“When I say.”
The terse reply shut Sealander up. They were all scared. And for that very reason, they weren’t going in until he had a good feel for things. Twenty-third-century technology told him there was nothing alive in Starlight, but he trusted his instincts.
“Okay,” he finally said. “Lead us in, Sealander.”
“Shit,” Sealander said.
Wise giggled.
Sealander got to the main hatch, scanning it with the lights of his helmet. “She’s not pressurized, First,” he said over the comm. “Airlock is blown.”
Riger and the others came across the compound, nearly hopping in the low gravity. The shadows around them were deep, sinister pools. The beams of their lights slashed about like blades.
They went in.
* * *
“Can you get some lights going in here?” Riger asked.
Sealander shrugged inside his suit. “Sure. Probably. Generator’s down. There should be four backup systems. Funny none of them kicked in.”
“Maybe, somebody shut them off,” Wise said.
“Now, why in the hell would they do that, son?” Doc Kang asked.
Wise had no answer, or none he was willing to share. The kid had imagination, real imagination, and sometimes that was a benefit, Riger knew. But not in a situation like this. What you needed here were level-headed, nuts-and-bolts types. An imagination could be lethal.
If it was up to me, he would have stayed behind.
But Captain Cawber picked who he wanted, and that was that.
Sealander studied Starlight’s layout on the inside of his helmet bubble. “Looks . . . looks like the power core is below. If we follow this corridor, take a left, and a right, we should see the hatchway at the end.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t split up,” Wise said. “I mean, not just yet.”
“C’mon, kid, and zip it with that talk,” Sealander said, leading him off.
“All right, Doc,” Riger said. “Let’s you and I find central control.”
He led the way with his blue-tinged helmet lights. Kang followed. Crazy, knife-edged shadows swept around them. They checked a few rooms on their way to central, mostly labs—geo and bio—and an emergency supply closet. They saw no indication that anyone had been there in some time.
“What do you make of it, Doc?” Riger asked when they paused at the station canteen, their lights scanning row upon row of empty tables.
Kang shrugged. “Not really sure. I mean, let’s face it, if anyone was still alive, they would have picked up our transmission.”
Riger felt his throat tighten. “But there were fifty people here . . . they can’t all be dead.”
“Can’t they?”
He was right, and Riger knew it. It had been six weeks since the distress call. That was a lot of time. Anything could have happened.
“At the very least,” he said, “there should be bodies.”
Kang shrugged again. “When I first joined the service, I was a medic on an ore-crusher, the Dolly B., making the hop from Proxima D and E to the uridium refineries on C. There was an ore camp called Crater Valley. Automated but for five hardrock drillers. Nobody had heard from them in weeks, so we sent down a rescue party. You know what they found?”
“Not a thing.”
“Exactly. Those boys were gone—just gone. Point being, things happen way out here, First. Bad things. Things you can’t even imagine.”
Riger had heard plenty of tales like that in his time. He didn’t even bother commenting on it. Doc was always going on about something. He didn’t believe people belonged out this far.
Riger called in to the Cosmo, told them there was nothing to report. Not yet.
They moved down the silent corridor and up a metal flight of steps. Their footfalls echoed out and came back at them, making it sound as if they were being followed. Had Riger been an imaginative man, he might have told Cawber that the atmosphere of the station felt corrupted, contaminated by something namelessly bleak and horribly noxious. It seemed he could feel it seeping into him like a disease. The station was deserted. He was sure of that. Yet Starlight felt unpleasantly occupied. But by what, he could not say.
* * *
Five minutes later when Sealander came over the comm, Riger nearly jumped. “Hate to say it, First, but Wise was right: somebody shut everything down. And I mean everything. Not just power but life support, water recyclers, atmospherics, everything. About five-and-a-half hours ago from what I’m reading.”
Riger felt something chill inch across the back of his neck. Just after sundown, he thought.
“Can you power it up?”
“Sure, I can cold-crank the pile, but it’ll take fifteen, twenty minutes to cycle it.”
“Do what you gotta do.”
“Aye.”
