Walter Greatshell - Apocalypticon

"Bullshit! You're the traitor!"

Tran stood up as well, edging around the table, and saying, "Easy now, Alton. Surrender your weapon before anyone else gets hurt."

Backing away from them, Webb said, "Take one more step, and I'll shoot. I have the authority. One way or another, the sabotage stops here."

Phil didn't stop, and Webb said, "You asked for it," and fired, hitting him in the chest. The man faltered, then shook his head and kept coming. Webb shot him again in the face, popping a neat round hole in his forehead and blasting a chunk out the back of his scalp. Tran's head jerked from the impact, but still he didn't stop. Wiping oddly colored blood out of his eyes, he came on with infinite patience. Nor did the others seem to find anything unusual about this.

What the fuck?

Retreating out the forward door, Webb cried, "Stay back! All of you!"

Webb grabbed the little boy and carried him up the forward companionway. No one seemed to be following, and when he emerged two flights up at the command deck, there was no one in sight. So that's it, so that's it, he thought, not quite knowing what "it" was.

"You're the crazy ones," he muttered.

Hauling his unresisting hostage aft through the radio shack, the sonar room, and into the control center, Webb was disconcerted to find the whole first deck deserted. He hit the general alarm and dragged the boy into the CO stateroom, barring the door.

Catching his breath, Webb put the child down and switched on the 1MC. "Attention all hands, attention all hands," he announced breathlessly, voice crackling from speakers throughout the ship, "this is Commander Alton Webb speaking. This is an emergency. I hereby order all security personnel to report to the main deck. There are… enemy insurgents aboard." He didn't know how to put it so as not to sound stark raving mad. "They have infiltrated members of the crew and are attempting to take over the ship. Please acknowledge this message."

There was no reply; the speaker remained silent.

Suddenly, he heard a muffled voice in his ear, as if inches away: "C'mon, Al, get with the program."

Webb nearly jumped out of his shoes, spinning in the direction of the voice. There was no one there. Of course-the room was much too small for anyone to hide. Was the kid a ventriloquist? He checked the shower-empty.

"Who the fuck was that?" he demanded.

Moon-eyed, the boy raised his skinny chicken arm and pointed a grubby, accusing finger at the plundered captain's safe. Webb's safe now, for what it was worth; Alton Webb's personal keep, with its scorched door from which the lock had been gouged like an offending eye, leaving an ugly black peephole.

"No fuckin' way," Webb said, yanking it open.

"How ya doin', Al?" quacked Fred Cowper's severed head, staring out at him with great black fish eyes. Cowper's mouth yawned open to a grotesque degree, splitting the old man's face from ear to ear like the exaggerated jaws of some primordial sea creature, one of those deep-sea monstrosities with teeth as huge and sharp as a cocked bear trap-a ravenous Pac-Man.

Webb slammed the door on the dreadful specter-OhGodohmyGod-and recoiled backward, holding his gun out at arm's length and training it on the safe. Before he could decide whether to scream, cry, or just go raving bat-shit, he heard a crackling sound beside him and turned to see the kid. What he saw, rising nearly to the ceiling, was beyond all comprehension.

Now Alton Webb did scream.

The Blue Man's day-to-day routine was simple:

He rolled out of bed when he wanted to, had a leisurely breakfast of tea and stale donuts, then moseyed across the cylinder to his pit latrine, where he did his business while reading a paperback copy of Boswell's London Journal. After that he washed up, polished off a chapter of Cellini's autobiography, added several more pages of closely written script to his own extensive notes, and had a light lunch. Then, if he felt like it, he might leave the cylinder to make his rounds of the garage and the wider city. These could consist of something as simple as raiding the Mr. Donut Dumpster in the alley or fetching water from the sink in the employee restroom. Or they might require more stealth, such as making a run across the pedestrian overpass to the Biltmore Hotel. You never knew who might be watching.

The habits born of years of vagrancy served him well. Truly, not much had changed: He had been a fugitive before, and he was still a fugitive.

In bygone days, the man known only as Old Joe Blue had been a familiar figure downtown, and particularly well-known in transient circles, where he was even more an object of curiosity than he was in the world of "squares"-homeless society being necessarily insular and mutually reliant. But Joe wandered in and out of their company with the same ghostlike detachment as he did everywhere else, partaking of charity handouts, freebies, and day jobs, then vanishing back into the ether.

Where did he live? Who was he, and who had he been? Since Old Joe didn't panhandle or sleep on the street, the system generally left him alone, but what was wrong with him? Argyria-an overload of colloidal silver-was the official explanation, but how, when, and why? The man himself was not clear about specifics. One rumor was that he was a former silversmith from one of the old factories in the Jewelry District, and had developed metal toxicity from years of breathing the vapors. When the factory closed its doors (as so many had, in the age of Kmart, Wal-Mart, and cheap imports) he was thrown out like an old pair of shoes-blue suede shoes, they joked. This story was certainly more plausible than Joe's own explanations, which were rambling diatribes about doomsday and salvation-the man was a notorious crackpot. But few dared to contradict him, and anyone who did challenge that eerie shambling figure had an odd way of never being heard from again. So people left him alone, and the more superstitious ones crossed themselves in his wake.

"Wormwood," Joe might mutter, standing in a soup line. "Read your Book of Revelation. Most comets are like dirty snowballs, just ice and dust. But not that one, no, that comet there is a Trojan horse. Don't you get it? It shouldn't have come anywhere near us, it's on a whole different trajectory, but it changed, it zigged. Do you understand what that means?" When people started edging away, he would shake his head, mumbling, "Dodos-dodo birds."

Old Joe's lifestyle was flexible enough to accommodate not only the end of human civilization, but a guest to share it with. Noah didn't build the ark just for himself, Joe reasoned. So in his fits of hoarding he stored away enough provisions for at least two people to weather an extended siege-which was exactly what he had been preparing for all these years. The boy didn't eat much. With minor replenishment, Joe figured they were good for at least four months. Plenty of time for the last vestiges of the old world to be scoured away.

For it was only then that his life's work could truly begin.

"Here, look at this, look here," Joe said, showing Bobby his trove of old magazines. Pulling out a moldy issue of National Geographic, he said, "Take a look at this cover story about Saturn-the Cassini mission: 'On July 14, 2005, the spacecraft descended to a hundred miles above Enceladus's south polar region. Data indicated that plumes of material were erupting near the south pole. Then, four months later, Cassini made images that showed geyser like eruptions of water vapor and ice particles shooting far out into space.' Unquote."

When Bobby didn't react, he grew impatient. "Do you see what I'm saying? Enceladus! Here we thought it was only Jupiter's moon Europa that had liquid water and the potential for life, but now we learn that Saturn has its own salad bowl-the moon Enceladus. Picture it: an aquatic race living in perpetual darkness, in a hydrothermal ocean under miles of ice. It's a womb down there, a whole damn amniotic planet. They live and grow in that fishbowl for millions of years, competing against one another, developing tools and higher intelligence, until one day one of them starts to wonder what's above that frozen ceiling? Does it go on forever, to infinity? And maybe they kill that guy for heresy, and the next guy and the next guy, but eventually space starts running short-see, it's a very small moon, just three hundred miles wide-and they start thinking seriously about the possibility of other oceans in the ice, other worlds to conquer. Meanwhile, their science develops to the point where they can start drilling boreholes long enough to reach the surface. Eureka."