by Joshi, S. T
The next morning I called his mother and told her that he was cramping my style. With all his partying, he wasn’t getting any work done either. Better send him someplace else to study. I wanted him out of here by week’s end.
I knew as I said it that I was destroying my friendship with my sister, and my relationship with Josh, but the pain of that was worth it. I had to save him. His mother transferred him to UT in Austin, and found him a rental apartment there. In a week there was no sign left that he had ever stayed in the cottage. The house felt empty with just me and Lilac hanging around inside. It didn’t feel like home any more.
* * *
As I said at the beginning of this report, I’ve made a living writing about the strange things that happen in Galveston. But there’s one story that even the old locals won’t talk about until the lights are dim and all the kiddies are in bed. Then, given enough time and whiskey, sooner or later someone will mention it. It. The thing the Hurricane unleashed.
The thing that waits, under the waves.
Anthropomorphizing the ocean is an easy game. But my account isn’t about the ocean. It’s about the thing that lives in it, tainting the waters and all the creatures that have crawled out of them onto the land. Maybe some of those tainted folks live out on the west end of the island, waiting for the return of the monster.
Now I believe it: there is something living in the sea. A terrible something that was asleep for a long time, but was awakened by Hurricane Ike. Who knows how long that thing has lived in the deeps offshore?
Poor, deluded Fabiola Courtney thought she was summoning great spirits of Nature that would help create a better world in return for our obedience—and perhaps an occasional human sacrifice. But she had blundered across an ancient Evil, an enemy of all that lives upon the land, one that has lived beneath the waters since time began. I don’t know if Fabiola ever realized what she had conjured, but her husband figured it out and, at the end, sacrificed himself—and her—to save the rest of us.
When I looked into that terrible blinding light unleashed by her chants, I didn’t see a loving face, beckoning spirit, or wise and ancient Elder Gods. I saw a mouth, hungry, open, and waiting. Endlessly hungry. Always wanting. That thing needs us the way we need cattle. It ate poor Ben Mattox, and Matt Westerby, and the others who vanished suddenly in the night.
And I don’t think it’s over. That Thing touched Josh, and he’s marked now. It wants him, and if he had stayed here by the water, sooner or later it would have tried to come for him.
That’s why I sent him away. I don’t want him calling out to a monster in the night. I don’t want it to find him.
And now I know what I have to do.
Because, you see, that thing touched me, too.
I’ve begun dreaming of green starfish shapes and strange songs and chanting rituals. So I’m closing down the Chron, selling my cottage, and moving to the mainland. But not to Houston. Oh, no, that’s too close to the water. I’ve got to stay away from the water.
Texas is a big state. I’m thinking about Amarillo, or maybe Lubbock. I’ve got to get away, to someplace far from the ocean and the terrible hungry thing that lives in it, waiting.
OBJECT 00922UU
ERIK BEAR AND GREG BEAR
XENOARCHEOLOGIST MIKAEL TAKEDA’S LOG—
MISSION TIME-00659
WHEN WE LEFT THE JUMP I COULDN’T SEE IT AT FIRST. THEN I noticed the black gap in the starfield. It was hard to even see it as a shape, more of a presence. Officially its name is Object 00922UU, the first U for “unknown civilization,” the second for “unknown function.” The less official name is Tenebrae, and the even less official name is the Big Black Ball. It sits unmoving in empty space just at the edge of the Charybdis Galaxy. Best as can be determined, it has no corners, only curves so gentle it looks flat close up. Not quite a sphere and not quite a tube, with subtle ridges and valleys all over its surface. The surface is utterly non-reflective, the absorption of light so complete that it would be practically invisible if it weren’t larger than ten gas giants put together. The GSS Searcher A isn’t a very big ship to begin with, but Tenebrae makes us look like a gnat. There’s only one apparent point of entry—a tunnel on its underside. Captain Moshive says we have 7 hours until entry. Everybody’s eager to get started figuring this thing out.
