The Lacrima clears the obscuring edge of the alien craft’s length while Debussy swells over the ship’s speakers, rising into the middle section of the third movement of “La Mer”—the “Dialogue du vent et de la mer. Animé et tumultueux”—and Eliana is forced to slit her eyes when a baleful, red glow envelops the entirety of the ship’s cabin. On this side of the obscuring object, a deep, crimson pulsing blurs the light of distant stars. Like a breathing eye, the pulsing orb inhales and exhales light, the red shift deepening and paling sequentially.
Eliana screws her eyes shut and turns her face away from the overwhelming ruddy light, blindly swatting at the con panel, her fingers sighted, even in self-imposed darkness, through long practice. The Lacrima’s main viewport filters out the burning red shift and Eliana opens tear-streaked eyes, blinking away the stinging salt. Her newly opened eyes focus on the strange shape before her, webbed to the side of the still-all-but-invisible craft.
The thing attached to the side of the ship is hard to focus on, at first. It is roughly circular in shape, rising in an imperfect half-dome from the hull of the drifting, possibly derelict ship, and seemingly translucent. The hazy, ill-defined bulbous contusion on the alien ship’s hull runs the height of the craft and stretches over a quarter of its length, the enormity of the canker mind-boggling. The more Eliana focuses on the strange shape, the more she realises that it is not the dome that is red, but something within—something that pulses and breathes. Something that moves within the confines of the space, tentacled limbs roving and thrashing in amniotic dreaming.
With a Pavlovian reaction that tears at her gut and opens the floodgates of her memory, letting loose a torrent of buried images and sensations tied to the child who once gestated in her own womb, Eliana realises that the thing attached to the side of the alien craft is an egg. Her stomach dry-heaving, hand across her mouth, Eliana struggles to subdue the raging floodwaters crashing through her mind: images of her son laughing; his tiny hand in hers; his first step across bare, clattering floorboards; the soft, downy smell of him in the spring air; his first breath in an antiseptic hospital; his last, choking gasp for air as he convulsed and simply slipped away, cradled in her arms, her hot tears running through his hair and down into his staring eyes; his unmoving flesh clutched to her breast.
These and innumerable other moments, captured in refracted amber, steal the breath from her lungs and now, she does disgorge the contents of her stomach, what little there is in it rushing up as bile and sluicing out over her lips to blob and float away. Followed by tears that do likewise and choking sobs that echo in the small confines of the Lacrima’s cabin.
As Eliana cries, the tendrils of the thing inside the egg cease moving and it pulses once, deeply. For a few moments, it is silent, utterly still, as Eliana is wracked with the outpouring agony of her long-repressed grief. And then, all the tentacles of the immense, spacefaring entity thunder against the egg’s outer membrane at once, releasing a torrent of gravimetric waves that traverse the empty space between the alien craft and the Lacrima, slamming up against the pitted, already-cracked surface of the decaying vessel.
Eliana rocks in her straps as her ship shakes violently in the gravimetric storm. And then, one of the straps, long overdue for replacement, tears and she is hurtling through the cabin to smash up against the open viewport at the front of the cabin. Her head cracks sharply against the well-reinforced, poly-paned glass. And then there is only silence.
In the darkness in which she floats, there is a voice. It is her son’s. She knows this without thinking. It is as automatic a recognition as the ceaseless, effortless work of breathing. Eyes opening on a vast plane of darkness where no stars lie, she sees herself floating, then comes to stand upright on an unseen sense of solidity beneath her.
Her son is before her, rushing toward her, his small legs pumping quickly across illusory, solid terrain that cannot be seen, but is nonetheless felt. But Eliana has been here, before. She knows the illusion for what it is, even in this state, somewhere between dream and memory. Always, always in her mind is the knowledge of his death. Ingrained so deeply that neither sleep nor dream can steal the knowledge from her. She holds herself erect, dream eyes closed as her dead son throws his arms around her and holds her tight. She clenches her jaw and looks away from the small, thick arms cradled around her upper thighs and the warm, soft head nestled up against her navel.
Again, she damns her subconscious mind for thinking this will bring her peace or a measure of comfort. Doesn’t her symbol-ridden sense of self understand that nothing will ever be right again?
She keeps her eyes shut against the sight of her long-dead child, but opens them when the arms pull back and the warmth of him moves away. That’s new. Confused, Eliana opens her eyes. Before her stands her son, his head cocked at an angle, his body naked and pristine, so unlike the actual state of him in death, when the lesions had blossomed on his rosy flesh and his skin had rotted away in great weeping chunks. But there is something wrong with him, here. Something…different.
Eliana stares, unable to take her eyes from her dead son as he twitches, shudders and then convulses uncontrollably. She stands, rooted to the spot, unable to move her body, though every muscle screams to run to him and cradle his spasm-ridden body. Before her eyes, he throws up one tentacle, then two, then three, until his mouth is full with the thickness of a fungal bloom of cephalopod tendrils. He chokes on them, as she screams, and then tendrils are bursting through all of his skin, ripping it aside in order to be free of the cage of still-mortifying flesh.
She cannot stop screaming.
She is still screaming as she awakens, the sound loud in the silence of the Lacrima’s cabin. Debussy no longer plays over the collapsed speaker system, the ship’s silent collision alarm awake and blaring in swift, repeating, red pulses of light that mimic those generated by the entity now raucously beating at the shell of its cage, drifting between her ship and the debris field far beyond. Blood wells and orbs from a deep gash in her forehead, and her vision swims, but suddenly, Eliana understands, watching the tentacled entity beat at the cage.
It is trying to birth, but cannot free itself. And through the haze of her own floating blood, Eliana sees not the trapped tentacled entity, but knows it for what it truly is. Her son has come back to her. He has found her at long last. Tears well in her eyes, but now, after twenty years, finally, she sheds tears of joy. Her son has come back to her.
Eliana sets her jaw, straightens her spine and pushes off the cracked viewport with one steady hand. She floats her way back to the cabin’s pilot seat and settles in as best she can, grabbing for the helmet that dances away from her in the weightless air, everything bathed in the intermingled glaring reds of the struggling entity and the Lacrima’s alarm system. She adjusts the helmet over her head and snaps it shut with a violent twist, her suit filling with refiltered air. She closes her right eye against the sudden rush of properly flowing blood as it courses down her face, filling one half of her vision. Strobe-lit orbs of her blood still speckle the cabin, intermingling with the ever-present sparkle of her globular tears, filling the otherwise-empty space.
With the barest nudge on the control panel, Eliana sets the Lacrima’s impelling engines roaring to life and the battered ship slides forward, gaining momentum as she revs the hulk up to ramming speed. With a look of absolute joy on her face, Eliana sends the Lacrima slamming into the immense, tentacled creature’s egg, shattering it. Sheer portions of the collapsing egg fall away and shear sections of the Lacrima from the main body of the hull, opening parts of the engine room and auxiliary fuel dumps to the void of space. A thick, black, quickly-globuling leak of engine coolant and fuel bleeds out into space as the ship depressurises and portions of the hull begin to crumple inward.