by Ian Creasey
Minutes passed. If Wei looked at the mist, he had to fight the urge to throw up. It was easier if he kept his eyes on the arrow and concentrated on his footing. The ground was more level here, the black rock formed into squares like a chessboard, sizes and elevations varying only slightly. No one was talking. He’d lost all sense of time or distance. He had no idea if they were close to the alien structure. So long as he watched the arrow and minded his feet, it didn’t seem to matter much.
Then Karras screamed.
It came over both the mental network and, mangled with interference, the audible comms. It lasted the barest instant and was cut off. It had been appalling, but the silence was worse. Wei began to run. He had no way of judging where Karras was, whether he was moving toward him or away. Still, he ran. The arrow bobbed, from left to right. He waded forward, into the parting fog.
Abruptly, a figure – the broadness of the outline identified it.
“Karras …”
It turned toward him. The fog was too dense to make out anything beyond a shape. It seemed to waver, as though with heat haze. Wei stepped forward. The thing that was Karras reached out an arm, and a noise came over the comms – a thick gargle, like soup slopped over a stone floor.
The figure shuddered.
It began to unravel.
The sound grew unspeakable. Wei realized with utter certainty that the substance Karras was trying to scream through was himself. He watched as the navigator spiralled apart, dissolved into glistening ribbons.
All the while – probing, churning, grinding – there was the crimson fog. Strip by strip, drop by drop, it was taking Karras into itself.
Mechanisms had responded to clean the vomit from inside Wei’s helmet. They could do nothing about the rank aftertaste in the back of his throat.
“I tell you, Captain, it fucking ate him.”
“Don’t disbelieve you, Doctor. Only – crazy place, this. Hard to see. Hard to think, even.”
“I watched it happen.”
There was no evidence. Not so much as a scrap of Karras’s suit. As though he’d never been. Wei would have found it easy to doubt himself – to blame it on hallucination, as the others clearly did. He refused. Not for himself, but for Karras. Bad enough that he should be erased. How much worse for even the memory of his death to be excised from existence?
“You think it was the mist?” asked Solberg, his tone admitting nothing by way of belief.
“It was. I’m sure.”
“Well,” said Adusei, “nothing to do then. We keep going.”
“What?” Wei’s incredulity was wasted. They couldn’t see his face, or even judge his tone through the worsening static.
“Nothing to do. Nothing we can do. Takes us or it doesn’t, but we keep going.”
They came upon the tower unexpectedly, as though it were something phantasmal that had condensed from the air. They’d been travelling closer together, hardly a meter apart, and then abruptly its flank was rising sheer in front of them.
Was it metal or crystal? It seemed to have properties of both. Or maybe that was just how Jeikes perceived it. He was finding it harder to focus on anything outside, anything but the transmission and its shadow-twin imbedded in the white noise. Even Karras’s death had barely upset him. He’d never liked the navigator much, and although Wei’s description had made his death sound grotesque, Jeikes felt instinctively that he was safe, for a while at least.
Adusei led them around the outside of the structure, though there was little to see through the fog. On the opposite side from where they’d started, the surface was ruptured, widely at the bottom and shivering up in cracks almost to the peak. The substance, whatever it was, had torn in an almost organic fashion, like a cut in meat. Adusei tried to probe the interior with her helmet light, without success. Between the fog and the darkness, she might as well have tried to illuminate the depths of a tar pit.
“Makes no sense,” she said. “One building. Out here, all alone.”
“It does make sense.”
“What?” Adusei turned on Jeikes.
“It’s a …” He struggled to form the concept into words. “Like a panic room. Like a safe house.”
“That what you think?”
“It’s what I know. I’ve been working on the transmission.” Having to give even this minimal explanation exasperated him. He had no intention of mentioning the other signal, the one that lived within the static.
“Not so safe,” said Adusei, more to herself than him. “Still a distress call?”
“Not exactly,” he admitted. “It’s … complicated. I’m still working on it.”
