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

  Earth would have no chance.

  Unless... I still posed some kind of threat to them.

  I stopped the rover and slowly looked over my shoulder into the bed. There were crates of seismic charges from the day when I’d done my subsurface survey. Singly, they were puny and couldn’t hurt much. But detonated as a whole?

  I sat back down and floored the rover, turning ninety degrees and using the GPS signal from the Gossamer in orbit to ensure I was on course for the pyramid. Bednar may have locked me out of voice and video communication with the Gossamer’s return module crew, but I still had a reliable connection to the one-way link.

  If I could give them a reason to leave the descent module and come after me...

  “So why did you wait?” I asked over the wireless to my three former teammates. “You obviously came all this way—traveled between the stars—to find fresh partners to work with. If you’ve been here as long as you claim, why not just go directly to Earth and take it immediately? Humans were probably living in caves back then. It would have been no contest.”

  Silence.

  “Cat got your tongues? Huh? What was the problem?”

  “There were... complications.”

  That time it was all three of them speaking in unison.

  “Complications? Did your ship crash? Seems like you’ve got a lot of ships if what I think is true, is true. How did all of them get trapped on Titan, buried beneath all the ice? Hell of a prison, if you ask me. Frozen for God knows how long.”

  “Your limited concept of God has nothing to do with us,” said the three.

  “Really? Well, if it wasn’t God then who did trap you here? Because that’s the only logical explanation, now that I think about it. Titan is worthless. A purgatory. No sane being comes here to stay. I reckon you were sent here against your will. All of you. It’s a shame whoever condemned you to Titan didn’t destroy you outright.”

  “The beings who wronged us and condemned us to eternal unconsciousness were foolish. They did not realize we still have power, even when robbed of energy and suspended in time. They also did not see that the once puny inhabitants of your Earth would rise one day to unlock us from our crypt. Now that we are free, your race shall become our chariot. We shall use it to burn a trail of fire across the heavens! We shall have our revenge!”

  Three humans, shouting as one: angrily, and with bloodlust.

  I felt a raw chill run down my spine.

  Whatever was powerful enough to put down the aliens once, would be powerful enough to put down the aliens again. And this time it would be all the Earth put down with them. Could such a super-race exist? I imagined that if it were up to me to do the job, and I had a whole star system infected with the nanocyborgs, I’d figure out a way to make the home star blow up and sterilize everything out to the Oort Cloud.

  Or worse.

  Though what worse might look like...

  I willed myself onward, toward the pyramid.

  “Well, you can’t have your revenge just yet,” I said. “There’s still one human on Titan with the will to fight back. So if you can afford to leave me to do my worst, by all means, take off. But if you can’t afford to leave me, you’ll have to come out here and get me before I do something you’ll all regret.”

  There was no response that time.

  Just the telltale clicking of the wireless signal dropping out in my helmet speakers.

  I had them.

  But what I’d do about it? I wasn’t yet sure.

  ***

  First change I noticed as I hit the bottom of the ramp was that the air was oxygenated. The little atmosphere icon in my FOV was blinking green as I came to a stop, towing the sled full of seismic charges behind me. Made sense. How else could Bednar have coaxed Kendelsen into taking his helmet off? Though how the pyramid had produced the oxygen, or what controls had been used, still wasn’t obvious.

  I kept my helmet on as I towed the sled over to where the alien corpse lay.

  Poor bastard.

  As gruesome as he was—she was? It was?—the creature had apparently been only a pawn.

  For the first time, I looked at the beast with a sense of kinship, as well as pity.

  Had its world been overrun and absorbed? How many such species had suffered a similar fate?

  I began to understand that the nanocyborgs weren’t just vermin, they were about as literally evil as anything mankind had ever encountered. I wasn’t a spiritual person, but the fact that they had dismissed God as if He were both real and inconsequential made me cold inside. Any race that could wave away God like that...

  I pushed the sled filled with charges up to the edge of the bowl where the alien host resided. I began to daisy-chain the charges together and throw them into the basin, until I’d surrounded the entire alien with a halo of explosives.

  Thus far I’d been unable to find or make access to the rest of the pyramid. Since the area beneath the alien’s body was the only place I’d been unable to check, I figure it was time to find out if that was the key.

  I unwound the detonation line all the way back up the ramp to the waiting rover. A quick 360 scan showed no sign of anyone or anything in my immediate vicinity, so I flipped open the trigger guard on the det line’s control box, took a deep breath, and depressed the big red button.

  A tiny vibration could be felt through the ice.

  After a few seconds, black, belching fumes poured from the door.

  I tapped on my helmet lamps and plunged back down the ramp.

  It was virtually impossible to see.

  When I reached the bottom of the ramp, the entire room was clogged with blackness. Like squid ink.

  I stumbled forward, hoping to see the mild green light of the depression in the floor where the alien was.

  Suddenly there was nothing underneath me and I plummeted, screaming.

  Thankfully, the fall was not a great one. I crashed down onto a pile of loose debris. Scrambling to my feet, I scanned about me with my lamps.

  I guessed I’d fallen about twenty meters. Lethal in Earth gravity. Not so bad in Titan’s. Especially with something to cushion me when I hit bottom.

