Stasis (The Ascendants Book 2) Page 5

  Ravenous. The clacking of mandibles and the racket emitting from them scratched at her eardrums and she let her own voice join the chorus, screaming as she ran. An airlock door sealed the end of the hallway and she hoped that it would open. The horde’s noise grew behind her and she knew they gained distance on her, but she had no time to look over her shoulder to see how much. She could only continue running, and hope that the door would open. But it drew closer, and with every step it seemed more to her like an insurmountable wall than a door, and when she finally threw her body against it and called out for Llewellyn, she had already given up on the possibility of it hissing and sliding open to save her at the final moment.

  The horde bore down on her, and she turned to face them. Her hand dropped to the holster hanging from her hip, but she found it empty. No matter. It would only be a momentary delay. She closed her eyes, and readied herself.

  “KASEY, NOW!”

  And then she heard it: the hiss of an airlock door sliding open. A cool rush of air lapped against the nape of her neck, freezing the sweat that formed there. She turned around expecting to see the unforgiving titanium of the door, its pinwheel knob that jutted out from the center and refused to turn for her when she first tried it, but instead saw the gaping maw of a doorway, opened for a brief second and again sliding closed, as if it chewed on the contents of the room it protected.

  “JUMP, KASEY!”

  And she threw herself through the door as it threatened to close on her indefinitely. A shipping container slammed against the other side—the side on which she stood until a moment before, when the apparition of a child’s voice boomed in her mind with the force of command that compelled her through the eaves—a loud, echoing slam that repeated itself like a cloud of refuse floating in the abyss of space, panging against the outside of a vessel drifting past.

  She immediately scooted backwards on her buttocks, pushing against the cold metal floors with the palms of her hands and the soles of her boots, fearing that the alien horde would pulverize the slab of steel that separated them and rush in to overwhelm her. She knew in her mind that the door would not give, that, for the moment, she had saved herself—

  The boy had saved her—

  —from certain death, but the lingering fear that took control of her mind a moment before still held its grip on her conscious thought, holding her prisoner and shaking her limbs with the terror and exaltation of a woman spared.

  She scanned her surroundings, searching for a hint of where in the ship she was, but her bearings had been lost so long before, and the emptiness of the room had so few clues, that she scarcely could determine what deck she was on. She sat in a solitary pool of light—white, not emergency red—and everything else around her remained shrouded in the impenetrable dark of space that she had never perceived inside of a vessel before. Staring into that blackness, she felt as if the patch of light forming a circle around her was the last column of solid ground remaining after a terrible catastrophe had occurred.

  Movement behind her, a faint scurrying, maybe a breeze from an open door concealed in darkness. She spun around to see what made the sound and found nothing, only the blackness staring back at her like the dead eyes of a corpse. A rustling from behind her again, and she jumped to her feet.

  “Who’s there? Llewellyn?”

  No voice came back to meet her call, though through the darkness, she spied the boy’s silhouette, standing out against a bank of light that had jumped to life as she queried the empty hall. “Llewellyn?”

  “This way,” he whispered, and the silhouette disappeared so quickly that Kasey was left wondering if it had been there at all. She looked only at the flickering of the lights—tiny bulbs no bigger than the tip of a pen—and knew instantly where she stood. The mainframes. The ship’s brain.

  As the realization dawned on her, she smelt the acidic reek of burning plastic assaulting her nose and heard the cracking of sputtering livewires electrifying the air. She found herself unable to determine if the smells were confined to her memory, or if the room actually sparked with flame, and then had the notion that the two were co-mingled—memory and experience—and that what she was seeing and hearing and smelling had already happened to her.

  “Run, Kasey,” Llewellyn shouted from the dark. “The doors won’t hold forever.”

