Excerpt: The Titular Short Story: “Asteroid 6”

Asteroid clearing was always bad duty. Jones sighed as he looked out into the dark void of space. The star combine continued its work, sweeping a cone-shaped field of energy out in front of the ship and turning this section of the Anterra asteroid belt into star dust.

Wilkes was somewhere in the back looking for beverage packets. He probably didn’t even hear the proximity alert when it sounded. Piece of crap, thought Jones, kicking the console. The older combines, such as the Starshine Boogie, were notorious for malfunctioning.

But then Jones received visual confirmation.

The asteroid looming before him turned the cockpit of the small craft into shadow. It was the size of a small planet, far larger than anything the combine could handle. Jones rubbed his eyes and blinked several times to confirm. Sometimes out in the belts on long shifts space played tricks with your eyes. Besides, he wondered, how could such a mammoth chunk of stone elude the long-range scanners?

“Warning… current course obstructed…” droned the computer.

Wilkes grabbed the doorframe leading to the cockpit with two packets of Mango Poppers! in his free hand. “What the hell!” he exclaimed.

“Strap up,” Jones ordered. “We’re going to hit!”

Wilkes slid into the co-pilot’s chair and buckled his reentry harness.

They activated the crash shield and lowered the shutter on the front portal. Each bore an uneasy expression. Wilkes tried to grin but the forced nature of the expression gave it an insane aspect that made Jones feel worse.

For a moment there was silence but for the strobe-like hum of the combine’s matter disintegrator.

The impact was tremendous. The ship landed on the front right side and flipped over twice before settling on its roof.

The only sound Jones could hear was his own breath. He looked over at Wilkes whose harnessed body hung limp, the pulp-like right side of his head crushed. His left hand was closed so tightly around the Mango Poppers! that the packaging was now torn. Syrupy orange juice covered Wilkes’ chest. To Jones it looked like alien blood.

Panic ensued and Jones furiously fished for the harness release. After long moments the latch clicked open and the restraining strap snapped back into its retractor housing. Jones tumbled out of the seat to the floor, which he soon realized was the roof. He also became aware that the asteroid had more gravity than expected. He scrambled to the control console and yanked the red lever, activating the ship’s emergency transmitter. In approximately twelve hours a company-issued rescue craft would arrive, and there was plenty of vitamin gel to sustain Jones while he waited.

Jones sat down on the roof and planned to spend the lonely hours feeling sorry for himself. He didn’t succeed.

At first Jones thought that the darkness and isolation were causing him to hallucinate, but there was no denying the sounds that grew  louder by the minute—a sweet and fragile crooning, like a choir of angels, but layered with undercurrents of strength and savagery. Jones suddenly realized that he wasn’t hearing a signal across the vast vacuum of space. Rather, he felt the sound resonate within his own body—a direct transmission from nearby that reached directly into his skull and rattled his bones.

As if on autopilot, Jones clumsily crawled his way over the previously stowed equipment to the rear of the craft and donned a space suit.

Soon he was free, taking great, nearly weightless, strides across the cratered surface toward the source of the sound. The number of abandoned spacecraft on the surface was surprising—mineral huskers, fighters from the Cimalyan War, and early model star combines.

The song continued its intensity as he bounded ahead. Under normal conditions Jones would have been concerned about escaping the asteroid’s gravitational pull with his wild arcs, but he felt strangely secure and was determined to reach his goal.

Finally he crossed a ridge and experienced a sensation not unlike desire as he spied a monolith in the distance. Ankh-like glyphs were carved into the pyramid’s surface, and a green glow shown through the carvings, pulsing in time with the mesmerizing siren song.

As he moved closer, Jones realized how small and insignificant he was against the massive black pyramid. The cold bite of fear and isolation engulfed him. It’s going to be a long twelve hours, he thought. He considered turning back, but the song intensified to the point of a scream. It drove him to his knees on the rocky ground.

I am your mother, the alien voice shrieked, outraged by Jones’ attempt to resist his maker. I am your wholeness. 

Driven to all fours by the sound; Jones bowed, supplicant.

The voice faded and Jones recovered his footing as a state of calm washed across his nervous system. The fear was gone and once again he felt the excitement he’d experienced upon seeing the monolith. It was as if he had never heard the shrieking voice. A hexagonal portal on each side of the monolith opened, welcomed him to enter the darkness. He moved fast.

Inside, Jones followed glowing runes toward the heart of the structure. The voice came again, welcoming now, and silently imparted to him the knowledge of the race that had created this pyramid, the glorious race that preexisted man and all of the creatures of the Earth. The voice placed in his mind beautiful images of fantastic cities whose spires climbed upward to kiss pink moons, and dark-winged creatures that braved the chrome skies.

