Remembering what Brik had said to him he’d run a thorough diagnostic on the emerging planet below and had seen that Brik had not lied to him when he’d told him where his people were. Yet, why were they there and how were they alive? Never before had he encountered an Immaterial capable of harboring life, especially during the planet-wracking process of extraction, which threw out the equivalent energy of a flaring sun. At first he didn’t believe, but all systems said the life-forms were there –millions of them.
While he was checking and rechecking the readings the monitors had come on and he’d seen the barely discernable image of his world’s Supreme Commander, Oseia.
“Captain Sal Greta, is that you?”
After some hesitation he’d answered in the affirmative.
“Good. There’s much interference and I haven’t the time to explain completely. Come down immediately. Once we’d finished the Construct we all came down. Somehow, you were overlooked. I can’t explain everything now, but don’t worry, soon, everything will be made known to you. Come quickly. There’s a paradise here, Captain. You can’t imagine it. Come down. That’s an order.”
When her image had faded he’d run codes on the main computer and had been heartened to discover that someone had sent a distress bot into hyperspace and to the Generals. Eventually an emergency fleet from the 579 worlds of the Extraction Company would arrive.
However, it could take from a few months to up to two years for the fleet to arrive. Despite the message most definitely being a trap he needed to know if his people were safe now. And if they needed help, he needed to offer it now. Suicide mission or not, he would go to the planet below and reconnaissance the situation. It was his duty as the main officer in charge of this extraction.
And so he’d suited up with his most durable and toughest exo-skeleton, since all ships aboard Earth 142 had been gone, and had blasted down, even if it was to a trap.
For Sal Greta looking at the process of extraction never got old. He stood on the open cargo platform of the lowest rung of the observatory. He could hear only a low rumbling that vanished away into silence. Between open space, machinery, the process, the stars and infinity, he had never felt so alone.
He knew it wasn’t only the shade of his viewing screen, nor the toughness of his exo-skeleton suit, made to withstand from a distance the extreme buffetings and poundings, heat and energy of extraction, but something else, something in this slice of space, something willful perhaps, or perhaps some law of physics, some as yet undiscovered power, that kept him safe.
He could see the beauty of the harnessed power and miracle below him. He could see the ring of the Construct as it vanished in a circle, fading in the distance, and below him, on one side, a black planet emerging; on the other, empty black space.
It was a planet being pulled from extreme curvatures of space, from where it’s nearly inconceivable density, pent up energy and weight, and the laws of nature, had embedded it so deeply into reality, that reality had curved over it, like a black marble pushed hard into a soft pillow, becoming hidden from view. This was the working hypothesis of his people’s scientists.
Sal Greta fixed on his view screen where the millions of his people were located, then setting his thrusters in the proper direction, powered up and blasted off the open observatory towards the Immaterial.
Oseia had said the planet was a paradise, but as yet he could detect nothing of a paradisal nature on it. It was black just like any other Immaterial, except once past a certain limit, all signs of extraction disappeared. It just looked like dead rock.
His sensors picked up the distress signal from the fighter ship of his Chief Tactical Officer. He recalibrated trajectory and headed in her direction.
His propulsion blasters were powering down, his sensors were reading no massive energies or heat, incredible this close to extraction, when he heard it.
As he neared the planet he heard a slowly rising crescendo of noise that slowly turned into one great concerted wail, like the death of a species, the death of a world, a scream of madness.
Simultaneously with it he shut down his auditory mechs to stop the noise from pummeling his ear drums and switched his helmet screen to comp view to swathe the planet below him. In less than seconds, in an over-all view, he saw great patches of lighted dots, of groups and swarms of people, disappearing, until in mere seconds all lights went dead.
“Shit! Shit! Fuck!” he yelled.
He landed softly on flat rock and saw all before him acres of exo-skeleton suits, derelict ships and empty clothing, lying motionless, like one vast boneyard of detritus.
