“Hey!” Alena exclaimed. “You there?” The man did not respond. Alena lifted her hand up to his face and places her first two fingers under his nose.
“What are you doing?” Caitlin asked.
“He’s still breathing.” Alena furrowed her brow and thought for a second about what to try next. Then she reached into her jacket and pulled out a laser pistol. She checked to make sure it was charged and placed the barrel against the young man’s temple.
Caitlin grabbed her wrist. “What are you doing?” she yelled. “There is no reason to hurt him.”
Alena batted away Caitlin’s arm. “I wanted to see if he was faking.” She pulled the weapon away from the man’s head, then pointed it straight at the woman next to him. Her eyes didn’t even move to look at the gun. “I don’t think they’re faking.” She put away the gun and turned to face Caitlin. “What’s going on?”
“That is what we need to figure out. I think it has something to do with the star. Commander Hathaway took me to this hidden room nearby. He made me look at the star and it... It gave me these visions. Visions of destroying this station and our ship.”
“That’s insane,” Alena said. “But, then again, so is all of this.” She motioned to the paralyzed men and women around her. Let’s find Commander Hathaway. Maybe he knows something”
Caitlin and Alena pushed into the crowd. The paralyzed Antigone crew didn’t make any effort to get out of their way, but they also didn’t make any effort to stop them. Caitlin went from person to person, trying to locate the commander, but he was nowhere to be found.
With each vacant face staring into her, Caitlin felt the fear in her heart grow. They were gone. The part of them that was alive was missing. They didn’t even seem human anymore.
“He is not here,” Caitlin said as soon as she’d looked at all of the gathered crew members. Commander Hathaway was not among them. It did not come as a surprise. “He is probably in the command center or in the hidden observation room. We should go.”
Alena didn’t respond. Caitlin looked to her side and realized that she’d lost her. “Alena!” she called out. She was about to yell again when her stomach turned. Alena was standing at the very front of the crowd, staring at the view-screen like everyone else in the forge. The corona of Epsilon Andrii glowed softly on the screen. As Caitlin’s eyes passed over it, she could hear the ringing in her ears and the pressure in her head surge forward. It almost overwhelmed her again.
“No,” Caitlin gasped. “This is not happening.” She rushed forward and put her hand on Alena’s shoulder. “Stop looking at it.” She pulled at with all her strength, forcing her to look away.
Caitlin breathed a sigh of relief as Alena broke free from the hypnotic power of the screen. She immediately spun away from it, towards Caitlin, and looked at her with wide eyes.
“We have to get out of here,” Alena said.
“I know,” Caitlin replied. “The commander is not here. We are wasting our time and--”
Alena shook her head. “No. Forget the commander. We have to get off this station right now.”
Before Caitlin could object, the air was split with a loud crash! The floor shook, nearly knocking Caitlin and Alena to the ground. The crew members surrounding them didn’t lose their balance for even a second, shifting their weight perfectly to accommodate.
Suddenly, Caitlin felt light-headed. It was as if her feet were lifting off the ground. And then she realized that they were. The gravity on the station was changing. She didn’t need to look at any statistics to confirm it. She could feel it in her bones.
Alena held her wrist to her lips. The small comm link around her arm flashed as she called the Fenghuang. “What’s going on?” she demanded.
Seth Garland’s voice crackled through the speaker on the comm link. “Some kind of explosion on the station. We’re trying to figure out. We think it had something to do with the artificial gravity drive.”
Caitlin didn’t need to hear any more. She’d already put it all together. “We told him how to do it,” she said. “We told him how to crash the station into the sun.”
And with that, Caitlin and Alena took off running. They pushed through the paralyzed crew members towards the door. Caitlin struggled with the strange way her body seemed to float with every step, but Alena grabbed her hand and pulled her forward, helping her keep her balance.
As they reached the door, the lights outside flickered. The view-screen behind them lit up and burned out. The forge went dark.
Suddenly, the crew of the Antigone woke from their waking slumber. No longer entranced by the faint image of the star’s corona, they returned to life.
The young man near the back, the one who Alena first examined, stumbled towards them. He seemed to be having just as much trouble with the fluctuating gravity as they were.
Caitlin stopped. “Are you okay?” she asked.
He didn’t respond at first. He just sneered. Then as he got closer, he lurched forward and tried to grab Caitlin by the arm. She tripped backwards, just narrowly avoiding his fingers. He looked up at her, fury in his eyes.
“The Dobhriathar must be broken,” he hissed.
A flash of red light momentarily brightened the room and the young man fell backwards. Smoke rose from his chest and Caitlin looked back to see Alena holding her laser pistol out in front of her.
“We have to go,” Alena said. “We’re not welcome here.”
The rest of the Antigone crew backed off. They saw what happened to the man who dared approach Caitlin and Alena. He was dead, and it took them a second to decide whether they wanted to risk the same fate.
This gave Caitlin and Alena just enough time to back out of the forge. Just as they were leaving, the crew realized that Alena couldn’t shoot them all and rushed forward. But it was too late. Caitlin put all of her weight on the metal door, shutting it. Alena put her laser pistol up against the control panel and pulled the trigger, locking them in.
