River of Pain

by Christopher Golden

  “You remember you sent some wildcatters out to that plateau, out past the Ilium range?”

  Simpson grimaced. The Jordens.

  And the morning had been going so well.

  “Yeah, what?” he asked curtly.

  “Well, the guy’s on the horn from our mom-and-pop survey team,” Lydecker explained. “Says he’s homing in on the coordinates, and wants to confirm that his claim will be honored.”

  Simpson grumbled, cursing himself for sending Jorden out there at all. The guy had been on Acheron as long as Simpson had, and he needed to clarify the rules? Then again, Russ hadn’t been chosen for his smarts.

  Lydecker, on the other hand, didn’t need to know that this was anything other than a routine wildcatting expedition.

  “Christ,” Simpson said, putting some drama into it. “Some honcho in a cushy office says go look at a grid reference that’s in the middle of nowhere, we go and look. They don’t say why, and I don’t ask. It takes two weeks to get an answer out here, anyhow.”

  “So what do I tell this guy?” Lydecker said.

  Simpson glanced at his coffee, but it had lost its magic altogether.

  “Tell him that as far as I’m concerned, he finds something, it’s his.”

  * * *

  DATE: 21 JUNE, 2179

  TIME: 1109

  Russ Jorden felt alive. He gripped the crawler’s steering wheel, and his heart raced as he hit the accelerator.

  The vehicle roared across a shelf of furrowed rock, down a slant, and then blasted through the crest of a high drift of volcanic ash. With the dust eddying around them, it felt to him as if they were surging along the waves of a dead gray sea, with the promised land straight ahead.

  In the back of the crawler, Newt and Tim bumped each other and bickered as siblings had done on journeys since time began. His children loved each other and played together daily, but they nipped at each other like growling, overgrown puppies. Sometimes he grew impatient with them, but not today.

  “Look at that, Anne,” he said, glancing over.

  In the green glow of the magnetoscope, she looked ethereally beautiful, a ghostly, wild angel. The memory of their argument from the week before gave him a sudden jolt of sadness, but he pushed it away. They were together, now—really together—partners the way they were meant to be.

  “I’m looking,” she said, staring at the scope, which pinged again. The tone of the pings altered slightly depending on their proximity to the object they were nearing and the angle of their approach. Right now the sound was loud, and clear as a bell.

  “Six degrees west,” she told him.

  “Six west,” Russ echoed, turning the wheel to compensate. The scope kept pinging and he glanced over again, gleeful.

  “Look at this fat, juicy magnetic profile!” he cried happily. “And it’s mine, mine, mine!”

  “Half mine, dear,” Anne reminded him with an indulgent smile. His exuberance always amused her—it was how he’d won her over in the first place.

  “And half mine!” Newt yelled from the back.

  “I got too many partners,” Russ joked, although the moment the words were out of his mouth, he knew they weren’t really a joke at all. Weyland-Yutani would take the lion’s share of whatever it was the scope had picked up.

  Don’t get greedy, he reminded himself. This is still the find you’ve been waiting for.

  Whatever the scope had identified, it definitely wasn’t any sort of natural rock or mineral formation. The ping was too strong, too regular, and he knew the terrain around here well enough to know what a huge anomaly they’d found. No, whatever it was, it had been built by someone… or something. Now he just wanted to see it. Sure, the payoff would be lovely, but he couldn’t help thinking about what it would mean if he found the ruins of some previously unknown race. His name—their names, his and Anne’s—they’d be written in history books, along with Burkhardt and Koizumi and the rest.

  Newt poked her head up between the seats.

  “Daddy, when are we going back to town?”

  Russ smiled. “When we get rich, Newt.”

  “You always say that,” she sulked. “I wanna go back. I wanna play Monster Maze.”

  Tim nudged her and put his face up close to hers.

  “You cheat too much.”

  “Do not! I’m just the best.”

  “Do too! You go into places we can’t fit.”

  “So what? That’s why I’m the best!”

  Frustrated, Anne spun to face them.

