Angel Stations (23 page)

‘Ah.’ Bill nodded sagely. He’d heard of such things: animal memories, stuff like that. ‘Run with the wolves, that kind of thing.’ Then comprehension kicked in. ‘You’re talking about those Books I gave you. So what happened?’

‘Listen, Bill,’ Kim licked her lips, ‘you said any-thing’s addictive.’ Bill nodded slowly and she continued. ‘That’s sort of true, but I don’t have that kind of need. I have a specific aim. Do you understand what I’m saying? Addicts don’t think things through, then go out to deliberately become an addict. Because that’s what I did. I set out deliberately to do what I’ve been doing. But something happened when I ate one of those Books you gave me. I . . . I almost can’t find the words to describe it. I need you to tell me the name of the person who found them.’

Bill shook his head slowly. ‘Kim, I already told you I can’t do that.’

‘Yes, you can, Bill, or I don’t say anything about what happened. You’ll have to try someone else if you want to find that out.’

Bill looked pained, stared at her for a long moment. ‘Okay,’ he sighed. ‘It was Pasquale. Word’s been getting out, anyway.’

Pasquale. He’d been running his tiny one-man ship through the asteroid fields of the Kasper system longer than anyone else Kim had ever met. She felt good for him, as he was getting old, needed to retire. With a big find like the one Bill had described, Pasquale could end his days in luxury.

‘I ate the Book, okay?’ Bill nodded for her to go on. ‘I was somewhere else. I mean beyond space and time, somewhere else.’ She could see Bill had no idea what she was talking about. The words somehow weren’t right: language wasn’t adequate to describe what she’d seen, what had happened to her. ‘I felt as if I lived for a billion years, and I fell right outside the universe’ – she winced involuntarily, having been avoiding thinking of that deep, terrible abyss – ‘and finally something came to me and spoke to me – but not in words. And then I was back here.’ She wasn’t ready to talk about the horrors of the Citadel.

Bill’s shoulders heaved in a sigh, and he leaned forward and carefully clasped her hands in his. ‘Kim, I think, in all seriousness, you have been out in that Goblin for far, far too long without any company.’

She swatted his hands angrily. ‘I am
not
crazy! I’m
not
joking, Bill. I saw things, things that sort of spoke to me, that went through my head, that were—’

Alien?

She leaned back in her seat, suddenly silent, a coldness welling up in her.

‘Pasquale,’ she said, her voice suddenly small. Her eyes drifted far away for a moment. ‘You said he found Angel Books. Right?’

‘Sure.’

‘You were right, Bill. I think I saw inside an Angel’s head – or something like that.’

Bill shook his head. ‘I gotta be honest with you, I didn’t think there was anything at all in those things. But somebody wanted me to find out in case it turned out to be lucrative. You sure you saw all this stuff?’

Kim stared at him for several long seconds. ‘Yes, I am,’ she said quietly. ‘What else did Pasquale find?’

‘Did you feel that?’

Tomason glanced towards the security door, then at the monitors that showed what was behind the door. She had been thinking about the artefacts. In several weeks of research, she and her research team had come to two conclusions: the blue glow of the artefacts was an unknown form of radiation, and it was the by-product of some internalized power source. In other words, they didn’t know anything.

She looked over to her co-researcher. Lindsey was staring at her with a frown.

‘I didn’t feel anything . . . Oh, there it is.’ There had been a faint tremor. Or was there?

‘Could be a blow-out,’ said Lindsay nervously. She had the corner of her bottom lip pinched between her teeth.

Tomason shook her head. ‘Not a blow-out. Every siren on the Station would have gone off if that happened.’

‘But I did feel that. Did you feel it?’

‘I did.’ She glanced towards a large-sized smartsheet, this one wall-mounted. They’d turned the sound down low, and left it running on the default settings. A montage of images from one of the news channels played across it, the Station’s own standard text feed running below that. Nothing looked out of the ordinary. All seemed normal.

‘It was probably nothing.’ Tomason looked back towards the steel door. Could it be the artefacts?

