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HOWLERS IN THE VOID

Brian Trent



If Brian Trent isn’t a familiar name to longtime Baen readers, he should be. A regular contributor to our Black Tide Rising and Weird World War anthologies, as well as having had stories published elsewhere reprinted in several of our Year’s Best Military and Adventure SF collections, Trent has a knack for telling stories that cross a range of subgenres, while letting his own voice and personal touches shine through.

For this story, he’s managed to bring a lot of his signatures to play. Marooned soldiers on an alien world, hostile alien pirates, and far more dangerous things lurking in the dark corners of a dead world. Military sci-fi, planetary adventure and Lovecraftian horror in equal measure, the resulting tale is a roller coaster.

***

I. Point of Impact


The two ships cracked through the atmosphere like a single meteor blazing toward the planetary surface. Lashed together by grappling cables, and cloaked in the incandescent plasma of atmospheric entry, they drew a smoky trail down a black sky.

Strapped into the cockpit of one doomed ship, Captain Shayne Dunsany of the TerraNet Compact thought: We’re going to die, and it’s my fault.

Survey missions in the stellar outback could be dangerous, there was no denying that. In the lightless periphery of a local star—what surveyors called the “junkyard”—there were dead comets, lone asteroids, dwarf planets, and lost moons. Resources beckoned from these unmapped corners. That was the benefit and the danger: the galaxy was full of civilizations, and therefore full of competitors. Dunsany had seen it before: landing on a platinum-rich asteroid only to discover that it was full of robotic maggots, chewing their way to the rich interior, crawling out of holes to expel mineralogical nectar, while other robots or alien pilots waited to receive the material. In such instances, it was wise to move on and keep searching.

If, however, you didn’t see anyone already operating there, the time was ripe to act like an insect yourself: a locust. Landing on a surface to quickly strip-mine it. Drill, collect, catalogue, and retreat! Fill your ship’s belly to bursting and fly back to a TerraNet world for good pay and the satisfaction of having assisted your species. It was, Dunsany liked to think, the story of civilization—of any civilization, really. Gather resources. Strengthen your position. Master your own small corner of the galactic ocean.

Sometimes that meant you had to fight.

When the rogue world appeared on his ship’s ladar systems, Dunsany hadn’t expected a fight. Yet as he swung into high orbit, another vessel appeared. The pingback silhouette matched that of a thovogri vine-ship. He had promptly attacked them.

He didn’t consider himself a violent man. The decision to attack stemmed from several considerations. He didn’t want them thwarting his intentions here. Didn’t want them opening fire on him—the thovogri were thieves and butchers and monsters in every sense of the word. In space, it was often necessary to make split-second decisions, and so he strafed their vessel, disabled it, demanded (and received) their surrender. His ship grappled theirs, and he began reeling it in for boarding.

Then the vine-ship grappled them back, and made a run for the planet surface.

Dragging his ship with them.

“John!” Dunsany shouted, shuddering in his seat harness. “Standby to initiate hull release!”

“Aye, sir!”

He stiffened at the voice. Twisting around, he was confused to see—not his copilot of five years—but Robotics Engineer Fallon Wilmarth. She climbed into the adjacent creche.

Before he could ask what the devil she was doing up here, he noticed John’s body. The copilot lay crumpled at the foot of telemetry panes, neck bent at an unsightly angle. He must have been thrown in the first moments of their quarry’s run.

Dunsany’s heart sank.

My fault.

It’s my fault.

Voice brittle, he said, “Wilmarth? We need to eject the outer hull.”

She blinked at the control panel. “I understand.”

“The release should separate us from the enemy, but I’ll need to concentrate on recovery maneuvers. Bring up the AI-assist. Wait for my command.”

“Yes, sir.”

He closed his eyes, importing a virtual feed of their tangled descent straight to his visual cortex. Why the hell were the thovogri trying to commit suicide? Death before dishonor? It made no sense, but neither was there time to contemplate the alien motivations of an alien race. All that mattered was survival. He saw the two ships in his mind’s eye. The velocity, angle of descent. There was one chance to escape this plunge down the gravity-well. He anxiously licked his lips, hands snaking into the flight control haptics. The ship rattled around him.

“Wilmarth!” he shouted. “Eject the outer hull!”

His visual field went dead.

He opened his eyes and realized the darkness was not just in his virtual interface. The cockpit itself was dead. All instrument displays were black. All holos collapsed like flowers clamping up for the night.

We’re going to hit the surface like a bug on a windshield.

He never even heard the crash.


Metal spiders crawled over his face, leaving little footprints in his sweat.

Captain Shayne Dunsany stirred awake, as the spiders found the wetports in his neck and sank needle-tipped mandibles, administering a soup of stabilizing agents. Emergency lighting transformed the cockpit into a ruby-hued miasma of fire-suppressant gas and chalky, post-crash debris.

He undid his harness and fell out of his chair.

“Ship status,” he choked. “Anyone copy?”

