The Burning Dark (22 page)

There was a sharp click in Ida’s ear. He let go of his rifle with one hand and touched the comms link on his collar.

“Receiving.”

“Captain?” It was Serra, calling from several decks below his feet.

“Reading you, marine. Found any vermin yet?”

“I don’t know. We’re on Level Fifteen, Gamma Eleven-Two. Do you have any environment problems up there?”

“Affirmative. Temperature just took a dive in the last thirty seconds.”

No reply.

“Hello?”

Ida thumbed the comms link twice, and suddenly it sparked back into life with a burst of static, loud enough to make him cry out in surprise. The sound receded quickly, but remained in the background as Serra’s voice broke through. He couldn’t catch her words, and asked her to repeat.

“Same here,” she said. “We’ve tried the manual controls, but even the lights won’t come on. Looks like some kind of general power failure.”

Ida looked back at his team of marines. Leena was standing, gun down, listening to the conversation. Perrett and Lawrence remained alert, covering the front, rifles up. Newman had her back to the group, covering the rear with her rifle.

It was deliberate sabotage; it had to be. Which meant they were closing in.

Serra’s voice was edged with white noise over the comms. “Captain, we’ve got company. There’s someone up ahead.”

Leena lifted her rifle and aimed just a notch over Ida’s shoulder. Then she nodded at him. “Sir.”

Ida snapped his head around. At the end of the passage, against the next bulkhead, was a dark figure, humanoid but bulky. Someone wearing a spacesuit. Ida clicked the comms.

“Serra, confirmed, so do we.”

White noise, static.

“Serra? Come in?”

Nothing. Nothing but the angry roar of subspace.

Ida kept his eye on the figure ahead, noting that the bulkhead door hadn’t opened despite the proximity of the intruder. That was it—they were controlling the environment, turning the lights off when it suited them, overriding the doors somehow, disabling the manifest and life scanners so they could move through the wreck of the
Coast City
unnoticed. Reducing the ambient temperature because—

Ida’s comm sprang into life with a roar of white noise, just as the passage lights above Ida and his team flickered on to full for a second before falling back to the system minimum. The flare hurt Ida’s eyes, and he drew an arm up instinctively to shield his face.

Ahead, the figure in the suit was somehow hard to focus on. Ida squinted. The outline was furry at the edges, streaking out like it was a reflection from somewhere being bent in the air. The shadows seemed to move, clustering around it like iron filings to a magnet.

More noise from the comms. Ida thumbed the control again and again, but each time, the roar seemed to come back louder and louder.

“Serra? Serra, come in.”

Click,
static,
click,
static.

“Sir?” Leena raised her rifle.

Behind her, Newman had turned from covering the rear and brought her gun to bear on the intruder. Lawrence and Perrett did the same. Ida pulled his own gun back to his face and put his eye to the sight, but the intruder ahead melted into the background in the computer-enhanced view. Ida released his safety and took a step forward. His boot crunched something on the floor; glancing down, Ida felt the blood drain from his face. It was his imagination, it had to be. The flakes of paint on the floor were red on one side, pale on the other. They swam around his ankles like autumn leaves on a nonexistent breeze.

He took a sharp intake of breath and realigned the gun sight with his target.

“Halt and identify yourself!”

The intruder began to walk forward, very slowly. With each step, the temperature in the passageway plummeted, and within seconds Ida’s breath plumed in a cloud of steam in front of his face. The ceiling lights, already on minimum, dipped as the intruder passed underneath, almost as though their power were being siphoned away.

Ida adjusted his grip on the gun. As he shifted his weight, his boots crunched again. Something inside him screamed out, but he ignored it. “If you do not halt, you will be shot. You are unauthorized personnel. Prepare to be detained. Halt and identify yourself.”

The intruder didn’t stop. Ida felt his rifle, pressed hard against his bare cheek, become a cold, slippery block of metal as a dusting of frost began to grow on its surface. He shifted his grip again, pushing the sight hard enough into his eye socket to hurt. With the lighting fading, the scope automatically adjusted, enhancing the view even more so Ida had a crystal clear, if green-tinged, view of the passage ahead. He could see ahead to the closed bulkhead, but the corridor was completely empty.

