Providence

by Max Barry

  “Beats me, Gilly.”

  “They must have special requirements,” he said. “Or else . . .”

  “Watch that fucking tunnel,” Anders said.

  His eyes had drifted. “Sorry.”

  “I don’t give a shit about breeders, Gilly. I just want you and me to get out of here.”

  But he’d had a thought and couldn’t keep it in. “Or else there aren’t many. They have more nurseries than breeders. So they have to transport embryos in sacs from one to the other. Through liquid-filled tunnels. Tubes, which come up in pools.”

  “Watch that fucking tunnel. I’ve got this gun stuck halfway in the wall. It’s going to take me a second to pull it out.”

  “Understood.” Anders strained again. “If there aren’t many breeders, they’re valuable,” Gilly said. “That could be another reason to separate them: for their protection. There might be only a small number.” He licked his lips. “There might be one.”

  Anders looked at him.

  “A queen.”

  “Gilly—”

  “They have identical DNA. They’re all produced by a single animal. It’s a common hierarchy in colony species. It’s been hypothesized. We just never had any evidence for it.” Anders opened his mouth. “Anders, if there’s a queen, and we kill it . . .”

  Anders sighed.

  “They’d have a way to replace her, but that would take time. Years, potentially. And until then, no new salamanders. It would end the war.”

  Anders shook his head. “All that money on the ships and you want to go face-to-face.”

  He snickered. “The ship got us here. And it chose us. AI selected the crew.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure it was imagining this situation. Gilly, I have to shoot this wall.”

  He couldn’t argue any longer. “Not here. Farther over. You don’t have to disintegrate the rock. Just warm it up enough to soften.”

  Anders positioned the barrel of the lightning gun against the rock a few feet away. “Here?”

  “How much energy will that put out?” He couldn’t remember the specs. He had skipped all the small-arms sessions, because he thought he’d never use one.

  “Shitloads,” Anders said.

  “Farther,” Gilly said.

  Anders shifted. “I’ll give it the smallest kick I can.”

  “Uh . . . all right.” He turned away.

  “Don’t look away! I’ve got my back to a tunnel. I don’t want to get jumped.”

  “I don’t want to get shot in the face.”

  “You’ll be fine,” Anders said, and pulled the trigger.

  There was a flash. The wall cracked. He strained and something tore. He felt himself falling. He tried to balance but his legs were useless.

  Anders pulled him to his feet. “Now move.” Gilly stumbled to the hole on wet-noodle legs and followed Anders through. There were a few feet of rock and then open space. It was dark and he brightened the small light on his helmet, which did nothing in the gloom. The pool that Anders had described lay a short distance away. When he moved toward it, he felt something soft underfoot. There was a centipedelike creature, black and sticky, with long pincers and a segmented body. A larva. He stared. It was larger than he’d imagined. He squatted beside it while Anders moved around the chamber, sweeping with his light.

  “Is this an older one?” Gilly said. “A juvenile?”

  Anders returned and began to set up the converter. He scooped up larvae and placed them inside. “No. They come out of the eggs like that.”

  “Sacs. This size?”

  “Yep.” The converter’s lights glowed on, revealing more of the chamber. There were giant slabs of rock or resin just as Anders had described. Again, the spaces were disconcertingly large. “Problem?”

  “If there’s a queen producing millions of these, she must be huge.”

  “It’s a big hive.”

  “Yeah.” He began to explore the math on how much mass would be involved. It seemed like the answer was a lot. He poked at the burned larvae.

  “There’s the pool,” Anders said. “Check it out while I feed these little shitholes to the converter.”

  He rose. The pool was filled with briny brown fluid, its edges laced with stringy froth. In theory, beneath it was a liquid-filled tunnel that served as an express elevator to a breeder. If it were large enough, they could traverse it in their suits. Which, he figured, it had to be, since the larvae were big.

  Beside the pool lay two slumped forms. As he drew closer, he saw they were fully grown salamanders.

  “Eyes open,” Anders said. Gilly saw him bent over, fixing the lightning gun to the converter. “We have no gun while it does this.”

  “Didn’t you say adults don’t come in here?” Gilly said.

  “Right.”

  “Then what am I looking at?”

  Anders’s light swung onto the creatures. “Nurses. The babies eat them. It’s disgusting.”

  Gilly moved closer. He let his light play over them. The bodies were disfigured by the effects of the lightning gun; he could barely tell which way they were facing. He’d never heard anyone propose that salamanders might have nurses. “The larvae eat them?”

  “Or drink. I don’t know. The nurses have bulges on their backs. See them? Like blisters. The little ones suck on those.”

  He squinted. He didn’t see any blisters. Most had popped and shriveled under fire, and hung in loose flaps. Some, toward the front of the creature, seemed older. Remnants of past feedings, maybe. These had dried to thick white ridges, like scars.

  “Oh, no,” he said.

  “What is it?”

  “Martin is a nurse.”

