The commander barked, “Well, make them respond!”
Cobb clearly bit back some kind of retort. He activated the speed brakes and pulled back hard on the throttle. The sudden deceleration smashed us into our seats.
Joline’s chanting continued. “Gof’nn uh’e hupadgh Shub-Niggurath’geh nog kadishtu. Gof’nn uh’e hupadgh Shub-Niggurath’geh nog kadishtu.”
“We’re not slowing down fast enough.”
Olympus Mons stretched across the viewport. Its six gaping calderas were shadowed maws in its peak. They grew very large very fast.
“Gof’nn uh’e hupadgh Shub-Niggurath’geh nog kadishtu! Gof’nn uh’e hupadgh Shub-Niggurath’geh nog kadishtu!”
The rim of the deepest caldera passed underneath. Sheer walls closed in. Joline’s gibberish grew louder, more frantic. Her wrists bled where they chafed against the restraints.
Cobb strained against the controls, desperately trying to stop the ship. When only a few kilometers remained, he put us in a 10-g spin to point the main engines at the caldera wall. I felt sick. He fired the engines. Our horizontal velocity slowed, and we slammed into the ground, spinning and sliding before we came to a stop just half a kilometer from the wall.
“Gof’nn uh’e hupadgh shub-niggurath’geh nog kadishtu! Gof’nn uh’e—” she was shouting.
Isiah was out of his seat in a flash, injecting a sedative into Dr. Landry. She quieted.
“What the hell was that?” asked Cobb, staring at Joline in disgust.
“Forget it,” said Commander Marshal.
Isiah stayed on board to monitor Joline. Marshal, Cobb, and I suited up to go outside. Marshal unlocked the outer door of the airlock and turned to give us final instructions. “Nobody wander off. As soon as we know the extent of the damage, we’ll re—”
The door flew open. I shielded my eyes from the sudden ruddy glare. I saw a shadow flit into the airlock, but I heard Marshal’s scream. Next thing I knew, Cobb was outside the ship with some kind of assault rifle, screeching obscenities. His face was twisted in fear and rage. He aimed high above the lander, firing continuously until his magazine was empty. My ears rang, but I could still hear Cobb shouting through the com. Trembling, I got to my feet, walked out, and put a hand on his shoulder. He jumped back a full meter, looking at me like I was a ghost.
I turned to see what he was shooting at and froze. On top of the lander—and spilling over the side—was the lifeless body of a creature like a failed science experiment: an amorphous mass of tentacles, eyes, and teeth. One massive claw still gripped the maneuvering engines, the dead flesh melting into a kind of solid goo as I watched.
Commander Marshall was dead, asphyxiated in the thin Martian air. I couldn’t tell whether the creature or Cobb’s rifle had killed him. My mouth opened and closed on its own. It was some time before I could even think.
I turned on Cobb. “Why the hell do you have a gun?” It was the first coherent question that came to mind.
Cobb took longer to reach lucidity than I had; after all, he’d seen the thing alive. “O-orders. NASA wasn’t … wasn’t sure what we’d find.”
“What’s going on?” Isiah said over the com.
“Look at my feed.” Although I longed to look away, I kept my helmet pointed squarely at the dead creature.
“I am,” he replied. “What the hell happened to Clay? Did Cobb shoot him?”
It was a confusing several minutes before we figured out the truth: the creature did not appear on any of our cameras. I wish it had. When Isiah finally saw the creature with his own eyes, he went ash white.
Cobb marched back to the airlock. “We’re getting out of here.”
“How?” I said.
“By finishing the mission. Find the Curiosity, get the cells, go home.”
Isiah and I didn’t argue.
Cobb checked the lander while we got our recording equipment. We were terrified, but we were scientists.
We had to leave Dr. Landry with the ship. I admit that at the time, I envied her.
Cobb confirmed that the lander was in good condition, despite the rough landing. If we could get the rover’s solar cells, we’d be able to return to the Victoria, restore her power, and return home. The pilot produced two more assault rifles and additional ammunition from concealed compartments. He handed a rifle to each of us.
