by K. Gorman
They peered down at it.
“I don’t see anyone.”
“Maybe it is night cycle?” Soo-jin said. “Or they got stuck somehow? I had a ship auto-shut its doors on me once.”
“Did it auto-shut, then let you make an emergency call?” Marc said. “And then turn off all the lights?”
“I’m pretty sure my brothers were the ones who turned off the lights.”
Movement through the windows caught her attention. Karin squinted, then sat straighter. “Guys—look. Navigation desk.”
There was a man sitting there, nearly invisible against the dim background and the gray, unlit dashboard controls. He sat up as they loomed closer, face turning toward them.
Marc gripped the back of her chair. “Hail them.”
She was already on it. The call thrummed through the room.
He didn’t move.
She frowned. “Maybe he can’t hear it? Soo—”
“Comms are up.” Soo-jin tapped a few keys. “He should be getting it.”
“Maybe the speakers are broken,” she said. “Marc?”
He shook his head slowly, staring up at the other bridge. “I don’t know. Something doesn’t feel right. It’s too dark.”
Leaning forward, he gestured toward the two switches on the dashboard that controlled the frontal auxiliary lights. “Flash them.”
Karin switched them on.
Five Shadow people twitched at the sudden light, their forms stretched and thin, stark black against the brilliance.
Within seconds, they all scurried out of sight, their movements both snappy and fluid, like spiders or insects, and folded back into the deeper shadow around the sides and aft of the bridge.
“Suns,” Marc breathed.
Across the room, Soo-jin echoed his sentiment: “Motherfucking Suns.”
Karin fought to regain her breath. The ship dipped, drifting as she made a slight lapse in control.
On the Ozark’s bridge, the Shadows had vanished from sight, though she thought she saw movement in the darkness toward the back of the room. Bars of shade crossed over the Ozark’s now well-lit bridge from its structural supports, curving over empty panels and gunmetal-gray flooring. The man watched them from below, his face tracking them as they moved.
“So,” Soo-jin said, her voice about as breathless as Karin felt. “Guessing that our demon attack wasn’t an isolated case.”
“No.” Marc’s arms had returned to his sides, but his figure appeared as rigid as a board, his muscles so tense, Karin could see the tendons strain in the backs of his hands.
“System law allows us to ignore distress calls when our own safety is at risk,” Karin said. “It might be something to consider.”
“Oh, I’m definitely considering it.” His hands clenched at his side, and he made a visible effort to relax them, pushing out a big breath. “Just how far did these things go? I mean—”
“Did anyone see that?” Soo-jin said suddenly. She sat straight in her chair, attention fixed on the ship in front of them.
“The demons?” Karin asked, an eyebrow arching upwards in confusion. “Yes. We saw them. We—”
“No, no—the light.” Soo-jin half-stood, rising out of her chair. “There.”
Marc and Karin turned back to the Ozark, gazes roaming across its bridge.
“Where?”
“Move back. It was on the right, near the wing—” She pointed. “There. You see it?”
Karin shifted the Nemina. They slid over the curve of the Ozark’s nose, engines thrumming at the delicate maneuvering. As she pushed them alongside, a small flash of light caught her eye from one of the windows, no larger than the flare of the scrounging torches they carried.
She brought them even with the porthole, angling the ship to fit beneath the Ozark’s wing.
The window began to flash again.
“Is that a… pattern?” Karin asked.
“Yes.” Marc curled his lip. “Old Morse, I think. Zoom in. Capture it.”
This time, Soo-jin worked the computer. A minute later, they had their video.
“Is that a kid?” Karin asked, squinting at the screen as she held them steady. Soo-jin had freeze-framed it around one of the flashes. A small, pale face looked out of the porthole at them, eyes wide.
“Looks like.”
“What’s he saying?” Karin glanced to Marc. He had already identified the code, so she assumed he knew how to read it.
But it was Soo-jin who replied.
“Help,” she said, a strange emotion scratching her tone. “He’s saying ‘Help.’”
Chapter Seven
“You know, there are times where I wish I were a little more heartless,” Soo-jin said.
Karin glanced up. It was the only thing the woman had said for a few minutes. Given how chatty she was normally, it was odd.
Plus, there was an extra layer of emotion to her tone. Though the sentence itself passed as flippant, the depth she said it with made Karin suspect there was something deeper going on.
But, whatever it was, she doubted she’d get it out of her now. The woman was a closed book, and they hadn’t known each other long enough for Karin to get a look at its cover.
Besides, she had her own shit to deal with. And Soo-jin’s current mood might play right into it.
“You mean ‘heartless enough to leave a kid to the void of space and uncertain, shadowy doom so as to guarantee our own safety’?” Karin asked. “I think I know the feeling.”
She kept her eyes down and her tone careful. That was easy enough—she was still monitoring the ship. It gave her an excuse to have a serious face. The computer gave a small beep of confirmation as it aligned the locking pins between the two ships’ airlocks, and she watched on a side-view camera while the Nemina’s air bridge extended along the track. She tapped her finger against her bicep, mimicking Marc from earlier. He’d left a few minutes ago, saying something about flashlights and firearms.
