Nexus by Robert Boyczuk (philippa perry book TXT) 📖

pent up breath. Air wafted through the recirculators as sensors detected the sudden accumulation of perspiration on his forehead and in the palms of his hands. His suit hummed quietly, trying to cool him.

One of those things passed in front of Bh’Haret’s sun, Sav thought. He watched the stars along the horizontal arm of the cross disappear, then reappear, one by one. But the object itself was invisible against the backdrop of space. Sav should have known this before he’d left the airlock, but only now the fact of it struck home. Out here, he’d be able to see nothing. The only evidence of the objects would be second hand, as they occluded the stars in front of which they passed.

Sav pulled himself back to the airlock. He palmed the lock handle and the doors slid open. After the lock finished its cycle, he stripped off his suit and pulled himself down the access hatch to the stasis quarters below. His shift was at an end, his six days up. It was time to return to stasis.

6 Days Left

“Shit!”

The curse came to Sav, distantly, as if dulled by a heavy fog. Then the muffled sound of several blows, like a fist hammering against a solid surface. A single, sharp crack followed.

Sav blinked uncertainly; his mouth was gummy, his stomach tied in knots, and his limbs quivered with the familiar post-stasis ache. Josua’s hazy outline, swam into view, and it took Sav a moment to force his eyes to focus. Josua wore no shirt or shoes. His face crimson, like he’d been exerting himself, and he looked angry. In his left hand he cradled his right fist. He stared at Sav where he lay on his pallet with an infuriated expression, as if he blamed Sav for this injury.

“What…what’s the matter?” Sav’s voice was hoarse.

Josua took a step towards Sav, and for a moment Sav thought he was going to take a swing at him. But then Josua’s face changed as if a switch had been flipped: his anger dissipated, was replaced by blank expression. Letting go of his fist, he held up his watch. It showed 5-20:29. Less than six days left.

“We’re a few light minutes from the exclusion zone,” he said. “A day out.”

Sav swallowed. It was like sandpaper grating in his throat. With an effort, he turned his head. Across the room, Ruen’s naked form was visible as a pink outline through the translucent door of his cell. The thin figure was perfectly still. Why wasn’t the door open? Why wasn’t he stirring yet? Josua had said he was going to revive the holy man shortly after his own shift began. But he hadn’t. “What…what about Ruen?” Sav managed to croak from between parched lips. He propped himself on one elbow; his head felt like it was stuffed with wet sand. It swayed heavily on the end of his neck.

“I aborted the sequence. I didn’t think there was anything he could do to help. So I let him sleep. Now he has twelve days to our five. If we wake him, we’ll be taking that extra time away from him.”

Sav peeled the leads from the back of his head, disconnected his catheters and swung his legs outside the cell. He leaned forward-and saw the control panel next to his cell had been smashed: a crack ran down the centre where the panel had been pushed in, as if from a sharp blow. It was shorted, its screen full of garbage. Sav looked at Josua’s scraped knuckles, then back at the panel.

“You were overdue. I was trying to make the damn thing work,” Josua said, flexing his fist. “I lost my cool.”

Before he’d gone under, Sav had made sure his revival had been locked in; he’d coded the abort sequence with a password. Without changing the logic cards buried beneath the cell, there was nothing that could be done from the panel to abort the revival process. He knew this from the years he’d spent working longhaul. But chances were that Josua wouldn’t have known. Perhaps Josua had decided his revival was as pointless as Ruen’s and tried to stop it. But there was no way Sav could ever prove it. And if he could, what was there to do about it?

Josua’s gaze drifted around the cabin; but he wouldn’t meet Sav’s eyes, nor look directly at the panel. “By the way,” he said in a matter-of-fact tone, “we have another visitor.”

“We picked up another one of those things?” Sav’s voice was still rough.

“No. It’s bigger.”

A ship? Sav pushed himself onto unsteady legs. “Has it tried to contact us yet?”

Josua danced back a step. “No.”

“When did you pick it up?”

“The instruments detected it two days ago, fifty-six million klicks out. It’s about two hundred times the size of The Viracosa. And it’s accelerating. If we maintain our current course, intercept should be just before we hit the exclusion zone, in less than a day.”

Fifty-six million klicks, Sav thought. “How the hell did you find it?”

“I didn’t have to. There was a burst of long wave radio transmissions between the things outside and the new object. I took a couple of readings and triangulated them to find the source.”

“And the ship didn’t respond to similar frequencies?”

“I didn’t say it was a ship. I just think it might be.”

“What about it’s response?”

Josua blinked; he crossed his arms. “No response.” He frowned. “I decided not to initiate contact yet.”

Sav couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Josua had left him in stasis even though there was likely a manned ship out there. “Two days and you haven’t done anything yet?”

“I tried to wake you.” Josua’s voice had taken on a querulous note, like that of a child making excuses. “I didn’t think there would be any point. When they’re ready, they’ll talk.”