There was no response. Silvan’s body lay on the floor, jackknifed and motionless. In the copilot creche, Engineer Wilmarth blinked weakly at him through her biomask; it grew around her face like a jellyfish.

“Captain?” she began.

“Sit tight,” he ordered, and stumbled into the next room.

There was no next room.

Under ordinary circumstances, his vessel was a Marzanna-class, thousand-meter-long mining ship serving his home colony of Winter Calm. The Marzannas were the workhorse of the Winter Calm fleet, scouring this edge of the galactic spiral for precious resources. Now, all that remained of her was a cockpit and ragged half of the robotics bay. The only thing keeping him and Wilmarth alive was the plasmic membrane that had snapped shut over the breach, restoring air pressure and oxygen; through that translucent barrier, Dunsany saw debris strewn like a comet’s tail across an alien horizon.

“Fuck,” he whispered.

Marooned on a rogue world. The planetary surface outside the barrier was an uninviting vista of icy spires and glassy hedgehog shapes. Colossal tusks—they couldn’t be called mountains—stabbed laterally from enormous mesas regularly spaced along the terrain like allergic hives on a gray arm.

“Sir?” Wilmarth appeared behind him. “The ship . . . ?”

“See for yourself.”

“I don’t see the cargo hold.”

“I’m more concerned about the enemy ship we grappled.” He walked to within an inch of the plasmic membrane, surveying the desolate view.

“Do you really think they could have survived?”

“We did. What’s your status?”

She touched her wristpad, considering the bio-readings. “Minor contusions. Whiplash. Otherwise, I’m all right, unlike . . .” She bowed her head. “John is dead.”

“I know.”

“He must have been thrown when the thovogri ran. Captain, I’m so sorry.”

The direness of their situation had a suppressive effect on his emotions. He was acutely aware that they were operating on borrowed time. This wasn’t a crash on a colony moon, where a distress signal could summon rescue from anywhere within several light-hours. Interstellar travel had been FTL for a century, but no communication system could break the light barrier. A distress signal would not be detected by listening posts for at least a few hundred years, unless another FTL ship managed to intercept it.

And there was no telling if another ship would be under human control. Could easily be another thovogri. Could be something else. The galaxy was a rogue’s gallery of dangerous species.

“We’re going to hold off on sending a distress signal,” he said at last.

Wilmarth raised an eyebrow. “Sir?

“Given the circumstances, our priority should be the enemy ship. Where did it land? Are there survivors? Can we salvage it and appropriate its own systems for our needs? Grab a side-arm, Wilmarth. We’re going outside.”

“You want me to . . . ?”

“You’re going to tell me you have no experience with planet-side recon.”

She gave a stiff nod.

He sighed and did his best to hoist a sympathetic smile. “I’m familiar with your guild record. I requested you, remember? You’re an experienced, versatile and capable engineer.” He saw the compliment register in her eyes.

“Yes, sir.”

“Blue box on the wall. Grab a pistol and as many spare rounds as you can carry.” Heart pounding, Dunsany pressed his chest-plate controls, and his own biosuit bled out from his flight-suit shoulders, waist, and legs like dew, covering him head to foot. At the same time, its shape-memory circuitry configured its life support suite, including rebreather, exterior pockets for ammunition and supplies, commlink, and sensor pores. The entire process took less than two minutes. He raised each boot, letting the biosuit bleed over the soles. Then he strode to the plasmic wall and stepped through it.

There was a springy resistance, and suddenly he was through. Outside on an unknown world. Wilmarth followed a minute later, pistol in hand, looking nervous.

“Look at this place!” she exclaimed. “Have you ever seen anything like it?”

“No.”

It was a frozen hellscape. Strange mounds and protean formations gave the appearance of a jungle built out of glass. Their impact had splintered through enormous fernlike shapes. Tumbled blocks of ice lay strewn at the base of curving towers.

“That’s where the thovogri ship is,” Dunsany said, indicating a fresh scar that sliced open the landscape north of their position. “Let’s double-time it!”

They jogged along the trail. Something about the spires and mounds began to gnaw at him. Rogue worlds floated through the void, beholden to no star. So how had these topographical features formed naturally?

“This place is volcanically active,” Wilmarth said, running alongside him. “There’s no other way to account for this surface.”

“No? I can think of another explanation.”

“Sir?”

“Artificial construction.”

She laughed. “You think someone spent all this time carving a city out of ice?”

“Why not?”

It wasn’t such a ridiculous thought, he mused. Most cultures, human and alien alike, worked in stone in the primitive phase of their development. Was it so absurd to think that something had done the same in ice? While in orbit, ship sensors had detected geothermal signatures coming from within the planet. That surely accounted for much of the surface’s character, as his engineer supposed. It was certainly true that cryovolcanic activity could produce unusual formations. Hell, even normal volcanism could do that. Regular, geometrically precise shapes were a well-documented phenomenon, from the Giant’s Causeway on Earth to the Cydonian plateau on Mars.

