Kudzu, Chapter 32

Tags

book 4, kudzu, novel

Kudzu, a Novel

Chapter 32

 

 

Susan was glad there were no video feeds. She was still angry, and embarrassed — and a host of other things that she didn’t want to think about — after Amelia’s dressing down, and she sure as hell didn’t need anyone looking at her. Not when she couldn’t control what her face might do.

It was frustrating. Maddening. Susan knew herself well enough to understand why. She was a multitasking genius, able to juggle complex tasks without dropping a stitch, to mix a metaphor. Unfortunately, her mental acuity didn’t extend to the emotional realm, and situations that called for simultaneous contradictory emotions left her feeling like she was flailing stupidly in a failed attempt to be a real human.

The problem, of course, was that Amelia was right. Right now, the past didn’t matter. They’d all made mistakes, they’d all been stupid, and selfish, and a dozen other things besides. All that mattered now was the task at hand, and each of them had to get over themselves enough to work with the others. There was no space for error, and that meant there was no space for personal feelings or enmities.

They had a plan. If they could pull it off, they might survive. That’s what mattered, and each of them had their role, even if hers was mind-numbingly boring.

And yet, it felt like something was missing.

On the speaker on the control panel, Tharp’s voice. Nothing coherent, just the sound of a man straining to lift above his weight.

“Lift with your knees,” Jaworsky said, “not your back.”

A red light blinked on the console, and a message warning that Spoke 2:2 had been uncoupled flashed on the monitor.

Susan hesitated, wondering if anyone wanted to hear her voice, after… but she was supposed to put everything aside, so they should… Fuck it. She could second-guess herself all day. “Good job, everyone,” she said. “The system says you successfully detached the spoke.”

Jaworsky grunted something neanderthal and incoherent, and Susan cringed.

But, “Thanks,” Tharp said, and Susan let out the breath she hadn’t realized she was holding.

“Let’s do four next,” Jaworsky said. “That’s the one on the opposite side, Tharp. After that, come back in so we can refill your tanks.”

“Yeah, alright. On my way.”

“I got a question,” Susan said. “When we detach all the rings from the hub, how’re we gonna fly this thing?”

“You know the airlock behind the docking bay?”

“Yeah.”

“It only takes up half the space. The other half is the cockpit from the original launch. None of the luxuries of yer fancy bridge, but it’s got everything we need.”

“Huh,” Susan said. “I never heard of it.”

“That’s ’cause they mothballed it once the ship was finished. Same reason it’s so hard to detach the rings — you don’t want some lone lunatic to be able to fuck up the ship and kill everyone.”

“When you say ‘mothballed’…”

“Locked up and disabled— Fuck.”

Jaworsky took a deep breath, let it out.

“Susan,” he said, “meet me at the airlock. Amelia, you too. Tharp, you keep on to the next spoke. Give a shout when you’re near. Fuck. No, there’s not enough time.”

“There’s a file on the server,” Amelia said. “Emergency Control System Procedures or something like that. I wasn’t able to get into it, but maybe you can.”

“Yeah, good,” Susan said. “I’m on it.”

Finally. Something useful to do. Susan jacked her mobile into the pilot’s console and took control, slaved her more powerful personal server to it, and started a multithreaded crack on the file system.

She grinned. This was a numbers game. No messy politics, or hurt feelings, or moral gray spaces. Just numbers, fingers on a keyboard, and a dance of lights. No ambiguity.

This she could do.

~

Michael and Colleen helped each other out of their space suits — or what was left of them.

It only took a pinhole to compromise the integrity of the suits. They had been built to withstand a certain amount of abuse, and to be able to provide at least some limited regional isolation in case of punctures. As long as the helmet remained intact, the unfortunate spacefarer who suffered such damage had a reasonable chance of getting to the safe side of an airlock before total decompression.

Of course, they had lost both their helmets and their gloves, and in Colleen’s case, her boots as well, so the fact that their suits were compromised enough to fill entirely with water was really beside the point.

Colleen kicked the sopping heap that had been her space suit. It spilled across the moss-covered kudzu, glittering silver in the green luminescence of the lamp leaves, and three cats rushed to investigate. They circled it suspiciously. One batted at a sleeve with one paw, then hissed and arched its back as the sleeve flopped over.

Colleen laughed, and when Michael turned his attention away from the cats’ antics to look at her, he found himself staring as she pulled her t-shirt up over her head.

“What?” she said. “Our clothes are wet. I don’t want to survive a waterfall just to catch my death.” She unbuttoned her pants, stopped to press her fingers between her breasts. The area was red, and just starting to bruise. “This is going to be ugly.”

“I don’t know if ugly is the right word,” Michael said.

“Tomorrow I’ll be purple, from head to foot.” She peeled her pants off, then turned slowly. “Do you see any other bruises?”

Michael found himself suddenly very warm. “Your ribs, under your left breast,” he said. “Your hip, and thigh. There’s a really nasty one on your right shoulder. And, uh, your…”

Still facing away from him, Colleen stepped out of her panties.

“My what?”

“Left buttock.”

“Ass.” She turned to face him, and she was beautiful, in her damaged, crazy way. “Sometimes surviving certain death leaves you cold. Empty. Like Death made a mistake. Like you’d died, but they forgot to turn out the lights. Other times, there’s nothing like cheating Death to make you live again.”

Colleen looked down at herself. There was a bruise on her inner thigh, just above her knee. She touched it. “Kiss it,” she said. “Make it better. Make everything better.”

“I don’t think…” it would be a good idea. But she lay back in the soft green moss and spread her legs, and then, Michael reflected, as he kissed his way up her thighs, he wasn’t thinking much at all.

Colleen twined her fingers into his dreads and pulled him against her, mouth hard against her cunt, so close that every breath tasted of her. His hands cupped her ass, lifting her toward him, opening her, and she came, silently, faster than any woman he’d ever been with (though not, he mused, faster than several men).

When the tremors that shook her belly subsided, she released her grip, and Michael pulled his clothes off as fast as he could.

Colleen reached for his cock — which needed no coaxing, really — as he lowered himself over her, but when he tried to kiss her, she turned her head and pushed him away. One hand against his chest, her foot against his hip, rolling him off her.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

She looked at him with an unreadable expression, then rolled over onto her stomach and spread her legs.

“Shut up,” she suggested, “and fuck me, already.”

~

The new bridge was a problem. Or old bridge. Whatever. It was a problem. Amelia’s tail curled as she considered it.

It wasn’t just how cramped everything was. Space for six, suited, and the equipment. Six humans, that was. None of it was built to raccoon scale, so not only didn’t she have a seat that fit her securely, but she had no way get around the control panel without risking floating off — and then getting thrown around the room, and probably killed, on impact.

They had finished detaching the rings — or at least, the first three. That should be enough to survive a crash landing, as long as they didn’t strike a satellite or something, hidden under the foliage.

