Dawn of Procyon (24 page)

Chapter 47

PSD 29-214: 0717 hours

The Argoni had not reappeared from the darkness, but Landry wasn’t even thinking about that now.

He was still straining toward the stringy glob of resin that was swinging back and forth, tantalizingly just out of his reach. He was pushing so hard that the skin on his forearm felt as though it was about to peel back from his flesh. It was
excruciating
.

But he knew that he couldn’t call out. He couldn’t attract the attention of the Toad.

This is it
, he thought.
My only chance of escape.

He had to make it out of here, right now, or he would die. Simple.

In truth, he wasn’t sure what was going to happen if he should manage to reach the resin. As far as long shots went, this was a doozy. For all he knew, making contact with the machine might fry his brain. Or do nothing; it might not respond to him at all. Or if it did, he might not be able to interface with it or understand it.

But he had to try. What else could he do?

He was biting so hard on his lip that he could taste blood. He continued to stretch with his arm.

Then he realized he didn’t need to necessarily free up more of his arm to touch the resin; he just had to change the orientation of his hand. He had to
twist
. So that was what he did.

This time he couldn’t help but cry out. His skin was being positively flayed under that resin. He expected that should he see his arm again, there would be nothing left but a swath of raw meat loosely attached to bone. He chanced a glance up the tunnel, but the Argoni had not returned.

If it had heard him, it was paying him no attention.

Was this another test, he wondered? Was it trying to give him hope, only to crush him once again?

He felt something against his hand, and when he looked down, the string of stiff resin was there, dangling from his fingers. His grip upon it was so tenuous that he didn’t dare even breathe, for fear of having it slip from his grasp.

It felt disgusting—wet and slimy, but he tried not to think about where it might have come from.

Slowly but surely he worked his fingers, drawing it more gradually into his grasp.
There
. It was in his palm. His grip was firm.

His eyes flicked to the tunnel. Still no Argoni.

He worked the resin forward, edging ever closer to the graft on his wrist. He thought he heard something behind him, gasped, but did not let go. Panting, he manipulated his fingers, and then the resin touched the blackened patch of skin and seemed to stick there like glue.

At first, nothing happened. Landry watched expectantly as the resin clung to him, waiting for the images to assault him as had happened with the Argoni, but the experience seemed different. A few moments passed, and Landry sensed a subtle presence awaiting him, like a silent visitor shrouded in darkness. It was as if the link to the machine was a more passive one, as if the device—or creature, or whatever it was—were waiting for Landry to stimulate the connection.

He allowed his thoughts to flow out of him, tentatively at first, but then with more strength. He asked the machine to release him, to remove his bonds. The response he got was baffling; imagery that seemed to bear no relationship to the conversation he wished to initiate. Strange, dreamlike visions.

He wasn’t sure how long he sat there, allowing the thoughts to wash over him, but in time he realized that the machine spoke only in symbols. There was no language, as such. No words or phrases, no commands, only representations of those things.

Landry imagined himself walking along the pier on the day Freida had tried to teach him how to fish. He remembered the creak of the boards under his feet, the shimmer of the ocean. The sheer magnitude of it, stretching out to the horizon. Never-ending. He felt the wind in his face, the colour of Freida’s eyes as she watched him, smiling.

That
was freedom. He couldn’t encapsulate the concept any better than that.

He must have passed out at some point, because the next thing he knew, he was lying on the floor. Landry looked back, saw the curved wedge of resin upon which he’d been sitting, saw the machine looming over him, the resin still attached to his wrist.

He was practically naked, he realized. The Argoni had stripped him out of the EVA suit before coating him in the resin. His underclothes were practically shredded, his skin red from rubbing against his confinement.

He didn’t even want to look at his arm. It was a mess, pockmarked with acid holes, caked in dried blood. Great chunks of his flesh were raw.

He tried to get up and couldn’t. He lay there for a moment, trying to gather himself, then managed to haul himself to his feet.

He looked around.

The shiv the Argoni had used on him was still sitting on the edge of the machine, and he took it and grasped it in his hand. He wasn’t sure how much good it was going to do him, but he figured it was better than nothing.

Okay, what now? How do I get out of here?

He figured his options were limited at this point. The Argoni would undoubtedly return soon. When it did, he could try facing it one on one, but he didn’t like his chances in his weakened state. Similarly, hiding down in the hive wasn’t going to get him very far. Sooner or later the Argoni would find him.

No. The only viable option was to find the parts of the antenna, get back in his EVA suit, and get out of there. With any luck, he could contact the outpost before the Argoni hunted him down again.

