The shovel crashed through the tile’s roof, sliced through its gooey interior, and penetrated maybe a centimeter into a surface as hard as limestone.
Tyaney slapped his knee, doubled over with laughter.
Daisuke pointed his shovel at the native. “Your turn.”
The bottom or floor of the tile was as full of holes as a slice of lotus root. The holes, as they slowly and painfully chipped deeper into the ground, turned out to be the insides of tubes or pipes or roots. These burrowed into a substrate that was not soil so much as chalky sand. Rahman discovered this when he wedged the tip of his shovel into a crack in the tile and levered it up, releasing a white puff of dust.
The three men held their breath and stepped back until the dust had dissipated. Then it was a relatively easy job to grab the shards of floor and rip them up. Multicolored worms fled through the chalk-sand from the light.
“Aha,” said Daisuke. “Rainbow worms! Dung Yeli, eh Tyaney?”
Tyaney said something Rahman translated as, “You dig more, maybe you find your god too.”
“I think we will find hell,” said Daisuke, holding his nose.
The cracked pipes released a warm milky liquid that stank of sulfur. It seemed, though, that the main pathways in this strange natural sewer system had already rerouted away from the tile they’d removed. The chalk-sand they shoveled out of the hole was dry.
“All right,” Daisuke said. “I think it’s deep enough.” The hole had become a shaft, walled with the stalactite-like root-pipes of the surrounding, healthy tiles.
“Easy!” said Rahman.
Daisuke nodded. “Let’s dig a second hole for the women.” He cast about, his eye coming to rest on a pale yellow-tan tile that stood out against the purple of its neighbors. “How about that one?” he said, pointing. “It looks dead, maybe we can lever it up easily?”
“Lever?” said Rahman.
“I’ll show you.” Daisuke placed the edge of his shovel at the crack between the yellow tile and one of its neighbors.
“I understand,” Rahman said. “Lever like ‘lever lock hiking pole monopod’ for camera.” He stood next to Daisuke and wedged the tip of his shovel in. The yellow glass gave slightly.
Yelling from the camp. “No, I don’t know what it is, just don’t bloody touch it!”
Daisuke looked up to see Anne stomping away from Pearson. “I thought soldiers were supposed to take orders. If I have to explain where I get my theories from everyone will be dead before I finish sentence one. What are you three doing?” She came to a stop in front of them, arms folded. “What stupid busywork does Pearson have you doing, I should say.”
“A latrine is necessary.” Daisuke let go of his shovel. “Think about it this way. We will be the first humans to mix our waste with the local ecosystem.”
“You chose one of the yellow tiles.”
“Yes,” said Daisuke. “I think it is dead. Maybe easy to dig up?”
“Hm,” Anne said.
“So I should dig hole?” asked Rahman.
Anne held up a hand. “Wait. What’s adding our waste to the soil here actually going to do? Kill all the soil microbes certainly. Hm.” She frowned, thinking. “I wish there was a way we could keep our poop sealed in plastic or something.”
“Absolutely not.” That was Nurul, walking toward them with a wrinkled brown packet in one hand. “We have more important things to think about than sewage. Like food.” She held up the packet. Unfolded, this proved to be a conglomeration of taped-together vacuum-packed packets, each covered in dense text. “Most of it is American army rations like this.”
Daisuke’s heart sank. He had hoped for canned food, which could be placed over a steaming hole in the ground and warmed without contaminating it. “What kind of rations?”
“‘Cold Weather Meal,’” Nurul read off the largest packet, the one with a plastic spoon attached to it. “It appears to be many sachets of different kinds of powder.”
“Which we will have to mix with water,” said Anne, “and heat. And we don’t have either.”
“Should I dig hole?” Rahman asked again.
“Yes,” said Nurul.
“Wait. Why do we need two holes to crap in?” Anne asked.
Nurul smiled the smile of a journalist trying to stop herself from rolling her eyes. “I would appreciate some privacy from the men. Can we perhaps put curtains around it too?”
Anne snorted. “With big pink flowers on them? This is not high on our hierarchy of needs.”
