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THE BUILDING
WILL CONTINUE

Gray Rinehart



Be it his novel Walking on the Sea of Clouds, his contributions to several Baen anthologies, or his short stories on the pages of Analog and Asimov’s magazines, Baen’s slushmaster general Gray Rinehart is no stranger to telling a wide variety of stories, be they stories of struggling to colonize the moon, or of ancient cetaceans attempting to make first contact with primitive humans.

All the same, this may be the first time I’ve actually seen Gray tackle Lovecraftian horror, delivering a story of broken men on a hostile world, whose ancient mysteries and still present dangers have their own plans for the visitors from Earth.

***

“Do you mean to suggest that these expeditions are cursed? Absurd.”

“I didn’t exactly say that,” Leland said, “but it’s starting to feel that way.”

Professor Kellick sneered, which made him look even more pompous. “Have you been talking to Fitzhugh? Nothing he says is credible. We don’t know for sure that he . . .” His voice drifted off, and Leland knew he couldn’t bring himself to say murdered his entire team. When Kellick spoke again, his voice was low, as if only for himself. “Everyone having nightmares . . .”

No crap, Leland thought. He certainly was, and stranger with every passing night. But he couldn’t tell the man-in-charge what he already knew: that they’d all thought Delvecchio’s group would still be here, just cut off by a communications failure. Frustrated, he murmured, “Anybody with a soul would.”

“Would what?”

“Have nightmares. Mass disappearances are the stuff of nightmares.”

Kellick glanced up, briefly. “Thankfully, I do not come so equipped.”

Leland looked out the window at the trees that Delvecchio’s group had called “magnificedars.” Their boughs waved lazily, deep green in the growing twilight, but the breeze did not reach them inside the shelter.

Just as well. It would stink like rancid cooking grease.

“I wonder if they do,” Leland said.

“They who? Do what?”

“The hyperprotists.” The name Delvecchio’s team had given the things didn’t exactly roll off Leland’s tongue; but, then, he wasn’t a biologist.

“What about them?”

“If they come equipped with souls.”

Kellick looked up from his tablet, his stylus loose in his hand. All he needed was a pipe to complete the look of professorial haughtiness. “Oh, certainly.” His derision came through five-by-five in his tone of voice. “And theirs probably stink like they do.”

“Because cleanliness is next to godliness?”

Kellick sniffed. “If ever a species deserved to be called ‘the great unwashed,’ the hyperprotists do.”

“We probably smell bad to them, too.”

“Ah, but that is beyond my apprehension.” His attention back on his tablet, Kellick tapped the display with the stylus. “Why this sudden fascination with souls? Are you getting religion?”

“Not that I know of. What do you have against them? Against souls?”

“I gave up mythology when I was young. Besides, if everyone had one, what would be so special about them? I always thought souls must be cheap, being so common.”

Leland rolled his eyes, not that Kellick would notice. “I’m going to walk the perimeter.”


The encampment was about the size of two soccer fields set side-by-side, so walking the perimeter took little time.

The boundary itself was unimpressive: a ragged line of piled-up timbers the first expedition’s remotes had put in place after they cut the clearing. Not even a palisade, really, but why would they have built anything more substantial? Surveys had found no fauna larger than a terrestrial cow, and like cows the largest creatures were slow-moving herbivores. Had Delvecchio’s expedition placed their camp on the grassy plains rather than this forested bluff, it might have been in danger of being trampled by a migrating herd, but here getting overrun was wildly improbable, even by the far-more-numerous hyperprotists.

Leland watched his steps carefully. Other than their smell, the hyperprotists were inoffensive enough—they were just creepy as hell. They slithered through the grass and over obstacles like land-borne octopuses, except that they had no real tentacles—and no prominent head, either. Dinner-plate-sized pseudopods covered in mottled and mixed shades of cilia, in twilight they became especially hard to see. Leland supposed there were enough of them to cover the whole planet, so it was good that they stayed mostly in the trees.

Those trees stood like towering sentinels—or enormous prison guards—beyond the perimeter. Leland turned his back to them, and shivered at the breeze in his face. Not a fresh breeze, mind. It was stale, as if too many people had already breathed it, like the air in a cramped, crowded cell.

Not that his quarters were any better. They still smelled as musty as when he had first opened the room a week ago. Its previous tenant, Delvecchio’s assistant Jessamine Bonnehill, had left the usual detritus of occupancy: a couple of coveralls, some mufti, and a few personal trinkets, all of which Leland had packed into a pair of plastic bags and turned in before he unpacked his own things, and none of which pointed to where she had gone. The thought nagged him that she might show up unexpectedly and wonder why he was in her room. But like the others, there was no trace of her: She simply disappeared—into the forest, presumably—without warning or explanation.

Leland meandered on, and brooded.

Maybe Kellick could ignore the nightmares. Maybe he wasn’t having them. Leland hadn’t, at first, but he figured that was due to the post-transit sedatives: Even though he’d felt wrong in Bonnehill’s old space, he slept well that first night.

