Forbidden Planets (10 page)
Wind shrieked and wailed and hooted, sometimes pushing them forward, sometimes pushing so hard against them that they had to lean into it and battle their way step by step. Dust scudded and skirled, and in every direction the world faded into a formless brown haze. The sun’s smeared blur hung low ahead of them, a fixed eye glowering through flying murk. Dust kept coating the faceplate of Bea’s helmet, and dust worked into the joints of her pressure suit. The suit’s left knee grew stiffer and stiffer, and an hour into the trek, Bea was walking with a pronounced limp.
“You keep up,” the Mary told her, “or we deal with you here and now.”
“Then you’ll have to fly yourself back into orbit.”
“It can’t be too hard,” the bodyguard said. “All it is, is straight up.”
John-Jane Smith told them to stop bickering and save their energy. “Our real work doesn’t begin until we reach the lander.”
Bea had a fix on the lander by radar and by its radio beacon, but because her mind was dulled by the sheer plodding labor of walking, the featureless haze, and the unchanging position of the sun, she was surprised when she saw a fat cone loom out of blowing dust. At first sight, the lander looked intact, squatting four-square on angled legs above the scorched pit its retrorocket had burned into the ground. But the hatchway to the lifesystem hung open, and after John-Jane Smith went up the ladder and clambered inside, it gave a shrill cry, half surprise, half despair. Bea dodged past the Mary and swarmed up the ladder, swung through the little cupboard of the airlock (the inner hatch was open too), and found the neuter stooped over flight controls that had been smashed and broken in some mad frenzy. A mantling of dust covered every surface, and handfuls of cabling had been ripped loose from opened access panels. There was still a trickle of power from the batteries—barely enough to power the beacon—but there was no way the lander could be repaired, and a quick inspection revealed that its oxygen and fuel had been vented.
After Bea told John-Jane Smith and the Mary this, the bodyguard drew her reaction pistol, and Bea closed her eyes, hoping for a quick death. But with a scream of frustration the bodyguard fired past her into the howling storm, then turned around and stalked away.
“We will find Mr. Palmer,” John-Jane Smith said, once again calm and decisive. “Mr. Palmer will know what to do.”
Bea thought it was unlikely that the surviving member of the expedition—Linval Palmer or one of his companions—would be any help at all. It was obvious that one of them had wrecked the lander, and it had been done recently too—when she’d checked out the lander via the uplink before beginning the descent to the planet, all its systems had been working just fine. It had probably been wrecked after her gig had landed, by someone who not only didn’t want to be rescued but wanted to strand their would-be rescuers as well. Someone who had left the beacon working, to draw them here. . . .
The snap of a shot cut through the noise of the wind. The Mary had fired her pistol again. And this time she had killed something.
The bodyguard held it up for inspection. Half a meter of pink muscular rope armored in ridged translucent scales like fingernails, ending in a red rag of smashed flesh. The rest of it was spattered on the ground, already half buried by blowing dust. Its blunt head lacked a mouth and had bunches of coarse black bristles where its eyes should be.
‘It wrapped itself around my ankle,” the Mary said. “Gave me a nasty electrical shock too. Would have paralyzed someone without my training. Stay frosty. There may be more of them.”
Green lights of a headup display ran up inside the faceplate of John-Jane Smith’s helmet; the neuter pointed aslant the bleary eye of the sun. “The entrance to the tunnel system Linval was investigating when he disappeared is in that direction. That is where we have the best chance of finding him.”
