“Cold Open”

CHAPTER ONE

Biowaste Processing Plant “Low Station”

Beta Beta Prime, Fleet/Order Border

Sheldon wanted to see something beautiful.

Beta Beta had long since lost her charms. Craggy peaks of ice like teeth and glittering snow held their share of pleasance, but there was only so long one could look at the same frigid, airless landscape before longing to see something else, something warm and, well, breathable.

Low station had never held even such a fleeting visual pleasure as the frosty rock it was screwed to. It was aptly named–Low Station–and always smelled of shit. Sheldon didn’t like using the word, but that’s what it was, truly. Shit. Literal feces. Low station processed the sector’s human and alien excrement. And the ass-end of the galaxy was no place to meet your end.

It may have turned out differently for Sheldon if he’d heard the proximity alarm. But, he didn’t. As it was, through his own grunting and sweat, he didn’t. All he could think about was how he couldn’t stand digging holes, and how he wanted to see something beautiful.

“A strato-room,” he said to himself, pausing his work and closing his eyes. “And a real girl with tits.” One of the swanky ones. The hotel, too. He could feel the sheets, see the clouds outside the window, smell her skin like salt and candy.

Sheldon often day-dreamed as such when he was working outside, digging. The frost-covered surface of the Beta Beta comet was pock-marked with the work of his shovel. When they’d built Low Station here oh so long ago, they’d been afraid the comet—that’s what Beta Beta was, an extraordinarily large comet—would rotate in its far-orbit of its star, casting the surface in alternating shadow and sun as it spun. Such variance in temperature was not good for pipes, particularly pipes full of excrement, and so they’d put them underground. It made sense, Sheldon was sure, at the time. But Beta Beta didn’t rotate. He’s not sure if it ever had. Low station was always in shadow on the dark side of the icy rock.

Neither had it spared the pipes; they still leaked. All the time. And when an underground pipe leaked, the only way to fix it was to dig it up. There were miles and miles of pipe under the cold white surface where millions and millions of gallons of waste filtered through an elaborate process that produced, of all things, heating bricks and fertilizer for the Fleet and Member Worlds. Energy and Food. From shit. It might have been impressive were it not so vile. And ugly. He was standing on half the waste of the galaxy, if he thought about that for too long, he would lose his mind.

There were many, many things Sheldon had done to deserve such a posting, but he was here to pay his penance, and then leave for better things. Beautiful things.

Sheldon sighed and opened his eyes, mustering up the strength to once again plunge his shovel into the rock and ice. But not too far, not all at once. The only thing worse than digging out frozen shit to mend a busted pipe was to puncture all the way through that freeze and cause a blowout. It geysered for hours, splattering the pure white, airless surface, and froze on his suit. He couldn’t get it clean after that, not completely, and CK was very strict about his bi-weekly EV suit allotment. The rest of Low Station’s miserable crew would avoid him like the plague.

“CK?” He spoke into his helmet microphone to raise Low Station’s resident AI. “How deep am I?”

He received no answer, which might have alarmed him, but then he remembered that he’d switched off his comm link. CK had a habit of reminding him every two minutes ‘you’ve used twenty five of your allotted seventy thermal units,’ ‘you’ve used twenty six,’ and so on. With all the energy Low Station produced, you’d think the AI would be less miserly when it came to the heating bill. Use too much energy and time would be tacked onto your service debt.

Sheldon sighed, closed his eyes again, and used a gloved hand to click the link back on. He knew from how long he’d been working, and from the depth of the hole, he must be getting close.

“CK?” He repeated slowly.

His hail was met with more silence. Sheldon frowned. He raised his wrist to look at the small rectangular computer there. It listed his vital signs, his available air, heat, etc. And right there lit up nice a bright was the small green light that said the comm link was active.

“Hey, CK.” Sheldon spoke directly into where the microscopic mic was embedded in his helmet, and he raised a sluggish, gloved hand and tapped on the outside. “You read?”

Still silence.

Sheldon looked behind him, back in the direction of Low Station, but all he could see were the craggy ice peaks between them. Maybe they were causing interference? Sheldon frowned. They never had before. It had to be his suit.

He exhaled and put down his shovel. The blade hissed steam as it lay flat, its heating element vaporizing the frost. It took him two stabs in his thickly insulated boots, but he kicked the power off and the hissing stopped.

He was halfway trudged back to the ice cliffs and in view of the long, narrow-bored passage that led to the other side before he realized quite ruefully that he’d turned his helmet speakers down all the way. The only sound was his breathing, the tick of his heart, and the shuffling crunch of his footsteps on the ice. No pinging status updates on his energy consumption, or alarm at his having left a tool behind. Right. That must be it, after all. No wonder he couldn’t hear the response of the AI. It wasn’t interference, or his microphone. He’d muted them, that’s all.

A screeching sound stopped him in his tracks the second he reactivated his helmet speakers. He had to turn it down before he realized what it was.

He could finally hear the proximity alarm.

Adrenaline surged through his body. Fatigue vaporized, and everything snapped into focus.

He looked up. There was nothing above him beyond the wispy entrails of the Beta Beta comet that hung in front of the stars like an atmosphere. He couldn’t see anything moving between them.

