Expendable Heroes, page 14
Steven shook his head. “They never told us about them either, and they never told us that you moved the ascent craft, or that the buildings were completely overgrown. They must have known this. I mean—they could see it from orbit.”
“Were you sent down as a science team, too?”
“No. We’re all political prisoners of one kind or another. We were meant to find you, but that was just a front for the fact that we’re guinea pigs for a medical trial. We’re expendable.”
She blew out a breath. “Those people are engaged in the most egregious bastardry I’ve ever seen. Their only motivation is profit and money.” She lowered her voice. “They’re probably listening. We asked for help. They would not come to get us. Told us it was too expensive, told us that we had all the supplies we needed on the surface. While they knew they’d already lost two other teams.”
Luciane said, “What are they looking for that they keep sending people down to this fucking dreadful planet?”
“Medicinal compounds to prolong life.”
Jack was nodding. He’d suggested that earlier.
Nina asked, “Do you know who the members of the board are?”
Steven shrugged. He didn’t know much about Merlin.
“Some of them,” Luciane said.
“Jeremy Calvert?” Rollo asked.
Her face twisted into a mask of hate. “He’s the worst of them. One of the company’s founders. They’re all mega-rich and don’t care what happens to their workers.”
“Is that why they use prisoners?”
“No doubt.”
“But we’re going to get out with that ascent craft, right?” Jack said.
“Yes, I would like to. If we can.”
Steven had noticed just how thin and frail she was.
“Are you healthy enough to run or fight?” he asked. “Did you get enough to eat?”
“I’ve eaten Gork’s supplies every day, but I guess I don't look a picture of rude health. "
No, that was understating the fact. She walked with a bent back, with small steps. From what Steven remembered, she had to be somewhere in her forties, maybe pushing fifty, but her build and movements suggested someone at least twice that age. It was common for people who spent a lot of time in space for their hair to go grey early, but hers was white, thin and lank.
“We bring at least one thing that will make your life safer,” Jack said. “We were given an experimental treatment that stops the poison from the plants doing its work. I can give it to you before we try to get out. I have to warn you that it hurts.”
“I don’t care. I want to get out. I have no family left. Thomas was my partner. I have nothing to live for except to get revenge on these bastards.”
“Right then.” Jack slid the pack from his back and extracted his medicine box. “Let’s get you prepared.”
Nina sat through the injection without a sound.
Steven inspected the room while Jack was busy. He didn’t like needles or medical stuff.
On a bench against the back wall of the room stood a box that contained a set of square dishes with various little dark green cubes and plant parts inside. There were also more of the black chips in transparent bags. Nina said that this was her supply of food that the alien Gork brought her. “Tastes like shit, but keeps me a live.”
“Barely,” Jack remarked.
“We have a buggy full of rations,” Rollo said. “We can bring the stuff in here.”
“Why are we faffing around here? I’d like to go out to the ascent craft as soon as we can,” Luciane said.
“We need to make sure the craft is operational,” Rollo said. “We only get one chance.”
“It will be dark soon,” Jack said.
“We need a plan,” Steven said.
Luciane whirled to him. “A plan? We go to the fucking craft, we check it and we get the fuck out of here.”
Jack said, “Calm down, Luce. I know we’re all keen to get out but we need to make sure we actually have somewhere to go to and that we have enough air on board to last us the trip.”
Steven waited for the outburst, but it didn’t come. Jack looked at Luciane, daring her to start swearing at him, but she didn’t.
Luciane would know that he was right, but also, it was a mark of how they had learned to work together and accept each other’s anxieties.
When they first met, she would never have accepted that Jack called her Luce, or that he told her off. But Jack was a lot more useful than he’d seemed at first. He had a calming, steadying influence on the others.
In the silence, Nina said, “We can’t leave here without Gork.”
They all looked at her.
Luciane said, “Excuse me, did you just say we should bring an alien with us?”
“I would not be alive without him.”
“But we don’t know what he needs—”
“I do.”
“But how can we—”
“Would you leave another live sentient creature alone stranded on this world?”
“Well…” Luciane looked at Steven as if he had an easy solution. Jack and Rollo looked at him as well.
What did they expect?
Yes, he could think of all kinds of arguments. Sensible arguments. Biosecurity arguments. But he said nothing, because they were heartless arguments.
He hesitated. “How… sentient is this creature? What does he eat? What does he need? Has he contacted his kind, and how likely are they going to come after us? Could he give us diseases?”
Nina met his eyes squarely. “If he was a dog, would you leave him here alone?”
Steven blew out a breath. “I guess we all know the answer to that question.”
“Do we?” Nina asked. “I want to hear you say it, because the company are a bunch of the most greed-driven and small-minded people I’ve met.”
“We’re not like them,” Steven said.
Luciane shook her head. Jack shook his head. Rollo said, “The fuck, we’re not.”
“Good. I’ll take you to see him.”
