The sudden realization that there was no way back crashed into Diego like storm-whipped breakers against rock. Forced and committed, he blanched. “Now what?”
Katja grasped his hand, reassuringly. “Everything is going to be alright. We are going to be OK.”
“How do you know that?” Diego asked, voice quavering.
“I don’t,” she replied, momentarily unsure. “But you have to trust me.”
Katja began leading them down the corridor, away from the fleshy airlock. Something was wrong, off… alien. Well, no shit, they were in an Iban generation arc, but that wasn’t it. Diego couldn’t shake the sense that the arc was tailoring itself like a honey trap. Luring them in.
Poor little Diego, always fearing the unknown. He’d cried his first day at school, not elementary either, but Monterrey Space Academy. He was sixteen and he didn’t want his Mommy and sisters to leave. It was a small mercy the other boys hadn’t seen him – they’d arrived early and set him up in the dorm before most of the others showed up. His father just shook his hand distractedly before they left.
That homesick void weighed on Diego for the first weeks, eating away at his concentration and his ability to socialize. Aloof and reclusive, he was also a mediocre student. Outside of class he would mope and call home nightly. In class he engaged in wool-gathering. There was nothing he could do at home, he knew that, slip into a life of menial drudgery or run for the border. It didn’t matter, he wanted to be home in the bosom of his family.
He’d never really recovered. That homesickness followed him with each new demeaning contract. If only he could go home he could repair the eroding mortar of his family. But it wouldn’t be, where he wanted to be most; that unit had disintegrated after he left. It wasn’t his fault – but it was.
What had been a loving household had fallen into shadow – shattered, scattered and fragmented. But the void still returned, as it did now in the belly of the Iban arc. Compelling him to run to a home in ruin, to Mommy. Sewing doubt and fear, only there was nowhere else to go but forward. Hand-in-hand with Katja.
The girl was strange, but damaged. Diego had to remind himself she was damaged. Everything that station had touched was probably broken in some way visible or otherwise. Even himself. Katja had baulked at his touch in the corridor, a primal distrust in her eye borne from their mutual love for another. Now their hands clasped. She moved with confidence through the arc, as if somehow she’d been here before. It was a confidence Diego hadn’t witnessed in Murmansk-13. Steely and slightly remote. Perhaps she was already shedding the corrosive effects of the station as it fell away.
“Do you know where you are going?”
“I think so.”
The corridor stretched out long and straight, cavernous. The Iban scale was unfathomable. Intermittent archways met their pinnacle fifteen metres from the deck, reaching into the steady violet glow above, reminding Diego of the Cathedral of Our Lady of Guadalupe. A parallel version, starved of Earthly light. Beyond, the vaulted deckheads were sparred with metameric ribs. What Diego interpreted as wiring conduits or cable bundles skirted the bulkhead baseboards and covings, stretching into the distance. They bore an unerring resemblance to intestines, the fleshy casings wriggled in peristaltic pulses transmitting God only knew.
The deck was coated in a spongy stratum of what appeared to be iron filings, their soft tips glistening like optical fibre. The metallic carpet eddied gently beneath their feet, the fine filaments whipping against the cyclic flow of fresh oxygen. Each step left an ephemeral print like a pinscreen in reverse before rebounding, erasing their trail.
Occasionally the bulkheads were adorned with glowing sigils in bas relief, magnesium flame white. The script etched and jagged, almost runic. Beside them fleshy doors like constructs were sutured shut. Each doorway seemed to emit the imperceptible hiss of bellows. Or lungs.
The sense of mechanical life made Diego feel lightheaded and queasy. “I’m not sure I like this place.”
“I think it’s beautiful,” replied Katja pulling him forward, unperturbed by the doors or the opalescent blackness that closed down around them.
The violet light was starved of shadow or tone. It reached everywhere and stemmed from nowhere, penetrating into the expanse, its uniformity robbing the space of depth. When they reached the corridors terminus, they did so at a point Diego had seen when they first began. The small compartment housing the membranous airlock was still clearly visible at the farthest end, beyond a field of twinkling deck fibres over a mile distant.
“Where are we?” Diego asked as the arc sighed around him. The mechanical resonance he had come to understand as the white noise of space, of the Riyadh, was absent here. Replaced with something part-biological.
“Where we have to be, to be protected,” Katja replied as she ran her hand over the sigil. She shivered as the sigil changed colour – white to sepia – before fading into the shimmering sable of the material beneath.
The sutures retaining the huge doors popped, falling away limply, allowing the flaps to butterfly open. Parting with a sticky peel. Diego shivered too as Katja retook his hand.
“Katja, are you OK?” Diego asked, anchoring his feet and stilling her forward momentum, pulling at her. “You seem… different.”
“I am where I am meant to be,” she replied in a childlike voice, her expression blank. Gooseflesh prickled her skin. “I think the arc called me, wanted me. I feel…” she paused, as if her brain were searching for the correct terminology in a foreign language, then smiled. “Happy.”
Happy. The word had slipped hollow and intoxicated from her lips as fear picked at Diego’s mind. Pure unadulterated fear. There was no happiness here, just a bastion of death.
Nobody had even seen an Iban, at least not as far as Diego was aware. No biological specimens, extraterrestrial or otherwise, where ever publicised when the first arc was towed to Siberia and he doubted remains had been found here. The thought occurred to Diego that perhaps the Iban’s didn’t exist, that the arcs were some godhead construct – punishing the weak minded, the compellable. Thrown into space like flypaper, that beyond the threshold of the door lay the denouement. The creators killing jar.
Diego squared his frame, locked his joints. He could feel the compression pains pour back into each joint as lactic acid screamed through his muscles. “I’m not going any further Katja, this place. It feels wrong. Harmful.”
Katja screwed her face up, petulantly, for a moment Diego thought she would stamp her foot. “We have to go on, Diego. Otherwise you’ll die. We’ll both die. Don’t you understand that?”
“No. No, I don’t understand. How can I understand, how do you understand?” Diego could hear his voice heighten an octave , reaching a falsetto shriek. He tried to pull his hand away. “This place is alien.”
Katja stared at Diego as if she only just realized he was there. “I don’t fully understand, Diego. You’re right, we can’t. But the arc is telling me that it will protect us.”
“What if it doesn’t, what if really it wants is to hurt us, or kill us?” Diego could feel the fear etched in lines of his face, the terror welling in his eyes. Finally he whispered. “What if it is lying?”