Space Eldritch Read online

  And it definitely wasn’t prayer.

  Pretending he wasn’t lying to himself, Randolph Choate began to chant.

  He couldn’t wait until the god arrived. If the god arrived, it brought utter ruin with it.

  He had to go where the god was, and lead Niarlat astray.

  ***

  “This is astonishing.”

  Gabe yanked the emergency kit from underneath the captain’s chair. In the sudden aftermath of gravity loss he yanked too hard, and sent himself gliding across the small bridge, thumping into one of Chaz’s inert panels. The emergency kit banged him in the chest, and droplets of blood from the wounds he’d sustained trying to save Vito’s life scattered in a fine red mist about the bridge.

  He was painfully aware that between him and his wife prowled his batshit-crazy captain, with Vito Moroni’s blood on his hands. This was supposed to have been Gabe’s last haul with the Navy. At Wellman’s World he retired, so he could farm and Annie could teach school.

  “I’m interested in two things right now,” Gabe grunted. “If you can get the power on again, great. If you can help me subdue the captain, great. Anything else, right now, fails to make my give-a-damn list.”

  “I think it’s a wormhole,” Balbinder Sandhu said, ignoring Gabe. “But there’s something inside it. Something huge.”

  “Huh.”

  “And maybe organic.”

  “Congratulations. You’ve discovered space whales.”

  Sandhu missed both the joke and the irritation in Gabe’s voice. Gabe undid the latches on the captain’s emergency kit, scattering tubes of antiseptic cream, painkillers, and adhesive bandages in all directions around him in a slow-moving cloud.

  He grabbed the stungun.

  Gabriel Goldman had just watched Jim Rodriguez slaughter his own medical officer like a farm animal. Not watched as a passive bystander; Gabe had tried to intervene, and for his trouble had been beaten and cut by his captain, who somehow had a big bit of sharp stone in his hand, like volcanic glass.

  And...

  Gabe felt dizzy. He sucked canned air into his lungs and drifted, thumping his skull gently against the bulkhead. The gray light of the bridge faded to a dimly-pulsing black and he struggled to hold onto the stungun.

  It was the sudden shift to zero-g, he thought as he fought back from the brink of unconsciousness. And the Hypnostasis emergence cocktail still coursing through his veins.

  Gabe caught himself against an inert computer panel and shook it off.

  “What have you got there?”

  Gabe grunted. “Glad you can tear yourself away from the screen, Bal. It’s the stungun we came for.” He held up his hand with the stungun in it—

  only it wasn’t the stungun.

  It was a stone tablet.

  The tablet was the size of Gabe’s two hands put together and worn smooth all around its edges. Glyphs that might have been little letters and might have been little pictures marched up and down both sides in columns, surrounding two different central images. On the obverse side was what looked like an opening between two doorposts. The space between the two posts was carved out and flakes of some ancient paint lingered in the depression. On the reverse was a... a monster.

  Gabe shook himself, feeling an uncomfortable tingling in his spine. Monster? Why a monster? Tentacles for a head and three arms and legs didn’t make a creature a monster. It was just a nonhuman life form, unknown to Lieutenant Gabriel Goldman, despite his long years spent getting to know the worst bars in every ragged port of known space. But there was something about the image that was troubling. Wrong. It seemed different each time Gabe blinked, and the shape of it... didn’t work. The geometry of it was tangled. Things that had to be behind were before, and vice versa.

  A thing of too many dimensions. Gabe shuddered. Just looking at the images made him feel... uncomfortable. Out of place. Wrong.

  “That’s doesn’t look like NACSS issue,” Sandhu said. It might have been a joke, but there was a strong note of fear in his voice.

  Thud!

  The sound came from the emergency ladder.

  Gabe had a moment of panic, but then found he did have the stungun after all, in his other hand. Where had the tablet come from, then? Had it been inside the emergency kit? Was that someone’s idea of a joke? Or was someone in the crew hiding it?

  But who would have access to the bridge? For all his war stories about busting tariff runners above Mars, was Jim Rodriguez an antiquities smuggler? It made no sense at all. Even if he was, there was no one on Wellman’s World to smuggle antiquities to.

