Beyond the Rubicon

by John Peaseland

  We stripped off, barely aware of genitals, (my ball bag was non-existent in any case, shrivelled to walnut size) as we doubly checked cracks, crevices, bulges, male and female, and any other likely hiding spots for a bit of blob. We told the woman’s voice on the intercom that we were clear and she, still not fully satisfied made us stand one at a time in front of the camera. Talk about assholes and elbows. Further instructions followed. Her name was Lilly, she said at the end of her narrative; as if this made everything OK.

  Chapter Twelve. The Pipe.

  And so there we were, just six of us left. Jenna, her bald tattooed head beginning to sprout hair. Bram, more beard now than face, eyes staring unblinking. Neil, all brawn and not much brain. Clem, minus her leather gloves. Pernio, her nervous twitch more pronounced, her beaky nose testing the air for danger, and yours truly. We were told to bring our weapons, the ones we hadn’t left behind, but leave all our clothes (new stuff would be provided). We were to make our way to a room on this level, part of the base that had been used as a makeshift kitchen cum lounge. Once there we were to locate a sealed inspection hatch that led into a system of service tunnels. When I say tunnels, think of tubes just about wide enough to nearly get stuck in.

  “Where’s this hatch,” growled Bram in his best stoker’s voice as he chucked a mop and bucket to one side, in what could easily have been the janitor’s storeroom. They clattered across the floor and I winced at the noise.

  None of us had a flashlight and letting go a burst from the flamethrower wasn’t thought a good idea, even though I’d suggested it. We got down on hands and knees and after a time our eyesight got accustomed to the stygian gloom, the only light source leaching from the corridor via the kitchen. Finger ends eventually located an air tight trap door inlaid into the floor. Some cutlery from the kitchen was retrieved and we all had a go at chipping away at the seal. Half an hour later, sore fingers, a lot of curses, a couple of cuts, a coil of damaged rubber seal and we had the hatch lifted.

  “I smell arse,” Jenna announced as she pushed me headfirst into the man-size tube on account that it was I that held the flamethrower. In theory, I did have the weapon of choice, but since I had to push it, gas tank and all ahead of me because of the limited space, I didn’t see what good it would do me if I met anything unpleasant. At least being first in was a concession to not having to endure the smelly nasal handshake that wafted from behind fear-ridden bodies.

  I’m mildly agoraphobic (isn’t everyone?) and my skin dampened with a cloying mantle of dread at the thought of going further down this small dark tunnel - full of shit knew what. My bulky weapon clattered before me, announcing my every move; should the blob need to know!

  As the rest of the crew entered the tunnel, I moved slowly forward allowing everybody to bunch up and then move off as one unit. Whispers of encouragement and then gasps as cold metal met bare flesh, served to scare the ‘bejesus’ out of me. Every sound was accompanied with ghostly acoustic anomalies that threw voices and noise in unaccountable directions. “Come on! Hurry Up,” I hissed, conscious of my ass, literally swinging in the breeze.

  The bottom of the pipe was running dry and parallel for a while. We’d been told by Lilly, the disembodied voice from the intercom, to make our way down a level to the sleeping quarters of the erstwhile crew of Blue Base. It was to here that she and ‘the others’ were holed out and were waiting. This meant taking two long turns right and then one left. We would then be at a connection and would need to be cautious. There would be a vertical drop, not much further on and we were to lower ourselves into it, climb down twenty metres of piping using only the palms of our hands and the grip of toes for traction. Nobody had questioned this mode of transport when we had been instructed, we were all too shook up from killing Henry and wanted to be away. It had seemed the most natural thing to do, haul ass through a barely navigable metal pipe, in blackness as thick as hell’s waiting room and somehow not break your neck, run amok with terror, or get swallowed by a blob that was on the loose. Getting down a floor level had seemed easy. Instructions that would have been crazy to follow in the cold light of day, fully clothed and without the danger of a dangerous prey hunting you down, might have been questioned. You might have asked quite reasonable; “Why can’t we use the stairs?” I couldn’t see the back of my eyelids never mind the route ahead. I had to literally nose my way forward using touch and the change in the pitch of the pipework to give me a clue as to when a turn was coming. All this, and pushing a heavy and cumbersome flamethrower. Every now and then we’d concertina together when I was unsure where I was or what to do next. Jenna’s spiky head would butt up against my bum. “What the fuck you doin’?” she grunted for a third time, as if I was stopping on purpose, somehow getting a sexual thrill from her spiky brush. Dream on! I would have let her pass me, let the bitch lead for a while, only there wasn’t room to pass a cigarette paper between us. I’d have to put up with the whinging cunt.

