Stranded (Shadows of the Void Space Opera Serial Book 2) Page 8

  Her experience of the telepathically relayed emotions of the aliens, which Harrington had unofficially named Paths, was such that it was like a run, and though the run was indeed high, coming down brought her lower than she’d ever been. She realized that the happiness they filled her with was almost entirely unfamiliar. Only dim, drug-hazed memories of the time she’d had her children with her came close, and since that time, her only moments of pleasure had been when she’d been able to escape the hard reality that was her lot in life.

  After passing through the chamber that held the creatures, she’d descended with Harrington into the ship’s engine. But the machinery made no sense to her, based on her understanding of the Galathea’s engines. She couldn’t find any similarities, nor recognize any parts, nor understand how the thing moved the ship through space.

  After long hours of exploration and study, she’d silently shaken her head at Harrington. It was no use. Maybe if the chief engineer had survived, he might have made something of it, but understanding the technology was beyond her.

  All that had been left for them to do was to transport the fleshy lumps back to the ship. They’d lifted from the floor like fungi pulled from soil, radiating waves of joy. It was impossible to explain why, but both she and Harrington had no doubt that these strange creatures were completely harmless, and they were ecstatic to be taken from the starship. They’d packed them onto trailers and the defense units had hauled them across the plain.

  Back aboard the Galathea, after placing the aliens in quarantine, Toirien had persuaded First Mate Haggardy to allow her to return to her cabin. The man acquiesced, perhaps realizing she didn’t pose him any threat. She had no interest in the running of the ship nor anything else.

  Throughout the day, Toirien had been hoping for and anticipating the moment when she could get back to her cabin. When she arrived, it was with great relief that she saw no one had discovered the few drops of myth she’d secreted away along with the hypodermic needle and syringe she’d pilfered from the medical center.

  The room was empty. Her bunkmates were away in the canteen eating their evening rations. She needed to start her run immediately, before any of them came back.

  She lay on her bunk and pulled down her pants. She tried to recall the place her supplier had shown her to inject the drug all those years ago. He’d told her the myth would work wherever it was injected, but for the maximum effect, you had to hit one of a few perfect spots. She craned her neck to look along the length of her bare midriff and thighs. It had been somewhere between her hip and pubic bone, she seemed to remember.

  It was ironic, Toirien thought, that when she was at her lowest, she had the very thing that would take her the farthest she could get from her utter misery. She wondered whether, if it weren’t for the promise of the ecstasy of myth, she wouldn’t have unclipped herself from the unit that had carried her up the ship to ensure a quick, painless death on the ground below. Maybe, once this run was over, that would be an idea she would carry out. It would be quick at least. She didn’t want to be around when whatever was in those blocks decided to come out and get them.

  Holding the skin taut between the fingers of her left hand, she guided the needle home and depressed the plunger on the syringe. The second the myth hit her system, she was gone. The syringe slipped from her hand, the needle still in her flesh, and hung to one side. Toirien’s respiration sped up, her mouth gaped, and her eyes were open but unseeing.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Jas was in the middle of a standoff with Haggardy on the flight deck.

  “What do you think we’re going to do?” she exclaimed. “Leave the ship? You’ve got the defense units under your control. Do you think we’ll round up the crew and persuade them to commit mutiny? They’ve already seen what happened to Karrev. It isn’t like they’re going to want to follow in his footsteps. And if we start anything, the units will put a stop to it easily enough. You let MacAdam go. Why not us?”

  Haggardy regarded her from beneath his brows as she sat at his feet, her ankles bound and her hands tied behind her back. Jas still hadn’t figured out if he’d been infected or not. She’d missed that first phase, when the victims showed that touch of inhumanity. Now, he seemed normal. If Haggardy was infected, she supposed he would have been leading them all into the nearest structure so they could be possessed too. He would be forcing them into that structure that had appeared beside the ship, yet he hadn’t. That didn’t make sense if he had been taken over by an alien, unless there was something preventing him from doing that, something she wasn’t aware of, or that didn’t fit in with his plans right then. Maybe the man in front of her really was all Haggardy and nothing else.

