Ilium

49 The Equatorial Ring

For the first two weeks, they lived on lizards in the polluted spring. Each lost so much weight that his thermskin had to contract two sizes to stay in contact with skin.

The death of Savi had so shocked Daeman and Harman that for a full minute after Caliban’s departure—still carrying their friend’s corpse—each man had sat stupidly on his rock pillar ten feet above the fetid water. Daeman found that only one thought had been running through his mind—Caliban’s coming back to get us. Caliban’s coming back to get us. Then Harman broke the spell by leaping feet first into the stinking water and disappearing himself.

Daeman would have howled from terror then if he’d had the energy, but all he could do is stare at the undulating scum where Harman had abandoned him. After what seemed like long minutes, Harman bobbed up, gasping and spluttering and holding three objects in his hands—their two osmosis masks and Savi’s gun. He pulled himself up onto the lower shelf of rock and Daeman—finally released from his paralysis—clambered down to join him.

“It’s only about ten feet deep here,” gasped Harman, “or I never would have found this stuff.” He handed Daeman his osmosis mask and slipped his own on over his thermskin cowl, not securing it over his face. Then Harman had hefted the gun.

“Does it work?” asked Daeman, his voice shaking. He was afraid to be so close to the water, certain that Caliban’s long arm would snake up at any second to pull him down. Daeman kept remembering the obscene snap as the monster’s jaws bit through Savi’s throat and spinal cord.

“One way to find out,” whispered Harman. The older man’s voice was also shaking, although from the cold water or terror, Daeman couldn’t tell.

Harman aimed the weapon the way he’d seen Savi fire it, slipped his finger into the trigger guard, and squeezed. A circle of water near the far wall erupted in an irregular fountain three feet high as hundreds of flechettes ripped the surface.

“Yes!” screamed Daeman, his voice echoing back to him in the small grotto. Fuck Caliban!

“Where’s Savi’s pack?” whispered Harman.

Daeman pointed to where it had fallen behind and below her rock column. The two men scrambled to it and pawed through the contents. The flashlight still worked. There were three more clips of flechettes, each clip holding seven plastic packs of darts. Harman found the way to release the current ammunition clip and count the remaining flechette charges there. Two.

“Do you think he . . . it . . . is dead?” whispered Daeman, glancing over his shoulder at both points where the underground stream entered the small grotto. The rocky space was illuminated only by fungal glow. “Savi shot it straight in the chest from just a few feet away. Maybe it’s dead.”

“No,” said Harman. “Caliban’s not dead. Tug your mask down. We have to find a way out of here.”

The underground stream ran from grotto to grotto, then grotto to cavern, each space larger than the last. The top layers of the asteroid under the crystal city seemed to be honeycombed with caves and pipes. They found blood spattered on rocks in the second grotto they surfaced in.

“Savi’s or Caliban’s?” whispered Daeman.

Harman shrugged. “Maybe both.” He swung the flashlight around the flat rock stretching away to shadows ten yards on either side of the foul stream. Rib cages, tibias, pelvic bones, and a skull stared back.

“Oh, God, Savi,” gasped Daeman. He tugged his mask down in a hurry and prepared to jump back into the underground stream.

Harman stopped him with a firm hand on his shoulder. “I don’t think so.” He walked closer to the bones and shifted the flashlight beam to and fro. More skeletal remains were scattered on all the rock ledges on either side of the stream. “These are old,” said Harman. “Months or years—maybe decades.” He picked up two ribs and held them in the light, the bones shockingly white against his blue thermskin glove. Daeman could see the gnaw marks there.

Daeman began shaking again. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

Harman shook his head. “We’re both in shock and starved. We’ve eaten almost nothing for more than two days.” He lay prone on a rock near the edge of the water.

“But maybe there’s food in the city . . .” began Daeman.

Harman’s hand shot down into the water and there was a wild thrashing. Daeman jumped away, sure it was Caliban returned, but when he looked back over his shoulder, the older man had an albino lizard in both hands. This one was not eyeless like the one who selected Savi—its beaded eyes were pink.

“You’re kidding,” said Daeman.

“No.”

