Luna (12 page)

26 | Alive

“Suzette!” Blake shouted into his helmet transmitter while he stared into the subterranean lunar pit.

“Sounded like she said ‘help me,’” Caitlin said, also peering into the void. Only Asami looked behind them and along the tunnel they were in.

“Suzette, we heard you! Where are you?”

The marketing VP’s voice came again, but it was garbled and unintelligible. Sort of bubbly, like a person trying to talk underwater. They all waited a few seconds but no more transmissions came.

“I didn’t get any of that,” Caitlin stated.

“Me neither,” Asami seconded.

“She must be too deep into that pit for the radio signals to propagate normally. Probably down into the secondary cavity.” Blake turned away from the edge of the hole.

“At least we know she’s alive,” Caitlin said. “She must have found that equipment cache and been able to swap out her oh-two cylinder.”

“And hopefully the carbon dioxide scrubber,” Asami added.

Blake pointed to the climbing rope clipped to Asami’s spacesuit.

“Asami, let me use your gear. I’m going in after her.”

The selenologist hesitated, but only for a second.

“C’mon, Asami. Now, while there’s still a chance.”

“Here.” She gave him the gear and prepared the rope at her end so that she could belay him as he had done for her earlier. While they set up, they continued to call out for Suzette but didn’t hear her again. Then, just as Blake was about to descend into the cavernous hollow, a wrenching, haunting wail permeated their frequency.

Not words, though. Suzette, yes, but words?

“That’s the weirdest sounding scream I’ve ever heard,” Caitlin said.

“Shhhhh.” Blake halted, poised with his back to the open space below them, ready to drop inside. They listened some more and heard some indecipherable sounds, very strange sounding vocalizations, unidentifiable. And then, Suzette’s voice once more: “It hurts...so bad...help...” Her language degenerated into a babble of incoherent syllables.

Blake whipped his head around and eyed the pit below. The inner, deeper pit was still open. “You got me, Asami? I’m going.”

“Got you.” She tightened her grip on the rope and Blake rappelled down into the chamber, landing on the first level floor. He stood there a moment, this being his first trip into the hole and not exactly sure what to expect, especially with the creatures in the area. He shifted his weight from foot to foot, getting a feel for the ground, wondering if in fact it was real ground. It seemed to be.

“Looks like the pits are the spaces the creatures have left vacant, but the rest of the chamber floor is actually rock.”

“Copy that,” Asami returned. Communications established and as acclimated as he had time for to the new environment, Blake walked over to the end of the cavern, where the deep hole was.

He gazed down into it with trepidation, fearing that at any moment one of the life forms could come roaring up at him. But there was nothing, which was both good and bad. Good because there were no monsters lurking. But bad because, literally, he could see nothing. That black void seemed to be bottomless. He angled his head lamp this way and that, but although he could see the walls of the pit in its upper reaches, no bottom was visible.

“What’s down there?” Caitlin wanted to know.

“Not a whole lot that I can see, just—”Suddenly Blake
felt
the ground tremble beneath his feet. Not quite moving, like an earthquake, but more like a series of vibrations he could feel through his booted feet, like the sub-bass at an electronic music show. “Hold on.”

He looked around the room to make sure one of the creatures wasn’t creeping into the space from the far end that Caitlin and Asami couldn’t see. But it was all clear. He aimed his headlamp back into the pit at his feet...

...and saw rising movement. The pit was no longer pitch black as far as he could see, but now had what looked like a floor coming up at him, like an elevator. “Something’s coming up!” Blake reared back as he realized whatever it was would erupt from the hole any second now.

“Move, Blake!” the two women shouted, alerting him. He was already in motion as a gigantic worm-like animal burst from the subterranean tube and shot upwards toward the opening to the main tunnel Caitlin and Asami occupied. The creature towered above him as it rocketed higher, so close that Blake could have reached out and touched it, but he did not dare. He leaned so far backwards to make sure he wouldn’t be hit by the ascending snake-worm that he tripped and landed on his backside, moon-bouncing in slow motion until he stopped his motion with hands stretched out behind him. He sat there, staring up at the creature. He was about to push himself to his feet, deciding that should the animal change direction he would need to be mobile, but what he saw next rendered him absolutely motionless.

