Beyond the Rubicon

by John Peaseland

  I couldn’t find any purple blobs, which was just as well because I had nothing to kill them with. I ran to catch up the trolley that ended its journey in an antechamber just off the hub. My body remained alive with amphetamine. Clem was banging and clattering in the darkened room ahead of me. I went inside and thought she was working by feel alone, until my eyes adjusted. She pulled out from a large row, what I assumed were spent canisters, and rolled them away from her. Me and Pernio, without asking, picked them up and handed her newly charged ones from the torn open boxes in the trolley. We deposited the returns in the empty spaces left. We were being so noisy I found myself wincing at every turn.

  San came into the room, without us hearing him above the din we were making. He patted me on the back and I nearly swallowed my tongue, on my way up to the ceiling. He was wearing a rubber coverall, breathing mask and goggles.

  “Shit to fuck, you scared the shit out of me,” I gasped.

  “Where’s Bram?” San muffled.

  “Dead!”

  What can you say in situations like this? What can anybody say? Maybe something like, “Oh he died, I’m sorry to tell you that, but he was old you know.”

  San said nothing at first and then loudly, “I came to check the canisters were loaded. The air is thick with poison in the lab. Was gonna shut it down, too much chlorine gas.” Great, he’d already made a start with production of the sodium hydroxide.

  “Keep going then,” Clem yelled back, “that’s the last one home. The air should be clearing as we speak.”

  Clem walked to the door, grabbed my arm and said, “Follow me.”

  I did so without question. Pernio came after. We ran down the corridor to the left of the hub, past San who disappeared through a door, which closed quickly behind him. We came to a halt along the first wing of the sleeping quarters. “Get as many large pieces of fabric as you can find. Enough to make a sail.”

  My eyebrows raised, I thought she’d run mad. “What you on about Clem, we ain’t sailing outa here, are we?” At this stage I considered anything possible.

  “No, we need something big to hold the hydroxide, set the trap for Sporo.”

  Ripping and pulling we managed to get about ten square metres of more or less intact sheeting. The memory foam within was discarded. We took the sheeting next-door where Clem had already fashioned a tailors’ shop. Laid on the bed there were rudimentary needles made out of bits of metal, holes drilled at the head to take the thread. I say thread, it was more like parcel twine. Clem set me and Pernio to stitching the fabric together from one end, while she set about the other, with a plan to join us in the middle. We were to do this several times till we had enough sheets joined together. I was fiddling about a fair bit and Clem shouted across, “Just stich it so the hydroxide won’t slip through the cracks, it doesn’t have to be neat like a wedding dress for fuck’s sake.”

  After four and a half hours, my fingers burning with cramp and my eyes feeling like gritty water, we had a piece of sheeting as large as a sail; the term Clem had confused me with. “We got to get to level 1, tie this over the top-side airlock,” she said, bouncing off the bed.

  “Is that the airlock the lander was torn from?” I asked, unsure that her plan might fall at the first hurdle.

  “No, that’s more the ceiling. There are several locks connected by exterior walkways. You’ll see.” I must have seemed sceptical, so she added, “I checked already.” We gathered up the ‘sail’ and were heading out the room when Clem had a thought. “Wait!” She went further along the corridor and returned with some rope already cut up into lengths of about three metres. “Need these to tie off the trap.”

  Using the oxyacetylene torch left to the side of our first and last defensive seal, Clem melted the scar for a third time. She didn’t have goggles - forgotten in the rush - so relied on the cracks between her fingers to peak through at intervals. It was like the kind of shit safety measures the Skree had you use, back on earth, when equipment had been lost or stolen. Not great for the long term good of your eyesight, but hey, we didn’t do long term.

  We were half way through the melt, well Clem was, when furious banging on the roof began again with renewed vigour, possibly born of desperation. It sounded like the depths of damnation was beginning to crack open. Hands, furiously wrapped in the sheeting to prevent burns, pulled at the doors, half frantic in the knowledge that getting this far and failing was a definite possibility. They wouldn’t budge. Clem finished the melt job properly. Row, row, row your boat, etcetera!

