Edge of the Wire, page 20
Coupled with the sound of roaring and screaming that now all but deafened him (he’d had no idea the volume in his enviro-suit could ever go so high), Rowe’s reaction was not “voluntary” in any real sense of the word. He screamed and ran . . . to nowhere and everywhere at the same time.
It was difficult to know in which direction to flee, and some part of his mind remained whole enough to understand that he might now be careening directly into the thing of five wheels. But he could no longer control himself. The worlds inside and outside of his helmet began to blur.
Between the assault of eyes and teeth, as if from a deep background, Rowe seemed to see the thing of five wheels springing forward, but could not be sure. Above the monstrous screams projected through his suit, he also heard shouts that were human. Then he saw a powerful discharge of blue light, and heard the report of gunshots.
Total sensory overload came swiftly. There was a brief point at which he felt he might be able to hold everything that was happening in his mind at one time. That somehow, he could process these sensations and stay inside a sane, conscious version of himself. But the primal strings of his being had been expertly plucked. Everything that told every animal that had ever evolved to avoid eyes and teeth was now turned up to 11. His conscious self held on to the ledge as long as it could for a succession of terrible instants, but in the end, a mindless madness overtook him. He ceased to be himself, and then seemingly ceased to be. Every sense that he possessed now told him he was being eaten by a succession of giant animals. Titans. Enormous predators.
And when the blackness of oblivion came, it took the form of the inside of a stomach.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CONSCIOUSNESS WAS SLOW TO RETURN.
Rowe gradually became aware that there were no longer ear-shattering screaming sounds all around him, but wondered if this was only because he had been rendered deaf.
Then he realized he did hear a sound. An acetylene torch. He knew what it was because he had heard it before, that very same day. (At least probably. What time was it, anyway?)
Rowe felt his cheek pressed against a cool floor of tile or metal. He first tried to wiggle his fingers and toes, then entire limbs. All good. He realized his enviro-suit had been removed. He assumed he was bruised all over because his body felt as though he had fallen down a flight of stairs. Maybe several.
Rowe managed a small moan and opened his eyes. An instant later, he was grabbed by the back of the neck like a cat and pulled upwards.
He found himself looking into Waverly’s face. His friend’s expression said that the danger—whatever it was—had not yet passed.
As Waverly’s manic eyes inspected him, Rowe glanced over and saw one of the black-clad Silkworms welding the door to the vault shut.
There was a moment of vertigo before Rowe understood that they were now outside of the vault. They had escaped.
Some of them.
Rowe realized the Silkworm using the welding torch was grievously injured. Waverly himself was bloodied about the face and hands. Waverly was also no longer wearing his enviro-suit. Rowe swiveled his neck in the opposite direction to see if any others had escaped. He saw Collins, and no one else. She had been propped against the wall and sat at an awkward, unnatural angle. Her left leg was gone below the knee. (Her strange black enviro-suit seemed to lack any mechanism for first-aid deployment.) Her face looked gray and drained of life, but her eyes swiveled wildly in their sockets.
“What’s happening?” Rowe asked.
His throat felt like he’d been up all night shouting at a concert.
“Hang on,” said Waverly, unceremoniously dropping Rowe and jogging back over to where the other Silkworm was doing welds. Waverly clasped sliding metal parts together so that they could be more easily sealed. The two men acted with great urgency.
Rowe managed to get to his hands and knees, and crawled over to Collins. Though evidently injured himself, something told him he must see if he could help her.
Collins’s eyes trained on Rowe like a laser.
“Mister Rowe . . .” she managed in a voice that had gone breathy and weak. “I’m dying. I have to tell you something before I go. Can you hear me? Please listen to what I tell you. This place . . . it is not what you think it is.”
“Yes,” Rowe said, finding his own strength growing slightly, even as the woman in front of him faded. “I figured that much.”
