Um. I felt kinda bad completely ripping into someone's band just there, when I don't have any of my own creative output out there on the big bad Internet so that other people can do the same to me. I wrote this for the October issue of TBD, the bi-monthly magazine produced by IO, Glasgow Uni's sci-fi/fantasy society. Um. You probably won't get most of the jokes unless you're a big Rocky Horror fan - it's full of references to the song "Science Fiction Double Feature", and the films referenced by that song.
Of the Blackest Night
These are the spaces between the stars. An infinity of darkness, and yet not truly dark. Look closer. What fills those spacious voids but more stars? Look closer still. The gaps between those stars are crowded with others yet more distant. Again, look closer. A steadily blazing wall of light, now, without atmospheric interference to cause scintillation. Nevertheless, a star twinkles. Another winks out, briefly, and then returns. Now his neighbour vanishes for an instant. Look closer.
A black shape, eclipsing stars as it passes, and this
is black. Not so much as a glimmer illuminates the surface. Look closer. A featureless expanse, an unlit plain of a scale impossible to determine. An obsidian pool rimmed by starlight. Look closer. Now there are stars no longer, only the darkness. Look closer. Look closer still.
******
“What? What is it? I’m awake!”
“Barbara Rush, that chick from ICFOS. We’ve got a level two inbound that she thought we might like to know about.”
“
Another one? Damnit, they could have installed a dozen automated defence systems with the money they spend calling us every five minutes.”
The International Centre for Orbital Safety had been established some fifteen years earlier, right after the ISS-2 disaster of 2053. A fragment of space debris no larger than a human finger had punctured the hull of the second International Space Station, killing all nine crew members in the resultant decompression. The Station took out several hundred communication satellites in a cascading chain reaction before crashing into the Aegean Sea, causing so much disruption to businesses worldwide that no-one was yet sure how many trillions of dollars it had cost. The flash-shields now routinely fitted to Orbitals would easily deal with such small objects, but are incapable of handling anything larger than a golf cart. Hence the ICFOS Orbital. The organisation had been set up to track the movements of every large piece of debris in the solar system, and issue warnings whenever something got too close. This, as it transpired, happened with annoying frequency.
“Just bring it up on the scope, Helen. Save your complaints ‘til we know it’s nothing serious.”
“C’mon, Ray, don’t rain on my tirade. You know as well as I do that…yeah, check it out. Nowhere near us. It’ll impact the atmosphere and burn up. Why did they have to bother
us with it? They must have known we weren’t in any danger.”
“They also know they’re not infallible. I’d rather be woken up by a ‘phone call than by getting sucked out of the hull.”
“Yeah, I guess so.” Helen conceded. Ray was short for an astronaut, about 5’7”, and she was a good four inches taller. His Napoleon complex got tiresome after a while, so she’d gotten used to allowing him to win arguments. If some comet-spotter wanted to make herself look important and justify her funding by continually interrupting everyone’s sleep, well, there wasn’t a lot Helen could do about it anyway.
“Think I might go pick up a breakfast tube. You want anything?” asked Ray.
“Nah, I’m fine, thanks” Helen replied “Could you grab one for Michael, though? He’s still pretty unwell.”
“Sure. What about Jean-Claude?”
“Ha! The Invisible bloody Man, you mean. Haven’t seen him in, like, four days.”
“You sure he’s OK?”
“Oh, he’ll be fine. Let him mope. It’s bad for his ‘strong and silent’ routine if you try and actually discuss things like an adult with him.”
“I’m going to check anyway. Take him some breakfast. He shouldn’t isolate himself like that.”
“Alright, fine. Do whatever you want. I’m staying right here. Don’t suppose I’ll ever get back to sleep now.”
She watched him float off towards the provisions storage cupboard. Ray, like all Orbitally-stationed astronauts, was completely bald. Shedding a hundred hairs a day was something you really couldn’t afford to do inside a space station, and besides, zero-g hair was an intolerable nuisance.
The tracking scope lit up about the same time as the comms board started making noises. Helen launched herself towards the scope, glanced at the readout, and reached out a hand to flick the comm. switch. It would be ICFOS, telling her what she already knew. Their harmless piece of class two space junk had just undergone a course correction.
*****
The black-within-black. Motion, now. Systems which had lain dormant for millennia, responding to the carefully modulated radiation fleeting across the jet-black hull. The shape responded with a blast of radiation of its own, abruptly shifting direction. Another blast, then another. Homing in on the broadcasts. Finding the source.
*****
“It came from
where?!”
“Outer space. Listen, we’re lucky we even had this much warning. That thing’s coming in
fast. And it absorbs pretty much any radiation we can throw at it. We didn’t pick it up until it eclipsed Mars.”
“Do you have a fix on the new trajectory?”
“The only way we can even tell it’s
there is by the stars it’s obscuring. We’re doing the best we can, but…oh.”
“Oh?”
“That’s odd. It seems to have stopped moving. What the hell is this thing? Can you get a fix on it? We’ll need a third point to triangulate; I’ll get someone on a channel to the RKO in a sec.”
