by Robert Reed
“Just some inner structure,” our teacher assured us. “The explosions must have exposed the mine itself.”
One girl told of the moon’s government declaring an emergency, all shuttle flights canceled until whenever. She wasn’t sure for how long. And the militia was being activated in all the lunar cities for the first time in history, and food and water were already being rationed. Why was the militia being used? we wondered. Who needed soldiers now? Our history teacher—a smallish man with fiery eyes and a squeaky voice—explained how crowds needed to be controlled, hoarders found and punished, and the social order maintained. He reminded us of the delicate hold people had on the moon. It wasn’t the earth with free air and easy water. Maybe more farming domes would be punctured by falling debris…and then what? “Anarchy!” he cried, lifting a finger to the ceiling. “They have to take a hard stand against such a thing. Against panic!” His fiery eyes began to water, and his upthrusted finger started to shake.
Later in the day, in science class, a boy reported some craziness he had overheard. “There’s something loose inside the moon’s moon.” He paused, swallowed and said, “That’s what started it, they think.”
“Who thinks?” we asked.
“The government. The people on TV. Everyone. They say it’s some sort of infestation—”
The teacher laughed in a gentle, disarming way. “An infestation? Are you sure you didn’t hear some other word?” She herself hadn’t been following events, busy to tears with her students; but she felt confident enough to tell us not to be concerned. “This is all very bad, yes,” she said. “It’s easily the worst disaster in space history, and I know we’ll always remember today. But an infestation? I don’t think so, no. No.”
The boy told us, “That’s what I heard. I’m sure—”
“All right.” The teacher gave a challenging smile. “An infestation of fruit flies? Cheese mold? What?” There were scattered laughs, then she said, “Of what? Tell us.”
The boy rocked in his chair, admitting, “I don’t know, ma’am.”
“The moon’s moon is a mining camp, nothing more. The only thing I can guess is that some strange alien life form has been living inside the moon’s moon. But does that stand to reason? No. No, because why hasn’t the life form been seen before now? They’ve been tunneling for years, and nothing. Nothing. And now this explosion? No, it’s a simple bad accident of some kind or another. It’s not a biological infestation, thank God.”
The boy said, “Yes, ma’am.”
“All right,” she told us. “Does everyone understand?”
I wanted to believe her explanation. I did. But I kept thinking of the dark diamond interior with its strange hairs, thinking that it didn’t sound like a mine’s guts. Did it? Through lunch and most of the afternoon I kept to myself, concentrating on all the clues plucked from around me—from Dr. Florida and Lillith, and from today’s rumors—weighing each of them and trying to fit them together. Then it was the last class of the day, art class, and a girl in the back said the word “spark-hounds” to the kids around her.
The teacher’s head lifted, turning while his mouth turned grim. “What did you say, young lady? Where did you hear that word?”
“In the hallway. During break—”
“Class!” he cried. “Eyes forward!”
We jerked in our seats, everyone startled.
“Miss Blackmere? Tell the class what you know please. Now.”
“Pardon, sir?”
“Did you hear anything more? In the hallway?”
The girl said, “Some older kids were talking. About things called spark-hounds. I guess they’re monsters of some kind. They got loose inside the moon’s moon, and they’re doing all the damage. They just got out of social studies—”
“The spark-hounds?”
Kids giggled, then stopped themselves. No one made a sound.
And the girl said, “No, sir. The kids I heard talking. Their teacher had let them watch the news on TV—”
“I see. Thank you, Miss Blackmere.” Our teacher was a youngish man with chiseled features and long blond hair. He dated the girls’ physical education teacher, and the current rumor was that they did it on the smelly wrestling mats after school. In the gym. Then they burned the mats to hide the evidence…a story I found unlikely and intoxicating in equal measures. I couldn’t help but see them naked and making love on the sweaty slick plastic. But I didn’t believe it, no. Why would they do it there? I couldn’t see any reason.
The art teacher watched us for a moment, then he said, “Spark-hounds.”
