Luna (17 page)

37| ... And Switch

Caitlin drove toward the river of creatures she had dislocated earlier by driving through their midst. By now they had come back together, resuming their organizational drive as they plowed toward the LEM.

“Better make that repair work in a hurry,” she radioed Takeo. “The ones coming from the crater look like they’re about to be on the move again. She slowed the rover to a stop to get a look at them. At least now she was already on the other side—the side closest to the Outer Limits lander, so she didn’t have to worry about crossing through them again. But my, oh my, Caitlin thought as she scanned the line of beasts. There were some large individuals here. One she estimated to be the size of a small farm tractor. An animal that size could easily damage the LEM simply by rolling into the side of it as the other, smaller ones had done.

In an attempt to draw it off, she rolled up to it and stopped. The worm, its upper half protruding from the soil, stopped moving and coiled its length so that its head was pointed in Caitlin’s direction. She contemplated ramming it, to send it a real message, but decided against it. What if it enveloped her vehicle in its pliable folds? The image of Suzette, hopelessly and permanently intertwined with the creature—embedded into its own physiology—returned to haunt her and she backed off. But she noticed that the giant creature moved in her direction. She waited for it to creep up on her a little closer, then wheeled off a safe distance away. She continued this process until she looked back to the line of worms and saw she had effectively lured the largest among them almost a football field away.

She began driving the rover toward the Outer Limits LEM, not at full speed, for she didn’t want to outrun the worm, leaving it to go back to the precious Black Sky craft. Plus, she’d conserve battery power by not running at top speed. So she drove on at a middling pace, the worm shuffling after her out of curiosity, she supposed. She wasn’t sure if it just wasn’t moving as fast as it could, or if the large ones couldn’t propel themselves as quickly as their diminutive brethren. But regardless, she kept a close watch on the animal in her rear view mirror as she motored on toward her LEM.

She also kept an eye out for new creatures as she went, but didn’t see any. At about the midpoint between the two LEMs, the large worm dropped back and when she could no longer see it, she increased her speed. She didn’t know if the worm would bury itself where it ended up, or try to make its way back to the rich oxygen source of the Black Sky lander, but she had done her job of drawing it off the site so they could work.

Now she had to complete the other half of her job: pick up Dallas and James and bring them back over to Black Sky. She navigated a rough section of uneven terrain, forcing her to reduce speed, but when she emerged from it onto a flat plain, she should see the Outer Limits LEM in the distance. She checked the mirror to see if the massive worm had used the rough terrain as an opportunity to gain on her, but she saw only a static, gray landscape.

She put the rover to high speed and gripped the steering wheel as she jostled along over the lunar surface. Before long, the boxy form of the LEM took shape. She slowed as she approached, scoping it out visually. The lights were on, indicating they still had power. That was good. Other than that, she didn’t see much, no one on an EVA...and then she noticed something on the ground a short distance from the spacecraft. A worm? That was her first thought. But as she rolled nearer in the rover, it soon became apparent that it was not one of the creatures. Not one of the lunar creatures, anyway. It was a creature all right—but a human one. Naked, without a spacesuit, so obviously dead. She rolled closer to the inert form until she could get a detailed look.

The corpse of Martin Hughes lay on the moon. His skin appeared to be a strange color to her, but she couldn’t be sure that wasn’t due to the unusual ambient lunar light, so bright with no atmosphere to filter the sun this time of day. She guessed that he must have been removed by Dallas in order to reduce risk of biocontamination, since he had been killed by somehow coming into contact with the bio-specimen. Still, she found it unnerving to stare at the dead man on the moon, so much so that she avoided looking at him while she brought the rover to a stop and walked to the airlock.

Inside the lander, she found Dallas and James at the radio console, attempting without success to establish contact with Mission Control. “...dust storm status. Do you read, over?”

Dallas looked up at Caitlin as she approached, her suit helmet now off.

“How was the drive?”