“They are going to be trapped here. They are going to die here,” Caitlin said.
“They were going to kill us,” Alena replied, almost as if that excused it.
The comm link on Alena’s wrist crackled to life again. “The station’s orbit is deteriorating,” Captain Garland said. “It’s... It’s really happening. It’s falling into the star. Just like he said it would.”
“Just like he made it,” Alena replied. “We’re headed back to the ship. Prepare to leap. These people have lost their minds. Let’s leave them to the results of their madness.”
Alena started down the hall, towards the airlock. Caitlin wanted to tell her to stop. There was still too much they didn’t know. But they couldn’t risk staying on the station. If it was falling into the star, they had to leap away. No mystery was worth dying for.
Without anyone in the halls to stop them, they reached the end of the hall quickly. Alena brought her arm to her mouth and yelled into her comm link. “Open the doors! We’re here!”
The gears whirred and clicked as the airlock came to life. Sparks flew from the door, flying across Caitlin’s face and sending her reeling backwards. Then the airlock doors stopped moving. They were stuck.
“What’s going on?” Alena demanded. “Open up!”
A long string of static crackled across the comm link speaker. After a few seconds, Captain Garland responded. “We can’t. Someone... They’ve overridden the controls. We cannot separate from the station. They’re going to take us down with them.”
And, in that moment, everything finally made sense to Caitlin.
Chapter 6
The legends of Airlann were full of men and women who experienced visions. Almost all of these were credited to the Goddess Airlanni, who came to the aid of her people to give them the answers that they needed. Some versions of the Dobhriathar legend included elaborate dreams sent to the ch
osen, giving them the solutions to the problems that plagued the planet.
But not all visions were the work of the goddess. Some spoke of sights that did not exist, and were driven mad by their persistence. They would commit crimes, even murders, at the behest of the strange desires that overwhelmed their senses.
Many believed that these awful visions came from the depths of the stars, from the black sky beyond the protection of the goddess. They believed that these hallucinations, as well as those that were burdened with them, were evil.
If Airlanni, their own planet, was their goddess...then the void was their devil. Their demons came from the depths beyond the pinpricks of light that broke the darkness of the night.
Caitlin was raised to know that these poor souls were not possessed by monsters from beyond the stars. They were plagued by biological defects, tricks upon the brain, that convinced otherwise rational men that reality was not what it seemed. They had a disease that was just as real and as fatal as the wasting that killed her mother.
But now, after staring into the surface of Epsilon Andrii, Caitlin coulsdn’t help but wonder if there was something to those old stories and superstitions. She had no doubt about what she saw. Something in the star got into her head, and it showed her visions that she could not deny.
The star wanted them dead. And it looked like it was about to get its way.
*
Arcturus Hathaway stood at the back of the Antigone generator bay, his arms stretched out to his sides. His hands were swollen and red. The controls and screens around him were dark, save for intermittent streams of sparks that flew from their surfaces. As soon as he heard the door open behind him, he turned to face his visitors. His eyes were wide, manic and bloodshot.
“I didn’t know which panel to destroy... So I broke them all.” The commander’s voice trembled with excitement.
Alena pushed past Caitlin into the room. “Step back. Let me...” As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she realized that there was nothing more that could be done. Hathaway hadn’t just destroyed the interface, but there were huge holes in the wall near the console. He’d damaged the gravity drive itself. “What have you done?”
Hathaway lower his hands and took a step towards them. “We are surrounded by darkness, but soon there will only be light. Beautiful, warm light!”
“We’re all going to burn to death!” Alena exclaimed.
Caitlin stepped into the generator bay behind Alena. “That is what he wants,” she said. “That is what it wants.” She looked at Hathaway and tried to keep her voice calm. “The star wants us dead. Not you. Us. Me, Alena, Captain Garland... Am I right, commander?”
A wide smile spread across Hathaway’s face. “I thought you wouldn’t understand! I thought you would fight this, but you see it too.”
“The Dobhriathar must be broken,” Caitlin said and Hathaway nodded furiously.
“What are you two talking about?” Alena yelled. She pulled her laser pistol out of her jacket and pointed it at Commander Hathaway. “We don’t have time for this and he’s just going to get in our way. ”
Caitlin rushed in front of Alena and grabbed the barrel of the pistol. “No! Do not kill him! I need to understand.”
“The only thing you need to understand is that we have thirty minutes, tops, until the bulkheads of this station start to melt...and if I’m going to get the airlock open, I need every second of that time.”
“Just... Just let me talk to him for a moment.”
Alena nodded and lowered her gun, but only enough that it was pointed at Hathaway’s legs instead of his chest. She started to circle around him, towards the control panels in the back of the generator bay.
Caitlin looked back at the commander. “How do you know about the Dobhriathar?”
Hathaway smiled again, but he didn’t say anything. He just motioned to the ceiling and pointed up, towards the sky.
“The star told you. Did it use that...word?”
“It does not need to use words. Where it comes from, there are no words.”
Caitlin felt a chill run down her spine. “What do you mean? What is it? What is Epsilon Andrii?”
