Space Eldritch
Page 5
Gabe shouted more nonsense. Then: “Stop! Jim, stop!”
James collided with the captain’s chair and the Other caught himself. Gabe cowered before him. I must stop him, Jim thought, and didn’t know who him was.
The Other raised his weapon in James’s hand.
“No!” Jim howled, and made his final move. He seized control of his weapon arm—
twisted the blow as it fell—
and slashed his own wrist.
***
In this queer weightless void, blood didn’t spill or flow. It exploded out of a body in heartbeat-powered jets, each burst articulating into a swarm of discrete balls like a barrage of shotgun pellets.
Jim stabbed the obsidian knife into his own arm and bounced away shrieking. The blood that squirted from his veins was blue. For a moment, Randolph wondered whether the man was inhuman, but then the blue became a colorless gray, the chamber rippled before his eyes, and he remembered that he was losing his mind.
“Jim!” shouted Gabe the vessel.
“Leave him!” Randolph barked through the same lips. “We have no time!” He wondered if Jack Kale had already joined Carver in death, and then he wondered if the word already had any real meaning in this context.
He didn’t let himself think about it.
Jim drifted towards the shaft, convulsing. Some of the curses that came from him might have been Egyptian. Others sounded like a history of science lecture alternating with gibberish. “Kepler! Feynman! Franklin! Hawking! Darwin!”
Randolph noted distractedly that the man’s voice modulated back and forth between a strained tenor when he spoke English and a growling, raspy baritone when he spewed out Egyptian.
“Show me the monster,” Randolph said. He felt like throwing up. The wall of the spaceship slid away from him and rushed back in irregular contractions. “The beast... outside this... craft.” He relinquished control, struggling just to stay awake.
Gabe pushed to a panel in the chamber’s wall and pressed buttons. “There it is.”
Randolph looked and guffawed. “That’s not a beast. That’s a row of numbers.”
“That’s data. Look.” Gabe pointed their shared finger at a number that rapidly decreased. “That’s our distance. The wormhole, and the thing inside it, are getting closer.”
“I can stop it.” Randolph said the words though he didn’t know whether they were true. “I can turn its path aside, but I need to see it. Is there a vantage point?”
Gabe laughed hollowly. “You open the door for a vantage point, you, me, and everyone else on this ship dies instantly.”
“A window?”
Gabe pressed buttons. At the shaft entrance, Jim thrashed and screamed, throwing out drops of blood like a centrifuge.
“There’s not enough power.” He pointed at another number. “I can’t get the visual up without shutting off other systems.”
“Shut off other systems.”
Gabe tried. “I can’t.” Randolph felt sweat beading on the vessel’s skin. “There’s too little juice in the system. To turn on the visual, I have to shut down life support for the rest of the ship.”
“Do it.”
“I’ll die. You’ll die... if you can die.”
Randolph thought of Delilah, swinging slowly by a knotted hotel sheet in the rain. The face of Mr. Burroughs himself, smeared with Carver’s blood and belly fat as he ripped out a length of intestine with his teeth. “I can die. Do it.”
“There are twenty-five hundred people down there!”
Randolph considered for a moment. The vessel Gabe, he remembered, had mentioned his wife. Small wonder he was distraught. “Is there enough juice to withdraw from the... wormhole?”
“Maybe.” Sullen and defiant. “Maybe we can make one push, and get out of this thing’s way.”
Randolph looked for the right words to say. He would have sighed, but he lacked the energy to be that much in control of Gabe’s body. Instead, he drifted as he ordered his thoughts. “In the United States,” he finally said, “there are one hundred twenty million people. The earth with her billions is at risk. Twenty-five hundred lives are a terrible loss, but they are twenty-five hundred doomed lives anyway. You and I, Gabe, must make a choice. I am sorry that your wife is with us, because it means we must make a choice for her, too. It is a hard thing, and I resent that it is our fate, but there is no avoiding it.”
Gabe said nothing.