  Turning her head back to the door that had opened for her, she noticed the bulging curvature of the titanium slab and thought she even saw the first signs of fissure threatening to burst and allow the aliens entry into her sanctuary. She scrambled to her feet, and ran off again into the darkness, unaware of what lurked before her and fearing only that the enemy in pursuit would catch her before she burst from the darkness into the light that must be on the other side, just out of reach.

  Always just out of reach.

  Her legs pumped and she felt the stitch bursting in her ribcage again. The sound of her heartbeat took over everything else, and even the sound of Llewellyn’s voice could not surmount the pounding of blood through her veins.

  Chapter 12

  He felt their stares on him like a shackle around his neck and he knew they all waited for him to slip up, to make one wrong move so they could throw him before a tribunal and strip him of his power and his command, his legacy, his name. He wouldn’t have it. He let them wait a moment longer and then spoke with a voice that concealed more than it illuminated.

  “We move forward.”

  No one spoke. No one fluttered their arms and gulped down an empty mouthful of air or loosened the knots of their collars. They only went back to work, hunching over their monitors and terminals and security banks to ensure that as the Althaea pushed beyond the last ring of the solar system, breaking through the turbulence of the Plutonian Gravity Field and entering the realms of the outer rim, nothing would go wrong and nothing would delay their approach to the beacon that had been discovered on the radar early that morning, and that took precedence—according to their under-aged captain—over their current mission.

  “But Captain Hardmason,” one of his officers had said when he ordered the directional shift, “the mines are so close. We cannot abandon our orders to a safety beacon beyond the range of any reasonable help. Who says the person sending that signal even still lives?”

  And Jakob Hardmason let his regard fall upon the man with the weight of a rockslide crashing from am unseen precipice. “You would let a traveler perish for your own fear,” he said with a snide tone and a wolfish grin. “Is that how you were trained to react to danger, Commander?”

  The man had swallowed and begged forgiveness and Jakob had granted his wish, though he remembered the man’s face and looked for him in the ranks of bridge command men who now reacted mutely to their captain’s new orders. He couldn’t find him, though he knew the man was there, bickering in hushed whispers about the lunatic captain who would stray so far over so little.

  A beacon.

  And now, a transmission, though most of the bridge command did not know of the transmission, and it did not originate from the same sector as the beacon.

  I have found her.

  He wished the man had been more discreet in his choice of words but he understood the rush of energy that would accompany such a find. Badger. A spy embedded in MarsForm and listed as a crewmember on a freighter called the Vulcan, suspect and distrusted and coming to him with information that would rip open the fabric of the Terran Council’s propaganda material. He ran through passivity’s in his head and did not know which one was the most likely. The man could be mistaken, he figured. The coordinates could have been encrypted in such a way as to cause a discrepancy in the detection systems of other ships. He knew of Ajax’s technical prowess, and wouldn’t put it past the man to install scrambling software in the Age’s and the Morrow’s secondary and tertiary vehicles, the escape pods and the like.

  Otherwise, if the code was not scrambled, it could be a trap.

  He considered this possibility with a ruffled brow, staring
down at the activity on the floor of the bridge command and searching for the sidelong glances that would come his way. Badger had a notoriously spotty record and Jakob felt it a miracle that the agent hadn’t been dispatched. Offline once, for a period of over a month. Unresponsive and cowardly. Suspected of being of double agent, but cleared.

  As Jakob ran through his mental notes on the man who had contacted him, he felt as if the most disparate possibility, the one least likely to be true, was that the man was correct and honest. That he had found Kasey Lee. He couldn’t begin to think of the ramifications of that find, but he knew that when the message reached him, he would follow the signal to its origin, trap or not, and if he fell dead on the way, then at least he would know that the smear campaign against Ajax was exactly that.

  “Captain.”

  The voice broke his train of thought and he started slightly. “Admiral Jessup.”

  “Captain, I believe we should speak in private.”

