Out Through the Attic (24 page)

A pulse rifle spat azure flame, but it reflected off black flesh into a pirate who went down screaming. Its motion a shadowy blur, the demon tore into the pirates locked in with it, feeding an insatiable evil. Screams like those twenty years earlier filled the room for long minutes as Reece toyed with flesh and fed upon suffering—all but Kurlock. The station became silent once again, and the demon stared down at black hands covered in crimson.

Kurlock stood before it, defeated but defiant. It wasn’t death, no matter how horrific it might be, that filled him with dread. It was having to finally own up to his half of his bargain with Abaddon. The allure of immortality was what had clouded his mind, dulled his thinking. A much younger Kurlock would have seen the clues and avoided Reece’s trap. In his mind’s eye he saw Abaddon’s black pit opening under his feet.

“I would
dearly
love to toy with you, Kurlock, for squandering your gift, but Abaddon is hungry, and I have work to do. I’ll make this quick.” The demon opened its mouth slowly, widening far more than a human jaw could manage, and fangs within extended like rows of daggers climbing out of shadow. The beast leapt, and Kurlock screamed in agony as taloned fingers speared through flesh and bone. With a brutal yank Kurlock’s heart came free and lay pulsing within a black, bloody hand. With a flick the heart disappeared into the demon’s gaping maw, and its fangs clamped shut like a bear-trap. Kurlock fell lifeless to the floor, a look of horror eternally etched upon his face.

The thing that was now Reece examined the corpse thoughtfully for a few seconds then reached out to the
Chimera
, whispering for its return.

O O O

Pieces of Kurlock’s crew lay strewn about the hallways of
Chimera
, and their blood flowed freely over obsidian walls and floors.

Reece, his vessel of flesh filled now with the grace and fury of Abaddon’s greatest soldier, ran a taloned finger over the arm of the command chair.
Chimera
purred underneath his touch. A map of the stars appeared on the screen before him, rotating slowly over the mark of Abaddon still blood-etched and glowing upon the deck. He rotated the image with an ebon talon, as if he were turning the pages of a book. A white towel covered with the crew’s blood lay on the deck next to the command chair in precisely the same spot Kurlock’s towel had been discarded twenty years earlier.

“What shall we feed upon next, my pet,” Reece whispered to
Chimera
. They disappeared into the stars in search of more prey.

TH
E RESURRECTION OF SAMHA
IN

Originally appeared in The Scribing Ibis: An Anthology of Pagan Fiction in Honor of Thoth from Bibliotheca Alexandrina in August, 2011.

“I can’t believe that old bugger Kyteler actually bought the thing. Earth must really be short on credits.” Lieutenant Quintin Hayes scanned the lased crater before him and fed in the data to an analyzer at his hip. The pit, a perfect cylinder, was three hundred meters across and twenty meters deep. A ring of portable force-field generators resembling little Kilroys, their noses dangling over the edge, lined the perimeter at ten meter intervals and kept the sides from caving in. The deep-green turf of the region, an inches-deep carpet of what looked like curly jade hair, ran right up to the edge of the pit.

Numbers slid by on Quint’s visor: dimensions were accurate out to five decimals; latitude and longitude were dead on right down to the microsecond; the geological magnetics were as near a match as they were likely to find on Stranach IV. He lifted his stratavisor and rubbed tired eyes.

“And to ship the damn thing seventeen parsecs out here….” he said into the comm with disbelief. “What kind of money does that take?” A low-hanging autumn sun still cast warm light, but things would start to get chilly when it dropped below the horizon.

“You don’t have that many zeroes in your head, Quint.” Captain Maggie Dunne kidded, laughing lightly as she stood in front of the lasing-rig control-panel and held her finger over the sys-check icon suspended in the panel hologram. Maggie reflected back to his arrival in an over-burdened, one-way transport pod two months earlier. They’d detected his transponder and received a brief message about why he was there. When he landed, he had a short list of equipment, including the force-field generators, the lasing-rig and a tidy set of orders to prep for the arrival of Kyteler’s new acquisition. “Did the numbers check out on the hole?” She asked in a rigid tone, all business once again.

