The Burning Dark (19 page)

They weren’t alone. She screamed. She couldn’t help it.

Carter cried out and tumbled back as Serra’s grip on the sheet suddenly loosened. He regained his balance on his heels and slid off the bed, spinning around to face the door, stopping just short of slamming straight into it.

They had a Peeping Tom, all right, and Carter had been right. The face was pressed tightly against the Plexiglas, rolling from side to side, dragging the fleshy cheeks horribly, exposing yellow teeth and sickly pale gums.

“DeJohn!” yelled Carter. “What the fuck?”

Carter slammed a palm against the locking mechanism. The door whined but didn’t open, and for a moment DeJohn’s distorted face stopped squashing itself against the glass just long enough to look Serra in the eye.

“Fucking
fuck,
” said Carter, slapping the door control repeatedly.

There was something wrong with DeJohn, thought Serra. He’d never had the best teeth in the world, but through the slightly cloudy glass of the cabin door they looked yellower than ever, and ragged, almost chipped at the edges, pointed. But it was the eyes—the whites were almost a dark shade of yellow, shot through with a bright spiderweb of red. DeJohn was grinning, his eyes so wide as to be almost perfectly circular.

“Get fucking rid of him,” Serra called from the bed. She’d brought her legs up to her chest now and pressed herself against the wall at the head of the bed. On a fucked-up space station like the
Coast City,
the last thing she needed was DeJohn being a fucking
carajo
.

Carter looked down at the door control. “The hell is wrong with this thing?” He slapped it again, his palm smacking with a wet sound against the silver-chrome surface. The door whined again, and this time, after just a second’s pause, opened.

The passageway was empty. Carter muttered under his breath as he strode out into the corridor. As soon as he crossed the threshold into the passage Serra saw him tense, his skin suddenly crawling with gooseflesh, the cold outside the cabin enough for him to reflexively pull his head back as though avoiding a blow. His body shone metallically with sweat in the dim light.

As Carter paced outside the cabin, Serra screwed her eyes tight. She was a marine, a fucking marine, and a little cold air and someone being a dick was nothing,
nothing
. But she’d had a surprise, and she was annoyed at her own reaction. She’d been more on edge before than perhaps she realized, and this made her uneasy, uncomfortable. Right now she’d rather have been at the front line of a battle against the Spiders, using her ability to plug into the Spiders’ own psi-net and fuck with their communications.

“What the
fuck
is up with the environment control?” Carter’s voice drifted out of the passageway. He reappeared at the door, sweat steaming off him as he stepped back into the cabin.

Serra thought of the purple light of Shadow. “I’m not going back outside to try to fix it again,” she said quickly.

Carter paused and gave her an odd look. Then he nodded.

“Freezing out there. This hulk is fucked, I tell you. Environment control is all screwed up again.” Carter reached behind him and hit the door panel. As the door slid shut, he knocked the cabin’s environment control to high and sighed as warm air gently blew in through the vents near the ceiling. Carter walked over to the bed and began separating his clothes from Serra’s.

“This demo job is really beginning to piss me off,” he said, pulling on his pants. He swore again as his foot got tangled in the leg.

“So what the hell was DeJohn doing out there? Did you tell him to fuck off?”

Carter huffed. “Where’s my shirt?” Finding it, he yanked it over his head and unrolled the T-shirt down his chest and back while shaking his head. “There’s nobody out there.”

Serra stiffened under the thin sheet. “What do you mean? What did you tell him?”

“I said,” Carter growled, hopping on one foot as he pulled his boots on, “there’s no one fucking out there.”

“But … he was there!” Serra pointed at the door, waving her finger around as though that emphasized her words.

Carter glanced up at her and shook his head again. “He must have run out of the section.”

“Where are you going?”

Carter hooked a thumb over his shoulder, toward the door. “Gonna see if I can find him, then see King.”

“King?”

“Yep. Something isn’t right.”

