Outpost

by Allan Baillie

  ‘All right. I wonder what this does – ’

  Dece quickly hissed, ‘Don’t turn on your light, Seps!’

  Seps turned towards Dece and the yellow played over her skull, white lips and eye sockets.

  ‘There is something out there,’ repeated Dece.

  Seps’ eyes followed his arm, pointing at the door, and she nodded.

  The lights by the door began flickering weakly, then grew stronger. Dece felt a soft movement under his feet. Something heavy was on the other side of the door.

  ‘I can feel it moving!’ Seps murmured.

  ‘Don’t talk.’ As if what it was would turn away now.

  The urgent sound grew louder in Dece’s helmet. The deck was awash with light. Dece slipped sideways into the darker area. He didn’t know what else to do. He sensed that Seps had crept with him.

  His mind jerked out of the haze. The little robot! He should’ve ignored Seps and blasted it. And he should not have ignored the rustling sounds of the ship. They should have gone back to the Tug. Stupid! The robot was organising the bugs to get them.

  The light spread onto the bridge and was changing to a white burn. Dece felt heavy movement through his boots.

  No, no, it wasn’t a bug. It was a robot, a big one. Maybe several.

  Dece’s leg touched a seat and wobbled as Seps backed into him. There was a quick sucking breath, but he didn’t know whether it came from him or her – or something else.

  Dece recalled the black rectangular boxes in the cabin walls and in the big pods room. They were full of something. Big.

  The shuffling sound stopped and was replaced by a soft creaking outside. Bright light flooded the bridge and Seps grabbed at Dece in fright, causing the cutter to bang against his suit. Dece gently pushed Seps behind him and swung the cutter towards the door.

  A brilliant beam of light shone from the open door, higher than Dece’s head. He blinked and saw a shadow behind the light. A large shadow. Dece clicked on the cutter. The shadow shimmered towards them.

  Dece lifted the long miner’s machine.

  20.

  The Beacon

  DECE clutched at the cutter.

  I can’t fire! He thought. What if …

  ‘Hello,’ he mumbled.

  The shadow stopped.

  Seps was gasping, and Dece glanced at her in the shifting darkness.

  ‘It can hear you,’ Seps said. ‘Say something to it again.’

  ‘Um, peace.’

  The shadow rocked a little and its lights blasted Dece’s eyes. He jerked his head down to the deck, but kept the cutter lifted.

  ‘Can’t you hear me now?’ boomed a voice.

  Dece pulled his head up, and saw the shadow’s bulging shape. His eyes were beginning to adjust to the glare.

  ‘Cap?’ said Seps.

  Dece sagged in his suit. He whipped the cutter down.

  ‘All right, all right. I thought – never mind.’ Cap waved his arm. ‘You are not hurt? Why aren’t you using your lights?’

  ‘No, no, sorry.’ Seps clicked on her lights almost as quickly as Dece. ‘We were frightened.’

  ‘But – ’

  ‘Frightened of me? Well, you should be! Playing games in a shipwreck! An unknown shipwreck. You are as smart as a rock.’

  ‘Ah …’ Dece couldn’t get his words through his throat. He swallowed and shot a smile at him. ‘Yes, as a dung beetle.’

  ‘What were you doing?’

  ‘You were sleeping and we didn’t know when you would wake up.’ Dece was groping for words, and looked at Seps.

  Her eyes flicked over to Cap. ‘We wanted to see if there was something in the ship to help us fix the engines.’

  ‘Engines … ?’

  ‘The Tug engines. Did you look at them?’

  ‘Not really. I was trying to find you.’

  ‘Well, it’s bad. So we looked around the ship. We did see some parts near the end of the ship.’

  ‘But they were no good for the Tug,’ Dece said. ‘Nothing looked anything like something on the Tug. Everything looked odd.’

  ‘Yes, it would. It is an alien ship. I’ll have a look.’ Cap nodded. ‘But your lights?’

  ‘Well …’ Dece glanced at Seps. ‘We weren’t frightened when we turned off the lights – not at the beginning. Seps saw a weak yellow light and she wanted our lights off so we could see it properly.’

