The man blinked again. “Interstellar exploration? Planet?”
“Yes—”
“Did you say, the Wellington?” The man’s brow was furrowed in concentration.
“Yes, it’s my ship. My name is Captain Walker.”
The man stared Walker hard in the face for an uncomfortable few seconds, and then he assessed his surroundings one more time, taking particular notice of Walker’s exo-suit. “The name’s Calder. Captain Max Calder, formerly of the British Army.”
Walker could detect the trace of an English accent, but he was suspicious. “Welcome aboard, Captain Calder. But tell me, there hasn’t been a standing army in the United Kingdom for almost a hundred years. There’s the EU Defence Force, of course, but it’s—”
Calder cut in, “What year is this?”
“Year? It’s 2416, Captain.” Walker stood to the whirr of the exo-suit’s electronics. “Maybe you need to rest. We found you in some sort of cocoon. How in hell did you end up orbiting a planet 150 light years from Earth?”
“Cocoon? The spider. I must have fallen off the web ...” Calder trailed off.
In the ensuing silence, Walker glanced at Peng, who was turning the flute in his hands. As the junior officer stared at the instrument, his face slack as if he were drifting, a beep emanated from the crewman’s exo-suit. A second later, the same beep sounded from Walker’s suit. The two men closed their visors immediately.
Walker’s HUD lit up. The cause for the alarm was readily apparent.
“It’s the source of the radio waves,” Peng said as Walker came to the same conclusion.
Waves of white lines, which simulated radio waves on the HUD, radiated from the flute. The instrument was also emitting vast amounts of infrared light like some infernal star. There were traces of neutron and gamma radiation, too, depicted as orange and green pulses on the HUD, but they were well within safety limits.
Walker turned to the man on the bunk. “Calder, what is this thing? Is it dangerous?”
“It’s a flute, Captain Walker. A very special flute.”
“Take it to the lab and lens it, Peng. If those radiation levels increase, I want you to space it. Got it?” Walker ordered. A full lensing would provide all the data they’d need.
Calder tried to rise again, but Walker barred his way with an outstretched arm.
“Stay there,” Walker said. “I need some answers. Besides, we don’t know what condition you’re in.”
“Where is my gun?” Calder propped himself into a sitting position, but judging by his panting, he wouldn’t get much further.
“It’s safe.” Walker patted his thigh. “You won’t need a weapon on my ship. For now, we need to talk.”
Walker turned to see if the room was clear, but he found Peng dawdling as he admired the flute. “Peng!”
Peng picked up his pace, but as he left the crew quarters, Peng retracted his visor and raised the flute to his mouth.
“Cut it out, Peng!” Walker shouted after the crewman. He whirled back to Calder. “How did you end up in that cocoon?”
“You wouldn’t believe me.”
“Try me, Captain Calder. I just retrieved you from inside a cocoon that was floating in an alien space graveyard. Nothing you could say would surprise me.”
Calder clenched his fists, closed his eyes, and sighed. “The stars are held together by a vast web. That’s the way I understand it. A colleague of mine, Peel, called it ‘dark matter’. A lot of what he said went over my head. I was just there to kill some spiders, but one of them almost killed me.” Calder exhaled a long breath. “That’s how I ended up in a cocoon. As for how I got out here, I must have fallen off the web. Peel must have had something to do with it.”
“So you’re saying giant spiders made the universe? If that’s true, why did I find you here?”
“I told you, I must have fallen off the web. It’s hard to explain, but there are forces, cosmic forces, that are pulling this web of stars apart. Peel called the forces ‘dark energy’. They’re like magnets. They repel the cosmic web, the dark matter, but draw in other things.”
“This is going over my head, too, Captain Calder. Why don’t you rest up, gather your thoughts, and we’ll talk more in a few hours.” Walker turned to leave but paused. “Is that flute of yours dangerous? I’m not putting my ship and my crew at risk, am I?”
“No, as long as no one—”
An off key note sounded from the lab. It was quiet but piercing at the same time. That single note caused Walker’s skin to prickle with goose bumps, and even though it was just one short toot, its echo plagued his ears for long moments afterward.
