Fleeing into the Darkness of Disaster
Gregory L. Norris
The crisis that sent Walter Anchester and I past the bulkheads and into the cursed realm of Exham Priory began generations earlier, when that part of the Euphrates first went dark. As legendry goes, religious zealots in the form of the nefarious Magna Mater cult took possession of the Northwest Biosphere, one of four vast open-air living spaces attached to the topside superstructure of our generational starship. In the tunnels that lead closest to that lost, mysterious expanse, the cult’s hated name and numerous arcane symbols were long ago scrawled or painted across the bulkheads, many of the later in what was confirmed to be human blood.
Since the loss of the Northwest Biosphere and, presumably, all who lived there, Euphrates had limped forward on sub-light engines, aimed toward an unthinkably distant destination: a small blue globe known as PL1-311. A moon, really, in orbit around a gas giant whose atmosphere crawled with numerous red eyes, Euphrates—along with The Great Wall, Acropolis, Fertile Crescent, and their eleven sister ships—set out to reach mankind’s new beginning and second chance. That was four hundred years ago. The latest chapter of the crisis that sent us through the bulkheads and to Exham Priory began six days ago. God help us.
Worries over diseases like the blight that wiped out not only crops but also seeds on Earth had been a factor in Euphrates’ and the exodus fleet’s design. Four biospheres, each separated from the others by safeguard measures, primarily a system of emergency bulkheads, would insure protection should infection break out in any one section of the ship. We had first noticed the evidence in gnaw marks through the corn and in the rows of root vegetables upon which the people of the Southeast Biosphere depended. No vermin existed here, or shouldn’t. While the genetic biodiversity of Earth travelled with us, the material remained safely stored in a life bank, which all four biospheres were outfitted with in readiness for planet-fall when we eventually arrived to our new home.
My name is Garson Delapore, and I am the Southeast’s Primary Agritect. For generations, my family has supervised the husbandry of our land, which presently feeds one thousand souls. We have maintained that number in our populace since the light-drive was sabotaged, and communication with the Northwest went dark and silent. There was twice that number here before.
Walter Anchester, my trusted Secondary, brought the situation to my attention. “Look.”
A man of few words, his one telegraphed the nightmare soon to unfold. A row of corn at the outer edge of the agristretch had been shredded, the ears gnawed down to cob. We discovered a similar situation in the nearest bed of vegetables. We couldn’t afford the loss of even the woodiest, most unpalatable crops; strict trade rules imposed by our fellow travellers to the Northeast and Southwest had forced us to be self-sufficient.
“Let’s check the seed,” I said, and drew in a deep breath.
I instantly knew more was wrong than only our gutted crops. The air in the agristretch had always been pleasant—lush and green and, I assumed though I had never been there, earthy. Now, I detected a wrongness, something dark and musty, the smell of the rot that had invaded our isolated society and now threatened to destroy it.
The seed stores were protected behind powerful armoured doors. No one had accessed them beyond what was expected, according to security logs. But as the doors trundled open, Anchester and I immediately found further proof of the wrongness: bins of sealed seed lay spilled and pilfered, and a sickening fetor hung over the interior of the chamber. The spilled treasure crawled with a kind of fungus, which we found coating the rest of our crops in the days that followed.
Blight,” I said to Anchester, Avello, Patton, and Helaine Canfield, our community liaison, after all had gathered around the conference table in Citizen’s Hall. “We’ll need to ration. We’ve burned the infected crops and salvaged what seed we could.”
Of course, there were questions, and also lies. My Secondary and I didn’t tell them about the other thing we discovered in our seed stores. Armoured doors hadn’t been forced, no. But in one far corner of the structure, behind overturned storage bins, we discovered a rip in the reinforced metal fabric of wall. Conduit ran back there, though parts of that, too, had been removed. Gnawed through, by powerful teeth.
And, in the fields, we discovered holes in the soil, leading deep down into the hydroponic sub-layers. Something had tunnelled through the ground and into our biosphere.
They couldn’t know what we’d discovered. If word got out before we were done gathering our data, a panic would sweep across the Southeast Biosphere, leaving us likely in the same predicament as the doomed populace to the Northwest.
“Something got in, past the bulkheads,” I said.
Anchester’s eyes filled with dark emotion and said all that his tongue refused to.
