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

  Chydi stood up. She’d spoken to diplomats before—rooms full of people. Look above their heads, move your eyes around. But never like this.

  She told about the supernovae. “I don’t feel the Ktonni come from our galaxy at all. Their minds migrate through spacetime, using runespace.”

  The room fell silent, and the khargi asked, “How do you know this?”

  “Vivid, lucid dreams and recurring nightmares. In some, I found myself looking through an old-fashioned mystic tome, The Book That Never Sleeps.”

  “Charlatanry,” said the khargi.

  “Uncultist hysteria!” shouted the Dakoomite.

  “Nonlocality is on occasion a viable conduit of wildcard data,” Gi said. “Corroborating footage arrived yesterday by runeship. It remains classified.”

  A holo jumped up on the conference table, video from a deep space telescope. Glyphs of some alien language cycled through timestamps. The red fist of Kton blinked against the broader band of the galaxy, a ruby on a silver ring. Then a nearby star billowed outward, a classic supernova eruption.

  The timestamp spun faster; two more stars lit and exploded within . . . hours? Days? Chydi could not tell from the glyphs. Three dying stars ringed the red giant Kton. Her every nerve tingled. A brief surge of jubilant validation—I’m not crazy—gave way to a deeper, colder fear.

  “The light from this event only reached the Cele-Kton Cluster a few months ago,” Gi said. “It will take many more years to reach us.”

  “What can do this?” her father asked.

  “Technology far beyond our own,” said Gi. “Thoughtful deliberation should continue until we reach a consensus. However, I will dispatch a Living Ship to investigate Taral. All are welcome to contribute to this task force.”

  At that, all the envoys started speaking at once.

  “Thank you, Chydi,” the pawn murmured in a low voice. “You may go.”

  Chydi rose and left. The diplomats ignored her, save for her father staring a hole in her back. How could he stay angry when the Association—Brakandy with it—teetered on the abyss?

  * * *

  “You’re leaving?”

  “I snared a driftcore gig,” Kaldoun said. “The driver got called up on accoun’ of this Taral mess.” Kaldoun packed her kit bag in a rush, dashing about their salon. “I be back in six weeks.”

  Chydi collapsed onto the divan, drained by everything and now this. She wanted to share a water-womb soak, but Kal worked as a freelance pilot, working when it suited her, vanishing for months. It dampened things, no doubt.

  “Chydi?”

  “Yes?”

  “Take care, okay?”

  Chydi smiled. “I will.”

  “I hope an’ hope so.” Kal kissed her with an uncharacteristic undertone of sadness and left.

  * * *

  Chydi soaked in a zero-gee bath, banishing everything complicated until she decided to visit a sensorium. Kaldoun would not mind; they kept things open-ended. She changed into a mix of silk and holos, heading out. A dose of placidium took the edge off her irritated skin.

  Soft lights marked the evening cycle as the humming walkway whisked her toward downtown. The seventeen decks of the Social District provided the beating heart of the Circlet’s never-ending nightlife. But tonight, the vibe felt harsher, edged with a fin de siècle ambience, the grim news driving people to desperate excess.

  She could relate. It was what she craved.

  Club Club glimmered at the end of a pier, the pink sand castle where she’d first met Kaldoun. Grav stasis held a kaleidoscope of slabs together. Synesthetic data—music, light, fragrance—pulsed through every room, synched to link progs and aerosol hallucinogens. Assignations took place within bead-screened alcoves.

  She tasted and touched, surrendered to the scene, drowning out everything else. Near dawn, she stumbled home, fearless along the Circlet’s safe and well-lit boulevards. She never saw the shadowy figure that followed her into the studio.

  Eyes like yolks gleamed in the dark. A scale-faced Uncultist in indigo robes and metallic face paint showed a mile-wide smile and a blade.

  “Hear the Call of Kton,” the attacker hissed, “the Eater of Stars.”

  The shock dagger struck true, and the pain exploded through her nervous system, like the primordial singularity. Then, oblivion.

  III.

  He stared at the white fog of runespace from behind a triple pane. He’d already tried the door. It would not open. He pressed the call button again and again to no avail.

  The locked room looked like a Brakandean hospital suite. A regen pod filled half of it, but he’d awoken on the bunk. He suspected the Permanence, his father’s starship.

