The lighthouse of kuiper, p.34
The Lighthouse of Kuiper, page 34
Riqan’s voice kept echoing in her ears.
This planet’s a tomb.
Oxygen levels were badly depleted in the underground’s atmo, temperature deathly low. Only slightly better than those outside. Barely enough to inconvenience the xenocyte in their ENEXes. Tharsis’s palm readout looked like the summer weather report for the upmost accessible regions of Olympus Mons.
Riqan’s wrappered hands twitched on his gun.
A round portal was set deep in the floor below them, rimmed with blasted, broken metal, as if the door had been blown out. And the lieutenant had a sudden flash of the figure from the snowfields drifting down towards it, a heavy burden in tow, silent. Grieved.
The Trojan twisted the image, considering.
Even over the radio, tDaer sounded frantic.
Tharsis hit mute on her radio and hit the gravity on her boots to descend.
Somebody, she figured, was going to snap.
Arrans, Caleb had been told, lacked the ability to dream.
He still could, though. He often did. Of the Rockies under winter snows and summer breezes, of greased gears in atmospheric aircraft bays, of clouds gone black under the weight of their loads at the top of the sky. Of monsters with human faces, howling even as they died. Of dark hair and sad eyes and soft hands tucked into his own. Of a woman he’d loved desperately, quietly, without ever saying a word to her about it.
People, places, long vanished from his life. Memories. Slippery, flighty things that almost always vanished before he woke.
But he dreamed most often of her, and even though he couldn’t see her face in his mind anymore, he’d always known who it was.
She was there now. Standing next to him before a wide window, ice stretched out in front of them, curving away off the edge of the world, a stealth-hulled craft rising away from it, visible only where its mass sliced through the starfield.
Her hand was in his. Clammy-cold. Squeezing hard enough to snap bone.
They were both in uniform, and he didn’t understand why her heart was breaking.
It was the clearest image of her, of Eliza Rallison, that he’d had in years. Had to be important. Why else would it be coming through so strongly? But he couldn’t remember, not clearly, not in waking, why they had been there, what they were watching, or why it was forcing its way through now.
Made all of this harder. Made it all that much more difficult to understand.
He woke in considerably less pain than he’d been expecting.
It took effort to rouse himself, overcome the murderous ache in his gut, but it took no time to take stock of his surroundings. The island was less than an acre wide, the area around its little house seeded with soft, low vegetation. Hardly natural, though. The island was something that Ibbies could win in yearly government lotteries or buy outright. Settle. Use as they pleased.
These places were stashed far away from the urban sprawl. The city’s central spires were only barely visible on the horizon, and then, obscured by the thick rain falling there. But even as far out to sea as he was, he could still hear the Arcna broadcasting. It was insane. She normally took breaks, sometimes days of breaks.
The Rallarhu had left him there. For what reason, to what end, he had no idea.
Fifty years he’d served by that woman’s side, he’d been told, but his Journals spoke of nothing but rage between them now.
What had they seen in Noqumiut?
What the fuck had they left out there?
He probably had organ damage, and his abdominal muscles had been sliced open. Neither injury could be fixed by a few hours in a puddle of goo. He wasn’t going to die any time soon, but he needed surgery, time, and rest. Caleb didn’t regenerate like one of those not-humans in his granddad’s old comic books; as long as he was alive, he had to have his injuries conventionally treated like everyone else.
Beat up like this, he couldn’t swim back.
Tyr would have gotten back, at least. Nothing stopped that animal when he wasn’t of a mind to be stopped.
“Fuck,” Caleb grumbled, staring off at the iron pinnacles, retreating into the distance. He went back to the little house, to see if he could get the island’s engine working.
He got lucky. An hour of uncomfortable maneuvering inside the little wheelhouse got everything moving again back towards shore, and whatever the hell it was the Rallarhu was trying to hide.
CHAPTER
FORTY-TWO
Those hours spent crawling through Noqumiut’s underbelly were the most unbearable of Tharsis’s life.
The spaces spoke of what the stories did—human activity, human community, striving towards the Arcna’s perfect society. Alive and vibrant in some distant past. Abandoned now to the detritus of human existence. Toothbrushes were still snapped in their holders in the shower room they found, mold growing half-dead in the grout of the tiles. Towels were still wrapped around their hold-bars. Trinkets floated gently in faint air currents. Equipment stood as if abandoned mid-use, and instruments bobbed in sterilely packed containers. Amino combines lay in ruins, gaping, shattered.
It was all disconcerting, terrifying in the vague way that an abandoned hospital might have been terrifying. But there were none of Ang’s tuurngait, no umbran, no echoes of any kind. Nothing resembling the montage of nightmares lurking topside, in the forest.
Not that there weren’t still physical things that whispered of horrors. One hallway boasted labs, deep rooms of empty medical vats and smashed silic processors. Another was sealed tight ten meters back, the plug harder than concrete. Bullet holes and dark stains riddled tile surfaces, and evidence of chemical fires was burned into hemispherical containers that seemed to be everywhere. One room held nothing but bones. Another, empty oxygen tanks. Still another, broken-down engine parts, horns and pipes and magnetizers rusted beyond use.
Most doorways, however, were empty voids, blank spaces staring dumbly into the temporary illumination of the search. Empty. Useless.
In front of them was a wall. With the largest door yet. Two and a half meters high, arched, made of what looked like real wood.
It took six floaters to throw enough light into the space to get a proper look at it, and even then, it made no sense, richly appointed in dark woods and leathers and plush wool carpets. Nothing was bolted down, as it had been in other locations, so it was a floating mess of furniture and books and ends of lamps. tDaer went paddling through it quietly, radio generating only static as hen caught books and released them again with what was no doubt a frown.
