Requiem (40 page)

'For science,
right?' said Belameir a little sarcastically.

Tialus looked
at Belameir. 'The data will be transferred back to Saranture. We
will not watch the recording. It is the death of a civilization not
a spectator sport.'

Belameir said
nothing.

Twelve hours
later, with the cruiser still in the system, only moments from
entering the gate, the drone fed back the footage of the dwarf
planet and its final approach to Acyr14-5B. No one watched the
hideous red glow form on the edge of Acyr14-5B growing like a
blister, pulling away towards the approaching dwarf planet. The
atmosphere ignited. The planet's skin ruptured, fissured, bleeding
its molten heart, trying to fill the emptiness.

Seline stepped
out of the shower. She stood on the thick rubber matting and let
the remaining droplets of water run off her skin. She stared
straight ahead. The face of a boy was stuck in her mind. He might
have been about ten years old. He was grubby. He was
always
grubby. He looked terrified as the dogs chased him. His eyes wide
and frantic, his pupils dilating, eating the colour in his irises,
pulling in every ounce of light they could find as if that would
allow him to see some hidden exit sign. Seline could taste the dirt
and dry air on her tongue, feel her cracked lips, baked from the
sun, and the sound of the rabid dogs yelping and gnawing at the
air. His name was Miles.

If these are
the memories I have then maybe it's best I don't try to uncover
them. If I'm capable of something like that then what else could I
have done that I don't remember?

You were a
kid. You were scared.

I let him
die.

He saved
you.

He was
screaming my name. His parents-

He didn't have
parents. He was a street kid. You know that.

As if that
makes a difference.

Seline ran her
fingers through her hair, pushing it down and back, feeling the
water drip and run down her back.

There's a
reason I blocked all this shit out.

You were a
kid. You were scared. There was nothing you could do.

I could've
died for him. It could've been the other way around.

It could've
but it isn't. Live with it.

She sighed,
dried herself and began to dress.

His name was
Miles. Her name was Abigail. And somewhere your mother is saying,
“Her name was Seline”.

Like mother
like daughter, right? Just run away. Let others deal with the
consequences of your actions.

I'm not like
my mother.

There's one,
probably two, dead bodies that would tell you otherwise.

Abigail's not
dead.

According to
what? Those fucking messages that keep getting sent to you? Those
are fake. Everyone can see that.

They might not
be.

This habit, of
having conversations with herself, was it something she'd always
done? She couldn't remember
not
doing it but she was sure
that it hadn't always been like this.

It's starting
to creep me out.

You're telling
me.

I'm going to
stop doing it.

Good. You
should.

'Always so
serious,' her mother had once told her. She remembered, sometime
after the dogs and Miles, her mother bending down and kissing her
on the forehead and telling her, 'You're a kid. You should smile
more'. But, even then, the words sounded forced. After all, what
use was a smile in a place like that?

She remembered
her mother, working at her desk while Seline watched from the
doorway. She remembered this clearly. Not because it stood out in
any particular way but precisely because it didn't stand out,
because it was normal. What she was seeing was something she'd been
witness to so many times before. These periods would stretch on and
on and with a child's sense of time it felt like it would go on for
weeks or months at a time. She hated it when her mother stared at
her holographic screen, the blue glow, lighting up her face,
drowning the hazel in her eyes.

Mother's room
was sparse. Just the single bed pushed into the far corner, the
sheets all crumpled and piled on top of it, a stack of washed and
folded clothes on the floor and then her desk placed in the middle
of the wall close to the door.

Seline didn't
know it at the time but the reason the colour drowned her mother's
eyes so often was the same reason she had running water. The same
reason the gang wars didn't encroach too far from the horizon.
Working for NeoCorp did have its benefits.

Tears pricked
the back of her eyes. Seline swallowed. She could almost taste them
on the back of her tongue.

She thought of
the blackbox. She'd been thinking about it a lot over the past two
days.

The song you
sang for me.

But what if she
couldn't remember it properly? What if she missed some important
detail? A word, a tone, even the colour of the carpet or the look
on her mother's face? She didn't know how much of the memory had to
be intact in order for the blackbox to unlock and she realised that
this scared her almost as much as seeing the memory itself. What if
she scoured her past clean, even ran her fingers through the
rotting dregs right down in the deepest trenches and she still
couldn't find the memory? What if, once she started looking, she
couldn't stop? All she was really doing was rebuilding the past but
it could never be any more than a tombstone, a monument to dead
days, dead years, a dead mother. What if she realised too late that
forgetting was the right choice all along?

Would it all be
worth it? That was the question that lay beneath all the others but
it was the type of question that can only be answered once you've
already jumped, once you've committed yourself to the fall.

Seline rubbed
her eyes with her palms. She pressed them until she started seeing
stars then pulled them away. She stood up and finished dressing. A
plain black singlet and a pair of black, loose fitting pants.

The warmth of
her feet left a trail of damp footprints down the hall from the
showers. She turned into the mess hall where Belameir was, once
again, arguing with Sear and Mercer.

'So what are we
going to do if we find this thing?' said Belameir.

'It depends on
what we find. But looking at what it has already accomplished, it
may very well be that we cannot do much,' said Sear.

Seline walked
into the room. She glanced at Sear and Mercer who were seated on
the two seater table on the far wall while Belameir was sitting on
the edge of the main table, his back to the door and his legs
dangling over the side. If Tialus saw him she'd probably drag him
into one of the seats by his ear.

Belameir
continued talking as Seline made her way to the drink
dispenser.

'Doesn't that
worry you? Because it kind of scares the shit out of me,' he said
to Sear and Mercer.

'It is
disconcerting, yes.'