  Leaving the doors open, we ran along the corridor and through the next two sets. Then up the stairs, arriving at the now fully explored scene of devastation. We weren’t encumbered by spacesuits this time and crabbed across the metal ledge and then the precarious bridge with relative ease. Not wearing space suits posed another risk however.

  “Hey Clem,” I shouted above the racket the Sporo was making, “did you get all them eggs?”

  “Let’s hope so,” she replied undecided; then torpedoed my boat by adding, “cos if one of those bastards survived, you can bet your bollocks it’ll snare us for sure.” Sure as eggs is eggs came to into my head, by way of a reply, never-mind the bollocks.

  We were across the bridge and just beyond was the nest of eggs, obliterated for a second time. With a lot of luck, they’d all been blasted to kingdom come. It looked as if Bram and Clem had made a pretty good job of their work. Everything was fire scorched to a blue-bottle blue colour, every corner annihilated. I felt slightly more confident as I tight-roped across the debris field, to where the airlock was situated. From the noise the Sporo was making, the egg situation wasn’t really an issue, we were all gonna be dead soon.

  “Christ,” Pernio bellowed over the din, “let’s get this done and quick.”

  Clem gave us each a few pieces of rope and like demented Christmas decorators we spread the great canvas under the rafters - or rather the tungsten beams - allowing a good sag in the middle. This sag, Clem explained, was to be filled with the sodium hydroxide and then, ‘dropped on the fucker’s head.’

  “How we gonna bring it down on its head? I mean, are we letting it in?” I asked this with a great deal of incredulity.

  “Yeah, how else we gonna do it? It has to be in a dry place; has to land on the Sporo, then fizzle the git in its own juices.”

  God what an option! “How can you bring it down on its head?”

  “Shoot the net to bits, else pull the ropes and run, I don’t know yet, haven’t got that far.”

  I was opening my mouth to speak.

  Clem closed it with an acerbic remark, “Shut the fuck up Paul, we got to get the crystals before it’s too late. This is neck or nothing stuff, do or die.” She made a long face, “Comprendez?” As if to underline her last statement a thin reed of high pressure water began to shoot through a tiny fissure above us.

  Chapter Twenty. Sporo.

  We ran back across the debris field, over the two broken sections of flooring, down the grated stairs, through the doors, into the hub, and down the corridor to a bedroom where the makeshift chemistry lab was in operation. Outside there were seven buckets of grey-brown crystal. Lilly must have managed to salvage the two boxes of salt, brought over by the robots.

  As we arrived she was bringing out an eighth bucket. At least I think it was Lilly, dressed as she was in full rubbers. I went to pick up a bucket. “Don’t touch it,” the masked Lilly shrilled, “you’ll burn your hands off! Just wait a minute.” She went off further down the corridor and came back, after an age, with three pairs of thick black, elastomer gloves. “Put these on.”

  I meant to tell San that we needed to use what hydroxide he had made, right now, we had no time to wait. To this end I put my head around the closed door.

  “Don’t come in here!” a voice shouted, a fraction too late. Surprised, I breathed in a lungful of noxious concoction, chloride gas at a guess. I coughed and puked into the corridor, my eyes popping out my head, my nose and mouth s
treaming phlegm in long ribbons of sticky reeds. “Get them buckets upstairs… puke… now!” I hacked, “Water… coming in!” I don’t know if Lilly or San heard my words clearly, but the message got through.

  My lungs ached, and I wasn’t sure if I’d damaged them, but with all the adrenaline, amphetamine and fear that was coursing my veins I managed to rise. It was that or death.

  Lilly came out of the chemical factory, toxic gas clinging to the shape of her body. She held another bucket-full of crystals. Clem and Pernio had already left at a gallop, carrying two each. I pulled on the pair of gloves discarded at my feet, next to the puke.

  Lilly glanced my way and left off without asking if I was all right. Ignoring the griping pain in my chest, I picked up two more buckets - there was one left for San to bring - and hobbled after Lilly.

  Blowing like the town band before I even got to the stairs, I stopped and tried to catch my breath. I took the stairs one at a time with a miserably slow tread. I reached the landing, my chest heaved; I empty retched a few times. I stumbled onward and found a human relay across the metal floor-shelf. I passed my contribution to Lilly who then passed them to Clem and on to Pernio.

