The Burning Dark Read online

But we’re still heading right into this fucking mega-explosion and the warp cone is decaying quickly, so I give the order and we pop quickspace for just a second and fly through the explosion, and then the second pilot—promoted, needless to say—kills the engine and we slide back into space just a million klicks north. Of course we cooked the engines and the nav computer went offline to run a diagnostic, or maybe it was just really pissed off that we popped quickspace without telling it first and it went into a sulk. It was a rough ride too, and something burns out in the control console in front of the pilot and then there’s a bang and something pings against my leg, but I don’t notice, not yet. We’ve got enough juice in the tank to turn her around and coast back in. All the baby Spiders have been mopped up too, with only a few U-Stars damaged. One of which was the Stripes, and already someone has cracked a joke about scratching the paint job. Goddamn boys and their toys.

  And you know what? We were in time. Tau Retore took a fucking pounding, but they’d been clever and got nearly everyone evacuated just as soon as the Spider appeared in the system. Just about the whole planet was saved, almost three hundred million of them.…

  Now, that’s a result. We actually won something, and won it big. I mean, I don’t know if you heard, but things … well, things are not all rosy in this great and wonderful war. The Fleet is mighty and the Fleet is all, but, the Spiders? They might not think like us or act like us, but, goddammit, there are so many of them. I mean, it seems like we’re taking one step forward and two steps back all the damn time and …

  Anyway.

  So guess what? I’m a hero. A genuine, bona fide heroic sonovabitch. So then I call up the commander of the U-Star Castle Rock, which I see up ahead, and I ask her about how many medals she’d like to have, and then someone says my leg is bleeding and …

  * * *

  “Abraham?”

  “Hmm?” Ida paused, hand reaching for the cup. His head was a little light but his throat was dry … if someone would just be so kind as to pour another shot of the strawberry liqueur, that would do nicely, very nicely indeed. He rolled the thought around in his mind and glanced at Zia Hollywood, seeing nothing but his own reflection in her mining goggles.

  “Shut the fuck up.”

  Zia’s lips hadn’t moved. The woman’s voice was coming from the other side of the table. Ida frowned and turned his head too quickly. The room spun in surprising and interesting ways.

  “Excuse me … Serra?”

  She’d called him Abraham. He hated that.

  Serra shook her head, looking at him with a mixture of disgust and pity. It wasn’t a pretty expression, no matter how perfect her olive-skinned face was. She stood up and pushed her chair back, looking away.

  “Come on, let’s go.” Serra’s voice was almost a whisper. Disgust was now outright embarrassment. Carter, her inseparable lover, six and a quarter feet of military might wrapped in tight olive fatigues, nodded and muttered under his breath, but Serra was already stalking away from the table. Carter stood and threw Ida a look you might call dirty.

  “Jackass.”

  And then they were gone, and Ida was left with the two VIPs. Fathead’s permanent grin was as wide as ever, and oddly hypnotic to Ida’s pickled brain. Zia’s face was set, expressionless, and he noticed she hadn’t had much of her drink.

  Ida’s head settled a little, and he glanced around the canteen. It was late now, but a couple other crewmen of the U-Star Coast City were still here, backs turned to Ida’s table, apparently happy to keep out of the way of the space station’s guests.

  Zia Hollywood said nothing as she stood and tapped Fathead’s shoulder. She walked off in silence, leaving her big-haired crewman to pull Ida’s empty cup away from him before picking up the red bottle and the bag it came in from the floor and following his boss out.

  Ida was alone at the table. His hands played at nothing in front of him. He wished the cup would rematerialize.

  Well, fuck you very much.

  Ida stood quickly, chin high, chest out, and he took a breath. He was better than this. He took a step toward the canteen’s serving bar. Then his knee protested, and he relaxed his stiff-backed posture into his more regular, round-shouldered limp. The servos in his artificial joint didn’t seem to like alcohol much.

  Alcohol was forbidden on all U-Stars, and while the expensive liqueur had been brought in by the famous crew of the Bloom County, Ida wondered if there was some of the marines’ home-brewed engine juice around. Didn’t hurt to ask.