I balked. “What did NASA think we’d find?”
Cobb wouldn’t say. “If you have to use it, plant your back foot hard. There’s a lot more kick up here.” With that, he led us out.
The rover’s signal took us along the caldera’s edge. The enormous cliff face towered three kilometers up. It felt like it might crush us at any moment. Cobb was well ahead of us.
About half an hour out, he stopped and faced the wall.
“What is it?” I said, still walking.
“It’s here.”
We caught up to him. He was staring at a narrow crevice in the caldera wall. On the other side was an open canyon. Carved into the walls beyond were enormous structures, monoliths with engraved symbols, sweeping arches and ramparts. They were majestic and terrifying and like nothing man had ever thought to make.
“The pictures,” I said. This was what had brought us here in the first place. Though seeing it in the flesh was not as exciting as I’d thought it would be. I ached to be home, safe.
“Where’s the rover?”
Cobb fussed with the tracking device. “Inside,” he said finally, “and down.”
There was an open doorway set in the face of the monoliths. We followed Cobb inside, switching on our helmet lights. From the architecture outside, I had assumed we’d find some sort of hall or foyer or, failing that, a natural cavern. Instead, we were in a tube. Five ridges ran down into the dark with striations at regular intervals. The striations were approximately twenty centimeters high, tall enough that we had to be careful to step over them. Pentagonal passageways occasionally opened on either side.
That’s my scientific description. Cobb’s version was more evocative. “Looks like an intestine. Why didn’t the rover report this?”
“I know why,” Isiah said. He showed us the pictures and video he’d been recording since we arrived. They showed the caldera, the monoliths outside, but the rest—those images taken from inside the cavern—showed only the outer slope of Olympus Mons, as though we were still outside.
“How is that possible?” I asked.
“How is any of this possible?” Isiah replied. “We’re gazing at the abyss.”
Isiah put the camera away.
We began documenting things we could record. Scrapings from the rock walls showed metals our equipment couldn’t identify. The air was much thicker, and our instruments showed a significant amount of oxygen, though none of us dared remove our masks.
A breeze blew down the tunnels and back up in regular intervals. Like breathing, I thought, but it seemed too crazy to state out loud.
The striations ceased abruptly, and the tunnel opened into an enormous cavern. It was so large that a kind of fog obscured the ceiling. The cavern was filled with strange, tree-like formations: leafless with thick, entangled branches and massive knots on the trunks. Instead of roots, each had three stumps supporting them. I couldn’t make any sense of these statues, and Isiah couldn’t so much as scrape a sample from them.
Interspersed between the trees were obelisks covered in writing and glyphs, some matching those outside. These were more interesting to me. “Look at this,” I said. “I think it’s a history.”
“Of what?” Cobb said.
I found repeated figures among the glyphs that I thought might represent the people themselves. “Whatever used to live here.”
“The trees,” Isiah said, pointing.
He was right. The figures were stylized versions of the statues. It was the beginning of understanding. After all we’d been through, it helped me feel a little better.
“There it is!” Cobb ran ahead.
The rover was ina
ctive, smashed into the ground. Part of a statue had fallen on top of it, crushing half of it beneath two knotted branches. Thankfully, the solar cells were intact.
“I’ll get the cells,” Cobb said. “You two keep an eye out.”
“For?”
He hesitated. “Anything.” He set down his pack and began disassembling the cells.
The work took a long time. I stared at the mist for several minutes, never wandering far from Cobb, but the glyphs kept grabbing my attention. God, I wish I had pictures of them. What did they mean? Could we decipher their language? What might we learn?
“Sarissa, come over here!” Isiah squatted next to one of the obelisks, running his hand across the engravings. “What does this look like to you?”
I knelt next to him. The familiar tree people appeared in several places, but Isiah was looking at something else—a kind of scribble with claws and tentacles.
No, not a scribble. “Is that the thing that killed Clay?”
“That was my thought.”
Excited and scared, I studied the glyphs intensely, backing up to the beginning of the passage. There were spheres—worlds, I thought. Had the tree people been starfarers? “Go find more,” I urged him. “I want to see where this begins.”
Starfaring life. We weren’t alone! I got lost in the puzzle, driven by my need to understand.
This is what I learned.
The tree people believed they were the children of some greater being, their Mother. This Mother drove them from world to world with one purpose: to claim and devour. They consumed world after world until they met a race of amorphous creatures, like the one that killed the commander. The amorphous creatures had their own masters: sort of tubular beings on spindly legs, like a bacteriophage. These drove off the invaders’ first advance, but then the tree children just … stopped. It was unclear to me at the time why.
Excited, I told Isiah what I had found. But his face grew increasingly concerned.
Then Cobb screamed.
We rushed back. The tree—the Child—was no longer on top of the rover but had lifted Cobb three meters into the air. What I had taken for knots were now opened, smacking, licking mouths.
“Shoot it!” Cobb shouted.
We scrambled with the assault rifles on our backs. Isiah got his first and filled the dark Child with lead. My first burst knocked me back two meters and went wild, but I soon found my footing. The creature howled from twenty different orifices, lashing out with thick tentacles in a blind fury. Finally, it collapsed into a disgusting heap.
It was too late for Cobb. He’d been torn to pieces, one leg halfway into one of the Child’s terrible mouths. I threw up in my suit.
The ground shook. A rumbling, cracking sound came from all around. The other Children—what I had thought were statues—began to move.
“Come on!” Isiah grabbed Cobb’s bag with Curiosity’s parts and sprinted back down the tunnel.
I followed. Tentacles waved and mouths clacked around us. They stamped forward on their enormous stumps, closing in on us. Isiah blew one away with his rifle, but three others took its place. We were being cut off.
I spotted an opening to the right. “This way!” It was a hole in the cavern, like the one we had come through from the surface. I hoped to God they connected.
But this tunnel went down, deeper into the mountain. I kept trying to turn toward another tunnel, one that went up, but at each junction, several Children blocked our way.
“Oh, God, they’re herding us,” Isiah said.
I had already come to the same conclusion.
We were driven deeper into the dark, hurdling each striation, until the ground smoothed and opened out again. The cavern floor fell away sharply, forcing us to a sudden halt. The air blew strongly, in and out, more like breath than I cared to imagine. We stood on a narrow rim. In front of us was a vast darkness.
The dark expanse wasn’t empty. Stalactites and stalagmites stretched out to meet in the center, a kind of webbing, like neurons in the brain. There were dozens of them. In the center of two of them—
“Joline! Clay!”
They were unconscious or dead, their arms and legs enmeshed in the rock that stretched out from the walls of the place, spreading their limbs like a grotesque Vitruvian.
Isiah screamed as a stony tentacle wrapped around his ankle. The rifle and the bag fell from his hands as the tentacle dragged him into the darkness.
I ran toward him, gun blazing at the tendril. Somehow, I did enough damage to loosen it, and I pulled Isiah free. He was convulsing, babbling incoherently. I lifted him to his feet and ran along the ridge of the open cavern, looking for another way out.
All I saw were the Children. They stood in every opening. They weren’t advancing though, just waiting.
Waiting for us to join Clay and Joline.
One of them tumbled forward, howling maddeningly, smothered by a black, amorphous mass. The Child fell into the dark pit, but the mass recovered instantly, tendrils latching onto the cavern walls and floor. It was like the creature from the ship! It shot another tendril out at the next Child and dragged it down to the dark.
Isiah continued his babbling, eyes blind.
The creature’s fury was terrible, but the Children countered just as viciously. Five pounced on it at once. For each Child the creature tore to shreds or threw into the abyss, two more took its place. They grabbed the amorphous mass, stretched it, consumed it.
But they ignored us.
I wrapped one arm under Isiah’s shoulder and ran for the nearest opening. Thankfully, he had enough reason left to keep pace with me. The cannibalized solar cells had fallen into the pit, but I didn’t care. I ran, blindly heading toward the surface.
At last, we squeezed through a hole in the surface just over a meter in diameter. I never thought I’d be so grateful to see an alien sky. We were only half a kilometer from the lander. Perhaps, the entire caldera contained underground passages. I don’t know. I don’t ever want to know.
The amorphous creature was gone. The lander’s doors were open; that’s how the Children got Joline. Mercifully, the ship was otherwise undamaged, and I was able to take off from the surface before anything else found me. I returned to the Victoria without further incident.
I don’t know if anyone will hear this or believe me if they do. Isiah is mostly incoherent except for ungodly gibberish and the phrase, “We’re inside. Inside her.”
I don’t want to know what he means. If I let myself think about it, I’ll go as crazy as he is.
Not that it matters. I can’t restore power to the Victoria. I don’t have enough propulsion to leave orbit, and our life support is dwindling, but there’s no way in hell I’m going back down there.
By the time you receive this message, Isiah and I will have run out of oxygen. We’ll be dead. But I beg you, by all that is holy and human and good, stay away from Mars. We are not ready.
We never will be.
Adam Heine lives in Thailand where he and his wife foster a bazillion children (for certain values of bazillion … okay, there are ten of them). He spends a lot of time training these kids to be gamers, thinkers, and supervillains. (A few insist on being good at sports and stuff; he tries not to hinder them.) By day, Adam is the Design Lead for the upcoming computer roleplaying game Torment: Tides of Numenera. By night, he writes science fiction and fantasy for whomever will pay him. His short stories have appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies and Paizo’s Pathfinder Tales. You can see more of what he’s written and what he’s working on at adamheine.com. He desperately tries to pretend that he still has spare time in which to watch Naruto Shippuden and play Banner Saga.
Perfect Toy for a Nine Year Old
Bruce R. Cordell
Dad, this is boring.” Margaret flopped down on the couch next to Charlie.
Charlie Tokarev looked away from the program they were watching: mustachioed fish explored a land of robot dinosaurs across three walls and the ceiling of the family ro
om. He hadn’t been paying close attention because the show was boring. But his daughter picked the program, so he’d pretended to watch. Charlie gratefully wiped the fish away with a wave of his hand. A green forest, wet with rain, rustled to a phantom wind all around them.
“Then choose something you like,” he said.
“But I’m bored!” Margaret dropped her head back to stare straight up at the ceiling and the digital clouds scudding by.
Charlie swallowed a sigh. When she didn’t get enough sleep, Margaret got cranky. She’d spent the last few days at her friend Zoey’s house and probably slept only a few hours the previous night.
“Tell you what, pumpkin. How about we talk about your birthday next week. I want to get you something special. How old will you be?”
Margaret didn’t immediately respond, but that was a good sign.
“Nine,” she allowed.
“Nine! Nine is a very important number. I think you deserve something extra special for turning nine.”
“What?”
“Something from the printer. Something real.”
After putting Margaret to bed, Charlie went to the office. A couple chairs, a slender cabinet that stored their visors, and the printer fit snugly. One chair held a sleeping black and white cat—Max. He wasn’t especially social, but he sometimes accepted pets with purrs instead of a bite. Charlie’s wife Sylvia reclined in the other chair, wearing her visor. By the way her hands traced slopes and curves in the air, he knew she was working on her dissertation.
Sylvia’s visors were slender goggles and included earbuds and gloves. The outside world faded completely when she used them, allowing her to develop increasingly brain-stretching quantum physics and string theory calculations without distraction.
Charlie didn’t disturb her. Instead, he moved the cat and relaxed into the other chair. Donning his own goggles, Charlie logged onto the net. He subvocalized his search parameters: “perfect gift for a nine year old.”
The results compiled in colorful charts ripe with meaning. The most popular gifts for children currently, what they’d been last year, and what they were likely to be next year were evident at a glance. Music, interactive design apps, and scads of virtual customizations for the popular online communities that children enjoyed were trending.
Tomorrow's Cthulhu: Stories at the Dawn of Posthumanity Page 20