“You should stay here,” she said. “I’ll go in with Marc.”
“What?”
“You heard me. I’ll go. You work the computer from here. Give us support.”
“Why?”
She glanced over, meeting her eyes. Soo-jin sat next to her, having moved from the sensor station to watch the docking. The light of the screen reflected off her beige skin in highlights of blue. This close, Karin could see the details in the woman’s normally liquid-dark eyes.
“There’s something I want to see,” she said.
Soo-jin’s eyebrows arched. “What the hell do you need to see over there?”
She bit her lip. “It’s something weird. Do you mind?”
Soo-jin threw her hands up in an exaggerated shrug. “Oh, yeah, go for it. I’ll be quite fine with not going on the freaking ghost ship.”
A noise at the door drew their attention back. Marc stood there, the bottom half of his suit in one hand and a crow bar in the other.
He looked between the two of them a minute, then focused on Karin.
“You’re coming?” His eyebrows rose less than a millimeter, but his skepticism reflected in his eyes.
“Yes. That a problem?”
“Not at all. Get ready. I’ll meet you at the airlock in five.”
She nodded, gaze following him as he left the bridge.
Her stomach did a slow flip.
Suns, I hope this isn’t a mistake.
Karin always felt self conscious in air bridges. They were flimsy, unreliable, easy to break—most felt more like one of those hot-air balloons from Old Earth than something formulated within the last hundred years. The competition of the free market had driven the quality and sturdiness down to get ships into affordable price ranges.
They also made her feel like a sitting duck, lit all around, readily visible to the other ship and with nowhere to run.
The Nemina’s bridge was better than most, thanks to its older military build. It had a metal frame instead of prefab, with a kind of doubled, thick
plastic fabric that reminded her of the kevlar vests from Old Earth, or that tough fabric zodiac boats had been made of. It absorbed wear and tear well, though one of the longer scratches was unnerving. The flooring was also sturdy and solid beneath her boots, with only a little give—some air bridges she’d been on felt more like suspensions and seemed to wiggle with every movement.
Some of the lights on the Nemina’s air bridge had burned out, though. They’d been that way for months, but the disjointed light seemed to creep under her skin, and her brain was hyperaware of it.
Maybe she was being paranoid, or oversensitive. But, given what they were about to do, the dead bulbs and asymmetrical lighting felt ominous as she waited for Marc to punch in the override.
The Ozark’s door hissed as the pressure equalized. The systems checker on its interface flashed green.
“Ready?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
A heavy clunk sounded as he disengaged the lock. As part of emergency standards protocol, the Ozark’s broadcast had come embedded with a code that allowed them to override certain parts of the ship’s systems. When they got to the bridge, she could use it to access the log and find out what had happened.
Of course, given the Shadows they’d seen earlier, she was pretty sure she knew exactly what had happened.
The door trundled upward, retracting back into the hull. Pinpricks of unease crawled up her skin at the darkness beyond. It looked thick, as though she could take a piece of it in her hand and squeeze it. The light from their airlock only pushed through a meter or so, illuminating a dim patch of crosshatched metal flooring.
Neither she nor Marc moved, holding their breaths, staring hard into the darkness.
Then, after several long seconds, the running lights began to flicker on, illuminating a quiet, slightly vintage-looking hallway.
A quiet whir on the right indicated that life support had recognized their entry and adjusted its cycle.
Marc let out an exhale. “Suns. This is going to be like a horror movie, isn’t it?”
Karin, fighting to control her racing pulse, nodded. “Yep. Let’s go. Quick like a grass-snake?”
“I think I prefer slow on this one.” He stepped over the threshold, blaster at the ready. They’d left their suits behind, both agreeing that they’d rather have the ability to run and move fast than have the suits’ clunky bulk slow them down. Instead, they’d improvised with some utility belts from the engine room to hold their tools. Marc wore the shoulder holster for his blaster, though he carried the gun in his hand, raised as he crept up the corridor.
They paused at the first junction, a T-shaped hallway whose corridor split equally in both directions, and took a moment to look.
The Ozark was not a pretty vessel. Like the Nemina, it had been built for practicality rather than looks—but, somehow, it managed to look even worse. Where the Nemina’s ugliness was curtailed by its small size, its practicality taking on a kind of quaint, ship-packed charm, the Ozark was not small. In fact, it was huge. Dull, gray-painted metal hallways stretched out on either side of them, likely running the full length of the ship.
Twenty people, Soo-jin had said. On a ship this big, that was a skeleton crew. What had they been doing out here? Running a pick-up?
“Soo-jin, close the door behind us,” Marc said over the radio. “I don’t want anyone sneaking up on you.”
“Yeah, Sol that,” came the response.
A second later, they heard the roll of metal as the Ozark’s door began to track back into place.
“Right.” Marc pulled up the ship’s schematics on his helmet display, a square of light appearing on its surface. “Let’s find the kid first. Maybe he can tell us about the guy on the bridge. You got the map up?”
With a twitch of her fingers, she brought the image up on her visor. “Yep.”
“Good. If we get separated...” He glanced down the hall, back toward the door. “Meet here, unless it’s compromised.”
