by Diane Carey
“Move! Run!” Alley grabbed Clyde and started running, heading toward the forward sections. “Dave, get her!”
Behind them the sounds of thrashing and sizzling were even more disturbing because there was no human sound, no screaming, no fighting. Big Henry probably had nothing left with which to cry out. Alley tried to block the image out of his head, but he couldn’t do it. The image of what had gone on above their heads was pervasive because it was so obvious.
And he hadn’t even seen one of the creatures yet.
Fighting off a pang of responsibility, he dragged Clyde onward down the tunnel, listening for Dave and Lena scrambling after him. A shaft of panic went through his chest.
“I’ve killed us all—” he gasped. Instantly he hoped Clyde hadn’t heard.
Clyde was in no condition to listen. At Alley’s side, stumbling valiantly, Clyde had his free hand pressed to the side of his face. His mouth hung open in silent, puffing breaths of exertion and pain every second. Acid burns…
Where did these creatures get all that acid? So powerful that it could burn through a ship’s plating, but not burn through their own hides? What could they possibly be made of? Why would nature create a thing so one-sidedly destructive? Even a gazelle had been given the means to escape from a lion!
What did he have? What did the humans have to fight their aggressors?
One’s down! We killed one! At least we killed one of them! How many are left? Six? Seven?
Suddenly it mattered how many proto-morphs had escaped when Keith and Gunny stupidly opened the blue jug. Every story was a little different. Gunny had said eight. Jonsy thought seven. Keith hadn’t lived long enough to report.
“Keep moving!” Alley shouted. “Clyde, stay with me! Don’t slip!”
Their feet set up a determined cadence on the narrow metal deck. Clyde was a mass of sweat-soaked clothing and rapidly weakening muscles. He clasped Alley around the back with his right arm, his left hand pressed to his face, but he was losing the battle and soon went down to his knees.
“Clyde!” Alley let him drop to the deck, stepped around, and changed his grip. “Clyde, I can’t carry you!”
“We can carry him!” LaMay called, but he was already dragging Lena.
“No! Move on!”
Fortunately, Dave didn’t argue, but followed the order and disappeared with Lena into the depths of the tunnel in front of them.
Clyde’s eyes glazed by agony, wobbled back and forth.
Alley grasped Clyde’s left hand and dragged it away from his face. The hand itself was halfway burned through, showing a palm of sinew and open white bones on the insides of the fingers. Alley suddenly thought of a Halloween glove, where one side was normal but the other side was a skeleton’s hand. He was looking right at it.
And Clyde’s face… the cheekbone was exposed, sizzling and dissolving into powdery liquid draining now toward his ear, eating flesh as it went. Now lying on his back, arched in terror and pain, Clyde abruptly choked.
“Oh, no,” Alley murmured. He held Clyde’s good hand. “No, come on…”
Clyde’s eye focused for a final moment on his captain’s. With a final shudder, his body gushed out one long irredeemable breath, and drew no more to replace it. The injury was horrific and ugly, but he probably died of shock. In the grip of grief, Alley felt his own lips peel back in misery and helplessness.
But there was more… the acid was starting to lose its power already.
Sucking his own breath in gulps, Alley summoned all his command strength and dropped Clyde’s hand. He picked up the other arm and held the skeletal damage facing toward him. Against every revulsion crawling in his stomach, he stuck a finger into the acid-damaged tissue of Clyde’s palm.
Only a faint burning sensation tingled on his finger. He was right—the acid was neutralizing.
“Clyde, I’m so damned sorry…”
Sorry for his mate’s having to die in such a way, sorry to have learned something from it.
Alley forced himself away from Clyde’s body and launched the long run to catch up to Dave and Lena.
This had been a grave mistake. They should’ve huddled in the engine room and fortified.
Or would they have simply starved to death?
He hardened himself to his first decision and stuck to the plan. Action was better than starving or waiting or hoping. Two more men down—only himself and LaMay left to reach the pilot house.
“Dave!”
“Here!”