At this, she couldn’t help but laugh. “You make it sound as though I was coming up I-95 to stay for the weekend.
Oh, it wasn’t too bad, the usual traffic...”

“The perks of having the only vehicle on the planet, I guess. Plenty of places to park.”

“Yeah, except for where the corpses are. And the killer worms. They’re having a bitch of a time over at the other LEM, Dallas. I—”

Suddenly Blake’s’ voice burst through the radio speaker. “Dallas, you copy?”

Dallas turned away from Caitlin to concentrate on the radio. “We read you loud and clear, Blake. Caitlin just got here, over.”

“Tell her she did a good job—at first we were able to work outside the LEM on repairing the oxygen leak and damage to the ship’s exterior, but those things are back now and we haven’t fully made the repairs yet.”

Dallas looked back at Caitlin before replying over the radio to Blake. “Maybe when James and I get over there with Caitlin, the extra manpower will make a difference.”
We can hope, right?

“Plus, I’ll be able to use the rover again to draw them off once more if necessary,” Caitlin added. Dallas relayed this to Blake, who agreed. Then they heard shouting coming from the Black Sky end of the transmission before Blake’s voice came gain.

“I better let you get to work. Don’t forget to charge the rover fully and bring anything we can use over here that you can fit in the rover. See you soon, over and out.”

Dallas signed off and addressed Caitlin and James, who had started to grill the female astronaut on what the situation was like over at Black Sky’s ship. “How much strife is there between Blake and Kennedy?”

“You can tell they’re uncomfortable around one another but at this point they seem to be working together well enough. They got through the EVA together to get the supplies, so they should be okay.”

“What about my counterpart over there, the illustrious Mr. Stenson—how’s he doing?”

“Do I detect a hint of sarcasm there, James?”

Burton nodded. “Let’s just say I would have been promoted a lot earlier without him around for so long. But I have to admit, all that seems like a minor annoyance compared to what’s going on up here.”

“Will you be able to work with him if you have to?”

“From what I hear, Blake and Kennedy make Stenson and I look like best friends. We’ll be fine.”

Caitlin told him about Stenson’s openly critical attack on Kennedy’s methods, which elicited a knowing smirk from James, although he remained silent.

Dallas jumped down from his control panel seat and moved to put on his spacesuit. “We should get a move on. Caitlin, is the rover charging?”

“First thing I did when I got here was to plug it in.”

“Good. How about oxygen? We should have one canister left. Go ahead and grab it while James and I get our suits on, please. Then I’ve got a little plan to tell you about.”

Caitlin found the full oxygen cylinder—now free to use since they would be leaving their ship behind—and loaded it into the rover. Again, she avoided making eye contact with the nude corpse of Martin Hughes. She wondered if he had found some kind of peace, God or no God. When she got back into the LEM, she found Dallas and James fully suited up, but still in the main cabin of the ship. She addressed them through the comm loop.

“I put the oh-two cylinder and a few tools in the rover. Nothing else I can think of. You ready?”

Dallas looked up at her, his fingers poised over a switch. “Just about. Rover’s charged and ready to roll?”

“All set.”

“Good. Because once we vent the air from this puppy, there’s no turning back. And we’re likely to have company if we stick around too long.”

“Vent the air? Why do that? I know we don’t intend to use this ship, but still...”

“That’s the plan I was telling you about. To see if we can attract the creatures over in this direction, take some of the pressure off of the Black Sky lander.”

“That will probably add pressure to our drive over there, though.” Caitlin flashed on driving over the squishy worms.

“You got here, though. So it’s doable.” This from James, who usually remained silent to observe the interplay among the astronauts, but now deciding that his own future was less than certain, asserting his opinion.

Both astronauts stared at him as though they had witnessed a dog speak English. Dallas recovered first. “Mr. Burton has a point.”

