The spacecraft made a distinct hum that Dr. Noah Fischer could only describe as otherworldly. It was the sound of their repulsine engines, the two giant spinning electromagnetics that propelled the bell shaped craft forward through the vaccuum of space. The sound made Noah’s skin crawl. He did not want to be here, and how he’d come to be here was something of a tangled mess. He ran a hand through the equally tangled hair that crowned him and glanced towards the front of the ship as it whined forward.
At the helm, sat Jack Davenport, a former test pilot and ace, and next to him sat Roy Lancaster, his co-pilot and once wingman. Davenport was Commander of the crew. Salt and pepper hair, a square jaw and rock solid frame. He was everything you would expect from an ace fighter pilot, well mannered, decisive, fearless.
If Noah ever had a daughter, Davenport would be his hope for her. Unfortunately, he imagined that she’d probably pick Lancaster. He was younger, less put together, more arrogant. He had an easy swagger, a carefree attitude, and considered himself something of a player. The type to have a woman in every port… or at every airfield… at least that’s what Noah imagined.
The third and final member of the crew, the one who’d started this whole mess, sat across from him—Gail Keats. Black hair, green eyes, and a body made for entrapment.
One month earlier, she’d sat down in the back of Noah’s class. He’d been teaching a class on early Indo-Aryan linguistics at Dartmouth. She’d been dressed like every other college girl, and yet… he should have seen her coming.
Her sweaters had always been a bit too tight, and her skirts, they had a habit of riding a little high up her thigh, nothing too distasteful, but enough to make her long porcelain legs seem even longer. She was whip smart, confident, and feminine. She asked pointed questions, she paid attention, she gave small teasing compliments. She was like no one he’d ever met, much less a student, and definitely not like his wife.
Awkward since birth, it had taken Noah a week just to make eye contact, but once he did, she never dropped it. Several times she stayed after class to continue discussions on topics that most other girls couldn’t pretend to care about. These discussions soon became full study sessions, and then finally research sessions—late nights in the library, talking and giggling as she helped him work on his research.
He’d married a wonderful woman who valued all of the things about him that he did not, and she seemed quite happy being a bookish professor’s wife. To Noah, she was his world, but if she was the world, then Gail had quickly become his moon. For she was clever and funny, and doting without ever being sentimental. She made him feel wanted. Wanted in a way that Evalyn never really had. After half a semester, Gail had him wound so tight around her pale fingers that he could not think straight.
And so, almost inevitably, they’d found themselves next to each other one night. The library’s dim yellow lights and the stale smelling stacks of books providing the sort of romantic ambience that only a bookish professor could ever fantasize about.
They’d been talking about something, he couldn’t remember what now, but he’d removed his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. And when he’d re-opened his eyes, he’d found hers closer, cat-green emeralds, gently staring back. Her mouth had hung slightly open, pink and wet and wanting… and then they’d kissed.
Her hands had found the edge of his shirt and slipped underneath, fingernails blazing new paths into his skin, and then, as if it was suddenly his idea, the academic in him, the overthinker, the analyzer… they all let go… and the man took over. And he had her, he had right there on top of the table. And when they were done, though he would not know it for another three days, his life was to remain fundamentally changed.
She did not show up to his class the next day, nor the day after that, and he found himself worried sick about her. First for her well-being, and then gradually, over the fact that he’d perhaps done something to offend her. That he’d overstepped somehow. The overthinker was back.
And through all of this, his wife never suspected a thing, and for some reason this made him hate her. She was a fool for not seeing it, no matter that it was he who’d made her one.
Three days later a man had come to see him. He had knocked politely on Noah’s office door. He wore a dark gray suit, and carried a leather brief case. Bushy gray brows hung heavy over a pair of piercing blue eyes.
“Please come in,” Noah said, motioning towards a chair on the other side of his mahogany desk. “How can I help you?”
The man sat, resting the briefcase across his knees. “I work for the United States of America. My name is Mr. Wolff.” The man spoke with a heavy German accent.
“Ok,” Noah said, a bit surprised.
“Your recent paper… I read that. We read that. Interesting stuff.”
“Which one exactly?” Noah asked, “I’ve published several in the last year.”
“Before Silence: An Argument for Ancient Inhabitation and Interplanetary War in Our Solar System.” The man rattled the title off as if he’d come up with it.
Noah grimaced, having been somewhat scared that this was the one the man had wanted to talk about. As the title suggested, it was about as close to career suicide as a linguistics professor could get without just straight up advocating for therapeutic psychedelic use in the Saturday Evening Post.
