Logic only takes us so far. She knows this well after years of working on the human body, attempting to save lives, losing them for no apparent reason. She never met an experienced surgeon who claimed to have all the answers. Some bodies just quit. Others can be pushed well beyond their apparent limits and keep sucking air into their lungs and pumping blood through their veins. Sure, there are theories about this. White blood cell counts, immunodeficiencies dependent on age and lifestyles, etc., but death does not follow these rationalizations.
For a short period, she considered religion. At Starvation City, she made regular visits to the chapel. There was a nice chaplain there, an older woman who called herself Night Sister, a name Lana found pretentious until Night Sister told her it was her prostitution name. She kept it because she claimed she no longer knew the person her parents had named. Night Sister was the one who had gone through hardships. That other woman—that supposedly purer one—she had never existed at all. This was all shared under the presumption that Lana would open up about her own life, let her doubts spill to this gray-haired figure in a gray robe. She almost did. What would she have said? Something about being lost, feeling empty. But such emptiness is the state of the universe, so is it a negative thing to feel that way? That was borderline New Darwinism and she knew it. All their space is cruel so we better be crueler bullshit. Excuses to go around slaughtering innocent people. Yet that doesn’t mean there isn’t a kernel of truth in there. Whole civilizations murdered each other based on texts that preach peace and love and kindness. It doesn’t mean peace and love and kindness are wrong. It just means the ideas had been perverted. If the New Darwinists got anything right, it’s the inherent cruelty of the universe, but they were wrong about everything else. Where there is no air and no sea and no ground and no way for life to develop, life should be considered more precious, not less.
And yet, another possibility occurs to her. If in this cruel uncaring universe, something close to life were to form out here, something that could sustain itself over billions of years, something so strange that we might not recognize it as life at all when we encounter it, how brutal would that something—that non-lifeform—have to be in order to survive? What tactics would develop in its evolutionary line? And what would happen to any lifeforms that stood in its path?
She should sleep.
She helps Dino down a couple sleeping pills and enough pain meds to hold him over for the next few hours. He thanks her and squeezes her hand. She knows he hates being seen this way. He’s supposed to be the invulnerable one. She tells him they will find him a shiny new arm when they make it back.
“Something with spikes,” he says, and shuts his eyes.
Back in the main chamber, the flight chairs have been pulled up from the floor. Justin snores loudly and curls into a fetal position. Stetson sits on the helmet, but has managed to fall asleep with his chin on his fist. Dandy and his mercs lie next to each other at Stetson’s feet. The room stinks of men. That musty fart smell and BO. It is a smell she will always associate with the shelters of Midland, their filthy walls and their hidden sicknesses and their cold rooms with bad lighting. Here in the pod, the lights have been turned pleasantly low. The only two figures still awake hover near the monitor at the front of the room.
Hunter and Jack watch the blobs on video. Jack turns when he hears her coming. “Hey.” He wants to know how Dino’s doing.
“He’ll recover,” she says.
He nods. “Good.”
Jack does not look good. He has cut the torn sleeves from his jacket so she can see all the nicks and scrapes and burns along his forearms. In all this craziness, she forgot to clean his wounds. Dried blood and debris cling to him.
“A little salve will go a long way,” she says.
He follows her gaze. “Oh. It’s fine.”
“Not really.”
“I’ve dealt with worse. Trust me.”
Hunter jabs at the display. “There’s got to be a weakness.” She says it more to herself than Jack or Lana. “I mean. No lifeform can just hang around forever without food and water.”
“You’d be surprised,” Lana says. “A lot of animals don’t even have red blood cells. Sponges and crabs. Jellyfish. Worms.”
“Bees,” Jack says.
“Sure.”
They get quiet. That they are even here right now is proof of their own lunacy. They could have done any number of things to avoid participating in Dandy’s little game. They could have disappeared from Earth. Changed their names and their hair. All Lana had to do was stay put, and she couldn’t even manage that. At the worst, they could have blasted the suspension cube off into space never to see it again.
And that is when it hits her.
The discovery in the Kuiper belt. The sphere. Three hundred and sixty smaller spheres inside.
She groans and rubs her tired eyes.
“What is it?” Jack says.
“We weren’t supposed to find the ship,” she says. “Nobody was.”
Jack studies her face. “Lana,” he says, “when’s the last time you slept?”
“Hang on,” Hunter says, “I want to hear this.”
Lana says, “Think about it.” And it all feels so simple. The way they are quarantined in their own ship. The same way the creature was quarantined in its pod. “This thing can’t be killed, can’t be destroyed.”
“As far as we know.”
“And it’s extremely deadly. What do we do with our extremely deadly things, the things we can’t just destroy? Our nuclear waste, our oceans of non-recyclables?”
“What are you getting at?”
“We bury it,” Lana says.
Jack rubs his own eyes. “Okay.”
“What if we had no ground to bury it in? Wouldn’t we just blast it into nowhere? There are people doing it all the time. It’s illegal, but they do it. That’s why there’s all that debris floating everywhere. Dandy even said the ship they found had no propulsion system.”
Jack says, “I’m not sure I see—”
“Because it was never a ship. It’s just a dumping ground.”
Hunter nods along. “If it’s four billion years old, our solar system didn’t exist when they launched it. At least, not like it does now.”
“Right. They sent it somewhere they thought no one would find it. A desert. Only it’s not a desert anymore. And we did find it.”
Jack says, “Even if that’s true, why make it accessible? Why give it a door?”
She doesn’t know the answer. All she has are guesses. “Maybe they were being optimistic. We always assume an alien race will be advanced far beyond ourselves. Maybe they assumed the same. That someone else would have a solution. A way to kill it.”
Jack sighs and rubs the back of his neck. “What does any of this have to do with us?”
Lana stifles a laugh. “You never could read between the lines.”
“Meaning what?”
“We don’t have a way to kill it. You’re right. And if we leave Bel out here, someone will find her the same way they found it in the Kuiper belt. They’ll think they have a ship to salvage, and when they open the door…”
“Too bad for them.”
“Think about the bigger picture.” She sees in her mind the camps at Starvation City, the men and women and children struggling in their illnesses, their addictions, all scrambling over themselves, raising their hands to burning garbage. And in the sky, an explosion. A ship breaking apart, erupting with tentacles that slither where they land and clot what rivers are left, choke the oceans. Devour it all.