by Dave Stone
“Don’t ask,” said Trix. “Just remember, some shit goes down and you hear that things called greys are involved, be very, very afraid. Little bastards aren’t nearly so harmless as they try to make out. This isn’t about that.”
Eddie wasn’t entirely sure that Trix was joking. She gestured to take in the prefabricated barracks huts and storage units of the Base.
“Arbitrary Base,” she said, “is basically a moveable feast; the facilities that make it what it is, that allow it to deal with what it deals with, move between the existing installations, patching into their command structures…”
“You seem to know a lot about this stuff,” Eddie said. “GenTech’s really running Arnie’s Freedom Commandos? Is that how it is?”
“We wish,” said Trix Desoto. “It’s a hangover from the whole Military-Industrial Complex thing. That whole self-perpetuating thing of selling a bunch of arms to guys, then sending in our guys to sort out the situation where you’ve got a bunch of armed guys, you know?
“Anyhow. The Pentagon is split up into as many factions as there are Multicorps, these days. GenTech just happened to end up connected with the faction running Arbitrary Base.” She smiled sardonically. “Lucky for us.”
“Oh yeah?” said Eddie. “How so?”
“How so because certain of our… associates have a serious interest in the materials falling under the remit of Arbitrary Base. Or maybe it was the other way around: GenTech had access to those materials, which is why our… associates made contact with us in the first place.”
It might have been all the new knowledge downloaded into him as a part of his induction into the Loup, but Eddie was learning to recognise an ellipse at twenty paces.
“And so just who, exactly, are these dot, dot, dot associates?” he asked.
“You’ll find out,” said Trix Desoto. “For the moment, though, initially, it’s gonna be better to show than tell. And here we are. Shed Seven.”
A squad of Deltas were waiting for them outside of an unprepossessing galvanised steel hut.
Eddie had occasionally come across off-duty military out in Las Vitas, and so some large part of him expected to be greeted with, at best, outright hostility. A supercharged Testostorossa had nothing on off-duty military when it came to assuming that people with more brains than muscle were fags.
Not that he’d had any brains to speak of in the first place, he recalled, which had left him doubly screwed.
He assumed that Trix Desoto herself might be made, well, welcome, for a certain number of reasons, but not in an entirely salutary manner.
Now he came to appreciate the difference between highly trained and not, and off-duty and on. The soldiers snapped to instant attention as he and Trix approached, and the lieutenant in charge of them saluted.
“Butcher,” he said, matching the name tag on his greens.
Eddie thought of several replies to that, but then discounted them more or less instantly as either heavy handed or asinine. A guy in the CNG with the name of Butcher would have heard them all in any case.
“You requested a close-order escort,” said Butcher. It came out as a kind of completely neutral statement, requiring neither confirmation not comment.
“Yeah,” said Trix Desoto, confirming it anyway. “Don’t sweat it, There’s no rush; we just want to check it out at this point. You’ll have time to get into your gear.”
“Ma’m,” Butcher said.
It might have been Eddie’s imagination, but there seemed to be a sense of relief, both in Butcher and his squad, though they gave absolutely no external sign.
The escort took them into Shed Seven. Eddie had not been quite sure what to expect—but he certainly hadn’t expected it to be bare-walled and completely empty.
“What is this—“ he began, when the floor lurched under him and dropped with the whine of heavy-duty servos.
Eddie wasn’t entirely stupid—at least, since undergoing the processes of the Loup it seemed to him that he was increasingly less so—so by the time the servos whined down to a stop he had more or less convinced himself that his underwear was safe.
They were in an underground chamber slightly larger than the galvanised hut of Shed Seven had been. Along one wall were racked the bulky and somewhat ape-like forms of heavy-radiation armour.
At an order from Butcher, the squad broke formation and began climbing into the suits double-time. Eddie noted that, for all their speed in doing so, they were extremely careful about checking the on-board systems and seals.
Trix Desoto, meanwhile, had wandered over to a storage unit, from which she now returned with a pair of paper-thin polyceramic coveralls.
“There you go,” she said, giving one of them to Eddie.
Eddie looked down at it. The cuffs at the wrists and ankles seemed to be elasticated.
“The fuck?” he said.
“What do you think?” said Trix Desoto. “You want Mommy’s help putting it on the right way round or something?”
“Yeah, but…” Eddie gestured in the direction of soldiers busily girding themselves up for any and all manner of radioactive nastiness.
“Oh, right,” said Trix Desoto. “The coverall isn’t to protect you. Nobody cares what happens to you, frankly. We’re going into a clean environment. I’d advise you to look up the term, along with the word ‘soap’.”
The Shed Seven-sized elevator floor lurched again. Eddie decided that this was probably because it was built to military specifications as opposed to faulty design. It was built to do the job, and do it reliably, rather than indulge in the niceties of giving a smooth ride.
“This is gonna have to be refitted,” said Trix Desoto. “Some of the components we’re going to be bringing down here are a little too… delicate for all this lurching around.”
“That was a polite way of putting it,” said Eddie.
