“Massacre,” he said briefly, downing his in one gulp. “Them or you. Not as clear-cut as you think, either. Could’ve just ended up in the swamp, like that see-all who Warden accidentally shot. Or pinged the ship to say no one there to rescue. I’ve seen both.”
“That was my fault, sir,” she said.
“Warden’s.”
“I was the one who put her up there,” Rossi said firmly. “There was always a chance that could happen.”
“We’ll let the investigation decide that.” He waited till she’d finished her whiskey and said, “I’m recommending you for the Haytham Award for this, just so you’re not surprised when you get the call. Dismissed. Good work.”
She stood gasping in the hallway, a little buzzed. It wasn’t their highest military award, but it wasn’t given out easily, either. It was for significant achievement in a humanitarian military mission. Her first mission.
After a dazed and private lunch, she headed down to where the rescues had been quartered, what the other grunts had taken about two minutes to start jokingly referring to as “Steerage.” Several people nodded at her—some in a perfunctory gesture born of decades of getting along in a very small community, of course, but some with genuine friendliness.
With a few exceptions, they had adapted well to ship life. The updates Rossi covertly got from Medical indicated that they’d been gorging themselves and had to have their food rationed, and they were constantly dehydrated because they couldn’t convince themselves the water wouldn’t run out. They kept reassigning themselves to different rooms so that they could sleep together three and four in a bunk, which made tracking them difficult. But otherwise: clean, vaccinated, medicated, well on their way to returning to the global citizens their hopeful ancestors had been all those generations ago.
They kept graffitiing the walls, though, the same handful of strange symbols. And the kids must have gotten some door codes or something, because the vandalism kept turning up in places they shouldn’t have been able to get into, like the canteen, several med labs, and the halls outside crew quarters.
Rossi paused outside the impromptu classroom, where letters and pictures flashed on the projector and the desk tablets. “That’s an R!” one of the kids shouted, derisively. The others tittered. She’d seen that in war zones before, of course. Kids bounce back first. You drop a kid from a sad and sorry place, and a lot of them simply hit and roll. And the others were getting therapy and reintegration treatments; they’d be fine in time.
“You, Francesca Rossi!”
She turned, already smiling. Ambricius, the old man who had led them to the oracle, was following her down the hall, swimming in his cotton uniform. All the colonists had ended up in clothes too big for them. In the pale blue fabric, intended to stand out from the crew’s black and gray, they looked like so many misplaced clouds. “Hello, Ambricius.”
“I sent you a message! You didn’t reply.”
“I’ve been out of my quarters. I’m sorry.”
“Come! We are telling stories.” He turned brusquely, and she followed him to their common room; this had happened twice already, so she knew the drill. They had kept trying to build open fires in the middle of the room, setting off the smoke alarms, and after repeated reprimands from McKay had failed, Rossi had arranged for installation of a large ceramic space heater, a blunt cone a couple feet across, which seemed to satisfy their unquenchable craving for heat and light. After word got out that she was responsible, there had been a general thawing of all their attitudes—even Ambricius, whom she had assumed hated her.
Britta, golden-skinned and heavily pregnant, got up, approaching the “fire.” “We will talk about the Day,” she said quietly. Everyone shuffled closer. Rossi, who felt that today, of all days, she had intruded on some enormous private grief, stayed near the wall.
The Day always referred to one day, Britta explained, embroidering the story with the hand gestures they all used, echoed with slight variations through the entire room. One day, which everyone knew. Six ships of six thousand each, always known because it had been written. “Yes, written,” whispered Ambricius with the others. Of which, for unknown reasons, five had simply crashed into the planet at speed.
Rossi gasped. No one looked back at her.
And so to this day, five is the number of hex, the unluckiest number, used by sorcerers who held up hands and feet to cast it. Five had destroyed their beautiful planet, their Fortunato. Split and fragmented like a skull under an axe. And their ancestors, on the blessed last ship, saw it all: the fountains of stone and dust and burning lava, the earthquakes, the breached volcanoes and geysers. They had landed safely into a war zone, unable to leave the ship for over a year. “Which was written.” “Yes, written.”
