Crescent

by Phil Rossi

  Gerald raised his eyebrows and sighed. He felt around for his cigarettes, but knew he had left them sitting on the bar.

  “It’s been a long day,” he said. “How about you give me a smoke and I’ll promise not to tell you about it.”

  (•••)

  The comm terminal’s incessant chiming pulled Marisa out of a restless sleep. She sat up and rubbed her eyes; her legs were tangled in the sheets. She could see the comm unit from her bed. The glowing, glossy display screen was a manifestation of the dread that had kept her tossing and turning all night. Security HQ was calling her. Captain Benedict was no doubt feeling unsettled by the ugly night at Heathen’s. He was calling to blame her, and why wouldn’t he? After all, Marisa herself had cleared those mercenaries to enter the station.

  She rose, went to the terminal and activated the unit. The screen filled with a sea of static, and then went blank.

  “Hello?” she said.

  The screen winked back on. It showed a grainy security feed for a dark and empty corridor. A few light panels cast flickering patches on a dirty floor. Marisa leaned in close. She didn’t recognize the part of the station she was looking at. A woman walked through the camera’s field of view. She wore the blues of a security officer. The woman glanced up at the camera as she walked by. This prompted Marisa to lean even closer to the screen. Was it… ?

  No. It couldn’t be.

  The camera changed angles to show a large, black bulkhead. Yellow letters were stenciled across its surface. They read no entry, authorized personnel only. A large, red X was crudely painted over the span of the bulkhead.

  Good lord. It was the Vault. A Crescent myth, the Vault wasn’t supposed to actually exist. Even if someone could find it, the whole area where it was rumored to be was strictly off limits. Everybody knew that. The station level had been sealed off due to some catastrophic event in its early history—or so said the rumors.

  A delicate thing of a woman with thin arms, long legs, and blonde hair that fell past her shoulders knelt in front of the bulkhead. Her cheek was pressed to the black metal. The security officer stepped back into view and Marisa now saw what she hadn’t believed at first. The officer was her. There was no sound, but Marisa could tell by her onscreen mannerisms that her pixelated alter-ego was confronting the blonde woman. The woman reached out so quickly it was all but a blur. Slender fingers wrapped around the wrist of the onscreen version of Marisa. She was pulled forward into the black bulkhead. In her apartment, Marisa put her hand to her forehead, which had begun to ache. The screen started to fill with growing black patches, as if the LCD was burning out. Soon, the whole screen was black.

  It didn’t stop there. The darkness seeped out around the edges of the comm panel and drifted toward Marisa in long, thin tendrils. She stepped back to avoid them but she was too slow and they brushed against the bare skin of her arms.

  She had never felt so cold.

  (•••)

  Marisa’s eyes fluttered open. She stared at her ceiling. Her sweet, familiar ceiling. A dream, she thought. It was a strange one, at that, and probably a reaction to the stress of the previous night. It felt really early to her. She had woken up before her alarm had gone off. Two hours early, according to the ovoid PDA strapped to her wrist. A bottle of carthine sat open on her night stand. Apparently, the sedative had not done its trick.

  Judging by the flashing clock display, there had been another power failure—the second in as many weeks. The power was back on now, though, and that was a good thing. The last power outage lasted so long; the entire apartment block had to be emptied out. It got so cold, people’s crappers were freezing; the water in the bathrooms had turned to solid ice. For an hour, she lay in bed watching the clock above the comm flash a row of glowing green eights. She spent the next hour showering and mentally preparing herself for a day that was sure to be full of questions. She kept expecting the call from Captain Benedict, but it never came.

  Marisa pulled the uniform jacket over her tee shirt, pushed the wet hair out of her face and tied it back. She slid the slender stun rod into the curved holster that hung on her hip and looked at the wall clock. Eights. Crazy eights.

  She stepped out of her apartment. There was a splash when her boot came down.

  “What the fuck?”

