Luna (15 page)

33| The Consultant

“Asami, did that valve open?” Blake’s voice rung with concern.

“It did,” Kennedy responded.

“I don’t trust you to tell me the truth, Kennedy. Sort of like that time you told me we were getting quality chips from that company in Mongolia. That worked out real well, as I recall—”

“It opened, Blake! I saw it.” Asami’s shrill words cut Blake off.

“We need to get out of here very fast then, people,” Blake said. “Our lab scientist says the creatures are attracted to pure oxygen.”

“How does he know that?” Kennedy asked.

“We need to move
now
!” was Blake’s only response. The group took off down the tunnel at a loping, bouncing moonwalk, the top of their helmets occasionally scraping against the ceiling.

“Blake, how does your scientist know that the creatures are attracted to oxygen? It’s dangerous for us to move this fast through here,” Kennedy said, panting, “so I think we have a right to know your reasoning.”

But Blake hurried on in silence, pausing at a Y-fork to look left, then spot their footprints and move right. They heard Caitlin’s voice next over the comm link.

“He knows because he and Martin Hughes captured a small, live specimen earlier and brought it back to our lander’s lab.”

At this, Kennedy actually stopped in his tracks despite the well-known urgency for haste. “
What
?”

Takeo bumped into him with his sudden halt.

“Yes, we brought back a specimen to the lab, that’s how we know. Can we get going now, please?” Blake came back.

“Sure we can,” Kennedy said, putting one foot in front of the other again, “but tell me this, Blake. How many more secrets are you hiding from us? I mean c’mon, it’s been one thing after another. Reminds me of the time when you misled our investors into thinking our home security software would be first to market even though you knew a Chinese competitor would beat us. Remember that, Blake? Remember Tsing Mao?”

“I remember it all too well, Kennedy. I also recall that—”

Suddenly, the tunnel wall opened up on their right side. A cavernous, dark space appeared there for a moment but was then filled in as an enormous one of the creatures filed its body past the opening.

“That one is huge!” Takeo said. He sounded genuinely scared.

“What do we do?” Kennedy looked over at Caitlin and Blake.

“Stay calm,” Blake told him. “It’s very large, it won’t be able to enter the tunnel just anywhere. Hopefully it keeps going.”

But no sooner had he finished his sentence than the great beast halted its forward movement, sliding to a stop next to the group. Its gray, scaly body quivered in unpredictable spasms.

“It stopped,” Caitlin said.

“Maybe we should go,” Kennedy suggested.

“Wait, what’s that?” Asami pointed to a section of the worm’s body, near the underbelly. “There’s some kind of discoloration.”

Blake stared at it, too. “Does everyone have everything they’re supposed to be carrying? Because it looks like this thing may be sitting on something manmade.”

Everyone accounted for what they were carrying; nothing was missing. Then the worm moved, rotated inside the rock wall, so that what they had been thinking of as its “belly” now rode up higher within the rock opening.

“Is that—” someone started.

“It’s a helmet,” Asami said. “Wait...”

“It’s a face!” Kennedy suddenly screamed. “Oh my God, it’s a face? What is going on here? Blake! Let’s go!”

But no one moved. They were too entranced by the horror of what they were witnessing, like a group of motorists rubbernecking at a bad car accident, they couldn’t look away.

“It’s—is...it?— a helmet with a face in it!” Takeo stammered.

Caitlin dared take a step toward the monstrosity for a better look. She leaned in closer. “It’s just a helmet...Wait...
Strat
? Oh my God, I see his face!” They heard her retching over the comm channel. Blake reached out and thumped her on the back. “Get a grip on yourself, don’t throw up. Come on.”

Instead, she broke down crying. “What the fuck am I seeing, Blake? Is that... is that Strat?”

Kennedy spoke for Black Sky. “We don’t know what he looks like, not that whoever that is, or was, still looks like they used to.”

Blake stared into the helmeted face that was sewn into the side of the creature. Through the scratched faceplate, he recognized those green eyes, the shape of the mouth...and...
there
: the scar on the right cheek, fish hook shaped. In New Mexico, Strat had told him the story of how he had gotten it once, as a boy, playing with fireworks one New Year’s Eve.
Jesus
...

“Strat!” Caitlin wailed.

They all saw it: the eyes widened in recognition.

“Good lord!” Kennedy gasped. “Where...what happened to his body?”

It was a good question. All they could see was his face.