As she trudged after the neuter and the bodyguard, Bea’s thoughts ran quick and cool, like beads of water down a windowpane. There really was nothing like the prospect of imminent death to concentrate the mind. She knew that there should be no life anywhere on Hades bigger than a microbe, and although her knowledge of biology was pretty basic, she was certain that an animal as large as the snake-thing had no business being here unless there was an entire ecosystem where snake-things could live. Most of the rumors about Elder Culture technology sold by Jackaroo traders were bogus; the Jackaroo were expert swindlers with a tradition more than a million years old. Before first contact, they’d infiltrated Earth’s information systems and started a global war, then convinced the survivors to exchange rights to most of the Solar System for the specifications for a basic torch fusion drive and access to the impoverished wormhole system of the First Empire. It was little consolation that they had pulled this kind of trick many times before. At least a dozen Elder Cultures had left their traces on the asteroid reefs of the First Empire before ascending to wherever it was ascendent species went. Still, around one in a hundred of the rumors about functional Elder Culture tech sold by Jackaroo traders to the credulous, desperate, or plain crazy were authentic, just enough to keep humans coming back for more. Linval or his brother must have found something in the tunnel city after all, and it had driven them mad. . . .
Bea kept her speculations to herself, limping up a long slope littered everywhere with wind-smoothed pebbles, a dry beach waiting for its sea. She noticed that the Mary was limping too, and asked if she was all right.
“Snaky fucker gave me a bad shock. I’ll live.”
The Mary’s voice was tight with pain and laced with self-loathing. It gave Bea a little hope, although she hated herself for it.
The entrance to the tunnel city was a shallow cirque that narrowed and gradually closed around them as they walked down it. The sound of the wind died back, and the haze of dust lessened. At last they could see that they were descending a long tube with smooth black walls that curved up to meet ten meters overhead. Their shadows were cast ahead of them by the sun, which glowered straight into the entrance. Dust had fallen out of the still air in high, silken heaps and ridges heaped one after the other across the wide floor, and the Mary discovered footprints leading away between the shoulders of two sinuous ridges.
John-Jane Smith couldn’t keep the satisfaction out of its voice, saying that it had been right all along, saying that they would find Mr. Palmer and everything would be fine.
Bea thought that the footprints could be anyone’s. She also thought that, like the beacon, they could be the bait for a trap. Stripped of her intimate contact with her ship, her merely human senses felt blunted, and she had the eerie feeling that something was watching them in the darkness beyond the reach of their helmet lamps. It didn’t help her nerves that John-Jane Smith kept calling to Linval Palmer over the radio.
After about ten minutes of steady walking, the dust heaps smaller now, not much more than waist high, the trail of footprints ended, and the tunnel split into two. While John-Jane Smith and the Mary were casting about, Bea said that if anyone wanted to be rescued they would have answered by now.
“We aren’t going to stumble over them by accident. There are over a thousand kilometers of tunnels down here. It would take weeks to explore the entire city, and we only have a few hours.”
John-Jane Smith said, “These are the tunnels Mr. Palmer set out to explore just before we lost contact with him. He is in here somewhere. I know it.”
Bea said, “That’s hardly a rational attitude.”
For a moment she was tempted to tell John-Jane Smith about her plan to survive this. But then the Mary told her to be quiet, adding, “I should kill you. You waste air we need.”
“We are not murderers,” John-Jane Smith said.
The bodyguard ignored the neuter and raised her pistol and aimed it at Bea. Her hand was trembling lightly, and her voice was trembling too; she must have been more badly hurt than she had admitted. “We’ll all be dead soon, so what does it matter if she dies now?’
Bea fought the urge to run—the bodyguard would cut her down at once.
The moment stretched. Then John-Jane Smith said, its voice low and urgent, “I see something.”
Bea turned to look to where the neuter was pointing, saw a fugitive flicker of red light a little way down the right-hand tunnel, and felt a chill wave climb her back, tighten around her neck, her scalp.
John-Jane Smith called out to Linval Palmer again and began to trudge toward the flickering light.
“Make no more trouble,” the Mary said, and forced Bea to follow at pistol-point.
Bea’s first thought—really it was more of a hope than a thought—was that the fugitive light was some kind of static discharge. But it was too regular and too bright, and it quickly resolved into hair-thin lines that blinked from one part of the tunnel to another in a nervous web. Like message lasers, Bea thought, gripped by another chill. She flicked on her pressure suit’s night-sight capability, enabled the movement tracker. Almost immediately the tracker caught something and replayed it in a pop-up screen. Something hand-sized scuttling into the base of a heap of dust, emitting a brief thread of red light as it buried itself. Bea played it over again and was about to call out a warning when John-Jane Smith, who had almost reached the beginning of this display, suddenly turned aside, trotting toward the curving wall, kicking through a knee-high dust ridge.