Still, the majestic scope of the towers and needles and lattices really did appear to be the work of intelligent construction. The galaxy was filled with intelligent civilizations. Couldn’t someone have built an icy metropolis out here? If there was heat beneath the crust, maybe something had evolved. Maybe they used the surface as a canvas of artistic expression.

His thoughts trailed off as, picking their way through the debris field, they saw what had become of the alien ship.

It had been swallowed by a mound.

The thovogri vessel must have hit the surface at an oblique enough angle that they didn’t shatter like porcelain, and instead went rolling and sliding into the base of one of the regularly spaced mounds rising from the surface. They had smashed through the mound’s base like a stone through a window pane.

“The mound can’t be solid,” he said.

Wilmarth absently scratched her face, then apparently realized she was insulated by her biosuit. “It’s probably a cave that got iced over. Caught the thovogri like a baseball in a glove.”

She splayed one hand ahead of her, fingers lighting like a luminous starfish. Data washed over her faceplate, and her eyes widened. “Ladar is pinging off a silhouette, a thousand meters inside.”

“Be ready with that pistol.”

There were lots of things Dunsany could say about the mining guild. One of the positives was that they required members to go through an intensive battery of multidisciplinary training, which included firearms and combat tactics. Wilmarth was a robotics engineer, coordinating deployment of the drillers, sifters, and processors that constituted the bread-and-butter of mining operations . . . yet by the way she held the pistol and used surface debris as defensive cover, it was clear she hadn’t forgotten her defensive training. As an ancient writer once penned: Specialization is for insects.

Dunsany took up position at one side of the cave entrance. Then he slipped inside, and found himself in waist-deep fog. Stalactites and stalagmites protruded ahead of him, fangs in a wintry mouth.

“There are lights!” Wilmarth cried behind him, voice tinny through transmission to his suit speakers. “Are you seeing this?”

“I’m seeing it,” he breathed, hardly believing his eyes.

The fog billowing through the cave’s interior was punctured by a constellation of lights. These formed a deliberate, patterned luminosity: not a serpent of light but a hydra, spiraling along numerous paths.

“Lichen,” his engineer muttered. “It has to be a bioluminescent lichen.”

“Does it?”

“I know what it looks like, but that really doesn’t make sense, does it?”

“What does it look like, Wilmarth?” He considered the sprawling tendrils of light fading into frosted miasma. “Because I’ll tell you it looks like to me: a city.”

It was ridiculous, of course. There could be no city on a dead planet so far from any sun, and with no political borders to defend or supply it. Who would colonize such a place? For all the territorial struggles between humanity and alien races, no sentient species could desire such a useless piece of real estate like this unless . . . 

He was approaching the nearest light, finger tight around his pistol, when a hunched shadow loped across his path.



II. Gloomknot


It happened so fast that he nearly pulled the trigger. The fog burst around a humanoid shape, its feet splashing through puddles of meltwater. Dunsany’s first impression was that it was a man—a human man!—carrying a child on his back. Neither of them were wearing biosuits or other protective gear; rags hung loosely from the man’s body.

The fellow was perhaps forty years old, with very long, black hair and a voluminous beard. The child on his back appeared to be young, judging by the pale arms wrapped around his neck and emaciated legs around his waist. He couldn’t see the kid’s face; the child clung, piggyback, to the adult in what must have been pure exhaustion, face buried beneath a matted tangle of stringy hair.

Shipwreck survivors?

“Hello!” Dunsany began.

The man halted, eyes bulging from shrunken sockets.

“My name is Captain Shayne Dunsany of TerraNet. Can we render assistance?”

The man stared, breathing in labored gasps. The child at his back didn’t stir.

“We’re here to help. We encountered a thovogri ship in orbit. Is that where you came from? Did they abduct you and your child?”

That was a strong possibility. The thovogri were smugglers for half a dozen different species. Weapons were the typical contraband, but they weren’t above acting as slavers when demand called for it.

Wilmarth approached, hand splayed. “Captain? He’s not matching anyone from colony registries.”

“He came from somewhere. Not every colony reports their—”

The man threw back his head and howled.

Dunsany recoiled. The howl went through him like an icepick, and he thought: The man’s insane! What the hell has he been through? Before he could react, the man turned, child still on his back, and bounded into the mist. Somewhere farther away, he howled again, and the ululation turned into a series of echoes like the baying of wolves.

Or maybe it wasn’t an echo.

Maybe others are howling back.

“The thovogri ship,” Dunsany said, collecting his thoughts. “If any of them survived, neutralizing them is our first priority.”

“Yes, sir.”

They followed the lighted path. As it turned out, the source of illumination was within the ice as a series of buried luminous globes. They varied in size, with some as large as basketballs and others as diminutive as pearls; in either case, they lit multiple trails through a labyrinth of shadows. And the details of the environment were becoming clearer. Dunsany noticed looming, rectangular shapes around them. Structures too deliberate to be natural.

