Dead Space: Martyr (22 page)

He slowed the bathyscaphe as he came up, trying to time it so that the signal would be strongest and Hendricks would be regaining consciousness just at the moment the craft moved into the submarine bay.

Hendricks was groaning, his eyes fluttering, by the time they were fully in. Altman knelt down and undid the ligature that hogtied Hendricks, then undid the rope around his legs but left his hands tied. He unrolled one of the ropes and tore a square of fabric off it, which he tucked into his pocket. Then he helped Hendricks get to his knees.

It was cruel, but he couldn’t think of another way.

“Where’s your father, Hendricks?” he asked.

The man’s eyes focused briefly then moved independently of each other, wandering about the sockets.

“Hendricks,” he said again. He had to hurry. The bay was almost drained down to the catwalk. Soon enough water would be pumped out and the guards would be there. “Where’s your father?”

Hendricks’s eyes focused again and this time stayed focused. “My father,” he said. “He was just right here.”

“We left him down there,” suggested Altman. “We abandoned him.
You
abandoned him.”

For a moment there was no response, and then, abruptly, Hendricks let out an ungodly howl of pain and slammed his head into Altman’s chest. It hurt like hell. Then he fell on top of Altman, slavering, trying to bite his face.

Altman got his hands up against his shoulders and tried desperately to hold him away, watching the man bare his teeth and shake his head like a wild animal. But he was too heavy, was bearing down too hard, his teeth getting closer and closer to Altman’s face. He cried out and pushed out as hard as he could, genuinely terrified now, trying to roll him off but failing.

Just when he thought he couldn’t hold him back any more, the bathyscaphe’s hatch hissed open and a guard dropped in and wrapped an arm around Hendricks’s neck. Altman scrambled back and away, dodging a second guard who had dropped down and scurrying up the ladder to the hatch. There was a group of guards around the hatch, pointing their weapons at him when he came out. He pushed past and, stumbling, rolled off the curve of the bathyscaphe not onto the catwalk but into the water.

He had only a few seconds. Holding his breath, he floundered briefly to the observation porthole, tugging the square of cloth from his pocket and using it to gather up the pale pink swath. Through the porthole he caught a glimpse of Hendricks struggling with the two guards, who had forced him back to the floor. He balled up the sodden cloth and thrust it deep into his pocket and returned to the surface.

He broke to shouts and cries. Hands were immediately there, pulling him onto the catwalk and out of the water. Somebody wrapped a blanket around him.

“Don’t kill Hendricks!” he heard himself shouting. “He doesn’t know what he’s doing!” And then he was hustled out.

38

They let him stop off in his room to get a change of clothing. He managed to slip the rag out of his pocket and force it and the pink substance into an empty water bottle. He secured it in his drawer and then let the men lead him out.

He stripped his clothes off and showered. When he stepped out, he saw that his clothing was gone. When he asked the guards about it, they didn’t answer.

He got dressed as the guards impassively watched. When he was done, they opened the door and gestured him out.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

“Debriefing,” one said.

A few minutes later, he was on the command deck. As soon as he entered, the other people in the room started to clear out. In the end, only he and Markoff were left.

“All right,” said Markoff. “Let’s hear it. Tell me everything.”

He told him almost everything. He mentioned the strange fish, knowing that Markoff would see the vid recording anyway. He told him about the pink swaths but didn’t mention the sample he had retrieved. He told him about the problems with the
MROVs, that they either weren’t receiving their commands or had failed in some other way. He described the progress that had been made. Markoff just nodded.

“What happened with Hendricks?” he asked.

“How’s he doing?”

Markoff shrugged. “Delirious,” he said. “They’re shooting him full of something to calm him down. He keeps talking about his father.”

“He was doing that down there,” Altman said. “He thought he saw his father outside the bathyscaphe. He wanted to let him in.” He gave a wry smile. “I, quite understandably, was opposed to this.”

“I thought Stevens gave him a clean bill of health,” said Markoff.