XDT EDUCATIONAL VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
As mankind has been spreading itself across the stars, hyperjumping from point to point across the vast gulfs, hundreds of alien artifacts have been discovered—everything from floating space junk to ornate monuments to abandoned planetwide supercities. Yet despite the dozens of different species evident throughout the universe’s history, we have never found a living alien being. These once-mighty civilizations went extinct thousands or more years before mankind ever dreamed of leaving Earth. Some were destroyed by plagues; some wiped themselves out in massive intergalactic wars; others simply disappeared in ways yet to be understood. Their tragic legacy is a cautionary tale for humanity.
But they left behind more than just history: malfunctioning stellar-fusion power plants; planet-eating doomsday engines still set in their ancient programming; bombs loaded with civilization-seeking nanoplagues waiting to be triggered. Whether superweapons from wars that ended millennia ago or merely powerful technologies beyond human understanding, these relics can be wildly dangerous. One wrong step and all mankind could be extinct in a matter of days.
And that’s where the Xenic Disposal Team comes in. Composed of the most highly skilled experts in fields such as engineering, computing, biorobotics, and xenoarcheology, our mission is to study these relics, determine if they are dangerous, and if so, disarm and dismantle them before they can cause any harm. Never again will we allow another Sirius Incident.
(Cut to memorial icon. Text: Sirius 3. Ten thousand souls never forgotten.)
ENGINEERING BRIEFING ROOM AUDIO TRANSCRIPT—
MISSION TIME-00515
ENGINEER 2ND CLASS JIM VANHOVEN: Dyson sphere, you think?
ENGINEER 2ND CLASS ROB KELLERMAN: Well, it’s not really a sphere, is it? Plus, only one access point to the outside?
VANHOVEN: Maybe they’re xenophobic.
KELLERMAN: I think in that case we’d have run into some defense systems. Bet you fifty it’s some space pharaoh’s tomb.
VANHOVEN: Oh, I got a feeling about this one. See your fifty and raise you fifty more.
CHIEF BIOROBOTICIST SARRA BROWNBECK’S LOG—
MISSION TIME-00125
Biobot bootup mostly went smooth, except for a few dead ones in Pod 19. Ensign Marshall got a little sloppy again, cycled their systems too quickly. The older biobots can’t handle it. He doesn’t seem to care much. Says they’re just tools. I mean, he’s right, but they’re living things too. I put the dead ones in the slurry mixer to be broken down into bot food. I like that nice clean cycle of bot life.
At least we can afford to lose a few. We’ve still got 493 to spare. It’s going to be a challenge coordinating them all and I’m not sure Marshall is up to it, but Gralow can probably hold up his end of things.
Got some of the new-model scoutforms on board and I can’t wait to try them out. They’re built for speed, basically six-foot mantises with sensor arrays all down their spine, plus they produce some kind of gel that lets them stick to walls. Damn if I don’t want to drive one of those babies all around this giant thing and see how long it takes to get from end to end. They age out within a week or two I hear, but live fast die young I guess.
CAPTAIN TERNATA MOSHIVE’S LOG—
MISSION TIME 00100
Brought Searcher in nice and slow through the entry tunnel, sticking close to the wall. Tunnel went on longer than sonar could see, dark and silent, gave me the creeps. It could run up through the whole object. Eventually we got to a point where other tunnels started branching off, about 50km in past the surface. Sonar showed a whole network of tunnels running around this thing. Too big for Searcher to fly through, so we’ve dec
ided to land on the edge of the big shaft, deploy scoutforms to cover the tunnels, and take a crew in ourselves, since the interior atmosphere is human-breathable. Need to think of a better name than “big shaft,” though—that’ll probably reduce the boys to giggle fits.
MISSION TIME 00129
Okay, looks like Big Shaft stuck. We got about five klicks down the Shaft, muleform train in tow, and it opened up into this big vaulted chamber with a ramp leading down into it. There’s something about the gravity of this place where whatever you walk on is the floor. Hell if I know how it works, but it’s got Ngede all hyped up about it. The chamber is huge. It’s so big we can’t see the edges of it with our flashlights. It’s filled with massive columns rising up out of the floor and going all the way up into the dark ceiling. They come in all different sizes. There’s no pattern to it, it’s like a forest mixed with a cathedral. Also, the columns are covered in some kind of relief pattern that Takeda thinks is writing.
