The searing, building pain wasn’t like anything Faith had ever experienced before in her eighteen years, and that was saying something — she had already faced a lifetime’s worth of adversity and suffering. She twisted her lips into a manic grin. This was a good pain, she told herself. This wasn’t the pain of an abusive stepfather stubbing out a burning hot cigarette butt into your arm, or the numbing throb of a broken heart after catching another loser boyfriend cheating. The pain tearing her insides out was different because it filled her with hope. After all the screw-ups and wrong moves and bad mistakes, she finally had done something good with her life, something she could be proud of.
She grimaced and her jaws tightened with the final effort. She exhaled a sharp gasp of unbridled anguish and the wails of a newborn filled the room. Everyone relaxed. Faith could see the tension easing from the medical staff. She sensed that they were smiling under those surgical masks. Her baby was alive and well.
The doctor wrapped the screaming infant in a blanket and handed it to one of the nurses. The physical contact seemed to calm the baby down a little. Faith weakly turned her head, straining to catch a closer look at her child. Her eyes found the newborn, and the steel inside her grew brittle.
She had learned from a young age to keep her emotions in check. Emotions could be exploited as a weakness and used against you. A smile had to be earned, never given freely. But the innocent, helpless bundle before her broke down all defenses. Tears welled up and her lips quivered into a smile of pure joy. She didn’t care whether it was a boy or a girl, didn’t wonder what she should call the child. Those were questions for another day. Right now, what mattered the most was her overpowering need to hold her own baby. To feel that trembling ball of life next to her. She struggled to speak and was shocked at how weak her quavering voice sounded. “Can I hold her?”
The question hung in the air, greeted by a moment of inaction. There was doubt in the nurse’s eyes, duty at war with her own feminine nature. The nurse took a tentative step toward Faith when the doctor appeared. He looked down at Faith and there was resigned sympathy in his gaze. “I'm sorry. You’re not allowed contact with the baby.”
The baby. Not your baby.
She had given life to this child but, according to the state, she would be granted no further rights over her own daughter. Her body had been nothing more than a means to an end, a biological incubator denied its own creation. A door zoomed open and men wearing black-gray uniforms appeared. Faith’s breath hitched and her heart seemed to trip over its own beat. She swallowed against the lump in her throat. A perfect moment had degenerated into a nightmare.
Nooo!
Almost as if the newborn knew it was about to be separated from its mother, the baby started to scream again. Agonizing seconds stretched as the uniformed men snatched the child.
Faith stirred. Despite what she'd been through, she had to take action. Tapping into her last reserves of strength, she pushed herself out of bed. When her naked feet hit the icy floor they left a trail of blood in their wake. The nurse and doctor tried to stop her but they shrank away, scared by her intensity. A dark fire burned inside of her, a primal instinct honed by thousands of years of human evolution.
She managed to take a few weak steps before the exertion took its inevitable toll. Her legs gave out and she crumpled, head hitting the freezing tile with a dull smack. She wrenched her neck and looked up through a cloud of tears. Her words shook the room with maternal anguish as the uniformed kidnappers vanished through the door. The world slipped out of focus, growing fuzzy around the edges. “Please, don't let them take my baby. PLEAAAASE…”
***
Faith’s eyes snapped open. Her body spasmed and her lungs inhaled sharply. The scene in the hospital room had been a dream, an old memory hungry for attention. She was not sprawled on the hospital floor any longer but instead found herself suspended upright inside a metal-reinforced glass cylinder. A tangled mass of tubes extended from her body like artificial umbilical cords. She was naked except for a tank-top and shorts. Her hands came up and she realized there wasn’t enough room to shift her position. Groggy and doing her best to shake off her confusion, she stared through the glass lid of her high-tech coffin at the world beyond. The glass distorted her view and she could barely make out a cavernous maze of metal and glass and shadows.
Where was she? What was going on?