The nightmares had started the next night, the first without sedation. By the third day it was clear that others were having bad dreams, too, but they mostly had the advantage of duties more engaging than Leland’s.

He had troubleshot and repaired the satellite communication ground station in one long shift—the most time-consuming part had been fabricating a new waveguide to replace the one that someone had, for some unfathomable reason, removed—so now he felt increasingly redundant. He almost wished Delvecchio’s group had lost contact because of a problem with the quantum repeater in orbit, instead of the ground terminal, because then he need never have set foot on the planet. Now that communications could go out normally, Leland checked that the systems kept working, sat security, and helped Ames fab things, but over the course of the twenty-nine-hour day he still had far too much time for thinking.

At the path to the ruins, Leland paused again. The indigenes’ road was made of local stone fitted together as well or better than any Roman road, and except for some encroachment it cut an arrow-straight path through the forest. He studied one tree-root that was forcing the left edge up, then shifted his attention to the disorderly ranks of trees beyond. He marked how, deeper into the woods, their massive, black-barked trunks seemed to blend together in darkness.

That darkness moved. It beckoned him. He stepped toward it, a tentative half-step, then drew back and shivered.

He turned away from the forest and stalked toward the canteen. Whether he scrounged a snack or found someone to talk to or play a game with, it would delay him returning to his room, delay him returning to sleep.


Sarina Bruce clicked her tongue at Leland’s question. “I haven’t slept well since we got here, so why should last night be any different?”

“Just hoping someone was getting better sleep than me,” he said.

“Nobody I know.” She sipped her cocoa. Leland appreciated the way her lips touched the mug. “You ever figure out who sabotaged the comms?”

Leland turned his mug of tea a full rotation, thought about drinking some, then left it on the table and crossed his arms. “Watunge, I suppose. But I can’t figure why she’d do it that way. I’d’ve pulled a circuit board, that’d take a lot longer to fab.” He yawned, then said, “Sorry, I—”

“Don’t worry about starting me yawning,” Sarina said. Her blue-green eyes brightened and her teeth were perfect when she smiled. “I’ve been doing it all day.”

“I can imagine.” Leland smiled, though his stomach tightened as he said, “You have amazing eyes.”

Sarina ducked her head for a second. “Thanks. My parents ordered them special.” She winked, and continued, “They’re optimized for the sun over Phoenixhome, so they start to hurt if I’m outside too long here. Too much IR.”

“Well, your parents did a fine job. And they gave you a beautiful smile, too.”

She sat up a little straighter. “Lee Strickland, are you hitting on me?”

He laughed, though he was not as lighthearted as he wanted to seem. “Maybe,” he said. “It depends.”

The way Sarina scrunched up her forehead was delightful. “On what?”

“On whether you like it. If so, then yes, I’m hitting on you. If not, if it bothers you, then no . . . you must be mistaken.” He winked at her, and tried to smile casually.

Sarina squinted at him, then they both laughed.

“Okay, then,” she said. “I don’t mind at all, it’s sweet. But . . . I have a girlfriend back on Phoenixhome.”

Leland took a deep breath and tried not to sound too disappointed. “That’s the way it flies sometimes. To change the subject, what has anyone gotten out of Fitzhugh? Does he know what happened to the others?”

She set her mug down, and fought—only partly successfully—against a yawn of her own. “He hasn’t said much coherent since we found him. The sky-eye didn’t see anyone else at the site, and it would pick them up on imagery unless they’re deep underground.

“Did you see they caged him outside the dispensary? He went wild when they took him inside. He’s better—quieter—if he’s outside, even yesterday when it poured rain.”

“But, not helpful?”

“I don’t know what to think about him.” She finished her cocoa and slid her chair back. “He mostly talks about the hyperprotists, and even then half of what he says doesn’t make sense.”

“Like what?”

“I guess he studied them pretty closely, but when he talks about them he starts getting all mixed up. One minute it’s aphorisms—‘all for one, one for all,’ ‘united we stand, divided we fall,’ that sort of thing—and the next it’s a story of how he tried chasing one, and it turned into another one or something.”

Leland rubbed his eyes. “Kellick said Fitzhugh tagged some of them. Put trackers on them, but it didn’t work.”

Sarina laughed. “Oh, it worked, but not the way you’d expect. You know how they ooze around? Sometimes I guess they’d just flow around the tag and leave it on the ground or in a tree, pinging away. Or they’d flow a tag from one to another—Fitzhugh claims he saw a prote with four or five different tags on it.”

“That’d confound your survey.”

“Yeah. Once, Fitzhugh said that particular prote was being punished by having to carry all the tags, then later he said it was a hero, wearing the trackers like medals. As if he would know.”

“So that’s what he was doing when we got here? Studying the protes?”

“No idea. Could be he was out looking for everyone else, and just avoided being eaten long enough for us to find him.”

“Eaten? By what?”

Sarina shrugged. “Whatever ate all the rest of them.”


Catfish. Breaded, deep-fried catfish. Leland salivated at the thought. He smacked his lips and imagined he could smell them frying, hear the crackle of the oil. . . . 

