“Twenty minutes away,” she said. Her voice carried no inflection. And he knew she feared the worst. What sort of chance did they have, a real estate agent, a foundation director, and Dr. Science, against that monster?
He couldn’t remember what he said, but she caught something in his voice. “Don’t give up,” she told him.
The last of the giant snake disappeared into the hole.
He waited.
Marked the time. Watched the snow and the shovels.
Occasionally he talked to Hutch. She assured him she’d be careful. Wouldn’t get herself killed. Try to relax.
It’ll be okay.
The minutes dragged past. Everything was happening in slow motion.
He didn’t know what he wanted to see. Whether having the thing come back out into the daylight would be a hopeful sign or not.
Hutch’s shuttle dropped into the clouds. “We were lucky,” she said. “Couldn’t have hoped for a better window.”
He was frustrated, having to sit there while the woman took her life into her hands. Damn. What was he supposed to do if she went down the hole and didn’t come out again?
“Hutch?”
“Yes, Jon?”
“How about directing the AI to bring up the other lander? So I can get down there, too?”
There was a long hesitation. “Not a good idea.”
“You might need help.”
“You can’t get here in time to do anything. All you’d do is put yourself at risk.”
“Damn it, Hutch, you can’t expect me to just sit here.”
“There’s an outside chance they’ll need the lander as a shelter.”
“Hutch, damn it—”
“Let it go, Jon. I’ll get to you as soon as I know something.” She was below the clouds now, descending toward the plain. Mountains in the distance.
The hole had become a gaping wound. He watched it, stared at it, wished he had a better angle, wished he could look down into it.
THEY CONTINUED UP. Matt tried to pick up the pace, tried to do it without stumbling. He kept his eyes on the stairs because Antonio was right behind him, crowding him. Or maybe he didn’t want to look fearful. He was almost at the top when the journalist screamed. A pair of glittering green eyes had appeared at the top of the staircase. Enormous eyes. He threw himself back as the head rose, large and reptilian, wide and big and grinning with dripping incisors.
He was falling back down the stairs and suddenly everything was dark again. The head was gone, and he was grasping for the handrail and simultaneously trampling somebody, probably Antonio.
One of the lights hit it again. The thing was white as the snow outside.
They were all tumbling, scrambling, screaming, back down, hopelessly tangled in one another’s arms and legs. The thing came after them, slow and deliberate and watching, mouth wide, big enough to take any of them down whole. Matt lost the rhino gun. The thing’s jaws kept opening wider. He could have driven a truck into its mouth.
Then there were no more stairs, and he crashed hard onto the floor. And there was the rhino, just the barrel, sticking out from under somebody. He made a grab for it but it vanished again. And a small voice somewhere whispered to him, Captain Rigel, Captain Rigel.
The thing’s eyes stayed locked on him. So much for the lightbender. Light swept across the scene, and he saw a long python body, absolutely white, silver as starlight, wide as a small train, stretching up the stairway, across the landing, disappearing into the darkness.
He was groping for the gun, trying to find it in the chaos. But it was Antonio who came up with it finally, who fired a charge into the creature’s mouth. Right between those cavernous jaws and down its throat. Its tongue flicked, red and glistening. Then the round exploded, and the head was gone. Red mush blew past him, got all over him. The body slithered past, slammed past, knocked him down, kept coming, kept jerking and thrashing, and began to pile up. Antonio couldn’t fire a second charge because Matt had the projectiles. But it wasn’t going to matter.
The convulsions slowed. And stopped. For a long time no one said anything.
Finally, in a voice that was barely a squeak, Antonio asked if it was dead.
“I think so.” Matt shuddered. He was under the goddammed thing. It had piled up on him and he’d been too terrified to move.
Antonio gave him a hand. “You okay?”
“Yeah. I’m good.”
“I don’t think Rudy is.”
Oh.
Matt got clear, finally, and went to look at Rudy. “He took a bad fall, Matt.”
They extricated him from the beast. His head hung at an odd angle. His eyes were wide-open, locked in terror. The book he’d been carrying was still gripped in his right hand.
Matt couldn’t find a pulse.
Antonio handed over the rhino gun, and Matt fired another cartridge into the thing.
chapter 30
MATT KNELT OVER Rudy, trying to awaken him, trying to breathe some semblance of life into him. “Nothing?” asked Antonio.
“Can’t be sure.” Matt didn’t want it to be true. God, he didn’t want that. Rudy dead. Why the hell had they come down here anyway? For a goddam book? He took it, the one Rudy still cradled, and, still on his knees, threw it against the wall.
Antonio was shining his light up the staircase. “We need to get out of here, Matt. There might be more of these things around.”
“Yeah.” He bent over Rudy again, felt for a pulse, for a heartbeat, anything. Finally, he gave up, and they lifted his body.
The serpentine corpse partially blocked the staircase.
They climbed past it, hanging on to Rudy, trying not to touch the thing. Matt found himself thanking God Rudy didn’t weigh more.
They got to the top. And to the end of the snake. When they were past it, they stopped to rest a few moments. Then they stumbled into the supply room. The cable was still in place.
