In These Dark, Dark Woods

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say.

But sometimes, nothing is quite so loud as the silence.

For the better part of six hours, Sebastian Rehal watched with the crew of the Union AstroCorps Ship Falconer as a derelict vessel drifted slowly, silently, along the edge of the DMZ and into Union space. The moment it did, it was time.

“Falconer,” he said, “we are ready to enter the suppression zone around the target. We will reestablish contact once we have it down.”

“Falconer-actual: copy that, XO,” the admiral’s Earth-born voice echoed over the system. “See you on the other side.”

“Aye, Sir. Rehal out.”

Closing the ship-to-ship, he rounded out the shuttle’s course, leaving nothing ahead of them but the black of the void, interrupted only occasionally by the pinprick of some distant star. It settled in the back of his mind for a moment—the dizzying, awesome emptiness of it all—until it was broken by the shuttle’s forward lights catching a shine off the derelict Kitezhki vessel’s hull, held thirty kilometers off Falconer’s port. It was a graceful thing of sloping angles, shaped like a narrow, shallow ‘v,’ with a rounded apex.

“No visible hull breaches,” engineer Mariah Tetley observed from her co-pilot’s chair. She tucked a piece of blonde hair from her face and glanced at him. She must have seen his tension—she always did—because she offered a light grin and elbowed at him. “Come on, Seb.” She kept her voice below earshot of the fire team in the back. “This is exciting.”

“We can celebrate when we get back,” Seb said. “Right now, we need to make sure not to vaporize ourselves the moment we dock.”

“We won’t. That’s why you brought me.”

Mariah’s eyes gleamed in the low light, and he couldn’t help a small smile in return.

“Shit, look at that,” heavy footsteps brought the fire team leader forward and Hal Marcone braced himself against both flight seats as the shuttle swept along the side of the derelict. “We reading anything now we’re on approach?”

Mariah shook her head. “No. Gadget still barely recognizes there’s a ship here.”

“Ghost colony tech,” Marcone muttered, a hint of awe carried in his voice. “Wild to think those people are human as you and me.”

“Not entirely convinced they are,” Mariah replied.

Marcone leaned deeper in toward the shuttle’s front viewer as they passed Kitezh’s colonial crest emblazoned on the vessel’s underside and he whistled between his teeth.

“It’s just a single deck transport, yet that crest still gives me chills.”

“Remember what they say about size,” Seb said. “Their corvettes are not much bigger, and all the sims show a pair of them could put Falconer through its paces.”

“Nah, I know, XO. Just always imagined our first catch would better match the hype. At least have a big-ass canon on it. We go back to Falconer with nothing but a travel log for the experience, and Admiral Ung will have a tantrum.”

“If we can get aboard at all it will be the biggest intelligence win in decades.” Seb’s brow furrowed as he found an airlock exactly where he’d expected just off the stern on the side facing away from their ship. “The admiral knows that.”

“Your lips to Ung’s ears,” Marcone said. “But we know our CO has visions of rubbing a tech intel cache in the First Flag’s Kittie-loving face.”

“I’m seeing damage on the exterior hatch,” Mariah interrupted. “Could they have been boarded?”

“No telling,” Seb said. “Initiating docking protocol, but we’ll have to complete the seal at point of entry. Tetley, you set?”

“Five-by, Sir.” Mariah grinned as she stood and pulled her helmet on. Marcone moved forward for the secondary check on her seal. “Gunny’ll hold point for me,” she said, her voice confirming that short-range comms could still make it through the Kitezhki suppression field, “just in case.” He could hear the wink in her tone. “Don’t worry, XO. We’ll have the passage pressured in no time. No vaporization necessary.”

Seb waved a hand and Mariah headed toward the rear. The interior airlock door cycled, and he watched the monitor as she and Gunnery Sergeant Lin opened the exterior door and moved out into the docking arm. Mariah positioned herself at the hatch, her magboots grounding her in the low-g. She affixed two small metallic disks to either side of the control unit. Gadget transmitted the sync to the shuttle, Kitezhkia script labeling every command. Seb always marveled at how Mariah worked, and here was no exception: on to the next step before translations even finished, her engineer’s intuition guiding her.