Some kind of anomaly marred the creature’s side. The white-and-silver colors immediately drew Blake’s eye away from the mostly grayish hues of the rest of the gargantuan body. Then he saw a splash of color and realized with a sickening, debilitating jolt of adrenaline that it was the Outer Limits logo. On a spacesuit. Suzette’s spacesuit. With Suzette still in it. The space-suited form of Outer Limits’ marketing executive was somehow attached to the animal. She wasn’t simply holding onto the side of it, though, or merely being bounced along by the animal’s motion.

Blake had to suppress the urge not to vomit in his helmet, a potentially dangerous occurrence that could have dire consequences while wearing a spacesuit. But it was difficult not to as the goliath worm-animal dragged Suzette past him and he got a close look at her.

Appendages of some sort penetrated her suit, fastening her body to the creature. But it was worse than just that, Blake saw as he focused on the alien tendrils snaking
into
Suzette’s body.
Through
it. The tentacle-like appendages were translucent, for he could see a liquid of some sort running through it. Altogether it had a bluish cast, but he wasn’t certain if it was a clear tube structure with a blue liquid inside, or a bluish tube structure with a clear liquid inside.

How is this possible?
Blake understood at this moment that Suzette hadn’t found the left-behind equipment, but that the lunar dweller itself was somehow infusing her with oxygen, keeping her alive as a part of itself.

As a part of itself
...

He recalled her words, just minutes ago...
It hurts
...

And then the creature bent slightly, contorted itself enough to be able to fit through the opening through which Blake had come down here, and he was suddenly helmet-to-helmet with Suzette Calderon. In the most surreal moment of his entire life, Blake Garner made eye contact with his employee.

“Suzette!”

He saw her part her lips to speak, but by then the creature’s head—if it was a head—had emerged into the tunnel where the screams of Caitlin and Asami drowned out all other sound on the comm channel. He reached out a hand to grab onto Suzette—saw that hers were pinned tightly behind her back, while her legs were immobilized—her feet actually disappearing into the creature’s flesh itself. A tube the diameter of a garden hose ran up through her chin into her mouth, disappearing to where, Blake could only imagine.

His hand slid off her spacesuit and she was carried higher by the alien beast. Blake watched helplessly as the animal passed through the fractured wall. It turned left, heading deeper into the tunnel system with Suzette in tow, her bubbly, distorted grunts echoing in their headsets.

27 | If It Isn’t One Thing

Blake stared up out of the chamber until he saw the creature’s tail end pass through into the tunnel. He heard Caitlin ’s voice.

“Blake, get out of there! Hurry, before it comes back.”

“C’mon Blake!” Asami added.

He felt the slack in his rope tighten as Asami prepared to belay him up. But now that the creature had left, he couldn’t resist taking a good look down into the deep chasm from which it had come. He turned around and directed his headlamp back into the pit. In it he saw a vision of Hell, a vacant hole seething with moving flesh, the floor opening and closing as giant worms passed through. Or snakes. Whatever the hell they were. But he knew one thing: he had been absolutely right that they had mistaken the very walls and floors and ceilings of this tunnel network for rock, when much of it was living flesh, constantly changing the configuration of the network of passages as they moved about. The humans were inside their hive, in an alien catacomb of sorts, assuming that if the creatures lived here, they must also die here. The notion made him nauseous and he turned away as Asami yelled at him again.

“Now, Blake!”

He moved to the wall below the opening, where he looked up to see Asami staring down at him, a glint of light from his headlamp reflecting off of her faceplate. He couldn’t see Caitlin but knew she’d be facing out into the tunnel, watching for more creatures. He “walked” up the wall, a task made easier in the low gravity—which he was grateful to discover was an actual rock wall and not some sort of living thing—while Asami pulled him up with the rope. He got a look at Asami’s eyes when he stepped back into the main tunnel; she was visibly shaken at having seen Suzette pass by her, raked across the wall by the worm-creature. She and Suzette had not gotten along well, but she would never wish this kind of fate on anybody. The spaceship incident with the camera seemed so trivial now.

“Thanks,” he said to Asami, unclipping his rope harness. “It went that way, right?” He pointed to their left, the direction that led deeper into the tunnel system.

“Yes.” Caitlin’s voice sounded weak. She, too, had been traumatized by what she had witnessed.

Blake checked his oxygen gauge. “We could chase after it for a little while, see if we might be able to rescue Suzette when it stops—rip her out of it—”

“No!”

