17.
Ridge sat at the table in WorkPod01, eating cereal, and reading The Odyssey on a digitablet. As he read about the violent and gory battles on primordial Holocene Earth, he was rapt and lost in that world where wind keened through rolling grasslands and cattle lowed on distant hills while warriors clashed and died. He could almost hear the whinny of horses, the crackle of burning walls, the cries of wounded and dying men. A voice speaking nearby pulled him out of that reverie.
Venable, wearing an officer's black Class B jumpsuit, sat across the white tabletop from him. Venable folded his hands on the table. He was a handsome young man in his mid-30s, with dark brown hair cropped close, and dark blue eyes in a lightly tanned skin. "Can you feature all that?"
"What do you mean?" Ridge put a tongue depressor in the book as a mark, closed the book, and put the book on the shelf under the table.
"The sights and smells. Do you relate to them?"
As the two spoke, various crewmembers came and went between their moon doors and the common quarters such as bathrooms, showers, and weight room. They all looked vaguely familiar, though none were from the last iteration except one. There was no Tomson, no Lantz, no Mahaffey. He thought he did see Brenna beyond the rippled glass door of the shower area, combing her hair and singing to herself as she looked into a mirror surrounded by little round light bulbs. Again and again she ran the brush through her thick hair which was deep blood red like autumn leaves.
"It's as if I'm there," Ridge told Venable, thinking of the unpleasantness at Bronze Age Hissarlik.
"Excellent. The ship did a good job putting us together."
Ridge looked around. "This is a broth."
"Yes." Venable looked at him thoughtfully. The faint flicker of his eyes betrayed complex criss-cross considerations, not all happy ones.
"Are you part of this iteration?"
Venable shook his head. "I don't think so." He turned his head to look at, and guide Ridge's gaze to, the open door far off in a corner. Ridge looked at the door with the hint of jumble in the small room, and the yellowish light pouring out. "I go back there."
"I thought I pulled your hoses."
"You did. We're all part of the ship though. You knew that."
"Yes. I didn't mean to terminate you. I figured the ship would take care of you."
"It's not the ship so much," Venable said. "It's about the genetic broth, and the ship's mission. I just want you to understand."
"I understand, or maybe I don't. Why?"
Venable leaned forward. His collar was casually open, revealing stray comma-like hairs against dusky skin. "Ricardo had persuaded Brenna to leave her modeling job in New York City and move to Buenos Aires to marry him. They were happy together and she was pregnant when the comets appeared without warning, coming up at a near perpendicular angle to the solar system ecliptic."
"So there was at least one set of child genes," Ridge said. He lost interest in eating and pushed the cereal bowl aside. With one finger, he idly traced sharp jaggy figures in the bluish milk spilled on finely rippled white plastic. Little bits of soggy cereal were stuck in there; good detail, he thought, nicely done, ship.
Venable continued: "The angry one was Venable, who had loved Brenna from the first and was determined to steal her from Ridge. The old gaucho, Caulfield--"
"Uncle to both Ricardo and Venable," Ridge offered.
"-Exactly. Caulfield owned significant portions of the global economy, including trade, hospitals, blood banks, and shipping, just for example. Caulfield had one huge ship plying the planetary trade run. In fact, Caulfield had a monopoly on the Neptune run. His ship was just arriving in orbit of L5 near Luna when word of the comet swarm first made the news. It was academic that Caulfield would refit Neptune Express for a desperate gamble to take a few thousand colonists to the stars. With enough genetic material in racks to furnish unique DNA for a million persons, and the finest wetware including AI, wormware, you name it, Caulfield was the only one who could get a ship ready. With no habitable worlds in the solar system to make a new home, mankind needed to break out into the Milky Way."
"Yes," Ridge said, "and the new ship, Nebula Express, set off on a course running counter to the stellar vortex of our galaxy, thereby multiplying her effective speed in searching for the best new world. Have we found it yet?"
"Yes," Venable said. He sat back with his hands in his pockets and looked at Ridge with his chin resting in the deceptive informality of his open collar. "We make orbit in another fifty years, and at that point Venable will be the master of the ship, and Brenna will be at his side. There will be no place for Ridge in that scenario."
"You are telling me this--why?"
Venable grinned and folded his hands between his knees. He leaned over his knees as if he held the secret of fire between them. "I want Ridge to know he lost."
Ridge nodded. "I see. The victory is no good unless the loser knows he is getting creamed. Sort of like Achilles slicing Hector up with his sword."
Brenna came walking out. "Ridge, I thought we were waiting for Largo to come to life." She looked ravishing in her pink slip. Her figure moved like shadowy music against the back-glow of light from the shower. She was still pulling the brush through her hair, and smelled like damp flowers from her morning shower. "Why are we back in this workpod?"
