The pod gradually accumulates a small fleet of pursuers that in its diversity suggests an alliance of a dozen different species. Perhaps it’s their malice toward upstart races that unites them, but what does it matter? They’re still magnificent, and their presence sings to me.
I turn to Otienno, who looks ten years older than at the start of the day. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I can’t do this anymore.”
“You have to!”
“No.”
“I’m sure you’re tired—“
“Not so much. The patron does most of the work. It’s just . . .” I feel a vague shame, but it’s a puny sensation compared to my desire. “Communing with the entity changes you. I don’t care about protecting what I already know. I need to experience what I don’t. That means running toward it, not away.”
“That’s crazy!” Roberts says. “The aliens want to kill us!”
“Maybe,” I say, “but that will be an experience, too.”
She aims her carbine at my face. “Not if I kill you first.”
Otienno pushes the barrel out of line, “Valdez, you say linking up with the entity made you this way?”
“Yes.”
Taking me by the shoulders, she turns me away from the porthole and back toward the endless cascade of glowing spheres. “Then go deeper. Maybe, it’ll change you again.”
Should I? The patron is the one thing that interests me just as much as the aliens. Yet I balk. I fear I’m still not ready to engage with it on a more profound level and that perhaps no human ever can be.
“Fine,” Otienno says. “I’ll look.” Fists clenched, she stares into the radiant mass.
I can’t tell if it’s shame, fondness, or duty that convinces me that I should, if only symbolically, support her. Except for curiosity and awe, my emotions have so faded that it’s difficult to tell them apart. But I, too, gaze into the heart of the spheres and strain to see them more clearly than ever before.
Pain rips through my eyes and into my head. It’s like a torrent of gravel pouring down the sluice of my vision to fill my skull with ever-increasing pressure.
But the pressure never bursts my head in any physical sense. The cracks that open are breaks in the blinders that hinder human perception, and when the shattered barriers fall away, the spheres shine brighter. After a moment, I recognize the clustered orbs for a reflection of the lattice of mathematics and information on which space-time grows like skin.
A relative few of the shortest, wispiest strands in the pattern are the spans of races burdened with corporeality. Each comes into being, struggles and suffers for a moment or two, and dies leaving nothing of consequence behind.
Perceiving that, I likewise recognize my infatuation with the aliens for the childish thing it is, a tropism no less parochial than my crewmates’ attachment to our own particular species.
Everything is a wonder, and everything is empty and cold. But once accepted, the absence of meaning allows freedom of choice for even the most random and trivial of reasons, like Otienno fallen at my side, eyes gouged, fingertips bloody, and heart stopped.
I turn to the rest of the crew. I don’t care if they understand my thinking, but my dead friend would have wanted it that way.
“I can’t shake the aliens off our tail,” I say, “and Otienno was right: we don’t dare lead them back to Earth. But maybe I can make sure they never tell any more of their friends that human beings exist.”
“We get it,” Roberts says. “Do what you have to.”
I turn my attention on the shining spheres, now reverted to the chaotic map that guided me before. I hope the physicists back on Earth were right about time after all. From what I observed moments before, I think they may have been.
I jump to the world of the tiger grass at a time five minutes before the expedition departed. My current version of the pod materializes thirty feet from the other. I wait for my pursuers to catch up.
I then open a gate big enough to swallow both pods. We shift together, the earlier version snatched from the temporal path that led the newer one to now.
I half expect to vanish. I don’t. Apparently, my existence is more resilient than that.
I worry that my patron will stop indulging me. After all, if it’s more than the lurker, the haunter, the key, if watcher and watched are one, aren’t I wounding it? But compared to its immensity, the injury is miniscule, and perhaps, it’s foolish on my part to imagine the consciousness can be hurt at all. Maybe any event, any feature, no matter how violent or unnatural, simply constitutes part of the whole. At any rate, the incantations keep working.
I fear the aliens will perceive the trap and break off. But relentless hunters that they are, they keep chasing me as I gather one pod after another from points along our history and accumulate my own little fleet.
