The Void (26 page)

“Computer,” Aidan said to himself, “how about some lights?”

He sat down behind the console and had an almost irresistible desire to laugh. “Where to even begin.”

Chapter 21

The
Singularity
and the
Chronos
hung in space, two silver mirrors reflecting each other's light. In emptiness they waited. In silence they remained. To the observer—if there had been one—they seemed utterly at peace, floating in the nothingness, but to believe that would be folly, for giants surrounded them. Beasts that sought to feed, with hungers that were never sated. The greatest of them sat just beyond the two ships that  slowly, inexorably, drifted toward the mouth of doom.

There was silence in the depths of the
Singularity
, in the engine room where Aidan tinkered with broken consoles and cursed smashed computer chips, in the darkened hallways where Rebecca's feeble light bobbed up and down as she walked back to the bridge, in the crew quarters that Dr. Ridley and Gravely had decided to divide between them and investigate. And silence on the bridge, where Jack Crawford sat staring at diagnostic reports and crew logs from the
Singularity'
s last mission. In that silence, they stood alone. Or at least, that's what they believed.

But the men and women aboard the
Singularity
were not alone, for there was nowhere onboard that ship where
they
were not. They mingled in the shadows. They waited in the darkness. They walked in the black corners and darkened hallways of the ship. Always watching. Holding the feeble minds of the crew in their hands. Seeking which ones to devour. And then their gazes fell upon those who had the most to lose.

The smell started as a tingle, a hint of something acidic, something that bit at the back of Jack’s throat and burned the hairs of his nose. Then it grew stronger, thicker, until it filled his nostrils so thoroughly that he thought he might never escape it. It was the scent of his childhood, a certain type of cologne that in all his life, he had only known one man to wear: his father. When he spoke, Jack wasn't even surprised. He simply turned to the sound of the voice.

“I never took you for a desk job.”

His father was leaning against the bulkhead, still dressed in his tuxedo, hands jammed into his pockets.

“I do what the job requires,” Jack said dryly.

“Of course you do.”

Austin Crawford pushed himself away from the wall and ambled around the bridge, almost sauntering, as if he was visiting a museum and perusing the art.

“Why are you here?”

Austin grinned. “Me? I'm here for you, son. Just like I always was.”

“You were never here for me,” Jack said flatly. “Never.”

Austin stopped and took measure of his son. Austin’s face was implacable, just as it always was. But Jack thought he saw a quiver of emotion pulse across it, though what feeling it was—anger? sadness? pain?—remained hidden.

“That's not true,” he whispered. “That's not true at all. I gave you everything I had. I made you the man you are, for better or worse. And you never hated what you became. When you wake up in the morning and look in the mirror, what do you see? That's me, son. I've always been with you. I always will be.”

The two men stood now, glaring at each other over the space of a few short feet. It seemed like the gulf of eternity. The distance between them shimmered, like vibrant air on a hot day over black pavement.

“Then tell me, Father, why are you here, now?”

“To help you finish your job,” Austin said. “To help you see it through to the end.”

Jack could feel the veins in his head shrink, the pounding of blood against his temples, new pain with every heartbeat. Should he have been afraid in that moment? Terrified of the specter that stood before him? His dead father, killed by his own hands? Perhaps, but he was simply bone tired. Spent, like an empty shotgun shell.

“We have what we came for. I don't need you.”

“But you don't have it, son. Not yet. This ship must be saved. It's special, you know?”

He did know. He had known all along.

“We have the ship. She's ours now.”

Austin shook his head slowly. “They are working against you. They want to destroy it. To let it slip back into the void. You cannot allow that.”

“Who? Who wants to destroy it?”

“The others,” Austin growled, and the acid that dripped off his tongue when he spoke the words seemed strong enough to burn a man, as if there were none to be hated more than them. “Traitors. Subverters. Enemies. They will oppose you at every turn. They are in it together.”

