Driscoll and Ludmilla were quiet, staring at Cormac.
Cormac frowned and looked about the cabin.
Sergei was no longer tied up, but gibbered softly in the corner.
“What the hell? Why isn’t he tied up?”
Driscoll took Cormac by the shoulders. “Relax. We have bigger problems than what is between our two countries.”
“Tell that to the Commie I just killed.”
“Arkady?” asked Ludmilla.
“Wrestler? Yeah.”
She hung her head a moment, then composed herself as if nothing had been said.
“Sorry, Red.”
“I am Major Ludmilla Serakovna, please address me as such.”
“Whatever, Red.”
“Cormac, don’t. We need to work together to sort this out.”
“Sort what out? We do our mission, we go home. If we’ve lost Ryman, we go home.”
Driscoll shook his head. “Regardless of Ryman, I don’t know that we should go back out there. I only dared to save your life. I told you, I’ve never been so afraid before.”
Cormac shrugged him off. “This has gone far enough. Stop talking about this space monster. Stop thinking you see something that isn’t there.”
“You are half right,” broke in Ludmilla.
“Quiet, Red!” Cormac rubbed his swollen face. “How can I only be half right? I’m all the way right. You’re both delusional.”
“Sergei can see it too. He is terrified.”
“What do you mean ‘see?’ Like, right now?”
Ludmilla nodded.
Driscoll pointed at the viewing window. “It’s been at least partially visible since just after you went into the airlock to look for Ryman.”
Cormac cocked his head, disbelieving the pair of them. Sergei was tucked away in a corner sobbing. “You’re having a laugh,” grumbled Cormac, as he turned to look out the window.
He went silent, staring in disbelief at the refutation of all his accepted knowledge.
A vast blue-black shape writhed and moved its great paddles or perhaps feet one after another not unlike a caterpillar, as if there were even solid ground out the window. Stars winked randomly through the monstrosity, sometimes clouded, sometimes piercing the mottled hide as if visibility were a fluctuating rhythm. Only a score of glowing green eyes at the front remained constant.
Cormac rubbed his eyes and looked again at the gigantic behemoth.
“It almost looks like a tardigrade,” said Ludmilla.“A water-bear.”
Cormac furrowed his brow at that remark and returned to staring at the colossal monstrosity outside their window. “Never heard of ’em.”
“But they are less than six millimeters. This looks to be at least a two kilometers long, maybe more.”
Cormac watched intently, asking, “Why does it flicker?”
Ludmilla agreed. “Like it is phasing in and out.”
“I think it is only partially here.”
“Partially? You were the first one to argue it was here. Now you’re telling me it’s not?”
Driscoll nodded, “Ryman said something about opening a gate, a dimensional window. Maybe we are only seeing a shade of the creature.”
“Entity. I remember now. Ryman called it an entity.”
“A dark entity.”
“What the hell did Ryman get us into?”
The radio crackled alive through Cormac and Driscoll’s headsets. “I am still here.”
“Ryman, you son of a bitch! Where are you?”
“I appreciate your concern. I was about to open the airlock when a cosmonaut that you failed to take care of hit me repeatedly. I lost my grip on your tethers and in trying to escape his brutality, I went free-falling below the station and the X-20. Striking something in the process I was rendered unconsciousness for however long that has been. I awoke to your inane use of my name in vain.”
“Are you hurt?” grumbled Cormac, who then shrugged at Driscoll.
“Ah, yes. I am very sore and do not know that I can climb back up my line. This is much harder than I ever gave you both credit for.”
Driscoll spoke up. “I can pull you in, but before I do, we want an explanation on that thing out there. Is it dangerous?”
“Ah, very. But not to you. Not yet.” Ryman’s breathing was labored and he exhaled roughly several times between his stunted phrases. “Please, Major Driscoll, Captain Ross is injured, will you pull me inside?”
Cormac put his shattered helmet into a cabinet. “You want to give me yours and I’ll go do it?”
“No, you’re still recovering yourself. I’ll do it. I am coming, Mr. Ryman.”
