Junction

by Daniel M. Bensen

  “I’m an asshole is what I am,” said Anne, who seemed to have completely forgotten about their future audience. “I automatically assume the worst of everyone. And I blow up way too easily. You know when I was in uni I actually kept track of which of the rows I started had a legitimate cause? I stopped after my roommate found the graph and we had a row about it.”

  Daisuke fell back on his original plan: give everyone a job. “We don’t need you for your people skills. We need you to understand this place and protect us.”

  Anne stopped walking. Her chin jerked up and down. “I know. And I’m scared I can’t do it.”

  “You can,” said Daisuke.

  “That’s easy for you to say.” Anne flapped a hand at him. “You’re Mr. Survivor-man. You’ve been lost in the wilderness a hundred times.”

  “Never wilderness as dangerous as this.”

  Things whizzed through the beam of his flashlight, as large as cats, sliding across the ground like giant pale hockey pucks. He had no idea what they were, or what they would do if they attacked.

  “Are those dangerous?” he asked.

  “Probably not,” said Anne. “Small nocturnal predators like squid or bats. What would be the terrestrial equivalent? Shrews?” And, as if she hadn’t just demonstrated her indispensibility, “Anyway, you can actually, you know, talk to people. Make them do what you want. I see how you keep defusing arguments.” She sniffed. “Despite my efforts to the bloody contrary.”

  If I was good at people, I wouldn’t have a dent on my finger where a ring used to be. But Daisuke wasn’t about to say that.

  “That’s what you’re doing now, isn’t it?” Anne looked up at him. “You’re trying to manipulate me into being a productive member of the team. No.” She closed her eyes and flapped her hands in front of her face. “I don’t mean manipulate, that sounds bad, but…I don’t know. Just. It’ll be hard.” She opened her eyes and looked into his. “I trust you.”

  “You shouldn’t,” said Daisuke, and nearly bit his tongue off. His eyes went to her bodycam. Shit. I shouldn’t have said that. Anne handed me the perfect ending for this scene, and I flubbed it.

  She frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean….” Daisuke scrambled for some platitude to put her off, but nothing came to him. A warm breeze wound up his leg. Why couldn’t he stop looking at Anne’s bodycam? Don’t look into the lens, you fool. “I…I mean. I am not so good with people.” He rubbed the place where his ring had once been. “I have a wife. We are in the middle of a divorce.”

  “Uh,” she said. “Oh. What does that have to do with anything? She’s not even on this planet.”

  Anne was, though.

  “My wife cheated on me,” said Daisuke. And there it was. He’d said it. He’d broken his promise and talked about his divorce on the public record. And it had been easy. Like leaning against what you thought was a solid wall to find it was only painted paper. Like taking a bite of a stinking durian and finding out how good it actually tasted.

  “She didn’t bother to hide it,” he said into Anne’s silence. “I was angry about that at the time. The way she let me find her with her boyfriend. It would hurt my reputation and my career. But it never got out.” Until now. But it felt too good to tell the story. “Now I wonder if she wasn’t trying to do me a favor. Give me an excuse, you know. Otherwise we might still be together, our hearts dying.”

  “Oh. Wow. I’m sorry, Daisuke.”

  He looked down at her face. Wormholes and stars swam, reflected, in her eyes. She hadn’t mispronounced his name this time, but Daisuke still heard ‘I love you’.

  Daisuke cleared his throat. “Call me ‘Dice’,” he said. “And I shouldn’t have told you all that.”

  “I’m glad you did, though,” said Anne, entirely failing to back off. “So you’re definitely available then?”

  Perhaps this was a good time for more truth. “Not really. The divorce isn’t finalized.” And somewhere in the night, a gun went off.

  So, a bit too much truth, there. Anne didn’t say anything as she led the way back to the campsite. That wind from the north-west was even stronger now, and all they had to do was turn around and walk with it, as fast as possible without stepping on any yellow tiles.

  Flashlight beams flicked through the fog like the legs of a giant panicking insect, centered on a spot of glass between Anne and Daisuke and the ‘fireplace’ where they’d eaten their wretched dinner.