“We want you to work for us,” the man continued. “We have a special project coming up. It will be about one month of training, and then the project itself will last a week at most.”
“I… don’t think I can,” Noah stammered the words out. “I have my job. My wife.”
“By working for us you can keep both,” the man said, smiling. It was a wolfish smile, and the first since the man had entered. “Look… you are one of the best and brightest linguists working today. You are fluent in Ancient Sumerian, or at least as fluent as one can be in the oldest and deadest language known to man. You’re one of the few professors more interested in doing actual work… less interested in publishing Marxist drivel about earth mothers and peaceful savages. How long can a man like you last in these institutions?”
“I’m sorry,” Noah said. “I just can’t uproot my life.”
“Unfortunately,” the man said, “we thought you’d say that.” Gently, he unbuckled the briefcase and peered inside.
Noah watched him.
The man withdrew a sheet of paper and slid it over to him. “Now, one more time. This is a non-disclosure agreement,” the man continued. “You’ll sign it. And you’ll report to Wright Patterson AFB next Monday. And you won’t like my next offer.”
“But what is the special project?” Noah asked.
“You don’t get to know that,” the man said. “It’s a matter of national security.”
“But what about my wife… We can’t just pick up and leave and go to Ohio.”
“Of course you can,” the man said. “You’ll simply tell her that the University and the Air Force have partnered on a project, and you’ve been recruited for the whole affair on account of your specific set of skills. We have made arrangements for her to stay with you. At this point, all that is needed from you is your signature.”
“I won’t do it,” Noah replied. “And I don’t really see how you can force me to.” He was starting to feel bullied and he was not at all accustomed to being thrust into adventures.
The man pursed his lips and dipped his head again. He re-opened the brief case and withdrew several photographs. They were large, glossy, color photographs printed on 8x11. He tossed them somewhat flippantly onto the desk.
They were obnoxiously large photographs of Noah’s night in the library. It was rather jarring to see oneself flash frozen in pornographic time. The nature of memories and shame make memory of trysts like that somewhat malleable, and eventually, forgettable. But now his sin was memorialized forever. Yet one more death knell for romance, Noah thought, or would think eventually. Just then, he had been too stunned to respond, his mind racing in a thousand different directions.
“You are going,” the man stated flatly. “Or you’ll be going under physical duress and without a wife to go with you and without a career in academia to come back to.”
Reluctantly, Noah picked up the pen and scribbled his signature.
“Gail will meet you at the gate in Wright Patterson to escort you on.”
“So she wasn’t a student,” Noah asked.
“You really think a student would fuck you like that?” the man asked.
The vulgarity with which the man had said it sent shivers down Noah’s spine.
“I don’t… know,” Noah stammered.
The man chuckled and Noah suddenly realized how dogs must feel when you rub their nose into their accidents.
“You keep those for posterity’s sake,” the man said with a wink, motioning to the pictures. “We made copies.” He rose after that, and then pausing at the door, said, “you’ll be receiving a packet in the mail with instructions regarding your move. In a year and a half you can have your life back. Until then, you’re ours. Make the most of it.”
Two days later America had landed on the moon. He’d soon found out, during his very own space training, that it had all been faked, shot on a sound stage in Laurel Canyon. A psyop conducted by NASA, the propaganda arm of the Air Force’s space program. But the lie wasn’t that America had gone to the moon, it was that America hadn’t already been on the moon.
No, the real space mission was kept nowhere near NASA. It was, as Noah had come to find out, kept at Wright Patterson AFB and was two centuries ahead of the rest of the world.
The high-pitched whine turned into a scream as Davenport throttled down. Somewhat counterintuitively, the X-Bell made more noise when it slowed down then it did while speeding up. And even more counterintuitively, none of this speed, or velocity was transmitted to the crew via motion. That was mostly because they weren’t flying in the normal sense. They were sliding through space. There was no gravity, no thrust, no lift, no drag to worry about because space itself was bent around them. The repulsine engines themselves were only really called engines because it was too conceptually tedious to come up with something else to call them.
“This is it,” Davenport said, punching buttons on the ship’s dashboard.
Through the porthole windows that lined either side of the ship, Noah watched as inky blackness swirled past, then suddenly parted in time with the ship’s screaming. Noah clapped hands over his ears but it didn’t help. The sound was vibrational. Exiting subspace was supposed to be uncomfortable, but Noah had not been prepared for just how grating. Then as if a great black veil had been snatched away, stars blinked in the distance, billions of them, then momentarily blotted out as they passed through the shadow of a massive stellar body.
“Switching to manual flight,” Davenport called out.
“Roger,” Lancaster answered him.
