by Joe Vasicek
“All right, she’s here. Stand by.”
The tension in Jeremiah’s body grew until he felt he would burst. He clenched and unclenched his fists, leaning forward to sit at the edge of his chair. At long last, a scratchy voice sounded over the loudspeaker. His heart skipped a beat—it was her.
“Noemi?” he said. “Noemi, it’s me. Are they treating you well? Mariya, please translate.”
Mariya nodded and leaned forward to speak into the microphone. A few seconds passed as their transmission was sent, then Noemi’s voice came again through the transceiver.
“She says that it’s been hard for everyone, but she’s still healthy. They—”
“Do you actually need a translator to speak with your wife?” Helena interrupted. She scoffed in amusement, making Jeremiah bristle. He decided to ignore her.
“Noemi, how is the baby? Are you taking care of your health?”
As the message transmitted, an idea came to his head. He turned to the sensor display and counted all the signatures his instruments were picking up. Beside the two approaching spacecraft, there was one large ship about the size of the Revenge at the station and about a dozen satellites, probably weaponized. Those were probably connected to the network, though, so—
Noemi’s voice came on again. Before Mariya could translate, he put his hand over the microphone and leaned over.
“Tell Noemi that there’s one other capital ship at the station, with at least twenty defensive satellites in orbit, perhaps more.”
Mariya nodded. He lifted his hand from the microphone.
“That’s great, honey,” he said. “I want you to take good care of yourself, okay? Everything’s going to be fine—we’ll be together again soon. I love you.”
Mariya spoke quickly, her face pale but her voice steady. He was glad the transmission was just audio—it would be impossible to pull this off if it were visual as well.
“That’s enough,” came Helena’s voice. “Are you satisfied? Will you stand down, or should I order my men to fire?”
“I’m satisfied,” said Jeremiah, his heart still racing. “Tell your men I’m powering down now.”
“Good. You’ve made the right choice, Jeremiah. Helena out.”
As the transmission finished, he sighed and leaned back in his chair. His arms felt limp, his legs like water.
“Is the radio off?” Mariya asked. Her voice was low, barely more than a whisper.
“Yeah, it’s off.” He reached up and began putting the systems on standby. The hum of the engines died to a low whine, and the cabin lights slowly dimmed.
“Noemi said that she’s going to move ahead with Captain Elijah’s plan. Once they dock at the station, she’ll hack into the network and seize control of their starships.”
“And what about her health? Is she strong enough to pull it off?”
Mariya hesitated. On the sensor display, the boarding craft raced toward them.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Noemi thinks that she can, but—it’s difficult to say.”
A thousand questions raced through Jeremiah’s mind. He opened his mouth to speak, but held himself back. There’s not much we can do about it now, he thought to himself. Nothing except wait.
That was always the hardest part.
* * * * *
The acrid smell of cigarette smoke hit Jeremiah’s nose almost the moment the airlock hissed open. He cringed and recoiled, but the black-clad soldiers were already inside his ship. Salazar was one of them.
“We meet again, star wanderer.”
He grinned, baring his yellow teeth. His men stepped forward, carrying two pairs of restraints.
“We don’t want any trouble,” said Jeremiah as they clasped the restraints on his wrists. “What do you want from us?”
Salazar took another puff from his cigarette and tapped the ash onto the floor of the Ariadne. Without answering the question, he motioned to his men. They escorted Jeremiah roughly to the airlock.
“Jer-Jeremiah!” Mariya screamed as the soldiers pulled him away. He glanced back just as the door hissed shut, cutting her off.
“What are you doing?” he yelled. “If your men do anything to—”
A sharp blow to the stomach knocked the wind out of him. He gasped for breath and collapsed to the floor as the soldiers struck him. One of them kicked him in the side of his head, making his ears ring. The beating went on for a few more moments, until Salazar motioned for his men to stop.
“Did you really think we wouldn’t separate you? You escaped from us once, but we won’t let that happen again.”
Something about the way he grinned made a chill shoot down Jeremiah’s spine. He rose painfully to his feet, but collapsed onto the floor, his sides aching with pain. The soldiers ignored him as they took their seats around the room, while Salazar gripped one of the handholds on the ceiling.
The flight to the station passed in a long, tense silence. Jeremiah nursed his bruises until the pain faded to a low throb. A buzz sounded in the ear that had been hit. It dulled a little, but refused to go away.
It’s okay, he tried to tell himself. Noemi’s alive. But even that was little comfort, when in just a few days, she might be gone.
After what felt like hours, the docking clamps groaned through the bulkheads and the floor jolted in a way that could only mean that they’d arrived. Salazar palmed open the airlock and the soldiers half-led, half-dragged him out. Someone cuffed him on the cheek, nearly knocking him over.
They passed a number of grimy looking men, all of them talking in a loud, harsh language that he couldn’t understand. It sounded nothing like the language that Noemi spoke—her words were like a soft, soothing rain to his ears, while these were like knives. A couple of men got into a fistfight, and Salazar shouted at them until they stopped.
