The Void (4 page)

“What do you mean?”

Dr. Jackson looked up at him and smirked. “Well it must have been a rather one-sided conversation. Lieutenant Felix hasn't said a word since we found him.”

*  *  *

The evening was an illusion, the night a myth. In space there was no sun, no moon. Darkness, yes, but no night. Only the image of the thing, a creation of lighting and shade.

But the human mind is no more made for eternal sunlight than endless darkness and so every day at 7:03 p.m., the lights would begin to dim. By ten o'clock, the feeling of evening was complete. One might, if he were so inclined, mistake the gently curving corridors for the lanes of a Paris neighborhood, the sidewalks of Central Park.

Aidan sought solace there, when sleep would not come. He found himself wandering the halls of the ship at night, feeling the emptiness within. As long as he avoided the glare of the bridge or the engine room, he could almost believe that he was not millions of miles from Earth.  

So it was that night, the last night that he left his room, before he decided it was better to stay locked behind his door, hoping that it would not open on its own. It was a night not that different from most nights.

The gentle hum of the engines, ever-present, no matter how far from them one might be. The ripple of the video walls, never really off, ready to deliver messages to whomever might require them. The soft kiss of the circulator breeze, refreshing the air and cooling the skin. Perhaps it was for that reason—how normal the night was—that he noticed the change just before he turned the corner of an otherwise insignificant hallway.

At the time he noticed only a tingle—a slight pulse of electricity as it rolled up his arm. When he thought on it later, he remembered more, things that he had not known then, though he should have. Remembered the smell, acrid and sharp, like the scent of burning leather. Remembered the tremor, as if the ship shifted from its place—moved to somewhere beyond where it should be. Remembered the sound, the tinkling timbre of chimes on the back porch at the house he lived in as a child when the wind would blow from the north. Remembered the cold chill, the one that seemed to come from within rather than from without, and remembered that even in the night, the world around him seemed to grow darker.

If he had known these things then, if he had felt them, sensed them, in any way other than his subconscious, maybe he would have turned and ran. Fled from whatever was before him, back across whatever threshold he had crossed when the world changed. But he did not. Instead, he paused for an instant, cocking his head to the side to hear a sound that he didn't even know was there, only to keep walking without another thought. He did not walk for long.

He saw it as soon as he turned the corner, but even as he stopped dead, he whispered to himself it was just an illusion. A trick of the mind. Or of his dreams maybe, a half-remembered nightmare lived and relived over those last twenty years.

It stood at the end of the hallway, reposed in the depths of that unnatural night.  

He watched it for a long moment, one that seemed to stretch into infinity, and later he would wonder if more time passed in that hallway than he had thought. He stood and it stood, though it did not stand still. There was motion all about it, though what moved and what did not, he couldn't tell. Or maybe he simply shook so profoundly that the world moved with him.

It happened in an instant, and somehow he knew it was coming. He watched as the thing took a step forward. Lurched might be a better description, as he could not say whether its body had legs. Looking upon his nightmare, Aidan couldn't run. Yet even in his fear, he knew that it had not come for him.

There was a crackling hiss and Aidan felt his legs go weak and his vision go black. He grabbed the wall and his sight cleared. The hallway was empty. The smell was gone, and the light was as dimly clear as always on those gray half-lit nights. Aidan was alone, the gentle rumble of the ship his only companion.

He did not linger long in that place, nor did he leave his room in the nights that followed. Whether the figure was figment or dream would remain unknown to him; his mind could not handle the notion that it was more than a shuttering weakness in his brain.

He probably would have dismissed it as such, had Lieutenant Felix not been found dead in his cell the next day. Dr. Jackson would call it natural causes, though even she was unable to say what in nature could make a young man's heart explode in his chest.

Chapter 3

Before the warp channels opened, mankind was confined to the solar system. He strained against those bounds, fought against the limitations, but there was no use. Technology was his enemy, and no incremental change could save him. Thus he remained locked to the Earth and the feeble colonies of the moon and Mars, awaiting the day of his liberation. Nonetheless, when the
Armstrong
reached Alpha Centauri, the celebration was short-lived. There was no time to waste. Not when there were such worlds to conquer.

