Cargo (The Ascendants Book 1)

by V. M. Law

  ***

  In the atrium, where Brysen had his garden and his insects, the alarm blared significantly louder, but did not muddle the concentration of the man who spent so much time in silence. He did not stay in the garden, beneath the shade of the tree where he wished to die. Instead, he sat in his living quarters, formerly a kitchen big enough to feed hundreds of people, now only partially powered and dismal in its stillness.

  Kasey found her great grandfather here, and the way he spoke with his back to her and his head cocked back as if he still stared at his maple tree made her think he had intuited her arrival, or that he knew everything in advance, or that everything that happened in the universe was preordained and he became initiated to its secrets in a deep, inaccessible drug binge.

  “I had a strong feeling that the syrup was too good for you.”

  She could tell he smiled at his own quip even without seeing the stained yellow teeth and the hearty complexion of his face that had seen too many hours of artificial sunlight. “I couldn’t, Brysen. I couldn’t leave you.”

  “So you chose to die with family instead of strangers. A Lee to the end, I see.”

  “I am not choosing to die. I’m choosing to fight with you. I’m choosing to live with you.”

  Before responding, he turned to face Kasey, and she saw in his eyes the extent of his delirium, and knew that this man would never bow to the impositions of another. He had spent too long in the solitude of a vast and mostly empty solar system to die at the call of others, and his ideal manifested itself in the way he set his jaw, the intonation of his voice. He said, “Though you don’t know it, you are destined for one more role in this game we play.”

  She cut him off. “Brysen, enough. Let’s go.” As she spoke, she wrapped her hand around his emaciated wrist and gave his limp arm a tug. He never broke eye contact with her.

  “You were brought here by my son, I imagine. He told me about your parents, and I figured after my abandonment, he would want to keep you close.”

  She continued to pull at his wrist, his shirt sleeve, anything that would get him to stop his banter and proceed to the Catacombs. He continued to tell her about Corbin as he knew him, when he was six years old and his father left the planet and never came back. “I talked to him periodically, for a few decades, and by the time he settled on the land, he gave up going to the communication center to see me.”

  Through her determination to get him moving, Kasey saw the portrait of Corbin—stoic and proud—bedraggled and torn between a dying land and a dead father who wouldn’t stop talking to him. “We need to leave,” she said, but she said it without conviction, something Brysen understood. A computerized voice—inanimate, preprogrammed to lack the vitality of Patsy—informed them that a vessel had penetrated the defense shields and that they should all be on their way to their designated command posts for further instruction in the defense of the base.

  She pleaded with her great grandfather, increasing the vigor of her pulls on his arms and the frantic wavering of her voice, but before she could convince him to follow her, the quake of projectiles on the outer surfaces of the space station shook their walls, sending unused sauce pots, frying pans, knife wracks, and cutting boards dashing against the floor. Warm freezers rolled from their dusty resting places, forcing Kasey to side step if she did not want to end up flattened against the door of the stove behind her. She braced herself for further impact, but only the faintest tremors reached her feet.

  “Brysen, I don’t want to die here, or anywhere else, at least not for a long while, and I don’t know what I am doing here, on Neptune, in freaking space. I am only sure that I followed the same instinct you followed when you decided to leave your wife and six year old son to make some fool’s difference in things you didn’t understand.”

  The words fell from her mouth in a torrent, unlocked by the relief she felt upon letting them loose. “I ended up in front of you because I wanted to retire early, with the bounty of an interplanetary terrorist and drug smuggler to pay my way. And I ended up on your doorstep, eating whatever the hell a waffle is made of.

  “If you believe that I have a role to play in whatever might happen, you have to see that you, and Ajax and Gustav, and even Llewellyn, have roles too. As long as one of us is still breathing, there is a hope—however faint, however far away, distant, unattainable; it is still a hope—that the Charybdis can be used to shut down the Jump, stop whoever is on the other side, kill the Ides. Whatever it is you designed it to do. Whatever secret you’ve been keeping, because Ajax and Gustav don’t know, and I surely don’t. Unless you tell me.”

