Red Shift

By Michael Teasdale

The captain brought the rubber stamp down on the document and frowned at the blood-red imprint.

“This makes grim reading,” he sighed. His stare burrowed into the chief inspector’s face. “You found no evidence of survivors?”

From across the desk, he watched Holzfäller fold her hands across her lap. “No trace, sir.”

His eyes narrowed.  She’s as cold and unreadable as ever.

Biting his lip, he pushed the maddening report to one side. “What about surveillance footage? Red Shift was an experienced outfit. They’ve performed the supply drop countless times since the planet was terraformed. The Oma is a retirement community, Holzfäller! Are you telling me that over three thousand senior citizens just wandered off into the night? That the planet just swallowed up the supply team?”

“There were gaps in the surveillance. Two days of footage wiped. The first a week before Red Shift made planetfall. The second following their arrival. By the time we arrived to investigate…”

The chief inspector leaned back in the chair, as if suddenly distracted. The captain tracked her vision to the reinforced glass dome that framed the ceiling. From outside, the twin moons of Deimos and Phobos, peered back at them through the inky void.

Grumbling, he swiped at the air. A screen crackled into life, and the colony’s insignia spiralled into view.

“Computer,” he growled, “play last recorded footage, pre-planetfall.”

An image slid into focus, and for several minutes, the captain pinched and prodded at the projection, watching the retired colonists, the bedrock of the colony’s early pioneer days, shuffling around their community, eating, exercising, living mundane everyday lives. He lingered briefly on one scene–an elderly couple feeding the birds in the geo-dome. He thought about his own grandparents, long departed, and almost smiled when the old lady looked around conspiratorially and pecked her husband on the cheek.

Holzfäller’s monotone drawl broke the spell. “If it helps, sir, I personally sifted through this footage. The answers lie in what is missing, not what remains.”

The captain bristled at her tone. “Computer,” he called out, “play next available footage.”

“Sir, there’s nothing you’re going to find that—”

“Damn it, Holzfäller! I need to see this! People don’t just vanish. There has to be some clue!”

Again, he watched the scenes play out, feeling the gaze of his chief inspector burning though the translucent projection, digging at his authority, questioning his judgement.

Nothing. The same people going about their business. Some he recognised from the first footage. Old astronauts hitting the treadmills in the gym. Folks having lunch in the canteen. An old woman looking around conspiratorially and…

“Computer! Freeze playback!”

The captain leaned in close to the screen. Could it be?

“Captain, I…”

“Good God, Holzfäller, don’t you have eyes?”

The chief inspector straightened her shoulders.

“Computer… overlap playback.”

Now, even Holzfäller’s stony expression altered just a little. The captain scowled. How could she have missed this?

A green light winked to amber at the corner of his vision. He began to turn, but then Holzfäller squinted. “I don’t see—”

“Complete synchronicity!” He threw his hands in the air. “It’s not just similar footage. It’s the same damned footage! Computer, confirm!”

“Negative,” came the disembodied reply. “Records show contrasting weather, temperature, and varying planetary factors. Report follows.”

“Cancel report.” The captain dismissed it with a wave. “These people weren’t just doing loosely the same thing. They were doing exactly the same thing, motion for motion, seven days apart! What’s going on here?”

The chief inspector rose from her seat, frowned, and wandered over to the back of the captain’s office, hands clenched behind her back. She seemed to be studying the painting of Ganymede that hung there. “I have a theory,” she said.

“Proceed,” said the captain and glanced down at his desk. Was that light blinking before? A prickle of warmth crept across the back of his neck. His hand inched toward his desk drawer.

“A thorough scan for pre-existing life is integral to the terraforming process,” Holzfäller continued, “but what if this time… something was missed.”

“Go on…” prompted the captain. Inside the drawer, his fingers closed around cold metal.

“Something old. Something buried and dormant. Something the cyanobacteria reactivated…reanimated.”

“We’d have detected it.” The captain brought his hand out of the drawer.

“But what if this lifeform was different? What if it had a unique skill? What if it could mimic other lifeforms, take on their appearance, clone their mannerisms to such an extent that they could be mistaken for one’s own grandmother? It would be an easy thing to convince Red Shift that everything was normal and then, while they slept…”

On the desk, the light burned from orange to crimson, and the low wail of a siren interrupted the conversation.

“Emergency! Emergency! Hostile breach detected!”

The captain, with a trembling hand, pointed the gun at Holzfäller’s back. “Turn around slowly, Chief Inspector.”

Holzfäller’s shoulders began to shake.

“Oh, Captain! Surely, you’ve guessed by now that Holzfäller is gone. We took her back at the Oma. It doesn’t matter if you shoot me. Lots of us made it back on the ship. The colony took our home, but we’ll do just fine on yours. Eventually you’ll be one of us, too. We’ll all live happily ever after.”

Holzfäller turned around.

Her face was gone. The eyes were larger, the mouth wider, and there were wrinkles in the brow and bags under the eyes.

It was no longer the face of a promising young chief inspector.

Instead, it was his own.

The doppelganger smiled. Then the smile widened, cracked, and broke into something altogether inhuman.

The captain fired once before the creature was upon him. The gun skittered out of reach as they crashed to the floor.

The last thing he saw was the creature hunched over him, throwing back its head and howling at the twin moons, who peered back down through the inky darkness of the void.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michael Teasdale is an English writer of strange fiction and occasional travel memoir whose stories have previously appeared in the UK publications Novel Magazine, Litro Magazine and the science fiction anthology series Shoreline of Infinity. He has called six different countries home and currently lives in Transylvania, Romania with his partner and their two cats.

---

More Stories