As soon as they put the body down, Antonio turned and started back into the corridor. “I’ll just be a minute,” he said.
“Where are you going?”
“Get the books.”
“You can’t go back down there, Antonio,” he said. “Let them go.”
He stopped in the doorway. “What do you think Rudy would have wanted?”
There was something in Antonio’s eyes. Sadness. Contempt. Weariness, maybe. He’d seen how Matt had reacted. Had seen him jump when the serpent appeared. Knew that, instead of playing the heroic role he’d assigned himself, he’d fallen down the stairs, fallen on top of Rudy, anything to get away. “Wait,” said Matt. “You’ll need a hand.”
WHEN THE LINK began working again, he contacted Hutch and gave her the news. She told him she was sorry and had to fight for control of her voice. She was on her way down from the Preston, and when they climbed out of the hole, carrying Rudy’s body, and bringing one of the two books with them—one had gotten lost somewhere, was probably beneath the dead animal—her lander was already visible coming in over the snowfields.
She landed a few meters away and got out. They laid Rudy in the snow, and she knelt beside him. One of the problems with the hard shell the force field throws over the face is that you couldn’t wipe your eyes.
When she’d regained control she stood up. “You guys okay?” she asked.
“We’re good,” said Matt. She carried a rhino gun. “Where’s Jon?”
“In the McAdams. I didn’t have time to pick him up.” She looked down the side of the mountain, gazed at the broken tower, at Antonio. She was trying to say something else. And finally it came: “Was it quick?”
Matt nodded.
Other than that, she didn’t say much. Told Matt and Antonio thanks. Embraced them. Then she suggested they not hang around. They opened the cargo locker and lifted Rudy inside.
WHEN THEY GOT back to the McAdams, they froze Rudy’s body and put it in storage. As captain of the ship on which he’d been a passenger, and as a longtime friend, Hutch would perf
orm the memorial service. She’d brought along a captain’s uniform, with no expectation of having to wear it.
During the ceremony she realized how little she actually knew about Rudy. She knew about his passion for stellar investigation, and his longtime desire to find an alien culture with whom it would be possible to communicate. She knew his politics, his contempt for a government that, in his view, had used the endless war against greenhouse gases as an excuse to eliminate funding for the Academy. But the inside personal stuff remained a mystery. She had no idea, for example, whether, despite his start as a seminarian, he had still subscribed to a formal religion, although, judging from various comments over the years, she doubted it. She didn’t know why his wives had bailed on him. He’d been an attractive man, congenial, armed with a sense of humor. During the years she’d been associated with him, there had been occasional women, but he’d never really formed a serious relationship with anyone. At least not that she knew of.
He’d been a decent guy, a good friend, a man she could trust to back her if she needed it. What more mattered?
He had a brother in South Carolina, a sister in Savannah. She’d met the sister, years ago. She wished it were possible to communicate with them, let them know. She’d have to wait until they got home, which meant, until then, his death would be hanging over her head.
When she took her place before the others, when she began to explain why Rudy mattered so much, she was surprised to discover that her voice shook. She had to stop a couple of times. She tried surreptitiously to wipe her eyes, and finally she poured everything out. He’d stood for all the things she believed in. He’d never backed off even though other careers had been so much more lucrative than the Foundation. And in the end, he’d sacrificed everything, a decent married life, the respect of his colleagues, and ultimately life itself, to the idea that humans had a greater destiny than hanging around the house.
Antonio said simply that he’d liked Rudy, that he’d been good company, and that he’d miss him.
Jon expressed his appreciation for Rudy’s support. “Without him,” he said, “we wouldn’t have gotten out here.”
Matt started by saying he’d known Rudy only a short time. He thanked him, surprisingly, for giving him something to live for. And ended by blaming himself for his death. “I took my eyes off the top of the staircase. The steps were so hard to navigate. The thing just came out of nowhere. And I panicked. He was depending on me, and I panicked.”
“I don’t know anybody,” Hutch told him, “who wouldn’t have reacted the same way. Give yourself a break.”
She’d lost people on prior missions. It had started a lifetime ago, on Quraqua, when she’d been perhaps not as quick as she should have been, and Richard Wald had died. There’d been other decisions that had gone wrong. She might have allowed them to haunt her, to drive her to her knees. But she’d done her best at the time. And that was all anyone could reasonably ask. No one had ever died because she’d screwed around.
“It happens,” she told Matt. “If you do these kinds of flights, going places no one’s ever been before, there’s always a risk. We all accept that. You do your best. If something happens, something goes wrong, you have to be able to live with it. And move on.”
EASY TO SAY. She’d remember all her life watching the oversized white serpent slither down into the hole Matt and the others had dug, and her sense of helplessness while she tried to get them on the link—Come on, Matt, answer up, please—the whole time running for the lander, climbing into an e-suit, telling Jon what was happening and why she couldn’t stop to go to the McAdams to pick him up.
