Lost in Space

by Joan D. Vinge

  Aboard the Proteus the actual robot swiveled on its treads, following Will's motion, to fire on the pursuing spiders. The laser bursts of its arc welders had more effect than Don's pistol, blasting aliens into bits of flesh and shrapnel. But through its sensors he could see even more spiders pouring out of the ceiling to replace them.

  And he saw some of them lag behind, stopping beside the wounded spiders flailing brokenly on the floor. Were they helping each other, like humans?

  As he watched through the robot's eyes, the spiders fell on their wounded comrades and began to rip them limb from limb, devouring them alive.

  Will gave a squawk of sickened disbelief that made his mother and sister turn. "They eat their wounded!"

  "T/iey eat their wounded!"

  Was that what the robot had said? Don slowed his headlong flight down the corridor, trying to see past the robot's massive body to what was happening behind them.

  "Duck!" Judy shouted suddenly. He looked ahead again, saw her take aim—straight at him. He dove for the floor as she fired her pulse rifle, hitting the fire sensor panel beside the open blast door. The door slammed shut just behind the robot, crushing spider bodies with a grinding crunch.

  Don scrambled to his feet. Emergency lighting stained the tunnel a bloody crimson. He saw the others slow down and then stop up ahead. He looked where they were looking. The blast door at the other end of the tunnel had closed at the same time, sealing them off from the airlock access.

  They were trapped.

  He leaned against the wall, panting; watched the others search the suddenly claustrophobic space with frightened eyes as they realized the same thing.

  The spiders ate their wounded. Alive. He knew now why there had been no trace of the Proteus's crew. Was this how it had ended for ]eb?

  "We've got to get that door open," Robinson said. He started on toward the far end of the corridor. The others followed him without a word, as if they didn't know what else to do.

  Don started after them, knowing it was futile, wondering when they would figure that out. No one could open a blast door, once the locks were set. But the spiders could eat their way through anything on this ship. It was only a matter of time before they ate their way in here… He slowed, and stopped, midway down the corridor. Closed his eyes, and saw Jeb's face.

  And then he knew what he was going to do.

  He went down on one knee, facing back the way they had come. "A million bucks' worth of weaponry—" he muttered, slamming a pulse enhancer onto the barrel of his gun, "—and I'd trade it all—" he engaged the wrist support, "for a lousy can of Raid."

  He hit a stud on his jacket control panel, enabling the blast shield on the helmet of his fieldsuit. It rose like a cobra's hood from the yoke of his equipment harness; segmented alloy shields fanned down to cover his face.

  Kneeling there, he waited, his eyes fixed on the door. The metal was already beginning to buckle.

  At the far end of the corridor Judy watched her father carry on his electronic debate with the door's control panel, telling herself that if anyone could convince it to let them pass, her father could.

  The small alien clung to her neck like a frightened baby, pulling at her hair. She winced, removed its tiny clutching fingers and set it down on the floor; trying not to lose her temper with it just because it was being so difficult, so impossible, so much like the damned door that she had so stupidly sealed shut on them —

  She looked back as an earsplitting burst of sound echoed toward them: pulse weapon fire. She saw Don West, kneeling in the hellshine of the emergency lights far down the tunnel, firing back the way they had come. And then she saw the spiders…

  The tiny alien covered its enormous eyes with its ears, huddling in the corner by her feet.

  "I can't override the fire protocols,'' her father said.

  As Judy turned back in dismay, the robot suddenly came to life behind her. "Stand clear," it said. She scooped up the alien baby, pushing the others with her as she moved out of the way.

  The robot settled itself like a runner digging in, and raised its grappling arms. An energy charge began to build, crackling between its pincer claws, and she had to remind herself that this time it was really Will telling them to get clear, her own brother who controlled the robot's weapons —

  Who sent it barreling forward at top speed, and fired an energy blast just as it crashed into the immovable door, blowing a hole through the ceralloy that left it torn and seared. As the others pushed forward she looked back, shouting, "Don—!"