He opened his eyes. The multialarm’s dim green status light greeted him. He was in his quarters, and didn’t hear oil crackling, but more rain tapping on the shelter’s roof.

The smell, on the other hand, was real. Less catfishy now, more greasy, as if something foul had been fried in it—and thick. He could almost feel it on his skin.

He reached for his comm, thumbed it to life, and turned on the flashlight. His room seemed fine. The narrow locker was closed, his work boots sat where he’d left them, everything appeared to be in order.

The air handler kicked to life, and the smell wavered. Maybe a prote had crawled over the intake. Once it was on its way, the smell should dissipate. . . . 

He felt a sudden urge to step outside and see if he could find the hyperprotist, maybe follow it to see where it went. He sniffed, and swallowed down enough spit and mucus to quell the urge. He thumbed off his comm, turned on his side, fluffed his pillow and laid his head on the wriggling cilia of a prote—

He gasped, and tried to sit up—

But the coverlet was a writhing mass of the amoebic creatures, linked together in a living, moving fabric that pinned him down—

Leland jerked awake.

Green status light, locker, boots . . . scratchy fabric pillowcase, thin textile coverlet, both soaked in his sweat. His comm lay right where it should.

He didn’t bother to check the time. He got up, wondering if it were possible to avoid sleeping for the rest of his life.


The first rays of sunlight were brightening the sky when Leland stepped out of the admin shelter after checking that all the comm equipment was up and running. He stretched, but the additional movement did little to energize him. He felt unsteady, as if he’d been drinking.

He aimed himself in the direction of the canteen. A low mist hid the ground, but not so thick as to hide the path. Still, he stepped carefully, loath even to step near a hyperprotist.

Sarina waved at him when he entered. He smiled and waved back, and when he’d warmed up a sausage roll and poured himself a cup of coffee, he joined her at the table.

“Have you heard?” she said as he was sliding his chair forward.

“Not that I know of.”

“I’m surprised. I would think some reports about it would have gone out by now.”

He shrugged and bit into the sausage roll. He wasn’t sure how authentic it was, but it tasted right: good spice blend, with a hint of sage. He breathed around the hot bite until it was cool enough to chew and swallow, which elicited a friendly smile from Sarina.

The coffee was foully bitter, and reminded him why he usually didn’t drink coffee. But he needed something stronger than tea to keep functioning.

“I don’t read the comm traffic,” he said, “I just make sure it can go out and come in.”

She nodded. “Collette disappeared.”

Leland shook his head. “Which one is she?”

“One of the real archaeologists.” Sarina mildly emphasized “real.” She was still an apprentice. “Short red hair? Super smart. We’re all mustering to go look for her.”

“Need an extra pair of eyes? I haven’t even been out to the ruins yet.”

“Then you should definitely come along.”


The van topped a rise, and Leland looked back to see if he could glimpse the landing zone. It sat on a ridge opposite the encampment from the dig site, three kilometers farther away for safety. A layer of fog obscured his view.

He was glad the eight of them were in an enclosed vehicle, unlike the other six: he hated the thought of passing through the domain of the foul-smelling hyperprotists in an open truck. He and Sarina sat in the rearmost seat, and even though he recognized the others it took him a few minutes to put names to all of them. Wallensky, like Sarina, was part of the archaeology team. Barber was the security chief, with three members of his contracted detail: Dixon, Magalotti, and . . . Garrison. Billings, one of the company pilots, drove.

It took only a few minutes to cover the five-kilometer-long “avenue” to the outskirts of what once had been a mid-sized, Bronze-Age equivalent city. “Dismount!” Barber said, even before the van had stopped. “Circle up and we’ll assign sectors.”

A few minutes later, Barber stood on one side of a rough ellipse of people. “Don’t mind the smell—you won’t notice it after a while, and even if you do you’d better just ignore it because there’s no getting away from it. So the quicker we find Ms. Lillington the quicker we can get back.” He pushed maps to their comms, outlined the communication and safety protocols, and concluded with, “Remember: Look inside structures, because the satellite’s given us no IR or multispectral hits, but don’t go so far that you get lost. Now let’s pair off, one of my team in each pair.”

“Wait,” Sarina said. “I want to go with Leland.”

Barber frowned, and looked as if he was going to press the point. But the security squad had been a late add-on when the previous expedition went silent. This was still technically a university venture, and Kellick had made it clear that what the archaeology team wanted, they got.

Sarina grabbed Leland’s arm. “Let’s go.”

“I didn’t realize we were such good friends,” he said as they walked away.

She glanced behind her, then leaned in close and whispered, “I don’t like the look of some of them.”

“I thought I’d won you over with my charming self.”

She hit him on the shoulder, then consulted the map on her comm screen and said, “This way.”

Piles of brush lined the path on either side. Delvecchio’s group had fabricated a couple of bush hogs which, combined with their forest-clearing drones, had mown their way through most of the city. Leland’s feet swished through wet grass as he walked. As they drew near their assigned area, Sarina outlined what the archaeologists had learned about the ruins. They were the remains of a city of a few thousand inhabitants, at around 2000–1500 BC levels of technology. Their builders were roughly human-sized, though no remains had been found yet to know much about them . . . 