Dave had dragged Lena into a slanted ladder shaft and begun to climb, as good a path to the pilot house as any. There were several options, a dozen possible routes, each one just a guess. Which area had been infiltrated? Were all the creatures bundled together in the upper space behind them, demolishing Henry’s corpse, or were they solitary, spreading out all over the Virginia?
Alley threw the Firebolt’s strap over his shoulder, grabbed the ladder’s cold rungs, and began to climb.
How intelligent were those things? Could they anticipate which direction Alley and Dave and Lena were traveling? Would they try to head them off? Could he fool them by being clever or by knowing the ship better than they did?
He didn’t know his enemy well enough to be able to make reasoned choices. Random choices were just as effective, or just as deadly, and he couldn’t know. There hadn’t been time for anything more than the most cursory of computer searches to get a glimpse of the past interactions between humans and these things. They could be killed, but they were better at killing. They could be blown apart, but had tough hides. They communicated somehow with each other in the same vicinity, but nobody knew how. Margin of error was small, decision time almost non-existent. They acted on some kind of enhanced instinct, not on calculation or consideration, so they couldn’t be out-guessed or out-strategized because they didn’t think that way.
But there was no time for more study. Anything more they could discover about the enemy would be revealed in the flames of struggle.
“Dave! Dave, do you know the shutdown code? Dave! Did Clyde teach you the code?”
But there was no answer.
“Dave!”
Again, no answer.
“Dave?”
Again.
8
“You can’t use organic chemical-based caulks in near-absolute zero vacuum. They’d freeze to a brittle rock-hardness before they could be spread out… well, really they’d probably explode from the expansion of contained gases. Nano-alloy caulks are molecular-sized powders which… the moment they’re in contact with the material they’re supposed to be bonding, like maybe a ship’s hull, they form a dense superstrong alloy film.”
“A film? Like glue?” Ned asked.
“Um, yeah, kinda, yeah, but more like spray paint,” Stewart replied. “The heat of the reaction melts them into a continuous solid film and adding more makes more reaction.”
“Does it build up to what you need, or something like that?”
“Exactly. You just keep adding layers.”
“In a zero-G environment? Right out in space? You don’t have to bring it inside?”
“Nope.”
“How do you make it… cure?”
“Good question! You get an ‘A’ in spray caulking.”
“Well?”
“Huh?”
“What’s the answer?”
“Oh! Nano-alloy caulk is sprayed like paint and activated by a gamma-ray burst from the applicator gun. It gives the nano-particles an electrical charge so they repel each other and can be shot from the gun, which is locally charged to the opposite charge to attract the nano—”
“Whoa, there, Cochise, you lost me bad. I’m lost, lost. I’ve a one-dimensional mind. No depth. I can only do one thing at a time and I have to think about it.”
“Like cleaning the bell?”
“For the fourth time.”
Ned let out an involuntary sigh on that last comment. He was indeed on his fourth hour of cleaning the captain’
s bell, having fielded three hours of failing to satisfy the captain. He had polished the already gleaming bell from shoulders to skirt. Not enough buffing on the skirt just above the lip. A touch of tarnish on the clapper. The two mermaids who formed the housing were unevenly buffed. No utility light reflection on the floor from the bell’s copper underside. Streaks on the crown. Polish caught between the scales of the mermaids’ tails. Not enough gleam on their flippers. Uneven cleaning of the letters of the word “RAVEN.” The shine not raised to a high enough gloss. Fingerprints on the yoke. And he had learned the unhelpful subjectivity of the word “enough.”
His arms ached from his ears all the way down. His throat burned from the constant assault of brass polish fumes. His fingernails were stained with green sludge, his palms almost black. He was now using a toothbrush on the raised frieze of ivy leaves running around the skirt.
