Space Eldritch

by D. J. Butler, Michael R. Collings, Robert J Defendi, Carter Reid, Nathan Shumate, Howard Tayler, Brad R. Torgersen, David J. West, Larry Correia

  Rigby, walking in front of him, stopped suddenly and whirled, his flashlight shining back down the way they had come. Saxon pivoted to follow the beam, and saw—or thought he saw—the afterimage of movement crossing the corridor mouth, something lower to the ground than a person that blended in with the shadows in the chamber they had just left.

  “What?” he hissed to Rigby.

  Rigby said nothing, every muscle taut like a hunting dog alert to motion. Then he stepped silently past Saxon, back toward the corridor mouth. Saxon motioned the others to stay put and followed Rigby.

  Rigby stopped for a heartbeat just before the corridor opened into the chamber, then stepped out and swung his light to the left, where Saxon had half-seen the movement.

  There was nothing. Their footprints were the only ones in the gritty dust.

  “Did you see it too?” Rigby asked.

  “I saw something. Maybe.”

  Rigby peered at his flashlight beam as it disappeared down the other passage leading from the room. The air seemed thicker, as if their passing had stirred up the darkness itself to hang and swirl in the air.

  “Look at this,” muttered Mendez, and both Saxon and Rigby jumped. They hadn’t heard him come up behind them and crouch at their feet. Now he pointed at the floor.

  “You were supposed to stay back there,” Saxon said.

  Mendez ignored him and held his flashlight almost parallel to the floor.

  Saxon saw that his initial observation was not quite true. There were, as he had said, no new footprints in the room after their own. But Mendez’s light followed a faint trail of brushing or sweeping marks in the dust that partly erased their prints as it crossed over them at right angles, going toward the passage that still swallowed up Rigby’s flashlight beam.

  “Hey,” came Swann’s urgent whisper in Saxon’s left ear. “Either you come back, or we’ll follow you. We’re getting spooked.”

  Saxon hefted his flashlight. It was thick and sturdy, with dense power cells that could provide hours of continuous light. It was, he realized, the only thing he was carrying that could reasonably function as a weapon. A terraforming base staffed by fourteen persons on a lifeless planet didn’t need offensive weaponry.

  Unless the lifeless planet wasn’t lifeless.

  Saxon tapped Rigby and Mendez on the shoulders and motioned them back to where Swann and Chu waited anxiously. He pulled everyone’s heads together—a comforting but pointless gesture, communicating as they were through the radio link—and spoke softly.

  “We need to find Ishida and get the hell out of here,” he said.

  ***

  The next chamber was barely more than a turning point in the corridor, and Saxon knew he was in danger of getting hopelessly lost. The sixty- or seventy-degree angles on which everything was laid out played havoc with his sense of direction.

  Mendez stepped forward into a chamber which opened directly off the small one, and gasped. Saxon immediately stepped up behind him, flashlight held backward over his head like a club.

  Unlike the previous empty rooms and corridors, this one had actual objects in it. Along one wall a stepped series of mounted stone slats functioned as shelves, filling the surface—the first truly vertical surface they had seen—from ankle- to shoulder-height. And on the evenly spaced shelves were metal cubes, glossy under their layer of slow-accreting dust, reflecting the flashlight beams with what was becoming a familiar greenish tint. They were roughly four inches on a side, haphazardly stacked in no discernible order.

  Saxon took the lead, stepping cautiously into the bare center of the room. The passage had felt close; now, as he crossed from the entrance in which the rest stood—the entrance from what had actually been some sort of antechamber—he felt exposed on all sides to the darkness that owned these catacombs.

  He bent so that the cubes on the topmost shelf was at eye-height and examined what was in front of him as closely as he could without touching. The cubes each had identical dimensions, and yet looked slightly irregular on their mirrored surfaces, as if geometrically precise forms had been dipped into green-tinted liquid chrome that slightly softened the corners and distorted the reflections of their lights. The dust had only settled in a thin layer on the cubes. As he stepped closer, Saxon could see a confused set of footprints in the dust, and more indistinct marks on the shelves that would have been most convenient for a grown man to reach.

