by Rok Chillah
"Is it me," Ridge said, "or are the lights really turning on as we get close?"
Lantz shook her head. "I think it's all just the way we see it. Why would the lights turn on-you mean, like someone is turning them on?"
Ridge shook his head. "No, more like it's automatic. Like there was no reason for them to be on until we came."
"Because there was nobody here until we came," Tomson added with a sardonic tone. "I'm becoming a pessimist. Someone please help me." One or two persons laughed, and Lantz punched him lightly on the arm.
The platform followed its track along the curving, increasingly bright, but still barren walls, into a dark tunnel that led into the bow area. The platform slowed as it entered a long, dark area that resembled an outdoor trolley stop complete with benches, overhead lights (now dim), and billboard schedules and announcements. The platform made several lurching motions and stopped. "We're here," Tomson said simply, and Ridge echoed: "That's as far as we go." He turned to the others and said: "Stay close together. The bow section is smaller, but it's full of small quarters and narrow passages. If we keep making our way forward, we are bound to reach the CP. If our luck holds, we could be safely in the CP with Captain Venable in just an hour or two."
"Yes!" several persons exclaimed. A few high-fived. The group stepped onto the more solid steel platform. They had mixed looks of relief and apprehension. Ridge understood their feelings. It was a relief to be out of the cargo holds and to have gotten this far. It was a feeling of apprehension to think of what new and unpleasant surprises might await them here, because it was quiet and there was no sign of life. They waited a minute or two on the platform, listening to the hum of air circulators, the soft crackle of fluorescent lights, the muted banging of metal as the platform they'd arrived on cooled and settled in its berth. Each time a relay slammed shut, a metallic clang traveled through the shimmering corridors with their highly polished floors. Each time a thermocouple closed or a sensor triggered some change of state, like time to turn on or off an air vent or a climate control duct, Ridge and his companions jumped. When Neptune Express docked, she brought with her an entire industrial capability including factories, hangars, offices, and an internal trolley system that seamlessly linked with the local one. On a busy day in port, thousands of workers might stream through here. The ship would dock in the external secondary moons of Luna or L-5, and an army of workers and officials would get her ready for her next journey-hence the trolley station. A smaller but no less excited flurry of motion and bustling humanity would erupt when Neptune Express docked at Triton, which hopefully would be soon.
"This way," Ridge said, pointing to the widest corridor leading forward. The group gladly followed him. "Look!" Jerez exclaimed, pointing to a huge image in a wall between two pillars. The image glowed with a lovely blue light against the black backdrop of space. The image looked much like any of the live action shots they'd become accustomed to seeing during their earlier days of passage. Neptune had a light, almost happy blue glow. As the legend inscribed digitally on the glowing signboards related, Neptune was slightly over 30 times as far from the sun as Earth, averaging nearly five billion kilometers or nearly 2.8 billion miles from the sun. Neptune measured roughly 156,000 km around its equator, or almost 97,000 miles. As a gas giant, it had a mass roughly one third that of Earth. It had about 58 times the volume of Earth, and just under 15 times the surface area if one could call the outer edge of its gaseous, wispy atmosphere a surface. An astronaut floating there would appear to weigh about one and one sixth as much as he or she would on Earth. If that sounded hospitable, the next fact quickly shot down any hope of comfort: the hydrogen, helium, and methane based atmosphere stayed at a chilly minus 214 degrees Centigrade or minus 353 degrees Fahrenheit.
"Those pictures are so beautiful," Jerez said with a tear in one eye.
"Aren't they though," Tomson said shaking his head.
"Almost feels like we're halfway back to normal," Ridge said with a grin. He recalled the warmth and comfort of WorkPod01 as he remembered it. He remembered how good it had felt to crawl into his warm bunk and snuggle up in the privacy of his dreams in his down sleeping bag. It occurred to him that he wasn't tired at all yet, though they'd been on the go for hours now, and stressed to their utmost with several horrid deaths. He should be mentally, physically, and spiritually exhausted, but he wasn't.
