by David Ryker
Then came a voice, familiar and yet colder than he’d ever heard before.
“Kill each other,” it said.
Quinn had no time to process the statement before he saw the air ripple around him, sending out horizontal waves like a stone that had been tossed into a pond. When the effect was over an instant later, he saw Sally’s face twist hard as she began to scream.
5
Sally’s shriek was piercing, and Quinn was thankful that his hands were already near his ears. He clamped them down to block out the sound while he worked to stay upright. Just as it had on the Raft, his mind’s eye filled with horrendous images, and his legs threatened to give way under him. Except now, the emotions that came with the images were muted, music from a neighboring apartment rather than a speaker blaring next to his ear the way it had been the first time. He was still shooting, but now it was like he was watching someone else doing it.
The sensation faded quickly, and within seconds Quinn was back in reality, standing in the mess surrounded by chanting inmates. He was rattled, but he still had his wits about him. His men looked to be about the same, shaking their heads as if to clear them, and he deduced they’d experienced the same thing as he had. Meanwhile, Sally was writhing on the floor, her screams as primal and feral as a trapped animal’s. Her companions seemed to be in shock, lying in heaps next to their leader. They both had their thumbs in their mouths, their oversized eyes even wider than usual.
“What the hell…” Quinn muttered. Then he looked to his left and saw Kergan and Sloane standing only a few feet away, watching the spectacle with even keener interest than the inmates. It was a first—guards never went onto the mess floor without protective gear and weapons at the ready. But these two were not only unarmed, they weren’t even paying attention to anyone who might attack them. Their gaze was locked on the three Yandares as Sally finally gave up screaming and simply lay on the floor, her chest heaving under her tight jumpsuit. Around them, the inmate audience had suddenly quieted as well, likely from confusion.
“Hey man, dja see that thing before?” said a bald guy a few feet from Quinn, who recognized him as one of the Southern Saints gang. “With the, y’know, air?”
“Hunh?” another Saint answered. “I didn’t see nothin.’”
“You sure? It looked like the street’s o’ N’Orleans on one o’ them sweltering hot days. Like heat waves or sump’n.”
“Yer dreaming.”
No, he’s not, Quinn thought absently as he kept his attention on Sally and her friends. But those three are.
Two things happened then: first, Sally’s companions both pulled their thumbs from their mouths and rose from the floor in unison. They stumbled a bit, swaying with what may have been confusion or simply the effort of getting to their feet, and took a few tentative steps toward Kergan and Sloane. The guards met them with approving nods.
“Attenuation achieved,” Kergan said blandly. He could have been ordering a coffee.
A moment later, Sally, who had gone silent, suddenly drew in a huge gasp that sounded like someone emerging from the depths of the ocean and fighting for air. Her wide eyes darted around the room, panicked, as she scrambled to get to her own feet.
“That was…” she breathed, scanning the people around her, hands up in a position to fend off an attack. “That was… what the fuck was that?”
She reacted the way we did, Quinn thought. The other two didn’t. What the hell is going on?
The crowd was already starting to disperse around them. None of them seemed to even notice that there were two unarmed guards standing on the floor, ripe for a beating. Quinn figured the inmates were smart enough to know they’d pay for it later, and the price was far too high for the brief satisfaction it would bring.
To his left, Quinn’s men had formed a triangle next to Sally. To his right, Kergan and Sloane were silently leading the other two Yandares away toward the zero-G hatch in the center of the room. For a brief moment he considered shouting after them, demanding to know what was going on, but he quickly thought better of it. He doubted he’d be getting answers any time soon, and for now he was just grateful that none of his men had been seriously injured.
And that the experience he’d lived through was far less intense than the last time.
“Status,” he said as he joined the others.
“Five by five,” said Bishop, his voice shaky. The others nodded their agreement. Quinn could see beads of sweat on each man’s forehead.
He turned to Sally, who still seemed to be trying to process her surroundings. He took a step toward her and she flinched into a fighting posture.
“Don’t try it,” she warned. “For real. Just don’t.”
Quinn held his hands up in surrender, something he wouldn’t have dreamed of doing even five minutes earlier. Around them, a few other inmates were glancing at them, mildly curious about what was happening, but their attention didn’t last long.
“I don’t want to fight,” he said. “I just want to ask you something.”
She stared at him in silence.
“What did you see?” he asked gently. “I don’t want details, just … what was it like?”
Sally’s eyes widened in horror, and Quinn thought she looked like a cornered animal. She obviously wasn’t going to tell him anything about what she’d experienced.
So much for that, he thought. But even without answering, she had given him the information he wanted. Sally had had a horrifying vision, just like the rest of them, right after that weird shimmer in the air. The other Yandares hadn’t reacted the same way, though, and the guards had taken them away.
At least he’d gotten some answers, even if he still had a thousand more questions. Chief among them were what the hell was going on, and what it had to do with their trip to the moon’s surface.
“Are we going crazy?” Geordie Bishop wondered aloud that night as the Jarheads lay in their beds in the cell they’d shared for the better part of two years. It was eight feet square, with a pair of metal bunks and a toilet and sink against one wall, all made of cold steel. Not even a porthole, though, to be honest, all there was to look at was stars anyway.
