Galactic Exploration, page 12
She hated what she'd done. Sitting there, she knew she should have been pushing on through the maze of tunnels, weaving her way back to the Swift . It was wrong to collapse here in self-pity. The autopilot would take her home. How did she know that? Trixie remembered the autopilot, but she wasn't sure how. Then it dawned on her, the thoughts flooding her mind were a mixture of her memories and his. Somehow, she still remembered things he’d seen, thoughts he’d had. She shared his desire to escape, to warn the Rift Valley , to protect the crew. Yet those thoughts were cold. Although they were in the depths of her mind, they felt alien, as strange and foreign as the roots entwined around her.
She couldn't run. As much as she knew Berry would have wanted her to, she couldn't. It didn't feel right. The reality of what had happened stunned her. Trixie was in shock. Her arms felt numb. There didn't seem to be any purpose anymore, not now Berry was dead. How bittersweet her escape had been. She could run, but to where? To the Rift Valley ? The only conscious thoughts she had of that spaceship were his. And what awaited her there? The only man she'd ever known was dead. Nothing would ever change that.
A dark shadow loomed over her, blocking out the glowing fires beyond. Trixie looked up. Through her tears, so large in the low gravity, she saw the distorted outline of a thinker crouching over her. She should run, escape, try to get away. But it was all too much. Why postpone the inevitable? Why fight? There was nothing left to fight for.
Trixie sat there defeated, looking up at the imposing alien.
The thinker staggered forward, its multitude of legs stumbling as it crossed the roots. Smoke rose from its back, drifting in the breeze. A cluster of long, spindly arms stretched down either side of its shell. They waved back and forth in changing patterns and combinations, as though their symmetry was a reflection of its thoughts within. The creature seemed to be looking right through her. Trixie didn't care. She wasn't afraid. There was nothing to be afraid of. She was already as one dead. There was nothing more to lose. She stood, facing the creature defiant.
“Why?” she yelled. “Why would you do this?”
The huge beast swayed in front of her. Its cold, impersonal eyes as black as coal. Its silence intimidating.
“Was it worth it? Is any of this worth it? We live. We die. And for what? For this?”
Rage swelled up inside her. She grabbed the cylinder.
The thinker reached out with its tiny arms, trying to touch her. Trixie lashed out, swinging the cylinder around and bringing it down like a baseball bat on the side of the animal. She struggled to hold the cylinder with both hands, determined to transmit as much force as possible with each blow, each time crying out, “Why?”
The thinker fell on its back, its smoldering shell-casing lying across the roots. The alien made no attempt to defend itself. Trixie pounded it, using the butt of the cylinder and driving hard at the creatures eyes, hoping its brain was somewhere behind them.
“Why? Damn you. Why?”
Dark body fluids ran from the open wound and crushed eye stalks of the thinker, but it never fought back. Slowly, Trixie's thumping softened. Black fluids stained her hands and clothes. She tossed the cylinder to one side, looking at the pathetic creature lying there. Was it mercy it craved? Was it absolution? Was it understanding? Why should it expect any, when it had shown none? And she realized these were her thoughts, her feelings, projected onto this alien creature that seemed to have no recognition of any such concepts.
She couldn't kill it.
Looking at her black stained hands, she felt pity. Killing this creature wouldn't bring Berry back. Nothing ever would. She touched the creature's arms, running her soft fingertips over its hard exoskeleton. What had it seen in its life? What would be lost with its death? Did these alien creatures have any concept of individual consciousness? Did they realize the pathetic waste of death? A feeling of tragedy and loss overwhelmed her. Life should not be so, she decided. Life should be lived above death, it should not perpetuate the misery that all creatures endure given time. And yet, neither she nor Berry had brought this fight. These dark creatures had.
Trixie had no desire to kill, she had a desire to survive. She had to survive, and if that meant the alien's death, then it had to be so. There was a confusion of thoughts in her mind, some of them hers, some of them Berry's, but that realization gave her a new reason to hope.
