by Gwynn White
“—Did you hear that?”
“What?”
“Sssh.”
They held their breath, their four hands joined in a knuckly ball.
And Elfrida heard it.
Scrittcchh … scrittchh …
Just like Colden had said.
And as Colden had also said, she couldn’t tell what direction the sound was coming from.
“That’s it! That’s what I heard!”
“Ssssh!”
Scrittcchh … scrittchh …
Silence.
Kristiansen came back at that moment and found them clinging to each other, shaking with fear. “What?! What is it?”
“It’s the POCKs,” Elfrida gibbered. “They’re aliens. That was your hunch, wasn’t it? I’m sure you’re right. It’s the only explanation. That’s why UNSA wants us to kill them. They’ve found intelligent non-human life at last, and they’re trying to cover it up.”
Kristiansen put back his head and laughed. “Someone’s had too many THC candies,” he said. “Try thinking, instead of using your imagination. If there were aliens, they wouldn’t look like giant hamsters.”
“They might!”
“They’d have evolved in a completely different environment.”
“They might have evolved on—on a generation ship from Proxima Alpha—”
“Or they might be monsters with lots of tentacles, wearing hamster suits to put us off our guard,” Kristiansen suggested.
Elfrida gave up. “Oh, frag off,” she spluttered, and gave him the finger.
Kristiansen spread his hands. “Why are we even arguing about this? If there were aliens, they wouldn’t be stuck on Ganymede, scavenging kale from our farms. And we wouldn’t be trying to kill them. We’d be competing to license their extrastellar technologies and sign them up for exclusive media deals. Most importantly, if there were aliens, we’d already know about it. Signals travel faster than ships, remember.”
Elfrida chuckled. She was glad to be talked out of her fears. But Colden stuck out her chin. “We heard them,” she said. “It. Them. Whatever. While you were gone, we heard it. Didn’t we, Goto?”
“What did it sound like?”
“Like something crawling. Or maybe … something being dragged.”
“Maybe it was our POCK thief,” Elfrida speculated.
“Tell me about that,” Kristiansen said.
Elfrida and Colden explained how at least one of their kills had gone missing. Kristiansen listened in silence. When they finished talking, he nodded judiciously. “Well, Pipe No.3 is no good, anyway. I tried to use my rifle to melt steps in the ice. Handholds. But it didn’t work.”
Surprised by Kristiansen’s refusal to comment on the mystery of the missing POCK, Elfrida said, “That’s a good idea. Why didn’t it work?”
“The beam’s too narrow. You get a deep hole, but you can’t even fit one finger in it. I guess you didn’t get far in Pipe No.2, either?”
“No, only about as far as we came down Pipe No.1.”
“Was the slope just as steep?”
“Yes. No, not quite. Maybe.”
“We’ll just have to try numbers four and five. Are you going to be OK here, Colden?”
Colden nodded wearily. Kristiansen started towards Pipe No.5, then turned back. He took a knee next to Colden, popped open his pouch of cocoa, and held it out. “Have something to drink.”
Steam rose. A mouthwatering aroma filled the cavern. Colden took the pouch. Elfrida watched her lips close on the nozzle, trying not to think about how thirsty she was, trying not to panic as Colden kept drinking and drinking. When Colden gave the pouch back to Kristiansen, it was so flat that there could only be a couple of swallows left.
“Sorry,” Colden said.
“That’s OK,” Kristiansen said. “What’s mine is yours, and all that jazz.”
Elfrida headed into Pipe No.4.
Previously, the hope of escape had driven her on without regard for her tiredness, but now her steps flagged. The physical exertions of the day, not to mention the shock of falling down Pipe No.1, were catching up with her. She was extremely thirsty. Morbidly, she wondered what would happen if they couldn’t escape. Would dehydration get them first? Or hypothermia?
The icing on her cake of misery was that the crotch seam of her leggings was chafing her new piercing.