"Look, there is Triton," Brenna said, pointing. Ridge noticed that she had the faintest lisp, for there was a tiny gap between her upper front teeth. The more he saw of her, the more he longed to be with her. The feeling was so strong that he wasn't fighting it anymore. His wife Dorothy was a distant condition right now, a possibility rather than a factor. If they ever got back home alive, he might tell her about Brenna, or he might not. Maybe when the world got back to normal, he'd wonder what he had ever seen in his soft-faced young woman with her wine-dark hair and eyes a darker blue than the dangerous atmosphere of Neptune. Ridge shook these thoughts away. His gaze followed her pale, pointing finger toward an image of Triton rising over the cusp of the eighth planet. Both worlds glowed with distant sunlight, and the faint rings of Neptune curved like a veil uniting them. Triton's diameter was 2,705 kilometers (1,623 miles), compared with Luna's approximately 3,476 kilometers or 2,086 miles. Triton's thin nitrogen atmosphere glowed grayish-white above the Sea God's blue atmosphere. Neptune looked deceptively Earth-like in these images, but Triton's surface temperature at minutes 391 Fahrenheit made it the coldest spot in the solar system.
"I don't like it in there," Yu said. Ridge looked in the direction Yu was looking. "The corridors are too empty, too quiet," Yu said.
"Yeah, it's scary," Jerez said. Her teeth audibly chattered. Her eyes were large and scared.
"We'll wait here," Yu said. "I have the gun."
"We shouldn't split up," Tomson said.
"Let's all go together," Ridge said. He felt sorry for Jerez, but Yu was beginning to really irritate him and he almost welcomed the idea of parking the bio-engineer someplace until he could sort out what was going on.
"We'll stay here and guard our retreat," Jerez said with false cheer.
"What retreat?" Tomson said. "There is no way back out there that I can see."
"Back to WorkPod01," Yu said seriously. "That's the only place we know."
"That's home," Jerez said vehemently. "We're staying here."
Ridge and Tomson exchanged looks. Tomson shrugged, seeming to say 'let's get on with it.' Ridge rolled it around in his head. He had no real authority, just a thankless position as Senior Engineer. "Okay," Ridge said. "You call your own shots. We'll keep in touch on the collar mikes."
Jerez touched the large black button clipped to the edge of her collar by her throat. "We'll hold the fort over here. If you find the Captain, give us a holler and we'll come running."
Reluctantly, Ridge gathered his diminished team together. Tomson, Brenna, and Lantz. "Anyone else want to stay?" he asked halfheartedly. They shook their heads. "We're sticking with you," Lantz said. Together, they marched off down the wide central corridor. The corridor itself curved, so that they had limited visibility under its constantly low ceiling, but they could see through strategically placed windows. In the distance, they made out a trolley station on the opposite hull. Part of a white tubular object protruded-the nose end of a high-speed rail car. This must be the internal, working rail line, Ridge thought, and that the commercial, fancy one for docking purposes. Once they were away from their station of egress, there were no more ceiling panels to look through, and Ridge became nervous about the limited visibility.
The four walked slowly and carefully down the corridors. It looked as though humans had just stepped outside for a few minutes. In glass-windowed cubicles on either side, desks and chairs stood empty. Dozens of persons must work here, Ridge thought as he looked at coffee mugs on desks, digital pads open to receive dictation, family holocubes knickknack shelves. It looked so congruent with his memories of life on Earth that he al
most forgot they were closer to Neptune than to Earth or Luna. The others appeared to be thinking the same thing. Brenna tried a door in passing, and it swung open. Silently, the door crept open a few inches and stopped. The four persons stopped to listen. They heard air in vents, wind in airshafts, small machinery clicking in the walls as a million Microsystems fine-tuned the climate. "Wonder where they all are?" Brenna said.
"If you see any calendars," Ridge said, "let me know. That might give us a clue."
Tomson gave a humorless, nervous laugh and ran a hand quickly over his short, kinky hair. "Man, this is almost as creepy as that wasteland outside."
Lantz pointed to a glass case that stood partially open. "Look, emergency equipment. I see guns." They stepped into the office. Carefully, Tomson and Ridge sidled in holding their guns ready. Lantz and Brenna crowded behind them. Ridge sniffed. "Smell that?"
