Edge of the Wire, page 6
Rowe kept the helmet portion of his suit retracted. He began to walk aimlessly. After a few moments he moved out of range of the lander’s low and constant hum. For the first time, he was able to listen to the sound of Tendus-13 without the background noise of other humans or machines.
The lightning bolts made Rowe think of whips in the sky, as if some giant rider drove a team of horses through the heavens in a never-ending race. Sometimes there was the sound of specific, sharp bolts rippling through the atmosphere in individual crackles. In most cases however, the lightning and thunder rumbled in clusters of sound, and it was more akin to rolling waves. There was also omnipresent wind noise, like a desert at dusk.
This was not even the natural state of Tendus-13, Rowe reminded himself. The TerraChem had set changes into motion that would, theoretically, one day bring Tendus-13 around to looking and feeling a little like Earth. The lightning storms would be among the last things to go, but even they were slightly diminished now from their pre-contact intensity. As unpleasant as it was, Rowe reminded himself that this was “Tendus Light.”
And without TerraChem? Tendus-13 would still be the kind of killing place where an unarmored human was frozen, burned, or poisoned to death in about thirty seconds.
Killing places were most places, at least in the galactic sense.
Rowe glanced doubtfully at the horizon, then back at the lone Silkworm drinking coffee. He still had the creeping feeling that he was not safe, and that there was a very specific danger he had yet to detect. Something told him not to relax. That to relax would be fatal.
He wondered if these thoughts were connected to the fact that he was dying. Perhaps, when you’re told something inside your brain is about to explode and kill you, you’ll feel a creeping sense of dread wherever you go. That made a kind of intuitive sense, yet also felt inadequate, and surely too easy. It felt like something you believed because you wanted to believe it.
The wind picked up. It could blow very powerfully when it wanted to.
Rowe took another deep breath of the strange, peanutty air and quietly made his way back to the lander.
When the Silkworms awoke several hours later, the low atmosphere scan had completed.
“No, it doesn’t look like there’s much out there,” Rowe said, reviewing the results over his morning coffee. He grasped the glowing projection of topography schematics and spun it around to reveal different angles.
“When you say ‘much’ . . . In my experience, ‘much’ is always a term that varies from planet to planet,” Waverly pointed out. “Some of these space rocks are so damned flat and boring, I get excited if I see a divot.”
Waverly sat back and sipped his own coffee as Rowe continued to rotate the image and zoom in and out.
“Shallow hills and valleys immediately around us,” Rowe said, keeping an eagle eye on the projection. “Clusters of big boulders in a few places. More of those in the distance. Some larger hills and outcroppings too, but also farther off. Big craters and crevasses. Still, I don’t see any obvious places survivors would go, even if they had food. Not any good places, I mean.”
Rowe “handed” the virtual projection to Waverly who zoomed-in to an almost granular level near the site of the Marie Curie. He was silent for several moments as Rowe ate reconstituted scrambled eggs.
“What are these?” Waverly asked, indicating the faintest traces of a pattern in the surface near the dead ship.
Rowe looked closely.
“I suppose that could be a track or a trail,” Rowe said. “They don’t look like individual footprints, but at the same time . . . what else are they? That’s not us, is it? We didn’t make those yesterday?”
“No,” Waverly said. “They’re headed in the wrong direction.”
Rowe looked again.
“An old riverbed, maybe? It’s so faint though; it’s barely there.”
“I didn’t see anything when we were out there,” Waverly said. “Or if I did, I didn’t notice it. I mean, I think I looked in that direction . . .”
“Let’s go check it out,” Rowe said. “Maybe we’ll discover something we missed.”
Waverly’s expression said that anything was possible.
They finished their breakfast of coffee and grim, microwaved ESA food and walked back to the Marie Curie alongside the other members of their team. The squad pushed a massive hydraulic drill on great inflated rubber wheels. When again they stood before the naked, empty ramp leading up into the ship, Rowe pulled up the low atmosphere scan, comparing it to the floor of the valley.
“I mean . . . maybe I see something,” he said.