And with time to spare, in theory. They had a three hour window before they had to get the ship moving back toward the kudzu. The problem was, with their limited fuel, they had to get the ship’s trajectory perfect from the outset, or they were screwed. Every second of burn counted, because there were no second chances. If she lost her grip, if she slipped, the ship wouldn’t hit dead-on the kudzu ball’s axis.

And if they aimed wrong — if she aimed wrong — they’d hit the fast-spinning side, and after a quick mangling, what was left of the OPEV Beagle would be thrown off into space.

Jaworsky touched the tip of her snout.

“Why the long face?” he asked.

Ordinarily she’d have snapped at his finger, but the realization of what she had to say was crushing.

“I can’t do this.”

“Whaddaya mean?”

“I mean, I need to be able to reach this keypad and that joystick at pretty much the same time. On the bridge, I just ran fast. We’ve got no gravity here. If I do what I was doing there, I’ll just fly off and bounce off the ceiling.”

“Maybe Susan could do it?” Tharp suggested. “She’s smart and quick.”

“I can give it a try,” Susan said.

“No. This is too precise, and too critical. We screw up and we die.”

“Do you have a better idea?” Susan snapped.

“No. Just… It’s not that I don’t think you can learn this, but I had hundreds of hours on a simulator before I ever touched the controls, and even then, if I didn’t have the experience of getting us through the asteroid belt, I wouldn’t be able to do this.”

“Ah, hell,” Jaworsky said.

Amelia felt his big hand grip the scruff of her neck as he swung himself into the pilot’s chair. He shifted his hold, grasping her around the torso behind her shoulders, and held her over the controls.

“Right. So what’s first?”

“This isn’t going to work.”

“I wish I had a camera,” Susan said.

“You give the orders,” Jaworsky said. “Left, right, top, back, middle. Something like that.”

“You’re not going to react fast enough,” Amelia said.

“We got three hours to practice,” Jaworsky said.

“And how are you going to keep me from flying out of your hands on impact?”

Jaworsky chuckled. “Think about it,” he said.

“I…”

“Oh,” Susan said.

Of course. She didn’t need to be at the controls when they hit the kudzu; all the fuel would be spent hours before. There would be ten minutes of intense piloting, followed by twelve hours of waiting. And praying.

“Okay,” Amelia said, “let’s get started.”

End of Book IV

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Kudzu, Chapter 31

Tags

book 4, kudzu, novel

Kudzu, a Novel

Chapter 31

Eric Tharp supposed there wasn’t much point mentioning that none of this was in his job description. Tromping around the exterior of a spaceship was about as far from analyzing core samples as you could get.

One of the four spokes that connected the second ring to the hull rose up in front of him, as massive and imposing as the Washington Monument. And the task before him seemed impossible.

It all made sense when Jaworsky explained it. The Beagle had been constructed on Earth, and then launched into space. It hadn’t looked anything like it currently did now, not even counting the damage from the explosion. In space, aerodynamics don’t matter. But getting it into space was a different story.

The Beagle had started out with all its rings connected to each other, collected toward the rear of the ship. Several layers of thin material covered the rings, extending on an angle to about midway up the hull. This protected the rings during takeoff, keeping them from breaking off or being otherwise damaged. Once in orbit, the protective covering unfurled into the vast solar collectors, and the rings were moved to their proper positions.

In preparation for ramming the kudzu, they needed to reverse this process. Standing at the base of the second ring, Tharp was struck by the immensity of the project.

“This is hopeless,” he said. “It’s like trying to move the Sphinx with a pair of tweezers.”

“Piece of cake,” Jaworsky said. “All you need is to put the tweezers on the end of a big enough lever.”

“We don’t have a big lever.”

“Yeah? So we’ll use a pulley.”

Tharp could imagine Jaworsky on the other side of the radio–a shrug and a wise-ass grin preceding the words. It wasn’t helpful.

“Look, Tharp,” Jaworsky continued, “we don’t actually need to move the rings. All we need to do is loosen them. When we hit the plant, the rings’ll slide down the hull like they’re supposed to. If we don’t get them loose, they’ll do that anyway, but they’ll peel the hull apart in the process. It’s really not that big a job. It just looks big.”

It was really a twelve person job: someone in each coon-hole dealt with detaching all the systems that constituted the interface between the main ship and the ring. Four more people on each spoke–two to detach the spoke internally, and two to detach the spoke externally. The clamps were paired, interlocking, so there had to be one person on each side of the hull to detach any clamp pair.

Jaworsky had spoken in small words, like he was talking to a child. Tharp had bit back a knee-jerk response and listened; after all, two doctorates or not, he really didn’t know this stuff.

In a perfect world, Jaworsky explained, the four raccoons would get their work done first, and then monitor the systems, and then the eight humans would synchronize their actions. The ring would detach from the hull, and then robot drones would move the ring to its new location.

In the real world, they would be doing the job in half-spoke intervals. Which made the last spoke particularly dangerous.

“I’m ready,” Amelia said.

“‘Kay,” Jaworsky said. “I will be in about… now. What about you, Tharp?”

“Almost there.”

Tharp edged around the curve of the spoke. He saw an indentation in the spoke, big enough for two of Jaworsky to fit, or three of himself. It was painted red.

“You said starboard, right?” he asked.

“Yup.”

“Which side is that?”

“Very funny. You’ll see a lever. You’re going to pull it until you feel a click, and then twist counterclockwise.”

“Widdershins,” Amelia said.

“Fuck are you talking about, ‘Melia? No, don’t answer. I don’t want to know. Tharp, got that? Lift until it clicks, then twist it. You’ll feel it snap into a locked open position. At that point, we go to the other side.”

“Yeah, all right.”

At Jaworsky’s word, he started to pull. Damn, this thing was heavy. Well, not heavy, but might as well be. He grunted with the effort of it.

“Hold on,” Jaworsky said. “You got yourself tethered to the hull? You want to do that, in case you lose your grip. You don’t wanna go throwing yourself out into space, do you?”

“Oh, right. Thanks.” Tharp said. “Give me a minute.”

~

Stupid. Jaworsky fumed at himself. Of course Tharp wouldn’t know basic spacewalking safety procedures. As long as he was pretending to be in charge, he needed to remember not just people’s strengths, but also their weaknesses. Any forgotten detail could mean someone’s life.

“You had to go and tell him.” Susan’s voice interrupted Jaworsky’s thoughts, and Jaworsky didn’t need to see Tharp to feel him wince.

“Susan—” Shut the fuck up, he was going to say, but Amelia cut him off.

“Susan, you and me, private channel.”

“Hey, I was just—”

“Now.”

Just as well. Much as Jaworsky hated to admit it, he and Susan were assholes cut from the same cloth, and he was just as likely to set off a shitstorm as calm a situation, butting heads with her.

Susan and Amelia came back online with an “I’m sorry,” and Tharp’s “No offense taken” was ungrudging, if not entirely convincing.

“We all ready to get back to work?” Jaworsky asked. “Good. Then, on my count…”

~

Colleen stared at the thing as it watched the water, perfectly motionless but for the tip of its tail, which twitched from side to side.

