Part Two — The Keys · The Threnody
Chapter Thirteen
Cirrus Station — Present Day
Cirrus Station was falling, and had been for thirty-one years.
Vash watched it from the shuttle's forward port, a great dim wheel the color of old pewter, turning slowly against the amber storm-bands of the gas giant below. Four hundred meters across. A ring, four spokes, a hub. Every light on it was dark. Every window was black. It hung in the long cold nothing above the planet's upper atmosphere like the skeleton of something that had been beautiful once and hadn't yet been told it was dead.
"Decay rate's steeper than the records suggested," Geordi said from the copilot's seat. The visor turned toward the wheel, and she wondered what he saw in it. Heat bleed, power traces, the ghosts of old current. "The giant's upper atmosphere swells on this side of its orbit. The station's been skimming the edge of it for decades. By my numbers it crosses the point of no return in three hours and forty minutes. Then it starts to come apart."
"Three hours forty." Vash looked at the chronometer above the port. "Captain Picard said forty hours from Ke'Thara. We've spent thirty-nine."
"The Sorokin clock has nineteen left on it," Worf said from the rear bench. "If it comes to that."
"It will." She let her head rest against the bulkhead. "What's the cargo bay's status?"
"Geordi's modifications hold." It was Dara who answered, from the seat beside her. "The orb's field has been stable for six hours. He thinks the secondary dampers will keep it within bounds for another sixty."
"I think," Geordi said, "is carrying a great deal of weight in that sentence."
"It usually does."
Nobody laughed. They were very tired, all of them, in the way that had nothing to do with sleep. The tone on the shuttle had risen since they left the Enterprise, not loud but present, and Vash noticed that they had all begun to speak more softly, like people in a house where someone was ill.
Tobin, at the back, said, "There's a ship at the docking ring."
She turned.
It sat at the third dock, a long ugly salvage tug with mismatched drive pods and a hull that had been painted so often it had a grain. Its running lights were off. A thin line of frost had formed along its cargo hatch, which meant it had been there for hours.
"That's the Fair Weather," Tobin said.
"I can see that."
"He got here first."
"Yes." Vash kept her voice flat. "He did."
Worf had already unslung his phaser. "Captain Picard will wish to know."
"He will." She was calm. She noticed that she was calm and didn't trust it. "Tell him. And tell him Kestrel's dock is four hundred meters from the nearest spoke, and we'll take the far one."
Inside, the station was the cold of a place the heat had left long ago. Their lamps made small, steady cones in the dark. The air was thin but breathable, cold enough to bite. The ring's spin gave them a weak gravity, a third of a standard, and every step came slow and floating, like walking in a dream.
The corridors were perfectly preserved. That was the eeriest part. Nothing had been looted, nothing had been smashed. A mess hall stood with its tables laid, the plates still set out, the trays abandoned with meals frozen on them in neat rows. A wall calendar in an office showed a date, thirty-one years old, with a single appointment marked in red pencil. Dentist, 2:30. In the recreation room, someone had left a half-finished game of chess.
"They left in a hurry," Geordi said.
"They left in an orderly way." Dara moved along the wall, her lamp sweeping the dead terminals, her breath visible. "The chairs are pushed in. The lights were switched off. Whatever happened, someone stayed calm enough to shut down the room."
"Somebody made them shut it down," Vash said.
"Yes," Dara said quietly. "I think so."
The clocks bothered her most. She noticed them one by one, a clock in every corridor, in every room, mounted high on the wall in the old station-issue style, their faces dim with dust. Every one of them had stopped. No two of them agreed. A clock in the mess hall read 4:10. A clock in the corridor outside read 11:52. A clock by the airlock read a time that could not exist, the hands locked in a position that fell between two hours.
"It's as if each room had stopped separately," Tobin said.
"It's as if each room stopped when it was ready," Geordi muttered.
They found the first log in the operations office, a console Geordi coaxed awake with a portable cell and a great deal of patient muttering. The display flickered, showed a cracked Brandt Atmospheric Research Consortium logo, and brought up a scroll of text.
"Personal log, Chief Engineer Ilse Brandt," Dara read. "Day two hundred and twelve. She was a bit of a poet, I think. Listen."
She read it aloud, slowly, in a steady voice.
