“…he had risen up out of the blackness of twenty-seven centuries, and… he had heard messages from places not on this planet.”
—“Nyarlathotep,” H.P. Lovecraft (1920)
The silver ship shuddered. Its nuclear engines burned to life, correcting its course against the pull of the nearby Moon’s gravity.
Within the cold metal skin, Coleman Chang awoke and swatted at the flutterby hovering and beeping by his temple. He raised himself on his elbows and blinked the deep, cold dryness from his eyes. Beyond the nearest viewport, icy stars sped by amidst the black void.
None of the others had survived. The monitor lights at the base of their suspension tubes all flashed blue. Coleman knew the entire crew, himself included, had been expected to perish, but he’d harbored secret hopes of beating the odds. Not that any of them mattered. Only the data mattered, and that rested securely in the belly of the craft.
Coleman pushed back the glass seal and shifted out of his tube. His flutterby withdrew, the blue disc floating a standard three feet behind his left shoulder, its devices scanning his vital signs, recording his every move. The blue discs of the others lay cold upon the steel and glass cocoons that had become their coffins.
Fifteen years, Coleman thought. I’m going home alone.
Out of those fifteen years, he’d spent perhaps one fully conscious, with six months alone dedicated to the team’s research, completing work only possible during the period when their seemingly infinite, preprogrammed trajectory carried them within range of Pluto and the mysterious celestial body beyond. Near enough to run scans and measurements from within their vessel. Did the knowledge gained justify the deaths of six men and women, Coleman’s friends and colleagues? He didn’t know. He served only as messenger, the value of the data well beyond his judgment.
The hum of the engines faded, and the ship plummeted onward in heavy silence toward Earth. Coleman entered the tiny cockpit and commenced the required diagnostic routines. All systems checked out. With luck, the Marathon would approach Earth orbit in less than two days. Until then, he would wait in the cramped and cold cockpit. He preferred that to returning to the sleep chamber. He wished for a book or music to soothe his restlessness, anything to distract his mind from the enormity of their undertaking and the sheer horror that demanded their sacrifice.
Coleman tried to pin the start down to a single event, but there were too many. What had happened seemed the inevitable confluence of history—and he had no idea how history might have changed during his long absence.
In his lifetime alone, humanity had weathered riots led by men and women who’d succumbed to madness and degenerated to a primitive state of bloodlust, thousands of cultists burning the cities, murdering all those they could. Humanity trembled in the grip of raw violence for nine dark days before order returned as thirty, fifty, a hundred nations enacted martial law to stamp out the erupting savagery. Coleman turned seven years old that year.
Five years later, twelve-year-old Coleman followed the news, transfixed, as the Black Armies of Kavage Kash rolled forth from the deserts of Africa and marched in conquest across Persia into Asia and Europe. They bore strange weapons: massive, glowing contraptions and dirty, soot-coated machines hauled on heavy trailers to spread poisons and disease. They held great cities hostage, bent once-powerful nations to their will, and it seemed soon the entire world would fall beneath their ruthless onslaught. Then came a fleet of planes bearing immense bombs and the most crucial armament, information. A shard of luck had revealed the location of the Black Armies’ leader, and so his enemies cut loose the head of the beast, obliterating him and all life surrounding him for twenty miles.
Some claimed Kavage Kash served only as a figurehead for the true power behind the Black Armies. Small circles of cynical men whispered of a dark and powerful leader, who traveled in mystery surrounded by a fog of panic. In his mind, they said, dwelled the secrets of ultimate chaos and despair and that his hidden connivances edged the world ever closer toward an unyielding abyss. Where he walked, cities screamed in the night.
From the dust of the Black Armies’ destruction, abhorrent, deformed creatures spilled forth from the sea, rising to attack lonely ships on open waters. Rumors circulated of isolated communities of men who were no longer men but hideous beasts who’d forfeited their humanity for terrible profits. Perversions lurked behind the doors of even the most respectable families, and the rulers of the world were revealed as utterly bankrupt of conscience.
At age eighteen, Coleman joined the military. Five years later, he volunteered to lead six others on a fearful journey further into the depths of the cosmos than any other person had ever traveled.
In his last earthbound days, his grandfather bid him farewell. The old man spoke of times past when smoke and blackness did not fill the skies, when men still cherished the idea of living in peace because they fought only among each other. He recalled arriving in his adopted country, his soul swelling with pride and determination to build a new life. Many of Grandfather Chang’s generation surrendered their sanity in the face of the changed world. “Bleak” and “hopeless,” they called it, an “abomination of life,” but to Coleman, who’d never known it otherwise, it was only the world. He marveled at the confidence in his progenitor’s voice, speaking of subjects that caused others to tremble with emotion.
