Jack Chalker - Melchior's Fire

“What are you going to do? My god, Jerry! I don’t dare ever to crack that door and you don’t, either! You’re going to have to leave the base, and me, here and get the hell out! You saw the way it hid as a thin coat on the smelter! I’d be paranoid to even pick up anything in the place!”

“Sit tight, sit tight and just relax,” Nagel responded soothingly. “This thing may be a smart and supernasty organism, but at the bottom, the least common denominator, it’s just an infestation problem, and those we’ve got policies for. It’s not going to tolerate extremes because no matter how fluid it is, it’s carbon-based and organic just like us. It doesn’t like wind and it doesn’t like extreme cold and somehow, I suspect, it breathes in something. Even cockroaches, who can withstand what would be lethal radiation for other creatures, breathe and have their limits. Critters come with crew and pressurized container cargo. They don’t ride on the outside of spaceships. At least, from what we’ve seen, this one won’t. I admit I wish you had a suit in there with you, but you ought to be able to manage if you’re totally sealed, totally on recirculating air, and just sit tight and let us do the driving.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Infestation handling 101,” he responded. “Standard by-the-book procedure. You forget, and it can’t do anything about, the fact that we have the master controls for just about everything right here. Stand by and strap in. We’re sealing out suits here, and then we’re going to dock and take control. I’m just more than a little fed up with this alien bastard.”

The shuttle pivoted, then slowly glided over the top of the base unit until it reached the depression that was its dock and integration spot with the base unit. Just as it came in to land, Cross gave a wide heat burst that covered the entire dock area. Stuff started curling up and burning under it, and more began to ooze away from the landing area.

Damn! That thing had covered half the base exterior!

Not exactly, but it had managed to hide in that part that was out of the wind, showing that it could withstand at least the daytime temperature. Now, though, it backed away, shocked by the unanticipated fire and also knowing that it only had to wait. When the shuttle docked, it would be right there on top of it, looking for a way in.

It wouldn’t find it. Cross had activated the spacefaring mode; that thing was sealed very tight indeed.

As soon as the docking occurred, Queson saw all the lights and controls in her lower room flash and then things began to move of their own accord. Displays that were incomprehensible showed up on the screens, and the schematic was back on the main one, doing a full diagnostic.

“Doc? You strapped in that chair?” Nagel asked.

“Yeah, Jerry. Good as I can.”

“Then sit back and assume launch position. We’re going to go to orbit. Sit tight and trust me on this one.”

The whole base shuddered, then came to a kind of life of its own. She could feel soft vibration, and a few storage areas and loose items began to jiggle and rattle.

“Lucky? You got control?

“Yeah! There were a few spots it was workin’ on, but the son of a bitch can’t get around the failsafes. Going up, count of ten… nine… eight… seven… six… five… four… three… two… one… Now! ”

One of the smaller screens showed the view from the underside of the base. Now as the vibration rose to maximum and a few things in the control room started bouncing around, the base unit lifted up from the plateau and rose steadily if with agonizing slowness into the air.

Cross rotated the combined craft and much of the exterior coating of the creature was suddenly full into the wind. It peeled off and dropped to the ground with amazing speed.

Now the whole plateau was visible, and both Queson in the main unit and the trio in the shuttle gasped as they saw how much of the region around the hard, flat rock had been undermined with what looked like water-filled tubes or punctures. That thing had been preparing to engulf the whole damned base if need be! That would mean… Just how huge was the main body of that thing?

Now it was all a speck, and then even the plateau, the base, and all fine detail merged into the usual high-altitude view and then was completely obscured by the clouds.

The sky turned increasingly dark, and within another couple of minutes they were a hundred or more kilometers above the deceptively peaceful-looking world below.

It was unlikely that any of the goop, exposed to the vacuum and extreme cold of space, could have survived anywhere on the exposed surface of the unit, and there was nowhere it could hide from those extremes. Inside, though, was a different story. Inside, what had been formed from the ingestion of Achmed was as warm and comfortable as she was in the sealed control room. She wondered, though, how it liked being weightless. Such a fluid creature would find it most unpleasant, she suspected, unless it was pretty well concentrated in one anchored spot.

Cross put them in a parking orbit well away from the Stanley, perhaps only halfway to the main ship, and turned to that problem next.

“Okay, Doc, relax and don’t get nervous about what you hear or feel,” Nagel told her. “We’re gonna find out just how well insulated the backup control room really is from the rest of the ship.”

“You mean there’s some doubt?”

He tried to laugh off the comment but knew he needed some amplification. “Not between it and the rest of the base, no, any more than there’s any doubt that we’re well insulated here. If not, we’d be dead here in one fashion and you’d be dead in the other.”

“How can you be sure I’m not? That this is really me?” she asked him, irritated by his tone.

He paused a moment, then said, “Because there’s no privacy once we’re docked. Period. We can see you, even do an analysis of your composition, just as we can with what remains of poor Achmed. It’s just that what we’re gonna do may test the mechanical integrity of these systems and, well…”

She finally understood what he was trying not to say. “The blister should have been totally insulated from the outside, too,” she managed. “It shouldn’t have been able to get in to get him.”

He sighed. “Um, yeah. Somebody’s been skimping on the maintenance bill.”

“Well, what about the maintenance here ?”

“Don’t worry so much about that. If it could have gotten in it would have by now. Just hang tight.”

Alarms started going off all over the board. “What are you doing ?” she almost shrieked at him.

“Just hold on! Busy right now! Just stop up your ears if it’s too noisy!”

The computer’s voice now came from the control panel itself. “Passwords approved. Decompressing main quarters unit.”

Now she understood. Lucky had commanded the immediate decompression of the whole base unit except for those with their own separate systems. It was the emergency decontamination he’d talked about, the one that was supposed to even kill the roaches and the rats.

“ Ooooeeee! ” Cross exclaimed, looking at a view Randi couldn’t share. “Lookit how the goddam things explode! Sounds like fireworks!”

“Sounds like bacon frying, but I’ll take it,” Nagel responded. “Pressure down to ten percent… five… that’s the last. We’ve got a vacuum inside. It’ll ice down pretty quickly. How long you want to keep this going?”

“The hell with the icing! Half the shit that means anything to me is ruined anyway!” Cross responded. “I want every little bit of that thing dead, dead, dead!”

Nagel thought of Randi. “How you doin’, Doc? Still warm?”