  “Hey, can I get a drink, my friend? Something … special. Anything you recommend?”

  The canteen server had his back to him. Ida coughed, but the man didn’t turn around.

  “You’ve had enough. Any more trouble and I’ll be talking to the marshal.”

  Ida blinked. “Huh,” he said, tapping the counter. No progress then. Four weeks on board and he was still Captain No-Friends. The U-Star Coast City was turning out to be a real nice place.

  Ida turned, regarded the silent backs of the other crewmen still seated at the other table, and limped out the door.

  * * *

  It was late in the cycle and the station’s corridors were cast in an artificial purple night. Three turns and one elevator later, Ida was back in his cabin. He flicked the main light on, the autodimmer keeping it to a warm, low, white yellow. He tended to dim it during “daylight” as well, as the low light helped hide the nasty, functional nature of his quarters. What you couldn’t see, your mind filled in for you. He liked to imagine the dark shadowed corners were crafted out of fine mahogany and teak paneling. Just like he had at home.

  “Ida?”

  Captain Abraham Idaho Cleveland was called Ida by his friends. Nearly everyone on the station called him Abraham, or worse. Mostly they called him nothing at all.

  But not her.

  He smiled, limped to his bed, and lay back. The damn knee … Ida raised his leg and flexed it, trying to get the psi-fi connection between the prosthetic and his brain to re-pair manually, but his leg was heavier than he remembered and lifting it made him feel dizzy. He dropped his leg and sighed, and closed his eyes.

  “Hello, Ludmila,” he said.

  The woman’s voice crackled with static as she laughed. It was high, beautiful. It made Ida smile.

  “How was your night?” the voice asked.

  Ida waved a hand—then, remembering he was alone in his cabin, switched the gesture for another dramatic sigh. “It was … bah. Who cares how my night was. How’s yours going?”

  The voice tutted. “You’ve been drinking, haven’t you, Ida?”

  Ida’s smile returned. “Oh, maybe one or two.”

  The laugh again, each giggle cut with noise. She was so very, very far away. “Time for bed?”

  Ida nodded and turned over. “Yeah, time for bed. Good night, Ludmila.”

  “Good night, Ida.”

  The room fell quiet, and the lights autodimmed again to match the purple dark of the rest of the station. Ida’s breathing slowed and became heavy. Underneath the sound of his slumber the room pulsed with static, faint and distant.

  * * *

  Ida dreamed; he dreamed of the house on the farm. The red paint on the barn behind it shed like crimson dandruff in the sun and the same sun shone in the blond hair of the girl as she beckoned him to come with her, come into the house. But when he held out his hand to touch her, he was holding her father’s Bible, the one that sour old man had pressed into his hands the very day he’d first met him, insisting Ida read the damn thing each and every night.

  Ida felt afraid. He would not go into the house. He looked into the sky, at the sun, but saw that the sun was a violet disk, its edge streaming black lines. He frowned. An eclipse? There hadn’t been an eclipse that day. He turned back to the girl, but she was gone and the door of the house was open, a rectangular black portal. Had her father sent her away already? Ida wasn’t sure … it hadn’t been then, had it? He and Astrid had another summer left, surely.
/>   He took a step forward, and as he breathed the country air, the farmyard pulsed with static, faint and distant.

  * * *

  The static from the radio cracked sharply, and Ida jerked awake, dream forgotten.

  “Mmm?”

  “Ida?”

  “Mmm?”

  “Can you tell me the story again?”

  Ida shifted. His bed was soft and the dark was pleasant on his eyes. He lay on his back and looked up into nothing. His knee seemed to have sorted itself out and didn’t hurt anymore. He had a vague recollection of a red barn and a heavy book, but he shrugged the thought away.

  “You mean Tau Retore?”

  “Yes. Tell me again.”

  Ida chuckled and turned over. The still, blue light of the space radio was now the only light in the room. Ida stared into it, imagining Ludmila, wherever she was, watching her own light in the dark.

