Outpost

by Allan Baillie

  And then the corridor bucked and twisted for its entire length. Dece lurched, felt his body falling into the chasm, and flapped his arms.

  Seps grabbed one of his arms, pulled him back up, and pushed him against the rocking wall.

  ‘Thank you,’ Dece said, and he squeezed her shoulder. ‘That was better than what I did with the little robot.’

  Seps seized the wall until the wild movement calmed down. It seemed to take a long time.

  ‘No, it wasn’t.’ She shook her head.

  ‘All right?’ Cap looked back at them.

  ‘Yes, I guess,’ Seps said. ‘But what was that?’

  ‘The bugs are after us.’ Dece was putting on a weak smile. See, I can laugh.

  Cap looked at him sharply and saw the smile. ‘Funny. I would prefer the bugs. We could deal with them.’ He waved the cutter.

  Dece and Seps looked at him.

  ‘Never mind, it’s gone.’

  Cap turned away and moved down the short corridor. But Dece had seen his eyes and they were troubled.

  Cap stopped at the end of the corridor and looked at the wrecked Tug for a moment. ‘All right. Where did you see the parts? Near the ship’s engine? Maybe I can find something there.’

  Seps led Cap to the crowded storerooms near the engines and he fiddled with the odd-shaped objects.

  ‘This lot are tools of some sort, but I don’t have a clue what they do. They’re useless for the Tug. It would be like trying to put a round bolt in a square hole. Come on.’

  At the end of the corridor, Dece touched the sealed doorway to the great black grin.

  ‘What’s up?’ Cap said.

  Dece looked at him, and he was not frightened anymore. Not much, anyway. ‘What about the Watcher?’

  ‘Watcher?’

  ‘Remember?’ Seps said. ‘Dece thought he saw something when the Tug was going past the ship’s engines.’

  ‘Ah. Then we’d better take a look.’ Cap lifted the cutter.

  ‘Maybe these are the last survivors,’ Seps said.

  Cap hesitated and banged the door with the muzzle. ‘Hey, can you hear me? I am going to cut through the door. All right?’

  They pressed against the door and heard nothing but the creaking of the ship.

  ‘Stupid idea.’ Cap positioned the cutter and cut into the door.

  Immediately the beginning of the hole clouded and a fine spray spurted out.

  Cap stopped. ‘Watch it! There is some type of gas on the other side.’ But he only stepped sideways before he continued with the cutting. The section fell slowly towards the room. He waited for the gas rush to stabilise and he stepped through it.

  ‘Oh,’ he breathed.

  22.

  The Alien

  SEPS grabbed the cut door and began to push herself through, but hesitated. ‘Are you all right, Cap?’

  ‘It’s fine.’

  She swung through. ‘Oh.’

  Dece swallowed and moved clumsily after them.

  For a moment, he was tumbling from the ship into a great span of stars. He lurched back and clutched Seps’ arm, but then his eyes focused. Huge windows framed the stars and more. Through the windows he saw the rings, the closer ice boulders and the ship’s scarred engines. There was a square, glinting panel with buttons near the door, a metal cabinet and a big mirror on a wall to reflect the stars and there were several enormous green seats looking at the stars. Seats with arms. Cap had been right – it did look a bit like a lounge room, maybe.

  Then Dece saw something on the arm of a seat and sucked in his breath. ‘Oh, oh, oh.’

  ‘Yes,’ Cap murmured.

  On the arm of that seat was part of a skeleton resting on the soft green material like shells on the beach.

  ‘I think we have found part of the crew,’ Cap said slowly.

  Seps took a step forwards, but hesitated for a moment.

  ‘Just take it easy,’ Cap said. But she pushed on.

  ‘Wait, Seps.’ Cap moved after her.

  But Seps didn’t stop. She turned her head to the seat and Dece heard a muffled gasp. He was glad he couldn’t see her face. Cap patted her shoulder as he stared at the seat.

  ‘It’s just – horrible!’ Seps was shivering.

  Dece had been building up the courage to join them, but felt it slithering back.

  ‘He’s not all that bad.’ Cap tilted his head.

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Well, he is dead. Dead things look like that, for a start.’

  ‘Not like that.’ Seps moved her head and her lights aimed at Dece. ‘Are you going to have a look?’