Rossi found her lips moving along with theirs, unable to make a sound. Tears streamed down a dozen faces, only the younger children rapt, too frightened or excited to weep.
And in that year, they learned to survive off each other, learned the ways of sacrifice and community. A few giving, so many might live. Cannibalism, Rossi thought. Of course. No other way to do it. I was right.
And when they finally emerged, the brave few, they discovered that their promised land was all wrong—the air, the plants, the water, the animals. But one good thing emerged from these dark early years: the Line of the Oracles. And it was the oracles who taught them how to survive, by speaking to the gods of the land who had been awoken by the crashes.
“The gods of the land,” Ambricius whispered.
No, Rossi wanted to whisper. It was because of your training. Like mine. It was because of . . . luck, and provisioning, and resourcefulness. What gods? No. No. We trained you better than that. Even a few hundred years ago you didn’t believe in gods.
But no. Britta explained: the gods were ancient and real. The gods were there first. We lived by making a deal with the line of the oracles in exchange for belief, and for the food of the gods.
The bones in the swamp, Rossi thought. The line that never lost its taste for human flesh, that demanded it in exchange for advice. No gods required. And yet, were they chanting, somewhere in another room? There was a noise, a buzz. Was the mere mention of the story enough to invoke their wan, atonal cry? How did they know?
She edged out the door. Ambricius, rapt, didn’t even notice. Everyone looked up as the door swished open, letting in a square of white light that illuminated Britta’s swollen belly, but by then, Rossi was gone, walking as fast as she could back to McKay’s office, not running. Telling herself not to run.
But hang on. What would she even say? “Don’t give me a humanitarian award! I thought we were going on some kind of massive space-charity run for a lot of helpless and unfortunate people. Not for an inbred cannibal cult who attribute their survival to some ancient, awakened gods!”
That would get her swung straight back into quarantine, scrubbed, zapped, questioned, dunked, flushed again. And banned from Steerage, which—as much as she hated to admit it—she couldn’t bear. There was so little to break the monotony of ship life. And what were these skinny, traumatized people going to do to a whole crew of healthy, well-fed, combat-trained people? Their gods, anyway, had been abandoned on their ruined planet. No one was left to feed them belief and willing victims.
She sighed and went back to her quarters, pausing only to rub off a few of the squiggled symbols with her sleeve. The cleaning drones would get them eventually, of course, but they bothered her simply to look at, the way they seemed to squirm and misbehave on the clean grey metal.
* * *
Rossi only realized something was happening when the alarms sent her flying from her bunk to the opposite wall, weapon somehow in her hand. She was uniformed and armed before she was fully awake, running to her station, muscle memory so powerful that she almost crashed into the door at the end of her corridor before seeing that it was shut. Someone barreled into her from behind—Ashford, his wide dark face crisscrossed with sheet marks, and a dozen other cr
ew members who shared this hallway. The weekly code didn’t work in the locked door. Neither did last week’s. The clamor behind her grew.
“Anything from Command?” Ashford said, prodding the tablet embedded in his sleeve. It was flickering red, everything red. Nothing safe and green.
“Nothing. What the hell is going on?”
It was supposed to be a rhetorical, unanswerable question, but the intercom squeaked into life above their heads—incomprehensible at first, just noise, gradually resolving itself into a babble of voices. Rossi’s stomach flipped as she recognized the colonists’ accent.
“Holy shit, they’re at Central Control,” Ashford gasped. “Look at the readout. They’re locking doors all over the ship, and our trajectory is all out of whack. What are they doing?”
“They’re trying to go home,” Rossi said numbly.
“What? No, that’s crazy—they can’t fly this. They’ll never be able to land on—”
“Listen, they’re obeying a higher authority than logic.” She pointed her blaster at the door lock but paused. No, the blowback would be terrible in an enclosed space; she’d seen that enough in combat. “Hasn’t this happened in a movie?”
