Magic Dirt: The Best of Sean Williams (19 page)

Without looking around him, he crawled through PB1 to the airlock. Mindful of his last experience there, he reached only an arm inside and tugged the pressure suit free. It took him five minutes to shake it thoroughly—thereby convincing himself that it was unoccupied—then another thirty seconds to unpop the seals. He forced himself to take it slowly from there, resealing the suit with care, limb by limb. Before thumbing down the last seal, stretching from his right shoulder to his left hip, he inserted haemoceramic rebreathers in their internal pockets.

He felt better inside the suit. Not quite as naked, more confident of himself. He lacked the flexibility required to hunt anything, let alone a creature as nimble as a spider, but that didn’t matter. For the first time in what seemed like days, he felt safe.

On the heels of that thought came another. Did he really need to kill it now? He could always seal the suit and black out the visor; that way he’d never know if the spider was anywhere near him. He could survive the rest of the trip that way, surely?

No. Not knowing was in some ways worse than knowing. Even if it came nowhere near him, he’d lie immobile for—he checked the timer automatically—still well over six hours, imagining it crawling all over his suit, bare centimetres from his skin.

His scalp crawled at the very thought, as though the air had turned icy.

He had to kill it. There was no other option.

He reached into the airlock for the helmet and clipped it firmly to the neck-ring of the suit. Then he slithered back through the crawl-spaces to the cockpit and gathered his bag, which he zipped into a thigh pocket. He quickly ran through the whole ship, making sure any loose items were firmly strapped down or sealed away. Anywhere that had been open since he had last seen the spider, he left open. He didn’t want to give it anywhere to hide.

When he had finished, he went back into the airlock and attached one end of a twenty-metre tether to the metal mesh inside and the other end to his suit. Then he strapped himself across the legs and chest, just to make certain.

With one arm free, he could just reach the outer lock control with its red LED display. A jab opened its control panel. Inside were a large number of yellow and red buttons barely wide enough for the stubby fingertips of his glove. Dredging the codes from his early days of pilot training, he tapped in a complex sequence of commands.

When he had finished, the LED had changed from SECURE to

10, which in turn changed to 9. Then 8. Then 7.

He wrapped his free arm through the strap around his chest, and unconsciously held his breath.

2. 1. 0.

With an ear-splitting bang the outer lock blew open. A hurricane of air roared past him, carrying with it all the unstowed scraps he had missed while preparing the cabin for evacuation. He cried out as the escaping atmosphere buffeted him from side to side, tossing him like the last defiant leaf on a storm-swept tree. Something struck his shoulder on its way out into the void, and he prayed the suit would hold.

The strain proved too great for the strap across his chest. When it snapped, the torrent of air instantly dragged him through the outer door. He shouted again and scrabbled for a handhold on the lip of the airlock. Luckily the straps holding his legs held firm, and only his head and shoulders swung out of the ship—but that was bad enough. He closed his eyes tight, afraid to see the imminence of the Void.

Although it seemed to take forever, the rush of air gradually subsided and the sound of his own cries rose above the noise. He relaxed his death-grip on the hatch and let the straps around his legs take all his weight. A few last wisps of air rushed past, like someone running a hand gently up his suit from toes to neck, then everything was silent.

When he opened his eyes, he discovered his faceplate dusted with frozen air. He wiped it away with one shaky, gloved hand. His body felt as though someone had run a pneumatic hammer along it. He would have some fast talking to do to Traffic Control when he resealed the ship, and the cost of the air and missing equipment would be debited from his salary, but—

But the Earth was full, and the spider was a knobbled, twisted crystal headed in the only direction that mattered—away from him. That made it all worthwhile.

Weak in every muscle, he leaned forward to grab the edge of the airlock and hauled himself in.

It was at that moment that something black slid across his field of vision. Puzzled, he raised a hand to wipe it off his visor. It remained where it was; only a centimetre from his nose.

Inside
the helmet.

He froze for a split-second, then clenched his eyes shut. He wanted to scream, but didn’t dare open his mouth. All that emerged from lips was a strangled whimper.

While his body remained paralysed with fear, his mind went into overdrive. He saw the single strand of web leading from the suit’s neck ring to the wall of the airlock—not the other way around, as he had first assumed. He imagined it retreating to the helmet every time he had threatened it, resulting in his complete inability to find it anywhere else.

Part of him wanted to laugh. Instead of laughter, though, a scream boiled inside him.

He panicked. His hands twisted the helmet along the neck ring and lifted it off in one smooth movement.

A brief explosion of air hissed around his neck and face and blew the helmet out of his hands. Surprised, he went to gasp and discovered that he couldn’t.

Cold terror sliced into his heart and his brain. He lurched forward, already feeling dizzy, and punched the largest button on the airlock control. The external emergency hatch slid silently shut. Butterfly wings of unconsciousness brushed against his mind as he pushed the blue button at the bottom of the panel and air gushed in from small vents by his feet. He scrabbled down to put his mouth against one—but his movements were too jerky and he slipped away, limbs waving uselessly in space. The pressure to breathe in again was almost unbearable, and still he couldn’t. His left hand knocked against something. He twisted, saw the helmet.

Oh, Christ, no!

He had no choice. Desperate for air, his brain forced him to retrieve the helmet and place it back on his head. He pulled it around the ring lock, and felt, then heard, the rebreathers releasing their oxygen reserve now that the suit was sealed. He counted to ten, then sucked in a lung-full.

Something crawled along his scalp. He finally screamed. The spider bustled, startled by the sudden change in pressure and the noise, and scuttled down Alek’s neck, then down the small of his back.

