Cosmic Savior: (A Space Opera Adventure) (Interstellar Gunrunner Book 3), page 23
“Well, think about it… according to human science, everything in a dream is just an extension of the dreamer. The land, the animals, the sounds… it’s all you. When you talk to another being in a dream, it’s just your mind in a different form. So why would your own mind need to dream up fake sensory organs to interface and communicate… with itself?”
“I’m not a neurologist, Ru.”
She leaned closer. “Who’s to say that this world, the one in which you and I are talking, isn’t yet another dream? Who decides what’s real and what isn’t?”
“You really couldn’t cool it with the philosophical terror for another few hours?”
“I can see it in your eyes. My words are resonating.”
“You’re cheating with twosight.”
“I don’t need the future to know what’s right in front of me, Bodhi. Whatever you saw or felt was real enough to rattle you. And calling it a hallucination doesn’t make it any less real—it just muddies the truth.”
I held her gaze for a long moment, shuddering as aftershocks of that disquieting experience came back to me. The room began to feel less and less real… as though I could pop it like a balloon with one simple thought.
“Am I dreaming?” I whispered.
Ruena rolled her eyes. “If you were dreaming, it wouldn’t matter what I told you. I’d just be part of your dream.”
Solipsistic terror, meet Bodhi.
“Just tell me what you saw,” she continued, taking my hand in hers. “I have a foot in both worlds… one in your reality and one in the infinite dream. Nobody else on this ship will understand what you’re going through.”
Something about her presence put me into a hypnotic state of suggestion. Was it her comforting tone, her genuine gaze? Even now, I can’t be sure. Whatever the reason, I felt compelled to spill my guts to her.
And so I did.
I laid out the entire story, beginning with the spider bite and stretching all the way to the moment we were rescued.
When I’d finished, Ruena pulled back slightly and stiffened her face. “The maitreyans came to you.”
“Come again?”
“The maitreyans, Bodhi. You’ve never met one in the flesh, have you?”
“No?”
“Then how else could you have known how they looked? How many arms they had? What language they use?”
“That’s simply impossible.” Desperate to disprove her claim, I began combing back through my memories of the ship. Surely I’d seen a mural depicting their people somewhere, or read some obscure book on nomadic species years ago. But it all came up empty. That hallucination had been my first brush with a maitreyan specimen—and according to Ru, it had been legit. “It just doesn’t make any—”
“Sense,” Ruena finished. “No, not by physical laws. But the maitreyans have said that they’re not limited to our dimensional perception… those who have perfected their minds exist on all levels of the continuum.”
“You lost me there.”
“Doesn’t matter. What I’m saying is, it was real, Bodhi. Maybe not to them, but to you. And that’s what matters. Dreams… reality… they’re sides of the same jewel. There’s no divide.”
My breath grew very shallow. “But if it was real…”
“I don’t know,” Ruena said softly, surely using her twosight to jump ahead of my replies. “I can’t tell you what to do with it, or how you ought to live. All I can tell you is that you were in the right place, at the right time, and with the right circumstances. You weren’t chosen by accident.”
“But you don’t get it, Ru. That was the best I’d ever felt. I mean, it was borderline euphoric. Who knew peace was better than an upper?”
Her smile struck me as somehow sad. “The maitreyans always preached exactly what you’re saying. They said stillness was the only thing that mattered. The only thing that goes beyond death.”
“Then what the hell do I do? Just lie here and die?”
“Like I said… it’s not my forte. That’s a question for yourself.”
I shook my head. “Those damn maitreyans. Couldn’t they have revealed the ultimate nature of reality after I got us out of this mess?”
“There is no after, Bodhi,” Ruena said, patting my shoulder as she stood. “There’s only now. And you have eternity to learn that.”
Then she walked to the door and stepped out, leaving me with a heaping cargo load of questions I wasn’t equipped to process. Foremost among these questions was whether we’d ever truly spoken or not. Had Ruena sat beside me, or had she merely come to me in a dream? I never did ask. Some things are better left untouched.
I don’t know when I drifted into sleep, but I certainly know when I woke up. Whirling red lights and low, droning sirens filled the triage unit. Never good.
