by Gorman, K.
“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. 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.
“He’s saying ‘Help.’”
Chapter 7
“You know, there are times where I wish I were a little more heartless,” Soo-jin said.
“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.”
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 bridgewalk 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. 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.
Her 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.
She nodded. “That a problem?”
“Not at all. Get ready. I’ll meet you at the airlock in five.”
*
Karin always felt vulnerable 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—it had a metal frame, with a kind of doubled, thick plastic fabric that absorbed wear and tear, and its flooring was sturdy and solid beneath her boots—but some of the lights had burned out.
They’d been that way for months 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.
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 us.”
“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 improvise.”
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 said. “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 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.”
“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.
“Maybe they're binge-watching Moon Sailor in the rec room.” 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.
The closest person shifted, one hand dropping to rest beside his thigh as he rocked back and forth. Further in, others made similar movements.
None seemed to notice her and Marc.
Her heart pounded hard against her ribs. Every single hair lifted on her skin. For a second, she swayed, her knees suddenly weak.
“What are the chances the kid’s behind that door?” Marc said softly.
She took a moment, steadying her breath against the sudden surge of adrenaline pounding her system. All of her instincts told her to go—to run fast and far—but she forced herself to stay put.
“You’re the one who doesn’t believe in coincidences,” she said. “What are they doing?”
He narrowed his eyes. “They look like they just got out of bed.”
She hadn’t taken her attention off the group since she’d first come around the corner, but her brain was in flight mode, searching for danger, for sudden movements and immediate, actionable threats. She forced herself to look closer. Most wore the same, standard shipboard cotton garments in a similar gray tone to the ship’s walls and ceiling, but, as her stare picked through the crowd, she found oddities. People missing pants, or socks, or pajama tops that had come undone. One woman was almost completely nude, with only a ratty pair of underwear keeping her from the air.
She seemed unconcerned by the fact.
Actually, no one in the group seemed to be concerned about anything. They simply stood, facing the door, as if waiting for it to open.
“Karin,” Marc said. “Their eyes.”
What? She took a step, leaning forward to squint against the glare.
One man turned toward her movement, face plain to see.
His eyes were black as obsidian. Everything—pupil, iris, sclera—black.
She jerked back with a yelp. Marc gripped her elbow, pulling her steady.
“What the fuck?”
“The Shadows, do you think?” he said. “Is this what they do to people?”
She swallowed hard, staring. The man tilted his head, then took a tentative step toward them.
Marc pushed her behind him.
“Hey! Hey, you!” He waved his flashlight, the beam bouncing off the man’s face. “We heard your emergency call. Do you need help?”
The man didn’t answer, only tilted his head back and blinked, staring dully at him.
Others were turning toward them now. Karin’s jaw tensed as their stares pricked at her skin, dull, black eyes watching her. They started shuffling forward, their movements like whispers in the hall.
Marc pushed her back as the rest of the group joined in.
“Go,” he said. “Run. Run
.”
Chapter 8
They didn’t have to go far. As weird as the black-eyed people were, they didn’t move fast. In fact, by the time she and Marc had reached the stairwell again, most of them had stopped.
She paused with Marc to watch them, a foot in the doorway to keep it open.
“What the hell?” he said. “You ever heard of anything like this?”
She shook her head. “Only in fiction.”
“I bet the kid’s behind that door, too.” He swore under his breath. “What are the chances he’s like them?”
Soo-jin’s voice crackled over the radio. “Hey, guys, you got me on the edge of my seat over here. What the hell’s happening?”
Marc dipped his head to his collar to answer. “We still in range of that relay?”
“Yep.”
“We just found a bunch of black-eyed people acting like zombies. Can you do a search?”
There was a pause.
“Zombies?”
“Yeah. Shuffling, despondent, basic motor reflexes probably. Their eyes are completely black, though—iris and sclera, too.”
“Clio’s bounty,” Soo-jin said. “I’m on it. Get a picture if you can. Have you seen any Shadows?”
“Not yet.”
“Good. Keep me informed.”
The radio crackled again as she cut her mic.
Karin leaned back on her heel, watching the loose group of people at the end of the hall. A couple of them shuffled around, their directions random. One stared at a wall.
“I don’t think the kid’s like them,” she said.
“Yeah?”
She gestured. “Look at them. They’re completely useless. He managed to flash us a code.”
“True.” Marc put a hand to the doorframe, fingers flexing over the metal edge. “I definitely want to check on him, black-eyed or not.”
“Me, too.”
“And maybe he can tell us about the Shadows. Could help us if we decide to go to the bridge.”
