Mars Prime (15 page)

No! He couldn't, shouldn't, wouldn't think like that.

Sharma pushed himself to one knee, took a deep breath, and stood. He felt his head spin, felt his body sway, and felt the ground come up to meet him. Shit.

It felt good to lie on his back and look up at the river of stars. They were extremely bright, like ice crystals on black velvet, so close that he could reach out and scoop them up. No, he had to concentrate, had to focus on the task at hand.

Sharma rolled over and began to crawl. His destination wasn't exactly clear, but had something to do with dragging himself out of the ravine so that the searchers could find him.

It was cold inside the suit, so damned cold, but he didn't dare turn up the heat. No, he had to save power, save power, save power. Shit, he was losing it again . . . fading fast. . . buying the farm . . . checking out . . . stop!

Sharma stopped, rolled onto one side, and activated his helmet light. He moved his head back and forth. The yellow beam played over a steep embankment, glinted off something, then lost itself in darkness. He brought it back, found the spark of reflected light, and stopped.

What was that anyway? Ice? Quartz? Metal? No, it couldn't be metal, not in the wastelands of Mars. Could it? Not unless it was part of an old wreck, a crawler like his, destroyed when it fell into the ravine and left as unsalvageable. But that was stupid. The odds against something like that were millions to one.

His thoughts were suddenly gone, consumed by nausea and the dry heaves that came with it. It took some time for the convulsions to die away.

Something started to beep. Sharma looked up toward the indicator lights, saw that his oxygen was in the red, and knew he had fifteen minutes left. Fifteen minutes in which to contemplate a largely wasted life, pray to his mother's gods, or fight for survival.

He crawled toward the glint of reflected light, drawn to it like a moth to flame, determined to possess whatever it was. Knowledge perhaps, or a talisman, something to take with him.

"One foot, two foot, three foot four, drag your butt across the floor."

Sharma giggled then forced himself to stop. He was losing it, oh yes, lose, lose, losing it. Oxy deprivation? Maybe ...

Now! There it was, only inches away, metal by god! Bright, shiny metal. Sharma scrabbled at the embankment, pulling himself up, reaching for the metal. Gravel, rock, and sand avalanched down around his boots, sliding away from the metal as if reluctant to touch it, fanning out to become part of the ancient river bottom.

The beeping seemed louder now, even more insistent than before, a horrible sound that bored holes in his brain, and signaled things he didn't want to think about.

Sharma leaned forward. His glove touched dirt and something solid beyond that. Another curtain of gravel fell and a hole appeared in the metal. A pinprick at first, through which a tiny ray of light passed and formed a dime-sized dot at the center of his chest. Then it grew, and grew, and grew until the opening was about three feet across, and he was bathed in light. The aperture was round and looked like the bore of his father's twelve-gauge shotgun. The tunnel was smooth and oily, as if a cleaning patch had been passed through it.

Sharma did his best to look inside, to see where the light came from, but it was far too bright and caused his visor to polarize.

Should he enter? Take a chance on the unknown? Or wait for help? Stupid question. Light meant power, and power meant oxygen, or the possibility of it anyway. Sharma bent at the waist, stuck his head into the circular passageway, and wiggled inside.

The walls were slick, so it was difficult at first, but he pulled himself forward until his knees hit the embankment and it was necessary to straighten his legs.

The beeping went on and on. He hated the sound and loved it at the same time. The beeper symbolized life and living. Existence measured out in second-long increments. How many were left anyway? A thousand? A hundred?

Something moved and Sharma felt the resulting vibration through his suit. What the—? He turned, felt his helmet hit the side of the tunnel, but managed to look over his shoulder anyway. Damn! Look at that! The passageway had closed behind him. He didn't know whether to feel scared or grateful.

Sharma turned back, reached toward the light, and felt his glove encounter something solid. Trapped!

Now he felt scared, and no sooner had that emotion registered on his brain than the beeping stopped. His oxygen was completely and irrevocably gone.

Sharma drew shallow little breaths, desperate to extend his quickly dwindling lifespan, trying to take it in.

