Brian Evenson - Dead Space - Martyr

They took the F/7 down seven or eight times, test runs. At first, Dantec just watched what Hennessy did, listened to him talk, observed him. And then one day, suddenly, Dantec informed Hennessy that it was his turn.

“But this is a delicate piece of equipment,” cautioned Hennessy. “You need to have months and months of training before—”

“You’re making my headache worse. Move,” said Dantec. And Hennessy, turning away from the instrument panel and taking stock of his partner for perhaps the first time, seeing his dead expression and his steady eyes, did.

That night, just as he had sat down on the bed and begun to take his shoes off, Tanner heard a knock at the door.

“Come in,” he said, continuing to work on his laces until he saw a familiar pair of boots appear. He looked up. Why is it, he wondered, that Dantec always looks so predatory?

“It’s you,” he said to Dantec. “Everything coming along nicely?”

Dantec nodded. “I’ve figured it all out,” he said.

“You can pilot the thing if you need to?”

“After a moon lander, it’s a piece of cake,” said Dantec. “I won’t have any problems.”

“What about using the drill?”

Dantec shrugged. “Nothing too complicated to it,” he said. “I know how to drill a bore tunnel and can probably figure out how to make it do anything else we need. Hennessy is no longer essential. If he gets cold feet or something goes wrong, I can take over.”

“What do you mean if something goes wrong?” asked Tanner.

Dantec shrugged. “Just being prepared,” he said.

“If something does go wrong,” said Tanner slowly. “I prefer you don’t kill him.”

Dantec hesitated, then nodded. “Your preference is duly noted,” he said.

The next morning found Tanner speaking to an image of the Colonel on the vidscreen. “We’re ready,” he said. “Anytime you want we can move the ship over the center of the crater and drop the F/7. Both pilots are trained and comfortable with the vessel. Both are eager to leave.”

“Very good,” said the Colonel. He seemed again to be looking through Tanner, as if Tanner weren’t there. “Move the freighter into position tonight,” he said.

“Tonight?”

“Weigh anchor just before dusk. I want you in position by 2100 hours and ready to go by 2200. No need to tell your two pilots anything or do anything to make them suspect or get word back to someone if you’re wrong and they’re spies. Just wake them up and get them on board in time to drop the F/7 well before midnight.”

“Yes, sir,” said Tanner.

The Colonel reached out to disconnect the link, then stopped. “You look tired, Tanner,” he said. “Everything all right?”

“I’m fine, sir,” said Tanner. “Just a little headache. I’ve been having trouble sleeping. But nothing to worry about.”

“Tomorrow may be a historic moment,” the Colonel speculated.

“Yes,” said Tanner.

“What do you think is down there?”

Tanner had been wondering the same thing for days now. How could something seemingly man-made end up at the bottom of the crater, buried under miles of rock?

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe it’s just a natural formation that somehow doesn’t seem natural. Or maybe it’s something man-made that’s been placed there God only knows how. Or maybe…,” he said, but couldn’t bring himself to finish the sentence. It was too big to get his mind around.

“Maybe what?” asked the Colonel.

Tanner shook his head to clear it, which just made the headache throb more. “I really don’t know, sir,” he said.

“I’ll tell you what you’re thinking since you’re not man enough to say it yourself,” said the Colonel. “You’re thinking, ‘Sure, it may be constructed, but not by us, not by humans.’”

Tanner didn’t say anything.

“Believe it or not, Tanner, it’s a genuine possibility. That’s what we’re hoping for. The first contact with intelligent life other than our own.”

It made Tanner dizzy to think about it, even scared him a little. If that was what it was, if that’s what happened, it could change everything. “With a little luck, we’ll know soon enough,” he said in as steady a voice as he could muster. “I’ll keep my fingers crossed, sir,” he added, and then cut the link.

He was trying to run, but wasn’t getting anywhere. His arms and legs were flailing in the air, but nothing was happening. He couldn’t even feel the ground beneath his feet. And there was something wrong with the air. Every time he tried to breathe it, he ended up coughing, choking. He was slowly suffocating. He looked frantically around him, but on every side it was the same — an endless gray expanse, nothing solid, nothing definite, just he himself, alone, floating in a void, dying.

He knew he was dead, but he still, somehow, was . He was floating, his eyes open but seeing nothing, his body turning slowly around and around. There was nothing there but him, but he wasn’t exactly there . He heard something. Quiet, like the sound of an insect scuttling over paper. It slowly got louder. It blossomed into a loud whisper. A human voice, speaking to him.

Hennessy, it said. It was a familiar voice. He wished it would speak louder than a whisper so he could be sure about who it was.

Hennessy, it said again. He heard it close to his other ear, and then in two slightly different whispers at once. It wasn’t just one voice, he suddenly realized, but legion, all of them whispering, all of them saying his name. Hennessy, Hennessy, Hennessy .

And then, spinning around, the gray space around him suddenly didn’t look so gray anymore. It was changing. Transforming. Becoming something else.

He knew he was dead, and he couldn’t move. All he could do was stay there, floating, body spinning slowly about, listening to the voices, as the blank gray void that had been there all around him quickly became more and more textured. For a moment it was striated, run through with creases and lines, and then those shifted and crumpled in a way that reminded him of a human brain. And then these, too, tightened and shifted, beginning to take on vague features. It was not a void, he realized, but a tightly packed mass of bodies, stuck to one another, fading into one another, all of them dead.

He wanted to close his eyes but couldn’t. There were thousands of them, maybe more, and as the faces became more and more differentiated, he began to realize that they were people he knew, all of them dead. There was his wife there, her neck broken from the accident, his mother and father, both withered and decrepit just as they had been after the cancer took them, and others, many others, whom he hadn’t forgotten but who, upon noticing them, he knew were all dead.

Hennessy . The word came from one of those open and unmoving maws, like an echo from deep within a cave. But which? Hennessy, said another. And soon, they were all saying it, pressing closer and closer to him, and there was nothing that he could do to stop them. And then their fingers were sliding under his skin, threading through his bones, insinuating their way into him.

“Hennessy!” someone was yelling. “Hennessy!”

Something was grabbing him, shaking him. Hands. Someone was screaming, Hennessy realized, and then he realized that that somebody was him.

He lashed out and scrambled backward, out of the grip of whatever it was, until he struck a wall. It was only then that he was able to stop screaming and consider where he was. A normal room, in the DredgerCorp complex, in Chicxulub. There was his bed. It was his room. It was okay. He was back in the real world.