Dead Space: Martyr (12 page)

“Do you mean a signal of some sort?” he asked, thinking of the pulse.

There was a silence on the other end of the line.

“Some sort of transmission?” said Altman.

“Maybe,” said the voice slowly. “Do you have something in mind?”

“Who is this?” said Altman again.

“That doesn’t matter,” said the voice.

“What kind of transmission are you talking about?” he asked. “A pulse of some kind?”

The voice suddenly turned nasty. “You’ll have to do better than that, Mr. Altman,” it said, a harsh note to it.

“Wait,” said Altman. “Let’s make a deal. If you tell me what you’re looking for, I’ll tell you if I come across it.”

The line went dead.

“What the hell was that about?” asked Ada.

“I don’t know,” said Altman. “I wish I did. Someone trying to pry something out of me.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted.

He got out of bed. He went into the bathroom and washed his face, stared at the man looking back at him from the mirror. There were dark circles under his eyes, his eyelids puffy and swollen. He barely recognized himself. He hadn’t been sleeping well. Bad dreams and, on top of that, all the excitement and fear
associated with whatever was going on in the crater. Plus a headache that seemed to go on and on.

What if something had happened to Hammond?
he wondered. What if they had killed him? What if they were coming after him now?

No, that was crazy. There was no point being paranoid. It was just a phone call.

He went into the other room, switched on the computer, connected to the secure server. Nothing new from the others since he’d last checked.

“What are you doing?” Ada asked him. She was sitting up in bed again, hair falling partly over her face.

“I have to check on something,” he said. “It won’t take long.”

“Michael,” she said, her voice stern now, “I want to know exactly what’s going on. You shouldn’t keep secrets from me. You’re not in trouble, are you?” she asked.

“I don’t think so,” he said.

“If you were in trouble, you’d tell me, right?” she said.

“I’d like to think I would,” he said.

“What do you mean you’d like to think you would? What kind of answer is that?”

“I mean yes, of course I would.”

“There,” she said. “That’s better.”

She ran her fingers through her hair and twisted it so it fell behind her shoulders, then got up and went into the bathroom. He turned to the screen and quickly typed:

Strange phone call this morning, just after 3
AM
, asking me if I’d intercepted something. Thought he was talking about the signal from the center of Chicxulub, but when I hinted at that, he rushed to get off the line. Maybe a transmission of some sort, but what, I don’t know. Anybody else get the same call?

He waited a minute, staring at his screen until Ada came out and climbed back into bed. Then he logged out and shut the system down, climbing in next to her.
Probably nothing,
he told himself.

“You promise me you’d tell me?” she said, sleepy again now.

“Yes,” he said.

A few minutes later, he realized she was asleep. He lay in bed, eyes open, staring up at the darkened ceiling. It was a long time before he was able to fall asleep as well.

In the morning, logging on, he discovered all three of the others had had the same call, all well after he’d had it. Ramirez first, then Showalter, then Skud, which suggested that maybe the person making the calls was simply moving alphabetically down a list. They were all as puzzled as he was.
Ask around,
Altman wrote back.
Find out if other people had it, and what they make of it.

By noon, they had the answer. Every scientist in Chicxulub they’d contacted had been called. Most of them had no idea what was going on, chalked it up to a crank call or the work of some paranoid. But Ramirez had finally talked to someone who seemed to know.

“He’s talking about the vid broadcast,” a man named Bennett said, a geologist and amateur radio enthusiast. “I figured it out right away. He called, all cryptic, fishing for something but not wanting to give away what. I said, ‘You mean the vid broadcast?’
He pretended not to know what I was talking about, got me to describe it, then he thanked me very politely and hung up.”

Bennett had only part of the vid, a few brief seconds, something he’d come across broadcasting on not just one band but several, and so, out of curiosity, he’d recorded it. There were about three seconds of static, followed by five slightly distorted seconds of someone talking, followed by eight seconds of static. A few other people, said Bennett, had gotten other bits of it, and someone at DredgerCorp seemed to be gathering copies of all the bits. Why, he didn’t know. Bennett was pretty sure it was a hoax, somebody’s idea of a joke. But how they’d got it to seem like it was being broadcast from the center of Chicxulub, he didn’t know. Probably a transmitter on a boat or—

“It was broadcast from where?”

“Somewhere near the center of Chicxulub crater,” he said. “All part of the hoax, I’m guessing.”

“Can I have a copy?”

“Why not?” he had said. “The more, the merrier.” He spun it over.

It was a strange document—a man, naked, his body covered in symbols written in a substance that seemed to be blood, staring with a strange grin into the camera. “understand it—” he said, “destroy it—” And then static.

Altman watched it again. There wasn’t much to it, just a few seconds. Maybe Bennett was right and it was a hoax, but there was something about the man’s expression, the tightness of his features, the dead, mad emptiness of his eyes, which made Altman feel that it was not. Where was he? He watched it again. It was a small, confined space, the walls, too, smeared with symbols written with the same substance as was smeared on the man. Something at one point cast a reddish glare under the man’s
chin, when he bobbed forward. The lighting was industrial, harsh and unfriendly. “Understand it—destroy it,” the man said.
I’m still working on understanding it,
thought Altman.
To be frank, I’m not even sure what
it
is.

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
.”

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.