The planet was dark, the only lights coming from the stars and the faint sight of extraction in the sky above, coruscating like a high up aurora borealis. The Construct was barely noticeable here from this distance, though an alien moon in the sky, separate from the sectors original three, pronounced itself as Earth 142. His Chief Tactical Officer’s ship was nearby, still sending its distress signal.
Numb now and emotionless, he sat down and rested.
Suddenly his automatic auditory warning system came on alert. His bio-detector told him there was another life-form near him, by the fighter ship. Sal Greta looked in that direction and saw one of the exo-skeleton suits trying to get up. He knew who’s it was.
“Lorna! Lorna!” he yelled, as he tried to shake the sunken form into life.
He could clearly see through his Chief Tactical Officer’s view glass and what he saw upset him greatly. She possessed the face of a thing that seemed to have melted and had then recombined again, though not completely in the same way it had formerly been or should be. There was now no trace of her former beauty. Pangs of long gone memories and of lost love began to surface in his being. Love and anger were at war in his chest, though there was more of pity in it. Now was not the time for such feelings, he thought. There was no place for humanity here. Not at this time, nor in this place.
“Captain,” she barely whispered while in pain, through voice chords that now were not hers.
“Don’t speak.”
“Sal, we were deceived. You were asleep for so long. So much happened.” She tugged at him desperately, with what, he could not bring himself to imagine, beneath her armor.
“Just lie there, officer. Do the med mechs aboard the ship work?”
“Don’t. Listen. Why do you think in times past the Immaterials were never noticed? Because they weren’t there. They were placed there recently, as cosmic time goes.”
“What? By whom?” he asked franticly, but she could no longer answer him. Her face, perhaps her whole body, he couldn’t tell, broke down into something like porridge and then set itself again, but this time into something less human. She couldn’t speak, her rudimentary mouth barely allowed her to breathe. There were no more eyes on her.
She stopped struggling.
Sal Greta got up and pointing his arm weapon at her view glass, fired.
“Good night my sweet princess, may flights of angels sing you to your rest.”
Something behind him began to seep towards him. Something old and yet young. A thick liquid like black mire that undulated under the stars as it came. Like cold lava it stopped behind him and then and there began to grow and expand into a living entity, as cellulose skin covered it. Spirals became etched on it, its tissue coarsened and became prickly, it turned grey and then the head and flat piscine face of Brik appeared.
As Sal Greta looked at the dead waste before him, Brik said, “Beautiful isn’t it.”
Sal Greta did not bother turning around. Did not even show surprise, but merely whispered, “Why?”
“When minds are the same they share the same points of reference, the same biology and mental make-up. In a story told by someone with the same mind as you, you understand what suspense, fear, darkness, love are, because your minds are the same. But what if your minds weren’t the same? What if your minds didn’t share any points in common. The words would be merely gibberish. The story –incom
prehensible. Our story is incomprehensible to you.”
The surface rock below Sal Greta’s feet now became as slush and all around him in the blackness of the planet the exo-skeleton suits began to move and the discarded clothing began to fill up with bodies. The mire was reconstituting itself into his people.
“Come, sisters!” Brick yelled.
He looked down and saw Lorna breathing again.
He could sense the black liquid trying to blend in and pass through his armor.
The planet began to shake.
“What is happening?” Sal Greta asked, angered.
“Mother is finally fully awakening and we, her children, rejoice in it. Across your universe her sisters are also awakening. Look up!”
He looked up and saw his home suddenly and violently explode, sending fiery debris and a white light hurtling through space. What was left, like the after-birth of a cracked egg, was a planet-sized, white, spider-thing, suspended and twitching in space.
“It’s now time for final extraction,” Brick said.
The Captain jumped quickly to one side as one of Brik’s six arms tried to violently grab him. He turned and fired a lethal blast at his former Lieutenant Captain. The creature fell back and disintegrated in fire and smoke. Luckily he had saved enough energy for one massive blast.