“Maybe I don't want to save it,” Jack said. “Maybe I want to see it destroyed. All it's brought me is you.”

Austin smirked. “Don't be a fool.” He coughed. “You really don't get it, do you? They are coming for you.”

“I think I can handle Connor,” Jack said.

The smirk turned into a laugh. “Not Aidan. No, you can handle the living. But can you overcome the dead?” Jack turned pale. “Ah, so there is something you fear. And fear it you should. They have waited for you, son, all this time to take their revenge. The dreams gave them a portal, purchase in this world. A foothold from which to invade your mind. They are close, my son, and they will have you soon. But this ship has seen wonders that you cannot imagine. It is their prison, you see? Our prison. As long as it exists, they cannot touch you.”

“And if I should fail?”

“If you should fail, then they will haunt you all the days that remain to you, until, screaming in insanity, you take your own life and become theirs forever. That is your fate, if you should fail now.”

Jack had been inclined to disbelieve his father, to assume that this was a ruse, a trick. But then he saw them. The teeming mass, the dead returned for their vengeance. He saw Elizabeth, her face soft at first, then stricken with the poison coursing through her veins, and finally melting and twisting with hatred.

Robert lurked behind her, more animal than man. So many of them, mere shades of their former selves, all lacking some basic piece of humanity. They were hunters now. Haunters of the dark, seeking to devour their one enemy, mortal in every sense of the word.

As he watched them, just beyond the wall of sleep, the wall of shadow that had come from his dream and into the real world, something inside of Jack cracked. A dam split. The black, lightning strike line snaking down its shell until it gave way in one great crash. Behind it, the flood. The totality of a lifetime of fears hidden and ignored, suppressed below a thin sheen of training and self-denial. His rational mind drowned, replaced by one overarching imperative. Protect the ship at all costs.

Jack did not notice his father studying him and missed the look of triumph that passed briefly over his face.

“You will do what is needed, I trust?”

Jack barely heard him over the thunder of his own fears, over the howls of rage that he and he alone discerned from the spirits who darted in and out of existence somewhere behind Austin. He nodded once and Austin had all he needed.

“I'll be with you, son,” he said, backing away into the swirling darkness. “I will never leave you.”

Then he was gone, vanished along with the rest of Jack's phantoms. Jack stood alone. In that silence and emptiness and loneliness, another wall came tumbling down. For the first time that he could recall, Jack wept until he collapsed to the floor.

Somewhere in the darkness, the thing that had been Austin watched Jack through empty eyes. As his form melted back into a thin, black wisp of shadow, he felt the power of Jack's fear and fed upon it. And, were such a thing not so entirely foreign to its true constitution, it would have smiled. Instead, it merely melded into those that surrounded it, awaiting its day of liberation.

*  *  *

Rebecca was starting to worry. She had left Aidan behind in the engine room fifteen minutes before, but she still hadn't reached the bridge. She had followed the map on the computer screen, tracing her way through the oppressive darkness of the ship, cursing herself for not having Aidan focus on fixing the emergency lighting. She removed a pair of night-vision goggles from her breast pocket and held them up to her eyes, keeping them a few inches away from her face. The same blinding white glare as before.

Somehow, in the rush to explore the ship, she had been so concerned with maintaining her cover and achieving their objectives that she had not stopped to think about their night-vision's universal failure. A malfunction was not out of the question, even if she had never known one to occur. But on both Gravely and Ridley's suits? Even if it was some bug in the computer system of the
Chronos
, her goggles were independent. Yet, they didn't work, either.

Standing in the darkness, she considered what it could mean. Radiation? Maybe, but she figured enough radiation to fry all their systems would have killed everyone on board. Or at least ruined their computers. She looked down at the computer pad in her hand, the one that had led her in circles for the last fifteen minutes and smirked; maybe it had.

She glanced back up at the night vision goggles again. For the first time, she noticed that it wasn't simply blinding light she saw. There were gradations, slight though they might be, and some areas shone brighter than others. She squinted, thinking that if she concentrated enough, she could almost make out the hallway. Then something moved in the light.

