by John Daulton
She backed away and listened to the sounds above her, parsing the noise of the hooks moving in and out of something from the rest. She looked at her forearms again. They were turning pinker, like a bad sunburn on the way. She had to get out of this.
She set the Higgs prism and jumped up along the wall. She hoped she didn’t fly right up into the path of one of the damn hooks. Might as well jump into freighter traffic. She didn’t.
She drifted up out of the thickest steam and found that her suspicions had been correct. There was a hole in the bulkhead: a big one, twenty yards across, roughly circular, as if it had been burrowed by the hooks themselves.
Hooks were coming in and out of it in a steady flow. The ant analogy worked almost perfectly. Some of them were angling up along the hull, heading back down the length of the ship. Others peeled off and angled up and across the bulkhead.
They ran along the vents and gripped the cross members as they went across, preventing themselves from being blown off the wall. The wind blew the length of their bodies out like shrimp-shaped flags, but their mustache tentacles held them tight and they traveled right along anyway. They’d get to the narrow horizontal bands of unvented protein that separated the levels and scurry along flat again, making the transitions from calm to windblown easily and without ever losing speed.
The vents ran the length of the bulkhead as far as she could see. Each layer of the ship was defined by this incredible wind factory. Impressive, but impossible to appreciate given the nature of her current agonies.
She turned back and regarded the opening in the bulkhead. If she went in, she could probably keep herself above the backs of the hooks traveling in and out of the corridor, like a cockroach crawling on the ceiling.
She got herself to the opening, drifting over the top of it. She reached down to feel for any wind. There was none. So her plan might work.
Except she didn’t know what her plan was now.
What was her plan?
Hell if she had a clue.
She waited to see if any of the aliens coming and going paid any attention to her.
They did not.
She wondered if they could even see her. It was possible that the big aliens with the billows were too big to notice a puny human, but it seemed like these smaller creatures ought to.
Or else they really didn’t care. Maybe cockroaches didn’t bother them.
Maybe there were poisoned traps somewhere. Or an exterminator.
Ugh. She could be running right into one.
She shrugged. She had to do something, so she was committed now.
She lowered herself down into the corridor. No more than eight or nine yards separated her from the back of an alien running in, but as long as she moved carefully, she could pull herself along the top and stay above the scuttling traffic of them all.
She peered down into the darkness. There were no lights ahead, no round rings of violet or ovals of orange light. The hooks themselves, they glowed a little, though. The farther into the tunnel they got, the more they did, a pale gray light that formed a line in the distance. From the way the light of their wide bodies turned to a thread in the darkness, the tunnel was very long.
She looked back into the long stretch of the ship behind her, at the stacks of grates climbing up out of the steam and out of sight. One guess was as good as another.
She pulled herself along the ceiling, heading deeper into the tunnel. The going was slow, and she had to do it with only one hand. It was very dark. The aliens didn’t throw off much light. She was tempted to pull the small flashlight out of her utility belt, but decided against it. If the damn things communicated with light—at least the big ones did, she didn’t know about the hooks—she didn’t want to turn it on and announce that she was here. They were doing a fine job ignoring her still, and she didn’t want to ruin it.
She pulled herself along. She must have done so for a half hour or more. Finally she came to an intersection. Hooks were crossing … on the ceiling.
Of course they were, the bastards.
She made her way carefully to the intersection and looked left and right. The aliens stayed on the ceiling as they traveled down that one. That wasn’t so troubling. And there was something glowing in the distance to the left.
She inched across the ceiling and waited for three aliens to scuttle past. She pushed in after them and rotated the dial on her Higgs prism. Soon she was standing on the floor.
It is hard to appreciate simple things like walking and gravity until one has done without them for a very long time. Improvised travel along ceilings and through wind-blasted deck levels gave her a new respect for simply being on her own two feet.
She looked back and saw another hook coming her way. Her first instinct was to run, but instead she crouched down and let it run past. It never slowed at all. Not even the twitch of a tentacle or the dip of its hook as it ran past. She might as well have been invisible.
She tried to jog along in its wake, but the jolt of each step was too much for her ribs, sucking the wind right out of her lungs. She wouldn’t be any use to Altin lying there unconscious for an hour. So she had to walk.
She went toward the distant glow, ducking each time an alien scooted past even though she didn’t quite need to.
The light grew steadily brighter as she went along. She thought she must have walked well over an hour that way, until eventually she discovered that it came from a corridor branching to her right. She peered down that one and saw that it ran another several hundred yards ahead. Something was very bright beyond.
She crept toward it.
A massive chamber opened out above her. It reached well up into the distance, several miles at least, and in its center, filling almost the entire space as far as Orli could see, was what appeared to be a giant bubble. It was filled with a clear fluid, like water, as clear as any she’d ever seen. She couldn’t be certain it was water, but there was no odor in the vast chamber, so she thought it likely that it was. That and the fact that there were plants growing inside, long, sinuous vines reaching upward like a kelp bed, though these were brighter shades of green, and some were red or orange or black. They grew in wide clumps, and were illuminated by the brilliance of the blue light that filled the chamber and the giant … well, tank, for that’s what the bubble seemed to her. In fact, the longer she looked into it, the more it reminded her of the giant fish tank her mother had kept back on Earth when Orli was a child. Except this one had to be ten miles wide and at least three or four high, and of course all the water was boiling.
