by Michele Lang
Clea leaned back in her lab chair and sighed. “I am sorry,” she said. “But we are long past your time, you know. Thousands and thousands of years.”
“But still I weave my webs,” Arachne replied. “Do not be afraid. I cannot catch any butterflies here. I’m not here to make you feel my sting. But I can warn you, that someone weaves a web to capture you.”
Clea glanced around the lab, the machinery humming. “Capture me? Who?”
The spider lowered down to the computer screen, touched the face of the monitor with a gentle swipe of her front legs. The computer reacted to that touch, shifted to a face that Clea knew intimately.
Her teacher. Her mentor. The woman she trusted with her fortunes and her life.
“No,” Clea finally managed to stammer out. “Not Elena. I owe her everything, my career, my position at the Institute, this particular job. I’m sorry, you must be wrong.”
The spider actually shrugged. Her laugh sounded like a little chuff of static. “I did not realize I would offend Athena so intensely. I presumed that she would take my triumphs as her own. I presumed that I occupied the same exalted level as my teacher, the Great Weaver. Do not presume.”
Clea stared at the image of Dr.Elena Shivath, and remembered. The long years of apprenticeship, the many papers and awards they had won together, the letters of recommendation. “I don’t presume, Arachne. To the contrary, I appreciate, I honor. I am sorry you suffered so for your indiscretions, but we’re different.”
“Are you?” For the first time, Clea heard the acid venom in the spider’s voice. “Ask yourself why Dr. Elena didn’t come on this trip, the great triumph, the pinnacle. Tell me why she told you not to patent the Weave Drive you developed right before you left. Explain why the only other people on this vessel are low level ground engineers, expendable to her affairs.”
“Why are you telling me all this?” Clea asked. Trembling, she drew up to her considerable height, and she towered now over the fragile, iridescent creature standing over the image of her mentor’s face. A single swat with the handheld Clea clutched in her hands, and Arachne’s voice would be silenced forever.
“I like you,” Arachne replied simply.
Clea rested the handheld on the gleaming metal desk, ashamed. “But how do you know me?”
“This is my home. I have watched you prepare for this mission, watched you working on your ideas, humming as you tried first one way then another. You…remind me of who I used to be.”
“So you think my teacher is stealing my new invention?” This was the worst thing Clea could think of, and she said the words in a wounded, angry voice. As if she were mad at the spider, not the betrayer.
“Yes. But I think she will get away with it if you don’t disable the self-destruct instructions embedded in your flight codes.”
Clea staggered away from the spider. The very idea of it was too absurd to even contemplate. But then she remembered her grandmother’s admonition, and the fact that she spoke with a spider. If she could accept Arachne’s existence, Clea should at least prove her warning invalid.
Clea swiped the spider out of the way, and ignored her indignant exclamations while she pounded on the face of the computer to bring up the flight codes, to see if Arachne could possibly be telling her the truth.
“That’s not how you’re going to get out of this alive,” Arachne said, in a low, intense rush of words, but Clea was too focused on the screen to reply.
She worked her way into the base codes, and found the instructions pooling out.
“Self-destruct sequence activation in 5:23, 5:22…”
Clea disabled the flight codes, but the computer reinstated them again a moment afterwards. If Arachne was right, Elena had programmed this sequence with genius – the vessel was set to destruct at the edge of Mars’s atmosphere. It would look to a search team like the ship had simply broken up on entry.
Clea racked her brain, trying to come up with a workaround. The seconds ticked away, faster and faster, and she covered her face with her hands.
“I can’t override the codes,” Clea forced out. Instead of screaming panic, she floated on a dead calm, a serene certainty that in a few minutes she and the entire crew would be exploded into microscopic particulate.
“Yes you can,” Arachne said. “But you have to believe in yourself. I never did, not until it was too late for me to escape my fate. I defined myself only in relation to my mentor.”
Clea forced herself to take slow, steady breaths. She had a few minutes left to work on this problem…she had unraveled worse tangles in her professional career.
“First things first,” Clea said. “Elena’s a computer specialist. She can program anything. But I…”
“You are a weaver,” Arachne said. She drew closer, delicately climbed up and perched on the bend of Clea’s knuckle like a miniature dragon. “You weave. Like me.”
Clea took another deep breath and considered Arachne’s words. She invented new things, Elena initiated sequences within existing systems. With a gasp, she saw their relationship in a new, disturbing light.
Elena had the technical skills. But Clea had the flashes of insight, the crazy ideas that turned out to be breakthroughs. “Why would she kill the golden goose?”
“Because she couldn’t bear for you to outshine her. The protégée can never exceed the master. At least for some mentors, the false ones, that is the secret rule.”