Placing a gloved hand to what Jones thought of now as the breathing wall revealed images of the ancient race: slender, nearly nine feet tall, and possessed of strong features. Their laughter and speech hung in the crystalline air like notes of heavenly music above the atmospheric terraces and walkways of their cities. He witnessed lovemaking rituals that were sexual but not quite sex in human terms, and the prows of black warships pushing through dark seas.

The wall repelled his touch and he could see no more. Jones felt hollow after breaking contact, and continued along the dark corridor in search of connection. The tunnel began to slope steeply downward toward the center of the asteroid itself.

The channel cut down and down, on and on. Jones did not know how long he’d walked, but he was sweating profusely. When he felt hunger or fatigue, he would reach out to the glyphs and the monolith would replenish him, cool him, give him the will to continue.

Finally he reached a cavernous hollow. The back walls of the chamber contained hexagonal sections like the honeycombs of a beehive. As Jones entered, the apiaries emitted a soft glow, and he could see that each chamber contained a member of the old race, curled on their sides as if in gentle sleep. They were suspended in their rest in a viscous solution that held them in stasis, hundreds vertically stacked into a shaft that extended above into the dark, a long tower of cells reaching up beyond Jones’ vision.

A large black triangular-shaped spacecraft rested on the stone floor before the honeycombs. The chamber was divided in two by a sapphire-emerald energy field in the foreground. Jones felt agony upon realizing that the barrier kept him from the Old Ones. He stepped forward anyway. He needed to reach them, to be closer. As he advanced, his eyes were drawn to the black glow of an obsidian triangle set into the rock wall.

Release us, a thousand voices cried in unison within Jones’ very soul.

As Jones raced toward the triangle, he tripped on something unseen and fell forward, slamming gloved hands against the rock floor. Someone or something—an arm—was now draped around his back. The scream he emitted was deafening but could not escape his helmet to be heard. Jones struggled to free himself and stand.

It was then that he noticed the spacesuits littering the floor. Ghost suits! his mind yelled out, for each contained skeletal remains. The pressure suits bore the insignias of almost every planet in the Federation. The realization was as stark as it was certain: So many before him, from countless worlds, had come here to die.

Jones turned in horror toward the entrance where two creatures now stood in hostile, disciplined poses, features sharp and lean like their masters’. They were an amalgam of hound and gazelle, as if manufactured in Dr. Moreau’s south Pacific laboratory. Each sentinel stood six-feet tall in chrome with azure stripes and muscles that rippled like gallium-indium eutectic..

They are the guardians, watchers of the gate! They will not harm you! the voices cried. Release us! You are the chosen! You are the savior! The others were destroyers, but you that whom we have sought! Free us, and we will free the world!

The emerald eyes of the guardians sparkled hypnotically at Jones in reassurance of this promise.

His terror subsided at their words, and Jones yearned once again to free the beautiful ones. He made his way in a rush toward the panel on the wall. Unintentionally, Jones brushed an elbow against the glowing barrier. Within a millisecond, a final series of images filled his mind in shocking brilliance. He saw the human colonies ablaze, the Old Ones cutting down the cities of Earth like mere weeds while their dark warships sailed unchallenged on hazy, blood-soaked tides. The eyes of the guardians lost their jeweled aspect as their lips tightened to reveal razor teeth.

This had been their plan all along: to find a specimen capable of reawakening them that they might resume the carnage that the enslavement had denied them for so long. The guardians were there to punish him unless he did their bidding. It was all-too clear, Jones realized, for he could not outlast them , certainly not for the twelve-hour period until, and if, he was found by the rescue team. Even if he managed to resist the call of the voices and the torture of the guardians, even if he was able to keep the dark creatures entombed, he would needed to warn the rescue team to also resist the siren song.

Jones smiled back at the guardians, first in reassurance as he raised his hand toward the triangle set into the wall. In defiance he suddenly released the oxygen seal of his helmet, and in his last moments of life threw it across the floor, past the guardians, and into the passageway, a grim warning of those who might seek to save him. Perhaps, he thought, it will be enough. Within seconds his body folded in on itself and he collapsed to the ground, joining the rest of humanity’s bones on the floor.

Unmoved in their chrysalis the ethereal voices shrieked a final time—an audible cry that raced up the walls of the cavern and shook the bodies of Jones and his predecessors. With Jones’ demise, no one remained to care for or help free the creatures. They would, for now at least, remain alone: an inert and impotent race, captives of Asteroid 6.