Darker Space (17 page)

I tried the door anyway. Locked.

It was already warmer in our room. I felt clammy.

“Brady,” Cam said, gesturing at the other chair at the small table. “Sit down and eat something.”

I took the chair and dragged it underneath the vent. Maybe it was an obstruction or something. I’d just gotten my fingers hooked through the vent when a sudden blast of cold, dusty air almost choked me.

“Fuck!” I reeled backward, stepped off the chair, and ended up on my ass on the floor. “Motherfucker!”

Cam raised his eyebrows. “Are you okay?”

I climbed to my feet, rubbing my hip. “Yeah.”

He shook his head and grinned. “I told you not to panic.”

“I wasn’t panicking. I was
investigating
.”

“And how’d that work out for you?” he asked.

I pulled the chair back to the table and sat. Helped myself to one of his crackers. “Shut up.”

Cam went back to reading.

I glared at the vent. I’d never known one to stop working before. Routine maintenance, my sore ass. There was a secondary system, of course, but usually that was tested on a small section of the Defender, not sleeping quarters. Risk management and all that. The only other thing I’d ever heard of the secondary system being used for was…

“Shit.”

Cam looked up. “What?”

“We’re quarantined,” I said. “For real, I mean. I bet they’ve isolated this section of the quarters and given us our own source of oxygen. It’s possible. Years ago they got a measles outbreak on Defender Seven. Can you believe that? Fucking measles. Anyway, they got so many guys infected that the isolation chambers in the med bay wouldn’t hold them, so they blocked off a whole section of the sleeping quarters and threw everyone in there. Which seems a little excessive in our case, but hey, at least the bed here’s more comfortable than a cot in the med bay.”

We’d shared one of those once too.

I got up and checked the door. This time when I pulled the handle, it opened.

“Told you! Our cage just got a lot bigger, LT.”

Cam followed me out into the passageway. We made it as far as the set of sealed blast doors about five rooms down in one direction, and the elevator in the other. Just for fun, I tried opening one of the doors on our way.

It actually worked.

I went inside and made a beeline for the chocolate bars on the table. “Thanks very much”—there was a pressed uniform hanging from the bathroom door—“Captain Hayashi.”

“Jesus,” Cam said as I ripped a chocolate bar open. “Is looting seriously your first instinct in circumstances like these?”

“Apparently,” I told him, my mouth full of chocolate.
“What are they gonna do, LT? Make me a prisoner and send me to the Faceless?”

His mouth quirked up in a wry smile. “Point taken.”

I guess Captain Hayashi was an engineer of some sort, or at least a hobbyist, because he had a half-taken-apart
something
by his bed. Whatever it was, it had an intricate circuit board showing. I was more interested in the little tool kit beside it, in a slim zip-up case.

“Brady!” Cam exclaimed as I picked it up and shoved it in my pocket.

“I’ll put it back,” I said. “Just as soon as I’m finished with it.”

Because, come on, the brass had left me in a sealed-off area of Defender Three with a tool kit and a vending machine. What did they think would happen?

Cam stood and shook his head while I got to grips with the vending machine in the corridor. Then he gave up and headed back to our room. “They’ll throw you in the brig for this!”

“Can’t!” I yelled after him. “Quarantine!”

The vending machines in the officers’ quarters were easier to break into than the ones in the enlisted men’s quarters. They had better stuff as well. Actual brand-name chocolates, small packets of sweet biscuits, more than one flavor of chewing gum, and—I’d hit the mother lode here—cigarettes.

I was elbow deep in the vending machine, a growing pile of contraband on the floor beside me, when the elevator doors rolled open. I froze as a guy in an orange hazmat suit stepped through.

I was just wondering what I could say to explain myself, when he spoke first.

“Brady Garrett, you thieving little bastard.”

I relaxed. “Hey, Doc.”

Doc moved closer, plastic rubbing on plastic as he walked. “I’ve come to check your hand.”

The hand I currently had in the guts of the vending machine. “Yeah, I’ve got pretty much all my movement back.”

“I can see that.” I couldn’t see his face clearly behind his mask, but I could hear the growl when he spoke again. “I’m also here to tell you how much you’ve pissed off Commander Leonski.”

