by Huskyteer
Deck thirteen hadn’t changed since the last time Ben was there, being relegated to the role of a storage area in the wake of the first of the incidents, then an unofficial rubbish heap after the second and third. It was a gloomy, shadow-haunted place, thickly populated with every conceivable species of garbage, with a stench so powerful he could taste it. The guys in maintenance had long since excluded it from any to-do lists they might have kept. That meant the only lighting came from emergency backup LEDs spaced in intervals along the floor, which were not particularly bright even when new, but these had not been cleaned, much less replaced, for millennia. Where they were not covered up with trash, they cast a red glow that did not reach the ceiling, and it was not the vibrant hue of a rose or an apple, but stygian and sickly, a color like a damp scab.
Ben switched on his flashlight less from necessity than from a desire to ward off the atmosphere; it reminded him too much of the gaping emptiness outside the hull and seemed, though he would not have verbalized it, to be the beachhead in a war the principles of decay were waging against his folk, a war he knew they must inevitably lose. The flashlight did help, some, so he slogged through the waste, which was warm (Why the hell is it warm when the air is so cold? he wondered), over the short, but winding and labyrinthine route it took to reach corridor B. When he heard the hum of the electric fence, he knew he was there.
Going to corridor B was the second most popular suicide method amongst the crew, the first being a simple hack that set one’s stasis chamber to reclamation mode; after that one needed only to nestle in and sleep while machines helpfully disassembled one’s body. The practice was outlawed, of course, but its ease and painlessness attracted many who despaired of the grey walls, the tasteless food, the tiring and repetitive work. For of what use was the work if it all came to nothing? So, people would find ways to get around the safeguards. But it still took a certain amount of fortitude to end one’s existence with one’s own hand; some were simply not up to the task. These were who ended up in corridor B. Their notes were scattered on the floor around the fence, no doubt full of regrets and apologies and farewells, but no one would ever read them. They were just more garbage for the pile.
The fence, as they called it, was a metal grate welded over the corridor’s entryway in the days following the first incident, when the scientists were still optimistic about reconciliation between themselves and the thing they had brought on board. Like fools, Ben thought, but it wasn’t fair to level such a harsh judgment; scientists are a curious breed and they had no way of knowing what manner of devil they were dealing with any more than they’d been able to prophesy that the freeze-dried “corpse” they’d dug out the rock was going to spring to life and start biting off their limbs. So, they’d installed the fence and electrified it so that they could observe the thing, but it had been improvised to keep a monster in, not to keep people out. A gap at the bottom was plenty wide enough for a man to crawl under.
Behind the fence was the gate, which was not unlike every other gate on the ship except for the fact that there was a murderous alien demon behind it. There was a speakerphone on the gate’s control panel, Ben activated it and spoke.
“Mastema,” he said, for that was the name his people had given the creature, “on the count of ten I will open the door. I am armed. Stay back. Do not approach the fence.”
Tranquilizers or no, his hands were shaking by the time he finished his count and pushed the button. The mechanism creaked to life, filling the chamber with an awful squeal (the tracks had not been lubricated in living memory) as it dragged the gate up into the ceiling. Ben switched off his flashlight. Bright light pained the creature, infuriating it at this stage would be counter-productive. The smell of rotten blood came surging out with such force it nearly knocked him over. He covered his nose with his hand and told himself to breathe through his mouth, which was better, though not by much.
He couldn’t see anything; the first thing Mastema had done when locked up in there was to destroy the lights. But Ben could hear, or thought he heard, some vague movement: claws tapping the floor, perhaps? There was no time to ponder this because it was then that it spoke, its voice a booming growl, strained, halting, weird and terrible, the product of a vocal apparatus ill-suited to speech. The sounds it made were only an approximation of words.
“One little wrinkle rat…comes chasing another. Expecting me to buy that…this sister’s…a brother!”
“And so it begins,” Ben thought. The thing was already trying to get under his skin. It was supremely uncouth, the very apex of impropriety, to refer to workers or soldiers as anything other than male. In his culture, only queens who had birthed a litter, thereby establishing their femininity, were so honored. That said, he needed to keep his cool and not let it rattle his nerves; he could not afford to make any mistakes. So, it had known which set of works Ben kept in his pants. Could it smell the difference somehow? No, he decided. It had recognized him from their previous meeting.
“You remember me?” Ben ventured.
“I know you,” came the reply. “I was with you…in the garden.”
“I’ve never been to the garden and neither have you.”
“No…” There was a pause. “Truly. Not here. Another time…another place.”
Ben’s night-vision was kicking in; he could make out shapes by the LEDs sharing the chamber with him, and occasional flashes of voltage moving through the fence, and was shocked to see Mastema staring back at him from not even an arm’s length of distance. In an evolutionary move that would have pleased Aristotelians, Mastema’s eyes did not merely reflect light, they generated their own, dim and red as dying embers. Ben stumbled backwards out of surprise and leveled his bolt rifle at its massive head—a ridiculous reaction, to be sure, since the fence would probably divert the charge if he tried to fire through it, which might also short it out. There was also the fact that Mastema had once taken seven bolts straight to the face without even slowing down, but Ben was trying not to remember that.