'Whoa, strong
language. Let's not get too dramatic' said Belameir. 'After all, it
only devours stars whole and strips planets in less than a few
days. Let's save the hyperbole for something a little more
serious.'

'We take this
very seriously, Belameir.'

'Really?
Because as far as I can tell you looked more worried when I told
you the toilet was blocked.'

Sear glanced at
Belameir then at Seline who was waiting for the dispenser to fill
her cup of coffee.

Belameir looked
at Sear and cocked an accusing thumb in Seline's direction. 'She's
probably the one that blocked the toilet by the way.'

Seline ignored
him. 'How big must this thing be to eat stars anyway? To harvest
entire planets?' she asked.

'The fact that
it is capable of travelling through the Atlas Gates tells us that
it is at least under a thousand kilometres in diameter. Any bigger
and it wouldn't be able to fit through.'

'Unless it can
change its size, maybe dismantle itself before it travels between
each system and then rebuild on the other side,' said Mercer.

'That is a
possibility. We are, after all, dealing with something with a
technological capacity much greater than our own.'

'That single
drone tore right through the hull of the scout ship and from the
looks of it, it accomplished that all by itself,' said Belameir.
'Imagine an army of those things! Hell, that's probably what we
were looking at when that star vanished.'

'You may be
right,' said Sear.

'So shouldn't
we have some kind of plan for dealing with this thing?' said
Belameir.

Seline walked
over to her usual seat at the end of the table and sat down with
the steaming cup between her hands.

'Beyond what
we're already doing I don't think there really is much more
planning that we can do,' said Mercer. 'No one has ever encountered
something like this before. It's like Tialus said. We don't want to
risk any more ships and no other ship is as prepared for potential
conflict as the one we're on right now. And we're not trying to
engage this thing right now. Even if we bring in more fire power
that only exposes more of us to potential risk.'

'It's not like
we're going to try to wage a war with it anyway,' said Sear. 'This
is purely reconnaissance. We try to gather what information we can
as safely as we can.'

'I guess we
don't really have a choice in the matter do we?' said Belameir.
'We're hunting the white whale. Say, Tialus doesn't happen to have
an ivory leg by any chance?'

Everyone,
including Seline, looked at Belameir with blank expressions.

'What's a
whale?' asked Mercer.

'Never mind,'
said Belameir. 'Just a little inside joke.' He passed his open hand
over the top of his head but that gesture was also lost on the
others.

'We agreed to
this when we came on board anyway,' said Seline. 'Being stuck out
here is kind of part of the deal.'

'Doesn't mean
I'm not allowed to complain about it though. And how do we know
that something isn't creeping up behind us while we're following
this thing, maybe trying to flank us?'

'We have been
leaving small probes at the Atlas Gates we pass through,' explained
Sear. 'They will tell us if anything comes through. But, by the
looks of things we're all alone out here.'

'Yeah, just us
and Lord Galactus,' mumbled Belameir. He leaned back on the
table.

In the
momentary silence, Seline stole a glance at Sear who was looking in
her direction, although he could have been looking at Belameir or
any number of things in the room. She stared down into her mug of
coffee.

He was
impossible to read. Even if she came right out and asked him if he
was looking for more than just a key to a little black box she was
sure that he'd either give her some kind of cryptic response or
some kind of subtle indication of his intent that wasn't really an
indication at all. No matter how hard she tried she couldn't shake
the doubt long enough to be certain. But... he'd told her about the
orphanage. He'd told her things she was sure that he'd never told
anyone else. That had to count for something didn't it? She'd
enjoyed the story, enjoyed hearing about her planet, her people
through the eyes of an alien. And that's exactly what they are –
her people. And that's exactly what it is – her planet. She hated
it but, in a way, it also felt right.

'Alright then,
fine,' said Belameir. 'If we're going to get ourselves killed then
we at least have to come up with a name for this thing. Any ideas
what we should call it?'

'Like it's some
kind of bloody pet,' came Athene's voice over the wall comm.

Belameir jumped
from the edge of the table.

'Jesus Christ,
Athene. Could you warn us when you're about to do that?'

'No,' said the
hidden microphone in the small comm display. 'You should be ready
at all times.'

'Have you been
listening the whole time?'

'Yes.'

'Don't you have
a job to do?'

'I see it as
part of my job to stop you from making an ass of yourself.'

'Good luck with
that,' muttered Seline.

'Well, we have
to call it something don't we?' asked Belameir, ignoring her.

'He's right,'
said Sear.

'I vote we call
it Little John,' said Belameir.

The others
looked at him again, their expression blank. As was Athene's on the
other side of the comm.

'Do you hear
that?' came Athene's voice. 'That's the sound of no one
laughing.'

'I'm familiar
with the sound,' said Belameir.

Seline was
staring into the pale brown liquid whirl-pooling in her mug. She
tried to imagine what Icarus might look like but she realised that
her limit for effectively grasping the size of an object stopped at
about the size of the sun which was probably the biggest thing
she'd actually seen. Instead, she found herself thinking of the
little book of Greek myths that Abigail had given her. She was
thinking of the story of Icarus.

'How about
Icarus?' she said.

The room fell
silent. She blushed a little when she felt their eyes on her but
there was also a kind of comfort in the attention.

'The name comes
from an old Geek myth. A man, Daedalus, was imprisoned on the isle
of Crete with his son, Icarus. Daedalus built a pair of wax wings
for himself and for his son in order to escape but when they began
flying, instead of following the safe path of his father, Icarus
flew too high, too close to the sun. The heat melted his wings and
he fell into the waters beneath, to his death.' Seline cleared her
throat, sipped some of her coffee. 'We don't really know the
origins of this... whatever it is we're chasing so the story may
not even be relevant but I like the name and its association with
the sun, with stars.'