Том Светерлич - The Gone World

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.