Kudzu, Chapter 13

Tags

book 2, chapter 13, kudzu, novel

Kudzu, a Novel

Chapter 13

It wasn’t completely rash and stupid, Colleen figured, as she squeezed through the gap Slim had cut in the plant. She’d been watching the kudzu carefully as she’d floated around the docking bay–it’s not like there had been anything else she could do–and while it visibly moved as it grew elsewhere, it seemed to make no attempt to repair the smoldering hole.

Of course, it could just be that the heat had effectively cauterized the vines around the hole, that the charred ends inhibited growth. That seemed a more likely scenario than the plant making a conscious decision, and one less subject to sudden change.

And if the thing ate her? Well, it’d be a valuable learning experience, and at least the crew wouldn’t have lost anyone important.

The wall of kudzu was thick, almost as thick as she was tall, which was good, she supposed. If the hull of your space station is made of twigs and leaves, instead of metal and polycarbon alloys, you want it as thick and dense as possible.

And the wolf huffed, and puffed, and…

Colleen pulled herself the rest of the way into the tunnel and freed her legs from coiled vines.

It was one thing to know what to expect, and another to experience it. The walls were lush and thick, and moving ever so slightly, like an infinite sea of green and brown snakes basking in their own light. The luminescent leaves glowed a soft blue-green, pulsing gently with waves of varying intensity. Almost as if the plant was breathing light. It felt, Colleen thought, like she was underwater, floating in crystal clear waters.

Peaceful, that’s what it was.

Dangerous, too. The tunnel within the plant was wide enough that she couldn’t reach from one side to the other. She could, potentially, have gotten stuck floating, out of reach of anything to grab a hold of. She could imagine herself suspended here, hypnotized by the softly oscillating light, slowly drifting down the twisting kudzu pathways until her oxygen ran out. Longer, even, as her body decomposed until all that remained was a skeleton in a space suit, floating around the place forever.

There’d be poems about her. Songs, even. The ghost of Colleen Byrne, doomed to haunt the giant space kudzu in search for her one true love, lost at space, long ago. Stories told around antique incandescent lamps to scare baby astronauts. She hummed a few tentative lines under her breath.

“Hey, your ass is blocking my view.” The snout of Slim’s helmet prodded her in the lower back, as his voice crackled in her ear.

“Sorry,” Colleen said. She moved away from the hole that led back to the Beagle, and then poked at the control panel on her left arm until her intercom turned off. Then she kicked off against the wall, launching herself down the long, twisting tunnel, deep into the depths of the mysterious plant, where–if only for a few precious moments longer–she could be alone.

~

Inertia was a bitch.

“You’d think it would be easier dragging a ton of cable in zero-G,” Jaworsky grumbled.

Amelia’s voice laughed from a dozen speakers built into the hull. “Ten minutes ago it was only half a ton. You must be moving at relativistic speeds.”

Jaworsky bit off his response. She probably wouldn’t have taken it in the right spirit anyway. Instead, he uncoiled another loop of the heavy copper cable from the spool and stretched the end out until the slack was gone.

Lather, rinse, repeat. This is why he shaved his head. He hated repetitive jobs, especially jobs like this: mind-numbingly simple, but exacting. If he wasn’t careful, he’d end up with too much of the cable moving at once, with no way to stop it. Nothing like getting crushed between a ton of slowly unspooling cable and the outer wall of a nuclear reactor to ruin your whole day.

There were conveyors built into the sides of the hull to move things safely from one end of the ship to the other. Unfortunately, they needed power to work, and until he got this damned cable spliced in, power was in short supply.

Jaworsky ground his teeth, uncoiled another loop from the spool, and painstakingly hand-walked it down the hull, until the slack was gone.

Lather, rinse, and repeat.

~

“That won’t work,” Ash said, watching characters flicker across the screen of Susan’s computer.

“Fuck off,” Susan suggested. She tapped at the terminal keyboard, studying the flow of data from the ship’s computer. Or rather, the lack of data. “And stop hovering over my shoulder.”

“No, I mean, I already tried breaking the encryption with Garfield-Han decoding, and I ran gank and rootit against the password files.”

“You did it wrong.”

“No, I didn’t. I got results. It’s just the results didn’t work.”

