by Darren Beyer
Again she listened, and now she could identify the direction of the voices. Abruptly she turned to run the opposite way—
And ran straight into a wall of black.
Looking up, she stared into the dark mask of a very large-armed man. Her arms were suddenly pinned from behind, and a cloth bag was thrown over her head.
Quick breaths drew the hood against Mandi’s mouth as her captors guided her across the dry, loose ground. With her arms secured awkwardly behind her back in her ill-fitting pressure suit, a few stumbles nearly brought her to her knees, but strong hands kept her from falling. In just minutes, sweat ran down her face, and her body became drenched. Between the heavy suit and light atmosphere, Mandi felt as though she were climbing Mount Everest.
After a time, Mandi was assisted onto some sort of vehicle and held fast by people on both sides. The bumpy ride that followed jarred her to the bone, but she welcomed the small amount of wind that found its way through the cloth hood to cool her face.
After one last heavy jolt, the vehicle drove onto a smooth surface, then down a long ramp. At the bottom, the grade leveled, and the vehicle came to a stop. She could hear the hum of machinery, the knocks and bangs of mechanics at work, and occasional unintelligible loud voices. The echoes suggested they had entered a large interior space.
Hands under her arms pulled Mandi from the vehicle and ushered her forward. Sounds were all around her now, and she focused on “seeing” with her ears and other senses. The floor was smooth and hard, like concrete, and it was dirty—she could feel the grit through her boots.
The piercing screech of a power grinder briefly drowned out the mechanical hum. A hand pushed her head down as they passed through a door that creaked loudly, then the door latched behind her, and the cacophony was reduced to muffled clatter.
Dim, artificial yellow light now filtered through Mandi’s hood, and the reverberations of the larger area were replaced with softer echoes of a hallway. After a long walk involving a couple of turns, she was taken into a room—her head being pushed down once again as they passed through the door—and set down into a chair. Footsteps left the room, and the door latched behind them.
Sophia had drilled into Mandi to slow her breathing, close her eyes, and open her mind while listening to the mass sensors. Even though the mask let in almost no light, Mandi closed her eyes. Letting out a long, slow breath, she listened, letting the pervasive hum of machinery fall away. Like the background signals in space, it served only to mask what she listened for. Just as when she’d detected signals on both Dauntless and her latest, unnamed ship, she listened for patterns. And as clearly as if she were wearing a headset connected to a sensor system, she heard a repeating sound. Someone breathed quietly, a meter away at most.
“I know you’re there.”
The breathing changed pace, then steadied again.
“Keeping quiet won’t change the fact that I know you’re there. I’m sure there are others listening in, but you’re here with me, which means you’re the one who’ll be asking the questions. I’m tired. I’m thirsty. I’m out of patience. Start talking.”
Mandi heard a man’s deep-throated breath, then the creak of his chair as he shifted his weight.
“Who are you, and what have you done to our ship?” he said.
Mandi jumped at the voice, then anger and frustration replaced her alarm.
“Holy hell. Not this again. I told them—I told your people on the ship. Someone ambushed us on Ouricsen, and they must have followed us here.”
“That’s not possible. I will not ask again. Who are you, and what have you done to our ship?”
“It is possible.” Mandi shook her head in frustration. “And my name—my name is Mandi Nkosi, and I went to Ouricsen with Jans Mikel to find you.”
Seconds passed with no answer. “Did you hear what I said?”
The latch clicked, and the room’s door swung open. The mask was pulled from Mandi’s head, and she squinted in the room’s yellow lighting. In front of her stood a Middle-Eastern man, his gray hair and close-cut beard betraying his age. Cocking his head, he scrutinized her face.
“What?” Mandi’s voice was sharp.
The man’s mouth turned upward in a grin, and he nodded to another man to Mandi’s right, who moved behind her and cut her bonds.
“You have her looks.” He handed Mandi a plastic water bottle. “Your mother, that is. I used to work with her.” His smile grew. “I am Nassir—Nassir Khalid.”
