Space Eldritch Read online

  SPACE ELDRITCH

  D.J. Butler ● Michael R. Collings ● Robert J Defendi ● Carter Reid ● Nathan Shumate ● Howard Tayler ● Brad R. Torgersen ● David J. West

  Foreword by Larry Correia

  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 ©2011 their respective authors.

  Cover design and illustration by Carter Reid

  Cold Fusion Media Empire

  http://www.coldfusionmedia.us

  Table of Contents

  Foreword – Larry Correia

  Arise Thou Niarlat From Thy Rest – D.J. Butler

  Space Opera – Michael R. Collings

  The Menace Under Mars – Nathan Shumate

  Gods in Darkness – David J. West

  The Shadows of Titan – Carter Reid and Brad R. Torgersen

  The Fury in the Void – Robert J Defendi

  Flight of the Runewright – Howard Tayler

  Contributors

  Acknowledgments

  Michael R. Collings sends his thanks (and love) to Judi and his family, who have lived in a house of horror and survived to tell the tale.

  Howard Tayler would like to thank Drew Robbins for his invaluable copy editing assistance.

  David J. West would like to give an extra-special thanks to Douglas Duane Dietrich, as well as grateful acknowledgments to Piers Bizony, Jack Parsons, the Cordiglia Brothers, Clyde Lewis, and Debi L. West.

  Nathan Shumate would like to offer thanks to Christopher Jackson and fellow contributors D.J. Butler and Robert J Defendi for helpful comments, and to all of the Space Eldritch contributors for their participation in this crazy project.

  Foreword

  Larry Correia

  “With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos.”

  – H.P. Lovecraft

  When Nathan Shumate, the publisher of Space Eldritch, approached me about writing a foreword for this anthology, he told me to think of it as Lovecraftian Space Opera.

  That certainly painted an odd picture…

  But the more I thought about it, the more I realized just how well the idea of Lovecraft’s mythos mixed with science fiction clicks. It’s appropriate. It’s like peanut butter and chocolate, or maybe peanut butter and a dark sinister concoction of wailing madness with a hint of cocoa. Whatever, but it fits.

  Lovecraft’s works were all about looking outward, dwelling on horrors that lived beyond space and time, out way past that point where human understanding called it a day. Science fiction was all about looking outward as well, to the stars and beyond. Both of which can make mankind seem remarkably fragile and insignificant. Floating in infinite blackness and encountering a gigantic unblinking hungry eyeball, it doesn’t matter if you are a space marine in power armor or a college professor on a very bad field trip, that makes for some good reading.

  Several of my own books have borrowed elements from Lovecraft’s mythos. There is just something awe-inspiring about antagonists so big, so alien, and so mind-bending that the most common way to respond to them is to descend into gibbering madness. Nearly everybody has an ingrained irrational fear of things with tentacles, chitin, or too many mouths... for good reason. Slimy, nasty tentacle monsters are gross and terrifying. Now put them on steroids, make them the size of blimps, arm them with science so advanced it might as well be magic, and then give them the alien equivalent to PhDs in theoretical physics and mammal dismembering, and you are talking about some scary-ass villains. Only I hesitate to use the word “villain,” because most of the time humans are too insignificant to attract enough attention to deserve a proper squishing, but when we do, watch out.

  I discovered Lovecraft when I was a kid. It scared the living hell out of me. I read every horror novel I could, and nothing moved me like Lovecraft. Even if the story was basically a couple of well-spoken New Englanders doing nothing but sitting around in the dark telling each other stories, nobody conveyed menace and isolation like Lovecraft. Nobody.

  You know what else is menacing? The cold vastness of outer space... See? Peanut butter and shoggoths right there.

  Science fiction gets all the cool toys, starships, robots, artificial intelligence, even really snazzy unicorns, but it doesn’t matter in the end, because ancient squid gods don’t really care about our toys. To them, we are the toys, and ancient squid gods are notoriously hard on their toys.

  Space Opera often features themes of exploration or the expansion of knowledge. You know, exploring brave new worlds, meeting new civilizations, all that jazz. However, when you bring in the Lovecraftian mind-bending tentacle horrors, then it makes that exploration a lot more dangerous, the knowledge we’re finding might not be so good for our sanity, and that brave new civilization may just want to sacrifice us to their dark idols.

  Space Eldritch is all about going out there and exploring a little too far anyway.

  Sign me up.

  Arise Thou Niarlat from Thy Rest

  D.J. Butler

  “Is this enough blood?”

  Sa-Niarlat, born Senwosret, high priest of the venerable complex of Huut-Niarlat, gazed down from the height of the valley temple. Once, the plains behind him and across the river’s gorge had been lush and wet with rain. There had been no valley temple then, and no need for one. Men had traveled freely on roads that cut through meadows and forests to bring them to the temple overlooking the river. Sa-Niarlat knew, for he had seen it, lying in utter darkness in the god’s heka-barge and breathing in the greasy yellow fumes of durhang.

  There had been sacrifices, yes, blood shed under the eyeless gaze of the god. And the sacrifices had been effective. Blood had whetted the god’s appetite, and his saliva had watered the plains and raised the emmer, the einkorn, the barley, and the sheum that had given life to tens of thousands.