  Don glanced back over his shoulder as he heard the explosion. He saw the glowing hole in the blast door; thought he saw someone waving him toward it.

  And then he looked ahead again, and went on killing spiders.

  He was dimly aware that the others were escaping, dimly aware that he should go with them. But he couldn't go yet… the spiders kept coming and coming; they'd eaten through the door, and too many of them were still coming at him… not enough of them were piled up dead yet in front of him. There would never be enough dead spiders, even if he went on blasting them until the end of time. They had killed his best friend, and he would— he was…

  He was alone. The team was gone, and suddenly there were no more monsters coming through the door.

  He staggered to his feet in the sudden silence; lowered his aching arms, his numb hands barely keeping hold of his weapon. Blue-black ichor dripped from his suit and helmet. He looked over his shoulder and then back down the splattered, reeking tunnel. Spider guts and spider shrapnel were piled knee-deep in front of him in the lurid glare.

  "No way it's that easy," he mumbled, shaking his head. He looked again at the glowing hole in the far door: the way out, waiting for him…

  And then he looked back, one more time. And watched the floor in front of him begin to heave and rise, throwing off the midden of fragmented spider parts___

  A giant's shadow fell across his shielded face as he stood frozen in disbelief, looking up, and up… as the mother of all Alien-Monster-Spider-Things rose before him like a cresting wave.

  "Oh, rib"— * Don raised his gun and fired, point-blank, blowing it to hell and gone as he staggered back out of range.

  It was gone, all right. Leaving a gaping hole in the corridor floor… freeing countless techno-organic drones to come swarming up through the gap in a hideous flood. They poured endlessly out of the floor from somewhere down below to surround him and smother him and tear the flesh from his living body-Don threw himself backward as they flowed around him; shoulder-rolled, blasting spiders mindlessly as he scrambled to his feet again. He bolted down the corridor, freed now of the killing fury that had made even his own survival meaningless. The seething avalanche of spiders flowed after him in a single undulating mass, covering walls and floor and ceiling, gaining on him with every heartbeat. God, they were fast! Damn it, why hadn't he seen how long this tunnel really was—?

  They were almost on him, he had seconds left, but he was almost to the blast door, almost there, almost—

  As he leaped for the opening, the spider at his heels whipped its taloned tail forward. He jagged, barely dodging the meathook at its tip… lost his footing, and fell.

  Maureen ran to the com as she heard her husband's voice call her name. She saw him onscreen through the robot's eyes, standing at the airlock door, inputting codes while the others waited tensely behind him. An airlock. Then they were almost safe-John looked up from the panel access; he spread his hands in frustration. The lock wasn't responding. "Maureen, can you give me something—?"

  She queried the Proteus's CPU, found the answer she needed. "It's cycling through a vacuum check. I'm overriding. Try it now. John—?" She looked up again when he didn't answer. The screen where she had seen his face was empty.

  Don fell headlong through the ruined blast door, into the airlock access. He landed hard, gasping with pain as the fall knocked the wind out of him.

  The monster lunged after him from the other side, its ser
rated maw opening wide as it saw him stranded on the floor, helpless, fresh meat—

  Suddenly, his front-row view of his own death was blotted out by a fluid wall of blue: The robot stood before him, barricading the door with its back.

  Metal clanged on metal; the robot's body shuddered like a human's, but it did not give way as the spider-things mounted a savage, single-minded attack from the other side of the doorway. Don heard the wrenching squeal of metal, as teeth that could rip a starship open like a can of tuna tore into the robot's back. He tried to get his feet under him, desperate to get away from the door and what lay beyond it, but his body seemed to have turned to rubber.

  Abruptly there were hands under his shoulders, lifting him up, helping him stand. He turned, and saw Judy, her eyes shining with relief and —

  "Let's move!" Robinson called. The lights went green, the door slid open; and suddenly there was no time for him to say anything to Judy, even if he could have found the words.

  Judy let him go, and they ran for it with the rest.

