Enigma - Michael Jan Friedman [60]
The admiral stared at him. For a moment, Ben Zoma was certain that McAteer was going to put his foot down. Then something seemed to soften in him.
“All right,” he said, “have it your way, Commander. We’ll keep going for a while.”
Ben Zoma nodded. “Thank you, sir.”
He woke up in the heavy, pulsating darkness, his skin clammy, his heart pounding. Before he knew it, he was sitting bolt upright, waiting for awareness to come.
But it didn’t. There was only the starless night, always and forever. He couldn’t remember a time when it wasn’t there, when he knew something hard and real to hang on to.
And who was he, in that stark, black night? What was his name, his parentage, his place in the universe?
He didn’t know—either who he was or what he was doing there. He didn’t know anything.
I am someone, he insisted. I have a name, a body, a face. I come from somewhere.
All he had to do was dredge it out of the depths, drag out the answers that would create his world piece by piece. All he had to do was remember.
Slowly, ever so slowly, the darkness relented. Things took on shape and substance around him. The bed he was sitting in, drenching the covers with his sweat. A chair. A set of clothes draped over the back of it.
And outside, someone. A person, like himself. A female. As he watched, she turned to him.
“Lieutenant?” she said.
Her tone was one of concern. But more than that was what she had said. Lieutenant. He was a lieutenant.
Yes…on a ship. With other crewmen, a great many of them. He could see them in his mind’s eye, walking the corridors, dressed in red and black uniforms.
Then it came to him—what he was, where he was. Who he was. My name is Ulelo, he told himself. Dikembe Ulelo. I’m a communications officer on the Stargazer.
But no…he was more than that, wasn’t he? He was a plant, a spy who had come to the Stargazer to transmit information about the ship to his comrades.
And who were they, again? He couldn’t remember. It was insane. He had sent out that information at great risk to himself. Whom had he done it for?
And why? For the love of reason, why?
Ulelo had no answer—though he had a feeling he had posed the question before. It was as if there were a great, dark abyss at his feet, an echoing, bottomless gulf that swallowed everything he needed to know.
Suddenly, he saw it—the abyss, as if it had always been there. It was immense, a universe unto itself. He could feel the chill rising from it, smell its fetid breath.
And it wasn’t just his memories that it craved, sucking them down into its depths with infinite hunger. It was Ulelo himself—because without his memories he was nothing…
Nothing at all.
He felt empty in the presence of all that darkness, so empty. There was no substance to him, no weight, nothing to keep him anchored to the ground. And the abyss was so hungry, so insistent on having him.
Ulelo didn’t want to be drawn in, but he had no strength to stop himself. He could feel himself falling, twisting in a decay-breath of wind, surrounded by it, engulfed by it….
No! he screamed, frantic to get back to the brink where he had stood. But it was soaring up and away from him, more impossible to reach with every breathless second.
No! he shrieked, his cries consumed by the rush of darkness all around him. Nooo…!
Chapter Fifteen
GREYHORSE DARTED INTO THE BRIG, a med pack slung over his shoulder. At the end of the short hall where Ulelo’s cell was situated, the electromagnetic barrier was down, and Joseph and Pierzynski were attending to the prisoner.
“What happened?” asked the doctor as he forcibly moved Pierzynski out of the way.
“He just started yelling,” said Joseph, who stood back of his own volition. “No warning or anything. Then this.”
Ulelo was twitching, his eyes had rolled back into their sockets, and his tongue was lolling uncontrollably in his mouth. It was clearly a seizure of some kind.
Scanning Ulelo with his tricorder, Greyhorse