He blinked, glanced over at the parts of the scout ship that had been strewn along the horizontal wedge that ran along the wall. As he stumbled toward it, there was a tug at his wrist, and the resin snapped.

He screamed in pain at the awful sensation, but kept going. He had to find the antenna. Nothing else mattered. He had to find the antenna and—

He stopped as he reached the wedge. The components from the scout were there, all right, but they had been gouged and chopped almost beyond recognition. Many of the fragments had been laid out carefully, however, as if there had been method in the madness.

This Toad was quite the curious one, it seemed. Not only had it tried to rip Landry apart, both mentally and physically, to find out what made him tick, but it had done the same to the components from the scout. Landry thought he could locate most of the pieces from the antenna, but they had been damaged too badly in the process, and the disparate segments were covered in a viscous black goo that was eating into the metal.

There was no way he could put it together again. Not with the tools he’d brought with him.

Disconsolately, he kept searching. Beneath the wedge, Landry found something else. It was his EVA suit, but as he dragged it out into the open, he saw that it too had been dissected. The visor was smashed, and the suit itself had been slashed open, bits ripped out.

Not even gaff is going to get me out of this one.

He was stuck down here. He was never going to make it to the surface again.

The toboggan was underneath the suit, and he began to flick through the parts there, even though he could no longer see the point. He was simply going through the motions, like a man on death row sorting through his belongings on the morning of execution.

Then he heard a noise. Footsteps.

The Argoni was on its way back.

Instinctively, he turned and began to make his way back down the tunnel. Past the machine and the resin chair was another darkened section of tunnel. If he made it there, he thought, he might be able to hide. He might be able to—

There was a horrible grating sound, and over his shoulder he saw the Argoni standing there, its feet planted in much the same way as it had done on the day he’d first seen it, back at the wreckage of the scout.

Only this time, something was different. As it stood there, the rhizome that coated its body began to quiver, almost as if it were pulsating.

Landry realized he knew what that meant.

It was angry.
Furious.

Landry was overcome by a wilting sense of fear. He struggled toward the tunnel, whimpering, but as he reached the chair, he stopped.

He stared at the tunnel. A part of him was telling him to run, that there was no other chance for survival, but then something else occurred to him.

He was tired of running. He was
sick to death
of it.

And he hadn’t just been running since the moment the scout hit the dirt the day before last. No, it had gone on for much longer than that.

You ran from your grief
, he told himself.
You ran from your life, from the whole planet. You ran from the child who’s waiting to be born—the child who represents the only remaining fragment of the woman you loved.

He heard Freida’s voice again.

There’s a part of me that will live on.

He turned back to the Toad and lifted the shiv.

It was time to stop running.

“Come at me, you piece of dirt,” he rasped. “This is it. I’m done with you.”

The Argoni watched him, offering no response. Landry glanced down at the shiv, knowing that there was no way it would penetrate the thing’s armor.

He didn’t care anymore. Only one of them was leaving this tunnel alive.

“I said
come at me!
” Landry bellowed, and suddenly he was back on the school playground, waiting for the bully Harry Spring to charge him. He was a little kid again, pitched into a no-win contest with an opponent who would offer no mercy. He’d stood his ground that day, and he’d do it once more. He wouldn’t turn away.

“Do you think I’m
scared
of you?” he screamed. He reached to where one of the larvae jutted from the rhizome, wrenched downward and snapped it off. “I eat you scumbags for
breakfast!
” he roared. He bit deep into the larvae, tore a chunk from its head, spat it on the floor. “
Literally!
”

The Argoni roared its own challenge, a snarling, inhuman sound, and then it swept forward, bounding toward him in great strides. Landry stood firm, white-knuckling the shiv, watching it come.

Wait,
he told himself.
Not yet
.

It was ten paces away. Five. Three. It practically filled his vision, blocking out everything else.

It lunged.

Landry’s free hand snapped upward, gripping the acid tube that dangled from the ceiling, and he yanked it downward with all of his might. He swung the shiv, slicing through the tube in one motion, and then turned his face away as the acid arced outward, splashing across the path of the oncoming Toad. The creature shrieked and tried to stumble out of the way, but it was too late. The acid showered over it, coating it in yellow goo, and then the Argoni collapsed to floor, writhing and screaming in pain.

Chapter 48

PSD 29-214: 0729 hours

Landry watched the Argoni crawl feebly across the floor. A strange, high-pitched keening sound emanated from it as it scratched for purchase and tried to pull itself away from Landry.

All the while, the acid ate deeper into its flesh. The creature was melting before Landry’s very eyes.

