⚒️ Deep in the realm of the dead

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The old woman passing by on the rolling footway made a warding sign, crossing her fingers and pursing her lips as if she planned to spit on the floor, before evidently remembering the strict public hygiene bylaws of Byron Station.

If it wasn’t so tiresomely familiar it would have hurt Alfredo’s feelings. He understood it though.

Not many people survived a raid on their vessel by the far-from-friendly denizens of the great dark. As much as kindergarten textbooks, cartoon programmes, and corporate propaganda might have wanted people to believe the vast blackness of space was populated by friendly, helpful, eight-legged aliens, you did not have to escape Earth’s gravity for long before the horrible truth found you.

Valerian St John had been a very lucky man, Alfredo thought. His search for extra-terrestrial life succeeded, and by unlocking interstellar communications with one of the more benevolent of the shell-wearing, stalk-eyed monsters traversing the stars, he had secured his place in history as one of humanity’s great heroes. A sourer stroke of fortune could have seen the planet turned into an all-you-can-eat buffet for voracious carnivores and St John reviled as a villain and a fool for the few years the species would have enjoyed.

Alfredo had seen what could result from the endless appetites of the most brutal of the shellbacks. A quiet cargo run for a minor Cavendish subsidiary had turned into a nightmare he still struggled to wake from. The freighter had shuddered, twitching like a fish on a line, as the reavers surged out of the inky depths to latch onto their soft undercarriage. The ship screamed as the teeth of the predator gnawed through the metal and organic hull. Sirens wailed, warning the fatally stupid of their transport’s distress. Almost sentient djinn systems coughed and croaked, pleading with crew members to fulfill their roles, to fight their fear. Tasks went undone as some unfortunates were vented into the raw vacuum. 

Whatever Alfredo feared, the boarding party exceeded his terror. Evolution’s test had a constant answer, both on and off Earth: an exoskeleton for hardiness; organic weaponry to crush or rend; and octopodal symmetry affording speed and maneuverability. Like their terrestrial counterparts, these space-faring creatures came in all sizes. Only on Earth had something other than carcinine achieved biomeal supremacy.

Monsters stalked the interior of the tramp freighter, hunting for their suppers. The size of baby elephants, their sharp feet gouged chunks out of the decking, their vicious claws drummed on the walls, sending throbbing echoes through the air.

Alfredo survived because he was halfway through fixing the refrigeration unit. He welded the door closed and sat shivering with fear as the rest of the crew were turned into meals by the enemy.

The irony wasn’t lost on him.

The worst part, the very bottom of his trench of despair, wasn’t the interminable wait in the silence of a coffin he made for himself; it was the quiet of the ship when he finally dared to emerge. Daubs of red decorated the wall, like the scribbling of insane troglodytes. Fingerprints, pleas for help drawn in blood, and tracks of spilled viscera were all that remained of his crewmates. 

One of the xenobiologists who debriefed him told him that some species metabolized the human skeleton particularly well.

That throwaway comment returned to him in his sleep over and over, the thought of his friend Pedro’s skull pressing up against the monstrous carapace of a looming beast intent on adding his bones to its own.

Alfredo kept himself to the left of the walkway. When he was employable he prided himself on his effort and punctuality. He had almost run from place to place. Now he was subsisting on the station’s Minimum Basic Income; he had no better place to be than any place he was. He had become the definition of an indigent.

His second encounter with the horrors shared too many features with the first. A calm, easy job interrupted by the whimper of alarm systems. A lack of warning. A collision, and the noise of semi-organic matter gnawing on the skin between safe air and the chasm of entropy beyond.

Where the first monsters had been enormous, megapredators from some abyss or potent gravitational clutch, the second were uncomfortably familiar. Their bodies were no larger than ruby grapefruit and were it not for the bandoliers of circuitry and cybernetics, they could have easily been a species of crab swarming a coconut-strewn beach to spawn.

Their feet punched needle-fine holes in spacesuits and EVA equipment as they clambered up their victims en scuttling masse, creating carmine cross-stitch patterns as they tenderized the meat beneath.

Alfredo watched the head-chef of the cruise liner vanish under a pile of shells, legs, and hungry mouths. 

He swore they had been laughing, cackling over the fat man’s screams as they devoured him.

Alfredo’s salvation came, again, from blind luck or divine providence. His terrified feet knocked over a fifty-liter jug of spirit vinegar, set aside for pickling.

If he had thought the beasts were laughing before, he knew they were screaming as their shells dissolved with bubble-bath effusiveness.

A kitchen is full of acids. His culinary instructors insisted it was essential to consider in every dish he would ever make. 

He doubted they had envisaged what use he could put lemon juice to, if forced. 

The rescue party found him surrounded by writhing limbs in a mousse of dissolved carnivores, a moat of vinegars guarding his flank, empty bottles of salad dressing and hot sauce scattered all around.

He was told he had been giggling.

He tried not to remember.

If twice was abhorrently bad fortune, it was his third encounter that marked him as a Jonah—though the third touch of unkind fate was in many ways his least distressing. The first ship in the ambush was smeared across the cosmos by a rail gun round of depleted uranium encased in synthetic diamond. The second latched onto the pilot’s deck with hungry enthusiasm; an enthusiasm which was their undoing as an uncareful fang tore open a plasma conduit and turned the command crews of both vessels into superheated gases.

Alfredo hadn’t even protested when they marooned him on Byron. At least here he wouldn’t starve. On a more libertarian station he would have long since been consigned to Reclamation.

The station shuddered beneath his feet, hidden struts and matrices flexing. It happened sometimes, when large cruise ships docked to enjoy the casinos, or even larger ore-mules attached their hungry nozzles to silos.

Then the alarms began—the calls to action stations, the sleep-shattering klaxons and multilingual alerts. What followed next was grimly familiar to Alfredo, and a terrifyingly terminal novelty for the rest of the station’s inhabitants.

The claws. 

The mouths.

The screaming.