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

  They passed a tech serf, his body shattered on the floor, electronics still whole, one too-large mechanical arm and plastic legs of different sizes. His face looked entirely human. His blood, mixed with hydraulic fluid, refracted rainbows like an oil slick. He’d been hacked with a melee weapon, so as not to damage his cyberware. Was he in hell now, for what he was, or heaven? Spetzna had never been clear on the fate of a tech serf’s soul. He looked up as he passed.

  “How many?” Spetzna the Automaton asked.

  “Forty families.”

  Spetzna the Man felt like he was going to vomit, but Spetzna the Russian Paragon didn’t break stride. “Families?”

  “It’s a long haul cargo ship,” Pasha said. “A lot of them have converted into small villages. They can be away for a year at a time, and if you’re willing to sacrifice cargo for living space, there’s enough room.”

  So these people turned away from more than half of their profits so as not to be separated from their wives and children. These were the people that the Greeks had butchered. The war dragged at them all, but this was beyond the normal, casual atrocities. This was beyond petty arguments or the Schism.

  “You haven’t seen the worst of it.” Pasha stopped at the end of the hall and gestured for him to go first. Spetzna had to twist slightly to get the bulk of his combat armor through the hatch. On the other side, Speztna the Clockwork Man took over completely, and Spetzna the God-Fearing flinched away.

  The bodies lay in piles against the wall of the mess hall, husbands on the bottom, wives on top of them, children strewn in front. Pulser holes riddled the wall. The tables lay pushed aside, allowing for clean fields of fire. Five of his troopers stood around, looking tiny and lost in their heavy combat armor, their pulsers in their hands, fidgeting as if aching for someone to shoot.

  “The heretics,” Pasha said.

  “Yes,” Spetzna said. Still, the Eastern Orthodox bastards might be heretics, but it was a long way from denouncing their rightful patriarch to butchering children. He didn’t really have a response. He just went colder.

  “What are we going to do?” Pasha asked.

  “We’re going to find them,” Spetzna said.

  “At least they didn’t torture them this time.”

  Spetzna shook his head. “Too many victims. They would have tried something, even against pulsers. The Greeks just would have had to put them down anyway.” This was, what, the twenty-first ship or border community they’d found raided, all presumably by the same Greek frigate.

  “Major?”

  Evidently Spetzna had stood there too long without saying anything. Deep in the most guarded corner of his heart, he screamed in horror. On the outside, he turned to his XO. “What does the placement of the bodies tell you?”

  “They killed the men before the women,” Pasha said.

  “And then the children,” Spetzna said. “They made them watch. They got them organized. They told the men that they’d go easy on the women if they lined up peacefully, and maybe they did. The women are all clothed at least. They made the women and children watch as they killed the men. Then they made the children watch as they lined up the women, probably with more promises about the children, and killed them over the bodies of their husbands and fathers. Then, after the children had watched every horror that they could possibly imagine, they killed them as well.” A miracle of crowd control and organization, really. Spetzna hated himself for noticing.

  “What do we do?”

  “What do you think we do?”

  Pasha looked at him a long time, then turned back to the scene before him. “Do you know when you’re least frightening, Major?”

  “When is that?”

  “When you’re yelling.”

  He was yelling. He was yelling deep inside. Stop. Make it all Stop.

  “And why is that?” Spetzna’s voice was as smooth as vodka in a frosted glass.

  “Because that’s when we know you aren’t really angry.”

  He was calm. Collected. The anger was deep inside. The anger was in that part of his heart no one ever saw. The part denied him by God and Country. The place locked away behind a wall of Russian Duty.

  “And what does my voice tell you now?” The words came out like breath on a razor blade. What could drive humans to this level of depravity?

  “It tells me the Greeks are going to pay.”

  Pay. He would have to kill them. That was his job. There were no authorities to censure an enemy nation. There wasn’t a police force to turn them over to. This was war, and he was a soldier. He had to stop this. His duty said so.