  “Knock it off, you two. I catch either of you playing in the air ducts again, I’ll tan your hides.”

  “Mo-om,” Newt whined, “all the kids play it.”

  Russ would have defended them, reminded Anne that if they were children stuck in Hadley’s Hope, they’d certainly have spent whole days exploring the system of ducts that crisscrossed the facility. But just at that moment, he lost the ability to put together a sentence—not to mention anything resembling a cogent thought.

  All he could do was take his foot off of the crawler’s accelerator and lean forward, staring out through the windscreen at the massive shape looming ahead of them in the veil of drifting ash.

  “Holy shit,” Russ said reverently.

  At first glance, the gargantuan object rising out of the ground looked almost organic, as if it were the huge, curving remains of some giant alien beast. As the crawler slowly rolled nearer, he saw that the shape did, indeed, have some kind of organic influence in its design. And there could be no doubt that it had been designed.

  But not by humans.

  “Oh, my God,” Anne whispered.

  Russ felt his heart hammering in his chest as he pulled the crawler to a stop. They’d never seen anything like the object’s horseshoe shape, or its strange, bio-mechanoid construction, but it most certainly was a vessel. A starship. Judging from the way the rocky terrain had been torn up, leaving great piles of debris clustered around it, he felt sure it had crash-landed here, digging up the stone and ash as it scarred the ground on impact.

  “Folks,” Russ said, “we have scored big this time.”

  The kids moved out of the way as Anne pulled on her heavy coat, helmet, and the goggles that would protect her eyes from the blowing grit. Russ shut down the engine and followed suit, all four of them keeping up a stream of excited chatter. They wore belts equipped with core samplers, flashlights, and short-range comms that would allow them to communicate without having to shout.

  Hefting cameras and testing equipment, he and his wife climbed down out of the vehicle and dropped to the surface. A massive gust of wind buffeted against them and Russ stood to block Anne from the brunt of it. The wind reminded him of Otto and Curtis, and he silently vowed to be more careful than was typical of him, and to watch the skies for any sign that the weather might worsen.

  Their breath clouded in the air. The temperature had dropped.

  “You kids stay inside,” Anne called to them. “I mean it! We’ll be right back.”

  Clicking on his helmet light, Russ set off toward the derelict object, trudging through dust and then climbing onto a rocky ledge that protruded from the ash. Anne caught up to him as he studied the shape and the weird texture of the ship.

  “Shouldn’t we call it in?” she asked.

  “Let’s wait until we know what it is,” Russ suggested.

  Anne gave a soft grunt. “How about ‘big weird thing?’”

  It was a joke, but she didn’t sound as if she was joking. She sounded spooked, and Russ couldn’t blame her. Truth was, he was more than a little spooked himself, but he wasn’t going to admit it. From the looks of the “big weird thing,” it had been out here for ages—maybe centuries. Whatever it had been once upon a time, now it was little more than a creaky old haunted house, silent and remote.

  Anne took the lead, trudging down from the jutting stone, through drifts of ash, and up a cascade of rocks beside the hull. Russ ran his gloved hand over the surface, its texture rough
and lined when stroked in one direction, but smooth when he slid his palm across it the other way.

  They began by attempting to walk the entire periphery of the ship, but just a few minutes after they’d begun, Anne froze up ahead of him.

  “What is it?” Russ asked, as he came up beside her. Then he saw the thing that had caused her to halt. It was a large, twisted gash in the metal hull, blackness looming—almost breathing—within.

  “What is it?” Anne repeated. She glanced at him, and he could see the wild grin behind her mask. “I’d say it’s a way in.”

  She pointed the light attached to her belt, and turned it on. Russ did the same.

  14

  DERELICTION AND DUTY

  DATE: 21 JUNE, 2179

  TIME: 1121

  Sgt. Marvin Draper and his cronies had spent Brackett’s first week on Acheron testing the new CO’s patience. They muttered to one another in the captain’s presence, showed up late for duty assignments, and argued among themselves and with other marines. It made him wish he’d kept them confined to their quarters, but he couldn’t have left them locked away forever, tempting as the thought might be.

