Cold Sleep, page 5
Again, Zed takes the lead and a childlike part of me screams we’re about to come face to face with the killer. Whispers we’ll find the engine room covered in torn wiring and broken circuits and know we’re doomed to never slow down. Makes me shake myself and give a literal mental shout of Get a grip! Zed had told me sabotage of the engines isn’t likely. Whatever had come over the killer—whether it’s a part of his mission or he’s lost it and gone space-happy—we’ll deal with him. I raise the metallic tube of the darter almost squeezing the trigger as the airlock wheezes open.
Nothing.
Zed steps through with me following him close behind. The connecting corridor’s clear. No sound from the medibay. No sound from ahead where the cavernous engine room is lit by the faint glow of the ion drive. Without asking, Zed hits the lights. Untouched. No sign of anyone having been in it since we’d entered cold-sleep. No trail of blood. No damaged wiring. Nothing.
“Where the fuck is he?” Zed says.
“Rad suit missing?”
“No, all here. If he came this way and climbed into the engines, well, that’d sure as shit explain why he’s been silent for so long. Still, I better check the bolt hole.” He starts down the half-kilometer long walkway over the ion engine.
“But we heard him doing something,” I say. “All the clanging and screeching can’t have been for nothing.”
As if on cue another heavy booming comes, this time from behind me. It sounds much closer. More like something heavy hitting the deck than someone striking something metal.
“So much for the checking the CO2, the psycho’s still in one of the cargo bays,” I say.
There’s another crash and another.
“I’ve had enough of this bullshit,” Zed says, his face darkening. Great. Just what I need—one moment he’s flapping, the next losing his goddamn temper.
Before I can pull him back, he pushes past me and races to the airlock. In the main corridor, deep booms reverberate every few seconds. Banging on the light, Zed charges in. Another sound comes from our right.
“Third door down?” I ask.
“One way to find out.”
Zed dashes to the door with me taking up position to one side with the darter ready to go.
“On three.”
“Just open the fucking door, Zed.”
He hits the control and the door slides open. Dull red emergency lighting winks on.
“Can’t do better than that,” Zed says.
“It’s good enough.”
We move together into the compartment. The arching vault, like each of the ten on board, contains ten thousand caskets. A colonist frozen on the edge of death imprisoned in every one of them.
The caskets are arranged so some follow the curve of the compartment while others hang above our heads, held in place by magnetic fields and thick chains which jangle and clank when touched. In the dim light, I catch sight of movement ahead of us, maybe forty meters away.
With a booming crash a casket drops from above, landing flat on the deck. The force of the impact strong enough to feel through my feet. All around it other caskets lie scattered. The steel meshwork of the decks glistened in the low light.
Movement away and to the left—I jerk the darter up, tracking the figure I can barely make out in the gloom. The beam from my penlight shows me a man in a cold-sleep wearall. No hesitation—squeeze the darter’s tube. It coughs out a flechette, then the man-shape is on us.
There’s a vague sense of Zed struggling with our attacker then a surge of pain flashes through me as something grazes my cheek. Falling back, I try to fire again but it’s too dark and chaotic to see where Zed ends and the killer begins. The gasping sound must’ve come from Zed, the sort of short panting of someone fighting for their life. I’m all too aware of my own rapid breathing and the burn of adrenaline. I can’t shoot—I want to run and cower in the darkest reaches of the ship, but the struggling men are between the door and me—no hope of getting past and out.
Aiming the penlight at the fight, I try to find an opening to shoot. There’s a thud, and a hiss of liquid under high pressure. A face rises into the wavering circle of my light. What I see transfixes me, so I freeze when I should fire. A face—top half covered in the flame retardant foam, bottom half slathered with blood. No way to know if it’s Zed or the killer until the mouth opens wide in a scream and through the blood reveals where there should have been teeth, instead there’s only a cluster of broken shards of glass jammed into the gums, reflecting the light with a bluish tint even through all the blood. Then the face moves out of the light and Zed gives a pained grunt.