“I have to speak quickly,” she continued. “I can feel my life draining away. Mister Rowe, this is not a J-Class, or even an X-Class planet. It’s something else. Another kind of planet that’s not been typed or named. Even at the most senior levels, very few Silkworms know it exists. The Goo would normally withhold this information from you, for your own best interest, but I think . . . I think if I could talk to the Goo right now, it would want me to tell you this. I . . . I really wish I could talk to the Goo right now . . . I wish . . .”
Collins paused for a moment, overcome by emotion. She had been forsaken by a protector and friend. Rowe knew exactly how she felt.
A few yards away, Waverly and the other remaining Silkworm continued frantically to work on the door. Periodically, the sound of a moaning—tremendous, low, and ominous—came from the other side of it.
“ESA ships have been coming to Tendus-13 for many, many years,” Collins said, finding some last reserve of strength. “Every few decades, we think we know something new—a way to solve the problems on this planet—and we try again. Your lander and the Marie Curie . . . it was a new attempt. A two-part test. Tendus-13 is not located at the edge of the universe, you see, but hundreds of light years in. The Goo aboard our ship has been misrepresenting our location intentionally since this mission began. I can’t explain it all now, but . . . The thing here. What is happening. It is connected to the Goo. Related to it.”
“I gathered that, though I confess the details are still unclear,” said Rowe. “I feel like I can see pieces of this puzzle, but not how they fit.”
“I was assigned to the team that works on Tendus-13 because I was supposed to be among the best and brightest,” Collins continued. “I really thought I would be the one to crack it. It was pride, I suppose. I was prideful, yes. Overconfident; I see that now. My career had been such a success up to this point. I believed I could succeed where others had failed. I . . .”
Now she took deep, shuddering breaths.
“We think what’s here could infect the interstellar Goo,” said Collins. “So we can’t leave. No one can ever leave here until the threat is dead. The ESA knows that much. Nothing from this place can ever be connected back to the interstellar Goo until the threat is definitively eliminated. That’s why the rocket you sent up was blasted to smithereens.”
Rowe thought for a moment.
“But the original image that brought us here?” he objected. “That came through, right? Because it showed the sort of thing we saw in the infirmary.”
“That was an image from another ship, from another time,” Collins said. “I just told you, we have been coming here for decades. Centuries.”
“Centuries? But . . .” Rowe stammered.
“I was such a fool,” Collins continued, each ragged inhalation moving closer to a death-rattle. “All the new models suggest we ought to simply kill it. Many go further and suggest destroying the planet completely so that such a creature—and any technology it possesses—would be lost forever. But would it be lost? There are concerns at the highest level on that point. What if it survived and reappeared? What if it lived, perhaps upon an asteroid created when Tendus-13 was blown to bits, and then showed up again after a thousand years? What if we pushed it into a black hole, and it came out of a white hole where we least suspected? I held with those who said this creature—which all the models suggest must be the key—should be captured in some way. Captured and known. For if we could take what is wrong here, and make it right . . . then perhaps we could do anything.”
Now Collins seemed to fade further. Her face was like parchment. She had the sallow pallor of a drowning victim. Rowe strained to think of how to keep her with him, yet everything he saw and heard told him she was mere moments from expiring.
He must try something. Anything.
“Other intelligent life has come to Tendus-13,” Rowe said loudly and excitedly. “I saw their ship and went inside. So did Waverly. It’s translucent. There are other aliens here, Mission Commander. Other aliens than this one, I think.”
Collins’s eyes opened in what seemed genuine surprise. Despite her wound, she rallied a bit. Her lips forced a smile
“That . . .” she said. “That has been one of my theories for some time. That this place is, somehow, a beacon. You see, Tendus-13 emits a cosmic ray phenomenon.”
“How could a planet emit a cosmic ray phenomenon?” Rowe could not help asking.
“The lightning,” said Collins. “What you perceive as lightning. It is lightning, but . . . The Goo has withheld from you the way it truly appears when observed from a distance. For all purposes, it is a lighthouse crossed with a strobe lamp.”
