“You doing alright up there, Stets?”
“Makes no sense to have an airlock way down this way. Double-doors would solve that.”
The pod takes a sudden leap forward.
Something in the ceiling goes crunch.
“See! Then we wouldn’t have to deal with all this fucking noise!” He throws his head back and screams. “I fucking hate you, you piece of shit!”
The mind controls the body. Once it goes, the body shuts down or does something irrational, like the worst kind of drunk. Either he’ll hyperventilate and pass out or go manic. Confined areas and the constant stress of space will do that to anyone, no matter how long they’ve been out here. One of her more memorable patients during the war was a lieutenant who lost it during a raid and opened an airlock, blew his whole squad out. He was the only survivor until he stole a syringe of regenerative tissue and shot it directly into his heart.
“Hey Stets. How many walks will this be for you?”
He makes a strange sound. Whining and whimpering.
“I need you here, Stets. You’re gonna have to guide me. I’m relying on you, okay?”
“Hoooo,” he breathes. “That’s a good one. I’m alright. I’m okay. Hooo. We’re inside the airlock now. Ten seconds. Put your head back. There’s no grav drive. Just good old-fashioned thrust.”
She presses into the seat, takes whiteknuckle hold of the armrests.
They jerk ahead, more bouncing.
Clang, clang, goes the hydra.
“We’re clear of the airlock. Preparing for launch. Let’s hope this knocks our stowaway off, hey? Three. Two. Blastoff.” He jabs at the control pad and that is the last thing Lana sees before the force sucks her into her seat and socks her in the gut. The oxygen in her brain slides to the back of her skull and the pod shrinks to a pinpoint of light somewhere far ahead.
Chapter 42
Death collapses time to nothing, stretches it to the infinite. The moment is there and not there. Seems to flicker between these two states. Later, if you survive, it will feel as though it never happened, and you’ll repeat the story to yourself, trying to make it real, to build it into your ongoing timeline. That time death reached for you and barely missed. A piece of you will wonder if it didn’t. If all of this is just a ghost’s dream. In fact, it is, but you have always been the ghost. Somewhere far ahead, or far behind, death has already found you. In this moment, Jack looks upon death—not for the first time—and he sees that it has a thousand shifting arms in tangles, yarn that meshes and ties and slides through itself smooth as glass. Gashes appear across its surface like so many mouths. It comes for him, tentacles growing and gliding.
He dashes for the hallway. Moves on instinct, bolting toward the forward gravity shaft. Hears the hydra thump thump thumping after him.
Into the hall.
Grav shaft straight ahead.
Creature just behind.
He hurls himself into the air, finds the handholds at the lip of the shaft and flips his body up and into the tunnel. Head still poking out, he has an upside down view of the hydra. It has taken the form of some kind of giant millipede with legs sprouting in every direction. They shuttle it forward, propelling off the walls, ceiling, floor. As it nears, the front end splits apart. He doesn’t wait to see what shape it takes next. He pushes off the sidewall, rising feet-first, slaps the ladder to spin his body upright in the shaft. He glances down and sees the hydra not twenty feet below, tentacles boiling. He kicks off the ladder at the second story landing, glides into the corridor.
Belinda knows what to do.
She cranks the shaft’s gravity in reverse, forcing the creature to the third level. It whips past quick as a hypertram, a pale tangle. An appendage lashes out and misses his foot by inches, leaves a dent in the wall.
Bel reactivates the gravity on level two. He isn’t expecting it and drops to his knees before stumbling back to his feet, keeps on running toward the rear of the ship as fast as he can, his right knee aching. Bel says something he can’t quite make out over the sound of his footsteps and gasps. Let it be something good. Maybe Hunter made it to the airlock. Or Lana and the others have ejected safely. Or his path is clear.
She relays the message through her onboard speakers. “Squiddy is straight ahead.”
This is not good news.
“Faster,” Bel says. “You can make it.”
He takes her word, sprints full-speed. She opens each door, white flashes.
“Up the mid-shaft, down the stern,” she instructs.
The landing doors part. Jack’s heart stutters but his feet behave.
Squiddy burbles out of the doorway across the shaft. The ladder is all that separates them.
He jumps, hits the ladder at an angle. One hand slips between the rungs. His face slams into metal. He scrambles to correct his grip.
Squiddy unfolds, each tentacle doubling or tripling in length. They reach.
He ducks and leapfrogs from the ladder to the wall, pushes off and up, and glides toward level three.
A tentacle smacks the wall between his legs.
Squiddy follows him up the shaft.
Jack tastes blood in his throat, ignores it.
He reaches the third floor landing.
The rear doors are already broken. He leaps from shaft to hallway, into gravity again. Lands on his feet. Thumper crashes out of the fore corridor just as Squiddy erupts from the top of the shaft. The two hydras intertwine, twin strands of bile. The floor shudders, and the combined hydras suck down the hole as Bel cranks the gravity. “Faster,” she commands.
Across the final landing, dark shapes clog the far corridor, a wall of tentacles careening out of the kitchen. Big Bear. This enormous growth larger than any animal, its anatomy shifting in disharmony, as if a hundred life forms have been mashed together and it can’t decide on one—here a loop of tentacles and there what appears to be the snout of a dog and here bug-like mandibles and there an arm that could be human except for the extra fingers.
Is it imitating these shapes, or were they absorbed in its past?
Belinda shouts, “Jump!”
He dives into the shaft headfirst.
The bloated hydra throws itself after.
He falls five times faster than Earth gravity. The ladder is a silver blur. A glimpse of tentacles at the second level. The combined Thumper-Squiddy hydra, lashing out too slow. He drops into the cargo bay, through the mangled remains of the grav shaft. The cage has fallen away, shattered during his first chase with the hydra. As he nears the floor, Bel cranks the G forces in reverse. He jerks upward.
The hydra bubbles out of the shaft after him. The very end mushrooms, holding fast to the surface around the opening like a blooming grappling hook. Slowly, steadily, it swells into the chamber.
Bel’s voice squawks from his portable: “Talk to me, Jack. Say anything. There’s not much time.” The force of the fall and the rebound did a number on him. He can’t quite place where he is or why he is bathed in a field of light. A demon oozes out of a metal hole nearby. He recognizes Jim Dandy below, hands on his hips, gaping. A jolt of hatred courses through him. He remembers everything. He floats in the air near one of the ceiling lights. Bel must have targeted him for selective Zero-G.
Dandy waves. “The hell you doing up there, Jackie?”
Chapter 43
Someone left the storage room door open. Garbage clutters the panic pod’s cabin. Foil wrappers, crumbs, the flattened carcass of a cockroach. A minor annoyance in what is shaping up to be a successful trip. Two pieces of great news: First, Hunter made it safely aboard the Homunculus. Both it and the pod are maneuvering into Bel’s shadow for the spacewalk. Second, there’s no sign of the hydra since blastoff. It must have dislodged. It’s probably still in the ejection chute or maybe fried in the sun’s heat, not so invincible afterall.