Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror (14 page)

It occurred to him, partway through the first chorus, that the dust devils hadn’t registered on the radar.
Probably a glitch
, he thought, glancing at the screen. He thumped it a couple of times, which usually did the trick. Thing likely had a short somewhere in its innards. But the display didn’t change. There was the storm at the top, sixteen kilometers and closing fast. But there was nothing reading
between
the dragger’s coordinates and the storm.

He looked at the windshield again and asked the AI to bump the resolution and to magnify by fifty.

Immediately, he wished he hadn’t.

Alas, how terrible is wisdom

when it brings no profit to the man that's wise!

This I knew well, but had forgotten it,

else I would not have come here.

That was the first thing in his mind, that nasty snatch of poetry, though he had no idea where or when he’d heard it. He’d made it through three years of college before shipping out, and in between the courses on geology, physics, engineering, and suchlike, he’d had to suffer through a few lit elects, so probably he’d picked it up there and the words had lain dormant in his brain ever since.

This I knew well, but had forgotten it,

else I would not have come here.

What is it I’m seeing?
he thought, praying he wouldn’t find the answer.
What the fuck is it I’m seeing?

The procession marched along, west to east, swaying this way and capering that, flapping, lurching. It was hard to tell how many of them there were, because in places the creatures seemed to bleed together, one into the next. They were enormous, the tallest of them easily thirty meters high, some surely sixty meters long. Nothing alive was that big. Nothing alive had
ever
been that big. He thought,
A mountain walked
, and then he pushed the thought away.

Hey Jude, don't be afraid…

Bench shut his eyes, then opened them again, but the parade of monstrosities was still right there.
Don’t look. Don’t look, and you won’t see. Don’t look, and they won’t see you.
But no one survives the hardscrabble by lying to himself, and so Bench did look. He looked long and careful. He considered trying to wake Nonny, but she was deep in the grip of the emmas, and she’d be out until they wore off.

“Dragons,” he whispered to himself, as there was no one else to hear. “That’s what they are. They’re dragons.”

They weren’t dragons, of course, but somehow it was easier to watch the creatures once he’d put a name to them.

That’s when he noticed that his left hand was on the airlock lever, and a second later the computer warned him in its tinny, genderless voice that neither the dragger’s cabin nor its occupants were prepared for exposure, and he quickly pulled his hand back. But the marching things were singing, he realized, and they were singing to him. They were calling him to join them. There would be this one opportunity, and then there would never be another. Never, ever again. He told the AI to begin filming, and the recorder hummed to life. He sat there, disbelieving, yet certain he wasn’t hazing, though he wished to Hell and Heaven that he were.

They
weren’t
dragons…

And don't you know that it's just you, hey Jude…

… else I would not have come here.

Before the storm reached the procession, it had passed from view and taken its song with it. And when the sand and the wail of the tempest finally enshrouded the dragger, Bench McDermott was more grateful than he’d ever been in all his life.

01000110 01101001 01110110 01100101

Peter Sazerac (Doc Pete to his team) sits on the floor and stares into the cylindrical holding tank where his softsuit floats suspended in the bluish gel the chemo geeks call “the soup.” In fact, it’s a complex emulsion of hypersterile organic and inorganic compounds—a finely tuned and constantly monitored environment that allows the living cells to survive indefinitely free of their human host. The suits still give him the creeps, no matter how many times he’s donned his. Back in Nevada, his body was meticulously laser-scanned, and a wax model was created, from which a custom-made culture mannequin was then crafted, around which the suit was grown, beginning with a hybrid of stem cells and a sample of his own DNA. The resulting cloned organism is as alive as Peter Sazerac, though so many mutations were introduced during the process that it’s hardly an identical clone. The “skinbag” also possesses a biomechanoid prong that links with a surgically implanted port at the base of the wearer’s skull, entering the cerebellum, temporarily allowing the suit and the host to act as a symbiote. The suit is a highly modified human slipcover, capable of withstanding all the environmental factors inimical to unprotected walkabouts.

