Dead Space™

by B. K. Evenson

“You have all your data,” she said in a very steady voice. “You’ve put it together and made it mean something.”

  “I might be wrong,” he said.

  “That’s not what I’m getting at,” she said. “Just be quiet and listen, Michael. You scientists have only one way of looking at the world. I’ve got data of a sort, too, and it’s just as troubling.”

  She started to lay it out for him, slowly weaving it together as if it were a story. The signal pulse began at a certain moment, she said, and from that moment on, everything was different. He knew it as well as she did. “Do you remember when you started having bad dreams?”

  “I’ve always had bad dreams,” he said.

  “But not like these,” she said. “Bloody, apocalyptic, end-of-the-world stuff every night?”

  “No,” he admitted. “Those are new.”

  “Everyone is having them, Michael. Even me. And I’m not normally prone to nightmares.”

  She had noticed how distracted and ill-rested everyone seemed, from the townspeople to her colleagues. She was trained to notice things like that, so she’d started asking around. Did you sleep well last night? Did you have any dreams? Nobody was sleeping well. Nobody was dreaming anything but nightmares. And when she could get them to remember when the nightmares started, it always corresponded to when the signal pulse had begun.

  “That’s just the start,” said Ada. “Do you know how many times over the past week you’ve told me that you had a headache? Dozens. Do you know how many times you’ve clutched your head and winced, but not said anything about it to me? Dozens more. And you’re not the only one,” she said. “Everybody is having them. Before the signal pulse, hardly anyone was having them. Now everybody is. Coincidence? Maybe, but you have to admit it’s strange.”

  “All right,” he said. “I admit it.”

  “Don’t be a smart-ass, Michael,” she said. “This is serious. I’ve spent months investigating the rituals and legends of this region, and before that I spent years reading other people’s reports on them. The thing about the legends is that they’ve been basically the same for hundreds of years.”

  “So?”

  She reached out and cuffed the side of his head. “I thought I told you not to be a smart-ass,” she said, her dark eyes flashing. “They’re no longer the same. They changed drastically once the pulse symbol started.”

  “Shit,” he said.

  “The villagers are having nightmares, Michael,” she said, “just like us. But while our dreams are only thematically similar, theirs are very specifically alike. They’re all dreaming of the ‘tail of the devil,’ which, as I mentioned the other day, is what the word Chicxulub means. Coincidence?”

  Altman just shook his head. “I don’t understand it,” he said.

  “I’ve noticed here and there, traced in the dust or freshly carved into the bark of trees, a crude symbol like two horns twisted together. When I asked what it was, people ignored me. When I kept asking, finally someone told me, almost spitting the word: Chicxulub.”

  She got up and went to the fridge, pouring herself a cup of distilled water. She drank it down and then poured another cupful, sat back down. She reached out and put her hand in his palm. He squeezed it.

  “I don’t know how it all fits together,” she said, “nor how it meshes with your own data. Maybe it’s all just weird coincidence. But all of it taken together makes me think that whatever is at the bottom of the crater is something that wishes us harm.”

  “You make it almost sound like a living thing,” he said.

  “I know it’s not very scientific,” she said. She took her hand back, rubbed her temple with it. “Ah, another headache,” she said, and gave a wry smile.

  After a moment, she went on. “The people of the town seem to have a whole mythology about this ‘tail of the devil.’ I don’t know if the mythology has always been there or if it’s something that’s only recently developed. Certainly I’m only starting to notice it now.

  “The only one I can get to talk about it in any detail is the town drunk, and he talks only if I ply him with booze. He claims there are stories that have been passed down from generation to generation, about a huge forked object thrust deep into the middle of the ocean. This, he told me in a mix of Spanish and Yucatec Maya, is all that remains of a great devil who surrendered his dominion upon the earth to dig down to the depths and rule over hell. His tail got caught and is still there, perhaps still alive. Some believe that this devil may still be attached to it.

