Dark Between Oceans Read online

  Tension rides through the eter, tightens the bands around my chest, squeezes the flesh of my thighs. You might expect desperation from the dark, but no, what's creeping up on me is cold and hard, rich with the coppery scent of blood and the memory of violence. It has no colour. It is the absence of light, and it draws a whimper from the scared toddler in my gut.

  It slips through my shields like they're not there and worms its way into my memories, seeking. Too late, I try to rip it out, to rip me from its grip, but it's not holding me anymore, it's part of me, in my skin and bones, winding through my muscles, trying to make a home.

  Shit. Shit. Shit.

  What do I do?

  There's no Dude here, no Hunt, just me, Aeotu and the darkness.

  It sinks deeper.

  I retreat, but retreating from yourself isn't that easy. Walls and shields and ditches the width of an ocean, I throw all of it, every single scrap between me and it. It laughs. It. Laughs.

  The sound is like flippers rubbing together, like a song underwater. It almost sounds like a million Onahs and h'Rawds wrapped into one – if either of the kin breathed underwater.

  Wait.

  Kin

  Under water.

  Water-kin.

  Well, shit.

  Realisation dawns like a new star, loosening the web's hold.

  I rip myself out of its embrace.

  There two species of kin aboard Citlali – air- and tree-kin – but there's a third species, an aquatic one. They didn't come with us for a couple of reasons; the adults will tell you it's because there wasn't enough liquid water aboard the ship, and while it's true, it's not the real reason. We all know the real reason, even if no one actually says it out loud.

  The water-kin were fucking scary.

  Ask a tree-kin about their aquatic cousins, then watch them struggle to keep their tail from scooting between their legs and their ears from flattening.

  There is a story, something you whisper in the dark with a glow pushed up under your chin. A legend made to scare your friends, one you tell where the adults can't hear, one that causes the tree-kin to shudder, and the air-kin's feathers to rise.

  It's a story of the water-kin, how they rose out of Jørn's oceans and wrapped their mind around the world to destroy an entire species. An entire alien species. It's a story everyone knows but no one talks about, but there's another version, one where the water-kin didn't just destroy the alien minds, but planted something in them, a command buried deep in their psyches where not even a telepath would find it.

  I found the command, or it found me, and now it's wrapped around my mind, crawling in my veins. Now that I know what it is, the black waves make sense, are familiar in the way Onah is familiar. Not exact but close enough that the shape of it makes sense.

  The darkness is a command sphere like nothing I've ever seen. It pulses with a life of its own, with a purpose independent of the minds that created it, thick with fear, pain, and retribution. As complex as it is, as weird, it carries a very simple command, one wrapped around an image of Them – the flat-nosed aliens the kin once drove from Jørn, the same ones that built Aeotu.

  Kill.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Kill.

  Kill, kill, kill. Images of Them stabbing me in the brain over and over and over.

  The command follows me into sleep, trying to pierce my anima.

  In that sleep there is no pain, and the darkness is replaced by a torrent of colour. The colours of Aeotu.

  The AI is a dark shape, a shadow within the kaleidoscope dancing under her skin, ever changing. Wild. Bright as a supernova. I'm barely able to look at her. She's waiting for me. Waiting for me to wake, to get up or to acknowledge her, one of those things. Or all of them, it's hard to tell. And while she waits, she's focusing elsewhere, only part of her attention on me. There's a bright vein of emotion, of hope amongst the supernova, a bouncing, joyous explosion, and an answering thrum from somewhere outside, a rush of power so immense I think it could swallow me whole. Burn me to atoms.

  Movement. We are moving, I can feel the cold glide of the void against the hull, the fire of stray particles, the shiver of thinspace. Thinspace. I don't know that word, and yet... Hunt whispers inside my skull, equations and physics tumbling through my brain, but they're as alien as the whorls and lines on Aeotu's walls. Still, something clicks, something about engines and distance and how time changes... Faster than light, we're travelling FTL, punching through the fabric of space to defy the laws of the universe. Okay. So we're doing that, but then we were doing that before. Travelling to wherever—

  Sister. The word flashes in the space between Aeotu and I, but she's not referring to me. An image hovers in the kaleidoscope, a ship that looks exactly like the few glimpses I've had of Aeotu, but different somehow. It takes me a moment to see it, a couple of seconds in which Hunt swarms behind my eyes, highlighting the markings on the other ship's hull.

