Dead Space: Martyr (27 page)

Soon they would get close to the surface, and the Marker would be drawn onto the freighter itself. Already the water had changed, the darkness receding, and he could see the Marker more clearly than he’d ever seen it before. In the light, it was even more impressive, covered with symbols and laterally striated by dark lines cut into the rock. He still could see no evidence of joints or cracks. It still seemed like it was formed out of a single large rock.

When the station was five hundred meters above them, Markoff ordered the ascent stopped.

“What’s wrong?” asked Altman over the audio channel. “This wasn’t how it was planned.”

“Thank you for your help to this point, Mr. Altman,” said Markoff. “A deepwater craft is no longer required. Return to the submarine bay.”

“What? I think I’ll stay here, Markoff, if you don’t mind,” said Altman.

There was silence for a long moment and then the vidscreen crackled into life. He saw Markoff’s face.

“You’ve been an asset to me to this point. Now you risk becoming expendable.”

“What’s going on?” Altman asked.

“That is none of your concern,” said Markoff.

He opened his mouth and then closed it again. Markoff, he knew, was capable of having the bathyscaphe torpedoed. Perhaps it was time to flee, dive deep and head for somewhere safe.

As if he could read Altman’s mind, Markoff added, “Do you need something tangible to convince you to behave? Your girlfriend?”

For a moment, he hesitated. In a way, he had already lost Ada to the Marker, to her desire to be one of them. It was just a matter of time before he lost her completely.

All the same, he still loved her and couldn’t live with her being dead because of him. With a sigh, he cut the signal and began to head for the surface, leaving behind the Marker, hanging in its gigantic metal net. On the way up, he passed a trio of submarines dragging a new cable. It led back, he could see, to the gigantic below-water chamber of the floating compound, the chamber that had been off-limits to everybody except for Markoff’s inner circle ever since they’d arrived. What Markoff had planned, Altman had no idea.

47

As soon as he had left the bathyscaphe, he made for the chamber that he knew would house the Marker. Centrally located and the biggest of the below-water chambers, it had four ways in. But three of those ways, he discovered, had been welded closed, permanently sealed. The fourth, the main entrance, already had two guards stationed in front of it. He tried to bluff his way in.

“I’m supposed to be in there,” he said. “To bring the Marker up.”

“Do you have a pass?” asked one guard.

“Nobody gets in without a pass,” said the other.

“I left my pass back in my room,” he said. “I don’t want to be late. I’ll bring it back and show it to you later?”

“No pass, no entrance,” said the guard.

Another man, a scientist, sidled past him, flashing his pass, and was nodded through. Altman watched as the doors slid open, but saw only an airlock on the other side. The man stood there waiting, and the door slid shut.

“Please,” said Altman. “I need to—”

“We already told you,” said the first guard. “No pass, no entrance. Now move along or I’ll have you thrown in the brig.”

He went back down the corridor. He couldn’t get in, but maybe he could at least get some idea of what was happening.
He went from lab to lab, trying doors until he found one that also had a window facing toward the chamber.

Looking out, he saw the Marker hovering just below the chamber, being slowly drawn up and in. But he couldn’t see into the chamber itself. Something had been done to render the glass semiopaque. He could see vague shapes and the sense of movement and then, as they began to reel it in, the shadowy rising shape of the Marker, but little more.

“You see,” said Field, “we knew you would come around to the truth.”

Altman hadn’t come around. He still thought that Field and his believers were insane, but saw no point in telling Field that. The Marker had been in the station less than twenty-four hours, but ever since the Marker had been raised and secured, the whole feel of the station had changed. Even before he’d entered the submarine bay, a series of researchers had been declared inessential and had been shipped back to the DredgerCorp land compound, which rumor had it was serving now less as a research facility and more as a holding tank for scientists for whom Markoff had no use but whom he didn’t want to release into the larger world. Ada had been among them, which meant he hadn’t gotten a chance to see her and make sure she was okay. Altman suspected he, too, might have been among them if the bathyscaphe had arrived slightly earlier. As it was, he’d been told to pack his things, that he’d be among a batch of researchers to be shipped out early the next morning.

