HUSH

by Craig Robert Saunders

  HUSH

  by

  Craig Robert Saunders

  Copyright © 2019 Craig Robert Saunders

  All characters in this novel are fictitious and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover or format other than that in which it is published and without similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchase.

  This 1st Edition 2019

  Cover Art. Lettering and Design © 2019 Craig Robert Saunders

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE

  HUSH

  1.

  Ulrich Bale

  2.

  The Crypt

  3.

  Anna

  4.

  Pioneers and Exiles

  5.

  Something to Hold in your Hand

  6.

  Hush Speaks

  7.

  Ulrich Bale and the Crew

  8.

  Dr. Lian Skerry

  9.

  Anna and Lian

  10.

  Jin and Anna

  PART TWO

  DAWN

  11.

  Cassie Kiyobashi and Ayobami

  12.

  Once Reluctant Enemies

  13.

  Blue Sun Dawning

  14.

  Djima Kanado

  15.

  The Ones to Watch

  16.

  Doctor’s Assessment

  17.

  Brief and to the Point

  18.

  White Fire

  19.

  Outside the Shield, and Inside

  20.

  Death Stripped Bare

  21.

  Endless Ice

  PART THREE

  BORN

  22.

  Jin That Was

  23.

  Rhetoric

  24.

  To Ashok

  25.

  The First and Last

  26.

  Rebirth

  27.

  Indochina Falls

  28.

  The End of Coeus

  29.

  Reward

  30.

  Neither to Save nor Serve

  31.

  E Pluribus Unum

  PART FOUR

  COLD

  32.

  Dark Light

  33.

  The Silver Dollar

  34.

  Short on Time

  35.

  Crevasse

  36.

  Sculptor of Motions

  37.

  Taking up the Gun

  38.

  No one Dies

  39.

  Death of a Ship

  40.

  Fallen Drone

  PART FIVE

  LIES

  41.

  The Company Rules

  42.

  New Doorways

  43.

  Darkness Brightens

  44.

  Weapons Cold

  45.

  The Perfection of the Dead

  46.

  Quiet Lies

  47.

  Misplaced Gratitude

  48.

  A Place for Calm Reflection

  49.

  The Wood for the Trees

  50.

  Warden’s Stave AP

  51.

  Cannibal

  52.

  Live or Let Die?

  53.

  The Dead Man’s Face

  54.

  Light to See by and Light to Blind

  PART SIX

  KIND

  55.

  Anna Wakes Again

  56.

  Citadel

  57.

  What Becomes One?

  58.

  The Titans Return

  59.

  To the Heart of the Kind

  60.

  Phobos Class

  61.

  The Giants of War

  62.

  Dig

  63.

  Anna’s Purpose

  64.

  Willing to Die

  65.

  Ghost

  66.

  The Finality of Peace

  PART SEVEN

  HOME

  67.

  Turn your Face to a Distant Sun

  CAST

  PART ONE

  Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.

  -

  Carl Sagan.

  HUSH

  1.

  Ulrich Bale

  The Cabin

  Castaic Lake

  Earth

  2351 A.D.

  Ulrich Bale limped heavily to an old stump, then thumped down onto it. His hip poured blood and his old, worn face was drawn with loss and pain and tiredness. The three men who had taken away the one person he loved were before him, zip-lock tied. None were gagged. He didn’t care what they said.

  She was dead because Dig wanted her dead.

  Dig’s blood was drying on the floorboards in the cabin behind Ulrich.

  The knife that killed Dig, and soon these men, had been with Ulrich since his thirteenth birthday. An heirloom, looked after, handed down from grandfather to son. It was a thing, and he did not love it. You can’t love a thing, or an act, Ulrich figured. You could only love people.

  ‘You’re going to die. You know that.’

  Ulrich held out a small inhaler. About the size of his thumb. Pressurised X-S. Heightened sensitivity to light, sound, sensation.

