by Rok Chillah
Brenna frowned as she looked up. "Ridge?"
He looked down. "Yes?" As he did so, he saw the growing horror on her face. She started to say: "Mudmen" and at that moment Ridge saw the claw coming through the door. Each of the mudman's hands had one large claw and three small ones in opposition, like a thumb and three fingers. A head like a button mushroom with stitches around the sides, and slitty eyes looked down in mudman glee as it reached out for him. Its claw raked Ridged over the head before he grabbed the arm and twisted. The thing rounded its mouth and wheezed a horrid squeal that started as glee and ended in pain. More mudmen piled on top of it. Ridge punched upward several times, caving its face in while he twisted its arm until the arm came off in his hand with a sour honk of twisting innards and torn mushroom bone. The thing lashed out with its other hand and cut Ridge across the forehead. Ridge ignored the blinding pain and the blood running over his face. He reached up with both hands and hung from the lever. The first mudman died as he crushed it with the door, plus the others were stupidly putting their weight down rather than pulling up. During that moment of mindlessness, Brenna climbed up along Ridge wielding a large kitchen butcher knife and started carving at the mudman. First she sawed off its head, which fell down and spattered on the floor. As sickly, yolky yellow fluid drooled down out of the neck cavity mixed with greenish blood, she carved some more. She carved off its shoulders one by one and they fell on the floor exposing papery muscles and exposed ribs that were a poor genetic imitation of heavier, sturdier human ribs. The mudmen appeared to be quickly, cheaply manufactured (or hatched) life forms of limited usefulness and lifespan. In a way, it was another triumph of Venable cynicism, Ridge thought as he staggered back. Brenna finished sawing the mudman cadaver in half at the waist, and took Ridge's place hanging on the door. Ridge stepped back blindly and fell on the floor. "I've slammed it shut!" she said. She groaned with effort. He heard a click. "I've got it locked."
"Quick," he said, lying on the soft rubbery floor but propping himself up. "Get me a towel, anything to stanch the blood and clear my eyes so we can get going."
She found a box full of sealed packets with wet first-aid wipes and brought that to him. They tore open all the packets and got the blood flow stanched. The wipes had that sharp stinging smell of isopropyl alcohol, and he hoped they would help kill the germs in his wound. She found an old shirt somewhere and brought it to him. She tore it in strips and tied them around his head. His forehead burned and throbbed, and his head hurt a little. He hoped there wasn't some mudmen poison in those claws. He recalled old school warnings about mushrooms and hoped they didn't have some deadly poison that would kill him as he walked. So far so good, he thought as she helped him up and they hurried back the way they'd come.
Three hooting tones sounded all at once in the next room. Brenna and Ridge jumped back as they caught just a glimpse around the corner of three mudmen rising up through the shaft they'd come from. That way was now blocked. "They've got us surrounded," he said. "What to do?"
They looked around, rifling through cabinets, and Brenna found it first: a row of gas canisters lined up in a cabinet under a sort of barbecue stove. Each canister was about the size of a gallon milk bottle and had a fitting that allowed it to be screwed into the receptacle in the stove from which gas was drawn off to burn under food. The lighter lay on the tile counter, and Ridge grabbed it. Brenna handed him a bottle. It wasn't mean to go this way, but he'd have to improvise. He reached over and tore one of her sleeves off. He wrapped the sleeve around the brass fitting. He opened the liquor cabinet, took down a bottle of rum, and smashed its neck off in a sink. With several abortive snaps of the lighter, he managed to get the contraption blazing. Behind him, Brenna tore off her other sleeve and manufactured a similar bomb. Ridge stepped into the doorway of the room where by now a half dozen mudmen were milling around hooting and breathing at each other-apparently they worked in a collective thinking mode, not being very bright individually but being rather fiendishly effective collectively. Ridge was in luck. A second or two later-the mudmen had just begun to turn and raise their clawed hands toward him-the silica based rubber petcock melted off the bottle, and a thick continuous flame gushed out. The flame was a meter long and half was wide in diameter. It was reddish and bluish but white toward the origin, and caused mudman flesh to shrivel. The place filled with a stink like singed plastic, and a sooty, greasy black smoke drifted about. The mudmen shrieked and tried to run, but their fellows blocked the way. A half dozen became quickly incapacitated. Brenna handed him a new bottle as the old one petered out. He rolled the dying bottle across the floor into the crowd, and the surviving mudmen dove back down the hole. Brenna walked about with a meat cleaver, chopping up the remaining mudmen, some of whom still reached up with wide reddish eyes and pleading round mouths-more from hunger than from a dull realization they were in pain and dying. The last mudman down the hole pulled the door shut, and Ridge obliged by standing on the trapdoor.