  Their latest antics, less than twelve hours earlier, had been to get drunk and enter the livestock pens, so that Cpl. Pettigrew could demonstrate his childhood pastime of “cattle-tipping”—knocking the cows over for a laugh.

  All of it was behavior Brackett would have expected from college fraternity boys, but not from Colonial Marines.

  He’d had enough.

  “You’ve got a decision to make,” he said to the five marines lined up in his office. “Either you fall in line, or you are going to spend the rest of your time on Acheron in your quarters, until I can have you transferred to somewhere even more remote than this hellhole.”

  Draper raised his stubbled chin.

  “Sir, is there anywhere more remote, sir?”

  Nguyen and Pettigrew remained blank-faced, but Stamovich smirked. As far as he was concerned, Draper was the alpha dog at Hadley’s Hope, and the corporal had all the confidence in the universe that it would remain that way. Pvt. Yousseff, on the other hand, closed her eyes and pressed her lips tightly together, either furious with Draper and Stamovich, disgusted with them, or both.

  Brackett wanted to slap the shit out of Stamovich, but he knew the only way to deal with an ass-kisser was to kick the ass he was so fond of kissing. He focused on Draper instead, moved nearer to him.

  “What is my name, Sergeant?” he barked.

  “Brackett, sir!” Draper barked in return, cocky as ever.

  “Think again!”

  “Captain Brackett, sir!”

  Pettigrew, Nguyen, and Yousseff all shifted nervously. Stamovich watched the exchange from the corner of his eye, still half-smirking, sure that his asshole idol would win the day.

  “Look me in the eye, Sergeant!” Brackett snapped.

  Draper sneered as he complied, revealing his true nature.

  “I am your commanding officer,” Brackett said, quietly now, eye to eye, staring so hard he told himself his gaze was burning the core right out of Draper’s brain. “If I order you to lick the floor clean, that’s what you will do. If I want you to stand on your head in the corner, and stay there for a month, that’s what you will do. If I tell you that you are confined to quarters, with zero human contact, then you will damn well stay alone in your quarters until you gouge your own eyes out with boredom.”

  Stamovich blinked and shifted a bit.

  Draper still seemed too confident, though. Brackett knew he had been foolish to give the man an out, and now he took it away.

  “You think it’s going to be as easy as transferring out of here if you don’t like your new commanding officer?” he continued, glancing at each of them in turn before coming back to Draper. He leaned forward, shuffled nearer, physically intruding on Draper’s space until the marine had to take a step back.

  “If you want out of here, I have to sign that paperwork. I have to be the one to let you out. So I’m not just your captain or your CO, Marvin. I’m your jailer. I’m your warden. I’m your personal fucking deity. I can be a benevolent god, or I can be the devil you wish you’d never met.”

  The pink flush in Draper’s cheeks pleased Brackett, but not as much as the uncertainty that appeared in the man’s eyes.

  “You see it now, don’t you, Marvin?” Brackett went on. “You and your friends. The moment I arrived here you made certain assumptions, the stupidest of which was that a young captain with no visible battle scars might just be soft. You figured you could just go on with whatever—”

  “Captain?” Yousseff said, voice quiet but firm.

  Brackett rounded on her. “You’ve got something to say, Private? Do you not see me chewing Sergeant Draper a new asshole?”

  “Yes, sir,” Yousseff said, eyes front, still at attention. “And it’s about time, sir. But you should know that this far from home, the company is the tail that wags the dog. They have far more sway than the government. It’s been that way forever. We—”

  “Maybe none of you is listening,” Brackett said, fists clenching and unclenching. “So I’ll say this as clearly as I can. I am a marine. I do not work for Weyland-Yutani, and neither do any of you. If the order comes down from above that I’m to reinstate marine escorts on these survey missions, so be it. Until then, we run the show by the book, and the colony’s science team will just have to do without us!”

  “They’ve already done that, sir,” Pettigrew said.

  Brackett frowned. “Done what?”

