The Lighthouse of Kuiper by E.M. Rensing

Author:E.M. Rensing
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: E.M. Rensing

CHAPTER

TWENTY-SIX

Tharsis woke—disoriented and alone—into a nightmare.

Barefoot on ground cold enough to burn away skin. Icy dust rustled between her toes.

Where the fuck was she?

Turning around, trying to find some kind of bearing in the eternal night around her, Tharsis noticed a light. A light, burning like the final star left unclaimed by the entropy of Armageddon.

Something new, in the now familiar darkness.

She had to get to it.

The going was slow, or impossibly fast. There was no way of knowing how long it took her, pushing off, landing again, pushing off, in great bounding leaps that took her unknown distances into that space she couldn’t see. But the oppressive darkness lifted as she neared that source, revealing the ground she was standing on.

A Lighthouse control center, same as the one from Europa, except that this one was retrofitted: torn apart and rewired by hand. Soldering clumped on metal components, biological casings bulging with cancerous growths, mechanical pieces twisted and broken. A gang of preschoolers hardly could have damaged the innards of such a complex system so utterly.

In the center of the room there was a creature. Naked. Almost human. Long hair swayed in mats around wasted shoulders, obscuring nothing; Tharsis could discern every rib, every sagging bit of skin, and it stank. A monster of the Euphemism, it seemed, one of those things that had rampaged through the unconscious, unrecognizable as anything other than reality.

In its eyes—

Tharsis shot straight up, jolted into the waking world by some horrible knowledge dissolving before it could solidify in her mind. In a blind panic, she tore at the loose confinement of the sleeping hammock and threw herself out. Her bare back hit the nearest wall, stunning her still.

The Arran lieutenant scrubbed a hand over her face, letting intrude on her senses the soft glow of the room’s night-light, the close comfort of the walls, the sound of tDaer huffing in sleep. Sweat cooled on her skin, chilling cold. Tharsis went over to her rucksack.

Touching the bandages as she pulled threadbare clothes mechanically on, she felt sick, beyond the lingering pain from the burns. The thought that somebody would think her capable of betraying her country without a second thought, of doing it happily, horrified her. Almost as much as tDaer’s reassurances that it didn’t matter, the Naven’s death didn’t matter, nothing mattered but this mad quest to find Noqumiut.

The whole thing was insane.

She strapped her knife carefully to her thigh. On Mars, nobody left home without some kind of personal protection, but Cronuans hated the mere mention of weapons. It would probably disappear from her bag if the Iapetan caught sight of it. And that would be bad, especially if something broke loose. The average voider, like tDaer, with lighter bone and thinner muscle, wasn’t necessarily a threat. Riqan, however, was a different story. Half of his DNA was Earth-bred, and male, and huge.

Get the algorithms and get out.

She donned the rest of her clothes quickly, grimacing a little at the cold permeating the material, her body working hard to warm them up as quickly as possible.

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