  “Well,” said Ida. “This is how the shit went down. Lemme tell you about it.…”

  SOME KIND OF HERO

  >> … please wait …

  >> FLEET_WIKIA_REVISION_889

  >> ~cleveland_AI_835401

  >> … please wait …

  >> last login: Sun Jan 12 06:18:53

  >> WELCOME BACK, CAPTAIN

  >> /rpos_intro_CC-SECURE.rtz

  >> password: ********************

  Union-Class, Fleet Starship; Research Platform and Observation Station (RPOS) configuration. Catalog reference: Psi Upsilon Psi. Nameplate: COAST CITY.

  Summary:

  The U-Star COAST CITY was one of only two RPOS-configured stationary orbital platforms put into service by the Fleet. Although twenty-four such space stations were ordered, production problems with kitset modules for both the COAST CITY and its sister COLLINSPORT resulted in curtailing of the RPOS program by then–Fleet Admiral LAUREN AVALON. After a lead-in time of seven years, the Fleet station program was retooled, resulting in the now ubiquitous Multipurpose Orbital Platforms (MOPs), the STAR CITY, the METROPOLIS, and the [REDACTED] being the first science platform and command center stations put into operation.

  After the COAST CITY and COLLINSPORT were commissioned, a series of [REDACTED] structural failures and robotic system malfunctions during assembly at each site resulted in [REDACTED]. While both stations were completed and activated to schedule, their history made them unpopular tours for Fleet personnel and both facilities were plagued with morale problems and petty crime. Following an [REDACTED]

  The COLLINSPORT was decommissioned after twelve years of service, its demise hastened by a failure of the main power pack and [REDACTED]. Originally designed as a monitoring station and launch point in the Oort cloud for Fleet craft entering and exiting the Home System, the unpowered U-Star was towed to Jovian orbit, where it was disassembled. Components of the station were recycled and reused as part of the helium-3 robotic mining systems in orbit around that planet. For more information, please see /JMC_27s_intro_CC-SECURE.rtz, “History of the Jovian Corporation.”

  The COAST CITY was assembled in a stationary orbit at a distance of 1.2 AU around SHADOW, an asymptotic giant branch technetium star in the constellation of Upsilon. The COAST CITY served a dual role as science base for the study of the star and the properties of its radiated energy and also as a forward warning post against SPIDER aggression in the SHADOW system, as it was believed at one point that the sentient machine race would attempt to harness the unusual properties of the star as part of an attack on Fleet space. This concern proved to be unwarranted and no SPIDER activity was ever recorded in the system. For more information, please see /antag_SPIDER_techspec_high_CC-SECURE.rtz, “Spider high-energy experimentation and special weapons development.”

  The COAST CITY was placed under the command of Commandant PRICE ELBRIDGE, seconded from the PSI-MARINE CORPS on the personal orders of [REDACTED]

  Specifications:

  Station hub

  Diameter: 1,627 meters

  Circumference: 5,112 meters; housing 23 levels of habitable space plus robotic service levels

  Spire

  Length: 2,063 meters (including communication antenna and sensor probe packs)

  Diameter: 200 meters (widest point, housing bridge and command centers [habitable space] plus robotic service levels and computer bays) tapering to 13 meters

  Power pack

  Three Rolls-Royce Dreadnought cold fusion reactors, output 3.9 GW per unit

  Crew complement

  2,200; consisting of crew, executive and scientific personnel, one Marine battalion, and one Psi-Marine company

  “Long way out, sir.”

  Ida looked up from the screen. Sitting in front of him in the shuttle, the pilot didn’t turn around but nodded at the viewscreen that occupied the entire forward wall of the cockpit, wrapping around each side a little to simulate an actual window. Ida let the computer pad rest on his leg and adjusted himself in the narrow seat, the leather beneath him creaking.

  “It sure is,” said Ida. Background reading on his destination forgotten for the moment, he took in the spectacular view.

