Primal Darkness

by Ryan Kirk

  As Kindra spoke, a floating droid came into the room with several cylinders Tev recognized as containers that stored air. He understood what he needed to do as Kindra was speaking. He turned around so the droid could attach the tanks to his exosuit.

  Tev caught Kindra’s final words. “Deliver the oxygen, but be careful. The captain said the environment outside is dangerous.”

  Tev nodded and Kindra left the room. He turned and stepped towards the airlock, trying his best to contain his excitement.

  As soon as the airlock opened, Tev was thrust into a world unlike any he had grown up in, different even than the limited training experiences he’d been in.

  He had trained in space several times now, but every time space had been empty, devoid of anything but the jumpship he now called home. In front of him, space was anything but empty. On his display, pieces of junk were highlighted with a dim green outline. For once, Tev was grateful for the extra information. In the darkness of space, many of the pieces would have been almost invisible to the naked eye.

  Unfortunately, the area in front of him was packed full of the green outlines. At times, Tev could see safe paths through the debris, but as he watched, they would close again.

  Immediately, Tev realized the danger. He knew that his suit needed to stay in one piece if he was to remain protected against the extreme environment of space. It was armored, so it could probably take several hits from the fragments, but every hit was a risk he didn’t want to take. All it would take was one unlucky strike and he would be on his last hunt.

  Tev took a deep breath, befriending the fear he felt. Kindra spoke in his ear. “The ship you need to get to is here.”

  A brighter, yellow outline came up on his display and then faded again. Tev squinted, but in the cloud of debris, he had a hard time making out the ship without the outline.

  “Leave the outline up, please.”

  A second later, the brighter yellow outline returned, and Tev saw where he had to go. “Is there anything else I need to know?”

  “No. Time is important, but you’ve got a window. It’s more important that you get there safely. Several lives depend on it.”

  Tev nodded and pushed himself with his legs out of the airlock, being careful not to jump with all his strength. If there was one lesson he had learned in his space training, it was that small changes made a huge difference. If he started even approaching the edge of control, there was no way he would make it to the ship in one piece.

  Tev took a moment to get readjusted to the realities of space. There was no up or down anymore, no direction for his body to get used to. He kept his head pointed towards the disabled dropship and gave himself a small thrust to increase his velocity. Small omnidirectional thrusters had been added across his suit, with the largest being on his back and chest. They were controlled through mental manipulation, with the suit interpreting his commands and directing thrust as necessary. It wasn’t a perfect system, but it allowed for a fair degree of mobility in space.

  Tev worked hard not to focus on any one object. Everything around him was moving, and he had to be constantly aware. His display warned him when objects were heading his direction, and he would respond with gentle thrusts to move himself out of the way. So long as he knew of the debris well before it came near him, just the slightest firing of a thruster was all he needed to change his trajectory away from that of the debris.

  Throughout his flight, Tev only had one close call, when a vector adjustment brought him into line with another, closer piece of debris. He cursed himself and adjusted with a stronger thrust. He barely passed by the larger piece of debris, but more challenging, it took him several small adjustments to get his course back on track. Once he did, he breathed a deep sigh of relief. He wasn’t sure what kind of support he would have out here if he lost control. The debris might kill him before anyone else could get to him.

  Tev slowed his velocity as he approached the other dropship, and for the first time, he allowed his mind to wander and wonder what had happened here. The dropship was full of holes, and Tev could see that many were caused by explosions outside the ship. He also wasn’t sure where all the debris had come from. There seemed to be far too much to have come from a single dropship.

  Tev’s questions disappeared as he used gentle thrusts to turn his feet towards the damaged dropship. In his mind, the dropship changed from being up to being down. With a few more gentle thoughts, he landed, the electromagnetic soles of his suit engaging against the hull, keeping him locked down.

  Kindra answered his question before he could even ask it, highlighting the location on the dropship where he needed to go. Tev moved with more ease, more familiar with the mechanics of moving on the hull of a ship from his practice.

  Tev found the hole Kindra had highlighted without a problem, dropping down after taking a brief look at his landing position. The ship’s artificial gravity was out, but through a combination of gentle thrusts and the pull of magnets on his feet, Tev was able to move almost normally through the ship. Kindra overlaid the route on his display. All he had to do was follow the arrows.

  Kindra’s voice was soft, as though she was afraid to disturb him. “You’re making good time. So long as you get there within the next five minutes, there shouldn’t be any problem with the air supplies.”

  Tev grunted his acknowledgment. The interior of the ship was a maze, and he needed to focus on his surroundings.

  He turned a corner and took a deep breath as he came face to face with the body of a crew member of the ship. It was a woman who had managed to attach a harness to an anchor point. When her section of the ship had been breached, she hadn’t been sucked out into space, but space had come for her, nonetheless. Tev, out of habit, said a short prayer to Lys before stopping himself. The woman hadn’t been a hunter, and even if Lys could hear his prayer, Tev didn’t think she would grant it. He kept moving towards the rest of the rescue mission.