  Chapter Fourteen

  ITIaureen and PenriL| sat at the com of the ]upiter Two, powering up the ship's drive. Behind them Will fought virtual monsters, heaving invisible spiders off the back of his sim, as the real robot fought real monsters at the other end of their link. Its holographic form around him was already flickering in places, as the real-time damage to the robot mounted.

  "Will," his father shouted from the Proteus's airlock, "can you get the robot in here?"

  More spiders clung to its hull, burrowing through its body in their mindless urge to destroy the living flesh it was keeping from them. Will grimaced as if he could actually feel its pain, and shook his head. "I can't move him without letting the spiders into the ship!" The robot was crawling with them, inside and out; they were pushing through gaping rents in its body, furiously trying to reach the humans in the airlock.

  "Leave him behind," his father ordered, and Will could barely see the emotion on his face.

  "I'm sorry…" Will whispered his final words to the robot, and began to disengage the simbot's controls.

  * $ *

  On board the Proteus, a spider squeezed through the robot's ruined body, flinging itself with monomaniacal bloodlust toward the airlock door.

  "Seal it! Now!" Robinson shouted, and Don hit the button with his fist. The door was still closing as the first monster reached them. The spider thing lashed out, grazing Smith's back with its taloned whip, just as the door dropped down.

  The alien baby leaped from Judy's arms with a shriek of terror, landed on Smith, and launched itself toward the rear of the chamber. The door sealed shut, lopping off the alien's tailhook. It dropped with a mucasoid splat to the floor in the sudden silence of their profound relief.

  Smith rubbed his back, glaring at the trembling form of the alien baby huddled again in Judy's arms. "This tiny horror scratched me."

  Don pressed the stud on his jacket with an unsteady hand, finally retracting the blast shield and his helmet. He looked down, his heart beating like a fist against his ribs as he stared at the severed appendage still twitching on the floor. Slowly, the lock cycled.

  Back on board the Jupiter Two, Don shoved his way past the others, heading for his chair at the com. He sank into the pilot's seat—his seat—with a sense of stupefying gratitude. And then he looked at the screens. The exterior view of both ships showed him countless spiders emerging from the Proteus, swarming over its hull to the place where the Jupiter was docked.

  Robinson took the copilot's seat. "Prepare to disengage," he said; but Don was already there.

  fc * $

  Will watched from inside the simbot as his father and Major West went to the com without a backward glance. More pieces of the robot's image winked out around him with every passing second.

  He stepped out of the mangled form, no longer able to go on witnessing its horrible death. "Good-bye, Robot," he whispered.

  Penny came up beside him and put her arm around his shoulders. "You couldn't save him, kid," she murmured.

  Will looked up, seeing his sister's face haloed by a sudden flash of inspiration. "Save him—" he said. "Of course!" He ran to the console and shoved a microdisk into his deck. He ordered the robot's memory to download, his fingers flying over the ke't"s. The monitor lit up in front of him, showing him the progress of his save: 75%… 80%… The screen went blank, and DOWNLOAD INCOMPLETE flashed across it. His face fell. Penny sighed, shaking her head, and turned away to her work station.

  As she sat down, a small blur came shooting past Will and skittered up the back of her chair—over her head, tangling itself in her hair, before it landed in a heap in her lap.

  "Are you insane?" Penny shouted furiously. "Look at my hair!" Wiping her hair back from her face, she looked down—and found the alien baby huddled on her lap. Its scaled skin rippled through rainbows of color until it was the exact shade of her clothes. She gave a small laugh of amazement and gently touched its face.

  Chapter F i f 't b e n

  Dan released the docking ring. He looked up, watching the monitors as the Jupiter Two drifted free from the probe ship's side. An endless stream of spiders was still pouring out of the Proteus. His stomach knotted. "This is a fun picnic," he muttered, forcing his gaze away from the screens. "First yellow aliens, now giant spiders." Across the room the tiny alien buried its face against Penny's chest.

  "It's okay. Everything's going to be all right…" Penny murmured. Her voice sounded anything but certain.

