by B. V. Larson
Soon, the boot came loose. It tore free of the rest of the alien. The leg was instantly retracted out of sight. A spray of crimson blood splattered to the floor of the ship and instantly froze there in smoky droplets.
Examining the boot, the trach brought it up to its confused orb. The Savant knew in an instant what had happened. The alien had been wearing some kind of covering. All the trach had managed to do was rip part of that covering off. It was good to know the enemy could not live in vacuum any more than she could, but essentially the trach had failed in its mission.
The trach had puzzled this out as well by now and dropped the boot. A moment later it unfolded its legs and dropped down to the floor of the lifepod. It trundled after the escaping creature. Outside, it was immediately clear that the alien was alone.
The Savant studied the visual signal, which the trach kept sending. The creature had clamped off the exposed foot with its vacuum suit and now managed to ignite some form of propulsion jet. A blast of light and misty vapor struck the trach in the face as it attempted to pursue the creature out onto the rocky surface of the moon.
The human flew away from them in a great, tumbling bound. As the backwash blew over it, the trach snapped its cusp shut over its orb and withdrew its stalk defensively.
Pursue! Kill! Retrieve! blipped the Savant. She needed that escaping source of protoplasm, now more than ever. And she meant to have it.
The trach scuttled obediently after the fleeing human.
#
Nicu had tired of Kizzy’s shower scenes. Even clips 33 and 179, his favorites, had grown stale. He’d moved on now to gaming. He was playing his second favorite tonight, one that allowed him to fly with realistic sensations transmitted throughout his spacer suit. He was playing a level that flew through a series of hot waterfalls full of nude, nymph-like beauties.
Vacuum suits, especially ones built for real professional spacers, had many special qualities that were designed to improve the survival rate of their wearers. They had the ability to change their rigidity, much like reactive armor, to prevent tears and damage from the many unfortunate accidents that tended to befall people in space. For example, if one was caught accidentally in the backwash of a jet or a sudden blast of radiation due to exposure to powerful starlight, a good vacc suit would change its composition and reform itself, due to a weave of nano-active fabric. It could harden to prevent penetration or soften into a cushion to prevent injury. It wasn’t armor and could not stop a bullet or a laser, but the engineering marvel often saved spacer lives.
Nicu and other bored spacers everywhere had discovered other, unintended uses for their nano-cloth suits. They had learned to hack the control module and introduce their own modified software. Linked to something like game program, or even the steamy vids Nicu preferred to watch, he was able to feel moving sensations on his own body surfaces. The flexible suit contracted, shifted, and even slid about in pleasurable patterns. The result was a spacesuit turned into a playground, where he could feel as well as see and hear a virtual environment in a game, greatly increasing the immersion level of the activity. Sexual encounters, sensations of flying or running—or even painful events such as bullet strikes in an action game—could all be simulated.
Naturally, hacking one’s spacesuit was strictly forbidden. It was considered highly dangerous, as the suit lost its innate ability to respond to the very real survival needs of its occupant. There wasn’t a company in the Nexus that didn’t periodically go through and do a remote sweep of every suit, reinstalling software and issuing automatic citations to discovered violators. But still, the hacking went on. Life in an airless void tended to be tedious and lonely. Spacers, being only human, continued to indulge themselves when they could get away with it.
In Nicu’s case, he had simply taken matters to their logical extreme. He now did little else other than sit in his suit and please himself.
When Boldo’s emergency summons came to his headphones, he was quite distracted. He knew, at least at some vague level, that Boldo had gone outside to investigate whatever broken wire or meteor strike had caused an alarm. The base’s central processor was overly paranoid, in Nicu’s estimation. It tended to flag the tiniest event as dangerous and recommended immediate action on everything. Barely a day would go by without the CPU imagining some apocalyptic scenario.
