by Scott Reeves
The whiteness of hyperspace abruptly vanished, swallowed by the blackness of space, a blackness speckled with a million stars, faintly visible through the purple mist of the Goat’s Horn Nebula within which Caldor nestled.
Directly ahead, Caldor itself was rapidly swelling to fill the forward quarter of the viewing dome. Caldor, a harsh metal orb with a circumference made jagged by the millions of megascrapers that stretched from the artificial core of the planet all the way to the edge of its atmosphere. Black clouds of smoke obscured much of the surface, and bright orange lights marked the sites of raging fires that had to be incredibly massive to be seen from space. Caldor was quite obviously a world in the throws of a planet-wide catastrophe.
“Sir,” Chet Mith, the on-duty communications officer, said. “I’m picking up something strange from Caldor’s top subspace channel.”
Jayce Michaels kicked his throne around to face the comm officer. “Godammit! I said to cut us off from subspace, and I meant it! Hands off! Treat it like you would a whore with the nastiest case of trans-syphilis in the history of the galaxy! Isn’t that what I said?”
Mith withered under his captain’s glare. “Yes, sir! But I’ve only got a receptor open, just for passive reception, no possible way anything could get in.”
Michaels grinned. “You’ve got an industrial strength rubber on that receptor, is that it, Chet?”
Mith grinned back, relieved to be out from under the heat of the captain’s notorious glare. “That’s it exactly, sir.”
“What are you picking up, then?”
Mith twisted a virtual dial on his holoboard. A cacophony of shrieks suddenly filled the air, drowning out the whisper of the thousand shipboard conversations. The agonized screams and terrified wails of an untold number of humans.
It was the most horrifying and disturbing sound Michaels had ever heard.
“Someone on Caldor is transmitting that?” Michaels asked. “What the fuck for?”
In the darkness of the command deck, against the backdrop of the stars and the swelling orb of Caldor, Mith shook his head. “No, sir. This isn’t a transmission. This is the subspace carrier wave. This is the current sound of subspace itself.”
From within the web of the pilot’s cocoon, Horax Bellock said, “No fucking way!”
“Shut it off!” Michaels barked. The sound was ripping at his heart, making him ache with thoughts of the type of suffering it would take to elicit such horrific howls from a human being.
Mith flicked a virtual switch, and the shrieks cut off.
Michaels sagged into his throne with a sudden weariness. It had taken all his strength to maintain his composure, just listening to the shrieks for those few brief moments.
He cleared his throat, then asked with an unusual softness: “Any word from Mac over radio or fatline channels?”
“No, sir,” Chet Mith responded.
Anson Torqual, Head of Science, put in: “We’re going to patch into Mac’s diagnostic subroutines in a moment, sir. Establishing the link now.”
“Careful,” Michaels said. “Make sure you put on one of Mith’s rubbers, An.”
“Aye.”
“Sir,” Bellock said. “I’m picking up some activity on one of the planet’s rooftop spaceports. A dozen or so people, apparently alive. Half a dozen dormant robocop units.”
“Take us down to that spaceport,” Michaels ordered. “We might as well start there. Maybe those people can tell us what the hell is going on.” He clicked on the intraship communicator. “Command deck to infirmary. Doctor Chebbors. We’ve located survivors on a spaceport. Get to your shuttle. I want boots down in five minutes.”
“Sorry, Cap. It’ll be at least thirty minutes.”
“What?” Michaels barked, outraged. “I told you to be ready to initiate quarantine protocols upon arrival! What the fuck have you been doing down there for the past four hours? Inoculating the nurses with your little needle dick?”
“No. I’ve been pulling your shuttles out of mothballs, dusting them off and getting them back in shape. Doing the job your fucking crewmen should have been doing, if you’d been doing your job of being their captain. Any more stupid questions, Jayce?”
Michaels chuckled. “Thirty minutes, Boris. No longer. Those people down there might get antsy and try to leave if we keep them waiting.”
“Aye, aye, Cap.”
