Free Dead Space: Martyr by Brian Evenson Page B

eased the ship forward, then cut the engines, let them drift. There they were, right up against it. The F/7 bumping softly against the Marker ’s side.
    “It’s marvelous,” Dantec whispered.
    It’s not marvelous, said Shane, his face stretched into a strange rictus. It’s horrible. Dantec is becoming one of them, brother. I’m afraid we’re going to have to get rid of him.

17
    So far, so good, thought Dantec, or good enough anyway. He’d probably make it through. His head had been aching ever since he got into the goddamn sub. Or, if he was to be honest with himself, for weeks now. Pills didn’t seem to help. Whatever he did, it was still there, not unbearable, just always throbbing quietly, keeping him from sleeping, destroying his concentration. He hadn’t felt so strung out since the moon skirmishes. For that matter, he hadn’t felt this confined—this trapped—since then. He hadn’t realized how much being in a sub underwater was going to feel like being in a jettison pod in space. It brought all sorts of things flashing back at him from the moon skirmishes, that weird war that wasn’t officially a war, where all it took was one little tear in the fabric of your suit for you to die and where, by the end, if you wanted to survive, you had to stab a knife in a buddy’s back just so you could steal what was left of his oxygen. How many men had he had to kill to stay alive? All that had changed him, hardened him. He thought at first that it had lifted him above things, had made it so he wouldn’t feel fear, wouldn’t be subject to the same emotional weaknesses as others. But he was beginning to realize that that wasn’t quite right. True, he’d managed to avoid those parts of himself for a long time, butthey were still there. And now that they were forcing their way up to the surface, they were raw and red, more sensitive than an exposed nerve.
    And that bastard Hennessy. It didn’t help being stuck with him. He was a real, genuine fucking chucklehead, that was for sure. First he had been like a kid in a toy shop, unable to contain his delight at the F/7, at his new toy. Then put him in the thing and he does a Jekyll/Hyde, becomes nothing but panic and nerves and slow collapse into madness. That was the last thing you wanted in a confined space like this. In the moon skirmishes, he’d killed men for less.
    Not like the thought didn’t cross his mind. But Tanner didn’t want him to do it. Tanner had been good to him over the years. Though if Tanner had understood what had really happened during the moon skirmishes, Dantec knew, he might treat him a lot differently.
    During the skirmishes, Tanner never realized that Dantec was not interested in saving him so much as stealing his air supply. Dantec had planned to kill him and take his oxygen tank, and he would have done it, too, except that, while looking for a safe place to kill Tanner, he’d stumbled onto a working transmitter, a technician’s severed and frozen arm still stuck to it. So, instead of killing Tanner, he called the dropship to pick them up. Tanner never understood that the reason he blacked out and almost died before the ship arrived was because Dantec had turned the airflow on his tank down. Just in case the ship didn’t come fast enough and he needed Tanner’s air after all.
    But loyalty and guilt toward Tanner weren’t the only reasons that Dantec hadn’t killed Hennessy. He didn’t like the idea of killing someone in such a confined space, where he couldn’t dispose of the body. He just couldn’t imagine sitting there, knowingthe body was behind him, feeling its dead eyes on his back. Add to that the fact that over the last six or so hours, he’d actually become a little afraid of Hennessy. Panicking, then whispering to himself, speaking to the bulkhead to his left as if there was actually someone sitting beside him. The man was out of his mind, and Dantec didn’t want to do anything to provoke him. He knew, from personal