by John Shirley
“Oh my God,” she muttered, pushing Cal along ahead of her.
They reached an intersection and saw the entrance to Airlock Three off to the right. The airlock led to a flexible tube, an umbilicus that extended from the ship to the main body of the Study Station. Running up to the airlock, Cal tugged at the door latch—it wouldn’t turn. A small indicator read: locked down. An oval viewport to the right of the airlock showed the umbilicus extending through space to the station.
Marla could see the popeyed steward running through the transparent passage, arms pumping up and down, passing a hastening group of passengers. There was no one else in the umbilicus … which was now detaching from the Homeworld Bound, as if the station were recoiling from the starship. Marla realized with a thrill of horror that they were simply too late.
“Mom—they left us!” Cal yelled. “Now what do we do?”
Behind them came the angry whir of the drones—and the crump of a distant explosion.
The ship shuddered from an internal shock wave. Marla and Cal staggered to keep their feet as the deck rollicked under them. “Mom!”
“Stay calm! There are lifeboats on the lower deck. Come on!”
Another thump, jarring through the starship, made them stagger as they hurried through the corridor. The way looked strangely foggy—smoke was thickening around them.
“There, Mom!” Cal shouted. He grabbed her hand, led her down a plasteel ramp, then down another, switching back in the other direction, till they emerged in the Emergency Hangar. Down the center of the deck was a row of shiny metal capsules, each big enough for one person—not much larger than coffins.
“Mom? They’re one-person lifeboats!”
“Never mind, we’ll go separately, it’ll send us to the same place …” She hit the emergency release on the nearest capsule, and its hatch hissed open. She helped her son climb into it—the deck again rocking under their feet.
“Mom, wait!”
“I’ll find you, Cal! I’ll find you and we’ll find Dad! I love you!”
Coughing in thickening smoke, she pushed him down into the recliner. Its cushioning arms automatically enfolded him, holding him in place. He looked frightened—though she could see he was trying to seem brave.
Marla made herself close the see-through hatch over him—just as another explosion shook the Homeworld Bound and she heard a high-pitched metallic squealing sound. Wind rushed past her, making her hair swish and slap around her head, suction roaring in her ears.
A hull breach, somewhere. Air was rushing out of the ship.
Marla forced herself to turn away from Cal, staggered on the shivering, pitching deck toward the next lifeboat. She slapped at the emergency latch, and it popped open—just as she felt herself tugged backward, away from the capsule, the increasing vacuum trying to drag her toward the breach in the hull. She grabbed at the rim of the lifeboat passenger hutch, held on to it, used all her strength to try to pull herself into its compartment, fighting agonizingly against the decompression. The breath was ripped from her lungs, and she felt that her trembling arms might be pulled from their sockets—then she grabbed a passenger strap, pulled herself down out of the stream of suction, managed to twist about onto her back, and hit the close button. The hatch hissed shut; the cushions enfolded her. She was surprised when she realized she still had her shoulder bag.
The Emergency Hangar seemed to tear apart around the lifeboat, debris flashed by the transparent hatch like trash in a tornado, and smoke darkened her view.
This is it, she thought. I was too late. I’m going to die. And so is Cal.
Then the hangar vanished entirely. There was a sickening feeling of plunging into nothingness …
Stars—blocked out when the planet rolled enormously into view. The sullen globe of Pandora rushed toward her.
Pulsers hummed to life on the underside of the lifeboat. An energy parachute bloomed around the little vessel …
Then the lifeboat began to spin, faster and faster …
Centrifugal force built up, pressing her deep into the cushions. She could barely draw a breath. Pressure threatened to crush her flat …
Marla screamed—and lost consciousness.
Zac sat on the rim of the small impact crater in the late afternoon sunlight and watched the DropCraft burning. It was about ten meters from him, downslope, the fire crackling and spewing black smoke.
He ached. He’d been thumped around in the crash landing, but, to his surprise, he didn’t seem seriously injured. An energy parachute had deployed about a kilometer from the ground, tilting the little vessel into this rugged landscape of rolling gray desert and purple plateaus. But there was no possibility of returning to orbit in the crumpled wreck of the DropCraft. He’d barely gotten out before it had burst into flame.
