Dark Horizons

by Jay Caselberg; Eric Del Carlo

  “Those men were deserters; they’re probably scattered across half of Seattle by now.”

  Tanner shook his head again, the smirk resting on his lips. “Oh, Harris, you can drop the cover-up now; our custodian found their bodies in the dumpster outside, partially consumed. You’d think a clever man such as yourself would do a better job hiding your victims—maybe your mind is going.”

  “You’re crazy. And this conversation is a waste of my time.” Harris turned toward the door.

  “I don’t think you want to go out there, Colonel. Several men are already outside, waiting to terminate you. For the health and safety of everyone here.” He smiled now, a clown’s grin that crept across his face like oil on water but didn’t reach his eyes. “This conversation was just a formality.”

  “You bastard.”

  “Believe me, Colonel, this breaks all of our hearts. You know, if I were you I’d consider doing the deed yourself to spare your men the anguish.”

  Harris lunged at the little man and knocked him to the ground. Tanner let out a garbled shriek as he fell. His glasses shattered, the shards slicing into the skin around his eyes. A fist collided with his cheek. Blood obscuring his already blurred vision, he had only touch and sound to orient himself. Harris pulling at his shirt, ripping it at the shoulder seam. Momentarily release of pressure as Harris suddenly sat up. The sting of a bandage being ripped off a nearly-healed wound. A whispered, “you bastard.” The door exploding. Gunshots.

  The bullet landed just an inch above Tanner’s head, via Harris’ brain.

  A few of the other scientists suggested examining Harris’ corpse—he was a unique case, a high-functioning, asymptomatic infected—but Tanner shot them down. “Harris was a good man who kept these departments functioning through crisis. It would be a perversion to strip him down and dissect him like a lab rat.” He should be given a proper send-off, and then cremated at once, Tanner recommended. In the interests of respect.

  Tanner retired early that night, jittery from the close call.

  It had been close, he reflected, changing his bandages and flushing the soiled gauze down the toilet. Harris, perhaps supernaturally perceptive, had ripped his shirt completely open, revealing the wound underneath. Tanner had barely enough time to cover himself back up as the soldiers were pulling Harris off him. It would have been bad if any of them had caught a glimpse of the injury.

  Throwing the blame on Harris had been an act of desperation. Tanner’d been sloppy at disposing of the bodies, and even sloppier in his choice of victims. Incompetent research assistants under his purview. He should have widened his net. Suspicion had not immediately fallen on Tanner after the grisly discovery in the dumpster, but it was a matter of time.

  What marvellous stroke of luck that the same day the bodies were discovered, the security team turned in incriminating footage of Harris’ surreptitious outings. That, plus some creative interpretations of evidence by Tanner (“of course, it is possible that an infected individual may not manifest all of the usual symptoms, at least not initially …”) had deflected suspicion onto Harris. It was regrettable—his later praise of Harris had been genuine, and he doubted that anyone else in the organization was qualified to take the Colonel’s place—but necessary. Harris was abnormally competent, but there were thousands of others with his mindset. Visionaries like Tanner were few and far between.

  The bite on his shoulder was healing up nicely, Tanner noted. No sign of infection. Better still, no sign of decomposition, physical or mental. By all accounts he should be a walking corpse by now. Perhaps he was a new breed of humanity. He smiled at the thought.

  Of course, to fulfill that potential, he’d have to keep himself alive. And well-fed.

  DEEPER

  CHRISTOPHER FULBRIGHT

  FROM THE COCKPIT OF the mining vessel Tycho Brahe, the two men at its helm gazed into aeons of endless night on the viewfinder screen. The sight of more deep space was a soul-sucking vision of despair. Peyton fought a downward spiral with hope that Captain Draver would say the word for them to turn around and head home. Soon. As in, any fucking minute now would be fine.

  Where is that son-of-a-bitch?

  “I’ve had about all I can take,” Peyton muttered.

  His co-pilot, Jeff Abrams, grunted, eyes rapt on the viewfinder, entranced by the cosmos. He blinked, then looked over at Peyton in a post-daydream lethargy.