  “Rigby,” Saxon said softly, and Rigby advanced shoulder to shoulder with him. Like Saxon, he moved his head from side to side, examining the shimmering surfaces in the beams of light.

  “Dangerous?” said Saxon. “I think it was part of one of these that Caldwell had in his hand.”

  “You think it blew up or something?” Rigby asked. “There’s no sign of fragments in here, and they’re not being stored with any sort of precautions.”

  “Maybe they weren’t volatile originally,” Saxon said.

  Rigby removed a plastic-handled ballpeen hammer from his belt, reversed it in his hand, and tapped softly on the top of one cube with the handle.

  “Boom,” he said under his breath.

  The other three men stayed in the entrance, craning their necks but showing no eagerness to get closer.

  Rigby placed the hammer handle against the side of the cube and pushed. It scuffed an inch along the shelf before it hit its nearest neighbor.

  “Not heavy enough to be solid,” said Rigby. He slung the hammer back at his belt, then reached out slowly with his gloved right hand. He touched the nearest cube on an upper corner with one finger and held there for a breath. Then he slid that finger to the corner on the right, and extended his left index finger to the opposite corner. He lifted the cube between his fingers, held it a moment, then set it down again.

  “Nope, not solid,” he said. He bent over before lifting again and peered underneath, at the bottom face of the cube. “Same as the other sides,” he said.

  Rigby set the cube back down, then adjusted his grip and picked it up with both hands. As he turned it in the stream of light from Saxon’s and the others’ flashlights, the reflected green gleam danced and jumped across the other dust-matted cubes.

  “No openings or obvious seams,” Rigby said. “No real up or down that I can see.” He slid his hands across the flat surfaces of the cube. “There do seem to be two shallow dimples on opposite—”

  His teeth slammed together and his back arched violently, as if he had been struck by lightning. His hands clenched, and the cube popped out of his grip. For the longest instant Rigby stood there, balanced, like a statue of an athlete in motion. Then he toppled backward. His head hit the stone floor with a meaty thud right before the cube clanged down beside him and bounced twice.

  Saxon jumped for him, too late to catch him or ease his fall. Chu also dove forward, swinging his med kit from his back to his front. Swann and Mendez took either side, as if they were sharing a wavelength, and aimed their lights down. Chu shone his own light into Rigby’s half-closed eyes, checking the pupils as best he could without moving the goggles, then gingerly worked his hands inside Rigby’s hood to the back of his head.

  “What was that?” shouted Saxon, louder than he’d intended. The fallen cube was spotlighted in his flashlight beam, looking harmless and innocent. A crack ran up and branched on one face.

  Chu grabbed one of Rigby’s still rigid hands and massaged it. “Don’t think it was electricity,” he said. He felt Rigby’s ribcage with one hand while he struggled to pull out a stethoscope with the other. “Heartbeat’s strong and fast,” he said, more as a checklist to himself than to Saxon. “Breathing’s shallow—maybe just adrenaline, but...”

  Rigby’s breath hissed in jolts through clenched teeth, and his eyes hadn’t moved or refocused since he had collapsed.

  “Rigby!” said Saxon. He leaned down, pulled Rigby’s hood away from his exposed ear, and moved his own mask aside for a second. “Rigby!” Rigby didn’t respond.

  Saxon looked up to Ch
u. “Can we move him?”

  Chu shrugged helplessly. “I don’t think he’s got a concussion. We could try the stretcher—”

  “Let’s do it,” said Saxon, standing. His flashlight went from Rigby’s unseeing eyes to the innocuous cube on the floor, to the passageway through which they had entered—

  Something was there.

  His mind tried to recognize it, to categorize it, but it couldn’t. The thing was maybe waist-high, a mass of something leafy or fibrous that gave no reflection back from his light. Its top—its head?—was a chitinous, segmented dome.

  Saxon froze. No one else had noticed yet, and he couldn’t get any words out, as if his brain were stymied as to what he could possibly say.