  “If you touch the tail, they say, you make yourself known to the devil. If the devil knows you, he will try to claim you. If you destroy more than you create, you make yourself known to the devil. ‘You and your people,’ the drunk told me when he was deep in his cups, ‘you are known to the devil,’ and then he made that strange symbol at me, a kind of curse, twining his index and middle fingers together.”

  She stopped and drank the rest of the water, leaving the cup on the table. “After that, he refused to say more,” she said. “I tried to coax him to go on, offered to buy him more drinks, but he just shook his head. He was, he finally admitted, afraid that the devil might hear him.”

  They sat silently for a moment, staring at each other.

  “Maybe there’s a logical explanation,” said Altman.

  “For the stories?”

  “For all of it.”

  “Maybe,” said Ada. “But I don’t know. I could, I suppose, argue that these stories are an odd mixture of Mayan and Christian belief. Maybe if I dug deep enough and thought long and hard enough, I’d have a theory about how they developed. But there’s still something there, a genuine warning and sense of fear that my heart tells me we should be listening to. I love you, Michael. Promise me you will at least try to listen.”

  26

  “We’ve tracked down around a dozen or so people who saw the vid broadcast,” said Tanner. He’d managed to get a few hours of sleep, though his head still ached and he felt like his eyes had been rubbed with sandpaper. “Of those, about half got mostly static. The others got more. Of those, about half recorded it. But we knew that already as we used their recordings to augment our own.”

  “Besides you and the technicians in DredgerCorp, who else has seen the version you showed me?”

  “Nobody,” said Tanner. “I’m sure of it.”

  The Colonel furrowed his brow. “Take a look at this.”

  He spun the holofile to Tanner. It was a communication sent from someone with the alias “Watchdog.” DredgerCorps’ Illegal Doings in Chicxulub, the caption read. The body of the message consisted of a short bit of typed text—Last Words from a Submarine Tunneled Deep into the Heart of Chicxulub Crater. Retrieval Mission Gone Wrong—and a vid.

  He opened the vid, saw Hennessy’s blood-covered body and face, watched his strange smile and brief speech. Oh, shit, he thought. The worst has finally happened.

  “Who sent it?” he asked.

  “This copy was sent to Lenny Small,” the Colonel said. “The list of other recipients is several pages long, mostly scientists in Chicxulub, but a few others as well.”

  “That vid’s originally from Sigmund Bennett,” said Tanner. “He recorded it.”

  “Do you think he’s the one disseminating it?”

  Tanner shook his head. “He’s not the type. One of my men talked to him—it was pretty clear he thought it was a hoax. He probably didn’t even think twice about it, probably just sent it to someone else because he thought it was interesting or weird. I’ll have someone speak to him and find out who else he showed it to.”

  “Don’t bother,” said the Colonel.

  “Don’t bother? But you said—”

  “Too many people have seen it already,” he said. “There’s no point in killing anybody now. That’s more likely to hurt than help.”

  Tanner let out a deep breath. He was glad to know he wouldn’t be asked to kill anybody. “What do we do, then?”

  “We come clean,” said
the Colonel.

  “We come clean?” Tanner felt his stomach drop out. “That’s not what DredgerCorp does. Shouldn’t we run this by Small?”

  “Small’s not running the show,” said the Colonel. “I am.”

  “This is a disaster. I’ll tell you now,” Tanner said, face flushing red. “I’m not going down with the ship. I’m not willing to swallow the blame on this one. I’ll fight it all the way.”

  “Calm down, Tanner,” the Colonel said. “We don’t actually come clean; we just pretend. If we release the story to the press, then we’re the ones to spin it. We play it right and we’ll be in a better position than we were in before.”

  “How do we do that?” said Tanner.

  “Simple,” said the Colonel. “Call a press conference. Claim that you’ve seen the video that’s been making the rounds and heard the rumors and that you thought it was time to set the story straight. You give the press all the footage you have and ask them to broadcast it. You’re not losing much there, since lots of people have seen bits and pieces of it—anybody gets curious enough and they’ll be able to put together a good chunk of it, just like you did.”

