The Last Astronaut

by David Wellington

  They came to a place where a thick bundle of cables were braided together like a rope that led off in either direction farther than their lights could show. The cables were similar to the tendrils, but much, much bigger—thick trunks as wide across as Jansen’s waist that rose like a sandbank from the dark water. Flickers of electricity moved across the cables, barely visible. They had to backtrack a fair ways before Jansen could steer them around the braid. Even when she found the way forward she stopped, because she’d seen something else.

  From a distance she saw something that looked a little like a tree, except that some of its branches could move like arms, on thick, knobby joints. The twigs at the ends of the branches looked far too much like human fingers for her liking. Human fingers that stretched a meter long.

  She couldn’t help but stare as the fingers slowly curled together, trembling and weak, to form tight, knotty fists.

  “Keep moving,” Hawkins said, breaking the spell. She planted the TBL and heaved, and they moved forward. He stumbled past her and dropped to his knees at the front of the raft, sweeping the water with his lights.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Don’t stop what you’re doing,” he said. “It’s nothing. It’s—”

  She was steering them around the side of a massive, low arch. They were close enough to make out its surface texture. It didn’t look so much like concrete, as she’d originally thought, as something more organic. Not wood, but—it was made of closely woven fibers so tightly packed they made a continuous surface. Dotted through the striated surface were deep, shadowy pits, as big as caves. Interesting, she supposed, but Hawkins was acting as if he’d seen something else.

  Suddenly he reeled backward, his suit lights spearing up through the dark, murky air. They caught something, a pale shape that clung to the shadow on the top curve of the arch. Jansen planted her pole and looked, trying to make it out. “What is it?” she asked.

  “Quiet!” Hawkins barked.

  Then the shape moved. It looked at first as if it was unfurling, separating into individual appendages like arms and legs and—

  “Oh my God,” she said. “It’s—it’s—”

  It had the shape of a human being. It was moving, flickering in and out of the light. Jansen caught a flash of color. A momentary glimpse of bright orange.

  KSpace orange.

  “Hey!” she shouted. “Hey! You, up there—”

  The figure made a sweeping gesture with its arms, pointing back the way they’d come. The message was unmistakable. Go back, the figure was telling them. Go back.

  Jansen shook her head. “Taryn Holmes?” she shouted. “Commander Foster?” She couldn’t even tell if the figure was male or female. “Sandra Channarong? Please, we’ve come to help!”

  Whoever it was, they slipped into the shadows and vanished as if they’d never been there.

  Jansen pushed them closer to the arch. Hawkins lunged across the raft to try to grab the pole away from her, but she held it out of his reach. It was all Rao could do to hold on to the ice as they started to spin in the dark water.

  Water that was splashing hard against the side of the raft. It was as if they’d wandered into a strong current. The water pushed them away from the arch, but Jansen kept poling against its flow.

  “You saw it, right?” Jansen demanded. Rao looked up and saw Jansen standing over her.

  Rao just nodded. Yes, she’d seen something. Though it had been hard to tell in the dark, with Hawkins’s light bouncing all over the place.

  “That was one of them,” Jansen insisted. “One of the KSpace crew. We have to get closer!”

  “They were warning us about something,” Hawkins said.

  Jansen didn’t even seem to hear him. The raft danced under her feet. She pushed down hard with the pole, trying to stabilize them. It looked as if she was having difficulty. Rao pointed her lights across the water and saw whitecaps snapping along the surface, pale claws of water surging between the bobbing ice floes. The current she’d sensed before was getting stronger. She could hear the waves slapping against each other. It felt as if something was moving out there in the water. Something big. Was this what the figure had been warning them about? It was coming fast. A big wave came right at them, maybe big enough to capsize their raft.

  “Jansen!” Rao cried. “Look out!”

  From far out in the distance there came a sound like a whale jumping from the water and landing again with a huge, meaty impact, and then the water surged again, the waves even more powerful than before. The raft bobbed wildly, threatening to buck them off.

  “Hold on!” she shouted. Whatever was out there in the dark stirring up the water was still moving. She heard it smack the surface of the water like a vast hand, felt little shocks and ripples bouncing the raft up and down. “Hold on,” she shouted again, and dropped to her knees to try to gain some stability.

  Hawkins was still half-upright. “Whatever it is—”

  There was a vast churning sound, and then the direction of the waves changed a hundred and eighty degrees, as if a tide that had been going out had suddenly been sucked back in. Whatever it was, out there in the dark, it had to be enormous—and it was turning the water to foam.

  Jansen reached in a pocket of her suit and took out one of her flares.

  “What are you doing?” Hawkins asked. “If it sees us—”

  The flare had a built-in grip and ignition switch. Jansen pointed it up above her head and hit the trigger.