  At what I calculated to be about five hundred metres in our procession - which is a bloody long way on hands and knees in 1.3G - we’d taken our two turns right and one turn left, and it had taken us an hour, easily. My arms, kneecaps and elbows were murdering me. A cold clammy sweat was beading my forehead, salting my eyes and readying itself to drip off the end of my nose. I was unable to wipe it away due to the restricted space. It was mildly more annoying than Jenna. On and on we went, and I became increasingly worried that I might have made a mistake. But, how could you? I reasoned. Then something really scary began to happen. Along the frictionless metal, my flamethrower began sliding forward of its own accord, as if it were being pulled by supernatural force. It began to take my arm and then me with it. I let go and like a demented clock-hammer, it went ringing into the depths of God knew where. I heard it clamour and bounce down and realized I must be at the vertical shaft that led to the sleeping quarters below. A previous idea about panicking crossed my mind and in an instant my breathing had changed to erratic, strained and fast. I’ve been in situations where panic has taken hold of me before and I knew, as I gulped back a stomach-full of acid, that if I did succumb, then I would be beyond all earthly help. At least on earth you could run, here, in this tight conduit, all I could do was kick and scream and probably fall to my death; if I wasn’t pushed first. Resting my arms - stretched in the aspect of a dive - I concentrated on getting angry. This strategy has helped me in the past, when strong emotion countermanded my unnerving fear, brief paralysis, and probable destruction, should I have tried to make a berserk dash for it. I recalled Bill, Conner, James and Maureen, thought of their pointless lives, their likely cruel deaths, screwed my eyes tight and clenched my fists. After a few moments I released the hold on my lungs. A long intake of stale, carbon dioxide rich air and then longer exhale brought pins and needles to my fingers, but more importantly reduced the sensation of terror in my head.

  “What’s the holdup?” Bram queried through the dark, his voice preternaturally loud and large.

  “We’ve come to the down pipe.” I swallowed, “Just working out how to enter the thing.”

  My mind refocused on the problem at hand. Getting into the vertical tube wasn’t going to be easy. Tracing around the circular drop, I found the rim to be slightly bevelled, a precaution against balling dust and debris when the shaft was used for its proper purpose, that of air filtration. I reckoned it was just about a metre in diameter. The way I was facing made direct entry impossible unless I wanted to go down the thing head first. I would have to traverse across the hole, then lower my legs backwards, before climbing down the slippery sides; something like a Scrit chimney monkey. Being naked helped, because although the walls were of a smooth polished metal, the sweat generated by my anxiety had wetted my skin, especially the palms of my hands and feet and the extra moisture allowed me a better hold.

  I was doing OK and then Jenna, thinking I was moving on, shoved her face into the gap whilst I was lowering myself backward. I sat my rear-end on the back of her head and
throttled her neck. Her muffled curses and a bout of coughing followed, before I hissed at her, “Get back, let me get into the hole first.”

  Pressing my shoulders against the curve of the tube I began to slowly lower myself. I thought bare flesh was going to help with traction, and it did at first, but with the great pressure I was exerting my skin became increasingly stuck to the metal. On peeled it away it squeaked and caused friction burns. As I slowly descended, I heard Jenna explaining the entry procedure to Bram and so on. All was well.