After passing through an elevator, they came to a long, darkened corridor with corroded walls and windowless doors. Condensation dripped from blackened pipes, while wires dangled from a mold-infested ceiling. Jeremiah’s heart started to pound in his chest as he realized that the corridor came to a dead end.
“Where are you taking me?” he asked. One of the soldiers slapped him again, while Salazar grinned.
“You are not going to escape from us again, star wanderer. I will enjoy this very much.”
They came to a room with a decrepit old reclining chair in the middle, the synthetic leather blackened and worn. A large dark stain ran along one side, while a hole in the center made it look like a toilet. A device that looked like a dream monitor hung from a battered computer core, while IVs dangled from a large rack against the far wall.
“What is this place?” Jeremiah asked, his hands shaking. “What are you going to—”
“Silence,” said Salazar, grinding out his cigarette against the back of the chair. “This is your holding cell. The captain wants you alive—though I doubt she cares what condition you’re in when she arrives.”
At a nod, the soldiers took off Jeremiah’s restraints. He rubbed his wrists and considered making a break for the door, but Salazar pulled out a pistol and leveled it at his stomach. He swallowed and held his ground.
“If you know what’s good for you, you’ll do as I say,” said Salazar. “First, you’ll find some zero-gee toilet equipment on the floor. Pass it through the hole and put it on.”
“Put it on?”
“That’s right. I don’t want you dropping your shit all over this place.”
Jeremiah hesitated, then reached down and picked up a large toilet cup with a tube connecting it to a pump in the floor. It smelled disgusting, but he opened the lower portion of the jumpsuit and strapped it to his crotch and backside. The padding was sticky—he doubted it had been cleaned since the previous use.
“Good,” said Salazar. “Now, sit down in the chair and make yourself comfortable.”
“Wait—what are you going to do?”
“I said sit!”
Jeremiah jumped a little and complied. As he
settled down, the soldiers fitted a set of clamps around his arms and legs. He made as if to resist, but they forced him down until he was fastened in.
“What are you doing?” he shouted, struggling in vain against his bonds.
“Putting you into a brain vacuum,” said Salazar, pulling down the dream monitor. “A prison—for your mind.”
He shoved the neural jacks into the socket at the base of Jeremiah’s neck, making his skin crawl and his fingers tingle. He opened his mouth to scream, but before he could utter a sound, his world turned to darkness.
* * * * *
The brain vacuum wasn’t like any other simulator. Normally, the neural interface projected sensory details directly, bypassing the eyes, ears, and other senses without totally eliminating them. The brain vacuum cut them out entirely, so that Jeremiah perceived himself as a bodiless entity drifting through a starless void. Height and depth, distance and time—none of these translated into any meaningful sensation. The only awareness of his own existence came from the thoughts running like an electric current through his mind.
At first, there was confusion and terror. Where am I? What is this place? He’d heard of brain experiments done by the Imperials at the Coreward Stars—attempts to separate the human consciousness and merge it with an AI. All of the experiments had failed miserably, turning the subjects’ bodies into vegetables while causing system failures that ultimately destroyed the networks built to house their minds. Was this what he was experiencing—a computer crash as viewed from the inside? Or had some of the scientists succeeded, finding a way to exile him into a database forever?
Gradually, terror gave way to reason. Even if the Imperial scientists had found a way to upload a consciousness to a computer, these pirates were the last ones who would have that technology. And even if they did, it didn’t make sense for them to use it just to torture him—indeed, if this was supposed to be torture, it was remarkably painless. As frightening as the place was, it wasn’t hellish—more like a bizarre sort of limbo.
Salazar had forced him to put on the toilet equipment before plugging into the brain vacuum. That meant that his body was still out there. If Helena had ordered her men to keep him alive, that probably meant he was receiving at least some kind of sustenance. Perhaps she wanted to interrogate him when she arrived—if that was the case, he’d be plugged into the brain vacuum for a little over a week. But how much time had passed, or how much he still had to look forward to, he had no way of telling.
Numbness swept over him, an emptiness of thought and emotion punctuated only by his memories. Fleeting images drifted across his awareness: Noemi standing with her sisters, waiting to be chosen; the warmth of her hand as they walked through the garden at Oriana Station, stars shining up through the glass floor; the gentle beating of her heart as she lay next to him on the Ariadne, sleeping in his arms. In all of the memories she was there, echoing the remnants of a longing that he could not satisfy. He came to the events of the last few days, and the memories became tinged with regret. If only he’d spent the last few months together with her, instead of traveling the stars alone. He’d tried to do what seemed right at the time, and yet everything had still fallen apart.
How had it come to this? Where had he made his first mistake? At Zeta Oriana, by telling everyone about the new colony? At Alpha Oriana, for joining the mission at all? Or had he simply been doomed to fail from the beginning? Whatever the case, he’d made a mess of everything, and now there was no way to turn it back. He was as lost as a shard of ice in the void between stars.
It was impossible to say how long he fell back into such melancholy thoughts. Time was as nonexistent in this place as space or distance. Eventually, however, the simulation began to shift. A light appeared in front of him, growing gradually brighter until it threatened to blind him. He squinted, and in that moment he realized that his natural senses had returned.
