Ride the Star Wind: Cthulhu, Space Opera, and the Cosmic Weird Read online

  Karisten lingers, her brown eyes still clouded by my theft of her memories. “It’s good to see you again, Rem. I’m sorry things unraveled how they did, but I’ll do my best by you here. Everything will be different, you’ll see.”

  I can offer up no words for the woman I came here to murder. She departs before the awkwardness worsens. Zele and I stand alone in the refectory.

  “Now what?” I ask.

  “I suppose I shall show you to quarters,” he replies, striding off. “Unless you still mean to overpower us all.”

  He stops in a hall I presume is reserved for senior officers. “This is our only available space, unfortunately. You’ll be sharing with Paki.”

  The room he singles out is barren of adornment save a mat on the floor and a single chair. A man sits there, his eyes closed. I stop. He’s young, handsome, and uncannily still. “What’s . . . wrong with him?”

  “I’ve told the crew he’s sick.”

  Paki’s consciousness is an utter void in the room. I cut my eyes at Zele. “Sickness would require an ability to be affected by pathogens in the first place, Averator.”

  “Too true.” He nods, pleased at his prying foray into my capabilities.

  “An android?” I surmise. “Why lie to them? Your family?”

  “Because they shouldn’t be punished for crimes of my design. What else can you—”

  “Just stop,” I cut in. “Stop this. Better for me to drive the Dubious into the nearest star than indulge your curiosity.”

  He stiffens. “You’d do that to protect your secrets?”

  “To protect you, Averator. Even a subliminal impression of one with my . . . abilities can be traced.”

  “You must interact with people at some point,” he protests. “The most solitary nomads in the Known still form kin groups.”

  “Of course, but none remember me.” His face softens for an instant, and I curse the insight I’ve given him. “It’s safest, believe this. Families would be tortured, colonies razed for what you’re so eager to unearth.”

  Zele’s brow furrows. “The Cassad would stand for no such action against an Averator.”

  I fold my arms. “How will the Cassad stand against something none of you remember?”

  His reply is stayed by an alert from the Dubious’s comms system. “We’ve arrived. I must prepare.”

  I flee Paki’s hollow presence soon after Zele departs. Bardas waves a mission briefing at me in the halls, his green eyes afire with holographic orbital scans of the planet’s surface. He’s tall and bronze with a booming voice. “Ruins! You don’t know how lucky you are, joining at a time like this.”

  We join Yoseef in the main crew quarters, a wiry and practical engineer who demonstrates their modified incursion suit with a measure of pride. I’m familiar enough with the design to input my own measurements and strip. The suit’s blue flex-fabric whirs at the seams, fitting perfectly around my torso and extremities, dense and cold.

  “Perfect. Are you ready?”

  I nod.

  Gorshen claps me on the shoulder as we stride out together. “This discovery will send the New Regime spinning, you’ll see.” He means well. I regret making him soil himself.

  Eliat calls loudly to the band of surface explorers boarding the hopper ahead of us. “What do Averators do?”

  “Make history!” The answering cry is followed by shouts and whoops. I nearly join in.

  * * *

  Our hopper vaults out of the Dubious, into the orange and blue expanse of the Reach’s unique, ribboned nebulae. R’lyeh is a pink, featureless world, devoid of major land masses and weather. The thin atmo sets the pilot’s console blazing with alerts as we descend.

  “All anticipated,” Zele says calmly. “My shielding will endure.”

  We land with a squelching thud that sets my teeth on edge. Stable ground doesn’t sound like that. “We’re close,” Gorshen calls out from the pilot’s chair. “It’s just over the rise directly behind us.”

  The hatch opens and the exploration team files after Zele through the airlock. Nkedi, an interstellar biologist with penetrating hazel eyes and deep dimples, laughs at my expression. “Don’t worry. The Averator thinks of everything.”

  Somehow, I don’t find that soothing. We stride into the environs of this strange world. The ground is pervious, the color of flesh left too long in the sun. Visibility is fifty meters at best in the soupy atmo, which is caustic enough to melt us down to the bone in an hour. But gravity and relative pressure are tolerable, though I feel as though I’m swimming rather than walking.