He was not in a particularly good temper. The elasticated band around the polyfabricated hair-cap he was wearing seemed to be increasingly cutting into his head.
“I was trying for elliptical, myself,” said Trix Desoto.
Like Eddie, she was now in cap and coveralls—though the latter were a strategic half a size too small for her, to noticeable aesthetic effect. An effect periodically enhanced by the blasts of air that washed over them as the butterfly wing hatches of airlock stations slammed shut above.
“So, Eddie,” said Trix Desoto in a loud, clear voice. “You ever seriously think about getting it on with me?”
The question, coming completely out of left field, left Eddie momentarily dumbfounded, as though several areas of his brain had simply and physically shorted out.
“I mean, I know what I come off like in my… with my usual look.” Trix Desoto glanced sidelong at a collectively and absolutely stone-faced squad of Deltas, what could be seen of their faces behind their visors.
“Couple of guys here,” she continued, “are having a little bit of difficulty keeping their fingers on their numbers. And you’re, what, seventeen years old? You should be getting a little chubby on over the thought of dry wall. Thinking up things to try and talk to me about. Looking for excuses to touch me and cop a feel.” She turned to look at him meaningfully. “And I just don’t get any of that from you, Eddie. I wonder why.”
Of any possible scenario while being stuck in an elevator with a squad of Delta-trained Marines this was absolutely, in the considered opinion of Eddie Kalish, the very worst.
“My age?” he managed, latching on to one desperate detail in an attempt to head the conversation off. “You’re maybe two years older than I am…”
“Yeah, well girls notoriously mature faster than boys,” said Trix Desoto. “So you’re shafted twice, and not in a good way, believe you me. Don’t you like girls, Eddie? Is that it? Do you prefer boys?”
Not absolutely the very worst thing he could have imagined, then.
“Could I borrow your gun, please,” he said to Lieutenant Butcher. “I think I’d like to shoot myself in the head.”
“Good job you didn’t ask him to do the job for you,” said Trix Desoto, a little sardonically. “You wouldn’t believe your current clearance so far as these guys are concerned.”
Eddie handed the gun back to Butcher, who racked it back onto his rad-armour without comment.
“The reason I bring it up,” said Trix Desoto, “is that there are a number of people out there, you know, out there in the world, with a specific and particular variety of Alienation Syndrome.”
She pronounced the term in a way that you could hear the capitalisation.
“The effect’s quite subtle,” she continued. “It’s very easy to confuse with merely having a touch of Asberger’s, or Adoptive Syndrome—you know, dislocated from any family with a similar genetic makeup—or just being, basically, a bit of a sad little dork who’s a failure in everything and who doesn’t have any friends.
“The symptoms include a total failure to understand how humans can go crazy for things, any number of things—for a girl or a boy, or for money, or for a leader giving orders. A certain lack of concern for other human beings and what happens to them, however bad. There’s a connection simply broken in there.
“These people always seem to have murky and displaced origins—like foundlings, you know? But whereas most displaced persons tend to spend their lives trying to find out who they are and where they came from, searching out living relatives and trying to go home, that sort of thing just never even so much as occurs to these people…”
Eddie, for his part, was starting to wish that Trix Desoto would go back to digging at him about his sexuality. At least such jibes could be defended against by a general and generic response.
This specific detailing of his character and its flaws, on the other hand, was just hurtful.
“Well pardon me for living!” he snapped. “Okay, so I don’t know exactly where I came from before, I dunno, the first places I remember being and the first things I remember doing. Forgive the fuck out of me for not tearing my hair out all the live-long day and wailing about it!”
“Hey, I’m just saying,” said Trix, “that some people just don’t have the homing-instinct. They don’t have it because they know, on the deep subconscious level, that to have one would be completely and utterly pointless. There’s nowhere in the world for them to go.”
The elevator platform gave another lurch.
“I think we’re coming to the end of the line,” said Trix. “Don’t take what I just said to heart. I’ve been trying to prepare you a little, just so’s you don’t go completely bat-shit on me. And a second from now, you’ll see what I mean…”
Abruptly, the sequence of butterfly wing hatches slamming shut behind them became a single armoured hatch locking into place in a rock ceiling. The elevator platform rack-and-pinioned down support pylons through a cavern.
The cavern was not impossibly vast, just bigger than the mind was comfortable with.
Visitors to the ventilation galleries of coal mines, or to the overly grandiose subway stations of the world, have reported just that vertiginous sensation: it’s not that this empty subterranean space is big, but that it’s obviously man-made, imposed on the bedrock of the world, and so feels somehow wrong.
Or if not man-made then at least artificial—and one can ponder that particular distinction later.
Concrete stanchions reinforced the rock walls in the manner of the support superstructure of a cathedral dome. Their undressed surfaces seemed to have been colonised by some strange fungoid organism: fleshy webs of tendrils from which cilia rippled like the soft spines of a sea urchin; clusters of globular fruiting-members that by some inner process appeared to give off their own light. Clusters of jewels sprouting in flesh.
