Dead Space: Catalyst (18 page)

He’s crazy,
thought Henry.
Maybe they’re all crazy
. He was glad that he was not one of the guards, that he wouldn’t have to be one of the ones to go in there.

He had to stay watching the prisoners until one of the monitors showed him the guards lined up behind the door, ready to go in. Then he triggered the alarm, telling the prisoners to return to their cells. A few of them did, but most of them were still standing there, still in shock maybe. So he followed protocol and turned on the loudspeaker and turned the volume all the way up and gave them their one warning. There was a little confusion, but in the end all of them returned to the cells except for one. He considered issuing the warning again, but no, he knew the rules, he wasn’t to do that. So he closed the cell doors and then called down and warned the guards that there was a corpse and one loose inmate but that that inmate looked stunned, wasn’t likely to be a threat. And then, when he’d had acknowledgment, he opened the doors and watched them rush in.

They beat the loose inmate unconscious. There was no need for it, no reason to do it, and it made Henry think again that he’d made a very bad choice by taking this job, by coming to this planet out in the middle of nowhere to live in the outer circle of a penal colony that not only the prisoners but the guards, too, called Hell. He watched two guards—he couldn’t tell which two because of the riot gear they wore—drag the unconscious man away and deposit him in the ring with the cells in it. Meanwhile, the three remaining guards milled around the corpse.

Henry’s earpiece crackled. “What are we to do with the body?” asked their leader. On the monitor Henry saw him turn and stare up at one of the cameras.

“What do you usually do with the bodies?” asked Henry.

“This is the first one I’ve had, sir, since they converted the morgue to an interrogation room,” the man said.

Don’t call me sir,
Henry wanted to say,
I’m not one of you
. But he knew if he said it, it would only confuse the man. Plus, he wasn’t absolutely sure that it was true. In a sense he was as guilty as the soldiers who had beaten the loose inmate unconscious. “Isn’t there a protocol?” he asked.

“Not that I’m aware of, sir. Before, we left them in the morgue and someone collected them.”

“Who collected them?” asked Henry.

“I don’t know,” said the man. “Someone from the other complex, the one we don’t talk about.”

“Well, we can’t leave the body there,” said Henry. “Bring it inside and put it somewhere until we can figure out what to do. The interrogation room, maybe. I’ll contact the commander and see what he suggests.”

*   *   *

Once the body was inside, lying flat on one of the metal tables in the interrogation room, Henry established the link. It took a few minutes for it to go through, the satellite that directed the signal first having to assure itself that the link was authorized and then having to encrypt the signal and send the decryption code securely to the vessel circling the planet. It had always seemed strange to Henry that almost all of the military personnel lived not within the outer ring of the prison but in orbit around the planet. It wasn’t as though there wasn’t enough room for them here. But maybe they felt freer where they were. Or maybe from their vantage they could keep watch not only over the penal colony but over the other complex that had been built not far away. Henry had no idea what it was or what purpose it served—he had only caught a glimpse of it when the shuttle landed him here, and then if the light was just right or the darkness deep and hazeless he could see its glimmer there at a distance. But he knew it was there, and knew if it was out here in the middle of nowhere whatever was going on inside of it wasn’t anything he wanted any part of.

Eventually the line crackled and he saw the face of one of the ensigns. A thin, awkward fellow with a prim mouth.
Orthor,
read the name over his pocket.

“Supply ship isn’t here yet,” said Ensign Orthor. “It won’t arrive for a few weeks. You should have more than enough to last you until then.”

Jerk,
thought Henry. “That’s not why I’m calling,” he said.

“Oh?” said the ensign. “Then why are you calling?”

“I need to talk to the commander.”

“About what?” Henry didn’t answer, just stayed silent and staring until the ensign said, “Let me see if I can raise him.”

The screen went blank. When it lit up again, it showed the face of Commander Grottor. He had a crew cut and a craggy face, his cheeks covered with pockmarks that most people would have had surgically corrected. A scar, too, ran from one side of his nose through his lip, the skin splaying out slightly.

“Jenkins, no?” he said.

“No,” said Henry. “Wandrei.” He couldn’t help but feel that the commander had deliberately gotten his name wrong.

