by P P Corcoran
Phobosteus
by Dennis Mombauer
- ACT I -
The curtain rose, and the first act began.
Falb stood in one of the claustrophobic hallways of the cruiser, surrounded by other soldiers. The projection screens in the walls had come alive and commanded everyone’s attention. Falb took a deep breath and clenched his teeth. Until a moment ago, the screens had only shown star-speckled emptiness and the yellow glow of the colony world: now, there was something else.
Sensor domes protruded from it like bone spurs and superstructures covered the immense hull like fins as it plowed through space toward them. Radiant stripes of light illuminated an endless mass of dark metal, its prow the closed jaws of a horrific sea creature. This was an Apparition ship, a Phobosteus, named after a species of armorfish that only went extinct because there had been no more prey left.
The enormous vessel had charted a direct collision course with the cruiser however, something was wrong with it. Falb allowed himself the briefest of smiles. The protective plating and parts of the engine had burst open like flower buds, and cold brightness leaked out into the vacuum. The damages were greater than the furrows of small rocks and interstellar plankton the Phobosteus must have dived through. They were combat wounds.
Falb had seen all he needed to see and began moving toward the staging area. “Put on your costumes,” he shouted. “Curtain’s calling.”
Falb and his brother trekked through the trees of a dark forest. They treaded on the soft soil without noise and followed the well-traveled path. Danger inhabited these woods, but the brothers felt no fear, for they had crossed them many times before.
Soldiers streamed through the hallways toward the cruiser’s staging area, their steps accompanied by warning sirens and announcements. Falb strode into the high-ceilinged staging area and toward the boarding shells, where men and women changed into combat gear. Falb already wore the thermal underlay and plating of his own effigy suit, and hundreds of tiny needles painlessly sunk into his flesh, preparing to pump drugs and stimulants as needed.
The room jerked as gravity tightened and pressed the soldiers against the floor. Their cruiser maneuvered against the Phobosteus, and Falb needed to assemble his unit.
The forest grew darker, and wind rustled above the treetops, imbuing their leaves with a choir of whispers. Old waystones rose by the road, overgrown with moss and lichen, but the brothers knew them by heart.
“There you are,” Deuteros called. She was Falb’s second-in-command, a career soldier and veteran who shouldered her rifle and stuffed extra magazines into her pockets.
“Here I am.” Falb marched right by her. “Get Tritos, Tetartos, and Pemptos. I’ll find the new guy and meet you at the shell.”
The artificial gravity shifted as the cruiser turned to the side, and the projection screens along the bulkheads showed the Phobosteus simultaneously changing its course. Falb glimpsed the planet below with a dark shape hanging in lower orbit, a converted corporate freighter almost as big as the cruiser. The colony world’s evacuation was progressing, but it would be hours before they had ferried up half the population.
“Boarding position in T-5 minutes,” the announcement system proclaimed. “All units, prepare for launch.”
Ceiling lights rotated in deep orange, and Falb discovered his missing man on the wrong side of the staging area, staggering between soldiers that advanced in orderly lines. He called to him: “Hektos!”
Heads turned, and a few looks lingered: Falb’s complete lack of hair made people nervous. He had permanently removed it from his body, although single hairs still sprouted in one place or another, which Falb had to pluck out with a pair of pincers. Nothing was medically wrong with the hairs, but Falb couldn’t stand them, didn’t want them as a part of himself, and he removed them as soon as they appeared.
“Hektos!” Falb strode toward him, and this time, his newest recruit turned around, the faint blue of his eyes so spotless they gave him an even more boyish appearance. Falb reached Hektos with a few steps, grabbed him by the shoulder and dragged the young soldier along.
The announcement system continued to count down: “Boarding position in T-3 minutes.”
All the organs in Falb’s body attempted escape in different directions, the familiar sickness that always accompanied combat maneuvering. It was just the heavy oil swashing through the tanks of the cruiser’s Flüstermeer engine, but he never got used to it.
“All right, come on, come on.” Falb herded his soldiers down a ramp and toward the open hatch of their boarding shell. “Everyone to their positions.”