“Kuh,” she said, because that’s all that would come out.

Michael sat up beside her, shrugged.

“Well, why the hell not?” he said. “We’re inside a giant plant. In space. With waterfalls, and giant goldfish, and bees.”

“Bees? What bees?”

Michael showed her his hand; three red welts marked his palm, and another decorated the underside of his index finger. One of them still sported a stinger.

“Yeah, bees. That’s why I fell. I think I used a beehive as a handhold. So, yeah, why not this, too? Makes about as much sense as everything else.”

“But, cats?”

“Hey, don’t look at me. I’m allergic to the things. They must be part of your subconscious. I certainly didn’t dream them up.”

“Do they have subconsciouses in the afterlife?”

Colleen lifted herself up on her elbows. Water poured down her suit and seeped into the moss. The rip was about two centimeters long, right over her sternum.

“I don’t remember going through a long tunnel,” Michael said. “Or, well, okay: there was a long tunnel. But no bright light or dead parents or any of that stuff. Besides, aren’t all our earthly pains and worries supposed to ease?”

“I don’t think you can call this ‘earthly.'”

Michael wiped his face, wincing. His hand came away bloody. He wiped it on the moss. The cat came to investigate.

No, it was a different cat. The other was entirely black; this one had a spot of white on its chest. It licked at the smeared blood.

“I’m pretty sure if we were in Heaven, there wouldn’t be any blood. And my fingers wouldn’t be all pruned. And there wouldn’t be any damned cats.”

“Who said anything about Heaven?” Colleen said.

“Well, I’m going to Heaven, so we can’t be dead. It’s more likely we’re all still in cryo, and this is some sort of shared dream.”

“That’s not possible. None of the studies have shown any correlation of dream-states between people in stasis. Even if they were physically touching.” Colleen winced as she twisted to reach the sealing seam of her suit. “Fuck. I think I broke a rib. Can you help me with this thing?”

Michael rolled over onto his hands and knees, and pushed himself to his feet. He extended a hand.

“Yeah, sure. None of the subjects were under for as long as we were. Or are.”

“I remember some of my cryo-dreams,” Colleen said. “None of them were like this.”

In her dreams, Henry was dying. Always dying, but never quite dead. “I forgive you,” he said. He always said, caught in a hideous loop, over and over, his lips forming words that his eyes didn’t mean.

Kudzu, Chapter 29

Tags

book 4, kudzu, novel

Kudzu, a Novel

Chapter 29

At a certain point, Colleen no longer needed to do more than tread water; the current picked up and moved them fast enough that she felt safe conserving her strength for whatever came next.

The massive fishes continued to investigate her, but so far, none had tried to take a nibble. Some of that might have been her space suit. She couldn’t imagine the puncture-resistant reinforced polyfiber would be particularly tasty. Mostly, she worried about Michael’s hands.

He was still unconscious, and while she was able to keep his head above water, there was nothing she could do about his dangling arms.

It was impossible to gauge the size of the lake. Walls rose from the waters, she was certain, but for the most part, the curvature of the chamber occluded them.

For her first month on the Beagle, this sort of inverted horizon had really thrown her off balance. She kept walking into things, misjudging distances. Henry had teased her mercilessly. She had gotten used to it, though, gotten used to the ceiling being the horizon line that everything disappeared behind, and not the floor.

But being used to it didn’t help her see around corners. Now, as the current picked up, it became obvious the walls were getting closer. They were approaching the far side of the lake.

There was a noise, a rumbling, rushing sound that grew as she came closer to the walls. The current moved faster. The previously placid surface of the lake became choppy with little wavelets.

“Shit.” Another waterfall.

They’d survived the last one because of the low gravity, but who knew how far this one would go, or what the gravity would be at the bottom.

Not gravity, Henry would have said — had said, over dinner in the mess hall once, maybe six months before the accident — because he was a stickler for these things. It’s centrifugal force, and operates on completely different principles.

Bill had rolled his eyes, laughing silently. Winked at her.

That night, while Henry was on shift, Bill explained gravity.

“Aristotle knew the truth of it,” he said. “Everything in the universe has an essential nature, and it is the nature of things to seek their natural place. It’s the nature of a rock, for example, to want to be as close to the center of the earth as possible, while fire reaches for the moon.”

His lips were at her ear, his hands pushing her pants down over her hips. His cock hard against her. She leaned forward and reached to open herself for him.

“Bodies are attracted to bodies of like nature,” he said, slipping deep inside her. She pushed back against him. “Everything that is, is set in motion by bodies seeking their natural place. The place where they fit. And the motion of the heavens is a reflection of bodies in motion.”

What was it about him? She didn’t even like him. Even now, the thought of him…

Michael groaned, spat water. Started to thrash.

“Michael! Michael, stop! I’ve got you. You’re not drowning.”

He didn’t hear her, or in his panic he didn’t understand. He twisted in her arms, and Colleen went under. His elbow caught her in the solar plexus, and all her air went out of her in one great bubble. She gasped, involuntarily. Cold water hit her lungs.

She let go, pushed herself away from him. Coughed and retched as she surfaced.

Michael was still floundering.

Colleen had lost hold of the loop of rope holding them together. Not good. If got caught up on anything, in this current, they could drown. They were moving faster — even with everything else going on, she could tell — and that meant it wouldn’t be long before they’d be tumbling through treacherous waters again. The best thing she could do for Michael right now was gather the rope.

Eventually, Michael would stop thrashing. As soon as he stopped panicking, he’d realize their suits gave them a little bit of buoyancy. The only problem was that the air reserves in the back of the suit were bigger than those in the front, so they naturally tipped face-forward into the water.

The sound of rushing water was loud now. Colleen had almost gathered all of the rope up. Tugging on it pulled her closer to Michael.

Michael finally stopped waving his arms around like an idiot.

“Hey,” he said, “I’m not drowning.”

Colleen had just enough time to register the irony.

And then all there was, was water. No direction, no up or down. Hard and urgent as a lover’s lies, the current’s enthusiasm caught them up and flung them over the edge, to tumble, dizzy and battered, into an uncertain future.

~

Jaworsky leaned over the conference room table, peering into the holographic blueprints. Frowning. Across the table, face shimmering through the holographic image, Susan sat with a touchpad computer. She watched him with hopeful eyes. Tharp slouched sullenly in the chair at the head of the table, ice pack held to his face.

Jaworsky stuck his hand into the hologram, pointing.

“Can we take a closer look over here?”

“Sure.” Susan poked at her mobile and the image hovering over the table shifted, expanded.

“A little more… hell, just bring up that conduit there so we can see it good. Yeah.” He tapped his finger on it, or tried to; it was air and light, and the gesture lost its impact.

This is why I’d make a crappy captain, he thought. Put me in charge for fifteen minutes and I’m already embarrassing myself.

He sank into his chair. The cushions sighed under him. A far cry from the plastic benches and folding chairs the working class got.

