“Are there alternatives I’ve overlooked?”
“Given your physical constraints, your plan is solid in theory.”
“In theory.”
“I’m a computer, Jack, not a fortune teller.”
“But you’ve computed the odds.”
“At this moment, I don’t believe sharing statistics would prove useful.”
“Probably right. Just watch my back.”
“I have been.”
To Hunter, he says, “Don’t move till Thumper takes the bait.”
She nods, studies him a moment. She wants to hug him or something. But that would signify goodbye. “Don’t be an idiot,” she says.
“Too late.”
He straddles the hatch. Thirty feet below, the prep chamber glows, a bright square. Thinking of his previous encounter, he pauses to pull off his boots. Then he starts down, slow as a sloth, his breath already making the walls sweat, his feet silent on the rungs.
Chapter 39
They wait to eject the pod. Stetson’s fingers poise above the touchpad. The scent of blood and something fouler linger in the air. Don’t look at the slickness on the floor, and don’t step in it. Just like those packed rooms with their beds, soldiers bandaged and moaning, the Alliance unwilling to spare tissue regenerators on such low priorities as suffering men. Lana’s hands shaking, gloves wet. It was a different time but it keeps come back, all that suffering and loss. All you can do is apply more bandages.
“The hell is he doing?” Stetson says.
On the holo-screen, Thumper continues to slap at the airlock. Jack has yet to drop out of the hatch. Lana’s not surprised this was the best plan he could come up with. Consciously or not, the moment the hydra arrived, he recognized his chance to sacrifice himself. That’s why he confessed about the camps and why he wouldn’t look at her after. He can go to the grave feeling lighter now, having said his peace. Nothing to do anymore but watch for the cloaked angel with the skeletal face. Because the future is harder to see when it is open.
A scraping sound from above disrupts her thoughts. Metal grinding metal.
Stetson doesn’t notice, absorbed in the screen.
The sound again, louder, joined this time by a chorus of raining pebbles.
Not pebbles. Claws.
So she won’t have to see Jack’s death onscreen. She’ll beat him to the other side.
“Stets. It’s in the ceiling.”
He hears it too. Tilts his head back. “How?”
He switches cameras. This one shows a familiar view of the closed pod, the white doors with their divots and scratches, the floor battered to chips. There is a new piece of destruction now. Twisted fixtures hang from the ceiling. Nanotubing and ceramic shielding and fiber optics dangle from a jagged hole.
The hydra found a way to skirt the doors.
“Will it hold?” Lana says.
“It should. It’s designed to.”
“Not good enough. We need to eject.”
Stetson isn’t so sure. They should be safe, he says. The hydra couldn’t get through the doors, so why would it get through the hull? Plus, the pod is like a reinforced train car on a magnetic track, its doors butting against the hallway. This track runs through an airlock and into a long chute where the pod’s rear thrusters will activate to launch her. Does Lana really think the creature can 1) hold to the pod during launch, and 2) survive in outer space, without an atmosphere, and this close to the sun?
He isn’t thinking rationally. “Even if the hull holds, the longer we sit here, the longer it has to get a better grip. And we still need to do a spacewalk.”
“Shit,” he concedes. “We should confirm with Jack.”
“You call him now, you’ll get him killed.”
“Right. Dammit.”
“Do it, Stets.” She drops into the flight chair beside Dino, pulls the safety belt over her shoulders. A few helmets and gloves still lie on the floor, but the heavier equipment—EM-packs and air tanks—have already been secured.
Stetson doesn’t act until another screech erupts overhead.
“Good God!” He clicks himself into the pilot chair. “Belinda, have you been listening?”
“I have. You’ll need to activate the launch sequence manually. Jack has trained you on this, I hope?”
“Yes. Basically.”
“You sound uncertain.”
“I’m just a little shaken up, Bel!”
“Understood. Good luck out there. It’s been lovely working with you.”
“Yeah. Sure.”
Screeeeee, goes the ceiling.
Stetson fiddles with the controls. Lana leans back and shuts her eyes. Just go already.
He calls Hunter first. “We’re ejecting. No time to explain.”
“Copy. Bel said the hydra got into the ceiling.”
“Well I’m glad she told you.”
“Second in command, Stets. I’m sorry. I thought you knew or I’d have—”
“Gotta go, Janessa.”
“You’ll do great. I’m not patronizing.”
“Patronize this,” he says, and smacks the controls.
The pod lunges sideways. A dizzying sensation as it spins to face the chute.
Chapter 40
He feels his way, one rung to the next. The hydra slams again and again against the airlock and the sound echoes up the shaft twisted and amplified. The air tastes musty and thick. As he nears the lower hatch, he hears, in addition to the banging, that stomach-churning sound of the creature’s body rubbing against itself, slick and wet. It will waste no time turning on him. He’ll be helpless but for his feet and Bel’s reaction time. No way to kill it. No way to stop it. It has shown its intelligence, but is it conscious? Does it feel any which way about him, about them, these little moving wads of meat? Does it feel pleasure when it wraps its body around its prey, a rush of elation? He thinks of the bees that stung Kip. How they erupted out of that rotten log. Insects are not conscious, are they, and yet they can show panic. Has the hydra ever faced an enemy it could not run down? How many worlds has it destroyed? Does it remember the things and people it has absorbed? Are they in some way still alive inside of it? Does it sleep, and if so, does it shoot up in the middle of the night seeing their faces?
His feet find the final rung. He clings, shaking and cold. The hydra’s efforts reverberate through the ladder and his bones. It is just a mechanism, a force of destruction, a black hole with a will, and Jack teeters just outside the event horizon. There is nothing to do now but drop inside.
So that is what he does.
Chapter 41
The pod shunts down the track, a bumpy few feet that jostle them side to side. She checks Dino’s safety belt and holds hers at the shoulders. Dino drips with perspiration. Every time the pod shakes, it jostles his stump. “You’re alright,” she tells him.
“Yeah,” he grunts. “No sweat.”
She grips his glove, but it’s empty.
The hydra’s efforts have increased to a steady scream. The hull should hold. It has to. It’s required to withstand millions of degrees of heat and forces that could liquefy bone. The hydra is powerful, but it can’t be that powerful. Can it?
Stetson watches a wireframe illustration of their coming journey down the track, narrating with a flat voice, his attempt to keep the terror at bay. It’s not working. “The airlock’s coming up. The track is actually very short. See, the, uh—This airlock was added when they installed the pod. Behind us, the track will be pressurized with the rest of the ship. It’s actually kind of a wasteful, uh—Waste of good oxygen, honestly, if you ask me. If I designed it, I’d have, uh, I’d have added a secondary door in the hallway here, see? That’s what I would have done.”