  It was devilish hard work and I was in the process of unsticking my backbone from the metal for the fourth time when a carbine fell between bodies from above my head and knocked away my hand. I fell edgeways, my neck catching the brunt of the fall on the opposing curve. This forced my head sideward with an audible click. I heard Neil swearing and then my grip loosened, and I was gone, falling. I expected to impale myself upon the flamethrower that had clattered down the chute previously. It was total darkness and I rattled down the tube like a pool ball caught in the jaws of a pocket after a power shot. At least this action slowed my tumble somewhat. I landed on a grid floor where neither the flamethrower nor the carbine was present. Muffled thuds came from above. I could see light, and tried to scramble out of an open grill that had been unhinged and opened to the front of me. It was too late and the inevitable happened. Several bodies piled up on top of me and pinned me flat. I could just about turn my eyes upward where I saw the sideways face of a middle-aged woman, raven black hair and rosy cheeks, pointing a gun at my head. “Hi there,” I managed in a mincing breathless way, “Lilly I presume?”

  Lilly, if indeed it was Lilly, our non-too friendly voice from the intercom didn’t smile, “Get out,” she yelled, “hands and arms raised where I can see them, legs spread.”

  It would have been comical if it hadn’t been for the fact that I was quickly suffocating and couldn’t have moved to save my life – literally! With what air remained in my lungs I managed, “Caaan’t breeeeathe!”

  There was a man with Lilly, strange dark skin, young, athletic with a mop of luxurious hair. He took a worried look at the situation. “What shall we do?”

  “Oh fuck, San… shit… shit… shit!” Lilly danced about in a less than helpful way.

  There was a very real danger I would die whilst the two strangers hopped about the place without any obvious plan to assist me. Evidently Lilly and San (short for Sanjeev as I later found out) hadn’t bargained for this eventuality. They’d been rather hoping that we would all tool out of the air vent in an orderly fashion, be inspected at leisure for infection, all the while they got to point a gun firmly at us. Now they were confronted with the prospect of physically having to grab our bodies in an attempt to extricate our twisted limbs from the vent, or not. If they decided to lend a hand, then in doing so, if any one of us was contagious, they stood the real chance of contaminating themselves. What would you do?

  Lilly made a decision. She exited centre left and was gone for about a minute. Coloured blotches began to appear before my peripheral vision and yellow glitter spots danced in ever greater circles before my eyes. Noises from above, that might have been complaints, sounded like the cracks and blips of insensible clatter. Lilly returned and sprayed the contents of a can liberally around the parts of my limbs that were interlocked, primarily with Jenna’s. It must have been an oil of some kind, or lotion, because I thought I smelt perfume. Starting with Jenna’s knee that had lodged itself around my windpipe, she levered. Once free, I took massive yawns of air and could now breathe to a certain extent, only hindered by the weight from the bodies above. “Lend me a hand San,” Lilly grunted, pulling at my shoulders.

  San, having decided to throw his hat into the ring, joined her, and together they yanked my head and neck, as if delivering a very large and awkward baby from a stubborn birth canal. With a heave, not much short of the jolt you’d expect at the end of a hangman’s noose, I shot out and onto the floor. Spluttering, I aptly lay in a foetal position, unable to do anything but watch the further proceedings from a half-conscious distance.

  The same method of operation was used to extract each person in turn, until Pernio, the last in the line, washed onto a blue tiled floor and into an untidy communal lounge. I took a squint about the place. The blue tiles stretched in all directions and might have been the reason the settlement was unimaginatively called Blue Base. A cine screen covered the whole of one wall and facing it were any number of comfy looking chairs. Each one had a different design, as if individually tailored to fit a particular sized bottom and personality. A glass, mirrored bar stood proud at the far end with bottles of bright, fluorescent coloured liquors set out in no special order. After recovering sufficiently from my near asphyxiation and rubbing at countless bruises, I decided a visit to the bar area was a good idea. I picked a random bottle and took a swig of bright orange. An arc of heat shot down my stomach and rebounded. God, it felt good.

  Lilly, (she was the voice over the intercom) could do little more than try an awkward greeting. I watched her reflection in the bar’s frontispiece mirror. Just her mouth moved, the rest of her head was caught between a brightly coloured painted sign that read, ‘Welcome to Ric and Jill’s Jolly Saloon. Beer Gas-ethanol and Spirits served by the gill.’

  “OK, so you are here,” she wavered. “We still want to check each of you for any spores… err… if that’s OK… so, err we would like each of you to show us your bodies, especially the cracks.” If Lilly - middle aged and perhaps turning just a little past her best, as she appeared in the mirror - had said that to me in a bar three weeks ago, (not counting hyper-sleep) I would have got a boner.

