An alarm sounded behind her, and she turned, startled, to see the diagram on the main screen showing a complete dock and lockdown of the smelter unit and the opening of the topmost hatch. That meant Achmed was coming inside. If the things weren’t already here then he was safe, but if they’d somehow gotten in he wouldn’t last long at all.
Outside, Cross was laying down a weak fire field around the entire base unit and under it as well. That was what was causing the slight vibration she felt now, and it puzzled her. As it reached a stronger level, though, two suits popped out from under the base in one of those spots a scanning camera would leave blind for a few minutes, and she realized that they’d somehow dug a shallow pit in that time and covered themselves with the fine dust. Cross saw them, too, and came around near ground level and sprayed them with a series of bolts just strong enough to blow the suits but not strong enough to threaten the ground on which the base stood nor the base itself.
“Still there? How do you like it now?” she asked the thing.
There was no reply, but she wished she had better control of the cameras and a better understanding of the master board now. She needed a closeup on those two suits, or at least a second look, for she’d sworn that one of them, at least, had its helmet blown clear off and that there was nothing in it.
Cross angled a burn on the side and Queson realized that one of the things, now in its flowing, plastic state, was crawling up the side of the base. From being open to exposure of the hostile elements, the thing suddenly found it very hot as Lucky Cross fried it with a heat ray, the safest powerful weapon she could use directly against the side of the base. An outer skin designed for atmospheric entry would not find even a full-power heat ray much of a jolt, but anything open and exposed on the skin would find it a different story.
Still, was that the one from the empty suit or from the other one?
Damn! she swore to herself in frustration at the lack of communications. These things could split. Who said one had to be the size of a person? There could be one sitting right there on the shuttle dock airlock or even inside via the air vents and if they zap a third creature out there they won’t know it. They’ll feel safe to come in. Hell, if it was already inside it would already be Achmed, and would know everything about internal operations anyway.
Damn it! How was she going to know if it was safe?
“I’m gonna turn back to the old channel now,” Cross’s voice came out of nowhere. “They ain’t got no fuckin’ radios any more, not that would it useful. You okay in there, girl?”
“Sort of,” Randi responded. “Trouble is, that thing did a nice imitation of An Li that almost had me fooled, so I don’t know who or what I’m talking to now.”
“Good point. Look, check this first. Is there any way, did you give it any way, to get inside other than through the air ducts?”
“No. Haven’t touched a thing, I’m sealed in here.”
“Okay, if you check you’ll see that any breach of the air filtration would cause a major alarm. Did that alarm go off? It shoulda been loud, and even if it somehow got silenced, it should have lit up on the board in there.”
She hadn’t thought of that. “No, no alarms. But you should know that,” she added suspiciously. Cross had duplicate controls in the cabin of the shuttle.
“True, but you never can trust nothin’ anymore, can you? Look, I haven’t docked yet, so if this is me on the squawker then it’s the real me, right?”
“Yeah, okay.”
“Put your palm on the plate and then instruct Emergency Gamma Two. The computer will do the rest.”
She looked over, put her hand on the flat identification plate, and said, “Emergency Gamma Two.”
“Switching to alternate emergency frequency, encryption level maximum,” the computer responded.
“There. Still hear me?” Cross asked her.
“Yes.”
“Welcome to the club. Sorry we had to leave you in the dark, but we just couldn’t risk giving anything away and we wanted the fuckers to surface.”
“You shouldn’t have left me like this!” she almost shouted, feeling on the edge of breaking. And it wasn’t over yet.
“Can’t do much about the desertion. Didn’t figure on this going so far,” Cross told her. “Who’d have thought the sons of bitches would be putting on and using fully charged e-suits? And that big bastard, it’s tryin’ to figure out how to undermine our safe plateau, there, and we may have just accidentally given it the general idea. If it doesn’t take us easy, then them colonists had to have some pretty powerful machinery to carve out that base from the cliff in the first place, let alone move and construct that base. If we can melt this cliffside, then it can surely figure a way to cut through the solid rock holdin’ the base up. Just like us, though, it’ll take a lot of time to get that stuff powered up and over to where it can do much good. That means keepin’ us here as long as possible. Hang on.”
Queson could see the main board suddenly come alive. Cross was running some kind of diagnostic, including one on the smelter.
“Sweet Jesus! That goop’s ’bout coverin’ the damned thing! Son of a bitch!” Cross swore. “Lemme fry what I can!”
Nothing at all that seemed out of the ordinary was showing on the internal cameras, but on the schematic on the main screen there were hundreds of low-level fuzzy blotches. As Cross opened up on them, the cameras showed thin layers of the living alien protoplasm or whatever it was peeling off like dead skin and dropping, smoking, to the ground below. Some of it was trying to get away, to flee the wide beam, but if there was any more of the stuff on the thing then it was out of direct reach of the heat beam.
“Shoulda thought of that earlier. Jerry came up with it just now,” Cross told her. “Damned thing would have enough residual heat that it would provide a rough and uncomfortable but potentially life-preserving ride. Spread itself so thin and with such consistency that you couldn’t even tell it was there on visual!”
“Does that mean that Achmed—?”