  After the continuous darkness of 2I, the flare’s light was blinding and Rao had to look away. When she dared to lift her head again she saw it, a red comet blazing across the air above them. For a second, just a second, she could see for kilometers, she could see the arcing walls of 2I, the walls of the drum curving up and away from her, walls covered in water dotted with the last scraps of ice. She saw all the bubble mounds and hand-trees and arches, the vast domes and wells and things she couldn’t describe, saw just how much of this dark lake had come to life. She saw, directly above her, the roof of the drum, saw hand-trees up there that must be kilometers tall, saw their slender fingers twitch and curl up. She saw the arches rising up over her head, hundreds of them, arches growing from the curves of other arches like the staircases in an Escher painting. The air over her head was crisscrossed by a network that branched and rebranched very much as the tendrils ramified. A pale scaffolding that crossed from one side of the drum to the other.

  All of it so maddeningly familiar. Rao’s mind raced, still trying to make sense of this alien world. Even when her body screamed at her to get down, to keep her head down, as the raft continued to buck and tilt.

  The flare hit the top of its arc and deployed a little parachute. It started to sink back through the thickening air of 2I, pulled down by the artificial gravity. After a moment she couldn’t see the world above their heads anymore, which was a relief.

  Unfortunately, a short-lived one. Because instead she saw what had been making all the waves.

  Hanging from the arches like fat stalactites were long pods, dark, oblong shapes connected at their tops by thin stalks or peduncles. They had to be twenty meters long, and they were everywhere, dangling overhead, hanging down from the undersides of the arches like roosting bats.

  And they were moving. Twitching.

  The ones that touched the water convulsed and shook, slapping and slamming their thick ends against the submerged surface of the drum. This was what was causing the waves—the repetitive, thrashing motion of the pods.

  So many of them, and they were all moving. So big.

  The flare had fallen nearly all the way down to the water’s surface. In the last of its light, Rao looked around and thought she saw something, just a glimpse, but it looked as if one of the long pods had split at its end, split open and something was slithering out—

  “Jansen!” Hawkins shouted, and Rao twisted around to look at him. He was half on, half off the raft as it bucked and shook, tossed by the waves
. His fingers dug into the ice, trying to find purchase that wasn’t there.

  Rao lunged forward and grabbed him, grabbed both his wrists to try to hold him on the raft. She saw his face, saw the look of real terror there. She held as tightly to him as she could, tried to dig her knees into the ice and pull him back up. She started to make progress, started to feel she was actually going to save him.

  “Jansen,” he said, and pulled one of his hands free of hers to point behind her. Rao’s helmet wouldn’t let her look back. She grabbed his arm with both hands and heaved, but he wasn’t looking at her, much less doing anything to help. “Jansen’s gone!” he shouted.

  Rao let him go and flipped over on her back and looked around, her suit lights sweeping across the raft’s surface, but it was true, it was true—Jansen was nowhere to be seen. The pole quivered in the air for a moment, then fell backward into the water. Had Jansen fallen off the floe? Had she been dragged off? Rao scrabbled across the ice, away from where Jansen had been a moment before.

  Then a massive wave smashed into the raft, flipping it over completely, and she went flying, and she and Hawkins were both thrown into the fast-moving water and carried away by an implacable current.

  “Run it again. Is there any way to get better resolution on this?”

  “I’m sorry, sir. The trickle of data we’re getting from the neutrino gun doesn’t allow high-quality video. I’m doing what I can—”

  McAllister waved one hand at the technician in frustration. “Just put it on a loop. I have to be sure.”

  On the big screen in the control room, the video played over and over. Just a second or two of imagery taken from Parminder Rao’s viewpoint. It showed one of the long pods hanging from the arches that zigzagged across 2I’s interior. One like all the others, except that as McAllister watched it smashed itself against the floor of the drum—and broke open.

  Something fell out of the pod, something big and indistinct. It collapsed into the water, throwing up spray that made it even harder to see. But McAllister was certain. He knew for a fact that the thing, whatever it was, had reared up out of the water and wriggled forward a few meters.

  The video started over, slowed down and magnified until each pixel on the screen was as big as McAllister’s hand. He watched it again.

  That thing was moving under its own power.

  It was an alien. It had to be. One of 2I’s crew, perhaps, or—

  “Sir,” someone called out. It wasn’t a shout, but he could hear the fear in the voice. He turned and saw Utz, the biomedical engineer. “Sir, Orion’s telemetry is all over the place. Look at this.”

  She threw a new video up on the screen, one that moved so fast he thought at first it must have been sped up. It showed Jansen’s viewpoint, and for a second it was nothing but a spinning, vertiginous slice of near darkness. Then silver bubbles erupted across the view, and water surged over Jansen’s faceplate.

  “They’re in the water,” Utz said. “Sir—they’ve capsized.”

  “Dear God,” McAllister said.

  ROY MCALLISTER: There was no way for us to contact them, to ask for an update. Add to that the fact that we were still half a light-minute away from them, so all the information we had was roughly thirty seconds old. As I watched Jansen fall into the water, I knew that there was a possibility the entire crew was already dead.

  ENCOUNTER WINDOW

  It was about all Jansen could do to breathe.

  It felt as if she’d been fighting the water for hours, wrestling with the constantly changing currents, trying desperately not to smash into anything hard enough to damage her suit. It didn’t always work—one of her suit lights hit the bottom and went out with a terrible jangling noise. The instrument package on the front of her suit caught on the side of an arch, snagging and almost tearing off before she could free herself.