He glanced down and saw that he was completely naked. His body glowed like the afterimage of a holoscreen, and was semi-transparent, so that he could see through it. His arms and legs were without feeling, but when he flexed his fingers, they obeyed.
When he looked back up to the light, he saw that it had transformed into Noemi. Her eyes were closed, her hair waving outward as she floated in midair. She was as naked as he was, but that somehow felt right in this place. Her belly was more swollen than it had ever been, and though she was as ephemeral as he was, her muscles looked strained and wearied.
“Jerem-ahra,” she whispered, opening her eyes. Her lips turned up in a smile.
“Noemi,” he said. “Are you—is that you?”
She nodded. “Yes, it’s really me.”
He opened his mouth again, then froze. Had she just answered him in Gaian? Since when had she learned how to speak it so well?
“We can understand each other because of the network interface,” she said, speaking slowly and distinctly. “Our minds are linked directly, not to a simulation.”
“Linked directly?” He frowned. “So does that mean you’re in the network?”
She nodded. “I’m in. There’s not much time, though. I can’t hold out … much longer.”
Her body looked as delicate and fragile as a glass statue. His heart went out to her, but he didn’t know what to say or do.
“They’ve hurt you,” she said, each word coming with great effort. “I can see your body—they’ve treated you very badly.”
“Noemi,” he said. “Please—don’t push yourself.” They came closer, and he locked his gaze on her, afraid that she would shatter if he so much as blinked.
She shook her head. “I must do this, Jerem-ahra,” she said. “It’s the only way.”
“I’m so sorry,” he said, the words spilling out of him. “I’ve made a mess of everything. I never should have left you—never should have brought you to this place. Everything that has gone wrong has been my fault.”
She shook her head and put a finger to his lips. At her touch, a feeling of love and forgiveness swept over him, calming his anxieties as if he were a little child.
“It’s okay,” she said. “You did your best—that’s all I could have asked. Besides, it isn’t over. You can still help.”
“How?”
“Thirty eight seconds have passed in real-time since I broke into the network. Helena is on the Revenge, and there’s one other ship nearby, plus all the orbital defenses. I can seize control of them all, but the burden is so great, I don’t know how long I can last.”
She needs another mind to connect with the computer, Jeremiah realized. Some way to shift those cycles to someone else.
“I can help you,” he said, his heart racing. “Give me the burden—let me carry it for you.”
She held out her hands. They felt airy and insubstantial, but the moment he touched them, a great heaviness passed onto him, like a heavy weight on his chest. He gasped for breath and saw a steady stream of numbers flowing in and around him.
“Ah,” said Noemi, sighing in relief. Her skin began to glow even brighter, and that brightness extended through her fingers to him.
“What’s happening?” he asked. The weight grew even heavier as the space immediately around them began to light up. He looked at her face and thought that she’d become an angel.
“Thank you, Jerem-ahra,” she said. “Thank you … for everything.”
She closed her eyes and threw her head back, and in that moment a conduit of pure white light opened high above them. The universe began to spin, the way it did just before a jump, and the weight on Jeremiah’s chest became unbearable. He gripped her hands as tightly as he could, but it wasn’t enough. The spinning grew worse, and then he was falling, falling away from her.
“Noemi!” he screamed. But then, he passed out into blackness.
Chapter 21
When Jeremiah returned to consciousness, he felt a terrible aching pain from every joint and muscle in his body. At least he still had a body, though—that was a good thing. He pried h
is eyes open and held up his hand, wiggling his fingers as if seeing them for the first time.
“Jeremiah?” came a voice—so loud!—in his left ear. Everything seemed louder, brighter, and more intense than it ever had before.
“Jeremiah?” the voice came again, and he turned his head to see who it was. His muscles responded sluggishly, as if he were under several extra gees, and when he finally did succeed in getting his head into position, his neck cracked, sending shivers down his spine.
“H-hello,” he said, his throat raspy and dry. The thirst was so strong, he felt it as an actual physical pain. His eyes took a second or two to focus, but when they did he saw a narrow, clean-shaven face staring down at him.
“Patient is responding,” said the man, apparently to the medical bot hovering next to him. “Vital signs appear to be good, though I see evidence of severe dream fatigue. Recovery is progressing smoothly, however. Patient has regained consciousness and is responding well to external stimuli.”
“Doctor Andreson? Is that you?”
The doctor looked down at him and smiled. “Hello, Jeremiah. How are you feeling?”
He coughed. “Where—where am I?”
A nozzle appeared over his lips, and he opened his mouth to let it in. A spurt of blessedly cool water flowed over his tongue, running down his parched throat and extinguishing his thirst. He gasped for breath and gulped it down as quickly as he could.
“You’re at Zarmina Station,” said Doctor Andreson. “We found you a little over an hour ago in a prison cell. Your arm was hooked up to an IV, and your brain was plugged into a dream simulator with its databanks wiped. We suspect the pirates kept you in a comatose state for at least eight days.”
Eight days. No wonder he ached so much. But where was he now?
“Zarmina Station?” he asked as the doctor removed the water nozzle. “Where’s that?”