“Blake!” Caitlin was even more forceful than Asami. It surprised her that he would put himself on the line for Suzette to that degree. It wasn’t heroism, though, that was the troubling thing. She knew it was the desire to save his own company’s reputation from the fallout that would surely result from a death—and a spectacularly hideous death at that. He wanted to save her only because it would save Outer Limits in the process. “There’s no way we can save her. Did you see her? It’s like she was a part of that thing…like...”

“Like it had injected her with its own blood vessels or something like that?”

Caitlin nodded, the reflection of Blake’s headlamp bobbing crazily in her faceplate.

“We need to worry about ourselves, Blake,” Asami cut in. “I can’t end up like that...I—”

She choked off a sob, envisioning herself entombed like Suzette into one of the organisms, being dragged through the series of lunar burrows, for what purpose, she had no idea, but she couldn’t imagine a more horrible fate.

And it hurts.
Help... it hurts!

Suzette’s plea echoed in her brain until she could take it no more and she turned to leave in the opposite direction the creature went.

“Okay,” Blake relented. “We’ll leave.”

“Good.” Caitlin breathed a sigh of relief as she turned to follow Asami toward the exit. She had been concerned that Blake’s judgment might be clouded by knowing that this horrendous event marked the end of his dreams of space leadership that he might do something stupid. But he fell into line after Caitlin and Asami, head on a swivel as he looked around for signs of the creatures while they progressed toward the exit.

They moved fast, bounding through the twisty passages, using their footprints to guide them, avoiding contact with the walls. A couple of small creatures wriggled here and there on the floor, but by the time they emerged out onto the crater’s inner slope, they had seen none of the larger ones. Asami hypothesized that perhaps the bigger individuals needed to stay deeper in the soil, that the larger they got, the deeper they ventured. She noted slightly higher oxygen readings in the soil samples taken from deeper underground.

“Can’t say as I give a crap about it right now, Asami,” Caitlin said. “I just want to get back to the LEM in one piece.”

“I won’t argue with that,” Asami said.

Blake led the way up the crater slope. As soon as they topped over the rim, they heard Dallas’ voice on the comm channel.

“Dallas to Outer Limits EVA party, do you copy, over?” he repeated himself.

Blake replied. “We copy you, Dallas. We just came out of the tunnels, now on the crater rim, over.”

He paused to look out over the plains while he waited for Dallas to respond. That their rover was still there was the first thing he confirmed. And in the distance: a gleam of light off of Black Sky’s LEM. But he saw no EVA activity between that ship and the rover, no space-suited figures slinking away after having sabotaged their ride.

“Suzette?”

“We couldn’t save her.”

“She wasn’t down in the pit?”

Blake flashed on the hideous monstrosity of the worm with Suzette infused into its physiology. He shuddered while he spoke. “Dallas, I’ll fill you in on the details when we get back to the LEM.”

“She’s not dead,” Caitlin blurted.

“What?” Dallas sounded uncharacteristically stunned.

Blake reached out and swatted Caitlin on the shoulder, glaring at her through their helmets. That didn’t shut her up, though.

“She’s...it’s so awful Dallas...we
saw
her, and she’s alive, technically, but...”

“She’s
alive
? Why didn’t you bring her back? Blake, what’s going on?”

Blake’s voice rose in pitch along with his anger. “I told you, Dallas, I’ll fill you in on the details when we get back. Suffice it to say for now that we could not rescue her. Now tell me about the status of the ship repairs,
over
.”

A lengthy pause ensued while Dallas digested this heavy development. Blake wondered if James Burton had overheard the radio message. “I concluded my troubleshooting of the guidance system, Blake, and I’m afraid the news is not good.” After a chorus of exasperated sighs, Dallas continued. “There’s an electronic part I need in order to fix it, and we do not carry a spare.”

Blake threw his head back in aggravation before responding. “Copy that, Dallas. Did you try contacting Mission Control to ask them to advise as to what, if any, components might be cannibalized out of other, less essential systems so that you might build the part we need?”

Caitlin nodded silently. It was a good idea, worth a try, since Mission Control had the man- and computer-power to comb through all of the ship’s specifications quickly, looking for a match with whatever resources were known to be aboard the spaceship. They could then instruct the astronauts accordingly. The approach had worked famously well on the ill-fated yet non-catastrophic Apollo 13 lunar mission.

But again, Dallas had bad news. “I tried, Blake, but was unable to establish communication, probably due to the dust storm at the spaceport they mentioned was approaching the last time I did talk to them.”

