Tag: ghosts on an alien wind

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.

Cheating, a little: I actually wrote this yesterday. But today was complicated.

We followed the almost-path of gorvines all the way to the Dig site, to absolutely nobody’s surprise. Well, I know I wasn’t surprised, and I assume the Anticipant couldn’t be. If Oft had any sudden revelations, he didn’t talk about them.

He was the first one to notice the regular sets of discoloration on the walls, though. “More places for torches,” he grimly observed, and I didn’t blame him at all. The Scouts had been here for a reason, and it involved the Erebus Dig. I tried not to think about the implications of that, and I definitely didn’t try to think of the suggestion that the Scouts were making this trip in the dark. It would have been a beautiful morning anywhere else in the world, and I absolutely did not want to be here.

Navigating this place at midnight sounded like a great way to court a heart attack.
From my last visit I remembered that there’s not much of the Dig aboveground. The topside part of the planetary defense center or storehouse or whatever the inhabitants used the place for before their Last Stand had been broken down to gravel, making the area look like a Jeffersonian parking lot. That was there, and still stubbornly free of any vegetation or even moss.

What was different was the primitive elevator centered over the Dig shaft, camouflage netting still draped it to hide it from the sky.

Ran out of excuses to work on this!

“What about the Dig, itself?”

“Best guess is that it was a Last Stand.” I didn’t like walking on the gorvines, but standing still would have been worse. This particular species was attracted to human scents, and would shift to get closer to us if we didn’t keep moving. Nobody’s ever been attacked by one, but spill any blood around a gorvine, and it’ll go looking for it. “It was just like how it was on all the other Tomb Worlds. They reported lots of signs of fighting, tons of smashed-in doors and walls, and not a bone to be found anywhere.”

“A half-told tale is far too tall,” offered the Anticipant. Either she was trying really hard to speak normally, or I was trying really hard to understand her, because I got the gist.

“Yeah, all of the reports leave out how it feels to be down here.” I scowled at the encroaching wilderness. “I guess we can’t get away with calling the Dig a ‘infective apprehension area’ or ‘static neurosis zone,’ or whatever else the head-stirrers are saying instead ‘really damn creepy’ this week. It’s not an accident that the main bases are all on the other side of the planet.”

Exploration!

I’d never been to Erebus Dig before; and even if I could go back there, I wouldn’t, ever again. The very look of it reeked of awfulness as I set the hauler down on the overgrown pad — and, yeah, I know: you can’t see smells. I saw it anyway.

When we got out, I also saw that the pad wasn’t overgrown enough. Somebody had used Earthtech reaction engines on it in the recent past. Oft noticed it, too. “How long, Pam?” he asked me.

“Not recently,” I decided. “A year, maybe? There’s still soot marks from the burned-off vines, but no smell.” One-Eighteen’s ground vines looks normal to us, but we don’t burn any of them if we can help it. Their sap collects copper and iron, and the smell when it ignites can be a bit much. “They didn’t clear away the brush, though.”

“Doing so might have attracted notice, if somebody flew over this site from the air” Oft responded. “A small chance, to be sure, but the Scouts are famously known for being ready for anything. I hope they did not use this pad very often.”

I didn’t ask him by what Oft meant by ‘hope,’ because I could make a few guesses, myself — and none of them sounded very nice. There was also always the chance that he’d come up with something even worse that I hadn’t thought of.

Just realized I needed to add a scene.

I was annoyingly fresh-faced and well-rested the next morning; there had been a pharmaceutical care package waiting for me at home. Eight hours of guaranteed restful sleep, full of amazing dreams, and complete with all the mood-shifters you could want to keep mental trauma from sticking around and turning into neurosis. I would have preferred Syah to stick around, but he had been a gentleman about it. I didn’t even think he was wrong to be one, either.

I still wished he had stuck around.

Greg had a look similar to mine, only a bit more so. It made me raise an eyebrow. “You all right, Greg? You almost look ready to fly.”