He was dying, actually dying, and little more than seconds left. How many seconds? Well, the suit might hold two or three minutes worth of air, so three times sixty would be . . .

No! It was stupid to draw it out. Slowly, deliberately, Sharma reached up to release his neck seal. Anything was better than death by slow asphyxiation. The safety cover flipped upward with ease, the lever moved under his fingers, and air hissed out of his helmet.

Sharma waited for his brains to be sucked out through his eyes and ears. Waited for blood to spurt out through the pores in his skin. Waited for the brief moment of mind-numbing pain before he ceased to exist.

Nothing happened. It took a moment to register. Nothing meant oxygen, and oxygen meant life, and that was good. Excellent! Wonderful! Incredible!

Unless he was trapped inside some sort of metal tube where no one could find him. Sharma reached through the light. The barrier had disappeared. Then he had it. The tube was some sort of air lock, like the ones humans used on their ships. . . .

Oh shit, shit, shit! Sharma pushed himself backwards, away from the light, towards the entrance.

What the hell would use a tubular air lock? Some sort of goddamned snake, that's what, or a slug-like thing, or . . .

No, there he went again, freaking out when he should be thinking. The alien thing was stupid. Wasn't it? Yes, damn it. The most likely possibility was some sort of secret military installation. Maybe they'd developed some sort of tubular thingamajigs that needed their own lock. God only knew what those bastards were up to. Yeah, that made sense. The suits would be pissed at him, but hey, he'd be alive and that was the main thing.

Sharma wiggled forward, stopped while another bout of dry heaves racked his body, and resumed his journey. The light came from a ring-shaped fixture that was mounted flush to the tunnel. Sharma inched his way past it, found himself on an incline, and slid to the bottom.

He rolled over, sat up, and took a look around. So much for the military hypothesis. The interior of the ship, for that's what Sharma had decided that it was, wasn't even vaguely human.

The room was large and sort of womb shaped. The light was bright and came from panels that spiraled around the walls. A lattice-work of what looked like dried seaweed crisscrossed the open space, drooped in places, but was largely intact. There were four kidney-shaped constructs too, dangling from the ceiling like pieces of abstract sculpture.

And there, hanging between them, was an alien, or what had been an alien hundreds or even thousands of years before, and was now little more than a desiccated mummy. A tube-shaped mummy that had oozed, wiggled, or squirmed through the same lock he had. His first guess had been correct after all.

A chill ran down Sharma's spine. Had the idea been the result of logical extrapolation? Or some kind of weird vibrations transmitted by the ship itself? He shook the thought off. The place was spooky enough without adding anything to it.

The stomach cramps started again, causing him to double up in pain and momentarily wish that he were dead. They passed after a minute or two, but left him gasping for breath and covered with sweat.

It was warm inside the alien ship, so he made a decision to shuck the E-suit. Sharma stood, unhooked the helmet from its umbilical, locked the major joints and released the seals. He touched a switch and heard servos whine as a seam appeared down the front of his body, and the left and right front quarter panels hinged open, followed by the thigh panels, lower legs, and boot covers. The movements seemed slower than usual, as if the power pak was almost completely exhausted and giving up the last ergs of its precious energy.

After that it was a simple matter to pull his arms out of the sleeves, disconnect himself from the urine collection device, and duck out of the shoulder yoke.

Sharma took a step away from the suit, caught a whiff of his own body odor, and wrinkled his nose. Whew! Time to hit the showers and then some.

The floor ... deck? . . . was littered with pieces of dried out something. Sharma could feel chunks of the stuff pressing up through his synthi-leather booties as he walked around.

An alien space ship. Damn, what the suits wouldn't give to get their hands on this baby! What the hell had happened anyway? A crash? Maybe, but nothing seemed damaged. A landing then, followed by an unexpected illness, or something similar.

Sharma looked up into the spiraling lights. The tube-shaped thing just hung there, the dried out leavings of what had been a sentient thing, one of many such creatures that had . . . still did? ... wiggle and squirm with life.