“All right. So the deal is, all that stuff we spent a month doing to get the ship running after the accident? We have to undo that shit in… How long do we have, ‘Melia?”

Amelia’s voice crackled over the speaker. “I don’t know. It depends on how we spend our fuel. I can time it the way you said, but if I screw up, or if anything goes wrong, we might end up floating out here, just out of reach.”

“You said before we have enough fuel to get back.”

“I said we had just enough fuel to get back. That’s assuming we headed back using one long burn, with a short burn to slow us down for docking. I’ve been reading the specifications on the engines. Each time we fire one up, it uses thirty liters of fuel just to spin up. There are twenty-four engines, so starting them uses seven-hundred twenty liters. That’s fuel that isn’t providing propulsion.”

“I see. What if we use really short burns?”

“Well, that’s the other thing. Seems this model doesn’t reliably start if fuel goes below a certain threshold.”

“Those cheep, fucking bast… How much time do we have if we play it safe?”

“Six hours. Maybe eight, at the most.”

Jaworsky shook his head. “Not enough time. We need at least a day just for the ring to spin down once we get the motors halted. We’re going to have to do the approach in two burns.”

“Well, that’ll get us there, for sure. The deceleration is going to suck, though.”

“It’ll suck more if we get there with the rings still rotating. That’ll just tear us apart. So, yeah. What can you give us?”

“I dunno. Two and a half days? Maybe more, maybe less. The engines aren’t real efficient, or real precise, when they’re running this low. I’ll be flying by feel as much as by instruments.”

“Yeah. So here’s the other half of the problem. That fucker there, that conduit? Half of what we gotta do is in there. Problem is, there’s only one person on this ship can fit.”

“What do you mean?” Tharp asked. “Oh. Right.”

Confused, Susan glanced back forth between Tharp and Jaworsky.

“It’s a coon-hole,” Jaworsky said. “Just big enough to fit a raccoon with a tool belt. Whole ship’s filled with them.”

“What?” Susan zoomed in on the conduit some more. “That’s crazy! Who the fuck would design a ship—”

“There were some funding issues,” Tharp said. “It started with international politics and went south from there. Then the GMO corporations got involved. They wanted to prove their product was safe and stable, so they funded the project as long as it was built to ensure that their product was indispensible.”

“Their product?” Amelia’s voice held daggers.

“You. Slim. The other raccoons.” Tharp rubbed his forehead. “Cheap, subsidized labor. Low maintenance cost. Non-union, and not recognized as persons in any nation. Good for low-to-medium skilled, high-risk positions. That’s all straight from their whitepaper.”

“When were you going to tell us? When were any of you going to tell me?”

“Never. There were only three of us on board who ever saw that—Captain Vasquez, Jerisen, and me–and after we met you, we knew there was more to you than that. We knew you were people, and we swore we’d always treat you just like anyone else.”

“Enough,” Jaworsky said. “We don’t have time for drama, or theory, or grief counseling, or even good fucking manners. We have a spaceship to break. And Amelia, I’m going to need you to do Slim’s job.”

“Who’s going to pilot the ship?”

“Susan. She’s smart, she knows how to work things with buttons and dials, and she’s good at describing shit. You’ll be in the coon-hole, describing to me what you see, and doing what I tell you. At the same time, Susan’s going to be coming to you for instruction. Got it?”

“You want me to get you more bandages?” Tharp asked.

“No. I’m going to need you on the outside. There’s some critical stuff that has to happen out there at the same time we’re working in here.”

“Great. I can’t wait.”

Kudzu, Chapter 28

Tags

book 4, kudzu, novel

Kudzu, a Novel

Chapter 28

Sir Reginald assessed the raccoon as he tapped his pipe against his boot, spilling soft, white ash on the ground. A tendril of kudzu grew toward the ashes, twisting across dirt, investigating. It lay across the pile and extended roots into it.

“I presume we’ve met, then,” Sir Reginald said.

“Very funny.” The raccoon tucked its glasses back into its pouch and clambered down the wall.

Kevyn glowered at Sir Reginald. “You seem to have everything figured out, don’t you?” She stepped out of a loop of kudzu that had begun to encircle her foot.

The raccoon limped across the clearing. A long stripe of missing fur ran from under its rib cage across its left haunch, almost to the base of its tail. It sat upright when it reached Sir Reginald and raised a paw to slap against his palm. As it stretched, the fur on its torso parted, revealing a vicious scar. It looked like the poor creature had been disemboweled, and then stitched back together inexpertly; the scar was a deep furrow that gouged through muscle and, very possibly, bone.

Kevyn gasped. Looking away quickly, she covered her mouth and blushed.

The raccoon glanced at her. Its lips pulled back in an opened-mouthed smile, tongue protruding goofily: the raccoon expression of amusement. “The stories I could tell,” it said, retrieving its spectacles. “Good times, good times.”

“Good times? It looks like you almost died!”

“The world writes her history on our flesh. Some of us are blessed with the interesting bits.” It wiped its glasses on a soft cloth and settled them on its snout.

It looked like it was about to launch into lecture when it caught sight of the abducted guard, who had been examining the kudzu-choked tunnel that led back to the prison.

“Niamh? Niamh Murphy?”

Murphy looked up at the raccoon. “How do…?”

The raccoon launched itself at her, covering the space between them before anyone could react. Murphy had just enough time to straighten up before it leapt at her. It struck her chest, and they both tumbled to the ground.

Sir Reginald was reaching for the scruff of its neck when he realized it wasn’t an attack. The raccoon was licking Murphy’s face, like she was a long lost kit, and Murphy’s terror dissolved into splutters.

“Ahem,” Sir Reginald said.

The raccoon glanced at him, and abruptly sat up on Murphy’s chest.

“Fuck me,” it said. “This is…” It realized where it was sitting, and leapt off her immediately. Pulled at her arm to help her get up. “This is so embarrassing. It’s just… It’s been so long, and we’ve missed you so much, and… And what are you doing in those awful clothes?”

Murphy sat up, wiping raccoon saliva from her face.

The raccoon took a step back, and a deep breath, and then bowed.

“Welcome home,” it said.

~

Susan was a rumpled, silvery robot, stomping mechanically toward the airlock. Jaworsky hurried after her as fast as he dared. They didn’t speak, and Amelia was keeping a respectful silence. Presumably Tharp’s mic was still on mute.

Susan’s breath came in short bursts through her nose; Jaworsky knew the sound of it, and he worried she’d hyperventilate. In the suit, in a vacuum, it could be a dangerous thing.

He wondered if she could hear his teeth grinding.

He half expected Tharp to be waiting for them on the other side of the air-lock, but he was blessedly absent. They changed out of their suits in silence. It wasn’t until they were getting in the elevator that Jarworsky spoke.

“‘Melia, we’re in. Where’s Tharp?”

“He’s here.”

“‘Kay. We’re on our way.”