She had a tube of novocaine cream the piercer had given her. She needed to pee, anyway. She wrestled her layers down. “Oh God, it’s cold …” Her pee smoked. Watching it trickle away, she considered the waste of liquid, and wondered if she would regret this moment later.
Squatting, she noticed a dark stain on the ice floor.
She bent to examine it more closely. It looked like a smear of dark brown liquid, frozen solid.
Blood.
There were white hairs embedded in the stain.
POCK blood.
Elfrida dragged her trousers up, forgetting to apply her novocaine cream in her hurry.
Whatever had stolen their POCK, had come this way.
Or maybe a different POCK had left that bloodstain, on a different occasion.
After all, she’d seen clumps of POCK hair at the top of Pipe No.1, too.
And something had swept the entrance to Pipe No.1 clean, to allow for easier access.
Kristiansen had debunked Elfrida’s fear of aliens. But that didn’t mean there was not something down here. If the biotech gang on Ganymede had been irresponsible enough to create a race of giant hamsters, who was to say they had not tried to solve the problem by creating a different kind of gengineered animal to prey on them?
Something that lived deep down in the dark.
Something with claws that could dig into ice.
Something that could climb.
We have to get out of here.
Elfrida hurried on to the point where the tunnel inevitably swooped up at an 80° angle. Her theoretical predator might have been able to climb this slope, but she couldn’t. Just like before, she launched herself at the ice face, and just like before, she slid back down, scrabbling helplessly with her gloves and the toes of her boots. Her headlamp did not reach the top of the drop, no matter how high she jumped.
She thumped the ice with her fists and sobbed in sheer frustration. Her tears stung her numb cheeks, bringing back the feeling.
She trudged back the way she had come, praying that Kristiansen had had better luck.
Long before she reached the convergence point, she heard a noise on the fringe of audibility. She froze. Held her breath.
Scrittcchh … scrittchh …
The same as before.
But slightly louder.
Closer.
“No! Get away from me! Stop!”
That was Colden.
“No-ooooo!”
Colden’s shout dissolved into a scream.
Elfrida dashed down the tunnel, her weariness forgotten. She fumbled her rifle around on its strap. She heard cracking ice. Thuds. Another scream from Colden. The zzzzzip!! sound effect of a laser rifle.
And then nothing except her own panting breath.
She burst out of the tunnel. At almost the same instant, Kristiansen burst out of Pipe No.5.
Their beams crossed, danced across the empty convergence point.
Not quite empty.
Elfrida dashed forward and picked up a small object. It was a pendant on a cheap silver chain, its once-gaudy enamel almost worn off. “This is hers!”
“Yeah, I’ve seen her fiddling with it during exams.”
Kristiansen’s voice was glacially calm. He turned in a circle so that his headlamp illuminated every cranny of the cavern. Nothing jumped out at them. Elfrida wedged the stock of her rifle between her elbow and her side. She kept her finger on the trigger button. “Something’s taken her, just like it took our POCKs!” she screamed. “Where did it go?”
Kristiansen gestured with his rifle at the narrowest pipe, the haft of the trident, which led straight on. O
ne of Colden’s boots lay at the entrance of the pipe.
“She must have undone it to try and get comfortable,” Kristiansen said in the same frozen voice. “Her foot was probably swelling up. So she loosened her boot, and it came off when—when she was dragged away.”
“Let’s go. They can’t have got far.” Elfrida started down the pipe, picking up Colden’s boot as she went.
Kristiansen stopped her. “Headlamp.”
“What? Oh.”
Their headlamps would betray them instantly to … whatever it was … that had taken Colden.
“It can probably see in the dark, anyway,” Elfrida whispered. “Colden was sitting in the dark. And it found her.”
“Yeah, but we don’t need to make it any easier.” Kristiansen was whispering, too.
Unwillingly, Elfrida switched her headlamp off. So did Kristiansen. The dark closed on them like a fist.