  'Euiva.'

  Another image, more of a confused jumble of things. The bright pulse of a sun, the hot scent of a quantum signal. All of it adding up to a destination, a place she knows as well as I know the warmth of Mum's arms.

  Aeotu's going home, not just to the constellation of minds but the place where she was made.

  To Euiva.

  No. You can't. Danger. My thought shivers through Aeotu, and I sense her turn, the particles impacting her hull lessening as she slows—

  Agony knocks me out of Aeotu's mind, wraps me in a cocoon of acid.

  No, fathead. Grea in my face, Euiva behind her eyes. You can't stop us.

  I push her away, gasp as I slam back into my own body. Pain chases my nerves, but there's a warm golden fuzz travelling up my brainstem, chasing it away, spreading relief in his wake.

  'Dude.'

  The critter hums and snuggles under my chin.

  'Where are we?'

  'On Aeotu.'

  I'm lurching to my feet, adrenalin surging on my blood, fug-armour crawling over my shoulders, up my arms—

  Mac stands in the corner, crammed into the small space between hatch and bulkhead like he's trying to merge with it. The shiny black of his armour has receded, leaving his head and chest bare. And I mean bare, as in skin. No ship suit, no nothing beneath. Just Mac.

  Crap. He's put on muscle since I last saw him as like... him, awkwardly returning my hug before Grea dragged me to our family's stasis unit. He was a big guy already, naturally built as Mum would say, with extra cords of muscle added thanks to his semi-addiction to lifting weights. Grea thought the weight training was stupid, kinda like I did before I wrestled fug-eaten handles and doors that refused to budge. Some time in the last ship-cycle before all of this, I pretended to do the gym thing, always making sure I faced the mirror wall.

  He's older now, again that jarring shift in age, the years Aeotu took from me manifesting in this shock to my memories, of looking at all the people I knew and loved and realising that I missed something, that they lived without me.

  His jaw is broader, squarer, filled out like all those weights added bone to his face, and his eyes... Sadness radiates from them, a beam hitting me in the chest, reaching in and squeezing my heart, but what's worse is the tiredness, the acceptance in their depths, like he's given up. That reaches right into my anima and makes me want to hide, want to look away. The urge is so intense the tendons in my neck stand out like steelcrete cables, as I fight it.

  Dude butts my chin, his fuzz warming my muscles, washing away the urge and—

  'What are you doing, Mac?' I mean, apart from trying to push every bad emotion he has onto me. 'Stop it,' I say, and there's a growl in my voice.

  He frowns, and that urge, that desperate hopelessness, intensifies. His eyes are a laser, directing the emotion right past my shields, filling me up with all the shit in his head, like he wants me to feel what he feels, like he's punishing me. But why?

  'You did this,' Mac says, and from the way he says it, the images he thrusts into my mind, h
e's not talking about our current situation. Or at least, not the one we're in right this second.

  He presses harder with his mental attack, the muscles in his chest and shoulders straining as if those somehow count. He only wishes.

  Mac should know better than to go up against me in an empathic battle. I mean, his ability is weird, a mash of telepathy and empathy with a little bit of something, the kind of thing that the kin and the scientists don't like to talk about, the kind of thing that shouldn't be possible. But he's not a full empath and he's not me.

  I take down my shields, let the full force of his psionic blast in, and capture it. Twisting his attack back on him is easy, and kinda mean, but that hopelessness is buried deep in his psyche. If it weren't deeply rooted, if it didn't have the sense of age, or being so much a part of him, it'd make me angry. Angry that he's given up, angry that maybe he tried so hard and failed, over and over again, that the effort burnt him out, turned my best friend into a husk of what he was. But all of that anger is buried, smothered under sorrow and pain, things almost as bad as the despair wracking him now.

  At least he has determination on his side, even if that determination is to blame me for… whatever it is he's blaming me for.