Leland recalled bits of the summary report on Delvecchio’s expedition. After a long-distance scan found this planet was habitable, a fast-action probe detected the ruins of an old civilization and catalogued roving herds of wildlife; Delvecchio’s team was assembled, dispatched, and arrived in orbit; they examined radar and other imagery of multiple sets of ruins largely reclaimed by forest or laid waste by quakes, floods, and so forth. Eventually they selected this particular site to investigate and sent their drones to clear the landing zone and set up infrastructure. Their team sent back regular reports on the ruins—imagery of the sites and related findings, reports on lifeforms—but their transmissions became more and more disjointed. Members went missing, they mentioned something about alien contact, then sent an invitation to Kellick’s group to join them before communication stopped altogether.

“Do we know why they died off? The builders?” Leland asked.

“No,” Sarina said. She turned left between two hills that the map showed were overgrown buildings. “Someone suggested a plague, but it’s hard to imagine a plague so virulent it cuts down an entire species. My money’s on solar flares or a long period of low stellar output. Some of Fitzhugh’s biological sampling pointed in that direction.”

A hyperprotist, black and sleek as a panther though smaller than a tire, skittered across the path in front of them. Leland shivered at its undulating strangeness, and wondered if that omen was worse than a black cat.

“What about them? Where do they come from?”

“Here, so far as Fitzhugh was able to tell. Their enzymes and bacterial markers match a lot of the local plants, I guess. But they seemed to have a close connection to the builders, like pets or something.”

“How do we know that?”

You’ll see.” She took his hand and pulled him into a dark slice in the side of a hill. “In here.”

In their comms’ flashlights, the interior opened into a lobby of some kind. The rancid hyperprotist odor was thicker inside than it had been in the city at large, but Leland pushed it to the back of his mind as they looked around. Portals led to corridors going left, right, and deeper ahead into the hill, and long ramps sloped up to higher floors. They called Collette’s name, but the sound echoed and was swallowed in darkness.

Leland wished he had a sidearm. It had been a long time since he’d been in the service, but he still reached for his hip when a hyperprotist dropped from a shaft in the rear wall with an oozy plop.

“See the niches?” Sarina said. “The protes rest in them, and some lead to little tunnel systems they use to get from place to place. Delvecchio thought they might have been domestic servants, like trained monkeys.”

“I don’t see that they could do much,” Leland said, “and I’d hate to have them around.”

“Oooh, they’re not so bad. Hey, let’s go up here.”

She led the way up a ramp that ascended to the left and put them out at the mouth of a curving hallway. She walked as if she knew where she was going.

The only light came from their comms. Ten steps into the hallway, Leland was about to suggest they go back when Sarina pushed on a door to their left. It crumbled into splinters, and she stepped through without a glance.

Leland’s nose wrinkled at the sudden cloud of dust, and the rush of foulness that followed it. He patted the empty place on his hip. Damn it all.

Through the doorway, Sarina stood facing him. Her comm sat on a low stone shelf, its flashlight aimed up and illuminating her. She swayed slightly, as if she were listening to a tune in her head.

“Dance with me,” she said.

“What?”

She reached up and tugged on her coverall’s zipper. She zipped it down, down, past her lacy bra, past her navel . . . 

Dance with me,” she said, and plunged her hand inside her coverall, into her panties.

Leland gulped. Sarina tipped her head back and moaned.

“I . . .” Leland began—

Sarina lowered her head and stared him down, like a lioness hunting. Her shoulders rose, and her hips moved with her hand.

Her eyes, so enticing before, alarmed Leland now. He looked around, and two—no, three—mottled hyperprotist shapes sat in niches in the wall. They pulsed, almost rhythmically.

Leland looked back into Sarina’s wild eyes. She was breathing deep, in time with her rocking hips, in time with . . . 

. . . the hyperprotists’ rhythm.

His chest tightened, and his pants. The rhythm reached out to him. Heat suffused him. Sarina beckoned, and he felt as if a chain were attached to his sternum, pulling him toward her. He struggled to inhale, to take a cleansing breath, but he had to fight against the rhythm—

“This is wrong,” he said. He stepped to his right, away from the wall and away from Sarina, and gasped as he shone his light around to other parts of the oblong room. Any furnishings it once had were long decayed, and bits of rock had spalled out of the walls and ceiling in some ancient quake. “You don’t want me.”

“I doooo,” she said.

“No, you don’t. You said so.” Leland tried to watch every corner as he hefted one of the fallen stones. “What’s her name?”

Sarina swayed. Her speech was slurred, as if her mouth was full of sticky toffee. “Collette.”

“No, not Collette. We’ve been looking for Collette.” Leland fought to stand upright under a bout of sudden fatigue. Speaking was hard; it felt as if he had to force each word past his teeth. “Your girlfriend. On Phoenixhome. Her name. What’s . . . her name?”

Sarina’s brow furrowed. Was she puzzled, or thinking? Her eyes lost a bit of their wildness.