“I said to keep back!” Ben shouted, furious, but more at his being startled like that than for anything else. And the creature laughed, or rather, vocalized in a way that resembled laughter, a series of rumbling pulses, deep and harsh. Once, while escorting a survey team across a frozen moon, tidal forces from the gas giant it orbited had caused a chain of icequakes fit to level mountains. The laugh was like that, he could feel it in his marrow. It was at that point that Ben, flaring with pure, childish anger, clicked on his flashlight.
Mastema snarled and retreated a few steps, but Ben got a good look in before he came back to himself and turned the flashlight off. He had seen it before, though it was no less strange this time around. Unable to conjure the strict terminology of an anatomist, he described it in terms referencing pictures stored in the remnants of the archives: it looked, he would say, something like a reptilian kangaroo the size of a draft horse, though it was horned and had a long mane of wan, sea-foam colored hair on its head. Another witness had said it resembled a dragon, still another, an alligator. But of course it was none of those things.
“I could smash your little fence!” Mastema said, “Put my jaws around your head…and pop it…like a grape!”
Ben’s eyes would need to readjust, but he heard its tail writhing in irritation, thumping against the wall as it spoke.
“But no,” it said. “I am your…friend.” The malice in its voice was so naked that Ben couldn’t imagine why it bothered to lie. Well, the claim about being a friend was a lie anyway; the part about being able to smash through the fence was probably true. The part about popping his head open definitely was.
“You might break through it, sure,” Ben conceded, then defiantly adding, “but not without eating enough voltage to put even a…whatever the hell you are, flat on your ass. It wouldn’t feel good, either, and you’re no friend of mine, so why don’t you go fu—”
“But I am. Tell me…when was the last time you spoke…face to face with someone
…other than me?”
“I—” Ben began, but the question had taken him unawares. His work consisted primarily of patrols around remote places like the stores or the armory, under orders from someone in a command station near the officer’s quarters on the other side of the ship, delivered via telecom. And he performed them by himself. On the rare occasions he met people on these patrols, he had only to point his scanner at them to determine whether or not they were meant to be there, then nod them through.
He ate with the others in the cafeteria, but silently; he had no comrades. He couldn’t, he realized, recall the last time he’d conversed with someone else in person.
“The loneliness…” Mastema said, face mere inches from the fence, close enough for the LEDs to illume a smile full of triangular, shark-like teeth, “I can take it from you. The suffering…the doubt…everything.”
“I’m not here for that.” Ben shook his head clear. How it had come to know about his personal issues enough to tempt him with such an offer, he couldn’t say. It may have been the case that the monster understood these things intuitively, or it might have chatted with someone familiar with the crew psychological profiles, though the latter was unlikely. It didn’t matter, he had a job to do and he meant to do it, mind games aside.
“No. You have come for the man…Yakub DeSiiva…and his toy.”
“You’ve seen him.”
“He is here…with me. I did not want to bring him up…just yet. But I can…show him to you.”
Ben grimaced, not liking the sound of that “bring him up” one bit. Mastema, it was known, did not have a complete GI tract, but regurgitated what it could not metabolize. Since Ben had no desire to see a pile of his compatriot’s bones and organs puked up, he decided to let that line go. His mission now focused on recovering or destroying Yakub’s workstation: the man himself was accounted for.
“What about the workstation? Do you have it?”
“Oh, yes…” Mastema smiled again, more broadly this time. It had a laptop in its claws now, though it had not been there a moment earlier. Ben wondered if he just witnessed some sleight-of-hand.
“He wrote on it…here,” it continued, dragging one of its talons across the case, though it was too dark for Ben to make out anything. “His full name. He said these symbols…are the sounds of his…name.”
At first, Ben didn’t grasp the significance of this information. Lots of people wrote their names on their computers, so what? But there must have been a reason Mastema was pointing this out to him, he knew, and that made him leery. What dawned on him sent his heart into wild and fearful thumping. Mastema had not been capable of utilizing the decryption AI up until this point, but soon, too soon, that would no longer be true: it couldn’t use the computer because it couldn’t read, but now, knowing that the letters written corresponded to Yakub’s name, it had a key, and the same fierce intellect that had allowed it to communicate with the researchers after only three days of contact would now be tasked with deciphering the alphabet. There would be volumes worth of reading material in the rooms along the corridor that it could use for practice, and once it could read, it could begin the process of figuring out what all those funny little computer icons do…
He had to think fast to come up with a way to get that workstation away from it. But what would he try? Bribery? He had nothing to offer and even had it been otherwise, there was no guarantee it would work. Threats? But what could they do to it that hadn’t already been done? In the past they’d tried to kill it with poison, which had no apparent effect. They couldn’t cut off the flow of air because it had torn out the vent seals, and that would probably just cause it to enter the same hibernation state they’d found it in…after however many years it took for one creature, even one of that size, to breathe up all of the whatever-it-respirates in the hallway and its adjoining rooms. They could always blow it out of an airlock, he reasoned, if they could talk it into walking into one; corridor B was internal and didn’t connect with the hull directly.