"We brought the object to the hub in the spring. We were told it was a dense meteoric fragment, captured in a stable orbit, unremarkable apart from its mass. I do not believe any of us thought anything of it. We built the core around it. It seemed economical. A fixed mass at the center of the spin, a natural ballast. And then the reactor began to produce more than we put in.
"It began as a rounding error. Four percent. Then nine. By the end of summer we were generating three times the rated output on the same fuel. It was wonderful. The consortium was delighted. They wrote me a letter.
"I do not know how to say what came next. It is a sound. Not a loud one. The crew complain of it in the evenings. A high, sustained tone, at the edge of hearing. Some of us hear it better than others. Two of the technicians have begun to sing it, without knowing. I have asked them to stop. They look at me with such patient kindness, as though I were the one who did not understand."
Dara stopped. Her voice had gone quiet.
"There's more," Vash said.
"Yes." Dara scrolled. "Day two hundred and thirty-one. We cannot shut it down. I have tried everything. The core will not accept a scram. It does not resist. It simply declines. The reactor keeps running, the output climbs, and I have begun to understand that we were not the ones building the station. We were the ones being built around."
Nobody spoke. Somewhere far down the corridor, the dark ticked and settled.
"Day two hundred and thirty-four," Dara read. "The evacuation order goes out at midnight. I will stay to seal the hub behind us. I have designed the lock myself, from the core's own geometry. Whoever opens it will need to understand what they are doing. I do not think that can be said of anyone who has worked on this station, including me."
"She locked it," Vash said.
"With the core's own geometry." Dara looked up. Her eyes were very bright. "She was talking about the Key. She built the door to match it."
"Why?"
Dara hesitated. "Because she understood it," she said. "And she was frightened of what it wanted."
The spoke ended, a hundred meters short of the hub, in a bulkhead with a red light.
It was an ordinary pressure door, set into the corridor wall with its warning stenciled in faded yellow. The light above it burned a steady, fading, patient red. Geordi put a hand to it, tilted his visor, and said, "Okay. That's not good."
"Explain," said Worf.
"Section's open to space. Beyond that door, the corridor's gone. Micrometeoroid hit, probably, years ago. It's been venting ever since. The air in here's from the ring side. There's no pressure on the other side of the wall at all."
"Can we reach the hub another way?"
"Not unless you want to go through the spin core, which has eleven tons of dead flywheel in it. Or you want to go out." He shrugged. "The spoke's got an outer truss. External maintenance rail. We can walk it."
"Walk it," Tobin said faintly.
"Clip on and go hand over hand. It's eighty meters. I've done worse."
"When?"
"Once. On a very bad day." Geordi grinned, a little crookedly. "Look, we've got suits. We've got tethers. The gravity's nothing out there, we'll be basically weightless. The only problem's time. The orbit's decaying faster than I thought. It'll hit the thick part of the atmosphere in about two and a half hours, and when it does, the whole station's going to start to shake."
They suited up in the airlock beside the bulkhead. It was a cramped, cold, silent business of seals and clamps and hissing valves, and nobody spoke much. Vash checked Dara's helmet twice. She checked Tobin's three times, and he let her, with a small embarrassed nod.
The outer hatch opened on the dark.
She had been in space before. She had walked a dozen derelicts, in a dozen different suits. But she had never gotten used to the first moment, the step out of the lit chamber into that clean, enormous, indifferent black, with a world turning below her like a great slow wheel of amber and bruise. The gas giant filled half the sky. Its upper atmosphere glowed faintly where the station dragged through it, a thin trailing aurora of heated gas, pale violet and green. It was hideously, extravagantly beautiful. It was also, she understood, a clock.
The truss ran away from the hatch in a long straight line of gray lattice, studded with handholds, vanishing into the dim spoke ahead. At its end, eighty meters off, the hub hung against the stars like a dark bead on a string.
"Clip on," Geordi said. "Don't look down. I mean, you can look down. It's gorgeous. But don't stop."
They went hand over hand. It was slow, strange, silent work. The only sound was the rasp of her own breath and the click of the tether's carabiner on each rung, and the faint high tone, which she could hear even through the suit, a thin chord at the edge of hearing, rising as they climbed. Tobin went just ahead of her, with Worf behind him. Dara came last. Vash looked back once and saw her, a small, slight figure in a white suit against the black, her face turned up toward the hub with a look of such utter quiet attention that Vash looked away.
Halfway across, the station shook.
