False Idols and Other Short Stories Read online

  A faint scuttling sound, like the whisper of a snake’s rattle, echoed across the canyon. Travis stopped and held his breath. All he could hear was the wind.

  “Travis?”

  “Shush.”

  He scanned the horizon. He could not make anything out except the clay, the occasional smooth boulder, a few thorny shrubs, and, in the thick of the fog, something that was either a cliff wall or a steep ridge. The scanner was of no help.

  “Travis?”

  He let his breath out in a long sigh. “I thought I heard something,” he said.

  “Just your imagination.”

  Travis bit the inside of his cheek. “James, I’m sorry I got you into this,” he said, marching on once more. “Why did you jump ship?”

  “We sinned, Travis. We stole from the Church.”

  “We found information that can save lives,” Travis said. “There’s a difference.”

  He could make out a column of smoke in the distance, just beyond the ridge. He assumed it came from James’s pod, and cursed silently. Through occasional clear patches in the billowing miasma, he saw that the sedimentary rock face was at least a hundred feet high and stretched miles in each direction. More importantly, the pods had atmosphere recyclers, but the suits did not. He only had an hour of air left.

  “All the colonies use Invictus Intelligrain,” James said. “It is Sol’s will. We challenged that will, and now look at us.”

  “It’s poison,” said Travis. “It’s swimming with toxins, and they know it.”

  “The digestive systems of the faithful can handle it.”

  Catherine looked up at him with large, faultless, brown eyes. She was terrified. She had been sick, and her vomit was red. Her whole dress was stained with—

  Travis squeezed the memory from his mind. “My daughter has Crimsons,” he said. “She’s four.”

  “I’ll pray for her.”

  Travis closed his eyes. “I don’t understand,” he said. “If you felt this way, why did you help me?”

  “You tempted me with money. You lured me away from Sol’s light and into sin.”

  “Letting millions die isn’t a sin?”

  Travis could hear James breathing hard. “The Pontifex Maximus knows the will of Sol,” the elder man said at last.

  Travis checked his scanner. It estimated another one and a half miles to go. That was assuming he would not have to scale the ridge. He cycled the sensors through various spectrums. The luminescent wisps caused too much interference to survey the landscape beyond forty feet, but his scanner had charted his course as he walked. He looked at the map and swallowed.

  About a fifth of a mile back, he had been walking on a road.

  “Travis?” James asked. “Travis, can you hear me?”

  Travis switched the radio off and considered his options. The most important factor was air, and the direct route was usually best. However, a road was some sort of construction, and there was a good possibility that it led to a passage.

  Travis retraced his steps to the road and wondered how he had missed it. It was much harder beneath his feet than the clay that made up the rest of the landscape. He knelt and brushed at the top layer. The surface underneath was dark and mirror–polished. He ignited his arc knife and tried to cut a piece off. The blue–white line of plasma flared against the murky glass, but left it unscathed. He pocketed the tool and switched his radio back on. “Are you still there?” he asked.

  “I’m still here,” James said. “You hung up on me. Do not ever—”

  “Shut up,” Travis cut him off. “I found a road.” There were a few moments of silence. “Do you hear me, jackass?”

  “I hear you.”

  “There’s intelligent life on this planet, or at least there was. Contamination is an executable sin.”

  “So is stealing from the Church.”

  Travis pressed his forehead against the cool glass of his faceplate. “I have friends,” he said. “They could have helped us. Now we’ll never get out of here. I know you were scared, but what the hell were you thinking?”

  “Well, you didn’t have to follow me.” James began to cry again. “I am a sinner, and the light of Sol Invictus will protect me in all things,” he chanted. “I am a sinner, and the light of Sol—”

  Travis snapped the radio off. He had two choices: return to the pod, set the beacon, put himself in suspended animation, and claim ignorance if rescue ever arrived — or move forward and find James.

  Catherine — just her name was enough. He did not want to recall her bloody image again. He had to find James and retrieve his half of the data. Besides, he realized as he checked his tank, in forty–five minutes he would have to return to the pod anyway.