Ridge shrugged. Venable had left, disappeared, gone back into his room, whatever-that distant corner door was closed. "The ship wants to dump our genes, I think. The ship wants to flush us out. I'm supposed to get terminally wiped on this iteration. I don't know what they have in mind for you." A horrible suspicion dawned on him, and he did not want to scare her with it.
She sat down where Venable had just sat. "Darn this hair," she said making a pained face as she pulled on the brush and it only inched through her hair without coming out. "I'd give anything for a decent wash and perm on uptown Santa Fe or Campos."
"I'm sure we will find a decent hairdresser on Largo," Ridge said. "Why don't you go in your cube and lock yourself in? You'll be safe there. Maybe you can skip going out on the job."
"Oh no," she said, "they won't let anyone stay. You know the workpod gets locked up tight as a drum. Now we know why."
Other team members were starting to appear, buttoning uniforms and adjusting hats or carrying web gear in preparation for the day's work. Already, a red light flashed its silent alarm. An image appeared on the view screen near the portal, and the team leader appeared beside it. It was a young, earnest man with short blond hair and sincere Boy Scout eyes. "He knows nothing," Brenna said.
Ridge examined the young leader and the others. "None of them do. Maybe they have a few molecules of Lantz or Mahaffey or Tomson, but they are unique."
She sat holding her brush tightly in her hands on the table, shoulders squeezed narrowly together with the tension of her thoughts. "Each a unique life, engineered to be disposed like a lab rat after 30, 40, 50 hours."
Ridge put a hand over her two hands and brush. "We have to focus. We can't do anything for these people, but we might be able to stop Venable once and for all. I think he's called me out for battle."
"Oh darling," she said with tears in her eyes. She pulled her hands out and caressed his hands in hers. "Please be careful."
"Ready?" said the young leader. Team members crowded around. They looked relaxed, self-assured, courageous.
Captain Venable's image smiled and spoke in the view screen as before. "You have an important mission. A stray space object has hit the ship, and there is considerable damage. Yesterday's workpod team managed to get an important milestone under control, and you can bring us a step closer to ultimate success today."
Ridge whispered to Brenna: "Just another load of food for the mudmen. Watch your step." Brenna put her arm around his back. Her hand squeezed his side with near-painful force, in silent agreement.
"Thank you and God speed!" said Venable with that wide, pleasant grin. The view screen went blank. The light atop the portal winked red-red-red-red...
No bleeding man pounding on the window this time, Ridge thought. Not even a warning for this crew. Venable has made sure of that.
A man and woman with hand-held electronic box controls pushed the sliding doors apart. The work crew walked out onto the platform. The young leader signaled, and the man and woman walked the door shut. As the door slipped closed, and sealed itself with a click and a sigh, the red light stopped winking. A green light started winking in its place. "We are on our way," the young man said proudly. "Let's see what we can do to make the Corporation feel we earn our pay." He raised one arm and signaled to the woman at the controls: "Start us rolling."
Ridge and Brenna both tensed as they noticed what none of the others had any reason to be suspicious of. In the darkness, just beyond the circle of light shining on wet, drippy surfaces, faint red dots moved. Barely visible smudges of gray light-mudmen heads-moved this way and that. Now they heard the first of those low fluting sounds. One mudman uttered a long, soft breath, and another elsewhere replied in the same wistful, melancholy timber.
As the platform gave its first little jerk, and the bicycle chain stretched between pulleys started a greasy rattle, Ridge heard a series of clicking sounds he recognized from some past life. "Down!" he said, and pushed Brenna onto the platform. She did not fight him, but buckled at the knees and fell onto her palms with her terrified face to one side on the dirty steel grating. He threw himself over her, just as the first bullet started to strike the team members clustered helplessly and naively on the platform. Several powerful machine guns opened up, and bullets spattered and ricocheted off the steel walls. White cobwebs marked smashed spots on the heavy windows above, though for the moment the windows and the walls appeared to be holding. The six other work team members did not remain standing long. In seconds their riddled, bleeding bodies lay sprawled in a heap on the grating. Ridge closed his eyes and held Brenna tightly. He could feel the dead bodies around him bucking as more bullets struck them. Ridge did not feel any pain or numbness or ripping impact that suggested he'd been hit. He pressed his face close to Brenna's and felt her regular though terrified breathing. The firing stopped.
"Oh God," Brenna whispered as a pale shadow flitted beneath the platform on the curving, bumpy, wet inside of the hull.
"We've got to run for it," Ridge said. "On my signal, go." He waited for a moment, gathering his energy and staring through the holes in the grating for the best direction to take.
Already, the platform rocked once, twice, three times and more, as mudmen dropped down to finish off the kill. He could smell their mushroom, earthy sweat. He heard the chorus of satisfied breaths as they contemplated how full their stomachs would soon be.
