“Have you seen this—it’s ARCS’s activity log.” She opened a window, and text scrolled across his face. He resisted the urge to swat it away like a pesky fly.
Instead he looked at what she was trying to show him. It took a second to find it, but yes, it was there. The robot’s map had stopped updating.
“It might have crashed into something. Or maybe been eaten by hungry aliens,” he said, making another half-hearted joke. “We didn’t expect it to keep operating indefinitely.”
She gave him the briefest of smiles. “We were hoping it would last longer than this, though. When it stopped responding, it was only about sixty percent done with its map. There could be all kinds of things ahead of us, hazards between us and the brain, and we won’t know to expect them.”
“We’ll figure it out,” he said. “We’re smart people. You especially.”
She tilted her head to the side. The closest thing she could do to shrugging while she was supporting Jansen’s weight.
“We need to think about consumables, too,” she said.
He grimaced but said nothing.
“Running our lights all the time—my batteries are down to about thirty-four percent charge. We have oxygen for another day, and water for longer than that, but we’re going to run out of everything, eventually.”
“Nothing we can do about that,” he said.
Rao clearly didn’t see it that way. “When we get to the brain, then what? We’ll need to walk back. We need to consider that.”
No, Hawkins thought. They really didn’t. But of course, he couldn’t say that. “Once we find the brain we’ll be very close to the south pole airlock,” he said. “It won’t take long to get back to Orion.”
Rao shook her head. “We don’t actually know if that airlock is accessible. From outside it looked like it had been sealed shut. Listen, we can bleed the power from two of our suits and charge up the other one. That way at least we’ll have enough to keep one set of lights going.”
He stopped walking. Turned around and faced her. Anger stirred in his stomach, like a wild animal waking up when it heard a strange sound. “You’re not touching my suit,” he said.
“I wasn’t suggesting—”
“Good, because it’s not going to happen.”
Rao looked down, away from his face. Was she shaking, a little? What had she seen in his eyes?
He needed to keep control. He needed to keep control of his command, at the very least.
“Sorry,” he said. He turned around and started walking again. He forced himself to slow his pace, just a little.
Less than an hour later they came to a clearing.
The forest just—stopped. Jansen sank to the ground, grateful for a rest, even if it lasted only long enough for them to figure out what they were seeing.
They’d been struggling through a thick copse where the hand-trees grew so close together there was no way to progress except by pushing their way through. Every single time they touched a tree they sent it into a crazy paroxysm of hands grabbing wrists, until the canopy over their heads swayed and rustled constantly. Then Hawkins shouted for them to hold up, and Jansen pushed between two last trees and—
—grabbed on tight to the tree behind her. Because directly ahead of them was nothing at all. They stood atop a sheer cliff face, looking five meters down to flat, level ground. There was no slope to it, the ground and the trees just stopped, and there was empty air.
Hawkins unclipped his helmet from his waist and lifted it high over his head, trying to shine its lights as far as he could. He grunted but said nothing. He didn’t need to say anything. Jansen could see that about twenty-five meters away, across the gap, was another cliff face, and at its top another thick growth of hand-trees.
They hadn’t reached the end of the forest. Just a place where a river or something had dug a trench through the island. Jansen leaned carefully over the edge and pointed her single light down at the ground below. There was no water down there to reflect her light, nor any trees or other structures. The floor looked smooth and featureless.
The discontinuity extended as far as their lights reached, in either direction.
“This bastard’s pretty much perpendicular to where we want to go,” Hawkins said. “Of course. We can go sideways. Follow the top of the cliff left or right, look for where this ends. That could take hours, though. Or days, if it stretches too far.”
“Or,” Jansen said, but he cut her off.
“Or we go through it. Down this side, up the other face. It’ll still slow us down, but only an hour or so.” He nodded. “Hand me that bag.”
She knew the one he meant. It was the bag she’d filled up with safety lines and climbing gear back on Orion. They still had the 3-D-printed ascenders, as well, the motorized belaying devices they’d taken from Wanderer.