Susan paused, fingertips playing on the surface of the keys as she considered. “Interesting,” she said, and then began typing again. A quick combination of keys opened a new screen; a few more keystrokes and Ash’s login prompt glowed at the top of the screen.

“Password?” Susan asked.

“What? I don’t think so.”

“I promise I’m utterly uninterested in your porn collection.”

“No. I’m not giving you my password.”

“I’m serious. Jaworsky’s porn is way better than yours.” Susan shrugged. “Yeah, so I get bored easily. But seriously, how many cheerleader fantasies can you watch before the fetish is worn thin? I can hack your account again in less than an hour, or you can just tell me your password, already.”

Ash flushed. “I can’t believe you hacked my account! That is a violation of, of privacy, of trust, of–”

“Fucking hell. I only hacked your account after I started logging your failed attempts to hack mine. Now stop being such a self-righteous prick and tell me your damned password.”

Ash chewed on his lip. “Fine. Whatever.”

Susan spent the next few minutes silently reviewing hidden files in Ash’s account, scanning and processing the data faster than Ash could read. Then she chuckled.

“You got trojaned. The password file you hacked was a decoy, and when you tried to access those accounts, all you managed to do was install software that makes sure you never get near any real system files. Everything you’ve been trying to hack has been an illusion. You really are just a waste of time.”

“Fuck you. I’ve been trying to help, and all you do is tear people down. Well fuck off, and don’t come asking for favors.”

Ash stormed out of room, and almost made it all the way to his cabin before bursting into tears.

Kudzu, Chapter 12

Tags

book 2, chapter 12, kudzu, novel

Hey look! It’s Sunday. And I’m posting the next chapter! Who knew I could actually pull it off? Anyway, enough about me – let’s get back to the slowly unfurling disaster.

Kudzu, A Novel

Chapter 12

Michael curled himself into a ball. Braced for impact. Prayed the flailing torch would miss him. Slim still screaming through the helmet speaker in his ear, drowning out Amelia’s voice. Amelia shouting, “What’s happening? What’s happening?”

The jet of gas slammed Michael against the wall. He bounced a few times at the end of his tether before the force of the escaping gas pressed him flat.

Colleen pulled herself tight against the gentle curve of the outer wall, legs bunched beneath her, and launched herself into the middle of the room. She was too late to catch Slim, but she wasn’t aiming for him. That was suicide, and there was always time for that later. Instead, she aimed roughly for the midpoint of the docking bay.

The jet of gas hit her at the same time that her hand wrapped around Slim’s tether, diverting her course and sending her tumbling. The rope jerked taut, shifting her again, but her mass exceeded Slim’s, even with the cutting torch and the acetylene tanks he was wearing. Inertia was on her side; she kept tumbling toward the far wall.

Slim struck the back wall hip first, a good three meters from Michael. He spun, rolling against the wall, and felt something in his tail pop. He ignored it, scrabbling to get control of the cutting torch. His fingers wrapped around the hose, and he tugged it to keep the flaming end pointed away from him. It buried itself in the wall.

“Ow,” he said.

The hiss of the gas softened as the pressure equalized. Tharp’s voice cut across the noise.

“Michael! Status report. Now!”

“Damn trigger is jammed,” Slim said. He found the shutoff valve on the fuel tank, twisted it until the flame died. “It should have shut off as soon as I let go.”

“Michael?” Colleen said. She had let go of Slim’s rope and was floating slowly around the perimeter of the room.

“Yeah, yeah. I’m here. I’m okay. Just a little….” He took a deep breath. “I’m fine.”

“Slim?” Amelia’s voice shook.

“What is it with shit on this ship?” Slim asked. “I mean, really, what the fuck? Can’t we have even one thing just work properly?”

“I don’t care about the stuff. What about you? Are you–”

“I’m fine. I’m gonna have a giant bruise on my ass, but I’m fine.”

“Full body bruise,” Jaworsky said. “Now that’ll be a sight. How ’bout you, Lady C?”

“What the hell happened down there?” Tharp demanded.

“What I said earlier?” Amelia said. “This is the sort of thing I was talking about.”

“Thank you, Amelia,” Susan said. “Tharp, you need to learn how to not be an asshole. Colleen could be hurt or dying down there, and you’re safe on the bridge getting pissy because people aren’t updating their reports at your whim.”

“You tell him, sister.”

