22

“How long has it been?” asked the Colonel.

“Too long,” said Tanner, his face drawn, his voice hoarse. “Nearly forty-eight hours now.” He’d been awake almost two and a half full days. Most of that time he’d spent trying to get in touch with the F/7. There’d been a few scattered bits, moments when somehow everything aligned to let the signal through, and so he assumed there had been moments they’d seen him as well. But it never lasted long enough for them to communicate. And then, just when he was ready to give up hope, there had come a signal, broadcasting on all bands. They had gotten only bits of that, too, but others had picked up other bits of it on other channels. Tanner’s team had gathered as much as they could and were working to sequence it all together to form something. He’d thought they’d have something by now, which was why he’d contacted the Colonel, but they were still working.

“Could they still be alive?” the Colonel asked.

“We already know one of them is dead.”

“Hennessy?”

“No, Dantec,” said Tanner. He rubbed his eyes. He’d had a headache for days now, maybe even weeks. He was starting to feel like he couldn’t remember when he hadn’t had one.

“That’s a surprise,” said the Colonel.

Tanner nodded. “We still don’t know what happened, but we know he’s dead.” He spun the holofile through the screen, watched the Colonel take it up on his end. Tanner knew what it was: a grisly image capture showing a disjointed torso propped in the command chair, its limbs piled neatly on the chair just in front of it. The head was broken and distorted and hardly human. “It’s a piece of one transmission that we were able to salvage. The last image we have, really.”

“How do you know this is Dantec?” asked the Colonel. The Colonel was a hard man, Tanner thought: his voice was just as even as it had been before, like he was looking at somebody’s wedding picture.

Tanner circled portions of the image on his monitor. “You can see here and there bits of hair. It’s caked in blood, but we’re reasonably certain it’s hair.”

“Ah, yes,” said the Colonel, “now I see.”

“Hennessy was bald,” Tanner said simply.

The Colonel leaned back in his chair, thoughtful. “What happened?” he asked.

Tanner shrugged. “Something went wrong,” he said. “Beyond that I can’t say.”

“If you had to guess, what would you guess?”

Tanner sighed. “Hennessy must have gone crazy and caught Dantec unawares. Maybe something wrong with the oxygen supply that had some effect on his brain, maybe the pressure of being confined in such a small space for too long. Or maybe he was already insane and we didn’t know.”

“Doesn’t it strike you as strange?” asked the Colonel.

“Of course it strikes me as strange,” said Tanner. “It’s not normal behavior.”

“No,” said the Colonel. “Yes, of course, all that is strange, but it’s even stranger that it happens now, just now, when they’re on their way toward an impossible object found in an impossible location.”

“Sabotage, you think?”

“I can’t rule it out,” said the Colonel. “But that’s the least strange of the possibilities, Tanner. Show a little more imagination.” He leaned forward again. “Contact me immediately once you’ve got some footage to show me,” he said, and reached out to cut the link.