“That’s crazy,” was all Rowe could think to say.
“It’s not though,” said Collins. “It’s a symbiosis. The planet and the thing. The things. Some people on our team think—I think—there is just one. Here is what you must understand. If a civilization evolves enough to notice Tendus-13, then it also probably has some version of the Goo, and some way of wiring a planet. And then this thing gets into it. Infects it. In the end, they take it back with them to their home civilization. And perhaps it destroys that civilization. Perhaps that is why, after all these years, we have yet to find other life at our own level of intelligence and technological advancement. So I think . . . it has been my theory, at least . . . that this thing is like a parasite. No, it is more than that . . . It’s almost like a . . . Like a . . . There’s . . . There’s so much I want to tell you, Mister Rowe.”
“Yes,” he said. “Stay with me. Tell me.”
“This thing in this ship with us . . .” said Collins. “The thing on the other side of that door. Remember the first rule of life, Mister Rowe. It has to be a thing that eats. Everything eats. Maybe it feeds using photosynthesis, like a plant. Or maybe it’s like an undersea worm that feeds on heat from a hydrothermal vent. But you see, Mister Rowe, I don’t think it eats meat. I don’t think it eats meat at all.”
As if overwhelmed by this idea, Collins leaned back against the angled wall as her eyes went straight ahead, making her appear deep in thought. Her body shuddered a final time before she died.
It took Rowe a full minute to realize that she was gone. He felt as though he ought to do something, but did not quite know what. He slowly got to his feet.
Rowe felt unsteady, as if he were very drunk. His whole body ached. He watched as Waverly and the Silkworm in black continued with the welding. The intermittent groan beyond the door also continued. At one juncture, it seemed to be joined by a low grinding scrape, as if something were probing the door. Exploring for weak points.
When Rowe felt too weak to stand any longer, he lowered himself back down beside Collins. At the same moment, the welding noise stopped. Rowe looked over at the Silkworm clad in black and realized the man was explaining to Waverly that his torch had finally run out of juice. Whatever they had done thus far, it would have to suffice.
Waverly turned to look back at Rowe and Collins.
“Oh shit,” he cried.
He looked desperately at Collins, then to Rowe. His expression was a question mark.
“Dead,” Rowe replied.
Waverly took a very deep breath and shrugged the shrug of a man who knows he must not allow himself to think of the implications of the situation. Must not allow his mind to correlate its contents.
He approached Rowe.
“Well, I think I can carry her,” Waverly said. “I’m not quite as beat up as you are.”
“What happened inside there?” Rowe asked. “That thing screamed into my brain and I saw monsters—like from the recordings we watched—and I just lost it. It was so much worse than I ever thought it could be. I don’t remember anything after that.”
“You attacked us,” said Waverly, standing over the corpse of Collins. “Sort of.”
“Did I kill anyone?” Rowe asked.
Waverly shook his head.
“You were running around like a scared kid, punching and kicking. But the thing . . . I didn’t know it could move like that. What we saw before—in the videos and so on—that was it fighting with a hand tied behind its back. This time it was serious—maybe because we were in its home. It killed almost everyone, very quickly. It pulled no punches.”
“Crimeny,” said Rowe.
“You eventually ran into a wall and passed out,” Waverly continued. “I took your suit off and pulled you away.”
“So they’re all dead in there?” Rowe said.
Waverly’s expression wondered how Rowe could suggest otherwise.
“Everything on the other side of that door is meat,” Waverly told him, shaking his head. “All these Silkworms with Collins had different guns in their suits. They tried to use them, but I don’t know if they even hurt the thing. They sure made it mad though. It’s still alive and it’s very angry now.”
Indeed, Rowe could hear the horrible shuddering moans of the beast even as his friend spoke.
Waverly stooped and managed to lift Collins in an awkward fireman’s carry. Though its occupant had passed away, the suit still emitted light from the joints and fissures.
