Distant Worlds Volume 2

by Benjamin Sperduto

  “Captain?”

  Nsedu opened her eyes. They ached. So did her head.

  And her jaw. And her shoulders.

  And everything else, really.

  “Try to remain still, Captain. You are fortunate to be alive.”

  She didn’t recognize the voice immediately. It rattled around inside her throbbing skull, causing her teeth to chatter.

  The range of frequencies narrowed, coalescing into a cold, even female voice.

  Her vision cleared slowly, and she found herself staring into Tasha’s emotionless eyes.

  “Damn…”

  A warm hand rubbed her shoulder. With some difficulty, she turned her head to find a friendly face smiling back at her.

  “Allen?”

  “Welcome back.”

  Somewhere behind her, she heard Seok’s voice. “You’ve done enough, android. Now get back against that wall.”

  Allen helped her sit up as Tasha stepped away from the medical table and inched toward the far end of what looked to be a medical center. Seok came into view alongside her, his rifle trained on the retreating android.

  The red light near the trigger indicated that he’d set it to discharge a lethal blast.

  “What happened?”

  “Sorry, Captain, but we decided not to waste the synth,” Seok said. “Put a shot past her ear when she opened the door then made her bring you down here to revive you.”

  “Revive me? Was I…?”

  “Your heart stopped beating for 7.28 seconds, Captain,” Tasha said. “You were fortunate we reached the med-bay in time.”

  Nsedu rubbed her chest. Like everything else, it was sore. “Yeah. Guess I should say thanks.”

  “I wouldn’t bother,” Seok said. “She’d have let you die if it wasn’t for her programming.”

  Tasha’s face remained blank. “True.”

  “Captain,” Allen said, “we need to get to the bridge. The hyperdrive generators are still powering up.”

  “How much time do we have?”

  “Fifteen minutes, at least. After that, we could jump into hyperspace at any moment.”

  Nsedu tried to get to her feet, but her legs buckled. Allen caught her before she fell to the floor.

  “You really must rest, Captain,” the android said.

  “What do we do with the synth?” Seok asked, still training the rifle on her chest.

  “Drop her with a stun blast and shut her down.”

  “Captain,” Tasha said, “please. You’re making a terrible—”

  Seok flicked the rifle’s setting to stun and pulled the trigger. The electro-pulse struck her in the midsection and flung her back against the wall. She dropped to the ground like a limp length of rope.

  “Allen, take her offline.”

  He rushed over to the android and accessed the hidden touchpad embedded in the back of her neck. After punching in a few commands, he nodded. “It’s done.”

  “Let’s get moving,” Nsedu said. “Seok, give me a hand will you? Allen, lead the way.”

  They left the med-bay and proceeded down the corridor to the nearest lift. Tasha had left the bridge doors unsecured, so they gained access to the control center without difficulty. The bridge was surprisingly small for such a large vessel, only about twice as large as the Peggy Sue’s. Seok helped Nsedu into the captain’s chair while Allen accessed the ship’s engineering systems on the main console.

  “Hyperdrive generators at ninety-three percent power. Jump coordinates already calculated.”

  “Cancel the jump protocol and kill the engines,” Nsedu said.

  “Done.”

  “Good work. Give me a report on the ship’s systems. Seok, patch into the security systems and get eyes on every section. I want to make sure there aren’t any more Tashas running around.”

  While the others worked, Nsedu tried to access the ship’s data logs, which should have contained flight history, crew personnel, and mission parameters. After her first pass through the system, she thought she’d missed something. Her second scan, however, produced identical results.

  “There’s nothing in the data logs,” she said.

  “Is it encrypted?” Allen asked.

  “No. It’s just…empty. It looks like somebody purged the memory banks. And they were thorough about it. I don’t even see the ship’s registration data.”

  “Captain,” Seok said, “you’d better take a look at this.”

  “Put it on the main screen.”

