Her vitals were lower than normal, but she seemed unharmed and her suit remained in working order. When he knelt beside her, however, he saw that she’d deactivated her helmet’s visual display, which allowed her to view her surroundings unfiltered by the warpsuit’s sensors.
Tarkin’s display rendered her still expression in exacting detail, casting her wide-eyed stare and gaping mouth with a glossy, artificial sheen.
“Nayla!”
She moved slightly, but her gaze remained fixated on something in the distance. Her lips moved, but Tarkin couldn’t hear her through her muted intercom.
The warpsuit’s proximity sensors tripped, indicating movement coming from several directions. Tarkin looked up to find half a dozen figures lurking behind the nearby rock formations. His display portrayed them crudely, like vaguely humanoid blobs of blurred static.
Weirdlings.
“Get up, damn it!”
He dragged Nayla to her feet. She staggered halfheartedly alongside him, too slow to escape if the things decided to give chase. Luckily, they merely stood and watched while Tarkin hauled his delirious wife back to the realspace perimeter.
Nayla remained unresponsive for the rest of the day, staring blankly into space without appearing to actually see anything. Only when Tarkin tried to strap her dream inhibitor to her forehead did she give him a reaction, moaning that the device gave her a splitting headache. After she ripped the contraption off for the fourth time, Tarkin gave up.
One night of unfiltered dreams couldn’t cause too much damage.
She slept fitfully, tossing, turning, and occasionally muttering something Tarkin couldn’t quite understand. He wondered if it was related to the stuff she’d been reading over the last few days.
When morning came, Tarkin felt like he hadn’t slept for more than a few minutes.
Five days left.
Nayla finally seemed to be sleeping, so he left her undisturbed as he dressed. He went to the airlock, retrieving the bag of crawler parts along the way. If he didn’t make some sort of progress on the generator today…
Eight hours of work left Tarkin exactly where he started.
The warpsuit’s proximity sensors tripped so many times for no apparent reason that he stopped paying attention to the alerts altogether.
Tarkin trudged back to the house feeling defeated. He decided that he would have to chance a trip to Lanah’s place. It was a ten-mile walk to the north over rough country. Risky, but he didn’t have much cause for hope if he didn’t try.
He found the inner airlock door locked.
Maybe he’d flipped the lock by accident when he left.
He pressed the intercom button.
“Nayla?”
No answer.
“Nayla, open the airlock.”
Again, silence.
“Shit.”
Tarkin pried off the nearby control panel cover to expose the circuitry and hydraulics that operated the door. He severed a cluster of wires to cut power the locking mechanism and the forced the piston down to pull the door ajar enough for him to squeeze his fingers into the gap and pry it open.
It was dark inside the house. He fumbled along the wall until he found the light switch.
When the lights came up, he felt like he’d been dunked into freezing water.
Nayla sat naked in the center of the living room. She’d stripped every piece of wire from the crawler and had already twisted several lengths together to form long spikes.
“No!”
Tarkin jerked the half-finished piece from her hands and scattered the small pile she’d stacked beside her.
He hoisted her off the floor and held her tightly.
“Don’t you do this to me,” he said. “Don’t you dare.”
Nayla didn’t struggle to get away from him.
She just stared at the floor and shivered.
Four days left.
Tarkin set out for Lanah’s homestead just after dawn.
He’d tied Nayla up and locked her in the bedroom before he left. He should have forced her to wear the dream inhibitor, but even the sight of the damned thing seemed to cause her pain.
The terrain shifted frequently as he pressed northward. Although the helmet’s display rendered a rippling, uneven terrain, Tarkin felt the warpsuit compensating drastically with every step as if he were traversing the surface of a choppy sea.
A proximity alert sounded just before midday. He thought he caught a glimpse of a weirdling to the west, but a more intensive scan turned up nothing. The sensors later warned him of a large warp anomaly somewhere to the east, but the display refused to render it as anything more than a radar blip.
That was roughly where Nayla had been heading two days ago.
The signature vanished after a few minutes, leaving Tarkin alone in the center of his virtual world.
He tried not to think about Nayla anymore.
By late afternoon, he spotted the telltale shimmer of the realspace field surrounding Lanah’s place.
The helmet display switched off when he stepped inside the perimeter, allowing him to view the farm through the clear viewplate. Most of the plot looked overgrown and poorly tended. Only a small quadrant of gardens near the house appeared to be maintained.
Tarkin made his way toward the house.
He got about halfway there before the threat sensors tripped.
“That’s far enough, stranger.”
Lanah stepped through the airlock door training a coil rifle at his chest. Tarkin raised his hands.
“Put the gun down, Lanah. It’s Tarkin.”
“Prove it. Lose the bucket.”
Tarkin pulled his helmet off.
Lanah nodded and lowered her rifle.
“Haven’t seen you for a while,” she said. “Where’s the wife?”
“Minding the farm.”
Tarkin started toward the house, but stopped when Lanah raised the rifle slightly.
