Beyond the Rubicon

by John Peaseland

  “The umbilicus is undamaged as far as I can tell.” Pernio broke my concentration. I couldn’t see what she meant, I couldn’t see anything now that the action of hovering had disturbed so much silt. It was like walking into a snow storm. “Taking her in to rendezvous! Err… just for info, I’ve lost contact with Rubicon.” There were multiple groans.

  Our craft turned slowly on a horizontal axis. A short burst of thrust added to the swirling madness. “Switching to sonar. Ah hah, 3D has picked up RV, relay tether deployed.”

  In the grainy, stymied square of the monitor I viewed, a large yellow structure came into the picture. My brain, eager for information, finally picked out the words, Space X Blue alongside one flank. Green telemetry now overlaid the screen, as the on-board computer took over the docking procedure. Words like cord slide, attitude incline, holding position and retrograde aspect, continually updated and reassessed themselves, in the form of quickly changing numbers.

  As we neared our target, a square with a crosshair centre began to blink rapidly. The sediment cleared as we approached a hexagonal door lock. More flickering and the crosshairs went bananas blinking wildly and then merged into a thick steady line. There was a muffled clang and the words, ‘Free drift stabilised’ appeared on the screen. “Ok folks we’ve arrived, prepare to disembark, have your pass-papers ready.” That last line must have been a joke, but I was so keyed up, I wasn’t sure.

  Clem lifted her head and sprang up like a gazelle, her eyes pinprick glints, her crucifix flashing against a backdrop of dark. She began to twist the port hole or whatever the massive levered door to the lander was called. Bram followed at her shoulder, giving extra muscle. Then the lander lurched violently to one side. In the tail of my eye beyond where Jonti, Dave and Paddy were unbuckling, I saw the windows of the cockpit fill with a blubbery, purple mass. Pernio shouted, “What the shit?”

  In the cramped confines of the lander, Henry and Jenna, being the nearest, went toward what was now effectively the back of the craft, where Pernio’s voice had just raised another pitch. I could just about see over their shoulders. “Hell-fire. It’s squeezing the fuck out of the windshield.”

  The thing, whatever it was, obscured the whole of the canopy. Suckers, or feelers, gave the impression that they were inspecting the polycarb shell, trying to detect a weakness. A beating fluorescence, undulated throughout the creature – because creature it had to be - and I would have bet money, even at this stage, that what I could see was the beating heart.

  The creaking and banging grew, as the pressure in the lander pushed back against the onslaught of crushing from without. The dire situation had become a fight for supremacy. Then things got worse. A ghastly spectre was squashed against the glass and slowly began to slither sideways. A dead, waxy face, flattened, with tearing nose, examined us with a mixture of horror, dismay and sympathy. The left eye of the vision trailed an aqueous stream of goo that ended in a gory orbital hole. Its front teeth had risen to one side of its face, giving it a terrible rictus howl, a silent scream almost. What was left of a uniform then followed. A shoulder star, braid, platinum buttons, the insignia of an officer - well, a former officer - of the Blue Base crew.

  With slow, car crashing perception, every nerve vibrating with the tension of the atmosphere, we saw all, and could not move. The expressions we wore, watching the dread sight were transfixed and then, CRACK, a long, jagged tear began zig-zagging down the canopy. Water jets under pressure of 1.3G, plus depth, hit our faces and brought us quickly out of our inaction. We moved away, and it was just as well, because the tightly squeezed jellied limbs of the animal attacking our vessel poked through several crevices and fired off sharp projectiles to all ports. Where they hit, they stuck like darts. Fronds, like those of a giant sea anemone, began grabbing at anything they could get hold of. A loose helmet was sucked into the grip of one and a message sent back to the beast. It was quickly discarded as inedible. It wasn’t going to be tasty enough and the dripping remains fell to the floor in a phlegmy froth.