With a wet plop, a fourth hyperprotist slid out of another niche and down onto the shelf next to Sarina’s comm. In its light, the creature was mottled brown and blood-red. Its fluid body rippled.

Leland lunged.

He brought the rock down on the hyperprotist’s body. The creature wheezed out like a bellows. The others began slithering out of their niches, whistling low, discordant notes. Leland hit the alien thing again, and a third time, then dropped the rock on it, snatched up Sarina’s comm, and turned—

Sarina screamed.

Leland put both comms in one hand and grabbed her wrist. He stumbled, almost as much as she did, getting her out of the room.

Her scream died out as she ran out of breath. She gasped, and yelled, “It’s in my head!”

They ran, and whether they stepped in puddles or on protes, Leland neither knew nor cared. Neither spoke, and they fetched up against a fernlike tree at an intersection between mounds, both gasping. Sarina stood, dazed, and Leland zipped her coverall up. His side hurt, and he twisted and stretched to get it to release.

A low rumble, like thunder, rolled up through his feet.

He rotated left, then right—

A score or more of the cow-sized beasts from the lowlands crested the hill and barreled toward them.

“Up!” Leland said, and grabbed Sarina’s arm. “Up the hill!”

The grass was thicker, and it both helped and hindered. They could grasp it and pull, and it mostly held, but their feet slipped across it. They had climbed only a few meters when the square-headed, thick-limbed creatures galloped past, moaning mournfully, their red-brown fur flying. They left a plume of oily stench in their wake.

Leland called a warning over his comm as a solitary straggler trotted by. “Look,” said Sarina, and pointed.

A hyperprotist rode atop the creature’s head.

“What is that about?” Leland said, but Sarina had no answer.

They were the first to return to the vehicles. Leland didn’t care that they’d given up their search for Collette. Gradually, the other teams reported negative results and made their ways back.

All but one pair.

Barber fumed, but everyone else was subdued, as minutes flickered away on their comms. Finally Barber assigned three of his security team to stay with him and continue the search, and released everyone else to return to the camp.

But only six people boarded the van: Two others had wandered away, that quickly, without being seen. And one of them was Billings, the pilot.


Leland walked Sarina to the canteen and reconstituted some soup for her. He saw her to her quarters, then he practically ran through the camp looking for security team members. All were gone, and even worse: None had left behind any weapons.

On his way to the admin shelter, he found Kellick coming out of the canteen eating an apple.

“I want a gun,” Leland told him.

The professor looked puzzled, then amused. Leland quickly realized that the expedition leader was in his own world of impractical, intellectual crap. At one point Kellick began speculating about how the hyperprotists might be domesticated like dogs. Leland turned to walk away.

Kellick became stern. “You don’t need a gun.”

“Need or not, I’d feel better if I had one. I’ll talk to Barber when he gets back.”

Kellick shook his head. “He’s not coming back.”

Leland felt as if the professor had slapped him. “What do you mean?”

Kellick pointed at his comm. “Didn’t you know? Magalotti blew Barber’s head off, then called in to say goodbye.” He shook his head and took another bite of apple. “What a waste,” he said as he walked away.

Leland stood there a moment, and more, tendrils of exhaustion entwining him like kudzu.

He stumbled into the canteen, slapped together a sandwich with something that looked like ham and choked down a mug of coffee that tasted like motor oil. He poured another mug and carried it to the archaeologists’ quarters. Sarina answered him from the other side of her door, but her voice was so low and muffled he wasn’t sure what she said. He told her to stay put, and went to the machine shop.

The fabrication shelter was quiet. Nothing was running, and Ames was nowhere to be seen. Leland rang her comm, and it buzzed on the counter. Next to it, someone—Ames, he guessed—had spelled out “Pretty!” with a bunch of aluminum pellets.

Leland sank down into a chair, and sipped the vile coffee. He had liked Ames: They had done good work together, making the waveguide to fix the satcom antenna. Now she was gone. Would he be next? What did that mean? Sure, he had felt the pull to chuck it all and go for a walk in the woods, but the forest here was dreadful.

And if he didn’t go? Would he be left alone like Fitzhugh, driven half-mad or more by loneliness and fear and failure? Now, with those cow-things about . . . 

The hell with that. He turned to Ames’s terminal, typed in his access code, and started looking for firearm designs in the database.

Nothing.

“Come on,” he said to the silent room as his searches came up empty, “give me something. A crossbow, even.” But if there were weapon designs in the system, he could not find them.

He balled up his fist and lightly pounded the desktop. Then he said, “Be that way,” and started pulling up files for things he knew he could fabricate: general tools and communications equipment. He opened up specs for everything, looking for anything he could piece together into an impromptu weapon.


Someone screamed, and Leland woke. He hadn’t meant to sleep. His hand closed around the handle of the first thing he’d hastily designed and pulled off the fabricator: a long steel cylinder with a dozen spikes sticking out of one end.

A second scream tore the air, and he turned his attention to the fab shop door. The sound was close by, but he couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. Not that it mattered.

