by Diane Carey
And there was another body, flying past the shuttlecraft, close enough Corgan could recognize it. Eyeless, his mouth spewing fluid, face bubbling from within, barely recognizable…
Corgan looked away.
“Oh fuck,” Ashley muttered. “Nate.”
It struck Corgan fully, then. He’d been trying to kid himself. But Nate had known he’d never get back to the shuttlecraft.
Don’t think about that now, Corgan. You’ve still got one crew member you can save.
But where the hell were they headed? He looked back, saw the steel egg receeding… And “above” it, relative to where the shuttlecraft was, the CANC out-system mothership was just visible where it drifted above the curve of the alien craft, just its front end—making him think of a moray eel looking out from the other side of an undersea boulder.
Nate. But all he felt was dragged out, bone tired—it was hard work, feeling nothing when his only close friend had moments before died giving his life for him.
He let out a long breath and looked at the control panel. “Okay. How do we steer this goddamn thing—and to where?”
But the shuttlecraft was steering itself. It was turning, on its way somewhere, arcing away from the steel egg…
It was heading down toward the surface of Iapetus.
21
“I don’t know how we ever thought this thing could still be navigated after all this time,” Corgan muttered, shaking his head, as the shuttlecraft angled down for certain impact with the icy surface of Iapetus. “Desperation makes for some crazy damn ideas, I guess.”
“It’s still actually going under its own power,” Ashley observed. Her voice was shaking but otherwise she seemed calm as she looked around at the shuttlecraft. “You can feel the engine power, the vibration underneath… And we’ve got the same gravity as in the big ship—if it’s generating artificial gravity and flying, it’s still working in some ways, at least.”
He shrugged. “So it’s flying down to crash into the moon. Listen—I’m sorry, Ashley. Getting you into this thing…”
“What? Why should you be sorry?” There were tears in her eyes but the expression on her face was genuine puzzlement.
“Because… I should have found some way to save you. Us. And Nate. I guess I should’ve ordered a surrender.”
“They’d have killed us. You know they were going to, no matter what we did. We were what stood between them and claiming the anomaly.”
“They might yet. Could be they’ll intercept us—take us prisoner, before we actually…”
But looking out the front viewport he could see they were heading way too fast for the surface for that to happen.
The ice-coated, pocked gray surface of Iapetus was rushing up toward them. “We’ve got to try to operate this thing—and just take a chance we don’t do something fatal…”
He put his hands over the instrument panel… and it didn’t respond.
They tried everything they could think of. Pushing at the “piano keys,” tapping them, looking for other controls. Nothing. No response. The vessel seemed locked on one suicidal course.
He snorted, shook his head. “People have been wondering about that ridge around Iapetus for, what, a couple generations at least. Sent a couple of drones, didn’t find much. Now we get to have a real close look. Seems like that’s where we’re going to impact.”
She only nodded numbly, seeming deep in thought.
He was facing certain death—and he was surprised by how little it seemed to matter. Maybe it was fatigue. Despair. But all he felt was an aching regret for Ashley— for all the possibilities she represented gone to waste. Everything she could have done in her life—smashed to flinders on a frozen rock millions of miles from home. For that matter, everything they could have done together…
The icy gray-white surface rushed up toward them; there were craters, and there was the ridgeline, cutting across the entire face of the moon right at the equator, an anomalous surface feature as high as a midsized Earthly mountain, but all of a piece and not jagged at the summit, unlike the sawtoothiness of a mountain range. Like a giant wall with a curved top. Some astro-geologists thought the gravitational pull of Saturn had formed the anomalous ridgeline somehow, others thought it was the result of a big meteoric shockwave; others supposed it an unusual volcanic formation.
The ridgeline looked almost eerily regular, smooth to him, as they approached the Saturnian moon—but they were heading for a place where it did buckle a little toward the eastern horizon. They were going to slam right in that hollow place toward the end of the ridgeline. It rose up to meet them… There were seconds left…
He really ought to comfort Ashley in her last moments.
“Hey, Ashley,” he said. He reached toward her—and realized he was being restrained. By the seat. The seat he was in had grown arms of something like soft plastic that reached out on its own initiative and held him in place, a stretchable automatic seatbelt. He satisfied himself with taking her left hand. “Look, I…”
“Yes?”
There were only a few seconds left. They were going to crash. He needed to say it… and say it now.
“I just wanted you to know I always felt… I thought we… I… especially lately, I… uh…”
“For Christ’s sake, say it, Daryl!”
“Ashely, I…” But it was too late—a looming darkness drew his attention to the transparency in front of them, it was filled with the onrushing ridgeline, they were about to hit the ice-coated stone… and it was just too late.
And then, one second before they’d have struck, an opening in the wall dilated, and the shuttlecraft flew into a tunnel suffused with a soft blue light. About a hundred meters in diameter, the smoothly engineered curved walls and flat floor underneath attested to an artificial tunnel, not some volcanic tube. A whistling and vibrating against the front of the vehicle as they went suggested that it held an atmosphere. Why hadn’t the atmosphere blown into the vacuum of space when they’d entered? he wondered. Corgan dazedly guessed some force field, opening tightly around the entering shuttlecraft, had held it in place.
