Fluency

6

Bergen stepped in first, triggering the lights to come on. A puff of air greeted him. It was another huge storage room. This one was filled with floor-to-ceiling, cylindrical storage tanks—all the same color as everything else in the ship.

“Somehow, I expected the interior of an alien spaceship to be a little more exciting,” Walsh commented.

“Yeah.” Bergen glanced at Walsh as they walked down the undulating aisle, getting a feel for just how far back it went. The aisles weren’t in conventionally-structured, straight lines. “What do you think about what Jane said?”

“I’ll wait to hear what Varma says on the subject.” Walsh’s tone let him know that was the end of that discussion. “Any idea what’s in these tanks?”

Bergen yawned, then shrugged. “Same kinda stuff we’ve got in our tanks, probably. Water, compressed gases, fuel of some kind. It takes a helluva lot of gas to fill a ship of this size with air. I’m sure Jane’ll figure it all out. She’s fucking amazing.” He shrugged again and suppressed the urge to giggle with a frown.

He glanced at Walsh to see if he’d noticed his expression or the comment about Jane. He hadn’t. He was busy studying what appeared to be a valve on one of the tanks. He’d taken off his pack and harness and was bent over in an exaggerated, comical pose. He needed a really big magnifying glass to complete the picture. Bergen snorted at the idea.

“Speaking of air—it’s really blowing around in here, don’cha think?” Walsh swayed a little bit and grinned. That was weird. Walsh never smiled. “Feels good after ten months of stale air crammed in that damn teapot.”

Bergen spontaneously whooped with laughter. “I know, right? It’s like the ventilation system’s gone haywire.”

Walsh clapped him on the shoulder, an uncharacteristically friendly gesture, dragging his pack and emergency breathing equipment behind him. “We’ll tell the little green guys to fix it, if we ever find ’em.”

“Yep. No, no. Jane’ll tell ’em.”

Walsh nodded solemnly. He was acting like he was drunk. That didn’t seem normal. “Right. What was that about, yesterday, do you think?”

Bergen shook his head, trying to clear it. Things were a little fuzzy. “I just asked you that and you said you’re gonna wait to hear what Ajaya says.”

“Right. I said that. You’re a total ass, you know that Berg?”

He gave Walsh a playful shove and Walsh went reeling across the room, laughing his ass off.

“Hey, hey, hey—careful! I think Gibbs bruised a couple of ribs yesterday when he fell on me.” Walsh staggered to his feet and seemed confused, feeling around his torso with both hands. “That’s funny—they don’t really hurt much anymore.”

Bergen approached Walsh slowly. “Did you tell Ajaya about that?”

Walsh heaved an exaggerated sigh. “It’s nothing. Holloway was more important at the time.” He looked around. They’d wandered down a narrow aisle between the tanks after he’d shoved Walsh. “A door,” Walsh commented blandly. “Let’s open it up and see what’s next door. More of the same, I bet. Lots and lots of the same stuff. Gibbs was right—this is a really weird color. Why would they want every damn thing in this place the same color? Have we seen any other colors since we got here?” Walsh tapped the door control, strode through, and stood there blankly staring into the dark. That was strange. The lights had always come on automatically before, whenever they entered a new room. It gave him a feeling like maybe they weren’t supposed to be there.

Walsh made a funny face, smacking his lips like a stretchy-faced comedian. “My lips are numb.” Walsh’s voice had taken on a deeper timbre.

Something was wrong.

Bergen turned around to look for some kind of motion sensor and recoiled. “Oh, fuck.” His own voice came out sounding strange and deep, but they had bigger problems than that. He grabbed Walsh by the back of his flight suit and turned him around. “Look.”

“Holy mother of God,” Walsh said slowly. His voice sounded low, demonic. “What the hell?”

The only light came through the doorway from the other room. The wall around the door, as far as they could see, was studded with some kind of animal ranging in size from a cucumber to a large dog. In the dim light against the dark wall, it was hard to tell what color they were—maybe grey, maybe purple. They had a wet look to them, iridescent, slimy, and they were moving. Some of the bigger ones moved alarmingly fast. Even so, they didn’t seem terribly threatening. Bergen decided to keep his distance nonetheless.

“Big-ass slugs,” Bergen replied in a leaden bass, shaking his head and smiling with disbelief.

He and Walsh exchanged disconcerted expressions. Walsh giggled for a moment, but it sounded low-pitched and distorted. He stifled himself and looked disturbed. “Ok. Let’s go back.”

“Commander Walsh, this is Providence. Come in. Over.” Both men jumped as Ajaya’s voice blared over the radio.

Walsh drew himself up. “This is Walsh. Varma, report. Over.”

“Jane is unconscious again. I cannot wake her. Over.”

“What happened? Over.”

“She started drifting and I realized she was unconscious. Her vitals are normal. Your voice sounds unusual, Commander. Are you all right? Over.”

