by Paul Haines
There hadn’t been any frost further back, he was sure of it.
He reached the position from which the fragment had dislodged from the wall. Here the wall surface was thicker, and punctuated by a void through which the next inward layer was clearly visible. Shining the torchlight through the head-sized opening, he could now detect a concatenation of similar holes within three or four successive layers towards the ship’s central axis. And as he swung the torch across, there was a glint of reflection from deeper within. Metal? Machinery?
“Any suggestions?” he asked. “Other than ‘turn back now’?”
said The Voice, after too long a pause.
Nothing in his suit’s toolkit was appropriate to the task of clearing a path through the obstructive carbonaceous sheeting of the layers. A series of karate-like hand motions were still sufficient to tear the fabric, albeit with some structural resistance. Nonetheless, the continual necessity to re-orient himself was tiresome and wasted propellant; and he was starting to sweat.
He increased the suit’s cooling.
Minutes lapsed, and he had penetrated to the onion-skin’s next layer. These walls too were frosted, but here the powder persisted against gloveheat. Water ice, or small organics? There were other differences also in the texture of the skin here—more regularly ridged, less perforated, thicker.
There were four or five layers more of the wall-substance between him and the reflection’s source. If the layers continued to thicken progressively as he went inward, he doubted his ability to breach them all before his suit’s oxygen reserves became too depleted. He could, nevertheless, get further in before needing to turn back.
He was expanding the third layer’s breach. For a few long seconds, he was finally afforded a clear, cleanly-lit view of the embedded metallic object. Then a sheet of the carbon-wall matter drifted across the aperture; but it was enough. It wasn’t what he’d been expecting.
The Voice, it seemed, had seen it too.
Lem’s voice was suddenly thick, his words slow. “Why? You want to explain to me what happened here?”
“No. Not until I get some answers.”
“Bullshit! Those are copper impactors! This is one of your dirty little seedship secrets, isn’t it? Like those embryos you all decided to terminate.”
“But you can speculate! You want to tell me how three impactors happen to be clumped together in the belly of a derelict alien ship? When this, right here right now, is apparently the first time anyone’s had a close look at one of these things? Three in one spot implies an unbelievably accurate aim, or very close range, or—”
Lem paused, his anger suddenly congealing into something different.
“And the secretiveness? The cover-up? That only makes any kind of sense if—”
“What the hell was that?”
“Bullshit! The thing shook. Like a dog.”
“I know. Yes. I’m going. Shush now.”
Another tremor pulsed through the derelict. Spooked, Lem hit the suit’s main thruster. He caromed blindly back through the penultimate layer’s breach, then made a fresh rift in the tenuous outer layer. Then he punched through into the clear darkness of interstellar space. Neither Tuonela’s running lights nor the shuttle’s illumination panels were visible.
His brain, pulsing with sudden terrible realisation, was slow to alert him to the new danger.
Finally, his spacer’s logic told him he was thrusting away from the derelict too fast. In seconds, he’d emerge from its shadow to face the unshielded streaming of interstellar dust grains, any one of which might be the bullet that killed him. Much as the copper impactors he’d glimpsed had, or had nearly, killed the ship.
Ship, or perhaps even creature. Not derelict. Alive, if not now then in the historically recent past.
But the tremor—surely that was an indication of something ongoing? Life? He fumbled the thruster nozzle, fighting against clammy palms, an insanely racing heartbeat, and ragged breath, as he forced himself to monitor the burn. He came to a halt, then brought his suit back in close to the creature’s outermost layer.
Even through adrenalin-edged senses, the object had taken on a new quality. As a dead ship, it had appeared decrepit, decaying; now seen as a creature, those same features spoke of grace and economy of form. Even the once-unsightly gaps in the hull invited reinterpretation: they were not damage but a symptom of the absence of a need for fluid containment.
He should be close enough now to be shielded. Fear edged back towards anger, and a sense of betrayal.
“This distance, I think we’re safe enough. The thing’s cold enough to freeze hydrogen, it’s not going to be capable of rapid movement.”
“You lot said you’d built the colony ships up by mining. You never said anything about, about flensing!”
“Look, I’m tired of the lies, the coddling. I’m even more tired of being alone. And then, turns out we’re not alone out here, and you lot had known that, you’d been carrying out what amounted to some sort of eradication policy in our name. . . Look, I don’t know if those things have any intelligence, I doubt it, but I’m just sick of—I don’t even know what I’m sick of, but—how can I trust you?” He stopped, uncertain, suddenly guilt-struck. He had no stomach for unpicking the centuries-long history of The Voice and its siblings, their role in bringing Earthlife to the cloud. But he was conflicted, torn between anger and the childlike adoration in which his ancestors had held the machinery of the life-enabling Voices.
“Yeah. Don’t ask, don’t tell. And then you go and bloody claim amnesia.”