We harvested early everything we could, and did our best to smooth down the tunnels with soil-tending equipment. Eyes were ever upon the agristretch, so we went about our business, putting forth an illusion of normality as unfeeling stars shined beyond the transparent dome and the vast bulb simulating sunlight burned at twelve-hour intervals.
Two days later, more tunnels appeared, and the sour smell of rot in the air deepened. Our attempt at concealing the truth had failed.
In retrospect, we went by the book, Anchester and I. We did what should have been done in order, as may have our counterparts in the Northwest Biosphere leading up to the tragedy that befell them following the launch of Euphrates from a blighted Earth fouled by cultists like the Magna Mater and others of similar wretchedness—the followers of the Hellstone, and Crecelius the Yellow, and Atys, who made rivers run red in three of the six remaining terrestrial continents according to legendry, B.E.—Before Exodus. Anchester and I did what we thought would save our people and ourselves.
“Can I trust you?”
He nodded. I led him to the maglev, which once connected all four biospheres and travelled to the farthest corners of the Euphrates’ damaged star-drive. Now, the system went only as far as the Central Nexus, heart of the vessel’s superstructure. Bulkheads automatically triggered after the main engines were sabotaged by those Magna Mater devils blocked access to the remaining biospheres, our only communication with our neighbours after that via regular broadcast updates. I could only wonder if reports of the blight had travelled past our borders to the two remaining quads, as they were no doubt spreading through our citizenry.
We departed the maglev carriage, and pressed forward the rest of the way on foot, sona-rifles at ready. I only hoped the high-intensity sound bullets would prove effective against anything we encountered in the realm beyond those hated and arcane symbols.
Track lights fed by solar power ran at half-strength. I wondered if the stories were true, about how the Nexus had once been a thriving centre of trade between the four quads. Little refuse lined the dusty floors and walls to prove it, though it’s entirely plausible that even the most banal of castoffs had been repurposed over the centuries.
“Why are we here, Delapore?” Anchester asked, shocking me out of my wandering thoughts.
I turned and saw that his face had taken on an ashy pallor in the sparse glow of track lights being starved on the glow of unnamed stars. Rarely had I travelled far from the comfort of the agristretch, but I remembered one of my father’s stories, and mused that my shoe treads were now following his from years long ended.
“Direct vision ports, past the Nexus,” I said. “In my father’s youth, on an expedition with his father, he told me of one that faces the Northwest. He said the dome was visible, and through it, a glimpse of Exham Priory where their seeds stores were housed.”
Our voices, low as they were, reverberated through the vast throat of the corridor. My imagination painted an eerie picture of that abandoned place, Exham Priory, a collection of towers and wings, like a medieval castle on Old Earth, only one made of metal and composites rat
her than blocks of stone.
The reality was far different after Anchester and I moved northwest at the junction, into an area where the lights had failed, and we reached the first of the direct vision ports. Following the sabotage of the star-drive engines when the system of emergency bulkheads was activated, so, too, were most of the blast covers throughout the ship. Not so here. The first space window we encountered offered a view toward home soil, the Southeast Biosphere. The vast domed space rose up from the superstructure, visible in the distance, alive and, yes, quite beautiful to see. I’d never beheld such a sight.
But as I stood and gazed at our quad, the same musty door of wrongness I remembered from the agristretch assailed my nostrils, and I experienced a vision of some twisted abomination, not quite human anymore, more vermin in identity, standing in my exact spot, staring at the Southeast Biosphere with rabid hunger.
Our glimpse through the half-shuttered direct vision port onto the Northwest Biosphere existed beyond the first of those ruddy scrawls across the bulkheads—an open eye that dripped more than wept, and a rough image of a tree wreathed not in branches but tentacles, above which I read the cursed words: Ungl Ungl Hellstone Steryx Magna Mater!
I caught Anchester standing frozen; his focus fixed upon the tree symbol, and set a hand upon his shoulder. My Secondary jumped. His grip on his sona-rifle tightened. We approached the space window and faced past, present, and our uncertain future.
The vision from my youth superimposed over the day’s reality, only there in afterimage between blinks. The Northwest Biosphere dominated the wedge of vision port left unprotected by a stalled blast shutter. Exham Priory stood clear, surrounded by dense greenery. The dead realm was nowhere near as lifeless as we all believed.
“The seeds,” I said, and paced the patch of dirt that should have been home to thriving vegetable crops but wasn’t. “If the stores in there are still intact…even if they aren’t, if there are heritage crops growing wild now in there that we can bring back with us.”
My mind raced. My stomach knotted, the cramps born of nerves, not hunger. Not yet, though that was inevitable. A thousand hungry mouths would burn through our stores in short time. We needed to act. We needed to heal what had been done to us and fix what was damaged.
“You and I are going through the bulkheads, into Exham Priory,” I told Anchester.
He nodded, and, after leaving our team in charge of tilling and replanting—and sealing the holes in the granary, we departed for that cursed no-man’s land.
Navigating back through Euphrates’ Central Nexus was relatively easy, and required no more than the equivalent of four hours’ worth of the solar bulb’s morning light. Without maglev service, however, the kilometres of corridor and bulkheads past the direct vision ports would be arduous and time consuming.
Again, I asked myself why our ancestors—among who were Delapores in comparable duty positions to the one I occupied—hadn’t done more to help the Northwest quad’s citizenry. Was it the dark stain of the Magna Mater that had cropped up among others who were surely innocent and had no part in the sabotage of the Euphrates’ star-drive? Magna Mater cultists had, reportedly, gazed upon their handiwork of an irrevocably desecrated Earth with pride, so the legendry went. In condemning the cultists, had we also doomed those not responsible for the unthinkable crime of wholesale slaughter?
Such was the nature of my thoughts on that long and dark march away from the Nexus, and toward whatever waited at the far end of the corridor.
We had prepared well, with flashlights that easily attached to our sona-rifles, meagre provisions, and my copy of the original schematics, which we used to navigate our way through unfamiliar territory. I had also, smartly, saved my father’s copy of the Primary Access Codes, stamped on a yellowed strip of laminated paper, which had passed all the way down the Delapore line. All Primaries since the launch of Euphrates possessed such a failsafe. If the residents of the Northwest Biosphere were, indeed, all deceased, and none had reset their codes following the destruction of the ship’s main engines, the codes might serve us well once we reached the shuttered bulkheads.
I needn’t have worried on that one count.
Anchester and I pressed on, our flashlights illuminating more references to the Magna Mater, more madness, scrawled across the walls. What seemed days instead of hours after crossing through the Central Nexus, meeting point between the biospheres, we came upon a colossal fissure in the deck plates, one easily measuring three dozen meters across. The split seemed to originate in a break between the original welds and was, I assumed, a result of the powerful eruptions that had taken out the star-drive. The jolt had sent sections of deck spilling down, down into darkness.
I shined my light into the gap. The wreckage lay canted in jagged chunks. There was no going forward, at least not by the route we intended. A scan of the Euphrates diagrams revealed that the corridor opened beneath us led in the same direction, straight into the underbelly of Exham Priory, the former cultural, political, and religious capitol of the Northwest Biosphere.
Also among our preparations were two solid lengths of rappelling cable. I glanced at my trusted Secondary, that man of few words, who nodded and affixed the cords to the nearest support column. We were already steeped in the madness flowing out of control in that section of the ship and into ours. How infected the situation was, however, had yet to reveal itself fully.
The wrongness first spoke to us as we slowly descended, one-handed, with rifles held parade-ready and flashlight beams strafing this underworld we had willingly entered.
It manifested in a scratching of nails along the walls that filled my insides with primitive revulsion, a race memory from the home world that my race had destroyed and then escaped; a world neither I nor the last six generations of Delapores had known. It seemed to my ears that the scratching came from behind the bulkheads, a sound of rats moving on the other side of the walls. Both Anchester and I swept the stygian realm around us with our flashlights, but the beams only revealed the pitted, centuries-old metal. Through gaps in the bulkheads, I imagined eyes—hundreds if not thousands. Dark lenses devoid of compassion, tracking us as we descended. Gooseflesh dimpled across my arms.
We reached the broken deck plates and made the rest of the distance to the corridor floor in decent time. I remember setting my shoe treads down and, at first, worrying that Anchester and I would topple through the porous metal and even deeper into the Euphrates’ long forgotten lowest sections. After the sabotage of the star-drive, the superstructure was abandoned for fears of explosive decompression and no longer maintained. Sub-light was automated, and ran off the same solar collecting tech that powered interior lighting. Few if any believed the ship capable of reaching its destination anymore; we were living in the present and barely thinking about the future beyond the closest days.
