4.
"Ready?" Ridge said. He was the first out, followed by Tomson. Ridge and Tomson stepped gingerly about on the clanging, vibrating, gridded steel platform outside. They kept their guns aimed straight ahead and looked carefully about. Ridge examined the spattering of bloody hand prints on the portal.
Tomson said grimly: "We were not dreaming, Ridge."
"No, we weren't. I wish we were." Ridge's gaze followed the trail of fresh blood away from the portal, over the railing, down into the blackness below.
Tomson stepped up to the steel railing and touched the thick blood there with one fingertip. "No doubt about it. That is blood. What do you suppose that was all about?"
"I cannot imagine," Ridge said.
Brenna stepped up behind Ridge, briefly putting a reassuring hand on his shoulder. Her touch went through him like the warmth of a heat lamp. "Probably some poor soul lost his mind," she said. "The ship's constabulary had to take him away, and the Captain will give us a talk about it later."
"Yes yes yes," came a murmur of assent. The group were digesting and denying, processing and getting on with things, as humans wanted to do. Ridge felt the urge to put it behind him also. He said: "Let's lock down the workpod completely." It was SOP anyway, some esoteric Corporate regulation probably having to do with insurance rules.
"Let's get our jobs done and get the hell back here where it's safe and sane," Lantz said as she buckled up her web gear. "Yes yes yes," came the chorus, and the others secured their gear. Each of the eight technicians wore a light-weight rig similar to hers, olive drab in color, held together with adjustable straps and consisting of cylinders and pouches sitting snugly against the chest and back.
Under Tomson's direction, Yu and Mahaffey used hand-held wireless devices to make the twin doors slide shut. They locked the portal tightly, and Ridge could see nobody smaller than a crazed hippo could force his way through there. At least their home was safe, although now they had no way back in. The only way to re-enter WorkPod01 would be when they returned and telephoned Captain Venable to have him transmit the entry codes.
"We're ready to rock and roll," Tomson said. "Are we going to open the workstation down under?" He meant the lower floor of WorkPod01, which contained practically an entire factory, tool making facility, whatever one could think of. Normally, it was an island brightly lit from inside, with its doors open and a ramp laid down to truck in heavy parts, motors, assemblies, special tools, even portable generators and hoses.
"No, let's hold off," Ridge said. "Let's go out on Ring 61 and assess what we have going on. Then I'll decide whether we come back here for tools, or bring the shop out there with us." Implicit in his thinking was the fact that it took a lot of work, a lot of energy, and a lot of time to move a fifty ton room made of solid steel and containing all that equipment. He'd need a special auth from Venable plus possibly assistance from one or two other workpods. It was tricky running the shop out there, separating it from under WorkPod01 and then trucking it out like a gondola at a ski lift. It wasn't something to do unless one had to.
With that decided, for the first time Ridge was able to focus on the platform and the guts of the huge ship beyond. The steel grid platform, big enough to park a truck on and surrounded by safety railings, seemed jammed among the massive girders making up the ship's inward skeleton. The men and women in their suits and helmets, with miners' lamps atop their visors, stood in puddles of light, while all around them loomed darkness. The sun itself was too far away now to shed anywhere near the bright heat it did on Earth or the Moon. The ship's nuclear reactors were on minimum output, and the ion drives did not ordinarily power internal systems.
Ridge counted heads. "Everyone ready?"
Single-file, looking like old-fashioned miners going down into the bowels of the Earth, the eight technicians with Ridge in the lead started on their journey. Their voices echoed hollowly in the nocturnal void that stretched in all directions, offset only by the faint glow of daylight from that distant little star, that pinprick known as the sun. Huge girders, much lighter than their massive shapes suggested, curved through the darkness. Their crisscross members merged and blended with other gloomy shapes, like large round containers and tanks, work platforms, ring shafts, and other features. That was just the inner cylinder, with zero G at its central axis. The precious cargo was stashed in blisters, pods, and hangars in the inner skin of the ship. Deserted stretches of walkways represented the loading and unloading bays for when she was to dock in orbit of Triton.
