The Void (8 page)

But it was said that the miners found something there, in the excavation. A relic from lost worlds, from one of the civilizations of light that had flourished before Omega was cast into darkness. Whatever cyclopean temples the men of Anubis had discovered changed them, for some things never die. Some things merely sleep.

Aidan recalled clearly when he first met them. The image of that moment was burned into his mind. They came to collect the supplies and supervise the loading of their cargo. They bought only meat; he remembered that too. Their leathery-plastic suits tugged tight at every inch of their skeletal frames and they did not walk upright, but rather bent and hunched over. That you couldn't see their eyes—hidden behind thick black glass as dark as the Anubian sky—only made it worse. No, the black men of Anubis never left Aidan. He saw them often in his night-haunted dreams.

It was always the same image: the last one he saw as the cargo ship lifted from the pad in Dejima. The airspace over the planet was tightly restricted but there were things one could not help but see as the ship cleared the walls. On that day, as Aidan looked out from the forward portal, it was them that he saw. Thousands of them, the colonists, all dressed in the same dark black suits that he had seen before.

The unnatural leather shimmered in the dim light, making each entity seem to quiver as if shaking from the cold. They were in every street, in every open space. Each man and woman, if you could still call them that, staring up into the sky at the purple star that barely gave any light. As Aidan watched, the rotation of the planet and its revolution around its sun fell into perfect alignment. A great wave of pale violet fire rolled across the surface of the planet, covering buildings, streets and people alike.

Aidan's eyes had fallen upon one of the beings below. He would never know precisely why this man had drawn his sight, but the reason did not matter. All that mattered was what he saw. As the beam of light rolled over him, as the purple fire that had left all others behind covered him, he was suddenly gone. Disappeared. Vanished. None of the others reacted. It was as if they had expected it. They simply shuffled away to wherever they went when they weren't there, until the streets were empty. Then the wave moved on. Rolling along the planet, to some other city or place. Perhaps to take yet another offering.

Still, that was not why Aidan found himself staring out into space on most days.

“So yeah,” he continued, “we were on our way out to Anubis. At the time, Anubis was the most distant colony, until we settled Riley, which is a few light years beyond. We had finished the run, no problem, and were heading back out of the system. We had just hit the jump point.

“It's hard to describe what it's like at the edge of a system, you know? Especially a system like that. When you think of space, you think of the sun, the planets, and their moons. But out there, it's just empty. Just nothingness. All you have are tiny little points of light. These faint dots in the distance. You can see them pretty well since the only other illumination is coming from your own ship. And you can just feel it, the emptiness, if that makes sense.”

Aidan shook his head. “It's crazy, you know? I was sitting on the bridge, one just like this one. I was looking up at the screens. Paying attention, but not really. . .”

Aidan paused. He had never told this story and he wasn't really sure why he was telling it now. He couldn't think of how to describe it. No, that wasn't true. The description itself was fairly easy. It was the believing of it that was hard.

“Go on,” said Rebecca.

“So there was no one else on the bridge with me,” Aidan continued. “And I'm looking up at the screen and I can see the stars. And then . . . it was like a shadow moved over us.”

“A shadow?”

“Yeah, a shadow. I know that's a weird way to describe it. But I only knew it was there because, as it moved, I saw the stars wink out of existence one at a time and then reappear as it passed. It only took a second and it was gone. Then, everything was back to normal. Like nothing happened. The stars were there, the lights of the ship. I don't know. Part of me says it was nothing. But I know what I saw.”

“What could it have been?” Rebecca asked.

“Beats me. All I know is that that there are still some things out there we don't quite understand. Still a lot of things we don't know about. And I believe—I'll always believe—that out there on the rim that day, on the very edge of explored space, I saw something that shouldn't be there. So I figure either I'm right, or I'm crazy. But maybe if I sit here long enough, I'll see it again. And then I'll know for sure.”

Rebecca raised an eyebrow. “How will you know it's not just you being crazy again?”

“Well . . . huh . . . good point.”

They both laughed.

“Tell you what,” she said, “how bout I stay here and watch with you?”

Aidan looked at her and saw a spark in her pale blue eyes.

“I think that would be just fine.”

She leaned her chair back and then they were both staring up at the screen. She said, “I was just kidding, you know.”

“About what?”

“About you being crazy. I don't really think that.”

“Well, I don't think you're crazy either.”

He stared straight ahead, but he felt the change as her head fell to the side and she looked at him and he knew enough about secrets to know what she was thinking.

“I read your file,” he said. “Maybe I shouldn't have, but Riley's a long way away. I like to know who our passengers are. Was surprised to learn you're a warp engineer though. Can't say I saw that coming.”

“You read my file?” she repeated. Rebecca had always been a private person and while she liked Aidan, she felt violated.

“It's not a crime,” he said. “If you are a passenger on a transport, your life is an open book. I'm the navigator on this ship. I just wanted to see whom I was dealing with is all. Didn't mean any offense.”

Of course he didn't, she thought. She wasn't really mad at him anyway. She was mad at herself, at her one great weakness. The one that made her question who she really was.

“Look, I know you failed the test. Plenty of people have. I've worked with a lot of good guys who failed it too. I've never had a problem with any of them. Most people out here have never even taken it. You'll be fine. It's just a bunch of government bullshit.”

“But what if it's not?” she said. “I mean, the way everybody talks about the dreams . . . what if it's not?”

“Well . . .”

Aidan didn't really know what to say about that. If it was true, if she really was weak, there was a good chance she was about to lose it out here, and she would never get it back. Nobody liked to talk about the Kirkbride Institute. Nobody in the trade, nobody in the void, nobody at all, really.

Most people had probably never even heard of its existence, though they must have known of the need for it. It was the place people who had lost their minds from the dreams went, assuming they didn't die on the trip. It was virtually a myth, its location hidden, its population a secret. But they were there.