  A gigantic shockwave ripped through the kitchen—Brysen’s apartment—sending the two of them to the floor, their arms wrapped over their heads while more spoons and ladles and skewers crashed down around them. When Kasey looked up, Brysen’s gaze was fixed intently on her, unsettling her, as if he stared at an unseen foe that lurked behind in the dark.

  “It’s a black hole,” he said. “Charybdis.”

  She tried to conceal her stupefaction, her inability to comprehend, but he seemed to realize that it did not matter anyway, and told her that he would likely not be seeing her, but that she must go and tell the rest that it is a black hole. He promised her they would understand, even if she didn’t. As he spoke these final words, she sensed the dishevelment of his neglected years alone in the extremities of the solar system had been lifted from him, that he had snapped out of a fugue, been revitalized and was once more the competent abandoner that Corbin had told her all about.

  “Tell them that the autopiloting computer in the Morrow is set and they need hold off the Ides long enough to prime the engine. It should do the rest itself.”

  She extended in her hand the pistol that had been hidden beneath her tunic, and he refused. He went off, leaving her in the kitchen to follow his frame with her eyes as he ascended a stairwell. He ducked his head beneath the awning he had just exited, and addressed Kasey as she turned her back on him. “Remember, bean paste and cornstarch, then add a little water and stir until it’s thick. Waffles.”

  Chapter 27

  Llewellyn followed Gustav at an arm’s length, nearly tripping the German numerous times as they crashed down corridors and stairwells, retracing their path to the Age of Discovery, and keeping their thoughts private as they careened to their destination. Llewellyn made attempts at interrogation, more to allay his sense of confusion than to lighten Gustav’s mien or entice him into anger. He felt sheer terror, stripped of any lingering sense of hope or the possibility that the feeling was unfounded, and as he thought back to the conversation that had sent the two of them in the other direction as Ajax, he was faced with more questions that he pressed on Gustav to no avail.

  That had been shortly before the explosion that sent Kasey and Brysen Lee tumbling to the ground amid a cacophony of culinary supplies. They stood at the door to the space elevator, at the bottom of which lay the Catacombs. They were arguing over the proper course of action, what to do about Kasey and Brysen, and how much time it would take the Ides to breach the base’s security systems when the shockwave ripped through the air around them, shaking the walls as they braced themselves on anything that was within arm’s reach.

  They looked at each other, grim, and activated their rifles. They made their decisions. Llewellyn and Gustav took off as Ajax continued trying to open the door to the space elevator.

  That seemed so long ago, as if he ran through an endless dream, and every time he turned a corner, he felt the sinking feeling that accompanied anyone who faced high stakes and insurmountable odds. Each corner, he thought, would be the last. They would bank around it and waiting for them would be the Ides, who would not even need fire power, who would relish the smell of their blood as they sliced and gouged and dismembered as they did on Europa.

  Or they would be at the Age of Discovery, which Llewellyn was now convinced Gustav could not locate. When he said as much, he received an angry bark in response and was told
to keep his tongue behind his lips.

  After an immeasurable period of running, of crouching behind cover and peeking, of fear, Llewellyn and Gustav stood before the Age in its hangar and for the first time since he left the terrestrial atmosphere, the ship seemed small, inadequate. Its hull was tarnished, burnt black in some spots and dented in others.

  On board, darkness made the ship appear the facsimile of a nightmarish maze, a smaller version of the powered down base that he had just ran through. As he moved with the German through the halls of the Age, he had the unsettling feeling that the entire universe could be contained within the confines of a bag of marbles.