“What do you want here?”
“One of my generators blew a fuse. Was hoping you had a spare I could borrow.”
Lanah shook her head.
“Can’t help you.”
Tarkin glanced around the farm. The overgrown quadrants looked like they hadn’t been touched in months.
“Looking a bit messy around here. Where are the kids?”
Lanah shrugged.
“Scavs knifed Uwe a few months back. There’s been a pack of them about. Sniffing around the generators, mostly.”
Tarkin recalled the condition of the generator units at Sabrelle and Maddock’s farms.
“What about the twins?”
“I sent Marta to warn Sabrelle about the scavs, but her suit gave out somewhere between here and there. Ellik took it hard when she didn’t come back.”
“Suicide?”
“Something like that.”
Tarkin thought of how he’d found Nayla the day before, thought about the scenes inside the other houses. Then his mind seized on a more important detail.
Lanah was all alone now.
“Listen, why don’t you come back with me? We could use an extra set of hands.”
She shook her head.
“All my suits are shot. I wouldn’t last a mile before my brain turned to mush out there. Besides, this place is still home, even if there ain’t nobody left here but me.”
Tarkin took a deep breath. How long would Lanah last out here on her own? A year? Maybe two? What kind of life would that be anyway?
It would be dark soon. He thought about asking her if he could stay the night, but he already knew what the answer would be.
“Well, good luck to you, then,” he said.
Lanah nodded.
“You too, Tarkin. Give the wife my regards.”
Tarkin put his helmet back on and walked away.
When he was clear of the realspace perimeter, he followed the energy field to the generator on the opposite side of Lanah’s house. He slipped back through the field, pried open the generator�
��s control panel, and yanked out the fuses.
The field flickered as the generator lost power and then blinked out of existence.
Tarkin muted the helmet’s audio sensors so he wouldn’t hear Lanah’s screams.
He should have waited until morning to make the trip back to his farm.
The helmet sensors could compensate for darkness, of course, but the warpsuit’s motion adjustments were more severe and came far more frequently. Grainy and pixilated images drifted across the display at strange intervals, sometimes moving faster than seemed possible for their size. The proximity alert sounded so many times that Tarkin finally shut the motion scanners off.
A pack of weirdlings picked up his trail about a mile from Lanah’s place. He spotted five, maybe six, of them scampering over the uneven terrain behind him. They seemed content to keep their distance, never coming closer than a few dozen yards. Most of them scattered whenever another of the big, indistinct shapes showed up on the helmet’s display. Tarkin didn’t try to think about what those poorly rendered blobs might represent. If the warpsuit’s sensors couldn’t make sense of them, he wasn’t about to put his brain at risk trying to sort them out.
Instead, he kept his attention focused on the navigation system. He set the distance to display out to the smallest decimal so he could see the numbers counting down with every step. The terrain became more difficult to traverse, even with the warpsuit’s considerable assistance, and his legs were still sore from all the walking he’d done over the last few days.
He knew he should stop to rest, but he pressed onward. The weirdlings kept pace with him, always reappearing shortly after they dispersed. There was no telling what they would do with him if they decided to catch up with him. Maybe they would just kill him, or maybe they would pry off his helmet and watch him squirm while his brain turned to jelly.
Just like Lanah’s.
Tarkin ignored everything but the tiny distance readout in the corner of his display.
When he finally reached the farm, he thought he’d punched in the wrong coordinates.
The realspace field was down.
“No…”
His rubbery legs found strength enough to carry him to the closest generator. There was no need to remove the control panel cover or inspect the power levels.
The unit had been stripped clean, just like the ones at the other farms.
Just like he’d done to the ones at Lanah’s farm.
He threw the bag of fuses and spare parts against the generator’s bare frame.
“Fucking scavs!”
Slowly, Tarkin looked back to the house.
The outer airlock door stood open.
He found no signs of damage when he reached the airlock, and as far as he could tell, the door hadn’t been forced open.
The lights were still on, and everything seemed much as he’d left it. The scavs hadn’t looted anything from the house itself. In fact, aside from the open door, it didn’t even seem like anyone had gone inside.
He glanced over at the bedroom.
The door was ajar, the handle broken.
“Nayla?”
Tarkin pushed the door open, almost expecting the scene waiting for him inside.
The broken furniture had been pushed back against the walls, the wire from the bedsprings wound together tightly to crown the wreckage with a row of spikes. Blood filled the symbols etched into the floor.
Aside from the frayed ends of the cable he’d used to tie her down, there was no sign of Nayla.
He staggered outside, fighting the urge to vomit inside his helmet.
The weirdlings had gathered in what used to be the fiber root garden. They stood motionless, indistinct blurs on the helmet’s digitized display.
Tarkin looked over the ruined remains of his small plot of land. For ten years it had been a haven from the horrors of a planet gone mad, one of the last remnants of the world that was.
For ten years, it had been his home.
Their home.
He turned back to the weirdlings.
