Dead Space - Martyr

He ordered a bottled beer and made sure it came with the cap still sealed. As he waited on his change, he scanned the bar, trying to determine who might have telephoned him. The small bar's only inhabitants were half a dozen scientists from the North American sector-it could have been any one of them.

He sat down at a table. He'd just opened the beer and taken a sip when a man approached him. The man was pale skinned and thin, wearing a jumpsuit, his hair cropped short. Altman guessed he must be a technician of some sort.

"You're Altman," the man said. It wasn't a question.

"That's right," said Altman. "And you are. . ."

"I only give my name out to friends," he said. "Are you a friend?"

Altman stared at him.

"All right," said the man. "Maybe you don't make friends right off the bat. Okay, whatever you think of what I tell you, if anybody asks, you didn't hear it from me."

Altman hesitated only a moment. "All right," he said.

"Shake on it?" the man suggested.

The man extended a hand. Altman took it, shook. "Hammond," the man said, "Charles Hammond." He pulled out the table's other chair and sat down.

"Nice to meet you," said Altman. "Now suppose you tell me what's going on."

Hammond leaned in closer. "You've been noticing things," he said. "You're not the only one."

"No?" said Altman coolly.

"I'm in communications. Freelance, mostly industrial installations." He reached out and poked Altman's chest lightly with a finger. "I've been noticing things, too."

"Okay . . ."

"There's a pulse," Hammond said. "Slow and irregular, and very weak, but strong enough to fuzz up other signals just a little. I'm a perfectionist. When I set something up, I like it to be crystal clear. Things that don't bother other people bother me. That's why I noticed it."

He stopped. Altman waited for him to go on. When he didn't, Altman took a sip of his beer and asked. "Noticed what?"

Hammond nodded. "Exactly," he said. "At first I thought it was a problem with the communications terminal I was installing for DredgerCorp."

"I didn't know DredgerCorp had a place here," interrupted Altman. That, as much as anything, was an indication to him that something odd was going on. DredgerCorp was one of the shadiest of the resource retrieval corporations, the sort of company willing to swoop quickly into an area under the radar of the local government, strip-mine or bore and take as much as they could before it was noticed, and then swoop quickly away again.

"Officially they don't. Just got here. Very hush-hush," said Hammond. "I'm not supposed to know who they are. Anyway, at first I thought it was a loose connection, something off just enough to give a minor electrical discharge that gave the line an occasional slight hiss every so often. So I took the thing apart.

Nothing wrong with it. So, I put the thing back together. The hiss still came. Sometimes once or twice a minute, lasting a few seconds, sometimes not even that. Maybe you missed something, I told myself. I was just about to take the fucker apart again when I thought maybe I better check another terminal in the same system. Same problem. I was just about to tear DredgerCorp's whole system apart when something dawned on me: maybe it wasn't just in this system but in other places as well."

"And?"

Hammond nodded. "Everybody's picking it up, but nobody's noticing. It's not a problem with one system. It's an electromagnetic pulse, weak and irregular, broadcasting from somewhere."

"So what is it?"

"I did some investigating," said Hammond, ignoring Altman's question. "I set up a few receivers, triangulated the pulse. It's irregular enough that it took me a little while to figure out where it's coming from. And when I did, I decided it couldn't be right. So I moved the receivers, triangulated again, and this time I was sure of where it was coming from."

"Where?"

Hammond leaned even farther in, putting his arm around Altman's shoulders and bringing his lips close to Altman's ear. "Remember," he whispered. "You didn't hear this from me."

Altman nodded.

"From the crater," whispered Hammond. "From the exact center of Chicxulub crater, under a kilometer or two of muck and rock. Right where you found your anomaly."

"Oh my God," said Altman. He explained to Hammond what Ada had been hearing. "Three different things," he said. "All of them leading back to Chicxulub crater."

Hammond leaned back, nodding his head. "My thoughts exactly," he said. "Maybe the pulse has been there all the time and nobody noticed it until now. Maybe we're only hearing it now because our equipment is more sensitive. But I think I would have noticed it before now. That's not the kind of thing I miss. But here's my question to you: Is it a pulse or is it a signal?"

"A signal?"

"It's a little irregular, but it still has a pattern to it. I can't swear to it, but I think it's something that's being deliberately made. Down there, under millions of tons of water and rock."

"That doesn't make any sense," said Altman.

"No," agreed Hammond. "And it gets stranger." He came in close again, and this time Altman saw something in his eyes, a haunted look. "I told DredgerCorp about the pulse, figure it's my job to do so. I don't want them blaming me for it, want to make it clear that it's something that everybody is experiencing, even if no one's noticing it. And what do you think they say?"

"What?"

"'Have you told anybody else?' That's an exact quote. Before I know it, they've got me signing a gag order. In exchange for certain monetary considerations, I can't talk about the pulse, not to anybody. I haven't, until now, with you."

"What do you think it means?" asked Altman.

"What do you think it means? Let me ask you something. Who is the only person that a secure communications system isn't secure from?"

"Who?"

"The guy who installs it. From me. If you're putting a system in, you can loop yourself into it in a dozen different ways without anybody being the wiser. I do that from time to time as a matter of course, just to keep my wrist limber. A hobby, really." His voice grew almost inaudible. "I did it with DredgerCorp."

"And?"

"It didn't last long," he said. "Ten days after I put the system in, they tore it out. Flew someone in from the North American sector to do it, someone in-house this time."

"They must have known the system wasn't secure."

"No way for them to tell," said Hammond. "They couldn't have known for sure. They're on to something. There's something at the bottom of the crater, something valuable, maybe even something unique. Lots of speculation about it from the communications I was able to intercept. But after about three days, things went cryptic; they started coding everything." He reached into his pocket, took out his holopod. "Take a look at this," he said. "Up close. Don't let anyone else see."

"What is it?" asked Altman.

"You tell me."

Altman shielded the holopod in his hands, watched the image that appeared, rotating slowly between his palms. It was just a digitally imaged representation. It was impossible to know what it was made of or what it looked like exactly, but he could get at least some idea. A shimmering three-dimensional shape, in two parts, thick at the base and coming to two points near the top. It was clearly something man-made rather than a natural formation, no doubt about that. Or was that just the digital model making him think that? It reminded him of something. It looked like two separate strands, joined at the bottom, but twisted around each other, though it might have been a single tapering structure with a perforated center.

He stared at it a long time, watching it slowly turn. And then he remembered. It was the shape Ada had made with her fingers, crossing them over each other, the sign she'd said many of the villagers were now making.

"Tail of the devil," he whispered, not realizing he'd said anything aloud until he saw Hammond's startled expression.

He clicked the holopod off, handed it back to Hammond.

"I got that off the com system before they tore it out," Hammond said. "According to the message appended to it, they cross-indexed all the information they had-worked with the pulse and the anomaly and probably some other things that neither you nor I are aware of yet. And this is what they came up with. This is what's at the heart of the crater."

They sat in silence awhile, staring at their glasses. "So, a pulse starts up," said Altman finally. "Maybe a signal of some sort. Something at the center of the crater, something that appears to be not a natural geological formation but a man-made one."

"Constructed, yes," said Hammond, "but who's to say manmade?"

"If not man-made, then . . ." said Altman. And then suddenly he got it. "Shit," he said, "you think it's something inhuman, something alien?"

"I don't know what I think," said Hammond. "But yes, that's what some of the folks at DredgerCorp thought."

Altman shook his head. "I don't know," he said. He looked nervously around the bar. "Why are you telling me...