  The U-Star Coast City was a giant doughnut floating on its side against a starry background bruised purple with the expanded gas cloud that enveloped the Shadow system. The pilot rotated the shuttle, and the Coast City flipped to the horizontal. At this angle, a more natural one that followed the station’s design, Ida could make out the windows of the bridge and other structures familiar from a hundred other platforms. Everything in the Fleet was constructed from the same prefabricated sections, after all; everything from tiny one-man hotseats, used on extended EVAs, to cruisers to the largest star bases. The entire Fleet was modular, allowing for an infinite number of combinations and functions, limited only by the imagination of the Marine-Engineer Corps—which meant that, actually, the vehicles of the Fleet only came in about five different forms. Efficiency was a higher priority than imagination, so really there was no need to mess with tried and tested configurations. And every war machine produced by the Fleet was given the Union-Class Fleet Starship designation, which no doubt made the accountancy and logistics departments of the Earth government happy, but it meant you couldn’t tell what a ship was from just the name. Including the U-Star Coast City, which, in this case, was a space station.

  As familiar as Ida was with Fleet “vehicles,” the Coast City was an older boat, and, as he’d just learned, one of only two of this type assembled, so while the shape was more or less what he expected, the torus was a little fatter, perhaps, and the spire that punched through the center of the hub had antenna extensions that were far longer than standard.

  Ida hadn’t quite seen one like this before, and he’d never seen one being taken apart either. As the curved outer ring of the station moved around in the viewscreen, the shiny solidity of the hub changed to a ragged, torn framework. The superstructure was all still there, leaving the torus and spire shape perfectly intact. But as the shuttle orbited the station, its skeletal innards were revealed. Lights flickered here and there, betraying the progress of construction drones carefully separating plates, girders, bolts, and rivets, making sure not a single stray particle was left floating in space as they repackaged the kitset form of the station back into a series of long, cuboid boxes that stuck like limpets at irregular intervals on the strongest parts of the exposed frame.

  A minute later and the shuttle had returned to the intact half of Coast City, all solid metal and lights and Fleet insignia. Ida saw another shuttle, similar to the one he was currently in, heading away from the docking bay. Even during demolition, Fleet routine held sway; the Shadow system was clearly still being patrolled for Spider activity, the secondary function of any platform.

  The Coast City had primarily been pushed into orbit around Shadow to research the peculiar properties of the star. Ida leaned in toward the shuttle’s curved viewscreen; glancing to the left, he could just see the very edge of the star’s violet corona. He let out a low, long whistle. The light from the star was des
cribed as “toxic” in his briefing and the Fleet wikia reported it as “unusual,” but that was all he knew. Now, seeing it even via the viewscreen, which processed the light as much as possible, he thought he might agree. When he looked back toward the station, his vision flashed purple and he felt a little dizzy and sick, like he’d been standing on the top of something very tall and someone had come by and given him a shove in the small of his back. He blinked for a few seconds and the feeling dissipated.

  “You here on leave, sir?” The pilot’s hands moved over the controls, lining the shuttle up for docking.

  The question surprised Ida. He was in uniform, so he supposed there was no reason why anyone wouldn’t think he was still on active duty if they didn’t know. But this pilot was positively chatty. Ida considered reprimanding him, telling him to focus on his job, which was 90 percent automated. One last little flex of power, perhaps. Then Ida laughed.

  “Sir?” Now the pilot turned his huge fly-eye goggles to his passenger. Ida saw a dozen tiny reflections of himself, then turned back to the screen.

  The Coast City now filled nearly the whole view. On a small display inset into the console that showed the rear, the U-Star Athansor was just a hulking silhouette with a few rows of lights that might have been nothing but far-distant stars. Only the ship’s nameplate, lit in neon red, was any indication that the black mass was an artificial construct.

  Ida clapped a hand on the back of the pilot’s seat, and then quickly removed it, realizing that while the docking procedure was nearly automatic, the pilot probably needed to keep concentrating as they made the final approach. Ida slid the computer pad on top of the console beside him and adjusted his straps.

  “I’m retired,” Ida said. “But I’ve one last duty for the Fleet, signing the final decommission order for this old crate. That and getting some TLC for this thing.” He knocked on his right knee, and the sound came back hard and dead. The pilot nodded, although he wasn’t looking.

  The window was now showing an expanse of metal, tinged purple by the evil light from Shadow. In the center of the metallic wall, an octagonal patch of light allowed them to see into the station’s shuttle hangar.