First Contact - Digital Science Fiction Anthology 1

by Ian Creasey

  I don’t really care one way or the other.

  “They go everywhere,” he says, with his mouth sealed shut. Yet his voice rings clear through my skull.

  The creep. The stinking, deformed monster. He’s in my head.

  “Yes, I am.”

  I grit my teeth. “Do you like it in there?”

  “Not yet. It’s not mine yet.”

  “It never will be.”

  “They all say that.”

  I wish I could hide my thoughts somehow, but I have a feeling it wouldn’t do any good. In the back of my mind I know he’s the target – the tempest my team was looking for. This industrial beast, whoever he is, should be destroyed.

  “My name is Doyle,” says the man in the machine. “You are to call me Doyle. We need to have names in order to have a proper conversation.”

  “A proper conversation, is that what this is?” I say, eyeing his chest through the rifle’s scope.

  “Yes, Hammond.”

  I don’t like how he digs through my brain to learn my name like that. “Why did you kill my team?”

  “I didn’t. You did.”

  The liar. “How’s that?”

  “You’ve killed many times, Hammond. They just increased your score. Six more notches on that fat belt of yours.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “So you deny being a killer?”

  “No. Just not this time.”

  Doyle is silent. I’m sure he’s rooting through my thoughts, my memories, as though they’ll offer him something useful. The girl is as far away from him as the chains will let her be, and she’s trying to cover herself up with her arms as best as she can. Doyle doesn’t appear to be concerned with her.

  “What are you?” he finally asks.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re a murderer.”

  “I guess that’s your answer then.”

  There’s something new in his voice, an unexpected flavor. I can’t quite place it; fear, I think.

  “Something’s not right with you,” he says. “There’s something missing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Pain.”

  The planet Hera, a deserted sand ball with an Earth-like atmosphere, was discovered a little over a decade prior to my team’s mission. As soon as they realized the air was composed of the same stuff as at home, just with lower levels of oxygen, researchers went crazy wishing for a shot at making the planet better.

  Terraforming was proposed, but it was decided that it’d be easier to build a facility they could filter air through, rather than alter the entire planet’s atmosphere. Talk of terraforming, probably from the weaker scientists who found it inconvenient to wear an oxygen tank outside of the facility, had been starting up again recently, but was cut short on account of them all being killed by the tempest.

  My team was the last-ditch effort to understand and conquer – mostly conquer – Hera’s tempest. There were some theories about what it was: an advanced security system triggered by something the researchers did; a living, carnivorous entity; a bizarre weather phenomenon that was somehow drawn to human bodies.

  In any case, it killed. Like an insatiable beast, it killed. All the information we had on it came from satellite images and the frazzled eyewitness reports from a few lucky survivors. It seemed a dust storm – some described it as a dust devil or tornado – would sweep up on an individual, and once it dissipated, only a corpse was left behind.

  No official autopsies had taken place since the majority of the research colony, including the medical staff, had been massacred in less than a week. This meant actual cause of the deaths could not be officially determined, but more than the tempest appeared to be involved. Unsubstantiated reports suggested one of the researchers had gone on a shooting rampage inside the facility, slaughtering all those who had barricaded themselves inside trying to hide from the tempest. The shooter probably had gone crazy with fear and found his release in murder.

  It didn’t really matter. The dead shooter was not the problem. Our mission was to destroy Hera’s tempest. I always thought that name was something of a misnomer. I’m no meteorologist, but it didn’t really seem like a tempest to me. A dust devil maybe. Not a tempest.

  My team – seven soldiers assembled by some military higher-ups and a shrink named Marlowe – were dropped off about a mile away from the facility. We stepped out of the ship, the recommended oxygen masks dangling from our waists. The air felt thin, but it wasn’t anything we hadn’t experienced before. It was so hot that inhaling warmed your chest.

  Danielson kicked around the orange sand with his boots. “This place sucks.”

  “Don’t be a pussy,” said the captain, hopping down from the ship. “We gotta move fast. I wanna get into the facility before you’re all dead, so we move now, and we move quick.”

  “You’re expecting some of us to die?” asked Danielson.

  “Most of you. Let’s go.”

  And we were off like a pack of stray dogs, streaking across the desert while the unfamiliar sun evaporated the sweat off our arms. Our guns were hot to the touch.

  After a minute of pounding across the sand, we felt a wicked wind erupt the ground beneath us, whipping the dust into a frenzy and blinding the whole team.

  With my arms over my head protecting my eyes, I stumbled through the sudden storm looking for an exit. Eventually I bumped into someone, Danielson I soon realized, standing calm, arms by his side, while the sand rushed in a vortex around him. His lips were moving in a way that was half-speech, but not – the faintest dribble of words spilling out.

  “Danielson!” I yelled.

  He didn’t respond, so I stepped in front of him, trying to ignore the beating I was taking from the sand, and grabbed his shoulders.

  “Danielson!”

  He was staring at me, but I could tell he didn’t see me, as his lips mumbled and tripped over leaking thoughts. Suddenly he squeezed his eyes shut and screamed, “Calico! Calico! Calico!”