Deuteros climbed in first, followed by Pemptos, Tritos, Tetartos, and finally young Hektos. Falb checked the shell’s gauges while everyone strapped into their padded holding clamps. Once the cruiser reached boarding position, it would fire the shells at the Phobosteus, still connected to the cruiser by their tethers.
Everything read out operational, all shell functions normal: however, the situation was anything but. Falb recognized an opportunity when it presented itself, and this might be the biggest one he would ever get.
He stepped into the shell and closed the airlock behind him before he addressed his soldiers: “You have all seen it. The Apparitions have sent a damaged ship into battle. First time that’s ever happened, and we’ll take advantage of it.”
In the beginning, no one had believed the stories, dismissed them as the yarn of space sailors desperate for attention: then, the incidents piled up. A cruiser of the Amaranthine Fleet reported an immense ship that had projected the faces of dead men on its screens; a corporate freighter with inaccurate Flüstermeer calculations spotted a ghost ship drifting far outside its target system; a smaller cruiser vanished without a trace. The oneiromancers received images of towering waves and broken seashells; and then, without any declaration, the attack waves began.
Falb held the wide-eyed gaze of his soldiers and finished his address: “We’ll go in and do what no one else could do before: We’ll find and capture an Apparition.”
#
Underneath the ceiling of leaves and branches, the path reached the most remote region of the forest. Falb looked at his brother Timeon, but Timeon didn’t look back, and they both continued onward.
“Hold tight.” At Falb’s command, his soldiers fastened their grip on the handholds and braced for the shell’s impact on the Phobosteus’ outer hull. They waited like young actors before their first performance, and Falb remembered his own early battles: how the anxiety had throbbed hot through his nervous system, how he had dreamed of fighting creatures like the companion in a Larvosis play.
He had known that those theatrical dreams didn’t equal reality and the odds of returning from a combat mission against the Apparitions were slim—but as far as Falb was concerned, probabilities only mattered to people without vision.
A shock traveled through the shell as it touched down, landing like an angry hornet on the skin of the immense Phobosteus. The central ring corridor of the Apparition ship should stretch below them, and as the magnetic claws pulled them closer, the shell’s welding lasers heated up.
Falb closed his eyes, inspected his emotions, and arranged them before his inner eye, a shimmering armory of tools and weapons. There was his thirst for knowledge, long and barbed, his urge to get answers: What the Apparitions were? Why they had descended upon humanity? What they looked like? Next to this, a double-edged blade: Falb’s anger at the Amaranthine Fleet and its petrified hierarchies, at the oracles who only ever saw the same; and finally, the spearhead of Falb’s ambition, his desire to rise above such restraints.
Deeper than these emotions, Falb’s relationships secured him like the shell’s tether secured it to the cruiser: His brother Timeon, who had stayed behind to command the cruiser, and his sister Larea, whose whereabouts Falb didn’t know but whose face he remembered vividly even after all those years—siblings not by birth, but by choice.
He listened into his body, to the
steady rhythm of his heart, the muscle contractions when he clenched his fists and relaxed them, the creeping of the metal shell at his back.
Pemptos’ voice yanked Falb out of his meditation: “Let’s stage the play.”
He opened his eyes and took stock of his unit: Deuteros, the veteran; Tritos and Tetartos, the owl and the otter; the tall Pemptos; and finally, Hektos, the boy with the blue eyes. Tritos tried to straighten his shaggy hair, Tetartos mumbled something inaudible, Pemptos caressed the grenade launcher on her rifle. Hektos stared at Falb’s bald head, and Deuteros looked down at her effigy suit, into whose surface words had been burned with acid.
Deuteros noticed Falb’s attention: “The survivors,” she said. “Everyone who returned from a mission with me. They’re my mantra.”
Falb nodded. To do this job, to fight against the Apparitions, the soldiers of the Amaranthine Fleet needed control over themselves. They needed to rely on their bodies and minds to withstand the nightmares, and they needed something to hold onto, some object or idea. Deuteros had the names etched into her armor, Pemptos her weapon, Falb the pincers he used to remove hairs from his body.
