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

  I look around. The bunks, the banks of LEDs in the ceiling, the wall panels and doors . . . it all matches my memories. The air is stale, familiar. Yi’s teddy bear is on her pillow, and Erin’s bunk is scattered with her socks and Stanford tees. There’s my old desk, looking just the way I left it with my old tablet and Lego figures . . . or does it? Can I trust a memory that’s nearly a decade old? Can I trust any of my memories after the psych sessions I can’t remember?

  “Hello,” I call out. The inside walls of the dormitory module aren’t thick. We could all hear conversations in rooms three doors down. Keeping a low voice was important, and privacy was difficult. “Is anyone here?”

  No answer. I hold my breath, listening. The hum of the lights. The exhalation of the air system. Above it all, the faint mosquito whine of a ship’s idling stardrive. And if I hear that, this isn’t the moon, and this is definitely a trick, and I’m so furious I want to grind the tricksters’ faces into broken glass. Or is the faint whine just a figment of my imagination because I’d rather be anywhere but here?

  Regardless, I cannot hear another soul.

  Taped on the wall behind my desk is an old photo of my father, Dr. Giacomo Rappaccini Muñoz, kneeling proudly in his overalls between bushes lush with his blue rose cultivar “Mexican Moonlight.” He was fifty when he married my mother, and I was only ten when he died of a heart attack. My sisters were just one and two, and they don’t really remember him at all. My clearest memories are of helping him in his greenhouse on the weekends and during my summers off from school. While I helped tend his glorious, peacock-blue roses, he lectured admiringly on the poisons and medicines people harvest from flowers. I wanted to become a scientist partly to honor his memory.

  I stare at the picture. Is it really the one I left behind that day, the one I thought was destroyed and gone forever? I decide that its authenticity doesn’t matter; I pull it from the wall and tuck it into the breast pocket of my jumpsuit.

  I look at the door to the hallway. It’s the only way in and out of the dorm room. A hundred yards down the hallway, it connects to Greenhouse #4. At the time, it seemed terribly convenient to be housed so close to my work area. But if this recreation is based on my memories—or my nightmares—I know what’s in the greenhouse.

  And there is no point whatsoever in delaying.

  I step to the door, and it slides open, catching just a little on the edge of the thin blue nylon rug as it retracts into its slot. Just like I expected it to. The round hallway beyond it lit brightly for morning. It, too, looks just the way I remember . . . except that it is completely empty. Yi and Erin should be by the door to the cafeteria, laughing about a movie. A couple of Russian researchers should be whispering over their coffee as they head back to their dorm room. I reel for a moment and have to steady myself against the molded white plastic wall panel.

  For a split second, I’m seeing a double image of my memory overlaid on this alternate reality. Ghosts. They fade. I am alone.

  The door to the cafeteria is closed. Locked. The room beyond is dark. I give it an experimental kick, and it doesn’t budge. I consider trying harder to break into this forbidden space. The chair in my dorm room is sturdy enough to smash the window beside the door. But I wonder what will happen. Maybe I will be gassed and find myself waking up in the dorm bed again, the clocks reset, my father’s photo taped again to the wall. Maybe this has already happened, but I just don’t remember.

  My thoughts turn outward. Where is Joe? Is he eating reconstituted eggs in the mess hall and wondering where I am? Or is he standing in the empty streets of a dead Texas town? We don’t know the details of each other’s bad dreams; that’s far too much intimacy for a warship.

  I walk on, past more locked doors and dark rooms, until I reach my greenhouse. It’s lit up like high noon, and I find all the flowers I’d been coaxing from seeds in full bloom: soft pink oleander, white devil’s weed, blue moonflowers, flaming milkweed, and purple belladonna. Rows upon rows of gorgeous, genetically modified flowers. The heady fragrance in the air would have been hard to fake. I touch the nearest oleander branch to confirm it’s real. It’s the experimental phenotype, engineered to reduce its heart-destroying glycosides while boosting compounds predicted to improve immune function. Did they save my seeds, somehow? But I reconsider: I wasn’t the only one with the seeds. My notes were careful and complete. I thought they were destroyed—misdirected bombs intended for the spawn destroyed the cloud server sites back on Earth with all our backups—but anyone who found them could have replicated the whole experiment from the start.