  Teetering across the ledge and then the bridge, I fell a little way behind. I came across the others already hard at work, piling the contents of the buckets into the sheeting. Lilly, still wearing her mask, was doing the pouring and Clem and Pernio were arranging the buckets along the length of the trap. San arrived with his bucket and a long piece of rope. He added his bucket to the bulge that now looked like the beer-belly of a well-nourished Van. San tied the long rope to the far end of the sheeting, and grinning a hopeful expression, he trailed it along the corridor to where the bridge in the floor began. I guess this was the mechanism for pulling down the hydroxide on Sporo’s head. With the initial rush of activity over, we studied the scene, weighing up if our simple trap would work. Water leaks were getting worse, it was time to put the plan into action; it was now never!

  I wasn’t asked, I volunteered to operate the airlock. Eyes widened at my apparent altruistic behaviour; I even surprised myself. As I closed on the lock, it was the first time I’d seen, in such dismal light, the bloody smear marks of a desperate struggle, all around the opening mechanism. I turned the failsafe and the yellow beacon began its alarm. I opened the inner airlock. WARNING, WARNING, AIRLOCK ACTIVATED…

  I watched aghast, as long, serpentine tendrils of purple felt its way in. They tested for danger and then, with sudden movement, the Sporo squeezed and squeezed against the inner airlock door. The whole hideous sight of the monstrous window-licker poured forth. The airlock began to creak. Come on you fat bastard, I willed, pushing my face against the viewing hatch as added incentive, a warm meal in a tin, as it were, almost ready for the taking. I knew we needed a dry Sporo for the full damaging effects of sodium hydroxide to wreak maximum havoc on its hydro-absorbent tissue, yet the outer door would not close. It could sense a large proportion of body - that it must have taken to be human - was still outside its parameters. Shit, shit, shit, shit!

  “Put the rope down, make it ready for me to pick up as I run past,” I shouted at the expectant faces, watching me from a relatively safe distance. Their expectation turned to confusion. There wasn’t time for this. “The things too fucking big to fit in the airlock,” I yelled. “As soon as I open the inner airlock, run for it.” There was a nod of understanding from at least one person. My last shot: “Get down the stairs and barricade the door. It’s gonna flood, don’t wait for me!”

  My split-second idea was to open the inner door and then run, simple as that. I had a notion that the bulk of the Sporo would stop the water coming in at such a speed as to null the effects of the hydroxide. It might die blocking the corridor - with luck - leaving us time to get to the last bulkhead door and close it before the waters arrived. If it didn’t die, then our last line of defence would be as useless in containment, as a wet paper bag holding an eel. Probably worse.

  I took half a breath so as not to cough. FUCK IT! I pressed OPEN and ran.

  I was metres behind others; they had a good start on me and yet, Clem held back. She let me pass the broken bridge first, screeched after me, “KEEP RUNNING!” On the far side I stopped and turned. I saw her wait, wait, wait and then pull on the rope. She was running past me before I reacted.

  Together we were jumping the stairs, through the open doors and to the one last skin of defence on hub level. All together we bludgeoned the door shut. Water was pissing down the corridors but not too quickly that we hadn’t already started our forth welding of the bulkhead.

  “What now?” panted San.

  “We wait,” Clem said.

  Chapter Twenty-One. Beyond the Rubicon.

  We couldn’t wait for long; the amphetamines wouldn’t let us.

  “We got to know what’s gone on, got to know if the Sporo is dead.” Clem expressed the feelings of everybody.

  “Well, I suggest we send a robot to look, then we can decide what to do next. If God has been merciful it will be dead. Let’s take no chances though, enough people have died already.” Lilly was right, why not send a robot? She certainly had the handle on working them.

  As we jogged back to the hub, I realised I had not been in Blue Base for more than 24 hours. It was still a surprise though, when Lilly guided us into the main control room which I didn’t even know existed. There was one large central desk, behind which sat a solitary chair. It took up the whole centre ground and commanded a view around the walls of a long curving work station. These were subdivided into consoles and overlooked nothing more than blank windows. There were no monitors like I’d seen in the pod.

