The Burning Dark (34 page)

“I made contact with someone with this thing, just before you arrived. Caught a signal and then found a voice.”

“And?”

“And she didn’t exist. The transmission was from a thousand years ago and had been bouncing around subspace ever since. The sender was a cosmonaut, mid-twentieth century. Except not one that ever existed.”

“Subspace?” There was something in Zia’s voice that made Ida want to sit very still, very still indeed.

“Ah … yes. Some malfunction, the set could pick up—”

“God
damn
it, Ida, you’ve been listening to a voice from fucking
subspace
?”

Ida turned the chair, surprised at Zia’s outburst. But there was something else too, that cold fear again, somewhere in his middle. He could feel his heart kick up a gear and he watched Zia. She was sitting up on the bed again, her eyes wide.

Zia swore. “Jesus, Ida, don’t you
know
about subspace? Didn’t the Fleet send you a fucking memo?”

“I know subspace frequencies are illegal, but—”

“Holy crap. You know why they’re illegal?”

“Um.” Ida’s breathing was fast and shallow. The quiet, creeping fear grew and grew and grew. His mind tripped over memories, trying desperately to claw back what he’d learned at the academy, searching for answers, facts that he felt he should know but that he now realized hadn’t been taught by the Fleet, not to him, not to anyone.

The stories. The half-remembered whispers about subspace, about how it was dangerous. About what lurked below. Hellspace.

“Um,” he said again. His throat was dry.

Zia sighed and slouched back on the bed, shaking her head. “Things,” she said, like that explained everything.

Ida let out a breath and blinked. “Things?”

“Damn
it
.” Zia rubbed her forehead. “There are things in subspace. Bad things. You could say they lived there, but they’re not alive, not really. They live in subspace and deeper too. Hellspace.
Fuck
.”

Ida swallowed. His throat felt tight, the sound so terribly loud in his ears.

Hellspace.

He rolled the word around in his head, trying to convince himself that this conversation wasn’t happening.

“You’ve been hanging out in too many colonial bars, Ms. Hollywood,” he said quietly, but he knew he was out of his depth.

She turned her head to look at him. “Don’t you get it?”

“Get what?”

“Subspace is illegal because the
things
that live in it got out once. Followed a signal. Back in the early days of the Fleet, before the Spiders. Took everything we had to push them back, and then subspace was closed off. No one went near.”

Ida stared at her, his mind racing. Then he shook his head and laughed—a nervous reaction, the laugh of a man afraid, one that quickly died in his throat. He closed his eyes and held up a hand.

“And how do you know this, exactly? I’m an officer of the Fleet and even I don’t know—”

“Look,” said Zia, and Ida opened his eyes. She was leaning forward, toward him. “Someone like me, I get to see a lot of things.
Hear
a lot of things. There’s a whole lot of people, all of them want a piece—of me, of my money, everything. They want my ship, they want to be friends, business partners, lovers. When you’re rich and you’re famous, then doors get opened, you get to go places most people don’t, not even officers of the Fleet. And you’re told things, shown things.”

Ida shook his head. “Told things?”

“You’d be amazed at how willing people are to talk when they think they can impress someone like me, thinking it can get them
in,
get them close. Trust me when I say that those stories about subspace and what lives there are all true.”

Ida sighed. He believed her. And if what Zia said was true, then the stories, the rumors, about subspace and hellspace, they didn’t even cover the half of it. There was something out there. Something the Fleet didn’t want anybody to know about. Something that, Ida thought, was now stirring.

“What if they’re coming back?” he asked. “What if someone made contact again and what if they’re following the signal back out?”

“Then we’re all dead,” said Zia.

40

With only a fraction
of operational personnel on board, the
Coast City
’s hangar was a rare hive of activity, the crew busying themselves with familiar routines and protocols, trying to keep order, control. It was the Fleet’s way. In the middle of a difficult and protracted war, this is what you did. You carried on, and maybe you told yourself that the final transport was already on the way, having headed out early, as soon as the lightspeed link had gone down.

