This part does not sit well with the crew. He asks them to submit alternatives, but they have none.
So that’s it. The situation as it stands. No guarantees. No failsafes.
It’s suicide and everyone knows it. Anyone stepping out these doors will be swallowed up in seconds, and where will that leave the survivors? In the same position, down two members. At least they won’t have Jack to take orders from anymore. If by some miracle the sun’s radiation wouldn’t kill them, they could wait up to a year, rationing their food, hoping someone just happens to venture close enough to hear their signal. And they would die. One way or another.
Something nags at Jack. He keeps seeing Bel’s mainframe in his mind. Those silver panels and humming corridors. The hydra wiggling like a giant slug. The memory makes his skin crawl. How close he came to being a meal. What saved him? If the hydra has extrasensory sight or whatever, how the hell did he make it out of there? Maybe it stopped chasing for the same reason it stopped banging on the panic pod door. It’s not going to starve anytime soon, like Lana said, so it’s simpler to wait things out. That doesn’t seem right, though. Why chase him at all if it wasn’t that interested? It wanted him and it could have had him. Should have. He knew it the moment it slid around the corner and sent those feelers up.
Feelers.
Feeling for what? Vibrations in the air? Like an eardrum.
But sound alone?
It sees through walls.
No. Not really.
He clicks his portable. “Belinda, can you hear me?”
“I can.”
“When the hydra was chasing me in the mainframe, you said something about a power surge. Tell me again.”
The others listen, wondering where he’s going with this.
He faces the wall so their stares won’t distract.
“When I came back online, I sent electrical pulses through my mainframe in an attempt to disorient the creature. It appeared to work.”
“Why would electrical pulses disorient it?”
“There are a number of possibilities,” Belinda says. “The strobing of lights would have confused its visual field, and the loud noise would do the same for its hearing.”
Jack says, “It doesn’t have eyes, Bel. Why else would electricity distract it?”
Belinda says, “Perhaps it can home in on bioelectric frequencies.”
“Son of a bitch,” Hunter says.
“That’s not unheard of in nature,” Lana says. “Bees can sense the electrical charge of flowers.”
“Electric eels,” Stetson says.
“Right.”
Jack says, “Could we use power surges throughout the ship? Try the same thing?”
“Repeated surges can be dangerous to my components. I’m thinking of something else. Step over to the monitor. Tell me when you’re there.”
They crowd around. “We’re here.”
“Take a look at turret B1. I will calibrate it to roughly match the bioelectrical output of the average human body. It is not much. Keep in mind this is unlikely to succeed.”
Hunter pulls up the display. They all hover a little closer. Something silky rubs against Jack’s elbow through the shreds of his sleeve. Dandy. They come face to face. Dandy grins. The fucker thinks he still has the upper hand. Maybe he does. Jack resists the urge to drive a fist into that smile. He focuses on the screen, the red dot that represents the laser’s target. Bel swivels the turret and the camera shifts left to reveal the coils of a hydra squeezed into a higher corner of the corridor, a brownish tangle of squid limbs. This is the smallest of them, the one on the first level. It just hangs there, motionless, maybe waiting for a victim to stroll into range.
Bel places the red dot on the wall next to the hydra.
The dot turns green, indicating that the laser is on.
Nothing happens.
Jack bites his cheek.
“Well there goes that plan,” Justin groans.
“Wait,” Lana says. “It’s moving.”
Jack squints, leans closer. Hard to tell. The picture is grainy and stutters often. The feed to the pod was done in a last minute rush at the suggestion of the installation team, and the turrets are antiques. He bought them at an auction years before, never expected them to work. And yet. The coils shift, tighten.
Bel widens the laser’s diameter. The green dot grows.
The hydra throws a tentacle against the wall, directly over the laser. Bel swings it out of reach and the hydra pulls from the corner, extends stiff insectoid legs and crawls after it, whipping tentacles to try and snatch it.
The pod erupts with cheers. They are going to make it out of this. No one hears Belinda’s hums of uncertainty as the hydra begins to slow, shoots more feelers into the air, points those long slender cilia at the source of the laser.
Chapter 29
Lana mops Dino’s forehead. He’s a little warm, but so is the room. Though the pod has ventilation, it’s meant for around five people at the most. They’ve nearly doubled the capacity. The walls are slick with moisture. Now and then droplets of water fall and make the floor slippery. Their own sweat and breath surrounding them.
Dino wakes, disoriented. In the morning, they will need him lucid. If the term “morning” applies. Call it a window of seven hours instead, after which they will decide they’ve rested enough and put their plan into action. Everything is truly relative out here, far from the assuredness of solid ground. All that certainty is an illusion. The truer vantage—space—shows Earth as just one more scintillating pinprick in an overpopulated field of pinpricks. No cycle. No night or day. No atmosphere to nudge evolution along its path. There is only the calendar and the clock, governed by standard solar time, an invention she grew up with. Mankind attempting to impose order onto chaos. She remembers vividly the first time this realization came to her. She was young, but she had outgrown her phobia of looking into space, and she was walking through Observatory Park for some reason. She must have been around eight or nine. She can’t recall now what she was doing there or why. Maybe a picnic with her mother and father. Maybe a playdate with friends. She ran along the stone path in front of the enormous window, the one looking out not at Saturn, but at the emptiness in the opposite direction. The starfield. She had seen it many times, but on this day, she stopped and stared. That old fear bubbled up inside of her, but she let it simmer below the surface, just enough to know that it would always be there, and she felt something that even now she has a hard time naming. It was more like a texture than an idea. It was as if she were suspended in the middle of a canyon, floating high above the ravine and its walls, and at any moment, if she broke her concentration, she would fall. This sensation evolved in time, became less terrifying, more conceptualized. She feels it now, the tenuousness of their position in the universe—in all of existence. Chaos is real. It’s what Einstein left out of his theory. The way relativity itself is an invention because there is no one out there measuring things. That is what humankind does. Space has no need to justify itself. It just is. If we ever make it out of our little planetary system, maybe we will find that physics works differently elsewhere. Maybe there are no yardsticks other than what we bring along.
She explains things to Dino, and as she hears herself saying it, the whole plan seems very stupid. So the hydra can spot a circle of energy moving across the floor like a cat chasing a light. Does that mean the cat can’t tell the difference between the light and a mouse? Can they say they truly understand this creature, or are they just floating above a cliff pretending they will never fall?