Walking to Aldebaran

CHAPTER TEN

JOE TOOK THE lead, of course. He was the sort of man that, look at him and you just about reckoned God had personally designed him with ‘taking the lead’ in mind. Katarin and Louis went after, then me with the motorised trolley with all our gear on it, then Karen and Ajay bringing up the rear. This order had been worked out in advance and had in fact been the subject of colossal international argument on the long flight over. NASA practically threatened to walk away from the project unless their man got to set first foot inside the Frog God, a latter-day Armstrong. What Joe, Louis and the other US crew would have done had that actually happened, I can’t imagine. Were we supposed to just pack them for storage in the sleep chambers until the international kerfuffle sorted itself? Anyway, Roscosmos and the ESA folded on that one, so we didn’t have to find out.

And so we trekked into the dark, our suit lamps and torches illuminating black walls, the first few metres inscribed with that ornate but maddeningly nowhere-leading floriate scrollwork, the rest just blank stone. I remember the sound of my breath in my ears, my heart rate. I remember checking and rechecking my HUD to make sure nothing was going wrong with my suit. Gravity was an unwelcome friend from the past come to slob out on our couch and watch our TV, and although all the instruments said the atmosphere was cleaner and more breathable than the air in most major conurbations, nobody was keen to try it – even Louis, who’d already been exposed to it. I can’t imagine what it was like for him, how every little tic and murmur of his body must have seemed the harbinger of some dreadful bacterial doom. Except how could there be any pathogens out here that would infect a human body? (And indeed, despite the macrofauna that infests this place, I’ve not had so much as a sniffle. Maybe some unseen mechanism scrubs the air. Or maybe I’m still incubating…)

We walked for bloody hours.

We knew we were going to. There was one of the lit areas some way ahead that the remotes had found, our base-camp-to-be. We’d all been exercising and on a cocktail of steroids, but none of it prepared us for a long hike under gravity. We had to stop sooner than anyone liked, and then after another march we had to stop again. And then, when we set off, the trolley wouldn’t work.

That was unwelcome.

Thankfully, doing complex maintenance while suited up is something we had trained for, and at least the tools wouldn’t keep drifting off. Karen and Katarin took the trolley apart and tested every single circuit and ball bearing of it, while the rest of us kicked our heels and Louis flew the remote ahead, trying to get a glimpse of the promised lights. There was nothing wrong with the trolley, except it wouldn’t work. Nothing we did could make the damn thing go. The blame for this somehow fell on me because I’d been driving it, though nobody could say what I was supposed to have done wrong.

So that was all our gear – our supplies, our tents, all that useful stuff that nobody wanted to haul through a G of gravity. In the end we cannibalised the wheelbase of the trolley, and Ajay and I pushed it. Actually pushed it, like an actual supermarket trolley with a squeaky wheel, loaded with as much as we could manually shift.

And we set off again, a testament to the indefatigability of human dumbassery. But, trolley aside, all was still not well. Louis couldn’t find the lights, and everyone agreed that, given the distance we’d travelled, we should be seeing them by now. The remote was sent further and further, finding only more lightless passageways, draining a battery we couldn’t recharge now we’d had to leave the guts of the trolley behind. We watched the camera feed on our HUDs, seeing only an extra slice of second-hand darkness overlaid on the personal dark outside our helmets.

Joe had a confab with the Mission Team about what we should do. They said they’d send more remotes after us, but probably we hadn’t gone as far as we thought, and we should just continue.

I wonder about that trolley, you know. Because I’ve met plenty of aliens walking the Crypts, and walking was what they were doing. I never met an alien in a golf cart or a motorised carriage. Even the Egg Men, who were kind of in little robot suits, had little robot feets to move them around. I firmly believe the Makers killed our trolley, or something they left behind did, perhaps even some intrinsic and unimaginable law of the Crypts. You travel their ways with a proper reverence, perhaps. You make your pilgrimage to the stars, if not on your knees, then at least by putting one foot after another, just as I still am, all this time later. Nobody gets a free ride.

But there we were, going deeper and deeper into terra incognita because we’d rather play chicken with the universe than look yellow.