A growing physical discomfort put a halt to her questions. Each breath had become an ordeal and she gasped for air. Inside the chamber, oxygen levels must have dropped below an acceptable level.
Her arms twisted in the confined space and she pushed her hands against the cylinder's glass surface, pressing. A fierce struggle ensued but yielded little result. The tube didn’t budge. How was she going to get out of this contraption? Claustrophobia took hold, control threatening to slip away once more. She started pounding the glass. Her parched mouth couldn’t form the words echoing through her mind... LET ME OUT OF HERE!
Her moment of sheer terror was mercifully cut short. There was a sudden explosion of escaping gas and the lid of the cryo-tube slid open with a hiss. The cables popped off her body and retracted into the wall of the cryo-chamber.
Faith stumbled out of the open glass cylinder and collapsed on her knees. She greedily sucked in air. As the oxygen revitalized her, she hazarded a look back at the now-empty cryo-tube and realized it was just one out of many such tubes. The room was filled with hundreds of identical glass cylinders, each containing the silhouettes of men and women.
The sight brought further clarity to her jumbled thoughts, snapping her memory into sharp focus. Ten years had passed since she gave birth to her daughter. She wasn’t on Earth any more but aboard the Orion, a colony barge headed for the main belt asteroids, a 134-million-mile, one-year journey. She had chosen to leave everything she knew behind to start a new life in the outer colonies. Paul, the young man she’d dated for what seemed like a minute before she decided to sign up with the mining corporation, had frowned at her when she first brought up the idea of moving to the asteroid belt. “Why would anyone take a chance on a rock millions of miles away from home?” The answer was clear to her even if Paul might not appreciate it: maybe home had nothing to offer them.
Faith stood in the dark for another moment, eyes adjusting to the subdued lighting, reassured by her growing understanding of her situation. Taking in the maze of sleeping colonists around her, she couldn’t help but wonder why she was awake. The most likely explanation was a timer issue with her capsule. The grim alternative was an onboard emergency of some kind, but if that were the case, wouldn’t every one of the four-thousand passengers on the Orion be awake by now? Her premature return to consciousness had to be a glitch, and glitches could be fixed.
As far as Faith was aware, the ship was run by a skeleton crew — the captain and about 15 other essential personnel — while most of the colonists remained in deep hibernation. All she had to do was locate an intercom system, put in a call to the bridge and let them know what was going on. With any luck they’d be nice enough to tuck her back in and let her catch up on her beauty sleep for the remainder of their journey. Surprisingly, the gray, sterile environment of the Orion seemed more appealing than another cryo-sleep cycle. She wasn’t quite ready to face the nightmares of her past again so soon.
Faith staggered erect, her legs straining under the weight of her own body. The cryo-tube was supposed to electrically stimulate her muscles and assure they wouldn’t atrophy, but she could tell she hadn’t used her legs in quite some time. With each step, it seemed like someone was driving sharp nails into her calves and thighs.
She caught her reflection in one of the cryo-tubes and for a moment, her features seemed superimposed over the dormant person inside the cylinder. She didn’t like what she was seeing. She must’ve lost about 10 pounds since she slipped into the tube, the bones of her face outlined sharply under the skin. She looked gaunt and haunted, the mileage catching up with her beauty. She
was only 29, but the last decade hadn’t been a cakewalk.
Her attention shifted from her face to the tattoos that shimmered over her body, a mixture of strange glyphs and numbers. They flickered and kept changing shape as she flexed her muscles. Each tattoo contained a series of three digital images that were randomly projected under her skin. Souvenirs of her own rough past. For a moment, she marveled at the images — a fierce dragon becoming a Chinese symbol of peace, only to make way for a police badge with a waxy death’s head at its center. Images that once meant so much to her but now didn’t seem to belong on her body. Time had made them lose their meaning.
Faith kept walking. Her footsteps echoed through the vast, cavernous chamber. The only other sound was the incessant thrumming of hyper-drive engines beneath her bare feet, the spaceship’s faint yet steady heartbeat.
