“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?
Yes, Toto. Yes, it is.
But I am a man. I am civilized. I am humanity’s ambassador to the stars. All right, I killed one of them, and that probably means some awkward paperwork back at the embassy, but it was an accident. I was attempting to establish a line of communication. Not my fault they don’t have robust diplomatic channels, after all.
So I try harder this time. As the other goblin cowers and screams silently – moreover, as the keening of her mind saws into me with all her grief and fear – I just flick the front of her helmet, just thumb and forefinger, like I was killing a fly. I expect a crack, but the industrial-toughness plastic shatters and quite a lot of it goes into her face and eye, but at least I can hear her now. At least we’ve established the possibility of dialogue.
“Just get out of my head,” I roar reasonably. “Stop it with the scratchy-scritchy stuff. I can’t be having with it.” I accept that, to an impartial observer, this may come across as a little less urbane than I intend, but with mind parasites surely it’s the thought that counts.
But she’s still screaming, and now there’s more blood and eye everywhere and she doesn’t seem interested in any kind of détente. I pick her up and explain my point of view to it, lay out my grievances and suggest some sort of dispute resolution, shaking the goblin for emphasis in lieu of bullet points. Surely we can get round a table and settle our differences like civilized monsters? At some point during this process she stops screaming and gives up on the mediation process.
The sudden cessation of sound is blissful. The near-absence of scritch-whisper is little short of divine. No false alarms this time, I can genuinely blame goblin mind-worms for all of my troubles. I sit down, feeling emotionally exhausted. It’s hard, Toto, it really is hard to survive, a lone human being lost in the Crypts for months or weeks or years. Sometimes you have to take pleasure in the simple things.
Speaking of which, my stomach reminds me I have dead goblins rapidly cooling, and maybe I shouldn’t encourage the horrible monsters of this place by leaving good food around the place.
I consider just bolting them, but the suits look problematic, like eating tinfoil and cling-film. I strip them off, or at least I tear the suits away, shredding them. I keep the name tags, though. The first goblin was Carswell P and the second Proshkin M, which is a weird coincidence when you think about it.
Being the rational human, I should probably ponder a bit, but my stomach is jabbing me urgently, so I decide that post-prandial cogitation is the order of the day and wolf them down.
And my, are they good! You’ve got to remember, I’ve been a long, long time with my modified gut fighting a dozen different alien biologies, proteins evolved in the light of other stars, means of storing energy less and more efficient than a little belly fat, weird sugars that’ll do more than rot your teeth. I mean, there are only so many places molecular chemistry can go if you’re built around the carbon atom, but a lot of those places are far from Earth. But these goblins, oh, man, these goblins. I never had anything that went down so smooth. They’re made of stuff my microbiome tore into like it was pork chops and sausages. No long hours of aching and nausea as my stomach tries to conquer yet another unfamiliar biochemistry. You’d think the goblins had been made to be eaten. The only problem is how tiny they were. I crunch those two up like popcorn and they barely touch the sides.
But there are more of them out there. I can hear their whispering. It’s not maddening yet, not now I’ve worked out my issues a little, but I can feel it rising again. I can feel them out there, the delicious little noisemakers. I’m going to register a complaint with the neighbours, Toto. If they won’t invite me to their noisy little party, then I’m going to crash it and empty the buffet.
CHAPTER TWELVE
I HELD ON to my helmet for far longer than I should. For quite a while I sat in the lit section, trying to call the Mission Team, or Karen, or anyone. After getting nothing but dead air, I jury-rigged the receiver so I could search frequencies, scanning for any kind of communication at all. Sometimes I felt there were patterns to the white noise, like whales passing beneath choppy water, but I never got anything. The stone of the Crypts and the general electromagnetic fritziness of the place makes long-range communications nigh on impossible. But when I finally realised it was move or die, I took the helmet with me, dangling from my hand like a teddy bear for the whole first [period between sleeps] of my odyssey. The battery was going anyway, and the red lights on the HUD weren’t even touching on how fucked I was, but I couldn’t abandon it even though it was just dead weight.
I could have taken off the suit, too, but the Crypts were too damn cold, no matter how clumsy it was.
Sometimes I called out, until the echoes of my own voice curdled into something nasty and I began to think that the only thing worse than being alone might be not being alone. Soon enough my throat was too dry, though. I’d worked my way through all the water the suit had salvaged from all the water my body had profligately pissed away, and I reckoned I was probably on the fourth time round. The rancid stuff I was drinking was like an old friend, like a guest who turns up and doesn’t know when to go.
I found a second lit patch surprisingly quickly, almost as soon as the faint glow of the last had faded. I’d been blundering about in that pitchy dark when my fingers found tooled grooves in the stone. Following them a short distance, I saw a grey light ahead. It came from a single orb, weirdly un-luminous, sheened with mother of pearl. It had been set right in the floor by some alien race who presumably never stubbed their toes or tripped over things. You could put your hand to it, and there would be no silhouetting, no sense of actual light coming from it, and yet it bathed the passageway in a flat grey-white radiance for fifteen metres either way.
I remember just standing and staring, the helmet dropping from slack fingers (faceplate badly scratched, but who really cared at that point?) This was alien. This was the most alien thing I’d ever encountered. Save perhaps the Crypts themselves, and they were alien on such a mad scale you couldn’t really appreciate it. The lights in the previous section, taken as a whole, had they really been so different to those lights my neighbour Steve had put out in his garden one Christmas and just left there forever? Not so much. This would have shut Steve up about his water feature and his chrysanthemums, though. And it was there, untended and abandoned in the depths of this black maze, and so was I.