  The water churned and burst all around her. Wave after wave crashed over her and threw her buoyant suit this way and that. She tried to find something to grab on to and failed. She tried to grasp the rootlike tendrils that formed a thick carpet under the water, but they were too slippery. She tried to fetch up against one of the arches, but the current was just too strong.

  The whole time she kept looking out for Rao and Hawkins. Calling their names, shouting for them. Once she saw some suit lights, cones of light stabbing upward through the froth and foam of the waves. She tried kicking toward them only to get caught by a new riptide and hauled off into the dark. Once, as she battled to keep her head up, above the water, she felt a human hand slap hers, felt fingers try to grab her palm, only to be torn away.

  At least—she hoped it had been a human hand.

  The water never stopped moving, never gave her a moment’s break. It threw her back and forth, pulled her under in a broad maelstrom, spit her back out on the curl of a miniature tsunami. She was caught by a sudden surge, a roar of bubbles all around her, pulled under and dashed against the floor. She went spinning, head over heels. She shoved out her arms and her legs, trying to maximize her resistance to the water’s pull, and it kind of worked—and then a huge wave came through, sweeping millions of liters of water ahead of it, and she went flying forward, faster than ever before.

  In the dark water her light could show her only a torrent of bubbles, a sweep of debris as she was propelled forward faster and faster, and then something solid was right in front of her, rushing toward her—she threw out her arms, trying to create drag, trying to slow herself down. She was thrown sideways and then something smashed into her leg, into her knee—

  There was a blinding flash of light inside her head, pain transmuted to white, screaming light, and a sickening crunch she felt vibrating through all the bones on her left side.

  And then the water surged again, throwing her forward, dragging her across a floor of massed, curling tendrils that gave way to—to something else, something—

  She was shoved bodily up a slope, a slope that was rough yet yielding, a slope that canceled her forward momentum. She slowed to a stop.

  The water pulled back all around her, draining away from what was, suddenly, a shore.

  She realized she was lying facedown on something she chose to call a beach. She’d been thrown up onto dry land.

  Maybe not for long. The water hauled at her legs as it slid down the slope of the beach, headed back toward the dark sea. She started to slip and thrust her hands forward, grabbed at the beach. It was hopeless—she couldn’t get a grip, couldn’t hold on—she was going to be pulled back into the churning water, pulled back and thrown around again, and this time—

  Hands, definitely human hands grabbed her wrists and hauled her up against the surging tide. She heard Rao shout something, maybe not even words, and then she was out of the water and being dragged up the shore.

  Jansen rolled onto her side and took a series of long, deep breaths. Rao was shouting at her, asking her if she was all right, but Jansen could barely hear her. She was paying too much attention to her knee. If it was broken, if she couldn’t walk, what would they do? If her patella was shattered, just chips of bone under her skin, then… Except it didn’t hurt anymore. Her knee didn’t hurt at all. It was completely numb.

  She didn’t know if that was good or bad. She knew it had to be bad. She shook her head and did the thing that she knew, consciously, was a terrible idea, but which her subconscious begged her to do. She climbed carefully to her feet and put weight on her left leg.

  She didn’t scream. She didn’t collapse in a heap. The leg held. Whatever had happened to her knee, it wasn’t broken.

  She didn’t think so, anyway.

  Rao was right there, right in front of her. Jansen pulled her into a hug, their fiberglass torsos smashing together.

  Then she staggered away from the younger woman, really, really needing to lie down, and fell lengthwise across the almost-solid ground.

  The beach underneath her was rubbery and soft, enough so that her knees and hands sank into its mass, forming little
craters. She lifted her hand and the surface sprang back. It was like kneeling on the top of a giant balloon.

  Rao was still talking to her, shouting something. Jansen turned away from her. She needed to know where she was first. Then she could deal with whatever problem Rao had identified.

  The surface was a deep-maroon color. It wasn’t smooth, but instead covered in tiny, pale nodules. It reminded her of the skin of an octopus. She looked around and thought that she was on some kind of island, a mass of rubbery material that had risen from the shallow, dark sea. Every few seconds it felt as if the ground rippled, swaying up and down by the slightest degree. Or maybe that was just her.

  “Jansen,” Rao said. Finally her voice broke through the fog in Jansen’s head. “It’s Hawkins, he—”

  “Hawkins.” Jansen put her hands down, pushing herself upright. “He’s here?” But as her solitary helmet light swept around the island, she didn’t need confirmation. He was farther up the slope, lying on his side, his arms and legs splayed limply in front of him. Jansen staggered over to him and then dropped to her knees.

  She couldn’t see his face. The inside of his faceplate was smeared with blood.

  “He’s alive. All his telemetry is coming through and he’s breathing, his heart’s beating, but he’s not responsive,” Rao said. “I think he must have hit his head pretty hard.”

  “That’s a lot of blood,” Jansen pointed out.

  “Head wounds bleed a lot. He could have a concussion.” Or he could have cracked his skull, Rao thought. He could be about to die. “I would need to check his eyes and palpate his head to be sure.”