Mandi’s mouth dropped open.
“Now, I need you to take off that suit and come with me to talk about what happened up there.”
“There’s not a lot to it. We were attacked by a ship. It’s using a—”
Nassir silenced her with a raised hand, and she frowned.
“Please save your words. Others need to hear them as well, and we don’t have the time for you to say them twice. Our presence here is a secret. If there is indeed a ship up there, it is imperative we keep it from leaving.”
“Isn’t it a little late for that?” Mandi looked to Nassir. “They must’ve shot off a jump pod by now.”
Nassir cocked his head and furrowed his forehead. “Oh, of course, you wouldn’t know. That big orange sun in the sky is the star Iota Ceti. We are out of jump pod range.”
“Out of range of what?”
“My dear, we are nearly three hundred light years from Earth. We are out of range of everything.”
Chapter 43: Eridani
A buzzing sound pulled Erik from his slumber. Sitting bolt upright in his bed, he snatched his handheld comm from the table next to him. Anyone risking his wrath by calling him so late must have something important to tell. Squinting, he recognized the manager of the Pathogen security team.
“Yes?”
“A tripwire has been triggered at the facility network firewall.” Erik’s ears perked up.
“We tried backtracking, but the trail went cold at the first hop out.”
“The first hop—the communications platform?”
“Yes, sir. Whatever triggered it must also be running some sort of bot that scrubbed the logs.”
“Wouldn’t that require the bot to be run locally at the platform?”
“It would, but we ran a diagnostic and found nothing unusual.”
Erik rubbed his chin and stared at the man through the comm.
“Send me all the logs. I want inbound and outbound traffic, access logs, everything.” He paused. “Do we have any cameras on the communications platform?”
The officer turned his attention to someone nearby, then looked back to the comm. “We have two—due to be installed next month.”
Erik flattened his mouth in frustration. “Get all the drone footage, logs, everything ready for me.” He cut the call and cursed under his breath.
Without bothering to clean himself up, Erik dressed and hurried to his holo screen. The facility’s footage and data logs began to arrive, and at superhuman speed, he scanned them. Everything in the logs was as his security head had told him—he would find nothing new in them. He accessed the video footage, and his eyes darted rapidly across the screen as four videos played simultaneously at three times normal speed.
With the quickness of a snake striking its prey, Erik reached into the screen and brought the playback to a halt. He reversed it to a point where one of the drones had crested a ridge and sped into the valley beyond, then looped back to survey the slope it had passed by. The drone’s automated detection routines had missed it. The drone operators had missed it. But to Erik, it was clear as day. Someone had traversed the slope about midway up, and there—Erik zoomed in— there was someone in highly effective camouflage, lying motionless. He slammed his fists so hard on the table that it cracked. His stomach knotted, and he closed his eyes until the feeling of anger passed. Then he called Karis.
“We have a physical breach at our Pathogen facility. Get our best security team together and prepare transport—quickly and quietly. We’re go
ing there—tonight!”
Chapter 44: Iota Ceti
Mandi had barely cast her pressure suit aside when Nassir ducked down to leave through the room’s unusually short doorway.
He leaned his head back in. “Are you coming?”
“Oh—yes. Of course.”
Nassir’s footsteps echoed as he retreated down the hall. Mandi hurried after him.
The dim yellow lighting failed to hide the facility’s decrepit condition. The plain gray cement walls had crumbled in spots, leaving them rough and pockmarked. Mandi had to step over bits of rubble as she hurried to catch up with Nassir.
“Where are we going?”
“Come, please.”
Nassir turned to one of the many metal doors lining the hall and led Mandi into a crowded room. The walls were lined with hundreds of charts, sketches, and old black-and-white pictures. Old-fashioned corkboards held uncountable more, stuck in with thumbtacks and pins. On the floor, boxes overflowed with stacks of paper. It looked like an old-style police station in the middle of an investigation. More than a dozen men and women sat working at tables, and as Mandi entered, talking ceased, and all eyes turned to her. Had one of the pins fallen off a board, she would have heard it hit the floor.