Maybe I can sweet-talk it… Ben thought, so nervous by now that he almost tittered, tranquilizers or no. But finally, understanding that he had to do something, he opened up his mouth and the following words escaped:
“The drive on that computer contains information vital to the operation of the engines. Without it we’ll become stranded, so it’s really in your best interests to return it to us. Just slide it under the fence and back away.”
Mastema lapsed into silent motionlessness for a few moments, most likely mulling over what Ben had said, then made a chuffing noise and smiled the toothiest smile yet.
“I have been playing with this…toy. I have grown attached. What is it to me…if we stop? There is nothing…out there.”
“I’ll give you a new toy, a better one,” Ben lied, like hell he would do that. “I promise.”
“Yes…a promise…good.” It did not have to crouch to set the computer down since it was on all fours; it was much too tall for the ceiling when it stood on its hind legs. And then the faint red glow of its eyes began to recede away down the corridor.
“As a sign of the trust…between us…come in. Take it. I will stay back. No tricks, I swear it…”
Then the eyes were gone and the only sound was the hum of the electrified grate that Ben had no intention of crawling under, but he knelt and had a peek with his flashlight. Mastema had set the workstation down behind a pile of debris, so there was no way he could get a clear shot at it without going in, which he wasn’t seriously considering doing, was he? But after shining the beam around, satisfying himself that Mastema was too far away (judging by the distance to the spot at which he’d lost sight of its eyes) to cover the ground in time to prevent his destroying the machine, he decided to chance it. There was not a doubt in his mind that he would be ambushed and odds were good he wouldn’t escape with his life, but this was something that had to be done for the survival of his people; his eusocial leanings, damn them, demanded it.
For the briefest fraction of a second, he considered calling in to beg for backup, but ascertained that this opportunity might not come again; it was now or never. He entered warily on hands and knees, flashlight held between his front teeth, ready to backtrack at any noise, at the slightest hint of movement, but there was nothing. The attack came as he leveled his bolt rifle at the laptop (knowing that one hit would scramble the circuitry beyond recovery), but it still managed to catch him off guard despite that he had been expecting it. That was because it came not from the front, but from the doorway to his immediate left. He knew he had seen the eyes move backwards down the hallway, just as he knew the layout of the area did not permit any means of secretly doubling back; all of these near rooms were cul-de-sacs. What had happened was that Mastema had constricted the bioluminescent glow in its eyes to give the appearance that it was moving away (a trick employed by certain deep-sea animals in the past), then stepped into a side room to wait. But, Ben didn’t know that and didn’t have time to think about how this was possible. He had no time to think at all. What happened next was purely reactionary and instinctive.
Rather than flinch, he turned to face the creature head-on. When the flashlight beam was in its face, it winced, eyes clinching shut, mouth popping open to emit a pained cry, but it never had the chance. Ben launched himself forward, literally stuffing the end of his weapon down the monster’s throat, and pulled the trigger, holding it down until the battery was spent. The electric crack was muffled by flesh, but audible, as was the sizzling of innards. Smoke curled up and out of the creature’s head, the effect was much greater than any that had been observed when bolting it externally; all thousand-plus kilograms of it hit the ground with a thud that felt like it could have knocked the whole ship off-kilter.
Recalling the event later, Ben thought that it would have been cool to say, “Choke on that!” or something, but at that moment he had not the presence of mind for one-liners. Instead, he grabbed the laptop and flung it at the floor as hard as he could, h
eard the crack and felt the shrapnel on his shins as it broke into dozens of pieces. Then he dove for the gap under the fence, which might have been a good idea if the floor had been smoother and he’d built up a bit more momentum, but as it was, he only made it about a third of the way under before he stopped. At that point he started flailing his arms and legs, almost like he was swimming, but it got the job done. Once he was clear of the fence he spun onto his back and scrambled away backwards on his butt just in time to see Mastema’s colossal arm swiping at him from under the gap, missing by centimeters. He kept right on backing up that way until he was stopped by a wall. He pulled his knees up to his chest, put his arms around them, and, rocking himself, wept like a baby, though he would omit that lattermost detail during the debriefing.
“One day I will escape,” Mastema promised, somehow managing to talk with a molten throat, “I will catch every child. I will eat their bones…in front of you. And even if I do not…even if you find your star…what then? All your work must return…to nothing.”
“Yeah, well, maybe after we find our star, we’ll send this ship, along with your sorry ass, straight into it.”
There was no reply. He tried to stand and found that he could not; his legs were shaking too badly. He had cut his arm on Mastema’s teeth, the blood was dribbling onto the floor, though he couldn’t much feel the wound since naked mole rats lack a chemical key to the transmission of pain signals. Also, his heart was beating so hard he thought he might die, and he had peed himself. But his legs would soon become steady again, his heart-rate would slow to normal levels, he would bandage his arm and change his undergarments. Mastema growled, though Ben had the curious impression that it had less to do with rage than with annoyance, but it didn’t matter. The assignment was over. He was safe.
* * * *
“How are you feeling, Constable?”
Ben looked around. He hadn’t even known there was a telecom in the locker room, but it had to be so because there was no one else in there with him.