Walsh was squeezing his eyes closed, concentrating on listening. Why was it so hard to think? Bergen felt like he was falling asleep on his feet, numb and disconnected. They needed to get out of there.

He grabbed Walsh’s arm and headed for the door. Walsh started, as though waking up, but then followed obediently. Bergen lost track of any thought except getting back to the door and through it.

There was a loud, piercing sound and both men stopped in their tracks. It took Bergen almost a minute to recognize the sound. It was Walsh’s oxygen monitor. As soon as he made the connection, his own started alarming as well. The numbers were fluctuating wildly up and down the scale. No wonder he was feeling so lightheaded.

He slid the pack from his shoulder and then the compressed-air gear. He fumbled with the valve, but his fingers weren’t working properly. They felt like blocks of wood and weren’t cooperating with his brain.

Bergen looked over at Walsh, expecting to see him doing the same thing. He wasn’t. He was watching the slugs. Bergen could see why. They were moving around a lot faster now. The alarm must be disturbing them.

Walsh seemed to be mesmerized by them. He was walking slowly toward a large one, his hand outstretched. Dammit—he was walking in the opposite direction of the door. Bergen shook his head vigorously to clear it and bounded after Walsh, pulling him back. “Don’t be a goddamn Redshirt, Walsh!” Walsh didn’t reply.

Their oxygen monitors were still alarming, which helped Bergen to remember what he was doing. He went back to fumbling with the compressed air. His hand closed over the valve, finally, and he pulled the mask toward his face. Then, the lights went out.

Walsh stumbled back into him and they both went down in the dark. It wasn’t a soft landing; they both went flailing and cursing. Bergen dropped both his pack and the canister. He scrabbled around for it.

Walsh was grasping at him, alternating between speaking incoherently and laughing maniacally. Bergen fought down panic and froze in place for a moment, concentrating. His thoughts were disjointed…the deep voice. There was something…yesterday….

Why couldn’t he think?

“Commander? Walsh? Bergen? Report. Over.” Ajaya’s voice again and still the monitors beeped.

Walsh’s grasping movements slowed and he went limp, a dead weight, collapsed against Bergen’s side. He was asphyxiating or something. Bergen knew he was next unless he could find that canister. He shoved Walsh’s inert body to the floor and redoubled his efforts, blindly feeling all around them, searching for the canister, the pack, anything.

Walsh. Walsh has a canister too.

Bergen scrambled, adrenaline pumping, to turn Walsh over. Dammit! Walsh must have taken the harness off at some point; it wasn’t on his back.

Bergen slumped. He and Walsh were going to die there, in the dark, on an alien spaceship—surrounded by ginormous, freaky, alien space-slugs.

He closed his eyes, giving in to the sleepiness. It was hard to sleep, though, with all the beeping. Someone should really turn that off.

His dozing was interrupted by the sound of Jane’s voice and he roused himself half-heartedly to hear her. Her voice sounded urgent. “Walsh, Bergen—this is Jane. Can you hear me?”

“Jane?” Oh. She’s on the radio. He grabbed at it, his fingers thick and unresponsive. The little red light came on. He could talk now. “Jane? S’Berg.”

“Dr. Bergen? Are you…ok?”

He struggled to keep his eyes open. “Lost it. Both of ’em. S’dark, Jane.”

“What—what’s happened? What did you lose?”

“Dunno. Air, I think. So sleepy, Jane.”

Beeping. Lots of beeping.

“Alan, listen to me. Stay awake. You—it—I think it’s a gas. The room you’re in is flooded with some kind of gas. You need to get out of that room!”

Well, he’d thought of that already. “Can’t. Can’t see a damn thing. Can’t see the slugs.” His voice sounded slurred. Was he drunk? How had that happened?

“Ok. Right. That’s the problem, isn’t it?”

“Yup.”

Jane went quiet then.

The alarm still beeped, shrill in his ear. He started to nod off again.

“Alan? There are very tall storage tanks with access ladders nearby, right? Climb one of them. There’ll be less of the gas, if you can get higher. I’m coming to help you, but you have to do some work too.”

What was that beeping sound?

“Jane? What’s going on?” Compton’s voice. Now they were talking.

Bergen tuned them out and clung to what she’d just said. A gas. Huh. He pulled himself upright and stooped down to grab Walsh’s arm. He stuck out his other arm, searching for one of the tanks, and took a step, clumsily dragging Walsh along.

There were going to be slugs on it. Icky, squishy slugs.

He staggered, dragging Walsh behind him. Something rattled, skittered across the floor nearby. What was that? It seemed important. He concentrated on the angle the sound had made and dropped to his hands and knees and felt around. Finally, his fingers brushed against something hard and cold and then closed around it.

Air. Oh, holy fuck, it was the air.

It seemed to take forever to get his fingers to close over the mask and bring it to his face, while he braced the tank against his chest and turned the valve with his other hand. He concentrated on inhaling deeply. After just a few moments, a comprehensible picture began to form.