The fungus might or might not have been found anywhere else on Earth, but Eddie recognised it. If you took into account all the screwing around that dreams do, where you can go to sleep thinking about a leaky transmission and suddenly it’s three mice playing maracas, these were the cavern walls he had fallen through in one of his dreams when being inducted into the Loup.
All of this was purely secondary. The larger part of Eddie’s mind and focus was fixed on the object that all but filled the cavern, the object that they were descending towards. The object that for all the world looked liked a spiked chainmail glove, except about a million times bigger and bristling with enough weapons to turn the eastern seaboard into nothing more than a ketchup stain. The object that was floating in the middle of the chamber as if it had just bitch-slapped gravity and was now enjoying a celebratory drink. The object that Trix Desoto had, somewhat euphemistically, referred to as the Artefact.
As Eddie stared at it, he felt several entire areas of his mind shut down… and several he had never been aware of before, start up.
A number of things, now, became clear—not least being what he had thought was meaningless taunting on the part of Trix on the way down.
The stuff about how there are some people in the world who never bother looking for home, for example—for the simple reason that there is nowhere on this world for them to look.
“Oh God…” he breathed.
“The Artefact,” Trix Desoto confirmed. “I tried to clue you in a little, and did I get any credit?”
“Yeah, well you could have done a better job,” said Eddie Kalish. “You could have included the single most salient point. That’s not a fucking Artefact, that’s a fucking Ship.”
18.
Butcher and his men remained out in the cavern, guarding the elevator platform against the ravening hordes of those who might, for some strange reason, want to spirit it away.
Weirdly enough, you could tell by their postures that each and every one of them was doing his absolute best not to look directly at the Ship.
Eddie Kalish couldn’t help noticing, also, that in addition to their heavy armour they had taken up position behind heavy lead shields.
“Look, I’m not trying to be funny or anything—“ he began.
“I wouldn’t either,” said Trix, “the material you’ve got. This is funny, and there you are over on the other side of the room, the material you’ve got.”
“Thank you very much,” said Eddie. “You’ve been a lovely audience and I hope you rot in hell. The thing I was going to say is, how come the soldier-boys get all the neat gear, body armour and shit and we get…” he plucked distastefully at the thin polymer of his coverall “this.”
“We don’t need anything else,” said Trix Desoto. “At least, I don’t need anything else and you probably don’t. You passed the first test.”
“Oh, yeah?” said Eddie. “And what test would that have been, exactly?”
“Here we go,” said Trix.
They were at what appeared to be an airlock hatch, a sphincter-like arrangement in the skin of the Ship that seemed every bit as semi-organically repellent, to Eddie, that the word sphincter might suggest.
Trix Desoto ran her hand lightly down the… well, down the whatever it was that the skin of the Ship was made of.
“Come on, baby,” she murmured. “Open up for me.”
Smoothly and silently, the hatch relaxed open.
Eddie gazed dubiously into the darkness beyond.
“I’m not going in there,” he said. “There’s things in there. Things in the dark. Moving around. I’ve seen them.”
“What are you talking about?”Trix snapped. “What things? Where?”
“Things. Bad things. I’ve seen them in my head.” Eddie had not been entirely serious, of course, but he was still feeling decidedly nervous.
“So we really have to go in there?” he said. “Would it not, I’m saying basically, have been an idea to bring along a couple of flashlights?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Trix said, cl
imbing up into the hatch. “You coming or not?”
Eddie considered this, for a moment, with some seriousness.
Whatever the soldiers were protecting themselves against might be doing horrible things to his body, but he was probably right in assuming that the Loup in Trix and himself was counteracting the effects.
Then again, how much worse might those effects be if you were actually inside the thing that was producing them?
On the other hand, nothing exactly bad had happened so far—and how many chances did you get to go inside a genuine alien starship? With the off-chance of coming out with your colon and memoplex intact, in any case.
He realised that he was looking at the outline of Trix against a pale and shifting glow. At least there was light of some kind in there, in any event. He shrugged to himself and followed her inside.
The tunnels winding through the main mass of the Ship had a tubular and somewhat organic quality, not as if they were crawling through the bowels of some living organism or some such, but like the ship had in some way been grown on organic principles.
Fitful tendrils of electrical activity crackled along the tunnels, clustering in the areas where Trix and Eddie walked. It was as if the Ship itself were attempting to light their way.
“I think she’s trying to be helpful,” Trix said.
“She?” said Eddie.
“It’s just nomenclature,” said Trix. “I don’t mean anything by it.”
“Well I’ve gotta tell you,” said Eddie, “that I can’t imagine thinking of this thing as anything other than an it.”
“Suit yourself,” said Trix Desoto. “Now, I’ve been here before, so we’re not going on the grand tour. We just need to find what we’re calling a node… and speak of the devil. There we go.”
The so-called node was little more than a place where some of the smaller tubes, running through the main tube of the passageway in a manner no doubt analogous to cables or ducts, clustered and fused together in a malformed lump. The electrical activity within it glowed in a way that, while still faint, was markedly brighter than in the tunnel itself.