“Fuck that,” Susan said. “I don’t want to be anywhere near you fucks. I’m going to bed.” She crossed her arms and kicked the wall, almost sending herself across the elevator in the low gravity.

Jaworsky clicked off his mic. He grabbed Susan’s shirt and pressed her against the wall, just long enough to turn off her mic.

“Listen,” he said, “I get that you’re sad. I get that you want to crawl in a hole and pretend the world don’t suck. We’re all sad, and I gotta tell you, I liked Slim a whole fuck’a lot better’n you liked Ash. We’re fighting against… Don’t fucking roll your eyes at me. We’re fighting the fucking clock here, and we have a lot of work to do if we’re going to survive.”

Susan shook her head. “I don’t care.”

“Jesus. I don’t care if you don’t care. We don’t have time for this shit. You can play the privileged brat all you want when we’re done. Hell, if you still want to die, I’ll shove you out the fucking airlock myself. But you don’t get to take Amelia with your selfish, self-centered ass.”

“I am not…”

The elevator door whispered open. Susan looked both ways down the hall, before she spoke again.

“I’m not—”

“Selfish. Or self-centered. Yeah, yeah. Heard it all before.”

“You’re not being—”

“Fair? Never said I was. C’mon.”

~

Amelia paced the control panel, up and down each of the planks that had been jury rigged to it, hopping down into the pilot’s chair and then back onto the board.

“Try them again,” Tharp said.

She wanted to claw his eyes out.

She tried the comms again. Nothing from either Earl or Susan, like they’d dropped off the ship.

“Nothing, sir,” she said.

“What about the elevator? What’s it doing? Where is it?”

“That data isn’t available.”

“Why the hell not? Why does nothing on this heap work?”

Because someone couldn’t remember his administrator password. Amelia held her tongue. Mostly.

“Is that a rhetorical question? Sir?”

Tharp’s lips tightened in anger.

The door beeped, announcing that it was opening. Jaworsky and Susan stood framed in the hallway’s florescence.

Tharp turned to face them.

“Where the hell have you been?” he asked.

Jaworsky’s fist crashed into Tharp’s face. Tharp stumbled backwards against the captain’s chair and tumbled to the ground. Blood poured from his mouth and nose. He spat out a tooth.

Jaworsky examined his hand.

“Probably hurts like a motherfucker to talk right now, so I’ll save you the effort. Slim is dead. So’s Ash. And they’re dead because of you. Because instead of trying to save your crew, you wanted to save yourself.”

He looked at the screens.

“How much time do we have before we’re too far away to get back?”

“Twenty minutes. Maybe half an hour.”

“That’s not enough time. If we stop our drift now, where does that put us?”

“Just stopping us from getting farther will use most of our fuel.” Amelia chewed on a foreclaw.

“Do it. Get us moving back into the kudzu, but as slowly as you can. We’ll need as much time as we can get.”

“Aye, aye, Captain, sir.”

“Don’t put this shit on me,” Jaworsky snapped. “I’m just the guy that knows how the ship works. Soon as we’re clear of this mess, someone with brains gets to take over.”

He poked Amelia’s shoulder. She blinked in confusion.

“What? Oh, no. I’d be a terrible captain.”

“We don’t fucking have time for this converstation right now,” Jaworsky said.

“Yeah. Yeah, okay. I’ll say no later.”

Susan cleared her throat. “What do you want me to do?”

“Can you get me the ship’s schematics?”

“Yeah. Give me five. I’ll put them up in the conference room, ‘kay?”

Jaworsky nodded, and Susan took off at a run.

The hull trembled as the engines kicked in.

Tharp got to his feet. He spat a mouthful of blood, clenched and unclenched his fists. For a second, Amelia thought he might actually try to fight Jaworsky, but then he sighed, and his shoulders relaxed. He looked almost relieved.

“What about me? What can I do?”

Jaworsky looked at his knuckles. “You wanna be useful? Go get some bandages. I cut my hand.”

Kudzu, Chapter 27

Tags

book 4, kudzu, novel

Kudzu, a Novel

Chapter 27

Phosphorescent kudzu leaves flashed by as Michael fell. Like falling elevators, he thought. Like cars rushing past each other on a foggy night. Water fell with him, the drops coalescing into streams, and breaking apart into spray.

When he’d signed on to the Triton mission, he’d had to read twenty-three pages of disclaimers and warnings, all the possible ways he could be killed or maimed spelled out in gruesome detail in fine print. He’d had to read each and every bulleted point, and then initial it.

He was pretty sure falling to his death in a pit made entirely of kudzu was not on that list.

Either he was drifting, his course shifting as he fell, bringing him closer to the wall of the tunnel, or the tunnel curved — ever so slightly — toward him. The difference was academic. Michael tried to emulate videos he’d seen of skydivers in freefall, controlling how fast they were falling and what direction they were going with their limbs. He spread his arms and legs, hoping to get himself away from the wall.

Too close.

His right hand caught on a vine, sending him spinning. The tethering vine wrapped around him, pinning his arms to his sides.

He realized he was screaming.

Then he hit—.

~

Water filled the air around Colleen.

Where did it go?

Same place she and Michael were going: down. Which meant there had to be some sort of pool at the bottom, didn’t it?

The vine connecting her to Michael was taut; Colleen used it to maneuver her body, getting her feet below her. She pointed her toes, just in time to cut through the water.

The water tore at her skin, her clothes. Rushed up her nose. She rose to the roiling, swirling surface, spluttering. Water crashed down on her head, but already a current pulled her, out from under the cataract and downstream.

It would be pulling Michael, too, assuming he was still attached to the other end of the rope vine. The water rushed through a wide tunnel, a twisting rapids full of unexpected turns and precipitous drops, cascading over thick intersecting vines and roots, and once — Colleen was pretty sure — the rusting hull of an old spaceship.

Colleen tugged herself along the rope, hand over hand, trying to get closer to Michael.

He had to be alive. He had to.

But when she reached him, she couldn’t tell. He was all tangled up in the rope, and unresponsive. His head lolled in the water. She struggled to keep his mouth and nose above the surface. The crashing, swirling current forced them both under as she fought to hold on.

Finally, the rapids spilled them out into a wide, placid lake. Colleen wasn’t sure how deep the water was, but the ceiling was low, almost close enough for her to reach. Bunches of purple berries hung down to the surface, or brushed the top of her head as they drifted by. The light-leaves looked like ghostly lanterns, reflected in soft ripples on the surface.

Michael was breathing.

But not conscious. She tread water, holding Michael’s inert body against hers, and tried to untangle him from the vine. All she managed to do was dunk herself a few times. Eventually, she settled on just pulling up the slack in the vine so it wouldn’t get caught on anything.

As she gathered the vine to her, she felt a sudden tug, almost pulling it from her grasp. She froze, but it didn’t repeat, not until she started gathering again. This time, the vine yanked out of her hand, and she had visions of her and Michael getting dragged under the surface. But again, nothing happened once she held still.

Something splashed, somewhere behind her.

She spun in the water to look, but whatever it was had vanished, leaving only ripples.