“It’s healing nicely,” says Oklahoma, as the door slides shut behind her. Her real name isn’t Oklahoma, but she was born in Norman and picked up the nickname during basic. It stuck. “No need to wait three months for a replacement.”

“That would have been a fucking situation,” he replies, though there’s a part of him that has no desire to ever set foot in the temple again. They’ve only gone so far as the area dubbed the anteroom. But there’s that other part of him, the part that made him a scientist, then led him to Mars, that aches to know what lies beyond the anteroom.

Oklahoma stands beside him, and she places one hand against the tank. “The graft seems to be taking perfectly. Clay did a number on you. How’s the leg?”

“I’ll live,” he tells her. “They say I’ll be good to go in a week or so.”

“I’m always surprised at how warm these tanks are,” Oklahoma says. “Any word on Clay, how she’s doing?”

“You’re kidding, right? The ward’s got her now, and it always will, till death do them part.”

“Yeah, the ward’s got her now. I don’t know why I asked.”

Oklahoma takes her hand off the cylinder and stares at it. “What do you think happened down there?”

“I’m trying not to think about it, truth be fucking told.”

Peter hasn’t taken his eyes off the tank. He counts the fingers and then the toes, none of which have nails. The skin is bare of even a trace of body hair, and the compounds in the flesh that repel cosmic rays give it the color and sheen of graphite. There are no nipples, no genitalia, no urethra, no anus, no ears. Where there should be a face, there’s only the Makroclear visor, tightly fused on a molecular level with the suit's epidermis.

 “I checked, and her last psych profile was clean as the inside of that tube.”

“If it wasn’t, she wouldn’t have been out there.”

“I was just—”

“Don’t sweat it, Oklahoma. I checked, too. I knew the results, but I checked, too.”

She sat down beside Peter, then and took his right hand in her left. His palm was sweaty, and she wondered, briefly, if that was a side effect of the antibiotics or if it was anxiety. Obviously the latter. Obvious to anyone who’d been in the hole when they found the idols and Clay tried to kill him.

“You think they’re ever going to let us see them again?”

“The artifacts?” he asks, finally glancing at her. There’s something about her close-cropped auburn hair that always surprises him. There’s a clove cigarette tucked behind one ear.

“I have a feeling the most we’re ever gonna get is holos. Probably damn decent holos, but I’m pretty sure they’re not going to chance another incident like Clay.”

“But you believe they’re going to send us back down the shaft?” he asks.

“I don’t think they have much of a choice. The Board’s not about to shut down the expedition, and they sure as hell aren’t going to settle for remotes. We’re dispensable, replaceable with only a minimum of inconvenience and expense. They’ve already named Clay’s replacement, right? I figure the only thing the tops are worrying about is that slice job and the PR mess back on Earth. But even
that’s
not going to stop them.”

“You were always this cynical, weren’t you?”

“Only since grade school,” she smiles, then uses her free hand to brush his greying bangs from his face. “You need a haircut.”

“Just now, I need a lot of things.”

“Including a haircut.”

He reaches out with his free hand and lightly thumps the tank. “I’m making up for baldy in there, okay?”

Since their last walkabout and that emergency extraction, the team’s hardly spoken to one another. There’s been nothing much but the debriefings, and of course those were one on one with the security officers. Still, Peter has no particular desire to discuss the subject, but he knows that’s Reason Number Two for Oklahoma’s visit, so he’s ready for the questions when they come.

“From what I saw before she cut you, they weren’t all that different from the carvings outside the temple, those hideous fucking gargoyles on the columns and capitals and the doors and shit. Sure, the idols didn’t look like basalt, but they were the same style—I don’t know what an architect would say—but the same style.”

“Why does everyone keep calling them idols?” he asks.

Oklahoma frowns and stares at him a moment.

“Well, what would you call them?”

“I don’t know. But assuming they’re idols is as premature as calling that place a temple. For all we know, they were part of some sort of art collection. I don’t like all this assumption when we have almost no data to back it up.”