It was not a violent thing. A long, slow shudder, like a great animal turning over in its sleep. The truss flexed. The handholds trembled in her grip. Somewhere ahead, a plate of hull plating came loose from the spoke's side and spun away into the dark, turning end over end, glittering, until the gas giant swallowed it.
"Atmospheric drag," Geordi said, through the link. His voice was tight. "That's the first of the real stuff. We're ahead of schedule on bad news. Move."
They moved. Her arms burned. Tobin was breathing in long deliberate counts. Beside her, a shape drifted past, a strip of insulation torn from the wall, and she ducked it without thinking. The hub grew larger, a cold gray cylinder with a small round airlock set into its flank like a closed eye.
Thirty meters. Twenty. The shudder came again, harder, and she felt the whole truss sway.
"Worf," Geordi said sharply. "Cable!"
She turned in time to see it. A long loose cable had come free from the spoke's flank and swung out across the lattice like the tail of a whip, and it caught Dara's tether in a loop and snapped it taut. Dara cried out. Her hands came loose from the rail. She went backward, spinning, one arm flung out, her white suit bright against the amber of the planet.
Worf was already moving. He let go of the truss with one hand and launched himself along the tether like an arrow down a string. He caught her by the harness, and held, and the cable went slack and slid away into the dark.
"I have her," he said.
"I'm sorry," Dara said. Her voice was thin and shaking and entirely sincere. "I'm so sorry. I wasn't looking."
"It is nothing." He drew her in. "You are not hurt?"
"No."
"Then we continue."
They reached the airlock with the station groaning around them like a ship at sea. Geordi cycled it with fast, sure hands, and Vash fell through into the pressurized dark on her hands and knees and lay there with her heart going like a fist.
"Okay," Geordi said, from somewhere above her. He had his helmet off, and was grinning, and his face was gray. "That was fun. Who wants to do it again?"
"Nobody," said Tobin.
"Good. Because we've got to do it on the way out."
The hub lay at the center of the wheel. They had come to it by the long spoke, and the last stretch ran inward again behind a second airlock, a corridor sloping steadily up, the weight draining from their bodies as they climbed, until Vash's boots barely touched the floor and they were pulling themselves along the rail hand over hand. The tone grew louder with every meter. It was not a note now. It was a chord, several voices, close together and slightly flat against one another, the way a choir sounded a half-second before it found its pitch.
She noticed it wasn't quite the pitch of the orb. It was a third lower.
"Geordi," she said. "Are you getting this?"
"Getting what?" He was hauling himself along the rail ahead of her, visor flashing. "I'm getting a lot. Power traces everywhere. Whatever's in there is still drawing on the station's dead reactor. I can see the current moving in the walls. Faint. Slow. Like blood in an old man's hand."
"How much?"
"Enough to power a small city."
"For thirty-one years?"
"For thirty-one years."
"Nobody's ever come looking," Tobin said from behind.
"Somebody did," said a voice from ahead. "Once. A long time ago. And then a few hours ago it was me."
The hub's antechamber was a wide round room at the end of the spoke, lit by a single battery lamp that had been set on the floor. The far wall was a vast circular door, forty meters across, seamless except where a dozen fresh cutter scars had scored the metal and failed. Seven concentric rings stood in its face, each one set inside the next, each one carved with the looping line of the Makers. They didn't move. They didn't appear to be doors. They looked like the face of an enormous clock that had forgotten how to tell time.
Roan Kestrel sat on an equipment crate in front of it with his coat open and his elbows on his knees. Beside him, cross-legged on the floor, Kessel slept fitfully against the wall, the pale hair plastered to his forehead. Kestrel looked up as they came in, slowly, the way a man looks up when he has been expecting a blow for some time.
"You're late," he said.
Vash let go of the rail, drifted to the floor, and found her balance on the cold metal. Worf's phaser had come up. She put out a hand and he lowered it a few centimeters and no further.
"How long have you been here?" she asked.
"Four hours. My backer gave me the coordinates two days ago." He rubbed his eyes. "I've tried the cutters. I've tried the pry bars. I spent an hour trying to learn what the carving meant, and I got as far as the fourth ring. I have never been so completely and humiliatingly useless in my life."
"Why are you telling me this?"
"Because I need your help, Vash." He looked at her. "And because before you decide whether to give it, there's something I have to tell you. Something I did. I think you'll want to hear it first."
The tone in the room had gone quite still. Vash could hear, for the first time, the sound of her own heart.
"Tell me," she said.