  Jakob eyed the man—his navigations admiral—and, after a moment’s consideration, nodded in agreement. He turned on his heels and began walking with the martial step of a man who knows that the eyes of others followed his movements. He kept up his stride until the doors of his personal cabin slid closed behind the two of them. Cool air circulated, and he removed his captain’s cap with a wave of his arm.

  “What do you think, Jessup? Can we trust him?”

  “Badger?”

  “Badger.”

  The two men stared at each other until Jessup threw his arms in the air out of exasperation. “All the people out there, and our contact has to be him.”

  “We have to try, Jessup. We must.”

  Jessup sat now, reclining with a groan against the upholstery of the couches that lined the walls of Jakob’s personal housing. His eyes had a vacant look and he tapped his foot against the carpet with the effort of concentration. In his rumpled uniform, the signs of sleep deprivation that wrought terrible shadows across his face seemed to stand out with greater intensity, and the gravity his questioning voice commanded struck Jakob as completely sincere. “He just came online. How long ago now? A month, two? And now on his first journey he comes back with the signal of Kasey Lee’s pod. It seems suspect.”

  Jakob bit his knuckles and paced back and forth, unable to find comfort in the cushions as Jessup did. His mind raced. He felt alive, like the energy that powered the Althaea ran through the floor and into the soles of feet, electrifying his blood and sharpening his focus. His thoughts came too fast to articulate. And beneath them all, as he paced in silent fervor, ran the undeniable current of the unstoppable machinations of a movement bigger than any of its players. “We are going, Jessup. It cannot be any other way.”

  Jessup sat back and his upper body receded into shadow. His fingers stroked his beard and again, Jakob was struck by the impression that the man had aged far beyond his years. “Must we, though? Must we?”

  When Jakob stared back in shocked silence, unable to bear the weight of Jessup’s questions, the Admiral continued. “How long has it been since we heard from anyone in the Ascendancy, and he’s the first that comes along. We are alone out here, Jakob. Except for each other, we have nothing. You need to think straight.”

  Jakob felt his anger flame up, and again he shot his finger to his mouth and bit harder than he intended to on the knuckle of his index finger. He inhaled deeply through his nose with an audible hiss that he hoped Jessup had missed. Can’t look unprofessional. Spoiled. Despite his long tenure as Jessup’s partner, he could not tell, when he talked with the man, if he also shared the other crewmember’s disdain for his youth, for his fortune or his attitude, and he felt as if to show any indication or hint of superiority would be to give into a vanity that would cripple him in the end, a weakness that would consume.

  “Are you questioning my capacity for captaining this ship?” His sneer communicated more than his words. He saw Jessup shift his weight in the sofa, and then lean forward so that the light hanging above him bathed over his brow and cast contoured shadows over his gaunt and wrinkled face.

  “I think that you are excited. Quick to make a name for yourself, and willing to gamble with other people’s lives in the process.”

  He knew this would be coming and he turned his back on the tirade as he continued to parade through the room with his knuckle between his teeth and his breath fuming through his nostrils. I think that you should have consulted me before sending the order to shift directions, and I think that by going over my head, you undermined my authority in the eyes of the crew while simultaneously drawing attention to the fact that our relationship extends beyond our duties to the company.”

  The words hung in the stillness. Jakob had stopped pacing. He stood in the shadows beyond the reach of the overhead light’s glow, and stared at the Admiral, who refused to lean back against the soft cushions, but sat rigidly with his spine fixed and his eyes leveled at the man he challenged. After the ringing of Jessup’s rant faded, Jakob asked in a soft and cooing voice if we were done. If he had exhausted himself yet.

  “Or are you faltering out of fear for your own life? So old, and still so held up on chiseling a few more years out of that rock you call a body?”

  Jessup grunted, neither an acceptance nor a denial of his partner’s derision.

  “So, if you’ve nothing else, Jessup, I think the navigation room will need your hands-on assistance in coordinating maneuvers. We must be on our toes.” He cut the conversation short with the quick pivot on the heel of his foot, just as he had done when they walked from the terraced platforms of the bridge floor to his private den.

