by John Daulton
“Maybe this is the creature coming to greet us finally,” Altin was saying. Roberto wanted to agree, but he wasn’t so sure. The light was getting really bright, and the vehicle was right above the two of them now. Nothing about it seemed too warm and welcoming. The tentacle reached out toward the edge of the ramp. It clearly knew they were down there. It stretched over the edge and started down toward them. The glare was so bright Roberto could hardly see them in it.
A second tentacle shot out from the top of the vehicle right after, whip quick, and it arced over the edge of the ramp, bloated at one end, and ejected something globular.
“Oh shit!” he managed to get out.
The tip of the tentacle recoiled as if it had just spat something down at Roberto’s friends, and then they were encased in some kind of wiggly goo. A third tentacle came down right after, this one holding a large tubular device, with a sharp end like a probe. It jammed the probe into the jelly, and something sparked.
“Hey, Orli. Altin. You guys all right?” he asked.
No answer.
“Hey, Orli. Seriously, don’t screw around. Answer me.” He waited a half second. “Altin? You guys getting me?”
Still nothing.
Roberto ran toward them, into the wind. The sand blowing rasped against his helmet glass.
The beam of light from the tentacle changed colors. He looked up. A new tentacle was holding a different device. It looked to be made from the same avocado material as the ship and the ramp. The wiggly iceberg of jelly in which Altin and Orli were trapped began to rise.
“Shit. Orli!” he called. He ran faster. “God damn it, Orli, say something. Altin, come in. Jesus. This is Roberto. Altin Meade, can you hear me? Orli? God damn it.”
He drew his blaster and thought about blowing the light to hell. But the blob and his two friends were now over a hundred feet in the air. The drop would kill them.
“Orli?” he called again, but there was nothing coming back. Not even a crackle or a hiss. He saw that all the lights on their suit packs were out. That wasn’t good.
He ran back to the base of the ramp. This time he was with the wind, and it gave him speed, though he fell three times. The third time he actually leaped as he felt himself losing his balance and let the wind carry him that much farther before he bounced to a stop. He got to the base of the ramp and sprinted up it as best he could in the damn suit.
“Hang on, you guys, I’m coming,” he called. His blaster was still in his hand.
The spaghetti-armed monstrosity in the giant vehicle had them up on the ramp now. He could see them both hovering above it, still suspended by the dimmer light at the end of the tentacle boom.
A quarter mile had never seemed so far away. Up and up he ran.
He was close enough to take a shot. He stopped, dropped to a knee, and aimed carefully for a section of the tentacle from which the suspension light came, about a half yard from the tip. He fired. The tip bent downward, as if hinged, cut halfway through by the searing shot. The yellowish jelly holding his friends plopped to the deck. Roberto was up and running. “Take that, you spaghetti fuck,” he called as he ran.
They were only a hundred or so yards away. He pushed himself for speed.
Another tentacle came out through the top of the egg shape. It took up the device that the wounded tentacle had let go. Once again it lifted the jelly blob up. The vehicle turned and began to roll away, back up the ramp and toward the opening in the ship.
“Oh no you don’t. Eat this, bitch!” He dropped to his knee again and fired another shot. This time the laser beam struck some kind of barrier and angled off into the sky. “Like I didn’t expect that!” He switched to conventional rounds as he ran closer. They wouldn’t be any good from this far away. The vehicle was moving away too quickly. He had to shoot anyway.
He aimed and fired. He couldn’t tell if he hit anything or not. Nothing happened. He fired again, then three more after.
The vehicle stopped.
“Hah! Now you see how it is. Give me my friends back.” He ran farther up the ramp.
A tentacle reached out toward him. It held an oblong black device. He wasn’t sure what it was, but he didn’t like it, so he stopped and shot at it too. Three shots, crack, crack, crack.
Something happened in the air in front of him: it rippled, like barely visible smoke rings being blown at him. The force blew him backward eighty feet, and were it not for the slope of the ramp, the landing might have killed him. As it was, he struck hard and his breath was knocked from him. He slid another sixty feet before coming to a stop. He’d damn near slid off the edge of the ramp. The seventy-foot drop would have finished him.
He got up, realized his gun was gone, and immediately fumbled for the sharp pair of pliers in his suit’s tool kit. “This shit isn’t over yet!” That’s when he realized all the lights were off on his suit too. All of them.
He paused, thinking. He looked up and saw the vehicle was already getting up and over the hump in the ramp, heading into the black hole that would take it inside.
He refocused, looking at the blank glass inside his helmet. Nothing. No video, no temperature readings, no oxygen monitors.
“God damn it!”
He wouldn’t be any good to them dead.
Chapter 3
The creature snaked a tendril up into the steam-filled wind, a tentacle perhaps, for there were round structures along it like suction cups, though from the distance, and the steamy darkness, it was hard for Orli to be sure. The tendril flapped and fluttered as it rose, much as the mucus had when the ochre jelly was melting away, but it climbed steadily higher. Its ascent was guided by a number of the small discs, which flattened out like giant oval dinner plates, spreading out from the center of the tendril and angling here and there, some upward, some vertical to the direction of the wind, like the rudder and ailerons of an old-fashioned airplane.
