Nexus, Robert Boyczuk [best free ereader TXT] 📗

patrix had fallen silent, his agitated motion stilled, his eyes closed; the holy man began chanting, a low disquieting murmur that seemed to darken the space, to thicken the air like an unsavoury, cloying perfume. The unintelligible plaint grew in intensity, turned into a funerary dirge. A lament for their deaths. It was hypnotic, insinuating its rhythms of despair and hopelessness into Sav’s besotted brain.

The chant stopped abruptly; Ruen’s eyes snapped open below the arc of his bony brow, swung wildly around until they seemed to catch on Sav. The patrix‘s irises dilated, then shrunk to pinholes, and he swallowed, the goiter in his neck travelling along his throat like a burrowing animal. He raised himself up on one elbow, straining against the mesh. “I have sinned,” he whispered, staring directly at Sav. His tone was filled with righteousness-and self-loathing. “Forgive me,” he said, extending his hands through the webbing.

Sav turned and hauled himself up to the flight deck.

Josua was strapped in the pilot’s seat, his back square to Sav, tapping steadily at the keypad. The lights of the bridge had been dimmed, and in the centre of the flight deck the display had been activated. At head height, on the opposite side of the bridge, a planet-the Hub, Sav assumed-was represented by a blue point. It orbited a binary star system, two needlepoints of brilliant light that dazzled his vision and made his head ache. Even though the magnification of the display was too small to show the huge tidal bulges in double stars orbiting so closely, the perturbations were evident in the incessant solar flares that licked out from both roiling suns like groping tendrils of light. In the few moments he’d been on the bridge, the double suns seemed to have shifted their positions slightly. At first he thought his perceptions had been addled by the fever; then he realised that the stars were moving. Their orbital period could be no more than a few hours. Although he had understood before the enormous velocities at which these binaries whirled around each other, seeing motion on this scale staggered him. It was the reason Nexus had built the Hub here: to use the gravitational whip of the two stars to fling their vessels into the void like rocks from an unimaginably powerful slingshot.

Sav pushed off from the ladder and drifted towards the navigator’s station, still riveted by the spectacle. The couch was as he had left it, facing inward. He twined his hands through the harness, pulled himself into the seat. The twin stars and the Hub were now above his head; with an effort, Sav lowered his eyes, focussed his attention on Josua’s hunched figure across the cabin. Raising his free hand to his forehead to shade against the luminosity of the stars, Sav cleared his throat; Josua seemed oblivious to his presence-and unaffected by the plague. He continued tapping the keyboard as if nothing was amiss. “Josua,” Sav croaked in a hoarse voice, his lips numb and difficult to work.

Josua’s hands stilled; he swivelled his seat around. The front of his coveralls were darkened by perspiration. His face and arms shone in the light of the stars. But it was his eyes that left no doubt about his condition: they seemed to have grown in Josua’s skull, the iris and cornea merging into black undifferentiated circles, glittering feverishly.

“Hebuiza’s watch,” Sav said raising his wrist with an effort. “It says we still-”

“No.” The double suns of Nexus were reflected momentarily as sharp points in his febrile eyes. “It’s wrong.”

Sav stared at the timepiece, his thoughts sluggish. He blinked back sweat that rolled into the corner of his eye. “Hebuiza miscalculated?”

Josua fixed Sav with his dark gaze. “No.”

“I don’t understand….”

“There’s no more fuel left,” Josua said, as if that explained everything.

Sav’s head throbbed. It made no sense. “Why would Yilda and Hebuiza want to mislead us? Why would they endanger our mission? By the time we get to the Hub we’ll be too sick to negotiate!”

“Did it ever occur to you,” Josua said quietly, “that Yilda might not be interested in the cure.”

It took a moment for the words to sink in. “Why?” he managed to say, his voice choked into a whisper.

“Who knows?” Josua answered indifferently. “Perhaps Yilda wanted to use us as a distraction. To keep Nexus occupied.” He gazed at the blue marble of the Hub that hung like an unsocketed eye, staring at them. His features tightened. “And now that we’ve outlived our usefulness, he’d just as soon have us dead.” He spoke, it seemed, more to himself than to Sav, his voice taking on a distant quality. “Tie up all your loose ends. That’s the way I’d have done it.”

In the few moments Sav had been there, the suns had continued their tight orbit; the slightly duller secondary now hung to the right of Josua’s head, creating stark, unreal shadows on the left side of his face. “The bomb,” Sav said, squinting beneath the light of the star. “Did you plan that together?”

Josua swung his gaze back on Sav, the eye on the unshadowed side of his face brimming with fever, his other a darkened, hollow socket. Thin lines of perspiration rolled down his temples, dripped from his jaw onto his collar bone, and soaked into the ragged collar of his coveralls. He smiled. “Bomb? What bomb?”

“I know about the reserve tank.” Articulating his thoughts had become increasingly difficult. Sav spoke slowly, deliberately. “I know what you did down there.”

Josua pursed his lips and stared at his feet, as if he was considering the whole question of the bomb abstractly, the way he might consider a problem in mathematics. Sweat fell from the tip of his nose to spatter on the deck. “You didn’t, ah, disturb it, did you?”

Sav said nothing.

