The Burning Dark (6 page)

“It’s on,” said Ida.

Izanami reached forward and scratched at the LED with an immaculate fingernail. “Are you sure? I don’t hear anything. Is this light supposed to be on?”

Ida’s hand dwarfed Izanami’s, and he gently brushed the medic’s delicate, almost skeletally thin fingers away so he could fiddle with the controls.

“Huh,” he said. He hit the box with his fist. The light flickered white briefly, then began to glow, dark purple at first, brightening to a near-white blue.

Izanami clapped excitedly. With Ida bent over the space radio, she laid a hand on his shoulder. She was cold; he could feel it through his shirt.

“Well done, Ida!”

Ida smiled and tightened the radio’s housing with an old-fashioned screwdriver, then stood back to admire his handiwork. Izanami’s hand fell away, and she stepped back politely. When he glanced over his shoulder, he saw her smile was as wide as his.

Ida scratched his chin with the blade of the screwdriver. He regarded the plain silver box with the glowing blue light; then he slid his finger over the surface, like he was wiping dust off the spotless device.

A space radio. It had taken just two cycles to assemble it, using components from the electrical stores and the plans Ida had committed to memory nearly thirty years before. The device was actually quite simple, certainly easy enough for the ten-year-old Abraham Cleveland to build with a little help from his father.

Izanami tilted her head, clearly intrigued by Ida’s handiwork. “So, what can you listen to?”

Ida looked into the blue light of the device. This was going to be fun.

“Well, that’s a good question,” he said. “Let’s see, shall we?”

PART ONE

THE SIGNAL

1

“You ever seen a
chick from Polaris? I mean, holy schnikes. You need level-ten protective eyewear just to look at them. Naw, seriously, they radiate UV when they get turned on. Some kinda survival mechanism. So yeah, it’s risky and you need to prebook yourself ten weeks in a class-three ICU afterwards to get your DNA rebuilt, but man, what a rush. What a
goddamn
rush. There was this one time—”

Ida flicked the volume of the radio set down by half. It was Clive’s Friday night. Let him have it.

Clive was a pilot orbiting a lump of ice near Polaris. In a few hours he was due to break cover from behind his asteroid and spearhead a lightning strike on the hidden Omoto base on Polarii Inferior. Chances were this time tomorrow Clive would be a patch of brown radioactive dust drifting in the Polarii solar wind, the residue of his beloved Polarii women with him. Because no matter what the outcome of the attack—be it Fleet victory or a successful defense by the Omoto—there wasn’t going to be any sentient life left on the planet afterwards.

So, let him command the air awhile. Ida felt bad and hoped Clive made it, but he wondered if perhaps he should stay off the radio in the next cycle or so, busy himself with those damn checklists he’d let slide. As boring as Clive was, he wasn’t sure it would be the same without him, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to hear about the outcome of the Omoto sortie, good or bad.

It was a waste, one that Ida objected to. Strategically important but ultimately futile. The universe was a big place and maybe the Omoto could keep their base. The Omoto weren’t even the Spiders, and wasn’t the Fleet supposed to be fighting those mechanical creeps instead of starting little wars over lumps of ice? Given how the war was going, Ida wondered if maybe the Fleet wasn’t focusing on the right thing sometimes.

A little interference on the line was obscuring select moments of Clive’s monologue.

Ida flicked through a set of diagnostic routines on the space radio’s three-dimensional interface. What was a hobby for, if not to present a series of tiny challenges that needed to be overcome, one by one? Talking to others out in space was only half of it.

The white noise of interference spiked. Ida leaned his chair back to the upright and cast an eye over one of the screens that hung on an arm over the desk. It wasn’t part of the radio set, it was just a display from his cabin’s computer, but he’d patched it into the solar observatory located at the very top of the station’s spire. He found the data useful. It had been ten cycles since Ida first turned the radio on, and he’d quickly discovered that the physics of Shadow frequently threw a spanner in the works. And tonight it was no different.

