Eric Flint: Slow Train to Arcturus

Or it could be his head spinning. He'd lost a lot of blood.

Eventually, he realized that it wasn't a pole. It was the line, the cable, that linked the habitats. He was right at the center of the habitat, possibly near a pole. Off to one side of him-that was an elevator! An alien elevator, yes, but still function defined form. The explosion-hole he'd fallen down… someone must have blown out an elevator shaft. Possibly they had filled an elevator with explosives in the shaft, and then exploded it. The stair he'd followed had been a mere standby.

His mind had been drifting between extreme lucidity and delirium for some time. It was in one of its lucid phases just then. There had to be a reason for the stairs and the lift shaft being right there-and looking at the cable he could see it.

A door. A door set into the central cable, with the millions of microtubules that surrounded the core in brackets around the door to allow access to it. Well… it would have been a door-if there had been any sign of a handle. And off to the side was a wide passage with a rail set into it. With an odd start Kretz realized that he'd seen one like it before-at the airlock they'd come in by.

The engineering side of Kretz's mind clicked in. This was for heavy equipment transport. And it had to run between the central cable and airlock. The question was… which airlock? Had he ended up at the wrong end of the habitat? And mostly, what should he do now? He knew that he'd been shot by the aliens. The suit had of course protected him to some extent. But he was badly bruised and still losing blood, and he had a broken arm. He stood, swaying, indecisive. Eventually he set off down the wide corridor. It was not one of the greenhouse ones, and was lit only by small lights on one wall. It curved quite steeply downwards and he found himself desperately hoping that he'd found an unguarded way to the airlock. He had to stop and lean against the wall quite often. But at least he found no more of the murderous aliens. And it brought him out into an antechamber with an airlock.

A glance at the surrounding water-reservoir was enough to tell him it was the wrong airlock. There was no way that, in his present state, he could make it out and over the equatorial ridge. He doubted if he had the air for such a trip anyway. And-thinking slightly more coherently-he realized that it wouldn't have helped if this had been the airlock by which they'd come in, anyway, right now. His suit-fabric would knit and repair itself, but not in time. He needed a place to hide. Perhaps inside the airlock would do.

He was about to step forward when he heard alien voices. He turned and fled up the ramp again. In the darkness he felt slightly more secure, just wishing it wasn't all uphill. There were no exits off this tunnel either, which made escape awkward.

At last he came to the cable. Here were other passage-entrances. He could hide here in one of the dead areas, surely? And then in one of those odd moments of lucidity he had an idea. If he could open that handleless door, he could hide inside the cable. Surely the only reason for it being handleless was to keep the passengers out? It was big enough to hide in. And, if there was a similar door on the far end of the habitat core, well, that should take him to the other down-ramp to the airlock that he wanted to reach.

All he had to do was to open a handleless alien door, which seemed impossible. But he still had his tools. It was worth trying surely? The thought of a hiding-place where these alien murderers couldn't find him was attractive. The thought that it might just open into a vacuum also occurred. Well. That would kill him. And them.

He began an electromagnetic probing of the door with a basic electronic workman's remote. It detected the active circuits within easily enough. The question was-could he open it?

He gambled and used a pulsed signal to interrupt the circuit. It was just the first thing to try…

And it worked.

There was no rush of air into a vacuum as the door swung open. Just a puff of old, stale, cold air, at slightly higher pressure. There was perfectly ordinary handle on the inside.

He stood there, leaning against the thick door, and staring into the blackness inside. A transport tunnel. That's what it had to be. A way of replenishing lost water or air from the stockpiles that were just behind the ramscoop. One stockpile for the entire string of habitats, fed through this tube. Simple. Elegant. Alien. Did he dare crawl into it?

A wave of giddiness nearly overwhelmed him. And then an alien voice said "I told you those were his tracks. Shoot him before he gets away!" There was an explosion. Water from broken microtubules splashed onto him. As quickly as he could with one good arm, Kretz scrambled up into the tube, and pulled the door closed behind him. It shut with an audible click. And the sound of the alien voices was gone as if cut off with a knife.

They probably wouldn't have an electronic workman's remote with them, thought Kretz. It was then, to his horror, that he realized that he didn't have his, either. He must have dropped it. That set his hearts racing even faster. If they knew how to use it…

And then he panicked. The tube was too small for him to stand up in. And crawling with a broken arm hurt. He shuffled and somehow made his way away from that door. He wasn't too worried about where he was going. The crucial direction was… away. Away from aliens with guns.

It was much later, in the dark, with no sounds of pursuit behind him, that he finally thought of putting his headlight on. When he got to another door… he lay down. It was not sleep really. More like half coma, half delirium. But no one and nothing disturbed him until his thirst did. There was nothing left in his suit tank. He cursed. Lay there and shivered with the tube going around and around. He tugged feebly at the door handle. It opened. It was obviously not intended to be secure from the inside.

Kretz was reluctant to leave the sanctuary of his refuge. But he knew that he had to drink. Had to. And besides, all Miran were somewhat claustrophobic. Females far more so than males, but no Miran liked confined places that much. It seemed better to let them kill him in the open. He was sure that he was too near death for them to beat anything out of him now.

Getting out and onto the ground was a difficult process. He hurt himself so badly that he passed out for a while. When he finally managed to stand up, he saw to his horror that the door he'd come through had somehow closed.

But at least there were no aliens around. To his blurred senses this end of the pipe seemed more verdant. There were certainly no burned-out passages, and the air smelled different. Perhaps they had local air-current circulators. The Miran explorers had barely begun to fathom the engineering of the habitat before the attack. Kretz still found it nearly incomprehensible that the aliens were so cavalier about destroying their own habitat. It was almost as if they did not know, or care, about how fragile an enclosed environment was. Of course a huge, complex one like this had far more self-correcting biofeedback loops than a smaller environment, but still, there had to be a point at which those could not compensate, and then collapse would be swift. The aliens must be pushing that limit, he thought, deriving some savage satisfaction from the idea, as his feet seemed to become more wayward and distant.

Suddenly, there was a squeal in front of him. A squat, four-footed pink alien peered malevolently at him from the shelter of the bush it had been rooting behind. This side of the habitat was very different. There was soil underfoot, along with plant-cover, even in this, the wide passage with the overhead rail. And there were transverse passages here too.

The alien was unclothed and rather muddy. It looked at Kretz… and turned and ran. The last he saw of it was its curly tail disappearing around a corner, into a transverse passage. Kretz watched it from a sitting down position and through a haze of pain, because his legs had gone wobbly on him and deposited him on his butt-which, by the feel of it, had started the bleeding again, and had jarred his arm.