Chapter 19
It is surreal. This young man with his buzzcut hairdo hiking up his sleeve and looking out at the Dandy. The Dandy nodding.
Don’t. This is the word stuck on Lana’s tongue, a sane word. They should all say it together. Let it resound across the solar system, all mouths accepting its common sense. A nice thought, but impossible. Because here is the Dandy grinning like a demented circus clown, and here is Jack sweating and bracing for a sprint and mouthing something in her direction—panic, it seems to be—and here is Lana Weir with her own mouth half-open and her shoulders slumped forward, silent witness to a collective psychosis. This is how all wars are waged and repeated. Idiots locked into their forward momentum. Don’t. The word does not exist to them.
“Do it,” Dandy says.
The young man has to bend slightly at the knees. He bites his lip and pushes his arm inside. Hand, wrist, elbow, bicep. His cheek presses against the sphere.
What does he feel? Is it cold or warm, rough or pearl-smooth?
This is Jack’s doing as much as it is the Dandy’s. His quick thinking brought them this. Activation of an alien device, which is what they were meant for all along. If nothing else, maybe Dandy will die alongside them. When there are no sensible choices, chaos reigns.
The young man grimaces.
Everyone backs away. Lana positions herself in line with the far door, though it is blocked by Dandy. The rest of his men spread out, making to circle the sphere, raising their rifles.
“Mmf,” the young man says.
The object’s glow grows more intense. The blue gems light up vertically in sequence, a column that swings clockwise around the sphere. She notes how this flashing makes the blue jewels appear drawn toward the red stone, which pulses rapidly.
“There’s something…” the young man says. “Got it!”
The light goes out. The sphere becomes a cloudy ball.
Nothing happens. Palpable disappointment settles over the hold. Even Lana feels it, however absurd. She didn’t know what to expect. Just something.
The young man pulls his arm free. He stands upright, unharmed. He turns to the group and shrugs. “I guess—”
Behind him, the sphere explodes.
Chapter 20
Jack ducks. Shards of debris smash to the floor around him, thick and heavy. When he looks up, a great deal of dust lingers where the top of the sphere used to be. The bottom portion forms a jagged bowl. The boy is still there, but he’s acting strange. He leans forward and slaps at his neck. He jerks upright and pulls his hair. He opens his mouth to scream but no sound comes out. Something has wrapped around his throat. A long tendril extending from the remains of the sphere. It resembles a thin electrical cord. The flesh of his neck ripples. He hops from foot to foot. The rippling passes through his face, his arms, and somehow through the fabric of his uniform.
Jack should be running now. He has been edging toward the nearest Zero-G shaft, but freezes in place. Any time now his feet will carry him away from this terrible sight.
The boy splits open with a tearing sound. For a moment, he remains standing, a skeleton in shredded clothes. Glistening muscle over pink knobs of bone. Fibers or cords wind around his limbs, stitch through his ribcage, wrap his jaw. They ascend from the gore, reach for a sky that isn’t there. The bones rise and separate all at once, disjointing and folding wrong. Impossibly, they dissolve. Like sugar in hot water. Like a magic trick, the boy is gone, replaced by a waggling knot of pale fibers that retract into the base of the sphere where a central mass rises.
Jack’s feet come unglued.
He spins and sprints. Everything is movement and color. The Zero-G shaft is only 15 feet away. One of Dandy’s men has gotten in front of it. He raises his rifle. Jack throws up his hands. A faint light slices the air and he smells burning dust. The laser zips over his head, targeting the thing behind him. The thing he can hear bounding closer on heavy legs.
No time to look.
Jack passes Dandy’s man and glances to where the others should be.
They are gone.
No, not gone.
There by the door. They crowd through the exit, bottlenecked. No one looks in his direction. He does not blame them. Instinct takes over. You forget the world, your buddies, your orders. You run your fucking ass off.
He ducks through the grated archway of the Zero-G shaft. Gravity goes. He catches the central ladder with his left hand. Momentum swings him around to the other side and he faces the way he came in time to see a bear composed of wrinkled brain matter smashing into Dandy’s man. Except it is not a bear and it is not made of brain. It is a mass of tentacles compressed into the shape of a beast without features. No fur, no head, no tail, no paws or claws that Jack can see, just stumpy bundles of rope. An imitation of what an animal should look like. And when it connects with the man wielding his useless rifle, the tentacles come apart and wrap him and drag him across the floor beside it. He screams and fights but the cords lash out. They enter him. His skin shakes, and then his skin is gone, and then he is filled with snakes, and the snakes reattach to the animal form and the man is gone, the animal nearly twice its original size. But just as fast.
It charges for Jack.
He kicks off and up, rocketing toward the ceiling as the creature smashes into the base of the ladder. The metal vibrates like a tuning fork. When he looks down the animal seems to have exploded. Disembodied sinew swirls around the ladder like webbing. The strands flash to the sides of the enclosure and all it once it spirals up at him, a churning cluster. It is too fast. He kicks another rung to increase speed. He enters the ceiling. Dim lights set in the walls, a cramped tunnel. Sound is amplified in here. He hears wet squishing like a vat of meat. It enters the tunnel after him, swallows the light, filters it orange-red-brown, inches behind.
The tunnel ends five or six feet ahead. White hallway of the second floor.
Jack doesn’t think. He screams: “Belinda increase shaft three gravity twenty Gs now!”
Nothing happens.
He floats out of the tunnel and up into the corridor. The shaft continues overhead, forming another tunnel that extends to the third level, but there is no time to continue up. He kicks against the ladder, floating sideways into the second floor hallway as tendrils spill from below, winding the ladder, gripping the floor, shooting toward him and—
“Bel!”
The shaft’s gravity kicks on.
The force slams the creature down the hole. The ladder twists and rends under this new weight, snaps with a series of cracks and bangs and whines. There’s an incredible clatter as the base of the enclosure falls away, yanked apart by that thing’s strength and 20 Gs of force.
He floats in midair. He pats himself down to check that he’s intact.
What just happened?
He wipes beads of sticky sweat from his eyes.
The crew is probably to the pod by now.
He calls Lana. She doesn’t answer.
“Bel,” he says, “where are the others?”
“I cannot be certain, Jack.”
“What do you mean you can’t be certain!”
“Communication between my systems is incomplete.”
“Where’s the creature now? Is it still in the cargo hold?”
“Communication between my systems is incomplete.”
“The hell does that mean!”