They went. Men and women who could find no succor on the planet that had given them birth. Earth had not failed them. It was not the air or the water or the land that chased them away. Although every generation had foretold her doom, she kept chugging along.

No, it was from their fellow men that they fled. From their rules and their laws, from the chains that kept their minds enslaved. There was nothing new under the sun, and when they went, it was for the same reasons that their forefathers had in the days that men set forth on rickety wooden ships across monster-infested seas. But the travelers could not enter warp unless they were sleeping. And with sleep came the dreams.

*  *  *

Caroline Gravely watched the cross she had worn around her neck since her confirmation—the one her grandmother had given her on a rainy Easter day decades before—float in midair, a foot from the tip of her nose. She reached up a hand and spun it with one finger. The golden flecks sparkled in the sunlight that flooded into the shuttle through the small windows lining its sides.

Yes, Caroline had worn that cross since the day she was confirmed, but she had never really looked at it. She waited until the chain had wrapped itself into a single tight strand before she reached out and grabbed it, untangling it and tucking the cross back into her shirt.

She listened as the clamps holding the shuttle in place released and felt the pressure as the vertical thrusters fired, pushing the small vessel down and away from the landing bay. She looked out the portside window and watched, as the station seemed to drift into the distance.

She noticed, as she always did when she was this close, that the space dock was dirtier than she remembered from her childhood. From when her father called it Luna because it shone almost as bright as the moon in the summer night sky. She thought it was beautiful then. In her eyes, time had not dimmed it, and it didn't matter how many people told her differently.

Then the rear thrusters fired, and the shuttle took a hard turn to the right. Through the window, she could see the mighty American capital ships of the Fourth Fleet. Even across silent space, she could have sworn she heard the splendid rumble of the
Agamemnon
as its massive central structure spun in the void. The
Alabama
was out there somewhere, the ship she had once called her own, the vessel she had captained for the last decade. The fleet would leave soon, back into the deep, but this time with another at her helm.

The thought brought sorrow, even though she had sworn it would not. She had done her part for the Navy. She had lived up to her family's legacy, the one that stretched all the way back to the ancestor who was little more than a legend: Samuel Gravely, the man who had been the first of his race to command a ship of the line, back when such things mattered.

The shuttle banked to the left, and Caroline felt her stomach rise into her throat. She would never get used to that, no matter how long she spent in space. She wondered how the shuttle pilots did it, their boats too small for the artificial gravity of the capital ships and too cheap for a gravity generator. A life of weightlessness.  

The intercom crackled to life and she heard the voice of the pilot call her name.

“Captain Gravely? There she is out the starboard window. The
Chronos
.”

Caroline leaned her head against the glass and stared out across the shuttles that swarmed past. The
Chronos
was below in space dock and she had never seen anything so beautiful. It was her own. Truly her own. Not just her ship to command but one built with her blood and her sweat and her tears.

“Is she everything you thought she'd be?”

Caroline smiled. “No,” she said, “she's more.”

*  *  *

The first time Cyrus walked into the crew compartment of the
Chronos
, he could hear someone vomiting in the room beyond. The door was cracked open, and he didn't hesitate to push it the rest of the way so he could get a better look. He grinned when he saw the man in the suit on his knees, head over the toilet. “Civilians,” he thought to himself, “always the same.”

“First time in an orbital shuttle, I take it?”

The man didn't look up. Instead, he held himself perfectly still, balancing with his hands on both sides of the bowl, hoping that his calm would transfer to his stomach. It did not. As he lost it again, Cyrus turned and walked back toward his bunk.

