Beyond the Rubicon

by John Peaseland

  There was a large piece of piping, fitted into a holster by the side of the door, where Lilly had just been studying. It obviously gave leverage to the one spindle that was longer than the rest. “Hurry up,” I whispered.

  She inserted the pipe over the spoke and turned. It didn’t budge. From her position on the ladder it was difficult for me to reach around her bulky suit and help. “Get out of the way,” I said rather more harshly than I intended. We switched places like part of a comedy sketch.

  As I stood on the top rung, the top of my head felt queer, as if an icy hand wanted to crush my skull. It was likely imagined of course, but the real prospect of the Sporo appearing gave me the extra human strength to turn the wheel. Besides, Lilly had been doing it wrong. There was a locking pin that had to be inserted to prevent slack and give maximum leverage. Once she saw I’d managed the feat, she pressed down on a handle. There was a great deal of positive pressure inside the pod, which meant when the door lock released its tension, it sprang open and pushed me violently to one side. It would have been better to let go of the ladder, but I held on doggedly to one rung, twisting my wrist in the process. The suit held, but my hand felt busted. I couldn’t take my glove off to see the damage.

  The hatch began to reclose under the rush of water, filling the void inside. Risking my good hand, I inserted it, along with my arm, to prevent the hatch acting like a plug. When the stream of water lessened, and after the control room was more than half full, I clambered through the waterfall, closely followed by Lilly. She’d been waiting in trepidation, two rungs below, watching my half-assed performance.

  It was dark inside, but sensing our presence, three rows of round lights, along the top ceiling, illuminated. I was pleased that we’d been recognised as the good guys, until I turned and saw Lilly’s hand come away from a light switch she’d just flicked on. I looked at her face. Her normally ruddy complexion was ashen. It might have been the light.

  A murky, prosaic vision of our new world came into view. Banks of monitors, all silent and grey, sat around waiting like lap-dogs for attention. Three foam seats had left their positions and were floating free, their wheels beginning to upturn. The ever-present coffee cups and a few desk gonks - one in the form of a fluffy purple monster can you believe - floated toward our noses. There were no shocking dead bodies, or worse. Allowing Lilly to pass, I turned and closed the hatch. My helmet told me that I had 97 minutes of oxygen left.

  Lilly went straight for what I presumed was the master computer. She clumsily pressed some keys, her hands hindered by thick, insensitive gloves. Mercifully it lit up, despite the possibility of thick finger syndrome and it being underwater. Whilst the ends of her fingers purposefully picked the right keys, I checked what was lurking outside via the numerous viewing windows. Lights went on as Lilly played, and huge pipes in half eclipse, cast even bigger silhouettes towards the main hangar doors. When all lights were on, shadows diminished to reveal a tumble of metal boxes crisscrossed with reinforced steel slats, that lay in domino topples of disorganised lines across some staging. I checked around the walls. Where pipes joined, bolts the size of fists connected their casings. I looked further up and saw huge walkways and galleries that circled the structure at various levels. These were the things I knew and could recognise. I disregarded them as friendly, man-made stuff. The things that worried me were great gobbets of who knew what, bobbing without purpose in the empty space between. It was impossible to tell if they were parts from broken packaging or if they were Sporo spawn. My eyes came closer to the control room and two massive cranes held the centre ground, some of the steelwork being viciously attacked with that same sort of aggressive rust I’d seen outside. I hoped to God our suits were up to their job and could withstand the corrosive oxide, whatever it might be.

  Then I saw the four robots. They were positioned at the corners of the hanger, as if separated for fighting in the playground. They were ten metres plus tall, but from my limited watery viewpoint it was hard to gain a true perspective. Their legs looked roughly humanoid, with joints - as far as I could tell - conforming to human locomotion. Ball and socket, hinged, pivot, saddle, plane and so on. These would allow movement in all directions. There was no defined head, instead, the trunk and head were morphed into one. I saw windows. “Hey Lilly?” She didn’t answer, too engrossed in what she was doing. I didn’t press her.