“Green across the board,” he confirmed. “The geo-magnetics came in at a ninety-seven-percent match, and we only needed ninety-five. It’s double-solid.” Quint took one last look at Maggie’s distant figure at the far edge of the pit and turned away, heading back to their small encampment. The tight coils of vegetation, Stranach IV’s equivalent of grass, were spongy under his feet, and he wove his way around the sparse maze of short, multi-colored blooms, fronds, stalks and boles of the native plant species that covered the rolling, alien countryside around him.

“Roger that. Running the sys-check and shutdown on this pig.” She pressed her finger through the projected icon and pulled it back.

“Awwww … don’t say that,” Quint complained. “Machines are people too, you know. You could hurt its feelings.”

Lifting its seven ton mass off the ground on repulsor beams, the gray, egg-shaped rig powered up with a deep humming sound and began swiveling, extending and then retracting the half-dozen lasing arms that extended out of its cerametal carapace. Maggie stepped away from the unit and let it go through its sequence.

“Machines are machines, Quint. You’re mental.”

“Wrong on both counts,
Captain
. I’m an engineer, and that lasing-rig has more intelligence than a dog if you’d just give it a chance.” Quint reached their small group of inflatable shelters and hopped up on a fallen log that bordered the camp. He lowered his visor, selected magnify and scanned back towards the pit, picking out Maggie’s floating form. Her slim figure was flying back towards him, passing directly over the pit.

“Dog-smart or not,” Maggie replied with an amused tone, “it’s still a machine,” She stared down into the pit below her as she sailed over it like a ghost, suspended in the field emitted by her grav-belt. She scanned for irregularities along the bottom of the pit. “Now get the stove up. I’m starving,” she added.

He adjusted his visor again to zoom in past her to the colony ship that squatted in permanent retirement to the right of New Dublin where 2,000 Irish colonists had been living for four years. The Unified Systems Council based on Mars had granted Stranach IV to the Irish Culture Polity as a culture-integrity world ten years prior.

Shortly thereafter, the colonists were tucked into the belly of a cheap colony-ship,
The Monsterrat,
and placed in cold-sleep for their journey to Stranach IV. A year later
Monsterrat
touched down and gave birth to Ireland’s third colony in the Vega cluster during the third phase of old Earth’s expansion push.

Quint scanned south of New Dublin and could see harvest rigs in the fields as they went about collecting the last of the season’s harvest. The colony was booming and the people he had met during his brief stay in the township seemed happy and healthy.

“Roger that,” Quint replied finally and stepped off the log.

By the time Maggie was touching down by her shelter, he had water boiling and was dropping in a chopped assortment of the local roots and vegetables followed by a few pinches of spices that were also native fare. He was a much better cook than Maggie, and he seemed to have a natural culinary flair for working with the local flora. They waited a few minutes in silence, just watching the pot boil.

“That smells great!” she said finally as she stepped up behind him and put her hands on his shoulders, her hands instinctively starting to massage them.

“That feels
better
,” he replied, leaning back slightly into her. “This stuff won’t take long if you want the tubers to be al dente.”

“You’re the chef. Impress me,” she ordered and kissed his neck.

“I’ll impress you once we get into your shelter. As to this, can you go grab us some bowls?” He kept stirring the pot.

“Pretty sure of yourself,” she accused as she stepped away and reached into a container holding their supplies.

“You just let me know when you have a complaint, and I’ll put in for a transfer,” he retorted then lifted the pot off the stove.

“You don’t have any place to transfer to,
lieutenant
,” Maggie said, smiling. She held out a bowl in each hand, allowing him to spoon in some of the stew. With the vegetables chopped the way they were it looked like any stew one might find on old earth. He set the pot back, turned off the flame and they sat down next to one another, leaning against the fallen log. The comfortable silence lasted as long as the meal, and when they finished, they both set their bowls aside. Maggie leaned in to Quint’s shoulder as he put an arm around her, and they watched the sun start to slide behind a far-off hill. The gray dungarees of the Colonial Engineering Corps were warm, but the nights were getting colder as winter started to set in.

“So, when does it arrive?” Quint asked, squeezing Maggie and grabbing her hand.

“In two days … on the thirty-first.” She squeezed back and cuddled in closer as the temperature dropped.

“Seriously? It’s arriving on Halloween? How prophetic.”

“The old man doesn’t do anything without a reason.” She stood and pulled him up behind her, heading for her shelter. “And you better get used to calling it Samhain, not Halloween. You’re on an Irish world with Irish colonists who want to get back to their roots.”