  Every nerve stung. Every bit of skin burned. His body, twice ravaged by regen, wanted to die. He’d seen the hollow concavities in the mirror, raw red scars of the knife’s bite.

  He chose not to call himself female now—not until he could undo this cruel reversal. Ashi lacked male and female pronouns, but he still thought in his native tongue. He could not escape Brakandy, it seemed, but he would keep the name: Chydi.

  * * *

  An hour later, his father walked in wearing the teal-and-cream uniform of Brakfleet.

  Chydi glared.

  “You look like dockside riffraff,” father said, a sparkle in his eyes.

  “How could you?”

  “Extropy is the restoration of order.”

  “You had no right.”

  “This is Brakfleet, not the Circlet.”

  With a groan, Chydi dropped to the bunk. “A second regen so soon could have killed me.”

  “The stabbing could have killed you. The regen saved your life. I only instructed the doctors to undo your youthful folly.”

  “How could they? That’s illegal!”

  “I have the authority to disguise your identity to prevent further assassination attempts.”

  Anger ran through Chydi, but arguing never swayed the admiral from his course. “Was anyone else hurt?”

  “The attacker committed ritual suicide after setting your studio ablaze. You’re lucky not to have burned to death. Thank Gi’s persistent surveillance; the machine intervened with vacuum nozzles and cryo foams.”

  “Kaldoun?”

  “Away in some ship.”

  Chydi breathed relief. “So it’s back to Brakandy.”

  The admiral fixed him with a hard-eyed stare. “Naïf. This fleet succors Taral. We shall sweep the stars of Ktonni cylinder-ships, sunder them from all energy and purpose.”

  To fry them like fish, Chydi thought. “You sound like Kaldoun. Why bring me?”

  “Gi thought your visions could be useful.”

  “You do not.”

  “No. You provided the machine some slim verification, nothing more.” For the first time, his father looked concerned. “Unless you had more dreams?”

  Chydi considered and shook his head. “Nothing since the dagger. How long have I been under?”

  “We are eight weeks out of the Circlet, a few days from Taral. When the moment comes, join me on the bridge. For now, rest and repent. I suggest the Cantos of Salt.”

  He left; Chydi suffered.

  * * *

  Forty thousand tons of Brakandean steel slunk through the gloom, traversing a formless, inchoate shadow universe where black anti-stars pulsated amid the roiling, white aether. The umbra of Taral’s star loomed closer by the day as Permanence chewed up parsecs, like so much saltwater beneath an ancient prow.

  They hit the edge of the system’s gravity well. Vibrations sent raw, coursing power through the floor gratings and up Chydi’s boots. Illimitable fractal lightning, kilometers long, boiled and roared on the edge, illuminating vast tracts of the billowing void.

  Klaxons sounded, bulkheads sealed, and crew shouted, running for crash couches. Hazmat teams stood by in vac suits.

  “Dropping! Dropping! Secure for realspace!”

  Chydi clung to his grav harness as the ship shot back into
reality. Gravity, linearity, and three-dimensionality hit like a doubled-fisted gut punch.

  “Can you feel it, boy?” His father swung in the next harness over. “Can you taste dominion over space? This is my moment of bliss.”

  Chydi felt only nausea and the wrenching forces spitting them between realities. Father should shut up.

  Lights and sensors came online, harnesses relaxing as gravcon kicked in. Brisk, competent junior officers snapped out stat checks in Ashi:

  “Transition normal.”

  “Taral Sys astrometry confirmed.”

  “Fleet radio reestablished.”

  “Weapons online in thirty, twenty-nine . . .”

  “No unknown tracks. Repeat, no unknowns.”

  “Primary sixty AUs starward.”

  * * *

  Permanence rejoined the Stellpax formation. Chydi stood with his father at the forward screen. Other screens showed the rest of the fleet. The sight impressed.

  Three missile wasps from Crystal Fleet flew high guard, Kaldoun’s people driving elegant spindles on vortex engines. The draconic hulk of an Eightieth Dynasty man-o’-war paced the van, gunports open, thanatomic missile racks displayed. Permanence took its place in formation, one of seven ships arrayed in a sphere around the flagship, Demiurge.

