Dead Space: Catalyst (12 page)

After that, he had trouble falling back to sleep, was worried about having the same dream over again. He made the bed and then lay on top of it, thinking.

I did everything I could for Istvan,
he told himself.
When we were together, I tried to help him and keep him out of harm’s way. Later, I tried to stop him from doing something rash. Later still, I spent months and then years looking for him. I did everything I could
.

Still, despite saying it, he did not quite believe it. He had not found his brother. How could he say he had done everything he could when his brother was still missing?

*   *   *

It was a hard day. He was, for one thing, exhausted, even more so than usual. For another, he found his thoughts returning throughout the day to his brother, wondering where he was now. Enough had started to come out now about the methods used by the SCAC against political prisoners and terrorists that he couldn’t help but think that Istvan had likely been through a lot. Maybe they had driven him mad, made him even madder than he already was. Or maybe they had crippled or maimed him. Even killed him.

Did he really want to know what had happened to his brother? Would Istvan even be the same person if he were to get him back?

*   *   *

I’ll think about him for a few days and then slowly forget about him again,
he told himself.
Life will continue on as normal. Even if I didn’t find him, I can hardly be blamed.
But a few days came and went and he was still thinking about his brother, unable to help himself. And so he did what he usually did when this happened: he filed another request with the military to be allowed to have contact with his brother, knowing that it, just like all the petitions he had filed before it, would simply vanish. It would not even be acknowledged. But at least his conscious mind could now tell his unconscious that it had tried to do something.

*   *   *

He was still working the same picking job as he had been four years earlier, back when his brother had disappeared. He piloted a small cargo ship designed to shift freight from local orbital spacecraft to the larger shockpoint ships in orbit and vice versa. He showed up in the morning, was given a series of deliveries and pickups, and worked with a small crew until they were done. If everything went right, he could do the job in eight hours or so. If anything went wrong, though, he’d have to stay until things were taken care of, and even if he went over his eight-hour shift he never got overtime. But it was a job and the economy was bad—he was lucky to have anything at all. The piloting was far from intense—nothing beyond what he might be trained for in the first few weeks of military flight school except for the docking procedures—but it was something anyway. He wasn’t making much money, wasn’t saving any, but he was getting by.

*   *   *

And then, a few weeks later, he came home to find a vid message waiting for him. It was from his mother. It was surprising: he hadn’t heard from her since her confinement in the asylum where, he could tell from the background the vid showed, she still was. She looked relatively okay, though: her hair combed, her eyes drifting a little but not darting about like they used to do. Plus, she was able to form coherent, unslurred sentences, even if she only said a few words.

“Jensi,” she said. “I need to see you. Come see me.”

It didn’t make sense. Why would his mother call? She’d always blamed him for Istvan’s disappearance, and the few times, early on, that he’d tried to see her, she’d turned his requests to visit down. Even then he hadn’t particularly wanted to see her, but he’d felt obligated. He didn’t want to see her now, but at the moment, still worrying in the back of his mind he’d failed Istvan, still feeling guilty about his brother, he couldn’t stop himself from trying to contact her. But by vid rather than in person. No, in person would be too much.

It took a while for the hospital staff to acknowledge that he had a right to communicate with her, and then even longer for them to track her down and bring her to a vid. She didn’t look as good as she had in the first vid. Her hair was sticking out in all directions now, and her face had a slackness to it as well, as if she had perhaps just been medicated. Seeing her like that, he couldn’t help but say:

“You haven’t called me for years. Why are you calling me now?”

He had to repeat it twice before she understood what he was saying. For a moment she stumbled over her words, babbled almost, and then managed to say, “But I’ve finally forgiven you.”

“Forgiven me?” said Jensi. “For what?”

“For what you did to your brother,” she said. “I forgive you.”

Jensi felt himself beginning to fill with rage. “But I didn’t do anything to Istvan!” he said. “Whatever happened to him is not my fault. Whatever happened to him, he brought upon himself.”

“I need you to come,” she said, her voice strange now—high pitched and screeching.

