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

  Of all the people on this ship I wanted sitting next to me, this guy is the very last one. I spotted him the first day aboard the Treader: a mountain of Kentucky meat covered in cheesy heavy metal tattoos and badly covered White Power symbols. At some point in his youth, he thought it was a great idea to get a swastika on his neck, right over his jugular, and whoever lasered it off did a terrible job. He covered it with an American flag, but if the light hits it at an angle, you can see the raised scar of the swastika plain as a supernova.

  “Joe Jorgensen.” He smiles real big and holds his hand out to me for a shake, like he’s a used car salesman about to ask me if I’d like a tour of the lot. “You’re Beatrice Muñoz, right?”

  I know I’m supposed to be professional with the other recruits. I know, right? Brothers and sisters in arms and all that. But this backwoods Nazi bastard thinks he can just sashay on up and plop his beefy ass down and expect me to greet him like an old friend? Nah. I’m in too damn much pain for that nonsense.

  So I fix him in a basilisk stare that should turn him and all his illegitimate sprogs back in Dogpatch to crumbling pillars of salt, and I growl, “This. Seat. Is. Taken.”

  His smile falters just a micron. “It’s the ink, am I right?”

  I keep staring, trying to kill him with my mind. He isn’t the first I’ve tried it on, but I figure with enough practice, someday it might work. I picture his skull exploding, his brains spattering across the glossy void-gray wall behind us.

  No luck. His head doesn’t burst, so I have to reply, “Could be.”

  He holds up his hands in an appeasing gesture, and I see the faint outline of a coiled Gadsden flag snake on his palm. That “Don’t Tread On Me” thing. It looks more like a pile of shit.

  “I can explain,” he says.

  “Can you.” I try to make my voice flat and cold as the wall, so he will just take the hint already and walk on.

  But he doesn’t budge, so I continue—dropping my voice low, so it can’t be overheard, but speaking very clearly, so he can’t misunderstand me. “Speaking as one of the more colorful women in this room: I am not here to absolve you of your past actions or inactions. That is not my role, motherfucker.”

  He doesn’t so much as blink at my anger. “I’m not here to ask for absolution.”

  “Why are you here, then?”

  “To preemptively clear up any misunderstanding that may be causing undue stress or that may prevent optimal teamwork in the future. I am only asking you to hear me out.”

  The intelligence and polite calm I hear in his voice does not fit with what I know about men who get the sort of ink he’s wearing. And I’ve met plenty like him. Some of them hooted racial slurs and filth at me and my little sisters from the safety of their jacked-up trucks while we walked home from school. Another beat my uncle Max with a tire iron at a gas station. And yet another put a bullet between my cousin Hernando’s eyes at a traffic light. I still want to cave Joe’s teeth in with my sidearm, but I’m also just a little curious.

  “Okay. What’s your story?”

  He quickly touches the swastika scar on his neck, the Aryan fist on his left forearm, and the Totenkopf symbol on his right. It’s a bit like watching a Catholic priest cross himself.

  “I am a man of violence, and I own that,” he says in his soft drawl. “My father was a man of hate, and he led me down that path when I was a boy. These tattoos come from that time, but I cannot deny my own history. I was not a man in any sense when I got this ink, and I am trying to make amends for the harm I caused. Making amends means restoring justice and doing the right thing. Part of the amends I need to make here is to assure you that I have dedicated my violent self to the protection of the whole human race. And I promise you here and now that I will lay down my life to save yours.”

  I blink. My biggest talent, aside from getting stubborn seeds to grow in a lab, is knowing when people are bullshitting me. He’s utterly sincere. But I’m not done being skeptical. “You gonna give that speech to everybody here?”

  “Yes, ma’am, if it seems like I ought to. But I figured I’d start with you, seeing as you’ve been giving me glares sharp enough to shave my chin for two weeks straight now.”

  I snort, amused. “So what changed your mind about people like me?”

  He pales, and his expression turns grim. “San Angelo.”