Until, finally, surface reality can no longer support the growing weight of paradox. A vortex churns open, and pursuers and pursued spin down together into a realm as incomprehensible as it is poisonous to dull-witted mites like us.
Richard Lee Byers is the author of forty horror and fantasy books, including This Sword for Hire, Black Dogs, Black Crowns, The Ghost in the Stone, Blind God’s Bluff, and the volumes in the Impostor series. He’s also written scores of short stories, scripted a graphic novel, and contributed content on tabletop and electronic games.
A resident of the Tampa Bay area, the setting for many of his contemporary stories, he’s a fencing and poker enthusiast and a frequent program participant at Florida conventions, Dragon Con, and Gen Con. He invites everyone to follow him on Facebook and Twitter.
Departure Beach
Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.
Illustrated by Nick Gucker
Came out of trans-drive into hell.
Seventeen Cenrenu war-raiders, the big ones, were shredding a supply fleet, a multi-corporation five-liner, and there we were in the middle of the furnace. Look of the carnage, must have been tens of dozens of carriers and tankers that had been fucked-to-pieces by trigger-happy—shit whizzing, parts you couldn’t re-piece together, debris and fluid spills the size of small moons, shitshow explosions, partial chunk of something that resembled half of a tanker. Ten seconds in, and we took two laser torpedoes aft and were spinning.
Estrada didn’t blink; he sealed the upper rear decks where we’d been hit. “We were lucky, more or less,” he barked into the comm system. “Shield held. We took one small breach.”
Captain Andrew Mack and Dawn Fulton shutdown everything but life support and the level five shielding—figured our size, we might pass for wreckage, just drift and take any raps. The war-raiders were ripping through the cargo fleet and not doubling back. I thought we had a good chance to avoid being noticed and limp out later, if we didn’t get bashed to shit by all the debris.
Sat there and waited out the black minutes. Bumped—crashed into—pushed aside. Wished I had some kind of faith drilled into me I could call on, but my mother was as anti-deity as they come. Spikes of doubt, the rustle of nerves, eating at discipline. Estrada hissed at our communications officer, Andromeda Vanbeck, to stop praying. Taborn made a fist five minutes ago while looking out the window. Two minutes later, frustrated, he released it. Nobody voicing their questions. Nobody with an answer. The weight of memory wandering around the flight deck. Long fucking wait. Maybe an hour in that fuckhole before the propulsion system was turned back on.
“Puff” Monder—(That’s me, el space-jockey supremo, baby—I can fly anything; wings, no wings)—inched and jogged our way to the edge of the debris field and shut everything down again. He might have been the ship’s self-professed king of comedy, but the look on his face was not expressing anything amusing.
We drifted again.
I sat and watched a trio of Cenrenuian carrion sweepers move in and cull through the massacre. Blast here. Threaten. Cut out a prime loader; get it lined up to haul away.
The radio was hot. Cenrenuians would hail a vessel and demand the shipping manifest. If the
y didn’t want the listed cargo the vessel was set upon by carrion sweepers and obliterated. Ships that did not immediately comply were destroyed.
Two immigration vessels, the big conservation carriers, were traveling with the fleet. They informed the fucking Cens they had no offensive or defensive weaponry onboard and were each transporting one hundred thousand settlers, mostly farmers, tradesmen, and their families. The Cenrenuians are not slavers and do not participate in human trafficking. Rice paper in a bonfire, two hundred thousand innocent lives gone in an instant.
Two hours.
Silent.
Every single one of us doing hard time. No one voiced it, but as my eyes roamed eye-to-eye face-to-face, I saw it. Fear—little, big, baking in it. Adrenaline. Cold sweat. Anger. Compound of fatigue and wondering. The ever-present why and no one to interrogate.
I sent Corporal Peter Rechy out back to fill Davidson in and see if he needed anything. Rechy came back, said he was good, wanted to be kept posted. I instructed Rechy to update Davidson every hour on the hour unless something happened.
Three.
My thoughts kept returning to Davidson.