“Why should I come? What did you ever do for me?”

“Come and receive my forgiveness,” she said. “Come and be saved.”

He cut the feed, angry as hell, feeling it had been a mistake to humor her and talk to her at all.

*   *   *

A few hours later, he had a brief prerecorded message from Henry, who was now working off world, doing security for a special facility. “Very hush-hush,” he said, and winked. “Can’t tell you much about it. Very lucrative as well. It’ll give me the step up I need, the capital to start something decent back on Vindauga. I hope you’ll be part of it.” When he tried to examine the location marker of the message, Jensi found it had been stripped. Not only did it not indicate a particular location, it didn’t even pinpoint a specific planet or even solar system. What could Henry be up to?

*   *   *

His dreams had faded and he had almost forgotten about Istvan again, when he had another live vid feed from the hospital. Thinking it must be his mother, he rejected it, but the call came back immediately, this time with an emergency designation. Curious despite himself, he accepted it.

It was the director of the asylum. “There’s no easy way to put what I have to say,” he said.

“Then just say it,” said Jensi. His mind was racing out in front of him, imagining his mother going berserk and attacking another patient or a doctor or a visitor. Or imagining the director saying that the public assistance funds had reached their end and that they could no longer take care of her. Because of that, paradoxically, it was almost a relief when he learned that his mother was dead.

“She had a cerebral hemorrhage,” the director informed him.

“A cerebral hemorrhage?”

“She’d had a brain scan not long before and nothing was there to make us worry. But things can change quickly. There was probably nothing that could have been done.”

Jensi thanked the man and hung up the telephone. He sat down and tried to feel something, but wasn’t sure what to feel. He felt some anger, some loss, some grief, but it was nothing compared to what he felt over the disappearance of his brother. And his mother was gone, was dead. His brother might still be alive.

I need to find him,
he thought.
I haven’t done enough
.

But he was helpless to know where to start.

13

Grottor sat up on the bed and ruffled his hair, then leaned over and answered the vid. On the screen was one of the men who Blackwell had introduced him to.

“Ah, it’s you,” Grottor said.

“Expecting someone else?” said the man.

Grottor shrugged. “Do you know what time it is here?” he asked.

“Last I checked, you were on a ship rather than a planet,” said the man. “Which means time doesn’t really apply.”

Grottor grunted. “What am I even supposed to call you?” he asked. “What’s your name?”

The man gave a strange smirk. “You can refer to me as the gray man,” he claimed.

“The gray man?”

“It’s a name that someone gave me,” said the man. Yes, Grottor realized, his face did look somewhat gray. “It’ll serve as well as any other.”

“What do you want?” he asked. “Where’s Blackwell?”

“Now we get down to it,” said the man. He smiled. “We figured it was time to cut out the middleman. Saves time and saves confusion. It’s simpler.” And then he added, without transition, “Fischer’s been killed.”

“Killed?” said Grottor, surprised. “What happened?”

“Shot,” said the man. “Head blown off. We’ve interrogated the man responsible, one Istvan Sato. He doesn’t seem to know anything. Strangely enough, it seems actually to be a coincidence, which means the project should be able to go forward without impediment. He’s a man with severe mental problems. There’s something about him, though, that intrigues me.”

Grottor nodded. “Why are you telling me this?” he asked.

“Because he’ll be arriving at the prison camp on Aspera,” he said. “We don’t expect anything to happen to suggest we were wrong about it being a coincidence, but we wanted someone there to be aware of him, just in case anything came up. That’s why we contacted you. Blackwell didn’t need to know.”

“I appreciate the faith you put in me,” he said.

“It’s not a question of putting faith in you,” said the man. “It’s a question of us losing faith in Blackwell. His motives are … shall we say, impure?”

Grottor remained impassive.

“You’ll notice we haven’t contacted Orthor,” said the man. “He’s Blackwell’s pawn, not ours. As for you … We’ve always preferred a knight to a pawn.”

“I don’t know whether to feel insulted,” said Grottor.