  I’d never heard of that riverside city out in the big empty part of Texas until the spawn of Azathoth chose it as a primary invasion site. Of a population of 120,000, fewer than ten thousand technically survived. I say technically because many of them are still in comas or catatonic. Other survivors, the ones who initially seemed to have escaped relatively unscathed, killed themselves in the following year, unable to live with what they’d witnessed.

  Simply meeting the blister-eyed gaze of a spawn twists your brains. Most of the time, that means depression, mania, anxiety, full-on psychotic breaks. It’s the ones who escaped catatonia but not utter madness who gave us the name of Azathoth. Victims who had no connection to each other would babble or scream the name, ranting about a vast, powerful god beyond our galaxy.

  Sometimes, when the spawn twist a mind that’s already deformed, it makes it into something more. Not something healthy, mind you. But keener. More perceptive. More connected to the dark matter of the cosmos. I wonder if that’s what happened to Joe. He doesn’t seem dumb, antisocial, or self-destructive enough to stain himself the way he has, and I’m starting to think that he isn’t. Not anymore, anyhow.

  I know I’m not the same woman; she’d never set foot on this warship. She’d have seen this place as a vulgar, ugly, necessary evil she wanted no part of. The spawn left a stain in me far darker than any of my tattoos.

  “My family moved there from Corbin, Kentucky when I was sixteen,” he says. “Me and my pa and my brothers found work in the oil fields. Good money. Paid for most of my ink. Got connected to the Aryan Circle and spent my nights cooking drugs and hurting people. I should be dead ten times over by now.”

  He shakes his head and picks at his blurry Totenkopf as if he can simply peel it up. I wonder why he didn’t cover it or laser it, but I’m guessing he wants the reminder. It’s marginally subtler than a neck swastika, at least.

  “How many of your family died when the ships came?”

  “All of them.” He’s staring at the ugly snake on his palm as if it’s about to start speaking to him. “You ever see a spawn?”

  “Yes. I was at the International Lunar Research Station.”

  I feel a spark of panic as unwanted memories crowd the edges of my consciousness like flies around a drop of nectar. I can’t let myself remember the details, I know I won’t be able to keep my shit together if I remember the details . . . and I breathe deeply.

  Instead, I visualize a tall, concrete garden wall rising in my mind, and the synopsis of my disaster is engraved there in stark block letters. A memorial for other lives, not mine. I can simply look at it and repeat the stony text if anybody asks what happened and I won’t feel a thing. There were far fewer of us to die: 2,000 on the base and ten of us survived. After the habitat’s dome shattered, I spent three days hiding from spawn with nothing but freezing moon craters and my space suit for cover. Just two other people made it out the way I did, and both are in long-term mental care facilities.

  Joe doesn’t ask for any details; either he already knows what happened on the moon, or he can guess. Instead, he just says, “I sure am sorry to hear that.”

  He looks at my forearm and points to my watercolor tattoo. It’s a twisting ladder of DNA, the rungs wound with blossoms: soft pink oleander, white devil’s weed, blue moonflowers, flaming milkweed, and purple belladonna. “Were you a scientist?”

  “I meant to be. I was a junior in college, and I won an international fellowship to go up there to study the effects of low gravity on alkaloid production in plants. After the NASA team rescued us, I didn’t know who the hell I was. Now, I’m trying to be a soldier.”r />
  He gets real quiet for a moment, still staring down at the ugly snake. “You get nightmares?”

  I feel a spike of panic as my mind almost turns to examine the horror lurking in my neurons, but I breathe deeply, and the calm garden wall rises with one word chiseled on its smooth concrete.

  “Yes.” I let the word float out into space. It doesn’t mean anything. I am not remembering anything.

  Joe nods. He doesn’t pry further. And from the look on his face, I don’t have to ask if he has terrible dreams, too.

  “We can’t let them get to Earth again,” he finally says.

  “No. We cannot.”

  He and I bump fists.

  The doors to the auditorium open, and the COs bark at everyone to take their seats inside.