I pulled my arm out of the vending machine and gathered up my cache of ill-gotten gains. “I guess this is something Cam will need to hear as well.”

We headed back to our room.

Cam was in the shower. Steam was escaping out the open bathroom door, and he’d left his clothes on the bed. I took them into the bathroom and squinted at the vague shape of him through the fog. “Cam! Doc’s here.”

He shut the water off and stuck his head around the partition. “Did you…”

I set his clothes by the sink.

“Thanks. I’ll be out in a second.”

I went outside and sat on the bed, and Doc took the chance to inspect my hand. He dabbed antiseptic over it, making me hiss, and checked I had enough anti-inflammatories for a few more days.

Cam came out, his T-shirt clinging in interesting ways to his damp skin. He was still running his towel over his wet hair as he sat down beside me. “Major Layton,” he said.

“Lieutenant,” Doc growled.

“He’s pretty pissed,”
I told Cam.

Doc grunted. “Maybe one of you would like to tell me, so I can pass it on to Commander Leonski, exactly why,
knowing
the connection was back and affecting another person, but not knowing how it was transmitted, you both though you’d just walk on board this Defender without warning anyone you might be contagious.”

I rolled my eyes. “Hey, if HQ didn’t transport us in quarantine, how is that our fault?”

“Because I fucking trained you to know better!” Doc growled. He shook his head and relented a little. “Brady, you should have disclosed this as soon as you realized.”

“Except what would have been the point, Doc? It’s been ten months since I got Lucy back, and you’re right, we don’t know what this is or how it works, but it’s taken that long to affect the one person we’ve had most contact with! And it wouldn’t have changed anything—it wouldn’t have changed the fact that I’ve come into contact with thousands of people since I got back planetside. If they’re infected too, there’s nothing we can do about it. The only thing that would have been different about full disclosure is they would have put Lucy in a fucking cage with us!”

“Still, you knowingly entered a closed environment carrying what might possibly be an alien contagion.”

“Yeah, well, you know what else is a closed environment, Doc? The Earth. And if this is a contagion, we’ve already spent the last ten months spreading it.”

“It’s not a contagion,” Cam said suddenly. “It might share some characteristics with one, but it’s not a disease.” He dragged his fingers through his damp hair. “It’s
more
than that. I never exchanged bodily fluids with Brady for him to get the connection.”

I rubbed a thumb over my leg, remembering the way I’d cut my thigh when we’d been trying to get Cam out of the pod. I’d ended up with slimy goo from the pod all over me, and in the cut. “I cut my thigh, though, remember?”

“The fluid from the pod was sterile,” Doc said, then shrugged. His hazmat suit rustled. “So far as we could tell.”

“It doesn’t follow the rules a disease does,” Cam said. “It’s more complicated than that. It targets certain people, like Brady, or Lucy, and makes the connection itself. It’s not random, like a disease or a virus. I think it brought Lucy in because she was a part of our family group. I don’t even think anyone else was at risk until Chris and the others injected themselves. They’re the ones risking it spreading now, through their own families. Not us.”

There was Cam’s faith again. Trusting the Faceless. Trusting the link, and the way it was transmitted, to have a purpose, even though it was one he couldn’t understand. Mysterious ways and all that.

“You can’t know that, surely,” Doc said.

No, but he
believed
it.

“The way the Faceless communicate…” Cam made a face. “I don’t know how to explain it exactly. Their family groups are structured almost like hives, and they communicate within that group only. To talk to another hive, someone has to get linked. But it doesn’t automatically get passed to every other member of the hive. Kai-Ren was the only one I could talk to. I think it’s something very specific to their biology, but it doesn’t work exactly the way it should with ours.”

I thought of Kai-Ren’s face, sickly white in the sunlight.
“Your bodies, your chemistry, they are
different.”

I curled my fingers through Cam’s.

“I’ve told a hundred different officers this a hundred different times,” Cam said. He sighed, and the weariness of the past year rolled over him. “It’s in all the reports. But I can’t explain it any better than that, because I can barely understand any of it myself. I’m not hiding anything, sir.”

Doc was silent for a long while before he finally spoke again. “You’re asking us to take a lot on trust, Rushton.”

He always was, ever since he came back from the Faceless.

“I know that, sir.” Cam shrugged helplessly.