  He leaned forward. “You never liked me, did you, Harrington? Well, I’ve got news for you. I never liked you either. Always doing everything by the book, getting in the way of common sense and everyone’s chance at a bonus. Ms. High and Mighty, weren’t you? You know, it wasn’t just me, either. No one liked you.”

  “Oh, grow up, Haggardy. Doing your job isn’t about being liked. Face it—you need us. You need Lingiari to fly the ship, and you need me to keep you safe and everyone else under control.” Jas wasn’t convinced about that last part herself, but she hoped she sounded convincing to him. She didn’t relish the idea of another night on the hard floor of the flight deck. The ship’s temperature had equalized with the outside, and a chill had seeped into her bones.

  “And keeping that animal tied up is totally ridiculous,” Jas added. Flux’s bindings and gag had been on him for more than twenty-four hours, and the creature looked ill.

  Haggardy snorted and stood, but he was knocked to the floor. The ship rocked violently, as if there was an earthquake. The floor shook and seemed to drop several centimeters. Haggardy had lost his smug, haughty look, and he gripped the floor, terrified. Jas stared at Lingiari as she tried to figure out what was going on.

  The movement stopped, and Jas went to speak, but before the words left her mouth the vibration started again. They weren’t only shaking from side to side, they were lifting and then dropping to a lower level. They were sinking into the planet surface.

  Her heart froze as she realized what it meant. That was what had happened to the starship at the base of the structure. It had once been on the surface, but the ground had opened up and it had been drawn gradually deeper and deeper down into the soil and rock.

  If they didn’t get off the planet soon, the same thing would happen to them.

  Chapter Nineteen

  A vision played in Toirien’s mind. She was traveling head first down a tunnel, carried on a breath of warm air toward a welcoming glow. She knew that everyone she’d ever loved, everything she’d ever wanted in life, lay at the end of that tunnel, bathed in the gentle light. Tears ran from her eyes and down her face, and they dripped from her chin before the balmy breeze lifted them and bore them away. She reached out with her arms, eagerly speeding herself on, anticipating the moment of arrival. The limbs she saw before her weren’t her own. Her muscled, freckled forearms had been replaced with long, lithe, tapered specimens, just like the arms of someone modded for physical perfection.

  She burst from the tunnel into the light, which was as warm and comforting as a mother’s embrace. Joy suffused her being, and she floated, twisting and turning gently in the pure love that seemed to envelop her. Toirien spread herself wide, and her physical body and her mind melded with the glow, suffusing it so that neither were separate from the other.

  As a part of this ethereal entity, she oozed herself wide, feeling with her senses the edges of her domain. But she was limitless. She encountered beings similar to herself. Others who were part of the one, unknowable, nameless whole. Toirien reached into the souls of these other beings and became one with them, perfectly harmonious and entire.

  Immersed in the completeness, she became aware of others different from the rest. Snatches of thought and glimpses of shadows flitted through her perception, too fleeting to unde
rstand or behold. These beings left behind them jarring vibrations that upset the harmonious unity. As these shadows faded, other beings appeared at the edge of her consciousness—beings who seemed to see into the depths of her consciousness, and to the great, weeping wound at her core.

  These beings approached and lifted her up, pulling the tendrils of her disintegrated self from the ether, and carried her away. Toirien fought. She rolled and jackknifed and tried to prevent herself from being taken from her bliss. She tried to scream, but she had no mouth and no vocal chords. She tried to hold onto something, but she had no hands and there was nothing to hold on to in that intangible, sublime place.

  She struggled until she saw them. She knew who they were immediately. Their small, stocky figures, their bouncing ginger curls, their bright smiles. But as she drew nearer to her children, she realized this couldn’t be them. They were too young. They would have grown in the intervening years since she’d last seen them. They couldn’t be real, and yet they seemed more real than anything she’d ever known.

