A female voice directs him down strobing passageways. “Right, left, straight ahead!” The voice has energy. Psychedelic lights flash and run in all directions. Shudders and thumps in the walls, like the mainframe is falling apart. “Turn right! Faster, faster!” It isn’t until he is resting at another intersection that he realizes the voice is Belinda’s. She sounds different. She tells him to wait, listen, and backtrack slowly. He lost sight of the creature as soon as the lights came on, but he heard it close behind. Somehow, it lost him.
She guides him to the main room with the tinfoil walls.
“Bel? What the hell happened back there?”
“I’m not sure. I woke up, and that thing was right on top of you. I sent localized power surges to the area to disorient it. I guess it worked.” She sounds just like a person. Before he deactivated her AI all those years ago, she must have been like this. He doesn’t remember, but he can’t help feeling guilty, and grateful that she’s back.
He pokes his head into the hallway. No creature.
She says, “I didn’t have time to tell you, but you missed another call.”
“Justin?”
“Lana.”
“Patch me through.”
She picks up after half a ring. “Jack! Are you alright!”
Unbelievable to hear her alive and well. He struggles to keep his own voice steady. “I’m fine, just—I’m on the second level. Where are you? Who’s with you? Is everyone safe?”
“We’re in the pod. Justin’s missing.”
“What about Dandy?”
“He’s here. With two of his guys. He tried to kill us, Jack. We got their weapons.”
“Good.”
“Can you get here?”
“I’m on my way. Stand by the controls. You’ll need to open the door from inside.”
“Okay.”
“You open them exactly when I say. We’re in a bit of trouble here.”
“I think I got that.”
Belinda cuts in. “Jack, you should leave this area immediately.”
Before he goes out, he closes the panel, but there’s no lock.
“Lana?”
“Yes.”
“I’m gonna hang up. I need to meet up with Justin. We’ll meet you at the pod.”
“Okay. We’ve got you on surveillance. Be safe.”
He floats into the main hall, checking both directions. To his right, a dead end. To the left, a door that leads to the shaft landing. All white and still, deceptively safe.
He tries calling Justin back, but there’s no response. Great.
“Bel, is the creature still in the mainframe?”
“One of them, yes.”
“There’s more than one?”
“I have surveillance on three, but there may be others where I don’t have access.”
“Where are they?”
“One is in the mainframe behind you. Another is in the first level hallway. Another is in the dining room on the third level.”
“What are they doing?”
“I can’t tell. They appear to be looking for something.”
Hunting would probably be more accurate.
“Did the gravity in shaft three reset?”
“Yes.”
“Amp it up again. 20 Gs. Do you have eyes on Justin?”
“I’m not sure.”
“What do you mean?”
“The room to his quarters is open, and I see a partial human form inside, but I can’t be certain that it’s Justin.”
They should have installed cameras in crew quarters. And in the lavatories. Anywhere the creature or creatures could be hiding. To hell with privacy.
“Okay. I’m going to get him. I need you to be my eyes and ears.”
“Okay. I’ll do my best.”
He pulls himself along the handles and through the first set of landing doors and wonders what the hell he is doing. Justin is probably dead. Why else would he fail to answer his portable? Why else would his door be open? Jack is no savior. He should just get to the pod where Lana and the others are safely awaiting his arrival. Every man for himself. That’s how it always was. You hoard for your own stash, not for your so-called friends. They’ll toss you away when you’re useless. Sick or unable to work, all you do is take up space. Sure, the doctors worry over you, sneak you extra rations, but then the guards come and they tell you food is already low and something must be done, and what happens then?
For God’s sake, Jack. You aren’t in the camp.
His breath is very loud in his head.
Something else is bothering him. “Hey Bel.”
“Yes, Jack?”
“You said you would do your best. When I told you to be my eyes and ears. Why’d you say that?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know much about the biology of these creatures. They don’t conform to any known lifeform. I’m still analyzing their behavior, but I may be ineffectual at understanding when they’ve spotted you.”
Careful to avoid the gravity shaft, he goes through the next set of doors, bracing for a wall of tentacles that isn’t there. “How about this?” he says. “If one of those things starts moving very fucking fast in my direction, you let me know. Does that make sense to you?”
“Of course. I’m sorry if I’ve upset you.”
“Let’s just get through this.”
“Alright. Currently, there are no creatures moving very fucking fast in your direction.”
“I didn’t know you had a sarcasm setting.”
“I’m being quite sincere.”
“You tell me if Justin wakes up. And keep trying his portable.”
“Yes, Jack. And Jack?”
“Yeah.”
“Good luck.”
“Thanks,” he says. “We’re gonna need it.”
Chapter 23
The Dandy and his men huddle against the inside wall, Dino across from them with a rifle in his arms and a don’t-even-try-it look. Stetson pulls up surveillance. On the washed-out holo-display, Jack propels himself along the main corridor of the second level in Zero-G. He pauses often to cock his head and listen. Stetson asks Bel to put the creature onscreen. In the mainframe, it blocks the lens. Every now and then the darkness twitches and light filters between what looks like a number of eels. On the first floor, a small grayish wad or ball has tucked itself into a high corner near the forward grav-shaft where the soldier pulled his grenade. Strands of this creature dangle like the fronds of a nightmarish willow. The third one in the kitchen is much larger. Maybe seven feet tall standing upright. It’s hard to get a sense of its shape. Far as Lana can tell, it has no central body. The tentacles or arms or whatever they are compress to form limbs, but as it moves they wind and unwind, in constant flux, with no distinct length or diameter. They slide over every surface. Floor, walls, stove, lights. It opens the cupboard, snaps the handles off the doors. Tosses pots and pans. Violence in these movements. Anything useless gets cast away.
“We should shoot them,” Stetson says. “The turrets are functional.”
Hunter clucks her tongue. “Not with Jack out there.”
“All the more reason.”
“We might just agitate them. They don’t see him. For now, that’s good enough.”
Stetson grunts his disapproval.
Lana just wishes they could do something.
Stetson switches to a feed outside Justin’s room. Through the doorway, the monitor shows a shoe at the end of a filled-out pair of jeans, lying twisted and still.
Jack comes up the middle shaft to the third level and steps back into gravity. His portable, which had drifted up near his head, falls against his chest. Justin’s room is the last one on the right, the nearest to the panic pod. Jack heel-toes it, wishing he wore sneakers instead of clunky boots. No news from Bel so far.