Riger was standing in the cabin of the chief biologist, a woman named Freeman. As he swept his light around, he saw nothing out of the ordinary. There should have been something. Even a few drops of blood would have been reassuring.
It’s so damn quiet, so damn empty.
“First! Over here!” Kang called over the com.
Riger rushed out into the corridor. Kang had ventured ahead into central control. He had his light on a form pressed up against a bank of instruments. Whoever it was, they wore a yellow e-suit and bubble helmet. Both were old in comparison to the lizard skins of the Cosmo team.
“Who is he?” Riger asked.
“I don’t know. Can’t get anything out of him but gibberish.”
“Scans should have picked up his life signs.”
“Yes,” Kang said. “They should have.”
Inside the helmet, the middle-aged man’s eyes were huge and white, unblinking. His face was contorted in pain or terror, his mouth trembling. Every time he started to speak, it became quickly incomprehensible.
“Can you shoot him up?”
Kang nodded. He pulled a hypo from his medical kit and found the port on the man’s suit. There was a low hissing as the medication transferred. Right away, the man relaxed. He blinked his eyes slowly and licked his lips.
“You . . . you got the distress?”
“Yes,” Riger told him. “Who are you? What happened here?”
“Pelan,” he managed, his eyes dopey and glazed. “Geophysics, Starlight Project.”
“I’m Riger, and this is Doc Kang. We’re from the DS Cosmo.”
“Deep space, eh? Deep space boys.” His face hitched as if he had been jolted. “It . . . it . . . there’s so much. It was Henley, you know. George Henley. George and I were friends. He found the site, the ancient city by the dry ravine. That’s where it started. It was Phyterian. There was no doubt. We . . . we always thought the Phyterians were wiped out by climactic upheaval. But that wasn’t true. No, no, no. George proved it. The extinction event . . . it was the relic. The relic George found buried in the ruins. The relic . . . oh dear God . . .”
Riger and Kang were kneeling by him now.
“What relic?” Riger had to know. “Tell me.”
Pelan was breathing hard, nearly hyperventilating. Cords as thick as the roots of an oak sapling stood out in his neck. “That city . . . it was abandoned sixty thousand years ago. That was the time of the event, you see. The extinction event. George found the relic. That’s why it came back, the entity—Yiggura, Yiggrath . . . the Phyterians had many names for it.” He was sobbing now, his eyes darting about. “The relic . . . the relic called it . . . old as the universe, pestilence old as the Big Bang, the primary cosmic generation. Don’t you see? Don’t you see how late it is? It’s here! It’s here now! It watches us, calls to us!”
“Dr. Pelan, you need to calm down,” Kang told him.
“He’s raving, Doc,” Riger said, shaking his head. “He’s not making any sense.”
Pelan went rigid. “Goddamn you, listen to me! The Phyterians worshipped the thing! The relic was holy to them! When George found it in the ruins, Yiggrath came! Dark matter entering the v
isible spectrum! It is here now!”
“He’s goddamn hysterical,” Riger said.
Pelan scrambled to his feet. He started this way and then that. He was shivering and shuddering, vibrating rapidly like a pneumatic hammer. It didn’t seem as if the human body could move like that. He vibrated faster and faster until his boots rattled on the deck plating.
“What the hell is happening to him?” Riger asked.
“I . . . I don’t know,” was the best Kang had to offer.
Pelan looked like a man being electrocuted . . . slowly. He was holding onto two modular desks as the clonic tremors rolled through him faster and faster. His voice, high-pitched and wavering, was frenzied: “D-d-d-dark matter . . . an ecosystem for s-s-such things . . . the great spiral intelligence . . . born of gravitational force . . . antimatter into a subatomic particle storm . . . writhing anti-creation, the absolute negative . . . it can . . . it can . . . it can be broken down theoretically, empirically, m-m-m-mathematically . . . the writhing shadows . . . the tenebrous spiraling sentience . . . do you see? Do you see? The voices . . . God help us . . . the voices . . . seven . . . it differentiates, it assimilates . . . it accelerates . . . it expands . . . eight . . . eight point three point one-five-seven point nine-three . . . yes, yes, I hear it, I hear it! The hungering star-jelly . . . no longer entombed . . . now is the time of the turning, cattle, accept me and see me and stare into the primordial riven wastes of chaos! Five . . . five . . . five . . . six . . . seven three . . . point nine-three-one squared . . . point six point six point six point six six six SIX SIX SIX SIX SIX—”
There was a loud, fleshy eruption, a very, very wet eruption of blood and tissue. Pelan launched into the air, his suit making a horrendous, grisly popping sound, expanding to three or four times its size like a helium balloon inflated to bursting in a microsecond.