“Yeah,” Waverly agreed. “Maybe.”
“Noyes, can you provide any insight?” Rowe asked.
The miniature clergyman appeared at his shoulder. He put a hand to his virtual chin and considered.
“It’s mighty faint, innit? The green, glassy cracks cover the surface like a netting. They make it hard to see individual footprints in the dust. Still, the scan sees something. Could be natural. It’s possible the wind blew the sand into a small trail.”
Putting first things first, Rowe led the drill detachment back aboard the ship. After pulling up a few different blueprints, they selected not the weakest-looking point to drill, but the one leading most immediately to passages that connected with the central decks. The work would be slow, so Rowe and Waverly let the squad go about their business and returned to the planet’s surface. Behind them, the drill fired up and they heard the unmistakable sound of the drill bit cutting into metal. It was a low, guttural scream, like someone singing from the throat.
“That’s going to take at least until lunch,” Waverly opined. “We can make it a casual stroll.”
“I’m game if you are,” Rowe replied.
The men started off across the rocky gray-green landscape, trying to follow the faint path or trail that the scanner had found. Rowe pulled up a digital copy of the scan and mapped it in front of him, 1:1. He tried to follow the ghostly trail with his naked eye, but relied on virtual way-points for most of it. There were boulders and rocks along the horizon, but the men saw little else.
“If you left the Marie Curie, where would you go?” Waverly asked idly. “Like, imagine you descend the ramp. You look out across the horizon and see . . . this. What calls to you?”
“I think a better question is why,” said Rowe. “Why are you heading out into this empty wasteland?”
“Maybe you just decapitated three guys and you had to think things over,” Waverly suggested. “Nothing like a nice long walk to clear your heads. Head.”
“I guess,” Rowe said.
He looked down at the suggestion of a trail or footpath beneath them. He tried hard to guess if it could have been made by human feet.
“Do you think we’ll find more severed heads when we get deeper inside the ship?” Rowe asked.
“Honestly, yes,” said Waverly. “And probably worse things. You saw that image Collins showed us. Whoever or whatever launched that picture back up probably did so for a reason. I think that reason was a warning. We’re lucky if it’s just severed heads.”
“Are those going to be my last living sensations, Noyes?” Rowe asked in a tone that said he meant to lighten the mood. “Looking at a bunch of awful heads inside the Marie Curie?”
He spoke to Noyes as one might speak to a dog or cat.
“There could be worse things, boy-o,” the projection answered thoughtfully. “Lot’s wife died looking at Sodom and Gomorrah.”
“Yeah, but at least she got to see people fucking,” Waverly interjected. “I mean it was Sodom and Gomorrah, right? They were doing all kinds of things. Butt-stuff, I bet.”
“He’s got you there, Noyes,” Rowe added.
Noyes’s expression said he would not dignify this with a response.
They arrived at the lip of a new valley—very long across but much shallower than the one containing the Marie Curie. The gray-green floor of Tendus-13 seemed to stretch out only in more variations of the same bleak nothingness. Beyond the valley were three tall, rocky outcroppings. The first two were roughly equal in height, with the third half as high. In the distance, past them, it seemed there were other buttes—even higher—that stood alone.
Rowe looked again at the projection of the low atmosphere scan.
“If this is a footpath, it goes over near those cliffs or buttes or . . . whatever you call them,” said Rowe.
Suddenly, Rowe’s enviro-suit dinged to indicate an incoming transmission.
“Go ahead for Rowe.”
“Yeah,” an uneasy voice came back. “We’re in.”
“Into the Marie Curie?” Rowe replied. “Already?”
“Yes,” the Silkworm replied. “The wall was weaker than we thought.”
“How’s it look?” Rowe asked.
An awkward pause.
“I think you ought to see firsthand,” the Silkworm said ambiguously. “It’s . . . uh . . . something.”
“Dead bodies?” Rowe asked.
A beat passed.
“Yeah,” said the Silkworm. “Affirmative on that.”
“Okay,” Rowe said. “We’re on our way.”
