Dark Side

by Jonathan Green

  Carefully, he dropped the articles of clothing into the cockpit, taking care not to drop anything heavy on his master or on any of the devices on the control console. He didn’t want to add to the damage that had already been caused during the crash.

  Having made his way back down to the cockpit, he first set about putting on his own environment suit before attempting to help his master into the other one.

  Ulysses moved and mumbled something groggily, his words slurred and unintelligible, his mouth not even open, as Nimrod pulled the vacuum suit up over his shoulders.

  “It’s all right, sir. I’m just helping you on with your suit.”

  There was more mumbling and then his master’s body went limp again.

  Nimrod took another look at the graze on the man’s head as he gently guided it through the suit’s heavy metal and rubber neck seal. It had stopped bleeding, a red-black crust starting to form as the blood matting the greying hair at his temple hardened.

  Nimrod was starting to feel breathless. The air inside the LEV was running out more quickly than he had hoped it would.

  Hurriedly he secured his own helmet and locked the seal shut tight. As he activated the suit’s integral air supply, the sound of rushing gas filled his ears and he took a number of luxuriously deep breaths.

  He quickly secured the second helmet over his master’s head, twisting it to lock it, flooding it with oxygen.

  Nimrod himself had checked that the suits’ air tanks were full before setting out from Luna Prime. As a result, if their kept their exertions to a minimum, their air supply would last upwards of four hours. If Inspector Artemis’s team were already nearby there was nothing to worry about. However, if they were more than four hours away – which seemed far more likely, unfortunately – Nimrod and his master were doomed.

  Nimrod reached up to the control panel above his head and flicked the protective shield off a large, red button marked with a hazard symbol, and depressed it fully. A repeating chiming note began to sound inside the cockpit.

  With the onboard emergency Mayday signal active, Nimrod prayed that someone would find them and pull them to safety before the oxygen ran out.

  ULYSSES OPENED HIS eyes to be met by the dimly illuminated up-ended interior of the LEV and the concerned face of his manservant.

  “I don’t suppose there’s much point asking what happened?” he said, taking in the state of his surroundings.

  “We were hit by a landslide triggered by the moonquake,” Nimrod replied, his voice coming to Ulysses through the short-range comm built into his helmet. “It knocked us into a fissure. The LEV’s air supply was compromised and so here we are.”

  “But what caused the quake in the first place?”

  Ulysses eased himself up into a sitting position and winced, automatically trying to put a hand to the bump on the side of his head but finding half an inch of reinforced glass helmet between the wound and his own gloved hand.

  “How long have we been like this?”

  “About thirty minutes,” Nimrod replied without checking the chronometer built into the wrist panel of his suit’s left arm.

  “So help should be here – what? – within about an hour or so?”

  “We can only hope, sir.”

  “Indeed.” Ulysses looked from the main body of the LEV rising to the sealed airlock at the rear of the cabin, and then down at the bubble of reinforced glass on which he was lying. He immediately wished he hadn’t.

  Knowing that the glass had survived the landslide as well as being bowled across the Moon’s surface without sustaining so much as a scratch still didn’t fill him with reassurance when he gazed down into the black void beneath them.

  “How far down do you reckon that goes?” he asked, as nonchalantly as he could manage.

  “Far enough, sir,” came Nimrod’s blunt reply. It was said that some of the cracks in the Moon’s surface were as much as fifteen miles deep.

  “And how long did you say we’re likely to be stuck down here?”

  “Long enough.”

  Putting a hand to the armrest of the seat above him, Ulysses pulled himself into a standing position. “I think I might just have a sit down up here, if that’s all right.”

  A tremor passed through the Copernicus, causing the LEV to shift and drop by several inches, and Ulysses fell back onto the glass of the cockpit.

  “Was that me?” he gasped.

  Another shuddering aftershock rattled the rover, setting cupboard doors swinging open and sending their contents raining down on the two men.

  “More tremors, sir,” Nimrod said, an anxious look replacing the more usual expression of aloof disdain.

