The Burning Dark (23 page)

He lay on the floor, alone. The image of Astrid was gone, and the black shadows had evaporated, taking the marines with them.

23

“Help me, somebody!”

Maybe he’d been asleep. He felt stiff, tired, cold, and his right leg was wet. He moved, and a sharp pain shot up from his robot knee, all the way up to his shoulder. He’d been shot, he remembered now. He’d been talking to Astrid and someone said …

Ida jerked his head off the floor. One side of his face was numb, and the saliva in his mouth was cold. He swallowed, and coughed, and looked up and the down the passageway. He could hear the environment system purring, bringing the temperature back to ambient normal. The lights were on and tinged with purple. It was night on board the
Coast City
.

“Hello? Can anyone hear me?”

Ida pulled his right leg around to a better angle. He could move his toes, and his knee still seemed to work, luckily undamaged by the ceramic round. For the first time, Ida was thankful the joint was artificial—the shot would have completely destroyed it otherwise. Thank God the passage hadn’t been stripped of the rubberized floor tiles yet, either; otherwise, he’d have a head injury as well.

“Come in, please, somebody.”

He looked left and right and up and down. He was alone. They’d gotten the marines, taken them. And they’d sent Astrid to get him. A ghost from the past to tempt Ida away to … what? He shook his head. They? Who were “they,” anyway?

“Help me, please, somebody.”

It took Ida a few seconds to realize a woman was speaking. He closed his eyes and listened. Maybe he had a concussion. Yes, a concussion. Hit his head, not thinking straight. He’d been dreaming too, a woman’s voice, far away, calling out. They’d sent Astrid to get him, and Astrid was dead. They’d …

“Can anybody hear me?”

Ida’s eyes snapped open, and he swore. He had to get moving. Someone was calling, not over the comms but from somewhere on the same level, from behind the next bulkhead. Maybe Serra had escaped and made it to Ida’s deck. Maybe she’d been hurt too.

Pulling himself awkwardly to his feet, using his good leg and the wall to support himself, he tested his knee. Each flex stung like all hell and his leg felt weak, but he could manage a limp. He’d get Izanami to patch him up. Gingerly testing his weight, Ida pushed off the wall and stood in the middle of the empty passage.

“Help me, please.”

The voice was from the left, and it didn’t sound like Serra. Maybe it was one of the other marines? Leena? Or Newman? No, the voice was different—it was hollow and had a strange accent.

Ida limped down the corridor, through the bulkhead door, and toward the next section. The voice kept calling out, getting louder all the time. Ida replied, shouting that he was coming, but his voice sounded quiet and weak. The woman’s voice had a crackle behind it, some sound that was so familiar to Ida, but he couldn’t put a finger on it.

Hobbling as fast as he could, hissing at the pain and his own too-slow progress, he cleared the next passage and bulkhead and kept going. The woman’s voice was getting stronger, and now Ida realized he was in familiar territory. Level 12, Delta-12. Omega Deck. The very edge of the crew quarters. His own cabin was just ahead.

He stopped. What if the voice was a trick, like Astrid and the dark shadows that had taken the marines? It
had
been her, hadn’t it? Or had he dreamed the whole thing?

Ida closed his eyes and felt dizzy. He was confused, trying to untangle a million illogical thoughts.

“Help me, please!”

Ida sucked in a breath. He had to keep moving. Concussion and confusion were clouding his thinking. Someone was injured and needed his help. Someone familiar, if only he could place the voice.

Ida reached his cabin and punched the door control. As he stepped inside, the lights swelled to twilight-normal. On the desk in front of him, the blue light of the space radio pulsed softly.

“Is there anybody there? Come in, please!”

The woman’s voice was coming from the radio set, punctuated by static, echoing across one thousand light-years of space. Ida recognized the accent, and recognized the voice. Moving to the desk, he saw that the radio wasn’t set to receive; it was set on playback. The recording—the last communiqué of the lost cosmonaut—was running. Ida recognized the static and white noise and the distinctive crackle burnt into the signal as it crisscrossed space and time, bouncing around in subspace, across channels that didn’t even exist in the real universe.

The recording of the woman dying in space, one thousand years ago.

The recording was speaking to him.