“You’re doing a noble thing, Coleman. It’s a fitting way to define yourself,” said the elder Chang. “But the universe has its plan for us, and the power of men—whatever role we are meant to play—may be insufficient to alter it. Fate will make us its agents, willing or not.”
Coleman wished his grandfather could’ve lived long enough to greet him when he returned.
The Marathon had lifted off before dawn on a hot summer morning. The resources of the entire nation supported the vessel’s construction. The seven-person crew underwent two months of the most intense training Coleman ever experienced. Although they’d spend most of the trip unconscious, they could leave no margin for error during their active period. Each crew member fulfilled a vital function, and they would get no second chances. Given more time, the scientists might have perfected the suspension tubes in which the crew would sleep, but time was an empty well. The crew left, knowing no test subject had ever survived a second stint in suspension. One way only, no return.
Coleman thought of the feverish passion that had burned in President Aldrich’s eyes, the glow of physical energy and iron will that had surrounded that barrel-chested man when he spoke, as though secrets within him burst to break free. Three nights before departure, he brought Coleman and the crew by helicopter from their training base in Virginia to an isolated valley in the mountains of Pennsylvania. There, Aldrich transported them deep beneath the surface through the labyrinthine tunnels of an abandoned mine until they entered an underground complex, where he gathered them into an observation room overlooking a darkened chamber.
Lights flared to life. Coleman and the others flinched in disgust from the vast, fetid mass that churned below them. It moved like a single-minded beast, but its body writhed like a bundle of thick worms fused together at the tails. A strand of the thing smacked upward and caressed the heavy window, smearing a sticky trail of smoking slime on the glass. The sight sent cold dread flowing through Coleman. He had faced horrors in the line of duty, mutations and feral killers, demonic creatures and foul, pathetic cannibals, but none so fundamentally repulsive as this.
Aldrich couldn’t identify the thing or say where it had come from, or even if it possessed intelligence. A recovery team had seized it from a Navy destroyer found adrift in the Indian Ocean. Fifty-three men died to transport it in an empty oil tanker and bring it inland. Aldrich revealed it to Coleman and the others to prepare them. “It’s only right,” he said, “that you who are about to give your lives should know firsthand what we’re fighting. Life exists out where you’re going and in other dimensions where man should never venture. There are, well, dormant entities present on Earth, even now, and they see humanity the same way we see vermin. Or maybe insects. Or microbes, for all we know. They’re stirring. We think they mean to reclaim our world where they once ruled as masters.”
Aldrich led them through the complex to other rooms where scientists studied alien metals in laboratories that stank like graves, where learned men ruminated over the enigma of ancient works penned on paper and skins now desiccated and fragile, where generals plotted their resistance. These men pried at the locks on the occult knowledge that would guide them as they schemed for the freedom of mankind on Earth. Coleman’s team would take the first steps toward securing freedom for humanity in the universe. Their investigation would determine the truth of disparate ancient writings that heralded a benighted body beyond the ninth planet as home to otherworldly beings. And so they had done.
Coleman assembled a mental picture of the icy, inexplicable mass they had encountered, the horrifying structures that dotted its surface, the slowly spinning black forms that covered miles of ground, and the tiny, wriggling figures that flitted through the air. Sickly-colored gasses filled its atmosphere, shot through by bolts of carmine lightning. Jets of emerald flame flared from great crevasses in the planetary crust. A ring of shining, black bodies, like demonic idols carved from obsidian, orbited the equator, the sleeping guardians of a veiled world. Most of the crew viewed the high-resolution camera images of the surface. Coleman learned all he cared to know about the visions of Hell they’d dredged up from the expressions on the faces of people he knew as fearless. He cared only about completing the mission.
A flutterby chirped, stirring him from his nightmarish ruminations.
In the blackness ahead loomed a shining craft Coleman identified as a starship, though he’d never seen its like before. It blotted out the heavens. Coleman’s fingertips hammered at the course controls, but his ship remained locked on its heading.
The radio crackled with a familiar voice. “This is President Aldrich to the Marathon. Do you read me?”
The words, the voice, stunned Coleman. His heart brimmed with feeling. Aldrich repeated his greeting twice more before Coleman mustered an answer.
“This is Marathon. Captain Coleman Chang here,” he said.
“Coleman!” the president said. “My God, you’re alive! Incredible. It’s good to hear your voice, captain. What’s your status?”
“Ship status, fine. All systems intact,” Coleman said. “Crew status is… six members code blue.”
“I’m sorry, son,” Aldrich said. “But welcome home. We’ve taken over your craft by remote now. We’ll guide her in. You relax. We’ll have you up here in no time. You’ve done more than we could ever have hoped for, soldier.”
What could have happened in fifteen years to place this ship here to meet him halfway between the Earth and the Moon? The Marathon embodied the peak of human technology when he left. How could his people have constructed such a vast machine in so short a time? Why did President Aldrich still hold office after so many years?