  The crew was gathered around a lump of pale flesh the size of a large cat. Hariyadi seemed shaken and Pearson grim, while Nurul was excitedly whispering at Rahman’s camera. The journalist was all but rubbing her hands together, which meant something juicy had happened. Tyaney and Sing looked like spectators at a chess match. Misha just looked grumpy.

  “I was asleep,” he said. “You wake me up next time, it better be a bear. Or at least something with claws and teeth.” He examined the corpse. “Or legs. Or a mouth. Or a head.”

  Rahman squatted, focusing his camera on the creature, and despite everything, Daisuke felt the narration welling up inside him. “Come with me,” he whispered to Anne. “Follow my lead.”

  “That,” he said, striding from of the darkness, “is a shmoo. A larger version of the creature Anne and I saw earlier. Amazing, isn’t it?”

  “Your viewers might not agree,” said Pearson. “This thing looks like ten kilos of snot in a plastic bag.”

  “Less fearsome creatures than this have killed people,” said Daisuke, and looked at Anne.

  For a wonder, she took the cue. “Just ask anyone stung by a box jelly. Assuming that person hadn’t yet gone into cardiovascular collapse.” Anne knelt by the corpse, carefully avoiding the pool of steaming liquid around it. “What happened here?”

  “It was I,” said Hariyadi. “I was on patrol and my flashlight beam shone off something. There were eyes in the dark, like a cat’s.”

  “The eyes of a shmoo,” Daisuke clarified.

  “We have got to change that name,” Nurul muttered.

  “It attacked my boot.” Hariyadi lifted his foot, showing a splash of discoloration across the toe.

  “Acid burns,” said Anne. “Hm. So these things excrete acid when stressed, as well. Or…I’m thinking of that smaller shmoo eating its way through the silicone calking of its tile…. Is what we’re seeing here a feeding strategy? Or both?”

  “Misha, we have found your teeth and claws,” Daisuke said.

  “Oh,” said Misha. “Goody.”

  “Hey.” Anne looked up at Hariyadi. “That was a really dumb thing to do. You see a glowing-eyed creature snarling at you from the shadows and you kick it? You don’t even have real boots.” She stomped her steel-toed monsters for emphasis.

  “I did not kick it,” Hariyadi said stuffily. “I stood still. It…” he coughed, “…ran at my shoe. Or to be precise, it moved. Without legs. I kicked it away, giving me enough time to draw my weapon and shoot the beast.”

  “Nice to know bullets work on these things,” said Pearson.

  “But…but….” Anne seemed to be struggling with the urge to get angry. If so, she lost. “That was really stupid. You had no idea what shooting that thing would do. It might have exploded like a balloon full of acid. The bullet might not even have penetrated. Or it might have gone all the way through and ricocheted off the tile under it and hit you. The bullet might have set off another exploding tile.”

  “We should be careful,” said Daisuke. “Anne is right. We don’t know what’s out here.”

  “What’s out here is one less shmoo, anyway,” Misha said. “How did it run with no legs, I am wondering.”

  “Yes, Anne,” said Daisuke. “How does it run?”

  “You want me to dissect this thing now?” Anne said.

  “Yeah,” Pearson said. “You said we don’t know what’s out here. It’s ti
me to change that.”

  Daisuke nodded encouragingly at Anne. Rahman, behind his camera, gave her a thumbs-up.

  Anne blinked and rubbed her face. Smoothed down her hair. “All right,” she said. “It’s time for an alien autopsy. Everyone come shine your torch on the shmoo. And Daisuke, turn it over with your boot, all right?”

  Under the light of their flashlights, the creature was a bruised gray, like mashed banana. The bullet hole was visible as a puckered scar, from which oozed steaming whitish liquid.

  “The bullet was stopped inside the shmoo’s body,” Anne said. “But it didn’t hit a bone. This thing doesn’t seem to have any. And this steaming discharge. Nothing alive could be that hot. Not while it was alive. But when it was pierced by the bullet… the way its body flopped when Daisuke moved it…. Press into its side again, Dice.”

  She winked at him and Daisuke’s heart flopped over.

