Ghost Station, page 13
This unit is another lab; it blurs with all the others on this side. Except it’s clearly been closed off since their initial walk-through yesterday. Whoever was going through with the broom skipped this unit, and there’s debris still piled up in the corners and scattered across the floor.
Ophelia shivers. Though the temperature in the hab is the same in each unit, a comfortable twenty degrees Celsius, it feels cooler in here. Darker, too. It doesn’t help that the lights aren’t on, part of Kate’s order to conserve energy by making them inoperable in the unnecessary spaces.
Ophelia’s cloth shoes grit across the shattered bits of glass and polymer. She hopes the pieces aren’t too sharp, or that her soles are thicker than they look.
“Birch?” she calls into the small space, even though she’s fairly sure she’s the only one here. It’s just an open-sided lab table, two desks, and a bunch of junk.
Ophelia bends down and checks beneath the first of the desks, one of the only conceivable hiding spots in the room. Nothing, of course.
But as she’s pulling back from the desk closest to the door, she stops. On the underside of the plasti-fab desk, deep gouges mar the otherwise smooth material in parallel lines. Four of them.
Ophelia squints in the dim light, trying to understand what she’s seeing. She kneels down and traces the lines, the rough edges of the grooves scraping her fingertips. What could have caused that?
Dark smudges are smeared along the desk’s edge, wrapping around to the top.
Frowning, she straightens up carefully until she can see the top of the desk. There, beneath a thick coating of dust, is a matching mark, with more of the dark smears.
One on the top, but in direct alignment with the four underneath.
She holds her hand above the marks, without touching them. Thumb on the top, fingers underneath.
A perfect fit.
Someone clawed at this desk, hard enough to make actual marks.
Why?
Her brain immediately summons images, memories of bloody streaks on the floor, left behind by hands grabbing for purchase as people were hauled out of their hiding spaces.
No. Ophelia shakes her head. Not here.
But the back of her neck prickles with a chill of awareness, as if someone is just behind her, looming in the threshold, breathing just hard enough to ruffle the tiny hairs there.
Goose bumps spring up on her arms, and she whips around, hands up to defend herself from … something.
But no one is there.
She lets out a sharp laugh at herself. Get a grip, Ophelia. What is wrong with you? A question for the ages.
Whatever happened to that desk, whatever caused those marks, that (maybe) blood doesn’t have anything to do with Birch. The smears were dry, the dust undisturbed until she touched it.
With a grimace, she starts for the door, and then she stops short, retreating to the other desk, the one under the window, to check it, just to be sure.
No marks on this desk. No dark smudges, either.
Motion outside the window catches her attention. Hard crystalline flakes, more ice than snow, click faintly against the window. Ophelia stares at them, watching them spin and move and collect against the rubber seal at the base of the window.
But then a swirl of darkness beyond pulls her gaze. The alien ruins loom, stark lines in the distance. This, however, is a person-size patch of darker gray, just above the frozen expanse of white, lurching awkwardly, first right and then left. As if fighting against the storm.
Horror curdles the coffee in her gut. Oh fuck.
Not person-size. That’s a person. In the storm. It’s one thing to talk about the possibility, entirely something else to witness it.
“Birch!” Ophelia pounds on the window. But he can’t hear her. He’s too far away already.
She rushes through the hab, out into the corridor, and races toward the central hub. Stumbling over the threshold, she rights herself and then bolts for the airlock at the opposite end.
It takes too long, so long. Even though it’s only seconds, she can feel every one of them ticking down, like Birch’s chances of being rescued before he’s lost in the storm.
The airlock door is already open, and she throws herself inside. Only to find Severin, Suresh, Liana, and even Kate—with no gun in sight—standing there, on the far side, near the corner. They don’t seem to be rushing into suits, though. They’re gathered in a half-circle, staring down at something.
“Birch is…” she begins, panting. She waves her hand at the outer door, as if they’ll understand that. “He’s—”
Four heads turn toward her at once, like a choreographed action. Suresh watches her with his eyes wide. Kate and Severin exchange another of their patented silent conversations, which are so irritating. Just say it out loud. We don’t have time for this! Then Liana steps toward her with a concerned frown.