Gail stood and straightened her suit. She smiled at Noah. “You ready cowboy?”
He gave a slight nod. The truth was he still had no idea why he was even here.
“The landing zone is 3000 clicks away,” Lancaster said. “Putting in the coordinates now.”
Gail motioned for Noah to follow her. “I’ll help you suit up. Come on.”
He followed her down the stairs to the lower level, the landing level. A terrified heat rose in his chest.
“You ok?” she asked, putting a hand on his arm. “You know I won’t let anything happen to you, right?”
Noah shrugged, and pushed her hand away.
“Noah, you know it was real right?” Gail said.
“It’s over,” Noah said. “You got me where you want me, but that doesn’t mean I’ve got to wallow in it like a pig in shit.”
She’d spent the last month making passes at him. He didn’t know what else to call it. Alternating between seduction, apology, and distress. Something about it had felt like an act, inhuman on one level, animal like on another. She was still beautiful, but the love he’d once felt, or thought he’d felt, had soured as soon as he’d found out it was all a ruse. He’d even surprised himself a little bit, finding a hidden dignity that had never been put to the test before.
He didn’t know why she still tried though. Whether she was being pressured from higher up to keep him strung along… carrot and stick sort of thing. Some sort of fucked up tradecraft to make sure he stayed compliant. Or whether she’d really developed some sort of feelings. He couldn’t say. Maybe she was just one of those women that only wanted what she couldn’t have, and so his sudden principles made him something of a white whale. Of course women like that were never happy when they finally harpooned their white whale, and the emotional butchery that followed was doomed to be more violent and torrid than a Nantucket sleigh ride
He opened the locker that held his space suit. “When do I get to know why I’m here.”
“Now, I guess,” Gail said. “That paper you wrote… Before Silence: An Argument for Ancient Inhabitation…” She snapped her fingers trying to remember the rest.
“…and Interplanetary War in Our Solar System,” Noah finished it for her. It was a bit rambly, he thought.
“You argued that nearly every planet in our solar system was once inhabited. That an intergalactic war had occurred millennia ago, and Earth was the only one left inhabitable.”
“What about it?” Noah replied.
“You were right,” Gail said, moving towards one of the port holes. “Look out there.”
Noah moved to the window, and watched as a massive rocky body slid into view. It reminded him of an asteroid, or at least what he imagined one looked like, but it seemed a bit too big.
“That is Ceres,” Gail said.
“Were in the asteroid belt?” Noah asked.
“That used to be a planet,” Gail said.
“You’ve already been here,” Noah said suddenly, finally having enough information to start piecing together scenarios.
“What makes you think that?” Gail said coyly, her voice almost a purr.
He wondered how long she’d been waiting to tell him this. To let him know what it was all about.
“You wouldn’t have brought me unless you’d already found something.”
“Took you a while,” Gail said. “But yes, we’ve already been here. Several times actually, but not in the way you think.”
Noah ignored the implications of that, and asked the question he was driving at, “What then? What did you find?”
“Ruins,” Gail said.
Noah’s heart skipped a beat.
“Ruins from a previous civilization,” Gail said. “What appears to be an ancient temple.”
“But how do you know all this if you’ve never been here?”
Gail turned and took two steps towards the far wall. She slid a piece of paneling back to reveal a large television set. The lower deck served as both briefing room, loading dock, and locker room. She opened a drawer next, and pulled out a magnetic cassette tape, this she slid into the tape-player beneath the TV. She hit the power button and the TV crackled to life, analog lines cutting across the black and white picture… static… and then the video steadied.
Gail turned the volume up.
In the video, a woman leaned backwards in some sort of recliner. Her head was shaved, and electrodes were taped onto her head, dozens of them.
Next to the woman, sat Ludolph von Wolff. It was the same man that had recruited him.
“Wolff was once the head a top secret occult research group Hitler stood up towards the end of the war,” Gail narrated. “When the war ended, we granted him asylum in exchange for his knowledge.”
Noah leaned forward and squinted at the woman on the TV, he suddenly asked, “Is that you?”
“Yes, that’s me,” Gail said flatly.
“What are you doing?”
“Just watch,” she said.
He watched as Dr. Wolff set something on her outstretched tongue.
“What was that?” Noah asked.
“Serum 44,” Gail said, brushing her hair back, “what you know as LSD.”
On the screen, Dr. Wolff handed her what appeared to be a 3x5 card. Gail took it. Read it. And then handed it back. Then she closed her eyes.
“Are you ready?” Dr. Wolff asked.
“I am,” Gail replied.
“Tell me what you see?”
