by B. V. Larson
The boots shifted. Boldo slammed his fist down upon the locker door. Nicu crouched inside, his heart pounding. How had Boldo figured it out? How had he been given away? Nicu seethed with curses. A beating would be the result of this, at the very least. If Boldo lost his temper completely—and that wasn’t an uncommon event for any Romani—he might space him. There was even an airlock at the end of the access tube, ready and waiting.
Underneath Nicu’s armpits, sweat tickled. The locker was locked from the outside, of course. He’d made sure of that. He had rigged the lock, however, so it could be opened from the inside as well.
“Damn,” muttered Boldo.
Nicu wanted to whoop with relief as the boots clanked away. Boldo had seen nothing. He had simply chosen Nicu’s cramped trick-locker to beat his fist upon in frustration. Inside the dark, cramped interior, Nicu smiled. He revealed a great many teeth, more than most of his people had left in their mouths by adulthood.
After Boldo had finally left to harass someone else, Nicu snicked open the lock and unfolded his wiry body, exiting the locker. He stood wearing his vacuum suit in a packed octagonal tunnel lined with lockers like his. Equipment hung in cargo nets from every conceivable point.
Boldo had almost caught him. That had been close. Too close.
He shook himself. He needed an excuse for being AWOL. He needed some of the emergency items he kept in the locker. He rummaged and dug out a bucket of black silicon grease and a freeze-gun of gas. He quickly coated his spacer gloves in the grease—not too much, he didn’t want to overdo. Then he put on his helmet and boots and frosted them with the gun. Boldo would be back soon, he knew. It had to at least look like he’d been working outside all along.
He quickly removed the senso-goggles he’d been using. The implanted data-bean contained stolen holos of every female he’d managed to vid over the years—which amounted to pretty much every female in the domes. The goggles doubled as a gaming set too, another item strictly forbidden anywhere in Minerva’s orbit. Storing all his saved files on the data-bean, including holo-vids of countless showering women and thousands of saved games, he was finally able to relax. Now, even if they found his senso-goggles, he would still have his files. The data-bean went into a tiny pouch he’d sewn into the interior of his suit, and the goggles—
The doors at the far end of the packed tunnel flashed open. Boldo stood there. Nicu did not jump. He did not even look up. With a surreptitious movement, he slapped the goggles up onto the roof of the locker’s interior. There, they stuck to a glue-pad he’d placed there for precisely that purpose.
Boldo watched him. Nicu could feel the other’s rage, but he kept up his act, pretending to be a hard-worker returning from craters loaded with frosty dust. He slammed the locker shut. It rattled with the impact. He leaned on it and stretched himself as if worn out. In truth, he was still feeling a few kinks from having hidden in there with his goggles for several hours.
Boldo began clanking closer now.
“There you are, Boldo. Right on time for your shift. I’ll have to tell you a few things, however. We have trouble outside—”
Nicu got that far with his banter before Boldo was upon him. He grabbed him up by his suit and lifted him. Nicu’s magnetics weren’t on, and the gravity of Minerva’s biggest moon was only two-thirds standard, so it wasn’t that amazing of a feat, but Nicu always felt impressed when someone lifted him into the air in a blind rage.
“You have cheated me AGAIN!” roared Boldo.
“Nonsense,” said Nicu. “Put me down, you ape.”
Boldo kept his grip. His eyes blazed. His helmet faceplate was open now, and his mustaches—long, dark and hooked at the ends—bristled with fury. His eyes however... They were the frightening thing. They were black marbles of madness. Nicu knew, looking into them, that he was in real trouble.
Boldo kept him held in the air like a baby. He took several clanking steps down the tube. Nicu didn’t have to look over his shoulder to know the airlock waited there.
Boldo’s helmet faceplate crashed closed. He must of have chinned it. At the same time, Nicu’s air line popped on his back. Boldo had torn it loose.