  Joe and I file in with the others and drop into narrow theatre seats on the twenty-second row. I stare up at the ceiling, marveling at the construction. Most of the ship is made of a new ceramic matrix composite they dubbed tarakium: tougher and lighter than titanium, it blocks ionizing radiation twice as efficiently as lead, and it welds nearly seamlessly. It’s not a good conductor of electricity, but if you apply low voltages to it, it glows like an LED. Any part of any surface can become a light source—or a video monitor. I can see the vague reflections of the audience in between the light spots on the ceiling. If I stare at it long enough, I think I can see the shapes of the poisonous flowers I left to die on the moon.

  Many of the others are staring, too. This ship was only possible because American, Indian, and Chinese scientists salvaged the invaders’ downed spacecraft and replicated their technology. Fear being the motivator that it is, our politicians stopped squabbling and threw the whole US economic engine behind development. American tech jumped three hundred years in the space of eight. Nobody grew up with this, so nobody’s jaded to it yet.

  Lieutenant Colonel Mercedes Patel steps onto the stage and takes her place behind the podium. She scans the crowd of us once, slowly, and begins to speak.

  “There was . . . debate, even up to just a few moments ago, about how much I ought to tell you all about what happens next,” she says, looking grave. “My own personal code of conduct calls for absolute transparency in all matters unless national security dictates otherwise. Mine is a traditional view. This, as you know, is no traditional war; the Apocalypse Treader and our other warships are scheduled to join with ships from China, India, and the European Union for the next offensive. This is World War III, but every soldier fights to save humanity.”

  I wonder if that’s true. Certainly, every spawn we kill out here—that’s the big plan: track down their nests or hives or whatever you want to call them and nuke them to oblivion—is a spawn that can’t go to Earth and wreak horrors. But that’s not why everyone signed on. Some don’t care about the big sweaty mess of humanity but want to save their own families. Some don’t give a damn about anyone, but the paycheck’s appealing. Others have better ways to make money, but they’re itching for the kind of epic fight that goes down in the history books.

  And a few once stared into the eyes of a spawn, and the stain on their brain is telling them they’ve got to do it again.

  “Unfortunately, traditional means of combat have proved inadequate against our inhuman foes,” Patel says. “We have had to adopt . . . experimental tactics. And while I can’t offer as much transparency as I’d prefer, you all need a better idea of what’s in store for you.”

  Patel pauses again, touching her earpiece, and she nods curtly to someone offstage. “You have all volunteered to lay down your lives to protect America and the rest of the Earth, and we are all thankful for your offer of sacrifice. In most any other conflict, even a highly dangerous one, our soldiers have found comfort in the knowledge that if they do their jobs well and survive, they can return to their homes and families. They know that they will be inevitably changed by war, but if things go well, they can lay down their arms and live out their lives in peace. That . . . cannot happen here.”

  I sit up straighter in my seat. A murmur ripples through the crowd. I don’t know how I feel about this, mostly because I don’t actually have any kind of plan for what to do when this is all over.

  Patel holds up her hands. “Please, note that I am not saying that this will be a suicide mission. It is highly dangerous, yes; even those of you who’ve only seen the spawn on television know that much. We hope for victory. We hope that our soldiers will survive. But we very recently determined that those who proceed with the next phase of training cannot return to Earth. This is due to the possibility of infecting our ecosphere with dangerous biological contaminants. Those who serve here must stay in outer space.”

  I can tell that many of the recruits are shocked by this news, but I’m not. Obviously, none of us has the security clearance to know what the brass is planning, but I already figured that we’d be throwing bouquets of biological weapons. The spawn don’t get the courtesy of the Geneva Protocol. Which means that we don’t, either.

  “It’s possible that we may find a solution that enables a return to Earth down the road,” she says, “but for now, this is our reality. And you all deserve time to consider the ramifications of that for you and your families before you’ve passed the point of no return. You have forty-eight hours to decide. Those who opt out will be reassigned to first-response positions on Earth with no loss of rank, though of course you will lose special combat pay. We have fertility specialists available to extract sperm or ova from those of you who want to continue but wish to send a genetic legacy back to your families.”

  A genetic legacy. I always figured my boy-crazy little sisters would gladly fall on that grenade for me. Marriage and babies have never much appealed to me, and any interesting genes I have are surely scattered in my siblings, too. I glance at Joe, thinking about his annihilated family in Texas, and I wonder if he’s got anybody dirtside who would want to make a bunch of test-tube Joe Juniors. But asking seems cruel, so I don’t.

