Distant Worlds Volume 2 Read online

  Distant Worlds

  Volume 2

  Benjamin Sperduto

  All stories copyright © 2015-2019 by Benjamin Sperduto

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover art by José Bethencourt Suárez.

  www.benjaminsperduto.com

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  A Small Plot of Land

  A Most Refined Taste

  The First Price

  The Harvester

  The Iron Face of God

  The Shoggulators

  Where Gods Fear to Tread

  Mira

  Lena’s Song

  The Cambyses Event

  The Temple of the Shrieking Goddess

  Sins of the Father

  The Wolf Queen

  A Small Plot of Land

  Originally published in Dark Horizons (Elder Signs Press, 2016)

  Originally written for a post-apocalyptic themed Cthulhu anthology, this one bounced around a few times before finding a good home. Aside from a reference to some ancient Aramaic script, though, there’s not much that specifically ties it to the Cthulhu Mythos. It definitely has that vibe to it, though, although it’s closer in spirit to William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land than to anything Lovecraft wrote. This story is one of my favorites. I “borrowed” the title from a David Bowie song of the same name. The story doesn’t have anything to do with the song (or Bowie), but I always loved the title and it served as the genesis of the story. The Dark Horizons anthology also has the notable distinction of being the only book with my writing that I ever found on a random bookstore shelf (and yes, I signed both copies).

  Tarkin knew something was wrong when the sunlight hitting the northwest quadrant started to slither.

  The light strangled a few rows’ worth of the protein bulbs he planted a few weeks back. They sprouted prematurely, loosing prismatic spores in a puff of pollenated dust that settled upon the rest of the crop. Within a day, the spores sapped the color from everything they touched, turning most of the quadrant into a mottled, grey and black waste. The infection was probably already in the root system, leeching further nutrition from the soil.

  It would have to come up. All of it. Every bulb, every root, every trace of cultivation. The entire quadrant needed to be cordoned off from its neighbors and decontaminated. Weeks of tilling, planting, and irrigation would be lost, all on account of a blown fuse.

  “Fuck.”

  Tarkin managed to reroute the energy flow on the northwest generator to get the filtration shields back to full strength, but the workaround put a lot of strain on the primary fusion couplings. The power core would be running hot until he either replaced the damaged fuse or the microreactor melted down and vaporized everything in a two-mile radius.

  He probably had little over a week. Two if he was lucky.

  Tarkin kept the warpsuit on until he reached the house. Although he’d placed containment field stakes around the infected area, he worried that something else might have slipped through the perimeter along with the diseased light. Only the generator’s spectrometer shielding appeared to have failed, but he thought it best to not take any chances.

  His wife wouldn’t take the news well. Nayla had been counting on a new crop of protein bulbs to pay for the parts she needed to fix the crawler’s warpfield generator. The setback would doom them to at least another year or two of isolation, limited to contact with only the few meager settlements within walking distance.

  Another year without children.

  He circled the house five times before he went inside, rehearsing and refining how he would explain the situation to Nayla on each pass. When he finally stepped through the airlock and stripped off the warpsuit, he found her waiting for him just inside the inner hatch.

  “It’s gone, isn’t it?”

  Tarkin tried to describe what happened, but the words caught in his throat when he saw Nayla’s shoulders droop. She seemed to age ten years in the span of a second. He couldn’t hold the tears back and would have collapsed had she not embraced him. Nayla guided him to their bedroom, where they wept and made love for the rest of the morning.

  After the emotions ran their course, Tarkin brewed a pot of coffee while Nayla took stock of their supplies. He had a cup waiting for her on the kitchen table by the time she finished.

  “That the last batch?”

  He nodded.

  “Must be bad, then.”

  “Sit down.”

  Tarkin told her about the generator malfunction. She listened closely, asking pointed, technical questions along the way. Nayla could tear a sub-orbital aircraft engine apart and reassemble it in a driving sandstorm at night, but she didn’t know shit about realspace shield generators. The basic principles of fusion microreactors and power circuits still applied, though, so Tarkin managed to convey most of the important details.

  When he finished, Nayla leaned back in her chair and took a big gulp of coffee.

  “How long till it blows?”

  “At least a week.”

  Nayla pushed her list of supplies across the table.

  “Can you rig up anything from this? Buy a few more days?”

  Tarkin examined the inventory and shook his head.

  “What about reconfiguring the perimeter? Can we cut back to a triangular plot just using the other three generators?”

  “They’re calibrated to work in concert. Even if the capacitors could handle the increased power outlay, we’d have to physically move the generators to reset the perimeter for three units. And that would mean deactivating the realspace field, anyway.”

  Tarkin didn’t have to explain what that would mean. A partial failure in the field had already wiped out a year of work in less than 24 hours.

  “Can you fix it?”

  “If I had the right fuse, sure.”