"This won't do," Brenna said.
"I know," he said. "I have an idea."
"Me too." Together, they gathered all the bottles of liquor. They stacked up the gas bottles, wrapped them in odds and ends of cloth, and soaked them with rum or vodka. Ridge lit the first bottle and stood prepared as he signaled Brenna to pull on the door. As the bottle caught fire with a loud whoosh, he nodded to Brenna. She pulled open the door. A number of mudmen, having already forgotten their dreadful lesson, hovered below with round mouths and beseeching eyes and gripping claws reaching up for human flesh. Ridge doused them in flames and they melted back-literally-shriveling in a lot as they fell back. Brenna lit a bottle on fire and dropped it down the hole. It exploded in a ball of flame as the bottle shattered below. This gave them the idea to advance on their enemies, and they descended into the hole throwing more bottles and shooting more gas until the heat and smoke were so bad they had to climb back into the galley and close the door. They could hear alarms going off as the ship realized it was on fire internally. Ridge was so flushed with combat and anger that he didn't care if the ship exploded in space and if he and Brenna and the rest of the human race died at that moment, just so long as these genetic monsters were destroyed.
Klaxons blared, sirens shrilled, alarms warbled. The noise was deafening. The kitchens began to fill with smoke, and when he saw Brenna double over, coughing and choking, Ridge knew they could not survive here in the burning hell they themselves had created. He signaled to Brenna and climbed back up the ladder. They worked in unison, using up the last of the alcohol and gas bottles. She pushed open the trap door in the ceiling, and as mudmen claws streaked down, he turned a withering gas fire on them. The arms shriveled and dropped off. A mudman reared up on fire and staggered away. Its upper body fell off and the lower torso walked another few steps before falling down. Ridge and Brenna forced their way up into the executive lobby. There, they killed another half dozen mudmen before the smoke started to thicken. It was a race for time between the growing smoke and the hard-working exhausts in the climate control system. Decorative plates and collars fell from the ducting, exposing raw silvery accordion ducts that trembled from the maximal exertions of the engines trying to clear smoke out. The system had been designed centuries ago to handle some pretty devastating fires, but the machinery and the material were old and on the verge of failing. "Down!" Ridge yelled. He and Brenna threw themselves on the carpet amid burning pieces of mudmen bodies and embers glowing in the rug fibers. Lying down might buy them another minute or two of life before the smoke overwhelmed them.
Flames licked up as the secretary desk began to burn. The seat behind it smoked thickly. The noise continued unabated, and Ridge noticed that sprinklers had finally begun to weakly start twirling out water once they pushed through all the accumulated moths' nests and other debris in the pipes.
A change seemed to go through the ship, and Ridge wondered if it was about to blow up. That would be the final and irrevocable end of everything, he thought, as he crawled
close to Brenna and put his arms around her. She choked and coughed and pressed her face against his chest. He held her closely and stroked her thick hair, thinking this would be as good a way as any, to go together, if go they must.
The lights went out, and the ship shuddered. Then an emergency light came on, and another. The klaxons fell silent, as did the rest of the noise. The ship was at its utmost limit, and conserving power as it struggled to stay alive. If the hull were compromised-if the air and water it had hoarded all along escaped-then the ship would have no way to repair its precious life content. Systems would shut down, and she would become a drifting hulk, a cold cinder, a shattered shell drifting among the galaxies for the rest of time. How many such hulks from how many lost civilizations were even now floating on the luminous tendrils of alien nebulas? So Ridge wondered as he pushed the cloth up out of his eyes, and brushed his blood away with grime-blackened fingers. Brenna's face was pale and composed as she lay in his lap, with her lips turning blue and her eyes gaining shadows as when a brightly orbiting satellite disappears around the cusp of a planet and enters the nightside where sunlight is no more than a weakly reflected silver dream. So he thought as his own eyes started to close.