  I move slowly through the raised rows of plants. It looks like they’re all the experimental phenotypes I worked with. The moonflower (a potent Datura) has been tweaked to increase brain stimulation and might someday help people with ADHD or Alzheimer’s. The devil’s weed (derived from a fascinatingly complex Asclepias species) is an improved painkiller. The belladonna (or deadly nightshade, an odd cultivar of an already rare Atropa species), a better antispasmodic. The devil’s weed and belladonna will still probably make people hallucinate; there’s a lot of other chemicals in these plants, and nobody knows quite what they do. Which is why I was studying them.

  In my dreams, the flowers are here, but there’s always something wrong with them: stems twisted, leaves curled as if with fungus, blossoms blackened, like dead stars. These look nearly perfect but for the usual greenhouse flaws, like a few withered leaves here and there. I’m afraid, awed, and envious; someone else got to do the work I wanted to do.

  A plastic bucket clatters to the floor near the wash sink. The sound makes me jump even though I was expecting it sooner or later.

  There, on the floor. A creeping, bubbling mass of protoplasm, shivering as it emits a terrible buzz that bores straight into my brain. I can’t describe the color of the thing; it seems to change shade as it bubbles, but none of its vile hues would be seen on a living Earth creature. The spawn oozes the rest of itself through the grate of the floor-level register, and it’s rising, rising, taking a shape, like a huge necrotic cancer cell. The horror of it is more than the sum of its parts; its very existence is an insult to the idea of a loving, sane, just God.

  The buzzing. The buzzing. I think it’s going to break my skull in half.

  In my memories, this is where I bolted and ran back the way I came.

  In my nightmares, I stay rooted to the spot as the thing devours me with acidic slime.

  Today, I grab a claw-headed cultivator from the shelf beneath the nearest plant table, and I start slashing the abomination with as much force as I can muster. The steel prongs rip boiling gashes in the spawn’s gelatinous flesh, and the stench of disease and rot steams forth. It flinches, but I’m not seriously hurting it. If it has internal organs, they’re too deep for the prongs. There’s an awful noise, and it takes me a moment to realize it’s me; I’m screaming obscenities at the top of my lungs.

  I spot a big plastic bag of quicklime under a table. That might do it.

  I drive the cultivator as deep into the spawn as I can and lunge to grab the bag. Rip it open and fling twenty pounds of gritty, corrosive calcium oxide onto the wounded spawn. It emits a shrill fluting screech as the quicklime eats into its gelatinous form, burning it. The heat of the chemical reaction is startling, and I step back. The spawn is thrashing as it melts like a slug under salt. I cough and retreat further as the corrosive powder hanging in the air burns my nose, and I swipe at a burning itch on my wrist that I figure is a spot of lime—

  But I feel my flesh bubbling beneath my fingers, and my heart nearly stops.

  I look down to confirm disaster. It’s not a chemical burn. Sometime in the fight, the spawn stung me with a pseudopod. Its cells are invading my flesh. It’ll go into my bloodstream, my internal organs, my brain. It’ll make me into its clone, and my bones and muscles will melt into foul, murderous jelly. My memory briefly flashes on Yi screaming and melting inside her spacesuit. If I’m lucky, the transformation might take
an hour; if I’m not and my immune system puts up a good fight, I’ll be in agony for days. And then I’ll be a monster.

  I will die before I let that happen.

  I stumble among the rows, plucking blooms from every species, shoving them into my mouth, chewing up their nectary bitterness and swallowing them down. Even with the genetic modifications, I’m eating enough toxins to kill a dozen people. This should be quick, unless I start vomiting before an immediately lethal dose enters my bloodstream.

  I keep devouring flowers until my knees buckle, and I collapse onto the tiled floor. My vision blooms with color. I’ve never taken a hallucinogen before, and the swirling fancies are a pleasant distraction from the sharp ache in my distended stomach and the cramping in my infected arm.

