Dead Space™ Page 8

  When he hit the porthole, he didn’t stop, just wrote right over it. Anything that got in the way he wrote on. After a while, he was running out of space and started writing smaller so that there’d be enough room. When he ran out of room on the walls, he wrote on and under the instrument panels. When he ran low on blood, he stomped on what was left of Dantec’s chest, trying to force more out. But only a little came out. So he stomped on a limb hard and blood began to leach out. Before too long, Dantec’s body had been torn to pieces, looking even less human than when he’d started.

  The com unit crackled, sending out an angry hiss of static. “—in, co—F/Seven—othersh—” it said.

  “Not now, Tanner,” he said back.

  “—ome in, come—o you read?” it said.

  “Not now!” he shouted. The ceiling was already covered, the walls were already covered; all that was left was the floor. He piled the pieces of Dantec’s body in the command chair. He tried to strap them in, but quickly realized it was useless. That was all right, he told himself. The vessel wasn’t moving. They weren’t going anywhere.

  There was hardly any blood left, and what was left on the floor was beginning to clot. He dipped his fingers in it, kept writing in light, wispy strokes, conserving the blood. But very quickly, he ran out of floor.

  He wished Shane were there to tell him what to do next. Had he done the right thing? Had he betrayed his brother? He stayed there on his knees, staring.

  It was hot, almost too hot to bear. How could it be so hot? He stood up and took off his shirt, threw it on the other chair. It helped a little, but not enough. He was still hot. He took off his shoes, piled them on top of the shirt, then took off his pants, his underwear. Naked, he stared down at his body. Pale, he thought. White as a sheet. No, not a sheet, he corrected. White as paper. And then he knew where he would write next.

  Only there wasn’t any more blood. He’d used all of Dantec up; he hadn’t saved enough to write the ending.

  He looked around. Surely there was more blood here somewhere. Didn’t they travel with bags of blood? What if they needed to do an onboard transfusion? How could they go anywhere without blood?

  His eyes were scanning over the room, searching, when they passed over his arm, saw the pulse of a vein. “Ah,” he said, breaking into a smile, “that’s where you’re hiding. There you are.”

  · · ·

  It wasn’t easy to get the blood to come out, but in the end he managed, tearing the arm open with the sharp corner of the same strut he had used to discipline Dantec. At first, the blood came readily and he could simply rub the finger against his arm and then inscribe a symbol on his body. But quickly the wound slowed and began to clot. He had to tear it open again, and then a third time.

  By the time he was done, it was as if he himself had become a representation of the Marker. He was beautiful, covered with a swarm of symbols, all the knowledge of the universe expressed on the surface of his skin. He stood straight, arms to his sides, and held still. He was the Marker. He could feel its power flowing through him.

  How long he was like that, he couldn’t say. He was snapped out of it by a sharp noise and an intense pain in his head. He swayed and fell down, clutching his temples. When the noise finally stopped, he stood and stumbled up. He had more to do, he remembered, confusedly. He had to tell them; he had to warn them.

  He turned on the vidscreen and stood in front of it, set it to simultaneously record and to broadcast on all frequencies. The message was for everyone—Shane had been clear about that. He needed to tell everyone, if the message could get through the rock and muck at all.

  “Hello,” he said to the vidscreen. “Officer James Hennessy here, acting commander of the SS Marker. I’ve been informed by my brother, Shane, that there’s something we all need to know.”

  There was a stabbing pain in his head, as if someone were prodding his optic nerve with the tip of a dull knife. He clutched his head and leaned on the counter. After the pain had passed, he stood there for a moment, unsure of where he was. He opened his eyes and looked around him, unable to take it all in. And then suddenly he remembered: He was on TV!

  He gave the camera his most winning smile. What was he doing again? Oh, yes, that’s right: He was saving humanity.

  ”We’ve heard the wrong whispers,” he started. “There’s little time, and we’re listening to what they say, but Shane says we should not obey. We are not following the right answers. We have to resist the past before it is too late. Too late for Convergence.”

  He gave his winning smile again, looking straight and intensely into the camera. Anyone watching would realize he was talking directly to them. They had to understand how important this was.

  “I’ve drawn a map,” he said, gesturing to his body. “I don’t know if that’s what Shane wants, but I looked at the Marker and looked at it and then I had to draw. We need to change our ways and learn to understand it,” he said. He shook his head, confused. Had he gotten off track somewhere? “Or else not understand it,” he said. It was like there were two forces inside him, fighting to claim him, and he was no longer sure which was which, and which he should listen to.

  The Marker caught his eye through the porthole. He watched it pulse a long moment. He looked at his left hand, then looked at his right hand and slowly brought them together, in front of him. “Convergence,” he said. He gestured at the Marker through the porthole, then gestured at the symbols on his own body. “We need to understand it,” he said, even though a part of him was screaming at him to stop. “That’s the only thing that’s important right now, to learn from it. It is the way. We need to understand it, not destroy it.”

  He backed away and turned the vid off. He was so tired now. His head hurt. He needed to rest. He would rest for just a minute and then head for home.

