“Captain Walker?” Huang asked. His voice was devoid of emotion, but then again, Walker had seen many so-called ‘enhanced’ people who had lost too much of their humanity to cybernetics—like his brother, Tim.
“What?”
“The radio wave source. It’s 146 metres off the starboard bow.”
“Damn it, Huang, there are people floating out there! Flesh and blood people! Dead! And there are goddamn alien life forms. Do you know what this means?” Walker tried to calm himself by taking deep breaths. He closed his eyes for a moment, willing the nausea inside him to settle down. “Huang, I’ll check out that radio wave reading shortly. In the meantime, Peng, set up a feed, I want to record everything we’re seeing.”
“But captain, nothing is showing up on the—”, Peng began.
“I don’t care! You can see all those bodies out there, can’t you? There must be millions—”
“Trillions, captain,” Huang interrupted. “I estimate there must be trillions of individual ... entities ... in orbit.”
Walker stared at his first officer. “What are you saying? Trillions? That’s not possible. That’s more people than ever lived in humanity’s history! That’s, that’s ...”
Once more, Walker looked out the viewport at the bodies floating in space. Tens of thousands of them filled the viewport in just the small section of the planetary ring he could see. Forms of life that were completely alien to his mind floated in abject stillness, overwhelming the population of human corpses interspersed between them. Many appeared to be non-carbon-based life, but Walker’s mind had trouble assimilating their spikes, flowery undulations, pseudopods, and bizarre geometries. Time and again, his gaze came to rest on the familiar—the occasional corpse of a man or woman—but it sickened him to dwell on their tortured, void-ravaged features.
After several minutes absorbing the sheer scale of the dead life forms surrounding Osiris II, Walker shook his head to clear his thoughts. “Let’s look at your radio wave source, Huang.”
Huang didn’t answer, but Walker could feel his stare boring into his back. He glanced back at the first officer after a moment to confirm his suspicion. Sure enough, Huang was just standing there staring, looking at nothing in particular. His data feed was insufficient to explain the strange absent-mindedness.
“Peng?” He turned to the junior, who was also gazing blankly at the main screen, although his eyes were buzzing with feed. “I don’t care if the sensors can’t see what I’m seeing, record everything.”
“But—” Peng said.
“But nothing.” Walker strode from the bridge for the exo-suit room. As he stepped through the hatch, he glanced back into the bridge. Both Huang and Peng stood watching him, staring like glaze-eyed statues. Huang’s datafeed had reignited to match the intensity of Peng’s, but Walker was aware of their shared gaze, their shared otherness, and it unnerved the hell out of him. He felt as at home looking them in the eye as he did studying those dead alien monstrosities outside.
Walker sighed and made his way to the exo-suit chamber, gathering his thoughts to the thud of his magnetic boots striking the titanium grille floor.
The Wellington was a small exploration ship, barely fifty metres in length, with a rotating central hub providing 0.3g of artificial gravity—enough for a crew of three to live and work almost indefinitely. Besides the bridge, there was a small living compartment, an even smaller lab, an exo-suit compartment, an air lock, and the largest section, the cargo hold. Interstellar exploration was sponsored by various Earth governments—this trip (and Huang’s contract) was funded by the Red China Bloc—but the real money was made by recovering metals such as osmium or the more plentiful iridium ore, which was why the Wellington’s hold was disproportionately large.
Walker took only three minutes to suit up. Wearing an exo-suit made him feel invulnerable to the crew’s dehumanised stares, and he was keen to get a few minutes alone, even if that meant a spacewalk through a floating alien graveyard.
For good measure, he slipped two Personal Laser Device bands on over his gloves. The personal lasers were useful for cutting through rock and metal, and even more effective against flesh, which was why they were standard military issue. PLDs were unnecessary for a float-and-grab retrieval mission, but deep in the pit of his stomach, Walker did not want to be floating in the cold dark void with trillions of dead bodies—dead things—without some form of defence.