“This has happened in a thousand movies,” someone said authoritatively from the back of the hallway. “Someone needs to go into an air duct and get help.”
Ashford laughed, but Rossi pointed above his head: an air duct cover with four helpfully removable screws was set near the ceiling, a cleaning drone peeking through the grate, green lights blinking. She scanned the crowd for someone light to boost up.
Freed from the hallway, the loose group—her squad, Rossi was already calling it in her head—stutteringly made their way to Control, sending their intrepid air duct ambassador ahead to keep doors open, sometimes wedging them in the process of shutting. The scribbled symbols became more frequent, in pen, lipstick, food—sticky syrups and nut butter packets—and other, more disquieting substances.
“That ain’t all them that’s writing these,” Ashford said quietly. Rossi, having just concluded the same, nodded as they jogged down the unfamiliar corridors. Of course not. Their contagion had spread, gotten to the crew. She didn’t know who. Maybe afterward they could find out. If there was an afterward.
The voices over the intercom—shouting, pleading, threatening, chanting, coercing—had still not resolved themselves into a coherent narrative. Rossi wondered if the colonists were even aware that it was on. She could hear the sounds of combat, discharged blasters, the splashy noise they made when they hit something organic and dispersed. Maybe Control was fighting back, maybe it wasn’t a mutiny, yet. It was infuriating as well as terrifying not to know.
And then a single, piercing cry, “Fellows! My fellows! We are returning to our home! The land of our gods cries our name! For it was the will of the oracle!”
“Oh, goddammit, Ambricius,” Rossi muttered. She looked back at Ashford, expecting him to say something, like “You got this,” but he was grayish and taut with adrenaline, simply meeting her gaze, waiting for her to give an order. I’m not your commander any more, she wanted to say. I’m just . . . the one in front.
They had reached one of the six doors to Control, this one covered in the colonists’ graffiti, overlaid and crisscrossed until the metal couldn’t be seen. A smashed cleaning drone lay crumpled in the corner next to it. The sigils of their gods, she thought deliriously. Placed here for protection, and as a ward against us. Before they entered, she paused and held her hand up—five fingers spread, five times. A hex on you; a hex on your gods. The metal hummed under her testing fingertips: not the thrum of the ship but something else. She swallowed.
They entered low, ducking and rolling as blasters incinerated the air above their heads. Rossi took the scene in: crew members bound in the corner, jackknifing furiously—not her concern. Three more still at the controls, frantically trying to get the ship into a landing orbit. Twenty or so colonists, shooting and waving sticks at the remaining crew members, six or ten of whom were still on their feet. She took a deep breath and pivoted into combat.
With the extra numbers, it was over in minutes. She disarmed and immobilized Ambricius herself, trying to be gentle, almost succeeding. Out of the corner of her eye, several people had occupied themselves immediately with pulling the ship back up. How close had the mutiny gotten? She could hear the familiar, faint scream of the atmosphere, orange flames fluttering at the monitors. The effort to get fresh believers to the planet surface had almost resulted in a crash. The cosmic become personal.
“Your gods didn’t help you,” she hissed as she hauled him to his feet.
“Did they not?” he retorted. Someone pulled him out of her hands and dragged him off with the others. He kept his head resolutely forward, not looking back.
* * *
“Frank?”
Rossi looked up at the wall tablet—Roscoe and Cheo, their dress uniforms a solid block of blue at the bottom of the screen. “I’m coming,” she said. “Running late.”
“You’re giving a speech in five minutes!”
“I’ll make it.” She hit “private” and picked up her dress hat, still stinking of its plastic storage bag. Would the guys notice that she had matched her lipstick to the band? Probably not. She touched it up anyway. Her hands were shaking.
She was going to be late for her speech, though. She’d been watching the video feed from the airlock chamber that the colonists had been quartered in. “Secured under conditional duress,” McKay explained, meaning they could simply be ejected into space if they tried anything. Watching as the walls were covered with the sigils and symbols again, as the sourceless lights flickered, as shadows crept up in every direction, often testing the sealed seam in the floor that was all that kept a hundred people from flying into space. She was watching for something else now, hoping she would see it before the awards banquet. It must be soon. Must.
