The Burning Dark (9 page)

If Shadow continued to act up like this, the station would be cut off from the rest of Fleetspace. Which, thought Ida, might not be such a bad thing—the last transport wasn’t due to swing by and pick up the station’s last remaining crew, Ida included, for a couple of months. If the Fleet lost contact with the
Coast City,
they’d more than likely send the ship early. Which suited Ida just fine.

Except right now, when he needed to get answers from Fleet Command, the increased activity of Shadow was just what he
didn’t
want.

Between the endless waiting and signal dropouts, what information Ida had managed to gather was next to useless. Even when he had persuaded someone to impart the data he wanted, or even just look the damn thing up in the first place, there were either no records or a single-line description. Commanders Stockley and Stevens, no record. Lieutenants Yung, Martin, and Hazlett—two listed as deployed, with no further information, and the third an empty record. It was the same with all the command crew of the First Arrowhead. Like the U-Stars they had captained just a few short months ago, the men and women who had been under Ida’s command were mysteriously unavailable, their records vague, their status indeterminate. Swept under the carpet. Just as Ida had been.

No doubt with proper authorization he could probe further into the records and mission status of the crews, but that would mean convincing Provost Marshal King, as
Coast City
commanding officer in the absence of Commandant Elbridge, to put the request in. Ida once again reflected on the early and unexpected departure of the commandant. There was another situation Ida didn’t feel entirely comfortable with.

Ida closed his eyes. His lack of progress was worrying. Something was going on at Fleet Command, something revolving around him, his former compatriots, and the action over Tau Retore. The interference from Shadow was the icing on the cake. He almost felt the star was doing it deliberately.

Ida opened his eyes.

The brightest light in the dark cabin was the blue dot on the front of the radio set. It was the first thing he saw every morning, the pale, sky-colored LED drawing his gaze toward it. It represented so much—not just the effort of building the thing in the first place, but the link it formed with the rest of the galaxy. With the radio, he could escape from the
Coast City
and the weird nightmare he now found himself in. With the radio, perhaps he could find the answers out there in the black. Maybe Izanami had been right.

Ida sat up on the bed, his eyes used to the dim of the cabin, lit in pale blue by the radio, the red and yellow LEDs scattered on the other equipment and the walls of the cabin itself nothing more than an abstract star field of pinprick lights. He pushed himself off the bed with his knuckles and slid into the swivel chair, rolling it back over to the desk.

He coughed and looked around the empty room. He had no idea where to start—if the Fleet didn’t know where his former colleagues were, then what chance did he have of finding them?

He waved a finger over the uniformly silver top of the radio set. The blue LED flicked to a brighter setting, and the cabin filled with the background white noise of the universe as it breathed. The sound swam until Ida found his headset. As soon as he snapped it to the sides of his head, the main speaker cut.

Ida was alone with the universe.

He closed his eyes, listening to the rush of static until his brain began to impose order on the sound, introducing patterns and rhythms Ida knew were nothing but figments of his imagination.

As a child, back on the family farm, he used to lie in the dry grass of summer, staring at the brilliant sky until his vision went white. Then he’d roll over, dust tickling his lips and the smell of dry dirt and leaves in his nostrils, and watch the patterns play out in purple black behind his tightly closed eyelids. Sometimes, if you stared long and hard enough, the patterns didn’t just form geometric shapes and figures that danced left and right. Sometimes whole narratives played out. How long he used to spend lost in this nonexistent world, he had no idea. Years later he taught Astrid the same trick, and together they would lie in the grass and describe what they were seeing to each other, Astrid weaving intricate fairy tales and scary ghost stories.

Ida blinked and pushed the memory away.

The noise rose and fell, waxed and waned. The echo of the Big Bang, reverberating on for all eternity.

“
Sonovabitch,
where you been?”

The voice that erupted in his ears practically threw Ida out of his chair. Heart thundering, the next thing he heard was howling laughter. Ida coughed as he drew breath.

“Clive! You’re alive!”