  Death surely waits. Not long now. Not long now . . .

  * * *

  I awaken slowly. The bright lights make my eyes ache. It takes me a moment to realize that I’m lying on my back on the greenhouse floor. The same spot where I collapsed. How long ago? I lift my smartwatch to my blurry eyes; if it and my memory of the time are correct, I’ve been here for twelve hours. And I’m not dead. But my hands and arms look dead: my flesh has turned a streaked, greenish blue as if from extreme hypoxia. Or poisoning. But I’m breathing, and my heart is still beating, though it feels different than before. Muffled. My chest feels full and strangely congested. I don’t know what that means, but I’m not in pain. My lungs feel itchy and clogged, but I’m getting air. In fact, it feels like I’ve got far more lung capacity than before, as if sometime in the night I traded organs with an opera singer. I check the sting site on my wrist, and my flesh bears a purple scar like a healing burn.

  I’m absolutely stunned to be alive. Has my body cleared the spawn’s infection? What about the poison? I certainly look very, very poisoned . . . but I mostly feel fine. I don’t believe in miracles. There must be science behind all this, but it’s beyond my knowledge.

  I get to my feet and survey the greenhouse. My vision and head are clearing. Everything looks the same as when I lost consciousness, though the dead spawn at the other end of the room has completely cooked down to a tarry, white-crusted mess that stinks like a tire fire. I listen for voices, but instead, I hear the distant buzzing of spawn in another room. The door beyond the dead spawn is shut, but the light above it glows green. I’m almost certain it was red and locked before.

  I push through the door. It’s almost completely dark inside, and I can hear the buzzing clearly. I cautiously step further into the room, and the door slams shut behind me as the lights snap on. I’m in a grey battleship interrogation room. The wall to my left is made of tarakium modified to function as a one-way mirror. But there’s no table or chairs in this room.

  There’s just the hungry, shuddering, bubbling spawn in the corner.

  I realize I should have brought another cultivator or something to use as a weapon, and the realization makes me angry with myself, angry at this nightmarish simulation or re-creation or whatever it is, furious with the twisted psychs and brass who set me up, and absolutely enraged at the disgusting spawn rising in front of me, so I open my mouth and take a deep breath to scream obscenities at it—

  And instead, I cough out a blue-black cloud of smoky particles that billow onto the spawn. The abomination flinches away, attack abandoned, its pseudopods and blistery multi-pupil eyes retreating into its gelatinous mass. It spasms, shuddering as if it’s trying to sneeze. Surprised, I taste the powder coating my tongue, and I realize isn’t ash or soot. It’s bitter, sweet, and the grains are sticky. Pollen, I realize, amazed. I’ve just coughed up a whole bunch of pollen onto the monster.

  Each tiny coal-speck of pollen dissolves on its glistening surface, and the spawn is in visible distress. At first, I think it’s an allergic reaction, a rash, but the nodules rising on its flesh burst open, and I see tiny rootlets sprouting. My pollen is fertilizing the cells beneath, and they’re becoming my seeds. I am simultaneously repulsed, astonished, and delighted.

  The seeds grow with a vengeance, sending spiny roots all through the monster. It stops buzzing and emits shrill fluting screeches as the roots spread like strangling kudzu through its bulk, impaling and crushing it.

  “Not so nice when someone does it to you, is it?” I sit down on the floor to watch it die.

  It takes an hour for my vines to utterly annihilate the spawn. When it’s all over, there’s something like a tree’s root ball there on the floor. I think that if I could just find a nice, deep patch of dirt, something very interesting might grow.

  One thing bothers me, though: I can still hear the buzzing. It’s very faint, and it’s extremely far away, but I can still hear the spawn. All of them.

  I had forgotten about the one-way mirror behind me, but I hear the click of a speaker coming on and remember that I’ve been watched this whole time.

  “Ms. Muñoz.” It’s Lieutenant Colonel Mercedes Patel’s voice.

  I stand and face the mirror but resist my urge to salute. “Yes?”

  “I’m pleased to report that you have passed your final exam with flying colors,” she says.