Her uniform screen flickered, a countdown sent by one of the guys. Two minutes. One. Minus-one.
There. Britta, flat on the floor, and someone else, turning to find the camera in the dim light, holding something up, slick with fluids: the new baby, three eyes blinking at its strange new world.
Premee Mohamed is an Indo-Caribbean scientist and spec-fic writer based in Canada. Her short fiction has been published by Nightmare magazine, Shoreline of Infinity, Innsmouth Free Press, and many others. She can be found on Twitter at @premeesaurus.
The Writing Wall
Wendy N. Wagner
Illustrated by Justine Jones
We had been on Huginn for five hours, and already, the leather birds had surrounded our camp. Twilight obscured their silhouettes in the massive horsetail trees, but the soft rustle of their dry-fleshed wings undercut the conversation around our chemfire. Shayna tightened the cords on her hood and scooted closer to my side.
“The orientation team said they were harmless,” I reminded her.
My sister shook up a pouch of peach cobbler and activated its heating element with an expert snap. “They said the rain stopped once in a while, too. You can’t trust those bastards.” She pressed the warming packet to her cheek. “Damn, it’s cold.”
I pulled out my own pouch, probably stew, and pinched either end. “Hey, you’re the one who got me into this.” The pouch, heating element still not activated, popped out of my hands and hit the ground with a wet splat. Two weeks into Huginn’s six-week dry season, and there were still puddles everywhere. The forests on the satellite world dried from the top down.
Shayna recovered my stew and opened it for me. “You’ll get the hang of it.”
“First trip to Huginn?” The man beside us had been silent since we’d made camp. But now he smiled, giving his heavily bearded face the cheer of a forty-year-old Santa Claus. “Jay Bara,” he added. “Logistics.” I’d seen him on the transit ship. Quiet guy, always reading. I would have never pictured him on an underground spelunking expedition.
I put out my hand. “Lena S
mith-Wu. Biology.” I made sure my handshake was as firm as his.
“My sister,” Shayna explained. “I’m Shayna Smith-Wu, scouting and ops. We’ve met before, Mr. Bara. We were at the same table at that military-to-private sector hiring event in DC.”
“Ah.” He paused a moment. “I’m terrible with faces. Sorry.”
One of the leather birds gave a hiss, and the air crackled with the sound of their wings.
“Territorial things.” Bara took a puff of an old-fashioned vaporetto. “There’s so much we don’t know about them.”
“You sound like you admire them.” I couldn’t keep surprise from coloring my voice. As a biologist, it was my job to study and appreciate the stupendous array of bizarre creatures and fungi on Huginn. But most people were only interested in the cute ones.
“Their entire stomach is a mouth,” Bara mused. “And instead of teeth, they have independently mobile claws that serve both as a zipper to hold shut their umbilical maw and to restrain their prey. They’re eating machines on wings. You have to admire the evolution of such a creature, if not its appearance.”
“As long as they don’t interfere with my mission, I won’t interfere with theirs.” Shayna didn’t need to tap her sidearm to punctuate her meaning, but she did anyway.
I couldn’t help but notice Jay Bara’s disapproving look.
* * *
By midmorning, I had forgotten the leather birds. We’d left our campsite at first dawn, which on Huginn was still very nearly dark. The huge gray disc of Wodin, the gas giant Huginn orbited, still obscured the edge of the sky, its shadow stretching out over the forests. Wodin demanded fealty from the ocean, too, drawing the sea back from the beach where our shuttle had landed and leaving a long stretch of brown mud.
Our team had humped our gear through two klicks of dense forest, a crew of scouts roving ahead to clear some sort of path. No one wanted to run a ton of surveying gear through a patch of red death puffballs. Their silicate spores were the most famous cause of death on Huginn, but there were plenty of other ways to die on a world filled with alien fungi and proto-plants.
Ride the Star Wind: Cthulhu, Space Opera, and the Cosmic Weird Page 23