Адриан Чайковский - Walking to Aldebaran

Karen was quick off the mark and had the drone up above/below the boundary layer, scanning down/up at the ceiling/floor beyond, still unsteadily because she was having to drive the thing with half the controls reversed. We had a shaky glimpse of a great yellow-brown leathery mass clumped in whorls and tangles, just about coating the entire ceiling. Here and there were clenched-fist nodules that I’d taken as eyes.

They opened.

This was all maybe thirty metres up, and five metres past the dust layer. We saw them unfurl and then flick at us, slender lances darting down like rain.

What happened was this: the thing was thrusting its pseudopods up , of course, not down, but once they cleared the dust then it was downhill all the way, a free lunch as its tentacles speared towards us. One of them struck Joe through the helmet, piercing the industrial-toughness plastic like a bullet and going most of the way towards his boots. There was an explosion of blood and cartilage from his knee where the tip came out. He wasn’t screaming. He was too surprised for that, though not as surprised as when the thing retracted its limb and whipped him up twenty metres up into the air.

For a moment he hung there, and, I kid you not, he had his bloody knife out and was trying to cut the thing, though the fall would have killed him even if the impaling trauma didn’t. Then with a great convulsion the tentacle hauled him to the gravity boundary and, from there, it was downhill all the way. He practically hit the remote as he tumbled, and a momentary sweep of its lamp highlighted the opening of a dreadful barbed orifice which swallowed him whole.

Like rain, I said; well, there’s never just one raindrop, is there?

Katarin was next. The lance plunged through her chest as she stood staring up, and I think it killed her outright. Louis was skewered through the thigh, and the whole chamber rang to his screams. Ajay ran and grabbed his hand, and nearly had his shoulder dislocated when the thing hauled poor bloody Louis Chung up in one muscular fling, his yelling cut off in a crunch that reverberated through the walls of the chamber.

Karen ran. I wish I’d run with her right then, but Ajay and I were just standing there like morons, babbling to one another, trying to raise Naish and the Mission Team, still thinking we could save anybody. I remember us turning to each other, clumsy in our suits like a pair of comedy puppets waving our arms and panicking at each other. We had not been trained for this, nobody had.

The next pseudopod plunged through his shoulder and into his chest. We had a moment of realisation, eyes locked, and I fumbled for his hand. Then he was gone, our fingertips brushing for a fraction of a second as he was whipped to his doom.

And I looked about the chamber, wheeling around, unsure of where we had come from, unsure which passage Karen had taken, panicking like a horse with a broken leg. And I ran. I ran the wrong way, if indeed there was a right way.

Later, after I’d skidded down too many corridors and all my HUD readings were red – suit damage, integrity compromised, running out of battery, running out of air – after I realised I was horribly lost, that I couldn’t find the relays (which I should have thought to look for when I legged it, but which had gone completely out of my head); after all of that, when I thought I knew just how screwed I was (I didn’t, there was more), I found a lit area. I don’t think it was the one we were looking for, but it was there, a string of dim reddish beads in a line along the ceiling for about a hundred metres. I collapsed then, weeping for the others – plenty of time later to weep for myself. Before I could follow poor doomed Louis’s example and wrench my helmet off so I could breathe the dead air of the Crypts for the first time, though, I heard a voice.

Karen. She was calling us. She was calling anybody.

“ …there? ” I heard. “ Ajay? Louis? …hear me? … Aanbech to Mission, …tor Naish, hello? ”

“Hello!” I cried out joyously. There was hope. She had survived! We would find each other and find our way home! Hope!

“ …hear me? ” she continued. “ Gary? ”

“Yes!”

“ Ajay? Anyone? ”

“Karen, it’s me!” I shouted, as though bellowing into the microphone and deafening myself would boost the signal.

“ …at the exit, but I can’t… the Quixote . There’s nothing here but… anyone? Quixote , where are you? Is this even…? ”

And then I lost her, and I have never found her since.

WELL NOW, MY little mind parasites. Caught you bloody red-handed, haven’t I?

So I go round the corner, and they’re even smaller than I thought, wretched spindly gremlins that barely come up to my waist. Fragile, too; they don’t walk these goddamn halls in their hairy birthday suit like I am. It’s silver suits and goldfish bowl helmets for them, and little lamps and torches everywhere because the mind-whisperers are scared of the dark. Even as I make my appearance, a butt naked demon king from the world’s worst panto, their voices keen in my head like swarms of locusts, like giggling imps, like the ghosts of the wronged dead. I almost think I hear the names of my vanished comrades amongst the chitter: Martino, shaken not stirred, Aanbech, Rendell. They know my name. The bastards know my name.

I want so much to stomp them into jam, to grind my heel on all that whispering and scritching until there’s nothing but a stain on the stone, but I am a man. Am I not, still, a man? Am I not a thing of reason, Toto?

What’s that, Toto? Kill them all? But no, I shall be merciful, if they only tell me why they torment me so.

I try to ask them. It comes out like a roar, but then I’ve been roaring inside since the scritchy started up, pacing about the bars of my psychic cage unable to act against my torturers. Now the lion is on the streets and he’s bloody pissed off, I can tell you. You rattled my cage, little goblin men. You hissed and whispered your glottals into my cerebellum and now I’m going to going to going to –

No. No, I will not. Not yet. Give them a chance. Let them explain. And so I ask again even as they cling together. I spit out interrogatives in English and Danish past the jut of my teeth. I see their pasty little faces go white and their mouths open and shut, but no sound comes out of their stupid helmets and the scritchy just gets louder and louder, a shrilling chorus in my brain.

“Just shut up!” I say to them. “Just stop, just, just, I’m not going to be able to stop myself, just stop doing it to me and I’ll go, I will! Just – stop! What’s that?” That slack circle of a mouth opening and shutting meaninglessly, a goldfish in the bowl. I grab one of the goblins. I shake the other one off and then I take the one I’ve got and dash it against the wall to break that helmet and let the words out. Only when I’ve done that, there aren’t any more words, just a lot of blood and shards of skull and greasy greasy grey that coats my hands. And although this one’s dead and no longer broadcasting its cicada song, the buzzing chitter from the other one grows louder and louder until I feel they’ve got a sawblade against my skull and are trying to do to my brain what I just did to their friend’s.

“Is that all you’ve got?” I bellow, or try to, but it just sort of comes out like a slobbering froth of sound. The remaining goblin is trying to scoot away from me, her suit scraping on the floor. The torch she dropped is turned on her now, like an interrogation. Her pale, terrified face, eyes wide with horror, a dash of blood across the clear dome of her helmet like a smudge of dirt on the cheek of a Dickensian orphan. Quite artistic, really, couldn’t have done it better if I’d planned it. And she’s screaming so loud and I want to tell her that (a) I can’t hear her and (b) you can make yourself deaf like that, ’cause I remember just how those helmets are. Maybe she’s begging, as well; you know, for her life. That’s the sort of thing goblins do just before they stab you in the back, isn’t it?