  The robots having these windows, made me wonder if a man could climb inside and operate them, in the same way as a farmer might a tractor, from inside his cab. This was news to me, I thought they were only remote controlled. The arms and hands of the robots followed the same pattern as the legs, conforming to human anatomy, including the evolutionary anomaly given only to primates - that of opposing thumbs.

  I turned to Lilly to see how she was doing. My eyes ran across the monitor she was prodding into action. As she moved, I could see an idiots guide plastered over the main commands, childishly written in permanent marker and pointing to key features. It was a spider’s web of intrigue, that in my opinion seem to make things more complicated. ‘Forward Speed, Thrust Lateral, Vertical Horizontal, Manipulator and Cutting Interface,’ adorned the top line. Next down and scrawled at angles to fit, were the words; ‘CP Inference, Proximity or Contact, Obstacle avoidance, Multi beam profiling, Fixed Focus Zoom & Stills Camera.’ Running out of space, the author had turned higgledy-piggledy, placing several messages to self, where he could. ‘Emergence Trobe - don’t use, Beacons, Tracking, Tooling, Auxiliary Connections - this for telem and dc. Toggle stick control. Verbal Command Interface.’ I sure hoped Lilly knew better than the last guy. As if she’d just read my thoughts, she said, “Poor Ben, he always was a fucking retard!”

  We’d being doing so well up till now, any thought of the Sporo had diminished to that of a vague dread. Lilly was programming the robots at speed her swollen fingers allowed and three had set off. I’d watched as their beacon lights had begun to whirr, and like giants, with a reassuring deliberately tread, they’d walked with a purpose, stepping over what might have been piles of robotic diarrhoea. They were awesome, and I wondered if they might kill the Sporo outright, if properly operated and they could get hold of the fucker; save us the bother.

  “One for the sorbent canisters and two for the salt,” Lilly chirruped, obviously pleased with her work. We’d stopped worrying about the ‘no’ talking protocol. Besides, hearing each other’s voice was a comfort. Things couldn’t last. We, or rather Lilly was in the process of sending the last robot to Hanger 1 for food, when a cable to the left of our view became taught. At first, we thought the robot had snagged itself or had been tethered to the wall by the last technician and we’d missed it. But then the cable snapped and made a brief whip-tail of foam in the water, in advance of hitting the back of the robot’s head.

  Next, a vortex of water spiralled upward and the barrels along the staging rolled in a wibble-wobble way, as if the contents were half full of heavy liquid. The next thing was surreal, the robot had stopped, as if in afterthought. It looked behind to see who dared to defile its dignity, someone that had had the temerity to flick a peanut. We couldn’t see after that. The Sporo rose in front of the control room, its countless limbs flecked with pulsating light. It constantly shape-shifted and was sneaking its purple, pliant limbs, along avenues of exploration, trying to figure out inherent weaknesses around the control pod. It coiled along pipes making them look like giant suspension springs. We felt the control room shudder. Sporo limbs flailed and whipped at the windows with such force that one of them must surely burst. Some of the reinforced boxes were picked up and the creature used them to batter our hexagonal framework. The boxes slowly crushed, and yet the pod, that we depended on for our lives, remained stubbornly intact.

  There was a pause. Sporo was thinking?

  A long piece of tungsten piping, selected it seemed by an intelligent entity able to experiment with tools, jabbed like a spear, over and over again, at the same point in the main observation windo
w. A small hole chipped and then began to snake toward the four corners of the frame. Lilly screamed, “Leave us alone you bastard.” The Sporo wouldn’t listen.

  I felt useless, there was nothing I could do apart from crap my pants and hope Lilly would come up with a plan, one a little more substantial than asking the ‘bastard’ to leave. She did. She released the housing that sat across a button that said: ‘Toggle Stick Control.’ I watched her closely, my life depending upon her actions.

  A new panel emerged from a shelf underneath the main workings. There was, in the centre of the square, what we Scrits would call a ‘Joystick.’ It had other shifts and switches all over the place, but I didn’t have time for a lesson. “I’m going to try and control the robot,” Lilly shouted over the comms.

  “Do it Lilly, sort the bastard out!”