“Good. I await your assistance.”
Driscoll put on his helmet, climbed into the airlock and shut the inner hatch.
“That should have been you,” said Ludmilla. “He is brave man. Not just killer.”
Cormac shrugged. “We all have our failings, and our talents.”
“You may be talented at what you do, but do not think it makes you hero or even valuable. Anyone can kill.”
Cormac smirked, “I’ve heard Russians say, ‘Laughing bride weeping wife, weeping bride laughing wife.’ Which are you?”
“I am not married,” she said, licking her lips.
Cormac flipped a switch and took off his suit.
***
Driscoll opened the outer airlock hatch. “Cormac. Did you turn your radio off? Cormac?”
There was no response.
“He must have,” grunted Ryman. “Can you see me?”
Driscoll scanned past the X-20 and saw the dangling tether going underneath. He then looked toward the Earth and the behemoth that still loomed overheard, its strange image coalescing in and out of reality. “No, Ryman. I can’t see you yet.”
“My line is from the X-20, but I am beneath the Salyut. Dragged like a dog through space. Weak as an infant. Help me.”
“I’m coming, hold on.” Driscoll held Cormac’s secured tether from the airlock back to the X-20 where he could see a line running from the cargo hold down beneath the space plane.
Ryman’s radio crackled, “Where are you?”
“I just reached the X-20. I almost have your line and I’ll pull you in.”
“Thank you.”
Driscoll took firm hold on the tether and planted his feet firmly against the X-20. It was hard work straining against his suit and keeping balance. All movement wished to betray him to become his own satellite orbiting the earth; and from every perspective he could still see the bloated phasing creature listing in the ether like a beached whale.
“Cormac, is your radio on? Are you receiving me?”
“We are alone,” said Ryman cryptically.
Driscoll wondered at that, as well as feeling no weight attached to the tether, but supposed it was because of the zero-G of space. “Are you all right, Mr. Ryman? I can’t tell if you’re about to come up from beneath the Dyna Soar or not.”
“I’m fine!” Ryman leapt up from the X-20’s cargo hold and beat Driscoll with a Baikonur wrench.
Ryman mercilessly struck Driscoll’s limbs and chest repeatedly. Having been straddling the cargo entrance, Driscoll was in the worst possible position to defend himself. In the melee he lost his grip on the X-20’s deck and began to drift away.
Ryman pulled him back and bludgeoned him against the hull of the ship.
“Cry for help and I’ll smash your faceplate in! Turn your two-way radio off.”
Driscoll groaned but did as his tormentor required.
“If our thug of a captain happens to turn his back on, I alone will do the talking. Even now I am sure that what I predicted is occurring.”
Spitting blood, Driscoll mouthed, ‘Why?’ at his cruel keeper.
“I read the psychological reports. Our good captain has a thing for redheads and accents and she for brutes. Their union is the positive-energy half of the necessary invocation. And you, my friend, you and I will be the negative half.”
&
nbsp; Ryman battered Driscoll’s limbs again. “What if it didn’t happen this way, you ask? I would make it so. I will it!”
But for the vacuum of space forcing his body apart, Driscoll would have been in a weeping fetal position, but the pressure on his suit and broken bones kept him splayed in agony.
Ryman dragged Driscoll from the X-20 toward the Salyut’s airlock hatch, following the tethered guideline left by Cormac.
“Soon enough this will all be over. Your broken soul will feed and mark the way for the coming of the Dark Levy and I, Chief of the Apostates, will rule at the Grand Decreator’s side!”
Smashing Driscoll’s body into the airlock, Ryman delivered several more brutal kicks and beatings before shutting the hatch. He pressed the Cyrillic flat-topped A button and waited as the pressurization and oxygen adjusted. He broke the seal on Driscoll’s helmet and removed it, and then his own.
Driscoll stared blankly and gasped.
Ryman returned a wicked smile and slammed Driscoll’s head against the steel wall, knocking the broken man unconscious.
