“I… wasn’t going to,” she said.
He didn’t reply. He stalked a few paces forward, looked around. Lifted his helmet from his waist and manually panned his light across the trunks of the trees. “Of all the dumbfuck ideas your buddy Jansen has had—man. I don’t like this.”
Rao couldn’t help but agree.
The forest was almost silent, except for the occasional rustling sound from overhead. Was that what Hawkins had heard before? She watched the hands curl and uncurl and shivered. When she’d seen the heart, she’d known exactly what she was looking at. Oh, she couldn’t have proved it, and as a scientist she was always careful about jumping to conclusions, but there’d really been no doubt in her mind. It was a heart. Just like every heart she’d cut out of a dead body in med school. Just like the heart of the fetal pig she’d dissected in high school biology. Hearts didn’t scare her. These hand-trees, though—she had no idea what they were, what they were for. She felt that unknowing almost as a physical pain, a soreness in her mind she couldn’t soothe.
Hawkins lifted his feet high as he made his way deeper into the trees. “Watch out,” he said, “the ground here is crawling with tendrils.”
She wished he hadn’t used that word, crawling. The tendrils were immobile. She had seen them move, seen how fast they could move, when she operated on Stevens. The only thing keeping her from absolute panic was the certainty that these tendrils were stuck fast.
She stepped very carefully on a twisted mass of them. Lifted her other foot and swung it forward to take another step. Hawkins was well ahead of her, and she wanted to hurry to catch up. She wanted very badly not to be alone in the forest, alone with—
“Nooooo…”
It was a long, moaning wail of a sound. It had to be Jansen. Rao was certain it had to be Jansen making that noise. If it was something else, she knew she couldn’t bear it. She would turn around and run back out of the forest, back to open ground.
“No… please…”
Hawkins swung around and looked at her. Then he started running forward, between the tree trunks, as fast as he could. Rao called out for him to wait, to let her catch up, but soon she needed all her breath as she raced after him, trying very hard just to keep his back in view, inside the cone of her lights. Trunks flashed past her on either side, pale, fibrous shapes that flared in her light and then immediately disappeared into the dark again. She tried to keep an eye on her footing, but it was all she could do to keep moving, to keep running.
Then Hawkins stopped, so suddenly that she nearly collided with him. He bent down and picked up something he’d found on the forest floor.
Rao gasped when he brought it up into his light. Proximal phalanx, she thought, flashing back to anatomy class. Just as when she’d seen the heart, she knew, instantly, what she was looking at.
Except—this wasn’t part of 2I. It wasn’t an alien phalanx.
Hawkins lifted his head, then moved forward, not rising from his crouch. He picked up another bone. This one was broken, one end cracked and jagged.
Ulna.
“What… what…” She couldn’t stop herself. “Why? Those are—they’re—” She couldn’t form a coherent thought. She was shaking inside her suit, her eyes barely focusing on what she saw.
Together they moved forward and found a clavicle. And then most of a scapula. There was no question in her mind it was a human shoulder bone. It looked as if it had been stripped clean and bleached, as if it had been prepared so it could be articulated with the other bones, hung up as a model of a human skeleton.
Something crunched under her boot. She jumped back and saw she’d stepped on a mandible. Unlike the others it wasn’t loose on the ground. Tendrils had wrapped around the jawbone, snaked between missing teeth. She grabbed it and tried to pull it free, some deep part of her horribly offended by the way the tendrils had snagged this piece of a human being.
“Leave it,” Hawkins said. He gestured with two fingers for her to move up, to join him. He put a hand on her arm. Scared as she was, she barely felt it.
Up ahead, just a few meters away, Jansen lay curled on the ground, shaking. Rao could hear her sobbing. Jansen had a long, straight bone—a femur—in her arms, and she was clutching it to herself.
Rao looked up and saw a splash of orange across the white forest. It took her a second to actually see what was there, to process it.