Tomson wrinkled his nose, shook his head, looked at Ridge. "What?"
"Dust," Ridge said. "Stale air."
"Cold," Brenna said, wrapping her arms around herself. Lantz followed suit, and goose bumps appeared in pinkish-white fields on her triceps.
Ridge said carefully: "If I had to guess, I'd say this was all shut down for a long time and just turned on when we came. You know, sort of like those lights that snap on when someone gets near your house back on Earth." It did smell stale in here, he thought.
Brenna put her finger on it: "There are no people smells. No perfume, no sweat, no mothball sweaters, no shaggy coats, no leather gloves or purses. Not that we'd see them in space, but civilians on Luna or Triton might have them. There's nothing like that here, nor are there any people sounds, like someone flushing a toilet, laughing, pouring coffee, sneezing. Nothing."
"It's a black hole of people," Tomson said softly. "Why?"
Ridge pointed to the open locker, where a half dozen long-arms stood in perfect soldierly alignment with their buzzmuzzles pointing up and their trigger guards pointing outward. Along the inside walls of the cabinet, left and right, were several small-arms plus all the expected equipment, from cleaning kits and synchronizers to spare charge packs. "Take a look at this." He walked over to the locker and knelt. With one fingertip he traced back and forth on the steel floor of the gun case. A fine layer of dark dust coated everything. From there, rising, he tracked the black dust to desks, chairs, ledges. "It's on everything," he said.
"Soot," Tomson said, sniffing his fingers after rubbing them on a ledge. "There was a fire in the ship."
Lantz pointed to several chairs standing around as if the owners had just risen a minute ago for their lunch break. "Nobody has sat here since it got dusty," Lantz said.
Tomson gestured with both arms. "Look, all the chairs are turned as if they suddenly rose and headed for the door we just came in."
Brenna pointed to a cup lying on its side on the floor farther in the office bay. "Looks like a few people did drop things. A cup, a handkerchief, a slipper."
Ridge added: "In and orderly fashion, I'd say. Like it was a drill. Or an emergency, but they had trained for it. But losing a slipper and not going back for it is a sure sign there was something extraordinary happening."
Brenna examined the closet and pulled out a rifle. "It's charged, but it's been on Sleep." She pulled the Wake pin, and the indicators glowed green along the stock under the barrel. "God knows for how long."
"Arm yourselves," Ridge said. "Let's take all the rifles. We can use them." He handed each of them one of the stun-rifles and pulled down two extras with Yu and Jerez in mind. "If you see lights, we can use those also."
A minute later they strode quietly down the corridor. Ridge felt a trifle more at ease now that they were better armed. "Keep an eye out for spare charge packs," he told them.
The corridor led to a central rotunda. The floors were coated with that faint black soot, but otherwise everything gleamed as though cleaning crews had been working nonstop.
"Ridge," a voice said. Yu.
Ridge whipped his hand to his throatcom. "What is it?"
"Not sure. Something is happening."
"We're coming back." Ridge turned and started to run. "I knew we should not have split up."
"What is it?" Brenna said with a worried face as all three fell in behind Ridge at a goodly trot.
"Not sure," Ridge said, "but why take chances. I want us all together from here on in."
They heard Jerez scream, and that was when they knew something was really wrong. They started running back to the trolley stop as fast as they could. Their footfalls echoed around the gleaming windows and walls. Dust kicked up lightly around their feet as they pattered along the rubbery floors. They heard shouting-Yu, Ridge thought-and then another scream—Jerez, Ridge thought—and then muffled shouting from both.
As they emerged into the trolley station, they saw swarms of frantic movement. A number of mudmen bodies lay spattered on the tiled floor surfaces, smearing the fine blue and white decorator tiles with greenish-brown blood. Yu and Jerez had left the moving platform and had their backs against a dead-end wall. The platform rocked as mudmen clambered up from underneath. Jerez looked dazed and bloodied as she fought two of the creatures off, wielding a wooden staff she'd found, with which she swiped at them. Her face was contorted in a silent scream, and her eyes were half-closed in terror. Yu's face looked calm, and his eyes had a mechanical, methodical appearance as if he'd shut down all emotions and was acting with his last shreds of rational calm. One by one, he shot deadly sizzling charges into his attackers. He aimed his gun again and again until it ran out, and then both he and Jerez disappeared under a pile of attackers.
