She drove to Virginia by the pale luster of the White Hole, a blinding disk bounded by a halo of night. Four a.m., but people gathered on their lawns and lined the roads, staring eastward, the unnatural light reflecting against their faces reminding Moss of faces in a movie theater. At dawn the sun rose pallid, but the sky remained preternaturally gray, the temperature dropped, and soon Moss turned on her windshield wipers against fat snowflakes that spun in the air. The radio was full of prophecy at the Star of Bethlehem, announcing the second coming of Christ—a child had been born in Puerto Rico in the instant the White Hole appeared, he’d been named Jesus, and already the infant was hailed as the sublime sign announcing the end of time. Winter was general over the Earth; even the sandblasted deserts of Africa experienced snowfall. NPR news reported that suicides lined the streets of Manhattan, Los Angeles, London, copycat deaths of Heaven’s Gate, bodies draped in sheets. There had been minor looting of shoe stores, people stealing the black-and-white Nikes favored by the cult. This is how the world ends, Moss thought. No panicking, no riots. No reports of the hanged men appearing, or of people running in herds, not yet anyway, though when she arrived in Virginia Beach, its few snowplows deployed laying salt and scraping the roads clear of slush, she learned that scores of people had congregated on the beach, that they had bent and flailed in concert, a sort of calisthenics, before wading into the ocean to drown.
Naval Air Station Oceana was in the midst of Operation Saigon when Moss arrived at the gates. The president’s and vice president’s families would be flown here on Marine One, would be boarded onto Eagle, a Cormorant shuttle kept ready for this moment. Their families and the members of their essential staff would rendezvous with TERNs Group 6, the USS James Garfield, at the Black Vale Station. NSC soldiers were notifying civilians who’d been chosen for evacuation, a life-or-death lottery plagued by nepotism, a supposed mix of genetics, genders, and aptitudes that a think tank of politicians and scientists had devised in consultation with the military to represent the last best hope to revive mankind. Moss drove the streets of the base and saw one of the Cormorants taking off, its flight path over the churning Atlantic. She met O’Connor at the NCIS offices.
“We have a new crime scene,” he said.
There would be a final Cormorant, a last ship held to transport NCIS and NSC staff who assisted with Operation Saigon in these final hours. Moss was prepared to miss that flight. Now that the White Hole shone, now that QTNs flooded every man, woman, and child, soon to wipe away consciousness like a whiff of ether, she knew she would work against the Terminus until she, too, was wiped away. She hadn’t remained with NCIS all these years to save herself, to book passage on a lifeboat leaving Earth—she had joined to help people, to protect the innocent, and she felt that everyone was innocent in the face of dissolution. She took out her yellow legal pad, uncapped her pen.
“Tell me what we have,” she said.
“The appearance of the White Hole coincides with the launch schedule of a Cormorant shuttle called Onyx,” O’Connor said. “The B-L fired last night, at 10:53 Eastern—the exact moment the White Hole appeared.”
“A Navy ship will bring the White Hole,” said Moss, shaking her head. “Who?”
“The ship was registered as public/private,” said O’Connor. “Black Vale reports that the Onyx was requisitioned two days ago, by Senator Curtis Craig Charley.”
“C. C. Charley’s the chairman of the Armed Services Committee,” said Moss.
“He’s close with Admiral Annesley.”
“So Onyx sailed Deep Waters, returned with the White Hole in its wake. It would have followed the Onyx’s Casimir line,” said Moss. “But why is the Onyx a crime scene?”
“Because everyone on board is dead,” said O’Connor. “Could be something as simple as a mechanical failure, but we have to find out. The B-L launch was successful, but Black Vale received the Onyx’s emergency beacon. We get first crack at the ship, but we have to move. NSC will take Onyx from us as soon as they need it for the evacuation, but they want us to determine what happened in case it represents a threat to the evacuees.”
The Grey Dove was cleared for departure within the hour, one of the few departing Cormorants not ferrying evacuees to dock with the massive TERNs. Moss taxied with the other Cormorants, wondering how quickly the effects of the Terminus might manifest. She launched, cutting through dense, snow-spitting clouds that spired into violent plumes stretching magnificently upward. She imagined everyone on Earth already in a state of living death. She imagined crucifixions, imagined running to the sea. The Grey Dove broke from Earth, and Moss floated into the main cabin, her view of Earth no longer one of tender blue fragility but of a white-palled planet, an eye milky white and blind.