  “If the cabin pressure goes,” Pernio shrilled, “we’ll end up flatter ‘n road kill.” There was renewed panic. Neil dived past Clem and Bram and began feverishly yanking at the door release mechanism. We all ran to be next in the queue, bumping together, making it harder for the door to be opened. “BACK OFF!” shrieked Bram, his eyes wide in fright as he turned, lashing fists and elbows to clear us out the way. More cracks were audible, and I dived under one of the seats. A frond of gelatinous menace went for me but missed and instead caught hold of Jonti’s long hair. It twisted, and she was caught, and then with the force of a shotgun blast, taken in the chest, her whole body was pulled backward. She was probably already dead – hopefully – by the time her face turned toward Dave and Paddy and her once squinty eyes enlarged and popped out her head. Lassos of ghastly rubber squirmed out with them. Her face shrank inward, eaten away on the inside. It looked like a hideous deflated balloon with ghoulish attachments, a thatch of ginger hair, perched on top of a stick. Dave and Paddy struggled to release their own heads from finer filaments that had sprung from the pores of Jonti’s skin. The fine purple tines were pulling backward and twisting, trying to force both men toward the main part of the monster that was sprawled over the cabin windows and might have been watching. Dave and Paddy in their turn ran sideways, bouncing off walls, attempting to unstick themselves from the grip of the filaments. They skittled over Neil’s weaponry as they kicked out in berserk frenzy. A reinforced toe-capped boot caught me a glancing blow to the face and my nose began to drip heavily with blood. I crawled away from the melee on all fours. Pernio seeing the situation from behind and thinking discretion the better part of valour, high-jumped across the space left to the rear of Dave and Paddy’s struggle. Her hands tore at Clem as she and the others were pulling open the hatch. I joined the disorganised onslaught, keeping more than a weather-eye on what was happening at the back of me. The last thing I saw as I pitched forward, was Dave and Paddy’s heads explode in a tumult of teeth, bone and blood.

  The Devil, being as he was in the driving seat, meant that even if a bull had been standing in our way, it would have relented under the momentum of fear of self-preservation that propelled us forward. Bodies fell into an antechamber between air locks. As I fell through Clem was recovering, and I was lucky not to have my leg removed by the clang of the heavy metal door as it slammed shut behind us. “We need to get through the next hatch,” she yelled at the same time as the lander, now abandoned to its fate, was being ripped a new asshole. She didn’t need to tell us, we knew!

  The problem was that Blue Base didn’t recognise us and we’d lost all contact with Rubicon. Neil, the fearless soldier was into a killing mode, and in our current situation, was less than useless. He pulled and yanked at the release mechanism of the next airlock, as if brute force would solve the conundrum of being locked out. He was about to blast his way in, with one of the only guns he’d managed to bring with him when Clem stopped his arm. “You’ll get us all killed, the whole plant will rupture.” It was within and ace as to whether Neil would fire anyway, but he must have just caught the words, “We have time, we are behind much thicker metal.” His trigger finger, with the deliberation of a baby’s first step, lifted and stuck out pointing along the barrel.

  Crammed like fish in a can, air probably limited to a few minutes, we all went quiet - at least those of us who weren’t quiet because they were dead. We stood impotent in the airlock between two worlds. I found some space and peered into the next chamber, into Blue Base itself through a tiny window. It was a chimera beyond reach. Six inches of metalwork and space, frosted with reinforced glass, stood between us and safety. The glass, being our only source of light, had Bram shouting at me, “Get your head out the way asshole, nobody can see nothing!”

  It was indeed dark and the only crumb of comfort I got, as I moved away from the viewing porthole, was the knowledge that Blue Base still functioned with some form of power.

  “T
here’s got to be a manual override, a bypass somewhere,” Pernio said in a hand wringing whine. Everybody, including myself, blindly searched the floors and walls trying to find a way out of our trap. Metal grills on the floor wouldn’t shift an inch and as Clem pointed out, “It won’t matter anyway, they’re only containment vessels to catch accidental spillage,” so it was a moot point. The walls didn’t promise much to improve the general mood of despair. There were a few corrugated pipes, some torn padding here and there and an emergency first aid kit with oxygen bottles and facemask attached.

