Revenant-X

Book 2: Red Space

by David Wellington

Genres: Horror; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Exploration

Synopsis

Revenant-X is the terrifying second novel in a new trilogy of survival and exploration in deep space, from Arthur C. Clarke Award-nominated author David Wellington.
 
FEAR THE DARK.
 
The crew of the Artemis - led by Firewatch agent Alexandra Petrova - have survived the furious onslaught of the Basilisk and broken through the space blockade around Paradise-1. Now they can pursue their original mission and investigate why Earth's first deep space colony has fallen silent.  
 
The answer seems obvious: the site is deserted.
 
Or so they think.
 
Some of the colonists remain . . . but they're no longer human.
 
Petrova and her crew now face a desperate struggle to survive as they attempt to uncover the mystery of what has befallen the colony.
 
If they fail, the darkness that has fallen over Paradise-1 will consume them.

Release date: November 5, 2024

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 684

Sample

The first settlers from Earth had called this planet Paradise-1, but Alexandra Petrova wondered if the name was supposed to be a joke. She had rarely seen a more desolate place – even the airless moons of Jupiter were full of life by comparison. Here the wind blew forever through giant lava tubes, channels of rock that bored through the mountains like the tracks of worms. The few spiky plants that grew from the dark rocks looked sullen and abused as they stretched up toward blaring sunlight that was just the wrong color. She hurried into the main town of the colony, a cluster of prefabricated structures and houses built on a plain of black igneous rock. A place so new, so meager it had never even been given a name. She had been sent to check up on this place. She hadn’t expected to find it deserted.

She’d looked in a dozen of the houses. Called out, shouting questions into that ceaseless wind. She’d gotten no answer. There were supposed to be ten thousand people here. She couldn’t find any of them.

The town wasn’t very large, and simple enough in plan. A neat grid of streets, houses and little workshops and storage sheds built around a large open central square. South of the town stood the fields that had fed the people here, plots of dirt that looked more like gardens than agricultural land. The plants out there had all died, lay wilted and spent, draped across the ground, yellow on the black soil. South of the fields stood the landing pad where they’d come down, where Parker had landed their tiny shuttle. It had cracked up on re-entry and they’d barely made it to the ground. The remains of the shuttle down there were the last human thing she could see. Beyond the landing field there was nothing but hills and defiles, the occasional impact crater.

North of the town stood high, craggy mountains, blank and solemn. The wind came down from those heights, cold and moving fast.

“Hello?” she shouted, as she had a hundred times, and again there was no answer.

She walked farther into town. Past prefabricated housing units and what looked like a school. They’d had everything they needed, these people. They’d built themselves a simple world, within which they could live out meaningful lives.

And now they were gone.

“Is this what you wanted to see?” she asked, speaking to the thing in her head.

Just to get this far she’d been forced to make a very uneasy alliance. A billion years ago, maybe, aliens had built a watchdog to keep this planet safe. To keep people like her from getting too close. Just to land on Paradise-1, she’d had to accept that ancient jailer into her brain, where it nestled like a parasite. Normally she could feel it wriggling around in there like a worm trying to get comfortable in the hot cage of her skull. Normally it talked to her, made demands of her. Normally it didn’t shut up.

Not now.

“You wanted to come here,” she whispered. That had been the deal.

She’d had to confront a thing with no human context at all, and she’d given it a name. She called it the basilisk, and it had driven her here, forced her to come to this place.

The watchdog had grown bored over the eons. It had grown curious about the thing it protected. It should have killed her for being in the wrong place, just slaughtered her for the audacity of coming here. Instead it had allowed her to live so they could both see what was down here on the planet.

Now? Whatever it wanted wasn’t here.

Maybe it was just as confused as she was.

Where had all the people gone? She stepped into a house, walked into an empty kitchen and found a coffee pot on a heating element. The sludge of coffee inside had long since boiled away and burned to a thick scum of black carbon on the bottom of the pot. She switched off the heat. She touched a jacket someone had left hanging on the back of an aluminum chair. ATLAS had been picked out on the back in massive stylized letters. She knew that was the name of the first colony ship that had arrived here. Who had that jacket belonged to? Had they just put it down for a second, thinking they would pick it back up, put it on, one sleeve after the other? She touched the cast on her own left arm. Another casualty of the journey here. She imagined the colonist who owned that jacket, their arms, their back. Even in her mind’s eye she couldn’t see their face. Whoever they were, they were gone now.