Even at that moment, he looked up and saw that with the ship's systems failing, the doors to the inner sanctum in the nose of the ship had slipped open. In the dim light of the emergency apparatus, he glimpsed the inside of that room whose ceiling was the small dome inside the very bullet-nose of the entire ship itself. He saw in there a great coffin, like that of a pharaoh or some Maya king buried in jade and gold. The coffin was of a reddish stone with creamy yellow veins. It had a thick glass lid, and through the lid he saw the sleeping face of the caudillo himself--Armando Cleator de Colfirio, the billionaire who had built Nebula Express out of a planetary cargo vessel during a final frantic year of preparations.
Wrapped around the coffin was a huge mass of mudman material like a tide flowing down from a mountain. Snuggled in the top of the dome itself was a face of sorts, with many slitted eyes that now opened to look down in baleful reddish hate and rage. The Queen, whom Venable had inadvertently created when twisting the genes of the cleaner humanoids to serve his selfish ends. Embedded in her grasp was Venable himself, looking helpless and melancholy. When Venable saw Ridge, Venable's face assumed a mix of fear and fatalistic expectation. His eyes spoke of the colossal evil he had created, in whose lap he now lay as it manipulated him in order to control the entire ship. Apparently, the caudillo had succeeded in immuring himself so tightly and thoroughly, probably with redundant and independent support systems, that the Queen had not managed yet to terminate his incubation.
Ridge staggered to his feet. He heard the Queen blow like a ship in her harbor, a thousand mudmen mouths strong. She bellowed defiance and loathing as Ridge staggered into the inner sanctum, the workpod that kept the pharaoh in wait until his afterlife. Ridge lit a pair of canisters and walked in with a flaming ball in each hand. The Queen screamed as he tossed first one, then the other. As he did so, he glimpsed the mechanism by which the mudmen were created. Her great hulk contained a thousand little orifices, which had been closed, but which now fell open as the flames began to kill her. She sweated yellow and bloody fluids, groaning loudly, and from her orifices popped a mass of slithering black things resembling eels. As these things slid out of their holes and wiggled down the slopes of her body, they contacted the air and puffed out into cottony larvae. Still wiggling, they crept away from her body and entered holes in the floor-which had probably been designed long ago with cabling and conduit in mind but had now assumed a biological function. Ridge understood: they dropped down into the hollow spaces in the ship's nose, between floors, where they attached themselves to the steel girders and grew until a mudman ate its way out and commenced its simple life of cleaning and killing, which after all were the same thing in a mudman's feeble and programmed brain.
Venable looked toward Ridge with enormous longing in his eyes, trapped as he was in the webbing of the Queen's cobwebs and pupa weavings. Ridge understood in that moment that Venable had only one thought, and that was: I have lost. I did not win over you, and Brenna remained yours to the end. Emanating a look that said those things, Venable blackened, shriveled, and doubled up on himself. His hands rose up toward his head, and he seemed to tilt his head into his hands, and his sizzling brain fell out even as the entire blackening mass contracted into a shapeless oblong of charred and oily flesh. A white coating of ashes formed, hiding the thing that had been Venable, and in that moment the ship shuddered again. The ship seemed to relax a bit and die just a little bit more.
Ridge fell down and flickered in and out of consciousness. Wondering where Brenna was-hoping to have one last glimpse of her before he died-he raised himself effortfully on his elbows and coughed. He thought he spied her lifeless figure lying several meters away in the center of the reception area.
Flames licked up and the Queen fell silent. The last of her eels fell down and wriggled on the floor, burning to death. The caudillo remained in his coffin, seemingly unscathed. His pale skin and sharp nose glowed red in the firelight, and his white hair looked almost transparent.