And maybe there was no starship to return to. He’d seen a white flash in the sky, just before hitting the ground. Was that the Homeworld Bound—blowing up?
If so, had Marla and Cal gotten to the Study Station? Or had someone sabotaged the station too? Was his family alive?
Zac shook his head miserably, muttering, “I’m an idiot.” He should never have transmitted the coordinates to Marla. Whoever was trying to stop him from getting to the area of the alien craft wouldn’t want Marla to have the coordinates either. He knew from experience how ruthless the corporate powers could be. If there was truly major profit to be had, they’d sacrifice a starship full of people. He could imagine the cover-up. Interstellar Transport Homeworld Bound was destroyed in a tragic accident when malfunctioning security drones damaged its …
A sob racked him and he thumped his own forehead with his fists. “Idiot!”
But, on the other hand … there was no proof the Homeworld Bound had been destroyed. Even if it had been, he had no idea if Marla and Cal were dead. His wife was a smart, resourceful woman. She’d get the two of them to safety in the Study Station. She’d make the station engineers look for him. Maybe the DropCraft had sent an automatic mayday. Maybe a landing craft was looking for him right now. Could be they’d spot the smoke of his burning craft …
He stood up, wincing with pain, and looked at the sky. He scanned the horizon, shading his eyes against the sun, turning all the way around.
He saw only rolling hills, a few crests of stony ground, indistinct scrub plants, swaths of clouds in the pale blue sky. But there—something was moving in the sky, quite a ways off. A rescue craft? He squinted at it, and watched closely.
He made out several spots moving in the sky. They swooped about randomly, it seemed to him—like vultures. After a moment he was sure they were flying animals of some kind, not rescue craft.
Zac suddenly wondered if he had come down anywhere near the alien crash site. He looked around for a volcanic cone, and the terrain Rans had described. He saw nothing of that sort. No surprise—the DropCraft had gone out of control, had spun way off course. He might be thousands of klicks from his original destination.
He was lost on Pandora.
If only he could call someone. He reached into his pocket—and felt a surge of hope. His uni was there.
He tugged it out—and groaned. It was smashed. He’d been knocked around too much in the crash. He tried to activate it, but there was no response.
Zac sighed, tossed away the broken uniceiver, and looked back at the DropCraft. Rans—that son of a bitch!—had claimed there was a gun in the DropCraft, but Zac hadn’t seen one. Now that the DropCraft was just a half-buried teardrop of flame and greasy smoke, it wasn’t likely to render up usable weapons. He had no food, no water, no transportation, no working communicator. Nothing but his coveralls and a thin jacket.
“Come on,” he muttered. “You’re alive. You’re okay. Survive!”
He had to assume his family was all right. He had to believe it.
He heard a distant snarfing sound, a growling that sent chills up his spine, and turned to see a four-legged beast, clearly a pack predator, coming toward him across a basin of sand ab
out forty meters away—then another, and two more, trailing after it, sniffing the ground. Four of them, seeming intent on investigating the smoke from the crash. They had armored, scaly, bone-slabbed hides, and spiky ruffs. One of them opened its mouthparts in a shrieking roar—and he saw that the beasts weren’t much like homeworld pack predators: this thing’s mouth split into three jaws, two that opened laterally, one from beneath. Each jaw with its own set of teeth.
He’d seen pictures. These were skags. Like the ones that had almost killed Rans. And they were coming his way. They’d seen him—were running at him, now, picking up speed.
Was this it? Was he to die within minutes of landing on Pandora, torn apart like a rabbit in the jaws of a coyote?
Not without a fight.