“I too am tempted by this will o’ the wisp hope, but I cannot take the risk of being deceived. Much blood has already been shed,” Randolph added. “To make the sacrifice worth it, you and I must choose to shed a little more.”
Silence.
“We sacrifice twenty-five hundred,” Randolph said. “We save the earth.”
“Schrödinger!” Gabe pushed off from the bulkhead and glided to the shaft opening, where Jim tossed and turned in the air. He’d stabbed himself again, and yowled like a cat on fire.
“Blood and sand!”
“Goodbye, Jim,” Gabe said. He hooked a foot into the struts of the captain’s chair, grabbed Jim by the ankles and pushed the other man head-first into the shaft. Jim drifted away, shouting nonsense.
Randolph was impressed with the ease with which Gabe moved in the void. He continued to be impressed as Gabe punched the glass from a small panel he hadn’t noticed and yanked the lever inside. With a muffled thump, a plate snapped across the shaft opening from where it had lain hidden in the shaft wall.
“Mechanical trigger,” Gabe explained. “Explosive-powered. It’s an emergency system, uses no power. He won’t bother us again.”
Unspoken: Jim was now locked in the same part of the spaceship as Gabe’s wife. Randolph felt a heavy, heavy weight upon his soul.
They returned to the wall panel. Randolph sensed tears on the vessel’s cheeks and his vision threaten to dissolve into tatters of blackness and static.
“Thank you.”
“What are you going to do?” Gabe asked.
“Tangle its path. I can’t kill this thing. Nothing can kill it. I don’t even know if it is alive, in any sense of the word you and I would understand. But I think I can keep it from its destination, send it somewhere else.”
Gabe nodded. “You ready to kill twenty-five hundred people, Choate?”
Randolph hesitated. “Yes.”
Gabe touched the panel again. Nothing changed that Randolph could detect with his wrecked vision, but Gabe’s shoulders slumped.
“Now what?”
“Now we run out of oxygen. A few minutes at most, I guess. But you’ll have more power for other ship systems.” Gabe laughed hollowly. “At least only one of us is breathing.” He touched a spot in the wall. “We’ll last longer.”
The panel filled with an image, and Randolph shuddered.
It rocketed away from him and then lurched back, blurred, shifting in color and spinning, but Randolph recognized the thing on the screen. He knew the writhing tentacles, the mouth, the body in too many dimensions. He knew this beast from the Lemurian tablet. He knew it from other ancient images, and he knew it from his nightmares.
Niarlat-Hetep, the resting Niarlat, Niarlat in his prison.
Arise thou Niarlat from thy rest, he thought. This was Niarlat’s rest, a light-shot, trembling, extra-dimensional cocoon in the vast darkness of outer space. Here it had lain for eons, and from here madmen sought to bring it to Earth. A golden-black, coruscating ribbon of light and void crossed the vast nothingness of space, between the cocoon and the spaceship. It was as if a great cone of the void had been seized and twisted into a hank of cosmic rope, an umbilical and a highway for the dark god.
That ribbon, Randolph saw, was the gate. His spell in the basement of the Burroughs Manor had been successful, and had brought him here, into the very path of the god.
“Curie.”
And before Randolph’s eyes, the crackling energy around the colossal elder god split and dissipated. Niarlat stretched, snapped its vast tentacles in t
he void, and began to move. Like a swimming jelly, it devoured the darkness with swallowing movements of its tentacles and dragged itself forward, up the ribbon of light and darkness towards the spaceship and an ignorant humanity.
Randolph seized control of the vessel Gabe. He was weary and he could barely see, but if he didn’t act now, the thing before his vision—the thing towards which he was rapidly hurtling—would devastate the Earth.
He couldn’t hurt the elder god, but he could tie a knot in the path at its feet.
Randolph tightened his grip on the Lemurian tablet and began to chant. The tentacles snapped through space at a speed that Randolph would have thought impossible had he not seen it, rushing towards him in the viewing screen. Or was it only Randolph’s withering sanity that made it seem so?
