Tag: ghosts on an alien wind

Thank God, that bit is finally done. It needs major spackling, but it’s on the paper, as it were.

I had gotten Oft halfway up the ramp when the not-cow ripped through the trees. It was one of the smaller ones, so no more than fifteen feet high. That was bad news, by the way. The bigger not-cows get, the slower they move. This one was moving at a pretty good clip, although you shouldn’t take my word for it. Right then, I would have said that even a crawl was too damn fast.

Worse, it looked sick. There were boils and weeping sores spreading across the front of its headless torso, raw and green-black. Some of the not-cows legs looked like they had snapped in two and left to fester, instead of cleanly popping off; and the tekelilis it made sounded all wrong, full of phlegm or something even more foul. Absolutely worst of all was the way I could see the infection, or contamination, visibly strengthen as it moved.

No, wait. That’s wrong. The absolute worst thing of all was that none of this was stopping the not-cow from closing the distance. Whatever this horrible disease or whatever was, it wasn’t slowing down the creature any.

That would have to be my job.

Bit the bullet and made myself work on this.

I’d like to say that any of us could have lost the lottery and gotten hit by a thrown tree, but that’d be untrue. Oft was in the rear, because that’s where the most danger was; he told me later that he was the most disposable of the three of us right then, so it made sense that he be a convenient distraction. Which is what he became. Or maybe it was just the malignant luck of the draw, because the tree came flying out of the canopy just as he stepped onto the landing pad.

It wasn’t a big one, and it didn’t hit Oft squarely enough to break more than a couple of ribs and his leg. It didn’t trap him underneath its branches, either, which would have absolutely sucked. He still went flying, hitting the ground hard enough to dislocate his shoulder with a pop that I could hear all the way in the cockpit. I immediately snarled, “Finish the preflight!” to the Anticipant as I rushed back to the hatchway. I didn’t know if she had that skill, and at that moment I didn’t care. She’s a fucking witch, right? I thought to myself as I pulled out my gun. She can figure it out as she goes.

I finally got that passage done. Now we go back to revising.

The switch I had pulled had also turned on the emergency lights. Their harsh glared revealed a gorgeous corridor, filled with delicate friezes and mosaics, that I perceived as a blur as I ran for the Scout’s elevator. I wasn’t sure what I could do, once I got to the surface (I mean, I couldn’t just leave them here), but having an unclimbable shaft between me and them sounded like a great idea until a better plan came to mind.

I got to the lift easily. I slapped the up button — and nothing happened. I did not slap it again, repeatedly. That’s what people who panic easily (and die early) do in bad situations. Instead, I popped off the back of the casing holding the button, noted without real surprise the conspicuous lack of connecting wires, and started looking for spares. They train you hard to not freak out in the Tomb Worlds, because if you start, you’ll be doing it literally for the rest of your life.

“She took out the wires without damaging them, Pam.” I didn’t freak out from hearing Oft, either. That would get in the way. “You really don’t need to get new ones.”

I gave him a look. He and the Anticipant were there, but keeping their distance. The Anticipant in fact had the wires in her hand: she waggled them at me, as if to mock me — and then she lobbed them over, with perfect aim and precision. I plucked them out of the air without even thinking about it.

“Did you need us to back off some more?” asked Oft. “We can retreat a bit while you get the lift up and running, if you really need some time alone to process this. If not — we’re done down here, right?” he asked the Anticipant, who nodded vigorously, while frowning. “Yes, we’re done down here, and neither of us are inclined to linger. Personally, I would rather not try to figure out where the bathroom is.”

I’m not entirely sure where this is going.

Oft saw the resemblance just after I did, but I didn’t stick around to hear his reaction. I stood not on the order of my coming but went at once, as the Bard might say. Right up and out of the room, because there was no way I was going down into that pit.

That was the only time I was really frightened to be around Oft and the Anticipant, you know? Even then, I wasn’t afraid of them; I was terrified of the thought what they might do to me. I couldn’t even blame them, much. Seeing my face on a Scout ritual statue was one Hell of an incriminating circumstance. I’d suspect me of being involved with the Scouts, after that. Hell, maybe I was involved in the Scouts, only they had put me under some kind of deep cover and all I needed to hear was the activation phrase to ‘wake up’ again. You hear stories about stuff like that. No proof, but there wouldn’t be, right?

Monster!

“It’s the principle of the thing,” I muttered, trying to make myself breathe deeper. The more I smelled that air, the less I liked it. There was a rankness in it that crept up on you. “Tell me we’re down here for a reason, please.”