As they carefully made their way along catwalks high in the air, Ridge tried to call Venable again, this time on his collar com. No reply. Ridge tried calling the other numbers he knew, including the Provost Marshal, the Chief Engineering Officer, and more, but the communications grid appeared to be dead. Ridge kept getting a prickling feeling up and down his spine that they were being watched.
The others were voicing questions of their own. Mahaffey was never one to be put off. "Hey, this place looks like it took a direct hit from an atomic bomb."
Yu said: "Come on, it's not quite that bad."
"It sure is dark and spooky," Lantz said. Her normally pale, freckled features looked ashen.
Ridge walked ahead, with Tomson bringing up the rear. Ridge told them: "Keep your eyes on the path ahead and your hands on the railings at all times." He took a deep breath. "If you feel the need for oxygen, pull out your mouthpiece. Tomson tested all the bottles and gear, so we should be in good shape."
Tomson, in the rear, said dryly: "If you trust that I'm not ready to be yanked off the window by any guys in white coats."
"Those weren't guys in white coats," Jerez said. When she was nervous, her Universal Anglo slipped deeper into a classic Castilian Spanish complete with lisped letter 's.' Yu thought it was cute and told her so, for which he got a tongue-lashing in Tagalog. Several persons laughed.
"Eyes on the path," Ridge reminded them. He was troubled, though. Nothing was as he remembered it. He did not remember the vastness and cavernous nature of the ship's interior, at least not around Ring 61, which he had always assumed to be a Ring of many small compartments. Looking around in the dim light, he began to think that the devastation here was much worse than anything he had seen in other decks they'd worked. He tried to picture the other decks, but couldn't put a number to any one. It scared him a bit that his memory was so vague in places. He wondered if he were going insane. At first it was just a nagging thought. He kept seeing Brenna's alluring look over her shoulder as she pranced away in her turban and robe a while ago. Did she do that on purpose? Was it just how she was? How could a seductress have slipped through the fine toothed comb of Corporate industrial psychologists? Or was it all in his imagination, and was he having problems with Dorothy without knowing it? Then he got a real scare. He couldn't remember the names of his children. This made him tremble with fear. He had chills going up and down his arms and back.
"Ridge, are you okay?" Jerez asked from nearby.
He nodded, but tears were running down his cheeks. Am I going insane? Or is it fear of heights, something new I didn't know I suffer from? What is going on here?
"Ridge?" Brenna asked from mid-line of slowly moving figures in a phantasmagoric landscape. Nightmare within nightmare. He was in love with her, and it was eating him up. Why did he suddenly now realize this? Why was her tone so warm and concerned, as if she knew what was burning inside of him. Was it in her too, this desire to hold and be held, this longing for one another's warmth and reassurance?
"Speak to me, Ridge," said Tomson in a worried tone.
"I'm all right," Ridge said. "Just thinking."
Jerez imitated in an annoying falsetto: "Eyes on the path. Eyes on the path, or we'll fall in the manure." Several persons laughed, and Ridge laughed too, which sort of broke the tense and scary atmosphere.
A minute later, there was a shriek. The line stopped and people bunched up. "What is it?" Tomson said.
Ridge had one hand on the gun in its web holster on his belt as he looked around. Jerez had shrieked and stood pointing. She was pale. "Look, did you see that?"
"You're hallucinating," Yu sneered.
"What are you smoking?" Mahaffey added.
"No no no," Jerez said, "I saw one of those guys in gray suits or whatever they are wearing. Looks like those sugar candy guys from the Days of the Dead in Mexico, the Dias de los Muertos."
Ridge felt a new shiver on his back: he thought he spotted a pale gray figure, just for a second, across the chasm on the other side. It looked like a man wearing stitched rags and red sunglasses, fleeting from one hole in the wall to another. He heard a scurrying sound, and a noise like air blowing softly through a flute, just for a second before silence reigned again. Amid the silence, water splashed in distant places, as if the place were terminally leaking.