Ned was glad of one thing this day—Stewart’s company. The other boy was occupied by painting the undersides of the benches that provided seating at the salon table. Stewart was, of all the boys, the most like Ned himself, somewhat quiet but friendly, unaggressive but willing, and not bothered by manual work. They even looked similar, both dark-haired, but Stewart’s hair was shorter and curlier, while Ned’s was free-flowing and somewhat shagged, mostly because he tended to give it a clip here and there when necessary and rarely bothered a barber for a tidier look. And Stewart was a bit taller and Ned was a bit quicker. Stewart was normally quiet, even quieter than Ned, but when Ned asked him about his specialty— space caulk—he went off like a sparkler. Ned had enjoyed hearing about the unfamiliar technology for better than forty minutes now.
“Do you like it here?” Stewart asked. “In space, I mean.”
“It’s interesting, for sure. So much new.”
“Like what?”
“All the technologies, pretty much,” Ned admitted, digging between ivy leaves. “I’d never given much thought to space before.”
“Happy on your island?”
“I always knew men moved in space, but I’m content in my life as a shepherd and sometime sportsman. I’m an Earth-born boy, I guess, and an old Earth at that.”
“What’s it like?”
“We live half in the past, because people like to visit the past.”
“What’s that mean?”
Ned paused to stretch his aching hands. “Means tourism. It’s the mainstay of the Manx. It’s in our vested interest to wear a cloak of the ancient. That means we hide our tech behind the cowshed.”
“How do you get along without technology?”
“Oh, we’ve our share. We don’t need much. Everything’s a short buzz away across the Irish Sea. Universities, hospitals, shopping… Dublin, Liverpool, Glasgow, Belfast… we don’t lack.”
“You mean, you don’t want much?”
“True enough,” Ned agreed thoughtfully. “I like the solitude. I don’t even carry a palm-com like the other kids at my school.”
“Wow! I’ve had one since I was three.”
“Yelling’s just as good, when you’re in spitting distance of everybody you care to speak with.”
“Mostly your family or what?”
“That’s it. Robin and the grans, along with the occasional invading cousin.”
“Don’t you have friends?”
“Plenty,” Ned said, “but they’re mostly motorcycling friends at the TT. The Tourist Trophy road race.”
“Like that T-shirt you wear.”
“That’s it. We’ve had the occasional Beltaine bonfire at our farm, but mostly we meet on the roads and trails for a good ride, goin’ hammers all over the island. Beats the city out of you, and you’re back to tell the sheep all about it. They’re good listeners.”
Stewart smiled—he was usually smiling anyway, so it wasn’t a far trip—and finished up doing his own work. He wiped his hands, looked at Ned and the bell, and asked, “Want some help?”
Ned shook off a feeling of dread. He made a little warning glance at Stewart. “Best not. That might go against the throw.”
“Oh…” Stewart looked downcast for the first time. “I forgot.”
To distract him, Ned asked, “Where’re you from?”
“Me? Oh—I’m from Battle Creek, Michigan.”
Ned smiled. “Sounds fiercely peaceful,” he said, and they laughed.
They clammed up briefly as other voices sounded from the companionway.
“It’s ‘myriad’ this or that, not ‘a myriad of,’” they heard. “‘Myriad’ is an adjective.”
“Are you sure? It’s not ‘a myriad of colors’?”
“No. It’s ‘myriad colors.’”
This would be Leigh and Robin, with Leigh doing the linguistics while she fixed the rubber band at the bottom of one of her cornrows. She was a short girl who would someday be a short woman, with a medium to thick build, intelligent eyes, and hair almost the same color as her skin. She was different from the girls Ned knew at home, and he liked to see her making friends with his sister. Leigh was no-nonsense and Robin enjoyed the senseless. Together they were an entertainment. Standing there with his buffing rag and his toothbrush, his filthy hands and his aching arms, Ned found a moment to grin at the sight of them.
Robin caught her brother’s eyes and instantly got the expression of a girl looking at a beaten kitten. “Aww, Neddy… still at it?”
“Oh, it’s job security,” Ned dismissed.
“It’s abuse,” Leigh prosecuted, pointing at the bell.
Ned laughed, happy to be so defended. “What are you two doing here?”
“It’s pulling on to lunch time,” Robin said.
“Lunch? Did we not just have breakfast?”
“No,” Robin said. “You’ve been cleaning the bell for an entire half-day. It’s just not right. That captain’s mortal cruel.”