  Cap frowned at both of them as if he knew something had happened, but couldn’t understand what. He took the cutter from Dece. ‘The yellow light? Where is it?’

  ‘We have to kill ours to see it,’ Dece said.

  Cap grunted but followed Dece and Seps in putting out their lights. Seps pointed at the yellow glow and Cap moved to it. He lowered his head and examined, even talked to it. The light seemed to be affected by his voice, slightly. Finally he nodded at it, stood up and turned his light on.

  ‘Nothing much,’ he said. ‘A computer has detected me. And it can still power a beacon, but that’s it.’

  ‘A beacon?’ Seps looked at Cap.

  ‘That is what we can hear, the whispering. So the aliens know where this ship is.’

  ‘Oh,’ Dece said with a dead voice.

  Cap heard his tone. ‘But they will not come here.’

  ‘Ah, why?’

  ‘They know it’s a wreck and it charged off from its original course after the impact of the meteor. It’s not worth chasing it across the galaxy, and who knows how long this ship has been here?’

  Dece nodded, but he noticed something not quite direct about Cap’s eyes.

  Seps was frowning. ‘But why did the whispering start when we were in the hold?’

  Cap looked at her with a touch of annoyance. ‘Maybe you can’t hear it from the Tug.’

  ‘We heard it from the bridge of the Tug. It just started.’

  Cap shrugged, but his eyes shifted. ‘Maybe you didn’t notice it before because of all the other troubles – like me. Never mind, there are bigger things to worry about.’

  Dece didn’t know how to interpret Cap’s shifting eyes, but in a dead ship with a crippled Tug he knew what Cap was talking about when he said there were bigger things to worry about.

  ‘Why didn’t you answer me before?’ Cap said.

  ‘When?’ Seps said.

  ‘Lots of times. I called from the Tug – oh, thanks for getting me into the sleeper – and from the ship’s corridors. Lots of times.’

  She glanced at Dece. ‘We didn’t hear anything.’

  ‘All right, stay here.’ Cap moved towards the barrier, but then he jerked and hissed.

  ‘Cap! Are you all right?’ Seps hurried to him.

  He shook his head and waved her back. ‘I can feel the nanorobots working on my pelvis. Never mind.’ He slid past the door, remained in the corridor for a long moment and came back. ‘Well, did you hear me?’

  ‘No.’ Dece looked at Seps.

  ‘Just a little squeak,’ she said.

  ‘That’s our trouble!’ Cap thumped the wall. ‘I was talking, but the metal won’t allow our voices to pass through it.’

  ‘We tried to talk to Boss from the hold.’

  ‘All right, we just keep close now, instead of thundering around the ship.’

  Dece muttered, ‘It’s the whole ship that is after us.’

  Cap glanced at him as he moved to the control panel. He studied the screens, sat on a seat and tried reaching for the mass of buttons. He looked smaller in the seat.

  ‘They must be big,’ said Seps.

  ‘Not too much,’ Cap said. ‘But they must have four arms to operate these buttons and switches.’

  Dece shuddered. ‘And there are two types, too. You can see the difference in the cabins.’

  ‘Really? I’ll have to look.’ Cap swung from the seat and left the ship’s control.

  The ship lurched and there was violent creaking from the corridor just outside. Cap froze.

  ‘Dece thinks the ship has bugs,’ Seps said with
a touch of mock dread in her voice, as if she was hoping Cap would laugh the fear away.

  Cap listened, and glanced at Dece. ‘Big bugs?’

  Dece nodded.

  ‘Bigger than your place, Dur, right? With long antennae and huge pincers?’

  Dece stared at the ceiling with wide eyes.

  Cap smiled. ‘Remember how your bugs swarmed over a dead fat animal? In a few moments there was nothing left but a skeleton – less than that.’

  Dece stared at Cap in horror. He was picturing that terrible afternoon in Dur. He still sometimes had nightmares from it.

  Cap shook his head. ‘Well, if your bugs – huge, of course – are here on the ship they would have gobbled you up a long time ago.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘What you’re hearing is just Cotal’s gravity acting on the ship. Nothing to worry about.’

  Dece looked at him with doubt.

  ‘Really. Now I better have a look at your cabins.’

