Dead Space: Catalyst (30 page)

“Are you looking for him?” asked Waldron. “Don’t bother. He’s probably dead and has become one of these things. You find him and he’ll try to rip your head off. If I were you, I’d be worried more about saving my own skin than about finding my crazy brother.”

“No,” said Jensi, as much to himself as to Waldron. “He’s still alive. He’s got to be. How could I have gotten this far if he was already dead? He needs me. He needs my help.”

Waldron shrugged. “You’re a fool,” he said.

*   *   *

They walked back down the hall, Waldron always behind him, one hand on Jensi’s shoulder, always anxious, always nervous.

“How do you get out?” Jensi asked.

“Control room probably has a door to the outside,” said Waldron. “I think it was locked. I heard one of the guards say so before one of those creatures killed it. There may be other ways out, I don’t know. This is the first time I’ve ever been in this ring.”

“Ring?”

“That’s what we call them,” said Waldron. “Sometimes we call it a three-ring circus and sometimes it’s the three circles of hell. The prison is the two on the inside and this outer ring is for the guards. They watched us from here, controlled us.”

“Were you the one who contacted me?” asked Jensi.

“What? No,” said Waldron. “How could I have done that?”

“If you were sending a signal, where would you send it from?”

“I don’t know,” said Waldron. “Must be the control room.”

“Waldron, we may be all right after all.”

*   *   *

He had a hard time getting Waldron to cross the gore-spattered room. He had begun to mumble under his breath and tried to turn back and screamed when Jensi dragged him across, but in the end they managed it. Through the door on the other side was another hallway, curving slightly. They followed it around, slowly.

And then, suddenly, there was a moment when Jensi felt a wave of pain wash through him. He grunted and stumbled, nearly went down, and his head began to throb. There again was his dead mother, standing before him, looking at him this time. As he watched her a sluglike flicker of blood leaked from her nose and down across her lips. She licked it away.

“Jensi,” she said. “Help me. I must arrive at what awaits me.”

“You’re not real,” said Jensi. But he was having a hard time believing she wasn’t real. She looked so genuine, so much like she had in life that part of him couldn’t quite believe this was a hallucination. It had to be something more.

“Jensi,” she said, and reached out for him.

And then something heavy struck him on the side of his head. Woozy and disoriented, he fell to his knees, looked up just in time to see Waldron’s boot kick him in the face. He fell back.

“No, father!” Waldron was shouting. “No!” He was waving at the air with one hand, pulling on it as if it were palpable, and flailing about a loose riot helmet with the other. And then his voice changed, becoming nervous and weak, the voice of a little child.

“Where are you?” Waldron said. “Where have you gone?”

“Waldron,” Jensi managed to say, as he started to scramble up. “Stop. There’s nothing there. You’re hallucinating.”

But then Waldron turned to him and looked directly at him, a strange glow in his eyes. “Ah, daddy,” he hissed. “There you are.”

“No,” said Jensi. “I’m not—”

But Waldron was already upon him. He brought the helmet down hard, but Jensi brought his arm up and blocked it. Pain shot through his arm, his hand going numb. Waldron kicked him in the side and then Jensi was half up, swaying upon his feet, groping for his pistol. “No, Waldron,” he said. “I’m not him!”

“You need to die, father,” said Waldron, his voice a strange croon. “And this time you need to stay dead.”

He started forward again. Jensi circled, trying to stay out of reach. “Stop or I’ll shoot!” he claimed. He had the pistol out and was aiming it, but Waldron didn’t even seem to notice it. He only had eyes for his father.

And there, over Waldron’s shoulder, distracting him, he saw the flowing white figure that was his mother. “Jensi,” she said. “Why don’t you come?”

His concentration had been thrown just enough so that when Waldron rushed forward he found himself unable to get away. He fired twice, trying to hit him in the legs, just trying to bring him down, but the first blast hit him in the stomach and the second in the hip. He fell onto Jensi, but whatever had been driving him forward seemed gone now and he did not strike out.