She stepped back out into the street, looked up at the sky. Clouds scudded by overhead, thinner than the clouds on Earth. Clouds starved of moisture. This planet had no oceans, just a few big lakes and some anemic rivers. It almost never rained here.

Why had they chosen that ridiculous name for their new world? Simply because it offered a fresh start? The colonists who’d come here were committed. Zealous about building a future for humanity. So where had they gone? They wouldn’t have just run off into the mountains for no reason. Would they?

“Hello!” she shouted, at no one. “Hello! Where are you?”

At first there was no answer. Then, off in the distance, she did hear something. Just the faintest call, a high-pitched wail that didn’t even sound like words. It took her a second to realize that wasn’t a colonist answering her.

That was Zhang, her crewmate.

Her blood went cold.

The sound she’d heard was Zhang, and he was screaming for his life.



Petrova ran toward the screaming and found it was coming from a housing unit, a prefabricated module perched on the rocks at the edge of town. Its windows were covered in thick plastic shutters and its hatch was closed, but she could hear Zhang’s voice clearly. She found the hatch’s release panel and slapped at it, over and over, until it started to sluggishly open. Petrova had seen Zhang face down death before and he’d never screamed like that. Before the hatch was fully open, she squeezed her body through the narrow gap, her good hand already grabbing at the pistol on her hip.

She drew and brandished the weapon before her eyes had even adjusted to the dim light in the housing unit. She saw Zhang down in one corner, his back pressed up against the wall. Blood covered his left leg as far up as his hip, and his face was a mask of terror. He was staring at something in the shadows on the far side of the room, something she still couldn’t see.

“I’m here,” she shouted. “Zhang! What happened?”

He shook his head and pointed at the dark corner. “Look out,” he gasped. “Just… just watch out, it’s… it’s—”

Whatever it was, it sprang out at her so fast she couldn’t make out more than a humanoid silhouette. Suddenly it was on her, a hand like a claw grabbing at the cast on her left arm, another hand on the side of her face. It tried to drag her down, pull her off her feet, but she slammed herself backward against the wall and widened her stance. She’d trained for this, learned techniques to handle this kind of attack. Her pistol was useless now – if she tried shooting the thing, she would probably just hit herself. Instead she tightened her grip and used the side of the pistol to bash at it, trying to hit its head. Teeth sank into the collar of her jumpsuit and wrenched back, as if the thing were trying to bite out her throat but had just missed. She hit it again, and again, but it didn’t react at all. It made no sound, not even a hiss of breath.

Then it reared its head back and she got her first good look at its face. It might have been human once. It wasn’t anymore.

Its eyes were solid black, as if its pupils had expanded to swallow everything else. Black veins radiated outward from those eyes against skin the color of a fish’s belly. It had no hair at all, and its mouth was a broken horror of jagged, stub-like teeth.

“Petrova!” Zhang shouted. “Get clear! Get clear!”

She knew the thing was going to lunge forward at any moment, that those broken teeth would sink into her cheek or tear off her nose. She twisted her head away even as she brought her knee up into the space between herself and the thing, the narrow little gap that had opened there. She kicked out as hard as she could, sending herself sprawling sideways but knocking the thing off kilter as well. It staggered back, away from her, keeping its footing but waving its arms for balance. She saw its hands were as broken and battered as its mouth, shards of nail wedged into the ends of mangled fingers.

She did not hesitate. She brought her weapon around and fired once, twice, a third time. Two shots in its center mass. One right in the middle of its forehead.

She hit it. She knew she’d hit it, because of the black wound that opened in its brow. No blood emerged from the wound, however. Instead, a fine black dust sifted out of the opening and drifted down its nightmare face.

“Zhang,” she said. “Zhang!”

“Stand back,” he said.

Zhang had his own weapon, though it wasn’t reliable. It acted on its own agenda, not when he wanted it to. Woven around his arm was a thick nest of golden tendrils – a medical device, designed to keep him healthy. It could, on occasion, decide that the best way to ensure his safety was a good offense.