  Whilst she talked a few of my undead colleagues drifted my way, maybe listening to her, maybe not. Their obvious intent, like my own, was to find a fix, something strong and lots of it. We kind of looked at each other, elbows on the bar. The words Lilly had just uttered, coupled with hysteria born of fright, held the stage for a moment, and then the room exploded with laughter. Bram made things worse - tears streaming down his cheeks - by mooning his bare backside toward Lilly and saying between guffaws, “Get a load of that darling… hahaha… told you I had brown eyes!” His big bollocks and indeed, his brown-sphincter was no pretty sight and more uncontrolled laughter followed. It was the huge release of pent up tension. The sides of my rib caged ached by the time the howls had eventually subsided to an odd snicker.

  Lilly and Sanjeev, had drinks pressed into their hands. There was nothing they could do but accept. “Welcome to Jill’s Bar,” San said, “please sit down, we have a lot to tell you…” and then more ominously “…and not much time.”

  Nobody sat, everybody too intent on having a fill of drinks. Lilly and San went to the rear of the bar and started explaining their dire circumstances, like barhops on a slow day. Jill’s Bar apparently acted as the hub to four wings that were mostly used for sleeping quarters. When they’d finished giving us a very brief rundown San said, “We’ve laid out some clothing on the beds that used to belong to our friends.” He lowered his head, “Pick out what you need and come back here. We need to talk urgently, we have problems, big ones.”

  Chapter Thirteen. It Never Rains…

  The sleeping arrangements were unremarkable, igloo shaped rooms off short lengths of passageway that terminating in ovaloid weather shields. The bedrooms I ducked into, searching for a previous male occupant roughly my size, had been personalised with the odd picture of family, a few curios here and there, but mainly sparse due to the lack of raw materials Burgesses had provided to make luxury things. In the particular room that I found clothes, the artistic individual had made gypsy flowers out of bits of bent metal and scraps of cloth. It was more melancholic than uplifting. Beds were frames bolted to the floor.

  After donning dead-man’s clothes, all mirth vanished. Re-emerging onto the corridor the faces of my cohabitants were solemn. It was hard to believe that a few minutes earlier they had been lit with hysterical laughter. There wa
sn’t even a cracked smile at some of the more outlandish clothes the Vanguard thought useful on a terraforming colony. We trudged back to the hub. I purposefully followed Clem, watching her buttocks roll in tight fitting kecks.

  San and Lilly were waiting. “Pour some more drinks if you like, then we’ll try and bring you further up to speed.”

  The story told was not one your mother was likely to tell you at bedtime – not unless she hated you! It made known how the base of sixty souls had ended up as just two, in very short order. We were shocked. How can so many be dead?

  This is how it happened. Blue Base had been doing very well up until a year gone. Terraforming was galloping along at a tremendous pace and the more success to be had, the more confidence amongst the base personnel grew. The atmosphere had become almost breathable and temperatures had soared from -60® C to a mean of 22® C. Plants had started to grow on selected microbial sites chosen and seeded by scientists and then enhanced with huge UV lamps. New houses were being built into the ground by the Tasla bots, a body of robotic machinery with well advanced artificial intelligence to boot. They could also be voice commanded, and coupled with their hard-drive, full of technical knowhow, blue-prints were soon transformed into homes with only minimal supervision.

  “We didn’t know what was coming and had no idea that a catastrophic flood was about to overwhelm us.” Lilly looked at us, her eyes sparkling with an earnest cry from the heart. “Oh, we knew there was subsurface water but totally underestimated how much. With its own magnetic field and iron core, we were fooled into thinking the planet had maybe… and it was a big maybe… just enough water to make a few lakes here and there. We were going to desalinise them for fresh water. I even remember Ramon saying to me, ‘Don’t build a boat yet, there’s probably not going to be enough to float a stick.’ How utterly wrong he was. Not only did he… well we I suppose, underestimated the size of the underground sea, but we didn’t even manage to detect several giant layers of ice sandwiched between crust and core.” Lilly broke off.