  “Why did you decide to try this . . . experiment with me?” Dark pollen puffs like cigarette smoke from my lips. I’m still furious with her, but for now, at least, curiosity is an effective tarp on my emotions.

  “That’s largely classified, I’m afraid. But I can tell you that our researchers discovered that people like yourself who are long-term survivors of initial encounters with the spawn have particular genetic traits that, under the correct conditions, can produce interesting physical enhancements when they are exposed to spawn for a second time. We have implemented customized training and testing programs for survivors. And many of these uniquely personal trials have produced uniquely successful results.”

  I stare at my blue hands, which seem greener now. “How many have survived your tests?”

  “That is classified. But know that you are not alone.”

  I clench my fists. I am alone. I’m supposed to help save humanity, but even if I succeed, I can’t rejoin any human group, not even the other soldiers condemned to space, and that’s a bitter leaf indeed. If Patel were in front of me, I’d punch her right in her face, but that’s why there’s a good thick tarakium mirror between us.

  I throw up my hands instead. “You’ve turned me into a walking biological weapon. That’s all I am now, isn’t it?”

  “You are a most effective soldier in our war against the spawn.” Her voice is sternly corrective. “You are still human in all the ways that most matter. You are a tremendous asset to our forces, our nation, and our planet.”

  “What happens now?”

  “You must stay here in deep space for a few more days, so the doctors can clear you for duty. Then, you will take command of one of our Shuriken-class vessels and a small tactical operations unit. Because of your condition, most of your crew will be remotely controlled android drones. We hope to assign you at least one living crew member, both for morale and for backup in case your other crew lose connection to their drone bodies.”

  “Someone I can’t accidentally kill with my breath?”

  “Yes.”

  “I want a laboratory,” I blurt out, staring at the root ball. I’m feeling strangely protective of it, and I don’t want it to dry up and die. “And a good greenhouse. One suitable for trees.”

  A pause. “I believe that can be arranged.”

  “And can we wrap this in some wet burlap, please?”

  “Yes. We’re just as curious as you are as to what’s going to grow.”

  * * *

  I rest my hand on the wrapped, dormant root ball as the autopiloted shuttle glides into the docking bay of the USS Flechette. We land with barely a bump, and the rear door slowly lowers. I unbuckle my flight harness and walk down the ramp.

  It’s chilly on the flight deck, which is fine. Extreme temperatures don’t bother me as much as they used to. I just need to sit naked under grow l
ights for a few hours each day.

  Six android drones stand at attention on the flight deck behind a human lieutenant. I blink. Is he human? He towers a head above them, and his skin is crocodile rough, blackened as if he’s been charred by a fire. He’s wearing a short-sleeved uniform, and his arms, neck, and face look as if he’s been torn apart and put back together with steel staples. As I stare, trying to make sense of what I’m seeing, recognition dawns.

  “Joe?”

  His grisly face splits into a smile. “Yep, it’s me. Good to see you, Bea.”

  “Good to see you, too. Not to be rude, but how did you survive all this?”

  He gives a laugh like stones grinding together. “I didn’t. But I’m here anyway. Well, let me introduce you to your crew . . .”

  Each drone steps forward as Joe gives their name, rank, and a brief career resume. It’s a good crew, competent and smart. The drones are all the same drab gray model, but they’ve each got a different color stripe around their torsos so people can tell them apart. They’re not human enough to seem uncanny-valley creepy; they remind me of crash test dummies even when they salute and address me in their pilot’s voices.

  After introductions are over, Joe sends a pair of ensigns for my cargo and dismisses the others. He steps closer. Joe stinks of death. I’m guessing they have the temperature turned down to keep his flesh from rotting. I don’t mind the smell, and my pollen can’t fertilize dead cells. I’m relieved that I’m no danger to him.

  “Can you hear them?” he asks.

  I know he’s talking about the spawn. The buzz of monsters massing amongst the stars. “I can hear every one of them.”

  “Are you ready to go kill those bastards?”

  “Absolutely.”

  In my mind, I see a thousand planets covered in my trees, and among them, I am never alone.