—
The Onyx was a Cormorant, identical to the Grey Dove. It looked like a mirror-smooth piece of black glass, almost indistinguishable from the surrounding night except for the silvery planes of the wings and some hull sections that caught the glare of the White Hole and reflected cast-off light from the moon. The Grey Dove’s AI maneuvered close to the Onyx while Moss prepped for the crime scene, wearing the olive-green space suit marked NCIS and checking her camera, the film. The Grey Dove chirped a three-point alert once it had closed the gap between ships, matched rotation with the Onyx. Moss fastened her helmet, floated into the tubular airlock. The airlock of the Onyx was only twenty-five feet away, but the distance between ships was a span of open space. The Onyx and the Grey Dove spun in relation to each other, like the two parts of a binary star. The Onyx’s airlock was directly in front of her, unmoving. She gripped its steel handlebars while she worked to quell the sense of vertigo that curled through her stomach at the thought of floating from one ship to the other. My God, she thought, still just a girl from Canonsburg when faced with a space walk. Moss had seen marines do this maneuver, jumping ship to ship, countless times, soldiers leaping from the lip of one ship and floating—sometimes untethered—across the gap as easily as jumping over a sidewalk puddle. Moss attached one end of her tether to the Grey Dove, tugged on it experimentally.
She stepped into space, an infant on an umbilical cord, full of adrenaline as she drifted between ships. And soon the Onyx’s hull loomed large enough that she could reach out and grab hold of the airlock, pulling herself the rest of the way.
“Onyx, this is Shannon Moss. Please unlock the port airlock.”
The lock snapped open. Moss hooked her tether to the Onyx, stitching the ships together, then pushed open the airlock and crawled inside. She waited for the Onyx’s green light of pressurization before she swam into the body of the ship, through the lightless airlock tube, her path lit only with the penlight attached to the side of her helmet. She gasped when she saw the bodies in the main cabin—there were twelve, naked, floating in the airless, lightless room like icebergs under dark water. Her penlight spotlighted wherever she looked. Globules floated among the bodies, some as large as her fist—blood, she knew, fractionated, large water spheres filled with sprays of red platelets and yellow plasma like the swirls of color in hand-blown glass ornaments.
“Onyx,” said Moss. “Lights, please.”
The interior of the ship illuminated the ghastly dead and their floating blood. It struck her that the bodies looked like they might have been dead for only a few minutes, but she knew that was because there was no oxygen to trigger decomposition. Years could pass and they would look virtually the same.
They killed one another, she thought, that much was clear. The bodies were marred with slash marks and other cutting wounds and blunt-force trauma. Some of their bones had been broken; in one case a snapped shinbone had poked through the victim’s skin. A long gash flared across one man’s spine; another had entrance wounds over his heart, several stab marks. She counted: someone had stabbed this man at least thirty times, mincing his heart and lungs. Like documenting a crime scene that’s been put in a box and shaken, she thought. She recognized the senator, C. C. Charley, his body on the ceiling, his foot caught in wiring. His stomach had been opened, and his guts had leaked out across the ceiling like the long tentacles of a crimson squid. Moss took photographs. Smaller blood droplets hung like a rainstorm frozen in place, the fine mist painting Moss’s space suit as she moved through the ship, snapping pictures. After every few shots, she wiped blood from her lens.
She measured the distances between bodies, taking notes with pencil in the notebook fastened to her suit. She used yellow cords to tie the bodies to the ceiling and walls so they wouldn’t drift. A ghastly concern, but despite their weightlessness these bodies’ masses were the same as they would have been on Earth and could crush or injure her like falling debris if she were to bump one, set it moving.
Where were the murder weapons? She began to find them, handmade things: a shard of a mirror duct-taped to a length of pipe, pieces of a shattered faceplate fastened to the fingers of an EVA glove. She bagged the shivs in plastic evidence sacks. They had used the rather dull knives from the mess room, scissors, and some of the decedents had bruising that indicated they were choked and beaten to death when weapons weren’t available. The sailors would have had firearms, but Moss saw no indication that they’d been discharged. She couldn’t find bullet wounds in any of the bodies. The image of what had occurred here turned in her mind, and she closed her eyes to regain herself. She had excused herself to vomit at crime scenes before, cleansing herself to refocus on the work, but vomiting at this crime scene, into her helmet, would be disastrous. She waited for her nerves to calm, for the flopping sensation in her stomach to level. Deep breath. Being up here alone with so many bodies was claustrophobic; the Onyx enclosed her. She opened her eyes.
The onboard computer recorded that the life-support system had been cut manually. Moss weighed the extent of the damage these people had inflicted on one another, the sheer butchery. She imagined some sane sailor cutting life support just to make the killing stop. Or maybe he’d cut life support in order to kill everyone with a single stroke. The crew of the Taurus, that first NSC ship to encounter the Terminus, had met a similar fate, a sudden flash of insane violence—and Nicole had spoke of Esperance, sailors killing one another on those icy shores until the Navy SEALs, Cobb and Mursult, had helped the survivors regain their sanity.
