Ludmilla’s rage flared, staring at both men with a scorn only a woman can muster.
“Look at her. She is dangerous. If you don’t take care of her, I will be forced to do so.”
“Nyet! Do not touch me!” she shouted, backing away.
Cormac held his hands up in a supplication of her anger and stepped away from her and toward Ryman.
Still perusing his book, Ryman waved his pistol in a irritated yet idle manner, saying, “Do not tempt fate and make me nervous, Captain. Kindly back away and leave me to my work. If you wish to live, you will go out and prepare the X-20. That is all. I am done with this game.”
“Tell me, Ryman. What will that thing do to the Earth?”
“It will change everything you think you know. Move,” he ordered, as he put the grimoire down and went to the Salyut’s control panel, which displayed the position of the station over the Earth at any given time. He seemed intimately familiar with the readings, despite his earlier claim of inability to understand Russian. “We have less than fifteen minutes. Decide.”
Cormac looked to Ludmilla. “Get into the Soyuz and go.”
“No!” shouted Ryman in his greatest break of composure. Breathing deep, he calmly said, “If she matters so much to you, both of you may join me in the X-20. She can become one of us.”
Cormac took a step, blocking Ryman’s line of sight of Ludmilla and the Soyuz docking entrance. “You’ve played your hand. Everything you say is a lie. I won’t let you finish whatever this is.”
“There is still a place for you, if you will but obey.”
“I don’t think so. You couldn’t possibly know how to land the X-20 and survive, no matter how many simulator runs you might have done. But a Soyuz capsule? Anybody could ride that. And I won’t let you have it.”
Ryman frowned and took quick, careless aim.
The deafening shot took Cormac in the left arm.
“Get out of here, Red!”
Ludmilla disappeared through the docking bay and slammed the hatch shut.
“No! Damn you by all the devils in the nine hells!” screeched Ryman, as he took a reckless shot at the docking hatch. The bullet ricocheted from the heavy steel door and thudded into the padded interior walls of the Salyut.
“You! You have ruined decades of planning! Years of work!” cried Ryman, as he wheeled and brought his snub-nosed pistol into Cormac’s face.
The Soyuz capsule groaned as Ludmilla broke the connection and it jettisoned away from the Salyut.
The cold warrior held his wound as droplets of blood left his arm and floated freely about the cabin. “You got me weeping, but this ensures you don’t kill me and leave me here.”
Ryman backed away, putting the pistol down. “Well played, you barbaric savage. Allow me to finish my work and then take us both back to Earth and this can still be the beginning a fortuitous alliance. Bygones can be bygones and all that.”
It was Cormac’s turn for lop-sided grin. “Sure. What do you have left to do?”
“I have but to read some few more passages from the Lex Libre Hereticus and take a virtuous life—definitely not yours. Driscoll’s. Why do you think I chose him? Then the piercing of the veil and binding of the darkness to this station, which when it crashes to Earth will make me a god in darkness as well. I will burn the light and take back our dominions.”
“And to do that you need to kill Driscoll and what else?”
Ryman gave a grimace. “Do not interrupt or mock my life’s work. Simply because you fail to comprehend what I do does not mean it is not real!”
“I’m not mocking, I’m asking. Mind if I get ready?”
“Of course not, just keep your distance. I am unnerved.”
“Yeah, me too.”
As Ryman began his incantation, Cormac did keep his distance, bandaging his still bleeding wound. He then put his space suit back on as well as Driscoll’s helmet. He opened the airlock and placed Ryman’s helmet inside. He did not close it.
Though Ryman sat across the room and recited from his grimoire, he held his pistol close.
Cormac appeared curious but left a good amount of space between them. He then rummaged through the cabinets and took a handful of supplies, the Cubans and vodka. He was weakening from blood loss and knew that his first instinctual plan of attack would likely fail against a rested, armed antagonist. But there was always a plan B.
Waiting until Ryman seemed as involved as he would ever be, Cormac picked up Driscoll’s still breathing body and flung it into the airlock.
“What are you doing?” shouted Ryman, drawing his pistol.
Cormac drew the Baikonur wrench from its wall sheath and threw it with all his might.
Another deafening echo from the revolver rocked the station as the bullet hit the steel hatch and ricocheted.
Ryman’s sure shot was thwarted by the careening wrench which missed the man but struck the wall behind and came hurtling back again.
Cormac dove into the airlock and slammed the door shut. He hit the pressurization control, whispering, “Hang on buddy,” to the labored breathing of Driscoll. He then placed Ryman’s helmet on Driscoll and sealed it.
Ryman’s voice crackled over the radio. “You think your escape will avail you anything?”
“Doesn’t matter. I got your ‘Eye of Newt’ right here.”
“Yes, perhaps you have him on the other side of this steel door. But if he dies in the next few moments from your manhandling or even if he cannot handle the pressures of the vacuum of space, I will still succeed and draw upon that energy. The behemoth cares not whether you kill Driscoll or I do, it will savor his soul all the same and work dark magicks to my benefit. And oh, the horror for you that I will rain down!”
“That’s a chance I’m willing to take.”
Ryman then screamed unintelligible curses through the radio as Cormac popped open the exterior hatch and gently pulled Driscoll through.
There was only a single tether looped through the bar below the hatch and back to the X-20. An irritating trick of Ryman’s somehow. Cormac held the tether with his left hand and Driscoll’s harnesses with his good arm. He took careful gentle steps.
“You were supposed to be the best. You were supposed to be a soldier that followed orders. A killer beyond reproach!”
“People change.”
“No, they do not,” snarled Ryman. “My ceremony is finished. With his death, I conquer.”
Cormac looked up at the pulsing leviathan. It loomed larger than ever, phasing in and out of reality. Soon its presence would momentarily blot out the sun.
They were halfway to the X-20 when a rumble shook the entire station and a sudden jerk almost made him lose both his grip on the tether and Driscoll.
“I will not fail! you both will die for this insult!”
Cormac instantly knew Ryman was firing the Salyut’s boosters. Edging closer to the X-20, Cormac felt blood soaking his entire left sleeve and shoulder. Moisture began to collect inside his helmet, making it difficult to see.
“You will fall,” taunted Ryman, as he jerked the controls of the Salyut and randomly fired and extinguished the boosters.
A sudden jolt whipped and hit Cormac in the back.
The tether had snapped, as had the X-20’s tentative hold via armature to Salyut.
All four masses were tumbling independently through the Detritosphere. Both the tether and Driscoll were stolen from his grasp. He was cast loose into outer darkness.
“Your hubris is your undoing.”
Cormac reached for Driscoll’s motionless body.
“Doom is coming.”
He strained.
“We are foot soldiers of the Dark Levy.”
Fingers wet with blood or sweat slimed against the inside of his glove.
“It will eat your souls.”
The tumbling Salyut was below or above them by more than twenty feet.
“The Mistress of the Dark...”
Cormac had never been so far
without a tether.
“...and her children are impatient.”
He caught Driscoll’s limp gloved hand, pulling him closer.
“An eternity in the maw of damnation.”
The Salyut was separated from them below by more than fifty feet, but it was moving in a revolution and would soon enough be coming back down upon their heads.
“In the absence of Light, all are one.”
The X-20 tumbled a short yet unreachable distance away, the tether still attached, drifting alongside, equally unattainable.
“Against the thrice-damned light, we shall always fight.”
The Salyut cast a shadow, finally blocking out the terrible monstrosity.
“Are you dead yet?”
“Not hardly.”
Re-orienting himself to the oncoming Salyut, Cormac prepared what would be his only chance.
The Salyut came up fast.
Holding tight as he could to Driscoll, Cormac tensed.
The station hit with a jarring squish in his boots.
Cormac jumped using the Salyut’s impact to propel himself at the X-20.
Though the azimuth in Cormac’s own mind was close, he missed the X-20 by several feet. His fingers were outlined against the sun, cruelly empty.
The Salyut and X-20 drifted by in an awful slow motion of despair.
The tether flailed behind.
His hand shot out against all the blood and doom, and Cormac caught the lifeline.
I seemed like it too agonizing hours to pull himself and Driscoll aboard the X-20.
Inside, he strapped the unconscious major into Ryman’s former seat, then fired up the Titan booster, shooting himself ahead of the revolving Salyut.
“Hey, Ryman. Remember what I do up here.”
The radio crackled to life. “You’re still alive? I would have thought you would have accepted your fate and embraced the darkness at last.”
“Yeah, I don’t do that.”
“Sergei must have been a suitable enough conduit. Can you see from whatever lost perspective you have that a tendril from the leviathan now engulfs the station? Accept that I have succeeded and will take the monstrosity back to Earth and rule!”
“Yeah, about that. What happens if you can’t make it back to Earth?”
“You cannot stop me. When we reach the atmosphere, my powers shall be complete. I had feared my return without a suitable vehicle, but I feel the power pulsing from the Mistress of the Void, I know I will survive re-entry and the I shall burn a madness deep into the world.”
Cormac turned the X-20 into a rendezvous directly ahead of the Salyut. “Remember what I do up here? I’m the best.” He dumped the load of ball bearings directly into the flight path of the Salyut.
There was no possibility of the Salyut changing its course on such an abrupt path. Ryman’s screams, instantly silenced, were testament of such.
For every light, there is a darkness. Repulsed by its loss of a conduit, the Mistress of the Void retreated to await another time and avenue to enter this realm.
There is no “fair” in the universe, but there is justice.
The Shadows of Titan
Carter Reid and Brad R. Torgersen
The sky was dim. Dimmer even than the Puget Sound’s on a rainy winter day. And there were no clouds. Just a persistent, dirty-yellow haze. As if the smog over Mexico City had thickened and dropped to ground level—only I was reasonably certain it had never drizzled liquid methane in Mexico’s Federal District.
The Celsius reading in my helmet’s field-of-view display said it was a crisp 179 degrees below zero. I could faintly hear the susurrations of my coldsuit’s circulation system as it piped reheated antifreeze throughout. The battery had been rated at twelve hours during coldsuit testing in Antarctica, where things only got to about 80 below. Judging by how rapidly the charge bar in my FOV was presently dropping, I guessed we each had about four hours before we had to get back to the Gossamer’s descent module for a battery swap, and a break.
Which was fine by me.
Titan kind of gave me the creeps.
“What do you make of it?” asked a voice in my ears.
Captain Bednar, playing it cool.
“No idea, ma’am,” I said honestly.
Clad in a coldsuit built for a woman’s physique, Bednar’s arm was pointing at the four-story-tall pyramid that thrust out of the heaped ice of Titan’s surface. We’d seen the artifact on accident as we’d come in to land. It didn’t show up on Doppler or infrared. And it had been too small to be seen from orbit. A chance look out a porthole had done the trick. It had taken us ten minutes in a rover to get here from the designated landing coordinates.
That the pyramid was not a natural landform had long since become obvious. Its sides were smooth and black like obsidian, and the drops of methane that precipitated out of the nitrogen atmosphere immediately ran down the pyramid’s sides—like it was coated in non-stick Teflon.
But who had put the pyramid here, and why, and for what purpose, were complete mysteries.
Captain Bednar’s arm slowly dropped to her side.
I looked at her as she continued looking at the artifact.
The expression on her face, as seen through her helmet’s clear face shield, was almost greedy with anticipation.
I felt a twinge.
Technically, she was a mutineer.
According to the mission plan established years before leaving Earth, Bednar was supposed to have remained in Titan orbit with our two crew who were manning the Gossamer’s nuclear-rocket-powered return module. Instead she’d handily ripped that page out of the plan upon our having entered Saturn space—and there’d been precious little any of us could say otherwise.
After all, what was Mission Control going to do? Fire her?
She was the captain. And this far from Earth the captain’s word was law. Once her intentions had been declared, we were more or less helpless to prevent her from going down.
So we’d bundled into a craft originally built for three people—some of us gritting our teeth—and made our way down via parachute and, then, hot air balloon.
“Is somebody getting pictures?” asked another voice.
Specialist Majack—our other female on the descent team. She’d lingered back at the rover while the rest of us approached the pyramid in slow steps. I got the sense Majack found Titan as unsettling as I did. Visibility was only about a hundred meters or so, before things just kind of... faded out. The horizon was a murky blur in the distance, and the sun was a small, semi-bright disc that seemed too far away to give any comfort.
Specialist Kendelsen cursed and remembered his media recorder dangling from a cord attached to his torso. All of the coldsuits had digital cameras integrated into their helmets, recording every second of our time on the surface. But Kendelsen had the high-res device that would get the good stuff our bosses back on Earth would want to see. No flash bulb necessary. The device had been designed to compensate for Titan’s perpetual low-light conditions.
Kendelsen held it at waist level and began a slow, steady reconnaissance around the pyramid proper.
Excited jabbering—from Pilot Jibbley and Engineer Gaines above—told me that they were getting the recorder feed being beamed to the rover, then back to the descent module, then up to the return module.
“Historic,” Bednar said to no one in particular.
“That’s what you wanted, right?” I said.
Captain Bednar glared at me for a moment, then she went back to staring at the artifact.
“They’ll be talking about this discovery for decades,” she said. “Maybe even centuries. Nothing else like it in over one hundred years of probes and landings. And it was just... dumb luck that we happened to pass over it as we floated down. What are the odds, Chief?”
“Million to one,” I said. And meant it. I too was feeling more than a little impressed by the fact that if our landing zone had been even a few kilometers further in any direction, we’d
have missed the pyramid completely.
“There’s something on the south side,” Kendelsen said with obvious excitement.
“What is it?” Bednar demanded.
“I might be wrong, but it looks like... a door.”
Majack, Bednar and I all hop-trotted in the relatively weak gravity, our path taking us around the way Kendelsen had gone until we too could see what he was talking about.
And sure enough, it had the looks of a door, albeit buried halfway beneath the icy surface. I walked up to it and ran my suited hand along the door’s edges. I couldn’t tell if the material of the pyramid was hot or cold. My coldsuit’s fingertip sensors didn’t seem to register a temperature at all.
When I spotted the small circle in the middle and tapped it reflexively with a fist, I didn’t actually expect anything to happen.
I fell back into the crumbled slush at Captain Bednar’s feet as the door rapidly slid up and out of the way, and a ramp lowered into the black bowels of the pyramid.
All four of us were dead silent.
Then Captain Bednar sprinted past me and down the ramp, disappearing almost immediately into the darkness within.
“Chief..?” Specialist Majack said, half-questioning, as she and Kendelsen stared down at me.
I spat a couple of choice curses, stood up, and tapped the small control panel on the forearm of my coldsuit. My helmet lamps came on, throwing thick shafts of yellow-tinged white light into the air in front of me. The lamps would drain battery power even faster than the reheaters, but there was no choice now.
“Kendelsen stays,” I said. “Majack, get back to the descent module. Grab as many spare coldsuit batteries as you can, along with the augers and surface sample lockers containing our smaller tools. I’m going in to see what our beloved commanding officer is up to.”
“You don’t want me to come with?” Kendelsen said, disappointed.
“No,” I said. “If neither myself nor Captain Bednar return, somebody’s gotta stay outside to help Majack. I’ll keep sending audio and telemetry as long as I can.”
Which didn’t seem like it would be too long. Already we’d lost Bednar’s feed. Whatever was blocking exterior electromagnetic examination was cutting off our suit-to-suit communications too.
Space Eldritch Page 20
