by Rick Chesler
Caitlin snapped her helmet on with a finality that both unnerved and energized her. This was it. They had a plan, they were executing it, and she was a key element of that execution. If she couldn’t drive that rover to the Outer Limits LEM, then Dallas and James would likely perish, left behind on the barren moon.
Takeo escorted her to the airlock. He said he felt like they’d been through a lot together already and that making sure she would be able to drive off in the rover would be easy by comparison. Everyone else was in the middle of repairing the ship. Even with Black Sky’s needed part and the new oxygen cylinder, the work itself was painstakingly slow going, and there was no room for error. Time had also been lost to an EVA in order to fend a few of the worms off of critical parts of the ship. They had stayed away for a while, but now seemed to be returning in most aggressive fashion.
Takeo donned his helmet. “I’ll go with you to help you get to the rover. After that, you’re on your own until you get back here. Good luck.” He smiled at her and she wondered if he had some kind of attraction to her as a result of their bonding on the trip back from the tunnels.
“Thanks. I’ll take all the help I can get.” With that, the outer airlock door slid open and they stepped out onto the moon together.
Immediately, Caitlin registered a blur of movement out of her peripheral vision and then felt a thud on her facemask. A smear of blue liquid marred the glass surface after a small worm bounced off. The suit helmets were not equipped with “windshield wipers,” a feature that had been discussed but dismissed as being unnecessary.
“They’re falling from the roof.” Takeo pointed to the top of his LEM. A horde of animals toppled off the side of the spacecraft like lemmings from a cliff, splashing onto the ground and kicking up dust-devils wherever they happened to land. Caitlin made a giant stride toward the rover, parked perhaps twenty-five feet away. She wished now that they’d driven all the way to the airlock, though, because between her and the rover was a river of worms still leading from the crater to the ship.
They walked up to it and she judged whether she’d be able to jump over the fast-flowing stream of life. It would be close. Small creatures were ejected from the main plume with regularity, spouting up into the airless atmosphere. Still, there was no other way around. But her companion had an idea.
“Here,” he said getting down on one knee as he bashed a creature away from his helmet. “You step on my gloves and I’ll give you a boost. Get you up higher before you jump.”
Caitlin thought it could work. With a little extra height and springboard power, she might just be able to launch herself over the river of creatures. Takeo wasn’t going with her, so he wouldn’t have to worry about how to cross over himself.
She placed her right foot in the crux of his interlaced fingers and pressed down, prepping him for the force of her coming jump. Off to their left, one of the football-sized animals broke from the river of life and wobbled toward them, only a few feet away.
“I’m ready, do it!” Takeo said, one eye on the advancing threat.
Caitlin eyeballed the ground on the other side of the oxygen-seeking worms and then launched herself. In midair over the creatures, she felt a pattering sensation on the soles of her boots as the smaller animals pelted her like rain from the ground. Due to the low gravity, she was able to achieve a much higher jump than if she had been earthbound, and she sailed over the moving line of creatures, landing on the other side.
“Go!” her companion encouraged her. The animals were still drawn as if inexorably toward the oxygen leak on the LEM, but there was no point in Caitlin standing around to see if they would take an interest in her before she even got to the rover. She bounded off in the now familiar hopping moon run toward the rover. When she got to it, she jumped in without looking back and hit the power button.
The control panel lit up and Caitlin put the vehicle into drive. She wasn’t looking forward to what she was about to do. She’d much rather simply drive over to her LEM and pick up Dallas and James, but if she wanted to make sure they’d have a ship to return to that could get them home again, she had to draw the worms off Black Sky’s lander.
She accelerated away from the line of animals, testing the rover, making sure it was working properly; warming it up until the controls were but an extension of her hands as she coaxed the maximum performance out of the machine. When she felt as ready as possible, she put the buggy into a turn until she was pointed back at the LEM—and the stream of moving flesh. She drove toward the animals at full speed, watching the Black Sky man bounce-run back toward the LEM.
She eyed the movement carefully as she was jolted along, looking for a spot to impact where there were none of the larger individuals. She was pretty sure she could run over the smaller ones, but she didn’t want to take a chance with the larger ones fouling up the drivetrain. When she saw a suitable target, she hunched lower in the seat and focused on maintaining a stable trajectory.
She had no idea what driving through the animals would do—if it would have no real effect, where they simply reorganized once the interruption was over, or if they would abandon their well-formed line to chase the rover around. But she had to try something to give them a chance to work outside the LEM without the threat of the beasts, if only for a little while.
Caitlin plowed the rover through the line of burrowing aliens at a near perpendicular angle, sloughing them out from under the wire wheels as it cut through. She felt the vehicle bog down for a second and her hands white-knuckled the steering wheel, anticipating getting stuck in the middle of the animal activity and wondering what she would do. She lurched forward again and saw the front wheels kick up a flurry of dust. This was followed by a bump as the rear tires banged over a thick clump of worms and then the moon buggy was rolling over flat ground once more.
She had done it—broken through the flow of creatures without damaging the rover or getting it stuck. She set the moon car into a turn toward the LEM.
