Magic Dirt: The Best of Sean Williams (17 page)

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ATRAX

WITH SIMON BROWN

Ah, what a cruel guest!

It never stops for rest, never for peace!

Not by day, nor by night, when I sleep!

— Gustav Mahler, “Songs of a Wayfarer”

(translated by Nick Jones)

“Whyalla
? This is Traffic Control. You have your window. Primary burn in four minutes.”

Alek Gregory stowed his pressure suit in the airlock and hurried to the cockpit. Swinging through zero-g, using his fingers and toes to nudge him along the narrow crawl-spaces connecting the clipper’s chambers, he cut a lean figure: short but not stumpy, with cropped black hair and eyes the colour of percolated coffee. Free of the suit, he wore only a white singlet and shorts.

He slid into the pilot’s seat and positioned the headset over his ears and mouth.

“Traffic Control, this is Moon Transit Clipper
Whyalla.
Christ, Bab, that was quick.”

“A courier cancelled at the last minute,” the tinny voice crackled. “If you’re not ready, Alek, we can give it to someone else—”

“No, no, that’s okay. Feed me the course and I’ll warm up the engines.”

“Roger. Traffic Control out.”

A timer began to count milliseconds backwards in a blur as the translator burbled through the cockpit. Alek’s hands flickered over the control board, completing diagnostics at record speed. He had expected at least an hour or more before a window opened, and was unprepared, but an opportunity such as this had to be exploited immediately or another pilot would snatch it from him.

As soon as he had finished, he slipped out of the pilot’s chair and crawled to the passenger bays to check on his cargo. Passenger Bay 1 contained four couches, as did PB2. Instead of human passengers, the couches cradled plastic containers approximately half a metre square. Each bore the green seal of the Low Earth Orbit Nature Reserve. A quick inspection satisfied him that the containers were secured for the burn, apart from one whose lid was slightly ajar. A glance inside revealed only pale green shoots, neatly arranged in rows a centimetre apart. He snapped the lid shut, thinking:
That’ll keep the good doctor happy.

Dr Ngairi Nelson had been redesigning the maze-like enclosure of a farm of cockroaches when Alek had come to collect the cargo three hours earlier. Suited-up and ready to go, he had felt decidedly out of place surrounded by the leafy plants and chittering birds of the habitat. Ngairi’s blonde hair cropped to a practical length contrasted with cotton free-fall overalls that reminded him of something out of an old video. Seeing him, she had nodded to a corner of the chamber where, next to some sort of sprawling eucalyptus, eight containers had been stacked.

“I’d help you,” she’d said, glancing at her dirty hands, “but ...”

“That’s okay. I can manage on my own.”

“Thanks, Alek.” Catching the expression on his face, she’d asked: “Something the matter?”

“Nothing insecticide wouldn’t fix.”

Smiling, she stuck a hand back into the cockroach enclosure and wiggled her fingers, agitating the colony. “They don’t hurt.”

“Sadist.” He shuddered, imagining thousands of tiny insect feet crawling across his own skin. “I hate them anyway. Too many goddamn legs.”

“I have some huntsmen spiders if you’d prefer.”

“Spiders are worse: all those legs
and
hair! Don’t even think of bringing one of
them
near me, okay?”

Her smile had only widened as Alek had turned away to avoid the sight of her fingers sinking deeper into a swirling mass of chitinous brown ...

The bird-like whistle of the translator finishing its task brought him back to the present. He hurried back to the cockpit and strapped himself in. Another timer had appeared on the display, waiting to start. It read: 18:48.

The radio crackled. “Alek? You’re cleared for departure.”

“Thanks, Bab.” He double-checked his harness. “Primary burn in ten seconds.”

“Check. Give my regards to Mare Imbrium.”

“Will do. See you in two days.”

He tensed as the first counter hit straight zeros. The main drive roared, sounding deceptively close—as though someone had set off a fire extinguisher behind his head—and a firm hand pressed him backwards into the couch. He didn’t fight the pressure; only his eyes moved, watching the control board for irregularities.