One tendril, then another, swung out, away from his arm. They grew thin as they lashed across the empty space between him and the thing, moving fast as striking snakes. They sank deep into the thing’s pulpy flesh. There was a sudden noise like a massive electrical discharge, and the thing jerked and seized, its neck twisting around. It dropped like a slab of meat, its feet drumming against the housing unit’s floor.

Not for the first time, Petrova found herself wondering exactly where their bosses had found such a device. It had capabilities she’d never seen in a medical implant before. This time she decided not to question it too much, not when it was keeping them alive.

The gold snakes withdrew, wrapping themselves back around Zhang’s arm as if nothing had happened. He pushed himself up against the wall until he was standing, and stared at the thing on the floor as if he was hypnotized.

It was already recovering from the shock it had gotten. Already climbing back up onto its knees. Its face showed no sign that they’d even hurt it – the bullet wound in its forehead didn’t seem to faze it one bit.

Petrova looked around, thinking that if bullets didn’t hurt the thing, she needed a new weapon. She found a folding chair with metal legs. Grabbing it up with her one good hand, she felt its weight, then swung it hard. It glanced off the floor with a ringing noise, and the vibrations rattled up her arm. She gritted her teeth and swung again, and this time she connected. One of the chair legs bit deep into the skull of the fallen thing. She swung again, and again, until spurts of black dust erupted from the wreck of what had been its head. Until she was one hundred percent certain it would not get up again.

“Come on,” she said. She dropped the chair to clatter on the floor. Grabbed Zhang and pulled at him. He couldn’t seem to look away from the ruined body. “Come on,” she said, louder, and yanked him toward the hatch, and the daylight beyond.

Once they were outside she slapped the release pad and the door ground shut. Together the two of them stood there on the rocky soil of Paradise-1, saying nothing, just trying to catch their breath.

They’d been on the planet for less than an hour.



Zhang was lost in a daze. He barely felt the wound on his leg. The bite. He barely knew where he was.

“Parker. Rapscallion. Come in,” Petrova said. “Talk to me, guys. Zhang’s hurt. Come in!” She was speaking to them via radio, he realized. He couldn’t see the two other members of the crew. He tried to focus on his surroundings. Petrova had her shoulder in his armpit and she was dragging him across a broad open square at the center of the little town. He wanted to look at her, to say something. Something important. He licked his lips. Tried to form the words.

“Focus,” she told him. “Talk to me. Are you in shock?”

Shock? He supposed he was. But it wasn’t her place to ask that question. He was the crew’s doctor. At least, he’d been a doctor once. Most recently that just meant he was an expert at watching people die. So many people had… had died—

“Zhang!” she shouted. She grabbed at the golden RD on his arm. The device twisted away from her touch. “You! Device! Give him something. Snap him out of this,” she insisted.

She should have known better by now, Zhang thought. The RD had a certain level of artificial intelligence, which mostly meant it had a will of its own. It acted when it chose to, and no one could convince it to—

A golden snake lifted away from his wrist. Its head narrowed down to a sharp point and it struck, jabbing itself into the cephalic vein in his forearm. He gasped at the sudden spark of pain – then gasped again as his head reeled, a rush of oxygen flooding into his brain. Had the device injected him with some kind of vasodilator? He grabbed the bridge of his nose and squeezed.

That was when his leg started to hurt. A moment later, it really started to hurt.

“Oh no,” he wheezed. “No. No no no. Petrova…”

“I’m here. I’ve got you,” she said.

He nodded. He realized he was sitting down on the stony street. He looked up, saw the mix of dark stone houses and prefabricated housing units around him. “I need to… I need to patch this up,” he said. His leg was still bleeding. Badly, though not enough to kill him immediately. She had wrapped a tourniquet around his thigh – when had she done that? He didn’t remember it. But he could tell she’d done an incomplete job. Laypeople, people without medical training, never tied a tourniquet tight enough. You had to constrict all the blood vessels or all you accomplished was to cause the patient incredible pain. “I need to check the wound. Maybe sew it up. There’s a medical center here. Where? I saw it on our way through town.”

She nodded. “I saw it too. It’s right up there.” She pointed, but he didn’t bother following her gesture. “Can you walk?”

“I think so. I don’t think I broke any bones.” He climbed up onto his feet. He was shaky, but he could stand. “Help me. Okay?”

