by Allen Steele
“Or claws.” There was a wry smile on Jason’s face. “He’s right, skipper. It’s entirely up to them, so we might as well relax and wait.”
Wait, yes . . . but Andromeda was damned if she was going to be passive about it. She tapped a finger against her headset wand. “Zeus, are you there?”
“Right here, skipper.” The chief petty officer didn’t need to tell her where he was. “I’ve got the weapons out. Want me to bring them upstairs?”
“Negative. I’ll have Jason come down to fetch them.” Her first officer started to say something, but Andromeda silenced him with a raised forefinger before he could speak. “You know what’s happening, don’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Zeus’s tone became menacing. “They’re not taking us without a fight.”
D’Anguilo blanched, and Andromeda suppressed a smile. At least she wasn’t alone; someone else was suspicious of the danui. “I’m not looking for a fight,” she replied, giving D’Anguilo a sidelong glance. “At least not for the time being. Right now, I want you to prepare for docking. Suit up and board the pod.”
“Yes, ma’am.” There was newfound enthusiasm in Zeus’s voice; apparently he, too, was tired of doing nothing. “I’m heading below.”
“Good man.” The lander’s bay doors had been left open after the Reese had departed, so Zeus should have no problem taking out the pod. She muted the mike, then turned to Jason again. “Go collect the fléchette pistols from Zeus and bring them up here, along with holsters. I want everyone to have one before we . . .”
“Captain, I object!” D’Anguilo stood up from his seat and took a step toward her. “This endangers the very purpose of this mission! The danui have no history of hostility. They . . .”
“Dr. D’Anguilo, your opinion has been noted.” Andromeda stared him straight in the eye. “As commanding officer, it’s my duty to take whatever measures I deem necessary to protect my vessel and crew. You say the danui haven’t acted in a hostile fashion. I disagree. They’ve refused to respond to nearly all our messages, allowed another race to act against our survey team, then captured this ship and brought it to an unknown location. And now they’re preparing to do something else . . . dock the ship, and possibly even board us . . . against our will. As far as I’m concerned, those are hostile actions, and I’m taking the minimum precautions.”
“Captain . . .”
“Sit down and shut up . . . or I’ll have Mr. Ressler confine you to quarters.”
Jason was already on his feet. He stood beside D’Anguilo, waiting for Andromeda to give him the word. Everyone else in the command center stared at them; no one dared to speak. The astroethnicist regarded Andromeda for another moment, then he looked away and sat down again without saying another word.
Jason headed for the access hatch, but not before he paused beside Andromeda. “I hope you know what you’re doing,” he whispered.
Andromeda quietly nodded. Jason left the bridge, opening the hatch to glide headfirst down the access shaft. She let out her breath, then returned to her seat and sat down again. She could feel D’Anguilo’s eyes upon her back, but she refused to look at him.
Hex grew larger, no longer resembling a wall but instead a latticework of six-sided spaces with HD 76700 gleaming as a captive star within its center. The Montero came closer, thrusters firing periodically to correct its approach vector, and it soon became clear that the vessel was being guided toward a hexagon about halfway up Hex’s northern hemisphere. If D’Anguilo’s estimates were correct, that was the zone where the biopod gravity would be approximately 1 g. Whoever had reprogrammed Montero’s comps were apparently aware of human environmental tolerances.
The Montero was less than fifty miles from the hexagon when a small red spot of light appeared upon the outer surface of the node at its upper-left corner. As the light grew larger and brighter, the thrusters fired again, maneuvering the ship toward it. The lidar was still active, and Melpomene reported that the light was coming from within a circular hatch that had just opened. Apparently, that was the place where the Montero would be docked.
Jason returned to the bridge, bearing an armload of fléchette pistols. He passed them out among the crew. Andromeda checked to make sure her weapon was fully loaded with its arrowhead-like slivers, then clipped its holster to her belt. D’Anguilo made a sour face when Jason gave him a gun; he shoved the holster into his chair’s cupholder and stared back at Andromeda when he caught her watching him. She decided not to make an issue of it. Perhaps it was just as well; if the danui were as peaceful as he insisted, then it might be a bad idea if their chief negotiator approached them with a weapon on his hip.