Adusei nodded. “We go inside. Get this done.”
She stepped forward, and was swallowed by the fissure. Solberg followed without hesitation. Wei, perhaps anticipating some fresh horror, waited until Solberg thought over the network, “Hurry up, damn it.” Then Wei darted forward as if electrocuted.
Jeikes followed more slowly. If they’d asked him what was inside, he couldn’t have said. He had no way of putting it into words, or even coherent thoughts – only a vague presentiment. Still, he had no desire to see for himself.
It was lighter within, as though the darkness were a curtain hung over the entrance. The walls, opalescent and curved like the innards of a shell, were dimly lit with filigree of green. It was odd to see a color not distorted by the appalling sun, or by the fog, which like the darkness hardly penetrated here.
Jeikes was briefly alarmed to realize the others were hovering a few feet from the ground. He pushed off experimentally and drifted upward. Clearly, there was some transit technology in operation. He’d seen something similar on Calix Erythraeus before the evacuation. He found that gentle swimming motions moved him; immobility brought him to a standstill. He caught up.
There was a ceiling, formed from the walls in a way that seemed more grown than manufactured. The tear in the glittering surface extended a little way inward. It was wide enough that they could squeeze through, one after the other. There followed three more floors and three more ceilings, each ruptured in similar fashion. The final gap was the narrowest. Karras couldn’t possibly have penetrated it.
The fissure led into a chamber with a high cupola roof. In the center, a slim column ran the height of the room. Toward its base, it spread into a rectangular heap with two curved, outward-facing panels mounted on its summit. Presumably these were control surfaces, because in front of each was a high-backed hollow construction – and in these, two figures sat.
It would have been more of a shock if they weren’t so obviously dead. The beings were fully twice human height, long-limbed, insectile. Their heads were triangular, bristling with antennae, topped by slits of silver-facetted eyes. From their jutting shoulder blades hung the tatters of gauzy wings, draped in scraps like rotten bridal veils. Their flesh had strung together a series of chitinous plates, which now hung loose, exposing desiccated grey-green meat.
It was Solberg who broke the long silence. “That’s the transmitter. There were two of them, sealed in. Set to keep their signal going out for as long as they could.”
“Makes no sense,” said Adusei. “Something broke in, killed them, but equipment’s still broadcasting.”
“Maybe what got them couldn’t disable the console,” suggested Wei.
“Got through the walls pretty damn good.”
“It’s a message,” said Jeikes.
All three turned to look at him.
“The walls weren’t broken to get in. They were broken so we could make it here to see.”
“See what?” asked Adusei, her tone laboriously cold.
“That these two lived longer than everyone else.”
In a moment, Solberg was on him, wrenching Jeikes’ arm behind his back. “What do you know, you fuck? What’s going through that alien-lover head?”
Jeikes didn’t wince. He switched to network so that his voice wouldn’t shudder, and thought, “Adusei, tell this prick to let go of my a
rm.”
Adusei motioned. His arm fell free.
Aloud he said, “I’ve been working the signal,” as though that explained everything. “There was so much here once. On this planet, in this system. You wouldn’t believe, to look at it now. A race like we’ve never seen. Their language was beautiful.”
Jeikes paused, hunting for the right words. “Something came through. Tore through. Something from outside what we think of as space.” He pointed to where the black sun hung invisible beyond the dome. “They stopped it there. If this had been a human world, they wouldn’t have lasted an instant. But they had an amazing civilization out here, far ahead of us. The thing that broke through … they bottled it.”
“In the sun,” Adusei said.
“In the sun,” he agreed. “It’s more complicated than that. What attacked them, it wasn’t even matter, really. But yes. They trapped it. They couldn’t save themselves though. The dissolution it had started was too far gone. They’d seen that coming, too, of course. They put everything they had left into one last project. Just these two, their tower, and their transmitter. A warning to the rest of the universe. Even then …”
“It let them.”
