Short Story: Coming Home to Vancouver Station

Hello, folks! Today’s piece is a little sci-fi horror story I’ve cooked up. A young soldier finds himself somewhere shockingly familiar, but nothing is quite the way it seems…

All he knew was that this mission had gone disastrously wrong. He was lying prone on the floor of a tunnel, somewhere deep beneath the planet’s surface, the heavy carapace of his armor suffocating him, his plasma rifle sitting useless on the ground just out of reach. Darkness swirled all around, broken only by muzzle flashes and the sweeps of helmet lights. People were shooting, somewhere.

He knew Marks and Connolly were already dead. But who were Marks and Connolly?

He was the commander—he had to think! He had to remember. Those creatures had ambushed them, coming out of nowhere—

He reached again for his rifle. But as he extended his hand, the weapon moved that much further, pulled away on invisible puppet strings.

He remembered bulging eyes and membranous, grublike bodies, crawling through holes in the wall—

Segmented legs tapping on bare stone—

They were everywhere, and they were talking to him—

He opens his eyes again to smooth, polished wood. He’s lying on his stomach, one cheek pressed against a hardwood floor, his armor gone and his weapon nowhere in sight. It’s quiet. The air is fresh. He rises to his knees, then his feet, and he knows immediately where he is.

He’s on Vancouver Station, in the living room of the house he grew up in. His father sold the place two years ago, but regardless, everything is as it was back in high school, when his family was all together. Simpler and happier times. Before the Academy, and the war against the Tarback.

He’s distantly aware that he’s supposed to be fighting for his life in an alien tunnel. Not here. Still he’s mesmerized, taking in his new surroundings, letting memories come flooding back.

He was a lieutenant! He was at war! His men were counting on him—

Tall windows look out back, towards the station’s faraway central mirror, where sunlight streams in from interplanetary space and fills this miniature world with light. Inside, a pair of long, flat couches face a television in the corner. There’s a coffee table, a pane of glass almost seeming to levitate atop thin legs of lunar aluminum. It’s tidier than he remembers—just an unlit candle in the center, not the magazines, tablets, and drinking mugs that always cluttered it.

He looks to his left. There’s the dining room, where a long wooden table is already set with placemats and porcelain platters, and beyond it the kitchen, visible through an arch of plaster wall. He turns back to the living room; a spread of familiar items have appeared on the coffee table, exactly the magazines, tablets, and drinking mugs he expected. He walks over and picks up the August 2106 issue of National Geographic, its cover featuring suited astronauts in a red, rocky landscape, under the headline: “New Discoveries on Proxima B.”

Mom used to read those with him. She started when he was a little kid, and continued well past the age when he would have been embarrassed to admit it to his friends. God, he misses her. And Dad. They’ve been sending him video messages, but when he’s on campaign, waging a war for the survival of the species, there’s precious little time to stay in touch with family.

He was passing down a tunnel—dragged, perhaps, or maybe he was walking on his own two feet, though certainly not of his own volition. Strange lights flickered somewhere close by. Human forms walked beside him. Through holes in the walls he thought he saw glimpses of those creatures…

He steps into the kitchen. On the counter is a tray full of scones, tidy white triangles studded with blueberries. His sister Beth must have made them; she loved to bake. He picks one up, finding it still warm from the oven, and takes a bite—then he scarfs the rest down, letting crumbs fall to the hardwood floor. It’s been too long since he had real food, not rubbery cubes of combi-protein.

He had to remember! He had to hold on, even as they tried to pry it away from him—

He’s thoroughly out of uniform. He has no shoes on, just socks. And instead of his composite carapace armor, complete with newly minted lieutenant’s bars, he wears shorts and a green t-shirt bearing the seal of the Terran Strike Force. Military service was always a dream of his. Now at long last, he’s gotten through the Academy, earned his commission, and made his parents proud. He’s a real officer, entrusted to lead Earth’s fighting men and women.

Isn’t he? Perhaps not, since he’s standing here in his socks. There’s a dream fading quickly from his mind, and he has already forgotten the details.