Hearing the first rip of claws through cloth, Ridge wrapped his arm around Brenna. Together, they rolled once, twice, and fell off the platform. He grasped a vertical stanchion as they dropped. He broke their fall and caused them to swing like a pendulum away from the platform first outward then toward the hull. They let go and fell, crashing in a daze, rolled down heaps of sliding slag, and ended up in a soft mound of black stuff like coal dust about 100 feet below. On the platform, mudmen chorused greedily and appeared not to notice.
Ridge and Brenna ran as best they could. They held hands and alternately fell, clambered, and slid on the slippery mass. They could hear the piles of slag groaning softly as the ship turned. Much of the ship's cargo structure had apparently been shattered and then had spent centuries rusting. The ship turned like the body of a concrete mixer, and piles of rusty debris made grinding noises as they slipped along the inner surface an inch at a time.
"There!" Brenna said. She pointed upward. Ridge saw the platform slowly following them. From it hung the arms and torsos of dead team members, and the shadowy bodies of mudmen were hard at work with slashing claws and bloody chewing mouths. Along the forward railing were several figures with machineguns. Ridge exclaimed as he recognized what was at work there. The mudmen-like figures wore black jumpsuits and masks. The masks were tied behind the head with soiled linen ties, like surgical masks, and the faces were all identical: Venable's luminously greedy face and crazed eyes. "Those are a cut above your ordinary mudmen," he told Brenna. "Venable had the ship make those, using uniforms from the officers I saw in the CP that time. They are all mummies, but the ship has their memory soup. Apparently Venable has enough control to be able to tap into the heart of the ship and make it do whatever he wants."
Several weak brownish spotlights now shone down on Ridge and Brenna from the platform. They heard a voice, Venable's. He sounded angry and desperate. "Brenna! You weren't supposed to be on this iteration. Come, and I'll save you!"
Brenna hugged Ridge's arm with both of hers, and pressed against him. "I wanted to come with you. I waited until he was gone, and then I came out of the shower room. I don't ever want to leave you. I love you."
"I love you and that's how it will always be," Ridge said. He squeezed her, then let her go again, just holding her hand. He looked up at the platform. The speaker was one of the black-suited mudmen. The others carried machineguns, but this one did not. Instead, the lead Venable-clone did not even have hands, but instead had twisted bunches of white tubing about a foot long that wiggled like nests of pale snakes when he raised his arms. "Must be something that grew like a tumor on those tubing connections I whipped together," Ridge told Brenna, meaning the speaker above in his entirety. "Somehow, the seams must have leaked and cells got out there, and gene code, and that thing grew slowly over the years. It formed the other mudmen in its image."
"That means Venable creates the mudmen," Brenna said.
"Brenna!" Venable cried in a wailing voice that drifted over the wet slag heaps in that bronzed, doom-ridden light.
Ridge pulled Brenna along all the more forcefully. The platform above made greasy rattling noises as its pulleys turned and the chain propelled it along after them. "What do we do?" Brenna asked as they ran on strong new legs, with fresh lungs and factory-fresh bodies.
"We have to get to Largo," Ridge said. "It's the only place we might be safe." He thought of the police station there, and what was left of its armaments. "We might stand a chance at holding them off."
"And then? We spend our last hours in a hotel room, afraid they'll come bursting in on us?"
Ridge could not answer. He merely pulled her along, and she readily came, holding his hand. Even now, they could not see the lights yet of the nose area, nor the glow of that trolley station into which the platform must inevitably travel. "Let me think a bit."
More machinegun fire punctuated the air. The echoes were deafening. Rusty water splashed up, as did stinging particles. Ridge and Brenna ducked left and right.
"There is the bow section," Brenna said pointing at dim coppery light ahead.
"They're desperate now," Ridge said. One by one, he saw the Venable clones drop down from the platform with their machineguns and clamber down the slag heaps. He said: "They can't catch us quite so easily once we're in the labyrinth of the bow area with all those levels and rooms."
"But it's infested with regular baseball-heads," she said.
They reached the base of the wall separating the bow from the cargo holds. The wall was of riveted steel. It had many odd sections welded on top of one another-circles, squares, oblongs, triangles. Some looked like doors with barlike handles and locks. Steel ladders stretched precipitously up the wall. Here and there glowed indirect light from lanterns hooded by weeping reddish iron casques aimed inward toward the wall. Ridge and Brenna started climbing without a clear goal-anything to escape for yet another minute or another half hour of life.
The Venable clones were running across the dark hills, firing their machineguns. Ridge winced several times as the metal surface near his head rang with an impact. Once or twice, dust kicked up and stung his face. "You okay?" he asked. She replied from directly under him: "So far, so good."
He found a handrail and pulled himself up on a narrow ledge. He leaned down to pull her up. They were dizzyingly high, at least 100 meters. "I see a doorway!" she cried. At that moment, more weak spotlights cut in. Light roved over the tramp-steamer surfaces around them. Shots popped far below, and bullets whizzed and twanged through the air by their heads. The platform blocked most of the shooting. Ridge glanced down and saw small figures climbing while others watched. "I think they may be afraid to climb."