“This is our research office,” Nassir said to her. “Everyone, please gather around.” His people made their way to him, their wary eyes locked on Mandi. “This is Mandi. She has come to us at great expense, to both her and us, from the remnants of Applied Interstellar Corporation.” Mandi saw many of the faces soften. “Undoubtedly, she has quite a story to tell, and I’m sure you will all want to get time with her. But right now, we need to know what happened to our ship in orbit, and the preceding events.” Nassir looked to her. “Start with what happened on Ouricsen, if you would.”
Mandi swallowed nervously. “We—we went to Ouricsen Station—to the meeting place, as we were instructed. But TSI had beaten us there. I didn’t know it at the time, but one of them—he has a scar across his eye and cheek.” She traced her finger along her own face. “I called him Scarface. He was there, waiting.”
Nassir’s eyes narrowed, and others in the room showed reactions ranging from fear to anger.
Mandi caught Nassir’s gaze. “You know him?”
“I gave him the scar.”
Mandi didn’t ask for details. “A few hours later a message was slipped to us to meet in a cargo bay, but we didn’t make it. Scarface and three of his men trapped us. Then, well… everything started to happen.”
Nassir raised an eyebrow. “Everything? Please be more specific.”
“Sorry, of course. The lights went out, alarms started going off, and the fire suppression system filled the hallway with gas. We couldn’t see more than a meter at most. It let us escape Scarface, and that’s when Hatim showed up and got us out of there. He said another of your people had hacked into the station’s control systems, and set all that stuff off. Scarface chased us through the station, and we thought we were done, but the governor came to our aid.”
“Governor Ennis helped you?” Nassir sounded genuinely surprised.
Mandi nodded. “He gave us a rover and access to a launch vehicle. Jans, Hatim, and I escaped in it, but we were chased. On the way to the launcher, we learned that our ship was destroyed, so Hatim called your ship in.” Mandi paused to compose herself. “We made it to the launcher, but Scarface’s team showed up before Jans was on board. He knew we wouldn’t get out if we waited for him, so instead he drove the rover right at them—to slow them down. They fired a missile. It hit—and Jans…”
Shock registered on Nassir’s face and on those of the assembled researchers.
“Is Jans dead?” Nassir asked.
Mandi couldn’t bring herself to say the words. She wrapped her arms around herself and shook her head.
“Mandi, I’m sorry, but this is important. Is Jans dead?”
She took another moment before answering. “I don’t know. After he was hit, he called out over his comm. I just don’t know.”
Nassir sighed. “I see.” He paused. “Please, continue.”
Mandi looked around the room at all the faces. “We launched, Hatim and I, but then we were also hit. It blew a hole in the ship, and Hatim was sucked out. It was everything I could do to keep from following him. The ship still made it to orbit, but we were way off where we were supposed to be. The only air I had was in my pressure suit, so I had no choice but to put out a distress call—and your ship picked me up.”
“Let’s skip to today—what happened here, in orbit.”
“I—I was on the bridge, with the Yosef and… and the pilot. I’m sorry, he never told me his name.”
“It’s okay,” Nassir said.
Mandi nodded. “We were going to contact you, but the pilot said there were communications problems, like we were being jammed. And that’s when he mentioned a sensor issue—an NMO alert. Debris that kept showing as a threat, even after the pilot moved the ship. I’d seen this before. I warned them, and we maneuvered to run, but it was too late. They were too close, and when we tried to get away, they attacked.”
“Attacked by something that looked like a piece of debris?” Nassir asked.
“At AIC, they call it mass dampening.”
“Mass dampening?” a woman asked.
“It’s like stealth technology for mass sensors. It reduces a ship’s mass signature to the point of being nearly invisible to sensors.”