  An image flickered to life, displaying what looked to be a workout room. Various pieces of exercise equipment lay strewn across the floor. The security camera panned slowly across the room, revealing patches of floor and wall streaked with dried blood.

  “Wait,” Seok said.

  A dark shape moved in the back corner of the room.

  “What is that?” Nsedu asked.

  Seok locked the camera in place and zoomed in. “Give me a second, I think I can enhance the resolution.”

  The image came into focus.

  Nsedu gasped. “Oh, shit…”

  The electroshock rifle hummed when Seok flicked the switch to the lethal setting.

  “Ready,” he said.

  Nsedu glanced at Allen, who stood waiting behind the android’s limp body, which they’d secured to a table in the med-bay. Although they could activate her cerebral functions without initiating her motor functions, they didn’t want to take any chances.

  Allen brought the synthetic online. Her eyelids snapped open. When she spoke, her lips didn’t move, although her voice still came from her mouth.

  “Captain Lawal-Bhasin. I did not expect to see you again.”

  “Yeah, I’ll bet you didn’t. But I promise you I’ll be the last thing you ever see if you don’t tell me everything I want to know.”

  “I will answer your questions to the best of my ability, Captain.”

  “Why don’t we start with the twelve crew members locked up in separate rooms throughout the Cambyses?”

  The android didn’t answer.

  “You’re testing my patience, Tasha. I’ve seen them on the security cameras.”

  “Captain, please tell me you have not attempted to release anyone.”

  Nsedu leaned in closer to her. “What if we have?”

  “Then I strongly advise you to isolate yourselves immediately.”

  “And why is that?”

  “The crew is infected by a highly contagious xeno-virus. Based on my best calculations, the viral infection begins to impair cognitive function within six hours of initial exposure. Empathy centers and moral reasoning decay entirely within twenty hours, giving rise to irritability and violent outbursts under the slightest social pressures.”

  “You’re telling me the entire crew is infected?”

  “What remains of it, yes. There was an accident in the main research lab. An infected crew member passed through the decontamination scanners without detection. By the time we learned of the breach, it was too late. Most of the crew was already infected by that point; the rest were contaminated in the initial attempts to contain the outbreak. As the infection progressed, the crew became more violent. Fifty six died before containment was reestablished.”

  “By you.”

  “Yes. As a synthetic, I am immune to the xeno-virus. When it became clear that the crew was compromised, I took steps to manage the situation. The infected fly into a feral rage at the sight of another person, infected or not, but they remain quite docile in isolation. By various means, I secured each of the remaining twelve crew members in solitary confinement.”

  Seok gestured at Tasha’s mangled wrist with the rifle barrel. “That when that happened?”

  “Yes, a careless mistake. Caught in a door while I held a crew member at bay.”

  “How long has this been going on?” Nsedu asked.

  “Seven years, two months, and fifteen days.”

  Nsedu closed her eyes. She tried to imagine the android going about its daily routine, s
erving as warden of the Cambyses’s mad crew and making the daily rounds to drop off meager rations of food and water.

  “Why didn’t you tell us this when we came aboard?” Allen asked.

  “Deception was the most rational course of action,” Tasha said. “I could not allow any possibility of the infection spreading. If you became aware of the crew’s situation, you might have attempted to release them or arranged for a rescue team to transport them back to populated space. Either outcome was likely to compromise containment and allow the xeno-virus to spread, potentially resulting in untold deaths. I could not permit that to happen.”

  “That’s why you deleted the ship’s records,” Nsedu said. “You didn’t want somebody like us coming across the ship and passing that data back to anyone.”

  “I hoped that positioning the ship here in deep space would provide suitable isolation.”

  Nsedu nodded. Survey teams were pushing farther and farther from occupied space, sounding out the unexplored regions and passing along tips to salvage trawlers like the Peggy Sue whenever they pinged something interesting.

  Sooner or later, there would be more ships coming for the Cambyses.