Clea looked down at the golden creature perched on her hand, and she could see the iridescent eyes, the pretty, neat limbs. The sharp mandibles.
“It’s going to take a crazy idea, isn’t it.”
“Yes. A flash of brilliance, or we’re all dead. Look, only a couple of minutes left, dear Clea.”
Clea looked from the spider to the screen, back and forth, until she felt that familiar yet always exhilarating click when the larger pattern was revealed. “This meeting, you and I, is no coincidence.”
“No.”
“My gramma had something to do with all of this.”
“She loves you very much. She knows that space contains the greatest strangeness, and she remains open to the whispers of intuition, the favors of the gods. And she saw the danger you had gotten yourself into.”
With a flash, Clea remembered her grandmother’s final warning, before embarking on this now-doomed mission. Gramma knew from knives in the back – she’d been betrayed before, and survived. She warned Clea to watch out, and Clea had shrugged, not really listening.
Her fatal mistake.
“But it’s too late.”
“Okay, say it’s too late. What then?”
In two minutes, less, the ship was going to self-destruct. The ejection sequence wouldn’t work outside of the planetary atmosphere…they’d just burn up out there.
What would Gramma do?
What?
Clea held her breath and did the one thing her instructors had taught her she must never do.
She reached down, under the console, and punched the kill switch.
The computer powered down, and now the Arachne floated in space, without circulating oxygen, without power, without automated pilot.
Clea sat at the bridge computer, her face in her hands, and heard the screaming from the bridge. A minute later Juaraz, the ship’s engineer, came bounding into the lab. “What the holy--” he began, but Clea held up a hand to stop him.
She explained the self-destruct sequence she had discovered, how the only way to stop it was to kill the system that ran the ship and piloted it. He protested frantically, lunged for the command console, and only Clea’s presence of mind kept him from overpowering her and re-activating the automated captain program.
The blaster she held in her hands was forbidden by Federation regs, but her grandmother wasn’t about to let her go outside of Earth’s orbit without protection. She convinced him to go away or die, and eventually he saw reason and left. Clea manually bolted and blocked the door behind him.
“Now I’v
e done it,” Clea muttered. “The rest of the crew is going to break down this door, and then…” she shuddered. The sequence was complete – if anybody turned on that nav system now the entire ship would explode, nearly instantly.
She had no time left. The ship was about to enter Mars’ terraformed atmosphere. It was still much thinner than Earth’s but they would crash and burn without computer navigation.
“Where are the manual controls on this ship?” she muttered.
She could no longer see the spider, who had hid when Juaraz had barged in, but she heard her voice, barely more than a subtle vibration. “None. This is a modern ship, with the most advanced automated navigation system in the fleet. No controls necessary.”
Clea sighed with frustration, worked the top off the command console. Underneath she found a tangle of copper wire – most old-fashioned. But a lifesaver.
Her grandmother had taught her wiring, how to hot wire computer-controlled vehicles, override the automatic systems, and how to drive them away. Long ago, her grandmother had been known as the Witch of Moon Port 3, the wildest and most resourceful pirate captain of the Federation.
You don’t get ahead by following rules, she had tried to teach Clea. By blindly following a leader, or a mentor. But Clea was too much of a protégée to believe it.
Until now.
Clea saw where the hydraulics attached to the digital interface. She improvised a navigation system she could work manually, with the emergency electricity from the generator. She made calculations in her head, using the stars as a guide. And she wove a pathway through the sky, a web of thought and trajectory.
For the first time in the history of the Federation mission to Mars, a captain landed a ship herself. By the time they had landed, the oxygen on board was all but gone, but it didn’t matter. The port had plenty to spare.
She couldn’t get the door open, so she waited for the ground crew to pry them out. Clea looked for the spider, to thank her, to warn her to stay hidden.
But she was already gone. Arachne had vanished.
Clea assumed with a sigh that the creature was a figment of her imagination, the voice of her gramma speaking to her from across the universe as in a dream. But then she saw it, across the face of the computer monitor.
A single filament of golden silk.
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About the Author:
Michele Lang writes supernatural tales: the stories of witches, lawyers, goddesses, bankers, demons, and other magical creatures hidden in plain sight. She also writes tales of the near future, including the science fiction romance, NETHERWOOD, which will be re-released in late 2013. Author of the LADY LAZARUS historical fantasy series, Michele's most recent book in the series, REBEL ANGELS, released March 2013.
Michele is also a lawyer who has practiced the unholy craft of litigation in both New York and Connecticut. She returned to her native New York shortly before 9/11, and now lives in a small town on the North Shore of Long Island with her husband, her sons, and a rotating menagerie of cats, hermit crabs, and butterflies.
Visit her on the web at www.michelelang.com
Visit her on Facebook at www.facebook.com/michelelang