Cargo (The Ascendants Book 1)

by V. M. Law

  “He’s trying to say something.”

  “The—”

  They waited for more words but none came. The light went out in his eyes and he began to tremble. “This is it,” Ajax said, calmly, with his hand resting on Kasey’s shoulder for emotional support.

  “The weapon. Char—”

  “You did it, Lew. I don’t know how you made it this far, but you did and we’re here. We’re going to get you out.” Kasey indicated silently to Ajax that the time for moving Mantiss had arrived. Kasey hooked her hand under his armpits and went to hoist him, and he clasped his hands with one final exertion of strength and bore into Kasey’s eyes with his own. His eyelids shook and twitched and stood wide open, baggy and dark.

  “They’re coming.”

  Kasey looked around her as if expecting to see the Ides standing over her shoulder, and her stomach rolled around in her torso as the nerves of time running out became unbearable.

  “We have to get him into the elevator,” she screamed.

  Ajax had tied the Charybdis around his own belt loops and now he grabbed the boy by his ankles and prepared for the weight. It was hard moving, and after a minute of grunting and huffing, they had moved him twenty feet, maybe less.

  “It’s not working, Kasey,” Ajax said panting. “I’m too old, he’s too heavy.”

  “Damn you, we have to try.”

  “Kasey!”

  When she looked at his face, he stared down the hall at the security door, at the dents forming.

  “We need to run.”

  Kasey screamed in objection and fury for Ajax to grab Mantiss’ ankles. She continued to carry on until her friend’s voice, dying and weak, reached up to her ears and bade her stop, let him drift, because he floated an inch from the floor and he felt like a sunset after the sun had dipped below the waves, and it felt good.

  “Go,” he said, and Kasey, seeing the smile that spread on his lips as his eyes dimmed and the life faded from them, had no other choice. She fled, running down the hall until she caught up with Ajax, who could not even look at her.

  On the security door, the dents forming began to give, faltering under the strength of the aliens entreating entrance.

  Chapter 32

  When the Ides came barreling down the hall, across the ceiling, and over the walls at Ajax and Kasey, threatening to overtake them in a wave of razors and claws and foreign weaponry that seemed archaic compared to the weapons they carried, the two immediately turned around and ran for the space elevator door. It closed far too slowly for Kasey and obliged her to open fire into its diminishing crack, dodging the knife-sharp claws of the aliens that struck out furiously, mindlessly at their quarry.

  In that moment, Kasey realized that the Ides did not possess the desire for anything else except blood, as if they fed on it, thrived on it, bathed in it. Ajax fired his gun into an overheated, sizzling wreck and the two began their long descent to the base of the space station, on the surface of the planet, where the pressure and temperature would not allow any naturally occurring metal to support the weight of the structure that towered above. The only material capable of withstanding the local environment, Ajax told her, was an artificial alloy engineered for this base specifically, and used only in the construction of the Catacombs’ walls, vaulted ceilings, and spire-like support columns. Kasey made no reply.

  The severed limbs of the Ides sat in piles around them, the last one to be removed still twitching and seizing and convulsing with enough life to draw blood from those who would set their feet in its swinging arc.

  “I’m sorry about the boy, Kasey.”

  Despair written across her face, she watched the movement of the twitching limb cease and felt surprised at herself, at the distance of her emotions and memories, of everything that her and Mantiss had shared. The feeling that permeated her being was most akin to emptiness, though there was guilt and remorse and a thousand other feelings dammed up behind the stoic, unmoved eyes that would not let the corner of the elevator go.

  “Sorry about Gustav.”

  After another tortured silence, Kasey turned to Ajax and reminded him that both of their friends received deaths better than anyone on Earth, and felt the falsity of her statement even before the words left her lips. The elevator made a faint whirring sound as it plunged through the nearly tangible layers of the Neptunian atmosphere. Kasey’s mind remained stuck on the dash to the elevator, the gruesome gullet of the aliens expanding with their bloodlust and their malignant laughter. The sound of a broken fan that accompanied their stunted flight, their inhuman leaps through the air that they landed with the precision of a diver. She leaned back against the elevator and slid down until her buttocks rested on the floor, chin propped on knees.

  “The Age is still up there,” Ajax said, forlorn.

  “Is that really what you think about when you contemplate the death of the human race?”

  “If the Ides are hovering outside the base then the Morrow is doomed; it’ll be shot down before it leaves the hangar door.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m going back.”

  “What? You can’t. I can’t. How am I going to start the Morrow without you? How am I supposed to get out of here?”

  “It needs to happen.” He spoke as if Kasey were a thousand miles away. “I need to chase them off.”

  “You’re going to kill yourself, Jax.”

  “I’ve had a good run of life. A long one, at least, if it wasn’t all good. I can bear it. Death. You should get ready for it, too. I hate to make you feel young at the moment of your death, but I think I’ve been in enough gunfights to know that there isn’t going to be any survivors from this one.”

  Kasey nodded in affirmation, though she had been running through all the possible ways for the two of them to live. They had to. The fate of the human race could depend on it, she thought, and on the heels of that thought, this: If anyone remains.

