by Jamie Sawyer
“You’ll miss him, huh?” she suddenly asked.
“Of course I will.”
“Happens a lot out here, on Helios. People die. It’s what this place does to you. Gets every one of us, in the end.”
Her reaction should have made me even angrier – she was a civvie and didn’t have any idea what losing someone like Blake meant – but something caused me to pause before responding. Looking into her eyes, my venom seemed to slowly dissipate. Then suddenly the moment – whatever it was – was gone, and Tyler was smiling again.
“Kellerman said to speak with you about using Operations to contact Liberty Point,” I said. “We want off this rock. He’s welcome to whatever he finds down here.”
Tyler moved a finger to her lips, so briefly that I barely saw it. Her eyes remained locked on mine.
“Listen, if you want a warmer area of the base, feel free to drop by and see me sometime,” she said. “We can talk more sports.”
She fidgeted with the toe of her boot on the floor, then shrugged and left. I watched her go, frowning uncertainly at her behaviour. Maybe she was interested in me. I wasn’t interested in her, but it had been too long since I’d felt wanted. She was a pretty girl, and I was flattered.
There was something on the floor, written in the dust. Tyler had drawn something.
M11.
Module Eleven. She wanted a meeting. I slid my own foot over the characters, blurring them, and looked about cautiously. The bay was still empty. Tyler had chosen now to approach me and whatever she wanted to say she couldn’t say it in front of the rest of the crew. She’d been speaking in code: there was no twenty-two-hundred series for speedball. She was referring to a time.
I stood silently, turning Blake’s dog-tags over in my hands, feeling the pressed metal and the embossed biometric chips. I slipped the neck chain over my head, and tucked them inside my fatigues.
There had been so much activity over the last day or so, I’d almost forgotten about using the comms rig in Operations. This was my opportunity to make contact with Liberty Point – to get the rest of my squad to safety. I was going to make sure that no one else died on Helios, not on my watch.
My squad languished back at the hab. I didn’t explain to the others that Tyler wanted a meeting, and as darkness fell I slipped out. With everyone wrapped in their own private sorrow it was easy enough to get away unnoticed.
Dressed in fatigues and a makeshift facemask, I braved the swirling winds and dropping temperatures. It was approaching twenty-two-hundred hours by the station sleep-cycle. A mixture of fear and excitement lurked in my gut. It finally felt like I was doing something right – for the first time since we had arrived on Helios.
The rest of the station was dark and deserted. I remembered the location of Module Eleven from my reconnaissance aboard the Oregon, and I headed straight there. The module security doors were open. Is this part of Tyler’s plan, to get me through the station undetected? I felt as though I was being guided. Or perhaps lured.
Just in case, my Smith & Wesson sidearm was strapped to my leg. The holster was reassuring, and I had already cycled off the safety. No chances out here. I trusted Tyler about as much as I trusted Kellerman.
Glow-globes installed in the walls led the way through a junction. Cabling and pipes lay strewn across the corridor, and the nearest bulkhead security panel had been torn open. It sparked violently for a few seconds, then went dark. I edged past the damaged unit but jumped with a start as it hissed to life again.
The temporary flash of light was enough to illuminate a corridor wall: LIFE-SUPPORT SECTION – T5 TO T8.
There was a muffled step behind me, and I twisted to face the attacker. I reacted as quickly as I could. Someone was on me. My ribs exploded with renewed pain. Rough hands from a second assailant grabbed my jaw. I smelt grease and oil. I brought up my right elbow and smashed it into something hard behind me. There was an encouraging crack as the blow connected with a ribcage or sternum, followed by a pained grunt. The attacker fell backwards. I arched my back, struggling with the second assailant. They fought to hold on, but seemed to pause as the first went down, as though shaken by my reaction.
I took immediate advantage of that. With a single motion, I grabbed the attacker by one arm with both hands. I reached over my right shoulder and pulled hard. The figure sailed over my shoulder – then slipped and crumpled in front of me.