  Usually, I'd wrap all of his emotion up in a sticky ball of crap and fire it back at him, but I can't. Just. Can't.

  Dude hums, his gold wrapping around my mind, burrowing a hole through my sorrow to the burning core of anger beneath.

  Yeah. Yeah, that's it. I let it fill me, gather it in my hands, a molten mass of anger, of rage. There's pain in there too, the kind that stokes fury, makes it stronger. The kind that swallows me whenever I think of the look on Jim Engineer's face.

  I don't just throw it at Mac, I follow it in and hammer it home, spreading it through his brain.

  He rocks back on his heels, like I smashed him in the face with a hover sled, which I guess I did. Surprise blooms in the air, widens his eyes makes his jaw drop.

  The laser beam of hopeless is obliterated. I'm on my feet, punching Mac in the chest with a fug-tipped fist a second later, sending him rocking back into the bulkhead again.

  'Not nice, Mac.' The memory of Grea saying the same thing echoes in my head, makes my gut twist.

  He's looking at me, that dumbfounded expression still stamped on his face, but not for long. That anger I planted is there, glowing in his eyes. He pushes back. 'Don't push me, midget.'

  I stand straight, and yeah, maybe I'm reaching a little, stretching my calves and spine as far as they'll go, making myself as tall as possible without standing on tip toe. Mac still towers over me, but I don't have to tilt my head to look him in the eye. 'At least I don't have to turn sideways to squeeze through a hatch.'

  A glower, Mac's dark brows meeting over his nose, and then... and then... 'What?'

  'You know, 'cause your shoulders are so big you have to...' I step back and mime twisting sideways and sliding through a doorway. 'To get through the door.'

  Silence. Mac's glower easing, the anger fading away to... 'That's stupid,' he says.

  I shrug. 'Hey, it's not my fault it's true.'

  'I do not need to turn sideways to get through a door.'

  I spread my arms, half-squinting like I'm measuring his shoulders. 'I don't know, man. I mean, I'd really need a doorway to measure it against, but from looking...'

  Mac grunts and crosses his arms, making the muscles under the dark bronze of his skin bunch in interesting ways. 'You're full of it, Darzi.'

  'I know, but at least I look good, right?' The grin is a little forced, coloured by the vestiges of Mac's hopelessness. It’s easier to pretend it's not there and project other, hotter emotions to counter the effects.

  'Hmm.' Mac's looking at me, and some of what I'm projecting is in his eyes, mixed in with other emotions. Confusion is at the front, backed up by a hot, uncomfortable feeling I'm not prepared to name.

  I can name the acknowledgement though, right at the back. It swims between us. He knows what I'm doing, what I've done, and I can't help but tense, the beginnings of dread building at the base of my skull. Mac's always been a private person and never liked what I can do, how I can reach in and manipulate people.

  He's never said anything, but then he's never had to. Mac isn't exactly shy about sharing his feelings, and knows, in the way only someone with a little bit of empathy can, how to make them known.

  'Thanks,' he says. Appreciation rises, a bright yellow fog threading through the air.

  I nod. On my shoulder, Dude hums.

  'Where's your critter?' I gesture at his shoulder.

  'My what?'

  'The critter, you know, the little guy that was with you before. The one...' I trail off. I don't want to say 'controlling you', don't want to give the hopelessness something to cling to. Mac's face hardens, and I know I've stuffed shit up, that I probably shouldn't have asked that, but...

  'It wasn't a critter, and it's dead.'

  'Oh.' I wait a beat, not having to imagine what it would be like if Dude died, seeing none of that grief clinging to Mac. 'What was it?'

  'Xin—' He catches himself, makes a face and I'm pretty sure it's because of the blank look on mine. 'It's made of stuff similar to the viyu, the fug as you call it.'

  'If it's not a critter, then why does it…?'

  'Look like one?' His expression changes, becomes still and dark, despair rising around his ankles. And just like that the moment of happiness, of anger I forced on him, is gone. He points at Dude. 'Probably because of that. Of you.'

  Of me. I don't quite get that, what Dude or I have to do with Mac's critter thing.

  He turns away. 'Aeotu will send me a new one soon,' he says.