He resisted the temptation to chant faster, knowing he would only garble the difficult language. He heard a soft banging and scratching sound and realized that Jim was outside the emergency gate, pounding on it with fist and stone.
The tentacles hurtled nearer. The gold streaks in the ribbon glowed brighter and the black was blacker still, and the ribbon seemed taut and full.
Randolph Choate chanted firmly and clearly, articulating each syllable for his dead friends, and for the entire human race. He felt his soul slipping away as he chanted, and he realized with a moment of awful horror that the spell was stealing it. The enchantment by which he would entangle the gate was killing him.
He persisted. He would make the sacrifice, for Delilah, for Carver, even for Jack Kale.
He could do it, he knew. He bit off the last syllable with his teeth, and then he had done it. In his view, the shimmering ribbon twisted, an elbow of ninety degrees kinking suddenly into existence. The gate was entangled, the path dragged aside. Whatever Niarlat did, it would not reach the destination its cultists imagined.
Randolph looked up at the viewing screen at the dark god flying in his direction, feeling life, time, vision, and mind all slip away from him. As Niarlat grew closer he felt his own breaths coming harder; this was it, asphyxiation, the end he had chosen. The heart he shared with Gabe raced. The angle of the viewing device changed perceptibly as Niarlat changed its angle relative to the spaceship, and for the first time Randolph saw the long knobbly body of the vehicle in which he rode the cosmos. It look like a string of silver bubbles against the black.
Silver bubbles full of people. Full of people, full of blood. Blood was power.
A horrible doubt seized Randolph Choate.
“Planck.”
Niarlat smashed into the hull of the spaceship. Tentacles grasped and tore, shattering the craft. Sudden motion spun the conical chamber violently, slamming Gabriel Goldman’s body against the bulkhead.
The viewing screen went blank. Randolph’s vision began to follow.
In the last horrible second before it all left him, he wondered what he had done.
***
The ground trembled.
“Earthquake, really?” Jack shook his head. When it rained, it really hit the fan.
The stone crocodile statues on each side of the professor teetered back and forth too much for him to be comfortable, so he picked up Choate’s unconscious body and slung it over his shoulder. The professor was still foaming at the mouth, but he was still breathing, too, so Jack wasn’t too worried. Also, he was muttering in his sleep. It didn’t sound like American, but half of what old man Choate said didn’t sound like American, even when it was.
Jack set the professor on the floor again when he was sure he was out of danger from the statues, and turned his attention back to the rattling door. It would have been nice if the earthquake had killed the crazies outside, but no such luck.
“Ginnies.”
He pointed the tommy gun at the door and got ready to fire.
BOOM!
A sound like thunder exploded into the basement of the Burroughs Manor, and the air became thick with dust. Dust, Jack thought, and the smell of blood. Only the dust smelled wrong. It smelled like hot sand, of all things. For a second, he thought the earthquake might have toppled the house above him, but that was ridiculous—whatever sand there might be on the grounds of the Burroughs Manor, it wouldn’t be hot, not at this time of year.
He turned to check on the professor and discovered something much more unexpected.
A boat.
A frickin’ boat, with oars and a sail and everything, sitting where the picture of the boat had been. Its mast was jammed up into the ceiling, bringing down cement dust, and its gunwales had knocked over the two crocodile idols.
If he hadn’t moved the professor, Choate would have been smashed flat.
The door shook, its planks groaning.
Choate coughed, spitting out dust, and sat up.
“Oh, good, you’re back. Everything go according to plan, Professor?”
Choate grinned. He had a stone in his hand, but it wasn’t the one Jack remembered. It was chipped and flaky, like a big old Indian arrowhead, and he didn’t see any pictures on it. Maybe the ship had knocked this rock out of the wall, he thought. Maybe this arrowhead was one of the piles of junk and trinkets the professor always seemed to be able to produce to work his mumbo jumbo.
Jack turned back to face the door again, away from the professor, and aimed his tommy gun. “We saved the day, then. There’s still nutjobs outside the door, but don’t you worry about it none, the tommy’ll take care of ’em.”