Astonished, Sav stared at Josua. What was he thinking? They had less than six days before the onset of the disease. Perhaps seven in which they could still reasonably function. And here he was, waiting patiently for a contact that might never come. Sav staggered past Josua, grasped the rungs of the ladder, and hauled himself up to the bridge, his muscles screaming their protest. Dropping into the seat before the comm panel, he called up the history file on the screen, located the frequency Josua had been monitoring. Slipping on the headset, he started reeling off orders to the ship’s AI. Behind him he heard the tread of Josua’s footsteps.

“What are you doing?”

Sav ignored him; instead he finished dictating the parameters for the comm system, ordering a radio burst in thousand megahertz bracketing frequencies.

“It won’t do any good,” Josua said. But his voice was uncertain-strangely agitated. “It won’t respond. No more than the others did.”

Sav switched on receiver and gave the order to transmit a standard hailing message; the board responded with a confirmation of the order. The message was dispatched.

“Maybe we should-”

But whatever Josua was going to say was cut off by a sudden burst of static piped over the bridge’s speakers, followed by a sound like the growling of an engine.

Sav retransmitted the message.

The bridge speakers hissed and sputtered, spewing out more grinding noises that warbled and changed pitch in a seemingly random pattern. Then the garbage abruptly stopped; a flat, male voice began rhyming off a list of words or perhaps an alphabet: “…_lect_, ezeni, verrach, tlui, eech, lemech, ruhr…”

It sounded like Nexus standard. Sav opened a two-way voice transmission channel. “This is The Viracosa, outbound from Bh’Haret. Please acknowledge.”

At first, silence. Then, a single word. “Viracosa.” It was a different voice this time, still emotionless, but definitely a woman’s. “You are expected.”

SJH1231-K, The Relay Station

17 Days Left

Without conscious thought, Liis’ feet kicked into action after she’d seen Penirdth plummet from sight; half a dozen quick strides propelled her midway to the ragged hole before she realised the lunacy of what she was doing. There could be more weak spots in the crust here. And what about the area around the hole? How close could she get to the lip before it would crumble and swallow her as well? She let herself glide to a halt. It wasn’t difficult-the drag of her sled worked like an anchor. She looked back. No one had moved; they stood in their positions in line, watching her. Mira had dropped her poles. She seemed to be swaying.

Liis turned and stared at the opening, visible as another deep shadow against the endless, red-tinted snow. She couldn’t walk away, leave Penirdth for dead. But should she go forward and risk the ice? She bit her lip, tasted blood.

To hell with it, she thought. Using the tip of her pole, she pressed the release on the bindings of her skis. She stepped free of them; her boots sank a few centimeters into the lightly packed snow. Dropping her pole, she unfastened the leads to her sled and stepped towards the opening, her boots crunching as the snow compacted beneath them.

Something thumped to Liis’ right. It wasn’t the noise that alerted her-the suit effectively deadened most sound on the outside. Rather, it was the vibration that ran through the crust of the snow and into the soles of her boots. Twisting to the side, she saw the end of a rope two meters away.

She swung around to face the others. The tarp on Yilda’s sled had been rolled back. He stood next to it, the rope in his hand, a thick coil by his feet. With a gesture, he indicated Liis should pick up the other end of the line and secure it to her harness.

Yilda gestured again, this time more emphatically.

Liis retrieved the rope, tied it to her harness, making a large knot with her good hand. She pulled it as tight as she could. Meanwhile, Yilda had flung the other end of the rope at Mira and Hebuiza. Hebuiza took up the line, slowly, reluctantly, but Mira didn’t move. Yilda gestured at her fiercely. Mira swayed.

She’s in shock, Liis thought.

Hebuiza moved forward and shoved the rope at her, nearly knocking her over. She closed her fingers around it, staring at it as if she didn’t understand what it was.

Yilda gestured at Liis again, only this time he tapped his visor and made a small motion with his hand as if he were adjusting a dial. He repeated the motion several times, but Liis had no idea what he was trying to convey. She lifted her shoulders in a shrug. At this, Yilda nodded and waved his hands as if to say, ‘Never mind.’ He gave her the thumbs up sign.

Liis nodded. Turning, she resumed her march towards the hole.

She halted three meters away. From this distance, the edge looked reasonably solid; the cross-section exposed by the collapse of the surface showed a thick layer of ice beginning fifteen or so centimeters beneath the snow. She circled cautiously, keeping the same distance. The ice extended downwards as far as she could see in all directions. Liis was relieved; she had feared that there was a extensive cavity beneath her. But the opening, it appeared, was merely the end of a relatively narrow shaft, roughly four meters in diameter. She moved closer, to within a meter and a half. At that distance she went down on her hands and knees, then onto her belly, clenching her teeth and sucking in a sharp breath as her weight settled on her injured arm. She squirmed forward, the ache in her broken limb forgotten, until her helmet poked over the lip.

The shaft corkscrewed down, twisting and turning