The Burning Dark (25 page)

Ida turned back to watch the Hollywood gang fidget as King lectured them on the wheres and why-fors of station procedure before they were taken on a tour of the facilities. They were too far away to be heard over King’s monotone on the feed, but Ida saw the Mohawked man glance at the Fleet personnel around him and then rock on his heels in a suppressed laugh, although what he could possibly find funny about being surrounded by a squad of marines in full field battle kit was beyond Ida. Behind Dathan, Ivanhoe and Fathead had lost interest in the briefing and were playing some kind of hand-slapping game while their boss stood, arms folded, mouth set, and expression unreadable behind the protective eyewear. Fathead gave his bald companion’s hand one last sharp slap and then, laughing, sidled over to Ms. Hollywood. He trailed his hand over her arm as he swung around behind her. Then with one fingernail he traced the moving tattoo on her arm, the ink swirling like liquid under his touch. Hollywood remained still, but Ida thought she turned her head a little to look into the security camera.

“Admit it, you don’t like her.”

He found himself rubbing his chest through his shirt, trying to ease the tight feeling he now felt around his heart. “I don’t even know her.”

“Exactly,” said Izanami, and she walked toward the door, and then out of it.

Ida bit his thumbnail and watched the empty space where she had stood, then sighed.

“What’s wrong?” said the voice, thin and edged with static like the rolling waves of the sea. The space radio popped and crackled and Ida felt his heart kick.

Ludmila. She was real, apparently—an electromagnetic ghost bouncing around subspace, her voice echoing out of nothing but only when the recording was on playback. She was impossible. She was real. When she spoke, Ida felt afraid, knowing that he couldn’t, shouldn’t be talking to her. But then the fear faded, melting away, leaving Ida dizzy. They’d been in contact for little more than a cycle, but already he felt that he’d known her for years, that they had some weird connection, two spacefarers trapped in situations they had no control over.

Ida closed his eyes. If he thought about it too hard, none of it made sense, but there at the back of his mind he recalled a story he’d read years and years ago, a tall tale if ever there was one, but one that now made him take pause for thought. The story was that Marconi, the guy who had invented radio in the first place, hadn’t been trying to build a new form of communication; he’d been trying to find a way to talk to his dead brother. That scared Ida too, and he was perhaps a little grateful that the lightspeed link was down, as he wasn’t sure checking the veracity of an urban legend like that would do him any good.

“Nothing,” he said, opening his eyes. “I’m glad you stuck around, though.” This much was true. She was a welcome distraction.

Ludmila laughed. Ida liked it when she laughed; the sound was high and young, and very happy. The background static pulsed in time with it, and then she sighed, the sound cut like dry leaves in an autumn wind. Ida couldn’t remember the last autumn he’d had on Earth. He got as far as thinking it was red and orange before the memory was too fuzzy. He’d spent too long in space, too much time in Fleet service. He preferred to remember the summers on the farm, anyway. Or … he had, until recently.

Ida moved back to the door and glanced through the semi-frosted window, but the corridor to the right was just a faint orange smudge.

Then Ida looked to his left, and saw Izanami standing in the passage. He recoiled from the window in surprise; then he hit the control panel with his palm. The door snicked open.

“Izanami?”

Izanami took his arm, her fingers like ice even through Ida’s sleeve. For a moment her eyes seemed to catch the light in an odd way, like they were spun blue with stars. Then the space radio popped and went quiet and Ida blinked, and the light was gone.

“I just walked around the deck,” she said, pursing her lips. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean what I said before.”

Ida smiled weakly, and gestured for her to enter his cabin.

27

The P-Prof
Bloom County
crouched on the side of the U-Star
Coast City
like the Spiderbaby it really was, customized mining legs folded into a symmetrical array of scalene triangles. From a distance it looked like a complex communications pod, myriad antennae pointing out into the inky black. Closer, it looked like a parasitic insect, a strange locust–spider hybrid, clamped to the side of the station, sucking from the belly of its prey. They hadn’t used the station’s hangar. They didn’t need to—thanks to its unique design, the
Bloom County
could just sucker onto the side of the station, air lock to air lock.

