Dead Space: Catalyst (22 page)

“Data,” he groaned. “What good will that do us? We know where we should be. We need to dig. We need to keep digging until we find something.”

“What are we going to find?” she asked.

“How should I know?” he said. “But I’m sure something is there. The Marker wouldn’t lead us here if there wasn’t.”

Callie just looked at him, not speaking.

“What?” he finally said.

“Nothing,” she said.

“Why are you staring at me?”

“You don’t want to hear it,” she said.

“Tell me.”

Anger flashed in her eyes. “All right,” she said. “You’re obsessed. You’ve lost your objectivity. You’ve let your feelings run away with you. You’ve convinced yourself that that Marker is a living thing. You don’t know if you’re coming or going, Briden. You don’t know if you’re engaged in an act of scientific discovery or an act of worship.”

But I do know,
thought Briden.
It
is
an act of worship. How can you be so blind?
Trembling, he managed still to keep his temper, but said nothing.

When Callie spoke, her voice was calmer. “I know you’re trying,” she said. “We’re all trying.” And then she reached out and touched his hand.

He pulled his hand back as if he’d been bitten. Gathering his plate and utensils, he stood and left.

Another test,
he thought.
She’s just another test. Here to confuse me. She’s not right, I’m right. The Marker believes in me, not in her.

He stalked his way up and around the ring until an hour had passed, maybe more, and his legs were sore. Then he sat in the control room, leaning his elbows on the desk, waiting until enough time had gone by that he felt he could wake the others up and start them digging again. He tried to gather himself, tried to bury the irritation and doubt Callie had made him feel.
Not Callie,
he told himself,
Dr. Dexter.
How could she unsettle him so?

But soon, he told himself, everything would change.
Soon everyone will know that I was right and she was wrong, and then we’ll see who unsettles whom.

*   *   *

They dug deeper, another sixteen feet before the contact beam burnt out entirely. The engineer came up shaking his head. “Not made for this kind of work,” he said. “It’s better for just clearing up small piles of rubble. You need something larger, a borer. Something you can sit in.”

“A borer,” said Briden. “Well, let’s bring one in.”

The engineer shook his head. “We don’t have one,” he said. “We’ll have to get one sent in.”

“Let’s do it,” said Briden. “How long will it take?”

“A month,” said the engineer. “Maybe two.”

A month? Two
? “There has to be another way,” he said.

The engineer shrugged. “We’ve got another contact beam or two,” he said. “We could burn those out as well, maybe get a little deeper. But I have to tell you: there’s no indication that anything’s there. The rock that’s there, it’s been in place probably for millions of years. There’s no evidence that it has ever been disturbed.”

Another test,
thought Briden, tightening his lips. But who was to say that whatever was there, down below, hadn’t been there just that long. The Marker technology could be eons old.

“Go get them,” he said. “And order a borer just in case.”

The engineer sighed and left.

And that was when it happened. Another pulse, a strong one, which left Briden lying on his back right next to the hole that had been dug, almost falling in, his head throbbing, his vision almost obscured. For a moment he saw something or someone, but he couldn’t make out their features. And then for a flash it was his dead father’s face, and then that, too, vanished and he was panting, lying there, staring into Callie’s eyes.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

He opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out. Near him a guard had fallen to one knee, and was groaning. One of his own researchers was tearing at his hair. From the cells he could hear the cries and howls of the prisoners and realized that one or maybe two or maybe more of them were probably in the process of beating themselves to death. More corpses. More souls opening themselves to Convergence. As he himself would do as well. Only not yet.

“Did you feel it?” he finally managed to say.

Callie nodded. “I felt something,” she said. One of her eyes, he noticed, was leaking tears, but only one of them.

“Wasn’t it glorious?” he couldn’t stop himself from saying.

She scowled. “Don’t be a fool,” she said and pulled him up.

The guards were scattered and confused. The two other scientists were slowly calming down, one of them standing there with tufts of his own hair in his hand, the other massaging her temples with her fist.