I instantly went for my pistol, unholstering it and bringing it up to fire.
“Harris! Harris! Stop – it’s us!”
I looked down at the groaning figure on the floor, and realised that it was a male tech. He was sprawled across a pile of debris, at an entirely uncomfortable angle. He half-rose, rubbing his side with both hands. I turned to look behind me to find Tyler. She had her hands up, defensively, backed against a wall.
“Hell of a welcome. Don’t you people know how to just say hello?” I muttered, looking back to the tech.
The man was about the same age as Tyler, with a crop of sandy hair, dressed in a Helios Expedition jumpsuit. The name R FLYNN was printed on his lapel. He winced as he sat up. I reached out my hand to help him, and he slowly took it. Tyler seemed to relax, but only momentarily. She ran back the way that I’d come, and looked down the corridor.
“We’re clear,” she said, her tone hushed.
“I was trying to stop you from calling out,” Flynn said, still rubbing his ribs in an exaggerated fashion. “Tyler, will you be all right down here on your own? I should get back up to Operations.”
Tyler nodded. “I think I’ll be fine with this old tiger. A little late for introductions, but this is Flynn. He’s in on this – we can trust him.”
“Less of the old,” I said, but the nagging pain in my leg caused by the sudden bout of exertion told otherwise. “And what exactly is this? For the record, I’m not in on anything until I say so, and I don’t trust either of you.”
“I don’t blame you,” Tyler said. Then, to Flynn: “Go back up to Ops. You can do more for us there anyway. My shift doesn’t start for another few hours – cover for me.”
Flynn nodded and followed Tyler back up the corridor. She waved him off, then immediately came back.
“Follow me,” she said.
Tyler led me into an unlit corridor. It looked like it had either been abandoned or otherwise was in a state of construction. She unholstered a torch from the tool harness around her waist, and periodically shone it into the gloom. We passed darkened, empty chambers, moved through rooms filled with noisy life-support facilities. The background hum of the complicated machinery was deafening at times and the place was unbearably hot. Sticky sweat formed on the back of my neck, made my fatigues cling to my chest.
Just as I felt that I couldn’t follow Tyler any longer without some sort of explanation, she stopped. Leaning against a wall, she eyed the section of corridor. Some emergency glow-globes had been installed in the walls and the ceiling was dominated by a series of air-recycling fans. As the enormous blades of each fan lazily turned, they caused the light from the globes to strobe. Tyler’s sweaty face glistened in the flashes of light. She looked out of breath and exhausted.
“This is the place,” she said. “He won’t be able to hear us in here.”
“Who won’t? Kellerman?”
“Of course – who else? He has the entire station wired. He watches and hears everything. I need to tell someone – to tell you – what has been happening here.”
“I’m listening.”
“There’s no one else I can turn to. Kellerman is a damned maniac.”
“All right – then tell me. Start at the beginning: why did the station stop reporting?”
“Kellerman just decided one day that we had to stop transmitting. It was entirely his decision. I run Ops, for Christo’s sake, and he’s never explained to me why we stopped. Whatever this planet is, whatever the Artefact and that Shard ship are here for: we’re messing with something that none of us understands, him least of a
ll.”
“Take your time,” I said. I could tell that Tyler was finding this difficult, that she had a lot to tell me and couldn’t really decide how to do so.
“I was one of the two thousand and thirty-two original station staff.”
“What happened to the others? I asked Kellerman, but he wouldn’t give me an answer.”
“He threw them away. Spent them. Just like he spent Sara.”
She began to pace nervously, occasionally stealing a glance in my direction as if to evaluate my response. I listened to everything she was saying, considering whether I believed her.
“Kellerman is obsessed with the Artefact. He doesn’t know what he’s doing.”
“He told me that it was a beacon, that it can transmit a signal across the Maelstrom. The Shard ship might be a genuine breakthrough. I saw what the researchers uncovered.”