They took one last look at the rocky landscape beyond the valley, then returned the way they’d come.
“You stopped with it like this?”
Rowe stood with his hands on his enviro-suit’s hips, inspecting the hole that had been bored into the wall.
“We got it big enough for a person to fit through,” one of the Silkworms said defensively. “Big enough to look through too. We thought you’d want to see before we did anything more.”
Rowe took a deep breath and stuck his head into the crude opening that his colleagues had cut into the metal wall of the bay. He had the momentary urge to redeploy his translucent helmet, but it passed. He should show bravery in front of his squad, he decided.
Rowe focused his enviro-suit’s collar lights forward into the aperture. The hallway beyond showed three corpses. One was evidently headless. The remaining two had been subjected to so much blunt-force violence that the prospect of decapitation was not immediately possible to determine. They were almost like piles of paste. The metal walls resembled a sluice inside a slaughterhouse—covered with gore and with small flecks of hanging meat. One of the bodies wore an enviro-suit that had been bashed apart—utterly stomped and stamped down into the flesh. The other corpses were covered only in shreds of torn fabric that might once have been clothing.
Abruptly, a low creak—just like the one they’d heard the day before—sinisterly emanated from what seemed to be the deepest bowels of the ship. It came up the floor, and through the Silkworms’ feet, until they could feel its reverberations in their kneecaps.
Rowe flinched a little, and reflexively his enviro-suit helmet deployed from his collar. He dinged it against the roof of the opening and swore. Rowe pulled his head back out, shook his head to calm himself, then retracted the clear helmet again.
“That was like a belch,” Waverly said, clearly amused. “This ship ate something that doesn’t agree with her.”
“Yeah,” said Rowe, glancing back at the hole. “I kind of think it did.”
Rowe stepped back so that Waverly could have a look.
Out of a kind of respect, Waverly deployed his own protective helmet as he lowered his head inside the opening.
“Well that’s fucking horrible,” he said matter-of-factly. “I know it’s what we expected, but . . . it’s something else when you see it firsthand. Did these guys kill each other, d’you think?”
Waverly removed his head from the hole.
“I don’t think so,” Rowe replied. “This looks like their suits were bashed apart after the fact by something huge and heavy . . . and maybe flat-sided. A mallet a giant carries in a children’s book. Something like that.”
“It’s the bodies from the three heads, though?” Waverly pressed.
Rowe did assume these bodies must belong to the heads that had been placed at the entrance to the ship.
“Noyes?” he said.
“Already working on it; gimmie a sec . . .” the hologram replied, fading in just long enough to give this reply, then fading out again.
As they waited, Waverly turned to the nervous-looking squad of Silkworms behind them.
“Drill the rest of it open,” Waverly commanded. “We have to go in.”
“Actually, wait a second fellas,” Rowe said, putting a hand on his friend’s chest. “This barrier may have been put in place to keep us out. But it may also be in place to keep something in. I don’t want to make it easy for anything to escape. Besides, I think we can pass through this hole just fine. You can, if you suck in your gut big man. So no need to make it larger just yet.”
As if to prove his point, Rowe all but dove through the opening into the sluice of gore. His enviro-suit scraped the sides, but only for a moment.
“Waverly, on my six,” he called back through the hole. “You other men, stay here and keep watch.”
“You want we should start drilling openings in some other spots?” a Silkworm called from outside.
“Absolutely not,” Rowe replied. “We want one way in, and one way out. And if anyone—or anything—comes back through this opening that isn’t us, catch it if you can, but otherwise kill it. Got me?”
The Silkworms indicated that they understood.
Waverly made his own awkward leap/shimmy through the hole and joined Rowe inside the metal corridor. They inspected the remains of the destroyed bodies.
“This enviro-suit,” Waverly said, kneeling beside a mass of metal and smashed corpse parts. “I didn’t know they could be broken in this way.”
For a moment, he said nothing more.
Rowe also took a knee.
“Look at the outlets on this suit,” Waverly continued. “And the slots for the memory cards. Am I crazy or . . . ?”
