Edge of the Wire, page 21
“Maybe if we kill it,” Rowe said as they climbed.
“Hmm?” replied Waverly, straining between steps.
“If we find a way to kill that thing, maybe then it will be safe for more ships to come down and collect us. We just have to make it safe down here. Another ship could land if it was safe. If it . . . We just need to . . .”
Rowe trailed off.
“You’re really babbling now man,” Waverly replied. “Try to relax until we get out of here, okay?”
Rowe tried.
After an interminable trek through the dark guts of the ship—their way illuminated only by the eerily natural light from Collins’s black suit—they reached the opening that led into the loading bay of the Marie Curie. Both men breathed a sigh of relief.
The only sound was their own footfalls. There were no further noises from the thing of five wheels. Rowe realized he had failed to notice when precisely they’d faded away.
It was awkward getting Collins’s body in its heavy suit through the aperture. She fell several times before they managed it. Rowe found a handcart in one of the pallets. They took it out, unfolded it, and placed her body upon it.
With her suit like a glowing headlight, Waverly pushed the cart over to a panel near the closed mouth of the ramp. The spot was near the same flywheel they had used to raise it.
“This uses compressed air,” Waverly explained. “Apparently, the escape slide that comes down will be inflatable.”
“Thank fucking Goo you knew about this,” Rowe said.
Waverly pressed several buttons on the control panel. Though they did not illuminate, the right combination caused a portion of the panel to lift as if spring-loaded. This revealed a further button with a large, red X.
Waverly pressed it.
Immediately, there was a sound like a firing squad, many percussive caps going off in near-unison. A few feet away, a man-sized panel in the side of the wall abruptly and inelegantly fell to the ground with a tremendous thud. Beyond it was another flywheel, this one smaller and red. Waverly approached and turned it. When he had finished, an opening appeared in the side of the ship. Beyond that, an inflatable slide dangled precariously down to the surface of the planet.
Sensing the natural illumination from the lightning outside, Collins’s suit ceased to glow quite so brightly.
“Can you make it to the lander?” Waverly asked. “I could do you on the cart first, and then come back for her.”
“No,” said Rowe. “The more I’m walking, the more I’m feeling a little better. Get some food and water in me, and I’ll be right as rain.”
Waverly nodded, but his expression said he was not sure he believed that.
They carefully descended the inflatable slide with Collins’s body on the cart. The slide was surprisingly sturdy for something filled only with compressed air. At a glacially careful pace, they pulled the cart up the side of the valley, and then struck out across the flat landscape.
Even at a slow creep, the trek was not an overlong one. Soon they saw their lander in the distance, and the camp that had grown up around it—as well as the rocket vessel by which Collins had descended.
However, it was immediately apparent that there was no activity or movement. No people.
Nothing.
They moved nearer, and when they drew close enough to have realistically waved-down other Silkworms, they found nobody at whom to wave. The landing site possessed a total stillness.
The doors of the lander were open, and the men drew close enough to see that the other Silkworms were not inside.
As if by instinct, Rowe understood that they had been abandoned.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
NEITHER MAN SPOKE. THEY WERE EXHAUSTED AND TRAUMATIZED. BOTH wanted to believe the other saw something, or knew something, that would mean that this horrible thing—which was so clearly happening—was not actually taking place. That it was some fever-induced mirage or illusion. Neither wished to be the one to pronounce their horrible sentence aloud.
They walked closer to the lander.
Ten yards out from the door, Waverly stopped pushing the cart. He leaned against the handle, letting it support his weight. Rowe got down on the ground and took a knee like a football player. Both men surveyed the scene for a very long time.
“She can hang out here for a second,” Waverly said.
He left Collins in the cart and walked to the lander.
Rowe headed in a different direction, toward Collins’s vessel.
“I don’t think the other Silkworms took anything,” Rowe called as he walked, looking over the equipment that still littered the area. “If they headed off in a group, there would probably be surface tracks. And if something touched down, then we’d—”
“Something touched down,” Waverly announced.
Waverly was now pacing to a flat patch just a bit beyond the lander. Rowe loped over.
“I can see indentations, there, there, and there,” Waverly said. “Three-point booster rocket base, with a reusable core. Four central engines. Probably an ESA Mark-7.”
Rowe, finally, allowed himself to speak the horror into existence.
“While we were gone, the ESA came down and picked everyone up?” he said.
Rowe still needed to make it a question. Still needed the possibility of some other explanation or alternative, however small, that might yet come from his friend.
“Maybe our other crew members just couldn’t be useful anymore,” Rowe continued after Waverly did not immediately reply. “It was up to us to kill that thing, and they knew it. Right? Yeah. So the other Silkworms could have been evacuated for their own safety. You know . . . just to let us finish the job.”
“I think they’re dead,” said Waverly.
Rowe was not exactly thunderstruck by this suggestion. Some part of him was already thinking about that possibility.
“Dead?” he said. “You really think so?”
“Yeah, I do. All of them. Dead or . . .”
Waverly trailed off.
Rowe detected an apprehension in Waverly’s voice. Something that said this man—despite his physical toughness and general good nature—had now been pushed to near the limit of something at his very core.