Samala Vintron
Samala Vintron swam up out of blackness, gradually becoming aware of herself again. The last thing she remembered was that foul man dragging a knife across her throat, just after he’d finished doing things to her, vile things the memories of which she vainly tried to cram back into the receding blackness so that she wouldn’t have to remember them.
She was lying on something squishy, and with every breath, a god-awful stench assaulted her lungs. She looked at what she was lying on: a mass of slimy mush that appeared to have once been food, as well as a mixture of broken plastic, glass, and soggy cardboard. Looking back up, she saw that she was in a cavernous room that was so huge she could not see the distant walls in any direction she looked. The room —although “room” seemed too inadequate a word for an enclosure so incredibly humungous— was filled with piles of garbage as far as the eye could see, massive hills of every conceivable sort of detritus that a world of 800 billion humans would produce.
High above, a domed concrete ceiling arced across a hazy sky that was cloyingly humid from the moldering piles of refuse. In the ceiling directly above her, far above her, was a gaping rectangular hole: the entrance to a shaft that no doubt rose into the heights of the Caldorian planet city.
She’d never seen one of these places before, but she’d heard rumors of their existence, rumors that she had thought were merely urban legends: one of the planetary garbage dumps.
Now, in hindsight, it seemed foolish to have doubted the existence of places like this. Where else did she think the garbage went to when she dumped it into the chute in the kitchen of her apartment? She supposed she’d just assumed the garbage fell into some sort of vaporizing device. But apparently not. Apparently it fell down into one of these gargantuan rooms deep in the planet, where it lay in moldering heaps, slowly composting over the years and decades. But what did they do with the compost? And who were “they” anyway? Some sort of garbage corps, whose duty it was to monitor these gigantic composting rooms?
That immense concrete ceiling was pockmarked at regular intervals with holes similar to the one through which she had fallen: the exits of garbage chutes that laced the interior structure of her home megascraper, and possibly neighboring megascrapers as well. Who knew how many of the vast city-buildings were served by this gargantuan garbage dump?
But she didn’t care about any of that at the moment.
She was alive!
How could she be alive?
She took her eyes off the rectangular shaft opening high above her. It was obvious what had happened. The horrible man had raped her, murdered her, and then tossed her lifeless body down one of the billions of generic shafts that laced the planet-city. Down she’d tumbled for untold miles, cast away by the fiend like a piece of human garbage, bouncing off the walls of the narrow shaft, until she’d come to rest down here, among all the other cast-off waste of humankind.
But how could she be alive? Had he botched the job, failing to complete her murder?
She sat up and examined her body. She was nude. Her skin seemed more vibrant and unblemished than it ever had before. In fact, there was a highly polished sheen and an almost translucent glow to it, as if a golden fire were burning deep within the core of her. She saw traces of blood on her breasts and stomach, but most of it had been washed away by the dreadful humidity that had coated her skin with a thick layer of dew.
Then those vile memories came swimming back up. He had cut her throat!
She felt her throat, and discovered that it was intact, with no trace of the gaping, ragged wound she would have expected. But the examination of her throat did reveal s
omething quite unexpected: she had no pulse.
She pressed her fingertips to her jugular again.
No pulse.
She pressed the fingertips of one hand against the wrist of the opposite arm.
No pulse.
She had no pulse!
God help her, her heart wasn’t beating!
But her skin was warm, lacking the coldness of death. And she was breathing, and was obviously alive. Yet she distinctly remembered her throat being cut. How could she be alive if her throat had been cut and her heart wasn’t beating? And why was she breathing? If her heart wasn’t beating to carry oxygen and nutrients around in her body, what need had she of air?
To speak, she realized. That was why she needed air in her lungs. No, not to speak. To scream.
So she screamed. Loudly, and at the top of her lungs. A screaming wail filled with a universe of pain as the horrific memory of what had recently been done to her erupted from her soul with the intensity of a volcano. Try as she might, she couldn’t forget the things that vile man had done to her.