When today’s warning had come in, he had shirked and dodged, finally vanishing into his locker as usual. Boldo could take care of it, he’d been certain. In fact, he’d long since stopped worrying about it. It was a blessing in disguise, really. Boldo was guaranteed to wander around out there in the crater dust for an hour or two and find nothing, or next to nothing. That was a precious source of uninterrupted time for Nicu, and he made the very best vigorous use of every second.
But an emergency summons from Boldo, his nominal partner in sector maintenance, was another matter entirely. Now there was a recorded request for assistance—not from some machine, but from a very real person who tended to be bad-tempered.
The emergency summons had come at a very inopportune time. In fact, from Nicu’s point of view, there would probably never be a moment when he relished such a summons.
An emergency call. Damn the luck! It would be hard to ignore this one. It was recorded and would automatically be relayed up every priority queue all the way to Mala herself. His response would be recorded as well, and nothing he did could possibly be good enough to satisfy that crazy old witch.
The first call he could safely ignore, he knew. One could always pretend to have missed a single beeping, and thus escape wrath for being slow to respond. If there wasn’t a second call, the matter had obviously taken care of itself. On the other hand, if it turned out Boldo was dead before he transmitted a second distress call, then clearly Nicu couldn’t have helped anyway. The matter had been impossible, Boldo had been doomed.
If Boldo managed to solve his own problem after only one call and returned, he would be angry, but so what? Boldo was always angry with Nicu. If the man wanted a snappy response, perhaps he should consider being more kind to Nicu, who thought of himself as being misunderstood and grossly abused for pursuing the life of a free spirit. He was the sort individual that the Vlax Romani were famous for producing, a dreamer, a man with higher aspirations. Mere dull routines, such as spacer work, could not hold his attention for long. They were, in fact, traps designed for lesser men. Nicu simply couldn’t be bothered to fall into them. If he had one firm policy in life, it was this: he did not waste his time.
When the second alarm signal sounded, and the unwelcome beeping came less than a minute after the first, Nicu growled in frustration. He saved, disconnected, and reset his suit. A thousand gentle fingertips, which had been gliding over his body in a most pleasurable fashion, vanished. As far as Nicu was concerned, that was the true violation.
He slapped his handheld into life and stroked it roughly. The screen came to life with petulant slowness. He selected the blinking red e-message. Expectantly sighing, he brought up the visual.
But there was nothing. Nothing at all. He looked for audio next, then text, in case Boldo’s suit had malfunctioned so significantly that the pinprick pickups on the surface of it no longer operated.
Still nothing.
He frowned more deeply. Boldo had sent him a blank emergency message with no context, no message.
Nicu sniffed. He considered what might happen if a man were to press the emergency send button on his suit and not enter anything, not selected any feeds. Quite possibly, a blank message might result.
He stare for a moment at the blinking message. Then he selected the acknowledge option, and slammed his fist into the inside door of his locker hideaway. The door rattled. Now the entire affair was registered. Now, when the reports filtered through to Mala’s office, she would see who had gotten the message and who had acknowledged it. He was out of options.
Cursing in Romani, he reached up and flipped the trick catch. He climbed stiffly out of his locke
r. He was going to have to do some work today after all. Damn the luck.
Nicu reset his suit a second time to make sure, then headed toward the airlock. His helmet checked, and so did the rest of his survival gear. It was with some surprise he realized he was about to go out and walk the surface. He had logged a dozen reports—no, more like a hundred—since the last time he had actually gone outside and done anything. For months, all his activity reports had been one hundred percent bogus.
He double checked to see his seals were good and his oxygen levels and mixes were all in the green. They were. It had been so long, he didn’t want to make a rookie mistake. He hadn’t bothered to really inspect his equipment for—months? There had been no need up until this moment.
It was with a certain sense of foreboding that he clamped down his helmet, popped the inner airlock door and stepped inside. His hand hesitated over the air-cycling pump button, but finally he pressed it. The air hissed away and then, finally, the outer door opened.
