Space Eldritch II: The Haunted Stars Read online

  SPACE ELDRITCH II:

  The Haunted Stars

  Edited by Nathan Shumate

  Published by

  Cold Fusion Media

  http://www.coldfusionmedia.us

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  All contents are copyright ©2013 their respective authors.

  Cover design and illustration by Carter Reid, http:www.thezombienation.com

  Cold Fusion Media Empire

  http://www.coldfusionmedia.us

  Table of Contents

  A Darklight Call’d on the Long Last Night of the Soul – Michaelbrent Collings

  Dead Waits Dreaming – Larry Correia

  The Implant – Robert J Defendi

  Plague Ship – Steven L. Peck

  From Within the Walls – Steven Diamond

  Space Opera: Episode Two—The Great Old One Strikes Back – Michael R. Collings

  The Queen in Shadow – David J. West

  The Humans in the Walls – Eric James Stone

  Seed – D.J. Butler

  Full Dark – Nathan Shumate

  Fall of the Runewrought – Howard Tayler

  Contributors

  A Darklight Call’d on the Long Last Night of the Soul

  Michaelbrent Collings

  Gerrold Mason turned over, and for a moment he thought he had seen red hair. Red hair with subtle threads of black and brown running through it, like a dark rainbow that portended not the sun breaking through the clouds, but the clouds’ triumph over all that was bright.

  It was an omen. He should have recognized it for what it was.

  Then the red hair disappeared. Just like it always did. Though now he saw a flash of lighter red, this shade stitched through with bright threads of blonde, as if a confused painter had seen father and mother and remained unsure which parent’s hair color should rule.

  Then he was alone. Alone in the dark, in the deep black inkwell of a wormhole and hearing a single voice, over and over: “Do you love me?”

  The voice changed, becoming deeper, smoother. The voice of Gerrold’s lone shipmate.

  “How are you feeling today?”

  Trixie. Her voice had exactly the qualities determined to be most soothing to those who needed assistance of a—what was it the Company basketmen called it?—“mental and spiritual nature.”

  Gerrold hated it. Hated the voice, hated her. But it wasn’t like he had a choice. Trixie had come with the trip. At first he had been thrilled with the upgrade, until he realized she wasn’t just there to help him, but to keep an eye on him. To make sure he didn’t implode.

  He was lucky he still had a job, he supposed. The Company didn’t like publicity.

  “How are you feeling today?”

  He looked over at her. She had light hair—probably because of some long-running research study that showed headcases were less likely to snap in the presence of a blonde—and was fairly attractive without being sexual. The perfect companion on a long trip: calming, helpful.

  Bitch.

  “Are we there?” said Gerrold, though he knew they had to be, or at least that they had to be close. Trixie wouldn’t have started yammering if they weren’t.

  “We’re on approach.”

  “How long?”

  “Three hours, give or take.” She smiled in exactly the right way to show she was just an aw shucks kinda gal, and not the typical stick-up-my-butt shrink he could have been saddled with. Like Gerrold should note she gave an approximate time value rather than exact information and appreciate that fact.

  Trixie blinked, and her image flickered for the barest fraction of a second. Even with long periods in hypersleep, the trip had been long enough that Gerrold had grown to recognize the flicker as a signal that she was changing tacks with him. Evidently she had realized he was not interested in talking about his feelings—

  (shades of red and brown shades of red and blond and Do you love me?)—and had shifted protocols: trying to get him to open up another way.

  “Would you like me to open up a com-link to Shane?” she asked.

  That took Gerrold aback. She’d never offered that. For a second he almost smiled, almost looked at the floating holo by his bed as a person rather than a collection of photons. Then he realized she must have just downloaded new protocols while he slept.

  Humans dream—computers uplink and run systems checks, he thought. She’s not a friend, just Trixie 2.1. Just some Company software keeping watch over Company hardware.

  “What time is it? Where Shane is?”

  “It’s…” (again that minute flash as her image responded to the query) “…5:40 a.m. in Middleton.”

  Gerrold shook his head. “Let him sleep.”

  He ached to put the call through. He wanted to see Shane. He hadn’t seen the boy for months, not in the flesh, and the last com-link had gone… badly. But he didn’t want to wake the kid up. He was still dealing with things. Still processing the loss.

  “When are they coming back?” That was Shane’s favorite question. “When are Mommy and Dalia coming back?” And no matter how many times, no matter how many different ways Gerrold tried to explain it—ways that all boiled down to never—Shane never seemed to understand.

  “What about God?” he would ask. And Gerrold had no answer. Because while it was easy to talk about God when you were in church and surrounded by happy people and nothing bad was happening, it was a lot harder to believe when you had just been told why there would be no possibility of an open-casket funeral for your wife or daughter.

  (“Do you love me?”)

  Even worse was the fact that Shane didn’t understand why Gerrold hadn’t come home. Even though that reason was even simpler: poverty. Iago once said, “Poor and content is rich, and rich enough.” Which to Gerrold was proof either that Shakespeare was an ass, or that Iago had no children. Because while poverty could be bearable, poverty with children could not.