“Oh, do I? I was wondering. That dose I took last night had quite a wallop.” He said all of that perfectly clearly, with no vagueness or loss of focus. Whatever’s in that brew does the business. “I haven’t had dreams like that in years.”

“Same here,” I admitted as I sat. “What is all of this chaos doing to the schedule, anyway?”

He snorted. “What schedule? Right now I have everything grounded or on hold until Burcu shows up. She’s going to be a handful, and until we can figure out what she and the rest of the Council lunatics are really looking for, we’re going to need to walk careful. If only they’d tell us what their game is!”

“I don’t want to sound like Nur, Greg, but: maybe they didn’t have an agenda at all when they came here? They’re just here to act mysterious and see what happens?”

“Space travel isn’t that cheap, Pam.”

“Then I don’t know. Maybe the Great Powers gives them a budget to be assholes to colonists, and it’s just the end of their fiscal year.”

Added about 1000 words today, in fact. All I could stand before I got bleary-eyed.

“All right.” I walked over to Syah. “Hey! Get up, stop feeling sorry for yourself, and walk it off!”

For a moment, I didn’t think that it worked; Syah almost jumped up, while still sitting. The way shame and guilt were fighting each other in his expression made me wonder whether a full therapy session might not be in order. Then his face cleared, and he even laughed. “That’s some bedside manner you have there, Pam.”

“Blame her,” I replied, pointing one thumb over my shoulder. “I’m just saying what she’s too nice and polite to. I’m just the shuttle jockey with a checklist.”

“You’re not ‘just’ anything, Pam.”

“Hey, you can’t distract me here, Syah,” I blatantly lied. “Look. There was a situation, you tried something, it didn’t work, and somebody got hurt. Welcome to the Tomb Worlds. If you really need more time to proc— to get over it, say so. There’s no shame in it! But if you don’t? We’ve got a mess, Syah. The faster you’re on top of it, the faster the mess goes away.”

“That’s true,” Syah murmured. He set his shoulders. “Right. Just keep going, huh?”

“Just keep going. Gina, can he get out of here?” At her nod, Syah levered himself out of bed one and a half handed, waving off my attempt to help him.

As he dressed, Gina murmured to me, “Well, that was quick. He’s got it bad for you, you know.”

I didn’t, entirely, but I liked hearing that from an outside observer. “Great. It’d be nice if he could figure it out.”

Creepyness!

I was doing ‘cosmetic maintenance’ in the shuttle docks when they throttled back the security coverage. It was my professional opinion that fussing over the haulers until they were humming improved their performance efficiency, and I had the reduced downtime statistics to justify it. It was my personal opinion that nobody liked being reminded that the haulers were quasi-organic in nature. Intellectually, I could see why, but it never bothered me personally.

All of which means I was waist-deep in a hauler’s jet intake chamber scrubbing down carbon buildup when the lights flickered — and went out. That didn’t startle me. What did was the tiger alarm; I nearly bruised the hauler while yanking myself out.

“Process!” I shouted (despite myself) while reaching for a pistol that wasn’t there. “What’s the situation?” Silence. I started to get alarmed, then remembered that the power was out, and relaxed. Then I saw that the power was back on, which made me stop relaxing.

I instinctively stopped myself from calling out again. The last thing The Process needed right now was any distractions. Instead I looked at the regular communications channels — and nearly threw the phone away. Everything was jammed up, with static, feedback, and strobing lights that horribly tickled my stomach. I didn’t throw up, myself, which put me among the twenty percent of the people who didn’t. The vomiting were lucky, at that. Five people ended up with burst blood vessels in the eyes, and one had a partial stroke. All easily treatable, sure, but still painful as hell.

The Din (that’s what we called it, after) lasted five minutes and twenty-three seconds, and I don’t remember any of it, really. I dimly remember running around, pulling people out of workstations and hauler pits, while futilely trying to turn off every screaming communications device. It was impossible to think more clearly, with that Din pounding in our ears, but XHum trains its people properly. Our reflexes were the right ones; pull people out of danger and let the horrible noises flow over us. Until it stopped, as suddenly as it began.