If we didn’t locate a new source of seed in the Northwest Quad—or mercy from our fellow travellers in the two remaining biospheres—the Southeast’s residents would be lucky to survive for six more months.
We aimed our lights toward the heart of the Northwest Quad and noticed after an hour of walking that the way grew steadily less dark. The stagnant, fungus smell, however, intensified; a fetor of rot I associated with standing water and upturned graves. The light thickened instead of actually brightening. What we were witnessing, I realized, was a kind of bioluminescence from the skeins of fungus growing on the walls, feeding off the chemicals in the makeup of the bulkheads.
More scratching filtered out from the walls. I dug in my treads and halted. The terrible scraping stopped, too. I tipped a look at Anchester, standing at my side, and my trusted Secondary opened his mouth, intending to speak, I assumed, but too afraid to form the words.
“It’s following us,” I whispered, my voice sounding twice as loud as I’d intended for it to in the empty throat of the corridor.
It sounded more like them, plural,
a multitude of scurrying vermin on the other side of the fractured bulkheads. The urge to return to our rappelling cables overwhelmed me. But what if we made it back to the chasm and, for whatever reason, by whatever sinister hand, the ropes had been cut? I reminded myself why my Secondary and I were there, lost in the bowels of the generational ship’s superstructure, and indicated for us to press forward. According to the schematics, which I referenced again soon after resuming our march, we were close to the lower levels of the priory.
At the bend that turned our course toward the biosphere, the scratching resumed, this time so loudly, so concentrated, I thought the bulkheads wouldn’t stand the unholy clatter. I thought of long talons, filthy but also polished sharper than razors, working holes into the bulkheads, creating tunnels and warrens through the marrow of Euphrates; some abominable life form released from the ruins to our Northwest while we in the other quads went about the business of our daily lives, none the wiser.
We turned another bend—and that voice inside my head, the one still sane by a sliver, worried not only about severed rappelling cables but also if we’d be able to find our way back to them. Fear smothered the aches in joints, bone, and flesh. We had walked for kilometres, through desolate space. We had walked what felt like a distance of light-years.
Ahead of us, a single hatch appeared. The release did not require my override. We manually pushed on the metal wheel, which resisted turning and felt damp, slick, to the touch. The wheel groaned and the hatch eventually rolled open on its tracks.
Something unholy spilled out, knocking me to the deck.
I screamed.
And screamed.
Hideous thing, it was part of an articulated skeleton that had held onto its shape. Only the shape wasn’t correct. A quadrupedal approximation of human form, I later realized it was the abomination’s clothing that kept its bones intact.
Those bones, particularly the thing’s misshaped skull, had been gnawed upon, like the bulkheads surrounding us.
Anchester pulled the remains off me and helped me to stand. My next shallow sip of breath filled with the foul stink of fungus and worse; of slop piled up in strata over several centuries, and the rancid door I now equated with urine. The waste of vermin. The vermin of the Northwest Biosphere.
We had arrived at the lowest level beneath Exham Priory, the centre of civilization to our neighbours in the northwest who, according to rumours, legends, and theory, had suffered at the hands of bloodthirsty cultist-infiltrators. And those dark, hellish rooms lit by the sallow jonquil glow of the fungus crawling across the walls were filled with skeletons.
Some had been butchered, according to the instruments we found among the pieces of bones. Others had been caged, and their remains suggested they, too, had been devoured. All that had died were eaten, even the butchers, and their skeletons bore deep gouges that could only have come from teeth.
In another room, we discovered the remains of the life-bank, emptied long earlier of its precious cargo. Anchester invoked God’s generic name. But all of the gods had shunned this place, and only demons had answered prayers here in the Northwest Biosphere.
I think we both went mad in the deep level beneath Exham Priory, for it was madness to believe we could still complete our mission. We moved from one horrific scene to another in our search for seed stores, which clearly were no longer in existence and hadn’t saved the people from this quad or their mutated descendants from the orgiastic frenzy that swept through hundreds of years in the past during those dark, early years of the Euphrates’ flight. It occurred to that sane sliver, that last piece of what I now believe was my soul that we were ascending higher, ever higher, along a ramp of sorts, and that the jaundiced glow had shifted.