Caitlin pointed through the ship walls to the Black Sky LEM. “They have a relatively small leak, though—one that over days leaked a substantial amount of oxygen, but you’re talking about suddenly releasing the entire volume of air in the ship? That’ll be like ringing a dinner bell. I can’t say for sure how many of these things will be attracted to that and how aggressive they’re likely to be.”

Dallas withdrew his hand from the first of the switches necessary to begin the venting process. “I’ll leave it up to you, Caitlin.”

James’ eyes widened as he looked from Dallas to Caitlin, who walked up to the switch. “I suppose once we get over there, we’re going to need every edge we can get. Give me a three minute head start to get out to the rover and get it started up.”

Dallas consulted his wristwatch while she made her way to the airlock. After an uncomfortable three minutes during which James Burton made frequent eye contact with him through their faceplates but said nothing, Dallas’ hands got busy on the control console. He executed the series of actions required to open the valve that vented the LEM’s cabin air supply to space, flooding the moon with gasses the barren world would ordinarily never be exposed to.

A red flashing light went off and Dallas stood. “Party’s over here. Let’s get over to our new home on the moon, shall we?” With that, he and James exited the craft. With a last look at Martin’s lifeless body—soon to be worm food, Dallas reflected—they moved quickly to the rover, where Caitlin waited at the controls as promised. Dallas took the front passenger seat while James climbed in back.

Caitlin put the buggy into gear. “Fasten your seatbelts, boys. I have a feeling this is gonna be one helluva ride.”

38| Fight

They didn’t speak much in the rover. Caitlin was focused on driving and following her own rover tracks back to Black Sky’s LEM while Dallas and James obsessively monitored the landscape for signs of the creatures, knowing they had baited them with oxygen. They had gone almost halfway and still seen nothing out of the ordinary. But Just as Dallas was about to question the effectiveness of the deliberate air-leak, Caitlin slowed the rover gradually until she came to a complete stop.

“What’s up?” James said from the back seat, looking all about. Caitlin pointed straight ahead. “Ground’s moving up ahead. See that?”

Ripples of motion stirred the lunar floor in the distance.

“Still pretty far away,” Dallas commented.

Caitlin nodded. “Could mean they’re big ones. Really big.”

“Can we go around them?” James asked, a quiver of fear in his voice.

“I can try. No point just sitting around waiting for them to get to us.” Caitlin put the rover back into gear and angled left, taking them off the path they had been on. She drove without mishap until reaching the area where they’d sighted the disturbance. Although they were off to the left of it, immediately they could see that the upheaval was occurring over a very large area, and not simply in “the road” they had chosen based on the rover’s previous tracks.

“They’re here, too,” she said, slowing the rover.

James’ voice made her jump. “There’s one behind us! Go!”

Caitlin glanced into the rear view mirror and saw one of the gargantuan slug-like beasts burrowing into the ground, then rising out of it again, porpoising through the soil like a dolphin in slow motion. She set the vehicle into forward motion again, knowing that not far in front of them was an entire underground wall of the frenzied alien animals.

And then James yelled again, something unintelligible this time, but it mattered little what he actually said. She looked back through the mirror and saw the massive worm animal jump through the airless void as if attempting to land on the moon buggy. She made a sharp right and the creature landed where the rover had been mere seconds earlier, thudding into the ground with a spray of gray dust.

“Watch it: one o’clock.” Dallas’ voice was calm and low. Caitlin eyeballed the direction he indicated and there—perhaps forty feet away—another humongous worm-thing reared up out of the soil. Dozens of little ones wriggled around its fleshy, waddling base, like drops of water into a lake. Caitlin veered left, wishing to steer well-clear of that one. But as soon as she did, a barrier of medium-sized animals cropped up, perhaps the size of bean bags. They rolled along, easily as high as the rover and in some cases piled two or three individuals high.