Brenna ran forward and pushed a door open. "We're in!" He followed her into a dimly lit room full of huge pipes and sighing steam. "Some sort of boiler room, maybe for the climate control," she guessed. They clambered among shadows, across girders, and up higher into more shadows. The place smelled of oil and steam, of coal and dead rats, of decay and flowering mushrooms.
They climbed through a less unpleasant warren of dry concrete pens that smelled of potatoes or rags or soured wax. The wan light here came from metal-covered biolumes shaped like eggs. They emerged into a marbled corridor that smelled of fresh wax and glowed with indirect lighting from gilded wall sconces. Nougat-creamy gargoyles and putti and lightly draped nymphs floated in the shadows under the ceiling amid Art Nouveau stained glass oculi and long, narrow windows. The walls themselves were of fine dark woods. Statues of mythological men and women stood frozen in alcoves. The statues were draped in flowing garments that exposed rippling muscle (the men) or smooth skin (the women) and bore Homeric helmets pushed back over elaborate hair tumbling from under ribbon-ties. "It's a museum," Brenna said. "I remember some of these statues from my childhood. We lived in Buenos Aires and my parents used to visit your parents at the Palacio Colfiriano."
"That's right!" Ridge said. The memories, once a small trickle came loose like wheat in sacks, grew into floods. "Colfirio was my uncle. He adopted both me and Venable, cousins to one another, after our families died in a plane crash. It was a ski trip in the Italian Alps."
Now the paintings, all around as they ran down the corridors, made sense. Some canvases stretched from floor to ceiling. One showed Napoleon on a horse, leading a charge as thousands of heroic Guards overcame impossible odds during the early glory years when the world trembled in the Napoleonic wars.
A sound traveled over the marbled floors: fluting. The mudmen were close! Ridge and Brenna came to a lobby of gilt panels and dimly silvery mirrors. They saw a bank of elevators and pressed all the buttons. "They are closing in on us!" Brenna cried as the fluting tones trembled in the air around them on all sides.
"They are surrounding us," Ridge said. "Seems to be their style. Surround and devour." The doors rumbled open, and they ducked quickly inside a carpeted elevator car. Its gleaming brass doors slid smoothly shut. At the last moment, something slammed against the outer wooden door in the lobby, a mudman claw probably, but they were safe for the moment and on their way up. Ridge remembered the buttons and pressed the one for the executive boardroom at the very nose.
For a moment, they thought they were safe. Brenna looked up and wrinkled her nose. "I smell mushrooms and soil and worms wiggling under damp rocks."
"Mudmen," Ridge said. "They will be waiting for us up there." He pressed the red Stop button. The elevator ground to a halt and hung swaying. Now they heard the frustrated, disappointed wind of the mudmen. They heard the rasp of eager chitinous claws on soft marble. It was a sound that traveled up and down the spine like chalk on a blackboard. Ridge shivered involuntarily and held his palms over his ears. What to do? They were stuck between floors.
"We cannot afford to stay in any one place," Brenna said.
"I know. Let's try this." Ridge stood on a brass rail separating top and bottom of the interior décor. He pushed away the ceiling panel designed for workmen, and pulled himself up. His head emerged in elevator shaft, which appeared to be made of steel beams held together in crisscross patterns by huge bolts. "Wow," he said as his eyes became accustomed to the weak amber light. Brenna clambered up and they both stood on the roof of the elevator beside a bluish greasy coil of cabling around a pulley. Thick cables above and below apparently connected the car to opposite ends of the shaft, in the oddly adapted artificial gravity.
"We are in the structural guts of the bow section," he said.
She added, "this must be how the whole ship looked before the space debris took out the central cargo areas."
The former Neptune Express, now called the Nebula Express, consisted of a slightly ovoid cylinder with blunted pointy ends. The insides got their structural integrity from a crisscross of riveted steel, like the guts of some spaceborne Eiffel Tower. Now that they were in the heart of the bow section, they saw that everything else was bolted on to that inner structural steel. The floors themselves were steel boxes stacked on top of each other like in a child's toy construction set, for all that the boxes contained all the world's surviving treasures of marble and gold and all sorts of precious materials. It was a giant steel construction set whose cubes, boxes, domes, spheres, pyramids, and polyhedrons contained the history of mankind. Inside were stored the accumulated remnants of Colfirio's avid lifetime collecting: friezes of Mesopotamian kinds hunting lions from chariots; pharaohs wearing the combined crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt; Roman wall paintings from the House of the Mysteries in Pompeii; Chinese vases and Japanese prints; African ceremonial masks; Inca mummies and Aztec gold; greenish-pink Mogul inlays and Hindu elephant gods sitting among Buddha statues; combined warrior and priestly vestments of Crusader priests complete with chain mail and swords; a thousand artifacts, a million texts and images, all stored in this construction resembling Victorian ironware department stores.