As the Montero made its final approach to Hex, the spherical node filled the wallscreen. Realizing that the bow cameras might not reveal everything she wanted to see, Andromeda left her seat again, pushing herself up to the ceiling portholes so that she could get a better view. The ship slowly passed through the outer hatch, and she caught a glimpse of the recessed flanges of its sphincterlike doors; the hatch was big enough to admit a vessel ten times the size of her own. Scarlet light gleamed from the other end of a broad, circular tunnel; in the sullen green glow of Montero’s port formation lights, she saw that its walls were grey and seamless, and appeared to be composed of some stony material.
“What the hell is this place made of?” she asked aloud, speaking to no one in particular. “Whatever it is, it’s not metal.”
“Restructured matter,” D’Anguilo said, and Andromeda looked around to see that he’d joined her at the windows. “Possibly carbon nanotubes, but even if that’s so, it probably started as something else.”
Nice to know that D’Anguilo didn’t bear grudges. Either that, or his sense of wonder outweighed any desire to indulge in a feud. “What do you mean by that?” she asked.
He shrugged, still staring out the window. “If the danui built this place the way I think they did, then what we’re looking at is native material from their homeworld . . . or what used to be their homeworld, that is. After they tore their planet apart . . . along with just about every other planet and asteroid in this system . . . they broke its matter down to the most basic elements and compounds and used it as raw material.” He paused. “Don’t ask me how they did it. They just did.”
Andromeda felt something stick in her throat. “You make it sound easy.”
“Didn’t mean to.” A wry grin. “I’m sure it can’t have been as . . .”
He stopped, his mouth falling open in amazement, and when Andromeda followed his gaze through the windows she saw why. The Montero had reached the end of the tunnel; before them lay a vast spherical chamber, tinted red from glowing red threads upon its walls and lined with deep, broad indentations that appeared to be docking bays. Apparently a harbor of some sort, yet so large that it could have held the Coyote Federation’s entire merchant fleet. Within it, the Montero was little more than a toy.
She barely had time to comprehend the size of the place when she felt the RCRs fire again, that time to brake the ship. A sudden jolt from the starboard side, followed an instant later by another one from the port side, and the Montero began slowly gliding into the nearest bay.
“What in . . . ?” she began, then Rolf looked up at her.
“Skipper, you gotta see this!” he snapped.
He pointed to the wallscreen, and Andromeda pushed herself away from the ceiling to see what he was looking at. As the Montero coasted to a halt, thick cables uncoiled from recesses within the bay walls. Serpentine and swift, they lashed out toward the ship, wrapping themselves around the hull like the tentacles of some unseen kraken.
Andromeda couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Within seconds, the cables formed a snare in which the ship was suspended. Her headset had become dislodged during her fall; pulling it up from around her neck, she jabbed at the wand. “Zeus, are you seeing this?”
“Aye, Captain.” There was an irate undertone to his voice. “I’m watching from the pod. They’ve
got us trapped, but good.”
“I don’t like this,” Melpomene muttered. “Not one bit.”
Andromeda nodded. She didn’t like it, either; it felt too much like being imprisoned. But there was no point in asking Mel if she could fire thrusters and dislodge the ship. Perhaps there was another way . . .
“Zeus,” she said, “go out and see if there’s any way you can detach those lines.”
“Captain . . .” D’Anguilo began.
She shot him an angry look. “Don’t start with me again.”
“I’m not trying to.” D’Anguilo raised his hands in surrender. “Just let me point out that this might be normal docking procedure. It might seem like we’ve been captured, but . . . well, you don’t know for sure.”
“You’ve got a point,” Andromeda said. “But since we don’t know for sure, I’d like to see if we can escape, just in case your pals aren’t as harmless as you say they are.”
D’Anguilo’s gaze traveled meaningfully to her holstered pistol. “Why are you assuming that everything they’ve done constitutes enemy action?”
