10.
"Watch out!" Lantz cried suddenly as mudmen burst into the elevator lobby. Lantz whirled about, holding her rifle ready in pale, muscular arms. Her rangy body bucked several times as she fired, and damp curls of orange hair jigged about her narrow, intent face. More mudmen spilled into the area waving their claws, and the humans dispatched them in a welter of crackling blue light and flying chips of faux marble.
"In here!" Brenna said, punching open the elevator doors. The four remaining humans sidled into the grayish light inside the elevator as shiny brass doors rumbled shut. For a second, mudmen tried to pry the doors apart. Ridge got a lingering glimpse of scaly skin and peeling, horny claws. The claws were at least two inches long, and ribbed with black lateral stripes within, while the outside was coated with a thick layer of horn. "Don't shoot!" Tomson cried. Lantz and Brenna used their rifle butts to slam the clawed hands into bloody pulp, which the owners then pulled away. A puddle of greenish blood dripped onto the floor, and bits of gore dribbled down the crack between the doors. Ridge looked away as he felt his gorge rising.
The elevator rose. Lights flashed by above, indicating changes of floors. Ridge counted twelve floors. The lights were round and bore small black numbers. The last circle was red rather than yellow, and had the letters CP in it. "That's where we want to go," Ridge said. "That's where we'll find Captain Venable and get an explanation of all this."
For a minute or two the elevator slowly rose. The four humans stood tensely with their eyes upcast. Ridge felt the tension in himself, and noticed how his companions' cheekbones were hollowed, their eyes framed in dark orbits, their faces dribbling sweat as they stood with their rifles ready. Then the elevator began to falter. "No!" Lantz cried, punching the buttons. "Go go go!" Tomson muttered under his breath. "Come on!" Brenna said. Ridge felt like smashing his rifle against the buttons. The elevator slowed down, shuddered, and stopped. "Oh no!" they all said. "Damn!" Tomson kicked the splashboard along the wall with his boot. Ridge said: "Let's think it through, guys. Let's be calm. What is happening? The elevator died on us. Looks like we made it about half-way up there. We may need to climb the remaining six floors on foot. We can do it."
The elevator did not start up again. The lights were lit and the lighted buttons promised power, but somehow this was not translating through to the guts of the machine. "Open the door," Ridge told Lantz. All four stood with their rifles pointing, as Lantz gingerly reached over and pressed the button. She sprang back in a ready pose. The doors made a shuddering noise and then rumbled gently open. Ridge expected a mudmen charge, but all was quiet. They stepped out into a wide space, and for a moment Ridge thought it was just another clean, well-lit laboratory or office space. A moment later he began to realize how wrong he was. The first clues were what looked like ancient shreds of cloth lying along the carpeted floors.
"Weapons," Tomson said softly in a warning tone of voice. They moved slowly forward while holding their weapons ready. The air was still but when the climate control fans hidden in air ducts cut in, Brenna let out a little yell, and Ridge nearly jumped a yard backwards. "Damn!" Tomson said. Lantz's eyeballs were rolling left and right and up, while her hands flexed around her rifle. Lantz's cheeks looked sucked-in, and her mouth had a quizzical tilt to it, as if she were about to cry. Ridge felt the same way.
The lobby area was about forty feet long and twenty feet wide, with large open portals leading into darkness on either side. Opposite the elevator doors were high glass walls whose dark hues varied from dark brown through various off-shades of gray to a dirty charcoal. They looked old, Ridge thought with added foreboding. Maybe he was ready now to face the truth, whatever that was. Nothing was as he'd thought it to be just that morning, and he swallowed hard at the thought that he'd have a lot of other unhappy surprises before the tally was done. "Careful," he said. Keeping the others in line kept him from going crazy. Keeping his friends alive meant more than the luxury of slumping inward and preoccupying himself with the gloom he felt slowly spreading through his soul. "Easy does it."