  Endless ripples mar the ground as though we’re walking on the inside-out lining of some great beast’s stomach. A stench of rot creeps in. I ponder the fact that it has penetrated my incursion suit with no small sense of dread. It’s simply not possible—a lungful would end me.

  I grow convinced that something stalks us, always on the edge of sight. The minutes tick past, but still no detected movement in the formations.

  “I’ll bet someone my next credit disbursement that these aren’t hills around us,” Bardas announces.

  Others stop cataloging substrate samples and weigh in. “I . . . I think they’re ancient buildings, Averator!” Opraila offers excitedly. A slight, deliberate historian, this is the first I’ve heard her voice.

  “If that’s true, this planet rose up and ate them,” Karisten’s mutter is barely audible.

  “Observable facts, please,” the Averator chides her with a wink.

  “Buildings is a stretch,” Nkedi proffers. “More like algae blooms. That correlates to other Reach worlds’ mega fauna.”

  The masses rise higher and grow more complex around us. A ridge to my left, buried in slick purple material akin to fatty deposits, could be some collapsed assembly bays for drones or an organism’s vertebrae. Pits issue gray steam in one place, green in another. We studiously avoid both.

  A sudden nudge makes me jump. “We’ll keep you safe, Rem,” Karisten says with a laugh. “No need to get squeamish.”

  She trips on her next step and stumbles into Bardas, swearing. I make a show of searching the horizon when Zele scowls in my direction. A glimmer of something metallic catches my eye through the pink fog and twisted shapes around us. “Look,” I call.

  “Good eyes,” Yoseef says approvingly. “I don’t know how we missed it. It’s enormous.”

  We redirect into a bowl-shaped valley, cut around an acidic pool covered with yellow froth. The structure we seek is a solitary, monolithic spire—perhaps, thirty meters tall. Serpentine lines divide the smooth, ivory surface. It is untouched by the corrosive landscape.

  Something I can’t place strikes me as odd about it. A sense of foreboding wars with my wonder as we approach.

  “Those are glyphs around the base!” Eliat outpaces the rest of us. His quavering voice crackles through our comms system as he studies the surface. “Undoubtedly Cassad. Scripting indicates the early conquerors . . . but this is no monument.” The man gives Zele a haunted look that cloys my stomach. “It’s a warning beacon.”

  A piece falls into place for me. “They must’ve dropped it from orbit!” I blurt out. “We’re standing in an impact crater.”

  A hush falls over all of us.

  “Record everything you can,” Zele barks. “We’ll leave promptly!”

  The team immediately produces crude sketches, rubbings of the surface; samples of the substrate go in plastic bags. Their tools are plastic, too, immune to the corrosion.

  Soon we’re trotting back the way we came. But now the Cassad are muttering, peering suspiciously through the surrounding warren of growth. Slick blue objects that appear fungal, fibrous coils that might be vines if bright pustules took the place of leaves. Heaving sounds exhale from underfoot at every step.

  “Averator, time to test a hypothesis?” Nkedi calls out. Groans of disbelief and outright curses ripple through our comms.

  “Quickly!”

  She sinks her shovel into the visc
era that passes for ground. A long piece of plastic reveals itself, machine-cut. There’s a partially decomposed skeleton beside it. My breath catches. The angle of the jawbone is familiar, where I’d once rest my cheek—

  “These aren’t buildings,” Nkedi proclaims. “I believe they’re spacecraft—landed or crashed.”

  I squeeze my eyes shut and look again. The skeleton isn’t there. Jobrel isn’t there. I’m seeing things. Shaken, I scan the horizon with fresh eyes. The pool we passed is too circular—a communication array? Massive, flesh-colored ridges on the western horizon might be ailerons. “There must be thousands,” I whisper. My psionics are screaming at me. We should not be here.

  Panicked breathing pushes through our comms.

  “If they knew the ground would eat their ships, why land?” Karisten mutters. “Couldn’t imagine what called—” She cuts off with a yelp. The fog around her suit’s faceplate coalesces into a pulsating globule. Tendrils loop through the air for her shoulders and neck. “Get this damn thing off of me!”

