Nowhere Else

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Nowhere Else Page 14

by Felicia Davin


  “Oh,” Solomon said, his voice small. That was sensible, but it was bad news for his cats.

  “Do you have something to say?” Emil asked.

  “I was going to ask—” Solomon paused. His gaze fell on Kit, whose arms were crossed over his chest in his typical unfriendly posture. It was irrational to ask a person he’d nearly killed for a favor.

  But the cats would go hungry. His heart seized.

  “The cats,” Solomon said, his throat half-closed.

  “We left them on the surface,” McCreery clarified. “We were hoping someone could check on them periodically.”

  “Sure,” Kit said. “I’ll message Laila or Aidan. They’ll get someone to do it. No big deal.”

  Solomon gaped, almost too astonished to speak. “You’d do that?”

  Kit rolled his eyes. “You know I’m the one who rescued your cats from the Nowhere, right? I’m not gonna leave them to starve. Those cats are, like, the single best thing about you.”

  That was undeniably true, but next to Solomon, McCreery stiffened, his spacesuit rustling. “Don’t be—” he started, and Solomon laid a hand on his arm.

  “Thank you,” Solomon said to Kit, and then to everyone else, “That’s all.”

  “Okay,” Emil said. “Back to business. While we’re all stuck here, be smart. Don’t wander off on your own. Keep in regular touch with everybody. We’ll sleep in shifts. Obviously with no power, some of our food is going to spoil, but there’s only eight of us total, so we should have enough to get by. Once we’re out of danger, getting the power back on will be a priority.”

  “We’ll need power to run the machine,” Solomon said, and Emil nodded at him, so he kept going. “Given the state of the gravity generator, and the likelihood that this entity arrived through the breach in my lab, our next step has to be examining the machine for damage. Closing the breach remains our first priority, and we can’t do that without a functional machine.”

  Emil looked at Miriam, and she nodded her consent.

  “We have to talk about the alien eventually,” she said, her eyes on Solomon. “Intentionally or not, it is destroying the place we live.”

  “Ideally, it will return to its place of origin,” Solomon said.

  “And how do you plan to accomplish that?” Miriam asked. Her tone was harsh, though the question itself was perfectly fair.

  “Okay,” Emil interrupted. “You make a good point, but first things first, let’s go look at the machine.”

  They crossed the hallway, Eliza at their heels. Their flashlight beams swept over the labyrinthine graffiti scrawled on the lab’s walls and floor. Distortions glimmered in the air. The two curved parentheses of the machine still stood at the other end of the room. In the dark, at this distance, they looked the same. It might have been a hopeful sight—if the machine was still there, closing the breach would be possible—but Solomon could only feel dread.

  The incessant whine of the breach, those two pitches a half-step apart, contributed to the feeling curdling in his stomach.

  “I know you were the one who crossed this room last time, and I know you can see the distortions, but I think you should let someone else do it today,” Emil said.

  Solomon recognized the gentleness in his tone and thought of McCreery saying I’m not insulting you, I’m watching out for you. McCreery, who was standing next to him, perhaps closer than was warranted. McCreery, who had subtly positioned himself between Solomon and the breach, as though his body could serve as one last defense against the dissolution of reality.

  They were protecting him. But of course they would. They needed him to fix the problem he’d caused.

  “If you help me navigate, we can send Eliza,” Jake started.

  “It’s faster if I do it,” Kit said.

  Emil frowned at Kit, even though he’d asked for volunteers, and Kit was the only true runner among them. The task would be easiest and least risky for Kit. He could teleport. The Nowhere couldn’t harm him. It was logical.

  “Okay,” Emil said after a pained silence. “Be careful.”

  Solomon might have scoffed at such an emotional reaction once, and he wished he still could. Instead he recognized himself in Emil’s reluctance. When he’d been afraid in the basketball court, his fear had been for McCreery—and for himself, if he lost McCreery.