A bright-orange space suit, slumped against the trunk of a hand-tree. Part of a bright-orange space suit, with a pattern of hexagons painted on the helmet and down one sleeve. The other sleeve was missing, as well as most of the leg on that side. The faceplate of the helmet was smashed, and only jagged, triangular shards of the polycarbonate remained. Nestled in those shards was a broken piece of a cranium—of a human skull.
Tendrils snaked across the chest of the suit, across the remaining leg. They sprouted from inside the helmet and erupted from the missing shoulder, whole tangled knots of them, some as thick as fingers, some so thin they looked almost like hairs. They rose from the torn parts of the suit and wove upward around the trunk of the hand-tree, disappearing into its translucent flesh.
Rao drew in a very difficult breath. Then let out a choked little scream. She was too terrified to make a bigger sound, though she didn’t know if she was scared something out in the forest might hear her, or if she was just petrified by the thought of intruding on Jansen’s grief. She pushed past Hawkins and knelt down beside Jansen, her arms around the older woman’s helmet, trying to comfort her, to give her something.
“No…,” Jansen wailed.
Hawkins moved to stand over the body, pointing his lights down at the orange parts of the suit. The light was intense, the sudden burst of color making Rao want to look away.
“It’s Holmes,” Hawkins rasped. He pointed at where the astronaut’s name had been painted on the front of his chest panel. “Taryn Holmes.” As if unwilling to actually touch what lay before him, he used his foot to push some broken shards of helmet polycarbonate away from the exposed half of the skull. “Looks like the tendrils removed the flesh,” he said. Then he added, more quietly, “Why do you suppose they did that?”
Jansen’s body curled in on itself at the sound of his words.
A flash of rage split Rao’s skull right down the middle. She hated Hawkins in that moment.
“Asshole,” she spit. “Shut up! This isn’t the time.”
Hawkins looked straight back at her. Not flinching at all. He gave her the slightest of frowns, then he turned and walked away, between two tree trunks. Maybe he was giving them space. Maybe he was just done with them.
Except—of course—he couldn’t leave it at that. He turned and spoke to Jansen over his shoulder, not even looking at her.
“I know this isn’t what you wanted to find. I’m sorry. But it means one less thing to worry about. We can focus on finding the brain now, and finishing our mission.”
PROXIMITY OPERATIONS
VIDEO FILE TRANSCRIPT (4)
[The video shows only flashes of motion and, occasionally, flares of light. The voice of Taryn Holmes is very faint and indistinct, and the accuracy of the transcript cannot be guaranteed. The voices of Willem Foster and Sandra Channarong are much more distinct.]
Taryn Holmes: No light. I can’t see. Can’t [indecipherable]. I don’t have any eyes.
Willem Foster: Hold him down. Get his arm—
Sandra Channarong: Cut those things off him! Cut them! They’re killing him!
Foster: I’m trying. I’m trying! Just—just—
Holmes: I’m so hungry. I’m—it was cold, it’s [indecipherable] been cold. So cold and empty and so, so long. Close now, though. Almost [indecipherable].
Foster: What did he just say? Did you hear that?
Channarong: He’s dying! Who cares what he—just help him!
Foster: I’m trying. But did you hear—
Holmes: It’s almost over. It’s [indecipherable]. It’s warm here, near the sun. Good to be w
arm. Good to be [indecipherable].
The memory stick had been hung on a nearby hand-tree, from a loop of wire placed over one of its extruding fibers. It had been Rao who found it, but she’d just handed it over without a word.
Jansen played it as they walked. She played it over and over.
She thought she understood what had happened. She’d seen something similar, after all. She had watched Stevens get caught in a web of tendrils, watched him struggle to break free. She thought Taryn Holmes must have been trapped the same way—except somehow, even with Foster and Channarong both working to free him, he hadn’t been able to get loose.
Looking at the time stamp on the video clip, she saw that Taryn Holmes had probably died while she was struggling up the slope toward the airlock, struggling to get Stevens back to safety.
