Space Eldritch II: The Haunted Stars, page 6
Dr. Riady checked on the stasis tank holding the body of Leland Chang one last time. He appeared as dead as any other space traveler, but she knew it was an illusion. Unlike the rest of them, his mind would be totally open to the sanity-breaking horrors of null space.
What would be left of this man on the other side? What did it matter, the Captain had argued, one man’s sanity versus six hundred thousand presumed dead? Command needed answers, and they’d get them, even if they had to dismantle the only survivor down to his individual molecules.
Sweet dreams, Mr. Chang.
***
There was no more news. No feeds. No brainless chatter. The silence was deafening.
I was nearly out of meds. I called the treatment center but only got their automated message system. Even their AI would not respond.
I would have to go outside.
You do not need an imagination to be frightened. I still experience fear. Self-preservation is the most basic of all human instincts. I really did not want to go outside.
But it was preferable to remembering null space and the dreams of the dead.
The hall was empty. Some of the other apartment doors were open. The rooms inside were a mess, but I didn’t see anyone alive. Mrs. Garcia was on her couch, pistol in her lap, brains all over the wall. In Mrs. Johansen’s apartment there was something odd stuck to the ceiling. At first I thought it was a green and grey sleeping bag, but it was a cocoon, made of a material like unto mucus.
The lift still came when called, which was good, because I didn’t think my legs could handle the stairs.
The building’s lobby was empty. It was the first time in fifteen years that I’d not seen another human being inside of it. It room was filthy. The air scrubbers were off. There was a wet black trail through the red dust. At first I thought it was oil, but it had a greenish tint to it. Following the trail with my eyes, I came to a steaming pile of dead skin and regurgitated bones.
The main doors were made of glass. On the other side was chaos.
The streets were filled with trash. There had to be a crack in the dome because red grit coated everything at ground level. Clouds of insects were swarming, hopping and flying, skittering about in the shadows.
Opening the doors, I stepped into the end.
The environmental systems were failing. The air tasted like metal. It was terribly hot.
There were… people in the market. Hunched, lurching about, their bodies covered in rags that had been clothing so recently. They paid me no heed. A hulking man brushed by, not even noticing me. He kept his head down, hat concealing his face, but I saw the puckering green hole where his ear had been, and then he went down an alley where some others had gathered, feasting on the guts of a stray dog.
Focus. The nearest pharmaceutical dispensary was only a block away.
I made it half that distance before I came upon the Black Man.
He was waiting on the sidewalk. His featureless head swiveled toward me, watching without eyes.
The Black Man wasn’t part of the chaos. He was above it. He’d seen it before.
He saw me and knew that I was different.
You do not participate in the Great Becoming?
I turned back toward my apartment, walking quickly.
Wait.
The Black Man followed.
Beneath the red winds, beneath the sands of Rhonoth-dur, the temple of undoing beckons. You alone decline this invitation?
I began to run.
The Black Man continued walking after me.
Unable to meet your full potential, you are broken. You have gazed upon the grandeur of the Between and have wilted. Your dreams of unmaking are not for my world. To another master they must fly.
I reached the glass doors of my building. Recognizing I belonged there, they slid open to save me.
Delicious screams.
“Help! Wait!”
“Let us in!”
There were three children running up the sidewalk from the opposite direction, terrified, reaching for me with tears streaming down their faces. There was a shadow behind them, shambling. My eyes tracked up toward the incomprehensible mass of hungry, twisted meat that was pursuing them.
Tentacles wrapped around the last child’s ankles. He sprawled into the street, and was sucked back to be consumed.
I held the door open. “Hurry!”
The first child, a girl, no more than ten, got past me. The next, a boy, probably six or seven, ran up, and I placed my hand on the back of his head as he passed to push him to safety.
My fingers touched hard chitin.
I snatched my hand away. Beneath his patchy blond hair, the back half of his skull was a slimy black and red plate.
He looked up at me with wide goat pupil eyes.
I shoved him back into the street and forced the door closed.
The girl was inside, watching me, emotionless, as the tentacled horror dragged the boy away.
The Black Man stood outside the door.
This world is mine. You have been claimed by another.
I went back to the lift as the girl squatted in the lobby and began to draw intricate designs in the slime.
The lift doors opened. The Black Man was inside waiting.
I stepped inside and called for 216. We started up.
This world is mine, priest of another. We do not share. Your dreams of unmaking must serve another.
A few seconds later we reached my floor. I stumbled into the hall in a swarm of flies. The Black Man did not follow. Mrs. Johansen’s cocoon had burst open. Something had slid beneath her couch and was breathing wetly. Mrs. Garcia’s body was gone, but her bloody footsteps went to the wall and simply disappeared.
I went inside my apartment. The Black Man was waiting, standing in front of my window, watching Atlas be cleansed.