“I’ve got you,” she said, as she helped him hobble forward. Putting weight on his wounded leg hurt. He gasped in pain, but he fought it back. Kept moving, even as he felt hot blood rolling down his skin inside his jumpsuit. They passed through the town’s main square, an open space of level soil with a fountain and a massive sculpture in its center. The medical center was just on the other side of the square. She helped him through the hatch and into an open room beyond. The power was still on and the lights made the space almost as bright as the square outside. There was an examination table just inside the door.

“Hang in there,” she said, as she helped him climb up on the table. A robotic arm swung down from the ceiling and started scanning him.

He shook his head. “Petrova,” he said. “It came out of nowhere. It just… it lunged at me, and—”

The robot finished its scan. “Hello. Welcome to the medical center. It looks like you’ve cut yourself. Are you in pain?”

Zhang had worked with robots like this often enough. “Switch to provider mode,” he told it. “Assess this injury. Does it require sutures? Also, run a complete screen for bacterial infection, viral infection, foreign proteins, animal venom.” He turned and looked at Petrova.

For the first time he saw just how scared she looked. She was worried about him. Worried that he was hurt. He smiled, despite himself. There was a time when the two of them had not gotten along. They’d actively disliked each other when they met.

That felt like a very long time ago now. Now they were a team.

“The thing that bit me,” he said. “Did you see it? How much did you see?”

She turned away from him and tapped at her palm, working the controls of the communications device built into her hand. “Rapscallion? Parker? Where are you guys? Zhang’s injured. I want you at the medical center, in the middle of town. What is your position?”

“Hey,” Zhang said. “Listen to me. The thing that attacked me was—”

“Some kind of alien,” she said. She shook her head and stared at the wall behind him. She was refusing to make eye contact. He thought he knew why.

The robot arm cut away the leg of his jumpsuit with a laser, then carefully lifted the cloth with a mechanical pincer. He got a good look at the wound for the first time. It looked like a classic bite injury, a semicircular perforated laceration. A big patch of skin and some of the underlying fatty tissue had been torn away and was missing, leaving a crater full of bright, welling blood.

“Injury assessed. Laser cauterization and sterilization of the area recommended. Should I administer analgesics?”

He looked down at the RD on his arm. It could have given him painkillers at any time since he was hurt. It hadn’t. He remembered it had given him something to wake him up, break him out of his shock reaction. Maybe pain medication would have a negative interaction with whatever that had been.

“No,” he told the robot. “Just do it.”

A green beam of light swept across his mangled flesh and Zhang gritted his teeth. Then he grabbed the edge of the table hard enough to make his knuckles turn white. Eventually he just gave in and screamed in agony.

Petrova grabbed his shoulder and squeezed. Maybe it helped. A little.

When he could breathe again, he pulled on her hand until she looked at him. Made actual eye contact.

“The thing that attacked me,” he said. “It wasn’t—”

A flare of light filled the middle of the room, and then Sam Parker was standing there. Sam Parker, the pilot who’d brought them here. Sam Parker, now a hologram ghost.

He hurried over to the exam bed and tried to grin. Normally you couldn’t wipe that grin off the man’s face. Now it looked like a bad imitation of his normal expression. “How is he?” he asked.

He was asking Petrova. She looked up and gave him a shrug. “Fine. Where’s Rapscallion?”

“On his way,” Parker said. “I figured it would be faster if I just transferred myself over here on the public network.”

There had been a human named Parker once, but that man had died on the way to Paradise-1. Their ship, Artemis, had decided to bring him back. It had a complete recording of his personality and memories pre-mortem, so it had just created an artificial intelligence that thought it was Sam Parker, that acted exactly like Sam Parker. The hologram was the closest thing it could give him to a body.

“You can do that?” Zhang asked. “Transfer yourself around like that?”

Parker blew air out of his mouth. “I don’t like to. But yeah, I can exist in any computer system that’s big enough to hold me. The system here has plenty of room. Jesus, buddy. What happened? You piss off a rabid dog?”

Zhang looked down at the wound on his leg. It was bright red, the flesh swollen where the laser had fused his skin back together. “It felt like exactly that. But it was—”

“An alien,” Petrova said, too quickly. “Something. Some kind of…”

“Alien,” Parker said, trying to make eye contact with her. “Like the one in your head?”