  So when the Company called not ten minutes after the news, Gerrold said yes. Even though it meant he wouldn’t be coming Earthside. Even though he knew it was just a way of keeping him—and, by extension, the Company—out of the public eye.

  Even though it meant not seeing Shane. Not holding, not touching him.

  Because they were paying him double wages, and hazard pay. And if he didn’t come back at all, they’d triple those rates, and all of it would go into a trust for Shane.

  When Gerrold was young and single, just a blaster doing micro-jumps to Sol-based shops that needed some kind of attention, he wouldn’t have worried about poverty. He could sleep in his spacer, or just on the couch of a friend. Even when he was a bit older, money didn’t matter so much to him.

  But when Dalia came… it all changed. He held her in his arms, and felt the most intense love blossoming within him. Even what he felt for his wife wasn’t the same, because what he held in his arms depended on him, truly and utterly. And with that understanding came the realization that below the love that now throbbed like bright life-blood through his mind and heart, there was something else. Something darker.

  Fear.

  He could lose her. He could lose her in an instant.

  He was no longer alone, he was no longer young, and doing high-risk jumps to asteroid mines was no longer an option.

  So he signed with the Company. And he became a FixIt. A man who would go anywhere, do anything. He was a Company Man, through and through.
Which meant he surrendered his soul, surrendered his joy.

  But he found a steady paycheck. He took care of his children. And whatever joy he lost in his life was made up for by their smiles, and by their embraces when he made planetfall in between jobs.

  Being a Company Man was solid. It was secure. And it was safe. Which was important for a man who needed to take care of his children.

  It was safe. No one would touch a Company Man. No one would dare touch anything the Company had a part in.

  At least, until TF-653.

  ***

  “How close now?”

  “Barring movement, we should be there in less than an hour.”

  Gerrold flicked a quick glance at Trixie. That wasn’t her name, of course. But neither was “Patricia,” which she kept trying to get him to call her. So he would call her Trixie because that was a good name for a prostitute and as far as he was concerned that was all she was: just a thing, bought and sold and doing a job without any real feeling. If he had to anthropomorphize her, he’d do it on his own terms. And he actually fancied it irritated her, though that was about as possible as her stepping out of the holo and planting a big wet kiss on his cheek.

  Still, sometimes he did think he caught emotions flitting across her face. Irritation, annoyance. Or, as now, fear.

  “Has there been any?” he asked. “Movement?”

  She shook her head. Sometimes Gerrold missed the more hands-on interface of his spacer, but having Trixie do everything for him was damn handy from time to time.

  “No,” she said.

  “Hail the base,” he said.

  “I’ve been doing so continuously since we left the wormhole,” said Trixie. “No response.”

  “Put it on ship speaker,” said Gerrold.

  Trixie flickered, then pursed her lips. Just the right exasperation. “Wouldn’t your time be better spent preparing for the—”

  “This is preparing, Trixie,” said Gerrold. “Put it on. Cease hailing, though. I just want to hear the frequency.”

  She nodded. A moment later a light static came on the speakers. Hissing, like the sound Gerrold might make if he had burnt his fingers. Or perhaps the sound he might make if more seriously injured but dared not make a noise: the sound of restrained, contained agony traveling across the void of space, from the base on TF-653 to Gerrold’s ship. The sound of pain in the dark.

  (“Do you love me?”)

  Gerrold shook his head. “Shut it off,” he said, surprised at how disquieted he felt. Then he almost screamed, “Wait!”

  Trixie hadn’t moved. She didn’t need to in order to carry out his orders. But the static stayed on, so he had stopped her in time.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Shh!” was his only answer. He listened, his brow furrowed deeply. Then he added, “Amplify.”

  The static hiss increased, the sibilation pulsating through Gerrold’s quarters, throbbing through his mind and body until it was hard to tell where the sound ended and his own heartbeat began.

  Low sounds emerged. “Amplify,” he said again, more shouting it this time in order to be heard.

  The sound grew, no longer pulsing but arcing around him like lightning captured in this tight space and now raining destruction all around in its attempt to escape. And below the lightning was something else. Something new.

  Something terrifying.

  ***

  The sound Gerrold heard was powerful. Powerful and horrific. More horrific than the officers on the com-link, telling him they hadn’t recovered all of Amy’s body, that Dalia’s own form was shattered beyond recognition. More powerful than the explosion that had taken their lives. And yet…

  And yet so very small.

  So very short.

  Just a few words, silt in the deadly undertow of the static. Four words.

  “Do you love me?”

  Gerrold heard the words, though they sounded nothing like they had the last time he heard them, when the rain was pounding down on her and Dalia was waiting in the car and he wondered if his life was coming to an end.

  “Do you love me?”

  They were Amy’s words, it was even her inflection, for God’s sake, so soft and pitiful, so hopeful and hopeless at once.

  But the voice wasn’t hers. It was the voice of a demon. A monster, something that had chewed up the souls of the damned and vomited them forth and kept only the bones to gargle with.

  “Do you love me?”

  Gerrold felt strange. The floor spun below him. The static disappeared, replaced by rain falling on a long-distant wife and child. The room disappeared, fallen into a well darker than any wormhole, blacker than any hypersleep he had ever known.

  Do you love me?

  ***

  Gerrold woke, and couldn’t be sure where he was, or what was happening.

  He saw a flash of red hair, streaked with brown. Another flash of red, this one highlighted by blonde.

  Then a face leaned into his field of vision. “Gerrold, are you all right?”

  “What?” For a moment Gerrold couldn’t place the face. Then he realized it was Trixie. Realized where he was.

  Realized what had happened.

  He bolted upright on the bed that was the only real piece of furniture in his quarters. The ship he rode in was enormous, larger than the terraforming base he was going to check out. But that was only because it carried every piece of equipment necessary to do any repair, fix any problem. He was a Company FixIt, and FixIts always came prepared.

  “Did you hear that, Trixie?” he shouted.

  “Hear what?” She looked concerned.

  “The voice, dammit.”

  Trixie straightened up. She flickered, then frowned. “Gerrold, I’ve been monitoring the frequency non-stop. There have been no vocal contacts whatever.”

  “I—” Gerrold thought about arguing, then shut himself down. What would be the point? What did he hope to accomplish? He wasn’t going to change a piece of software’s mind—there was no mind to change. The best he could hope to accomplish would be to convince Trixie he’d lost his own mind, thus forfeiting his job and his benefits.

  Gerrold couldn’t afford that. Shane couldn’t afford that. Not with all that it cost to keep him in the best hospitals. Company hospitals, of course—they knew they had Gerrold coming and going, damn them.

  He stood and attempted to look like nothing untoward had ever happened in this room. “Where are we?”

  “Geosynchronous orbit over the TF base,” answered Trixie. Flicker. “You sure you don’t need to talk?”

  Yeah, like that’ll ever happen.

  “No,” said Gerrold as smoothly as he could. “Let’s just get down there.”

  ***

  Gerrold suited up for a solo drop, just him and his suit in the airlock.

  He never went down with any major equipment, at least on the first trip. Doing so just labeled him as a FixIt and, since FixIts had the complete authority to do whatever was necessary to resolve low productivity at Company facilities—up to and including servicing mechanical issues, replacing personnel, or assassinating administrators—he found his presence caused extreme… nervousness. Better to get the lay of the land in as low-profile a manner as possible.

  So it was just him and the dropsuit and the sound of the last transmission Company HQ had received from TF-653 before everything went dark.

  “Go ahead and play it,” said Gerrold.

  “You sure?” asked Trixie. “It might be better to come back inside where it’s comfortable before—”

  “Just play it, Trixie.”

  A moment’s pause, then:

  “We’re moving!” screamed the voice, a panicked shriek that Company computers had identified as that of Mikael Arturovic, one of the mechanics at TF-653. “Everyone’s dead and they’re all waiting for me to die, waiting for me to die and join them. Waiting.” A long pause, then. “We’re moving! Save me! Save me, they’re here! The dead! THE DEAD ARE—”

  Th
en nothing.

  The Company send various missives, but there were no further responses. Stranger, a scan revealed that Arturovic had been right in one of his blathering statements: he had moved.

  Terraforming occurred through the use of huge bases that gradually shifted a hostile planet’s environment to within human tolerances. It took anywhere from one to twenty years and cost hundreds of trillions of dollars. The bases themselves were massive constructs, usually built into the sides of volcanoes or other ready sources of geothermal energy—or right over them, the bases were so enormous.

  But the long-distance scan revealed that Base 653, originally located at Company coordinates 25.1.71.3 on TF-653, had—completely impossibly—moved to coordinates 37/2350.1.115/81111.3. The base—larger than many cities—had apparently shifted over a thousand miles in the space of minutes.

  And stranger still, all systems of the terraforming base appeared to be functioning. Scanners, internal and external life support systems, even the tie-ins that linked to the geothermal power supplies. Everything was alive and, to the best of the Company’s reckoning, fully functioning.

  The only thing that wasn’t working, it seemed, was the crew at the base.

  Accordingly, a FixIt ticket was issued. But for the first time, no FixIt wanted the job.

  No FixIt but Gerrold.

  Gerrold put his helmet on. Locked it. Trixie appeared and looked at the fittings, though he knew that was (like everything about her) a programmed response meant to give the subject (him) a feeling of care and security. She had already scanned him a thousand times before the holo ever showed up.

  “Looks good,” she said.

  Gerrold nodded. He gave a thumbs-up to show he was ready.

  A moment later, the floor dropped out from under him.

  He plummeted toward the planet below, guided by a series of thrusters and magnetic impulses that he didn’t even pretend to understand. But they got him down time after time, and that was enough.