She tried not to stare at the walls of dormant people as she passed them. Even though these space travelers were asleep and not dead, she couldn't shake the feeling of being inside a giant mausoleum. Surrounded by hundreds of people, yet utterly alone, she felt a crushing, almost paralyzing, sense of loneliness descend over her. The colonists looked like ghosts trapped in icy limbo. Faith realized she had been one of them only minutes earlier and a shiver crawled up her spine. Cryo-stasis might the cheapest way to space travel but it sure as hell wasn’t her favorite way.
Faith approached a door in the bulkhead. It whooshed open, sensors responding to her presence. She stepped into the adjoining chamber that was dominated by an observation window and stole a glance outside. For a moment she could only stare, overwhelmed by the sight that awaited her. To behold the infinity of glittering stars was to experience both awe and fear. The darkness of deep space loomed, a perfect void. In her mind’s eye she could picture the Orion, a million tons of titanium, gliding through the vast nothingness beyond the observation window, nuclear thrusters the size of football fields roaring like incandescent, plasma-powered miniature suns.
They were a long way from their final destination and, once again, Faith wondered why she was awake. Gripped by a growing sense of foreboding, she suddenly wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer.
CHAPTER TWO
FAITH STUMBLED INTO a shower area. Sensors registered her presence and steaming water engulfed her. She sighed, her body responding to the hot stream with pleasure. She basked in the sensation, the water streaming down her form washing away the residue of the various cryo gases. After 10 minutes she felt dizzy and instructed the computer to kill the furious spray. She stumbled out of the shower and a blast of hot air enveloped her body and hair.
Still a bit groggy but sporting a happy, satisfied smile, she approached a giant wall of lockers. Her personal belongings were kept in one of them.
“Faith Cadena...” One of the lockers snapped open. Her utilitarian mining tech uniform was waiting for her.
Faith got dressed. Before she closed the locker, she reached inside and found a small metallic disk. She studied the object with deep emotion before tapping it. A hologram flickered to life that showed a little girl playing with a ragged doll. The child was laughing, full of life and joy, the image of a daughter she had never held in her arms, an image so pure and sweet that it broke Faith's heart. Tears welled in her eyes and she smiled wistfully.
She tapped the holo-image and the little girl vanished into thin air. Faith pulled out a pack of cigarettes from another pocket and lit up. She inhaled deeply, smoke wafting around her head. The smoke singed the lining of her throat and after months without a fix, she could feel a cough building in her chest. Nevertheless, a crooked smile curled her lips.
God, she needed that!
Faith finished her cigarette and stepped up to a comm system. She mouthed her first words in months. “Cryo-deck to bridge, can anyone hear me up there?”
Her words were greeted by crackling static.
“Someone must be flying this ship. Hello?”
No answer.
Frustrated, and increasingly disturbed, Faith shook her head. “Great.”
She had no choice but to head for the nearest elevator. Faith stepped into the lift, doors whooshing shut behind her. She selected the upper habitat deck as her destination. The elevator hummed to life and ascended. Faith was unnerved and fought back a sense of growing anxiety. By now, the computers should have alerted the crew that one of their passengers was awake. What the hell was going on?
The elevator stopped and the doors opened. To Faith's surprise, she was greeted by moaning and gasps of pleasure, almost as if someone was having sex outside the elevator. Her curiosity grew.
Gingerly, Faith stepped out of the lift. Guard up, she made her way though the dark, deserted common room. The source of moaning became apparent: holo-porn filled the room, a three-dimensional couple flitting over the couches and armchairs in the common area. There was no audience for the shimmering images of furious copulation. Besides Faith and the energetic holo-couple, there was no sign of a living presence.
Mildly amused, Faith passed through the hologram, the couple dancing over her body to become, ever-so-briefly, a virtual threesome. She studied the room. A table was littered with a few half-empty beer bottles: more evidence of a stag party interrupted. Fifteen men stuck in a hunk of metal for ten long months without female companionship had to find a way to blow off steam somehow.
