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| "The Castaway" Image Prompt from IronAge.Media |
“We've done it,” Tom said, nearly a whisper. “We've left the Solar system.” He glanced at the numbers on his screen, half in disbelief. They were the first humans to make it outside the Kuiper Belt. Fifty-five times further away from the Sun than the Earth, the trip had taken nearly a month using the most powerful rockets the human race could produce. Even now, the thrusters continued their burn, creating a weak but definite sense of gravity inside the ship.
The danger of collision was nearly gone now, rapidly declining on an exponential. Soon, the four caretakers of the Lotus would retire to their quarters and enter a cold sleep, along with several thousand of their fellow men and women, for a period of many years. It would take that long for them to reach their target, a planetary system surrounding a yellow main-sequence star nearly ten light-years from the Earth.
This crew of volunteers were mankind's first attempt to colonize the stars. Tom, at his computer, was measuring and calculating distances, confirming that everything was where they thought it would be. The system compared the distances between the Sun and the planets, all now so faint as to be no different to the human eye than any other star, to a complex Solar model and confirmed once again that they were beyond the limits of the natural halo of particles trapped in orbit around the Sun.
Alex was monitoring the nuclear reactor, the source of the vast and long-lived power that the Lotus would need to keep its people alive for those years of cold sleep. The pile was at exactly the right temperature, providing the slow trickle of energy that they needed without burning through the uranium pellets too quickly. He tapped some numbers into a waiting console, and it spit out the result of a complex calculation. At current rates, the fuel would last over two hundred years, far more than they would need, even with the thrusters burning the whole time.
Rachel was using the ship's sensors to catalog the last few pieces of debris that they saw before they left the Belt. She would collect the data into a report, the last bit of human communication the Lotus would have with Earth, and it would take nearly nine hours for the transmission to reach. Those last voice clips she would record would be the last anyone now living on Earth would hear of them. Their next transmission would be generations in the future.
Morris was pulling himself carefully along the rails that went down the middle of the two rows of sleeping pods. He had been carefully checking each one and its occupant for the last few hours, and now he was nearly done. Everything was exactly as it should be, each future colonist sleeping soundly, arms crossed over his or her chest, illuminated by a pale blue light. The room itself was cold from the thousands of icy pods--it made no sense to waste energy heating it. Morris's breath puffed out, a tiny cloud of fog painting the inside of his helmet.
The silence was shattered by Rachel's voice coming over the intercom. “Everyone, could you please get up here?” she asked. Morris continued working on the pods. He only had a few dozen more to go.
“What's the matter?” Tom's voice echoed, breaking the delicate silence again, and Morris rolled his eyes. Was this chatter necessary? They only needed to do a few more hours' work, and they could finally sleep. Morris just wanted to be done with it, to lay back in a soft pod and while away the next century in blissful quiet.
But it was not to be. “Just come up here,” Rachel's voice came back. “Everyone, to the comm room. Please.” There was an odd urgency in her voice. Morris finished one more check and started to make his way to the ship's central spine, and then he made his way to the communications room where Rachel usually worked.
He arrived a few steps after Alex, and they bumped helmets as Morris tried to go through the tiny door into the tiny room. Tom was already inside, and Rachel was at her seat, staring at her screen. They all crowded around to see.
When Tom saw that everyone was present, he asked, “What's the matter?”
Rachel was pale, sweat trickling down her face. “Something,” she said, barely able to get the words out. “Something big.”
There was a trace on the screen. The lidar system showed an outline, one long, continuous shape. It must have been tens of kilometers across, but it didn't look... natural, thought Tom as he gazed at the red, pulsing halo. It was far too long, its edges far too straight, too regular.
Tom licked his lips. “What is it?” he asked.
Rachel shook her head. “I... don't know. It's too big, and it's moving all wrong. It's not a part of the Kuiper Belt.”
Through his helmet, Alex spoke. “It's getting closer.”
The Lotus was never designed to maneuver like this. There was very little they could do.
“Why didn't we see it until now?” Morris asked. The sensor package should have been able to see something this large from thousands of times further away. They needed to be able to see that far out, because they could barely change their course. They had only needed to avoid one little bit of debris up until now, and they had had nearly a day of advance notice. This... thing that was approaching them, it was only minutes away.
