Nexus, Robert Boyczuk [best free ereader TXT] 📗

Liis’ ears still buzzed. And a dull ache had seemed to have lodged permanently in the back of her skull. With Sav’s help she had managed to pull on a pair of coveralls and, despite the knots in her muscles, clamber up the ladder to the bridge. Now she stood beside the navigator’s couch on the bridge of the Ea, clutching the thick straps of the floor-to-ceiling webbing behind it. The flight deck was dark, and a three-dimensional projection filled the small, circular space. Hovering above the comm panel was their home, Bh’Haret.

“Status?” Sav asked the display.

“Still unable to initiate contact.” The Ea replied to his question tonelessly. “No response on any of the specified frequencies. Continue scanning?”

“Yes.”

The planet was a ball of shocking colours: sharp blues for its oceans and seas, long dark brown sweeps and emerald swaths marking its continents and forests. Banding the whole world was the brilliant white of clouds. In many places, where the cloud cover broke, unaccountable black smudges marred the land, like blemishes. Across the bottom of the display, two words in dozens of languages, some of which were familiar to Liis, circled the room endlessly. All, she knew, conveyed the same message:

….hazard plague hazard plague hazard plague….

Sav shifted nervously, cleared his throat. “You heard. I ordered the Ea to signal on all the standard frequencies. No answer. Nothing but this warning.” A dozen small, bright pinpricks of light girded the planet; Sav pointed at one which had just risen over the upper edge of the world. “Someone’s set up a network of screamers to pump this message out over and over….”

Liis stared numbly, saying nothing.

“The navigation beacons are gone. I’ve instructed comm ops to cycle through all the different frequencies sending out emergency calls. But I haven’t received a response yet.”

._…hazard plague hazard plague hazard plague…._

What am I supposed to feel? Liis wondered.

“If there’s anyone left in the mining colonies or the orbitals, they’re not transmitting,” Sav was saying. “Even if there is anything out there, there’s not a hope in hell of picking it up with these screamers jamming all the channels.”

….hazard plague hazard plague hazard plague….

“I don’t get readings on anything down there at any wavelength. No EMF spikes from power grids, no hot spots on infrared where cities should be. Nothing except what you’d expect from…an unpopulated world. I think…I mean it looks like-”

“Bh’Haret’s dead.”

“Yeah.”

The planet spun in silence. It looked peaceful.

Liis stared at her home. At the home she’d fled centuries ago to work longhauls. A readout indicated their distance at fifty thousand kilometers. The image was so clear she felt she could reach out and touch the planet. She extended her arm.

….hazard plague hazard plague hazard plague….

Sav grabbed Liis by the wrist, pushed her arm down. “Liis, I don’t think anyone’s left alive.”

Everything was gone. Liis wasn’t sure if she wanted to laugh or cry.

“Don’t flip out on me.” Sav tightened his grip. “I need you here!”

Liis looked at the small, round man, at his drawn expression. She felt her bones grind under the increasing pressure of his grip. Liis pried Sav’s hand free. “I’m…I’m okay,” she said, but thought, No, no I’m not. She rubbed her wrist unconsciously.

Sav stared at her and she knew he was appraising her. Waiting to see if she’d flip.

Liis stretched herself to her full height, a head taller than Sav. “What now?”

“I don’t know.” Sav killed the display. The image fled and lights rose in the cabin. They stared at one another, blinking in the sudden brightness.

To Liis, it seemed unreal, standing here centimeters from a man she hardly knew, talking calmly about the death of their world. For a moment she allowed herself to believe she was still dreaming.

“It’s real.” It was as if Sav had read her thoughts. “It happened. You’ve got to deal with it.”

Liis nodded again. She tried to think, but her thoughts were hopelessly confused, spinning off in dozens of different directions. She needed to do something, anything. To be in motion. She turned and walked unsteadily back towards the ladder. Without looking back, she said, “Let’s get the others.”

Loners and misfits.

Those were the sort longhauls attracted. A few claimed it was for the adventure; others claimed it was for the pay. But most, whether they’d admit it or not, were trying to escape the mess of botched lives. And what better way? Years locked in stasis during which your friends (if you had any) and your family (if they had not repudiated you) drifted away in time. While your biological processes were flash frozen, you’d accelerate towards a world you wouldn’t see for years, a world you’d see only through the thick glass port of the lazarette-the orbiting quarantine station-before returning to the cryo beds for the long journey home. Of that time, you’d be out of stasis and conscious maybe fifteen days.

But when you’d return, those few subjective weeks older, everyone else had lived decades in hard time. Two or three longhauls and your past would be completely eradicated.

The perfect solution.

Liis made no bones about being a charter member of this misanthropic club. A disastrous relationship with a man she loved but who refused to love her back-followed by a half-hearted attempt at suicide-had brought her into the fold at age twenty-five, one of the first, and the youngest, to crew a longhaul mission. At the time, the emptiness of space seemed a soothing balm.

