It was cold. Why was it so cold? Most species fit comfortably into the same habitable zone of temperatures, and this was an asteroid, an artificial atmosphere; it could be as cool or warm as the inhabitants wanted. So why were they keeping it roughly the same temperature as a freezer?
I rubbed my hands over my arms. “Seriously?” I asked Jane.
She gave a ghost of a smile. “They’re dead, remember? The dead don’t need heat.”
“But I mean . . . they do. They’re not actually dead.” I paused for a moment, and then I couldn’t help it; I had to ask. “I mean, they’re not, right? This isn’t . . . we’re not . . .”
“No, Esa, they’re not actually dead. But they do their damnedest to convince themselves they are.” Jane looked around the massive docking bay, her smile gone, replaced by a frown. I got where she was coming from. This was . . . off.
I’d visited plenty of spaceports with Jane over the past three years, and even in private bays like this one, there was usually some measure of activity—techs running around making repairs, automated systems humming quietly in the background. Here, there was nothing. Just a kind of stillness, one that could only be described as “funereal.”
Of course, I was maybe only thinking that because of the whole “we’re all actually dead” thing.
Still, it was . . . off. Weird. Eerie. There should have been something.
“How long do we wait?” I asked her.
“Until they’re ready to see us,” she replied, though she was staring at the locked doors at the entrance just as hard as I was.
“And if they decide they don’t want to see us?”
“Would you want two demons just . . . hanging out in one of your docking bays, unattended? They’ll see us.”
“Ummmm. Jane?” Since we were both staring at the door, it was hard to miss: not the door itself, but just beside it, near the control panel.
A smear of fuchsia, bright against the cold metal of the wall. Vyriat blood. It led right up to the edge of the door, like someone had been bleeding, reaching for the door controls, then had been dragged away. Likely through the opening, to the other side; otherwise there’d be blood on the floor. Someone had been trying to seal something out of the bay, and themselves in. Not good. Not a good fucking sign.
“Yeah. I see it.”
“Maybe they aren’t coming to see us. Because maybe they can’t. Do we have some sort of plan B, here?”
Jane was still staring at that lone splash of color, grim and vibrant at the same time; she reached up to activate her comms. “Schaz?” she asked. “Can you access their systems—hack your way in, get us camera feeds, find out what the hell is going on out there?”
“That’s a negative, boss,” Schaz replied. “Their networks are firewalled to high heaven.”
“Right.” Jane approached the control panel—didn’t bother punching in numbers, just pulled out her knife and jimmied it open instead, to get access to its guts. She put the blade away, then started digging into the wiring, turning only for a moment to tell me: “Get ready for anything to come through that door.”
I nodded, beginning to pull teke energy into myself. “Can I go back inside Schaz, get Bitey?” I asked.
She shook her head, still crossing wires and attaching things to other things that theoretically shouldn’t be attached. Look, what do you want, I’ve already said I don’t know much about electrical engineering. “We don’t know that the natives aren’t around; they might just be busy,” she said. “They’ll expect us to wear pistols; rifles would be seen as a declaration of . . . ill intent.”
“Jane, you see that, just like I do.” I nodded at the bloodstain. “That doesn’t say ‘busy’ to me, that says ‘not capable of much at all.’ It says ‘very bad things have happened here.’ ” I stepped closer, touched the blood. Still wet. “Very recently.”
“Just get ready.” She crossed one more wire, and the door slid open.
I was usually happy to be right. This wasn’t one of those times.
Half a dozen corpses lay in the access hallway. They had been butchered, the strange, flowing robes they were wearing stained and heavy with the blood of several different species. Many of the bodies had been burnt as well; the heads, specifically. Specifically, and very purposefully. It was as if whoever had done this had torn them apart, then approached each body, one by one, and scorched their faces right the fuck off.
I let the teke pulse subside, and drew one of my pistols instead. Jane did the same thing. “Schaz?” she said into her comms. “Can you get us a route to the central core of Charon?”
“Can do; I’ve collected mapping data on Valkyrie Rock from your prior visits here. Feeding the information to your HUD.” I couldn’t see anything, of course, but Jane started forward, moving like she had a purpose—Schaz was already showing her the data.
“Where are we going?” I asked, stepping over the bodies.