“And if it’s compromised?” she asked.
“We…” He paused, glancing around, considering the space. “Improvise.”
Uh huh. She forced a tight smile. “Let’s try not to get separated.”
“Agreed.”
He led the way to the left, finding a cramped stairwell partway down the hall and, with a quick hiss-click of doors, following his gun down it. According to what they had figured from the ship’s schematics, the kid was several floors away from the airlock—provided, of course, he hadn’t moved in the interim.
Karin’s jaw tightened at the thought. Moving door to door, searching for a lost, possibly running away child was not something she wanted to do. Not here. Not now.
Tension trailed up her skin. The ship was nearly silent around them. Only the tap of their boots, the clicks and creaks of their belts, and the slight hum from the lighting system interrupted the quiet. The floor and walls looked scuffed and smudged. Ingrained dirt and a noticeable wear pattern on the steps and railings told her they had seen a lot of use, though she wasn’t sure how recently. Even with time, and a dedicated laser-cleaning robot, some dirt proved just too ground in to remove.
Marc paused at the next landing. Karin, partway up the stairs, held still as he cocked his head to listen through the door.
“Anything?” she asked.
“Just my stomach,” he said, reaching for the console. “Like I said, this place—”
With his hand still in the air, the console flashed green. The door hissed open in his face.
He yelled, jumped back, readying his blaster—
And then brought it up short.
Nothing was there.
He took in a heavy breath, then blew it out, straightening as he relaxed his stance.
“Horror movie,” he repeated. “This place is like a horror movie.”
“No kidding.” She forced herself to relax the death grip she’d made on her crow bar, pretty sure that, if she looked, her knuckles would be bone-white. “Electrical glitch? Maybe it’s wired to sense people coming, so you just have to get close, not touch it?”
She’d seen some of those on other ships, though most people preferred the touch sensors. Either the wave sensors were only motion sensors, and tended to open at any kind of movement, including drafts and changes in lighting, or they were fully-secure scanners capable of identifying whoever approached, much more expensive than the simple touch-and-read sensors that were most common.
“I’m assuming ghosts, at this point,” he said with a dry tone. “Soo-jin, anything happening over there?”
“All quiet. Enjoying the radio play, actually,” came the reply, her voice sounding surprisingly clear over the comms—clearly the Nemina had better recording and broadcasting capabilities than their exoplanet suits.
“Good.” He stepped through the corridor, leveraging his gun again. “Let us know if anything changes.”
“Aye-aye, capitan.”
They moved into the corridor, fanning out to cover both directions. The hall stretched out on either side, as dead and empty as the last one.
“Where is everyone?” Karin asked.
“Binge-watching Moon Sailor in the rec room, I hope.”
She snorted. “That might explain why they didn’t answer our call.”
Moon Sailor, a cross-genre blend of spy thriller, murder mystery, and interstellar romance, was the longest-running soap opera human history had ever produced. Someone once calculated that, if you took in all the spin-offs, webisodes, and holiday specials and watched them end to end without stop, you’d be going for more than a decade, non-stop.
Of course, on a long haul in space, there was plenty of downtime.
She doubted the crewmembers of the Ozark were on a binge, though. Not when they’d found Shadows on the bridge.
He checked his map, then indicated the space ahead of him. “The kid should be around here.”
The hall stretched out a short distance, then ended in a sharp right turn. Several doors marked
the walls, the light on their consoles a steady red glow.
Marc snorted, stepping forward. “Maybe they’ll all open at once. Give me another heart attack.”
They checked them as they went. By Soo-jin’s estimation, they weren’t quite on the spot, but there was always the chance that their guess at the schematic had been wrong, or that the kid had moved. The first door Karin opened was a closet. The usual mops, vacuums, and buckets cluttered the tiny space, loose from their zero-grav holders. A couple of small cleaning robots sat on the floor, though by the bangs and dents on their surface and the thick layer of dust on their tops, she doubted they had seen any action in a while.
The second and third doors led to mixed living quarters, both empty with their beds and desks folded back and locker keys magnetized to a strip on the wall—but the fourth room looked to have been inhabited. Two of the beds had been pulled down, one with rumpled bedding that draped half onto the floor, the other stacked with boxes and cases.
Her attention lingered on the bedding, the beam of her flashlight shivering as she followed its crumpled mess back to the bed. She remembered the night when the creature had attacked, how she’d struggled, how the sheets had tangled around her feet…
She shook the sudden shiver from her spine, pushed the feeling back, and did another quick sweep of the room. A glance to the porthole showed the underside of the Ozark’s wing, where she had held the Nemina when they’d been looking at the light.
She backed out of the room. “We should be getting close. Maybe if we—”
“Karin,” Marc said, his voice strained. “Come here. Quick.”
He stood at the end of the corridor, stock-still, staring into the next hallway.
She picked up her pace.
When she got to the corner, she almost dropped the crowbar.
About fifteen people stood in the next hall, dead silent, all facing a door in the right-hand wall. It wasn’t a very wide space, and they weren’t crowding each other like she’d seen people do on the inner-city trains back on Enlil or Belenus, but they didn’t spread out very far—maybe a couple of meters in either direction.