He hit the floor with a wet, gelatinous sound like jelly in a plastic bag. The inside of his helmet was splattered bright red. What was inside his suit was no longer recognizably human. It slopped and rolled. Droplets of blood glistened on the suit’s seams.
Kang went to him right away though he was obviously beyond hope. He pulled the pressure locks of the suit and unzipped it. He cried out as Pelan’s anatomy surged out at him in a wave of red, mucid pudding that nearly engulfed him.
Riger pulled him to his feet.
“Like . . . like he underwent some massive systemic decompression,” Kang said, his voice shrill.
The only thing Riger could really do was call it in. But when he tried, he got static. A heavy, droning, listening sort of static that bothered him in ways he could not put into words. It sounded as if there was something just beneath it, a low and unearthly sort of respiration. As if he was hearing the planet breathe.
“I don’t get it,” Kang said. “Comm was working just fine ten minutes ago.”
Yes, it was, wasn’t it? Riger wanted to say but didn’t dare. He was in command, and he had to act like it. His skin was literally crawling now, and it had nothing to do with what had happened to Pelan. This was something else, something that ran much deeper. An instinctive sort of fear. He had the feeling that they were being watched, coldly appraised by an inhuman intelligence that was icy and cruel.
“Got . . . got a mountain of pure copper just over the rise, Doc. Sensors picked it up. It can play hell with communications.”
Kang nodded, but it was obvious he wasn’t buying it.
Riger tried the comm again, and this time, the static was so shrill it hurt his ears.
“I don’t like this,” Kang said.
“Me neither, Doc.”
He tried to raise Sealander and Wise. At first, there was just dead air, and his heart began to hammer. “Yeah, First. Sealander here.”
Thank God. “I want both of you up here right now. We’re finishing the sweep and heading for the Bart.”
Silence. A crackling. “Shit, sir, we’re almost done here. Another five minutes, and we’ll have this place lit up like the Fourth of July.”
Five minutes, five minutes, Riger thought. Do we even have five minutes? He didn’t know. He just didn’t know.
He was generally a strong, secure sort of leader . . . but moment by moment, he was feeling weaker. It was this place, this awful place. It was sucking the life out of him.
“All right, five minutes. But no longer.”
“You got it, First.”
“At least the suit-to-suit comm is working,” Kang said.
Or being allowed to work, Riger thought.
* * *
They found George Henley’s cabin next. The walls were pasted with prints of the Phyterian city. It looked like a nightmare labyrinth of black basalt, narrow and crowded, sharp pinnacles rising high above like fangs. There were maps, too. One laid over the top of another. The city was only a few hours away.
“Look at this,” Kang said.
Photos. Grainy blowups of something that looked like an immense, craggy skull made of a mottled, bluish material that appeared metallic. It looked to be fifteen or twenty feet in length with a grotesque, exaggerated, goatish appearance, like the skull of a ram that reminded Riger of medieval prints he’d seen of the Black Goat of the Witches’ Sabbat. The idea made him shiver. The devil, the devil, way out here. Regardless, the skull was hideous, chambered with hollows and exaggerated jaws, two immense cylindrical horns rising from its apex.
“Makes . . . makes me think of ancient Egypt on old Earth,” Kang said in a dreamy sort of voice. “That thing looks like the head of Anubis.”
Riger only knew the image of the skull made him feel uneasy, nervous . . . expectant. Disturbed. The skull was dead, of course, but the feeling he got was that it was not dead enough.
Kang pushed the photo print closer to him. “That’s the relic,” he said with something like religious awe. “That’s the relic that summoned Yiggrath, the unborn and undying, the endless, deathless shade from the black seams between time and space.”