Maybe. But until it arrived, the crew went about their duties, running the hangar bay and readying the station’s shuttle for its routine patrol of the system.

The
Magenta
was illuminated from underneath by landing lights, and from their position behind a row of empty loading pallets, Ida and Zia could see two crew members sitting at the flight controls.

Ida and Zia had a plan.

In his cabin, they’d patched into the comm channel between the bridge and the hangar and listened to the chatter between the two for nearly half a cycle before heading down to the hangar. Most of the talk had been the usual system updates and routine checks, although they learned that two crew members who were due on duty were not responding to calls and couldn’t be found on the hub. More taken.

They waited, listening, until the
Coast City
cycled into night. The dark was dangerous, the domain of Izanami—the thing from subspace, Ida now knew. But they needed to risk it, because they had to get to the
Magenta.
Their objective was clear.

The debris field.

They’d pored over data from Zia’s wrist computer. The field density readings originally supplied by the Fleet said the slowrocks were pure lucanol—a gold mine, as Zia had said, but one that was impossible. As Zia had seen firsthand, whatever was floating out on the other side of Shadow wasn’t a cluster of asteroids at all, but something regular, artificial: a single solid object, one that had moved toward the
Bloom County
like it was being piloted.

Piloted … like a ship. Another coincidence too far. The answers lay aboard it. Ida knew it and Zia knew it and they also knew they had to get back there. They were clean out of options on the station.

They couldn’t take the
Bloom County,
not without people noticing. And Zia had refused to get back on board it. But the
Magenta
was due to make its regular, routine flight. If they could get on board and bide their time as it went about its patrol, they could take the ship over and be at the target before anyone knew about it. Before Izanami knew what they were doing.

Space Piracy 101: Secrete yourselves on board, wait for the ship to blast off, count to a thousand, and, bingo, hijack. It was so simple, it might just work.

Zia was restless, and Ida didn’t blame her. They’d been crouched behind the loading trays for more than an hour now. Ida flexed his fingers around the Yuri-G’s molded grip; he looked back at the shuttle.

“Here we go,” he whispered.

Two hangar crewmen walked down the
Magenta
’s rear ramp and headed toward the stairs leading to the control room, a large cuboid box that hung on one side of the bay. They looked tense, anxious, and as they walked in silence they both glanced around, into the shadows that draped the far corners of the hangar. The
Coast City
’s crew was holding on, but only just. The Fleet’s training was good.

“Preflight routine complete,” said Ida into Zia’s ear. “The shuttle will be empty for less than an hour.”

Zia nodded. Ida watched the hangar crew move up the stairs and into the control room. After disappearing around a door, they appeared briefly at the main window as they completed their check, then turned and walked out of view. Just to be sure, Ida counted to twenty, but nobody reappeared on the stairs.

“Go!”

Zia led the way, crawling around the side of the loader and then ducking under the superficial railing that separated the cargo pads from the shuttle landing pad. She dropped the three-foot step silently, and ran at a crouch to hide behind the
Magenta
’s front landing gear. She waited a count of three, just like Ida had told her, and then scrambled to the rear of the craft and up the exit ramp.

Ida counted to three himself, and then followed her pattern—railing, check; landing gear, check; exit ramp, and on.

Time to fly.

*   *   *

She fell asleep in
the power conduit. Pressed against her, Ida watched as her gentle breathing bounced a strand of her hair against her lips. He hoped she wasn’t dreaming.

They’d been in the conduit hatch for only another twenty minutes before Ida heard the
Magenta
’s crew climb the ramp and fire up the craft. Ida had tried to count the footfalls on the floor above their heads, but he hadn’t been expecting so many and had lost count. It sounded like a whole squad of marines. Ida knew that this was standard, in case the
Magenta
was required to board any other craft in the vicinity, but with the
Coast City
at such reduced manpower and the Shadow system devoid of other activity, Ida was surprised they kept to the book. With King still locked away in the ready room, and without orders to the contrary, Ida imagined the marine commander on duty was just trying to do his job as usual.