  'Why?'

  'To replace the old one.'

  'But why do you need it? I mean...'

  'I'm not like you, Kuma.' The words are quiet, sad. The hopelessness is rising again, swallowing the anger I'd laid over it. I try to smother it, to emote harder, but no matter how much red and yellow I force into the eter, the dark tide beats against it. There's a force behind it, an intelligence. Mac. Mac is beating back my emote, grabbing hold of the hopelessness and pulling it around him, pushing me out.

  'I'm not like you, Kuma.' He says it again, and it's as if the words are a shield or trigger or something, cause all of sudden the darkness has taken over. Shredded the joy and laughter like a hand through mist. 'I wasn't the first Jørgen Aeotu came for.' Memories flood the space, of bodies wrapped in fug, of moans and screams. 'I wasn't even the second.' There, amongst the fug, a familiar face with Mac's almond eyes and dark slashing brows, but older and softer, her jaw a fine, heart-shaped point. Mac's mum.

  It's like when I first woke, all that time ago, of slipping into Mum's dream, the scent of burning flesh and the sharp pain as spikes erupted from my chest in a shower of blood. Except it's Mac's mum I'm watching, and while there are no fug-spikes exploding from her chest, she's still screaming, and there's blood running down her chin and—

  The memory cuts off, leaving me staring at Mac, at the pain in his eyes.

  'Aeotu wanted to make more of…' He gestures at me. 'You. You gave her something, filled a hole in her psyche, but then you were in the escape pod and gone, so she tried to find it with someone else. Except she can't communicate with all of us.'

  Mac crosses his arms. 'It needs something specific, something you and Grea have, but most of us don't.' A new vision springs to life, of faces I know, of friends, of people I knew by name, that I worked with and played with and ducked chores with. Old, young. A double handful standing in the room with us, staring at me with the same hopelessness in Mac's eyes.

  I swallow.

  'Are they...?' I can't bring myself to say the word.

  'Dead?' Mac says it for me, plucks it out of the ether like it's something he does all the time. That thought freezes my insides. 'Some of them.' A handful of the faces fade, not disappearing, just fading, becoming translucent and grey, ghosts in the eter. 'Others aren't so lucky
.'

  The vision changes again, the faces changing, the bodies distorting, growing too-heavy limbs and holes in places that shouldn't have them. There are tendrils coming out one boy's head, replacing his hands, sprouting from his back, reminding me of Grea, stalking through the darkness with a cloak of viyusa. Only he isn't moving and his eyes... I reach, push through the darkness and latch onto the essence of him.

  Cold reaches back, runs up my arm and runs for my brain. It's not him, not the boy I remember, the sensation is barely even Jørgen. There's no thought there, no intelligence, no memory, just... just...

  Brother.

  Aeotu. I breathe her name, the sound of it rising on the eter.

  A pulse, warm, welcoming.

  I thrust her away. Turn to Mac.

  'What happened to them?'

  Sadness, anima-deep, climbs up his feet, encasing him in another kind of armour. 'They're not empaths. Aeotu couldn't talk to them like she can us, and so...' He shrugs. 'She tried to fix it, but didn't know what she was doing.'

  'But why? Why...' I gesture down at myself, at Mac, at the armour crawling over our skins.

  'I don't know.' Tiredness rolls off Mac, is in the droop of his shoulders. 'I don't know, Kuma. She doesn't speak to me, she tries and...' He shrugs. 'I can feel her sometimes, but it's strange, half-heard, like it's through a veil or a bad comm connection. The xin help, but...' He shrugs again.

  'You have to stand on your head.' The words are out before I realise how ridiculous they sound, and the look on Mac's face reinforces that. I feel the blush rising up my neck. 'Psionically, you kind of have to... twist? It's strange, but once you get it—'

  'I can't get it. I told you, I'm not like you, I can't do the same things.'

  'But you're—'

  'Weird? Different? That I'd be the only telekinetic ever, if only the kin and psy-researchers admitted it was a thing?' He leans back. 'Some kinds of different aren't all they're cracked up to be, Kuma. You should know that.'

  'What's that mean?'