After this chamber the tunnels start splitting up all over the place, so I’ve had us set forward camp here, bring in the biobot monitors, and start mapping things out. We’re splitting up into three teams to handle the interesting stuff in person. Spritebots will be following us and recording.
SPRITEFORM 9 VIDEO FEED—
MISSION TIME 00225
(The crew are riding horseforms—stout quadrupedal biobots with slate-gray skin and thick bulbs for heads. Making up the train behind them are the muleforms, bigger than the horseforms and with hollow compartments in their torsos to carry equipment. They are loaded up with camping supplies and scanning instruments. Several other spriteforms flit beside them in the air. The hallway they are riding along is roughly circular, slightly curved to the right. The interior of the structure is completely dark and so the tunnel is lit only by flashlight. Chief Engineer Marcele Ngede is riding her horseform on the “ceiling” of the hallway relative to the other crew.)
MOSHIVE: Ngede, quit playing and get down off the ceiling.
NGEDE: Come on Captain, this is mega cool.
MOSHIVE: If whatever’s doing that stops working I’m not gonna scrape your ass off the floor when you splat.
NGEDE: Fine.
(Ngede sighs and spurs her horseform to the right. It makes its way down the wall to rejoin the rest of the line.)
NGEDE’S LOG—
MISSION TIME 01350
Tenebrae is the best thing that’s ever happened to me. It sounds a little selfish like that, but this place is absolutely totally insane. Whatever the builders did with gravity in here is at least level 3 anti-physics tech. But so many empty passages, so much wasted space, why? I’ve dealt with some pretty alien logics before, but this feels like it all has a function and everything belongs here.
We found a corridor that loops back in on itself but doesn’t actually—it just keeps going, two separate spaces occupying what should be the same physical space. I actually felt my heart beat faster when I realized Reinyer and Kellerman’s beacons were both at the same coordinates. This place is Escher’s wet dream. Mine too TBH. Gonna make my career studying this place, assuming we don’t have to blow it up. Hope we don’t.
Everybody else seems nervous, though. Everybody’s got their hardass face on, acting tough. Lots of oneupmanship, machismo. If I hear Tomasi tell one more I’m-such-a-badass story I might gag. Glad to have Takeda along on this one, he’s the only one that isn’t going for that bullshit, plus I haven’t seen him in ages. Still I suppose everybody has to have a coping mechanism. Tenebrae is creeping them all out. But I love it.
XENOBIOLOGIST PAOLO TOMASI’S SUIT-MOUNTED CAMERA FEED—
MISSION TIME 02633
(Kellerman and Tomasi are in a dark corridor. They are looking at a hexagonal door set into the wall, the edges of it barely visible. Kellerman is holding his pad up and typing.)
KELLERMAN: There’s a compatible RFID system here. Let me just …
(The door opens like a flower, peeling into six petals that meld flawlessly into the floor, walls, and ceiling.)
KELLERMAN: Bingo!
(They enter. The room is small, roughly spherical, with the walls made of hexagonal plates joined together.)
KELLERMAN: Something off about this room.
TOMASI: Seems normal to me …
(Kellerman turns around and around, scrutinizing the walls.)
KELLERMAN: You shouldn’t be able to put together a polyhedron like this. The sides shouldn’t fit together right. The angles are wrong.
TOMASI: An optical illusion?
(Kellerman takes his pad and sweeps it around, running diagnostics.)
KELLERMAN: Trying to map this out just results in an error message. Hey, looks like there’s some UV spectrum emissions here.
TOMASI: Hold on …
(Camera switches to ultraviolet mode. The walls are covered in glowing pictoglyphic symbols. They pulse and move in no discernible pattern.)
TOMASI: Whoa. Go to UV mode.
(Kellerman sets his visor over his eyes. He moves his head around slowly, taking it in.)
KELLERMAN: Whoa, cool.
(Going over to the wall, he puts his hand to the symbols. They respond to his touch and form swirling circles around his palm. Tendrils of ultraviolet light extend from the circle to his fingertips. Camera feed cuts to black for half a second.)