  It didn’t matter now. Gabe pushed gently off the wall and drifted parallel the opening of the shaft.

  Jim Rodriguez banged his way bridgeward in the ladder’s tunnel. He didn’t move like the trained and experienced astronaut that he was, though. He moved like the worst of dirtsiders, like an untrained bear, slamming his elbows and head against the walls and muttering words Gabe could hear but didn’t understand, or even recognize. It might have been the same gibberish he’d been shouting when he’d slit Vito’s throat and tossed Gabe across the Hypnochamber.

  It wasn’t just the words that were wrong, though. His voice sounded raspier than it should, and deeper.

  “Stop right there, Jim!” Gabe called. He tucked the queer stone tablet under one armpit and aimed the stungun at his drifting captain.

  He felt dizzy again and sucked air through his teeth. Sandhu watched at his shoulder.

  The Temerario’s captain shouted his strangled, violent babble again.

  “Full stun,” Sandhu suggested.

  “That your scientific opinion, Bal?” But Gabe had already set the stungun to its maximum setting. At that level, in the best of circumstances, he’d only get off a dozen shots before the energy cell gave out. Given that the something seemed to be draining the power out of the ship, he had no confidence that the gun’s wasn’t also depleted.

  Jim shook his fist, spraying blood around the ladder tube, and kicked himself forward.

  Gabe hit the fire switch. Golden light flashed in the bridge and in the ladder shaft, and the beam hit Jim—

  who kept yelling.

  “Again!” Sandhu yelled, pointlessly. The science officer pushed off a wall to throw himself out of the captain’s irregular, tumbling path.

  Gabe fired twice more, and then he depressed the switch a fourth time and nothing happened.

  Jim hurtled out of the shaft in his direction, swinging the object in his hand. The object with which he’d killed Vito, some kind of caveman knife. He still moved like a lubber, showing no sign of his zero-g combat training, which was a blessing. Gabe twisted to one side, the knife narrowly missed him, and he threw his captain against the wall.

  Jim hit hard, and for a split second as he impacted into one of Chaz’s larger interfaces, all the lights of the bridge snapped on, as did the viewscreens. Gabe saw the impossibly dark black of deep space, the distant twinkling of remote stars, and a thing.

  And then the thing was gone. And then it was there again.

  It looked like a pit...

  ...deep... as infinitely deep as the space around it, but in a different direction.

  Motion within the pit—a maw—tentacles?

  His mind couldn’t process what he saw. He felt a ball of ice in the pit of his stomach.

  “Help me...” Jim Rodriguez moaned. His voice was streaked with despair, but it sounded like him again.

  Gabe jerked his eyes away from the viewscreen. He found he was breathing hard and sweating. “Chaz,” he said. “Distance to anomaly?”

  “Ten thousand kilometers and closing.” Chaz’s voice crackled, its North American Standard accent thrown off by the warble.

  Sandhu cursed in Punjabi.

  “Degree of magnification, Chaz?”

  “Zeeeerooooo.” Chaz’s voice slowed and dropped in pitch. The lights snapped off, and the ship’s computer’s voice disappeared with them.

  Gabe slammed the neare
st panel, then kicked it, trying to resuscitate the computer again. Nothing.

  “Not enough power,” Sandhu said, reading the minimal data that still marched down the dark viewscreens.

  “No kidding.” Gabe kicked the wall, knocking himself away from it.

  “Just about everything we have left is going into life support.”

  “I’m siiiick,” Jim Rodriguez groaned. “Help me.”

  The Temerario’s captain trembled, pawing at the bulkhead. He reached out to his science officer with quavering fingers.

  “Dammit, Jim,” Sandhu whined. “I’m an astrophysicist, not a doctor!”

  “My head...” Jim rubbed his temple and squeezed his eyes shut, curling slightly towards a fetal ball as he did so.

  Gabe mentally cursed the stunner. Was it broken? Was the cell so depleted that the stun had been ineffective? Or had Jim Rodriguez just shaken off three stungun blasts, any one of which should have dropped a horse in its tracks?