  The glow faded. Her feet—all of a sudden she had feet—hit pavement, and she was running, running into the arms of her darlings. Wrapped around each other, Toirien couldn’t breathe in enough of her children’s sweet scent, feel enough of their enveloping arms, bury enough of her face in their soft hair.

  “Mammy, Mammy, you came back. We knew you would come back one day. And you’re here. We missed you so much. Now you’ll never, ever leave us again, Mammy, will you? We love you, Mammy, we love you.”

  Toirien wanted to say, no, that she would never, ever leave them again, but somehow she knew the words were wrong. Her children were wrong. Something stopped her from giving into the vision that was playing out before her.

  “I can’t,” she said. “I can’t. I can’t come back to you. I’m too far away. There’s too much space between us, and too much time has passed.”

  “Yes, you can, Mammy. You can come back. There’s nothing wrong. Nothing wrong at all. Silly Mammy. All this time you’ve been worrying—worrying about nothing. Things aren’t as bad as you think. You only need to try.”

  Toirien’s heart raced. She stared into the face of little Grace, trying to reconcile her childish features with the words that were coming out of her mouth.

  “Silly Mammy,” echoed Joan. “Come back to us. We’ve been waiting for you a very long time. Don’t make us wait any longer.”

  The little girls broke their embrace with her and held hands with each other. “Bye-bye for now, Mammy. See you soon.” They skipped away.

  The image of her children was replaced by the view of her bunk screen and the ceiling of her cabin. Toirien’s run had ended, and she was suddenly completely sober. A soreness emanated from her hip. She looked down to see the hypodermic needle hanging from her skin. Wincing, she drew it out. A drop of blood welled up.

  Her cabin mates hadn’t returned, which meant she’d only been gone a short while. The run should have lasted hours. She couldn’t understand it. Toirien pulled up her pants and fastened them. Her heart was racing, and she breathed heavily, though she didn’t know if these were the effects of the myth or her strange vision.

  She could hardly believe what her children had said in her dream. It was all impossible. Yet what they’d said was true. She hadn’t believed the evidence of her eyes. She’d always thought she would mess up again, and that she would let everyone down. She’d never believed the fix could be such a simple, easy thing. She hadn’t trusted in herself, but had always focused on the worst possible outcome.

  Maybe her dream was just the meanderings of her drugged imagination, but even if there was the slightest chance they weren’t, if she’d been taken to a place where she could connect with her children and the truth of what they’d said, it was worth telling the others. It was worth trying. What did she have left to lose?

  She had a weird feeling that she’d been strongly shaken while she was out. As she swung her legs over her bunk and jumped down, another vibration started up.

  Chapter Twenty

  MacAdam pushed open the door to the flight deck and staggered as she burst into the room. The ship was shaking again.

  “I thought of something,” she shouted over the grinding noise. Haggardy, Harrington and Lingiari were all staring at her after her sudden entrance. “I should have said it before, but...I...I couldn’t find any damage to the engines when I scanned them. I thought I just didn’t understand what I was looking at. But I’ve just realized...we haven’t even tried to start the engines since we crashed. What if they aren’t that badly damaged? What if they just shut down because of the crash-landing? We could try to start them up and see what happens.”

  “Is this correct?” Haggardy asked Jas and Lingiari, raising his voice. “You didn’t even try to lift off the planet?”

  The vibrations stopped. Jas and Lingiari were staring at each other.

  “I never thought...” said Lingiari. “The crash was so bad, I just assumed...”

  “Me too,” said Jas. “We never thought to even try it. To think we might have been sitting here all this time when we didn’t need to...”

  “Let me try,” said the pilot, trying to get to his feet. “Untie me, Haggardy.”

  The first mate considered a moment, then instructed a defense unit to release Lingiari from his bonds. He slid into the pilot’s seat, brushed the screen in front of him with his fingertips, and flipped some switches, but the screen remained dark. He turned to MacAdam. “It was worth a try, but she’s dead. Not a squeak from her.”