Then he saw the thovogri ship.

It had come to rest against a cavern wall, upside-down, nose crumpled against the ground. One wing had broken off on impact. The hull had sheared away in places, exposing steel ribs and honeycombed compartments. Black vines dangled, entwined around a cylindrical structure at odds with the vine-ship.

“The cargo hold!” Wilmarth cried.

“Secure the enemy ship first,” Dunsany said, though he felt a flicker of hope. He climbed up through the alien hull, and his engineer followed.

Two thovogri were dead inside. They had killed each other with vine-casters. A nasty short-ranged weapon, Dunsany had encountered it before; three years ago, a thovogri raiding party hit Winter Calm. He had engaged them with the colony guards. Vine-casters were a peculiar weapon, and they behaved unexpectedly. They looked like rifles, but shot rubbery tendrils. These could knock a man down. Could lash onto limbs and tear them out of sockets. Could go rigid and pierce like a medieval lance. They could even flower into a makeshift shield, deflecting bullets. A nasty piece of alien tech.

The two thovogri had fired these vines at each other. Both were pinned through like butterflies on corkboard. Dunsany ducked beneath these stiff projectiles.

“Looks like they had a disagreement,” Wilmarth noted.

“Good.”

“Maybe this explains what happened in orbit. They had surrendered, remember? Then they grappled us, and ran.”

“Maybe.”

He disentangled one of the vine-casters from an alien claw. With the press of a button, the vine snapped back into the muzzle in a whiplike flourish. Holstering the weapon, he climbed higher into the ship.

In the next chamber, the floor and walls were cluttered with shipping containers. Most were intact despite the crash. One container, however, had become pinned by a compressed bulkhead and popped open like a chestnut. The contents littered the floor, and Dunsany stared in horror.

Gloomknots!

He was so astonished that he failed to react before his engineer climbed up beside him. She glanced to the floor and went pale.

“Fuck,” she whispered. “Oh, captain! Fuck! They’re out of containment! They . . .”

“Back away,” he barked.

“Captain! I can feel them—”

“Wilmarth, listen to me . . .”

“I can feel them in my eyes!”

“Back away! Now, officer!”

She retreated, eyes so large he could see veins. She withdrew into darkness, though he could still hear her ragged gasping across the commlink.

When she was gone, he turned back to the artifacts.

They looked like mutilated creatures. Pulpy, bubbled, and vivisected. Bony cross-beams presented an eerie impression of endless depth. Each was twice the size of a human hand. Unknown artwork by an unknown race. The best researchers from TerraNet couldn’t agree on who had made them, or when, or even how they worked.

“You’re going to be fine,” Dunsany said into his commlink, wondering if he was speaking to himself or his engineer. “Just breathe slowly and don’t think about them.”

“Captain . . . I’m sorry . . .”

“I know you can handle this.”

Fallon Wilmarth was a good engineer. Skilled, smart, and efficient. She’d finished top of her class at River Lord Academy, then gone on to serve two TerraNet cruisers, one of which saw action at the Battle of F’deel. By all accounts, she had been a valuable addition to each crew and good under pressure.

Then she took a job working a shepherd moon in the Brin System. While drawing core samples, one of her robotic drills became unresponsive. Wilmarth had gone out to see what the trouble was. The bot had broken into an air-pocket. In that exposed interior, a bizarre object glinted in her flashlight.

A gloomknot.

Why the hellish thing had been buried on a tiny moon, Dunsany would never understand. But that was par for the course: whatever civilization had crafted the goddam things had also seen fit to pepper them across the galaxy.

Neither was it understood how the damned things did . . . what they did. Wilmarth’s exposure had screwed with her mind. Current theory was that the artifacts represented an encoded, data-rich pattern capable of rewriting neural pathways. Stare too long at a gloomknot, and it changed you. She’d been hospitalized for six months. Upon discharge, she found herself unemployable; rumors of her mental breakdown—of what had broken her down—had traveled ahead of her. People were afraid of gloomknots. Those who had suffered exposure were pariahs.

Hating such ignorant prejudices (having experienced ample bigotry himself—the galactic elite was only too eager to sneer at Winter Calm’s igloo-dwelling blue-collar laborers), Dunsany put in a requisition for her. And Wilmarth’s gratitude had since bordered on obsession. She was eager to please, desperate to succeed in this second chance.

He pulled a heavy blanket off the wall (an incubation skin, he noted, being smuggled to one of an egg-laying civilization) and spread it over the gloomknots, being careful to avoid looking at them again. Their shapes burned in his memory. Like being drawn into a mandala. Like marveling at an optical illusion. A kaleidoscopic tunnel.

Stare long enough, and you might see the image hidden at the other end...

“Captain?”

“What is it?”

“Are you okay?”

He finished spreading the blanket over the gloomknots, taking care to ensure that even the concealed shapes were sufficiently camouflaged. “I’m fine. Stand guard. Take further ladar readings of the cave.”