“Et voila!” she said.

The control panel light turned from orange to green and Seb released the breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. He set the shuttle to standby, pulled on his helmet, then joined Marcone and his lieutenant, Yitzak Caiben, in the airlock.

“I see the protocol in the code, but it’s confirmed unarmed,” Mariah’s voice filtered through his comm link as he and the others met her and Lin at the end of the docking tube. “I’ve almost got the access popped. Their interfaces aren’t much different from ours.”

“We all did start from the same place,” Seb agreed. “At ready?”

She made a few quick keystrokes on the exterior pad, then nodded a hand and unlatched her magboots, expertly shoving herself just far enough out of the way before relatching them. “Press the bottom left command and it should open easy.”

“Okay. Marcone with me at point.”

“Aye, Sir. Unless you want it, Tetley. Good ATLAS prep and all.”

“What, and deny you the opportunity to earn your own invite, Marcone?” Mariah scoffed. “I told those elitist asshats where they could stick that invitation, so there’s a spot open.”

“Turning down ATLAS.” Marcone chuckled through the comm. “Anyone ever tell you you’re a piece of work?”

“Almost certainly why she got the call to begin with,” Seb replied. “The rest of you, wait for our signal. On three. One… Two…” He pressed the command and with a chirp the hatch pulled open. Seb moved in fast, Marcone at his heels.

Nothing but darkness.

The mass compensators made themselves known, the vessel’s relative gravity easily half again the .9g AstroCorps standard: less than ideal, especially in a 15kg vacsuit. Marcone pressed his back against Seb’s as they upped the luminosity on their rifle lights, shining them in either direction down the still passage.

Seb waited a beat to ensure he had his balance, holding one hand toward their team still in the tube. Then he tapped Marcone twice and slowly, they each took a few steps in opposite directions, moving deeper into the derelict.

There was no sound but his own breath echoing inside his helmet. Emergency lighting began to flicker on, dim, but enough to eat away at the darkness. As it did, a wave of dizziness washed over him, as if he should recognize the space but had somehow forgotten it.

The basic elements were all there: ergonomic decking and gleaming tech-infused wall panels. But it was just different enough to feel entirely wrong. The corridor was wider than it would be on any Union ship, the aesthetic rounded and arched rather than squared off, with intricate buttress-like archways every twenty meters or so. It was smooth, graceful, beautiful even: so different from the sharp and utilitarian design he was used to and so at odds with all their assumptions about hyper-militarized Kitezh.

Seb moved slowly in the heavy gravity and touched the far wall. The bulkheads were lighter in color than on Union ships, not the varying shades of gunmetal gray but something closer to pale slate with an iridescent, barely blue quality to it. The low lighting caught a glimmer of something in the material not unlike in quartz. The bulkheads were smooth, with no indication of where one panel stopped and the other began, as if the ship had been carved out of the stuff. It made the back of his neck prick, and goose bumps rose on his arms.

It didn’t help the eeriness that the hallway was immaculately clean. No blood, no blast marks, no bodies. No sign of anything amiss. Only a ghost ship shimmering in the dark.

“That is anti-climactic yet creepy,” Marcone remarked, waving at the others to venture in. “But there’s atmosphere. Pressure’s good. And extra bonus, the grav compensators are particularly enthusiastic.”

Caiben cursed, stepping in through the hatch. “What’s the point of this?”

“You train heavy,” Mariah said, “and you’re prepared to invade anything.”

“That’s dark, LT,” Lin replied, chuckling quietly. “You sure you’re not ATLAS?”

“It may also be a symptom of whatever killed the ship,” Seb said, wincing at the chatter. They were nervous, he got that. He was too. But they needed to focus. “We will make do.”

