moments more before jumping, it would have been easier.
The crew module was so low now that its thrusters were kicking up dust from the valley floor. Abruptly, the searchlights came on, illuminating a sheer wall of grey rock. It towered into the sky behind the Ulysses, and Clare realised how huge it was; it must have been two hundred metres high at least, a perfect vertical face. It was as if the surface of Psyche had been pulled apart violently, exposing a great gash in the landscape. Stars stared in from above the valle
y walls and she saw the now-familiar constellations overhead.
As she watched, a strange feeling crept over her. Prompted by some unknown impulse, she stood up in the dust, and started walking towards the cliff. In the low gravity, she hardly had to make any effort to walk; she could just push off and glide over the ground for many metres before coming down again. She took it carefully, coming closer and closer to the Ulysses, where it hovered in front of the cliff, as if waiting.
Inside her helmet, an amber LED lit up and started blinking. She stared at it incuriously. She realised, as if watching herself from a distance, that she must have lost more air than she thought, and she was on reserve. She knew she should be panicking, but a sense of great calm had descended on her. Something told her to stand and wait.
Behind the Ulysses, something was happening. The exhaust from its thrusters seemed to be disturbing the cliff face. Dust and splinters of rock rained down, bouncing off the valley floor in a great wave of debris to either side of the ship. The whole cliff wall seemed to be on the move. It was as if the cliff face was dissolving in front of her, changing shape as it did so.
Gradually, something began to emerge from the rain of dust. It started at the sides, where two huge pillars began to reveal themselves, set into the rock, fifty metres apart and nearly a hundred high. The rock between them resolved into two halves of a colossal doorway, just as in the drawings. The fall of rock began to slow as the full shape was revealed in the Ulysses’ searchlights. With a rush, she recognised the scene from the drawings. It really was there – there really was a gate!
And as she watched, the gigantic doors began to open.
Clare’s skin crawled as a crack was outlined down the centre line of the doors. More rock and dust burst out, and then the doors began to swing slowly outwards. She felt like ice water was trickling down her back at the sight. This could not be happening.
A bright sliver of light exploded suddenly in the darkness, and she held up her hand to shield her eyes. It widened to a strip, and then opened out as the doors swung aside. The Ulysses hovered in front, silhouetted against the scene, the crew module and antenna mounts making it look like the head and shoulders of a grotesquely-armoured knight.