I had never seen him so intense, so emotional, his chiseled face becoming angry. But not angry at us, no. He cleared his throat and said, “I hoped you’d go home and learn about this from your parents.” Then he sighed and thought hard for a long moment, finally saying, “Listen.”
No one spoke.
“Apparently Dr. Florida has been operating an experimental lab inside the moon’s moon. In secret. Spark-hounds are some kind of tailored organism, and I guess they’re terribly dangerous. That’s why he did his work so far from here. And somehow those hounds have escaped and done awful things, and I don’t know much more myself. I wish I did.”
Someone asked what they looked like. The hounds.
He said, “They have wings, and they spit electricity some way or another.” He shook his head, saying, “It’s a tragedy. But we shouldn’t worry too much,” and he sighed. “This business is happening a long ways from here. I don’t think these hounds can live long in space, and of course we’re fighting them. We’ll kill them.” His handsome face and his poise meant a lot to us. I know he made me feel brave, a little bit, and he told us, “Get back to work now. Go on,” and I didn’t think too much about the moon’s moon or those spark-hounds. I focused on the drawing on my desk. I was making a sky full of clouds, fighting my clumsy fingers to make it look real…and somewhere in the midst of one cloud I started to draw Dr. Florida. I made his face full of pain and tears on his wrinkled cheeks, and I stopped and looked up and shivered, tears in my eyes and my fingers starting to mash the tears as they crept out onto my cheeks.
Beth was crying after school. “All those poor dead people,” she said, and I said it was too bad. It was very sad. I wished it wasn’t so.
Cody and Marshall came out together and found us. Cody said, “Let’s go to the oak and watch. At least for a while.” She touched my shoulder and said, “Isn’t it crazy, Ryder? Huh?”
I said, “It is.”
“I hear those damned hound things have been running free for weeks.” She snorted and told me, “While we were swimming at his place? And eating his food? Florida knew about them. All along.”
“I guess so,” I admitted. “He must have.”
We hurried to the parkland, crossing the pasture and pulling ourselves into the treehouse. Jack was lying stretched out on the long bench with his feet in a window, his toes pink in the sunlight. “Hi!” he said, winking and rising. “All of you at once?” Then he saw Beth’s damp red eyes. “Hey! What’s happening?”
“Didn’t you go to school?” asked Marshall.
“Hunted half the night, so I skipped.” Jack missed as much school as he could manage. To the day. He shrugged, saying, “I read the encyclopedia all afternoon, which is better than listening to teachers anyway—”
“So you don’t know?” Marshall persisted.
“Know what?”
“He doesn’t!” Marshall gave a strange little giggle and danced for a moment, banging his head into one of the wooden beams.
Jack laughed and then quit, watching us.
Cody said, “Shut up, Marshall,” and brought out the TV. She didn’t want to explain anything now. She set the TV on the game table and then sat in a west window, helping to cut the sun’s glare. Beth told the boiled-down brunt of the story to Jack. Then Marshall hit him with some alarming details, trying to bother him. Cody said, “Shush!” and glared at everyone. She filled that window
and her face was full of tension, and she told us, “Watch. Would you watch this?” and pointed at the colored screen.
A reporter was talking to a man—a sour, exhausted man halfway drunk and sitting in a bar in Hadley City—and the reporter said, “You used to work for Dr. Florida. Am I right?”
“Absolutely.” He nodded and swirled the red liquor in the massive knobby glass. “A good twenty years, lady.”
“And you’re here now. On the moon,” she said.
“Meaning I’m not where I’m supposed to be?” He pointed toward the unseen sky. How many times had I seen people make that gesture today? The man said, “Lady,” and shook his head. “My team is dead. Every last one of them, and I’m a coward. I’ll admit it. Go on, shoot me. Who gives a good goddamn? You know? Who cares? I ran from there and escaped, lucky me, and now you want to hear all the sweet details, right?”
“Tell me whatever you want,” she said.