  Now, below the gates of the valley temple, angry men took each other’s lives in tens of thousands. The incense-stink of hot blood filled Sa-Niarlat’s head with giddy delight. Almost, it gave him visions.

  When the new gods had come, the plains had dried up; there had not been enough sacrifices to water them and the god’s presence had withdrawn, into the void and his state of black, blessed rest. Other sanctuaries to the god had been burned but not sacked, their treasures left to rot and tarnish as cursed. The sands had come and covered the land. The roads had been lost, and the river had replaced the road. Then the valley temple had become necessary, a gate at the river of the level that opened into a passage sheltered by long sandstone walls leading up to the temple at the bluff behind it.

  The valley temple had become necessary, and the deception. Sa-Niarlat, who rejoiced in a name bearing his god’s blessing and the glorious titles Helmsman of the God’s Black Barge, Feeder at His Father’s Teat, and Lector of the Black Book, passed before the world as the humbler, poorer Senwosret, Keeper of Secrets of Sebek the Crocodile.

  It was Sebek’s image that adorned the valley temple, in two immense statues flanking the valley temple’s gates, and in plaster-and-paint murals within it. To a careful observer with an eye learned in the ancient signs, the statues and murals would have revealed something else: a Sebek hexed and impotent, a puppet, and behind him, a true, ancient, and hungry power, waiting with cold thirst for a sacrifice large enough, satiating enough, to bring it and its blessings back to its ancient lair.

  But there we
re few such eyes that might see the statues and murals, and fewer still that were not themselves adepts of the temple. Most of the traffic through the valley temple, up the long passage and into the Forecourt, consisted of supplicants of the crocodile, and they had no idea who really heard their prayers.

  Heard them and laughed, hungry, and waiting to make his black return.

  Of the temple’s staff, the large majority did not know whom they truly served. Even Pa-Ankhi, Captain of the Gate, the burly Asiatic at Sa-Niarlat’s side.

  “Enough blood for what, Pa-Ankhi?”

  The soldier gestured below. The last of the temple’s defenders outside the walls were subdued. Screaming men were dragged beneath one of the statues of Sebek even as the attackers threw ropes around the monument. Dozens of arms gripped the ropes and pulled, chanting effeminate Theban hymns in unison.

  The screams ended in a single wet thump.

  The temple would fall, Sa-Niarlat saw. The fire-eyed zealots of Thebes would desecrate the god’s earthly darkness, the valley’s last hope of fertility and abundance would disappear, and the sands of the infinite desert would well and truly come. Sa-Niarlat and the god’s other disciples had not yet amassed enough heka, the vital power-within-the-blood, and did not have a large enough flock of sacrifices, willing or unwilling, to supplement. The god was too far away, and Sa-Niarlat could not summon him.

  Unless...

  Sa-Niarlat reached within his robe and laid his hand on the obsidian knife that always lay next to his skin.

  “Enough blood to convince you that I was right, Keeper of Secrets? That your mysteries are not worth the price it would take to preserve them? That you should have cooperated with the priests of Amun, and permitted them into the sanctuary of Sebek, as all the other priests have done?”

  The Asiatic leaned forward and spat over the parapet at the jeering Thebans. When he turned back to face Sa-Niarlat, the high priest slashed him with the knife across his throat.

  “Ia Niarlat!”

  Pa-Ankhi sank to the stone with a look of surprise on his face.

  “No,” Sa-Niarlat told his dying Captain. “There has not been enough blood. Not yet. Not nearly.”

  ***

  Blood.

  He wiped with numb hands at the crystalline firmament in front of him, looking for a revelation in all the red globular brilliance. He found a face.

  Did he know the face? He couldn’t be sure. It was a woman’s, not particularly pretty, but somehow dear to him. Or hated.

  No, not hated. The face he loved was meat, the meaningless face of a cow.

  He realized that he was floating.

  But he... he... who was he? He realized in a moment of total loss that he had no idea.

  Worse, he had a terrible feeling that there might be more than one answer to the question.

  Who are we? he thought, mind flailing.

  A shriek stabbed his ears.

  The woman behind the crystal firmament opened her eyes. She stared at him through the firmament, slapping long nails against the clear barrier that restrained her.

  He smiled, feeling turmoil within himself he couldn’t identify. In his hand he found he had a stone.

  Raising it behind his head, he smashed it down on the crystal. The force of the blow pushed him backward, away from the woman. The sack of blood.

  She screamed again.

  ***

  Captain James Rodriguez sat up and smacked his face into the lid of his Hypnotube.

  “Ouch!” He tried to rub his nose but couldn’t reach it in the narrow slot that carried him while the NACSS Temerario traveled in Nullspace. He heard the soft hiss and felt a gentle sucking at his hip and then a hypodermic needle jabbed him.

  “Edison!” he cursed.

  The Hypnostasis emergence procedure had gotten garbled. He was an experienced Nullship pilot, and had been through Hypnostasis many times. At the end of the voyage, the ship injected you with a stimulant that slowly brought you up, and by the time you were awake, the Tube was open.

