More alarms went off. Life-support telltales went yellow and red. We re-sealed our spacesuits.
“I think that decision’s been made for us.” I gestured for my pod-brothers to brace for the necessary manoeuvers.
Throughout the series of thruster firings, I waited for disaster. When we landed and gravity resumed its pull, it took a moment to believe we had returned safely to Asteroid Urtukansk.
Or not-so-safely, I realized, as we exited Sally’s spaceship, just in time for Urtukansk’s companion to rise over a horizon all-too-close. Except it was no longer a solid mass but a cloud of fragments that continued in the same orbit as their parent body. Within it rippled the eye-twisting form of the monster that had killed two of my pod-brothers.
A panicky voice came onto the suit-radio circuit. “It’s coming after us!”
Before I could calm my pod-brother, Sally came on. “I’m taking the ship back up and trying to distract that thing long enough for you guys to blow your breeder reactor.”
There was no time to argue the wisdom of that plan. At least the task of running across an asteroid’s surface, without launching ourselves into orbit, kept our attention on the ground.
We were within a dozen meters of the reactor complex when Mirosha shrieked, “It’s got her!”
Behind us, a light flashed, casting our shadows in sharp relief on the rocks. I squelched the urge to turn and see what had happened. Sally had bought our chance and we mustn’t waste it.
Only at the airlock for the reactor complex did I pause. I pushed three of our surviving pod-brothers safely in, but even as I reached for poor, lagging Mirosha, the writhing mass overhead extended a tentacle that wrapped like a sinuous rope around his waist and lifted his feet right off the surface.
His shrieks of terror over the suit-radio circuit made my ears hurt, but there was nothing I could do for him. I shut the airlock behind me and hit the controls to cycle us in. When the screaming stopped, we knew Mirosha had met the same fate as Alyosha and Volodya.
Once inside, we hurried to disable the safety systems. All the time, we could hear that thing clawing overhead, trying to break in.
We had just shut down the coolant pumps when the roof gave way over the reactor. Atmosphere vented into space and, with it, everything not fastened down. I hit the buttons to withdraw all the control rods from the reactor.
The explosion threw me against the wall so hard I thought sure it would break the faceplate of my helmet. A flash of light filled the area and in that moment, I saw the hideous thing torn apart, reduced to a dust of ash so fine even photons would scatter it to the farthest reaches of the solar system.
Although the control room shielding did protect me, I still took a lethal dose of radiation. It just bought me enough time to transmit this account before my body fails altogether.
Now you must see that my warning gets to every mining outpost in the Asteroid Belt. There are things undreamed-of by our science, that can lie encysted for so many millions of years that the accretion of space dust upon them can form an asteroid around them. And when disturbed, can reawaken to a life inimical to our very existence—
[Choking sounds, followed by an open carrier for 15 minutes]
MYRISTICA FRAGRANS
By E. Catherine Tobler
E. Catherine Tobler lives and writes in Colorado—strange how that works out. Among others, her fiction has appeared in Sci Fiction, Fantasy Magazine, Realms of Fantasy, Talebones, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. She is an active member of SFWA and senior editor at Shimmer Magazine. For more, visit www.ecatherine.com.
ABENI BABA WAS accustomed to things falling apart in her hands: grains from distant worlds, the dead in autopsy, her marriage. As iyaloja of Aphelion Station, she found that things fell apart less than they once had, yet still, these corridors with their people and goods could surprise her, as happened when she took the palm-sized copper pendant from the opened sack of nutmegs. How had it come to contaminate the goods? This was her first thought, being that her purpose was to ensure clean and equal trade among the people; she was Mother of the Market, these traders her children, these goods her grandchildren. And this pendant—
It was marked with a figure: upward man and downward fish. When her thumb moved over it, the pendant came apart, silent and sure, and Abeni closed her hand around it so that none might see. Her dark eyes lifted to the vendor before her. Bolanle bowed her head, spreading broad hands toward the bounty of nutmegs she had procured this journey. Such goods were worth more than gold on Aphelion, yet Abeni would give them all up for a taste of sunlight once more.
“You journeyed to…?” Abeni’s voice trailed off, wondering from where these sacks had come. She knelt before them, one hand sliding over the canvas sack, finding it had no mark upon it. In her other hand, the pendant warmed, seemed to send tendrils of sunlight up the length of Abeni’s arm. Her fist tightened.
Bolanle’s answer didn’t interest Abeni: It was a common trade route, the nearest planet to the Aphelion Station. However, the dark man who emerged from behind Bolanle did interest Abeni. She watched this man, overly tall and thin, peer around Bolanle’s slender bare shoulder, borealis eyes widening as he looked down upon Abeni and the sacks of nutmegs. He reached with one impossibly long arm—Where was the joint for his elbow, for his forearm seemed to reach entirely to his shoulder?—black spindle fingers sliding with a whisper against Abeni’s own, holding a startling coldness that seemed like the very depths of space to her. So, too, his skin: black abyss, like that which stretched around and out from Aphelion.
“Mother Baba.”
The dark man dwindled and faded to nothing more than Bolanle’s shadow as she rounded her goods and knelt beside Abeni. Abeni felt the pulse of the thing in her hand and slowly rose, shaking Bolanle off. “It has been a long morning of arrivals,” she said, nodding to the traders who cluttered the docking ring and cargo bays. “And I’ve more to tend.” Her voice snapped and Bolanle withdrew. Abeni took one nutmeg with her and fled Bolanle’s stall without marking the requisite forms to allow her goods full entry to Aphelion. And if Bolanle opened her mouth to cry a protest, Abeni took no notice, so intent was she on leaving the docking ring.
Aphelion Station spread in five concentric rings, rotating on the edge of known space. Abeni had never been troubled by its motion before, for her work consumed her. But as she hurried away now, she caught sight of the whole and infinite black beyond the arched station windows, and she cried out, as if looking into the face of the shadow man. And then, Aphelion faded.
Abeni felt the pulse of the thing in her hand and found herself standing in a field of grain. Sun drenched the space and her. Abeni thought she would melt, that her entire body would liquefy and flood the ground beneath her. Her death would feed these grains until they were strong, until they—they whispered against her fingertips as she walked and under her passage, they grew. They changed. These grains, once green, flushed to gold and thickened. These grains, once only knee-high, pressed their roots into the soil and surged upward, until they reached skyward. Abeni lifted a hand, but could no longer touch the grain tips. And these tips, once gold, now burned under a flaring sun, turning black, the charred fragrance falling onto Abeni’s shoulders like snow. The grains closed over her then, pressing her to the dirt, until its darkness filled mouth and nose, until the shadow man snatched a hand out and pulled her into the earth.