Tharsis cast around from the floor, trying to catch a glimpse of anything that might help. A few of the titles she recognized, but most were written in unfamiliar languages. One book completely disintegrated as she touched it.
Another flash, the penumbra ripping open in the center of the room, and that figure coming in, unburdened now and faster. Moving towards a central shelf, far in the back.
tDaer met her, swimming down as Tharsis trudged over, gravity fluctuating painfully.
the Arran replied, and reached out for it, sensing her hand pass through others—bigger, smaller, older, younger—to pull it free.
The bookcase groaned, the furniture shifted. A hard current of cold air poured out around them.
A dark room, set behind the wall.
More cave than chamber, the feel of the ground uneven, the shape oblong. Sending a float-lamp into the narrow space did little to alleviate the darkness. The white light seemed to die, splattering to exhaustion across the spray-sealed surface of the hewn icerock. Penumbra energy. Stained with grief.
That figure from the snowfields was there, seated in a floor-bolted stool. Spread out in front of her was a book.
Fairy tales, bedtime stories.
In the ruins of Noqumiut, in the end of the Heliosphere itself.
In response, tDaer sent up a float-lamp across the surface, scattering light through the contents.
A tank. It was a tank. Nearly three meters long and filled with some half-frozen substance leeching blue.
Over a weave. Organic. Biological. Like the roots of some weird tree, spreading and twisting in all directions, some thinner than hairs, other thick as fingers. All of it, radiating out from one central point-cluster, the shape mimicking the shape of a human body.
tDaer made a strange noise.
Riqan cocked his head.
Tharsis’s mind was spinning. That, right there, was the purest violations of the Tenancy Accords there was. If the Rossen knew, if he could be told, if proof was offered…had he not seen it when he came here?
Walking around to a cluster of electrochemical data converters in the back, Tharsis found a plaque. A strange, obtuse little thing, plasma-cut from something completely different and welded. The lack of sensation in her fingertips from frustrating; running her gloved hand over it, Tharsis couldn’t tell if it was plastic or metal. It was wrong, though, and so was whatever was written on it, some type of odd glyph-forms that seemed to fade when viewed directly.
she admitted, and tapped the glass.
But before she could check for a reaction, the radio crackled and Riqan’s voice filled their ears.
tDaer’s body stiffened.
Tharsis groaned.
She gave the tank one last glance as they left the room. But if the wetware was still alive, it gave no sign.
No mylings.
The Jovians were down one of the hallways exactly opposite, oriented away from the heat shield. At the end of it, a vast room gaped out into the icerock, crowned with a steel-hard ceiling of methane snowfall.
A room full of tiny, coffin-like capsules.
Those hemispheres they’d seen everywhere in the facility.
Each and every one empty.
The same name tagged on each.
USSF Padua Anthony
That acronym was familiar. One of her old history lessons. Which one though, Tharsis couldn’t recall.
<—and where the hell’s the Arcna?> Tharsis finished, sick.
They spent half an hour amid the stasis containers cracked open like mussels breathing in the shallow waters beneath thick sea-ice. It was an eerie place, long cold, long dead, with barely a whisper of energy to it. But here and there, Tharsis caught a glimpse of children.
Curled up in deep hibernation.
Being leveraged out with cold, uncaring hands.
Dragged away naked, covered in suspension fluid, screaming.
Seeing that last part, she shut off her goggles, struggling to keep herself together.
No, she wanted to answer, and knew that none of them would understand.
Despite the fact that thruster fuel was running low in both of their ENEXs, Tharsis insisted on altitude once they hit the forest. She couldn’t face them: those wordless umbran, ghosts of wordless children torn from safety, hope, into this horror. Echoes in the energy, nothing sentient left, but still more than she could handle.
Angakkuq didn’t speak until they were back in the air lock. Hood pushed back a little too soon, eyes closed, he so unlike that confident, wannabe philosopher-Tok she’d come to know.
He looked scared.
“What do you suppose happened to them?” he asked, hoarse from sucking pure oxygen for the past seven hours.
“I think they died. I think they all died.”
“Not the kids. I mean, the people who came here to help her bu—”
“It’s the same fucking thing, Ang. Same fucking answer.”
He didn’t ask her anything more. Just took a couple pills of something and crawled straight into his bag when he got fully inside, not even bothering to seal up his exogear first.
Tharsis changed out her thruster fuel-bottles and oxygen filters and dunked her ENEX back in its tank to knock the xenocytes back into dormancy.
After she was sure he was asleep, she threw her gear back on and headed out, fast as she could.
Thruster tanks in her suit changed out, it was an easy trip back to the divedrive. Tharsis kept her eyes firmly up and away from the snowy wastes. Away from that figure trudging on, endlessly.
Stop thinking about it, she ordered herself, and pressed on.
Inside the divedrive, she tapped up the comm system, opened her bucket back to the Barachiel, or wherever the fuck the Rossen was.
Despite the inevitable consequences, she wanted to dive back. Tell them.
Flee.
But that would sign the voiders’ death warrants, something she couldn’t do. And the plutonium had been off-loaded with the rest of the gear, a big black package tied to the base of the shelter. She couldn’t leave them here with that. Not until she knew what the fuck was going on. Whatever had happened to the children of the Padua Anthony here—whatever had happened to the dreamers of Ang’s fantasies, or the heroes of tDaer’s theories—the Rossen had allowed it to stand. However unthinkable. However illegal.
Had he known? About the wetware?
Tharsis couldn’t see Sergeant Olin, who’d grown up in the dark days, just permitting this.
Something else was going on.
So, she dropped her message in its comm bucket and headed back.
No sooner had she closed the shelter air lock, pressurization cycle initiated, than a frantic call came over the radio.
