The Burning Dark (31 page)

“What’s the matter?” Izanami asked. The smile didn’t leave her face.

Ida paused at the threshold, one hand on the doorframe, one hand rubbing his forehead. He was getting a headache, a real thumper. It was cold and there was a sound in his head, the rushing noise of subspace like some kind of tinnitus, echoing in his ears.

“I saw her,” he said. He gasped for air. His body felt like it was made of herculanium armor.

Izanami hopped off the bed and went to Ida, her hands behind her back. She peered at his eyes. Ida held the back of his hand over his mouth like he was going to retch, but nothing materialized.

Izanami’s smile grew a little at the corners. “You look like you could use a rest, Captain.”

Ida shook his head and tried to straighten up, but his vision was going black and red at the edges. The shadows, crowding in. He turned to Izanami and was surprised by the blue light in her eyes.

“She’s here,” he said, shaking his head again. “And Zia’s gone … going … she saw … I…”

Ida screwed his eyes shut. It felt like hot metal was being pressed against his temples. He staggered to the table, where he sat heavily in the chair.

Izanami turned but stayed by the door. “Who’s here?”

From Izanami’s tone, Ida thought for a moment she was addressing a small child. He opened his eyes, but she was looking at him. The room flipped momentarily in front of his eyes, and nausea crawled up his chest from somewhere lower down. He grimaced and gripped the arms of his chair so hard, the edges bit into his hands.

He closed his eyes again. The last thing he saw before he did was Izanami’s eyes. They were blue, as blue as the sky, as blue as the light on the space radio and just as bright.

Behind his closed eyelids he wished for the purple shapes of summer, the breeze on his face, and the grass in his nose, but all he got was black shapes on a black background. They shifted, squirmed, rolled.

The
sound
filled his head. He sucked a breath in that was colder than he thought it should be.

“Where have you been, anyway?” he asked. He kept his eyes closed. He didn’t want to look at her. There was something about her eyes.… “One of Zia’s crewmen needed attention.” He opened his eyes. The cabin was still dark, and Izanami was hidden in shadows. Ida stood, waiting a beat to make sure he wasn’t going to keel over. Then he hobbled to the bed and lay down.

She shrugged. “I’m not the station’s official medic. You should get some rest.”

Ida turned over, the effort titanic. He opened his eyes and looked up and saw two Japanese medics sitting on his bed, the black shadow of a translucent third orbiting above them. He blinked and rubbed his eyes, and the image refocused. Izanami was still smiling.

“Sleep, Ida. Sleep.”

Sleep. Yes. He was tired, very tired, and cold. He thought about Zia and about the empty canteen, but the roar of subspace was a like a blanket, enclosing, enveloping, smothering his thoughts.

“Good night, Ida.”

“Guuhnmm…,” he said into the pillow, and she was gone.

On the table, the blue light of the space radio shone, but there was no static, no interference, no noise.

After a while, Ida jerked awake, but the room was empty. When he looked up, the radio’s blue light shone straight into his eye, and he let his head drop back to the pillow.

“Good night, Ludmila,” he said.

There was no answer, but Ida was asleep. In his dream he saw himself holding a gun and looking around an empty room. Red paint flakes fell like snow, and Astrid called his name.

As he was lying on the bed, his left hand unclenched, finally releasing the small, silver object onto the olive green blanket. Ida sighed in his sleep and turned over, knocking the lighter to the floor. It banged dully as it hit the rubberized decking, but not enough to wake him.

35

Ida woke and the
nausea hit him like a punch in the stomach. He got to the communal bathroom down the passage just in time. After he threw up he felt better, at least physically. He knelt in the stall for a few minutes, collecting himself. He had to see King straight away, insist he put the station on full alert, get everyone available to work on clearing the lightspeed link. The
Coast City
and everyone in it—everyone
left
in it—were in danger.

As he shuffled back to his cabin, he found himself checking over his shoulder more than once, more than twice. The environment control had settled into a low twilight, which wasn’t helping his state of mind.