Jeikes nodded, grateful that she understood, that he wouldn’t need to explain. If the natives had striven to communicate, so had the entity they’d trapped. This tower itself was its message, and so was the crack heaved into its side. The two alien bodies were fresh. Decomposition had barely begun. These two had survived where everything else on their world had perished, left for the crew of the Fixed Identity to find. Why?
As bait.
As testament to the price of survival.
“All right,” said Adusei. “Simple then.”
She flicked out her stamp-gun, aimed, fired. Air sizzled in a tight beam. The console split and spewed greasy yellow smoke.
“That was stupid,” said Jeikes, fear in his voice for the first time. “Really stupid. Now you’re all dead.”
There was nothing for it but to head back toward the Fixed Identity. But Adusei made her intentions clear. They would scuttle the ship, destroy any transmitting gear. To Jeikes, it seemed as though she was determined to taunt the thing in the black sun.
He wasn’t at all surprised when the mist took her.
She didn’t scream like Karras had, only dropped to her knees and moaned, while the fog drew around her like a garment. She looked oddly beautiful for a moment, as the suit tore apart to reveal skin almost bluely black. Crimson tendrils of vapor wrapped around muscles hardened by twenty-five years of desperate living. Then the skin came off – was flayed off, slowly. Still she didn’t scream.
Jeikes had to look away. When he looked back, there was nothing left.
They trudged on. Solberg was inconsolable, almost catatonic. He had shut off all communications, but Jeikes could see the tears coursing down his cheeks. It was obvious now that the Norwegian had harbored some deep love for his captain. That was something that Adusei, who had favoured only the briefest and roughest forms of affection, could never have returned.
Jeikes was struck by how pitiful it was, but also by its irrelevance. Had Solberg not shut off his communications, Jeikes might have tried to explain that Adusei was not dead at all – or even gone very far.
It would probably have been no comfort. In any case, the mist took Solberg soon after. His face, through the splintering faceplate, looked almost relieved, at first – until the pain began in earnest.
After that, it was just Jeikes and Wei.
They reached the cliffs that joined the lower valley to the upper without incident, and without a word passing between them.
Wei was afraid – too afraid to analyze or categorize his fear. He could only trudge forward, trying not to think, trying to keep his teeth from chattering. Yet on some level, he understood that what terrified him most wasn’t the fog or the black sun or the thing trapped within it. It was Jeikes, who had once been his friend.
Wei had caught his eye when Adusei died, and again when the fog took Solberg. He’d seen nothing there. Not regret, not so much as disdain.
Jeikes went up first, using the rope as little as possible. In the wrong light, his grey suit looked black and glossy, like the carapace of a beetle. He moved like an insect, too, with a confidence Wei had never known in him. It wasn’t long before he disappeared from sight.
Wei had no desire to follow. He’d have put the moment off, except that every inch of him craved to be free of the crimson fog. When his head broke its surface, sending eccentric waves rippling, he felt born again, as though he should whoop hallelujah to the awful skies.
The feeling passed, more quickly than it had come. The fear came back. The fear, he felt instinctively, was truer.
He climbed on. If he hung back from the cliff face, he could just see Jeikes waiting above. He thought about stopping, but Jeikes had stationed himself on the first good-sized ledge. If Wei waited, his strength would run out sooner or later.
The devil, he thought, or the deep red sea. The devil had once been his friend, at least. Wei climbed on.
At the ledge, Jeikes offered a hand, and Wei – although he distrusted the hand as he would a poised adder – took it and drew himself up. They were halfway between the higher and lower valleys, with the hardest of the climbing done. Wei was struggling for breath. Jeikes showed no sign of tiredness at all.
He said, “I think we need to talk. Before we go any further. Don’t you?”
Wei gulped to control his breathing. “Sure.”
Why not?
His palm rested on the grip of the stamp-gun holstered behind his right hip. Maybe it was inconspicuous, maybe it wasn’t. There was no way he could unholster it, though, without Jeikes seeing.
