The Void (9 page)

“I'm not a shrimp!” She giggled on queue.

He, or the synthetic, rubbed his hands through Emily's curly auburn hair. He felt the resistance of each strand and its coarse, scratchy texture, as clear as if he were there himself.

“Emily?” he heard his wife call.

“Momma, it's Daddy!” she squealed, with the unbridled enthusiasm of the young and innocent.

Cyrus raised himself up and looked at his wife. She put her hands on her hips and smiled back, though he saw the same fear on her face as always. It was almost cruel to make these calls before the jump, the most dangerous time of all. How many had made their last call this way, one foot home, one in the unknown?

They chatted for a few minutes about nothing. It was awkward, as it always was. His wife had never gotten used to the synthetics, and even though a customized image of Cyrus was projected onto its skin (one he had designed himself, with slightly less heft and a little more muscular definition than the real thing), it still made her uneasy. But it didn't matter. He couldn't keep her long. And he didn't have much to say. Nothing but that he loved them and he hoped he would be home soon.

*  *  *

Rebecca sat at a table, staring down at the latest communiqué Jack Crawford had received from the command. The same blurry image of a strange, arrow-shaped ship as before, no real information except a guess based on its configuration. And its location, just beyond the Anubis system. She took a deep breath and looked up at him as he walked over to her.

“I think we should tell them.”

Crawford didn't look surprised. Setting down the cup of tea he had made for Rebecca and sitting across from her, he leaned forward, his hands flat on the table.

“And why do you say that?”

She hesitated. It had taken her all morning to work up the courage to say it, but she had expected a different response. Jack had a reputation for never straying from the mission, for sticking to the present parameters at all costs. It was one of the reasons his assistance was valued above many other agents. It was also a sign of the importance central command placed on this mission that he was here, with her. But now, even though she was suggesting they break protocol, Jack seemed entirely too calm. Almost disinterested. She could have handled yelling. She wasn't prepared for reasonable.

“Well,” she said, “they seem like good people, the crew, and no one likes to be deceived. We both know they will find out eventually. You know how they are going to react. Why not tell them now? We will need them, Jack. I can't do this alone.”

Jack leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. “I guess telling you this is not up for debate won't suffice.”

“No, Jack. No it won't. Because you know I'm right.”

“No, Rebecca, I don't. You know our orders.” She started to protest, but he held up a hand. “Look, we've been over this a hundred times. The computer will drop out of warp automatically when it reads a derelict ship in normal space. This is a commercial transport. There is a very good chance that they will want to salvage the vessel. Then the crew doesn’t have to know anything. We wait till they deliver the ship to Riley. They receive their salvage award, and unknown to them—we get the ship. The plan is flawless.”

“But, Jack . . .”

“Rebecca, please. We've been on this ship for less than a week, and you already think you owe these people something?”

Rebecca had worked with Jack at the agency for five years. He had not been the first person in her life to tell her she was too emotional, but his words had cut the deepest. Jack was an operator, a cold man, who accomplished his goals through brute force and cunning. He had abandoned friendships and more, when necessary, and he certainly didn't care about anyone on this ship.

But Rebecca was different. She fell easily and fast. She probably did care too much, and in the few days she had spent on the
Chronos
, she had made friends whom she wasn't ready to manipulate.

“Look,” he said, his voice softening, “just tell yourself you are following orders. And remember that this opportunity fell into your lap. We do this and you're out. You were never cut out for it anyway.”

She might have taken it as an insult, but it wasn't meant that way. She
wasn't
cut out for this, and she couldn't say that fact upset her too much. Especially now.  

*  *  *

“Captain, this is the bridge.”

“Go ahead, bridge.”

“We are a go. Ready to set the countdown.”

“We'll be waiting.”

The comm channel went silent and Rebecca took a deep breath. It was happening. Right now. In ten minutes, according to the soft female voice (why were they always women?) that echoed through the chamber, the engines would fire and it would begin.

The door opened and Aidan walked in. He looked over at Rebecca and nodded. There was no time for sentimentality. Aidan's pod was directly across from hers. He sat inside and then lay down. There were eight minutes remaining.

A hundred different, random thoughts ran through her head. The pod was remarkably comfortable, though she wished she had a bigger pillow. She was afraid she wouldn't sleep, though she knew she’d be drugged. She wondered what she'd dream. What if she couldn't take it? What if these were the last sane thoughts she ever had?

Five minutes. Her breathing was fast and shallow. She was sweating. She was starting to panic. In a few more seconds, she would lose it. Then she was likely to leap from where she lay and just run down the corridors of the ship until the warp engines fired and she really did lose her mind.

Then a cooling calm wafted over her. Her heart rate slowed. She felt like she was floating. Her rational mind knew that the computer had read a spike in her vital signs and reacted, dosing her with just enough morphine to cause her not to care one whit about what was soon to happen. She didn't resist.

At three minutes, the glass domes that covered the pods lowered and locked themselves in place. At two, there was a sweet smell, a gentle, fruity breeze that kissed at her face. She smiled and felt her body rock back and forth, though in reality it didn't move. She thought to summers on the back porch of her house in Pensacola, evenings where she would climb in the hammock that her father had strung from one end of the veranda to the other.

On those cool nights as the wind would blow in off the bay, she would listen to the birds, the crickets, and the cicadas. Sometimes her father would sit in a small, wicker chair across from her and read. They didn't speak, for in those moments it was enough to be together. The silence and the peace was something to be treasured. It was a place she always felt warm and safe. A feeling she had never really felt since, until now.

These were the emotions that stirred within her on that day, as the computer counted down and the world faded. She fought against sleep, not because she feared it, but because she didn't want to leave this moment behind.