The door slides open, the light from the central corridor blinding me. A silhouette moves across the rectangle of light but disappears before there’s any chance to tell if it’s Zed or the killer. Gripping the darter and ready to fire, I play the penlight over the form between the door and me. There’s a lot of blood—smeared all over the deck and the dark fabric of the figure’s wearall. A dark hand gropes towards me, nearly making me fire a dart but the hand is shaking—seeking help not grabbing for my throat.
“Zed, you alright? Talk to me.”
He groans. “Fucker bit my neck, I managed to pull him off, hit him with the extinguisher but I’m bleeding. Bad.”
“Hold on,” I say.
Shining my light on his face and neck shows blood caking him but no sign of the kind of injuries to explain the amount of it. There’s a ragged wound near his neck but more on the meat between neck and shoulder. It’s bleeding but not with the kind of spray or pumping I’d expect from a severed artery or vein.
“You’ll live,” I say. “I think.”
“Help me up,” Zed raises his other arm and I grab it, heaving him to his feet. The expression on his face is near invisible in the dim light, but his breath is still coming in desperate gasps.
“Can you stand?” I ask.
“Yeah… yeah, I can,” he says, holding one hand to his wound.
“At least we know it wasn’t a naukara or a contract killer, right?”
“What?”
“Well, you fought him off,” I say. “If he was enhanced, you’d have lasted about two seconds.”
“No, but he was strong. Real strong. Had to use everything I got to keep him off me. But what I don’t get is there was almost nothing to him, he felt like skin and bones.”
“Thought I’d hit him with the darter, but I must have missed.”
“No, the fucker had something sticking out of his arm, I guess there wasn’t any tranq or toxin in those darts after all.”
“I don’t believe it. Anyway, you see his teeth?”
“Are you kidding? I fucking felt them.”
“No,” I say. “That’s not what I mean. He’d done something to them, looked like he’d ripped out his teeth and shoved broken shards of what looked like glass in their place.”
“You mean it looked recent?”
“Yeah. Nothing like cyber-surgery to give him fangs; this looked like he’d done it to himself.”
“I told you. I fucking told you. It’s the cold-sleep. Something’s gotten into him—he’s tripping balls on contaminated tranq or plain out of his gourd. Unless…”
“What?”
“Well, you’ve heard the stories. Maybe… maybe he didn’t come back from suspension. Maybe something else did.”
I splutter with disbelief that he’d even say it. “Spacer’s tales. We’ve both been through cold-sleep what, a dozen times? You wake up stiff and sore or you don’t wake up.”
“No, come on. You’ve heard the stories. And you’ve had the dreams when they’re putting you under. The bright tunnel of light. The voices.”
“Cut the bullshit out. OK? You no more believe in that crap than I do.”
“No, not really. But… I mean, it does sound like this thing I’d heard about…”
I look at him, making sure my face says what a crock of shit fantasy he’s indulging in.
He looks down. “Yeah, You’re right. But have you thought maybe the QI virus Stengler gave us was meant for more than our little job?”
“What are you getting at?” I ask.
“Like maybe we were meant to be a cover for something else going on? Like maybe they found a way to trigger the madness mid-trip.”
“This sounds almost as paranoid as the ghost stories, Zed.”
“No, listen. The tales all talk about the ships where someone’s revived and they’re changed. Gone… like someone else, like something else was in them.” He catches my scowl and stutters on. “Or… or brain damage or some shit. Then they kill themselves or go schizoid, start trying to open the airlocks or some other loco shit. Well, no passenger is meant to be woken during a flight. Maybe it’s something you can trigger. You know, program a virus to wake him without doing it right. Make him go fucknuts crazy. Space-happy killer is kind of deniable, right? So Stengler…”
“Stop it,” I shout. “I don’t give a shit about the reasons. We can work them out later. You’ve hurt him and we need to find him and finish the job. We’ll work out if Stengler fucked us over when we’re done and you can come up with all the thermo-foil cap-wearing, superstitious spacer bullshit you want. Deal?”