  “Look at that,” said Anne, prodding the shmoo. “Look how it sloshes around. Several layers with blood and viscera between. Not a tube-within-a-tube like us but…bags-within-bags.”

  Daisuke summarized for the camera: “So this creature is like several water balloons, one inside the other.” He looked down at his steaming boot. “All filled with acid?”

  “Can’t be,” said Anne. “There’s only acid in this outermost layer, the one under the skin. The reservoir of sulfuric acid is sandwiched between what must be some very tough barriers.”

  “So how does this thing hunt?” asked Daisuke.

  “Probably with these.” Anne pointed at a transparent, centimeter-long spine, one of hundreds that dotted the creature’s tough skin like the quills of a porcupine. “Let me…. Dice, you got a pair of pliers on you?”

  As it happened, Daisuke did. He plucked his multi-tool from his utility belt and passed it to Anne. Her warm fingers brushed across his.

  “Don’t want to touch this thing with bare skin,” she muttered, clamping the pliers to the tip of the spine and pulling. The spine slid a good five centimeters from the shmoo’s body before it stuck.

  “Hm,” said Anne. “These spines go all the way to the core of the animal. I bet they’re for sucking up the juice of the prey animal. The shmoo doesn’t even have to inject digestive enzymes like a spider. All it has to do is pierce the inner layer that protects a glasslands animal from its own acid.”

  “As I did, when I shot it?” Hariyadi asked.

  “But the bullet didn’t go all the way through,” said Anne. “It pierced the outer layer, the inner one, the gooey center of the animal, but got lodged here.” She prodded a black lump in the rapidly deflating mess. “Against the other side of the inner layer on its way out.”

  “Damn, that thing must be tough on the inside,” Pearson said.

  “It would have to be, to defend against exactly the sort of attack it uses on its prey.” Anne scooted around the shmoo. “Where are those eyes? I can’t seem to find them.”

  “It seems a fragile existence,” said Hariyadi. “A walking chemical reaction.”

  “You’ve just described yourself,” Anne said. “Ever see someone with a gut wound? Same problem.”

  Daisuke heard a sharp intake of breath and realized that maybe Hariyadi had seen a gut wound digest a man from the inside out. Perhaps the dear colonel had caused one.

  “Ah,” said Anne, “there the eyes are. Interesting.”

  “Interesting?” Daisuke prompted.

  “I can feel the lenses inside,” Anne said, prodding the sagging body with the plier nose of the multi-tool. “They’re embedded in the tough inner membrane. But how does the organism see out through its outer skin?” She brushed the tool around the glass spines at one end of the oblong body, smoothing them into a swirling circle like the petals of a chrysanthemum. “Shine your light here. At this angle.”

  The chrysanthemum petals blazed suddenly with blue light. As Anne poked them, the light flicked to green, then red.

  “Aha,” she said. “These spines aren’t just transparent. They can conduct light all the way through to the core of the animal. It can even tune its visual system by slight adjustments to the angles of these…what…optical spines?”

  “Like….” Daisuke’s brow furrowed as he worked on a way to dumb that down. “Uh…a periscope? Eye glasses?”

  “Like a weird alien eyeball made of millions of tiny prisms floating in acid,” said Anne. “That’s what it’s like.” She pushed off her knees and looked up at Hariyadi. “These things are going to be a problem.”

  “If we stay here,” Nurul said.

  “We’re staying here,” said Pearson, and turned to Anne before the journalist could respond. “Houlihan, how do we solve the problem?”

  “Well, it’s not like we can dig a moat to keep these things out.” Anne rapped the glass ground with her knuckles and Nurul flinched. “And I don’t know how much luck you’d have if you tried to kick it, or even step on it. A bullet works, but only two of us have guns.”

  “So,” said Hariyadi. “As I said before, we must retire to the plane. I don’t believe these shmoos can climb into planes, can they?”

  Anne nodded. “The plane would be more secure—”

  “If it wasn’t in danger of blowing up,” Pearson said.

  “Oh!” Hariyadi shook his head in disgust. “Surely the plane is safe by now. It is not even burning. Alekseyev, will it explode?”