  Black water covered the deck and rippled around her shins. Overhead, fluorescent panels flickered dim, and dapples of light trembled faintly on the walls and neighboring apartment doors.

  “This is ridiculous,” Marisa said through clenched teeth. The water was cold and her calves began to twist into painful knots. The door to her apartment slid shut with a gurgle. She entered her keycode. There was a crackle and nothing happened. “Of course. Makes sense,” she said to no one in particular.

  Most of the lights were out—more than three-quarters of the translucent ceiling panels were dark. Water dripped from around their edges in steady drip-drops. She could see her breath in the meager light that fell from the few lit squares. She was the only one in corridor, as far as she could see. The hall curved into darkness in front of her and behind her. She began to walk in the direction of the lifts. If she knew one thing, it was that she was freezing her ass off and none too happy about it.

  There was splashing up ahead, just around the bend of the corridor. The sound was almost frantic in its intensity. It sounded as if someone were playing, and having a gay old time, to boot. The station was filled with such freaks; she could hardly believe it sometimes. She went around the hallway’s curve and suddenly her foot was no longer in contact with the floor. There was an instant of freefall, and then Marisa was submerged in the cold water. She broke the surface with a coughing gasp. Panic whispered hello somewhere in the back of her mind. She looked around and felt an approaching scream for help tickle her throat. Was there a hole in the deck?

  She looked up and saw the rectangle of fluttering light above her. From the looks of it, Marisa surmised she had fallen at least three meters. Maybe more. Water trickled down the face of the close, dark walls in a slow moving sheet. It looked like living glass. Drops of it rained from overhead.

  Again came the sound of playful

  Violent.

  splashing. It wasn’t far off. She removed the small flashlight from her belt and turned it on. A white shaft of light cut through the narrow chamber. Mist lifted off the rippling surface of the dark water in ghostly filaments. She lifted her face upward, and pointed the flashlight beam overhead, where she could make out rusted chains hanging from the shadow-veiled ceiling. Water rained down on her again. Marisa closed her eyes as it hit her face in big drops. She had seen enough to know where she was—one of the condensation cisterns that were part of Crescent’s life support system. How the hell had she ended up in there? The cisterns were a long way from home. The answer didn’t matter too much at the moment. What mattered was to keep moving and find the exit before hypothermia put her to sleep for good. She was shivering so violently it was difficult to walk straight.

  As she had suspected, Marisa wasn’t alone in the cistern. A man, hairless and shirtless, was waist deep some five meters ahead of her. His back was to Marisa and he was dashing around in the black water. His arms flailed in and out of the dark liquid. The water trailed above his bald scalp in arcs that caught the light of Marisa’s flashlight. The droplets glittered like diamonds before spattering back into the murk.

  “Hey!” she shouted. He didn’t answer her. As she got closer, she could see he had tiny, silver studs poking out of his skin. He was a vatter.

  “Hey!” she shouted again. The man went still with such suddenness that Marisa took a step backward. He turned and looked at her with sable eyes. They were darker than the water. Marisa took another stuttering step backward and the vatter began running at her. The water was still up to his waist, but he managed to cut through the liquid with a horrible speed that left her paralyzed. He closed much of the space between them by the time Marisa convinced her body to move. She turned a
nd began to trudge away from him. Well ahead of her, the rectangle of light stayed no bigger than a shoe box. Marisa knew the water was slowing her down way too much. There was no way she could escape. Terror poked holes in her brain stem. Breath puffed out before her in quick white clouds. Panic spoke up full now, and it said, Scream for your life, bitch!

  Marisa screamed. The rectangle of light began to fill with black—slow black, like tar. The light from above was choked out. It reminded her of the dream.

  Around her, the shadows began to slink off the walls. Penumbral tentacles reached out to wrap around her.

  An icy hand grabbed her by the back of the neck and plunged her beneath the water’s black, undulating surface.

  (•••)

  “Is she going to be okay?” a distant and familiar voice asked. Her eyelids were so goddamned heavy. They felt gummed together.