  Searching for a means of escape wasn’t helped when at the same time huge bangs and screeches, and metal being torn asunder, was getting ever more frantic on the other side of the airlock. I had no idea what would happen if the bastard managed to rip the lander off its couplings, but I didn’t suppose it would be anything good.

  I was considering taking Bram’s carbine and calling the decorator, when a disembodied voice sounded above our heads. “Stand clear. The airlock will open in ten seconds.” Bemused expressions stared around and then turned to joy. I expect they were something akin to the faces of drowning men who’ve left off clutching at straws, accepted their fate, only to be plucked from oblivion at the last second by a passing sailor. The voice continued, “Find an intercom that works on the other side for further instructions. Out.”

  The airlock opened in a side to side motion with an efficient electronic blimp. Up until now, we’d been trying to prise it upwards with finger-ends. We raced through the hatch, and once all through, Jenna slammed her hand against the ‘Close Airlock’ button. It shut and now we had a second layer of protection against us and the blob, who, having missed the rest of its dinner, had gone ominously quiet.

  Clem had a plasma phaser or a phase plasma (whichever it was I couldn’t remember) pointing ahead of her. With her military honed training, she immediately began a tactical inventory. She worked like a mechanical crab. Henry and Bram had hold of a carbine apiece and Neil held nothing in his hands, but he might have had that pointy stick he’d been on about, sticking up his ass - the useless fuck. Mind you, I was one to talk, I didn’t have a weapon either; neither did Pernio nor Jenna.

  Bathed in a grey gloom, things in Blue Base didn’t look particularly welcoming. Structural gaps were ripped out all along the walls, leaving sculptures of twisted, torn and sharp-edged metal leaning toward the middle. Further in, the reinforced partitioning had burst from its fixtures and looked like the rib cage of a giant dead animal. We made our way forward, hiding behind Clem and Bram like their reluctant shadows. We came to a ceiling collapse. Water dripped down, a danger sign to anyone who cared to think too much. We sidled around the obstruction and came across some low-level lighting that was still working at the far side, despite the devastation. We could see a bit more, but the downside was that it cast shadows, and as we walked, they leapt up at us in a way that had us ducking for cover. When you are escaping monsters, the last thing you need is formless shapes jumping out at you. I began imagining everything was out to get me. From a knot of burnt spool wiring that lay on the floor dead-ahead, a long flex hung down from a wall-hanging casement and was still attached. It looked like a monstrous carnivorous ivy climbing the walls, trying to finger its way into every orifice and devour the innards. We kept looking over our shoulders as we continued. Then we saw those darts that had been fired off from the stretched skin of the creature, when it had gained access to lander. They were stuck to the walls, but though their shapes were easy to make out, all were burnt to a black spiral pinnacle, and had ceased squirming some time ago. There had been a large-scale action hereabouts. Body armour was strewn along the floor and darts were stuck to it. A flamethrower lay to one side of what might have been a body. A partial ankle bone and a fleshy foot was encased in an elasticated sock. That’s all that was left.

  “Check the flamethrower,” snapped Bram, seemingly unaware that he was being so loud.

  I picked it up; it felt half heavy. “Is it juiced?” he barked.

  “It’s half-heavy,” I replied non-committal; I knew a loaded question when I heard one.

  “What the fuck does that mean fer fucks sake? Will it work or not?”

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  Bram rolled his eyes. “Pick it up then you fuck-wit.”

  There was a strap behind the business end of the tank and I pulled it over my shoulder. I didn’t like wearing an unexploded bomb. There was a touch screen in front of the right tubular grip, and the buttons were easy to understand. IGNITE/STANDBY/FIRE. I pressed the ignite button, and guess what, a blue flame appeared at the end of the go pipe. I pressed standby and the flame turned yellow. “Ok,” Bram said, in his more even, gravel tone, “Turn it off now we know it works, save the gas.”

  There wasn’t an OFF switch. “There isn’t an off-switch Bram,” I bleated, feeling stressed. He came to my rear and hit the ignite button and the flame flickered and died. “Right, you’re the front guy from now on, let’s see if we can find an intercom.”