  "We're clear. Everybody hang on." Don did a controlled burn of the Jupiter's engines, boosting them away from the probe ship. The spiders bounded down the Proteus % hull in a frantic mob as the gap of empty space between the two ships widened.

  Don grinned in satisfaction, watching their frenzied disappointment. "And the crowd goes wild — "

  "Recall your nightmares from childhood, Major," Smith said, with heavy skepticism. "Monsters are rarely so easily dissuaded."

  Don looked down at his ichor-smeared clothing. His hands twitched. He swiveled his chair to face Smith.

  "Why don't you go out and talk to them then, Smith? Bug to bug."

  Smith's mouth twisted. "I think they'd rather come inside." He nodded at the screens.

  Don turned back, and breathed a curse. Uncountable numbers of spiders covered the Proteus s skin like bloodsucking lice, a parasitic infestation of monsters. As he watched, they began to hurl themselves from the probe ship's surface; launching into space, legs retracted, they spun like silver disks toward the Jupiter's retreating hull…

  "Arming torpedoes — " Don input the commands. "Fire in the hole!"

  An array of rockets shot out into the swirling mass of spiders. He watched, holding his breath, waiting for the fireworks as they detonated.

  The torpedoes flared up and went dead, like defective birthday candles, drifting through the sea of spiders and on into the darkness without killing even one. Don slammed his fist down on his seat arm.

  "The robot must have damaged the detonator cores," Robinson said. "They won't blow."

  Don turned back to the monitors, feeling the unfamiliar tingle of panic in his gut as he watched the spider swarm close with the ship. Some of them overshot. Others made it, reextending their limbs, and began to burrow into the hull.

  And then the ones on the ship began to shoot filaments of webbing from their bellies, catching the stragglers and reeling them in.

  Maureen Robinson came back onto the bridge from belowdecks with the severed tail held in metal tongs. She carried it to the Life Sciences console.

  "That's the same expression you had when my mother came to stay with us," John said.

  She threw him a mildly scandalized look. "DNA extrapolation coming up now."

  A graphic of the severed appendage appeared in Don's lower monitor; he watched as the computer extrapolated an image of the whole thing, filling in muscles and flesh.

  "Silicon based," Maureen said. "Adamantium shell and lack of
respiratory system suggest an ability' to live in deep space. Tiny front brain implies communal relationships. Like bees."

  Or army ants, Don thought. Nothing seemed to stop them, not even hard vacuum. They just kept coming. He looked away from the screen. "If the biology lesson is over, Professor, I could use some help here—"

  Maureen glanced up at him. "If you can't find what hurts an enemy, Major," she said evenly, "find what it loves." She nodded at the displays on her console. "They may be attracted to heat and light."

  Heat and light. That was why they'd followed the Jupiter out into space. That was why they went after living flesh…

  He turned back to the control panel, and began to input commands. The Jupiter wasn't the only ship with a functioning drive unit. Their computer was still linked to the one on board the Proteus. If he played this just right—

  The screens told him the Proteus was responding, pow-ering up on cue; he saw her tubes glowing red as the engines began their initial burn. "Remote commands are working," he said. "I'm bringing the fusion drive on line."

  "Warning," the computer said. "Outer hull has been compromised."

  He looked up at the screen, at the spiders slowly-flensing the ship's skin.

  The Proteus's drive ignited; a few spiders still drifting from silks behind the Jupiter broke free, heading back toward the probe ship. Most of them stayed.

  "Let's turn up the heat—" He headed the Jupiter back toward the Proteus, aiming directly for the wake of the fusion drives.

  "Warning," the computer said. "Inner hull breach in twenty seconds."

  Don glanced irritably at Robinson. "You invent that too?"

  "Uh… yes, actually," Robinson said.

  "Can you shut it up?" Don turned back to the com, wiping sweat from his forehead.

  He cut straight through the Proteus's nuclear wake; felt an electric jolt of elation as the spiders abandoned the Jupiter in droves. He watched their spiraling flight back toward the probe ship, where they attached themselves to the superheated nacelles of the drive. He glanced at the display's. All of them. It got every one.