  Lilly went to the head honcho’s desk and sat in the ample seat. She click-clacked at the keypad in front of her, and two of the twenty odd windows lit up with blue static. She tapped away at a few more keys and the visuals to one of the robots fizzed into view, emerging as a split screen provided by two mounted cameras.

  “That’s robot two,” she announced as if it were important we should know. A panel in the desk opened and a joystick with toggles, bells and whistles emerged - much the same as those I’d seen over in Hangar 2. The controls were minus the crude instructions the late Ben had written as an aide memoir.

  “Wow, look! The water’s gone down some more,” Lilly squealed with excitement. I couldn’t tell; Lilly had been using the robots, so she must have made her assessment based on the POV visuals. More keys were drummed. I saw a scroll of data. ‘Temperature 10°C, Oxygen 4.7%, Carbon Dioxide 91.7%, Argon 1.3%, Nitrogen 0.8%, Carbon Monoxide 1.6%,’ and a host of trace elements, mainly nitrates. “The temperature has gone down another half a degree, maybe the poles are freezing up again. It’s happening quickly, the water must be getting locked in again, now that terraforming has stopped.”

  “Is that oxygen level enough to breath?” I asked, thinking 5% was probably sufficient.

  “No,” San said to my back, “you need at least 19% atmospheric saturation.”

  I now got my first real view of Burgesses. The sun was in the final quarter of the sky and shone a dappled path of salmon-pink across oceans of water. It was setting in the east, in direct opposition to our own. There were hills in the distance, or perhaps they were mountains; it was hard to tell scale from a camera view. I got to thinking of the fairy-tale we’d been told at municipal school, the one about a man and his family called Noor and his big boat called the Cutty Sark. The place reminded me of that, just before a bird in the story found habitable land. There was a curious blue shape that was beside the sun.

  “What’s that?” I asked Lilly’s shoulder.

  “Small satellite moon that orbits Mumsy.”

  The lens of one of the screens zoomed in and picked out parts of the land we could see in the far distance. The fantastic optics selected individual rocks and even the sand between them.

  “It’s very rocky, but we were making soil for the biospheres by grinding them and adding amino acids, enzy
mes and bacteria we brought from Earth.” Lilly must be thinking that we might survive the present situation and a future might be possible.

  The robot was marching around to the back of Blue Base - if a circular building has one. It was huge, I mean mega. It had spirals of walkways, gantries, elevator shafts and cranes all around the structure, and now the water had gone down some, I could see more of the apex. Lilly concentrated the camera’s and said, “That’s lock one.”

  The robot was far too large and much too cumbersome to climb ladders, or to take the lift to airlock one. All that Lilly could do, she explained apologetically, was keep searching the black hole for evidence of the Sporo.

  We searched and searched and then, “Oh fuck, what’s that?” Pernio’s hand came across our heads.

  “Where?” the rest of us said in unison.

  Pernio went over to one of the large windows, her face lit by the colours, eyes blinking furiously. Her head was jerking every couple of seconds. The muscle spasms from which she suffered had got real bad over the last few hours. Being only five feet and a bit, she jumped up, trying to land a finger over the area she meant us to look at. “There, there, look! There!”

  Lilly panned the camera right and centre and zoomed in. “Christ, it’s trying to get to the water.”

  What was left of the Sporo was a pitiful sight, if anyone cared - we didn’t. The main body had shrunk to one tenth its original size. We could see it moving slowly. It had pitched itself onto a massive under hang with the obvious intention of reaching its natural habitat, the ocean. Because it was seriously injured or possibly dying, its extremis had dried onto the metal; yet it still progressed, leaving bits of goo behind.

  “Has the robot got any weaponry?” Clem asked.

  “No, but it could squash it, if only the fucker wasn’t so high up.”

  “Right,” I said with determination, “suit me up one last time. I’m gonna take the last plasma gun, finish the sucker off.” The camera showed the Sporo pulling hard along one edge of the under hang, still trying desperately to move forward. “Let’s be quick, it might yet survive.” As an afterthought I added, “The waters going down, see if you can raise the Rubicon. They’ve been of no help!”