“Everything and everyone could use that beacon for a Q-space jump – Krell, human, maybe even the Shard if they are still out there. Do you want our first contact with another alien species to be fronted by Dr Kellerman? Not only that, but if the effect on the Krell is as Kellerman predicts, then whoever controls the Artefact will have a planet-killer: an instant red-button.”
I sighed to myself. Kellerman had shown me some of his research, sure, and his remit on Helios had been to study the Artefact. But his intention to take control of it, for his own purposes, wasn’t part of the plan. The idea of a single man, wielding power over the Krell species, terrified me.
“Tell me about the missing personnel,” I insisted.
“Kellerman is preoccupied with activating the Artefact. He ordered Sara and the rest of this damned outpost to their deaths.”
“Who’s Sara?”
“My sister,” Tyler said. Her voice was fraught, emotional. “We came to Helios together, when we were kids. Can you imagine? Sara was twenty-one years old and I was twenty-three. We both had degrees in Colonial Tech, and we were invited to apply for the posts by Alliance Command. This was going to be some big adventure – something to tell our children about. We signed official secrets declarations, the whole deal. This thing – the Artefact – was going to be the next big discovery.” Tyler let her words hang. “Sara died the year after our arrival.”
“I – I think I saw her picture,” I said, rubbing my temples. My head was throbbing so badly. “Back in the hab module. It was above one of the bunks.”
“That’d be right. Your squad is holed up in her old unit. The whole hab is gone now.”
Am I this person? Am I Tyler’s saviour? I wasn’t sure. All I knew was that I wanted off Helios, and my team off too. Of course, I felt for Tyler – I’d lost Blake out here, just as she had lost Sara – but she wasn’t my problem. The tactical situation on Helios had changed dramatically with the crash of the Oregon, then again with Blake’s death. I had to focus on my own people. Could I leave Tyler out here though? She was in opposition to Kellerman. Maybe that was enough to make her an ally.
“How did it happen?” I asked. I was sure that she was going to tell me anyway.
“Dr Kellerman started to conduct sand-crawler runs right into the Artefact. They began as automated ops – just gunbots or security-eyes on crawlers. None of them got anywhere near the Artefact. If you’ve seen it from space, you’ll know that it’s surrounded by fish heads.”
Tyler bit her lip, eyes growing distant. As if she was remembering something too painful to properly focus on.
“You’ve never seen so many of them. They stretch the desert floor like particles of sand. Primary-secondary-and tertiary-forms. Leaders, gun-grafts, and everything in between – all of them driven insane by the Artefact.
“He began to use manned sand-crawlers. Wanted to see how close he could get to the Artefact. Every time a team went out, they would be ordered to get a little closer. Every time they got closer, they would have to fight more and more Krell.”
“Why did they agree to go out there, if it was so dangerous? It’s obvious that anyone travelling through the desert is going to meet with severe resistance.”
“The Artefact doesn’t just send the Krell mad. Staff started losing it. Have you slept well since you came to Helios? I didn’t think so.”
Fuck. It’s happening to me. I swallowed hard. Don’t admit anything. Easier to bury it, pretend it isn’t happening.
“Not everyone is affected. Some get hit by the signal worse than others. For many, it starts and stops with insomnia. For others, the signal means madness. There have been over a hundred suicides on this station. Probably more. Add to that the accidents, and the unexplained disappearances.”
This confirmed what Kellerman had told me. It explained why the rest of my team weren’t reporting the same symptoms as me. Through some misfortune, I was the only one touched by the madness. Is this going to get worse? Am I going to descend into insanity, like Kellerman? If his mania was fuelled by an alien transmission, what were the depths of his ambition? I’d recognised him as dangerous, but this was so much worse.
“Your sister died out in the desert?” I asked. “Like Blake?”
“No,” Tyler said, shaking her head. “Under the Artefact, the planet is a honeycomb of tunnels. Maybe natural, maybe created by the Shard. Does it even matter? The tunnels are big enough to drive a sand-crawler through, and they gave Kellerman an idea. He ordered teams into the tunnels, to approach the Artefact from underneath. Sara was on one of the teams. She went into the tunnels willingly. She wanted to go; wanted to do this thing for him.”