Zac turned and jumped down into the impact crater, ran toward the burning DropCraft, feeling its heat on his face as he got nearer. He dodged around behind the blazing wreck, coughing from the fumes, hoping to hide there, hidden by the smoke …
But the skags spread out around the rim of the small impact crater, roaring down at him. There was no hiding from them. He unzipped his coat, slung one end of it through the flames over the DropCraft, caught it on fire, kept swinging it so the flaming cloth met the skag charging at him down the crater’s slope. The flames snapped like a whip into the animal’s gaping maw—it squealed in pain and writhed back from the flame. Another skag came at him, roaring, slashing with its talons at his right hip, tearing fabric and skin—he whipped the burning jacket into its face, and it yipped, backed away, lowering its head. A third skag charged him and he jumped aside, so that it ran headlong into the burning wreckage, shrieking in pain, bounding off in confusion.
Then something struck Zac in the middle of the chest, making him stumble back. A tongue had struck from a skag’s gullet—they could use their long, strong, leathery tongues as secondary weapons.
Zac fell on his back, close enough to the burning wreckage that it seared the side of his head—he kicked at the roaring, looming skag, caught it square in its trisected mouth and it squealed and took a step back. He jumped to his feet—but the skags were closing in on him.
Then two gunshots boomed, and the nearest skag fell on its side, writhing, blasted through the back of its head. Zac looked up with a sudden surge of hope to see three men standing on the rim of the crater. The heat near his head distorted his vision—he saw their forms rippling, twisted with smoke. Another gunshot banged, a third, and the skags turned and rushed the gunmen. A hail of shots, and the skags went down—one of them with its head on the boots of the biggest of the three men, as if it were an affectionate pet. The big man kicked the body out of the way and took a step down toward Zac.
The stranger was large as a bull, his eyes hidden in goggles, head shaved but for a fin of hair, his mouth covered with a dark surgical mask. In his hands was a combat rifle—and it was pointed down at Zac’s head. He said something to the other two men—Zac couldn’t it make it out through the muffling mask and the crackle of flames. The smaller men came down to Zac, each of them in identical leather jerkins, glowing red goggles, faces covered in dust-filter masks; they wore high leather boots, and there was a red stripe centered on their helmets. They pointed pistols at him, and dragged him up to the crater rim between them.
Zac stood wobblingly, coughing from the smoke drifting up onto the crater rim, as the three men looked mutely at him. Their weapons were directed at him from almost point-blank range. “Fellas,” Zac said, between coughs, “I was never so glad to see anyone. Another thirty seconds and I’d have been skag chow.”
They just stared at him, their goggles reflecting smoke and flames.
“Yeah, sooooo … thanks. I’m, uh, from … from a starship in orbit. I … was just … just, you know, sightseeing and uh …”
“You search for the Vault,” said the big man in the surgical mask in a voice like a belt sander. “You search for what is to be ours one day.”
“Actually—no!” It was true, anyway, that he wasn’t looking for the Vault. “I just … you know, wondered if maybe there was some good land for … for settlement … see, we’re on our way to, ah, Xanthus and … thinking maybe we’d, ah, stay here instead.” And that was … untrue.
“Stay here? Why would anyone stay here? We, the condemned—we have no choice. But you …”
“Oh, well, there are lots of, um, business … opportunities, here …”
“Can we kill him now?” asked the smallest of the three men, in a whining tone. “I’m hungry!”
“We could cook him over that fire, down there in the pit,” suggested the other helmeted man, helpfully.
“I don’t like it when people come here, looking to take what is ours,” rumbled the big man. “So, yeah—you can begin killing him now. But, kill him slowly. Piece by piece. Cut off a piece of his leg. Then let him watch as you eat it. Then another piece, perhaps his groin.”
“Yes,” said one of the smaller helmeted men.
“Oh yes,” agreed the other, taking a step toward Zac.
Then the nearest man coming at Zac went rigid … and screamed, as he clawed at himself—his face was sizzling away, burning up in phosphorescent blue ooze, mask, goggles, nose, eyes, lips—and all. He fell, babbling with pain …
The other two turned toward the knoll overlooking the crater—where Zac saw a great gangly creature rear up over them, towering on four long, thin stalks, like a gigantic daddy longlegs, but with an oblong, blue-glowing body as big as a man’s torso, its four jointed and fleshless legs each seven meters long, while long antennae curved high over its yellow-eyed head.