Voices and grumbles sounded throughout the group.
“I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
“That’s not possible!”
Nassir raised a hand to quiet them.
“It’s not just possible,” Mandi continued, “it’s real. I’ve listened to it on mass sensors, and I’ve been on a ship that used it.” Murmurs grew. “AIC has this technology. We used it to dodge the entire Coalition fleet. And TSI has it too.”
“How did the attack come?” Nassir asked.
“We were hit by something—I don’t know what. It disabled the engines and sent us into a tumble. Then they breached the hull. The pilot…” Mandi fought back the tears. “The pilot was closest. He was sucked out. Two of them, in armored suits, came in shooting. Yosef was hit— twice, I think. I made it to the lifeboat; he didn’t. The next thing I knew, the lifeboat picked up your landing beacon, and delivered me here.”
“So there’s an enemy ship in orbit right now.” Nassir was confirming for the assembled people what he already knew.
“Unless it’s left in the past few hours, yes.”
Another murmur ran through the group, this one tinged with alarm.
“Quiet, please.” Nassir’s commanding voice silenced the room. He turned to Mandi. “How could it be that a ship followed you in?”
“Sophia figured out how to track where a wormhole leads based on neutrinos or something. If she figured it out, then others could have done it, too.”
A man in the back of the room spoke up. “Or one of our people on Ouricsen talked.”
“We can’t let them leave,” said another man, sounding panicked. “They’ll tell everyone about us!”
Then everyone began speaking at once, and mostly in Arabic. The room filled with a confusing din.
Exhausted and dehydrated, Mandi tuned it all out. Her mind floated into a familiar and, for the moment, comfortable place. The sounds of discussion faded, and the shapes of the people blurred and melded together in a swirl of muted colors. Mandi hadn’t felt this since she’d left the Eridani system. It was like the Anghazi had followed her. As if to accentuate the point, the ouroboros flashed across her vision. It was different than before—the snake was more squat and thick, the head was rounded and sporting oversized fangs. And the sensation was different as well. Less organized and not as intense—though it still kept Mandi from fully focusing. The symbol would lose its form only to coalesce again, creating the unpleasant sensation of motion sickness.
A loud clap made the symbol evaporate, and Mandi�
�s vision filled with a mottled gray. Another clap transformed the gray to blurred forms.
“Mandi!” Nassir’s face came into focus. “Mandi, come back to us!”
“I’m okay.” Mandi felt her senses returning, and she realized she was on her back on the floor, with Nassir leaning over her. “I’m okay.”
With Nassir’s help, she rose to a sitting position.
“I haven’t felt like that since…” She stopped herself from saying too much.
“Since?” Nassir looked her in the eye. “Since leaving an icy moon of Ascension? Since you were with the Anghazi?”
Mandi couldn’t hide her surprise. “How did you know?”
“I didn’t, but I assumed. Ascension is the only gas giant in the Eridani system.” Nassir took a deep breath. “And of the very few habitable planets we know of, each has an Anghazi that has grown on an icy moon orbiting a gas giant in the same system.”
The revelation took Mandi’s breath away. “You mean there’s one here, too?”
Nassir answered with a slow nod. “Like your mother, you have the gift.”
“I’m not sure I’d call it that.” Mandi scowled and struggled to stand. “But how could I get affected here? We’re not on a moon around a gas giant.”
“No. Our Anghazi in this system—she’s trying to reach you.”
“How does she even know I’m here? And how can she reach me?”
“There’s too much to go through now.”
“I need to know. The Anghazi at Ascension—the moon’s called Helios, by the way—if you listen to my mother, she could have killed me.”
Nassir paused. His gaze wandered to others in the room, some of whom nodded. “Look around you,” he said, returning his attention to Mandi. “The walls, the floor.”
Mandi did so, noting the same pockmarked cement walls, ceiling, and floor she’d seen in the halls. They reminded her of something out of an old World War II movie.