“No, not like that.”

The hatch-like door of the medical center sighed open and a tall figure made of bright green plastic stepped through. Rapscallion. The robot was currently wearing a body that looked human enough. He’d even 3D-printed a human face for himself, a kind of mask that hung just slightly askew on the front of his head.

“What did I miss?” he asked, closing the door behind him.

“Zhang got attacked by an alien, but not the kind of alien you’re thinking of,” Parker said.

“You have no idea what I’m thinking of,” Rapscallion pointed out.

“The gang’s all here,” Zhang said, with a little sigh. “Petrova, we really need to talk about this. About that thing, about what it was.”

She didn’t answer him for a while. She was too busy looking out of one of the medical center’s windows. Scanning the street. She lifted her good hand, then patted the air to ask for patience. They would have that talk, she was suggesting.

Just not yet.



They scanned the whole town, but Parker couldn’t find any traces of movement, any indication at all that the creature Zhang had stumbled on wasn’t alone. “Maybe there was just the one,” he tried. “Just one alien.”

Petrova shook her head. “Maybe.” She gave an annoyed shrug. “Okay, maybe. But if there are more of them, we have to be ready. Keep looking.”

Parker brought up three more holoscreens, rectangles of light that popped into existence in the air before her. Each one showed the feed from a camera located somewhere in the town. The main square was empty. Nothing moved there – the wind didn’t even stir the dust. Another screen showed the edge of town under the shadow of the mountains. That view showed a long stretch of road, with a street lamp mounted on a high pole every fifty meters. She saw a line of warehouses and work sheds with big rolling doors. Nothing in the image moved until a piece of debris, a wadded-up bit of packing material, it looked like, went skidding down the street, blown by the wind. The third camera showed the view from the top of the main administration building, the tallest structure in town. From up there the camera could see a broad expanse of prefabricated housing units, sitting in a perfect grid of narrow streets. Some units had their doors open, their window shutters retracted. Others looked like they’d been sealed up tight and locked.

Nothing in that view moved or changed. Not a thing.

“No colonists. No aliens,” he said. “Why don’t you look relieved?”

“Because I still don’t buy it. One alien couldn’t have…” She stopped and looked at him, as if judging whether he was okay hearing what she said next.

“Go on,” he told her.

“Ten thousand people lived here, back before they stopped talking to Earth. There were ten thousand people in this town. Now they’re all gone. I don’t think they just picked up and relocated one day. I’m assuming they’re all dead.”

“Jesus,” Parker said.

“We searched half this town and found exactly one of those creatures and zero colonists. How many more cameras are there? How many have we looked at so far?”

“There are… three hundred and twelve,” he said. “We’ve seen twenty-nine of them so far.” He didn’t need to check a screen for that information. Parker wasn’t really sitting next to her. Really he was inside the medical center’s computer system. It felt like he had just reached out with an invisible hand and grabbed that number. “You want to check them all? It’ll go faster if you just let me or Rapscallion do this.”

He expected her to say that she wanted to see them all with her own eyes. She used to want to do everything for herself, as if she didn’t trust anyone else to do it right. She’d changed, though. The Alexandra Petrova who’d been assigned to this mission had something to prove – that she wasn’t just her mother’s daughter, that she could actually do this job. That felt like a long time ago. He’d watched her evolve as a leader, learn how to delegate.

“Let the robot do it,” she said.

Rapscallion lifted one hand in the air to indicate he was on it.

Parker watched her walk over to the bed where Zhang lay asleep. The thing on his arm had finally given him some painkillers and they’d knocked him right out. Petrova reached down and touched his shoulder, gently so as not to wake him.

“When was the last time you ate something?” Parker asked her.

Her brow furrowed. “Do we even have any food? We didn’t bring anything with us.”

It was true. There hadn’t been a lot of time to plan their descent to the surface of Paradise-1. Parker had flown them down in a stolen shuttle that had not survived the landing. They’d walked away with the clothes on their backs, basically.