Landry stood stiff and alert, the shiv clutched in his fist as he waited for the Argoni to make some sort of miraculous recovery. He half expected it to shake off its injuries and bound to its feet, ready for round two, but after a few moments, it became clear that wasn’t going to happen.

It was done. It wasn’t getting up ever again.

In addition to that, something strange was happening to it. A transformation of some kind. That bony outer layer of chitinous armor seemed to be shrinking, peeling away like rotten folds of skin. Beneath, Landry could see softer, scaly skin, riddled with acid marks, crimson ooze seeping from the wounds.

As he watched, the outer portion of the Argoni, that inky-black coating of armor, completely fell away, revealing a much smaller creature inside. It was perhaps a meter in length, had two arms and two legs, although these seemed boneless, or at least multi-jointed, as they writhed like tentacles as the thing struggled. Its face was elongated, its features squeezed up toward the top of its head, and there were three small orifices under its glinting black eyes, which were contracting and dilating rapidly. Landry could hear air rushing in and out, and he had the distinct impression that it was breathing through the holes—that they were nostrils.

He glanced over at the larvae hanging from the wall, then back at the Argoni. Somewhere in the back of his mind, connections were being made. The thoughts and memories that had transferred from the Argoni to himself during the interrogation were far more numerous than he’d first realized. They swam tantalizingly just out of reach. Slowly, one by one, he was gathering them back in, making sense of them.

The rhizome wasn’t just a nutrient delivery system, he realized. It wasn’t just a system of pipes that conveyed food and water. The Argoni used it for armor as well. It could somehow take on a malleable form, adjusting to the contours of the Argoni’s bodies and then harden to that incredibly resilient bone-like exterior. An exoskeleton of sorts. And they were able to communicate with it, control it, the same way they interfaced with everything else—through the links on their wrists.

He wondered if, perhaps, this might be his ticket to survival. Could he somehow extract water from the rhizome, using the graft on his wrist, the same way he had somehow drawn mental imagery from the Argoni, he wondered? Could he prolong his survival down here by feeding the same way the Argoni did?’

But what about all the other Argoni present in this hive? Surely this wasn’t the only curator—

He stopped, racking his brain. He already knew the answer, he realized.

This Argoni
was
the only fully matured specimen in the hive. There had been one other, but it had been aboard the dogfighter that had hit Gus and Landry’s scout the day before last. The one that had been surprised by Gus coming in low and fast as he attempted to avoid the outpost radar.

But where had that Argoni been headed in the dogfighter?

With a start, Landry realized he knew the answer to that as well.

To tend to another hive.

One of many that were spread across Proc-One.

Oh no. No.

Landry had to get out of the hive. He had to warn the others at the outpost. They were in great danger.

He stumbled across to his EVA suit again and spread it out across the tunnel. He tried to think of a way that he could possibly make it hold air again, maintain a steady pressure, but there was no way. It was shredded. That simply wasn’t going to be an option.

His head was pounding. He ached all over. He couldn’t think straight.

You need to rehydrate. You’re delirious.

He turned to the rhizome that coated the walls like thick, ropey vines. He took a deep breath.

What did he have to lose?

He reached out and touched his wrist against the rhizome, his hand shaking. He could see it pulsing again, like a gigantic and grotesque artery pumping who knew what. It was cold and supple, but not slimy as he had expected. He immediately sensed it responding to him. Impressions were coming through the link in his wrist. He detected what he thought was a formal greeting of some kind, or in machine terms, a handshaking protocol. It almost seemed like a programmed response.

But Landry understood now that it wasn’t a machine. It wasn’t a tool created by the Argoni—it was alive. Not just alive, but
sentient
. Now the touch of his wrist against its cool skin elicited a flash of images, hundreds of them. Thousands. Too many for Landry to process.

Amongst the chaos, he was somehow able to pull out clues. Piece together the puzzle.

The rhizome possessed some kind of race memory. It harbored knowledge of itself that stretched back eons, like an endless pool of recollections gathered by its ancestors and passed on through time.

Landry saw it all unfold before him.

The Argoni and the rhizome were symbiotic. They were two separate species that had evolved together on the same world—a world with a remarkably similar atmosphere to Earth’s—hiding underground to escape the fearsome predators that had roamed the surface. Over the millennia, the physical forms of the two species had even begun to merge. The Argoni, the smaller reptile-like creatures that sprouted like plants, provided intelligence and mobility, including the ability to cover great distances and seed new hives. The rhizome, on the other hand, contributed sustenance, nurturing, and the protection of hard outer shells to the inherently weaker Argoni.

Landry marveled at the strangeness of the concept, trying to imagine how two species could embark on a partnership like that, but it was beyond him. It was so alien that he could barely get his head around it.