“Shut the fuck up, Jaworsky.”

Amelia snarled into the microphone, ears back, lips curled back to reveal long canines. Tharp took a step backward. Amelia suppressed a smile, imagining everyone else doing the same.

“Colleen?” she said, into the sudden silence.

“I’m unhurt, thanks. But I could use a little assistance. I’m caught in some sort of air current, I guess coming from the plant. It’s just moving me around in a big circle in the middle of the room. I could use a hand getting to something solid.”

“I’ll be right there, Colleen,” Michael said. “Just let me swap out to a longer tether.”

“Thanks.”

Amelia examined the readings on one of her monitors. “Pressure in there is starting to stabilize, which is good. Too much and we’d just pop off the surface of the plant. Michael, you ever figure out what kind of gas it is?”

“No, sorry. I’ve been a little distracted.”

“Yeah, well, you’ll want to figure out what’s in it. Make sure it isn’t corrosive or explosive or anything.”

“I think if it was explosive, we’d have known by now. Or at least, you’d know. Anyway, I lost the sensor. It came off its strap, and it’s probably floating out there like Colleen.” Michael uncoiled his long tether and clipped it to the wall. “Okay, Colleen, I’m on my way.”

#

Catching Colleen as she spun around the vastness of the loading dock was easier said than done. The kudzu plant quite literally grew before their eyes, even as it continued to spew a jet of gas into the room; the perpetually changing surface of the plant redirected the current, altering Colleen’s trajectory in unpredictable ways. In the end, they had to wait until pressure in the loading bay equalized with the inside of the plant.

As Michael set out to catch Colleen on her next pass, Slim approached the plant’s surface. He lit the cutting torch and began widening the existing hole.

The outer surface of the plant was thicker than expected. Slim widened the hole enough to crawl into, so he could cut through the deeper layers.

“What if it’s all like this?” he said. “All the way through.”

“It doesn’t have enough mass, according to our scanners.” Amelia’s voice sounded distant, hollow and staticky, like Slim was tuning in to a far-off radio. “At least part of it has to be hollow.”

“That doesn’t necessarily follow,” Michael said. More static. “It could just be a less dense jungle. Hold on.” A moment of silence, and then: “Got her.”

“Thanks,” Colleen said.

“I’m through,” Slim announced. He turned off the torch and peeked through the opening.

Beyond the dense tangle of vines and leaves that formed the outer surface of the kudzu, the plant opened into what seemed to be a tunnel, lush and thick with leaves and berries. The outer surface was dotted with silver-black leaves amongst the verdant green; the interior walls were similarly punctuated with not-quite-natural foliage. These broad leaves glowed softly, filling the tunnel with a gentle, but adequate, light.

“This,” Slim said, “is weird.”

“No shit.” Ash Hendricksson’s voice, sarcastic.

Susan cursed. “Jesus, here we go again.”

“All I’m saying is, maybe he should tell us what he sees.”

“No, what you were saying…”

Amelia rumbled a warning.

“Yeah, sorry,” Susan said.

“You tell her, sister,” Jaworsky said.

Amelia bit her tail, not to snicker out loud.

“Okay,” Slim said. “I’m pretty sure this thing is not natural.”

“A fucking genius,” Ash muttered to himself, not bothering to mute his microphone.

“I’m getting so much interference,” Slim said, “it almost sounds like you’re all getting along. I’m going to widen this hole up enough that someone smart and human can take a look.”

The cutting torch began to sputter as he worked, and died completely with only centimeters left to cut away.

“Damn it,” Slim said. “This thing is fucking cursed. There’s plenty of fuel left. It just won’t work. I’m getting a pry bar.”

Michael and Colleen peered through the hole as Slim launched himself across the docking bay to a storage locker on the far wall.

“I bet I could fit through that,” Colleen said.

“Not without me, you’re not,” Michael said.

“The inside is hollow,” Colleen reported. “Big enough around for three or four people to get around comfortably. And it’s lit.”

“Some kind of bioluminescence,” Michael said, “but only from select leaves. It’s bright enough in there to get around. I’m going to hazard a guess that the silver leaves we saw on the outside of the plant function as a sort of biological solar cell, generating power for use elsewhere in the plant.”