“I see a mountain. It towers above everything else. I’m in a low point in the land… in a crater of some sort. Lots of ice. The dirt is gray.”
“Try moving,” Dr. Wolff directed. “Can you walk?”
“I think so,” Gail replied.
“Very good,” Dr. Wolff said. “See if you can do a 360 degree turn and tell me if you see anything unique.”
A long moment of silence followed, then Gail replied, “I see a cave… well not quite a cave. It’s an entrance of some sort. Like an underground bunker.”
“Can you get closer?”
“Yes,” Gail said. “I’m moving now.”
“Tell me when you’re there,” Dr. Wolff said.
“I’m going in,” Gail said. “It’s black. I can’t see anything. I need a flashlight.”
Noah watched as Dr. Wolff bent down and retrieved a flashlight from a small basket on the floor next to him. He set it in the incapacitated Gail’s hand. Her hand closed around it.
“How though?” Noah asked.
“It’s magic,” Gail said, snidely, then added, “It’s not of course. It involves quantum entanglement. But it might as well be.”
The tape continued.
“A long hall,” Gail said. “There is writing on the walls. I can’t make it out, but it looks ancient. Like some sort of cuneiform.”
“Where are you now?” Dr. Wolff asked.
“There is a door of some sort. Like a vault door. There’s a panel, with more of the writing. It could be instructions.”
“Can you open it?”
“No,” Gail replied. “It’s locked somehow, but I feel confident that if I could translate the words I’d know how to.”
“Can you transambulate?” Dr. Wolff asked.
“I can try,” she said. A long moment of silence followed, “Something is blocking me.”
“That’s ok,” Dr. Wolff coaxed.
Suddenly Gail sat straight up in the recliner and screamed. Then she collapsed backwards. Dr. Wolff stood over her, he was trying to shake her awake.
“She’s unresponsive,” Dr. Wolff shouted.
Gail cut the tape there. “Anyways, you get the idea.”
“What happened there… at the end?” Noah asked. A white hot chill swept his body. “Were you alright?”
“Never better,” Gail said, and winked. “Now suit up, we should be landing any minute.”
They exited the X-Bell in the shadow of Ahuna Mons. It was the largest mountain on the tiny dwarf planet. Shiny silver streaks ran up and down it’s sides, almost flickering as the light from the sun hit it.
“It’s cryovolcanic,” Gail said, her voice sounding a bit tinny over the spacesuit’s communication system.
“What does that even mean?” Noah said somewhat irritably.
“It erupts gases,” Gail said. “Water, ammonia, hydrocarbons. Those silver streaks are likely salt and ice deposits.”
With that, she bounded forward in a slow arcing jump that deposited her several meters ahead. Noah followed while Davenport and Lancaster brought along the rear, each of them carrying one end of a large tool tote. On earth it would weigh 500 lbs. but on Ceres the tub felt like 15 lbs. or so.
The entrance to the bunker was a black pit on the edge of the crater.
“Does it look the same?” Noah asked, thinking back to the video. He found it uncanny how close it looked to the description she’d given.
Again the white hot chill swept his body as they neared the black maw of an entrance. It was the kind of chill one felt when someone suggested playing with a Ouija board or recommended having their fortunes read. That sense that certain things were left undone and better left undisturbed.
Noah clicked the headlamp built into the side of his helmet. It was clear now that the cave was not a cave, but some sort of structure. Thick angular slabs of rock or concrete framed the dark entrance, stairs leading downward into the spider black heart of the dwarf planet.
They waited for Davenport and Lancaster to catch up, watching as they awkwardly wrangled the chest of tools through low gravity.
“You said you thought this was a temple of some sort earlier,” Noah said. “What do you expect to find?”
“We’re looking for our origins,” Gail said. “The beginning of humanity. The truth about God. You name it.”
“I wasn’t aware the Air Force was so concerned with archeology,” Noah said.
“It’s an exploratory mission,” Gail said, “not everything has to be about war.”
Davenport and Lancaster came flying in hard and almost sent the tools tumbling down the staircase. “Overshot that one a bit,” Davenport said, straightening.
“Come on,” Gail said, leading off.
Noah followed, ice and dust crunching underfoot.
They descended for what seemed like an eternity. The staircase curving down in wide circles. The smooth rock walls guiding them downwards via corkscrew. It was hypnotic in a way. For one could only see so far around the next bend in the stairs, and when one reached it, another blind spot lay just ahead. The only light was from their headlamps. Down and down they went, until Noah’s legs felt shaky, his breathing heavy, and his muscles felt on fire.