“Good work! You broke them up,” she heard Takeo say into the comm unit. “The really good news is, they’re not heading for the LEM anymore.”
“What’s the bad news?” Caitlin slowed as she turned the wheel some more.
“They’re coming after you.”
“Fast?”
“Affirmative.”
“Let me see what I can do about the ones on the side of the ship.”
“Copy that.” He lurked nearby the airlock in case the creatures became too aggressive, while Caitlin turned the corner around the spacecraft. She sucked in her breath as she took in the massive conglomeration of seething, writhing animals that literally wormed their way up the side of the ship, huddling en masse in an oxygen-fueled frenzy. Caitlin considered simply ramming them with the buggy, which had a decent front fender, but decided she couldn’t risk any more damage to the spaceship. She would have to be careful and clip the outside of the group and hope that deterred them.
She increased her speed and pulled hard to the right as she passed the huddle of vermiform intruders. She noticed that, unlike those in the line, these animals paid no attention to her or her vehicle at all as they gorged on the chemical rush leaking from the ship. It was like they were drunk on oxygen, or perhaps blood lusting like a shark in a feeding frenzy. Whatever it was, she would have to do more if she was to disturb them.
“Where are the ones from the line—coming this way?” she transmitted to Takeo.
“They’re confused. They chase after me, then turn toward the side of the lander, then back toward me again. It’s like they don’t know what to do. I’ll stay on this side of the ship, though, so I don’t lead them your way.”
“Copy that. I don’t need any more than I’ve already got here. So many of them...”
She trailed off as she banked into a turn in order to come back for another pass at the huge mountain of worms threatening to envelope the ship. This time she approached closer to the pileup, still at a parallel course, driving by them, swiping a few
with the side rail as she passed. Looking back as she carved out a turn, she saw some of the creatures tumbling from the pile and then rolling around on the ground. She had disrupted them somewhat.
She came around for another pass, executing on it the same way as the first. More minor success. She repeated it again and again, and with each pass more of the animals ended up wriggling around on the ground in disjointed fashion rather than glomming onto the station where they prevented access to the leaking oxygen port.
The Black Sky astronaut walked around the corner. “It’s working! Keep it up!” Takeo radioed the crew inside to get ready to make the repairs. Caitlin continued making rover passes, crunching over the smaller animals while avoiding the larger ones as she side-swiped the wormy dogpile. When it became apparent that there were more animals on the ground than on the lander, she drove the rover in a wide arc away from the LEM.
“Think you can take it from here?” Caitlin asked Takeo.
“Roger that. You thinned ‘em out for us, thanks.”
“All right. I’m off to pick up our new crew.”
“Good luck!” Takeo watched as Caitlin drove off toward the Outer Limits lunar lander.
37| ... And Switch
Caitlin drove toward the river of creatures she had dislocated earlier by driving through their midst. By now they had come back together, resuming their organizational drive as they plowed toward the LEM.
“Better make that repair work in a hurry,” she radioed Takeo. “The ones coming from the crater look like they’re about to be on the move again. She slowed the rover to a stop to get a look at them. At least now she was already on the other side—the side closest to the Outer Limits lander, so she didn’t have to worry about crossing through them again. But my, oh my, Caitlin thought as she scanned the line of beasts. There were some large individuals here. One she estimated to be the size of a small farm tractor. An animal that size could easily damage the LEM simply by rolling into the side of it as the other, smaller ones had done.
In an attempt to draw it off, she rolled up to it and stopped. The worm, its upper half protruding from the soil, stopped moving and coiled its length so that its head was pointed in Caitlin’s direction. She contemplated ramming it, to send it a real message, but decided against it. What if it enveloped her vehicle in its pliable folds? The image of Suzette, hopelessly and permanently intertwined with the creature—embedded into its own physiology—returned to haunt her and she backed off. But she noticed that the giant creature moved in her direction. She waited for it to creep up on her a little closer, then wheeled off a safe distance away. She continued this process until she looked back to the line of worms and saw she had effectively lured the largest among them almost a football field away.
She began driving the rover toward the Outer Limits LEM, not at full speed, for she didn’t want to outrun the worm, leaving it to go back to the precious Black Sky craft. Plus, she’d conserve battery power by not running at top speed. So she drove on at a middling pace, the worm shuffling after her out of curiosity, she supposed. She wasn’t sure if it just wasn’t moving as fast as it could, or if the large ones couldn’t propel themselves as quickly as their diminutive brethren. But regardless, she kept a close watch on the animal in her rear view mirror as she motored on toward her LEM.
She also kept an eye out for new creatures as she went, but didn’t see any. At about the midpoint between the two LEMs, the large worm dropped back and when she could no longer see it, she increased her speed. She didn’t know if the worm would bury itself where it ended up, or try to make its way back to the rich oxygen source of the Black Sky lander, but she had done her job of drawing it off the site so they could work.
Now she had to complete the other half of her job: pick up Dallas and James and bring them back over to Black Sky. She navigated a rough section of uneven terrain, forcing her to reduce speed, but when she emerged from it onto a flat plain, she should see the Outer Limits LEM in the distance. She checked the mirror to see if the massive worm had used the rough terrain as an opportunity to gain on her, but she saw only a static, gray landscape.