So, sure. Let’s talk.
“I don’t like this any more than you do.” Then, shaking his head as though to dispel this obvious untruth, Jeikes began again: “The thing that broke through here, the thing the natives trapped … it needs energy to free itself. A big ship, bigger than ours. The reactor cores those leviathan-class vessels pack – like miniature suns …”
“You’re saying it used their signal as a lure? But we were right on the brim of uncharted space, and we barely heard it. The odds of them drawing in anything from the main shipping lines are nonexistent.”
“No. They were isolationists. They weren’t exactly set up for interstellar cries for help. Only, now it has us. Even the panic buoys on the Fixed Identity are better than their toy transmitter.”
Wei eased the restraining flap up with his fingertips. “You’d do that? Sit there, transmitting, until something big enough comes along? Or just something bigger than us? You’ll be the little fish that pulls in the bigger fish, that pulls in the bigger fish, that … “
“Yes,” said Jeikes, cutting off Wei’s building hysteria. “I think so. As long as I’m transmitting, I think it will let me live. I want to live. I can’t stand the thought of dying. Or –something worse. You do know they’re not dead, right? You know what the red fog is?”
Wei nodded, as though this made perfect sense. His heart was beating a tattoo, there was sweat in his eyes, but he had the gun free.
“You could stay with me. I think it would keep you alive. You wouldn’t even have to help.”
Wei brought the stamp-gun around. He’d intended a quick draw and in the last moment thought, what if it snags on the suit? Instead, he swung his arm in a crescent. It seemed an incredibly lazy motion. He wasn’t even surprised when, before the gun was half way, Jeikes leaned in to place a hand on his chest and pushed. By the time the gun was pointing in anything like the right direction, Wei was stepping back. There was no back to go to. There was empty air.
Wei fell. Although it must all have happened in an instant, he was aware of the fraction of time when the fog closed back over him. Then pain, enormous pain, a seismic shock pounding through dough-like muscles.
Lastly, over the mental network, Jeikes’s voice: “Yeah, I thought you’
d say that.”
Wei had been unconscious. Now he was awake. There wasn’t much difference. He understood, as much as he understood anything, that his back was broken. He had the vaguest sense of his body; something spread-eagled like a drowned spider, arms and legs crooked. Maybe he’d broken more than just his back, but that was the clincher. On Lucida he’d seen men crawl with their legs smashed up like sacks of grit. He’d watched men fight with limbs missing and not even realize until much later.
You didn’t crawl if your back was broken. You didn’t fight. You waited.
The crimson fog was all around. He had the sense that it was watching. Clearly, it had patience. It had eaten well. Adusei and Solberg not so long ago, Karras before that.
Of course, it hadn’t eaten them exactly. Despite his disorientation, despite the vastness of his pain, Wei understood that now – what Jeikes had been trying to tell him. They were still there, or something of them was. Unbound. Transmuted. Reformed by the vast energies trapped in the black sun. Naked of flesh, seething with hate and pain. Together, though churned with the trillion consciousnesses that had once inhabited this world.
The fog drew close. In its whispers, in its sickly lapping, he could hear them. Their combined voices were a scream just on the edge of hearing.
Karras. Solberg. Adusei. And – not yet, but soon – himself.
Pop Quiz
By Curtis James McConnell
Willie sat fearfully in the small room behind the small table. He jumped just a hair when the door opened suddenly. A man in a wrinkled suit and tie stepped in carrying a large sheet of laminated text.
“Good evening, sir. I am Sub-Ambassador Darren Dolen, municipal-class authority. I understand you have been arrested on suspicion of Stypean conspiracy, a war crime even in a time of cease-fire. If you are inhabited, I remind you that certain alien words cannot be pronounced by human tongues, and ask that your occupants please take no offense at our official approximate pronunciation. I am compelled by treaty to read you the following: