by James R Tuck
He didn't fall.
He kept shuffling towards us. Step by shambling step. Chanting the guttural chant.
I turned, jerking my arm free, and sprinted down the hall, not looking back. I heard the CRACK! of the coil gun cutting through the noise of shuffling feet and moaning throats behind me.
I heard Klactac curse, harsh, sharp, and metallic.
The coil gun clattered on the iron deck. The sound of the cathode shattering ripped at my eardrums.
I stopped, looking over my shoulder. I had to see.
Klactac had been overwhelmed by the mass of crewmen, limp and unconscious, held in bands of arms.
Muscles bunching, heart racing, I turned to run.
I bounced off something wide and solid, falling to the floor. My head hit hard, washing red across my vision. Shaking it made my stomach churn and boiled black spots up into the red. Looking up my vision waved like a mirage. Hannigan smiled down at me.
"Molly! Just the gal I was looking for.”
Chapter 8
“Let me go you sons of bitches!”
Hands.
Dozens of hands.
Grabbing. Pinching. Bruising.
Violating.
They pressed me on all sides, holding me aloft. I was carried by people I'd worked with. People I'd avoided talking to. People I knew only by name or aptitude.
Mason, Riveter, Goldum, Torch, Mark, Kenetlec . . . not my friends, but still familiar. They all knew who I was. Boss. Chief Engineer.
I struggled, muscles jerking like banded rubber on bones that thrummed with incessant, unrelenting chanting, chanting that shook me to my very core, vibrating my brain against the inside of my skull. Dozens of voices stripped of their humanity, boiled down to a mindless monotone mixed with the chitinous rustling of trillusk shells.
Shhhuubbbb . . . Niiigggg . . . uuurrrrr . . . raaaath!
Shhhuubbbb . . . Niiigggg . . . uuurrrrr . . . raaaath!
Shhhuubbbb . . . Niiigggg . . . uuurrrrr . . . raaaath!
Over and over and over again it beat, waves of madness on the beach of my sanity. The droning chant stabbed deep in my ears. I thrashed, the futility of it compounding in my chest, stacking like bricks behind the breastbone. Desperation drove me to fight harder. It grew and grew, crackling in my mind, squeezing the breath from my chest, dread fusing with frustration.
I slammed into the metal walkway as the hands stopped holding me, all of them jerking away as one. Pain flashed, burning across nerves as I took the brunt the crash on my shoulder and back. I gasped, fighting to drag air into lungs collapsed like burst air ballasts.
The walkway bounced as the crew shambled back, lining the walls, glaucoma eyes looking ahead. The rusty steel grate rattled underneath me. I rolled, looking up overhead at the vast, smooth expanse of shadowed steel. I knew this place. I never came down here but I knew it. Just like I'd never seen the back of my own head but I knew every inch of it. They had brought me to the belly of the ship, under the FTL Drive.
It was the junkyard, the scrap heap, a collection point for discarded parts and broken tools. A metal graveyard where decaying steel from spare bits and bobs could be reabsorbed into the whole of the ship, feeding the replication process.
Shoving through the pain, I drug myself up, pushing my feet underneath me. Half-eaten bolts and shredded gears and lumps of metal rolled away as I stood. I'd thrown one of them down here myself earlier today. Hunched, I swayed on loose knees, holding myself up with a backbone of anger. A knotted roll of dirty red hair swung in front of my face. It was blurry, my eyes having a hard time focusing. I pushed upright spine grinding in protest, and came face to chest with Hannigan.
My throat hurt as I pushed words through a clenched jaw. "What the hell you want?”
"I want what any good son wants, to bring my Mother home.”
What the fuck is he talking about?
I knew Hannigan. We worked overlapping shifts of Awake. He was my right hand through a lot of figuring out ways to keep the ship moving forward. His mother was long gone, left behind because she was a shitty parent who dropped her kid off at a military school and then screwed her way across half the colonies in the galaxy.
Hannigan didn't give a damn about his mother.
His eyes were rolled back, the same as the rest of the crew, but he sounded like his old self. His voice still the robust lilt of the Scottish, rolling from his tongue in honey whiskey syllables.
The skin above his beard had formed pustules of corruption, leaking from red, raised bumps and sunken-in sores. Puss and lymphatic fluid caked his mighty beard in hard knots. His lips were chapped, cracked and split, black scabs filling the fissures in the thin skin.
Looking at him made my stomach burn, sour with acid and bile.
"I have no idea what the hell you are talking about.”
Hannigan stepped closer, red chunky beard thumping against his chest as his head tilted. His smile was a wide, gibbonous thing on his face.
“We are all her children now.”
"Her who?” I didn't step back.
"Mother.” His arms raised, fingers splaying toward the crew members who lined the walls. His gesture drew out the moaning, that hideous word that drove through my skull like a nail under a hammer.
Shhhuubbbb . . . Niiigggg . . . uuurrrrr . . . raaaath!
Hands over my ears.
"Stop it. Stop it. Stop YOUR DAMN CHANTING!”
The words ripped my throat.
Hannigan looked down and smiled. The cracks in his upper lip pulled, splitting to his nostril in a pulse of dark crimson blood. The torn skin fwapped as he spoke turning his lilt into a lisp that rasped across my eardrums.
"You should have bonded with your trillusk Molly. It would have been the easy way.”
The front of his coveralls squirmed. Coarse fabric made thwipping sounds as something moved underneath. “You've been a cantankerous, stubborn bitch since your daughter died.” Dark spots soaked through the cloth over Hannigan's midsection, spreading, growing, joining together into one wide stain. His voice raised, jubilant. “But she forgives, she always forgives." He smiled, lip pulling apart, his teeth yellow, his gums black. "Mother loves you, Molly.”
"Fuck your mother. What the hell happened to you?”
The snaps that ran down his coveralls from neck to crotch bulged. It was all I could look at, that snap filling my vision as it tilted up then down. The cloth puckered, straining at the edges, quivering from the pressure underneath.
Hannigan's chuckle crept up the back of my neck, pulling tight the hair at the base of my skull.
The snap popped open.
The tip of a suckered tentacle slipped out of the opening, testing the air.
The skin covering it was slick with moisture, glistening rainbow like a sheen of oil, the suckers underneath a raw, florid pink, the color of flesh inside an incision. Their edges were rimmed in horn, opening then closing, tiny cuttlefish mouths seeking a tender morsel.
It squirmed further, wrist thick and rippling.
I couldn't think, my mind full of the blind static of terror.
The tentacle froze.
Oh god . . .
It lunged, ripping wide the snaps on Hannigan's coveralls. A mass of them spilled out, writhing through the air like electrified entrails. Whipcracking across the air they wrapped my arms, my legs, my waist, my throat. Tight, so tight. Binding. Mummifying. Suffocating.
Through my clothes, down to the skin, I could feel a hundred tiny horn-rimmed suckers chewing at me.
I fought, struggling as they began to pull, to drag me toward Hannigan. A cloud of rust kicked up from the walkway. The tentacles flexed, squeezing their oily grip, lifting me till I was eye to skeined eye with Hannigan.
He grinned.
“Feel the love of Mother. Commune with her. Let her sup from your table.”
One tentacle slithered up my chest, pressing along my neck with its biting underside until it lay across my face, inching and pulling along the s
kin of my jaw. It brushed across my lips, pressing between them, seeking entrance. I clamped my teeth shut, trying to keep it out. Blood filled my cheeks, leaking through the tiny spaces between my teeth to lay like iron on the top of my tongue. I swallowed and clenched, keeping my jaws together. It hovered for a long second, then pulled away to move alongside my nose. Rearing, it hovered over my eyes. Clear, viscous fluid hung from the suckers like spittle, strung between the tentacle and my face.
My mind screamed at me.
Shut your fucking eyes!
But they were frozen open, glued to the vision by sick, sticky dread.
The tentacle fell and the world went black.
Chapter 9
It was like music.