Lem’s response died in his throat. He’d been tracing his way back around the creature’s hull, and his torchlight was now answered by the glow of Tuonela’s running lights. But the shuttle was not where he’d expected it, nor was it responding to his signals. Unease kindled anew in his loins.
At three kay back to Tuonela, protected only by the suit, he’d be dead from dust impact before he’d covered a quarter of the distance. Even if his air held. Even if he retained enough propellant for braking.
Signalling again, he gained an answer. Weak, and from an unexpected direction. The shuttle was upstream, near the creatureship’s prow, six hundred meters from the position at which he’d matched velocities.
Dust drag on the low-mass shuttle would have pushed it back relative to the more streamlined “derelict.” Therefore the latter must have moved—subtly, imperceptibly—while he’d been exploring within. It was, indeed, alive still.
But to what purpose?
One hour twenty. Still plenty of time, and propellant, to reach the shuttle and return to Tuonela. But he wasn’t sure now if he’d get that chance.
“You have any idea why it’s maneuv
ered behind the shuttle?”
“Mating?”
“That’s all I need.”
“I almost prefer your previous suggestion.”
Lem had been working his way forward, attempting to remain shielded by the alien-vessel’s ramscoop while retaining safe distance from its skin. But what, in this context, was safe? He still did not believe the creature capable of sudden dramatic movement, but he could not afford to be mistaken on that.
“We get through this in one piece, I have to signal the sister-ships about this. No more of you lot’s dirty secrets. If this cloud is already a biosphere, they deserve to know, they need to know. God knows what else might be out here. These things have a predator?”
The Voice remained silent.
“I said—”
This time, there was a faint responsive crackle, but nothing more. Noise, no signal. Hell of a time for nano-senescence to kick in, thought Lem bitterly.
The readings were contradictory, and it took time to reconcile the information. He was gaining on the shuttle, but more slowly than he was making progress against the skin of the alien/ship’s hull beneath him.
The vessel was still manoeuvring. Perhaps, having sensed the diffuse expanding nimbus of expended propellant from the shuttle’s braking, it had fallen back. Maybe it was now repositioning itself anew in response to his suit’s EVA jetting. Hungry, perhaps, for gas rather than less-digestible solids? He grew newly conscious of the sound of his own breathing, loud in the absence of The Voice’s intrusive commentary.
The changing geometry of ship and shuttle would leave him exposed. Still short of the shuttle, he would be clear of the alien ship’s ram-scoop, its mouth. He must put himself at the mercy of the non-attenuated flux of killingly swift dust.
A minute, most likely, not more; a ticket in life’s terminal lottery.
He skimmed against the foremost sections of the leviathan’s fuselage, which tapered subtly before flaring into the broad scoop at the very front.
Clear of the scoop now. Not, perhaps, merely its mouth. The scoop could also be an antenna, sensitive to radio wavelengths. An eye, to sense out the cloud’s warmest, densest regions, the thick knots of substance which would, eons hence, condense to form stars and planets. Such environments would offer the best feeding-grounds here. . .
The leviathan, like Tuonela, was departing from D’s material wealth. Escaping the seedship’s predatory bombardment? The leviathan, like Tuonela, was heading for clump C. A shared trajectory, a similar purpose. Not such a chance meeting, after all.
He closed on the shuttle. Judged by Tuonela’s running lights, the smaller craft’s configuration was wrong. It drifted askew. Gyros must have failed—more of this bloody nano shit.
With the shuttle’s delicate interior exposed to the thin stream of abrasive dust, who knew what damage might have been done? But there was more besides: an inky occlusion like a snake or a cable. The black cord connected the lip of the leviathan’s ram-scoop mouth to the shuttle’s aft propellant nozzle.
Heart thumping, he impacted gently against the exposed cage and clung on, spraining his wrist. No time to strap in. Instead, he hooked a leg around the cage-frame for added leverage. He one-handed his own suit’s verniers to correct the shuttle’s attitude, re-establish the shielding, then toggled the forward propellant nozzle full-on in a brief burst.
The shuttle glided backwards, bending and then snapping the tethering tendril that ran from the leviathan’s mouth. The fragment—knotted, obsidian-black, arm-thick and perhaps five metres in length—swung limp, brittle, from the shuttle’s nozzle.
He did not take his eyes off the black rope as he consulted the heads-up on his visor for details of his current trajectory, oxygen remaining, and suit propellant.
Fifty-three minutes oh-two, ample to return to Tuonela. Good. He no longer wished to trust the shuttle’s air-circ. Not that he seriously believed it could be contaminated, more that he lacked faith in the shuttle’s judgment. He hadn’t survived by taking more chances than minimally necessary.
He applied an additional couple of attitude bursts, to correct the slight residual tumble that resulted from snapping the leviathan’s tether.