Serra buried her chin in the sheet. The Fleet-issue bedding was terribly thin, and despite the warm air filling the cabin, the sweat on her body refused to dry, making her feel wet and cold. But she didn’t want to move. It was ridiculous. She was a marine, a trained solider, just like Carter. And yet … and yet she had to bite back the urge to ask Carter to check under the bed, just in case.
And then when he leaves,
she thought,
I’ll lock the cabin door, turn off the lights, and hide in the corner, and wait for him to come back.
She didn’t want to be in view of the window in the door. Or, more important, she didn’t want to be able to see out of it herself. Because …

“You see his face?” she asked.

Carter blinked at Serra. He was standing over the bed now, dressed. The muscles on his chest were tight, stretching the fabric as he clenched his fists.

“His eyes…,” she said quietly.

Carter nodded.

Serra sat up a little. “Is he sick? He looked sick. Maybe that’s why he didn’t respond earlier?”

Carter nodded again. “Stay here,” he said.

But he needn’t have bothered. Serra just watched as her lover opened the cabin door, standing in the frame for a good few seconds as he checked left and right and left again. With a final look over his shoulder and a small frown, he disappeared down the passage. The door snicked shut behind him automatically, and the light dimmed as the passageway darkened as he walked away.

In the corner of the room, on the bed, under the thin green sheet, Serra sat, every muscle in her body tense, not wanting to move, not wanting to close her eyes. If she edged back, just a little, the angle of the door window was enough that nobody could see her easily. Perhaps that was enough, but she didn’t dare move across the room, not even to get dressed.

Shivering with cold and shivering with fear, Serra lifted the sheet over her head, plunging herself into a world of cold, green dark.

*   *   *

This fucking spaceship.

Carter walked slowly at first, then picked up the pace once he realized the environment control had at last decided to play ball, switching section lights on around him as he moved, keeping the ambient temperature just so. Still, it played havoc with his sinuses. The inside of his nose was cold and dry and it hurt when he sniffed. His lips had a layer of cracked skin on them.

The second passageway, then the third. Each gently curving corridor was separated by a bulkhead and door, the edges of each premade section that, when assembled together in space by the robot drones, formed the kitset space station.

Carter reached the end of the third passage along from the cabin he now shared with Serra. The bulkhead door slid upward silently as he approached, the ship’s sensors timing it so that he didn’t have to pause to pass through no matter what his travel speed.

Serra. Now,
there
was a marine. Her gunnery scores were higher than those of anyone else Carter had met in service, specialists like Sen aside, helped by that goddamn freaky sixth sense she had going on. But that wasn’t the half of it. For the first time, he’d met someone who really understood him, who knew what it was like not just to be a marine but also to be ex–Black Ops. She knew what this meant, more than anyone he’d met who hadn’t actually
been
there. She helped him deal with his past—it was a slow process, but he was getting better, he knew it, and it was all down to her, too, not the army of shrinks the Fleet threw at him. Serra was special, in more ways than one. And if they could only escape from the Fleet one day, then he knew, he
knew
she was the one he wanted to grow old with. Time spent with her helped him forget, more and more, about the Fleet and its business.

Carter stopped on the other side of the door, peering ahead. He was heading toward the demolition zone proper, marked by a red line running at eye level on the walls on either side of him. The metallorubber floor tiles had already been lifted, leaving a shallow grid of black metal. The corridor was very long, and although it was nearly pitch dark ahead, the bright red LEDs on the next bulkhead door did a fine job of illuminating the end of the section in a dreamy, misty light.

Carter sighed, tapped his fingers against the doorframe behind him, and then turned to leave. He needed to see King.

Just as he turned, the red light at the end of the passage flared in his peripheral vision. He stopped and snapped his head back around. Something had moved across the red LEDs. A shape, indistinct and blurred.

“DeJohn?” Carter stepped back into the section, trying to see through the mist now filling the dark passage. Lit by the low LEDs on the walls, it created an eerie violet glow.

“DeJohn? Hey, Niels, you there?” He shook his head, muttering, and kicked his feet at the clouds forming near floor level. The environment control had gone loopy again. Mist? “What the—?”

Carter took two steps forward, each footfall ringing out on the metal floor grid. Then he stopped.

He was there.

Standing at the far bulkhead, the figure in the spacesuit was unfocused and rough at the edges, the mist curling around it, crawling up its legs like it was alive, aware. It was standing in front of the door panel, and the glowing air made it look like you could see through it, see the lights behind.

