Dead Space: Catalyst (21 page)

“A believer?” asked Henry.

Briden reached into the neck of his shirt, pulled out his icon, a small twisting shape, the Unitologist symbol. “Altman be praised,” he said.

“No, sorry,” said Henry almost too quickly. “I’m not a believer. Not that I have anything against it.”

“You will be,” said Briden, slowly tucking his icon away, a smile still frozen on his face. “You’re feeling it already, but you just haven’t admitted it yet.”

And with that he turned away, went back to directing his team and setting up the equipment, leaving Henry a little shaken and not quite sure what to do with himself.

*   *   *

It’s here,
thought Briden.
I’m sure of it
. Whatever the Marker wanted them to find was to be found here, and he, Briden, was going to be the one to find it. He had been chosen to do so. His calling was a sacred one, and he could almost feel a holy crown there shining on his head, invisible for all to see except the truly sacred, the truly chosen. He would find it and he would do whatever he needed to do to protect both it and the Marker from all unbelievers.

It had been a mistake to approach Wandrei the technician as he had, but he had felt something, detected something in the man. He knew that Wandrei felt something, just as he, Briden, felt something. Everybody felt a little bit of something—that was how powerful the Marker was, reaching out to believers and unbelievers alike—but for most it was nothing significant: a headache, a little anxiety, or nausea. More and more people, though, were sensing a call to Convergence, a call to lose their life so that they could find it, so that they could find a larger sense of unity and life in the one. Already six people among their number had let go of their lives, or had had them taken away by a well-meaning soul, and Briden had made very certain that their bodies were prepared and preserved for the day they might rise again. Yes, he understood that the work here was holy.

And there was Callie Dexter beside him suddenly. She was his affliction, the thorn in his side. She did not believe and he knew better than to speak to her about his belief: she would not understand it. She would mock him and would try to use it against him. No, she was there as a test for him, something for him to fight against and overcome, but quietly and subtly and with great care.

“We’re all set?” Briden asked.

Callie nodded. “All the monitoring equipment is in place. Now we just wait for a surge.”

“Yes,” said Briden. “But there are things we can do in the meantime.”

“Things? Like what?”

“We need to get a feel for the place,” he said. “We need to walk out there and sense its energies.”

“Energies?” said Dr. Dexter. “What sort of mystical bullshit are you trying to feed me?”

“I mean, measure for any anomalies,” said Briden, backtracking. “Magnetic abnormalities, pressure irregularities, any unusual readings of any sort. Anything that can tell us what’s there, what the Marker is looking for.”

“There you go again,” said Dr. Dexter. “Always thinking of the Marker as human.”

Briden bristled. He
wasn’t
thinking of the Marker as human. Sentient yes, but hardly human: it was far beyond human. “It’s just a metaphor,” he said. “I don’t mean anything by it.”

Dr. Dexter gave him a hard stare. “I wish that were true,” she said. “All right, let’s see what we can find.”

30

The voice and the changing face that went with it were with Istvan almost all the time now, very quiet most of the time, but still something he could hear and understand as long as he was listening in the right way. It was like having a brother again, only better because it wasn’t going to abandon him as his brother had done. No, this was a new friend: someone, he felt, that was willing to be with him forever, someone with whom he could spend the rest of his life.

It was beginning to teach him things. He could feel it sometimes touching his brain lightly, smoothing parts of it out, scrunching other parts of it up, and doing so in a way that was beginning to build something within him. It was a strangely intimate sensation, as if someone had their hand in his head and was caressing his brain softly, and he wondered if he shouldn’t be afraid. He was, admittedly, a little afraid at first, but then it stroked a particular part of his brain and the fear diminished at least a little. There were shapes and figures beginning to form, strange twisted and watery shapes that he could not only see but that he felt he understood, that he felt somehow, if he just had the right tools and the right training, he could build. It could be glorious, the voice whispering in his head told him.
Glorious. The next step in evolution. Marvelous Convergence, the extension of consciousness from bodies to a place both within and between bodies.

It was wonderful, so wonderful that he almost didn’t feel the pain as the burst came, stronger than it ever had been before, and took him into the other world. He could hear, behind that world, in the world before, the groans and cries of his fellow convicts and knew that somewhere they were feeling it, too, though not in the same way as he was. Where the fingers in his brain moved delicately, stroking and rearranging in a way that he found at once sharp and exhilarating, they must have felt like their heads were being torn off. Indeed, once the burst faded and parts of his vision started to return, he did see that the man roughly across the table from him had beaten his head over and over against the surface of the table until that head had cracked open. Blood was pooling on the surface of the table, slipping over it and toward Istvan. Istvan watched it come, unconcerned, not moving even after it began to drip slowly into his lap.
Was the man dead?
he wondered.
What had been the convict’s name again?
And then he decided that it didn’t really matter. He wasn’t dead yet, but he’d be dead soon.

The alarm went off, sending them back to their cells. The other convicts looked almost in shock, some of them wandering aimlessly about, others just staring at the body, one hitting his head over and over again with his hands. But slowly they began to come back to themselves and move. Istvan braced his hands on the table, to either side of the pooling blood. But before he stood, the voice said something to him.

Wait,
it said.

“Wait?” he said. “Why?”

But for once it didn’t answer. He looked around him, at the other convicts moving back to their cells, at the dead or dying man across the table from him. What did the voice know? If he listened to it, he’d be beaten by the guards, maybe killed. He again started to stand.

Wait,
the voice said again.

He stopped, confused. Why should he wait? What did he gain by doing so? No, it was a mistake. And yet, he waited.

The loudspeaker crackled out its warning, giving him thirty seconds to return to his cell. He counted it down, and then counted a minute or so more before he heard the cell doors clang closed.
Now it is too late,
he told himself.
Now you are in trouble.

