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

“You’re hyperventilating.” It was Josua’s tiny voice, kilometers away. “Take slow, deep breaths.”

Sav’s limbs tingled; a loud buzz had settled in his ears. Not his recirculator, he realized. That had failed completely-and produced the odor of burnt insulation he smelled before. He focussed his will on slowing his breaths, defeating the overwhelming urge of his oxygen-starved body to pull in as much air as it could. He began counting each breath: after a dozen, the buzzing had diminished, and his breathing settled into a steady rhythm.

“That’s it. Nice and easy.”

Sav’s head throbbed unmercifully; his eyes were still shut tight and dying sparks skittered across his vision. He felt fingers-_cold fingers!_-work into the gap between his neck ring and his helmet. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt the touch of flesh on flesh. Sav opened his eyes a crack; through his visor he could see a dark shape hovering over him, and that he lay half in, half out, of the elevator.

“I’ve already undone the compression snaps to your helmet,” Josua said. “Try to keep your head up so I can slide your helmet off.”

Sav’s heart skipped a beat. The seal’s been broken. He’d understood this before, but now its consequences hit him. Josua’s fingers were on the back of his neck. I’ve been exposed, he thought. I can’t go back to the Ea.

“Sav?”

Though his neck ached, Sav raised his head as best he could. There was a tiny rasp as the helmet came completely free of the neck ring. It slid over Sav’s head.

“There.” Sav blinked in the harsh light of the corridor. Josua crouched next to him. “Are you okay?”

Sav nodded, let his head sink to the floor. The concrete was like a cool compress against the back of his scalp.

“Well,” Josua said, rocking back onto his heels. “Here you are.”

“Yeah,” Sav said, his voice hoarse. “Here I am.” Wanting to sit, he tried to move his left arm to lever himself up, but it was pinioned, trapped by a heavy weight. Suddenly he realised he was laying on top of it.

“Here,” Josua said. He reached around Sav’s shoulders, lifted him until Sav could pull his arm free. It tingled. He shook it and made a fist until the pins and needles started to dissipate. With Josua’s help, Sav pushed himself into a sitting position and propped his back against the elevator door.

“What happened?” Josua picked up Sav’s helmet and was turning it over in his hands, scrutinizing the dead status display.

“Recirculator,” Sav said. “Crashed sooner than I expected. Cut off my oxygen supply.”

“Didn’t your suit warn you?”

“Yeah.” Sav thought about the yellow warning icon that he’d ignored for the last week. “I should have serviced it. I just got busy, you know, thinking about other things….” He let his words trail off. “I guess it’s lucky you were here.”

“Not so lucky,” Josua said. He crouched, placing the helmet on the floor. “I saw you were in trouble.”

“You knew I was here?”

“Hebuiza’s rebooted the local net and repaired the links to all the AIs. Security’s back up for the whole facility. I was watching you from my office when you collapsed.”

“Then…then why didn’t you stop me when I came in? I walked right past your door.”

“What good would it have done? I can’t keep you here if you don’t want to be here.”

Sav stared at Josua, but could read nothing in his face. He’s not a stupid man, Sav thought. He had to have known why I came back. And that means he’d been certain of Liis. “And if I decided to keep the dropship? What would you have done?”

“The question is irrelevant. You’re here now. And you’re still free to do whatever you want. Except return to the Ea.”

“That’s very generous of you.” Other than a slight tightening at the corner of his mouth, Josua didn’t react to the dig. “I take it Hebuiza’s gone back to the Ea change the security keys.”

“Not yet. He’s waiting for me to give him the go-ahead.”

Sav struggled unsteadily to his feet, waving away Josua’s help. His head spun; his legs felt rubbery.

Josua rose from his crouch. “You can still leave if you wish. No one is going to stop you. Hebuiza has volunteered to shuttle you anywhere you’d care to go on Bh’Haret. I rather suspect the Facilitator would be happier if you left.”

“And you?”

Josua said nothing for a moment. “I’d prefer you stay. I know you have reservations about Hebuiza’s experiment. Liis doesn’t like it either, though she understands its necessity. But if it makes you feel any better, I’ll tell you what I told her: there will be no new exposures. The experiment begins and ends with the six subjects we’ve already isolated. On that I give you my word.”

Your word?, Sav thought. What good has that been so far? Sav dropped his gaze to the grey floor. He’d thought it through a hundred times in the last two days: stay or go? The arguments spun past in rapid succession, making his head swim. “No more revivals.”

“I’ve just said I won’t expose them-”

“I’ll stay if you agree to halt all revivals.”

“They won’t be infected, I promise.”

“That’s not good enough. There’s no need-” A wave of dizziness struck him, then passed. He had to struggle to remember what he was going to say. “Th…there’s no need to revive anyone. At least none I can see.” Sav was adamant that he wasn’t going to give Josua the opportunity to deceive him again.

Josua stared at him, as if he was weighing Sav’s determination. “As some point we’re going to have to revive these people. Otherwise they’ll die.”