She glanced around the outside of the tank, suddenly aware of how long she’d been looking into it. Nothing was coming at her. There didn’t appear to be anything inside looking at her either, though from her current location, she couldn’t see much for all the long ropes of green and orange and black.
A narrow space ran around the edge of the tank on either side, no more than ten yards separating the massive liquid-filled vessel from the chamber wall. She touched the side of the tank as she peered around its edge, tentatively testing its temperature with the palm of her hand. There was very little heat coming off. It was softer than she’d expected it to be as well, like it was made from a membrane, something grown, and perhaps even alive.
She moved around the tank a little ways, trying to see deeper into it through the forest of long, ropy plants, waggling their way upward and out of sight. She got to a wide gap between a clump of them and discovered that, more astounding than the giant tank, or even plants that could grow in boiling water, there was a monster floating in the middle of it all.
Filling perhaps a quarter of the tank’s total volume was a great spotted blob, its flesh awash in black and gray and yellow. It looked like a dirty oil cloud churning beneath the sea. The colors of its skin moved around as if independent, the shapes of each cellular, like hundred-foot-wide microbes crawling around on it. They flattened or grew oblong as they squeezed around on it, pinching together into figure eights sometim
es or stretching out into long, gooey-seeming strands. They’d shift from black to yellow to gray, none of them staying the same for long. Every so often one of them would flicker with light, then several nearby would follow suit, and then a prismatic blast would follow for a time, beaming out of the tank against the chamber wall, painting it in rainbow colors and patches of gray. Orli thought the patches of gray might actually be colors she just couldn’t see.
Whatever they were, they had to mean something, though she had no way to know what. It didn’t look like anything. It wasn’t shaping images like the aliens that had examined her and Altin had done.
The wall upon which the colors were projected, the wall around the tank itself, was soft and white. And for the first time since coming onto the ship, she realized it wasn’t rough in the way of the hard protein from which everything else seemed to have been made. This was rough in a different way, like sandpaper or, given the pale white color, maybe more like the belly of a shark.
The thing in the tank, the creature, shone its prismatic display on the pale wall for a time, and then the pattern went away. Then the creature was simply black and gray and rather golden for a time. It had a luster to it, as if it were polished and very smooth. She thought it was beautiful, though for some reason it terrified her too.
She watched it and finally noticed that inside the giant boiling fish tank there were hook aliens as well. Several of them crawled around along the bottom, apparently gobbling up small blackish objects that had fallen down there. She thought they might be excrement.
They opened up their little puckered protrusions and, with their tentacles, handed the round globules into themselves. Lots of them were doing it.
Others were crawling around on the flesh of the undulating mass, the big thing inside. Seeing them crawling around on it, looking like larvae or little bits of wriggling rice, gave her a sense of scale for the monstrous thing. She set her Higgs prism to zero and pushed off from the ground, wanting to get a better look at the colossal thing.
When she was nearly a mile off the ground, she was high enough to see that the little ones were blowing bubbles of something syrupy and brown. She had a feeling she knew what that was. Others were blowing bubbles of pink or gray. She wondered what those did, but she was pretty sure she didn’t really want to find out, at least not firsthand. The bubbles clung to the giant alien’s skin, placed there upon it like stitched-on beads. Orli had no idea what was going on.
From this height, however, Orli got a better idea of the sheer enormity of the alien within. Suddenly the long, tentacled aliens with their billows and bulbous cores seemed like nothing, bare wisps of stringy servitude. Drones, entirely insignificant. That thing in there was at least three miles across at its thickest parts, though it was hard to say for sure. Its soggy form kept changing, stretching and globing about, making it impossible to estimate.
She pulled herself up the surface of the tank, making great time at zero gravity using her hand and both feet. As she did, she angled herself around it as well. When she got perhaps a quarter of the way around the tank and just past the halfway point, around the widest of its bubbled bulge, she saw that the big alien had a tuft of tentacles growing out of its top, almost like a patch of hair. It reminded her of the writhing threadlike roots on a garlic bulb, the alien one monstrous bulb of shifting color, turned bottom up and reaching out of the water with all those filaments. There were thousands of them. She knew they were not threadlike, though. She was sure the tentacles were no less thick than those of the long, billowy aliens, but by comparison to its sheer mass, they seemed delicate fibers—at least from this distance.
Whatever their size, they waved up into the heights above the creature, out of the boiling water, where they vanished into steam coming off the surface. The steam concentrated itself at the top of the chamber, thick like smoke, and shaped into a whirling disc like a massive hurricane cloud viewed from space. She had no idea what the creature was doing with all those arms reaching into it, for its purpose within the steam cloud was entirely obscure.
She also couldn’t say how any of this was going to help her find Altin.