Three and a half hours documenting the main cabin before moving through the ship. She found the commanding officer’s body in the galley, a knife stuck in his back. There was still food in his mouth—either he’d paused in the killing to have supper or was the first to have died, someone ambushing him as he ate. She found another body shoved into the toilet compartment, his lips cut away from his face to reveal his teeth. Distracted by the grotesquerie of the mouth, she didn’t recognize the corpse until after she’d taken pictures of him.
Driscoll. Dr. Peter Driscoll, the scientist who appeared to me as a simulation. She recognized his hair, that white whoosh. Without his lips, Driscoll’s teeth could almost be mistaken for a cheek-spanning grin, his dark eyes wide open, his eyebrows lifted, as if he, too, were surprised at what had happened here. Senator C. C. Charley, Dr. Peter Driscoll—Moss formed a guess about the party aboard the Onyx. She expected to find other future founders of Phasal Systems on this ship, engineers and physicists from NRL, if anyone ever took the trouble to identify the bodies. She found Admiral Annesley’s corpse floating chest-down near the floor like a bottom-feeding fish. Moss flipped the corpse over and saw that the man’s face had been cut away.
Another corpse she recognized, drifting near the sleeping compartments—a woman’s body, obese, her flesh floating outward. Carla Durr had been gutted, slashed from neck to belly. In the moment of her death, she must have plunged her hands into her breast cavity and tried to pull herself apart. It looked like she was revealing her rib cage and organs, some of which had floated away.
We saved your life, and what did you do with it?
The Navy had arrested Carla Durr in her hotel room in Chevy Chase and questioned her. She had sold Patrick Mursult’s secrets to Admiral Annesley, Moss figured. How much money had Durr received, what other favors than this voyage to Deep Waters? Whatever information she’d sold had led to this.
The thought came to Moss.
A chain of information: Patrick Mursult to his lawyer, Carla Durr, Durr to Admiral Annesley, to Dr. Peter Driscoll, to Senator C. C. Charley—Hyldekrugger had been breaking the chain. But I saved this woman’s life. I should have let her die. The thought was repugnant, but as Moss looked at the lawyer’s ruined body, the enormity of what had hinged on her decision to save this woman’s life rushed over her, when in the hospital she had told O’Connor that they weren’t too late to stop the killing. But I should have let them kill her—it was clear to her now. What was one life set against all life? Hyldekrugger had been right: killing this woman would have broken the chain, would have staved off NSC from discovering Esperance for another few years at least.
It’s my fault.
Moss screamed, thinking, No, letting the lawyer die wasn’t right, that wasn’t the right answer. And she turned inward, surrounded by butchered corpses, thinking about inevitability. Throughout her professional life, Moss had lived with the idea of the Terminus sweeping closer, but now her mind opened to the idea that it had all been because of her, that her career in NCIS had set her on the path to the Mursult investigation, and every bit of evidence she uncovered, culminating in her decision to intercede in the killing of the lawyer Carla Durr, had ensured that NSC would rediscover Esperance sooner and sooner and sooner. I ended the world, she thought, looking at the dead that surrounded her, but their eyes offered no solace. She felt trapped here, spun in webs, the White Hole a spider’s eye bearing down on her.
Someone else would quit. Her little mantra was so absurd in this hideous context that just thinking it made her feel a rush of giddiness, as if she were losing her mind. But when that sensation passed, she felt centered, resolute.
This is a crime scene. There are questions to answer.
What had Mursult told his lawyer?
Mursult’s information might be here, but where? The Cormorant-class ships were fitted with personal compartments, little more than cubbies cut into the floors and ceilings, coffin-shaped cubicles meant to serve as private places to sleep. But most people preferred to tether their sleep sacks somewhere in the main cabin rather than squeeze into these casketlike compartments, so civilian passengers generally used these compartments as footlockers to stow personal items. There had been twenty people on board the Onyx. Moss picked through each compartment, looking for Durr’s.
“Here we go,” she said, uncovering a set of burgundy overnight bags monogrammed “C.D.” Undergarments, a folded tracksuit, hosiery, a jar of Oil of Olay, bifocals. She found a Stephen King paperback and a manila envelope closed with a metal clasp. Moss opened the envelope, slid out the sheaf of papers: lined sheets, torn from a spiral notebook, the edges fringed from the perforation. Crude pencil drawings. What are these? In one of them, Moss recognized the Vardogger tree. There was a photocopy of a map, red ink pointing to a location at the Red Run, the thin space, highlighting the approximate location of the access route to get to that spot. Then she found a handwritten note:
It’s a trick, it might take you a few times before you see the trees if you can ever see the trees at all. Bietak thinks you need QTNs in you to see it, as some people never can figure out the trick, but I don’t think that’s the case—the damn thing opens whenever our engine misfires. Follow the trees once you see them, but once you cross the river, don’t step off the path. You’ll think you’ll want to—it feels like that—but if you step off the path, you will be exposed and you can’t be saved.