The ragged, wounded scream eventually faded away into a ragged whimper. That was when she suddenly became aware of a sound that had been present ever since her return to consciousness, but she hadn’t paid it any attention. Now she did.
Someone was behind her, eating, and thoroughly enjoying the meal, judging by the wet slobbering sounds, the gnashing teeth, and the moans of pleasure.
She whirled to look behind her.
A woman was crouched a short distance away, a woman whose tattered clothing was drenched in blood and gore. Wild eyes watched Samala warily as blood-smeared teeth in a blood-smeared mouth tore hungrily at the meaty calf of a human leg which the woman clutched in her clawed hands, a leg that had been broken off at the knee.
As Samala turned her attention on the woman, the woman stopped eating and growled low in her throat, a feral growl of warning, like a rabid dog.
Samala was disgusted and terrified by the woman, and was suddenly reminded again of the other events that had occurred before her apparent murder: her father had turned into a beast just like the woman before her, and had attacked Samala, forcing her to flee through the air ducts with the horrible man who had done...those things...to her.
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, then opened them again.
The psycho animal woman had resumed her meal, apparently having decided that Samala wasn’t a threat. But Samala had no doubt that the wild woman would have pounced on her if the grisly meal hadn’t provided a distraction.
Then something on the half leg caught Samala’s attention. There was a tattoo of a crucifix near the ankle, a crucifix that Samala knew well. Down the vertical length of the cross were tattooed the words, “Always remember that I died for you, Samala.”
Samala reeled backward in shock. That was her leg the wild woman was eating!
But...
Samala looked down at her legs. Both were completely intact below the knees. Her legs weren’t missing.
She gasped.
But the crucifix tattoo that had for so long graced the supple ankle of her right leg was no longer there.
And a closer examination of the knee of her right leg revealed a ring of pinkish, glossy skin that completely encircled the leg. Almost like a scar marking the location of a previous trauma to her leg.
Almost like a scar marking the location where her leg had been ripped off, or perhaps gnawed off, and where another one had grown back in its place.
She looked at the half-eaten leg which the wild woman was currently devouring with great gusto.
Apparently the wild animal woman had been in the process of consuming Samala’s body when Samala had been recalled to...life? Now, the woman would be denied the rest of her meal, a fact with which Samala was completely comfortable.
Samala rarely cursed. Her Christian upbringing usually cringed at the slightest thought of cursing. But she felt a curse was appropriate to the moment.
“Just what in the name of fuck is going on?!” she screamed at the top of her lungs. She realized she was practically hysterical, and needed to calm down.
The wild woman paused in her meal and glared at Samala, licking her lips. Perhaps considering abandoning the leg for something with a bit more meat on it. Or maybe realizing that the rest of her food was about to walk away.
Samala backed away slowly, not wanting to startle the wild woman with sudden rapid movement. The wild woman watched her go with unblinking eyes. Finally the woman bent her head and began tearing meat from the leg once again.
“I hope you get sick from that and die, bitch!” Samala shouted, then turned and fled across the vast landscape of garbage.
She had to find a way back upward. She had to find Mal. Would he be looking for her? How long had she been...dead? For that matter, was she still dead, as her lack of pulse seemed to indicate? What exactly was she, now?
All she knew was that the answers lay upward.
Andy Watson
Andy stared up at the immense hawk-shaped starship that, for the past half-hour, had been hovering above the rooftop spaceport. There had been no sign of activity on board. No crew was visible through the many windows that peppered the starship’s hull. Andy knew the windows were probably tinted on the outside to shield the interior from the harsh radiation of interstellar space. There could be thousands of crewmen standing at the windows looking down upon the ragtag band waiting on the rooftop and they wouldn’t have been visible to anyone outside.
Andy thought back to the cruiser which had brought him to Caldor. He’d been able to stand on the observation deck, shielded only by a huge force field rather than tinted windows, and he’d been clearly visible to the watchers on the rooftop. But that had been a luxury starcruiser, whose fares were calculated to afford the passengers such high-tech luxuries. Starships, funded as they often were either by the Star Union or private universities, chose to spend their allocated funds on more useful things, and so sometimes chose to go with the lower-tech tinted windows.
What are they waiting on? Andy wondered. Why don’t they send someone down for us? Obviously they wouldn’t be using the transmats; whatever agency had sent this starship to Caldor had probably warned its crew that the transmats were malfunctioning.
Malfred Gil came over to stand beside Andy. “Why do you think he went through the transmat and did that to himself?” the young man asked, nodding over at the force cube in which Rodor Batsalam crouched, foaming at the mouth and snarling a low feral snarl.
Andy hadn’t had the answer at first. But after pondering for the last half hour, he’d realized the answer. “He thinks that people who believe in Christ Jesus will survive this catastrophe, and be resurrected into a state beyond death.”
He directed Mal’s attention to the minister, Joyce, who sat nearby, glowing as if transfigured, even as she stared around in horror at the rooftop strewn with body parts and blood—the result of the recent battle they’d fought to make the rooftop safe.
“Joyce believes in Jesus. She died. I know. I killed her. Or the transmats did; I’m not sure which.” Andy swallowed hard at the memory of snapping her neck. “And now she’s...alive?” She had no pulse, but she had recovered from her previous animalistic state of walking death.
“Let me make sure I understand,” Mal said gruffly. “That Rodor guy was content to hole up here on Caldor and restart civilization after cleansing it of all these...what do you call them? Zombies? But now that he thinks people who believe in Jesus will resurrect, he wants you all to go out into the galaxy, preaching fire and brimstone to convert people, thereby saving them from becoming zombies? Aren’t you a little late? The whole galaxy’s probably already died and come back as...those things.”
“Maybe not. There are probably pockets of survivors all over the galaxy, maybe whole planets. There will be plenty left to hear the message of God.”
“You guys are nuts.”
“No, we're Christians.”
“Th
ere's a difference?” Mal said snarkily. He ducked his head then, as though ashamed of what he’d just said. “Anyway. Do you think Rodor is right?”
“I don’t know,” Andy replied. “With just one case to go by, I don’t think a definite conclusion can be drawn. But I think maybe he is.” Andy looked sidelong at Mal. “How about you, Malfred? Have you heard the good news of our Lord and Savior?” Andy had come to Caldor to spread the gospel. Maybe now was the time to start.
Mal raised his arms, palms out, as though to shield himself from Andy. “Oh, no, don’t you start on me! I had to tolerate that shit from my girl, but I’m not about to have it from a complete stranger!”
Andy opened his mouth to reply, but just then a loud crack sounded from the starship above. Everyone on the rooftop looked up. With a horrific sound of grinding metal, a huge bay door at the rear of the starship was sliding open like a metal curtain, exposing a dim hangar bay. It took only a few seconds to open, and then a small boxy shuttlecraft drifted from the bay, hovered a few seconds, and then slid silently down toward the rooftop.
“I’m not going with them,” Mal announced suddenly. “I don’t want to be rescued.”
Andy took his eyes from the descending shuttle and turned a questioning look upon Mal.
“My girlfriend, Samala,” Mal said. “She believed in your Jesus. If you and Rodor are right, and there’s a chance she’s resurrected from her murder...” He shook his head. “I’ve got to go back down and find her. Will you help me operate that lift thing to get off this rooftop?”
Andy looked at the young man’s pleading eyes. He looked at the shuttle, which was just now settling to the tarmac of the spaceport. He looked at Joyce, and at the snarling Rodor Batsalam confined within his force cube next to Doctor Dmitriyano’s captured woman. Finally, he put a hand on Mal’s shoulder. “I’ll do more than help you operate the lift. I’ll go with you, if you’ll have my help.”
Mal smiled a sour smile, clearly annoyed at the thought of having someone like Andy along, but reluctant to refuse the help. “Let’s go before the people in that shuttle try to stop us.”