  ‘I …’ He thought, I can do it. I can keep my eyes closed and nobody will know. He moved towards them.

  ‘What do you think you’ll look like when you have been dead for a long time?’

  ‘I’ve seen pictures, Cap. This is nothing like that. Is it?’ Seps looked at Dece.

  ‘Um …’ Dece was staring away from the alien at a bright green star.

  ‘Well?’

  He glanced at Seps and he knew that she would not let go until he looked at it. So he jerked his head down.

  There were deep sockets where the alien’s eyes had been and they seemed to be moving. Dece stumbled back and the sockets followed him.

  ‘See?’ Seps looked at Cap. ‘It’s horrible.’

  Cap sighed. ‘You sound like Boss.’

  There was a long, awkward silence.

  Dece wobbled on his boots and saw the alien’s sockets dip. He thought, It’s only my lights doing that. He is dead.

  The sockets were really big on a small bone skull. There was a hole under them, and under the hole was something to crush things. The body was crowded with bones, ribs like big fish from the deep, long bones sprawling on the seat into small, crumbling boots. There were thin bones poking out of the boots.

  Dece said slowly, ‘He is not that bad.’

  Seps looked at him in amazement.

  ‘Yes.’ Cap nodded. ‘When you get over the shock. Now we can see how they were able to work those thousands of control buttons.’

  Dece looked at the end of the alien’s arm bones. There were many little bones spreading over the seat’s arm, so many that fragments of the skeleton had fallen on the deck.

  Cap glanced at Seps, who was screwing up her face. ‘Saphare would have loved this. He would have died for this …’ He stopped for an instant and shook his head. ‘But he would have said this alien is connected to us.’

  ‘What! With all those bones!’

  ‘We were once microbes, and so was he. We oozed from the hot mud till finally we got whizzing around the stars and he just found a different way to get here. He must’ve eaten something like our ancestors – look at the mouth! – it doesn’t matter. We’re here. Us and them.’

  Dece looked at Cap in surprise; he was sounding like Saphare now.

  He looked back at the skeleton. He is like me, thought Dece. He got here on a space ship and I got here on a space ship. His ship was wrecked … He turned to Cap. ‘What happened to him? The only crewman left in the ship.’

  ‘Ah …’ Cap looked at the sockets as if trying to get the alien to talk. ‘Maybe he was the gardener. So he would sleep in the pods, like the crew, but he would be woken early by the computer so he could look after the plants in the big room. Maybe he sleeps in those little cabins, exercises on the funny equipment in the robot’s room and rests here. He would probably go back to his pod once he had finished with the plants. But he didn’t get there that day.

  ‘He never used his suit when he was working with the plants, and he didn’t need it on the ship. Maybe he came out of his cabin to watch the stars. And then the meteor hit.’

  Cap crossed to the glinting panel by the door. He touched the buttons and nodded. ‘This must be emergency control. So when the meteor severed the bridge from the rest of the ship, the captain was woken by the computer. He went to the bridge but couldn’t operate anything from that side of the chasm. So the garden
er took over.’

  He tilted his head to the skeleton. ‘You had a tough day.’ Cap spoke slowly. ‘The ship should have seen the meteor coming, but something broke down. It can happen, even to aliens. Maybe the gardener saw the meteor streaking in, but couldn’t do anything. Couldn’t act fast enough to beat it.

  ‘After the initial hit, the ship would have pitched about wildly. Things would have been sucked out to the chasm until the doors closed. Huge plants would have been ripped from the walls, funnelled through the corridors and hurled into space. The ship would have been spinning, but the computers on the bridge couldn’t fix it. The meteor had cut everything from the chasm to the stern, so the bridge couldn’t operate the ship’s engines. The ship must have closed the doors automatically and alerted the crew in the pods, and now it was dying.

  ‘The crew pushed on their suits, and opened the doors using the ship’s last gasp of energy. There was a shuttle in the hold for escape. First they had to leap that chasm, but the ship was twisting. That leap was impossible.’