“He did,” said Altman. “No reason to think otherwise. I thought he was okay most of the way down. He was a friend. I’m sorry this happened to him.”

“He was unstable.”

“No,” said Altman. “I think there’s more to it than that.”

He told Markoff the whole story, only glossing over the end, suggesting that it was Hendricks himself who had wriggled free of his bonds.

“We did a diachronic tracking of the pulse signal,” Altman said. “The strange thing is that it seemed to correspond to Hendricks’s mental decay. When the signal was stronger, he started seeing things, becoming paranoid and violent. When it was weaker, he seemed to be like he normally is. I think the signal changed him.”

Markoff looked at him a long time. “That doesn’t seem possible,” he finally said.

“I know it doesn’t,” said Altman. “But it correlated perfectly. I think the pulse signal does something to the human brain.”

“Why didn’t it do the same thing to you?”

“Who knows?” said Altman. “Maybe I can resist it for some reason. Or maybe it’s doing things that I haven’t managed to notice yet.”

“What do you think it is?” Markoff asked again, just as he had asked weeks before, in Altman’s kitchen.

“I don’t know,” said Altman. “I haven’t even seen it yet. But I can tell you one thing: it scares the living shit out of me.”

They were both silent for a while, lost in their own thoughts. Finally Markoff looked up.

“You’ll have to go down again,” he said.

“Now?”

“Soon. We need to add some equipment to the console so that you can communicate with the MROVs.”

“Funny,” said Altman.

“What’s funny?”

“I was going to suggest doing that,” he said. “Adding something to the console.”

Markoff gave him a quizzical look. “You did suggest it,” he said. “That was one of the first things you said to us. Don’t you remember? Are you all right?”

I must have been more rattled than I realized,
Altman thought. He thought about how to answer Markoff, rapidly decided the best strategy was to ignore it.

“As long as it’s not with Hendricks, I’m willing. I don’t mind going down alone.”

“Not alone,” said Markoff. “I want you to take a few trips down, we’ll try a different person each time.”

“How do I know they’re not going to react like Hendricks did? I was lucky with him. I may not be lucky next time.”

“You’ve become more important than I expected you to be,”
Markoff said. “You know how to run the bathyscaphe and take the proper measurements. Which means I’m counting on you. I need you to do this.”

“And in exchange?”

Markoff gave him a level stare. “No ‘and in exchange.’ You’ll do it.”

“Is that a threat?” Altman asked.

“When I’m threatening you, you’ll know.”

Altman closed his eyes. If it wasn’t a threat, it wasn’t far from one. But he knew he didn’t really have a choice.

“All right,” he said. “But I want a tranquilizer gun just in case. And I want whoever goes down with me to be strapped to his chair.”

“Agreed,” said Markoff. He stood and made a show of shaking Altman’s hand. “Thank you for your cooperation. I’ll be in touch.”

39

Hendricks woke up in a strange place, some sort of medical facility. The last thing he could remember was being on the bathyscaphe. He and Altman were going down, and then his head had started to hurt so much, he could hardly stand it. After that, it all felt like a dream. There had been some kind of problem. He remembered Altman speaking calmly to him, remembered taking readings, but also remembered the feel of the floor. He must have fallen. Maybe they hit something.

He felt groggy. Parts of his body were numb, and parts of his brain felt like they had been torn out. There was a tube running into his forearm. Maybe they were experimenting on him.

He looked around. He was the only one there.

He moved furtively out of bed, peeling the tape off the tube in his arm and pulling it out. It burned coming out. He dropped it, left it dripping beside the bed, and stumbled to the door.

It was locked.

He stayed there, staring at the handle.

After a while he heard the sound of footsteps in the hall outside. He rushed back into his bed and half closed his eyes.

Through his eyelashes he watched the door open. A woman came in, dressed in white, carrying a holoboard. She walked
straight to his bed. His mind pictured him running out the door at the far end of the room, but in the end his body did not move.

“Hello,” said the woman. “How are we today?”

He didn’t say anything, still pretending to be asleep.