  The first sign he got that something was wrong was Kindra’s voice shouting at him. All he heard was his name, but it was too late. About a dozen meters in front of him, an explosion blew the floor plating into the ceiling. The explosion only lasted for a fraction of a second, but Tev felt the entire ship twist and buckle underneath him.

  Tev had never felt anything like it in his life. In his limited experience, a ship was always solid. It was like the ground, something firm and steady you could trust to be underneath you. Suddenly, that was no longer true.

  The entire corridor twisted, with the wall becoming the new floor, and the opposite wall becoming the ceiling. Tev’s boots kept him anchored, but still he twisted. The experience was incredibly disorienting. Tev could feel the composite materials groaning underneath his feet.

  Tev’s instincts kicked in. He was in a dangerous place and needed to escape. In front of him, a gash opened in the hull, and Tev could see more and more stars out in the void of space as the hallway separated. Fortunately, all the air was already gone from the section of the ship Tev was in, so he didn’t have to worry about decompression. He looked at his display and saw Kindra’s navigational arrow, still pointing towards the same hallway he had been traveling down.

  Tev realized it was only the part of the ship he was in that was breaking apart. His destination was still intact. He moved, his suit reacting to his mental commands. He ran forward, using a strong boost of thrust to get his body moving in the right direction. As the hallway continued to twist around him, Tev made a step and ran along the wall, and then the ceiling as the twisting continued. He made it to the gash that was ever-widening and leapt, trying to focus on his thrusters.

  His aim had been true, and he was crossing the void of space towards the same hallway he had originally been walking in, but he was moving too fast. His actions had been too powerful. Acting on instinct, he used his thrusters to spin his body around so he was heading feet first towards the hallway.

  Tev landed and absorbed the impact with his legs. The magnets clicked back on, an
d he was locked in place. For the moment, he was safe. He took a deep breath and looked around. With the angle he had come in at, his boots had locked him against the ceiling of the hallway, so it was a little disorienting to look forward. But when he looked behind him, he saw the entire back section of the ship tear apart, the section of the hallway he had been in a tangled mess.

  “Are you okay?” Kindra asked.

  Tev grunted. It had been close. Very close. Gingerly, he rotated around so he was facing the hallway right side up. He didn’t need to, but it helped his perspective. He started moving forward quickly. The crew only had a few minutes left for him to get them the oxygen.

  A man should never be able to stand without a head, but that was the image that kept haunting Kindra. She knew she was dreaming, but rationality didn’t stand a chance against the flood of emotions battering her from all directions.

  Kenan stood in front of her, or at least, his blood-covered suit did. Tev had lost visual before his final battle with Kenan, and at first, Kindra had been grateful. She hadn’t needed to watch the end. Now, she wasn’t so sure. Her imagination and guilt seemed more than happy to fill in the blanks in her knowledge, and Kenan’s death was always a wretched affair in her nightmares.

  Kindra was trying to explain herself to Kenan, for what felt like the thousandth time. But even without a face his judgment was clear. She had murdered him. The fact was simple. She didn’t pull the trigger, but she armed the weapon and pointed it in the right direction. She was every bit the murderer that Tev was.

  Her alarm pulled her out of the nightmare, but scraps of the dream followed her into wakefulness, imprinting on her memories. She pressed her palms to her eyes, as though the pressure would somehow erase the images.

  After a few minutes the images faded. They weren’t gone though. They never left. It had been weeks, months since the events on Tev’s planet, and Kindra was beginning to wonder if the guilt would ever fade.

  She rolled haphazardly out of her bunk, disgruntled that her shift was beginning again.

  Kindra had never had any desire to be a captain, and almost every day she developed a greater appreciation for everything Derreck had done on a day-to-day basis. She had thought her own report needs were overwhelming, but she had never seen a captain’s paperwork.

  Derreck was recovering in sick bay, but it would still be a matter of weeks before he was at full strength and cleared for duty. She knew the forced bedrest was eating him alive, but on the bright side, at least he had volunteered to help with some of the paperwork. He had to be bored if he was stooping so low.

  Even so, the number of reports she had to file was getting ridiculous. Fleet was becoming more and more organized, and the closer they got to central space, the more report requests were filtered through local commands. Every report she filed in Destiny’s servers spawned two more. Kindra rubbed her eyes and stood up.

  A message popped up in the corner of her vision, reminding her that she had a commander’s meeting in a few minutes. The reminder elicited a full-blown groan. She was well aware of the meeting and had hoped the reporting would take her mind off of it. She had begged Derreck to go, but he had smiled and reminded her he wasn’t currently the commanding officer on their little dropship. Even if he tried, the security on the jumper wouldn’t let him anywhere near the meeting room.

  This was the last major meeting before their last series of jumps towards Haven. Captain Absalon, the captain of the jumpship Destiny, would soon be inundated with the work necessary to jump within the central systems. The commanders needed to meet to decide their actions. They also needed to share the results of the experiments they had been performing while in transit.

  With a sigh, Kindra walked towards the meeting space. A part of her wanted to meet with Tev beforehand, considering a fair amount of the meeting would focus on him. But she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Tev was more delighted than he had been since he had left his home planet. His rescue a few weeks ago had made him something of a hero among the crew of the Destiny, and he was eating up all the attention. She didn’t want to bring him down by discussing what the future might hold.

