Things In The Darkness

Instead of going back to the passenger deck, Buddy wound his way down the dim dark dusty corridors and stairs back outside to the aft deck. There, more than one crooked sailor congregated by the starboard side railing. In the thick fog they looked like a flock of some long dead giant avians. Buddy heard them whispering amongst each other as he waltzed up behind them without any of them noticing. He was beginning to like his new feet.

“S’pose it’s Leviathan?” one of the gruff men said.

“Nay, fool, that beast resides in the Atlantic, near Atlantis. That thar looks like an island,” a woman without eyes said. She did have a rather large ocular lens on her forehead, however.

“Atlantis ain’t in the Atlantic! And there ain’t no islands in these waters...” the man said, trailing off as all the sailors realized what it was they were looking at.

Buddy, however, with his arms folded and with an eyebrow raised, looked out at the giant shadowy mass off in the distance, without a clue in the world of what it could be. “So, what is it?” he asked with genuine curiosity.

The row of men and women jumped and spun to see the tall, lanky bounty hunter standing behind them.

“Christ on a cross don’t ye have any manners you gun-toting scum-wrangler!” another of the sailors, this one with lapel pins marking him as boatswain, cursed.

“Well, I do apologize my good boatswain. The name’s Limbo, Buddy Limbo, nice to meet you,” he said and offered a seven fingered hand.

The boatswain took a step closer. He was a squat man with a flat face. His scalp was a mishmash of metal plating, and though his arms and legs, and most likely everything under his long coat, were cybernetics, the skin of his face, apart from the nose, was still very human, as so often was the case. His nose had evidently been broken so many times it had been swapped out for a crude metal plate with two holes. His jaw was wide and flat like an anvil, and a pair of deep set prosthetic eyes glowed a ghostly green from under a heavy hairless brow.

He grabbed Buddy’s proffered hand with a claw more akin to an industrial vice, giving it a snappy tug in greeting. “The name’s Stick. And to answer yer question, that there most likely is what we in the business call a False Harbor. If our captain is as good as the See says, he’ll steer clear soon enough and we’ll be on our merry way.”

“The hells is a False Harbor?” Buddy asked, “some sort of mercenary thing or?”

“Nay, tis—” the boatswain snapped around, “shut yer traps you useless louts and get back to work!” he roared, scattering the lingering sailors back to their respective jobs. “Apologies. Can't stand lollygagging. Anyways, False Harbors’re far worse than mercenary outposts. Thems, though an uncommon sight, are well known by us seafolk, and nobody is foolish enough to dock there no matter what its surface looks like.”

“Again, I’ll have to ask for elaboration,” Buddy said, “what are they?”

“Tsk, you land crabs call em ghost islands and the like. To be honest I’m blessedly ignorant that I’ve not a clue what they really are. Never been on a stupid enough crew that had the spheres to dock on one. But there’re stories. A gunman I once worked with said he looked at one through his gunsights, good scope he had, and he swears to this day that there were tropical trees and other organics there. Hell, said he saw weird spindly animalia jump around in the canopies.”

“Dang. Do you believe him?”

At this the boatswain roared in laughter that sounded like a misfiring diesel engine. “Boy, I’ve been around for the better part of a century, and I ain’t ever come across no organics apart from algae and sea moss. There are the occasional Grower cargoes whenever a deal is struck, but thems are few and far between, specially now that the eastern shores of the Gulf are all but a warzone. Besides, whenever one of those things appears out of the blue, it’s with a fog like this, and there ain’t no eye that can pierce this fog.”

Buddy raised an eyebrow. “But fog is just dense water vapor. It should be easy enough to filter visual spectrums and play around with ray refraction mitigation to see through it."

The boatswain grinned wide. His teeth were polished obsidian. “Take a gander then, eh?”

Buddy turned his lambent eyes toward the shadowy blob in the distance, now receding as the ship had altered course and was giving it a wide berth. He did just as he’d said, but upon realizing that it wasn’t enough, kept experimenting, flicking between optical settings and rendering profiles. He even cycled through base mono-colors, through the entire known chromatic spectrum. He went through ultraviolet, infrared, contrast monochrome, everything his eyes could do, which was a lot, and the only thing he saw each time was just a thick drape of coiling fog, and a fat shadow in the distance.

“Huh,” he said, returning to regular sight.

“Now, hope you ye’ve learnt yer lesson. Don’t think we sailors haven’t tried everything under the white sun, because we have. Those who were stupid enough to take skiffs and boats to see what they’re eyes couldn’t, ne’er came back. Best leave some things be, I say.”

“I can’t agree with you more. I ain’t looking for any more trouble than we’ve had so far. I just want to get to Roma Prima without a hassle.”

