Fear the Abyss: 22 Terrifying Tales of Cosmic Horror (16 page)

"I heard the engines," he said tightly, looking past her to where the others had disappeared into the ship. "I woke and you were gone. Are you going to answer me?"

"It's all right, James," she said soothingly. She looked as she always had. Her green eyes were still clear and level. Yet she seemed a stranger.

The annoying high-pitched whine was getting louder, and his shivering increased. He felt his face, wondering if he was running a fever.

"I wish you had stayed sleeping," Shy said, closing the space between them. "Sleeping through the first stage is preferable." She took hold of his arm, trying to guide him back toward the ladder. Her hands burned hot against his skin and he tried to pull away.

"I'm sick," he whispered, and his breath came in a puff of white vapor. "The first stage of what?"

"It will pass," she promised, and pressed him to sit on an empty crate before he fell.

"What's wrong with me," he asked, every nerve in his body screaming.

"It's necessary," she whispered. The piercing tone he'd noticed before was getting louder, and dropping into lower registers.

The cold swelled, so much like fire in the way it raged through his nervous system. He might have screamed; he wasn't sure. He might have swelled and split, like Shy's dream of floating unprotected into open space. When at last the agony began to fade, he opened his eyes again.

Everything had changed. Shy scintillated, coruscated, fairly blazed with iridescent light. The cargo bay was no longer deserted. The space was filled with flickering crystalline shadows that crawled around and through each other. A strange liquid song filled his ears, alien and indescribable.

"Where did they come from?" Argol whispered, still pressed against the wall.

"From the diamonds," Shy answered. "They've been trapped on Neptune for millennia, unable to break away from the gravitational pull. We're helping them; setting them free."

"How humane," he breathed.

"After so long, they can't survive on their own outside the immense pressure," she explained. The living cold inside him seemed to listen to her words with a strange understanding. "They are symbiotic. Each one needs a host, a partner. We can be that for them."

Nejem and Rocha reappeared from inside the ship, and now Argol could see that same prismatic aura around each of them. They were also infected.

"Dennis and Inanna will take the first of them to Titan and Calliope," she said, "while the drones continue to bring more of them up from Neptune. They have agreed to let you stay here with me."

"What if I don't want this? What if people don't want to 'host' them, as you said?" he asked. He thought about running, but there was nowhere to go. The cold was inside him now, contained as a pearl within an oyster.

She gestured wordlessly to the bright ephemeral shadows crowded around them. She did not need to answer. There wasn't a choice.

"They've changed you." It was not a question.

"What do you mean?"

The cold encased his heart, but sorrow still welled. "You always wanted to be alone."

Shy shook her head, cupping his face with cold hands. "Now I'll never be alone again."

Jamie Lackey

Jamie Lackey lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and their cat.  Her fiction has been accepted by dozens of venues, including
The Living Dead 2, Daily Science Fiction, Beneath Ceaseless Skies
, and Post Mortem Press’
Torn Realities
. She reads slush for
Clarkesworld Magazine
and is an assistant editor at Electric Velocipede.  Find her online at www.jamielackey.com.

Lucas tried to shake off the cold sleep haz
e
and went over the numbers one last time. The ship's scans matched the probe's readings. Excitement spiked through his belly. "There's definitely life down there," he said.

"Carbon based?" Olympia, his wife and the team's second scientist, asked.

Lucas nodded.

Captain Argus--the only other crewmember awake--scowled. "Is it intelligent?"

Lucas shrugged. "We're not picking up any radio signals."

"How can anything survive with the temperature and background radiation down there?" the Captain asked. He'd obviously been hoping that the probe's readings had been wrong.

Life--especially intelligent life--would make his job a lot harder.

Olympia didn't bother to hide her excitement. "We don't know how it survives. It must have adaptations unlike anything we've seen before!" 

The captain rubbed his temples. "What exactly does that mean for me?"

"It means you let us do our jobs," Olympia said.

The captain scowled. "While I sit here on my thumbs and my team stays in cold sleep."

Olympia grinned. "Exactly."

*****

They launched their first rover. Olympia was practically bouncing in excitement. Lucas kissed her.

"This is really happening, isn't it?" she said.

"We have no reason to think that they're intelligent," he reminded her.

She squeezed his hand. "I have a good feeling."

