Or at least—where he had been a moment before. She swung her lights around and saw he’d gotten to his feet and was dodging around to the side of the thing.
Then he reached into his backpack and took something out. Rao was too far away to see what it was, until he squeezed it in his hand. Red fire, hard to look at, burst from its end. It was a flare, the last of their flares. Instead of firing it into the air, he’d ignited it in his hand and now he held it like a torch. He waved it back and forth in front of the thing, as if he was trying to get its attention. Like a matador facing down a charging bull with a red cape. Did he think he could lead it away from them?
“It doesn’t have any eyes!” Rao called out.
He didn’t look at her, but maybe he heard her. As the thing slid toward him, neither faster nor slower than it had moved before, he stopped swinging his arm. He danced backward, clearly getting ready to run away. It wouldn’t help, Rao saw. She’d seen him run before. The animal was moving much faster than he could.
“N-n-no,” Rao said, unable to keep her teeth from chattering in fear.
Hawkins lifted his arm. He raised the flare up to shoulder height, then he squeezed it again. This time it launched and flew toward the toothy maw like a missile, like a rocket. Rao expected the flare to land inside the mouth, and she was certain the thing wouldn’t even notice it there. This was a creature that devoured literally everything in its path; a little burning magnesium wouldn’t even give it indigestion.
Instead the flare struck one of its hundreds of legs, catching it in the meaty part where it attached to the body. Red fire burrowed into its flesh, lighting up its skin from within.
The maw spun wildly, all those teeth blurring as they revolved around and around. The creature made no noise, no shriek of pain, but it reared up, its head lifting off the floor and then crashing down again. Its legs writhed and spasmed.
Hawkins dashed back to where the two women stood. “Why aren’t you running?” he demanded of them. “That’ll only hold it for a second!”
Indeed, already the animal was rolling over on its side, rolling over to smother the spitting flame that burned frantically under its skin. Rao was certain that it could crush out the fire, and then it would come for them again.
“Fucking run!” Hawkins shouted, as he tore past them.
Jansen’s lungs burned as she hobbled forward, glad at least to be on solid ground instead of the rubbery soil of the island, even if it meant that every step was a jarring impact, a new shard of glass shoved up under her kneecap.
She was only peripherally aware of Rao at her side, trying to take her arm. Why hadn’t Rao listened? Why hadn’t she run away when she had the chance, left the two of them behind? 2I had changed them all, but Rao the least, or the most subtly, and if anyone had a chance…
The thoughts churned through her head, getting nowhere.
She looked up and saw that the trench curved to the right up ahead. She had no choice but to follow its path. Hawkins’s lights swung wildly up there as his helmet bounced on his hip, the narrow cones of light swinging up the trench wall now, then splaying out across the porous drum floor the next moment. She could see almost nothing, her own single light skewed around so it pointed down at her feet. It had to be that way, so she could see where she was putting each foot down. She was terrified of tripping, terrified that the bitter betrayal that was her left leg would finally do her in. She knew that if she fell, Rao would stop to help her up, and they would both be devoured. Because the giant worm had to be right on their heels. She could hear its wheels of teeth spinning, grinding against the stone-lined floor of the drum. She imagined them throwing up sparks, but then she had to discard that image because no, that would generate light—and light was forbidden here, light was an intrusion on universal darkness. A violation of something ancient and sacred to itself.
The thing exhaled, its breath pluming over them, smoky and dense so it billowed through their lights. She was very glad she couldn’t tell what that smelled like. She looked up to find Hawkins, to look for his lights—he would have to breathe in that hellish plume of gas—and realized something horrible. She couldn’t see him at all. There was only darkness ahead of her, darkness and what little of the floor and the trench walls Rao’s frantic lights draped across.
“Where is he?” she gasped.
“He ran on ahead—he’s around the curve,” Rao told her, and she heard the younger woman’s breath coming fast and shallow. Rao must be tiring, too, she must be slowing down while the thing behind them kept coming at them, clearly intending to swallow them whole. Why? Compared to the walls of the trench, compared to the hand-trees and the flesh of the island, how could a few humans in space suits be tempting? They would be tiny morsels, a tiny supply of calories in a wonderland of good things to chew up and devour.
Unless it wasn’t just hunger that drove the worm. Unless something other than their food value lured it on. What, though? Their lights? The thing had no eyes, as Rao had pointed out. The radios in their suits?
Jansen took a chance and—while still running forward as best she could, swinging her hurt leg ahead of her—took a look at the rearview mirror on her sleeve.
She could see nothing. There was no light back there. Angry with herself for not thinking of that, she reached up and twisted her light around to point directly behind them.
The worm was still there. Still dragging itself toward them, its whirling rows of teeth scraping across the drum floor.
They came around the curve in the trench. It took a while to realize, because their lights covered only so much ground, but Jansen was certain the trench was opening up, growing wider. Maybe that would give them more room to maneuver, she thought. Which made her think of a strategy for how to deal with the current situation.
She would run one way and Rao would run the other, getting as much distance between them as possible. If they did that, the worm could chase only one of them at a time. One of them—the one not chased—might gain a little time for thinking of some way to escape. The other would surely be devoured.