Nicu could still see the madness in Boldo’s eyes, right through his cloudy faceplate. Boldo’s coarse hair, greasy from years of rationed showers, flared into a wild nimbus around his face. His mouth split into a grin. He breathed hard with the effort of carrying Nicu, causing the faceplate to steam up further, but he showed no signs of letting go.
Boldo ignored the smaller man’s complaints. Nicu thought hard. He considered kicking, but that would have little effect, he knew. It would only make Boldo more determined.
They reached the airlock. Boldo would have to reach down to grab the latch and open it. That would be the moment, Nicu told himself.
Boldo threw open the latch and it hissed with escaping gas. Loose debris lifted into flight all over the tunnel.
Nicu made his move. With smooth speed, he produced a length of monofilament blade.
“Look down,” he told Boldo.
Boldo’s eyes flicked down, saw the screwdriver-shaped knife at his belly. The monofilament edge could cut through steel. His suit would be opened, as well as his guts. Boldo looked back up and grinned at Nicu.
“Then we both die, yes? That might be worth it.”
Nicu thought fast.
“I’ve got pictures of Kizzy. I’ll beam them to your unit.”
“Pictures?”
“From the showers.”
Boldo snorted. “You are a pig of a man.”
Nicu had never seen a pig. He had seen rats, but only a few of them. Ironically, he’d spent his entire life being compared to these animals that he knew next to nothing about.
Boldo dropped him and took a step back. Nicu landed lightly. Boldo’s rage had passed. Suddenly, he laughed.
“You do no work. You waste air. One day, I kill you. But not today, as you have made me laugh today.”
Still chuckling, Boldo turned around and clanked away. Nicu thought about snaking up behind him and severing his spinal cord with the monofilament, but the others would figure it out. He wasn’t as popular as Boldo, nowhere near. He would never be able to talk his way out of such an obvious murder. They would space him for sure.
Life simply wasn’t fair.
When Boldo was gone, Nicu heard something. Something beeping. One of the countless annoying alarms that the dome skirts constantly triggered. He searched panels, having to push aside festoons of cargo-netted gear. At last, he found the proper panel. Dark blue lights flashed. He found the shunt and slipped it to one side, then pressed the button firmly for five long seconds. All that time, the beeping continued, setting his teeth on edge. Finally, the computer’s little excitable mind was convinced he really did mean to override the warning and it shut up. Only then did he boredly check to see what the trouble was.
“Motion sensors?” muttered Nicu. That made no sense. There wasn’t much out there on the moon’s surface. Dust, scraps of frozen methane and boron. There wasn’t any atmosphere, so there wasn’t any wind to set off a sensor. Everyone’s vacuum suit had transponders that told the motion sensors to ignore spacers when they walked around, so it could not have been one of the base people. He looked toward the frosty triangular window of the airlock. What could have set it off? A falling rock from the crater rim?
He shrugged. Boldo could go out there and investigate. If Nicu hadn’t been so mistreated, he might have gone out there and had a look around himself. But now, he felt more than justified in shirking this duty. After all, he’d been abused. What sane commander threatened the life of his workers and then expected enthusiasm? They would never get that from Nicu. He was no one’s fool.
Nicu’s eyes drifted to his locker. He slipped inside and put his goggles back on.
Soon, he forgot about the blue flashing alarm and the fact he had overridden it. Kizzy washed her slim shapely legs and warm water splashed everywhere. He could almost feel the silver dr
oplets that rolled over the pinhead camera lens, as if they ran over his own face.
Five
The Savant had never strained her processes so extensively. Somehow, despite the hard vacuum that crept in from the barely sealed crack in the lifepod, she managed to revive the trach and get it moving. The worst part of it was the levels of protoplasm she’d used up. She had been forced to burn her supplies of glucose prodigiously as well in order to generate enough chemical heat to keep herself alive and revive the trach. That had left her with dangerously low levels of supply.
She made a fateful decision then. She drained the arteries of the lifepod, adding them to the protoplasm supplies and feeding both the trach and herself. This meant the lifepod could never be revived and would die the final death. She could never use the vessel to escape this dead world. Her mission had been a matter of do-or-die from the start, of course, but she hadn’t thought it would get down to that level in the opening hours.