“It’s...it’s in there somewhere!” Takeo couldn’t hide the incredulity in his voice. “It must be, he’s alive! His eyes are open, blinking!”

“But his spacesuit was bloody and shredded back there.” Kennedy looked behind them back toward the cave, as if he would see the discarded space garment walking on its own toward them on bloody legs.

“This is like what happened to Suzette,” Asami said. A flash of regret coursed through her in an instant as she recalled the uncomfortable incident with the camera.
I’m sorry, Suzette.

No one replied, and then the worm moved. The face of Strat Knowles was ground into the tunnel floor, the faceplate of his helmet recessed just enough into the creature’s flesh to keep it from breaking. A tear ran down Caitlin’s face inside her helmet, before the worm righted itself and again Stat’s imprisoned head came into view.

This time they saw his lips move. Saw them move and then heard his voice, as if in a nightmare, over the comm channel. Like Suzette’s had been, it was bubbly, the words nearly indistinguishable from each other, but barely recognizable.

“Blake...I’m a consultant now...”

Then the worm moved off down the rock fissure it inhabited, carrying Strat with it. They could no longer see him but still they heard his mangled voice. “...moon...I know more about the moon than anyone...moon...”

“Switch channels!” Kennedy demanded. They did, and then they started walking. But soon Strat found them on this new frequency. “...consultant. Need my help. It hurts...pain. I know everything now though.”

“He’s not making any sense!” Blake yelled. “Let’s go!” He and Kennedy led the way through the tunnel, with Caitlin bringing up the rear, constantly looking back to watch for the massive worm—Strat’s worm.

Then Asami’s shriek pierced their earpieces.

34| They’re Baaaaack

Asami was second to last in line in the procession of moonwalkers. Takeo was behind her and Caitlin immediately in front of her. A yawning gulf appeared to their right and a massive worm-like animal jutted into the passage. At first, it slammed its humongous proboscis, if those earthly zoological terms had any meaning here, to and fro, whipping up a highly localized maelstrom of lunar dust and knocking Takeo backwards to land on his side.

Then the worm reared its head up again and an aperture at the end of it dilated, the “mouth” not so much as unhinging on a set of jaws as it was unfolding like an old camera lens. The body of the animal tracked across the tunnel floor while the head bent at an ungodly angle, bringing the aperture down on Asami’s helmeted head. It seemed to inhale the spacewoman into its gullet, her feet leaving the ground, flailing ineffectively in the airless void.

“Get me out, get me...Caitlin! Blake...anybody!”

The only part of Asami not yet ingested was from the knees down. Caitlin was closest to her and the first to grab hold of her feet. She crossed Asami’s ankles and clutched them together so as to get a better grip, but the sheer force of the monster was overwhelming, and Caitlin was shipped into the tunnel ceiling as the worm-creature twisted spasmodically about. From her awkward position lying pressed up against the tunnel roof, Caitlin lashed out with a booted foot and kicked the creature in its...underside, she guessed it was. The flesh was soft and spongy, though, absorbing most of her impact as if she had booted a half-deflated rubber ball. Even so, the animal gyrated even more with her efforts, twisting and cavorting recklessly as the comm channel filled with panicky shouts.

By the time Caitlin hit the ground in that slow motion moon gravity and looked up again, the other astronauts were doing battle with the thing, lashing out at it with small hand tools, coordinating their efforts to attack different parts of the beast. But what captured her attention was Asami. Somehow she had inverted herself within the beasts’ mouth so that her head was now visible. Caitlin made eye contact with her through their faceplates, and in that ephemeral burst of wordless human communication, she stared into depths of terror that had been unknown to her only moments before, for the alien being’s jaws or mouth or whatever the hell it had began to close around Asami’s head.

“Need help, people!” Caitlin pleaded. The group was already circled tightly around the worm-thing, poking and prodding at it to little effect. And then the animal’s fleshy outer lip-like appendages sloshed over Asami’s helmet, the astronaut looking out as they swiped back and forth over the glass, like a scared kid in a carwash. Then the sea of swampy flesh inside the animal’s mouth circulated, moved, parted, revealing a set of teeth in multiple rows. Not sharp teeth like fangs or even incisors, but more like big molars with flat, grinding surfaces.

Those teeth closed around Asami’s helmet with ferocious speed and force, cutting off the astronaut’s scream as the helmet shattered, instantly exposing her head to the zero-pressure environment. Her head imploded, caving in on itself in a microsecond. The creature reared back and gyrated with the influx of bio-fluids down its open maw while the faceplates of Kennedy and Blake were splattered with gore to the point it obscured their vision.