  “It tells me, Major, that you might be the angriest man alive.”

  No. Spetzna was made of ice and gears. Only the guarded part of his heart knew anger. Only it knew pain. Only it knew his terrible, terrible secret. He killed for God and Country, but he wasn’t a killer. No. Not in that one, guarded place. Because strip away the duty and the war and the talent for killing and you would be left with the one truth of Spetzna’s existence.

  In his heart of hearts, he was a pacifist.

  It’s just that around that was wrapped a wall of obligation. Around that, a murderer. The angriest man alive? Hardly. Spetzna was cold, emotionless steel.

  “Sir!” one of his troopers shouted.

  Spetzna glided over to where the man stood. He’d pulled back one of the bodies. A man. There was something smeared in the blood between his shoulder and the wall. Writing. The man had written something in his own blood, even has he died. Written and then died on top of it. It hadn’t quite been obliterated by fresh blood. His heart must have stopped soon after.

  “I can’t make it out,” Pasha said.

  “It says Daedalus,” Spetzna said.

  “What’s a Daedalus?” the trooper asked.

  “Someone out of Greek mythology,” Spetzna said, “but I’m guessing something else. Radio the Catherine. Have them find a tech serf with a ship registry grafted into his head.

  “I’m betting the Daedalus is the name of our Greek ship.”

  ***

  Icarus Argyris knelt in the meditation dome protruding from the top of the Daedalus, his mind casting out across the vast empty tapestry of space, his soul expanding into the universe around him, seeking. He knelt, his soul quiet for once, submissive before God even as it battled with the infinite, expansive desert that surrounded him. Despite his personal misgivings, the Commander wanted another ship, and as a priest, Icarus was one of the few who could find it.

  And out there somewhere was more than just a void. Somewhere, in all that open infinity, was God. He had spoken to others, but never Icarus. Icarus wasn’t worthy.

  “Do you think the church assigned you to this ship ironically?” Colin Spiros said beside him.

  Icarus didn’t break his meditation. The young father was always trying to break Icarus’s concentration. The boy was determined to prove that his Father Superior was fallible. Either that or he just thought it was funny. It was hard to tell with Colin.

  “You know. Your name: Icarus... the ship’s name: Daedalus.”

  Was that something out there, in the night, some twinkle of a human soul? A glimmer of like recognizing like? In the vast void, darker by far in the spiritual than in the temporal, did Icarus sense a light?

  “Father/son? Wings of wax? Ring any bells? I mean, someone had to put that together when they were assigning you, didn’t they?”

  Yes, a spark, and another. There were human souls out there, and slowly he oriented on them, reciting the Litany of Bearings in his head as the souls resolved. A long way off but closing fast. A ship. Russian heretics?

  “You don’t usually think of the old fogies as particularly funny, but they have to have a sense of humor in there somewhere, don’t they? Everyone has a sense of humor. It’s an integral part of the human condition.”

  More and more souls. Eight. Ten. Twenty. Icarus’s eyes shot open. Not a merchant vessel. One hundred. Two hundred. Not a passenger liner
in this part of space. A military ship, then.

  What did he do? He had to report it. This wasn’t some civilian ship that the crew would torture and cast aside. There would be no moral quandaries about the acts of the crew, no dilemmas surrounding his personal role as the crew spent their hate and frustration into the Russians. This was a military vessel. He had to tell them.

  He started to stand when another presence brushed his mind, casual, silken, powerful enough to drive him to his knees. It burned in his mind like a thousand suns, exploding through his consciousness, vast, incomprehensible, perfect and fearsome all at once. It was... divine?

  “Father Superior!” Colin shouted and was instantly at his side, grasping an arm, holding him steady. Icarus reached out and grabbed that arm, so ephemeral in its reality, wisps of vapor next to the intellect he’d just touched.

  “Father Colin,” he croaked.

  “Yes, sir,” Colin’s hand brushed over his brow.

  “I think I just had a visitation.”