“Aye, ma’am.” He doesn’t salute and there’s no need to see his face to know the sullen, dangerous expression he’s wearing.
“It’s a man. Gone crazy maybe. But still only a man. Not a cybernetic killer or face-shifting assassin.” I deliberately avoid using the term Ghost-Face to forestall any more mumbo-jumbo. “We need to get him somewhere the lights are on and hit him with all four of the remaining darts. If that doesn’t work then we fight together, I’ll try to hold him while you bash his head in.”
“But…”
“No more buts. We’re going after him, right?”
“Don’t you want to see what he was doing with those caskets first?”
“No.”
“Kara, come on. I need to get patched up before we can go after him. There’ll be a medikit in here—we can take a look at what he was doing while you seal my neck back up. Please, I’m bleeding here.”
“Okay,” I sigh. “We patch you up; then we kill him.”
I lead Zed to the emergency locker, get a medikit out and slap wound sealant on his neck.
“This is getting to be a regular thing,” I say.
Zed doesn’t answer. He is staring over my shoulder, penlight in his free hand moving back and forth while I treat his injury.
“What is it?”
“Look,” he says.
The tone in his voice is like nothing I’ve heard from him before. Makes me turn slowly, reluctantly.
Framed in the small circle of light from his penlight, the deck around the fallen caskets is thick with blood. A wide pool of it. From this angle, the casket’s positions no longer look random—they’re arranged around the pool of blood. I shine my own light over them. Each of the caskets is blank—they don’t have the sophisticated viability monitors of the VIP section, only a red or green light. No chance of interfering if one starts fading out. None of these caskets has a light on. Cut from power, they’re defrosting, the people inside no longer viable. But where did the blood come from?
“Lights are off, Kara.”
“Yeah, poor bastards, nothing we can do for them.”
“No. Light should be red; every casket has its own capacitor so they can be moved easily. Only goes off if they’re empty.”
“What?”
“Where do you think all the blood came from?”
I stalk forward to the nearest casket—its seal is broken. Faint traces of condensing air vapor waft from it as my approach displaces the air. Reaching out to the lid of the casket, the cold bites into my flesh. I ignore the discomfort and pull the lid open. Inside is soaked with blood but of the occupant, there’s no sign.
“What do you see?” Zed asks.
“Whoever was in here has gone—there’s a lot of blood and no body.”
“Gone. Gone where?”
“Don’t know,” I say. “I have a really bad feeling about this. I think maybe it’s time we woke the Captain and screw the consequences.”
“Whoa, Kara. You know what she’ll do to us!”
“No, I’m not sure. When she sees what’s going on here, I don’t think she’ll care.”
“You’re crazy! I ain’t diving out of an airlock. Not for you, not for anyone.”
Something else catches my eye. Part of the casket has been pulled away, exposing where the optical matrix of the casket’s basic computer should sit—a plate of glass with crystalline circuitry. What little remains is shattered…
The teeth in the mouth of the man who’d attacked us.
As I move closer, my foot kicks something that chitters across the floor. Focusing the beam from my torch on it, reveals what looks like a mouthful of teeth scattered across the deck. Some have gone into the pool of blood, but each has left its own tail of red—comets trailing blood instead of ice.
“What the fuck?” I breathe.
Zed steps forward. “I got the strangest feeling. Like we’re being watched.”
“We’ve got to get out of here. I don’t think the man that attacked you is the same as whoever—whatever killed the young woman.”
“What?”
“I think there are more than one of them. We’ve got to wake the Captain—if we can even get to her.”
There’s a rasping sound like metal grinding on metal. It almost sounds like laughter.
“Run,” I shout.
We bolt for the door. All around us come echoing footsteps. I don’t stop, don’t look back. Zed is bigger than me, stronger, and probably faster but he’s injured—maybe more than the neck wound. I make it to the door ahead of him and pound the control to open it. As the door slides up and bright light engulfs me, Zed cries out.
Glance back—six figures surround him, one larger than the others. Can’t see much of them with my light-blinded eyes but I can see the terror on Zed’s face.
