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= NEBULA EXPRESS =

a DarkSF novel

by John Argo

Page 14.

"Whoa," Ridge said. "Guys, we all have to live together."

Brenna started singing in a high, thin voice. It wasn't words but a sweet keening sound. Everyone was so shocked that all further conversation fell silent. The group stopped in mid-air, in just that sphere of dim light from their collective head lamps, with no view backward or forward. "Keep moving," Ridge said, and Tomson in the back said "Go! Go!" The group obediently started moving again, but Brenna did not falter in her song.

Somewhere in the darkness, a fluting noise sounded. Chills ran up and down Ridge's spine again. What on earth (or not on Earth) was going on here? More fluting voices joined in. Ridge found he had to listen very carefully or he would miss the low sound of air hitting air as those deadly mouths in the darkness communicated with one another. It was scary in one way, and yet nothing new in another way, since they knew they were being shadowed by these deadly terrors that had torn Mughali to pieces. Ridge found that if he shut out the childlike singing of Brenna, he could triangulate somewhat. His hearing told him, as he turned his head in various directions like a radar dish, that there were mudmen all around on the inner cylindrical surfaces of the ship. Mudmen padded silently along shadowy girders in midair. Mudmen moved in groups along ledges. There were a lot of them, for he could see the occasional flash of a pair of ruby eyes-the backs of their eyeballs, to be more specific, where light gathered and reflected in the tapetum, a reflective structure coating the rear surfaces of a typical nocturnal animal's eyeballs to gather, reflect, and amplify meager light sources. Most earth animals tended to reflect in the greenish wavelengths of light; whatever the mudmen were, they went lower yet, into the red at the edge of visible light. There was an explanation for everything, Ridge thought, and there would be an explanation for all this too. He told the group so, adding, "Soon we'll all have a good laugh about this."

"How about Mughali," Mahaffey said. "She isn't laughing."

"Neither are any of us," Ridge said. "Now shut up."

Brenna stopped singing. "That was a lullaby. I sang it to my babies when they were real small so they would be quiet. I will sing it to you some more if it will make you quiet."

"Thank you," Lantz said sincerely. "Well, you know I grew up near Tacoma. It rains all the time there, but it's very lovely. When I was small, my dad used to pack us in a minivan and drive us around the Olympic Peninsula. That is one of the largest non-tropical rainforests in the world."

"Is that where you learned to lift weights?" Mahaffey asked.

"Yeah. Shut the fuck up, okay? I'm sick of your crap. Now listen. So we used to pull over in these dark, beautiful tunnels and get out of the van. We'd walk on tiptoes right into the edges of the forest. There was moss so rich and dark and green that it muffled your footfalls. The moss hung down in ropes and beards and sheets from all the trees. You had to climb carefully, but it took you down into these little valleys where fresh water flowed. There were these little waterfalls, and sometimes you could see a tiny little rainbow right in the waterfall, glistening over these slippery looking slimy rocks. These rocks were cold and slimy and wet. They had this green coating on them in little ropes like seaweed and you could see butterflies flapping up around where the sunlight penetrated way down into the deep parts in the forest."

"That's a beautiful story," Brenna said. "I just want to tell you that I loved walking my stroller up and down the boulevard."

"What boulevard?" Mahaffey asked.

She said with sweet patience: "All of them. Ricardo would be off flying to Rome or Cairo, and I'd be alone with the little ones. We had a sort of beat up little green hatchback, and I would take the double stroller. I'd drive down to the beach along the Rio de la Plata. I would find a nice spot to park where the airplane noise wasn't too loud from the Aeroparque Jorge Newbery, and then we would walk along the little concrete sidewalks. The sun would shine, and the bees and butterflies were out in force, the wind was balmy and the flowers were in bloom, and I would sing my lullaby to the little babies in the stroller." She raised her voice sweetly in a humming sound that Ridge found incredibly sweet. As soon as she started, echoes came from the mudmen, chilling imitations, haunting inversions of evil where Brenna shed goodness. Then again, perhaps even mudmen had some sort of soul and life. Maybe they believed in something. Certainly they yearned to eat and drink, and they had a taste for human blood and meat, so maybe they were capable of higher yearnings. Or baser yearnings, Ridge corrected himself. Brenna's lullaby from Buenos Aires trickled away. For a few minutes the mudmen continued their faint puffing and lowing, and then that stopped. Only the sound of water trickling randomly from high places to low places was audible now.