“Still good,” Rechy reported. “Comes to doin’ time, he’s a rock, Lt.”
“That’s why it’s his ass sitting back there.”
Seven fucking hours. But deliberate and frosty wins the game, or so I hoped.
Again, I wondered how Davidson was doing. He was stuck in the rear cargo hold with the artifact. Wasn’t happy about it, but he did volunteer, knew what it meant.
We all did.
All of us had raised our hands and signed up, swore to preserve, protect, and defend the Union. With our lives.
Shitty chances, little in the way of data, no charts of where we might wind up if the wormhole theory panned out. Battle-scarred fools and patriotic idiots, possible death-wishes not discussed. But there were innocents among us. Collateral damage. Caught myself in the lie, didn’t like the taste of it, never have, but that had never stopped me when I had to make a command decision.
The crew focused on enduring and maybe winning. They saw the end game. Shame it wasn’t the one on my dance card.
“Puff” Monder and two female members of the crew wore small gold Christ crosses on chains around their necks. I envied their faith. Was worth shit at the end of the line, but a hand to hold when you’re in the fire is still a hand to hold. People take their comforts anywhere they can find them. Always have. Always will.
Wished I had faith. Switched gears, wished for a bottle.
Cenrenuians had been gone three hours. We headed out.
Betty Jens was in the galley crying over her coffee mug. Andromeda Vanbeck sat next to her, arm around Betty’s shoulders. Betty looked up at me. “How many thousands of people were on those immigration vessels, and the others, too? They’re dead now. And the Cenrenuians must have led three or four hundred ships away—they won’t let those people live. I wish—”
“We all do.”
Andromeda’s eyes met and held mine, said, Really? That I doubt. She told me once, she could have a thing for me, if I wasn’t such a cold son-of-a-bitch.
Been taught survival, evasion, resistance and escape—hurt like a mother. I was an FNG in a river of blood. You can keep your god, I was baptized by a 5.56 cartridge that missed my liver by two inches. Been in hell with grunts; no matter what you’ve heard, we didn’t drink the devil’s beer for free. Lost men, friends, brothers-in-arms, cried at their graves and over their bodies, every farewell was a furnace. Knew I was going to die, wouldn’t be pretty. Got scars, knife, bullet, from being tortured. Andromeda’s disapproving look hurt worse than the whole shebang stuffed into shit sandwich. That’s a fucking ache they never trained me for.
* * *
Davidson’s face looked like an old carpet, worn, well traveled. He was a heartbeat away from sixty and had been a soldier since he took the oath age eighteen. He had medals (six), scars (most from his seven years a prisoner) and (seven) tattoos (unit and tour bars on his forearms, and the nine inch Anubis on his shoulder—I didn’t have clue what it was for), and memories some sprawling, some small and personal.
There were days he talked—your ear off: dogs (Like Betty and Estrada, he was a dog lover. Still had a picture of his beloved, Bugler. In the photo Davidson was eight, all elbows and knees, and they were sitting in the open doorway of his parents’ barn in Iowa.) and trains (“Steel. Dreams. Rolling through the Heartland on a warm Missouri night, the whistle blowing, the stars up in the sky talking, that’s comforting.”) and “real” country music from the twentieth century, back before the whole damn Union homogenized pain.
Got to drinking drinking, he got quiet. Subject of war came up he had little to say, in fact, most often he’d up and leave the room; take the bottle, too. But there was one time. He had Maneri pinned in a chair, hand on his shoulder holding him down, faces a foot apart: “Bloodsport? You assbag-motherfucker—you want to talk sports, Ivy League, talk sports, baseball, soccer. Two opposing forces, both trying to win; guns and death, everything blown away, GI’s killed, thrown in a green fucking bag if there’s any pieces left, that ain’t a goddamn sport, fuckhead. Comprende?”
Sgt. Maj. Edward Davidson (Ret.) was the Gate Guard. Made sense to me; he knew how to spend time alone, and what the waiting would end with.