He opened the door enough to see into the evening gloom, and the smell of frying oil gone bad wrapped around him like fog. But this time it conveyed a different sensation to the back of his throat, a feeling beyond smell or taste, like the time Palas Macadar had ordered for him in a restaurant in Kouraganda. The waitress had presented him a small bowl of what he took to be local calamari, thinly sliced in a spicy-sweet sauce. The interior edges of each slice had been feathery, and the sensation of eating it was like holding both terminals of a battery against his tongue. Macadar had laughed when he told Leland he’d eaten some creature’s intestines, but Leland wasn’t able to speak clearly for a couple of hours.

He stepped into the foul air, holding his club before him. His feet crunched in dry, dead grass, and his steps were the only sound. As disconcerting as the screams had been, he wished for some noise to draw him.

He glanced around the corner toward the dispensary, and froze.

The biologist Fitzhugh stood in the makeshift cage Kellick’s people had jailed him in, his hands on the fence wire and his eyes fixed on some . . . thing.

It stood on two legs, and towered over the cell, half again as tall as Fitzhugh. Its legs were thick, its torso massive, and its arms hung almost to its knees. It reminded Leland of a giant ape of some sort, though its head was bigger and squarish. It seemed to be made of shadows, or its coloration drank in the light, and whatever it wore from its head to mid-thigh rippled, though Leland felt no breeze.

It reached out to Fitzhugh, offering him something it held in its hand—

Fitzhugh screamed.

Leland ran forward, tension in his legs feeling like springs compressing and releasing. He held his club in both hands, ready to swing when he got near enough.

Leland yelled, but his voice felt distant, muted—his mouth was truly numb.

The creature turned. Its face was shrouded, though its lips quivered and dripped foul saliva. It reached out, and in its massive hand—paw?—it held the largest hyperprotist Leland had ever seen.

He skidded, his feet slid on the grass, and he fell backward.

The creature stepped toward him—a slithering, smooth, silent motion. The essential wrongness of it tickled Leland’s mind.

Leland screamed, and pushed his club’s spiked head up in defense—

—and woke as his coffee mug tumbled off the bench and shattered.

He blinked in the sudden light. His hand was on the club he had truly fabricated, but the only sound was the chattering of the machines chewing through feedstock and growing what he’d ordered.

Leland swallowed the bitter aftertaste of coffee, and felt only the barest hint of the numbing vileness he’d dreamed.


Leland left the pieces of the mug on the floor. They probably wouldn’t matter much, soon.

He had almost wept with relief when Sarina answered her comm. She had balked at coming to help him, protested that she was too tired and didn’t know what to do, but ultimately he had reminded her that he could have left her in that room in the ruins, and now he needed her help and she owed him that much. Laying that guilt trip on her felt a little like bullying, but he didn’t have time to worry over it.

He made sure the components he had ordered were coming along well enough—taking the time to retrieve the mounting frame and set up that machine to start on the waveguide—then joined Sarina in the canteen.

She had backed up a truck to the canteen’s service door just as he asked, and he found her inside munching on some slices of cheese. She had to be hungry if she had stayed in her room all the time he had been working.

She glanced at his club, but said nothing except to offer him some of the cheese. He gladly took it. “Grab everything you want, that you think will keep,” he said, “and we’ll get it over to the machine shop. Then we’re going to the comm center to send a distress call.”

“Why the machine shop? Why not just take stuff to the comm center?”

Leland started opening cupboards. “I’ll explain as we shop.”


Sarina nodded at the humming fabricators. “You designed all this?”

“Most of it was already designed,” Leland admitted. They talked as they moved supplies. “We could make a whole ground station if I had enough feedstock. I found parts in the database for some different models, and tweaked a few things. The main issue was power, and thermodynamics.”

“So you say.”

“Well, behind that comm you use is a whole relay system you never see. That thing would be one heavy brick if it had to transmit by itself over a long distance.” He paused by the truck, and pointed in the direction of the satellite antenna on the edge of the clearing. “That S-band antenna is a microwave emitter, powerful enough to beam signals up to the relay satellite, right? All I’m doing is building one we can aim at something down here.”

She looked at the antenna, then at the meal packet in her hand. “And essentially cook it?”

“Right.”

She shuddered, and seemed about to comment but he cut her off with, “Look, I’d love to have borrowed a couple of rifles from Barber’s squad and just printed off a few thousand rounds of ammo, but they’re nowhere to be found, are they? So I’m doing the best I can with what I have.”

They moved the rest of the food into the shop in silence. When they were done, Leland pulled off the latest completed parts and reset those machines for their next runs. Then he checked the fabricator feedstocks. “When we’ve sent our message, we’ll need to replenish the tanks. Can you drive a forklift?” Sarina shook her head. He shrugged and said, “We’ll figure it out. Can’t expect to move the stuff cup by cup.”

In a small voice, as if afraid he would lay into her again, she said, “So what is it you need me for?”

He sighed, and raised his empty hands. “Because even though I engineered something to kludge together and mount on the back of that truck, the pieces are too big for me to assemble on my own.”

Sarina pursed her lips and nodded. Then she half-grinned, and flexed her bicep. “So you’re saying you only want me for my body?”

