Dark Humanity

by Gwynn White

  “Why does it matter?”

  “They’re totally untrustworthy. Shyaka probably sold the crystals out of these radios and embezzled the proceeds.”

  “Oh …” Elfrida said vaguely, not crediting Colden’s suspicions in the least. Then the snow fell away in front of her. It was down to her waist. Down to her knees. Gone.

  Ahead of them, the ledge appeared to have been swept clean.

  They were right under the roof, as Elfrida had guessed. From the furthest reach of their headlamps, the ceiling of the proto-dome swept away into the dark.

  Colden pointed.

  In the back wall of the ledge, at floor level, was a perfectly round opening, about a meter and a half in diameter.

  “Kristiansen! Kristiansen?!?”

  Colden yelled into the hole. Elfrida shone her headlamp down it. Glacially blue ice sparkled. The walls and ceiling bore strange swirling grooves. The floor sloped down slightly. It reminded her of what you saw on the screen during an endoscopy. Except blue.

  It was a tunnel.

  The floor was chipped and gouged, littered with ice splinters. Elfrida also saw clumps of what could have been snow … or POCK fur.

  “Kristiansen!!”

  “ … here … you …”

  “That was him! Kristiansen!”

  Colden’s face lit up. She bounded into the tunnel.

  The roof was too low for kangaroo-hops. They pushed off like speed skaters, their bodies canted forward. This turned out to be an excellent way of achieving momentum. And so, when the tunnel plunged sharply downwards, they had no way to stop.

  Colden first, then Elfrida, sailed out over an apparently bottomless drop. Elfrida’s momentum carried her towards the roof of the tunnel, which had now become the wall of a not-quite-vertical shaft. She fended herself off with her hands, and rebounded. When she hit the other wall, her rifle flew around on its strap and smacked her on the jaw. Stars exploded in her vision.

  Tangled up with Colden, she slid helplessly. The shaft levelled out to the pitch of a playground slide. The torn-up ice of the floor caught at their clothes. They tobogganed to a halt.

  Panicky, Elfrida pulled herself out from under Colden, who let out an earsplitting scream.

  “Are you OK?”

  “No. My leg. Are you OK?”

  “I hit my head, but I don’t think I broke anything. Just my headlamp,” Elfrida panted.

  “Leg.” Colden clawed herself into a sitting position.

  “Here? Where?”

  “Other leg!”

  “I can’t see what’s—”

  “It’s my knee. It could be broken or whatever. I don’t want to take my gear off to find out. All I know is it hurts.”

  “We have to get out of here.”

  “Oh really? You think that might be a good idea?”

  “Don’t get mad at me! I wasn’t the one who sprinted in here without checking it out!”

  “I already said I’m sorry! If you want to go ahead and leave me, that’s up to you!”

  “Of course I’m not going to leave you!”

  “Oh, so what was that, night before last? You went off with that chick and I didn’t know where you’d gone! I was worried! You know the stories you hear about Ganymede. You could have been kidnapped by a surrogacy gang, or—or killed and eaten!”

  “Hur hur. I don’t think there are any cannibals nowadays, even on Ganymede,” Elfrida said, automatically deflecting the accusation with humor.

  But Colden did not laugh, and in the silence, the accusation wormed into Elfrida’s shocked consciousness. Maybe she had been inconsiderate, going off like that. Maybe she wasn’t as good a friend as she thought she was.

  That possibility played into one of her deepest fears: that she lacked any kind of internal moral compass. So often, she ended up doing the wrong thing without thinking twice about it. She seemed to lack a framework of right and wrong, or her framework was incomplete, or buggy. She depended on Colden to make those judgements for her.

  “I’m sorry, Colden.” She stammered with sincerity. “I mean it. I should have told you where I was going. I shouldn’t have gone.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t have minded if I knew.”

  “She wasn’t even that hot. It was just the atmosphere. I got high on the whole ambience of do-whatever.”

  “I know what you mean.” Wincing, Colden tried to get her left leg, the uninjured one, under her. Elfrida hastened to give her a hand. They maneuvered Colden upright, leaning on Elfrida’s shoulder.

