by Diane Carey
“They display animal traits,” Ned said, staying with the only line of reason that made sense to him. “They’re ruled by instinct, not reason. We can deal with them on that level. We can win against them if we play by their rules.”
For a moment there was silence, a contemplative pause while every person in the room rolled that idea around inside the mind.
Adam, still limping, moved closer to Ned and peered at him through narrowed eyes. “How do you play by an animal’s rules?”
Ned turned to him, but as he turned something came into his periphery. Pearl. Her expression was dithery, but not quite the human vacancy she was assumed to be.
Had she said something?
Yes, she had.
Adam started to move. Ned put up a hand and stopped him. Instead he stepped to Pearl and asked, “What did you say?”
Her crackpot eyes shifted back and forth between Adam and him. “I hear a funny noise.”
“What kind of noise?” Dan asked. He moved in between Adam and Ned.
“Squeaky.”
“Where’s the terminal?!” Dan spun around, scanning the galley, and found the computer terminal that linked the galley with the rest of the ship. He leaped to it and began hammering on the keyboard. The monitor flickered to life, with a search program that shifted almost instantly to a bandwidth display.
Ned and Adam crowded behind him.
“There it is!” Dan crowed. “Right there… two hundred twelve kilohertz. Plain as day! Higher than any Earth life-form. Higher than beluga whales. The blasted wasps are communicatin’ with each other!”
“Pearl, can you hear that?” Ned asked.
She nodded.
“You mean they’re talking to each other?” Leigh asked.
“Not talkin’,” Dan said. “Communicatin’. It’s not language. It’s more like…”
“Signals,” Ned said.
Dan looked at him. “Well… aw’ right, yeah. General sorta alarms and like. Calls. Summoning. Kinda like we use signal horns at sea.”
“Animals make simple signals,” Ned said. “They’re not building bridges, so they don’t have much to say. So it could be a call, to come… or a warning, to run away.”
“How can we use it?” Adam asked. “And why can she hear it?”
The answer to that was both obvious and unhelpful, Ned noted as they both watched the kilohertz level on the screen go flaring toward the high end.
“Dan,” Ned began, “can we artificially replicate—”
But rude interruption clattered at the outside of the galley hatch, sending everyone into a seizure.
“Open the door! Please, open it! Open it, pleeeeeze!”
The shrill scream pealed through the closed hatchway. Over and over the voice of one of the smugglers burned through the metal, actually causing the cabinets in the galley to ring.
The teenagers huddled, shocked, confused, and leaderless. Robin coiled her arms around her foundling and began to weep against his tiny rose-petal face. Her terror had given way to resignation. But abruptly she raised her head again, hearing another wail from outside. “My soul, it’s one of the women!”
Ned heard the pounding and the screaming from outside the galley, and his heart tore in half. But something else happened to his brain. Of course it could only be the other woman, the Nordic one. She had some kind of an accent, but Ned couldn’t place it. Dutch, maybe.
He shifted his eyes to Adam and the two of them engaged in a moment of resolution. Adam was somehow still himself, still assured and annoyed by life, yet there was something else now.
The cries hit a higher pitch. “Open! Open the door! Open—God, open it! Help! Please help! Open! Open! Open… open…” And the sounds of pitiful sobbing.
The pounding began to weaken.
“Do something…” Mary suffered. The noise from outside crushed her.
Dan broke toward the hatch.
Ned snatched out to stop him, swinging him around before he reached the hatch.
“Leave off!” Dan wailed. He shook his arms until Ned was thrown off.
The captain snapped, “Don’t open it, you idiot!”
“This is wrong!” Chris countered. “We can’t leave her out there!”
“You don’t know these people.”
“Do I have to?”
“Pleeeeze! Open! Open! Begging you—open!”
“Hell, yes,” the captain said.
“You’re sick!” Dan yanked away from Ned and plunged for the door. “Chris, get ready to pull her in!”
Ned moved toward them as Chris pushed past him and crouched near the hatch and Dan took the hatch lock. “Dan, I don’t know…”
“Shut your trap! You’re not the boss!”