Even for Nicu, the cold beauty of the place struck through. It had been quite awhile since he had looked outside, and he nodded in appreciation. As good as his suit graphics were, he had to admit reality had its advantages. Just as he imagined Kizzy’s real caresses would probably be better than the simulated ones he’d conjured up with his suit. He sighed. She despised him.
He trudged outside. Nothing was obviously amiss. He grunted. If Boldo thought he would trick him into searching the area by firing off a random e-message and vanishing, he could think again.
In fact, that thought caused Nicu some concern. What if... What if this was all a trick? Boldo had been on the verge of murder not long ago. That wasn’t so odd for him, but he had seemed more earnest in his rage than usual. Perhaps he had stopped, not because he had lost his anger, but because he’d had a better idea. Perhaps Boldo sought to lure him out to a spot with no witnesses, with no data pickups, and murder him there.
Nicu put his hands on his hips and looked around, waiting impatiently. He wasn’t about to search every crater on this forsaken rock. He took another reading and got a fix on the source of the e-message.
He turned and looked up at an imposing spire of rock. He took a dozen steps, then a dozen more. He halted.
There was something in front of him now. Something dark lay on the crater floor. Dust had pushed away from it in a circular pattern, as if it had fallen there and now lay still.
Nicu stopped, staring.
There had to be a way. There had to be a method by which he could extricate himself from this situation and get someone else to investigate. The trouble was, although he stood there and wracked his fertile, twisty mind, he could not think of anything. No escape, no slippery dodge.
If Boldo was dead, they would claim he murdered him. If Boldo was found dead by someone else, they would know he either murdered him, or shirked his duty as first responder to the emergency message.
There were only two ways out: if Boldo yet lived, he would save him, problem solved. If Boldo was indeed dead, and from the look of that dark puddle of broken material on the crater floor, the possibility was a strong one, then he had to hope the evidence would show he had not done it.
Chewing his lips and cursing in his helmet, Nicu stepped up to the thing in the dust. It was indeed Boldo. He lay face down, and his boot was missing. Had hard vacuum gotten in there and frozen him solid? Nicu gave a tiny shudder then moved to roll Boldo over. He was surprised the other was not yet stiff.
Boldo’s face looked up at his, through the misted faceplate. Agony was frozen on that face, but Nicu saw that the lips yet writhed, they were speaking, in fact. He was alive! His suit must have closed the wound, however it happened, and somehow he’d lost most of his electronics.
Nicu grabbed the big man’s hands and dragged him toward the airlock. Behind him, the ice-blue, dust-encrusted dead foot, exposed as it was to hard vacuum and absolute zero temperatures, thumped and flipped lifelessly. Nicu could tell they would have to cut that thing off right away.
Puffing hard in his suit, Nicu moved with surprising speed. The moon’s gravity was far less than standard, and Boldo’s resulting lightness with Nicu’s excitement combined to make him into something of a superman.
He had almost made it back to the airlock when he caught sight of the thing that chased them. It was a nightmare. A creature right out of the worst suit-games, the ones that gave you heart palpitations if you played them in full-contact mode.
Crab-like, but with a single huge claw, it was about the size of a human in mass—a very large human. At least eight scuttling legs pumped in perfect rhythm, bringing it silently closer in the vacuum world. A plume of raised dust fluttered up behind it. Its single claw opened as Nicu watched, yawning to a width easily enough to completely enclose his helmet. From the look of it, the thing could apply enough crushing pressure to pop his helmet and his skull like a boiled egg.
Nicu made a choking sound. He released Boldo’s hands, but found, to his unhappy shock, the man was holding on to him. He wasn’t letting go, either. Nicu danced backward, now dragging Boldo not by design, but by necessity.
Whimpering, he kicked at Boldo’s helmet, but that was worse than useless. Boldo hung on to him, clasping his hands with frantic, desperate strength. Nicu had no choice but to drag him the rest of the way to the airlock.