Andromeda was tired of arguing with him. Turning away from D’Anguilo, she walked over to Rolf’s station. One of his screens displayed the hangar bay’s interior; the chief engineer had activated the pod’s hull camera.
“Pod ready to undock,” Rolf said quietly. Andromeda nodded, and Rolf murmured something into his mike. The screen changed, showing the hangar walls as they silently fell away beneath the service pod.
“Captain?” Anne said. “Receiving another text message. It’s in Anglo.”
“Put it up on the wall,” Andromeda said. Anne’s hands darted across her keyboard, and a moment later the message appeared on the wallscreen, superimposed over the forward view of the node harbor:
Your vessel has been secured. An enclosed walkway will soon be extended for your convenience. Please do not interfere with docking operations.
“Captain, I recommend that you order your man back inside,” D’Anguilo said. “I don’t think they want us sneaking around outside our ship.”
“No one’s sneaking around. We’re just making sure that we can leave when we want to.” Andromeda continued to watch the smaller screen. The service pod had left Montero’s lander bay. As it turned toward the bow, she could see the tentacle-like cables wrapped around the command module’s cylindrical hull. “Zeus, can you get close to one of those things? I’d like to get a good look at it.”
“Wilco, Captain.” A moment passed, then the screen showed the hull coming closer, with one of the cables in the hatched crosshairs of the camera’s focal point. The cable didn’t have any visible seams; although it had a metallic sheen that dully reflected the pod’s floodlights, there was something about it that was disturbingly organic.
Apparently, Zeus was curious about the tentacle as well, because when he’d brought the pod close enough, Andromeda saw one of the remote manipulators move into view. Its claw opened, then it gently touched the side of the cable.
“Feels like rubber,” Zeus said, and Andromeda noticed that the cable’s surface dented ever so slightly where the manipulator claw touched it. “Going to try to get hold of it, see if I can . . .”
Suddenly, almost too fast for the eye to catch, the cable whipped free of the claw’s grasp. “Hey, what the hell?” Zeus exclaimed as it disappeared from view. “It just . . .”
Then the screen view shuddered, as if something was violently shaking the pod. “What’s going on?” Rolf snapped. “Are you . . . ?”
“Goddammit, it just grabbed me! I . . .”
“Get out of there!” Andromeda bent low over the console. “Zeus, fire your thrusters and . . . !”
“Captain, I . . . !”
“Zeus!” Melpomene screamed. “Get out of . . . !”
And then the screen went dark, and they heard nothing further from the pod.
CHAPTER TWELVE
MARK DUPREE’S LAST ACT HAD BEEN TO BRING THE REESE down in a long, flat plain not far from the biopod’s central river. His flying skills probably saved the lives of everyone else aboard. Sean reflected upon this as he and Cayce pulled the pilot’s body from the wreckage and laid it on the snow-covered ground.
“Thanks, buddy,” he said quietly as he covered his friend with the emergency blanket he’d found among the lander’s survival equipment. “I owe you one.” Then he turned to look around.
Were it not for the ammonia-rich atmosphere and the weird trees that looked rather like immense broccoli, he could have sworn that he was on Coyote’s north polar tundra. But only for a moment. To the west—the only way he could tell the direction was by checking the digital compass of his helmet’s heads-up display—the landscape seemingly stretched away to infinity, with no apparent horizon. To the east, beyond the long furrow left by the Reese, the terrain ended in what appeared to be a hemispherical wall, so high that its upper reaches were hidden behind the cirrus clouds; it looked as if they’d come down closer to one end of the biopod than the other. To the north and south, the land gradually sloped upward until it reached mountainous ridgelines that seemed to run the entire length of both sides of the biopod.
In effect, he and the others were in a giant valley a thousand miles long and a hundred miles wide. The landscape wasn’t the most disturbing thing about the place, though, but rather the sky.