  He shook the thought, not wanting to distract himself and not knowing where such an idea might have come from. He thought about Kasey instead, wondering if the Ides found her and Brysen, the old kook, yet. He thought about the old man, and how unhealthy he looked, how his posture sagged when he walked or sat or stood up and how his breathing always was audible, even if only faintly. He felt enmity for him, for stealing Kasey and ensuring her a lonely death. He felt animosity for the German and for Ajax. Most of all, he felt anger at himself, for not freeing himself from Gustav’s grasp, for not being stronger, for not dying with Kasey as he should have.

  He thought back to the moment when Gustav grabbed him and held him fast as Kasey’s footfalls faded, and he could not escape the notion that fear had gripped him to such a degree that he stopped fighting the strength of Gustav’s hands—which Llewellyn could have broken with his own without much fuss—and let Kasey leave because maybe, possibly, it would work out that they would survive in the Catacombs.

  He knew it was a fool’s security, surviving in the Catacombs. If MarsForm built this facility and have been working with the Ides, then they are probably already on the way to Ajax right now, having already ran through Kasey and her great grandfather.

  A hard slap on the backside of his head broke his train of thought and brought him back to the world of cold steel and titanium alloy and ten foot tall grasshoppers that could sever a human head with a twitch of the muscles.

  “Focus. We need to concentrate.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “We are getting Charybdis. It is in the holds.”

  They continued through the halls, safer in the Age than in the base, and Mantiss began to feel more comfortable, safer. He lowered his rifle and Gustav lowered his. They began to speak in voices louder than whispers and by the time they reached the deepest levels of the ship, where dangerous cargo was stored in specialized containers and where only those with high security clearances gained access, Gustav stopped before a storage container and took a deep breath, holding it in as if he were smoking, before exhaling with slumped shoulders. “We are here.”

  Mantiss looked at the container. Rusted red and twenty feet tall and completely innocuous next to the myriad stacks that abounded everywhere. As a mechanical technician, Mantiss had never been in this quarter of the ship and could not stay the swiveling of his neck as he swept his vision around, taking in the massive halls of the Age’s cargo holds.

  Gustav opened the swinging doors of the container and squeezed his frame through the contents, edging his way back until he reached an opening in the farthest corner. He bade Llewellyn follow, and when they both stood in the recess at the back of the storage container, Gustav reached down, slipped his fingers beneath a panel, and pulled it from its place, revealing a dark hole with a rope ladder hanging down.

  “We’re going down?”

  Gustav looked at him with consternation in his eyes as if to say that he could stay back if he were afraid of the spiders that lived down there, and Mantiss gulped.

  They descended the ladder, climbing down through a tube with barely enough room for Mantiss to squeeze his shoulders through. At the bottom, another clearing, though short, with barely enough room to stand. Both had to keep their necks craned. The stench that engulfed Llewellyn made him want to vomit and flee from the compartment. All around, refuse and detritus piled up, and beakers, flasks, crucibles lay smashed in disorganized heaps.

  “God,” Mantiss said, covering his nose and waving his other hand at the air around him. “What were you guys doing down here?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? Vitrol synthesis. It is messy work, and requires some choice ingredients that do not make the casual observer feel very good at all.”

  “No wonder that shit is illegal. God!”

  Gustav, crouching, moved to the darkest corner of the compartment and removed another false panel. Emanating from the smaller compartment within the larger, a strange, alien looking light filtered through a cloth bag that seemed to contain a heavy, circular object, about the size of a human fist, but requiring Gustav to brace his shoulder muscles to support the weight that hung from his hand.

  He extended the parcel to Llewellyn, who took it with trepidation, surprised by the weight that the bag contained.

  “Don’t drop it.”

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know, honestly. Just don’t drop it.”

  Mantiss tied the bag to his waistband and nodded to Gustav, who motioned for Llewellyn to leave the compartment. When they exited the storage container, Mantiss breathed deep, tasting the purity of the air and feeling its cool breath on his sweaty forehead.

  “We need to leave. The Ides will be destroying anything they see, but if Farrow, or any human element is involved, they will be coming straight for the Age.”