So far he’d seen no sign of any cuneiform writing. Just smooth stone walls, as if laser cut.
Once, he turned back around and looked up the steps, but the light from his headlamp only made it a little ways up the staircase before being defeated by the darkness. He could not see any dot of light that could be construed as the entrance. Not finding that dot of light gave him vertigo. He felt clammy and hot and then the suit was beeping at him to slow his breathing.
“You ok, Dr. Fischer?” Davenport asked. He felt a hand close around his elbow, as the pilot helped him straighten up.
“Yeah, I’m good,” Noah said.
At the bottom, it was another hour of walking before they found the first bit of cuneiform writing on the wall. The heads-up display in the top corner of his helmet said they’d walked approximately five miles since leaving the ship. He’d already cycled through his oxygen supply four times, and was rebreathing, the suits carbon extractors working overtime.
“Well?” Gail asked.
Noah lifted a hand to the stone etchings, and ran his fingers over the symbols. “It’s Sumerian,” Noah said. “Or at least uses many of the same symbols.”
“What does it say then?” Gail hissed through the mic.
“Cuneiform is logo-syllabic, meaning some symbols stand for whole words or ideas, while others represent sound or syllables. Without more context, I’m not sure, and half of these logograms I’ve never seen.”
“What about the ones you have seen?” Gail said.
“Death and Queen. Those are the only words I can make out. And that’s what they meant on earth over six thousand years ago. Out here, who knows if they had the same meaning.”
“They do,” Gail said, as if privy to some information he was not. “Count on it.”
A bit further and he heard Gail give a sharp gasp. She froze. Two steps further and Noah realized why, the tunnel dropped off, a deep shaft having opened up in the middle of their path. The gap was about twenty foot wide, with the tunnel continuing on the other side. How deep it was, he couldn’t tell because the blackness swallowed up all of the light from their headlamps.
“We can jump it,” Gail said.
“Are you—”
“—Easy jump,” Davenport said, and then without missing a beat hurled himself across the chasm.
Noah watched as Davenport somewhat effortlessly floated across the canyon. Noah had still not yet fully adjusted to what was physically possible in a low gravity environment. Gail jumped next, not even bothering with a running start. And then went Lancaster, towing the tub of tools along behind him.
“Come on, Noah” Gail said. “We have got to get going.”
Gingerly, Noah took a step forward, gulped hard, and then sprinted towards the edge of the gap. But just as he pushed off, he felt something slip beneath his boot and he lost traction just as he pushed off. Tripping over the edge, he somersaulted headfirst into the chasm.
It was the curse of the overthinker, he thought, even as he gently spun downwards, any opportunity to use his body or his muscles typically ended like this, in some sort of clumsy disaster, his mind failing to get out of his body’s way.
The next few seconds were a mass of awkward tumbling through space. Then finally, he slammed bodily into the far wall of the chasm, lashed out desperately to try and catch the edge, again failed to perform athletically, failed to catch a hold of the ledge he’d lashed out for, and once more started falling down the black well.
He fell for what seemed like an eternity, somewhat exasperated by the slow motion nature of his death.
At last he landed, flat on his back, a bit stunned by the softness of the landing.
“Noah”—hiss—“ok”—hiss—“come in.” The comms were broken up something awful and Gail’s voice sounded even more tinny and distant than usual. The rock walls of the planet were making a mess of their radio signals.
Slowly, he picked himself up. His head lamps sputtered, and he gave them a strong slap to steady them out.
He’d landed on a floor of some sort, almost perfectly flat and marble smooth. Intricate designs were laid into the floor, of birds and fish, and animals he’d never seen before.
Slowly, he turned around and around, finding himself in some sort of enormous chamber. The light from his headlamp reflecting off of intricately carved pillars that traveled upwards. Millenia of dust covered the floors. And then he saw it, a massive statue of a dragon. The figure coiled upwards out of the floor, its base ten or twenty yards across. At the top of the statue, the serpent’s body split into two heads. Forked tongues hung from heavily fanged mouthes. But the eyes, they were the most mesmerizing. They glowed red, almost as if they were alive.
He gasped in awe and fear.
“Hello,” came a voice from the dark.
Noah whirled even as his stomach dropped out of him. With some surprise, he found her the source of the greeting—Gail. She stood right there behind him. But it was Gail minus her space suit. Minus any clothes at all in fact. Her pale naked form alabaster in the glow from his headlamp.
“Gail?” Noah said, hesitantly. “Where is your suit?”
“Who are you?” she asked. “Do you know me?”
“It’s me?” Noah said. “Noah.”