  * * *

  About a quarter of the recruits disappear over the next two days; there’s a steady stream of men and women with their duffle bags heading for the transport deck. I’m assigned to bunk with three younger women who recently emigrated from Eastern Europe. They’re already besties, and they chat amongst themselves in Belarusian, of which I know not a single word. Part of me realizes that this is a prime opportunity to make new allies and learn a new language. But my heart isn’t in it—I still flinch when I remember what happened to Natalya, Yi, and Erin, my roommates on the moon—so I politely smile and wave but otherwise keep to myself. They don’t seem to care, and that’s fine with me.

  On the third day, we take our sedatives, and the ship takes its first nerve-wrenching, equilibrium-mushing hyperspace jump to someplace well away from Earth. One out of every ten of the recruits can’t handle the jump; I’ve got a searing headache, and Joe’s turned an impressive shade of green, but we’re both still standing. My Belarusian roommates make it, too. The ones who can’t get to their feet and just lie there puking on the deck are washouts; I don’t know if they’ll be condemned to stay in space or not.

  The fourth day is more medical tests and a battery of neurological and psychological exams. Part of it involves answering uncomfortable personal questions while I’m wedged inside an MRI scanner that’s making a terrible grinding buzz; I think this will be the worst, but I’m wrong.

  Something worse comes after they give me an injection they say is just a sedative, just something to relax me for the next psych interview, and I blink and find myself waking up in my bunk twelve hours later.

  I don’t like time going missing in my head; that’s why I’ve never been a drinker. I check myself all over twice, but I can’t find any new incisions or punctures, and nothing’s sore that wasn’t before. I don’t think I’ve been assaulted, but I can’t be sure. Nobody acts like anything happened; my roommates tell me I was sleeping in my bunk for the last five hours. So whatever I did or said during the other los
t hours or whatever was done to me, the brass is okay with it. Or they’re trying to gaslight me into thinking things are fine when they’re anything but. Or I got hypnotized and implanted with some black ops shit. Or this is all a test to see how I cope with paranoia. Or, or, or . . .

  Joe is missing time, too, but unlike me, he doesn’t seem to be wracked with anxiety about it. He thinks that it was some kind truth serum and that the memory loss was just a side effect. His hypothesis seems plausible, but I’m still profoundly uneasy.

  The next few weeks are grueling combat training sessions in high-gravity and zero-gee. In some ways, this is worse than basic training. We go hard for three days straight and then get a day off for rest and classroom battle tactics study. Apparently, someone’s new kinesiology research says that’s most efficient. I’m twenty-eight years old, but at the end of our training days, I feel ninety; I envy the eighteen-year-olds who have the bounce to go off to the canteen and arcade afterward to play. I barely have the juice left to brush my teeth and drop into my bunk, and I’m fast asleep.

  * * *

  I wake with a jerk, and when I see the room I’m in, I want to start screaming and just never stop.

  I’m lying on my bunk in the International Lunar Research Station.

  I’m. On. The. God. Forsaken. Moon.

  No.

  I can’t be. This room got blasted to hell eight years ago. Tech has gotten scary but not time machine scary. That shit wouldn’t stay secret. I’d have heard whispers. This must be a trick. A test.

  Okay, I tell myself. You were a scientist, once. Observe and analyze, and don’t lose your goddamn head.

  I take a deep breath, visualize the garden wall as a solid, death-proof edifice against my back. Roll off the bunk onto my feet. The gravity certainly feels like the moon’s, but they could recreate that easily. I’m wearing a brand-new ILRS jumpsuit: white velcroed polyester with antistatic grey booties, but my underwear is what I was wearing when I went to sleep onboard the Treader. The smartwatch strapped to my wrist is old, cracked, and I’m pretty sure it’s the one I had on when I was rescued. It went missing in the hospital. I click it on and am surprised it still works. It shows the date and time of the morning the spawn attacked, and I have to breathe deeply to stave off my panic.