  “But what’s causing them?”

  “A moonquake, sir?”

  “But caused by what? The Moon’s been dead, geologically, for the last three billion years!”

  Another tremor juddered through the Copernicus, causing it to slip another foot further into the crevasse. A cascade of regolith showered down over the top of the cockpit, skittering off the curved glass bubble, illuminated from underneath, for a moment, by the cabin light, before vanishing into the darkness below.

  “Whatever’s causing them, sir, I would suggest it’s time we vacated this vehicle.”

  “While we still can, you mean?” Ulysses said, scrambling to his feet again.

  “Precisely.”

  “Then we’d better start climbing, hadn’t we, old boy?”

  “Just what I was going to suggest, sir.”

  “I mean that airlock isn’t going to open itself now, is it?”

  THE OUTER HATCH of the transport’s airlock fell open and Ulysses, aided by his ever loyal manservant, emerged from the dull gloom of the LEV into the cold cloying shadows of the crater.

  Nimrod dropped to what passed for ground here and then helped Ulysses down after him.

  And all the while the Copernicus kept on sinking into the coarse grey sand and the yawning fissure beneath. Only moments after Ulysses made it to the surface, the airlock slammed shut and, as the two companions watched, the rover sank from view beneath the rippling regolith.

  “Come on, sir,” Nimrod’s voice came through Ulysses’ helmet-comm again. “On your feet. We need to get moving before we go the same way as the Copernicus.”

  Being many degrees of magnitude lighter than the heavy rover, it was considerably easier for the two men to avoid sharing the LEV’s fate but, if they hung around too long, they would soon discover that the grey, broken pumice could be as deadly as quicksand.

  Aided again by the ever-patient Nimrod, Ulysses struggled to his feet, his vision greying for a moment, accompanied by a stab of pain at his temple, and then the two of them were moving at a stumbling run, bounding over the lunar surface away from the site of the sinking LEV as quickly as they could.

  At last the shuddering tremors subsided and the Moon’s crust settled into stillness once more.

  “So, now what?” Ulysses said, sitting on a slab of grey rock as he recovered his breath.

  “We go on, sir,” Nimrod stated. “Our transport’s gone, we’re a thousand miles from Luna Prime and we’ve only got enough air for a few hours, if we maintain a steady walking pace.

  “On the other hand, I estimate the base,” he said, pointing, “to be only another six miles away as the crow flies.”

  “Not that we’ll be seeing many crows flying round here, will we, old boy?” Ulysses grinned, despite the dire nature of the predicament they now found themselves in. “Then, as you say, we go on. I mean we don’t want to wait for Inspector Artemis and miss all the fun now, do we?”

  THE TWO COMPANIONS – master and manservant – set off across the crater, on course for the moonbase, their heavy lead-lined boots clomping over the unstable ground. Every step over the minutely fractured surface of the Moon felt like hard work, as it gave beneath with every footfall.

  As they walked they said nothing, not wanting to waste valuable oxygen when they still had several miles of hard
walking to go.

  It had been twenty minutes since the last tremor when the ground began to shake.

  “Not again!” Ulysses complained as the regolith began to rattle around their feet. “What is it that’s causing these sodding tremors?”

  “I don’t know, sir,” Nimrod said wearily, “although I’m quite certain that if we don’t pick up the pace we could quite possibly go the same way as the Copernicus.”

  The two of them quickened their steps, even though they used up great lungfuls of air with every strenuous breath.

  With a sudden lurch, the Moon’s crust splintered beneath them, great chunks of fractured granite-like rock rising up in jagged shards as tons of shifting sand poured from whatever it was that was now pushing its way up from below the surface.

  Ulysses and Nimrod were sent tumbling backwards, head over heels, down the slope of the newly-formed mound. They landed in a tangle of limbs, their environment suits and helmets thankfully still intact.

  Ulysses gazed up at the massive maggot-like form blotting out his view of the star field in horror and disbelief.