She veered back to the right, but the sudden maneuvering caused the rover to fishtail, and when she hit the hippo-sized worm that suddenly breached out of the soil, the vehicle was already unstable. The beast pushed up and out of the ground beneath the left front wheel, flipping the moon buggy onto its side.

The web harnesses kept the vehicle’s occupants inside the rover, which was good since the moon buggy was ringed with snuffling worms of various sizes. Dallas was first to unhook his harness and scramble out of the car. James managed to crawl out on his own, but Caitlin was suspended in the driver seat, which was on the side not in contact with the ground.

She got her harness unclipped and Dallas began pulling her out through the upended side of the vehicle, rather than let her fall to the ground and risk damaging her suit.

“Hurry!” James sounded panicked. “They’re all around us!”

Caitlin lifted one leg out through the doorless vehicle, then the other, and Dallas set her onto the moon feet first. Then both of them turned around to see what they were facing.

It wasn’t good.

A thick ring of animals surrounded the upturned rover, with a few creatures already inside the ring.

“Look for gaps!” Dallas commanded, head on a swivel as he scanned the perimeter of animals for a weak point. He’d looked almost all the way around when he spotted small one. Maybe a two-foot gap, but it was the weakest point. “Let’s go. There!”

He led the three of them toward the opening but the animals closed it off before they had even gone four steps. He looked around the circle again for another opening. Found one, even smaller than the last time, in the opposite direction on the other side of the rover.

“We could tip the rover back and try to drive out!” Caitlin suggested.

James was all for that suggestion, already putting his hands on the vehicle while bracing his feet against the moon.

“I’m afraid to turn my back to these things!” Dallas uttered. “See if you two can right it while I keep an eye on them.”

Caitlin got into position alongside James on the other end of the rover. Together, they started to push. Even in the weak gravity of the moon, the rover was still a small car and not all that light for two people to lift. While they pushed it, a worm the same height as a medium sized dog, but much longer, rolled sideways toward Dallas, its gristly proboscis opening and closing as it went.

Dallas was caught by surprise at how fast it moved. He attempted a high jump as it rolled up to him, and while his right foot cleared the worm, his left tripped up on its upper surface, knocking him onto the creature’s fleshy topside.

“Need help!” Dallas managed as he fell off the worm while it rolled on without him. Caitlin turned to look back at Dallas and she lost her grip on the rover, causing it to knock into her and James.

“Watch it!” the FAA man shouted. “Push up!” But the momentum was too much and the car fell back on them, upside down. Meanwhile, Dallas rolled off the worm he landed on, sprawling onto the moon’s flat surface. He moved to right himself but the creatures converged on him, smothering him while he was still on his hands and knees.

“Caitlin!”

But it was James Burton who reached him first. He lashed out with a foot, delivering a vicious kick to a large animal slithering over Dallas’ neck. The creature recoiled, its reactive wriggling atop Dallas’ back flattening the astronaut to the ground. Then Caitlin arrived and delivered another kick to the same worm, this time causing it to slither away from Dallas.

Burton whirled back around and ran to the rover, trying to right it himself. “They’re closing in! C’mon, let’s get this thing going!”

Caitlin was about to help him when the ground opened up right in front of her. Dallas was in the process of pushing up with his arms to get his feet, when suddenly he fell into the open, gooey maw of a strange worm. While substantial, it was not nearly as big as the one that had integrated Suzette to its physiology, nor even as large as the one that had consumed Asami. It was about twice as thick as a human, but Caitlin couldn’t see how long it was because only part of its body was above ground.

Its mouth opened wide enough to envelop Dallas Tanner. The great worm erupted from the ground with explosive force, punching through the moon’s surface with ease as Dallas fell into its mouth, his arms and legs dangling outside.

Then the creature’s mouth snapped shut, leaving only the astronaut’s limbs protruding. They could still hear Dallas, though, screaming now, pleading for help as he was contorted into bone-breaking positions. Caitlin reached out and punched the creature in the side, but it had little effect. When she saw another worm the same size as the one that had grabbed Dallas homing in on her, she stepped back.