A lattice of plant life on the inside wall caught his eye. The colors were a mix of jewel tones: vibrant greens and glittering blues and purples. Vines with small white flowers wound along the lip of the perimeter, and one tendril had reached out to cling to the edges of the adjacent archway. Delicate ice crystals reflected on the petals, though the plants still seemed to be thriving. Gadget said it was below freezing, but the engines must not have been down long enough for all residual heat to have disappeared. It would be cold, but still livable for a while yet.

“Green walls,” Lin said. “We had those on Curahee. Bet it smells a lot better in here than what we breathe on Falconer.”

“Maybe that’s the Kitties’ secret,” Marcone replied. “Gardening.”

Caiben shook his head. “Nah. I heard their planet’s an ice ball.”

“We’d get traders on Pasha now and then,” Lin said. “Least, they said they were Kitezhki. Listening to them, it’s a paradise. Puts even Cygni to shame.”

“Not possible.” Seb thickened his Cygnitian accent, and when Mariah glanced his way, he offered a small smile to break some of the tension that had taken root in her expression, visible even through her visor. Any trace of humor from before was gone, which surprised him; Mariah didn’t typically let circumstances get to her, though he supposed this whole situation was unprecedented. “Three objectives: get the power on full, reestablish comms to Falconer, and comb this place for hazards. Stay fully suited until all-clear.”

He pulled up his link and frowned as he oriented it. Even inside, Gadget had yet to compensate for the sensor suppression. The whole center mass of the vessel remained a gray haze on the readout.

“The corridor should make a circuit toward the forward point,” Seb said. “That should be where we will find the command deck. Marcone, take Tetley and Caiben to the right. Gunny, you and I will go left. Keep an eye for anything that may be an access to the drive core or computer. It must be somewhere in here,” he tapped at the interior wall, “but shielding is keeping Gadget out. Be cautious. Slow. We do this right.”

They split off.

The ship’s habitat wasn’t that big. He and Lin made it only a few bulkhead sections—or at least, past a few of those elegantly buttressed arches—before finding a double hatchway. The plaque above it read something in the scrawling Kitezhkia script. Gadget’s translation interface took a moment to snap its meaning into his heads-up display. Hall, it read. Helpful.

“Let’s get this open,” he said to Lin, locating the manual override roughly where it would be on their own ship. Seb pumped the access lever a few times. The hatches hissed open enough that they were able to get a grip on either side and pull them apart.

Seb’s display noted this atmosphere was slightly warmer, with elevated nitrogen and methane levels. It took a few seconds for their movement to bring up the flickering emergency lights, revealing a few tables folded into stowage locks against the walls and a cluster of putrefying bodies gathered in the center of the room. Decomp would have slowed as residual heat began to dissipate in drift. For the bodies to get this far gone, it had to have been quite a long dissipation window: Kitezh either kept its ships very hot, or the engines remained on for quite a while after whatever happened here went down.

Either way, more questions.

And either way, the smell had to be terrible. No green wall would counteract this. The helmeted vacsuit suddenly didn’t seem so cumbersome.

There wasn’t enough blood to suggest a fight had taken place here, so the crew must have died elsewhere. The bodies had been dragged in and arranged: arms folded across their chests, small black cloths with the crest of Kitezh placed over their faces.

“Looks like someone survived whatever happened,” Lin remarked. “A pirate wouldn’t take time to honor them like this.”

“No. But, then why not set the destruct?” Seb moved closer to the bodies, adjusting his grip on his rifle. “The one thing we absolutely know about Kitezh is they police their tech.”

“That’s above my grade, XO,” Lin said. “But I wouldn’t mind the answer.”

“Me either…”

Seb surveyed the bodies in the center of the room. His Gadget link isolated the wounds on each, providing a brief post-mortem on his heads-up. Four female, two male. One died from multiple stab wounds, two from what looked like a traditional projectile weapon, the others from large and controlled energy blasts. Pirates may not have arranged the dead, but they were the only ones Seb could think of that would use such a mix of weaponry.

And yet, what kind of pirates would risk violating Kitezh space, much less have the arrogance to take on a Kitezhki vessel? Even one this small. It may not have the big-ass canon Marcone and the admiral hoped for, but Seb had no doubt there was still a formidable weapons system hidden somewhere under that sleek outer hull.

