I ran in silence through the endless-seeming tunnel system that crisscrossed the interior of the asteroid like arteries through a body. Everything was so still that just the sounds of my labored breathing and the pounding of my heartbeat were deafening in my ears. The rock walls around me seemed unchanging, repeating: the same twisting designs, the same abandoned heavy machinery, the same stripped-out veins of ore. I didn’t even need directions from Scheherazade: so far, there was only one way through.
I was almost glad to have the silence broken when I heard Jane’s voice in my ear, until I realized why she was talking. “Hey, fuckstick!” she shouted. “I think I’m a little tired of your attentions. You want something from me, why don’t you try asking politely?”
I couldn’t hear whatever response he made—if he made a response at all—but I did hear Jane’s reply: it came as I entered a chamber unlike any I’d seen before, endless rows of metal racks holding pans of foul-smelling algae. Must have been what the former inhabitants of the asteroid ate for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. “I don’t give a damn about what you want, you ugly son of a bitch,” Jane said. “In fact, I—” Whatever threat or insult she might have issued was drowned out by the roar of a gunshot. That might have meant her enemy had attacked, and she was answering; it might have just meant she shot first, trying to catch him off guard by breaking into her own sentence with a sharp piece of violence.
“Left, then down a ladder,” Schaz told me; I veered between the racks of algae, and I could see the ladder she’d mentioned, sticking up out of a hole in the rock floor.
“Well that was rude,” Jane said, and there was something in her voice I didn’t like—something that might have been fear, or pain. “I’ll tell you what, why don’t we just—” Another gunshot; it seemed to echo as I began my descent, the tight confines of the rock brushing against my shoulders.
“At the bottom of the ladder, go right, then keep moving straight through the next chamber.”
“Got it,” I answered, forgetting for a moment that my comms were muted, that Schaz couldn’t hear me.
“Fuck you, and fuck whatever you might call a mother, and take your fucking crusade and your fucking genocidal tendencies and you fuck them both with a—” Jane’s tirade cut off in mid-flow, and there wasn’t an answering gunshot this time; I felt fear bloom up through my chest as I hit the bottom of the ladder. Very little could stop Jane in mid-insult.
The corridors were tighter down here; good thing I wasn’t claustrophobic. I was on the shortish side, and I still had to stoop—that put me at eye level with a strange maxim, carved into the rock: “Those who await redemption lie beyond.” What the fuck did that mean?
Still, it was my route; I pressed forward. Still nothing else from Jane. In desperation, I unmuted my comms. “Schaz, what’s happening?” I asked.
“Jane’s taken the fight into the reactor chamber; it’s unshielded, and the radiation is interfering with her comms,” Schaz told me. “Don’t worry, she’s all right. I think. There aren’t any cameras in that room.” She sighed. “I’m going to have to decontaminate her all over again when she gets—”
Another voice boomed out, not just through the comms, but through the speakers built into the girders inches from my head: “Ad infirmum purificatorio!” Charon, screaming the words throughout the entire asteroid.
“Oh, dear,” Schaz murmured.
“What the—what’s going on? Did that AI just shout something in a dead language? Why does the AI speak a dead language?”
“Because it was programmed to, dear,” Schaz replied mildly. “Charon just vented the reactor’s excess heat in the general direction of Jane’s adversary. Don’t worry about Jane—she should be all right, I’ve coded Charon to make her survival a priority. Just concentrate on where you’re going. You should be about to reach—”
“Oh, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me.” A moment ago, I would have given anything for the tunnel I was in to widen out again—despite my aforementioned lack of claustrophobia, I had been growing more and more unhappy about the ever-tightening passage. Now that it had opened up, I would have given anything to crawl back into the confines of the tunnel.
“Yes. That.” Schaz said. It took me a moment to force my hand to work, but I managed to reach up and mute my comms, a singular act of bravery, in my opinion. I didn’t need Schaz—or Jane, or our pursuer—to hear the noises of sheer terror I was about to make.
“Those who await redemption,” my ass. The chamber before me was packed full of the cultists’ dead. They’d left redemption behind a good long while ago.
The corpses were stuffed into alcoves carved into the rock; they were stacked like cordwood up on the floors; they hung from the ceilings on chains. They’d all been preserved somehow—the smell was intense, but it wasn’t decay, something else, drier and more chemical. These weren’t mining tunnels any longer—they were catacombs.
Because of course a people obsessed with death wouldn’t just consign their dead to the void around them like anyone else would. Of course they’d make some kind of maze of dead bodies the very heart of their asteroid. And of course the path I’d need to take led right through the middle of said maze. That was just . . . that was just how things worked.
If I survived long enough, I wondered if this moment would be my very own “sinking of the Ishiguro,” a story to drunkenly regale some green recruit with after I’d tied on half a dozen too many and decided to regurgitate my private nightmares all over everyone in earshot. Then I decided I’d be perfectly happy if that were true—because it meant I’d lived through this.
I was not going to enjoy the next twenty minutes or so. I started forward anyway, pushing my way into the tight corridors lined on either side with corpses.
They were dead; they weren’t going to wake up. They were dead; they weren’t going to wake up. None of the hands I kept brushing up against were going to reach out and grab me; none of their eyes were suddenly going to pop open, a precursor to the army of corpses around me lurching into motion. None of their sunken chest cavities were going to suddenly swell into breath as the dead came back to life, just long enough to attempt dragging me to my own place among their number. Why would they, that would be stupid: the dead didn’t need to breathe, they’d just reach for me without even that much warning.
Stop it. Stop it. They were dead; they weren’t going to wake up.
No matter how much I told myself that, it still seemed almost a guarantee that they would. As I pushed my way past the limbs hanging free of the alcoves and ducked under the hanging bodies, I let out a series of tiny yelps and muted curses. It didn’t get any better when I passed through what must have been the exact center of the asteroid, and gravity got weird for a bit; I was suddenly climbing where I should have been falling, jumping where I should have been crouching, using the alcoves as handholds and crawling over the corpses themselves when “down” suddenly became “sideways,” and then “up.” Some of the bodies were floating. I did not enjoy that, either.
Finally gravity got its shit together again, and a little ways past that point I saw the exit, another small tunnel, hopefully leading back to another ladder and up the other side. Halfway through Valkyrie Rock; the armored asshole’s ship was somewhere above me, in another docking bay, the same as the one Schaz had set down in.
Still no word from Jane.