CHAPTER 21
Nina had hit her stride.
She led the group out of the back of the room through a smooth-looking door that slid aside with very little noise.
Rollo, always the technician, peeked into the recess where the door slid into the wall.
They went down a staircase with steps that were broad and very tall, like the ones outside.
“Who built this building?” Steven asked.
“I’m not sure. Probably Gork and his kind.”
"I assume that these tall steps are more suited to the alien kind?" They had to almost jump down.
"I am not sure. You'll see when you meet Gork.”
“Did you get to communicate with any of his kind?”
“No, just him. When we first came here, they seemed afraid of us, always keeping to the bottom floor of the building where most of their stuff is. He only became interested in us when his fellows died.”
At the bottom of the steps, they entered a stone hall where low light came from a doorless opening. A maw on the other side of the room contained another staircase, also going up. What was the bet that those led to the top of the waterfall?
Nina led the group through the opening into a low ceilinged room with dark paving. Faint light emanated from the walls. The floor was similarly very smooth as it had been on the top floor. Steven looked at the ceiling. Yes, it was semi-transparent. He could see faint shapes.
In the middle of the room was a kind of depression with water in it, and at the edge of this shallow pond sat a creature with its back to the door.
It bore a row of soft tentacles on its head, each of them with a round knob the size of a fist. These things waved gently above what Steven assumed to be the creature’s head.
When Nina and the group came in, all these tentacles stopped waving and bobbed at the same time. Then the creature slowly turned around. Steven could only describe it as a giant slug. Apart from the tentacles on its head, and some of those contained what look like eyes like a snails’ eyes on stalks, its face bore coloured blotches that wavered and changed colour like on the skin of a squid.
“Hello, Gork,” Nina said.
The alien responded with a gurgling noise that indeed sounded like Gork.
But it was not an ugly-sounding gork as the combination of letters suggested. It sounded oddly musical, produced in a singing tone with an uplift at the end as if it was a question.
“Look, Gork, these are the people who have just arrived,” Nina continued. She kicked off her shoes and sat down on the edge of the pond, sticking her feet in the water.
"Does he understand you?" Luciane said. She kept a little behind the rest of the group, staring at this alien creature.
“He does, to a point. They come from a dark place and communicate with light and touch.”
She demonstrated by holding out her hand. The alien extended one of its tentacles and touched her fingers. Blue-purple disjointed triangular patterns lit up inside its semi-transparent body.
“What does that mean?” Rollo asked.
“Blue means he’s happy. He makes triangles when he’s curious. He wants to know who you are.”
Gork slid off the side of the pond into the water. He swam the short distance around Nina’s feet in flowing, undulating motions, while feeling the sides of the pond with his tentacles.
Rollo and Jack had come to the edge of the pond but had not taken off their shoes. Luciane still stood back from the group, watching with a doubtful expression on her face.
Gork ran his tentacles up and down the skin on Nina’s feet and ankles.
The coloured patterns inside his body changed from purple to blue to green and back again. The triangles became squares and circles. It was pretty to watch.
“What’s he doing?” Steven asked.
The alien’s skin changed colour to green, and the pattern changed to leaves.
Nina stroked a tentacle. “No, I’m not here because I want food. I want you to meet my friends.”
The light changed to blue and in a clumsy but clearly recognisable way, the word friend appeared on its skin.
“Yes, friends,” Nina said and gestured to Steven. “Come on. He doesn’t bite.”
Steven undid the straps of the mech suit harness and jumped down from the footrest. “Hold it for me,” he said to Luciane.
She gave him a suspicious look. “Going to be one with the alien? Rather you than me, Mr. Biologist.”
Steven took off his shoes and walked barefoot to the pond and sat next to Nina.
The water was lukewarm and smelled earthy. He hoped there weren’t any alien diseases in the pond. He’d rather not think about how long this water had been in here and what hid in the slimy residue on the bottom.
As soon as he sat down, the alien scooted across the water around Nina’s legs. It latched onto Steven’s knees with two tentacles and pulled itself up.
Whoa!
That soft-looking body was surprisingly solid. Muscles strained within the squishy body parts.
The top of the alien’s head rose taller than Steven’s. The creature’s tentacles ran over him, bumping into his skin. They were soft and warm, but not slimy. The patterns on the skin changed from blue to green and back. Circles and wavy lines undulated over the skin. From deep within the soft body came the gooorrrk sound that made the skin vibrate. It was an oddly melodious exclamation, almost a question.
The tentacles came up to his face.
Steven leaned back.
“Let him do that,” Nina said. “This is how he sees things.”
The tentacles bumped into Steven’s neck and then his face. The alien’s stomach or whatever was his digestive system, made gurgling sounds. He extruded a section of soft tissue and patted Steven’s cheeks with it.
“How do I know he’s not going to eat me?”
“He’s just getting to know you. Tasting you.”
That was exactly what he feared.