Falb activated his effigy with a thought and summoned the floating holographic representation of his body, visible only to himself. He made the organs glow, visualized his blood flow, and the major areas of activity in his brain, all the “fuel stats,” as the soldiers called it, before the image dissipated into the air again.
“Boarding Shell 7, touchdown.” The prompter filled the background of Falb’s consciousness and created a rough picture of the Phobosteus and the substantially smaller Fleet cruiser, the space between them crisscrossed by tethers. “Shell 3 and 4, welding process completed. Shell 9, touchdown in T-10 seconds. Nine. Eight.”
Every moment now, their own announcement would sound, and the anticipation in the men and women under Falb’s command was palpable. An icy lump grew in every one of them, getting bigger and colder by the minute. For some, it inhabited the stomach, made their legs weak and spoiled their appetite days before the mission; for others, it occupied the lungs or the heart.
Hektos shouted “Curtain up!” in an uncertain voice, far too loudly, and the others joined in: “Curtain up!”
The last sparks glittered as the welding lasers finished their work, the pressure adjusting with a hiss that pierced up into Falb’s eyeballs.
#
- ACT II -
“Go!” The airlock opened, and Falb pushed himself into the next act, followed by the rest of his unit. He leaped through the freshly opened hole, the edges still glowing, landed hard and panned his rifle. The ring corridor looked the same in both directions, broad and as clinically sterile as an operating theater, punctuated in regular intervals by open airlocks. There were no isolated light sources, only long tubes that flooded everything with the same, contrastless brightness.
Above the forest, the moon came up, and its pale light trickled down between the treetops while the wind chased away the clouds. The moonlight illuminated a trail of footprints in the soft forest floor, and Falb followed it. It was said that a network of hidden paths traversed these woods, only visible in special nights: and that one of those paths would lead to the tree of visions.
“Faster!” Falb shouted at his soldiers. The heavy effigy suits made them look like archaic divers sinking down into the Apparition’s realm. They hit the ground, went through a trained sequence of movements, and trudged to their positions.
Falb glanced at curved crossbeams, perpendicular hallways, and round columns that harbored the ventilation fans. In the distance, he could see a second unit jumping in through another welded hole, just before the airlocks came down. It was the usual pattern: once foreign matter boarded the ship, the Apparitions segmented the ring corridor and separated all boarding teams from each other—and with this, the countdown started.
Nobody knew the reason for it—maybe tactical considerations or a psychological predisposition—but when the Apparitions attacked, they always followed a fixed hierarchy of targets: Intruders on their own ship, ships in orbit, and, at the very last, the world they had come for. Even if several Apparition ships opposed a single defense cruiser, they only initiated their surface attack if the cruiser had been destroyed, captured, or forced out of the system.
The trail meandered between trees and bushes into a wilderness that neither Falb nor his siblings had ever explored. The silvery reflection of puddles guided him on his way like a series of beacons, without providing any meaningful illumination.
The soldiers formed a semi-circle around Falb and aimed their weapons at the perpendicular hallways that led further into the ship.
“Incoming!” Deuteros cried, pointing her weapon as several hatches opened along the inner wall. With a low-pitched whirring, fist-sized drones dashed out, their glowing sensor antennae rotating in the air as they skimmed over them in formation.
Under Falb’s feet, the wet forest floor turned to mud as he followed the trail from puddle to puddle. Trickles ran down the tree trunks and combined with other trickles from swampy wells. Water sloshed between the trees like an inland tide, swelled and flowed into a reed-covered lake.
Six muzzles lighted up, the noise of ejected cartridges and reloading mechanisms filled the Phobosteus. Falb couldn’t tell if the drones were autonomous or if the Apparitions controlled them, but they were transmitting data: and that meant that the Phobosteus was aware of Falb’s every move.
Falb’s soldiers fired again. Two drones exploded, the rest swiveled sideways to fan out, speeding up above their heads.
