Brian Evenson - Dead Space - Martyr

She got up and went to the fridge, pouring herself a cup of distilled water. She drank it down and then poured another cupful, sat back down. She reached out and put her hand in his palm. He squeezed it.

“I don’t know how it all fits together,” she said, “nor how it meshes with your own data. Maybe it’s all just weird coincidence. But all of it taken together makes me think that whatever is at the bottom of the crater is something that wishes us harm.”

“You make it almost sound like a living thing,” he said.

“I know it’s not very scientific,” she said. She took her hand back, rubbed her temple with it. “Ah, another headache,” she said, and gave a wry smile.

After a moment, she went on. “The people of the town seem to have a whole mythology about this ‘tail of the devil.’ I don’t know if the mythology has always been there or if it’s something that’s only recently developed. Certainly I’m only starting to notice it now.

“The only one I can get to talk about it in any detail is the town drunk, and he talks only if I ply him with booze. He claims there are stories that have been passed down from generation to generation, about a huge forked object thrust deep into the middle of the ocean. This, he told me in a mix of Spanish and Yucatec Maya, is all that remains of a great devil who surrendered his dominion upon the earth to dig down to the depths and rule over hell. His tail got caught and is still there, perhaps still alive. Some believe that this devil may still be attached to it.

“If you touch the tail, they say, you make yourself known to the devil. If the devil knows you, he will try to claim you. If you destroy more than you create, you make yourself known to the devil. ‘You and your people,’ the drunk told me when he was deep in his cups, ‘you are known to the devil,’ and then he made that strange symbol at me, a kind of curse, twining his index and middle fingers together.”

She stopped and drank the rest of the water, leaving the cup on the table. “After that, he refused to say more,” she said. “I tried to coax him to go on, offered to buy him more drinks, but he just shook his head. He was, he finally admitted, afraid that the devil might hear him.”

They sat silently for a moment, staring at each other.

“Maybe there’s a logical explanation,” said Altman.

“For the stories?”

“For all of it.”

“Maybe,” said Ada. “But I don’t know. I could, I suppose, argue that these stories are an odd mixture of Mayan and Christian belief. Maybe if I dug deep enough and thought long and hard enough, I’d have a theory about how they developed. But there’s still something there, a genuine warning and sense of fear that my heart tells me we should be listening to. I love you, Michael. Promise me you will at least try to listen.”

“We’ve tracked down around a dozen or so people who saw the vid broadcast,” said Tanner. He’d managed to get a few hours of sleep, though his head still ached and he felt like his eyes had been rubbed with sandpaper. “Of those, about half got mostly static. The others got more. Of those, about half recorded it. But we knew that already as we used their recordings to augment our own.”

“Besides you and the technicians in DredgerCorp, who else has seen the version you showed me?”

“Nobody,” said Tanner. “I’m sure of it.”

The Colonel furrowed his brow. “Take a look at this.”

He spun the holofile to Tanner. It was a communication sent from someone with the alias “Watchdog.” DredgerCorps’ Illegal Doings in Chicxulub, the caption read. The body of the message consisted of a short bit of typed text— Last Words from a Submarine Tunneled Deep into the Heart of Chicxulub Crater. Retrieval Mission Gone Wrong —and a vid.

He opened the vid, saw Hennessy’s blood-covered body and face, watched his strange smile and brief speech. Oh, shit , he thought. The worst has finally happened.

“Who sent it?” he asked.

“This copy was sent to Lenny Small,” the Colonel said. “The list of other recipients is several pages long, mostly scientists in Chicxulub, but a few others as well.”

“That vid’s originally from Sigmund Bennett,” said Tanner. “He recorded it.”

“Do you think he’s the one disseminating it?”

Tanner shook his head. “He’s not the type. One of my men talked to him — it was pretty clear he thought it was a hoax. He probably didn’t even think twice about it, probably just sent it to someone else because he thought it was interesting or weird. I’ll have someone speak to him and find out who else he showed it to.”

“Don’t bother,” said the Colonel.

“Don’t bother? But you said—”

“Too many people have seen it already,” he said. “There’s no point in killing anybody now. That’s more likely to hurt than help.”

Tanner let out a deep breath. He was glad to know he wouldn’t be asked to kill anybody. “What do we do, then?”

“We come clean,” said the Colonel.

“We come clean?” Tanner felt his stomach drop out. “That’s not what DredgerCorp does. Shouldn’t we run this by Small?”

“Small’s not running the show,” said the Colonel. “I am.”

“This is a disaster. I’ll tell you now,” Tanner said, face flushing red. “I’m not going down with the ship. I’m not willing to swallow the blame on this one. I’ll fight it all the way.”

“Calm down, Tanner,” the Colonel said. “We don’t actually come clean; we just pretend. If we release the story to the press, then we’re the ones to spin it. We play it right and we’ll be in a better position than we were in before.”

“How do we do that?” said Tanner.

“Simple,” said the Colonel. “Call a press conference. Claim that you’ve seen the video that’s been making the rounds and heard the rumors and that you thought it was time to set the story straight. You give the press all the footage you have and ask them to broadcast it. You’re not losing much there, since lots of people have seen bits and pieces of it — anybody gets curious enough and they’ll be able to put together a good chunk of it, just like you did.”

“How does that help?”

“What matters is what you say about it,” said the Colonel. “You can’t say that it’s a hoax, because that just gives the conspiracy junkies fuel for their fire. So tell as much of the truth as you can without damaging us.”

“How much is that?”

The Colonel’s lips tightened. “You need me to spell it out for you? Where’s your imagination, man?

“First, you say Hennessy went crazy. Not too hard a proposition to make stick once people see the vid. You say you had brought him down to Chicxulub because you were interested in testing an experimental new bathyscaphe, a borer, a vessel that can at least in theory, dig down through rock while underwater. It’s something which you’re certain will change the future of undersea mining, assuming that you can get all the bugs worked out. Got it so far?”

“Yes,” said Tanner.

“Anyway, you chose Hennessy because of his experience with submarines and because he was a company man, someone who was reliable and who could keep a secret. Obviously, technology like this, the last thing you want is for information about it to be leaked. You came to test it in Chicxulub.. Why?”

Tanner thought for a moment. “Because Chicxulub is out of the way,” he offered. “We have a little more privacy here than we might have had in other places, and it’s possible here to test how a bathyscaphe would respond boring through a variety of strata.”

“Good enough for now,” said the Colonel. “Polish it a little for your answer. I’ll arrange for a few testing permits to be filed retroactively to cover us. So, you did a series of test runs along the coast in shallow water, with Hennessy and another experienced submarine pilot, Dantec. Everything went fine, no problems whatsoever. Then you decided, after consulting with President Small, that it was time to test the bathyscaphe in deep water.