  He whipped his head around. He could have sworn he heard the whispering rattle again, but he saw nothing. He took a deep breath and headed down the road.

  A pair of objects appeared on the scanner as flat planes within the ridge’s wall. Travis was not sure what they were at first, but as he got closer, he saw that they were gates. Each side was ten feet high and twenty feet wide. What he took initially to be wrought iron filigree was in fact a network of twisted vines. He pulled at them. They were as hard as steel. He put his gloves where the two monstrous gates joined and pushed with all of his strength. They refused to budge.

  He stepped back and examined the interwoven design. He decided that it might be possible to cut a hole large enough to crawl through. He ignited his knife.

  The vines lashed out the moment the fire touched them. Travis jerked back, dropping his knife to the road, but he was not fast enough. They whipped around the fingertips of his right hand and constricted. He screamed as the bones in his middle, ring, and index fingertips snapped, popping in rapid succession like firecrackers. He yanked back his mutilated hand, but the vines squeezed harder. With a wrenching twist, they tore off his fingertips.

  Agony exploded up Travis’s arm. He fell back to the ground, dimly aware of the whoosh of escaping oxygen. There was a new pain now as the suit clamped around his fingers at their first joints. He felt a prick in his wrist, and his hand went blessedly numb. White fire flared around his knuckles, and he watched as the remaining halves of his three torn fingers plopped one by one to the crystalline road. The glove twisted itself tight at the end of his stubs, like sausage casing. The whooshing noise stopped.

  “Attention,” a pleasant female voice said in his ear. “Your Aurelian–Award environment suit has detected a breach and possible biological contaminants. Contaminated digits have been amputated and the relevant breaches sealed. Please seek immediate medical assistance. Aurelian–Award apologizes for any inconvenience.”

  Travis lay sprawled on the ground, staring at what was left of his hand. The vines still clutched his fingertips and the torn silver swatches of his glove. The bioluminescent fog descended upon the discarded digits. There was a sound like the drone of angry hornets, and then the glowing wisps dissipated.

  What were once his fingertips were now amber crystals streaked with flaws the color of cinnamon. Every detail had been transformed. He could make out the whorls on their undersides, the cracked nails, the hardened veins sticking out like yellow, glistening wires amidst the torn joints, and even the bones underneath.

  The vines tossed his crystalized fingers and their silvery wrappings to the ground. They reached for him, extending two feet out of their filigree. Travis scuttled in the dust, pushing himself to his feet with his one good hand. The vines stretched as far as they could in his direction. Then, with a creaking groan, the gates inched apart.

  Travis darted back, clamping his mutilated hand underneath his armpit. The gates screeched outward, the vines swirling toward him like snakes. He watched as the gap widened to a foot, then two, and then three.

  He ran.

  The razor–sharp tip of a vine scraped a furrow across his faceplate as he passed between them. The hinges screeched as the gate fought its own momentum and switched directions. He continued running, his feet pounding on the hardened clay. He turned his head to see the gate swing shut behind him with a reverberating clang. His foot caught on a rock and he sprawled forward.

  He lifted his head. It was not a rock, it was a root. He reached out for the tree and pulled himself to his feet. Then he realized it was not a tree, and what he had tripped over was not a root.

  It was a tentacle.

  The statue was seven feet high. Its face, if Travis could call it that, was a mass of segmented eyes at its center. It was fashioned from the same crystal as the road and his amputated fingers, but it had a bluish hue, as if carved from a cloudy sapphire. Its seven tentacles each ended in a maw lined with needles. Circling the eyes were three rows of overlapping ridges. Beneath the ridges, Travis could make out a silvery hose that led to some mechanism deep within its chest.

  Travis stared at the sculpture, his breath coming in long, hard gasps. He swallowed back nausea. Three fingers. He had lost three fingers because of James’s stupidity, on his right hand, no less. Praise Invictus he had not lost his pinky. He wiggled his remaining digits. They obeyed. His hand no longer felt numb and it did not hurt, but holy shit, did it itch. He rubbed his stumps with the thumb of his left glove. “Warning,” the suit’s voice said in his ear, “please do not agitate the emergency seal or temporary grafting epoxy. Seek immediate medical attention. Aurelian–Award apologizes for any inconvenience.”