The little craft whipped itself along, as smoothly as a monorail following its track, right down the middle of the long curving tunnel that ran under the ridgeline—the tunnel that, evidently, was the Iapetan ridgeline’s true purpose. They flew through a tunnel perhaps seven kilometers— Corgan was so astonished by this development he couldn’t quite keep track of the distance—and then the vehicle slowed and set down on a platform about ten meters over the tunnel floor.
The seat that had held him in place let go, its seatbelt extensions drawing back into it.
Corgan looked toward the side of the shuttlecraft, where they’d entered, afraid the oval entrance would suddenly open up, since the vehicle seemed to be making its own decisions—exposing them to who knew what atmosphere.
Ashley was looking around with wide, shining eyes, her mouth hanging open. “Oh my good goddamn Lord,” she muttered.
“Get your spacesuit on,” he told her, starting on his own.
“There’s atmosphere out there—maybe it’s the same as in their ship. Maybe we can breathe it.”
“Or maybe not. Come on, get it on—now. Quick!”
“Aye, aye,” she said, grinning with relief. They hastily pulled on their spacesuits, and breathed a sigh along with compressed oxymix when they clicked their helmets into place.
“You pressurized?” he asked her, through the suit radio.
“That’s a big affirmative there, Captain,” she said, sounding giddy.
“You okay? I mean—you need to rest before we explore out there?”
“I’m okay, I’m just kinda… fripped.” Fripped: the late-twenty-first century equivalent of freaked out.
“Me too. Well here goes…”
He pressed the sonic key—and the entrance irised open in the side of the shuttlecraft. He climbed through— moving carefully, the moon’s gravity lower than the artificial gravity of th
e spacecraft. He had to get used to it. He turned and helped Ashley climb out. They just stood there, looking around.
They’d landed on a platform big enough for several shuttlecraft. In front of them was a bubble of glassy material, with the outline of a door in but no clear method for opening it. Above them were spikes of indeterminate material ending in clusters of crystal nodes, and tangled with curved translucent-green piping. Behind them the tunnel they’d flown into extended in a gentle curve, its farther reaches lost in misty blue distance.
Corgan walked over to the glass bubble, putting his gloved hands against it, looking for an entrance. When he touched it, a man-high section of the bubble wall darkened, and he felt a tingling, like he’d felt at the navel’s airlock—and saw flush crystalline triangles moving in the darkened area. He was being scanned.
Then the door whispered open. He hesitated a moment.
Ashley stated the obvious. “Let’s go in. What have we got to lose?”
He led the way and they entered the bubble. The doorway sealed behind them. Inside there was a smooth pathway across a floor inset, on either side, with parallel, curving striations of metal, like the ones on the outer hull of the steel egg.
A door at the farther end of the bubble dilated… and a robot whirred smoothly through. It was a bushelsized striated sphere, a head taller than Corgan, on a rod connected to a spherical wheel, the whole made of some off-white synthetic—looking like plastic but doubtless something more advanced. As it came rapidly toward them it sprouted white arms and hands—jointed tentacle-tipped hands, the limbs seeming to grow from it. The hands made gestures as delicate as a hula dancer’s as it approached… The motion was almost hypnotic…
It rolled up to them, and Ashley and Corgan glanced at one another. Corgan cleared his throat and said, “Uh—greetings?”
It reached out with both many-jointed hands, the gesture slow and gentle—and suddenly its tentacular fingers grew, seamlessly, from within it, stretched out long and coiled around them both, binding their arms tightly against their sides. Then an aperature opened on its chest and another arm extended, and neatly, in two seconds, removed Corgan’s helmet. He decided the air was breathable—then he saw it was removing Ashley’s helmet too. He struggled—and was held fast.
A humming sound, from within the sphere of the robot’s top end… he felt a tingle, and thought he was being scanned again.
Just go with it, let it scan you, he thought.
But he quickly realized it wasn’t a scan. He came to that realization as the intrusive vibration, passing through his head, drew a cool, infinitely black curtain over his mind.
A moment later he lost consciousness.
* * *
Reynolds used the last of his extract to get rid of the sentries, two technicians—and two rival exobiologists. He was especially glad to dispose of his rivals.
The plan had formed after he’d discovered the steel egg’s internal surveillance system. On the alien ship’s bridge was an object resembling an old-fashioned television, to Reynolds, but with all the visible guts taken out, just the television’s “box” remaining; on the right side of the box was a circular knob in a socket, like the mouse that used to be on some laptops. When he touched it, the cube lit up with an image of the bridge, a roughly holographic image, though a trifle fuzzy at the edges: the bridge, with him sitting there. When he rolled the “mouse” hemisphere with his thumb, the image changed, cycling through all the chambers, tunnels, and entrances of the enormous Giff craft. It was looking down from the ceiling, but he discovered that if he applied a little sustained pressure to the knob, it zoomed in; if he tapped it, the image zoomed out. There was a second, smaller hemispherical knob under the internal surveillance mouse: a sound control. He could listen as well as watch.