“Of course you don’t,” said the man. “Now turn off the vid and go back to sleep and try to pretend this was all a bad dream.”

14

In a fit of desperation, he considered joining the Colonial Marines. If he did that, maybe after years of hard work and faithful service he’d be in a position where he’d be given sufficient security clearance to be able to gain access to information about his brother. But then again maybe not. Still, what else could he do? Maybe develop his computer skills further and hack his way into the system? He’d never been terrible with computers, but he was hardly an expert, either, and how would he know where to start?

He was considering these and other schemes when a live feed changed everything. He was lucky to catch it—normally he would have been at work during that time, but he’d traded shifts with someone who had a funeral to attend. Even so, he was lucky to see it: the vid request came in without a name or a location marker and so at first he figured it was just an ad, something new put together by a vidimarketer.

But there flashed into his mind the recorded vid from Henry. That, too, had had no location marker. And so he connected.

It was Henry this time, too. He was hunched toward the vid screen, difficult to see. He was whispering. He looked nervous and cagey, and kept glancing back over his shoulder. It took him a moment to realize the connection had been made.

“Henry,” said Jensi. “What a great surprise.”

“Shhh,” said Henry. “Not so loud. I shouldn’t be calling out at all, let alone using this channel. If they find out I did, at the very least it’ll cost me my job.”

“What’s wrong, Henry?”

Henry shook his head. “I’m calling you just so you’ll stop worrying about your brother. He’s here. He’s alive, he’s okay, you don’t need to worry about him anymore. That’s all I can tell you.”

Jensi felt his heart leap. “Where’s here, Henry? I have to know.”

“I can’t tell you,” said Henry. “It doesn’t matter. What matters is he’s okay.”

“Is he a prisoner? What’s happened to him?”

“It’s a penal colony,” said Henry. “That’s where I work. Yes, he’s a prisoner. I saw him for the first time yesterday. Not in person, on vid. I almost didn’t recognize him.”

“What was wrong with him that you almost didn’t recognize him?” asked Jensi, his voice rising.

Henry pressed his finger to his lips. “You don’t know what I’m risking telling you this.”

“It’s not enough,” said Jensi. “I need more. I need to know where you are.”

“Classified,” said Henry, reaching now for the off switch. “I wish I could, but—”

“Henry, think of everything we did together,” said Jensi hurriedly. “You’ve already told me enough to get you in trouble. Now give me the rest.”

Through the screen, he saw Henry hesitating, his hand still hovering near the cutoff.

“Please, Henry,” he said. “I’m your best friend.”

And for a moment Henry’s nervousness stilled. He nodded almost imperceptibly, and said one word: “Aspera.”

And then the screen went dead.

15

Aspera. At first he thought it was the name of the facility, of a penal colony on some backwater world, but a quick search turned up nothing of the kind. The only Asperas he could come up with were a school back on Earth, now defunct, and an uninhabited and uninhabitable planet, an uncolonized world far to the edge of the galaxy and away from normal trade paths. He found a satellite image of the school and saw it was collapsing. Definitely nobody there. No images seemed to exist of the planet. It had few valuable resources, and had been classified off limits to industrial concerns and other interested parties.

It was just one word, very little to go on, plus what Henry had said to back it up and the little he could infer. Maybe his brother was there somewhere on the planet.

Or maybe Aspera referred to something else, some off-the-vid corporation or lesser-known location on another planet. Or maybe he’d misunderstood what Henry had said—it could have been “Asberra” or “Hasparrow.” Those were possibilities, too, he supposed, but exploring those names didn’t turn up anything substantial either.

It was the first time in years he’d had any clear indication that Istvan was still alive. He had to ask himself:
Do I really want to go after my brother?
If he was in a penal colony, what could he do for him? Shouldn’t he leave him where he was? But despite himself, like a bad reflex, he found the same protectiveness for his older brother kicking in. Now that he suspected he knew where Istvan was, how could he stop himself from going after him? Even if he wasn’t there, even if he didn’t manage to see him, at least he had to try.