Luna (11 page)

23 | Once More unto the Breach

Caitlin walked over to the control alcove, where Blake and James both stood with arms folded. Dallas occupied the console seat, but currently faced away from the controls. Caitlin could tell that Dallas had that look, the one that was as close to concern as she had ever seen him come. Just an intense sort of concentration. Blake addressed her as she walked up to them, while Dallas nodded to acknowledge her but then turned around to the console.

“We need to get back into the tunnels to look for Suzette.”

Caitlin met his gaze. “I agree. But at the same time, Blake, if our oxygen supply was almost out by the time we got back here, then hers is out by now for sure.”

Blake nodded. “I know that. However, there is a stash of Outer Limits equipment from earlier missions up here, including extra EVA suits and full oxygen canisters, some spare electronic parts.”

“Where are those?”

“Deep in the tunnels. Deeper than we went today. But she might know how to get to them, or come across them by accident. She went deeper than we did today, that’s for sure.”

“If she even survived that...fall,” Caitlin said, not sure how to describe what had happened to Suzette in that hellish video scene.

Blake shrugged. “As long as there’s a chance—and with the additional gear, I think there is—then we have to assume she survived until we know otherwise.”

James Burton nodded at this.

Dallas turned back around from the console. “I can’t reach mission control. Transmission’s not getting through.”

Caitlin told him about her conversation with Ray, omitting mention of his suspicions in front of Blake, but telling him about the dust storm and the static-ridden connection.

Dallas nodded. “I’ll try again later after doing some more work on the ship repairs. First, let me get a look at Suzette’s video.”

Blake handed the imaging device to him, but Burton leaned over his shoulder, intent on watching the content. Blake put a hand over the screen.

“I’m not sure you need to see this, Mr. Burton. It’s intellectual property belonging to Outer Limits.”

James narrowed his eyes. “The fact that I know it exists means it’s going into my report, regardless. If someone higher up than me wanted to, they could demand to see it and subpoena you if necessary.” Blake fumed and looked like he was about to retort but Burton kept going. “Not only that, but my personal safety is at stake up here, too, so I’d say I have a right to see it from that standpoint alone, to better understand what I’ve gotten myself into.”

Blake reared his head back in frustration. “You’re not going back to the tunnels with us, Mr. Burton. So your safety is not at stake.”

“Still not true.” Burton raised his pointer finger in the air. “If something happens to you two—especially her—” Burton added, taking great pleasure in emphasizing the fact that Blake himself wasn’t actually needed for operating the spacecraft, “then I am in danger. I bet Dallas could fly this thing up to the Command Module on his own if he absolutely had to, but I doubt it’s an optimal situation, am I right?” Burton stared directly at Dallas, who nodded matter-of-factly.

“He’s right.”

“I know that!” Blake’s face reddened. “But we need to make an effort to find Suzette, damn it! One more trip!”

“Why can’t Asami or Martin go?” James asked.

Blake shrugged. “They can go, if we can pry them out of the lab with their discovery of a lifetime, that is. But I can’t go back with only them. Martin is a biologist, for Christ’s sake. Of the two, Asami has more lunar experience, but she’s still not an astronaut. Caitlin is specially trained on lunar EVAs, including the rovers, and that’s who I want coming with me.”

“Jesus, what is this?” Dallas cringed as he watched Suzette’s video.

Caitlin pointed to the screen. “Looks like the floor just opened up.”

“I see that. But…what’s in there? It looks...”

No one had any words for him, himself included. Those who had already seen it watched the footage again to see if they could notice anything they had missed the first time around, like any sign of Suzette herself, but there was nothing of the sort.

Blake grabbed the video camera from Dallas as soon as the recording ended. “Now that we’ve reviewed the footage again, it’s time to get underway. Caitlin, suit up, please.”

She exchanged a wordless glance with Dallas before turning on a heel and heading for the airlock. But then she spun back around and directed her gaze to Blake. “What happened to Strat Knowles?”

The Outer Limits CEO, who had been looking at the video machine, looked up at Caitlin, his expression unreadable. “Strat? He left us to start his own company. Was doing quite well last I’d heard. Why—he’s not working for Black Sky, is he?” He gave a lopsided grin.