“Maybe we can chop down some of those crystal trees.” Nurul pointed to an obelisk growing in the distance. “And…sort of…arrange them around the hole? Anne?”
But Anne wasn’t listening. Her eyes had gone unfocused, drifted to the ground. “Flowers,” she said. “Red against green.”
Nurul turned her attention to Daisuke. “Well? What do you think?”
“I think that won’t work,” said Daisuke. “But that small screw-tree might make a good weapon. Like a….” He mimed the throwing gesture, having forgotten the word in English.
“A spear,” Nurul said. “Good idea. But we are back to the issue of privacy.”
“Blanket?” said Rahman. “On head?”
The only blankets they had were the silvery thermal kind. Daisuke imagined the mirror-reflective, vaguely humanoid figure squatting on the field of glass, with the wing of the crashed plane rising up in the background. We’ll look like the art on a progressive rock album.
“Good. That’s settled,” Nurul said. “So we do have some bottled water, as well as something called a flameless ration heater. But don’t you think it would be best to save them, Anne?”
“What?” said Anne, who had been staring at the ground. “All right. I can probably find a way to get water and heat out of these tiles. Give me a second to think.” Her voice dropped to a mumble. Something about yellow flowers on a purple field.
“And food?” Nurul asked. “Can we get that from the ground?”
Anne looked up sharply. She seemed to have taken Nurul’s question as sarcastic, rather than desperate. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
Nurul held up her hands. “I think you misinterpreted—”
Anne stomped and the tile under Rahman thunked hollowly, like a glass drum. “What, do you expect me to conjure a feast from the purple goo? I keep telling you people, I don’t know! I’m a biologist, not a bloody supermarket.”
Nurul’s mouth drew up. “I know that, Anne, but there is no one else who might know how to keep us alive out here.”
“And putting it all on me,” Anne ground between her gritted teeth. “Just like bloody Colonel Pearson. But I’m trying to think and I don’t know how to get food and I’m just as bloody scared as you lot, all right? So leave me alone.”
Hell, but Anne was bad at human interaction. “We’re all doing our best,” Daisuke tried to temporize, but Anne seemed to have offended Nurul already. The journalist snapped something in Indonesian at her husband. Daisuke assumed it was, ‘When are you going to be done?’
Rahman mumbled something and bore down with his shovel.
Daisuke held his hands out. “It’s all right. I will dig the hole. You can go talk to your wife.” It was what he would want if there were someone here he could turn to for comfort. Or if there was someone anywhere, on any planet.
“Thank you,” said Nurul, walking forward to take Rahman’s hand. “I am sorry I was angry, Anne. It’s only—”
Anne’s eyes went wide. “Wait. Yellow tile! It must be under pressure!”
“Would you stop interrupting me?” Nurul said.
“Stop!” Anne leaped toward Rahman as he strained to lever up the bulging yellow tile.
Which exploded in a plume of steam.
* * *
Anne’s legs and front flashed cold, then
hot. How much damage had that steam done? That hot acid? The sort of thing that disfigured a person forever…. Anne clenched her fists. She couldn’t think about that now, not with the yellow mist filling the air. Yellow would show up against purple, the glasslands equivalent of a flower. Flowers meant reproductive cells. Reproductive cells meant…something that would kill her a lot faster than some third-degree burns.
“Hold your breath!” Anne shouted. “Get out of the cloud.” And then, before she clamped her hand over her mouth and nose and squeezed her eyes shut, “Help!”
She pulled herself across the tiles, thinking at every moment of how it would feel if another one shattered. Her foot throbbed. Her hands stung. Help.
Footsteps thumped across the glass. Daisuke, from the sound of it. He wasted no time asking what had happened or if she and Nurul and Rahman were okay. He just grabbed.
“Matsumori!” Pearson shouted. “Get the water. We have to wash that acid off her.”
Acid wasn’t the problem. Pollen was. Or whatever it was the tiles used for pollen. Where would water be? With their bags?
“Colonel, stop!” Daisuke shouted.
Why? What was Pearson doing? Anne swallowed past a lump in her throat. Swallowed again, and realized her lips and hands had begun to itch.