Rowe wondered if he should speak further. Then he did anyway.
What else was there to do?
“Or what?” Rowe pressed his friend. “You were about to add something.”
“Or not back on the Apollinax or the Halifax, that’s for sure,” Waverly clarified, his eyes now directed up at the flashing heavens. “If they are somewhere—if they are at all—then they’ll be somewhere they can’t infect the Goo.”
“You could safely bring a person back to the ships if you stripped them naked,” Rowe pointed out. “Took off their enviro-suits and any other devices. Removed any implants they had in their bodies. That’d be better than killing them.”
Waverly moved next to Rowe and put an arm around his shoulder. Rowe realized that this was because Waverly himself needed the support.
“I sure hope they got stripped naked then,” Waverly said uneasily, “but I don’t see a big pile of enviro-suits anywhere.”
He slowly motioned with his other arm across the landing site.
“Do you?”
Rowe did not.
“There’s so much I don’t like about this,” Waverly continued, the agitation in his voice growing. “I don’t like the idea of being left with no explanation. I don’t like the idea that the ESA would just strand us here without a way to know what’s going on . . .”
Waverly started breathing hard.
“It’s a . . . It’s like a double abandonment,” he continued. “We don’t deserve that. After all we do? After all we’ve done? No! We deserve better.”
Now Waverly began to sound unhinged. Almost hysterical.
“This is not what the Goo is, and this is not what it does! This is something else! This is not the work of the Goo! It can’t be!”
Rowe did not know what to think, and certainly did not know what to say.
They walked back inside the lander and Rowe found some food and pain medicine. The other Silkworms, it seemed, had left in a hurry. The interior of the lander was not prepared in any orderly way. Nothing had been stowed or stored. There were cups of coffee still sitting out on tables; not hot coffee, but not that cold either.
Rowe waited for the pain drugs to kick in. He still felt like hell, and eased into a sleeping cot for what he told himself would only be a moment.
Waverly sat at a table and took thoughtful sips from one of the abandoned coffees.
“I still want milk for this,” Waverly said, a raw hysteria still emanating from him.
Then he began to laugh—to laugh in a way seemingly beyond his control. To laugh in a dangerous, truly mad way—a way in which Rowe had never heard another human laugh before.
“Everyone is dead or gone!” Waverly cried. “Everyone is dead or gone, and the ESA left us here to die . . . but I still want some milk! Ha! It’s fucking absurd . . . but I still want it. I still want the milk. What the fuck does that mean, man? I still want.”
Waverly got up and walked to a refrigeration unit and got himself some milk.
Rowe stayed silent, waiting for the pain pills to work.
Waverly returned to the table and took sips of his newly milky coffee.
The pair sat in silence for several long moments.
“There had to be a procedure for Collins and her team to get off the planet,” said Waverly, his voice still slightly manic.
“I’m sure there was,” Rowe replied.
“What about her ship?” Waverly cried. “Can we use that to get back up to the Apollinax? If there’s anything needed to pilot it, I’m sure it’s still on her person.”
“I honestly don’t know,” said Rowe, remaining supine. “We need to think very carefully about our next step.”
“What are you talking about?” said Waverly. “Think carefully? Now’s the time for action, not caution!”
“If I heard Collins right, we’re not at the point in space we thought we were. Tendus-13 is something worse than X-Class. Something the ESA doesn’t tell grunts like us about. The Goo understands that there is only danger here, but that may be about all it understands. And the ESA defends the Goo against danger.”
“Yeah,” said Waverly, his voice growing somewhat softer. “There are a lot of moving parts. I get that.”
“No,” said Rowe. “I’m not sure that you do. Even if we can use Collins’s ship—or hell, this lander—to take off, I’m not sure we don’t get blown up immediately once we get on the other side of the atmosphere. You’re the one who just said that everyone else was dead. Why would we be an exception?”
Waverly violently pushed a metal napkin dispenser off the table.
“This is fucked,” he said.
“It is, but you can understand their position,” said Rowe. “If there is something here that can infect Goo, and all Goo everywhere is connected . . . But I think you’re right about one thing. I think there must have been some protocol for Collins if she had successfully killed the creature and wanted to signal that it was safe. I don’t think this was a suicide mission for her. I think there was a scenario where she kills the thing, confirms that the Goo is not infected, and gets off the planet a hero. I’m just trying to think through the steps. What if everything had gone the way Collins wanted? Say we killed or captured that thing, and no Silkworms died. And say she proved that that thing was causing the anomalies in the Goo, so there was no longer any threat. Then what? We walk back out of that ship—maybe with that thing’s body on a cart, instead of Collins’s—and . . . and then what? That’s what I can’t figure out. There had to be a way for Collins to tell the ESA vessels that it was mission accomplished. Take the thing’s body up to study, and then get on with the wiring job down here, right? The Goo would be safe, and she’d be famous for solving an unsolvable problem.”
“We could search her suit for clues,” Waverly suggested. “It’s not connected to the Goo, so maybe she had something written down.”
“Yeah, maybe,” said Rowe.