  “Now what?” Elfrida muttered.

  Colden’s breath came in ragged gasps. “Weren’t there some meds in those emergency kits?”

  “Of course! Let me look … Uh. No.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “Yeah, this is incredible. No meds whatsoever. I have my novocaine cream, but that’s all.”

  “Crap on it.”

  “At least we’ve still got our rifles.”

  “I’m not in that much pain.” Pause. “Goto, did you bring your stash?”

  Before Elfrida could reply, a light popped into view further down the tunnel. “Hey, ladies. You decided to come, after all?”

  Colden gasped. “There you are! I am so reporting you to the dean!”

  Kristiansen’s headlamp bobbed closer. He walked into the circle of weak light from their one working headlamp. “Are you OK?”

  “I hurt my leg when we fell.”

  “You fell?”

  “How did you get down?”

  “Well, I walked, and then I slid.”

  “And you thought that was a good idea, why?” Colden snapped. She was clearly in a great deal of pain.

  “I didn’t say that. It wasn’t a good idea. I realized that about halfway down, when I was sliding too fast to stop.”

  Elfrida broke in. “Did you try radioing for help?”

  “Of course I did,” Kristiansen said. “But I couldn’t get through. Something’s jamming our signals.”

  Colden laughed brittly. “Just like at an off-line club. But not as much fun. Ow! Owww! Cra-a-ap!”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I told you. It’s my freaking knee.”

  “Can I take a look at it?”

  “What’s the point? We don’t have any meds, or anything to use for a splint. Ow! Ow!”

  Kristiansen hooked Colden’s other arm over his shoulder. Like this, Colden could hop between them without putting her right foot on the ground.

  “It jars,” she said, teeth gritted.

  “Not as badly as it would under Earth’s gravity,” Kristiansen said. “Well, we can’t climb back up, anyway. Not because of your leg. It’s just too steep; I already tried. You would need crampons, an ice axe, or something.”

  Elfrida said, “What is this tunnel? Why is it here at all?”

  “I think for drainage,” Kristiansen said. “When you excavate a cavern, you need to remove stuff. So they melted n kilotons of ice into water, right? They would have needed to drain that off before it froze again. There’s probably a pipe like this on every level.”

  A drainage pipe. Elfrida relaxed somewhat. That explained the weird swirling patterns on the walls: they were the traces of flowing water. It made the tunnel less of a terrifying enigma.

  “But where to?” she said. “Where does the pipe lead? I suppose there must be a reservoir, or …”

  “Well, that’s exactly what I was wondering,” Kristiansen said. “I thought maybe there was a natural network of caves that they were using as a storage reservoir.”

  Elfrida shivered. That was a bit too close to Colden’s scenario of subterranean tunnels populated by aliens.

  “But that wouldn’t make sense,” Kristiansen added. “Any such network of caves would be in vacuum. And obviously, we aren’t. So it has to be something else. So I did a bit of exploring, and—”

  Colden broke in. “Let me get this straight. We’re trapped down here because you were curious about the plumbing?”

&n
bsp; “No—” Kristiansen started. Then he laughed. Then they were all laughing. It was the first time Elfrida had ever seen Kristiansen laugh at himself. He ducked his head away like a little boy. It was cute, and she could see Colden thought so, too.

  But when they stopped laughing, they were still trapped.

  ★

  Their training had been very clear on what to do when you didn’t know what to do.

  1. Call for help.

  2. Remain where you are and wait for help to arrive.

  Nothing had been said about what to do when you couldn’t call for help, because the ice was blocking your signals, or because your radio had been sabotaged by a corrupt UNSA official, as Colden insisted.

  They discussed the second part of the directive—remain where you are—and decided that it did not apply, either. All they’d gain by sitting here would be to get colder. Colden’s knee was also a concern. It had swelled alarmingly. Kristiansen diagnosed a patella fracture. Elfrida (who had brought her stash, in the expectation that she and Colden could reward themselves with a toke after they’d caught enough POCKs) gave Colden a couple of THC candies in lieu of painkillers.