But he had to admit it was really quite a fascinating academic study on the interaction between the star’s strange light and the station’s own artificial magnetosphere. As the amber glow of data flowed across the screen, he noted a few spikes of stellar activity that corresponded to the static on the set. He could try to retune, or perhaps, given an hour, come up with an algorithm to work the mess out of his signal. Ida poked at the screen, the amber of its data tables and the blue light of the radio the only illumination in the cabin.

Clive kept talking. Castle, a civilian mining engineer whose job supervising the construction of a drill head on one of the moons of Arbitri clearly left too much free time on his hands, butted in occasionally to express his satisfaction with the juicier aspects of Clive’s adventures in Polarii love and to ask respectfully for more technical data on the difficulties of human–Polarii anatomical interaction. A newcomer too, calling himself Captain Midnight—Ida wasn’t sure whether this was his rank and name or some kind of superhero identity—seemed to be enjoying the chat. Ida didn’t quite believe he was calling from inside a black hole, but, hey, the radio hams of the galaxy were a bunch of sad, lonely losers with nothing better to do. If Captain Midnight wanted to be inside a black hole, then let him be inside a black hole. On the radio you could be anyone and anywhere you liked.

Ida wondered whether he should tell them about his adventures over the skies of Tau Retore, and whether he’d get a better reception here than among the jarheads that inhabited the
Coast City.

DeJohn had been quite right about Fleet service being an honor. In the middle of a difficult, decades-long war against an alien machine intelligence, a citizen could do no greater service for humanity than enlist in the Fleet. And Ida knew full well how he would feel if he came across someone claiming a heroic action that they had no right to.

But was he really so far out on the edge of Fleetspace that the news about Tau Retore hadn’t made it? He’d saved a planet and seen off a whole Spider cluster—including a
Mother
Spider. Why else did they think he’d been awarded with the Fleet Medal?

And, he thought, an artificial knee, an enforced honorable retirement, and a final posting to one of the most remote backwaters in Fleetspace. To oversee the decommissioning of an unremarkable space station well past its use-by date.

Ida absently flexed his robot knee, which had grown stiff as he sat at the desk.

He sat and thought.

Something was well and truly FUBAR, and not just on the
Coast City,
but at Fleet Command itself.

Something that, maybe, he should look into.

2

Space is black. Everyone
said so—in verse, prose, even song. Except in the Shadow system, space wasn’t black; it was
purple
.

Serra took a breath. She stared at the violet-tinged metal wall in front of her, her eyes flicking over the green HUD projected onto the inside of her helmet visor. Among other things—suit status and integrity, temperature, oxygen, constant (and pointless) system notifications from the
Coast City
’s main computer—the HUD’s main features were two glowing brackets on either side and an upside-down T right in the center, showing which way was up and which was down. Although such things lost meaning in space, the Fleet liked to impose its own order on the universe. The slice of it occupied by humans wasn’t called Fleetspace for nothing.

She wanted to turn around, but, clamped on to the outer hull of the space station, she could only manage to get her helmet around enough to look awkwardly over one shoulder. She wanted to turn,
needed
to look, but she was afraid.

“Carminita…”

The voice again.

“Date la vuelta, m’ija.”

Turn around, my child.

It echoed inside her helmet, washed with static, and she swore whenever it spoke the comms indicator on the HUD flickered. But she knew the voice wasn’t coming from the station. And it certainly wasn’t coming from Carter, working just a few meters away on the hull.

“Carminita, está bien, nena.…”

It’s okay, baby.

Serra closed her eyes and took another breath, pulling on the atmosphere a little harder than the suit expected. She heard a whirr as it compensated.

“That’s it. Cycle the power again.”

Serra opened her eyes and turned her head slowly. The front of her visor was an inch from the station’s hull, and she watched the metal slide out of her vision until it was replaced by the black—by the
purple—
of space. Until there, just at the edge, she saw something brighter, a violet-tinted white.

Immediately her suit’s HUD changed from regular green to a bright, angry red. A countdown appeared, superimposed over the inverted T in the center:
4
′
38
″
, and a third column that spun too fast to read.