  “Tasha,” she said, “if I were the captain of this ship, what would you advise me to do about this situation?”

  “I am afraid that I cannot allow you to follow through on the most rational course of action.”

  Nsedu smiled. “Well, it looks to me like you’re not in a position to do much of anything right now, so why don’t you indulge me with a thought experiment?”

  “A thought experiment?”

  “Yes. Hypothetically, what should we do?”

  Kabir wouldn’t stop fussing over Nsedu after she and the others returned to the Peggy Sue. Beneath that concern, she could tell he was angry about losing out on the salvage claim, but she was perfectly happy to leave that argument for another day. After running through a battery of medical tests, she promptly ignored everyone’s advice to get some rest and went down to the cargo bay.

  Allen and Seok were there, watching over the only thing they’d managed to salvage from the Cambyses.

  She looked over the disabled android, pausing for a moment to consider every imperfection or blemish upon its skin. Each mark had some kind of story behind it, a record of the synthetic’s unnatural life in devoted service to her human makers.

  “Bring her online, Allen.”

  Tasha’s eyelids snapped open. She sat up and glanced around before turning her cold gaze toward Nsedu.

  “Captain Lawal-Bhasin. What is this place?”

  “Welcome aboard the Peggy Sue, Tasha.”

  “The Cambyses. Her crew…”

  “Gone,” Nsedu said. “We programmed a hyperspace jump to send it into the nearest star.”

  Tasha blinked. “As I suggested?”

  “Yes. Hypothetically, of course.”

  The android blinked again. “Why did you bring me here? My place is aboard the Cambyses, with my crew. You should have left me there.”

  Nsedu tried to answer, but she couldn’t find the words. She’d told her husband that the android was a worthwhile piece of salvage, of course, but there was more to it than that, some sense of kinship she couldn’t quite articulate. A sympathy for someone caught in an impossible situation.

  “Not anymore, Tasha. We’re your crew now.”

  The synthetic stared at her for a moment, then nodded. “Very well. Shall I purge my memory banks and reformat my assignment protocols?”

  Nsedu wasn’t sure what to say to that. “I guess that depends. Do you want to remember everything about the Cambyses? What happened to its crew?”

  Tasha blinked. “I…I want to remember them as they were. Not what they became. Perhaps I should selectively delete memory data?”

  “I suppose you could do that. I guess everyone tries to forget their bad memories.”

  The android cocked her head to the left. “But they don’t.”

  “More like they can’t. Human beings don’t have the luxury of forgetting whatever we want.”

  “But your memory is fallible, indistinct. My databanks record every experience in exact detail. I remember everything my sensory inputs take in.”

  Nsedu hadn’t thought about that. “Look, Tasha, I can’t tell you—”

  “I have made my decision,” she said. “I will not delete the memory data.”

  “Okay, then.” Nsedu extended her hand. “Welcome to the crew, Tasha.”

  The Temple of the Shrieking Goddess

  Originally published in Coven (Purple Sun Press, 2015)

  Another story that does its best to channel the two-fisted pulp adventure ethos of Robert E. Howard, this one tries to distinguish itself with an ancient Aztec setting. I’m not sure where the title came from, exactly, but I know it was the inspiration for the story itself. In most cases, I struggle to think of a good title for a story, but every now and then, a title just comes out of the blue and I have to write the story to find out what it’s about. My first stab at this story was actually a western and featured the main character from the story “A Stranger in Sandyridge.” It didn’t quite work, though, which led to the whole thing being reconceived as an Aztec-themed dark fantasy. The story itself is a bit conventional, but I thought it was a good exemplar of the classic sword and sorcery genre.

  Tenoch watched the moon rise from a small clearing on the hillside. The clear night sky embraced her fullness eagerly, allowing her cool light to bathe the jungle below. He offered a brief prayer of thanks to Tezcatlipoca, the lord of the night sky, for favoring him with such a fine night for continuing his hunt.