  The thing was as big as a whale, its undulating hide the same colour as the sands from which it had emerged. The thing twisted its shapeless body, its eyeless head flopping back down onto the regolith.

  Was this what had been causing the tremors – Ulysses found himself wondering as the gigantic, slug-like beast turned its tooth-lined, leech-like mouthparts towards them, sensing them in some unfathomable way – or was it the tremors that had driven it to the surface?

  Whatever the truth of it, and whatever the thing was, Ulysses knew that he and Nimrod had to get away from it as fast as possible, as it spasmed and lurched towards them, its mouth stretching to form a cavernous maw.

  He kicked at the regolith with his heels but failed to get a purchase or move himself out of reach of the abomination.

  Twisting, he scrambled to his feet, as Nimrod tried to do the same, and cursing his lead-weighted boots, tried to run, the wound on his head pulsing painfully with every beat of his hammering heart.

  But no matter how hard the two of them ran, the ground continued to give way beneath them with ever increasing speed.

  Ulysses turned, risking a glance backwards.

  The slug-like beast lay there, wriggling deeper into the sand with every convulsion of its horrid form. Its cavernous mouth yawned only a few feet below them, as it sucked great quantities of the grey dust into itself with every rippling convulsion.

  Ulysses re-doubled his efforts, but the more energy he extolled, the quicker the regolith slipped away beneath him and the closer he came to the creature’s gaping, hungry maw.

  And then Nimrod was gone, with barely a protest, the treacherous shifting sands giving way beneath him entirely and dropping him into the monster’s gullet.

  Ulysses gave a cry of shock, pain and desperation.

  With one last herculean effort he launched himself up the cascading slope. He landed flat on his face, far from anything remotely resembling solid ground. And then he knew that he had condemned himself by his own actions.

  With one last great gulping peristaltic motion, the slug swallowed one last dredger-sized mouthful of regolith and, with it, the desperately clawing Ulysses Quicksilver.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The First Men In The Moon

  T MINUS 3 HOURS, 19 MINUTES, 5 SECONDS

  HE WAS SUFFOCATING. The air was being squeezed from his lungs as something soft and squashy smothered him, rippling with a disgusting peristaltic motion as he was passed through the suffocating coils in the pumping, red darkness with every sphincter-like contraction of the thing.

  The sphincter contracted again and he was squeezed out of the rear end of whatever it was that had swallowed him and dropped several feet to land in a drift of grey sand.

  He sat up and looked around him. He was sitting in the middle of a wide crater and the ground under him was shaking again. An eerie sound, like the rumbling of rocks or the wheezy robotic laugh of the juggernaut-droid Rusty echoed impossibly from the walls of the airless crater.

  And then his viewpoint changed drastically as he hurtled away from the Moon’s surface and into orbit, his gaze still focused on the moonscape beneath.

  The faster and the further he travelled, the more was revealed to him. First he could see the craters – scores of them, hundreds, then thousands – and the grey-white lunar mountain ranges. And still he was speeding away from the Moon, the curve of the satellite clearly visible now.

  As he continued to fall deeper into the cold depths of the void, it became clear that the topographical features of the Moon were in fact the features of a huge moon-face.

  Lips of basalt moved, sending tremors skittering through the brittle crust and an urgent expression furrowed a brow made of craters and lunar mountain ranges.

  The Moon was trying to tell him something.

  ULYSSES QUICKSILVER OPENED his eyes.

  There, in front of his face, were the concerned aquiline features of the ever-loyal Nimrod.

  “Sir,” Ulysses heard him say, in a voice that was barely more than a whisper, “you must wake up, sir.”

  He sat up, blinking himself into wakefulness. “Nimrod?” he said, his tongue thick and sluggish within his mouth. “Where are we? What happened?”

  “We were brought here.”

  Ulysses was not fully concentrating on what his companion was telling him, as he peered past him, trying to make sense of where he was through the murk.

  “By what?”