  “Ooh, you’ve got the chocolate ones,” Colden said faintly. “Although, I still prefer those nutriblocks. Anyone got any left?”

  No one had.

  Worse, Kristiansen was the only one who had any fluids left. They had been given a canteen of gatorade each, but they had polished those off when they sat down for their snacks. Kristiansen had also brought a pouch of instant cocoa, stamped with the Space Corps logo, from their ship’s stores. In other circumstances, Elfrida and Colden would have laughed at him for being so thrifty. Now they eyed the pouch with silent, intense longing. Elfrida had not been aware of it before, but she was so thirsty that her throat ached.

  “500 cc’s divided by three,” Kristiansen said, as if to himself. He put the pouch away.

  “We should get moving,” Elfrida said determinedly.

  They started down the tunnel at Colden’s limping pace. After a few meters, Kristiansen said, “I think it would be better if one of us carried you.”

  “OK,” Colden said between her teeth. “Goto, would you?”

  Elfrida carried her piggyback. Since Colden only weighed eight kilos on Ganymede, it wasn’t much of a workout. Elfrida just wished the tunnel was high enough to walk fully upright. Keeping her head bent all the time was killing her neck.

  This is a test, she told herself. This is a test.

  The tunnel continued to slope gently downwards. As they walked, Kristiansen told them what he’d found out in his explorations. The short answer was, not much.

  “So you didn’t see any aliens?” Elfrida said.

  “There aren’t any aliens.”

  They soon reached a fork in the tunnel, which Kristiansen had already discovered. It was shaped like a trident with five tines. They had come out of one of the endmost tines. They could either go straight on, or double back along a different tine.

  “I tried the next tunnel over,” Kristiansen said. “It slopes up again, but not as steeply. But I didn’t get far before I heard you calling me.”

  Elfrida set Colden down near a wall so that Colden could prop herself upright. Elfrida rubbed her back, swung her arms. This convergence point had a slightly higher roof. They were standing upright again. But ahead, the tunnel seemed to constrict. If they went that way, they’d be bent double within a few paces.

  “Five drainage pipes. One for each level,” Kristiansen went on. “So logically, one of these must lead to the floor of the dome. We should be able to walk out.”

  “Great!” Colden said. “What are we waiting for?”

  “We could try each tunnel in turn. Or we could split up. It would be faster that way.”

  Elfrida instinctively disliked the idea of splitting up. After all, it hadn’t worked out very well last time. But she did not feel able to oppose Kristiansen’s logic with a mere kneejerk reaction. She looked at Colden, waiting for her to make the call.

  “That makes sense,” Colden said. “I’ll stay here. You guys try the tunnels.”

  She pulled her headlamp off and gave it to Elfrida, whose headlamp had been smashed in their fall.

  “You’ll need this.”

  As she accepted the headlamp, Elfrida saw a funny gleam in Colden’s eyes. She realized that Colden was terrified at the thought of being left alone, in pain, in the dark. Who wouldn’t be? But she was being brave. Elfrida couldn’t take that away from her, especially not in front of Kristiansen.

  “Thanks,” Elfrida said. “We’ll be right back, I promise.”

  Kristiansen stared worriedly at Colden. Her bravado obviously wasn’t fooling him. Then he turned to Elfrida. “You take that tunnel, I’ll take this one. If it gets too steep, turn around and come back. Try your radio as you go. We might get through to the others, if they’re still inside the cavern.” He hesitated. “Sit tight, Colden.”

  “Like I have any choice.” Colden lowered herself to the floor, hissing in pain. Her right leg stayed bent at an awkward angle. She rested her rifle across the thigh of her good leg.

  “If the aliens show up, frag them,” Elfrida said.

  “With extreme prejudice.” Colden sketched a salute.

  Elfrida started up Drainage Pipe No.2 (as she was determined to think of it). Like the tunnel they’d come out of, Pipe No.1, it sloped gently uphill. She had not gone more than a hundred meters when the slope got steeper. She was on her hands and knees, climbing, and then she was slipping, banging her elbows and knees. She slid helplessly back to where she’d started.