Trixie stepped back from the creature, picking up the bloodied cylinder and the welding torch as she started down the tunnel. After a few feet, she stopped and looked back at the pathetic alien creature that had once held so much power over her.
She remembered the interrogation, the pain as her mind was jacked, the humiliation, and yet she still felt sorry for them. They were brutal beasts. For all their intelligence, they had succumbed to the base ideals of conquest and exploitation. These were new concepts to her, but Berry had understood them, and now she did too. The irony wasn't lost on her, that to reach such heights as interstellar conquest and yet to be driven by greed and power was a waste of intelligence. These had been Berry’s thoughts, but she embraced them as her own. For her to survive, they had to die. It was no longer personal, it was her primeval survival instinct kicking in.
Trixie reached the junction where she had lost sight of Berry on their first escape. From here, it was a dog's leg back to the Swift . Several hundred yards further on, she had to cut back on an angle of 120 degrees, and then straight on to the surface a couple of miles away. These were Berry’s thoughts. She knew that because she hated dogs and would never use a dog's leg as an analogy in her thinking. Carefully, she screwed the cylinder into the welding torch, preparing to use it as a flamethrower in the same way Berry had.
The workers scurrying around her had gone dark, switching off their chemical lights and leaving the intersection in darkness. A soft yellow glow appeared down one tunnel, and she remembered Berry's plan, but the makeshift fuse Berry had built had gone up in the inferno.
Stepping out of the intersection and into the narrow tunnel, Trixie noticed her hair drifting in front of her again, bouncing softly as she walked, just as it had several hours ago.
Walking around the circumference of the tunnel, Trixie found she could turn to what had once seemed to be upside down while always staying upright, always experiencing that giddy sensation of weightlessness around her head as she edged down toward the massive ball of dust in the far chamber.
Trixie stopped halfway, thinking, realizing she could use this effect to her advantage. Were these her thoughts or Berry’s? They were hers, she decided, as it seemed all they shared were memories. If this worked as Berry had suggested, she might just destroy them.
Trixie unscrewed the cylinder, taking the regulator off. She held it parallel to the ground, with its brass-threaded end facing her, and lifted it up slightly above head height. Letting go, she watched as the cylinder floated in zero-gravity, defying the pull she felt at her feet.
Within the confines of the narrow tunnel, the cylinder was stable, floating freely between the circular walls. Trixie opened the valve, making sure she was out of the way. Globs of liquid acetylene leaked out, floating in small spheres, bubbling as they released their gas.
Trixie gave the cylinder a gentle shove, propelling it down the tunnel toward the glowing sphere of dust. She watched as it disappeared into the haze. Moving back to the intersection, she followed the stream of slowly shrinking bubbles drifting in the opposite direction. As they reached the intersection, they became subject to differing gravitational strengths and fell into the roots. Trixie lit the pilot flame on the welding torch and held it up to the gas stream in the mouth of the narrow tunnel. A pulse of fire flashed down through the tunnel. Trixie threw the welding torch down the tunnel as well for good measure, before darting back and up out of the intersection.
Her heart raced.
Time seemed to slow.
Nothing happened.
Maybe Berry was wrong and that powder wasn't flammable after all.
Maybe the flame never reached down into the heart of the swirling dust storm.
Maybe the dust storm smothered the pilot light, starving the flame of oxygen. Maybe a thinker or a bunch of workers had smothered the flame.
Trixie charged along the main artery, remembering Berry's warning that without disabling the ship she could never leave. All of a sudden, leaving was important. The idea of escaping was now real. The cloud over her mind seemed to lift with the prospect of freedom.
A flash of light broke around her. The air compressed, throwing her down through the tunnel as a wall of fire erupted behind her in the intersection. The noise of the roar deafened her.
Getting back to her feet, Trixie had newfound excitement.
In the low gravity, it was difficult to move as fast as she wanted to, so she leaned forward, almost falling over, and used her legs to propel herself along at a rapid pace.