“Tetley to Rehal.” Mariah’s voice echoed in his helmet, startling him. “We located the command center, but I’ve triggered some sort of lockdown as I entered. I can’t get it open from this side. Marcone and Caiben are circling back to try the other entry point.”

“Okay, but use caution. We cannot trust the system is unarmed. There are several bodies arranged in the mess. Someone survived this.”

“Bodies?”

“Six.”

Something caught his eye to the left. Approaching, he found another: male, partially hidden by the growth of the garden walls. This one stood out from the others with textured black hair and a medium brown complexion only a couple shades lighter than Seb’s, a contrast to the pale of the other bodies in the room. And while the others wore the crisp black uniform of Kitezh’s military, this one’s was a sleeveless black top covered by a tech-infused combat vest of light body armor, not that dissimilar from the Union ATLAS operations gear.

“Make that seven.”

The body was propped against the wall, hands open in front of him, the cloth with the Seal of Kitezh across his palms instead of over his face. It provided a clear look at the wound in his forehead. The others had torso wounds, signs of defensive injuries, but it looked as if this man had been executed.

The captain, maybe?

Seb frowned, crouching beside the body. Dizziness edged in, turning his stomach with heavy dread that made his head spin. The edges of his vision darkened. The response made no sense. Seb had seen more gruesome death than this. It wasn’t until he touched the man’s upper arm that he understood what triggered it: a tattoo, mottled in the dead flesh.

“XO, you there?”

“Yes, Lieutenant.” His voice sounded far away even as it echoed in his helmet. He cleared his throat. “What were you saying?”

“It’s a treasure-trove, Seb. Drive core access is just below me and the computer core is in this rear compartment. Everything seems centralized. I’m tapping into the databases now.”

On the surface, it was only a tattoo, nothing unusual. Even in the Union, elite squadrons tended to have them, to say nothing of Place Marks—those carefully designed lines and geometric shapes etched into the forearms of settlement brats, proclaiming their place in the vast human galaxy. Tattoos were less popular on official colony worlds, though even he had one, the legacy of a night of bonding early in his Academy days.

But looking at the elegantly drawn feathers that arched over the dead man’s right shoulder and down the bicep, memory could fill in the singular wing that fanning over his upper back. Seb had seen this design before.

“Lieutenant Tetley, stand down. Touch nothing.” Seb heard his voice harden even though he felt as if the air had been pressed from his lungs. “I am coming to you.”

“I should be able to tap into the controls from here and get things running. That—”

“No. Mariah, that is an order. Step away. I am coming up.”

Seb closed the channel and stood. He meant to walk calmly, but it turned into a sprint down the corridor, his body protesting in the heavy gravity, his suit sending a pair of exertion warnings blinking in his helmet. Lin was on his heels but fell behind quickly.

“Marcone,” Seb panted, pulling up at the command deck hatch at the end of the corridor. “Get me in there now.”

“We can’t get more'n a couple inches before it snaps back. What’s wrong?”

“Mission compromised.” Seb set his rifle aside and examined first the door, then the control panel Caiben had taken apart.

“Compromised?”

“Gunny,” Seb glanced back toward Lin coming up in his wake, her round face flushed behind her visor. “Catch your breath and manage the control panel. Marcone, Caiben, we push it back. We need enough so I can get through and stop her.”

The fire team leader cursed in understanding.

Seb withdrew his sidearm—less power, but better for closer quarters. He pressed himself into the corner, weapon in one hand, the other ready to help push. Caiben sat on the floor, legs braced against the wall for extra torque, and Marcone took position so he could grab the edge and pull the hatch back as they pushed.

“Gunny, count down.”

Lin nodded. At one, the door popped open just enough for Seb to throw himself through, then snapped closed with such force that the others barely got their fingers out of the way and probably wouldn’t have if the door hadn’t clipped his foot.

He drew his weapon up, ignoring the pain. The emergency lights remained off, leaving the command deck illuminated only by the torch on Seb’s sidearm and the console screen where Mariah worked. With an eye movement, he directed Gadget to a closed comm between them.