She took out twenty meters of safety line, tugging on it at several points to make sure it was sound. She looped one end around the trunk of a hand-tree. “Make sure this will hold your weight,” she told him.
“It’ll be fine. NASA doesn’t take chances with their equipment.”
“I’m not worried about the line breaking. I’m worried you’ll pull the tree out by its roots,” she said.
He nodded and clipped the other end of the line to one of the D rings on the hard upper torso of his suit. Then he walked backward, hauling on the line as he went, leaning backward and putting all his weight on the rope. The tree shivered and its branches writhed, but the trunk didn’t budge from the ground. The tight nest of tendrils woven around its base kept it secure.
“OK,” he said. “Here goes nothing.” Then he stepped backward off the cliff edge, letting the line play out through his gloves.
Rao grabbed the trunk of one of the trees at the edge and looked over the precipice, watching Hawkins descend. Jansen kept an eye on the tree he was using for support, and the carabiner at the end of the line. She knew it was the weakest point in the connection. But it held just fine.
“You go next,” Rao said, holding out one hand to help Jansen get to her feet. “And be careful when you get to the bottom. If you land the wrong way, you could hurt your bad leg.”
“Thanks, Mom,” Jansen said. Making sure Rao saw that she was grinning. The two of them shared a laugh. It didn’t last very long, but it felt surprisingly good after everything they’d been through.
Jansen turned and looked over the edge. Hawkins was down there waving her on. A sudden thought occurred to her.
She could just unhook the carabiner. Let the rope fall over the edge. Better yet, just haul the rope up before he could grab it.
Leave him stranded down there.
What the hell? Where had that thought come from? The last thing she wanted to do was to put another astronaut in jeopardy. Shaking her head, she cast off and started rappelling down.
As she descended, she studied the cliff face. It was almost vertical, but far from as cleanly cut as she’d thought. The surface was broken and torn, as if the channel had been ripped out of the island rather than cut. It looked as if it had happened recently, too. She could see places where tendrils had been sliced through, leaving circular openings in the wall that looked almost exactly like the outflow pipes of a chemical factory. Black liquid was still drooling from some of them, suggesting the cut had to have been made recently.
When she reached the bottom—easily, landing gently on her good foot—she unclipped herself from the line and waved up for Rao to follow her. Then she crouched down and touched the ground beneath her feet. It was very flat and smooth and perfectly dry. She ran one glove over the surface.
“I noticed it, too,” Hawkins told her, coming up behind her.
It had the same porous texture that she remembered from her first visit to 2I. Before they’d reached the ice, she and Stevens had walked over a surface just like this. It was the unadulterated, unreconstructed surface of the drum.
Whatever had cut its way through the island had dug all the way down
to the floor. It had scraped this part of the drum clean. “Water didn’t do this,” she said. “Not in the time since we’ve been here.”
“Things change pretty fast in here,” Hawkins pointed out. “All of this,” he said, gesturing at the island around them, “wasn’t here a day ago.”
“Yeah, no, I’m a trained geologist,” she said. “They were going to send me to Mars, remember? I know what weathering effects look like. This has to have been done with construction equipment. A 2I-sized bulldozer or something.”
“It doesn’t matter. The big question is how we get up the far side,” he told her, pointing across the trench. Then he rushed forward to grab Rao as she came down the rope. Rao hadn’t been out of control or anything, Jansen thought. He was clearly just trying to be helpful. She couldn’t figure him out, sometimes.
“I’m sure I’ve got something I can use as a grappling hook,” she told him. She rummaged around in her bags and packs until she found what she was looking for, an L-shaped bracket that had been designed to help secure the multifrequency antenna to the outer skin of Orion. It was about thirty centimeters long, and if she bent it a little bit—easily done; it was made of lightweight aluminum—she could make it look like a very big fishhook. Attach it to a carabiner at the end of a safety line and it would do. They would have to test it carefully to make sure it would hold their weight, that was all.