***
As the airlock’s pressurization light went green, Ryman opened the hatch and pushed Driscoll through. “Captain Ross! Where are you?”
“I’m here,” said a shirt-less Cormac, as he pulled himself through the docking portal leading to the Soyuz capsule. “What happened to Driscoll?”
“Another cosmonaut that you failed to take care of! That’s what! Why was your radio off?”
Ludmilla lurked behind in the Soyuz docking portal, only half-dressed herself.
“You people,” snarled Ryman. “And your urges.”
“Hey, lay off, Ryman. I don’t have to take anything from you. I was recuperating from almost getting killed out there.”
“Yes, recuperating.”
Ludmilla saw Driscoll and rushed to his aid. “What happened? Where was he hit?”
“Everywhere, I imagine,” said Ryman, placing the Baikonur wrench in a form-fitting sheath on the wall.
She opened Driscoll’s suit and tried to awaken him.
Cormac took hold of one end of the suit and pulled, letting the bulk of the cumbersome outfit down to Driscoll’s waist.
Upon examination, it was readily apparent what instrument had done the damage. Beneath his undergarments, several wrench-shaped bruises splashed purple across his pale frame. Broken bones were obvious even to the naked eye.
Driscoll groaned.
Ludmilla looked to Cormac and shook her head.
“Maybe if I can get him back in time. What else is there to do, Ryman? Did you kill the last—” He bit back saying “cosmonaut” as he looked at Ludmilla.
“Yes, I killed him with his own wrench. He is gone. Drifting away into the void now.”
Both lovers scrutinized Ryman.
“How did you do that, exactly? Thought you said you were too weak to climb back to the station on your own.”
“I was. Driscoll pulled me back and just as I was crawling aboard the vessel and could grab your tether, that last cosmonaut, the one that you failed to eliminate, struck and beat poor Driscoll senseless. I was able to surprise the Soviet from behind.”
Cormac cocked his head, staring deep into Ryman’s eyes. “What now?”
“Watch your tone, Captain. You have failed several mission parameters today. Besides the woman, do we have yet another prisoner?”
“‘Woman?’ I am Major Ludmilla Serakovna.”
“Easy,” cautioned Cormac. “There is another passenger, Sergei Kurylenko. But he is in shock and hardly aware of his surroundings.”
“A Soviet trick, no doubt. He probably radioed a warning to Moscow the first time he was left out of sight.”
Cormac shook his head. “No, I put him in the head. He’s delirious or asleep.”
“I radioed Moscow when you latched onto our vessel,” said Ludmilla.
“So kinda moot point, Ryman. You had to know they would do that.”
Ryman smiled cruelly. “Quite. Sometimes I let others think they have the solutions and that it was all their own devising.”
Furrowing his brow, Cormac rubbed his hands across his face and asked, “So what are we doing?”
“The behemoth you see outside this ship? That leviathan that appears to be the largest living thing you have ever seen? Yes? It is not truly alive, yet it is a god in darkness. A mistress of the void, its natural state is chaos, hence its shifting reality between space and time.”
“But why is it here?”
“We summoned it.”
“We?”
“Not simply you and I. The blood we have spilt this far from the cradle of our existence on terra firma is a beacon through the void. It comes to feed.”
“On what?”
“Souls. Damned souls. All those that have perished in terror and misery, those that cannot let go of their pain, those whose light was snuffed out even before they left the womb, those ravaged with age or even those in simple quiet desperation—in short, nearly every member of humanity. Few can attain a balance to rise above and be translated.”
“So you can send it away?”
“I shall bind it to this space station.”
“That! How?”
“Think of it as a toe-hold. Simply to keep it in balance. It will feed and I will manipulate its power as I invert the Tree of Death and fully enter, navigate and then command the Qliphothic realm.”
“How?”
“I will fully open the gate allowing its entrance to our world.”
“Wrong answer,” said Cormac.
Ryman quickly withdrew a small revolver from his pocket and smirked. “I have accounted for everything.”
Cormac raised his palms in cautious readiness.
