Future Lovecraft

THE DAMNABLE ASTEROID By Leigh Kimmel

I HAVE ONLY a little time. I must get this warning out for all mining outposts throughout the Asteroid Belt.

Two weeks ago, Urtukansk acquired a companion. From the moment the smaller asteroid became enmeshed in Urtukansk’s gravity well, it aroused our profound distaste. With each passing day, we found it harder to maintain our work schedule. Crossing the asteroid’s surface from our habitat to the uranium pits and the breeder reactor meant seeing that scabrous lump rising and setting in its rapid orbit overhead.

We started finding excuses to stay inside. There is always more maintenance than a single pod of miners can keep up with and still make its production quota. Fix the balky valve in the ‘fresher, lay new circulator lines in the algae ponds, run tests on the electronics in the life-support monitors—all legitimate tasks, but also all ways to avoid making that trek across the surface and having to see that horrid thing sweep across the starlit sky.

But there is only so long the mind can avoid a matter, however unpleasant, that remains in close proximity. There was the issue of our unmet quota of refined plutonium to drive us forth to extract the radioactive ores and prepare them for the breeder reactor. But that foul body orbiting overhead exerted its own pull upon our minds, relentless as gravity. Like an itch under a spacesuit, it grew more intense the harder we tried to ignore it.

Alyosha was the first to investigate what we all had agreed to ignore. When I confronted him, he responded that he had done nothing more than the gravimetric and spectroscopic observations that are standard whenever a body of substantial mass approaches an occupied asteroid. However, his demeanor—a direct challenge to my authority as pod leader—was at such marked variance with his usual disposition that I felt no inclination to examine his data. Instead I bawled him out, a punishment he took with a display of resentment atypical of his character.

Three days later, we received a hail from an approaching spacecraft. It belonged to Sally Nguyen, an independent sutler we’d done business with before.

I don’t know why I didn’t follow my initial urge to order her to pass us by. At least I won’t have long to regret my decision to tell her to note our new satellite when laying in her approach.

We welcomed her with the traditional bread and salt. I was as happy as my pod-brothers to see a new face. Although we could’ve traded and sent her on her way, none of us wanted to lose the opportunity to socialise.

Over vodka, we talked and, as it loosened our tongues, the conversation turned to our unwelcome companion. Sally had done her own analysis of the satellite asteroid during her approach and believed its peculiarities indicated the presence of valuable materials. However, by her people’s law, it became our property when our asteroid’s gravity captured it and she could not explore it, except as our business partner.

The vodka had clouded our judgement, as well, for we agreed without a second thought. We spent the next two hours planning our venture before turning in to sleep off our drunk.

The next day, we ate a hasty breakfast before suiting up and piling into Sally’s ship. Our asteroid’s escape velocity is so low that a layer of padding on an empty cargo hold sufficed for acceleration couches. It actually took longer to lay in the course and get our launch window than to make the trip, since the satellite asteroid’s orbit fluctuated in response to Urtukansk’s local mass variations.

As we landed, and I got a better view of that leprous-yellow surface, I regretted the previous day’s bravado. But I squelched the urge to bail. I was not going to look weak in front of my pod-brothers, much less an outsider. So, I put on my brave face and led the way.

Stepping onto the asteroid, I noted the crumbly texture of the surface stratum. It resembled rock exposed to high levels of radiant energy, but with a tendency to clump together, which suggested a strong static charge. However, electrostatic measurements proved negative, leaving us to speculate what unknown force might produce such an effect.

When we reached a safe distance from the spacecraft, we set to work digging that yellow matter that grew spongier the deeper our hole became. All my misgivings returned in force, and I was just ready to call everything off, when the robot excavator teetered, then tumbled through an unseen opening.

Alyosha scrambled down the slope, sending dust spraying in all directions. As he approached the place where the digger had disappeared, his whole body went limp. In the tiny asteroid’s gravity, his fall looked more like a bit of paper fluttering to rest, but I knew something had gone very wrong.

So had Volodya. He and Alyosha were always close, although not enough to unbalance our pod’s brother-bond.

Before I could caution him, Volodya scrambled down the slope. He got within a meter or two of Alyosha before he, too, went limp and fell.

Even as I struggled to make sense of what I’d seen, Sally brought a tool from her ship—an extensible pole with a grip-claw at the end. Its internal structure kept it rigid, even when fully extended and, with our help, she pulled both our stricken brothers back to the edge of the pit. I knew the worst when I saw the darkened life-support telltales on their helmets, but my heart could not yet encompass it.

Sally’s shipboard autodoc was smaller than our habitat’s medlab but more sophisticated. Still, it could offer no aid, only information—neither Alyosha nor Volodya had died from life-support failure. Instead, the cellular mechanisms of their bodies had shut down in the same moment as the electronics of their spacesuits.

At that point, I knew we had no business continuing to explore. “Let’s get off this rock and leave it to somebody with the equipment….”

Before I could h, the deck set to vibrating. All of us hurried to the nearest viewport.

The scabrous surface of that damnable asteroid bulged upward, as if a balloon were expanding just beneath it. Cracks formed at the highest point and spread across the bulge. Dust and debris rose, flung out with such force that they struck the spaceship’s hull, hard enough to make it ring like a bell.