She saw it rising in the distance behind Altin where he knelt in front of her, watched it climb right up to the large grate high above them. She followed its flight, saw it wind itself around one of the cross members of the grate, and then, right after, it seemed to haul the most colossal creature out of the darkness from down below.
“Oh no,” she said as she watched it emerge from the shadows.
“Oh no, what?” Altin asked, turning and following the direction of her gaze.
Up rose a billow of gray material, looking rather like a colossal parachute made from a film of mucus. It bloated with the prevailing wind, and it followed the tendril upward for a time, growing larger and larger as it drew near. Soon it was high above them. From within it, descending out of the space inside the gray, filmy dome, came a long body, at least three times longer than the billow was deep. She thought immediately that the creature looked like a soft, lumpy-stemmed mushroom made of snot—with lots of tentacles.
It was enormous. The billow, inflated and massive as it spread wide above her, had to be at least a hundred and fifty yards across, and nearly as deep inside. And the body that came out of it was a mucous gray tube that couldn’t be any less than three hundred yards long. It had two bulbs, a small one up inside of the billow and another at the center, and at the end of its very long, cylindrical body it narrowed, like the tapering of an insect’s thorax, though soft and seemingly malleable. An odd puckering of flesh at this terminal end reminded her of someone about to spit.
The large central bulb seemed to recommend itself as the creature’s head and face, or at least something approximately so, despite being located where it was. It swelled at the middle of the long, tubular body, not much below the line of the billow’s edge, and appeared as if the creature had swallowed something enormous and oblong in the way of a python that has just had a meal of something extremely large. Around the equator of this bulbous area blinked three large, silvery eyes, massive half spheres that bulged out of black eye sockets, each of which were formed by concentric rings of black flesh like stacked rings embedded in the soft flesh.
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It was also from this bulbous central part of the creature’s body that the tentacles came. One of them, the first tendril she had seen, emerged near the top of the protuberance and now stretched taught like a guy-wire up to the grate above, holding the creature in place despite the wind. Several other tentacles waggled freely, loose and streaming like smoke plumes in the currents blowing by. Five sprouted from the bulb above the eyes, spaced evenly around, and five more emerged from beneath those blinking orbs, also equally spaced all around, ten tentacles in all.
The creature snaked a tentacle down at the two of them, Altin and Orli standing there. Once again it flattened a few of its discs out to guide the tentacle toward them. It came waggling down, its tip flexing, not quite sharp, and it tapped once against the back of Altin’s head.
“Oh God,” Orli said as Altin muttered something profane and entirely Prosperion.
The tendril tapped twice more on Altin’s helmet, then right after, and quick as a dart, it dove down through the grate beneath him. It threaded its way back up and wrapped itself around the beam several times, while yet another tentacle came down and slithered around him, wrapping him up in a stack of coils.
“I can’t imagine this is going to end well,” Altin said, though he sounded more curious than afraid.
Orli could hardly believe he was so calm. She jumped up and tried to pull the tip of the tendril away, intending to unwind it. She couldn’t budge it. It might as well have been three-inch rebar. She reached for her blaster. It was gone.
“I think it’s trying to do something,” Altin said, still remarkably restrained. “I can feel pressure all over my suit. It’s like a thousand fingers all over me, squeezing and prodding me everywhere.”
He was jerked up and away before she could reply. She screamed his name. The tendril curled up into the blowing mist. Another tendril came down, this one having been first sent up to the platform above, wound through it, and sent back down. It locked together with the tip of the one that had Altin wrapped up. Both went taut between the two grates, with Altin like a joint in the middle of them.
There followed a loud, sucking sound, and in that moment the creature sucked its puffy parachute-like billow in. The massive dome of shimmering flesh vanished almost too quickly to be seen, settling into the smaller bulbous area that she’d noted near the top of the creature’s body, situated up inside the billow earlier. That bulb became pregnant with the billow’s mass and now matched the central one for size, the whole thing together looking like two scoops of snot-flavored ice cream on a mucous cone—a five-hundred-yard-long one with tentacles and eyes.
From the larger, central bulb a light came on, emitted from one of the creature’s eyes. It shone down on Altin, the beam bright and tight, as focused as any spotlight could be. It beamed into Altin’s face, and she could only guess how blindingly bright it must seem to him, being that he was at least two hundred yards closer to it than she was.
The beam changed colors, from white to blue, then green. The tentacles around Altin flexed. Gaps opened up here and there between the coils. Still the light shone. Orli shouted up to him, but she knew he couldn’t hear her over the infernal wind and all the other noise, the roiling rumble from down below and all the thumping and hissing coming from everywhere.
Altin was upside down now. Another tentacle had been brought to bear and was prodding at him again. It was too dim to make out his features in the darkness, with the distance and with the misty wind, but she was sure he must be terrified.