  He looked at the hole. He couldn’t tell how long Martin had been there. When the light struck her face, she launched herself and landed heavily on the floor. Anders yelped. He ripped the lightning gun free from the converter. Gilly saw two glowlights along its barrel blink on. Anders rose to his feet and Martin collided with him with enough force to jerk it from his grip. She galloped across the floor and drove Anders into the end of the slab.

  Gilly ran to the gun and snatched it up. He didn’t know how to fire it. But he’d seen Anders hold it and raised it in the same way.

  Martin was slumped to the floor, moving slowly. Gilly advanced, keeping the gun trained on her. Her hind legs twitched. She began to rise. She took a few unsteady steps and that was when he saw that Anders was crushed against the rock.

  “No,” he said. “Anders. No.”

  “Gik. Kee,” Martin said.

  He sank to his haunches. He couldn’t look at Anders but also couldn’t look away. There was a wild grief in his chest, pressing against his lungs.

  Martin tottered toward the pool. She made no move to attack him. She lowered her head and nosed at the burned larvae.

  Beside her, the converter lay in pieces. Martin had stepped on it during the attack. Even from here, he could see that it was destroyed.

  He breathed. He looked at Anders. Then away.

  According to his film, he had approximately an hour of life remaining.

  Martin hunched over the larvae, her middle legs scooping at the pieces.

  He stared at her. It was as if a veil had been ripped from his vision. Martin wasn’t his friend. She wasn’t like him. She wasn’t like anything he had created in his imagination.

  His core battery reading flipped below sixty minutes.

  He explored the gun. It didn’t seem complicated. There was a thumb latch, a trigger. He thought he could figure this one out.

  He forced himself to his feet. “Martin,” he said.

  She turned. What was in her features, he had no idea. He couldn’t intuit her thinking. Martin might have understood what he was doing, or not.

  He squeezed the trigger. The gun kicked. The afterim
age of lightning crawled across his eyeballs. He sat and cried for a while.

  * * *

  —

  He spent some time inspecting the converter piece by piece, just in case. But there was no miracle: It had been destroyed.

  He sat with Anders. He squeezed shut his eyes. He didn’t think he could do this without Anders. Anders was the one who made impossible things happen. “I’m sorry,” he croaked.

  Anders’s core, too, was unusable.

  So that was that. There was no chance of escape. This was not a carefully designed puzzle with a tricky solution he had to work hard to find. It was simpler than that. It was the logical result of forces beyond his control.

  He enabled his suit’s ping sweep, and within a minute it flared Beanfield’s location. She was on the edge of his range, her little blip flitting in and out of existence. He tried to hail her but received no response. He was able to transmit asynchronous data at a low rate, though, so, for what it was worth, he sent the recordings he’d made, everything from the beginning. Then he recorded a clip, describing what had happened and what had become of Anders, and sent that, too.

  When that was done, he shut down all comms and ping. It meant that Beanfield couldn’t reply, even if she moved closer. His core read forty-two minutes. For what he wanted to do next, he couldn’t spare the power.

  “I’m going after the queen,” he said. He was still recording, but realistically, this was just for him. It had probably been like that for a while. “I might be able to make a difference.”

  He moved to the edge of the pool. He wound the lightning gun’s strap around his body and waded in.

  The sides quickly grew steep. When he reached the point where his next step would take him out of his depth, he gave the chamber a last glance, then let the liquid close over his faceplate.

  Gravity tugged him downward. His helmet light illuminated thick brown muck to a distance of ten inches. He put out a hand and felt rock sliding by.

  After a few minutes, his boots hit something solid. He jerked. He wasn’t sure of the effect of discharging the lightning gun underwater and didn’t especially want to find out, but he thrust the weapon in that direction. A shape loomed, amorphous and indistinct, a sac: a translucent blob congealed around a dark larva. He let it float by.

  He tried to control his breathing. His thermals were rising. None of this was good for his core battery. He had thirty-five minutes.

  Soon he encountered another sac, then more. The fourth was smaller and less well formed, and frayed apart as he maneuvered by. For most of his descent, he had periodically scraped the sides, as the tunnel fell at an angle, but now it widened to the point where he couldn’t feel the walls. He found this disconcerting. He’d been prepared for a long tube, but expected it to be narrow: one end connected to the nursery, the other to something he could shoot.

  “Where are you?” he said.

  He began to swim and still couldn’t find anything solid. Soon every sac he encountered was little more than sticky clumps of gossamer. He feared he’d taken a wrong turn, becoming lost in the muck and winding up in a place for discards and genetic failures. This tube might have side tunnels. It might be a network. He sank through soup.

  Eventually his boots found the floor. He used his light and saw round boulders. There was nowhere else to go, so he struck upward at an angle.

  Unexpectedly, he broke the surface. He bobbed, casting about with the light. He was on a lake. There was a high rocky roof. To his right, it curved down to meet the soup. The rock was different: rough and irregular, gray rather than orange. He swam until he found a natural shelf on which he could rest.

  He breathed, exhausted. He had been avoiding looking at his core, afraid of what it would say.

  Six minutes.

  He had to move. The queen, or whatever there was, could be a hundred miles away. Or it could be around the next turn of rock.