With this device Reynolds had been able to locate new hiding places on the ship; had confirmed that the xenomorphic queen was still sequestered, and had avoided discovery by the CANC explorers.
And, he had watched the fight on the alien hangar— bitterly noting that Captain Corgan had apparently taken the only working shuttlecraft—and he’d seen the fight’s confused aftermath, with a man he identified as Chou; and he’d watched developments in the vat-nutrient production room, where the xenomorph queen had her nursery and lair.
He’d seen Commander Kyu Kim and associates lying there, unconscious, with the face-gripping stage one implanting its endoparasite within them; he’d seen the ceiling over the alien queen slowly burned open by three CANC technicians, sent by Chou. They’d used a heavy-duty mining laser from their vessel, setting it up within one of the nutrient tanks. Reynolds had gleefully watched as one of the technicians was killed by the alien queen, the man torn in half as he tried to descend on a harness into the lower chamber—the queen retreated from the big industrial laser, wielded by the surviving technicians. She could wait…
They had just managed to get Kyu Kim’s unconscious form out… but the queen had made it impractical to get at the others.
Then Reynolds had watched as the technicians, protected now by two sentries and advised by two men he guessed were exobiologists, covered the gap they’d cut into the floor with a foil-like material. They’d then trundled up an atmospheric compression tank on wheels, and inserted a tube from one end of it through a slit in the foil. They carefully sealed the foil around the floor and hose, fitted their space helmets over their spacesuit collars, then activated the compression tank. It rattled to itself and pumped—he couldn’t see what it pumped, but he guessed it was a poison. Reynolds had taken a course in Sino-Multi and, though his grasp of the language was primitive, he heard one of them say something he was pretty sure meant something like “how much toxin needed.”
So they were trying to poison the queen and the stage ones. And sacrificing some of their own people, trapped down below, at the same time. Typical CANC indifference to human life.
But then, he thought with a chuckle, he’d rather given up on treasuring human life himself…
Reynolds didn’t think the toxin would work. His research suggested that the xenomorphs scarcely needed to breathe, could go long periods without air—without even air pressure, due to the superb natural engineering of their exoskeletons. He had seen additional recordings in the Giff computer database that indicated the xenomorphs could live in the vacuum of space, at least for awhile. He was equally certain that the predatory aliens did need oxygen—but they stored up a great deal internally, and could go without a fresh supply for long periods. They had evolved to survive on many kinds of worlds, with many kinds of atmospheres. It seemed unlikely they’d be easy to poison.
He switched to a view within the queen’s lair, and noted that the queen had gone somewhat quiescent, probably a mode she adopted when confronted with a poisoned atmosphere. He had no doubt she would be responsive and quick to act in a moment, with the right stimulus…
Reynolds had his materials prepared already, and took flight immediately on his diamond-flyer, the moment he saw that the technicians and scientists had pumped the poison gas out and descended through the big roughly triangular hole cut into the deck, descending to the alien nursery, thinking they’d killed the xenomorphs. One of the sentries had gone with them; the other, wearing his helmet, looked down from above. He didn’t notice Reynolds flying silently up behind him—never knew who pushed him down into the hole, to fall into the nursery. His helmet shattered when he struck the lower deck.
Reynolds dropped in the glass bulbs, cadged from a Giff laboratory; they contained the last of his xenomorphic alarm-pheromone extract, and the yellow mist quickly spread out in the chamber below, exciting the stage ones and waking the queen.
She struck the sentries down, stunning them for later use, before they could do more than damage her left talons with their weapons; the others were taken down by a swarm of face-hugging stage ones, stimulated to hyper-activity by Reynolds’s extract. There was scarcely time for the soldiers to scream.
It took the CA
NC ship a while to respond to the last desperate calls for help from the team sent to deal with the xenomorphs. Before they got there, Reynolds found an assault rifle, fully loaded, along with extra ammunition, and discovered that the industrial laser had a gravitational reducer on its underside; he was able to tow it, though it was as big as a portable cement mixer, back to his new warren in the chamber under the stern engine room…
Now he was armed. Now he could do some real damage. He dropped down into the shaft just long enough to gather up two of the face-huggers who’d fallen away from their victims—endoparasitism implantation was complete. He caught the discarded stage one arthropods up and escaped with relative ease from the queen: she was occupied attaching someone to a wall…
Smiling as he considered the possibilities, he went back to his research. He was close to discovering how to make the steel egg move through space.
All in good time, he would take it back to Earth.
There was just one snag. The queen.
Soon after returning to his surveillance station, he discovered, through the Giffs’ unknown camera mechanism, that the queen had left her lair. The gas attack and gunfire had provoked her into taking the initiative.
So it was that when the rescue team, seven men and a woman, came from the CANC vessel, she was waiting for them. They didn’t see her, poised over on a workstation platform, above the interior airlock from the navel. They were all engaged in taking off their helmets, collapsing them, attaching them to their belts. Their weapons were laid on the deck.
“No clue!” Reynolds chuckled, watching on the ship’s internal surveillance. “They think she’s waiting politely for them where they left her!”