Leland laughed. “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”


The admin shelter stank, not of human body odor but of rancid grease. Leland and Sarina looked at each other, neither wanting to admit what that meant.

Nothing looked amiss in the communications center, a small room close by the shelter entrance. While he checked the systems, Sarina continued down the corridor.

He had just completed a loopback test when Sarina called from the other end of the shelter. “Lee? I think you ought to come see this.” She sounded . . . tired, more than anything else. Leland could relate.

The smell thickened as he approached the head office.

Sarina stood just outside, her arms crossed, hugging herself. Leland looked in.

Professor Kellick’s feet stuck out from behind his desk.

“Is he . . . ?”

A tear streaked from Sarina’s left eye, and she sniffled. “I didn’t touch him.”

Leland remembered that Kellick was probably more than just a boss to her. She must have known him several years, sat before him in any number of classes and seminars. Leland touched her gently on the arm, then slipped past. He walked around the desk and froze.

A hyperprotist covered Kellick’s face.

Leland almost retched, less at the smell than at the thought of one of those . . . things . . . covering him, suffocating him. He struggled for breath—

—the hyperprotist pulsed—

Leland staggered back as if struck. He had a sudden urge to lift the creature up, let its viscous mass flow through his fingers, over his arms, bring it to his lips and kiss it—

—he slapped himself. Outside the doorway, Sarina started. He shook his head at her, afraid of how he must look.

She reached out. “Let’s go,” she said. She stepped into the doorway, still reaching, and he looked back at Kellick and swung his right hand until she grabbed it. He let her pull him out of the room.

“Close the door,” she said.

He did, and the barrier helped a little. He still had the urge to pick up the hyperprotist, to pet it, stroke it, lick it—

—Sarina punched him. Her eyes were full of tears.

The miasma lifted, just a little, just enough.

They retreated to the comm center.

Sarina stood watch while Leland pulled up the messaging system. The queue was empty, and the transmitted messages were listed in reverse chronological order. Kellick had sent most of them, the last one only ten hours before.

Leland opened it.

“He’s invited another expedition,” he told Sarina. “Just like Delvecchio did.”

She stepped in and read over his shoulder. “That doesn’t make sense. Why would he do that?” She put her hand on Leland’s arm and continued, “Can you find Delvecchio’s last message?”

He looked, but all the messages prior to their arrival had been erased.

Leland shook his head. Not making it easy, are they? He accessed the backup, and held his breath until the older message traffic showed up.

Delvecchio’s last message had the same tone as Kellick’s: The reported troubles were all misunderstandings, come join us and share the credit and the discoveries.

“Look at that,” Sarina said, and pointed at the screen.

Watunge, the previous comm tech, had sent a message after Delvecchio. Leland opened it.

“It’s a distress call,” he said.

Sarina leaned over him to read it. “That’s why they sent security with us.” Some of her hair brushed the side of his face, and the light scent of vanilla and some variety of berry was a huge relief from the alien funk. “We’d better make our call more explicit.”

“But what should we say?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “What do you call it when a whole group has nightmares? And they start coming true? And people disappear?”

Leland turned his attention to the terminal, pulled up the outgoing message form, and started typing.

“How long before someone comes to get us?” Sarina asked.

Leland shrugged. “A couple of weeks? How long did it take us to get here?”

Sarina nodded and stepped back. The hyperprotist stink flooded into Leland’s nostrils. He turned—

“Look out!” he said.

He spun out of the chair, grabbed his club in his right hand while he shoved Sarina aside with his left. The hyperprotist coming through the doorway paused. Its edge rippled the way a jellyfish’s fringe moved in water.

Leland brought the spiked end of the club down atop the creature. Pulpy innards sprayed out, coating his boots and the bottoms of the equipment racks.

“Let’s finish up and go,” Sarina said.


Fitzhugh was walking across the compound when Leland and Sarina drove away from the admin shelter.

“How did he get out?” she said.

Leland shivered at the thought of being trapped in a cage. He said, “Probably good that he did.”

They pulled up next to the biologist. He turned, and to Leland he seemed clear-eyed and alert.

“Fitz?” Sarina said through the open window. “Do you remember me?”

“Miss Bruce,” he said. He bowed to her, arms wide and one leg swept back. Leland had only seen such a thing in teleplays. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“We’ve got food in the fabrication shop. Would you like to join us?”

He looked off into the distance and patted his stomach. “I could be induced to do so.” He pointed. “Guide me, oh thou great behemoth.” Then he waved his hands and added, “Not you, young lady. That brute you’re with and the leviathan he steers.”

Leland started the truck rolling again. “This is going to be fun,” he said.

“He can help us put your contraption together.”

“Good point.”

After a healthy amount of dehydrated fruit, packaged cheese, and lukewarm tea, Fitzhugh agreed to help carry components to the truck and assemble the system. Soon an antenna dish was in place, with a waveguide and emitter ready to transmit killing power to anything nearby. They put the motors and gimbals through their paces with power off the truck itself, guided by the rudimentary pointing of a camera attached to the antenna that fed back to a screen with a joystick. Leland had a slightly better control system printing—he would have liked to include targeting electronics linked to a suite of sensors, but had not found such designs in the database. A high-capacity power cable was also printing, to hook the entire system to the machine shop itself. Leland thought again about fabricating batteries to make the system portable . . . 

