Super Extra Grande (13 page)

Who said it was impossible? I’ve found the needle in the haystack.

Or at least I have a rough idea of where in the haystack it is.

Because localizing a few dozen kilos of metal, which is to say, all the magnetic material contained in the Juhungan bioship where Enti Kmusa and An-Mhaly are trapped, is still very different from being able to get there.

According to this ultrasensitive instrument, the girls and their ship are barely three hundred meters from here—but they might as well be in another galaxy. Between me and them lies nothing but sol-phase cytoplasm. And I’ve already learned how hard it is to force my way through that living flan.

For a second, despair overcomes me; I’m still drawing closer, and less than half a minute from now I’ll be as close as I can get to where they are, after which I’ll start moving away…

With them so close, could I really resign myself to not being able to…?

No way.

I’m not moving from this spot, to start with.

I deploy an anchor, a sort of metal claw on one end of a cable, which shoots out and sinks deep into the sol. It’ll stop me from moving till I can figure out how to get to Enti and An, who are now barely a hundred fifty meters from me…

Till I think of something…

It’s unfair. Have I swum so far just to drown here by the shore? Why won’t some brilliant idea pop into my head right now? Why can’t I be a holoseries hero, like the ones that always killed me even though they were so much smaller and weaker than me when I played giants on Anima Mundi? One of those characters who grow when the going gets tough?

I can’t crash into the sol protoplasm barrier using
Beagle
as a battering ram. I’d hardly get anywhere, and the crash alone could break my neck. If it isn’t broken already, I mean.

And I don’t have enough salt left to liquefy this much sol-phase cytoplasm by osmosis. There’s hundreds, maybe thousands of tons of the stuff.

I look desperately at the distance gauge; it’s showing 156 meters now… and growing.

Shit. I’m fuming. It’s enough to make you pull out a pistol and shoot yourself.

If I only had one…

Wait a sec!

That’s it!

A pistol.

I do have a pistol, and it’s a
HUGE
one.

Of course I didn’t bring any personal weapons aboard, whether sonic, projectile, or laser. What could I have done with one? Shoot Cosita? Blow out my brains before I died of asphyxiation or hunger if I got trapped in its cytoplasm?

We veterinarian biologists rarely fire anything but anesthetizing dart guns. Though, given my specialty, I’ve sometimes been tempted to use anesthetizing cannons.

But as it happens,
Beagle
is all one enormous gun—and I suspect it’s well loaded.

Who knows, but I won’t end up thanking that stuck-up Kurchatov for his intransigent militarism. And I’ll owe him one, precisely for not allowing me to remove the missiles from the magazines.

I just hope I’m able to fire them.

Let’s see…

On-board computer, what munitions am I carrying?

DATA UNAVAILABLE. TO UNLOCK OPERATIVE CAPABILITIES OF ON-BOARD WEAPON SYSTEMS, PLEASE INPUT PERSONAL PASSWORD OF GENERAL JUNICHIRO KURCHATOV. AWAITING INPUT.

Shit and triple shit. I’m sitting inside a gun loaded with God knows what, I don’t know where the safety is… and the computer has automatically defaulted to “don’t touch me unless you’re an officer” mode, blocking me from pulling the trigger.

Twelve characters? It could be anything… But I have to try. Try thinking like them. Kurchatov. Military. He once told me that Igor Kurchatov was the father of the Russian atomic bomb. Fix it up a little, and maybe…

Atomicbomber.

PASSWORD NOT RECOGNIZED.

No, it’s not going to be easy, like in a holoseries. But, twelve characters?

What if I misjudged him? What if all the disdain I thought he was showing for me was just envy and nostalgia for the good old times we had as students partying at Anima Mundi?

Let’s see, I’ll try it. If it’s a reference to veterinarian biology, what password would my old party buddy Juni Tacho pick? Ecology? Evolution? Seven and nine letters, too short. Cellularbiology? Fifteen, too long. What about my name? How ironic would that be… JanAmosSangan… No, could have worked, but it’s thirteen characters. Some professor, maybe—Argol Swendal? With no space it’s twelve letters. But forget it, Kurchatov hated symbolic logic, had a tutor assigned to help him both semesters. Raul Pineda? No, we only had classes with him in the fifth year, so Tacho never met him, and his name only has eleven characters even with the space. Besides, Juni Tacho didn’t bother going to classes very often; he was too busy hanging out in bars, cantinas, and other dives…

Heh.