“That’s the big question, ain’t it? Depends on whether he kept everything totally buttoned up and nothin’ came loose. The thing isn’t pressurized and uses basic air exchange unless it’s outfitted for an alien mix, but it’s tight because of the insulation.”
“And all that means?”
“It means it beats the hell out of us.”
Yeah, thanks. Back to square one. “There’s no quiz you can give it now that it can’t pass if it did get him,” she pointed out. “We could have him go back out, but he could leave just a small part of himself behind if he’s now part of it and it wouldn’t do any good.”
“Seeing him would tell us what else we have to deal with,” Jerry Nagel put in, taking one of the comm links. “They don’t seem to have the ability to assume the color and texture of real people, at least not yet.” He thought for a moment. “Listen, do you have an e-suit in there?”
“No. Not that I know of. You know where we have ours.”
“Yeah, yeah, but hope springs eternal. I thought you might have put one on before you built your little fortress. That’s bad. We can’t get to you without coming inside, and we can’t do anything drastic in there without making it maybe impossible for you to ever get out. Hmmm… This is going to take some thinking.”
“Try not leaving me alone next time!” she shot back, anger almost edging out fear.
“Sorry, doll. Had to be there to see if the problem was getting solved. Next time you and Sark can cuddle.”
“Fuck you, Nagel. Just get me out of here!”
“Just tell the computer to show you the forward view, under, shuttle and watch. Lucky’s just told Achmed to come back up into the bubble on the other secure frequency, the one we were using.”
“Shuttle, forward, under, on main screen,” she instructed, and the schematic changed to the view forward of the shuttle craft, which was nearly stationary and hovering just above the smelter blister.
Achmed did not appea
r to be there.
She could hear Cross in the background talking to Achmed and insisting on a security check, and Achmed’s familiar grumbling, accent and all, and protest that he was in the shit can, but Cross wasn’t in the mood to be patient for long. She gave him two minutes to get his ass back up in the control chair inside the blister.
“Jerry, what if he doesn’t do it?” Randi asked, worried. “Right now some kind of thinking goo might be running around looking for a way into this place. If it finds a way, I’m toast.”
“Or worm, anyway,” he responded, trying to keep the tone light although she could hear his concern. “Hang on. We’re not gonna let them get you.”
There was a pause, and then somebody else on the shuttle, probably Sark, said something. Queson looked at the screen and saw a figure emerging partway into the hatch leading up into the blister atop the smelter and waving. It looked like Achmed, but it was only a face, shoulders, and one arm, and then it was gone back in just as quickly.
“Achmed! Get your fat ass back in there now!” she heard Cross roar through Jerry’s headset. At the same time, the appearance was replayed on the monitor and the image of Achmed increasingly blown up.
“Jerry! The face!” she almost shouted.
“I see it. Looks like a death mask.”
Which, in a way, it was. Clearly trying to improvise on the fly with whatever was at hand, the thing that had consumed Achmed, probably inside the smelter as it either hovered or traveled back, had tried putting some kind of powder or light brown grease on the face to make it look human. It probably knew that the ruse was unlikely to work, but there hadn’t been much time and it was better than nothing.
“Okay, so it’s got Achmed and it’s inside,” Nagel sighed. “Close everything up tight, Doc, including going entirely on internal air. Sit tight. I don’t know any other way of handling this.”
“What are you going to do? My god, Jerry! I don’t dare ever to crack that door and you don’t, either! You’re going to have to leave the base, and me, here and get the hell out! You saw the way it hid as a thin coat on the smelter! I’d be paranoid to even pick up anything in the place!”
“Sit tight, sit tight and just relax,” Nagel responded soothingly. “This thing may be a smart and supernasty organism, but at the bottom, the least common denominator, it’s just an infestation problem, and those we’ve got policies for. It’s not going to tolerate extremes because no matter how fluid it is, it’s carbon-based and organic just like us. It doesn’t like wind and it doesn’t like extreme cold and somehow, I suspect, it breathes in something. Even cockroaches, who can withstand what would be lethal radiation for other creatures, breathe and have their limits. Critters come with crew and pressurized container cargo. They don’t ride on the outside of spaceships. At least, from what we’ve seen, this one won’t. I admit I wish you had a suit in there with you, but you ought to be able to manage if you’re totally sealed, totally on recirculating air, and just sit tight and let us do the driving.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Infestation handling 101,” he responded. “Standard by-the-book procedure. You forget, and it can’t do anything about, the fact that we have the master controls for just about everything right here. Stand by and strap in. We’re sealing out suits here, and then we’re going to dock and take control. I’m just more than a little fed up with this alien bastard.”
The shuttle pivoted, then slowly glided over the top of the base unit until it reached the depression that was its dock and integration spot with the base unit. Just as it came in to land, Cross gave a wide heat burst that covered the entire dock area. Stuff started curling up and burning under it, and more began to ooze away from the landing area.
Damn! That thing had covered half the base exterior!
Not exactly, but it had managed to hide in that part that was out of the wind, showing that it could withstand at least the daytime temperature. Now, though, it backed away, shocked by the unanticipated fire and also knowing that it only had to wait. When the shuttle docked, it would be right there on top of it, looking for a way in.