Further inspection revealed overturned furniture and Faith spotted a few broken bottles scattered across the carpeted floor. A chilling thought occurred to her. Could these be signs of a struggle of some kind? Faith had seen enough violence in her life to recognize its stark signature. Her gaze stopped dead at a nearby couch and she was hit by a rush of anxiety. The couch was stained black. There was no doubt in her mind she was looking at dried blood. It had seeped into the furniture and the carpeted floor. Apprehension choked her.
Faith stumbled toward the nearest exit, fighting back a sense of mounting paranoia. She arrived in a sterile corridor lined with doors. The skeleton-crew’s living quarters. As she headed down the hallway, she couldn’t shake the disquieting sense that someone was tracking her every move. The silence was unnerving. Her muffled footsteps were the only sound in the empty corridor. Overhead lights flickered on and off, creating a surreal, strobing effect.
Faith shot the doors a wary glance before deciding to approach one of them. She hesitated but then gave herself an internal push and tapped a button. The door whoosed open. Faith stepped into sleeping quarters.
Treading lightly, she soaked up the details of the room. It was tiny, cramped, and held three unmade bunk beds. A sink overflowed with toiletries. Faith approached the bunk beds, her eyes alert. A few holograms crackled into existence as the bunk sensors registered her approach. The image of a smiling man holding up a three year old appeared in front of the first bunk while the pin-up of a stunning blonde materialized over the second bunk. Faith wondered whether the image came from a calendar or some lover left a million miles behind on Earth. As she shifted her attention to the third bunk, she was greeted with an aerial view of Hawaii taken from space. Faith allowed herself a smile and she could feel some of the tension leaving her body. She welcomed the various holo-images’ mundane nature, their humanity. It meant someone else was around and she wasn’t alone aboard this godforsaken vessel.
Faith turned and exited the room, stepping back into the corridor. It was lined with many doors. She guessed they must lead to the other sleeping quarters, but she had seen enough. Instead of checking each room individually, she decided to head straight for the bridge. The desolate corridor was making her anxious. A part of her was tempted to just shout, so she could put an end to the oppressive silence.
As she brushed past the doors on her side, her gaze focused on the dark hallway ahead, the door behind her opened without warning and a man lurched out at her. Gurgling blood, he wore a blue mining tech uniform that was now tattooed in red, the handle of a shiver-blade protruding from his chest. Faith cried out and recoiled while a part
of her mind, toughened by years of surviving on the unforgiving streets of New Cairo and further honed by a nine-year stint on the lunar penal colony, was galvanized into action. As the man collapsed, hitting the floor with a wet thud, Faith knelt by him, desperately trying to staunch the bleeding. She was soon covered in blood, overwhelmed by the number of gushing wounds. By the time she turned back to the hapless man’s face, his now empty eyes stared into space, dead. Paralyzed for a moment, she just leaned over the corpse. Copper scented the air and made her feel nauseous. A dark, nagging suspicion had just been confirmed in vivid, crimson detail. Something was terribly wrong aboard this ship. It brought another thought. Her being awake might not be a random accident after all.
She stole a glance inside the open sleeping quarters from which the dying man had emerged. Despite her fear, Faith entered the quarters. She was greeted by the pungent stench of human decay. Death lurked within the room. She looked across the chamber and was sickened. Three men were slumped in their bunks, faces bloated and putrefied. Unlike the fellow in the hallway, they had been dead for weeks, if not months. Their maroon uniforms told her that they weren’t miners but part of the ship’s crew.
Faith could feel her heart racing. Her hands came up and covered her nose, protecting her from the worst of the smell. She stifled back the scream building in the back of her throat. Repelled by the grim setting, she was stumbling back when she heard the shuffle of footsteps behind her.
Occult Assassin: Ice God Page 9