“Wandrei, of course,” the commander said, and gave a broad but lifeless smile. “Well, what do you need?”

Henry explained.

“A fork, you say?” said the commander. And then said, “Doesn’t sound like a man with all his marbles.”

“No indication of disturbance or madness until now,” said Henry. “Most of these men have their spirits broken. Last thing most of them are up to is any violence toward others or themselves.”

“And yet, here we are. I wouldn’t worry too much about it, Jenkins. You’re not to blame.”

“Wandrei, sir,” said Henry, and watched a flash of irritation cross over the commander’s face. “I didn’t think I was to blame. I’m just not sure what to do with the body. Shall we bury it? Incinerate it?”

The commander hesitated for a moment, finally shook his head. “Probably we should have someone take a look at it, just in case. Store it for now.”

“Store it?”

“You’ve got a morgue, don’t you?”

“We had one, sir, but it was replaced by the interrogation room.”

“Ah,” said Grottor, “I see. Well, put him in a refrigerator.”

“We only have the ones we use for food.”

“Well, clear one of those out and put him in. It’ll only be for a few days.”

“A few days?” said Henry, imagining one of the guards waking up and stumbling into the kitchen and opening a door on a corpse.

“Maybe sooner,” said the commander. “We’ll do what we can.” He reached out and clicked the screen off.

23

Ensign Haley still wasn’t sure if she should be flattered or insulted. She couldn’t decide if Grottor was using her or not, and she wasn’t altogether sure how much or how little of the truth he was telling her. She also wasn’t sure if she could ask him.

You’re relieved of your duties,
he had said to her in the privacy of his cabin.
I have a more important task for you.
He’d explained to her how she would continue to sit at the same console that she’d sat at before, but he’d arranged for an ensign off the bridge to handle her formal tasks, and then she’d be allowed to do what she was supposed to do.

“And what’s that?” she’d asked.

“Why, draw, of course,” he said. “Doodle and draw. Don’t think about it much. Anything that comes to mind or half to mind, just draw it and then vid it over to me.”

“You want me to spend my time doodling, sir?”

He nodded. “You really don’t have any idea, do you?” he asked.

“Any idea of what, sir?”

“You didn’t recognize what you drew?” he asked.

“No,” she said. And then said, “Well, it looked like the Unitologist symbol.”

“That’s right,” he said. “But it’s much more than that. Can I share something with you?” he asked.

“Umm,” she said, startled. But the hesitancy with which she’d responded had made him clam up again.

“It’s tied to our work on the planet,” he had said. “What you’re doing, Ensign Haley, is important work. It might not seem so, but it is. You’ll have to take my word for it. We need to be careful who takes advantage of it.”

She had laughed. “You must be joking, sir,” she had said.

But apparently he was not, for here she was now, sitting at her console, scribbling with her stylus on her digital pad. She had been doing it for more than a week now, and spinning each doodle over to Grottor as soon as she felt she was ready to move on to a new page.

Grottor’s response had been impassive at first; then, slowly, he had begun to express his disappointment. “No,” he finally said, “that’s not it. That’s not helping at all.”

“Perhaps if you’d tell me what you’d like me to draw,” she said, “then I could be of more help.”

He shook his head. “No,” he said. “If it’s to be of any use to us at all, it just has to come.”

But ever since primary school, she’d been trained to please and she was incredibly frustrated that now, somehow, she couldn’t. She tried to second-guess what Grottor wanted. He’d been initially pleased when she drew some version of the Unitologist symbol, and so she drew it again, and saw for the briefest moment a flicker of excitement when he saw it. But the excitement quickly faded.

“Stop thinking,” he scolded her. “Let it just come.”

Let what just come?

*   *   *

It might have gone on much longer like that, might have gone on just like that until the moment when Grottor, frustrated, gave up on Ensign Haley and returned her to her duties, but Grottor, luckily, was not a man to become easily frustrated, and, also luckily, something happened first.

They were, Grottor would realize when he looked at the data later, at the point in their loop where they were directly above the man-made facilities on Aspera’s surface. They were also, due to sloppy navigation on Ensign Orthor’s part, closer to the surface than they usually were. And finally, instrumentation would reveal, there had been a burst of energy from the planet’s surface. From the Marker.