  When he had almost reached the door, and held his hand extended toward the key pad to slide it open, Jessup stopped him with a coolly determined voice: “I harbor no fear, and I will do what needs to be done if the pod is out their for the taking, but I will not watch you march yourself and this entire crew into a battle that can’t be won.”

  Jakob turned. Jessup stood now, facing him with balled fists and breathing deeply, so that his shoulders heaved with each patient, steady inhalation. “Don’t do this, Jakob. I’m begging you.”

  “We must do our sworn duty, Jessup. There is no other way. We will have that pod.” Jakob turned again and the door to his cabin slid open. He walked through the threshold and back into the glaring white floro light of the bridge floor, leaving Jessup behind to stew in the darkness and meditate on the his grim determination to see this mission through as if it were a calling from fate that he had no more power to deny than he could deny the beating of his heart. There was no other way.

  As he reentered the bridge command floor, voices and questions rose to meet him in waves. “Captain, another vessel has been detected, much closer. The Vulcan. Should we proceed with our original mission?”

  “No. We will investigate the beacon and remain in the area to support the Vulcan if she needs any assistance. If she fails, we will have quite the rescue mission on our hands.” He smiled and feigned confidence, though he saw death in the eyes of everyone staring back at him. Death caused by his own hand.

  Chapter 13

  Sasha stood before the door as it buckled. On the other side, she heard the languid clicking of the Ides’ mandibles and imagined the drooling slime that would be hanging in long ropes from the height of their mouths—six feet from the floor, at least—to the metal paneling below. She swallowed, and clenched her fists, fixing her gaze on the pulsing red square on the doorframe, trying to decide what to do. The others watched. They waited for her to make a move, and the strong man, Anton, spoke up. “Okay, Sasha, you made your show of valor. I’ll do this if you want.”

  “I got it,” she said, disgruntled at the break in her concentration. “Just get into your positions. Get everyone through the wall.” The others exchanged looks that didn’t quite settle properly in Sasha’s mind, and she imagined that they were beginning to question themselves and her, as if they just realized that a terrible mistake had been made and tha
t they were on the brink of not being able to revert it. She turned away from them before their flailing confidence infected her any more. “Go!” she screamed. “Get to the fucking coolers!”

  Again they exchanged looks, but these were of a resigned defeat, a surrendering of the future to luck and fortune. But they moved. One by one, they threw their legs over the four gravity lifted coolers that had lined the perimeter of the kitchen. The contents of the coolers—meat and poultry, milk, cheese and other artificial creations of culinary art—had been piled in a heaping mound in the center of the cafeteria, a pool of oil that had all eleven of them breathing through their mouths.

  A jetty of overturned tables had been constructed to divide the room in two, rising so high that it nearly scratched the ceiling, and every croak or groan that escaped its corpus drew uneasy glances and nervous laughter from the builders. On top of the highest peak of their makeshift mountain of appliances and chairs jutting out at all angles, a burner teetered, and even now, moments after activation, Sasha watched heat rising from the innocuous looking piece of metal that already smoldered on the table it had been placed on.

  Beneath that, another table, and a cooling unit, but attached to the table—the second table—a rope. She would pull that rope, as she scampered over the pile, and the tables would fall. She tried to imagine it, what it would smell like, sound like. Would they sound like lobsters? Or would it happen so fast that they wouldn’t have time?

  And beneath her hypotheticals: will it work?

  Looking at the mountain of obstacles in her way, she told herself, you can jump that, though even in her head, it came out more as a question than a reassurance. She understood the gamble she made with all of their lives when she agreed to follow the man’s instructions, but it hadn’t hit until a moment before, when her eyes fell on the glow of the door’s control panel, that the man could be insane, rattled by whatever horrid scenes he witnessed, or terrible actions he committed to purchase his own safety. He could be a complete ignoramus with no plan. He could be anyone.