Silently, Caitlin corroborated this, but she didn’t want to bring up that she’d spoken to Ray, since he told her about Strat Knowles.

“But I’ve got another idea,” Dallas came back before Blake could voice his displeasure.

“Go ahead.”

They heard Dallas clear his throat. “Bear with me here, Blake. You might not like this on the surface, but I’ve thought it through and am convinced it’s our best shot at getting this system fixed in time.”

The phrase
in time
was an unspoken threat none of them needed to be reminded of, meaning that if they couldn’t fix the lander’s guidance system before their oxygen supply ran out, they’d have no choice but to attempt to rendezvous with the orbiting Command Module without it, a near-impossible task that almost surely would have them careening out into the void of space forever entombed in the LEM.

“Go ahead, Dallas.”

“You have a visual on Black Sky’s lander, correct?”

Blake glanced across the plain at his competitor’s LEM. “That’s affirmative.”

“You could drive over there and ask them for the part we need—an actuator—and then bring it back to me.”

A non-verbal passage of air issued from Blake’s mouth that made it clear he was not at all comfortable with this idea. They all knew that to have to approach Kennedy Haig, Blake’s longtime business rival, would be less than palatable for him.

“I know you don’t like asking for help, Blake,” Dallas said, “from anybody much less Kennedy, but we’re really in a bind here.”

“They sabotaged our rover!” Blake returned. “What makes you so sure they’d want to help us? Seems like quite the opposite to me.”

Caitlin voiced her opinion. “Blake, listen. Dallas is right. Obtaining that part is the easiest way to solve our problem. If Black Sky has one they’re willing to give us—and if they do, I bet they will— then that’s the simplest solution. Otherwise, what? At best, we wait some indeterminate period of time before communications with Mission Control are reestablished, and then explain the problem to them and wait for them to get back with a solution—assuming they can come up with one—and then we have to execute on it...”

She and Asami stared at him while Dallas reiterated that Black Sky was absolutely worth a try. “Please, for our sake, just put the bad blood between you and Kennedy aside for now in order to act like professionals and save our lives!” Caitlin pleaded.

Blake threw up his hands. “All right. Fine. We’ll go visit Black Sky. They’ll probably think we’re there about our rover, but then when I ask about the part instead, it’ll throw Kennedy for a loop, and I’ll enjoy that.”

The three of them started toward the rover until Dallas spoke again. “There’s one more thing I should tell you. About the creatures.”

“Go ahead.” Blake was pretty sure that he already knew all he wanted to know about those creatures. He resumed walking toward the rover, waving for the others to follow him.

“Martin had an incident with the specimen in the lab.”

“What happened?” Blake was becoming inured to bad news. It just kept coming, and he knew they couldn’t really handle much more, but at the same time he just didn’t seem to care. Whatever it was, he would deal with it. He had no choice.

“Martin says that the creatures—he says they may actually be worms although he’s not yet certain because he didn’t get a chance to dissect it—”

“Why didn’t he get a chance to dissect it? He didn’t want to kill it, I guess, since it’s the only one? Well, you can tell him not to worry about that; there are plenty more where that one came from.” Uncomfortable laughter from Caitlin and Asami.

“No, that’s not it. It exploded before he had the chance.”

“Exploded?”

“Yeah, as soon as he took the lid off the specimen container. Nothing left of it except liquid that sprayed all over his face.”

“
What
?!”

“Sounds like you heard me correctly.”

Blake reached the rover but he stood there without getting in while he concentrated on the radio exchange. “Is he okay?”

“No, he’s sick now.”

“He’s not praying yet, is he? Because if an atheist starts to pray, you know he’s sick as a dog, am I right?”

No one laughed. “It’s really not funny, Blake. He doesn’t look good at all, and seems to be getting worse. In fact, I have to get back to him now to evaluate possible surgical options, which is another reason to obtain this part from Black Sky—one less thing for me to deal with.”

“I’ll let you get back to it then,” Blake said, the closest he was likely to come to an apology.

“Real quick, let me tell you what Martin did find out before this happened. He said that these life forms will be attracted to high concentrations of oxygen, since oxygen is a limiting factor in their environment and they apparently have evolved to extract minute quantities of it from the soil.”

Asami nodded. “Makes sense, since all of the ones we’ve found so far have been underground.”

“Carry on.” Blake climbed behind the wheel of the rover while Caitlin took the shotgun seat and Asami got in the back. He pointed the vehicle toward the Black Sky lunar lander and accelerated.