#
The exo-suit’s HUD was lit up like a metropolis at night as Walker neared Huang’s mysterious radio wave source. Bodies of all shapes and sizes filled the horizon, but they were all dead, damaged, and imperfect like moths with frayed wings.
Humanity had been exploring the stars for close to eighty years, but in the history of interstellar exploration, this was the first evidence of complex alien life. He had hit the mother lode, but too many hard questions beckoned for him to appreciate the moment.
Beyond the ocean of dead things, Osiris II loomed as a mustard-dirty beacon that had drawn these moths to its flame and trapped them in its orbit.
The light from the yellow dwarf in the distance haloed the planet’s haze, giving it a sharp outer crescent of gold. The thin band between the gold crescent and the mustard-coloured atmosphere swirled with a dull sewage rainbow of browns, greens, and sepias. Most planets Walker had seen in his twelve years of interstellar exploration were breathtaking when backlit by their suns, but with Osiris II, the light forced him to squint. It was as though it slid into his eyes and lingered for seconds more than it was entitled, fuzzing his brain and making concentration difficult.
Walker turned his attention to the radio wave signature. The exo-suit’s jets sparked into life, nudging him further away from the Wellington, which was behind him and entirely out of his view. His pace was methodical; he was careful to remain above the plane of corpses, but many of them floated in irregular orbits above and below the main mass. Walker kept his path clear of these stray entities, ensuring he did not come close to touching anything drifting about him.
The entities were all long dead, and most he didn’t even recognise as forms of life. All had crystallised with ice in the extreme cold of space. Sunlight glinted off the bodies, and if he didn’t give it too much thought, it was like floating through a vast field of sparkling diamonds. In contrast to the planet’s weird light, the bodies were almost beautiful.
But he did give it thought, and the hundreds of thousands of objects that floated in his field of vision jutted with appendages, protrusions, and geometric shapes. The frost, depredations of space, and play of light robbed the life forms of their identities, but there was no doubt they were dead. His mind turned to his love of history—perhaps because the system was named after Osiris, the Egyptian Lord of the Dead. The Egyptians believed the righteous dead were transformed into stars. The way the bodies twinkled in the light, Walker thought the parallel was chillingly apt.
He sighed and activated the com, having hoped to stay self-reliant for a few minutes longer, but he had an itch that needed to be scratched. “Huang, do you read? Access something for me, will you? When was this system named?”
“1999.” Huang’s voice sounded in his ear. With advancements in technology, it was as if Huang was inside the exo-suit with Walker rather than back on the ship.
“And we’re definitely the first ship in this system?”
“Of course,” Huang answered with typically suave condescension. “You know our mission as well as I, Captain. Our commission is to catalogue this system and claim any applicable colony or mining rights for the Red China Bloc.”
Walker gritted his teeth, “Thanks for the obvious.” With a blink, he terminated the comlink and whispered to himself, “Osiris ... did someone at the turn of the millennium know what was going on out here?”
Walker shook his head to his own question and consigned the mystery to the back of his mind. He fired his thrusters once more and propelled past an organism composed of a cluster of tarnished gold pen
tacle-shapes and towards a purple and brown monstrosity that resembled an immense nine-limbed crown-of-thorns starfish. Half-metre orifices between clumps of spikes had wept some kind of fluid, but the ravages of space had frozen the fluid into crusts.
A humanoid woman was snagged on one of the creature’s protrusions, and as Walker jetted past, he examined the woman’s corpse. Under covering of ice, her naked body appeared to be scuffed with dirt. Her head was oddly shaped, with a prominent brow, jutting jaw, and receded forehead. It took a few moments for Walker to realise she wasn’t human at all but one of humanity’s earlier ancestors—perhaps a Neanderthal?
Walker shuddered inside his exo-suit. It was all too damn strange.
“You’re coming up on the radio wave source now,” Huang’s said over the com.
Walker blinked his comlink active again. “Roger.”