It was a small movement, but one that Rebecca couldn't chalk up to mistake or hallucination. She dropped the goggles. They skittered across the ground as she fumbled with her rifle, finally raising it to her shoulder and pointing it at her unseen adversary.

“Who's there?” she shouted, swinging the gun wildly from side to side. Nothing answered back. Only the black night, her lights vainly fighting a losing battle against its completeness.

Rebecca kept her gun pointed at the nothingness, looking down only to see the next turn on her map. She'd had enough of standing in the dark. Her heart missed a beat as the screen flickered for a second and then faded to black.

“Oh shit. No. No, no, no!”

She slapped the side of the pad—vainly she knew—in the hopes that it would fix itself as quickly as it had died. When nothing happened, she rolled the pad up tightly and stuck it in her pocket. She backed away, pointing the rifle in the direction of the movement she had seen. She kept on until she backed into a wall.

She slid her body to the right, hoping to retrace her steps to the engine room. But she had come so far and the computer had turned her around so completely that the hope of finding Aidan again seemed a slim one at best.

Rebecca felt the first fingers of panic start to tighten around her throat. Tears stung her eyes, but she knew to lose it now might be the end of her. She couldn't say what it was that she believed lurked in that darkness just beyond her sight. Whatever it was, she didn’t want to meet it.

Then came a sound, not from the direction she faced, but from somewhere to her right. She spun around, pointing her rifle right and then left. First in the direction of the movement, then in the direction of the sound and back again.

The sound came again, this time louder and more distinct. Her mouth fell open and the gun dropped to her side. She could no longer lie to herself about what she heard. Not like at first, when it was but a tinkle in the distance. It came again, a ringing, chiming sound, the
ding
ding
of a bell on a child's bike. Then the physical embodiment of that sound emerged from the shadows into the feeble light, though it might as well have come from the deepest recesses of her mind.

The girl stopped in front of her, putting one white sneaker-clad foot on the deck. She looked up at Rebecca and smiled.

“You're gonna miss the festival, silly.”

Whatever reserve Rebecca had maintained fell to the ground along with her rifle and shattered. She broke and ran away from the girl, away from whatever lurked in the shadows, not knowing or caring where the winding corridors were taking her.

She didn't stop until she ran headlong into a door, one of the only ones on the ship, which now had power. It slid open and she found herself in the engine room, just in time to hear Aidan scream, “You're a liar!” to no one in particular.

*  *  *

While Rebecca wandered in circles, Aidan sat in the engine room staring down at a broken motherboard.

“What I wouldn't give,” he said, “for a Charlotte about now.”

He discovered a tool chest in one of the compartments that normally would have supplied everything he needed. Unfortunately, it wasn't tools he lacked, it was parts. Whoever had gone after the engine had done an effective, if not thorough, job. The warp core was intact. That had been the first thing he checked. If they had tried to run up the engines with a warp core breach, there wouldn't have been anything left for the search teams to find.

That was the good news, but it was completely undermined by the bad. The damage to the ship's standard drive was extensive, and they were in the one place where that mattered. Normally, they could have warped the ship to habitable space and then had her towed in the rest of the way. But this close to a black hole, going into warp would be suicidal. The gravitational forces would tear the ship apart. They could surrender to gravity and warp
in
to the black hole, but that was about it. Aidan didn't feel like that was a viable option.

“Maybe for Jack,” he mumbled.

It was rather simple then. If Aidan couldn't repair the standard drive, the
Singularity
wasn't going anywhere. Since the drive also powered the ship's electrical grid, he couldn't even turn on the lights. He managed to access one of the ship's emergency batteries, but there was only enough juice left to power some of the ship's doors. At least they wouldn't have to use the manual releases, he thought. But the sinking feeling that the damage was beyond his ability to repair was growing by the minute. His only hope was that Rebecca could be of some help.