The laughter cranked up again. “You’re a poet, and you know it.”

“How was the, ah, sortie?” Ida winced. He wasn’t asking about Clive’s holiday in the sun, after all.

There was a sloshing sound, followed by a hollow pop. Clive was on the sauce. Probably quite deserved.

“Oh man, we hammered the Omoto. It was a beautiful thing. Also, I rescued some damsels and got me some prime Polarii pussy for the ride home. Listen to this—”

Ida bounced forward on his chair. “Tell you what, maybe later. Good to hear you’re in the land of the living.”

Clive didn’t notice the snub. He supped from his bottle again and gave a friendly holler over the air. “Take it easy, bro!”

“I’ll try my best,” said Ida, pointing a finger and rotating it in the air. The channel shifted, and the warm static filled his ears. Good old Clive. Nice to hear someone made it.

Ida leaned back and rubbed his face, allowing the virtual dial to keep spinning up as he considered where to start looking.

After a moment, the white noise changed, lowering in pitch, taking on a harsher edge. Ida’s eyes flicked open in surprise. He glanced at the display hovering in the air in front of him and sat upright very quickly.

The radio’s tuner had cycled down through the regular frequencies but had kept going. All Fleet communications equipment had built-in fail-safes, preventing certain frequencies from being accessed. Ida’s rig, constructed entirely from memory, was clearly flawed, as the set should have hit the bottom of the dial and then stopped.

The sound in his ears was different. He was in unknown territory. Dangerous territory.

The set was tuned to subspace.

Ida frowned, hesitant to continue but also hesitant to turn the radio off. The frequencies of subspace were illegal, but despite his misgivings at the alien sounds that now filled his ears, he had to admit he felt a little thrill. Not just because he was breaking Fleet regulations, but also because he was doing so on board the
Coast City.
King would probably burst a blood vessel if he found out what Ida was doing … but what the marshal didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him, right?

Ida closed his eyes, leaned back, and listened. The sound of subspace wasn’t just white noise and it had nothing to do with the Big Bang. The sound of subspace was the angry roar of the nothing that resonated
between
space. It was weird,
alien.
Ida couldn’t remember quite what the penalty for accessing subspace frequencies was. He didn’t imagine the regulations had been enforced in years. In fact, he wasn’t even sure why they’d been drawn up in the first place.

Ida knew what every U-Star crewman knew about the physics of space travel—and maybe a little more than most. That interest was probably the only reason he’d even known
how
to think of pushing a whole U-Star through a Mother Spider via quickspace, the “hidden” dimension of the universe, the one that allowed objects, such as U-Stars, to travel faster than light, and which the Fleet’s entire communications net—the misnamed lightspeed link—depended upon.

But subspace … subspace was different. Scary, even.

Back in the day, when quickspace and other dimensions were first probed, everybody thought subspace was
it
. Mankind had hit the jackpot and discovered the legendary hyperspace, the key to interstellar travel and faster-than-light speed, the subject of hundreds of years of science fiction. But, as it turned out, you couldn’t push anything through subspace except energy, which made it useless for travel but perfect for communication. Then quickspace technology was developed, and by the time U-Stars were powering toward distant stars, subspace had been long abandoned, the lightspeed link having become Fleet standard.

No, subspace hadn’t just been abandoned—it had been
banned
by the Fleet. Ida scratched his cheek, trying to remember the reason, trying to remember if he ever knew it. It had been a long time ago, he knew that much, nothing more than a footnote in Fleet academy textbooks. Nobody thought anything of it.

The noise flared, and Ida opened his eyes again. He blinked in the dark, eyes drawn again to the blue light on the radio set, and he frowned.

Maybe he did remember, just a little.

There was a story—probably just nonsense, a bit of spice to explain why subspace was prohibited—that the sound of subspace, that exotic static, was
bad
for you. Listening to it would drive you mad or rot your brain or make you curse your mother and start drinking at an early age. Some said the sound of subspace was an echo from another dimension, something
deeper,
a place where monsters lurked. A name had even been coined for the imaginary lower level: hellspace.