“No, you’re not,” said Rowe. “They’ve been targeted. Whoever smashed up this Silkworm went back and made sure there would be no way someone could jack into the suit posthumously. Whatever video the suit recorded, they wanted to make sure other people never saw it.”
“Do these bodies look like men or women to you?” Waverly asked, rising to his feet.
Noyes sprung to life.
“I can see secondary male sex characteristics in all three bodies,” the hologram chimed. “But . . . just fucking barely.”
Waverly raised a hairy eyebrow.
“You curse now, Noyes?” he asked.
“I do when I see things like this,” the hologram replied, still sounding a bit stunned.
Rowe said: “Now that we’re standing closer, can you tell if these are the bodies that went with the heads?”
“No,” Noyes replied. “I’m still working on that. But what I can see confirms they are excellent candidates. I can’t rule them out; let me put it that way.”
Rowe and Waverly attempted to scrutinize the remains to a further degree, but found little else useful.
He said nothing aloud, but the sight of this carnage shook Rowe deeply. Silkworms were accustomed to encountering all manner of peril from alien environments, but seeing the results of apparently intentional murder of humans by other humans was an exceedingly rare thing. Silkworms were occasionally lost in accidents, or through unexpected poisonings or from radiation. But murder? And the mutilation of corpses? No. These sorts of things were not on the typical bill of fare. The horrible but undeniable intentionality behind it made Rowe feel weak inside. What were they dealing with? Who or what would do such horrible things? And to human beings, no less?
And the Goo had no answers. Rowe knew as much as it did.
Rowe had dedicated himself to a life lived on the leading edge—or perhaps bleeding edge—of the universe. The humans who dwelled on planets already settled, colonized, and wired with Goo faced some dangers in their lives, true, but nothing compared to what Silkworms did. Most humans lived full, happy lives, filled with information and ease, and largely emptied of danger. He had intentionally forsaken this. And he knew it. Rowe had always known this. He had certainly known this when he’d signed up.
But the sight of these pulped bodies . . . It seemed another thing entirely. Something more than he had ever signed on for. More than any of them had.
Rowe and Waverly ventured deeper into the ship.
Rowe pulled up a schematic of the Marie Curie and made his suit project it in a glowing green outline along the wall. Though only half the size of the Apollinax and Halifax, the spacecraft was still utterly immense. Rowe zoomed again and again to isolate their location, but still felt paralyzed by the sheer number of options ahead of them. Dead, dark, and powerless, the thing was like a labyrinth that theoretically had limits, but in practice felt as though it surely went on forever. If the Apollinax was a floating city, the Marie Curie was still a good-sized town. (The living and working spaces for the Silkworms were only a small portion of the ship’s bulk, of course. But a man could still walk for days aboard the great vessel and not traverse the same passage twice.)
Rowe and Waverly rounded the first bend in the passageway. The metal corridor surrounding them smelled like rubber and machine oil and dried blood. The small opening to the loading bay passed out of sight behind them. Now there was only bare, dark corridor.
This answered Rowe’s first question. The three smashed bodies seemed to be a finite, isolated incident. There were no other corpses to be seen along the farther hallways.
As they made their way forward, Rowe had the uncanny sensation that the corridors were trying to close themselves off, to separate themselves from the rest of the world. That they wished to be forgotten. Rowe stopped and looked again at the glowing green schematic.
“Okay, we’re about here,” he said, pointing. “There’s an elevator bay up ahead—which won’t be working—but staircases near it lead to the galley, engineering, and fuel storage. Any of those sound good to you?”
Waverly considered.
“If something on the ship made people start killing each other, I imagine things played out in the medical bay . . . or else the armory,” said Waverly. “You’d have wounded from the fighting either way. And if—like Commander Collins said—it was a battle of the sexes, you’d have a race to get your hands on the best weaponry. That still seems so insane to me. Men and women attacking one another. It . . . I didn’t want to say this before, but I just get the feeling that it can’t have been that. It seems too far-fetched.”