“I’m sorry,” I say and pound the door control. It slides down and the desperate scream of the man who’d been my lover and partner in crime cuts off as the seal is made.
CHAPTER 4
* * *
No time. Yanking open the control, I rip out the wiring in handfuls. Maybe I’m not as skilled as Zed, but any spacer’d know enough to break the connection to main power.
Pounding comes from the other side of the door—there are only moments before they find the manual release. I pull out the manual crank on my side and wedge the penlight into the mechanism then yank the handle. It grates but doesn’t move. I step back and kick it, nearly breaking my foot through my soft-soled deck-shoes. Still the crank won’t move. They’re rattling it on the other side. The handle bobs but the penlight’s stopping the mechanism from turning. It’ll hold, for now.
I sprint down the corridor to the pressure door between the core of Charon and the command section. A trail of blood leads all the way to the end. Red handprints cover the control panel. Darter raised and ready, I press the door release and wait. Behind me the rattling of the manual release is getting louder as the penlight works all too swiftly loose.
The door finishes cycling and, with a creak-hiss of equalizing pressure, slides aside. Lighting in the short corridor is still on. The trail of blood leads past the VIP boat to the fore compartment.
“Please don’t let me be too late.”
The rattling sound behind me becomes a grinding. I dive through the airlock. Don’t stop to look but seal it and sprint towards the forward pressure door. As I approach, the door slides back. I skitter to a stop, slipping and landing on my backside. A thin man shuffles through, into the corridor. He’s soaked in blood and has white fire suppressant foam smeared across his face, blending in pink wetness with the blood. Opening his mouth to shriek, he lurches towards me.
I fire the darter over and over as he comes. Four darts hit him, two in the chest, one in the throat and one straight into his right eye. Though his body jerks at the impacts, he doesn’t slow. His hands are held open—claws ready to grasp me.
Scrambling backwards as he bears down on me, both my hands are raised to ward him off. Mouth agape, he presses down on me, blood dripping from torn gums pierced with shards of glass. Coming closer and closer.
One moment I can smell his breath, sharp with a coppery taint. The next, a hot wave of fluid covers my face and his body slumps over me.
“Get her up!” Captain Dominguez’s voice.
Wiping my eyes with a hand, I clear the man’s blood away. M’Benga’s frowning face looms over me. She pulls the corpse off and grabs me by the front of my wearall, hauling me to my feet. She seems huge to me then, though I tower over her when I manage to stand upright.
The Captain fixes me with hard eyes which give away no emotion.
“Lieutenant-Commander Rozanski, are more of our passengers awake?”
“Aye, ma’am,” I say and remember my salute.
“Where?”
“Cargo compartment three, Ma’am.”
“How many?”
“At least six.”
“Warrant Officer Hong?”
“Presumed dead, ma’am.”
“While M’Benga and I clear up this mess, have a think about the story you want to tell me. Make it a good one, Kara. Make it fit the facts because if I find you’ve endangered my ship, you’ll be taking a walk out of the nearest airlock.” She sighs. “Goddamn revenants.”
“Ma’am?” What is she saying? “You know what they are, ma’am?”
“Every time we go into cold-sleep, we die. All of us. You know this, I’m sure.”
Of course. You don’t get to my rank without some idea. But I can’t process this. Sounds like… no, she can’t believe such horseshit, can she?
“When we’re revived at the end of the journey, sometimes, there are those who aren’t viable for revival—they don’t wake up. Sometimes, what comes back isn’t the person who was there before. Sometimes it’s something else entirely.”
“But…” I want to challenge this Spacer woo-woo bullshit. To call her out on it, because there’s no way a rational human being can believe in this kind of possession. Not unless they’ve suffered their own cold-sleep induced brain damage. I want to tell her it has to be a problem with the tranq, damn Company short selling us or offloading a bad batch. I want to tell her it’s casket failure, some disease, or hell, even a conspiracy. Tell her one maniac who self-mutilates can give all the other loons the same idea. Tell her there’s no such things as ghosts, or demons, or spirits. Not on Earth and not in the void of space.
