The Burning Dark (33 page)

Something clicked in the back of Ida’s mind. “A woman in an old-fashioned spacesuit?”

“No. She was laughing. Dressed in white.”

Ida’s stomach did a flip-flop. He opened his eyes to stop a sudden wave of dizziness and felt hot bile in the back of his throat.

He turned to look at Zia. She was sitting calmly, but her eyes were wide and she was as white as a ghost.

“Describe her.”

Zia’s eyes unfocused; although they remained on Ida, he didn’t think she was looking at him. “A white dress, short. She had black hair, long and straight. And blue eyes, pale baby blue, very bright, as bright as the stars. She was Asian … Japanese or Korean. I don’t know.”

Ida swore, and prayed to whatever gods were listening to stop the walls of the world crashing in on him.

“She knew my name,” said Zia. “She called to me. My father asked me to come with them. And then … then they changed. Became … I don’t know.… She’s looking for someone too. She asked me if I knew where he is.…”

She was shaking now. Ida watched her lips move, although no more words came. Then she squinted and pressed the heel on one hand to her forehead. Ida knew exactly how she felt.

Ida’s mind raced. “When I found you,” he said quickly, “before you left, that’s what you said. You said, ‘Where is he, where is he.’ Who?”

Zia shook her head. “I don’t remember that,” she said. She closed her eyes tight, and her shivering increased.

He stood, pushing his own chair away noisily. She jumped at the sound but didn’t open her eyes. He walked over, ignoring the way the shadows moved like smoke in the corners of the canteen. The others in the canteen had gone; Ida just hoped they had walked out rather than been …
taken
.

Ida grabbed Zia’s shoulders firmly, not sure what he could do other than to let her know that he was here, that
they
were here, together.

Zia screwed her eyes even tighter, and her hands shot up and grabbed Ida’s forearms. She squeezed them hard, hard enough to hurt. Ida grimaced, but then she opened her eyes.

“They’re watching,” she said, her voice a whisper.

38

They locked themselves in
Ida’s cabin.

It had been hours, although it was hard to tell, as Ida’s override meant the automatic night cycle never came. For all he knew, the station was back in twilight outside. There was no way in hell he was opening the door to check. The frosted window was just a vaguely orange opaque square.

The shadows were dangerous, and they weren’t
just
shadows. This they both agreed on.

And Izanami. He’d seen her fade with his own eyes—the only pair of eyes, he now realized, that had
ever
seen her aboard the
Coast City.
Individual ideas and suspicions finally coalesced in his mind, forming a picture he didn’t want to see. The malfunctioning life scan that never showed Izanami in his cabin. Interrupted conversations. Izanami’s insistence that she wasn’t a member of the crew. It turned out she was telling the truth.

“Not sure we can count on the marshal, either.”

Zia looked up. “Do you think he’s a part of it all?”

“Maybe,” said Ida. “He knows something, I’m sure of that. He’s been frosty since I arrived, but the last few cycles it’s like he’s not really here.”

Zia shrugged. “Sure he isn’t just buckling under the pressure?”

“No, seems more than that. Like he’s … I don’t know, fighting something.”

“What about the others on the station?”

“Well, there aren’t many left. At first it was just a bug in the manifest, but now we know that crew members are disappearing. Carter and Serra were taken in the last group I know of. Six in total.”

“Like Dathan and my crew.”

Ida grimaced. “Like them.”

“What happened to your commandant?”

“When I arrived, he’d already gone. But he’d managed to get off the station
between
transports.”

“And we know what that means.…” Zia sucked in a breath.

“Maybe he was the first,” said Ida. “I heard his voice later—calling over the comms, during the first security breach. The ready room was attacked at the same time.”

Zia shifted forward on the bed. “But if you heard him, doesn’t that mean that he’s … well, that he’s out there, somewhere? And the others too?”

“Maybe,” said Ida. He rubbed his face and spoke into his hands. “They were taken to somewhere. Maybe they’re still alive.” He dropped his hands and watched the dark space under the bed, thinking back again to Zia’s account of what happened on board the
Bloom County
.