There were many theories about the origin of the Spiders, about how an organo-metallic life-form might have evolved—or been
created
. About why the planet-eating, intelligent but not quite self-aware machine race looked so much like spiders. About why they had any interest in human affairs anyway. But for the crew of the
Bloom County,
the Spiderbaby at the heart of the ship was merely a very, very effective tool that helped them do their jobs. Out on the ragged edge of space, there was no time for theories.

*   *   *

The short, bald member
of the Hollywood gang, who went by the name Ivanhoe, flicked a switch, dimming the lights in the
Bloom County
’s control cabin, and leaned back in the navigator’s seat. He’d been born in the stars—just like the rest of the crew, each handpicked by Zia Hollywood with starbirth the most important parameter—and far preferred their light to the artificial illumination on board the ship. And while Shadow, the technetium star, was hidden on the other side of the space station, its high-energy emissions floodlit a shell of dust that enclosed the whole system nearly a tenth of a light-year out, giving the normally infinite black canvas of space an eerie—and with the cabin lights off, quite bright enough to work by—purple glow. This far out on the galactic rim, the star field beyond the glow was not as dense as Ivanhoe knew, or liked, but the scattering of distant suns that were visible were large and bright. So Ivanhoe sat for a spell, eyes flicking from one tiny solar body to the next, watching their outlines curl and flicker behind the dust cloud. He was happy to have gotten out of the VIP tour of the space station and glad to be able to look at the stars, even if he had a lot of work to do. They’d been lying about the security alert; that much was obvious from the number of marines on guard at every doorway. Unlike his crewmates, Ivanhoe didn’t like guns much. Especially guns on board a spaceship.

Someone knocked a tool off the bench behind him. Dathan, probably, either finally managing to pull himself away from their boss or finally being told by said boss to go and fix the motherfucking ship. Either option was good for Ivanhoe. Tracing the fault in the navigation pod would be much easier with two people, and besides, if someone had to go out onto the hull and open up the pod itself, he’d rather it wasn’t him. It wasn’t the light of Shadow that bothered him. The pod, a box shaped like half an egg three feet in length, was within reach of the mining claws.
That
was what bothered him.

One day, Ivanhoe knew, just
knew,
those claws would turn on them. Zia said she knew what she was doing, and Ivanhoe had no doubt about that. But nobody really
understood
Spider tech, not her, not her father. And, well, those claws were
alive,
my brother. They twitched, and sometimes they even grasped, as the Spiderbaby slept. There, they were doing it now. Ivanhoe’s eyes moved to the blinking indicator on the control desk in front of him. Two legs out of the four on the portside array were moving. Just a bit, just a flex, like someone who has sat on their hand for too long rolling their fingers to get the circulation back. Damn, it was as creepy as hell. But creepy as hell was paying the bills. Good old Spiderbaby. Sleep tight.

“I’ll tell you now,” said Ivanhoe to the shadows behind him, “I ain’t going out there. Let’s see if we can’t get the nav pod rejacked from here, my brother.”

Silence. Ivanhoe tore his eyes from the flickering indicator and slowly revolved the navigator’s chair around. The control cabin was empty, and the door was closed. The fallen tool—just a regular screwdriver—was on the floor in the middle of the cabin.

Ivanhoe sighed, pushed himself to his feet, picked up the screwdriver, and dropped it back on the tray of tools on the bench, not really thinking about how far the screwdriver had fallen from one side of the room to the other, not really thinking about how hot the metal tool had felt in his hand. It didn’t matter. Space was strange. Artificial gravity wasn’t perfect. Ivanhoe didn’t trust it—he’d been born in zero-G, my brother, and like the water babies of Earth, anything else just wasn’t natural. Falling through starlight. That’s how he liked to describe it. It impressed the ladies, anyway.

He turned back to the control deck and put his hands behind his head, scratching his bare scalp as he did so. The mining leg motion indicator had gone dark, but the data screen showing the nav pod output was still a wash of amber nonsense.

“Well, fuck you very much, you spiky-haired freak show.” It was clear what had happened. Even if Zia had told Dathan to go and help him, he’d probably stopped by the nearest dark corner of the station for a quick jerk-off. That prick had the slimy dirty hots for their boss. He made no secret of it, but it seemed to suit Ms. Hollywood. He’d jump to anything she said. To Ivanhoe and Fathead, it was free entertainment.