  Cap stroked the panel buttons almost with affection. ‘But the gardener was right here. So he tried the controls to stabilise the ship and he slowed down the pitch of the ship to allow the crew to make it over the chasm. Then the engines died. The crew climbed into the shuttle. The gardener opened the hold – he probably had a huge battle with the doors of the hold with the ship twisting all over the place, but he did it, and the shuttle left.’

  ‘Without him,’ Seps said.

  ‘Yes.’ Cap moved back to the skeleton as Dece and Seps followed. ‘He did things – great things – to save his shipmates, but he could not save himself. He didn’t have a chance, and I think he knew that the moment the meteor hit. The ship had sealed him into this lounge. He couldn’t get out. He could open the door, but he had no suit. He knew that he would die the moment the door opened. Maybe the crew knew he was here, but they couldn’t get him. The ship probably had a gadget to get him out, but if it was there then it was somewhere on the other side of the chasm.

  ‘It is likely that the crew on the shuttle tried to get him from the engines’ side.’ Cap pointed at the windows. ‘That shuttle must have had docking facilities. But the ship was still twisting …’ And he stopped.

  Dece looked at him. ‘I was thinking,’ he said. ‘I think he waved the shuttle away. It was too dangerous. I don’t know what I would have done.’

  ‘He is not an alien,’ Seps said. ‘Not really.’

  Dece stared at the skeleton. The deep sockets were still there, and bones everywhere, big bones, little bones, but it was all right now.

  Cap moved to the metal cabinet with the big mirror behind it. ‘He took a snack from this big cabinet, then he lay there and looked at the stars.’

  Dece looked out the window, saw the dead engines thrusting from below, and beyond that the scattered ice boulders and beyond that the stars – a flood of lights from the centre of the galaxy, old explosions of novas, red giants, the blistering, blue young star – and the weak sun.

  ‘He probably died staring at his star,’ Cap said.

  For a long moment the lounge was quiet, and then Seps sighed softly.

  Very slowly, Ord drifted into view over the ship’s right engine. Dece could see some of the ridges, which they called mountains, craters and dark blue ice seas on the grey-white moon. But it looked small, no bigger than an ice boulder.

  ‘We are like him, aren’t we?’ Seps said heavily. ‘We will never get back.’

  23.

  Why?

  DECE looked away. At last someone had said it.

  He had been thinking of it from the moment the Tug hit the ship. Seps had probably been thinking about it then too, and Cap, but someone had needed to say it, and no one had. Until now. Seps’ words were wrong, but he knew what she meant. And that was just as terrible as her words.

  Seps knew that they could get back into the Tug and into the sleepers. She knew they could sleep until the ship from Control got there – it was already on its way. The crew of the ship would wake them in a couple of centuries and that would be that.

  Except for Boss. She was not in a sleeper. She would get older, maybe die while they just slept. And she wouldn’t know if they were alive.

  Cap blinked at Seps, as if her words were only now filtering into his mind. He looked down at the skeleton, then at cold Ord.

  ‘No,’ he said, and again, stronger, ‘No! We are not him. We can do things. Come on.’

  They moved out of the lounge, leaving the sockets staring at the stars. Seps and Dece glanced at each other and they knew what the other one was thinking: maybe Cap is not a meathead all the time. Maybe, maybe, he can get something going. Maybe.

  They had just about reached the hold when the ship shook. A crashing, rumbling sound erupted over Dece’s head and then the corridor swayed as if the ship had got caught up in one of Ord’s geysers. Dece grabbed onto a corner as the corridor twisted so violently that the deck almost became the wall. And then everything settled.

  ‘That’s the second time.’ Seps’ voice was tinny.

  ‘Still coming from Cotal,’ said Cap.

  But Dece was looking at his eyes and could tell he was hiding things. It was how Cap had acted with the light on the bridge, and the chasm, thought Dece. He doesn’t tell us everything. And that’s all right. I don’t want to know.

  ‘There is nothing we can do,’ Cap said.

  Dece knew that he was not lying this time.

  They moved into the hold and the Tug looked worse now. It looked like a pile of scrap metal in a rubbish fill and nobody said anything for a while.

  Cap turned to Dece. ‘Did you get the Tug in the hold by yourself?’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘He didn’t make that wreckage!’ Seps blurted. ‘That happened outside when the ship hit – ’

  Cap screwed up his face in anger. ‘Sometimes you have to shut up!’ He wiped the anger away and caught Dece’s eyes. ‘Now, did you get the Tug here without using the attractor from the ship?’