When we stopped again, Joe’s confab with Doctor Naish was rather more heated. Our remote’s battery warning was on, despite the fact it should have had way more life in it, and we hadn’t seen so much as a space glow-worm lighting up the place. Worse, the chaser remotes, which should have overtaken us an hour before, were conspicuous in their absence. Naish said they were still on their way to us, following our trail of comms relays. Joe Martino said that was frankly impossible unless she’d sent them by snail. We all had a good laugh; not.

Then Louis said he’d found something.

It was not our proposed base camp, but it was something, and we’d been in those four-metre-wide tunnels for a long time. Any variety seemed like a good deal. In this case it was a big chamber, twenty metres across at least, by the remote’s instruments. There were several passageways issuing off it. None of this had been found by the initial drone, and we had obviously missed a connection somehow, turned when we should have gone straight or vice versa. How could we have been so bloody stupid? I could feel everyone on edge, on the point of blaming each other. Doctor Naish’s voice, somewhat staticky, said we should camp in the chamber, set the proximity alarms and keep a watch, generally get some shut-eye. Ajay and I, still on trolley duty, heartily agreed.

“How can the remotes be following our beacons without finding us?” Karen demanded. “I vote we go back.”

I don’t know what might have happened if we’d listened to her. We didn’t, obviously we didn’t, and I have reason to believe it wouldn’t have been wine and roses even if we had. But it would have been different. I’d still be in a mess, doubtless, just not this mess.

And there was something – the last words I had from her, crackly and broken over the comms. I wonder, I really do. I wonder just how far we walked, and what we put between us and home other than mere distance.

Toto, this is where it happens. The moment we’ve all been waiting for.

We reached the big chamber. Twenty metres across, like I said, but far higher, like we were at the bottom of a big old silo. I remember shining my torch upwards, turned as strong as it would go, and seeing a weird silvery layer of dust motes glittering up above our heads, as though it marked the border between two layers of pressure. That was possible, of course – we knew from the remotes’ misadventures that there were parts of the Crypts invisibly sectioned off into regions of hostile atmosphere, greater or lesser pressure, all that. We had originally picked out a path that avoided such shifts, and somehow we had followed a different path that still managed to remain curiously Earthling-friendly. And I don’t know. I have suspicions about why we never found the lights, but that way madness lies. And I passed madness some while ago and don’t want to have to retrace my steps.

Ajay and I just parked the trolley and sat down on it, exhausted. My suit was already showing some warning signs of wear and tear, never really intended to be worn for extended periods in-atmosphere. Katarin was setting up the one tent we’d been able to carry, which was self-powered and would provide us with somewhere to de-suit, if we were Olympic-grade contortionists. We’d had two tents, but one was back with the trolley’s innards. The whole expedition was a disaster; everyone knew it, nobody was talking about it.

Karen had the drone controller and was taking the little flier up to look at that dust ceiling, with what was left of its battery. Joe was hailing home again, saying that we’d have to come back after we’d slept, a long and defeated slog nobody much wanted to envisage. Naish’s voice on the comms was crackly and faint despite the relays. The replacement drones hadn’t turned up, though Naish seemed to be saying she’d found the room we were describing but where were we? Another room, obviously, only a crazy person would think otherwise. And perhaps that wasn’t even what Naish was saying; her voice seemed to be echoing to us distantly, from far far away.

Louis snapped, then. He had thus far kept up a profoundly dignified professional front, but something about this latest indignity broke him and he threw a magnificent strop. “That’s the line!” he yelled, whether to Naish or to us. “This goddamn mission!” He took his helmet off, fumbling angrily with the catches. His pink-tinted face glowered at us, weirdly undersized within the neck-ring of his suit. “Don’t look at me like that,” he snapped. “I already got a body-full of whatever the hell this place has to offer, don’t I? And it’s fine. The air’s fine. Look.” He made a great show of breathing in and out, an effort mostly hidden by the bulk of his suit.

“You’re going to have to go into quarantine when we get back,” Joe warned him.

“I’ll live with it. This is goddamn ridiculous,” Louis shot back. “I have never been part of such a goddamn fool mission in all my days. I swear we should never have got into bed with the goddamn Hispanics.” By which I assume he meant Madrid.

“What the hell?” Karen said, having pretty much ignored all the shouting. She had the drone up at the dust boundary and now it was dancing wildly through the motes, its lights spinning about the walls. It wasn’t an atmospheric line, but a gravitic one, just like I would later find at the bottom of my long fall. Except in this case it was down both ways from the line instead of up.