Falb steadied his hand as he aimed at one of the drones, followed its flight path and pulled the trigger. The insect-like machine tilted in the blink of an eye and narrowly evaded the burst of fire, falling back into its horizontal position increasing speed with an audible hum.
The rat-a-tat of rifles cleaved the air, but no more of the tiny machines went down.
Shapes moved in the algae-green water of the lake, nearly transparent fish with eyes that glimmered like streaks of gold. Could the fish see him? Were they responsible for his feeling of being watched? And most importantly: would they reveal to him the tree of visions?
“Fields of fire! Cover your quadrants!” Falb exchanged hasty glances with his soldiers and indicated angles with his hand. A brief silence washed through the room, allowing Falb to take a few quiet breaths. Beating the Apparitions was about being smart, to outmaneuver them at their own game.
The units’ weapons barked, and three drones turned into smoke and wreckage when they found no escape.
“I got one!” Pemptos cheered as she hit another target and continued to fire at the next. Tritos and Tetartos synchronized their volleys while Deuteros lowered her rifle and waited.
The remaining drones sped toward their hatches in the wall and slipped in. Tetartos rejoiced: “They are retreating!”
But Falb knew that they would have done that no matter what, that this was only the first stage. It was a small victory, and it was their high point: everything that followed would be worse.
#
“Stay sharp. Hold your positions.” Falb pivoted the barrel of his gun to keep the his section of the ring corridor in sight.
“Puppets!” Blue-eyed Hektos aimed into one of the perpendicular hallways, where half a dozen figures in scarred battle armor advanced stiffly.
“Take cover!” Falb shouted ducking behind a nearby ventilation column as the enemy opened fire. He knew exactly how the next minutes would go, he had played through them in simulation and live action a thousand times, and still his heart pounded. He peeked through an incredible window of opportunity, and these dead men in metal blocked his view. He had no time to fight them, but there was no way around, no shortcut to the Apparitions.
The puppets in their armored suits moved with the cumbersome momentum of a cargo train. They made a series of heavy steps toward him, bracing their boots against the floor and firing their weapons as if their arms were being
lifted up on strings. There was no organic flow to them, just a sequence of separate motions without hesitation and consciousness. Their rifles howled with supersonic acceleration as they hurled out volleys of projectiles. Servomotors hissed as the puppets moved their feet and their metal soles touched down.
Falb let his reflexes and muscle memory take over: acquiring targets, firing short bursts, diving back behind cover. The puppets came like waves breaking against a sea wall, and their projectiles hit everything around Falb.
Falb’s nerves twitched without provocation, his fingers clawing together, and his breast trembled. The nightmares flooded in with the puppets, the subliminal presence of the Apparitions. A shiver ran through Falb, as if he had touched the golden ornaments of an oneiromancer, and his arms and legs began to cramp.
He could see in his soldiers’ faces that they felt it as well, that their bodies rebelled against the Apparitions. Hektos scratched at his armor, trying to wrench parts of it free, while Tritos tore out his shaggy hair and Pemptos ground her teeth.
The fish in the lake grew restless, whipping their scaly fins, darting back and forth with faint splashes. They filled the lake with movement, but their golden eyes never left the human following his trail along the shore. Falb saw a shadow of the tree of visions floating below the surface, but he sensed that the tree itself wasn’t here.
Falb concentrated on his breathing, using the deliberate tensing and relaxing of his muscles to slowly bring his body back under control. The Apparition’s nightmares always came in waves, each one stronger than the last, but they were nothing more than illusions. Falb wouldn’t be stopped by such trifles, not when he finally had a chance to get answers, to reach the center of this damaged ship.
Nobody understood the Apparitions. They emerged like the darkness in a Larvosis play, a faceless and formless threat, and as far as scientists, military, and the oneiromancers could tell, there was nothing the Apparitions gained from invading human space. They didn’t take any resources, they didn’t occupy territory, they showed no interest in slaves, wealth, or technology. They abducted some people and turned them into puppets, but one colony world alone would’ve been more than sufficient for that.