‘I’m going to take a quick look.’ Tomason went over to the rack where they kept the lab suits and pulled one on, now peering out at Lindsey’s alarmed face from behind a plastic visor.

‘Hold on a minute,’ said Lindsey. ‘You really think the tremor came from those things?’

‘One way to find out.’

Tomason had been running old records of other major technology finds, looking for clues, any correlation. She despaired at the amount of information that was still classified, and had already put in for clearance – how else could she do her job? – but had been warned the process could take months. By then, the artefacts would likely have been shipped through the singularity to somewhere with real facilities.

The steel door was merely the entry to an original airlock. Beyond the airlock was a hastily bolted-on accommodation unit converted into a makeshift lab for studying and storing the artefacts Pasquale had stumbled across. Tomason looked back at her co-researcher’s worried face and hit the button that opened the main door. After a few seconds it lurched open with a dull, bass click, and she stepped through. She hit the button on the inside so that it clicked shut behind her, then repeated the process with the door on the far side of the airlock.

At first, nothing looked out of the ordinary.

The artefacts had been stored on steel shelves, with half a dozen cameras studying them constantly from every possible angle.

There were also instruments to monitor vibration, temperature, sound and the entire electromagnetic spectrum. So far, the artefacts had done nothing to draw attention. With her limited resources, Tomason had thus been reduced to being really not much more than a glorified caretaker, until they could be shipped out.

Noticing one of the artefacts was missing, she frowned. Then she saw a shadow flit against the far wall. Something scuttered out of sight. An icy shiver ran down the length of her spine.

She realized the far wall was rippling and she froze, waiting. The steel wall of the lab was undulating very softly, like a bedsheet flapping gently in a summer’s breeze. She backed away slowly, realizing she had no idea if her contam suit would be of any use in a vacuum, if the wall suddenly ripped open. Not likely. She thumbed the door switch without looking and counted the long, long seconds before she could slip back through it.

Nine

Pasquale

Pasquale could not sleep.

When he dreamed, mostly he dreamed of the blue light from the artefacts that had seemed to seep through his body, even, he imagined, his soul. He came from a long line of Chilean Catholics and often, as he slept, his hand would reflexively reach out to the tiny silver cross he wore around his neck. This had been his one personal trait that had remained endearing to his ex-wife during the turbulent two years of their marriage. Shortly after a less than amicable break-up, he had blown all his savings and a lucky gambling streak commencing a life in the stars.

During the four subsequent years he had spent in a cramped, second-hand Goblin amid the asteroid fields of the Kaspian system, it had often occurred to him he might actually have been better off continuing to work the nightshift back in Chile: humdrum tele-operating work for some conglomerate. The work had involved peering through goggles while a four-wheeled robot trundled through Blight-devastated Indian villages and towns, looking for anything salvageable. After three months in that Goblin, he had come to the weary conclusion that the only reason living humans were needed inside the Goblins was to decide what went wrong in case of instrument failure. Assuming they weren’t killed by that same failure.

The gambling streak had proved the one occasion in his life when he’d been really lucky, and he hadn’t expected that to happen a second time.

His training in operating the Goblin had taken a little under two weeks, but most of that had involved emergency procedures: how to signal to the Station or the nearest ship that there was a problem. There was also idiot stuff, like don’t open the hatch when you’re in deep space, but apparently it had happened. Pasquale suspected that wasn’t always unintentional. Most of the other people he’d met wanting to be Goblin pilots were crazy or twisted in some way, or clearly just looking to disappear for a while.

But when the Goblin’s sensors had zoomed in on the underside of a certain crater, somehow some sixth sense told Pasquale he’d struck lucky a second time in his life.

The crater had been located on a ferrous asteroid travelling on a highly elliptical, wildly eccentric orbit that the astronomers said had probably looped around Kasper’s sun for most of forever before finally being sucked into Doran’s gravity well probably not long before the arrival of humanity. It was sliding closer and closer to the planet’s surface, so in maybe another year it wouldn’t be there. The weirdest thing was that the rock had been surveyed before, yet nothing had turned up.