Dylan backed up and ducked under the serving counter. “Captain?”
But Pangborn ignored him. “Don’t open it.”
Too late, for Dan was already spinning the handle and the oblong clanked free of its housing. He pulled back and swung it open.
And suddenly the captain and Ned were the two smartest people in the universe. At first they only saw the blond woman, her hair half torn from her head, her slashed face turned upward, imploring, as she lay on her stomach, pressed to the deck by a long clawed foot.
Ned dragged Dan back and scrambled to pull Chris. The boys didn’t resist, but tumbled against Ned’s legs. He rolled them behind him like beach balls.
At first it was just the leg, and behind it a swirling tail, but then the creature hunched its body and looked inside the galley hatch at them. Its head was too big to come in level, so it bent deep, spread its teeth, and drained its gluey resin all over the deck.
A scream rose from Mary. Leigh made a noise just as awful, and Adam put his hands out but couldn’t move. Adam’s mouth fell open in surprise and his eyes were wide. Apparently even he had not expected this.
Staring upward, Ned shooed the others behind him, but he refused to give ground. The breath of the creature ruffled his hair as it closed its clawed foot on the Nordic woman’s spine, one of its claws cracking into her skull. One second alive, the next dead, she went limp with one hand reaching through the hatch.
He sensed the other cadets and the captain shifting back into the depths of the galley toward the freezer, but that would only be another trap. Ned used every shred of experience he’d ever gained in his rural life, operating on instinct almost like an animal himself. He flared his arms out at his sides to appear bigger and didn’t flinch or even blink.
“Neddy!” Robin’s shriek tore through his head, just as he expected the dragon’s claw to tear his flesh.
Without looking at her, without distraction, he simply snapped his fingers to silence her.
The noxious creature parted its silvery jaws and hacked in her direction.
For the second time in half an hour, Ned held his ground.
From his left, he caught a movement in his periphery—a short, round movement, and an arching object. Spiderlegs stepped out from the food prep area, rotated his short arm, and flung the canister of baking soda at the grotesque head just as it came through the hatch. Baking soda fanned out from the can in midair, made a rather elegant beige snowstorm, and went boof all over the alien’s excuse for a face. The can struck it in the snout and went ringing across the deck. Tang tang tang rattle-click.
Startled, the creature snapped its jaws shut and shook its head, scraping its skull case with both prehistoric paws and brushing at its exo-skeleton—the bones were on the outside, weren’t they?
Without a pause, the brave little cook spun forward on his short legs and heaved the butchering cleaver with quite a lot more strength than he appeared to have. The heavy cleaver, big and solid and perfectly formed for its task, turned one perfect revolution and crack—embedded itself in the creature’s skull case.
The animal shrieked and rotated its great head as green acid spurted from the wound, but the cleaver was sunk in mighty well and acted as a plug.
But not quite—the
baking soda stuck to the creature began to sizzle and bubble, reacting with the acid! What was happening? The acid was neutralizing!
The animal shook its head again, disoriented. It opened and closed its claws, looking for the utensil embedded in its head, but it couldn’t find the wound. Still, it wasn’t going down. It staggered a bit, but wasn’t wounded enough.
And that might be worse, for now it was wounded and angry.
Standing between the huge pest and everybody else, Ned gave himself up for dead, for the second time today. He would at least not die for nothing. He fixed his eyes on the place where the creature would’ve had eyes in any other incarnation, and took a step forward.
“Neddy…”
Somehow over the stridor of the furious creature, he heard his sister’s whisper. He wanted to speak to her, but this would have to do. His posture alone would have to communicate his intents to her, his resolution, and his goodbyes.
At least he might be able to back the animal out the door. Somebody would come behind and close the hatch. Do it, Adam.
He took another step. The hornet, still shaking off the baking soda, trying to scrape its head clean, stumbled backward off the body of the blond woman. Its claw caught in her neck and dragged her back with it, finally shaking free as if she were a kitchen heap.
