Nexus by Robert Boyczuk (best large ebook reader txt) 📕

Sav shook his head in disbelief; his chin scraped against the inside of his helmet.

“We have no choice,” Josua added.

“Nor,” Sav said, “do they.” Turning, he strode from the room, his anger carrying him like a wave through the reception area and into the corridor. How could they do this? How could Liis? Three missions together and he thought he’d known her; but she’d changed.

Like we all have.

A strange giddiness took possession of him. He stumbled out of the facility and up the short path to the dropship. Climbing inside, he dropped into the pilot’s seat and watched his hands snap his command cable into the navigation panel. He felt the hum of the rotors, then the jerk as the dropship lifted clear of the pad. The world dropped away.

Sav sat there, not thinking. His recirculators whined and moisture fogged his visor; he ignored the yellow icons warning him his suit was long overdue for service. The ship climbed. Three thousand meters into the ascent, it stopped. Sav suddenly became aware of the AI’s voice in his earpiece, asking the same question over and over: Course input? Course input?

It was only then he realised he had nowhere to go.

Day 41

Down here, on the fourteenth sublevel, the lights had not been restored. Stepping from the elevator into the hallway, Sav switched his helmet lamp on. It speared the darkness. Empty. Moving down the corridor, he stepped as lightly as he could, like he had done when he drifted past Josua and Hebuiza’s closed doors on level zero. He cranked his external pick-up to max, but couldn’t hear his own footsteps. But then he couldn’t hear his own breathing over the constant, high-pitched whine of his recirculator. The unit had begun complaining moments after he eased the dropship from its bay on the Ea four hours ago.

Outside the fifth door on his right, he paused. Then, gently, he pushed it open. Inside, Liis lay on her cot, the detritus of Josua’s care still scattered about the floor. Her eyes were closed and she appeared to be asleep. But when Sav stepped inside, she sat up and swung her long legs onto the floor. She blinked in the glare from his light, her pupils shrinking to black points.

“Sav?” Her voice was faint, almost drown out by his recirculator.

He moved into the room.

“Where have you been, Sav?”

“Away,” he answered. The last two days he’d spent aboard the Ea, ignoring the incessant requests for a commlink. The cot squeaked as he sat down next to her. “I needed to do some thinking.”

“Hebuiza’s furious. He’s been stuck in his suit for over fifty hours.”

“So?”

“And Josua’s been worried about you.”

I’ll bet, Sav thought. More likely he was worried about his precious dropship.

“He wants to talk to you.”

“I don’t feel much like talking.”

“Then why did you come back?”

“Because…because I….” Sav hesitated. Now that he was here, he was suddenly unsure. Why had he come back? he stared at her; she returned his gaze unwaveringly. Without judgement. As a friend might. “Why don’t you come with me?” he blurted out. “The two of us could find a place.” It hadn’t been what he’d wanted to say. But now that he said it, he felt the urgency of his need to convince her. “We could start over. The two of us.” Her expression hardened, and he felt her slipping away. Panic welled in his chest. “We don’t need to do these revivals Liis. It’s madness.” Now his voice sounded like a child’s in his own ears. He felt foolish, desperate. Sweat gathered on his temples. “We…we can leave.”

“And go where?”

He hadn’t given it any thought; the act of escape itself had seemed enough. But now he faced the problem that had been dogging him all his life: he had nowhere to go. No place that was home. “I…I don’t know. Somewhere. Anywhere is as good as here.”

Liis looked past him, as if contemplating his offer. Then she met his gaze. “Sav. I’m sorry.”

Anger got the better of him. “Don’t fool yourself. It’s not like Josua needs you anymore.”

The scars on her face rippled as her jaw worked beneath. She pushed off the cot, began pacing, her long legs moving in short, agitated strides, like a large animal trapped in a cramped cage. She stopped abruptly two paces from Sav, and raising her hand to her face, touched her lips. This gesture seemed to calm her. From behind the line of raised fingers she said, “No. He still needs me. He told me.”

“He’s lying to you, Liis. He’s using you.”

She dropped her hand, shaking her head slowly from side to side. “You’re wrong.”

“Wake up, Liis! He’s still obsessed with that dead woman. He wants to vengence. On Nexus. That’s why he’s revived those plague carriers. He wants to prove Nexus was behind the plague!”

“No!”

Sav found himself on his feet, standing in front of her. “He’s crazy! he’ll continue his resurrections until he’s proved what he’s wanted to prove all along. That Nexus is responsible.”

“That’s not true. He told me that the next ones wouldn’t be part of the experiment.”

The next ones? Sav stared at Liis; she gazed back defiantly, but her face had coloured. “Josua’s going to revive more?”

“Two healthy interees. People who can help us. A longhauler and a medic.”