  The thing moved out of his flashlight beam, not in a surprised rush but with deliberate movement, its hundreds of leaf-like appendages carrying it smoothly back into the darkness that filled the small antechamber. Saxon thought he could hear—but could he, past the activity of the others?—a dry swishing on the stone as it retreated.

  Then Saxon felt something like a change in the air—which made no sense, very little of his skin was even exposed, but it was there nonetheless—and Swann and Mendez turned and looked at the opening where the thing had been. Even Chu faltered in his ministrations over Rigby, though his eyes never left his patient.

  Rigby gasped, and his fingers twitched like a man warming up to play the piano.

  Saxon dropped to his knee beside him. “Rigby! Can you hear me? Can you speak?”

  Rigby’s breath came in punctuated gasps that gradually resolved into random words. “The... the... it sees... the...”

  “Swann, help me.” Saxon grabbed one shoulder and Swann the other, and together they eased Rigby upright. The shocked rigidity had left his body stiff; Saxon thought insanely of a half-cooked noodle. Rigby al dente.

  Saxon swiveled Rigby’s head until their eyes met through their goggles.

  “Rigby. do you know where you are? Can you walk?”

  Rigby blinked clumsily. “You... you don’t know...”

  “Rigby!” Saxon shook his shoulders. Rigby’s eyes snapped into focus.

  “Saxon. Oh lord, Saxon...”

  Satisfied for the moment that Rigby was still with them, Saxon turned his head back toward the entry, now their exit... But he knew there was something out there. He couldn’t see it now, and he didn’t know if it was hidden somewhere in the palpable darkness. But even if it wasn’t there, it was there—the unquantifiable change in the air somehow told him so. He had that bitter metallic taste at the back of his throat, but it wasn’t in his throat at all, it was a taste in the back of his brain, and he knew he didn’t want to stop and examine how he could feel something like that. Instead he looked at the other men.

  “I don’t think we can get out that way,” he said. The others nodded in silent agreement. They knew, just like Saxon.

  Every chamber they had encountered had had at least two exits, and the cube chamber was no exception. Saxon hoped that that meant that there was a way to get back around to the mouth of these tunnels without passing the antechamber, but he wasn’t confident in his ability to maintain even a marginal sense of direction in this labyrinth. He was about to ask for suggestions from the others when Rigby lifted his hand mechanically and pointed to the second exit.

  “Left,” he said in a dry voice. “Then right and right and...”

  He trailed off, his lips still making sibilant sounds with no breath behind them. He gasped again. Saxon glanced at Swann, and together they guided Rigby to the far opening. Mendez was right behind them, shining his light past them into another claustrophobic passage. Chu threw his equipment into the med kit and hurried to keep up with them.

  The passage went past their doorway, crooking just a little as they met. Rigby’s hands were suddenly strong on their shoulders, turning them to the left.

  “Rigby,” said Saxon, “how do you know where to go?”

  “The memories...” Rigby trailed off. As they stepped fully into the corridor, Saxon caught a last glimpse of the cracked metallic cube, winking in their retreating flashlight beams.

  “From that?” Saxon asked. “The cube?”

  Rigby nodded, then his chin fell, and Saxon could hear the man’s stomach gurgle.

  “He’s going to vomit!” yelled Chu, behind them, unable to help. “His mask—”

  Saxon wrenched Rigby’s breath mask away just in time for a stream of yellow bile to project itself from Rigby’s mouth, all the way from the center of Rigby’s clenched body. He heaved again, and between heaves he gasped hard. Saxon didn’t know how they were going to give Rigby air to breathe when his every exhalation carried a payload.

  After three heaves, though, Rigby threw his head back and sagged more heavily on Saxon and Swann’s shoulders. Saxon wiped his sleeve across Rigby’s mouth and twisted the face mask back into place. Rigby didn’t even seem to notice the thin, unbreathable air his body had been trying to take in.

  “He needs rest,” Chu said. Swann pointed ahead where the passage widened out into another chamber. The four men moved the fifth one down the passage. The chamber was empty and featureless, and two more openings yawned in the blackness on the opposite side.