“Ophelia?”
Ophelia opens her mouth to explain, but in the gap opened by Liana’s movement, she can now see what they were all looking at.
Birch. On the floor, in the corner between the outer wall and the mobile sample containment unit they hauled in from the lander yesterday.
Not outside. In here.
He’s sitting up, wrists resting on his knees, looking a little dazed and irritable but otherwise fine.
Suddenly, Ophelia feels like she’s the one being battered by the storm, twisted up and spun around.
“—right there,” she finishes weakly.
13
“Didn’t you hear me say on the wrist-comm that we found him?” Liana asks, her forehead creased in confusion.
“No. I…” It dawns on Ophelia in that moment that she never turned the volume back up on her own device. “I guess I was … distracted.” Pounding on the window and trying to get the attention of … who, exactly? Electric fear sizzles down the nerves in Ophelia’s arms, making her fingers tingle painfully.
Liana and the others are all still staring at her.
I saw someone. Outside. In the storm. The words are perched on Ophelia’s tongue, ready to leap off.
In the moment, it seemed so clear. She can still picture that pronounced left-right swaying of someone battling the storm to make forward progress.
But Birch is here. And so is everyone else.
Ophelia reviewed the pre-mission probe scans for herself—there’s nothing alive on this planet except for them. Claim jumpers are always a (remote) possibility, but it seems unlikely that jumpers would wait for them to be settled in at the hab. Plus, the figure she saw, if she’d seen anything at all, was heading away from their facility, toward the city ruins.
So … a shadow, an optical illusion. The snow and wind creating odd patterns and the suggestion of movement. Plus, the team’s obvious anxiety that Birch was outside probably planted the suggestion in her own sleep-deprived—and therefore highly suggestible—mind. You see what you expect to see and all that.
That has to be it.
Ophelia swallows hard. “It just occurred to me that the airlock was the one place we hadn’t searched,” she says.
That answer seems to satisfy them. Most of them, anyway. Birch is staring at her with open hostility, and even Kate is eyeing her, head cocked sideways with curiosity.
“Hell of a place to fall asleep, man,” Suresh says to Birch, stepping forward and offering him a hand up.
“Yes. It is,” Severin says, arms folded across his chest, stance wide again. “Explain it to me again.”
Birch glowers as he pulls himself up with Suresh’s help. “It’s not that big of a deal. You know how it is the first night after cold sleep. I was awake, couldn’t fall back asleep, so I thought I’d get up and check on the status of the storm.”
Get up? Birch’s words distract Ophelia from her own worries. He didn’t get up last night. Not from what Ophelia saw on the iVR control tablet this morning. Wakefulness is one thing, but physical activity on that level would have registered with elevated heart rate and a change in breathing. No one was out of bed last night, based on the numbers. As far as those were concerned, Birch was asleep in his bunk—or, to be fair, wherever he initially dozed off—all night long.
“I sat down for a few minutes, and I must have fallen asleep,” Birch finishes with a shrug.
“Inside the airlock?” Kate asks Birch mildly. Now that Ophe- lia is closer, she can see the outline of the gun tucked inside the oversize utility pocket on the side of her jumpsuit. “There are plenty of other windows to choose from.”
Birch lifts his hands with an exasperated noise. “I don’t know. I was feeling restless, okay?” His gaze slips past them, meeting Ophelia’s for a fraction of a second before skittering away.
No matter how often it happens, it always strikes Ophelia as so strange how you can hear a lie sometimes. It’s the fractional pause before the response. The thinness of the words, as if they’re brittle ice, holding the shape of an answer but not strong enough to sustain thorough examination.
“It’s no different than that time Liana passed out under her bunk,” Birch points out.
Suresh snickers.
“Hey, that’s not fair,” Liana protests, her cheeks flushing pink. “You guys didn’t tell me it was spiked.”