Ned put his hand on the hatch, his foot on the coaming—
“Hi! Hi, bird!”
Pearl!
Under his arm she went, quicker than he had ever seen her move.
“Hi!” she rasped again, beaming up at the creature and waving her silly hand. “I heard you singing!”
Ned tried to bring his arm down on her, to coil around her and drag her back, but the alien flared and hissed and snatched out its hand to slap him away. He flew back, right off the deck, and slammed into Adam. The two of them crashed backward into the pantry door.
As they struggled to sit up, pulling at each other for support, the black death pivoted its spined head at Pearl. In a single fluid movement it wrapped its hands around her—and they engulfed her whole torso. She floated up off the deck like a birthday balloon.
“Pearl!” Ned cried out. He pushed his hands and heels into the deck to force himself up.
“No, Ned!” Adam clamped his arms around him and held him down.
The last thing they saw of Pearl were the soles of her orthopedic shoes and her white calves disappearing in a flyblown twist. The last thing he heard was the husk of Pearl’s delighted laughter fading down the corridor.
On the deck, all that remained was a puddle of bubbling baking soda as it cooled the rage of nature’s poison.
17
“It took her!” Robin cried. “It took her!”
“What does that mean?!” Leigh also bellowed, agonized.
As Dan slammed the hatch shut and spun the locking handle, Ned twisted around as he lay on the deck and shouted at Adam. “Why did you stop me?! I could’ve—”
“You could’ve what?” Adam countermanded.
“Why would they take her instead of killing her?” Leigh asked, dizzy with empathy. “What does that mean?”
Captain Pangborn, now with an edge on his words, said, “It means she’ll be turned into a human cocoon. They’ll beat her and break her bones and condition her until she’s barely alive, but still alive. They’ll find one of their eggs, if they have them, and the egg will open up. From the egg comes a—”
“Stop!” Ned pushed onto his feet. “Stop frightening them on purpose!”
“If you don’t have all the facts, you’re not grown-ups. You’re just children being soothed until you die.”
Favoring his right leg where Leigh had kicked him and on which Ned had landed after the alien batted him away, Adam struggled to get to his feet. Supporting himself on the counter’s edge, he moved toward Ned. “Okay… how do we play by an animal’s rules?”
Taken aback, Ned blinked. “I thought you were challenging me.”
“No, I was asking you.”
“Why did the baking soda bother it?” He turned to Spider-legs. “Mr. Follo, how did you know to do that?”
Spiderlegs shrugged his sloping shoulders and flattened his lips. “Just… makes sense, Nedmenzie, every cook knows that… pour baking soda on a grease fire and all… neutralize it and all… pretty simple—”
“Simplicity from a simpleton,” Pangborn derided.
Adam spoke up again. “It works because everything reacts with something. It’s a base. A base is acid to acid.” He looked at Ned. “How did you make the dragon back off?”
Ned fought to clear his spinning head. “I… I just treated it like the wild thing it is. Everybody who grows up on a farm knows you never back down from a charging animal.”
Adam smiled at him. “Looks like we found your talent.”
Unsure whether this was a compliment or another snotty remark, Ned said nothing.
But Adam was smiling at him, not something Adam did very often, or at least hadn’t done so far.
“Everything backs down from these things,” the captain bluntly told them, deliberately diminishing Ned’s accomplishment. “Everything in space or anywhere always backs down from these things. Eventually, they kill everything around them. It would’ve killed you.”
“Oh, it was going to kill me,” Ned admitted. “But it was already confused by Mr. FolIo. I was just hoping it would kill me in the hall after the door was shut and you’d all at least be safer.”
Overcome, Robin ran to him, holding her foundling in one cradling arm, and throwing the other arm around Ned. He clasped her tightly in gratitude, though he had little reassurance to give. She smelled of birthing fluids and birthing bloods, like the ewes at the farm after lambing.