Sharma paused for a moment and looked around. How the heck had the alien hoisted itself up there anyway? And why? The human walked in a circle trying to imagine what the space had looked like hundreds or thousands of years before. The tube-shaped thing hanging there, directing the activities of the ship, thinking about what? Food? Sex? Power? There was no way to tell.

Okay, the shift is over, time to take a break. What does the tube-shaped guy do now? Lower itself to the floor by means of those seaweed things? No, trained or symbiotic plants were a possibility, but he really didn't think so. The latticework looked too lacy, too even, as if it were left over from something else.

Left over! Now there was an interesting idea! What if something had dried out and disappeared over the years? Something that had filled the room. How do tube-shaped things move anyway? They squirm over and through dirt or water, that's what. Water! Maybe the whole space had been filled with water! Or a jellylike substance. Yeah, a tube-shaped thing would like that, squirming around through oxygen-enriched clear gelatin, protected from G-forces, moving up, down, or sideways as the need presented itself.

So, what if the alien had wiggled up to where it was now, had died in place, and been suspended there as the jelly-like stuff dried out. It made a halfway decent theory and would also explain the kidney-shaped thing-amajigs that surrounded it. They were control panels or the worm equivalent thereof.

Yeah, it made a lot of sense, but did him no good whatsoever. What he needed was a way to summon help, or failing that, to resupply his suit. Then he could walk out, trade the ship's coordinates for some cash, and retire to Earth. Sharma imagined a future filled with money, sex, and power. What a way to go . . . No, there was work to do first.

Okay . . . first step. Explore the rest of the ship. There was power here, the lights proved that, and plenty of oxygen. All he had to do was find a way to transfer them into his suit.

The ensuing search took an hour or so, with time out for bouts of nausea and the accompanying stomach cramps.

Sharma found three additional womb-shaped compartments. All showed signs of having contained the jelly-like substance and were interconnected by tube-shaped air locks.

The first compartment was relatively small and might or might not have correlated to a galley-mess area. There were no appliances as such, or furniture, just a series of transparent bins, each containing thousands of what looked liked multicolored berries. These were fed down through a funnel-like device to a nozzle.

Sharma imagined a worm wiggling its way into the compartment, wrapping an organ around the nozzle, and sucking berries into its what? Mouth? Stomach? God only knew.

The second compartment was quite large and filled with what Sharma assumed was machinery, though it was sealed inside metal casings and completely inaccessible. A rather sensible precaution when one lives in gelatin.

The third compartment was smaller, a cargo bay from all appearances, and filled with a double-helix-shaped storage system, which, though inconvenient for humans, would be rather useful for goo-encased worms.

A quick check revealed that the storage system was full of carefully bagged rock samples. Sharma grinned. A rock doctor! Or collector anyway. The alien had been in the same line of work that he was! What a small universe.

The most valuable discovery, however, was the suit locker. He found it towards the far end of the cargo bay next to a second and even larger lock.

The first thing that Sharma noticed was that while there were provisions for two suits one of them was missing. Was it outside somewhere? Pinned under a fallen rock? Buried by a landslide? Is that what had happened? One worm had gone out and never returned? And the other had waited, and waited, and waited? There was no way to tell.

The remaining suit went a long way towards confirming some of his theories, however. It was tubular in shape, about nine feet in length, and stored horizontally rather than vertically.

The outside surface of the suit was covered with hundreds and hundreds of textured black balls. Sharma found that while some of the balls spun freely, others refused to budge, suggesting a drive system of some sort.

The inside surface of the suit was slippery with what might have been lubricant and was heavily dimpled. Sharma imagined a worm sliding into the suit, pushing some of its substance into each one of the dimples, and controlling it through the resulting contact.

The other thing he noticed was that the suit was quite thick. Thick enough to protect the worm and still leave room for air bladders and power cells to be sandwiched into its skin.

But while all of these discoveries were interesting, and would have driven the egg heads crazy with scientific lust, the most important discovery was ancillary to the suit itself.