  Nayla drank the rest of her coffee.

  “I guess it’s time to pay the neighbors a visit, then.”

  The warpsuits’ power cells had a life expectancy of at least five hundred years, but the actual suits themselves were as prone to wear and tear as any piece of equipment. Tarkin and Nayla inspected the suits carefully before and after each use, looking for the slightest signs of malfunction or deterioration. A single tear in the polymolecular fabric, a single short in the hundreds of feet of wiring laced through the suit would likely mean death outside the secure confines established by the realspace generators.

  There was a slim chance of surviving such a malfunction.

  If they were especially unlucky.

  After donning their warpsuits, Tarkin and Nayla loaded everything they thought they could afford to spare into a sealed container and stepped through the airlock.

  The four realspace generators stood at the corners of a one acre plot of land, connected to each other by a wall of translucent energy that resembled clouded glass. Sunlight filtered through the energy field one hundred feet above them, creating the optimal growing conditions around the living compartments they called a house.

  They turned west and walked up to the plot’s boundary. Tarkin took a deep breath and grasped his wife’s hand tightly.

  “Together,” she said, her voice transmitting over his helmet’s intercom.

  They stepped through the energy field.

  The helmet viewscreen went black for a split second while the warpsuit switched over to virtual display mode. When the screen came back up, everything seemed sharper and colder than before. The desolate, flat
landscape sprawled out toward a digital horizon beneath an empty, sterile sky. No signs of movement broke the stillness.

  “Quiet today,” Nayla said.

  Tarkin heard nothing but the hum of the warpsuit’s circuitry. He closed his eyes and listened intently, thinking that he might at least be able to sense the impression of sound beyond the insulated helmet.

  Nothing.

  “Let’s get moving.”

  The first few steps were always the hardest. Tarkin felt the warpsuit sending energy pulses through the polyfibers to redirect his movements ever so slightly. The natural inclination was to fight back, to resist the corrections, but doing so either made the suit react even more forcefully or caused a loss of balance. Countless hours of practice had conditioned him to surrender his instinctive sense of equilibrium to the warpsuit, which paradoxically granted him better control over his movements. The initial sensation never ceased to be unsettling, however, and it always took at least a dozen steps or so before the brain remembered what to do.

  Tarkin activated the suit’s navigation system and called up their destination.

  Sabrelle’s farm. Distance: 4.24 miles.

  He didn’t remember it being so far.

  Nayla grumbled.

  “Must have shifted since last time.”

  “Maybe.”

  The terrain held steady for most of the journey, only turning less even when they neared Sabrelle’s. Small hillocks jutted up from the flat ground about a mile away from the farm and slowly gave way to irregular, rocky hills. When Tarkin last visited the place a year ago, he’d encountered nothing more severe than gentle slopes.

  Things could change a lot in twelve months.

  Outside the realspace perimeter, radio transmissions scrambled all to pieces beyond a few yards. The only interaction they ever had with Sabrelle came during their face-to-face meetings once or twice a year. She had a cousin who occasionally ferried supplies to and from Redoubt Prime, which stood some seventy or eighty miles south. As far as anyone knew, it was the only major settlement within a thousand miles. Tarkin and Nayla had visited it a few times, but not since the crawler broke down a few years back. If only the crawler was functioning, it would be simple to make a run for extra generator fuses.

  But they’d never survive the walk on foot. The terrain was too rough and much of the land between was crawling with weirdlings.

  Not to mention the bigger, nastier things lingering in warpspace.

  Sabrelle’s farm sat nestled in a shallow valley. Or it at least it used to. Even from a distance, Tarkin saw that the landscape had changed significantly since his last visit. Jagged rocks crowned the upper ridge surrounding the valley. By the time they climbed up to the top, Tarkin had a good idea of what they would find in the valley below.

  The realspace generators weren’t running. Sabrelle’s squat, concrete house sat alone in the center of what used to be her fields. When Tarkin last visited, the surrounding land bloomed with half a dozen different crops. Now nothing but oily weeds and black thorn bushes grew from the brittle, packed dust. The valley floor sparkled with prismatic spores released by long dead contaminated plants.

  “Weirdlings?”

  Tarkin wasn’t so sure. The realspace generators and the house itself looked untouched.

  “Maybe. I’ll check the generators. See if you can find any bodies.”

  Nayla scampered down the hill, her limbs jerking awkwardly as Tarkin’s helmet struggled to render her movements on his display.

  He checked the western generator first. It looked to be in perfect condition, except that it was picked clean of fuses, circuit boards, and power supplies. Anything that wasn’t welded to the structural frame had been expertly removed.

  Scavengers.

  The southern generator was similarly stripped. He almost didn’t bother checking the eastern and northern units, but he went through the optimistic motions all the same.

  Nothing.

  Nayla had emerged from the house by the time Tarkin circled back around to the entrance. He told her about the generators, but she didn’t seem to be listening.