“Drifter!” yelled the shorter bandit.
The drifter spat out another glob of glowing blue projectile that struck the biggest bandit square in the chest. The big thug yelled in agony and fired a burst with his rifle at the creature—but he was shaking with pain and couldn’t aim straight.
Zac saw his chance and sprinted away from the DropCraft wreckage, running for an outcropping of gray and purple stone. Someone in the darkness shouted, “You wanna eat, you eat some rockets, you Bruiser son of a whore!”
It sounded like it was coming from the drifter but that didn’t seem possible.
Zac heard a whuff and a series of short sharp explosions rocked the ground. He reached the rocks, vaulted over a low boulder, and looked back to see a ragged little man with a smoking rocket launcher standing under the drifter. The bandits were blown to pieces that bubbled with glowing blue ooze. The little man had a crudely made hat, roughly conical, sewn together from pieces of skag hide; he wore a long, frayed dirty-brown overcoat. His craggy, white-bearded face squinted toward Zac. “You still alive over there?”
Zac said nothing but only crouched lower. He wasn’t about to trust anybody on this planet.
The little man whistled through his teeth, and the drifter responded, bobbing once on its legs as if nodding with its whole body, then it turned and, with just three long strides, came to tower over Zac. He was suddenly in its shadow, looking up at its gnashing mandibles, its glowing pale-yellow eyes.
Remembering the blue ooze this thing spat, Zac was afraid to move.
“Bizzy won’t hurtcha!” the stranger called, jogging over to Zac. “Nossir! He won’t hurt ya at all! Less’n I tell him to!”
Zac swallowed. “Uh … Bizzy?”
“My friend the drifter here!” said the old man. “I found him out in the Parched Fathoms, brought him over here, made him my buddy!”
“And … how … did you do that?” Zac asked, afraid to look away from “Bizzy.” He cleared his throat. “How’d you tame a creature like that?”
“Oh, I … well, that’s none of your business, is what that isn’t!” said the old man. “You’re lucky to be alive, buster! Onliest reason you’re alive is, I hate Bruisers!”
Zac looked at him. What a gnarled, sunburnt, dust-caked face the old man had. He was so weathered it was difficult to tell how old he was. He noticed an odd sort of collar, as if ma
de out of metal scales, on thick coppery wires around his neck. It had the look of alien technology. He forced himself not to stare at it. “Bruisers?”
“Like that big fella that I blowed up just now! No sir, I don’t care for ’em! They gimme the willies! Don’t like their little bandit buddies, neither! But Bruisers—they’re bone mean, and ugly as hell, and cruel as a pig that eats its own young! They’re really a mutie like them Psychos! That radiation from the Headstone Mine, it made ’em what they are! They wear them masks so you won’t see how ugly-mugged their ol’ faces is after that!”
“I see,” Zac said. “I do thank you and … and Bizzy … for your … your intervention. And now …” Zac started to back away.
“You going somewhere’s, buster? I don’t think so! No water, no weapons, no shelter! I seen that little spacetube of yours crash! I know what’s up! You’re prospecting—just like I was! And being as I haven’t had anyone but murderers and drifters and skags to talk to for many a moon—I’ll let you live so’s you can gab with me! What’s your name?”
“It’s Zac, Zac Finn. I’m—”
“Fine, Zac, just fine. Mine’s Berl and you already met Bizzy. Berl ’n’ Bizzy, Bizzy ’n’ Berl, that’s us! Now come along, right this way! I’ll take you to shelter! If we don’t get killed first! Always a possibility! I started out with a partner, you know, had more’n one. But they always get killed—and wasn’t me that killed ’em, neither, in case you were wonderin’ …”
“No, no, I wasn’t wondering that …”
Berl turned and started immediately toward the bluffs in the distance, whistling in that odd way—and Bizzy turned cumbersomely about, making the ground tremble with the placement of its pole-like hooked legs, and followed.