Five bodies lay half buried in the dust, laid out neatly side by side, wrapped in shrouds of some kind of polymer with the grain of human skin, thickened here and there in callus-like ridges. Bea enabled infrared and saw that they were a few degrees warmer than ordinary human body temperature, much hotter than the ambient temperature of the tunnel, glowing an even white from head to foot.
John-Jane Smith touched the nearest body with the tip of its boot and hastily stepped backward when it jerked and shuddered. The other bodies jerked too, like puppets pulled by the same string.
The Mary’s reaction pistol fired, a flare of light filling the tunnel, a thunderclap rolling away into darkness. It wasn’t a snake-thing she’d killed this time, but something like a hand-sized crab. Most of it had been smashed to a bloody ooze, but enough of it remained to see that it had a bony shell, two pairs of knuckled limbs tipped with what were very definitely fingernails, and a thick sensory stalk at the front bearing a single blue, human eye.
Bea realized what it was and felt her gorge rise. Red threads were flicking all around them. The Mary was pointing her pistol this way and that; she gave a shout of triumph and fired again. Ridges of dust erupted, and hand-crabs shot toward her from every side, swarming up her legs, her torso. She swung completely around as she swatted at them, and Bea threw herself to the floor just before the reaction pistol fired again, three quick shots that screamed overhead and knocked chunks from the tunnel wall. John-Jane Smith shrieked, and the Mary was down, her legs kicking, crabs covering her torso and her helmet. White vapor jetted when an air line gave way.
John-Jane Smith had fallen to its knees and was clutching its midsection. Blood leaked through its gloved fingers. Hand-crabs were stalking toward Bea over a ridge of dust, blue eyes jerking to and fro on thick upraised stalks, fixing on her. Bea took a step toward the neuter, and the hand-crabs stepped sideways too, uptilted rear ends firing threads of red light from an offset bump that would be the wrist bone if they were real hands, every hand-crab linked in a flickering web, more and more of them emerging from the mounds and ridges of dust. John-Jane Smith knelt in a tightening circle of hand-crabs . . . And beyond the neuter, beyond the five bodies in their cocoons of warm skin, stood a human figure.
A man clad in only the skintight one-piece garment worn under pressure suits, arms folded across his chest, black face gleaming in the light of Bea’s helmet-lamp. Was he smiling? Bea didn’t stay to find out. She turned and ran as fast as the bad knee joint in her pressure suit would allow, shrieking in fright and almost falling over when a flurry of snake-things shot out of a dust heap. She managed to swerve around them and ran on toward the bleary sunlight that filled the end of the tunnel.
It took her more than four hours to reach her gig. She half expected to find it as wrecked as Linval Palmer’s lander, but the hatch was firmly dogged, and inside everything was as she had left it. She powered up the lifesystem, patched the leaky hatch seal with duct tape, and collapsed onto one of the couches, breathing hard inside her suit and listening to her pulse thump in her ears, while Hades’ unbreathable atmosphere was flushed out and the cabin was repressurized with the standard oxygen/nitrogen mix. Then she unlatched her helmet and raised the ship on the radio.
Tor Torqvist answered, cheerful, impossibly sane. Bea told him that John-Jane Smith and the bodyguard had put themselves out of the picture but refused to go into details. The whole story could wait until she was off this dusty hellhole—if she was allowed to escape, that is. Tor told her that the Mary had locked him in a cabin, and he’d sealed the air vents with his clothes, accessed the ship’s lifesystem via the cabin’s air-conditioning unit, and increased the partial pressure of carbon dioxide in the air circulating through the rest of the ship.
“I gave her ten minutes, then cracked the door manually and dashed to the nearest emergency station and strapped on a breathing mask. The vicious little bitch was out cold on the bridge. I suppose she thought she could control the ship from there.”
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