Shit. Anaphylaxis. Her body had detected something in the yellow spores it didn’t like. Some misshaped protein that worked perfectly fine inside a glassland organism’s body, but would bring Terran metabolism to a screeching halt. She remembered the treeworms’ response to human spit. Sucks to be on the receiving end.
Daisuke set her down. “Allergies. Is there an EpiPen?”
“Alekseyev!” Pearson bellowed. “Where’s the damn anaphylaxis kit?”
A frantic rustling as he searched through their supplies, then a gurgle and snap of plastic and clean water splashed over Anne’s face. Daisuke’s hands scrubbed down her belly and legs, where the yellow cloud had touched. But she couldn’t breathe anymore. Her windpipe had closed. Her swollen eyelids let her see nothing but red darkness.
Thumping on the glass, as of someone heavy running. “Yes, sir?” It was Misha’s voice, quite close. “Oh, holy shit!”
Holy shit indeed, Anne thought. If they don’t have an EpiPen in there, Misha is going to have to cut open my throat. That’s how I’m going to die, when a Russian ex-con drug-smuggler tries to perform a tracheotomy on me.
“It’s right there,” said Misha, “Yes.” And someone punched her thigh. A jab like she’d been attacked with a staple gun. Cold lightning flooded up her torso. Adrenaline sped her heart, dilated her blood vessels, tore loose the invisible fist that had closed around Anne’s throat.
Anne gasped in a breath of sulfurous air. Coughed. Spat and gave herself a more thorough flushing with the remainder of the two-liter bottle Daisuke gave her. She also gave Daisuke a good flushing too.
He coughed. “Water,” he said. “Nurul and Rahman will need it too.”
Yes, thought Anne. She still couldn’t speak, but the swelling was already much better.
By that time she could stagger, trembling and bleary-eyed, to where Misha and Daisuke were kneeling over Nurul. The journalist shuddered in the grip of adrenaline, then started her own coughing, wheezing recovery. Both of them were soaking wet, and Misha and Pearson were wet up to the shoulders. Bumbleflies whirred and clinked, drinking the spore-juice, settling in a glittering carpet over the ground around the steaming hole where that yellow tile had been.
The commotion had attracted Hariyadi, who relayed Anne’s orders in Indonesian, adding in other good ideas such as “drag the bags away,” and “get the burn ointment.”
Anne’s foot started throbbing, right on cue. Her shoes and pants had protected most of the parts of her closest to the exploding tile, but some of the hot, acidic spray had gotten up one leg, and it stung like blue blazes. Nurul had gotten some spray on her hands too, and had to be seen to. Both needed another dousing with water to flush off the acid before it ate through their clothes.
By the time the adrenaline, artificially administered and naturally occurring, had worn off, the purple fog was gone, nobody had died of allergic reaction, and their clothing and luggage had been cleaned and (mostly) saved. But they only had four liters of water left.
Chapter Five
The Stars
Daisuke and Anne left the others back at camp while they scouted for sources of water, food, and firewood. Anne was more optimistic than Daisuke that they would actually find any.
“None of you pay enough attention to aliens,” she said, sliding her way back across the glass toward the plane. “Didn’t you notice the swimmers under the glass? The smell in the air? The plumes of vapor?”
“Well, we didn’t think we were going to be exploded. But I understand you.” Daisuke did his best to slide too. The glass wasn’t as slippery as ice, but walking took extra concentration.
They stopped in the furrow left by their landing. The jagged metal that had once been the plane’s wing had plowed up the glass tiles here, exposing bubbling, steaming, sulfurous-smelling purple slime. It did not look like a promising place to find something that would keep them alive, but Anne stopped and squatted. Daisuke followed suit.
“This stuff on the ground isn’t exactly glass.” Anne pressed her finger into the surface, which gave slightly. Little trapezoid plates separated, a spiderweb of fault lines radiating from the center of the plate. “There are pieces of glass, or some kind of silicate, yes, but they’re suspended in a tough membrane. Maybe silicone?”