He then dashed towards the ship’s doors. They opened, recognizing the identity of the Captain. Yet as he tried to step in, two hands held on to his shoulders. They pulled him back. He fell and the attacker fell on top of him. The assailant didn’t have an exo-skeleton suit on so Sal Greta could see the man’s face. It was a soulless, dead face, with large, black as night, eyes. Except for the mask-like resemblance, there was nothing human about it.
Using all his strength Sal Greta managed to shove the shape off himself. Then quickly getting up he kicked the man hard on the side of the head. The man went limp.
Once inside the ship he quickly removed the exo-skeleton suit with the mire seeping into it and threw it outside.
He rapidly closed the doors and began to panic when he felt the ship tilt and begin to sink into the planet.
He threw himself at the controls and firing the thrusters, lifted the ship off the muck. Great lumps of ooze fell from the ship as it sliced into the sky.
On monitors he could read the life signals of his people again. He heard from the comm a recognizable voice.
“Sal,” Lorna said. “Sal, come back. You don’t understand.” After a few seconds of silence she continued, “We had many great adventures together across the galaxies, didn’t we? I love you.”
He turned off the comm.
He maneuvered close to the twitching monstrosity in the gulfs of space.
As he powered up the fighter ship’s attack weaponry his concentration was forcefully jerked to one side, to the Immaterial instead. He gasped as the black planet horrifyingly came to full life and began to constrict and then try to wiggle its way out of the space it was embedded in. Spacetime dilated violently as the planet, like an insect trying to free itself out of a cocoon, thrashed in two different dimensions of reality. It tried to heave itself out.
Unexpectedly many tentacular appendages popped out of the embedded space. Their moon-sized widths whip-lashing brutally into his dimension. Their sudden action sending energy like a disturbance, like a cosmic tidal wave, rippling destructively out in all directions.
Just as this pulse of energy crashed into Sal Greta’s ship and sent it reeling uncontrollably he’d fired his weaponry and missed the spider-thing. Then his ship went dead, drained of all energy except for that running his life-support systems. This was impossible. He’d had enough power to last at least 52 days. Now he was dead in space, without the ability of motion, and at the mercy of those inscrutable things.
Helplessly he watched as a wormhole opened near his vicinity and the planet, now a strange black tentacular beast, with many eyes and mouths, flew squid-like into hyperspace, followed by its millions of children.
The devil-kin, resembling smaller versions of their parent, filled the hell spaces around him.
He saw as Lorna flew past his ship’s window, and looking unemotionally at him with her black eyes, dived like a sea-thing into the void.
Defeated, he lowered, then raised his eyes, only to see Brik staring back at him from the other side of the window, smiling.
“Mother and her fellow centillions and more of sisters have now awakened throughout the universe,” Brik said, his voice breaching the hull of the fighter ship. “Grandmother is now headed to the galactic centre of your terre civilization. It will be one of many stops. Her visits will reform all life-forms, even those unknown to you and those greater than you, throughout the cosmos. Don’t think that any help will come. The 579 Dyson sphere worlds are no more.”
Brik left, and Sal Greta saw as the last of his people disappeared into the wormhole, like schools of fishes.
As it closed he felt the impression of something grand, malign and galaxies-wide, pass and brush by him, from that other dimension of hyperspace.
That must be the grandmother, he thought.
Days later, with the fighter ship’s life-support systems nearly depleted, Sal Greta had resigned himself to his and his human civilizations possible destruction. If they were to be destroyed, so be it. They’d had their time and that brief time, however short, was better than nothing. They’d lived and breathed, and even if the universe should forget them, it couldn’t erase that fact. What had it all meant? That humankind had existed –that’s all the meaning he needed it to have.
Curiously he watched as the former Immaterial planet which had once powered his home Dyson sphere began to tilt so that he could finally get a good view of the creature’s underside.