  Working blind at first, Lilly grabbed the joystick and with sightless fury, brought the last robot toward our position with a hard yank downward. She then toggled a finger along a scroll-wheel and the Sporo moved. Robot four approached us with the aspect of a wrestler about to engage his opponent in a bear grip. The Sporo seemed surprised – or was that me projecting my thoughts – and dropped the spike, attempting to slither from the robot’s outstretched hand. I’m sure as it did so I recognised its small beating heart, a definite shape, that same fluorescent thumping I’d seen during our hurried exit of the lander.

  Lilly followed the Sporo’s moves, her head, and probably her tongue, following the motion as the monster twirled away left. The robot went after. The Sporo spread its limbs and made a web that stretched thinly, right across the vast structure of the hanger frame. The robot walked right into it, tearing at the lines of fibre. Like a fly in a trap the robot got stuck, the Sporo wrapping itself around its prey. The robot wasn’t done though, it thrashed its arms and legs to get free and was making some progress. There was a couple of times that it tore pieces of the Sporo away from the main body. These pieces floated downward and seemed to swim away. It was a fight between Samson and Goliath. “What we gonna do now?” I yelled, half watching, half turning away.

  “Leave him to it. I’ve given him max-auto. His learning algorithms should take over and help him learn a strategy to prevent destruction. Maybe he’ll work out how to kill it.”

  The robot was holding its own. It grabbed for the pulsating heart, and the Sporo, sensing real danger, moved to one side. Keeping away its vitals the Sporo turned constrictor, enveloped its extremis around the back of the robot’s main frame, within which, all systems were housed.

  The fighting became more frenzied, as wounded animals will become, when both know that this is the fight to the death. Collateral damage, in the form of huge chunks of ceiling, began to fall and float down in a heavy sort of way.

  “WE gotta get outa this place.” I pulled Lilly away from the viewfinder, she’d become transfixed with the spectacle of the gladiators’ battle.

  Fumbling at the wheel hatch, cursing the time it took for the spins to release the locks, that bloody awful nursery rhyme, ‘Row, row, row your boat’ came into my head. The hatch unlocked; it was heavy under the added weight of water. Lilly scrambled over to help me open it. By the time we were out and on the ladder, the hanger had a serious lean to one side. One of the main A- frames was buckling.

  We tumbled off the ladder and were away and running on landing, but like in those sodding nightmares, the ones where you want to run from a monster and can’t, seemingly caught in quick sand or some invisible force field, we made piss poor progress.

  Great rips appeared from corner to corner of our hanger and more sheet metal and debris began raining down around us. The whole place was about to fail. I looked back to see how our side were doing in the battle of the giants. I was gladdened to see that robot four was gripping and squeezing big lumps of Sporo into goo balloons and then rotating them until they snapped off. More blisters popped where the goo was overstretching, and the heartbeat luminescent of the Sporo had upped a few notches, to that of a blaze. I turned and tried running some more, swimming some more, praying some more, looking back occasionally. The last I saw of our robot, he was covered head to foot in Sporo but was still, somehow, managing to walk. Steel pipes and poles were coming down in the water in slow motion, and then we were clear.

  The water pumps were - more or less - where we had left them. The hanger was collapsing and with the devil driving, both Lilly and I found we had synchronised our movements in sympathy to each other. The pumps fired us away from immediate danger. Even the sideways current didn’t hinder our journey back to Blue Base such was the frantic efforts of our fight for survival.

  Lilly led for most of the fifty metres or so and as we neared airlock one, I heard her say “shit!”

  “What is it?” I squeaked, alarmed.

  “Look!”

  One of the robots had dumped the supplies right in front of the door, preventing immediate access. A cannonade of debris was following us from Hanger 2. Soon it would be impossible to see anything, we’d be lost in a cloud of ruins. Oxygen said 39 minutes; plenty of time to get to the next lock.

  There was plenty of time, only airlock two had a similar problem to airlock one. A motionless giant was standing sentinel before its load of salt, or Sorbent, whichever it was, awaiting further instructions.