  She had been deliberately screening Corbin from her mind, but now, as the fuse burned quick, she couldn’t help but remember what he had said to her when she embarked for her training program on Mars. “The stars go on forever, Kasey. You can never see them all. Just remember that when Lew gets you thinking about adventure.” And Llewellyn laughed, mock-punching Corbin in the ribs and saying something about old timers and the new age that came out sounding like an echo, even though he meant it as a joke. Kasey nodded in affirmation then, too.

  Now she listened intently to Ajax more out of a sense of awe in hearing the final speech of the celebrity pilot who had made so many speeches in his younger years.

  “After I take the Age, if they bite, board the Morrow and get out in the escape pods as soon as you can. If Brysen did what he was supposed to do, the ship should take the plunge at speeds too fast for ejection, and it should constantly speed up until it reaches the Kuiper Belt. By then, you’ll not stand a chance.

  “If they don’t bite, and I take the suicide plunge into the ship, you might as well stay here and die fighting. It’ll be faster.”

  When she objected, protesting that they could both survive, they could both make it back to Earth, he cut her off told her he would die how he wanted to, and she was welcome to do the same. If that meant starving in an escape pod, then that was her prerogative.

  “So it’s settled,” she asked, though the words came out with a ring of finality that undermined their interrogative meaning.

  ***

  They reached the bottom of the elevator and Kasey stepped out into the Catacombs. Ajax remained on the platform, with the Charybdis in his outstretched hand. Every time the doors closed, one of them had to reach out a hand and prevent them from cutting short the final conversation. She fought against the tears, remembered briefly how badly she wanted to shoot this man that she cried over, and could not contain her emotions.

  She took the orb that he offered and held it in her hands, surprised by the simplicity of its engineering and the weight that it possessed. It’s a black
hole, she thought, echoing the statement of her great grandfather. The doors closed on Ajax and he smiled at her as they did. She turned from the doors after they had fully closed and the sound of the elevator running upward told her that he was not playing any jokes, that he would be sacrificing his life even if he did not need to.

  Thinking about the crushing weight of living alone beyond the natural years of a human life, of keeping that secret from everyone through numerous public appearances and volleys of applause, to be always smiling, made her understand the smile that spread across his face as the doors shut forever on him. He felt glad to be rid of his corporeal husk, glad to fly at the speed of light into the nose of the Ides warship, if it would put an end to the constant running around, the constant hiding that made up the life of an interplanetary pirate and vagabond.

  Above her were ceilings that were almost indiscernible, they hovered so high in the dark. The walls were equally as far away, and the effect produced by the size of the chamber Kasey found herself in was one of fear and the buzzing of an over active imagination. She wondered what beasts might populate the darker shadows of the area, the peripheries of her vision, where the light did not reach.

  She stepped forward into the darkness, knowing where to go only by the directions that Ajax gave to her before they reached the bottom of the elevator.

  When you get to the control tower, you will know what to do.

  That is what he said to her before they changed the subject, talking instead about their feelings at the imminent hour of their deaths. Ajax had been resigned to this for a decade or more, he said.

  Kasey responded that she wasn’t dying yet.

  She ran through the vast expanse of the Catacombs wondering who built it, what they thought about the massive cavern and its uses, whether or not anyone thought about the eventuality of it being used as a bomb shelter during an alien invasion.

  The antechamber, Ajax had said, was the largest room and on the other side of it, in a straight line through the dark were three doors. The hangar was through the leftmost door. When she reached it, it did not move in its sliding track and she had to jimmy it open.

  Upon reaching the end of that hallway, she found among the myriad doorways and opening that led to various laboratories or hangars or testing facilities, one bent, rusted door that stood slightly ajar, leaving a space of maybe a foot and half between the bottom of the door and the floor.

  So far, Ajax proved to have a shockingly good memory for someone who had lived to superhuman years with the aid of a drug that induced memory loss and delusions.

  She stared at the gap, trembling and sweating. She wondered what she might find on the other side, what the Morrow looked like and whether or not she would be able to follow Ajax’s instructions when she summited the spiral staircase that led to the control tower. There she would find the nexus point of the hangar, its brain, once set up to run entirely on its own with no supervision but now corroded and malfunctioning.

  She imagined a tombstone when Ajax described it to her, like the ones she saw as a child when she explored a surface cemetery. A structure devoid of architecture and put together solely with the art of engineering, a technical structure for one job. A box made out of slabs of alien metal with one gigantic window facing the gaping maw of space, like a placeholder where the deceased’s surname would be written with a chisel.

  She dropped to her knees, not thinking about her pistol or her safety in the crushing loneliness of the hangar system.

  Chapter 33

  The Ides were easily distracted and it took only the sound of their cohorts yipping in the distance for them to be dragged away from the allure of the elevator and the smell of human meat that lingered about its buttons and control panels. Ajax stepped out of the doors gingerly, with his rifle shouldered and his grenade belt fully activated. He tried to remain quiet, walking with care not to crunch the fibrous exoskeletons of the Ides beneath his boot soles, but the slaughter left behind at the elevator’s entrance proved unavoidable. It still smoldered from the heat of Kasey’s gun, and the sound of legs being snapped made Ajax cringe.