“Aye, as do we all. Well, I’ve wagged my chin too long. Best be off, there’s always someone slacking that needs a beating. Good day to you sir.”

With that the boatswain left, his footsteps clanking on the deck as he hobbled to a hatch and disappeared into the ship’s bowels. Buddy remained by the railing, looking out over the sea. He sat atop a bollard near the railing and felt the wind in his cable hair. He looked over the black wake of the ship, at the black spot now in the distance.

He looked around, then, hesitantly, he unholstered the atomizer. He held it in his lap and looked at its spiraling cylindrical barrel. The porcelain surface began to sweat as the strange fog licked its smooth surfaces.

“Can you hear me?” Buddy asked the gun, and though he felt a fool for doing so, he expected a response.

When none came, he sighed. “Look, I know you’re at least semi-sentient, I heard you whisper back at the outpost. I feel your moods. Hells, each time I’ve used you, each time you’ve killed something, I feel how happy you are, even though I don’t really like seeing the way you do it.”

Again, no response. Perhaps she was asleep. Or perhaps she was angry at Buddy for not killing the assassin. Whatever the case, Buddy gave up for now. He holstered the weird weapon and continued his solitary vigil over the black waters of the Mediterranean Gulf. He’d had a little scare when the ship had stopped, but now it seemed that there would be no further excitement during the remaining two days of the voyage, thank God.

Too bad he was wrong.

---

Outpost Occultatur Sabulo had little to no value to the See. A small walled circle with a central tower to guard the desolate wastes around the town, it resided in a valley surrounded by eroded mesas that looked like the massive teeth of some titanic beast. The only reason it existed was because there had once been, deep beneath the outpost, a mine rich with nickel and cobalt; resources integral for the production and maintenance of cybernetics, no matter how rare the need for upkeep was for average folk.

But the mine had long since dried up; the people long since left apart from a skeleton garrison, those who had no prospects or couldn’t afford to leave, and some old rust-joints that had a sentimental bond with the place. The birth rate was two a year, and though the population was only a hundred, people kept to themselves. They didn’t want to talk to the other ghosts of the dying town. They didn’t want to reminisce of the old days when the mine had been a crucial part of the See’s operations, when more than one battle had been fought in the nearby territories. Legends said that even Leviathan walked by on its rampage once upon a time.

All those stories did was remind them of a waned pride, one that could never be revived. One that only existed in the memory of the old, never to be experienced by the young, who in time left the outpost like proverbial avians from their nests.

Alia was one of these young avians, ready to fly out and experience the world. She’d grown to be a tall and shapely young adult, despite the buffeting rad winds, and she was apart from the rest of the townsfolk in that she had hope. She didn’t walk crooked, downcast and crestfallen, but with her chest held high, glassaic prosthetic eyes gleaming. She’d won the marvelous pair in a card game when she’d been sixteen and had worn them ever since.

She’d done odd jobs for the garrison for years until she had finally earned enough credits to take the next fuel provision ship to one of the coastal outposts and make her way to the cities around the Mediterranean Gulf. She’d finally be free from this dusty old place. She’d finally get to experience being a woman. The men around town were either ancient perverts or younglings yet without their first replacements, and though some were good company, she was saving herself for someone more appropriate.

Her ride left tomorrow midday, so tonight, for the last time, she’d decided to get hammered and wag her chin with the ancients. So hammered in fact that her software glitched at times, sending her optical feed misfiring signals that in all honesty made for a pretty nice show. She outlasted the elderly, and even some of the recently of age, and when it was only her and the barkeep, she decided it was best if she got at least a couple hours of hibernation before her long trip up north.

Her hab-cube was just about a hundred meters up the road from the bar, but she decided to relieve her waste fluids in an alley instead of holding it all in. That choice would come to cost her dearly.

She squatted in the shadows and let go, giggling at the thought of being seen. Then, when things started flowing, she gave a soft sigh of relief. When she was done, about to get up and pull her trousers back on, she heard a low snarl come from deeper in the cramped alley.

Alia stiffened, but, be it due to habituation to an overly safe environment or the alcohol, she wasn’t as scared as she should’ve been.

“Who’ss thar?” she slurred, cranking up her auditory pick-up with some difficulty. “Amar, that you?”

She managed to finally amp her receivers, just in time to hear a low, overlapping voice whisper in the darkness. She caught what it said mid-sentence, but even though what she heard was limited, the malice dripping from the voice made her freeze.

It said, “… fine, you may have that one.”

In some way she couldn’t explain, she knew that it knew she had heard, and before she had time to try and escape, much less think of doing so, trousers still around her ankles, a massive pale form lunged from the darkness and dragged her kicking and screaming into the gloom.

Within a second of Alia disappearing into the shadows, her screaming stopped.

 

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