  They were in some sort of low-roofed cave, with walls the colour of pumice. As his eyes became accustomed to the low light he saw that what little illumination there was came from some species of luminous fungus covering the roof and walls of the chamber.

  “You mean you don’t remember the slug, sir?”

  Ulysses turned to his friend, a look of consternation on his face.

  “You mean being swallowed? That was real? I thought that was a dream,” he said, shaking the last of the sleep from him.

  The memory of the suffocating darkness and the fluid intestinal tract sprang back into his mind.

  “I’m afraid not, sir.”

  He looked at his environment suit. Something unpleasant coated it in a sticky sheen to which the dust had clung, and which was starting to harden over the fabric. He shuddered.

  Ulysses was dimly aware that he had been lying on some sort of shelf, a shallow hollow easily large enough for a man to lie down in. There were others in the gently curving walls all around him but none of those were occupied. Under the palms of his hands, the shelf felt smooth to the touch.

  Ulysses started, holding his hands up in front of his face. Where were his gloves? It was then that he realised that he wasn’t wearing his helmet either. He gave a gasp and felt his chest tighten as his heart began to race.

  “My helmet!”

  “It’s all right, sir.” Nimrod placed a calming hand on Ulysses’ shoulder. “Don’t ask me how but there’s a breathable atmosphere down here.”

  Swinging his legs over the edge of the shelf Ulysses took several, long, slow, deep breaths, savouring each and every one, feeling his lungs inflate and deflate again, watching his chest rise and fall. He was still wearing most of his environment suit; it was just the gloves and helmet that were missing. The air tasted slightly sooty – with a hint of sulphur. In fact it smelt like gunpowder.

  “You said, ‘down here’. Nimrod, where are we?”

  “I believe we are inside the Moon itself, sir,” Nimrod said, a look of baffled bewilderment on the butler’s face.

  “But how is that possible?”

  “Like I said, sir, we were brought here.”

  “But by whom?”

  Nimrod was about to reply when, detecting movement at the periphery of his vision, Ulysses turned to the opening that led into the cave and his question was suddenly answered.

  “Good God!” the dandy gasped.

  Three figures
stood in the doorway – but they were like nothing Ulysses had ever seen, and he had seen some mightily strange things in his time.

  It was immediately obvious that they were not human. For a moment he wondered whether they were some form of mutation created by Doctor Galapagos’ accursed serum. But there was something so unutterably alien about the creatures that he quickly dismissed that idea.

  The closest he could come to a comparison was that they were like bi-pedal giant ants. They had six limbs but stood only using the hindmost pair. The uppermost pair were more like arms, projecting from the thorax on shoulder-like joints, and indeed two of the creatures were holding bone spears. Their bodies were also divided into distinctly different parts; a thorax as well as an abdomen, surmounted by a head that was more insect than human, with twitching antennae and large, compound eyes.

  The aliens’ bodies were coloured a khaki brown, although Ulysses could see some differentiation in hue and pattern between the three. He wondered if this was just chance, or dependent on the genes of the parent, like hair or eye colour in human beings – or whether it was more significant than that. Their carapaces provided them with a hardened exterior but two of the three were also wearing what appeared to be polished plates of black chitin in place of armour. Ulysses could have believed that they were wearing the discarded carapaces of others of their kind, perhaps even the exoskeletons of their dead.

  All three were facing him, their compound eyes rippling with purple-green iridescence, like the polarised rainbows found in a drop of spilt petroleum. Realising that he was staring at them with his mouth agape Ulysses shut it, and then opened it again when the third figure – wearing what appeared to be a ceremonial necklace of shed scales and bone fragments – addressed him directly.

  Welcome, Ulysses Quicksilver.

  When the ant-like being spoke, its mouth parts worked rapidly and Ulysses could hear a hollow knocking sound, accompanied by a series of chirrups and clicks. But the words he heard, in perfect Queen’s English, were inside his head, having bypassed his ears altogether. His mind reeled at what this meant – that the creature was communicating telepathically.