The next sheet was a drawing of Libra, in black ink, the bow circled with rings of blue ink—meant to be the spurting blue flame from the B-L drive, Moss guessed.
The trees lead you here to Libra. When you’re here, you will see other lines of Vardoggers. If you walk these other paths, you go to other worlds like your world but slightly off. H marks paths we took, so we remember. He sets cairns in the paths. There are many paths.
Moss flipped through the pages. A map of Buckhannon, the chemical lab marked in red.
Building a heavy-duty facility at Zion, multi-million dollars, H got the idea from cult in Japan. There’s an orchard there—Jared’s mom will move to the orchard, hold it for him. H and Jared want to re-create Japanese gas attacks, use the same stuff they used. Test batches at Buckhannon.
There were other drawings, some of geometric shapes, seven-pointed stars, one of the Black Sun design, its spokes like the Vardogger paths, and there were hand-drawn maps labeled ESPERANCE, a series of drawings showing locations of campsites, remembered fragments of geography. Moss recognized the fjords and oceans Nicole had described. There were star charts marking the location of the dim binary stars, the location of the planet that Libra had discovered. She found a longer letter:
Dear Durr. If I show up someday demanding my cut of the money, then the deal’s still on but for now it’s too late for me haha so use this info in good health. H is coming tonight, Nicole told me so. I was at my buddy’s when she told me so had to run. She’s a nice kid but a rat and squeals whenever H pushes her. It cuts me she ratted me out to him but at least she confessed to me, gave me a heads up. At least love’s worth that much. NO ONE knows you not even Nicole so don’t worry you’re safe. So now’s the time for brass tacks. Included: location of Krugger, location of Esperance, location of Libra and that special tree, the Vardogger, just like I promised. I know you haven’t believed most of what I told you but after tonight you’ll at least know the danger I am in is real, so please watch yourself too. I was with H from the beginning with all his bullshit because I wanted to LIVE. I wanted to live, that’s all. But I can’t stomach all his killing. I saw someone he burned alive with acid and couldn’t take it. Sometimes I wish I would have helped Remark make that black hole, a cascade failure to obliterate us all. Too late, too late for all. I will not get my money or my pardon, but my cut will be for you to sell this information to Navy or FBI, make a good buck for yourself but stop this man. He wants to kill us all. Krugger walks every path. He worships death. Worships death like most men worship Jesus. He prays to it. He takes their fingernails and uses them like relics, like holy things. He will be at my house soon and so I left my family there, left him to kill my family to slow him down some so I can get this information to your safe deposit box, per our agreement and also get somewhere safe. You might think that sounds harsh to let my family die but here’s something else you won’t believe but it is truth: merrily, merrily, life is but a dream. No matter what happens to my family tonight, I can find another one. I’ll walk the Vardogger trees to some other place and time and there my wife will welcome me home, safe and sound. They will be dead here, but they will be alive somewhere else. My wife will be a young woman there and my Marian will be a young child, she’ll be five again, and I’ll watch her grow up again happy and I’ll watch my youngest come into being all over again. Durr we are all just shadows that come through the woods, shadows that cross the river. It’s like this, that old poem I used to recite to my Marian when she was a child and I rocked her to sleep in my lap: ’Twas all so pretty a sail, it seemed, As if it could not be, And some folk thought ’twas a dream they’d dreamed, Of sailing that beautiful sea. Anyway I look at the time and know even now my family is dead or dying. I cry over my children but I know they will live yet. I will drop this information at your box, then will drive to a space I like, this calm spot where I like to think, where I like to stay sometimes and sleep. I’ll think of my family that was here and prepare for my new family that will be there. You’ll never see me again—MUR.
Patrick Mursult thought he would escape through the Vardogger, walking the paths, start a new life in some other IFT. But he was killed at the Blackwater Lodge before he could escape.
Marian will be a young child . . . But how was that possible? None of us can go back, can we?
The Terminus had followed Libra, but Libra was caught in a space-time knot, somewhere beyond time. The Onyx, however, had returned to terra firma. The crew of the Onyx had shed their clothes because they were infected with QTNs, Moss thought, remembering how her own skin had burned. That had been the sensation in the minutes before her crucifixion: burning skin. She had stripped off her clothes despite biting winter wind, and was crucified.
“Onyx, please call Apollo Soucek Field.”