  “Gone ahead without us. One of the wildcatters told me the orders came in from the company—something specific, which isn’t how it usually works,” Pettigrew replied, chin up at attention, rather than in defiance. “The family went out early yesterday morning, in a crawler.”

  Icy dread snaked along Brackett’s spine.

  “What family?”

  Pettigrew shrugged.

  “Do any of you know?” Brackett asked, scanning their faces.

  Stamovich glanced at Pettigrew.

  “It was Russ, wasn’t it?” the corporal said. “Guy with the scruffy beard and the cute wife?”

  Yousseff frowned. “They took their kids?”

  Brackett stared at her a second, wanting to say something, but the words would not come to him. He had denied it to himself, pretended he was too pragmatic a man to harbor any romantic illusions, but now the truth was stripped bare inside him. He hadn’t come to Acheron to steal another man’s wife, but had he secretly hoped Anne would realize her mistake, and choose him at last? Put them back on the path they had once shared?

  Damn fool that he was, yes he had.

  He still loved her.

  His decision—not to allow his marines to escort the survey teams—still felt like the right one. But he didn’t like it, the thought of Anne and her family, sent out on their own. He could still picture little Newt, her mouth stained with cherry freeze-pop. If anything happened to her because he’d stuck to the rules, he wouldn’t be able to forgive himself.

  And how had he not known this? It had occurred to him that he hadn’t seen Anne, or run into Newt or Tim in the halls—not in the past day or so. But he’d been so focused on getting his squad in line…

  Just another reason to be pissed at Draper.

  He worried not just because they’d been sent out alone, but because of the circumstances. If specific orders had come in, this wasn’t anything routine.

  “The order from the company,” Brackett said, turning to Pettigrew again. “What did it say, exactly?”

  “No idea, Captain,” the corporal replied. “Sorry.”

  All five marines were watching him now, no doubt wondering why he seemed so troubled by this news. Brackett didn’t care. His personal fears were not theirs to know.

  “Draper.”

  “Yes, Captain?”

  “For some reason, these friends of yours look up to you.” Brackett stared into his eyes again
, making it clear that there was no room for debate. “That means that I’m not only going to hold you responsible for your actions, but theirs as well. You’ve formed your own little tribe here, but you’re not part of any tribe. You are a Colonial Marine. I leave it to you to decide whether or not you will begin to behave like one.”

  Brackett studied them all again.

  “Dismissed.”

  The five of them filed out. He counted ten seconds after the last of them had gone, and then he rushed out into the corridor, shut the door behind him, and went in search of Al Simpson.

  He needed answers.

  And he couldn’t get her out of his mind.

  Anne.

  * * *

  DATE: 21 JUNE, 2179

  TIME: 1122

  When she was nine, back on Earth, Anne Jorden’s brother Rick had persuaded her to swim with him in a pond in the dying woodland at the end of their street. The pond had a layer of rotting leaves on top, and a scummy surface tinted a sickly, unnatural green. Mosquitoes flitted across the surface, but never alighted for long.

  Aside from the occasional eel they saw nothing else living in the water, certainly no fish. But Anne worked hard to keep up with Rick in those days, fought to be seen by him as his equal, though he was three years her elder. She knew how to throw a punch and climb a tree and fix a car, if the trouble wasn’t too complex. And when Rick threw down the gauntlet on a dare, he could be certain his little sister would take him up on it… as long as he led the way.

  Anne didn’t need her brother to lead the way anymore, but as she stepped through the gash in the starship’s hull, a shudder went through her, and she remembered that day at the pond with utter clarity. In only her underpants, she had walked into the water, the silt and muck squishing up between her toes and sucking at her feet. Wading in, she had felt the pond water slide over her skin in an oily, viscous caress. By the time the water was up to her waist, she felt filthier than she ever had in her life.

  The interior of the ship reminded her of that pond. The air ought to have been dusty and dry, and the floor near the breach was piled with ash, but even through her heavy jacket she could feel a kind of cold, clinging, damp weight to the air.