“It’s a power plant,” Slim said. He pulled a crow bar from the locker, and a hack saw. With sharp and pointy objects that might puncture a suit, he was more circumspect: a long, slow leap across the room.

“Heh, yeah.” Michael assessed Slim’s trajectory and moved to be close enough to help, if it was needed. “Anyway, it looks like some serious genetic engineering here. Not only is this plant able to withstand a complete vacuum, it seems to be generating power and atmosphere, and creating human-navigable passages.”

“All right,” said Tharp, “I think that’s enough. Let’s all meet up in the conference room at, uh, twenty-one hundred… no, shit.” Amelia rolled her eyes watching Tharp counting off on his fingers. “In, uh, about forty-five minutes. And we’ll figure out where to go from here.”

“Sorry, Captain,” Michael said.

“What?”

“There’s only one place to go from here, at least for me. And that’s following Colleen.”

“No. No, that won’t do. We need a plan. Get back here, both of you. All three of you.” Tharp shot a nervous glance at Amelia.

“Don’t worry, Cap,” Slim said. “I’ll keep ’em out of trouble.”

 

Kudzu, Chapter 11

Tags

book 2, chapter 11, kudzu, novel

I’m not sure how I managed to make it through the whole day yesterday without remembering to post this week’s chapter. fdsa (That was me, slapping my own hand.) I’ll do better, I promise. We leave Kevyn stranded in the dark observatory and return to the survivors on the Outer Planet Exploratory Vehicle Beagle.

Kudzu, A Novel

Chapter 11

The docking bay door opened slowly onto a field of green. The leaves, pressed against the metal door, bushed out into the widening gap.

“Fuck me,” Slim said, wide-eyed behind the plexiglass of his helmet.

Amelia’s laugh barked across the intercom. “In your dreams, kit.”

Jaworsky’s rough chuckle projected from whatever blasted part of the ship he’d gotten himself to.

“It’s just…” Slim trailed off, frowning at the cutting torch he’d brought for the task. “I think I’m going to need a bigger flamethrower.” He shrugged into the harness that strapped the twin tanks to the back of his suit, and tossed the nozzle from paw to paw a couple times before testing it. The torch sparked blue and white hot for a brief moment. In the evacuated docking bay, it made no sound, but Slim could feel the hiss of the flame through the nozzle, and through the fabric of the suit, as real as any sound. He clipped a cable to his belt, and to the wall, and then pushed off toward the massive plant.

“Be careful,” Colleen said.

Slim capped the superheated tip of the torch’s nozzle before he clipped it to his belt. He gave Colleen a thumb’s up. He clipped his long tether cable to his belt, and tossed the other end to Michael.

“Will you spot me?”

Michael unclipped himself from the wall and pushed himself off in a long flight across the docking bay, coming to rest on the far wall. “I got you,” he said, attaching both his and Slim’s tether to the wall. He wrapped Slim’s tether around his hand. “Any trouble and I’m yanking you out of harm’s way.”

“Thanks,” Slim said. He hand-walked across the wall, until he was situated in front of the thick green and silver foliage. He raised the cutting torch.

It may not have been a big torch, but it was made to cut through reinforced metal alloys. The plant flamed briefly as it carbonized and crumbled. Gray smoke floated around the raccoon. Bits of charcoal engulfed him like a cloud of gnats.

“How deep does this shit go?” he asked. “Anyone know what the fuck I’m looking for?”

Tharp’s voice crackled across the intercom. “Well, obviously we’re hoping that it’s not all this dense. It’s a gamble, of course, but it’s not like we have much choice. As you may have discerned, we’re in dire need of any number of resources, from basic sustenance, like food and water, for example, to mechanical parts. You see, without any means of communicating with the world, we’re unable to request…”

“Jesus fucking Christ.”

“Ms. Kernighan, your outbursts in the meeting were… understandable. This situation is somewhat of a shock to us all. But there’s been plenty of time to calm down and get ahold of ourselves. We need to work together, and your tone–”

“My tone? As opposed to your I’ll-speak-slowly-so-even-the-coon-can-understand tone?”

“My what? Amelia will tell you, I have no problem with raccoons. I authorized Amelia to pilot this thing, against some people’s protests, if you remember.

“Oh, well then, Mister-Not-As-Bad-As-Ash, maybe it’s your I’ll-speak-slowly-so-the-hired-help-understands tone. Sorry, Doctor Tharp. Anyway, it’s fucking bullshit.”