They’d been separated by work details until supper, which they ate together as always, but they kept the conversation to a minimum. They all knew they needed to talk, but not within earshot of others.
“I was born crazy,” Maggott muttered. He was on his back, his sausage fingers laced over his belly. His nose had stopped bleeding, but it was slightly flatter than it had been before lunch.
“You should have Dr. Bloom look at that,” said Quinn. Bloom was Oberon One’s medical officer, and she was one of the few Oberon One staff members that the inmates didn’t actively want dead. “But to answer your question, Geordie, we couldn’t all go crazy at the same time.”
“That’s not necessarily true,” said Schuster. “If we were all exposed to the same element or circumstances, it could be possible.”
“Like what?” asked Quinn.
Dev Schuster shrugged on his bunk over top of Maggott’s. “Search me. Something on the surface, obviously. Maybe caused by the meteorites?”
“How, though?” asked Bishop. He’d dropped from his own bunk and was sitting next to Quinn on the lower one. “We were in environmental suits. It’s not like we were breathing in the same air—they’re all self-contained.”
“And there’s no atmosphere to breathe anyway,” Schuster snipped. “Yeah, I know. What I’m saying is that the only thing we all had in common before the visions was that we were together.”
Quinn pondered that for a moment.
“Not just us,” he said. “Kergan and Sloane, too. They started acting weird when we were on the surface, and they kept acting weird in the mess today. And both times, there was that ripple in the air.”
Bishop’s eyes went wide as he looked at Quinn. “You saw that, too? Shit, I was worried I was the only one. Thought maybe I was losing it.”
“I saw somet
hing in the mess before the dream hit again,” said Schuster. “But I thought it was just my eyes.”
“I dinnae seen noothin,’” Maggott grumbled.
“I first saw it with Sloane when we were on the Raft,” said Quinn. “Right before the first… episode? I don’t know what else to call it. Anyone else see it then?”
They all shook their heads. It didn’t surprise him—he’d been the only one looking in the guards’ direction at the time. They’d all felt the effects afterwards, though.
“Sloane was talkin’ foony,” said Maggott. “I dinnae see the thing you were talkin’ about, but I heard that. Sounded all intellectual-like.”
Quinn nodded. Sloane had agreed with Schuster’s assessment of the crater situation right before the ripple had hit. But something else had happened, too: Sloane had stared silently at Kergan for several seconds. After they’d all recovered from their visions, Kergan had said something strange.
“Attenuation achieved,” Quinn mumbled.
“Eh?” Maggott frowned at him. “What’d ye say?”
Bishop snapped his fingers. “Attenuation achieved! I was trying to remember what Kergan said in the mess. That was it!”
“I heard the same thing on the Raft, too,” said Quinn.
He and Bishop looked up at Schuster, who rolled his eyes in frustration. They obviously needed a definition.
“Am I the only one in this turkey outfit who actually reads?” he groused. “Attenuation means a reduction in amplitude or oscillation.” He could see they were still in the dark and sighed. “It means turning down the effectiveness of something. Like sunglasses attenuate sunlight. Ear plugs attenuate loud noises. Get it?”
“No,” Maggott grumbled.
Quinn frowned. “What does that have to do with what happened to us?”
“Don’t ask me.” Schuster shrugged. “I’ve never heard it applied outside of electrical engineering.”
“Our thoughts are just electrical impulses,” Bishop offered.
“It’s a little more complicated than that,” said Schuster. “But yeah, on a very basic level, you’re right. And our brains can definitely be affected by electricity. They used electroshock therapy on people for decades before breakthroughs in medicine made it obsolete. And electricity is the basis of the weapons the guards use in here to keep us in line. Everyone is more docile after a good blast from one of the shock rifles, even if the effect is only temporary.”
“That doesn’t explain what happened to us,” said Quinn.
“Mebbe it’s a new weapon?” Maggott said tentatively. His tone made it clear that he knew full well he was the muscle of the Jarheads, not the brains.
Quinn and Bishop exchanged a wide-eyed look while Schuster dropped down from his bunk and sat on the edge of Maggott’s lower one.
“That’s actually kind of brilliant, big guy,” he said. “A weapon that can directly affect the minds of the inmates.”
“And torture us at the same time,” said Bishop. “That sounds like standard operating procedure for SkyLode, wouldn’t you say?”
“All right,” said Quinn. “Let’s run with that: where was the weapon? In the mess, Kergan and Sloane weren’t carrying anything.”
“Maybe it was in their uniform somewhere?” Schuster offered.
Quinn nodded. “That’s possible. But it doesn’t explain what they said.”
“Attenuation achieved might be their lingo for saying the thing works,” said Bishop.
“I’m not talking about that; I mean what Sloane said on Oberon, and then what Kergan said on the Raft and in the mess. Did you guys not hear it?”
The other three shook their heads. Quinn thought it was more likely that they’d heard but hadn’t been paying attention. They’d followed him for a long time; he did the critical thinking, they took the action he ordered. It had worked very well for them in the war—at least until the incident that had landed them in Oberon One.