Ida rushed into his cabin, immediately shutting the door behind him and leaning back against it as he took deep breaths, waiting for the panic to abate. He closed his eyes but that seemed to make it worse, and he quickly turned around to check through the frosted window. The corridor beyond was empty and silent. Ida exhaled loudly and rolled his neck. He had to see King, yes, but right now he didn’t really feel like venturing out in the corridor again, not just yet.

The cabin was cold, so very cold. Ida scrambled to the bed and grabbed the blanket to wrap around himself; then he saw something glinting on the floor in the low light, a bright white-blue sparkle like a tiny star. He reached down and picked it up.

The cigarette lighter: old-fashioned, either a replica or maybe an antique, forbidden on a U-Star as part of standard protocol (no naked flames). Ida flipped the cap, shook it—nearly full—then flicked the wheel. The flame was short and shone brightly in the twilight.

“Ludmila?”

Ida’s eyes flicked toward the space radio. It was on, the blue light shining. But the speaker was dead. Suddenly Ida missed the hiss and pop and crackle.

“Ludmila, are you there?”

Nothing. Ida dropped into the chair in front of the table. He adjusted the set, altering the volume, the gain, the everything.

Silence.

Ida swore and quickly pulled the radio set toward him so he could access the back panel. Nothing. It was all the same, all the jumpers were in the right place, the tune controls aligned. He pushed the box back and ran a finger over the manual controls on the front. All fine.

Ludmila was gone.

Ida pushed away from the table with a shout, allowing the momentum to spin his chair around and around, his face in his hands.

Had she ever been there? Maybe she’d been a product of his imagination, a voice conjured from the dark shadows of his mind. Maybe she’d never answered back. Nobody else had heard her, after all. Ida wasn’t even sure now that he’d told Izanami it.

Maybe he was cracking up. Maybe he already had. Maybe the same thing had happened to DeJohn before he vanished. Being alone in the dark could break a man.

But … no, he’d
seen
her. She’d been there, an apparition, a warning. And Carter had seen her too, earlier. He’d described the red
CCCP
insignia on her spacesuit.

Ida flicked the lighter closed and swore.

The blue light of the subspace radio. Ludmila. She
was
real, and she was connected to whatever was going on aboard the station. Ida knew that now—she’d died when her capsule burned up a thousand years ago; what was left was an echo in subspace, some part of her personality imprinted on the fabric of that bizarre dimension. Intelligent, self-aware survival after death. A ghost in the machine. And right now, the only person—alive or dead—who knew what was going on.

He waved his hand in the air above the space radio. The blue light flickered as the set recognized his commands and the three-dimensional holographic control panel materialized in the air. Ida began scrolling through frequencies; every few seconds the radio auto-locked onto something, but it was all garbage, the signal destroyed by the interference from Shadow.

He searched, lower and lower. Ludmila’s signal had been at the very bottom of the set’s range, where it shouldn’t even have been able to pick anything up: subspace, where the frequencies were thin and the signals weak, meshing with the background noise of the dimension itself.

Finally he was there, and the voices died down to be replaced by the roaring ocean of white noise that was so familiar, the roil of metallic static tinged with danger. He sighed and sat back, letting the sound roll over him and bounce around the room.

He was close. Close to her, he knew it.

He opened his eyes and scrolled farther, the noise, the poisonous, hypnotic,
addictive
pulse of subspace ebbing and flowing like a tidal current.

There. He jerked his head up. The patterns in the static had changed. Another signal, buried deep in the roaring. His eyes narrowed in concentration as he tried to focus on the sounds.

More pops and crackles and … a voice. His back went straight.

Ludmila.

He pulled himself closer to the table and yanked the radio closer to him so it practically hugged his chest. He carefully scanned the region he was tuned to.

“Ludmila? Ludmila, can you hear me? Come in, please.”

Something there, scrambled. A woman’s voice.

Ida’s heart raced. The answer was within reach.

“Ludmila? It’s Ida. You’re very faint. Can you hear me? Over?”

“Ma . . Y … this … ty…”

More fine-tuning. The voice started to pull itself together like a jigsaw. A woman, yes, but the accent … Ida frowned.