  ‘Attractor …’

  ‘Was there something in the ship that pulled the Tug into the hold?’

  ‘Oh, no.’

  ‘I didn’t think so. So you got the Tug into the hold.’

  Dece waited for the abuse.

  ‘That is good.’ Cap patted his helmet.

  Dece stared at Cap as if he had grown a new head. ‘Seps helped.’

  ‘No, it was him,’ Seps muttered.

  ‘Doesn’t matter; it’s here. Now we have to fix it.’

  Cap moved slowly to the wrecked engines, tapped a cowl, which creaked, ducked under it and carefully studied the three cowls, the nozzles and the engines. He looked like a fat bug blinking at a nozzle, wondering if it was edible, thought Dece. Finally Cap came away from the mess, sat on the ship’s metal deck and stared at it. He stayed there for a long time, even through a storm of ice from the open entrance. The small sparks of ice whirled around him, but he didn’t seem to notice.

  Dece and Seps had been sitting motionless and silent, but finally Seps crept away. Dece watched her slide into the Tug and thought of following, but he worried his movement would break Cap’s concentration – if he was really thinking at all. He looked like he was asleep.

  Seps came out of the Tug with a small case and placed it near Cap and he still didn’t move for while. When he slowly became aware of her he turned his head.

  ‘What?’ He was irritable.

  She passed the case to him. ‘It might help.’

  When Dece recognised the case he was angry with himself.

  Cap glanced at it and looked at Seps with a touch of wonder. Suddenly Seps knows things about the Tug? He nodded and turned to the case.

  It’s so simple, thought Dece. The tiny nanorobots and microrobots are still trying to fix the Tug and everything they do is recorded in the case. The case was a part of the bridge. Seps had taken it from its slot. Now Cap can see everything to do with the bridge and how the robots ar
e working. Seps had never touched the case before, but she knew what it was by reading the computers and they had also told her where the case was. She’d never flown the Tug, but she probably could do that too from having watched Cap. Dece should have thought of the case, but he was the dummy.

  Eventually Cap stood up, turned and saw them behind him. He looked a little surprised.

  Dece couldn’t wait. ‘Can we do it?’

  ‘Well …’ He shrugged.

  Dece read from Cap’s slight movement that there was no way of getting the Tug from the ship.

  But Seps read the word instead of the gesture, and came up with a different meaning. ‘We can?’

  ‘Maybe. It’s complicated.’ Cap beckoned, moved under the nozzles and rapped at the nearest one. ‘This is One Engine, but we can’t do anything with that.’

  Dece could see that. The Tug had hit the ship with the nozzles, cowl and heavy engine. The nozzle had crumbled like a bugs nest across the cowl, the next nozzle and the first two engines. The engine connected to the nozzle was half crushed and had collided with the other two engines.

  ‘And …’ Cap waved his arm. ‘One Engine demolished Two Engine and Two Engine almost destroyed Three Engine.’

  ‘But … ?’ Seps looked at him.

  ‘We have to shift out One Engine. All of it. And then we may see.’

  And that was it. Cap had a glimmer of an idea, but he wasn’t talking about it. Not to some dumb shrimps.

  Dece and Seps exchanged looks, trying to read each other’s eyes. Cap was slipping back to the secretive, furtive bug they knew, but it was all right because they were doing things.

  Cap led them to the Tug, and got tools and a long carrier from the Tug’s hold. He went to One Engine, with the intention of sliding the carrier under the nozzle of the crippled engine. The carrier could be flattened like a tray without weakening it, but Cap could not squeeze it between the ship’s deck and the nozzle.

  Cap hit the Tug’s hull in anger. ‘You aren’t giving us anything at all, are you?’ He looked at the carrier and Dece. ‘All right, we’ll see.’

  He sent Dece to get two light cables, and once he had these he fitted them onto the edges of the carrier and passed the ends to Dece and Seps before going to the bridge. Cap gave some instructions to Dece and Seps, who separated and went to the end of the ship’s hold with their cables. A tiny jet started up near the engines and the Tug didn’t move. They watched each other across the large hold and the nozzle.