  ‘This can make death last and feel like the opposite of love. I loved her. Don’t know if you understand that. I don’t know you at all. Dig tells you to kill, you kill.’ Ulrich shrugged. ‘It’s a job. Dig told me to kill, I killed. People who loved and were loved in return. I didn’t care. Same as you, I guess.’

  ‘I’ll talk,’ said one. ‘Dig’s dead. Fuck it.’

  ‘I don’t have any questions. You understand?’

  The man eyed the knife in the sheath. The two others glared. Ulrich understood – you’re going to die, you can scream or cry or beg, doesn’t make any difference. Everyone had their own way to go. Ways they thought they’d go and the ways they went weren’t always the same.

  ‘This knife, you know...’ He took his knife from the sheath. ‘It’s old. Just steel, I think. I don’t know. Everything’s complicated now. Lasers and ceramics and things I never really wanted to understand. It’s a knife. Doesn’t need to be complicated. Been sharpened so much it was probably thicker, longer. I made a new sheath. Old one was too long.’

  ‘Ulrich? Please. I got a wife, too.’

  ‘Fuck, man,’ said one of the tough guys. ‘You’re begging? Shut the fuck up. Ulrich, just get it done. Nobody gives a fuck about your knife. You’re wife’s dead, we all did it, we all get it. Do what you got to.’

  ‘Quiet a minute. I’m telling you something. Something important. See, this is around four hundred years old...’

  ‘Fucking...’

  Ulrich sighed. He didn’t really want to get up ‘til he had to, but...

  Does it matter?

  Maybe not, but he wanted it how he wanted it. He’d figured this on the way back from the cabin. Played it out in his mind. Guy was like a heckler, ruining it for Ulrich.

  He pushed up, weaker than he should have been, took a few steps and smashed the fist with the knife clenched tightly in it into the man’s throat – fist o
nly – and now the guy couldn’t talk. Gagging, sure, but not dead, so at least they weren’t words. Like someone with a cough in the audience, not a heckler. Impersonal, a more unavoidable kind of interruption Ulrich could live with.

  The other two shut up. The one who begged looked afraid, which didn’t matter, and the one who stayed quiet didn’t start crying or anything.

  Ulrich’s clothes were soaked with his own blood. There was only a rolled shirt and duct tape stemming the flow from the wound in his hip. His back, his arm and his leg’d been hit, too, but none of his injuries were bad enough to let the three men slide.

  ‘It’s been through wars,’ said Ulrich, brandishing the blade. ‘Like me. You...maybe? I don’t know. You look young. But it’s been cared for. Like it was important. Maybe the handle’s two hundred years old. I don’t know. But it’s sharpened, oiled, maintained. It was important to someone. I still oil it, sharpened it. If it gets wet, I dry it. I oil it. I look after it.’

  ‘Come on, man. Dig’s dead. It’s done.’

  ‘It’s not done,’ said Ulrich. He stared at the man who spoke, then the other two. The quiet one, the talkative one, and the one who was retching with a smashed windpipe.

  He dropped the sheath on the ground, his stance lop-sided. He wasn’t so worried about the pain so much as maybe passing out and not doing what he had to do.

  Early morning mist hung on the lake in calm and still air, the woods around them all quiet so far. Not even wildlife with anything to spoil Ulrich’s soliloquy.

  Ulrich clamped the X-S inhaler between his teeth and squeezed to release the gas, drawing it deep inside his lungs.

  ‘Don’t know. Maybe there’s a point to the story, you know? Maybe if you look after things, they last.’

  Ulrich felt his heart race, thumping crazily, then, everything began to slow. His movements, his speech slowed and slurred but that was only to his ears.

  ‘Yeah. I think that’s it. This,’ he said, and dropped the inhaler to one side, ‘Isn’t for you.’

  The inhaler still seemed to be falling while he spoke. Time, sound, everything tuned up, crisp. Vision, hearing, taste, and even time all seemingly boosted a thousand fold.