“I do not expect you, a mere soldier, to understand half of the gifts I have laid at your very feet. It never ceases to amaze me how people only account for one set of variables. I account for them all.”
“Why?” asked Ludmilla.
“‘Why?’ is the lament of the damned. Truly the only thing that surprised me, Captain Ross, was that you let Sergei live. Not that it matters.”
“Then I’ll ask,” said Cormac. “Why the deception?”
“Because I can. I enjoy that surprise when the terrible revelation of truth hits people. They cannot handle it. Lies are what people want, what they crave, what they deserve.”
“You are the real monster,” spat Ludmilla.
“So it would seem. Bring Sergei here, I want him to see this as well.”
Cormac watched with a wary eye but went to the head and brought the disturbed, babbling man into the cabin.
Still shivering, Sergei saw Ryman’s gun and look of cruel intent and crouched beside Driscoll in submission.
“Even in his madness, he knows the order of things,” said Ryman. He pulled the trigger and put a deafening shot into Sergei’s chest.
Ludmilla screamed.
Sergei crumpled beside Driscoll.
“You bastard!” shouted Cormac.
Ludmilla glanced toward the portal window and saw the leviathan pulse and flex as Sergei’s life force faded.
Ryman held his revolver at the ready, “Hold your tongue, Captain, and respect your betters. There is nothing so ironic as a killer like yourself judging me for doing what you yourself do on a regular basis. Remember, this sacrament could contain your doom or your salvation.”
“I never killed anyone in cold blood.”
“Whatever lie you need to tell yourself, Captain, the end result betrays the truth. You outmatched every man you ever fought, otherwise you would not still be here, and in so doing you knew you would be victorious and thusly what you did was in cold blood.”
Cormac shook his head. “I never know what will happen.”
Ryman chuckled. “Tell yourself that again, if you like.”
Ludmilla focused on the abomination outside. Was it growing larger or moving closer?
“You see it, do you not? How it grows stronger with o
ur very proximity and ruin.”
“It’s growing?”
“Of course, Captain. I learned from the Great Beast personally, when I was but a lad, that it must have tripled in size the day we bombed Dresden.”
Cormac tried to fathom the far-reaching history of this vile sorcery.
“Understand, I bear you no malice, Captain Ross. I greatly respect your contribution to the cause of destruction and a return to the symmetry of darkness. For you there is a place in the Kohort of Darkness. If you learn subservience and embrace the unknowable wisdom, you might even become one of my chosen lieutenants.”
Cormac concealed his disgust as best he could, but for a man hard as diamond, not wearing such upon his scarred face was difficult. “What do you want?”
“What I have always wanted. You to pilot me back to earth after I perform the ceremony that will bind the Mistress of the Void to this station and thusly our very reality.”
“Why could you not do this from the Earth?” asked Ludmilla, with a tone daring Ryman to shoot her.
“I needed to be close. To see for myself the marvelous work and wonder. I needed to feel the darkness and know that I did this. And,” he paused a long while, “it can be complicated piercing the veil between worlds. It takes joint positive and negative energies. You both supplied the positive and now I shall perform the negative.”
Cormac and Ludmilla stared in wonder as Ryman produced his grimoire from a pouch built into his space suit.
“I recited the opening passages earlier to bring the shadow of the leviathan you see outside into our realm. It was always there, but fully ineffable and nigh invisible until tonight.”
“It was always there?”
“Of course. Nothing spontaneously appeared. Everything has always existed.”
Ryman thumbed the thick pages, looking for the correct verse, ever watchful and keeping his revolver trained on Cormac.
“What more do you want me to do?” asked Cormac, clenching his jaw.
“Nothing. Take Driscoll’s helmet to replace your own and go prepare the X-20 for our departure.”
“You mean to leave him here?”
“Of course. He is useless, except as a conduit. His fractured form is perfect. If you will serve, you will obey.”
“And her?”
“Forget her. She was merely a tool for the positive energies. You may dispose of her if you wish.”
Space Eldritch Page 19