Zia’s crew were not only highly trained but highly paid as well, and when their employer told them to jump, they asked for the height, distance, and details of the bonus remuneration offered for the task. At Zia’s call, Fathead had dragged Ivanhoe from the infirmary and readied the
Bloom County
without pause or hesitation. When Zia joined them, they didn’t speak unless spoken to, and the trio blasted off to their destination ahead of the official schedule. Neither Ivanhoe nor Fathead asked about Dathan, and Zia didn’t mention him. The only thing her two remaining crew members knew was that they had to get away from the
Coast City
quickly. As well as miners and pilots, they were bodyguards and minders. Zia Hollywood was one of the most valuable private assets in all of Fleetspace, and protecting her was a deep-drilled instinct. They were a three-person self-preservation society. Saving their asses was the prime directive.

The slowrock field lay on the other side of Shadow, forming a cone-shaped spearhead of rubble powering cometlike toward the star. Perhaps it
had
been a comet, one that had broken up into its constituent rocky parts. Over time, if it wasn’t engulfed by Shadow or vaporized by its strange light, the field might separate until its density became almost undetectable in deep space. This was the bounty Zia had come to hunt. The readings were off the chart, making it a prize worth crossing half of Fleetspace for. Each bite-sized chunk, according to the data leaked to them by the Fleet, was composed nearly entirely of lucanol, a metalloid that, when combined with herculanium, made an alloy strong enough to construct the core filaments of quickspace drivers. Half a standard mining hopper of rough lucanol ore could buy you a small asteroid of your own to call home. A
Bloom County
skipful of the pure metalloid meant Zia could buy the Fleet itself. Maybe that was her plan.

Or had been. The new plan was to get the hell out of the system, and fast. The question of the slowrocks hadn’t even entered Zia’s mind until they came up close, quite by accident as the ship curled away from the
Coast City
and into a trajectory that would take them away from Shadow. The ship’s mining computer got a lock immediately and started pumping out data without anyone even asking.

The readings were impossible. Lucanol was soft, reactive; that’s what made it so rare. So either the readings were subject to the same kind of weird interference from Shadow’s radiation … or they were being altered somehow. Deliberately.

Two hours later and they’d swung by the leading asteroid’s perihelion, the debris looming large on portside as they raced along. It was black, solid, a single triangular wedge, something too perfect, too regular.

Then the Spiderbaby under their feet had begun to twitch. It was unusual, but within bounds, and probably due to the light of Shadow as they skimmed its corona. They were close to the star, far closer than they’d intended.

The first sign of trouble had been when the movement of the mining legs had stopped. A minute later and the
Bloom County
’s engines cut out. As Fathead scrambled over the controls, they went dark. The control cabin cooled a little as the environment systems shut off, giving Zia’s crew just a few hours of life support before they’d freeze in space.

Ivanhoe worked on the engines while Zia and Fathead got the backup systems online. Minimal life support and emergency communications, and that was it. The flight deck was dark, lit by the weak orange of the emergency communications screen and the dull purple glow of open space coming in from the large window. Zia thanked the stars for their light, and the fact that their ship had real windows and wasn’t reliant on viewscreens.

She’d seen it first. The starlight itself began to dim. The debris field was suddenly looming over them, much closer than it should have been as they’d drifted unpowered toward it. It was impossible. Unless the great black nothing had steered toward them itself.

As Zia watched, the window went dark, leaving them with nothing but a sick orange from the comms channel as it sprang to life, filling the cabin with a hard-edged roar of white noise. Then the light from even that dimmed, as the darkness came through the window and filled the cabin like a heavy, black gas being poured into a tank.

Fumbling in total blackness, Zia called for Ivanhoe and Fathead. At first her crew replied and Zia walked and stumbled, arms outstretched, the small flight deck impossibly large in the dark. Then the voices stopped. Zia realized then that there had been three responses: Ivanhoe and Fathead … and Dathan.

As her eyes adjusted, Zia could make out the comms deck ahead of her. The shadows seemed to move at her peripheral vision, black-on-black shapes darting out of sight as she turned her head.

And then a new voice.

Ida scratched his chin and looked at Zia. “The voice,” he said, waiting a moment as Zia tilted her head quizzically “You sure it was him?”