Aidan knew only because he had seen a classified document once on a run he made ferrying some government guys between Earth and Mars. And it had mentioned Kirkbride, a place navigators in the guild only whispered about. There was no hope for the people there. Dr. Ridley and his psyche meds couldn't reach them. Their minds were gone forever.

Some of them claimed to be prophets. To know things that other men did not. To see truths that other men could only guess at. To see the future even, all the way to the end of time itself. And then there were the screamers. Aidan had been on a ship once with one of those. It had been the kid's first time. He had made the initial jump just fine. But when the ship warped back into solar space, Aidan awoke to the man's terrified shrieks.

The boy had never stopped screaming, the rest of the trip. Even though they had isolated him, they could still hear his desperate cries through the walls, and he was still screaming when they turned him over to medical. The screaming had not ceased long enough for him to tell them what he saw. The consensus seemed to be that he was living the dream over and over again. Seeing it, even in his waking life. Whatever images of horror that had driven him mad, they never left his sight.

“You'll be fine,” Aidan said finally. “You'll be fine.”

“And how are you gonna be?” Rebecca asked. She lowered her head toward him, conspiratorially. “You're not the only one that can read a file.”

“I'll . . . I'll be fine,” he said, after a moment's hesitation.

“You know it wasn't your fault, just because you made it back,” she said. “There's no way it was your fault.”

“Yeah, I know. I mean, I know that on some level,” he said. “But I can't remember it. And as long as I can't remember it, I can't help but have doubts about what exactly happened that day.”

“Well,” she said cheerfully, “at least we've got each other. Two screwed-up peas in a pod.”

“Yeah.” Aidan laughed. “At least we do.”

The ship rumbled beneath them, and the screen showed only the blankness of space and the stars beyond. But had they been watching it more closely instead of laughing with each other, they might have seen, if only for a second, a shadow pass over them. As abruptly as it had come, it faded away and was gone.

Chapter 6

Caroline Gravely sat in her office, slumped low toward the floor, her back leaning uncomfortably against the wall. In her left hand was a glass half-filled with bourbon and a recently opened bottle of Maker's Mark remained on the floor beside her. In her other hand she held a piece of paper—folded, creased, and refolded many times over. It dangled precariously between her knees, and one who saw it would have thought that at any moment it might slip away and fall, as if she cared nothing for the letter or its contents. In fact she kept just enough pressure on its edges to prevent that.  

She had received maybe five paper letters in her life. The first was from a boy in high school who, lacking the boldness or charm to approach her directly, hoped that the gesture would win him a date to the prom. Perhaps surprisingly, it had.

She had never felt more excited than when she opened the envelope, felt the crisp folded paper in her hand, smelled the ink and the processed wood. So much more permanent, so much more real than words on a screen. Yet she still had access to every email she had ever received, while four of the letters had passed to dust, forgotten somewhere in a life that spanned millions of miles of space and decades of time. But this letter—the last one that she had received to date—this letter remained and she kept it close at all times.

She had found it, quite unexpectedly, sitting on her desk on the
Alabama
some ten years prior. She immediately knew the hand, even before she read her name in jagged sharp angles on the front of the envelope. The only other name it contained was her father's. On two fragile sheets of paper were written the final thoughts he would ever convey to her.

He had passed the letter to her through a mutual friend on the ship, though she never discovered who had been the courier. Her father knew full well that his communiqués were scanned before they left his computer. Given what he had written, he must have also been completely aware that the words contained therein would surely be the end of him, were anyone but her to find them. Or maybe he just wanted his daughter to have something solid, something tangible to hold on to. It was clear he never expected to see her again.

Each time she read it, she knew that whatever had befallen him had been no accident. His disappearance, although officially a warp core breach, had a very different and terrifying explanation. He had broken, somewhere in the night and it had cost him, and those with whom he served, everything. So she read the letter again, as she had done before each jump for these last ten years. To remind her what was at stake.

There was a soft chime. Aidan, she thought. “Answer, audio only. This is Gravely.”

“We've reached the trans-Plutonian void, Captain. Warp space reads clear. Based on the schedule, it looks like we have an eight hour window.”

“Excellent, Mr. Connor. Prep the ship and the crew.”

“You got it, Captain.”

Another tone sounded, lower pitched, and he was gone.

“Computer,” she said. “External video, aft.”

A ripple seemed to roll across the far wall and then a flash of light. What had been a blank gray canvas changed into an image of the outside of the ship.

“Reverse angle, computer.”

Another ripple. The ship was gone, replaced by the emptiness of space. She gazed back behind the ship, across time and distance, to a single point of light. The tiniest of spheres, with just enough dimension to not simply be another star. It was the sun, bright guardian of day and master of life. Here it gave no warmth.

*  *  *

Somewhere a deck below, Cyrus sat in the comm chair and pulled a helmet down over his head.

“Log in ready?” a gentle female voice asked.

“Ready,” he replied.

There was a soft whirring buzz. He felt two pads press lightly against his temples. The sounds of the outside world disappeared as his ears were covered. A flash of light followed, and Cyrus felt like he was

falling away from reality and into something else. Then another flash, and he was no longer on the ship.

He stood in the midst of the breakfast nook of a kitchen. His kitchen. The windows were open, the bright light of the sun streaming through, the breeze blowing the curtains up in great white billows.

“Daddy!” Emily cried. He turned and saw her running toward him.

“Hey, shrimp,” he said, bending down and picking her up. As he did, impulses gathered by the synthetic's neural network were sent in an instant across millions of miles of space via warp tunnel relays. It was a means of communication that was expensive and drained a great deal of energy. Crew were permitted only one such call, and only immediately prior to jump.