He opened his bag and removed the only three things he never left home without. The statue of Mary his grandmother had given him when he was thirteen years old was first. He crossed himself twice before kissing it lovingly on the forehead. Then the compass he always kept in his pocket. That was a gift from an old girlfriend. A perfectly useless thing really, much like everything else that had come out of that relationship. But he loved it, and it gave him direction. And finally a pennant from the New England Patriots' last Super Bowl championship. That had been a present to himself.

He was attaching the flag—he was old-fashioned; there wasn't a hologram on the thing—to the cold silver metal behind his bunk when the man in the suit finally emerged from the head. Cyrus watched him as he tried to dust the dirt off his knees. He thought back to his first time in zero g. It had been no different.

“Better?”

The man nodded his head and smiled weakly.

“It gets easier,” Cyrus said. “Seriously, the next time, you won't even notice it.”

“Hopefully,” the man said, speaking for the first time, “there won't be many next times.” He was British, and Cyrus made a mental note of his accent.

“Nah, there won't be. Only the orbital shuttles don't have a-grav these days. On the big Cap ships, you got your whole hab complex spinning. It's really pretty impressive. That way, you think you got gravity even when you don't. Ship like this, of course, uses antimatter.”

“Is that right?” the man said. He might have been trying to blow Cyrus off but Cyrus had never been one to take a hint.

“That's right.” Cyrus leaned himself against his bunk and explained. “You see, antimatter is basically the opposite of matter in just about every way. So the more matter you got, the more of a gravitational field it creates. Antimatter, the less you have, the more gravity you get. You take a single atom of antimatter, and in a nanosecond, it'll be a black hole. Thing is so small it evaporates just as fast so no danger or anything. But anyway, every one of these freighters has just a tiny amount of antimatter. Costs as much as the engine.”

The man looked impressed. “And how do you know all this?”

“Cyrus McDonnell, ship's engineer,” he said, offering his hand.

“Jack Crawford,” the other man said, taking it. “I'm just along for the ride.”

“Ah, well that makes sense. Sorry about the accommodations but this is a freighter, not a passenger ship. Only the captain and the navigator get their own cabins. Even the ship's doctor is stuck back here with the rest of us.”

“Right,” Jack said, sitting down on one of the lower bunks. His stomach was still reeling but he had just enough control over it now. “It's a lot cheaper.”

“And what business do you have on Riley?”

Jack smiled. “Just business.”

“Your own business,” Cyrus said, coughing out a laugh. “And I guess that's none of mine. Well it's not a short trip out there.”

“Same as every other one, right?”

Cyrus didn't like Jack; he knew that now. Didn't like him one bit. Cyrus didn't like most people but usually it took a couple days or more for him to realize it. Jack was right, of course. The trip out to the solar rim always took the same amount of time and you were asleep during the jumps. Cyrus shivered. He didn't like to think about that.

“You all right?”

He looked down at Jack and found the man genuinely concerned.

“Yeah, I'm fine,” he said.

“So,” Jack said, trying to change the subject, “have you worked on this ship long?”

“Nope, you’re in luck. This is her maiden voyage. I was on the Gliese run for a while, working the trade between the system and Earth.”

“Not exotic enough for you?”

Cyrus frowned and looked down at his feet. “Actually, we lost our captain on the last trip out. Made the jump back and found him dead. Died in his sleep. Just like that.”

“I'm sorry to hear that,” Jack said.

“Yeah, well, anyway. I needed a job and this one was available. So here I am. But now, I've got work to do. I'm sure we'll talk later.”

Jack nodded politely and watched him leave. He didn’t bother to follow. He'd see him again in due time and didn't really care what Cyrus did or where he went. Jack had his own business to attend to. He pulled out the data pad from his inside jacket pocket. A beam from the screen scanned his retina in under a second, and he was in.

There was nothing new to report, so he opened the last message he had received, the one that had led to this assignment. The image was unfocused and the object at its center otherwise unremarkable. But it was a ship, of that there could be no debate. One that should not be. One that, according to the official records, never was. He tapped the screen and the image was gone. The mission was to proceed as scheduled. Now he just had to wait to talk to Dr. Kensington.