Stasis (The Ascendants Book 2) Page 2

  He shot glances around the room. Not much. A few janitors eating pale and papery looking sandwiches and one lonely old man drinking an effervescent, fizzling concoction that left a lime-green stain on the man’s cracked lips. He muttered something to himself, and Caspar wondered absently if the man were senile, or simply frustrated with his job and complaining in a quiet and safe manner, away from prying ears.

  A crackling crunching static sound came forth from the SatCom, and the screen flickered on and off in the cafeteria without revealing the face of the man who spoke through it. The voice came so low that Caspar wondered if he heard anything at all, or simply imagined the tiny voice escaping from the speaker and informing him to spill the information that is so important it required an untraceable cipher to communicate.

  “You better start talking,” the voice said, and that time, Caspar was sure that he imagined nothing, that his SatCom finally picked up the signal his handler transmitted from Monolith.

  “Is this the day the morning star rises?” Caspar asked, dropping his voice to a hushed whisper and shooting cursory glances about the room. No one paid any attention to him save the man working the bar, who maybe wondered if the dead-beat in the corner whispering into his phone would ever buy a drink, or if he would have to be tossed from the premises for vagrancy. Sensing the man’s consternation, Caspar hailed him and requested some libations from the man, covering the speaker while he ordered to prevent a mishap from occurring.

  “The morning star rises red.” And then, “Now, get the fuck on with it.”

  “I have found her, Jakob. I have found her.”

  He smiled in the dark corner of the bar and café as he received his beverage, and, feeling smug, he smiled at the man and offered a tip from his meager wallet. He would be remembered for this day. And no one again would banish him to the far reaches of the solar system.

  “Send me the coordinates. And destroy this SatCom.”

  “You’ll need manpower.”

  “It’s done. Bring the horse to stable. I say again, bring the horse to stable. And don’t fuck this one up.”

  More static and then nothing, and Caspar was left his drink and the ecstatic feeling of making a discovery, of changing something, that made his drink taste better and the musty smell of the cafeteria seem like the air that swirls in an alpine meadow on Earth.

  Maybe, he thought, he would be allowed home after making such a discovery.

  Maybe the signal wasn’t even Kasey Lee, and he would be ran out of the Ascendancy for incompetence when the cavalry showed up and found an old personal radio floating in the abyss and sending out sporadic and random frequencies that could not be distinguished, and therefore appeared to his monitoring software as an unlabeled signal.

  He hoped it was the latter.

  Exiting the bar, he fled the lower levels and retreated back to his personal unit, his cubicle, the place where he rested his head. A hole in a damned wall, he thought, surveying the area and shaking his head at the disorder, the clutter. One room and a public bathroom. That is what I get.

  He reclined on the cot in his quarters and thought about the words: Bring the horse to stable.

  Could he? Would he, given the opportunity? He thought about it, asked himself sincerely, without the false deceit of conversation shared with another: Can you do it?

  In the darkness of the his quarters, with a couple hours to sleep before the alarm blared to send him back to work on the bridge, he tried to answer the question and came up with only a vague sense of regret at whatever decision he would make at the time, an inescapable failure that would doom him to exile and loneliness, no matter how he chose to act when the moment of reckoning came.

  Chapter 5

  The hours became meaningless as he stared at the screen before him, his mind burning with the anticipation of his discovery and the communications he awaited, with the restraint he was obliged to demonstrate, waiting for a buzzing vibration of his SatCom receiving a transmission. Dreading the moment that it would go off and he would be forced answer the call. Every second that went by, the urge to dig through his bag and slam away at the screen of his communication link grew stronger, until he could think of nothing to do besides tap his foot and look with excitement at the bag, lingering always in the corner of his vision. He couldn’t take it. Every heart beat, every ring of the phone, every new piece of information being picked up and decoded by the Vulcan’s various systems and defenses, all became markers and milestones on the road that would eventually end with him hearing the SatCom going off and knowing that the man whom he had been waiting for was finally calling.