  Mantiss nodded again, but his mind was captivated by the weight that dangled from his waist and the ominous glow that leaked through its canvas covering. It seemed to get heavier the longer it hung there, and every step he took sent it waving back and forth until he became unable to push its presence from his mind.

  They hurried through the halls of the space station, careful to protect Charybdis and not make noise. The weight of the orb and the importance of its survival excited Mantiss’ nerves, made him jittery. “Why am I holding this thing?” he asked, his gaze set rigidly on the bag.

  “You are a terrible shot.”

  “Well, then let’s get the hell out of here before the shooting starts.”

  “That is what we are trying to do.”

  The darkened hallways were indistinguishable from one another and every time they turned a corner, Mantiss couldn’t decide if they had been there before, or if they were lost and running in circles until they would eventually come upon the fatal enemy. They quickened their pace, and their heart rates quickened with them. One turn after another, dizzying, untraceable, made Llewellyn wonder if Gustav knew where he was going, or if he guessed their way as surely as Llewellyn now guessed their fates. He felt their presence—the Ides—before he heard them. When the sounds reached him, they served only to steel him for the impending fight and reassure him that, regardless of the outcome of their mission, the four of them—five, including Brysen—would soon be given a much-deserved repose.

  The feeling calmed his nerves, allowed him to steady his twitching fingers and right his uneven breaths. He felt peace wash over him and as the Ides met them when they rounded the next corner, so close to Ajax and the space elevator, he barely noticed the screams that issued from his lungs. They sounded far away, like the clacking of the Ides as they bore down upon the two.

  Gustav, who saw the look of cold-hearted determination spread across Mantiss’ face as they rounded that corner, tried to pull him back, but the mechanic refused any logic and continued to place shots down range—fifty meters, forty meters, than thirty five—until the oncoming Ides tripped over the fallen, rolling over their pencil thin spines and bounding back to their feet.

  “What are you doing, Mantiss! We must run!” Gustav screamed as he ran up to break Llewellyn’s blood lust. When he clapped his hand down on the shoulder Mantiss propped his gun on and spun the man around to face him, he saw in the eyes of the annoying and childish mechanic, whom he had wanted to kill even after the importance of the girl became apparent, a look of age a
nd misery hiding behind a façade of rage. “Give it over or run with me,” he said, as Mantiss turned back to the Ides and continued firing.

  They were a short fifteen meters out when the laser’s heat wave singed the eye brows on his face, successfully awakening Mantiss to the dangers of foolish bravado. Amidst the shooting, he had forgotten the inexplicable weight of the Charybdis that hung from his waist, and remembered the weapon only after Gustav informed him to give it over. Rather than comply, he simply nodded and ran back in the direction they came from.

  They ran down the hall, firing shots over their shoulders as the Ides closed the distance with alarming rapidity. “In here!” Gustav screamed as he shot out the grate of a ventilation shaft that ran down the length of the hallway. Its cover fell with a clash and bounced on the ground. The German held his hands out as if to hoist the mechanic through the portal he had created. “You have to jump!” he screamed. “I’ll boost you!”

  “Got it.”

  “Hold onto that thing. It’s not stable.” He fired his pistol at the crowd of Ides bearing down on them from down the hall and dropped two more. They fell to the ground with hideous squeals of pain and a stench rising from their blood that would scar Mantiss’ nostrils for the rest of his life. It was the smell of death, of decay, venom and stagnation. It was the blood of a dead thing, brought to life through unholy necromancy and bearing no resemblance to the blood of any creature either of them had seen on Earth. He fired one more shot, and laced his fingers together to boost Mantiss into the relative safety of the ventilation shaft. The Ides returned fire, but many were unarmed, and the ones that were did not stop to aim, but instead were drawn by the smell of human sweat and pushed forward relentlessly.

  “Let’s go; we’re out of time,” Gustav screamed. Mantiss placed his foot on Gustav’s hands and pushed, reaching up to grab the lip of the opening created by the broken grate. He slipped, though his fingers came down stained with ancient dust.