“No. Seriously, Blake. What’s the name of his company?”

“Why are you bringing this up now? Never mind. Tell you what.” He looked at his watch. “I’ll tell you the whole story on the way back to the crater, but we need to move now for Suzette’s sake. Okay?”

Caitlin said nothing but nodded and this time left the alcove for good. James Burton stared at her while she walked away, while Blake watched him.

“Still not able to reach Mission Control.” Dallas’ back was turned to them as he worked the radio. James and Blake eyed one another behind his back. After an awkward stare-down that neither man looked away from, Blake spoke.

“Why don’t you join us on the EVA, Mr. Burton? Since you weren’t really uncomfortable out there after all, right?”

James shook his head. “I’ve already seen how the moonwalks work, and this time I want to stay in the lander to monitor the process of repairing the ship.” At this, Dallas froze for a second but he said nothing and soon returned to pressing buttons on the console.

“Fine, Mr. Burton. Dallas, I’m going to the lab to see if Asami and Martin wish to accompany Caitlin and me on the EVA.”

“Got it, Blake. Let me know when you’re prepped for EVA so I can check you out.”

Blake glared briefly at Burton before leaving for the lab.

24 | Encounters of the Last Kind

Martin adjusted the overhead lamp to better illuminate the specimen container now sitting on the small lab bench. The lab wasn’t a proper laboratory; there wasn’t the space, but instead was another alcove curtained off from the ship’s main cabin. On the opposite side of the cramped lab, Asami worked on the only other bench, analyzing the moon rock and regolith samples she’d collected from the tunnels and crater.

Martin hunched over to stare eye level at the...
creature
, he’d taken to calling it, for lack of a better term at this point...which had burrowed into the moon dust so that only a small part of it was visible pressed up against the side. “Let me get a look at you, little guy...”

He picked up the box and upended it, forcing the creature out of the dust, where it immediately wriggled its way beneath it again. “It absolutely does not like being out of the dust,” Martin concluded.

“I’ve got my first test results on the soil samples from the tunnels.” Asami glanced at the readout of a flow injection analyzer.

“And?” Martin turned around.

“They’re somewhat higher in oxygen content than the samples taken from our landing site.” Both of the scientists were well-aware that although there is no oxygen in the moon’s atmosphere, there is a small amount dissolved in its soil.

Martin turned back around to look at the organism, examining it closely. “I wonder if it may extract oxygen from the soil.”

“How would it do that?”

“I note a series of frill-like appendages, sort of hair-like structures. Perhaps they could be something analogous to a fish’s gill? A ‘sand gill,’ if you will?”

“Interesting...” He and Asami discussed the merits of this theory for a time, until Martin focused on the actual specimen again.

“You know, it hasn’t moved for some time now.” He upended the box again, which had been causing it to wriggle wildly back into the dust, but this time it remained still. Although it gave him a better view of the entire creature at once—with its bristling ‘sand gills’ running its entire length, and its apparently segmented body—he was concerned that it had died.

“Shock of being transported?” Asami suggested, examining a rock sample under a microscope.

“Possibly. But what I fear—if it does in fact obtain its oxygen from the soil by whatever mechanism—is that by now it’s consumed all available oxygen in the cube.”

Asami turned to stare at the creature as she replied. “It has been in there for some time now.”

“Yes, and just as a fish in too small a bowl or tank with no air added to the water from a pump will run out of oxygen and die, I fear that could be happening with this little fellow.”

“Hmmm...” Asami pointed to her bag of collected regolith. “We could add some more dust to its container and see if that revives it.”

Martin nodded, still staring at the unmoving creature. He put his hand on the lid and was about to remove it when Blake and Caitlin entered the lab space.

“Hello, Martin, I’m sorry to interrupt your work.” The exobiologist paused, his hand still on the box. Asami turned around from her rock samples while Blake continued.

“Caitlin and I are heading out on an EVA back to the tunnels to look for Suzette in the hope that she found the equipment stash there and may still be alive. We need for one of you two to accompany us.”

Asami stood from her lab stool. “Martin should continue working with the specimen. I’ll go. Not only that, but...” She paused, as if uncomfortable about voicing her thoughts.

“What?” Blake asked.