  Great, I was point, and Clem, thankful to be released from this onerous and dangerous duty, fell behind my unsteady frame.

  There were rooms off from the corridor and I entered them with fear mixed adrenaline. They mostly contained desks, empty coffee cups, built up paperwork, and a few had overturned filing cabinets that may have been used as a last defensive barricade or else toppled in a rushed evacuation. All had intercoms that were built flush with the walls, but none appeared to work, or else we were doing something wrong. Repeated button pressing, escalating to punches, didn’t seem to do the trick.

  The rooms got bigger, and in what was obviously a scientific lab, somebody had been doing rudimentary experiments on parts of our blobby friend, presumably after it had shed bits of itself. Demijohns of various sizes showed the creature had been subjected to assorted methods of destructive engineering. Apart from gawping at the foul specimens, we had little time to ascertain which one was likely to be the most effective. In fact, just to spook us good and proper, there was still activity in two bottles and little blobs of purple, sensing our presence, clung to the side of the jars like the jiving feet of alien leeches. Without bulk of the whole, the small lumps didn’t seem to have strength enough to break out, which was nice!

  In the next room, a water pipe had burst at some point. Though now dry, it had soaked what was left of a donut. The dough had outgrown the plate it was on, expanding and bloating enough to freak me out. I relit the flamethrower but didn’t fry it, realizing my mistake before letting off a blast.

  At the first intersection there was an intercom and it was flashing, waiting for a response. Clem, natural born leader as ever there was, ran over, pressed the insistent button and said, “Hello!”

  A woman’s metallic voice, the same that had been in the airlock, said in a no-nonsense way, “Strip off, all of you, it’s important.” Nobody moved. Whoever the woman was she must have been watching on a closed-circuit monitor… “It’s the only way to know if anyone of you has been infected.” Apart from looking at each other, still nobody moved. “You are not coming down, until we can be sure you are not infected!”

  We began striping in unison, until that is, Henry ran off. The corridor was far too long for him to make a meaningful escape, and Clem, frosty and sharp, fired her gun. A tracer shot skewered after Henry, tracked his movements and smacked him in the back. He fell.

  “He’s not dead, temporarily out is all,” Clem reliably informed us. We ran over and whilst we breathed heavy over his comatose body she said, “We’ll strip him first, before we decide to do anything else.”

  Peeling off the layers of protection it soon became apparent why Henry had run. We found where a minute piece of blob must have gotten in from an unsecured sleeve. Just the tiniest of slits, the organism had connected with the skin on Henry’s wrist. His arm, now swollen, pulsated with a purple anomalous mass that was tracking its way up his arm. From a need to do something, other than look at the dread thi
ng, I ran back to the intercom and following Clem’s example yelled down the speaker, “He’s infected, what shall we do?”

  “Burn him, but get rid of him quick. All of him, leave nothing.”

  “What? Jeez, that will kill him.”

  “It’s an aggressive Sporocyst,” the voice gabbled “it branches and tunnels. You can kill it with a ton of salt, which you haven’t got, or that flamethrower you’re wearing over your shoulder. Only do it now before it transmutes. It will know it is in danger. GO! GO NOW!”

  I ran back to the others, “You got to burn him!”

  The others stared at me. Then the blob on Henry’s wrist began to peel away. The thing sensed its own jeopardy and, almost with cat like poise, prepared to jump. I pressed standby on the touchscreen and then let rip, aiming my venomous flame right into the heart of the ball. It writhed. Henry’s sympathetic nervous system woke him, and seeing that he was on fire he screamed, jumped to his feet and bounced off the walls trying to put himself out. I let him have it again, fear and hysteria taking over any empathy I had. He stopped dead in his tracks, knowing it was over for him and turned his burning eyes upon me. He mouthed something that wasn’t spiritual and then crumpled into a heap. Clem finished the job of melting Henry with her own spew of fire. Numbed silence proceeded the grisly task. A minute maybe passed, and the intercom eventually cut through our thoughts with its insistent high-pitched bleating. We re-approached it as if it were an Oracle. “Strip off now, or you will not hear from us again!”