This was no ordinary darkness. It was darker than outer space (where there was always something electronic blinking at you). It was darker than a cloudless night on Earth. It was darker than lying in bed with your eyes shut. The closest Elfrida had ever experienced to it was the sensory deprivation chamber on the Sargent Shriver, where they had all had to do a few hours as part of their training. This was a furry darkness, a tactile darkness, a darkness that seemed to get inside your head and wrap itself around your eyeballs.
She reached out for Kristiansen. They locked gloves. The sound of Kristiansen’s breath was like a radar beacon in the subterranean night, reassuring her that she was not alone.
“We better hurry,” she whispered.
“Yes, but be quiet.”
They felt their way into the tunnel. It rapidly constricted to about a meter in diameter. Coupled with the need for stealth, this forced them to crawl. Elfrida tried to pick up her hands and knees without a sound, but her trousers scraped on the ice. Scrittchh … shhshh …
“This is what we heard,” she whispered. “Somebody down here, crawling.”
“Or something.” Kristiansen was ahead of her.
“I thought you didn’t believe in the aliens.”
“I don’t. But there are other reasons Colden could have been taken.”
The only one that occurred to Elfrida was, food. She didn’t want to make that possibility any more real by uttering it. Instead, she whispered, “Something down here has been hunting POCKs. Killing them. Dragging them away. I saw bloodstains.”
“Yeah, I saw some in Pipe No.5, too.”
They crawled on.
Chapter Three
The tunnel gradually got narrower, until they were forced to worm along on their bellies. Elfrida’s hat caught on the roof. She had never been claustrophobic—any tendency to claustrophobia would eliminate a Space Corps candidate at the evaluation stage—but now she felt a surge of terror. She pictured herself buried like a fossil, 70 kilometers beneath the surface of Ganymede, a mystery for future generations to dig out.
“Kristiansen. Kristiansen.”
“Yeah?”
“Any narrower than this, and Colden wouldn’t have fitted through. A POCK wouldn’t.”
“Which is why it can’t get any narrower. It probably widens out again soon.”
“But if this really is the way to …”
To its den.
“… If we’re getting closer to wherever it’s taken Colden.”
“Yeah.”
“We might walk. Crawl. Straight into it.”
“Yeah, that’s kind of the plan.”
“That’s a sucky plan..”
Kristiansen stopped crawling. “Whatever happens,” he said, “we have got / Laser rifles, and they have not.” He sighed. “That’s about as smart as I can get right now.”
Elfrida’s teeth were chattering. The cold had seeped into her bones. She remembered her conversation with Colden about their motivations. Here in the dark, it felt all right to ask a personal question. “What did you get into this for, anyway, Kristiansen?”
“My father is in Star Force. He taught me that jingle about laser rifles. Of course, that was in the days before every squatter in the Belt also had a laser rifle. He expected me to join the Force, but I … wanted to do this. You know. Help people.”
“My mom works for the UN, but I’m the first in my family to go into space.”
“Why?”
“I just felt like there had to be something more out there.”
“Guess we’re going to find out what.”
Kristiansen shifted as if he were about to start crawling again. Elfrida grasped his ankle. “Kristiansen, I forgot to ask. Was Pipe No.5 any good?”
Kristiansen hesitated. “It was a gentle slope all the way. We could have walked straight out.”
“Oh my God! Now you tell me?”
“We couldn’t leave Colden, anyway, right?”
“No. Of course not. But one of us could have gone for help, while the other one came this way.”
Pause. “I didn’t think of that.”
“You could still go back. I’ll go on.”
“I can’t squeeze past you. The tunnel’s too narrow. You’d have to be the one to go.”
Tears stung Elfrida’s eyes. “I can’t do that. It’s Colden, FFS. But I am never, never doing anything like this again.”
They crawled on.
★
“There’s a bit of cocoa left. Let’s split it.”
“Yes, let’s.” Elfrida’s voice was an alien croak.
Kristiansen drank first, then passed the pouch back to her. He had been wise to do it in that order. The minute Elfrida tasted the sweet, luke-warm liquid, no force in the universe could have pried the pouch out of her hands until she had drunk it all.