“I need a favor,” he claimed, his hand on the chunk of Marker that he carried in his pocket. “There’s something the Marker wants from me. I have to see it.”

Field’s face fell. “It’s being guarded,” he said. “It’s very hard to see it.”

“You said the other evening that some of the believers were in Markoff’s inner circle.”

“Yes,” said Field, “that’s true. But—”

“It’s important,” said Altman. “I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t.” He took the chunk out of his pocket and showed it to Field. “This is a piece of it,” he said. “It needs to be returned.”

Field reached out and very gently touched it. “Can I hold it?” he asked, his voice filled with awe. Altman handed it to him. He took it delicately in both hands, like he was holding a newborn child, his face lit up with a joy it frightened Altman to see. He crooned to it, a soft chant, something that Altman couldn’t make out, and then reluctantly handed it back. He knelt before Altman.

“Stand up,” said Altman. “And not a word to anybody about what I plan to do.”

But Field refused to stand. “Thank you for choosing me,” he said, his head bowed. “I will do all I can to help you make the Marker whole again.”

Around three in the morning, a knock came at his door. It was Field, and another man with him wearing the black garb of one of Markoff’s inner circle. He was carrying a package under his arm. Altman vaguely recognized him. “This is Henry Harmon,” Field said. “Mr. Harmon, Michael Altman.”

“I know who he is,” said Harmon dryly. “You’re sure this is absolutely necessary?”

Altman nodded. Harmon tossed him the package. He tore it open, saw an outfit identical to Harmon’s own. “Put that on,” he said.

Altman stared at it. “How’s this going to help?” he asked. “Won’t they recognize me, in any case?”

“Maybe,” said Harmon, “but they won’t try to stop us. They won’t question the pass as long as you have the uniform. If we have trouble, it’ll be afterward, which is a risk I’ll have to take.”

He put it on and they set off.

Field followed them, but Harmon turned briefly, shook his head, and Field, a look of disappointment on his face, disappeared.

He checked his chronometer. “There are four guards total, two at the door outside the chamber and two inside, all armed. We’re lucky: the two guards inside are with us, though that’s far from being generally known. The two outside, though, aren’t. Shift changes in about fifteen minutes and all bets are off. If we stay longer than ten, chances are good that one of the guards will get curious and place a call to check on our authorization. Understood?”

“Yes,” said Altman.

“Here’s your pass,” he said. “It’s not the best, but the guards outside should only glance at it. The men inside will go with whatever I say.”

Harmon was right. The guards outside the room seemed hardly surprised that someone was coming to see the Marker in the middle of the night. They looked at Harmon then glanced at both passes and waved them in. The guards inside didn’t even bother with that, withdrawing discreetly to the other side of the room as soon as they entered.

There it was. A series of catwalks had been built up along the walls to make it easy to get a close look at any part of it. Massive and towering, it dominated the whole chamber. Seeing it out of the water, he got a fuller sense of its bulk and strangeness. It was
like nothing he had ever seen, a kind of impossible object that was nevertheless there. A power seemed to emanate from it. It was dangerous.

At the same time, he felt his scientific impulses kicking in. It was amazing, and he genuinely wanted to study it. A piece of extremely advanced technology, something predating humanity.

He took out his holopod and began to vid it.

“What are you doing?” whispered Harmon. “Nobody is allowed to vid it.”

“That’s what I came for,” he said.

“But it’s not allowed.”

Altman shrugged once, then ignored him. Either Harmon would stop him or he wouldn’t. He filmed the whole structure at first, then ran the lens in close-up over the sides closest to him. As he did so, he tried to spot the place where the piece of rock he had in his pocket was from, but couldn’t find it.

He felt like he’d only just begun when Harmon grabbed his arm. “We’ve got to go,” he whispered.

Altman nodded. He slipped the holopod back into his pocket and headed for the door, Harmon pulling him along. Harmon nodded once to the guards on the inside and they resumed their stations. The guards on the outside he saluted.

“Why do you need a vid of it?” asked Harmon as they walked away. “I have half a mind to turn you in.”