  She turned around and went back.

  “Who’s there?” Colden shouted, while Elfrida was still in the tunnel.

  “Me.”

  “Thank God.”

  “I guess sound carries well in here,” Elfrida said as she emerged from the tunnel. “I thought I was being quiet.”

  Colden sat where they had left her. Elfrida noticed that she was gripping her rifle tightly in both hands. “It’s a freaking echo chamber,” she said. “Remember, Kristiansen heard us calling him, all the way from the top of Pipe No.1? That’s got to be a kilometer from here.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But the thing is, you can’t tell what direction sounds are coming from.”

  “Well, we can’t get out that way,” Elfrida said, jerking her thumb at Pipe No.2. “It’s pretty much vertical.”

  “While I was waiting for you, I heard something.”

  “You heard something?”

  “I noticed it as soon as you guys were gone. It got quiet. Like, really quiet. And then—this noise: scritch, shhhh … like something c-c-crawling.”

  Elfrida dropped to the floor beside Colden and seized her around the shoulders. “Oh my God, Colden, oh my fucking God.” The circle of light cast by her headlamp seemed tiny and weak.

  The darkness beyond, infinite.

  Malevolent.

  “I couldn’t tell how far away it was, or which direction, or anything,” Colden whispered.

  “Maybe it was a POCK.”

  “Maybe the POCKS are the aliens.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  Silence.

  “Wonder what’s happened to Kristiansen.”

  “Maybe the POCKs got him.”

  “Oh shit, Colden.”

  “Maybe he found the way out, and just left us.”

  “I don’t think he’d do that,” Elfrida said uncertainly.

  Colden shivered. “This isn’t what I was expecting when I signed up for the Space Corps.”

  “Me, neither.”

  “Why did you sign up, anyway?”

  “Oh, you know. Drugs, debauchery, zero-gravity sex.”

  “Venus?”

  “Yes, of course. Venus. I mean, it’s a dream, isn’t it? It’s the only dream we’ve got.”

  “I joined to get away from people,” Colden said fiercely.

  “Huh?”

  “Without laying
a whole saga on you, things are intense at home. It’s the 23rd century, and we’re still at war. You can’t even leave a basic profile up without getting it stolen. People vanish overnight, and their avatars pop up in enemy territory, all disfigured and crap. I didn’t want to end up as a head on a stick, you know?”

  Colden was referring to the virtual dimension of life on Earth. Elfrida had never really gotten into immersion. She’d never had a tribe to drag her in. But she understood what Colden was saying. The infowars of central Africa were legendary. The media always made them sound like fun. But evidently, it wasn’t so much fun if you were in the middle of it.

  “That’s why Venus,” Colden went on. “A new world. No tribal bullshit, no virtual drama. Somewhere people can just live.”

  “I’d settle for living through this.”

  “Keep dreaming that dream, Goto.”

  “Ha, ha. But I’m serious. When we get out of here—” when, not if— “I think I might quit.”

  “Whaaat? Tell me you are joking.”

  “No, I mean it. I’m sick of being jerked around like this.” Elfrida thought back to their night in the Y-Zone. The thrill of talking to strangers. Sex in a toilet stall with a woman who spoke about growing a tail. Getting her new piercing in the cool of the morning. Pigs on wings snatching garbage out of the air, kids singing “Barb’ra Allen,” an old man who gave her a daisy to put in her hair, “to match your smile, darlin’.” None of that stuff ever happened at home. People lived differently out here, on the frontier, outside the protective canopy of the UN. They lived harder. Lived better.

  This was her last chance to escape the world of stifling rules and regulations. If she got another chance, she wouldn’t pass it up, she vowed.

  “This really puts it in perspective,” she tried to explain to Colden. “I mean, what kind of a freaking test is this? Why are we letting them do this to us?”

  “Because we’ve got student loans?”

  Elfrida was silent. She didn’t have student loans. Her mother worked for the UN, and her father was a software artist. They’d paid her way through college in Paris, and made her regular presents of mad money during Space Corps training.