“CK?” He called, alarm tensing his voice.

Again, there was no response. Something was wrong. Actually wrong. Sheldon took up his pace once more, closing the distance between him and the tunnel and double speed. The station was on the other side.

“Anyone back there? Can you hear me? What’s going on?”

He paused at the entrance, once again looking around. Behind him, the ice field was as still and empty as it always was. Above him and across the field, nothing stirred in the stars. Still, the only sound he could hear was the droning of the alarm.

“I repeat, this is Sheldon. Is anyone receiving me?” He would lose reception for real once he stepped inside the tunnel.

Nothing.

He plunged himself into the tunnel. Several hundred meters of ice and rock above him threw his helmet commas into static, and he once again silence them, taking care this time to prompt his wrist computer to haptic tick whenever a new alert came up. The tunnel was not long. It ran underneath the sharp ridge that separated Low Station proper from its filtering and leeching fields where Sheldon spent so much of his time digging; fifty meters or so. Not long, but it was always dark.

Except this time.

Sheldon was about halfway through when he saw the floating blue light.

At first he thought it was a reflection of his own helmet lights in the ice, but as he began to near it, he realized it wasn’t moving with him. It was moving all on its own. Slowly. Back and forth, up and down. Weaving. Coming towards him.

Sheldon may have had the impulse to back away from it, some part of his ancient fight or flight kicking into his intuition, but if he did, it was instantly overwhelmed by an intense feeling of wonder and attraction. His face went slack-jawed, and his eyes widened, transfixed on the blue light. His entire body melted, every muscle un-tensing, except for those that were required to propel him forward. And forward he went, towards the mesmerizing light, which was still bobbing slowly, deliberately towards him.

“What is that?” He asked no one in particular. His voice was awed, cracked.

He couldn’t stop moving toward the light. His mind didn’t want to. Not even when his own suit lights revealed that it was dangling from a long, inky black, undulating stalk, or column, or…tentacle. His body rebelled, however, and his mouth opened to scream at what he was moving towards. He knew not if the sound ever actually came out, at least by record of his own ears, but he must have made a sound.

“What’s all that racket?” A voice called to him from inside the light.

Sheldon knew the voice.

“Why you making noise like that?”

An old woman, dressed in dirty grey linens, the kind a sanitation tech would wear, was standing in front of Sheldon, hands on her hips. He grey hair was wild and skewed to one side, and her dark brown eyes burned like coals, piercing the darkness. “I told you not to make noise like that,” she said, and came near enough to smack Sheldon on the helmet.

He caught her arm as she retracted it. It felt warm in his hands. Strong. He had the dim thought that he shouldn’t be able to feel her arm through his gloves, but he wasn’t wearing them any more. He looked at her face, cracked and old, but vibrant and pulsing with life.

“Nana,” he said.

“Let me go,” she said back, yanking her arm from his grasp. She then gestured around them. “What you doing out in the cold like this?”

Sheldon looked around. He couldn’t remember where he used to be, but he knew where he was. Snow drifts piled around them, pushed aside by the auto plows that kept the road open up the mountain. Behind the old woman was a house with burning yellow windows and a trail of grey smoke rising up to the winter sky. He’d lived in that house a long time ago.

“You trying to run away again?” Nana said, hands back on her hips. The scold had left her voice, however.

Sheldon looked the other direction, over his own shoulder, down the road that led into the woods, away from this place. No, he hadn’t been trying to run away. He’d never run away from this place. It was cold outside.

“No ma’am,” he said to her.

“Then what are you doing out in this cold, all by yourself?”

She stared at him in that way that she always did, the stare that cut right through him and turned him inside out. He stared back at her, not daring to believe.

“I don’t know,” he said, and he shook his head to try and not burst into tears, but the tears came anyway, hot and shameful on his cheeks.

“Alright, alright,” Nana said, wrapping him up in her big warm arms and squeezing him tight up against her. “It’s alright. We can talk about it in the morning when Gramps gets up.”

“Grandpa’s here, too?” Sheldon looked up at her.

“Course he is! Where else would he be?” Sheldon broke anew, and Nana held him together in her arms and started them back towards the warm house. “You’re alright, Sheldon,” she said to him, rubbing his shoulders. “You’re alright. Probably just sleepwalking. Let’s get you inside.”

Sheldon allowed himself to be hauled up the stairs, and the door ahead of them creaked open, eyes blurry and wet.

“Hold on now,” Nana said, holding him on one side of the threshold. “You take that thing off before you come in here.”

She was pointing to the suit.

Those were the rules. Outside clothes stayed outside. The interior of the house, all yellows and oranges and reds, beckoned him in from the cold.

Sheldon nodded.

He reached his hands up to his helmet, braced them, clicked it to the side, and it hissed open with a whoosh of escaping air. The helmet dropped to the floor of the tunnel with a crack.

He froze to death seconds later in the frigid vacuum, long before the tentacles of oily black ooze had dragged him out of the tunnel.

On the ice, the helmet had its sound back on. It was blaring the proximity warning over and over.

Alert.

Alert.