She heard the tone for “failed command.” Moss found one of the ship’s computers, saw: . . . ACCESS NOT AUTHORIZED.
“Override,” said Moss. “Please place a call to Apollo Soucek Field.”
. . . ALL CHANNELS REQUIRED FOR OPERATION SAIGON.
“Damn it,” she said. “Onyx, override. Send out emergency signal. Please place a call to Apollo Soucek Field or to the Black Vale.”
. . . ALL CHANNELS REQUIRED FOR OPERATION SAIGON.
“Fuck.”
The bodies in the cabin moved when she brushed against them. They looked like they danced, like someone’s dreamy joke of a morgue ballet. She escaped belowdecks, exploring the galley, the recreation room. She found an American flag, stiff without gravity, a fabric rectangle thumbtacked to the floor. On the ceiling were a camcorder and tripod. She checked the camera, found a tape, wondering if these people had filmed themselves murdering one another. She loaded the VHS tape into the entertainment system, figured out how to turn everything on. The screen was filled with an image of Senator Charley, wearing a blue polo shirt and khaki shorts, tube socks pulled near to his knees. The American flag was over his shoulder, a backdrop. Moss had seen the man countless times on television, but he looked much younger here, sparked by a childlike wonder, the circus ride of weightlessness.
“Fellow Americans, I have been on the journey of a lifetime, of a thousand lifetimes,” he said, and then a woman’s voice, off camera, asked him to try again. The senator cleared his throat, plastered on a practiced smile, and said, “I have been on the journey of a lifetime. Fell Americans. I mean, fellow Americans—”
“Go ahead,” said the woman’s voice. “We can edit.”
“Fellow Americans, on March twenty-sixth, 1997, aboard a Navy vessel, the USS Onyx, a group of men and women embarked on the journey of a lifetime, a journey of a thousand lifetimes. We traveled a distance once only dreamed of. No longer the ‘final frontier,’ the vast distances of space have been opened to us . . . Wait, wait, let me try that again.”
“You used the word ‘distance’ several times,” said the woman off screen. “We can use cue cards.”
“No,” said Senator Charley. “I want this to feel natural.”
“Let’s practice the section about Majesty,” said the woman.
“Okay,” said the senator. He smiled to the camera and said, “We have discovered a planet rich in wondrous, strange materials, beautiful fauna and undreamed-of life. Yes, life. I have had my eyes opened anew to the miracle of God’s creation and have had my mind opened to the possibilities of his grandeur. As Christians, and as Americans, we have called this planet ‘Majesty.’”
“A touch too preachy. Oh, hold on,” said the woman’s voice, off camera.
The image of the senator turned to fuzz, but a new image appeared. Someone had filmed through one of the ship’s windows—an image similar to pictures of Earth seen from a distance, the curved sphere of a planet, but the planet filmed here was a sphere white with ice and black with oily seas, crater-pocked and scarred with jagged mountains. A sizable moon rose over the crescent horizon, a golden giant. The monitor turned to static.
“—Shannon?” from over the comm.
The sudden voice startled her.
“Shannon, was that you? Are you okay?” said O’Connor. “I received the emergency signal.”
“I’m . . . I found something important up here,” she said, her voice shaking.
“I have rendezvous instructions for you, enact immediately,” he said. “You have been assigned to TERNs Group 5, the Cancer. Don’t come home, Shannon—”
“Listen to me,” she said. “The Onyx went to Esperance, they went to the—”
“I understand,” he said. “But it’s too late now. Once you reach Cancer, set the autocourse on the Onyx for Apollo Soucek. We need more ships for the evacuation, we need every ship. The Navy has seized control of the Grey Dove. They’ve recalled the ship, but we need more.”
“The answer might be here, on the Onyx,” said Moss. “We need more time.”
“It’s too late,” said O’Connor. “The hanged men are here, the running men are here. People everywhere are looking at the sky, their mouths are filled with silver. The forests are burning, the snow is heavy. It’s too late, Shannon. It’s too late.”
Moss pulled herself along the lower-deck passageway, flying upward through the portal leading to the helm, thinking, Remarque. They murdered the Libra’s commanding officer. The cockpit of the Onyx was identical to the Grey Dove’s: a reinforced-glass canopy, two flight chairs nestled into a sea of controls, panels of switches and knobs. She thought of her mother. She thought of Cancer. Receding in the distance was her ship, the Grey Dove, the tether snapped.
“Onyx, were you given new instructions?”
. . . RENDEZVOUS WITH USS CANCER, SET AUTOCOURSE FOR NAVAL AIR STATION OCEANA.
“Onyx, can you belay that order?”
. . . NO. ALL RESOURCES REQUISITIONED FOR OPERATION SAIGON.
