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

  I step forward to look down the cross passage. Nothing to the left. Nothing to the right. I proceed through, the key card’s map directing me straight ahead.

  I hear running footsteps behind me. I turn. Nothing. The noise grows, coming from the left cross passage. The sound of running feet goes by to the right, but I can see nothing making the noise. I step back into the intersection and look to the right. I can still hear the feet retreating, as if whatever is running is only a few meters away, but I see only empty hallway.

  On a hunch, I cover my eye.

  It’s foggy, out of focus, but I can see a black man, wearing black clothing, with forty centimeters of black dreadlocks flailing about his head as he runs. His clothing is loose, flowing, and patterned in—oh shit, his clothing has writing on it!

  “STOP!” I shout, my voice cracking in a screech, spittle flying with the sloppy, plosive P at the end.

  The man casts a glance back at me. Not a black man. Not a man at all. Or a woman. Where a human would have a face, this dreadlocked thing has a sickly pale orb, the blue of drowned lips and featureless except for a deep, black vertical slash. For just a moment his “face” looks like a cat’s-eye, pupil centered in a pallid field, haloed in writhing black tendrils.

  A chill rockets up my spine, an electric frost that shoots out to tingling fingertips. He turns away, still running. I clutch my key card tightly in my left hand and begin to chase after him.

  Two steps, then three, and I am leaning into a sprint. I need both arms pumping for balance, so I lower the hand covering my eye. The dreadlocked, rune-clothed figure vanishes, and I stumble in surprise. I cover my left eye, and he fails to reappear. Wait, was it my left eye I covered at first, or was it my right? I switch eyes. Nothing. I open both eyes and stare, hard.

  I stand like that for a moment, my heart pounding, my fingers tingling, both eyes watering and desperate for a blink. I can feel my pulse hard and painful behind my right eye, the migraine throbbing in time to my heart.

  Is this normal? Does anybody else not-hear what they see, and then not-see what they hear? And is the “dreadman” supposed to be on this ship? I should say something to the XO when I meet him, shouldn’t I?

  The key card chimes a dissonant chord. I look down and see the map flashing angrily, as if I should know better than to stray from the path, let alone ask these sorts of questions.

  I turn around, walk back to the intersection, and turn left. A cheerful, golden, two-tone chime from the card sounds very much like a singsong “thank you.”

  ***

  My map has led me to a round room bustling with uniformed stewards, the susurrus of their communication unintelligible from the entry where I stand. At the center of the room, one figure stands still. More accurately, she stands with stillness, the eye of the storm, the hub of the gristmill. She is obviously in charge. I don’t know why I was expecting the XO to be a man, but if she remembers me then I’d damned well better not appear even slightly surprised by her gender.

  Those around her move in deference not just to her, but to the sight line she drills to me, as if they know that space is about to convey deadly power from the center of the room to its edge. Her right eyebrow rocks up as if on rails, leaving the rest of her face unmoved, a potent metaphor for the degree of control she effortlessly extends.

  “Mister Simonson. Welcome to cabin ops.” She steps forward along that sight line. The creases in her slacks appear sharp enough to give the baggage security people pause. I shouldn’t be looking at her legs. Eyes up, meeting hers. “It is an honor to have you aboard, and a pleasure to see you here in good health.” Her gaze is friendly and familiar. Expectant. And I have no idea who this woman is.

  Shit.

  All thoughts of my visionary dreadman flee. I have bigger problems than reporting something that might actually be normal.

  I notice her hand is extended, awaiting my return grasp. How long has it been waiting there? I take it. Her grip is cool, dry, and firm. Her hand is smaller than my own, but I sense that she can bend iron with it. Or men’s souls. I try not to think about what my hand must feel like to her.

  “Umm, yes. Likewise.” I can feel a hot blush on my cheeks, my neck. I need an innocent bit of small talk to preserve what scraps of cover I may have left.

  “Commander Caryn Willis, executive officer,” she offers. “You don’t remember me?” she asks, both brows raised, her lips turned in a slight frown.

  “No... I mean, yes.” Shitshit. “Yes, I remember you. No, I haven’t forgotten.”