“Ahí estás, Carminita!”

There you are!

She closed her eyes.

“Serra?”

Serra blinked and gasped, but the suit ignored it and didn’t broadcast her sharp intake of breath to Carter. She turned back to the hull, and the HUD turned green and the counter froze on four minutes thirty-one seconds and remained in view for a few more heartbeats, just to make sure the reader got the message.

Serra got it: The light of Shadow will fuck you up. It wasn’t hard to understand. First it would eat through the shielding on your visor; then it would burn your mind out through your optic nerve. Shadow was an evil mother.

“Earth to Carmina Serra. Come in, please.”

Carter’s voice was loud, exasperated—not quiet, not female, like the …
other
. The comm caught the rasp as he scraped his chin against the padding inside his helmet.

Serra turned and her partner propelled himself toward her. As he approached, he reached past her helmet and yanked at the manual power override switch she was floating right in front of. Serra watched the fabric of his suit’s sleeve press against her visor, but it made no sound.

Carter sighed and pushed off again, back to where he had a service panel open. “You awake in there?”

“
Carajo
. Sorry, sorry.” Serra shook her head. Should she tell him?

No. A psi-marine hearing voices—
a
voice—wasn’t usually taken well by the regular crew. The psi-marines were essential to the Fleet, now more than ever as the fight against the Spiders seemed to be getting harder and harder. While this earned her class respect, she knew some found specialists like her more than a little creepy. She didn’t want to give them the excuse. Not that Carter would tell anyone, but sometimes he joined in with the ribbing with the rest of them.

“Don’t blame you if you need a little shut-eye,” Carter said as he worked, arms deep inside the skin of the space station. “Didn’t get much sleep last night.”

Serra shook her head and smiled as Carter’s laugh snorted across the comm. She wondered whether anyone in the station’s bridge was listening in. She wondered whether she cared. The ship’s manifest would have shown the two of them spending most nights in each other’s cabins anyway.

“You hear what our honored guest has going on?”

Serra turned back to Carter. “Cleveland?”

Carter snorted again. He pulled something out of the service panel, checked a connection, and pushed it back in. “Got himself hooked up with a space radio.”

“Oh.” Serra wasn’t interested. She wished she had more to do out here. She didn’t like being in Shadow’s light, but EVAs always had to be done in pairs and Carter had assigned her a simple task. “I didn’t know they still used those.”

“They don’t. Nobody does. Seems he’s a bit of a geek, among other things.”

“We need to talk about that, Charlie.”

“Not now.” Carter grunted and floated a few feet back. He had another part in his hands, a long black pipe with silver connectors at either end. He held one end up to his visor, then the other. “Damned if I can find anything wrong with this thing. It’s not the coolant conduits. I think in engineering terms, this whole thing is fucked.”

Serra laughed. Carter’s helmet turned slightly in her direction, and she could see her own golden-mirrored visor reflected in his.

And … something else. A black shape, like there was someone else out there, stuck on the side of the hull like a clam, just behind her.

Serra gasped. The comms ignored it again.

“Bridge, come in, please.” Carter spun the black pipe and let go. It continued to revolve in the vacuum between him and the
Coast City.

Serra turned her head quickly, the joint between her helmet and the neck of her suit clacking loudly. There was no one else outside. Of course there wasn’t.

“M’ija, no tengas miedo.…”

My child, do not be afraid.

Serra closed her eyes and turned back around to the hull. It was the light of Shadow—that fucking magical radiation from the technetium star—that was the root cause of all their problems. The voices in her head. The instability of the station’s internal environment system. Shadows where there shouldn’t be.

Her comms clicked again. It pulsed a little with static as Shadow’s light played with the data stream.

“Sergeant Major, I have Marshal King here.”

“Sir, no faults out here,” reported Carter. He pushed off a little from the hull and looked up. Above them, a demolition drone was crouched on the hull, parked temporarily but with a green winking light on its back indicating it was just waiting to continue its job. “The drone didn’t report anything, because there’s nothing to report. Fault must be elsewhere.”