“Onyx, can you belay the order to dock with the USS Cancer if you fly to Oceana?”
. . . YES.
The TERNs would be loaded to capacity, she thought. Two hundred souls. She thought of Cancer, an older ship, a ship that once had faulty O-rings before its overhaul. We would live like rats, thought Moss, and there would be nowhere to run, no haven, nowhere, there would only be one blind jump to the next, to far-future IFTs in unknown galaxies searching barren stars and infertile planets for safe landing, for any safe landing, until the food ran out or the recycling for the water malfunctioned. Everyone on board would kill one another, they would eat one another, drink one another, and eventually they would all starve, they would all die of thirst, or they would run out of oxygen. One way or another, they would all die.
Only a few hours of oxygen remained in her tank. “Onyx, please reestablish life support,” she said. “And belay request to rendezvous with the Cancer. Continue to Oceana.”
An impulsive request, but she felt the burden of culpability, the belief that her actions had brought the Terminus here. She felt she deserved to die or never escape. Pushing through the hanging legs and arms of the corpses felt like swimming through a skein of seaweed. Driscoll was in the toilet, his lipless, toothy grin—she didn’t want to see him. She didn’t want to see Durr’s revealed heart. She used the American flag as a cover to the upper-deck portal, to keep the blood out as the air began to circulate. When the Onyx had reached healthy oxygen saturation, Moss removed her helmet. She’d been expecting a smell of putrefaction, but there was none.
She left the lights on. She tried to sleep during her return to Earth, but her body tensed and her mind flitted with fear. Images darted through her thoughts. The hanged men, the running men, Nestor asking if she believed in the resurrection of the body. No, there is no God, this is the natural order. She imagined a snake flailing in the weightlessness of space until it curled toward itself to swallow its own tail. She thought of silver, swatches of silver swimming together, a school of fish. Njoku in the Pacific, reaching deep into a watery thin space and feeling a fish appear in the middle of his hand, the sensation of the fish slipping free . . .
Moss skimmed the surface of sleep and woke when she fell to the floor, the clatter of everything that hadn’t been tethered crashing down around her, the camcorder cracked to pieces, the tremendous thud, thud, thud of the bodies whapping the walls and floor. Earth’s gravity. She hurried to the pilot’s chair, strapped herself in, thinking of the wreck of the Libra, just before the misfire. Libra had burned and fallen in that long, dreamless night. The Onyx’s cockpit was tinted, shading the incandescent smear of fire as it burned against the atmosphere like a struck match. They murdered Remarque, she thought. At one of the Brandt-Lomonaco space-time knots, Pacific jack mackerels were caught in a Gödel curve—a loop. She thought of Libra, her disorienting night in the brig, her experience of mutiny and the shipwreck that followed. Mursult’s letter to Durr had spelled out what Remarque had been attempting, a cascade failure to obliterate us all. A black hole.
“I can do what Remarque couldn’t do,” said Moss, piecing her thoughts together even as she said them aloud. Nicole had told her that Remarque had ordered mass suicide. That if the entire crew of Libra blinked, then the planet Esperance would go unfound. “My God,” Moss said aloud, to no one. “Libra’s a jack mackerel. I can do what Remarque couldn’t do.”
But what would come of it? she wondered. What would happen if she managed to breach Libra, if she somehow managed to cause a cascade failure?
She had been brought here, pulled across the river when she was pulled from the cross. Everyone’s mistake, she’d been told, is that we believe in our own existence. The falling star as it blooms. Patrick Mursult believed he could walk the Vardoggers, travel backward in time: Marian will be young. If he could walk backward in time . . .
When was terra firma? she wondered. It wasn’t here, it wasn’t 1997. 1997 was Libra’s IFT. If she could cause a cascade failure, if Libra can blink, when was true terra firma? She imagined the thin space overwhelmed by the Terminus, imagined the Terminus reaching Libra, imagined the White Hole traveling Libra’s Casimir line back to the point of its original launch, to terra firma. Marian will be young, five years old. Nicole, when she rescued Moss from the brig, had said that eleven years had passed. Ebullience rose through her like bubbles in a flute of champagne. If Libra blinked, then this IFT will blink, everything will blink. NSC ships would still comb the universe and distant time, would still sail Deep Waters, but Libra will have blinked in its future. Esperance will go undiscovered. There would still be a chance of that planet’s discovery, Moss realized, some chance of another ship happening on that planet, there would still be a chance of the Terminus, but only a chance. A possibility. But there can be other possibilities. Terra firma would be the date of Libra’s initial launch, the moment just before Libra first used its B-L drive.
November 7, 1985.
“Courtney,” said Moss.