Then he was coming down again. The tendril that had been wound through the grate above elongated, stretching and thinning some as it lowered him down. Orli realized as it did so that there were colors flashing all up and down the creature’s body now. All the colors of the rainbow, dappled with gray, making patterns on its skin. The lights flashed on the puffs of steam that blew by, painting them to ghosts of rainbows. Orli realized the steam was rising up through the grates.
The added illumination from the enormous creature revealed more of the area around her. She could see that the grate they were on was indiscernibly long. She was sure she could see for a half mile in either direction at least, and yet there was no sign of a terminal wall in any direction. Just blowing mist. And strange alien machines.
Huge formations of the rough, green-brown protein rose up from the grate, the material shaping the alien constructs. They were blocky and towering, dotted with enormous glowing bulbs. The nearest had long flutelike chimneys, or so they seemed to her, which rose straight up and disappeared through the grate above. Levers thrust out thrice as long as she was tall. Holes were sunk into it as well, perfectly round and, by her best guess, about the perfect diameter to stick a tentacle inside.
There were other machines beyond it. The largest were giant melon-shaped things that sat upon the grating, braced in place by what looked like woven nests. The melon-things she thought might be reservoirs of some kind, tanks perhaps, but whatever they were nesting in was translucent, a dull seaweed brown, and having the look of coiled hose. Light pulsed dimly from inside of the strands, suggesting they were hollow and contiguous, and perhaps filled with something liquid moving inside.
These structures, reservoir and brace, were also attached to long chimneys, which again ran straight up and vanished through the grate above. More bulbous lights glowed here and there along their length.
There were other machines, many others. All of them massive and impossible to define. In some ways, they seemed very familiar, obviously equipment with functions like any other machine. But the sheer scale of them made function impossible to guess.
Altin was taken to one of them.
The creature traveled across the grate by hauling itself against the wind. One tentacle was locked to the grate Altin and Orli were on, the same grate with the machine it was heading toward. Two more tentacles were stretched up to the grate above now. The titanic being pulled itself against the gusting wind with these taut lines, its limbs like ropes, and with yet another tentacle, it laid Altin down upon the flat surface of a machine that was some quarter mile from where Orli was.
Orli couldn’t see him anymore. She could only see the enormous creature at work. She gathered up the three tubes that were plugged into her suit and ran as quickly as she dared along the grate, making right-angle turns to zigzag her way to him over the crisscross network of beams.
A puff of steam came up from below, thick like fog, and as it blew over her, she thought she might be in danger of heatstroke if such occurred too often. Her spacesuit wasn’t cooling at all that she could tell, and sweat ran from her in rivers. Worse, the steam made it hard to see, forming droplets on the helmet glass and making traversing the grate dangerous at best.
The light above grew brighter as she approached. She paused long enough to look up.
Another of the massive alien creatures blew into view, coming from the opposite side of the machine that Altin was on. It simply appeared out of the darkness like a phantom on the wind. It caught itself with tentacles wrapped around the grate above, stopping its flight abruptly, then sent more tentacles down toward the grate in places around the machine. Soon it had guy-wired itself in place beside the machine as the first alien had done. The two creatures began flickering and flashing back and forth, prismatic colors sliding up and down their lengths. It added a little extra light to help Orli run.
And Orli was a runner, her conditioning supreme, but the damn spacesuit and the damn tubes attached to it and the damn crisscrossed beams of the grate made movement agonizingly difficult. And then there was the wind.
As she neared the machine, she quickly realized that it was so huge that she couldn’t possibly see what was happening on top of it. She’d have been better off staying where she was. At least back there she’d had some kind of angle. All she could see up close were the three tubes that had been plugged into Altin’s suit hanging down the side of the machine like lengths of coarsely made rubber hose. “Altin,” she cried out, knowing
it was pointless. It was.
Something was being lowered from the darkness high above the upper deck of the machine. A light came on, glaringly bright. It came from the surface that Altin lay upon, shining upward and illuminating whatever it was that was coming down.
The object was a three-pronged device with long and thick tubes like fingers protruding from a blocky central mass. Attached to the blocky section of the device were lengths of the same hose-like material Orli had seen the melon tanks nesting in. These hoses, or pipes, or whatever they were, ran upward through the grate and attached to some other very large device mounted on the underside of the grate above. She could see it well because of how bright the light was shining up from the machine Altin had been set upon. These tubes, sinuous as they were, appeared to be the lone source of support for the large, three-pronged device, suggesting they must be tremendously strong.
The fingerlike prongs themselves, and the central mass from which they came, were made from the same green-brown material that seemingly everything else on the ship was. But the tips of them were different. On each was a black half dome that shone as if made of glass or some kind of semisolid liquid. None of them were quite the same size, nor were the prongs themselves identical in thickness or in length. Whatever they were, the shortest, thickest of them was being lowered right down at what had to be where Altin lay.
First she thought he might be crushed. Then she wondered what they might be doing … or emitting. She hoped he wasn’t being irradiated to death.
She considered climbing up one of the tubes jammed into his suit, but thought better of it. What if she pulled it out and it really was his only source of air?