The Withering Sky
a sci-fi serial by Arthur H. Manners
The following story will evoke visceral reactions to anyone with fear of abandonment or the great unknown. A derelict ship, like the one in this story, contains thoughts of “what once was” in addition to “what happened here?” which leads to both mystery and dread. Proceed at your own risk.
This story originally appeared in Writers of the Future Volume 39. Due to length, it will be serialized here in 3 installments.
The Withering Sky
part 1 (beginning)
by Arthur H. Manners
I stepped aboard the derelict armed with only three scraps of information: it was something from the Kuiper Belt worth keeping a secret; against interplanetary law, my employers had towed it to Neptune’s primary Lagrangian point; and the rest of the story was beyond my pay grade.
Five of us had stumbled off the shuttle: me, Kitamura, Rogers, M’Bele and Vezzin. I huddled close to them by instinct. Out here, the sun was feeble, just another star. I’d spent long enough on Triton to find comfort in the azure glow of Neptune’s ammonia clouds, but until yesterday it had been just another reminder of my crappy life on the frontier. Now, the planet had reduced to a smudge the size of a pea, and I would have given a month’s pay to have it back.
We stood on the threshold of a cylindrical object almost five kilometres long and three kilometres in diameter. An object made of a material so unreflective that it consumed our shuttle’s searchlights. An unlit, apparently unmanned, hulk.
It didn’t look like any space station I’d ever seen. Maybe a hulled-out asteroid, though they tended to have at least some reflective terrain or protruding apparatus—not like this, perfectly smooth and symmetrical.
However, I recognised the desolation of this place. In the ten years since I fled Earth clutching my degree, I’d slummed around my share of old wrecks. I had always felt a kinship with derelicts: motes drifting through the void, catching spent wisps of cold starlight.
Apart from our footsteps, there was an unfamiliar silence. Only hard vacuum could be truly silent. Stations and spacecraft were always noisy, filled with working equipment and pipes, radio transmissions, the voices of virtual assistants and the patter of shoeless feet on module walls.
This place was so quiet that blood roared in my ears.
“Can anyone find a light?” said Kitamura. She was stocky, a military type with a no-nonsense face and an imperious tone.
We sounded off: nobody could see anything beyond the beams of their own helmet-torches.
“A control board, anything?”
“I can’t even find light panels,” said M’Bele, bearlike in silhouette. Tall even for a Martian, towering above us, me especially.
“Don’t be stupid. You’re just not looking. Who hired you?” said Vezzin, a small weaselly man.
The two of them hissed at one another as we fumbled around in the dark for several minutes. Rogers, a short, mousy-haired white woman, eventually found controls on the far wall. Strong light banks threw back the darkness.
We were in some kind of antechamber, much larger than I had expected. The room was almost ten metres high and thirty metres across—the cavernous space was almost entirely empty. I balked at the wastefulness. I had spent a lot of time on space stations designed to utilise every millimetre; every extra gram required more fuel to move around.
The walls were bare except for the lights, which were integrated into the wall’s surface. The material was faultless brushed metal, a far cry from the budget construction of the oceanic research station back on Triton. I had only seen something like it on luxury leisure craft.
It was either the most expensive tomb ever made, or it had been evacuated.
Alarm bells rang in my head. What had I got myself into. Forget a month’s pay—I’d have emptied my accounts to see Neptune’s clouds right now.
But I couldn’t go back to Triton. Even if I could get the shuttle to take me, I couldn’t station-hop forever. I owed money almost everywhere a ship could land.
Unable to stay, with nowhere to run. That was how I always ended up.
My only hope was to use this paycheque to crawl back to Earth and beg my parents to bail me out. Again. Then maybe they would let me stay in my old bedroom—still plastered with teenage heartthrobs—just long enough for me get my shit together.
I reviewed the information we had. We knew this place was a secret; there had been nothing about this on the news circuits. But nobody could have built this place in Commons territory without being noticed. It must have been constructed in trans–Neptunian space and then towed into the solar system—at biblical cost.
On approach, M’Bele had railed about the illegality of it floating here, radio dark and almost impossible to find.
While he babbled, Rogers had studied the positions of the sun and Neptune. She confirmed that we were floating at one of the Lagrange points, the spots around Neptune where its gravitational tug of war with the sun balanced out.
Beyond the fact that this place had an airlock, everything else we knew was summarised on a single piece of paper, tacked to the shuttle door.
Instructions
1. Do not study the exterior. Illumination risks detection.
2. Do not disturb unsecured areas.
3. Await and aid research team. Until then, Major Kitamura has command.
Violation of the above will result in forfeiture of payment.
