by J. J. Green
She pulled up her sleeve to where the sedation dispenser was taped to the underside of her arm, and picked at the edges of the tape until she could peel it off. The dispenser was a lozenge of plastic with a fine mesh opening, through which the sedative was forced into her bloodstream at regular intervals.
Now that the tape was gone, the dispenser was only lightly stuck to her skin. She removed it and put it in the trash. She went to her wash basin and doused her face with water.
Not really knowing what she was going to do, Jas left her cabin. Though the doctor had infused calories into her system to make up for her days of self-starvation, taking away her dizziness, her legs remained unsteady from the doses of sedation. She rested a hand on the corridor wall as she went along to keep her balance.
She drew closer to an airlock. Jas thought she knew the code to open it. It was to access a sensor array for external repair.
If she went through the lock, it would mean a quick end to her pain. To die like that, frozen and floating among the stars, seemed kind of fitting. On the other hand, maybe she didn’t deserve a quick end. It seemed too easy after what she’d done.
She passed the airlock by, saving the option for another time.
Wandering aimlessly through the quiet corridors, she realized that she was making her way to the crew living sections. These were the dirtier, noisier parts of the ship, where the lowest-ranking crew bunked four to a cabin, and quiet and privacy were scarce. It had been a long time since Jas had lived in those conditions, when she’d been a plain security officer. Young and lonely. Had anything much changed? Now she was older and lonely, that was all.
The area wasn’t very familiar to Jas. She rarely came this way. She’d hated the way all the lowest ranks would leap to attention when she appeared. She’d felt like she was invading the one place they had where they could relax. But now she was no longer a commander. She wasn’t anything. She had no doubts that she would be retired on health grounds as soon as the sweep of the Shadow trap planet was complete and the Thylacine returned to Unity docking.
Jas came across a door that she vaguely remembered was the entrance to a lounge. She was tired, and she wanted to sit down. Thinking that the place would probably be empty at that hour, she opened the door. Four pairs of eyes turned to her. Four crew members were huddled together over something on a low table.
For a second, Jas and the men and women stared at each other, then one of them shouted, “It’s the commander.” They all bolted, pushing Jas down in their rush to leave the room. Dazed, she looked behind her into the corridor, but they were gone.
She rose unsteadily to her feet and went over to the spot where the crew members had been huddled. A small opaque bottle was on the table, along with some drug-taking paraphernalia. She sat down and picked up the bottle, an idea of what might be in it already forming. The bottle was tiny. After unscrewing the lid, she peered inside. She had to put her head close to the bottle to look through the small hole, and as she did so, a whiff of vapor from the contents confirmed her suspicion. Just a breath of the substance made her head spin.
It was myth.
Someone had smuggled myth aboard. Her attempts to weed out the addicts hadn’t been entirely successful. Automatically, she reached for her comm button to inform Pacheco, but it wasn’t there. She’d forgotten to transfer it from her uniform. She looked up at the door. Next to it was a comm console that would also allow her to do the right thing and tell someone what she’d found.
But that small barrier to action had given her time to think. She’d only experienced the effects of myth once—on Ganymede Station when the Council managers had wanted a volunteer to try to communicate with the Paths. But since that time Jas had never lost the hankering to try it again. The visit to the mythrin mine had concentrated the feeling.
Up until that moment, she’d always managed to resist the temptation.
Jas put the lid back on the bottle. She held it in her palm, cool and smooth. It was so small, it probably only held one or at most two doses, yet aboard the ship it would sell for a month’s wages. Jas recalled the experience of her myth run. She remembered how all concerns and fears had fallen away, and she had basked in perfect, seemingly endless bliss.
The prospect of escaping from the hell she was in—real escape, not the dulling of every emotion that the sedative gave—was tantalizing. The idea that she could forget that Carl was gone, if only for a few hours, grew stronger in her mind.
Jas picked up the paraphernalia, slipped it with the bottle of myth into her pocket and left the lounge.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
As soon as she’d closed her door, Jas took out the bottle of myth and box of needles and swabs from her pocket and quickly stripped off her clothes. She wanted to start the myth run soon or she might be discovered before it was over. She had the feeling that she was standing on the precipice of a vast, black abyss, yet she didn’t care.
Before lying down in her bunk, Jas unscrewed the bottle, plunged the needle into the crimson liquid and drew it all up into the syringe. The myth was a deep, dark carmine in the dimmed cabin light, like blood. Her heart raced at the thought of the escape that it held. She’d been right when she told Carl that she wasn’t brave. There were some things she couldn’t face, and this precious drug was her way out, for a few hours at least.
She lay down, holding up the hypodermic syringe in one hand. Closing her eyes, she brought back the memory of when Sparks had injected the drug into her. The site of the injection was important, she’d heard. She bit her lip. The memory of the bolt of pain that had shot through her when the myth entered her system was still vivid, but it was worth it for what happened after.