*****

Two days passed. The captain glowered and Olympia's shimmering hope faded. The rover puttered about. Its cameras recorded hours of footage of the storms. It collected samples, and Lucas analyzed them. He used the information to perfect suits to protect the miners from the harsh environment, and he monitored the weather satellite. Thundering storms of radioactive steam raged on the surface.

The rover found a few patches of lichen. Lucas thought they were fascinating. They were extremely different from Earth's lichens, but they still used the same basic symbiotic structure. They fed on radiation instead of sunlight. The rover collected samples. Olympia pretended to care.

"Would the sensors have picked up life that uncomplicated?" she asked while he pored over chemical readouts.

"It's still life, Olympia."

"There has to be more down there."

*****

The captain leaned over his shoulder at the rover's camera feed. "So, do your readings match the scans? Is the crap that runs our ships really just floating around in the air down there?"

Lucas sighed. "Yes."

"Wow. That's--that's money in numbers bigger than I even know."

"Only if we don't find intelligent life," Lucas said. "If we find life, we try to establish a dialog, then go home." It would be great to find intelligence, he reminded himself. But the money would be nice too.

"It looks pretty empty to me. Empty and gray," the Captain said. 

Lucas couldn't argue. It was empty. And gray. Even the lichens were gray.

"It's standard protocol to start with passive observation."

"How long is this going to take?"

Lucas shrugged. "The suits aren't ready yet, anyway. I need to run some final tests on the atmosphere before I can finalize the design on the rebreathers."

"Will those spandex leotards you're sewing up really protect my boys?" the captain asked.

"It's not spandex. It's heavy duty elastic weave. Once I'm done with it, it'll be temperature resistant, radiation resistant, impervious to the acidic air, and extremely tear resistant."

The captain fingered one of the suits. "At least you're pulling your weight."

*****

"I want to drive the rover," Olympia said. "According to the scans, the whole planet is honeycombed with caves. The more complex life forms probably all live below ground."

"That is possible," Lucas said. "But the rover hasn't even completed one of its planned exploration circuits."

"Has it seen anything interesting?"

Lucas didn't bother to remind her that lichens were interesting.

He let her take manual control.

Then he went to bed.

*****

Olympia shook him awake. "Lucas, I found them. Come on. Get up."

Lucas pulled his jumpsuit on and followed her. He didn't need to ask what
they
were. He just hoped she wasn't overreacting.

The probe's cameras had switched over to grainy green night vision. It was surrounded by an army of writhing black bugs.

Lucas wasn't proud of the revulsion that raced along his spine.

It was hard to judge their size, but the smallest looked about equivalent to a cat. The largest were bigger than ponies. They all had ten trisected legs with a longer, almost prehensile appendages jutting out from their heads.

"I'm pretty sure that they're communicating," Olympia said. She turned the volume up, and terrifying chittering filled the room. "It's all clicks and things, but more aliens keep coming. Larger and larger ones. The language analyzer is doing its thing--we might start getting simple words soon."

Language was Olympia's biggest strength. Her language program worked with every language on Earth--but Lucas wasn't sure if it could decipher clicks.

And he wasn't sure he wanted the creepy crawlies to be intelligent.

"New thing," the language program translated in its flat voice.

Olympia whooped. "It's working! And they talk! We're about to make first contact!"

"The Queen is coming," the program said. 

"They have a Queen!" Olympia hugged him. "That means they have some sort of social structure! This is the best day ever!"

Lucas tried not to shudder.

A dialog box popped open on Olympia's screen. "It's ready to translate simple messages into their language. What should I say?"

Lucas shrugged. "We come in peace?"

Olympia laughed and typed the words in.

An error message flashed. "Guess that's too complicated," Olympia said. She typed in
Greetings
, and hit enter.

The rover clicked. The smaller aliens scattered. One of the larger ones approached slowly. "Greetings, new thing. We wait for the Queen."

Olympia chewed on her thumbnail. "I hate waiting."

"Maybe you should grab some sleep," Lucas said.

"You'll wake me when she gets here?"

"Yeah."

*****

The Captain didn't try to disguise his shudder. "My gut's telling me we can't trust those things. In fact, it's screaming at me to nuke the site from orbit."

Lucas's gut wanted the same thing. "Wouldn't do much good. They're deep underground, and they already live in a highly radioactive environment."