Alek sucked in more air, screamed again. He bumped against the outer hatch and had barely enough sense left to kick against it. He rocketed out of the airlock and into
Whyalla
’s living area, bouncing off the privy hatch as he went. He turned, grabbed the lip of the airlock’s inner hatch, and wrenched it shut. The LED blinked for a moment, then read SECURE once more.

His hands tore at the helmet a second time and he hurled it aside, not caring where it hit. The air was thin but breathable. He unsealed the suit, stripped it off and flung it after the helmet. Then he screamed again.

Not from fear this time, but from pain. His right thumb felt as though it had been slammed by a hammer.

He didn’t want to look, but couldn’t stop himself. The spider, frantic and distressed by its treatment, was perched on his hand, its legs curled around the side of his palm, its black cephalothorax rising and falling as it plunged its fangs into his thumb again and again. He stared at it, paralysed by revulsion. The spider’s fangs were strong enough to stab through his nail. Blood spat from the tiny wounds and formed globules that orbited his hand like miniature suns.

How long he stared it, body frozen while his mind spun around an increasingly unstable axis, he didn’t know. It seemed like an eternity. And when he finally moved, it was purely on instinct. He shrieked and flung his arm forward, whipping the spider off his hand and away from him. It slapped into the airlock hatch and seemed to shrivel in on itself. Its small body drifted aft.

The pain in Alek’s hand was intense enough to bring him back to his senses. He brought his thumb automatically to his mouth, but he stopped himself in time. He couldn’t suck on it: it was filled with poison! Instead he used his left hand to manoeuvre himself to a first-aid kit, and wrapped a pressure bandage around the thumb and hand. He waited, staring at the bound limb, for the pain to ebb. It got worse instead.

He forced himself to be still, to ride with the pain rather than fight it. Only then did he notice how cold he was. That was not unexpected, given the emergency repressurisation the clipper had just undergone, but it didn’t seem to be getting warmer. Colder still, if anything.

He pushed himself one-handed up to the cockpit and slipped into the acceleration couch. There was a single red light flashing on the life-support display warning of an error in the clipper’s thermostat control system. One of the temperature sensors had been damaged, throwing the automated system out of equilibrium. It was doing its best to maintain livable conditions inside the clipper but was hampered by the imperfect data.

Precisely when the sensor had been damaged, he didn’t know. He remembered feeling chilly before donning the suit, what felt like hours ago. The plunge in temperature might have begun even then; decompression would have only made it worse.

Scratches on an instrument panel from his attempt to kill the spider caught his eye, and he remembered the ‘weird life-support readings’ Armstrong Base had reported. Had he taken the time to check what Traffic Control had meant, he might have fixed the problem before it became serious.

The astrogation screen showed him that
Whyalla
was in Earth’s shadow. Unless he could manually reset the system, it was going to get awfully cold inside the clipper, and soon. In fact, he could already feel goosebumps forming along his arms.

But not that soon,
he told himself. He called up the clipper’s internal monitoring screen, saw that the temperature was still eighteen Celsius. He tried to read the help files on how to recalibrate the thermostat, but his vision was getting blurry. He wiped his eyes with the back of his left hand, felt moisture.

That’s strange. Despite the goose bumps, he was starting to sweat. His heart beat a little faster.

Calm down, he told himself. You’re just reacting to events.

Alek closed his eyes, felt tears squeeze out and roll down his cheeks. He tried to separate his mind from his body, put some distance between
here
and
now.

But he couldn’t help noticing that he was suddenly salivating, and that his heart beat was still increasing. He could feel the sweat cooling on his skin.

Or
I’m reacting to the bite.

“Oh, God,” Alek murmured, and tried to reach the radio controls. His good hand started twitching as he extended it. He jerked it back and held it against his chest for a moment. He reached forward a second time, and the twitching returned twice as had as before.

He started to cry, adding real tears to the moisture weeping from his eyes. Through the haze he noticed the radio receiver light blinking on and off at him. Had he managed to reach it? He couldn’t be sure. Jack-knifing forward, he used a clumsy fist to flick the receiving switch.

“Alek! Alek! Can you hear me?” Ngairi’s voice.

He tried to speak, but couldn’t form any words.

“Alek, you have to listen to me! The bio-match program has a definite ID. What you have on board is not
Atrax robustus,
but
Atrax formidabilis.
Listen to me Alek, this is important. The species are similar in most respects, except that the
A
.
formidabilis female
is the deadlier sex, and not the male ...”

Tell me something I don’t know,
Alek thought. Again, he tried to speak, but his tongue was twitching inside his mouth and he could make no intelligible sounds.

Ngairi’s voice went on. Alek’s mind no longer registered the words. He was able to wipe his eyes one more time, and saw that ice was beginning to form on the inside rim of the cockpit’s view ports. It was getting very cold indeed, now. If the poison didn’t kill him, then the dropping temperature would.

He had to change his trajectory, try to get
Whyalla
out of the Earth’s shadow for at least a short while. If he could only get to the navigation over-ride computer, he could log in a path that would insert the clipper in a low Lunar orbit, letting it pass through sunlight long enough to stave off a freezing death, and hopefully long enough for help to arrive from Armstrong Base.

Or the suit, he thought. Got to get into the suit at the very least...

He gathered together his last vestige of strength and forced himself out of the acceleration couch. His muscles were now spasming, not simply twitching. Bile filled his mouth, and he spat it out. He was thankful he hadn’t eaten recently, because he wouldn’t have had the energy to eject any vomit from his larynx.

The spasms were almost comic in their effect. Alek was too scared to laugh. He tried to orientate himself, but his vision was almost non-existent.

Oh, no, don’t let it end like this. Please, God, not like this.

He reached out a hand, stretched his fingertips as far as he could extend them—