Commander Hathaway tilted his head to the left as he thought about this. After a few seconds, he seemed to come up with an answer, but when he opened his mouth, only one word came out.
“No.”
“What?” Caitlin asked. Hathaway started to move his lips, as if he was trying to speak but nothing came out of his mouth. Caitlin just kept asking questions, hoping that he’d have the answer for one of them. “Why does it want us dead? Is it because of the Heilmann Drive? Is the People’s Republic right? Is it damaging the... the...” Caitlin tried to remember what Seth told her was the problem with the Heilmann Drive, but she couldn’t think of the words.
Alena, who had made her way to the gravity control panel, filled in the blanks. “The fabric of space-time,” she said, though she’d barely been paying attention to the conversation.
“Does the star want us dead because we are damaging the fabric of space-time?” Caitlin finally asked. Hathaway shook his head. “Then why? What is going on?
“No.” The commander’s head twitched, and he tried to speak more, but again it was like something was stopping him. “I... I want to tell you.”
The commander looked down and saw his feet begin to float up off of the ground. As the artificial gravity systems failed completely, he was lifted into the air along with Caitlin, Alena, and everything in the room that wasn’t bolted down.
Fear pumped through Caitlin’s heart. It felt like the dreams she had, like she was falling. But she couldn’t let that distract her. She had to focus. “If you want to tell me, then just tell me. I need to know.”
Hathaway opened his mouth but instead of saying anything, he began to stick out his tongue. A look of panic filled his eyes and he started to wave his hands around. He kicked his feet in the air then grabbed at his face, but it did nothing. He couldn’t stop himself. As soon as his tongue was stretched past his teeth, he bit down.
Caitlin screamed as she saw the blood gush from his mouth. Almost as soon as the crimson liquid spilled forth, it formed into perfect spheres and drifted towards her. The commander’s severed tongue, barely two inches of pink flesh, floated up towards the ceiling.
“What’s going on back there?” Alena asked, then looked back to see Hathaway writhing in agony, bleeding profusely. His eyes rolled back into his head and he appeared to lose consciousness. “Well, I don’t know what you did, but I guess that was better than shooting him. No risk of hitting any equipment.” Caitlin looked at her, horrified at her calm reaction. “Come over and help me.”
Caitlin reached up and pressed her hand against the ceiling of the generator bay. She pushed herself towards the back of the room and the panel that Alena was working on.
“It made him bite off his own tongue so he would not be able to tell us anything,” she said.
Alena sighed. “He was insane. That’s it. Plain and simple. He can’t even see the star in here. There aren’t any windows.”
“You saw it too.”
“Just hold this for me.” Alena passed a long, shimmering cable to Caitlin. “We can discuss your theories later, when we’re alive because I’m not going to pay attention to them right now.”
Caitlin knew she was right, and decided to keep quiet. There was no point in convincing Alena of anything if they were just going to be dead within the half-hour.
The scientist and the governess worked quickly to try and repair as much of the computer interface as possible. There was no hope of fixing the artificial gravity generator, but if they could get the security systems back online, they could open the airlock doors and return to the Fenghuang.
Hathaway had shut off power to almost every system on the mining platform. Alena didn’t say so, but Caitlin assumed that this in
cluded life support. Normally, this would have been at the forefront of her worries, but the station would burn up in the corona of Epsilon Andrii long before the air ran out.
The only two systems on the station that were still receiving power from the generators were the emergency lights and the artificial gravity drive. Since Hathaway destroyed that, he hadn’t bothered to cut the supply of electricity. Alena figured that all they had to do was re-wire the cables from the gravity drive to the security and docking systems. Caitlin didn’t know what she was doing, but Alena gave very clear, concise instructions and she was able to follow along well enough.
Over the next fifteen minutes, they drifted between consoles, spliced wires into wires, ran cables from one end of the generator bay to the other, and carefully stitched the gravity and security systems together.
For the most part, they ignored the floating body of Commander Hathaway, though they had to push him to the front of the room because he kept getting in the way. Alena asked Caitlin to do this, but she could barely look at the man. His skin was pale and blood still bubbled from his crimson-stained lips. In the end, Alena had to take it upon herself to dispose of the incapacitated commander. She grabbed onto his arm and flung him towards the door, hoping he would slip out into the hall. Instead, he struck the wall near the doorway with a thud. For just a second, Caitlin thought she might have seen him twitch in pain.
By the time Alena and Caitlin were done, they were drenched in sweat. Beads of perspiration floated from their foreheads and arms and rose into the air. The temperature on the station had risen to sweltering temperatures. The station’s cooling systems were failing as it moved closer to the star. This was their only shot. If this didn’t work... They didn’t have the time to try and fix it a second time.
“This is it,” Alena said as she started booting up the security computers. “If anything goes wrong...”
Caitlin’s eyes were wide as she looked over at her. “What do you mean if anything goes wrong? I thought you were supposed to be the greatest engineer in history.”
“I’m working under pressure! And power distribution isn’t exactly my field. If the voltage isn’t modulated correctly or one of the wires is spliced to the wrong cable, bad things are going to happen.” She sighed. “But we did a good job, so I’m moderately confident about this.”