Anyway. Strange how empty the house seems. He leaves the kitchen and climbs the spiral staircase to the second floor, feet thumping on carpet.

“Hello?” he calls out. He’s on the upstairs gallery, where he runs his hand along the smooth wooden railing. “Anyone home?”

Nobody answers. Mom and Dad must be at work. But Beth must have been around to take those scones out of the oven a few minutes ago. He wouldn’t expect his sister to be in class, anyway—that magazine was dated to August 2106, so it must be summer break, just before his last year of high school. Not that summer is much more than a metaphor aboard a space station.

There’s a thump in the direction of his parents’ room—the second door on the right, already open. He goes in with slow, careful steps. The carpet is pristine and the sheets on the bed are expertly made.

There’s that thump again, coming from the bathroom. He hears a tapping noise. Hard legs skittering on tile.

They took him from tunnel to tunnel to tunnel, somewhere deep, far deeper than the intelligence briefings had even hinted this complex was supposed to extend. The passageways were only ever a little taller than his head, and the only light was a dim glow from some kind of wet, knotted substance growing across the walls. Fungus, probably. And always the rock was honeycombed with hundreds of smaller tunnels, each a foot or two wide, where those spider-legged grub-things kept constant watch.

He peeks into his parents’ bathroom and finds nothing out of the ordinary, save for a dripping faucet. A quick turn of the knob takes care of it.

He heads back out, down the hall, to his own bedroom. Already he catches a familiar whiff of dirty laundry and unwashed sheets. The moment he swings open the door, his heart flutters, because everything really is the way it used to be—perfect.

There’s his bed against the window on the far wall, sheets and comforter tangled up inside each other; there’s his desk, one half hosting a computer station, the other half strewn with papers he’d never bothered to clean up after the end of the school year; there are shelves all about, some for clothes, some for books, a few for meticulously painted models of Strike Force warships. Posters of movies and space missions crowd the walls. On a high windowsill is a hologram, flickering blue and slowly spinning, which shows Earth and its moon.

He walks through, wonderstruck. This was his own space, molded around his own interests—something he’s never had since the day he took that shuttle off-station to the Academy. His life now is a succession of bunks and sleeping bags and cold, hard patches of ground, with nowhere he can truly call home. But this… this is home. Never mind that his father sold this house years ago, and his room should be filled with some stranger’s things.

Long ago he played here with toy ships, enacting fantastic, far-flung adventures in metal and plastic. When he was older, he whiled away the hours with computer games. And of course, there were all the late nights—imposed by his parents’ high expectations—which he spent hunched over his desk, toiling on some school paper or other. How many times did he look up and find that the clock read well past midnight?

He sits down on his bed. The mattress is soft, almost decadently comfortable. He’s remembering one late night in particular, rather more fondly than the others. He lost his virginity in this room.

Clara. He still misses her. In the Strike Force he’s had his share of hookups, but she remains his first and truest love. They started dating in junior year, when he worked up the courage to ask her out to the homecoming dance; for a while, they attempted the adolescent game of sneaking around under their parents’ noses, until finally he had a lucky day home alone, and they got to seal the deal.

He looks over the empty bed beside him, remembering what she looked like laying there. Red hair. Square-rimmed glasses. A broad, pale, spade-shaped face. She was always the bookish type, far more than he was. She wrote novels, which she dreamed of one day getting published, and she was always asking interesting questions, about which she had interesting thoughts.

She would have been so poorly suited to the rigors of military life. Indeed, it was his decision to go to the Academy down on Earth, and hers to attend a private university on one of the other stations, that spelled the end of their time together. They tried to make it work for a year, before she put them both out of their misery and ended things over a video message. He has no idea what she’s been up to since.

This is the past, all right. But it’s a lonely place.

He gets to his feet, wanders back downstairs, pokes his nose in the kitchen again. The house is as derelict as ever. He notices, though, that his sister’s baking tray has replenished its original number of scones.