  And was it the monster outside that was drinking the ship dry? The same monster that was incised into the stone tablet with the glyphs?

  But that was ridiculous. That was impossible.

  “Okay,” Sandhu agreed. “There’s a sedative in the kit.”

  Gabe laughed, looking at the medical supplies drifting all around the bridge. “Good luck finding it.”

  Jim whimpered. “The dreams,” he said. “Sand and blood.”

  “There it is.” Sandhu dragged himself along a wall towards a spinning sliver, just above Jim’s shoulder. Gabe wouldn’t even have spotted it in the gloom, barely relieved by a single guttering emergency strip, but it certainly might be a hypodermic. “Got it.”

  Jim lashed out. His motion was sudden, swift, and sure, and the blow sent Balbinder Sandhu spinning away in a graceful backwards arc, head first, arms out to his side, and fat globules of blood trailing behind him.

  Throat slashed open.

  “Ia Niarlat!”

  The same kinetic energy sent Jim spinning back the other way, into the far corner of the bridge. He hit the bulkhead flat against his back and bounced.

  Gabe almost jumped at him then, but in the strangeness of the moment he hesitated. Then Jim regained his balance. The captain glared at his first mate and co-pilot with a malevolent sneer. “Sand and blood,” he hissed.

  Sandhu’s body struck the bridge’s main viewscreen in a splatter of red.

  Gabe hurled the useless stungun at his captain, gripped the stone tablet tightly in one hand and kicked himself into—down—the ladder shaft.

  He had to protect the passengers.

  “Sand and blood!”

  ***

  Sa-Niarlat led the entire staff of the temple across the Inner Court. Those who had never seen it before might have stared if they’d had more time; here the papyrus columns were identical to those in the Forecourt, only rotated one hundred eighty degrees, so that the esoteric versions of their tales faced the viewer, and the exoteric versions were turned to the walls.

  The esoteric tales were still lies, of course. But they were lies that taught in the direction of the glorious black truth.

  The Inner Court had a ceiling, and on it were carved and painted stars. Sa-Niarlat looked back to see some of the Sebek worshipers staring upward as they walked, trying to puzzle out the constellations that were represented. Sa-Niarlat had done the same thing as a youth. Only later, after many sacrifices, had he learned what those stars really were.

  He stopped at the Veiled Passage and turned to face the temple staff. The crashing sounds of the Thebans hammering at the doors of the Forecourt were still audible after priests closed the Inner Court’s doors.

  “The time has come for your ascension to the god’s great bark,” he told them all.

  “Sebek will save us.”

  “If he does not, we will swim with him in the waters of the sky.”

  Sa-Niarlat nodded piously. “We will swim with the god,” he agreed. “One at a time,” he told a Brother of the Dark Chamber, and he ducked to pass through the veil. “As initiates.”

  ***

  He wandered along the row of tombs, trailing blood in his wake, looking into the frozen faces of the dead.

  Not dead, something told him. Sleeping, behind plates of glass. He asked himself how he knew that, and found he had no answer.

  If they were not dead, he wondered, then why was he flying?

  And where did all the blood come from?

  He looked into the crystal shroud of one of the bodies and saw that it had been scratched repeatedly with a sharp tool. Long, deep gouges crisscrossed the window, marring the dull light that flowed around the sleeper’s face and up into his hand as he traced them with one fingertip.

  In the tomb beneath his fingers which was not a tomb, the dim light illuminating its occupant flickered and died, and then the gouges were no longer visible.

  The air felt thick in his lungs. Because it seemed like the right thing to do, he took the stone in his hand and began scratching at the crystal. His stone blade cut deep grooves, but he slammed it with too much force and it flaked, shooting splinters of black glass tumbling in all directions, slicing into the flesh of his own cheeks and forehead.

  Under his hands, the tomb shook violently.

  A portion of his heart exulted.

  ***

  Jack Kale finished reloading the drum of his tommy gun and spat on the floor.

  The door rattled. The huddled masses yearning to eat his flesh on the other side of it yelled their crazy gobbledygook and howled.