  A scowl. She still has my hand in hers, and then she has my hand clasped in both of hers.

  “I’m sorry, Mister Simonson.” Her gaze softens. “So sorry. I understand.”

  Shitshitshit. Understand what?

  “I was there when it happened. When that strap failed and your patch fell away. Captain Adams and I were touring the dry dock, all of us patched like you and your fellows, the noble runewrights.” She pulls my hand close to her breast and looks deep into my eyes. I cannot look away. “You and I spoke for only a few short minutes earlier that day. I recognized your voice when you shouted. Screamed, really.”

  “I... ”

  I don’t know what to say is how that sentence goes, but it’s not the heart-wrung I don’t know what to say, it’s the I don’t know what to say to preserve my cover version of the sentence, and I doubt this woman will mistake one sentence for the other, even if all the words are the same.

  But I have to say something.

  “I don’t remember.” Honest words, just don’t ask me why I don’t remember.

  “I see that now. We rushed you to the hospital, and the doctor told us your hemisphere breach was serious.” Her gaze bores into my brain. It’s her eyes that bend men’s souls. Her hands just hold them fast. I want to tell her the truth, that I’ve stolen my brother’s identity for a chance at freedom, a new life on a new world.

  I clench my teeth. Let her continue talking.

  “Serious enough that you’d lost much of yourself. But earlier this week, when you accepted the lottery ticket, we—Captain Adams and I—hoped the treatments had brought you all the way back.”

  She releases my hand and smiles sadly. “But I can see that there are still some holes. I’m sorry to have pained you by poking at them.”

  I stare for a moment in disbelief. My cover is intact, and I have just been handed an excuse for each and every inconvenient lapse of attention to my assumed identity.

  “I’m what they like to call high-functioning.” Sell it, Simonson. I cock my head a bit to the right. “A bubble-and-a-half off level, but I dress myself and I don’t hurt anybody.” Straighten up. Smile confidently. “I just have to steer around the potholes in my head.”

  “Well done then, Mister Simonson.” If you only knew. “Now, if you’re up to it, I would like to show you some of the fruits of your labors with a quick tour of engineering.”

  God, no, I’m not up to that.

  I hold up my gold eye patch in its wrapper. “Let’s go.”

  ***

  The wall at the end of this passage is convex, as if a cylinder half again as wide as the hall has been pounded into place, a massive round peg in a sorely abused rectangular hole. A scanner at the ceiling shines a laser back and forth over our faces. Low-tech.

  “Safety measures are different, tighter, now that the ship is complete. This door won’t rotate open until we’re both patched.” Willis holds her own slate-gray patch up where I can see it. “Strapless. More comfortable, and much more secure. The scanner is activating and programming the adhesive. This will bond to your face and won’t let go until you’re back out here in uninscribed areas.”

  She slaps the patch over her left eye and it sticks. The uniform and patch together would be ridiculously piratical on anybody else.

  I hold my own patch up to the scanner. I don’t know if it’s necessary, but this way I can get a good look at the back, and the adhesive bead running around the patch’s
perimeter. It softens visibly, and a ripple undulates around it. It’s hungry for flesh.

  I slap it over my left eye. It sticks. I pull on it experimentally. No give. I pull a little harder. I can feel my skin draw up and away from my face.

  “If you do succeed in pulling that off, it’ll come away with enough skin that the blood will blind that eye anyway,” Willis says. “It’s a feature.” She waves a key card at the door in front of us, and it slides open with a whisper. “After you.”

  The lock chamber feels hot and crowded with the two of us inside it, despite the fact that I am an arm’s length from Commander Willis and from the wall. The lock begins its one-hundred-eighty-degree rotation around us, sealing us in with another whisper. I draw a deep breath and try not to imagine sotto voce speech in the lock’s sound as it slides around us. The far door opens onto engineering and I exhale.

  “Did you say something?” Willis looks at me in concern, and I realize I’ve vocalized on my exhalation. I may have whimpered.

  “Uh, no,” I mumble in denial.

  “Well, come along then.” She steps through the door and beckons me to follow.