The narrow tunnel ended without warning, opening up into a chamber too broad and too murky for him to see more than a suggestion of the walls. Towering arches curved like ribs, receding into the darkness, concealing shadowed alcoves and the gaping mouths of tunnels. And in the air hung something foul, the foetid musk of all-too-vibrant life.

As a kid he’d had nightmares of being dragged down to some grey and remote place beneath the Earth. This was that place. Worse, nobody was dragging him—he had walked there himself. His legs moved with direction not his own, and the most he could achieve, fighting back during whatever intermittent patches of consciousness remained, were jerking twitches in his knees.

He approached a ledge. Narrow steps led down from there, curving along the side of that vast central cavity, and at the bottom he could just barely see them—thousands of them, crawling atop smooth stone terraces, interspersed with a scattering of human shapes, and the tall, furry, muscular forms of Tarback.

He could express no more than a grunt in protest as his treacherous feet showed him the way down.

He’s outside now, walking the streets of his old neighborhood. The modern, well-kept houses around him are just as vacant as his own. There are no couples strolling down the sidewalks, no autocars whirring atop smooth grey concrete, no kids with water-guns marauding through the cul-de-sacs. Dogs do not bark and birds do not chirp. The only things alive in this place are trees and hedges and bright green grass, all immaculately trimmed.

To either side, the town curves up and away, land and water receding into the distance until they meet again far overhead, on the opposite side of the station. A whole world hangs above his head. He can see the curves of highways joining like tributaries, and the gleaming spires of office buildings plunging towards him. Towards one end of this enormous tube shines the familiar blaze of sunlight, reflected off the central mirror, where shutters open and close to mark the passage of the days.

This is the life he grew up with—a rotating cylinder three miles across and ten long. When he went away for school, it was Earth that seemed the aberration, with its boundless flat horizons and frighteningly empty sky. Home was Vancouver Station, floating out past the orbit of the Moon.

There’s a nature park several blocks from his house. He can already see it, a pair of steep, forested hills jutting beyond pine trees and sloped roofs clad in solar panels. He and Clara would go up there sometimes to watch the shutters close for the night. He starts in that direction, his footsteps loud on the pavement without any other sounds to contest them. First he heads down Armstrong Street, before a right turn on Wildflower—

He hears something. A rustling of leaves to his left, coming from some low magnolias at one corner of a lush and terraced yard. He steps closer, investigating—and what stares back from between the branches has bulging, soulless eyes, spider legs, a fleshy body pulsating with fluid.

He was nearly at the bottom of the stairs when he finally regained control of one leg, sabotaging the step he was in the process of taking. That was enough to send him careening off the edge. It was about ten feet down; he made a rough landing, and pain flared up his leg—enough pain to snap him out of whatever hold they had on him. He was conscious again.

He was conscious!

Even as he lay on his side atop smooth black basalt, ankle throbbing, he remembered everything. The planet; the mission; the men and women of his unit. Terran Intelligence had thought this remote desert world harbored a new species, allied with the Tarback, and the Strike Force had gone in to investigate. His unit was the third to descend beneath the surface, after the first two disappeared without a trace.

He tried rising to his feet, only for his broken ankle to buckle immediately. They were all around him. Closing in. Pinning him against the wall. Silent, despite their numbers, the only noise they made the tapping of legs and the rubbing together of close-packed flesh.

On their own, the alien creatures looked neither strong enough nor large enough to overpower a man; they had help, though. There were the bestial Tarback, something perhaps like oversized, bipedal dogs, and there were humans among them, too—some of his very own troopers, entrusted to his care, now enslaved by something else. Growths of writhing flesh had sprouted along their necks and faces; he recognized Private Jenkins, or what had been Jenkins, and saw that one of his eyes was gone, popped from its socket by tissue growing underneath.

He himself remained unaltered, at least physically. While the aliens had entered his mind, their mutations had not consumed him yet—or, for whatever reason, he had been spared.

There had to be some way to fight his way out. His gun was long gone, dropped on the floor of a tunnel somewhere very far overhead, but as he felt around his belt, he realized not all was lost. In their arrogance, they had never taken his combat knife. He unsheathed the blade just as the aliens and his former comrades were reaching down towards him.