The Onyx cut through the whiteout squall, the ocean an undulating gray beneath the gusts, and skidded on the ice-slicked runway at Apollo Soucek. People broke through the barriers and swarmed the runway, chased the Cormorants as they taxied, insensible of their own safety in their desperation to flee. Moss saw bodies in the snow. She was still far from the terminal when a yellow truck the size of a bus cut across the runway ahead of her, sped toward her, to collide with her. What are you doing? she thought as the truck fishtailed on the slick surface. It was an anti-icing truck, the cherry-picker arm and hoses flailing wildly. The truck swerved and cut back and rammed the Onyx’s front wheel.
“What the fuck?” shouted Moss, the Onyx now stuck in the wreckage of the truck. Maybe an accident caused by the ice, maybe the truck had slid into her, but she saw the first few people rush toward the Cormorant shouting. Others appeared, families, soldiers, surrounding the Onyx, trying to climb aboard. They want to get into this ship. They want to save themselves, take over this ship.
Moss popped the canopy just as one of the men reached her. He’d clambered up the wreckage of the yellow truck, his eyes wild. “Take me on this one, take me!”
“Get in,” said Moss, climbing from the canopy to let him pass, needing to escape these people. She found her footing on the Cormorant’s boarding ladder, but once she made it down a few rungs, clutching hands yanked her off, tossed her aside to the tarmac. At least a dozen people had made it to the Onyx, and more were coming. They crawled over the ship, trying to find openings. She saw another Cormorant, the Lily of the Valley, streak past and swerve into the sky, bodies strewn along its runway. They’ve gone mad, thought Moss. She turned back to the Onyx and saw people ejecting the bodies of the dead, throwing corpses away like unwanted ballast.
“Shannon!”
She heard him: O’Connor. He was with Njoku, the snow blowing in slashing gusts between them. He waved to her, but she lost sight of them in the storm, in the rush of people heading toward the farther runways in anticipation of another Cormorant. Moss fought her way through the masses, into the terminal. The hallways were quiet compared to the clamor outside. She took off her heavy space suit, wearing only her long underwear. Luggage was strewn about the airport, abandoned in the mad rush to catch ships to escape. She found a U.S. Navy tracksuit in a duffel and a flight jacket with VFA-213 patches: the Blacklion, a double-tailed lion drawn in stars. She put it on.
The Navy had abandoned most of the base. The streets were empty, the snow mounting in sifting drifts. Moss brushed off a half foot of snow from her truck, listening to the engine crank before it turned over. More people streamed in through the abandoned station gates as she sped away, the streets of Virginia Beach swept with snow but passable. She had always imagined immense traffic jams in the event of cataclysm, but there were no cars on the road, only a few that had been pulled to the berms, abandoned. Everyone’s dead in their homes, she thought, or stuck in ice. There were a few other cars on the highways, their brights only dim spots in the blizzard.
Four people clustered on the roadside gazing at the White Hole, immobile, utterly paralyzed, their mouths hanging wide, extended open as if their jaws had been stretched apart. The silver filled their mouths; it looked as if each gurgled a mouthful of mercury. The silver ran down their cheeks, over their necks. She didn’t see her first pack of running men until well outside the city, a group of thirty or so runners, nude and barefoot despite the freezing winds. She had almost imagined the running men as something funny, absurd, but seeing them terrified her, running desperately without thought of bodily injury or endurance, their faces twisted into expressions of blank rage, some of them screaming. They ran like they were being chased by a swarm of stinging insects, passing into the forest that edged the interstate, disappearing into the woods. They would run until their bodies disintegrated, Moss knew. If they made it to the shore, they would run into the water to drown. She drove recklessly, spinning out on the icy roads, swerving lanes, panic settling over her that she was wrong to be here, so wrong, that she should have docked at the Cancer, should be among colleagues, far from here, leaving the dying Earth to seek a new refuge somewhere out in endless space.
Night descended as she entered the forest, and the glare from the White Hole reflected off the blizzard snowfall and bathed the evergreens in silver. The fires that would devour the Monongahela National Forest, and all forests, had burned since the White Hole appeared, and Moss saw firelight flickering deep in the woods on either side of her like will-o’-the-wisps or ghostly torchlight processions. The access route leading up toward the Vardogger was impassable. Moss abandoned her truck and climbed, sliding hopelessly down the snowdrifts until she grappled tree trunk to tree trunk, dragging herself upward by gripping saplings and using them like climbing cords. Any moment your skin might burn, the QTNs might fill you, you might shed these clothes and run, you might join a pack, you might be lifted into the air . . .
She staggered into the clearing where Nestor had once shot Vivian, where Marian’s bones were once found, where Marian’s echo had been recovered. The woods were on fire. She struggled for breath, the freezing air and smoke and ash burning in her lungs. Her body ached.