  ‘Why waste the extra time? You’re going to be dead. You won’t carry the scars, the knowledge, the pain...can’t. Can’t carry it long enough.’ It felt as though the words bit the inside of his mouth as he spoke. He saw his rage-filled spittle fly from his mouth while he spoke, hanging in the air before the men’s faces. The knife was still in his fist, rising.

  ‘Blame should be heavy, shouldn’t it?’

  Ulrich’s eyes glazed, and then he put the point of his old knife to his own right eye.

  ‘Just...I don’t know. It’s important, I guess. Important you know I killed her, not you.’

  He pushed the blade in. His left eye looked out at the mist on the water while he blinded his right eye with that old, cared-for blade. His left eye watered, and he cried. The pain was his, and it was heavy, but it wasn’t as heavy as knowing he’d killed her.

  These three, Dig, they’d done the work, but it was Ulrich who’d set it, wasn’t it?

  I’m sorry, he thought. That thought kept him awake through the pain of sliding that sliver-thin blade into his eye until all he could see was a waterfall of sorrow and tears on his left side.

  The pain was slow, the knife sharp, every movement agony, and he deserved every part of it.

  Vitreous jelly and tangled nerves and muck dripping peacefully onto his bloodied shirt like snow, or a feather, might, should it fall from the sky. Ulrich swayed, but he didn’t pass out.

  ‘That was for me,’ he said. ‘My guilt...my burden...my...’

  The X-S slowed everything, confused everything, clarified everything and sped it along, too, until experience and action, thought and word, were near instant and a billion years apart.

  The pain was brilliant. His missing eye screamed. No one else did. Killing didn’t hurt.

  *

  Ulrich’s breath hitched in his chest as his heart jumped back to life after his long, frozen sleep aboard the dark ship Hush. It was the same dream, the same memory, each and every time. The dream was always languid, like the X-S remained in his sleeping mind to remind him how some things should be slow and heavy and last forever. Awake, the hole in his face was there to remind him who he’d been, and would always be. The dream was there in case he should forget while he slumbered.

  *

  2.

  The Crypt

  The Crypt/Hold B5-3

  HUSH (Colony Ship/Interstellar/Pioneer Class)

  2472 A.D.

  Ulrich woke in the same glass container which had put him to sleep when he left Earth. Glass-like shell, though not strictly glass or it would have cracked apart when he was frozen. A sarcophagus – cryogen – no different to him than if he’d been buried in cold dirt and then dragged out. Fey as magic. Some kind of winter necromancy.

  He was cold, and his limbs didn’t want to work just yet. Ice covered the glass shell, and still clung to the sheer surface as his sleeping tomb cracked open with the hiss of air venting, cold, hitting the sterile and bland air which filled Hush’s slumbering chambers. Systems lit up, blinking and bright indicators and readings telling someone he lived again. Ulrich was free but didn’t, yet, move.

  ‘It’s important. I guess,’ he said, and it wasn’t him speaking but the echo of the only dream he had left to him, as slow to fade as his limbs were to wake.

  Frozen, perhaps millions of miles from Earth...and the guilt and memory of his part in his wife’s death was still as heavy as it’d ever been.

  It wasn’t her laughing, or the time they spent at the lake away from Dig, and work, and killing. It wasn’t the war that came before it all. It wasn’t childhood, or a puppy, or even the faces of all those he’d killed. No, there was only one true memory for him. It was always that moment.

  How many years did I sleep? How long was the dream?

  He wondered, slowly rousing, while the endless, looped memory unspooled, glitches and jitters scratching at it ‘til it was hardly there, broken pixels dancing, blue and red and green dots on his retinas, then, gone.