“Not to worry. It might’ve kept me from worse work. I’ll just do my best and cuss the Irish. Where are the others?”
“Chris and Dan are with Mr. Nielsen, learning about redistribution of freight, preparing for off-boarding, and Dylan’s doing something magnetic with Chelsea—”
“And Dustin,” Leigh supplied.
“And Mary’s, I think, on the helm with Dana.”
Stewart stepped in with the girls as they began taking tableware from the burnished wood cabinets and distributing plates and cups around the big table, after Robin dealt out placemats to protect the beautiful trestle table. “What about Pearl?” he asked.
Ned glanced at him, wondering why he would ask.
Stewart suddenly realized his faux pas and quickly added, “And Adam?”
“No idea.” Robin tried to be toneless, but failed. Then she lowered her voice. “Do you think the captain will really prevent Adam from eating?”
“I hope so,” Leigh said. “Adam could stand to be silenced by weakness. Well, I could stand it.”
“Oh, it’s not good,” Robin told her. “An empty bag can’t stand, you know.”
An uneasy quiet fell over them as Adam Bay entered from the aft companionway, characteristically unimpressed by his sentence to be here while the others ate. Clearly he knew it would be harder on the other teens than on himself, to eat heartily while one of their peers was made to go hungry. He stood aside, not taking a place at the bench. It seemed he meant to punish them further by standing and watching. He was not embarrassed in the slightest.
Through the forward hatch, at the same time, came Spiderlegs Follo, the little round cook, carrying two boxes of crackers and a tray of cookies. His animated round face, never quite completely shaven, went through several expressions. “Oh, hey, hey… this is good… somebody’s here! Oh, hey, can I get, oh, maybe some help, maybe some hands in the galley?” He spoke in a hesitant, childlike tone, like a Christmas elf. “I got this… this… whole thing… this big… thing… to carry.”
“How many do you need?” Ned asked.
“Oh! Oh! How about… maybe… uh…”
“We’l
l go,” Robin lilted. “Come on, Leigh, let’s be waitresses! I always wanted to!”
“Me too.”
Ned looked at his filthy hands. “I’ll need a moment to clean up—”
“Forget it,” Stewart said. “I’ll cover for you.”
“That’s well. Thanks!”
The other kids flooded out, almost in a panic to get away from Adam’s hovering presence.
Ned found himself alone in the salon with just the other haunting personality. He squirmed a bit and winced. “My rib hurts,” he finally said.
“That’s where you got speared by Pearl the Weird.”
Well, communication was its own blessing. Ned looked at him.
“I’m sorry for what’s happening to you,” he began.
Adam sniffed. “Sorry? For following the vaunted captain’s orders?”
“He’s just giving us a hint of the real thing.”
“He’s a fraud. It’s an act. He pre-hated us before we ever came aboard. He punishes people he doesn’t like. He goes out of his way to make us uncomfortable.”
“Maybe he doesn’t know he’s doing it.”
“Then why does he disguise it so well? He knows.”
Troubled, Ned gazed at the other boy. Adam was tragically cynical for his age. Having grown up with his grandparents and not having that buffer of parents closer to his own age, Ned had learned to see teenagers through the eyes of the elderly, and his life had been one of deep contrasts—the aging friends of his grans at their church and in the towns, and over the water in Belfast and Sligo, Liverpool, and Cardiff, in contrast to his own friends. His grans had taken care to make sure he and Robin had playmates their own age, but to have the bumper of middle-aged adults around was a benefit they could not provide to the two children they were raising in their old age. And they had already been old when Ned and Robin came to live with them on the farm near Kirk Michael.
“I don’t think the captain deals with guests very often,” he attempted.
“We’re not ‘guests,’” Adam said. “We’re customers. He’s profiting from having us aboard.”
“Still, he shouldn’t keep you from a bowl of stew.”
“He won’t,” Adam said smartly. “A person can go without food for two weeks. All I need is water. ‘Captain lets teenager starve on ship full of food’ is not the headline that’ll do his reputation any good.”