She walked towards him confidently, hips swaying from side to side, as if she was totally unaware that she was naked. She stopped just in front of him. And then slowly, without knowing why he did so, he lifted a hand to touch her. But as he did so, his hand passed right through her.
“A ghost? A mirage?” he whispered.
“We don’t have much time,” Gail said. “You have to listen to me.”
“I was just with Gail, and she had a space suit… and a body…” Noah stammered the words out.
“That’s not Gail,” the spirit replied, and then lifting her eyes towards the statue, she said, “it’s her.”
“Its who?” Noah asked, turning to glance at the twin-headed serpent behind him.
“Something far older and far more evil than you could imagine. She’s been trapped here for thousands of years. Disembodied… imprisoned.”
“What are you talking about?” Noah asked, taking a step forward.
“She stole my body when I was remote viewing this place. Locked me out of my own body. Can you believe it.”
“So you and I never made love?” Noah asked.
“No, what?” the spirit asked.
“Oh God,” Noah cried, “Oh God, what a mess. What the fuck is it?” he reached out to grab her by the shoulders, but his hands slipped right through.
“She’s chaos. The god of it. The mother of monsters. She’s been called many things, but to us on earth, she’s known as Tiamat.”
Noah’s jaw dropped and he felt like he was about to blackout. “Tiamat, the ancient Sumerian goddess. The one Marduk supposedly slew.”
“You have to stop her,” Gail said.
“From what?”
“We were looking for a weapon,” Gail said. “Whatever shattered this planet, or swept away the atmosphere on Mars, the Air Force wanted it.”
“What does the Air Force want with planet killing weapons?” Noah asked. “Gail… or Tiamat… She said this was an expedition to find humanity’s origins.”
“She lied,” Gail said. “The Soviets have already set up a secret colony on Mars. We weren’t the only ones who got their hands on Germany’s scientists. Besides, we don’t know what else is out there. For all we know there’s a whole universe of warmongering empires that haven’t destroyed and enslaved us purely out of the dumb luck fact that they don’t know we exist. But we’ve escaped our planet, and it’s only a matter of time before we meet them.”
“Is there then?” Noah asked. “Is there warmongering empires we should be worried about?”
“That’s classified,” Gail said.
“Ok, but I still don’t get how you switched bodies?”
“When I was remote viewing this place, she found me. She’d been locked off from the physical world. Banished here by the ancients somehow. Trapped on this rocky planet,” Gail said. “I gave her a way back into the physical. I created a door. And she locked me out behind her.”
“So why would she come back here?” Noah asked. “She had your body, she’d escaped?”
“I think,” Gail paused. “I think she needs something. I think whatever was holding her here was magic, or a curse, or something. That or she wants the weapon. I think she wants to kill earth. Wipe all life in the solar system out for good.”
“But you don’t know that,” Noah said.
“I don’t need to,” Gail said. “I’ve explored this place. The murals tell the story, Noah. She’s no good.”
“Ok, and what do you want me to do?” Noah asked.
“Follow me,” Gail said.
The atrium was dominated by a massive altar standing in the center. Five pairs of steps led up to the platform, laid out like the points on a star. Cuneiform script glowed around the altar’s bottom. Three basins were carved into the floor just in front of the altar.
Above the cylindrical altar floated a red cube. It glowed, pulsing with energy. The writing on its surface unreadable from this distance.
“That’s the weapon?” Noah asked. “What does it even do.”
“I think so,” Gail said, pointing to the walls around them. “We didn’t really know what was here, or what we were looking for.”
They were dominated by large colorful murals, one showing a large figure wielding a mace against a dragon, and another showing the figure using it to shatter a planet.
“Now what?” Noah asked.
“You have to get the cube back to the ship,” Gail said. “Leave with it before the others can get down here, before she can get down here.”
“What about Davenport and Lancaster. I can’t fly the ship by myself. What about you?” That last question took him off gaurd.
“Don’t worry about them… don’t worry about any of us,” Gail said. “The ship has a return home function. Hit the bright purple button that says Auto, and it will do everything for you.”
Noah stepped nervously forward, towards the floating cube.
“Stop!” The voice came in loud and clear over his headset. Across from him, having entered on the other side of the room, stood the embodied Gail, Davenport, and Lancaster.
Gail had her sidearm leveled at him. It was special-made for the low-g atmosphere and used rocket propelled ammo. They all had one, except him, even though he’d been trained how to use it should any contingencies arise.
She walked up the steps towards him.
“That’s not Gail,” Noah said, locking eyes with Davenport. “That’s Tiamat.”
The thing that was wearing Gail for a skinsuit stopped suddenly, and smiled wide as if thrilled to hear her real name spoken.