  He lay down on the floor. He felt both hot and cold. His bare body felt unnatural against the smooth floor. Slowly he folded in on himself, until he was curled into a ball, and started to shiver.

  At the end he had a brief moment of lucidity, when he realized that he was tired because the oxygen was running out, when he realized that something else had controlled everything he had done, everything he had said. But by the time he realized this, it was far too late to do anything about it. I’ll get up in a moment, he thought. I’ll get up and drill my way back up to the surface. And then I’ll sort this mess out.

  A moment later he lapsed into unconsciousness.

  Not long after, he was dead.

  PART THREE

  THE NOOSE TIGHTENS

  22

  “How long has it been?” asked the Colonel.

  “Too long,” said Tanner, his face drawn, his voice hoarse. “Nearly forty-eight hours now.” He’d been awake almost two and a half full days. Most of that time he’d spent trying to get in touch with the F/7. There’d been a few scattered bits, moments when somehow everything aligned to let the signal through, and so he assumed there had been moments they’d seen him as well. But it never lasted long enough for them to communicate. And then, just when he was ready to give up hope, there had come a signal, broadcasting on all bands. They had gotten only bits of that, too, but others had picked up other bits of it on other channels. Tanner’s team had gathered as much as they could and were working to sequence it all together to form something. He’d thought they’d have something by now, which was why he’d contacted the Colonel, but they were still working.

  “Could they still be alive?” the Colonel asked.

  “We already know one of them is dead.”

  “Hennessy?”

  “No, Dantec,” said Tanner. He rubbed his eyes. He’d had a headache for days now, maybe even weeks. He was starting to feel like he couldn’t remember when he hadn’t had one.

  “That’s a surprise,” said the Colonel.

  Tanner nodded. “We still don’t know what happened, but we know he’s dead.” He spun the holofile through the screen, watched the Colonel take it up on his end. Ta
nner knew what it was: a grisly image capture showing a disjointed torso propped in the command chair, its limbs piled neatly on the chair just in front of it. The head was broken and distorted and hardly human. “It’s a piece of one transmission that we were able to salvage. The last image we have, really.”

  “How do you know this is Dantec?” asked the Colonel. The Colonel was a hard man, Tanner thought: his voice was just as even as it had been before, like he was looking at somebody’s wedding picture.

  Tanner circled portions of the image on his monitor. “You can see here and there bits of hair. It’s caked in blood, but we’re reasonably certain it’s hair.”

  “Ah, yes,” said the Colonel, “now I see.”

  “Hennessy was bald,” Tanner said simply.

  The Colonel leaned back in his chair, thoughtful. “What happened?” he asked.

  Tanner shrugged. “Something went wrong,” he said. “Beyond that I can’t say.”

  “If you had to guess, what would you guess?”

  Tanner sighed. “Hennessy must have gone crazy and caught Dantec unawares. Maybe something wrong with the oxygen supply that had some effect on his brain, maybe the pressure of being confined in such a small space for too long. Or maybe he was already insane and we didn’t know.”

  “Doesn’t it strike you as strange?” asked the Colonel.

  “Of course it strikes me as strange,” said Tanner. “It’s not normal behavior.”

  “No,” said the Colonel. “Yes, of course, all that is strange, but it’s even stranger that it happens now, just now, when they’re on their way toward an impossible object found in an impossible location.”

  “Sabotage, you think?”

  “I can’t rule it out,” said the Colonel. “But that’s the least strange of the possibilities, Tanner. Show a little more imagination.” He leaned forward again. “Contact me immediately once you’ve got some footage to show me,” he said, and reached out to cut the link.

  23

  The power of the signal, Altman realized, had increased sometime during the night. The indicator he’d installed was reading higher than he’d ever seen it. The pulse ended and it fell back, still higher than it had been in its previous resting state.

  He glanced over at Field, who seemed immersed in his own calculations. Just to be safe, he angled his holoscreen so that there’d be no chance of Field seeing what was on it. He scrolled back through the data log until he found the shift. There, sometime around six or seven in the morning, though he’d have to do a full correlation to make sure. The signal’s increase wasn’t gradual but immediate, as if something had suddenly and deliberately amplified it.

  He hadn’t heard from Hammond since the night in the bar, which concerned him a little but not too much. The security technician was probably lying low, being careful. When he wanted to get in touch, he would. In the meantime, it was up to Altman to find out what was going on.

  He logged his results into the encrypted database and then looked to see if they correlated with work done by the others—the others in this case being the three other scientists who had, like Altman, been intrigued by the gravity anomaly and the pulse and wanted to pursue it: Showalter, Ramirez, and Skud.

  Showalter, who had more powerful equipment than Altman’s simple sensor, had gotten the same readings. At 6:38 a.m., there had been an extraordinarily strong pulse, followed by a shift in the signal patterning. The signal was now perpetually amplified. There were still high and low points, but the basic profile of the signal was stronger, and had remained so ever since.

