“We don’t have the codes to open that, let alone access the data,” Nysus reminds me.
“Okay, so…” I raise my eyebrows.
“We got lucky,” Kane says. “The captain seems to have sent a partial excerpt from her log as a personal message. Or she tried. But they were, at that point, already well outside what would have been an early and rudimentary version of the commweb we have today.”
“The message got caught in the buffer,” Nysus says. “It’s degraded, but I was able to loop it and filter out the noise, but that, of course, meant I also had to—”
“Nysus,” Kane says, a verbal nudge.
“Right. Okay, here.” He taps across the boards. “On the main screen.”
I turn to see a close-up of Linden Gerard. The image is distorted and fuzzy, but I can make out her features and enough of the background to determine that she’s in the command chair, just feet from where I’m standing. Her expression is one of forced calm, stress showing itself in the lines in her forehead and the tension in her mouth.
“… wrong. I don’t know… Officer Wallace seems to think… overreacting. But we’ve had a spate of suicides and… passenger-on-passenger violence is… people are reporting seeing things, impossible things…”
She pauses, glancing over her shoulder at the doors to the bridge behind her. Reflexively, I mimic her action. The doorway here is empty, as it is in her recording.
“I saw Maria.” Linden swallows convulsively. “From the corner of my eye at first, and then at the end of a corridor… foot of my bed.” Her determined calm breaks. “Mia, if you see this, I know you tried to tell me about omens and warnings.” A sob escapes her, and she covers her face. “I’m sorry I didn’t take you—”
A moment later, the recording jumps and she’s looking straight ahead at the camera again, her face shiny with tears and taut with resolution. “And I want you to know that, no matter what happens, I lo—”
The message breaks off abruptly with a loud crackle of static, and I jump.
“Maria is—” Kane begins.
“Her wife,” Ny and I finish.
“I remember,” I say, my mouth dry.
“She was at the time, and still is, on Earth,” Nysus continues. “She stayed behind to care for their three children. She was not on theAurora,not ever.”
“So Gerard was seeing things,” I say, feeling faint. How is that possible? My history makes me a prime candidate for another mental break, but Linden Gerard was an esteemed captain, with no known mental flaws or incapacities. CitiFutura would never have assigned her theAuroramission otherwise.
“And it seems she wasn’t alone,” Kane adds. “She mentions the other passengers reporting… oddities.” He hesitates for a moment. “And I’m wondering… I have to think that maybe I—”
A scream tears through the thick cocoon of quiet, and the sound is so startling, so out of place, we all freeze for a moment.
Kane recovers first, bolting for the corridor, heading toward the sound, down the starboard corridor of suites.
“It’s Lourdes,” I call after him, trying and failing to keep up with him, the throbbing in my head sending agony with every step.
I follow as quickly as I can. The smell reaches me first—rotting meat and the metallic scent of old blood—and I gag before I can stop myself. I know that smell. Not just death, but death and decay. And that is no hallucination.
17
Instinctively I lift my arm to my nose, using my sleeve to block the odor.
What the fuck?
But as soon as I see Kane, stopped in front of one of the suite doors, I can guess what’s happened, though I don’t understand why.
The smell gets stronger as I approach him, that particular room. Kane taped the edges on that door heavily, attempting to seal any gaps, because we knew as soon as the heat and oxygen kicked on it would be impossible to stop the decomposition of the blood and bodily matter and fluids soaked in the carpeting. We’d removed the frozen bodies—Anthony and Jasen—but we couldn’t do more than that.
But the tape on the door is now broken and peeled back. Kane is pulling a trembling Lourdes from the room, her breathing on the edge of hyperventilation. Why would she do that? Why would she go in there? She knows why we tried to seal the edges, what the doubleXsignifies.
I reach out to pat her shoulder in an awkward attempt at comfort, but she jerks away, burying herself tighter against Kane’s shoulder. “Why?” she asks, her voice muffled against him. “Why would you do that to me?”
I stare at her and then look to Kane, who gives a helpless shrug. “I don’t… What are you talking about?” I ask.