“You’ve cracked, Noah,” Davenport said. “We’re here to take you back to the ship.”
“That weapon,” Noah said. “Do you know why she wants it?”
“Noah, calm down,” Lancaster said, pulling his own sidearm.
Noah glanced around for guidance, but Gail’s ghost was gone. For a moment he faltered, thinking that perhaps the stress of the fall had caused him to hallucinate her.
Then, two gunshots—Tiamat’s gun spit flame.
Noah crouched, clinching his eyes shut as he did so… bracing himself for the impact… ready to bleed out… but no such thing happened.
Slowly, he opened his eyes. Before him, he found Gail, or Tiamat, circling the bodies of Davenport and Lancaster. They lay still.
“You killed them?” Noah asked. “But why?”
“Because I need them,” Tiamat hissed, her voice raspy now, and forceful. Otherworldly.
“I need the hearts of men,” Tiamat said. “I am the dragon. I am Chaos. Men caged me here, and men will set me free. Their blood bound my corporeal form within the cube. Their blood will give it back to me.”
She bent and grabbed Davenport and Lancaster by their collars, then dragged both men up towards the altar.
Without missing a beat, she flicked open a knife and cut open the pilot’s suit. Then she started on his chest cavity, cutting him wide open from stern to stem. She reached into the steaming chest cavity and pulled out his steaming heart. Then unceremoniously, she plopped it into one of the basins. Without missing a beat, she started on the second body.
Three basins, two hearts. Noah had just started doing the math when movement caught his eye from across the room. Gail’s ghost had reappeared, she stood at the far entrance and waved for him to follow.
He bolted for the far exit, took several steps, and somehow, when he’d needed it most, his body had not betrayed him. He was half way across the room before Tiamat realized he was on the run.
He’d just turned the corner out of the atrium when he heard the bark of her pistol and the zing of the slugs as they ricocheted off Ceres’ rock walls.
The X-Bells doors opened with a hiss. Noah flew up the ramp into the space ship and hammered the button to close the door. His spacesuit was screaming at him to stop running, the rebreather failing to keep up.
As he waited for the doors to close he could see Tiamat in the distance. She was jumping towards him, taking long arcing bounds towards the ship.
And then finally, the doors closed. Noah hit the release on his helmet, and gasped for new air.
“Now turn the red lever to manually lock,” Gail commanded. Her ghostly visage still accompanying him.
Noah turned the lever, just as he heard a tremendous thud on the outside of the ship.
“She’s here,” Noah muttered.
“You locked her out,” Gail said. “You’re good. Now go to the helm, and hit the purple button.”
Noah hurried to the front of the ship.
The pounding on the door had subsided, and now, it was eerily quiet. Noah held his hand out over the button, and let it hover there. “Wait,” he said, “what about you?”
“Who cares about me,” Gail said. “Just go.”
“I can’t,” Noah said suddenly. “You need your body back. You’ve helped me too much.”
“This is all of earth we are talking about,” Gail said. “If she gets ahold of your heart, this show is over. She gets her body back. She becomes the dragon. Besides, I can ride along. Better to end up a ghost on earth than here.”
“You’re right,” Noah said, and with that he slapped the purple button. The X-Bells engines whined, and the whole thing began to hover and wobble as it prepared to return to base.
But it was just as they slipped into the inky blackness of hyperspace that he saw her. There, in the door way behind them, stood Tiamat.
“But how?” Noah asked, the words falling out of him.
“You forgot about the weapons bay,” Tiamat said, taking off her helmet. She tossed it casually aside. In her other hand was the pistol. She lifted it, aimed, and then pulled the trigger.
CLICK.
She started laughing maniacally. “Oops, I guess I’m out.”
Noah just stood there, rooted to the floor, in disbelief at her appearance, and at the fact that he was still alive.
“You’ve got to fight her, Noah,” Gail said.
Tiamat stopped laughing. “Shut up you stupid bitch.” Then she pulled the knife from its sheath on her boot and charged Noah.
Noah twisted to the side, spinning one of the pilot chair’s into her hand, disrupting the thrust enough for her to miss.
She countered with a big swiping arc towards his head, and he fell backwards against the control panel. She slashed away at him, and he scrambled sideways, trying to regain his balance.
Then she caught him with a lucky overhand stab. The knife sank into his arm, right into his shoulder, but just as he was twisting away.
He took a long beat, staring somewhat confusedly at the knife sticking out of his shoulder. Finally realizing that he’d managed to wrench it free from her hand when he’d twisted away.