“For now,” Sav said. “I just want you to promise you won’t revive any of them for now.”

“Okay,” Josua said, shrugging. “They would have been useful, but they aren’t essential. We can manage without them. Let’s call it a moratorium. I won’t resurrect anyone else until you give your go ahead.” He paused. “So what’s it to be?”

Could he trust Josua to halt the revivals? Sav wasn’t sure, but at least it would be difficult to him to hide an operation like that. And would Hebuiza agree to Sav’s condition? Probably not. Sav realised he was setting up a confrontation between Josua and the Facilitator-as Josua must also be aware.

“We need each other.” Josua’s words startled Sav. “Whether you like it or not, we’re all we have left.” A sadness, an infinite longing, had settled on Josua’s face, brimmed in his eyes. For the first time since they’d returned, Sav felt he was seeing the real Josua, the one he had known only briefly before they returned to Bh’Haret.

“You give your word there will be no more revivals?”

“Until you agree.”

“Then I’ll stay.”

Relief, and a weak thing that might have been a smile, creased Josua’s face. “I’m glad. More than you can know.” He clapped a hand on Sav’s shoulder. “Now let’s get you out of that suit.”

“You cannot return. I have changed the keys to both the dropship and the Ea.”

“Yeah, I figured.”

Hebuiza stood in the doorway to Josua’s office, his spine rigid, his face screwed up like he had bitten into something tart. On the opposite side of the room Sav sat in a chair pushed back against the wall; he was acutely aware of the feel of the cushion through the thin fabric of his blue undersuit-without the insulating layers of his EVA suit. It was an unsettling feeling, and he tried to ignore it.

“Both vehicles will remain under my control until we have isolated the vector and the reservoirs.”

“Or,” Sav added dryly, “until your suit gives out. Like mine did.”

The Facilitator sneered. “My suit is nothing like yours.”

Sav glanced towards the corner where the crumpled remains of his EVA suit lay like a skinned animal. The stress of working in gravity had transformed its external material from a glaring white to the dull, powder grey of an old mattress. Here and there darker stains stood out like age spots. Under one arm, and the around the fingers of both gauntlets, the material had begun to fray.

“Unlike your suit,” Hebuiza added with a haughty sniff, “mine was designed to last.”

Sav checked the black fabric encasing the Facilitator. His suit looked no worse for wear than when Sav had first seen it.

“You can discuss the relative merits of your suits later,” Josua said from where he sat behind his desk. To his right, the bank of monitors had blank screens. When they had entered the room, Josua had turned pressed a switch on his desk that had shut them all off. Sav assumed it had been for his sake. “We have more important things to sort out.”

Hebuiza crossed his arms, but said nothing.

“Sav has agreed not to return to the Ea. And to continue scavenging equipment and supplies for us. In exchange, he has asked for an assurance that no more interees will be exposed to the plague.”

“The ones we have should be sufficient for my needs.”

“And if they’re not?” Sav asked.

“I make no promises.”

The Facilitator’s response didn’t surprise Sav; if Hebuiza had agreed readily, Sav wouldn’t have believed it anyway.

“But I will,” Josua said. “I give you my word there will be no further exposures.” Sav watched Hebuiza stiffen, his lips drawing into a thin, tight line; his head began swinging from side to side, then stopped. Hebuiza lowered his eyes, his pale cheeks tinged with pink, as flushed as Sav had ever seen them. Josua looked at Sav. “Can you live with that?”

“Yeah,” Sav said. It wasn’t much, but what more could he hope for? He slumped back into his chair, feeling disgust at himself for agreeing. If they were murdering these people, then he had just agreed to become an accessory.

Oddly, the disgust was replaced almost immediately by a surge of relief. The decision had been made. Now all he could do was sit back and let things would unfold as they might.

Day 42

Sav chose a room on the fourteenth sublevel, six doors away from Liis’s. Larger than hers, it was still cramped: wide shelving lined three walls and a half-meter wide free-standing unit filled its centre. He pushed it over to the side and set up a cot in the new space. Returning to level zero, he selected items from amongst the pile of clothing he had scavenged over the previous weeks, including boots, a bulky grey sweater and a lined coat. Evenings outside the Facility had already grown appreciably cooler; real winter was only a matter of weeks away. Sav had thought, at first, that he might be too large to fit in most of the clothes since he retrieved them with a smaller man in mind. But much to his surprise, they fit, albeit snugly. Although he was still a considerable man, in the last few weeks he’d lost a surprising amount of weight.

He dragged his goods back down to his new quarters, placed them in a space he’d cleared on one of the shelves, then sat down on his cot to survey his room. A dim bulb overhead gave scant light, and the grey walls were damp and stained behind the shelves. The shelves themselves were cluttered with dilapidated boxes; a thick layer of dust choked everything. It was a thoroughly cheerless space.

Sav lay back on his cot, trying hard not to miss his tiny stasis cell back on the Ea.

Day