Riger just stared at him. “What in the hell are you talking about? Pelan never said any of that.”
“I . . . I don’t know.” Kang looked confused. His adam’s apple bobbed up and down. In the lights of his helmet, his skin was sallow and diseased, his face running with beads of sweat. “I don’t know why I said it, First.”
Riger turned away from him. There was a loose, repellent cast to his features. It disgusted him.
Kang found a personal tablet hidden beneath more prints of the city. As soon as he touched it, it activated a holo-journal entry. A narrow, wizened face was projected before them.
“There can be no doubt,” said the dour voice of the image, “that what we now know of the Phyterian civilization and what we thought we knew are in direct contrast. For decades, we believed that the Phyterian race was destroyed by an extinction event known as the Primary Cataclysm. This climate-altering release of methane gases was from unprecedented and devastating seismic activity in the southern hemisphere in the region known as the Plain of Glass. These deposits were locked in intercrustal pockets during planetary cosmogony.
“At the PC—Primary Cataclysm—level of sediments, we see evidence of a mass extinction of the sort Earth experienced at the close of the Permian. Ninety-five percent of GE 4’s organisms perished some sixty thousand years ago. The Phyterians, a squat bipedal, toad-like race, also went extinct. Before that, the planet was rich in biodiversity—herd animals such as the hesperhippus and bonditherms, the massive quasi-reptilian crotacoils, numerous species of land-dwelling prycops and megacytes, aquatic helix worms and fishlike icthydonts as well as plant species such as the tyrannophytes and nyctaderms, thousands of species of seed pods, club mosses, and fungi. The list is endless.
“Now, no one can refute that the Primary Cataclysm occurred, but we now know there was another extinction vector. What this was is difficult to explain, but the finding of the relic skull by Phyterian priests known as the Accylardu-dek-despoda, or the Sect of the Gashed Ones, was the cataly
st. The skull—if I may be so bold as to apply such a descriptor—is formed of a spongy material that has so far defied analysis. I believe it is the material remains of a creature not from the space that we know and understand, of a denizen of the dark world, a creature of dark matter, a thing of dark electromagnetism from a parallel anti-universe. How it died, I cannot say, but I think that it was in a transitive interdimensional state between the exotic physics of its universe and that of our own.
“The Phyterian priesthood called this entity something that can be reproduced phonetically as ‘Yiggura’ or ‘Yiggrath.’ The skull opened the gates between two spheres of reality and channeled the pestilence that claimed the Phyterian world. That is a theory. That is a guess. But based upon glyphs in the dead city and my own assumptions, I believe it to be true.”
That was the first entry. Succeeding entries became more and more nonsensical, lacking lucidity or any linear logic until they became little more than ranting.
“Doc, we don’t have time for this,” Riger said.
“Then we better make the time.” He queued up another entry.
Henley reappeared. It was the face of a man close to madness—staring eyes, twitching mouth, trembling lips, a voice that was high and scratching, nearly hysterical.
“The skull, the skull, the damned skull. It is in my dreams, it shadows my life. It compels, it owns, it possesses. I am not who I was. I feel I am being appropriated by a godless horror from some loathsome dimensional pit of insanity. The skull is not bone. It is dead but it lives. It is warm under my touch, pliant and fleshy. There is memory in it, memory of this world and a thousand others, exterminations and extinctions and genocide. I have touched death, and death has taught me its secrets.”
The next entry showed an image of what looked like a very old man. His eyes were bloodshot, his mouth contorted into a grotesque grin.
“The others do not scoff so much now, eh? They do not think that George Henley is so mad after all, do they? None will dare approach the cursed ruins of Kry-Yeb, the dead but dreaming city of the Phyterian Empire. I have returned the skull to its tomb beneath the city, though distance matters not to such a thing. It beckons to me. But I will not go there. I will not lay my hands upon it and view the carnage of dozens of worlds turned to poisoned, toxic graveyards. I will not!
Ride the Star Wind: Cthulhu, Space Opera, and the Cosmic Weird Page 36