He never considered sending off a message. He had no time, and besides his hands were caught up in the horribly strong grip of Boldo. He did consider grabbing his knife and slashing himself free. But again, there wasn’t time to waste. The monster, whatever it was, drew closer with each passing second.
He backed into the airlock and slammed the button with his buttocks. The hatch fired down. Air pumped into the chamber. It seemed to take forever.
Nicu dared to step over the collapsed form of Boldo and look out the tiny, hexagonal portal at the dusty moon’s surface. Where was the monster? He saw nothing.
A moment later the inner door fired open. Nicu thought, finally, of his communicator. He chinned his com-link open and gulped, breath blowing hard over the mike.
“Emergency,” he puffed. “Mala?”
He was answered promptly. “Nicu? What are you talking about?”
“Emergency. I’ve got Boldo. He’s badly hurt.”
There was a hesitation. “If you stabbed him, Nicu, I’m going to space you.”
“No, nothing like that. He was outside. One of the sensors tripped. I went out to get him. He’s hurt.”
“We’re coming.”
“Mala?”
“What?”
“Something else—there was something else out there.”
Another pause.
“We’re coming.”
Six
Nicu lifted his lip in disgust. Boldo was a mess. His suit had closed around his ankle, reacting to the lost boot. Effectively, this had left his bare foot hanging out in minus 200 degrees Celsius. It had more than frozen, it had turned brittle as glass and shattered in places. Pieces were missing. Dust and frozen blood coated the rest. Had he tried to walk on it? How had he lost his boot in the first place? Could he have gotten stuck and been unable to get loose without yanking it off to free himself? The fabric was so tough, how had he managed it?
Nicu breathed hard, blowing steam onto his faceplate. Boldo’s chest still rose and fell. He was a big, tough bastard of a man. Boldo would survive this, Nicu felt certain. This could turn into a worst-case scenario. Boldo knew he had sent out his distress call, and Nicu had taken his sweet time coming out to investigate.
Nicu looked over his shoulder. Mala and the team were coming from central, but they had yet to arrive. His hand slipped down to the screwdriver-shaped monofilament knife. He carefully weighed his options. Perhaps it would be better if Boldo did not survive his dreadful accident. But how could he make a wound—an injury the others would not notice? They had to think he had died because of his ordeal. Because of that thing out there.
The thing. Just recalling t
he horror made it hard to think at all. His breath came in gasps. He felt stifled inside his helmet and flipped up the faceplate. He took a moment to step over Boldo and leaned to look out the fogged triangular window onto the surface again. He couldn’t make out anything. No sign of the monster. Was it hiding out there?
Nicu shook his head and eyed Boldo. The man was unconscious now. The last of his strength had given out when Nicu had dragged him into the airlock and sealed the outer door. He had expected, at that point, to hear the monster’s single great claw scratching at the door, but there had been nothing. No sound. It had vanished.
What could survive outside in hard vacuum? What did such a monster eat? There was no way something could be alive out there. Nicu blinked and shook his head. There was no possibility Mala and the others were going to believe any talk of monsters. The entire thing was an obvious lie, this monster business. If he told them some fantastic tale of a one-clawed crab chasing him into the airlock, they would be certain he was lying, making up an insane story to cover his obvious, disgusting incompetence.
He popped his knife from his belt. He thumbed it into life. It hummed inaudibly, making only a tiny vibration that tended to numb the fingers if you held the handle too long.
A single thrust. Then he would have to hide the knife. Boldo would have no tales to tell. All the tales would be those told by Nicu. The others would suspect nothing. The man should never have survived his injuries anyway. No one would be surprised if he died.
Nicu bent and took up the knife in two thin-fingered hands. He began his thrust.
He had hesitated only for a second, but that was too long. Boldo’s hands came up to grapple with his. The faceplate popped open.
Nicu’s teeth showed in a grimace. He tried, leaning with all his weight, but he could not drive the knife into the larger man’s chest.