  The dreadnought was one of Gi’s Living Ships—a crewless artifact from bygone days, commanded by an ancient machine intelligence almost coeval with Gi itself. Four hundred thousand tons of asymmetric titanium glittered like a diamond. This task force could smash any pirate fleet and render any planet in the Association amenable to Gi’s governance—or uninhabitable. But against the Ktonni? Chydi doubted.

  Fleet comm buzzed with ship-to-ship chatter:

  “No hostiles detected.”

  “No signals from the planet.”

  “Fuel depots alpha through gamma destroyed.”

  “All in-sys buoys lost.”

  Demiurge addressed the fleet, its voice a baritone echo of Gi. “Execute formation five, medium scatter on approach to Taral III. Tsuarzarg takes point; Crystal Fleet on high; Permanence, you are rearguard. Synched velocity zero null zero niner cee on my mark. All ready?”

  All ships acknowledged.

  “Execute.”

  * * *

  The orange disc of Taral’s star loomed larger by the hour. Sensors picked out a speck transiting the orb, little more than a dust mote. This was Taral III.

  Few ever bothered about it before the attack: a marginal world on the coreward edge of the Association but with a breathable atmosphere—and twenty thousand inhabitants, once.

  As the fleet approached, every scope surveyed it. Little touched by civilization to start with, Taral III looked undamaged, still wild. The EM band crackled with only natural, background radiation.

  “Resolving main subcontinent,” said the sensors officer.

  “Project,” said Admiral Sochum. A dark mass swarmed across a dusty plain.

  “Biosphere looks intact,” the officer said. “Autochthonous herds on annual migration.”

  “At least the Ktonni are not biocidal,” Chydi murmured.

  “Logical. They only want civilized brains,” his father said, pleased.

  Chydi could not shake a premonition of doom. “They want the ants out of their garden.”

  “Displaying Taral City now,” the officer said.

  Association architecture, modified for local conditions, filled the screen. But it all lay in ruins. Residential domes hung like shattered hulks. Warehouses formed of polymerized rock amalgamate lay in twisted heaps of slag. The broken shards of a towering, glass-and-steel parallelogram, headquarters of the Taral Company, reflected fractured, amber sunlight.

  Something else, too. Something unnatural. Chydi’s spine tingled. His throat went cold.

  Black, yawning apertures pockmarked the city, like so much buckshot emptied into the terrain. Each pit looked a hundred meters wide, depth unknown.

  “What are those things?” his father asked.

  “No data,” said the XO.

  But Chydi knew them from The Book That Never Sleeps: Ktoggoth Pits, rat-snares for vermin.

  Something gleamed in one of the boreholes.

  “Ambush!” Chydi screamed, yanking father’s arm. “Run!”

  The Admiral yanked the stick back hard as the trap fired.

  Dozens of beams of incalculable force lanced upward from the planet’s surface, targeting each ship. Crackling at light speed, the shafts covered a million klicks in seconds, too quick to evade.

  The Crystal Fleet ships shattered in sprays of decoherent glass. Implosions engulfed the other ships of the line. Even the mighty Demiurge, hit by multiple shafts, disintegrated after a moment of incandescent defiance. The beams cut the task force apart with pure antimatter.

  Not even Permanence escaped. His father’s reflexes and the ship’s rearguard position saved it from instantaneous destruction, but the beam still cleaved its bulk. The rupture triggered cataclysmic destruction. Klaxons blared and the ship’s crew scrambled.

  “Catastrophic hull failure,” intoned the ship’s AI. “Energy release in nineteen . . . eighteen . . .”

  “Abandon ship!” father bellowed. “To the pods! Get in the mist-mothered pods now!”

  “Come on!” Chydi yanked him toward the executive lifeboat. “They know what to do!”

  The two of them tumbled into their pod and fled the doomed ship. Grav-harnesses fastened only seconds before a sunbright light unleashed a few hundred meters away.

  The Ktonni barrage had immolated an entire Stellpax task force in seconds. It was as if these beings treated low-tech sentience like pests, taking some for samples, leaving traps for the rest. They could destroy the Association on a whim—on a whim—but might never bother.

  So much junk filled the electromagnetic spectrum, they couldn’t even make radio contact with the other pods. They braced for another beam to sweep them out of space, but it never came—not worth the energy expenditure, perhaps. They put on vac suits and gritted their teeth.