“Mari,” he said, shocked at how low and flat his voice sounded. “I gave you an order. What are you doing?”

“You’re the one aiming your weapon.” The grin in her voice was artificial. “Put it away. I almost have it hacked.”

“I need you to put your hands up and step back from the console.”

“Why? What’re you talking about?”

“One of the dead Kitezhki in the mess. He has your tattoo.”

As he said it, Seb could see his fingers trailing over the lines etched in Mariah’s skin, a memory from over a decade ago. She’d said she and her twin brother had gotten it together, before she left the Copernican system for the Academy: a single wing because they were two halves, one couldn’t fly without the other. Seb’s past self had commented how beautiful it was, the subtle iridescence of the ink, the way the feathers arched over her shoulder so they fluttered when her muscles moved.

“Listen to yourself.” The lightness in her voice seemed to come from someone else and was made even eerier in the vacsuit filtering. “It’s just a tattoo. Half the crew has the AC crest on their shoulders. Even you.” She didn’t pause, her fingers coasting over the console she leaned over, swift and certain. There was no discovery, no hesitations. It wasn’t an engineer’s intuition at all. Mari knew exactly what she was doing.

“Step away from the console. I will shoot.”

Her eyes met his through their visors. Mariah had always been able to read him. He thought it was mutual, the product of so many years in each other’s lives, but he didn’t know her at all.

Seb counted his heartbeats, forced himself to breathe. Protocol suggested a shot to hip or shoulder. That might knock her off balance enough that he could restrain her. Then again, he’d seen her in a fight, sparred with her plenty over the years, lost every time—and that without a vacsuit weighing him down in a gravity he was far from adept in. Mariah wasn’t ATLAS, but she could have been, and the AstroCorps’ hyper-elite didn’t extend that invitation lightly. You had to prove yourself. You had to be the best.

It was a stupid idea to come in alone. Mariah could take him. Easily.

So why hadn’t she?

A smile touched her lips. She had to know what he was thinking.

Gaze on his, she struck at the panel.

He should have fired. She knew he wouldn’t.

The command deck began to brighten, each pounding beat of his heart bringing with it another set of lights, revealing the gore and scorch marks from where the Kitezhki crew made their last stand.

And every console around the deck flickered on with the same message, Kitezh’s script as arching and fluid and elegant as their ship design, looping even in its digital form.

“Mariah, please.”

Her hand hovered low, at easy distance to her sidearm holster. She had frozen though, staring at the message. Her expression altered, lit by the internal lighting of her helmet, and her fingers tapped a final key in her movement to raise her hands. She stepped back.

“I left you some time,” she said, voice more like the her he’d known. “Not a lot. But some.”

Seb’s body turned cold even as sweat rolled down his neck. He should have emptied the clip. He was trained not to hesitate. And he was trained to know. How could he not have known?

Stop obsessing. Just fix this.

“That message.” He gestured toward the screens to distract her. “What does it mean?”

The hatch was being pried open, he could feel it through the deck plating. Marcone was speaking, Seb saw the alert on his display, but he stayed on the closed channel and instead motioned for them to stand down, not to shoot.

Mariah’s eyes slid over to look at the script. The rest of her remained still, fingers knotted over the hard curve of her helmet.

“It says, ‘Remember worse than wolves await in these dark, dark woods,’” she read.

“But what does it mean.”

“Something powerful.” Her eyes returned to his. “You won’t shoot me, Seb.” Her tone sounded heavy. “It’s not who you are.”

Silence fell through the space, the tension on a hair trigger.

“Mariah,” he found himself whispering, taking a small step forward, but remembering her as a seventeen-year-old Firstie disarming their defense instructor on day one at North Star. That fierceness, that fearlessness, it earned her so much attention, earned her that ATLAS invitation. But it was Kitezh the whole time, wasn’t it? It was all Kitezh and their near inhuman…

More sweat trickled down his temple, down his back. He couldn’t feel his hands.