“I don't know,” Rachel said. “We should have seen something like this days ago.” They all glanced at the screen again. The shape was closer, moving in slowly, as if it was matching their speed.
Then, they heard it. It wasn't a sound, it was in all of their heads. “Hello--children of--” It sounded strange, like it was partly covered by static. Bits of the sentence cut off in a garble of noise. The words repeated.
The four astronauts all shook their heads and asked each other questions in disbelief. “Did you hear that?” “Did you?” “Yes.” “Is it on the intercom?” “No, the audio display on my helmet didn't move.” “What is it, what is it!”
The shape on the display was dangerously close now, and still getting closer. There wasn't anything they could do.
Suddenly, the weak but constant pull from their thrusters lurched in a new direction. They all held on for dear life as they were nearly thrown across the tiny room. The familiar hum of the thrusters died out, and a moment later they were perfectly weightless.
“Hello--children of--” they heard again. Somehow, the voice sounded like it was coming from the airlock, down at the other end of the ship. They felt an irresistible urge to go there. Meter by excruciating meter, they pulled themselves along the rails toward the airlock, barely conscious of their own movements. All of them were silent. As their bodies moved, hardly within their control, their minds went wild. They felt fear, as if, were they to say anything, that strange message might ring through their minds again. They felt violated, from a foreign presence that had rung out in each of their minds. Tom gritted his teeth. Alex swallowed, trying to keep his nausea in check. Rachel was breathing shallowly and rapidly. The inside of Morris's helmet was fogged from his ragged breaths.
They reached the airlock. There was a sound outside, when there shouldn't have been. The airlock's console suddenly blinked from red to green. There was air on the other side of that door. The console blinked again, and the door opened with an eerie grind. No one had touched anything, they only stared in shocked silence.
The door opened into a dimly-lit hallway, perfectly octagonal and disappearing into darkness a few dozen meters away. A moment later, a shape came out of the darkness. Two shapes, no three. Four.
The four astronauts, tasked with protecting thousands of helpless people, faced four shapes that came out of the darkness. Four long, flexible cylindrical shapes slithered toward them, each coming along a different side of the octagonal hallway.
The shapes approached, and finally they reached the harsh fluorescent lights of the Lotus's interior. What the four astronauts saw stunned them to silence.
Each of the shapes wore one of their faces on the end closest to them. Each face had a strange expression, like... motion sickness, but it was wrong somehow. These... things... didn't know how their faces should be, how the muscles and bones beneath the surface should work together, only the general shape and features. Confused volumes of flesh.
The four shapes stopped a couple of meters from the stunned people. They hung in the doorway of the airlock, swaying gently.
Tom swallowed, and cleared his throat. “We... we come in peace?” He wasn't prepared for this, to be the first man to speak to an extraterrestrial intelligence. He raised his hand, palm forward, slowly and tentatively. The four faces twitched slightly at his words, then returned to their original state.
Then, one of the shapes spoke. It was the same voice they had heard in their heads, but this time, it was a real sound. Some of the garbled noise was gone, but there was still a curious crackle in the sound.
“Hello from the children of planet Earth,” it said.
Morris's face went pale. He had heard this before, in some history class. It was a recording, one that had been sent out into the stars many decades ago. The aliens were repeating the recording back to them.
One of the aliens moved, and a thin, ropy appendage raised up, like a finger, and pointed at Tom.
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The People had known of the life on the third planet of this star system for some time. They had stumbled upon a bizarre lump of metal and polymer, filled with strange artifacts. They had seen images of what these creatures looked like, heard sounds that they made. They had run their fingers over the artifacts, enjoying the cool metal and smooth plastic. They had even learned the smell of these strange creatures from a few stray fingerprints on the inside of the device.
And now, finally, they had taste.
# # #
Thanks for reading my little attempt at some cool space horror! I really liked the idea that there was just one thing holding back an alien invasion: that they didn't know how we taste.
If you like cosmic horror, you might find my book What the Soul Still Fears interesting! It's got a bit of a hard sci-fi hook as well. If space-faring fiction is more your thing, try out Missed Contact! It's got a group of salvagers hunting for a missing team of scientists on a newly-surveyed planet. You might also like my free short story Jade Cargo! Or you can check this list of my free short stories! Enjoy!
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