Once, years before, when he, Lorna and Brik, had been young, they’d travelled to a small watery planet on a diplomatic mission. This was after the first missions of their salad days and before their involvement and decorated heroics in the Yzqill Wars.
On this planet, young cadets who’d wished to rise to the next tier of their careers had to go out on ships and hunt on vast seas a monstrous, carnivorous whale-like creature called a Jirmak.
The elders of the planet had decided that if the three interlopers wanted to be listened to, they too would have to hunt a Jirmak and prove themselves.
For 73 days the three of them had hunted through wild seas the thing.
Then, on the last day, while sinking into the ocean after their ship had capsized, Sal Greta had caught a glimpse of the belly of the great fish. As it turned to face him he’d seen rows upon rows of terribly sharp teeth, as much as perhaps thirty or more, within its huge mouth. Beasts as large as plesiosaurs and megalodons were staked upon them. Parts of bitten off lands and buildings were in that mouth. The mouth was ripped and raw.
The moon-sized mouth he now saw rapidly and voraciously coming towards him was more terrible than that sight.
Yet now, as then, bravely he stood.
Julio Toro San Martin was born in Santiago, Chile, but resides and grew up in Toronto, Canada, and has had short stories published online in Innsmouth Magazine and The Lovecraft Ezine, and also in the print anthologies Historical Lovecraft and Future Lovecraft. He will have an upcoming story published in The Fungi Anthology.
Story illustration by Steve Santiago.
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A Counting Game
by Derek Ferreira
Inspired by (and with a great many thanks to) Roger Zelazny.
October 17
I found myself in my master’s leather satchel – I often did – as the long October weeks stretched onwards. The sound of men talking was muffled through the thick material, not that I was in any way paying attention to them. No, I was busy trying to stay comfortable while avoiding the pointy sticks that were sharing the space with me. Every step that my master took seemed to jostle everything about. It was dark and stank of herbs and garlic. When I could bear it no more, I nu
dged my head out from behind the heavy flap with my beak and took a long breath of freedom which, this time, smelled of newly-minted death. My master was kneeling beside a well appointed boudoir and though I could not see much from my peep-hole vantage point on the floor, I did note the slender, feminine arm hanging lifeless off the edge of the bed and the shadows of the men cast in candlelight against the far wall. I stifled a yawn and shook away the haze gathering around my head. I wasn’t really cut out for the whole ‘nocturnal’ thing.
“Ey! Ol’ man! Ow’ did you get in ‘ere?” A gruff, official-sounding voice called out. My master turned his attention over to where all the shadows were coming from but didn’t say a word. He was like that sometimes, reserved, when he didn’t think he had anything to add to a particular situation.
“Come now, constable. Don’t tell me you do not recognize this man.” There was a pause where no one spoke, but my master rose from his position at the side of the bed and I was forced to squirm around several shifting pointy sticks and the roll of a bulbous mallet. “I dare say that there’s not a more qualified man in all London in attendance here tonight. Present company included.”
“Mm. If you says so, sir. But you’ll ‘ave to agree to take all responsibility for his bein’ ‘ere. Last thing I need’s the Inspector gettin ‘ow he does.”
“Of course, of course.” said the other man. There was a waltz of shadows along the wall and I edged along the lining of the satchel to stare out at the other man, the one that had just vouched for my master. He was younger and leaner than Abraham, but his eyes were keen and I could see them moving minutely in the candle-cast orange glow. “Doctor, I quite enjoyed your monograph on blood born pathogens. A stimulating read. My name is…”
“I know who you are, Detective. Ah, forgive me, I find that mitt men such as ve, in lieu of introductions, it is best to allow our reputations to precede us, ja?” My master smiled and extended his hand to the other. They shook a greeting and both men turned their attention to the pale corpse of a once-beautiful young brunette sprawled on her bed in a tangle of sheets.
Lovecraft eZine Megapack - 2012 Page 50