A silver-white object loomed in front of Walker. It was three metres long and resembled a cigar-shaped cocoon. Something within the object emitted the radio waves, which was projected on Walker’s HUD as a pulsing white circle. As he studied the object, a yellow light flashed three times on his HUD.
“Huang, come in.” Walker said to the com. “I’m detecting heat from this thing.” Walker nudged his suit closer to the object and aimed his arm-mounted sensors at it. “Huang, I’m within spitting distance of this cocoon. Are you getting anything?”
Huang said in his ear, “Captain, the object is shedding amino acids. I’m also detecting trace amounts of oxygen and carbon dioxide.”
“This thing looks like a cocoon. Are you saying something could be alive inside it?” Walker said.
“Indeed. Bring it on board. I’ll cut it open to see if there is anything salvageable for the mother Bloc.”
“I give the orders, Huang,” Walker said through clenched teeth. “And keep the politics to yourself.” He blinked his com off and swore to himself.
If Huang heard his admonishment, he didn’t bother to respond.
After a minute seething at Huang, Walker attached a grapple to the cocoon object, but before he activated his jets to return to the ship, a shadow fell across his visor. With the shadow came a chill deeper and colder than anything he’d experienced before. Although he’d been in tight spots and seen his share of death, Walker’s muscles froze in place, and for a second, he considered not turning around to face whatever had floated across his path.
When he did, he flinched, and immediately regretted looking.
A mere metre away, directly above him, floated a human body. Like the others he’d seen from the ship, this man’s face—at least, he assumed it was a man—was a ruin of ice crystals and blood smears. His exposed face and arms were bloated from the vacuum, and he wore an orange and grey mining suit. It was the spitting image of the uniform his brother Tim wore on the day he died. The familiarity of the corpse’s uniform ran Walker’s blood cold.
“You okay, captain?” Peng asked over the com. “Your heart rate just shot up.”
Walker took a few moments to reply. He searched the corpse’s bloody stub of a face for answers but none presented themselves. “I’m bringing a body back with me, too.”
“Is that wise?” Huang said on the com. “The possibility of infection could—”
“Look,” Walker interrupted. “I already have this cocoon with your precious radio wave source, so we’ll need to run a decontam anyway. I need answers, and to get them, we need to inspect one of these bodies.”
Huang didn’t respond, which Walker took as tacit agreement.
He attached a grapple to the miner’s body, activated his jets, and hauled both of his finds back to the safety of the ship.
#
Huang had begun cutting open the silver-threaded cocoon as soon as it cleared decontam—before Walker had even completed his own decontamination.
“Hey, wait a minute!” Walker shouted as soon as his decontam was finished. He retracted his exo-suit’s helmet and strode over to Huang. In the Wellington’s artificial gravity, the exo-suit’s mechanised skeleton enabled him to move as naturally as an unsuited person, even though the suit’s mass was close to 400 kilograms.
“But look!” Peng said. Like Huang and Walker himself, Peng was wearing his exo-suit as a precaution. He watched over Huang’s shoulder as the first officer crouched over the cocoon and sliced away chunks of silk-like threads with the red beam of his PLD.
Huang paused and turned to Walker. “There appears to be a humanoid inside.”
“Keep going,” Walker waved him on. “But don’t singe anything!”
The lights in the cargo hold were clear and uncompromising, but as Walker watched Huang at this work, their light shimmered across the surface of the cocoon. Like the frozen corpses glittering in the sunlight outside, it elicited awe and unease in equal measure. The cocoon was composed of a tightly packed mesh of silver-white threads, although it radiated an intense white glare under the lights. The longer he stared, the more the cocoon undulated, like it was devouring the light and growing, but every time he blinked, the effect reset, and the cocoon was its same silken cigar shape. The effect was disorientating, which forced Walker to turn away. Huang was engrossed in his task, and Walker couldn’t decide if Peng was drifting or rapt in the spectacle.
Huang continued to slice at the cocoon, but the complex weave of the threads slowed the process considerably. Huang didn’t appear fazed. Although lasers themselves were noiseless, the thrum of the PLD’s micro-reactor droned through the cargo hold like a tree full of muted cicadas.