“Plan B,” Jane told me. “If we can get to the core of the AI running the station, we can reprogram him.” Her eyes were darting back and forth as we approached an intersection in the tunnel, scanning for a threat. “Give ourselves administrative access—cameras, door controls, power, the works. That way, we can figure out what exactly is going on here, and maybe isolate our . . . friend.” We were moving past corpses; “friend” wasn’t the word I would have used.
“We’re going to brainwash the station AI.” For some reason, that made me feel queasy.
“We’re going to flip a switch,” Jane replied. “We won’t change anything else.” She peered down the corridors at the intersection, in both directions; more bodies, either way. “Not that he’s going to have a lot of use left in him after this, anyway. What’s an AI with nothing to serve?”
It was a rhetorical question, but Schaz answered anyway, her voice chilling in its certainty. Or maybe that was just the bodies, making me jumpy. “A ghost,” she said, her tone matter-of-fact.
“Thanks, Schaz,” I said sourly.
We followed Jane’s route into the twisting maze of tunnels, our weapons raised. More bodies, all of them faceless. At least some of them had tried to fight, had weapons lying beside them, shell casings as well. But none of the dead had been killed by bullets. However it was that the glowing monster in the fancy exosuit killed, it wasn’t with ballistic firearms.
We’d known his ship might be faster than ours—that he might have arrived in-system hours ahead of us, maybe even half a day or so. But this—this level of bloodshed, of combat: it still took time. We’d been right on his tail when he’d left Kandriad—this had happened fast. Which maybe explained the lack of any sort of alarms. Still, I couldn’t wrap my head around how it could have happened so quickly—a whole platoon of soldiers couldn’t have left this much carnage in their wake, not in just a few hours.
Unless he was just really, really good at carnage.
We came to a more open section of the tunnels, the stone walls spiraling out, high enough to allow several different levels, with catwalks and metal stairs accessing what seemed to be storefronts and apartments on the higher elevations. Just a regular main street, for a death-obsessed cult living on an asteroid in a nebula in the middle of nowhere.
The corpses here had been piled high in the center of the thoroughfare, and burned. The stench was awful. The floor was matted with blood, where the bodies had been dragged from where they fell and tossed onto the bonfire. I’d thought what we’d seen on Kandriad, on the front lines, had been brutal, but it was nothing compared to this.
Whatever strangeness these people had believed in—whatever it was that had driven them out here, to try and stake their claim on a forgotten corner of the galaxy where they could practice their weird shared delusion untouched by the rest of the universe—they hadn’t deserved this. No one deserved this. It was tantamount to genocide, wiping an entire belief system out of existence and for . . . what?
I had the sinking feeling that it had nothing to do with their beliefs, no different than the carnage on Kandriad that the asshole had exploited, using a war he didn’t care about to try and achieve his own goals. Whatever this was, it didn’t feel like tactics, like something to do with resources or intelligence gathering or any kind of strategy—it was something else, and the people here had just been in the way. Collateral damage.
No different than Sho’s mother.
But why the burning? Why the . . . ritual, the debasement? Nothing about it made sense, didn’t fit into any logic I could summon. It felt like an act of madness.
And we were intent on chasing down that act’s executor, deeper in the tunnels of the dead.
That would make us the hunter’s actual prey. Not a comforting thought.
We moved up to the higher levels of the promenade—another one of Jane’s maxims, “always claim the high ground”—and tried not to gag on the lingering smoke from the still-smoldering bodies. We covered each recess in the rock walls as we moved past, the homes and shops where the people butchered in the center of the street had gone about their lives; it was impossible not to notice the bloodstains on the floors, or the smashed-apart doorframes. The thing in the armor had been methodical in his carnage, precise, bashing into apartments or shops one by one after he’d taken out those in the main thoroughfare, not just killing those in his path, but also hunting down anyone trying to hide from the slaughter.
Like he’d tried to hunt us down, on the train.
“Tell me we’re not far now,” I asked Jane—almost begged her—as we passed by the corpses themselves, piled high enough that even from the upper level we could still see them rise above the railing of the catwalk. I could have reached out and touched the topmost bodies, blackened and twisted by the heat of the fires. I did not.
Jane consulted her HUD. “We have to cut through a maintenance section, and then we’re there,” she said. I could tell by her voice she didn’t want to hang around here any longer than we had to.
I couldn’t blame her.