  Solomon knew what a bad idea it was to get attached to anyone. People turned on you, or they left you, or they died. Suddenly, frequently, and inevitably. He’d confined himself to casual sex for good reason. It was a lapse in judgment for him to have allowed any non-sexual feelings for McCreery to develop. That way lay pain.

  Kit had jumped to the other side of the room, taken some photos, and returned already. He offered the tablet to Solomon, who tucked his helmet under one arm and swiped through the images of the machine.

  The side not visible from where he was standing had long, ragged gashes in its metal, their edges dark with rust. The metal’s surface, where it remained intact, had become lumpy. That was strange. The gravity generator hadn’t looked like that.

  “What is that?” Solomon asked, mostly to himself, not expecting an answer.

  “I took another photo,” Kit said. “It’s weird-looking up close.”

  It was weird-looking enough in the first photo, but Solomon dutifully passed to the next. On closer inspection, what he had thought were lumps were dozens of tiny polyps, almost the same color as the steel but not quite. Their silvery flesh shimmered in the same way the distortions did. In the same way the mucus on the broken greenhouse pipes had.

  Each polyp, once he zoomed in, was a tube with a tiny dark channel down its center. An orifice for food, perhaps. But what would it eat?

  “Do you mind if I look?” McCreery asked quietly.

  The sound of his voice brought the room rushing back to Solomon. He’d shut it all out while he was thinking, but here it was again: the murmur of his companions, the screech of the A flat and the G vying for dominance, and under it all, unflagging, the faint C.

  Solomon held onto the tablet, but moved closer so McCreery could study the photo, too. McCreery remained blessedly silent, and Solomon sank back into contemplation.

  The arrangement of the polyps on the metal had no discernible pattern. Their overall shape evoked a coral reef, something natural that had rooted and grown wherever it could. Up close, they reminded him of the pipes of a church organ.

  “It’s making the sound,” he said, and then jerked his head up to see if any of the other people in the room understood him. They stared, waiting, so he repeated, “It’s alive and it’s making the sound.”

  “You mean the note you’re hearing,” McCreery said, first to catch on or first to believe him, and Solomon nodded. “You think this weird coral stuff is the alien.”

  “Yes.”

  “And the sound you’re hearing is coming from it?”

  “Yes,” Solomon said again. “It’s unclear how an organism like this would have damaged the greenhouse pipes or the wiring or the gravity generator. Perhaps it can move. Perhaps there’s something else in the facility.”

  “The way the metal’s corroded looks just like the gravity generator,” McCreery said. “Which brings me to the only thing more important than figuring out what the alien can do—your machine is fucked.”

  Despite the bad news, Emil had encouraged Jake and Lange to take the first rest. The weird little tubes growing on the machine didn’t seem hellbent on killing anyone right that instant, and fixing the machine would require days, not hours.

  It was midnight, Facility 17 time. Lange had been awake since long before they’d left the cabin, though Emil couldn’t have known what an interrupted night they’d had.

  Lange had shaken his head at the offer of rest, so Jake had seized the opportunity to speak his mind.

  “I don’t think I’m gonna be able to sleep right now,” he’d said. “I want to check the rooms where there are electrical faults. There might be more signs of the a
lien—or whatever. Lange can come with me.”

  “Have you considered that encountering the alien—or other aliens—might not put you at ease?” Emil had asked, and Jake had let slip something like a laugh. It wasn’t funny, it was just true.

  He needed to do this, regardless.

  Eliza was recharging, so he and Lange walked to the medical exam room where the tablet’s map showed an open circuit without her. It wasn’t far, and it felt easy compared to the hypergravity, but his muscles ached. The need to check every part of the hallway for an alien presence stretched the distance into tedium.

  Neither he nor Lange made any effort at conversation.

  The exam room door was closed. Naturally, neither the electronic lock nor the opening mechanism was working.