"Get yourself together," Lantz said. "You're trembling, and I hear your teeth rattling." She did what she often did when nervous, which was to loosen her coppery red hair and tied it back in a pony tail with rough, freckled hands.
Ridge raised his hand. "Everyone be still." He listened intently. Why were there holes over there, a thousand yards or more away? Why were there no decks? He thought he could make out twisted, melted girders, but it was too damned dark in this general gloom, and the lights on their helmets did not carry far enough. Just bright enough the lights were so they became targets if someone malevolent were watching them. But who or what would be watching them? What kind of nonsense am I thinking? He listened another second, but heard no more sounds.
"This place is trashed," Tomson said drawing up alongside Ridge. "This place is truly trashed, man. I don't mean just impacted or zipped or zapped by some pebble. This place caught the Huge Bazongo, and I mean long ago."
Ridge had to agree. He nodded and pointed across acres of blackened slag that seemed to hang like a frozen river below. "You're right. This is ancient damage, Tomson. What is going on?"
Tomson frowned and looked back. Ridge involuntarily turned his head back and looked at WorkPod01. Their home gleamed distantly like a white lantern amid gloomy bronze and brown shadows. Tomson said under his breath: "Don't let on you just shat your pants."
"I feel like I might," Ridge said with dry, terrified humor. "I've never been this scared in my life."
"There is something totally wrong with this picture," Tomson muttered.
"Are we going forward or not?" Jerez said with staring eyes.
"Of course," Ridge said. "Let's keep on schedule and stop being distracted. The sooner we get our day's work done the sooner we get back home and lock the door." He wished he hadn't said that, as soon as the words came out, but it was too late.
"I'd like to go back now," Jerez said.
"Me too," Mahaffey said.
"Guys," Ridge said, "we can't-"
"No, bullshit," Mahaffey said loudly, "we're civilians. We don't get paid to risk our lives or a heart attack from fear."
"Really," Jerez said. "I wouldn't mind if we went back now."
"Yeah," Yu said, "I'd like to get some reassuring words from Venable before I drag my tired butt out here and get scared to death."
"We can't go back now," Ridge said. "There is no reason to." He felt a rebellion rapidly brewing in his hands, and the worst part was he wanted to join it himself.
Tomson stared at him. "Your call, Section Leader."
Ridge knew he must think fast. They could not stay here, suspended a thousand feet or more in thin air above an alien-looking field of charred objects embedded in slag. Were they hallucinating or were there pale men running around who had just dragged a stranger to his death. What had the stranger been trying to tell them? Ridge wished he were a lip reader. No time now for nonsense; he must make a decision. Should they go forward or back? Instinctively, he knew the answer. "We can't go back because we are locked out, folks."
Several persons, including Jerez and Mahaffey, protested. Fear was written on their features.
"I don't know the answers," Ridge said, raising his hands and dropping them. "I don't even know at the moment how or why I got to be in charge of us, because I can't even remember my first name right now. Can any of you remember much of anything?"
"What the hell are you saying?" Tomson said, his face suddenly contorted with emotion. "You're crazy, man."
"Am I?" Ridge looked at him. "We can argue later." He turned to the others. "Folks, we're standing on a noodle high up in mid air. We're asking a lot of dumb questions and we have no answers. Suddenly, our whole world is like a house of cards. All I can suggest at times like this is that we hitch up our pants, put aside all the dumb questions, and get on with the job. I don't know what else to tell you. Those who want to go back, you do what you want. I'm going forward and I hope the rest of you follow me. Frankly, I think it's our only option." So saying, he started marching forward at a brisk pace. At first he was afraid nobody would follow. Then the gangway behind him, and under him, began to vibrate in a kind of familiar unison as they all marched in step, single file, holding on to the railing on both sides as they crossed the abyss, and for a short time the illusion of normalcy once again prevailed.
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