Josua raised his head until both his eyes were visible. Everywhere, the room seemed to waver-except for those two dark pools. Sav felt himself slipping into the power of Josua’s gaze; panic clawed at his chest, and he began to believe that Josua had the ability to reach down inside him, to extract, in spite of Sav’s unwillingness, the answer to his question. Although Sav knew it was his own illness befuddling his senses, the illusion was overpowering. He heard a whimper, realised it had emerged from between his lips.

Josua barked out a laugh, relinquished his gaze. “I didn’t think you had.”

Sav felt his face flush; embarrassment and anger heated his cheeks. His mind seemed to clear. “The bomb,” he said. “Was it part of Yilda’s plan from the start?”

“No,” Josua answered matter-of-factly. He was calm, dispassionate, as if what Sav thought was no longer of concern to him. “I didn’t tell Yilda, but I’m sure he had ways of finding out. Of stopping me if he had a mind.”

“Then he wanted you to go to the Hub. To detonate the ship.”

“It would seem so.”

“Why?”

No answer.

“Yilda wanted revenge?” Sav paused. “Like you?”

Josua met Sav’s gaze, but still said nothing.

“You never intended to negotiate for a cure, did you?”

“No.” Josua wiped the film of perspiration from his brow onto his bare arm.

“And the others,” Sav said. “What about them?”

“The others?” Josua appeared distracted, puzzled.

“Liis!” Sav blurted. “What about her?”

Shrugging, Josua said, “She’s with Yilda, isn’t she?”

The knot of nausea in Sav’s stomach tightened. She’s with Yilda. The cabin seemed to tilt, to swing in a long, gut-wrenching arc. What chance does she have? That’s what he means. To Yilda, she’s as dispensable as we are. She might be dead already.

“It’s too late for them,” Josua said, as if he was explaining a simple equation to Sav. “It’s was too late for all of us before we returned to Bh’Haret.” He expression became sad, wistful. “Only you were too blind to see it.”

Sav shook his head.

“You’ve got to understand,” Josua said, leaning forward against his harness, smiling weakly. He opened his hands, spread his arms wide. “All we have left is this final gesture. Our own Dissolution.” He laughed, turning his gaze toward the nose of the ship, toward the Hub. “They’ll remember us.” Josua’s face was a white, bloodless oval; his eyes showed as flat black crescents between pale lids, as if the sockets were empty. He looked more sculpted than human. “They’ll remember Shiranda.” The lesser star now hung directly above his head, a fiery crown. “I’m afraid I can no longer trust you,” Josua said. “Can I?” Reaching in the right pocket of his coveralls, he withdrew a pistol. Sav recognized the grey tape wrapped around its grip, the thick loop of its trigger guard, the nick on the top of its stubby barrel. It was the gun he had pointed at Josua back on Bh’Haret, then heaved into the bushes below the landing pad when he learned that they carried the plague. Josua must have recovered after Sav had fled into the forest.

Sav pressed himself back into his seat, raised his hand to block out the light of the star. Fear squeezed the air from his lungs.

“You see my dilemma, don’t you?” Josua’s voice sounded almost gleeful now. “We’re working at cross purposes. It would be foolish to give you the opportunity to ruin everything.” His finger caressed the trigger lightly, lovingly.

Darting afterimages from the star clouded Sav’s vision. “The code sequences. You need them-”

“I needed you to get this far. What does it matter if Yilda executes a Speaker or two? Perhaps losing a few of their precious Speakers will make the Pro-Locutors more cautious about interfering with me.”

Sav’s fevered head throbbed; sweat trickled into his eyes. The light from the star leaked around his fingers, burnt into his mind, lodged there, making coherent thought impossible. Yet Josua stared at him with his eyes wide, unperturbed. How? How could he do that, without shading his eyes from the blinding light of the star?

“Perhaps it will be better for you this way. Sparing you the brunt of the plague.”

Sav stared at the barrel of the pistol, his head spinning. There must be something he could do. Although he held himself in the navigator’s chair, he hadn’t fastened the harness. He was free to move. He glanced at the ladder belowdecks. Even if he didn’t have the proper angle to propel himself directly there, he could kick upwards to the bulwark overhead, spin and launch himself towards the semi-circular opening. The whole thing would take three or four seconds, leaving Josua ample time for several close-range shots. But if he could distract him….

“Forget it,” Josua said. “You’d never make it.”

Sav swallowed. The stars seemed to intensify; they bore into his brain relentlessly, dizzying him. I can’t think with those damn things there! Sav thought. He was suddenly visited by an image of himself dying under the painful brilliance of the double suns, his final thoughts scattered and incoherent. It was stupid, that at this moment all he could think about was those damn stars. He wanted to turn around and flick off the display, but was afraid Josua might react to the movement. He cursed the stars, the way they befuddled his thoughts and distracted him-_The stars!_

Josua raised the gun, aimed it dead centre at Sav’s chest.

“You can’t shoot me!” Sav blurted. “You’ll breech the hull!” He drew himself back, as if he was cowering, and pressed his feet on the floorplate to tilt his seat away from Josua and toward the panel. With his free hand he reached behind the couch, groped for the edge of the board, found it.

The snout of the gun wavered slightly. “That possibility had occurred to me.” Josua stared at Sav’s chest, then at the bulwark behind.