  Jake handed his flashlight to Lange, who didn’t accept it. Oh, right. It hovered in place, lighting Jake’s way while he unzipped the bag of tools he’d slung over one shoulder. He hunted through it, trying to keep everything strapped in its place so nothing floated away. He muttered, “For fuck’s sake, it’s a door. It works perfectly fine without electricity. Unless you ruin it because you’re a rich asshole with no sense. I could kill Quint for this design.”

  “You didn’t let me kill him,” Lange said, and the accusation did make Jake laugh.

  “I probably should’ve,” he admitted, grunting as he worked a crowbar into the space between the door and its frame. “But you weren’t in your right mind. I didn’t want you to feel guilty later.”

  “I wouldn’t have,” Lange assured him. “Though you’re right that we should endeavor to commit only the most deliberate of murders.”

  Jake laughed again, half from the shock of it. It was uncomfortably close to home for a joke. He glanced over his shoulder.

  “I regret hurting Kit,” Lange said, suddenly serious. He met Jake’s gaze. “And you. If I had—”

  “But you didn’t,” Jake said. He turned back to the door and wedged the crowbar in until it scraped metal. “You don’t have to apologize to me forever, you know. You didn’t kill me or anyone else. And I know you regret all of it—attacking me and Kit, the accident, everything. And not all of that was your fault. Whatever there is to forgive you for, I do. I forgive you. You know that, right?”

  “If you say so.”

  The latch broke. The dented door slid into its pocket, weightless and frictionless.

  The room beyond was as unremarkable as ever: an exam chair, a counter with a sink, and a row of cabinets above. A box of tissues that had been on the counter was drifting in the air, probably moved by the room’s ventilation rather than anything sinister. No sign of life. With the power off for the whole facility, this room’s broken wiring was no longer obvious. Jake would have to take apart the walls to find the problem.

  The ceiling tiles were all askew from the change in gravity, lifted by air currents and no longer resting in the grid that held them in place but drifting above it. He’d have to check up there, too.

  “You feel anything? Hear anything?” Jake asked.

  Lange shook his head.

  They went in. On a second sweep of Jake’s flashlight, one of the white ceiling tiles had a dark grey corner. He might have taken it for water damage, but there weren’t any pipes up there.

  “I’m gonna take a closer look at that,” Jake said. He lifted his feet from the floor, releasing himself. He could have pulled himself toward the ceiling by using the cabinets as handholds, but he didn’t have to. Lange lifted him higher. Jake let go of his flashlight, knowing not only that it wouldn’t drop to the floor, but that Lange would position it somewhere useful for him.

  “Thanks,” Jake said. He took hold of one of the ceiling tiles and freed it from the grid, releasing a cloud of dust into the air that made him wish he was still wearing his helmet. He batted it away from his face.

  The drop ceiling covered the facility’s plumbing and electricity, which had been installed next to the bare surface of the asteroid. The rough metal glinted in the beam of his flashlight. He brought his gloved hand to the asteroid for no other reason than awe. He’d lived in space for twelve years and still the thought of it humbled him.

  “McCreery,” Lange said. “The dust.”

  Jake had paid no attention to the dust other than to get it out of his face, but in the flashlight beam, he could see it moving. In normal gravity, it would have scattered to the floor. In zero g, it ought to have hung suspended, moved only by the minor air currents in the facility.

  It wasn’t doing either of those things.

  Instead the cloud had coalesced into a channel, and it was streaming toward the ceiling.

  “Fuck,” Jake said, removing another ceiling tile and leaving it hanging in the air. He grabbed the flashlight. “That’s a leak.”

  Not a water leak. An air leak. One of the ragged indentations in the surface of the asteroid, all of which swallowed his flashlight beam into darkness—one of them was a hole to space.

  “There are meters of asteroid between here and the vacuum,” Lange said. “The presence of a channel that goes all the way through is extraordinary.”

  “Extraordinarily fucking bad.”

  Jake tried to keep his search thorough and organized, not moving the light too fast or too frantically. He just had to figure out where the leak was. If it was small, he could patch it. An air leak wasn’t a death sentence. Any other day, he’d fix it without freaking out. All he needed was a deep breath—maybe not too deep. Methodically, he tracked the stream of dust in the air. The leak was close.