  “I think so. She was mildly hypothermic when the maintenance crew stumbled across her. I managed to get her core temperature back up with little problem. And her circulation is fine.” She didn’t recognize that voice.

  “Doc, how long was she down there?” She liked that voice, but she felt bad because he sounded so concerned.

  “I’d say at least several hours.”

  “Good Christ. Did she say anything to you? Like why the hell she was in the cistern?”

  Were they talking about her? Marisa couldn’t figure it out. Understanding teetered on the edge of her struggling mind, but she could only brush her fingertips against it. She didn’t remember anything about being in any cistern. Not really, anyhow. For some reason, she did remember water. Regardless, she thought the people in the room were talking about crazy things and she wished they would stop. She opened her eyes and the light hurt. She saw Gerald. He was facing away from her. She tried to reach for him, but was too weak to lift her arm. He was talking with a man in a white coat. A doctor.

  “She mumbled something about a vatter—about having to find something for him,” the doctor said. Marisa’s skin prickled at the word and she felt herself jerked closer to full consciousness. The cistern. The vatter. The Black. Yes. The Black.

  She blinked and behind closed lids, she saw Heathen’s. She saw the chaos from the night before, but it moved in still frame. Cords of shadow slinked through the shuddering crowd.

  The Black had been at Heathen’s.

  She knew the Black from somewhere else, too. Where? Somewhere deep.

  Her whole being felt suddenly heavy again. She let the thoughts slip from her like sand through extended fingers.

  “That was pretty much it,” the voice of the doctor said. “That, and that she was cold—obviously. The tox screen showed carthine in her system. Does she use it regularly?”

  “Only when she can’t sleep. We had an interesting night last night. I’m not surprised she took some.”

  “At high levels, carthine can and generally does cause powerful hallucinations.”

  “How much did she take?” Gerald asked.

  “It’s difficult to say. The body metabolizes it pretty quickly. Her blood alcohol level was also high.”

  Marisa had heard enough. She was tired. Too tired to deal with any of it. She closed her eyes and waited for sleep.

  She did not have to wait long.

  (Part IV)

  “ETA fifteen minutes, Captain. Time to wake up.”

  “Thanks, Bean. I’m not sleeping.”

  “No?” said the ship’s computer. “You have been awfully quiet since we left Crescent.”

  “I feel bad for leaving Marisa alone at that hospital, Bean. That’s all. I’m not a self-absorbed prick all the time, you know.”

  “Captain, I had not previously detected this level of sensitivity in you. Perhaps instead of taking off, I should have run you a hot bath?”

  The star Tireca took up most of the front viewport. Blue-green solar prominences flared off the sun’s surface as gossamer threads of glowing plasma. The nanites embedded in the four-centimeter-thick smart-glass automatically polarized so as not to blind Bean’s occupant. Gerald shielded his eyes. Even with the polarization, the view was almost too bright.

  “What do you make of a colony ship being this far off course?”

  “A faulty guidance system would be my first guess,” Bean replied.

  “Right. Because it’s impossible to know when you’re headed into a sun.” Gerald scratched one stubbly cheek. “Bean, we’ve done strange salvage runs before. Some really weird shit. But something about these last two has rubbed me a little funny. Call it a gut instinct.” Gerald yawned. He remained trapped in a maze of cotton-skulled exhaustion. It had been one thing after the other since he landed two days ago. Two days? Gerald thought. Is that really all? Feels like two weeks.

  “I won’t ask why, Captain. I confess. I do not understand the human gut instinct. Will you cancel your contract with Kendall?”

  “I don’t think that’d be a good idea. Another gut instinct. Kendall’s not the type to let contractors terminate their own work orders.”

  The ship began to slow.

  “Bean?”

  “We are approaching the limit of my hull’s heat tolerance.”

  Gerald looked over at the radar overlay and then out at the mottled blue brilliance that filled the viewport.

  “The colony ship is,” Gerald checked a display, “twenty-five hundred meters off. The retrieval line won’t reach that far.”