  Ramirez had noted something else, something that he had picked up off the satellite images while trying to get a sense of whether there had been a change in the condition of the crater itself. A freighter, anchored about fifteen miles southeast of the crater’s center.

  “At first I didn’t pay much attention to it,” said Ramirez in the vidfile he’d attached. “But then, I go back a day and it’s still there. I go forward a day and it’s there, too. If it’s really a freighter, what would it be doing sitting in the same place?

  “So, yesterday morning, I hired a local man who called himself Captain Jesús to use his old motorboat to run me out for a closer look. I took a fishing pole with me. Once we were about two hundred meters from the freighter, I had Captain Jesús stop and cast my line into the water.

  “The captain told me I wasn’t going to catch anything. When I asked why not, he gave me a long hard look and pointed out to me that I hadn’t bothered to put any bait on the end of my line.

  “I didn’t know what to say to that, so I didn’t say anything. Captain Jesús made a point of looking at the freighter and then looking back at me, then told me that it didn’t seem like it was fish I wanted to catch and that the kind of fishing I wanted would cost me extra.

  “In the end, I had to promise to pay the good captain double his normal rate to stay there so that we could get a good look at the freighter. It didn’t have any markings. Other than that, it seemed an ordinary enough freighter, except for the fact that it had a brand-new heavy-duty submarine lift attached to its deck.

  “That was all I had time to ascertain,” Ramirez said. “We’d been there all of five minutes, two of which I spent bartering with Captain Jesús, when a launch appeared from the other side of the ship and pulled up alongside us, manned by four muscle-bound boys with military haircuts, but without the requisite military garb.

  “ ‘Move along,’ one of them said.

  “ ‘I’m fishing,’ I claimed.

  “ ‘Fish somewhere else,’ he said. I was going to argue, but Captain Jesús threw the boat in gear and took us out. When I asked him why, later, all he would say was ‘These are not good men.’

  “Which left me with three questions,” said Ramirez, concluding his vid-log. “First, what use would a freighter, if it really is a freighter, have for a submarine? Second, what makes them want to keep other boats at a distance? Third, what the hell is really going on?”

  What indeed? wondered Altman.

  The last report, from Skud, a laconic Swede, didn’t arrive for another hour. It was a document instead of a vid-log.

  So sorry, his report read. Had to double check. What followed was a series of charts with captions in Swedish, none of which Altman knew how to read. After them, Skud had written: Insufficient data for certainty.

  For certainty of what? wondered Altman. He tried to scroll down, but the report ended there.

  He checked the network and found that Skud was still logged in to the system. Skud, he typed, please clarify the conclusion of your report.

  By insufficient data I mean there is not enough data, he wrote. Without enough data, we cannot be certain.

  Altman sighed. Skud was a good scientist, but a little lacking in communication skills.

  What is your data concerning? he asked.

  Seismographic data, wrote Skud.

  And what were you trying to prove? Altman wrote.

  That the seismic disturbance was something generated by a machine rather by ordinary seismological activity.

  What kind of machine?

  As I said in my note, wrote Skud, and then there was a long moment where the screen remained blank. Very sorry, he finally wrote, I see now I left it off my note. A drill. I do not have enough data to prove it, and maybe it is only ordinary seismic activity. But I think maybe somebody has been drilling, and maybe in the center of the crater.

  Altman immediately disconnected from the system and went outside to call Skud. The man seemed startled, a little confused, but after a while, he started to fill in the details in a way that Altman understood. Skud was drawing his readings from multiple seismographs, some on land, some underwater, several very close to the center of the crater itself. Only those near the center had noticed anything. The reading, Skud said, was something that would normally be dismissed as insignificant, very minor seismic activity. But it was also possible, he claimed, that it could be from a heavy, industrial-scale drill. It
was very regular, he said, which would not be typical of a seismic event.

  “But you’re not sure if it’s in the center of the crater.”

  “No,” said Skud. “Exactly, that is the problem.”

  “Where else would it be if not the center?”

  “It might be as far as fifty meters from the center,” said Skud. “I have done calculations but I am afraid they are inconclusive.”

  “But that might as well be the center!” said Altman, frustrated.

  “No, you see,” said Skud patiently. “As I said, it might be as far as fifty meters from the center. That is not the center.”

  Altman started to argue, then stopped, thanked him, and disconnected. He stayed there, looking out at the ocean awhile and then glanced inside to the window. Field was still keeping to his side of the room, talking on the telephone now, seeming no more and no less animated than earlier. Altman turned back to the ocean again.

  Slowly things were beginning to take shape in his mind. He wished that Hammond would get back in touch, since he’d been aware of it before anyone else. He might have a perspective that Altman and the others didn’t have yet. In the meantime, it was up to them.

  There was nothing to say for certain that the pulse, the freighter, and the seismic readings were all connected. But then again, there was nothing to suggest that they weren’t. And all three had something in common: the center of the crater. Something was going on down there. Maybe something had been discovered, maybe it was some sort of weapons test, maybe it was some incredibly uncommon but natural phenomenon. But something was happening, something weird, something that someone didn’t want the public to know about.