Lantz was the first to reach the high, arched portal on the right. The area around the portal was steeped in shadows from large, stacked boxes, but beyond the boxes Ridge saw light. As Lantz stepped through into the grayer, brighter light, she made a face and cried out. Her face did not lose its mask of dismay as the others crowded around her. Ridge almost did not want to look, but he knew he must.
They stood at one end of a long room like a dormitory. It had a low ceiling of large, square tiles. The walls were covered with monitoring equipment. In some areas were rows of two dozen black chemical suits with staring round eye holes in charcoal hoods; purpose unknowable, but obviously for some type of rescue. Doors on all sides led into more rooms like this one. Instead of beds, the incubators lined up by the hundreds reminded Ridge of the sleeping boxes he'd seen in WorkPod01 while hanging by his fingernails. He did not want to call these containers coffins, though they had some resemblance to containers for dead persons. Their rounded glass lids had a smoky look, but many of the lids had been torn off or hung at odd angles. Many other lids had been smashed, and the shards lay on the skeletal remains they contained. The incubators made an even procession of twenty to a row, and Ridge counted about 40 rows. As they walked in, Ridge saw other rooms like it, and guessed there must be several thousand incubators.
"All dead," Tomson said as he walked from one incubator to the next. Brenna, Lantz, and Ridge did the same in other aisles running among the receptacles.
"These remains are mummified with age," Ridge said. "This happened a long time ago." It was a bone house, a charnel place, Ridge thought. What had happened here? What was going on?
"Look," Brenna said pointing along the floors. Many of the bodies had been lifted roughly from their resting places and left of the thinly carpeted floor. Few of those bodies were intact.
"They've been gnawed," Tomson said in a disgusted voice. Lantz stifled a choking sound, and Ridge felt overwhelmed by the cruelty and insanity of this overwhelming sight. "Mudmen," he said. "It had to be mudmen."
"They had quite a feast here," Brenna said. "What a terrible place."
Ridge walked numbly with his rifle hanging. "For some reason, the ship's crew left their offices and other work stations. They came here, expecting to sleep through their emergency, whatever that was. They never woke up again, because they never expected to be attacked while they were asleep."
"Why asleep?" Lantz said. "On the Luna-Neptune run?"
"Expecting help," Tomson said. "It would save oxygen to go into suspended animation like this. Maybe the hull was punctured."
Ridge frowned. "Thousands of people. How can that be? Unless it was a colony ship, there wouldn't be this many people on board. And I've never heard of a ship where each person had a deep sleep incubator."
Brenna said: "You think the plan was to go to sleep? That would imply a much longer journey." She stared at Ridge, Tomson, back at Ridge. "There is no place in the solar system that would require a fast-moving ship to have deep sleep capabilities. Besides, those are experimental, and I can't think of a single ship that had them." She bit her lip, realizing she had said something that might not make sense.
"Poor kid," Lantz said. "What memories of ours are real?"
Tomson said: "If the hull was punctured, which is my bet since we saw all that slag and charcoal and all those missing decks that simply burned away, then the ship has done a great deal to repair itself. Or it's been repaired a lot. By whom?"
"People like us," Ridge said. "WorkPods. You saw how old Caulfield was. He must have been the last one out of WorkPod09 in many years."
"You saw incubators in WorkPod01?" Tomson asked.
"Yes." Ridge pictured once more the calm, secure, shadowy interior he'd glimpsed. He pictured again the orderly array of incubators. "I think the ship grows generations of us. For generations we've been repairing the ship. Generations of us." He trailed off. Lantz cried again. Brenna sniffled. Ridge continued: "Venable, that son of a bitch, if he's real. He and a few people, working behind the scenes, out of reach of these damned baseball-heads, have been growing generations of us to slowly get the ship back into shape. For some reason, nobody has come to rescue us, so it all just keeps going like this." He walked among the scattered bones and dried-up scraps of skin of the ship's humans. As he stepped over it all, laughing madly, he saw their clothing disintegrate into puffs of dust. "There is no question now," he said, "we can't deny it. This is a generational ship of some kind, purpose unknown. Colonization? Maybe. It's anyone's guess. I want to know the answer!" He shouted at the rows and rows of dead people. "I want an answer, you bastards!" He shook their incubators, and kicked one. It was heavy and barely moved. "Serves you right, you heartless bastards!"