“Go, c’mon!” somebody said. The point was clear. Asami was dead for sure now, there was nothing they could do for her, and so unless they wanted to be next, it was time to get out of here. Caitlin fell into line behind Takeo, who scrambled to wriggle his way around the creature into the open tunnel, down which Blake and Kennedy were already tripping and loping and tumbling. They moved any way they could to put distance between themselves and the specter of death that had claimed Asami.

In his struggle to keep up, Takeo tripped and let go of the other oxygen canister, sending it tumbling over Caitlin’s head and back toward the creature which now sat in a loose pile blocking the tunnel, quivering with digestive effort.

The canister sailed over Caitlin’s outstretched arm and she had to watch it tumble onto the tunnel floor on the other side of the mammoth, amorphous beast. She looked on as a river of Asami’s blood sluiced down the alien hide before turning back toward the group. Takeo met her gaze, as if to acknowledge the severity of his mistake. They had lost fifty percent of their precious new oxygen supply. More than that including the leak from Kennedy’s tank. But it was a matter of live as best you could with half of the supply or die trying to get the other half. Caitlin wasn’t ready to die, and so she moved away from the creature down the tunnel.

But Takeo stood his ground staring at the engorged animal.

“What are you doing? C’mon!” Caitlin called.

“I can get it. I—” He broke off as the worm-beast rolled on the ground, a ripple of weird flesh trembling in waves up and down its body.

“No, Takeo! Don’t—look, they’re coming!” Caitlin pointed past him, where the big worm had curled itself into a tight ball, leaving a narrow gap between itself and the tunnel wall. Past it they could see a river of the smaller creatures—most the size of rats but a few more like footballs, undulating through the regolith, heading their way en masse.

The astronaut saw that Caitlin was right and he gave up on saving his pride, not to mention his oxygen. He turned and loped off down the tunnel, where the others were now out of sight around a bend. Caitlin followed after him, finding it difficult to keep from bouncing into the walls and ceiling when taking the longer strides used in running. She had experience moon walking, not moon running, as did they all.

She caught up to the rest of the group as they emerged from the tunnel system into the interior of the crater. They were farther down toward the crater floor than the tunnel they entered earlier with Suzette, though, and so had a longer hike to the rim. Caitlin tried not to look down, tried to simply put one foot in front of the other until she was far up the crater, but she hadn’t even reached the next tunnel entrance when she looked behind her and below.

And there they were: a veritable horde of the creatures, burrowing their way up the crater along with them. Moving
fast
, too, Caitlin noticed. “Step on it, guys, these things are coming after us and they’re making good time!”

The comm loop was punctuated with heavy grunting and pants as the team loped and clawed their way up the inside of the crater. A couple of times someone tripped and fell, bouncing at an awkward angle until someone else pulled them back up. Progress was made but it became clear that the creatures were even faster. At the current rate, they would be overrun by the space animals before they reached the lip of the crater.

Caitlin couldn’t imagine what the thousands of small creatures would do to them, but she didn’t want to imagine that, especially after not having to imagine the fates of Asami and Suzette. Of the two, she supposed Asami had the more enviable fate, being killed quickly. She found herself wondering why Suzette still lived and then forced herself not to think about it. There was no time. Not if she wanted to live herself.

She yelled into her comm unit. “Need to do something, guys. Those things are gaining on us.”

“We could split up,” Kennedy suggested. “Take different routes to the lander.

No one disagreed, and with the shuffling of the lunar dirt growing closer to them, Blake said he and Kennedy would head off to the left and up, while Caitlin and Takeo would go right and up.

“At the very least,” Blake said, “even if these things follow both of our new groups, they’ll have to split their numbers in order to do it.”

Just as Caitlin uttered her agreement with the new direction, she caught a boot on a rock and went floating horizontally until she impacted with a boulder. Takeo helped to right her and urged her to get going. “They’re almost to us,” he said, voice unemotional.

“Damn these things are quick,” they heard Kennedy say, from his part of the slope. They all continued their hard-scrabble ascent, zigzagging at times in an attempt to throw the creatures off. It didn’t seem to, since the pack of dirt dwellers continued in a straight line for as long as they had to and then adjusted accordingly once they picked up a scent or a signal or whatever it was that enabled them to hone in on the humans.

Caitlin and Takeo were about twenty feet from the rim of the crater when they heard Blake’s voice issuing an expletive, followed by Kennedy telling him to calm down.

“What is it?” Caitlin demanded while bunny-hopping over a large depression in the ground.

“The parade of these animals is still making its way from the crater to the LEM,” said Blake.

“Is that where the ones that have been chasing us are going?” Caitlin reached the lip of the crater at the same time as her new colleague. She looked out over the lunar plain and instantly saw what Blake was talking about. Yes, there was a flood of creatures as there had been before when they left the LEM, but now there were very large individuals—perhaps even as big as the ones that had consumed Asami and Suzette in the caves—interspersed with the junior variety. When these behemoths moved, clouds of dust eased away from the ground ahead of their passage.

“At least they’re still pretty much in a straight line,” Caitlin said. She glanced back down into the crater, where the avalanche of smallish worms tunneled through the soil, perhaps a minute away from reaching her.

“Down we go, c’mon.” Takeo jumped off the crater lip, bounding down the crater’s outer slope in high leaps with long, arcing trajectories. After a quick look back at the deluge of rampaging alien mass, Caitlin also leapt down the crater, eyeing the Black Sky lunar lander on the flat plain in the distance and the moon buggy at the foot of the hill.

They heard occasional shouts from Blake and Kennedy as they made their way down, fighting their own mini-battles as they navigated their part of the slope. “Watch it! Look out for that—no...there! Go...”

Near the bottom of the crater, Caitlin was enveloped in a cloud of moon dust. At first she thought her companion was behind her, kicking it down on her after one of the many rough tumbles they took during their descent, but when it cleared a little she saw him ten feet in front of her, angling towards the rover. So what had caused it? She craned her neck around for a look.

A massive worm reared up above her, a ring of tendrils each several feet long, surrounding its mouth opening. “Move, Takeo!” she cried out, attempting to motivate herself more than anything. With a great sense of relief, she saw Blake hop into the rover’s driver seat and power it up.

Kennedy was tossing a large boulder in slow motion at a squat worm the size of a compact car. As soon as he lobbed it, he wheeled and ran for the rover without waiting to see if he had hit his target. As Caitlin ran for the rover, she saw the big rock land squarely atop the creature’s tubular upper body, where it disappeared into its copious folds without dropping back to the ground, as if the being had simply absorbed the heavy projectile.

A cascade of smaller animals continued to slide down the crater toward them. All of the team reached the rover and climbed in. Blake put the vehicle into gear and accelerated out onto the flat lunar plain. At first, the momentum of the oncoming horde was such that the animals kept pace with the car, only a few feet back. But as the seconds ticked on, it became clear that the beasts were not able to close the gap. Surprisingly fast as they were, they could not travel through and over the ground faster than the rover at its top speed.

Suddenly, an alarm brayed from the cockpit of the vehicle. Blake narrowed his eyes at a blinking red LED.

“What is that?” Kennedy asked what they all wanted to know.

“Battery overheat alarm,” Blake reported. “Never had it come on before.”

“Probably due to the sustained top speed,” Caitlin said, craning her neck around to monitor the creatures’ progress. “You could ease back a hair, but not much more than that the way these things are coming at us. They are
fast
.”

Blake did that to take the strain off the batteries and Caitlin watched as the worm tribe narrowed the rover’s lead by ever so much. By the time they were half way across the plain to Kennedy’s lander, though, the creatures had fallen back some, unable to maintain the shocking speed over long distances. All four riders bounced around crazily in the rig as Blake propelled them across the plain, the wheels dipping into small depressions occasionally, sending Takeo flying up into space at one point, holding onto a tubular frame rail by one hand before being pulled back in by Caitlin.

As they neared the lander, a new danger appeared. The rover crossed over the line of animals that had already been making its way to the LEM, scattering them momentarily. But as Caitlin looked back in the wake of the crossing, she saw them reorganize and join the newer path of following creatures, and together the two streams of animals plowed after the rover as it drove up to the lunar lander.

“Out, out, out, everybody out!” Blake yelled as he applied the buggy’s brakes. Kennedy transmitted on the frequency to his crew in the LEM.

“Incoming, open the airlock, we’re at the front door, over!”

They heard an acknowledgement as they fell out of the vehicle and made giant steps over to the LEM’s airlock. Caitlin could see from the way the creatures piled up on the side of the craft that the oxygen leak had still not been fixed. The team, slowed somewhat by the equipment they had salvaged, ran up to the outer airlock door just as it slid open.