“Black patch on the starfield? Got it, I think. But it’s definitely moving.”
“Really? We’re not showing any movement at all. You sure you’re looking in the right place?”
“Of course I’m sure! I’m trying to extrapolate a heading, but…”
Just then, the comm. line died.
“Oh,
shit!” Helen cried. The station rocked slightly as it was buffeted by a shockwave. A shockwave comprised of the vaporised remains of the ICFOS Orbital.
“What was
that?” Ray yelled, bounding into the room.
“Something just tore ICFOS a new airlock! The station’s gone. And now we’ve no hope of tracking whatever did it. We could be next, Ray. There’s some sort of fucking super-weapon out there and there’s nothing we can do about it.”
“Helen, shut up and look at the viewport.”
“What?”
“The viewport, Helen. Look at it! Look at the Earth, and tell me I’m not going crazy.”
She shut up, and looked.
There, in the centre of the viewport, hung the blue-green orb of her homeworld. The Earth, seemingly immobile in space, swathed in a blanket of pearlescent cloud. Helen’s face fell. A black speck marred the beauty of that shining globe, streaking across the surface until it plunged into the terminator and out of sight.
*****
The night side of the planet Earth. A hemisphere of sheer darkness, but still not truly dark. Look closer. See the glow of a myriad man-made stars, railing defiantly against the night. See them one-by-one eclipsed. Look closer. Look closer still.
*****
Frank Ahn had lived in Glasgow his entire life. He loved the city far too much to ever leave it. Currently he was admiring the architecture of a large sandstone building on Buchanan Street that he’d never really noticed before. “Funny”, he thought “how you can walk down a street every day for years and still have something new to look at.”
He dodged around a small knot of people coming up the stairs from the Underground station, and wandered up to gawp at the ‘new comics’ shelf in the window of Forbidden Planet.
“Tfft. Dross. ‘Potato Cow’? Who
buys this? ‘DeFister’? ‘X-Bastard’? Come off it. Oh, hey, there’s a new issue of Action Shanky. Jammin’. Nothing else worth buying, though.”
But then, he didn’t really go to FP for the comics any more. He went on Thursdays because that’s when Chris Murray and Patrick Quinn were in, the only two guys with the keys to the vault downstairs. He opened the door and nearly collided with a portly fourteen-year-old, arms laden with Star Wars merchandise. Not good Star Wars either; it was Attack of the bloody Clones.
“Sorry, chief” he muttered. “Hey, Chris, how’s it goin’?”
“No bad, Frank, no bad. Yersel’?”
“Aye, alright. Any new toys this week?”
“Take a look around, man. We’ve got more Lego than we know what to do with. Six different flavours of Optimus Prime.”
“Ye know fine well what I meant.”
“Aye, fair enough. Hauw, Pat! Gonnae watch the shop for five minutes, eh?”
“Nae bother, chief.” Pat shouted back. “Awright, Frank?”
“’right.”
They walked through to the back of the shop, through the ‘Staff Only’ door and down the stairs. Chris stepped over a box of Invader Zim merchandise, walked over to an unmarked door and pulled a set of keys from his back pocket.
“One shop. How come we need fourteen different sets of sodding keys?”
He unlocked the door and hit the light switch, illuminating an Aladdin’s cave of technological gizmos. Rack after rack of suspiciously weapon-like objects adorned the walls, and the floor was littered with boxes of sophisticated-looking electronic components. Fully one-third of the room was occupied by a gleaming metal table, with what appeared to be a large plasma-ball attached.
“Holy Christ!” Frank exclaimed. “You got a vortex blast chamber!” I thought there were only three of those. Prototypes, at that.”
“You’re looking at the only fully-functioning VBC in existence, man. The only one I’d trust not to take your balls off, anyway.”
“Dude! How the hell did you manage to get hold of that?”
“Ah, now that would be telling, and if I told you, what would you need me for? We also got those plasma charge relays you were looking for.”
“Both…”
“Both kinds, aye. What else was it you wanted? Richards’ gravfield generators? The ones with the built-in heat-sinks? We’ve got, like, a dozen of them. And a Class IV laser you could fit in a Smarties tube.”
“Magic. I’ll take that laser, four of the gravgens, two of each of the PCRs, uh, that RKO shielding unit you’ve got by the door there, any spare radon caps, as per, and…oh, aye, the new Action Shanky.”
“Not a problem. I’ll stick it on your tab. Anything else?”
“Naw, that ought to keep me busy for a while.”
“How goes the project, anyway?”
“That should be her just about finished, once I get those PCRs fitted. Finally sorted out that whole b-radon deal.”
“Nice one.”
“Cheers. Been meaning to ask – what’s with the scarf?”
“This? Used to belong to the Doctor himself, Tom Baker.”
“Ex-Doctor.”
“Hey, Tom Baker will
always be the Doctor.”
“I dunno, man. Sylvester McCoy had his moments.”
“Get out my shop, right now. Go on, piss off.”
“Feh. I had stuff to do anyway. Same time next Thursday?”
