Том Светерлич - The Gone World

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: