River of Pain

by Christopher Golden

  It took them ten minutes. When they’d finished in the sub-level, they lugged their gear back up the spiral, then paused together and looked along the corridor toward the crux of the ship. Both of them. They had been married so long, knew each other so well, that no words were necessary for a decision to be made.

  “This close,” Russ said. “Five minutes or less, we’ll be at the crux. See what there is to see. A few images, and we’re back outside in fifteen, twenty minutes at most. The kids are probably napping by now.”

  “I’m sure it’s been more than an hour,” Anne told him. But Russ knew that it wasn’t an argument. They both glanced back the way they’d come, toward the breach in the hull that would be their exit, and then he hefted his gear onto one shoulder and took her hand.

  Together they walked toward the crux.

  Around the next corner they discovered one of each of the two alien species, locked in a terrible embrace. This bug-like creature was different from its brethren. It was larger, and had a large, ridged plate on its bright blue head that seemed to be a kind of crest.

  “What the hell happened here?” Russ muttered.

  “War,” Anne said. “The question is, where did the bugs come from? Were they on the ship, in the cargo hold, or were they already here on Acheron, and attacked the ship after the crash?”

  “And what about this one?” Russ asked. “Why is it so different?”

  Anne studied the deadly embrace again, studied that blue crest, and frowned.

  “It’s a queen.”

  “What, you mean like with bees?”

  “Doesn’t this all remind you of a hive?” She gestured at the crusted walls. “Maybe the others are like drones, and this one is like a queen.” She shrugged. “Or maybe that crest on its head just makes me think of a crown.”

  The alien she thought of as a queen had impaled the crewman with its tail, but the crewman had given as good as he’d gotten. He’d thrust his left arm up inside the queen’s jaws, as if he had tried to destroy its brain with a bare hand.

  “Come on,” Russ said. “Let’s finish this up. I don’t want to be here anymore.”

  They walked on.

  * * *

  Minutes later, they found a vast chamber where many of the crew must once have been able to gather. The dome curved high overhead, and it was crusted with the same chitin they had seen elsewhere.

  “This is just creepy as hell,” Russ said. “I feel like I can’t breathe.”

  Anne could only nod.

  There was a platform at the front of the chamber. On it stood a massive seat and some kind of gigantic apparatus that she felt sure must have been used to navigate the ship. In the seat was another of the crew, though this one wore a helmet that covered its entire head.

  “The pilot, do you think?” Russ asked as they climbed up to investigate.

  “Or the navigator.”

  “Look at its chest,” Russ whispered, and she could practically feel his breath at her ear. But Anne had already seen the twisted, mummified bones jutting out of its exo-suit, and the hole behind its ribs.

  “That’s how they killed him,” Russ said. “Must have used a weapon, or maybe one of their tails, like in the corridor back there.”

  “I don’t think so,” Anne whispered. She’d seen the way the bones twisted outward. Whatever had killed the giant had come from inside.

  She stumbled back from it, nearly slipping off the edge of the platform. Catching herself, she grabbed the side of the navigator’s chair and turned to face the back of the cavernous chamber. When they had come in, the platform had been the first thing their lights had illuminated. It had drawn them to it immediately.

  Now she saw something else.

  Many other somethings.

  “Russell,” she said quietly. A disquieting feeling came over her, not quite excitement and not quite fear. “Look at this.”

  Her light played over a low blanket of mist that hung just below the level of the platform. As she looked, she saw that the vapor itself seemed to have some small luminescence of its own. Below it, spread out all around the platform in a recessed area of the chamber floor, were dozens of large pods, each perhaps a foot or eighteen inches high. They were oval, somewhat egg-shaped, though there was something almost floral about the tops of the things. Ugly flowers that would never blossom.

  Never, of course, because they had been here for eons.

  “The mist…” Russ began.

  “It’s weirdly humid in here,” Anne said. “Maybe the ship is drawing in moisture from the outside, and holding it in this chamber.”

  “What are they, Annie?” he asked, staring at the pods. “More cargo?”

  Anne shone her light around and studied the chamber. A cargo space? It might have been, she supposed. She set her gear on the platform and moved down toward the objects.

  “Should we bring one back?” she asked, pushing off from the edge of the platform and sliding down below the upper edge of the fog.

  The pods appeared to have a leathery texture, yet they still reminded Anne of flowers yet to bloom. She frowned as she dropped to one knee, and studied the nearest one.

  “Are they… pulsing?” Russ asked from behind her.

  “I think so,” Anne replied. A smile spread across her lips. It wasn’t possible for them to be pulsing, of course, because that suggested that life remained in these pods, whatever they were. Centuries or millennia after the ship had crashed and the bloody battle that had killed so many on board, these strangely cool hothouse mists seemed to have kept these pods in some kind of hibernation state.

  She reached for the nearest one, her fingers hovering only a foot away.

  “Wait,” Russ said. “We don’t know what they are.”

  Anne turned to smile at him.

  “If the surface is toxic, it won’t get through my gloves.”

  “Let’s just set up the camera, take some images, and Simpson can worry about them,” Russ urged.

  “Now where’s your sense of adventure?” she asked.

  She saw her husband’s eyes widen at the same time as she heard a wet, sticky, peeling noise from behind her. Russ grabbed her arm and hauled her toward him.

  “Get back!” he snapped.

  Anne lost her balance and slumped against the edge of the platform. Beyond Russ, she saw the pod opening, strings of mucous hanging from the four petal-like flaps as it split apart. Something shifted and jerked inside the object.

  “Russell…” she said, suddenly afraid.

  “It’s all right,” he told her, glancing over at the pod.

  The thing within launched itself at him, latched onto his face, and he tried to scream. The sound became a horrible gagging as he stumbled back into her. Anne cried out his name as she shoved and dragged and urged him up onto the platform. Only there did she see the back of the hideous spider-thing that had attached itself to him.

  It’s all right, he had said. But it was not all right. Nor would it ever be all right again.

  16

  BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR

  DATE: 21 JUNE, 2179

  TIME: 1207

  Upside down on the driver’s seat of the crawler, Newt hummed softly to herself. It hurt her neck a bit, putting the weight on her shoulders and the back of her head, but she pushed her feet toward the vehicle’s roof, extending her toes, trying to see if she could touch.

  “Rebecca, sit normal,” Tim instructed.

  “This isn’t normal?”

  “You’re upside down.”

  “Maybe you’re upside down.”

  Her brother reached up and whapped her legs. She scrabbled for purchase but went over like a falling tree, tumbling in between the front seats. Her limbs flailed and she felt her right foot kick her brother’s thigh. When he called out in protest, she kept flailing a bit longer and kicked him again, smiling to herself.

  “Rebecca!” he snapped angrily.

  She sat on the crawler’s floor between the seats and gave him a
n exasperated look.

  “Why do you always call me that?”

  “It’s your name,” he answered. “And don’t kick me.”

  “You pushed me over. I was falling. And I don’t like that name.”

  Tim sighed and shoved himself deeper into his seat. He’d been drawing before, but put his pad aside fifteen or twenty minutes ago.

  “Maybe I like being upside down,” she muttered, pouting her lips.

  “What?” he asked, glaring at her.

  “I like being upside down.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Fine. Just do it in the other seat. I’m going to take a nap.”

  Newt raised her eyebrows and edged closer to him.

  “Wow. You must really be bored.”

  Tim glanced at her. “Aren’t you? They take us all the way out here, but then they don’t let us do anything. What’s the point?”

  “I’m not bored,” she asserted.

  He sat up straighter, scratching at a blemish on his cheek.

  “You’re telling me you wouldn’t rather be back at the colony, playing Monster Maze with Lizzie and Aaron and Kembrell?”

  Newt scoffed and blew a lock of her hair away from her eyes. “Sure, that would be more fun than this. But Mom and Dad are here, and so it’s okay to be here with them. It’s an adventure, remember?”

  Tim leaned toward her, cocking his head and studying her as if she were some kind of weird insect.

  “Yeah, but it’s their adventure,” he said. “We’re just sitting here.”

  “Maybe you are,” Newt said, crawling back into the front seat. “I’m thinking.”

  Shifting around, she put her legs in the air again, propped on her neck and shoulders, and reached for the ceiling with her toes.

  “Yeah? What are you thinking, then?”

  Newt’s stomach gave a little uneasy flutter and she shivered.

  “I’m thinking Mom and Dad have been gone an awfully long time.”

  * * *

  DATE: 21 JUNE, 2179

  TIME: 1229

  Brackett skipped lunch in the dining hall, heated himself a bowl of soup, and then turned to exercise to try to sweat out the worry that was gnawing at him. Two hundred sit-ups, two hundred push-ups, and countless squats didn’t do the job, so he switched to the pull-up bar his predecessor had installed over the bathroom door. Biceps burning, he drew himself up and lowered himself down, steady and in control of his pace.

  His frustration began to leech away as his thoughts blurred with the effort. For the first time in well over an hour, he didn’t feel the urge to check the clock on the wall, to count the minutes since the colony’s last contact from the Jordens.

  Sweat beaded and ran down the middle of his back. His heart thudded in his ears while he tried to remember how many reps he’d done, and decide if he ought to do more. The answer was easy enough—if he stopped now, he’d only go back to watching the time.

  Whatever happens, it’s not your fault, Brackett told himself, taking hold of the bar again. An image of Newt flickered into his thoughts. Newt, her mouth stained from that freeze-pop, those big eyes so earnest and wise beyond her years.

  He hauled himself up again, pull-up after pull-up, trying to blot that image from his mind. It proved just as difficult as his attempts to forget Anne over the years. His life had gone on, and he’d been happy enough. Content enough. He’d thought that he would go the rest of his life without ever seeing her again, and decided that he could live with that.

  For a brief period he’d been in love with a pilot named Tyra, but that had all unraveled, partly because of the demands of their careers and partly because each of them had experienced greater love before, and knew that what they had wasn’t enough.

  Then came his assignment to Acheron. Part of him wished he’d never been posted here. River of pain, he thought, remembering the mythological origins of the name. As far as Brackett was concerned, they had chosen it well.

  Someone knocked at his door. He dropped down from the bar and grabbed his towel, wiping sweat from his face.

  “It’s open!” he called. The door swung inward and Julisa Paris stepped inside, straight-backed and formal.

  “Captain,” she said, by way of greeting.

  “You have something for me, Lieutenant?”

  “Sorry to say I don’t, sir.”

  Brackett felt an uneasy tremor travel down his spine.

  “So the Jordens haven’t checked in?”

  “That’s what I’m told,” Paris confirmed, her eyes grim. “As far as I can tell, Simpson hasn’t even tried to reach them. He’s playing it off as if it’s no big deal, and maybe it isn’t, but the shift supervisor I spoke to said people are getting jittery.”

  Brackett cursed under his breath.

  “What do you want to do, Captain?” she asked.

  “Nothing yet. But be ready. I stood on principle with this matter, and I’ll look like an idiot if I throw those principles out the window. But if that family’s in trouble, I don’t plan to leave them out there. Thirty minutes, Lieutenant. If the Jordens haven’t checked in by then, we’re going out.”

  Paris saluted. “Yes, sir.”

  She turned on her heel and departed. Brackett closed the door behind her.

  Where are you, Anne? he thought, as he hurried to the shower. He wanted to be suited up and ready to go if it came to that. The delay in reporting in could have been due to a communications malfunction, or they might be lost in the excitement of discovery. But a dreadful certainty had begun to form in his gut.

  Call in, damn it, he thought. Prove me wrong.

  * * *

  DATE: 21 JUNE, 2179

  TIME: 1256

  Newt sat in the driver’s seat, hugging herself.

  The crawler’s lights had gone on as it grew darker outside. The wind had picked up and it blew against the vehicle hard enough to rattle the windows. Though the heat ran, Newt still felt cold seeping in from outside, and she started to wonder how long the lights and the heat would work. Would the crawler run out of power? Her mom and dad wouldn’t leave them here long enough for that to happen, would they?

  Not on purpose, she thought.

  For the first time, she grew truly worried.

  The wind howled even harder as she glanced over at her brother, who had curled up in the passenger seat and fallen asleep at least half an hour before. She wanted to wake him, just so she wouldn’t feel so alone, but he would only be nasty to her. Most of the time, Tim was a good big brother. They got along well and they played together and they laughed a lot, but when he was tired or nervous he could be short with her, even mean.

  Newt didn’t think she could handle him being unkind to her right now.

  She sat staring out the window at the huge, curving spaceship. In the swirling dust and the gloom it was hard to get a clear view, but when there was a lull in the wind she could see it all right. The ship seemed quiet now, making it hard to imagine that anyone was alive inside it—walking around, having a Jorden family adventure.

  She shifted in her seat, turning away from her view of the big, dark ship. It troubled her now just to think of it, silent and empty. She shifted again, and the wind whipped against the crawler so hard it felt like giant hands were giving the vehicle a shove.

  She trembled and wetted her dry lips with her tongue. Tentatively, she reached out and nudged her brother. Tim grumbled and turned away, burrowing into the seat, trying to find a comfortable position.

  “Tim,” she whispered, shaking him a bit harder. “Timmy, wake up.”

  She hadn’t called him Timmy since she was very little. He didn’t like it, now that they were growing up, but at that moment she felt very small. Felt little again.

  “Timmy,” she said again, and he turned sleepily toward her, eyes opening.

  “What?” he groaned.

  “They’ve been gone a long time,” she said.

  For a second she thought he would snap at her, demand that she let him sleep. Then he s
at up a bit straighter, and looked out through the windshield at the darkened landscape, listening to the wind. Nothing so far had scared her as much as the uncertainty she saw in her brother’s eyes.

  Tim looked afraid.

  “It’ll be okay, Newt,” he said. “Dad knows what he’s doing.”

  Suddenly she couldn’t breathe. Tim never called her Newt. Why had he called her that now if not to comfort her, to try to make her less afraid?

  Suddenly the door beside her whipped open, crashing against the crawler. Newt screamed as the wind roared in and she twisted just as a dark shape lunged in at her. Shrieking, she pulled back from the shape, her heart about to explode. Then she saw the face and with a shock realized it was her mother, panicked and looking so wild that Newt continued to scream.

  Tim’s shouts joined with her own as their mom reached inside and grabbed the handheld radio that was tethered to the dash.

  “Mayday! Mayday!” her mother called into the radio, shouting over the wind. “This is alpha kilo two four nine calling Hadley Control. Repeat! This is—”

  Newt looked past her mother and saw that she wasn’t alone, that her father was there, too, but something was wrong with him. He lay sprawled on the ground outside the door and in the light from the crawler she could see there was something on his face. Some kind of disgusting thing that looked like a spider, its many legs like bony fingers, its body pulsing with hideous life.

  Her screams turned to shrieks as her eyes went wide. She screamed again and again, her voice merging with the howling wind, so that it seemed as if all of Acheron screamed along with her.

  * * *

  DATE: 21 JUNE, 2179

  TIME: 1257

  Brackett strode toward the command block, full of grim purpose. Pride and principle had to be cast aside now. Too much time had passed. The Jordens had to be in trouble.

  Lt. Paris walked beside him, perfectly in synch. Proving her wisdom, she hadn’t said a word to him about the fact that it had been his decision—his desire to shake things up—that had led to the Jordens being sent out without an escort.