She traced the fingers of her other hand down one side of her belly, trying to recall the exact spot. Her action reminded her of her night with Carl, and she whimpered from a hurt more painful than any she’d ever felt in all her years of fighting. She clenched her teeth. Just a few more moments, and the terrible ache would be gone. Her fingers probed farther south until she located the spot where she was certain she’d received her last shot of myth. She opened her eyes and lifted her head from her pillow, gazing down at the area.
She positioned the hypodermic syringe above the spot and hesitated. The tiniest flicker of sense at the back of her mind told her that what she was doing was wrong. But she pushed the thought away as she simultaneously plunged the needle into her skin.
The agony as she pressed the plunger home caused her to cry out, but the sound died on her lips as the drug took effect.
***
Jas was floating free, unchained from her pain, and it was bliss. Now that she’d returned there, she remembered the Void as clearly as if she’d never left. Its otherness was impossible to put into the language of the physical plane, but she was aware of infinite distance, light, and color.
She was also infinite and without form. She reached out to the vast ends of the Void, then contracted smaller than an electron. She reveled in the endless space, where nothing and everything had happened and time did not exist. Carl had not died. They were together and apart, and it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered anymore. She would stay in the Void forever.
After she had drifted for always and for no time at all, something told Jas that she wasn’t alone. Presences were approaching her consciousness. Unease rippled through her as a vague memory of something unpleasant about the Void surfaced. There were some beings there who trapped people—who had trapped her. She recalled fighting and an escape back to the other place.
But her senses told her these were not those beings. Her tension eased. These were the ones who had fought for her. These beings had come through to the physical plane to help her and others. She found it hard to remember where she’d come from. Consciousness of the other side was slippery in her mind. That place felt unreal. Here was reality and truth.
The beings of the Void spoke. “We know you,” they said. “You came to us in the other place. You saved us when we
were weak and helpless.”
“Did I?” Jas’ unspoken words echoed inside her. “I don’t remember.”
“You have been here with us before.”
“Yes, and now I’ve come back, and I’m staying.”
“You cannot remain. Your kind can never remain. You always go back.”
“I’m not going back.” Dark gray ripples of disquiet left Jas and spread out around her.
“You will.”
Jas twisted and turned, trying to escape the beings, but they were everywhere that she was, around her and within her. She rejected their message. Why wouldn’t they let her mind return to floating free and careless?
“Many of the Others are gone,” the beings said, “destroyed on the physical plane. We are sad that they harmed so many of you, but we are grateful that their existence has been reduced and they no longer trouble us.”
The beings’ words were sparking painful recollections in Jas mind. She wished they would stop. “Please, leave me.”
“We will depart if our presence disturbs you, but we came to tell you that the one you mourn is here.”
The words reverberated through Jas’ perception. The one I mourn?
“...What?”
“The one whose loss you grieve is here, but he cannot exist in the Void. He is fading.”
“What?” Jas’ unspoken voice was tiny.
“You ache. You have suffered a loss. We can sense this. The one you have lost is here.”
Struggling hard against the mind-numbing effects of being in the Void, Jas said without words, “Carl’s here?”
“If that is how you identify him using language, that one is here. We can sense him in you, but he is here too.”
“Where? Take me to him.”
“He is here as you are, but you cannot sense him.”
“Can he sense me?”
“No.”
Despair nibbled the numbed edges of Jas’ consciousness. Even in the Void there was no escape from it. Her escape was no escape after all.
“Should we return him to your universe?” the beings asked. “He may not survive the transition, but he also cannot survive here.”
“You can send him back? I don’t understand. Haven’t the Shadows got him? Won’t he come back as a Shadow?”
“We have the remaining Others under control. We can use their mechanism to push him through at the place where you found us. But the Others use their process to insert their persona into the newly created copy of the one they stole. We will eschew this part. We will not insert a persona.”
“No persona?” Jas couldn’t grasp their meaning. Carl wouldn’t be Carl? Just his body? She struggled to comprehend, but her thoughts were slippery and ephemeral. “Can you explain?”
“The Others recreated only the form of the creatures from the physical plane. They animated the copies they made with their own selves. If we return the one you lost, he will have no self.”
Jas still couldn’t really understand. It sounded like whatever they pushed through would have Carl’s brain with all its knowledge and memories, but somehow he wouldn’t have his personality. She couldn’t imagine what Carl would be like if the beings did as they proposed. But just to have him back would be something.
“What should we do?” the beings asked.
“Send him back. Please, send him back.”
“We will return him to the place where you found us.”
***
Jas opened her eyes. She was lying naked in her bunk, a hypodermic needle hanging painfully from her upper thigh. She sat up and carefully pulled out the needle. The syringe was empty. As she remembered what she’d done and why, the weight of her entire existence settled heavily over her.
So it had all come to this? All her years of fighting. Everything she’d endured. All the friends that she’d dragged into the fight, only to have them die. And she’d ended up like the man she’d despised—Loba, a myth addict, living only for the next run.
The hypodermic syringe in her hand fell from her fingers to the floor. Let it lie there. Let them see it. What did she care? Her mind returned to the airlock and its alluring escape.