"Careful!" was all Ridge could shout as he and his three companions appeared in the midst of this roiling chaos. It must be clear—they were armed to the teeth with fresh weapons, but a single stray shot could sever a limb or a head, and those must not belong to Jerez or Yu.
In another ten seconds, the appalling truth became clear. Ridge and his companions fired away at the edges of the mudmen crowd. There must be three dozen of the creatures, Ridge thought, shooting those that turned and ran toward him with their talons open to grasp and kill. The mudmen had a kind of fungus-like, mushroom smell, of forest floor and rotting wood and moisture in pulpy crevices. When scorched with the charge guns, they gave off a stench like burned rubber. They were leathery, and when they came apart under the darting energy rays, amid the smoke and carbonization, Ridge could smell the odor of their half-digested food, their feces, their rotting-leather blood. Several mudmen heads exploded as Ridge and his companions fired. It was all over in a minute or so, but by then the disaster was complete. The few surviving mudmen scampered away, throwing themselves over the sides into the dark to escape. They left the platform littered with the bodies of their fellows—and the bodies of their two human victims.
"Damn you!" Lantz sobbed as she walked through the roiling smoke, kicking mudmen body parts aside. Brenna, Ridge, and Tomson stepped over mudmen bodies. Ridge found himself slithering over their slime and offal. He slipped at one point, and nearly sprained his free hand bracing himself against the wall while holding up his rifle with the other hand. The fall brought him face to face with the mudmen's handiwork. Brenna screamed hysterically.
Ridge felt tears of anger, sorrow, and pity rolling from his eyes as he regarded the torn bodies that lay propped up against the wall. The remains were largely skeletal. The mudmen were like the fierce flesh-eating piranhas of the Amazon rivers. With their blank faces, slitty buttonhole eyes, and those little round mouths full of rows of tiny teeth, the mudmen had swarmed over their victims. They had sucked and torn and ground and whirled the flesh away right down to the bone. If they'd had another few minutes there would be nothing left but bone. As it was, most of the flesh was gone, and what remained in the torn and twisted jumpsuits were grinning caricatures of death.
"There is nothing we can do for them," Ridge said quietly. "We've got to get to safety." Seeing the hesitation on the others' faces, he added
: "We can burn or bury them later. We'll talk about them, maybe have a service. For now, we need to get out of here. Stay with me!" So saying, he started back toward the rotunda at a jogging pace. The others fell in behind him. They ran with their rifles at ready.
Nobody spoke, nobody cried—the situation had gone from desperate to grim, and Ridge could not fathom how it might get worse, but it surely could. Each knew they had to be prepared for some final stand, much as Yu and Jerez had just been forced to make. Hopefully, the end would be less ugly if it had to come now.
Chapter 9
Ridge was now more aware than ever of the claustrophobic effect as they ran toward the rotunda. They were four sooty, sweaty persons in dirty jumpsuits open at the collar where helmets should have fit, had they any helmets to wear or a vacuum to wear them in. They bristled with guns and fear. The corridor ran along the curvature of the ship, so that they seemed forever to be headed down under the ceiling. They seemed to be forever descending, and the ceiling ahead and behind robbed them of visibility.
In the rotunda, under a dome about 50 feet high, they stopped at a directory plaque. Ridge looked quickly around and noted closed doors all around, and a mezzanine of unknown function above. With Brenna, Tomson, and Lantz crowding around him in a sea of gun barrels, Ridge touched the view screen on the directory plaque. Simple interactive controls responded to the tip of his index finger. He moved his fingertip about and brought up a succession of images. They stood at the entrance to a warren of tunnels leading into the sensitive command structures of the nose. "There is the CP," he said, tapping on an image of a small area near the tip. He moved his fingertip, and the images rotated. A succession images and blueprints scrolled by. "There appears to be some kind of huge warehouse."