  Even though she had a hard time acknowledging the truth, she still struggled to speak with him. Once they met up with Destiny after leaving Tev’s planet, everything felt as though it had changed. Kindra’s nightmares began, and although she was still Tev’s primary connection to her world, there was a distance she didn’t know how to bridge. She didn’t know how to relate to him in the space between worlds.

  When she entered the meeting room, Kindra was reminded of just how spartan a space Captain Absalon preferred. The meeting room was the most secure on the ship, located near the heart of the jumper and virtually immune to any surveillance. The walls of the room were the same flat gray as the rest of the jumper, but nano usage wasn’t allowed in the room, so Kindra couldn’t even hang a painting in her neurodisplay without setting off at least four alarms.

  Captain Absalon opened the meeting with the usual formalities. He spoke about the rescue and what the results had been. Thanks to Tev’s actions, and those of the pilots who had initially gone over, they had rescued close to twenty people. Those who had survived had little information to report, but it was obvious they had been attacked. By who was a matter of fierce speculation around the jumper. From what Kindra had overheard, about half the ship blamed pirates, the other half claimed the rebellion was beginning again. Absalon let the commanders know that their investigation so far hadn’t turned up any concrete leads.

  Absalon turned the meeting over to his second-in-command, Freya. Freya brought up a display that Kindra recognized as the video feed from Tev’s suit, with a side display that mapped Tev’s neural connections with the suit. Kindra’s stomach twisted as she wondered what was coming next.

  Kindra respected Freya. She had been a combat pilot before going into command, and she had a no-nonsense way of going about her business. But beyond that, she was still friendly. Most commanders she had met were stuffy and full of themselves. Captain Absalon was a great example. But Freya was personable and sometimes pushed the boundaries of acceptable behavior for an Executive Officer. Kindra appreciated that.

  Freya began, her voice loud in the small space of the conference room. “One of our main concerns this meeting, as we all know, is the alien being known as Tev. Based on Kindra’s recommendation, he has had relatively free rein on the ship, and has been training as a pilot of our exosuits.

  “A few weeks ago that decision paid off. Thanks to Tev’s efforts, in tandem with our own pilots, we were able to rescue nineteen Fleet personnel. Personnel that would be dead if Tev hadn’t gotten them the oxygen they needed to survive.

  “None of this is news. It’s all anybody has been talking about. What I want to bring to the group is this footage and data from a portion of the rescue.”

  Kindra had watched the footage time and time again, but her stomach still twisted in knots as she watched the hallway Tev had been in shift and crumple around him. The entire clip lasted less than a minute, but it was all Kindra could do to sit through the entire video again. Tev had come close to meeting his end on that rescue.

  Freya continued, “For those of you at this table who are pilots, the footage speaks for itself. For those who aren’t, let me be clear. There are only a handful of pilots in the entire galaxy capable of what Tev managed to do on his fourteenth time in space. Although the data is technical, if you look at the graph on the right, you can see that Tev’s neural connection with the suit is off the charts, and he isn’t even enhanced with nanos.”

  Commander Mala, the commander of the other dropship housed in the Destiny, spoke up. “So why does any of this matter? He’s a great pilot, so what?”

  “When we get to central space, and home, one of the greatest questions we will face is what we do with Tev. I want to make it clear, as a pilot, that Tev may have a value even beyond being the first alien we’ve ever encountered. There will be those in Fleet t
hat will view him only as a specimen, and I want to make it abundantly clear that he is far more than that. I would have him on my wing any time.”

  Absalon wanted to keep the meeting moving, which Kindra appreciated. The only thing worse than a meeting was a long meeting. “You’ve made your point. Let’s move on to see all the data we’ve collected.”

  Absalon motioned to Mala to start with her findings. Kindra leaned forward. This was the part of the meeting she was most interested in. What Mala and her dropship had found still amazed her.

  Mala spoke. “As everyone knows, we were assigned to study a planet which looked exceptionally promising for signs of life. Not only did an early analysis indicate an atmosphere and an environment conducive to life, but we detected electromagnetic signals emanating from the planet itself. My team went in certain we would make first contact.

  “However, our discoveries were bizarre. What we found was a planet where a civilization had once existed. We found buildings, vehicles, and plenty of bodies. What we didn’t find is anyone alive. Some of their technology was still up and running, which was the source of the electromagnetic readings. Although we weren’t able to do a full scan of the planet in the time we had, we weren’t able to find a sign of life.”

  Absalon waved away the introduction. “None of this is new. Please focus on what your team has discovered while we’ve been in transit back.”

  Mala nodded. “Since we left, we’ve been analyzing all the data we gathered, and what we’re finding defies any explanation I can come up with. The technology is not similar to anything I’ve ever encountered before, but at the same time, is definitely human. We ran a search through Destiny’s mainframe, and there wasn’t a single match. My technician has looked inside at some of the code, and it’s the same thing. It doesn’t match any code in our databases, but the similarities are too striking to be ignored.