River of Pain

by Christopher Golden

“Mishap,” he said, the word sounding like profanity to his ears.

  Blank-faced, all of the scientists in the room just stared back at him. Only Russell and Dr. Hidalgo had the good sense to look slightly uncomfortable.

  Brackett turned to Simpson.

  “Get the heavy-crawler outside.”

  “It’s ready to go,” Simpson replied.

  “Fine. Call Sergeant Coughlin. Tell him he’s got three minutes to pick five marines and meet me at my quarters.”

  He turned and strode back into the corridor.

  Mishap, he thought.

  Welcome to Acheron, indeed.

  8

  STORMS SEEN AND UNSEEN

  DATE: 10 JUNE, 2179

  TIME: 1232

  Anne and Russ Jorden strode down the corridor side by side, connected by long years of marriage and a web of tension that chained them to each other even as it forced them apart. Anne hated the sound of her husband’s heavy footfalls, the way he seemed to stalk the floor when angry. She could feel the anxiety coming off him in waves, and it made her want to run away.

  If only there were some place to which she could have fled, just for a little while, to regain her sense of self. But where could she have gone inside the colony of Hadley’s Hope where Russ wouldn’t be able to find her? Or where she wouldn’t be intruded upon by well-meaning friends?

  Nowhere.

  “Still want to eat?” he asked, the words short and clipped, as if he’d barely opened his mouth to speak.

  “If you’re hungry,” she replied warily. They’d planned to check with Simpson about the Finch brothers and then go to the mess hall for lunch. Now she had a stomach full of what seemed to be warring factions of butterflies.

  “Game room, then?” Russ asked.

  Still monosyllabic. Anxiety was giving way to anger. It made her want to punch him. Anne loved her husband from the scruff on his unshaven chin down to his almost comically skinny ankles. Over the years they had laughed so much together. They’d been courageous, and sometimes a little crazy. They’d crossed the galaxy, and had their children so far from Earth that they joked that the kids might qualify as alien creatures if they ever returned to their parents’ home planet.

  There had been difficult years, but Anne and Russ had been together—a team—and that had counted for something when the sameness of life at Hadley’s Hope had started to make them both feel claustrophobic. On the day Russ had confessed that it sometimes felt like a prison sentence, Anne had cried until he’d sworn to her that her love, and the presence of Tim and Newt, were the only things that kept him sane.

  They still had good days—wonderful days, even—but they both had frayed nerves. Some nights Anne couldn’t sleep, and she felt as if she might be unraveling. Then she heard Newt laugh or saw Tim trying to model his walk after his father’s masculine gait, and all would be well.

  Not today.

  Anne Jorden knew her husband’s every tic and gesture. They weren’t going to make it to the recreation center. Just as that thought solidified in her mind, Russ ducked into a maintenance corridor and turned to face her. Anne wanted to keep walking—maybe the dropship hadn’t left yet—but instead she stepped into that quiet corridor with her husband. A worker passed by and glanced at them without slowing.

  “What the hell is he doing here?” Russ whispered, almost hissing the words. He searched her eyes for a moment, and then looked away, as if bracing himself for the answer.

  “I have no idea,” Anne insisted.

  His eyes narrowed.

  “And I’m supposed to believe that? Think about how far we are from Earth, how many colonies there are now, and how few people had any interest in volunteering to come here in the first place. You want me to believe that this guy you used to sleep with just showed up here? Here?”

  Anne felt her face flush. Her heart slammed against her ribcage, and she could feel her pulse throbbing in her temples. She took a step forward and punched Russ in the shoulder.

  “Hey, what the fu—” he started.

  She poked him in the chest once, then again.

  “You get your head together, Russell,” she hissed back. “Has your brain become so fuzzy after all these years out here that you’ve lost the ability to think rationally? How the hell would I know anything about what Demian’s doing? I haven’t had any contact with him since we left Earth.” She stepped back and looked at him. “What do you think? That I’ve been carrying on some kind of intergalactic romance? Sure, that makes sense—its only thirty-nine light years away.” She paused, then added, “Are you out of your damn mind?”