“I feel bad now about what happened with the camera during our takeoff. I was a little hard on her...”

“Don’t worry, you’ll have the chance to patch things up with her after we get her out of there,” Blake said, before turning to Martin without skipping a beat. “I wish I could hear what you’ve learned so far, but for Suzette’s sake we need to get going.”

“Understood.”

Blake and Caitlin left the lab with Asami. Martin turned back to the alien specimen.

“Now, where were we, little fellow?” He frowned as he noticed the life form was still motionless on top of its familiar dust. He slid the bag of Asami’s lunar dust closer to the container so that he’d be able to have the lid off the minimal amount of time for the transfer. He thought about other ways to introduce the dust into the box without opening the lid—what if the germs from the astronauts’ exhalations somehow contaminated the specimen? But short of exotic drilling tools and specialized tubing and suction equipment that he didn’t have access to—not to mention time to use, since the creature could be dying—he decided the best way to proceed was a rapid manual transfer of the dust into the container via the open lid.

Martin readied a scoop of dust to pour inside. Then he removed the lid. But by the time he raised the scoop laden with lunar regolith and eyeballed the specimen again, he saw that it was swelling rapidly. In a flash he realized it: the pressurized air environment of the lunar lander was so oxygen rich compared to the animal’s lunar soil environment that it had saturated it to the point that its cells were bursting.

He dropped the scoop and moved to put the lid back on the specimen box.

Too late.

The strange animal ballooned in size until its body nearly filled the entire cube, particles of dust sprinkling into the air outside the container from its swelling body. Then it burst, exploded, really, the entire organism forcefully coming apart and releasing its inner contents.

A bluish liquid splashed across Martin’s face, freezing to the touch. He instinctively backed away from the creature, spitting as he felt liquid enter his mouth although it had no taste or effect that he could discern. He almost tripped but regained his balance. He stared at the sample container. The moon animal was now nothing more than a messy sludge of strange matter slopped all over the lab bench. Martin brought a latex-gloved finger to his face and it came away wet with the bluish liquid. He brushed his fingers through his hair and felt it clumping together with the sticky wetness.

He brought his hand up to his face again, over his eyes. At least he had his clear plastic safety goggles on. He went to a supply cabinet with a shatterproof plastic door and stared at his reflection. Weird, he thought. The glasses were covered in the blue stuff, but he could still see right through it even though it looked blue. And
Jesus
. That thing had exploded all over him. He looked like he’d been sprayed with silly string or some kid’s art supplies.

He spotted the chemical shower hanging in a corner and ran to it.

25 | Now You See It, Now You Don’t

“Caitlin, can you slow down?” Asami bounced around in the back of the lunar rover, descending in slow motion back to the seat with each bounce.

“Sorry, I know I’m going a little fast, but Suzette’s life is at stake, Asami. I’d do the same for you, and hope you would for me, too.”

Blake pointed ahead at the rover tracks they’d left earlier. “A little extra speed makes sense in this case, Asami. We’ll be fine.”

They approached the crater and Caitlin brought the rover to a stop on the slope, but not as high up as before. “I don’t think I need to spell it out for you what would happen if our transportation gets tampered with this time,” Caitlin said, exiting the vehicle. “So better to walk a little farther up the hill, because a roll from this height might not be catastrophic for our little buggy.”

Blake and Asami agreed and the three of them trudged up the crater’s outer slope, following their earlier tracks. They crested the rim and took a look out over the plain below, where the Black Sky lunar lander squatted in the distance. They saw no unusual activity and so continued on their way down into the crater.

On reaching the tunnel entrance, they paused and conducted a check of their suits. Satisfied the life support systems were in working order, Blake looked into the tunnel system, his headlamp illuminating the dark passage. He paid close attention to the walls and floor, but detected nothing unusual. He spoke into his helmet transmitter. “Suzette, I don’t know if you can hear me, but we are coming into the tunnels after you again. If you can hear, please transmit something. Keep trying, your transmissions may be intermittent, over.”

He waved an arm to Asami and Caitlin and the trio ventured into the subterranean world once again. They set out to find the ruptured wall into which Suzette had vanished. Following their earlier footprints helped to a degree, but they had to be careful not to retrace their earlier dead ends. The familiarity due to this being their second trip inside, as well as the overriding sense of purpose at rescuing Suzette, or at least locating her body, drove them forward, and they soon found themselves in the general vicinity of the spot.