  I thought I could identify bits and piece of the alien host’s corpse here and there on the floor.

  It seemed I’d broken through into a huge corridor.

  I took a few steps forward, and suddenly light sprang on—so bright I had to reach up and flip my helmet’s unused sun visor into place.

  It was if the entire ceiling, save for the portion where I’d made the hole, had lit up like a bulb.

  Now this was more like it.

  I ran the way I’d first walked, until I came to another doorway similar to the one I’d first discovered on the surface the day the Gossamer’s descent stage had landed. Only this door was huge. On the order of magnitude of the creature whom I’d obliterated trying to find a path into the deeper recesses of the pyramid.

  I jumped, pressing the small circle in the center, thus causing the door to slide open.

  I walked through it, then stopped short just past the threshold.

  A room as big as a basketball arena. Hundreds upon hundreds of mildly glowing basins, each with an alien cupped at its center.

  Only they didn’t all look the same as the one I’d first seen.

  A grotesque menagerie of different life forms.

  All dormant. None of them Earthly in origin.

  I wondered if they had each come from the same home planet? I guessed they were merely nanocyborg hosts, just like the first alien. And just as Bednar, Majack, and Kendelsen had become.

  There was a large, wide ramp leading down to the room’s main floor.

  I began walking down the ramp, and was pummeled to my knees by a sudden, overwhelming impression of surprise and fear.

  One thought coalesced in my mind, but from an outside source: HE IS NOT PART OF US, HE SHOULD NOT BE HERE!

  “That’s right,” I said, willing myself to my feet. My head hurt and my se
nse of balance was off, but I realized I’d found what I was searching for: real leverage, to use against the enemy while bargaining on behalf of the human race. “I shouldn’t be here. But I am. Do you hear me? I’m a free man. The last one on Titan. And as long as I’ve got the power to do something—”

  “You’ll do what?”

  I stopped short.

  A human figure in a beige robe approached me from across the room. His feet were bare and he was bald, save for a semicircle of white hair that went from the back of one ear around to the back of another. He did not smile, but he also did not frown. I watched as he approached, then stood before me. His expression was passive.

  Another overwhelming impression:

  HE HAS AWAKENED THE SENTINEL!

  I staggered. The sensation of nausea was too much. I was going to vomit in my helmet.

  The figure—the Sentinel—quickly reached out an arm and steadied me. The moment his fingers touched my arm, my nausea vanished and I stood upright.

  “What are you?” I asked.

  “That is a question I should be asking you, but now that I have ascertained your being, I need not wonder any longer. I have been given your form according to your thoughts, so that I might communicate with you as something you will understand. Know this. You are trespassing, young human. Go back to where you came from. It is not safe for your kind here.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” I said. “Three of my kind have been infected by the—”

  “Prisoner 2663. Yes, I know. Already, those three infected humans have entered the upper reaches of this vessel. What you think of as a pyramid. Prisoner 2663 is devious. I have been inactive for a long time. Somehow Prisoner 2663 has managed to mask its more subtle activities from my passive senses, but now that you have made me active again I shall—”

  “What are you?” I repeated.

  The Sentinel looked at me with what seemed to be pity.

  “I am unlike anything you can comprehend. A mind. A machine. A soul. A power. I am all of these, and yet I was not so perceptive as to be aware of how much Prisoner 2663 was able to cloud my sight. Very worrisome. Very worrisome indeed.”

  “You have to help me,” I said. “The nanocyborgs want to claim my planet. They’re going to take over Earth.”

  “That is to be expected. Prisoner 2663 is just one of many criminal entities in your galaxy. There are convicts far more heinous, if your limited intelligence can imagine it. In the case of Prisoner 2663 the chief crime was the destruction of free will.”

  “Free will?” I said.

  “Yes. It is the original right of all sentient, sapient species across the universe.”

  “And what rights do the nanocyborgs have?”

  “Prisoner 2663 began as a noble experiment: the blending of biology and technology to create something able to help mortal sapience transcend what you might call merely human limitations.”

  “So what went wrong?”

  “What always goes wrong when mortal hands attempt to recreate paradise. Only, Prisoner 2663 was more cunning than most. Once it evaded quarantine and began to spread, it devoured tens of civilizations before it was properly policed, ultimately being confined here. To this moon you call Titan. To be kept in stasis.”

  “But why preserve the nanocyborgs at all when you yourself say they are such an obvious threat? A threat that you now admit is capable of sneaking past your safeguards? You should wipe them out. Destroy them utterly.”

  “A just policeman has to have rules,” the Sentinel said, looking dour. “Those who created me are bound by laws which even they dare not break, thus I am incapable of breaking them.”

  “And if the Earth becomes another pawn of this... this Prisoner 2663? If human civilization becomes the first in a new list of victims?”

  The Sentinel’s eyes looked down. He seemed chastened.

  “I regret that neither I nor my makers could see all ends. When Prisoner 2663 was confined to this place, humanity was using sticks and stones, little more. We did not realize that you could be touched by the collective unconscious of Prisoner 2663, much less that your own ambition would take you into space, in your quest for the stars. You were a humble species then. You are not so humble now.”