  Any second, he kept telling himself, but the call never came and he spent a tireless day at his work station, trying to ignore the desire to reach out to the man himself, though he had been specifically instructed to never do such a thing. The gossip of the woman across the aisle from him made no impression, and he felt no compulsion to take breaks from his work, either. The only thing he cared for was the SatCom, and its impending awakening.

  But nothing happened, as the hours burned away.

  He had reported the findings to Cromwell’s officers that morning, and as he awaited his urgent update, the officer with whom he spoke, Sergei Something, beckoned him away from his desk and his SatCom for the uncomfortable confines of Cromwell’s cabin. The eyes of his neighbors followed him as he followed Sergei, and he made contact with none of them. He stared at the Admiral’s back and nothing else, until he stood before Captain Cromwell in the same room he had been called to the day before.

  Sitting as he was told to sit, smiling when the others did so, Caspar Faulk sat among his higher ups and they wasted no time in telling him why he had been summoned.

  “You are sure of your findings?” Cromwell began, after brief cordialities. “Your report declares that the signal originated from an undisclosed vessel and bore no identification number.” The Captain looked at Faulk with an implication misting his eyes over, as if Faulk should know offhand why it never suited the good of the crew to list an unlabeled finding.

  When Faulk informed him that, indeed, it is possible he could have been mistaken, the Captain demurred, saying that the wise thing would be to investigate. That an unlabeled could be anything. Could be dangerous.

  The wise thing was to investigate.

  With a flurry of commotion that destroyed the grim tone of their conversation, Cromwell began ordering his officers to alter the ships course and prepare the defense force for any danger that might accompany the new trajectory. Caspar Faulk jumped into activity as well, attempting to convince his boss that the tests should be reran, that they shouldn’t expend the energy until they were sure. They had a mission, and by altering their course, they could be unnecessarily delaying it.

  “You made the report. Are you doubting yourself?” Cromwell inquired with a barbed tone of voice.

  “No, but anything could have happened, Captain. The signal was so weak, and its encryption was more powerful than anything I have seen in over a decade working in deep space. I’m still in shock that I was able to figure it out.”

  He hoped he sounded convincing, though by now, he did doubt himself and figured that with such impertinence, he would be docked down to the lowest decks, a janitor responsible for cleaning the main exhaust systems, for scraping trash gunk from the garbage chutes and replacing bad plumbing pipes. He exhausted his technical vocabulary, his ability to create reasons why the Vulcan should carefully consider its actions, and when he fell silent, the three officers looked at him incredulously. Accusingly. He knew that he would be scrutinized for his findings, but he did not know that the higher-level crewmembers of his vessel were secretly tasked to find the signal. How else could they have detected something so weak from so far away? For what other reason would they be willing to go through the trouble of traveling out to the beacon’s location to investigate. It didn’t add up, and the feeling of unsettled wonderment that spread through his core had him pricking his ears up at th
e slightest indication of a clue coming from any of the men who stared at him.

  “Corporal,” Cromwell began, “we are going to retrieve the origin of that signal because it is our duty as space explorers and human beings. Someone could be marooned out there, and you would have us pass right by?”

  Caspar thought that his boss would continue speaking, but was instead faced with the silently staring panel of Admirals awaiting his response. He stammered for a moment, choosing his words, before settling on, “Never, sir. But it could be a trap.”

  The words fell from his lips before he could stop them, before he could consider the ramifications of the statement, and he felt a small wave of relief when the only response his Captain issued was, with a step forward and his barrel chest pushing against the prison of his uniform, “If it is a trap, the defense force will be ready. Doubly so, after your astute thinking. Thank you, corporal.”

  Caspar Faulk nodded silently and received permission to dismiss himself from the room. He left immediately, trying to affect perfect posture and feeling the eyes of the three men following him until he left the room and the door shut behind him. They are talking, he thought. Right now, they are talking.