Ethereal and gossamer music drifting through my mind. Gently, so gently, it swept away my childhood first. The memories, too distant and detached to withstand, scattered like dust in the wind.
It moved insidiously through my teenage memories, becoming a rhythm, a drumbeat that drove against the milestones to adulthood, pounding away recollections and experiences that defined me.
First kiss, first date, first sex, first broken heart, first job . . .
First death of one parent.
Then of the other.
The presence grew, relentless, not a drumbeat but rolling thunder. Like the ocean, it swept across the skerry of who I was. Cold and vast, an immutable alien storm washing over my humanity. I crumbled before it, helpless, sand in a hurricane.
Hope flickered. Then sputtered.
I was nothing before IT, the song, the symphony. I was but a speck. A mote of dust in the eye of a god. Worthless. Insignificant. I had been arrogant to have even existed. How dare I?
My remaining memories washed away one by one.
My wedding.
My divorce.
My ex-husband.
.
My daughter.
.
.
Wait.
I pushed back. The presence in my mind paused, turning its malignant eye.
Not that. Not her.
Slow ponderous anger blossomed within the presence, scraping against my mind. Who did I think I was? What would give the mote courage to resist the storm? It pushed harder, seeking to drive the memory of my daughter under the weight of itself.
I bucked, planting myself on her memory.
You can't take her from me.
Hot, venomous wrath boiled from the depths of the presence. It rose inside me, lashing against the memory, scouring my mind, the crushing fist of an angry god.
I struck back.
Not her! Fuck you! Get out of my mind!
The god screamed at me and I screamed right back.
Chapter 10
The world rushed in on a choking gasp of air. Color shocked against my raw eyes, shredding the darkness crowding at the edge of vision. My lungs were raw inside but I sucked oxygen desperately. I knelt on scraped hands and bruised knees, still on the walkway in the ship's belly. The metal under me flexed with a clang as boots stepped between my hands.
I looked up, knowing who would be there.
Hannigan.
He stood over me, still skein-eyed, still wearing an apron of slick, writhing tentacles where his belly used to be. Anger twisted his features. One giant fist clenched and raised in the air.
"Mother has spat you from her mouth, Molly. You always were too stubborn for your own good.”
The fist clubbed across my temple, driving me back into the dark.
Chapter 11
Pain.
Nasty, throbbing, stomach-churning pain.
It swept over me starting from beside my eye and pulsing along nerves all the way to the backs of my knees. Sharp lines cut into the mushy, swollen skin of my face. An iron scent shellacked the inside of my nose. Rust or blood? I couldn't tell.
Ache sang through my bones as I pushed hands under me, lifting my body. The lines on my face tugged, pulling like a moist tongue touched to dry ice. The skin tore free, unclotting from the grated walkway where it had bonded blood to oxidized steel.
Damn that hurt.
Thin liquid heat began to bleed again but the pressure under my skin lessened with each drip, with each heartbeat. I pulled my tongue in between loose teeth. A firm knot of blood had clotted and lodged underneath. Gritty flecks of rust clung to the sides, scraping the roof of my mouth. I spat out both. I couldn't tell the difference between the taste of one and the other.
Pushing up, my fingers brushed something hard. I looked down. A sprocket wrench, a large one, one of the 685.8 millimeter jobs. It was busted and broken, unable to serve its purpose, but the heavy spine was still whole and still separate from the walkway. Recently discarded, the ship had not yet begun to reabsorb its steel. The hatchmarked grip bit my palm. The heft of it was familiar. Comforting. I'd used one of these just before going into Sleep.
Hell, this could be the same one.
Hooking the top of the F-shaped wrench on the railing, I pulled myself up.
My body groaned in protest. Teeth clenched against it, I stayed silent, forcing my body to do what I wanted. Anger bubbled deep in my stomach, dulling the knife-edge of pain like a narcotic. The weight of the broken tool dragged at the end of my arm. Tightening my grip, I straightened and took a step up the organic steel walkway.