“Yes sir.”

He advanced farther into the ship. When he reached the thovogri bridge, the angle of ascent was so steep that he was forced to hoist himself using the wall paneling as rungs, and—

—something whipped past his face like an oily tentacle.

Dunsany dropped to one knee, aiming his pistol at the thovogri commander who was strapped into the seat above him.

By comparison with the gloomknots, the thovogri wasn’t all that bad to look at. Its five legs stretched into their control ports like a starfish. An eye glared weakly from the base of each limb. The body itself was a headless trunk. A vine-caster was clutched in one claw.

Dunsany fired a single shot.

The vine-caster exploded. The thovogri hissed in fear, all eyes widening.

“Reach for another weapon,” Dunsany growled, “and I’ll blast off a limb of my choice. Got that, you bastard?”

The thovogri nodded—an exaggerated imitation of the human motion, and one that didn’t entirely work, considering there was no head upon its trunk, so that it heaved its entire body in an up-and-down fashion. The black eyes wormed in their fleshy sockets.

Dunsany’s fingers sweated around the trigger. “What business do you have on this world?”

“Not know world,” the alien said, speaking in a grating voice that sounded like rocks scraping together.

“You were orbiting when we arrived.”

“Surveying.”

“You’d never been here before?”

“Never.”

Dunsany laughed coldly. “So I’m supposed to believe that you just happened to stumble on a rogue planet at the exact same time we did? Out of all the star systems, we both ended up here? Know what the odds of that are?” When the thovogri made no response, he said, “I’ll tell you what I think. This world is a supply depot of yours. There’s artificial lighting. Air pressure, too, though I’m not sure how. And there are humans here—at least two—which suggests that you employ a slave labor force. I think we caught you in the midst of dropping off contraband, or picking some up. That’s why you tried to run! Not into space, no! You tried crashing us on your own planet!”

The eyes at the base of each limb widened in outrage. “This not our planet! You crashed us here! It was you!”

“You spawnless liar!” It was a supreme thovogri insult to demean one’s reproductive success. “You grappled us!”

“We surrendered!”

“You pulled us down into the planet!”

“No! You pulled us!”

A chill ran along his spine. He thought back to the moment they had grappled the enemy vessel and began reeling it in. Sensors indicated the engines were dead. Even visually, Dunsany had been able to see the filleted hull leaking a ribbon of plasma.

The thovogri had been dead in the water.

So how could they possibly have run?

There had been a sudden acceleration, there was no denying that. It happened so fast that it nearly snapped Dunsany’s neck. They hit atmosphere like a hammer. By the time he recovered from the shock, both ships were plummeting like a pair of meteors. Was it possible that his own ship had accelerated? That was ridiculous! Master control of the vessel was keyed to the captain’s creche. Sure, there were redundancies in place, but someone would have to manually reroute control to another station. That wasn’t possible on a whim. It required hours of work . . . 

...that an engineer could have done.

He remembered something else, too. He’d seen Wilmarth climbing into the copilot creche after John Silvan had been killed. Dunsany ordered her to shed the outer hull, and what happened? His ship had gone dead. Power cut. They’d fallen, blind and paralyzed, down the gravity-well.

“You’re lying,” he told the thovogri captain. “We grappled you, and you grappled us back! If you meant to surrender, why do that?”

The thovogri made no reply.

Dunsany pulled the trigger.

The beam severed the alien’s harness, causing it to tumble down from its command chair and crash into the wall. Dunsany pinned it there, pistol pressed against the fleshy trunk. In seconds, he had slapped plasmic cuffs onto all five limbs, binding them in a cross-section.

“You’re coming with me,” he said.

It was several minutes before he could wrestle his quarry down through the ship. He took care to avoid disturbing the blanket on the floor. He could still feel the gloomknot pattern in his eyes . . . not so unlike the dimpling of skin after pressing an arm against a raised surface. As a kid, bored in his schoolhouse classroom on Winter Calm, he would often entertain himself by creating “scars” on his skin by pressing against his school-desk’s corners. The gloomknot wriggled in his thoughts in a similar, tactile fashion.

I only looked for a few seconds, he thought. That’s not enough time for them to fuck with me. I won’t think about them. Won’t let their patterns form in my head.

Yet as he climbed down through the ship, pushing his quarry ahead of him, another thought floated up from the dark waters of his mind:

How long had Wilmarth looked, back on that shepherd moon? What if she was the one who crashed us here?



III. The Lost City


She was waiting for him outside the hull breach, one hand extended to the mist. Reams of data washed over her faceplate.

“What have you found?’ Dunsany asked, forcing his bound captive to its knee-joints.

“I’ve done a ladar sweep of the cave.”

“And?”

“You need to see this.” She made a sweeping motion, and his own faceplate filled with an extraordinary image reconstructed by the pingback.

It showed ruins.

The ruins of a city!