  He couldn’t resist activating his ping sweep one more time, searching for Beanfield. Now she was outside his range. When his light played against the rock wall, he saw a twist of something that appeared organic, almost like ancient tree roots. He wondered: Had the salamanders encased a planet in resin? Perhaps there was a whole world down here that they’d slowly drowned.

  The soup flowed gently by, lapping at him. When he raised a leg, it was filmed with a sticky substance. Sacs. Remnants of sacs. The lake was thick with the stuff. He couldn’t figure out why there was so much of it. It didn’t make sense to him that they would float around here until half of them disintegrated.

  Also: How were there so many?

  He hadn’t finished his train of thought from before. It was conceivable that all salamanders came from a single breeder; there were animals that bred in those kinds of numbers, fish that spawned thousands of eggs at a time. But tiny eggs, because the fish didn’t have much mass to give.

  If there were a queen, she would have to be the size of a city. Larger than he could imagine, spawning salamanders in an endless flowing tide. How would that work? What would she eat?

  What do you think you’re going to find out there?

  Answers. I like finding the answers to questions like that.

  Even if he couldn’t kill the thing, he wanted to see it. He at least wanted to answer that question to his own satisfaction.

  His suit was losing the ability to replace carbon dioxide with oxygen. It had been complaining for a while with low, insistent tones. He should move. But first, he closed his eyes.

  When he opened them, he saw the truth.

  The sticky film; the disintegrating sacs. They weren’t old. They weren’t broken. They were new. They were forming.

  He dialed up his suit light. Illumination spread across the surface of the lake. The edges of the light ran farther and farther back and found no end.

  There was no queen. Of course not. There was only soup.

  He laughed despite himself. “Oh,” he said. “Wow.”

  His core was beginning to list off imminent systems failures, thermals, filters, pressure. He shut off the display. He didn’t need to see that.

  “The salamander reproductive element is an amorphous fluid,” he said. “It appears to consume resources from the planet and create eggs via an exogenic chemical process. It’s too big for me to do anything about.”

  He stared at the gentle flow of soup. It didn’t even have a brain. There was no intent. No malice. They were at war with a blind string of DNA. He was glad he’d found the truth.

  His head nodded; he caught himself. He had run out of air.

  “Wow,” he said again.

  16

  [Beanfield]

  THE SURVIVOR

  She sat up. She was surrounded by rock. She turned her head and there was no Anders and no Jackson.

  Her throat was dry. “Anders,” she croaked. There was no sound but her own breathing.

  There was a low rocky overhang and she banged her helmet on it. She stopped and tried to think. Anders and Jackson had left her to go explore some kind of hole they’d spotted. She had lain down and exhaustion had fallen over her like a blanket and now this.

  She hobbled along the ravine. “Anders?” she said again. She fumbled at her film but couldn’t bring him up on it, for some reason. She couldn’t find either of them. “Jackson?”

  You wake up on an alien planet. There is no one and nothing. Go.

  She began to climb the side of the ravine. This was a lot harder than it looked, because she had a hot mess of an ankle and the gravity was relentless, but she fought her way up it a toehold at a time. There was a lip, and more rock after that. This would make a good Talia feed, it occurred to her: There was plenty of really identifiable Feed Talia behavior right here. Those were her most popular clips, the ones with vulnerability, and she was feeling pretty vulnerable at the moment, pretty goddamn vulnerable, becaus
e no one was here. She was starting to freak out a little, which people liked, too, watching Talia losing her mind over something silly. There had been a clip where she couldn’t find her white socks and it had sparked a set of memes and references that she hadn’t completely understood, but people dug it, was the point. There were so many people who would stand beside her in this moment, if only they knew. If she ever got out of here, she would tell how it had happened for her feed, and it would be amazing, and people would love her. She focused on that. When she gained enough height to turn and scour the landscape, there was rocky plain, split and sundered, as far as she could see and nothing else.

  You have been abandoned. Your home is fifty trillion miles away. Go.

  It was really unfathomable that she could be alone right now.

  She checked ping again. She didn’t know if she was doing something wrong or her survival core was preserving power or Anders and Jackson had decided to play a hilarious practical joke, but she was not loving this. She picked her way back down into the ravine and sat. She waited. That was what you were supposed to do when you were lost. That was what everyone said. Stay where you are and we’ll come find you. You definitely shouldn’t wander off, because you might get really lost, and never found.

  Time passed. She tried to clear her mind. She wasn’t terrific when left to her own thoughts, to be honest. She was better when she had other people to bounce off. When it was just her, all alone, she would return to old fears and inflate them. Like thinking she was the only person alive on an empty world.

  She tried to remember her roleplays. But she couldn’t think of one that applied to the situation, and was there any point to a roleplay if no one was watching? She might as well drop the facade. She might as well go ahead and give in to the bubbling terror that the worst thing she could imagine had come to pass.

  She couldn’t stay still any longer and rose and began to walk. She would go a short distance only. It wasn’t like a maze; she could find her way back. Once she got moving, she felt better. She was accomplishing something, putting one foot in front of the other. She walked for a while before realizing there had been a tiny red dot in the corner of her film this whole time.