Hellspace was just a story and the name itself was a joke, but sitting in his cabin in the dark, Ida felt unsettled. The roar in his ears was a little weird, but it sounded more or less like regular white noise … but he had to admit there was something else there, a rolling sound that was beginning to make him feel dizzy. Maybe there was a reason, a real one, stories and legends aside, why the Fleet didn’t want anyone tuning in to the roar of subspace.

Ida reached forward and gestured above the radio set, turning it off. The empty noise clicked off sharply.

Ida sat in the silence of his cabin, suddenly feeling alone. The sound of subspace had almost been like a physical presence.

Despite himself, it took Ida a few minutes to get the courage to move to the cabin controls and turn the lights on full.

6

The desk in the
commandant’s ready room and the green-shaded lamp that sat upon it were not standard Fleet equipment, but by tradition the most senior officers were allowed to bring their most treasured personal effects with them on long tours. Across the U-Star fleet, many wonders were held—rare and valuable books, sculptures, antiques and heirlooms. The officers of the Fleet liked to think they were a cultured lot. And having such objets d’art on display didn’t hurt when welcoming representatives of other cultures and planets aboard a Fleet ship. The Fleet had to impress sometimes, and not just with firepower.

Roberto King didn’t like the desk, but then it wasn’t his desk, and it wasn’t his office. The contents of the ready room belonged to Commandant Elbridge; indeed, since taking command of the
Coast City,
the only change the provost marshal had brought to the ready room was an adjustment in the height of the chair, itself as old as the desk it was placed behind. King was less interested in aesthetics and design and more interested in functionality. Give him a psi-couch and an earpiece, and he’d happily sit in the ready room and control without distraction the final few spins of the
Coast City
as it orbited toward full demolition. The chair was less comfortable, the desk less functional, but despite this, King spent most of his time in the ready room anyway.

He reached forward, the ancient springs in the chair protesting as he did so, and flicked to the next page in the book on the desk in front of him. He regarded the image on the thousand-year-old paper with distaste, but when he sat back into his chair he didn’t take his eyes off it.

The provost marshal didn’t like the desk or the chair (or, for that matter, the rug or the lamp), but he did appreciate the art on the wall behind him. He also appreciated the fact that the art was hung on that wall in particular, because it meant that while sitting in the chair, he didn’t have to look at it.

He liked the artwork, wondered at the artistry of it, found the palette interesting and the brushwork exquisite. Of the subject, he was less sure. It was a ship in a stormy sea, the prow of the vessel about to crest a titanic wave that was sure to overwhelm and drown the crew. It was Japanese, and rendered in classic blues and grays and greens that, despite the subject, made the scene bright, if highly stylized. Perhaps Elbridge had a fondness for the art of the Far East. Perhaps he liked it because it showed that, no matter what measures were taken, nature could not be tamed by mere mortals. Perhaps he felt that the picture represented the
Coast City,
its mission to study the technetium star around which it orbited akin to trying to sail in a stormy sea. Shadow was dangerous. King knew that now, and Elbridge certainly had.

Or perhaps there was another reason for having the picture on the wall. Because the picture went with the book, and the book went with the desk.

Elbridge had volunteered to command the
Coast City
from the very inception of the mission. He’d had the desk installed as soon as his office was ready. The desk was made from the timbers of a sailing ship, one with a famous name, although it was a name Elbridge had kept to himself. He’d written about it on the inside front cover of the book—a leather-bound first edition of something called
Spate’s Catalog,
published in New York in 1903—which had been hidden in a secret drawer. When King took over the office, that drawer had been left open, and it hadn’t taken much to figure out how the mechanism worked.

After only a little reading, King knew full well why the book was hidden. He knew why the desk was here. He knew what the picture on the wall behind the desk showed.

He also knew why Captain Abraham Idaho Cleveland, retired, had been sent to oversee the last orbits of the U-Star
Coast City
. He knew why the station was due to host Zia Hollywood and the famous
Bloom County
in just a short while.