Before I could sit straight, let alone hop to my feet, the simscreen beside my bed flickered on. Chitta Mini’s avatar zipped around in a strange display of alarm.
“Finally!” he barked. “I’ve been tryna wake you up for, like, five seconds!”
I rubbed my eyes. “Are we exploding?”
“Not yet, chief. But things aren’t lookin’ so hot. In fact, they’re not hot at all. They’re arctic.”
“Get to it.”
“Right, yeah, okay. Better if you take a look for yourself.”
The simscreen dissolved in a wash of static, only to rematerialize moments later as an exterior camera feed. Metal panels running along the image’s bottom edge hinted that the feed belonged, specifically, to the uppermost dorsal camera. At first, nothing appeared amiss. Our sensors and chassis and various instruments were intact, and we were still surrounded by the Untraversed’s ominous violet glow. Nothing else in sight. Had the chitta started losing his mind? Or had I lost mine?
“Oh, sorry,” Mini said. “Wrong feed. Lemme hit you with the underside cam.”
More static, more metal panels, more purple void, and—something else. Something enormous. Something that was currently surging up toward the belly of the ship, preparing to devour us. Even now, at what seemed to be several dozen kilometers away, it was a veritable city of skyscraper teeth and saliva oceans. We would be nothing more than a morsel between those jaws.
“What is that?” I whispered.
Chitta Mini gave an exaggerated hum. “Are you asking which phylum and genus it belongs to, or should I just say ‘something about to swallow us’?”
I tussled my blankets in a panicked fit, sensing—however irrationally—that doing so would make me feel more in control of the situation. It did not. “How fast are we moving!?”
“I’ll have a look-see,” Mini said. “It looks like we’re cruisin’ at… zero kilometers per hour.”
“Zero?”
“As in, one less than one.”
“How!?”
“You want the technical explanation, or—”
“The one that you deliver before we get eaten.”
“Oh. That version. So, uh, the data logs are showing that a hypersonic pulse shut down the reactors about forty seconds ago. Hence the auxiliary power. And methinks that pulse came from… whatever that thing is.”
Fighting down the urge to screech, I drew a long, shaking breath and watched the creature’s glacial approach. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
“Well, I tried to… but like I said, you were catchin’ some dreams.”
Even as Chitta Mini spoke, the creature’s jaws widened and stretched further, expanding beyond the boundaries of the camera feed. Neon blue lights shimmered between its rows of teeth and down into the infinite recesses of its throat. In its final seconds, the feed revealed a serpentine body twisting and trailing behind the gargantuan mouth—a long, long body, at that. Then the simscreen went dark. We were inside the belly of the beast. Or space-snake, in this instance.
Half-convinced I was trapped in a pharmaceutically fueled nightmare, I scooted to the foot of the bed and began assessing my options. The fact that I had to manually push each leg over the edge disabused me of the notion that I could outrun my problems.
“Mini,” I said, working diligently to flex my lifeless toes, “who’s at the helm? Chaska?”
“Not quite…”
“Mini?”
“So, remember that hypersonic pulse I mentioned?”
“Unfortunately.”
“Yeah, well, it also had a bit of an… effect… on the crew.”
With an ambitious lurch, I staggered forward and bumped into the wall. “Not the time to play it coy.”
“Point taken. They’re all, uh, unconscious.”
I froze mid-step. “Unconscious or dead?”
“Pretty sure they’re just unconscious. That pulse really threw a wrench into their brains, I guess. Except mine—liquid suspension, baby! Gotta love fluid dynamics.”
“What about me?”
“Seems that triage module’s got some half-decent shielding between the walls. You lucked out, buddy!”
Given the fact that I could barely stumble along the wall and was on the verge of collapsing just halfway to the door, “luck” did not seem applicable. “Mini, if you’ve got a game plan, I would be overjoyed to hear it.”
“Glad you asked! Check it out.”
Turning back, I found that the chitta had projected a new set of camera feeds onto the simscreen. By the looks of it, all of the feeds were interior, offering a well-rounded view of… nothing.