“Oh, God,” she said, heart pounding from the climb, but she continued through thicker pines and soon dropped several inches into deeper snow. She had found the runnel that Nestor once followed, the shallow ditch of the creek that had run dry. The cairns were near here, she remembered, but they would be buried under snow. She heard rushing water and followed the sound on a downward slope. A Navy truck was left here, iced over. They hadn’t yet fenced this area off, though they’d planned to before the evacuation. She saw heavier equipment, abandoned. Some trees had been cleared from the zone, were piled like lumber. The white Vardogger tree was untouched by snow.
Moss ran her hand over the bark; it felt like cold steel. She fell to her knees, hoping the tree would open, would multiply, to show her a path of trees, but nothing happened. The wind pushed through the hemlocks, the sound like a broom sweeping concrete. This was where Nestor had left her to die. In one of her futures, he had betrayed her here. What had happened to Nestor? She imagined him crucified, upside down in a forest of other crucifixions, but the thought seemed too cruel, despite his future cruelty. She chose to remember how his body had looked silvery in the moonlight of that first night they’d spent together, how his freckles had formed a constellation over his heart. She was filled with sorrow.
She stood, walked away from the tree, turned back.
There was only one tree.
No.
Mursult had written that the path might be a trick of the eyes. That it might always exist but remain unseen, or that it might be a function of QTNs in the blood, or that it might open whenever the B-L drive misfired. In any case there was no telling when or even if the tree would form an infinite path that led to Libra. The hour is late, Nestor had said. What do I do? Moss screamed, raging, nervous. What do I do? Time passed, the snow and violent wind numbed her, she bundled in her coat, concerned about QTNs that must be in the air. They must be filling me, she thought. They must be saturating my blood.
Will I die here? She wondered if her death would come while she waited for a path to appear. Nothing as violently bizarre as what QTNs might do with her, but naturally, a natural death in this unnatural cold. The flight jacket she had taken from Apollo Soucek was leather, lined with wool, but the cold seeped through and hoarfrost froze over her hair when she tucked her face deep into the lining. She pulled her arms in from the sleeves, breathed onto her fingers, but her skin stung and tingled, and she knew she would soon lose feeling.
Walk. Move. Keep your blood flowing.
Twilight. She went to the clearing, to the river, and returned to the white tree. When she passed the tree, the landscape changed around her. She lost sight of the Navy vehicles and the felled evergreens. The pines had grown in, were thick, and she pushed through branches, hoping to find that infinite path, but instead came back to the same white tree. Or . . . this must be a different tree.
She was in the thin space, she realized, but the path of trees that Hyldekrugger had followed wasn’t here; there was only a dark forest, boughs and branches, needles that scratched her. She came again to the white tree, and although she knew she was caught up in this place, just as she’d been caught here before her crucifixion, she began to panic, lost. She forced her way through dense pine boughs and came into the clearing, to the rushing black river, but she was on the wrong side of the river, she felt, the same sense that Njoku and O’Connor had described when they were here. She saw the white tree across the river, but she had come from the white tree. It should be behind her.
Marian crossed this river, she remembered, and I crossed the river with Hyldekrugger. But the pathway of trees hadn’t appeared for her, and there was no tree fording the river. Shannon Moss climbed from this river, the echo, she thought, just before Cobb beat her to death.
She approached the river, toed the bank. The swift water broke against boulders into white water, misting her with river spray. She could make it across, though, maybe. There were enough stones in the water, sharper rocks jutting above the rapids; they could be stepping-stones, she thought.
You’ll die, Shannon. You’ll get hypothermia in that water, with no place to dry off, with the air so cold. You’ll die.
But she scrabbled down the snow-covered bank, gauging her distance to the nearest rock, a few feet ahead. She stepped wide across the river onto the rock and found her footing, trusting her weight to her prosthetic leg. The wind ripped at her, and she shivered. The next rock was closer, with a wide flat section she could land on. She gathered herself, took another step, but her prosthetic knee joint gave when she needed it to lock, and she slipped and fell, gashing her head against the jagged stone before the current carried her under. Her entire body felt lacerated by the cold water, and her lungs constricted in the frigid rush; she couldn’t breathe. She was submerged, and she flailed in desperation; her hands groped, scraping against rocks, but she couldn’t find purchase. The river carried her. She reached above the water, and her fingers touched smooth wood. She grabbed for it, caught herself, held fast to the branch, and pulled her head above water, gasping. She heaved herself from the river, scrambling onto the felled tree, the bridge. She had found the Vardogger, and she hugged it, lying on her chest. Her clothes were soaked with river water, fast becoming a shell of ice. She had to warm up somehow, or she would die.