  “What?”

  “You may take me,” he said. Then the tempest vanished, letting him collapse into the sand.

  The rest of us stepped around him.

  “Check him,” ordered the captain.

  I bent over and placed my fingers on his neck. “Nothing,” I said. “He’s gone.”

  “Tell me about the last dead body you encountered,” Marlowe once asked me.

  I first met Marlowe, the shrink, after a military tour back on Earth in an urban African warzone that ended the careers of half my regiment. Some dead, some wounded, others just too screwed in the head to continue. The higher-ups weren’t sure they wanted any of us holding a gun anymore, so they sent us to Marlowe for evaluation. We each did five sessions, confessing our sins, exploring our childhoods, talking about our mothers. I’m not sure what they were trying to accomplish.

  “That I killed?” I asked. “Or just that I saw?”

  Marlow tapped a pen against his desk. He always sat behind his desk, using it as a barrier between us, though that wouldn’t have done him much good. If I’d wanted to kill him, his desk wouldn’t have stopped me.

  “That you saw,” he said.

  I had to think back for a moment. I’d seen more dead bodies than most, so it took me a little while to recall which one was the most recent. “I saw a head of a rebel on a pike just as we were leaving,” I told him. “Does that count?”

  “Sure.” Marlowe jotted something down on a pad of paper. “What did you think about that?”

  “I don’t know. It was just some guy’s head on a stick.”

  At the end of the last session, Marlowe had pulled my file from a drawer and opened the folder. Two stamps sat on his desk – one to approve my continued military service, the other to reject it.

  “You appear to be unaffected by the tour,” he said.

  I shrugged.

  “It seems none of the incidents, some terrible enough to disfigure the minds of a dozen other men, really regist
er with you.”

  “Does that mean I can go back to work now?”

  He slammed a stamp down on the file and placed it off to the side. “You’re to report to Commander Salvador at noon tomorrow for reassignment.”

  “Thanks.”

  He folded his hands together and leaned forward. “You frighten me, Hammond.”

  The next time I saw Marlowe was when the Hera team of seven met for our first briefing – only two days before the mission and thirty-six hours after the second massacre on the planet. Commander Salvador and the shrink stood at the front of an old classroom converted into a briefing area, while an intern handed out the mission files.

  “I’m sure most of you have heard about our trouble on Hera,” said Salvador.

  “The tempest,” Carter sneered.

  Yes. That.”

  “Didn’t it just kill a whole squad of high-ops there yesterday?” asked Danielson.

  “No. It killed three squads.”

  “You giving us a shot at it then?”

  The commander crossed his arms. “Your mission will be to get inside the research facility, search for any more survivors, and locate the tempest’s cause. Destroy it if you can. If not, at least find out what it is, then get out so we can bomb the living hell out of the place.”

  “What’s he doing here?” interrupted Danielson, jerking his thumb at Marlowe. We’d all been in to see him at one point or another and were thinking the same thing.

  Salvador and Marlowe made eye contact for a second, then the commander stepped aside and, with a sweep of his hand, turned the so-called podium over to the shrink.

  “Well,” Marlowe said, clearing his throat. “I have a theory about the nature of the tempest that I’ve derived through my research of the incidents on Hera. I showed my findings to Commander Salvador, and he agreed with the theory’s plausibility. It allowed us to assemble this team, based on your unique personalities, which I believe will offer you a higher chance of survival and success.”

  I glanced around at the other six guys and wondered what the hell kind of personalities Marlowe was looking for. We all had reputations, you see.

  Danielson scoffed. “Thanks. That clears up a lot.”

  Marlowe started to respond, but the commander stepped in. “That’s all you boys really need to know about that. All the relevant information is in your files. I expect you to have it memorized in eight hours when we meet back here.” He pointed at the captain. “I need to speak with you about some extra details. The rest of you are dismissed.”

  Chadwick, a redhead lacking in social skills, leaned into me as we left the room. “You get the feeling they’re not telling us everything?”

  I raised an eyebrow. Chadwick wasn’t known for his intellect.

  He was, however, the second of our team to die on Hera.

  The number of bodies increased as we got closer to the facility. Some were researchers; lots were military. They almost looked asleep.

  There were only four of us left. The last one to bite it, Carter, had been ahead of the group, blazing a path toward the facility, probably hoping to outrun the tempest, leaving the rest of us as bait. He’d put on his oxygen mask and quickly picked up speed, separating himself.

  I don’t like the masks because they impede my vision, so I dealt with the thin air. I hate not being able to see right.

  We all saw the oversized dust devil swirl up around him, and we knew he was as good as dead, so we ran forward, barreling through the blowing sand.

  As I pushed ahead I nearly ran into him, standing still, half-speaking to the wind just like Danielson. I didn’t see how the other two were before they died, but I imagine it was similar.

  I decided to move on past, but as I neared him, he screamed, “Fine! I’ll do it!” and lunged at me. Before he could even take a full step, he went limp like a marionette with its strings cut, and fell to the ground.

  Hera’s tempest vanished, leaving Carter amidst the rest of the corpses strewn through the desert. The remaining trio – me, the captain, and a weasel of a man everyone called Mink – looked at his body and then jogged onward.

  We came over a small dune and saw the facility for the first time. From the planet’s surface it looks like a small, one-story, concrete storage compound, but that’s because most of the structure is underground.

  “Why did you land us so far away?” asked Mink.

  “Orders,” said the captain.

  “We could have landed closer. We’d be inside by now.”

  “The higher-ups gave me some half-assed excuse about keeping the ship away from the bodies.”

  “You could have found a way.”

  The captain spun around and got in Mink’s face. “Do you think I wanted this mission? Do you think I wanted to leave my daughter behind for this?”

  Mink gave an ironic laugh. “I know you’d never do anything to hurt your little girl.”

  The captain shoved the weasel. “You watch your mouth, soldier!”

  I was more concerned with getting to the facility alive than with watching the captain beat the hell out of Mink. If the two of them wanted to argue in the middle of the desert like worms on a hook, that was fine with me, but I wasn’t sticking around to die with them. So I took off.

  Just as I reached the facility’s entrance, a slab of cement held shut by magnetic locks, the captain came sprinting up beside me.

  “Where’s Mink?” I asked.

  “Dead.”

  “Figures,” I said, and we set to work unlocking the door, which was stuck in emergency lockdown mode. All seven of us had the same sheet of instructions regarding the lock, since there was no way to guarantee which of us would make it there. The captain pulled his sheet out of his jacket pocket and pressed it against the concrete door.

  “What’s Calico?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “Calico. Danielson said it a few times before he died.”

  “Oh. Some girl he picked up while we were out for drinks the night before we left. Said she was a cheap lay.”

  “I see.”

  The wind suddenly picked up and tore the instruction sheet from his grip.

  “Oh crap.”

  I’m not sure what it is, but something in the room smells terrible, like engine oil and rotten milk. I try to ignore it.

  “Are you going to kill me, Hammond?” asks Doyle.

  “I could ask you the same thing.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Don’t play stupid. I saw your handiwork up there.”

  Silence.

  The girl has relaxed significantly since I arrived; she looks almost comfortable, having pulled her hair back behind her ears, revealing the delicate features of her face. She’s sitting with her legs bent to one side, hands on the floor, no longer covering up but openly nude, almost as if she’s posing for me.

  If it weren’t so pathetic it’d be sexy.

  “Quit looking at her like that,” Doyle growls inside my head.

  “Like what?”

  “Like a sex-crazed monster.”

  “Oh I’m the monster now?”

  “Youre a sinner.”

  The term holds little meaning to me. “Why her?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, why is she still alive? Why not kill her off like everyone else?”

  “She’s not like everyone else,” he says. Then he says that he wants to tell me a story

  Once upon a time, a fairy tale.

  There was a very smart man, too smart, who lived in a desert on a mysterious planet. He was a doctor and a good man. He couldn’t say the same about some of the other desert-dwellers.

  Also living in the desert was a beautiful woman whom the doctor loved deeply. She had large eyes, silky hair, a tiny waist, and a big chest. It wasn’t objectification, the doctor knew, it was love. The woman, however, did not love him back. Instead, she spent her time with some of the other desert-dwellers, who poisoned her with their evil.

 
Sometimes the other men would talk about the bad things they did with the woman, and it made the doctor very upset. He could see that the desert-dwellers were being overwhelmed by evil, and being a good man, he knew he had to stop it. He had to stop it before the beautiful woman turned bad forever.

  So while everyone else was busy doing bad things, the doctor went deep underground and built an incredible machine that only he could use. It would allow the doctor to go inside the soul of anyone and find the things they should be sorry for, then make them sorry for those things. Then the machine would remove all that was bad, and if the person was too evil, they would die, because they couldn’t live without their sins.

  When everything was ready, the doctor brought the beautiful woman down to the underground room with the machine in it; she would be safe there. Then he began cleaning the desert, wiping away all the evil.

  Once he was finished with that, the doctor knew they could be together forever, and that it would be good and perfect.

  When I finally made it inside the facility, a friendly, androgynous voice welcomed me. I could feel the increase in oxygen hit my lungs. I breathed it in deep and smiled. This wasn’t so bad.

  The captain had been sobbing, muttering stuff about his daughter before the tempest killed him. I’d heard rumors about his relationship with his daughter. Nasty rumors. Nasty enough that if they’d ever been proven, he’d have lost his career.

  I stood at the middle of a T-intersection. All three hallways were dimly bathed in red light. Before the mission we were all given blueprints of the facility: ahead was mostly labs, to my right was the residential area, to my left was some kind of control room. That seemed like a good place to start.

  As I turned left and began walking, a distant voice wafted down the hallway. When I got closer, I realized it wasn’t alive – it was the same sexless, computerized voice that greeted me earlier. Closer and I could tell it was repeating the same looped message.

  Soon the hallway opened up into a small room that served as a jumping-off point for four more corridors. A computer behind what looked like a receptionist’s desk was projecting the voice.