“It’s changing,” said Briden. “It’s growing stronger.”

“It’s becoming more dangerous,” said Dr. Dexter. “We need to be careful.” She gestured around her at the little patches of mossy tendrils clinging to the floors and walls. “You see what’s happened to the corruption?” she said. “There’s more of it now. It’s spread with the signal.”

“Then it’s part of the Marker,” said Briden. “We shouldn’t be trying to clean it up, we should be encouraging it to grow.”

Cassie shook her head. “It’s just a by-product,” she said. “We should get rid of it. We need to be careful.”

She unstrapped her portable reader, getting the feed from the computers in the control room, checking the signal, figuring out where the exact center of this one was. She stood beside the hole, adjusting the apparatus until it was right.

“Interesting,” she said.

“What?” said Briden.

“Try yours before I tell you,” she said. “Let’s see if we end up with the same reading.”

He took out his reader and turned it on. The other two scientists were doing the same with theirs. He waited for the new data to load, chose it, then waited for it to compute the nexus point and determine his location. At first, when the distance was still great, it looked just fine, as if he was exactly where he was meant to be, but as the machine dithered and the map scale became more precise he realized that no, he was nowhere near the nexus, was perhaps a hundred feet away from it. He looked at Callie’s screen, saw the same.

“We needed more data,” said Callie. “Told you.”

He nodded, began to move here and there, toward where he thought the new nexus was, Callie alongside him, the two other scientists following behind, still a little shaken.
It moves
, thought Briden. But what was it? What did that mean? Perhaps it was something they couldn’t see, something they wouldn’t be able to catch hold of. But still he kept walking, kept following his reader.

They came to the wall at the end of the inner circle but they weren’t quite there. It was on the other side of that, somewhere in the cell ring. He exchanged a look with Callie and they both headed for the opening into the cell ring and started down it, tracking down the hall. They passed half a dozen cells until, finally, they came to the one that his machine told him was where the nexus had been.

Inside, a young man sat on his bed, his feet flat on the floor, his hands flat on his knees. His eyes were closed and he was breathing slowly in and out in a very measured way.

“It’s here now,” said Briden. “If we start digging right away, maybe we can catch it this time.”

“Briden, no,” said Callie Dexter, taking his arm.

“What do you mean, no?” he said, turning to face her, angry. “Who’s in charge here? If I say dig, we dig.”

But she pulled him back, pulled him away from the bars of the cell. Half whispering, she said, “Don’t you recognize him?”

Confused, he turned and looked back at the man sitting serenely in the cell. He was just one of the prisoners, so what? And then the man turned and opened his eyes and looked at him and smiled.

“He was sitting at the table when we got the first reading,” said Callie. “He was sitting exactly where we dug.”

“No,” said Briden.

“And now here he is, sitting just where we got our most recent reading.” She sounded at once excited and confused, her objectivity momentarily shot as well. “Briden, we’re not looking for something buried. We’re not looking for a piece of equipment. We’re looking for that man.”

PART FOUR

32

He would listen to the voice, he would follow what it said. After all, it had not led him astray so far. No, quite the opposite: it had broken the bonds of his imprisonment. It had plucked him from Hell and brought him here.

“Are you comfortable,” the lead scientist asked him. What was his name again? Barden? No, Briden. He nodded.

“Can I get you something?”

He waited for the voice of the dead to tell him what was needed, but it didn’t say anything. Briden was staring at him; Istvan was not exactly sure how much time had passed. He shook his head. “Not now,” he said.

“Maybe later?” asked Briden, strangely eager.

Istvan nodded. The movement felt odd. When the voice was more distant from him, everything felt false, slightly off. He felt too much like he had felt growing up. Like the world was in charge of him rather than he being in charge of the world. He didn’t like that.

Briden was sitting across the table staring at him. Much like the small gray man had done. What did Briden want exactly?

“What is it like?” Briden asked.

“What?” said Istvan, surprised.

“It chose me, too,” he said. “It reached out and touched me, and I knew I would become its prophet. Did it do that to you, too?”