"Mudmen," Brenna said, pointing to the mounds and piles of dead husks all around. Ridge nodded. "They breed like moths, apparently, like insects, from larvae. This looks like one enormous hive."
"That means there is a queen somewhere," she said. They walked cautiously among the piled bundles that looked just big enough for each to hatch one mudman. Most had torn sides, where the newly hatched cleaners had chewed their way out. "Cleaners, Venable called them." Ridge scoffed. "It's a long way from creating drones to keep the ship clean, to their getting out of control and evolving into clawed killers."
They saw some larvae with cottony surfaces under which infant mudmen slept. Their eyes were closed in mudmen dreams, and their claws were open and defenseless over their faces. Soon enough, they would emerge from their cocoons as full-sized adult mudmen ready to hunt and kill, to remove corpses from hotel swimming pools, to polish marble corridors until they gleamed, and to eat anything that moved.
Ridge and Brenna found a small door, a small passageway, and crawled through it into a service elevator. They rode this grim, hard metal box upward as far as it would go. The ride ended in a gleaming gallery of blue and white tiled kitchens, whose walls were narrow all around, giving a familiar claustrophobic impression. "The executive suites must be right above us," Brenna whispered. Ridge nodded and held a finger over his lips for her to be quiet. They listened for mudmen songs, but heard only the faint whisper of climate control ducts, and air in elevator shafts. They wandered hand-in-hand through the kitchens, which looked as though crews could come in and start cooking at any moment. By now, Ridge knew who kept everything so sparkling clean. He and Brenna walked through one galley after another. A bar cabinet was stocked with gleaming bottles of white and brown liquors as well as red and yellow wines. The wines had spoiled, Ridge was sure, but the liquor looked pristine. Pots and pans hung from the ceilings. Dishes and cutlery stood at attention in plastic trays. Carving knives, prongs, and soup spoons sat in crocks. Ladles of all sizes and shapes hung among the pots overhead. Rows of mugs hung from hooks. There were tiny points of dissonance, if one looked closely: moths flew in and out of drain pipes in stainless steel sinks that had not seen flowing water in centuries. Refrigerators stood a quarter inch open because their rubber seals had disintegrated and made a pile of gray dust on the floor. Pretty soon, Brenna and Ridge had completed a circle around the entire deck. There wasn't a view screen or porthole anywhere (or what passed for a porthole; likely a viewing surface that transmitted images from outside the hull as if there were a window).
"Look here," Brenna said, pointing to a small ladder leading up to a trapdoor. She said: "Looks like there might have been a way to pass trays of food up that way."
Ridge climbed up the ladder and shook the door. It wouldn't budge. There was a complicated lever with sliding arms, and he pushed that aside. He felt the door pop loose a millimeter or two. He caught a glimpse of the lobby where they had once stood speaking with an image of Venable over the secretarial desk. "We could go up another level," he said. "We want to get to that executive level and see if we can negotiate with Venable, maybe. What else can we do?"
Brenna frowned as she looked up. "Ridge?"
He looked down. "Yes?" As he did so, he saw the growing horror on her face. She started to say: "Mudmen" and at that moment Ridge saw the claw coming through the door. Each of the mudman's hands had one large claw and three small ones in opposition, like a thumb and three fingers. A head like a button mushroom with stitches around the sides, and slitty eyes looked down in mudman glee as it reached out for him. Its claw raked Ridged over the head before he grabbed the arm and twisted. The thing rounded its mouth and wheezed a horrid squeal that started as glee and ended in pain. More mudmen piled on top of it. Ridge punched upward several times, caving its face in while he twisted its arm until the arm came off in his hand with a sour honk of twisting innards and torn mushroom bone. The thing lashed out with its other hand and cut Ridge across the forehead. Ridge ignored the blinding pain and the blood running over his face. He reached up with both hands and hung from the lever. The first mudman died as he crushed it with the door, plus the others were stupidly putting their weight down rather than pulling up. During that moment of mindlessness, Brenna climbed up along Ridge wielding a large kitchen butcher knife and started carving at the mudman. First she sawed off its head, which fell down and spattered on the floor. As sickly, yolky yellow fluid drooled down out of the neck cavity mixed with greenish blood, she carved some more. She carved off its shoulders one by one and they fell on the floor exposing papery muscles and exposed ribs that were a poor genetic imitation of heavier, sturdier human ribs. The mudmen appeared to be quickly, cheaply manufactured (or hatched) life forms of limited usefulness and lifespan. In a way, it was another triumph of Venable cynicism, Ridge thought as he staggered back. Brenna finished sawing the mudman cadaver in half at the waist, and took Ridge's place hanging on the door. Ridge stepped back blindly and fell on the floor. "I've slammed it shut!" she said. She groaned with effort. He heard a click. "I've got it locked."