He focused on the rhizome again, and realized it could do something else. Landry saw an image of an alien world with three suns in the sky, strange plants and trees stretching up into the blue sky. He saw massive predators, something akin to Earth’s dinosaurs, ruling the surface. One particular species, with huge claws and teeth like icepicks, was equipped with a massive club on its tail, which it bashed against the soil as it searched for subterranean prey. Landry watched as it listened for vibrations through some sort of proboscis under its chin, finding an anomaly beneath its feet. It used those fearsome claws to dig, uncovering and devouring a giant snake or perhaps a worm.

But the rhizome had its own defense mechanism. It was able to somehow absorb the vibrations in the soil, masking its presence. This in turn had allowed it to avoid the predators that sought to find it, keeping itself and the Argoni safe.

This is why the UEM can’t locate them underground
, Landry thought distantly.
They’re practically invisible to ground penetrating radar.

The memories evaporated, and Landry gasped. They had felt so real that he’d imagined himself hiding under the soil from those predators on that far-distant world. He could almost taste—

All of these thoughts came to him in a split second, the first moment he’d brushed against the rhizome.

Now something was scratching at his consciousness. He forced himself to focus.

The rhizome. It was attempting to communicate with him, trying to establish a connection.

It sensed something wasn’t right about him. Although Landry possessed the graft of Argoni flesh on his wrist, effectively a piece of their DNA, the rhizome could tell that there was something different about it. About
him
. He felt it begin to withdraw.

Don’t let it go
, he told himself.
You need to interface with this thing if you want to survive. There’s no other way.

He had to think like an Argoni. But how?

He recalled the patterns he had sensed bleeding through from the Toad as it had tortured him, that strange cadence in the way it thought. He’d been able to fall into step with it before, while using the machine. Perhaps he could do it again.

He concentrated, going over the pattern again and again in his mind. He tried to forget everything else. The only thing that mattered was replicating that pattern, fooling the rhizome into thinking he was something that he wasn’t.

He was so close. The rhizome would obey him, he
knew
it would, if only he could get the pattern right.

He felt a spark of excitement. He felt as though a kind of limitless power were almost within his grasp.

Then the rhizome withdrew further, and a moment later he lost the link entirely.

As he came back to himself, he heard a scratching sound behind him.

While he’d been interrogating the rhizome, the Argoni had managed to haul itself across the floor. It was at the machine, the resin reattached to its wrist.

“You dirty piece of—”

Landry bounded across to it, kicked at its arm, dislodging the resin link. He gripped the shiv again, prepared to finish off the Argoni once and for all, but it was no longer breathing.

The light had gone out of its eyes.

Whatever it had planned to do, it had left it too late. It had died before—

Landry glanced about. Something had changed in the room. It was almost as if the pressure had gone up. He worked his jaw, trying to pop his ears.

Then, simultaneously, every single larva that was attached to the wall dropped off and fell to the floor.

“What the . . . ?”

The smallest and most fragile of them fell with a wet splat, breaking open and leaking fluid in many cases. Ruined. Further up the tunnel, however, Landry could see larger specimens had remained intact. Worse, their eyes were opening. They were slowly getting to their feet.

He counted six—no, seven. Their movements were sluggish, and dribbles of fluid seeped from the places on their backs that had been connected to the rhizome. There was a surety about them, however, an intelligence. These were not helpless babes who knew nothing about the world around them.

They got up and turned to Landry one by one, as if sensing his presence, then stood there staring malevolently at him. He could see in their eyes that they knew exactly who he was and what he represented.

They would tear him apart if he gave them the slightest opportunity.

That son of a
 . . .
It initiated some sort of emergency release for the larvae.

Landry shifted uneasily, the shiv raised before him. Although physically smaller than he was, there was something unsettling about the newly birthed Argoni, something creepy and ghoulish. They were like carbon copies of the Argoni that Landry had just killed, brimming with hatred and fury.

“Back off, you ugly little critters!” he shouted, but, unsurprisingly, they did not heed his words. Instead, they turned to the rhizome and touched their wrists against it. In response, the ropey tubes began to flow over them, like rapidly spreading vines, winding over their tentacle-like arms. Their torsos. Their faces.

They’re suiting up
, he thought with horror.
Putting on their armor.

He thought of the hive in which he now stood, and wondered if this same thing might be happening elsewhere. Were these larvae hatching in the other caverns? Was he about to be trapped down here in this nightmarish pit with a hundred, or maybe a thousand, fully armored Argoni warriors?

“Holy
crap
,” he breathed.