  That was true whether the ship’s systems woke you up because you had reached your destination, or because some combination of data gathered by the ship’s sensors triggered emergence.

  James caught his breath.

  The hypodermic had jabbed him when he was already awake.

  So what had brought him out of Hypnostasis?

  James put his fingers to his hip and probed. He only felt one tender spot. Could the hypodermic have poked him twice in the same point? And what side effects would a double dosage of the emergence cocktail have?

  He shook his head. He’d ask Chaz. In any case, the Temerario was a long way from the nearest Terran system, and it was a bad thing if any of its systems was malfunctioning. The North American Confederacy’s colonizing ship had left the fringes of Terran space behind at its last entry into Nullspace, twenty-five hundred hypnostatic souls aboard and bound for a recently terraformed Class M planet owned by the Confederacy. Captain Rodriguez was to christen the planet (Wellman’s World, and when asked by the curious to explain the choice, he shrugged the blame off onto the inexplicable whimsy of bureaucrats), deposit the colonists, remain in orbit until they had shelter and a Nullspace Communicator in place, and then return.

  In and out, a freight run, nothing to write home about. Certainly not as glamorous as the actions against pirates James had flown as a young Navy officer, or even his later Customs work shutting down smugglers making the lucrative Mars Run through the asteroid belt of the Terran Home System. Though if the Temerario were malfunctioning, this freight run might be about to get significantly more exciting.

  But really, all the Hypnochamber had done was garble up its awakening sequence slightly. There was nothing to indicate that anything had gone seriously wrong aboard ship.

  He forced aside the nagging question of what had awoken him.

  The Hypnotube chunked cheerfully and its lid split down the middle, parting and sliding open in both directions. The inrushing canned air of the ship’s Hypnochamber made James realize how much worse the Hypnotube air smelled. It was the stink of his own body, too much, too close, and too long.

  He threw one leg out of the Hypnotube, then the other.

  The light in the Hypnochamber was amber. He raised his head enough to poke it out of the Hypnotube and look around; the other Tubes were open, but the rest of the crew lay still asleep. They’d been injected like James, but were waking up at the normal, gradual rate. The Temerario’s captain relaxed, just a little. There was no indication that the ship’s malfunction, if there had even been one, had been anything other than limited.

  He pushed with elbows and shoulders and forced his body out of the Hypnotube in a ragged lurch.

  James shook his head. Maybe it was the dream that had woken him. You weren’t supposed to dream in Hypnostasis. He never had, and he’d never heard of anyone else doing it, either. And what in the name of Leibniz kind of dream had that been, anyway? So much blood. Actual spilled blood was a rarity in naval warfare, mostly seen in boarding actions, which were uncommon—space was large, and ships shot at each other over great distances. A Navy man saw gore mostly in accidents, or dirtside brawls.

  A wave of dizziness and nausea swept over James. He thought he smelled blood for a moment, and hot sand. The tight ultraceramic walls of the Hypnochamber swung around him like the enclosure of a G-force training simulation. He sucked in the plastic-tinged air of the Temerario’s recycling tanks, feelings its stale tang tickle his lungs.

  Amber light meant that the Temerario had terminated Hypnostasis early for some reason, so James touched the interactive wall panels to find out why.

  Or he tried to touch them, anyway, and discovered that he couldn’t. His right arm hung numb and useless at his side.

  “Newton,” he cursed, and used his left. He shook his arm at the shoulder as he worked, trying to get blood to flow back into it. Must have cut off circulation, wedged into the Tube like that, he thought. Or maybe this was the resu
lt of getting the emergence injection twice.

  The touch panel lit up under his fingers, in Basic Mode. He tried to direct it to activate Standard Mode, but the icon remained stubbornly inert as he punched it over and over again.

  “Chaz,” he said, and because the computer didn’t answer to its nickname, he shouted it: “Chaz!”

  Nothing.

  “Computer. Ship’s computer, NACSS Temerario.”

  Still nothing.

  He growled under his breath. Fine. He could do this; it would just take a little longer.

  Dredging more complicated procedures from his memory, procedures designed for emergency situations in which the higher functions of the ship’s computers had been disabled—usually by power loss—James asked for more information.

  He would have liked visual representations of the data, schematics he could rotate to view at any angle, colored spectographic reconstructions. Instead, he got line after line of numerical data. His eyes blurred trying to read it, his head hurt, and his breath came short. He leaned against the bulkhead, smelling again the unexpected combination of heated sand and blood. Far away, he thought he heard screaming in a language he didn’t understand. Olfactory hallucinations, he thought grimly, and now auditory.

  James sighed and ran the fingers of his left hand through thinning hair, letting his senses drift back to normal. He’d ask Chaz for a sedative, he resolved, just as soon as he was sure it was safe to do so.

  He forced himself to look at the numbers again. It wasn’t immediately obvious to him what they meant. Gravity. Gravity and mass, as if there were a planet, he thought. Only there was no planet. Wellman’s World was still lightyears away. From James’s recollection of the time-adjusting star charts and data over which he’d pored back at Dunsany, he thought the nearest significant mass of any sort should be lightyears away.