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= NEBULA EXPRESS =

a DarkSF novel

by John Argo

Page 12.

Frustrated, Ridge threw down the metallic flowcharts he'd been studying and went out to visit the others. He found Jerez and Yu on station with their guns in the entrance. "Any signs of funny little gray men?" They did not share his sense of humor, but shook their heads darkly in reply. Ridge checked the gun on his own belt. "I'll be back to relieve one of you in a few minutes. Yu, I'll relieve you and you can go help Tomson. He's bitching and moaning back there in the communications center." Ridge wandered on through tight, dark spaces--through the galley, through darkened and uncomfortable chambers stuffed with equipment--until he came to the main transformer and throughput node for wireless transmission. The two women, Jerez and Lantz, hung on the sides of a globular pod. Its round, pewter-dull metallic hood stood open, and they leaned inside to work. Their headlamps were on, and their expressions mirrored confusion while their fingers flicked idly from one tangle of wires and coils to the next. "Ridge," Jerez said, "this is like trying to find a meatball in fifty tons of spaghetti."

"It's hopeless," Lantz chimed in. "These circuits are dead cold. We're trying to find a spark, a glimmer of data potential anywhere, and it's like she says. Where's the meatball?"

"Wish I knew," Ridge said. "I'm starting to feel just a bit hungry now that you mention food. If nothing else, we can get together and cook a hot meal."

He wandered further back into the guts of the station, to the experimental greenhouse. Corporations were forever experimenting with growing things in space, trying to combine the characteristics of crystals and charge particles and chlorophyll-driven Earth biology to come up with better ways of sustaining travelers in space. There, under a whitish light that made the outlying walls look all the blacker, he found Brenna. "What are you doing?"

She looked up with a faint smile of bravado. "Checking the plants for abnormalities."

"Why? You're a chemical engineer. Do something chemical."

"Ha ha, like what?"

"I don't know. Chemical." He gestured helplessly as he stood very close to her. He could almost smell the heat of her body emanating up from the shadowy recesses of her dark suit. Never had he longed so much to crawl into a dark space and curl up, to hide from reality. There was no place he wanted to be so much as beside her right now. He studied the minute peach fuzz on her fine cheekbones, the tiny scar on her right eyebrow (from a childhood accident with a swing, she'd told him). He leaned close to the pale, fragile column of her neck and inhaled the warmth rising from her body. He could smell the faintly lavender fragrance of her shower soap, and closed his eyes.

"What are you doing, Ridge?" she asked in a low, teasing voice.

He snapped back, straightened out. "Just wishing we were back home."

"Home home, or pod home?"

"Right now, honestly, I'd take pod home."

"Me too," she said, examining a tangled mass of roots attached to a dense ball of green sprouts.

"I'd curl up in my bunk," he said.

She grinned, and her white perfect teeth gleamed like ivory in the soft light. "So would I. Look at this plant." She held it up in the growth luminescence.

"I'd pull the covers over my head," he said, "and dream of you."

She froze and stared at him. Her eyes were very large. He'd said something he should not have said, and they both knew it. In that moment, as her smile changed into something arrested and uncertain, they both knew she felt the same way. It was a betrayal of the people they loved. "What about Dorothy?" she whispered in a voice so faint he could barely hear.

He did not know the answer. "What's with the plant?"

She looked at the plant in her hands as if rediscovering it. "Oh. This. It's been growing wild. See how the stems loop around each other? I was trying to figure out the pattern." She pointed with a soil-crusted fingertip. "See how the whorls go around in ellipses? It probably means these plants were exposed to some sort of diurnal solar cycle."

"In here?"

She shrugged. "We have a lot of research to do, and few answers as yet."

Tomson walked in. "How are you two doing?"

Ridge was startled. "Fine, fine." Brenna looked up, blushing, as if she'd been caught in a moment of intimacy. Tomson looked bewildered, but there was no chance for him to stare questioningly at them.

A scream resounded through the corridors, followed by cries, and then a man's voice wailing.

"That came from up front," Tomson said. Guns drawn, he and Ridge left Brenna where she stood and raced down the narrow corridors. "Don't leave me here!" Brenna wailed and started after them. Ridge glanced back at her, extending a hand to her. She was a trifle too slow, and he forged on as another scream resounded.

"Sounds like Yu or Mughali," Tomson said breathlessly as he and Ridge clawed and bounced their way through passages choked with equipment, some of which came pouring down out of rotting boxes and rat-gnawed bags as they struck shaky shelving with their shoulders. Music began loudly booming from all sides. "Over here!" Mahaffey's voice came. He sounded hoarse with fright. Ridge and Tomson burst into the entrance area behind the piled debris. Someone had turned on the banks of bright lights. Ridge found a bloody sight. Yu held the gun in trembling hands while sobbing uncontrollably.