"Quick," he said, lying on the soft rubbery floor but propping himself up. "Get me a towel, anything to stanch the blood and clear my eyes so we can get going."
She found a box full of sealed packets with wet first-aid wipes and brought that to him. They tore open all the packets and got the blood flow stanched. The wipes had that sharp stinging smell of isopropyl alcohol, and he hoped they would help kill the germs in his wound. She found an old shirt somewhere and brought it to him. She tore it in strips and tied them around his head. His forehead burned and throbbed, and his head hurt a little. He hoped there wasn't some mudmen poison in those claws. He recalled old school warnings about mushrooms and hoped they didn't have some deadly poison that would kill him as he walked. So far so good, he thought as she helped him up and they hurried back the way they'd come.
Three hooting tones sounded all at once in the next room. Brenna and Ridge jumped back as they caught just a glimpse around the corner of three mudmen rising up through the shaft they'd come from. That way was now blocked. "They've got us surrounded," he said. "What to do?"
They looked around, rifling through cabinets, and Brenna found it first: a row of gas canisters lined up in a cabinet under a sort of barbecue stove. Each canister was about the size of a gallon milk bottle and had a fitting that allowed it to be screwed into the receptacle in the stove from which gas was drawn off to burn under food. The lighter lay on the tile counter, and Ridge grabbed it. Brenna handed him a bottle. It wasn't mean to go this way, but he'd have to improvise. He reached over and tore one of her sleeves off. He wrapped the sleeve around the brass fitting. He opened the liquor cabinet, took down a bottle of rum, and smashed its neck off in a sink. With several abortive snaps of the lighter, he managed to get the contraption blazing. Behind him, Brenna tore off her other sleeve and manufactured a similar bomb. Ridge stepped into the doorway of the room where by now a half dozen mudmen were milling around hooting and breathing at each other-apparently they worked in a collective thinking mode, not being very bright individually but being rather fiendishly effective collectively. Ridge was in luck. A second or two later-the mudmen had just begun to turn and raise their clawed hands toward him-the silica based rubber petcock melted off the bottle, and a thick continuous flame gushed out. The flame was a meter long and half was wide in diameter. It was reddish and bluish but white toward the origin, and caused mudman flesh to shrivel. The place filled with a stink like singed plastic, and a sooty, greasy black smoke drifted about. The mudmen shrieked and tried to run, but their fellows blocked the way. A half dozen became quickly incapacitated. Brenna handed him a new bottle as the old one petered out. He rolled the dying bottle across the floor into the crowd, and the surviving mudmen dove back down the hole. Brenna walked about with a meat cleaver, chopping up the remaining mudmen, some of whom still reached up with wide reddish eyes and pleading round mouths-more from hunger than from a dull realization they were in pain and dying. The last mudman down the hole pulled the door shut, and Ridge obliged by standing on the trapdoor.
"This won't do," Brenna said.
"I know," he said. "I have an idea."
"Me too." Together, they gathered all the bottles of liquor. They stacked up the gas bottles, wrapped them in odds and ends of cloth, and soaked them with rum or vodka. Ridge lit the first bottle and stood prepared as he signaled Brenna to pull on the door. As the bottle caught fire with a loud whoosh, he nodded to Brenna. She pulled open the door. A number of mudmen, having already forgotten their dreadful lesson, hovered below with round mouths and beseeching eyes and gripping claws reaching up for human flesh. Ridge doused them in flames and they melted back-literally-shriveling in a lot as they fell back. Brenna lit a bottle on fire and dropped it down the hole. It exploded in a ball of flame as the bottle shattered below. This gave them the idea to advance on their enemies, and they descended into the hole throwing more bottles and shooting more gas until the heat and smoke were so bad they had to climb back into the galley and close the door. They could hear alarms going off as the ship realized it was on fire internally. Ridge was so flushed with combat and anger that he didn't care if the ship exploded in space and if he and Brenna and the rest of the human race died at that moment, just so long as these genetic monsters were destroyed.
Klaxons blared, sirens shrilled, alarms warbled. The noise was deafening. The kitchens began to fill with smoke, and when he saw Brenna double over, coughing and choking, Ridge knew they could not survive here in the burning hell they themselves had created. He signaled to Brenna and climbed back up the ladder. They worked in unison, using up the last of the alcohol and gas bottles. She pushed open the trap door in the ceiling, and as mudmen claws streaked down, he turned a withering gas fire on them. The arms shriveled and dropped off. A mudman reared up on fire and staggered away. Its upper body fell off and the lower torso walked another few steps before falling down. Ridge and Brenna forced their way up into the executive lobby. There, they killed another half dozen mudmen before the smoke started to thicken. It was a race for time between the growing smoke and the hard-working exhausts in the climate control system. Decorative plates and collars fell from the ducting, exposing raw silvery accordion ducts that trembled from the maximal exertions of the engines trying to clear smoke out. The system had been designed centuries ago to handle some pretty devastating fires, but the machinery and the material were old and on the verge of failing. "Down!" Ridge yelled. He and Brenna threw themselves on the carpet amid burning pieces of mudmen bodies and embers glowing in the rug fibers. Lying down might buy them another minute or two of life before the smoke overwhelmed them.