“I need you to understand,” and the tone of Mariah’s voice wrapped around his heart and squeezed, “this isn’t about you. I hope it doesn’t derail your plan.”

“Lieutenant,” Marcone’s hard-edged voice suddenly broke in, Gadget’s status showing that Mariah had ended their closed connected. “Do what XO says: turn around, put your hands behind your back.”

“You need to get back to Falconer,” she said in the open channel, still focused on Seb. “Fast. This ship is not meant for you.”

“You are coming with me.” Seb’s voice echoed hollow in his helmet. He could grab her. She’d need time to unholster her weapon, he could just grab her. Couldn’t he? “Mari. Please. Come with me.”

“Sebbie. That’s not what we do.” Her mouth pulled into a sad, heavy smile, lit eerily by the soft glow inside her helmet. Something flickered in her eyes. Seb was about to make his move when she made hers.

The order to hold died on his lips as the heavy thurk of an R-10 rifle from behind him shattered the quiet. The shot hit Mariah in the hip, its kinetic energy transferring into the vacsuit shielding. It was by-the-book, meant to knock her off balance, give them the chance to rush and incapacitate her, but it didn’t even slow her down as she pulled her sidearm up fast, relative gravity be damned.

Mariah got four rounds off, her aim and movements quick and sharp, directed toward the fire team behind him. From within his helmet’s inner space, the higher-pitched hiss of the sidearm created more of an impression than a sound, and Seb reacted on instinct, spitting two rounds from his own weapon into her suit’s shield before he rushed her, still wanting to end this right. To bring her in. To question. To learn.

To save her.

The gravity held him back, impeded momentum, and Mariah all but caught him. An insanely powerful, well-placed strike at his chest threw him back, landing him hard enough against the deck to pop an alert on his visor.

It was from that vantage point that he saw the impact. A three-shot rapid fire hit at her helmet, the pre-programmed action doing exactly what it was intended to: the first broke the already stressed shielding like a drop of soap in surface tension, the second cracked the visor, and the third struck her in the head, dropping Mariah’s body backward onto the deck. Hard. Motionless. Final.

Everything stopped with her.

Caiben cursed, breaking the silence in the comm connection. “What just…”

“XO,” Marcone’s voice carried the hollowness of emotional shock in the syllables, “she wasn’t going to stop. There was no other option. Mission OP.”

Seb didn’t say anything as he rolled over, pushing himself up and to his feet, body groaning with the exertion under the stress and gravity, his arms shaking. Everything shaking.

“Status?” His question was a motion, an act of habit, a way to regroup.

The team responded, numbly, giving thumbs up, though Caiben held his side, a pale red glow projected over it as Gadget alerted them where medical attention would be required. But the man was on his feet, speaking, and if it were an immediate need, the glow would be brighter and would pulse with the urgency.

In contrast, Mariah’s readout was completely black. Seb approached the body and crouched next to it. He didn’t let himself see the carnage too clearly. He didn’t want to remember her like that after half a lifetime knowing her as something else. Enigmatic. Incorrigible. Full of life. His mind was numb as the exchange played on a loop, each time landing hard on that look in her eye right before it all went irrevocably wrong.

He couldn’t feel it. Not yet. He dreaded when he would.

“Commander,” Lin said from the back of the room, voice shaking and her tone delicate. “Gadget says the power core is heating up. I think Tetley triggered the deadman’s protocol. We have a few minutes, tops.”

“Caiben, get a full sweep of the room. Do it fast. Marcone, Lin, take the body with us. Intel Service will want an autopsy. Move.”

As he gave the orders, Seb approached the nearest display, taking a still of the message to save to his local. He dropped a decode disk onto the console Mariah had been working on and initialized it, hoping to get any last fragment of data. The disk hadn’t been attached for more than half a heartbeat before it beeped. Nothing. What a waste.

Marcone and Lin were already huffing the dead weight down the corridor, leaving only a puddle of gore that had spilled out over the deck, mixing with that of the previous crew. The command console above it blurred and flickered in the power overload, obscuring the cryptic words, and the cold settled heavy between Seb’s shoulders.

Worse than wolves await.