There was no other possible interpretation of the ghostly silhouettes. Concealed in the ice fog, dozens of structures jutted in a spiraling pattern. Some towered two hundred meters and nearly brushed the ceiling. Others were stunted, lopsided rubble like shattered teeth in a giant’s mouth. Triangular edifices, ovoid monoliths, and spiny rectangles studded the cave in a showcase of undeniable architecture. The only natural formations were the glacial columns and stalagmites that supported this eerie cathedral.

“I don’t recognize the architecture,” Dunsany muttered. “Do you?”

“No, sir.”

He minimized the image and glared at his quarry. “How about you? This isn’t a thovogri settlement; I’ve seen pictures of your ugly little cities. You didn’t build this place. Who did?”

The alien captain blinked its radial eyes. “Not know.”

“Why did you come here?”

“Investigate reports of human outpost.”

“We don’t build outposts on rogue worlds!”

“Neither do we.”

Wilmarth closed her data-display. “We know there’s at least two people alive down here. Maybe they could shed some light on this?”

He hauled his captive to its feet. “Agreed. Let’s try to make contact.”

They pressed into the mist, following the nearest lighted path. At an intersection, Dunsany craned his neck to view one of the looming shadows. It was a curious thing to behold. Didn’t look like rock or ice. In fact, if he didn’t know any better, it seemed to be made of metal. Across the path was another massive shadow. And another.

Shadows dimpling the mist. Alien patterns. He imagined himself rushing into them. The fog brushing his face as he ran like a marathon runner into a maze of weird configurations . . . 

The gloomknot has gotten to me, he thought. It had only been a brief exposure, but the fucking thing is already messing with me. Burrowing into my mind. Rewriting pathways into neurological strange-loops...

“Captain?”

Dunsany saw a figure dash in front of him. He thought it was the shipwrecked man from earlier, but then realized this was a woman. She was very tall, nearly seven feet. That was common among colonists from low-g worlds—they tended to get beanpole, mantislike bodies.

“Excuse me!” he called after her.

She half-turned in his direction. He glimpsed the same hollow, famished looked as with the first person he’d seen. Remarkably, she also was giving a piggyback ride to a child. Dunsany noted the unkempt tangle of black hair, pale arms wrapped around the woman’s neck, pale legs locked around her waist. Then she melted into the mist.

And howled.

After a few seconds, she howled again, farther off, and this time was answered by at least a dozen others.

“This human place!” the thovogri observed. “Humans here!”

Dunsany approached an oblong darkness and ran his hand along the battered, metallic surface. “This isn’t a building,” he said. “It’s the outer hull of a ship.”

His engineer shone an illuminating beam from her hand. “You’re right! That’s a F’Deel sleeper ship.”

“And that ovoid building on the ladar map? If I didn’t know better, I’d say it’s the control tower of a Dilok trader.”

She studied the ladar map. “Are we in a junkyard? If all these ‘buildings’ are the husks of other ships, then . . .”

“Then who brought them all here?”

Old stories unfurled in his memory. Ships did go missing—that was a fact of galactic life. As civilizations expanded, their need for resources expanded in parallel. Expeditions were launched into unexplored regions of space. Sometimes they returned with surveys of metal-rich asteroids and unclaimed moons. Sometimes they didn’t return at all. Hostile aliens explained some of those disappearances. Accidents and malfunctions surely accounted for others. There were legends, though, of ships crashing on unmapped shores and the survivors forming makeshift colonies as they waited and prayed for rescue. And if the crash was devastating enough, there would be no way to call for help. What then? The marooned crew would be forced into a grim life of scraping for whatever resources could keep them alive. In most cases, they were doomed to extinction. In others . . . 

Was it possible for shipwreck survivors to build a city out of scrap? There were animals which did that; on Winter Calm, the imported crabs and mollusks had taken to using discarded cans and other trash as shelters.

Wilmarth approached a lumpish cone rising from the path ahead. It looked like a town well: round and with an open mouth.

“There’s heat coming from here,” she said, holding her hand over the top. “I think it’s a geothermal vent. This planet is geologically active.”

“Then maybe that explains how these people live,” he suggested. “If they crashed here long ago, they’d require heat. I don’t see any trees around to use as kindling, but geothermal vents could keep them warm. Could be used to grow food.”

“What food?”

An ugly thought occurred to him. Wilmarth seemed to read it in his expression.

“The F’Deel seedship,” she said slowly. “It would have been crammed with their larvae. If the humans here were desperate enough, they could . . . um . . . cook the frozen embryos. That could last them years. It’s terrible, but maybe it’s the only way.”

“And who knows what other ships are down here? Who knows what resources they had aboard?”

“But how could so many ships end up in the same place? And if those ships were salvaged for food and shelter, how could no one have thought to use the materials to build a distress beacon?”

It was a good question.