“My first plan was to seal off the ramp, but, uh, that’s not too possible without a ramp,” the chitta said. “Next, I thought we should—”
“Wait,” I interjected, narrowing my eyes at the screen. “Why are we sealing the ramp?”
All I saw beyond the staging bay’s open rear was the creature’s tongue, which was illuminated by our exterior floodlights. The pinkish tissue swelled and depressed in a lazy rhythm. We were perched directly atop it, riding the waves of its circulating breaths and streaming saliva.
“Oh, that’s not great,” Chitta Mini said darkly. “Let’s switch it up.”
In a flash, the simscreen’s camera feeds converted to a colorful sprawl of oranges and greens and reds. Now, I recognized this filter as one of the surveillance system’s ten or twelve different perceptive lenses—a thermal variant, perhaps?—but I couldn’t pinpoint exactly what it was. Not that I needed to. The alien image revealed the presence of nearly a dozen hulking human forms, all steadily advancing across the staging bay with squirming claw-glove-things extended from their hands. A boarding party, then. And, just my luck, one that my feeble human eyes couldn’t even see.
“Now would be an excellent time to update that game plan,” I growled.
“Let’s keep our cool,” Chitta Mini said. “For all we know, these guys are just checking in on us.”
“They’ve got living creatures stuck on their hands. And they’re invisible.”
“True. Alright, hang tight, we’ve got this. Step one is to get me out of that tank and into your head. Maybe we can parley with ’em.”
Dumbfounded, I slapped my thighs. Didn’t feel a thing. “I can hardly walk.”
“I’ve got a fix for that.”
“Which is?”
“Think about an emerald horse.”
Well, that sealed the deal. It seemed Chitta Mini had lost his precious mind. But as I stood there, half-thinking of that damned emerald horse and half-wondering if these intruders ate human flesh, a wall-mounted mechanism whirred to life. Before I could even look at it, let alone figure out its purpose, the mechanism’s hydraulic arm came zipping toward me. A two-inch needle stabbed me directly in the sternum.
“Sonofabitch!” I roared, toppling back against the wall. As the mechanism retracted, I clapped a hand to my chest and prepared to bleed out. Chitta Mini had gone bad. Sentenced me to death by my own ship. “What did I ever—”
Midway through that sentence, a hydrogen bomb exploded behind my eyes. Energy radiated from my core, sizzling down into my feet and the tips of my fingers. Pain evaporated. My mind accelerated to a hundred thousand kilometers a second. I was ready to take on the world bare-chested and bare-knuckled.
“Nothin’ gets a human goin’ like an amphetamine kick,” Chitta Mini said. “Now hurry up and get over here! I’ll wait in my tank.”
Even before the chitta had finished his sentence, I was bursting out of the triage module and sprinting like an interplanetary missile toward the meeting room. The world slid past me in a blur of red lights and sirens. I distinctly recall my stream of thoughts: Fast, fast, fast, fast, fast.
When I finally barreled into the room, I was quick to note that Chaska, Tusky, and Gadra were slumped over in their respective chairs, snoring into the tabletop. Ruena, I guessed, was in her sleeping pod, and Umzuma in his pit. This was good. Better than sharing a ship with a load of dead crew members, anyway.
“Psst!” Chitta Mini’s subtle reminder of his presence wasn’t so subtle; in fact, amplified through the speaker systems, I was quite certain our approaching foes had heard it, too. “Get me outta this thing, man. It’s gettin’ hot in here.”
Groaning, I crossed the room, climbed onto the table, and began prying his canister’s lid off. The thing was magnetically sealed, but no match for a man who’d just taken a full syringe of adrenaline-spiking uppers to the chest. I tossed the lid to the floor, then fished Chitta Mini out of his briny soup.
Just as I tucked him into my pocket, however, I heard footsteps. They weren’t your typical soldier’s bulky, discordant steps—quite the opposite. These were the footfalls of assassins. Orderly, polite, unified in both pace and position. It’s truly amazing what you can discern when your sensory input is dialed up to twelve.
Right on cue, Chitta Mini’s tendril prodded my side.
“You feelin’ cool?” Mini whispered. “’Cause I feel real cool. Almost too cool.”
“I feel like we’re about to get gutted,” I mentally replied, climbing back down to floor level as our guests drew closer. “If we survive this, remind me to keep a gun in the triage module.”
Then the footsteps grew softer and softer and softer…
A wealth of experience with hijackings prepared me for what was coming. I raised both hands, sighed, and announced, “Come out, gentlemen. I’m unarmed. And if you can’t understand alltongue, please be quick about my murder.”
Seconds later, my uninvited visitors materialized in a semicircle formation across the doorway.
They were massive, hunched over, and built like steroid junkies, but their general proportions confirmed that they were clearly carrying some of that sweet human DNA—or some simian offshoot of it. Even so, they looked distinctly… alien. Probably due to the lack of skin. They were covered from head to toe in overlapping, glimmering bone plates that either formed or encased their actual body. Tusks made of the same curious material jutted out here and there.
But the most alarming feature on these skeletal, serpent-mouth-dwelling beings was one I’d already identified through the simscreen footage—their choice of weapon. Each warrior wore a pair of “gloves” formed from writhing, inflamed-looking tissue. These questionable hand garments ended in a mess of wriggling filaments, nails, and teeth. Yes, teeth.
“So…” I began, trying in vain to swallow, “welcome aboard my ship.”
The largest of the bone-people stepped forward. “Hyoo-mon,” he croaked in throaty tones, his language so cryptic it took my linguistic implant several seconds to stitch together the ensuing grammar. “You have made a grave error in invading the domain of the Great Maker. The Circle of Torment will decide if your flesh is stronger than those who have come before you.”
I’m quite confident that if the “city” of the bone-people were ever listed on a tourism netgate, it would be filled with one-star reviews. And deservingly so.
In the event that such an entry is ever made, let me now submit my review for this must-skip destination:
This is a terrible stop for any would-be travelers. Situated in the literal mouth of a void-dwelling serpent, this hellhole is equal parts rancid air and oppressive darkness. Patches of glowing crystal do not provide sufficient lightning when being led, shackled and blindfolded, through a twisting series of canyons formed from tongue tendons and rotting teeth. More than once during my forced march, I was soaked up to my waist in unidentified, lukewarm liquid.
The hospitality was also dreadful. Rather than fielding any questions about our travel location or possible amenities, my hosts placed a gag in my mouth and carried my still-unconscious crew members over their shoulders in cloth sacks. At no point was I offered valet service for my ship, nor did I receive lodging in a suitable hotel.
At some point, my blindfold was eventually removed, seemingly so I could revel in the “beauty” of their capital city. Surprise, surprise, it was not beautiful. Nor was it structurally sound. Most of the buildings were carved into hundred-foot-tall teeth or otherwise cobbled together using scrap materials. The remains of scuttled and scavenged flagships lay wedged between molar peaks in the distance. Pollution was rampant, and the use of gallows and other torture mechanisms was too liberal for comfort. I did not get a chance to tour the overpopulated slums located in the cavities and receding tissue along the eastern gumline, but they did not look promising.
In summary, I would not recommend this city to any travelers, whether seasoned or amateur. If you insist on visiting this pitiful spot, be sure you haven’t eaten recently, wear stain-proof clothing, and don’t look the locals in the eye. Especially the last one. If you break this rule, you may find yourself dragged to the enormous, coliseum-like tumor that forms of the heart of the mouth-world—the Circle of Torment.
One star. Zero if I could give it.
Anyway, that review about sums up my take on the whole affair. It was hard enough penning that truncated account, let alone recalling details of the miasma and stomach juices firsthand. And so, detail-greedy reader, that is the best you will get.
But let us move along.
I’d been ordered to stand on a pillar that was half-submerged in a sea of salt. This pillar was one of many—ten in all, I counted—that lined the outer ring of the Circle of Torment. Waiting atop the other pillars were bone-people who looked more or less identical to the boarding party. The only difference was that my fellow pillar inhabitants were scrawnier and chipped in places, suggesting they were not the cream of this society’s crop.