If Stevens hadn’t been attacked—if KSpace had just responded to her radio calls—
“Keep moving,” Hawkins said. He was up ahead of her, maybe twelve meters away. She’d been dragging her leg along as she watched the clip. Again. “We need to make better time. You need to pick up the pace, Jansen—”
Rao said something, something conciliatory and quiet. Jansen didn’t even hear the words. She had started the clip up again, the grainy, shaky video playing across the inside of her faceplate. “Get his arm,” she heard Foster say. Again.
Something—something odd had happened. Foster had noticed something odd, something about Holmes’s final words.
Jansen started the clip over, again. Trying to hear what Foster had heard.
The dragon on the shaved half of Charlotte Harriwell’s head was rearing back, smoke jetting from its nostrils. It was ready to breathe fire.
The look on her face matched it pretty well, McAllister thought. As she plucked the device from the side of her nose and dropped it—along with a tiny purse—into the plastic bucket, he gave her what he hoped looked like a friendly wave. She didn’t look up, just stepped through the white frame of the security MRI, lifting her hands above her head. A security guard beckoned for her to come forward, then handed her the basket.
“Thank you,” she said. She pressed her device back onto her face. Then she turned to look at McAllister for the first time.
“Associate Administrator,” she said. He doubted it was a good thing she was calling him by his full title. “I have a very long list of questions. Perhaps we can start with this—can you name a dollar value for the loss of a privately owned spacecraft? Because I assure you, NASA will be compensating KSpace for the full purchase price of Wanderer.”
He thought of the convivial atmosphere of their last meeting, back at the Atlanta Hive. She had been all placid smiles and gentle tones back then.
He supposed that was before his team had wrecked her spaceship. He wished he had better news for her now. “Come this way, ma’am,” he said. She raised an eyebrow at the old-fashioned honorific.
He took her to a special elevator at the back of the building. There were only two buttons on the panel inside. One read Ground and one read Telescope. McAllister picked the latter.
She seemed surprised when the elevator started to descend. “Exactly what kind of telescope do you build underground?” she asked.
“One that you want to shield from cosmic rays and surface vibrations,” he said. “Ms. Harriwell, I need to inform you that what you’re going to see is… it’s sensitive.”
“As in—it’s likely to make me swoon?”
McAllister gave her a very small smile. He certainly hoped it wouldn’t, though he wouldn’t blame her. “As in, we have to ask you not to speak about what you see here with the public.”
“On my honor,” she said.
“I’m afraid I need a little more than that.” He touched his device and sent her a nondisclosure form. She glanced over at him—clearly she’d received it—and then made an elaborate show of blinking one eye very slowly. The equivalent of a signature.
“Thank you,” he said.
The elevator reached the bottom of the shaft—thirty meters below the soil of Pasadena—and let out into a small lobby, just large enough for the two of them. The floor moved slightly when McAllister put his weight on it. “This chamber floats on a pool of very thick mineral oil,” he explained. “Again, it’s for the vibrations.”
“Should we even be talking, then?” she asked. “If your telescope is so finicky?”
“That’s unnecessary. The telescope itself is kept in a nearly complete vacuum.” They passed through a door and out onto an enclosed catwalk. It looked out over a very large chamber, perfectly spherical. Lights came on and showed them the detectors—over ten thousand of them—mounted on the walls. Each detector was made from a crystal of cesium iodide so clear and pure it was nearly invisible, mounted inside a frame of copper. “These are coherent recoil detectors. We use them to track neutrinos emitted by black holes on the far side of the universe. Or, in this case, from inside 2I.”
Harriwell’s air of annoyance evaporated like drizzle on a hot summer sidewalk. “You’re talking to your people. You can talk to them.”
“The connection is strictly one-way. I can hear what they say, see what they see. I have no way to get a message to them.”
“You brought me here because you—you’ve got news about Foster and his crew,” she said. Her voice had grown very soft.