Jas rose out of her bunk and went into the shower. Maybe she could wash away some of the disgust she felt for herself. As the hot water started up, she was reminded of the shower she took the morning that she saw Carl for the last time.
She groaned. She rested her forearm on the shower wall and her forehead on her arm while the water cascaded over her. She would never be able to clean herself of what she’d done. She’d never be free of her all-pervading grief. Everywhere she went and everything she did reminded her of him.
Sometime later—she didn’t know how long—she turned off the water and got out of the shower. Her efforts to divert her mind from thoughts of Carl were useless, and something about him was nagging away at her like a toothache. A background annoyance that she couldn’t bring to the front of her mind.
She put on some clothes and sat on her bunk, slumped forward. Checking the time, she was surprised to see that only around two or three hours had passed since she’d injected the myth. As she understood it, she should have been out for at least five or six hours. She rubbed the inner corners of her eyes with her fingertips.
Carl. There was something important she had to remember about Carl. Something about... She squeezed her eyes shut and forced her foggy mind to clear. Snippets of her myth run flashed into her inner vision. The benevolent beings—the Paths—had been there, and there was something else, something to do with Carl. The Paths had told her...what was it?
Jas gasped. Her hands gripped her bunk.
The Paths had told her that Carl was in the Void and that they were going to send him back.
Chapter Thirty
Jas hammered on Kennewell’s door. Then she remembered about door chimes and pressed that too. Before the pilot had any time to answer, she pressed again.
“Kennewell,” she called through the door, “wake up. I want you to take me planetside. Now. Kennewell.”
Jas didn’t let up until the pilot’s door opened and the tousled-haired young woman appeared, staring at her with sleepy eyes.
“Commander?” she said, covering a yawn with the back of her hand.
“I need you to take me planetside in the shuttle immediately. I have the coordinates.”
“But, I, er...Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Kennewell’s returning memory that Jas had been relieved of her duties was evident in her expression.
“Yes, I’m sure. But if I told you why, you wouldn’t believe me. You’ll have to trust me. It’s about Carl Lingiari, one of the lost pilots. I think I might have a chance of finding him.”
“Oh.” Kennewell’s face turned sad and sympathetic. It was clear she thought Jas was so grief-stricken, she was delusional. Her face brightened as something occurred to her. “Okay, ma’am. Sure. I just need to ask the admiral for permission first.”
“No, you can’t.” Jas took a deep breath and tried to calm herself. She had to convince Kennewell to take her down to K.67092d. She’d known the pilot for years. She was almost a friend. “Look, I know how it looks. You think I’m crazy. I was. I was out of my mind with grief. But I’m not now. And I really, really need you to do this for me. Please. As a favor. I was a good commander, wasn’t I? I was fair? Not like Pacheco?”
“Actually, you and he are pretty alike.”
“What?”
“Never mind.” Kennewell sighed. “I’m probably going to regret this, but the war’s over and I’m going home soon, so what the hell. Okay. I’ll take you down. Just let me get dressed.” The door closed.
Jas waited impatiently for Kennewell to emerge, and when she did, she hurried the pilot toward the launch bay.
“You’ve cleared this, right?” Kennewell asked as they went along. “It’s not like I can just take a shuttle and fly it wherever I want.”
Krat. “No, I haven’t. What do you suggest?”
“Hmm...well, i
f Trimborn’s on duty, we should be okay. He might turn a blind eye and let me go.”
“Really? How come?” Jas was surprised to hear that her first officer would act so unprofessionally.
“We, er, we have a thing going on.”
“You do? Well, that’s great. I hope it’s him.” Jas also hoped that Pacheco was still asleep. If he found out what she was doing, he’d probably have her restrained. She was well aware that telling him about her myth run and what the Paths had told her would be useless. He would only think she was still insane with grief and guilt. Sayen might believe her, but she didn’t have time to convince anyone. The Paths had said that Carl was fading and that they would push him into the physical plane, but she didn’t know when.
Troops and defense units were in the process of destroying all the Shadow traps on the planet. If she didn’t get there soon, she might be too late.
The guards at the launch bay were nonplussed by Jas turning up in civilian clothes with Kennewell at her side. Jas put on her best serious commander face and nodded at them as she walked swiftly past. The guards fell for her bluff and didn’t challenge her.
It had taken Jas some serious digging to find the coordinates of the crash site of the Galathea, but she’d located them in the data files on K.67092d. The shuttle had a copilot’s seat, which Jas took. As she sat down next to her, Jas gave Kennewell the coordinates.
She let the pilot do the talking when it came to persuading Trimborn to okay the shuttle launch. Kennewell framed the request in terms of the commander’s receiving information about a lost pilot that she wanted to informally investigate. Trimborn didn’t sound like he believed her, but he allowed them to go.
Jas closed her eyes and tried to relax as Kennewell piloted the shuttle planetside. She doubted that the Paths truly understood time, coming from a place where it didn’t exist. Carl could have already come through into the Shadow trap and be wandering around a place that was just about to be destroyed.