“Liana, love. It wasn’t spiked. It was called grog and just the smell of it incinerated my nose hairs,” Kate says wryly.
“Why didn’t we get an alert that the airlock was opened?” Severin directs this question to Kate.
Her mouth tightens. “I turned off the trip for the interior door. One less power draw. I didn’t think I needed to worry about anyone wandering around in there for funsies.” She glares at Birch.
“Okay, okay, got it.” Birch rolls his eyes, scratching at his arm through his jumpsuit sleeve. The edge of the fabric near his wrist rides up, revealing a patch of angry red skin. Contact dermatitis, probably. “But you can’t blame me for being a little stressed.”
He sends a pointed look at Ophelia. It’s a classic redirect, but it works.
The last of the tension of drains away from the group, their questions answered, their problem resolved. Almost as one, they step back and away from Birch, a precursor to breaking off and returning to whatever they were doing before.
But Ophelia steps closer. “I’m sure it’s as you said, the remaining effects of cold sleep,” she says, choosing not to call Birch out on his lie. Hard to do otherwise, when she doesn’t have more information. “But I would still like to have a chat. Make sure everything is okay. Maybe we could run a couple tests through the med-scanner in the medikit.”
She looks to Kate, who gives an uncomfortable nod after a beat. “Sure.”
“No!” Birch says too sharply, at the same time. Then, with a frustrated exhale through his nose, he shakes his head. “No,” he says again in a calmer voice. “I’m fine. Let’s just get day one in the books.”
Ophelia holds her hands up, palms out, in the classic “I mean no harm” gesture. “I’m just concerned, that’s all,” she says to Birch, but just as much to Severin. “We’ve found that disrupted sleep is not just a contributor but can also be a symptom of—”
“I don’t have disrupted anything!” Birch snaps. “Just a headache that’s as much from you as anything else. And that fucking thing.” He points to the ground, where a discarded iVR band rests near his feet. Along with his wrist-comm.
Liana darts forward and picks up his wrist-comm, handing it to him by the thick black band. He nods his thanks, pausing in his scratching to loop the band—loosely this time—around his wrist.
Ophelia can’t help but notice that Liana does not do the same for the iVR band. Part of her wants to scoop it off the ground herself before its delicate framework is damaged, but she resists the urge.
“What are we doing today?” Birch asks Severin. “Core samples? Updated surface scans with the drones?”
Silence holds for a long moment. Everyone, including Ophelia, waits for Severin to answer.
“We don’t have a huge window between storms,” Severin says finally. “Priority will be documenting the ruins, taking a few samples, and a couple other housekeeping items.”
He’s not going to do it. Disappointment swells in her, followed immediately by irritation flickering to life inside her chest, like flame caused by friction. Severin will not force—or hell, even encourage, apparently—Birch to get help. She should have expected nothing less. He warned her that he would not support her efforts.
She could push it. Demand that Birch submit to a session and a blood panel to check for low iron and T3 levels, both of which are known to exacerbate conditions leading to ERS, or be benched.
But that would only make Birch hate her more, if that’s possible, and destroy any chance of him accepting her help when and if he really needs it, not to mention casting her firmly as the enemy with the others. Any progress she made toward trust with Liana this morning would be gone, if it isn’t already.
Birch nods once at Severin, seemingly in gruff satisfaction.
“Suresh, you’re on pod duty,” Severin continues.
Suresh’s mouth falls open in protest.
“But in this storm, no one goes anywhere alone. Birch, you’re with him.”
Suresh’s protest turns into laughter.
Severin’s glance briefly pauses on Ophelia, eyebrows raised, as if to ask, Happy?
That will keep Birch closer to the hab, which is probably safer, but nothing like an actual assessment.
Birch’s mouth thins into a line. “Commander, I don’t need to be babied because of—”
“Kate, Liana, you’ll head into the city with me,” Severin says, ignoring him. “The two of you will take samples from the towers; that’s listed as our top priority on the mission brief. I’ll handle the scan of the former excavation site, documenting what Pinnacle was up to. That’s second on our list.”