Suddenly Haley had given a little cry and clutched her head.

“Headache?” he heard Orthor ask. Every time the man spoke, it filled Grottor with irritation. It was partly because he knew the man was a plant from Blackwell, but in addition the man was simply irritating. Even toying with that technician down on the surface, Wandrei, pretending not to remember his name, didn’t help much.

It must have been a bad one. Ensign Haley had her head in her hands for twenty or thirty seconds, and seemed a little dazed after. What was it? he wondered. Simply a migraine? Why had it seemed to come along so suddenly? He watched her for a while. For a few moments she was still and then she picked back up her stylus and continued her task.

“Ensign Haley,” he said.

She raised her head, gave him a tired look. “Yes, sir?” she asked, her tone flat.

“Leave the bridge and take a few moments to gather yourself,” he said.

For a moment, he thought she was going to protest, as she had before, but instead she gave a curt nod, spun what was on her pad over to his vid, and stood up to leave.

She was halfway to the door when he realized what she’d sent him.

“Wait a moment, Haley,” he said.

She stopped and paused on the far side of the bridge, waited while he took a closer look.

A new series of equations.
Crystallization counter-sequence,
the gray man had called one part of the first set, or something similar if not exactly that. He recognized a few of the equational gestures that he’d seen alongside the first sketch, but he didn’t know enough to be able to judge how important or genuine they were. He would have to send them along, see what the gray man felt they amounted to. The image alongside them didn’t look at all like the Marker but there was a small rough sketch of the Marker lower on the page and he realized that the rectangle he was seeing was a cutaway, a cross section from the Marker.

“Leave the bridge, Ensign Orthor,” he said.

“What?” said Orthor. “I’m not the one with the headache,” he said.

“Sir,” said Grottor, flatly.

“What?” said Orthor.

“It’s: ‘I’m not the one with the headache, sir,’” said Grottor. “Leave. That’s an order.”

Orthor stood, face livid with suppressed anger, but left. “Now the rest of you,” Grottor said. “All of you. Except you, Ensign Haley.”

There was a moment of stunned silence and then the bridge crew started up and cleared up, a dull rumbling going through them. It took them a few moments, but soon he was left alone with Ensign Haley.

There was a long silence, which she finally broke. “What am I supposed to do, sir?” she asked.

“Do your task,” he said.

“My task?”

“Draw,” he said. “I want you to sit in that chair and draw until you can no longer see, and then I want you keep drawing.”

Confused, she sat and began; almost immediately it was clear that something was happening. She quickly entered an almost trancelike state, and what came pouring out was complex and strange: equations and models, plans and structures. He had always known she was special, but he hadn’t realized just how special.

She drew for hours before it began to fade and just became ordinary doodles again. He was not disappointed with the results. And, more importantly, neither was the gray man.

24

There was a static, a whispering, when the bursts came. It stayed with Istvan for more than a little while, even once the visions had begun to fade, and within it, if he listened hard enough, he could hear voices. They were incomplete and partial, but they were voices, he was sure of it. Or nearly sure. And they were not, as the other voices had been, merely a squashed repetition of words he had said himself. No, these were voices. Now all he had to do was train himself to listen hard enough so that he could hear them.

He took to sitting in his cell, on the edge of his bed, his feet flat on the floor, his hands on his knees, just listening. It reminded him of sitting on the edge of his bed late at night when he was a boy and practicing blanking the world out. There were the general noises he could hear around him—the sound of footsteps, the voices of the other inmates, a rustle or creak here or there—but these he tried to learn to unlisten to, to tune out completely, and, in a certain manner and after a few days, he succeeded. Then there was the sound of his heartbeat, the noise of his own breathing, the noises coming from his body and stomach. These, too, he learned to unlisten to, first dulling them and then reducing them to nothing at all. It came slowly, and had to be redone every time he sat down again, but it could be done. And then, once in that space of silence, he had to sharpen his ears still further, had to not only make them listen to the rumble of whispering voices beneath everything but to home in on just one of them, to pick it out, to start to hear its words.