“Why, damn you? What do you want from us?”
They didn’t answer.
They never answered.
Slowly, almost without thinking about it, Tarkin’s hand drifted to the helmet’s display controls.
“What did you see out there?”
He switched the display off.
The light hit him first, a miasmic cloud of purple and orange with glittering tentacles that spilled onto the ground to drench everything in the moist glow of a newly hatched star. Beneath his feet, the earth heaved, pulsating and bubbling with life while vast mountains broke like waves against the horizon.
Tarkin fell to his knees as his meager sensory organs struggled to absorb the raw force of unbridled creation flowing into them. The weirdlings stepped forward, their bodies taking on a thousand forms with every movement. Faint wisps of alabaster and onyx dust swirled around them, keeping their infinite forms contained. Like the world convulsing beneath their multitudinous feet, they occupied spaces and times beyond Tarkin’s frail perception.
“No!”
Pushing to his feet, Tarkin tried to scramble back to the airlock. The warpsuit fought to compensate for the shifting ground, but it couldn’t overpower Tarkin’s distorted equilibrium. His attempt to get up sent him sprawling onto his back, forcing his gaze toward the churning immensity above.
And then he saw everything.
Its bloated, fertile vastness loomed over the Earth with all the malignant idiocy of a stormcloud. The winds carried its tuneless, unthinking song down to the seething core of the universe to rip down the flimsy walls between dimensions.
Tarkin laughed, cried, and screamed all at once.
One of the weirdlings pressed its face against the helmet’s view plate. Even through the glass, he could feel the warmth of its skin.
A familiar warmth.
“Nayla?”
It said something, but Tarkin couldn’t understand the words. His brain felt ready to burst and his lungs tightened with every breath.
The weirdling dragged him back inside, away from the cruel, unceasing expanse of the flooded sky.
Back to the bedroom.
It stripped off Tarkin’s warpsuit and his skin boiled at the touch of the open air. The pain drove him to blindness and he tried to scream, but his overloaded brain no longer responded. He didn’t feel the blood pouring from his veins to mix with the symbols carved into floor, each drop flowing across countless dimensions to ultimately coalesce somewhere else, into something else. He didn’t feel the energy sucked through his pores and channeled through the ring of metal antennae transmitting into the sprawling multitude of the cosmos.
Then the pain stopped.
The four generators marked out a small plot of land about one acre in size. One of the generators had been running hot and needed a bit of work, but it was easy enough to get them up and running once Belloch installed all of the parts he’d brought along.
He and Felene didn’t spend much time talking about what they found inside the house. It was nasty business, just like the scav party said. Too long out in the warp, they’d claimed. Years of intense isolation could put a lot of strain on the mind, after all.
Some of the longtime scavs told a different story. They said it had something to do with the weirdlings, that when folks got tired of holding the madness at bay, they just gave up and left the door open for it. But the older scavs had some strange ideas about a lot of things. They probably weren’t very far from cracking themselves.
Could be they already had.
There was no sense in trying to salvage anything from the bedroom. They dragged everything outside and burned it before grinding the floor down smooth again. By the time they picked up a new bed and mattress from Redoubt Prime, they might feel comfortable sleeping in the bedroom.
The crawler was in bad shape, but they could cannibalize it for parts to help maintain the one they’d brought with them. If they were luck
y, they could keep it running for years.
None of the crops survived the realspace field going down. Belloch was glad they brought enough food to last them until they could scrape the land clean and start replanting.
After a few days, the proximity sensors went off, so he grabbed his coil rifle and went to investigate. When he didn’t find anything inside the perimeter, he decided to take a look beyond the plot. He was still getting used to wearing a warpsuit, and he needed a bit of help getting it on. Once he was ready, he walked to the boundary of the plot and stepped outside the realspace field.
He spotted a pair of weirdlings standing a short distance from the northeast generator. A standoff ensued for about a minute before the blurry figures turned and skittered away.
When he returned to the house, he didn’t bother telling his wife about the visitors. The weirdlings couldn’t pass through the realspace field, so as long as they stayed inside the perimeter, there wasn’t much to fear.
Belloch kissed Felene and told her that once they got the right set of crops in place, they would be able to feed not just themselves, but up to two children as well.
They were going to be very happy there.
Together.
A Most Refined Taste
Originally published in Revenge (Thirteen O’Clock Press, 2018)
Another oldie, this one was originally titled “Heir to the Throne” and is a strong contender for the story with the most rejections. Originally written sometime around 2005 or so, it’s a pretty straightforward dark fantasy yarn. You can definitely tell I was reading a lot of Robert E. Howard at the time. It’s a bit rough around the edges, but there’s a lot of elements here that would remain pretty consistent throughout most of my fantasy pieces. Careful readers will likely recognize some of the place names throughout the story as well as one of the key characters. Like the rest of my early Rostogov short stories, the canonical status of this one is a bit up in the air.
Distant Worlds Volume 2 Page 2