“What did she find?”
“Nothing. The nearer you get to the Artefact, the more powerful its song becomes. We traced her progress via a beacon on the sand-crawler, but we lost radio contact with her unit before they actually made it to the Artefact. By then, everyone on her team had gone mad. I – I stopped listening to their transmission—”
Tyler shook with rage and grief. She wouldn’t let herself cry. She just stood, looking at me with big, red-rimmed eyes. I awkwardly put an arm around her shoulder.
“Eventually, the sand-crawler ops stopped because Kellerman ran out of bodies,” she concluded.
“All I want is to take my squad back to Liberty Point. You can come with us. I just need access to the Operations centre, to send a message back to Command—”
“You think Kellerman will let you do that? He’ll never let you leave. Deacon is with him on this.”
“So what do you want me to do about it?”
“You and your squad could overthrow him.”
I mulled over the suggestion. Tyler stared intently at me as she waited for a response. I had the dread feeling that this would be another decision that I would have to justify back at the Point. It wasn’t to be taken lightly. Command would need more than the say of the Ops manager. I needed something concrete.
“Please, you have to help me,” she whispered. “The Artefact isn’t safe in Kellerman’s hands. I can give you proof. Kellerman keeps everything in Operations under constant surveillance. He will be watching for me. I don’t think he trusts me anyway, but at the moment he doesn’t suspect what we are trying to do. Flynn can fool him for a few hours.”
“All right,” I said. “Let’s go.”
Tyler was up and waving me to follow her. In the strobing, stop-start light effect created by the fans above, it looked as though she was making jumps in and out of reality. I felt as if I was out of synch with reality as well, but I followed her.
“We have to move quickly. This sector isn’t bugged, and I’ve asked Flynn to knock out surveillance for the silo as well. If we move now, I can show you all the proof you need.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
A SECOND CHANCE
Bent-double against the cold, dusty wind, we dashed across the compound. Tyler appeared to act at random, moving between buildings and taking cover behind battered vehicles. She crouched by a wall, poking only her head around the corner of a junction to evaluate the road ahead. Satisfied with whatever she saw, sh
e waved me on. We stalked to the next intersection and repeated the procedure.
“He has security-eyes on some of the buildings,” Tyler said, pointing to the corner of a module ahead. A glossy-black globe dangled from a cable above. “Flynn’s temporarily deactivated them, just until we reach the lab.”
Tyler led me to an enormous silo. A single gun-bot was sprawled like a sleeping dog in front of a double bulkhead. The door was ajar just enough for us to squeeze through.
“Flynn again,” Tyler said.
Cautiously, we moved past the bot. I kept my eyes on it – the machine had more than enough firepower to kill us both – but it remained inert. I paused at the door, and had the sudden and very real feeling that this was the point of no return: that to step across the threshold into the room beyond would change everything. Tyler turned back to look at me, and gave a weak smile.
“This is what I wanted to show you.”
There was a huge laboratory inside. I tried to take in as much detail as I could, conscious that at a later time someone would want my account of this moment. Isolation booths, with robotic manipulators, patiently waited for new users. I walked the narrow space between benches dedicated to monitors and holographic displays. The interior of the silo was darkened, lit only by computer screens and sleeping machine terminals. Tyler manually slid the doors shut behind us.
“This is Kellerman’s main research facility.”
“What’s he doing here?”
“See for yourself.”
She hit the lights, and one corner of the lab was illuminated by a bank of overhead bulbs. I drifted over in that direction.
The smell hit me like a wall: musky, fishy, rotten. Unmistakable.
There were Krell carcasses everywhere. Pinned to tables, nailed to walls. Tyler moved to the back of the room, into an area filled by enormous Krell skeletons. These specimens had grown huge, with ridged, thorny skulls. Although dead, and even though I’d faced a legion of them in my lifetime, I felt an uncomfortable shiver down my spine.