We came upon an open-air courtyard high in Exham Priory that gazed out at the interior of the Northwest Biosphere. The uniform terraces that housed human citizens and families were there, as in our realm far to the Southeast, though they formed a city of the dead. Windows were shattered, and whole sections of the structures had collapsed or were intentionally destroyed, according to the dark, oily blast marks. What was agristretch in neat patchworks to the southeast was wild jungle veldt here, an overgrown landscape of foul yellow-green fungus fed off the glare of alien stars, set beneath the dead sun-bulb draped in foul, toxic skeins.
And what was that statue-thing, erected at the centre of the fungus woods, neither human nor rat but constructed with features of both?
“No,” Anchester said. He repeated the protestation again and again.
At first, I thought he meant the hideous statue, which seemed to stare up at us with its vast, dead black eyes. An evil tribute, in my mind it embodied all of mankind’s sins since our species rose up from the muck to destroy the world of our birth. Worse, in those eyes, that sharp and hideous smile, it also promised to do the same should Euphrates ever reach her far-flung destination at PL1-311, the Promised Land.
But it was a nightmare even more horrific than the statue constructed by either Magna Mater cultists or those who followed Hellstone worship, or evil Atys. The towering fungus began to stir though no breeze whispered through the stagnant tomb of the Northwest Biosphere. The priory trembled from the movement, the stampede. Whatever the cultists had created or unleashed from the genetic life-bank, perhaps initially to breed and stem the famine in this quad, was coming, and it sounded hungry.
I caught up to Anchester. We ran down the ramp, our own steps kicking up bones and bone dust and that bitter urine-stink. Down, under the priory, I led us back through the hellish abattoir, to the hatch, and through, into the corridor.
We sealed the door and resumed running. The bulkheads wouldn’t keep out the horrors, we sensed. Oh no; the rat-things born in the Northwest Biosphere had eaten their way past the metal walls, through conduit, and had tunnelled up, up, through hydroponic layers and carefully-tended agristretch soil.
We ran, ran. At one point in the chaos of escape, I heard laughter. Perhaps the mad cackles were Anchester’s. I didn’t recognize the voice, though it’s quite possible it was mine.
The rappelling ropes were exactly as we had left them secured to columns high overhead. Would that the abominations we’d heard scratching behind the walls had chewed through the cords, trapping us below. It might have been a kinder and quicker fate.
We scaled the slope of the collapsed deck plates, and were doing the last leg of the climb back up to the overhang when that sound—that terrible, evil sound!—thundered down the throat of the sub-corridor. I ordered myself to not look down, which would have been the correct course of action in the sane world that no longer existed.
I looked and, as I did, the beam of the flashlight attached to my sona-rifle strobed the corridor below. I saw them. Gods and saints and whatever holy powers exist in this universe help me; I saw the ravenous hoard that had pursued us out of the cursed realm of the Northwest Biosphere.
They weren’t human. Not fully. And not vermin, either, as they were once known and shown in history texts and in the catalogue of the life-banks. No, what was born there was something wholly different, and completely abominable.
Anchester looked, too. As I scrambled the remaining distance to the precipice, I noticed he had stopped his advance. Saying nothing, as was my Secondary’s way, he calmly let go of the rope and fell willingly into that seething, biting mass. The sounds that emerged as the abominations frenzied for my best friend’s blood and flesh were chilling to hear, and severed that last string of my sanity. I started firing. And laughing.
I made it back to the Central Nexus and boarded the maglev, though I have no memory of returning to the biosphere, where members of the Delapore family have watched over the care of the agristretch and the feeding of our people for generations.
I have been held in the Detention Centre for days—at least I think so; time has fallen off track since my return, mutating some hours into seconds, and seconds into
hours. They say I murdered Anchester, that I lured him out of the quad intentionally. One less mouth to feed. Others in the council, like the Canfield woman, have accused me of intentionally releasing the blight across our food supply and of covering up evidence of a manufactured disaster by tamping down the soil following the shortened harvest.
When they thought I wasn’t listening, the new Primary Agritect, Hetri Avello, let slip that foulest of accusations: “Magna Mater,” he said, and tipped his chin toward my prison cell.
But I can see it in their eyes, the same look that was in Anchester’s right before he let go of the ropes. It has begun. And it will most likely end the way it did in that evil place, because, as they waste time building their case against me, there is an undercurrent of wrongness building in the air, and a smell that wasn’t present here before yet now is. It’s the smell of the rats in the bulkheads, which have found their way into the Southeast Biosphere.
I’ve heard in their whispers that people have started to vanish.
And the rats…the rats are coming!
From Out of the Dark Page 12