  The sharp crack of her faceplate spurs us into motion. Bardas and Opraila grasp at the mass. It dissolves in their gloves, reforms. Karisten falls backward, flailing and swearing.

  I lash out with my mind. There’s no motor cortex for me to disrupt—only a raw ball of what I interpret as fear, growing steadily. But its actions are clear enough. “It’s feeding on our thoughts,” I whisper in shock.

  Karisten staggers to her feet. Zele and Eliat grab her before she runs away screaming. “Averator!” Opraila shouts. “What do we do?”

  I lash my mind out again. Karisten falls limp in their arms. The entity dissipates as Zele and the rest flail at it with their hands.

  They sit panting, consoling a moaning Karisten. She’s alive, but the damage to her faceplate is serious. My academy training asserts itself. “Averator, we need to move.”

  Zele nods slowly. He’s in shock, too. “Lead the way, Remiliat.”

  Bardas and Nkedi bracket Karisten, who can still walk. I hear a click in my ear, and see Zele motion to his arm. I understand and adjust my comm to a private channel. “I heard what you said,” he whispers. “How do I keep the rest of my people alive?”

  It takes me several moments to find words that will make sense. “This biomass . . . has cognitive properties.” I’m not a powerful psychic among my kind, but I’m terrified of what I sense around us. “But it’s bone and muscle and brain, all mixed together.”

  “Astounding . . .” Zele stops in his tracks.

  “No, Averator.” My voice goes shrill. “It reacts to thought, eats it. And if these are ships and their crews were . . . were absorbed in this substrate—”

  “What manner of hell have I brought us into?” Zele whispers. “Are you suggesting they’re conscious?”

  “I don’t know!” I snap. “But their presence is aware of us on some level. And this land is swallowing our fear, like desert sands drink rain. Look.”

  All around us, vile shapes unfurl and bloom, like plague flowers. Fog clumps above our heads, sprouting hooked limbs that shoot into each other and burst. Yoseef dodges one and screams.

  “By the All,” the Averator whispers. “We can formulate a—”

  “You can’t think your way out of—!” I curse as the ground before us splits open like rotten fruit. Acrid steam pours out. “Whatever’s crashed here has taken on a life of its own. Ecosystems, generations! How many hallucinations have you experienced since we arrived here?” Zele’s silence is all the answer I require.

  The team halts with more warning shouts. An outcrop we passed earlier is pulsating as if some creature beneath a hill is stretching out to grasp us.

  I grab Zele’s shoulders. “Can you still your mind?” I demand.

  “Of course! But my people—”

  “Can’t fear what they don’t remember.” I coil my mind into a lash and snap at their memories one by one, mercilessly, until every face is slack. The aberrations bearing down on us dissipate almost immediately. My legs buckle with a wave of vertigo, but the Averator’s grip stays my fall.

  “Remiliat! Can you walk?”

  “Barely,” I mumble. “Their amnesia won’t last long. You’ve got to get us out of here.”

  * * *

  Scrub procedures aboard the Dubious take an hour. Our samples are quarantined; a quick burst of engine fire destroys the tools. None of us truly perk up until we’re assured that Karisten is recovering. Yoseef barely accepts the story Zele concocted about gas penetrating his incursion suit. No one is in any shape to debrief and Zele orders us all to quarters.

  He escorts me back to the android’s room himself. “If there were ever someone who deserved accelerated citizenship,” he murmurs. “Thank you, Remiliat. You’re an invaluable resource.”

  My jaw works for a moment. “I . . . still expect to be paid.”

  He laughs and strides off. I suspect the man rarely sleeps. The mat in the corner has never looked so inviting, even with the android’s dead face standing guard over the room. I tie my shirt around his head and curl up. In moments, I feel my muscles relax.

  My eyes snap open an instant after I close them.

  I’m back on the surface.

  Karisten watches me, laughing. Her face is ruinous.

  “Did you think you could run so easily, Dumasani?” she sneers. Leech-like organisms snake around her legs, tearing her muscle to ribbons.

  The planet still has us.

  Screams echo over the horizon, and I sprint for them. An impact sends me tipping to hands and knees. Pink biomatter spreads over my fingers, eating them. Dissonance overwhelms me; the cold grating of the Dubious’s flooring touches my hands.