“We don’t want to waste flechettes on killing this . . .” began Daeman.

Harman grasped the lizard firmly above its hind legs and bashed its brains out against a rock.

Daeman flipped up his osmosis mask, sure that he was going to throw up again. He didn’t. His stomach rumbled and cramped.

“I wish Savi had a knife in her pack,” muttered Harman. “Remember that nice skinning knife Odysseus always carried with him at the Golden Gate Bridge? We could sure use that now.”

Daeman stared back, appalled beyond nausea as Harman found a fist-sized rock amongst the human bones and began chipping away one edge of it. When he had a crude point, he chopped the dead lizard’s head off and began pealing away the amphibian’s white skin.

“I can’t eat that,” gasped Daeman.

“You said yourself there’s no food up in the city,” said Harman, crouched over his work. Skinning a lizard, Daeman saw, was a relatively bloodless process.

“How do we cook it?”

“I don’t think we can. Savi didn’t bring any matches, there’s no fuel to burn down here, and no air in the city above,” said Harman. He ripped red flesh from the lizard’s upper thigh, dangled it a minute in the flashlight beam, and then popped it in his mouth. Then he scooped up some stream water in Savi’s bottle and washed the morsel down.

“How is it?” asked Daeman, although he could answer that himself based on the expression on Harman’s face.

Harman ripped a thinner strip and handed it to Daeman. It was a full two minutes before Daeman slipped it into his mouth and chewed. He didn’t vomit. It tasted, he thought, like salty, fishy mucus. His stomach cramped for more.

Harman handed him the flashlight. “Lie at the edge of the stream. The light attracts the lizards.”

And Caliban? thought Daeman, but he lay prone at the edge of the water, shining the light into the deep pool with his left hand and preparing to grab at the white, swimming lizards when they wriggled closer.

“We’ll turn into Caliban,” murmured Daeman. He could hear Harman ripping flesh and chewing in the fungal darkness behind him.

“No,” said Harman between bites. “We won’t.”

They emerged from the caverns two weeks later—two pale, bearded, emaciated, and wide-eyed men—swimming up through the proper pipe, cracking through the skim of ice on the pond above, and floating into the comparative brightness of the crystal city.

It was, strangely enough, Daeman who insisted that they go up.

“It’s easier to defend against Caliban down here,” argued Harman. He’d rigged a sort of holster out of part of Savi’s pack and the gun was in it. They took turns sleeping against one cave wall or the other, and while one dozed the other sat watch with the flashlight and weapon.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Daeman. “We have to get off this rock.”

“Caliban might be dying from his wounds,” said Harman.

“He might be healing from them,” said Daeman. The two of them looked more alike now that Daeman had lost all of his pudginess and both had grown beards. Daeman’s beard was a bit fuller and darker than Harman’s. “It doesn’t matter,” he said again. “We have to find a way off.”

“I can’t go back to the firmary,” said Harman.

“We may have to. Those may be the only faxportals in the orbital ring.”

“I don’t care,” replied Harman. “I can’t go in that slaughterhouse again. Plus the faxportals there are for the bodies going up and down after their repair. The nodes must be coded to those people.”

“We’ll change the codes if we have to,” said Daeman.

“How?”

“I don’t know. We’ll watch the servitors fax people back down and do what they do.”

“Savi said she didn’t think our codes were fax-viable any longer,” said Harman.

“She didn’t know. She’d been out of the fax loop for more than a millennium. But at the very least, we have to explore the rest of the post-human’s city up there.”

“Why?” asked Harman. The older man had more trouble sleeping that Daeman did and his morale was low.

“There might be a spaceship stored somewhere,” said Daeman.

Harman began laughing then, softly at first but then so uncontrollably that he began to weep. Daeman had to pinch his upper arm to get his attention.

“Come on,” said Daeman. “We know the pipe that goes to the surface. Follow me. I’ll shoot our way through the surface ice if I have to.”

They explored the rest of the city over the next two weeks, finding cubbies and closets in which to sleep, one always standing watch while the other slept. Daeman always dreamed that he was falling and jerked awake, legs and arms struggling against the zero-g. He knew that Harman had the same dreams because the other man dozed even shorter periods of time before gasping and flailing awake.