He thought of what to say. He considered a number of possibilities, from simply laying out the facts in a clinical fashion to trying to break the news to her easily. He failed to find anything that would cushion the shock.
Instead he simply touched his device and brought up an AR display in the open center of the sphere. The colors of the image lacked saturation, and even from a distance the individual pixels making up the image were clearly visible. All the same, the image spoke for itself. It showed Sally Jansen kneeling next to the remains of Taryn Holmes.
“I’m so very sorry,” he said.
She pressed one knuckle against her lips. She said nothing.
“We felt you should see this. That you had a right to see it, regardless of national security concerns.”
She nodded. She wasn’t looking at him.
“I don’t want to create false hope. We have… some indication that Sandra Channarong may still be alive.” He blanked the image in the display and queued up the video file Channarong had left for Jansen.
Before he could play it, though, she reached over and grabbed his arm.
“What about Foster?” she asked. “Tell me about Foster.” She looked him straight in the eye. “Willem has a wife and two children in Alabama. I’d… very much like to know he’s OK.”
“There’s no news there,” he said, as gently as he could. “Though I assure you, Commander Hawkins and his crew are looking for him right now.”
Harriwell broke eye contact. The dragon had tucked its head under its wing. “Please,” she said. “Show me what you have on Sandra.”
He opened the file called YOUNEEDTOLEAVE.mp7 and let it play.
“Over there,” Hawkins said, pointing at what looked like a trail winding between the trees. It wasn’t a trail, of course. The trees were spaced apart at random distances, and sometimes he thought he saw paths, but it was always just a place where two trees grew farther apart from each other than usual. Still, he looked for those gaps. Far better than the places where the trees were so close together you had to brush against the trunks. Every time that happened it set off a ripple of grasping hands up in the canopy. Anyone who was searching for them could just follow those ripples—they might as well be shooting off flares every time it happened.
He shook his head. Who was searching for them? Channarong? She’d had the chance to join them—or to kill them in their sleep—and she hadn’t taken it. So why couldn’t he shake the idea they weren’t alone?
He was a rational man. He knew that his thinking was disordered, and when he had a chance to think, when the pounding in his head would recede a little, he could—by sheer force of wi
ll—take those thoughts and examine them, turn them over and see which of them were worth his time.
He had been cruel, he knew, back when they found Holmes’s body. He should have given Jansen a chance to grieve. His feeling that they were running out of time was hardly irrational—every hour that passed meant 2I got closer to Earth—but surely he could have given her fifteen minutes.
Instead he had insisted they keep moving. He hadn’t even let Rao do a postmortem on the bones.
It had been a mistake. He hoped it didn’t cost them.
There was no telling how big the forest of hand-trees might be, how long it would take to cross to its far side, or even if it just ran all the way to the cage of bone near the far end of the ship. They’d fallen into a rhythm of carefully picking their way over the snarls of tendrils that made a maze of the forest floor. They weren’t moving as fast as Hawkins would like, but even he had his physical limits. Not for the first time, he considered leaving the other two behind. Pressing on alone and letting them have their time to rest and think.
He knew he couldn’t do that, though. He couldn’t go on without them.
“Help her,” he said.
Rao looked up.
“Let her lean on your shoulder. I’d do it, but I doubt she would let me touch her.”
He’d meant it as a joke. Rao didn’t laugh. Instead she turned around and went back to fetch Jansen, who had fallen behind again. He heard the two of them talking, a short, heated conversation he didn’t need to pay attention to.
When they’d caught up with him, Jansen had her arm around Rao’s shoulders and they were walking together. A little faster than Jansen had been walking before. Maybe.
The old woman couldn’t even look at him. Her eyes were half-shut, and her face was dripping with sweat. She must be in agony, he thought, and spared her a little sympathy. He could still afford that.
Even while he was working out in his head how much faster they could move if they just left her behind.
“Have you seen this?” Rao asked.
He came back to himself with a start. “Sorry?” he said.
The Last Astronaut Page 28