She scratched at the ground. Purple scum flaked off under her nails, exposing a darker, duller burgundy color that seemed to be a property of whatever was under the glassy shell.
“Some kind of algae on the upper surface,” Anne muttered. “And something that eats the algae….” Her finger followed a track of clean glass that wound across the tiles. “Aha!”
Daisuke leaned his body toward hers, trying to point his bodycam at the blue blob Anne had found. “Hello there, you pretty little bugger,” she said, standing, and nudged the blob with the toe of her boot.
“Is it wise to touch it like that?” asked Daisuke. “On Earth, bright colors signal poison.”
“No shit,” Anne said. “But you’re assuming that this thing’s poisons will work on me, while I’m assuming that it doesn’t have any way of delivering venom through half a centimeter of steel-coated leather. Don’t worry, Daisuke, I’ve kicked a lot of things with these boots and nothing’s bitten my toes yet.”
The blob shivered and twinkled, a tiny burning ghost. Blink, and its body shifted from blue to a hallucinatory shadowless orange. It had no legs that Daisuke could see, but it slid toward Anne like a rock sliding across a frozen pond.
“It looks like bad CGI,” said Daisuke. Leaning closer, he saw the iridescent effect was the result of spines standing out from the skin of the animal. A bitter sulfurous smell hit his nose. On the tile below it, silicone caulk between the glass plates began to steam.
“Don’t piss off the shmoos, Daisuke,” said Anne. “They secrete sulfuric acid when stressed.”
“The whats?”
“Shmoo,” said Anne. “It’s the technical term for a K-strategy sea urchin larva.”
Daisuke retreated from the little animal. “K-strategy means?”
“Investing a lot of resources in one larva. Some sea urchins just churn out planktonic larvae, most of which die, but other produce just a few big shmoos, which are sort of blobs that grow spines. Like this.” She held a hand out to the creature on the tile before her.
Its threat-display done, the shmoo bunched up into a little orange ball. Much faster than a slug, it zipped over Anne’s shoe to a place where a piece of airplane had torn away the roof of a tile, exposing two centimeters of steaming purple slime.
That plume of steam buzzed with bumblebee-sized cre
atures like airborne crystal snails. Other animals had gathered around the damaged tile like gazelles at a miniature oasis: flattened oblongs, fuzzy coins, spiral worms, scintillating rainbow-colored marbles that rolled by themselves. Daisuke aimed his bodycam at a thimble-sized sea urchin as it walked on stiff stilt legs into the goo. Those legs flushed purple, like straws sucking up fruit juice.
“Hm,” said Anne, then, apparently to herself, “I’ll need to take a better look tomorrow, but I think what we’re looking at is a system to protect life against a hostile environment.”
“Hostile environment?” Daisuke asked, looking around nervously.
“I mean the air. Land,” Anne said. “When animals on Earth climbed out of the sea, they took the sea with them, as blood contained in a sack inside their bodies. On whatever planet these tiles came from, life covered itself in siliceous tests….”
Daisuke tried to halt the descent into jargon. “You mean these glass shells.”
“Spot on,” said Anne. “They dissolve the necessary chemicals in…well, it would have to be heated water. Which they could pump….” She trailed off.
That wasn’t going to play well. “Like the sewer system under a street?” Daisuke tried to summarize.
Anne rocked her head from side to side, pursing her lips. “More like an aquarium.”
“Ah!” The analogy came to Daisuke. “The goldfish you scoop at a festival!”
“You what goldfish at a festival?”
“Scoop!” Daisuke grasped an imaginary paper scooper and bowl, making the familiar motions. “You know, you have to work fast before the paper breaks in the water. Don’t you scoop goldfish in Australia?”
“No, Daisuke,” Anne said. “We do not scoop goldfish in Australia.”
“Anyway, the fish will die in the air, but you might put them in a glass bowl.”
Anne was less impressed with Daisuke’s imagery than he was. “Glass bowls aren’t linked together via underground geothermal pipes.”
“By geothermal, you mean they use energy from the interior of the Earth, I mean, the interior of this planet—”
Junction Page 7
