Dead Space: Martyr (7 page)

There was, from time to time, the flash of a fish through their running lights, though as they descended farther and farther, this became more and more rare. Mostly it was just the two of them in the cramped vessel, breathing each other’s air, waiting, just waiting.

His head hurt. It seemed like it was always hurting these days. He turned slightly in his seat and cast a brief glance at Dantec, who was staring at him, with steady eyes.

“What is it?” asked Hennessy.

“What’s what?” asked Dantec.

Hennessy turned back.
That guy’s enough to freak anyone out,
he thought. It seemed to get even hotter. The air became even more oppressive and difficult to breathe.

Another hundred meters. He’d never considered how small it was inside the F/Seven. But now that they were descending and the instruments didn’t need much attention, that was all he could think about. He was sweating. It was really pouring off him, buckets of it. He felt as if he could drown in his own sweat.

He laughed.

“What?” asked Dantec.

He laughed again. He couldn’t help it; he knew it was absurd to think of drowning in your own sweat, but what if it happened? It was absurd, but all of this was absurd.

“Take a deep breath and get a hold of yourself,” said Dantec.

He knew Dantec was right. The last thing he wanted was to dissolve into hysteria here, in a craft hardly bigger than a winter coat, miles from help. No, he couldn’t do that, no. But then, there it came, another chuckle.

He heard Dantec’s seat belt click off and then suddenly the man was there beside him, leaning on the instrument panel, the bathyscaphe listing slightly for just a moment before correcting itself.

He chuckled again and Dantec reached out and clamped his hand around his throat. Suddenly he couldn’t breathe.

“Listen,” said Dantec. “We can do this two ways. We can do it with you alive or we can do it with you dead. It doesn’t matter to me which way we do it.”

He struggled, but Dantec was too strong. He had never felt anything like it, had never been so afraid. He was beginning to black out, red spots blotting out his vision. He kept gulping for air, but getting nothing.

Finally, when he was just on the verge of passing out, Dantec let go, gave him a long hard stare, and slowly returned to his seat as if nothing had happened. Hennessy sucked in air, panting, massaging his throat.

“All right now,” asked Dantec, his tone flat. Less a question than a command.

“Yes,” Hennessy said, and was surprised to find he did feel a little better, a little more in control of himself. Though his head now throbbed even worse than before.

Hennessy checked the controls. They were still on course. Had Dantec’s actions really been necessary? It was just a little giggle after all, nothing to get upset about. But Dantec had overreacted, had made a big thing of it. Someone could have gotten hurt. What had Tanner been thinking, confining Hennessy to this sinking coffin with a madman? Maybe Dantec was stronger, maybe Hennessy couldn’t do anything now, but let him get back on land and he’d know what to do. He’d file a formal complaint. He’d go to Tanner and tell him about Dantec’s behavior and demand the fellow’s dismissal. And if Tanner wasn’t willing to do anything, he’d go over his head. He’d keep filing complaints until he’d gone to the very top, to Lenny Small himself. Surely President Small was a reasonable man. And if even Mr. Small wouldn’t listen, then he’d show them all. He’d take a gun and he’d—

“A thousand meters,” said Dantec.

Hennessy started guiltily, the thoughts dissolving. “A thousand meters,” he repeated. He noticed a tremor in his own voice, but not too bad. Maybe Tanner wouldn’t notice. He put the vidlink through.

“Mothership,” he said. “Come in, mother.”

Tanner’s voice crackled in, weaker now. His image was present but less clear, eaten away at the edges.

“Here, F/Seven,” said Tanner. “Still reading you.”

“One thousand meters,” he said. “Seals good, instruments good, no problems to report.”

“Very good,” said Tanner. “Proceed.”

They kept descending. It seemed even slower than before.

“Everything okay at your end?” Hennessy asked Dantec.

“Fine,” said Dantec. “And for you?”

Hennessy nodded. When he did, it felt like his brain was rubbing up against the walls of his skull, getting slightly bruised.

“Is the oxygen okay?” he asked.

“You just asked if everything was okay and I already told you it was,” said Dantec. “
Everything
included the oxygen.”