Leaving Ophelia to sit in the hab and twiddle her thumbs, apparently.
“If the storm gets worse, at all, if you even think that conditions might be deteriorating, head back immediately.” The sternness in Severin’s voice reminds Ophelia that this piece of common sense is not simply a nicety but a necessity among risk-seeking R&E teams, which most R&E personnel are, simply by the nature of the job. “If you get lost, stay where you are, we will find you. Be ready in twenty. We’ll go out together.”
Birch shoves past Ophelia on his way out, stomping across the airlock into the corridor. Suresh drifts after him. “Hey, it’s not that big of a deal,” he calls after Birch, but his gleeful tone is not going to help his case.
Birch is too far for Ophelia to hear his response, if he gives one at all.
Ophelia bends down to retrieve the iVR band, as Kate and Severin, discussing equipment needs, move to exit the airlock as well.
A quiet voice stops them in their tracks. “That plan leaves you going into the excavation site by yourself,” Liana says. She’s still standing where she was, rubbing her arms up and down with her hands, as if she’s suddenly cold. “You don’t know what the conditions are like there. You don’t know if there’s been a cave-in. Or if the support structure will hold. It’s been six years.”
“I’ll be fine,” Severin says, gently but firmly.
Liana shakes her head, mouth a stubborn line. “You said no one goes anywhere alone. It’s an unnecessary risk. You could fall, get hurt, become trapped under a mountain of snow so thick you can’t breathe and—” She cuts herself off, visibly steeling herself against the wave of emotion. But her eyes are shiny with unshed tears.
Ophelia lobs her own silent conversation starter at Severin. See? Trauma. I told you.
His jaw goes tight, the muscle jumping at the back corner of it. An acknowledgment of sorts.
“You could just wait,” Liana continues. “Kate and I will finish at the towers and then one of us will—”
“We don’t have the time for that, Liana,” Severin says with patience, no evidence of the exasperation that Ophelia would have expected from him if he were dealing with anyone else, especially with the shortened timeline they’re facing with the weather. Points to him for recognizing Liana’s vulnerability. That also means Ophelia was right in her assessment of Liana’s role on the team—she matters to them.
“I’m sorry,” he continues. “But I promise, nothing is going to happen.”
Ophelia raises her eyebrows. A bold statement, given the uncertainty of, well, everything in this place.
He leaves Kate and crosses back to the airlock to stand in front of Liana, forcing her to meet his gaze. “I’ll stay in contact,” he says calmly. “The team will know exactly where I am at all times.”
He’s good. Very good. Deep voice, soothing, reassuring, like a weighted blanket pressing tight over you.
Ophelia’s resistance to him—a tension in her chest—softens. She finds herself wanting to believe him.
Until she catches herself, squaring her shoulders against the onslaught. He might mean it, but it’s also a tactic, she’s sure of it. He’s just trying to keep all of his team members on task and focused. Fair enough.
“It won’t be like before. And I don’t want you to be distracted, worrying about me,” Severin says to Liana. “This is the best solution, the only thing to be done. Unless you think the doctor wants to join me?” He cocks his head toward Ophelia.
Liana offers a cautious smile.
It’s a joke, to smooth over the tension, reuniting him and Liana on the same side once more, the side of “this woman is an outsider and slightly ridiculous.” Ophelia recognizes what he’s doing, even if she doesn’t like it.
But it’s his exaggerated expression, a humorous version of a smirk, aimed at Ophelia, that does it—digs in, right beneath her skin. It’s the tiniest up-flip in the right corner of his mouth, an expression that says how crazy an idea it is, that rich, useless Ophelia Bray might do some actual work.
Ophelia’s seen similar looks before, from colleagues, classmates, even her various mentors. And she knows better than to be goaded by it. She absolutely has no business pretending to be a full-fledged R&E team member. Especially in a group that would, if not enjoy, be utterly entertained by her fumbling and stumbling around. Amused by her failure.