  “Go to hell,” he told them, and mimed shooting through the door. He held his fire, though. Every second the door could buy them was time for the professor to do his professorish bit. Jack didn’t really believe in magic, but he’d seen old Choate stop the door from caving in, and he’d seen him drive away that scaly flying thing with some weird words and the wave of a bit of chicken guts, so who was Jack to judge?

  Anyway, whatever it was, Jack’s job was simple. Watch the door until it burst open, and then blow as many foreigners to kingdom come as he could manage.

  Better light wouldn’t hurt. “Professor? You still using that lamp?”

  No answer.

  Jack tiptoed over the scabby wet cement to Professor Choate. The gaunt old guy lay on the floor, tightly clutching the bit of stone they’d lifted from the museum to his chest. His lips moved and Jack could hear mumbled words, but he couldn’t make them out over the howling of the wops. Anyway, Choate wasn’t talking to Jack.

  He also didn’t seem to be using the lamp, so Jack stooped to pick it up.

  In the illumination cast down by the raised light, he saw that there was something under the professor.

  Not an object, he realized, but an image. That crazy old ginny Burroughs—Burroughs was an Italian name, wasn’t it?—not only had statues of giant crocodiles in his basement, he’d painted a picture on his basement floor.

  Jack squinted. Through the lichen and the damp it was hard to be certain, but as best as he could make it out, the painting was of some kind of boat. It was curled up at the front and the back, and it had a canopy on its deck like a tent, and a bunch of bald men pulled at its bank of oars, rowing the boat through a field of stars.

  Jack snorted.

  “Ginnies.”

  ***

  Randolph Choate blinked and tried to focus. He was seeing through a veil of aqueous humors, he knew, his own perceptive and elective faculties—he hesitated to call them his soul, for the metaphysical and even theological implications of the word—using another man’s eyeballs.

  He hoped, at least, that his vessel was human.

  He looked down, flexing muscles and feeling relief that what he saw were indeed forearms and hands.

  But he was flying. Gray walls, featureless but for the rungs of a ladder, flashed before his flooded vision.

  He realized he had no sense of up and down. Was this the void? He had expected to find himself in coruscating energy, or the cold de
pths of space, not a tunnel. Was this hell? Randolph’s stomach fluttered, and he thought, for a split second, that it had been too long since he’d been to church.

  Not hell, though. Far too prosaic for hell. And yet he was within a tunnel, and moving.

  In a cloud of dark mist. Blood?

  The vessel struggled to resist. Randolph felt his arms flap spastically, grabbing at the rungs. He missed the catch, but snagged himself and threw off his trajectory. He bounced against the passage wall, spun, hit again, and lost his grip on the Lemurian tablet.

  The tablet spun away from him in the weightless void.

  Randolph clamped his will hard on the vessel, forcing the enslaved jaw and tongue to utter another Lemurian incantation. The spell took effect and the vessel relaxed; control became easier. With more grace, though not much, he caught himself on the ladder. Flailing in a passage too small for his purposes, he struggled to force the body around and return to where he’d lost the tablet.

  The tablet was gone.

  Then Randolph saw an opening in the side of the shaft. It was as large as a doorway, and he hadn’t seen it because he’d been flying so quickly without gravity. This void, this strange hell-though-there-was-no-hell, was a warren. He pushed himself through the opening and found the tablet, spinning like a top in mid-air.

  The vessel seized control of itself. It kicked off one wall, throwing Randolph against the facing surface and slamming his head against it. The wall was made of something that looked like china but felt like metal, and Randolph hurt.

  Randolph willed his mastery over the vessel’s vocal cords. He chanted in Lemurian again, trying to subdue the vessel. He needed the vessel’s body, to get him into position to misdirect the rising demon. And if he couldn’t even control the host, how was he to stop the dark god?

  The vessel’s hand gripped the vessel’s throat, trying to squeeze the incantation into silence. Randolph chanted faster, batting at the vessel’s free arm with the one he commanded.

  The force of the struggle spun him around in the air, and as his vision began to grow dim he saw words clearly stenciled on the wall: HYPNOSTASIS.