It was easy to detect the point where the lander had penetrated the biopod ceiling. Many miles above them was what appeared to be an upside-down tornado: a small yet distinct funnel cloud, off-white and rotating clockwise, its mouth open to the ground and its spout tapering upward. The storm was too far above them for it to cause anything more than a steady breeze where they stood, yet as Sean watched the phenomenon, he knew that a much more dire situation was developing.
The biopod was leaking its atmosphere into space . . . and their crash landing was the reason why.
Sandy’s right, he thought. We should have stayed aboard the ship.
“Sean?” Kyra said, and he lowered his eyes and turned to find her standing behind him. “Here. Got something for you.”
A parka, a pair of insulated trousers, knee boots, gloves, and an airpack. While he and Cayce were removing Mark’s body from the cockpit, she and Sandy had managed to pry open the cargo hold and locate the expedition gear. Kyra had already discarded her skinsuit and helmet; she was wearing cold-weather gear over her Corps unitard, its hood pulled up over her head, and the lower part of her face, from her eyes down to her chin, was concealed by the airpack’s goggles and respirator, its hoses leading over her shoulders to the pack itself.
Sean gaped at her, surprised by her abrupt change of appearance. “How did you . . . ?”
“Sandy helped me.” He couldn’t see her mouth, but the crinkling of the corners of her eyes behind the goggles told him that she was smiling. “C’mon . . . no time to be modest. You’ll be a lot more comfortable in this.”
He rather doubted that. The skinsuit had its own built-in heating system. But while the airmask might be cumbersome, even goggles would beat looking at the world through a helmet faceplate. Besides, he didn’t have much of a choice. In a few hours, the skinsuit’s oxygen supply would be gone, while the airpack could distill breathable oxygen and nitrogen from the atmosphere almost indefinitely.
Sandy had changed out of her skinsuit as well, and she was continuing to rummage through the equipment cases. But when Sean glanced over at Cayce, he saw that the team leader was making no effort to put on winter gear. Instead, he’d walked a few yards away from the wrecked spacecraft and was looking west, as if searching the horizonless distance for something.
Fine. Sean could have cared less what he was doing. In fact, if Lt. Amerigo Cayce wanted to continue wearing his skinsuit until he asphyxiated, that was okay with Sean. Dumb bastard is the reason why we’re in this mess in the first place . . .
He and Kyra walked around behind the lander, where she and Sandy had already spread another silver-coated blanket acr
oss the snow. Then, while she held his airpack and mask at the ready, he took a deep breath and removed his helmet. The atmospheric ammonia stung his eyes; he squinted through the tears until he managed to get the goggles and respirator over his face. That done, the rest was simple. His bare skin was goose-pimpled in the few seconds that he was nearly naked, but once he pulled on the unitard, trousers, boots, gloves, and parka, life seemed to be a bit easier.
If only that were true. As he pulled up the parka hood, Sean studied the lander. The spacecraft had come to rest at an awkward angle, with its intact starboard landing gear tilting it to one side. Although Kyra and Sandy had been able to open the cargo hatch far enough to remove the equipment cases, it remained partially blocked. They wouldn’t be able to get to the expedition gyro; if they had to walk far in order to leave the biopod, that would complicate matters greatly.
First things first. “I guess I’m going to have to help the lieutenant now,” Sean said aloud. His voice was muffled slightly by the airmask, and he remembered to switch on its amplifier.
“Only if you want to.” Kyra’s voice dropped a little. “Actually, I think Sandy wants to do that. She wants to make him change clothes in front of a girl . . . and I don’t think she’s going to help him very much.”
Sean smiled, but only for a moment. They were in a jam, no question about it. Marooned in a strange place, with one person dead and their craft totaled. That, and the fact that they were facing an environmental catastrophe, put their odds of survival against them. If he could only get in touch with the Montero . . .
“Have you found the wireless?” he asked.
“Not yet, but I’m sure it’s in there somewhere.” Kyra looked over to the other side of the lander. Sandy had opened another case and was rummaging through it. “Do you think it’s going to work? I mean, the ship is on the other side of Hex. The outside, I mean.”