A dark portal blistered open on the hull of the massive starship. Coleman’s craft floated into it, into dim lights and the glint of steel. The power of the immense thing thrummed all around him, then his ship emerged into the sterile glare of a hangar. He shaded his still-sensitive eyes and braced himself as the Marathon lowered to a soft touchdown. Coleman struggled for his bearings. Metal clanged as a tube connected to the craft’s dorsal hatch. Minutes later, it creaked open. Two men appeared, garbed in tight-fitting environment suits. They helped Coleman from the cockpit.
He spent three hours in a small medical facility. Doctors dissected his flutterby and processed the data within. They conducted countless tests, took a dozen readings, drew blood and other fluids, flashed lights in his eyes, and poked, probed, and injected him. Finally, the physician cracked the seal on his mask, removed his headpiece, and with a smile, pronounced Coleman healthy.
“We’re not sure why you survived your second suspension, captain, but you’re no worse for the wear,” the doctor said. “Guess you got lucky. That old tech is unpredictable. Occasionally, it outperformed expectations. Of course, we’ve got all those bugs worked out these days. Freeze you and defrost you a hundred times, and you’d never feel a thing.”
The doctor left, and Coleman sat alone for a while in the cold med chamber and thought of his lost companions. For him, only a day had passed since they had said goodbye.
Before long, a trio of soldiers escorted him through cramped corridors to a compact and austere room, where he sat on a plastic bench affixed to the floor. A garish piece of abstract art hung framed on the opposite wall. Coleman’s eyes strained to make sense of the image. Then he realized it wasn’t art at all but a map of the world. Here and there, he distinguished the shape of a familiar coastline or the outline of an inland body of water. But much had changed. He pictured the old world laid over this new configuration, and his head ached. He looked away, grateful for the distraction when a door swept back, and President Aldrich entered.
“I have no words to express how good it is to see you again, captain,” Aldrich said. He took Coleman in a rough embrace and patted his back. “Many people want to speak to you, but I ordered them off. I want you to myself for now.”
Aldrich had grown gaunt and frail. His hair had thinned and fallen out. A jagged scar disfigured his left cheek. His wide blue eyes, once crackling with life, were now stark and rheumy, and his hands trembled.
“I’m terribly sorry about your crew. If we’d had then the technology we have now… well, we’re already analyzing the data your team retrieved. Excellent work, captain. Exactly one-hundred percent what we sent you out there to do. Of course, it’s nothing we don’t already know now. We’ve learned a great deal since you’ve been gone. But it’s confirming the less definitive things Doctor Abgrund has theorized, and precise intelligence is key to a successful campaign.”
“Mr. President, what campaign? Who’s Doctor Abgrund?” Coleman asked.
Aldrich nodded. “Yes, I’m sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself. Don’t wish to jar you. It’s one of the reasons I made radio contact myself. Familiar voice. But we know so much more about the Old Ones now than we did when you left.”
“The Old Ones?” Coleman asked, but Aldrich didn’t seem to hear him.
“There aren’t many people left on Earth, now—maybe a million per continent, counting those trapped in the Antarctic deserts. We kept a lid on things as long as possible. I mean, what kind of cover story can you devise when a sinkhole swallows Berlin and spews forth a host of demons? Civilization broke down. More of the things appeared. You remember the one I showed you? Some like that. Many much worse. North America hung on the longest, but then the sunken city rose, and no one could question the prophecies any longer. That’s when Doctor Abgrund finally reached us and explained the massive tactical blunder we’d made so many years ago. We thought Kavage Kash and his Black Armies were the Crawling Chaos described by the ancient texts, the avatar destined to herald the apocalypse. But the Black Armies never meant to conquer the world. Abgrund had given them the weapons and technology to save it. We only weakened ourselves when we destroyed them. How many lives lost for our ignorance? Abgrund knows the Old Ones better than any of us. Once he served their cult during his youth in Egypt and Sudan, but when he realized the extent of their evil, he turned on them. His unique knowledge has been vital to implementing my contingency plans.”
Aldrich rose and stood enrapt before the map of the world.
“I see the questions in your eyes, captain, the worry and the fear, the uncertainty. I can imagine how disorienting it is to jump fifteen years into the future.
“When I was a child, my father told me a story on his deathbed. He’d exhausted his life in the pursuit of perverse pleasures and forbidden delicacies, wasting his body as he spent his soul. How many awful secrets he took to the grave, I couldn’t say, nor do I care to know. But with his final breaths, he whispered in my ear a message of terror—not of his own death—but of the doom awaiting all men. With those words, he redeemed himself. Through me, he saved humanity. He confided in me the location of a cache of books and materials he’d hidden and made me swear to take measures to protect myself against what I’d find expressed within them. The books were… difficult to understand… but I made out enough to realize I was meant to serve a greater purpose. I would save us all from the Old Ones who’d destroy our way of life and enslave us. My sole purpose became preparing for the coming battle. I acted in secret at first. Who’d believe such things until they were before their very eyes? I needed power enough to destroy them, and so I dedicated my life to obtaining it. Yes, I underestimated them in the past, but now I have all the force I need at my disposal.”