“Mr. Strickland,” Fitzhugh said after watching some of the power cable extrude, “why do you need a portable satcom terminal?”

Leland thought of stampeding beasts and a dark dream-giant. “Communication.”

Fitzhugh laughed. “But the quanettek have been communicating.”

Sarina looked as puzzled as Leland felt. “The what?” he asked.

Fitzhugh frowned. “No, you wouldn’t have caught their names. Not yet, not yet.”

“Who?” Sarina asked.

“Oh, this will never do,” Fitzhugh said, and walked around the far side of the fabricator.

Leland ran, but before he’d covered two steps the fabricator fell silent. The words What did you do? died on his lips as he saw that Fitzhugh had thrown the machine’s breaker.

“We’ll be fine,” Fitzhugh said.

The biologist did not resist as Leland and Sarina bound him to a chair. “You just don’t understand,” he said.

“Don’t bother explaining,” Leland said, and restarted the fabricator.

“You’re not a very good khamlak.”

“I don’t even know what that is.”

Fitzhugh laughed. “The khamlak worshipped the quanettek, like Egyptians worshipped cats. They would do anything for them.”

“I don’t worship anything,” Leland said.

“Don’t you?”

Sarina stepped in front of Fitzhugh. “The quanteks, whatever you called them—they’re the hyperprotists?”

“Oh, you are a smart one.”

“And the cam-locks were the builders?”

Fitzhugh closed his eyes in rapture. “And the building will continue.”


It took another hour for the power cable to finish, during which time the tracking subsystem failed its test and Leland had to start another one printing. He did manage to drill a hole through the shelter wall for the power connector, so when the cable was ready he hooked it up easily enough.

He leaned against the side of the truck and pointed toward the machine shop. “What do you make of all that?” he asked Sarina.

She frowned. “I think his ‘khamlak’ and the hyperprotists—‘quanettek,’ if he’s right—were connected. Maybe the hyperprotists were the brains and the khamlaks the brawn?”

“Riding them, like that prote on the cow-thing?”

“Maybe,” she said. “Then the brawn died out, and everything fell apart because the hyperprotists aren’t strong enough to—Lee, what’s that?”

He looked up. She pointed to the space between the next two shelters.

Hulking there, its cloak rippling in a nonexistent breeze, was a giant, roughly man-shaped, square-headed horror. Oily vapor tickled the back of Leland’s throat.

He slapped himself. It hurt. Could it still be a dream?

“Hit me,” Leland said.

“What?”

“Hit me, so I know I’m not dreaming! This thing—”

Sarina punched him. “Good enough?”

“Maybe,” he said. “It’ll have to be.”

He snatched up the controller, thankful that he had connected the ground power. He moved the joystick and the antenna swung.

The giant shambled forward. Its footsteps should have shaken the ground, but they were silent.

Leland sighted in the viewfinder, wishing he’d had time to boresight and test the thing. Only one way to find out . . . 

He touched the “Transmit CW” icon.

The only feedback was a hum in the electronics, and he trusted that a continuous wave of radiation was pouring out of the emitter.

The shambling giant stopped.

It trembled—no, it rippled as if it were made of rags blowing in the wind.

Then it flew apart.

But not an explosion. An escape: The structure collapsed as hundreds of hyperprotists erupted from it. They leapt away, scurried away, and left behind just as many of their hideous brethren flopping on the ground like gasping fish.

And as Leland watched, the fleeing hyperprotists turned back and began reforming into smaller constructs.

He started slewing the antenna toward the closest.

“We have to go,” Sarina said.

Leland spared a glance at her, then toward the landing zone, before he centered the next target in the camera view. “I’d thought of that before Billings ran off. Do you know where Voorland is? Are you a pilot?”

She shook her head. “No,” she said. She sounded tired beyond exhaustion. “We have to go with them.”

She stepped away, out of his reach, and began walking around the truck.

A loud bang! sounded behind him, followed straightaway by another, slightly gentler one. The viewer in Leland’s hand went dark. He turned around—

Fitzhugh lay in a heap against the shelter wall, his head at an awkward angle and his left hand on a fire axe. The axe head was blackened—

The power cable looked like a dead snake: cleanly cut in two.

He thought he only stared at the cable for a second, but when Leland turned back, Sarina was gone.


Leland pressed the heels of his hands into his bleary eyes, then stared into the overhead light. He should program a fabricator to build something, just to have the noise, but he couldn’t think of anything.

He was alone. No one answered any comms.

Occasionally he got a whiff of old frying oil, and spun like a dervish looking in every corner, high and low, and behind every machine . . . but he saw none of the whatever-it-was Fitzhugh had called them. He ended up where he began, huddled against a fabricator with his club across his knees. Shaking. Waiting. Praying.

Dozing . . . 


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Framed