“Sir, yes sir!” Quint said like a fresh cadet. He kissed her lips, stared down into beautiful green eyes and pushed a lock of fiery red hair off a freckled cheek. “Did I ever mention how much I love red-heads?”

“Call me ‘sir’ again and you’ll have to love another.” She glared at him but couldn’t hold it. The glare turned into one of her witching smiles that never ceased to melt his heart; he was powerless before that smile. She held open the door and slapped his butt as he went in.

O O O

“
Balor
, rotate X aspect point-two-five degrees starboard.” Quint stared down into the descent display that tracked the incoming chunk of Terran soil and tried to ignore the blasting wind that pressed down from above. He dared not look up at the black shadow slowly dropping out of the sky towards him. It was large enough to blot out both moons now, and he could almost feel the hundred million metric tons of earth suspended in the
Balor’s
tractor beams. That he was sitting in darkness only made the situation that much more unnerving.

The sun had set an hour earlier, so he sat in the middle of the encampment surrounded by black and shadows as he guided down Duncan Kyteler’s prize artifact. The darkness didn’t hinder his work, however, and he just barely managed to keep his hands from shaking. His eyes would never have left the screen for something like this anyway; the bonus for hitting the mark on the first try was incentive enough to do a perfect job. “Track point-eight meters to 183.25 degrees …” Quint’s voice sounded almost panicked in his ears, pitched way too high. He could only hope the crew didn’t’ give him too much grief when they were finished. “Steady.… Track point-two-three meters to 240.8 degrees….” His teeth started to ache as the perimeter of the starship’s drive-field crossed over him. He felt its sub-sonic hum, and the vibration felt like it was ready to shatter his skeleton and turn it to fine powder. “I’m in your field,
Balor
. Go to hover and maintain descent on tractors only.”

“Roger that, ground-control,” a man’s voice said casually into the comm.

Sure,
Quint thought,
it’s easy to be relaxed when you’re sitting on top of that thing rather than stuck underneath the son of a bitch.
Quint gritted his rattling teeth and kept his eyes on the monitor. “You’re on the mark … package passing zero elevation … negative one meters….” A high-pitched whistling filled his ears, and a blast of air washed over him as the huge earthen cylinder slipped into the pit with less than two millimeters clearance all the way round. He maintained focus as one of the shelters blew over on its side. “Negative two meters….” Quint thought his teeth were going to jump out of his skull. He reminded himself of the bonus:
I can buy new teeth … hell, a new head with that kind of money.
“Negative fifteen … negative sixteen … Okay … slow descent ninety percent and increase field-dampers three hundred….”

“Roger that, ground.” Quint wanted to slap the guy for being so calm.

“Easy … you’re almost there … slow descent another ninety-percent … you’ve got centimeters …”

Quint felt a gentle tremor flutter under his feet as the package bottomed out. The ground beneath him seemed to let out a tremendous, satisfied sigh as the bedrock once again took up the weight that had been stolen from it by the lasing-rig. The air stilled and the hum receded as the
Balor
drifted north, away and up from the surface. The drive-field receded, and then it was silent. Quint skeleton and teeth stopped feeling like they were being shaken apart.

“Package delivered, ground-control,” the man above said. “Nice guide-in, by the way. As good as I’ve seen.”

“Are you kidding me? I damn near crapped my pants.”

Laughter came through the comm. “Kid, take my word for it. I’ve been doing this twenty years. You’re a natural. You ever decide to get off that rock, you look me up. I’d give you a job in a Mercury minute!”

“Thanks,
Balor
,” Quint said sincerely. “I may take you up on that someday. Ground out.”

“Roger that, ground. Have a better one.” The comm went silent.

Quint pulled the comm-unit off his ear, shut down the terminal and pushed back on his chair, falling back onto the soft, green turf. He held up his hand before his eyes and could see it shaking slightly in the darkness.

The only thing that kept him from freaking out completely was that he was now a rich man. The bonus would be enough for him to live quite comfortably on Stranach IV for the rest of his life—and without farming …
Dea-Domhan
, he corrected himself. He’d have to remember it now that the colony had finally decided on a name for their new home. Maggie had told him that Dea-Domhan meant good earth, and he wished she were with him. She’d said that she had preparations to make for the celebration of Samhain.