  21.

  The Ship

  SEPS glared at Cap’s back, but Dece was smiling. Cap could laugh at him so long as he was right.

  Cap stopped before the sleeping pods then meandered around one of them. Dece and Seps followed. Cap tapped the rim and thought a bit.

  ‘And then there are those.’ Dece pointed at the black rectangular boxes in the wall.

  Cap moved to them. At first the lights from his helmet bounced off the black material, but then he adjusted them to red and this time the light penetrated.

  I could’ve done that, Dece thought, as he leant forwards for a better look. Too worried about the creaking sounds.

  There was nothing in the first rectangle. It was just a tall box.

  ‘Um …’ Seps looked at Cap.

  But he shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’

  Dece grimaced. He could tell Cap what he’d thought before about what was in there, but Cap would laugh at him.

  Cap moved to the other rectangular box, and this time something was there. It was like a huge metal flower sprouting from the middle of the floor. The stem was as fat as Cap’s arm and the five petals were open. He frowned at it for a while then walked to the cabin with the wire frames.

  ‘See?’ Dece said. ‘Two different types of aliens.’

  ‘But we’ve got these black boxes here, too.’ Cap ignored the wire frames and went straight to the two rectangular boxes. He looked at the empty one for a while. And then, ‘Ha ha! There are little holes on the walls in the cubicle.’ He slid to another rectangular box, which also had a flower inside.

  He turned back to the wire frames, leaned his head and nodded. ‘No, there were not two types of aliens. Not with those cubicles. The one with the little holes is the alien’s cleaning system. The alien steps into the cubicle and thousands of little rays clean its body with vaporised water that then gets sucked out. And that odd thing in the next cubicle removes waste from the alien. These five parts can move, closing onto the alien’s body.

  ‘No, there weren’t two types of aliens, but this ship was created to do two jobs. Here they slept on these wire frames. There is a flat area there, like a bed, but they wouldn’t have needed that while they were floating. That was what the wires were for; they tethered the floating aliens to the ‘bed’. If the ship was going to a star they used the pods, but if it was shuttling between planets and moons, the trip would take a week or a month, and the crew used cabins like this.’

  Dece slowly smiled at the wire beds.

  ‘All right?’ Cap said.

  Cap stopped outside the room with the square boxes and the strange black object. ‘I was curious about this big room, but you two weren’t there so I didn’t stop.’ He moved to the open door, saw the strange patterns and shadows on the walls, and looked down at the boxes. He stepped across the threshold and floated towards the floor below.

  ‘Cap!’ Seps hurried to the open door.

  ‘Shush.’ Cap floated down to the boxes.

  He hesitated over them, then settled near a large one and moved closer.

  Seps looked at Dece. ‘He shouldn’t do that.’

  Dece just watched. It didn’t matter what they thought. Nothing would stop Cap.

  Cap lifted the cutter, and with its muzzle lightly poked the black mass.

  Seps sucked a breath and gripped Dece’s arm.

  Cap looked at the black mass for a while, then lowered his head, as if listening to it.

  I should have the cutter, thought Dece. Any moment something is going to leap from the black object.

  The ship shivered and shadows danced through the boxes.

  Cap swayed before the object and said softly, ‘No.’

  ‘I can’t hear,’ Dece called.

  ‘No, nothing there,’ Cap said as he moved his head away.

  Dece thought he saw the object moving. ‘Cap!’

  ‘What?’

  Seps looked uncertainly at Dece.

  It was just the shadows on the boxes moving as Cap’s lights shifted. ‘Oh, nothing,’ Dece said.

  Cap grunted, banged the cutter’s muzzle against the hard black object to knock the loose fragments off, stepped back and studied the patterns on the walls. Finally he tapped the deck and drifted to them.

  ‘You said there was nothing?’ said Seps with relief.

  ‘Not anymore,’ Cap said. ‘I think there were plants growing down there, and some of them were big. You can see by the marks on the walls. Maybe the crew used to eat some of those plants and maybe the plants also cleaned the air while the ship moved between planets. Saphare would know what they were by looking at those patterns on the walls, but I am only a Tug captain.’