Flames licked up as the secretary desk began to burn. The seat behind it smoked thickly. The noise continued unabated, and Ridge noticed that sprinklers had finally begun to weakly start twirling out water once they pushed through all the accumulated moths' nests and other debris in the pipes.
A change seemed to go through the ship, and Ridge wondered if it was about to blow up. That would be the final and irrevocable end of everything, he thought, as he crawled close to Brenna and put his arms around her. She choked and coughed and pressed her face against his chest. He held her closely and stroked her thick hair, thinking this would be as good a way as any, to go together, if go they must.
The lights went out, and the ship shuddered. Then an emergency light came on, and another. The klaxons fell silent, as did the rest of the noise. The ship was at its utmost limit, and conserving power as it struggled to stay alive. If the hull were compromised-if the air and water it had hoarded all along escaped-then the ship would have no way to repair its precious life content. Systems would shut down, and she would become a drifting hulk, a cold cinder, a shattered shell drifting among the galaxies for the rest of time. How many such hulks from how many lost civilizations were even now floating on the luminous tendrils of alien nebulas? So Ridge wondered as he pushed the cloth up out of his eyes, and brushed his blood away with grime-blackened fingers. Brenna's face was pale and composed as she lay in his lap, with her lips turning blue and her eyes gaining shadows as when a brightly orbiting satellite disappears around the cusp of a planet and enters the nightside where sunlight is no more than a weakly reflected silver dream. So he thought as his own eyes started to close.
Even at that moment, he looked up and saw that with the ship's systems failing, the doors to the inner sanctum in the nose of the ship had slipped open. In the dim light of the emergency apparatus, he glimpsed the inside of that room whose ceiling was the small dome inside the very bullet-nose of the entire ship itself. He saw in there a great coffin, like that of a pharaoh or some Maya king buried in jade and gold. The coffin was of a reddish stone with creamy yellow veins. It had a thick glass lid, and through the lid he saw the sleeping face of the caudillo himself--Armando Cleator de Colfirio, the billionaire who had built Nebula Express out of a planetary cargo vessel during a final frantic year of preparations.
Wrapped around the coffin was a huge mass of mudman material like a tide flowing down from a mountain. Snuggled in the top of the dome itself was a face of sorts, with many slitted eyes that now opened to look down in baleful reddish hate and rage. The Queen, whom Venable had inadvertently created when twisting the genes of the cleaner humanoids to serve his selfish ends. Embedded in her grasp was Venable himself, looking helpless and melancholy. When Venable saw Ridge, Venable's face assumed a mix of fear and fatalistic expectation. His eyes spoke of the colossal evil he had created, in whose lap he now lay as it manipulated him in order to control the entire ship. Apparently, the caudillo had succeeded in immuring himself so tightly and thoroughly, probably with redundant and independent support systems, that the Queen had not managed yet to terminate his incubation.
Ridge staggered to his feet. He heard the Queen blow like a ship in her harbor, a thousand mudmen mouths strong. She bellowed defiance and loathing as Ridge staggered into the inner sanctum, the workpod that kept the pharaoh in wait until his afterlife. Ridge lit a pair of canisters and walked in with a flaming ball in each hand. The Queen screamed as he tossed first one, then the other. As he did so, he glimpsed the mechanism by which the mudmen were created. Her great hulk contained a thousand little orifices, which had been closed, but which now fell open as the flames began to kill her. She sweated yellow and bloody fluids, groaning loudly, and from her orifices popped a mass of slithering black things resembling eels. As these things slid out of their holes and wiggled down the slopes of her body, they contacted the air and puffed out into cottony larvae. Still wiggling, they crept away from her body and entered holes in the floor-which had probably been designed long ago with cabling and conduit in mind but had now assumed a biological function. Ridge understood: they dropped down into the hollow spaces in the ship's nose, between floors, where they attached themselves to the steel girders and grew until a mudman ate its way out and commenced its simple life of cleaning and killing, which after all were the same thing in a mudman's feeble and programmed brain.