“Oh,” said Hennessy. “Right.”

He was silent for a while, watching the water illuminated by their running lights. Nothing alive anymore, or if there was, he wasn’t seeing it. Floating through a dark, undifferentiated world. It was like his dream, he suddenly realized, which struck him as a very bad thing.

“I have a headache,” he said, as much to hear the sound of a voice as anything else.

Dantec said nothing.

“Do you have a headache, too?” asked Hennessy.

“As a matter of fact, I do,” Dantec said, turning to him. “I’ve had a headache for days now.”

“So have I,” said Hennessy.

Dantec just nodded. “Stop talking,” he said.

Hennessy nodded back. He sat there, staring out at the blank expanse surrounding them and their craft, listening to the creaking of the hull as the pressure increased. There was something else, some other sound he was hearing. What was it? Almost nothing at all, but it was there still, wasn’t it? Just loud enough to hear but not loud enough to interpret. What could it be?

“Do you hear something?” he asked Dantec.

“I told you to stop talking,” the other said.

Did that mean he heard it or not? Why couldn’t he just answer the goddamned question? He’d put it civilly enough, hadn’t he?

“Please,” said Hennessy, “I just need to know if you hear—”

Dantec reached out and cuffed him on the side of the head.

He doesn’t hear it,
a part of Hennessy’s mind told him.
If he heard it, he’d be wondering about it, too. Which means that either it’s something close to me, near the instrument panel or—

But the
or,
when he identified it, was too terrible to contemplate. So he bent forward, tilting his right ear toward the panel, bringing it close to each instrument, listening. He kept expecting Dantec to ask him what he was doing, but the man didn’t say anything. Maybe he wasn’t looking at him or maybe he just didn’t care. But, in any case, there was nothing. The noise was still there, but it didn’t grow any louder.

Which meant, he realized, that the sound was in his head.

As soon as he thought this, the noise became many noises, and these quickly became whispering voices. What were they saying? He was afraid he knew. He tried not to pay any attention, tried not to listen and—

“Two thousand meters,” said Dantec.

Yes,
thought Hennessy,
pay attention to that, to your job. Don’t think about the voices in your head, do your job. Pull yourself together, man, last thing you need is—

“Did you hear me, Hennessy?” Dantec asked.

“I heard you,” said Hennessy, shaking his head. “Two thousand meters. I’ll contact Tanner.”

He called up the link. There was Tanner, very pixilated now. “Two thousand meters,” said Hennessy.

There was a wait of about three seconds before Tanner replied. “Repeat that,” said Tanner, only it came out as a burst of static and then “—peat that.”

“Two thousand meters,” said Hennessy again, slower this time.

“Roger,” said Tanner, after the delay. “Proceed.”

·  ·  ·  

Another thousand meters,
thought Hennessy. Maybe even a little less. They were more than halfway there. Once they were all the way down, he could occupy himself with running the drill. He’d have something to focus on. Everything would be okay. All he had to do was make it that much farther. Then they could bore down straight to the object as quickly as possible. They’d do as Tanner had asked and take a small sample of it and get back up to the surface immediately. And then—if whatever it was was worth taking—it would be out of his hands. He’d fly back to the North American sector, go back to his life, putting all this out of his mind. If Tanner and DredgerCorp wanted to put together a full crew and excavate the object completely before other organizations got wind of it, that was their business: he’d be long out of it, long gone. If he thought about it that way, things weren’t so bad.

Maybe if he took short breaths, it would be better. Then he wouldn’t use up the oxygen so quickly. He was still sweating, the sweat was still pouring off him, but he wasn’t giggling about it now: he was afraid. He was afraid of what was happening and afraid of Dantec.

Hennessy, get a grip on yourself,
he thought. Or, rather, a
part
of him thought. Another part was screaming in his head, over and over. Another part of him was trying to force that part down belowdecks and then batten the hatch down. But then there were also the parts that were speaking, or rather whispering, all the whispering going on within his head that he didn’t even know for sure was him at all.
Hennessy,
the voices were whispering,
Hennessy
. As if trying to get his attention. They were both a part of him and not a part of him.