She continued to pull her way around the tank. It was widest at the midway point, so she was able to adjust gravity a little and make even better speed with some help from it sloping upward now.
She pushed herself along with her feet, just enough gravity to give her contact, but not enough to slow her down. Her runner’s legs gave her speed, and eventually she rounded far enough to count herself on the back half of the tank.
She watched more of the oil-cloud alien’s light shows on the wall for a time, wondering if she might maybe translate it somehow. She’d learned the common tongue of Kurr easily enough. Maybe she could figure this language out.
That’s when an image of the Glistening Lady appeared.
It came from the big garlic-glob alien in the fishbowl, a projection that was obviously Roberto’s ship, for it could be no other, the slender, silvery ship clear as it could be backed by a field of star-speckled black.
Orli wondered why it was beaming that. Roberto’s ship was on Prosperion, wasn’t it? Was that, like, a recording? Or was Roberto out there somewhere? Perhaps he really had gotten away.
And come back.
Hopefully that wasn’t an image of the ship they’d captured.
She pulled her way closer to the prismatic light show playing on the sharkskin wall. She wanted to call out. To wave.
The lights went out.
She could still see the ship.
She panicked. Was that a damn window, or just an image left there now? The alien hadn’t done that with its other projections.
She ran along the curve of the tank toward the image. She ratcheted down gravity and launched herself up at the wall, rolling the Higgs prism back again to brake her speed, and then set it to zero when she got there.
It was a window. A huge one, deep. She was looking through a half-mile-thick pane of window glass, or something just like it. But that was the Glistening Lady. There could be no doubt. She waved. She did shout this time. “Roberto! God damn it, get us out!” She pounded on the glass. It felt rough like the protein of the hull and grates. She pounded anyway.
She turned back, faced the big alien with its onion hairs all rising up into the steam.
“Let us go, God damn it. We haven’t done anything to you.”
She saw as she looked back across that there was another image on the far wall. It was so far away she could hardly make it out, even though it was probably a mile wide. It looked like Yellow Fire. The red world. The planet viewed from orbit.
“No,” she said, realizing what was happening. “No!”
The Glistening Lady moved out of view, laterally, as with the motion of this ship, not Roberto’s. Orli screamed Roberto’s name. The window went away. She was staring at the white wall again.
A blinding flash of light shot out from the alien in the tank, rolling over her. She had to turn away. It passed over her and played on the wall a few hundred meters left of where she was. It sparkled and glowed, and then there was the rift in space, visible through it, a great black rent with a pale pink flicker at the edges like fire. The stars around the rift were like the flesh of space, making the tear itself seem a bleeding gash.
It was growing bigger. Or for a moment, at least, she thought it was growing. Then she realized what was really happening. The ship—with her in it—was moving toward it.
It was huge, widening as they drew nearer and nearer, yawning darkness. The fiery pink flickers of its rim disappeared beyond the edge of her window’s view. Total blackness.
Then the alien ship was through.
Chapter 46
Sensors came online shortly before navigation did, weapons right after. They were just over the four-hour mark on the restart and making great progress. The specter of the four alien ships Roberto and Squints had seen coming through the wormhole had given the crew a forty-five-minute bump in efficiency th
at none of the crew would have thought possible prior. And that accomplishment might have been met with appreciation by the Glistening Lady’s captain had it not been for the fact that the first thing he saw when the sensors came up was a ship lifting off the surface of the planet. From its position in the formation around the dig site, he knew instantly that it was the same ship Orli and Altin had been taken into.
The great craft rose steadily up from the rocky red soil. Roberto could barely see it through the camera relay on the surface, due to a particularly nasty storm blowing down below, but between its shadowy shape rising above the rest, and the confirmation via other wavelengths, there was no doubt: it was leaving. The only question was, was it leaving leaving or coming the Glistening Lady’s way?
“Deeqa, get up here,” he called. “We may need to kick some ass in a minute.” He turned to Squints. “Strap yourself into that seat back there, junior. Do it now.”
The redheaded youth did immediately as he was told.
Roberto’s ship only carried four nukes, but he armed them all. The ion cannon and both lasers were charging by the time Deeqa slid into the copilot’s seat. She only needed a minute to assess what was happening. “Well, this will be fun. You sure it saw us?”
“Planet rotated us into range just before I got camo up. Be surprised if it didn’t.”
“It’s going to read our heat signature anyway.”
“I know. But you never know.”
The alien vessel took its time about breaching the clouds, and in the twenty minutes it did so, the Glistening Lady had prepared itself should the vessel decide to attack.
The alien ship took a position just above the upper atmosphere and stayed there, its orbit in perfect synchronicity with the planet itself.
“What the hell are they waiting for?” Roberto asked.
Deeqa swung her chair around, stretched her long body to the navigations computer, and tapped something into that console. She retracted herself and tapped in more commands. “Not picking up any scans on us,” she said. “Not saying I could if they didn’t want me to, but not seeing anything coming this way. Maybe they still don’t see us, just like last time.”