Jack Chalker - Melchior's Fire

Damn it! How was she going to know if it was safe?

“I’m gonna turn back to the old channel now,” Cross’s voice came out of nowhere. “They ain’t got no fuckin’ radios any more, not that would it useful. You okay in there, girl?”

“Sort of,” Randi responded. “Trouble is, that thing did a nice imitation of An Li that almost had me fooled, so I don’t know who or what I’m talking to now.”

“Good point. Look, check this first. Is there any way, did you give it any way, to get inside other than through the air ducts?”

“No. Haven’t touched a thing, I’m sealed in here.”

“Okay, if you check you’ll see that any breach of the air filtration would cause a major alarm. Did that alarm go off? It shoulda been loud, and even if it somehow got silenced, it should have lit up on the board in there.”

She hadn’t thought of that. “No, no alarms. But you should know that,” she added suspiciously. Cross had duplicate controls in the cabin of the shuttle.

“True, but you never can trust nothin’ anymore, can you? Look, I haven’t docked yet, so if this is me on the squawker then it’s the real me, right?”

“Yeah, okay.”

“Put your palm on the plate and then instruct Emergency Gamma Two. The computer will do the rest.”

She looked over, put her hand on the flat identification plate, and said, “Emergency Gamma Two.”

“Switching to alternate emergency frequency, encryption level maximum,” the computer responded.

“There. Still hear me?” Cross asked her.

“Yes.”

“Welcome to the club. Sorry we had to leave you in the dark, but we just couldn’t risk giving anything away and we wanted the fuckers to surface.”

“You shouldn’t have left me like this!” she almost shouted, feeling on the edge of breaking. And it wasn’t over yet.

“Can’t do much about the desertion. Didn’t figure on this going so far,” Cross told her. “Who’d have thought the sons of bitches would be putting on and using fully charged e-suits? And that big bastard, it’s tryin’ to figure out how to undermine our safe plateau, there, and we may have just accidentally given it the general idea. If it doesn’t take us easy, then them colonists had to have some pretty powerful machinery to carve out that base from the cliff in the first place, let alone move and construct that base. If we can melt this cliffside, then it can surely figure a way to cut through the solid rock holdin’ the base up. Just like us, though, it’ll take a lot of time to get that stuff powered up and over to where it can do much good. That means keepin’ us here as long as possible. Hang on.”

Queson could see the main board suddenly come alive. Cross was running some kind of diagnostic, including one on the smelter.

“Sweet Jesus! That goop’s ’bout coverin’ the damned thing! Son of a bitch!” Cross swore. “Lemme fry what I can!”

Nothing at all that seemed out of the ordinary was showing on the internal cameras, but on the schematic on the main screen there were hundreds of low-level fuzzy blotches. As Cross opened up on them, the cameras showed thin layers of the living alien protoplasm or whatever it was peeling off like dead skin and dropping, smoking, to the ground below. Some of it was trying to get away, to flee the wide beam, but if there was any more of the stuff on the thing then it was out of direct reach of the heat beam.

“Shoulda thought of that earlier. Jerry came up with it just now,” Cross told her. “Damned thing would have enough residual heat that it would provide a rough and uncomfortable but potentially life-preserving ride. Spread itself so thin and with such consistency that you couldn’t even tell it was there on visual!”

“Does that mean that Achmed—?”

“That’s the big question, ain’t it? Depends on whether he kept everything totally buttoned up and nothin’ came loose. The thing isn’t pressurized and uses basic air exchange unless it’s outfitted for an alien mix, but it’s tight because of the insulation.”

“And all that means?”

“It means it beats the hell out of us.”

Yeah, thanks. Back to square one. “ There’s no quiz you can give it now that it can’t pass if it did get him,” she pointed out. “We could have him go back out, but he could leave just a small part of himself behind if he’s now part of it and it wouldn’t do any good.”

“Seeing him would tell us what else we have to deal with,” Jerry Nagel put in, taking one of the comm links. “They don’t seem to have the ability to assume the color and texture of real people, at least not yet.” He thought for a moment. “Listen, do you have an e-suit in there?”

“No. Not that I know of. You know where we have ours.”

“Yeah, yeah, but hope springs eternal. I thought you might have put one on before you built your little fortress. That’s bad. We can’t get to you without coming inside, and we can’t do anything drastic in there without making it maybe impossible for you to ever get out. Hmmm… This is going to take some thinking.”

“Try not leaving me alone next time!” she shot back, anger almost edging out fear.

“Sorry, doll. Had to be there to see if the problem was getting solved. Next time you and Sark can cuddle.”

“Fuck you, Nagel. Just get me out of here!”

“Just tell the computer to show you the forward view, under, shuttle and watch. Lucky’s just told Achmed to come back up into the bubble on the other secure frequency, the one we were using.”

“Shuttle, forward, under, on main screen,” she instructed, and the schematic changed to the view forward of the shuttle craft, which was nearly stationary and hovering just above the smelter blister.

Achmed did not appear to be there.

She could hear Cross in the background talking to Achmed and insisting on a security check, and Achmed’s familiar grumbling, accent and all, and protest that he was in the shit can, but Cross wasn’t in the mood to be patient for long. She gave him two minutes to get his ass back up in the control chair inside the blister.

“Jerry, what if he doesn’t do it?” Randi asked, worried. “Right now some kind of thinking goo might be running around looking for a way into this place. If it finds a way, I’m toast.”

“Or worm, anyway,” he responded, trying to keep the tone light although she could hear his concern. “Hang on. We’re not gonna let them get you.”

There was a pause, and then somebody else on the shuttle, probably Sark, said something. Queson looked at the screen and saw a figure emerging partway into the hatch leading up into the blister atop the smelter and waving. It looked like Achmed, but it was only a face, shoulders, and one arm, and then it was gone back in just as quickly.

“Achmed! Get your fat ass back in there now! ” she heard Cross roar through Jerry’s headset. At the same time, the appearance was replayed on the monitor and the image of Achmed increasingly blown up.

“Jerry! The face!” she almost shouted.

“I see it. Looks like a death mask.”

Which, in a way, it was. Clearly trying to improvise on the fly with whatever was at hand, the thing that had consumed Achmed, probably inside the smelter as it either hovered or traveled back, had tried putting some kind of powder or light brown grease on the face to make it look human. It probably knew that the ruse was unlikely to work, but there hadn’t been much time and it was better than nothing.

“Okay, so it’s got Achmed and it’s inside,” Nagel sighed. “Close everything up tight, Doc, including going entirely on internal air. Sit tight. I don’t know any other way of handling this.”