“Ludmila?”

“Mayday … mayday … mayday…”

Ida gasped, hands busy on the ethereal control panel. “This is the U-Star
Coast City,
” he said, his training kicking in. “Please state the nature of your emergency.”

The static surged like a wave, and the voice was lost. Ida tuned some more, rotating an invisible dial between finger and thumb.

“Come in, please. Ludmila, is that you?”

He knew it wasn’t. When the voice returned, it was loud and crystal clear. His heart raced and there was a cold, hard ball in his stomach.

“Mayday, mayday, this is the P-Prof
Bloom County
requesting urgent assistance. We are drifting and need rescue. Mayday, mayday.”

Zia Hollywood, surely not more than a few million klicks away. Ida wasn’t sure what the
Bloom County
’s speed was, or how long he’d been out, but the ship couldn’t have left any more than a few hours ago, at the very most.

“
Bloom County,
this is Captain Cleveland aboard the U-Star
Coast City
. Zia, it’s me, Ida. What’s happened? Where are you?”

Static lapped at Ida’s ears like waves rolling on a beach. There was something else buried under the aural junk, and Ida realized it was Zia crying.

“Ida? Ida, help us. Help us, please.”

“We’re coming, Zia. Hold tight.”

Ida stood, the blanket falling away as he sprinted out of his cabin.

Zia said something else, but it was lost in the interference. It popped and crackled and fizzed in the empty room.

*   *   *

Izanami stepped from the
shadows, her eyes blue spinning diamonds of night. With each slow step she took toward the table, the white noise pulsed.

“Who’s there? Ida? Ida?” Zia’s voice came thinly over the air.

Izanami stepped up to the table.

“They’re all dead, Ida. All of them. They were taken. They’re dead.”

Izanami waved a skeletally thin arm over the radio set. The static roared as her hand approached the receiver, and the last sound that came over the speakers before the set overloaded and turned itself off was Zia Hollywood, alone in her spaceship, screaming.

36

Darkness. Darkness and sound;
enveloping, surrounding, penetrating. Pink noise and square waves and saw waves. Nothing random, nothing natural. A pattern: information, data. A
code.

The language of machines.

Frequency modulation. The machine was awake.

Ahí estás, Carminita.

The roar of the ocean. The roar of language, ancient, artificial. Alien.

The sound was all around her and it was inside her. Nobody could hear it except her. This was what she was born for, born to do. A gift, a wild talent honed by training, polished and sharpened until it became a tool, until the tool became a weapon.

And she was the best of the best.

Contact has been established. Contact has been established.

In the darkness, Carmina Serra smiled and turned over on the hard floor.

In the darkness, the machine clicked and whirred and lights flashed, once, twice, and then went out.

AOKIGAHARA AND THE GIRL WITH BLUE EYES

She was there the
next day too, standing by the tall pines that marked the edge of Aokigahara, the Sea of Trees. Tsutomu stood by the well and watched her for a while. Behind the forest, Fuji’s perfect cone pierced a sky that was blue and clear. It was still cold that day, unseasonably so; the water from the well was so cold, it should be frozen, Tsutomu thought as he filled the two buckets and lifted their yoke onto his shoulders. Some in the village said it was the falling star that had brought the cold, but at this, most laughed.

And then she was there, watching him. For five days she had watched in silence. He didn’t hear or see her arrive, or see her leave, for that matter. She never spoke and never seemed to move. She was wearing white, and her eyes were blue and bright, but Tsutomu knew that was just the strange cold playing tricks. People didn’t have blue eyes.

He bent down to adjust his load, and when he looked up, she was gone and the forest was once more empty and silent. A cold wind blew across the black rocky ground and Tsutomu turned to start the long trek back to the village. Maybe today he would tell the elders at the village and they could go and ask the daimyo. The daimyo would know what it meant.

The girl had appeared the morning after the star fell from the heavens. The star roared as it fell, as loud as the scream of a shisa, and everyone came out to look toward Fuji. Perhaps the mountain was angry, angry as it had been before, when the gods rained fire on the Earth and turned the sky thick and black with rage.