Grabbing at the roots and vines in front of her, Trixie used her hands like a monkey, guiding her motion, correcting her course as she charged through the tunnel.
Explosions rocked the alien craft as fire billowed through the interior, ripping through the interconnecting tunnels between the swirling balls of fine, almost gaseous particles.
Trixie had a rhythm, a cadence allowing her to cover the distance to the Swift in under fifteen minutes. She was moving much faster than she had with Berry, when they felt their every move was being watched. Now, she didn't care. She wanted to go as fast as she could, as fast as her legs and lungs would carry her. With each bound, she could feel the artificial gravity wavering beneath her, and she wondered how long it would last.
Explosions continued to resound through the alien spacecraft, although they were deep, far away from her. The branches and roots around her flexed and groaned. Ahead, she could see the main artery narrowing as it began splitting, close to the surface of the craft.
Trixie recognized the charred remains of the workers that had been scorched by Berry in the recess of the narrow side-tunnel leading back to the Swift . She felt electrified. Thoughts of Berry seemed so distant. The charred bars had been pried open, probably when the aliens had dragged them unconscious to the vivisection chamber. Trixie came up to the entrance and froze. There, blocking her way, was a thinker.
She backed slowly around the main tunnel, away from the entrance as the thinker moved out to face her. She was powerless, helpless.
The thinker seemed to be sizing her up, not rushing to any one action or another. Trixie noticed the workers in this region. They aligned themselves on the sides of several roots, ready to spring in her direction.
Explosions continued to resound in the distance. The whole structure of the craft vibrated.
The thinker advanced on her as though it were trying to corner her rather than attack her.
Trixie felt the gravity fluctuations becoming more extreme. While before they had put off her cat-like jaunt through the tunnel, now the tremors caused her to sway back and forth as her center of gravity shifted in response to the surge of gravity around them.
With her arms in front of her, Trixie determined to go down fighting like a wild animal.
The thinker seemed to feel the fluctuations. If anything, they made him more cautious, wary of what she might do, and she realized she held an unforeseen advantage.
They feared her. She had killed hundreds of them. She had set their craft alight. They thought they knew her, but they had underestimated her.
Trixie decided to test her theory. Rather than backing away, she lunged forward, curling her fingers like claws. The thinker and the workers reacted, pulling back, clearly not knowing quite what to expect. Perhaps the thinker was thinking too much. Maybe it thought she could spit out flames.
She lunged again, being more aggressive, baring her teeth and yelling with all her might. The thinker flinched, turning partially to one side as though it were expecting to be struck down. It was stalling, blocking, buying the aliens time. But the bluff was on both sides. She could no more hurt a thinker with her bare hands than she could breathe fire. The bulk of the creature reaching up almost two feet above her was intimidating.
Gravity pulsed around her.
The outward force keeping her anchored on the tangled roots increased rapidly. Instead of feeling light and buoyant, Trixie suddenly felt as though lead weights had been strapped to her shoulders, arms and legs.
The craft was coming apart. Its environmental controls were starting to fail.
Waves of heat surged up through the tunnels.
Trixie crumpled under the increased weight. Even her cheeks felt heavy, sagging away from her cheek bones. Her jaw was pulled open. She knelt, spreading her hands in front of her, trying to take the weight with her bones, but the surge was too strong and she collapsed to the branches. It felt as though an elephant had sat on her, crushing her body. The massive surge in gravity made it hard to breathe. She wanted to lift her head and look at the thinker to see if it could cope with these extremes, but her skull felt as though it was being squeezed in a vice.
Trixie's ribcage felt as though it was going to crack and burst. Her vision began to blur. On the edge of her sight, she could see the thinker twitching.
The workers were nowhere to be seen, having slipped into the cracks. The thinker lay face down on the roots, pools of dark fluid seeping out of it.
As suddenly as it had come, local gravity rebounded, returning to the soft level she'd become accustomed to before swinging wildly in its orientation again.