“You tell him, sister,” Jaworsky said.

“I’m not your fucking sister.”

“Damn good thing, too, ’cause those dreams we were having when we were in cryo, they’d be all sorts of–”

“Shut up,” Colleen suggested. “Please.” Though her voice was soft, it stopped Jaworsky short.

“Sorry,” he said.

“Thanks. We’re doing two things,” Colleen said, “surviving, and trying to get rescued.”

“Even if this stuff isn’t edible,” Amelia said, “we can process it into something that is, and extract water and oxygen out of it, at the same time.”

“And if you ever get back to cutting this shit open,” Susan said, “we’ll look for a way through it to some of the old communications satellites, so we can call for help.”

“Got it,” Slim said. And turned the cutting torch back on.

#

Tharp hit the mute button on the intercom.

“I’m not like that,” he said.

Amelia tapped at the keyboard in her console. It was made for human hands, not raccoon paws. It wasn’t illegal for a raccoon to be a pilot; why bother passing a law against something so patently absurd? Raccoons didn’t have the capacity for the sort of higher level abstract thought needed to pilot a space ship. Everyone knew that.

“I’m not like that,” Tharp said again. “I know how valuable your contribution is. If it wasn’t for you, we’d never have made it this far. You’re amazing. You’re exceptional.”

“So I’m an exception, huh?” Amelia didn’t let her teeth show.

“That’s not what I meant, and you know–”

“I think you should stop talking now.” Amelia finally turned her head to look him in the eye. He took a deep breath, looked away.

“The process of enculturation affects us all on many levels, and sometimes–”

“Susan is right, and you’ve got a lot of soul-searching to do, but this is not the time.” Amelia tapped on the keyboard some more, double-checking some readings. “Weird,” she said. “We evacuated the docking bay before opening the air lock. Other than the carbon from burning the plant, it should be a vacuum in there.”

“Why? What’s happening?”

“Un-mute us.”

Tharp took his finger off the mute button on the intercom.

“Hey, folks,” Amelia said, “we’ve got rising atmospheric pressure in the docking bay. There’s some sort of gas filtering in at a very low level. Not sure what it is, or whether it’s dangerous or not. Do you have any way of testing?”

“How much gas?” Michael asked.

“Negligible, but rising.”

“Let me check. Slim, I’m going to have to let go of your tether for a minute, so don’t do anything…dramatic.”

“To be or not to be,” Slim intoned, with a sweep of his arm. “Whether ’tis nobler to suffer the fucking slings of outrageous errors…”

“Very funny.”

“Yeah, I laughed through the whole movie. Best comedy ever.”

“Movie?” Ash said, incredulous. “It’s a damn play, and it’s a tragedy. Don’t you know anything?”

“Bunch of humans die of their own stupidity. That’s comedic gold. Could have used a chase scene, though. And a monkey.”

Michael fumbled with the clips on his tool belt, fingers clumsy in the thick gloves of his suit. Eventually, he managed to detach the device. He thumbed the power button. The small screen glowed amber.

“It’s too low a density to read. All right, give me a minute to figure out how to adjust the settings.”

Slim rolled his eyes and started up the cutting torch. The plant blackened and burned away, and then, without warning, burst outward.

Slim screamed as a jet of gas flung him across the docking bay. Stationed at the far wall, Michael dropped his scanner and scrabbled at the tether that held him in place, unable to evade the raccoon hurtling toward him, or the torch that swung in flaming arcs around Slim’s body.

His fingers found the catch, fumbled, slipped off, and Michael knew he would not get away in time.

Kudzu, Chapter 10

Tags

book 2, chapter 10, kudzu, novel

There’s an illustration for this chapter, but alas, between needy creatures (anyone want to adopt a special-needs kitten?), plumbers, electricians, tile contractors bearing figs, and a couple days of out-of-town datacenter work, it’s not quite ready for prime time. I’ll add it when it’s ready. [updated 11:53 am Aug 6th: We can haz art.]

Kudzu, a Novel

Chapter 10

For some reason, Sir Reginald had turned off the flashlight, leaving them in darkness. The only light came from some of the LED displays on the telescope controls, dim even in the blackness, and from the night sky.