“No!” Calder shouted.
The next few seconds were a blur.
A thunderous low-pitched sound—for that was as close an approximation as Walker could make—rumbled from everywhere at once. It was like a fog horn, only deeper, longer, and somehow, more invasive—a living, alien vibration, a wall of thunder, which shuddered through his bones and shook the Wellington to its core. If Walker hadn’t been supported by the exo-suit, he’d have slumped to his knees under the burden of that vibration.
Peng shrieked in pain, loud and clear and coming from the lab. It was a high-pitched counterpart to the other sound, but it was all too human. Almost simultaneously, another scream of pain resounded over Walker’s comlink: Huang.
Peng’s shriek died down as the thunderous vibration subsided, but Huang continued to scream on the com. Huang’s anguish stirred Walker back to himself, and he bounded off at a controlled run, augmented by the speed of the exo-suit. To his surprise, Walker heard footsteps behind him. He glanced back to see Captain Calder running after him, albeit on unsteady legs unused to low gravity.
By the time they had opened the hatch and entered the cargo hold, Huang’s screams on the comlink had turned to gurgles, and as Walker stepped through the hatch, those gurgles were cut short.
The miner’s corpse had returned to life. It hunched over Huang’s prone form and was in the process of tearing long ribbons of bloody flesh from the ruin of Huang’s exposed throat. He didn’t have time to lower his helmet, but it wouldn’t have made a difference. Huge rents had been torn in Huang’s exo-suit to reveal a gaping hole in the man’s chest.
At Walker’s entrance, the corpse looked up. The ice had melted away from its face, leaving brown-red pools of gore where its eyes should have been and ragged tatters of flesh instead of lips. More gore dribbled down its chin, although this was bright red—Huang’s feasted-on remains.
It shovelled the ribbons of veins and flesh into its mouth, while its other hand ripped one of the insulated strips from Huang’s neck. The corpse continue to bend and twist the metal strip in Huang’s neck, but the deep-threaded wires of Huang’s gen3 tech prevented it from easily tearing the implant free.
“Captain Walker!” Calder shouted at him. He was barely two steps away. “Shoot it!”
Walker hesitated. The blood spattered across the wall, the pool of blood expanding beneath Huang’s still-twitching body—it was all too surreal.
The corpse rose from its kill, and on legs that were steadier by far than Calder’s, it advanced toward Walker.
“Shoot!” Calder shouted.
Walker snapped out of his trance. He aimed one of his hand-mounted PLDs and blasted at the walking corpse. The orange energy pulsed through the corpse, and for the briefest of instants, Walker thought the corpse’s face looked like his brother’s. There was a hint of Tim’s cheek line, the set of his jaw ...
“Walker!” Calder cried.
Again, the corpse was a monstrosity with a blasted face that was no longer Tim’s, but somehow, it had crossed the room and was within pouncing distance. The corpse was set to lunge, set to tear off Walker’s face, but Captain Calder tackled it to the ground.
The pair tumbled together in a flail of limbs.
“Walker!” Calder said through clenched teeth. “Shoot!”
Walker blinked, spun the dial of the P
LD from stun to kill, and waited for a clear shot.
Although his arms copped a pummelling, using leverage, Captain Calder managed to heave the corpse away from him, and he held it there at arm’s length long enough for Walker to blast a hole through its torso with his laser.
The corpse spasmed, and Calder rolled its bulk off him.
“Thanks.” Calder regained his feet and grimaced as he rubbed his arm. “It didn’t pull any punches.”
Walker approached the body, but as he drew within its reach, the corpse sprang into life once more. It snarled a gurgly battle cry and barrelled into Walker. With the weight of the flailing corpse, Walker went down hard. The exo-suit did little to cushion his fall, and the air was forced from his lungs. Something metal skittered along the grille floor.
Walker fended off the corpse’s clumsy attempts to tear his exo-suit open while he regained his footing. Amid the chaos of the melee, he managed to blast away at the corpse’s midsection, slicing it in two.
The corpse’s lower half sank to the floor in a spasm of twitches and its intestines splattered in ropey loops across his legs and onto the floor, but Walker was still in danger. The corpse’s upper half continued to grapple with him.
It gurgled its hate into Walker’s face, and he screamed back at it, slicing its fingers off with another blast from his PLD. The corpse slid down Walker’s torso but hung onto his shoulder with its remaining hand.
“A little help?” Walker grunted.
A second later, Captain Calder appeared from nowhere and kicked the corpse free.
The corpse groped and gurgled on the floor. Blood spewed from its severed waist in small, icy chunks. More blood spattered from its mouth when it snarled.
Calder held out a hand, which Walker took to steady himself. The stranger had regained his firearm, which must have been flung free when the corpse tackled him. Side by side, the two captains fired their weapons—PLD and archaic pistol—at the thrashing corpse.
Calder’s gun sounded like a localised explosion. His shot struck the corpse in the forehead, which snapped its head back. Sparks of blue-white electricity exploded from the wound sizzled about the corpse’s head. Walker’s own laser sliced diagonally from collar bone to ribs, cutting the twitching body into two roughly equal chunks. Within seconds, the corpse succumbed to a second, final death.
“Do you know what’s going on?” Walker asked.
“No, but that sound we heard wasn’t from the flute. The first note was, but the other noise ...” Calder trailed off.
“We have to—” Walker began, but he was interrupted as the Wellington lurched forward and picked up speed.
“Peng?” Walker muttered. He glanced around the gore-spattered cargo hold and brushed the worst of the entrails from his exo-suit. Bizarrely, the smell was minimal. He engaged his helmet visor, sealing the exo-suit airtight. The HUD blazed to life before his eyes. “Peng, do you read me?” he said to the com. “Peng, come in.”
Seconds stretched on. He could hear subtle, almost inaudible noise on the com, gibberish picked up by the mic.
He turned to Calder. “Peng’s not responding, but he must be on the bridge. Let’s move. When this is over, we’re going to have a long talk, Captain Calder.” Walker glanced from Calder to Huang’s dead body and was about to say something more when another rumbling vibration thrummed through the ship.
Calder held his hands over his ears. Walker tried to do the same, but locked inside the exo-suit, he had to put up with the shuddering noise. His stomach knotted, and he suppressed the urge to vomit. This time, the noise was closer, more insistent, like a dull roar.
Peng screamed again, although it was off com as if he were screaming at the mic from metres away. It petered off and was replaced by hysterical laughter. The laughs segued into sobs when the thunderous vibration faded away.
“Peng’s in trouble,” Walker told Calder and then took off at a jog toward the bridge. Captain Calder followed. The pair was passing through the crew quarters when the Wellington juddered. The shaking threw Calder against the mess table, but he quickly regained his feet and continued on.
Walker paused at the hatch to the bridge, which was ajar, and motioned for Calder to stay quiet. He could hear Peng’s sobs off-com, although the junior officer had begun laughing again, softer than earlier.
He stuck his head through the hatch. Peng was sitting in his command chair, and he waved Calder’s flute like a baton. The controls had been smashed beyond repair. The console sparked with electricity and wisps of smoke rose from a mess of torn-out wires and circuits. Blue fire-retardant foam covered much of the floor, and one of the oxygen scrubbers was venting gas, hissing like an angry snake. Because of the gas and smoke, visibility in the bridge was impaired.
On the main screen, dimly lit because of the gloom, Osiris II grew larger by the second. The ship was speeding straight for it. Something about the looming planet unsettled Walker, and then he saw it.
The planet was moving.
A vast continent-sized tendril began to unwrap from the planet’s core. Only a hint of its true shape was visible above the layer of haze.
“Look there!” Calder pointed to one of the viewports.
The millions upon millions of dead life forms that had been orbiting Osiris II all teemed with new life. Their writhing was orgiastic. Some clumped together to bite, tear, or stab, others flailed as if to a song only they could hear. The details fled too quickly for Walker to fully absorb as the ship sped towards its destination.
“We have to get off this ship,” Calder whispered. “Can you fix the controls in time?”
Walker shook his head.
Calder nodded to himself as though thinking through an idea. “Then get me that flute. It’s our only means to escape before we hit that ... that thing out there.”
“When we’re done, you owe me a better explanation than giant spider webs.” Walker removed the PLD from his left hand and gave it to Calder. “Do you know how to use one of these?”
The other man shook his head.
“Mount it on the back of your hand. The trigger is squeeze activated. On the strap, see it? The orange setting stuns, the red setting kills. You saw how it worked.”
Calder slipped the PLD into place. “I’ll give it a try, but if it’s all the same to you, Captain, my Webley has gotten me out of tough scrapes before.”
“Does your firearm have a stun setting? There’s no need to kill my crewman.”
Calder pursed his lips. “Fair enough.”
Walker nodded and stepped through the hatch into the breach. “Peng, stand down!”
Peng turned and smiled. The strips on his neck had been fried, and blood had begun to crust on his lip, chin, and ears. “We’re almost home,” he said. He waved the flute for emphasis. “You’ll see.”
“So much for being enhanced,” Walker muttered. He raised his arm and fired a stun blast. Peng had the same idea. Both blasts struck true. Peng was knocked backward out of the command chair. The flute fell from his grasp and skittered along the floor. Simultaneously, Peng’s blast knocked Walker down. As he struggled back to his feet against the weight of an exo-suit that was partially offline, Walker thanked his maker that Peng had his PLD set to stun.
When he regained his feet, he saw that Captain Calder had retrieved the flute.
Walker watched the writhing Osiris II grow steadily larger on the screen and in the viewports. “Calder, you have to get into an exo-suit. If we lose atmosphere, it’ll keep you alive for a few days. I’ll activate the emergency beacon if it still works!”
Walker lurched forward towards the burnt-out command console, but Calder put a restraining hand on his shoulder. “No, Captain Walker, don’t activate your beacon. You can’t draw more people to their deaths. We can’t risk stirring this thing up anymore than it already is.” Calder held up the flute. “There’s another way.”
“What do you mean?” Walker glanced at the main screen, at the monstrosity that he’d mistaken for a planet
. It filled the entire screen.
Calder lowered the flute. “I told you that the stars are held together by a vast web. Those cosmic forces I mentioned, the dark energy that disrupts the web and pulls life off it?” He pointed to the screen. “I believe that this thing is one of those dark energy magnets.”
“So this entity sucks life in order to destroy the universe?”
“Captain Walker, it’s time to go. We can philosophise about this later when we’re not about to get swallowed by a living planet.”
“What about Peng?”
Calder shook his head. “I’ve seen this before. Believe me, he’s better off dead.”
Calder raised his flute and blew a short string of notes. Each note in the cacophony was more unpleasant than the last, and while Walker’s skin crawled and mind rebelled at the music—if it could be called that—he didn’t immediately notice the dark fuzzy sphere that coalesced in front of Calder. It was subtle, at first, but as Calder played more notes, his eyes closed and his brow sweaty from the effort, the dark rift expanded.
In moments, the tear dominated the bridge. It moved like an arc of lightning, establishing its ends between the ceiling and the floor, jumping to large metal objects such as the command chair for a second before stabilising again. Its centre was darkness deeper than space, but at its edges, the air was tinged with a purple-black haze that was too similar to Osiris II’s atmosphere for Walker’s comfort.
“Hurry!” Calder waved Walker toward him before spinning on his heel and jumping headlong into the lightning-like rift. The man vanished inside, but there was no scream, no tearing noise, no sound at all.
Walker stood mustering the courage to step through when he noticed the ceiling buckle under the influence of the rift. The floor, too, was being torn up by the dark lightning.
Two orange flashes filled his peripheral vision, and an instant later, Walker found himself thrown backwards. He tried to rise, but the exo-suit’s legs were inert from the stun blasts. The best he could manage was propping himself up on one arm.
Cthulhu Mythos Writers Sampler 2013 Page 27