Ivanhoe stood from the seat and, reaching one leg forward, dragged a wheeled tool tray out from below the console with the toe of his boot. He looked at the tray for a minute; then he selected two or three items before kicking it across the floor over to the pilot’s console on the other side of the flight deck. So, there it was. Once again it was up to him. Hours on his back under the consoles wasn’t Ivanhoe’s favorite horizontal activity, but the nav pod had to be fixed if they were going to find their prize on the other side of Shadow. And if he could fix the pod from here and not have to crawl out over the outside of the ship and take a look at it in person, all the better.

“Dominos…”

Ivanhoe jumped, dropping his tools with a clatter across the pilot’s station. An electric socket wrench with a heavy handle bounced on the edge of the console and hit the floor, rolling noisily across it.

“Hello?”

There was no one. He was alone in the cabin, but someone had very clearly called his name. His real name, one that he hadn’t heard in fifteen years and that, of the crew, only Zia knew.

He swore and stormed to the cabin door. Dathan again, playing some kind of trick. Maybe Zia had let his real name slip. Ivanhoe never wanted to hear that name ever again, and if she’d told Dathan, even accidentally, he was now officially pissed.

“Day, you fuck.”

The wheel on the door spun counterclockwise for a few seconds. Ivanhoe watched it impatiently, knocking his knuckles against the heavy metal frame of it. Dathan was a dead man.

The door beeped as it unlocked. Grabbing the wheel with one hand, Ivanhoe pushed it to his left. Beyond was a short corridor leading to a ladder that went up to the crew quarters and down to the hopper and the working end of the ship.

The corridor was empty, and the hatches in the floor and ceiling were closed.

The
Bloom County
’s navigator drummed his permanently blackened fingernails against the doorframe, the thin metal plating making a harsh, tinny rattle as he tapped. The hatches were closed. The latches on both shone with the orange glow of the engaged indicator. Besides, the hatches beeped in the control cabin when the latch was shunted to green for open.

Well, if someone was playing games, they’d have to play by his rules. Ivanhoe walked the short corridor, hopped up the first two rungs of the ladder, and flicked the ceiling hatch from engaged to locked. Jumping off, he locked the floor hatch. If anyone was coming, they’d have to damn well ring the doorbell.

“Dominos Tararaz … Where is he?”

Ivanhoe spun around just in time to see someone duck around the lip of the open control cabin hatch. The corridor was only twenty feet long and just wide enough for two people to pass. With the hatches locked and in full view in front of him, Ivanhoe was positive nobody had come in. He’d been in the cabin for a couple of hours and he knew the ship was empty, the rest of the crew accompanying Zia on the formal tour of the U-Star.

A stowaway was impossible—the crew made it their habit, each of them, to inspect personally near to every damn rivet in the ship before a flight. There was no room, no room at all. Which meant …

Intruder.

“Mother
fucker,
” said Ivanhoe, shaking his head in disbelief. Some bored grunt from the station taking a look around and messing with his head. Shit, did that piss him off. He had a lot of work to do, and nobody but nobody got into the
Bloom County
without his permission—even the famous and rich Zia Hollywood, who
owned
the ship, asked him before allowing any visitors aboard. As navigator, Ivanhoe was responsible for steering the ship true toward riches and glory and, more important, away from and out of trouble. The lives of the crew and the safe and secure transit of their valuable cargo were in his hands. If they went in the wrong direction, if the charts were off and they missed their mark and lost a paycheck, it was his fault.

“Hey, come out here so I can kick your green-covered ass!”

Something clanked from beyond the door. It sounded like one of the tools being picked up. Fucker was arming himself.

“The hell you do,” Ivanhoe muttered, and he jogged down the corridor. “You picked the wrong ship to play hide-and-seek in, my brother.”

The control cabin was dark, much darker than it had been. Ivanhoe squinted in the gloom. The main window shutters were wide open and the purple light of the dust cloud shone in, a smattering of large white stars still visible. But there was something else inside the cabin, obscuring the windows with a blackish haze. Ivanhoe absently waved a hand in front of his face, but the mist (was it mist?) didn’t move, didn’t react like it should. He stood still, unable to decide whether this was smoke and something was on fire. But the blackness had no odor or taste, and it didn’t move in the air. It was more like shadow, like swirling patches of air that were somehow less inclined to let light pass through them.