Doc sighed. “I’ll tell the commander that I believe you’ve acted in good faith, but I doubt it’ll be much consolation to him. The whole goddamn Defender is already in an uproar because of this shit. And the quarantine will stay in place.”

Cam nodded.

“Doc,” I said, my guts clenching a little. “Why are we in quarantine here, and not in the med bay? Not that I’m complaining, but last time they didn’t give us so much room.”

Doc’s suit crinkled as he turned his head to look at me. “Because, Brady, the others haven’t arrived yet.”

* * * *

It took three days. Three days of me alternately climbing the fucking walls or sitting and staring out into the black. Nobody came to see us: not Commander Leonski, and not anybody from intel. A bunch of ration packs appeared in front of the elevators in the middle of the night. We hadn’t just been quarantined—we’d been ignored.

On the third day, the lights dimmed. When they came back on, they were red. There was no accompanying Klaxon or recorded announcement, but the station was on high alert.

I crossed the hallway and went into Captain Hayashi’s room. His window overlooked the Outer Ring. I couldn’t see anything, though, except starlight. I was frustrated. I wanted to stomp on his circuit board just to be an asshole, but then I figured I’d already stolen his chocolates and caused him, and every other officer in this section of the quarters, to be banished from their own rooms. There was something eerie about that. Drawers left ajar, books left open, a wallet on the bed. It was like standing on the deck of the
Mary Celeste
or something and wondering where the fuck everyone had gone.

I flicked though a magazine of Hayashi’s—couldn’t read the Japanese, though—and then went back to our room.

Cam was on edge too.

We were both listening for it, so when the elevator doors rolled open at the end of the corridor, we both hurried down to see.

Four guys in uniform, packs slung over their shoulders, lugging two footlockers between them. They eyed us curiously. They all wore orange armbands, same as us, but the patches on their uniforms told us they were from intel. I checked their rank insignia too: a lieutenant, a second lieutenant, and two officer cadets. Of course they all outranked me by miles. Hell, I don’t know why I’d even bothered to look. Everyone always outranked me by miles.

The elevator doors shut.

“Lieutenant Rushton,” one of the guys said and held out his hand.

Cam shook it.

Shit.

A sudden swirl of emotions, too thick and fast to untangle and make sense of, crashed over Cam and caught me too. This guy here, sandy-haired and gap-toothed as a kid. Some woman, laughing, who smelled like perfume. An older man, mouth downturned in a thin sneer:
“You’ll never make it through officer training.”
A song playing in a club—strobe lights and this guy’s gaze fixed on some girl whose tits were trying to pop out of her dress. A teacher banging a ruler on a desk:
“Stupid, stupid, stupid!”
An overcast day. A funeral? The sound of a kid screaming. A champagne cork popping. Sweeping up sweet-smelling wood shavings off a garage floor.

A hundred different moments, connected in some way that only he knew, that had led him here, to the black, to us.

Cam reeled back.

“Shit,” the guy said, looking just as shell-shocked. “Sorry, sir. Shit.”

“It’s not your fault,” Cam said warily.

“It kind of is,” I pointed out. “These assholes did this on purpose, LT.”

“These assholes outrank you, Brady.”

We both watched the guys carefully, but there was no indication they’d heard. We were safe enough, for now, but how long until that last wall crumbled and every single one of them was in my head? In
our
heads?

They didn’t say anything else or make any more overtures. I didn’t care. I’d know soon enough, wouldn’t I? Whether I wanted to or not. I glared at them as they lugged their gear down the corridor, their boots squeaking on the metal floor.

“Fifth on the left is ours,” I yelled after them. “Stay the hell out!”

“Brady,” Cam said in a warning tone.

The elevator doors rolled open again.

Chris Varro stood there. He wasn’t alone.

He was holding Lucy’s hand.

Lucy.

I froze. For a moment I couldn’t even move enough to suck breath into my lungs. Then Lucy was barreling into me, and instinct took over. I wrapped my arms around her and lifted her off her feet. She squealed with delight.

I stared at Chris Varro over her shoulder, the sudden joy at having her in my arms colliding with the rush of hot anger that she was here, both of them crashing together in a million jagged fragments that I couldn’t begin to sort through. My body responded before my brain knew how: hot tears slid down my face before I’d even known I wanted to cry.