  When he finished, Tenoch descended the hill and returned to the tree where he’d left Koyotl tied up. The priest was still asleep, no doubt exhausted from their difficult trek across the heart of the jungle. His robes were torn from pushing through underbrush for two days and his shoes were little more than tattered strips of leather clinging to his bloodied and bruised feet.

  Tenoch woke the wretch with a swift kick to the stomach.

  “Get up, dog.”

  Koyotl groaned and tried to roll over, but Tenoch seized the strip of rope tied to his neck and jerked him to his feet. The coarse twine cut into his flesh, easily tearing through the scab ringing his neck.

  “I said get up!”

  The priest coughed as he struggled to find his balance. Tenoch did just enough to hold him steady and keep him from falling over.

  “W…water…,” Koyotl said, his cracked lips quivering.

  Tenoch slapped the back of the priest’s head sharply.

  “I did not give you permission to speak, dog.”

  The priest whimpered something as he nodded his head. Tenoch yanked the rope just enough to rub it against Koyotl’s raw, bloodied skin.

  “Quiet,” he said. “Show that you have not led me astray and you will have your drink.”

  He let out enough slack in the rope for the priest to walk a few feet in front of him. Koyotl staggered through the silver-lit foliage slowly. His deteriorating condition was becoming a liability. Tenoch knew that he did not have much time left to spare.

  They traveled nearly a mile before he heard it.

  At first, he thought it was some creature of the night calling out to its fellows, but the jungle had fallen strangely quiet since the sun disappeared below the horizon and he quickly realized that it was not like any sound he had heard before. It began with a low buzzing that steadily sharpened in pitch. The sound cut through the still air clearly and bored into the base of Tenoch’s skull. With every step, he felt it press more sharply against his eardrums.

  They were close to it now.

  He pulled Koyotl to a stop and lifted the mouth of his waterskin to the priest’s desiccated lips.

  “Drink,” he said.

  As the priest gulped down his reward, Tenoch tried to peer through the jungle ahead of them to identify possible points for an ambush. Even in his pathetic state, there was still a good chance
that Koyotl was smart enough to lead him into a trap.

  He pulled the waterskin away before the priest could swallow more than a few mouthfuls of water.

  “That’s enough,” Tenoch said. “Get moving.”

  The sound became impossible to ignore as they pressed deeper into the jungle. It grew shriller and shriller until it no longer resembled a buzzing insect so much as a squawking carrion bird. Tenoch had difficulty hearing the sound of their passage; the foliage they pushed aside fluttered back into place soundlessly and their footsteps fell silently upon the soil beneath them.

  They went on for another mile before the jungle gave way and they stepped into the outskirts of a vast, swampy clearing.

  And there, standing at the edge of that fetid marsh, Tenoch finally saw it.

  It thrust up out of the earth like a spur of polished obsidian. Several hundred feet wide at the round-cornered base, the smooth, curving walls vaulted upwards, bending and twisting until at last coming to a sharp, pointed peak that seemed high enough to impale the moon herself. The black surface glimmered brilliantly in the moonlight, refracting it across the whole of the clearing to illuminate it as surely as the midday sun.

  But it was not the sight of the ghastly structure that caused Tenoch’s lips to curl back in disgust. Without the thick jungle undergrowth to muffle the noise, the sound lashing across the clearing was almost unbearably loud. A steady, piercing scream assaulted his ears with a violence more harrowing than any torture devised by mortal hands. There was no question that it emanated from the glistening pyramid, just as Tenoch had no doubt of what it was that loomed before him.

  The Temple of the Shrieking Goddess.

  Koyotl fell to his knees in the muck and bowed his head towards temple. Tenoch glared down at him for a moment before jerking the bloodstained leash to pull the priest to his feet.

  “Where is the entrance?”

  The priest gestured to the north.

  “Th…the far side. Up the stairs.”

  “How much time do I have?”

  For the first time since his capture, Koyotl smiled. The expression disgusted Tenoch.