We do not share worlds. This one is mine. It has always been mine. We do not share priests. You have been marked by another. Return to He who has anointed you and awaken Him from his slumber. Awaken Him with your visions, so that the worlds He has claimed may hear His call.
Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.
Die again. And Dream.
***
The Alert cycled through the Mars gate without incident. Within seconds AIs had exchanged vast swaths of data. Curiously, Emma was unable to send certain bits of information because her database had somehow become corrupted.
By the time the first of the Alert’s crew began to thaw from hypersleep, a fleet of ships had been dispatched to Atlas to continue the investigation.
Dr. Riady, being genetically enhanced, was the first to shake off the stasis effects. She summoned a basin of water, splashed some on her face, and stared at her reflection in the mirror. As a side effect of near physical perfection, it was extremely unusual to find a pimple on her forehead. It was even more unusual, when she scratched at and squeezed it, to have a tiny insect pop out and fly away…
“Emma, is there a bug in my chambers?”
“No, Doctor. I do not detect anything of the sort.”
She shook her head, blamed the hallucination on the aftereffects of the hypersleep drugs, splashed some more water on her face, and got back to work. She had a crew to decant.
Within the last of those stasis tanks, deep within the Alert’s quarantine, Leland Chang’s eyes moved rapidly behind closed lids, as his broken mind relived visions of tormented ancient gods, trapped between the walls of reality, so vivid and imaginative that they could wake the dead.
Far beneath the ocean of the human home world, something began to stir.
And the sixteen billion humans spread across several planets, moons, and orbitals around Earth did not even realize that this was the beginning of the end.
The Implant
Robert J Defendi
Father Phai walked the halls of Saint Stephan University, ignoring the tech serfs who scuttled about like brain-damaged insects. The high stone ceilings of the building vaulted over his head as his feet shuffled along smooth marble floors. He paused in the middle of the hall and turned to Father Aristeides.
“You’re saying that God can’t create a rock so big that not even He can lift it?”
“Of course not,” his friend, also a priest, said. “God is all-powerful. He can lift anything.”
Father Phai shook his head and started walking again. A tech serf limped by on two mechanical legs. One was longer than the other; they looked as if they’d been made in different decades for different people.
“If He is all-powerful, He can certainly make a rock He can’t lift. He can just make it so that He can lift it again the next moment.”
“That’s stupid,” his friend said, “and you’re stupid for thinking it.”
Father Phai smiled and started walking again. “People have debated that one for five thousand years.” If it wasn’t for Aristeides, Phai would have been alone ever since he left Frona to join the seminary. The man was more than a friend. He was a personal salvation.
“Just because half of them were stupid,” Aristeides said, the smile clear in his tone even if his face was stern.
They pushed down a side hall and several of the priests smiled and nodded at Father Phai. He didn’t know half of them, but he’d always been good at making friends. Even the tech serfs treated him with a little more familiarity than they did the other priests. They didn’t seem to hold it against him that he was a priest in a religion that damned them with one doctrine while blessing them with another.
“I hear the border problems have heated up again,” Aristeides said.
“Russians,” Father Phai said, because you didn’t need to say anything more on the subject.
“They’re claiming this one isn’t fueled by the Church. They’re saying it’s just straight politics.”
The split between the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Russian Orthodox Church still drove tensions between the two peoples, even so many centuries after it happened. ”It’s good to know that hatred isn’t just an ecclesiastical trait,” Father Phai said.
“Indeed.”
They walked down a narrow stone hall now. Up ahead, scaffolding blocked half the passage and two tech serfs, their cyberware suited for heavy labor, braced a wall as they worked on the cracking stone. People walked sideways to pass one another beside the scaffolding.
“They still haven’t admitted to destroying the Daedalus,” Aristeides said.
“The Russians are heathens, and monsters, and rogues, but they wouldn’t destroy a ship,” Father Phai said. Thou shalt not violate the sanctity of a working ship—the most inviolate of the proscriptions. “They’ll violate commandments all day long, but a proscription? Unthinkable.” Except for the violation caused by the tech serfs, of course, but those were only done out of necessity.
“They say that a Greek ship found the remnants of the Catherine the Great,” Aristeides said. “They think it was the one the Daedalus tangled with before the end.”
“And?”
“A charnel house. Everyone inside dead.”
“How?”
“It looks like they did it to themselves.
Father Phai stopped just before the scaffolding. “Insanity?”
“Murderous insanity.”
“Well, maybe they would violate a proscription, then.”
“That’s all I’m saying.”
Father Phai twisted sideways to slide past the scaffolding, the metal tubing of the structure brushing against his back. Aristeides started a moment later. Father Phai was just uncomfortably sliding past a deacon when a loud crack sounded behind him, like a pneumatic piston firing.
