Distant Worlds Volume 2 Page 17

  Time fell away as the firestream signal coursed through every end of his nervous system. The distinction between his senses dissolved, leaving the taste of colors upon his tongue and the sight of music burned into his retinas. His eardrums registered the sound of a voice singing somewhere nearby, but the meager, physical signal had no chance of overcoming the hard stream of data pumping directly into his brain. There was no voice to be heard, only the gentle, soothing caress of fingers massaging his tired muscles. His body drifted, held aloft by countless hands, swirling water, and a soft cloud of sweet-smelling air.

  Then he slammed into a wall.

  The impact knocked the wind from his lungs and fire scorched his throat when he took his next breath. Every millimeter of his skin screamed, the sound blinding him as the undertow pulled him into a writhing pit of gnawing, shocking hands.

  Her fingers dug hard into the fretboard as Lena powered her way through to the end of the first verse, her snarling rhythms crushing Chris’s simpering vocals underfoot like a herd of stampeding mammoths.

  By the time they reached the chorus, Trevor had already picked up the tempo in response to her intensity. Chris shot her an agitated glare when he missed his mark, dropping the first few words of the chorus line in a panicked attempt to keep up with the rushing rhythm section. She might have tried to ease off a bit, give him enough space for his voice to be heard above her guitar. She could have turned to Trevor and worked on backing the tempo down to where it was supposed to be.

  But she was too angry now to make any such concessions. She was convinced he’d been lying to her about the show all along, knowing she would never have gone along with it if she’d known they would be playing to a crowd of firestreaming zombies.

  When they reached the end of the chorus, she looked down on the theater floor again in the hopes of finding an interested gaze. But there was nothing there but a sea of slackened, white-eyed faces swaying uneasily where they stood. A black cable connected each bobbing head to one of the ugly, patchwork piles of computer equipment positioned all around the room.

  The vacant attendees made no sound and seemed completely unaware of their surroundings.

  Lena found herself hating them. It had taken her years of practice to become as good a player as she was, but not a single one of the gaping things packed into the theater even realized she was there.

  She stomped down on her distortion pedal halfway through the second verse, drowning out Chris’s synth and vocals as the guitar roared like some monstrous, primordial beast.

  One way or another, she would make them hear her.

  At some dim, animalistic level of consciousness, Marcus knew something was very wrong.

  After a few moments of relief left his body aching with a dull, sweet pain, something new lashed out of the aether and yanked his body taut. He smelled his skin burning and heard ligaments tearing free of bone like rubber cords stretched beyond their limit and snapping cleanly in half.

  An instant later and he was spinning, bound to a wheel rolling through an amorphous fog of voices that smelled of youth and desperation. A black weight smashed against his spiraling limbs, the pain injecting into the base of his brainpan and creeping down his spine like frozen acid.

  The chorus flashed by in what felt like a single breath, the drums and synth whipped onward by Lena’s ruthless guitar. She choked off her final chord as the song skidded to a halt, a single, ringing synth note holding it back from tumbling over the edge of a cliff.

  Lena exhaled as she scanned the crowd once again, hoping to find one trace of genuine, human emotion standing out among so many blank stares.

  1…

  At first, she saw nothing. She could have been a thousand miles away from them and they wouldn’t have cared less.

  2…

  But then movement caught her attention.

  3…

  One of the zombies in the front row was swaying more than the rest, his lips jerking grotesquely as his eyelids quivered.

  4…

  Lena locked in on him as the first sensuous note of her solo catapulted the song over the cliff.

  The pain seeped out through his pores and turned to dust in the air as a dozen hands of warm honey slid over his quivering skin. Marcus gasped, his mind struggling to process the manifold signals pouring through the firestream feed. His heart began to flutter and his taste buds erupted with such intensity his tongue immediately went numb.

  Sweet liquid ran slowly down his throat, sending warm shudders through his bowels. His dick hardened as he floated in the thick, tingling substance. Muscle, skin, and bone became one, lapping up every saccharine taste of the dreamstuff holding him aloft.

  It was everything he’d ever wanted; a confirmation that he was, in fact, alive.

  Lena watched the man swaying uneasily as she reached the halfway mark of her solo. Quivering lips pulled back into something resembling a grin as he embraced himself like a forlorn lover.

  But the eyes were still rolled back in their sockets, his ecstatic face turned more toward the ceiling than the stage. Caught up in the firestream signal, the poor bastard’s mind was far from the theater in a manufactured netherworld of false sensations and cross-wired emotions.

  Her right hand flicked the guitar’s selector switch before she launched into the second half of the solo, her lip curling to form a determined sneer.

  The next shrieking note nearly blew out her amplifier’s speaker.

  Dangling somewhere along the precipice of serenity and orgasm, Marcus’s body convulsed as a million serrated hooks ripped it apart molecule by molecule. The liquid surrounding him roiled into the gaps between his cells and ignited, searing him from the inside out.

  It was too much.

  Primitive survival instincts pushed back against the torrent of information cascading through his neural implant, but his brain was already melting.