  He hoped they weren’t talking about him, but didn’t know what else they would be talking about. He, as a crewmember, just implied that there could possibly be a trap set for the Vulcan, and if he knew about it, he must have learned from somewhere. He had experience with their type, and he knew, sure as he drew breath, that those were the thoughts that went through each one of their heads as he continued to ramble on, insolently. He hated himself for it and wished he could take it back, but could only rush to his SatCom and see if anyone attempted to contact him in the amount of time he sat with Captain Cromwell and his two goons.

  He rushed back to his desk, feeling the eyes of his coworkers following him as he sat back at his desk, digging through his bag and pulling out what he searched for. When he found the SatCom, he checked it without taking it from his bag, and to his surprise, found no messages, still.

  He’s gotta know by now, Caspar thought to himself as he stared at the blank screen of his SatCom, the new one, the one with a perfectly working screen and speakers that did not warble when someone spoke through them. The one he waited for all day. With still no communication from the new link, the good one, he turned to the broken piece of trash that occupied its own secret pocket in his satchel. The one he spoke to Jakob on. Still no word from him either, and with Cromwell suiting up for a conflict, and the Ascendancy claiming that they would be there, he did not know what else to do besides dig up the pea shooter he brought with him in the event he ever needed to kill someone, and wait.

  He dismissed himself from the work station, pledging to put in more hours when he felt less under the weather, and hurried off to his room, where he pulled the pistol from behind his bed frame and sat on the bunk, cradling the lethal tool and staring at its cool reflective surface, the sheen that bounced off it from the overhead floros and set his eyes twinkling as he held it in his hands.

  He would.

  Given the chance, he would.

  Chapter 6

  He had been called to the bridge again, and this time, as he stood with Cromwell, Sergei Something—Sokolov, it was—and Kenneth Alexander, he thought about whether or not they were intentionally keeping him close, and dismissed the thought as paranoia. For such a delicate mission it would make sense to have the discoverer present at the bridge command meetings, to provide proper detail and terminology to those who were paid to command the ship, rather than operate its inner faculties.

  He imagined that neither of the three of them had ever sat behind a terminal monitor such as the one that he spent every day at, running through a million codes each time he sat down, standing for a few minutes, and then running through a million more, all in order to ensure that the ship ran smoothly and that no space trash would damage external appendages. No. Looking at their smooth hands and the proper attire they seemed to don themselves in around the clock, he imagined they had never even seen the inside of a personal dormitory enclosure. That kind of person started out at the top, and only reached higher as their careers blossomed.

  His reveries were interrupted by the stern look the Captain shot him.

  “Excuse me?” he asked, thinking he had missed a question.

  As he spoke, the three men stopped their talk and stared at him, wondering why he had interrupted and waiting for the Captain to berate him. For a moment, the tension in the air thickened until Caspar Faulk squirmed where he stood and the impossible weight of the Captain’s stare seemed to make the corporal melt before the eyes of his three judges, and the two men flanking Cromwell grew assured that the man would explode with rage at being interrupted at such a crucial moment.

  Before the explosion came, as Caspar Faulk stood up to the scrutiny of his superiors, the ship’s automated computer address system boomed through the hidden speakers scattered throughout the ship that an incoming vessel approached with increasing rapidity, and that it had not called out or given any clue as to its name or origin. A wholly suspicious vessel, the computer concluded as the bridge staff launched into a frenzy of activity, manning their stations and trying to decipher the meaning behind the signals received from the incoming ship.

  Jakob?

  Must be.

  The Captain shot him a look of suspicion that made Faulk think back to their earlier conversation. The accusations written about his commanding officer’s face made him think that the man had found his hidden SatCom, or had connections within the Ascendancy himself. Or maybe the Terran Council. The truth of the matter remained, that ever since Caspar Faulk had first been approached by the Council people, he had not been able to shake the feeling that any glance cast in his direction was meant to unsettle him, unnerve him, make him fear the intentions behind it.