  Seps and Dece remained silent.

  ‘It would be good if there was a live seed in those boxes that we could grow, but there is nothing in them. Nothing but dead seeds and dead roots in the cold soil. When our scientists get here they may be able to bring a seed back to life, but they are a long way away.’

  As Cap moved down the corridor Dece slowly smiled. Cap was beginning to tame the ship. All right, he was only a tug captain, but Dece was starting to trust him. What had happened to the hate bit?

  When Cap reached the first room before the chasm, he stopped by the fresh hole in the door. ‘I don’t know what happened here.’

  ‘Dece did it,’ Seps said quietly. ‘To save me.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Dece charged into the room because he thought I was being attacked by bugs.’

  Cap looked at Dece. ‘But there was only a tiny dead robot in there.’

  ‘Yes,’ Dece said. Oh, there was still a little bit of hate.

  Seps shook her head. ‘Doesn’t matter. Dece didn’t know what was in there.’

  Cap stared at Seps for a moment, then said, ‘I had better see the robot.’ He crouched to climb through the hole and moved into the large room.

  ‘Just a cleaner,’ he said, after he had wandered around the robot, tapped it, lifted it, peered into its dead lenses and put it down.

  He walked around the shapes, stopped at the large sphere and pushed at it. The sphere turned, but only on its axis. He nodded as if he agreed with the sphere. ‘There is a way inside this thing and the aliens battle with it.’

  ‘Why?’ Seps said.

  ‘On those long trips they would need exercise. Everything here is exercise equipment. Like how you dance with your hologram friend.’

  Dece nodded.

  It felt like the entire ship was changing. He could still hear the creaking sounds and see the black shadows, but there was nothing menacing there anymore. He was beginning to feel like he was part of the ship.

  Cap was about to step outside, but he touched the hole that Dece had made, looked back at him and smiled. ‘Did you feel great when you found out that little robot was your trouble?’

  Dece blinked and then he remembered his grin and the joking with Sep. ‘Yes, it was great.’

  ‘I felt something like that once. It was when I was walking at your place, Dur. I stepp
ed into quicksand and couldn’t get out. I saw the sand pouring over me and then nothing, and I kept sinking. I couldn’t see or breathe, but then I got swept into some kind of rock funnel that ended up dropping me outside and onto a mound of sand. Once I’d recovered I couldn’t get the grin off my face. When you are about to die but don’t, that is a great feeling, hey?’

  Dece started to nod, but Cap had turned away and was moving into the corridor. Didn’t matter, Dece was grinning like an idiot. Until he stopped before the chasm and the swinging tube.

  As they stood on the edge, a flurry of ice seethed from the hole at the bottom. Several pieces of torn metal were swinging in the chasm along with the tube. There was a deep grinding sound that Dece had not heard before.

  It had probably been there before when Dece was there, but he had been too worried about the tube to notice it.

  ‘I don’t like that,’ Cap said.

  ‘The tube?’ Dece stared at it, picturing how he would get over the chasm again. He would use his jet to drift across the shattered hole with the ice rising up and Cotal below; he could see the other end of the corridor, but between that and him there was the waiting tube. He had used up most of his courage.

  ‘No, that is almost easy,’ said Cap. ‘I meant … Never mind. Later.’

  Seps was beginning to charge.

  Cap stopped her with the cutter. ‘No, we’ll do it carefully with this.’ He studied the swinging tube and the area around the chasm. He watched the tube swing from the top of the wreckage to the swaying stars, lifted the cutter, aimed the muzzle at some cables and fired. The cables snapped, their ends swirling like blind tendrils searching.

  When the tube swung towards the cables, one of them slid over it, snaring it. The tube swayed briefly before setting itself free. But on the next swing two cables caught the tube and pushed it into some other cables. The tube spun slightly. The first two cables wrapped around it and others got tangled up with them, knitting the tube to the side of the chasm.

  ‘I can do that,’ Dece said, looking at Seps as she and Cap prepared to leap.

  She flashed a smile at him as she pushed off into the chasm after Cap.

  Dece followed them with nothing to worry about but a scattering of ice particles. At the other side he turned off his jet and settled down on the edge of the corridor.