  The signal was much too strong, too much for his fragile neurons to withstand.

  The portion of his conscious mind still functioning tried to reach for the killswitch, but the rest of his rapidly liquefying nervous system went on insisting his limbs were being flayed and burned.

  Marcus tried to scream, but the sound came out as a smile.

  As Lena bore down on the final measures of her solo, the man’s eyes snapped open. For an instant, their gazes met, his wild eyes focusing on her with a panicked intensity.

  She knew she had him.

  Nobody talked on the ride back from the theater, not even Trevor.

  Lena had gone straight to the van while the others packed up their gear. Chris told her somebody loaded the body into a car and went to dump it somewhere far from the theater. They’d had plenty of people scorch themselves before, but no one had ever seen anything like this.

  He was explaining how much blood had gushed out of the guy’s head when Lena told him to shut up.

  When they reached her apartment building, she hopped out of the van without a word, her old guitar case in tow.

  “Lena?”

  She turned more out of dumb, practiced habit rather than any desire to hear what Chris had to say.

  “Listen,” he said, “it wasn’t your fault, okay? They said he was plugged into a more efficient unit and had the sensitivity up too high. And the system wasn’t ready to handle a signal as strong as your guitar’s anyway. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  Lena remembered the man’s body jerking wildly, his neck snapping backward so fiercely that his spine nearly broke in half. She remembered him crashing into the entranced golems surrounding him, bouncing off each one as the blood started to run down from his nose and ears. She remembered him sprawling across his firestream unit and twitching until one of the bouncers finally unplugged him.

  But most of all, she remembered how she felt the moment his eyes had opened, the rush of adrenaline that came from knowing she’d reached down from the stage to make a connection with another human being, a stranger with whom she likely had nothing in co
mmon.

  In that moment, she’d felt more alive than ever before.

  “Good night, Chris,” she said.

  When she got to her bedroom, she laid the guitar case on her bed and opened it. The black thing inside leered at her, taunting her to pick it up and play the same notes which had taken her to such heights.

  She reached out to touch it, but then drew her hand back when she thought of the quivering, bloody body draped over the firestream unit.

  The tears came before she could stop them. A few drops fell onto the guitar’s body, leaving dark splotches that made her think of the man’s dark blood under the theater lights.

  “Goddamn you!”

  She wasn’t sure who she was cursing as she jerked the instrument out of the case and took it to the window.

  A gust of air swept into the room when she pried it open. The air made the guitar strings vibrate slightly. Lena paused, allowing the faint, tuneless drone to fill her ears. She thought back to the mindless, swaying things in the club and wondered if that was all they usually heard.

  Her grandfather was right. They didn’t really listen.

  But someone had. She’d made him listen, even if it killed him in the end.

  For a few moments, at least, she’d proved the bitter old man wrong.

  She pulled the guitar strap over her head and strummed a minor chord. Even unplugged, the old guitar cut through the low din of the crumbling world outside her window.

  Not everyone turned to music for the same reasons. For most people, it was just one more brick in the wall of discordant, meaningless noise forming the background of their lives.

  But some people were looking for something else.

  They wanted deliverance from that ceaseless monotony.

  Lena could give it to them. Whether or not they could handle it was their problem.

  She took out her phone and called Trevor. He answered before the first ring ended.

  “Lena? You okay?”

  She looked down at the guitar. The splattered teardrops had run across the body, forming an irregular cluster of wet streaks that reflected the light pouring through her window.

  Once, the guitar belonged to her grandfather, but not anymore. It had been baptized and reborn.

  The guitar belonged to Lena now, and it would play her song.

  “When’s our next gig?”

  The Cambyses Event

  Previously unpublished

  Written sometime in early 2017, this story was the result of a creative crisis I was going through at the time. After my first two books performed far below even my modest expectations and my third received a huge pile of rejection letters, I tried to go back to the drawing board and start working on short stories again. Around the same time, I’d joined a writing group in an effort to get more feedback on where I was as a writer. This was one of two stories I wrote for that group and the fact that it was well-received, even by people who didn’t care for the genre, was very encouraging for me. I’ve always shied away from writing a space sci-fi story because I don’t really have the science expertise to write hard sci-fi with any degree of competence. This story obviously draws more from Firefly than Ringworld, but I still managed to get dinged by an early reader for screwing up distances and relative speed in space. Whatever. I’ve always been a “push the button and it goes” kind of writer anyway…

  The Peggy Sue dropped out of hyperspace near the derelict ship, far enough to avoid an accidental collision, but close enough to bring its sensor suite to bear. A “Prowler” class salvage trawler, the Peggy Sue boasted an impressive array of scanners to help it distinguish a valuable haul from a worthless pile of scrap. After matching speed with its much larger target, the trawler deployed a cluster of self-guided probes to take a closer look at the derelict’s outer hull and power systems.