  “How does that help?”

  “What matters is what you say about it,” said the Colonel. “You can’t say that it’s a hoax, because that just gives the conspiracy junkies fuel for their fire. So tell as much of the truth as you can without damaging us.”

  “How much is that?”

  The Colonel’s lips tightened. “You need me to spell it out for you? Where’s your imagination, man?

  “First, you say Hennessy went crazy. Not too hard a proposition to make stick once people see the vid. You say you had brought him down to Chicxulub because you were interested in testing an experimental new bathyscaphe, a borer, a vessel that can at least in theory, dig down through rock while underwater. It’s something which you’re certain will change the future of undersea mining, assuming that you can get all the bugs worked out. Got it so far?”

  “Yes,” said Tanner.

  “Anyway, you chose Hennessy because of his experience with submarines and because he was a company man, someone who was reliable and who could keep a secret. Obviously, technology like this, the last thing you want is for information about it to be leaked. You came to test it in Chicxulub. . . . Why?”

  Tanner thought for a moment. “Because Chicxulub is out of the way,” he offered. “We have a little more privacy here than we might have had in other places, and it’s possible here to test how a bathyscaphe would respond boring through a variety of strata.”

  “Good enough for now,” said the Colonel. “Polish it a little for your answer. I’ll arrange for a few testing permits to be filed retroactively to cover us. So, you did a series of test runs along the coast in shallow water, with Hennessy and another experienced submarine pilot, Dantec. Everything went fine, no problems whatsoever. Then you decided, after consulting with President Small, that it was time to test the bathyscaphe in deep water.

  “What happened after that, you don’t know for certain. When you asked the crew to prepare the craft for a dive, they informed you that it wasn’t there. When you tried to find Dantec and Hennessy, they were missing as well. You concluded that they had taken the submarine without authorization, perhaps to steal it. You looked for it, but to no avail: it was either out of sonar range or they had their engines off. You started a search, you tried to contact them repeatedly, but there was never any response.”

  The Colonel’s lips curled back in a way that showed his teeth.

  “The next evidence of them you had, you tell the press, was the transmission you intercepted. You don’t know what happened, but it’s clear that Hennessy came unhinged. You’ve managed to figure out the location of the sub: it’s buried deep within the rock in the crater. So now you’ve contacted the military, asking them for help retrieving the bathyscaphe. If they’re able to retrieve it, you say that you’re committed to letting the press know what happened inside in those last fatal hours.”

  “The military,” said Tanner. “Is that wise?”

  “It’s not only wise, it’s brilliant. It gives us an excuse to change the scale of the operation. We don’t have to work covertly anymore.”

  “But who do we contact?” asked Tanner. “Won’t we end up losing the object to them?”

  The Colonel gave another predatory smile. “You’ve already contacted them,” he said, and pointed both thumbs at his own chest. “You’re already working with them.”

  27

  Altman had just sat down at the desk when there was a knock at the door.

  “Are you expecting anyone?” he asked Field.

  Field shook his head. “Not that I know of. Do you want to get that or should I?”

  “I don’t mind,” said Altman.

  He started for the door, then doubled back to log off the secure site. The knock came again. “Just a minute,” he called. It came a third time just before he reached the door, louder and harder now.

  Outside were two men that he didn’t recognize. Locals, he would guess. They were wearing ties, and dark shoes that had been polished to a shine. One was tall and thin, with dark skin and a bristly black mustache. The other was clean shaven, his skin lighter. He held a smoldering cigarette tight between his thumb and forefinger, like it was a joint. He was sucking hard on it when Altman opened the door.

  “Yes?” Altman asked.

  “We’re looking for someone,” said the man in Spanish. “Miguel Altman.”

  “Michael,” said Altman. “Can I ask why?”

  “You are him, perhaps?” said the taller man.