Bars, cantinas, and dives. Could be. And it has exactly twelve letters.

But it’s so unserious. Well, it’s not like we were all that serious at Anima Mundi.

Besides, I imagine I’ll get three chances to guess the password.

I’m sure this can’t be right, either. In the holoseries, the hero always guesses it on the final attempt.

But before I get to my third try, I have to do my second.

Oceanography.

PASSWORD ACCEPTED. WELCOME ABOARD, GENERAL KURCHATOV. ITEMIZING MUNITIONS CAPABILITIES: 46 MISSILES. 8 THERMONUCLEAR WARHEADS (20 KILOTONS EACH). 16 THERMOBARIC WARHEADS. 22 DIRECTIONAL HIGH-IMPACT BUNKER BUSTERS. ALL READY FOR USE. DO YOU WISH TO LOAD ANY?

A gun? Nope:
Beagle
is a fucking arsenal. I can’t believe it. Eight thermonuclear warheads? 160 kilotons? They weren’t just planning to get rid of me and Enti and An if things went downhill… I doubt even Cosita would survive an explosion of that magnitude going off inside its guts. They could have blown a hole in the planet Brobdingnag itself. How ridiculous.

Military brass. Always ready to blow everything up, obsessed with the power of destruction. It must have driven them crazy to find creatures like laketons in the galaxy that would just laugh at all their weaponry!

Naturally, sooner or later they’d want to prove who’s who.

But now it’s me with my finger on the trigger. Twenty-two “directional high-impact bunker busters”? Let’s see if they can open a path for me through… exactly 159 meters of sol-phase cytoplasm.

Shamelessly impersonating Kurchatov, I set the target coordinates, order the missile launch, and there goes the first one… And I’m still acting as thoughtlessly as before. Will the missile even work in liquid?

Turns out it does. It uses gas jets for propulsion, sending it off amazingly fast. Now I just need an explosion.

BOOOOOM.

It’s made a hole almost ten meters deep. I launch the second.
BOOOOOM.
And the third.
BOOOOOM.
What if I launch two at once?
BOOOOOMBOOOOOM
…

They don’t make quite as spectacular an explosion when they go off together; better space them out a little bit.

BOOOOOM BOOOOOM BOOOOOM BOOOOOM BOOOOOM
…

Seventeen missiles later, whoever said that brute force never solved anything? Handled properly, it can perform miracles.

I suppose I’ll have to explain how I guessed General Kurchatov’s secret password to the gatekeepers from Military Security, and also answer for each of the missiles I just fired as if they were members of my own family.

I hope they cost less than my reward for rescuing the girls. Otherwise, I might be in serious trouble; the military doesn’t like it when folks mess around with their toys, much less their budgets.

But the main thing is that now I’ve blasted a way clear through for my
Beagle
.

I drive on, a little worried to find my path closing up this fast behind me.

Aftershocks rumble through the protoplasm. Maybe the explosions were directional, but Cosita must be asking itself what’s going on. I don’t think it comes down with digestive ailments very often.

But over there, at last, I see the digestive vacuole where my old assistants are trapped. One last little push with all engines blasting, and I punch through the membrane…

Well, that wasn’t so hard, after all.

I’m inside now.

Shit, what if I didn’t get here in time…

Cosita’s digestive enzymes are stronger than we thought. Or else laketons find the carbon-reinforced germanium foam in Juhungan bioships more tempting than we’d figured.

I can barely recognize the ship’s original form, it’s so deteriorated. Whole chunks are gone. The outer shell isn’t a shadow of its former self. And forget about it being hermetically sealed.

I gulp. Did Enti and An manage to…?

They did; there they are, alive and kicking. They must have detected me the moment I blasted my way through. They waddle over in their ultraprotective suits, which fortunately aren’t organic. The suits are too heavy to swim in, as I should have expected. At least they can still walk, leaning against the vacuole membrane for support.