“‘Tell me whatever you want,’” he repeated, mocking her voice. He had wild eyes and a fleshy face, exhausted to the bone, and I thought to myself that he was a very unsavory person. I didn’t want him telling stories. I almost asked Cody to find a different channel and a better-looking witness, since I didn’t like this one—
“I was once a soldier,” he said. “In the U.N. Then I went to work for Florida, as one of his security people, and I did okay for myself. I did my work and went home afterwards and had my own life.” He sipped his drink and cleared his wet throat with a cough, then he said, “So about eight weeks ago…it seems like eight years ago…my supervisor came and said, ‘You can get a big boost in pay, Pete. If you want. You’ll get to do some traveling—I can’t tell you where because they haven’t told me—but they say it’s exotic and it’s got something to do with your military time. They want your skills.’
“So I said, ‘More pay? Sure, I’ll go,’ and one day later I’m shipped to Hawaii. I wasn’t supposed to tell a soul about any of it; the operation was that secret. And you know what? They put me in charge of my own team. A bunch of overweight ex-soldiers from other Florida companies. A whole lot of gray was in that team, and no one had done military time in years. At least most of them hadn’t. But the gal in charge of the whole show said, ‘Don’t worry. You won’t need muscles where you’re going.’
“I asked, ‘Where am I going, lady?’
“And she said, ‘I don’t know. But it must be fun. No one’s come back yet.’”
“From the moon’s moon?” asked the reporter.
“Yeah.” He finished his drink and said, “First I had one day’s practice in zero-gee combat, then a day’s ride on an express shuttle. The best guns money can buy, and no one was to know anything. Ever. We were sworn to secrecy, and they made us sign a thousand forms and threatened us with brigades of lawyers if we ever so much as oozed a word of this thing. As if we’d have audiences to tell up there, you know? They went as far as making family men record messages for the wives and kids, for later, making everything seem swell and so on.” He stopped, his eyes fixed on a point several inches in front of his face. Then he said, “Up there we were. Inside that chunk of grease and rubble, and nothing with us but those spark-hounds and their goddamn nests—”
“Spark-hounds?” she asked.
“It’s funny,” he said, and he laughed for a moment. Then he rolled his shoulders and produced another drink from somewhere. “We thought they were aliens from the stars, or something. We couldn’t think of them as being tailored. Me? I’ve seen plenty of odd critters in my years with Florida and his big-money freak show. But I’ve never, never seen armor-plated skin and bloodless meat and super-loop batteries instead of guts, plus mouths to put a damned shark to shame.”
“The spark-hounds?”
“Nothing like anything else,” he said. “We’re not talking bambis or cultured beef here. Spark-hounds. A week after it started for me—the fighting, I mean—they thought to tell us the truth. Florida built them for Neptune, or someplace. He had this crazy idea about seeding those places with the hounds. He’d designed them to live in the clouds, chewing up organics and each other and building their floating nests, the nests busy soaking up sunlight and fat-free bolts of lightning—”
“Lightning?” she said skeptically.
“A damn good energy source in some places.” He nodded and said, “What you see now? That crystal stuff inside the moon’s moon? It’s all nest material. It’s a lot like the solar cells on anyone’s house, only a thousand times tougher and wired to take big blasts of juice all at once.” I thought of those dark diamonds studded with silvery hairs, and the man said, “Spark-hounds build them like bugs build their nests. Together. They’re social critters in a big way.”
“If you can, please, explain the spark-hounds to us.” The reporter kept her voice slow and calm. “As best you can.”
He took a drink and said, “Hounds are organic factories with brains and wings,” and he shrugged. “Too simple? Well, think of it this way. You and me? We eat and burn what we eat with oxygen. But the hounds…the hounds live off stored electrical juices. Like robots do. They’re living batteries—thinking, breeding, mad-as-hell batteries. That’s them.”
“How do they look?” she asked.
He sipped and said, “Sort of like a bulldog in the face. They’ve got these simple hands and sharp crystal brains and long, long stinging tails that hang out their asses. They eat electricity with those tails too. Hit you with their juice and they’ll cook you to ash and smoke—”
“They’re like electric eels?”