We were instantly absorbed in what she’d found, all save Louis, who plainly wanted an audience to complain some more to. The little drone bobbed and wove about, unable to orient itself as Karen tried to sit it on the very boundary. Then its lamp beam strafed over the ceiling and I cried out. Everyone else had their eyes on the remote, but I saw what was beyond it.

“Eyes!” I shouted unhelpfully – and inaccurately, as it turned out.

Karen was quick off the mark and had the drone up above/below the boundary layer, scanning down/up at the ceiling/floor beyond, still unsteadily because she was having to drive the thing with half the controls reversed. We had a shaky glimpse of a great yellow-brown leathery mass clumped in whorls and tangles, just about coating the entire ceiling. Here and there were clenched-fist nodules that I’d taken as eyes.

They opened.

This was all maybe thirty metres up, and five metres past the dust layer. We saw them unfurl and then flick at us, slender lances darting down like rain.

What happened was this: the thing was thrusting its pseudopods up, of course, not down, but once they cleared the dust then it was downhill all the way, a free lunch as its tentacles speared towards us. One of them struck Joe through the helmet, piercing the industrial-toughness plastic like a bullet and going most of the way towards his boots. There was an explosion of blood and cartilage from his knee where the tip came out. He wasn’t screaming. He was too surprised for that, though not as surprised as when the thing retracted its limb and whipped him up twenty metres up into the air.

For a moment he hung there, and, I kid you not, he had his bloody knife out and was trying to cut the thing, though the fall would have killed him even if the impaling trauma didn’t. Then with a great convulsion the tentacle hauled him to the gravity boundary and, from there, it was downhill all the way. He practically hit the remote as he tumbled, and a momentary sweep of its lamp highlighted the opening of a dreadful barbed orifice which swallowed him whole.

Like rain, I said; well, there’s never just one raindrop, is there?

Katarin was next. The lance plunged through her chest as she stood staring up, and I think it killed her outright. Louis was skewered through the thigh, and the whole chamber rang to his screams. Ajay ran and grabbed his hand, and nearly had his shoulder dislocated when the thing hauled poor bloody Louis Chung up in one muscular fling, his yelling cut off in a crunch that reverberated through the walls of the chamber.

Karen ran. I wish I’d run with her right then, but Ajay and I were just standing there like morons, babbling to one another, trying to raise Naish and the Mission Team, still thinking we could save anybody. I remember us turning to each other, clumsy in our suits like a pair of comedy puppets waving our arms and panicking at each other. We had not been trained for this, nobody had.

The next pseudopod plunged through his shoulder and into his chest. We had a moment of realisation, eyes locked, and I fumbled for his hand. Then he was gone, our fingertips brushing for a fraction of a second as he was whipped to his doom.

And I looked about the chamber, wheeling around, unsure of where we had come from, unsure which passage Karen had taken, panicking like a horse with a broken leg. And I ran. I ran the wrong way, if indeed there was a right way.

Later, after I’d skidded down too many corridors and all my HUD readings were red – suit damage, integrity compromised, running out of battery, running out of air – after I realised I was horribly lost, that I couldn’t find the relays (which I should have thought to look for when I legged it, but which had gone completely out of my head); after all of that, when I thought I knew just how screwed I was (I didn’t, there was more), I found a lit area. I don’t think it was the one we were looking for, but it was there, a string of dim reddish beads in a line along the ceiling for about a hundred metres. I collapsed then, weeping for the others – plenty of time later to weep for myself. Before I could follow poor doomed Louis’s example and wrench my helmet off so I could breathe the dead air of the Crypts for the first time, though, I heard a voice.

Karen. She was calling us. She was calling anybody.

“…there?” I heard. “Ajay? Louis? …hear me? … Aanbech to Mission, …tor Naish, hello?”

“Hello!” I cried out joyously. There was hope. She had survived! We would find each other and find our way home! Hope!

“…hear me?” she continued. “Gary?”

“Yes!”

“Ajay? Anyone?”

“Karen, it’s me!” I shouted, as though bellowing into the microphone and deafening myself would boost the signal.

“…at the exit, but I can’t… the Quixote. There’s nothing here but… anyone? Quixote, where are you? Is this even…?”

And then I lost her, and I have never found her since.