At ten seconds, her eyes fluttered closed. “Five seconds” was the last thing she heard. The computer continued dutifully.

Five,

four,

three,

two,

one.

The words echoed through the long hallways and darkened corridors of the otherwise silent ship, though there was no one there to hear them.

Chapter 7

Rebecca was standing on a street, one she had never seen before. Her tawny hair hung loose and straight over her shoulders instead of twisted up in the back like she preferred. She was barefoot and a white cotton dress clung to her body. It was an Easter dress but it was not spring, not here. 

Rebecca gazed down a cobblestone road that was more like a corridor. There were buildings on either side. Not tall ones, but more like the row houses and storefronts she had seen on fall visits with her father to his native New England. They were strange, built wall to wall, no alleyways or sidewalks between them. It was that way as far as she could see, until the road curved right, a quarter of a mile beyond.

She couldn't remember how she'd got here and she had no recollection of walking down this road. No memory, she realized, until she came to this very spot. She turned around, determined to retrace her steps but what she saw froze her in place. There was only darkness behind her. Just a flat, impossible wall of blackness.

It was as if an ink-black curtain had fallen between where she stood and whatever was behind. She followed that Stygian wall to where it seemed to terminate on her right side, slicing in half what had been a local pharmacy sometime in the distant past. The same had happened on the other side to a diner. “Bottomless Coffee” a sign read, though whatever price the place had charged was lost to the darkness.

Rebecca wanted to panic but her rational mind would not allow it. “There's always an explanation,” she whispered to herself. When she didn't believe it she said it out loud. Then a desire struck her, one that in another setting she might have called mad. She raised her hand toward the ebony wall, extending her index finger. Closer and closer, until she was but an inch away.

A voice thundered in her mind. “No!” She jerked her hand away and turned her back to the darkness, determined not to look at it again. From somewhere behind her, the wind blew, lifting her hair, and with it, the pale white fabric that covered her. It seemed to her that the air was colder than it should have been and she shivered. Dead leaves swirled in crackling vortexes as the wind thundered down the road and away. Rebecca started to walk.

She looked at the storefronts and row houses on either side of her. She had seen images like this before, but only once, earlier in her career. It was the job of a warp engineer to twist the fabric of space. Maybe even to break it, depending on whom you asked. That was both an awesome power and an awesome responsibility, so everyone in her field was required to visit the Exclusionary Zone, a fifty-square mile parcel of forbidden and forgotten land in north-central Pennsylvania before they could receive their degree.

The town of Fiddler's Green had once been there. In fact, it was there still, dominated by the great cooling towers in the distance of the NuCo Nuclear Power Plant. But it wasn't the plant that had brought Rebecca and her fellows there.

What was left of Diego Quantum was located a mile from the reactor, the only power plant in the country that produced enough energy to power the quantum accelerator buried beneath five square miles of once-fertile Pennsylvania soil. It was there that they journeyed, like penitents on a pilgrimage, to stand upon the platform that jutted out over the blackest abyss she had ever seen.

The black hole would have swallowed the Earth, devouring land, sea, cities and towns were it not for the massive electromagnetic field generators that held it suspended between earth and sky, fed by the nuclear power plant, its sole purpose to provide the immense amount of energy that, if interrupted, would release the beast that slept in their midst.

The people of the town had been evacuated so quickly that everything was left behind, from merchandise in store windows to food on dinner tables. The people had been told they could return, of course. That was a lie. The only people that visited Fiddler's Green now were scientists like her, either studying the destruction or being reminded that technology giveth as well as taketh away.

That's what these buildings recalled to her mind. They were devoid of life or purpose, frozen in time from a century before. But they were out of sorts somehow, as if randomly thrown together by a city planner who had never quite mastered his profession. Pharmacies next to apartments next to feed stores. Three diners in a row, all identical, all broken down. Shattered window fronts and collapsed-in doors.

Rebecca had been walking for what seemed like hours and yet the orange glow of the setting sun never faded. Maybe it was always so, but the dim sun did nothing to illuminate the darkness within the buildings she passed. It remained thick and impenetrable, just like the shroud that had seemed to cover her exit before. Whatever existed beyond the broken windows and doors of the structures on either side of her remained a mystery she had no intention of exploring.

She was scared. The fear had crept into her bones the minute she opened her eyes. The silence—broken only by the leaves being crushed between her bare feet and the cobblestones or crackling in the constant breeze—chilled her more than an icy wind ever could. She wanted nothing more than to see another living person, but the sensation of being watched was so powerful it made her tremble. Yet it wasn't the shrouded gazes of hidden observers that made her hair stand on end—it was the whispers.

At first, she blamed the breeze. A trick of swirling wind through broken glass. In her heart, though, she knew.

Some of the voices were subtle, others harsh and coarse. They came from the stores and the shops. From those who watched just beyond the light. There were too many to make out and whatever they said became jumbled together and distorted. But she heard some words. One in particular.

“Rebecca!”

Her name, over and over and over. Called and cried and cursed. Screamed at times, if one can scream in a whisper. Running into each other. Doubling over. Rising in a crescendo and dying into a denouement. The whispers grew in both number and intensity. Elevated to such an unintelligible roar that she raised her hands to cover her ears, but it didn't help. The whispers weren't coming from without. They were in her own head.

Ding,
ding!

The sound of the bell on a child's bicycle would have stopped her heart from shock, had the voices not disappeared in the same instant. She didn't have time to turn before a girl rode by on a pink bicycle, white streamers caught up in the breeze as her bike bumped along the cobblestone street. Rebecca's mouth hung agape as she watched her ride by in a blue jumper and white sneakers, brown hair in pigtails.