“They’re like power plants, lady. Power plants.” He said, “A hound is stronger than twelve men, and the biggest one is my size. They don’t need oxygen, and so they don’t need atmospheres. And they don’t drink water either. Punch a hole in their armor plates, and you’ve made them mad. Punch a hole in their super-loop guts, and maybe you’ll kill them. Or maybe they’ll get you first. They’re full of redundant systems—with plenty of room for excess juice—and suppose they fry you and eat the ashes. Okay? Then they can heal themselves fast. And I mean fast, lady! I mean a few days and they’re a hundred percent again!”
“What kinds of organics…do they like?”
“Any kind.” He grinned and shook his head. “I suppose they’re made to eat Jupiter’s red spot, but they sure do love comet stuff. And people. Everything gets built in their body cavities—super-loops and new flesh and nest materials and eggs too. They’re always making eggs.” He paused and stared hard at his hands, then he breathed and lifted his eyes toward the reporter. “You know how long it takes them to cook a man? Maybe two seconds. A big flash and it’s done.”
“I see…”
“What else can I tell you?” He thought for a moment, then said, “You know what happens when two hounds from two nests meet? Huh? They fight. They’re really touchy bastards, and they’ll try to fry each other and it’s something incredible to see up close. Sparks everywhere. The heat enough to boil blood—”
“And they were meant to live on Neptune? Or was it Jupiter?”
“I really don’t know.” He lifted the big glass and said, “My guess was that Florida made them to kill me. At first. It was crazy to think that someone would invent hounds just to stock an empty planet. But now I can see it. I can. They’d do all right on a gas world, I think. Those nests of theirs would float in the wind—they’re strong but light, full of huge rooms—and maybe I can see Florida’s thinking. A little bit. Nests all over Jupiter, and trillions of pissed-off hounds busy scooping up raw organics and each other.”
Beth interrupted, saying, “I’m tired of watching this—”
“Shush!” said Cody.
The reporter wanted to hear about the nests. How were they built? How did they look up close, and what were those silver spines—?
“Yeah, the nests,” the man said. “Catch a hound with lasers and bullets and you can kill it. It’s tough but not that tough.” He breathed and told us, “The hound gets inside
its nest, however, and God help all miserable sinners. Nests have tunnels and turns and dead-end rooms everywhere. The walls are tough plastics…like I said, made inside the hounds themselves. I don’t know how exactly. I wasn’t on a nature hike when I was in close, believe me. There’s veins of conducting plastics that bring the juices in from the outer walls. You know. Light energy? And lightning? Then there’s an enormous mass of super-loops near the center of the nest. The core. That’s where the hounds feed. Like bees sucking up honey in their hive, except they use their tails. Not their mouths.” He paused, then he said, “A big nest can hold more power than a big city could use in a year. Believe me. I’ve seen the figures—”
“Really.” The reporter sighed.
“The big spines? Those silvery hairs?” he said. “They bend when they sense a stranger. Either spark-hounds with unfamiliar electrical fields, or people. Any people. If you get close and clumsy, lady, you can find all flavors of misery. I’ve seen it plenty of times.”
The reporter said, “I see,” with her voice flat and impressed.
“Florida has managed a real trick. He’s taken things we see every day that no one even thinks twice about. Like tailoring. And organic super-loops. And hardened energy sinks. And that’s how be built his spark-hounds. A bunch of ordinary things mixed together and made to work somehow.
“And you fought the hounds,” she said.
“Yeah, I did.” He nodded and said, “We fought them. We thought our best hope was shaped explosives and getting inside the nests through blind spots. That’s what we were doing in the end. Careful blasts to break the nests apart…only someone screwed up and we had a big kaboom. That’s when the chunks of the moon’s moon got scattered, and the last of my team was killed. And I was left alive somehow. The lucky one.”
He had a bitter expression. He said, “I just gave up then. Snuck my way on board a supply shuttle, came down to the moon and walked straight to the nearest bar. Here.”