“You’re not bad at this,” Hawkins told her. “Exploring.”
“It’s pretty much what I built my whole life around,” she told him.
He nodded and looked away. The far cliff was twenty-five meters or so away. He covered the ground easily, and before the women could join him, he was already swinging the hook at the end of a short length of rope, getting a feel for its weight before he tried snagging the hand-trees at the top of the cliff.
Rao came up to walk with Jansen. She offered her shoulder, but Jansen wanted to walk awhile under just her own power.
“He’s making a real effort to be nice to you,” Rao said.
Jansen frowned. “He’s a major in the space force. You don’t get that far unless you know a little something about leading a team. That’s all he’s doing—reinforcing morale.”
“It makes sense you wouldn’t trust him,” Rao said. “He stole your command.”
She turned and looked at the younger woman. Was Rao testing her now? Or just evaluating her psychological state?
“Let me ask you a question, Doc. If you broke your leg coming down that cliff. If you couldn’t walk at all. Do you think he would have personally carried you up the other side? Or do you think he would press on toward the brain and leave you behind?”
Rao’s face soured. “We need to work together if we’re going to accomplish anything,” she said.
“Sure,” Jansen said. “Together.”
SALLY JANSEN: Honestly, I suppose I owe Hawkins something. When we found Taryn Holmes, it could have destroyed me. I’d put so much subconscious weight on rescuing the KSpace crew… Hawkins wouldn’t let me dwell on Holmes’s death. He forced me to keep moving. Otherwise I might have just laid down and waited to die.
Hawkins spun the hook on the end of his line, twirling it faster and faster until it whistled through the air. Then, with a flick of his wrist, he hurled the hook into the air. It flew high over his head, carried by its angular momentum, and disappeared into the hand-trees at the top of the cliff.
This was his third cast, and he knew not to yank on the rope right away. He listened to the sound of the hook falling through the branches, let it settle before he pulled back. He could hear the hand-trees rustling up there and thought he must have set off a cascade of wrist grabbing. It never seemed to end.
Then he steeled himself and grabbed the rope with both hands and pulled—gently. Slowly. The only way to find out if the hook had caught anything was to pull and pull and hope it didn’t come flying back over the cliff and right down toward his face.
The rope went taut in his hands. “I think I have it,” he said. He looked over his shoulder and saw the women watching, expectant and silent. He turned back to his task, hauling on the rope with a firmer and firmer grip. He needed to make sure the hook was seated properly. He didn’t want to be halfway up the cliff when it gave way.
The damned trees wouldn’t stop rustling. If anything the noise was much louder now. Hawkins frowned and pulled harder.
An arm ending in a meter-long all-too-human hand flopped to the ground in front of him. Its fingers twitched for a moment, then a trickle of black liquid dripped from its severed end.
“Damn,” he said softly. Under his breath. The hook must have severed the branch and sent it falling down to the floor of the trench. He pulled harder on the line, intending to free the hook so he could try for another cast.
Fingers dropped from above, one by one. Then another arm. The rustling from up there had turned into a dull roar.
“Hawkins,” Jansen called. “Hawkins—get back!”
More arms fell, a few at first, then a cascade of them, trunks bouncing when they hit the ground, chopped-up pieces of tendril twisting and coiling in midair.
Hawkins danced backward. A falling hand brushed the front of his suit, and he yelped in terror, thinking it would grab him, those fingers would wrap around his chest and squeeze him until his hard upper torso splintered, until his ribs snapped and his heart was crushed. The hand lacked the strength to do more than twitch, though. He staggered back farther as the rain of hands and fingers grew more intense. He thought to look up and saw the whole cliff face trembling.
Rippling. Waves of pressure passing through the rubbery ground. And then—with a noise like thunder—the face split open, metric tons of flesh cascading downward, as something broke through from the far side.
“Holy shit,” Hawkins said.