Jon took her aside and asked whether they shouldn’t terminate the flight and return home. The tradition at the Academy in such cases had been flexible, which was to say there had been no tradition. In the event of a fatality, sometimes the mission went forward. Sometimes it was terminated. The decision had been left to the survivors. They knew best.
The Academy had suffered relatively few losses over the years. The wall that served as a memorial to those who had died on Academy missions had never come close to using the allotted space. It still stood in its time-honored place, near the Galileo Fountain on the edge of what had been the Academy grounds.
“We’ve made our point,” Jon persisted. “The Locarno works fine. Why bother going farther?”
She recalled Rudy’s comment when they had asked whether he planned on making the flight. This is going to be remembered as the Silvestri mission. But they’re going to remember the crew, too. And I like the idea of having my name associated with yours. “I think we should continue,” she told him. “Taking the body home accomplishes nothing. He wouldn’t want us to turn back.”
“Okay,” he said. “Whatever you say.”
MATT KNEW HUTCH was right, that he wasn’t really responsible for Rudy’s death. And the knowledge helped. But in the end he also knew that if he’d performed better, Rudy would still be alive. And there was no getting around that.
He refused the meds she suggested. Taking them would have been an admission of something. They all stayed on board the McAdams the night of the ceremony, huddled together, herd instinct. Antonio told him in front of Hutch and Jon that it wouldn’t have mattered if he’d reacted differently. “I jumped into him, too, and nothing you did would have stopped that. When that snake head showed up my reflexes took over, and all I could think of was to get out of there. So stop beating yourself up.”
During his years as a pilot, Matt had never faced a day like this. He’d never lost a passenger, had never even seen one in danger. He’d always thought of himself as a heroic type. Women had automatically assumed he was a couple of cuts above ordinary men. Antonio, he’d known from the start, was ordinary. If there was anybody who’d been run-of-the-mill, an average middle-aged guy, it was Antonio.
But at the critical moment, Antonio had grabbed the gun and blown the serpent away. He’d stood up while Matt flinched. That fact would be hard to put behind him.
MATT COULDN’T SLEEP. He kept replaying the sequence over and over. What he remembered most vividly was that there’d been no place to hide, that he feared the creature would swallow him whole. Gulp him down like a piece of sausage.
He got up to use the washroom. Hutch must have been awake as well because moments after he returned to his compartment there was a soft knock at the door.
“Matt, are you okay?” She was still in her uniform.
“My God,” he said, “don’t you ever go to bed?” It was after three.
“I’m reading.”
“Couldn’t put it down?”
“Nope. It’s Damon Runyon.”
“Who?”
“Twentieth century.” She smiled. “You’d like him.”
He got his robe and joined her in the common room. She made coffee, and they talked about Runyon’s good-hearted gangsters, and the black hole at Tenareif, and whether they should start tomorrow on the next leg of the flight. Jim broke in to report that the samples brought back from the tower and the buried building—he had analyzed the tabletop piece to which the book had been frozen—indicated that both structures were about three hundred years old.
That brought up another question: The signal received at Cherry Hill had been transmitted fifteen thousand years ago. The space station went adrift, got knocked out of orbit, whatever, also in ancient times. But they’d still had a functioning civilization within the last few hundred years. What had happened to them?
Maybe the same thing that had happened at Makai? They’d learned how to live too long? Got bored?
“No,” said Hutch. “This feels more like a catastrophe.”
“An omega?”
“That would explain the fused circuits on the station. A few good bolts of lightning.”
The conversation inevitably wandered back to Rudy, but it didn’t touch on Matt’s role in his death. They were still there at five, when Jon came out to see what the noise was.
“Rehearsing for Guys
and Dolls,” Matt said.
THEY STAYED IN orbit two days, making maps and taking pictures of the world. Meanwhile they thawed the book and gave it to Jim. He analyzed it and reported that he was able to translate some of the material. “Matt was right. It was a hotel. The book is a listing of services, of menus, of the contents of the hotel library, which seem to have consisted of both books and VR. And of attractions available in the area. You were right also that the place was a center for skiing.”
“Great,” said Matt. “That’s what he died for? A hotel package?”
“There’s more. More difficult to translate, but seemingly unconnected with the hotel. I’ve been able to do some translation, but the overall meaning tends to be elusive.”
“Explain.”
“Let me give you an example.”
“Okay.”
“‘The sea is loud at night, and there are voices in the tide. At another time, in another place, the moon did not speak. We were amused.’”
He stopped and they looked at one another. “Is that it?” asked Jon.
“That is a single piece of text, separated from the others.”
Jim put the lines on-screen. Matt frowned at it. “‘The moon did not speak’?”
“Are you sure you have it right?” asked Hutch.
“Reasonably certain. The word appears several times in the hotel directory. ‘If you need something, speak to any of the service people.’ ‘Speak the word and we will respond.’ And so on.”
“We might need more time with the translation,” said Jon.
The moon did not speak.
Did not.
It was hard to miss the past tense.
“What are you thinking, Hutch?” asked Matt.
“I don’t think ‘did not speak’ quite captures it.”
Jon looked baffled. “How can you make any kind of sense out of a talking moon?”
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