TOMASI: Maybe this is some kind of control room. It’s the first real interface we’ve found here.
KELLERMAN: Yeah … could be …
(He swirls his hand around the panel, causing the lights to downshift on the spectrum slightly as they follow his movements. Other symbols in the room respond by changing, curling, and uncurling into new glyphs. He withdraws his hand and they resume their normal motion.)
KELLERMAN: Don’t know what it controls though …
(Tomasi leaps forward and grabs Kellerman’s hand, pulls it away from the panel.)
TOMASI: Really, man? You should know better than that!
KELLERMAN: You’re right, I just … I don’t know, I forgot for a moment.
TOMASI: Doesn’t look like anything happened. No harm, I guess.
KELLERMAN: Jesus, I …
TOMASI: Let’s go back and tell the others about this. I want to get Takeda in here with me so we can start translating this.
KELLERMAN: Sure … give me a moment.
TOMASI (looking at Kellerman): Are you okay? You seem a little out of it.
KELLERMAN: I’m fine. Back there … did you … ?
TOMASI: Did I what?
KELLERMAN (looking away from Tomasi): Never mind… just… nothing. I’m fine.
MOSHIVE’S LOG—
MISSION TIME 02741
Kellerman and Tomasi found some kind of control room or something. It’s the first room we’ve come across that actually does something. So of course they went along and touched it. I chewed them out about that. I expect better from my crew. Now I don’t know what they did, but it seems like they opened up access to some corridors we weren’t able to get to before. Couldn’t even see the doors in the walls, they fit in so well. The new passages lead deeper inside the Ball, so I’m sending all our exploratory efforts that way. Whatever’s inside must be more interesting than all these blank hallways.
BROWNBECK’S JOURNAL—
MISSION TIME 04023
Well, dealing with the bots is turning into a total nightmare. They keep wandering out of comms range and never returning, either that or they get stuck somewhere. We’re down to 132 under our control now and even that number is probably gonna go down by the time I wake up in the morning.
Couldn’t sleep again last night. Some weird feeling kept me awake, so eventually I just gave up and took a walk. I know going out alone is against protocol, but I didn’t really feel like talking to anyone just then.
Somehow I got the urge to walk up one of the columns. A little disorienting at first, kinda made me dizzy looking back down at the “ground.” I remember feeling weird, like between awake and asleep, an
d thinking it was a bad idea to go out alone. But another part of me told me to just keep going and never stop.
Before long I got to the “ceiling.” All I could see of camp was a ring of light just small enough to fit around my pinky. I kept walking through the columns until somehow—I don’t really remember—I found myself walking down a long spiraling hallway. I could hear something big moving just behind me, and I got scared and started wondering just what the hell I thought I was doing. Suddenly my flashlight went out and everything was black for a second.
Then this vent in the wall snapped open. There was an orange glow inside. I could hear whatever was moving getting closer, but for some reason I wasn’t scared any more, I was just staring at the vent. I heard a faint noise coming from it, so I pressed my ear right up to it—
I can’t remember what I heard. I woke back at camp. Thought it was all a dream but now I can’t find my flashlight anywhere.
TAKEDA’S LOG—
MISSION TIME 05207
Been spending the past four hours in UV mode studying the symbols in the control room. I don’t know why, but I think it’s starting to make sense to me. I look at a symbol and I almost know what it means, sort of intuition with maybe some kind of low-level telepathic link. Whatever it is, I have a hard time understanding it, as if the symbols all represent concepts that there’s just no human frame of reference for. There’s a few I’ve almost got—one has something to do with time, another means something like “we” mixed with “me,” except there’s something else to it. It gives me a headache if I spend too much time in there. Ngede’s going to head an expedition in further through the new passages. Maybe I’ll go with her, a walk might clear my head.
NGEDE’S LOG—
MISSION TIME 06031
The inner passages are more interesting, more moving pieces but equally mysterious. Tenebrae is evidently still fully functional after eons spent abandoned. Could indicate automaintenance or hell, maybe even serious antientropics. Still haven’t seen enough to assemble the bigger picture yet, but can jot down some notes on what I saw in today’s exploration.