The
Magenta
’s orbit would be short. It was pure routine. A single perfunctory sweep of the station’s immediate vicinity, maybe out to a quarter of a million klicks. It crossed Ida’s mind that the shuttle might not even be fully fueled, without enough energy to get them to the debris field on the other side of Shadow. But if everything was being run to routine, then there was no reason to suspect the shuttle didn’t have a full complement of power cells loaded. More than enough to get them halfway to Earth, let alone a few million klicks around to the far side of the sun.

Ida pressed an ear against the metal panel beside him. The shuttle was small with disproportionately large engines, and every part of the ship was a perfect sounding board. He listened, and with a lifetime’s expertise judged the engine throttle. It was slowing, imperceptibly at first, the drone of the drive system lowering in pitch as the shuttle approached the far side of its orbit. There the
Magenta
would pause, like a ball at the top of a throw, and then curve a graceful arc back around to the other side of the
Coast City
. The edge of the orbit was their target. It was nearly time.

He nudged Zia, and she jerked awake. He shushed her and raised the Yuri-G as much as he could in the cramped compartment.

“Did you dream?” he asked, hooking fingers into the webbed underside of the floor panel that was their temporary ceiling.

“No,” she said, but she said it too quickly and Ida guessed it was a lie.

*   *   *

The short corridor that
connected the shuttle’s hold to the bridge was empty. The flight was running as normal: marines strapped into their flight harnesses in the troop compartment next to the hold, the four crew members (pilot and copilot, navigator and commander) in the cockpit flying the shuttle around the preset course, mostly on automatic, mostly in silence.

Ida crept down the corridor. The cockpit door was open, and he could see the back of the pilot and copilot’s Flyeye helmets. The commander’s chair was just out of sight, as was the navigator’s.

Zia moved silently back along the corridor, toward the troop compartment. Ida glanced over his shoulder and nodded, and then watched as she gingerly pressed the hatch lock. The troop compartment would now open only from the outside, but they probably had only a minute before one of the marines on the other side noticed the lock status light change color. Zia returned to her position behind Ida and tapped his shoulder.

Eyes front, Ida held up a hand, three fingers extended. At an even pace, he dropped them one by one; when his fist was closed, he darted forward, Zia on his tail.

He burst into the cockpit so quickly that at first only the commander and navigator registered his entrance. Both reacted in the same way, moving quickly to leave their posts and confront the intruder, but Ida held the Yuri-G in front of him and they both gently sank back into their seats, hands raised in surrender. Zia saw the pilot twist his head around and jumped forward, pulling the commander’s pistol from his belt as she passed him and moving around to stand directly in front of the freestanding control console, in the gap between it and the forward viewscreen.

“Everybody stand for the man with the gun in his hand!” she said, waving her own weapon at the pilot and copilot.

With Zia covering the cabin, Ida lowered the Yuri-G to a more comfortable position to cover the commander and navigator, now standing as Zia had instructed.

“This is treason,” the commander said, looking Ida up and down. Ida recognized him from the groups that used to congregate back in the canteen. A noncommissioned officer—he couldn’t remember the name—but one who had taken pleasure in sending sour looks over to Ida when they were in the same room. Ida squeezed the grip of the Yuri-G just that little bit harder.

“Technically, you’re right. But you might just thank me later.” Ida moved around the chairs at a sidestep so he was standing in front of the navigator. He wiggled the end of his gun, gesturing to the pair to return to their seats. He heard the Flyeyes move behind him, Zia having followed his lead.

“Navigator, you’ve got some new coordinates.”

*   *   *

The copilot saw it
first. They’d reached the approximate location recorded on Zia’s wrist computer; dead ahead the violet disk of Shadow burned in the center of the viewscreen. As Ida watched tendrils of blackness curl from the pale star’s horizon, he was grateful the
Magenta
had no actual windows.