  Colin looked down at him, his brow furrowed. “You mean like a ghost?”

  “No, Colin.” Icarus could barely say the words. “Like the Lord, Our Father.”

  “Sir, you need to lie down.” The doubt rang heavy in the boy’s voice. The brow under those Alexander curls strained with furrows to the point of bursting.

  “I’m not sick!” Icarus snapped.

  “Sir, you were casting your soul into nothing. It’s bound to have an effect on your mind. I’ve mentioned this before.”

  “I am the Father Superior of this ship,” Icarus said. “If God was going to speak to anyone here, wouldn’t it be me?” Wouldn’t it?

  “Sir, God doesn’t speak to people,” Colin said.

  “He speaks to the patriarchs and the bishops all the time.”

  “The Russian Orthodox bastards claim he appears before their Supreme Patriarch.”

  “Our patriarchs aren’t heretics like them.”

  “No, of course not. Not them.” Colin almost managed to keep the derision out of his voice. He did a good enough job that Icarus could ignore it.

  All this would have to wait. The ship. A military ship. The hound that they’d feared had come, braying at their heels. He climbed Colin and managed to achieve a standing position.

  Finally standing, he could see the shape of the frigate below the meditation dome. The commoners believed the spiritual gifts of the priests made them devastating forces, but the reality was they couldn’t sense anything down in the ship with all those blazing souls. Only up here, in the void, could they cast their senses out and spot a ship. Even after all their religious training, they could barely do this.

  But spot a ship he had.

  “That will have to wait,” he said. “Colin, there’s a ship. Military, coming in at maximum burn.”

  “We’ll need to tell the Commander.”

  “Lead the way.”

  Colin gave him one more cautious glance then started down the ladder into the ship. Icarus glanced once more at the heavens. He could still sense the ship out there. Nothing else except... no, that was just a maelstrom in the distance, churning with the death energy of all the people who had perished there. Nothing else but the ship. God had left him. But not abandoned him.

  And it was God.

  ***

  The next day Spetzna stood on the bridge of the Catherine, staring out the great canopy and into space. The Daedalus was a ship, the blessed/damned little tech serf database had confirmed it. It was a ship and it was out there.

  That could be anywhere, however, and as Spetzna looked through the canopy, space stretched out to infinity, cold and black, pitiless and ancient, the kind of darkness that could open your mind up and suck your essence into the void. Spetzna stared into this abyss now, the falling sensation clutching with talons at his belly, and he knew, suddenly, that if they found the ship, it would mean his death. He knew it in his gut, and his gut was never wrong.

  “Major?” Pasha said beside him.

  Spetzna managed not to jump at the sound. He hadn’t known his second was there. He had forgotten the Captain and all the tech serfs were there. Just him and nothingness. “Yes, Pavel Ivanovich?”

  “You are a long way away, sir,” Pasha said. Three more of his troopers stood near the doorway, out of sight of the captain in his gunmetal chair. Spetzna glanced at them and then back at his XO.

  “Pavel Ivanovich,” Spetzna said, “I am never farther away than the next order.”

  Pasha looked out the canopy in front of him. “Of course not, sir.”

  Now the sounds of the bridge hummed to the fore, the cybernetic buzzing of the tech serfs, divine and corrupt at the same time, under it all where you could feel it only in your molars and your testicles. Spetzna didn’t risk a second look at the dark, stained metal of the bridge. If he looked away again, the vast emptiness in front of him might peel him inside out.

  A huffing noise entered the bridge behind him, apologizing to the soldiers, and Spetzna didn’t need to look to know it was the Father Superior, that this was it. He closed his eyes. It was time to do what he did best. It was time to murder and slaughter until the blood filled his nose and throat and there was nothing left to do but choke.

  “We’ve found it,” the Father Superior said. Still, Spetzna didn’t turn.

  “The Daedalus?” The Captain asked.

  “Nothing definitive,” the Father Superior said, “But it’s two-hundred and seventy six souls.” Many of the men thought the priests could read a human’s mind, but Spetzna knew better than that. If a priest could do more than sense a general number and direction with his divine gifts then the church’s intel would be a hell of a lot better.

  “That’s the correct size, all right,” the Captain said. “Major Mikhail Vladimirovich!” the Captain called to Spetzna.

  Spetzna turned, looking back across the cramped bridge at the Captain, tall and gaunt as a corpse, framed by the blackened, rusted metal of the wall plating behind him. “Yes, sir,” he said.

  “Mikhail Vladimirovich, it is time to do what you do.”

  The Russian Orthodox Church had found his talent when he was a boy, on the playground. They had found him and they had trained him in combat and the litanies of strategy. He had killed, had torn men to tatters with his bare hands. He had felt the rage, and the rage swelled in him now.

  “Yes, sir,” he said and pushed past the anger. The rage tasted like pennies, smelled like cordite and blood. It rose and crashed, hot and familiar. They had found the Daedalus. It was time to do his job, because he was a master of his craft and that’s what masters did.

  “Gather the soldiers,” he told Pasha, who hadn’t missed a step at his side.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I will be in the prep room, checking my gear.” He growled the words.

  “Yes, sir.”

  The killing was about to begin. Damn it.

  ***

  The battle. The Daedalus. The death.

  They’d found it.

  Spetzna charged forwards through the smoke and fire at the edge of the linked air locks, the layered plates of his composite armor comfortable and smelling of sweat and leather, a second skin of death. His pulser throbbed and made chuffing sounds in his hand as AP/Explosive rounds ripped down the corridors of the Greek ship, puncturing hull and armor alike, a ripping harbinger of his will, reaching out through spidery webs of tracers.

  The enemy wore armor of their own, their religious symbols Eastern Orthodox, the cut and colors Greek—a light blue. One of them looked Spetzna in the eye just as the major’s rounds found their mark, detonating his head into a fine red mist and pink-grey chunks that reminded Spetzna absurdly of tofu.

  With each death, with each scream, Spetzna’s soul screamed with them. With each round, the screws twisted on his reluctant heart, the blood soaked his faithful soul, darkening it in a shade of maroon, ever closer to that pitch black that would eventually carry him to hell.

  “Kozel!”
Pasha screamed, pushing forward from the docking bay, his bullets ripping the air.

  Thou shalt not violate the sanctity of a functional ship. The first of the proscriptions. Spetzna cringed as the bullets ripped through the walls. A terrible sin, but just barely acceptable. Only on par with a commandment, perhaps. Thou shalt not kill, but commandments were made to be broken and walls could be repaired. He wanted to reach for the power axe on his back, but the tactician in him forced him to stick to his pulser.

  Spetzna and his soldiers took the first intersection in minutes and he ordered soldiers down each corridor, pushing out, looking for key areas of the ship. If they could seize ground quickly, the ship would fall with only a few dead. Spetzna’s soldiers thought he had such a successful record because of his grasp of battlefield tactics, but the reality was much simpler than that. A quick and decisive battle meant less killing in the long run, less poison to stain his soul.

  Ten minutes into the battle they rallied in a small, dirty mess. The blanket jammers they’d brought from the Catherine took out all wireless comms but those carried by Russian commanders. Spetzna spoke to them now, the jammers eating at the edges of the sound.

  “All units, report in.”

  “We’ve taken the port access.”

  “We have an aft causeway. I believe it will lead us straight to engineering.”

  “I don’t know where the fuck we are, Major, but we own it like a bad tattoo.”

  The reports came in one by one and Spetzna pushed past the deaths he’d caused getting to this point. The depredations of this ship were too vast. Murder and torture and piracy up and down the border, in the name of the state, the church, and the war. Better it end soon.

  Something tickled his mind, as if in response to his thoughts, like spider legs in his thoughts. What the hell? He looked around, searching for an external source to the internal sensation. Nothing. His conscience. It was just his conscience.