There appeared to be enough ships of enough variety that a breeding population of shipwreck survivors might be able to live for years. Decades, even. They retreat into the planet for heat, and emerge to scavenge as needed. He still didn’t understand how so many ships had ended up in the hollow interior of a massive ice mound, though. The thovogri ship had crashed here, but what of the others? Were they . . . carried here? How? It reminded him of how ancient terrestrial people had lugged blocks of quarried stone across miles of harsh terrain using only sleds, ropes, and pulleys.

The difference was these people had been forced to use junked, crashed, and derelict materials. A civilization built of garbage.

Dunsany looked to the thovogri. “You said you came here to investigate reports of a human settlement. Where did you get that report?”

The alien’s eyes swiveled in their fleshy sockets. “Signal detected.”

“From this planet?”

“Yes.”

Dunsany felt a flicker of hope, and he looked to his engineer. “Sounds like there’s working electronics down here. Maybe these people tried building a beacon but couldn’t give it enough juice. Maybe they did build a beacon, but as the years passed and no one answered, they forgot how to upkeep it. We might be able to fix it!”

“Why you here?” the thovogri demanded. “If not human outpost, why you here?”

“We were on a survey mission.”

“Why here?”

“Because . . .” he trailed off, not wanting to utter his realization.

Again, Wilmarth seemed to read his thoughts. “Because I chose this star system, right, captain? We were poring over star charts, and I suggested these coordinates.”

He turned away from the thermal vent and faced her. “Did you know about this planet?”

“No.”

“Why suggest these coordinates?”

Her lip trembled. “I was looking at the star chart with you. This seemed a good place to search.”

“Did you crash us here, too?”

“I don’t remember.”

“You don’t remember?

The thovogri gave a snickering sound that was probably laughter, but sounded like a dog snuffling.

Wilmarth pointed to their captive. “His vineship grappled us, I remember that. And don’t forget that he was smuggling gloomknots! Why don’t you blame him for the crash?”

“We smuggle many things,” the alien countered.

“You surrendered! And then you grappled us!”

“Not my order! Crewmate disobeyed.”

Dunsany felt another shudder pass through him, an awful implication forming in his mind. “Is that why we found two dead thovogri aboard your ship? They killed each other. Are you saying that one of them lashed our ship against your orders?” When the alien nodded its body, he said, “There was a crate of gloomknots on your ship. I assumed the crash had opened it, but now . . . I’m betting your disobedient crewmate was responsible. He broke containment to examine the things. Why would he do that?”

The thovogri said nothing.

“He had been previously exposed,” Dunsany guessed. “Maybe years earlier, he encountered a gloomknot. The exposure changed him. Influenced his behavior. He probably didn’t even remember what he was doing when he . . .”

Wilmarth threw back her head and screamed.

It was a scream of such intensity that it nearly blew the speakers on his biosuit. Her mouth stretched hideously wide, the cords on her neck as rigid as mooring cables. The worst part of it was the look in her eyes. She looked terrified. As if she had no control over the behavior. She screamed herself hoarse.

And the cry was echoed by others. Shapes bounded out of the mist.

Dunsany spun about, seeing the dragnet closing. Men and woman, vacant-eyed and ragged. Not all of them were human, either. A hulking Dilok lumbered into view, its single eye blank. More shapes, some familiar, some belonging to no recognizable species.

And each carried a child on their backs.

He aimed his pistol at the crowd. “We are with TerraNet! We have no hostile intentions, but we will defend ourselves as necessary.”

The crowd ringed them. A motley assembly of human and alien countenances. The children they carried, by contrast, were identical in appearance. Black mops of hair obscuring their faces. Pale, almost snakelike arms coiled around each host.

And suddenly, Dunsany saw something he hadn’t noticed before.

Hadn’t wanted to notice.

It appeared that there were children riding piggyback on this crowd, but now he realized this wasn’t the case. What he had taken for pale arms and legs lovingly entwined around their guardians were skinny, ropelike appendages. And the matted black hair? In the light from his biosuit, he now realized that it was a bristly, shaggy growth.

How had he ever thought these were children being carried by loving parents? These were lumpish creatures, affixed to the forlorn colonists like barnacles. Controlling them . . . 

“Captain!” Wilmarth shrieked. “I’ll help you! Let me help you!”

“What are you talking about?”

“Don’t move, sir! I’ll get you out of here!”

She started toward the geothermal vent.

With horror, he realized that while they had been speaking, a creature had crawled out of the vent. It made him think of an oversized cockroach. Flat in bodily orientation, scuttling on pale legs. It reared atop the vent, hair bristling like antennae. Wilmarth dropped to her knees, weeping, in front of it. She touched her chest-plate and the biosuit retracted, seeping back into her flight-suit ports.

“Captain! Put your arms around me! I’ll carry you to safety!”

“Wilmarth! What the hell are you doing?”

“We’ll fix the distress beacon! We’ll get back home!”

His engineer wrapped herself around the thing that had crawled out of the vent in an obscene embrace. It squirmed around her shoulders. A proboscis kissed the back of her neck. Fallon Wilmarth’s eyes rolled white.

