The Burning Dark (13 page)

Sen sniffed and returned to lean against the wall with her arms folded. “Yeah, but he isn’t.”

“And ain’t that sad fact. Hey, Ahuriri, punch the fucking lights already.”

Before the range commander had even pressed the buzzer again, DeJohn opened fire. Serra and Sen stepped back, Serra clutching her ear protectors as she watched him obliterate the target.

Serra frowned. It was easy enough with a rifle, she thought. Pistols were harder. She’d managed only five hits on her own target, all of them marginal. She turned to Carter—but so far he hadn’t fired a single shot.

“Hey, come on,” she said, putting a little more strength into her voice than she actually felt. But it was what he needed; she was sure of that.

Carter rolled his shoulders and, without another word, raised the gun and fired ten shots in quick succession. With practiced ease he slid the half-full magazine out of the gun’s grip, made the weapon safe, then punched the target button. The fiberboard Spider glided toward them.

There was only one hole in the target, ragged and large, in the dead center of the Spider’s head section. Carter’s aim had been perfect.

DeJohn whistled and shook his head in appreciation, then began reloading his rifle. “That’s my man!”

Serra and Carter exchanged a look, and Carter laughed. His shoulders slumped, and under Serra’s hands his muscles felt far more relaxed than they had been all day.

He nodded and smiled; she smiled back and walked over to her station and got another target up and ignored the voice in her head that kept calling her name.

13

The cabin was dark
when Izanami came by. She stepped half-in, half-out, and looked like she was about to back out when Ida spoke from his position on the bed. Izanami stopped and squinted, and as Ida sat up, the cabin lights warmed to the preset twilight dim. Izanami stepped into the room properly, the door closing behind her and cutting out what little light had crept in.

“Finally!” said Ida.

“Good evening, Captain.”

“Where have you been hiding? I’ve been looking for you.”

Izanami smiled and waved her hands vaguely in front of her. “Oh, around. So? Did you manage to run a translation?”

“I did,” said Ida, swinging off the bed and walking over to his desk. He stopped before sitting down and turned to face the medic.

Izanami frowned. “Find something?”

He nodded. “Plenty.”

He sat, pulled the computer screen toward him, and tapped out a sequence. The rush of static filled the cabin like a warm bath. When the Russian woman spoke again, Ida saw Izanami stiffen. The voice was now speaking in English. It was still distorted, and still heavily accented, the computer simulation a perfect match. And now they could hear what was being said very clearly.

“Five … four … three … two … one … one…”

“You were right about the countdown,” said Ida over the next section of dialogue. The static crackled over the top.

“Listen … listen! Come in! Talk to me! I am hot, hot.… What? Forty-five? Fifty? Yes, yes … yes? Breathing, breathing oxygen. Yes. I am hot!”

Izanami sank to the edge of the bed, hands clasped tightly in her lap. She was looking at the floor, but when she glanced at Ida, her eyes caught the blue glow of the space radio light again and he suddenly felt odd and had to look away. It was uncomfortable, listening in on someone else’s conversation. It felt wrong, but he wanted Izanami to hear the rest.

“So she is in some kind of ship? Smaller than a U-Star?”

Ida nodded but held up a finger. “It gets worse.”

The recording popped sharply.

“I am hot.… This … Isn’t this dangerous?”

Ida heard Izanami gasp. He closed his eyes.

“Yes … What? Talk to me! How should I … Yes? Transmission begins now.… Forty-one … Transmission begins.… I feel hot!”

“Ida, please.”

His eyes snapped open. Izanami was looking at him, her oval eyes shining brightly. As he watched, the shadows in the corner of the cabin behind her seemed to swim a little, but it was just his imagination. “Just listen,” Ida said.

He’d told himself, over and over, that he was just listening to a computer-generated interpretation. He knew that, but he couldn’t help the tightness in his chest. He knew that no matter what, he’d never be able to listen to the original Russian recording again, ever.

“I can see a flame!”

“Ida!”

“What? I feel hot.… I can see a flame! I feel hot.… Thirty-one, thirty-two…”

Izanami shifted on the bed. She was looking at the floor again. “An accident,” she said, her voice so low, Ida only just heard it over the static.

He nodded, but she wasn’t looking.

“I can see a flame! I can see a flame!”

The voice, computerized or not, was heartrending. The woman was clearly trapped and desperate to escape. These were her last moments of life. Of that Ida had no doubt. He also had no doubt that he was going to give up the space radio and never touch it again. He had only a couple of months to go on the
Coast City
. He’d sort out the business with Tau Retore back at Fleet Command. It wasn’t like he’d ever see Carter and the others ever again anyway.

“Am I going to crash? Yes, yes! I feel hot.… I will reenter, I will reenter. I am listening.”

The static snapped off and the silence that filled the cabin was as cold as the air had become. Ida stood and walked to the environment controls, pumping the heat up a few notches to compensate for the faulty atmos. When he turned back, Izanami hadn’t moved. She stared at the radio set.

“You said you’d found something else?” she asked, her voice flat, her eyes unmoving from the device.

Ida rubbed his chin and slowly approached the desk. He didn’t take his eyes off the radio either. He walked toward it like it was a thing alive and dangerous. Maybe it was.

“You were right about the signal being an echo, but—” Ida slapped his hands against his legs and sighed.

He glanced at Izanami, her eyes reflecting the blue glow of the radio light and, unless he was mistaken, a very slight smile dusting her lips. She was leaning forward a fraction, poised, anticipating.

“It’s weird. I can’t explain it and the comms deck didn’t like it either—damn thing threw up so many errors, I had to check it manually.”

Izanami’s mouth twitched; her eyes widened. She looked like she was contemplating a meal, but Ida put it down to the odd shadows cast across her face.

“The signal is old. Very old.
Impossibly
old. It was certainly a freak event that I picked it up.” When Ida blinked, the shadows moved, so he turned back to the desk and the radio set. “It’s not an echo from the lightspeed link. The signal is electromagnetic. It’s a
radio
signal—radio, honest-to-God electromagnetic radio waves—and it’s been racing toward us, from Earth to Shadow, for the last thousand years.”

Ida whistled. He knew that as you traveled out from the Earth, if you could overtake the transmissions as they were beamed into the black, you’d be able to—theoretically—pick up old signals. The farther out, the older the data. Although as far out as Shadow, the signal would be weaker than the background roar of the universe. The signal, somehow, had bounced sideways into subspace and been boosted until it reached the radio set.

He shook his head, trying to fathom the how and the why and, now that he had the translation, the fate that had befallen this woman a thousand years ago. The age of the signal put the transmission sometime around the middle of the twentieth century—it was a relic from the early days of space travel. Now that he knew there was no action he could take to save the sender, who was a millennium dead, Ida thought the hollow ache in his chest should have improved. But somehow it didn’t, and the more he thought about the signal, the more anxious he felt.

When he turned around to ask Izanami about that, she’d gone, leaving nothing but the sigh of the door closing behind her.

14

Marine-Engineer Niels DeJohn
stood in the corridor on Phi Deck, Level 20, the heels of his boots on the standard metallorubber tiles common to every Fleet U-Star and his toes on the hard grille of the demolition zone. Lights shone through the gapped floor, illuminating the mist that swam lazily, liquidlike at ankle height.

DeJohn stared straight ahead, into the side of the
Coast City
that was more skeleton than whole. It was safe, where he was; the zones open to space were accessible only to the demolition drones. But here, on the edge, the environment controls had a hard time. But nobody was supposed to be here, not really, so what did it matter?

The environment controls were fighting something else as well, not just the stress of the space station being pulled to bits, its mass redistributed, its structure altered, every slice and dice requiring careful recalibration of virtually all systems by the station’s central computer, no matter how carefully the demolition drones were programmed, no matter how routine these things were. Taking apart a U-Star, while keeping it functional as long as possible, complete with skeleton crew—now there was a difficult and dangerous task.

DeJohn stared ahead but he couldn’t see the corridor, not anymore. The mist swam around his feet, and his breath plumed out in a great white cloud. Unusual, but not impossible. Out in space in half a station, odd things could happen.

The shadows. Now, they were a problem. The corridor on Phi Deck was dark, twilight-normal, to conserve power, maintain efficiency. The low light created a lot of shadow, but not the sort that moved, the sort that swarmed around the marine, swimming through the mist, caressing his body as he stood, muscles tense—so rigid, he was shaking, like he was being held in place. His eyes twitched, as did his lips, and DeJohn stared ahead, but he couldn’t see, not anymore.

And then she was behind him. He knew she was there, knew who she was, but he couldn’t move and he couldn’t see. He was a Fleet marine, the best of the best, a warrior who had engaged in hand-to-hand combat with the Spiders themselves and lived to tell the tale.

But there were some things he couldn’t fight. Somewhere inside he screamed, somewhere deep where the last vestige of his conscious mind scrambled for a foothold. A second later that hold was lost, and the scream faded and echoed until there was nothing left. Nothing but silence and shadows and her standing behind him.

Her eyes glowed blue in the station’s night.

“Contact has been established,” she whispered. At her words the shadows roiled, peeling out of the corners of the corridor and sweeping around her in a slow orbit. Within moments she was the center of a storm of night. The shadows, alive, kissed her skin.

She reached out and pointed at DeJohn’s back. The marine’s eyes rolled up until only the whites were showing, and then he jolted like he’d been shocked, and then he turned around. The shadows coalesced around him too, and together the pair stood in the dark on Phi Deck, the world dimming around them until the only light was the light of her eyes, blue and terrible and aflame.

“Serve me and I will soon be here,” she said. “Serve me and soon I will end it all.”

DeJohn jerked again and blinked. He looked into her blue eyes and laughed, long and hard.

And as he laughed, she smiled, and in the dark, she burned.

THE SITUATION ON WARWORLD 16 HAS BEEN RESOLVED

“For services rendered.”

The metal strip was pinned to his tunic. Corporal Charlie Carter saluted the colonel, who stood back, saluted in return, then led the applause, deafening in the confines of the base’s operations room. Carter stuck his chest out just that little bit more.

Someone shouted out that Charlie Carter was the best goddamn marine on the planet. Carter laughed, and so did the colonel.

*   *   *

“Please,” said the man,
and when he said it, his bottom lip quivered like he was begging for forgiveness from his significant other. Which he was. The Fleet was everyone’s SO, whether you were enlisted or a citizen.
Especially
if you were a citizen out on a colony. The Fleet looked after you, after everything.

Didn’t it?

“Please,” said the man again, like he really, honestly, truly damn well meant it even more this time. The sweat on his face glowed in the low light. It was hot underground, in the bunker.

A bead of sweat reached Corporal Carter’s top lip as he stood in the dark behind the interrogator. He licked it off and regarded the begging man manacled on the other side of the desk. His own face was hidden in the shadows. To the prisoner, he was just one of two anonymous jarheads standing guard.

His father wouldn’t recognize him.

Carter turned his attention to the back of the interrogator’s head. Her hair was brilliantly blond and long, much longer than specified in Fleet regulations. But the interrogator was special, her skills unique. Not even the Fleet could tell the Angel of Death what to do or how to wear her hair.

“We trade protein. Only protein.” The man’s eyes were wide as he spoke to the Angel. In the silence that followed, she tilted her head.

“Oh, but that’s not all, is it?” It wasn’t a question; it was a statement. Her voice, cool enough and quiet enough to scare even Carter.

Another drop of sweat. Another nervous lick.

The Angel of Death would get the truth out of Carter’s father, even if it killed him.

And it would.

*   *   *

Carter found Angel Jones
in the bunker’s main passage, a wide, low-ceiling tunnel that led to the outside. Carter hadn’t been looking, but the moment was opportune.

“Ma’am,” he said. Angel Jones didn’t seem to have a rank, at least not one that the rest of them knew about. Her uniform was the same as everyone’s, save for the absence of any insignia at all.

The Angel of Death smiled. Carter wondered whether she knew what people called her on the base. Of course she did. Nothing escaped her on Warworld 16. That was why she was here.