“Sir?” Coleman said.
“I’d planned the ships since the first day I took office. This one. A hundred others like it. The technology didn’t exist, but only the concept that mattered then. Abgrund provided the missing pieces of the technical puzzle. He perfected our suspension tubes and designed our engines. It was deemed vital to our success that I remain president until the crisis passed. When the sunken city emerged, we gathered all those we could onto the ships and ordered the strike. It lasted three days. We fired fifteen hundred missiles. We wiped their worshippers—those dirty, subhuman traitors—off the face of the Earth. We buried the pits from which they rose. We scattered their numbers and slew their minions. It wasn’t enough. In the end, the sleeping city stood undamaged. It sank, again, beneath the waves after unleashing a psychic blast that left a billion mindless shells wandering our destroyed cities.”
Aldrich rubbed his eyes as though very tired and chilled to the bone.
“Then I understood what we needed to do,” he whispered.
“What, sir?” Coleman’s voice quivered. The meaningless deaths of his friends paled before the anguish he felt hearing of his world brought to the brink of extinction, thinking of the grotesquely warped map, wondering who and what remained.
“You see, captain, the stars were in the wrong configuration. Doctor Abgrund erred in his calculations. He believed the time was right for such a massive strike, that we should have been able to destroy the city when it surfaced and thus eliminate the heart of the Old Ones’ foothold on Earth. It appeared for only a short time, not long enough for its prisoner to fully rouse itself. Its protections remained intact. But when it sank again, it gave us the respite we needed. We don’t know how long we have, but we have our plan settled. Abgrund has translated the ancient texts fully now, and we know that the stars must be in the proper alignment for the Old Ones to return. We know which stars are required.”
Aldrich took Coleman’s arm and helped him up from his seat.
“Within this vessel are hundreds of thousands of men and women locked in suspension tubes, and in fifty other ships, the same. Our journey will be long. Many will die. So, we have reinforcements, endless and waiting to be called upon, prepared to assert the will of mankind against the stars themselves. They are our future.”
A cold light gleamed through the president’s face. The idea of his race entombed in living death numbed Coleman. Aldrich gripped the captain’s arm tighter and led him into an adjoining auditorium. Coleman experienced apprehension a thousand times worse than when Aldrich had long ago shown him the terrible beast. A wall-length portal afforded a view of Earth, but not the planet Coleman remembered. Thick black smoke and pulsing orange flame replaced its majestic blues and greens, and the ashy clouds roiled in tumultuous, lightning-seared swirls.
“We devastated the Earth to save it, Coleman,” Aldrich said. “I won’t let those countless deaths go unanswered. We must make sure mankind never falls prey to the Old Ones. This ship and its companions are capable of traveling beyond our solar system. Doctor Abgrund has led us light years beyond where we were when we built your little spacecraft.”
Coleman followed the president down an aisle between the rows of plastic seats that filled the room, each one occupied by a man or woman, their bodies as worn and deteriorated as their leader’s, a touch of madness in all of their eyes. They gazed at Coleman’s clear expression, unblemished skin, and powerful body with a dangerous hunger.
On the dais before the viewport stood a tall man in a black uniform with hands the color of ash. A smooth, featureless, silver mask hid his face. Through its slits, his eyes flickered like sulfurous coals. They burned through Coleman. The effect dizzied him as though an invisible force reached out from the man to send Coleman’s thoughts aflutter like a child running through a flock of feeding pigeons. Coleman averted his eyes, but his legs wavered.
“Captain Chang, please meet Doctor Abgrund,” Aldrich said. “Together, he and I have become the architects of our survival and the champions of our freedom. Behold our works.”
The starship rolled, and the fleet drifted into view—ten, thirty, fifty, and more ships like the one on which Coleman stood, hanging in the endless night. Mounted along their flanks hung innumerable steel spears like the weapons of a giant-killer, an arsenal of missiles with the power to turn space itself to embers. The ships dipped and swayed, a school of mechanical fish, orienting themselves for a long migration. Between them, as they shifted, Coleman glimpsed the ruined shell of the world he’d once called home.
“We’ll make sure the stars can never be right,” Aldrich said. “We’ll destroy them.”
The auditorium exploded with applause. Coleman’s mind drained to emptiness in an instant. Through the darkness came only the simmering laughter of the man in the silver mask, a dissonant, vaguely musical whistling like the pressure of eternity forced through a narrow pipe that filled the void within him—and then he heard his own voice join in cheering on Aldrich’s mission.