Chancing a glimpse behind him, there was no visible change in the alien vessel—it simply hung there. Probably nothing it did was rapid. At such low temperatures, economy of movement was king. In any event, he did not believe it could pose a serious threat to Tuonela. Even if the leviathan could match the gentle push of his ship’s ion drive (which he doubted), it would assuredly lack the thrust of Tuonela’s fusion impulse engine.
Less than two kay to go, he’d be back on board within twenty minutes.
Most probably the maneuvering, the tether, had all been part of the leviathan’s instinctual feeding response. It presumably lacked the means to break into the shuttle but could, over long ages, have attempted to digest the shuttle layer by atom-deep layer. Such a strategy would probably serve it well for most classes of solid material.
Strange, though, about the tether snapping like that. It made no sense, for a creature whose primary drive must surely be the hoarding, the jealous acquisition of substance in a matter-sparse environment. Why had the tether snapped at the base rather than simply relinquishing its hold? What conceivable advantage could possibly compensate the creature for the loss of such a substantial chunk of its gathered substance?
Lem was still pondering this mystery when the blacker-than-black casing on the seed-pod detonated. In response to the continued seeping warmth from the propellant housing, its shrapnel slammed into the shuttle’s components. Fragments pierced a bank of auto-guidance nano-gyros, a section of the shuttle’s shielding panel, and the sparsely-shielded tubing of his suit’s main oxygen feed. Lem spasmed, and tried to scream.
It grew dark and unbearably cold.
Time passed. Then, slower than a glacier, the leviathan nudged forward to inspect its catch.
A Sweet Story
Gitte Christensen
“I really shouldn’t. I’m already way too fat,” moaned the customer, an exceedingly slim, young thing who prowled back and forth peering into the display cabinet. The trays of sugar dusted millefeuilles, cream stuffed chocolate éclairs, decadent truffles, berry tarts, nutty knots and exotic pastries all endured the girl’s greedy gaze with equanimity.
“Take your time. In this establishment, we do not rush things,” said Sally, proprietress of The Gingerbread House, glancing through the shop window at the people hurtling past outside.
The girl suddenly hunched over the cabinet, fingers clawing at the glass. “Grandma used to make fairy bread just like that for my birthday parties.”
“Did she?” murmured Sally. “Sounds like you had a happy childhood.”
“Of yes,” gushed the girl, now hovering over the shop’s signature gingerbread men with their red buttons and roguish grins, “I swam and rode horses and sang in a choir and had lots of friends and heaps of fun.”
“And are you still having fun?” Sally rested a hand on the counter.
The movement attracted the girl’s attention. “I’m not as pretty as I used to be, or as strong, and I’m fat now and . . .” The girl’s eyes fixed on a cupcake covered with candied Forget-Me-Nots. “That one! I want that one,” she squealed.
Sally placed the cake on a cardboard square, which she then enveloped in a tent of tissue paper and dotted with a sparkly sticker.
“Wow,” said the girl, “So much fuss for one little cake.”
“Even a cupcake deserves respect,” said S
ally. The girl smiled, her lips parted to speak, but Sally stopped her. “Only when you truly mean it. We do not deal in perfunctory gratitude here.”
The girl blinked, nodded, then headed for the door with her parcel. The bell overhead tinkled. The girl paused at the threshold, momentarily confused by the hurly-burly beyond, before threading herself back into the tangle of modern life.
Sally carried an empty tray into the bakery behind the shop, where Susan was busy contemplating a bubbling pot with a practitioner’s eye and waving a sprig of thyme over it, and moved about quietly so as to not disturb any of her mother’s power flows.
The doorbell jingled again while Sally was icing a batch of bat-shaped biscuits. In the shop, a man stood staring at a sparkly disc stuck to the tip of one finger.
“I bought cookies here?” he said.
“Two Triple Chocolate Cherry Swirls,” agreed Sally. She stifled a yawn, smoothed back her long, golden hair, reflexively put on her kind and caring face.
The man looked up. “My wife and I ate them. Together. We had coffee, at home, not in a café, and we talked, and we really listened to each other.”
“How lovely.”
“I came back to . . .”
Sally perked up. “Only if you swear with all of your soul that you really mean it from the bottom of your heart,” she chanted.
“Oh, but I do. Thank you, thank you so very much for saving my marriage,” exclaimed the man.
Sally’s right hand made a strange gesture, then shot up and scooped the air. “You’re welcome,” she said.
“We talked,” repeated the man with amazement.
“That’s great. Now off you go.”
The man spun around and shuffled away. Sally sighed when he came to a halt by the glass door and stare dazedly at the world outside.
“Shoo! We’re done! Go home!” ordered Sally, and the man clumsily pulled the handle and stepped through the opened doorway.