It wouldn’t find it. Cross had activated the spacefaring mode; that thing was sealed very tight indeed.
As soon as the docking occurred, Queson saw all the lights and controls in her lower room flash and then things began to move of their own accord. Displays that were incomprehensible showed up on the screens, and the schematic was back on the main one, doing a full diagnostic.
“Doc? You strapped in that chair?” Nagel asked.
“Yeah, Jerry. Good as I can.”
“Then sit back and assume launch position. We’re going to go to orbit. Sit tight and trust me on this one.”
The whole base shuddered, then came to a kind of life of its own. She could feel soft vibration, and a few storage areas and loose items began to jiggle and rattle.
“Lucky? You got control?
“Yeah! There were a few spots it was workin’ on, but the son of a bitch can’t get around the failsafes. Going up, count of ten… nine… eight… seven… six… five… four… three… two… one… Now!”
One of the smaller screens showed the view from the underside of the base. Now as the vibration rose to maximum and a few things in the control room started bouncing around, the base unit lifted up from the plateau and rose steadily if with agonizing slowness into the air.
Cross rotated the combined craft and much of the exterior coating of the creature was suddenly full into the wind. It peeled off and dropped to the ground with amazing speed.
Now the whole plateau was visible, and both Queson in the main unit and the trio in the shuttle gasped as they saw how much of the region around the hard, flat rock had been undermined with what looked like water-filled tubes or punctures. That thing had been preparing to engulf the whole damned base if need be! That would mean… Just how huge was the main body of that thing?
Now it was all a speck, and then even the plateau, the base, and all fine detail merged into the usual high-altitude view and then was completely obscured by the clouds.
The sky turned increasingly dark, and within another couple of minutes they were a hundred or more kilometers above the deceptively peaceful-looking world below.
It was unlikely that any of the goop, exposed to the vacuum and extreme cold of space, could have survived anywhere on the exposed surface of the unit, and there was nowhere it could hide from those extremes. Inside, though, was a different story. Inside, what had been formed from the ingestion of Achmed was as warm and comfortable as she was in the sealed control room. She wondered, though, how it liked being weightless. Such a fluid creature would find it most unpleasant, she suspected, unless it was pretty well concentrated in one anchored spot.
Cross put them in a parking orbit well away from the Stanley, perhaps only halfway to the main ship, and turned to that problem next.
“Okay, Doc, relax and don’t get nervous about what you hear or feel,” Nagel told her. “We’re gonna find out just how well insulated the backup control room really is from the rest of the ship.”
“You mean there’s some doubt?”
He tried to laugh off the comment but knew he needed some amplification. “Not between it and the rest of the base, no, any more than there’s any doubt that we’re well insulated here. If not, we’d be dead here in one fashion and you’d be dead in the other.”
“How can you be sure I’m not? That this is really me?” she asked him, irritated by his tone.
He paused a moment, then said, “Because there’s no privacy once we’re docked. Period. We can see you, even do an analysis of your composition, just as we can with what remains of poor Achmed. It’s just that what we’re gonna do may test the mechanical integrity of these systems and, well…”
She finally understood what he was trying not to say. “The blister should have been totally insulated from the outside, too,” she managed. “It shouldn’t have been able to get in to get him.”
&nbs
p; He sighed. “Um, yeah. Somebody’s been skimping on the maintenance bill.”
“Well, what about the maintenance here?”
“Don’t worry so much about that. If it could have gotten in it would have by now. Just hang tight.”
Alarms started going off all over the board. “What are you doing?” she almost shrieked at him.
“Just hold on! Busy right now! Just stop up your ears if it’s too noisy!”
The computer’s voice now came from the control panel itself. “Passwords approved. Decompressing main quarters unit.”
Now she understood. Lucky had commanded the immediate decompression of the whole base unit except for those with their own separate systems. It was the emergency decontamination he’d talked about, the one that was supposed to even kill the roaches and the rats.
“Ooooeeee!” Cross exclaimed, looking at a view Randi couldn’t share. “Lookit how the goddam things explode! Sounds like fireworks!”
“Sounds like bacon frying, but I’ll take it,” Nagel responded. “Pressure down to ten percent… five… that’s the last. We’ve got a vacuum inside. It’ll ice down pretty quickly. How long you want to keep this going?”
“The hell with the icing! Half the shit that means anything to me is ruined anyway!” Cross responded. “I want every little bit of that thing dead, dead, dead!”
Nagel thought of Randi. “How you doin’, Doc? Still warm?”
“So far, yes,” she told him.
“Good. The only place any of that goop is likely to find any chance of survival is against the inner wall of your unit. That’s why I wish you had a suit. As it is, we’re gonna have to risk bringing you one. Shouldn’t be a problem if I’m fully suited up— remember, it couldn’t get those last folks in the colony, or at least by the time it got to them it didn’t bother, and whatever’s left, if anything, in the base has got to be small bits, not something that can break or harm an e-suit. The problem’s not with me or Sark bringin’ you the suit, it’s you.”
Melchior's Fire tk-2 Page 9