They looked over to the remaining Silkworm in black to see if he would accompany them back.
“I think I’m done,” the man said, and suddenly collapsed to the ground. His eyes rolled back in his head and he stopped breathing. Rowe and Waverly looked at him for several silent seconds.
“Fuck,” Rowe said softly.
“The thing was hovering over him for a while inside,” said Waverly. “Maybe it sucked something out of him. Maybe it just took his picture like before. I don’t know. Come on.”
“I can’t carry him,” Rowe said. “I’m too weak.”
“It will be enough for me to take Collins,” said Waverly. “Let’s go.”
“But where?” Rowe said, still feeling dizzy. “Where will we go?”
“For one, away from that thing,” Waverly said, urging his friend along. “For another, there’s an emergency escape hatch back in the loading bay. I’m sure there are other ways out of the ship too, but we’re not going to find them without Goo. The one in the bay—I saw it before, so I know it exists. I think we can use it to get planetside again.”
Rowe was silent. He did not have a better plan.
Huffing and puffing, they began the task of retracing their steps back through the dark halls of the Marie Curie. The men started up the first metal staircase slowly and steadily. If Waverly strained under Collins’s weight, he said nothing about it.
“This is a stupid question, but did anyone try talking to it?” Rowe asked. “Was there any attempt at communication?”
“Are you kidding?” Waverly said.
“I guess I’m not,” said Rowe.
“There wasn’t time,” Waverly said, taking each stairstep deliberately. “We were too busy being killed.”
“Man, take her out of that suit,” said Rowe. “That’s where the weight is.”
“Something tells me having her inside the suit might be important,” Waverly said. “Let’s just go easy.”
They made their way in silence. Behind them, the moans of the thing of five wheels grew fainter, but now and then the groans were also punctuated with sharp percussive blows, as though the thing were hurling its discs in quick succession against the door.
“What’s it going to do if it gets out?” Rowe wondered.
“I don’t know,” Waverly said. “I can’t tell how smart it is. We welded the main, eye-level door closed, but there are other ways to move things around down there. Even money says it’s going to figure a way to open one of the other doors pretty soon.”
“Then we have to get to a safe distance,” said Rowe. “There’s got to be a way to get out of range. We just need . . . We need to do a lot of things.”
And suddenly Rowe again wished more than anything that he could talk to the Goo. He wanted to ask it what the protocol should be for this situation. To get recommendations about the best way forward, and to be shown a timer countdown to when emergency services would arrive to provide assistance.
The worst part was that—somewhere in the back of his mind—Rowe knew this emptiness and abandonment was a situation of his own making. He’d joined the Silkworms, and he’d done so knowing that hidden somewhere in the long boilerplate contract that every initiate simply scrolled through without reading—before clicking “Accept”—was a clause noting quite clearly that this very sort of scenario could be one’s fate. To die abandoned and unknown. To pass away outside of the Goo’s warm sanctum, with no friendly advice regarding what to do, or reliable forecasts concerning what would happen next.
To end utterly lost and forgotten.
Rowe wondered how long it would take the ESA to decide that another ship should be sent. Collins had been babbling, mad, close to death—but the things she had said now filled Rowe with a deep and creeping dread. If Tendus-13 were truly something beyond an X-Class planet, it could be decades before anything was sent again. Centuries. Or this might truly have been the last time. The ESA might actually do the sensible thing, cut their losses, and move along. Rowe thought about Cortez, about how perhaps that meant she would have succeeded in her project.
Rowe attempted to shake these thoughts from his head. That was a worst case scenario, surely. Wasn’t it more likely that Collins had become confused by her injuries? Perhaps she had become so disoriented that she had spoken untruths. No doubt the ESA cared deeply about the fate of his crew, just as it had cared about the fate of all the men and women aboard the Marie Curie. The ESA would want to rescue them, Rowe decided. It only had to believe that it was safe to do so.