Fruit falling from the vine?

Something brushed the back of her legs.

Colleen bit back a scream.

In the dim light, the water was black under the reflecting surface. Colleen took a deep, shuddering breath and ducked her head under. She looked around, but as clear and clean as the water was, it was too dark to see far. She lifted her head for a breath of air, and looked again.

Something flickered through the water, a flash of silver and gold at the edge of her vision. Something big.

Colleen fought panic. She couldn’t control her trembling, or the shallow, rapid breaths, but she managed to make her legs do what she wanted, to keep them from thrashing like a wounded thing.

Holding Michael’s limp body to her, she kicked slow and steady, calmly following the current, wherever it might lead.

~

Niamh Murphy’s lips pressed tight as she watched the kudzu fill the tunnel that lead back to the prison.

“Well, fuck,” she said. “We really can’t go back now.”

“There’s got to be some other way out,” Kevyn said.

The foliage was dense, impenetrable; Kevyn surveyed the perimeter, trying to find any gap in the tightly woven vines, spreading the leaves apart every few feet, and checking all the way down to the ground.

“‘Course, the opening could be anywhere,” she grumbled. “Sir Reginald, you’re taller than I am, maybe you could– What the hell are you doing?”

Sir Reginald glanced up, briefly, then resumed his labors, packing, tapping, and repacking his pipe.

“Having a smoke,” he grumbled.

“Do you really think this is the time for—”

“It has been…” Grump’s brow wrinkled. “Roughly two hundred years since last I tasted tobacco, and I have pulled off no less than three daring and mysterious escapes since then. I should very much like a moment to savor my victories, such as they are.”

“Is it really too late to go back?” Kevyn asked.

Murphy glanced at the weed-choked pit. “Yup.”

Sir Reginald struck a match against his boot-heel and pulled on his pipe, drawing the flame down into the dense-packed weed until it glowed. He filled his cheeks and puffed out a series of misshapen smoke rings.

Kevyn completed her circuit.

“I can’t find a damned thing,” she said.

“Not surprising,” Sir Reginald said. He drew on his pipe one last time, exhaling a large cloud of cherry-sweet smoke. It hung suspended before him, then rose and swirled, following the smoke rings as it thinned and dissipated.

He pointed with his pipe, following the path of the smoke, toward a spot about five meters up the side of the kudzu chamber wall. There was a hint of an indentation, a hint of darkness behind the verdant green.

“That’ll be our way out,” he said.

The leaves where Sir Reginald pointed rustled and parted. Something emerged, snout-first, from the darkness. It looked around, blinking bandit eyes. One clever paw reached into a pouch and produced a pair of spectacles. It bent the frames into shape and set them on its nose.

“Ah, Sir Reginald,” the raccoon said. “You’re back.”

Kudzu, Chapter 26

Tags

book 4, kudzu, novel

Kudzu, A Novel

Chapter 26

The vines were slippery, damp with condensation. Each handhold sprayed a mist of miniscule droplets into the air. The moisture glistened on their suits, their skin, soaked into Michael’s dreadlocks.

When they started down the deep shaft, they had gone head-first, pulling themselves along in the near-weightlessness of the center of the kudzu ball. But as they progressed, forward became more like down, and down meant turning themselves around to keep from inadvertently pitching into the pit.

“Spot me for a minute,” Colleen said.

Michael curled an arm around a thick vine and held firm to the coil of vegetation that connected him to Colleen.

Colleen tugged off her gloves and clipped them to her belt.

“You sure that’s a good idea?” Michael asked.

“Space suits aren’t designed for rock climbing. Or kudzu climbing. I want to be able to feel where I’m sticking my fingers. And my toes.” She bent to unbuckle her boots, putting some of her weight on the tethering vine.

Michael was going to object, but it wasn’t a bad idea. The boots were made to protect the wearer from a vacuum, and from extremes of heat and cold. They were also made to magnetically adhere to metal surfaces, for easier negotiation of landscapes that consisted of metal structures with no gravity. As gravity increased in this humid environment, it was more and more evident the boots were an encumbrance, and potentially dangerous: bulky and slippery.

Once Colleen had both her boots clipped to her belt, she climbed back up to where Michael waited. She lifted one foot and wiggled her toes in front of his face.

“Freedom,” she said, grinning. She gathered up the slack in the tethering vine and braced herself. “Your turn.”

~

A few hours later, they were sitting on a natural ledge, a massive structural vine that punched through one viney wall and out the other, bridging the widening shaft. In their descent, they had passed a number of other, smaller tunnels that intersected this one, and water trickled or gushed from each of them, adding to the cascade. By now, the rush of water had surpassed a burbling stream and become a bonafide, if gentle, waterfall, under the strength of about a quarter-earth gravity.

They had collected bunches of kudzu berries as they climbed, storing them in their helmets. Now they sat on the thick trunk of kudzu and ate. Colleen kicked her feet in the water, luxuriating in the feel of it running between her toes.

“You know,” she said, “it never occurred to me when I signed up for this mission just how much I’d miss water. Just plain, clean water coursing over my body. Whoever marketed ‘antiseptic misting showers’ as ‘better than water’ should burn in hell. I don’t think I’ve been really clean for years now.”

“Decades,” Michael said.

Colleen shook her head. “Cryo doesn’t count. There’s no bathing in cryo, or dirt. Just weird-ass dreams.” She shuddered, then ran her fingers under the cascade. She looked down at her suit, now stained green and berry-purple. “I want to strip all this off and just stand under this, let it course over my skin. Or maybe dance.”

“Sounds dangerous.”

Colleen rolled her eyes. “Not here. When we get to the bottom.”

“You don’t know what else might be in here. You’d risk exposing yourself to that?”

Colleen plucked a berry from her helmet, reached out and pressed it against Michael’s lips, until he accepted the half-crushed fruit.

Colleen licked the purple juice off her fingers.

“Yes,” she said.

~

Michael had no idea how long they’d been climbing. The intermittent luminescent leaves were populous enough–and regular enough — to keep the entire chamber lit with its softly pulsating glow. On a spaceship, any sense of day and night was purely artificial, but time was kept, and there were regular enough cues that, once you got used to it, the body adapted. Here, cut off from all contact with the ship, none of that worked. It could have been hours, or it could have been days.

Whatever it was, he was starting to tire, and with gravity having increased as they descended to nearly half an Earth-standard gravity, the climbing was correspondingly more difficult. The water wasn’t helping, either. What had started as a trickle was now closer to a torrent, and with the winding of the tunnel and the vines that comprised its walls, it was more and more difficult to avoid climbing into the spray.

He reached the end of the length of their improvised rope and found a good, solid vine to wrap an arm around. Colleen started her climb.

She climbed down to where Michael had positioned himself. Not the best place, it turned out, as there were no close-by hand or footholds on either side. He’d have to shift over, and then she could squeeze by. Or maybe he could climb down a little further…

And then… and then she was no longer above him. She’d leapt. Across… it had to be a good two meters!