Chapter 12
They were gathered in the cargo bay, they had to be, it was the only place other than the ship's belly that could hold the entire crew at once. I slipped in through the access hatch to the control deck, carefully removing the slide hatch so it wouldn't make a sound, and pressing myself into a shadow in the corner so I could watch.
They stood in straight lines, not one jot or tittle out of place. I'd trained my eye to see any imperfections in even the smallest straight edge and those lines were perfect, not one half step off from each other. They stood at attention and all looked up at Hannigan with fish belly eyes. He stood at the front of the control deck. The platform held all the mechanics that ran the giant payload arm, the split doors that formed the entirety of the ceiling, and the hydraulic lift that was the whole of the floor.
The possessed crew massed in front of us. Their jaws slung low, letting the name of their god hum out of their collective throats.
Shhhhuubbbbb . . . Niiiggggg . . . uuurrrrr . . . raaaath!
Klactac hung from the railing of the deck Hannigan stood on, bound to it by the moist, squirming tentacles that undulated from the giant's stomach. The pilot's head drooped on its middle joint, limp as his rigid exoskeleton would allow.
Hannigan raised his arms, tilting his head in supplication. The skin along his skull was swollen, becoming a thin pulsing membrane. The sores spread across the bulging sack his head had become, gaping open and trickling on a face distorted and misshaped by the pressure. He didn't look human, the hanging, ropey dreads making him look like a cephalopod.
The trillusk still clung to his throat. It had grown, surrounding his neck with chitinous shell like a collar, lending even more the resemblance of a cuttlefish.
Hannigan's teeth gleamed wet and slickened as they gnashed around the words he called out. His booming voice turned into a torn-flesh lisp.
"Ia, Mother! Black Goat Of The Woods, Progenitor Of A Thousand Splendid Young, I call to you! I give you safe passage from your exile here on this side of the universe and offer myself as a vessel to you. I will carry you back to the world of man where you will rule and your spawn will gorge on a feast of flesh! I bid thee come, come inhabit me and take your pleasure.”
I felt the pressure change in the bay, pressing on my skin like displaced atmosphere. The air above us curdled. The fabric of reality tore, fraying like a decayed burial shroud, masking the ceiling until I couldn't see the bay doors. The laceration filled with eldritch night and as it did my bones grew cold as fear settled on me. Something approached. Something too enormous to measure. A thing so black, so terrible, that its hoofbeats shook the very universe. It loomed from the other
side, pressing one horrible, baleful eye to the rift.
Hannigan cackled with glee. “I see you, Mother! Press through and come to your child! Take me as I am and make me whole! I invite you into this world!”
My hand tightened on the iron wrench, rust scrubbing my palm. I couldn't take it. I couldn't let him finish. I stood and stepped from the shadow and swung.
The blow cracked across the back of Hannigan's swollen skull, sinking through thin, veiny membrane and clanking against bone.
He stumbled, going down on one knee. Black gore spurted from split skin, spraying across my face as he dropped. Listing sideways, he fell against the lever that opened and closed the bay doors. His tentacles jerked away from Klactac, uncoiling and writhing like salted slugs. They whipped the air around him in a frenzy. The pilot fell to the bay floor in a loose heap.
Hannigan's distended head lolled, straining to see what had struck him down.
I hefted the gore-painted wrench.
Hannigan's voice was clotted. Slurred.
"Molly?”
The swelling in his head began to recede as I watched, bones shifting, features pulling back to their normal formation. The skin smoothed like putty under a sculptor's touch. The glaucomas dissolved from his eyes, leeching away to reveal irises the color of springtime grass. In a few seconds he looked like Hannigan again.
My friend Hannigan.
Normal, human Hannigan.
"Thank God you came to save me. You broke the spell.” Tears streamed down waxy, freckled cheeks, soaking into the whisker-bramble beard. “It's over.”
Exhaustion fell on me like a stone.
Relief.
My hand loosened on the wrench, the weight of it pulling toward the floor.
Something brushed my leg, barely grazing the cloth of my pants.
I looked down.
Tentacles flowing from Hannigan's stomach hung in the air, surrounding my legs, rising from the floor, poised to strike like a ring of serpents.
