Tyche's Crown by Richard Parry

Author:Richard Parry [Parry, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mondegreen
Published: 2018-01-07T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

SHE COULD NEVER remember being so thirsty.

She couldn’t remember her name.

Darkness. Not total darkness, not the smothering of the womb, but close to it. A low, ruddy glow infused the room around her. Everything looked like it had been soaked in blood and left to dry, the wind chapping at it until it became close to black. Close to dead.

So very thirsty.

Across from her was a man. He looked familiar, and she knew she had been on a voyage with him. A comrade, at her side, to help her through. She couldn’t remember his name either. The man was awake, his eyes open, swiveling in their sockets, roaming, glinting in the red light. She thought he looked—

Pain/terror/run/trapped/run/fear.

—scared, frightened of something he’d seen, or experienced. Or perhaps something that had not yet come to pass. The man was encased around his arms and legs and a part of his torso in a chunky material, something that looked like globs of resin or fat or growing tumors. She was sure that wasn’t what had made him so frightened though. On top of his head was a thing that looked like a spider, an oversized daddy longlegs, with a wide, thin body and legs like needles. They were so thin they were hard to see in the red light. It was poised over the man’s head, those thin, terrible legs holding it upright.

Even that wouldn’t be the thing that would make this man scared. She was sure he’d faced down horrors before. This man had done things that would make normal people run screaming. No, a spider on his face wasn’t the thing that made him scared. It was that the top of his skull was gone, his brain visible to her in the low light, and the spider was walking over the spongey material. Inserting a long limb here, another there. There was a halo of blood around his skull where the bone had been removed. There was no sign of the missing part of his skull, no pile of hair and bone on the ground, just … nothing. Half his head was gone, and he wasn’t getting it back.

It had been eaten by something, she was sure of it. She wasn’t sure what, though.

That was what made him scared: that he was being analyzed, taken apart, and that there didn’t look to be a way back from it. With a good med bay—

A starship. You know the smiling face of luck.

—and enough time, you could grow a man’s head back, or put a metal plate over the top. Here, in the—

Hard black. An asteroid. A ship made of stones.

—place they were, there was no chance he would make it. They didn’t even have a helmet between them. There was no escape. No, he was a lab animal, and they’d work on his body until there was nothing left. She didn’t know why they started with his brain. Was it a mercy? End the person and then start on the meat?

He was a … friend of someone she knew, someone dear to her.

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