Carter blinked and took another step forward. The door behind him, sensing his progress, closed.

“DeJohn, you fuck. What do you think you’re doing? King is going to eject you into space, man. But not before you’ve explained yourself to me. Hey! I’m talking to you!”

The figure in the spacesuit didn’t move. It was DeJohn, wasn’t it? They’d seen him at the cabin window, although he’d put his helmet back on now. Although … the figure was somehow shorter and thinner than DeJohn, even in the bulky suit.

Carter suddenly had a feeling he should have ducked into the armory and signed out a sidearm. His fingers curled at his belt, searching for a holster that wasn’t there.

But he kept walking forward. The figure in the suit didn’t move, not really, although he shimmered in Carter’s vision.

Carter’s skin was pricking with a cold sweat, chilling him even further in the fucked-up atmosphere of the semi-deconstructed passageway, each step illuminating the next ceiling light tile to half power, enough to make sure you didn’t walk into anything but not enough to see properly. Ahead, the figure rippled again.

Carter frowned. The ceiling lights above the figure in the suit were still dark—another environment glitch—but the section where the guy was standing was lit better now by the lights above Carter as he approached. He could see now that the figure in the suit was standing almost hard up against the bulkhead door. The door was unlocked—Carter could see the indicator light through the spacesuit—but remained closed.

Through
the spacesuit? Carter stopped and pinched the bridge of his nose between forefinger and thumb. He felt dizzy suddenly. He sighed and strode forward.

“DeJohn, quit fooling around. You shouldn’t have that suit out of storage. King is already in a bad mood and you’re going to drive him truly apeshit, man.”

Carter stopped. He could feel the cold air move around him, the thin mist cloying on his bare arms.

He blinked and was alone in the passageway. The figure in the suit had gone. The bulkhead door was still closed, and he’d never heard it open.

The corner of his mouth curled into an irritated snarl, Carter looked at the frame of the door panel, as though an explanation might be printed there alongside the standard Fleet insignia. He stepped forward, just to check, and at the appropriate proximity the bulkhead door slid open, left to right. Beyond was another corridor in an identical state of deconstruction. The ceiling light across the bulkhead faded on, and, caught in the yellow-white light, Carter watched fingers of the cold mist drift into the clear air of the next section.

Carter swore, then stood and breathed deeply for a while. The nausea had passed, but his chest hurt. It was an unfamiliar feeling, being in a situation in which he wasn’t in control. You could never let that happen in space, nor on the battlefield. Calm, control. Think. He shook his head, like that would clear his mind. He focused on facts rather than on supposition, ignoring the uncomfortable way the image of the man in the spacesuit had been a blurring, shifting black shadow in the passage. He quickly came up with a theory, one that better satisfied him.

DeJohn had snapped at the same time the
Coast City
manifest had bugged. He’d dropped off the scan and was now running free around the station, high on engine juice. He must have fallen into a paranoid delusion, stealing the suit, convinced that the U-Star was going to fall apart around him at any moment. He was sick; he needed help. Carter had seen plenty of cases of space madness. The theatrical nature of the environment failures was just triggering the latent, primitive, superstitious parts of DeJohn’s mind. Carter understood—lighting and door failures, temperature drops and problems with humidity and condensation, it was enough to flip anyone out. And maybe with the station not altogether there anymore, they weren’t shielded from the light of Shadow. Shadow scared even Carter. The light of that star would fuck you up. That was something else to report to King. The
Coast City
may have been decommissioned and in the process of demolition, but it was probably important for the demolition crew itself to survive the process. Maybe they could move the station farther out from the star. There was no scientific crew left aboard to study the stupid thing anyway.

He turned around. The figure in the suit was a couple of meters away, now standing in the passage through which Carter had just come. Carter felt a lump in this throat and instinctively swore just as he took a huge intake of breath. The result was a strangled gasp that didn’t quite fill Carter’s lungs. He stood, back straight, and whooped for breath again. In an impossible second the figure was now standing right in front of him, close enough to touch. It reached forward.