  The temperature inside the sarcophagus rose by steady increments, and Ulrich’s systems in concert with those around him. Tubes pumped stimulants, relaxants, nutrients into his body. Cannulas were withdrawn from his blackened skin, flesh turning grey and shades through darkest purple to Ulrich’s natural hue. Outside the sarcophagus red strobe lights pulsed on, off, on. Ulrich blinked his one eye. Some kind of crust, on his eye or on the glass of the shell. Everything was blurred and indistinct – all his thoughts and senses were sluggish as a frozen wave. The memory-dream of that X-S moment to this slow waking was stark and shocking as the chill.

  Other colonists aboard the colony-ship Hush woke around him and from those other waking souls came terrible screams and fear, sounds that bounced around from the hard walls, and corridors, and high ceilings, ‘til they grew to fill the chamber in which he woke.

  Augmented humans who’d been awakened before general population by Hush already watched over the waking, frozen dead. Drone sentinels, matt-surfaced and blank dark metal knight-helms which had stood a long vigil hummed and buzzed. They roamed Hush’s pristine halls while the dead slept. The drones remained in far better shape than their cargo. The cargo might not have aged, but while those drones had not rested they looked just the same to Ulrich as they had the day he lay down in his cold bed.

  Ulrich puffed out his first breath, frosting before his face, still blinking. He tried out his first word, one of those floating helmets hovering above him.

  ‘Fuck,’ he managed. Then, almost as an afterthought, a short-breathed, wheezing, ‘off.’

  He didn’t like the things. He wasn’t keen on any of this future.

  Had he imagined they would be dusty, rusted, sparking and shorting, or gyros broken, ramming themselves into the ship’s walls?

  Ulrich didn’t
understand augmentations, or robotics, and nothing of space at all.

  He never wanted the universe. It always seemed too large a thing to wish for.

  It was five minutes, perhaps, from when the seal broke on Ulrich’s sarcophagus and the chill air vented, before his limbs moved at all. People cried from the pain of waking and their pain was hard on the ear. He didn’t scream. He’d heard worse, probably would again, and any pain he might feel wasn’t for sharing.

  Ulrich cracked the discs in his neck, backward, forward, side to side. Rolled his shoulders, moved his fingers, then flexed his feet. When he was about as limber as he was likely to get he swung up, letting his feet hang to the cold flooring of their ship. The bobbing, disembodied head of the drone floated back.

  Come on, he told himself, like he had so many times in his years. Pain didn’t matter. Not giving in? That did. That mattered.

  He stood, knees and hips and back cracking, sparks of pain from his neck dimming his vision and momentarily numbing his forefingers and thumb. He closed his eye, took a slow, steady breath, let the pain do what pain did, and then put it aside.

  He looked himself over and found nothing frostbitten, no limbs dead, and all the skin he was used to just where it had been when he’d gone to sleep in it. Sight returned to normal. His perception was off, but Ulrich’s perception probably hadn’t been the same as most people’s even before he took his eye.

  Here he was. An old soldier, a criminal, the guilty and the naked. Ulrich was coded and chipped like everyone else on Hush. Hush, a giant, out here somewhere in the depths of space. They – passengers at Hush’s sufferance – were all free of Earth, of prison or of a death sentence. All now beholden only to a ship with a mind, a leviathan in the black seas he didn’t begin to understand.

  For Ulrich, stuck in the belly of Hush, it was still as close to freedom as he’d known for a very, very long time.

  He was a man with the necessary temperament and skill set sent some place he might do some good.

  At least, that was how they sold it – space or death.

  The Company’s sales pitch had been damn near perfect.

  *

  Ulrich paced around his sarcophagus while he and a drone watched each other; him with his one eye, the drone with no eyes that Ulrich could see. While Ulrich paced he shifted his toes and then his heels, trying to understand something of the ship around him. Like taking his shoes off to walk on grass, to feel Earth beneath him. Here, there was nothing. The sense of the ship that returned to Ulrich through the soles of his feet was just about...nothing. He felt the same level of affinity for his surrounds as he might hold for a chair, or mug.