The trach itself was little help in the planning phase of the assault. It ran its orbs about the interior of the dead lifepod with a dull lack of ideas on how to proceed. A creature of spiny carapace, crab-like but with a single massive claw rather than the customary two, the trach was not a thinker. It was a working beast, heavily-built, slow, and tough. The single quality it had which the Savant hoped to exploit was its ability to survive, even in hard vacuum, for several hours. Radiation, cold, even a complete lack of pressure or oxygen, would not kill it for a prolonged period.
The Savant, however, knew that she was not so durable. If she allowed the trach to tear the membrane that covered the crack in the lifepod and exit in search of prey, she would be exposed to vacuum and soon die. Still, there was little choice. She decided to cocoon herself, using chemical polymers derived from the lifepod’s dead blood. She had to work fast before the blood froze solid.
And so she worked with what she had, preparing to send the dull trach out in search of more protoplasm. If the trach failed, then her entire mission failed with it. The concept was frustrating in the extreme, but she simply didn’t have any other options.
Just as she was squirting a second coat on the crusty interior of her hard resin cocoon, the trach sent her a tiny data blip. She felt a surge of anger. She had strictly ordered the fool to keep all traffic to a life-or-death minimum. Avoiding detection was critical. Better to perform the entire operation without communications of any kind than to risk discovery at this early, vulnerable stage.
She digested the message and her thoughts changed rapidly from anger to alarm. It was a visual message, a recording of what the trach had seen with its questing orbs. The creature had grown impatient, apparently, and torn a tiny hole in the membrane that sealed the crack in the lifepod. Naturally, this had caused a gust of all remaining gas to escape the pod. Life-killing vacuum now filled the interior of the pod with its nothingness.
The Savant despaired. Had the trach’s brain possibly been damaged in the rough landing? The creature had probably killed them both. She was inside her blister-like cocoon, a doubly-thick dome of crusty resin, but the gases and heat within would run out within hours. Even now, she urged her shuddering lung to stop gasping for oxygen. There was so little to be had now. The lifepod’s reprocessors were as dead as the rest of the ship.
Another data blip came in. Beside herself, she formed up a tiny blip of her own to send. The trach simply must shut up.
She paused, however, as she examined the contents of what the trach had sent. The creature had at least managed to dampen its communication to the weakest and fastest of signals. And this time the visual was much more interesting than the last.
The trach had extended its single stalk and opened the cusp to gaze around them at the exterior world. Despite her near panic, the Savant was intrigued by the novel environment. She had never been on any world before, and she suspected that her species had never explored this particular frozen rock.
As she reviewed the visuals, the trach’s orb rotated to take it all in. Spires of black rock pierced a sky filled with vivid stars. A massive planet provided virtually all the light in the scene. It was wide and blue, filling perhaps one sixth of the sky. That blue, she knew, was not the color of warm oceans. It was the atmosphere itself that was blue, a mix made up primarily of hydrogen, with a goodly amount of helium mixed in, along with a dash of methane. When Minerva rose fully over the horizon, she suspected the planet would fill nearly half the visible sky.
It was the more immediate surroundings that caught her attention, however. There, off to the right. What was that? A moving light? A group of them, in fact. A cluster.
The trach’s vision was occluding somewhat, growing dimmer. Probably this had to do with the extreme cold of the hard vacuum outside the lifepod. But there could be no doubt of it. Something was coming. Something approached the lifepod.
Heart pounding, lung quivering, the Savant sent a single tiny blip in return to the trach. The message was simple.
Hide, it said.
After that, the Savant went radio-silent. She tapped quietly into the sensory nerves she had drawn up through sheathes of the dead lifepod’s frost-covered flesh. This allowed her, by extending and connecting her own nervous system with the dead ship’s, to feel what the ship felt. She could not see anything, the lifepod’s orbs having long since died and frozen over. But she could still sense touches. It was all she had. Quiet, motionless, and filled with trepidation, she waited for the investigating alien to make its move.