Ida coughed and gripped the back of his chair. It was a dream; it had to be. Or a nightmare. He was lying on the floor of the corridor, bleeding to death. He’d been shot and the station was under attack from saboteurs and infiltrators and assassins. The hull had been ruptured and he was being barbecued by the fucked-up light from the purple star. This was not the real world; this was a violet-tinged nightmare.

“Who’s there?”

Ida flinched, looking at the radio. He cleared his throat.

“Who’s there, please? I can hear you. Can you boost your signal?”

Mouth dry and leg on fire, Ida found himself reaching forward, adjusting the radio’s controls. It was ridiculous, farcical even, increasing the antenna gain when the radio wasn’t even on. It was just playing back the dead recording. The dead recording that was speaking to him.

Ida cleared his throat again. “This is Captain Abraham Idaho Cleveland of the U-Star
Coast City
. Please identify yourself.”

He idly wondered who would find him first. Maybe the shadows had taken the entire crew off the station, and he’d condemned himself to a slow, lingering death alone in the corridor in deep space by refusing to go with Astrid. Or maybe Serra and her squad had fought off the attackers on the lower levels and were right now running up the maintenance stairs to his position.

“My name is Ludmila. Help me! Help me, I am lost.”

Ida slumped into his chair. He felt his breath leave him in a warm, shallow stream, and then white stars filled his vision and the room turned sideways and then upside down, and everything went black.

THE STARCHILD

The Private-Profiteer
Bloom County
cruised lazily through space, in the light of the star Shadow, toward the skeletal remains of a large, doughnut-shaped space station.

It was Zia’s father, Milo Hollywood, who had built the ship. True enough, at the heart of the vessel was an ordinary cargo barge—the original ship, the P-Prof
Herculanium Lady,
which had given Milo years of good use before being used as the framework for the
County
. But after the Spider attack on Earth—the historic battle that killed three billion and destroyed a hemisphere—it was Milo who saw the opportunity. He watched from the asteroid belt as the Spiders were defeated; then he piloted his barge into the shattered remnants of the moon to salvage what mineral wealth there was.

Well, he said, scotch on the rocks in one hand and flight joystick in the other, the moon was gone, no point crying about it, and hell if there wasn’t 7.3
×
10
22
tons of lunar rock just floating around in space that wasn’t no good to anyone, not to mention it being one heck of a hazard to the spaceways, or it
would
be once the spaceways were cleared of any last baby Spiders. Okay, so maybe a few people protested the blatant capitalism, and maybe a few people registered their disgust at the desecration of the moon, at his turning the disaster into profit, but come on, it was the Spiders that chewed it up and spit it out like they had something to prove.

You can’t fathom the alien mind. That’s what Milo said when he announced his trip, and that’s what he kept saying as the
Herculanium Lady
blasted off toward the Earth, skirting the cordon of damned hippie protest boats whining about the horror of moon mining. That’s what he said again and again as the
Lady
weaved through the brand-new asteroid field a quarter of a million klicks out from the Earth, a slow-moving morass of gray tombstone rock and bone-white dust, a vast lunar graveyard. And Milo kept talking, even though, inside, he found it hard himself as the
Lady
’s belly was filled with the valuable mineral ore. Even though two of his crew nigh-on had nervous breakdowns at the very thought of scooping up great chunks of the moon—the
moon,
for God’s sake. Even though perhaps he realized it
was
an act of desecration, pissing on the grave of three billion dead.

In fact, Milo kept saying you can’t fathom the alien mind even as he cashed in the ore—making more money than existed in theory on the entire planet and plunging the Earth into a huge debt to its myriad colonies—and took off in the
Lady
with his riches, never to return home again.

Well, he couldn’t, not really. The richest man in Fleetspace was persona non grata like nobody else. Sometimes, in the moments before sleep took him, Milo agreed with all his heart and all his soul.

But it was worth it. Because Milo Hollywood and his crew had found something else floating among the debris.

There was Fleet wreckage, of course, and whatever was left of the lunar colonies, but Milo didn’t really stop to check, because the herculanium that formed the walls of the lunar bases and the engine housings of the U-Star hulks could be recycled just as well as the mineral ore could be processed from the gray lunar rock. The Fleet didn’t seem to take any notice, being too busy patching that great hole in the Earth. The moon? Milo could have it.