“It’s important,” said Altman. “Trust me. You’ll see.”

Five minutes later, he was back in his room, hastily packing. The hunk of rock he kept on his person. He backed up his holopod onto a memory stick, which he hid in the lining of his jacket, just in case. And then he lay down on the bed and waited.

But sleep wouldn’t come. Every time he closed his eyes, he would see the Marker there, towering above him. It was powerful, it was dangerous, it wanted something from them. Why did Ada worship it? To worship it would be just to put yourself even more fully at its mercy. And it was not the sort of thing, Altman felt, to grant mercy.

Soon, in an hour or two, a knock would come at the door and he’d be escorted to the launch and sent back to the land compound. He stared up into the darkness, thinking. Once there, he could forget all about this, pretend like the Marker was no longer his problem and let Markoff do with it what he would while he went back to his life. Or he could figure out a way to smuggle out the vid that he’d taken of the Marker, make it available to the general public, and try to make the Marker a matter of international scientific inquiry rather than a toy for the military.

The first possibility would mean safety, a chance to lead a more or less normal life. Probably he could patch up his relationship with Ada. Maybe with time, miles away from the Marker, separated from the hallucinations of her mother, she would begin to come to her senses. She would stop thinking about it, would regain her sanity. Everything could turn out okay. That is, assuming nothing went wrong with the Marker.

The second might mean danger, even death. Markoff and his goons wouldn’t hesitate to kill both him and Ada if they became, as Markoff liked to say, expendable.

He already knew which one he would take. He’d never been the sort to take the safe route. Now all he had to do was figure out how to get the news out.

48

Markoff went from holofile to holofile, looking for some good news. So far nothing. So far the Marker had remained unresponsive and mute.

They had tried everything they could think of. They had begun to experiment on it. A team of cryptologists was attempting to decipher the symbols on the Marker, but without any idea of what the symbols referred to, they weren’t making any progress. They had subjected it to an electric current, without result. They had tried irradiating it, subjecting it to radio waves, microwaves, electromagnetic waves. Nothing, always nothing.

Or almost nothing. The Marker, the researchers had told him, had begun to broadcast again. Very slight now, but definitely present. Some of the scientists working on the Marker seemed to notice it; others did not. According to Stevens, those who noticed had begun to be visited by dead relatives, just as Altman had been in the bathyscaphe, all with some variation of the same message: leave the Marker alone, do not try to make use of it. The scientists themselves didn’t understand it any better than he did, and after conveying the message to Stevens, they had started speculating about it among themselves. It was a warning,
some felt, and should be taken at face value: nobody should touch the Marker, nobody should try to harness its technology; if they did, they would unleash something they couldn’t imagine. But maybe it was simply that they weren’t ready, others felt, that once they proved themselves worthy, the secrets of the Marker would be revealed to them.

There were many more in the latter camp. A mystical belief in the Marker had started to grow. Whenever they could, the believers gathered together and worked themselves up, convinced as they were that the Marker was the path to eternal life and oneness with the divine. Some argued that this was what it meant by “Convergence.” So far, the movement had been held in check by the guards, but even some of them, Markoff realized, had started to become believers. He was in danger of losing control of his project.

They needed to find a simple way to harness the power of the Marker and do it quickly. He was sure the technology, once harnessed, would be the pathway to tremendous power, even domination of the world, not to mention the moon. Even the solar system.

But now a group of believing scientists was trying to put down strict rules about how the Marker could be examined. Only
respectful interaction
with the Marker should be tolerated, nothing that might threaten or damage it or cause it to think less of humanity.
We needed to show the Marker that we were worthy of it so that it would begin to teach us.
It was a ridiculous list of demands, and Markoff dismissed them out of hand, but he couldn’t stop people from talking. There was a palpable shift in how people approached the Marker, even if Markoff had refused the believers’ demands. Indeed, he was surprised at how many people in the facility seemed to feel an almost religious awe for the Marker.
Something was changing, shifting, in a way that didn’t respond to his usual tactics. He had to figure out a new way to approach the situation.