I was glad he had the responsibility. Thought I’d get stuck with it, I’d done ten years as a transfer agent and knew the regs backward and forward, drunk, too. I knew what carrying the weight meant, what it cost, wives, lovers, family, your soul.
That first mission briefing, Davidson stood up and started quoting passages from the Book.
Man was never meant to know—
There are those who wear the Double Talisman on their chest above their hearts. They dream of the day when day shall be as night and the Harms Tremendous will return and all earthly pleasures shall cease. Through the ages, they have sought the key that unlocks the gates. They must be denied its secrets—
On the day the moon is old, take the Gate to a place no man has seen. Bury it deep—
His voice didn’t break, he didn’t look away, or pause. Davidson knew the deeps of the Book the way I knew the regs. Less than twenty minutes from when he stood, and Davidson was assigned mission Gate Guard by Charlie Butler, the SIT-COM commander. No one in the room offered Davidson a godspeed.
* * *
Our encounter with the Cens was two months and eleven days ago. There were some in the crew who thought we’d come far enough. Mentions of home with all the trimmings and all the trappings frequently found its way to tongues made supple by desire. I stayed out of those conversations.
The one time I got cornered and pressed by Andromeda, I only half-lied. “I’m a soldier. I don’t get to have a home. I have my orders and the mission. It’s my responsibility to make sure other people get to have a home and enjoy it.”
“What kind of life is that, Hank?” Andromeda asked. That was the first and only time she used my name.
Sound of my name on her lips hit me hard.
“The only kind I know. A hard one.”
I went in the back and sat with Davidson in the cargo hold.
“We’re over eight months out now. How far do you think we need to be?” I asked.
“I’ve no idea, Lt. The further the better. Maybe? There’s so much we don’t know.”
“You need anything?”
He had a copy of the Book in his hands. Didn’t look up from its open pages. “Same thing you do,” Davidson said.
“I hear that.”
Two days later, we came upon an undiscovered lens. I took the news to Davidson.
“It’s large enough to enter, or so the brain-boys are telling me.”
“If it takes us out, that would be great,” Davidson said.
“Whole mission is a big if. I say, we try it. And maybe . . . look, if we’re destroyed trying, that might work, too.”
Davidson nodded in agreement. �
�Okay. Do it.”
Into the lens we went. Freakshow lightshow—purple, red, pink escorting orange through a storm of charms, green eighty shades of green. Everyone on a roaring neon-bender, shift of delicious stripes eating surprising irises, yellow in conversation with prettiness and splendor, blue battling a tide of amber. A kaleidoscope—basking in the reality of LSD-trips had nothing on this, fractals . . . spaghettified . . . rotations . . . bundles . . . confused by unspooled riddles . . . embroidered to meaningless, to us—me, abstract patterns . . . with the consequence of a super-weapon or some divine punishment, scads of windowpanes overlapped the very nature of structure, both destroying and outlining new maps, new forms. Were we looking through God’s eyes or at parallel universes, space and time secrets we couldn’t understand, maybe we were looking into a crystal ball at pure magic tangling our senses and our souls? I was soldier looking at multi-verses through a poet’s eyes. Everything was ancient. Everything was new. Everything was unnerving. Here were the inconceivable flowers of a universe with billions of timelines and no edges. Unhinged boundaries. Bent and stretched. Bounced. Tumbled. Hellride might cover it. Came out.
People were looking at their hands, flexing their fingers, looking at the others. Estrada stood, took a wobbly step, grinned, “Seems like I work OK.” Puff crossed himself, put his christ cross to his lips and kissed it. Betty Jens went to the window. Her eyes said it; the stars were not our stars. Couple of minutes scanning, computers verified it.
“Fuckin’ A,” Estrada said. “Fucking. A.”
Captain Mack said, “It worked. Holy shit.”
Our physicist Maneri and our astronomer Taborn, wooted and traded high fives. One stunned, one beaming and bouncing in his seat, both kids Christmas morning high.
Ride the Star Wind: Cthulhu, Space Opera, and the Cosmic Weird Page 34