She rolled the pouch up from the bottom.
“All gone,” she croaked lightly.
Kristiansen pushed something else into her glove. “Here’s a nutriblock. I actually had a couple left. I was saving them, but I think we need them now … Don’t drop it.”
Elfrida clumsily unwrapped the nutriblock without taking her gloves off. It was one of the liverwurst-flavored ones, not as yummy as the chocolate, but right now, it was the best thing she’d ever tasted.
“I think we’re almost there,” Kristiansen whispered.
Elfrida choked, losing precious crumbs. “How can you tell?”
“The tunnel’s gotten slightly wider. And the draught is stronger now. You probably can’t feel it because you’re behind me.”
As soon as they finished eating, they crawled on. Elfrida found new reserves of strength, fuelled by the calories she’d ingested. Or it might have been hope. For better or worse, they’d be getting out of this hole soon.
Kristiansen stopped. She bumped into him.
“I can see light,” he whispered.
“I can’t!”
“You will in a minute. This is it.” Kristiansen was psyching himself up. “This is it.”
“Rifles.”
“Yeah.”
“How much charge have you got?”
“Um …”
“We should check now.”
They had been carrying their rifles strapped on their backs. They wrestled them around, on hands and knees. Elfrida fumbled with the user control panel. After so long in the dark, the glare of the little screen hurt her eyes.
“Two bars out of ten,” she whispered.
“… One bar.”
She had been counting on Kristiansen’s rifle. “But you didn’t shoot any POCKs!”
“I used my rifle to try to gouge out steps in the slope of Pipe No.3, remember? That must have burnt a lot of juice. I’m such an idiot,” Kristiansen groaned. “My father would kill me.”
“Well, what we’ve got is what we’ve got. About how many shots is one bar?”
“Two? Three? Depends on the intensity setting.”
“OK. I’m setting mine to maximum intensity. If we only have a few shots, we’d better make them count.”
Looking at th
e rifle’s display had wrecked Elfrida’s night vision. But soon the light from the end of the tunnel grew so strong that she could see Kristiansen crawling ahead of her.
It was LED light. But not the fake sunlight of YM City, nor the foggy pink growlight of Farm Dome 1.
She had a sudden memory of the trainees’ mess on board the Sargent Shriver. When they were juniors, she and Colden used to cut open pouches of green peas, beans, anything that came in morsels, and release it bit by bit, so that the trainees would be gradually surrounded by a zero-gravity cloud of peas or whatever. She gritted her teeth at the memory of Colden’s giggles. I will save her. If she’s still alive, I WILL save her.
But why had she remembered that now?
Because of the light—it was the same sterile white light as in the mess—but also because of the smell wafting from the end of the tunnel. The gamey smell of food.
Kristiansen stopped. Elfrida wriggled up beside him, even through the tunnel wasn’t really wide enough for them both.
They stared out into a shallow basin of ice about two hundred meters wide. It was shaped like an upside-down toilet bowl, with small openings irregularly clustered around the rim. They were huddled in one of these. At the bottom, a litter of construction materials surrounded a row of mighty capsules encased in tattered foil packaging.
A shaft opened at the apex of the slightly domed ceiling, wide enough to take the capsules they were looking at. That this was its purpose could be easily inferred. A gossamer curve of maglev rail descended from the shaft and split into a loop enclosing the center of the basin. The unused capsules sat on the ice inside the rail loop. One of them, stripped of its packaging, was parked on the rail with its side open, and that was what tipped Elfrida off.
They were looking at an embryonic train station.
“Kristiansen, that’s a maglevator!”
It would be identical to the one they had ridden down from Neith Spaceport, after a bit more work was put into it.
Well. Quite a lot more work.
But who cared? There were freestanding lights down there, and there was that smell. She could hear the muted mutter of machinery. Clearly, the place wasn’t deserted. Someone must be working here. Elfrida started to wriggle past Kristiansen.
He grabbed her arm. Hard.
Elfrida released the breath she had drawn to yell for help. “What?”