He couldn’t process what he was seeing, not for the first, vital seconds. His first impression was simply of teeth. Enormous, uncountable teeth, in a mouth big enough to swallow Orion whole.
Terror twisted his spine and made his stomach lurch. There was room for only one thought in his head.
“Run!” he shouted.
Rao hauled at Jansen’s arm, but the older woman didn’t move; she was clearly frozen in place by terror.
She glanced backward and saw the maw again and pulled on Jansen’s arm so hard she worried she was going to dislocate the shoulder.
Maw—that was the word she thought of. It wasn’t a mouth as much as a dark cave full of grinding, tearing teeth, arranged in three circular rows to form a deadly funnel. The concentric rows spun crazily, the middle row spinning in the opposite direction from the outermost and innermost ranks. Hand-trees and enormous gobbets of torn island-flesh fell into the maw and were torn to shreds, then disappeared down the dark gullet behind the teeth.
The maw slid forward across the trench floor, much faster than anything that big had a right to. Headed directly toward them.
Jansen finally moved, hobbling along on her bad leg. Rao shoved her shoulder into Jansen’s armpit and didn’t so much carry her as push her along, trying to run sideways, out of the path of the stampeding teeth. As she ran, Rao looked back over her shoulder as much as she dared. She could make out only glimpses of the creature that owned that maw, little snatches of it that caught her lights. She got an impression of a segmented body, glistening with the black ichor of the flesh it had torn its way through. She saw myriad stumpy legs, each ending in a vicious triangular claw that scratched at the barren floor of the trench. Mostly she saw the spinning rows of teeth. The thing was alive—it had be some kind of animal, as much as it more closely resembled a machine you would use to dig out the shafts and galleries of a coal mine.
It shook the ground as it moved, and she could hear a low, rumbling noise from its teeth that made her think of the whine of a dentist’s drill as much as the rolling of great wheels. It was headed straight for Hawkins.
“Get out of the way!” Rao howled, though she doubted he co
uld even hear her over the noise the thing made.
He must have, though, because she saw him look over in her direction. Only then did he start to run.
She was certain he wouldn’t make it, that it was impossible for him to outrun the creature, but at the last minute he threw himself forward and escaped its teeth. No, she saw, he hadn’t thrown himself—one of the countless legs of the thing had caught him and hurled him through the air. He hit the ground and lay there, not moving. She thought maybe she screamed his name.
The ground bounced underneath her and she tripped and fell, spilling Jansen across the flat surface. Jansen rolled up onto her feet—bad leg and all—and reached down to grab Rao and pull her back up.
The creature dragged itself forward on its many legs. Their only hope was that it would just keep going, that it would lurch forward and dig its teeth into the far wall of the trench, burrow its way deep into the flesh of the island and away from them. They were tiny, insignificant compared to its incredible mass—what could it possibly want from them?
Then her heart sank as she saw it start to turn. Its massive toothy head slewed over, its claws clattering against the ground as it twisted itself to the side segment by segment. It heaved the rear section of its body out of the side trench it had been digging, more and more segments and legs appearing every second. Then it turned its head one more time, to face up the trench, at a right angle to the direction it had been headed in when it appeared.
It was facing them dead on. And already it was starting to move forward again, shoving itself along the barren floor straight toward them.
“Oh no,” Rao said. “No. No!”
“Listen,” Jansen was saying. “Listen to me!”
Rao forced herself to look into Jansen’s faceplate.
“Listen,” Jansen said again. “You run like hell. You keep running and you don’t look back.”
“What? I don’t understand, you need my help—”
“But you don’t need me. Get out of here!” Jansen screamed.
Rao bent her knees and started to do just that. Instead, though, she looked back to where Hawkins was lying on the ground. The thing loomed up over him, impossibly large. It looked as big as a cruise ship barreling down on him, as big as a skyscraper come to life and turned into a giant, insatiably hungry worm, moving with impossible speed, hauling itself forward, its vast mouth rolling over him.
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