“Stay back!” he said, slashing across Jenkins’ knee. Mutation or not, he didn’t want to hurt any of what had been his people—only to protect himself. Jenkins dropped to the ground without even a whimper of pain.

“Back!” he shouted again. It was of no avail. At least five of them were on top of him, hands grappling him, and not even a combat knife could even those odds. A clawed Tarback hand wrenched it from his grip soon enough.

He was enclosed, smothered beneath flesh both human and alien. They grabbed hold of his limbs, lifting him by arms and legs, hauling him along despite his desperate thrashings. They handled his ankle roughly; he screamed. His back was to the ground, his face upturned to the sunless gulfs overhead, and there was no telling how high the darkness went.

He supposed this was it. What did death feel like? Empty blackness, probably. He hoped that would be his end, rather than becoming like one of the people who now carried him to his fate—lobotomized, subordinated to an alien will. But he doubted he would have the luxury of choice.

He felt their voices again, sounding deep between his ears. No words. No meaning, at least not that he could discern. His captors lowered him roughly to the ground, keeping firm hold of his limbs. Just beyond his head, out of sight, chitinous legs tapped on stone.

“Please. No,” he said, not that anyone would notice or care. His eyes were squeezed shut. “Please.”

He felt warm, foul breath. Liquid dribbled on his cheek. He knew what was just above him, and he dared not look.

He’s with Clara again. They sit together atop a mossy boulder by a broad, trickling creek, dipping their feet in the water, enjoying the cool of the shade of the broad branches overhead. This used to be their secret place. They would linger here for hours and hours, talking, kissing, sometimes just holding each other, without a word.

“I’ve missed this,” she says. She kicks her bare feet slowly in the stream.

“Yeah. I’ve missed this, too.”

She looks so lovely today. Elegant and cultured—square-rimmed glasses, green blouse, pearl necklace—yet at the same time, brimming with warmth—red hair, bright blue eyes, a pure and radiant smile. She is the crown jewel of this artificial world. For her presence alone, he would have chosen no other home than Vancouver Station, and if one day she left for some remote corner of the galaxy, he would follow her there.

“Do you ever feel…” She gives him a coy half-smile. “That we’re perfect together?”

“Yeah.”

He has his head turned towards her, transfixed in wonder. Clara leans in a littler closer.

“This is the way it was meant to be. For both of us. You don’t need to be afraid anymore.”

“I’m not afraid.”

His gaze remains on her. The forest is quiet around them, save for that steady trickle of water in the creek. Beyond it, there’s nothing—no human voices in the park, no rush of cars on the motorways. It’s just him and Clara, in their perfect little universe. They have the station all to themselves.

“We have a great future together,” she goes on. “You never needed to fight this war. It’s senseless for us to fight, when our races complement each other so perfectly. The Tarback have thrived under our guidance. Humanity will, too.”

He smiles and nods, never looking anywhere but those magnificent green eyes of hers. Shouldn’t they be blue? No matter. He could dissolve in their depths and be forever happy. “You’re beautiful.”

“I want you to go back up to the surface. You’ll tell your people you were ambushed by the Tarback, and you were the only survivor. Can you do that for me?”

He nods. “Anything for you.”

“We’ll be gone when you come back. We have our ways of disappearing. But don’t you worry—I’ll still be with you, everywhere you go. You’ll return to the Strike Force, and I’ll be right there. Always watching over you. Guiding you.”

“I love you.”

Clara smiles that wondrous smile of hers, and an electric thrill passes through him.

“I love you, too. We’ll always be together.”

She draws him into an embrace, guiding his lips to hers, and they kiss. She’s so warm. Something wriggles inside her mouth, but he doesn’t mind.

Really appreciate y’all for reading this one. Comment below if you’d like to give any feedback, and subscribe (below or to the right) if you’d like to see more of my work. Every week I post new articles on space travel, book and movie reviews, and exclusive short stories—don’t miss out!

Note: The cover image for this post is AI-generated.