The first line stuck in my mind. For whatever reason, they didn’t want anyone else to join the party. Not that there was much risk of accidental discovery. The object’s profile had been visible only by blocking starlight behind it—as much an absence, a negative, as a presence.
We didn’t have time to discuss the note, mostly because Vezzin had taken an instant dislike to M’Bele—whose measured tone could sound condescending. I bet Vezzin had been picked on as a kid. They had now resumed their bickering, almost nose to nose.
Kitamura tried to calm them, but succeeded only in adding to the growing noise.
I cut across them all. “Somebody else was here.”
A palette of supplies had been placed towards the rear of the antechamber. No boot prints were visible in the scrim of dust on the floor.
“They must have sent a drone ahead of us,” M’Bele said.
“If they have drones, why bother to send us?” Kitamura said.
“You really don’t know? And you’re in charge?” Vezzin sneered. He bared his teeth at the palette as though it might attack him.
Kitamura looked him up and down. She was at least a head taller than him, and I could see something in her stance that reminded me of a cobra before it struck.
“Why don’t we just find out why they sent us?” I said.
On top of the supply crate lay the same instructions sheet that was tacked to the shuttle door, with an addendum at the bottom underlined in red: Establish camp for inbound research team, ETA 2 days. Make no transmissions.
“Cut-and-dry babysit gig. Need-to-know basis. I can work with that.” Kitamura nodded.
“What, that’s it? You’re satisfied? Look at this thing!” said Vezzin.
“I’ve seen some strange places, but the jobs are always the same. This is how it goes: we set up camp, sit tight, carry the bags when the nerds arrive, and go home with the green.”
“Yeah. Sure,” I said, trying to sound more confident than I felt. I itched to jump back onto the shuttle. But opportunities to earn a quick profit were scarce beyond Titan, and I wasn’t going to throw away my last chance. I started unpacking the supplies.
Who knew why anybody wanted me for a cushy job like this. I had arrived at Bouvard Station expecting a briefing. Instead, I was peeled away from the other commuters by two burly men in plain clothes, and locked in stripped-down quarters with Kitamura and Rogers. When they finally came back, they promised answers, but instead we had been bundled into another shuttle with Vezzin and M’Bele. The autopilot took us out before we could protest.
The people running this outfit needed some sensitivity training. About thirty years’ worth might do the trick.
I tried to put it all out of my mind. I’d have crawled through shit soup in the sewers to get away from the frontier—to keep moving, keep running, the only thing I had ever been really good at.
###
Our alarm faded, but a vague dread remained. We talked while we unpacked the palette, filling in the blanks, relieved for something to do that made a little noise.
Everyone but Kitamura had been rerouted from Triton; she had the unmistakable bearing of a combat vet, and the musculature of somebody who rarely left Earth.
Rogers had been looking for extremophile marine life in Triton’s oceans, though she seemed to know a lot of astronomy for a biologist.
M’Bele was a financial analyst and part-time psychotherapist, more than bemused to find himself on a paramilitary dark-op.
Vezzin was an engineer who also owned a ten-shuttle freight company, which probably meant he was in deep with the black market. I was in enough debt to recognise someone taking a job with no questions asked, just to stay afloat.
Adding my own profession—surveying caverns and crevasses around Triton’s icy crust—made a team with no obvious complementary skills. There were no more clues in the palette to explain why we had been picked.
We sorted through some regulation clothes and selected a wardrobe each, set up chemical toilets in case the one in the shuttle blocked, and even found a collapsible shower. I hadn’t expected to see one in deep space, but I hadn’t expected gravity here either.
“This whole thing must be spinning fast to simulate weight like this,” said Kitamura.
Rogers arched an eyebrow. “The rotation is the whole reason the airlock is at the end-cap of . . . whatever this thing is. Don’t tell me none of you noticed the shuttle spinning us up on approach. That was a long burn we made.”
Kitamura bristled. “Nobody told me you were a physicist. Thought you were some kind of marine biological whatever.”
Robert shrugged. “Surprise. Anyway, the fuel required to spin up something this massive must have cost a fortune.”
She seemed more interested than unnerved, which unnerved me.
“Who would pay for something like that? There’s nothing here,” Vezzin said.
“Nothing in this room, no,” Rogers said.
We all squirmed in discomfort at the implication: it had been impossible to get a sense of scale from outside, but the object was no doubt far larger than this chamber.
By the time we ate, any comfort from the supplies had dried up. We were back to staring at the walls. The tension ramped up when M’Bele and Vezzin went back to sniping at one another.