"We are getting closer," Ridge said. "Faith, y'all. We're almost home." A cheer arose. "Yeah!" Tomson cried. "Plug me in to my music and hand me a stick of stimulay. I'm good for it." Laughter followed his declaration.

They came into an area of increasing light, though still faint. The catwalk on which they trod became more visible, showing its worn metal surfaces and floor gratings.

"Eyes open wide," Ridge said. "We're coming to the end of the catwalk and up the ledge on the home side now. We've made it so far. Anybody got the key to our home?"

Tomson said: "I think we'll find it when we get there. Anybody tried reaching the CP recently?"

"I'll give it another shot," Ridge said. He cranked up his collar mike and spoke into it: "Hello, Bridge. Captain Venable? CP, this is WorkPod01. Do you read? Over." He waited. "This is Ridge speaking. Bridge, this is WorkPod01 calling. Do you read me? Over." No reply came, just a faint crackle of static.

"You all think I'm just a poor kid from Sandtown," Tomson said, "but listen. My dad was an Air Force colonel. He used to fly the most advanced jets and saucers in our arsenal. He'd bring back photographs, when it was allowed, of clouds way up on the edge of space. They were these wonderful photographs in which you'd see a green mass below, and then a sort of a haze, kind of blue streaked with white, or white streaked with blue, and above that the black edge of eternity. That always got me, particularly when my old man managed to get some stars in the shot. That always worked magic for me. We lived in a great big old house on a quiet shady street. There were these huge weeping willows all around on the lawn. Elms lined the streets as far as you could see. I had a real happy childhood there."

Mahaffey cut in: "And then you discovered drugs and whores and became a juvenile delinquent."

Tomson took the needling in stride. "I did develop a case of clap early on, because I discovered those young ladies before I could afford protection. I learn quickly though, and I caught on a lot faster than you are catching on, you son of a bitch." There was no humor in Tomson's voice by the time he reached the last sentence of that short, threatening speech.

"Quiet," Ridge said. "Here we are." They stepped onto the gridded platform that would take them to their front door. Breathing a collective sigh of relief, they closed the railings around the moving platform, which was about the size of a living room. Ridge manipulated the simple lever controls with their black rubber ball grips, and the platform quietly started moving on well-greased chains and sprockets. It made a soft, fatty sort of rattling bicycle chain sound as it traversed the last few yards of the void. The platform swung gently around a turn, around a corner in the high walls, and moved slightly upward into a spill of light. The seven staffers waited as it glided over a ledge richly splashed with homey yellow light that spilled from the overhanging windows of WorkPod01. The platform rose up, elevator fashion, and attached itself like a front porch to the metal hull of WorkPod01. The metal walls were solid steel, well riveted and tough, and painted a dull chariot red. The sealed doors of the small work factory glowered below, visible through the floor grating. Ridge felt a deep sense of relief. "Okay," he said, "now all we have to do is get in."

"That's just the trick," Mahaffey said with a hysterical little rising laugh. "We can't get in. We're locked out, and there is a reason."

"Shut up, you fool," Jerez said, banging on the sealed steel portal with the flat of her hand.

Lantz followed suit. She banged on the steel with her fist, raising and lowering a muscular arm. Nothing. Ridge shuddered, realizing instinctively that Mahaffey was most likely right. They were locked out. Like a man in a bad dream, Ridge watched the members of the team look at each other in consternation, wailing and banging on the steel. Mahaffey is right, Ridge thought. We are truly hosed. We are never going to be let in there again. All I want to know is why? No, all I want is to lie down with Brenna and pull the covers over our heads and listen to that lullaby. But first we'd have to get in, and it doesn't look like we are ever meant to get in again.

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