  I step forward cautiously, acutely aware of my lack of depth perception and the absence of any sort of peripheral vision on my left side. The room is broad and long, perhaps twenty meters by sixty, with a couple dozen people in it, and there are runes everywhere—on the marble floor, the vaulted ceiling, the stone-paneled walls, and the massive petrified log table in the center, split and squared down its length, polished, etched, and laid legless on the floor. It must have been massive in life. Even after all the splitting and polishing, this block is counter-height. Compared to the rest of the rocks, the giant fossil is probably the youngest etched thing in the room, but it was alive once, and there is power in that, even if it was just a big, bloodless plant.

  Alive... For just a moment all the runes seem alive, twisting and squirming at the edges of my vision. Aware of me. Frightened by me. Shifting furtively as I look away.

  Vertigo washes over me and I stutter-step to a halt, my flattened perspective recasting the room as a massive canyon with a mighty plateau in the center. Dizzy, I look down. My feet are too far away. I am a giant from before the ages of myth, a man the size of a mountain, able to take seven-league strides without the help of magic boots. Across those leagues, surrounding the canyon’s central plateau, other giants, all with patched left eyes, wreak mysterious and arcane works. They effortlessly shift the rune-wracked boulders across the etched plateau, elder gods adjusting great tokens of fate upon inscrutably tiny mortals.

  “It takes a moment to get used to,” Willis whispers from my blind left side. “Relax and drink it in.” I turn my head, and there she stands, a godly giantess, right next to me yet miles away. I could reach out and touch her, but my arm is the size of a river.

  The vista collapses, rushing inward at the speed of thought. The canyon is a room, the plateau is the split trunk of a fossil tree, and my feet, while still rooted to the marble floor, are not so far away that falling to them would be fatal. Still dizzy, I stumble with that thought, feet not actually rooted to the marble, as it turns out. Commander Willis’s hand locks upon my elbow with a grip that bolsters me all the way to my spine.

  “That’s probably the worst of it,” she whispers.

  I right myself, and she releases her hold. Drink it in, she said. I look around again. The inscribed stone panels on the walls, wide, tall slabs polished to an illusory wetness, appear to be set at different depths. Two broad-shouldered, uniformed engineers grasp the edge of one panel, nod to one another at some silent count, and swing it out, like a stiff page in a giant book. The walls here are built like the poster displays in a pop-culture shop, but instead of posters, these are three-by-five-meter granite monstrosities, thick as my hand is wide, framed in dull metal and mounted on hinges whose engineers laid them to support panel after panel, rack after rack, ten crushtillion tons of etched stone.

  As the massive inscribed panel swings into the room, the runes upon it appear to wriggle under the gaze of my unpatched right eye. Suddenly the migraine is back, pounding now in time to the glyphic squirms. Illusory motion, caused by my pulse in my own eye? This is too real. Some invisible power rushes through those runes, warping their paths in defiance of the epochs-old molecular bonds of the granite page, a power that dares me to see it, knocking on my right eyeball as if on a door, inviting me to open the floodgates of damnation.

  The engineers finish the hundred-eighty-degree swing and lock the panel against the wall, new runes visible on its opposite side. These don’t wiggle at all, and the pain subsides.

  A keening screech, soft at first, begins rising in both volume and pitch above the great table. Fist-sized inscribed stones—blocks, spheres, pyramids, and obelisks—move of their own accord, tracing paths through the eldritch cursive of the table’s surface. The engineers surrounding the table look on, their unpatched right eyes wide with rapt attention.

  “On my mark, lock passage and reduce motive four ticks.” It is the voice from the departure announcement. The man speaking stands at the head of the table, on the far side from me. Captain Adams, no doubt. His arms are folded, and his face is a reflection in flesh of the graven stone surrounding us all. All unpatched eyes look to him.

  The keening ceases its rise in pitch but continues to grow louder. It chills me. Should one of my ears be covered like my eye is? It is not loud enough to hurt my ears, but I feel a pain growing, deep in my breast. The high screech starts a slow warble, as if beginning to break with strain.

  “Mark!”