There were none. The burn lasted five minutes, then abruptly stopped. Free-fall returned.

He was on his way.

The brash, brassy trumpets of the symphony’s finale blared out of the cockpit’s sound system. Alek turned the lights down to a mere glimmer and floated in the centre of the small room with his eyes half-closed. One hand tapped the rhythm of the music against his stomach; occasionally he sang along. Not once did he stop smiling.

The trip timer read: 16:17.

Few pilots considered the trip to the Moon to be boring, and Alex was no exception. Not that there was much to do. Although regulations advised that two pilots be present, he was alone on the clipper because one was always enough—and even if something unexpected
did
happen to him in mid-transit, the ship could fly the rest of the way on automatics and be landed by remote. Boredom was considered a luxury by anyone used to living in the crowded conditions of the station, and so was privacy. For that reason, even the shorter, partially powered trips such as this one were in high demand. On them Alek could listen to music as it was supposed to be listened to. Here there would be no unscheduled interruptions and no neighbours to complain about the noise. There was just him and Gustav Mahler—and the latter had been dead for one hundred and fifty years.

The music reverberated through the clipper’s cylindrical forty-metre long hull, right back to the now inactive main engines attached to the ship’s rear like the silencer on a gun-barrel. Between the engines and the cockpit evacuated storage space for heavy freight occupied most of the structure, with two pressurised crew compartments separated by grills and meshes forward near the pilot’s station. Three rings of chemical altitude jets banded the hull every ten metres; two communication dishes stuck out like twisted ears every thirteen. One forward airlock and another larger one amidships for cargo completed the clipper’s standard arrangement.

From the cockpit, Alek could almost see through Passenger Bays 1 and 2 to the combined kitchen/common-room at the far end. A tiny chemical toilet occupied a niche next to the forward airlock, opening onto PB1, and was the only space inside the pressurised section that had a proper hatch.

The symphony ended with a crash of percussion that thrilled through the echoing, metal space. As the last beats died away, he opened his eyes and reached out for a strap to give himself some leverage. He leaned forward, dipped into his personal effects bag for the next recording—

—and saw it. Tucked into a corner between the copilot’s console and the mesh separating PB1 and the cockpit, almost hidden by shadow, was a spider.

His hand jerked back instantly. Both legs kicked out for the wall, hurtling him bodily across the cockpit. His back struck the bulkhead, and he grabbed blindly for a handhold before he could rebound away. Only when he was stable again did he stop to look properly.

This is crazy,
he told himself.
I must be seeing things, hallucinating. It couldn’t possibly be …

But it was, and a big one at that. Adrenaline surged through him as he studied the distinctive arachnoid shape: eight legs, square robust body, eyes that seemed to watch everywhere at once. His pulse thudded into the silence and his stomach tingled; the muscles in his legs twitched, wanting to run; the skin and hair of his arms crawled.

It watched him in return but stayed as motionless as he was. How long it would remain so, he had no way of telling. They moved so damned
fast...

“Fuck!” He groped for his bag without taking his eyes off the thing. Part of him was ashamed that he could be so panicked by such a tiny creature—no wider than the palm of his hand, after all—but a greater part, a more basic part, screamed in terror and revulsion. If he hadn’t noticed it when he did, it might have touched him, crawled on him, got into his clothes ...

He shivered violently. The strap of his bag touched his fingers and he reeled it in. Without looking, he reached inside, grabbed the first solid object he found—his wallet—and threw it at the spider.

The wallet struck the wall and ricocheted back towards him. He flinched just in case his aim had been true and the spider’s remains had stuck to the wallet. He didn’t want to touch the spider even if it was dead. As the pouch went past his head, he rolled himself warily through the air to another corner of the cockpit.

A ginger-brown and grey shape crawled along the edge of the control board, heading rapidly for the acceleration couch and his feet.

He gasped, tucked his legs to his chest. The spider crawled under the couch and reappeared an instant later on the far side. He watched in horror as its legs wriggled in a blur, carrying its squat body away from him faster than seemed possible.

Something struck the back of his neck. He shouted and flailed with both hands to ward it off.

It was the wallet. He gulped a deep breath, and cursed his stupidity.

When he turned back, the spider had disappeared.

Slowly, wishing he too had eight eyes to watch all around him, he returned to the pilot’s console and tweaked the light control. Blinding whiteness dazzled him for a second. Clutching a plastic handhold, ready to jerk away if necessary, he leaned over to where he had last seen the creature.

It wasn’t there, or anywhere nearby. This would have reassured him had his fear been even slightly rational. Instead, it made him paranoid. If it wasn’t there, it had to be somewhere else—and, unfortunately, there weren’t many places it could go to on the clipper. It was trapped inside.

With him.

The clipper’s forty cubic metres didn’t sound like much or look like much on the schematics—and God knew it didn’t feel like much when you lived in it for any length of time—but there were too many nooks and crannies, too many places the spider could hide and too many ways for it to backtrack behind him if it sensed him coming.

But Alek searched anyway. Starting with the cockpit, then working his way back through PB1 and PB2 to the kitchen, he studied every corner, every section of mesh, every open storage space in which it could conceivably have hidden. He covered every centimetre of the clipper until his eyes ached with the strain and his back, despite the zero gravity, felt like an overwound spring.

It took him well over an hour. When he had scoured the last corner of the kitchen, he sighed in frustration and let the arm holding the bag at the ready drift in to his chest.

It wasn’t there. He hadn’t found it.

“Christ.” He stretched and plucked a bulb of water from the refrigerated compartment. Gulping the fluid down, he tried to avoid touching anything, just in case.

The only places he hadn’t looked were the toilet and the airlock. He’d saved them until last because they were the least cluttered and therefore the easiest to search. They also had airtight doors, which he had shut before searching PB1. If the spider had been in either room, then it was still there. It could wait a moment while he gathered himself. According to the films, he thought, this was when the alien grabbed him by the ears and chewed his face off ... or crawled up his arm on eight exoskeletal legs …

He threw the empty bulb into a trash container, then headed for the toilet and the airlock.

The former was empty, much to his relief. After carefully checking the complex apparatus that served as a zero-gee waste-disposal system, he used it. If he managed to trap the spider in the small chamber somehow, he wouldn’t have another chance to urinate until he reached the Moon. He wouldn’t open the door for anything.

When he finished, he closed the door behind him and unsealed the inner door of the airlock. The cylindrical space beyond was two metres deep and three wide, fitted out in heavy metallic mesh. A glowing red LED on the outer door’s massive manual locks described them as SECURE. The only other item in the room was his suit, which lay lengthways around the wall with its helmet locked to one side.

The grey colouring of the mesh walls made for better camouflage, and the space beneath the mesh—about two centimetres deep—was the perfect hiding place for something as small as a spider. The suit was the greater concern, however, so he searched it first.

Trying as hard as he could not to touch the walls, he leaned into the airlock and peered closely at the helmet. Nothing out of order was visible through the clear plastic double-film of the faceplate, much to his relief—but when he reached out for the neck of the suit itself, he broke a thin strand of web leading from the mesh wall to the suit’s neck ring.

Revolted, he snatched his hand away and wiped it on the wall. His heart was pounding again and he took a deep breath to calm himself. Although he didn’t like the thought of being so close to the spider, at least now he knew where it was hiding. All he had to do was get it out in the open, where he could kill it.

Holding the edge of the inner door with one hand and the bag with the other, he struck each of the suit’s dangling legs once. Nothing emerged. The suit jerked like a puppet as he swung again, this time higher up, hoping to herd the spider out. He struck the gusset, then the padded layers under the ventral and dorsal panels.