We had been aboard only a few hours, but nobody objected when Kitamura suggested we get some sleep. There were one-person tents in the supplies, which at first seemed ridiculous, given the absence of wind or rain or chill, but we decided to put them up for privacy.
I crawled inside—and paused. A pressure released in my forehead, one I hadn’t been aware of carrying. The feeling spread back through my head in a wave of relief. I poked my head out through the flap, looked around at the chamber walls. The pressure returned, at the limit of my perception, a tiny flower of discomfort blossoming between my eyes.
The others all had their heads poking from their own tents, brows furrowed. When Vezzin saw me watching, he withdrew.
“We must be more tired than we thought,” Kitamura said.
I lay down and tried not to probe at my forehead. I guessed the effect was some agoraphobic response after years spent swaddled by tight spaces. Our employers must have known it would happen; why else include tents.
For a few hours, the silence felt more comfortable. I barely slept anyway.
###
In the morning I crawled out unrefreshed and made sure I got to the shower first. Everyone muttered in their tents about headaches. I had hoped the water might ease the stabbing pain between my eyes, but it didn’t pan out. The sourness lurking between M’Bele and Vezzin soon returned.
As I padded back to my tent, Kitamura and I shared a look that said men.
Kitamura ordered them to give it a rest, but it was clear that they weren’t going to stop. She tried a new tactic. “We should explore, see what we’re dealing with—but you two stay away from one another.”
“The instructions say to not to disturb anything,” said Vezzin.
“We’ll just look. I’m not going to sit here without making sure we’re secure.”
Rogers was already preparing to head out. “Sooner we take a look, the sooner we’ll know the situation. This place could be a giant vat of nuclear waste, for all we know.”
“You don’t have to sound so excited about nuclear waste,” I said.
“What do you mean?” Rogers gave me a quizzical look, but the smile on her face lingered.
“Well, I’m not going anywhere. I’m not risking my pay to satisfy your curiosity,” said Vezzin.
I had a retort ready, but Kitamura shook her head. “No transmissions,” she said.
Vezzin glowered at her.
We left him there in his tent, and split into two teams: Kitamura and M’Bele, and me and Rogers. Beyond the doorway leading from the antechamber, a wide corridor headed off in either direction.
The corridor was dark when we first stepped into it, but then lights winked on in sequence, spreading out in a wave from where we stood. The corridor looked like it ran for kilometres in either direction. Despite the object’s size, we should have been able to see the end of the corridor, or where it bent out of sight. Instead, our view just petered out to a haze.
“Vaporised coolant?” I said. Thoughts of suffocation or poisoning shot through my head.
“Might just be damp in here. Mist,” Rogers said.
Each team headed in a different direction.
I felt better at once. It had always soothed me to be on the move. A mysterious lure had hung at the edge of my perception all my life, and chasing it was the only salve for the itch. Sometimes it dulled enough for me to make some fleeting caricature of a life. Sooner or later I always left, hoping maybe that nameless something lay around the next bend—maybe my destiny, maybe just an antidote to my lousy personality.
Rogers and I walked in silence for only a few minutes before she stopped and looked over her shoulder. Frowning, she got out her radio. “Kitamura, check in.”
“We’re here. Found something already?”
“No, the opposite. We’ve lost sight of you.”
She was right. Incredulous, I looked back the way we had come and saw nothing but empty corridor. We hadn’t walked more than half a kilometre.
“Same here. We can’t see you.” Kitamura’s tone was matter-of-fact, but her audible gasp had carried over the radio.
I heard M’Bele curse in the background.
“You didn’t turn any corners?” I said.
“No. You?” Kitamura said.
“No.”
“Vezzin, you still with us?”
“What?” Vezzin barked.
“Could you stand in the doorway? The antechamber is halfway between us. We’re having trouble gauging distances.”
Vezzin sighed. “Fine, I’m here.”
I couldn’t see him.
My mind reeled. I tried to imagine the geometry that would explain our lines of sight, but the effort almost gave me vertigo. I turned away to hide my reaction from Rogers, facing the mist.
“Well?” Vezzin said.
A long pause stretched out before Kitamura said, “Never mind.”
“Maybe it’s an optical illusion. Or we’ve come farther than we thought,” I said.
“We’ll deal with it later. We still need to know what’s in here.”
We pushed on. I kept glancing back, hoping M’Bele and Kitamura might reappear.
“Why are you smiling?” I said.
“I’m not,” Rogers said.
“You were definitely smiling just now.”
She shrugged. “It’s been a while since I’ve seen something really interesting.”
“Uh huh.”
I wished I’d gone with Kitamura.