  And now, as he followed the three men to the main floor of the Vulcan’s bridge, scrambling to find out who approached and why, he felt that look again, grazing his face—the way his nostrils flared and his eyes grew wider, the way his finger continuously clenched and unclenched behind his back as they walked through the maze of halls.

  “Grasshoppers, sir,” Kenneth Alexander told him after speaking in a hushed tone through the SatCom link that remained incessantly clipped to his lapels. “A big colony.”

  The Captain set his face into a grim snarl and cursed his fortune before ordering the men around him to man gun stations, to prepare explosives for the event of a boarding. “You, Faulk. Get to your station and do your job. Don’t lose that pod.”

  Without saying a word, he walked away from Captain Cromwell and began running toward his desk, where he would instantly reach to Jakob and inform him about the explosives. He thought of nothing else as he pushed his way through the crowds of people that ran to and fro, sending messages and orders, complying and activating weapons that would incinerate an entire bridge full of humans, preparing to turn them on the Ides remnant that still staggered about the solar system and audaciously dared to attempt taking a MarsForm freighter. He seemed to be the only one who ran about with any conviction; the others merely pretended for the sake of their superior officers, and thought about the upcoming minutes and hours as a mere ordinary occurrence, a hiccup in the days activities that required no more attention than the mending of a broken circuit or the pulling of a trigger.

  But it wasn’t Grasshoppers. He knew it. It was Jakob. Right?

  As he sat down at his desk, he reached for his SatCom and felt his stomach drop when he saw that no messages or communications awaited him. Surely he would be warned if the Vulcan were to come under fire from an Ascendancy ship. He tried to explain away the feeling of deep seated unease that tainted his every sensory perception and left an acrid taste in his mouth, but the only thing he could think that actually made sense was that the ship approaching them did actually contain a hive of lost Ides fighters. Grasshoppers. Nothing could be worse to a ship in deep space beyon
d the reach of a security blanket than a rogue Ides warship waiting to create a nuisance.

  He went through the codes that his monitor displayed, telling the story of a ship that drifted on nearly nothing, expending as little energy as possible. He imagined that the ship had been traveling in this manner for some time now, drifting, riding on minute thrusts to conserve energy and keep the temperature in the vessel down to a cool, homeostatic temperature that would slow the metabolisms of the alien insects on board. The communications worked; he picked up their signals from the host of antennae that must be on the ship’s surface, but they made no attempt to communicate and the lines between the two ships remained closed. The Ides. Fucking grasshoppers.

  But the signal emitted by the escape pod dimmed and he tried to get a bead on that pulsing echo. The ship drew closer and the escape pod drifted farther away, and he imagined the Captain in his quarters slamming his fists on the tables and throwing charts, berating his officers as Sokolov and Alexander stood by in silence. He imagined himself receiving a much more pointed explosion of fury if the escape pod made it beyond his detection radius.

  The computer’s voice sounded again, urgent and piercing and delivering a warning that the incoming ship had launched a projectile that would be making contact with the Vulcan’s shield in thirty seconds.

  The bridge burst into activity and the guns mounted on the surface of the ship—guns that towered higher than skyscrapers and shook the foundations they rested on every time their reports blasted through the stillness of space—sent cataclysmic spouts of green and red fire that lit up the blackness outside the bridge windshield and sent vibrations rocketing through the floors and into Caspar’s shin bones.

  Every shot missed.

  The projectile drew closer to the Vulcan, and somewhere on the bridge floor he heard an officer cry out: “It’s a boarding party, boys! ETA twenty seconds. Get ready.”

  He stared at his computer screen and watched the blip on his radar draw closer to the center of the display, thinking about the voracious predators that the flashing green light represented, thinking about the carnage that would follow if the next volley of defense cannon fire missed its mark as well. The cannon pivoted, responded to the stimulus of the bridge officers’ coordinates, to the heat of the vessel that approached. In unison, they spun, and Caspar Faulk imagined that from a distance, the turrets’ movements would seem like a dance executed with perfect choreography.