James was still trying to get the rover upright, but now a group of smaller worms plagued his efforts, cascading down on him from the rover itself.

“Forget it, James! We go on foot.”

“Are you crazy?”

Caitlin took a precious second to glance toward the Black Sky LEM. She saw a glint of light from its metallic surface. “I see the LEM. C’mon, they’ll get us if we stay here. We have to run.”

“Dallas?” He turned to look for him but couldn’t find him. “What—”

“He’s gone. Let’s go James, or we’re next.”

That was all he needed. He saw the spare oxygen canister on the ground next to the rover and snatched it up. Then he stepped up onto one of the rover’s roll bars and leapt from it, over a group of creatures. Fortunately for Caitlin, the worm with Dallas in its maw attracted many of the others. They shuffled about as if in competition for the strange new resource.

“Don’t leave me! Caitlin! Mr. Burton!” Dallas was still transmitting from his helmet even though he was now entirely contained within the worm’s body. Caitlin wondered with a shudder, even as she ran for the opening left when many worms moved to the one that had ingested Dallas, if he was destined to become like Suzette, entwined with this monstrosity; dead, but still alive, or if he would suffer a mercifully quick death like Asami, his helmet crushing under the predator’s teeth.

“Caitlin!” Dallas wailed.

She was swamped with dread, a pity beyond words at having to leave him behind, but to stay was without a doubt to end her own life and that of Burton. She almost said goodbye to him, but then stopped. If she said nothing, he might think the worm’s body was blocking his transmission and that’s why no one replied. She would rather have him think that as his last thought than know that she left him behind. But then she broke out sobbing with the pettiness of her rationale, with the shame of thinking about herself when he was going through such unimaginable Hell.

“I hear you, Caitlin! I can hear you crying!”

“Caitlin let’s go!” This from James Burton, who now stood safely, for the time being anyway, beyond the circle of worm-like beasts, beckoning to her with an arm.

“Don’t leave me! It’s eating me...it’s...doing something...” He emitted a strangely piercing scream, laden with emotion.

“Dallas...”

His anguish rang inside her helmet as she trampled over a litter of small worms while she ran to James, who looked ahead toward the Black Sky LEM. “Caitlin, they’re still coming for us this way, too!” He began to run back toward her, stopping when he realized they were trapped on both sides—in the direction of either LEM—by the creatures. It looked to him like they might be able to head off toward the crater mountains to the north, but if the worms pushed them too far in that direction they would simply run out of air and die.

Then Dallas’ voice pierced the comm channel again. “My air! It ruptured my tank! My—”

All went quiet on the channel, and in a few seconds the frenzy of organisms around the one that had consumed Dallas grew even more hyperactive as the big worm belched out the air from Dallas’ suit.

“At least it’s over for him now,” James said, taking Caitlin’s hand. “Let’s go, while they’re distracted.”

He and Caitlin set off in the direction of the Black Sky LEM, easily sidestepping the worms, who now seemed to have no interest in them, wanting only to pile onto the one that had swallowed Dallas. They had been walking for perhaps two minutes when they heard Dallas’ voice again.

“Are you still here? Caitlin? James? Don’t leave me! I don’t know how...oh it hurts so bad...but I’m...still...alive…” He trailed off into a cry of pure agony.

“What the...” James whispered.

Caitlin froze in her tracks. She whispered back, “It’s doing what the other one did to Suzette. Making him a part of itself.”

“It’s
what
?!” Dallas sobbed. “Oh God no...please help me...it hurts! How am I still alive...I can’t feel anything except pain...” He choked off into a gut-wrenching scream that went on for some time.

James looked at Caitlin and shook his head while cradling the oxygen can.
What can we do?

Caitlin, also not wanting to say anything else that would tell Dallas they were going to leave him, pointed toward the Black Sky LEM. Off they walked.