He heard Choate climb to his feet, spit, clear his throat, and spit again. Then, just as the door rattled hard because something on the other side slammed into it, Choate spoke. Only it didn’t sound like Choate; the voice was deeper, and more raspy, like the voice of a dedicated smoker and drinker.
And the words it said certainly weren’t American.
Jack was glad to have the professor back, anyway. He didn’t like being alone in the basement, with the shadows and the statues and the stars glowing on the ceiling, and however queer the bag of bones got with his bits of string and foreign jabber, there was no denying that Randolph Choate could do things. Things that really ought to be impossible, like jamming the door shut with a ball of hair.
“Ia Niarlat,” Choate said, behind him.
“Yeah,” Jack chuckled without enthusiasm. “Let’s get ’em.”
Space Opera1
Michael R. Collings
“Ah, when once we breach the boundaries of known space, what Works, what Wonders, we will achieve!”
- Torq, Farewell Address to the Koleic
1Opus: work, composition, esp. music, from L. opus, a work, labor, exertion; from Proto-Indo-European *op- ,to work, produce, originally of agriculture later extended to religion (cf. Sanskrit, apas—work, religious act). The plural is opera.
***
Most numbers would have at least muttered a vituperation, if not an outright blasphemy, when the klaxons sounded.
Most, perhaps. But not Torq.
Without a pause, his eyen split, half to the left, half to the right, while his first hands were already reaching for the buttons that would simultaneously silence the klaxon, perform an infinitesimal shift in the ship’s course that would make collision with the asteroid ahead impossible, and, the danger avoided, restore the ship to course and trim.
His second hands never once left the complex screencaps of their destination—the point at which the flash drive would take over and, for the moment, at least, the entire vessel and all of its contents would cease to exist within known realities.
His first hands slapped at the buttons. The klaxon ceased, and sudden, almost unbroken silence reigned once more on the command deck.
Almost unbroken silence.
Torq swiveled one eyen. Several stations to his left, one of the crew-hammocks was empty. The screen above it buzzed slightly, as if indicating its irritation at the disruption of its function.
Beneath the hammock, one of the crew—a seven, Torq noted wryly—had curled almost completely, now resembling more a glisten
ing brown ball than anything else. A thin mewling rose from within the ball, and a dribble of something pungent and black already stained the otherwise pristine floor.
It would be a seven. Figures.
The asteroid emergency safely averted, Torq swiveled to face the crew.
He did not speak. He did not have to. Everyone present knew what had just happened—that a feckless seven had failed in the number-one priority for command deck: Absolute Trust in the Name at the helm... The Chaptain is always right. The first lesson instilled in every number that emerged from the pupal crèches at the academy.
Most had probably heard tales of failure. Few had ever seen it happen, however, given the evidence Torq saw reflected in their eyen. Part of each focused on the inert seven, communicating enough of its anguish that every crew member felt an insistent yank on its own nervous system, the ages-old clash-or-curl instinct each knew and dreaded.
The other part focused on Torq. The lenses glittered in the diffuse light, a thousand sparks of fear and determination.
He waited.
Gradually, the split eyen joined, and all of the compounds were trained on him.
As they should be!
Without a word, he withdrew a thin metal rod from his carapace pouch.
A sudden susurration, almost but not quite inaudible, swept the deck, then ceased as Torq raised one of his second hands, pointed directly at the miserable ball of chitin just visible beneath the hammock, did something with his tarsi than none could quite distinguish, and lowered the tube.
There was another moment of silence before the unconscious seven tightened even further, so much that the faint crackle of bruised and broken chitin filled the deck as the thing—no longer one of them but merely so much tissue and ichor—compressed beyond the limits of possibility and finally, soundlessly, fractured into a mass of brown fluid.
“Clean that up.” Not waiting to see that the order would be carried out, Torq turned back to his consoles and continued to manipulate data on the dozen or so screens.