Ida swore and raised his head from the gun. The intruder was still there, shuffling forward slowly like a sleepwalker. He checked the scope again. Nothing. More tricks?

“Marines,” he called over his shoulder. “Do not use your scopes. Our equipment may be compromised.”

“Sir,” came the chorus of quiet replies.

Ida’s comms link chimed. “Cleveland…”

Ida’s hand shot to his collar. “Marshal?” The channel was clear enough, although the white noise pulsed steadily in the background, like the universe breathing. Or like a giant heartbeat.

“This is Commandant Elbridge. They’re … here … don’t let them get the … book … the ready room … the ready room … the…”

The commandant sounded like he was shouting in a hurricane, the roar that Ida knew was the sound of subspace drowning him out.

“Commandant? Come in, please. Where are you?”

The comm clicked and the white noise was so loud, Ida flinched, his hand a moment away from pulling the piece out of his ear.

The intruder stepped forward again. As it got closer, the edges of the suit seemed to resolve, as though the figure was coming into focus. A metallic blue spacesuit and narrow, elliptical helmet. A U-Star survival suit.

Ida’s hand dropped and frowned. He recalled Carter’s description of the intruder, but something didn’t match. Behind him, Leena gave the order for the squad to take up a firing position. Ida automatically fell into a firing stance himself. His boots crunched; he glanced down again, willing the thick, heavy flakes of red paint to vanish in the same way they had magically appeared. Perhaps he was dreaming again. Perhaps, if he turned around, the bulkhead door would be made of rough wood, paint peeling off in a summer breeze. He closed his eyes and opened them again, but the paint flakes were still on the floor. He jerked his gun up. “That’s enough. Stop right there.”

The suited figure stopped just a few yards ahead. It was a woman, Ida could see now, as solid and as real as anyone.

“Identify yourself.”

“Ida, it’s me.”

The barrel of Ida’s rifle dropped an inch.

“It’s me,” she said again. The figure raised her hands to the sides of the helmet, twisting the globe anticlockwise until it clicked, and then lifting it off.

The woman was in her early thirties, strands of blond hair streaked with bright red and pink visible around the edges of the skullcap she wore.

Ida took a step forward, lowering his gun.

Leena took a step forward, gun rock steady and level, ready to shoot. “Sir?”

Ida waved her off. He was staring at the woman in the suit, his mouth hanging open, forehead creased. Was it hot, or was it cold?

“Astrid?”

She smiled, her teeth shining pale blue in the low light and her eyes burning with the same color.

“It’s good to see you, Ida.”

Ida walked forward, mimicking the glacial pace Astrid had taken when she appeared at the bulkhead. He smiled, but his eyes were still narrowed in confusion.

“Astrid? I…”

She shook her head. “It’s okay, Ida, don’t worry. I forgive you.”

Ida stopped and raised his gun, pointing it directly at Astrid’s forehead. He slowly curled his head down to the sight. It showed nothing but empty corridor in front of him. He raised his head again. There she was. The barrel of the gun was less than six inches from her head.

“Come with me,” she said. Astrid glanced behind Ida at the tight pack of marines, each with a gun pointed in her direction. “All of you. Come.”

“Astrid … I…”

Astrid smiled. “Come with me.”

“Astrid, you’re dead.”

“All of you. Come.”

“You died. You all died.”

“Oh, Ida.” She laughed.

The sound made Ida dizzy, but he pushed his cheek so hard into the side of the rifle that it hurt.

Astrid tilted her head. “You can’t stop us,” she said. “Come with me.”

Ida touched the comms tag on his collar, and when he spoke, it was through clenched teeth.

“Serra? Come in! Serra, you there?”

When he released the call button, the static popped out again, rising and falling, like the winds of a storm pressing against the shuttered windows of Ida’s old family farmstead, back on Earth.

“Serra, dammit, come in.”

Astrid smiled and reached out a hand.

Ida froze, rooted to the spot. He tried to turn around, to direct his marines, but suddenly he was swimming through syrup, trapped in a slow-motion nightmare. With a huge effort, Ida pushed himself back and opened his mouth to shout an order to his troops.

The order never came. The comms flared into life again with the screams of Serra’s team, decks below them. He recognized her voice at first, before it melted into the wails of the marines with her, impossibly loud for the tiny earpiece pumping the sound into Ida’s skull.

Ida let go of his gun, letting it drop and then swing from the short line clipped to his chest. He yanked the earpiece out then pressed the heels of his hands into his ears, trying to shut out the terrible cacophony, the sound of pure primal terror that reverberated around and down the passageway.

The marines didn’t seem to hear it, couldn’t have heard it, because they just stood, ready for action, frozen. Ida’s artificial knee sent a pain signal so pure, so intense that the whole side of his body felt like it was on fire. Then it disconnected from his psi-fi field. The knee buckled, and Ida fell. Even that seemed to be in slow motion as the force, a presence so thick, emanating from all around them, threatened to swamp his senses.

Then he saw them, the shapes, tall and thin and black. As the overhead lights flickered and dimmed, each new shadow moved of its own accord, peeling itself off the wall, forming a misshapen, unfinished figure. Long, flaring human silhouettes flickered like guttering candle flame. Within moments they surrounded Ida’s team, and he found himself separated from the marines by an ever-decreasing circle of darkness.

It was only when the circle of figures finally closed in that the marines sprang to life. Beneath the screams of Serra’s team, piped out of the earpiece dangling over Ida’s shoulder, Ida heard his own unit cry out. Two of them fired their guns, lighting the passage in brilliant flashes of white-blue light, each flare showing a passageway entirely empty. Ida looked back over his shoulder and watched as Astrid’s image flickered in time with the gunshot flashes. He winced at the sound of the shots, each loud enough to punch through the roaring static and the wailing screams, and within seconds he could feel hot gritty dust coating his bare face as the soft ceramic shells were pulverized against the walls of the passageway. The marines were shooting at nothing. Ida found his voice and called on the troops to cease fire.

More barrel flashes and he felt something tug at the fabric of his combat suit, then an odd, wet sensation. Ida’s leg jerked, a blackened smear appearing on the side of his robot knee. Underneath the torn fabric of his suit, the silvery surface of artificial joint shone through a web of dark blood.

The static and the screaming suddenly increased in volume—so loud, Ida let himself slide against the wall as he pulled his hands to the side of his head. Ida cried out in surprise and pain, and looking up, watched as the black shadows drew to within touching distance of the marines. Watched as the marines—trained professionals, conditioned for space battle in the most deadly environments it was possible to exist in—turned to blind fear, throwing their arms in the air and wailing like cornered animals.

“Come with us. All of you. Come.”

Astrid’s voice was inside his head. Looking back at her, he could see her lips moving as she spoke, but her words echoed somewhere inside his own skull, her voice edged with metal and fire. She took a step forward, her outstretched hand now turned palm-up as she offered her help to Ida.

Ida looked back at the marines. They were writhing shapes, shadows cocooned in a deep black envelope, a frictionless absence of light that was impossible to focus on. Ida closed his eyes.

Astrid was dead. He remembered her scream and her plea for help as it echoed around the bridge of the
Boston Brand.
He remembered the faces of his crew as they listened to the dying cries of those on Tau Retore who hadn’t escaped. The one part of his heroic victory tale that he never told: how he’d been responsible for saving an entire planet, but he’d also been the reason many on the planet’s surface died, the ones who had stayed behind. Including Astrid, who had been taken away from him and sent to Tau Retore by her father, the Fleet Admiral. Astrid, the love of Ida’s life. When he closed his eyes he could see the stellar core of the Mother Spider drop, released from the heart of the machine, and plunge down toward the planet.

the star falling as though it were a lamp burning shining bright annihilation holocaust extinction

He opened his eyes.

“You’re dead, Astrid.”

Astrid smiled widely. Her eyes were burning blue ovals, deep and impossible like the black shadows that swarmed the corridor around them. “Come with me.”

Ida shook his head. He didn’t know what she meant. Nothing made any sense. As he lay on the floor of a corridor on the U-Star
Coast City,
his hands dropped from his head, and his fingers curled on the flakes of red paint beneath him.

He said, “No.”

Then Ida blinked, and he was alone in the passageway. The paint flakes were gone, and the floor had an icy sheen, cold against his cheek as his head flopped sideways. The ceiling lights stabilized and returned to the system minimum, spotlighting his prone form.