With his crew occupied, Walker turned his attention to the corpse he had retrieved. The miner had been laid out on the floor on the far side of the hold. Under the glare of the lights, its face was a mush of bloody ice. The man’s flesh was bloated, purple, and scored with cuts. Whatever humanity the man had possessed had been stripped by countless years orbiting Osiris II.
Walker bent over the body and unzipped its jumpsuit. “Just like Tim’s,” he muttered to himself.
He rifled through the corpse’s pockets, careful not to touch the frozen flesh. Although his search was fruitless, he stared at the orange and grey mining uniform. Although faded, it was identical to the one Tim had worn during his service on the Moon. The cave-in had robbed him of a body to grieve over, but he’d always wondered if Tim had survived, however fleetingly, under a hundred thousand tons of lunar rock.
“Captain Walker,” Peng called.
Walker’s gaze lingered on the dead miner’s face for a few seconds more. Try as he might, he couldn’t see anything that might have resembled Tim in that ruin of a person, but the man’s size and hair colour were right. He closed his eyes and tried to remember his brother’s face. It had only been a few years, and already, the details were fading, the memory slipping.
“Captain?” Peng said.
Walker sighed and opened his eyes. “Coming.”
Both Huang and Peng had retracted their exo-suits’ helmets to get a better look at their bounty. Before them, a man dressed in archaic clothes—a turn-of-the-millennium trench coat and dark cotton shirt and pants—was left lying on a bed of silver-white threads. He clutched an ancient firearm to his chest.
Huang’s exo-suit helmet folded over his face in an automated whirr. A few moments later, he announced in a booming voice over his suit’s loudspeaker. “He’s alive. Curious. He’s also the source of the radio waves.” As quick as Huang had donned his helmet to conduct his scan, he retracted it again.
Walker nodded. He stood over the man and studied his face. His skin was pale but sun-damaged as though he’d spent considerable time outdoors. He looked to be about Walker’s age, maybe a few years younger, somewhere in his early thirties.
“What’s with the clothes?” Peng said. He had picked up some of the cocoon’s threads and strung them through his fingers as he stared at the man. Both Peng’s and Huang’s datafeeds appeared minimal. Their eyes were alive with the real-world conundrum before them.
“Peng, put that stuff d
own!” Walker ordered. “Help me get him to a bunk,” Walker bent down, removed the old firearm from the man’s grasp, and slipped it inside the storage container on his thigh.
Peng frowned, dropped the silken threads, and moved to grab the man’s legs.
In moments, Walker and Peng had carried the unconscious man from the cargo hold, through the hatch, and to Peng’s bunk bed in the crew quarters.
“Can’t we use his bunk?” Peng inclined his head in the direction of Huang, who had stayed in the cargo hold to examine the miner’s corpse.
“Not unless you want to lift this guy to the top bunk,” Walker chided.
With the final effort to heave the man onto Peng’s bunk, an object fell free and clattered on the grille floor. It was a flute carved from a dark wood that Walker couldn’t identify—although with the limited forests Earth had remaining, he wasn’t sure he could identify any type of wood except for pine. Lines of symbols had been carved into its wood. The craftsmanship was incredible yet alien. Squiggles cavorted around the holes; something that looked like a dragon encircled the mouth piece. The instrument was ancient in a way Walker couldn’t put his finger on.
The moment Peng picked up the flute, the unconscious man stirred.
“Major Peel!” the stranger shouted. His eyes shot open, and he tried to rise against Walker’s restraining hand on his chest.
“Easy, easy,” Walker said. “You’re safe.”
The man blinked a few times and glanced around the crew quarters. His breathing soon levelled off, and although his hand shook when he placed it on Walker’s arm, he appeared composed.
“Where I am?” he asked.
Walker had anticipated the question. “You’re aboard the Wellington, a chartered interstellar exploration vessel. We’re near the planet Osiris II.”
Cthulhu Mythos Writers Sampler 2013 Page 26