Jensi rolled out from under him, turned him face up. The wound in the stomach was bad. He moved Waldron’s hands to cover it and try to hold the blood in, keep him together. The bullet in the hip must have struck some sort of artery. That wound was pumping out little gouts of blood. He pressed his hand against it to try to stop it, but he knew it was too late.

Waldron looked at him, his eyes hurt and confused. “You promised you’d protect me,” he said.

Jensi didn’t know what to say. “I’m so sorry,” he finally offered.

Waldron stared at him as if he hadn’t heard. He lifted his blood-soaked hands away from his stomach and stared at them, the blood meanwhile starting to pump from his stomach. His face was very pale. He let his hands fall.

“What happened?” he managed to ask. And then he died.

*   *   *

So many dead,
Jensi thought again,
so much loss
. He should not have told Waldron he could protect him. He couldn’t protect anybody, and if he’d left Waldron back where he had found him the man would still be alive. How many more deaths would he end up being responsible for?

He arranged the body, straightening the legs, smoothing the arms down the sides. He took a moment to contemplate his work, and a moment to dedicate his thoughts to Waldron and wish him well. And then he left.

He was halfway down the hall when the sound brought him back. A strange sound, a sort of crackling noise. He took out the laser saw and headed back.

One of the bat creatures loomed over Waldron’s body, its wings enfolding him in a sickly embrace. It had inserted a bonelike tube into his forehead and seemed to be pumping something into him. The body itself was not the same body he had left a moment ago. It had begun to change, transforming into one of the creatures, bone and flesh tearing and re-forming, slowly coming back to life. He turned on the laser saw and rushed forward, arriving just as the flying thing had withdrawn and taken off. He leapt after it, managed to cut through one of the wings. It fell flopping and he cut it down the middle, until it stopped moving completely.

And then he turned to take care of Waldron.

The thing that had been Waldron was already up, hissing, swinging its scimitars. One of them caught him in the side and spun him sideways, knocking him down. It leapt on him, trying to bring its mouth to his neck and he found himself grunting, struggling to keep it away. It gave a cry of what might have been frustration and thrust its blade down at him, just missing his arm. He dragged the laser through the bladelike appendage and severed it, and for a moment its balance was off and it reared up and he could bring his arm across enough to sever its other blade. It still held on to him with the stumps, was still trying to bite his neck, and for a moment it did get its teeth in. He gave a cry of pain and frustration and shoved it off, managed to roll it over so he was on top, and then he very quickly severed its head.

It took just a moment more to separate all the limbs and make sure he was immobilized once and for all. Then he lay there on his back staring up at the ceiling.
Hardly fair,
he thought,
to have to kill the same person twice.
But then again, he told himself, life is never fair. He lay there a while longer, catching his breath, and then he got up and went on.

The control room was only a little farther along. He followed the curve around and there was a reinforced steel door, a plate-glass window next to it. He looked in and saw the back of a man busy taking a piece of machinery apart. The desk in front of him was scattered with circuit systems, some of which he seemed to have joined artificially together with twists of wire. He tried the pad beside the door, but it wouldn’t open. He went to the window and knocked on it, but the man didn’t seem to hear. So he went back out to the room with the corpses and got a truncheon and brought it back and rapped as hard as he could on the glass.

This time the man heard. He spun around and stared and Jensi was a little shocked to discover it was Henry. But Henry was quite a bit more shocked. He fainted dead away.

*   *   *

Even when he was conscious again, Henry still couldn’t quite believe it. He wouldn’t open the door for Jensi at first, just stared at him. Then finally he came over and worked the intercom, spoke with him through the glass.

“This isn’t happening,” he said. “You’re just another hallucination.”

“No,” said Jensi. “It’s happening.”

“That’s exactly what you’d say if you were a hallucination,” said Henry.

“I’m not a hallucination,” said Jensi. “I just crash-landed my pod into the prison. You and I were speaking until they jammed your signal.”

“That was you?” said Henry. His face was lined and drawn, his eyes still suspicious, but he seemed to be trying to believe him.

“I’m real, Henry,” said Jensi.

