Magic Dirt: The Best of Sean Williams (18 page)

Still nothing.

He stared stupidly at the suit for a moment before remembering its arms. Of course: instead of coming out the neck seal, the spider had crawled down the sleeves. It was probably lurking in one of the gloves at that very moment.

He raised the bag for another swing, overbalanced and lost his grip on the inner door.

Pin-wheeling desperately around his centre of gravity, he tumbled into the airlock. His legs reached for the walls but kicked only air. The bag, still following its arc at the end of his arm, connected with the outer door and sent him spinning in a new direction.

When his feet finally touched metal, it was at exactly the wrong instant. The sudden kick sent him slamming backwards into the opposite wall and winded him before he could take hold. He bounced to the other side of the airlock and scrabbled for a grip on the mesh. With one joint-wrenching jerk, he was still.

“Jesus!” He clung tight as the panic slowly ebbed. Sweat trickled out of his armpit and down his side. The bag bumped firmly into the back of his head, and he made a sound that was half-sob, half-laugh. He was going to kill himself before the spider even got a chance!

He forced himself to let go and reach down with one hand to wipe the sweat from his side.

The tickling sensation crawled up his side and back into his armpit.

Reflexes took over instantly. Both hands slapped at himself to get rid of the thing. Tiny legs gripped tight for a horrifying instant until one desperate blow knocked it free. The spider whizzed past his face and he jack-knifed backwards. It ricocheted off the edge of the inner door and continued onward into PB1, legs wriggling obscenely in empty air as it went.

He watched it go with his hands across his mouth, too horrified to think. It had been on him—actually on him!

“You bastard!” he screamed, and threw the bag after it.

The spider hit the far wall of PB1 and scurried for cover under one of the Reserve’s containers. The bag missed by a clear metre and rebounded through the passenger bay like a die in a cup, losing momentum with each collision. When it finally came to a halt, the spider had disappeared again.

With both hands gripping the mesh, he tried to calm down. It was obvious what had happened: the spider hadn’t been in the suit at all, but under the grill. Maybe it had crawled into the neck of the suit for a look, but had ultimately decided not to go any further. Then he had come along and startled it from its hiding place. Perhaps it had tried to attack him but ended up coming along for the ride instead. Regardless,
it had been on him!
He could still feel its touch—and knew he would until the day he died.

He had been stupid anyway; he should have blown the airlock’s outer hatch. If he’d done that, the spider would have been dead now, instead of back in the ship and waiting for him to come out of the airlock.

He wouldn’t make that mistake again, given a second chance.

It took him five minutes to control the shaking of his limbs to the point where he felt he could actually move. And when the shaking finally faded, so had the fear. In its place, rolling like storm clouds over the horizon, Came anger, pure and cleansing.

In the cockpit, he grabbed the headset and put it on. He tapped his access code into the radio and waited for the signal telling him he was connected.

The operation was one he had performed a thousand times before, although never like this. Never hanging in the middle of the cockpit like a spider himself, anchored to two walls by one hand and one foot only. But this way he touched as little as possible, and had almost unrestricted visibility.

The timer read: 14:50.

“This is Shuttle Pilot Gregory on Moon Transit Clipper
Whyalla
,” he said when the line was open. He wondered if his voice sounded as bad as he felt, and was glad that Traffic Control didn’t expend bandwidth on visual channels. “Put me through to Dr Nelson from the LEO Nature Reserve. If she doesn’t accept, tell her it’s an emergency.”

“One moment,” said the voice from Traffic Control. Bab was off-shift, and he didn’t recognise the man who had taken her place. “Okay, putting you through.”

“Alek?” Ngairi’s voice was muffled with sleep but concerned. “What’s the problem?”

As her voice echoed through the cockpit, he had to fight the urge to kick the speaker.

“The fucking problem, Ngairi, is the specimen you slipped into the cargo. It’s escaped.”

“The what? I don’t know what you’re—”

“It’s crawling around inside the clipper!” He heard an edge of panic creep into his voice and couldn’t bite it back. “I’ve tried to catch it, but it keeps getting away!”

“Alek, calm down. Take it slow and easy.” Her tone was gentle. “What’s crawling around the ship, exactly?”

“The spider, of course. I first saw it just over an hour ago, but God only knows how long it’d been—”

“A
spider
? What does it look like? How big is it?”

He shuddered, feeling very young all of a sudden. “About four centimetres across, solid and
hairy.”

“I need more detail than that, Alek. Was it in the cockpit at any time?”

“Fuck oath—”

“Excellent. Jack in
Whyalla’s
black-box for me.”

“What bloody good—?”

“I have to see it for myself, Alek, and the cockpit’s black-box has a full audiovisual record of your flight. Now jack it in and send me a copy of the last hour-and-a-half.”

Angry with himself, now, for not realising immediately why Ngairi wanted the recording, he accessed the black-box and piggybacked a copy to a telemetry signal. While the data was in transit, he forced himself to breathe deeply, to regain a semblance of calm.

“Okay, Alek, I’ve got it. The computer’s running it through ... Jesus, it
is
big.”

“Tell me something I don’t know!”

“Hold on. I’ve got a bio-match program here that should identify ...” Her voice died.

“Ngairi?”

“Do you know where it is now?” She sounded sombre.

“Not precisely, no.” Alek fought hard to hold down the panic threatening to rise again.

“Well, the program’s identified the genus and tentatively identified the species.”

“And?”

“It’s a funnel-web.
Atrax robustus.
An Australian spider. Restricted vector on the continent’s east coast.”

“The vector’s obviously spread a little. Is it dangerous?”

“Yes.”

Alek swallowed. He felt suddenly weak. “Go on.”