  “You should go inside,” she said.

  “You find something?”

  “Just look.”

  Tarkin walked into the house, and his blood turned to ice.

  The rent furniture formed an irregular circle in the center of the living room. Sharp spikes, some no longer than a foot, others as tall as Tarkin, protruded from each broken piece. Closer inspection revealed that the spikes consisted of dozens of electrical wires wound together. A few of them had fused into a single piece of warped metal, leaving streams of melted wiring frozen in place like some hellish candle fashioned out of raw iron.

  Every sharpened tip pointed inward at the center of the uneven circle. An explosion of symbols covered the floor there, thousands, maybe millions, of clustered characters that spiraled, lurched, and crawled in every direction without any discernable pattern. Etched nearly a quarter of an inch deep into the metal flooring, each sign appeared to be unique.

  Studying any symbol for too long made Tarkin’s head hurt, but he had no trouble identifying the liquid filling every one of them.

  Blood.

  Aside from the bizarre scene in the living room, the rest of the house looked untouched. Tarkin found no signs of struggle or distress, and whoever stripped the generators didn’t bother to ransack the house.

  He also didn’t find any bodies.

  Tarkin rejoined Nayla outside.

  “Weirdlings?” she asked.

  He inspected the outer airlock door. It looked functional. Nothing had forced its way into the house.

  “Let’s get back to the house,” he said.

  Neither of them spoke again for the rest of the day.

  By the time they returned home, they were too tired to do much more than peel off their warpsuits and don their dream inhibitors before collapsing in bed.

  The next day, they walked the six miles to Maddock’s farm. They found similarly stripped generators and the same scene inside the house. After a brief argument, they decided against making the ten-mile walk to Lanah’s homestead to the north. When they got home, Tarkin inspected the faulty generator and judged that they had nine days left if the heat buildup remained constant.

  He considered suggesting suicide, but decided against it when he couldn’t think of a quick and painless way to carry it out. They’d exhausted the last of their ammunition years ago and none of the medication they had left was strong enough to do the job. He supposed they could cut their wrists if it came down to it, but the thought of all that blood gushing from his opened veins made him squeamish.

  Nayla spent an afternoon tinkering with the crawler before kicking her toolbox across the garage. When she finished cursing, she slumped down in the cockpit and refused to speak for the rest of the day. Tarkin heard her crying at one point, but she threw a wrench at him when he tried to console her.

  The next day, he donned his warpsuit and went out to inspect the generator again. He wondered if he could buy them extra time by swapping fuses between the units, giving each microreactor a chance to cool down, but the idea didn’t go very far. There was no way to keep the realspace field at full strength while he switched the fuses and rerouted each unit’s power. More of their crops would be contaminated and they would eventually starve.

  He abandoned the idea and instead busied himself digging up the blackened remains of the infected quadrant and dumping it well outside the plot’s perimeter. On two occasions, the warpsuit’s motion proximity sensors went off, but a more intensive scan turned up nothing.

  Nayla was still awake when he finally trudged back inside the house. She’d spent most of the day finishing off their last bottle of vodka.

  “No luck with swapping fuses,” he said.

  She didn’t look up from her computer tablet.

  “I was thinking about stripping the crawler down for parts. I know it’s your baby, but it won’t do us much good
if we can’t keep the generator from melting down.”

  No answer.

  Tarkin left her to her bottle and her reading. After scrubbing his skin clean, he settled into bed and strapped the dream inhibitor tight across his skull.

  Six days left.

  He worried that Nayla might have less than that if he didn’t find some hope quickly.

  Tarkin overslept the next morning. Nayla looked like she hadn’t slept at all. She’d finished off the vodka, but didn’t seem any less absorbed in her reading. He peered over her shoulder to see what she found so interesting, but the letters on the screen looked strange.

  “What language is that?”

  “Aramaic, I think.”

  “You think? How can you read it if you don’t even know what it is?”

  No answer.

  “I’m going to get started on the crawler.”

  “Fine.”

  It took about six hours to tear the crawler’s engine apart. Nayla probably could have done the same job in two hours had she been willing to help, but Tarkin didn’t know how to pry her away from her misery. After picking through the pile of parts he’d dumped on the floor, he came up with a few pieces that might prove helpful. He shoved them into a sack and went out to the airlock.

  Nayla’s warpsuit was gone.

  Puzzled, he pulled on his suit and stepped outside.

  A quick sensor scan of the area located her one mile northeast of the realspace perimeter.

  “What the hell?”

  Tarkin set out after her, moving as quickly as he could manage with the warpsuit adjusting his every stride. Her signal remained stationary, and he closed the distance between them rapidly. When his helmet’s long-range scanners acquired a visual of her lying on the ground, he ran so fast that the suit could scarcely compensate quickly enough to keep him from stumbling.