“Oh, dear. You’ve torn your IV out again,” she said. “We can’t have that, can we?”

She bent down for the end of the tube. It was at that moment that his body decided to reach up and grab her wrist. True, he was in his body, was watching through his eyes, but it was doing things he wasn’t telling it to do. He wasn’t the one controlling it, which meant there must be someone else in there with him.

As soon as he thought that, it felt like everything was happening at a little distance, like he’d sunk deeper into his body, like he’d never be in control of the body again. And yet he could still feel everything. He watched the hand holding the nurse’s arm pull her on top of him like she was a doll. He felt the jaw opening and the teeth closing around the nurse’s neck, and then a series of wet sounds as the neck burst open and warm blood spilled down across his chin and his own neck. Her wrist, the one he was holding, he saw, was broken, crushed, and the arm attached to it was no longer sitting in the socket right. She was trying to gasp for breath, but there was a hole in her windpipe now and all that came out was a hissing and a mist of blood. Her face was there just above him, her eyes terrified for a moment but almost immediately becoming loose in their orbits as she lost consciousness.

A few seconds later, after his body had done a few more things to her, he was certain she was dead. If he’d been asked to describe how exactly it had happened, he wouldn’t have been able to say, though he was fairly certain he had something to do with it. Or not him, exactly: his body. One moment she was still alive,
even if just barely, and then there was an awful blur of things happening. When they stopped, she was dead.

He padded softly to the door and tried it. It was still locked. How was that possible? She’d come through it, hadn’t she?

She must have had a key. He shambled back to her corpse in search of her pockets. But he couldn’t find any pockets. She was too much of a mess. Pushing his bloody hands through the sopping remains of clothing and flesh, he finally found something hard that wasn’t a bone.

He had just straightened up, bloody key in hand, when he realized that he wasn’t alone in the room after all. There was a shape there, in the shadows of the last bed.

“Who is it?” he said.

Don’t you recognize me?
a voice said.

He went a little closer, then closer still. It was as if the person was both there and not there at the same time. And then, suddenly, he felt a piercing pain in his head. He staggered. When he looked back up, he knew who it was.

“Dad,” he said.

Good to see you, Jason,
he said.
Come sit down. I want to have a serious talk with you.

“What about, Dad?”

But his dad wasn’t where he thought he was. He turned around and found him in another bed.

We’re failing, Jason,
his dad said.
You should leave that thing down where you found it. Convergence is not the only thing that matters.

“Convergence?” asked Hendricks, then had to search frantically for his father, who somehow had moved again.

They want us all to become one, son.
He gave a mournful smile, shaking his head.
Can you imagine?
he said.

“Who’s they, Dad?”

We have to be very careful or there will be nothing left of us.

Then his dad smiled. It was a beautiful smile, like he used to give Jason back when he was very young, just a few years old. Jason had forgotten that smile, but now it all came flooding back.

Tell them, Jason,
he said.
Tell everyone.

“I will, Dad,” he whispered. “I will.”

There was some noise behind him, but he didn’t want to look away from his father’s face. If he did, he feared he’d never find it again. Then there was shouting. He ignored it as long as he could, but it was too powerful. He turned around and moved toward it.

There was a roar and a flash and he was suddenly on the ground, staring straight up at the ceiling.
I should get up and tell them,
he thought, but when he tried, he couldn’t move.
I’ll just lie here,
he thought. “Dad?” he whispered, but there was no answer.

40

“Can I have a copy of this?” asked the icthyologist, watching the vid.

Altman shrugged. “Sure,” he said. “What do you think?”

“I’ve never seen anything quite like it,” he said. “Those strange hornlike projections, I don’t have a precedent for those. You may have discovered a new species. Or it may be the result of a mutation of some kind. I can ask around, see if anybody’s seen anything like it, but I never have.”

“So, it’s unusual.”

“Very unusual.”

“Well?” Altman asked. He was in Skud’s lab, the water bottle with him. The pinkish swath had been extracted from it and placed into a specimen tube. From this, Skud had taken a tiny sample, running a genetic test.