“On the ship?” she asked. “I know my own father’s voice.”

Ida nodded.

“Y’know,” she continued, “the very worst thing is that part of me wanted to go.”

Ida glanced at her. She sat cross-legged on the bed, her hands twisting at the sheets beneath her. Ida thought back to his own temptation on board the
Coast City,
in the lifetime ago before Zia had even arrived.

Zia sighed. “D’ya think it was really him?”

Ida didn’t answer for a long time. “It’s either him, or something pretending to be him. Whatever it—they—are, they can get into our heads, into our minds.”

“You’ve seen ’em too?”

Ida nodded. “I saw someone who was once very close to me.”

“Dead?”

“Yes, she’s dead.”

They sat in silence for a while. The shadows under the bed didn’t move.

“I couldn’t go,” said Zia eventually.

“No,” said Ida. “Me neither.”

“He said he’d forgive me if I came.”

Ida looked up. “Forgive you for what?”

But Zia wouldn’t meet his eye.

39

Quicker than Ida expected,
Zia changed the subject. “What makes us so damned special?”

“What do you mean?”

Zia shifted on the bed. She let go of the bunched-up sheets and began gesturing with her hands as she spoke. It was good, Ida thought. She was focusing on solutions, not problems. First step: gather data.

“They … she …
it
—whatever ‘it’ is—is taking people. The marines, the commandant, everyone on this fucked-up space station. Fathead, Ivanhoe, Dathan. And who knows who else. How far does this go? How many people have vanished in Fleetspace?”

Ida frowned. “And this station—or rather, this system—is at the center of it. Must be. Shadow is an unusual star, unique. Can’t be a coincidence. But more important, what are people being taken for? There must be a reason.”

They fell into silence. For once, Ida didn’t miss the static roar from the space radio.

Zia unfolded her legs and lay down. She looked at the ceiling, and then crossed her arms behind her head.

“So did all those fancy heroics really happen?” Zia asked.

Ida coughed, his train of thought broken. “Tau Retore? Yes,” he said, looking at her. “It really happened.”

“So if you saved an entire planet from the Spiders, how does something like that get erased from Fleet records? What I heard, the war isn’t exactly going as planned. Win like that would be shouted to the heavens.”

Ida felt the panic rise in his chest. Just a twitch, just enough to remind him that, weirdness aboard the good ship
Coast City
aside, there was plenty else wrong with the universe.

Unless, of course, they were connected. Another unlikely coincidence.

Zia sat up and leaned forward. “No, I’m serious. Damn thing never happened. I ain’t never heard of it, and none of my crew have either. It’s just smoke in the wind.”

“What do you mean? How do you know?”

Zia raised an eyebrow. “I checked. We were given a crew list of the station when our stop was approved. It was a long flight. I looked you up.”

“What did you find, exactly?”

Zia shook her head. “Nothing, is what. There ain’t nothing recorded. No name, no rank. No record. Nothing at all. You, my fine Cap’n, don’t even exist.”

Ida laughed, but the laugh died and he stared at the floor. Zia shook her head again. “But…”

“But?”

“Well, here you are.” said Zia.

“Here I am,” said Ida, throwing his hands open. “Stuck out in the back end of nowhere, surrounded by shadows and ghosts. Tau Retore happened, and then I was sent here.”

Zia blew out a lungful of air between pursed lips. “And so was I.…”

Ida straightened in his chair. “You were sent here? I thought you came of your own free will?”

“Well, yeah, but only because we were fed the readings on the slowrock field. If those readings didn’t show a whole damn gold mine floating out in this fucked-up system, I wouldn’t be here.”

“So you and me—”

Zia nodded. “Yep.”

“We were both sent here.”

“Yep.”

“For a reason.”

“Yep.”

Ida stretched his arms in front of him, turning his palms inside out and cracking his interlocked fingers. Then a thought occurred. A connection made, perhaps.

“I’m not the only one who seems to have dropped out of the history books,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

Ida spun the chair around slowly until he was facing the table. There sat the space radio, narrow and silver, the blue light now a dead black dot on the front of its shiny casing.