Colleen caught a vine with the crook of her elbow, but her feet slipped. They scrabbled in the air for a few endless seconds, and then she found purchase. She glanced over at Michael, and grinned.

Michael stared, gape-jawed.

“Are you insane?” he shouted, when he could finally get the words to come. “What were you thinking, pulling a stunt like that? What if you’d fallen?”

“You’d save me,” she said. She shrugged, and continued her descent.

“What if the rope broke? What if I lost my grip? Gah!”

Colleen paused and looked up at Michael. “Then we’d find out what’s at the bottom quicker.”

She turned her concentration back to climbing. When she reached the end of the rope and had gotten herself settled, she whistled; her signal that she was ready.

Michael picked his way down. Since Colleen had leapt to a different cluster of vines, they were now on different tracks; he couldn’t simply follow her path without making the same insane leap she had. Michael fumed. What if, further down, the vines split further apart instead of closer together? What would they do then? Climb back up?

Colleen had been suicidal since the accident. Everyone knew it. It was just a matter of time before she’d attempt it, which was why Michael took pains to keep an eye on her. To keep her safe, when she decided it was time to end it all.

Who knew when she crossed that line, she’d take to it with such joy? With such reckless abandon? She was taking crazy risks, and not paying attention to details, and—

And Michael’s hand closed on something. It was fuzzy, and textured, and not kudzu-like at all. And it moved.

Michael shrieked and pulled his hand away from… he wasn’t sure what, but it had moved, and now…

…And now his other hand was slipping, and he was tipping backward, away from the wall, feet slipping from their purchase. And then, he was falling. He saw Colleen — just the briefest glimpse, but he could read the horror in her face. And then he was past her, falling, until the rope snapped taut, and for a second, just a second, he wasn’t falling.

But there were sounds. Colleen cried out, in pain, and then in terror. There was the snap of breaking foliage.

Then he was falling again.

Above him, he saw Colleen.

And she was falling, too.

Kudzu, Chapter 25

Tags

book 4, chapter 25, kudzu, novel

Kudzu, a Novel

Chapter 25

Slowly, nearly imperceptibly so, the broken spindle that was the OPEV Beagle drifted away from the massive, twisted ball of impossible foliage. Further away from the thin creeper that had caught Slim and Ash.

A hundred meters out from the ship, Susan floated, helpless at the end of the line tethering her to the Beagle’s hull, as the voracious plant consumed first Slim and then Ash. The vine distended obscenely to accommodate their bodies.

“‘I love you’?” she echoed, staring at the lumps in the vine that had once been her crewmates. She could see the round bumps of their helmets, the curve of shoulders and hips. She could see Ash’s fucking feet, for Christ’s sake. “What the fuck am I supposed to do with that, you stupid fucker?”

“Susan?” Amelia’s voice was soft, and ignored.

“No,” Susan said. “You don’t get to do that to me. Bastard. You don’t get to say something that, that asinine and that fucked up and get away with it. You hear me? Get your ass back here right now!”

She shook Ash’s tether, extending out another hundred meters toward the carnivorous vine. The wave traveled the length of the nylon line. The end twitched like the tail of an agitated cat.

“Susan,” Amelia said again. “Listen to me. You need to come inside now.”

“We have to help him, ‘Melia. Them. Please. You can bring the ship closer. He can’t die like this.”

Tharp’s voice cut in. “Amelia, don’t you dare. Susan, get back in here now. That’s an order.”

“Tharp, you say another fucking word, I’m going to break your fucking teeth.” Jaworsky growled more than spoke. “Susan, sweetie, I’m coming to you.”

~

Some folks loved the space-walk, loved being out in the void, with as little as humanly possible between them and endless stars. Jaworsky was not one of them. The suit was clunky and uncomfortable, and the idea of a simple mishap turning into explosive decompression made his balls clench.

He’d never let that on, though. Good thing we don’t have scrotum inspectors, he thought. Give Tharp enough time and resources, though…

Jaworsky kept his eyes on the hull. One step at a time. The click-slap of one boot coming down, the magnets engaging as pressure was applied. Another click as the other boot’s magnet shut off to promote — how the fuck did those marketing assholes put it? — a natural walking experience.

Click-slap. Click.

Like a stroll in the fucking park.

Somewhere above his head, Susan was losing her shit. He asked Amelia to cut Susan’s channel out of his feed. It was taking everything he had not to lose his shit, too.

Amelia fed him directions, so he wouldn’t have to look up. He didn’t want to look up, not until he had to.

As he moved around the curve of the hull, Susan’s line came into view. He hurried toward where it anchored to the hull.

“I’m there, ‘Melia. Can you patch Susan back in?”

“Yeah, one second. Okay… done.”

Susan’s voice filled his helmet. No longer words, just incoherent sobs.

Jaworsky drew a deep breath. “Susan? Time to come home.”

There was no discernible response.

“Hey! Hot stuff!” Jaworsky barked the words. “Enough of that shit. I’m bringing you in now.”

He wrapped a gloved hand around Susan’s tether and pulled gently. A sudden image of him and Susan floating past each other — her toward the ship and him away from it — made him jam his toes under anchor.

“What?” Susan’s voice was panicked. “No. No, we can’t leave them.”

“Susan?” Amelia asked. “What are you…” And then, “Oh, no! She’s untethering!”

For a second, the words made no sense to Jaworsky. Then he pulled with everything he had. Amelia screaming in his ear: “Ohgodohgodohgod.” There was inertia, the resistance of a body at rest to sudden motion, and a sickening moment when Jaworsky’s feet came off the surface of the hull. His toe caught under the bar of the anchor, slid…

And then the tether came loose, and Jaworsky’s boots slapped down onto the metal plating.

The line pooled around Jaworsky’s feet, spooled over him. He struggled to keep free of it. Susan’s cries had turned to anger, and a steady stream of curses barraged him.

He steeled his nerve, and looked up.

It had worked. Susan was hurtling toward the ship — toward him, in fact. And beyond her…

“Jesus,” he breathed. “It’s like one of those egg snakes.”

And then Susan slammed into him.

Jaworsky fell back on his ass. Susan’s faceplate smacked against his; Jaworsky held his breath, waiting for an explosion of Plexiglas and air, but fortunately neither cracked. Momentarily detached from the hull, the two started to bounce away the ship. Scrabbling wildly, he managed to get hold of the anchor, and then caught Susan’s leg before she floated away.

Jaworsky’s hand — his artificial one — spasmed, letting go of the anchor for a single, vertiginous moment. Just for a second, and then it was working again, and Jaworsky wrapped his errant fingers around the metal bar and prayed they would hold.

He pulled her back to the hull’s surface until her boots clicked in recognition and glued her feet down. He struggled to right himself as Ash’s tether spooled down around them.

He tried to think of something smartass to say to goad Susan into willingly heading back to the air-lock, but all he could think about was Slim, swallowed up by that plant, all alone.

Fuck.