  Captain Nsedu Lawal-Bhasin drummed her fingers against her thigh as she stared at the derelict ship on the bridge’s main viewscreen. The ship’s operator, Renee Carlin, sat in one of two pilot consoles to her left. Half a dozen cables running from the console arrays plugged into Renee’s cybernetic implant jacks, according her direct neural control over the ship’s navigational systems.

  “Big as they said, isn’t she?” Renee said.

  “Just make sure she’s not leaving a trail of debris for us, will you?”

  “Field looks clear, Captain.”

  Nsedu turned to the scanner consoles on her right. “Give me some good news, Sasha. What are the probes telling you?”

  The woman plugged into the computer systems didn’t look up from the multiple displays glowing before her, which she had to cross reference against the information she received from her direct neural interface with the probes. The task would have overwhelmed even the most capable mind without assistance from specialized neural processing implants.

  “Results coming in now, Captain,” Sasha said. “Give me a moment to cross check and verify.”

  The bridge door behind them slid open and footsteps clanged against the metal grating.

  “Why haven’t we moved in closer? Allen has a team ready to go aboard and get started.”

  Nsedu didn’t bother turning her chair around to face her husband.

  “I told you to wait until we completed our scan, Kabir,” she said.

  “What, and wait for somebody else to show up? Who knows how many people that survey ship crew told about this derelict floating out here between systems? If we don’t dock and make a claim, somebody could—”

  “Nobody’s going to jump our claim. Now get back down to the hold and tell your people to stick a thumb up their asses until I tell them otherwise, understood?”

  Kabir sighed. Nsedu didn’t have to look back to know he’d crossed his arms and twisted his lips into that pouty expression he made whenever he didn’t get his way.

  “Fine,” he said. “But I want constant updates on your status.”

  “Of course, darling.”

  Renee chuckled after Kabir stomped off the bridge. “Loving couple, you two. A real testimony to marital bliss.”

  “Fuck you, Renee. And don’t fly us up the ass of this boat while you’re at it.”

  “I’ve got the results of the scan, Captain,” Sasha said. “No life signs, but the sensors can’t penetrate into all areas of the ship. Looks like some of the interior compartments are shielded.”

  “What about its systems? Power? Life support? Comms?”

  “Power core is online, but running at bare minimum. Life support and gravity field are functional, but only operating in about thirty percent of the ship.”

  She looked closely at the image displayed before her. The ship didn’t look like anything from the Martian or Centauri shipyards. Unique, purpose-built vessels weren’t exactly rare, of course, but the corporations and government that subsidized them didn’t typically shrug their shoulders and move on when one went missing.

  Unless they wanted it to remain lost for some reason...

  “Did you run the registration profile?”

  “It’s not transmitting. The comm system’s dead, too. I’m not picking up anything.”

  Nsedu tapped a few commands into her console to bring up additional sensor data on the main display. The ship’s hull was intact, which ruled out the possibility of external system damage.

  “Sasha, run a regression pattern on this thing’s trajectory. I want to know where it came from.”

  “Working on it now, Captain.”

  Nsedu zoomed the main display in on the ship’s hull, scrolling along its length until she found what she was after.

  A nameplate.

  “The Cambyses,” she read.

  “Odd name for a ship,” Renee said.

  “Better bring us in closer. Looks like we’ll need to dock and have a look inside before we can make a salvage claim.”

  After Renee engaged the ship’s docking clamps to latch onto the derelict, Nsedu met her husband at the Peggy Sue’s main airlock. They were joined by her hus
band’s chief engineer, Allen Sanders, and his security advisor, Ryong Seok.

  Kabir didn’t like putting off the salvage operation, but he’d at least stopped complaining about the claim after Nsedu told him they’d be docking with the derelict. Under interstellar salvage law, boarding the ship would allow them to assert salvage rights later so long as they didn’t uncouple.

  Although the life support systems aboard the Cambyses were functional, Allen and Seok insisted that the initial boarding party wear spacesuits as a safety precaution. Once they were equipped and ready, the team moved through the airlock to the derelict’s outer door. Allen opened his portable terminal to interface with the Cambyses’s computer systems and override the airlock controls. After gaining access, they moved into the ship and sealed the door behind them to repressurize the airlock.

  They approached the inner airlock door that led deeper into the ship.

  “Get this door open, Allen,” Nsedu said. “Seok, take point.”

  Readying his electroshock rifle, Seok positioned himself by the door while Allen bypassed the lock. When the door hissed open, Seok made sure the corridor outside was clear before motioning for the others to follow.

  The corridor was dark, lit only by a thin strip of emergency lights running along the floor.

  “What’s the status on the life support, Allen?” Nsedu asked.

  “Air’s a little stale,” he said, checking his handheld scanner, “but well within safety parameters. We can lose the helmets.”

  After removing their helmets and clipping them to their spacesuits’ belt hooks, they inspected the corridor around the airlock.

  “There’s a wall terminal over here,” Allen said. “I think I can get the lights up to full.”

  Seok raised his rifle and swung around to stare down one end of the corridor. “I’m picking up movement, Captain. Fifty yards and closing.”