A wave of pain flashed through his head. He grunted and pushed his thumbs hard into his temples, and then looked back at Dantec to see if he’d noticed. Dantec, he saw, was clutching his head as well, his face pale and pearled with sweat. He was grimacing. After a moment his face slipped back into expressionlessness and he straightened, met Hennessy’s gaze.

“What are you looking at?” he growled.

Without a word, Hennessy turned back to his control panel, hoping it had been longer, but not sure if any time at all had gone by. Maybe they still had nine hundred meters to go.

“How many meters?” he asked in as flat and noncommittal a voice as possible.

He watched the distorted, ghostly reflection of Dantec’s face in the observation porthole. The man looked deranged.

“I’ll tell you when it’s time,” Dantec said. There was a slight tremor to his voice now, unless Hennessy was imagining it.
Maybe,
thought Hennessy,
it’s as bad for him as it is for me.

On one level, the thought was comforting. On another, it made him realize that things might be much worse than he’d thought.

He kept looking out the observation porthole, sometimes watching the murky water, sometimes watching Dantec’s phantom reflection.
How much longer,
he thought,
how much longer?
He shook his head.
Hennessy,
the voices said,
Hennessy
. They were voices he recognized but he wasn’t sure from where, and then he realized they were the voices he’d heard in his dream. But one in particular was even more familiar. He knew who it was, he was certain, but couldn’t picture a face to go along with the voice. How could you hear a voice and know it was familiar and still not know who it was?
They’ve gotten into my head,
he thought.
I must have done something to let them into my head
.
Something is wrong with me.

Oh, God—oh, God,
he thought.
Please help me.

If he started screaming again, Dantec would kill him. He’d said as much.

There was a flash of something outside the bathyscaphe, down below them.

No, wait,
he thought,
it’s just Dantec’s reflection. It’s nothing.
But there it was again, coming out of the gray, something lighter, slightly textured. The ocean floor.

He slowed the bathyscaphe until it was moving at a snail’s pace.

“Three thousand meters,” said Dantec.

“We’re almost there,” he told Dantec, his voice suddenly confident again. “We’re almost at the bottom.”

He watched it approach. It was as barren as the moon, a thick layer of muck extending in all directions. They settled down very softly, raising almost no sediment. A flatfish that had been lying in the dust flicked its body and glided away, slowly settling again just outside the lights. In practice runs, there had been a fear that the craft would roll in landing and they’d have to struggle to right her, but she came down smooth and even.

“We’ve made it,” he said to Dantec. “Should be easy from here on out.”

Dantec just stared.

Hennessy contacted Tanner. Strangely enough, the signal here was better than it had been a thousand meters higher up, perhaps because of the new angle of the craft, though there were momentary pulses of energy that fuzzed everything out.

“We made it,” he said once Tanner was on.

“What’s it look like?” Tanner asked.

“Smooth, flat,” he said. “First layer anyway shouldn’t be too difficult to dig through.”

“It looks like the end of the world,” muttered Dantec from behind him.

Tanner nodded. “—say?” he asked.

“I’m sorry, sir, I missed that first part,” said Hennessy.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Tanner. “Proceed when ready. And good luck.”

Hennessy put out the struts for stability and to elevate the back half of the craft. The drill angled down until it was touching the ocean floor. He readied the controls.

15

He felt a hand on his shoulder, turned to see Dantec there, out of his seat and swaying, his eyes glazed over.

“I’ll run the drill,” he said.

“But I’m the one—”

Dantec squeezed and a sharp pain shot to his shoulder and neck; one of his arms went suddenly numb.

“I’ll run the drill,” said Dantec again, voice like flint. “Move.”

It was a struggle to get the seat belt unbuckled with Dantec squeezing his shoulder, but in the end he managed. He stood up. Dantec was still holding on to him, but he made his way to the other seat. Only once he was sitting and buckled in did Dantec let go.

Hennessy breathed a sigh of relief and began massaging his shoulder with his fingers. Slowly feeling began to come back into his arm. He stared resentfully at Dantec.