Target Rich Environment

by Larry Correia

  Dr. Riady reasoned that she might as well be truthful. “We’re going to make an electronic imprint of your long term memory.”

  “I’m familiar with the process. I keep up on all the science reports . . . It’ll probably kill me, won’t it?”

  “I’m going to do my very best to make sure that doesn’t happen, Mr. Chang.”

  “I don’t mind, Doctor . . . I’ve only got one last request.”

  “What’s that?”

  “If this works, if you’re able to see into my brain and record what’s there, please, no matter what, don’t look at the dreams I had in null space . . . It’s for your own good.”

  The news changed over the next week. There were fewer and fewer blog posts. Social media was unusually quiet. The pundits were extra angry and dimwitted. The ADF had been called up for an unspecified reason. The talking heads pontificated that it was related to the sudden increase in property crime. A riot had broken out in the undercity but it was contained. There had been a rash of accidental deaths at the Dark Side Dig. Compared to all of this, the fact that the Sleep Clinic was overwhelmed was hardly a footnote.

  The news was my anchor. I needed other people going about their lives so my lack of one was palatable. I did not like this.

  Needing stimulus, I opened the window covers. The sky today was a brilliant red as mile long tornados battled above the chasm. Far below, a large fire had broken out in the city, and it was surrounded by flashing red and blue lights. I was more upset that this event hadn’t even made the news than the actual reality of the event.

  Flies began landing on the window, great black, hairy things. Dozens at first, and then hundreds of them. I closed the cover.

  “Emma, I need to make a statement for the record.”

  “Confirmed, Captain.”

  “Dr. Riady has completed the memory lift of the patient, Leland Chang. The data is currently being analyzed. The gate will cycle in one hour and then the Alert will return home to report. As of this time our investigation into the cause of the Atlas incident remains inconclusive. I regret to say that our memory lift proved to be too much for Mr. Chang in his weakened condition and he has gone into a vegetative state. He’s been placed in stasis in preparation for hypersleep. I’m fully aware that taking someone with Keziah’s Disorder into null space may be considered torture under the Durban Accords, but I believe the urgency of our mission outweighs this so I have overruled Dr. Riady’s protests.”

  Captain Hartono rubbed his temples. He had a splitting headache. It was getting hard to think and even harder to make good decisions, but none of them had gotten much sleep since they’d arrived.

  The noise had come from the hall of my apartment. It had been loud enough to wake me from my drug induced slumber. It had trailed off before I’d come fully awake. Had it been a scream? An animal howl? A little bit of both?

  I asked my apartment building’s AI what had made the sound. It began to answer. Then it froze, gave me an error message, and had to reboot. It came back a moment later and said that there had been no sound and nothing was wrong.

  Logic said to stay in bed, perhaps call the authorities. I am no longer capable of curiosity, so I could not even blame that base instinct, but for whatever reason, I got up, went to my security door, and listened through the port.

  I heard grunting. And squishing.

  I took another pill and went back to bed.

  By the next morning the news feeds had grown . . . odd.

  Most of the local stations were offline. Only a handful remained, and those were the larger affiliates with more staff. I watched as one of the news reader beautiful people rambled incoherently about the beauty of tentacles, before vomiting blood all over the news desk. She began drawing in the blood with her finger before the feed was cut. We are experiencing technical difficulties.

  The independent sources and some of the bloggers kept on, though many of those had become garbled. The written ones struggled as well, and one popular author’s feed, now filled with typos, complained that typing was difficult once your fingers began growing together.

  I opened the window to the real world and watched the fall of Atlas. There were more fires in the streets below, as well as the occasional bright flash of a particle weapon. Vehicles were overturned and I could watch the people dance about them like ants.

  There were still clouds of flies clustered on my window. Only now I noticed a single, greasy handprint, undeniably human, pressed there, on the outside of the glass on the 216th floor.

  The Alert was prepared for the gate to open. The crew had already been placed in stasis. Captain Hartono and Dr. Riady would be the last to enter hypersleep, and after that control of the ship would be turned over to Emma until they cycled into their home system in a few months.

  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 apartment’s lobby was empty. It was the first time in fifteen years that I’d not seen another human being inside of it. The 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 tentacle 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 information. 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 that when scratched at and squeezed, 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 THEME of this anthology was Lovecraft in space, so I was excited to try something new. I don’t get to write straight-up horror very often. I use a lot of Lovecraftian elements in my Monster Hunter series, but that’s more about heroes having adventures and shooting cosmic horrors in the face, than well-spoken New Englanders telling each other scary stories in the dark. Lovecraft excelled at creating a feeling of creeping doom. He wrote about academics in an age where reason and science was supposedly going to banish religion and superstition, only their quest to know the unknowable was inevitably doomed. That’s the vibe I was trying to achieve with this one.