“Maybe. If you’ve learned some respect for the Baker by then.”
“Aye. Cheers, then.”
“Bye.”
*****
Frank liked to think of himself as a cooler version of Dexter from Dexter’s Lab. Granted, he had to work out of a grotty lock-up garage, but he
was building a robot. He’d decided to call it Susan, for no other reason than he rather liked the name. It was more or less arachnid in form, and he had no idea what he was going to do with it. He’d just gotten sick of seeing so much about humanoid robots. “They’re bipedal!” he thought. “That’s really stupid! I could build a better robot in the bloody garage!”
And so he had. The real masterstroke, he thought, was using b-radon as a power source. A naturally occurring, carcinogenic gas, formed by the decay process of Radium. It was in plentiful supply, perfectly safe if properly handled, and had several interesting properties he was fairly sure no-one else knew about. He fully intended to exploit this fact.
Robot Wars probably wouldn’t be happy about the Class IV laser, though. Sighing, he picked up a torque-wrench and got back to work.
*****
<Six weeks later, and some three and a half thousand miles distant>
“Ah, General Ween. Pleasant journey, I trust?”
“Cut the crap, Altair. You said you have information?”
“Indeed. We’ve been putting the new Beholder satellites through their paces, and your Scottish friend seemed like the perfect choice of subject. If I could draw your attention to the viewscreen behind you…”
“It would appear that he’s been putting his new toy through its paces. A most…arresting demonstration, I’m sure you’ll agree. I know your department’s had its eye on Robbie the Robot there for a good while now.”
“I don’t care what you know, Altair. I’m more bothered by what you want.”
“Whatever do you mean?”
“If you’d wanted something from me, you wouldn’t have just shown me that footage.”
“How perspicacious of you, General. Understand that I do not wish anything from you. I merely want you to remember that you are
in my debt. I’m sure your career shall receive quite a boost from this young gentleman’s technology. I would not want you to forget your…friends.”
“You’re no friend of mine, Altair, but I honour my debts.
“Very well, General. Do not allow me to…detain you.”
*****
No-one could really remember precisely when the darkness came. There had been a day when those who looked to the sky were blinded, and a night of terrible, shrieking, demons. “Androids”, the government soldiers had called them. Mechanical men. No-one asked any questions of the argent, faceless invaders, if that’s what they could be called. They had merely started shooting at them.
“That was our first mistake” said Helen, “and listening to J-Net was our second.”
J-Net had formerly been the largest, most successful, and most despised corporation on the planet, formed from the ruins of Microsoft, AT&T and ExxonMobil in the wake of the 2053 collapse. No-one had really been surprised when they turned out to be a secret branch of the US government with an army of robotic tarantulas.
“What would you have done, Helen? Sit back and let the world be taken over by those things?”
“They made no aggressive moves until we started shooting at them!”
“Tell that to the ICFOS Orbital, Helen. Oh, but, what’s this? You can’t! Because it’s
not fucking there anymore. Your alien robot buddies non-aggressively blew the hell out of it!”
“They could…there are any number of…argh. Damnit, Ray, I don’t know why I even bother.”
“Fine then, leave me to die. I can feel it, Helen, I’m fucking doomed. Everything in my life has been leading up to this. It’s fate. Something hates me.”
“Yeah. Me. C’mon, we’ve still got a lot of ground to cover. That looks like an impact crater further up the road. Maybe no-one else has gotten to it yet.”
They’d been scavenging for a few weeks now. Ever since Orbital Control had stopped talking to them and they’d decided to bail in one of the emergency landers. Helen hadn’t realised at the time that it would be impossible to get a signal back to her crewmates still in orbit. The whole country had been devastated, as far as she could tell. The battling war-machines had rendered large swathes of America simply uninhabitable. It turned out that the spider-robots had been using b-radon as a power source.
“An invisible carcinogenic gas. Nice one, J-Net.”
“Aw, stow it, Ray. See anything useable? Something we could exchange for food, maybe?” They had enough rations for perhaps two days, if they were careful.
“Well, the crater looks untouched, at least. Hmm. No, none of this looks useful. Maybe a…hey, is that a differential analyser unit? It is, too. Casing’s unbroken.”
He pressed a few buttons. “Helen!” he cried, excitedly “Get this!” There was a pregnant pause. “It doesn’t fucking work! Nothing works! We’re going to starve to death if your robot pals don’t find us first! Androids fighting! B-radon! J-net! I can’t take much more of this.”
“I can’t take much more of
you. Now toss that thing and let’s get…”
The words died on her lips. She had time to watch Ray’s facial expression shift from confusion to horror before his body was sundered into a cloud of atoms, and Helen found herself gazing into the gun-barrel of a weapon from another planet.
*****
A moment of fear, stretched to an eternity. Two figures, motionless, seemingly locked in a terrifying tableau. Now the taller hefts his weapon. Look closer. See the towering silver warrior reflected in the woman’s fearful eyes. See how darkness looms within the barrel of the gun. Look closer. Look closer still.