  “Who’s asking?” asked Altman. “Who exactly are you?”

  The second man sucked again on his cigarette, his cheeks shrinking in to make his face look cadaverous. “We are asking,” he said. He reached into his pocket and removed a badge. “Police,” he said.

  “Has something happened to Ada?” Altman asked, his heart thudding suddenly in his throat.

  “May we come in?” asked the tall one.

  Altman opened the door wider and they slid past him and inside. Field watched them curiously as they came in.

  “Hello, Field,” said the smoker.

  “Hello, Officer Ramos,” said Field. “Do you have business with me?”

  “With your friend,” said Ramos. “Perhaps we could have privacy for a moment.”

  “He’s not my friend,” said Field. “We just share a lab.” He stood and limped out the door.

  The tall policeman pulled over Field’s chair and sat on it. Ramos leaned against the wall next to Altman’s desk.

  “What’s happened?” asked Altman, his panic over Ada growing stronger and stronger. “Is she all right?”

  “It’s nothing to do with your girlfriend. Do you know Charles Hammond?” the tall man asked. His voice was flat and uninflected. He pronounced Charles as if it had two full syllables: Char-less.

  “The technician? I’ve met him.”

  “He says he’s met him, Gallo,” said Ramos. “What do we think that means?”

  The tall man, Gallo, ignored Ramos. “How well did you know him?” he asked Altman.

  “Not very well,” said Altman. “We met once.”

  “He says they only met once, Gallo,” said Ramos, and sucked on his cigarette again.

  “What’s this all about?” asked Altman.

  “What indeed,” said Ramos.

  “Where did you meet him?” asked Gallo.

  “In a bar,” said Altman.

  “Why?”

  Altman hesitated. “He had something he wanted to tell me.”

  “Sounds suspicious to me, Gallo,” said Ramos. “Which bar?”

  “How long where you there?” asked Gallo.

  “Which of you is asking the questions?” asked Altman. “You’re confusing me.”

  “Just answer my question,” said Gallo, same flat tone.

  “And mine,” said Ramos.

  “Wait,” said Altm
an. “I was, the bar was the one on the beach, near to here, and I—”

  “The cantina, you mean,” said Ramos. “There’s a difference between a bar and a cantina, you know.”

  “Cantina, then,” said Altman.

  “How long were you there?” asked Gallo again.

  “I was getting to that,” said Altman, his voice slightly higher now. “He called me and asked me to meet him. We must have been there, I don’t know, a few hours.”

  “How many is a few?” asked Ramos.

  “I don’t know,” said Altman. “Two, I guess.”

  “The bartender says three,” said Gallo.

  “Well, he’s probably right,” said Altman. “It probably was three.”

  “And yet you said two,” said Ramos.

  “It was just a guess,” said Altman. “How am I supposed to remember exactly? What’s this all about anyway? Can’t you get to the point?”

  “No,” said Ramos, “we can’t.”

  “The point is,” said Gallo, “you were the last one to see Hammond alive.”

  “He’s dead?” said Altman.

  “He’s dead,” said Gallo.

  “What happened?” asked Altman.

  “That’s what we’re trying to find out,” said Gallo.

  “You don’t think I did it, do you?” said Altman. “You don’t think I killed him?”

  “How did you know somebody killed him?” said Ramos.

  “I didn’t know, but I’m beginning to suspect,” said Altman.

  “He could have died of accidental or natural causes,” said Ramos, “but you jump to the conclusion that he’s been killed.”

  “Where did you and he go after leaving the bar?” asked Gallo.

  “The cantina,” said Ramos.

  “After leaving the cantina,” corrected Gallo.

  “We didn’t go anywhere. We shook hands on the street and I went home. I don’t know where he went.” Altman watched the two police officers look at each other, exchanging a significant glance. “What happened?” asked Altman. “How was he killed?”

  “Was Hammond your lover?”

  “What? No, of course not! Are you crazy?”