A little farther on, doorways appeared on both sides of the corridor. Each door led to a space at least as large as the antechamber. We tracked back and forth along the corridor, counting them. After finding the twelfth doorway and maybe glimpsing a thirteenth ahead, we headed back to the first.
M’Bele called in—he and Kitamura had found a similar number of rooms on their end. We agreed to proceed with caution.
Rogers led the way into the first room. It seemed to be a copy of the antechamber, though it was filled with large shipping containers, stacked high and arranged in a grid. I couldn’t get over the vast inefficiency of space. It was the kind of behemoth spacecraft drawn by a child, or a science-fiction writer with no respect for common sense.
We followed the walkways between the stacks until we hit the back of the room, but I spent most of the time massaging my forehead.
“What’s wrong?” Rogers said.
“The light’s all over the place. It’s giving me headaches.”
“Seems fine to me. You probably just need rest.”
We considered trying to open one of the containers, but we had no equipment. Kitamura and M’Bele radioed in that they had found something similar. “Just boxes and more boxes,” M’Bele said.
His voice seemed to echo over the line. I massaged my head some more.
Rogers grew still. “Do you hear that?”
“Hear what?” Kitamura said.
This time, I heard it too. Kitamura’s voice came twice—once over the radio, and again from somewhere to my left.
Rogers nodded. “We must be close to you.”
“What?”
“The corridor runs in a circle. It’d explain why we lost sight of you.”
“Doesn’t explain why I didn’t see any curves,” M’Bele said.
“Any better ideas? Stay where you are, we’ll work our way over to you.”
We weaved through the walkways, playing Marco Polo over the radio. But every time we came to a wall and they sounded off, the echo came from behind us. We crossed the room twice before we gave up.
“We should head back. We need to think this over,” Kitamura said. She and M’Bele got off the circuit.
But the voices kept coming, now from more than one direction.
“Echo through the air ducts?” I muttered.
Rogers grinned—the slightly unhinged kind. It didn’t help my nerves.
We hurried back to the antechamber. Vezzin didn’t even bother to wave.
At least things have been boring here.
Kitamura and M’Bele arrived not long after. They paled when we explained what happened. “We heard something too,” Kitamura said.
We talked it over, but Vezzin scoffed at us for letting our nerves get to us. M’Bele didn’t rise to it, which made Vezzin dog him all the more. In seconds they were circling one another.
Their spate was annoying as ever, but killed our nervous momentum. When they were done, nobody wanted to talk, so we turned in for the night.
I felt stupid as soon as I got near my tent. What did I care about this place, anyway. The job was simple—sit on the nest until the eggheads arrived.
I crawled inside, and a wave of relief flooded my head. Starting from my forehead and sweeping back, as though somebody had plucked a wad of iron wool from inside my skull.
I had been living with the discomfort all day and barely noticed.
Again, sleep refused to come. I had plenty of practice sleeping in noisy environments, but I had never experienced this kind of ringing silence. I could hear the others’ every snore, exhalation and sigh. There were times when I could have sworn I heard them blinking, as they too lay awake.
###
Next morning, everyone looked haggard, except maybe Rogers—before she started squinting.
I knew what that squint meant. The moment I left my tent, the pressure returned for me too, a vague throbbing between my eyes. The pain was unsettling; worse was how quickly it faded from my attention. If I concentrated, I could sense it, but otherwise I felt only general malaise.
Nobody felt like exploring. The research crew would be arriving today; they could worry about what did and didn’t make sense. I was happy to take a back seat and carry the bags until I had the money in-hand. Then I was gone.
But it became clear that waiting even a few hours was beyond us. Big as the antechamber was, it wasn’t big enough to keep cabin fever at bay. Given M’Bele and Vezzin’s feud, and the weird pressure in our heads, it was clear we needed distraction.
Kitamura took Rogers this time, M’Bele came with me, and Vezzin stayed behind again. I was glad on all counts, and even happier to be on the move. Everything was more manageable when I was moving.
In the hallway, we tested how far apart we could get before we lost sight of one another. I made an involuntary noise the first time Kitamura disappeared. She stood around a hundred metres away, in full view, with what seemed like at least a kilometre of corridor stretching away behind her. Then she took one step back and vanished.
She took a step forward and reappeared. It was like she was becoming transparent rather than stepping around any kind of corner.
Strung out in a line, we found that the vanishing distances between us were inconsistent. There was no discernible trend. We swapped positions and were even more disquieted to learn that the distances changed depending on who stood where, as though the horizon was personal to each of us. The only thing we could agree on was that none of us could see another person farther than two hundred metres away.