“Shit, Liis! he’s lying. Don’t you see? We don’t need any more help. It’s just an excuse to move to the next step in his experiment: he’s going to introduce control specimens. He’ll kill them like he killed the others. Only this time it won’t be terminally ill patients. It’ll be perfectly healthy people.”

“He said he’d wake them and let them out. Like us. I saw the lists. He had nearly a hundred healthy interees to choose from. But he chose the two most likely to be of help. Why else pick them? If he had wanted to continue his experiment, wouldn’t he have chosen people without useful skills?”

“He could have changed the list, Liis. Altered the data.”

“No,” she said, but her voice quavered. “He promised they’d be safe.”

What could he say to that? Nothing, Sav thought. There is no response. Josua had told her what she wanted to hear. Everything else was irrelevant. Liis would never agree to leave the facility now. Even later, after she discovered Josua’s deception, he’d tell her another lie to salve her conscience. Sav felt the anger that had animated him a few moments ago drain away. His shoulders sagged. He’d been in his suit for only a few hours, but it dug into his shoulders like his sample pockets were filled with stones. “Please, Liis,” he said once more, knowing he had no hope of swaying her. “We can find a safe place.”

“There are no safe places.” Oddly, Liis’ eyes seemed to be filled with concern for him. Reaching out, she grasped Sav’s hands in hers, the soiled and fraying material of his gauntlets cradled in her long, pale fingers. She looked around the room, her eyes lingering on the shelves, the pile of soiled sheets thrown in the corner, the garbage on the floor. “This place is as good as any other.”

Sav stumbled out of Liis’ room and into the hall. He felt overheated, giddy, like he’d spent too long beneath a blistering sun. Weaving down the hall, he picked his way through the scattered debris of the corridor and came to the elevator. It was as he’d left it, its door open, waiting for him. He stepped in. The orange floor buttons glowed steadily at him. He stared at them. What now? he wondered. What options do I have left?

He could take Hebuiza’s flyer and strike out on his own: Bh’Haret was big enough so that he would never have to see Hebuiza or Josua again. But as he considered the idea, he knew he could never do it. He had always been a loner; most longhaulers were. But the prospect of such irrevocable isolation terrified him. If he left the others, he would spend the rest of his life alone. And he would die alone, a final pointless death.

The alternative was to return to the Ea and try for planet fall on a non-affiliated world. Only the supply of deuterium microfusion pellets was almost exhausted; a one-way trip to the closest world would take centuries. And once there, he would almost certainly not be allowed past the orbital lazarette-if he and his ship weren’t destroyed first as a precautionary measure.

Which left him with only one other choice. He could stay. Help the others.

Perhaps, he thought, Josua will see reason if I talk to him. Stop his experiments. His heart beat with sudden hope. Even if he doesn’t, I could help those left in suspension, look out for their interests. Someone needs to. But he knew these were empty rationalizations. He was grasping for something to help him stay afloat.

They were terminal! There was nothing we could have done for them! If it had been me in suspension, I would have wanted them to do the same.

But he knew this too was a lie. He was boxed in.

With vehemence he stabbed the button for level zero, jamming his forefinger painfully. The doors slid closed and the elevator began to rise.

The motion made Sav’s stomach flip. His breaths became shorter; perspiration gathered on his forehead, ran down into the corner of his eyes, blurring his vision. The recirculators in his suit whined furiously in his ears. He tried not to think. Slowly, the floor indicator above the door changed, crawling through the levels towards zero; Sav felt like he was trapped in a bubble struggling up through a thick, viscous fluid. He let himself sag against the back wall of the car. His lips tingled and his heart thudded in his chest. Then, strangely, he was on his knees, his head bent, staring at the scuffed-up floor of the elevator. In the corner of his visor the oxygen warning icon, which had been yellow for the last week, turned red.

Oxygen deprivation, he thought dully.

Sav lay on his back, staring at the ceiling of the elevator. A hard object was wedged under his spine. The smell of burnt insulation swirled around him. His head hammered, a steady thumping beat that filled his ears and made his scalp throb. He couldn’t remember lying down. A voice (his own?) urged him to break the seals on his helmet. But his right arm was leaden, far too heavy to lift, and his left was immobile, trapped by an immeasurable weight. There was nothing he could do. Struggle was pointless. A thought came to him: here I am, suffocating in this suit, while all round me is a sea of air. This fact struck him as funny. He tried to laugh, but the effort made him gasp; fiery stars arced through his field of vision. He tried to follow them. But they didn’t want him and thrust him back roughly. He spun away. His ears popped; a tickle, like that of a feather, brushed lightly on his throat and cheeks, curled into his mouth and nostrils. An instant later he tasted a bitter, almost metallic, tang on the back of his tongue. Air, he thought. It’s the taste of air. But the muscles in his chest had given up, were too tired to drag any of it in to his weary lungs. Something pounded sharply on his breastbone; he gasped in shock, swallowed a lungful of air. His chest muscles spasmed, expelling the air and forcing