"Look down here," Tomson said. He pointed down a long central aisle wider than the rest. His three companions followed him into a wide central area crammed with dead machines. Stillness, shadows, emptiness hung eerily over the machines that were choked with dust and had not run in many years. "If I can fire some of these up," Tomson said, "we might be able to figure out what year it is and where we are. We might be able to figure a lot of information out."
Lantz held up her hand. They all fell silent and listened to a distant medley of flute sounds. It was like the noise made by wind pushing gently through drainpipes on a rainy night, Ridge thought. He had no idea where the image came from, but it felt eerie and creepy. Chills traveled up and down his back. Lantz ran a wrist over her forehead and leaned against the metal skins of the computer cabinets. "I don't know how much longer I can take this." She slumped down in one of a dozen or more chairs that stood randomly about. She rested her arms on the armrests and lay back tiredly for a few moments. Tomson did the same in another chair, and looked longingly at Ridge. Tomson said: "Ridge, don't you ever get tired?" He looked at Brenna: "You okay?"
Brenna hugged herself and nodded uncertainly. Her lips trembled, and her eyes flicked sideways as if she were glancing back into her wonderful memories. "I'll be okay once I get over it," she said faintly.
Lantz spoke for her. "I wish I knew if any of it was true. Do I really remember smelling the moss on foggy morning? Or is that just bullshit, like the memory of a butterfly wing beating in stillness so profound you could almost hear the wing flutter as the little guy moves from one big purple flower to the next. Or are the purple flowers bullshit too?"
"None of it is bullshit," Brenna declared in a small, firm voice. "All of it is real and sacred because those are our memories. We are people, and that is our soul. Our memories are our souls, and it doesn't matter how the memories got there." She suddenly burst into tears. "I had two beautiful babies and they were not bullshit." She threw herself against a tall computer cabinet and hugged it, crying. She hauled back and planted a resounding punch on the cabinet surface, which echoed like a flat cracked gong down the corridors. The flute music paused a second, then grew louder.
"They are getting closer," Tomson said. He moved weary eyeballs right and left as if wondering-should he run again? Was it worth it? Ridge had the same feeling, but wouldn't let it get the best of him...not yet, anyway. "Come on," Ridge said, "we need to find our way into the CP. We need to interview Captain Venable."
"I'd like to strangle him," Lantz said, jumping to her feet. "Come on," she said, offering Tomson a hand. "Let's go."
"Yeah," Tomson said with a sigh as he pushed himself erect. "Ridge, lead the way. Where's that man with the answers? Where is that handsome captain of ours? I'd like to have a few words with him before I wring his neck."
Ridge grinned. He listened carefully and heard the flute sound getting closer from several directions. He could have sworn he heard running feet. If the mudmen could run that fast, then there was little hope of escaping them. Sooner rather than later, they would catch up with the four remaining team members. Until then, Ridge thought, we'll give them a run for their money. "I think I see more elevators down there." Ridge pointed down a main artery to its end against the curving hull. "We're close to the nose area. Maybe we can get into the CP and barricade ourselves in. It's a small area and we can defend ourselves."
"If there is food and water," Lantz said.
Brenna shouldered her rifle and stepped forward. "I'd rather die of thirst than have those things tear me apart."
Once again, Ridge found himself a step closer to falling in love with Brenna-or was it awe? Her demand for dignity made Ridge feel quiet and content inside, even if they were about to be killed.
Brenna said: "Everyone, stop looking so glum. We have each other, we are still alive, and we have a CP to find. Let's go!" She started briskly off in the direction of the elevators by the hull, and Lantz was the first to scramble to try and keep up with Brenna. Ridge and Tomson followed, Ridge feeling glad for once he did not have to lead.
Behind him, the dull brush of mudmen vocal chords on rounded mouthfuls of air grew louder.
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