Trixie dug her hands into the roots, holding tight as her feet flipped out from beneath her and she found herself hanging from the ceiling. The dead body of the thinker fell to what now seemed to be the floor of the tunnel below her.
A few seconds later, Trixie was lying on her side before being dragged over to the other side as the gravitational direction fluctuated, gyrating around the main tunnel.
The body of the thinker rolled around the tunnel with each gravitational pulse. Finally, gravity aligned to what had been the horizontal, and the tunnel she had bounded through just a few minutes earlier became a deep shaft, a well dropping away beneath her feet.
The thinker fell into the distance.
Hanging from the side of the tunnel, Trixie looked down for several hundred feet, looking at a small kink in the winding passageway that had now become a landing. The falling body of the thinker struck the landing with a thud. Dark fluids sprayed out from the dead creature.
Shadows danced in the flickering light of the distant fires.
Trixie's inner ear was spinning. Vertigo swept over her at the counterintuitive view below her.
Moving hand over hand and digging her feet into the gaps between the mesh of roots and branches lining the shaft, she moved slowly around to the side-tunnel. Her footing slipped, and she thought she was going to fall to her death.
Grabbing hold of loose branches was dangerous. Each one felt firm at first, as though it would hold her weight, but they could easily pull away from the side of the shaft like loose vines.
The thick roots were hard to clamber over. Their smooth husks gave her little to hold on to, and she struggled to reach for handholds. With the muscles in her arms burning and her legs weary, she made it into the side-tunnel where there was gravitational normality.
Inside the cramped tunnel where the thinker had lain in wait, gravity still pulled in only one direction, down toward the heart of the ship, but Trixie had a thick mat of vines and branches to crawl on.
Within thirty feet, the side-tunnel petered out, dissipating into a thick cluster of new growth. Clawing her way through, Trixie pulled at the fresh tendrils, climbing between them, trying to make her way back to the Swift .
She was lost.
The alien superstructure looked entirely different. The tracks carved into the inner hull were gone. Were they overgrown, or was it that she had taken a wrong turn? Perhaps she had started tearing through the undergrowth at a slightly different angle, and after several hundred yards was off course.
In the darkness, she could pass within a few feet of the hull and still not notice the Swift . She began to panic, retracing her steps, second guessing herself. Nothing looked familiar. She pressed on, sure she was going to miss the craft when suddenly there it was, right in front of her. Her heart leaped as her hand touched the smooth metal.
Trixie clambered over the hull, searching for the hatch. The Swift had been moved, drawn deeper into the alien craft. It had been turned over on its side, forcing Trixie to drop down beneath the ship and climb in through the hatch from below.
Lights. She never thought she'd be so glad to be blinded by lights.
As she secured the outer hatch, the lights in the airlock came on automatically. On entering the main cabin, she could see the pilot's chair above her instead of out in front of her, as it had been before.
Something on the ground caught her eye. It was her bracelet, the one Berry hated. It was so pretty, with its woven, colored threads, like the bands of a rainbow. The silver disc glistened in the light. The bell rang softly as she picked it up. The sound was soothing, comforting, but she wasn't sure why. She slipped it over her wrist.
“Computer,” she called out, remembering how Berry had called the ship by this name.
“Online,” came the electronic response.
“Computer, get me out of here!”
“I'm sorry, you will have to be more specific.”
Trixie clambered up over the engine cowling, past the navigation console and into the pilot's seat. Lying on her back, she squeezed her legs up in front of her. She'd seen Berry in this position, so it seemed like the right thing to do.
“Take me home,” she called out with tears welling up in her eyes. “Please, take me home.”
“I'm sorry, I do not know where home is.”
A red light blinked next to the picture of Berry and his cat.
“Computer, what is...”
“Fuel cells at 2500 degrees Celsius. Containment will suffer a catastrophic failure in approximately fifty minutes. Computer recommends...”