For a while longer, they simply rested. Both men had the urge to curl up and sleep for half a day. They resisted, but only just.
Rowe returned to the cart and wheeled Collins’s body inside the lander.
“It’s weird to know someone is dead without confirmation from the Goo,” Rowe said as he and Waverly lifted the body, still in its suit, onto one of the long metal lunch tables.
“I’ve read that the eyeballs are the way to confirm it when you don’t have readings from the Goo,” said Waverly.
Waverly looked around for something sharp, eventually taking up a steak knife that had been left on a plate. He stood at Collins’s head and pulled up one of her eyelids with a gentle index finger.
“Don’t mind us, Commander,” he said, inserting the tip of the knife.
No part of Collins moved as the knife entered.
“Yeah,” said Waverly as he released the blade from his fingers and let it clatter against the table. “I think we’re good.”
They carefully removed the strange, black enviro-suit. Beneath it, Collins wore a black jumpsuit not dissimilar from their own, but not identical either. They set the body on an adjacent table and focused on the enviro-suit.
The boot was missing beneath the knee where Collins’s leg had been severed, but the suit remained otherwise intact. It soon became clear that while certain features found in traditional enviro-suits had been eliminated, others had been added. There were boxes and pockets, and buttons and switches fitted throughout. Though built with no means of connection to the Goo, the suit was not without basic electronics or power cells. They hummed at the back of the suit in a small built-in backpack.
Rowe and Waverly made a methodical inventory of the new suit controls. Some had clear functions related to self-defense, analysis, or preservation. Others were entirely mysterious.
“I think it is interesting,” Waverly said carefully, “to note that there seems to be nothing that is dependent on an assigned wearer’s being in the suit in order for it to function. By that I mean, one of us could put this suit on. It’d be a little wide in the hips and narrow at the waist, but I think I could shimmy in.”
“Yeah,” said Rowe. “I suppose I could swing it too.”
“And if her suit isn’t wired to the Goo . . . maybe her ship isn’t either,” Waverly added.
“Say again?” said Rowe.
“Just thinking . . . if the ESA knows that this place is poison—that it infects the Goo—maybe they planned for that when it came to extracting Collins and her team. Say it’s an old-school rocket—like from the golden age of space exploration—not connected to anything. It just goes up above the atmosphere. Then ESA ships spot it and . . . I dunno. Maybe there’s some way it gives an analog signal that all is well.”
“Yes,” said Rowe. “Or they scan it to try and make sure there’s no Goo aboard.”
“Collins was hoping to fly back up there with that thing,” Waverly said, talking himself through it. “Show it off like a trophy after it was dead. You don’t think they’d really want it alive, do you? She talked about capturing it, but . . . hell no.”
“I agree it’s probably too dangerous to keep alive,” said Rowe. “That part felt like BS to me also.”
“Maybe there’s some way we can take her ship, get up into the atmosphere, and make it clear to the Apollinax and the Halifax that we’re harmless,” said Waverly. “Wave at them through the porthole windows, maybe.”
Rowe said: “I feel like something would betray us. They’d know that Collins wasn’t with us, and that would scare them.”
“There’s got to be a way,” Waverly insisted. “Back a long time ago, hunters would parade home with their kill strapped to whatever they were riding on.”
“Are you suggesting we kill the thing and physically strap it to the nose cone?” Rowe asked.
“I dunno,” said Waverly. “Yes.”
At that moment, Rowe did not have a better idea.
They left Collins in their lander and walked over to her ship. They carefully climbed the long ramp leading up to its lone door. The craft sensed their presence and opened automatically as they neared.
Inside was a small, semicircular cockpit bay, with horizontal seating and security belts for approximately twenty people. A wall of screens and mechanisms hummed alive.
“Hullo!” Waverly called in a silly voice.
Rowe looked at him.
“Just checking,” he said with a shrug.
The ship was not inhabited. The flight deck was empty except for a few supply containers. Collins’s team had not brought much in the way of equipment. Rowe stood before the wall of screens and began to touch them. He had never seen a craft like this before.
“It looks like we could drive this thing,” he said to Waverly. “It doesn’t appear to care that I’m not Collins or one of her crew. It seems to me that there are really only two choices. One is we wait—like Martha Cortez did—and see if or when the ESA sends someone else back down. The other is we go hunting. Kill that thing. Strap it to the nose cone as you suggest, then launch this ship back up through the atmosphere and take our chances.”
Waverly opened his mouth to respond, but before he could speak there was the sound of a human shouting somewhere outside the ship.
Rowe and Waverly froze, looked at one another for a wide-eyed instant, then raced out as fast as their legs would carry them.
In a matter of moments, they stood back upon the surface of Tendus-13. They searched frantically, but saw no sign of life. The landing site was motionless. Nothing appeared changed.
The lightning flickered wildly above.
“Where did that voice—” Waverly began.
“Shh!” Rowe hissed. “I don’t know. Just listen!”
Then, a moment later, they heard it. Distant, but unmistakable.
“Ahoy, boy-o!”
The men looked at one another in disappointment.
“I guess Noyes is back?” Waverly said as a question.
