There’s a barricade behind the open hatch. Flensed silvery bones, some of them drilled and cracked, woven together with wire twisted into sharp-pointed barbs. A half-dissected skull stared at me with maddened eyes from inside the thicket of body parts, mandible clattering against its upper jaw. It gibbers furiously at terahertz frequencies, shouting a demented stream of consciousness: “Eat! Want meat! Warmbody foodbody look! Chew ’em chomp ’em cook ’em down! Give me feed me!”
Whoops, I think, as I grab for the hatch rim and prepare to scramble back up the tunnel. But I’m slow, and the field-expedient intruder alarm has done its job: three of the red-sprayed hatches behind me have sprung open, and half a dozen mindlessly slavering zombies explode into the corridor.
I don’t waste time swearing. I can tell a trap when I stick my foot in one. Someone who isn’t brain-dead organized this. But they’ve picked the wrong deckhand to eat. You and I, Lamashtu, we have inherited certain skills from our progenitor Freya—and she from a distant unremembered sib called Juliette—that we do not usually advertise. They come in handy at this point, our killer reflexes. Hungry but dumb, the zombies try to swarm me, mouthparts chomping and claws tearing. I raise my anti-corrosion implement, spread the protective shield, and pull the trigger. Chlorine trifluoride will burn in water, scorch rust. What it does to robot flesh is ghastly. I have a welding lamp, too, an X-ray laser by any other name. Brief screams and unmodulated hissing assault me from behind the shield, gurgling away as their owners succumb to final shutdown.
The corridor cleared, I turn back to the barricade. “This isn’t helping,” I call. “We should be repairing the—”
A horrid giggle triggers my piloerectile reflex, making the chromatophores in the small of my back spike up. “Meaty. Spirited. Clean-thinking.”
The voice comes from behind the barricade (which has fallen silent, eyes clouded). “Jordan? Is that you?”
“Mm, it’s Lilith Longshanks! Bet there’s lots of eating on those plump buttocks of hers, what do you say, my pretties?”
An appreciative titter follows. I shudder, trying to work out if there’s another route through to the reactor control room. I try again. “You’ve got to let me through, Jordan. I know where there’s a huge supply of well-shielded feedstock we can parcel out. Enough to get everyone thinking clearly again. Let me through and . . . ” I trail off. There is another route, but it’s outside the hull. It’s your domain, really, but if I install one of your two soul chips, gain access to your memories, I can figure it out.
“I don’t think so, little buffet.” The charnel hedge shudders as something forces itself against it from the other side. Something big. If Jordan has been eating, trying desperately to extract uncontaminated isotopes, what has he done with the surplus? Where has he sequestrated it? What has he made with it? In my mind’s eye I can see him, a cancer of mindlessly expanding, reproducing mechanocytes governed by a mind spun half out of control, lurking in a nest of undigestible leftovers as he waits for food—
I look at the bulging wall of bones, and my nerve fails: I cut the Teflon shield free, cover my face, and launch myself as fast as I can through the floating charred bodies that fill the corridor, desperate to escape.
Which brings us to the present, Lamashtu, sister-mine.
I’ve got your soul—half of it—loaded in the back of my head. I’ve been dreaming of you, dreaming within you, for days now.
In an hour’s time I am going to take my toolkit and go outside, onto the hull of the Lansford Hastings, under the slowly moving stars.
I’m going to go into your maze and follow the trail of pipes and coolant ducts home to the Number Six reactor, and I’m going to force my way into the reactor containment firewall and through the neutron shield. And I’m going to strip away every piece of heavily shielded metal I can get my hands on, and carry it back to you. When you’re better, when you’re back to yourself and more than a hungry bag of rawhead reflexes, you can join me. It’ll go faster then. We can help the others—
I’m running out of wall to scribble on; anyway, this is taking too long and besides, I’m feeling a little hungry myself.
Goodbye, sister. Sleep tight. Don’t let any strangers in.
About the Authors
Joanne Anderton lives in Sydney with her husband and too many pets. By day she is a mild-mannered marketing coordinator for an Australian book distributor; by night she writes science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Her short story collection, The Bone Chime Song and Other Stories, won the Aurealis Award for Best Collection, and the Australian Shadows Award for Best Collected Work. She has published The Veiled Worlds Trilogy: Debris, Suited, and Guardian. She has been shortlisted for multiple Aurealis and Ditmar awards, and won the 2012 Ditmar for Best New Talent. You can find her online at joanneanderton.com.
Michael A. Arnzen’s latest experiments in horror include a treasury of micropoetry (The Gorelets Omnibus), a set of horror-oriented refrigerator magnets (The Fridge of the Damned), and a web app for writers on the dark side (diaboliquestrategies.com). He is the recipient of four Bram Stoker Awards for his fiction, and is currently serving as Division Chair of Humanities at Seton Hill University, home of the MFA program in Writing Popular Fiction. Visit him at gorelets.com.
Marie Brennan is the author of nine novels, including the series Memoirs of Lady Trent: A Natural History of Dragons, The Tropic of Serpents, and the upcoming Voyage of the Basilisk, as well as more than forty short stories. More information can be found at swantower.com.
Mike Carey is the author of the Felix Castor novels, The Girl With All the Gifts, and (along with Linda and Louise Carey) The Steel Seraglio. He has also written extensively for comics publishers DC and Marvel, including long runs on X-Men, Hellblazer, and Ultimate Fantastic Four. He wrote the comic book Lucifer for its entire run and is the co-creator and writer of the ongoing Vertigo series The Unwritten.
Jacques L. Condor (Maka Tai Meh, his given First Nations tribal name) is a French-Canadian Native American of the Abenaki-Mesquaki tribes. He has lived in major cities, small towns, and bush villages in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest for fifty-plus years. He taught at schools, colleges, museums, and on reserves about the culture, history, and arts of his tribes for twenty years as part of the federal government’s Indian education programs. Now eighty-five, Condor writes short stories and novellas based on the legends and tales of both Natives and the “oldtime” sourdoughs and pioneers. He has published five books on Alaska. Recently, his work appeared in five anthologies: Icefloes, Northwest Passages, A Cascadian Odyssey, Queer Dimensions, Queer Gothic Tales, and Dead North.
Neil Gaiman is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than twenty books for readers of all ages, including the novels Neverwhere, Stardust, American Gods, Anansi Boys, Coraline, and The Graveyard Book; the Sandman series of graphic novels; and Make Good Art, the text of a commencement speech he delivered at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts. His most recent book for younger readers is Fortunately, the Milk. The Ocean at the End of the Lane, his most recent novel for adults, was voted Book of the Year in the British National Book Awards. He is the recipient of numerous literary honors, including the Locus and Hugo Awards and the Newbery and Carnegie Medals.