She looked thoughtful as she sipped at her drink. ‘What about you? How did you happen to get this great assignment?’
He held his cup between his fingers, twirling it back and forth, side to side. ‘I know you’ll find this hard to believe, but it’s actually much nicer than my previous posting. I like being left alone. I like being ignored. This is a good place for that.
Unless somebody needs attention or gets hurt, which happens a lot less than you might think, my time here is pretty much my own. I can sit and read, watch a viewer, explore the complex, or go into a holding room and scream my head off.’ He smiled winningly. ‘It’s a helluva lot better than having some sadistic guard or whiny prisoner always on your case.’ He gestured at her bald pate.
‘How do you like your haircut?’
She ran her fingers delicately across her naked skull. ‘Feels weird. Like the hair’s still there but when you reach for it, there’s nothing.’
He nodded. ‘Like someone who’s lost a leg and thinks he can still feel his foot. The body’s a funny thing, and the mind’s a heck of a lot funnier.’ He drained his glass, looked into her eyes.
‘Now that I’ve gone out on a limb for you with Andrews over the cremation, damaging my already less than perfect relationship with the good man, and briefed you on the humdrum history of Fury 161, how about you telling me what you were looking for in that dead girl? And why was it necessary to cremate the bodies?’ She started to reply and he raised his hand, palm toward her.
‘Please, no more about nasty germs. Andrews was right. Cold storage would have been enough to render them harmless. But that wasn’t good enough for you. I want to know why.’
She nodded, set her cup aside, and turned back to him. ‘First I have to know something else.’
He shrugged. ‘Name it.’
‘Are you attracted to me?’
His gaze narrowed. As he was wondering how to respond, he heard his own voice answering, as though his lips and tongue had abruptly chosen to operate independent of his brain.
Which was not, he reflected in mild astonishment, necessarily a bad thing.
‘In what way?’
‘In that way.’
The universe, it appeared, was still full of wonders, even if Fiorina’s perpetual cloud cover tended to obscure them. ‘You are rather direct. Speaking to someone afflicted with a penchant for solitude, as I have already mentioned, I find that more than a little disconcerting.’
‘Sorry. It’s the only way I know how to be. I’ve been out here a long time.’
‘Yes,’ he murmured. ‘So have I.’
‘I don’t have time for subterfuges. I don’t have time for much of anything except what’s really important. I’ve had to learn that.’
He refilled both cups, picked up his own, and swirled the contents, studying the uninformative eddies which appeared in the liquid.
The fan blades were each twice the size of a man. They had to be, to suck air from the surface and draw it down into the condensers which scrubbed, cleaned, and purified Fiorina’s dusty atmosphere before pumping the result into shafts and structures. Even so, they were imperfect. Fiorina’s atmosphere was simply too dirty.
There were ten fans, one to a shaft. Eight were silent. The remaining pair roared at half speed, supplying air to the installation’s western quadrant.
Murphy sang through the respiratory mask that covered his nose and mouth, filtering out surface particles before they were drawn off by the fan. Carbon deposits tended to accumulate on the ductway walls. He burned them off with his laser, watched as the fan sucked them away from his feet and into the filters. It wasn’t the best job to have, nor the worst. He took his time and did the best he could. Not because he gave a damn or anticipated the imminent arrival of Company inspectors, but because when he finished with the ducts they’d give him something else to do. Might as well go about the cleaning as thoroughly as possible so it would kill as much time as possible.
He was off tune but enthusiastic.
Abruptly he stopped singing. A large deposit had accumulated in the recess off to his left. Damn storage areas were like that, always catching large debris that the surface filters missed. He knelt and extended the handle of the push broom, winkling the object out. It moved freely, not at all like a clump of mucky carbon.
It was flat and flexible. At first he thought it was an old uniform, but when he had it out in the main duct he saw that it was some kind of animal skin. It was dark and shiny, more like metal foil than flesh. Funny stuff.
Stretching it out on the floor he saw that it was big enough to enclose two men, or a young calf. What the hell. .?
Then he knew. There were a few large native animals on Fiorina; poor, dirt-hugging primitive things with feeble nervous systems and slow response times. Obviously one had somehow stumbled into an air intake and, unable to get out again, had perished for lack of food and water. It couldn’t use the ladders, and the roaring fan constituted an impenetrable barrier. He poked at the empty skin. This desiccated husk was all that remained of the unfortunate visitor. No telling how long it had lain in the recess, ignored and unnoticed.
The skin looked awfully fresh to have contained an old, long since dried out corpse. The bugs, he reminded himself. The bugs would make short work of any flesh that came their way.
It was interesting. He hadn’t known that the bugs would eat bone.
Or maybe there’d been no bones to dispose of. Maybe it had been a. . what was the word? An invertebrate, yeah.
Something without bones. Wasn’t Fiorina home to those too?
He’d have to look it up, or better yet, ask Clemens. The medic would know. He’d bundle the skin up and take it to the infirmary. Maybe he’d made a discovery of some kind, found the skin of a new type of animal. It would look good on his record.
Meanwhile he wasn’t getting any work done.
Turning, he burned off a couple of deposits clinging to the lower right-hand curve of the duct. That’s when he heard the noise. Frowning, he shut off the laser and flicked on the safety as he turned to look behind him. He’d about decided that his imagination was starting to get to him when he heard it again -
a kind of wet, lapping sound.
There was a slightly larger recess a few metres down the duct, a sometime storage area for supplies and tools. It should be empty now, cleaned out, the supplies stocked elsewhere and the tools salvaged by the departing maintenance personnel.
But the gurgling noise grew louder the nearer he crept.
He had to bend to see inside. Wishing he had a light, he squinted in the reflected glow from the duct. There was something moving, an indistinct bulk in the darkness. The creature that had shed its skin? If so and he could bring it out alive he was sure to receive an official Company commendation.
Maybe his unanticipated contribution to the moribund state of Fiorinan science would be worth a couple of months off his sentence.
His eyes grew accustomed to the weak illumination. He could see it more clearly now, make out a head on a neck. It sensed his presence and turned toward him.
He froze, unable to move. His eyes widened.
Liquid emerged suddenly in a tight, concentrated stream from the unformed monster’s mouth, striking the paralyzed prisoner square in the face. Gas hissed as flesh melted on contact with the highly caustic fluid. Murphy stumbled backward, screaming and clawing at his disintegrating face.
Smoke pouring through his clutching fingers, he staggered away from the recess, bouncing off first one wall then the other.
He had no thought of where he was going, or where he was. He thought of nothing save the pain. He did not think of the fan.
When he stumbled into the huge blades they shredded him instantly, sending blood and ragged chunks of flesh splattering against the metalwork of the duct. It would have taken some time for his erstwhile friends to have found him if his skull hadn’t been caught just right between one blade and the casing.