  He moved down the hall, entering a doorway for cover, crouching as he ran to the next one, and in that painstaking fashion, making his way through the maze of the base. He avoided the hallway where Llewellyn died, wanting to spare himself and the boy the indignation of being eaten with a witness. Not wanting to think about the image of him in the same position. After slouching and crouching, running and hiding from the Ides, he reached his own hangar, where the Age of Discovery sat unguarded, uncared for, its gangway open for intruders. And probably stuffed with Ides, he thought. He made it this far without difficulty, and did not expect his luck to hold out.

  Kasey’s luck needs to hold, too. In his mind, he prayed for the safety of the girl he was commanded to draft onto his crew, whom he first laid eyes on when she snooped around his secret conversation. He did not let her know he saw her then, and never did. Maybe if she made it to the control tower in the Catacombs he could tell her that she sucked at sneaking around. He thought she would laugh at that.

  Proceeding up the gangway, he jumped at every noise, every hiss of a broken pump that sounded in the hangar. Obviously, the Ides had already been here, and their raucous fighting and swarming nature left its mark on the area. Everywhere, slashes ripped into walls and broken glass littered the ground. The hangar was trashed, though not so bad as the hallway, and the inside of the Age seemed even better than that. Maybe they did not find the entrance.

  Inside now, he sprinted, not worrying about the next corner or what might be on the other side of the doors that he kicked through. The galley flashed past, and then up a claustrophobic stairwell that turned onto a deck of residence halls for the cooks, which gave way to more residences halls—for mechanic, these ones—which in turn became the workshops of the thousand technicians who repaired all that broke on the ship.

  Knowing the maze of the Age from memory, he picked the perfect turn every time to lead him straight to the bridge in the quickest possible manner, encountering no violence or signs of the Ides until he reached the choke point, the officers’ common room, directly below the bridge’s foyer, where Marlo Cunningham had taken Kasey to be fired.

  He climbed the stairs, walking silently on the carpeting and elongating his neck to see if anyone lied in ambush, waiting for him to show his head in the stairwell leading up to the bridge. One step at a time, delicately, with his finger running the length of the trigger of his gun, he proceeded until he entered the bridge fully and heaved a sigh of relief.

  In the bridge, amidst the carnage of their battle together—overturned computer banks still remained in the labyrinthine layout that he had organized when the Leviathan boarded—he walked slowly, thinking about the time he spent on board, the places he had taken the ship, with or without MarsForm’s official knowledge. He thought, but he wasted no time in crossing the mess of tables and desks, the infrastructure of a successfully ran bridge equipped for a crew of one hundred and twenty five navigators and section chiefs. Some of the names of people who had occupied the desks came to him, some faces, but mostly he had learned to keep people at a distance, in the years since he began captaining the Age. He learned to remember people just enough to know who was useful or not, loyal or untrustworthy.

  He learned to hide his own thoughts and past, and he taught Gustav how to do the same.

  Gustav.

  The face came clearly, more clearly than any of the anonymous denizens of awards dinners and banquets in his honor, those who shook his hands and spilt gossip around the wine bowl. He remembered Gustav. Much had been slipping from his memory in the past few years, but he remembered everything that had transpired between him and the German.

  As he came to the doors to his personal cabin, he paused for a second to place his hand on the door to Gustav’s room, knowing that he would never set foot again in any of the places he had crossed to get there. The suite on Europa, his bedroom on Earth, the
mansion to which he moved after winning his first interplanetary long haul race. All the locations and that made his life memorable came to him as he opened the final door, his cabin door, where he would run his final race, his last flight, and if he performed well it would matter nothing to him because in the end, he would be obliterated among the stardust of a decrepit station, on a deserted planet, in what might be a deserted solar system.

  He reflected on the chicken he ate when Kasey first stood before him, shaking with fear. He remembered being a boy and watching the take offs, the grove from which it all seemed so clear, the promontory from which he could see the dancing frame of the Milky Way.

  He thought about the army, the tent he slept in, the texture of its flaps when he pushed through them every morning and night, the mess hall where he choked and passed out one night, drunk, the infirmary where he spent most of his time, laden with the stench of antiseptic and disinfectant and reminding him then of the ward that his little brother was born in, the boy who would die in a car accident and end his life in a similar smelling room far from the one in which he was born.

  He activated the proper fuel rods and turned on the necessary computer terminals—the navigation, the radar, the things he would need to draw fire from the Ides. His fingers ran over the knobs and levers and buttons without his thinking about it. The engines fired. The thrumming sound of their energy emission could be felt as a barely perceptible vibration that came to him through the soles of his boots. His gun sat unused, forgotten in the corner.

  Sitting in the plush chair from which he commanded his army of employees, he gave into his preordained death because he had time to sit and think, for the first time in his recent memory. He had the time to reflect, waiting for Kasey to signify the success of her own mission, and the beginning of his.