  Russ just stared at her, fuming with anger and frustration. But then the words sank in, and he ran his hands over the stubble on his cheeks.

  “No,” he admitted. “Of course not… that’s just—”

  “Crazy.”

  “—stupid,” he said. “But if this is a coincidence… now that’s crazy.”

  Anne took his hand, ran her thumb over the ridges of his knuckles in an almost unconscious gesture. She knew it calmed him, and did it without even thinking, just as he barely recognized the effect it had. Their marriage included a thousand such comfortable intimacies.

  “I’m not going to lie to you, Russ,” Anne said calmly. “I’m delighted that Demian’s here. We have friends in Hadley’s Hope, but it’s just such an unexpected pleasure to encounter someone who knows me well. Demian and I were together once, but before that we were friends for a long time. Real friends. He’s a good man, and I want to learn about what he’s done with his life since I saw him last…

  “But you’re my husband.”

  Russ exhaled, turned and slumped against the wall.

  “I’m sort of an idiot, right?”

  Anne smiled softly. “Sort of?”

  Suddenly they heard giggles echoing down the main corridor, and then the sound of running feet. Together they turned and watched as several of the colony’s children raced past the mouth of the maintenance corridor, scraps of paper in hand. Most of the children were seven years old or less, a band of tiny marauders who darted along in duos and trios. Anne saw the flaming red hair of Luisa Cantrell and then the familiar blond mane of their six-year-old, Rebecca.

  “Newt!” she called to her daughter.

  The little girl skidded to a halt. As she turned toward the maintenance corridor, she was nearly knocked over by her older brother, Tim.

  “Rebecca, what are you—”

  Newt smacked his chest.

  “Look out, dummy,” she said, walking over to her mother and father. “What are you guys doing here?”

  Russ grinned. “We needed a private place for some messy kissing.”

  “Eeewww!” Newt cried, but she followed it with a little giggle. “You guys are so disfusting.”

  “Disgusting,” Tim corrected, rolling his eyes.

  Newt nodded. “Exactly.”

  “You’re so embarrassing,” Tim told his parents. He had the same blond hair as his sister, but at nearly ten, he had begun to look less like the little boy he had once been.

  “We do our best,” Anne told him.

  Several other children ran past, including Tim’s friend Aaron, who shouted out to him that Tim and Newt were going to lose.

  “Tim, come on,” Newt pleaded, trying to haul her brother away, anxious to return to whatever havoc they were wreaking.

  “What are you all doing?” Russ asked. “Aside from running around like lunatics?”

  “Scavenger hunt,” Tim said as Newt took him by the hand and dragged him back into the main corridor. “Bye!” he called over his shoulder.

  Russ shook his head in amusement as he watched the kids rush off. Despite whatever tensions had been growing between them the past few years, Anne’s heart still melted when she saw how much her husband loved their children.

  “Hey,” she said, squeezing his hand as she rose up to kiss his cheek. She stared into his eyes. “There’s nothing to worry about, okay? Absolutely nothing. This
is home for us, and we’re strong together, you and me. Our family is safe and sound.”

  Russ smiled. “Safe and sound,” he said.

  Yet she couldn’t help noticing a trace of sadness in his eyes. As glad as she had been to see Demian, she knew her husband would continue to be haunted by the presence of her ex.

  He let her hand slip from his. “Hungry?”

  “Starving, actually,” she confessed. “My appetite’s returned.”

  They walked together to the mess hall, hands by their sides, not quite touching. Russ grew quiet, and Anne could feel the frisson of lingering tension between them. Doubts and fears coalesced, pushing them apart.

  Safe and sound, she told herself, not sure if it was a vow or a plea.

  * * *

  DATE: 10 JUNE, 2179

  TIME: 1337

  The marine driving the heavy-crawler was an aging jarhead named Aldo Crowley. He had skin like leather and gray in the stubble of his buzzcut, but the bright glint in his copper eyes suggested that he might not be as old as he looked.