It wasn’t much of a plan. It was all she could think of.
Until something bizarrely miraculous happened. Something she could never have expected.
Up ahead, in the middle of the widened trench, a spotlight came to life, high over their heads. An incredibly powerful light that fell in a cone of beautiful, pure, lemony radiance, to make a circle on the drum floor. Hawkins stood in the exact center of that light like an actor on a stage about to deliver a soliloquy. He even had one arm raised as if he was about to declaim at any moment.
Except—no—he was waving them on. Beckoning to them.
Behind him, just inside the cone of the light, was a massive pillar rising straight up from the floor of the drum. It was a pylon, part of one of the arches that made up 2I’s skeletal structure. Around its base it was splintered and worn away—the worm must have chewed on it extensively but been unable to break it down, even with those rows of grinding teeth.
Jansen hurried forward, faster now, because she understood something of what she was seeing. She knew what Hawkins was suggesting, and while she had no idea if it would work, it was at least a possibility. “You go first,” she told Rao, almost shoving her forward.
She’d thought they were in for some tricky rock climbing, using the natural texture of the bone arch to find hand- and footholds. As they drew close, however, a rope fell down into the light, bouncing and swaying for a moment before coming to rest. Hawkins grabbed on to it and started hauling himself up, looping it under his thigh for support. It was clear he wasn’t going to wait for them. Rao reached the bottom of the rope when he was near the top of the cone of light, about to disappear into the shadows. She got to the base of the pylon and slumped against the hard surface, grateful for anything that could take her weight.
“Go!” she said. Rao wasted time giving her a meaningful look—Jansen didn’t bother to reply. Then the astrobiologist grabbed the rope and
started to climb.
Jansen wondered momentarily whether the rope was anchored sturdily enough to support the weight of all three of them and their suits. Then she looked up and saw the worm was barely twenty meters behind her. She didn’t need any more incentive to get scampering up the line, hand over hand. At least she didn’t need her bad leg for this. She hurried upward, grunting and heaving as she lifted her own weight, a little at a time.
The worm was almost on her. She climbed as fast as she could. It reared up, its massive weight colliding with the pylon, making it shake and creak alarmingly. The rows of teeth swirled beneath her as if she were suspended over a terrible abyss. She pulled and grabbed and hauled herself up, up, even as the worm shoved its bulk against the pylon.
And then the rope got tangled in its teeth.
It yanked taut and she nearly went flying. She barely held on with one hand as the rope stretched and grew tighter, pulled down meter by meter into the devouring maw. She could feel the tension in it, even through her gloves, feel its fibers stretch and start to snap.
No, she thought, not when I’m so close—
The rope thrummed like a guitar string, then snapped with a sound like a gunshot. Jansen screamed and let go, thrusting her hands out toward the surface of the pylon, desperate for anything she could hold on to. Her fingers caught a natural seam in the bone and dug in, but it wasn’t enough. She didn’t have the grip strength to hold on.
Hands reached down from above, many hands. They grabbed the folds of cloth of the sleeve of her suit, grabbed the control panel on the front of her suit. She kicked her feet at the bone and found something, some purchase, and with the aid of the hands, she scrambled upward, up over a ledge where she could roll onto her side.
The bone pylon shook and creaked beneath her, but at least she wasn’t falling. At least she wasn’t falling into those whirling teeth.
She turned over and let her light show her where she’d ended up. She was inside what looked like a cave dug out of the pylon, maybe a bubble that had formed while the bone was growing. A nearly spherical cave about five meters across. Hawkins and Rao were half sitting, half leaning against the opposite wall, as far from the mouth of the cave as they could get. Between them and Jansen was a blinding light, clearly the source of the spotlight that had led them to this refuge.
Then the light moved, and she saw who was holding it. It was Sandra Channarong.
“Oh God,” Jansen said, unable to stop herself. “What happened to you?”
RENDEZVOUS
WINDSOR HAWKINS: We’d known she was still alive, since she left us that menacing video. I had assumed we would never see her in person, that she would watch from the shadows and wait for us to leave—or die. It hadn’t occurred to me she could help us. Or that she would want to.
Channarong switched off her light as soon as Jansen was safely inside the cave. She leaned out through the rough opening and looked down, then swore in a language Rao didn’t know.
The pylon shook—and listed a little, sending them all rolling across the floor. Below them the worm must be smashing and grinding at the bone, chewing away at it like a lumberjack striking a tree trunk with an ax. It wouldn’t be long before it broke all the way through the pylon. Rao had no idea what would happen then—would they fall? Would their cave become their tomb? She didn’t know if this arch was connected to any others that might help support its weight.
Clearly Sandra Channarong didn’t want to find out.
“Turn off your lights,” she shouted. “Your radios, anything electric. Do it now! They can’t climb for shit, but they can chew through anything.”
Rao switched her whole suit down. The air inside her helmet started to feel stale almost instantly. She was breathing hard—she was scared—and she knew she would start asphyxiating on her own carbon dioxide soon. But she had to believe Channarong knew what she was talking about. Jansen and then Hawkins switched off their own lights.