I open the airlock—and they’re inside. A quick decontamination cycle, off with the suits, which are a little deteriorated after all—this vacuole is pure acid—and then…

I’m no fan of gratuitous pathos, so I won’t linger over a description of the scene that comes next: how they crawl and drag themselves into the cabin, how they hug me (An-Mhaly rubs her six pectoral protuberances all over me, and I don’t object), how they kiss me, cry, accuse each other, accuse their bosses, their subordinates, Cosita, the Galactic Community Coordinating Committee, and the universe itself.

The important thing is, they’re both unharmed, though pretty shaken up.

But no time for gushing; we’ve got to get out of here.

This second.

First, out of the vacuole—because even
Beagle
’s theoretically inert metal casing is under attack from the aggressive enzymes, and suffering for it. And it’s made from a smart alloy that can’t regenerate at all, unlike living tissue, unfortunately.

A short engine pulse—and we’re out.

The bad thing is that now, according to the radar densimeter, there aren’t any gel-phase currents within several kilometers of here.

Am I going to have to use more missiles? I never found brute force very convincing as a solution to all my problems. Besides, it would take too many…

I explain things to my two new passengers, since they always say three heads are better than one… and An-Mhaly comes up with the idea that might save us: Why worry about extracting yourself from a place when it’s easy enough to get yourself kicked out?

All we have to do is make ourselves so undesirable and uncomfortable that Cosita expels us of its own accord.

Seconds later, I discharge all the salt I have left, together with two tons of colchicine (an eighty-percent concentration), into the cytoplasm around
Beagle
.

I knew it would come in handy.

It’s like pouring gasoline onto an anthill and setting it afire.

Cosita writhes in pain. But can this giant really feel pain?

Then, in less time than it takes to tell the story, we’re encased in an excretory vacuole, and three minutes later we’re expelled.

Hurray for the instinct of self-preservation.

Free at last!

It was practically child’s play.

The rest of the rescue, including our return to orbit via the nanotube cables suspended from the Juhungan ships, is mere routine, little more than retracing my steps. Though to lift us in this gravity, the heroic
Beagle
has to give every remaining drop of its strength.

Hard to believe, but from the time Gardf-Mhaly first contacted me to the moment she and her milk cousin embraced (back-to-back, as is their people’s bizarre custom), only sixteen hours have passed.

And just thirty-two hours passed from the moment the human and the Cetian fell into Cosita’s alimentary vacuole to when they were freed.

I dare anybody to do it better—or faster.

*

All’s well that ends well, as somebody once said.

Enti Kmusa and An-Mhaly returned home, unharmed and on time, and no one guessed why they had taken so long or what they’d been up to in the meantime. The super-duper-top-secret negotiations between Cetians and Olduvailans remained under wraps.

The human, Cetian, and Juhungan generals and Coordinators breathed a sigh of relief.

And, as they had all hoped, after the two negotiators reached a fair (and ultraconfidential) solution to the New Olduvai/Canaan/Urgh-Yhaly-Mhan disagreement, hostilities ceased.

The fifty-five thousand illegal colonizers remaining on Canaan, feeling undefeated, agreed to relocate to the second planet of Theta Muscae. Not as green or as fertile as New Olduvaila, but at least nobody else had ever claimed it before.

They named it Mvambaland. And who did they unanimously elect president but Enti Kmusa. That didn’t even take me by surprise.

The Cetians finally occupied Urgh-Yhaly-Mhan. Their Assimilation master was An-Mhaly, whose chief adviser was her milk cousin, Coordinator Gardf.

General Junichiro Kurchatov tried to lecture me about my unauthorized use of the missiles, but since nobody asks a winner for receipts… Let’s just say, they took the cost of the seventeen bunker-buster missiles out of what they paid me for “valuable services rendered.”

Which added up to quite a discount, but still, twelve million solaria (“we threw un pequeño incentivo for you to mantenerlo todo hush-hush,” said Admiral William Hurtado) is enough money that I wasn’t going to start complaining about a minor though fundamentally unfair tax.

On the other hand, good thing I didn’t use the thermonuclear warheads or I’d still be paying for them.

Truth is, I wasn’t expecting medals or public recognition (a secret’s a secret), but what I liked least about the whole deal was not being able to talk about it with anyone.

Not with my parents, who, for their part, each kept on grumbling that I’d wasted my life mucking through slime and mucilage.

Not with the eight veterinarian biologists from different species who had “observed” the whole rescue mission from their four observation vessels orbiting Brobdingnag.