Then, as quickly as he had come, the alien slid back into the water. The patterns on his skin undulated in patterns of green and purple and the occasional splash of yellow.
He splashed around in the shallow water, spraying water over himself with a flap at the side of his body.
Then all of a sudden, a pattern appeared on his skin in dark blue and green. Steven recognised the shape.
“That’s the ascent vehicle,” Jack said.
“Yes, he’s smart,” Nina said.
“I hope you’re recording this,” Steven said.
“I am,” Rollo said.
“Yes,” Nina said, stroking the tentacles. “That’s what they want.”
“How well does he understand you?”
“I’m not sure. I would like to think that he can follow what we say, but I doubt that he understands every word we’re saying.”
The alien produced a low thrumming sound.
The image on his skin disappeared to be replaced with some sort of schematic in light green.
“What’s that?”
“It’s the layout of this building. The top level. See, this is where the craft stands.”
“Wait, it’s inside this building? We could see the craft from below the waterfall. You said you landed it on the shore of a lake there.”
“We did, but that lake sits on top of this building.”
“Did Gork and his kind build this warren of corridors?”
“I can’t be sure. If they did, they’ve been here a long time.”
“If they’d built this building, they would have built ramps, not tall stairs,” Rollo said. “If you don’t have feet, what is the point of stairs?”
That was true and was a very good point. Rollo was a lot of things, but he was also practical and very good with things like this.
“This building looks very old,” Jack said.
Steven let his gaze roam over the empty expanse of smooth floor, trying to imagine activity from alien creatures both short enough to not hit their heads on the ceiling, and with legs long enough to negotiate the big steps.
He didn’t like any of the potential creatures his brain conjured up. They all had long legs, walked on all fours and probably had long claws.
“The craft seems in decent condition,” Jack said. “We can communicate with it, which is more than can be said for our contact with company vehicles in orbit.”
Luciane said, “Would that be because she was jamming our communication from here?”
And Nina said, “That’s because the aliens want to study our craft and look into our systems as much as we want to study them.”
Well, damn it.
“Do you know why Gork’s kind came here?”
“Same reason we came: exploration. They got stuck for the same reason, too: because of the plant poison. They also tried to leave but their craft crashed, or maybe it crashed and that was the reason they got stuck. They wanted to use our craft, but then they became ill and most of them died until now only Gork is left.”
“Where is their craft?”
“It’s that round thing on the schematic.”
“Wait…” Luciane said. “Were they trying to cannibalise our ascent craft to fix theirs?”
They all looked at each other, and meanwhile, one corner of the pretty green schematic on Gork’s body turned brown and then violent orange pulsating into red.
“What the hell does that mean?” Rollo asked.
“He gets upset when he remembers. Things happened when we first came here,” Nina said. “I would sometimes hear sounds and there would be fights.”
“Between the gorks?”
“No, Gork and his kind tried to stop other creatures coming in. They made terrible noises, too.”
“What sort of noises?” Jack asked. “Like the ones he makes?”
“No, they were terrible screeching noises that came from outside.”
“Were-tigers,” Luciane said, her voice dark.
“What are they?” Nina frowned at her.
Steven explained, “It’s just a thing we talk about in our group. She means local wildlife. They attacked your fellows and the buggy. It’s probably the skeleton you saw.”
Jack snorted. “We have weapons. Were-tigers or not, we came to recover our craft. It’s our only chance to get out of here.”
Gork’s skin flashed with bright orange spots.
“What does that mean?”
"He says he doesn’t like it.”
"Why? And also, what is he going do to stop us?"
“You'd be surprised. I don't think you really want to know. I don’t, at any rate.”
“I’m not going to be stuck on this fucking planet,” Luciane said.
“What does he want then?” Steven said. “If he wants to be taken off this world, this is his chance. Let him think about that.”
Whatever the company would think about bringing an alien back on their craft anyway, but that was for the future to worry about.
Nina didn’t think Gork was interested in discussing it. The fact that the light patterns had stopped appearing on his skin meant he was tired.
She said his kind weren’t suited to living in the dry air for long and she had concluded that their interest in the planet came from the abundant water. Was that why they’d landed next to a lake? If so, why hadn’t they chosen the shore of the sea?
“He is done for the day. There is not much I can do about that. His kind think very slowly. They move very slowly, too. I know that he is terribly afraid of the plants. If you want, I can show you the remains of their craft and what the plants have done to his comrades.”
“Are they still here? I thought you said he was alone?”
“In a way some of them are still here. But it’s best if you see for yourself.”
She bent down to Gork, who had slid back into the pool, and tickled him on the top of his head. Then she led the way out of the room, and into a low ceilinged passage. In an alcove along the side, they found cabinet with inside the desiccated husk of an alien creature. The skin had dried crisp and had become semi-translucent. Inside the space where the internal organs used to be, roots intertwined with each other, forming tangled knots.