The darkness was sudden and unbearable. Rao saw tiny flashes of light in her vision as her brain reacted to suddenly being struck blind. She was holding her breath. She realized she was trying to make herself silent, as if the worm could hear her. She exhaled… slowly. Quietly.
The pylon shook under her again, and she slid across the floor. She screamed—all concerns about silence forgotten—and threw her arms out to grab anything she could find. She was terrified that she might slide right out through the hole in the cave wall.
The floor under her jumped, actually throwing her into the air. She crashed back down and tried not to whimper.
And then it was over, as quickly as it had begun. The thumping, the shaking stopped. The worm must have given up. She prayed it had grown bored and wandered off.
For a long time all of them simply huddled there in the dark, none of them speaking. There was no light, and without her suit radio Rao could hear sounds only at a remove, distorted by her helmet. Not that there was much to hear. She thought maybe Hawkins was stirring restlessly. Or maybe it was Jansen.
Then Sandra Channarong snapped a glow stick and dropped it on the floor of the cave. The faint green light filled the spherical space, painted the walls and their suits. It made Channarong’s orange garment turn black, the light streaming upward across her features so that her eye sockets were filled with deep shadow.
Rao had seen a photograph of the woman before, back when Jansen had first suggested her rescue mission. In that picture Channarong wore a space suit but no helmet. Now she wore nothing but a short, sleeveless romper emblazoned with KSpace hexagons—even her feet were bare. She was tall and slender, with black hair cut in a short bob. In the photograph she had a large mole on her ear. That was gone now.
Her ear was gone.
The skin on the left side of her head was cratered, eaten away by necrosis. The pattern of damage continued down her shoulder and her left arm, which was missing below the elbow. The stump was wrapped up in makeshift bandages, strips of torn fabric wound around and around the amputation site. A large and powerful-looking flashlight was lashed with duct tape to what remained of her forearm.
She must have noticed Rao staring. She swiveled away, concealing most of the damage. Then she squatted down by the mouth of the cave, staring outward. Into the dark. She couldn’t possibly see anything there, but at one point she flinched—maybe she’d heard something.
No one spoke. Maybe the others were worried that if they made too much noise, the worm would come back. Maybe they just respected Channarong’s silence.
“You should have left,” Channarong finally said. “I told you to leave.” She sighed, her shoulders slumping.
“We have a lot of questions,” Hawkins said. “Don’t get me wrong. We’re very grateful that you saved us from—”
“I wasn’t supposed to talk to you before,” the woman said. She didn’t turn around to look at them. “I wasn’t supposed to have any contact with you. I broke the rules to tell you to leave, but you didn’t listen.” She moved, but only to sit in the opening, her legs dangling out over thin air.
“I understand,” Hawkins told her. “I’m military. I get operational security. But there are some basic facts we need to resolve.”
Channarong shook her head. “Foster’s had a change of heart. He sent me to find Commander Jansen. He has a message for her.”
“Foster’s alive?” Jansen asked, sitting up and pushing herself forward, supporting her weight on her hands. “Where is he? Can we—”
Hawkins cleared his throat and spoke over her. “Ms. Jansen is no longer in charge. I’m Major Windsor Hawkins, and I’m the MC for Orion now.”
Channarong finally turned and looked at them, and the weight of her gaze was enough to make even Hawkins shut up.
“I’m supposed to give Foster’s message to Commander Jansen.” As if she hadn’t heard him.
Hawkins stepped directly in front of her. She tried to move to the side, to look at Jansen, but Hawkins just moved with her. He tried again, forcing himself
to be patient.
“I’m the mission commander of Orion. Jansen has been relieved of that duty. Look at her. She can barely walk—she’s barely conscious. Whatever Foster wanted to tell her, you can tell me instead.”
Channarong bent low to look around him. Jansen was breathing heavily and not looking at anyone, but she managed to nod.
“Let’s find a place we can talk in private,” Channarong said after a moment. Then she reached up and grabbed the rim of the cave mouth with her hand. She swung her leg out and put her weight on a foothold that Rao couldn’t see, some rough patch of the bone just outside the opening. In a second she was gone, swallowed up by the dark.
Hawkins looked down at Rao and Jansen.
“Wait here,” he said. “I’ll be back.”
Rao went to the mouth of the cave, but the darkness out there was too intense—it felt like a solid wall of nothingness. She felt as if, if she put so much as a hand out there, it would get swallowed up, lost forever.
Like Sandra Channarong’s hand and forearm. The thought made her shiver, though she knew she couldn’t imagine what the woman must have been through. Stevens had described her as cheerful, almost too chirpy, when he’d known her, when he’d dated her, but now—
Rao turned around because she’d heard something. Not the worm coming back, or any of the horrors of 2I, but a much more human sound. She’d heard Jansen groaning.
“Ma’am?” she said.
Jansen’s face had turned deathly pale, and her eyes rolled in their sockets. Her whole body started to shake.
“Ma’am? Sally?” Rao said, rushing over to her. She grabbed the shoulders of her suit and tried to hold her still.
The Last Astronaut Page 30