  “I can fire the drones to haul it within tug range.”

  “And what’s the chance that the drones will survive the heat?”

  “Better than your own chance at survival if you return to Crescent without that ship.”

  Gerald laughed.

  “Bean, your capacity for humor in the face of adversity amazes me.”

  “I wasn’t joking, Captain.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Go ahead, launch the drones. That’s why I have’m,” he said, and then added, “They’re on their last leg anyway.” Still, Gerald felt little comfort.

  Gerald called up four holographic overlays, each representing cameras mounted on each of Bean’s drones. Each individual overlay was quartered, showing infrared, x-ray, microwave, and visible spectrum views. The colony ship appeared as a dark hulk against the hot, blue backdrop of massive Tireca. Gerald switched the visible spectrum camera to manual operation and began cycling through the polarization filters until the view became crisp. There it was. A floating, bloated mass of slag in a degrading orbit. The metal was glowing, almost white from the heat. It looked more like a terminal asteroid than a ship.

  “Bean. Did you pick up any lifeboat beacons?”

  “Negative, Captain. No indication that lifeboats had been launched.”

  Gerald sighed and cursed under his breath.

  “These ships carry easily two hundred passengers and you’re telling me not one got off? How the hell could this have happened? What were they doing going toward the sun?”

  “A bad sub-light drive?” Bean offered.

  “It sucks. That’s what. Hook up the tethers the best you can when the drones haul that thing in. If they manage to haul it in.”

  Several minutes went by before Bean spoke up again.

  “The drones have successfully latched onto the salvage. They are on their way back. Five hundred meters and closing.”

  “Whatever. Just tether the colony ship and take us back to Crescent.” Gerald’s mood was only worsening. The longer they were out there, the more he felt like hitting someone.

  Twelve hauling tethers uncoiled from Bean’s belly with serpentine grace. Gleaming, the lines twisted out to meet the oncoming drones and their burden. The arachnid-like robots doused the surface of the derelict with coolant. The ship’s skin was glossy and distorted, an unbroken sheet of rippling glass.

  The hauling tethers had nothing to latch onto. They slid repeatedly off the hulk.

  “Bean?”

  “Captain. Do I have to remind you that I am not a mining vessel? My tethers are designed
for ship and cargo container hauling. This colony ship is a small asteroid.”

  “Switch to manual and I’ll give it a shot.”

  “What makes you think you have a better chance of securing the colony ship than a computer?” Bean asked.

  “Watch and learn, Bean.”

  Panels in the top of both control couch arms slid open. Six small joysticks protruded from each panel; one by one, a green light winked on at the tips of the controls.

  “Manual control engaged, Captain.” An overlay shimmered into view directly in front of him; it showed the slagheap, the tethers, and Bean.

  “Rotate camera Alt 50 degrees, Azimuth 90. The friggin’ thing looks like a potato.”

  Gerald began to manipulate six of the twelve joysticks using his fingertips, sending the tethers toward the dead colony ship. Three of the shining lengths of segmented metal cable slid beneath the target while the other three slithered across the top. The tethers met at the aft of the target and tied themselves together. The remaining tethers snaked out and Gerald manipulated them in the same fashion as the first six, only perpendicular to the first set, effectively netting in the bloated, misshapen colony ship.

  “Viola. Simple as that, Bean-bag.”

  “I hate when you call me that,” Bean said. The synthesized voice sounded wounded.

  “Like you have feelings.”

  “My complexity would surprise even you, Captain Sensitivity.” Bean paused. “The hauling configuration is not stable. I fear the tethers will not hold the colony ship indefinitely.”

  “Who said anything about indefinitely? We just have to get it back to Crescent.”

  (•••)

  Bean shook violently when the sub-light engines disengaged.

  “What the hell was that?” Gerald gripped the arms of the control couch.

  “That was the colony ship decelerating at a different rate from us, and there is another problem.”

  “And that is?”