“The program’s still matching. According to this, your friend is a female.”

“What fucking difference does it make if it’s a female or a male?”

“All the difference to you. The male is the deadly one. His toxin is five times deadlier than the female’s. You’re okay.”

“Okay? I’ve got a spider the size of a rat in here—”

“Don’t exaggerate, Alek. It’s no bigger than a mole. And there are no records of a female ever killing a human. So you
are
okay. I wonder where it came from?”

“Where do you
think
it came from?”

“It couldn’t have come from the cases, Alek. They contain seedlings for the farm on Armstrong Base. That’s all.”

“Are you sure?” He didn’t want to believe her, but she sounded sincere. “You didn’t put it in there to scare me?”

“Why would I do that? Have a look, if you like. Just plants. No insects, let alone spiders.” She stopped as she thought of another possibility. “Could it have been in the ship all along? Where did you first see it?”

“In the cockpit. I was listening to music, and it was just sitting there—”

“The vibrations brought it out. Fantastic!”

He glanced nervously around. “Yeah, great.” His voice reverberated in the confined space.

“No, really. It must have come up on one of the shuttles from Earth. I wonder what it’s eating.”

“Me, if it gets a chance.”

“It won’t hurt you, Alek. It’s bite is relatively harmless, according to what I’m reading here.”

“Relatively
harmless!”

“Look, just let it wander around until you reach the base. I’ll have someone collect it when you arrive—”

“No way.” His anger flared again. “I’m going to kill the fucker first chance I get.”

Her indrawn breath was audible over the link. “Please, Alek, don’t. It might be a mutation. We need to study it, measure it, see how it’s adapted to—”

“You can measure what’s left when I’ve finished with it!”

“Alek—!”

He killed the line with a vicious flick of the wrist and threw the headset across the room. Ngairi wasn’t concerned about him at all. He meant less to her than a laboratory specimen—less than a
mutated spider.

That was okay. Although he was no better off than he had been hours ago—still trapped on a clipper on its way to the Moon with one uninvited funnel-web spider aboard—he had learned one important fact.

He knew how to draw it out.

Mahler’s Tenth Symphony—a signal from another era, from a composer dying even as he wrote the notes—made a fitting background to the scene. Alek had tried his best to recreate the atmosphere in which he had first seen the spider: the lights were dim, the music was loud and he was floating once again in the centre of the cockpit. The only differences, this time, were that he was wide awake and armed. The lid from one of the Reserve containers weighed comfortingly heavy in his hand: solid plastic, shock-resistant and ready to strike.

All he had to do was wait.

Time passed with painful slowness. The half-way point of his journey to the Moon came and went without incident. Eventually he began to feel tired and hungry, but he wouldn’t let himself move. He didn’t want to scare the spider away, if it came, and he didn’t want to leave his position of relative safety. Maybe, he thought, if both of us wait long enough, we’ll make it to the Moon safe and sound.

He laughed at that.
Sound
?
I doubt it. I’ll be lucky to hold an intelligent conversation after much more of this ...

The symphony’s final movement throbbed around him like the beating of an incomprehensible heart.

Finally, he saw it.

A shadow moved on the far side of the cockpit, slid slowly into the light. He inhaled sharply. The spider seemed even hairier than it had been before, and larger. Hand-like, it crawled across the copilot’s console, towards his floating body. Centimetre by centimetre, it slowly drew nearer.

He held his breath and tried not to flinch as the spider raised its legs to touch the sole of his naked foot. It was the hardest thing he had ever done.

Closer,
he whispered,
just a tiny bit closer.
The hand holding the container-lid tensed, ready to strike.

The spider hesitated, crouching back on its hindmost legs as though sensing danger.

Before it could run away, he brought the lid down—
hard.
And missed. It scuttled to one side so fast that it barely seemed to occupy the space between where it had been and where it was now. He followed it with the lid, striking as hard as he could along the copilot’s console. Always a centimetre ahead of him, the spider dodged the blows that rained after it, down the side of the console, behind the copilot’s couch and across a bank of electronic displays.

The violence of his attempt to kill the spider sent him ricocheting around the inside of the cockpit, cracking limbs and head against sharp angles and planes—but he was unable to stop. Having built up the determination to trap the spider, he couldn’t possibly turn back now. He didn’t know if he would have the courage to try a second time.

Then, with a crack, the lid splintered and he fetched a savage blow to his temple. The interior of the clipper went purple; for an instant, he thought he might pass out. Only the fear that the spider might touch him again while he was unconscious kept him from letting go completely. That, and an alert coming from one of the control boards...

His pilot’s instinct took over, uncurled him and took him by touch as far as his acceleration couch. He killed the music and opened his eyes a crack. The beeping and its attendant flashing light were coming from communications. Someone wanted to talk to him.

“Wh-what?”

“Moon Transit Clipper
Whyalla,
this is Armstrong Base Traffic Control. Autotracking is picking up some weird life-support readings. Is everything in order up there?”

Alek turned away from the console and studied the cockpit. Apart from a few new scars and the splinters of the lid, it seemed undamaged. He must have knocked a few switches out of place during his frenzy—nothing major, thank God.

There was no sign of the spider.

He took a deep breath. “No—yes. I’m okay.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’d call if I had a problem, wouldn’t I?”

“I guess so.” The voice sounded uncertain, but didn’t pursue the matter. “Sorry to interrupt. Control out.”

Alek wrapped his arms around himself, and shivered. Christ, what a mess. He had allowed his performance as a pilot to be compromised. Who knew what would happen in the trip’s remaining seven hours, followed by docking and decon at Armstrong Base? He had to kill the spider once and for all. Or get rid of it. And there was only one possible way to do
that...