As blank and vacant as the expression on the others here!

The thovogri trilled in panic. “We leave here! Must leave!”

Dunsany fired point-blank into the crowd, carving an opening through their bodies. Screeching howls erupted from every throat. Then he seized his captive by one arm and dashed through the breach, peripherally aware that the vent was expelling another crawling monstrosity.

“We’re going back to your ship!” Dunsany said.

“Ship no power!”

“But I’ll bet it has weapons. What smuggler doesn’t carry weapons?”

The thovogri grunted as it ran with him. “It has weapons.”

Dunsany’s thoughts raced as fluidly as his legs. This was a planet of parasites. Through sinister manipulations he could barely comprehend, it had lured ships of every known civilization—and those unknown to TerraNet—to this dark corner of the galaxy. Had gotten them to land or crash here. Took possession of the crews. Used them to build a city.

And suddenly, he suspected how they had done it.

The gloomknots. They had been scattered across the galaxy as lures. Those who encountered a gloomknot could hardly know why they chose to search out here. Could hardly understand why accidents befell their ships.

This wasn’t merely about his own survival any more. Dunsany considered the safety and comfort of Winter Calm. He imagined it succumbing to this hideous infection. The colonists taken over by this species of parasite. Then other worlds succumbing. The entirety of TerraNet. Other civilizations falling until every spiral arm of the galaxy had been possessed by an insidious force.

“You will get us lost!” the thovogri cried.

“I know where I’m going!” he snapped, but he called up the ladar map of the cave to be sure. The twisting streets, the confusing geometries of dozens of vessels brought here, dragged inside by the enslaved muscle power of a dozen intelligent races. He turned left, dove right. A clawed alien resembling a nightmarish crab scrambled at him from the fog; Dunsany had time to appreciate that there were multiple parasites affixed to it, before he shot it through the body. The blast tore the shell into separate halves and Dunsany and the thovogri slipped through steaming viscera.

“This is not the way!” his captive repeated.

But it certainly was the way, Dunsay thought, following the map. The thovogri ship wasn’t far off now. The spiral arms of the city were more complicated than he’d appreciated before; at the same time, there was a fundamental pattern to it all that roughly aligned with other cities he’d seen, human and alien alike. In fact, the longer he contemplated the map, the more certain he was that he’d seen this pattern before.

Then the realization stuck him, and he gave a wild cry.

It was the gloomknot!

The city’s design mirrored the bubbly protrusions and frenzied switchbacks. Terraced streets in kaleidoscopic mandalas. He found himself falling into the image as if through a hall of endless funhouse mirrors.

Distantly, he was aware of his alien companion breaking away from him. It emitted a panicked trill, as something trundled out of the fog, seized it, and dragged it away.

Dunsany ran on, no longer conscious of his legs pumping. He was only fleetingly aware of passing within view of the cave entrance, where the fog seeped out in vaporous tendrils; on the snowfield beyond, a mixed group comprised of multiple species appeared, pushing and pulling the remains of his own ship like ants cooperating to bring a useful resource to their colony. Another addition to this city of the damned.

The gloomknot blazed in his mind.

He tried closing the ladar map. His hands wouldn’t comply. In desperation, he slapped at his chest-plate to retract the biosuit. The map melted away as his faceplate disappeared with the rest of the protective barrier. There was nothing between him and the environment now. Nothing to—

—get in the way—

—distract him.

He spotted the thovogri ship. There was no way he could repair it into working order, but two hopes drove him on. He might be able to restore backup power, enough to send a distress signal. At this point he didn’t even care who picked it up. TerraNet or thovogri, pirates or slavers. Any fate was better than the one which awaited him here.

His other hope was that there were sufficient weapons aboard the vessel. He was outnumbered, but none of them seemed to be armed. None wore armor or seemed capable of advanced cognition. He didn’t know how many pitiable beings lived here, multiplying here, toiling to the demands of the parasites that hijacked them . . . but with the right weaponry it shouldn’t matter. He might be able to cull them with a few military-grade rifles and explosives. It wouldn’t be murder, but mercy.

Reaching the ship, he clambered down into it.

Vaguely, he wondered why he was climbing down. Earlier when he and Wilmarth found it, they had been forced to climb up into the vessel. The air felt humid and cloying around him.

Dunsany descended a narrow chute towards a source of light. The main cabin burned a hole in the darkness. He spotted the captain’s chair.

I need to rest, he thought. I’m so exhausted that I can’t think. Need to sit down. Plan my strategy. Why was I coming here? Why did I climb down into the ground?

He dropped into the captain’s chair. Something touched his back.

The harness. It had to be the harness.

Shayne Dunsany wept in relief as he pulled the harness around his neck and waist. The straps enfolded him in a comforting embrace.

Things were going to be all right.

He threw back his head and howled, knowing now that one day, the rest of the galaxy would be howling back.


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Framed