When he finally managed to tear his eyes away from the distended vine, he realized Susan had left. Trailing behind her was Ash’s tether, like seaweed on a half-drowned sailor, as she trudged toward the airlock.

Jaworsky coiled Susan’s abandoned tether over his mutinous limb, and followed her home.

 

Kudzu, Chapter 24

Tags

book 4, chapter 24, kudzu, novel, spiders

Unfortunately, my brain has yet to have clued me in on the true nature of the title for Book IV. It’s sure to relent one of these days, at which point I’ll update this. For now, alas, we must proceed without. Suffice to say that Book IV begins here, and now, despite its unwillingness to divulge its true name.

Kudzu, a Novel

Book IV: As Yet To Be Titled

Chapter 24

“Something is crawling in my hair.” Kevyn’s voice shook as they felt their way through the low, earthen tunnel. The floor was slightly damp, and the feathery fingers of roots protruding from the walls brushed their faces as they passed.

“Quit complaining,” Murphy said. “At least you’re getting out of jail. I’m totally screwed if I go back to work. I can’t even pick up my last paycheck.”

Kevyn pulled up short; Murphy collided with her.

“Oh, fuck,” Kevyn said. “We’re fugitives. I can’t go home. Who’s going to water my plants?”

“Your plants? I’ve lost my job, conspired with felons, assisted a jail break, contributed to arming a psychopath, and now I’m on the run with a crazy man and a whiner. I don’t give a fuck what happens to your plants. Who’s going to feed my cats?”

Sir Reginald said, “The Outer Planetary Exploratory Vehicles were first proposed as part of—”

“What?”

“If we’re going to be dealing with a threat from outer space, it’s important to have a little background, don’t you think?”

“We’re in a tunnel, breaking out of jail — which I wouldn’t have been in if not for you, thank you very much. Do you really think this is the right time for a history lesson?”

“Would you rather spend the time obsessing about theoretical spiders in your hair?” He cleared his throat. “Right. Then, where were we? Ah, yes. The beginning. The Outer Planetary Exploratory Vehicles were first proposed as part of an international and inter-corporate program to assess the resources available throughout the Solar System, and to allocate rights. Predictably, bickering over who would theoretically receive what scuttled the project before they even had a clue what they were theorizing about. At that point each nation or corporation capable of mounting an expedition did so on its own, all under the auspices of the original project.”

“Please tell me why I should care,” Murphy said.

Sir Reginald ignored the guard. “In all, there were nine expeditions that reached the production stage. Nine ships, all built to the same specifications, before the lawsuits over intellectual property rights for the technology incorporated into the ships stopped the project. Seven of those ships launched. One was disassembled immediately upon completion. The ninth was warehoused and forgotten.”

“If this was a story,” Kevyn said, “the editor would cut all this crap.”

“It’s important background.”

“It’s exposition, it’s boring, and it happened a million years ago. What does any of this have to do with us?”

“Sixty-five years is hardly a million. It’s not even half that. Where was I? Ah, the Beagle, yes. The OPEV Beagle was the first of two U.S. expeditions to the outer planets. The Beagle disappeared halfway through its mission, stranding a handful of the crew on the surface of Triton, Neptune’s largest moon. They discovered the shuttle buried in the ice covering Triton’s surface. There were no survivors, and those at the base died of starvation years before another ship was able to get there.”

“Great,” Murphy said. “First you kidnap me, and now you’re telling stories of trapped people dying of starvation — while we’re in a creepy, pitch-black tunnel that makes a century-old prison smell like a fresh breeze?”

“Seriously,” Kevyn said. “What is that smell? Raw sewage?”

“I think the word you’re looking for is ‘dirt,’ with perhaps a bit of mildew. That’s the problem with kids today: they live their lives indoors and never spend any time with their hands in the soil. The mildew is likely not terribly good for your lungs, but it’s not like we’re going to set up housekeeping here. I hope.”

“You hope?”

“Yes, well, I appear to have become rather vague, haven’t I? Best not to dwell on that, and just push on. We’re certain to come up somewhere interesting. Though I would suggest we pick up the pace. These sorts of tunnels are liable to collapse at any time.”

“I hate you,” Kevyn said.

“Indeed,” Sir Reginald said. “I have always suspected as much. The Triton castaways—”

“Oh, God.”

“Ahem. The Triton castaways left some records behind. There had been some sort of incident that caused substantial damage to the ship. They were unable to raise the Beagle on radio, and feared all personnel on the ship had been killed. After about a month, the Beagle broke orbit using only maneuvering rockets, and disappeared into the darkness of space. They were never seen again.”

“Until this week,” Kevyn said.

“Wait,” Murphy said. “Are you talking about the mystery ship that was on the news the other day?”

“Yes, Ms. Murphy, that self-same spaceship is the subject of our current verbal perambulations.”

“I thought it was from Mars. That’s what they said on T.V.”

“Did you know that at one time, journalism was a noble art? Ah, it doesn’t matter. The world goes its own ways, indifferent to those who would see it follow a different, perhaps better, path. Yes, the ship we spied through the looking glass was the OPEV Beagle, missing these many years and presumed lost in the infinite emptiness of space. Returned home, only to find home vastly changed, filled with news anchors who can hardly remember the previous night, much less a tragic tale from over half a century ago.”

Kevyn stopped again. “Okay, I see how you’re tying all this together, but what are we supposed to do about any of this? I mean, really?”

“Keep moving,” Murphy said.

“Ow,” said Kevyn. “You can’t do that. We’re not in prison anymore.”

“Every time you stop, that’s more time I’m stuck down here listening to two crazy people in the dark. So just keep moving. Please.”

“Yeah, okay. Sorry.” Kevyn shuffled off down the tunnel. “But seriously, what does any of this have to do with us?”

“I’m not certain,” Sir Reginald said. “I… I simply have a bad feeling about all this. I can feel it in the hollow of my chest, under my ribs. The last time I felt like this was when Astrid showed me her grand experiment. I ignored it then. Ran away from it, really. And look how that turned out.”

“Oof!” Kevyn said. “I’ve run out of tunnel.”

“Try going up,” Murphy said.

“Good idea—”

The light was blinding.

They climbed out into kudzu, blinking in the soft, green glow filtering through the leaves. Murphy waved away a cloud of gnats. Small white butterflies flitted between the clusters of kudzu flowers sprinkling the cavernous space.

“Hmm,” Sir Reginald said, looking at Kevyn. He brushed the top of her head with an open hand, and when he pulled it away, a huge black and yellow spider danced in his palm, clearly agitated. “It seems you did have a spider in your hair.”

He set it on one of the kudzu leaves, and it scuttled away.

“Did I mention I hate you?” Kevyn asked.

Murphy looked at the trap door they had come through. Now that it had been opened, kudzu vines had already started growing down into the darkness of the tunnel, back toward the prison.

“Now what?” she asked.

Sir Reginald looked at the vines twisting all around them and scratched his chin.

“Honestly? I don’t know.”