Xenon gas. He’d detected unusual amounts of it in the air the day before. The storage tanks must contain xenon and apparently there was a leak. It was an odorless, tasteless gas. Who knew what the concentration was in there? They were lucky they hadn’t suffocated.

The deep voice, the bizarre behavior, the disconnected thoughts. The effects of xenon were similar to nitrous oxide—laughing gas. He had to share the air with Walsh and he had to get them out of there. But the room was enormous and he had no way of knowing where another door would be.

Bergen took off the mask and pressed it to Walsh’s face, slipping the band around Walsh’s head. He put his hand on Walsh’s chest. It seemed like it was rising and falling.

Bergen held his breath as long as he could, then breathed shallowly as he systematically searched again for the other canister, or either pack. He was already starting to feel woozy when he located one of the packs. He groped around inside until his hand closed over the shaft of a flashlight. He turned it on and passed the light over Walsh, who was coming around.

“Take deep breaths, Walsh!” he yelled. Then he started chuckling. What was so funny, again? Oh, yeah. The oxygen monitors were still going off, which helped him remember.

Walsh sat up.

“It’s xenon gas!” Bergen shouted and then giggled helplessly as he waved the light around, looking for the other canister. He couldn’t see it.

Walsh stood up. Good idea. Xenon was the heaviest, non-radioactive gaseous element. They needed to get farther from the floor. Bergen stood up too and swayed, blinking owlishly at Walsh.

“Where’s the other canister?” Walsh demanded, taking off the mask and holding it over Bergen’s face. Bergen took deep breaths, quickly purging the dense gas.

“I don’t know.” He shined the light around them carefully, but the second canister was nowhere to be seen. All it did was illuminate the number of slugs in the immediate area, which was far too many for Bergen’s comfort.

They weren’t just on the walls. They were covering the sides of the tanks all around them. In fact, one of the largest ones was currently covering the door controls that led back into the other room. That’s why the light had gone out. Their escape route had just been violated by a turgid, purple blob.

The radio crackled with Jane’s voice. “Alan! Are you still awake?”

Jane. He remembered what she’d told him to do.

He passed the oxygen back to Walsh and approached the nearest ladder. “Still not dead, Jane. About to climb a ladder. We have one can of air between us.” He motioned to Walsh. “Come on, we have to get higher. The air will be better and maybe we’ll be able to see another door from up there.”

Jane’s voice came over the radio again, “Alan, don’t touch the slugs—they secrete a substance that could give you chemical burns.”

Bergen huffed and pulled himself up another rung. He couldn’t spare a hand to answer her. The rungs were ridiculously far apart. He had to pause frequently to breathe.

The exertion of climbing made them both take in too much gas. Walsh wasn’t doing so great. He wasn’t saying anything and had to be reminded what they were doing frequently. Hell, he was having trouble remembering what they were doing.

The flashlight was hooked to Bergen’s clothes, making visibility poor, but he needed both hands to climb and to pass the mask back and forth.

The slugs were all around him. He could see them glistening in the faint light.

Where was Jane? Goddammit, this needed to be over soon. How was she going to find them? How did she even know what was happening?

Life was about climbing an endless ladder and trying to keep Walsh alive. There was nothing else. Rung after rung in the near darkness. Breathe. Pass the mask.

Walsh grew less and less responsive.

The rungs were wide. Bergen hooked his elbow on a rung and slipped to the side, keeping his body carefully away from the tank and its gooey residents. He beckoned at Walsh to come up next to him, holding his breath to keep the oxygen inside as long as possible.

They would have to stay here, like this, until Jane could find them. To that end, he groped around until he had wrapped his body around Walsh’s, hooking one foot painfully around the bar and over a rung, to keep himself securely in place. He wasn’t about to let the bastard fall after all this.

After a long turn with the air, he risked trying the radio again. “Jane. Ok, look, this isn’t funny anymore. What’s taking so goddamn long?” His voice sounded a little closer to normal—a good sign.

“Are you safe now?” Jane asked.

“Not really. Walsh is in bad shape. I have no idea why. The compressed air isn’t helping him much.”

“I left Compton and Gibbs to keep trying at the door you went through. The door controls aren’t responding. We couldn’t get that door to open.”

“If the slugs are dripping toxic juice—that’s why. There’s a slug the size of a small pony sitting on the door control on this side.”

“I’m almost to another door that accesses the same room. It’s going to take me longer to find you from there. Do you have a flashlight with a strobe?”

He took the mask back from Walsh and took a few puffs before answering. “I still have a pack. I’m clinging to a ladder, trying to keep this stupid fuck from falling off. I can turn on a strobe. Just tell me when.”

He held back from saying what he really wanted to say to her: Hurry Jane. I can’t manage this much longer. Walsh is dead weight and he’s going to pull us both down.