  “Base come in.” Lilly’s voice quavered on the verge of losing it.

  There was a crackle of response.

  “If you can hear me, open airlock three for immediate use, one and two are blocked.” There was another crackle in response which I took to be a good omen.

  The cloud of detritus had reached us and engulfed our senses with it. We dropped the water pumps and with outstretched hands felt our way around the bottom of Blue Base, willing ourselves to find an open doorway three, and not one obscured by a robot with a massive box of salt. We hit some rough terrain and couldn’t tell what it was underfoot. We bounced over it, our clumsy heavy boots clipping and pitching us forward.

  Then we were there, a faint light illuminating an edge through a slough of soapy water. But something big was fast approaching at the same time. It might be robot three, but it might also be the fucking Sporo released from Hanger 2 that was in collapse. The slithery shithead might have stretched itself out the wreckage.

  “Get ready to hose us down with the flamethrower,” Lilly screamed over the comms; she lifted her hand with fingers crossed. The lock opened and we rushed inside, Lilly pressing the ‘Close Airlock’ repeatedly, as if the more she banged it, the quicker it would work. At the last moment, a slimy tentacle of purple slapped around the door, only to be cut off seconds later by the closing hatch. The small blob floating free in the water and then, after a moment to consider its new surround, went straight for my helmet. Even this diminutive version of the whole exerted a tremendous grip on my neck muscles. They were twisted this way and that like pulled pork. In an instinctive countermeasure I moved the muscles in sync with the force, not to allowing the spawn to gain a killing grip. I thought my helmet must come loose. I was vaguely aware of the hiss of air, the water becoming less and then being engulfed in fire.

  Chapter Eighteen. Pipemares.

  Lilly and I were helped out of our spacesuits. They were still hot, stained and smoking from a second dose of purifying fire. Pernio, Clem and Bram stood by, wide eyed and panting after their exertions, the latter holding a flamethrower by his side. I too, was totally exhausted and lay gasping on the floor for a few moments. Pernio spoiled my reverie by asking, “How we gonna get the supplies into the airlock?” her head jerking parrot-fashion.

  I managed to wheeze, “Fucked if I know Einstein, you figure it out, we’ve just nearly got eaten out there!”

  “And we didn’t get to send any food,” Lilly added to the happy mood.

  “Yeah Pernio,” I spat, searching the ceiling for cracks, “I suggest you go take your own titties back out there and get some.”

  The bickering - or rather mine - was cut short. There w
as great thumping reverberating throughout base as the Sporo, probably angry about losing a finger end, started a new racket above level I.

  “Hey listen,” Bram shushed, “sounds different. It was dull thudding before, now it sounds like sharp cracking.”

  “Yeah,” I observed “the fucker has likely brought back the metal spear it fashioned over there.”

  “What’s that Paul?” Bram said, in a tone that told me to get serious.

  I briefly told of our recent experience with the Sporo, ending with a pathetic plaintive appeal. “I can’t go on much longer guys, I’m wasted… I mean beyond tired. And I don’t think a bowl of that soya muck will help me much.”

  “Probably not,” San said, “what we need is some medication.”

  The Sporo’s renewed effort to smash the roof in acted as a sort of starting gun for San, who shot off looking for meds, some of those stims I never got to take the first time around.

  There was a period of waiting for his return. It was worse than listened to a storm outside your house, one when you know the tiles on your roof should have been fixed last summer. Frankly though, I was getting to the point where I didn’t give a damn and giving in to the inevitable was a preferably option. An overdose of opiates seemed easier than continuing to suffer. I didn’t hold out much hope for any of us by the time San returned, holding a brown bottle in his hand. He held it as if it were a trophy he’d just won, one for running to the medi-lab and back in a new record time. He gave everyone two tablets without water. Unable to move, I swallowed them and after nearly choking and then crunching their return up my windpipe, I got them down.

  “How’s Jenna doing?” I asked to pass some time. I wasn’t really bothered.

  “She’ll live if we don’t all die first,” Clem quipped dryly. Clem’s sense of humour and her calm serene composure, left me more miserable than ever.