Asami stared at the ground, analyzing the pattern of footprints leading off in various directions. “I could swear this was the place. “ But when she looked up at the wall—at both walls, but especially on the side where she had expected the opening to be—it was solid. “This is it, isn’t it? Blake?”

The Outer Limits leader stood in place while looking around. “Yes. I do think it is, but this...” He reached out and put a hand on the wall where they thought the opening had been. “This obviously isn’t it, there’s no opening here.”

The three of them looked around in bewilderment. “We should have taken a GPS point,” Asami said.

“GPS doesn’t work underground.” This from Caitlin.

“So we’re lost.” Blake slammed his fist into the wall in frustration.

Caitlin put a hand on his shoulder through the suit. “Calm down, Blake. We’ll—”

And then the wall started to move.

The stone was sliding from left to right as they faced it. When Blake lifted his hand from the wall and held it frozen in midair a few inches out from the wall, they could see a reddish oval patch travel past his fingers. Slowly, though not at a glacial pace.

“Wall’s moving!” Caitlin backed up a couple of steps. Asami and Blake both froze. They watched the wall begin to move faster, and then the direction of its motion changed. While continuing to move left to right, now it began to
roll
from top to bottom, as if a gigantic cylinder was being rotated as it slid along a track.

Asami pulled on Blake. “This is no rock wall! This is...this is...tell me what the hell you know about those creatures, Blake! Because that’s what this is, isn’t? It’s a giant one of those things!”

Caitlin gasped audibly.

The billionaire backed up from the wall to where Caitlin stood. The ginormous creature continued moving, blending in with the surrounding rockscape so well that were it to be motionless it could not be detected by the casual human eye.

“I swear that I had no idea about anything like this. I mean, okay, I knew about the small creatures like the one Martin and I brought back to the lab. But I can assure you that I had absolutely no knowledge of anything like this...”

Suddenly, the lunar life form’s tail end—they assumed it was the rear end since it was the last part of the body to pass by them as it moved—left a gaping hole in the rock wall. A hole exactly like the one Asami had descended into earlier.

“This is it,” the selenologist declared, voice subdued with a sense of indescribable awe, wonder and dread all at once. “This is the same opening I dropped into earlier.”

Caitlin leaned toward the opening to better look inside. “That means that before, this massive snake or whatever it is, just happened not to be here. That cave down there is its den, I guess. This whole tunnel complex...” Her voice faded as she looked around.

“Tell me again what happened to Strat Knowles, Blake!”

“Stop it!” Blake ordered. “Stay calm. Let’s not jump to any conclusions! Martin is working as we speak on characterizing the specimen.”

“I don’t need anyone to characterize anything for me!” Asami trilled. “Did you see the size of that thing? We’re not safe in here, Blake...and Suzette’s video...what she fell into...” She peered into the hole. She lowered her voice. “Oh my God.”

“What is it?” Blake also moved closer. All three of them now looked inside, the humongous animal having moved somewhere out of sight.

“The floor.” Asami pointed. “It’s solid again.”

The three moonwalkers looked at one another through their faceplates. “Which means that one of those...
things
...is in there right now.” Caitlin turned to back to stare down the hole.

Asami nodded. “These creatures—whatever they are—they are so big, and so numerous, that they actually seem to make up the tunnel walls themselves. But then when they move, empty spaces like caverns are left behind.”

“The little ones are here, too,” Caitlin said, lowering her head while she stared at the tunnel floor. The others turned to look and there they were: creatures the size of the one they’d collected earlier, burrowing in the lunar dirt.

“It’s like this entire tunnel system is nothing but a massive den for these things,” Caitlin said.

“Like we wandered into a giant insect hive,” Asami agreed.

Blake ignored them, taking another step closer to the opening. “Suzette? Can you hear me? I’m here with Caitlin and Asami at the entrance to the cave you fell into earlier, over.”

A few seconds passed during which the only sound was the slight rasp of their breathing in the suits.

Blake was about to say that they should go back to the LEM when they heard it.

“—
ake...I’m here... —elp me
!”