  Saxon and Swann tried to be gentle as they disengaged Rigby from their shoulders and lowered him to where the wall met the floor, but still Rigby collapsed and fell to the side, as if even the weak Martian gravity were too strong for him to fight against. Chu positioned himself beside Rigby and raised him back to a sitting position. Despite how completely limp his body was, Rigby’s eyes darted frenetically behind his goggles.

  Swann put his hand to the side of his head. “Saxon,” he said, “I’ve got no signal from Base.”

  “We’re still hooked to the relay?”

  Swann nodded. “I’ve got bounce-back from the relay, so I know the transmission’s going through, but there’s no response. They didn’t turn back on the repeater, either.”

  Saxon knelt in front of Rigby, right in the line where his eyes were already moving. “Rigby,” he said, calmly and deliberately. “You need to tell us what’s going on.”

  “It sees...” Rigby began, then trailed off into wet, thick coughs. Saxon gripped the edge of Rigby’s mask, ready to yank it to the side if needed, but the coughs subsided into labored breathing, as if every breath required conscious thought and effort.

  “What’s down here, Rigby?” Saxon asked.

  “From... the fifth planet.”

  “Not likely,” said Swann. “Jupiter doesn’t have any solid surface, and it definitely doesn’t have ores to mine.”

  “Not Jupiter,” said Rigby with surprising vehemence. “The fifth one... the last rocky one...”

  “You mean—the asteroid belt?” Saxon asked. “That was their home world?”

  Rigby nodded. “Came here when it... fell apart. Escaped on a piece... on an asteroid.”

  “Deimos,” said Saxon. “It’s an asteroid—it’s part of their planet, and they just rode it away.”

  Rigby nodded again.

  Mendez said, “And then—they just buried themselves here, millions of years ago? Why not come to Earth instead, if Mars is so inhospitable to them?”

  “Maybe Earth was on the far side of the sun when they needed to escape,” Saxon said. “Or maybe they miscalculated—I can’t imagine steering an asteroid is easy. But these things down here are their descendants, surely? Living down here since then?”

  Rigby shook his head. “They put themselves... they’re in the cubes. Their minds, their...” His hands twitched anxiously. “I don’t have the words!”

  “Easy,” said Chu. “You’re doing just fine.”

  “So that’s an archive of minds,” Saxon said. “But at least one survived in its own body—didn’t it?” He thought of the thing he’d seen, a mass of almost vegetable matter surmounted by a black, shellacked nucleus.

  “Those aren’t their... own bodies,” Rigby gasped. “They brought wit
h them things they’d constructed... artificial bodies that could last a long, long time. Their real bodies—”

  Rigby’s eyes widened, and his own hand clutched his mask away from his face before another spray of thin vomit leaped out of his mouth and cascaded down his front. Chu grabbed a gauze pad from his open med kit and quickly wiped Rigby’s lips before pulling his mask back into position.

  “It’s so hard,” Rigby slurred like he was under sedation, “so different—they don’t have the senses we do, they don’t use words, they—it’s so hard to use words...” Then after a pause, he spoke in a dull but clear voice: “It sees and eats.” His eyes closed.

  Saxon glanced at Chu, who shrugged. “I don’t know if it’s better to let him rest, or to get him back to Base as quick as possible,” Chu said.

  Saxon looked back the way they had come, as if he could see around corners and through the darkness millions of years old to what he had seen earlier—an ancient mind, not even in its own body.

  “I don’t know what’s best for him, but I can guess what’s best for all of us,” Saxon said. “Let’s get on the move and find a way out of here.”

  This time Mendez and Swann hoisted Rigby up, and Saxon led the way. Rigby’s earlier instruction from this point was the next right, and then the next right again. After that, Saxon supposed they’d try to rouse him and get further directions.

  Saxon tried to listen at the right-hand opening, hoping that the dusty swishings in his imagination wouldn’t keep him from hearing real ones. There was a trickle of moisture along the edge of the door—more condensation, though he hadn’t expected it to travel all this way through the underground maze. Or did that mean there was another path to the surface, closer than the one they had descended?