The dark corridor reeked of something more than just a dead ship. A presence filled it. Something Galluzzi couldn’t quite manage to comprehend—a quality that seemed to slip off at a ninety-degree axis from reality. That it did so at the very instant Galluzzi began to grasp its essence made it even crazier.
“Where are the lights?” Galluzzi tried to keep the panic from his voice.
“The Turalon crewmen supposedly fixed them. Not up to their usual standards.”
When Shig shone his light down the corridor, Galluzzi would have sworn that something devoured the photons. As bright as the beam was, it should have penetrated more than just a mere ten or fifteen meters. Light didn’t disappear that way; that it did here was plain unnatural.
Shig added, “I don’t think their hearts were in any of the repairs. Hard to concentrate when you’re constantly looking over your shoulder. I suspect only fear of Supervisor Aguila’s wrath enabled them to patch up the few systems they did. Get the ship stabilized . . . and get the hell off. Workmanship wasn’t a priority when things were sneaking in at the edges of their vision.”
“I’m creep-freaked enough to understand where they were coming from,” Galluzzi said through an exhale. “Next time something touches me, I’m out of here.”
He kept wanting to ask the ship for light, for air, for an explanation as he would aboard Ashanti.
They chopped the ship’s AI out with cutting torches, he reminded himself.
Shig continued to plod forward, his light a truncated cone of reality in the dark insanity that was Freelander.
“I saw her,” Galluzzi whispered. “Freelander. In the yards outside Transluna. They were fitting her structural members. Just the rude skeleton that would become this ship. I remember how amazed we all were. Knowing that we were on the leading edge of ever bigger and better ships.”
And now she has come to this.
Shig stopped at a hatch. Then he turned, shining his light past Galluzzi and back the way they’d come. “Consider this: We’re looking at the transportees’ deck. All this black and empty space. They voided this deck. Five hundred people suffocated here, most of them in their bunks. Then they turned off the heat. Let them all freeze. Think of that. Five hundred corpses, frozen solid. An entire deck as a deep freeze.”
Given the difficulty with which Galluzzi managed to swallow, someone might have jammed a knotted cloth into the bottom of his throat. He stared back into the depths, tried to imagine the frozen corpses, eyes frosted white, lips pulled back from teeth that glinted with icy crystals.
The voice beside Galluzzi’s ear whispered, “. . . wasn’t but two days ago when Melanie . . .”
Galluzzi whirled, threw up his arm, crying out. “Get away!”
Shig flashed his light back. “Hear something?”
“A woman. Whispered something about two days ago. Melanie something.”
“If you want, you can look her up on the transportee manifest. That, or search long enough, you’ll find her name on the wall.”
“What wall?” Galluzzi put a hand to his heart, trying to still it as the shadows closed in around him. He could feel them. Kept turning his head, trying to see behind him, fearful of another touch like the one he’d felt outside the shuttle bay.
“You’ll see. This way.” Shig cycled the hatch manually, opened it to a corridor where the lights flickered on. The panels glowed in what Galluzzi would have called malaria yellow and cast a urine-colored tone on the corridor that led to the Crew Deck.
But the walls . . . Galluzzi tried to understand. Dark, as if poorly covered with...what? Scribbling? Scrawling?
“That’s writing.” He bent to peer at the looping script. Layers and layers of it. Sentences written over sentences. Thousands upon thousands, until the original meaning was hidden in a mass of looping black ink.
“We’ve never bothered to scry them all out, given the overwriting, but one of the most frequent is ‘The exhalation of death is the breath of life. Draw it fully into your lungs.’ My personal favorite is: ‘The fingers of the dead wind through our bodies, stroke our hearts, and caress our bowels.’ I’ve always wondered if it was metaphor or factually derived.”
Galluzzi stepped warily along the corridor, awed by meter after square meter, the countless layers of overwriting covering walls, ceiling, and floor. He finally saw a legible line that read: “I am vacuum. A cloud of emptiness. I am vacuum. A cloud of emptiness. I am vacuum . . .” and then it was submerged in a tangled chaos of overwritten lines.
“How many days . . . No, how many years did they dedicate to this?”
I am reading the ravings of the long dead.
His hair was on end again, a tremble in his muscles. Every fiber of his body wanted to turn, chase pell-mell back through the dark corridor and to the shuttle. To be rid of this . . .
He jerked to the side, sure that something had just passed him. A faint image of a human. It vanished as quickly as it had appeared.
“Did you see that?”
“No.” Shig told him. “But I don’t believe you’ve glimpsed the bits of movement I have, either. One seemed to appear out of your right side, only to evaporate. Your only response at that instant was a slight flinch.”
“They lived in here for one hundred and twenty-nine years?”
“Correct.” Shig ran his fingers over the black mass of scrawl, as though it were braille. “They are writing to the dead. This hallway was the only one they left unsealed. Through this door, they brought the bodies, one by one, over the years. Carried them right through here before dropping them into the hydroponics.”
Galluzzi endured a flashback. Saw again the stripped and broken human bones sent down the chute from Deck Three to find their ignominious end in Ashanti’s hydroponics.
“We are all monsters,” he whispered.
“Perhaps. Among other things. All of which makes the study of humanity so engrossing, if not particularly illuminating.”
Shig fought off a shiver, turning his steps forward. Took a companionway up, having to turn his flash on again.
Then they stepped out on the Command Deck where again the lights came on with that off-putting urine-yellow glow.
“It’s the light in this place,” Galluzzi growled. “Like it’s sick.”
“Captain Torgussen has a theory. When Vixen puts her sensors on Freelander, it’s as if the ship is still tied to wherever it went on the ‘other side.’ They think it’s leaking particles, photons, energy and what have you, back into that universe.”
“That’s . . .” But no, apparently it wasn’t impossible. “My God, Shig, what happened to these people?”
“Mass murder. What they believed was an eternity trapped aboard Freelander. And, well, I want you to see this.”
“Crew’s mess, isn’t it?” He stepped through the hatch as Shig shone his light into the room’s center.
For a long moment, Galluzzi squinted, trying to make sense of the dome-like structure in the exact center. Some sort of yurt, or cupola. Rounded on the top, perhaps two meters across, two-and-a-half tall at the peak. But what was the lattice-like dome made of? He couldn’t place the rickety looking materials.
Shig slapped a palm to the wall, and dim lights flooded the two-story room with a faint glow that cast eerie shadows across the scraped and dirty floor.
“Holy shit.” Galluzzi fought for breath.
Bones. The whole damn thing is made of bones.
It put Batuhan’s carved throne to shame as a mere pipsqueak’s mockery.
Galluzzi felt himself pulled, almost staggered his way to the front of the thing. Stared in disbelief at the incredible artistry. Vertical femora held up the walls. Then came the lines of columnar shin and arm bones, the rows of staring skulls. Thousands and thousands of bones.
“Where did they get so many? My God, there must be hundreds of people here.”
“All of them.” Shig stopped beside him, rubbing the backs of his arms. “Even the last one.”
Galluzzi followed the nod of Shig’s head to where the wasted skeleton lay in the doorway. “How come they left that one lying there?”
“Because she was the last. There was no one to wire her bones into the temple.”