  “The pipes, the wiring, the machines, the asteroid—” Lange started.

  “I know,” Jake said. Those holes in the gravity generator. The streaks of rust. He’d been planning to bring up his hypothesis earlier, but everything falling the fuck apart had distracted him. “Metal. It eats metal.”

  “Yes,” Lange said. “I don’t think the damage is sabotage. I think it’s survival.”

  “Might still kill us, though.”

  “It is not ideal to be trapped on a large hunk of metal with something that consumes metal, no,” Lange agreed.

  There. That was where the air was going, a tiny crevice Jake would’ve mistaken for just one more rough spot in the rock face. Unlike a hole in a building on Earth, it didn’t feel cold when he got close to it. There was no circulation of warm and cool air. Nothing emerged from the vacuum of space. If not for the dust, the leak would’ve been undetectable.

  Thank fuck Lange had noticed it. Thinking about all the air they might have lost made him want to take a big gulp. His lungs felt empty, his heart too fast. Christ, he wanted to go home.

  That wasn’t a thought Jake had very often. Or ever.

  If he had a home, this asteroid was it. He’d been living in various space stations and ships for twelve years. There was nothing for him on Earth. That wasn’t home. But this little rock in the vastness of space, its systems crumbling one after the other, its air leaking into the void, its very existence threatened by the invisible gash in the lab—life didn’t belong here. Fear and fatigue gnawed at his insides. He wanted to be somewhere else. What would it even mean to go home?

  Jake glanced down at Lange. He cleared his throat. “Found the leak. Don’t let this flashlight drift into my face, please.”

  When Lange held the flashlight still, Jake dug through his bag for a can of sealant. The hole was smaller than the diameter of his flashlight. It wouldn’t be any trouble to patch. White foam hissed out of the spray can. It would harden into a seal in minutes. Jake could almost breathe again.

  Something shot out of the hole.

  “What the fuck?”

  A jet of mercury-like liquid, painfully hot. Jake yelped as it burned his fingers. His whole body seized up. The thing reshaped itself into a wriggling, flat blob, gleaming like a puddle of gasoline. It rushed over the rock face and into the darkness.

  “Jake!” Lange grabbed him by the ankle and yanked him toward the floor.

  His fingers
throbbed. Holy fuck.

  An alien? A different alien?

  Jake’s mag boots clicked against the floor, grounding him. When he’d seen that goo, he hadn’t recognized it as… as an organism, if that’s what it was. He’d thought the liquid was some byproduct, but the way it had charged him, the way it had heated on contact with his hand like it was defending itself—those things were responses to stimuli. It was alive.

  Now Lange was floating above him, staring into the narrow, dark space between the ceiling tile and the rock face.

  The blob reappeared, stretched thin. It wasn’t gliding over the asteroid surface like it had been. It was being dragged.

  Lange was dragging it.

  “Lange, this is a bad idea,” Jake said, but Lange ignored him and kept pulling the alien toward him.

  Only half its mass was visible. Ceiling tiles hid the rest. It was big—far bigger than Jake had first thought. Lange didn’t have full control of it.

  It roiled. A handspan from Lange’s face, the alien seethed and fought.

  “Stop!” Jake shouted. That thing might touch Lange. It would burn his face. “Stop it! Stop right the fuck now! Let it go, Lange!”

  With his uncontaminated hand, he grabbed Lange’s calf and pulled him down. When Lange released his hold, the organism spilled back into itself and flowed into the darkness, vanishing.

  The struggle had been silent, but the organism’s absence made the room seem quieter. Jake’s frantic pulse filled his ears.

  “I almost had it,” Lange said.

  “It almost burned your face off, you mean. Fucking Christ, Lange. Are you out of your mind?”

  “It hurt you.” Lange was taller than usual, his face level with Jake’s. He hadn’t touched his boots to the ground yet. He was still staring up at the ceiling, ready to fly up there and try again.

 

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