  He was. Aldo Crowley had turned forty-one in January. He was a grunt from a family of grunts, neither smart nor ambitious enough to rise above sergeant, and busted back down to corporal every time he disobeyed the orders of superior officers far greener than he’d been on his first day in uniform.

  Brackett learned all of this in the first sixty seconds of the conversation he’d had with Julisa Paris about which members of the squad to bring on the rescue mission. Crowley was the first person she’d suggested, followed by a couple of hard-eyed privates named Chenovski and Hauer, who’d earned a rep for keeping their shit together when a situation turned ugly.

  The captain took Lt. Paris with him as well, and the first three marines he could lay eyes on in the frantic moments of preparation—Nguyen, Pettigrew, and Stamovich.

  “Not sure why you brought me with you, Captain,” Paris said.

  Brackett glanced around the vast interior of the heavy-crawler. The others were lined up on benches along the forward compartment. The back of the vehicle was used for equipment storage and cargo space.

  He looked at Lt. Paris. With the rumble of the heavy-crawler’s engines, and the way it rattled as it churned across Acheron’s terrain, none of the others could have heard him if he’d replied. But what would he have said? That he wanted her there because he trusted her, though he’d only known her a few hours? That she knew the topography and the marines and the nature of the atmospheric storms? Any of those admissions would convey a kind of weakness.

  Instead he turned the question around.

  “Do you have concerns about Sergeant Coughlin’s ability to command in our absence?”

  Paris furrowed her brow. “None whatsoever!”

  “Good, then.”

  She studied him a moment, the heavy-crawler rocking them back and forth, and then she turned away, trying to peer through the windshield ahead. Visibility had been shitty from the moment they’d rolled out of Hadley’s Hope, and it had only gotten worse as they drove toward Processor Six. Aldo had an array of instruments on the dash that provided radar and thermography readings of the terrain ahead. Even so, Brackett had no idea how the guy could see anything at all.

  On the bench beside him was an exo-mask. The black masks with their bulbous goggle-eyes made him think of giant, nightmarish insects. They were generally used for brief exposure on planets and moons where the atmosphere had toxins, but was otherwise suitable for humans. Exo-masks were commonly utilized during the worst of Acheron’s storms, too, just to keep the grit out of eyes and mouths, making it easier to see and breathe.

  “Tell me something,” Brackett said, trying to break up the ice that was forming between himself and his lieutenant. “Has anyone ever asked why marines are sent along on these survey excursions? Is it as simple as free labor, or are our people supposed to keep the surveyors from slacking off on the job?”

  “I did ask, when I first got here,” Paris said. “My first CO on Acheron told me it’d been commonplace since the science team first arrived—we’re talking twelve or thirteen years ago, now. But the surveyors aren’t just taking samples and mapping topography.”

  Brackett arched an eyebrow.

  “What the hell else could they be doing out on this rock?”

  Lt. Paris cast a wary glance at Stamovich and the others who sat across from them. She tucked a stray short curl behind her ear.

  “It’s Weyland-Yutani, Captain,” she said, as if that explained it all.

  Brackett settled against the bench, his head bumping the wall as the heavy-crawler dipped into a shallow pit, and then climbed out of it. Maybe the involvement of Weyland-Yutani did explain it all. Standing orders from the corporation would include not only the study of the planetoid itself, but the company’s ongoing interest in alien life, whether aboriginal or left behind by spacefaring races. Yet thirteen years after the science team’s arrival, it seemed like a ridiculous idea.

  If the surveyors had been likely to find anything of interest to their employers, surely they would have found it already. Maybe the company was sending marines along for security, after all, just as a precaution.

  He leaned forward, trying to catch a glimpse of anything at all through the windshield. Aldo never slowed down, no matter how much the heavy-crawler shook or how completely the storm blocked out any visibility.

  “Can you see anything at all?” Brackett called to him, raising his voice to be heard over the vehicle’s rumbling and the staccato scrape of the windblown debris against its shell.

  Aldo glanced back at him.