  Travis cried out in frustration and rage. It would have been worth it if he could have saved Catherine.

  At the foot of the statue was an obsidian table, about two feet high, in the shape of an ankh. Runes adorned every inch of its surface. The round head was shaped like a shallow bowl. The depression was riddled with holes, as if it had been jackhammered with a spike. Each of the three spokes bore nests of vines. Travis stepped back from them. There was a brackish residue along the center of the cross’s arms and length. The luminescent wisps floating about Travis’s head made something shiny glint at the center of the depression. He picked it up.

  It was hard, clear, and irregular, like bubbled glass. It was curved, a shard of a sphere, with a spiderweb crack radiating from its center. A stringy, opaque, green and gold material clung to its surface, dangling a network of what looked like veins and nerves. Travis held it up to the horizon. He could make out the pillar of smoke through it, barely visible through the fog.

  He heard a rustling noise from behind him. He half turned as something exploded into the back of his knee. He fell, cracking his other knee on the corner of the altar. He rolled onto the clay as the vines on the cross’s arms lashed out for him.

  A man in an environment suit stepped between Travis and the sky, aiming a flare gun at his stomach. Travis squinted. Through the reflected landscape in the faceplate, he could make out ice–blue eyes peering down at him from a somber, wrinkled face.

  His helmet speaker snapped on with a click. “Very slowly,” James said in a cold, commanding voice, “remove your knife and toss it over.”

  Travis held up his mutilated hand. “I lost it when this happened,” he said.

  “When what happened?”

  Travis stared up at James, aware of the vines attached to the altar flexing just at the edge of his vision. “I tried to cut a sample of the road and it exploded,” he said. “There was some sort of resonance feedback from the crystal.”

  James tilted his head, considering. “I’m not sure if I believe you,” he said, “but it doesn’t matter. Hold your hand out.”

  Travis extended his right hand. James opened his pouch, removed a DualCoder, and laid it on the clay. He knelt on one knee, his flare gun steady, his eyes never leaving Travis’s. He slipped his pinky inside. There was a chirp and his end of the device lit up with a red glow.

  “Now you,” he instructed.

  “Answers first.”

  James’s face remained expressionless. “I can still make your finger work after you’re dead,” he said. “It’s not as difficult as the advertising claims.”

  Travis bit his lip and pushed his finger inside. He felt a tingle, like static electricity. His end of the device lit up blue. At the center of the DualCoder the colors swirled, forming fractal patterns. They merged into a violet ring, and the device emitted a high, satisfied chord. James yanked it off Travis’s finger and stood. He pressed a button and a chip the size of his fingernail popped out. He removed it and placed it in his pouch.

  “Thank you Travis,” James said. “The secrets of Intelligrain will be the icing on the cake.”

  Panic bloomed in Travis’s chest. “Who do you work for?” he asked.

  “Don’t be cliché,” said James. “Does it matter? All the religions are fighting over colonization rights. The Vatican, Hunahpu City, the Pontifex Maximus, the Synod, the Caliphate… everybody wants a piece of this planet.”

  The pulse in Travis’s temples began to throb. “There’s intelligent life here,” he said. “We’re contaminators. No one would ever think of rescuing you now, no matter what you’ve discovered.”

  The elder man gestured to the statue. “This planet’s already been contaminated,” he said. “Look at the ridges around the eyes. What does that tell you?”

  “Insomnia?”

  “If you had only bothered to look,” James continued, “you would have seen that every organ, vein, bone, and muscle have been crystalized. Those ridges are gills. There seems to be some sort of artificial breathing mechanism grafted inside. Apparently, non–biological material isn’t affected by the process.”

  Travis shrugged.

  “Gills, you idiot, on a world without an ocean. At least one other race made it to this planet before us, which makes the contamination charge invalid. The problem was that we needed a way to accidentally ‘discover’ that. And then you came along with your crusade, looking for a hacker, and promising espionage of Intelligrain intel from a ship on the Cassiopeiae run no less. How could we pass it up?”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Travis asked.