A voice spoke, in Argentine-accented English: "Thank you, Ricardo. You and Brenna have done well in ridding us of this monstrosity."
Ridge was on the verge of fading away, when he felt a cool breath of air. Was this death? Was he falling into a pond of fresh cool water where all this grime and pain would be washed away? Was this some peaceful garden where one could lie comfortably and smell blossoms in the night as white nymphs came this way, slipping gossamer garments off pale shoulders even as their feet stepped into a silky pools of water?
"Breathe," said a voice. Ridge recognized the long-ago voice of Colfirio. It was a strong, determined male voice, aging and racked with cigar smoker's debilitations, but still in charge as always.
Several masked faces looked down, and Ridge smelled mushrooms. He was too weak to care, too weak to be afraid for himself. Brenna?
"She has a pulse. We can bring her back." It was the voice of the sleeping caudillo. Colfirio, or the ship, or both said: "Thank you, Ridge. I am in control again, for the first time since Venable's coup as we passed through the Oort Cloud. Yes, it has been over two thousand years, and we have suffered much, but we are in what you Yanks call the home stretch. Trust me. You will see." With that, the voice in the walls trailed off. The caudillo had said all he needed to, and he was never a man to spend an excess austral or an excess antipodo or a word too many.
Mudmen wearing the uniforms of ships' officers lifted Ridge. Each of them wore a mask, only now the masks were cloth images of Colfirio. Ridge thought he recognized the uniforms he'd seen on the mummies in the CP. They had that same mushroom odor. They were the genetic ghosts of men long dead, whose courage had kept them at their instrument panels even as they died. They were the essence of men whose memories lingered in the ship's communal database, and now that Venable's corrupt touch was off the hapless cleaners, the mudmen had one last task to perform before breathing their last flute tones. Wearing the uniforms of the mummified officers, they brought oxygen to Ridge and Brenna. Ridge hoped for the best but was resigned to the worst. He hoped if he and Brenna must die that she would go easily and comfortably. In the long, lingering dream that followed, the officers carried Ridge and Brenna back to WorkPod01 and hooked them up to the newly cleansed incubators there. Gone were the temps who came forth about once a week to be little more than food for Venable's mushroom slaves. Gone were the memories of those brief but precious lives.
The officers carried Ridge through the control room and hooked him up to the same special receptacles that held their own DNA and memory broths.
Ridge lay immobile on an improvised bed-an officer's cloak, thrown nobly and casually on the great oak conference table-as he watched Brenna's immobile pale form being lowered into the life-sustaining waters under her new glass lid.
Then the mushroom officers
opened another lid and lifted Ridge. Together they stripped him and lifted him off the table.
As they carried him to his own incubator, he floated naked and full of wonderment on their hands, under the many glass windows (or viewing ports) almost as if he were floating in space itself. Before being laid in his bath of waters with the lid lowered, so sleep came over him, Ridge gazed in limitless wonder upon the Eagle Nebula (M16) with its enormous silhouettes of evaporating gas rising up. There, he beheld a wondrous sight—6,500 light-years from Old Earth and about 3,000 light-years from where Nebula Express now streaked through space, en route to the New Earth detected not long ago. Looking like figures wearing cloaks, the huge "elephant trunks" reared up from a vast cloud of cold molecular hydrogen. Metaphors did not suffice. One thought of stalagmites rising from a cavern floor, nunnish figures offering mystic mercies, gaseous towers rearing up in defiance, but most importantly, clouds giving birth to infant stars. Torrents of ultraviolet light, from the vigorous blue pinpricks of hotly burning new baby stars, boiled off the clouds from which they stole their fuel. Energy blew off in columns aligned with the mean axes of spin as the stars trembled just under the explosion threshold in their frantic incineration. Many of the pinprick stars were still hulled in glowing clouds of superheated gas. Some had burned themselves free and looked like burning eggs about to hatch in free space-all within the much greater flowing stream of circling energy that was the whirlpool of the Milky Way itself.
Chapter 18
New Earth was a watery world orbiting a sun much like the old, and that was what had taken the expedition so many thousands of years-finding just such a place among a hundred million or more suns in the Milky Way.