“Can I zoom in closer?” Kevyn asked.

Sir Reginald didn’t answer. Testing her.

Fine. She’d figure it out herself. There were a lot of buttons and knobs, but she at least remembered which of them she’d touched previously.

Her first attempt shifted the telescope to the right, to a view of empty space. She reversed that until the strange ship was more-or-less centered once again in the telescope’s view.

“Don’t worry, I’ll get it. I don’t need your help.”

She closed her eyes, took a breath, and tried to remember the feeling of her arm and hand moving to change the magnification, the way Sir Reginald had shown her. She let her hand follow her memory. Her fingers touched a hard, plastic knob. She opened her eyes.

Turning the knob toward her (turning it counter-clockwise; she wasn’t sure why her brain had decided that to-the-left was closer than to-the-right) zoomed away from the strange spacecraft, reducing it to a dot against the Greenmoon; turning it away from her brought it closer.

“See? Told you I’d figure it out.”

Sir Reginald remained obstinately silent.

If he thought playing stupid mind games was the key to getting in her pants, he was sorely mistaken. Of course, he proclaimed himself both a celibate and a virgin, but Kevyn didn’t believe that for a second. The man wrote pornography for a living, for crying out loud. He probably had a filing cabinet somewhere full of non-disclosure agreements with former lovers.

It was probably part of the franchise agreement, Kevyn reflected. A Sir Reginald F. Grump XXIII had been offending the reading public for hundreds of years. Kevyn herself had a first edition copy of Bugrotica, a collection of Grump’s 19th Century writings, published in the early 21st Century. Some Grump or another had been publishing sporadically for over three hundred years.

The myth of the perpetual pornographer, celibate and eternal, was certainly good for sales. The Sir Reginald that Kevyn knew perpetuated the myth by simply not addressing it. Admitting, in fact, that it was both absurd and impossible, with the tiniest smile that hinted that maybe there was more to the story.

Actually, it was kind of hot, she thought, when he did that — that hint of mystery glimmering in his eye. And then, remembering that he was probably barely a foot away in the darkness, playing creepy mind games, she put that thought where it belonged. They would not be needing a non-disclosure agreement. Especially if he kept this up.

Kevyn looked back at the strange vessel. It was moving, slowly. She hadn’t noticed its movement within a wider field, but closer, it seemed to be gradually approaching the Greenmoon.

“What do you think?” she asked. “Martians? Or someone else?”

The colonies on Mars had written off the mother planet. Quarantined the whole sector. Not that the conspiracy nuts believed a word of it. It was all a big hoax, perpetrated by the government and the media and the scientists, for alleged reasons that Kevyn still couldn’t make sense of. The Martians sent support shipments to the lunar colonies, unmanned drones full of precious water. That was how the lunar colonies survived (not that the conspiracy nuts believed that, either.) But those were one-way deliveries only. The Martians took no chances; any ship that came into Earthspace would never leave, and the drones were designed to fuse into an unsalvageable lump after their delivery was made.

Maybe this meant they’d changed their policies. Maybe they had finally decided to try to help solve the problem, rather than just avoiding it.

She increased the magnification yet again, close enough to see the details.

“Oh,” she said. It didn’t look like a Martian ship, with its trademarked red planet logo. This was something much older, and much bigger, than any Martian vessel she’d heard of.

And in much worse shape.

The entire back end of the ship looked like it had exploded, and what wasn’t just ribbons of torn metal was missing entirely. It looked like there had at one time been at least six rotating rings, and massive solar reflectors, mounted on a slender tube of a ship. Now, only the front two rings appeared at all intact, and only the foremost of them rotated.

Written on the hull of the ship’s central hub was its insignia: OPEV BEAGLE. Kevyn knew what a beagle was — it was a kind of predatory bird, one that had been extinct for decades. Large and graceful, and worthy of having a spaceship named after it. But she didn’t know what OPEV stood for.

“Sir Reginald? Come look at this.”

Sir Reginald remained silent, and the room remained dark.

“Sir Reginald? Hey! Grump!” Kevyn shouted. “Stop fucking around! You need to see this. These people are in trouble, and they’re heading straight toward the Greenmoon. Someone needs to warn them away, before it’s too late.”

Her voice echoed in the large, empty room.

“Sir Reginald?”