She did not have long to wait. At first, she felt spiny prickling, the sensation of the heavy trach maneuvering its crab-like bulk around inside the ship, treading on membranes. She had some sympathy. How was the creature truly to manage following the only order she had given it? Hide? Hide where? They were trapped together inside a spheroid less than five meters in diameter. There was no time to be more specific with her command, however. Just sending it might have already alerted the approaching alien. Or aliens, she amended. Who knew how many there were? A battalion of them could be searching for her out there. She had no way of knowing.
Struggling to contain her racing mind, she focused on using the nervous sensory apparatus she had.
What was that? A touch? A fluttering sensation at the torn spot in the membrane. The crack that split the lifepod open was a wound to her now. A painful, dull ache that stretched along the seam. Now something had made contact with that sensitive injury. She shuddered inside her cocoon. She almost withdrew and broke the connection between her nervous system and that of the ship. She couldn’t abide that crawling, searching touch. Something was making rubbing, caressing motions along the torn membrane where the trach, undoubtedly, had poked out its stalk and used its orb to investigate this airless world.
The touch, suddenly, exploded into ripping pain. A pause, while she caught her breath, then another ripping. The thing, the human—it was tearing through the membrane. It was trying to get into the ship!
What would come next? A cleansing blast of liquid flame? A charge tossed in, left to explode and kill everything inside? How many of the beings were out there? She’d only seen one, through the trach’s eyes, but that might only have been their scout. Surely, he would call on backup and a dozen more might, at any moment, attempt to break inside or even lift up the lifepod and drag it back to their base. There, in their aseptic labs, she and her sole trach would be torn apart and examined with cruel precision.
Her breath now clutched with fear and came in ragged gasps. Of all her kind, she felt more emotional effects than most. It was part of her genetic makeup. As a scientist, savants did not make the best military specimens, she could see that clearly now. Such fine, high-brow sentiments served a thinker well, but cold, quick, fearless logic served the warrior better. She tried to grab hold of herself accordingly. She had no command experience, and by nature she was terrible at it. She had to think. What would a proper military mind do in this situation?
The feathery touches were back as she struggled to th
ink clearly. The creature, she could feel the alien now as it pressed into the sore wound, pushed aside the membranes it had so rudely torn open. Compared to the cold vacuum, the creature felt burning hot to the touch.
Brilliant light splashed now into the lifepod. Nearly in a state of panic, she shot a command to the trach.
Report.
A visual flashed back to her. It was of the alien, reaching a long gray leg into the lifepod. This was simply too much. She could not allow it to enter, to squat upon her cocoon.
From the angle of the visual, she could tell the trach was on the ceiling of the lifepod, crouching there. She had told it to hide, and it had done the best it could, tightly gathering up its spiny legs and its single great claw onto the roof of the lifepod.
Watching with an exposed orb, the trach no doubt was wondering what was to be done with this invader, or rather its single, probing foot. Clearly, the human meant to violate her tiny craft, to profane it with its presence. It simply could not be allowed to do so. She had to act. If there were more aliens about, she was doomed in any case.
She activated an EMP-blast. The ship had the limited ability to fire a wave of magnetism around it. The system was designed to scramble smart weaponry such as incoming missiles. But in this case, it would serve to damage the enemy electronics. They would not be able to call for help.
Kill! she ordered the trach.
The visual feed continued. The single heavy claw unfolded itself and reached downward toward the invader. At the last moment, she wondered if she should have waited. If the creature was fully inside the lifepod, it would have been more effectively trapped.
The alien twisted itself, being too thick to easily slip inside the split-open lifepod. The booted foot tapped about on the uneven surface of the lifepod which was covered in flaccid, ropy veins. Following the Savant’s orders, the trach’s claw caught that boot now, and squeezed.
The boot paused for a split-second, then attempted to pull itself loose with great energy. The contest was an uneven one, however. The human tugged valiantly, but the trach had vastly more strength.