“When I was hanging off that ledge with Sloane, he said ‘Do it.’ He was looking right at me, but I’m sure he was talking to himself. Then, on the ship, when you all were clambering to get on board, he said ‘leave them.’ His voice was cold.”
Bishop’s eyes narrowed. “That doesn’t sound like Sloane.”
He was right. Kevin Sloane was a technician, not a jailor, and he’d never shown any hostility toward the Jarheads since they’d arrived, or any other inmates that Quinn knew of. Like Chelsea Bloom, he was one of the rare SkyLode employees who wasn’t in the inmates’ bad books.
“No, it doesn’t,” said Quinn. “But it’s Kergan’s words that really have me spooked. On the Raft, he looked at the four of us and said ‘These four are failures.’”
“That’s not unusual,” said Schuster. “Bastard hates us. All inmates, really.”
“Maybe, but I got the sense he meant leave us on the surface of the moon. In any case, it’s what he said on the floor of the mess that’s the most disturbing.”
“What was that?” asked Bishop.
Quinn took a breath, let it out. “I wasn’t looking at him when he said it, but I heard it clear as day: he said ‘Kill each other.’”
That got Maggott’s attention. He finally sat up in his bunk, which let out a metallic groan in response to him shifting his bulk.
“Are you fookin’ serious, Captain?”
“It’s Quinn now,” Quinn said automatically. “And yeah, I am. He was totally calm, too, like he was ordering lunch or something. Then that weird ripple came and the visions hit us.”
“And the Yandares,” Schuster pointed out. “It wasn’t just us.”
“Was Kergan saying it to you?” asked Bishop.
“I think it was meant for all of us,” said Quinn. “I didn’t see his face, but the fact he said ‘each other’ means he wanted us to get into a free-for-all.”
“Whoa,” Bishop breathed. “That’s messed up, even for him.”
“Then we all reacted to the ripple. Sally seemed to get it the worst out of the Yandares; the other two just went catatonic.”
“Then Sloane and Kergan took them away,” Schuster nodded. “They didn’t seem to give a shit about Sally, or the rest of us.”
“Failures,” Quinn muttered absently.
Bishop cocked his head. “You think that’s what Kergan meant on the Raft? That the way we reacted made us failures somehow?”
“Makes sense,” said Schuster. “Maybe we were supposed to just give in and let the dreams take over?”
“I almost did,” Maggott said in an uncharacteristic whisper. “I ent afraid te admit my brain just about fried when I let go of that rock on…” He went silent and looked down at his hands.
Quinn felt a scowl creep across his face. The three Jarheads who shared his cell were the best men he’d ever known: brave, tough as twisted leather, loyal to a fault. They’d been railroaded into prison with him, left with nothing but their character and their dignity, and now something was trying to take that away from them, too.
Not on Napoleon Quinn’s watch, he vowed to himself. I owe them that much and more.
“We’re going to figure this out,” he said, trying to keep his voice even. “But not tonight. Lights out, Marines.”
Schuster and Bishop both climbed back into their bunks as Maggott stretched out in his own again, his big feet dangling off the end.
“Oorah,” they said in unison. It had become a ritual over the years.
Within minutes, Quinn could hear all of them breathing deeply. As usual, Maggott’s breaths ended in quiet little snorts.
But it would be a long time before Quinn himself finally fell asleep.
6
It had been less than twenty-four hours so far, and Butch Kergan was already enamored of the new passenger riding shotgun in his head as he—they—made their way up the zero-G central tunnel up to the warden’s office.
It wasn’t just because of the way his new companion made him feel stronger, smarter, more free. It was also because it felt like
finally, after forty-two years of wandering through life, someone actually understood him. Accepted him. Maybe even loved him.
Wouldn’t that be amazing? For the first time in his life, for someone to actually love him? The fact that this someone didn’t have a physical body was beside the point.
As he used the cold steel rungs set into the wall to pull himself upwards, his thoughts were on a million different things at once. He saw the skies over a thousand different worlds, experienced the memories of trillions of beings. Watched as countless armies grew and fought, all thanks to the generosity of his new friend. Until now Kergan had never given any thought to the idea of other intelligent life in the universe. Now he not only knew other life existed, he was experiencing it.
And every once in a while, he would let himself feel the chaos of all the wars. The shrieks of terror, the ripping explosions that roared for an instant before being snuffed out by the airless void of space. The cold joy of seeing the light disappear from a billion eyes, knowing that resistance was at an end and that order would follow.
Yes, this passenger in his head was Kergan’s kind of guy. Or gal. He wasn’t sure that it had a gender, and he didn’t care. He only knew that it was there, and it was marvelous.
Sloane trailed behind him on the ladder. Kergan wondered about the technician, and not for the first time. Sloane had been the initial contact, after all. According to Kergan’s companion, that usually meant the strongest attenuation. In most cases the first went on to become the one who attenuated the rest, like a Patient Zero in an epidemic, and then became the leader of the assimilation efforts. But Sloane, ever the techno geek, seemed far more interested in simply drinking in all the knowledge offered by their new friends.
That was fine with Kergan. His passenger had made it known early on that he was leadership material, which was far more than the man they were about to meet with had ever done for him.