  “That’s the trick, Captain,” he replied. “You’ve just got to accept that there is nothing to see, and then you’re all right!”

  Brackett shook his head. “Why the hell did they put a colony on this damn moon to begin with?”

  On the opposite bench, Stamovich caught the question and spoke up.

  “The rest of the universe needed a place they could point to when things turned nasty and say, ‘It could be worse—we could be on Acheron!’”

  Nguyen and Pettigrew laughed at that, nodding in agreement. Stamovich high-fived Pettigrew, but the rest of the team Brackett had chosen for this mission didn’t seem at all amused. He glanced at Chenovski and Hauer, saw the way they were averting their eyes, and then studied Stamovich.

  The guy smiled thinly, an air of arrogance about him. Lt. Paris had told Brackett that Stamovich was loyal only to Sgt. Draper, but now he began to see that there was a deep divide among his squad, and it worried him. That kind of fractiousness in the ranks could get marines killed.

  The heavy-crawler tilted hard to the left, and the engine roared as it climbed out of whatever pit they’d rolled through. As they leveled off, Aldo hit the brakes. The crawler skidded in the dust, rocking back and forth for a moment. He locked the transmission, and then turned in his seat to look back at Brackett.

  “This is it, Cap,” Aldo said. “But I’d make it quick if I were you.”

  “Is the storm getting worse?” Lt. Paris asked.

  Aldo gave a tired laugh. “Nah. The processor’s on fire.”

  9

  OTTO’S WISH

  DATE: 10 JUNE, 2179

  TIME: 1341

  Brackett swore and pushed forward, jamming himself between the front seats so he could peer out the windshield.

  Off to their right, in the wind-driven swirl of grit, he could see the dark tower of Processor Six. Even from inside the heavy-crawler he could hear the groan and rattle of its core and vents, a kind of mechanical shriek. Black smoke poured out of the vents on top of the unit, and he saw the orange flicker of flames from inside them.

  “Son of a…”

  He grabbed his exo-mask.

  “Move out!” he bellowed. “This thing could blow any minute, and I don’t want to be here when it does!”

  Aldo stayed in the driver’s seat and Brackett ordered Pettigrew to stay inside the heavy-crawler—always good to keep someone back
to play cavalry if things went from bad to worse. The rear hatch of the crawler could be lowered to the ground as a ramp, but in the midst of the storm, they exited through a side door and slid it quickly shut behind them.

  Masks in place, Brackett and Paris led the other three marines through the blowing garbage, staggering against the wind. One step after another they made their way toward the atmosphere processor. Even inside his exo-mask, Brackett felt as if he were suffocating.

  “Listen to that!” Nguyen called.

  Brackett listened. Banging and grinding noises came from inside the processor. Every instinct told him to get the hell away from the groaning tower, but the noise bothered him much less than the stinking chemical smoke the storm swept their way.

  “Have you started to rethink accepting this post?” Lt. Paris shouted beside him, her voice muffled and almost lost in the gale.

  Brackett said nothing. He didn’t like to lie.

  They hit the entrance seconds later. Stamovich reached it first and released the latch. The wind blew the door in with a clang and Nguyen barreled inside. Brackett knew they were friends of Sgt. Draper’s, eager to make sure their friend was all right, so he didn’t worry about who had led the way.

  Out of the raging storm, the noise level dropped so dramatically that he felt for a moment as if he’d gone partly deaf. Then Chenovski slammed the metal door closed behind them and the captain flinched in the gloom. Only dim emergency lights provided pulsing illumination. Red warnings flickered all over the core, and a cloud of thin black smoke filled the tower, thicker overhead.

  Brackett pulled off his mask and glanced upward, but could not see whatever was burning up top.

  “Draper! Yousseff!” Paris shouted, and all of the marines glanced around.

  There were signs of the stranded team—jackets, a pair of goggles, and strangely enough, a boot—but nothing human in view. The core thundered, shaking so hard that the bolts locking it to the floor seemed to be trying to pull themselves out of their holes. One of the ascension ladders glimmered in red zoetrope shadows on the wall to the right.