Venable looked toward Ridge with enormous longing in his eyes, trapped as he was in the webbing of the Queen's cobwebs and pupa weavings. Ridge understood in that moment that Venable had only one thought, and that was: I have lost. I did not win over you, and Brenna remained yours to the end. Emanating a look that said those things, Venable blackened, shriveled, and doubled up on himself. His hands rose up toward his head, and he seemed to tilt his head into his hands, and his sizzling brain fell out even as the entire blackening mass contracted into a shapeless oblong of charred and oily flesh. A white coating of ashes formed, hiding the thing that had been Venable, and in that moment the ship shuddered again. The ship seemed to relax a bit and die just a little bit more.
Ridge fell down and flickered in and out of consciousness. Wondering where Brenna was-hoping to have one last glimpse of her before he died-he raised himself effortfully on his elbows and coughed. He thought he spied her lifeless figure lying several meters away in the center of the reception area.
Flames licked up and the Queen fell silent. The last of her eels fell down and wriggled on the floor, burning to death. The caudillo remained in his coffin, seemingly unscathed. His pale skin and sharp nose glowed red in the firelight, and his white hair looked almost transparent.
A voice spoke, in Argentine-accented English: "Thank you, Ricardo. You and Brenna have done well in ridding us of this monstrosity."
Ridge was on the verge of fading away, when he felt a cool breath of air. Was this death? Was he falling into a pond of fresh cool water where all this grime and pain would be washed away? Was this some peaceful garden where one could lie comfortably and smell blossoms in the night as white nymphs came this way, slipping gossamer garments off pale shoulders even as their feet stepped into a silky pools of water?
"Breathe," said a voice. Ridge recognized the long-ago voice of Colfirio. It was a strong, determined male voice, aging and racked with cigar smoker's debilitations, but still in charge as always.
Several masked faces looked down, and Ridge smelled mushrooms. He was too weak to care, too weak to be afraid for himself. Brenna?
"She has a pulse. We can bring her back." It was the voice of the sleeping caudillo. Colfirio, or the ship, or both said: "Thank you, Ridge. I am in control again, for the first time since Venable's coup as we passed through the Oort Cloud. Yes, it has been over two thousand years, and we have suffered much, but we are in what you Yanks call the home stretch. Trust me. You will see." With that, the voice in the walls trailed off. The caudillo had said all he needed to, and he was never a man to spend an excess austral or an excess antipodo or a word too many.
Mudmen wearing the uniforms of ships' officers lifted Ridge. Each of them wore a mask, only now the masks were cloth images of Colfirio. Ridge thought he recognized the uniforms he'd seen on the mummies in the CP. They had that same mushroom odor. They were the genetic ghosts of men long dead, whose courage had kept them at their instrument panels even as they died. They were the essence of men whose memories lingered in the ship's communal database, and now that Venable's corrupt touch was off the hapless cleaners, the mudmen had one last task to perform before breathing their last flute tones. Wearing the uniforms of the mummified officers, they brought oxygen to Ridge and Brenna. Ridge hoped for the best but was resigned to the worst. He hoped if he and Brenna must die that she would go easily and comfortably. In the long, lingering dream that followed, the officers carried Ridge and Brenna back to WorkPod01 and hooked them up to the newly cleansed incubators there. Gone were the temps who came forth about once a week to be little more than food for Venable's mushroom slaves. Gone were the memories of those brief but precious lives.
The officers carried Ridge through the control room and hooked him up to the same special receptacles that held their own DNA and memory broths. Ridge lay immobile on an improvised bed-an officer's cloak, thrown nobly and casually on the great oak conference table-as he watched Brenna's immobile pale form being lowered into the life-sustaining waters under her new glass lid. Then the mushroom officers opened another lid and lifted Ridge. Together they stripped him and lifted him off the table. As they carried him to his own incubator, he floated naked and full of wonderment on their hands, under the many glass windows (or viewing ports) almost as if he were floating in space itself. Before being laid in his bath of waters with the lid lowered, so sleep came over him, Ridge gazed in limitless wonder upon the Eagle Nebula (M16) with its enormous silhouettes of evaporating gas rising up. There, he beheld a wondrous sight-6,500 lightyears from Old Earth and about 3,000 light-years from where Nebula Express now streaked through space, en route to the New Earth detected not long ago. Looking like figures wearing cloaks, the huge "elephant trunks" reared up from a vast cloud of cold molecular hydrogen. Metaphors did not suffice. One thought of stalagmites rising from a cavern floor, nunnish figures offering mystic mercies, gaseous towers rearing up in defiance, but most importantly, clouds giving birth to infant stars. Torrents of ultraviolet light, from the vigorous blue pinpricks of hotly burning new baby stars, boiled off the clouds from which they stole their fuel. Energy blew off in columns aligned with the mean axes of spin as the stars trembled just under the explosion threshold in their frantic incineration. Many of the pinprick stars were still hulled in glowing clouds of superheated gas. Some had burned themselves free and looked like burning eggs about to hatch in free space-all within the much greater flowing stream of circling energy that was the whirlpool of the Milky Way itself.
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