She put the rover to high speed and gripped the steering wheel as she jostled along over the lunar surface. Before long, the boxy form of the LEM took shape. She slowed as she approached, scoping it out visually. The lights were on, indicating they still had power. That was good. Other than that, she didn’t see much, no one on an EVA...and then she noticed something on the ground a short distance from the spacecraft. A worm? That was her first thought. But as she rolled nearer in the rover, it soon became apparent that it was not one of the creatures. Not one of the lunar creatures, anyway. It was a creature all right—but a human one. Naked, without a spacesuit, so obviously dead. She rolled closer to the inert form until she could get a detailed look.
The corpse of Martin Hughes lay on the moon. His skin appeared to be a strange color to her, but she couldn’t be sure that wasn’t due to the unusual ambient lunar light, so bright with no atmosphere to filter the sun this time of day. She guessed that he must have been removed by Dallas in order to reduce risk of biocontamination, since he had been killed by somehow coming into contact with the bio-specimen. Still, she found it unnerving to stare at the dead man on the moon, so much so that she avoided looking at him while she brought the rover to a stop and walked to the airlock.
Inside the lander, she found Dallas and James at the radio console, attempting without success to establish contact with Mission Control. “...dust storm status. Do you read, over?”
Dallas looked up at Caitlin as she approached, her suit helmet now off.
“How was the drive?”
At this, she couldn’t help but laugh. “You make it sound as though I was coming up I-95 to stay for the weekend. Oh, it wasn’t too bad, the usual traffic...”
“The perks of having the only vehicle on the planet, I guess. Plenty of places to park.”
“Yeah, except for where the corpses are. And the killer worms. They’re having a bitch of a time over at the other LEM, Dallas. I—”
Suddenly Blake’s’ voice burst through the radio speaker. “Dallas, you copy?”
Dallas turned away from Caitlin to concentrate on the radio. “We read you loud and clear, Blake. Caitlin just got here, over.”
“Tell her she did a good job—at first we were able to work outside the LEM on repairing the oxygen leak and damage to the ship’s exterior, but those things are back now and we haven’t fully made the repairs yet.”
Dallas looked back at Caitlin before replying over the radio to Blake. “Maybe when James and I get over there with Caitlin, the extra manpower will make a difference.” We can hope, right?
“Plus, I’ll be able to use the rover again to draw them off once more if necessary,” Caitlin added. Dallas relayed this to Blake, who agreed. Then they heard shouting coming from the Black Sky end of the transmission before Blake’s voice came gain.
“I better let you get to work. Don’t forget to charge the rover fully and bring anything we can use over here that you can fit in the rover. See you soon, over and out.”
Dallas signed off and addressed Caitlin and James, who had started to grill the female astronaut on what the situation was like over at Black Sky’s ship. “How much strife is there between Blake and Kennedy?”
“You can tell they’re uncomfortable around one another but at this point they seem to be working together well enough. They got through the EVA together to get the supplies, so they should be okay.”
“What about my counterpart over there, the illustrious Mr. Stenson—how’s he doing?”
“Do I detect a hint of sarcasm there, James?”
Burton nodded. “Let’s just say I would have been promoted a lot earlier without him around for so long. But I have to admit, all that seems like a minor annoyance compared to what’s going on up here.”
“Will you be able to work with him if you have to?”
“From what I hear, Blake and Kennedy ma
ke Stenson and I look like best friends. We’ll be fine.”
Caitlin told him about Stenson’s openly critical attack on Kennedy’s methods, which elicited a knowing smirk from James, although he remained silent.
Dallas jumped down from his control panel seat and moved to put on his spacesuit. “We should get a move on. Caitlin, is the rover charging?”
“First thing I did when I got here was to plug it in.”
“Good. How about oxygen? We should have one canister left. Go ahead and grab it while James and I get our suits on, please. Then I’ve got a little plan to tell you about.”
Caitlin found the full oxygen cylinder—now free to use since they would be leaving their ship behind—and loaded it into the rover. Again, she avoided making eye contact with the nude corpse of Martin Hughes. She wondered if he had found some kind of peace, God or no God. When she got back into the LEM, she found Dallas and James fully suited up, but still in the main cabin of the ship. She addressed them through the comm loop.
“I put the oh-two cylinder and a few tools in the rover. Nothing else I can think of. You ready?”
Dallas looked up at her, his fingers poised over a switch. “Just about. Rover’s charged and ready to roll?”
“All set.”
“Good. Because once we vent the air from this puppy, there’s no turning back. And we’re likely to have company if we stick around too long.”
“Vent the air? Why do that? I know we don’t intend to use this ship, but still...”
“That’s the plan I was telling you about. To see if we can attract the creatures over in this direction, take some of the pressure off of the Black Sky lander.”
“That will probably add pressure to our drive over there, though.” Caitlin flashed on driving over the squishy worms.
“You got here, though. So it’s doable.” This from James, who usually remained silent to observe the interplay among the astronauts, but now deciding that his own future was less than certain, asserting his opinion.