Only long after he’d died, long after everyone she’d ever known had died (she’d aged a mere three years in the interim, while the world had marked one hundred and seven years), she stood at the foot of his overgrown grave, staring at his weathered headstone, and realized she’d not left her past behind, but still carried it with her. He was the one who’d escaped.

She signed up for more longhauls, jumping relentlessly into the future. What else was there to do? There was certainly nothing left anchoring her to the present….

Until this last run to Arcolet.

Emotions that had lain dormant, that she’d erroneously assumed had withered and died, had taken her by surprise. Foolishly, she’d allowed herself to develop feelings for their cargo, Josua. An envoy on his first posting. In his mid-thirties, he was extraordinarily young for a diplomat; nor did his looks help in this regard: he had a smooth, unlined face, almost innocent in its cast. Even his diplomatic scar-a small stylized bird on his right cheek-only enhanced the impression of guilelessness.

It was an infatuation, Liis told herself, nothing more.

But when he smiled at her she blushed; and when he accidentally brushed her arm, her heart hammered in her chest so hard she thought it would burst through its fragile cage of flesh and bone…

It was foolish. He was a diplomat; she was a longhauler. They lived different lives, travelled different worlds.

Still, he smiled at her. And although she couldn’t have said with certainty (her social skills having atrophied over the years), his smiles seemed to mirror hers, to hint at something more than just friendly intention. But in the cramped quarters of a longhaul ship, where no provision had been made for privacy, there was little chance to push it beyond an intermittent flirtation.

Liis vowed that after their return to Bh’Haret, she’d seek him out. Invite him to dinner. Tell him how she felt. And maybe, just maybe, give herself a reason to stop careening heedlessly into the future….

Only the universe had blind-sided her again.

Instead of sitting in an intimate restaurant across the table from Josua, she sat next to Sav in the bleak, cramped galley of a longhaul ship. Moments before Sav had helped Josua into the chair opposite. The galley couldn’t have been further from the romantic setting she’d envisioned. Like everything else on the ship, it was spare and functional, designed to minimise space and weight. The single table was made of a gun-metal grey alloy and weighed a gram; the chairs were made of the same material and weighed even less. Both had been fixed to the deck. The walls were a flat, pea green and unadorned except for the cooking surface that folded down at the far end of the room, and the nub of a comm projector above it. A narrow light strip overhead provided dull, watery illumination.

Liis tried to catch Josua’s eye, but he still seemed woozy, disoriented. It had been only his second time in stasis-the leg out had been his first. Like all newbies, he’d still be feeling the effects. Even so, he seemed more out of it than he should have been.

Not so with his companion, a man named Hebuiza, a Facilitator.

He paced the few steps from one end of the room to the other, distracting Liis. Unlike the others, his face bore no scars. When he reached the wall he turned in an awkward, swinging motion.

“This cannot be happening!” Hebuiza said, his deep voice overwhelming in the small space.

He was tall, taller than any of them, including Liis; he had to bend so his head wouldn’t touch the ceiling. But where Liis was broad-shouldered and solid, he was rangy, limbs thin and long in proportion to his trunk. A white T-shirt and dark shorts hung loosely from his frame. High, hollow cheekbones and a long, sharp nose gave him a cadaverous look. His skull was as hairless as the rest of him and on the crown of his head was a mass of thin wires and tiny sockets. As with all Facilitators, his brain had been surgically split into two halves to maximise processing efficiency, making him into the human analogue of a parallel processor. Pausing, he turned to Liis, eyes dark and accusing.

She stared back impassively. “It is happening,” she said cooly.

Hebuiza resumed pacing, his head swinging from side to side, a secondary effect experienced by some Facilitators after their hemispheres were split. Liis had noticed it became more pronounced whenever he concentrated intensely, or allowed himself to become openly agitated. At these times, his head would move back and forth like an animal hunting for a scent, competing halves of a brain both trying to see through optical nerves they didn’t control.

“How? How can this have happened?” The Facilitator glared now at Sav like it was his fault; as his head moved, he fixed Sav first with one eye, then with the other. “A plague? Diseases do not wipe out entire planets!”

“Maybe it wasn’t just a disease,” Sav said. “You saw those black scars on the surface. Near as Liis and I can figure out, they looks like they were caused by fission weapons. Maybe whatever happened escalated into a war. And the disease was a biological weapon. Or maybe it was the other way round, a lab accidentally lets a nasty virus get loose and before anyone could do anything there was a panic….”

“But there’d be survivors. What about those who were off-world? Crews in the orbitals? Where are they?”

Sav shrugged. “Everything that was in orbit around Bh’Haret is gone. All that’s left is those screamers.”

Through all this Josua said nothing; he had his hands folded in his lap and he stared at them, his head bobbing slightly. What was wrong with him? Liis fought the urge to reach out and comfort him.

“Then the mining colonies,” Hebuiza said. “They would have had plenty of warning.”

“Perhaps,” Sav answered. “But there’s no sign of the colonies on Dayside or Night. And Eramanus Station has disappeared. At least it’s not where it used to be. I instructed the Ea to set up broadband scans, but so