But the near-intact Spiderbaby, barely a scratch on it—now,
there
was a prize. It had taken up nearly an entire bay of the
Herculanium Lady
’s mineral skip, and it had cost nearly a whole cycle of mining time retrieving it, but the loss in profit was well worth it. Because Milo Hollywood was one to tinker—tinkering with the
Lady
was what had enabled him to turn the standard G-class cargo barge into something bigger and faster, reaching the asteroid fields before his rivals and carving out the Hollywood mining empire. And now he had a Spiderbaby, its gigantic articulated legs neatly folded around its spherical body in the instinctive protective formation as it slept.

Milo couldn’t exactly fathom why it was inactive. Perhaps this one was immature and underdeveloped, never having left its mother’s belly with its hundred thousand siblings, and had somehow survived as the Mother Spider was blown to bits by the Fleet’s finest all around it.
Whatever.
There it was, and it was his. All that alien tech, that living, thinking, adapting machine, eight giant legs and the beginnings of a mouth that would, in time—as the Spiderbaby became a Spider and perhaps even a Mother Spider—be able to render the ruined fragments of whole planets into so much particulate matter to fuel its growth and organo-technological systems.

Milo saw the potential. Sitting in his hopper was the perfect technology to pull open an asteroid like a piece of overripe fruit and process the mineral ore there and then, negating the need for bulk cargo trailers or unmanned barges to fill with raw, unprocessed ore and push back to home base on microkinetic rockets. The current technology was cheap but some of the haulers could take years to find their way back home, and some of them never did, each loss reducing the paycheck by a painful margin. If he could crack the alien tech, if he could turn the Spiderbaby into a mining ship, he’d go from commercial king to economic legend.

And Milo Hollywood was good, and he did crack it. It took twenty years, and most of his crew had by then left his employ, convinced the old man’s mind had cracked just like the Earth’s crust. But that was fine; he didn’t need them. The
Herculanium Lady
drifted through space with no set course, stopping here and there only to refuel and restock protein and carbohydrate packs for the two remaining crew, Milo and his wife, Honey. Even without a running mine operation, their bank balance was large enough for colonial governors to offer their own beds for the duration of each port call. It didn’t matter, none of it mattered, until the Spiderbaby had been cracked.

When he’d finished, the P-Prof
Herculanium Lady
was unrecognizable, its classic—if functional—lines hidden deep at the center of a new structure, eight insectoid legs folded around a cuboidal body, ready to twitch and grab and grasp at anything Milo landed on. The Spiderbaby’s primitive mind was left intact, and it still slept, but the legs could operate independently and automatically. The new chimeric ship wasn’t sentient, but it was alive, certainly.

Honey demanded the vessel be rechristened. The original ship had been named for her, but there was something alien and horrid about the new version that kept her awake at night. Sometimes her dreams were filled with dark shadows and alien whispers and the roar of the ocean, and sometimes when she awoke in a cold sweat in the middle of the night-cycle she felt she wasn’t alone. It was the Spiderbaby; it had to be. She knew it wasn’t dead, merely inactive, held in check by Milo’s ingenuity and quantum dampeners, but really only temporarily imprisoned.

Milo eventually agreed, although he could never figure out what the darned fuss was about. You cannot fathom a woman’s mind; that’s what he said as he dug out the registration certificate and scrubbed the ship’s name off with a short, thick finger, leaving the slightest trace of black dust on the pad screen as he did so.

It wasn’t until later that he found the new name. Once the original registration had been deleted, they were theoretically illegal and weren’t able to make port until the new registration had been filed. One cycle out from Arb-Niner and the little lady was giving him the ear about the state of supplies, so he had to do something. They had enough credits in the bank to buy all the real estate on Arb-Niner twice over, and as she paced the living quarters on board the
Herculanium
 … the
whatever-the-hell-it-was-called-now,
she said she might well do that and evict the entire planet’s population if Milo didn’t take some responsibility for a change and maybe invest a few precious credits in something a little better than the compressed protein and carbohydrate ration packs that had been their diet for the past twenty years. And maybe at five years old, their only child, Zia, could have some real food, and maybe they could even stop over for a while and Zia could meet some other people planetside. Zia was a starchild, born in space, schooled in space. Zia knew nothing but her ma and her pa and the tiny metal world of the
Herculanium
 … the
something-something
.