“Oh! Oh!” Spiderlegs began. “Know what I got? Not gonna believe this! Just look what I got!” He spun to the other side of the galley and clicked open a narrow spice cabinet. He pushed the button at the side of the cabinet, and the innards of the cabinet rolled through shelf after shelf, bringing him the one shelf he wanted. He reached as deeply inside as his stumpy arms could manage, and drew out a plastic packet about the size of a bed pillow. It flopped in his arms, loaded with containers of different sizes. “Baby food!”
“Baby food?” Robin turned. “But this baby is—too little.”
“I got it!” Spiderlegs dumped the plastic bag on the counter and zipped it open, and pulled out several baby bottles and cans of powdered baby formula. “See? It’s breast milk! Condensed breast milk!”
“Bless you,” Robin whispered. “You blessed man… please, let’s feed the poor thing!”
“What’s baby food doing here?” Mary asked.
“This ship is a contained city,” Pangborn said. “We’ve thought of everything. More than you could ever think of.”
As Robin moved away from Ned toward the counter, Ned was left once again with his troubles, and the burden of Adam’s lingering question.
“We can’t hide… we can’t camouflage ourselves from them… it seems they go after us because we’re alive and they know it. What we need is… to hide out in the open.”
His words floated about for a few moments on their own. Adam, Dan, Chris, Stewart… Pangborn and Leigh and Mary… they all watched him, their clever minds toiling to discover some sense in what he had said.
It was the captain finally who spoke.
“How?”
* * *
“What’s your next move?” Pangborn asked.
“I’m going after Pearl.”
“What!”
“I’m going to rescue her.”
“Rescue her!” Adam echoed.
“Yes.”
“Are you nuts? She belongs with them! She’s a mutant, a deviant, a pink elephant! She should’ve died in infancy! Maybe this is just nature correcting its error! Did you think of that? Why would you give up your life for that aberration who’s doomed anyway?”
“That’s wrong to say about her,” Ned told him sharply. “She’s one of us
. She’s a person. She’s not a throwback and she’s not an error, and I’m going to try.” He swung away from the distasteful thought of abandoning Pearl to that vile fate, and faced Pangborn again. “It could’ve killed us all, but it took her and went away. Did it know we were a group? When it’s solitary, does it tend to hide?”
Pangborn seemed somewhat amused by the questions, but he was also thinking about answers. “They’ve been known to hide… and when they’re in groups, they charge.”
“What does that mean?” Leigh asked.
“It means preservation,” Ned told her. “It means individuals don’t matter to the group, but the group matters to the individual.”
“That’s our weakness,” Adam added. “Individuals matter to us.”
Leigh shot him a withering glare. “Which individuals matter to you, except you?”
Ned kept to his own point, and spoke again to the captain. “How can I count them and track them?”
Pangborn shed the initial shock of that idea, and then laughed. “Oh! Okay! Sure, why not? Over on that monitor, call up the ship’s mainframe and go to the protocols for emergency search and rescue. Go ahead. I’ll give you the codes. Go ahead.”
He talked them through it, being surprisingly cooperative, teaching as he went, correcting when necessary. Ned noticed as he learned that if Pangborn had wanted to be a better person, if he liked other people more, he would’ve made an exemplary instructor. He was patient and careful, and by the time he was done, they had some answers. After a while, they were looking at a top-down schematic of the ship, with little dots of indicator lights, some yellow, some orange, moving about like ghosts on the beautiful picture.
“There are a total of twelve moving bodies out there in the ship,” Pangborn finished. “There are a total of sixteen living things, if you add the members of the crew you’ve put to sleep. You can see that even though they’re not moving, the sleeping crew is marked by these heat registries.”
“Are these animals warm? Will we know where they are if they stop moving?”
Pangborn shuffled back from the learning station. “I don’t actually know that. Never planned on dealing with them. The computer may not be able to register accurately because it’s never encountered those animals’ body types before. It sees motion and heat. They might have something it doesn’t see, or it might register something we don’t know they’re radiating. I just don’t know. Surprise— we don’t have all the answers. And we never will.”