  “I’m pretty sure that’s it. We’re done,” Abrams said. He looks older, Peyton thought. FTL travel retarded time’s effect on the aging process, but it didn’t do a damn thing for mental and emotional strain.

  “Yeah, we’re done,” Peyton said, “so where the hell is he?”

  The ship was a four-compartment vessel, big enough that a man could find a quiet corner to himself, but not large enough he could go unnoticed. The passageways beyond the cockpit were silent.

  Peyton growled and punched the button on the communications panel, opening a channel to the captain’s cabin.

  “Captain, we’re all set here. Just awaiting your orders, Sir.”

  Peyton and Abrams stared at the com panel. Its yellow light glowed, indicating the channel was open. Silence was their response.

  Peyton thrust his finger down on the yellow switch, closing the channel. He and Abrams exchanged a look that said plenty. Mutiny wasn’t far from Peyton’s mind, but mutineers didn’t get paid.

  As it was, sixteen months deep space assignment felt more like punishment than favor—the AAMC singled out their best men for DSAs and paid multi-millionaire’s fortunes on return. But sixteen months away from Earth was a long time, especially in quadrants AG637 through AJ453, claimed for AAMC just two years ago. No one’d traveled here before. It felt like getting on a roller coaster with disappearing rails, flying off into the night, not knowing what someday might turn up in these samples from moons and alien planets.

  It was a gamble coming out this far. The Brahe was one of five mining vessels developed with FTL drives over the past twenty years. Over those twenty years, four missions had been lost. Three of them were destroyed by mishaps. One—the Mark Twain—disappeared completely, with a handful of theories about what might have happened. No question: DSAs were risky. And sometimes when you looked through that viewfinder into the cosmos, fear swallowed you whole.

  The pilots back at Starcity Altair called it “going deeper.” Every kilometer traveled took a pilot deeper into the unknown, and every pilot on any DSA would tell you that by the end of it, the one moment he waited for was that command to turn around and head home.

  Peyton hadn’t seen his wife or their five-year-old daughter for sixteen months. He dreamt of them at night, unprotected, far across the galaxy on planet Earth, in the States, in their home in Dallas, hoping she’d remembered to activate the alarm, hoping Kalley’s window was shut tight, hoping Randi was being smart about things. Sixteen months was a long time for a woman like her to be alone.

  Don’t do this to yourself, he thought. It’s time to go. We’re on the home stretch. If only that asshole would get out here and do his job, I’ll be on my way back to my girls.

  Their final drop scan was complete. Preliminary data’d been compressed, transmitted, and received. Their computers were analyzing the samples contained in the geo-pods. The pods were locked in the bay on the ship’s belly for scanning and analysis on the return trip.

  It was dark in the cockpit. To conserve energy, the only things visible were lights on the navigation equipment and the viewfinder screen with planet SJ6392XC on the horizon. Next to him, Abrams’s face glowed, eyes shining as he stared into space.

  “What the fuck is he doing in there?” Peyton said.

  Abrams shook his head, looking skeptical. Peyton shared the sentiment, a sinking sensation in his guts.

  Bottom line, Captain Draver hadn’t been acting right. And by ‘right,’ he meant ‘sane.’ Both men agreed that Draver seemed to come loose a month ago. The AAMC didn’t recommend many people for more than two de
ep space assignments, but for those gung-ho enough to keep at it, they limited DSAs to four. At ten to sixteen months a shot, it averaged out to six years of Draver’s career spent on DSA. Six years spent staring into that vacuum of nothingness, hovering over alien planets, firing pods into them and bringing chunks of them home to dry. Six years spearheading the corporate movement of interstellar imperialism. Still, the captain seemed healthy as a plow ox till he came out of his cabin that morning four weeks ago looking malnourished, skin pale and damp, his pupils so dilated they shone like black glass.

  The memory crept over Peyton like a tarantula.

  “If he doesn’t come out soon, I’m going to back there to see what’s going on.”

  “I hope he’s not buggy, man … schitzed about this being his last trip. They’re making him retire and all that.” Abrams lifted an eyebrow and looked at Peyton meaningfully. Peyton knew what Abrams was getting at. They’d joked about this sort of thing before. Word around the Altairus base was that Draver would go bug-shit crazy out here on his last mission and refuse to come back, fly him and his crew into black infinity. It got a lot of chuckles till he and Abrams got the offer. And now, the way things had gone downhill the past few weeks … well, the echoes of those jestful conversations became portents of doom.

  Peyton swiveled his pilot chair, looking back through the portal that led to the common room and sleeping cabins. He looked at Abrams one last time, then half-stood, crouching to miss bumping his head, and took easy steps in the light gravity of the ship. He float-stepped down the short hallway and went to Draver’s cabin door.

  He paused in the cabin alcove’s soft glow. Peyton swallowed and listened at the captain’s door.

  The door swung open. Gaunt, pale, and sallow, Captain Draver stood before him like a ghoul.

  “What the fuck do you want?” the captain demanded. His skin was pasty now, like white gel ready to slip off the bone. There was black rot between his teeth and his breath was death by halitosis. His irises had returned, blue eyes like polished steel washers set deep in sunken pits of sleeplessness. He wore a green company shirt, open at the throat, rolled up around his forearms, ringed with sweat around the armpits.

  “Sir, we sampled the last J-site. We’re all through.”

  “No, we’ve got one more.”

  “There aren’t any more sites in the locator list, Captain. I’m pretty sure that’s it.”

  “Well, ‘pretty sure’ ain’t shit. Double-A transmitted an additional location code to me just after take off.”

  One more site.

  Peyton searched the captain’s skull-like features. His face was pinched in defiance of Peyton’s challenge to his authority.

  Not worth it, Peyton thought. It’s a long way home. One more site won’t take that long.

  “Do you have the location code?”

  “I’ll enter the location code myself.”

  “If you have the Double-A transmission you can just–”

  “I said I’ll just fucking type it in. Is there some kind of problem with your hearing, Peyton? Are you gettin’ antsy? Tell you what—we’re gonna be here just a little bit longer so we can get our job done, and then we’ll get you and your little sister home so you can go back to your mommas.”

  Peyton squared off with the captain in the dim alcove at the end of the hall. On one side of them was a small dining area called the common; on the other side were shower stalls. Peyton was aware that Abrams watched through the portal from the cockpit.

  “Something else you want to say?”

  Peyton met his eyes. Blood rushed to his chest and his jaw muscles tightened.

  The captain’s nostrils flared. His eyes dilated and a drop of sweat rolled off his chin.

  “No, Sir.” Peyton said evenly.

  “Good.”

  When Draver moved, a peculiar odor stirred in the hall. Peyton wrinkled his nose in remembrance of putrifying meat. The captain pushed past him through the portal. There was a mix of shadows in the cockpit as Draver punched in the location code. The captain marched back into the common area.

  “So, which one of you girls wants to make some coffee?”

  Before they replied he started to laugh. It was a wretched sound that started like a cough in corroded lungs. Its continuance was like the spasming of emphysemic gasps. Not a good laugh at all. Mirthless. Sick.

  Abrams emerged from the cockpit.

  “I’ll make some,” he said. “I’m starving anyway.”

  Draver stood in the common, staring at them both, his wet, spongy skin shining under the wan light.

  Peyton managed to refrain from muttering under his breath as he headed for the shower.

  Peyton tried to sleep but his mind wouldn’t shut down. Restless, he went into the common, made something to eat, and sat down at his usual corner of the table.

  Abrams poured himself a cup of coffee and sat across from Peyton.

  “Do you think that code is legit?” Peyton asked.

  Abrams cautiously took a drink of coffee. Steam plumed around his face as he sipped. He looked over the rim of his cup at the closed door of Captain Draver’s cabin.

  Abrams swallowed, shrugged. “Could be.”

  Peyton finished his meal in silence. Then he said, very meaningfully, “After this, we go home.”

  Abrams nodded.

  The destination alarm sounded from the cockpit. It made a buzzing sound that vibrated their teeth. They rushed to the navigation consoles. The viewfinder screen’s rectangular icon was flashing over the image of a planet.

  Peyton looked at Abrams disbelievingly.

  “That wasn’t on the charts,” he said.

  “Is it an asteroid?”

  “A chunk of ice, maybe.” Peyton reached for the controls to examine the celestial body for a place to send a pod and collect the final sample. “Doesn’t have an atmosphere, but it’s huge. It’s a strange, oblong shape, isn’t it? Like an–”

  Captain Draver’s cabin door whooshed open as he stormed out. He looked like he’d been sitting in a sauna, dripping with sweat. The wet flesh of his bare arms sagged on his bones. He was so emaciated now that Peyton had to do a double-take and make sure it was the same man he’d confronted an hour ago. His eyes were bloody pools in bruised shadow-sockets, the pallor of his porous cheeks and forehead decidedly gray, like putty. He pushed his way through the portal into the cockpit.

  Draver reached around Peyton to click two switches deactivating the storage bay panel door lock. It took Peyton just a moment to realize what he was doing; Draver decompressed the hydraulic clamps that held the bay of geo-pods closed—the sixteen geo-celestial samples they’d been out here all this time to collect. The bay doors thrummed through the floor beneath them, opening to release its precious cargo.

  “No!” Peyton jerked Draver’s hand away from the control, but as he gripped the man’s wrist, its skin slipped away and stuck to his hand like the membrane of rotten fruit. Lumpy white flesh lay exposed beneath.

  Draver, stinking, dripping with perspiration, snarled. He threw an elbow into Peyton’s face and chin. The quick, successive blows knocked him against the knobbed panel of the lab station, toppling him sideways, momentarily stunned, into the swivel chair.

  Abrams leaped across the console to restrain Draver but reached him too late; the captain had released all of the geo-pod samples from the carrier bay. They could see the pods in the viewfinder tumbling through space toward the oblong moon before them.

  Abrams forced Draver to the floor with a submission hold. In Draver’s condition, it was only a moment before he collapsed from lack of air. A wet, wheezing sound escaped the captain as he passed out.

  “Christ, what’s happened to him?” Abrams looked at the mucous-like slime left behind on the inside of his forearms after choking Draver. He wiped it away with disgust.

  Payton regained his senses just as Abrams was climbing back into his pilot’s chair.

  “Damn it,” Abrams said. “How can we get them b
ack? We have to get them back!”

  Peyton watched as all of the samples they’d worked to gather these past nine months floated, pods tumbling like spilled capsules through water, down toward the smooth gray surface of the icy moon—or whatever it was—on the viewfinder screen. Peyton wracked his brain, but there wasn’t a damn thing they could do, nothing short of ….

  “Wait,” Peyton said, “Maybe we can do a sweep and recover some of them. Swing around and position the ship belly-out toward the pods to see if we can catch some in the open bay.”

  Just as they began to turn the Tycho Brahe in line to skim the surface of the moon and turn around, something happened—something wholly and wildly unreal.

  The oblong moon came to life. The first samples to reach its surface glowed as their pods exploded, smashing to pieces one-by-one. A wicked branch of energy, like a forked bolt of lightning, ran blue and electric over the planetary body. The surface of the moon stretched like a milky membrane. It pulsed.

  Peyton’s mouth gaped. Abrams drew in a quick breath.

  The planet, or moon, or—God save them—creature, awakened. A crater near its southern hemisphere throbbed like a sphincter. It spasmed and rolled outward and, instead of an explosion of something foul, there followed a sudden flow of many dazzling silver and green ribbons outlined by ethereal light. It looked like a spider sac with its lower half transformed into a jellyfish with tentacles. Three dark patches across the front lobe of the gray head-sac gave the vague impression of a face glowering across the distance of space between them.

  Peyton swallowed hard and forgot to breathe. Abrams was pressed with horror, rigid in his chair. They calculated the immense size of the thing that reached its tentacles toward their ship.

  Behind the cockpit, from the gutter of the portal, Draver’s body convulsed. One arm came up suddenly, grasping at the air above him. He fixed seemingly blind eyes on the space in front of him as he screamed, “Adi Nath! Adi Nath, parameśvara loknath Nakteleth!”