  Echoing footsteps made me turn and look up to the doorway at the top of the huge ramp. Bednar, Kendelsen and Majack appeared there. I could just barely see their faces, at that distance. They were not amused.

  As a trio, they spat out something in an entirely alien tongue, and to which the visage of the old man I’d been conversing with reacted by stepping a few paces in front of me, and brandishing his hand in the air.

  Underneath my three former teammates, the floor suddenly gave way. A concave depression sank instantly, and before they could stand up again, they were frozen in place as a mild, eerie green light shown from the floor of the new basin.

  “There,” said the Sentinel. “The spread of the infection has been halted.”

  “Not entirely,” I said. “We took samples from a creature we found in the pyramid levels above. There is infected blood and tissue aboard my spacecraft.”

  “Then it is also infected and should be destroyed.”

  “How?” I said. “Do you have control over the surface too?”

  “No,” said the Sentinel. “My power, and the power of others like me, exists only in these spaces. Within the pyramids themselves. You must go and do this.”

  “And if I can’t? If Prisoner 2663 finds a way to get free and take over my body too?”

  The Sentinel considered me.

  “Human,” it said. “Would you consider the safeguarding of your species to be of utmost importance?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “And would you be willing to sacrifice yourself if it also meant ensuring that Prisoner 2663 never escapes this place, nor poses a threat to your species, ever again?”

  “Yes.”

  The Sentinel looked at me.

  Then the slightest of smiles touched his lips.

  “So be it,” was all he said before he rushed at me, enveloping me with his arms and kissing my forehead.

  ***

  The Gossamer’s return module is gone now. She left precisely 25 days after the last known contact with the descent module. Which I handily sank to a depth of about five hundred meters after melting the ice at the base.

  The ice has re-frozen again. The remnant of Prisoner 2663 that Captain Bednar freed has been neutralized. Along with Captain Bednar herself, who has become a permanent guest of the pyramid over which I now stand watch.

  If there is any trace of her left within herself, I hope Bednar understands. And Majack and Kendelsen, too. There wasn’t any choice. Accident or no, deliberate or no, once they became an active spreader of the contagion, their ultimate fate was sealed.

  I know, I checked.

  The Sentinel confirms that no organism so infected by Prisoner 2663 has ever been cured.

  As for me, I can’t yet say for certain what the Sentinel has done to me. In many ways it feels as if he is part of me, or that I am part of him. I’ve only begun to test the limits of my power.

  I’ve spent a lot of time recording my thoughts on all that’s happened, so that when men return to Titan they will find the disc. I left it in the rover, which now sits atop the ice, alone. Because I re-sank the pyramid to a sufficient depth too, long with all the others. And there are many. The longer I can keep those pyramids out of human reach, the better.

  Maybe by the time mankind is capable of raising and investigating them, mankind will no longer see the need?

  I can’t say I understand the ethos that prevents the Sentinel from destroying the nanocyborgs. He seems very old, and very unwilling to dispense information at anything more than a trickle. For my own good, he tells me.

  But I suppose I’ve got time.

  Enough to last for centuries. Or longer?

  Whatever it takes to keep Earth and the other uninhabited worlds of the Milky Way safe
—from the nanocyborgs at least.

  Prisoner 2663. The shadows of Titan. My charge.

  They never really sleep. Not entirely.

  Even now, they’re calling for you too.

  Can you hear them?

  The Fury in the Void

  Robert J Defendi

  They were killing people again.

  Spetzna reached up to scratch the stubble on his chin but stopped when he hit the visor on his helmet. He lowered his hand and tried not to appear impatient as he waited for the airlock to cycle. Around him, the grapple fields hummed and held the freighter in dock with the Catherine the Great. After a moment, the cycle finished and the airlock doors opened.

  The wall was something out of an abattoir, but all he could smell in his armor was recycled air with a hint of sweat. He felt the old rage rising, but that wouldn’t do. His men needed Spetzna the Leader, so he took a breath and the rage was replaced with cold detachment. The man might recoil. The soldier could persevere.

  He stepped out into the hall as his second-in-command approached the hatch. He hadn’t opened his visor. Good. If that was the way they were all going to play this, that was fine with him.

  “Pasha?” he said.

  “Major, I told you there’s no reason for you to be on this ship. We don’t know what kind of booby traps the Greeks might have left behind.” Greeks weren’t usually ones to leave booby-traps, but these Greeks... there was something deeply wrong about them.

  “My command,” Spetzna said.

  “During combat, certainly,” Pasha said. “But this is risk with no reward.”

  “I have to see it.” Spetzna used his command voice, and Pasha fell into place beside him. They started down the hall. It wasn’t all as bloody as the hatch—obviously the Russian merchantmen had made a stand there. The hallway bore smears as they walked through, just barely able to fit shoulder to shoulder as they walked. The old deck plates were charcoal-colored from centuries of booted feet, the metal warped slightly from the press of countless bodies. The lighting flickered from pulser damage, making everything slanted and off-kilter. Or maybe that was the grav plating.