Shaken, we regrouped and inspected the storage room Rogers and I had reached the day before. No voices this time. Just containers, which we found had no discernible hinges or handles, nor any other sign of how they might open.
We trooped back to the antechamber, relieved that the research team would be arriving any moment. But when we got back there was no sign of another shuttle. Vezzin had been trying to raise them on the private radio channel for hours.
“Could just be late,” I said.
“Could be they’re screwing with us,” Vezzin snapped.
“If this were any other job I wouldn’t care, but after what we just saw . . .” I said to Kitamura.
Kitamura grunted.
“Saw what?” Vezzin said. He grew skittish when we briefed him on what happened in the corridor. “What a dud assignment. This place is loony. Let’s get out of here.”
“What, just cut and run? I would have expected more pep from a respectable businessman,” M’Bele said.
“Never you mind my business!”
“I suggest you save that energy for the debt collectors waiting for you back at Bouvard. I hear they like to play with their food.”
“Screw you, you dog-faced turd-eater.”
“Enough,” Kitamura warned. She glanced at Vezzin. “The most likely scenario is that they’re delayed and need to maintain radio silence. We just have to sit tight. But I’m not doing a job with anyone who isn’t all in. Show of hands. Who wants to leave?”
I tried to picture finding another way of buying my ticket Earth-side, but M’Bele’s comment about debt collectors had stung. All that waited for me on Triton was a bottle of shine and a knifing on a quiet maintenance level.
M’Bele looked uncertain, but didn’t move. Rogers's face was a picture of disinterest. Vezzin had half raised his hand, but dropped it with a scowl when he saw he was alone.
“Okay, then,” Kitamura said.
###
We found the mural on the fourth day. Kitamura and I entered the seventh room leftward of the antechamber and I screamed.
The rear wall was alive, writhing and dancing. Reaching for me.
I fell back into Kitamura and flailed.
“Wait!” she said. The iron in her voice slowed me. She held my shoulders until I stopped struggling. “It’s just a painting.”
She was right, in that it was just forms on a wall.
She was wrong, in that it was no painting.
We stared at it for over a minute before either of us spoke, but by then I hadn’t even started to process it.
“What are we looking at?” Kitamura said.
I shook my head. I had the simultaneous impression of movement and a static image. Travelling in space offered plenty of conflicting sensory input, but this was a whole other level.
“You said it was a painting,” I said.
“Did I?” She frowned.
It was obviously nothing, some reflections of exotic ink. But a more animal part of me glimpsed a boiling broth of elemental forms, crawling over one another for primacy.
“What do you see?” Kitamura said. Her voice was even, but she took a small step back.
“Nothing.” I had to bite back: Everything.
We went to get Rogers and M’Bele. They had the same reactions, though Rogers wanted to take samples.
“Don’t go near it,” M’Bele said.
“Why? Look at it. It’s remarkable,” Rogers said.
“I don’t like it.”
Rogers rolled her eyes. She looked to Kitamura. “Well?”
Kitamura considered. “We’re not supposed to disturb anything. Do you even have equipment to analyse it?”
“No, but I’m not going to cower and put garlic under my door. Let’s just take a closer look. We’ll learn something.”
Kitamura nodded after a long pause.
Rogers started forward. I reached out to restrain her before I knew what I was doing. Kitamura and M’Bele did the same. Rogers looked bewildered at where the three of us had seized her.
I tried to focus on her face, but the wall snagged my attention. For a moment I could have sworn I saw a cartoon of all of us, outlined in black: a five-year-old’s drawing of four people with big down-turned lips.
“It’s just a painting,” I said. “It’s just that . . .”
“I don’t like it either,” Kitamura said. She looked embarrassed and cleared her throat. “For all we know, this place is a weapons lab. We don’t have protective gear. New policy—until we have an idea of what we’re dealing with, we don’t even go near anything. Especially in this room.”
For the first time since arriving, I slept well. The figures in the mural had moved too fast to make out, but in my memory they slowly unspooled, and returned in my dreams to slow-dance above me.
—to be continued—
Come back for part 2 next time!
Part 2 (the middle)
Meet the author:
Arthur H. Manners is a British writer with a background in physics and data science. He recently encountered the underside of life when he ended up stranded for hours in Helsinki Airport, alone—except for a snack shop clerk who looked as bewildered to be there as he was. His short fiction is published/forthcoming in Dreamforge Anvil, Drabblecast and Writers of the Future Vol. 39. In 2023, "The Withering Sky" received the Writers of the Future award. Arthur sometimes fails at social media on Twitter (@a_h_manners) and Instagram (docmanners). Find his newsletter over at arthurmanners.com.
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