I shouted for Sally to get us out of there, even as the whole ship lurched. In so little gravity, we went tumbling in all directions and, by the time we found handholds, even that gravity had gone. The violence of the eruption had thrown us back into space and freefall.

But only for a moment before the engines fired, this time a jolt strong enough to make me wish for proper acceleration couches. Improperly restrained objects pelted us as they fell.

Weightlessness returned and we pulled ourselves to the viewport. It took some seconds that stretched to subjective eternity for the relative motion of the three bodies in our micro-system to bring the damnable asteroid into view.

Our makeshift mine had become a maelstrom of dust, so thick it obscured the landforms around it. From within came a pallid glow reminiscent of certain growths that invade a habitat’s waste-reclamation system. It aroused a profound sense of revulsion, which I forced down in my determination to see what had just killed two of my pod-brothers.

Even now, I cannot describe the shape which emerged from that dust cloud. I had the impression of a great bulk, yet of a putty-like flexibility possible only in a microgravity environment. From it extended translucent surfaces of improbable size and thinness, fluttering as if on some cosmic aether from those tales that predate even the semi-legendary First Age of Space.

A touch on my shoulder pulled me free of that thing’s grip on my mind. I turned to find Sally waiting just behind the window.

“I’ve put the ship onto a parabolic trajectory that should buy us enough time for the computer to work out a solution for an inhabited asteroid.”

My mind was still befuddled enough that it took a moment to understand. Asteroid miners don’t work with orbital mechanics on a regular basis, so we don’t think about how individual asteroids’ orbits around the Sun make for constantly changing positions in relation to one another. The haste of our escape would have made matters worse, because the computer would first have to derive our new location.

On the other hand, our course had removed the damnable asteroid and its hideous inhabitant from our line of sight. One by one, my pod-brothers came out of the trance that monster had put them under.

Before I could answer their questions, an alarm began to whoop. Sally punched a button on a nearby terminal. As she read the data it displayed, her expression hardened.

“There’s a problem with the computer. It can’t resolve a course anywhere and it’s starting to degrade performance on other systems.”

I asked her what other options we had.

“No good ones. I can aim for an asteroid that’s transmitting, and hope I’ve got our trajectory right and don’t send us on a slow orbit to nowhere. Or I can return to Urtukansk on visual and we can try to fight—”

More alarms went off. Life-support telltales went yellow and red. We re-sealed our spacesuits.

“I think that decision’s been made for us.” I gestured for my pod-brothers to brace for the necessary manoeuvers.

Throughout the series of thruster firings, I waited for disaster. When we landed and gravity resumed its pull, it took a moment to believe we had returned safely to Asteroid Urtukansk.

Or not-so-safely, I realized, as we exited Sally’s spaceship, just in time for Urtukansk’s companion to rise over a horizon all-too-close. Except it was no longer a solid mass but a cloud of fragments that continued in the same orbit as their parent body. Within it rippled the eye-twisting form of the monster that had killed two of my pod-brothers.

A panicky voice came onto the suit-radio circuit. “It’s coming after us!”

Before I could calm my pod-brother, Sally came on. “I’m taking the ship back up and trying to distract that thing long enough for you guys to blow your breeder reactor.”

There was no time to argue the wisdom of that plan. At least the task of running across an asteroid’s surface, without launching ourselves into orbit, kept our attention on the ground.

We were within a dozen meters of the reactor complex when Mirosha shrieked, “It’s got her!”

Behind us, a light flashed, casting our shadows in sharp relief on the rocks. I squelched the urge to turn and see what had happened. Sally had bought our chance and we mustn’t waste it.

Only at the airlock for the reactor complex did I pause. I pushed three of our surviving pod-brothers safely in, but even as I reached for poor, lagging Mirosha, the writhing mass overhead extended a tentacle that wrapped like a sinuous rope around his waist and lifted his feet right off the surface.

His shrieks of terror over the suit-radio circuit made my ears hurt, but there was nothing I could do for him. I shut the airlock behind me and hit the controls to cycle us in. When the screaming stopped, we knew Mirosha had met the same fate as Alyosha and Volodya.

Once inside, we hurried to disable the safety systems. All the time, we could hear that thing clawing overhead, trying to break in.

We had just shut down the coolant pumps when the roof gave way over the reactor. Atmosphere vented into space and, with it, everything not fastened down. I hit the buttons to withdraw all the control rods from the reactor.

The explosion threw me against the wall so hard I thought sure it would break the faceplate of my helmet. A flash of light filled the area and in that moment, I saw the hideous thing torn apart, reduced to a dust of ash so fine even photons would scatter it to the farthest reaches of the solar system.

Although the control room shielding did protect me, I still took a lethal dose of radiation. It just bought me enough time to transmit this account before my body fails altogether.

Now you must see that my warning gets to every mining outpost in the Asteroid Belt. There are things undreamed-of by our science, that can lie encysted for so many millions of years that the accretion of space dust upon them can form an asteroid around them. And when disturbed, can reawaken to a life inimical to our very existence—

[Choking sounds, followed by an open carrier for 15 minutes]