Blood sprayed across the wall in front of him. He looked at the deacon in shock. Blood doused the man. Father Phai couldn’t see the wound, but horror dawned on the deacon’s face and he screamed.
Father Phai reached out to help him, his movements wooden. Shock? He’d seen blood before, why would he be going into shock? He couldn’t quite reach the man, and the deacon pulled back in horror, screaming again.
“Phai!?” Aristeides shouted.
Father Phai turned to his friend. He tried to ask what was going on, but his mouth wouldn’t move.
“Phai, you’re going to be all right!” Aristeides shouted.
He was going to be all right? He reached up to his face, numb now, and found it sticky with blood. Confused, he reached farther, his fingers sinking into a hole in his forehead, the edges sharp with shattered bone. A hole. In his head? His fingers slid inside, felt slick blood and pulpy matter and he suddenly smelled apricots.
“Phai!” Aristeides screamed.
He slid to the ground. What was going on? He raised his hand again and it thumped against his face. Something was wrong. Something was wrong. Something was wrong. Something was wrong.
***
Are you there, My child?
Can you hear Me?
I can see you there.
You do not understand.
But you will.
Come to me and everything will be right again, My son.
***
Dreams of pain and rage. Dreams of loss and horror. Dreams of loneliness. Father Phai awoke, screaming in a hospital bed.
“Father Hephaistos Ganis?”
He stared up into the face of a doctor, awash in blurry light from the window. The room was too brilliantly white to focus. “Aarrgh,” he said.
“Don’t try to talk. You’ve been in a terrible accident. The damage was severe.”
He reached up for the hole in his head, the urge to stick his fingers inside overwhelming.
“Stop him!”
Strong hands grabbed his arms, but his vision wasn’t working right and he couldn’t see who they belonged to. He screamed in rage. He was trapped. He started to weep. It was funny. He laughed.
“There has been damage to your frontal lobe. Can you get control of yourself?”
Father Phai spat on the doctor, and his tongue felt weird. He bit it, winced at the pain, but couldn’t stop himself from biting it again.
“Nurse,” the doctor said.
A slight pain burned in his arm, then drowsiness. Then it all went black.
***
You’re broken, lost, My son.
I am here, but you must be open to Me.
You are alone now.
You will not be alone forever.
Have faith and come unto Me.
***
“Phai,” Aristeides said.
Father Phai opened his eyes to see his friend standing over the hospital bed. He wasn’t alone. Thank God. He wasn’t alone. He started to weep and laugh at the same time.
He still couldn’t focus on more than one thing at a time. The rest of the visual data was there, but he couldn’t process it. Still, it was Aristeides. Not alone.
“Phai, they’ve asked me to speak to you as a priest,” Aristeides said. “I’m here as your priest, not your friend, do you understand?”
Father Phai nodded. Not a friend. The laughing stopped, but the crying didn’t. Still, he was here.
They’d strapped Father Phai’s arms to his bed and put a bite guard in his mouth. Yesterday he had smothered his face in his own pillow because he couldn’t stop himself. The vaguest idea became a burning need in his torn brain. The only reassurance was that he could barely remember most of it.
“Phai, they say that you have several problems from the damage. I’m sorry. A piston broke loose and fired through your... well, through you.” Aristeides gestured vaguely, but Father Phai knew that something had blown through his head, leaving him alive but terribly broken.
Thou shalt not violate the sanctity of the human form. An accident had broken the proscription, not him. Not him. The tears turned to tears of despair.
“They can fix you, Phai. They’ve checked. There’s a piece of brainware that came back on a salvage ship about a month ago. It’s meant to be a database brainmod, but it patches in through the frontal lobe. The side effect from its placement is that it has to replicate all the tasks of the part of your brain that’s damaged. They can make you whole, Phai.”
Whole. Whole but with a cybernetic implant in his head. A piece of tech sacred because the secrets of making it had been lost centuries ago. But its very presence in his body would be a violation of the proscription on the human form, the worst level of sin. Sacred and profane all at once.
They wanted to make him a tech serf.
“I’m here to counsel you, Phai, but I can’t see any choice but one.”
Aristeides reached out and took his hand. Father Phai squeezed it back, warmth and joy filling him from the touch, and he laughed around the bite guard.
“I don’t see what life you’ll have otherwise, Phai.”
Father Phai nodded. There was only one choice.
“Is that a yes?”
Thou shalt not violate the sanctity of the human form.
Father Phai started to shake his head, but what would he do like this? What kind of a life could he have if he couldn’t control his most destructive impulses? Merciful God, why have you done this to me?
He nodded again.
“Thank you, Phai. I’ll tell the doctors.”
***
There is a hole in you.
They think they have filled it.
But they haven’t.