  “It’s not real,” I breathe.

  The ship’s hall snaps back into focus. Undulating tentacles burst out of the walls and grab me. My vision grays as I struggle to breathe. I’m all too familiar with the power the mind has over the body.

  I stumble my way through the ship. The rigorous training I’ve loathed since leaving my homeworld is my salvation. My fingers ferret out edges and smooth corners where my other senses insist that swallowing maws and rotting tendrils await. My hands are all I trust. Screams from every side invite madness, beg me to open my eyes.

  “Remiliat! Don’t go that way! Are you insane?”

  I may very well be.

  “Remiliat! That’s an airlock!”

  The uncertainty of an unfamiliar ship halts my flight. It cannot be. But the sudden warning klaxon begs otherwise, the metallic lock and chunk of a door groaning open and the howl that no spacefaring person can ever forget: depressurization. Screams sail past me into the void.

  I claw my way from the latest hallucination. I won’t last long like this. I fumble back toward my quarters, seeking one last desperate source of aid. My hands close on feet, a strangely perfect torso, humming cables snaking beneath the ribs at regular intervals. I yank on them desperately. “Wake up!”

  A hand closes around mine. “I don’t know who you are,” a clear voice says. “Explain yourself and what is happening. Where is the Averator? Why is a shirt wrapped over my face?”

  The android. I cling to Paki’s presence like a patch of cold floor in the midst of a fire. “The crew is being attacked by an alien intelligence,” I say breathlessly. “Some of it must be on board.”

  “And you know this how?”

  I hesitate to divulge my secrets, even now—at the cost of my own life. My conditioning is that strong. “My people harbor telepathic abilities. That’s the only reason I’m still standing. Please, help us.”

  “I must find the Averator.”

  We depart, my hand on his shoulder, flinching at every distant scream.

  “Why do you hesitate?” he asks after a moment.

  “There are more . . . impressions that way.”

  “Then that is where we must go.”

  We stop when Paki encounters more crew. “Wait here.” I am a fool, standing defenseless with my eyes squeezed shut. But
Paki’s more reliable than my own senses. He returns and joins my hand with another. “This is Eliat. Don’t let him go.”

  I cling to his hand as tightly as I cling to Paki’s words. “Eliat, stay with me!”

  The answering beastly roar jerks my eyes open. Eliat weeps in agony as our fingers meld into an acidic web of conjoined bone and flesh. It’s not real. My fingernails slide free of their beds and sink under his bubbling skin. I clamp my eyelids together again.

  “You can’t trust her, Paki! She did this!”

  “We’ll see,” the android cuts into my protest. His hand guides mine to his shoulder. “She’s saved your life.”

  Twice more we pass crew members, and once, Paki pauses. I hear cartilage snapping, chewing noises. He murmurs, “I’m sorry,” before we move on.

  “Here . . .” I rasp. “It’s strongest here.”

  Paki’s voice sounds hopeful. “The Averator’s lab. Undoubtedly he’ll be inside.”

  “Don’t—” Eliat begins, but it’s too late. Paki abandons me. Eliat tears from my grasp. I cannot help but open my eyes.

  Tentacled monstrosities loom in opposing corners of the lab. The room is distended and swollen around us as if the laws of physics themselves bowed to these beings’ presence. Eliat collapses into a blathering pile on the floor. A single phrase spills from his lips in a maddening loop.

  “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”

  Reality is broken. My body twists and turns against all reason as the entities consider my being and test its limits. Before my spine ruptures, the pained bliss of ending this nightmare nearly over, one of the entities extends a tentacle toward my face.

  “Remiliat?” a familiar voice beckons me from the madness.

  The beings are gone. Amadi Zele himself extends his hand. The nightmare aspects of the room bleed out around me, leaching back into the confines of an unadorned laboratory with plain white walls. Samples from R’lyeh cover a simple work table behind him. I accept Zele’s grasp.

  Paki regards me, his eyes a remarkable orange hue, his hair cut close in a Ziaran style. I’d never know him for android without my psionics. He holds several ebon fragments, crushed but still delicately cupped in his hand as though he regretted the act.