The Egg Men begin crossing the chamber, and this is where the Crypts start messing with us, because the gravity in there is about half what it was in the passageway, and the aerome changes too – more oxygen and a crapton of methane, the sort of volatile mix that puts you off smoking. I have to take a few deep breaths before I got the fart smell out of my nose, and by that time the Egg Men are halfway down the wall, taking deliberate single steps and clinging on like flies somehow. I just jump down, and that turns out to be a mistake, because there’s an environmental boundary about halfway so that one moment I’m floating down like Alice down the rabbit hole, and the next I’m yanked sideways at what feels like 0.75G to crash into the far wall, which is now a floor. The Egg Men stop their careful descent, probably grateful that the Big Dumb Alien has just given them advance warning of some physics assholery ahead. I pick myself up and check that nothing’s broken.
The Egg Men are going to rappel it, apparently. They dig little hooks into the wall and then leap out into space until the gravity shift catches them, then just descend down their lines like silver spiders. They get most of the way down when the local resident wakes up to their presence and decides to have a go.
I see it unfold itself from the far wall. Most of the Crypt fauna are low-energy ambush predators, capable of lying dormant a long time between meals. This one had been camouflaged amongst the carvings, long worm body clutched to the wall, terminating in a horrifying assemblage of hooked arms about a saw-edged mouth. I see no sensory organs at all, but it plainly knows exactly where everything is and fancies eggs for dinner.
I holler like a madman, but the Eggs don’t react, and possibly they don’t actually hear things at all. So I end up legging it along the floor, wincing already because somewhere there’s a gravity break that is going to faceplant me into the far wall. My running around gets the Egg Men on high alert and some of them obviously see the worm thing as it uncoils towards them. The ones closest to the ground cut their lines and drop, trusting to their cradle of metal legs to cushion the wall. Others just speed up, spinning and jolting on their lines.
The worm thing strikes, long before I can get anywhere useful. One of the Eggs disappears into that clutch of arms, and I think for a moment the metal shell will defeat the beast. The crack of the casing sounds like a gunshot, though, and a moment later the worm is shedding jagged sections of Egg-shell as its smaller arms clear out whatever was inside. They are organic, those Egg Men. I never do get a good view of them or see what shape they were, but the worm obviously relishes the taste, because it’s back for more almost immediately.
But I have got close by then, and some new sense tells me I’m about to cross over. I turn it into a jump, aiming to strike the thing’s bloated body just behind the head. My personal maths is way off, though, and I ended up landing hard next to its tail. The worm reaches for another Egg Man, which is spinning madly on the end of its thread. In response, the Egg goes on fire, a crackling red nimbus dancing across its shell to ward the monster off. The worm doesn’t care, crunching the luckless Egg Man up as though the energy discharge is nothing more than a piquant little mustard on top.
I am not a brutal man. Fit, yes – you don’t get to be an astronaut without being in shape, and since the Crypts got hold of me I’ve become considerably more robust than any number of gym hours could have made me. I never went in for martial arts or boxing or any of that stuff, though. I’d have said I was a pacifist, in fact.
But now there is a monster eating my Egg-friends and I’m not having it. I shimmy up that worm’s body like a monkey, shouting every obscenity I can think of, because a man’s got to have a war cry, and because I’m scared out of my wits. Those arms could tear me into confetti in moments, and I’m only lucky that the thing apparently prefers Eggs.
I have a knife. It wasn’t intended as a knife, but it’s a sharp shard of metal about forty centimetres long and I’ve wrapped some plasticky stuff about one end to hold it with.
Out comes that knife when I get towards the worm’s head end. In goes the knife, slicing into that pallid sac of a body.
I think I go a bit mad, then, Toto. I honestly think the strain of wandering alone in these Crypts is getting to me, and sometimes an outlet for your frustrations comes along, and sometimes that outlet is a gigantic worm monster, and you just go for it.
Later, and we’re camped on the floor of the big chamber. The Egg Men are doing something complex, passing pieces of the shells of their dead friends around. It’s not hard to overlay a human interpretation of grief or remembrance onto it, and there’s no behaviourist here to tell me not to anthropomorphise, so that’s what I’ll call it. They pass bits to me and I try to handle them with the same thoughtful reverence before passing them back. I’m still covered in worm-entrails, because it’ll be a while before I find a decent shower in this place. The worm’s body is strewn weirdly across two gravity planes. I’m eating some of it.
Not bad, actually. Goes down very smoothly.
A few Egg-rests later and we reach a corridor that ends in a wall of water. The Egg Men and I are parting company. It’s not that I can’t follow: the only reason humans can’t breathe water is there’s bugger-all oxygen in it compared to the air, and we got lazy as we evolved away from fish; and maybe this water is super-oxygenated, or maybe it has no oxygen at all. There are things living in the water, and I guess there’s probably an exit somewhere, perhaps even an on-planet one whose natives didn’t even need to get out of orbit to reach the Crypts. But this isn’t a place I’ll find humans. This isn’t a place that will lead home for me. You and me, Toto, we need to find Kansas, or at least the solar system that, inter alia, Kansas resides in.
The Egg Men pause when they realise I’m not following. I wave, and they flash some lights at me, and we go our separate ways.
CHAPTER FOUR
KAVENEY’S LITTLE SISTER was Mara, now reprogrammed from its original planet-crashing role to something a little less cataclysmic. By this time, the live expedition was already well into planning, and several private space-ex teams were working on converting existing tech to take human lives further than we’d ever gone before, and building all the new bits we hadn’t known we’d needed. NASA, Roscosmos and the ESA were jostling elbows as each tried to publicly look as cooperative and nation-speaks-peace-unto-nation as possible, while behind the scenes an almighty shit-show of demarcation was going on as to who got to make what decisions and who got the credit if things went well. A side effect of this departmental flag- and dick-waving meant that the “live team,” as we were known, got picked out early, meaning we all got to sit through very long lectures about Kaveney’s original purpose, among other things. We didn’t know we’d actually be going up, of course. Half of us – the older hands mostly – were constantly expecting the whole thing to be cancelled the moment public interest waned. The rest of us were still very aware that the live team was three times the size it needed to be, so most of us would get all the fun of the training without the tedious chore of actually making history out in space.
But I made the grade, obviously. See all those lucky mes from before.
And we were all watching when Mara kicked off from Kaveney to go take a look-see. We got daily updates. We got to see a lot of the raw data, the images before they were prettied up for the consumption of the wider public. And we shared in the horror and panic of the Madrid team when it looked as though Mara’s reprogramming had completely screwed things, because the images were nonsense.