  “The systems are dead,” said Jas. “Doesn’t mean the engines are.”

  “Same thing,” replied Lingiari. “It’s not like I can crank her to start her up. Sorry, it’s a waste of time.” He unclipped his harness and stood up.

  “We’ve got to try again,” said Jas. “This vibrating—I think it’s the planet drawing us in, like it did with the other starship. Maybe it does that with every ship that lands on it.”

  “Krat,” said Lingiari. “That makes sense.”

  Haggardy collapsed into the master’s seat and ran a hand over his face.

  “Wait. Maybe it’s just a power thing,” said MacAdam. “The ship’s been on emergency power since we crashed. Maybe there isn’t enough power to get the system working.”

  Haggardy looked up. “It’s worth a try.” He spoke to MacAdam. “You, connect all the defense units to the ship’s system and direct all their power to the pilot controls.”

  “No,” said Jas. “Not all the units. We need some to keep Lee in stasis.”

  “Hmpf,” said Haggardy, “I saw you’ve been using defense unit power to maintain our dearly departed navigator. Well, her prolonged departure has finished. All available power, do you understand?” he said to MacAdam. “Can you do that?”

  The engineer hesitated.

  “No,” exclaimed Jas and Lingiari. The pilot flew at Haggardy, but he fell before taking more than a few steps, stunned by a defense unit.

  “You can’t kill her,” shouted Jas, her hands clenched into fists. “She...she’s your best asset. I’ve never known anyone so smart. What if your plan doesn’t work and the engines won’t start? What are you going to do then? We’re going to be dragged down into the planet, and Lee might be the only one who can figure out what to do. You need her.”

  The terrible grinding vibration started up again. The unconscious Lingiari flopped to and fro. Haggardy and MacAdam grabbed whatever they could to stay on their feet.

  Haggardy said to the engineer,” All the units except those powering the stasis room.” He added, looking at Jas, “For now.” MacAdam left the room, taking Haggardy’s defense unit guards with her. But the man also had a gun, which he trained on Jas.

  She nearly wept with relief at saving Lee. She also despaired. She’d never realized how dumb and ruthless Haggardy was. He really would have killed Lee. With him running the show, they’d all be lucky to survive.

  After a short time, MacAdam returned.
Lingiari turned, groaning, onto his back as she entered the flight deck. “I’ve attached all the units to the pilot control system, except the ones powering the stasis room. We can try again.”

  Rubbing his chest where the stun beam had struck, Lingiari returned to the pilot seat. He tried the controls once more. The others watched and waited. He shook his head. “Nothing. She’s dead.”

  “Perhaps we need a little more power,” said Haggardy. “I appreciate your attachment to your shipmate, Harrington and Lingiari, but honestly, she’s dead meat. It’s time for a noble sacrifice to save the crew. You’ll appreciate the sentiment, Harrington, I’m sure.”

  “You misborn fool,” said Jas, pushing herself awkwardly to her feet. She teetered, her ankles bound, her feet pressed together. “I keep telling you that woman is the best asset this ship has. If you turn off her stasis, we’re all dead meat.”

  “Hmpf. Well, let’s see if you’re right, shall we?” He instructed MacAdam to untie Jas’ bonds. “Let’s go and speak to Navigator Lee. We can explain the situation, and let her plead for her life.”

  Blood slowly returning to her feet, Jas wobbled as she followed the first mate to the stasis room. Lingiari and MacAdam came along with them. On the way, the ship experienced another bout of violent vibration. Jas wondered how far they’d sunk into the ground. If the engines really had been undamaged before, were they the same now?

  Lee seemed unchanged when they pulled her container out from the wall. Sparks fastened the electrodes to her scalp. Jas’ heart was in her throat. It would be unspeakably cruel to wake the navigator up only for her to find out she might be about to die, along with the rest of them.