She releases his hand and goes back to looking at the cylinder.

Peter sighs and rubs gently at the itching wound beneath his pant leg. “Okie, I’m well aware we have entered the land of freaky shit. I know that. But no one’s going to benefit from speculation. My nightmares are bad enough as it is.”

She shrugs, then apologizes. “Have you heard about Nzeogwu? She’s asked for a discharge.”

“No one’s going to let us out of our contracts. The best any of this team can hope for from the Conglomerate is to wind up in the ward with Clay, plugged to the gills with haloperidol, chlorpromazine, whatever cocktail of neuroleptics they’ve decided will keep us quiet and docile. Or death on the next walkabout. I suppose that would work just as well, without the unpleasant side effects.”

“Have you always been this optimistic?”

“Only since we opened those goddamned doors.”

Oklahoma takes out her lighter, takes the cigarette from behind her ear before she realizes what she’s doing and stops herself. “The skinbag should have protected her. When she touched it, the suit should have buffered crossover of any kind.”

“How do you figure that?” Peter Sazerac asks her. “The axons in the suit’s fingertips, its entire peripheral nervous system, feeds straight back through the jack. There’s no reason to think whatever she felt when she—”

“Doc, you’re about to make one of those assumptions you were just railing against. Bad science, and we can’t have that.”

“Fuck you,” he says, and she laughs. Then they sit together for maybe another half hour, just staring up at the bio-suit floating, only seemingly lifeless, and neither says anything else that matters.

01010011 01101001 01111000

Chase Greco is what recruiters call a “hard red.” She arrived on the Tharsis two weeks after the Conglomerate’s R&D facility became habitable, led the detail that brought the HQ mainframe online after months of setbacks, and she’s never left, and so far as anyone’s heard, she has no intention of ever leaving. If asked, she usually responds with a curt, “What exactly would I be going back to?” After three years, she became Division Head of Systems Integration, which might seem more impressive—she’s said this, too—if her staff consisted of more than two people. Still, the Board and their doppelgängers back on Earth know she’s as crucial to their operations as any keystone in any archway ever built. Yank her out, it all goes tumbling down. More importantly, Chase Greco knows this, along with pretty much everyone else on the campus and all those Conglomerate stooges toiling away approximately 1.52 AU (± 0.14) across that inky hard vacuum. This has, she’s discovered, made her pretty much untouchable. Most would use the word
indispensable
, but she prefers
untouchable
. This is not to say she pushes her luck on a regular basis, but it is to say she rarely takes shit off anyone.

Usually, Chase is a pretty happy little gremlin, perched there in her unlikely, and yet entirely logical, place at the top of HQs vicious trophic pyramid. But she’s a little less so today, because her domain has been invaded by someone a step or two below her de facto level on said pyramid. The Board—by recommendation of the Exped Division—has cast down upon her a nervous bureaucrat by the name of John Smith. She thought that was a joke at first, until she ran his creds, and sure as shit stinks, the son of a bitch’s name is indeed John Smith. John
Mitchell
Smith in full, but still. Anyway, making fun of his name gave her a leg up right from the start, and she’s taken every opportunity in the twelve minutes since to make John
Mitchell
Smith feel less and less qualified to be anywhere near her labs.

So, here’s the scene: Chase and her two underlings—her on-again lover Dylan, and Maxwell, who annoys Chase, but is brilliant enough she endures him—sit together in the ASA sensory retrieval module. The module is a prefab resilience bowl, vacuum-molded from a static resistant titanium-epoxy alloy, seven meters across, three-and-a-half deep, every inch of its surface a lattice of state-of-the-art quantum hardware (augmented with intercalated gooware canisters), audio and video codec tackle, coolant lines, coaxial cables, power conduits, and optical fiber connecters. Access to the module is only afforded by an aluminum catwalk leading onto the operations platform suspended above the hive. Chase, Dylan, and Max sit in their chairs there on the platform and stare at Smith, and Smith mostly doesn’t stare back at them. Chase is sucking on a cucumber-flavored Chupa Chup.