The crystal city was uniformly dead, although the towers on the far side of the mile-long rock were more elaborate, with more terraces and enclosed spaces. Everywhere floated the mummified, half-chewed remains of the post-human women. The two men were always hungry themselves, although Savi’s pack was filled with skinned and sliced water lizards, and sometimes Daeman’s belly growled at the sight of some of these meaty mummified remains. It was water, they knew, that would drive them back to one of the frozen pools every third day or so.

Although they expected to encounter Caliban at every kick or turn, they found only occasional floating spheroids of blood that might be his. On their third day out of the caverns, with their eyes just then adjusting to the brighter Earthlight through clear panels above, they found a wrist and hand—floating like a pale spider outside the thickest kelp beds—that they thought might be Savi’s. That night—“night” being what they called the brief twenty-minute periods where the Earth wasn’t illuminating the clear panes above—they both heard a terrible, Calibanish howl from the direction of the firmary. The noise seemed to be transmitted more through the ground of the asteroid and the exotic material of the towers around them than through the thin air.

A month after their arrival in this orbital hell, they’d explored all of the city except for two areas—the far end of the firmary beyond where they’d first encountered Caliban, and a long dark corridor right at the point where the city curved sharply around the north pole of the asteroid. This narrow corridor, no more than twenty meters across, was windowless and filled with swaying kelp—a perfect hiding spot for a recovering Caliban—and on their first trip around the moonlet, they’d both voted to stay out of that dark place in favor of checking out the rest of the post-humans’ city. Now the rest of the city had been checked—no spaceships, no other airlocks, no control rooms, no other firmaries, no storage rooms filled with food, no other sources for water—and they had the choice now of returning to the caverns to stock up on lizards since they were down to their last rotting lizard corpse, or going back to the firmary to try the tank faxnodes there, or exploring the dark, kelp-filled corridor.

“The dark place,” voted Harman.

Daeman only nodded tiredly.

They kicked their way down through the tangling kelp while keeping one hand on the other’s arm so as not to be separated. Daeman had the gun this day and he swept it from side to side at every spectral movement of the kelp. Without windows or reflected glow from the central city core, only Savi’s flashlight showed the way. Both men wondered about the flashlight’s charge, but neither spoke their worry aloud. Daeman reassured himself by remembering the dim fungal glow in most, not all, of the caverns below, enough to hunt lizards by, with luck, but the truth was that he didn’t want to go back down to those charnel hunting grounds ever again. He’d asked Harman about the near vacuum around them just two nights earlier.

“What do you think would happen if I took my osmosis mask off?”

“You’d die,” said Harman without emotion. The older man was ill—not a condition humans had encountered often, since the firmary dealt with such things—and he was shaking with cold, despite the thermskin’s preservation of all his body heat. “You’d die,” he repeated.

“Quickly?”

“Slowly, I think,” said Harman. His blue thermskin was filthy from river mud and lizard blood. “You’d asphyxiate. But it’s not pure vacuum here, so you’d struggle for quite a while.”

Daeman nodded. “What if I took my thermskin off but left my mask on?”

Harman thought about this. “That would be quicker,” he agreed. “You’d freeze to death in a minute or less.”

Daeman had said nothing and he’d thought Harman had drifted back to sleep, but then the older man whispered over the comm, “But don’t do it without telling me first, all right, Daeman?”

“All right,” said Daeman.

The corridor was so thick with wild kelp that they almost had to turn back, but by having one of them twist and shove the floating growth aside while the other fought his way through, they were able to wiggle and kick and pull their way the two hundred yards or so of the dark length of the windowless column. There was a wall at the end—just what both men expected after their troubles—but Daeman kept moving the flashlight beam past the kelp, and suddenly they could just barely make out a white square set in the dark bulkhead of exotic material. Daeman had the gun so he went through the semipermeable membrane first.

“What do you see?” called Harman on the commline. He hadn’t come through yet. “Can you see anything?”

“Yes.” It was Daeman’s thermskin suitcomm answering, but not Daeman’s voice. “He can see wonderful things.”