Every week or so the Station authorities beamed out to all the Goblins a list of rocks viable for investigation – meaning stuff, usually, that they had finally assigned a category number, or that had only just turned up on standard telescope sweeps. After that, it was up to oneself. Pasquale had found himself by chance only several million kilometres away from this particular rock, so decided to skip opening the airlock hatch for another day and take a looksee. Just for the hell of it.

He really hadn’t expected to find anything.

At first it looked like he’d found your standard ferrous space-borne rock: the usual ratios of iron, nickel and cobalt. Pasquale had been tapping this info into an operational database when a light started blinking on the Goblin’s systems board. Oh, happy day.

His discovery glowed with a strange light. At first he’d assumed it was radioactive, but everything on board the Goblin said no. So he brought it in, and studied it. Machinery? Pasquale wasn’t big on imagination and finding himself in another solar system on the other side of the galaxy hadn’t seemed that big a deal somehow. But for the first time since his lucky gambling bonanza, Pasquale got excited.

There had been other stuff beside the machinery, including a frozen block of something that got the scientific types orgasmic. None of this much interested Pasquale, but he knew how much it was worth.

Pasquale could not sleep, so instead he got up. Like Kim, and most of the people who found themselves living on the Angel Station, his home was tiny, barely large enough to stand up straight and stretch out your arms. There were cheaper quarters available, literally coffin-sized, that you could only slide into horizontally, and some people seemed to be happy enough with that. But Pasquale – who had once seriously considered a life as a professional poker player – relied on a pack of cards to keep himself afloat when all else failed.

This was one of the Quiet Times. Shift patterns were synchronized to match day and night back on Earth, and that meant there were periods of each daily cycle when the numbers of people in the twisting corridors were far fewer. Pasquale drifted downwards until he came to one of the spots where the raw construction material of the Station was allowed to show through all the human-added units clinging to the alien torus like some hi-tech mould. He got a kick out of touching the raw surface of the Station, although he couldn’t say why. And if he’d ever been asked, he’d feel uncomfortable, maybe get a little angry.

But deep down he knew he was touching something old,
really
old. Other hands had once touched this, or something like hands. Hands that never saw blue skies or tasted Chilean peppers or eyed sweet-bodied hookers during long wild nights in the favelas on the outer edge of town.

He reached down to touch the alien stuff. It felt warm.

Something dropped to the ground behind him. Pasquale froze, then looked round. Nothing there except something that looked like a child’s toy.

But it wasn’t a toy. It got up, waved tiny feelers at him, and scuttled on its little metal legs over towards the exposed Angel material.

It sank into the raw fabric like a rock dropped into mud. The Station stuff flowed over it, absorbing it whole.

Without thinking, Pasquale reached up and touched the tiny crucifix hanging around his neck. He glanced about and saw more of the things – insects? Machines? – drop from a rip in the wall of the corridor which he could have sworn wasn’t there a few moments before. They too headed straight for the Angel material, ignoring him.

Pasquale fled, heading to the higher levels, never looking behind him.

If he’d had the words to describe his feelings at that point, he’d have mentioned a feeling of primordial dread. He wanted to go hide himself in a cave somewhere, and the Goblin was a good enough substitute.

Kim

Kim found Pasquale packing his stuff. He looked like he was heading out for the long haul.

‘Joseph,’ she began, standing at the open door to his cabin. The old man jumped as if a ghost had tapped him on the shoulder. He turned and regarded her with wide, frightened eyes, then seemed to will himself to relax.

Pasquale looked the same as he always did, old before his time. ‘Kim, good to see you.’ He was fingering the tiny cross that nestled against his breastbone. The lights were dim behind him as he came forward, but in the semi-darkness she could see a whole host of Catholic paraphernalia: a crying Jesus, and postcards depicting the Pope in what looked like some South American city. ‘How you been?’

‘The usual,’ she lied. ‘I heard you got lucky.’

‘Yeah, well, here’s hoping my luck holds out.’ Pressure cases lay on the tiny bunk behind him, one or two of them half-open, with clothes and personal belongings spilling out of them. ‘I’m going back out for a while.’