  Misha gave an aggressive sort of Russian shrug. “I know that how? I must examine my plane, his engine. Not until tomorrow.”

  “First thing tomorrow morning,” said Hariyadi.

  “In the meantime,” Daisuke said, “I know how to make some weapons.”

  “Yeah?” Pearson said. “Out of what?”

  “Bamboo. Tree branches. Rocks….” Daisuke shook his head. “None of those around here. We might use shovels?”

  “You know,” said Pearson, “I like that idea, Matsumori. Astarina, you know where the collapsible shovels are? Issue one to whoever’s got next watch. Houlihan, Tyaney, and I’ll come too. Three people, two shovels, one gun. We’ll keep us safe the rest of the night.”

  Hariyadi grimaced. “And what of the next day?”

  “Well,” said Pearson, “we’ll just have to shoot that alien when we get to it.”

  Chapter Six

  Staying and Going

  The morning light slashed across the glasslands and into Daisuke’s eyes like a sickle on a chain. He licked at his mossy teeth while Misha grunted and cursed at the nose of the plane. Finally, the engine cowling of the Cessna fell to the ground, ringing against the glass.

  “Fuck, Alekseyev!” said Pearson. “Do you want to set off another explosion?”

  Misha just kicked the cowling away across the shattered ground. Like the rest of them, huddled together in the lee of the sideways airplane, the pilot was probably sore from a night spent on the heated glass, queasy from a partially pre-digested breakfast, and less than eager to march out here and perform an autopsy on the plane.

  “Is this really necessary?” Anne asked.

  “Well?” said Hariyadi.

  “Eh!” Misha grunted, shoulder-deep in the mechanical bowels of the plane. “What butcher reassembled my plane like this? Sloppy! No wonder my steering was so much like slug.”

  “Alekseyev,” Pearson barked. “Why did we crash?”

  “Oh yes.” The pilot extracted himself from his plane and wiped his hands on his pants. “Good news. We can camp in cold plane, hold big glass spikes, fight alien motorcycle slugs, no problem.”

  “Huh?” said Rahman.

  “Plane will not explode,” Misha said. “Inert. Whole thing. Electrical system is baked.”

  Pearson sighed. “You mean fried?”

  “Yes. Fried. What was I thinking of?”

  “How did it happen?” Hariyadi demanded.

&nb
sp; Misha threw up his hands. “How, how, everyone is asking how. How did plane crash? I tell you. Electrical system fried. How is fried electrical system? Probably there is too much electricity in one place or not enough in another. You want better explanation, you should have brought electrician. Or maybe stayed home.”

  “Electrical system?” said Hariyadi. “What about the radio?”

  “Fried,” Misha said. “Also eaten up.”

  “What?” said Hariyadi, Nurul, and Anne at the same time.

  “These animals,” Misha reached into the engine and pulled out a glass ball the size of a snail, candy-colored with complicated grooves around its surface, “they eat electronics. Etch them like acid. Silicon, right, Anne?”

  “Silicone,” said Anne, reaching out. “Let me see that.”

  Misha handed it to her. “Why bother with examinations? We are really stuck here. We have no choice but waiting.”

  “What about other radios?” Hariyadi insisted. “Walkie-talkies. Is anyone here carrying one?”

  “I have one, of course,” said Pearson. “But we don’t have line-of-sight with base and Junction doesn’t have satellites to bounce signals off. But the fact that we didn’t return yesterday means they’ll know something is wrong. They’ll be looking for us.”

  “So you say.”

  Pearson smiled unconvincingly. “Colonel Hariyadi, I thought you were a man of faith.”

  “If you mean am I religious,” said Hariyadi, “yes. I am registered as Muslim, and I wonder how I would have gone had I the misfortune to be born in your country, Colonel Pearson. Americans make much of their pluralistic society, but in fact—”

  “In fact, we don’t get sidetracked easily,” said Pearson. “We will stay here.”

  “Why must I?” Hariyadi spread his palms. “I can take half the supplies and set out for the base with Nurul and Rahman, and the natives.” He scanned their faces. “And anyone else who wishes to accompany us.”

  Pearson had stopped smiling. “You know I can’t let you do that.”