“But what if you’ve been sent by them to get me to open the door?” said Henry. “What if I believe you’re real and open the door and then they rush in and kill me? It would be smarter just to ignore you.”

“Henry,” said Jensi. “I’ve come thousands of miles just to be here. I just had to fight my way through creatures that seemed to feel no pain and had no interest in dying. I met a prisoner named Waldron and then had to kill him and then he came back to life so that I had to kill him again. I’ve been through a hell of a lot. Damn it, let me in.”

Henry stared at him for a long moment, then shrugged and opened the door.

*   *   *

There were a few more awkward moments after that, moments when he said something that made Henry doubt again that he was real. Once Henry became so suspicious that he picked up a screwdriver and tried to jab out Jensi’s eye, and if Henry hadn’t been weak from lack of food he might have succeeded. But as it was, Jensi took the screwdriver away and Henry became placid, and remained so for a brief while until he began to be agitated by suspicion again.

Or maybe it wasn’t even something he said, but just something else, the side effect of what Henry kept referring to as the pulse.

“What kind of pulse?” asked Jensi. “What do you mean?”

Henry tried to explain it. Scientists had come, he said, and they had recorded it. One of them had explained a little to him, though he didn’t think she was supposed to. A pulse, doing something to the brain, created by something called the Marker.

“The what?”

“The Marker. I’ve never seen it,” said Henry. “I don’t know exactly where it is or what it looks like. It’s in the research facility. Hush-hush stuff.”

“What about Istvan?” asked Jensi. “Did the creatures kill him?”

“No,” said Henry. “The scientists came and measured the pulse and scanned the area, and then they dug a hole. Once they’d done that, they became very interested in Istvan, and then took him and left.” He turned to Jensi and gave him a serious look. “But if the same thing is happening over there that’s happened here, he’s probably no longer alive.”

“He’s got to be alive,” Jensi insisted.

“He’s probably not,” said Henry. “I know you’ve come a long way to be here, but it might be time to admit that.”

Jensi turned away. Maybe Henry was right, but he wasn’t quite ready to give up. One part of Jensi wanted to become reconciled to the idea of his brother’s death, but another part still felt that his brother was still alive, was almost sure of it. Which part was correct? The one that accepted the reality of his brother’s death or the part that insisted on continuing to try to find and save him?

“I have to try,” he said to Henry. “He may be dead, but I can’t give up until I know for certain.” He’d had years of frustration over not having been able to prevent Istvan from being taken away, and all those years were gathering together to make him feel that he had to prove himself, that it was now or never.

Henry backed off. “Of course,” he said. “Who knows? Istvan may somehow have managed to survive. We’ll have to go to the research station to find out, but we were going to have to go there anyway. There’s nowhere else to go.”

And so they went.

46

They found Henry a RIG and then took the contained all-terrain vehicle through the hostile atmosphere of the planet and toward the research facility. The landscape struck Jensi as strange, more like a moon than a planet: deep reddish-black dust and rock, no plant life at all, no signs of life at all apart from the penal colony and the research facility.

Jensi caught Henry staring at him. “Watch where you’re driving,” he said.

Henry looked away and shook his head in astonishment. “I still can’t believe you’re here,” he said.

“Neither can I,” said Jensi. “And I can’t believe the shit that’s going on here.”

“It’s like a nightmare,” said Henry.

“It’s worse than a nightmare,” said Jensi.

For a while they didn’t speak much, just drove.

“What do you know about this place we’re heading toward?” asked Jensi.

“Almost nothing,” said Henry.

“Are we likely to have trouble getting in?”

Henry shrugged. “It’s a secure facility, so yes, I’d imagine so. But then again they aren’t expecting us.”

Or at least they weren’t until about a few miles away from the facility itself, when the receiver crackled alive and offered a prerecorded message.

Caution. You have entered a restricted area. Enter your code and authorization. If you do not have a code and authorization, stop your vehicle now and turn around.

“What do we do?” asked Henry.

Jensi shrugged. “Keep going,” he said.

The message was repeated twice at intervals of about thirty seconds. Each time they ignored it, kept driving. Thirty seconds after that, a new message came: