9 Tales Told in the Dark 19 Read online

  9TALES TOLD IN THE DARK #19

  © Copyright 2016 Bride of Chaos/ All Rights Reserved to the Authors.

  First electronic edition 2016

  Edited by A.R. Jesse

  Cover by Turtle&Noise

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  9TALES TOLD IN THE DARK #19

  Table of Contents

  WELL SUITED by D. A. D'Amico

  FERTILITY POD SUBJECT 803 by K. J. Kaufman

  DEAD SPACE by Cathbad Maponus

  BLIMEY by George Strasburg

  WHAT CAN’T BE SALVAGED, YET MUST BE by Jim Lee

  TRANSIT by Michael W. Clark

  SPARKLE SHIP SHINE by Hall & Beaulieu

  CRY HAVOC! by Shawn P. Madison

  FINAL STATION by D. A. D'Amico

  .

  .

  .

  .

  TALES

  TOLD

  IN

  THE

  DARK

  #19

  HORROR IN SPACE!

  WELL SUITED by D. A. D'Amico

  "It's happening again!"

  A hot needle of pain seared Patsayev's abdomen. Tight boiling agony sliced down his body, and his grip faltered. He drifted away from the hull. "I swear it's out to get me."

  He pulled back along his tether. His spacesuit constricted, undulating obscenely in contact with his naked flesh.

  "Please, Gregor, no more." Marcus Somby waved from the far curve of the ship. "Just get back to work. The quicker we finish the repairs, the faster you can get inside."

  "Sorry. I'm on it, I promise." Patsayev took a deep breath, steading his nerves. The twinges subsided, and he reached for the gold plate covering the malfunctioning aux-thrust injectors. It slid easily into place. The custom lugs rotated against their bolts, and a green LED flashed.

  "Plate going in."

  "Finally." Marcus snickered.

  Of the seven members of the Arcturus's crew, Patsayev was the only one visibly uncomfortable with the new spacesuits. He couldn't help it. They were repulsive. More than just garments, they were technically living things. Grown from genetically engineered hybrids of human and insect DNA, the suits fed off sweat and body heat. They grew stronger in response to muscle action, and sustained themselves by breathing in waste gases, expelling clean, though slightly oxygen rich, air. A man could survive a very long time in such a suit.

  "Almost there. One more and you can go in." Marcus floated along the massive crenelated heatsinks near the center of the massive hull.

  "Great." Patsayev shuddered. He didn't know if it was a blessing or a curse, the thought of having to enter the prep room again.

  It always gave him the creeps the way those empty spacesuits swayed like hanged men on their housings, arms and legs limp in the thick orange haze cascading from the inverted cones of their respirator masks. The sounds of wheezing, and the pungent smell of the nutrient mist, made him want to vomit. Patsayev's mouth went dry at the thought.

  It hit as he placed the final weld, another piercing stab. A thin wedge of agony sliced up his spine. He dropped the welder. It spun in a tight arc from his hands, scorching a white-hot trail across the hull. His tether melted free.

  "My suit, it's attacking me!"

  "Enough! This just isn't funny anymore, Gregor." Marcus turned away. He hadn't noticed Patsayev floating slowly from the ship, still clawing at his back.

  "I'm not joking." Patsayev gasped. The stabbing subsided as quickly as it had come, leaving him in a cold sweat. He shivered, thinking of the suit greedily wicking away his fluids, feeding hungrily on Patsayev's fear. "I swear it's alive."

  "It's not alive the way you think it is. Stop being paranoid."

  "Please, it's doing things to me. It's..."

  The suit's thorax tightened, forcing the air from his chest. Purple spots shot before his eyes. Panic turned his blood to ice as he fought to breathe. It really was attacking him. His eyes bulged, vision fading as his lungs processed the last of his oxygen.

  Then the tension across his chest eased. He gasped, sucking big gulps of air. The ship was twenty meters away now. He'd drifted behind the plane of the hull, away from line of sight contact with Marcus. The welding gun floated nearby. He snatched it up, turning it on the suit.

  He'd had enough. It was time to fight back.

  An anguished squeal of feedback echoed through his headphones. He played the tip rapidly across his torso, trying to scorch without burning through. The shrieking turned into a tight compression deep in his ears. He moaned, the pressure like daggers in his head.

  The suit flexed. He forced the welder against the angular chest unit, overlapping chitinous plates flaring on contact. The suit trembled in violent spasms, and then went still. The squeal faded. It was dead.

  He turned the welder off, clipping it to his belt. He shook his left arm, moving it in a wide circle, but there was no resistance. He'd won.

  "Marcus, are you there?" The ship was now a hundred meters distant, a blocky leviathan against the brilliance of the stars.

  "Gregor? Your signal cut out. Where are you? I can't see you." The voice faded, breaking up. Patsayev's angle of contact had become too oblique.

  "I got thrown off," he replied. It was no use explaining what had happened until he could get the proof back into the ship. It'd just get him laughed at. "My suit is damaged."

  "Can you jet in?"

  "I think so. Look for me, okay?"

  The chemical reaction pack around his waist wasn't part of the suit. It was purely mechanical. Patsayev felt somehow comforted as he tapped his wrist control unit. Tiny jets on the pack fired, sending small blasts of compressed carbon dioxide away from his direction of travel. The pack jerked. He could tell his angle was off, so he reached down to make the necessary adjustments... but his arm froze.

  His whole body went rigid, extremities stiff and unyielding. He tried desperately to move, struggling, but the suit had become solid. A cold ball formed in his stomach. The suit had tricked him, played dead, and waited until he attempted an EVA.

  He screamed, but no metallic return tone signaled his voice had been heard. He was alone.

  "Oh, God," he cried. "Please..."

  The jets continued to fire. He passed over the ship's hull, still thrusting. At his present heading, he'd soon be out of reach of any rescue attempt.

  "No you don't!" Spittle struck the curved glass of his helmet. He held his breath. He'd suffocate it before letting it win, even if it meant his own death. The suit lived off him, and if he could weaken it--but the torso flexed, forcing air in and out of his lungs.

  It had him. He was immobilized, forced to supply air, held captive. The ship dwindled, becoming a bright bluish star among many. Patsayev's lip trembled, and he started to cry.

  The spacesuit would keep him alive for a very long time, he was sure of it.

  THE END

  FERTILITY POD SUBJECT 803 by K. J. Kaufman

  Memorandum in Re: Hysterical Pregnancies, Po
d Complications

  To: All Program Scientists

  From: Executive Director of the Reproduction Initiative

  The following are excerpts of the gestation diary of Subject 803 for purpose of study. In the meeting tomorrow, we will discuss how to avoid the problems arising during this gestation and what the future protocol in similar cases will be. Attendance at the meeting tomorrow is mandatory.

  May 31

  “People in the last century,” the pink-haired saleswoman said, walking past a row of gently glowing model fertility pods, “would keep tiny pet fish in spherical glass bowls, not unlike these ones.” The color of her hair matched the first pod, which was propped up on a spiral metal case, and reached up to the woman’s hip. The others were lined behind her, in a color-coordinated pattern. The liquid inside the pods moved like a fire’s smoldering finale, in hues of blue, yellow, red, and green.

  I looked inside the billowing, viscous liquid of the first pod in the line. “Is there a fetus in there?” I asked.

  “No, no, of course not,” she said quickly, trying to look horrified, but you could tell she got that question a lot. “It would be against the Laws of Artificial Conception, of course.” Bruka, your father, looked embarrassed that I had asked a question he already knew the answer to. We stood there, in the big white room under the soft artificial lights, staring at the liquid circulating in the pod that would soon house you, while we waited for the saleswoman to come back from ringing up another customer.

  I wanted you to know where I was, what I heard and what I saw when I first thought of you. Even though we had not yet made our conception appointment, that would happen the next weekend, I had already conceived of you. You were already blasting your way into existence, from a dark void into a solid body. A miracle and a gift I could provide to the world.

  June 3

  I spoke with the doctors about the medication regimen. The doses were too high. I got snappy with the Fuel Committee at work, which had never happened before, despite my many internal memos criticizing their bureaucracy. They just don’t understand how much we need and they want to give more to LandProtein, even though we produce far more food. The Fuel Committee head is the worst. He was wearing his gray committee-issue suit, his hair a long and straggly blonde, tied into a bun at the top of his head, a constant smirk on his face as he explained the recommendation for the 502 barrels to be provided to FoodWaves. I could feel myself sweating in my own turquoise suit, the droplets falling down the back of my legs, wetting the thick plastic of my nylons. I felt exposed; they could all see my frustration. I swore at him in my response, citing our need, six times the provision. I almost called him a militia-racist, that he is the reason the re-building process isn’t going faster, but caught my tongue.

  I know I need these hormones to allow easier transmittal of fetal product from me to the pod. But it is hard to remind myself of the end result when I’m on the speedtrain in the morning, resisting the urge to strangle the man next to me for taking up too much room.

  July 1

  I saw you today. Just a little black squiggle amid the sea of blues and pinks and red, the fluid that protects you. I am hooked up to you right now for our night-synchronization. The glass is warm. I wonder how long I could sit here and watch you, before I could notice a change in your size. I almost want to just stay here, skip work, now that I can see you. But I need to remember the mass starvations, and that my work is going to help feed people for generations to come, including you. Tomorrow I have a meeting with a team of water farmers who have developed a new breed of water-protein and we need to figure out if a mass plantation would be feasible, and if so, what season would be best to start. Also, whether we can fund it. I need to get the money out of somewhere. Strange how a primary purpose of the pod is to allow free movement for women during pregnancy, but deep down all I want to do is stay here and watch you grow. At least we have tonight, little black squiggle.

  August 2

  Aleeka came over today. She seems to have a misunderstanding of the whole purpose of the pod, of what we are doing. She says that I am hurting you, and you are going to develop defects and Isolation-Syndrome. I don’t know what they are teaching in the Universities these days, too much Broken-World ideology, perhaps. They are forgetting that we are trying to rebuild now, and that is the whole purpose of the reproduction initiatives. She seems to think I am part of the problem, that all I am is yuppie foods and designer clothing, and she forgets that I am trying to help feed millions of people, which is why I get paid the surplus that I do. She thinks Bruka is the devil already, so I didn’t mention his goal of re-installing full corporations. I am used to her disagreeing with my job, and my life-style, and I can usually just remember the fact we are ten years apart and move on, hug her good-bye, say that I love her. But here I had to disagree. She doesn’t know what it is like to want a child but want to help make the world a better place, too. And hundreds of people have already purchased pods and produced children, according to all of the scientists at the Reproduction Initiative. These are the pregnancies of the future. I know that she’s taken gender studies courses in her University, so I tried to appeal to her reason. This is the final piece that separates men from women. But when I lifted my shirt up and put the synchronization tube in, she flipped out.

  “Is that what you do?” she asked me.

  When I became upset, and when the argument went to the darker places we tried to avoid, of your grandparents’ struggle with fertility, of my own fears of conceiving, of her unfairness to me, if what she felt was my neglect, you started to bubble. Well, not you, perhaps, but the Pod, the fluid that contains you, and I felt it within me, the anger flowing back. The Pod flushed to pink, and black, and then a crimson red. I had seen these changes in my mood echoed in you before, but I hadn’t seen it happen so dramatically.

  It was then that she sat down beside you, and touched the glass. “It’s so warm,” she said. And we sat by your light, flickering like a campfire in the middle of a dark forest filled with monsters, until she fell asleep. I am going to try to stay awake until Bruka gets home.

  August 25

  We flew to Yosemite for the day today. We went over the Waste-Zone, and it had been awhile since I saw it, so I sat by the window. As the sun rose over the blackened hills, I saw what was left of the boroughs and nesting grounds of the Past. Uneven holes in the otherwise smooth surface of the planet, the same irregularities in our dwellings today, really. But once the home no longer serves that purpose, it seems worthless, nothing more than a blight on top of a perfectly smooth hill. I was surprised when I saw large patches of green on the edges of the Waste-Zone, right before we passed over the Wall, and I asked Bruka what he thought of them.

  “Just seeds spilling over from the other side, making things grow where they probably shouldn’t, at least not for the next few hundred years. That’s what the government’s predictions are, anyway, about the re-growth. Privately funded scientists may come up with more accurate results…” and his voice trailed off as he gazed out the window. We both knew he would start on one of his rants, and there was nothing left for him to say on that for now, anyway. I knew his positions on the pseudo-corporations well.

  Despite our best efforts, the day was ruined from that point on. One of my only days off this month, and Bruka was barely able to take the trip at all. He spent much of the plane ride in communication with his co-workers, sending off tasks and responding to strategies, taking a moment here or there to respond to my window-gazing musings. Oh, we saw the sights when we got there, we hiked beside Half-Dome, gazing up at the force left by glaciers long gone, we munched on sandwiches, and occasionally held hands. But my mind was back in San Francisco, back to the apartment, back to my living room, back to you in the Pod, alone.

  On the plane-ride home, I looked for the patches of grass that had grown past the wall. Perhaps due to the deepening dusk or a change in our route, all I saw was the grey, black, and brown one might expect of our post-c
onsumer, post-war wasteland.

  September 1

  They said that weight gain was one of the side effects of the hormones, but my dress barely fit today. I looked in the mirror, and my stomach was huge. I made an appointment with the doctor.

  September 2

  I broke one of the pottery pieces I bought last year from one of the middle of the stands in the forest trading markets. The woman who made it told me she used to live in Los Angeles, before the Asian-Alliance had attacked and she and her family moved to the Bay Area. I wanted to buy something from her, I felt bad for her and her graying, flat hair, and her doe-shaped, brown eyes. She had a little child by her side, a black-haired girl who was playing with a doll made out of an old pair of jeans. It had keyboard keys for its eyes and nose, and thick black wires for its hair, like a medusa. I told the little girl how much I admired her doll, pointing out the intricacies of its features, the clever way the “W” was used for the mouth and gave expression to its face, before I settled on the blue and green bowl, speckled with gold. The woman thanked me at least three times after I paid her.

  It used to sit on my desk, under the lamp, reminding me of the importance of my work. I was picking it up to examine the detail on the edges, and clean off some of the dust that had collected inside it, and out of nowhere, I dropped it, and it shattered into pieces all over the concrete floors of my office. For the last half hour, I can’t stop crying. I feel like everything is falling apart.

  September 10

  The test results are back. I can’t decide if I am going to sue the Reproduction Initiative or just run away, taking you and the Pod and everything away from here. I’ve been unable to go to work; I’ve been throwing up all morning. I felt sick anyway, but at least now I know why.