"That's fucking terrifying."

Lucas sighed. "They're different than we are. That doesn't make them our enemy."

"Doesn't make them our friend, either."

"Try to keep an open mind, Captain."

"Oh, I'm trying. What do you think those creepy pokey pincer things are for?"

Lucas shrugged. Exoentomology wasn't his specialty.

"I bet they stab things with them. And suck out their insides. Like spiders," the Captain said.

That sounded far too likely to Lucas.

The aliens started to skitter out of the chamber. Lucas leaned over and turned the volume back up. "She comes! She comes!" the flat voice chorused.

Lucas ran to wake Olympia.

*****

The Queen was the size of a bus. She hardly fit into the rover's cave. She stared down at the rover, then ran one of her front appendages over it. "I am told you speak."

Olympia hunched over her keyboard, and Lucas read over her shoulder.
I speak for others.

"What are these others?" the Queen asked. "And where?"

We are a different kind of life. We come from another world.

A long moment passed. "Prove it."

*****

"I don't know if this is the best idea," Lucas said.

"It's a show of good faith." Olympia dragged a few more files into the list of information she was planning to send to the Queen.

"We know next to nothing about her."

"Exactly. So I'm trying to open up the lines of communication. I'm not sending anything more than they put on the Voyager Golden Record."

Lucas sighed. "I still don't like it." 

"You've been spending too much time with Captain Argus." Olympia scanned her list one last time, and hit send. "I'm well within the first contact protocols. Everything is going to be fine."

*****

They started sleeping in shifts, so one of them was always available for the Queen. She didn't sleep.

Lucas missed having a warm body curled next to his. He hated eating breakfast alone.

And he hated sitting next to the monitor. The Queen occupied the entire screen--she had to be close to look at the pictures that Olympia had sent.

He didn't like the feeling of the Queen's tiny eyes staring at him. She had three rows of six eyes, all glowing green in the night vision camera.

"Are you really so... unprotected?" the Queen asked him, scanning the screen. "Your structure is encased by flesh, not the other way around?"

The question made Lucas's skin crawl. Most of the Queen's questions did. He told himself that he was being paranoid and unfair--letting his lizard-brain fears influence his thinking.
That's right
,
he typed.

"It seems like poor design. So many things could harm you."

Our planet isn't like yours. We couldn't survive here without a suit
.

"So you can create a protective outer layer for yourselves?" the Queen asked. "That is very clever. Are you wearing suits to survive in the stars?"

We have a vehicle that protects us.

"I do not understand
vehicle
.
"

It's a structure that moves. We live inside of it
.

"I would like to see one of these vehicles."

Lucas sure as hell wasn't going to go down there. Or let Olympia go.

"I have asked Olympia about emotions. I would also ask you about them."

Go ahead.

"I do not understand how they benefit you."

Are you saying that you don't have emotions?

"We do not. I see no use to it. They seem to do little but cloud your minds. Surely they have some use?"

We are social creatures. We don't have a hierarchy like you do, with one Queen. Emotions help us relate to each other. Help us work together. We are stronger when we work together.

"I do not understand. If you work together, aren't there more of you sharing the same resources?"

Yes, but working together allows us to gather more resources, as well.

"I do not see how that could continue to work in the long term. But I do believe I understand the concept. Thank you."

Lucas wished he'd stopped Olympia from sending those files.
You're welcome.

*****

He sat on his bunk and stared at the wall. He hadn't done anything but work and sleep for almost a week.

He missed Olympia. She hadn't done anything but work and sleep, either. Maybe she needed a break.

He ordered a cup of tea and went to the monitoring station. He knocked on the open doorway. "Honey, do you want to take a break?"

Olympia took the tea and gave him an absent smile. "No, I'm okay."

Lucas sighed. "I miss you."

She turned away from the monitor. She'd lost weight in the past few weeks, but she'd never looked happier. He wanted to pull her back to their rooms. "I miss you too. But this is--it's my dream. I'm actually communicating with an alien intelligence! This is the most important thing I'll ever do. We'll have time for us later. I promise."

He wanted to tell her that loving her was the most important thing he'd ever do, but the words felt manipulative and small. "Can't we take a little time for us now? Just dinner."

Olympia sighed. "Lucas, I said no. I'm busy."