13

 

 

MIKK ATTACHES TETHERS to my belt, my suit and one of my boots. I must look like some kind of puppet. I warn him not to tug for at least an hour, unless I tug first. I take the device, turn it off, then turn it on, and make sure the lights run along the bottom and sides like they’re supposed to.

They do.

I attach it to my belt.

Then I float toward that damn door.

The opening looks smaller than I remember and somewhat ordinary. In my career, I’d gone through countless doors that led to an inky blackness, a blackness that would eventually resolve itself under the lights of my suit.

But right now, I have those lights off. I want to see the interior as I remember it. I want to see the light show.

Only I don’t. There are no lights. The persistent hum that I’d been hearing since we arrived has grown.

It sounds like the bass line to a cantata. I freeze near the door and listen. First the bass, then the tenors, followed by altos, mezzo sopranos, and sopranos. Voices blending and harmonizing.

Only they aren’t. What I had identified years ago as the voices of the lost is actually some kind of machine noise. I can hear frequency and pitch, and my mind assembled those sounds—or to be more accurate, those vibrations—into music, which as a child was something I could understand.

Now I understand what I’m hearing and for the first time since I go into the Room, I’m nervous.

“Your heart rate is elevated,” Roderick says from the control room.

“Copy that,” I say, and flick on my suit lights. They illuminate everything around me. There’s a floor, a ceiling, the window that we’d already observed, and walls.

A completely empty room.

Except for Karl, floating free in the middle of it. His face is tilted toward the floor, his legs bent, his feet raised slightly. Occasionally he bumps against something and changes trajectory.

He’s either unconscious or—

I don’t let myself complete that thought. I use a nearby wall to propel myself toward him. I grab him by the waist and pull him toward me. His bulky suit is hard to hold; I undo the tether on my boot and attach it to his right wrist.

That’s not normal procedure—you could pull off the arm of the suit if you’re not careful—but I don’t plan to let go of him. Instead, I tug my remaining tethers, and hope Mikk is strong enough to pull us both out.

It takes a moment, and then we’re moving backwards. I shift slightly so that I can see if we’re about to hit anything.

The empty room stuns me. I expected not just the lights, but shades of the people lost. Or their remains. Or maybe just a few items that they had brought in with them, things that had fallen off their suits and remained, floating in the zero gravity for all time.

The previous divers wearing the device said they couldn’t recover Commander Trekov—that he wouldn’t leave. Were they lying? Or had they seen something I hadn’t?

The open door looms. I kick away from the wall and float a little too high. I have to let go of Karl with one hand to push away from the ceiling.

Then we slide through the door and into the destroyed habitat. Mikk still clings to the tethers.

I shove Karl at him, then reach behind me and grab that damn door.

It takes all of my strength to close it. There’s some kind of resistance—something that makes the movement so difficult that I can’t do it on my own.

I’m not going to ask Mikk for help, though, and I’m not going to leave the door open. I grunt and shove, then turn on the gravity in boots for leverage. I sink to the metal floor, brace my feet, and push that door.

It takes forever to close. I’m sweating as I do, and my suit is making little beeping noises, warning me about the extreme exertion. Roderick is cautioning me, and Mikk is telling me to wait so that he can help.

I don’t wait.

The door closes and I lean on it, wondering how I can close it permanently, so no one ever goes in there again.

I can’t come up with anything—at least, not something I can do fast—so I make sure it’s latched, and then I turn off the gravity in my boots. As I float upwards, I grab the lead.

I wrap my other hand around Karl and pull him with me. Mikk is protesting, repeating over and over again that he can bring Karl in.

Of course, Mikk can bring him in, but he won’t. I’m the one who brought Karl here. I’m the one who put him in charge. I’m the one who didn’t protest when he wanted to go into that Room alone.

He’s my responsibility, and I need to get him back to the skip.

It only takes a few minutes. It’s not hard to move him along. Mikk moves ahead of us and pulls open the skip’s exterior door. Together we shove Karl into the airlock and then follow him inside.

I detach the lead. As I close the exterior door, I hear Mikk gasp.

I turn.

His body is visibly trembling. He’s looking into Karl’s faceplate.

I walk over to them and look.

Karl’s face has shrunken in on itself. His eyes are gone, black holes in what was once a handsome face.

“He’s dead,” Mikk says and he sounds surprised.

That’s when I realize I’m not. I think I knew Karl was dead when his belt appeared at that door. Karl’s too cautious to lose his extra breathers, his weapons, and the device.

“What happened to him?” Roderick asks from inside the skip.

I touch Karl’s faceplate. It’s scratched, cloudy, marred by the passage of time. The suit is so fragile that my grip has loosened its exterior coating.

He didn’t just die. He suffocated. Or froze. Or both. His suit ran out of oxygen. The environmental systems shut off, and he was left to the blackness of space as if he were outside the station, unprotected.

“Is it something catching?” Roderick’s voice rises.

“No,” I say. At least, not yet. Someday we’ll all die from the passage of time.

“Then what is it?” Roderick asks. I realize at that moment, he’s not going to open the interior door until I tell him.

“The device malfunctioned,” I say, and that’s true. It didn’t protect him, although it protected me. “The Room killed him.”

“How?” Mikk asks, his voice nearly a whisper.

All I have is a working theory at the moment, and I learned long ago not to let others know my theories. It causes problems, particularly if I’m right.

“I don’t know exactly how,” I say, and that’s not entirely a lie. I don’t know the mechanics of what happened exactly, although I do know what caused it.

That Room has a functioning stealth system. Ancient stealth, not the stuff we invented. The kind we found on the Dignity Vessel. Only here, it works, and has continued to work over time.

That’s why we couldn’t find an energy signal, like we did on the Dignity Vessel. Because the stealth tech is working here, masking everything, including itself.

The station isn’t growing. The stealth shield is degrading. The exterior parts of the station move in a slower timeframe . The interior part, nearest the stealth tech itself, is moving at an accelerated pace.

That’s why Karl died when the device malfunctioned. Time accelerated for him.

I wonder if that was when he saw the lights. Time passing, things appearing and changing, like the light from stars long gone, seen over a distance.

At least he hadn’t died frightened.

Or had he? Thinking he was alone in that big empty Room.

Thinking we had abandoned him.

Like all the other souls lost in that horrible place.