Brian Evenson - Dead Space - Martyr

He leaned back in his chair, his elbows on the chair’s arms, his fingers tented in front of his face. Maybe a hoax, he thought, but maybe not. What if we take it all seriously? What if we try to put it all together? What will we come up with?

A signal pulse from the center of the crater, something that hadn’t been noticed before.

A gravity anomaly, also something new.

A suspicious freighter, not exactly over the center of the crater, but not far from it.

On the deck of the old freighter, a brand-new industrial submarine hoist. Also military or ex-military personnel on board.

Evidence of either seismic activity or of drilling, either in or very near the center of the undersea crater.

A vid, sent out on multiple channels, apparently broadcast from the center of the crater. On it, a man in a confined space, apparently mad, covered in odd runes, saying “understand it — destroy it.”

It all seemed connected, and it all came back to the crater. Something happening at the heart of the crater that someone — probably DredgerCorp, since they were doing the asking, but maybe others besides them — was very, very interested in. Interested enough to start a drilling operation, probably illegal, to try to see what it was or to try to remove it.

That might also explain the vid fragment, Altman realized. What if the broadcast was from a submarine? He shivered slightly.

The problem was that that only raised bigger questions.

He sighed. It’d be easier, he realized, to think of it as just a hoax and stop worrying about it. Only he couldn’t think of it as just a hoax. The more he thought about it, the more he pondered it, the more he thought it must be real.

He brooded, hesitating. Your move, Michael, he told himself. What would be the best way to flush out the secret?

In the middle of the afternoon, he hit upon an idea. It wasn’t the best idea, but it had the beauty of being simple, and it was the only thing he could think of likely to have quick results.

He put a copy of the vid onto his holopod and slipped it back into his pocket. “Done for the day,” he said to Field.

The man looked over, his expression like that of a dead fish. “It’s only two thirty,” he said.

Altman shrugged. “I have a few things to look into.”

“Suit yourself,” said Field, and turned back to his holoscreen.

Fifteen minutes later, Altman had a hat pulled low over his face and was sitting in the lobby of the town’s youth hostel, using its single ancient terminal — a pre-holoscreen model. The deskman cast him a lazy glance and then ignored him. He wasn’t paid enough to care who used the computer.

He spun the vid from his holopod to the terminal and then spent some time making sure he hadn’t left a trail. Then he went onto FreeSpace and created a dummy account. It could be traced back to the monitor, he knew, but there was nothing he could do about that. It couldn’t, in any case, be traced directly to him.

He prepared a message: DredgerCorps’ Illegal Doings in Chicxulub, he typed into the subject line, and then captioned the vid, Last Words from a Submarine Tunneled Deep into the Heart of Chicxulub Crater . He stayed for a minute thinking and then added, A Retrieval Mission Gone Wrong. He then proceeded to copy the vid to every scientist he could think of in Chicxulub, himself included, and to a select few beyond.

There, he thought. That should get their attention.

That evening he told Ada what he had done, explained to her what they’d found out, what he thought it meant. He thought she’d tease him, tell him that he was making something out of nothing because he was bored. Instead, she just crossed her arms.

“You’re such an idiot sometimes. Don’t you realize it could be dangerous?” she asked.

“Dangerous?” he said. “What, you think they’d try to kill me for revealing some industrial secret? This isn’t a spy movie, Ada.”

“Maybe not, but you’re acting like it is,” she said. “Secure Web site, gangs of scientists, secret subs, signals that shouldn’t exist. And then this video.” She shivered. “A madman covered in symbols drawn in blood. Doesn’t that make you think it might be dangerous?”

“What?”

“How do I know what ‘it’ is?” she asked, shaking her hands at him. “The thing at the heart of the crater might be dangerous. Or the people who want to retrieve it might be dangerous. Or both.”

“But—” he said.

“It’s just—” she said, and then stopped.

She lowered her head and stared at the tabletop. He watched her hug herself, as if she were cold. “I don’t want to see you hurt or dead,” she said quietly.

She was motionless for long enough that he thought the conversation was over. He was about to get up and get a beer when suddenly she started speaking again.

“You have all your data,” she said in a very steady voice. “You’ve put it together and made it mean something.”

“I might be wrong,” he said.

“That’s not what I’m getting at,” she said. “Just be quiet and listen, Michael. You scientists have only one way of looking at the world. I’ve got data of a sort, too, and it’s just as troubling.”

She started to lay it out for him, slowly weaving it together as if it were a story. The signal pulse began at a certain moment, she said, and from that moment on, everything was different. He knew it as well as she did. “Do you remember when you started having bad dreams?”

“I’ve always had bad dreams,” he said.

“But not like these,” she said. “Bloody, apocalyptic, end-of-the-world stuff every night?”

“No,” he admitted. “Those are new.”

“Everyone is having them, Michael. Even me. And I’m not normally prone to nightmares.”

She had noticed how distracted and ill-rested everyone seemed, from the townspeople to her colleagues. She was trained to notice things like that, so she’d started asking around. Did you sleep well last night? Did you have any dreams? Nobody was sleeping well. Nobody was dreaming anything but nightmares. And when she could get them to remember when the nightmares started, it always corresponded to when the signal pulse had begun.

“That’s just the start,” said Ada. “Do you know how many times over the past week you’ve told me that you had a headache? Dozens. Do you know how many times you’ve clutched your head and winced, but not said anything about it to me? Dozens more. And you’re not the only one,” she said. “Everybody is having them. Before the signal pulse, hardly anyone was having them. Now everybody is. Coincidence? Maybe, but you have to admit it’s strange.”

“All right,” he said. “I admit it.”

“Don’t be a smart-ass, Michael,” she said. “This is serious. I’ve spent months investigating the rituals and legends of this region, and before that I spent years reading other people’s reports on them. The thing about the legends is that they’ve been basically the same for hundreds of years.”

“So?”

She reached out and cuffed the side of his head. “I thought I told you not to be a smart-ass,” she said, her dark eyes flashing. “They’re no longer the same. They changed drastically once the pulse symbol started.”

“Shit,” he said.

“The villagers are having nightmares, Michael,” she said, “just like us. But while our dreams are only thematically similar, theirs are very specifically alike. They’re all dreaming of the ‘tail of the devil,’ which, as I mentioned the other day, is what the word Chicxulub means. Coincidence?”

Altman just shook his head. “I don’t understand it,” he said.

“I’ve noticed here and there, traced in the dust or freshly carved into the bark of trees, a crude symbol like two horns twisted together. When I asked what it was, people ignored me. When I kept asking, finally someone told me, almost spitting the word: Chicxulub .”