  One of the engineers at the table snatches a moving stone from its runic track. What sounded like a tortured coloratura soprano now rings like a tight cluster of brass chimes, dissonant but steady in tone. The engineer slots his snatched stone at the edge of the table. Across from him, another engineer pulls a different stone over a ribbed bit of inscription with a tick, tick, tick, and tick.

  I blow out the breath I didn’t know I’d been holding. The pain under my sternum subsides with the fading of the brazen tone cluster.

  The captain looks down the length of the table at Commander Willis, and then at me. His patch is grey, and his right eye is set deep, a heavily furrowed brow above it, a sliver of sleepless bruise below. His monocular stare rocks me, and a moment’s passing vertigo casts him as a giant, standing several days of mortal foot travel down the great stone canyon. His are not mortal feet, though. He is the captain, and this etched edifice, this wound in the face of the world, is the lever from which the god-captain wreaks his will upon all the souls in his charge.

  Again, the vertigo passes and the room rushes down to being a comprehensible, indoor sort of huge. The giants are but men, and the god-captain in their midst merely a well-weathered soldier with more responsibility than most people would care to shoulder.

  But that stare. So powerful, and familiar, like his voice.

  He opens his mouth to speak, and I imagine him without the patch. Recognition floods me, and the vertigo returns. I feel like I am falling. I stand stock-still, but my heart drops inside me, beginning a plummet whose finish, miles below, will be marked by a splash of crimson against the marble plain.

  Recognition, vertigo, and confusion. This is the captain of an interstellar ship, but when I met him before, he was my brother’s doctor.

  ***

  “Thank you, Commander Willis,” the captain says. “I’ll take it from here.” He steps around the table, eye intent on me. I remember him from the hospital, the same stride, the same sad smile. It was bad news that time, as he told me about Jude’s condition. I can’t remember the conversation, but he has met both of us, Jude and me, and cannot possibly be fooled into mistaking me for the poor runewright strapped to that bed, wracked with agony from his head trip through the Abyssal Void.

  “Mister Simonson, I’m afraid you’re here under false pretenses.”

  The kind, firm tone of voice, the subtle ambiguity o
f the phrasing... this is a gentler accusation of identity theft than I could have imagined. I don’t know if I’m going to be slapped on the wrist or clapped in irons. It’s almost as if—

  “There was no lottery, as I’m sure you’ve guessed by now. You’re here because voyages in the Abyssal Void require a special sort of navigational ability, one acquired only through the painful experience of hemisphere breach.” He gestures at Commander Willis. “We broke your strap, and your mind. It is one of the prices of void travel, and we bear responsibility for what you have become.”

  He gestures at the inscribed panels around us with a sweep of his arms. “Simply put, we have maps, but we do not have directions.”

  I meet his gaze, terrified and abruptly bereft of hope. He isn’t accusing me of stealing passage aboard his ship. He needs my brother here to fly it.

  Handcuffs and the brig would at least see me delivered to Terra Tenska as a criminal. But if I try to pilot this ship I’ll certainly kill us all. Can the captain navigate without my brother’s rune-wracked help? Or are there hazards only my twin can sense? Are there shoals out here? Psychic icebergs poised to rip Voidheron open, spilling her suddenly damned cargo into Hell? Or are there timeless, tentacled horrors awaiting us in some seven-dimensional Stygian depth, preparing to feast on the souls whose fate my selfish lie has sealed?

  Safer to end the deception, and hope the captain can find another navigator.

  My right eye blurs with tears.

  “I... I’m not who you think I am.” My voice cracks with a sob. My nose begins to run. Confession flows. “My brother. My twin brother. I stole his ticket, his passport.” More sobs. “He... He’s still... nnngh... nnn.” Guttural syllables punctuate the gasps. “In the hospital.”

  The captain is unfazed, and through my tears I see that there is a rune on his eye patch. It stares at me, a sort of J with a tilde through it.

  Vertigo again. The room tips and shudders and then begins a slow spin. I drop to my knees, and the fall does not kill me. “I can’t steer your ship,” I cry, and I can feel my left eye swimming in the tears that have pooled behind the patch.