  With nowhere else to go, the pods fell toward Taral.

  * * *

  They’d crashed on the fringe of Taral City, far from other pods. Father had formed a plan of meeting up with resistance cells. It seemed a foolish hope, but he possessed a map of secret defense installations, rendezvous points where survivors might meet. They’d set off into the ruins.

  For the last hour, a slithering, shapeless thing had tracked them. Distant, panicky blaster fire punctuated by screams told the fate of the other pods.

  “Faster!” father shouted. “One more block!”

  Masonry tumbled as Admiral Sochum, sweat-grimed and dust-covered, found a blast door. “This is it. I know it,” he said, working the magnetic combo-lock. “Niner, zero, five . . .”

  Sentience, something thought-whispered from afar. Rubble shifted a few houses down. The lock clicked open.

  “I’ll hold it off,” his father said, shoving Chydi inside. “Someone must survive to warn Gi.”

  “You can’t fight it!”

  Father drew his astra, a sacred plasma torch. “I can try. And for what it’s worth, Chydi, I did you wrong. It was only my fear, but now, I find I have none. So go, and let permanence guide right action.” Then he welded the blast door shut. It closed Chydi off from father, from the world.

  Sentience, the ktoggoth whispered.

  Chydi scrambled deeper into the ruinous bomb shelter. Shattered pipes lay amid decaying corpses, reeking with flies and bugs. A few banks of emergency lights cast shifting beams across festering pools full of bricks and bones.

  Sickened, he stumbled and fell. Beneath his feet lay a wrecked sentionic doll, a pallid figure in a black gown. It lay in an ammo box, its lifeless eyes turned to the ceiling. Some child had loved this bot and left it. Just one of thousands, now gone.

  The ktoggoth never even opened the blast door. It just flowed through as if physicality didn’t exist.

  Sentience . . .
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  Otherwise helpless, Chydi prayed. “Mother of Mists, let nothing change. Mother of mists, keep everything the same. Mother of Mists, ward off entropy, death, and decay, forever—”

  IV.

  I awoke immobilized, without heartbeat or breath. An olive grid dominated my visual band, overlaid with twisting glyphs of no humanoid design. Input flooded in from unfamiliar spectra: ultraviolet, exoradio, infrablue, supergamma. Opposite stood rows of cylinders on shelves. Lights blinked on their grids. Outré wires and coils ran to ceiling valves.

  Panic yielded to a growing horror. The Ktonni had taken me. They had cut my head open, captured my brain.

  “Welcome to hell,” said a buzzing voice. It came from another cylinder, but reassuringly, it spoke Ashi. “What’s your name?”

  I had no mouth to answer with.

  “Depress the shining tetrahedron in the upper left of your display,” the voice said. “Use the focus of your consciousness as a stylus. This will activate your logos, a neural-audio interface.”

  I managed and gasped, “My name is Chydi. Is this a Ktonni ship?”

  The cylinder buzzed like grasshoppers. “The Ktonni are puppets, just one tool of the masters. This is a hypernexus.”

  “A what?”

  “A place inaccessible and inconceivable to transhumanity, built of mental energy.”

  “And you?”

  “Cowl the Antiquarian: once human, by and by a necromancer, now a madman! Thousands of years ago, on a world fallen to savagery, I sought lore within the ashes of the Astral Empire. I found the Ktonni, instead.”

  That worried me: such prolonged captivity sounded unthinkable. “You speak Ashi.”

  “Language is fluid and ever-changing, but we have time to learn them all.”

  His words damned my hopes. “Who are these masters?”

  “Invisible, disembodied tyrants, revealed only by their puppets and devices. We call them the Old Things as they predate our universe.”

  “Impossible. The universe is all.”

  “Bah! Our universe is a mere fifty billion light years across. What lies beyond?”

  “Maybe a multiverse. How can I know?”

  “Multiverse? Anthropocentric prattle! Existence does not fork based on our meaningless choices. Beyond this are more universes, trillions! They spark to life, flicker for a day and fade like embers in a macrocosm vaster than we can conceive—each macrocosm in turn but a single mote within an even more unknowable whole: the Lattice.”