Not knowing what Briden was talking about, Istvan hesitated, then nodded. Briden broke into a smile.

“What does it want from us?” he asked.

“Want?” asked Istvan.

“It’s here to save us, isn’t it?” said Briden. “It wants only our own good. It wants to bring us to Convergence. Has it told you what Convergence will consist of? Has it told you when it will come?”

Confused, Istvan just stared.

Briden watched him, expression open and waiting. When Istvan didn’t respond, a flicker of irritation passed over his face. “You can tell me,” he said. “I’m one of the chosen.”

“Chosen for what?” asked Istvan.

“Is this a test?” asked Briden. “Are you toying with me?”

Who was this man and what did he want? Istvan listened for the voice to tell him what to do. It was speaking, it was always speaking, but it wasn’t talking about the man in front of him, wasn’t telling him what to do. He tried to stare his way through this world and see the other world, see the face of one of his dead and feel the voice in his mouth, but the veil wasn’t ready to fall. He could not make it come.

“It chose me, too,” said Briden, defensively. “If it hadn’t chosen me, you would still be in there.”

That was true, in a matter of speaking, thought Istvan. But even when Briden had been staring right at him he hadn’t seen him. It had taken the other scientist, the woman, to recognize him. But to try to calm the fellow, he nodded.

It did calm him. Briden smiled and leaned back in his chair a little. “Now the question is what does it want us to do?”

But Istvan had a hard time paying attention. Inside his head the voice had started to speak again.
See me,
it said.
Understand me. Share me.

“See me,” he muttered.

“See you?” Briden said, surprised. “But I do see you. I’m right here, sitting across the table from you.”

“No,” said Istvan, “See him. I want to see him.”

“Him? Who is him?” asked Briden. And when Istvan just stared, he said, “Do you mean it? Do you mean the Marker?”

Did he? What was a Marker? He didn’t know for certain and the moment in which the voice seemed like it was giving him specific direction had faded into a quieter recital, not things he could hear exactly or know why they were important, but he still could feel his brain taking them in.

“All right,” Briden said. “Yes, why not. You’ll see it. That makes sense. We’ll have to ignore a few security protocols, but I am after all the director of this project. This is much more important than a few security protocols.”

The vid near the wall chirped. Briden glanced at it briefly. When he turned back there was yet another look of irritation on his face. “You’ll have to excuse me a moment,” he said. “This won’t take long.”

He stood and approached the monitor. When he accepted the link, Istvan could see a woman’s face, the face of the female scientist who had seen him and recognized him.

“What is it, Dr. Dexter?” asked Briden. “I’m busy.”

“The prisoner’s not in his quarters,” said the woman. “Do you happen to know where he is?”

“First of all,” Istvan heard Briden say, “he’s not a prisoner. He’s our guest. Second, yes, I do know where he is. He’s here with me.”

“What’s he doing there with you?” asked Dexter. “Why didn’t you follow protocol?”

“I needed to talk to him,” said Briden. “And I didn’t think that protocol applied in this case.”

“No? Why not?”

“I don’t have to explain myself to you, Dr. Dexter,” said Briden.

“No, actually you do,” said Dexter. “And be careful what you say. You can be sure that it will all appear in my report.”

He started to retort, then apparently reconsidered. Istvan watched him take a deep breath. “You still don’t understand, do you?” he said.

“Understand what?”

“The work we’re doing here. The nature of it. How important it is. There is no turning back now, Dr. Dexter.”

“Briden,” she said, bridling. “You can’t just—”

But that was all she had a chance to say because Briden had cut the feed.

He came back to the table, his smile restored. “Now where were we?” he asked. “Oh yes, you wanted to see it. Follow me.”

*   *   *

It was late, the workday mostly done. The few scientists still seated and working within the control room turned and looked at them when they entered. Most of them turned quickly back to what they were doing, but one or two kept staring for a time. Briden ignored them. He simply walked across the room and over to the observation window on the other side, drawing Istvan by the hand after him.