She sighed in annoyance. Ran her hand through her thick blonde hair. “That’s another thing we need to worry about. Zhang and I have to eat. We need water and—”

“Come on,” he said. He took her hand and led her up a stairway to the second floor of the building. Most of the level was taken up with private rooms for long-term care. They were hardly luxurious, but they could have some privacy up there. There was also a small kitchen, since any patients staying at the medical center would need to eat. The fresh food there had all spoiled, but there were still some boxes of shelf-stable noodle soups and broths. He tore the lid off a cup of ramen, and its integral heating unit soon had it bubbling. He stirred in a flavor packet with a plastic spoon and handed her the cup.

She looked at the noodles. Then at his hands. She seemed surprised. “How are you… Hard light?” she asked.

He grinned. He knew why she looked so surprised. As a hologram, he shouldn’t have been able to lift that plastic spoon – his hand should have passed right through it. Not in this place, though. There were special holoprojectors in the ceiling that allowed him to use artificial gravity beams to simulate the ability to touch and manipulate objects. It felt damned good to be able to touch things again, honestly. There had been hard-light projectors all over Artemis, but since the ship was destroyed, he’d been just an immaterial ghost. Finding those projectors had been like coming back from the dead.

He could touch things again. He could touch the people he cared about.

He watched as she set the cup on a table and started slurping up noodles. He watched the way her mouth moved, the grace in how she ate with just one working hand. What did those noodles taste like? he wondered. Were they too hot, too oily? Maybe she was hungry enough it didn’t matter. He remembered what it was like, being able to taste things.

She made appreciative noises as she gulped down the food. He grabbed the edge of a counter and squeezed until it started to creak. She didn’t seem to hear it.

“Oh, I’ve missed this,” she said, shoving the spoon into the empty cup and pushing it away.

“Me too,” he said.

“I mean the downtime. The moments when nothing is actively trying to kill me. Of course, when I actually do get to sit down for a second, that always means something terrible is about to happen.”

Parker ducked his head a little and looked up, as if he thought the ceiling might collapse. When it didn’t, they both laughed.

“Okay,” she said. “We need to get back to figuring out what we’re going to do. My original plan was we would land here and make contact with the colonists. Get an idea from them what we’re facing. That’s not an option, so we need to solve our problems on our own. As per usual. If we can find an ansible connection, we can send a signal back to Firewatch back on Earth, ask them to exfiltrate us, but that’ll take what? Weeks?”

“Two months,” Parker said. The fastest ship in the solar system couldn’t get here earlier. “But is that safe? Won’t the basilisk attack anyone who comes near this place?”

“Not anymore,” she said.

“Are you certain of that?”

Her jawline tensed enough that he could see it. She was grinding her teeth together. Was she talking to the parasite in her head? He’d never understood how that worked.

“As long as the basilisk gets what it wants, it’ll leave everyone alone,” she told him. “Which means we have work to do here, on the planet. We can’t just hunker down and wait for the rescue ship to arrive. Director Lang will want answers. Hopefully in two months we can find something she’ll want to hear. Assuming we live that long.” She tapped her palm and brought up her link to Rapscallion. “How’s that scan of the cameras coming?” she asked.

“Oh, I finished that three seconds after you gave me the assignment,” the robot replied. “There was nothing. So I went back and looked at stored camera footage, thinking there had to be something. What I found,” he said, “might surprise you.”

She looked over at Parker and raised an eyebrow.

The ghost could only shrug.



Rapscallion played the video for a third time, because apparently the first two viewings weren’t enough to make his point. It was right there in the corner of the screen. Didn’t humans look at metadata?

“The timecode,” he said.

The humans leaned forward, as if they needed to be close to the screen to read the flashing numbers there.

On the screen, people milled around the town’s central square. There was a monument there, marking where the first human being had set foot on Paradise-1. It was surrounded by a pleasant if simply designed fountain. It was clear the colonists enjoyed coming there on warm days to eat their lunch or just meet with friends and chat. In the distance, Rapscallion could see a number of colonists engaged in some kind of rhythmic calisthenics. As the video progressed, a group of children came racing through the view. Clearly they were playing some kind of game, rushing forward to tap each other on the shoulder then skip away. It was quite charming, honestly. It looked like the people here were happy and healthy.

Parker and Petrova stared at the screen like they’d never seen a video before.

Zhang struggled to sit up. His eyes were still half closed and he moved sluggishly, but he was awake. “Look at the date,” he said.

Of course Zhang was the first to