He raised his hands and put them behind his head so that they wouldn’t think him a threat. He waited. A minute later the doors to the outer ring opened and the guards came in.

Only they didn’t rush this time. They were moving more slowly, dressed in riot gear, and were flanking four people, two men and two women, dressed in ordinary clothing.

New prisoners?
he wondered at first. But no, their hands were free, they were at ease and relaxed, and they were carrying various pieces of technical equipment. The door closed behind them. Slowly they moved through the ring of cells and toward the central circle.

One of the guards raised his weapon. “Shall I neutralize him, sir?” he asked.

One of the four people in the middle, a man just approaching middle age with salt-and-pepper hair who was apparently their leader, shook his head. “No need to bother him unless he becomes aggressive. Leave him as he is.”

The scientists came forward, sweeping their way into the room, moving back and forth, the guards awkwardly flanking them and sometimes bumping into them as they moved in unexpected directions. Istvan just stayed there, watching them come.

“Check and see if that one is dead,” said the apparent leader.

“Will do, sir,” said one of the guards. He came forward and examined the man slumped across the table, then stripped off one glove and pressed his fingers into the man’s neck. “He’s dead,” he said.

“Ugh,” said one of the others in the group, a woman. “Ghastly.” But despite saying that, she came forward and stared at the body with some interest, as if fascinated. She looked up at Istvan. “What made him do it?” she asked.

Istvan hesitated a moment, then shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “I didn’t see it.”

“Of course you saw it,” she said. “You were sitting right across from him.”

“I heard it,” he said. “But I didn’t see it.”

Two of the guards were assigned the body. They dragged it away by the arms, leaving an irregular smear of blood in its wake. The other guards and the people with their machines kept circling around, slowly narrowing their focus until they were all standing around Istvan.

“Right here,” said their leader. “I’m sorry,” he said to Istvan, “but you’ll have to move.”

You can move now,
said the voice to him, and he saw again Conn’s ghastly face flash up before him, his strange smile.
You can go back to your cell.

Istvan nodded. Very slowly he stood and stepped out from the bench. “I want to go back to my cell,” he said.

Distractedly, their leader nodded. “Yes, yes,” he said, “go on, then.”

Hands still up, he walked away. The guards’ eyes followed him, as did their weapons. He could feel their eyes still on his back as he went slowly out of inner circle and into the cell circle and then stood by the closed door of his cell, waiting.

31

“Right here,” said Briden, pointing at the instruments. “Right where that fellow was sitting.” He turned to Callie Dexter. “I’m right, aren’t I? Some kind of anomaly? Something that responds in a particular way to the crystalline structure of our Marker?”

“Seems so,” she said.

He smiled. “So directly under the floor, I’m assuming? We get something in here and we start to dig.”

Callie shrugged. “Not enough data to know for certain,” she said.

“Sure there’s enough,” said Briden. “It led us here, didn’t it? There’s nothing here on the surface, so there must be something below.”

They put the one loose convict back in his cell, then sent someone back to the Marker compound for a contact beam and an engineer to operate it. It took an hour, maybe more, but finally they were there and cutting through the floor.

The going was slow at first, the engineer working the contact beam and some of the guards recruited to shovel out the rubble. There was a certain amount of danger, Briden knew: they might break into a cavern or other space without breathable atmosphere and then those standing near the hole might well be killed, which was why he stood at a little distance away. Callie Dexter, though, was up close and leaning in, curious, watching the work. He imagined her eyes bugging out and her gasping for air and it gave him a certain perverse satisfaction. He smiled, though he did eventually call for breathing equipment, just in case. But no reason to stop the digging while waiting for it to arrive.

They went down three feet, maybe four, without finding anything beyond dirt and rock shot through with veins of crystal. Maybe that was it, the crystal? Or maybe there was something there, deeper down? They needed another pulse, something they could correlate and trace and make sure they were on the right track, but it might be hours, or even days, before one came.

Another eight feet. The contact beam ran out of fuel and they replaced the cartridge, and then it overheated and the engineer hauled himself up out of the hole by a rope, shaking his head.

“We’ll have to let it cool down,” he said. “A few hours at least. Besides, it’s time to sleep.”

“We should keep going,” said Briden. “I’m sure we’re nearly there.”

The engineer wiped his face with his hands. “There’s nothing down there,” he said. “Nothing but rock. You’re wasting your time.”

Briden was eager to keep going, but looking at the face of the engineer and his fellow scientists he realized it was prudent to wait. “All right,” he said. “A little something to eat, a few hours of sleep, and then we can start again.”

*   *   *

They would find it, Briden was sure they would find it—it was waiting for them, the Markers had led them to this spot: it had to be there. This was a test of faith, a test of
his
faith. If he was to be their prophet, he had to persist, had to go on.

He pushed at the food in front of him, stirred it around his plate, but ate very little of it. Many of the others had already gone off to catch a few hours of sleep on the spare cots in the guards’ quarters or alongside the technicians.

“Penny for your thoughts,” said Dr. Dexter. She was still sitting across from him, observing him closely as if he were a specimen. He shook his head.

“Briden…” she said, and for once her voice was gentle, a little hesitant. “You have to realize that there may be nothing there.”

“But the readings,” he said. “You saw them as well as I did. We traced them as close as we possibly could—”

“The readings have been slightly different each time. Maybe they’re there for a moment and then not. Or maybe the Markers are off somehow. Maybe they’re trying to broadcast to something that no longer exists.”

But no, he thought, it couldn’t be that way. It
had
to be real. He’d invested too much of his life in this project. He
knew
it was real. The Marker was speaking to him, he could feel it when it pulsed. Unlike Callie, he had faith. He believed in this, believed in what he was doing. There
had
to be something there.

“Look,” she said. “I said it earlier. We need more data—”