He grasped it, pulled it free, his own hot blood streaming down his arm, and he charged her back, swinging the knife like he’d been born to it.
She sidestepped, then twisted, caught his arm, and then wrenched his whole body downward with a wrist-lock.
He dropped the knife, and it clattered across the floor.
She let up on the wrist lock in an attempt to bring a knee into his face, but it wasn’t enough. He tore his arm free, and just like that night in the library, the academic let go, and the man took over. He picked her up in a great big bear hug, lifting all 120 lbs. of her off the ground, and then he drove forward as hard as he could, gaining tremendous speed before smashing her into the far wall of the cockpit.
A crunch, and then she went limp in his arms. He dropped her, and gasped for air, his hands on his knees. When he’d finally managed to catch his breath, he looked down at Gail’s limp body.
“Oh no,” Noah said. He held two fingers to her neck in search of a pulse.
A faint beat. She was still alive, but unconscious.
Gail’s ghost sidled up next to him. “You need to get her sedated. She’s only as powerful as her human shell.”
“The med kit,” Noah said, without missing a beat. He snatched an emergency case off the wall, and then opened it up. Gail helped him find the right syringes.
Tiamat was just starting to wake.
“Hurry,” Gail said.
Quickly, Noah drew sedative out of the small glass vial, tapped the side of the syringe, and then purged air from the needle.
Tiamat started to rise, but was still trying to place her surroundings.
Noah plunged the syringe into her neck and injected the sedatives. They seemed to hit her almost instantly, and she slipped back under, sliding back down the wall into a pile.
“How long?” Noah asked.
“Should keep her until we land,” Gail said.
“How do we get you back in your body?” Noah asked.
Gail pursed her lips. “Dr. Wolff should know.”
Noah walked towards the helm… watched as the inky blackness slipped over the viewscreens… it looked like they were flying through oil.
About One Year Later
Noah sat in his office, feet on his desk, a cigarette burning between two fingers. There was snow on the bushes outside, and the sky was gloomy and moody—a gray Connecticut day. He was no longer at Dartmouth. Instead he’d taken a position at Yale. A few calls from Dr. Wolff and his ilk and he hadn’t even had to interview.
He looked at his hand, now free of his wedding band. Not even a band of white from the tan lines remained. He was a bachelor now, having screwed up maybe the only thing in his life that he’d ever done right. He’d confessed the affair almost as soon as he’d gotten back home. He left out the part about it being with an embodied eldritch god. She’d left that night, crying something awful. There’d been the usual stages of grief then. There was an attempt to make it work, then more anger, then marriage counseling, sadness, and then finally the divorce papers. And then the body was in the ground, the marriage contract torn up, and he resigned himself to a life of lonely academic study.
He eyed the dumbbells in the corner of the room, next to the weight lifting shoes. A new habit he’d taken up. He woke up with nightmares about Ceres, and most of them revolved around his inability to defend himself. That he’d survived was mostly due to Gail’s clever maneuvering and dumb luck.
And what of Gail? The question that hung ever present in his mind. They’d shuffled him off the base and away from the Air Force and into Yale the day after their ship landed, and they’d not communicated with—
A soft knock on the door frame.
Noah glanced up to find Gail Keats—in the body—standing there. He stood, his face no doubt showing his confusion.
“Hi, Noah,” she said softly.
“Gail?”
“It’s me,” she said. She entered, pushing a stroller in front of her, and then gently closed the door behind her. She sat down, flattening her pencil skirt as she did so.
“They got you back?” Noah asked. “I was worried about you. I was wondering about you. And this…” he motioned towards the stroller. “You had a baby?”
“Noah,” she said. “We can’t stay long. I’m not even supposed to be here.”
“What is it?”
“Dr. Wolff helped me swap back into my body.”
“And what about Tiamat?” Noah asked.
“Noah, I’m scared.” She stood up then, and pulled out the baby. “This is our daughter.”
Noah felt the blood drain from his face. He took two hesitant steps backwards and then fell backwards into his seat. “But how?” he finally muttered.
“When you slept with her… me… her with my body,” Gail said. “You got me pregnant. It pregnant.”
Noah was up then. “Let me see her?”
Slowly, Gail handed the baby over to him. Noah took her.
With two gentle fingers, he pulled down the blanket to reveal a round, cherubic face and a button nose and tiny hands. The little girl’s eyes though. There was something wrong with them. There was no Iris. As if it was all pupil. Just inky blackness the color of subspace.
“I think when I took my body back, Tiamat found another….” Gail offered slowly.
“So this is Tiamat,” Noah said.
Gail gulped and nodded.