Yu and Mahaffey stood at the base of the rocks. Yu had a gun in his hand, while Mahaffey held a flashlight. On the ground between them lay Mughali's weapon. Halfway up the pile lay the bloodied and ripped remains of the brilliant, diminutive Indian engineer. "Oh my God," Ridge said, feeling a ball of vomit welling up under his diaphragm. The woman's face was oddly mangled, so that her eyeballs stared in different directions, and the rest of her features were ground up so that the still wetly gleaming skull was partially visible under reddish gore. Her body had been torn and twisted by multiple powerful forces acting from different directions. Her uniform was twisted around and around, and her small boots pointed in odd directions, while her arms were pulled up and twisted and broken behind her oddly angled back. The sight of this vibrant, warm human being now nothing more than a tangle of shredded meat and bone made Ridge turn and toss the contents of his stomach violently against the wall. Mahaffey had apparently already done the same, judging from the ropes of yellow goo hanging from his lips as he stared in silent horror at Mughali's remains. Yu ran hysterically to the top of the pile and yelled: "Here, you sons of bitches, come and get this!" He fired two or three times into the dark, silent corridor. Zigzags and wireframes of bluish light flashed blindingly. The reports crackled in the air and faded. A stink of scorched dust drifted back as Yu readied to fire once more.

"Stop that!" Tomson and Ridge both hollered. Ridge said: "Don't run down your charge. Whatever killed her may be back for the rest of us any minute."

"Come on!" Yu hollered, waving his gun. "I'm ready for you." Mahaffey clambered and pulled him by the wrist, trying to calm him.

Brenna came running into the area, saw the body, and blanched. She kept her composure, raising both hands to her mouth, but observing: "There was another scream. Whom are we missing?"

Ridge and Tomson looked at each other. Tomson said: "Lantz and Jerez." They turned and ran. Ridge tossed his gun to Brenna, who caught it deftly. "Watch that doorway and shoot anything that comes through." Brenna nodded, and Ridge ran after Tomson.

They encountered the two women running toward them in the corridors. Both had spatters of blood and grayish gore on them. The two men nearly collided with them, and the women clawed past them with panic-stricken eyes. They carried bloodied tools-Jerez a wrench, Lantz a hammer-and their mouths were open but they were too breathless to scream. Looking past them, Ridge spotted a pair of moving red eyes glowing in the darkness. He made out clay-like gray figures with clawed hands drawn up ready to strike. "Mudmen," Tomson whispered, raising his gun. Ridge fired first. The first strike was on target, and a pair of red eyes winked out. It was dark, but Ridge thought he saw spattering body fluids. He and Tomson fired repeatedly until the air smelled like a mix of burned plastic and ozone.

"They've stopped coming," Tomson said, lowering his depleted gun.

"For now," Ridge said.

"We're in trouble," Tomson said.

"You got that right," Ridge said. "Come on, let's get the others together. We're leaving right now." His eyes were still flashing from the after-effects of the gunfire in close quarters, and he knew his own gun had weakened considerably. Unless they found a specially designed power source and adapter, they would not be able to recharge the weapons. Ridge burst into the small hall with Tomson behind him. Lantz and Jerez stood in the middle, breathlessly still waving their crude weapons about, while Mahaffey, Yu, and Brenna surrounded them.

"Nobody is watching the entrance," Ridge shouted as he ran toward the mound with his gun up. He half expected mudmen to come pouring over the top any minute. All he saw was darkness in the tunnels. He heard a regular, calm plashing as water dripped someplace.

"They came out of nowhere," Lantz said breathlessly. Her face was spattered ruby-red in the slightly off-light, as were her muscular bare arms.

"Out of the walls," Jerez said. Her face had streaks on it, as did her bare neck and shoulders. Sweat and streaks of blackish oil added a surreal sheen to the women's skin.

"Be real," Mahaffey said.

"Okay, it was like out of the walls," Jerez amended.

"She means they just popped up out of the shadows," Lantz said.

"Silently," Jerez said, gulping for air. "Stealthy."

Lantz nodded and gasped also. "We didn't know what hit us at first. They aren't real fast, but they just keep plodding along. They're stupid, like moths. You can kill them if you're fast enough."

Jerez said: "They know those tunnels backwards and forwards. We don't have a chance hiding in here. It's a wonder Caulfield survived as long as he did."

Ridge nodded. "That does it. We're heading back to WorkPod01. Everybody make sure you have some kind of weapon. Stick close together and watch each other's backs."

"Listen," Mahaffey said. His normally dark skin seemed pale, and his eyes were wide. Everyone grew still, and they listened. Ridge's skin crawled as he heard the mudmen singing their hunt-song for the first time: flute-like, at various low timbres, so soft you had to strain to hear them, as these enigmatic dwellers of the darkness sang to one another of their next meal.

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