Brian Evenson - Dead Space - Martyr

When he came conscious, Harmon was over him, stroking his head, a beatific smile on his face.

“You see?” he said when he noticed that Altman’s eyes were open. “You see?”

Altman pushed him away and stood, stalking quickly over to the monitor. He began to type frantically, sketching a structure out as well. His hands were moving faster than his brain, working on different bits and pieces of it all at once, flipping from holofile to holofile and back again. He was, he realized with a shock, recording the basic rudiments for a blueprint of a new Marker. It was sloppy and skew. There were a lot of unanswered questions, a lot of mysteries to be sorted out, but that was definitely what he was doing.

“What is it?” Harmon was asking from behind him. “What’s going on?”

“I’ve figured it out,” Altman answered. “I thought I’d figured it out before, but I was still struggling to understand what it meant. Now I know.”

He worked awhile longer; how long he couldn’t say. His head was spinning, his fingers aching. When he had finished, he turned to Harmon.

“I need your help,” he said.

“What is it?”

“I need you to help me translate what I have here, best as you can, and feed the signal back to the Marker.”

At first Harmon just stared and then he slowly sat down, took a closer look. He went through it, slowly. Suddenly he glanced up at Altman, the first coherent look he’d given since Altman had entered.

“This is the Marker,” he said, awe in his voice. “You understood it, just as she asked you to do.”

Altman nodded.

“You want me to transmit to the Marker the image of itself?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Altman.

“Marker be praised,” said Harmon. And then he added, “Altman be praised.”

It made his skin crawl to hear Harmon say his name like that, but he bit his tongue, said nothing. What he had done was far from complete, would require years and years more work, but hopefully it would be enough right now to stop the process of Convergence.

It took a few hours more, and a few attempts to transmit in different ways, before something connected. The Marker sent out a short, intense burst of energy, and then, as suddenly as it had begun broadcasting, it fell silent.

“What’s wrong with it?” asked Harmon.

“It’s resting,” said Altman. “We’ve done what it wanted us to do. We’ve saved the world.”

After it was over, he sat there for a long time, thinking. Why did the Marker want to be reproduced? What effect would it have? What did it mean? And if the hallucinations, the visions, weren’t from the Marker but were opposed to it, where were they from? Which of the two was on their side?

He still didn’t trust it. No, what he had felt when he touched the Marker was not love but nothing — total absolute indifference to the human race. They were a means to an end. What that end was, he wasn’t certain, but felt, more than ever, that for the Marker they were expendable, a necessary step on the way to something else. When the new Marker was constructed — and he had no doubt that that was what the Marker intended — what would happen then? He had stopped the Convergence, but perhaps by doing so he had jump-started a discovery that would lead humanity to an even worse fate.

Then again, another part of him responded, what if you’re wrong? What if you’re being paranoid? Or what if the love Harmon had felt was his own feelings, his own emotions mirrored back to him: his own religious love for the Marker being reflected as the Marker ’s love for him? What if the indifference Altman sensed was not something inherent to the Marker, but something integral to himself, reflected back?

He sat there thinking, thinking, but getting nowhere. What was he going to do now? Now that he’d given the Marker what it wanted, had he inadvertently made things worse for humanity?

“We’ll have to go,” he said to Harmon. “The Marker wants us to leave.”

“How do you know?”

“It told me,” said Altman.

Harmon nodded. He went to the Marker and touched his lips to it. He was no longer paranoid, no longer jumpy, no doubt because the Marker had stopped broadcasting. But he was still a believer.

“Where are we going?” Harmon asked.

“To the control room,” said Altman. “I have something to take care of, and then we can leave.”

He didn’t know what he expected — maybe that when the Marker stopped broadcasting the creatures would lose power, would collapse, even fall apart. But it wasn’t like that. When they left the Marker chamber and went down the hall and opened the door at the far end, it was to find the strange spiderlike creature still there, still waiting for him. It was a little slower maybe, a little more listless, but it was still there, still eager to kill them both.

Seeing that only strengthened his commitment to do what he planned.

They opened the door and saw it, and the creature’s back began to bristle. Altman grabbed Harmon, pulled them both behind the doorframe. The strange conical projections it cast from its back whipped down the hall and past them, whunking into the walls.

He stuck his head back out and waited for what it would do next. All three heads, he saw, were loose now, scurrying toward them.

He thumbed on the plasma cutter.

“You might want to stay back,” he said to Harmon, and then stepped into the doorway.

He caught the first with the blade as it leaped at him, separating the head from its tendrils. The head, still grimacing, bounced and richoted off the wall and he crushed it with his foot. The second he caught with an upward thrust as it scurried along the ceiling just above the doorframe. Then he had to step back and press against the wall again as the creature slung more barbs at him.

The last, he had to pry off Harmon’s neck. It had gotten past him somehow, he didn’t know how. He didn’t even know it had attached itself to Harmon, and wouldn’t have known if Harmon hadn’t grabbed him from behind and shook him. He’d turned, saw Harmon going purple, thought Not this again, and sliced the thing in half, somehow managing not to take Harmon’s face off along with it.

Harmon coughed, rubbed his throat. “Altman be praised,” he suggested in a hoarse whisper.

“Stop saying that,” said Altman. “Altman doesn’t want to be praised.”

He glanced again around the door frame. The creature was moving forward now, its spearlike legs rattling down the hall and coming toward them. He put his finger to his lips, warning Harmon to be quiet, then flattened himself against the wall.

He heard it coming, the tapping of each leg a kind of complex, echoing rhythm that suddenly made it difficult for him to tell exactly how close it really was. He heard it pause at the doorframe. He kept expecting it to sidle through, but for some reason it didn’t. Instead, it turned around and started back the other way.

Shit, thought Altman, so much for ambushes. And rushed around the door frame and after it.

It spun around, surprisingly quick despite its many legs. He sheared off the one nearest to him, then threw himself to the floor as its back bristled and it spat its barbs. He sliced off another leg on the same side, almost lost his foot as it stabbed one of its remaining legs down. Another swipe and it crashed to one side, disabled. He dismembered it, careful this time not to cut into the yellow and black tumor.

He went back for Harmon and they continued down the hall. They passed the laboratory doors and saw that they were open. Inside the second one, two of the creatures with scythes turned about in circles, performing a strange dance, as if the Marker, before falling silent, had sent them a message that they could not interpret and now they were caught in some kind of glitch, forced to perform the same motion again and again. Not knowing what else to do, Altman moved quietly past. If they noticed him, they didn’t show it.