  I also share a birthday with H.P. Lovecraft and Ron Paul, which probably explains a lot about me.

  SWEOTHI CITY

  This story was originally published on the Baen Books website. It is the origin story of one of the two main characters in the Dead Six trilogy (Dead Six, Swords of Exodus, and Alliance of Shadows) published by Baen Books, co-written by me and Mike Kupari.

  Sweothi City, Central African Republic.

  December 15th, 1993.

  1:25 p.m.

  THE HOTEL had been evacuated since the government had collapsed and revolution had spilled over the countryside, but the lobby still stank of stale cigarette smoke and sweat. Random cries, crowd noise, and honking horns resonated through the windows as the seemingly endless mob of refugees surged through the streets.

  The refugees did not know they were doomed. With the Mouvement pour la Libération du Centrafricain (MLC) rebels tearing up the Ubangi river basin, there was no escape. And from what I had seen in the last forty-eight hours, they didn’t take prisoners. The CAR Army was in shambles from the coup, with half of them joining the rebels, and the other half fleeing for the Congolese border.

  The lobby had become our improvised command center. Furniture, debris, and even some of the planking from the walls had been stacked against the doors to deter adventurous looters. Ramirez was on the roof, armed with an ancient DP machinegun and a radio. So far the MLC hadn’t made a move against the city, but they were massing, and every escape route was blocked.

  There were twenty men in the lobby, two separate groups forced together, uneasy allies with only one chance for survival. One could feel the anxiety in the air, a physical buzz, almost louder than the refugee train outside. All of them were filthy, armed to the teeth, exhausted, and aware that death was coming, and it was coming hard and fast.

  SWITCHBLADE was headed by Decker, the dispassionate mercenary leader. Someone had scrounged up a chalkboard, probably stolen from the missionary school next door and he was busy drawing a rudimentary map of the city and the route that the rebel army was most likely going to use to assault it. O’s were the bad guys. X’s and arrows showed his plan. Each X was one of us. Each arrow was an order given in a cold, emotionless, voice.

  There weren’t very many X’s on that map. There were a whole lot of O’s.

  Hawk, the weathered gunslinger, was second-in-command. The man always made me think of those gun magazines I had read as a kid, with the stories about blazing six-guns on the border. He was seemingly unfazed, even in our current situation. Cuzak sat on a barstool, head wrapped in a blood-stained rag, still in shock from the landmine that had splattered Irwin all over the rest of us. Areyh, the former Israeli commando, was squatting next to the board, memorizing the plans while he ran a bore brush frantically through a filthy Galil. Doc was our medic, and he was off to one sid
e attending to one of the wounded Portuguese mercs. I had a feeling that Doc was going to have a long day.

  And me.

  And that was all that was left of the illustrious mercenary company called SWITCHBLADE.

  Fucking Decker. Fuck Decker and his fucking mission. He should have listened to me. If he hadn’t been so damn sure of himself, so damn proud, Irwin, Slick, and Sam would still be alive.

  I hid my emotions behind a mask of mud and dried blood, and went back to dispassionately cleaning the Yugoslavian RPK that I had stolen, listening to Decker’s defensive plans, but already making plans of my own.

  The other half of our ragtag group of survivors was all that remained of the Portuguese mercenary company out of Angola. They had been hit worse than we were. Nobody had expected the rebels to be this well organized and equipped, but apparently the Montalban Diamond Exchange had brought in a large group of Cubans to train up the disorganized MLC. The Ports had lost most of their leadership in the last skirmish, and the only thing holding them together was a short, angry, hairball of a man named Sergeant Gomes.

  “If we put up enough of a fight along these streets, then the rebels will commit their reserves. Currently that reserve is blocking here, and here. And as far as we can tell, those are the shock troops. The groups moving into the city now are the irregulars. With them out of the way, we can then retreat down Kahiba Road toward Manova-Gounda. Then it’s a straight shot, fifteen clicks, to the airfield,” Decker explained calmly. “The plane is fueled and ready to go, but they will not wait for us if the rebels approach the airfield. We do not have much time.”

  He was calm now. The Belgian was always calm. He was calm when he got us into this suicide mission. Calm when we overthrew a government and brought hell down on these people to placate a diamond company, and he would probably be calm when I put my knife in his throat. I snapped a fresh drum into the Yugo and worked the charging handle.