  James let out a weary sigh. “Survey probes suggested months ago that this planet has some very unique life–forms. The natives are some sort of microscopic insects. They can chew material up and spit it out with molecular detail, like bees masticating honey into wax. But this wax has a crystalline structure more perfect than a diamond’s.”

  “Imagine that, bugs that can transubstantiate.”

  James glowered at him. “Imagine if we exposed certain biological forms to them,” he said, “if we genetically engineered animal life in the exact shapes needed for light–phase hyperdrive crystals.” He held his arms out. “This world will become the center of the galaxy. And it will be under our… guidance.” He stepped back and leveled the flare gun at Travis’s chest. “This may sting a little.”

  “Wait,” Travis said, holding his hands out. “What about my daughter?”

  James gave him a look that was almost pity. “Don’t you get it?” he asked. “Nobody gives a shit about Crimsons. Do you think that’s the only disease Intelligrain causes? Who cares, it makes colonization possible.” He clicked his tongue. “Besides, when has theology ever been a friend of knowledge? Adam and Eve were cast from paradise for wanting to think for themselves. For bringing mortals the gift of fire, Prometheus was damned to have his organs be eagle chow for all eternity. For daring to teach that the Earth was not the center of creation, Galileo was imprisoned. The other religions don’t want to bring Sol Invictus down, they just want their cut.”

  Travis nodded at the altar. “It won’t be perfect though,” he said. “There’s some organic matter there. How come it hasn’t been transformed?”

  James’s eyes narrowed. Almost involuntarily, they flicked to the polished ankh.

  Travis kicked upward into James’s stomach. The engineer fired as he fell, burning a path through the air millimeters from Travis’s faceplate. Travis staggered, blinded. He squeezed his eyes tight against the pain, waiting for the killing shot.

  Seconds passed. He opened his eyes and blinked through the dying after–glare.

  James had fallen onto the ankh. The vines wrapped around his shoulder and neck, pulling him against the altar in an iron grasp, the flare gun still clenched in his hand. Obeying an unheard command, a wind blew across the wasteland, pushing the dank fog back to the horizon. Only the glowing wisps remained.

  Beneath the glistening band of the Milky Way, the landscape was littered with statutes, altars, shards of green glass, and about a hundred yards away, the smoking wreckage of James’s pod. Travis recognized some of the species that made up the idols. There were creatures from Centuari and Betelgeuse, even a five–winged avian from AD Leonis. The rest were life forms he had never seen before. There was one he could only describe as a hybrid between a wasp, a squid, and a horse.

  The ground shook with a low rumble, like an earthquake. James strained and squirmed to raise his head. “Travis?” he shouted, “What’s happening?”

  They came from everywhere, from holes in the rocks, from the mountains, and from the cliffs. They were insectile, their exoskeletons sporting three spindly legs and an armored abdomen. Their twisted necks ended in one milky eye that looked as if it was made of glass, with an opal fluid sloshing inside. Their irises were uniformly the color of cinnamon, flecked with streaks of scarlet. There were hundreds of thousands of them, all roughly two feet high. They chattered and whispered as they came.

  Travis tore open James’s pouch. He snatched the data chip and dropped it into his own. A moment later, the sea of insects flowed around him, pushing him back from the altar. He did not resist. An eerie calm settled over him. Whatever happened next, he had no defense. They swarmed over James’s struggling form and wrapped their cursorial legs around him. The vines retracted as the insects yanked their prey to his feet.

  The glowing wisps of fog descended and enveloped the engineer’s helmet. There was a flash of orange and white as James fired into the onslaught. A handful of creatures ignited, their charred bodies spinning through the air. Finally, one shimmied up James’s suit and smashed his faceplate with its foreleg. He screamed as the phosphorescence assaulted his mouth and nostrils. He writhed, his hands tearing at his crystalizing throat. The insects dug their razor–tipped claws into his environment suit, shredding it from his body. They could not scratch his flesh, as it was now a hardened, emerald resin.