“Oh, we are.” He was sounding just a little deliberately focused, too.

“Really? What is it?”

“That, I’m not sure of. Ask the Anticipant.”

Naturally. “Okay. Anticipant, why are we down here?” The Anticipant laughed; it was a surprisingly cheerful sound. Then she sprang into action, barreling into me so hard, I went staggering.

Any outraged comment I might have made died a-borning as the reek in the air blossomed into horrible intensity, and I saw a darker gloom gusher over the lip of the pit. Oh, the sound of it! The thing had a growl like that of a diseased tiger; rough, uneven, and wet. It moved surely, though, and with a terrible purpose, aiming for the place that I had just been standing.

Only now, instead of me, the Anticipant was standing there, the lock and chain in one hand whirring in an angry circle as she brought it up to speed. She met the onrushing gloom with a resounding smash that rocked the monster back, then spun around with the chain to direct it to another strike.

Genre awareness is not always helpful!

The hallway ended in double doors. They were Amalgamation-made: the padlock and chains keeping them shut were distinctly human. We contemplated the scene for a long moment. Finally, Oft spoke. “If it makes you feel any better, Pam — I would also rather like to go back the way we came.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, readying my gun. “That lock’s pretty damned solid. It’ll hold, no problem. I think everything looks fine. We can just go back, hop on the lander, be back for a late lunch or early dinner. I’ll even buy the first round.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Oft replied as the Anticipant glided to the padlock. “Obviously I would cover the tab for the night. I could do no less, seeing as I wasted your time with this needless side trip. After all, we are sensible people, are we not? If we see a locked door, and know not why it is locked, it would be absurd for us to open it anyway.”

The lock popped off. The Anticipant grabbed it out of the air before it could fall, then reattached it to one edge of the chain in one deft motion. The other end, she wrapped around her wrist and arm, idly twirling the lock around as she stepped back and pulled open one door.

“Exactly.” I stepped forward, into the deeper darkness. “Look at us, being absolutely sensible people.”

Had meetings and game tonight. I was lucky to get anything done.

Down here there were more traces of the Scouts’ presence; cracks in the metal walls, floor, and ceiling had been repaired with plastic of paris. They had even sanded down the goop until it was flush with the surface, which showed dedication, in its way. There were also what were probably helpful signs on the walls, but seeing those in the dark was one level of miracles too much for even lightfolds.

It occurred to me that there were flashlights in the kits, too. It also occurred to me that neither Oft nor the Anticipant had taken theirs out. Neither told me their reasons for that, but I decided I agreed with them anyway.

“What are we looking for down here, Oft?” I asked him, quietly but without whispering. Too many things out there notice whispers. “It’d help if I know what the goal was.”

“That’s the problem, Pam. We don’t really know. All that we’re sure of is that the Scouts did things down here, far away from prying eyes like ours. Whatever those deeds were, we need to know about them — but there are so many awful possibilities. It’s best for us to have a completely open mind about it.”

Just a little ragged, Pam is getting.

It bothered me that the elevator platform went down the Dig shaft without bobbling or jerking. When you descend somewhere horrible that was used by cultists, you expect things to be slovenly, right? I kept waiting for the mechanisms to start whining or smoking, or maybe for the platform itself to turn out to be rickety and ready to collapse if you breathed on it too hard. That’s how cultist stuff generally was. People with no sense of self-preservation suck at doing maintenance. But not Scout-made gear! Oh, no! Those teenagers built things to last. I could tell how everything had been properly put together, with solid materials and no corners cut. They had done a proper job of weatherproofing, too. God help us all, somebody had worked hard on this job.

“Oft,” I ground out in the increasing gloom, “how sure are we that the Scouts are really off this planet by now?”

“Very,” he replied. “If they weren’t, we’d never have gotten this far without being challenged.”

“Lucky us.”

“Lucky us and lucky them, Pam.” The rough change in his voice made me blink. I looked over, and even in the dimness I could see how he stood tall and terrible, and a piercing light was in his eyes. In contrast, the Anticipant beside him was almost a shadow herself, the colors of her robe shading smoothly into the growing dark. It was alarming. The two of them might have both been weird, but I hadn’t really seen either as capable of being dangerous before. Now they looked thoroughly ready to deal with whatever we found, down here in the pit of the Dig.

I would have been afraid, if I had for a moment thought that they were here to deal with me.